1989 Continued
Ailey Finds New Quarters
September 19
Last fall, the administration of the Alvin Ailey company and school was desperate. Their 10-year lease in the Minskoff building at Broadway and 45th Street would be up in May 1989; they’d been searching for suitable studio and office space for over two years and had found nothing suitable that they could remotely afford. They hadn’t been able to get funds together quickly enough to join American Ballet Theatre and the Feld Ballet at 890 Broadway; negotiations to take over Pineapple Studios on Houston and Mercer streets had just fallen through. They were at the end of their tether.
But now the pressure is off. At the moment, they’re still in the Minskoff building, not in their old space but temporarily camping in the former Minskoff Studios on the third floor. Tishman Speyer Properties—who wanted them out, and had a new tenant lined up, but apparently didn’t want to be seen as the villain—is, surprisingly, accommodating them rent free from July through October, when they’re scheduled to move uptown. Last January, Ailey executive director William Hammond finally got lucky while rechecking agents and landlords he’d already spoken with. Irwin Ackerman owned a West Side space Hammond had seen and liked over two years before when its tenant ultimately decided not to move. Now, however, the moment was right; the tenant would be out in April 1989.
Last year, the Ailey Foundation paid Tishman Speyer $452,000 in rent—about $25 per square foot including electricity and maintenance—a low rent for the Times Square area where $38 per square foot isn’t unusual. At their new location at 211 West 61st Street, near Lincoln Center, they have a 15-year lease, the rent is set at a level they can live with without stretching their resources, though they’d rather not say how much. And the landlord is fronting the money for the necessary renovations (designed by R M. Kliment and Frances Halsband Architects), which will be paid beck over the period of the lease.
But the Alley company is initiating a capital campaign to pay back the fix-it costs, hoping to keep the rental down. The area at 211 is about the same as their old studio/office space, roughly 18,000 square feet—but the setup at the Minskoff Building was a rabbit warren that ranged over three floors. The new quarters—with four studios, offices for the school and company, and good light—is all on one floor, which affects the atmosphere in a positive way, keeping the administration in daily contact with dancers and giving students a better sense of what the whole operation is and how it runs. The staff notices the improvement even in their temporary quarters. And since the new location shouldn’t make parents nervous the way Times Square did, it bodes well for school enrollment. Ackerman bought 211 West 61st about four years ago and began to convert it from manufacturing space.
With teacher David Howard and Dinosaur Dance already sharing a floor and Ailey about to move in, Ackerman is now envisioning the building as a possible nucleus for the performing arts in the Lincoln Center area. His next step is to create a floor of open rehearsal space for musicals and touring shows.
Last fall, the administration of the Alvin Ailey company and school was desperate. Their 10-year lease in the Minskoff building at Broadway and 45th Street would be up in May 1989; they’d been searching for suitable studio and office space for over two years and had found nothing suitable that they could remotely afford. They hadn’t been able to get funds together quickly enough to join American Ballet Theatre and the Feld Ballet at 890 Broadway; negotiations to take over Pineapple Studios on Houston and Mercer streets had just fallen through. They were at the end of their tether.
But now the pressure is off. At the moment, they’re still in the Minskoff building, not in their old space but temporarily camping in the former Minskoff Studios on the third floor. Tishman Speyer Properties—who wanted them out, and had a new tenant lined up, but apparently didn’t want to be seen as the villain—is, surprisingly, accommodating them rent free from July through October, when they’re scheduled to move uptown. Last January, Ailey executive director William Hammond finally got lucky while rechecking agents and landlords he’d already spoken with. Irwin Ackerman owned a West Side space Hammond had seen and liked over two years before when its tenant ultimately decided not to move. Now, however, the moment was right; the tenant would be out in April 1989.
Last year, the Ailey Foundation paid Tishman Speyer $452,000 in rent—about $25 per square foot including electricity and maintenance—a low rent for the Times Square area where $38 per square foot isn’t unusual. At their new location at 211 West 61st Street, near Lincoln Center, they have a 15-year lease, the rent is set at a level they can live with without stretching their resources, though they’d rather not say how much. And the landlord is fronting the money for the necessary renovations (designed by R M. Kliment and Frances Halsband Architects), which will be paid beck over the period of the lease.
But the Alley company is initiating a capital campaign to pay back the fix-it costs, hoping to keep the rental down. The area at 211 is about the same as their old studio/office space, roughly 18,000 square feet—but the setup at the Minskoff Building was a rabbit warren that ranged over three floors. The new quarters—with four studios, offices for the school and company, and good light—is all on one floor, which affects the atmosphere in a positive way, keeping the administration in daily contact with dancers and giving students a better sense of what the whole operation is and how it runs. The staff notices the improvement even in their temporary quarters. And since the new location shouldn’t make parents nervous the way Times Square did, it bodes well for school enrollment. Ackerman bought 211 West 61st about four years ago and began to convert it from manufacturing space.
With teacher David Howard and Dinosaur Dance already sharing a floor and Ailey about to move in, Ackerman is now envisioning the building as a possible nucleus for the performing arts in the Lincoln Center area. His next step is to create a floor of open rehearsal space for musicals and touring shows.
Animal Crackers
October 31
I‘m accustomed to seeing Min Tanaka dancing solo, like some rootless castaway, nearly naked or in shabby throwaways, in a space that is inhospitable or only fractionally accommodating—like 10 years ago on the cold, wet roof of P.S. 1, or the rough bareness of La Mama’s Annex, where Tanaka rattled around like a loony in a derelict warehouse hack in 1983.
In Can We Dance a Landscape, a collaboration instigated by Dutch artist Karel Appel and presented at Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Carey Playhouse. Tanaka’s in relatively cushy surroundings. He’s performing with members of his company, Maijuku, who live and work in a rural community several hours outside Tokyo where they raise chickens and goats and plant rice.
I’ve always been struck by the immediate physical truth of Tanaka’s performances, by his quality of inner wakefulness, his zany roughhouse. But because the BAM performance, first presented at the Opéra Comique in Paris in 1987, is a visual spectacle and a group effort, it doesn’t absorb you in the struggle of a single being to know itself and make itself known. In front of Appel’s first intensely colored background—slashing greens, reds, yellows—on a misty stage, stand three stuffed Holsteins on little wheels. A lineup of nine stooping performers in big black overcoats face away from the audience. stepping quietly in place in black spike-heel shoes.
Their bodies’ are ashy white, regulation Butoh, their cheeks rouged, their huge hairdos like Louis XIV perruques coming undone. Dapper little Adolphe Menjou mustaches adorn their upper lips. A nearly naked woman, also in white, sprawls on her belly on the back of one cow, watching us, and laughing wildly. Across the back of the stage, three bare-chested roller skaters glide back and forth across a curved bridge that, in silhouette, suggests a makeshift walkway over marshland. And Nguyen Thien Dao’s music initially creates a festive clangor. Bent over, the dancers stagger off, then return one by one, torsos tipped backward, taking immense, clumsy steps. The naked woman walks away, crouched, as the life-size cows are slowly wheeled away. With twisting arms, she pulls herself upright, but she continues to arch and wriggle as if trying to shrug off her skin. A cutout of a blue dog’s head descends like a cloud. Her shoulders hiked to her ears, the woman totters stiffly across the stage. The score erupts with bangs and tocks and a twitchy guy with electrified hair gets the shakes. A huge oval garland replaces the dog’s head, and the red background is sliced with black.
One hardly knows what to make of this community of the afflicted, a loose assembly of human creatures instinctively bound together like insects in a hive. With their nodding heads, wobbly knees, and gelatinous musculature, their achievement is to manage to exist, to stand upright some of the time. Even when they appear in the dullest, most stupefied states, there’s a kind of narrow ecstasy in the performers. The communal taking on of debilitations seems to elevate their spirits to a level that’s weirdly joyous, like religious fanatics who gratefully emulate the sufferings of their martyrs. Perhaps it’s the absolute single-mindedness of the performance that gives it this ecstatic purity, the elimination of any outside perspective. Still, you can only be serious some of the time.
I can’t help seeing these guys as the undead -corpses revived, or being reminded of Michael York being turned into a beast by Burt Lancaster in The Island of Doctor Moreau. A man in a smeared overcoat falls backward, his legs open. The naked woman slithers down the steps of a platform on the side. Chalk dust ribbons from his coat as the man scampers across the stage. There’s an intense, whirring sound. The man keeps stumbling, toppling, falling. Another man convulses in a heap. Every leap or tumble produces a puff of billowing dust. For a few moments, the men lie in disarray, bare white legs and buttocks sticking out of their coats, wrapped penises like clubs poking upward. The men manage to stand, but suddenly the middle guy hisses, and they all thunk flat on their backs in clouds of dust. A man enters slowly carrying a white goat in his arms A beam of light comes up gleaming. The man puts the goat down holding it by a red leash. Its tongue flicks an and out. The goat licks the man’s toes, finds debris worth nibbling on the ground, shits neat pellets. The animal is perfectly calm, absolute master of the stage, while the man twists wretchedly, staggers slowly, vaguely, as if drunk on ether. He seems to become quietly inflamed, perhaps god-possessed, then crashes slowly backward. A man on the floor (Tanaka, I think) shakes, stands tentatively with his legs wobbling. His hands are soft claws, his body nearly boneless. He moves with sickled feet; his body seems to shrink and enlarge through an erratic inner pressure. He tumbles and trembles, veering into abrupt balances and collapses. swinging side to side with a strange lyric gaiety, then approaches a downspot at the edge of the stage where he stands, just behind the light, trembling, a spectre barely visible. Naked men advance slowly through billows of smoke, their arms crossed loosely in front of their flung-back heads.
As smoke rolls toward the audience, the white goat floats contentedly halfway across the stage suspended from a smiling animal-head cutout in the shape of a hot-air balloon. Two men crudely manipulate two others by their hair, like puppets, while a huge - stage-high -contraption like a leather harness with dangling ropes swings on. A fantastical nautical torture device, perhaps, it gives tremendous, ominous weight to the middle ground. Near it, the standing men seem to sway and hang, then sink to their knees, arching backward. Behind them, a figure in a black hat and heels stamps around as the men writhe. Spots of color—deep blue-green, with flecks of red— briefly glow in the mostly black backdrop, like fragments of Rouault’s stained glass.
Tanaka’s certainly not laying out an argument in this work. But his people seem to be victims of civilization searching their way blindly back into a sensible relation to the world, which the animals—untouched by the nightmare— seem to placidly exemplify. Shortly before the end, a white curtain painted with a huge face that might be a crude Appel self-portrait unfurls with a rush. Before it, the woman appears with a black chicken in her arms. A man, the whiteness washed off his body, comes down the aisle holding two more black chickens aloft. The couple set the birds loose to peck and wander, and imitate their moves. But people aren’t poultry; something is fatally out of whack in the equation.
At Brooklyn Academy of Music's Carey Playhouse (October 18 through 25).
I‘m accustomed to seeing Min Tanaka dancing solo, like some rootless castaway, nearly naked or in shabby throwaways, in a space that is inhospitable or only fractionally accommodating—like 10 years ago on the cold, wet roof of P.S. 1, or the rough bareness of La Mama’s Annex, where Tanaka rattled around like a loony in a derelict warehouse hack in 1983.
In Can We Dance a Landscape, a collaboration instigated by Dutch artist Karel Appel and presented at Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Carey Playhouse. Tanaka’s in relatively cushy surroundings. He’s performing with members of his company, Maijuku, who live and work in a rural community several hours outside Tokyo where they raise chickens and goats and plant rice.
I’ve always been struck by the immediate physical truth of Tanaka’s performances, by his quality of inner wakefulness, his zany roughhouse. But because the BAM performance, first presented at the Opéra Comique in Paris in 1987, is a visual spectacle and a group effort, it doesn’t absorb you in the struggle of a single being to know itself and make itself known. In front of Appel’s first intensely colored background—slashing greens, reds, yellows—on a misty stage, stand three stuffed Holsteins on little wheels. A lineup of nine stooping performers in big black overcoats face away from the audience. stepping quietly in place in black spike-heel shoes.
Their bodies’ are ashy white, regulation Butoh, their cheeks rouged, their huge hairdos like Louis XIV perruques coming undone. Dapper little Adolphe Menjou mustaches adorn their upper lips. A nearly naked woman, also in white, sprawls on her belly on the back of one cow, watching us, and laughing wildly. Across the back of the stage, three bare-chested roller skaters glide back and forth across a curved bridge that, in silhouette, suggests a makeshift walkway over marshland. And Nguyen Thien Dao’s music initially creates a festive clangor. Bent over, the dancers stagger off, then return one by one, torsos tipped backward, taking immense, clumsy steps. The naked woman walks away, crouched, as the life-size cows are slowly wheeled away. With twisting arms, she pulls herself upright, but she continues to arch and wriggle as if trying to shrug off her skin. A cutout of a blue dog’s head descends like a cloud. Her shoulders hiked to her ears, the woman totters stiffly across the stage. The score erupts with bangs and tocks and a twitchy guy with electrified hair gets the shakes. A huge oval garland replaces the dog’s head, and the red background is sliced with black.
One hardly knows what to make of this community of the afflicted, a loose assembly of human creatures instinctively bound together like insects in a hive. With their nodding heads, wobbly knees, and gelatinous musculature, their achievement is to manage to exist, to stand upright some of the time. Even when they appear in the dullest, most stupefied states, there’s a kind of narrow ecstasy in the performers. The communal taking on of debilitations seems to elevate their spirits to a level that’s weirdly joyous, like religious fanatics who gratefully emulate the sufferings of their martyrs. Perhaps it’s the absolute single-mindedness of the performance that gives it this ecstatic purity, the elimination of any outside perspective. Still, you can only be serious some of the time.
I can’t help seeing these guys as the undead -corpses revived, or being reminded of Michael York being turned into a beast by Burt Lancaster in The Island of Doctor Moreau. A man in a smeared overcoat falls backward, his legs open. The naked woman slithers down the steps of a platform on the side. Chalk dust ribbons from his coat as the man scampers across the stage. There’s an intense, whirring sound. The man keeps stumbling, toppling, falling. Another man convulses in a heap. Every leap or tumble produces a puff of billowing dust. For a few moments, the men lie in disarray, bare white legs and buttocks sticking out of their coats, wrapped penises like clubs poking upward. The men manage to stand, but suddenly the middle guy hisses, and they all thunk flat on their backs in clouds of dust. A man enters slowly carrying a white goat in his arms A beam of light comes up gleaming. The man puts the goat down holding it by a red leash. Its tongue flicks an and out. The goat licks the man’s toes, finds debris worth nibbling on the ground, shits neat pellets. The animal is perfectly calm, absolute master of the stage, while the man twists wretchedly, staggers slowly, vaguely, as if drunk on ether. He seems to become quietly inflamed, perhaps god-possessed, then crashes slowly backward. A man on the floor (Tanaka, I think) shakes, stands tentatively with his legs wobbling. His hands are soft claws, his body nearly boneless. He moves with sickled feet; his body seems to shrink and enlarge through an erratic inner pressure. He tumbles and trembles, veering into abrupt balances and collapses. swinging side to side with a strange lyric gaiety, then approaches a downspot at the edge of the stage where he stands, just behind the light, trembling, a spectre barely visible. Naked men advance slowly through billows of smoke, their arms crossed loosely in front of their flung-back heads.
As smoke rolls toward the audience, the white goat floats contentedly halfway across the stage suspended from a smiling animal-head cutout in the shape of a hot-air balloon. Two men crudely manipulate two others by their hair, like puppets, while a huge - stage-high -contraption like a leather harness with dangling ropes swings on. A fantastical nautical torture device, perhaps, it gives tremendous, ominous weight to the middle ground. Near it, the standing men seem to sway and hang, then sink to their knees, arching backward. Behind them, a figure in a black hat and heels stamps around as the men writhe. Spots of color—deep blue-green, with flecks of red— briefly glow in the mostly black backdrop, like fragments of Rouault’s stained glass.
Tanaka’s certainly not laying out an argument in this work. But his people seem to be victims of civilization searching their way blindly back into a sensible relation to the world, which the animals—untouched by the nightmare— seem to placidly exemplify. Shortly before the end, a white curtain painted with a huge face that might be a crude Appel self-portrait unfurls with a rush. Before it, the woman appears with a black chicken in her arms. A man, the whiteness washed off his body, comes down the aisle holding two more black chickens aloft. The couple set the birds loose to peck and wander, and imitate their moves. But people aren’t poultry; something is fatally out of whack in the equation.
At Brooklyn Academy of Music's Carey Playhouse (October 18 through 25).
Arctic Rock
March 28
I can hardly believe what I’m hearing. The seated Nanai woman who’s caressing a fireplace log (a stand-in for a sick baby in her arms) is quietly singing “Summertime.” Well, not exactly, but part of her song is surprisingly close melodically and in feeling. I’m amazed that the sound of the music - of the first two of three tribal groups performing in Asia Society’s “Music and Dance of the Siberian-Asians” the others are Ulchi and Koryak—-is so Western-sounding. It’s not quavering, not in quarter tones. Four or five elaborately garbed performers sit at the back of the stage where two ancestral wooden figures have been set with oil lamps burning before them.
You can tell right away, however, that these people haven’t just been scooped hut of Arctic isolation and plunked down on Park Avenue. You can tell, for instance, by Nina Geiker’s fashionably frizzed hair. Lydia Ajar chants as she beats a flat, hand-held drum, and one of the older men talks intermittently while she sings. As her drumming gets stronger, she takes small shuffling steps and rocks her hips to make a metal bustle tied around her waist rattle and clank, Geiker, walking bent over, twisting at the knees, taps two sticks sharply on the ground and shouts in a prayer to the carved images. An older man, 70-year-old Pansa Kile, follows Ajar, beating the drum; then he puts on the rattle, and dances with zigzag knees and flat, sliding steps, as the shaman into whose body the spirits are entering. The twisting knees, the waggling hips, the flat, shuffling steps, the light bounces, are common to much of the dancing.
These visitors from the land of permafrost are disarmingly simple and direct. Their material’s not gussied up or glossy. “This is what we do, this is who we are,” they seem to say, without a shadow of pretension or artifice. And what warmth they can generate! In Voices of the Woods, Pansa Kile plays slender reed flutes and Geiker a delicate wooden rattle to evoke the sounds of animals and birds. They just stand still in perfect modesty, making their bare, sparse whistles, tweets, and tocks, in their appliquéd robes, boots, and leggings. Geiker shifts a stick from place to place between her teeth and raps it to make the sound of a woodpecker. Adorable Nicolai Kile, only 60, with a friendly mien and broad, extravagant gestures, sings a fish story—it didn’t get away, was eaten by a dog—and, brimming with bouncing energy, follows up with a second tale of a successful catch.
In Bonderaga, juicy Anna Beldi girlishly squeals and jumps sideways against Nicolai Kile to invite him home, which request repeatedly seems to produce cross responses. And in Gorin River, Kile sings a song of contentment with blunt descriptive gestures of rowing, unloading, and hauling in fishing lines, and throws his arms open in expansive pleasure. These indicated signs convey meaning exactly like those of “I’m a Little Teapot—with no subtlety, but considerable naïve charm. Anna Diafu, of the Ulchi people of Northeastern Siberia, utters sweet little cries through her teeth as her jaw’s harp whirrs.
In Ta Ta Ta, she won’t even let the guy who thinks he’s her boyfriend touch her clothes—but eventually relents. In Telungu, Boris Diafu relates, with characteristic large-scale physical sketches, a cautionary tale about the evils of indiscriminate hunting, In amply cut leather dresses decorated with fringes, emblems, and strings of beads, and wearing ornate fringed and beaded headbands, three Koryak women—71-year-old Maria Pritchina and Lydia Chechulina and Elsa Levkovskaya (two diminutive women in their late twenties and early thirties, the youngsters of this group, along with 31-year-old Geiker)—climaxed the program. Pritchina sings a guttural song of the sea, forcing its syllabic rhythms--oh oh oh, ay ay cry, eh eh eh—beating a drum, and bouncing. Croaking, waddling, twisting her body, squatting to hatch an idea, Levkovskaya delivers the most virtuosic performance of the evening with enormous humor. She quite literally transforms herself into gull, raven, falcon, duck, to tell a story with a conservative moral something like “mixed marriages never work.”
While Chechulina sings and bounces in a rendition of an ancestral song, Pritchina, seated on the floor, delicately twitches her shoulders and hands, grooving with delicious finesse. In Etuvi, Pritchina and Chechulina pant harshly, utter sounds that keep climbing in pitch, and gabble madly to unmistakably imitate geese and other birds. Stooped slightly forward in another song, Pritchina tucks her arms back and softly flaps her hands to illustrate a raven. With its coyly twitching shoulders and cheerfully pumping arms, the full-bodied, bent-legged, hip-wiggling Koryak dancing is the stuff Chubby Checker was made of. It’s rock ‘n’ roll. Taxi, please, take these ladies to the World!
At The Asia Society (March 11 to 14).
I can hardly believe what I’m hearing. The seated Nanai woman who’s caressing a fireplace log (a stand-in for a sick baby in her arms) is quietly singing “Summertime.” Well, not exactly, but part of her song is surprisingly close melodically and in feeling. I’m amazed that the sound of the music - of the first two of three tribal groups performing in Asia Society’s “Music and Dance of the Siberian-Asians” the others are Ulchi and Koryak—-is so Western-sounding. It’s not quavering, not in quarter tones. Four or five elaborately garbed performers sit at the back of the stage where two ancestral wooden figures have been set with oil lamps burning before them.
You can tell right away, however, that these people haven’t just been scooped hut of Arctic isolation and plunked down on Park Avenue. You can tell, for instance, by Nina Geiker’s fashionably frizzed hair. Lydia Ajar chants as she beats a flat, hand-held drum, and one of the older men talks intermittently while she sings. As her drumming gets stronger, she takes small shuffling steps and rocks her hips to make a metal bustle tied around her waist rattle and clank, Geiker, walking bent over, twisting at the knees, taps two sticks sharply on the ground and shouts in a prayer to the carved images. An older man, 70-year-old Pansa Kile, follows Ajar, beating the drum; then he puts on the rattle, and dances with zigzag knees and flat, sliding steps, as the shaman into whose body the spirits are entering. The twisting knees, the waggling hips, the flat, shuffling steps, the light bounces, are common to much of the dancing.
These visitors from the land of permafrost are disarmingly simple and direct. Their material’s not gussied up or glossy. “This is what we do, this is who we are,” they seem to say, without a shadow of pretension or artifice. And what warmth they can generate! In Voices of the Woods, Pansa Kile plays slender reed flutes and Geiker a delicate wooden rattle to evoke the sounds of animals and birds. They just stand still in perfect modesty, making their bare, sparse whistles, tweets, and tocks, in their appliquéd robes, boots, and leggings. Geiker shifts a stick from place to place between her teeth and raps it to make the sound of a woodpecker. Adorable Nicolai Kile, only 60, with a friendly mien and broad, extravagant gestures, sings a fish story—it didn’t get away, was eaten by a dog—and, brimming with bouncing energy, follows up with a second tale of a successful catch.
In Bonderaga, juicy Anna Beldi girlishly squeals and jumps sideways against Nicolai Kile to invite him home, which request repeatedly seems to produce cross responses. And in Gorin River, Kile sings a song of contentment with blunt descriptive gestures of rowing, unloading, and hauling in fishing lines, and throws his arms open in expansive pleasure. These indicated signs convey meaning exactly like those of “I’m a Little Teapot—with no subtlety, but considerable naïve charm. Anna Diafu, of the Ulchi people of Northeastern Siberia, utters sweet little cries through her teeth as her jaw’s harp whirrs.
In Ta Ta Ta, she won’t even let the guy who thinks he’s her boyfriend touch her clothes—but eventually relents. In Telungu, Boris Diafu relates, with characteristic large-scale physical sketches, a cautionary tale about the evils of indiscriminate hunting, In amply cut leather dresses decorated with fringes, emblems, and strings of beads, and wearing ornate fringed and beaded headbands, three Koryak women—71-year-old Maria Pritchina and Lydia Chechulina and Elsa Levkovskaya (two diminutive women in their late twenties and early thirties, the youngsters of this group, along with 31-year-old Geiker)—climaxed the program. Pritchina sings a guttural song of the sea, forcing its syllabic rhythms--oh oh oh, ay ay cry, eh eh eh—beating a drum, and bouncing. Croaking, waddling, twisting her body, squatting to hatch an idea, Levkovskaya delivers the most virtuosic performance of the evening with enormous humor. She quite literally transforms herself into gull, raven, falcon, duck, to tell a story with a conservative moral something like “mixed marriages never work.”
While Chechulina sings and bounces in a rendition of an ancestral song, Pritchina, seated on the floor, delicately twitches her shoulders and hands, grooving with delicious finesse. In Etuvi, Pritchina and Chechulina pant harshly, utter sounds that keep climbing in pitch, and gabble madly to unmistakably imitate geese and other birds. Stooped slightly forward in another song, Pritchina tucks her arms back and softly flaps her hands to illustrate a raven. With its coyly twitching shoulders and cheerfully pumping arms, the full-bodied, bent-legged, hip-wiggling Koryak dancing is the stuff Chubby Checker was made of. It’s rock ‘n’ roll. Taxi, please, take these ladies to the World!
At The Asia Society (March 11 to 14).
Boys Will Be Boys
January 31
Doug Elkins must be pretty pleased with himself - and he should be. In a snappy, late-night concert at Dance Theater Workshop that was stylistically devious, boyishly crude, and smartly flamboyant, he bedeviled conventional notions of masculinity and femininity and thwarted expectations with obvious delight. There’s a fierce, zany innocence to Elkins’s dances that reminds me of the adventures of vintage cartoon characters like Jerry the mouse or Tweety who live joyously as prey and survive by their wits pretending to be harmless.
His immodest program bio calls him a “Charming, brown-eyed Scorpio graduated from SUNY Purchase” and lists the choreographers he’s danced with as well as his tour of duty with the American Break Co, Royal Rockers and guest appearance with Magnificent Five. The press release calls him a “self-professed style thief,” which is no criticism but suggests an extreme physical curiosity about movement and a ravenous appetite for its many flavors as well as a giddy confidence. Elkins has studied aikido, { }, capoeira and judo. What’s so unusual is that he manages to graft these various kinds of material - virtuoso street dancing, martial arts and concert dance - together so fruitfully. Rarely do the break dancing feats, for example, stick out like thrilling but irrelevant excrescences.
Doug Elkins’s The Testosterone Duets is brazen and hilarious. He sets the tone quickly in the first moment when Bob Bellamy, in a blue towel and sneakers, comes onstage as if preparing to shower, and whips the towel off his bare ass. With exaggerated consternation, he realizes the audience is watching. “Emily” he calls to the lighting technician in a harsh whisper, and silently slices his fingers across his throat: “CUT THE LIGHTS!” Two burly guys—the blond Bellamy and the bearded Brad Lewis—return in blue shorts and Davy Crockett hats for a punchy macho workout whose challenges are gleefully tinged with self mocking humor. Sometimes in unison, sometimes in competition, they do push-ups, falls, lock into wrestling holds and throws, roughly set each other tumbling, fling themselves straight into the air and go splat. They stagger into truncated shoulder stands like the humanoid figures crunched in the rectangular shapes of Mayan glyphs. They tumble over each other and, seated, legs out stiffly in front of them, bounce on their buttocks diagonally across the floor in precise rhythm. When Lewis whacks the floor hard with his palm, both of them sputter along a few more times, like pebbles skittering across a pond.
In the two women’s sections of Testosterone, Lisa Heijn, Lisa Nicks, Jane Weiner, and Marianne Smith are quite as unlovely as the men. Like coy and nubile adolescents, dazzlingly crude in their behavior, the women squirm awkwardly between shame and sexual heat, now bumping into one another, languorously winding their arms around their heads, now fussing at their skirts, now looking teasingly at the audience while wiggling their fingers suggestively. One, on her back, carefully pulls her skirt protectively upwards so she sticks her legs in the air so we can’t see her unmentionables. The sly narcIssIstic solo for slender Ben Munisteri to a Desi Arnez-tvpe voiceover of thetale of gentle Ferdinand the Bull, is subtle and exceedingly droll, and surprising on the occasions the dancing wryly mimics the text. Finally, it draws out the theme of sex-role behavior to a fine point. Caressing. insinuating, gently sliding a finger through his lips, Munisteri is extravagant and coolly ironic in his long, lazy, arching moves. His sinuous preoccupations, entwining with the sweet children’s story, illustrate in a tantalizing way how things are not always what they seem. And not always not what they seem.
The Patrooka (whazzat?) Variations (Conspiracies of the Seduced), for 11 dancers, is Spanish here and there and is set to, among other things, excerpts from various Carmens. Parts of it ripped by with such fluid rapidity that I hardly knew what I was seeing. And the performers socked it with tremendous savvy. Elkins has the opening twitching, wriggling, crazy-legs solo, doing bourrees on his knees and leaping about while maybe catching flies. Then there’re four slouchy women with roses or red ribbons in their hair. A delicate, loopy duet follows for Elkins and Nicks, but if - god forbid - she puts her hand on his shoulder, that’s a little too forward. And now I lose track. A guy and girl jumping onto two blue folding chairs and others jumping right over their heads, bouncing onto their laps. Adesola Osakalumi (Elkins’s first break-dance partner) and a woman in a jerking. punctuated, wriggling exhibition. A snaky, twitchy duet for Elkins and Munisteri followed by an intriguing men’s trio that tenderness keeps sneaking into and getting tossed out of. In a duet for Elkins and Osakalumi, one plays shaky, trembling, the other tough. And there’s a hard-edged. knotty break-dance solo for Osakalumi. writhing his muscular shoulders. In other sections, like the final group dance to the “Seguidilla,” near-embraces are constantly diverted, rebounded, deflected, thrown off. Throughout, spirits are high, dauntless, undiscouraged, but at every moment the beloved is elusive, incorrigible.
At Dance Theater Workshop (January 13 through 28).
Doug Elkins must be pretty pleased with himself - and he should be. In a snappy, late-night concert at Dance Theater Workshop that was stylistically devious, boyishly crude, and smartly flamboyant, he bedeviled conventional notions of masculinity and femininity and thwarted expectations with obvious delight. There’s a fierce, zany innocence to Elkins’s dances that reminds me of the adventures of vintage cartoon characters like Jerry the mouse or Tweety who live joyously as prey and survive by their wits pretending to be harmless.
His immodest program bio calls him a “Charming, brown-eyed Scorpio graduated from SUNY Purchase” and lists the choreographers he’s danced with as well as his tour of duty with the American Break Co, Royal Rockers and guest appearance with Magnificent Five. The press release calls him a “self-professed style thief,” which is no criticism but suggests an extreme physical curiosity about movement and a ravenous appetite for its many flavors as well as a giddy confidence. Elkins has studied aikido, { }, capoeira and judo. What’s so unusual is that he manages to graft these various kinds of material - virtuoso street dancing, martial arts and concert dance - together so fruitfully. Rarely do the break dancing feats, for example, stick out like thrilling but irrelevant excrescences.
Doug Elkins’s The Testosterone Duets is brazen and hilarious. He sets the tone quickly in the first moment when Bob Bellamy, in a blue towel and sneakers, comes onstage as if preparing to shower, and whips the towel off his bare ass. With exaggerated consternation, he realizes the audience is watching. “Emily” he calls to the lighting technician in a harsh whisper, and silently slices his fingers across his throat: “CUT THE LIGHTS!” Two burly guys—the blond Bellamy and the bearded Brad Lewis—return in blue shorts and Davy Crockett hats for a punchy macho workout whose challenges are gleefully tinged with self mocking humor. Sometimes in unison, sometimes in competition, they do push-ups, falls, lock into wrestling holds and throws, roughly set each other tumbling, fling themselves straight into the air and go splat. They stagger into truncated shoulder stands like the humanoid figures crunched in the rectangular shapes of Mayan glyphs. They tumble over each other and, seated, legs out stiffly in front of them, bounce on their buttocks diagonally across the floor in precise rhythm. When Lewis whacks the floor hard with his palm, both of them sputter along a few more times, like pebbles skittering across a pond.
In the two women’s sections of Testosterone, Lisa Heijn, Lisa Nicks, Jane Weiner, and Marianne Smith are quite as unlovely as the men. Like coy and nubile adolescents, dazzlingly crude in their behavior, the women squirm awkwardly between shame and sexual heat, now bumping into one another, languorously winding their arms around their heads, now fussing at their skirts, now looking teasingly at the audience while wiggling their fingers suggestively. One, on her back, carefully pulls her skirt protectively upwards so she sticks her legs in the air so we can’t see her unmentionables. The sly narcIssIstic solo for slender Ben Munisteri to a Desi Arnez-tvpe voiceover of thetale of gentle Ferdinand the Bull, is subtle and exceedingly droll, and surprising on the occasions the dancing wryly mimics the text. Finally, it draws out the theme of sex-role behavior to a fine point. Caressing. insinuating, gently sliding a finger through his lips, Munisteri is extravagant and coolly ironic in his long, lazy, arching moves. His sinuous preoccupations, entwining with the sweet children’s story, illustrate in a tantalizing way how things are not always what they seem. And not always not what they seem.
The Patrooka (whazzat?) Variations (Conspiracies of the Seduced), for 11 dancers, is Spanish here and there and is set to, among other things, excerpts from various Carmens. Parts of it ripped by with such fluid rapidity that I hardly knew what I was seeing. And the performers socked it with tremendous savvy. Elkins has the opening twitching, wriggling, crazy-legs solo, doing bourrees on his knees and leaping about while maybe catching flies. Then there’re four slouchy women with roses or red ribbons in their hair. A delicate, loopy duet follows for Elkins and Nicks, but if - god forbid - she puts her hand on his shoulder, that’s a little too forward. And now I lose track. A guy and girl jumping onto two blue folding chairs and others jumping right over their heads, bouncing onto their laps. Adesola Osakalumi (Elkins’s first break-dance partner) and a woman in a jerking. punctuated, wriggling exhibition. A snaky, twitchy duet for Elkins and Munisteri followed by an intriguing men’s trio that tenderness keeps sneaking into and getting tossed out of. In a duet for Elkins and Osakalumi, one plays shaky, trembling, the other tough. And there’s a hard-edged. knotty break-dance solo for Osakalumi. writhing his muscular shoulders. In other sections, like the final group dance to the “Seguidilla,” near-embraces are constantly diverted, rebounded, deflected, thrown off. Throughout, spirits are high, dauntless, undiscouraged, but at every moment the beloved is elusive, incorrigible.
At Dance Theater Workshop (January 13 through 28).
Chimera Central
January 10
The second half of Dutch choreographer Ton Simons’s The Palace at 4:00 am/Spinoza Variations is the plainer, dancier part, The music mounts to a series of smashing climaxes and eight dancers wearing skull T-shirts relentlessly leap across both the stage and the auditorium floor in pairs while Simons and Els Rijper, wearing black plastic outfits and immensely tall black and white dunce caps, stand chained to silver weights about the size of car batteries and hold their mouths agape in silent screams. The action has the excitement of West Side Story‘s “The Fight at the Gym,” but without conflict.
The nine members of the Ordinaires provide a claustrophobic brainful of exuberant blotto sound that - though it’s not deafening - gets so dense sometimes that the instruments cancel each other out. It’s an experience like driving in fog. The music peaks in a pounding drum solo, then turns sparse, sharp, and whiny. Brenda Daniels, in a tail coat and net stockings, coolly does high kicks and slow extensions. In pairs, the dancers slowly pull against, lean away from, and support one another, and tip periodically to the floor. The sound builds again, and at its top, the dancers shoot, whirl, and kick across the stage to loud, unforgiving musical blasts.
For The Palace at 4 am, which is divided Into nine non-narrative sections, Simons has arranged the seedy performance space of the RAPP Arts Center with the band and its equipment on and around scaffolding at the back of the stage. The dancers perform on two levels, foreground and background, on the orchestra floor and onstage, and circulate fluidly from one space to the other via stairs at the sides of the proscenium or by directly creeping or climbing on or jumping off the lip of the stage. Much of the time the spectacle is doubled effectively, with variations presented simultaneously as well as in linear time, and with great differences in emotional perspective. After the intermission, the music comes fully Into Its own, but the dancIng - mostly abstract and highly energized - is more vivid earlier. Then it is also more dramatic, mysteriously laden with omens, and performed heavily costumed in a surreal mode by Roe Aldarada.
I’m impervious to the symbolism of most of the costumes, but they are curiously timely, fetishistic and seem to make imaginative sense in this context: tarred-and-feathered Michael Cole, Paula Swiatkowski with a cow’s or antelope’s skull strapped to her waist, Gunter Kappler in a maroon unitard covered with roses and scarves; Clea Daiber with green plastic cups and plates on her bra; Christopher Batenhorst with wigs or scalps dangling from the bottom of his jacket; Tjorbjorn Stenberg (was it?) in a brown and yellow outfit decorated with triangles and sponges And was curly-haired Emily Stern the one in the tutu like a bent lampshade?
The piece opens with an onstage duet for Simons and Brenda Daniels: he in a version of practice clothes, she painted gray blue and wearing a decapitated gray blue suit jacket that’s reversed and hangs from her shoulder by spaghetti straps. Simons raises his arms slowly, places his hands behind his head, bends forward. Daniels, in releve, takes his hand as he lunges behind her. With Merce Cunningham purity, she leans back in his arms, spins with whizzing legs, and falls back against him. Their touching is careful, sure, almost caressing. Standing behind him, she slowly traces her hands over his arms, which rise at the invitation and descend when she guides her hands downward. After a muted pas de deux, he tenderly places his hand on her heart. Suddenly, he rips her dress, baring her breasts. A blue panel behind her is punched open and two fists furiously shake a pair of snakes on either side of her head.
Palace continues to reverberate with events recognizable from previous lives, Max Ernst reveries, and alien myths. Like some ancient s&m slave, Daniels wears a black mask and black metallike shield-masks, linked by a vertical panel, over her breasts and hips. She sinks down with her knees turned in, while hanging onto Simons’s neck—he’s right behind her. A woman (Rijper) in a refrigerator box wears a dunce cap and babbles. The dancers keep keeling to floor, rolling, swinging, falling, getting up. Rijper places pink shells against her ears, a big, pink, rubber dildo on her nose. Daniels emerges from a triptych of three aqua panels. A black scarf hangs to the floor from her neck, a brown band binds her breasts, and, with yellow callas in her hand, she walks, kneels, extends a leg and promenades in a bare, constrained solo. Meantime, Simons is on the floor below, whirling and falling, in a black vinyl top fringed with long rubber tubes that whip around and slap him. Swiatkowski parades, walking inside the doughnut hole of an asymmetrical, wheeled table to which four points of her dress are attached. Batenhorst and Elizabeth Maxwell cross the floor tipping over blue chairs, stepping into galvanized garbage pails, tumbling forward, and setting white ironstone spinning when they hit the floor, while a second couple investigates other chair-pail-plate variations on the stage. Simons’s complex piece is beautifully coordinated and has sufficient density of imagery to match the music’s impact.
The work has the coherence and refraction to enable me to trust Simons’s bizarre and. poetic images, the appalling bursts of emotion that sometimes howl from the unconscious. I think I’ll always be disturbed, for example, by Brenda Daniels wearing that long dark scarf around her neck, disturbed by my supposition that the scarf is a stream of blood. Everyday logic is too much to demand from such a clamorous, dreamlike spectacle.
At RAPP Arts Center (December 28 through 30).
The second half of Dutch choreographer Ton Simons’s The Palace at 4:00 am/Spinoza Variations is the plainer, dancier part, The music mounts to a series of smashing climaxes and eight dancers wearing skull T-shirts relentlessly leap across both the stage and the auditorium floor in pairs while Simons and Els Rijper, wearing black plastic outfits and immensely tall black and white dunce caps, stand chained to silver weights about the size of car batteries and hold their mouths agape in silent screams. The action has the excitement of West Side Story‘s “The Fight at the Gym,” but without conflict.
The nine members of the Ordinaires provide a claustrophobic brainful of exuberant blotto sound that - though it’s not deafening - gets so dense sometimes that the instruments cancel each other out. It’s an experience like driving in fog. The music peaks in a pounding drum solo, then turns sparse, sharp, and whiny. Brenda Daniels, in a tail coat and net stockings, coolly does high kicks and slow extensions. In pairs, the dancers slowly pull against, lean away from, and support one another, and tip periodically to the floor. The sound builds again, and at its top, the dancers shoot, whirl, and kick across the stage to loud, unforgiving musical blasts.
For The Palace at 4 am, which is divided Into nine non-narrative sections, Simons has arranged the seedy performance space of the RAPP Arts Center with the band and its equipment on and around scaffolding at the back of the stage. The dancers perform on two levels, foreground and background, on the orchestra floor and onstage, and circulate fluidly from one space to the other via stairs at the sides of the proscenium or by directly creeping or climbing on or jumping off the lip of the stage. Much of the time the spectacle is doubled effectively, with variations presented simultaneously as well as in linear time, and with great differences in emotional perspective. After the intermission, the music comes fully Into Its own, but the dancIng - mostly abstract and highly energized - is more vivid earlier. Then it is also more dramatic, mysteriously laden with omens, and performed heavily costumed in a surreal mode by Roe Aldarada.
I’m impervious to the symbolism of most of the costumes, but they are curiously timely, fetishistic and seem to make imaginative sense in this context: tarred-and-feathered Michael Cole, Paula Swiatkowski with a cow’s or antelope’s skull strapped to her waist, Gunter Kappler in a maroon unitard covered with roses and scarves; Clea Daiber with green plastic cups and plates on her bra; Christopher Batenhorst with wigs or scalps dangling from the bottom of his jacket; Tjorbjorn Stenberg (was it?) in a brown and yellow outfit decorated with triangles and sponges And was curly-haired Emily Stern the one in the tutu like a bent lampshade?
The piece opens with an onstage duet for Simons and Brenda Daniels: he in a version of practice clothes, she painted gray blue and wearing a decapitated gray blue suit jacket that’s reversed and hangs from her shoulder by spaghetti straps. Simons raises his arms slowly, places his hands behind his head, bends forward. Daniels, in releve, takes his hand as he lunges behind her. With Merce Cunningham purity, she leans back in his arms, spins with whizzing legs, and falls back against him. Their touching is careful, sure, almost caressing. Standing behind him, she slowly traces her hands over his arms, which rise at the invitation and descend when she guides her hands downward. After a muted pas de deux, he tenderly places his hand on her heart. Suddenly, he rips her dress, baring her breasts. A blue panel behind her is punched open and two fists furiously shake a pair of snakes on either side of her head.
Palace continues to reverberate with events recognizable from previous lives, Max Ernst reveries, and alien myths. Like some ancient s&m slave, Daniels wears a black mask and black metallike shield-masks, linked by a vertical panel, over her breasts and hips. She sinks down with her knees turned in, while hanging onto Simons’s neck—he’s right behind her. A woman (Rijper) in a refrigerator box wears a dunce cap and babbles. The dancers keep keeling to floor, rolling, swinging, falling, getting up. Rijper places pink shells against her ears, a big, pink, rubber dildo on her nose. Daniels emerges from a triptych of three aqua panels. A black scarf hangs to the floor from her neck, a brown band binds her breasts, and, with yellow callas in her hand, she walks, kneels, extends a leg and promenades in a bare, constrained solo. Meantime, Simons is on the floor below, whirling and falling, in a black vinyl top fringed with long rubber tubes that whip around and slap him. Swiatkowski parades, walking inside the doughnut hole of an asymmetrical, wheeled table to which four points of her dress are attached. Batenhorst and Elizabeth Maxwell cross the floor tipping over blue chairs, stepping into galvanized garbage pails, tumbling forward, and setting white ironstone spinning when they hit the floor, while a second couple investigates other chair-pail-plate variations on the stage. Simons’s complex piece is beautifully coordinated and has sufficient density of imagery to match the music’s impact.
The work has the coherence and refraction to enable me to trust Simons’s bizarre and. poetic images, the appalling bursts of emotion that sometimes howl from the unconscious. I think I’ll always be disturbed, for example, by Brenda Daniels wearing that long dark scarf around her neck, disturbed by my supposition that the scarf is a stream of blood. Everyday logic is too much to demand from such a clamorous, dreamlike spectacle.
At RAPP Arts Center (December 28 through 30).
Contrivances
July 11
There wasn’t much in Saga Ambegaokar’s concert at the Cunningham Studio that didn’t seem contrived of arbitrarily combined elements. What can she have had in mind’? Starting out mounted on adjacent ladders, Larry Sousa does a fussy, schematic dance about design in 1/6 (a solo from a dance for six), wearing a shirt suggestive of a Mondrian and abstract face makeup similarly patterned. But it would have taken a sophisticated use of rhythm to give shape to this aimlessly blank piece.
In Cold Bare Moon, dancer Eugenia Wecker-Hoeflin and actor Tomm Gilhies are wrapped in the opposite ends of the same cream robe. He recites, pretty effectively, translations of traditional Chinese poems, while she, after first wrapping up close to him, slips away. In black leotard and tights, She moves with maidenly delicacy while he drapes the remainder of the garment around him like an elaborate toga. She shows us birdlike flutters, happy prances, decorous sadness, but the spare, emotion-laden images of these landscape and occasional,poems (by Li Po, Wang Wei, and others) create an infinitely more vivid world than the pale one right before our eyes and we simply see through it to “cold beads of dew on swords and shields” or “fingers of the moon still playing on my old lute.”
Heli is a straightforward dance to three lieder from Schubert’s Die Winterreise cycle. In a duet, Debbie Parsons and Sousa brightly execute crisscross patterns of leaps and turns, and swing each other quickly till he catches her to his chest. But the chopped phrases of the dance finally leave a sense of dryness. In her solo, she flings herself into a crouch, does a slow, kneeling turn staring into her outstretched palm, falls over. Leaps, reaches, and skidding runs take her back again and again to the floor, where she pivots on her side, agonizingly reaching. But I can’t follow the emotional thread. Sousa’s solo, to “Der Leiermann,” starts with sluggish, hangdog steps then bursts into a sudden, arms-out run. He slides, rotates his arching body on the floor by pushing with his feet. When, he knots up, contriving to clutch himself in various ways, I start to believe him, but the grabbing impulses seem disconnected instead of linked.
The text of Two Peas in a Pod has to do with proles identifying with celebrities; the structure, however, is a maddeningly arbitrary. Crude young moderns Sandee Kastrul and Gillies read remarks about Albert Einstein, Jasper Johns, Georgia O’Keeffe, Sylvia PIath, et al., and recognize themselves described “to a T.” Alternately, Parsons and David Villella, two harem beauties from the world of Scheherazade, sway, arch, undulate, moon about, and play with a chiffon scarf. Eventually, Parsons butts into the world of the chameleon-like couple with her own self-absorbed comparisons, to their consternation. Huh? Good Thinkin’ is a free-for-all mishmash for eight, but it has an impetuous energy, and included four modest solos choreographed by dancers Gillies, Parsons, Alex Westerman, and Colleen Lawlor. The ongoing theme Is a verbal one—of dumb, commercial sayings like “Buy one, get one free” and “I have a headache this big!” Who knows why. The dancers race around in a circle, pile up against each other, lick their paws like friendly rodents, have a rhythmic conversation with their toes. Westerman caresses a wooden office chair, then balances tilted across it and another chair. He flexes his feet as a little joke, sensitively fondles the skinny chromium leg of the second chair, and, standing, smoothly swings his legs over the chair backs That small, reticent solo was lovely, the most coherent moment of the evening.
At the Cunningham Studio (June 29 and 30).
There wasn’t much in Saga Ambegaokar’s concert at the Cunningham Studio that didn’t seem contrived of arbitrarily combined elements. What can she have had in mind’? Starting out mounted on adjacent ladders, Larry Sousa does a fussy, schematic dance about design in 1/6 (a solo from a dance for six), wearing a shirt suggestive of a Mondrian and abstract face makeup similarly patterned. But it would have taken a sophisticated use of rhythm to give shape to this aimlessly blank piece.
In Cold Bare Moon, dancer Eugenia Wecker-Hoeflin and actor Tomm Gilhies are wrapped in the opposite ends of the same cream robe. He recites, pretty effectively, translations of traditional Chinese poems, while she, after first wrapping up close to him, slips away. In black leotard and tights, She moves with maidenly delicacy while he drapes the remainder of the garment around him like an elaborate toga. She shows us birdlike flutters, happy prances, decorous sadness, but the spare, emotion-laden images of these landscape and occasional,poems (by Li Po, Wang Wei, and others) create an infinitely more vivid world than the pale one right before our eyes and we simply see through it to “cold beads of dew on swords and shields” or “fingers of the moon still playing on my old lute.”
Heli is a straightforward dance to three lieder from Schubert’s Die Winterreise cycle. In a duet, Debbie Parsons and Sousa brightly execute crisscross patterns of leaps and turns, and swing each other quickly till he catches her to his chest. But the chopped phrases of the dance finally leave a sense of dryness. In her solo, she flings herself into a crouch, does a slow, kneeling turn staring into her outstretched palm, falls over. Leaps, reaches, and skidding runs take her back again and again to the floor, where she pivots on her side, agonizingly reaching. But I can’t follow the emotional thread. Sousa’s solo, to “Der Leiermann,” starts with sluggish, hangdog steps then bursts into a sudden, arms-out run. He slides, rotates his arching body on the floor by pushing with his feet. When, he knots up, contriving to clutch himself in various ways, I start to believe him, but the grabbing impulses seem disconnected instead of linked.
The text of Two Peas in a Pod has to do with proles identifying with celebrities; the structure, however, is a maddeningly arbitrary. Crude young moderns Sandee Kastrul and Gillies read remarks about Albert Einstein, Jasper Johns, Georgia O’Keeffe, Sylvia PIath, et al., and recognize themselves described “to a T.” Alternately, Parsons and David Villella, two harem beauties from the world of Scheherazade, sway, arch, undulate, moon about, and play with a chiffon scarf. Eventually, Parsons butts into the world of the chameleon-like couple with her own self-absorbed comparisons, to their consternation. Huh? Good Thinkin’ is a free-for-all mishmash for eight, but it has an impetuous energy, and included four modest solos choreographed by dancers Gillies, Parsons, Alex Westerman, and Colleen Lawlor. The ongoing theme Is a verbal one—of dumb, commercial sayings like “Buy one, get one free” and “I have a headache this big!” Who knows why. The dancers race around in a circle, pile up against each other, lick their paws like friendly rodents, have a rhythmic conversation with their toes. Westerman caresses a wooden office chair, then balances tilted across it and another chair. He flexes his feet as a little joke, sensitively fondles the skinny chromium leg of the second chair, and, standing, smoothly swings his legs over the chair backs That small, reticent solo was lovely, the most coherent moment of the evening.
At the Cunningham Studio (June 29 and 30).
Cubs
February 14
I liked the immediacy and the amicable, unpressured feeling of Frey Faust and Howard Fireheart’s duet concept, “ Dr. Motion and Mr. Wiggle,” made up of works that, for the most part, they choreographed together or for each other. Faust, who currently danced with Stephen Petronio’s company, is a lithe, vivid dancer with a hard-edged attack and a mischievous smile. Fireheart has danced with Clive Thompson, David Parsons and Susan Osberg, among others, juggled with the Royal Liechtenstein Circus, and is a cofounder of ITBOT (a collaborative performance company). His style is bold and grave but, characteristically, undetailed, imprecise. In contrast, Faust is wonderfully particular and exact; his way of moving is sinuous, fast, abrupt, tricky, sophisticated, and he presents himself in a very polished way Fireheart’s inclined to he rawer, offhand, more straightforward and blunt. They’re almost incompatible because their differences seem to spring from such opposing values. But they don’t concentrate on them. What holds their performance together is the evident pleasure they take in working with each other.
The pieces in “Dr. Motion and Mr. Wiggle’ are like assembled jottings, chopped-up sketches without much resonance, though, over the evening, there’s a satisfying repetition of movement themes. In One & One, the most substantial piece, they sway one behind the other and ripple their bodies in opposition. They vault, jump, flip, with solid, casual authority. Faust’s arms dart sharply, then he slithers into sudden break-dancing moves, and freezes with electric tension. They grapple together, and push one another softly with the playful strength of bear cubs. First rocking loosely, they grip each other and suddenly pull. The moments of expectancy, the suspensions of action, are like the chiropractor waiting for the right moment to crack your bones. Without warning, one flings himself—to be safely held against the other’s chest— with the impulsiveness of a baby kangaroo hopping hack into the pouch.
Faust’s bumpily phrased Great Beginning has Fireheart twisting his fingers, warping his arms, tightly curling his paws, writhing his shoulders, jerking his head, striking sharply with his hands. The piece is agreeably dotted with moments of flaccidity and dislocation, but its dramatic elements strike cut of the blue, as if a person’s character had nothing to do with what happens to him. Rocking on his back, Fireheart’s smile becomes more and more extreme till it distorts and erupts in a brief paroxysm.
In Flreheart’s When It Ends, Faust essays cool, tilted jumps alternately with hard. scribbling moves, while Fireheart plays guitar and sings hauntingly. Faust dives onto his chest and twists into skewed, upside-down balances, Flat on his belly, he lets slow, serpentine ripples drive through his body. I love his curiously sly introspection when he stands, rubs one ear, brushes the same foot, and rubs the opposite knee. So low key, And there’s a film of Flreheart dancing in an empty lot, while Faust, live, crouches like a cat ready to pounce. I like so many of this piece’s elements, but, as with some other dances on the program, When It Ends seems too much an accidental collection of fragments.
Corruption of This (Time) juxtaposes much of the movement material of the previous two solos and adds Faust rolling, flopping on, and creeping around the edge of a small round trampoline, while Flreheart tumbles, catches a white ball on the back of his neck, and vaults without losing it. Still, juxtaposition isn’t adequate to bring their contrasts into sharp focus and help me understand why they’re dancing together, aside from the fact that they enjoy it. Nix, Fireheart’s flash closing piece, is set to a couple of Benny Goodman standards. In it, he and Faust are a couple of swells—in tail coats, pleated shirts, but no shoes, cummerbunds but no ties. It’s full of the usual jumping, wriggling, rocking. Fireheart butts Faust. Faust, on his back, tosses Fireheart away with his feet. Linking hands, they knot themselves up, over, and around each other. With great joy, Fireheart throws himself vigorously against Faust’s chest, or over his shoulder, and at the very end, or maybe during their bows, somebody is carrying some body like a giddy child who won’t stop playing. Throughout, their charm and enjoyment counted for a lot.
At Washington Square Methodist Church (February 2 to 4).
I liked the immediacy and the amicable, unpressured feeling of Frey Faust and Howard Fireheart’s duet concept, “ Dr. Motion and Mr. Wiggle,” made up of works that, for the most part, they choreographed together or for each other. Faust, who currently danced with Stephen Petronio’s company, is a lithe, vivid dancer with a hard-edged attack and a mischievous smile. Fireheart has danced with Clive Thompson, David Parsons and Susan Osberg, among others, juggled with the Royal Liechtenstein Circus, and is a cofounder of ITBOT (a collaborative performance company). His style is bold and grave but, characteristically, undetailed, imprecise. In contrast, Faust is wonderfully particular and exact; his way of moving is sinuous, fast, abrupt, tricky, sophisticated, and he presents himself in a very polished way Fireheart’s inclined to he rawer, offhand, more straightforward and blunt. They’re almost incompatible because their differences seem to spring from such opposing values. But they don’t concentrate on them. What holds their performance together is the evident pleasure they take in working with each other.
The pieces in “Dr. Motion and Mr. Wiggle’ are like assembled jottings, chopped-up sketches without much resonance, though, over the evening, there’s a satisfying repetition of movement themes. In One & One, the most substantial piece, they sway one behind the other and ripple their bodies in opposition. They vault, jump, flip, with solid, casual authority. Faust’s arms dart sharply, then he slithers into sudden break-dancing moves, and freezes with electric tension. They grapple together, and push one another softly with the playful strength of bear cubs. First rocking loosely, they grip each other and suddenly pull. The moments of expectancy, the suspensions of action, are like the chiropractor waiting for the right moment to crack your bones. Without warning, one flings himself—to be safely held against the other’s chest— with the impulsiveness of a baby kangaroo hopping hack into the pouch.
Faust’s bumpily phrased Great Beginning has Fireheart twisting his fingers, warping his arms, tightly curling his paws, writhing his shoulders, jerking his head, striking sharply with his hands. The piece is agreeably dotted with moments of flaccidity and dislocation, but its dramatic elements strike cut of the blue, as if a person’s character had nothing to do with what happens to him. Rocking on his back, Fireheart’s smile becomes more and more extreme till it distorts and erupts in a brief paroxysm.
In Flreheart’s When It Ends, Faust essays cool, tilted jumps alternately with hard. scribbling moves, while Fireheart plays guitar and sings hauntingly. Faust dives onto his chest and twists into skewed, upside-down balances, Flat on his belly, he lets slow, serpentine ripples drive through his body. I love his curiously sly introspection when he stands, rubs one ear, brushes the same foot, and rubs the opposite knee. So low key, And there’s a film of Flreheart dancing in an empty lot, while Faust, live, crouches like a cat ready to pounce. I like so many of this piece’s elements, but, as with some other dances on the program, When It Ends seems too much an accidental collection of fragments.
Corruption of This (Time) juxtaposes much of the movement material of the previous two solos and adds Faust rolling, flopping on, and creeping around the edge of a small round trampoline, while Flreheart tumbles, catches a white ball on the back of his neck, and vaults without losing it. Still, juxtaposition isn’t adequate to bring their contrasts into sharp focus and help me understand why they’re dancing together, aside from the fact that they enjoy it. Nix, Fireheart’s flash closing piece, is set to a couple of Benny Goodman standards. In it, he and Faust are a couple of swells—in tail coats, pleated shirts, but no shoes, cummerbunds but no ties. It’s full of the usual jumping, wriggling, rocking. Fireheart butts Faust. Faust, on his back, tosses Fireheart away with his feet. Linking hands, they knot themselves up, over, and around each other. With great joy, Fireheart throws himself vigorously against Faust’s chest, or over his shoulder, and at the very end, or maybe during their bows, somebody is carrying some body like a giddy child who won’t stop playing. Throughout, their charm and enjoyment counted for a lot.
At Washington Square Methodist Church (February 2 to 4).
Downtown is Uptown
August 15
The Serious Fun Dance Sampler at Alice Tully Hall lasted about three hours, mixing some old stuff and some new, including three commissions: Stephen Petronio’s Surrender II, Ohad Naharin’s Passomezzo, and Doug Elkins’ Satanic Verses Godzilla (or Danforth and Multiply). The audience knew they were in for a marathon and seemed pretty happy with what they got, judging from the enthusiastic cheering and clapping during the applause-meter bows for everyone at the very end.
Among the familiar works were Ann Carlsons’s 1985 piece for four lawyers Kerr, Roenberg & Moore, the disreputable looking Second Hand Dance company’s Clackers in which they clunk the wooden blocks strapped to their hands against the wood or metal piece attached to their butts and Three Men at the Zoo with its human seesaws, intricate balances and centipede pushups and part of Stephanie Skura’s eccentric Cranky Destroyers. Three excerpts from Blondell Cummings’s 3B49 “Passenger”, “Driver” and “It Takes Two,” had a tremendous power and wit. In a rhythmic sharply etched, gestural solo. Cummings pulses alarmingly with the compulsions generosity and rage of a lifetime, and in the final droll duet, with Tom Thayer as a cabbie, she intently trails him around the stage while they cleverly mime the actions of their intertwining conversation and disparaging asides. Cummings is an electric performer an so grounded that the delicacy of her emotional flights is always unexpected.
Ohad Naharin and Rinde Eckert opened the bill with Humus, Part I an opening fanfare in close vocal harmony with a little flat-footed tap, foot-scuffling, monkeyshines, and falsetto yowling. It’s not a piece for the ages, but it set a dryly humorous and slightly outrageous tone for the evening. Passomezzo, a duet to “Greensleeves,” performed by Naharin and Mari Kajiwara, was unjustifiably heavy and vague.
First Comes Love, Marta Renzi’s duet for Cathy Zimmerman and Thomas Grunewaid—dealing with stages in a relationship—wryly alternates an offhand slackness with the tension of upside-down lifts that come out of the blue. It needed a more tightly defined space to convey its full, disconcerting effect. The way the dance impulse Is apparently dropped time and again and expectations are thwarted is a little unnerving. Zimmerman and Grunewald expertly downplay the difficulty of this piece, which is not just in the precise timing and cool agility required, but in its unpredictable changes of tone. Again and again, you think he’s going to pick her up; instead. she shoves him down. It takes a lot of this to rile him.
Christian Swenson “whistled while he worked” in Dansing, a solo that combined his scat-singing and jungle sound effects with articulate, quirky movement. A little too cute. Margarita Guergue was compelling in a strong, rippling solo, Fuga Pesada, to exciting live music by Hahn Rowe for the low notes of an electric violin with a percussion undercurrent. For a long time, Guergue stays locked in a small area at one side of the stage, before letting the sinewy, off-center movement twist her into the open space.
A pressured, knotted duet for Jeremy Nelson and Frey Faust, the dense opening section of Stephen Petronio’s Surrender lI is composed of intricately contrived yet inevitable lifts, twists, and manipulations. The gritty rooted quality of the duet is new for Petronio. Muscular and sexy, and performed superbly, the piece has the concentratedness of serious wrestling in which the combatants can hardly budge one another. I hated the skin-tight, thigh-length, black-and-white unitards (by David Dalrymple) divided across the chest like Empire gowns; it wasn’t their fuddled androgyny that was disturbing, but the way the design distorted the dancers’ bodies. The subsequent solo for Petronio—who’s got his head shaved now, like Rachel Rosenthal or Telly Savalas—is more lax and serpentine, and the trio that evolves doesn’t have enough of the compacted solidity of the duet.
Doug Elkins’s Satanic Verses Godzilla has the kind of brazen illogic you’d expect from the title. To a music and sound collage featuring the Talking Heads, the Chieftains, Handel arias plus rancid speeches from the Bush inauguration, and a newscast from a skinhead riot in Britain, Elkins puts together a series of diversions that has a flaky, mad humor, but reflects his essentially serious view. Reckless and elusive, Elkins is wired up to the real world and deftly converts its dismal absurdities and blatant lies into movement episodes of genuine and unexpected levity. If Satanic Verses Godzilla is still a little rough, even a bit of a mess, it doesn’t matter. With its daft wit and refreshing energy, it’s truer than today’s news.
Serious Fun at Alice Tully Hall (August 2 and 3).
Under the guidance of artistic director Peter Schaufuss, London Festival Ballet turns in a splendid and expansive Napoli. Schaufuss re-choreographed the second act, the one in the Blue Grotto - during which Danes used to skip out of Copenhagen’s Royal Theater for drinks next door. It’s the white act - only it’s blue - in which Teresina, nearly drowned in a sudden storm, is turned into a naiad by Golfo, the god of an undersea realm and forgets her earthly life and her eager boyfriend, until, she sees the holy medal on his chest. And not a moment too soon: he’s been drugged and is about to be turned into something blue too.
Schaufuss re-conceived the act as a dream: Gennaro, searching for her, but exhausted from rowing, falls asleep inside the grotto where Teresina, who used his guitar as a flotation device, is already looking for a way out. Schaufuss chopped down Golfo’s role, though now Golfo (Diego Ciavatti), appearing in a puff of smoke, looks just like Von Rothbart and has a corps of spellbound ladies who do wake-up stretches and hang about doing floaty things with their arms. Actually, it’s a substantial improvement on the Royal Danish Ballet’s stricter reconstruction. Not so dowdy.
While the myriad commercial transactions, social activities, and entertainments on the Act I quay almost swallow the nascent plot, Alexander Grant and Niels Bjorn Larsen, middle-aged macaroni and lemonade sellers respectively, nearly steal the show with their hammy attentions to Teresina and their endless scheming. I’m terribly fond of the street singer, whose voice is a horn in the orchestra, and his drummer, got up like the Mad Hatter. As Teresina, Susan Hogard has some lovely promenades in a pas de deux with Golfo while Gennaro wanders around groggy, enveloped by mists and encircling naiads. Hogard’s not quite as quick-footed as she might be in her third act variations, but the way she sails along in split leaps is breathtaking.
Schaufuss is pretty cute in his Neapolitan running shorts in Act I, and he’s simply brilliant in the air. At 43, he’s allowing no wear and tear. And what strength there is among the men! In the Pas de Six and Tarantella, Maximiliano Guerra, Martin James, Matz Skoog, and Patrick Armand are all glorious jumpers—clean, buoyant, generous, joyous. Among the women, Christine Camillo was particularly pert, airy, and danced with remarkable spaciousness. What a treat! Makes you want to put on your dancing shoes.
The Serious Fun Dance Sampler at Alice Tully Hall lasted about three hours, mixing some old stuff and some new, including three commissions: Stephen Petronio’s Surrender II, Ohad Naharin’s Passomezzo, and Doug Elkins’ Satanic Verses Godzilla (or Danforth and Multiply). The audience knew they were in for a marathon and seemed pretty happy with what they got, judging from the enthusiastic cheering and clapping during the applause-meter bows for everyone at the very end.
Among the familiar works were Ann Carlsons’s 1985 piece for four lawyers Kerr, Roenberg & Moore, the disreputable looking Second Hand Dance company’s Clackers in which they clunk the wooden blocks strapped to their hands against the wood or metal piece attached to their butts and Three Men at the Zoo with its human seesaws, intricate balances and centipede pushups and part of Stephanie Skura’s eccentric Cranky Destroyers. Three excerpts from Blondell Cummings’s 3B49 “Passenger”, “Driver” and “It Takes Two,” had a tremendous power and wit. In a rhythmic sharply etched, gestural solo. Cummings pulses alarmingly with the compulsions generosity and rage of a lifetime, and in the final droll duet, with Tom Thayer as a cabbie, she intently trails him around the stage while they cleverly mime the actions of their intertwining conversation and disparaging asides. Cummings is an electric performer an so grounded that the delicacy of her emotional flights is always unexpected.
Ohad Naharin and Rinde Eckert opened the bill with Humus, Part I an opening fanfare in close vocal harmony with a little flat-footed tap, foot-scuffling, monkeyshines, and falsetto yowling. It’s not a piece for the ages, but it set a dryly humorous and slightly outrageous tone for the evening. Passomezzo, a duet to “Greensleeves,” performed by Naharin and Mari Kajiwara, was unjustifiably heavy and vague.
First Comes Love, Marta Renzi’s duet for Cathy Zimmerman and Thomas Grunewaid—dealing with stages in a relationship—wryly alternates an offhand slackness with the tension of upside-down lifts that come out of the blue. It needed a more tightly defined space to convey its full, disconcerting effect. The way the dance impulse Is apparently dropped time and again and expectations are thwarted is a little unnerving. Zimmerman and Grunewald expertly downplay the difficulty of this piece, which is not just in the precise timing and cool agility required, but in its unpredictable changes of tone. Again and again, you think he’s going to pick her up; instead. she shoves him down. It takes a lot of this to rile him.
Christian Swenson “whistled while he worked” in Dansing, a solo that combined his scat-singing and jungle sound effects with articulate, quirky movement. A little too cute. Margarita Guergue was compelling in a strong, rippling solo, Fuga Pesada, to exciting live music by Hahn Rowe for the low notes of an electric violin with a percussion undercurrent. For a long time, Guergue stays locked in a small area at one side of the stage, before letting the sinewy, off-center movement twist her into the open space.
A pressured, knotted duet for Jeremy Nelson and Frey Faust, the dense opening section of Stephen Petronio’s Surrender lI is composed of intricately contrived yet inevitable lifts, twists, and manipulations. The gritty rooted quality of the duet is new for Petronio. Muscular and sexy, and performed superbly, the piece has the concentratedness of serious wrestling in which the combatants can hardly budge one another. I hated the skin-tight, thigh-length, black-and-white unitards (by David Dalrymple) divided across the chest like Empire gowns; it wasn’t their fuddled androgyny that was disturbing, but the way the design distorted the dancers’ bodies. The subsequent solo for Petronio—who’s got his head shaved now, like Rachel Rosenthal or Telly Savalas—is more lax and serpentine, and the trio that evolves doesn’t have enough of the compacted solidity of the duet.
Doug Elkins’s Satanic Verses Godzilla has the kind of brazen illogic you’d expect from the title. To a music and sound collage featuring the Talking Heads, the Chieftains, Handel arias plus rancid speeches from the Bush inauguration, and a newscast from a skinhead riot in Britain, Elkins puts together a series of diversions that has a flaky, mad humor, but reflects his essentially serious view. Reckless and elusive, Elkins is wired up to the real world and deftly converts its dismal absurdities and blatant lies into movement episodes of genuine and unexpected levity. If Satanic Verses Godzilla is still a little rough, even a bit of a mess, it doesn’t matter. With its daft wit and refreshing energy, it’s truer than today’s news.
Serious Fun at Alice Tully Hall (August 2 and 3).
Under the guidance of artistic director Peter Schaufuss, London Festival Ballet turns in a splendid and expansive Napoli. Schaufuss re-choreographed the second act, the one in the Blue Grotto - during which Danes used to skip out of Copenhagen’s Royal Theater for drinks next door. It’s the white act - only it’s blue - in which Teresina, nearly drowned in a sudden storm, is turned into a naiad by Golfo, the god of an undersea realm and forgets her earthly life and her eager boyfriend, until, she sees the holy medal on his chest. And not a moment too soon: he’s been drugged and is about to be turned into something blue too.
Schaufuss re-conceived the act as a dream: Gennaro, searching for her, but exhausted from rowing, falls asleep inside the grotto where Teresina, who used his guitar as a flotation device, is already looking for a way out. Schaufuss chopped down Golfo’s role, though now Golfo (Diego Ciavatti), appearing in a puff of smoke, looks just like Von Rothbart and has a corps of spellbound ladies who do wake-up stretches and hang about doing floaty things with their arms. Actually, it’s a substantial improvement on the Royal Danish Ballet’s stricter reconstruction. Not so dowdy.
While the myriad commercial transactions, social activities, and entertainments on the Act I quay almost swallow the nascent plot, Alexander Grant and Niels Bjorn Larsen, middle-aged macaroni and lemonade sellers respectively, nearly steal the show with their hammy attentions to Teresina and their endless scheming. I’m terribly fond of the street singer, whose voice is a horn in the orchestra, and his drummer, got up like the Mad Hatter. As Teresina, Susan Hogard has some lovely promenades in a pas de deux with Golfo while Gennaro wanders around groggy, enveloped by mists and encircling naiads. Hogard’s not quite as quick-footed as she might be in her third act variations, but the way she sails along in split leaps is breathtaking.
Schaufuss is pretty cute in his Neapolitan running shorts in Act I, and he’s simply brilliant in the air. At 43, he’s allowing no wear and tear. And what strength there is among the men! In the Pas de Six and Tarantella, Maximiliano Guerra, Martin James, Matz Skoog, and Patrick Armand are all glorious jumpers—clean, buoyant, generous, joyous. Among the women, Christine Camillo was particularly pert, airy, and danced with remarkable spaciousness. What a treat! Makes you want to put on your dancing shoes.
Duet for One
March 21
Arnie Zane died last March, but the company that still bears his name in tandem with that of his partner,
Bill T. Jones, is going strong. Jones has been working at a high pitch. For the company’s two-week engagement at the Joyce Theater (through March 26), he’s showing four brand new works. At Zane’s memoriaI service, and since, Jones reaffirmed his commitment to the company they founded—calling it their child—but I wouldn’t have been surprised if six months later he’d decided to chuck it. Wheeling and dealing was Zane’s forte; he was always dreaming projects. Though he was a committed artist, he would have been at home on Seventh Avenue. Jones faced an overwhelming administrative and financial headache back then. By last July, the company was facing complete closedown. It had fallen behind in tax payments to the tune of about $73,000 plus a further deficit of about $40,000. But a benefit art sale of works donated by about 30 artists pulled them pretty much out of the hole.
“That’s something Arnie had no trouble doing,” says Jones, “picking up the phone and asking for things. Something I’ve had to learn how to do. “It was encouraging to see how people did care about us. I’ve not always been sure about how we were perceived. And the dancers have been exemplary. The senior dancers have stepped to the fore and helped when I’ve fallen down. They’ve given me a lot of room for my emotionalism.” The dancers’ sense of responsibility, their solicitousness and generosity, is constantly evident in rehearsal in small ways, particularly with Janet Lilly and Sean Curran, Jones’s good right arm. Dancers are in the habit of giving themselves over to someone else’s needs. But there’s something particularly tender operating here. I suppose that’s because during the long period of Zane’s illness and Jones’s mourning, the company went through a lot together, hung together. Jones, too, surprises me by how fatherly he sometimes is with them.
“Well,” he says, “Take Arthur [Aviles]. In 1973 he was 10 years old, Arnie and I had been living together for a year and I was making dances.” Though some dancers have left, and there are a few new company members, Jones feels “the dancers really see what the stakes are. We relied on Arnie’s boundless energy, and his wit, humor, presence, vision. He was always figuring out what mountains we would climb next. And then when it was all over, it seemed so fragile, I think they take the process of which I’m a part very seriously and they donate a lot of their lives to it. They are growing up in this process."
“There’s a lot of talk about how Arnie’s death reflects in the work that made. Ruby Shang was watching rehearsal and remarked, ‘You don’t want to make another piece about AIDS.’ I call it about loss. This season is full of references to death, and mortality, as you might expect. I’m afraid that people will say it’s so much public mourning and write it off. But these are feelings that many of us are having now. Like in that Muddy Waters—or is it Lightnin’ Hopkins?— song: “The world is an uproar, danger zone is everywhere.’”
But in the two works I watch in runthrough, Forsythia and D-Man in the Waters, I don’t see that. Feeling runs deep in them, but they don’t seem dark. Jones quotes Jenny Holzer: ‘In a dream, you had a vision of how you might survive, and you were filled with joy.’
"That’s what I’ve been focused on in making dances,” say Jones, “It’s about the most positive affirmation I can give, a depiction of what joy dance can represent in a grieving world. “After Arnie died, I thought I’d dried up. Then Chatter spilled out a month, month-and-a-half later. It was a sigh of relief. There were things that I did that were like things that he’d have done. I felt—in a sort of metaphysical way— that he’d entered into me. I sometimes say, what would he do? I even talk to him. That’s how I stay in touch. Though when he first died I was trying to be both of us. It made me crazy. I always felt inadequate.
“Forsythias were part of my education under Arnie. He loved flowers and knew their names. I didn’t. When I was 19, he’d bring huge bunches into the apartment in Johnson City. Forsythia blooms in March and it was everywhere. And March was when he died,” The piece named for the flower is a duet for Jones and Aviles, for a tall black and a smaller white man. “It definitely looks forward as well as back,” says Jones. “When I finish doing it I don’t feel like crying, I feel energized.” “We started this year with a clean slate,” says Jones, “But doing a season and keeping the company going under tight fiscal constraints can build back a deficit. We’ve learned a lot though. How to try to make the relationship between what I dream about and what I can afford less wide. That’s so difficult to do when you’re inspired—inspiration costs dollars. Everybody from the office staff to the board wants to help me make the work I want to make, but we’ve limited resources. This is not completely bad. I’d like more and more of the work to look like Poor Theater—no elaborate effects or sets, usually. Now, most of the costumes are very simple. Waters’s costumes are from Unique Clothing. The biggest challenge is that I get many calls for myself—to appear as a soloist or do commissions—because the company is more expensive. But, I feel with diligence and perseverance, this will all balance out."
“I’ve tended to be a polemicist—a person who takes a strong position to delineate issues. But I don’t think anyone’s that unconflicted. Maybe I was more political before. Now my politics are not quite so visible, but I think they’re deeper. “In the past year I’ve learned to be more organized, state more clearly what I want, what I expect of people, and be more clear as to how l really feel. To not be afraid. I’ve had to learn how to relax and leave the work behind, How to start over, and be in love again. I’m trying to give back whatever I’ve learned in 20 years in the form of good work. “What have I done to keep going? I’ll quote Jenny Holzer and show you Waters.”
Arnie Zane died last March, but the company that still bears his name in tandem with that of his partner,
Bill T. Jones, is going strong. Jones has been working at a high pitch. For the company’s two-week engagement at the Joyce Theater (through March 26), he’s showing four brand new works. At Zane’s memoriaI service, and since, Jones reaffirmed his commitment to the company they founded—calling it their child—but I wouldn’t have been surprised if six months later he’d decided to chuck it. Wheeling and dealing was Zane’s forte; he was always dreaming projects. Though he was a committed artist, he would have been at home on Seventh Avenue. Jones faced an overwhelming administrative and financial headache back then. By last July, the company was facing complete closedown. It had fallen behind in tax payments to the tune of about $73,000 plus a further deficit of about $40,000. But a benefit art sale of works donated by about 30 artists pulled them pretty much out of the hole.
“That’s something Arnie had no trouble doing,” says Jones, “picking up the phone and asking for things. Something I’ve had to learn how to do. “It was encouraging to see how people did care about us. I’ve not always been sure about how we were perceived. And the dancers have been exemplary. The senior dancers have stepped to the fore and helped when I’ve fallen down. They’ve given me a lot of room for my emotionalism.” The dancers’ sense of responsibility, their solicitousness and generosity, is constantly evident in rehearsal in small ways, particularly with Janet Lilly and Sean Curran, Jones’s good right arm. Dancers are in the habit of giving themselves over to someone else’s needs. But there’s something particularly tender operating here. I suppose that’s because during the long period of Zane’s illness and Jones’s mourning, the company went through a lot together, hung together. Jones, too, surprises me by how fatherly he sometimes is with them.
“Well,” he says, “Take Arthur [Aviles]. In 1973 he was 10 years old, Arnie and I had been living together for a year and I was making dances.” Though some dancers have left, and there are a few new company members, Jones feels “the dancers really see what the stakes are. We relied on Arnie’s boundless energy, and his wit, humor, presence, vision. He was always figuring out what mountains we would climb next. And then when it was all over, it seemed so fragile, I think they take the process of which I’m a part very seriously and they donate a lot of their lives to it. They are growing up in this process."
“There’s a lot of talk about how Arnie’s death reflects in the work that made. Ruby Shang was watching rehearsal and remarked, ‘You don’t want to make another piece about AIDS.’ I call it about loss. This season is full of references to death, and mortality, as you might expect. I’m afraid that people will say it’s so much public mourning and write it off. But these are feelings that many of us are having now. Like in that Muddy Waters—or is it Lightnin’ Hopkins?— song: “The world is an uproar, danger zone is everywhere.’”
But in the two works I watch in runthrough, Forsythia and D-Man in the Waters, I don’t see that. Feeling runs deep in them, but they don’t seem dark. Jones quotes Jenny Holzer: ‘In a dream, you had a vision of how you might survive, and you were filled with joy.’
"That’s what I’ve been focused on in making dances,” say Jones, “It’s about the most positive affirmation I can give, a depiction of what joy dance can represent in a grieving world. “After Arnie died, I thought I’d dried up. Then Chatter spilled out a month, month-and-a-half later. It was a sigh of relief. There were things that I did that were like things that he’d have done. I felt—in a sort of metaphysical way— that he’d entered into me. I sometimes say, what would he do? I even talk to him. That’s how I stay in touch. Though when he first died I was trying to be both of us. It made me crazy. I always felt inadequate.
“Forsythias were part of my education under Arnie. He loved flowers and knew their names. I didn’t. When I was 19, he’d bring huge bunches into the apartment in Johnson City. Forsythia blooms in March and it was everywhere. And March was when he died,” The piece named for the flower is a duet for Jones and Aviles, for a tall black and a smaller white man. “It definitely looks forward as well as back,” says Jones. “When I finish doing it I don’t feel like crying, I feel energized.” “We started this year with a clean slate,” says Jones, “But doing a season and keeping the company going under tight fiscal constraints can build back a deficit. We’ve learned a lot though. How to try to make the relationship between what I dream about and what I can afford less wide. That’s so difficult to do when you’re inspired—inspiration costs dollars. Everybody from the office staff to the board wants to help me make the work I want to make, but we’ve limited resources. This is not completely bad. I’d like more and more of the work to look like Poor Theater—no elaborate effects or sets, usually. Now, most of the costumes are very simple. Waters’s costumes are from Unique Clothing. The biggest challenge is that I get many calls for myself—to appear as a soloist or do commissions—because the company is more expensive. But, I feel with diligence and perseverance, this will all balance out."
“I’ve tended to be a polemicist—a person who takes a strong position to delineate issues. But I don’t think anyone’s that unconflicted. Maybe I was more political before. Now my politics are not quite so visible, but I think they’re deeper. “In the past year I’ve learned to be more organized, state more clearly what I want, what I expect of people, and be more clear as to how l really feel. To not be afraid. I’ve had to learn how to relax and leave the work behind, How to start over, and be in love again. I’m trying to give back whatever I’ve learned in 20 years in the form of good work. “What have I done to keep going? I’ll quote Jenny Holzer and show you Waters.”
Frenzied Feet
September 5
I dropped in on the “Scat Dancing” program at Lincoln Center Out-of-Doors, in Damrosch Park, for about an hour. It was a little shy on the dancing and moved at lazy pace, The intimate sounds of Larry Ridley’s Jazz Legacy Ensemble, which could have been amped a little higher, tended to die on the languid air. Tapper Buster Brown was first up in a wily but barely audible dance to Ellington’s “Come Sunday.” Wriggling and shaking, dignified C. Scoby Stroman dug into the soul of the music with some fine rubber-legs dancing to “Blue Monk”. But it was the sort of thing you want to be right on top of, not half a block away from.
Later, Stroman danced on a sandbox, sounding at first like someone tearing paper exceedingly slowly. There wasn’t much to see; he looked as if he were on a treadmill. But when he built up the rhythm of “‘Take the A Train,” the band jumped in. I liked the way the scratchy sounds, Stroman’s choo-choo rhythms and long, soprano scrapes, backed by low drumming, developed into a grand, flamboyant tease. It was delicious the way the pressure for climax relaxed when the musicians came back into synchrony with him—like easy lovers with all night to groove.
I got a much better seat for the following night’s high-flying “‘Tap Blast!” The sound levels seemed higher and the program moved at a fresh clip. One loudspeaker intermittently did a Rice Krispies act—mostly crackling—which was a particular shame when it muddied the taps. The David Leonhardt Trio provided first-rate jazz, and singer Michele Hendricks, busting out of a tight orange dress, turned vocal somersaults with some mellifluous and spirited scat. Manhattan Tap—Heather CornelI, Jamie Cunneen, Shelley Oliver, and Tony Scopino—got the evening off to a bright start in sharp, easy unison. An ensemble of breezy, very individual dancers with a convincingly amiable air, Manhattan Tap looks to be having a fine time. Their sound is clear and brilliant.
Blues For Heather starts with tight, snapping rhythms. Oliver’s very fast and keeps her torso wiggly and alive. Scopino couples deft dancing with the endearing charm of a movie hero’s sidekick. Cornell, tall and with an appealing tomboyish brass, pulls off a subtle and intricate tap dialogue with the drummer. And Cunneen’a a whiz too, though his habit of mouthing the rhythms can be a little distracting. He finishes a smashing solo that burns up the floor with his blurry, nattering feet whirling like a couple of electric fans.
Later on, the crowd loved the group’s raspy, quick-witted sand dance, Slipped Disc, which had a genial competitiveness, and a lot more gestural, visual interest than Stroman’s the night before, though less savor. Fred Strickler—one of the founders of Jazz Tap Ensemble—performs his Excursions to music of Samuel Barber played live by pianist Althea Waites. This, is a class act: subtle stuff of the utmost elegance, executed to perfection. Strickler’s spacious interplay with Waites’s peerless playing opens up the music, and the gleaming accuracy and variety of his tapping ideally complements it. The cheeky second section is particularly exhilarating and full of contrast, with its lazy saunters and half- twists, its digs into the ground, its mercurial balances and suspensions, its evocations of equine gaits in the rhythms. With his cultivated, offhand good manners, the levity of his upper body, the artful boldness of his poses and quick escapes, Strickler skippity-doo-dahs like a veritable aristocrat with a get-down relish for real life.
Cornell joins Strickler and Waites in a polite piece for-a couple of swells, a conversation of dainty, clickety chatter to Scott Jopplin’s “Wall Street Rag.” Spare and light, veddy refined, it’s like a superior mineral water, the kind with tinier bubbles: Badoit instead of Perrier. Dancing on “the tap instrument, one of a set of six platforms designed and built for her by Daniel Schmidt, elfin Anita Feldman explored the tonal range of rich, hollow glugs and tucks of the platform with sharp, darting, full-body moves in Landings. Accompanying her, mallet player Gary Schall started out on marimba, proceeded to a row of drums, and finally, with very long slender mallets, was trickily bonging on the dance platform between and around Feldman’s feet. Feldman’s a vivid, individual dancer—she thrusts her arms wide with unusual force, and perches in delicate balances for musical rests—but she’s a little tight-mouthed and glittery eyed, and holds herself stiff through the neck and across the shoulder girdle.
Old-timer Charles “Cookie” Cook, who has been the most generous of mentors to younger tappers, closed the program with song and some warm, musical, close-to- the-ground dancing, interspersed with saucy rooster struts, scoots, and little wobbly sashays. “I’m too old for all that hoppin’ around,” he said, then gave that remark the lie. Returning for the finale, Cook’s Bambolina, everybody rocketed through a demanding routine of successive time steps that may have wiped them all out, though I don’t believe it for a second. Hendricks, gamely tapping along at one end, gave it her breathless best too, and kept up damn well. What a night!
At Lincoln Center Out of Doors, Damrosch Park (August 22).
I dropped in on the “Scat Dancing” program at Lincoln Center Out-of-Doors, in Damrosch Park, for about an hour. It was a little shy on the dancing and moved at lazy pace, The intimate sounds of Larry Ridley’s Jazz Legacy Ensemble, which could have been amped a little higher, tended to die on the languid air. Tapper Buster Brown was first up in a wily but barely audible dance to Ellington’s “Come Sunday.” Wriggling and shaking, dignified C. Scoby Stroman dug into the soul of the music with some fine rubber-legs dancing to “Blue Monk”. But it was the sort of thing you want to be right on top of, not half a block away from.
Later, Stroman danced on a sandbox, sounding at first like someone tearing paper exceedingly slowly. There wasn’t much to see; he looked as if he were on a treadmill. But when he built up the rhythm of “‘Take the A Train,” the band jumped in. I liked the way the scratchy sounds, Stroman’s choo-choo rhythms and long, soprano scrapes, backed by low drumming, developed into a grand, flamboyant tease. It was delicious the way the pressure for climax relaxed when the musicians came back into synchrony with him—like easy lovers with all night to groove.
I got a much better seat for the following night’s high-flying “‘Tap Blast!” The sound levels seemed higher and the program moved at a fresh clip. One loudspeaker intermittently did a Rice Krispies act—mostly crackling—which was a particular shame when it muddied the taps. The David Leonhardt Trio provided first-rate jazz, and singer Michele Hendricks, busting out of a tight orange dress, turned vocal somersaults with some mellifluous and spirited scat. Manhattan Tap—Heather CornelI, Jamie Cunneen, Shelley Oliver, and Tony Scopino—got the evening off to a bright start in sharp, easy unison. An ensemble of breezy, very individual dancers with a convincingly amiable air, Manhattan Tap looks to be having a fine time. Their sound is clear and brilliant.
Blues For Heather starts with tight, snapping rhythms. Oliver’s very fast and keeps her torso wiggly and alive. Scopino couples deft dancing with the endearing charm of a movie hero’s sidekick. Cornell, tall and with an appealing tomboyish brass, pulls off a subtle and intricate tap dialogue with the drummer. And Cunneen’a a whiz too, though his habit of mouthing the rhythms can be a little distracting. He finishes a smashing solo that burns up the floor with his blurry, nattering feet whirling like a couple of electric fans.
Later on, the crowd loved the group’s raspy, quick-witted sand dance, Slipped Disc, which had a genial competitiveness, and a lot more gestural, visual interest than Stroman’s the night before, though less savor. Fred Strickler—one of the founders of Jazz Tap Ensemble—performs his Excursions to music of Samuel Barber played live by pianist Althea Waites. This, is a class act: subtle stuff of the utmost elegance, executed to perfection. Strickler’s spacious interplay with Waites’s peerless playing opens up the music, and the gleaming accuracy and variety of his tapping ideally complements it. The cheeky second section is particularly exhilarating and full of contrast, with its lazy saunters and half- twists, its digs into the ground, its mercurial balances and suspensions, its evocations of equine gaits in the rhythms. With his cultivated, offhand good manners, the levity of his upper body, the artful boldness of his poses and quick escapes, Strickler skippity-doo-dahs like a veritable aristocrat with a get-down relish for real life.
Cornell joins Strickler and Waites in a polite piece for-a couple of swells, a conversation of dainty, clickety chatter to Scott Jopplin’s “Wall Street Rag.” Spare and light, veddy refined, it’s like a superior mineral water, the kind with tinier bubbles: Badoit instead of Perrier. Dancing on “the tap instrument, one of a set of six platforms designed and built for her by Daniel Schmidt, elfin Anita Feldman explored the tonal range of rich, hollow glugs and tucks of the platform with sharp, darting, full-body moves in Landings. Accompanying her, mallet player Gary Schall started out on marimba, proceeded to a row of drums, and finally, with very long slender mallets, was trickily bonging on the dance platform between and around Feldman’s feet. Feldman’s a vivid, individual dancer—she thrusts her arms wide with unusual force, and perches in delicate balances for musical rests—but she’s a little tight-mouthed and glittery eyed, and holds herself stiff through the neck and across the shoulder girdle.
Old-timer Charles “Cookie” Cook, who has been the most generous of mentors to younger tappers, closed the program with song and some warm, musical, close-to- the-ground dancing, interspersed with saucy rooster struts, scoots, and little wobbly sashays. “I’m too old for all that hoppin’ around,” he said, then gave that remark the lie. Returning for the finale, Cook’s Bambolina, everybody rocketed through a demanding routine of successive time steps that may have wiped them all out, though I don’t believe it for a second. Hendricks, gamely tapping along at one end, gave it her breathless best too, and kept up damn well. What a night!
At Lincoln Center Out of Doors, Damrosch Park (August 22).
Gorilla Girls
April 4
Lucy Sexton and Anne lobst celebrate America with savage parody in a roller coaster of raucous episodes as short as commercial. These girls are angry and having a grand time spewing it, pretending to shock us. In All the Rage, first they’re hausfraus: one’s ironing, one’s vacuuming, and then they argue and throw things, wreck the place. Iobst hits herself in the face with drippy pie, then gets Sexton. They throw powder, dump drums of popcorn over each other. Stage manager Lori Seid dashes in with a broom to clean the mess away while the Dancenoise duo goes right on.
Tough cookies, their aggressiveness is bracing and nothing fazes them. Iobst fills a fishbowl with water, drops in a mackerel, sloshes it around and drinks. Never at a loss for a smart remark or a sour comeback they carry the city wise sass of a Joan Blondell or an Eve Arden to new heights while ditching the tight smile that used to go along with the grace. But they’re not just smart women coping gloriously with the idiocies of relationships, consumer goods, advertising, political lies. Their unbound energy has a fiercely positive, imaginative thrust; the prodigious way they generate waste around them is proof of their generosity. Sexton shares a shabby couch with a seedy, lounging lion. “For a second I thought you were a lion,” she remarks, before a double take and shriek. One of god’s gifts to women, he slyly puts the make on her, edging closer and closer. But she tackles him, wrestles and decks him, kicks him in the balls, flings him over the couch (which flips too), and chases him with a chair and paddle just like Gunther Gebel-Williams. So much for the weaker sex.
They keep puncturing their serious setups, not to diminish but to twist them around, so in Romeo and Juliet we can see Ralph and Alice. “You kiss by the book,” complains Sexton/Juliet; temporarily departing from Elizabethan speech. The postcoital nightingale/lark dialogue turns into a screaming match, with Iobst/ Romeo grumpily yielding “Okay, okay, it was the stupid nightingale.” When she finds Sexton knocked out on sleeping pills and presumes her dead, lobst cashes in her chips by slugging down a bottle of Drano. Battling with feather dusters, shoving like incorrigible brats, dumping water on each other, pumping their arms, kicking their legs. lobst and Sexton are anarchic rabble-rousers, aerobic tarts. No target is too large or trivial for their gleeful contempt, but they don’t pull away or exempt themselves in any superior way. There’s nothing self-satisfied in their taunting comic rage. One dreams of a world free of lint. The other would like to put out those thousand points of light so she can get some sleep.
At P.S. 122 (March 16 to 19).
Lucy Sexton and Anne lobst celebrate America with savage parody in a roller coaster of raucous episodes as short as commercial. These girls are angry and having a grand time spewing it, pretending to shock us. In All the Rage, first they’re hausfraus: one’s ironing, one’s vacuuming, and then they argue and throw things, wreck the place. Iobst hits herself in the face with drippy pie, then gets Sexton. They throw powder, dump drums of popcorn over each other. Stage manager Lori Seid dashes in with a broom to clean the mess away while the Dancenoise duo goes right on.
Tough cookies, their aggressiveness is bracing and nothing fazes them. Iobst fills a fishbowl with water, drops in a mackerel, sloshes it around and drinks. Never at a loss for a smart remark or a sour comeback they carry the city wise sass of a Joan Blondell or an Eve Arden to new heights while ditching the tight smile that used to go along with the grace. But they’re not just smart women coping gloriously with the idiocies of relationships, consumer goods, advertising, political lies. Their unbound energy has a fiercely positive, imaginative thrust; the prodigious way they generate waste around them is proof of their generosity. Sexton shares a shabby couch with a seedy, lounging lion. “For a second I thought you were a lion,” she remarks, before a double take and shriek. One of god’s gifts to women, he slyly puts the make on her, edging closer and closer. But she tackles him, wrestles and decks him, kicks him in the balls, flings him over the couch (which flips too), and chases him with a chair and paddle just like Gunther Gebel-Williams. So much for the weaker sex.
They keep puncturing their serious setups, not to diminish but to twist them around, so in Romeo and Juliet we can see Ralph and Alice. “You kiss by the book,” complains Sexton/Juliet; temporarily departing from Elizabethan speech. The postcoital nightingale/lark dialogue turns into a screaming match, with Iobst/ Romeo grumpily yielding “Okay, okay, it was the stupid nightingale.” When she finds Sexton knocked out on sleeping pills and presumes her dead, lobst cashes in her chips by slugging down a bottle of Drano. Battling with feather dusters, shoving like incorrigible brats, dumping water on each other, pumping their arms, kicking their legs. lobst and Sexton are anarchic rabble-rousers, aerobic tarts. No target is too large or trivial for their gleeful contempt, but they don’t pull away or exempt themselves in any superior way. There’s nothing self-satisfied in their taunting comic rage. One dreams of a world free of lint. The other would like to put out those thousand points of light so she can get some sleep.
At P.S. 122 (March 16 to 19).
I Think We’re Alone Now
July 18
The only thing that grabbed me in Alive From Off Center’s Dance Lineup last season was Tim Buckley and John Sanborn’s snappy, eight-minute Endance. But this year’s crop of programs looks livelier than usual.
This summer’s Program 3 triple bill opens with Bill T. Jones’s black-and- white Untitled (directed by Sanborn and Mary Perillo), a memorial to his longtime partner, Arnie Zane. In it, Jones’s curt, drastic, sculptural gestures (some of them particularly associated with Zane) play against a voiceover of Zane laconically telling his dreams and Regina Crespin singing Berlioz’s “Absence.” Jones speaks precisely, almost accusingly to the camera, to the absent Zane. He recalls the names of friends and collaborators as their snapshot portraits flicker behind him, asking with strict formality “Do you remember Bill Katz? Do you remember Rhodessa?”“Do you remember Lois?” he continues. Then, with a suddenly tender inflection, “Do you remember Lois?”—letting in the warmth he has so persuasively kept at bay. For a moment, Zane’s ghost dances in a spotlit corner. Jones’s swinging, twisting torso, his agonized head rotations and flashing grimaces, the utter clarity of his movement, seem defenses against the pain of memory as much as articulations of it, The cuts and camera angles often change with nervous speed, cropping his torso, caressing his limbs. Urgently galloping, smacking and writhing, a sense of punishment accumulating in his moves. Jones sometimes has the uncomprehending air of a frightened animal despite his superb control. “I think we’re alone now,’ he says with great sweetness, and calls up memories of touring, of the house they shared, while the camera eyes him head-on. Meanwhile, he puts on a scarf, a big dark, coat, a scoutmaster’s hat—as if he’s the one who’s leaving, “I think, I think,” he says, beating his fist against his chest like a heart that cannot fail to keep going.
In pink tones, and curiously sited in a palatial hall, Susan Marshall’s Arms still comes across with great immediacy. The reticent Marshall and grave Arthur Armijo, standing beside each other, wing their arms to curve round, to nag, grab, to thwart an embrace. She press a his hand to her cheek. Armijo watch her with a sad, solemn look. Her hand touches his shoulder, his elbow locks around her neck, her upper body folds over his, his whole torso suddenly swerves against her waist. Active camerawork, alternating with stillness, suits Untitled fine. But Isabelle Hayeur’s direction of Marshall’s piece is a little too busy. I want only to be owed to submit to the obsessiveness of the steadily lashing arms in which the relationship’s complexities are revealed.
Ishmael Houston-Jones’s Relatives (directed by Julie Dash) is the only portion of the program in full color, and it seems like a fragment, We see him in blurred flashes of violent movement, o the beach in an orange life vest at a family picnic. He packs his mildly protesting mother over his shoulder and sets her in a chair to tell stories of his childhood while he flings himself around. “Oh, dance your little heart out” cries Houston-Jones’s mother, Pauline Jones, who steals the show with her keen, practical personality, and never misses an opportunity to have the last word. By comparison, the dancing’s unfocused. Houston-Jones shows an old family photo and traces his limp fingers in imitation of one Alice Trussel Smith in the shot, whom he imagines never saw a camera before, then uses that gesture in his furious dancing, But how are the people in the photo related to Houston-Jones and his mother? Who are the grownups and kids at the picnic? I want to know lots of details that are possibly none of my business, but the dancing provides no information. “Give me a couple of minutes,” says Houston-Jones, vague about what he’s up to. “A couple of minutes for what?” his mother snaps, tartly.
Philippe Decoufle’s bizarre, half-hour Codex (1987), the entire Program 5, is a clever cultural tour of some delectable terra incognita, much of it in monochrome sepia or bluish tones, like vintage footage. It’s a deft patchwork of brief, exotic scenes, held together by their outlandishness sand witty sensibility, Or think of it as a buffet of queer desserts. Invented hieroglyphs translated into solemn, gabbling pseudo-language introduce each section, Froggy, primitive figures hang upside-down, silhouetted on the TV screen. Maybe they’re underwater: they wear swim fins and tasseled caps. Then they bounce and galumph around in high spirits, A stooping figure runs across; others run helter-skelter around a quiet couple in the middle; single figures do flips across the screen. To Tahitian music, a line of white-clad people taking small steps sweeps counterclockwise like a minute hand. From time to time one of the men plops to the sandy floor. A man invades the scene riding a six-pronged contraption like a huge child’s jack that he can topple by shifting his weight, A bouncing figure ins baggy, low-crotch jumpsuit does a droll, swiveling, swinging dance as if he’s made of rubber, A black figure wearing a large quarter circle on each limb creeps up and down the sides of the television screen. In one ravishing section, two men in fetishy footwear suggesting spats and gaiters lean and roll against each other, climb on each other, while a beautiful black man, with reddish hair and a face as confidently serene as Jessye Norman’s, sings a sweet, repeating melody (original music is by Hugues de Courson). Raindrops roll slowly down his face. Wearing a crinkled neck piece and waders, he looks like a nobleman from a medieval legend. Moments later he’s clomping around ferociously with a huge, broad plank strapped to one foot. With every move, every bend or swing of his torso, water splashes out of his bloated, chest-high waders. Decoufle’s zany imagination translates marvelously onto the screen, partly because visual design is such an important aspect of his work and he has a penchant for working in a flat plane. He taps into a tantalizing, comic-book craziness, recalls the glitter of a pre-World War I music hall, delights in the mysterious. From the oddest ingredients, he cooks up delicacies to whet the fussiest appetites.
The only thing that grabbed me in Alive From Off Center’s Dance Lineup last season was Tim Buckley and John Sanborn’s snappy, eight-minute Endance. But this year’s crop of programs looks livelier than usual.
This summer’s Program 3 triple bill opens with Bill T. Jones’s black-and- white Untitled (directed by Sanborn and Mary Perillo), a memorial to his longtime partner, Arnie Zane. In it, Jones’s curt, drastic, sculptural gestures (some of them particularly associated with Zane) play against a voiceover of Zane laconically telling his dreams and Regina Crespin singing Berlioz’s “Absence.” Jones speaks precisely, almost accusingly to the camera, to the absent Zane. He recalls the names of friends and collaborators as their snapshot portraits flicker behind him, asking with strict formality “Do you remember Bill Katz? Do you remember Rhodessa?”“Do you remember Lois?” he continues. Then, with a suddenly tender inflection, “Do you remember Lois?”—letting in the warmth he has so persuasively kept at bay. For a moment, Zane’s ghost dances in a spotlit corner. Jones’s swinging, twisting torso, his agonized head rotations and flashing grimaces, the utter clarity of his movement, seem defenses against the pain of memory as much as articulations of it, The cuts and camera angles often change with nervous speed, cropping his torso, caressing his limbs. Urgently galloping, smacking and writhing, a sense of punishment accumulating in his moves. Jones sometimes has the uncomprehending air of a frightened animal despite his superb control. “I think we’re alone now,’ he says with great sweetness, and calls up memories of touring, of the house they shared, while the camera eyes him head-on. Meanwhile, he puts on a scarf, a big dark, coat, a scoutmaster’s hat—as if he’s the one who’s leaving, “I think, I think,” he says, beating his fist against his chest like a heart that cannot fail to keep going.
In pink tones, and curiously sited in a palatial hall, Susan Marshall’s Arms still comes across with great immediacy. The reticent Marshall and grave Arthur Armijo, standing beside each other, wing their arms to curve round, to nag, grab, to thwart an embrace. She press a his hand to her cheek. Armijo watch her with a sad, solemn look. Her hand touches his shoulder, his elbow locks around her neck, her upper body folds over his, his whole torso suddenly swerves against her waist. Active camerawork, alternating with stillness, suits Untitled fine. But Isabelle Hayeur’s direction of Marshall’s piece is a little too busy. I want only to be owed to submit to the obsessiveness of the steadily lashing arms in which the relationship’s complexities are revealed.
Ishmael Houston-Jones’s Relatives (directed by Julie Dash) is the only portion of the program in full color, and it seems like a fragment, We see him in blurred flashes of violent movement, o the beach in an orange life vest at a family picnic. He packs his mildly protesting mother over his shoulder and sets her in a chair to tell stories of his childhood while he flings himself around. “Oh, dance your little heart out” cries Houston-Jones’s mother, Pauline Jones, who steals the show with her keen, practical personality, and never misses an opportunity to have the last word. By comparison, the dancing’s unfocused. Houston-Jones shows an old family photo and traces his limp fingers in imitation of one Alice Trussel Smith in the shot, whom he imagines never saw a camera before, then uses that gesture in his furious dancing, But how are the people in the photo related to Houston-Jones and his mother? Who are the grownups and kids at the picnic? I want to know lots of details that are possibly none of my business, but the dancing provides no information. “Give me a couple of minutes,” says Houston-Jones, vague about what he’s up to. “A couple of minutes for what?” his mother snaps, tartly.
Philippe Decoufle’s bizarre, half-hour Codex (1987), the entire Program 5, is a clever cultural tour of some delectable terra incognita, much of it in monochrome sepia or bluish tones, like vintage footage. It’s a deft patchwork of brief, exotic scenes, held together by their outlandishness sand witty sensibility, Or think of it as a buffet of queer desserts. Invented hieroglyphs translated into solemn, gabbling pseudo-language introduce each section, Froggy, primitive figures hang upside-down, silhouetted on the TV screen. Maybe they’re underwater: they wear swim fins and tasseled caps. Then they bounce and galumph around in high spirits, A stooping figure runs across; others run helter-skelter around a quiet couple in the middle; single figures do flips across the screen. To Tahitian music, a line of white-clad people taking small steps sweeps counterclockwise like a minute hand. From time to time one of the men plops to the sandy floor. A man invades the scene riding a six-pronged contraption like a huge child’s jack that he can topple by shifting his weight, A bouncing figure ins baggy, low-crotch jumpsuit does a droll, swiveling, swinging dance as if he’s made of rubber, A black figure wearing a large quarter circle on each limb creeps up and down the sides of the television screen. In one ravishing section, two men in fetishy footwear suggesting spats and gaiters lean and roll against each other, climb on each other, while a beautiful black man, with reddish hair and a face as confidently serene as Jessye Norman’s, sings a sweet, repeating melody (original music is by Hugues de Courson). Raindrops roll slowly down his face. Wearing a crinkled neck piece and waders, he looks like a nobleman from a medieval legend. Moments later he’s clomping around ferociously with a huge, broad plank strapped to one foot. With every move, every bend or swing of his torso, water splashes out of his bloated, chest-high waders. Decoufle’s zany imagination translates marvelously onto the screen, partly because visual design is such an important aspect of his work and he has a penchant for working in a flat plane. He taps into a tantalizing, comic-book craziness, recalls the glitter of a pre-World War I music hall, delights in the mysterious. From the oddest ingredients, he cooks up delicacies to whet the fussiest appetites.
Ladies of the Night
February 28
There was something heavy about Dance Theater Workshop’s late. night program of solos. by five women, not because of the dances’ serious themes, but owing to the ineffectualness and strain of the middle pieces.
Risa Jaroslow, in Teen Kills Mom, plays two roles in one in a dance that portrays the disproportionate irritation, snarling frustration, and guilty anger of a mother and her teenage daughter without managing to illuminate their relationship. Johanna Boyce’s Out— which was originally meant to be a solo but became a duet with tenor Reginald Carroll Williams—combines verbal elements of a psychiatric case study with excerpts from Handel’s Tamerlano and “Take Me Out to the Bailgame.” But the contrasting elements—a woman wrapped up in the pain of a child who’s afraid to leave the house and an operatic king railing “against the forces that brought him to his demise”—fail to dovetail.
The other three pieces weren’t light fare either, but they came into vivid focus. Irene Hultman—who danced with Trisha Brown for five years—expelled her breath in soft hoots and blowings while moving with silky decisiveness inside a 12-foot-square space in Moontrip. Hultman created an absorbing abstract meditation. Listening to her body, she carefully dislodged herself from assured placements, permitted the little adjustments and illogical repercussions of movement to sputter or ripple through her body, altered a thoughtful, rhythmic pace to a dreamy, floating slow motion, and made her free choices seem inescapable in a hypnotic inner journey.
Vicky Shick, a quintessential former member of Trisha Brown’s company, dedicated It Was to her mother who died last March, and it was a pleasure to see such an intelligently conceptualized piece from this adored and exquisitely fluid dancer. Chopped into myriad bits by blackouts, and sometimes accompanied by Jane Morgan’s hit recording of “Fascination,” It Was is an unsentimental tribute. Sometimes we only see Shick for a moment before the lights go: walking to place, moving her arms stiffly to draw urgent, scribbly shapes, jumping with her arms flung out. Shick sets out a red leather handbag, picks it up, shakes it tightly against her chest. Later, she pulls a fox-fur piece out of the bag and wraps it around her neck, then collapses as she pulls it off. She pushes her hair back from her face and stares out as if into a mirror. With a feeling of intense melancholy, she seems to wonder, “Is this me?” “Am I okay?” Each time she does this, Shick’s unforgettable, forgiving face ages 30 years or so and she acquires the fragile gravity of someone who’s seen more than enough.
In Marta Renzi’s wry closing piece, The Penguin Dictionary of Science, the human body needs coaxing, needs all the help it can get. In a black tailcoat, dancing to music by Andy Teirstein, Renzi grapples with minor mishaps of her body’s own making with a plodding, thick-skulled cheerfulness. Mazy Shultz (on tape) occasionally reads definitions of gravity, entropy, and the heat death of the universe, while Renzi gets some parts of herself stuck on others and has to pry them off. She gets a foot glommed to an ankle while trying to run, locks an arm under a knee, The final image is classically optimistic, a chipper imitation of Chaplin’s famous waddling, flatfooted walk that caps the piece like a salute. Without actually clowning, Renzi gives her clumsy struggling an exhilarating poignancy—like when somebody gross turns out be joyously light on her feet.
At Dance Theater Workshop (February 10 through 18).
There was something heavy about Dance Theater Workshop’s late. night program of solos. by five women, not because of the dances’ serious themes, but owing to the ineffectualness and strain of the middle pieces.
Risa Jaroslow, in Teen Kills Mom, plays two roles in one in a dance that portrays the disproportionate irritation, snarling frustration, and guilty anger of a mother and her teenage daughter without managing to illuminate their relationship. Johanna Boyce’s Out— which was originally meant to be a solo but became a duet with tenor Reginald Carroll Williams—combines verbal elements of a psychiatric case study with excerpts from Handel’s Tamerlano and “Take Me Out to the Bailgame.” But the contrasting elements—a woman wrapped up in the pain of a child who’s afraid to leave the house and an operatic king railing “against the forces that brought him to his demise”—fail to dovetail.
The other three pieces weren’t light fare either, but they came into vivid focus. Irene Hultman—who danced with Trisha Brown for five years—expelled her breath in soft hoots and blowings while moving with silky decisiveness inside a 12-foot-square space in Moontrip. Hultman created an absorbing abstract meditation. Listening to her body, she carefully dislodged herself from assured placements, permitted the little adjustments and illogical repercussions of movement to sputter or ripple through her body, altered a thoughtful, rhythmic pace to a dreamy, floating slow motion, and made her free choices seem inescapable in a hypnotic inner journey.
Vicky Shick, a quintessential former member of Trisha Brown’s company, dedicated It Was to her mother who died last March, and it was a pleasure to see such an intelligently conceptualized piece from this adored and exquisitely fluid dancer. Chopped into myriad bits by blackouts, and sometimes accompanied by Jane Morgan’s hit recording of “Fascination,” It Was is an unsentimental tribute. Sometimes we only see Shick for a moment before the lights go: walking to place, moving her arms stiffly to draw urgent, scribbly shapes, jumping with her arms flung out. Shick sets out a red leather handbag, picks it up, shakes it tightly against her chest. Later, she pulls a fox-fur piece out of the bag and wraps it around her neck, then collapses as she pulls it off. She pushes her hair back from her face and stares out as if into a mirror. With a feeling of intense melancholy, she seems to wonder, “Is this me?” “Am I okay?” Each time she does this, Shick’s unforgettable, forgiving face ages 30 years or so and she acquires the fragile gravity of someone who’s seen more than enough.
In Marta Renzi’s wry closing piece, The Penguin Dictionary of Science, the human body needs coaxing, needs all the help it can get. In a black tailcoat, dancing to music by Andy Teirstein, Renzi grapples with minor mishaps of her body’s own making with a plodding, thick-skulled cheerfulness. Mazy Shultz (on tape) occasionally reads definitions of gravity, entropy, and the heat death of the universe, while Renzi gets some parts of herself stuck on others and has to pry them off. She gets a foot glommed to an ankle while trying to run, locks an arm under a knee, The final image is classically optimistic, a chipper imitation of Chaplin’s famous waddling, flatfooted walk that caps the piece like a salute. Without actually clowning, Renzi gives her clumsy struggling an exhilarating poignancy—like when somebody gross turns out be joyously light on her feet.
At Dance Theater Workshop (February 10 through 18).
Mama Mia!
May 2
Goodness we‘re looking at three windows high at the back of Home’s small black-box stage. Directly in front of us, Linda Mancini aqu Ivory liquid as she washes dishes. Lisa Love, standing close to her boyfriend, J ho Wells, ayes; a child, Amy Karp, in bed and plays with’ he . There’s a brightness to the { } have of their ordinary lives. cmi hard oi her wIndow for a tion.”p that!” she scolds silently, while we read her lips, it’s as if we’re the tog stickball—but her demands roll right off us. “Hey! Get out of there right now. I’m warning you!” The child rocks side to side in bed, the couple embraces comfortably, everybody { } These cheerful public images are superseded by more mysterious and private views. The child undresses little by little,and dresses again, perhaps for school. The couple’s embraces become more strained and sexual as they grope at each other and push at each other’s clothes. Mancini loosens her dark hair, shows her breasts, supremely conscious of whoever out here she imagines to be her audience. She pulls down her panties, pushes up her black slip that bunches at her waist. Voluptuous, exposed, she hefts her breasts to assess them or excite herself or someone beyond that window. She begins to bathe, letting water trickle over her body. The couple takes turns spying with binoculars. We shouldn’t be watching this. The voyeuristic scenario twists from the comic and familiar to intimate scenes that make us stunned but leery witnesses, like people drawn to the fascination of a gruesome accident.
Mancini’s so bold, grave, and compellingly real, half-flaunting and half-examining her naked belly, breasts, and haunches. Her presence is as gripping as that of the flamboyant whore who inflamed the imagination of the young Fellini in 8 and a1/2. Almost too real to bear.
Mancini’s generosity as a performer is a joy. She’s so juicy, funny, fearless. As Angelina Contadina in Angelina! she speaks only Italian. but makes herself so clear that even with only a spaghetti for good { } tellini vocabulary you understand every word exactly. Chattering, giddy, she wanders onstage en route to America. But when, finalmente, she arrives, removes her blindfold, and gets a look at the theater and the audience, it’s a definite downer. She’s not impressed, She expected something bigger, better. ily—tomatoes that arranges on a { } From a basket, she introduces her fans small table, Gina, ‘ Tha, Guiseppe, etc., etc., and Linda, a plum tomato who’s the { } buss smart, Reminiscing about the war, she gently sends them off, one at a time, like birds from the nest—but they bohib onto the floor, “Mario, coraggia,” she says, as she nudges a tomato off the table. “Ciao. Mi scrivi,” write to me. She keeps the feelings complex and bittersweet. The naked woman of Glances reveals unsuspected power and need. Mancini displays her body with a straightforward self-absorption and an objective neutrality that invite and magnify the audience’s dreams, desires, and fears. She’s overwhelming in a way, yet safely distanced behind glass.
And in Angelina! the head of a family fragmenting filters through the jokes. But Bone China builds so directly, narrowly. A --- with cups. Dressed in black, with gloves table for tea, crowds plus a feathered hat, a nervous, prune-faced Mancini enters. A lady. She pours herself some tea, drops in a cube of sugar, drinks, dribbles some on herself. She refills the cup, adds several sugar cubes, spills more. Increasingly desperate, she keeps refilling her cup, swilling it down. She dumps all the sugar into the cup, pours it over herself, so the cubes tumble over her sopping chest onto the floor where she moves. Without ceasing t be funny, the { } routine she obsessively { } falls as a panacea and rapidly { } to embody the horror of her unexplained predicament. In each of her pieces, Mancini uses her blatant humor and shameless vitality to carry us: like cartoon characters in chase just beyond the cliff edge. If we were careful and rational, we’d never be but here { } where there’s nothing. to hold us up.
The gravity and concentration of Carol McDowell in her circular solo, Madame Lazare, is quite beautiful, but the piece—in which a suicide is attempted, and perhaps accomplished, again and again with increasing deliberateness and desperation—seems like an exercise in classic alienation. McDowell climbs the rungs on one side of a rectangular structure—one foot slips slightly each time—stands on top, wavers, and finally leaps, crashing onto a huge box of newspapers. She rolls off it, and climbs again. There’s a voice-over text excerpted from Camus’s The Fall, which sounds like cocktail party chitchat and is almost impossible to follow, and a film that pointlessly sweeps around and around downtown rooftops. Both of these elements dilute McDowell’s relentless, minimal activity. But each repetition interests me less anyway, except in a technical way. The first time, when she stood up, hesitated, I realized what she was thinking, had the shocking thrill of waking in her character’s head. After that, we were just going through the motions.
At Home for Contemporary Theater (April 14 and 15).
Goodness we‘re looking at three windows high at the back of Home’s small black-box stage. Directly in front of us, Linda Mancini aqu Ivory liquid as she washes dishes. Lisa Love, standing close to her boyfriend, J ho Wells, ayes; a child, Amy Karp, in bed and plays with’ he . There’s a brightness to the { } have of their ordinary lives. cmi hard oi her wIndow for a tion.”p that!” she scolds silently, while we read her lips, it’s as if we’re the tog stickball—but her demands roll right off us. “Hey! Get out of there right now. I’m warning you!” The child rocks side to side in bed, the couple embraces comfortably, everybody { } These cheerful public images are superseded by more mysterious and private views. The child undresses little by little,and dresses again, perhaps for school. The couple’s embraces become more strained and sexual as they grope at each other and push at each other’s clothes. Mancini loosens her dark hair, shows her breasts, supremely conscious of whoever out here she imagines to be her audience. She pulls down her panties, pushes up her black slip that bunches at her waist. Voluptuous, exposed, she hefts her breasts to assess them or excite herself or someone beyond that window. She begins to bathe, letting water trickle over her body. The couple takes turns spying with binoculars. We shouldn’t be watching this. The voyeuristic scenario twists from the comic and familiar to intimate scenes that make us stunned but leery witnesses, like people drawn to the fascination of a gruesome accident.
Mancini’s so bold, grave, and compellingly real, half-flaunting and half-examining her naked belly, breasts, and haunches. Her presence is as gripping as that of the flamboyant whore who inflamed the imagination of the young Fellini in 8 and a1/2. Almost too real to bear.
Mancini’s generosity as a performer is a joy. She’s so juicy, funny, fearless. As Angelina Contadina in Angelina! she speaks only Italian. but makes herself so clear that even with only a spaghetti for good { } tellini vocabulary you understand every word exactly. Chattering, giddy, she wanders onstage en route to America. But when, finalmente, she arrives, removes her blindfold, and gets a look at the theater and the audience, it’s a definite downer. She’s not impressed, She expected something bigger, better. ily—tomatoes that arranges on a { } From a basket, she introduces her fans small table, Gina, ‘ Tha, Guiseppe, etc., etc., and Linda, a plum tomato who’s the { } buss smart, Reminiscing about the war, she gently sends them off, one at a time, like birds from the nest—but they bohib onto the floor, “Mario, coraggia,” she says, as she nudges a tomato off the table. “Ciao. Mi scrivi,” write to me. She keeps the feelings complex and bittersweet. The naked woman of Glances reveals unsuspected power and need. Mancini displays her body with a straightforward self-absorption and an objective neutrality that invite and magnify the audience’s dreams, desires, and fears. She’s overwhelming in a way, yet safely distanced behind glass.
And in Angelina! the head of a family fragmenting filters through the jokes. But Bone China builds so directly, narrowly. A --- with cups. Dressed in black, with gloves table for tea, crowds plus a feathered hat, a nervous, prune-faced Mancini enters. A lady. She pours herself some tea, drops in a cube of sugar, drinks, dribbles some on herself. She refills the cup, adds several sugar cubes, spills more. Increasingly desperate, she keeps refilling her cup, swilling it down. She dumps all the sugar into the cup, pours it over herself, so the cubes tumble over her sopping chest onto the floor where she moves. Without ceasing t be funny, the { } routine she obsessively { } falls as a panacea and rapidly { } to embody the horror of her unexplained predicament. In each of her pieces, Mancini uses her blatant humor and shameless vitality to carry us: like cartoon characters in chase just beyond the cliff edge. If we were careful and rational, we’d never be but here { } where there’s nothing. to hold us up.
The gravity and concentration of Carol McDowell in her circular solo, Madame Lazare, is quite beautiful, but the piece—in which a suicide is attempted, and perhaps accomplished, again and again with increasing deliberateness and desperation—seems like an exercise in classic alienation. McDowell climbs the rungs on one side of a rectangular structure—one foot slips slightly each time—stands on top, wavers, and finally leaps, crashing onto a huge box of newspapers. She rolls off it, and climbs again. There’s a voice-over text excerpted from Camus’s The Fall, which sounds like cocktail party chitchat and is almost impossible to follow, and a film that pointlessly sweeps around and around downtown rooftops. Both of these elements dilute McDowell’s relentless, minimal activity. But each repetition interests me less anyway, except in a technical way. The first time, when she stood up, hesitated, I realized what she was thinking, had the shocking thrill of waking in her character’s head. After that, we were just going through the motions.
At Home for Contemporary Theater (April 14 and 15).
Master Builder
June 20
Renee Wadleigh, an original member of Paul Taylor’s company, has been presenting dances in New York since 1982 A duet from her 1987 Down From the Moon, danced by Bill Young and Allyson Green, was delicately toned and strangely beautiful, a carefully spun web of tender interweavings set to a loop of genuinely haunting music by Gavin Bryars.
Green is slowly turning in lighting designer Michael Mazzola’s blue-gold twilight, moving up and down, her arms floating when Young creeps in, sparking a flurry of leaps and springs. But their duet is mostly quiet and harmonious. Rarely touching, they crouch and lunge together, moving in to the spaces around each other’s bodies, sliding to the floor. She darts sideways, and slants into his arms. He pivots over her to lie beside her. Mysteriously solemn and muted, the piece is all continuity, though it unravels suddenly at the end.
But Wadleigh’s two other pieces are obscure and often disconnected. She’s harried and distracted in her solo from Memory of Water, seeming to lose the thread between phrases. The space seems like a box to bang around in. Even when Rob Sorrentino joins her, their contacts are only hesitant teasings, like invitations to games she’s too fearful to play. The quartet for four women, Next to the Nevermore, is overcautious; like Memory of Water, it’s sketchy and not fully physicalized. The initial feeling is lovely and low-key. Mauri Kramer, Madeline Dean Black, Katherine Shapiro, and Lissy Trachtenberg quietly lead one another in pairs - slowly walking, bending over. They lean away from each other, or fall gently together, breast to breast, and counterbalance each other in various was. Sometimes they burst into flyaway leaps, skips, turns, their arms lifting free. But their activities eventually seem scattered and wan - without results or repercussions, without impact.
In about 20 sections, Bill Young’s 40-minute RoughSix bubbles along with an inventive vigor and playfulness that’s frequently aggressive. It was created last year out of 19 brief, made-for-tv computer-generated partnering episodes. You don’t nee to know that, but perhaps it explains the oddness of some of the physical contacts and juxtapositions. What’s so amazing is the capacity of this superb group of dancers - Larry Hahn, Susan Blankensop, Sondra Loring, Green, Trachtenberg and Young - to integrate and phrase the most diverse material. Mo Morales’ colorful array of melodies and rhythms for synthesizer and percussion, and voice (performed live opening night) enlivened the piece. Mazzola’s lighting, which might abruptly turn the space from luminous to opaque or plunge half of it into shadow, strategically emphasized its moods, contrasts and strange humors. The dancing in RoughSix has such elemental authority, such concreteness and specificity, that nothing arbitrary survives in it. The most peculiar gestures seem ebullient expressions of life’s variety.
The quintessential scene for me was a duet for Blankensop and Hahn in which they are fearlessly, brilliantly matched, perfectly attuned. They progress slowly, entwining, touching. She’s long-limbed, strong, exquisitely refined; he’s solid, businesslike, brimming with contained power. Then their movement erupts - she flings herself against his back, suddenly rides his thigh; they lean, roll, she butts against him hard and fast. He’s got the force of a cannonball, but she beats herself against him with the taunting resiliency of a guerilla army battering regular troops. Then Loring and Green intrude - leaping, pulling, and dragging each other. And Young and Trachtenberg come in fast, flying against each other. Young’s pacing is masterly; the sections are brief but not fragmentary. His own solo is an elegant, sinuous reverie. Some other sections have an air of moderation and composure. But what sticks in the mind is the plethora of quirky, vigorous duets, trios and small ensembles, with their whimsical intricacies and unwavering concentration. In one clustering, amoebic quartet, the dancers shove, yank, swing over one another, haul one another up and down, run over an ephemeral stair of bodies, swirl apart and together, till Loring rushes in and - bumping, pushing, striking with her knees and hips - quickly busts them up. There’s no shred of malice in her attack, no hint of rationale. It’s just time to move along.
At St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery (June 5 through 8).
Renee Wadleigh, an original member of Paul Taylor’s company, has been presenting dances in New York since 1982 A duet from her 1987 Down From the Moon, danced by Bill Young and Allyson Green, was delicately toned and strangely beautiful, a carefully spun web of tender interweavings set to a loop of genuinely haunting music by Gavin Bryars.
Green is slowly turning in lighting designer Michael Mazzola’s blue-gold twilight, moving up and down, her arms floating when Young creeps in, sparking a flurry of leaps and springs. But their duet is mostly quiet and harmonious. Rarely touching, they crouch and lunge together, moving in to the spaces around each other’s bodies, sliding to the floor. She darts sideways, and slants into his arms. He pivots over her to lie beside her. Mysteriously solemn and muted, the piece is all continuity, though it unravels suddenly at the end.
But Wadleigh’s two other pieces are obscure and often disconnected. She’s harried and distracted in her solo from Memory of Water, seeming to lose the thread between phrases. The space seems like a box to bang around in. Even when Rob Sorrentino joins her, their contacts are only hesitant teasings, like invitations to games she’s too fearful to play. The quartet for four women, Next to the Nevermore, is overcautious; like Memory of Water, it’s sketchy and not fully physicalized. The initial feeling is lovely and low-key. Mauri Kramer, Madeline Dean Black, Katherine Shapiro, and Lissy Trachtenberg quietly lead one another in pairs - slowly walking, bending over. They lean away from each other, or fall gently together, breast to breast, and counterbalance each other in various was. Sometimes they burst into flyaway leaps, skips, turns, their arms lifting free. But their activities eventually seem scattered and wan - without results or repercussions, without impact.
In about 20 sections, Bill Young’s 40-minute RoughSix bubbles along with an inventive vigor and playfulness that’s frequently aggressive. It was created last year out of 19 brief, made-for-tv computer-generated partnering episodes. You don’t nee to know that, but perhaps it explains the oddness of some of the physical contacts and juxtapositions. What’s so amazing is the capacity of this superb group of dancers - Larry Hahn, Susan Blankensop, Sondra Loring, Green, Trachtenberg and Young - to integrate and phrase the most diverse material. Mo Morales’ colorful array of melodies and rhythms for synthesizer and percussion, and voice (performed live opening night) enlivened the piece. Mazzola’s lighting, which might abruptly turn the space from luminous to opaque or plunge half of it into shadow, strategically emphasized its moods, contrasts and strange humors. The dancing in RoughSix has such elemental authority, such concreteness and specificity, that nothing arbitrary survives in it. The most peculiar gestures seem ebullient expressions of life’s variety.
The quintessential scene for me was a duet for Blankensop and Hahn in which they are fearlessly, brilliantly matched, perfectly attuned. They progress slowly, entwining, touching. She’s long-limbed, strong, exquisitely refined; he’s solid, businesslike, brimming with contained power. Then their movement erupts - she flings herself against his back, suddenly rides his thigh; they lean, roll, she butts against him hard and fast. He’s got the force of a cannonball, but she beats herself against him with the taunting resiliency of a guerilla army battering regular troops. Then Loring and Green intrude - leaping, pulling, and dragging each other. And Young and Trachtenberg come in fast, flying against each other. Young’s pacing is masterly; the sections are brief but not fragmentary. His own solo is an elegant, sinuous reverie. Some other sections have an air of moderation and composure. But what sticks in the mind is the plethora of quirky, vigorous duets, trios and small ensembles, with their whimsical intricacies and unwavering concentration. In one clustering, amoebic quartet, the dancers shove, yank, swing over one another, haul one another up and down, run over an ephemeral stair of bodies, swirl apart and together, till Loring rushes in and - bumping, pushing, striking with her knees and hips - quickly busts them up. There’s no shred of malice in her attack, no hint of rationale. It’s just time to move along.
At St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery (June 5 through 8).
Mindless Pleasure
June 13
Visual savvy and fine theatrical dancing marked the debut of Michele Elliman and John O’Malley’s new company, Neo Labos, in Coming To. The production had a lot going for it—a prIstine look, aggressive performing, effective lighting by Richard Schaefer, lots of costume changes - but the company style overall is not to my taste. The super-articulate clarity of the movement recalls the effects of Magic Realist painting wowing the audience with a perverse refinement of technique.
Coming To has an underlying dramatic/psychological theme, like an old Martha Graham piece, with characters labeled Self, She, Distraction, Assumption, and Status Quo to embody its argument. Maybe no one was sufficiently individual or convincing enough to engage me. but, whatever the reason, the generalized plot was over my head. What I saw was a lot of passionate intensity A woman arching and bending as she very gradually unwinds from a long swathe of cloth that binds her torso. Men and women dancing flamboyantly together with the bravura attack of adagio dancers, though they avoid the traditional sex-typed rules. (The women frequently support the men’s leaps, and the men flagrantly drop the women.)
I enjoy the sleekly sensational, ardent, show-biz aspects of the dancing, but I distrust the heightened self-consciousness of the performing style and that ooh-ooh-ooh, autoerotic, feel good quality that turns the audience on, regardless of the tone of the work, In this context it’s dishonest. Restless, possessive, manipulative, Coming To purports to be a serious place, not just a vehicle for a bunch of sexy numbers to do their stuff for our mindless pleasure.
At TWEED New Works Festival, Ohio Theater (May 24 and 25).
Visual savvy and fine theatrical dancing marked the debut of Michele Elliman and John O’Malley’s new company, Neo Labos, in Coming To. The production had a lot going for it—a prIstine look, aggressive performing, effective lighting by Richard Schaefer, lots of costume changes - but the company style overall is not to my taste. The super-articulate clarity of the movement recalls the effects of Magic Realist painting wowing the audience with a perverse refinement of technique.
Coming To has an underlying dramatic/psychological theme, like an old Martha Graham piece, with characters labeled Self, She, Distraction, Assumption, and Status Quo to embody its argument. Maybe no one was sufficiently individual or convincing enough to engage me. but, whatever the reason, the generalized plot was over my head. What I saw was a lot of passionate intensity A woman arching and bending as she very gradually unwinds from a long swathe of cloth that binds her torso. Men and women dancing flamboyantly together with the bravura attack of adagio dancers, though they avoid the traditional sex-typed rules. (The women frequently support the men’s leaps, and the men flagrantly drop the women.)
I enjoy the sleekly sensational, ardent, show-biz aspects of the dancing, but I distrust the heightened self-consciousness of the performing style and that ooh-ooh-ooh, autoerotic, feel good quality that turns the audience on, regardless of the tone of the work, In this context it’s dishonest. Restless, possessive, manipulative, Coming To purports to be a serious place, not just a vehicle for a bunch of sexy numbers to do their stuff for our mindless pleasure.
At TWEED New Works Festival, Ohio Theater (May 24 and 25).