Reviews 1988
At first, nobody clapped. We sat in the dark for a long time unwilling to break the spell...
The audience is very close and needs to be. This is intimate knowledge, a deep kinesthetic wisdom, that Karczag’s conveying, and we need to be with her, to feel her in three dimensions. The movement is pure, eloquent, without a shade of pretension. And in its purity it has a moral force to which we gladly acquiesce. |
Safe Sex
December 27
Moses Pendleton’s Debut C, to excerpts from three Debussy works (La Mer, Prelude a l’apres-midi d’un faune, and Danses sacrees et profanes) is an opium dream of sexuality seen through projections on a scrim. The first slide’s a close-up of Pendleton’s face from the nose up, his eyes mad; many of the others are extreme close-ups of the centers of sunflowers in various stages of maturity.
I like the idle, seductive way the piece keeps shifting between being half-serious and half tongue-in-cheek, though some parts are too diffuse, too sentimental, and soporific, and others too insistently clever. According to the credits, Debut C - I hate that cute title - is conceived and directed by Pendleton and choreographed by the cast, which I assume means that the dancers contributed most of the movements and Pendleton had final cut. In the first section, four men in flesh-colored jockstraps - Peter Pucci, Austin Hartel, Jack Arnold, Jim Blanc - wield pairs of long, gleaming poles. hey pretend to climb them, or possibly they’re masturbating as they rub their hands smoothly down and up again. No. They glance sideways and down to show they’re arrived at the top. The part the sticks into wide Vs, becoming archers or charioteers. They vibrate the flexible poles into reversing arcs, then walk back and forth across the stage shaking them horizontally so they make a sea of waves. Crossing the ends of the poles behind their necks, they create a quiet row of perfect Mt. Fujis.
Which leads into the dreamiest and most powerful image: the men bending forward, balanced on one leg, with the poles sticking out like skeletal wings that slowly flap. There’s an ineffable peacefulness to this scene; it’s like watching a glider moving at its incredibly leisurely pace through the noiseless sky.
I can’t help identifying the images when they’re relatively literal. With one end under their feet, the men bend the poles into deep C-curves and jam the other ends against their ears. That doesn’t register anything particular, but in a moment I glimpse skis and ski poles, and that’s gone. They’re pumping the poles as if squeezing a surging oceanic climax out of the Debussy. When they form a line from the front to the rear of the stage holding the deeply bent sticks on either side, they’re galley slaves and the boom boom in the music is the guy keeping the oars in sync.In this first section, I’m caught in the dram. The music’s flow, the way it gathers force and subsides, supports a stream of vivd but ambiguous images that follow one another without any evident reason That’s okay because they’re sufficiently removed from narrative and don’t illustrate any fragmentary personal relationships between the performers. I’m relieved of any desire to figure out what’s going on and can just soak them up.
The rest of the piece is quite different, and less satisfying. It’s a beatific vision of buttocks and breasts, for which I’m very grateful, but relationships do intrude. So I’m periodically pulled out of the detachment of my lulled state into wondering just what’s exactly going on.
What I find myself enjoying most are amusing, low-key moments like the beginning of the Faune section, when the four men are lying back with the poles like fantasy penises gently waving in the air. Maybe they’re just lazy guys fishing and snoozing. But when two bare-breasted women - Carol Parker and Jude Santa - sit close, touch hands, caress themselves, press their chests together, and kiss, those fishing poles come erect. Th women spend a lot of time upside down with their legs in the air - sliding, rubbing and knotting their bare limbs. The men do a lot of Nijinsky faun-type stuff, like flexing their torsos. They poke their heads through the diamonds and triangles the women design with their legs. There are more Faune references later, too, like when Pucci pulls off Sante’s long, white skirt and rubs himself with it before tossing it away.
In the third part, the men, in pairs, frame two cloth pods, through which the women peer like lascivious anchorites. The pods open into big, white circles: they were merely the women’s skirts folded around them. While Pucci crouches behind Sante and removes her skirt, Parker traipses over the other three prone bodies with their limbs waving. With Sante on her knees, Pucci, now nude as well, swings and rocks her, smoothes her body, plucks her, plays her like a harp to cues in the music. He folds himself over her as she swims in the air balanced on this thighs. Nice echoes of the flying in part one. Swimming’s just flying underwater.
Meantime the other four are making some balancing design on he other side of the stage. But who could be watching the people with clothes on when there’re gorgeous buck-nekkid people to eyeball? In the half-light I wonder if the other guys are naked now too. No. And why is Parker still wearing her skirt? Is there an artistic reason? Or would she feel too uncomfortable totally undressed? This is all so distracting. I don’t want to think.
At the Joyce Theater (December 13 through January 8).
Moses Pendleton’s Debut C, to excerpts from three Debussy works (La Mer, Prelude a l’apres-midi d’un faune, and Danses sacrees et profanes) is an opium dream of sexuality seen through projections on a scrim. The first slide’s a close-up of Pendleton’s face from the nose up, his eyes mad; many of the others are extreme close-ups of the centers of sunflowers in various stages of maturity.
I like the idle, seductive way the piece keeps shifting between being half-serious and half tongue-in-cheek, though some parts are too diffuse, too sentimental, and soporific, and others too insistently clever. According to the credits, Debut C - I hate that cute title - is conceived and directed by Pendleton and choreographed by the cast, which I assume means that the dancers contributed most of the movements and Pendleton had final cut. In the first section, four men in flesh-colored jockstraps - Peter Pucci, Austin Hartel, Jack Arnold, Jim Blanc - wield pairs of long, gleaming poles. hey pretend to climb them, or possibly they’re masturbating as they rub their hands smoothly down and up again. No. They glance sideways and down to show they’re arrived at the top. The part the sticks into wide Vs, becoming archers or charioteers. They vibrate the flexible poles into reversing arcs, then walk back and forth across the stage shaking them horizontally so they make a sea of waves. Crossing the ends of the poles behind their necks, they create a quiet row of perfect Mt. Fujis.
Which leads into the dreamiest and most powerful image: the men bending forward, balanced on one leg, with the poles sticking out like skeletal wings that slowly flap. There’s an ineffable peacefulness to this scene; it’s like watching a glider moving at its incredibly leisurely pace through the noiseless sky.
I can’t help identifying the images when they’re relatively literal. With one end under their feet, the men bend the poles into deep C-curves and jam the other ends against their ears. That doesn’t register anything particular, but in a moment I glimpse skis and ski poles, and that’s gone. They’re pumping the poles as if squeezing a surging oceanic climax out of the Debussy. When they form a line from the front to the rear of the stage holding the deeply bent sticks on either side, they’re galley slaves and the boom boom in the music is the guy keeping the oars in sync.In this first section, I’m caught in the dram. The music’s flow, the way it gathers force and subsides, supports a stream of vivd but ambiguous images that follow one another without any evident reason That’s okay because they’re sufficiently removed from narrative and don’t illustrate any fragmentary personal relationships between the performers. I’m relieved of any desire to figure out what’s going on and can just soak them up.
The rest of the piece is quite different, and less satisfying. It’s a beatific vision of buttocks and breasts, for which I’m very grateful, but relationships do intrude. So I’m periodically pulled out of the detachment of my lulled state into wondering just what’s exactly going on.
What I find myself enjoying most are amusing, low-key moments like the beginning of the Faune section, when the four men are lying back with the poles like fantasy penises gently waving in the air. Maybe they’re just lazy guys fishing and snoozing. But when two bare-breasted women - Carol Parker and Jude Santa - sit close, touch hands, caress themselves, press their chests together, and kiss, those fishing poles come erect. Th women spend a lot of time upside down with their legs in the air - sliding, rubbing and knotting their bare limbs. The men do a lot of Nijinsky faun-type stuff, like flexing their torsos. They poke their heads through the diamonds and triangles the women design with their legs. There are more Faune references later, too, like when Pucci pulls off Sante’s long, white skirt and rubs himself with it before tossing it away.
In the third part, the men, in pairs, frame two cloth pods, through which the women peer like lascivious anchorites. The pods open into big, white circles: they were merely the women’s skirts folded around them. While Pucci crouches behind Sante and removes her skirt, Parker traipses over the other three prone bodies with their limbs waving. With Sante on her knees, Pucci, now nude as well, swings and rocks her, smoothes her body, plucks her, plays her like a harp to cues in the music. He folds himself over her as she swims in the air balanced on this thighs. Nice echoes of the flying in part one. Swimming’s just flying underwater.
Meantime the other four are making some balancing design on he other side of the stage. But who could be watching the people with clothes on when there’re gorgeous buck-nekkid people to eyeball? In the half-light I wonder if the other guys are naked now too. No. And why is Parker still wearing her skirt? Is there an artistic reason? Or would she feel too uncomfortable totally undressed? This is all so distracting. I don’t want to think.
At the Joyce Theater (December 13 through January 8).
Different Strokes
September 13
For the second year in a row, France’s three-week long Montpellier International Dance Festival has sponsored a series of professional colloquia. Last year’s included a two-day event on international co-production that began to explore the curious, incompatible mechanics of how thing work financially and administratively in several western European nations and the United States - 11 countries in all. Even more importantly, it was a meeting ground for the people who can initiate projects - presenters, producers, funders, company managers, government officials - many of whom were able to meet for the first time.
The ways productions and companies are funded work so differently in Europe and the United Sates that for presenters to devise practical ways of working together they have to perform an imaginative feat. The fact that there is virtually no U.S. government money available to pay for touring foreign companies is almost incomprehensible to the European contingent, even that that matches their experience. Though the dance world perceives itself as a multinational, multicultural one, the United States holds itself in isolation. As a rule, when American companies tour in Europe, which is the most significant source of earned income for many of them Europe pays; when European companies tour in America, Europe pays. Before a decade or so ago, when Americans were bringing contemporary dance to the bemired civilizations of Western Europe, the unfairness of the situation was not so apparent or insulting, simply because we had what they wanted. Now there’s some lively and original action in Europe, even if not all of it will prove to be to our taste, but our government does nothing to enable freer exchange. The unfairness of the situation is increasingly grating to Europeans and shaming to Americans.
The eight-year-old Montepellier festival, directed by Jean-Paul Montanari, is distinctive in that it’s exclusively dance, and characteristically offers a grand mix. This year, it featured William Forsythe’s Frankfurt Ballet, the Grand Ballet de Tahiti, the Umzansi War Dancers, the Kathakali troupe from the Kerala Kalamandalam, Urban Bush Women, Georges Appaix, Michele Ettori, Ballet National Pirin of Bulgaria, Stephen Petronio, Joelle Bouvier and
Regis Obadia’s Theater de l’Esquisse, the Lyon Opera Ballet, and Maguy Marin, who was the centerpiece of the festival with three works (for her own company and the Lyon Opera Ballet) including a mammoth premiere, Coups d’Etats, which was a bummer. Even before reviews came out, Marin was quoted as saying she’d made a big mistake. I missed the exotic stuff, but caught Forsythe, fresh from New York, who thrilled audiences in the opera house, and Petronio, who is defining a clearer, less hectic style in AnAmnesia, co-commissioned by the Montpellier and Holland festivals. Georges Appaix' Affabulation, presented within the semi-circular arcades of the Cour des Ursulines (formerly a barracks, and a convent), was light and intricately worked but didn’t go anywhere. I missed Bouvier and Obadia, but their two short black-and-white films, La Chambre and L’Etreinte, shown as part of the festival’s extensive film and video screenings, were so fiercely beautiful that the audience demanded they be shown again immediately. And they were.
Set in the midst of all these performances and stolen hours at the beach, this year’s professional colloquia included a week-long program on “Dance and the International Network,” an attempt to expand last year’s introductions and to initiate moves toward building a European network. Everyone is looking toward 1992, when commercial borders will be abolished within the European Economy Community, and wondering how to make the powers-that-be aware of responsive to the needs of dance organizations. If “culture” is to be one of the priorities of the Europe of the future, then artists’ voices need to be heard.
The first days of the colloquium probed the state of dance in Southern Europe. Except in France, contemporary choreography is largely in a nascent state, and governmental support for dance, if any, is chaotic and grudging. Performance space, studio situations and technical levels are usually pretty basic - but that’s no surprise. Typically, within government, dance is represented as a vestigial adjunct of the cultural ministry’s music department (relegated there because, to the atrophied bureaucratic mind, dance=opera house corps de ballet). Companies from the poorer countries are marginal, isolated, financially hamstrung ; they get to tour very little. And because of permanent currency problems, and since audiences for contemporary dance haven’t yet been developed, little foreign dance is seen n those countries. Even England, just across the Channel, has seen very little French dance except for duos and trios, because money’s so tight.
Though dance appears to be burgeoning in Barcelona, choreographer Cesc Galabert points out that Franco’s repressive regime froze cultural development in Spain for years. “Until I went to New York in 1979,” said Gelabert, “I only knew Merce Cunnningham from photos. I imagined what Cunningham was.” Pina Bausch, aikido, Indian dance, and Maguy Marin all at once. “We have the chance to be synthetic.”
A decade ago, says Laura Kumin - an American who went to Spain then to study Spanish dance - there was almost no modern dance in Spain, except in Catalonia. But the situation has changed drastically in the past five years. For example, when Kumin and Margaret Jove established a choreography competition in Madrid, choreographers came out of the woodwork, and audiences, which were barely suspected, lined up around the block to pack the theater Anyway to the companies and presenters in these countries, France, in its support of dance, seems like heaven.
Relative to other countries, French choreographers and dancers are in an extraordinarily favored position. Back in the mid-to-late ‘70s, when contemporary dance began to take off in France (Dominique Bagouet won the Concours de Bagnolet in 1976, Maguy Marin and Daniel Ambash in 1978), the government gave the field an infusion of financial support that, within a decade, produced a number of choreographers and companies of international reputation. A number of maisons de la culture were established in major cities, although some have been shut down because of political overturns in local governments and subsequent elimination of municipal or regional financial contributions. But they didn’t necessarily go quietly: 200,000 people marched in the streets of Nantes the day after the Maison de la Culture there closed.
Dance companies are currently resident at 17 of these cultural centers (another 66 companies receive financial support), which means they are provided with studios, a theater, a home. Not many of these situations are cushy, but it’s hard to think of any company in the United States besides the New York City Ballet in a similar situation, with an actual home of its own Some of the most well-known, most favored choreographers complained bitterly of the pressures of their situations: much is expected of them, but their resources are inadequate and they feel obligated to choreograph better and better hits. There is also bitter feeling about the low status (lower status equals less money) of dance in relation to other arts like theater or opera, and of contemporary dance in relation to ballet. Contemporary choreographers are providing the big boost to France’s cultural prestige n the ‘80s, but the big bucks go to ballet companies. And the biggest bucks go to opera. The condescending English view seems to be that, basically, enthusiasm for dance demonstrates an immature taste; when you grow up you’ll like opera.
For the French, the notion of grant application reviews by peer panels that include a majority of artists (characteristic of the National Endowment of the Arts, New York State Council on the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, for example) is a revolutionary one. Of course, plenty of French choreographers have no funding whatsoever and the options for managing financially are restricted, to an American in unfamiliar ways. Dancers can’t supplement their incomes with jobs as waiters, for example: the waiters’ union won’t allow outsiders. But the paternalistic form of the government’s patronage contributes to a kind of fatalistic passivity (though dancers did lie down in front of the Palais des Papes in Avignon in July 1986 to protest threatened funding cuts).
In the U.S. artists are generally thought of as irrelevant. When the question of support for the arts comes up for debate, the arts are justified by the amount of secondary business they can be proved to stimulate. In France, culture is prestigious. Dancers and choreographers are acknowledged as having an appropriate function in society, but that function is essentially a traditional one perceived within an aristocratic framework: to serve the establishment. Now with French choreographers gaining international repute, and grand horizons opening, they are expected to provide France with extra clout in the culture department.
Now what is being termed the “American model” of corporate and private support is being foisted on them. Reagan fostered the illusion that there as this pool of money to be tapped by worthy arts organizations, while his administration slice away at the tax breaks that made making these contributions attractive. Mrs. Thatcher promotes the same idea in the United Kingdom and to her continental neighbors; however, there has been no tradition of this kind of support, nor, in most countries, have there been tax breaks for contributions to nonprofit organizations. There is little private giving to the arts - in France, only very recently has the law allowed tax exemptions to individuals for charitable contributions. Corporations generally expect something in exchange, if only to be made to look good in certain markets.
Total government support is not paradise: it can be ephemeral and subjugates the artist in peculiar ways. It makes the artist a child reliant on the governmental parent, though it can also allow the artist the freedom of his or her imagination. A broadening of the support structure diminishes that single dependency. yet it also demands more administrative manpower to search out, persuade and motivate other funders. But the notion being perpetrated of an “American model” is a rude joke. Our financial support system works on a minimal level and rests on the charity of artists who are expected to live on nothing.
It’s hardly a model, in the sense of something to admire or something worth emulating. The genuine American model is protean: a product of the inventiveness and determination that has produced a patchquilt of schemes to permit choreographers to work and companies to survive in a state of permanent, but not terminal, adversity. The point that Americans continued to make and to illustrate in the colloquia was hat artists cannot sit still and hope that a government, constantly faced with social demands it cannot fairly satisfy, will perceive their needs and give them the help they deserve. The useful American model is the push of the American dance community to define its needs, to make them known, and to demand a response. Boston Dance Umbrella - an active presenting organization as well as a resource and advocacy agency - was started by Jeremy Alliger who only wanted to put together a calendar of performances to avoid unnecessary scheduling conflicts between companies that drew on the same audience. He wound up, the first year, producing 40 weeks of performances in a studio with 100 folding chairs and, overnight, simply by responding to artists’ needs, created the largest performing arts series in the city, “before we got a nickel.” Last year, Dance Umbrella presented 30 companies in a dozen theaters. Similarly, Marda Kirn started the Colorado Dance Festival in Boulder in 1979 in a state that’s 47th in arts funding. Typically, neither of these people realized that what they were doing was impossible.
For the second year in a row, France’s three-week long Montpellier International Dance Festival has sponsored a series of professional colloquia. Last year’s included a two-day event on international co-production that began to explore the curious, incompatible mechanics of how thing work financially and administratively in several western European nations and the United States - 11 countries in all. Even more importantly, it was a meeting ground for the people who can initiate projects - presenters, producers, funders, company managers, government officials - many of whom were able to meet for the first time.
The ways productions and companies are funded work so differently in Europe and the United Sates that for presenters to devise practical ways of working together they have to perform an imaginative feat. The fact that there is virtually no U.S. government money available to pay for touring foreign companies is almost incomprehensible to the European contingent, even that that matches their experience. Though the dance world perceives itself as a multinational, multicultural one, the United States holds itself in isolation. As a rule, when American companies tour in Europe, which is the most significant source of earned income for many of them Europe pays; when European companies tour in America, Europe pays. Before a decade or so ago, when Americans were bringing contemporary dance to the bemired civilizations of Western Europe, the unfairness of the situation was not so apparent or insulting, simply because we had what they wanted. Now there’s some lively and original action in Europe, even if not all of it will prove to be to our taste, but our government does nothing to enable freer exchange. The unfairness of the situation is increasingly grating to Europeans and shaming to Americans.
The eight-year-old Montepellier festival, directed by Jean-Paul Montanari, is distinctive in that it’s exclusively dance, and characteristically offers a grand mix. This year, it featured William Forsythe’s Frankfurt Ballet, the Grand Ballet de Tahiti, the Umzansi War Dancers, the Kathakali troupe from the Kerala Kalamandalam, Urban Bush Women, Georges Appaix, Michele Ettori, Ballet National Pirin of Bulgaria, Stephen Petronio, Joelle Bouvier and
Regis Obadia’s Theater de l’Esquisse, the Lyon Opera Ballet, and Maguy Marin, who was the centerpiece of the festival with three works (for her own company and the Lyon Opera Ballet) including a mammoth premiere, Coups d’Etats, which was a bummer. Even before reviews came out, Marin was quoted as saying she’d made a big mistake. I missed the exotic stuff, but caught Forsythe, fresh from New York, who thrilled audiences in the opera house, and Petronio, who is defining a clearer, less hectic style in AnAmnesia, co-commissioned by the Montpellier and Holland festivals. Georges Appaix' Affabulation, presented within the semi-circular arcades of the Cour des Ursulines (formerly a barracks, and a convent), was light and intricately worked but didn’t go anywhere. I missed Bouvier and Obadia, but their two short black-and-white films, La Chambre and L’Etreinte, shown as part of the festival’s extensive film and video screenings, were so fiercely beautiful that the audience demanded they be shown again immediately. And they were.
Set in the midst of all these performances and stolen hours at the beach, this year’s professional colloquia included a week-long program on “Dance and the International Network,” an attempt to expand last year’s introductions and to initiate moves toward building a European network. Everyone is looking toward 1992, when commercial borders will be abolished within the European Economy Community, and wondering how to make the powers-that-be aware of responsive to the needs of dance organizations. If “culture” is to be one of the priorities of the Europe of the future, then artists’ voices need to be heard.
The first days of the colloquium probed the state of dance in Southern Europe. Except in France, contemporary choreography is largely in a nascent state, and governmental support for dance, if any, is chaotic and grudging. Performance space, studio situations and technical levels are usually pretty basic - but that’s no surprise. Typically, within government, dance is represented as a vestigial adjunct of the cultural ministry’s music department (relegated there because, to the atrophied bureaucratic mind, dance=opera house corps de ballet). Companies from the poorer countries are marginal, isolated, financially hamstrung ; they get to tour very little. And because of permanent currency problems, and since audiences for contemporary dance haven’t yet been developed, little foreign dance is seen n those countries. Even England, just across the Channel, has seen very little French dance except for duos and trios, because money’s so tight.
Though dance appears to be burgeoning in Barcelona, choreographer Cesc Galabert points out that Franco’s repressive regime froze cultural development in Spain for years. “Until I went to New York in 1979,” said Gelabert, “I only knew Merce Cunnningham from photos. I imagined what Cunningham was.” Pina Bausch, aikido, Indian dance, and Maguy Marin all at once. “We have the chance to be synthetic.”
A decade ago, says Laura Kumin - an American who went to Spain then to study Spanish dance - there was almost no modern dance in Spain, except in Catalonia. But the situation has changed drastically in the past five years. For example, when Kumin and Margaret Jove established a choreography competition in Madrid, choreographers came out of the woodwork, and audiences, which were barely suspected, lined up around the block to pack the theater Anyway to the companies and presenters in these countries, France, in its support of dance, seems like heaven.
Relative to other countries, French choreographers and dancers are in an extraordinarily favored position. Back in the mid-to-late ‘70s, when contemporary dance began to take off in France (Dominique Bagouet won the Concours de Bagnolet in 1976, Maguy Marin and Daniel Ambash in 1978), the government gave the field an infusion of financial support that, within a decade, produced a number of choreographers and companies of international reputation. A number of maisons de la culture were established in major cities, although some have been shut down because of political overturns in local governments and subsequent elimination of municipal or regional financial contributions. But they didn’t necessarily go quietly: 200,000 people marched in the streets of Nantes the day after the Maison de la Culture there closed.
Dance companies are currently resident at 17 of these cultural centers (another 66 companies receive financial support), which means they are provided with studios, a theater, a home. Not many of these situations are cushy, but it’s hard to think of any company in the United States besides the New York City Ballet in a similar situation, with an actual home of its own Some of the most well-known, most favored choreographers complained bitterly of the pressures of their situations: much is expected of them, but their resources are inadequate and they feel obligated to choreograph better and better hits. There is also bitter feeling about the low status (lower status equals less money) of dance in relation to other arts like theater or opera, and of contemporary dance in relation to ballet. Contemporary choreographers are providing the big boost to France’s cultural prestige n the ‘80s, but the big bucks go to ballet companies. And the biggest bucks go to opera. The condescending English view seems to be that, basically, enthusiasm for dance demonstrates an immature taste; when you grow up you’ll like opera.
For the French, the notion of grant application reviews by peer panels that include a majority of artists (characteristic of the National Endowment of the Arts, New York State Council on the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, for example) is a revolutionary one. Of course, plenty of French choreographers have no funding whatsoever and the options for managing financially are restricted, to an American in unfamiliar ways. Dancers can’t supplement their incomes with jobs as waiters, for example: the waiters’ union won’t allow outsiders. But the paternalistic form of the government’s patronage contributes to a kind of fatalistic passivity (though dancers did lie down in front of the Palais des Papes in Avignon in July 1986 to protest threatened funding cuts).
In the U.S. artists are generally thought of as irrelevant. When the question of support for the arts comes up for debate, the arts are justified by the amount of secondary business they can be proved to stimulate. In France, culture is prestigious. Dancers and choreographers are acknowledged as having an appropriate function in society, but that function is essentially a traditional one perceived within an aristocratic framework: to serve the establishment. Now with French choreographers gaining international repute, and grand horizons opening, they are expected to provide France with extra clout in the culture department.
Now what is being termed the “American model” of corporate and private support is being foisted on them. Reagan fostered the illusion that there as this pool of money to be tapped by worthy arts organizations, while his administration slice away at the tax breaks that made making these contributions attractive. Mrs. Thatcher promotes the same idea in the United Kingdom and to her continental neighbors; however, there has been no tradition of this kind of support, nor, in most countries, have there been tax breaks for contributions to nonprofit organizations. There is little private giving to the arts - in France, only very recently has the law allowed tax exemptions to individuals for charitable contributions. Corporations generally expect something in exchange, if only to be made to look good in certain markets.
Total government support is not paradise: it can be ephemeral and subjugates the artist in peculiar ways. It makes the artist a child reliant on the governmental parent, though it can also allow the artist the freedom of his or her imagination. A broadening of the support structure diminishes that single dependency. yet it also demands more administrative manpower to search out, persuade and motivate other funders. But the notion being perpetrated of an “American model” is a rude joke. Our financial support system works on a minimal level and rests on the charity of artists who are expected to live on nothing.
It’s hardly a model, in the sense of something to admire or something worth emulating. The genuine American model is protean: a product of the inventiveness and determination that has produced a patchquilt of schemes to permit choreographers to work and companies to survive in a state of permanent, but not terminal, adversity. The point that Americans continued to make and to illustrate in the colloquia was hat artists cannot sit still and hope that a government, constantly faced with social demands it cannot fairly satisfy, will perceive their needs and give them the help they deserve. The useful American model is the push of the American dance community to define its needs, to make them known, and to demand a response. Boston Dance Umbrella - an active presenting organization as well as a resource and advocacy agency - was started by Jeremy Alliger who only wanted to put together a calendar of performances to avoid unnecessary scheduling conflicts between companies that drew on the same audience. He wound up, the first year, producing 40 weeks of performances in a studio with 100 folding chairs and, overnight, simply by responding to artists’ needs, created the largest performing arts series in the city, “before we got a nickel.” Last year, Dance Umbrella presented 30 companies in a dozen theaters. Similarly, Marda Kirn started the Colorado Dance Festival in Boulder in 1979 in a state that’s 47th in arts funding. Typically, neither of these people realized that what they were doing was impossible.
A Voice in the Dark
March 9
That Awilda Sterling is a person of substance and warmth is crucial to Altar Mayor, because the piece is cut from and portrays her life's experience. It's not intimate or confessional or chockablock with entertaining incidents; it merely offers some commonplace treasures from her heritage.
First she lies on the floor resting her feet on a rocking chair, then moves to the chair where she rocks thoughtfully, with her legs pulled close to her body. There's no pressure in her presence, rather, a quiet, trustworthy assurance. I believe her completely.
Sterling moves plainly: she swings a leg behind her as she creeps backwards; stands with one arm upraised; turns her head aside and looks, waits. She's patient, though there's something of a challenge in her gaze. The fullness of her persona is in her face.
Altar Mayor was by far the most striking of our pieces on a program Sterling shared with another Puerto Rican choreographer, Viveca Vasquez, at P.S. 122 recently. On sheets hanging on a clothesline across the back three films (by Eduardo Canovas) are projected. Mostly black-and-white, they show aspects of a very simple life: Sterling as a child in an old snapshot, her whirling in a sunny alley-way or small courtyard, arranging photographs on a table in a poor dwelling with barred windows open to the air.
Then, somewhere behind us in the dark, we hear her father (Tetelo Sterling) singing. A distinguished, dapper man all in pristine white--white guayabera, white loafers--he comes around in front of us, sits in the rocker, while Sterling pulls the sheets aside and lights half a dozen candles on a large, low altar set with flowers and religious images.
Sterling's father begins to dance alone to Puerto Rican songs in a complex variety of Latin American rhythms. His dancing is tight, intricate, refined, gentlemanly--almost dainty in its delicate exactness. When he stops, Sterling returns in a flowered dress of a light fabric just made for dancing. There's an expectancy in her. She tries to be be demure, but her body insists on jiggling. Her feet pad softly, her hips sway, her shoulders have a little something to say. She gets defensive with an invisible someone, but the incident dissolves in runs, staggers, convulsing motions, and a moment of exasperation.
Sterling doesn't have a professional dancer's pared-down body. She whirls, then moves more slowly, with womanly firmness and weight. The ordinariness of her rounded arms, the soft way she uses her hands or claps them lightly overhead, is very beautiful. Her arms sweep out with a surprising airiness of spirit More of Africa slips into her dancing--stooping posture, waggling arms, rocking hips The skirt swishes, floats, and swirls around her. Her grace is a blessing she's bestowing.
More remarkable than Altar Mayor's gentleness is the perfect confidence Awilda Sterling demonstrates in the value of her heritage even in its simplest aspects. She doesn't pump it up or glamorize it or complain or try to charm; she doesn't bother to prove she's proud. Her Puerto Rican origins are not in some contest to determine which cultural background is superior. To her, rightly, the worth of her heritage, as that of herself, is self-evident and absolute. And she has the valor to yield us a gift of its savor, knowing it will be prized.
At P.S. 122 (February 26 to 28).
That Awilda Sterling is a person of substance and warmth is crucial to Altar Mayor, because the piece is cut from and portrays her life's experience. It's not intimate or confessional or chockablock with entertaining incidents; it merely offers some commonplace treasures from her heritage.
First she lies on the floor resting her feet on a rocking chair, then moves to the chair where she rocks thoughtfully, with her legs pulled close to her body. There's no pressure in her presence, rather, a quiet, trustworthy assurance. I believe her completely.
Sterling moves plainly: she swings a leg behind her as she creeps backwards; stands with one arm upraised; turns her head aside and looks, waits. She's patient, though there's something of a challenge in her gaze. The fullness of her persona is in her face.
Altar Mayor was by far the most striking of our pieces on a program Sterling shared with another Puerto Rican choreographer, Viveca Vasquez, at P.S. 122 recently. On sheets hanging on a clothesline across the back three films (by Eduardo Canovas) are projected. Mostly black-and-white, they show aspects of a very simple life: Sterling as a child in an old snapshot, her whirling in a sunny alley-way or small courtyard, arranging photographs on a table in a poor dwelling with barred windows open to the air.
Then, somewhere behind us in the dark, we hear her father (Tetelo Sterling) singing. A distinguished, dapper man all in pristine white--white guayabera, white loafers--he comes around in front of us, sits in the rocker, while Sterling pulls the sheets aside and lights half a dozen candles on a large, low altar set with flowers and religious images.
Sterling's father begins to dance alone to Puerto Rican songs in a complex variety of Latin American rhythms. His dancing is tight, intricate, refined, gentlemanly--almost dainty in its delicate exactness. When he stops, Sterling returns in a flowered dress of a light fabric just made for dancing. There's an expectancy in her. She tries to be be demure, but her body insists on jiggling. Her feet pad softly, her hips sway, her shoulders have a little something to say. She gets defensive with an invisible someone, but the incident dissolves in runs, staggers, convulsing motions, and a moment of exasperation.
Sterling doesn't have a professional dancer's pared-down body. She whirls, then moves more slowly, with womanly firmness and weight. The ordinariness of her rounded arms, the soft way she uses her hands or claps them lightly overhead, is very beautiful. Her arms sweep out with a surprising airiness of spirit More of Africa slips into her dancing--stooping posture, waggling arms, rocking hips The skirt swishes, floats, and swirls around her. Her grace is a blessing she's bestowing.
More remarkable than Altar Mayor's gentleness is the perfect confidence Awilda Sterling demonstrates in the value of her heritage even in its simplest aspects. She doesn't pump it up or glamorize it or complain or try to charm; she doesn't bother to prove she's proud. Her Puerto Rican origins are not in some contest to determine which cultural background is superior. To her, rightly, the worth of her heritage, as that of herself, is self-evident and absolute. And she has the valor to yield us a gift of its savor, knowing it will be prized.
At P.S. 122 (February 26 to 28).
Eureka!
December 20
With his latest work, AnAmnesia, Stephen Petronio’s choreography jumps to a new level. Originally designed for opera houses at the Montpellier-Danse and Holland festivals, which jointly commissioned the piece and premiered it this summer, AnAmnesia translates beautifully to the Kitchen’s space where, relatively speaking, you’re rammed up against the dancing. And performing the piece for months enabled the company to hone it to a thrilling pitch. Justin Terzi’s compelling black-and-white backdrops of two open hands - with one temporarily replaces by the head of a bespectacled man, possibly a political theorist - thrust the dancing forward in space. Ken Tabachnik’s dramatic red and lemon lighting leads you through it with a decisiveness that matches the impetus of the choreography, and the pickup of Peter Gordon’s forceful recorded score with its irrepressible references to klezmer, Weimar cabarets and the circus.
Petronio has also worked over last year’s Simulacrum Reels, changing some of the costumes, slowing it down here and there, so it’s become a little warmer and more human. Still, it’s a tornado, an outburst of abstracted fury wrested into a vivid, upbeat design. In Simulacrum, the extremities of the body seem to be trying to tear themselves away from each other, and the gestures tend to be convulsive. AnAmnesia is juicier, more rounded, softer, less severely wrenched.
In Simulacrum and other works, Petronio uses his inventiveness like a weapon, clobbering you into an admiring shell shock by the sheer wealth of his movement and his energy blitz. An ambivalent viewer, I’ve sometimes felt like a victim of the choreographer’s ambitions. I’ve wondered what he was hiding under all that density and bluster. But in AnAmnesia, what was previously relentless has given way to something weightier and more sincere. Petronio’s assurance is masterly, exhilarating.
At last, he lets you look at the dancing instead of hitting you with it. As lavish as ever, and working at as high a velocity, Petronio whips small groups on and off stage with astonishing efficiency, exchanges personnel so effectively that, if you blink, Kristen Borg has turned into Rebecca Hilton; maybe she’s twinned into Mia Lawrence and Susan Braham by the time confirmation arrives from the brain. But though Petronio’s cutting may be quick as ever, there’s greater clarity to the stage picture, a sense of breathless necessity to the flashfloods of whirling bodies - knots of dances that instantly disintegrate and disappear, and others that hurtle into the sudden gaps.
Basically, however, despite episodes of breakneck speed, Petronio lingers with his subject. AnAmnesia starts with a unison trio for three men - Frey Faust, Jeremy Nelson and Petronio, bare-chested and wearing hip-hugging red pants - who convey the insolent confidence and narcissism of the guys in classy underwear ads. Standing in elegant, studly slouches, they curl their arms as if not quite showing off their muscles, touch their fingers to their ears, toss their heads, slowly quiver into dreamy near-collapse. Their gestures are concise, curious, almost dainty in their precision. A couple of women dart playfully behind and around them, with brisk independence.
Borg whirls across, followed by Nelson, and the other women skitter in lightly, ducking their heads, and whipping out. In a duet, Faust and Borg crawl onto each other, freeze and continue. Ducking and nodding, she scampers to him, clamps on with her legs rigid in the air. Clutching each other, they rock together like a couple oblivious to anything but a pop beat. Nelson, Hilton and Lawrence are all over one another in a manipulative trio that welds them into an elaborate, useless contraption. Nelson breezes into spinning leaps with the single-minded grace of a hunting cat, subsides into a sulk of slow contractions.
As the piece culminates, the dancers’ confrontations become increasingly tactile, solid, factual. You can feel the force within those big hands on Terzi’s backdrop come alive onstage where each dancer radiates a compelling, magnetic influence. Tough a lightbulb to their skin, and - guaranteed - the filament would blaze and sizzle.
At the Kitchen (December 8 through 16).
With his latest work, AnAmnesia, Stephen Petronio’s choreography jumps to a new level. Originally designed for opera houses at the Montpellier-Danse and Holland festivals, which jointly commissioned the piece and premiered it this summer, AnAmnesia translates beautifully to the Kitchen’s space where, relatively speaking, you’re rammed up against the dancing. And performing the piece for months enabled the company to hone it to a thrilling pitch. Justin Terzi’s compelling black-and-white backdrops of two open hands - with one temporarily replaces by the head of a bespectacled man, possibly a political theorist - thrust the dancing forward in space. Ken Tabachnik’s dramatic red and lemon lighting leads you through it with a decisiveness that matches the impetus of the choreography, and the pickup of Peter Gordon’s forceful recorded score with its irrepressible references to klezmer, Weimar cabarets and the circus.
Petronio has also worked over last year’s Simulacrum Reels, changing some of the costumes, slowing it down here and there, so it’s become a little warmer and more human. Still, it’s a tornado, an outburst of abstracted fury wrested into a vivid, upbeat design. In Simulacrum, the extremities of the body seem to be trying to tear themselves away from each other, and the gestures tend to be convulsive. AnAmnesia is juicier, more rounded, softer, less severely wrenched.
In Simulacrum and other works, Petronio uses his inventiveness like a weapon, clobbering you into an admiring shell shock by the sheer wealth of his movement and his energy blitz. An ambivalent viewer, I’ve sometimes felt like a victim of the choreographer’s ambitions. I’ve wondered what he was hiding under all that density and bluster. But in AnAmnesia, what was previously relentless has given way to something weightier and more sincere. Petronio’s assurance is masterly, exhilarating.
At last, he lets you look at the dancing instead of hitting you with it. As lavish as ever, and working at as high a velocity, Petronio whips small groups on and off stage with astonishing efficiency, exchanges personnel so effectively that, if you blink, Kristen Borg has turned into Rebecca Hilton; maybe she’s twinned into Mia Lawrence and Susan Braham by the time confirmation arrives from the brain. But though Petronio’s cutting may be quick as ever, there’s greater clarity to the stage picture, a sense of breathless necessity to the flashfloods of whirling bodies - knots of dances that instantly disintegrate and disappear, and others that hurtle into the sudden gaps.
Basically, however, despite episodes of breakneck speed, Petronio lingers with his subject. AnAmnesia starts with a unison trio for three men - Frey Faust, Jeremy Nelson and Petronio, bare-chested and wearing hip-hugging red pants - who convey the insolent confidence and narcissism of the guys in classy underwear ads. Standing in elegant, studly slouches, they curl their arms as if not quite showing off their muscles, touch their fingers to their ears, toss their heads, slowly quiver into dreamy near-collapse. Their gestures are concise, curious, almost dainty in their precision. A couple of women dart playfully behind and around them, with brisk independence.
Borg whirls across, followed by Nelson, and the other women skitter in lightly, ducking their heads, and whipping out. In a duet, Faust and Borg crawl onto each other, freeze and continue. Ducking and nodding, she scampers to him, clamps on with her legs rigid in the air. Clutching each other, they rock together like a couple oblivious to anything but a pop beat. Nelson, Hilton and Lawrence are all over one another in a manipulative trio that welds them into an elaborate, useless contraption. Nelson breezes into spinning leaps with the single-minded grace of a hunting cat, subsides into a sulk of slow contractions.
As the piece culminates, the dancers’ confrontations become increasingly tactile, solid, factual. You can feel the force within those big hands on Terzi’s backdrop come alive onstage where each dancer radiates a compelling, magnetic influence. Tough a lightbulb to their skin, and - guaranteed - the filament would blaze and sizzle.
At the Kitchen (December 8 through 16).
The Danger of Being Earnest
December 13
I like the temperate pace and unglamorousness of Michael Blackwood’s latest dance document,
Retracing Steps, and the several ways it reveals its nine participating choreographers. It shows them giving high points of their own mini-bios, detailing their methods of working and their perspectives on the contemporary dance scene, performing onstage or pragmatically working things out in rehearsal. The film is a comfortably sprawling document of current dance in which the choreographers, many of whom have been around the block a couple of times since the late ‘70s, give evidence of their diverse experimentation in an art where there are no clear authorities to reject and no dominating forces or leaders. Despite plenty of individual invention at all levels, there’s no authentic avant-garde. And although for years dance observers have been hot to nail down any solid trend, the situation remains up for grabs - very earnest, but whimsical.
Nobody seems to feel hemmed in by traditional definitions, even if all styles are not equally marketable. Rebounding from minimalism and analytical constructs, free to be theatrical, emotional, to tell stories (but usually without an innately dramatic movement vocabulary), the choreographers’ problem has been to find their individual paths across a generous but treacherous terrain where nothing is off limits, and even jumblings of apparently incompatible styles may be appropriate.
The choreographers in Retracing Steps include Jim Self, Bill T. Jones and Arnie Zane, Wendy Perron, Johanna Boyce, Diane Martel, Molissa Fenley, Stephen Petronio and Blondell Cummmings . Almost any nine choreographers might have done as well, since these have little in common besides being on the scene at the same time. The film focuses on the persons; close-ups bring the choreographers to us in an intimate, engaging way. Unfortunately, the dances are often weakly, and too briefly, presented: smallish, abstract figures bouncing around at a distance. Since these choreographers are of interest because of their work, Retracing Steps is flawed by the fact that, on the whole, the art as shown is not compelling.
The textual structure (Sally Banes is credited as writer and consultant) is that of a Q & A, with the Q’s excised and the A’s edited into brief monologues. Whoever tells the best anecdotes wins. Petronio’s wry amusement and bluntness (“I like movement that’s fierce-looking. My eye is drawn to shocking moments”) and Cummings’s raw expressiveness as well as her passionate restlessness in movement make them intriguing subjects. Along with Boyce (“Movement doesn’t have to be adult and refined to be valid. My own movement is about that cumbersome jumping about”), they come across in many aspects, many humors, and are personal without giving away intimate secrets. Fenley (who’s opted to concentrate on “uncharted territory” in western dance) and Alabama-born Self (“I learned to dance by watching TV”) are attractive, articulate professionals. Jones is an artful spokesman, carefully presenting his creative profile. “I was rebelling against everything, rebelling against being considered my body. I was not my gender, not my past...” Perron and Martel, by contrast, are portrayed as one-dimensional, as Perron gets bogged down in theorizing, and Martel doesn’t have anything coherent to say. If Retracing Steps were a soap opera, they’d be in a plane crash before next season.
The dance excerpts drawn from theatrical performances generally have less interest than the clips from studio rehearsals. On the stages, with their black backgrounds, dancing occurs in a physical void. Fenley’s studio with thee red framed windows and brilliant light, or the one Petronio is working in, with its mirrors and clothing hanging over barres, are spaces that entice the eye. Petronio’s dancers, flinging and flying in and out of the frame, chopped off by it, and changing scale by rushing in front of and behind one another, are exciting, as is Boyce, who also gets limbs lopped off by the camera in her solo based on the clumsy, quirky, unpredictable movements of her infant girl. The twisting, carving upper-body movements of Molissa Fenley and her company etch vivid designs on the screen. But whatever’s polite or contained or thoughtful - like excerpts from Perron’s exotic Arena, or Boyce’s Women, Water and a Waltz - seems tired. An antebellum fragment from Jim Self’s Camellia seems empty and distanced - what’s going on? - but when he and a partner strip down, embrace and roll on the ground, we can get our teeth into the action very nicely. When, in Tuscaloosa, he saunters across the stage and smokes like women smoked when it was glamorous and wicked, the screen radiates a lazy, intent sensuousness. Bits from Martel’s deliberately coarse and highly exaggerated pieces seem merely infantile because their violence is flattened and miniaturized; their force in live performance is lost.
Retracing Steps is serviceable but curiously unexciting It supplies glimpses of dance that let us judge how what the choreographers do meshes with what they say. But despite a lot of bright remarks and the power of some appealing personalities, what lingers with me is not a sense of the eclectic vitality of dance today, but of underlying crankiness, weariness and dissatisfaction.
Maybe it’s just that earnestness kills joy. Somewhere Petronio remarks, “I feel a personal commitment to entertaining myself.” That’s basic, and it’s that I want to feel more of. Choreographing may be a pain in the ass, but it’s also got to be a terrific kick.
At Film Forum (December 7 through 12).
I like the temperate pace and unglamorousness of Michael Blackwood’s latest dance document,
Retracing Steps, and the several ways it reveals its nine participating choreographers. It shows them giving high points of their own mini-bios, detailing their methods of working and their perspectives on the contemporary dance scene, performing onstage or pragmatically working things out in rehearsal. The film is a comfortably sprawling document of current dance in which the choreographers, many of whom have been around the block a couple of times since the late ‘70s, give evidence of their diverse experimentation in an art where there are no clear authorities to reject and no dominating forces or leaders. Despite plenty of individual invention at all levels, there’s no authentic avant-garde. And although for years dance observers have been hot to nail down any solid trend, the situation remains up for grabs - very earnest, but whimsical.
Nobody seems to feel hemmed in by traditional definitions, even if all styles are not equally marketable. Rebounding from minimalism and analytical constructs, free to be theatrical, emotional, to tell stories (but usually without an innately dramatic movement vocabulary), the choreographers’ problem has been to find their individual paths across a generous but treacherous terrain where nothing is off limits, and even jumblings of apparently incompatible styles may be appropriate.
The choreographers in Retracing Steps include Jim Self, Bill T. Jones and Arnie Zane, Wendy Perron, Johanna Boyce, Diane Martel, Molissa Fenley, Stephen Petronio and Blondell Cummmings . Almost any nine choreographers might have done as well, since these have little in common besides being on the scene at the same time. The film focuses on the persons; close-ups bring the choreographers to us in an intimate, engaging way. Unfortunately, the dances are often weakly, and too briefly, presented: smallish, abstract figures bouncing around at a distance. Since these choreographers are of interest because of their work, Retracing Steps is flawed by the fact that, on the whole, the art as shown is not compelling.
The textual structure (Sally Banes is credited as writer and consultant) is that of a Q & A, with the Q’s excised and the A’s edited into brief monologues. Whoever tells the best anecdotes wins. Petronio’s wry amusement and bluntness (“I like movement that’s fierce-looking. My eye is drawn to shocking moments”) and Cummings’s raw expressiveness as well as her passionate restlessness in movement make them intriguing subjects. Along with Boyce (“Movement doesn’t have to be adult and refined to be valid. My own movement is about that cumbersome jumping about”), they come across in many aspects, many humors, and are personal without giving away intimate secrets. Fenley (who’s opted to concentrate on “uncharted territory” in western dance) and Alabama-born Self (“I learned to dance by watching TV”) are attractive, articulate professionals. Jones is an artful spokesman, carefully presenting his creative profile. “I was rebelling against everything, rebelling against being considered my body. I was not my gender, not my past...” Perron and Martel, by contrast, are portrayed as one-dimensional, as Perron gets bogged down in theorizing, and Martel doesn’t have anything coherent to say. If Retracing Steps were a soap opera, they’d be in a plane crash before next season.
The dance excerpts drawn from theatrical performances generally have less interest than the clips from studio rehearsals. On the stages, with their black backgrounds, dancing occurs in a physical void. Fenley’s studio with thee red framed windows and brilliant light, or the one Petronio is working in, with its mirrors and clothing hanging over barres, are spaces that entice the eye. Petronio’s dancers, flinging and flying in and out of the frame, chopped off by it, and changing scale by rushing in front of and behind one another, are exciting, as is Boyce, who also gets limbs lopped off by the camera in her solo based on the clumsy, quirky, unpredictable movements of her infant girl. The twisting, carving upper-body movements of Molissa Fenley and her company etch vivid designs on the screen. But whatever’s polite or contained or thoughtful - like excerpts from Perron’s exotic Arena, or Boyce’s Women, Water and a Waltz - seems tired. An antebellum fragment from Jim Self’s Camellia seems empty and distanced - what’s going on? - but when he and a partner strip down, embrace and roll on the ground, we can get our teeth into the action very nicely. When, in Tuscaloosa, he saunters across the stage and smokes like women smoked when it was glamorous and wicked, the screen radiates a lazy, intent sensuousness. Bits from Martel’s deliberately coarse and highly exaggerated pieces seem merely infantile because their violence is flattened and miniaturized; their force in live performance is lost.
Retracing Steps is serviceable but curiously unexciting It supplies glimpses of dance that let us judge how what the choreographers do meshes with what they say. But despite a lot of bright remarks and the power of some appealing personalities, what lingers with me is not a sense of the eclectic vitality of dance today, but of underlying crankiness, weariness and dissatisfaction.
Maybe it’s just that earnestness kills joy. Somewhere Petronio remarks, “I feel a personal commitment to entertaining myself.” That’s basic, and it’s that I want to feel more of. Choreographing may be a pain in the ass, but it’s also got to be a terrific kick.
At Film Forum (December 7 through 12).
Benefit Boogie
February 23
The staff at Performance Space 122 really knows how to throw a party. I spent Thursday and Friday nights at four of the half dozen "Get Down!" benefits February 4th to 6th and they were amazing. Among the dizzying smorgasbord of events were works of impressive sophistication, finesse, and vitality appearing in a popular, rough-edged guise. "The mecca of art of the Lower East Side," in the words of Carmelita Tropicana, P.S. 122 is one of those rare New York spaces much of whose constituency - artists and audiences alike - is really from the neighborhood (through Brooklyn and the Upper West Side are part of the neighborhood, too), so the camaraderie goes deep. But it's neither exclusive nor cliquish.
With the festivities smoothed by beer and other pleasingly deleterious beverages, there's an easy going atmosphere that encourages art to be whatever it is. It doesn't have to dress up and be art The recent benefits were to raise some money to fix up the downstairs space, a cold, dark, concrete dungeon, which has been home to many music and performance events (as well as voting machines and karate lessons). Time to get a real lighting set-up in there, and a decent sprung dance floor.
Pat Oleszko and two cohorts looking a lot like Huey, Dewey and Louie dressed up in feathery, plump goose outfits ("get down", goose down, get it?) With rounded bellies, great web orange feet and orange beaks, they hawked raffle tickets. Downstairs, the soon-to-be-rehabilitated space was festive with colored lights, '30s music, and Janie Geiser's satirical shadow-puppet newscast (a baby is tossed out of the window by an arguing couple in Brooklyn; a miniscule Robert Chambers knocks off a giant Jennifer Levin by jumping on her toe) playing continuously in one corner. Upstairs it was mobbed, though not quite everybody was ready to stay up till 2 am Thursday night.
It was nice to have genial Mat Leventhal (who runs Lincoln Center) hosting the first show which opened with a demo by the kids who take karate class downstairs. Performance artist Mark Anderson visiting from Milwaukee, did one of his astonishingly serpentine verbal riffs. John Bernd, out of the hospital the day before, essayed a fragile duet with Jennifer Monson. Sitting under a floor lamp Steve Gross systematically ate a great number of Oreo cookies, then told ominous stories and played mumblety-peg with a well-honed knife that quivered and gleamed nicely in the blond floor. Without leaving his spot behind the audience, Guy Yarden took a few minutes out from running the sound system to play a rich, amped violin solo. In Sleep Story, a powerful and memorable piece still in the works, David Dorfman ran madly in place while innumerating a litany of interlocked sorrows and personal disasters and Andrea Kane crashed into him from the side, knocking him over again and again and again.
The 11 o'clock show was hosted by the utterly disarming Ellie Covan, formerly of Austin, TX who runs Dixon Place (in her apartment - performance in the living room, and dressing room in the kitchen). Just a little lower key than Lucy Ricardo, and talking a blue streak, Covan was utterly delightful reading performance info off her endless computer print out, as well as singing on three different occasions - with the ephemeral, four person Dixon Place Ukelele Ensemble (attired in black evening wear, eclectic swimwear or slumber outfits) rarities of the vocal repertoire such as "Ukelele Lady." They closed with " Goodnight Irene" - if you can believe it - and the audience willing joined in. That was the night the saxophones came out: Lenny Pickett and the Borneo Horns, then Dan Froot with an all-sax quartet. Covan did a bit on her little red accordion to introduce B.Z. Squeezies- Billy Swindler and Zeena Parkins on accordions, with percussion by Hearn Gadbois on dumbek - playing marvelously rhythmic stuff twisting up folk song material. All seven members of Watchface did a striking polyphonic piece with abrupt choral movement and a tart, fresh-mouthed text on dread New York.
Pepon Osorio's sets could be some kind of tent, and we could take it apart. For a dance by Merian Soto, he erected a glorious calico palm tree. Why doesn't he design the building for the Coliseum site? Striking, but less fiercely controlling than usual, Maria Cutrona danced to spaghetti western music. Blond comedian Reno, who works almost completely off the cuff, did one of her high-powered riffs on, for example, the various names for the female genitalia, and airplanes. Friday night, 9th Street Theater/On the Lam Street Band blatted and tooted behind a spirited stilt dancer and a guy juggling torches. Carmelita Tropicana took over as emcee in a gold-sequined outfit and enticing red silk undies that she claimed were, miraculously, the only items rescued from her recently burnt-down house. (Why? The holy cross of the virgin was pinned to the garment's left - politically correct - breast.)
Holly Hughes took head-spinning risks in a stormy reading. ("Reading" is way too limp for what she delivered.) "The pre-eminent lesbian playwright of her generation," if she does say so herself, dressed like a small-town widow, did a breathily brilliant, manic performance, script in hand, of a ballsy, hot, hilarious, curiously perilously truthful-sounding story in which, emotionally wrought-up after the death of her mother, "she" fucks a putz from the office. Doug Varone danced his impulsive Chopin solo; Molissa Fenley tried out a solo section from a new piece to The Rite of Spring, and Bebe Miller was as powerful and eloquent as ever in a working excerpt from The Hell Dances. Later that night, uppity chanteuse Gayle Tufts took over. Ed Friedman of the Poetry Project read insidiously wide-eyed pieces from his "Desert News" series.
Well-loved stage manager Lori E. Seid made her acting debut (in the first part of a piece by Yoshiko Chuma) detailing the subtle torments (including sleep deprivation) of a techie getting along with downtown prima donnas, followed by Chuma dancing with wild gleefulness, humor and bountiful energy. Chuma's so wiggy! So hip to the nuttiness of life in America, so shamelessly entertained by us gaijin.
I finally got to see Danny Mydlack. He wore a red and white checked suit that looked like an oilcloth my mother covered the kitchen table with 40 years ago. He took off the jacket, skirt, smeared his chest with shaving cream, and told a tender story of a little boy who didn't care to go to heaven when the angel came for him, all the while drawing the story in simplissimo images in the foam, then smearing it fresh for the next picture. It was as poetic and touching a piece as I've ever seen. Then, playing the accordion, he howled a song, "My Name is Danny" with video backup showing his upside down mouth. Ann Carlson's beautiful dance Sarah mingled women, whale and vocalizations that sound like whale songs with eerie and tender volutuptousness. Blond dominatrix of the keyboard, Phoebe Legere sang "East Village Gentrification Blues," gave the piano a workout, and made me very nervous. Enough! I'm leaving out Wendy Perron, Charlie Moulton's Tapnology, Mark Morris, Jawolle Willa Jo Zollar, Jeff McMahon's film, an excerpt from Mabou Mines's Sex-Switched Lear (Ruth Maleczech was incredible in the title role), Nicky Paraiso, Ellen Fisher...in case any doubt remains, this is very fertile ground.
At P.S. 122 (February 4 to 6).
The staff at Performance Space 122 really knows how to throw a party. I spent Thursday and Friday nights at four of the half dozen "Get Down!" benefits February 4th to 6th and they were amazing. Among the dizzying smorgasbord of events were works of impressive sophistication, finesse, and vitality appearing in a popular, rough-edged guise. "The mecca of art of the Lower East Side," in the words of Carmelita Tropicana, P.S. 122 is one of those rare New York spaces much of whose constituency - artists and audiences alike - is really from the neighborhood (through Brooklyn and the Upper West Side are part of the neighborhood, too), so the camaraderie goes deep. But it's neither exclusive nor cliquish.
With the festivities smoothed by beer and other pleasingly deleterious beverages, there's an easy going atmosphere that encourages art to be whatever it is. It doesn't have to dress up and be art The recent benefits were to raise some money to fix up the downstairs space, a cold, dark, concrete dungeon, which has been home to many music and performance events (as well as voting machines and karate lessons). Time to get a real lighting set-up in there, and a decent sprung dance floor.
Pat Oleszko and two cohorts looking a lot like Huey, Dewey and Louie dressed up in feathery, plump goose outfits ("get down", goose down, get it?) With rounded bellies, great web orange feet and orange beaks, they hawked raffle tickets. Downstairs, the soon-to-be-rehabilitated space was festive with colored lights, '30s music, and Janie Geiser's satirical shadow-puppet newscast (a baby is tossed out of the window by an arguing couple in Brooklyn; a miniscule Robert Chambers knocks off a giant Jennifer Levin by jumping on her toe) playing continuously in one corner. Upstairs it was mobbed, though not quite everybody was ready to stay up till 2 am Thursday night.
It was nice to have genial Mat Leventhal (who runs Lincoln Center) hosting the first show which opened with a demo by the kids who take karate class downstairs. Performance artist Mark Anderson visiting from Milwaukee, did one of his astonishingly serpentine verbal riffs. John Bernd, out of the hospital the day before, essayed a fragile duet with Jennifer Monson. Sitting under a floor lamp Steve Gross systematically ate a great number of Oreo cookies, then told ominous stories and played mumblety-peg with a well-honed knife that quivered and gleamed nicely in the blond floor. Without leaving his spot behind the audience, Guy Yarden took a few minutes out from running the sound system to play a rich, amped violin solo. In Sleep Story, a powerful and memorable piece still in the works, David Dorfman ran madly in place while innumerating a litany of interlocked sorrows and personal disasters and Andrea Kane crashed into him from the side, knocking him over again and again and again.
The 11 o'clock show was hosted by the utterly disarming Ellie Covan, formerly of Austin, TX who runs Dixon Place (in her apartment - performance in the living room, and dressing room in the kitchen). Just a little lower key than Lucy Ricardo, and talking a blue streak, Covan was utterly delightful reading performance info off her endless computer print out, as well as singing on three different occasions - with the ephemeral, four person Dixon Place Ukelele Ensemble (attired in black evening wear, eclectic swimwear or slumber outfits) rarities of the vocal repertoire such as "Ukelele Lady." They closed with " Goodnight Irene" - if you can believe it - and the audience willing joined in. That was the night the saxophones came out: Lenny Pickett and the Borneo Horns, then Dan Froot with an all-sax quartet. Covan did a bit on her little red accordion to introduce B.Z. Squeezies- Billy Swindler and Zeena Parkins on accordions, with percussion by Hearn Gadbois on dumbek - playing marvelously rhythmic stuff twisting up folk song material. All seven members of Watchface did a striking polyphonic piece with abrupt choral movement and a tart, fresh-mouthed text on dread New York.
Pepon Osorio's sets could be some kind of tent, and we could take it apart. For a dance by Merian Soto, he erected a glorious calico palm tree. Why doesn't he design the building for the Coliseum site? Striking, but less fiercely controlling than usual, Maria Cutrona danced to spaghetti western music. Blond comedian Reno, who works almost completely off the cuff, did one of her high-powered riffs on, for example, the various names for the female genitalia, and airplanes. Friday night, 9th Street Theater/On the Lam Street Band blatted and tooted behind a spirited stilt dancer and a guy juggling torches. Carmelita Tropicana took over as emcee in a gold-sequined outfit and enticing red silk undies that she claimed were, miraculously, the only items rescued from her recently burnt-down house. (Why? The holy cross of the virgin was pinned to the garment's left - politically correct - breast.)
Holly Hughes took head-spinning risks in a stormy reading. ("Reading" is way too limp for what she delivered.) "The pre-eminent lesbian playwright of her generation," if she does say so herself, dressed like a small-town widow, did a breathily brilliant, manic performance, script in hand, of a ballsy, hot, hilarious, curiously perilously truthful-sounding story in which, emotionally wrought-up after the death of her mother, "she" fucks a putz from the office. Doug Varone danced his impulsive Chopin solo; Molissa Fenley tried out a solo section from a new piece to The Rite of Spring, and Bebe Miller was as powerful and eloquent as ever in a working excerpt from The Hell Dances. Later that night, uppity chanteuse Gayle Tufts took over. Ed Friedman of the Poetry Project read insidiously wide-eyed pieces from his "Desert News" series.
Well-loved stage manager Lori E. Seid made her acting debut (in the first part of a piece by Yoshiko Chuma) detailing the subtle torments (including sleep deprivation) of a techie getting along with downtown prima donnas, followed by Chuma dancing with wild gleefulness, humor and bountiful energy. Chuma's so wiggy! So hip to the nuttiness of life in America, so shamelessly entertained by us gaijin.
I finally got to see Danny Mydlack. He wore a red and white checked suit that looked like an oilcloth my mother covered the kitchen table with 40 years ago. He took off the jacket, skirt, smeared his chest with shaving cream, and told a tender story of a little boy who didn't care to go to heaven when the angel came for him, all the while drawing the story in simplissimo images in the foam, then smearing it fresh for the next picture. It was as poetic and touching a piece as I've ever seen. Then, playing the accordion, he howled a song, "My Name is Danny" with video backup showing his upside down mouth. Ann Carlson's beautiful dance Sarah mingled women, whale and vocalizations that sound like whale songs with eerie and tender volutuptousness. Blond dominatrix of the keyboard, Phoebe Legere sang "East Village Gentrification Blues," gave the piano a workout, and made me very nervous. Enough! I'm leaving out Wendy Perron, Charlie Moulton's Tapnology, Mark Morris, Jawolle Willa Jo Zollar, Jeff McMahon's film, an excerpt from Mabou Mines's Sex-Switched Lear (Ruth Maleczech was incredible in the title role), Nicky Paraiso, Ellen Fisher...in case any doubt remains, this is very fertile ground.
At P.S. 122 (February 4 to 6).
Dangerous Birds
June 14
Black-and-white film of a train, tracks, an industrial city (New York), spills across a gaping curtain of slashed vertical panels, while Takehisa Kosugi plays fierce, haunting music on an amplified fiddle. God, he's good. Brian Moran moves aside some of the panels. Suzushi Hanayagi, wearing an oversize black coat and sunglasses, brings forward two huge white balloons, anchors them one at a time: she plays out the string of the first until, high in midair, the balloon catches the image of a tree on its lunar surface.
Conceived and directed by Molly Davies who, with Richard Conners, was responsible for the film segments (requiring three projectionists), and choreographed by Hanayagi, Arrivals and Departures is a serene and resonant dovetailing of filmed and live performance. Except for that arriving train, the collaboration seems mostly about departures and the insistence of memory -- Charles Mee's recorded text focuses on a son's reveries about his dead mother. Across various screens and panels, the figure of a man in hat and coat hurries to be gone. Occasionally, we see Kosugi walking across a half-dark stage, or, on film, wandering in the woods, where Hanayagi also, in a white coat, tramps in the snow. The live performers penetrate layer upon layer of filmed image (in which they sometimes appear), giving the weight of witnesses to these searching interiors and landscapes of the mind, while they themselves become more nearly figures of the imagination. In her black coat, Hanayagi moves in a slow, muted fashion. Like a sleeping body in the midst of a vivid dream, moving out of sheer necessity, she's concentrated and thoroughly opaque. She abruptly jerks her head, suddenly steps into a very wide, low stance; her arms and hands move almost feebly, with an idle, distracted kind of caressing motion.
On his own, Moran is as eloquent, introspective, and obsessional, making almost ecstatically tense twitching motions of the arms and hands. Both he and Hanayagi are reticent, blank performers - perfect objects for one's own projections. In a white coat and a crushable white hat, Hanayagi enters with a bundle of long wooden slats and drops them with a crash. She gathers them together on he floor, squaring them up, then sprawls forward, scattering them in front of her. Her actions are systematic, though they grow increasingly impatient and angry with repetition; the sounds are aggressive, violent. Without any facial affect, she gathers the sticks again quietly, lets go with a clatter. Picks them up in a jumble and lets them fall all crisscross. Lets them collapse over her. Turns with them all in a bundle and lets them splatter.
Charles Mee's episodic text is like journal entries; partly because it seemed faintly apologetic, I kept expecting explanations that would turn the collage into narrative, or somehow effectively mediate for the audience. But that didn't happen, and the text didn't achieve the poetic immediacy of the physical actions or filmic images either. In the movement and film, the sense of de facto isolation was unthreatening, uncompromising, purely concrete.
** A fine concert from Wendy Perron at the Joyce, but let's discount Arena, an unfocused, exotic circus that closed the program, with its three, four, five ... ultimately about 15 regular street pigeons fluttering around, flapping their wings gorgeously, crapping from a hanging perch. Instead, think about Divertissement, Perron's 1986 duet for Lisa Bush and David Van Tieghem, to, in part, a text devised by Perron from conversations of downstairs neighbors more crass than Ralph and Alice Cramden. In dark suits, Bush and Van Tieghem move with stiff, discombobulated unwillingness - falling, pushing themselves backwards, stumbling, crumpling - to his kachunging music (on tape) and Bush's exposition of loud, well-worn marital grievance.
In contrast, Perron's Down Like Rain, in which two stylistically incompatible couples alternate in many brief segments onstage, was sophisticated and, somehow, extremely tender. Tim Buckley and Lisa Bush swing on first with kicks and fat, wary gestures. (I wonder if they're an updated version of the Divertissement couple.) Buckley slithers down Bush's side, or thuds to the floor like a stupefied doll. Donald Fleming and Vicki Shick come in from the other wing, light, curling in their moves; they're synchronous, beautifully meshed, in tune, softly sliding into unassertive poses, though Shick asserts her independence with a saucy wave as she slips apart from him. In a way, both couples have a distinctive harmony, and I loved the way each pointed up the character of the other without diminishing it. Buckley and Bush's clowning, their suspicious or grotesque moves, creepy arms, hard twitches, their clinging and dragging, their bonk-and-thunk approach to movement makes them as dumbly endearing as travelers to Oz, though no rosy optimism surrounds them. In their rambunctious, resilient way, they're like those weighted toy figures with special bases that right themselves no matter how ferociously you knock them down. Then, to Bob Telson's sensitive rendering of a Schubert sonata, Perron enters disguised as a white-haired sad sack - one of those fairy godmothers pretending to be a beggar woman? - in dark coat and hat. She moves with soft, hobbled steps, rocks gently, drizzles her fingers down as if the piano notes were rain. The duets continue to alternate, but gradually the music draws everybody close in a slightly wilting quintet as if some ancestral sympathy called them.
The sassy all-girl gangs of Don't Tell Us, to clanging music by Bosho, were quite a surprise. Ballsy and good-humored, Perron's dance is as formally organized as a Kabuki battle plan. Its 18 punkified Grahamettes glide on piece-meal, bending their knees, sticking out their behinds. In line, they slide, twist, jump, then break into two bouncing, twisting little armies. There's a pulsing elasticity to the ritual action, with each group clumping or expanding within itself, and magnetizing the other. Lisa Bush and Kumiko Kimoto, the two leaders, have a rigid, martial duet, as the groups link up with a stiffly bending, twisting progress, then break up and reform. Each group lifts up its queen, and advances into the spotlights percussively pumping their knees and elbows. With aggressive, stiff-armed gestures, archings, squats, the dancers drive one another back and forth across the stage, only to return stamping, bopping, jabbing their elbows back as they bend like dangerous chickens. Perron builds these repeated individual and group threat displays tersely, letting the rhythmic challenges cry, and avoiding actual conflict or the letdown of resolution. She leaves them flexing their torsos, swinging their arms, leaping at each other. For all the pushy behavior and don't-mess-with-us attitude, the assertiveness of Don't Tell Us is thoroughly cheerful. Girls will be boys, but they still just want to have fun.
Black-and-white film of a train, tracks, an industrial city (New York), spills across a gaping curtain of slashed vertical panels, while Takehisa Kosugi plays fierce, haunting music on an amplified fiddle. God, he's good. Brian Moran moves aside some of the panels. Suzushi Hanayagi, wearing an oversize black coat and sunglasses, brings forward two huge white balloons, anchors them one at a time: she plays out the string of the first until, high in midair, the balloon catches the image of a tree on its lunar surface.
Conceived and directed by Molly Davies who, with Richard Conners, was responsible for the film segments (requiring three projectionists), and choreographed by Hanayagi, Arrivals and Departures is a serene and resonant dovetailing of filmed and live performance. Except for that arriving train, the collaboration seems mostly about departures and the insistence of memory -- Charles Mee's recorded text focuses on a son's reveries about his dead mother. Across various screens and panels, the figure of a man in hat and coat hurries to be gone. Occasionally, we see Kosugi walking across a half-dark stage, or, on film, wandering in the woods, where Hanayagi also, in a white coat, tramps in the snow. The live performers penetrate layer upon layer of filmed image (in which they sometimes appear), giving the weight of witnesses to these searching interiors and landscapes of the mind, while they themselves become more nearly figures of the imagination. In her black coat, Hanayagi moves in a slow, muted fashion. Like a sleeping body in the midst of a vivid dream, moving out of sheer necessity, she's concentrated and thoroughly opaque. She abruptly jerks her head, suddenly steps into a very wide, low stance; her arms and hands move almost feebly, with an idle, distracted kind of caressing motion.
On his own, Moran is as eloquent, introspective, and obsessional, making almost ecstatically tense twitching motions of the arms and hands. Both he and Hanayagi are reticent, blank performers - perfect objects for one's own projections. In a white coat and a crushable white hat, Hanayagi enters with a bundle of long wooden slats and drops them with a crash. She gathers them together on he floor, squaring them up, then sprawls forward, scattering them in front of her. Her actions are systematic, though they grow increasingly impatient and angry with repetition; the sounds are aggressive, violent. Without any facial affect, she gathers the sticks again quietly, lets go with a clatter. Picks them up in a jumble and lets them fall all crisscross. Lets them collapse over her. Turns with them all in a bundle and lets them splatter.
Charles Mee's episodic text is like journal entries; partly because it seemed faintly apologetic, I kept expecting explanations that would turn the collage into narrative, or somehow effectively mediate for the audience. But that didn't happen, and the text didn't achieve the poetic immediacy of the physical actions or filmic images either. In the movement and film, the sense of de facto isolation was unthreatening, uncompromising, purely concrete.
** A fine concert from Wendy Perron at the Joyce, but let's discount Arena, an unfocused, exotic circus that closed the program, with its three, four, five ... ultimately about 15 regular street pigeons fluttering around, flapping their wings gorgeously, crapping from a hanging perch. Instead, think about Divertissement, Perron's 1986 duet for Lisa Bush and David Van Tieghem, to, in part, a text devised by Perron from conversations of downstairs neighbors more crass than Ralph and Alice Cramden. In dark suits, Bush and Van Tieghem move with stiff, discombobulated unwillingness - falling, pushing themselves backwards, stumbling, crumpling - to his kachunging music (on tape) and Bush's exposition of loud, well-worn marital grievance.
In contrast, Perron's Down Like Rain, in which two stylistically incompatible couples alternate in many brief segments onstage, was sophisticated and, somehow, extremely tender. Tim Buckley and Lisa Bush swing on first with kicks and fat, wary gestures. (I wonder if they're an updated version of the Divertissement couple.) Buckley slithers down Bush's side, or thuds to the floor like a stupefied doll. Donald Fleming and Vicki Shick come in from the other wing, light, curling in their moves; they're synchronous, beautifully meshed, in tune, softly sliding into unassertive poses, though Shick asserts her independence with a saucy wave as she slips apart from him. In a way, both couples have a distinctive harmony, and I loved the way each pointed up the character of the other without diminishing it. Buckley and Bush's clowning, their suspicious or grotesque moves, creepy arms, hard twitches, their clinging and dragging, their bonk-and-thunk approach to movement makes them as dumbly endearing as travelers to Oz, though no rosy optimism surrounds them. In their rambunctious, resilient way, they're like those weighted toy figures with special bases that right themselves no matter how ferociously you knock them down. Then, to Bob Telson's sensitive rendering of a Schubert sonata, Perron enters disguised as a white-haired sad sack - one of those fairy godmothers pretending to be a beggar woman? - in dark coat and hat. She moves with soft, hobbled steps, rocks gently, drizzles her fingers down as if the piano notes were rain. The duets continue to alternate, but gradually the music draws everybody close in a slightly wilting quintet as if some ancestral sympathy called them.
The sassy all-girl gangs of Don't Tell Us, to clanging music by Bosho, were quite a surprise. Ballsy and good-humored, Perron's dance is as formally organized as a Kabuki battle plan. Its 18 punkified Grahamettes glide on piece-meal, bending their knees, sticking out their behinds. In line, they slide, twist, jump, then break into two bouncing, twisting little armies. There's a pulsing elasticity to the ritual action, with each group clumping or expanding within itself, and magnetizing the other. Lisa Bush and Kumiko Kimoto, the two leaders, have a rigid, martial duet, as the groups link up with a stiffly bending, twisting progress, then break up and reform. Each group lifts up its queen, and advances into the spotlights percussively pumping their knees and elbows. With aggressive, stiff-armed gestures, archings, squats, the dancers drive one another back and forth across the stage, only to return stamping, bopping, jabbing their elbows back as they bend like dangerous chickens. Perron builds these repeated individual and group threat displays tersely, letting the rhythmic challenges cry, and avoiding actual conflict or the letdown of resolution. She leaves them flexing their torsos, swinging their arms, leaping at each other. For all the pushy behavior and don't-mess-with-us attitude, the assertiveness of Don't Tell Us is thoroughly cheerful. Girls will be boys, but they still just want to have fun.
Fan Letter
June 28
What performances by Julio Bocca and Alessandra Ferri in ABT’s Giselle! For all its quaint setting and supernatural resolution, Giselle remains an emotionally vibrant and timely tragedy without malice. It’s naive heroine is jilted by a two-timing lover, and then, through repentance and forgiveness, a kind of reconciliation and release is achieved, backed up by the solid hard work of a long night through which he dances for his life and she spells him. It’s not modern for her to go mad and die so they can work things out. To be contemporary, she’d have to lead the ghoulish pack dragging him to his comeuppance.
Ferri is an expressive actress but her technique falters and she fatigues over the course of the ballet. Still her Giselle is conceived on such a scale that it has a grandeur its flaws cannot diminish. It’s astonishing how much she carries of the girl Giselle into the graveyard act. Yet ghostly and ephemeral, she’s no longer shattered but consoling and agelessly wiser. Her tenderness is palatable. On the other hand, her Albrecht, Julio Bocca, is a miracle of youthful passion, jugging Giselle and his official fiancé Bathilde. He’s not a cad who toys with a village girl only to discover too late how deeply he loves her. He’s a young man used to his ways, who’s enjoying the benefits of two lives, true in both as long as each is secret from the other. But when both worlds come crashing together, he can’t quite react fast enough. He’s quick enough to go for his sword, but here his courage fails. He keeps up the pretense of innocence a moment too long, as though if he keeps his head in the sand, time will roll backwards and the bad news will evaporate. Then it’s too late, Giselle’s mind snaps, and her wounded heart gives out.
Bocca’s technical brilliance and verve, the excitement of his presence, make him a star. But he has a rare genius; he can enter a role wholeheartedly and seriously, and open it up from the inside with shameless vitality and delicacy of feeling. Impetuous as Albright, his approach is assertive rather than courtly; macho without it’s implicit insult. In Act I, he controls Giselle with his presence; he plants his body near her, in front of her, slightly too close, and she wavers faintly with intoxication, embarrassment, desire. When he reaches out for her and she’s already half a stage away and turns back to him, it is not quite as if the same yearning were aroused in both, but as if he physically touched and restrained her and she acquiesced gladly. His virtuoso dancing is as fully expressive of character and situation as is the mime that details the prosaic aspects of the plot.
As the jealous gamekeeper, Hilarion, Clark Tippet is intense and darkly fascinating in Act I; in Act II, when the vengeful spirits are dancing him to death, his performance divides. He pleads desperately for mercy, and immediately after leaps about very nicely. But in Bocca’s performance there’s no differentiation between acting and dancing. All the steps acquire particular meaning and savor, even those that may be filler. This gift makes Bocca great. And it’s the sort of thing that turns high-tone entertainment into art.
At the Metropolitan Opera House (June 10).
Robbie McCauley, Laurie Carlos, Jessica Hagedorn and John Wo (who didn’t perform) of the collaborative group Thought Music presented Thinking Out Loud – from their ongoing work, Teeny Town – a twisted, mocking minstrel show that’s gross and savage – funny too with racial slurs, sexist jokes and stereotypical posturings. The Teeny Town material is smart and sharp-edged but some of the sketches are pretty weak. They tie things up at the end with a miniature buck-and-wing that’s delightfully dry in its understatement. Ching Valdez-Aran and Sam Jackson yuk it up terrifically as “end men” in difficult transitional low-comedy bits.
But the four-minds-are-better-than-one principle leaves Thinking Out Loud rather shapeless. Some sections are done with a self-conscious amateurism that generates splendid crude energy, but have to be refined if they’re not to seem fraudulent. The acoustics at St. Marks are always tricky, and these performers should know enough to adapted to the peculiar aural characteristics of the space. When Carlos speaks quietly, for example she’s wonderfully clear, when voices get loud and emphatic, the words become muffled and overlaid with echo. As a performer, Hagedorn is whiny, self pitying and immature. Carlos has dignity, generosity, toughness. Her piercingly naïve childhood story, White Chocolate/She is the high point of the piece in this incarnation.
But I have a hard time with Robbie McCauley. She can be radiant, fierce, dangerous, sweet as honey. But I take it personally the way she sucks in the audience with her clarity of feeling and memory, then turns on it and blasts it with a rage she’s held in reserve. Life’s hard enough; we’re sufficiently hapless in the face of mindless adversity and cruelty. I’m not willing to be scourged by someone inflamed by her own ambivalence, who blames me for the snarling injustices of the past and present without addressing her own responsibility. There’s dishonesty in the way she uses the anger that boils in her. The audience loves her spewing tirades. They clap and holler. This is the real thing! Uncensored passionate expression! And she’s torn up about the same stuff we are, or should be, or would be if we lived her life.
But this isn’t theater or any kind of art. This is psychic sludge that McCauley isn’t dealing with and is dumping. Dumping again and again—and she’s never rid of it. McCauley uses her politics to justify her bitterness, and what that does is wed her in principle as well as in fact to her misery and dissatisfaction. She has learned to love her bonds. I won’t take the blame for that. I certainly won’t applaud it.
At Danspace at St. Mark’s Church-in-the-Bowery (June 2 through 5).
What performances by Julio Bocca and Alessandra Ferri in ABT’s Giselle! For all its quaint setting and supernatural resolution, Giselle remains an emotionally vibrant and timely tragedy without malice. It’s naive heroine is jilted by a two-timing lover, and then, through repentance and forgiveness, a kind of reconciliation and release is achieved, backed up by the solid hard work of a long night through which he dances for his life and she spells him. It’s not modern for her to go mad and die so they can work things out. To be contemporary, she’d have to lead the ghoulish pack dragging him to his comeuppance.
Ferri is an expressive actress but her technique falters and she fatigues over the course of the ballet. Still her Giselle is conceived on such a scale that it has a grandeur its flaws cannot diminish. It’s astonishing how much she carries of the girl Giselle into the graveyard act. Yet ghostly and ephemeral, she’s no longer shattered but consoling and agelessly wiser. Her tenderness is palatable. On the other hand, her Albrecht, Julio Bocca, is a miracle of youthful passion, jugging Giselle and his official fiancé Bathilde. He’s not a cad who toys with a village girl only to discover too late how deeply he loves her. He’s a young man used to his ways, who’s enjoying the benefits of two lives, true in both as long as each is secret from the other. But when both worlds come crashing together, he can’t quite react fast enough. He’s quick enough to go for his sword, but here his courage fails. He keeps up the pretense of innocence a moment too long, as though if he keeps his head in the sand, time will roll backwards and the bad news will evaporate. Then it’s too late, Giselle’s mind snaps, and her wounded heart gives out.
Bocca’s technical brilliance and verve, the excitement of his presence, make him a star. But he has a rare genius; he can enter a role wholeheartedly and seriously, and open it up from the inside with shameless vitality and delicacy of feeling. Impetuous as Albright, his approach is assertive rather than courtly; macho without it’s implicit insult. In Act I, he controls Giselle with his presence; he plants his body near her, in front of her, slightly too close, and she wavers faintly with intoxication, embarrassment, desire. When he reaches out for her and she’s already half a stage away and turns back to him, it is not quite as if the same yearning were aroused in both, but as if he physically touched and restrained her and she acquiesced gladly. His virtuoso dancing is as fully expressive of character and situation as is the mime that details the prosaic aspects of the plot.
As the jealous gamekeeper, Hilarion, Clark Tippet is intense and darkly fascinating in Act I; in Act II, when the vengeful spirits are dancing him to death, his performance divides. He pleads desperately for mercy, and immediately after leaps about very nicely. But in Bocca’s performance there’s no differentiation between acting and dancing. All the steps acquire particular meaning and savor, even those that may be filler. This gift makes Bocca great. And it’s the sort of thing that turns high-tone entertainment into art.
At the Metropolitan Opera House (June 10).
Robbie McCauley, Laurie Carlos, Jessica Hagedorn and John Wo (who didn’t perform) of the collaborative group Thought Music presented Thinking Out Loud – from their ongoing work, Teeny Town – a twisted, mocking minstrel show that’s gross and savage – funny too with racial slurs, sexist jokes and stereotypical posturings. The Teeny Town material is smart and sharp-edged but some of the sketches are pretty weak. They tie things up at the end with a miniature buck-and-wing that’s delightfully dry in its understatement. Ching Valdez-Aran and Sam Jackson yuk it up terrifically as “end men” in difficult transitional low-comedy bits.
But the four-minds-are-better-than-one principle leaves Thinking Out Loud rather shapeless. Some sections are done with a self-conscious amateurism that generates splendid crude energy, but have to be refined if they’re not to seem fraudulent. The acoustics at St. Marks are always tricky, and these performers should know enough to adapted to the peculiar aural characteristics of the space. When Carlos speaks quietly, for example she’s wonderfully clear, when voices get loud and emphatic, the words become muffled and overlaid with echo. As a performer, Hagedorn is whiny, self pitying and immature. Carlos has dignity, generosity, toughness. Her piercingly naïve childhood story, White Chocolate/She is the high point of the piece in this incarnation.
But I have a hard time with Robbie McCauley. She can be radiant, fierce, dangerous, sweet as honey. But I take it personally the way she sucks in the audience with her clarity of feeling and memory, then turns on it and blasts it with a rage she’s held in reserve. Life’s hard enough; we’re sufficiently hapless in the face of mindless adversity and cruelty. I’m not willing to be scourged by someone inflamed by her own ambivalence, who blames me for the snarling injustices of the past and present without addressing her own responsibility. There’s dishonesty in the way she uses the anger that boils in her. The audience loves her spewing tirades. They clap and holler. This is the real thing! Uncensored passionate expression! And she’s torn up about the same stuff we are, or should be, or would be if we lived her life.
But this isn’t theater or any kind of art. This is psychic sludge that McCauley isn’t dealing with and is dumping. Dumping again and again—and she’s never rid of it. McCauley uses her politics to justify her bitterness, and what that does is wed her in principle as well as in fact to her misery and dissatisfaction. She has learned to love her bonds. I won’t take the blame for that. I certainly won’t applaud it.
At Danspace at St. Mark’s Church-in-the-Bowery (June 2 through 5).
Filet de Film
November 22
In the vast sanctuary of Judson Memorial Church, Thom Fogarty has tried to make a song-and-dance cabaret, Dances Movies, built on songs made familiar through the movies, and interspersed with speeches and gestural bits robbed from films: like Fogarty and the other dancers (Steven Petty, Carlos Arevalo, Nancy Alfaro, Kathryn Komatsu) intensely puffing on ciggies a la B. Davis, or the hefty Arevalo pumping his forearms and turning in circles like the frustrated, wheelchair-bound Joan Crawford in Hush, Hush, Sweet Charlotte.
There’s a homemade quality to Mr. Fogarty’s hour-long opus, but it’s also half-baked. It’s a casual-seeming event with a friendly Mickey-and-Judy putting-on-a-show atmosphere, but the pretension to innocence - call it cuteness - is an embarrassment. To pull that off requires a great deal more control than Fogarty’s exercises. Dance Movies is nostalgic even when it doesn’t go back very far into the past, and its strongest moments are sentimental ones. I like the musical drift of the piece, from “As Time Goes By” to “Happy Endings” by way of “Cottage for Sale,” “Here Lies Love,” and another dozen-and-a-half songs which, as it happens, I don’t particularly associate with movies. But that isn’t enough.
To be effective, Dance Movies would require an intimate environment so it could be enfolded by its environment. But the Judson space feels lonely and unbounded. Though the speakers and singers come through with surprising clarity, the resounding echoes aggravate the feeling of isolation. The singers wear black; the dancers in loose, striped shirts with black tights, look appallingly shleppy and charmless. They need to be in something either brighter and neater or go the other way toward outrageousness. The outre Fogarty, with his raggedy hair and flashy earring, could set the tone.
It’s nice that Fogarty hasn’t coupled his revueish format with the exact, chipper sort of dancing you might expect. It’s weighted, swingy, prancing, sluggish, with bursts of punching turns and zizzing spins, and arms thrusting into accusations, salutes, waves goodbye. There are satisfyingly hammy moments, as when Arevalo, overcome by Fogarty-as-Bette, totters down the altar stairs and rolls across the floor. Ordinary gesture couples with abstraction in a narrative of jealousy from Paris, Texas, told by the three men in sequence, i which Fogarty, for example, knocks his head and slides sideways, then flings his arms back as part of a terse, disorienting commentary. I particularly liked Arevalo and Petty holding hands and playfully doodling their feet before sliding down and pulling each other around while Alfaro throatily sings “Don’t Ever Leave Me.” But these are just a few lively, scattered moments in an amateur night. We’re not in the parlor, Fogarty and pals aren’t Judy Garland and Margaret O’Brien singing “Under the Bamboo Tree.” Too bad.
At Judson Memorial Church (November 10 through 13).
In the vast sanctuary of Judson Memorial Church, Thom Fogarty has tried to make a song-and-dance cabaret, Dances Movies, built on songs made familiar through the movies, and interspersed with speeches and gestural bits robbed from films: like Fogarty and the other dancers (Steven Petty, Carlos Arevalo, Nancy Alfaro, Kathryn Komatsu) intensely puffing on ciggies a la B. Davis, or the hefty Arevalo pumping his forearms and turning in circles like the frustrated, wheelchair-bound Joan Crawford in Hush, Hush, Sweet Charlotte.
There’s a homemade quality to Mr. Fogarty’s hour-long opus, but it’s also half-baked. It’s a casual-seeming event with a friendly Mickey-and-Judy putting-on-a-show atmosphere, but the pretension to innocence - call it cuteness - is an embarrassment. To pull that off requires a great deal more control than Fogarty’s exercises. Dance Movies is nostalgic even when it doesn’t go back very far into the past, and its strongest moments are sentimental ones. I like the musical drift of the piece, from “As Time Goes By” to “Happy Endings” by way of “Cottage for Sale,” “Here Lies Love,” and another dozen-and-a-half songs which, as it happens, I don’t particularly associate with movies. But that isn’t enough.
To be effective, Dance Movies would require an intimate environment so it could be enfolded by its environment. But the Judson space feels lonely and unbounded. Though the speakers and singers come through with surprising clarity, the resounding echoes aggravate the feeling of isolation. The singers wear black; the dancers in loose, striped shirts with black tights, look appallingly shleppy and charmless. They need to be in something either brighter and neater or go the other way toward outrageousness. The outre Fogarty, with his raggedy hair and flashy earring, could set the tone.
It’s nice that Fogarty hasn’t coupled his revueish format with the exact, chipper sort of dancing you might expect. It’s weighted, swingy, prancing, sluggish, with bursts of punching turns and zizzing spins, and arms thrusting into accusations, salutes, waves goodbye. There are satisfyingly hammy moments, as when Arevalo, overcome by Fogarty-as-Bette, totters down the altar stairs and rolls across the floor. Ordinary gesture couples with abstraction in a narrative of jealousy from Paris, Texas, told by the three men in sequence, i which Fogarty, for example, knocks his head and slides sideways, then flings his arms back as part of a terse, disorienting commentary. I particularly liked Arevalo and Petty holding hands and playfully doodling their feet before sliding down and pulling each other around while Alfaro throatily sings “Don’t Ever Leave Me.” But these are just a few lively, scattered moments in an amateur night. We’re not in the parlor, Fogarty and pals aren’t Judy Garland and Margaret O’Brien singing “Under the Bamboo Tree.” Too bad.
At Judson Memorial Church (November 10 through 13).
Floating World
July 5
In sweltering heat, after a day when the thermometer reached nearly a billion degrees Fahrenheit, seven performers in tank suits hung in aqueous suspension in Columbia University's sub-basement pool. A mesmerizing, low-key work, Daniel Larrieu's Waterproof - superbly lit by Francoise Michel, and with a satisfying sound score by J. Jaques Palx and Eve Couturier - was neither an aquacade nor a water ballet nor synchronized swimming. It was a kind of dream.
Arrayed along the far edge of the pool, the performers, in raincoats, slowly bend to the pool's edge, let a foot or a hand be sucked under, allow their whole bodies to be peacefully swallowed with only the slightest rippling of the surface. As truncated figures, arms crossed over their chests, they take pedaling underwater walks, while the music hums like a million bees. On a large video screen set against the wall behind the pool, we see swimmers' faces with goggled eyes bobbing on the surface of the water, the group clinging together like a mass of kelp, a voluptuous nude women, a body curled on the tile. Motionless, isolated in rectangles of light, the performers hang in balance, legs apart. Maybe one swimmer wriggles like a tadpole through Larrieu's spare and formal design. Their raincoats sink to the bottom.
Occasionally simultaneous, the beautifully made video sections (sometimes black and white, sometimes in color) by Jean Louis Letacon usually alternate with activity in the pool in a refreshing way. Underwater walkers stride over rooftops. Submerged figures seem to be running, their feet splashing in a shallow sheet of water. The image is upside down: the bubbles are plummeting, the feet are riffling the surface of the water from below, and shattering it into blazes of light. It's not all solemn. The group makes tight runs at the edge of the pool and plunge straight in, out, back in. Four run, three tumble in shouting, "Encore!," then the remaining four spill back in. All seven lie in a line, feet on shoulders, and every other body rolls in. They crawl along the edge at a steady rhythm, and fall in one by one.
On video, a woman swims directly forward, initiating a pristine gymnastic solo that leads to a quiet sculpture garden of archings, crouchings, glidings, headstands - things we could never see from our perspective in the stands. Then, alive, in a burst of light, bodies spring halfway out of the water, hands together overhead as if for a dive into the stratosphere. And then the arms smack down, the bodies disappear under the broken surface to rebound, again and again, partly turned and rearranged in new configurations. There's accordion music and icy light. The swimmers are arched, floating shapes. They come together in a ring, barely ruffling the water's surface, then suspend themselves again in spacious privacy, their bodies twisted open like broken-jointed figures. So naturally amphibious do they seem that your rarely aware if they ever come up to breathe. Three performers crouch at the pool's edge. When their partners erupt from the water, they push them back under. But a fourth person rises and plunges simultaneously with the others; no one shoves him down. The crouching partners haul their partners out by their heads, or their feet, or their hips, caress them with sloshes of water, and tumble them back in. The fourth person keeps appearing, disappearing, at the same rate. The other waterpeople sway, hanging on their partners' necks, then slip away into the water. The video shows a forest of inverted legs. Underwater floaters greet their reflections on the water's undersurface. Seemingly in midair, hovering over the liquid mirror, they plunge their faces into their own images. The live swimmers drift across the pool carrying candles that generate the first really warm light we've seen. Gradually, they are extinguished and the swimmers are slowly swept back to the pool's edge.
At Columbia University’s Dodge Physical Fitness Center (June 22 through 24).
In sweltering heat, after a day when the thermometer reached nearly a billion degrees Fahrenheit, seven performers in tank suits hung in aqueous suspension in Columbia University's sub-basement pool. A mesmerizing, low-key work, Daniel Larrieu's Waterproof - superbly lit by Francoise Michel, and with a satisfying sound score by J. Jaques Palx and Eve Couturier - was neither an aquacade nor a water ballet nor synchronized swimming. It was a kind of dream.
Arrayed along the far edge of the pool, the performers, in raincoats, slowly bend to the pool's edge, let a foot or a hand be sucked under, allow their whole bodies to be peacefully swallowed with only the slightest rippling of the surface. As truncated figures, arms crossed over their chests, they take pedaling underwater walks, while the music hums like a million bees. On a large video screen set against the wall behind the pool, we see swimmers' faces with goggled eyes bobbing on the surface of the water, the group clinging together like a mass of kelp, a voluptuous nude women, a body curled on the tile. Motionless, isolated in rectangles of light, the performers hang in balance, legs apart. Maybe one swimmer wriggles like a tadpole through Larrieu's spare and formal design. Their raincoats sink to the bottom.
Occasionally simultaneous, the beautifully made video sections (sometimes black and white, sometimes in color) by Jean Louis Letacon usually alternate with activity in the pool in a refreshing way. Underwater walkers stride over rooftops. Submerged figures seem to be running, their feet splashing in a shallow sheet of water. The image is upside down: the bubbles are plummeting, the feet are riffling the surface of the water from below, and shattering it into blazes of light. It's not all solemn. The group makes tight runs at the edge of the pool and plunge straight in, out, back in. Four run, three tumble in shouting, "Encore!," then the remaining four spill back in. All seven lie in a line, feet on shoulders, and every other body rolls in. They crawl along the edge at a steady rhythm, and fall in one by one.
On video, a woman swims directly forward, initiating a pristine gymnastic solo that leads to a quiet sculpture garden of archings, crouchings, glidings, headstands - things we could never see from our perspective in the stands. Then, alive, in a burst of light, bodies spring halfway out of the water, hands together overhead as if for a dive into the stratosphere. And then the arms smack down, the bodies disappear under the broken surface to rebound, again and again, partly turned and rearranged in new configurations. There's accordion music and icy light. The swimmers are arched, floating shapes. They come together in a ring, barely ruffling the water's surface, then suspend themselves again in spacious privacy, their bodies twisted open like broken-jointed figures. So naturally amphibious do they seem that your rarely aware if they ever come up to breathe. Three performers crouch at the pool's edge. When their partners erupt from the water, they push them back under. But a fourth person rises and plunges simultaneously with the others; no one shoves him down. The crouching partners haul their partners out by their heads, or their feet, or their hips, caress them with sloshes of water, and tumble them back in. The fourth person keeps appearing, disappearing, at the same rate. The other waterpeople sway, hanging on their partners' necks, then slip away into the water. The video shows a forest of inverted legs. Underwater floaters greet their reflections on the water's undersurface. Seemingly in midair, hovering over the liquid mirror, they plunge their faces into their own images. The live swimmers drift across the pool carrying candles that generate the first really warm light we've seen. Gradually, they are extinguished and the swimmers are slowly swept back to the pool's edge.
At Columbia University’s Dodge Physical Fitness Center (June 22 through 24).
JOHN BERND 1953-1988
September 13
Dancer-choreographer John Bernd died of AIDS at NYU Medical Center around noon on Sunday, August 28. He was 35.
Bernd had been battling the various manifestations of the disease for a long time. It was six years ago that he presented the funny, angry, astonishing solo work, Surviving Love and Death, in which he publicly confronted his mysterious illness as well as life’s commonplace treacheries. A few years ago he sneaked out of NYU Medical center’s Cooperative Care division one evening to do a performance at St. Marks in the Bowery. In 1986, he was awarded a Bessie for Lost and Found: Scenes from a Life. This February he was still performing, in very fragile condition, in a duet with Jennifer Monson.
Mark Russell, director of P.S. 122, the performance space Bernd was actively involved with from its inception, recalls Bernd in the hospital in June, lying in bed, all skin and bones, and actively choreographing in his head. “He was hitting on me for the next gig and he was really fierce.” Bernd had a knack for brining people together and was a catalyst in the downtown dance and performance community. At P.S. 122, says Russell, he was “sort of the ethical guiding light. His intuitive sense of what was right,m his concern for the needs of the artists, and his ability to find the simplest, clearest answer were real gifts. For a long time, he cleaned the space - he was the cleaning guy - and he was very rigorous about caring for the actual physical space, as well as using it for rehearsal. He made it feel like a sort of a home and that informed a lot of the way things developed here. His concern for process and impatience with bullshit made things go. He was more than a member or just an artist. He’s a great, great loss to us.” Among the friends - call them family - who helped care for John in recent years, were Monson, Ishmael Houston-Jones Michael Stiller, Lori Seid, Yvonne Meier, Lucy Sexton, Annie Iobst, Jeff McMahon, Richard Elovich, Fred Holland, Jeannie Hutchins, Dona McAdams and Johnny Walker. A memorial gathering will be held Saturday, September 17 at 2 p.m. at St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery, Second Avenue and 10th Street. Bernd’s mother suggests that any contributions be sent to God’s Love - We Deliver, which provides meals for PWAs, or an organization of one’s choice.
Dancer-choreographer John Bernd died of AIDS at NYU Medical Center around noon on Sunday, August 28. He was 35.
Bernd had been battling the various manifestations of the disease for a long time. It was six years ago that he presented the funny, angry, astonishing solo work, Surviving Love and Death, in which he publicly confronted his mysterious illness as well as life’s commonplace treacheries. A few years ago he sneaked out of NYU Medical center’s Cooperative Care division one evening to do a performance at St. Marks in the Bowery. In 1986, he was awarded a Bessie for Lost and Found: Scenes from a Life. This February he was still performing, in very fragile condition, in a duet with Jennifer Monson.
Mark Russell, director of P.S. 122, the performance space Bernd was actively involved with from its inception, recalls Bernd in the hospital in June, lying in bed, all skin and bones, and actively choreographing in his head. “He was hitting on me for the next gig and he was really fierce.” Bernd had a knack for brining people together and was a catalyst in the downtown dance and performance community. At P.S. 122, says Russell, he was “sort of the ethical guiding light. His intuitive sense of what was right,m his concern for the needs of the artists, and his ability to find the simplest, clearest answer were real gifts. For a long time, he cleaned the space - he was the cleaning guy - and he was very rigorous about caring for the actual physical space, as well as using it for rehearsal. He made it feel like a sort of a home and that informed a lot of the way things developed here. His concern for process and impatience with bullshit made things go. He was more than a member or just an artist. He’s a great, great loss to us.” Among the friends - call them family - who helped care for John in recent years, were Monson, Ishmael Houston-Jones Michael Stiller, Lori Seid, Yvonne Meier, Lucy Sexton, Annie Iobst, Jeff McMahon, Richard Elovich, Fred Holland, Jeannie Hutchins, Dona McAdams and Johnny Walker. A memorial gathering will be held Saturday, September 17 at 2 p.m. at St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery, Second Avenue and 10th Street. Bernd’s mother suggests that any contributions be sent to God’s Love - We Deliver, which provides meals for PWAs, or an organization of one’s choice.
Foreign Bodies
February 30
Sex is the focus of Ruby Shang’s Invisible Languages, a collaborative project (with Bill T. Jones and Akaji Maro) that sets a lengthy, formal episode of ritualized passion in Japanese manner against a lightweight, game-playing American sensibility. The piece is haunted by a looming presence from the past (Maro, director of Dairakudakan Butoh Troupe), who wears a soiled ivory kimono and medals pinned to his chest. With a torn piece of paper sticking to the side of his head like a horny fin, ashen makeup, black eye sockets, and blood dripping down his arm, Maro is a fierce, gloomy figure—compelling to watch, but impotent and peripheral, like a ghost that beats on the window but isn’t invited in.
The first part of the piece, set in the past, is formal in its theatrical atmosphere. Elegant and infinitely prideful, Bill T. Jones, wrapped in a courtly blue garment, shielded and isolated by women (Akiko Ko, Diane Butler, Mayumi Kajiwara) carrying a veil, gestures with delicacy and abruptness, combining nobility and refinement with sudden drops, stamps, and skitters. He rests in a deceptively languid pose and maintains it with the patience of a hunter. He seems to exist fully in each moment in the polished, self-conscious pleasure of his perfect image.
Maro is his opposite. He represents an old malediction, a suppressed consciousness, the sins of the fathers perhaps. With arms bowed or drooping, shoulders hunched, he wanders around, searching, quivering, tottering. He backs carefully up the altar steps with his arms partially raised like some vampire shrinking from a crucifix. Then, Maro climbs into a giant round tub, and disappears. The highlight of the first part is a duet for Shang and Jones. Three servant women set down a thick paper mat, a bowl, and a candle. Shang enters in a black and red garment. She shuffles, staggers, her whole body wavers.
Tom Cayler’s text, which parallels but never simultaneously describes the actions or the feelings of the characters, seems to recall an amorous encounter out of The Tale of Genji, something about an arranged marriage, and also speaks of how impossible it is to find the perfect woman—one who meets every wrong with gentleness and forbearance. (The intentionally casual, very American reading is jarring in this section because it’s too isolated and weak in the way it contrasts with the deliberateness of the choreography.) Jones approaches while the women hold the veil to keep him apart from Shang and her honor intact. He offers a flower under the veil, then slips through himself. He caresses Shang with the back of his hand, loosens his robes, unwinds his sash, stripping down to a twisted loincloth, looking at her all the time. She acts numb, dumb; she barely exists. He loosens her clothes while she pretends to be asleep, leaving her in a sheer shift. Then she sways against him, lies back, and wraps him with her legs. With the utmost reticence, they shift through a sculptural lexicon of sexual embraces. All that honey skin! Jones spasms. When he lies back, she’s still warming up; she coolly attacks him and they ram at each other with obsessive inventiveness. But when their coupling is over, he’s gone. Ushio Torikai’s music gushes with rumbles and chimes. Jones squats motionless while the women dress him, slips back out through the veil. Goodbye. Wham, bam, arigato, ma’am.
The artfully sexy duet is balanced by a clever but intricate duet for Tom Cayler and Clarice Marshall in which they play house on, under, and around a couple of chairs and a piano bench (this kind of invention is vintage Shang). In their comfortable domestic relationship, Caylor and Marshall are equals. They gaily deprecate the attitude of men as revealed in traditional Japanese literature (“these guys were completely led around by their dicks”), but, on the other hand, he might not be totally averse to having a couple of women in his utopian household. He waltzes with Shang and Marshall. He caresses Shang, and they rock together. Then the three of them are thrashing, pulling, kicking. Briefly, Jones becomes a teasing, smiling partner to Shang, but their relation quickly turns into a roughly clutching struggle. He keeps yanking her back to him. The music is harsh; the servant women rush around like furies. Maro, who has been crouching in shadow up on the altar, faces Shang. He runs with legs deeply bent, and she follows closely. Then everyone poses on the altar as if for a family portrait. But after a moment, Shang begins to sink out of the group. Hurt, resentful, she crawls away, then flees, and everyone runs after her.
The gestural material in the first part of the piece is spare, exact, elegantly designed, and often resonant in its crystallization of feeling or behavior. Later on, the movement seems carelessly shaped, most significant in its rude energy. I suppose this energy suggests something more contemporary and American than the studied economy of movement in the earlier part of the piece, but it seems empty. And because relationships are so unclear, too much of the action seems like filler, to keep our minds off what we’re missing. What we’re missing are the connections between these emotional scraps.
The crucial problem with Invisible Languages is the ambivalence at the heart of Shang’s conception. She’s dealing with tough, complicated material, deep cultural conflicts that she has endured personally. But the material Shang wants to examine, she also wants to push away from, to hide. (And at the very end of the piece, she retreats entirely, abandoning the scene.) She doesn’t want us to know much. For example, there’s a personal drama here that’s central, that of Shang’s relationship with the wounded ghost-man (Maro) who lives as part of her own nature and represents, I assume, her father. (At one point, Maro is hidden under a red tub. When the tub is lifted, it is Shang who crawls out like a snail from underneath.) But Maro is never allowed to develop in relation to the other people. And Shang keeps clouding the relationships. It’s very Japanese to preserve one’s mask, to keep the private life hidden—and, of course, Shang’s real life is nobody’s business.
Born in Tokyo of a Chinese father and Japanese mother, educated in postwar Japan at the American School, working as a choreographer here, Shang must juggle many irreconcilable cultural elements in her own person. But to examine indirectly, in an essentially non-narrative but dramatic way, how these contradictions wear the psyche requires a common performance language as subtle as that of Henry James. More than that, however, it requires a decision to be straight.
At Danspace Project St Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery (February 11 to 14).
Gangbusters
November 8
At a noontime ceremony on October 27, at the landmark Battery Maritime Building, jam-packed with artists and dignitaries, Mayor Koch formally announced that a consortium consisting of Dance Theater Workshop and Creative Time will become the “cultural user” of the building as part of the South Ferry Plaza Project. DTW and Creative Time will renovate and share 30,000 square feet of space, mostly on the second floor of the landmark structure at the foot of Whitehall Street, receiving 15,000 square feet rent-free and 15,000 square feet at an initial rental of $15 per square foot. The commitment signifies the city’s recognition of the need to help make space available to the artists and arts organizations that the real estate market has driven to desperation. But it’s not exactly happening tomorrow.
The project involves berthing the Staten Island ferris in the Battery Maritime Building’s ferry slips while construction begins on a 60-story office tower on top of the ferry terminal. Then when the tower is five or six stories tall and the ferries can be moved back, construction will begin on the Battery Maritime Building, and only then can DTA and Creative Time construct their spaces within. DTW will have two theaters - one with 99 seats and one with 199 - office space and rehearsal studios, and Creative Time will have offices and exhibition space.
At the moment, 1993 is the projected date for completion. So what does that really mean? 1995? Is that still optimistic? What’s ahead for DTW and Creative Time is a campaign to raise about $4 million for the construction. While they’re waiting for this to happen, Creative Time, which sponsors mostly conceptual projects by emerging artists at sites in all five boroughs, will continues to work out of a show-box office. Dance Theater Workshop, whose lease at 219 West 19th Street expires June 30, 1989, has not found any other suitable space but it hopeful of working out a new five-year lease with its current landlord. In the best scenario, it will be obliged to pay crushing increases while trying to get up the scratch for its new home.
In the meantime, American Ballet Theater and the Feld Ballet joyously celebrated (on October 11) the designation of their home, 890 Broadway as the Lawrence A. Wien Center for Dance and Theater. (An independent corporation formed by both companies manages the building.) Wien is the philanthropist who rescued 890, with its splendid unobstructed studios, from sale to developers in 1986 by choreographer/director Michael Bennett. Initially, the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater considered going in on the deal, but found it impossible to raise money with the requisite speed and was also locked into a lease on the Minskoff building. But Ailey’s lease is up next spring, and a search for a suitable space (the company and school occupy 20,000 square feet now) at a rent anywhere near what the company can afford has so far been fruitless.
At a noontime ceremony on October 27, at the landmark Battery Maritime Building, jam-packed with artists and dignitaries, Mayor Koch formally announced that a consortium consisting of Dance Theater Workshop and Creative Time will become the “cultural user” of the building as part of the South Ferry Plaza Project. DTW and Creative Time will renovate and share 30,000 square feet of space, mostly on the second floor of the landmark structure at the foot of Whitehall Street, receiving 15,000 square feet rent-free and 15,000 square feet at an initial rental of $15 per square foot. The commitment signifies the city’s recognition of the need to help make space available to the artists and arts organizations that the real estate market has driven to desperation. But it’s not exactly happening tomorrow.
The project involves berthing the Staten Island ferris in the Battery Maritime Building’s ferry slips while construction begins on a 60-story office tower on top of the ferry terminal. Then when the tower is five or six stories tall and the ferries can be moved back, construction will begin on the Battery Maritime Building, and only then can DTA and Creative Time construct their spaces within. DTW will have two theaters - one with 99 seats and one with 199 - office space and rehearsal studios, and Creative Time will have offices and exhibition space.
At the moment, 1993 is the projected date for completion. So what does that really mean? 1995? Is that still optimistic? What’s ahead for DTW and Creative Time is a campaign to raise about $4 million for the construction. While they’re waiting for this to happen, Creative Time, which sponsors mostly conceptual projects by emerging artists at sites in all five boroughs, will continues to work out of a show-box office. Dance Theater Workshop, whose lease at 219 West 19th Street expires June 30, 1989, has not found any other suitable space but it hopeful of working out a new five-year lease with its current landlord. In the best scenario, it will be obliged to pay crushing increases while trying to get up the scratch for its new home.
In the meantime, American Ballet Theater and the Feld Ballet joyously celebrated (on October 11) the designation of their home, 890 Broadway as the Lawrence A. Wien Center for Dance and Theater. (An independent corporation formed by both companies manages the building.) Wien is the philanthropist who rescued 890, with its splendid unobstructed studios, from sale to developers in 1986 by choreographer/director Michael Bennett. Initially, the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater considered going in on the deal, but found it impossible to raise money with the requisite speed and was also locked into a lease on the Minskoff building. But Ailey’s lease is up next spring, and a search for a suitable space (the company and school occupy 20,000 square feet now) at a rent anywhere near what the company can afford has so far been fruitless.
Life’s a Beach
August 23
XXY Dance/Music faced a tough problem in creating a work for Art on the Beach's rough and weedy Hunters Point lot inhabited by seven sculptural presences. There's the authoritarian, hierarchical, truncated metal nose-cone of Paul Castrucci's Project for a Tower with its attendant rings of shed light structures; Kain Karawahn's tattered pentagonal tent with its burnt,wind blown canvas shrouds; Ann Reichlin's in-progress installation, Home, a kind of rambling, quasi habitation of raddled sticks. Rows of huge, crude, concrete blocks are part of the sites permanent design.
Desolation's a theme on this blessedly breezy knoll behind the Daily News plant, within view of Manhattan's skyline and two of its deteriorating bridges. When I arrived for Cyndi Lee and Mary Ellen Strom's Portrait of the Young Bird as an Artist, there was an intermittent music (by Pierce Turner) as well as the chatting of the technicians coming over the speakers, and some rehearsing was still going on. A few of the eight dancers were scanning the terrain with mock metal detectors. People kept popping up out of the shoulder-high weeds half in or out of costume. The situation was full of surprises and the apparent unrelatedness of one thing to another was, for the moment, pleasing-even ideal. When the piece actually began though, I thought I was supposed to understand who the characters were, what their relationship meant, and grasp the logic of events. But I couldn't.
A girl in black, Tina Dudek, wearing a stove pipe hat and, on her feet, one blue flipper and one white sneaker, wriggles her shoulders. Three weed-covered people camouflaged as bushes sneak around near her. Black-and-yellow cutouts perch on a chain-linked fence. Cyndi Lee swings, sags, and clenches her arms in a tough solo. Chris Meanor seems to be nestling. While Pavarotti sings Italian arias, she carries Meanor, guides his movement; they lean together briefly, making tender gestures; he jumps up on her hips. When Gregg Hubbard springs out of the shrubbery, the two guys race about together than Lee jumps on Hubbard's shoulder, flails in his arms. She locks her ankles around his leg while they embrace tightly. Meanor squeezes between and separates them, than all three do a trio of slipshod reels, awkward hefts and carries.
But this loosely flung, wobbly, oddly weighted movement is too much in tune with the battered environment. All but the strongest actions seem only indicated. The unevenness of the ground, the frequent obstructions, permit only an approximation of wildness. Inevitably, the energy is neutralized and dragged down, while the trio's occasional significant looks, intended to clarify their relationships, seem incomprehensibly cute and private. It's clearly difficult to find the right style and a convincing scale for the situation. Refined movement seems prissy, oversized expressions read false, and even very vigorous activity becomes muted. What seemed effective were things that were choral, aggressively formal, blatantly costumes-like the dance of the bushes, or the parade of people dressed in black, disguised as young Hasidic birds wearing flat-brimmed hats and yellow beaks. They fluttered their hands, pointed, nodded their heads in unison, strode along one of the concrete blocks, and did swan dives off the end, catching one another in turn.
The choreographers tried to confront the problems of Art on the Beach’s site by scattering the action so dancers appear out of the weeds, enter from and disappear along various pathways, trot and pose, on the concrete blocks. But this may be too distracting a location for a piece that doesn't have overwhelming armies of performers or the kind of pinpoint concentration that can utterly deny the outside world. At Hunters Point, there's no clear open area, no unifying background. The sculptures dominate with their distinctive, moody presences, and the open air, as always, has its powerful, deadly allure.
At Creative Time’s Art on the Beach, Hunter’s Point, Queens (August 10 and 12).
XXY Dance/Music faced a tough problem in creating a work for Art on the Beach's rough and weedy Hunters Point lot inhabited by seven sculptural presences. There's the authoritarian, hierarchical, truncated metal nose-cone of Paul Castrucci's Project for a Tower with its attendant rings of shed light structures; Kain Karawahn's tattered pentagonal tent with its burnt,wind blown canvas shrouds; Ann Reichlin's in-progress installation, Home, a kind of rambling, quasi habitation of raddled sticks. Rows of huge, crude, concrete blocks are part of the sites permanent design.
Desolation's a theme on this blessedly breezy knoll behind the Daily News plant, within view of Manhattan's skyline and two of its deteriorating bridges. When I arrived for Cyndi Lee and Mary Ellen Strom's Portrait of the Young Bird as an Artist, there was an intermittent music (by Pierce Turner) as well as the chatting of the technicians coming over the speakers, and some rehearsing was still going on. A few of the eight dancers were scanning the terrain with mock metal detectors. People kept popping up out of the shoulder-high weeds half in or out of costume. The situation was full of surprises and the apparent unrelatedness of one thing to another was, for the moment, pleasing-even ideal. When the piece actually began though, I thought I was supposed to understand who the characters were, what their relationship meant, and grasp the logic of events. But I couldn't.
A girl in black, Tina Dudek, wearing a stove pipe hat and, on her feet, one blue flipper and one white sneaker, wriggles her shoulders. Three weed-covered people camouflaged as bushes sneak around near her. Black-and-yellow cutouts perch on a chain-linked fence. Cyndi Lee swings, sags, and clenches her arms in a tough solo. Chris Meanor seems to be nestling. While Pavarotti sings Italian arias, she carries Meanor, guides his movement; they lean together briefly, making tender gestures; he jumps up on her hips. When Gregg Hubbard springs out of the shrubbery, the two guys race about together than Lee jumps on Hubbard's shoulder, flails in his arms. She locks her ankles around his leg while they embrace tightly. Meanor squeezes between and separates them, than all three do a trio of slipshod reels, awkward hefts and carries.
But this loosely flung, wobbly, oddly weighted movement is too much in tune with the battered environment. All but the strongest actions seem only indicated. The unevenness of the ground, the frequent obstructions, permit only an approximation of wildness. Inevitably, the energy is neutralized and dragged down, while the trio's occasional significant looks, intended to clarify their relationships, seem incomprehensibly cute and private. It's clearly difficult to find the right style and a convincing scale for the situation. Refined movement seems prissy, oversized expressions read false, and even very vigorous activity becomes muted. What seemed effective were things that were choral, aggressively formal, blatantly costumes-like the dance of the bushes, or the parade of people dressed in black, disguised as young Hasidic birds wearing flat-brimmed hats and yellow beaks. They fluttered their hands, pointed, nodded their heads in unison, strode along one of the concrete blocks, and did swan dives off the end, catching one another in turn.
The choreographers tried to confront the problems of Art on the Beach’s site by scattering the action so dancers appear out of the weeds, enter from and disappear along various pathways, trot and pose, on the concrete blocks. But this may be too distracting a location for a piece that doesn't have overwhelming armies of performers or the kind of pinpoint concentration that can utterly deny the outside world. At Hunters Point, there's no clear open area, no unifying background. The sculptures dominate with their distinctive, moody presences, and the open air, as always, has its powerful, deadly allure.
At Creative Time’s Art on the Beach, Hunter’s Point, Queens (August 10 and 12).
Linear A
September 16
The Joyce Trisler Danscompany presented an evening of dances from the twilight zone, or so it seemed, in their week-long engagement at the Joyce. The performers were full-blooded enough, but the conventional vocabulary of the dances gave the impression that it was incapable of expressing anything real or contemporary in feeling. Artistic director Miguel Lopez’s two offerings were the main offenders in this regard - Crawlspace (1985), an eight-minute solo, and Heartbeat, a premiere made for the company.
In Crawlspace, an adequate exercise, Regina Larkin is curled on the floor, twitching. Eyes bound, she pushes herself halfway across the floor on her back. Splendidly articulate, she strains to reach out, tries woefully to stand up. Caught erect in three crossbeams of light before dropping into a deep second position plie, she sways, falls, then crawls away. In Heartbeat, the men wear black unitards modestly ornamented with red worms and the women wear red with black worms - the kind of symbolic hokum Balanchine eventually ripped off the costumes of his early ballets. You don’t want to know any more except that Chenault Spence’s richly dramatic lighting almost made all this worth looking at.
Even Trisler’s 1976 declarative homage to the pioneer women of modern dance, Four Against the Gods, didn’t manage to say much about her heroines, though Trisler drew strongly contrasting, entirely impersonal portraits of them However Benjamin Harkarvy’s American Dancer, a new work dedicated to the later William Carter, manages to use traditional means with eloquence and immediacy Set to Debussy’s piano music, including two preludes, and excerpts from the Chansons to Bilitis, American Dancer is composed in four sections, anchored by an intriguing duet, and balanced by harmonious opening and closing group dances. In the first section, a sense of flexible and tender community is conveyed in the way three lines of three dancers each fade across each other, link together, loosely break apart, slide to the floor, roll away together to the back.
There’s a kind of solemnity to the atmosphere and a delicacy to the timing of these easy joinings and brief separations that seems idealized. The dancers’ costumes - blue, green, gray, brown - seem to burn with heightened vibrancy in Spence’s sunset lighting, which turns a little glassier, to the lemon sheen of dawn in the last section, when the group returns. Kevin Campbell is a runner in the second part - loping, warming up with little bounces in a deep lunge, soaring cleanly in leaps that sharply switch direction at their peak in midair. Dauntless, stretching his arms fully wide in his striving, Campbell is isolated, remote, even when a group surrounds him, with their arms raying outwards, and at the end of the solo he is still slowly, silently running. In the duet for Nicole Cuevas and Brian Frete, he seems to be asleep; beside him, she’s awake. Then, she dances by herself with a sense of the sober delight that one member of a couple can take in stolen moments alone When she returns to him, Frete’s arms and legs catch her to keep her briefly floating over his prone body. Then he arises with dazed turns, and a long, mysterious duet ensues in which they sometimes clasp and lean together, and sometimes seem quietly at odds, like when she tries to hobble him by rolling up against his heels as he moves.
I like the complexity, the changeability of the pair’s relationship, the way the dance’s tensions pull against the rueful music, and I was intrigued by the unexplained, literal moment when the dancers whisper together. Excluding the audience, it had the sudden weight and import of secret plotting, and the duet seemed to pivot on it.
At the Joyce Theater (October 4 through 8).
The Joyce Trisler Danscompany presented an evening of dances from the twilight zone, or so it seemed, in their week-long engagement at the Joyce. The performers were full-blooded enough, but the conventional vocabulary of the dances gave the impression that it was incapable of expressing anything real or contemporary in feeling. Artistic director Miguel Lopez’s two offerings were the main offenders in this regard - Crawlspace (1985), an eight-minute solo, and Heartbeat, a premiere made for the company.
In Crawlspace, an adequate exercise, Regina Larkin is curled on the floor, twitching. Eyes bound, she pushes herself halfway across the floor on her back. Splendidly articulate, she strains to reach out, tries woefully to stand up. Caught erect in three crossbeams of light before dropping into a deep second position plie, she sways, falls, then crawls away. In Heartbeat, the men wear black unitards modestly ornamented with red worms and the women wear red with black worms - the kind of symbolic hokum Balanchine eventually ripped off the costumes of his early ballets. You don’t want to know any more except that Chenault Spence’s richly dramatic lighting almost made all this worth looking at.
Even Trisler’s 1976 declarative homage to the pioneer women of modern dance, Four Against the Gods, didn’t manage to say much about her heroines, though Trisler drew strongly contrasting, entirely impersonal portraits of them However Benjamin Harkarvy’s American Dancer, a new work dedicated to the later William Carter, manages to use traditional means with eloquence and immediacy Set to Debussy’s piano music, including two preludes, and excerpts from the Chansons to Bilitis, American Dancer is composed in four sections, anchored by an intriguing duet, and balanced by harmonious opening and closing group dances. In the first section, a sense of flexible and tender community is conveyed in the way three lines of three dancers each fade across each other, link together, loosely break apart, slide to the floor, roll away together to the back.
There’s a kind of solemnity to the atmosphere and a delicacy to the timing of these easy joinings and brief separations that seems idealized. The dancers’ costumes - blue, green, gray, brown - seem to burn with heightened vibrancy in Spence’s sunset lighting, which turns a little glassier, to the lemon sheen of dawn in the last section, when the group returns. Kevin Campbell is a runner in the second part - loping, warming up with little bounces in a deep lunge, soaring cleanly in leaps that sharply switch direction at their peak in midair. Dauntless, stretching his arms fully wide in his striving, Campbell is isolated, remote, even when a group surrounds him, with their arms raying outwards, and at the end of the solo he is still slowly, silently running. In the duet for Nicole Cuevas and Brian Frete, he seems to be asleep; beside him, she’s awake. Then, she dances by herself with a sense of the sober delight that one member of a couple can take in stolen moments alone When she returns to him, Frete’s arms and legs catch her to keep her briefly floating over his prone body. Then he arises with dazed turns, and a long, mysterious duet ensues in which they sometimes clasp and lean together, and sometimes seem quietly at odds, like when she tries to hobble him by rolling up against his heels as he moves.
I like the complexity, the changeability of the pair’s relationship, the way the dance’s tensions pull against the rueful music, and I was intrigued by the unexplained, literal moment when the dancers whisper together. Excluding the audience, it had the sudden weight and import of secret plotting, and the duet seemed to pivot on it.
At the Joyce Theater (October 4 through 8).
Man in Motion
November 29
Michael Moschen’s performance is exhilarating, virtuoso entertainment, though he doesn’t ascend toward climaxes of spectacular difficulty like most circus or nightclub jugglers do. Instead, he draws his audience into moments of ravishing simplicity, most ingenious paradox, and solemn truthfulness. With a smile in his hands and a rolling crystal ball, or two hoops, or a couple of batons, he gamely makes you privy to the secret of the universe, though, as with most epiphanies, it evaporates in a moment.
Juggling, or whatever magic it is that Moschen does, is an art of manipulation and rhythm. Moschen lets the rhythm grow into music - there’s fine balance in the integration of his actions with David Van Tieghem’s score - but he appears to retreat from the manipulation. Bouncing balls against the inside walls of a huge triangle, flinging them t ricochet along congruent, triangular paths, he could be Jove, throwing fancy thunderbolts. But usually he seems to let the balls, or whatever, do what they want. He slips in and around them, intervenes when they decide to try out new patterns, and gets out of their way. You can take your eyes off the balls and just watch his fingers setting up the fluid ripple that keeps them whirling in his hand; it’s magic enough.
His body twists and lunges with unusual, modest elegance in a careful, loose-jointed dance that enables and earthily complements the fanciful dance of objects, which not only behave unnaturally and with infinite harmony, but appear to transform themselves altogether. What was merely line becomes volume, what was insubstantial becomes weighty. When Moschen swings a flimsy, teardrop-shaped form it becomes a heavy, gleaming solid, so heavy that it appears to be swinging him. Slowly, rocking in a wide plie, he pushes a small, shining hoop from side to side with an effort that suggests a potter smoothing the whirling clay with a heavy, flat caress. Then the hoop swoops around him, nearly escapes sideways, floats upward, around his head, and higher. He barely succeeds in keeping it from levitating beyond his grasp.
For about an hour and a half, Moschen creates and inhabits a world of strange, nearly impossibly harmony. He beams his warm attention upon objects that we might have considered lifeless. In the second part of his performance, he shares the stage with a number of flexible sculptural shapes: one is a big, hanging, linear form like a circle that’s been cut and had its ends pulled open into three dimensions - so sometimes it looks like a giant pincer, sometimes it’s S-shaped. (Is it a piece of plastic plumbing pipe?) When he sets it quietly whirling, or when it’s lifted and lowered, it seems to melt and reform.
The smaller twisted sculptures onstage have a similar inherent changeability. Though I find his intimate operations more compelling, I like the aesthetic way he enlarges scale here and tampers with our perceptions. He can swing or spin some of these objects and fill our head with casual delusions, but he can also work inside the larger objects, which seem to capture and release him as he moves. As a huge, hornlike, upcurved shape rotates center stage, Moschen skip-walks in and out of its realm, like some Native American dancer. He wields S-shaped wooden curves that have the simple grace of primitive weapons, lets them battle around his torso and trap him in their hooks. The special relationship he attains with the inanimate fills objects with radiance. He honors the, gives them spiritual value, reveals there mana. In an important way, his performance is an aesthetic model for the act we must learn to perform is we’re going to juggle ourselves and our planet into balance.
At Brooklyn Academy of Music (November 15 through 20).
Michael Moschen’s performance is exhilarating, virtuoso entertainment, though he doesn’t ascend toward climaxes of spectacular difficulty like most circus or nightclub jugglers do. Instead, he draws his audience into moments of ravishing simplicity, most ingenious paradox, and solemn truthfulness. With a smile in his hands and a rolling crystal ball, or two hoops, or a couple of batons, he gamely makes you privy to the secret of the universe, though, as with most epiphanies, it evaporates in a moment.
Juggling, or whatever magic it is that Moschen does, is an art of manipulation and rhythm. Moschen lets the rhythm grow into music - there’s fine balance in the integration of his actions with David Van Tieghem’s score - but he appears to retreat from the manipulation. Bouncing balls against the inside walls of a huge triangle, flinging them t ricochet along congruent, triangular paths, he could be Jove, throwing fancy thunderbolts. But usually he seems to let the balls, or whatever, do what they want. He slips in and around them, intervenes when they decide to try out new patterns, and gets out of their way. You can take your eyes off the balls and just watch his fingers setting up the fluid ripple that keeps them whirling in his hand; it’s magic enough.
His body twists and lunges with unusual, modest elegance in a careful, loose-jointed dance that enables and earthily complements the fanciful dance of objects, which not only behave unnaturally and with infinite harmony, but appear to transform themselves altogether. What was merely line becomes volume, what was insubstantial becomes weighty. When Moschen swings a flimsy, teardrop-shaped form it becomes a heavy, gleaming solid, so heavy that it appears to be swinging him. Slowly, rocking in a wide plie, he pushes a small, shining hoop from side to side with an effort that suggests a potter smoothing the whirling clay with a heavy, flat caress. Then the hoop swoops around him, nearly escapes sideways, floats upward, around his head, and higher. He barely succeeds in keeping it from levitating beyond his grasp.
For about an hour and a half, Moschen creates and inhabits a world of strange, nearly impossibly harmony. He beams his warm attention upon objects that we might have considered lifeless. In the second part of his performance, he shares the stage with a number of flexible sculptural shapes: one is a big, hanging, linear form like a circle that’s been cut and had its ends pulled open into three dimensions - so sometimes it looks like a giant pincer, sometimes it’s S-shaped. (Is it a piece of plastic plumbing pipe?) When he sets it quietly whirling, or when it’s lifted and lowered, it seems to melt and reform.
The smaller twisted sculptures onstage have a similar inherent changeability. Though I find his intimate operations more compelling, I like the aesthetic way he enlarges scale here and tampers with our perceptions. He can swing or spin some of these objects and fill our head with casual delusions, but he can also work inside the larger objects, which seem to capture and release him as he moves. As a huge, hornlike, upcurved shape rotates center stage, Moschen skip-walks in and out of its realm, like some Native American dancer. He wields S-shaped wooden curves that have the simple grace of primitive weapons, lets them battle around his torso and trap him in their hooks. The special relationship he attains with the inanimate fills objects with radiance. He honors the, gives them spiritual value, reveals there mana. In an important way, his performance is an aesthetic model for the act we must learn to perform is we’re going to juggle ourselves and our planet into balance.
At Brooklyn Academy of Music (November 15 through 20).
Man of Steel
November 15
In the first program of its three-weekend series at Aaron Davis Hall, Dance Theater of Harlem's dancers shown in a quintessential mixed bill - a Balanchine classic (Concerto Barocco), a nineteenth century virtuoso showpiece (Le Corsaire), a newish piece of black Americana (John Henry), and an exotic spectacle
(Geoffrey Holder's Dougla). It was good to see Ronald Perry - back with the company last May after eight years spent with American Ballet Theater (where his talents were wasted), Béjart, and the Dusseldorf Ballet. In the pas de deux from Le Corsair, he was appropriately flamboyant, tossing Elena Dominquez upward and catching her overhead instead of merely flaunting her, and Dominquez exhibited smart phrasing and surprising ballon in her solos. Sometimes the pace of the canned music appeared to drag them down.
Geoffrey Holder's opulent Dougla went into DTH's repertory in 1974, and its genial authority is as compelling as ever. Its combination of seduction and reserve is deliciously blatant. Holder's thumping throbbing pageant has the brass of a Roman triumph, but it's structured like a climax that goes on and on in a sequence of lazy ripples without ever cresting. It purveys male flesh and secretes female. With its corps of women and men stomping in ruffled, layered skirts and jiggling red bobbles, its semi-nude acrobats, its women whirling in costumes like vast black sails, its weaving processions, Dougla is an Afro-Indian dream of promised pleasures and endless vigor. Holder fills the unhurried sweep of his large design with the intoxicating motion of undulating bodies and gestural details of great finesse. His unfaltering assurance enables the viewer to yield to his fantasy with equal confidence. Judy Tyrus, Endalyn Taylor, and Augustus Van Heerden danced the leads in a gracious performance of Concerto Barocco, which has been in the DTH repertory since 1970. But, particularly in the first movement, the too dutiful dancers, including the small corps of eight women, don't seem quick enough off the mark, hitting the floor too squarely on the beat.
Arthur Mitchell's John Henry, which premiered last June, comes across as a thoroughly generic piece of work -- insubstantial, without much impetus -- though the audience responded wholeheartedly to his sociological good intentions regardless of the lack of excitement it actually delivered.
In Mitchell's ballet, John Henry is a kind of Everyman by default, heroic in his muscle power and noble in his pride, but sketchily drawn. Eddie J. Shellman was appealing, as ever, in the title role, flourishing a sledge hammer for balance in his wheeling leaps. Felicity De Jager was light and charming as his saucy girlfriend, who turns men's heads and plays the tease without being a bad girl. Shellman and a backup crew of eight men slowly swinging their sledges, inevitably recalled Donald McKayle's Rainbow 'Round My Shoulder, and lines of leaping men crisscrossing the stage while Shellman jumps over his hammer reminded me of Seven Brides for Seven Brothers. Unfortunately, the fatal contest where in which the folk hero beats the steam engine isn't climactic -- the five high-kicking guys playing the steam machine appear to be a group of unfriendly private cops. John Henry goes home feeling not so good and dies a moment later when his good heart gives out. Then at least two dozen dancers clap and spin to "This Little Light of Mine."
At CCNY’s Aaron Davis Hall (October 28 through November 12).
In the first program of its three-weekend series at Aaron Davis Hall, Dance Theater of Harlem's dancers shown in a quintessential mixed bill - a Balanchine classic (Concerto Barocco), a nineteenth century virtuoso showpiece (Le Corsaire), a newish piece of black Americana (John Henry), and an exotic spectacle
(Geoffrey Holder's Dougla). It was good to see Ronald Perry - back with the company last May after eight years spent with American Ballet Theater (where his talents were wasted), Béjart, and the Dusseldorf Ballet. In the pas de deux from Le Corsair, he was appropriately flamboyant, tossing Elena Dominquez upward and catching her overhead instead of merely flaunting her, and Dominquez exhibited smart phrasing and surprising ballon in her solos. Sometimes the pace of the canned music appeared to drag them down.
Geoffrey Holder's opulent Dougla went into DTH's repertory in 1974, and its genial authority is as compelling as ever. Its combination of seduction and reserve is deliciously blatant. Holder's thumping throbbing pageant has the brass of a Roman triumph, but it's structured like a climax that goes on and on in a sequence of lazy ripples without ever cresting. It purveys male flesh and secretes female. With its corps of women and men stomping in ruffled, layered skirts and jiggling red bobbles, its semi-nude acrobats, its women whirling in costumes like vast black sails, its weaving processions, Dougla is an Afro-Indian dream of promised pleasures and endless vigor. Holder fills the unhurried sweep of his large design with the intoxicating motion of undulating bodies and gestural details of great finesse. His unfaltering assurance enables the viewer to yield to his fantasy with equal confidence. Judy Tyrus, Endalyn Taylor, and Augustus Van Heerden danced the leads in a gracious performance of Concerto Barocco, which has been in the DTH repertory since 1970. But, particularly in the first movement, the too dutiful dancers, including the small corps of eight women, don't seem quick enough off the mark, hitting the floor too squarely on the beat.
Arthur Mitchell's John Henry, which premiered last June, comes across as a thoroughly generic piece of work -- insubstantial, without much impetus -- though the audience responded wholeheartedly to his sociological good intentions regardless of the lack of excitement it actually delivered.
In Mitchell's ballet, John Henry is a kind of Everyman by default, heroic in his muscle power and noble in his pride, but sketchily drawn. Eddie J. Shellman was appealing, as ever, in the title role, flourishing a sledge hammer for balance in his wheeling leaps. Felicity De Jager was light and charming as his saucy girlfriend, who turns men's heads and plays the tease without being a bad girl. Shellman and a backup crew of eight men slowly swinging their sledges, inevitably recalled Donald McKayle's Rainbow 'Round My Shoulder, and lines of leaping men crisscrossing the stage while Shellman jumps over his hammer reminded me of Seven Brides for Seven Brothers. Unfortunately, the fatal contest where in which the folk hero beats the steam engine isn't climactic -- the five high-kicking guys playing the steam machine appear to be a group of unfriendly private cops. John Henry goes home feeling not so good and dies a moment later when his good heart gives out. Then at least two dozen dancers clap and spin to "This Little Light of Mine."
At CCNY’s Aaron Davis Hall (October 28 through November 12).