1989 Continued
My, What Big Hard Dog
January 3
Barbara Hofrenning and Paul Langland’s “Kinetic poem” Domestic Virtue, or Bingo Rocks the House was a witty, large-scale assemblage presented lengthwise in Franklin Furnace’s small - but cheerful in these circumstances - performing dungeon, with the audience two inches way. Tight quarters accented the work’s immediacy and minimized its abstraction. Ambitious, sometimes a little academic in its structures, it was as generous as it was sprawling.
Featuring a cast of thousands, or 11 anyway, Domestic Virtue interlocked sound-and-movement dramas, sharp-edged semi-repetitive variations, and multifaceted dance episodes, Two people inch along flat on the floor, pulling with their teeth on slender ribbons of laundry attached to a clothesline. They seem to be nursing. After a while, two elegant women ask, “What are you kids doing?” like parents who’re not about to hang around for the answer. Frank Conversano carefully sets out four multi-colored wooden chairs of unmatched designs ‘My, what a big hard dog,” he remarks, in a series of pert “my, what a” comments to which various people contribute. A skinny guy, Scott Heron, crosses wearing a skirt and heels. “My, what a little red heart.” “My, what a ratty, ratty suitcase. “ Somewhere here the “kids” release the stretched-out clothes. Four women arrange and rearrange themselves on the chairs and upon one another. speak eccentrically worded and vocalized hellos, fall out of the chairs, hop around, slide into deep lunges. Insistent remarks are spouted by the dancers in long, sometimes looping sequences that, apart from their particular musical texture, sound like bright conversations in which none of the participants is listening.
“Find your mind, fix it, and grind it up,” someone repeats, hitting hard on the first word of each phrase. Instructive, bossy, sometimes of doubtful verity, these remarks provide a verbal current that impels the physical action. What else? I recall a growling, roaring chorus, mingling with crying sounds. Lanterns are brought, and then more lanterns, A row of four kneeling men chant “yoyoyo,” slump over partway, utter syllables in throbbing, stuttery voices, They gibber, making soothing harmonies while, in neat patterns of body gestures, they rotate their heads, tilt their rigid torsos, pass their hands over their knees, and clunk backwards. Heron straps tiles to his feet, then cartwheels across the floor, the tiles clacking. One of the men drives a nail through the pages of a telephone book. You get the idea, Nine million things happen, linked largely by a musical logic and bumped along with a kind of savvy belligerence.
The center of the piece is an extended, pertly improvised duet for Hofrenning and Langland. It’s unlike the rest of Domestic Virtue in the way the pair gulps the space with sheer abandon. It starts with a tilted, spraddling solo for Hofrenning, pushing herself off the rear wall. Tall, with long arms, long elegant legs, she moves with a unique dynamic that’s reminiscent of Viola Farber—fast and slow at the same time. “EK! ek ek!” Langland croaks, sitting tight, twisted, in a chair, till Hofrenning and he start to grapple, slide, and roll. “EK! ek ek!” They begin a gasping dialogue that sounds spontaneous, beginning sentences with the word darling: “Darling, we just run amok.” Their sentences burst from them in the midst of wrenching, staggering, whirling, vaulting exertions that rip them around the space. It’s the Fred and Ginger Horror Show.
“Why don’t we build us a little claptrap,” one says as they sling themselves to each other’s arms or run urgently from one side of the stage to the other. “Darling, I’ve just seen you for the very first time!” I liked Domestic Virtue’s deft games of permutation and imbalance, its wide embrace and especially its highballing vitality. It may have been overrich, like having extra icing on your Schwarzwalder Kirsch Torte, but sometimes, especially these days, enough is not sufficient and only excess will do. The excellent cast included Jonathan Bepler, Livia Daza-Paris, Julie Grella, Cyndi Lee, Jennifer Miller, Molly Rabinowitz, and Charles Richardson.
At Franklin Furnace (December 2 through 10)
Barbara Hofrenning and Paul Langland’s “Kinetic poem” Domestic Virtue, or Bingo Rocks the House was a witty, large-scale assemblage presented lengthwise in Franklin Furnace’s small - but cheerful in these circumstances - performing dungeon, with the audience two inches way. Tight quarters accented the work’s immediacy and minimized its abstraction. Ambitious, sometimes a little academic in its structures, it was as generous as it was sprawling.
Featuring a cast of thousands, or 11 anyway, Domestic Virtue interlocked sound-and-movement dramas, sharp-edged semi-repetitive variations, and multifaceted dance episodes, Two people inch along flat on the floor, pulling with their teeth on slender ribbons of laundry attached to a clothesline. They seem to be nursing. After a while, two elegant women ask, “What are you kids doing?” like parents who’re not about to hang around for the answer. Frank Conversano carefully sets out four multi-colored wooden chairs of unmatched designs ‘My, what a big hard dog,” he remarks, in a series of pert “my, what a” comments to which various people contribute. A skinny guy, Scott Heron, crosses wearing a skirt and heels. “My, what a little red heart.” “My, what a ratty, ratty suitcase. “ Somewhere here the “kids” release the stretched-out clothes. Four women arrange and rearrange themselves on the chairs and upon one another. speak eccentrically worded and vocalized hellos, fall out of the chairs, hop around, slide into deep lunges. Insistent remarks are spouted by the dancers in long, sometimes looping sequences that, apart from their particular musical texture, sound like bright conversations in which none of the participants is listening.
“Find your mind, fix it, and grind it up,” someone repeats, hitting hard on the first word of each phrase. Instructive, bossy, sometimes of doubtful verity, these remarks provide a verbal current that impels the physical action. What else? I recall a growling, roaring chorus, mingling with crying sounds. Lanterns are brought, and then more lanterns, A row of four kneeling men chant “yoyoyo,” slump over partway, utter syllables in throbbing, stuttery voices, They gibber, making soothing harmonies while, in neat patterns of body gestures, they rotate their heads, tilt their rigid torsos, pass their hands over their knees, and clunk backwards. Heron straps tiles to his feet, then cartwheels across the floor, the tiles clacking. One of the men drives a nail through the pages of a telephone book. You get the idea, Nine million things happen, linked largely by a musical logic and bumped along with a kind of savvy belligerence.
The center of the piece is an extended, pertly improvised duet for Hofrenning and Langland. It’s unlike the rest of Domestic Virtue in the way the pair gulps the space with sheer abandon. It starts with a tilted, spraddling solo for Hofrenning, pushing herself off the rear wall. Tall, with long arms, long elegant legs, she moves with a unique dynamic that’s reminiscent of Viola Farber—fast and slow at the same time. “EK! ek ek!” Langland croaks, sitting tight, twisted, in a chair, till Hofrenning and he start to grapple, slide, and roll. “EK! ek ek!” They begin a gasping dialogue that sounds spontaneous, beginning sentences with the word darling: “Darling, we just run amok.” Their sentences burst from them in the midst of wrenching, staggering, whirling, vaulting exertions that rip them around the space. It’s the Fred and Ginger Horror Show.
“Why don’t we build us a little claptrap,” one says as they sling themselves to each other’s arms or run urgently from one side of the stage to the other. “Darling, I’ve just seen you for the very first time!” I liked Domestic Virtue’s deft games of permutation and imbalance, its wide embrace and especially its highballing vitality. It may have been overrich, like having extra icing on your Schwarzwalder Kirsch Torte, but sometimes, especially these days, enough is not sufficient and only excess will do. The excellent cast included Jonathan Bepler, Livia Daza-Paris, Julie Grella, Cyndi Lee, Jennifer Miller, Molly Rabinowitz, and Charles Richardson.
At Franklin Furnace (December 2 through 10)
Fogged In
April 11
Parts of Demetrius Klein’s The Garden/Alone seem top-heavy with significance. He opens the piece talking stiffly about people endlessly striving, about confusing the sacred and profane. His statement is sententious, vague, and doesn’t clearly connect to what follows. Recorded excerpts from speeches by various Kennedys on voting discrimination in Birmingham, on the Cuban missile crisis, recreate an atmosphere of tension foreshadowing today’s. So what does this have to do with dancing?
Klein lays on these dismaying doses of historical rhetoric that remind us of just how far we haven’t come. If we haven’t actually lost ground since the ‘60s, our spirits have been sorely depleted. We’re still in the soup, battling more cloudy demons. And the many Appalachian hymns he uses lift you up with their tenderness but also invite thoughts of a blind, mean-spirited fundamentalism that scares me shitless. I don’t know how any of this ties in with his dance, except that anger swirls and impatiently erupts in it. The internalized pressure of life in late-’80s America, the dim view of gloom at the end of the tunnel, must infect even sunny Florida, where Klein is based.
Not that the four-part The Garden/Alone is a gloomy piece. There’s a sense of undirected anger in the chorales (if stamps and heavy jumps for he full group, combined with sharp, angled plummeting gestures.. But behind the group activity, Klein hides a short self-absorbed duet in which he and his partner gently handle and hold each other. Though the choreography is carefully shaped, the dance feels patchy, surging in and out of focus, and its occasional characters don’t stand out in sufficient relief except in the case of the third section - the fine, dark solo and duet for Klein and Patrick Ryel that make up the heart of the piece. One problem may be that Klein’s young dancers, though appealing and direct, are not yet highly skilled. While technically everything the dancing demands is within their range, they can communicate only on a routine level. Wearing an open raincoat, Klein scoots, slides, whirls around the floor, briefly perches in a gleaming arabesque, to the accompaniment of a hotshot child evangelist who quits when he begins to be aware of preaching lies.
Klein’s dancing is superb - fast and articulate, beautifully modulated. His arms slice the air, he does a quick wriggle, his coat whips around, and he’s sweeping about on the floor in a fluid, temperamental display that swings between fury and dreaming. When Ryel joins him, they wrestle, throw, hold, and pin each other. In evenly snatched, urgent spurts of action, they flip and fall, pull into one another’s arms, hang over one another’s shoulders, are bundled upside down or buoyed aloft. Theirs is the soul-making kind of battle in which both aspects of the self must be subdued and both win. The final section moves with a greater measure of sweetness and ease—perhaps it illustrates a kind of redemption, but more likely it’s just the relief you feel when a hard rain stops and the atmosphere brightens. The women leap over each other in their entrance, while a hymn plays: “I walk in the garden alone, while the dew is still on the roses.” Klein is more melting in his dancing; he twists, spins, lets his feet brush the floor lightly. In another exuberant hymn, the group carries, flips into the air and catches one dancer after another. Ryel mounts s staircase of bodies. Klein yanks his partner into his arms and carries her quietly off. I have many reservations about this crowded work, but Klein’s voice is genuine.
At the Mulberry Street Theater (March 24 and 25).
Parts of Demetrius Klein’s The Garden/Alone seem top-heavy with significance. He opens the piece talking stiffly about people endlessly striving, about confusing the sacred and profane. His statement is sententious, vague, and doesn’t clearly connect to what follows. Recorded excerpts from speeches by various Kennedys on voting discrimination in Birmingham, on the Cuban missile crisis, recreate an atmosphere of tension foreshadowing today’s. So what does this have to do with dancing?
Klein lays on these dismaying doses of historical rhetoric that remind us of just how far we haven’t come. If we haven’t actually lost ground since the ‘60s, our spirits have been sorely depleted. We’re still in the soup, battling more cloudy demons. And the many Appalachian hymns he uses lift you up with their tenderness but also invite thoughts of a blind, mean-spirited fundamentalism that scares me shitless. I don’t know how any of this ties in with his dance, except that anger swirls and impatiently erupts in it. The internalized pressure of life in late-’80s America, the dim view of gloom at the end of the tunnel, must infect even sunny Florida, where Klein is based.
Not that the four-part The Garden/Alone is a gloomy piece. There’s a sense of undirected anger in the chorales (if stamps and heavy jumps for he full group, combined with sharp, angled plummeting gestures.. But behind the group activity, Klein hides a short self-absorbed duet in which he and his partner gently handle and hold each other. Though the choreography is carefully shaped, the dance feels patchy, surging in and out of focus, and its occasional characters don’t stand out in sufficient relief except in the case of the third section - the fine, dark solo and duet for Klein and Patrick Ryel that make up the heart of the piece. One problem may be that Klein’s young dancers, though appealing and direct, are not yet highly skilled. While technically everything the dancing demands is within their range, they can communicate only on a routine level. Wearing an open raincoat, Klein scoots, slides, whirls around the floor, briefly perches in a gleaming arabesque, to the accompaniment of a hotshot child evangelist who quits when he begins to be aware of preaching lies.
Klein’s dancing is superb - fast and articulate, beautifully modulated. His arms slice the air, he does a quick wriggle, his coat whips around, and he’s sweeping about on the floor in a fluid, temperamental display that swings between fury and dreaming. When Ryel joins him, they wrestle, throw, hold, and pin each other. In evenly snatched, urgent spurts of action, they flip and fall, pull into one another’s arms, hang over one another’s shoulders, are bundled upside down or buoyed aloft. Theirs is the soul-making kind of battle in which both aspects of the self must be subdued and both win. The final section moves with a greater measure of sweetness and ease—perhaps it illustrates a kind of redemption, but more likely it’s just the relief you feel when a hard rain stops and the atmosphere brightens. The women leap over each other in their entrance, while a hymn plays: “I walk in the garden alone, while the dew is still on the roses.” Klein is more melting in his dancing; he twists, spins, lets his feet brush the floor lightly. In another exuberant hymn, the group carries, flips into the air and catches one dancer after another. Ryel mounts s staircase of bodies. Klein yanks his partner into his arms and carries her quietly off. I have many reservations about this crowded work, but Klein’s voice is genuine.
At the Mulberry Street Theater (March 24 and 25).
When We Were Very Rich
February 7
Black and Blue evokes a glamorous and unreal time, a Twilight Zone somewhere this side of World War I. It doesn’t have the intense, get-down atmosphere that was so important in Claudia Segovia and Hector Orezzoli’s two previous hits, Flamenco Puro and Tango Argentino, which recovered popular and authentic traditions. This revue glitters and shines, reflecting a world in which everyone is rich and happy. Even the blues are sung from an emotional place that’s a long way up from down: they’re heavy on irony, not on pain. And the delectable tap dancing in Black and Blue is lightness itself. Polished, debonair, genteel, even cute, it’s exactly the kind of thing that merits white tie and tails.
The show calls to mind the black-and- white movie musicals of the ‘30s with their mirrored floors, giant staircases, and vast, pristine nightclubs. Instead of Bill Robinson and Shirley Temple clickety-clacking up and down steps, there is eager, young Savion Glover flanked by Cyd Glover and Dormeshia Sumbry. Instead of Fred Astaire, there are seven or eight suave, smiling young gentleman tricked out nice and easy in formal attire that seems as comfortable as second skin. In “After You’ve Gone,” a single dancer, Bernard Manners, casts a big shadow, and six smaller shadows behind screens come out and dance, right out of Top Hat. Maybe it’s meant to be old hat, but routines - by Henry LeTang, Cholly Atkins, Frankie Mannlng and Fayard Nicholas - seem newly minted, as innocent as we never really were.
It’s momentarily disconcerting to sit in the very white audience of this particular black show because you’re immediately reminded that back whenever nobody black would have been allowed to sit in this crowd, You watch an array of performers who wouldn’t have rated a table at the original Cotton Club. Even though Black and Blue throws you back to no precise era—sometime in the the ‘30s, even ‘40s—it’s sleek patina and grand scale are just the thing to put the Depression out of mind, or, anyway, erase the homeless panhandlers right down the street. Seven swank gentlemen in tails and seven spirited girls in red spangles get chopped down to just their tapping lower legs in LeTang’s “Everybody Loves My Baby.” The men are terrific on their feet—the women no less—but what I like best are their frank affable hands. Once they’ve dazzled us, the set separates the dancers with long panels to facilitate a rapid, teasing sequence of switches in which men in black disappear and women in red pop out in their places. When more panels descend over the openings, we’re left with windows framing those busy chattering feet. And when the dancers shoot offstage swinging their flywheel arms, their white cuffs and diamond bracelets make rhythmic blazes in the spotlights. “After You’ve Gone” post-climaxes with grinning singer Linda Hopkins - the woman’s got good legs - showing she can cut a rug as well as anybody.
Ruth Brown, down and dirty in a black, bejeweled outfit Aubrey Beardsley might have designed, laconically plays the double entendres of “If I Can’t KiII It, I’ll Keep Sittin’ on It,” with killing refinement. To accompany Carrie Smith’s delivery of “I Wants Big Butter Man,” Fayard Nicholas choreographed a snappy, personable trio for Kevin Ramsey, Thad Levy, and Eugene Fleming, who get to rooster strut, shoot out their legs, and prance around with prissy elegance. Diane Walker, Manners, and Ramsey take it slow and easy in Cholly Atkins’s gracious choreography for “Memories of You.”
Jimmy Slyde is one of today’s most sophisticated tap artists, so it was disappointing that his rendition of “Stompin’ at the Savoy” didn’t fully project. With his high shoulders and raffish torso slightly tipped, he almost seemed to hide his witty footwork. He strove, I think, for a kind of intimacy - even his trademark slides were understated, But that’s a mistake in a show in which everything is so agreeably sold. In contrast, Bunny Briggs wearing a red velvet jacket in “Black and Tan Fantasy,” pulled his jacket close against an imaginary shower and seemed to bathe, even glow, in the atmosphere of the stage. While he danced with painterly delicacy, six men leapfrogged, primped, ground their hips, and generally got off themselves in choreography by Frankie Manning.
I love best these guys pretending they’re doing next to nothing. Old-timers Lon Chaney and Ralph Brown, wearing patchwork suits and soft hats (Brown’s was nicely bashed) that suggested an upscale hobo chic, did a slow, absolutely minimal shuffle to Duke Ellington’s “East St. Louis Toodle-oo,” and stole my heart even before they slumped together for an affectionate finish, And Briggs was the angelic ultimate in ”In a Sentimental Mood,” sputtering out a quiet, effervescent chatter of ringing taps, quickening them into a small rainstorm, and relaxing with dainty bounces. He wrapped it up with a moment of the sweetest self-parody, curving one arm overhead with his index finger drooping toward the top of head like a child ballerina. What Orezzoli and Segovia do so marvelously and imaginatively is, in a way, curiously simple. They choose artists they admire, provide an effective theatrical frame so they can do what they do best, and give them their trust.
At the Minskoff Theater.
Correction: Everybody knows the "Habanera" from Carmen. So I can’t believe that I wrote last week that Doug Elkins used the “Seguedilla" for the last section of The Patrooka Variations.
Black and Blue evokes a glamorous and unreal time, a Twilight Zone somewhere this side of World War I. It doesn’t have the intense, get-down atmosphere that was so important in Claudia Segovia and Hector Orezzoli’s two previous hits, Flamenco Puro and Tango Argentino, which recovered popular and authentic traditions. This revue glitters and shines, reflecting a world in which everyone is rich and happy. Even the blues are sung from an emotional place that’s a long way up from down: they’re heavy on irony, not on pain. And the delectable tap dancing in Black and Blue is lightness itself. Polished, debonair, genteel, even cute, it’s exactly the kind of thing that merits white tie and tails.
The show calls to mind the black-and- white movie musicals of the ‘30s with their mirrored floors, giant staircases, and vast, pristine nightclubs. Instead of Bill Robinson and Shirley Temple clickety-clacking up and down steps, there is eager, young Savion Glover flanked by Cyd Glover and Dormeshia Sumbry. Instead of Fred Astaire, there are seven or eight suave, smiling young gentleman tricked out nice and easy in formal attire that seems as comfortable as second skin. In “After You’ve Gone,” a single dancer, Bernard Manners, casts a big shadow, and six smaller shadows behind screens come out and dance, right out of Top Hat. Maybe it’s meant to be old hat, but routines - by Henry LeTang, Cholly Atkins, Frankie Mannlng and Fayard Nicholas - seem newly minted, as innocent as we never really were.
It’s momentarily disconcerting to sit in the very white audience of this particular black show because you’re immediately reminded that back whenever nobody black would have been allowed to sit in this crowd, You watch an array of performers who wouldn’t have rated a table at the original Cotton Club. Even though Black and Blue throws you back to no precise era—sometime in the the ‘30s, even ‘40s—it’s sleek patina and grand scale are just the thing to put the Depression out of mind, or, anyway, erase the homeless panhandlers right down the street. Seven swank gentlemen in tails and seven spirited girls in red spangles get chopped down to just their tapping lower legs in LeTang’s “Everybody Loves My Baby.” The men are terrific on their feet—the women no less—but what I like best are their frank affable hands. Once they’ve dazzled us, the set separates the dancers with long panels to facilitate a rapid, teasing sequence of switches in which men in black disappear and women in red pop out in their places. When more panels descend over the openings, we’re left with windows framing those busy chattering feet. And when the dancers shoot offstage swinging their flywheel arms, their white cuffs and diamond bracelets make rhythmic blazes in the spotlights. “After You’ve Gone” post-climaxes with grinning singer Linda Hopkins - the woman’s got good legs - showing she can cut a rug as well as anybody.
Ruth Brown, down and dirty in a black, bejeweled outfit Aubrey Beardsley might have designed, laconically plays the double entendres of “If I Can’t KiII It, I’ll Keep Sittin’ on It,” with killing refinement. To accompany Carrie Smith’s delivery of “I Wants Big Butter Man,” Fayard Nicholas choreographed a snappy, personable trio for Kevin Ramsey, Thad Levy, and Eugene Fleming, who get to rooster strut, shoot out their legs, and prance around with prissy elegance. Diane Walker, Manners, and Ramsey take it slow and easy in Cholly Atkins’s gracious choreography for “Memories of You.”
Jimmy Slyde is one of today’s most sophisticated tap artists, so it was disappointing that his rendition of “Stompin’ at the Savoy” didn’t fully project. With his high shoulders and raffish torso slightly tipped, he almost seemed to hide his witty footwork. He strove, I think, for a kind of intimacy - even his trademark slides were understated, But that’s a mistake in a show in which everything is so agreeably sold. In contrast, Bunny Briggs wearing a red velvet jacket in “Black and Tan Fantasy,” pulled his jacket close against an imaginary shower and seemed to bathe, even glow, in the atmosphere of the stage. While he danced with painterly delicacy, six men leapfrogged, primped, ground their hips, and generally got off themselves in choreography by Frankie Manning.
I love best these guys pretending they’re doing next to nothing. Old-timers Lon Chaney and Ralph Brown, wearing patchwork suits and soft hats (Brown’s was nicely bashed) that suggested an upscale hobo chic, did a slow, absolutely minimal shuffle to Duke Ellington’s “East St. Louis Toodle-oo,” and stole my heart even before they slumped together for an affectionate finish, And Briggs was the angelic ultimate in ”In a Sentimental Mood,” sputtering out a quiet, effervescent chatter of ringing taps, quickening them into a small rainstorm, and relaxing with dainty bounces. He wrapped it up with a moment of the sweetest self-parody, curving one arm overhead with his index finger drooping toward the top of head like a child ballerina. What Orezzoli and Segovia do so marvelously and imaginatively is, in a way, curiously simple. They choose artists they admire, provide an effective theatrical frame so they can do what they do best, and give them their trust.
At the Minskoff Theater.
Correction: Everybody knows the "Habanera" from Carmen. So I can’t believe that I wrote last week that Doug Elkins used the “Seguedilla" for the last section of The Patrooka Variations.
Video Spotz
October 10
Ariella Vidach and Claudio Prati have taken a cue from the brevity and punch of commercial TV advertising spots in their third collaboration, Spotz, made up of 16 sections, plus prologue and appendix. Prati’s mutable video environment is the real core of the piece. Initially, four TV monitors spaces along the floor show stills that isolate moments from a continuous projection of cars, pedestrians, and zooming traffic on a side wall, to the accompaniment of traffic sounds. There’s a slight shift in the perspective of the image across the four monitors. Prati’s fluid video work dominates the space, surrounds us with a roomy visual habitation that’s intriguing without being assaultive. manipulative, or haphazard. The fascinating mix of single images seized from the continuous spectrum of activity. the variation in size and intensity from wall to monitor, create a rich, atmospheric overture. Live movement is combined with video very effectively in Spotz, though, by itself, the movement is rather dry.
In “Frutz,” four women—Aviva Geismar, Lea Kraemer, Ann Sullivan. and Vidach—in black shorts and halters, jauntily skip and wiggle while a magenta pear form, then a chartreuse apple shape, float upon the monitors. To a groaning soundtrack, “‘Tash” shows us a weatherman with Edwardian side-whiskers standing in front of a map of Europe, while fizzing lines interfere with the image and break it horizontally. To music by the Lounge Lizards, in “Nudela,” Vidach tightly bumps and swivels wearing a charcoal vinyl outfit with narrow scarlet trim that armors her torso but barely covers her pubis. “Sfilata” is a fashion show, with a blond woman in a stiff Mylar skirt: another in an enormous yellow plastic beach hat and a plastic dress like a yellow kite; and Vidach in black-and-yellow garments that wrap her breast and hips and bind her knees.
The monitors show subtle fragments of the live figures within a single vertical band. Perhaps the most intriguing section is “Wapex 2,’ in which Judi French and Aviva Geismar appear, wearing silver/white unitards. They slowly—bending their heads, wriggling their shoulders, swinging their legs - while their images simultaneous appear on the monitors and on the wall behind them, like elements of a double or triple exposure. The surface they become part of is an almost nacreous, changing one that’s being frequently altered through a computer “paint” program. I’m not certain that their moving images are instantaneously translated to the screens (maybe the tapes are entirely prerecorded), but my sense is of something immediate happening. Again and again, the women are captured as images, frozen and clones while in actuality, they continue to move and - without any hurry or apparent awareness - to escape by a hairbreadth the conditions of permanence.
The two final sections feature nine dancers executing tight, no-nonsense phrases; driving, clamorous music of Rhys Chatham and compelling industrial animation. We watch an architectural diagram from several angles, a bouncing wrench, splotchy mountains, a thumping Coke can, a flow of tubes into a vortex, a red-and-white capsule that bursts open into a cloud of white pellets. But the movement’s blank, minimalist efficiency seems incompatible with the sensual, assertive visuals and Chatham’s dense music. It just doesn’t have equal weight. I wound up thinking of the dancers as the proletarian grunts of the art: they do their jobs, and the purpose of the mission is none of their business.
At Dia Art Foundation (September 14 and 15.
Two Magicians
Triangle Trade
August 29
Architect Anthony Tsirantonakis’s black, roughly triangular 21-foot structure, with three small, set-back platforms, a ladder to the top and a slide at the bottom, was a playground for Tamar Rogoff’s dancers in their collaboration The Angle of Ascent, presented in front of the fountain at Lincoln Center Plaza.
About a half-hour long, the piece, sponsored by Creative Time, gradually gained momentum and became increasingly frivolous, The program called it a “metaphoric collage addressing the variedness of life,” but it wasn’t helpful to have the piece casually introduced over the loudspeaker as meaning pretty much whatever you want it to mean,” even though that kind of remark may serve to un-intimldate an audience. Outdoor, non-paying audiences aren’t that easy to intimidate anyway, since escape is always at hand. Of course audiences will interpret work as they choose (and, like the blind men and the elephant, may be right to some degree) not bother, But fostering the idea that work can mean anything you like is a deplorable practice, though it can come in handy for artists who don’t care to gut their works by reducing them to explanations. (It’s not the same, for example, as saying that the dance itself is sufficient content.) The remark encourages the notion that the work doesn’t mean anything, that it is a grab bag of no particular character or intention. Audiences don’t need to be encouraged to believe that, and artists don’t need to make work of that description.
There is a festive process of constant transformation in Angle of Ascent: each time a dancer comes down the slide, he or she is helped by Thom Fogarty to change quickly, irrespective of gender, into another of his stock of 30 costumes (by Sally Young), then climbs the ladder, or, with help, mounts from platform to platform to the top of the structure, and then down again. At the end, on the top platform, Fogarty throws all the costumes into the air, piece by piece, then leans back, pressing on his padded belly as if in labor. Cebello Morales’s score creates a changing din of percussion and sounds of strife mixed with piping whines, baby and animal cries, storms, crashing waves, wind and whistles. James Adlesic holds Marika Blossfeldt over his back while Fogarty buries Margaret Liston in sand using a triangular shovel. (When Blossfeldt got to her feet, a marvelous gust of wind came up the moment she lifted her gaze, as it were responding to her summons.) Blossfeldt climbs to the second platform, helps Adlesic up, and they both swing side to side hanging on the rungs of the ladder. Richard Winberg dons a yarmulke and tallis, Ching Gonzalez a cowboy outfit. Liston swings upside down from the rungs in a ruffled skirt. With maniacal exuberance, she kicks her legs, batting her feet against the bottom of the upper platform. Gonzalez plunks a hat bedecked with plastic flowers, on Liston’s head and she goes down the slide. Blossfeldt starts upward in a bridal outfit, while Gonzalez heads down; Liston reappears in a gold tutu and tiara, and Adlesic lounges in quasi-gondolier gear. On top, Winberg dumps his shoes down the slide, puts on pink-satin ballet slippers, slides down to the sandbox where Fogarty wraps him in a pink chiffon tutu, and dispatches him to execute a little ballet combination.
I wish it were as hectic and exhilarating - as mad - as it sounds, but, on the whole, Angle of Ascent’s energy was too pedestrian and imprecise. One problem is the performers’ demeanor. Mostly, they act as if the audience didn’t exist, when maybe what’s needed is some old-time circusy showmanship. Because Blossfeldt is so specific and absorbed in what she’s doing, she’s naturally fascinating. And the bumptious Liston is an acrobatic fireball, holding nothing back. But too often the other performers seem to be tuning us out as they go through the motions.
At Lincoln Center Out of Doors (August 16).
Architect Anthony Tsirantonakis’s black, roughly triangular 21-foot structure, with three small, set-back platforms, a ladder to the top and a slide at the bottom, was a playground for Tamar Rogoff’s dancers in their collaboration The Angle of Ascent, presented in front of the fountain at Lincoln Center Plaza.
About a half-hour long, the piece, sponsored by Creative Time, gradually gained momentum and became increasingly frivolous, The program called it a “metaphoric collage addressing the variedness of life,” but it wasn’t helpful to have the piece casually introduced over the loudspeaker as meaning pretty much whatever you want it to mean,” even though that kind of remark may serve to un-intimldate an audience. Outdoor, non-paying audiences aren’t that easy to intimidate anyway, since escape is always at hand. Of course audiences will interpret work as they choose (and, like the blind men and the elephant, may be right to some degree) not bother, But fostering the idea that work can mean anything you like is a deplorable practice, though it can come in handy for artists who don’t care to gut their works by reducing them to explanations. (It’s not the same, for example, as saying that the dance itself is sufficient content.) The remark encourages the notion that the work doesn’t mean anything, that it is a grab bag of no particular character or intention. Audiences don’t need to be encouraged to believe that, and artists don’t need to make work of that description.
There is a festive process of constant transformation in Angle of Ascent: each time a dancer comes down the slide, he or she is helped by Thom Fogarty to change quickly, irrespective of gender, into another of his stock of 30 costumes (by Sally Young), then climbs the ladder, or, with help, mounts from platform to platform to the top of the structure, and then down again. At the end, on the top platform, Fogarty throws all the costumes into the air, piece by piece, then leans back, pressing on his padded belly as if in labor. Cebello Morales’s score creates a changing din of percussion and sounds of strife mixed with piping whines, baby and animal cries, storms, crashing waves, wind and whistles. James Adlesic holds Marika Blossfeldt over his back while Fogarty buries Margaret Liston in sand using a triangular shovel. (When Blossfeldt got to her feet, a marvelous gust of wind came up the moment she lifted her gaze, as it were responding to her summons.) Blossfeldt climbs to the second platform, helps Adlesic up, and they both swing side to side hanging on the rungs of the ladder. Richard Winberg dons a yarmulke and tallis, Ching Gonzalez a cowboy outfit. Liston swings upside down from the rungs in a ruffled skirt. With maniacal exuberance, she kicks her legs, batting her feet against the bottom of the upper platform. Gonzalez plunks a hat bedecked with plastic flowers, on Liston’s head and she goes down the slide. Blossfeldt starts upward in a bridal outfit, while Gonzalez heads down; Liston reappears in a gold tutu and tiara, and Adlesic lounges in quasi-gondolier gear. On top, Winberg dumps his shoes down the slide, puts on pink-satin ballet slippers, slides down to the sandbox where Fogarty wraps him in a pink chiffon tutu, and dispatches him to execute a little ballet combination.
I wish it were as hectic and exhilarating - as mad - as it sounds, but, on the whole, Angle of Ascent’s energy was too pedestrian and imprecise. One problem is the performers’ demeanor. Mostly, they act as if the audience didn’t exist, when maybe what’s needed is some old-time circusy showmanship. Because Blossfeldt is so specific and absorbed in what she’s doing, she’s naturally fascinating. And the bumptious Liston is an acrobatic fireball, holding nothing back. But too often the other performers seem to be tuning us out as they go through the motions.
At Lincoln Center Out of Doors (August 16).
Thriving on Challenge
August 1
"London Festival Ballet was last here in 1977, says Peter Schaufuss, its artistic director since September 1984. They were very much here as Nureyev and the London Festival Ballet. This time we’re here as a company - no guests. It’s a very different trip.”
Shortly before accepting London Festival’s offer, Schaufuss had been invited to head the Royal Scottish Ballet and the Royal Danish Ballet, but London Festival appealed to him because of the size and liveliness of London, and because it was an independent company, not attached to any opera house. “Independence, of course, is a problem, too,” says Schaufuss, “because we have no house to perform in and we have to rent.” “The challenge of Festival was really that the company was nearly bankrupt, they had to really interesting repertoire, and the talent within the company was not that great. The enormousness of that challenge was what was interesting to me. Even though Festival had existed for 34 years (it was started by Alicia Markova and Anton Dolin during the Festival of Britain in 1960, hence its name), it had no developed repertoire or style, and hadn’t really made a name for itself. It was sort of a large company performing without an artistic policy.
“I wanted to revitalize the repertory, and to develop some young dancers who would, I hoped, come into their own four or five years from then. I wanted to increase the dancers’ salaries. To have a company choreographer, which we have in Christopher Bruce. To start a school, which we did in September of last year. It took four years to get it off the ground. Everything takes a long time. In retrospect, maybe it’s not so long, but it’s four years of a dancers’ career, and you mustn’t forget how short that career is. Sometimes., I’d say, ‘Well, you know, be patient, because in two years time we’re going to do...whatever.’ And I could see them thinking, ‘Two years! What is he talking about?’ Festival Ballet used to be very much people coming and people going. But now if I say two years, people will say, ‘Oh, good,’ because they’re where they want to be.”
London Festival’s two-week engagement at the Metropolitan Opera House features two full-length works - Frederick Ashton’s 1955 Romeo and Juliet, and Schaufuss’s staging of August Bournonville’s Napoli - and a mixed bill of Etudes, Kenneth MacMillan’s one-act Anastasia, and Bruce’s Land. “ Even before I got with London Festival,” says Schaufuss, “I was trying to restage Romeo because I was afraid it was one of those ballets that was going to get lost. I thought it was my duty to get it back, because my mother [Mona Vangsae] was the original Juliet. It would have been a crime to lose it. It’s totally different from any of the other Romeo and Juliets because it was done before Ashton or anybody else had seen any of the Russian productions. His inspiration was only the play and the music. That’s why it’s so totally different. All the others have the same pattern - ‘Oh, here we have to throw oranges.’ Even Nureyev’s.”
The Napoli varies from the Royal Danish Ballet’s version, particularly in the reconstructed second act, the one in the Blue Grotto. It was originally mounted for the National Ballet of Canada at the O’Keefe Center in Toronto, which is an enormous barn, and that scale should be propitious for the Met. “The second-act music is by the same composers, but things have been changed and re-orchestrated, and parts that were cut out have been put back - that sort of thing,” says Schaufuss. “And the speed is greater. Not the speed of the dancing, but the ballet as a whole appears to be moving at a greater pace. It has a different soul.
“Our company has changed a lot. That’s why we’ve changed our name to the English National Ballet.” It’s not just to confuse people. but to reflect the company’s commitment to touring activity throughout England, where it performs “from the biggest theaters to the smallest, with the main company and a smaller size company, as well. “Things are a bit frightening on the larger stages, with the larger companies - there’s not much happening. Because of the economic situation, everyone’s afraid to take any risks. And when we take an artistic risk, it can hurt financially, no matter how effective a piece is. That’s why I formed LFB, a second, smaller company - so we could go out and do the small theaters. On that circuit you can do much more interesting things and the audience will come. It’s amazing that the people who are used to watching dance - in big cities like Birmingham and Manchester - only want to see Nutcracker, Coppelia, Swan Lake. But if you go to Ulverston or Billingham, or places you never heard of, in a situation where you have 500 seats and a small stage twice the size of this hotel room, there you can do Apollo, or a piece by Christopher Bruce or Michael Clark, or things like that, and people will turn up. The people that you, in a sense, baptize, who’ve never seen a ballet before, will come and they’ll love it.”
"London Festival Ballet was last here in 1977, says Peter Schaufuss, its artistic director since September 1984. They were very much here as Nureyev and the London Festival Ballet. This time we’re here as a company - no guests. It’s a very different trip.”
Shortly before accepting London Festival’s offer, Schaufuss had been invited to head the Royal Scottish Ballet and the Royal Danish Ballet, but London Festival appealed to him because of the size and liveliness of London, and because it was an independent company, not attached to any opera house. “Independence, of course, is a problem, too,” says Schaufuss, “because we have no house to perform in and we have to rent.” “The challenge of Festival was really that the company was nearly bankrupt, they had to really interesting repertoire, and the talent within the company was not that great. The enormousness of that challenge was what was interesting to me. Even though Festival had existed for 34 years (it was started by Alicia Markova and Anton Dolin during the Festival of Britain in 1960, hence its name), it had no developed repertoire or style, and hadn’t really made a name for itself. It was sort of a large company performing without an artistic policy.
“I wanted to revitalize the repertory, and to develop some young dancers who would, I hoped, come into their own four or five years from then. I wanted to increase the dancers’ salaries. To have a company choreographer, which we have in Christopher Bruce. To start a school, which we did in September of last year. It took four years to get it off the ground. Everything takes a long time. In retrospect, maybe it’s not so long, but it’s four years of a dancers’ career, and you mustn’t forget how short that career is. Sometimes., I’d say, ‘Well, you know, be patient, because in two years time we’re going to do...whatever.’ And I could see them thinking, ‘Two years! What is he talking about?’ Festival Ballet used to be very much people coming and people going. But now if I say two years, people will say, ‘Oh, good,’ because they’re where they want to be.”
London Festival’s two-week engagement at the Metropolitan Opera House features two full-length works - Frederick Ashton’s 1955 Romeo and Juliet, and Schaufuss’s staging of August Bournonville’s Napoli - and a mixed bill of Etudes, Kenneth MacMillan’s one-act Anastasia, and Bruce’s Land. “ Even before I got with London Festival,” says Schaufuss, “I was trying to restage Romeo because I was afraid it was one of those ballets that was going to get lost. I thought it was my duty to get it back, because my mother [Mona Vangsae] was the original Juliet. It would have been a crime to lose it. It’s totally different from any of the other Romeo and Juliets because it was done before Ashton or anybody else had seen any of the Russian productions. His inspiration was only the play and the music. That’s why it’s so totally different. All the others have the same pattern - ‘Oh, here we have to throw oranges.’ Even Nureyev’s.”
The Napoli varies from the Royal Danish Ballet’s version, particularly in the reconstructed second act, the one in the Blue Grotto. It was originally mounted for the National Ballet of Canada at the O’Keefe Center in Toronto, which is an enormous barn, and that scale should be propitious for the Met. “The second-act music is by the same composers, but things have been changed and re-orchestrated, and parts that were cut out have been put back - that sort of thing,” says Schaufuss. “And the speed is greater. Not the speed of the dancing, but the ballet as a whole appears to be moving at a greater pace. It has a different soul.
“Our company has changed a lot. That’s why we’ve changed our name to the English National Ballet.” It’s not just to confuse people. but to reflect the company’s commitment to touring activity throughout England, where it performs “from the biggest theaters to the smallest, with the main company and a smaller size company, as well. “Things are a bit frightening on the larger stages, with the larger companies - there’s not much happening. Because of the economic situation, everyone’s afraid to take any risks. And when we take an artistic risk, it can hurt financially, no matter how effective a piece is. That’s why I formed LFB, a second, smaller company - so we could go out and do the small theaters. On that circuit you can do much more interesting things and the audience will come. It’s amazing that the people who are used to watching dance - in big cities like Birmingham and Manchester - only want to see Nutcracker, Coppelia, Swan Lake. But if you go to Ulverston or Billingham, or places you never heard of, in a situation where you have 500 seats and a small stage twice the size of this hotel room, there you can do Apollo, or a piece by Christopher Bruce or Michael Clark, or things like that, and people will turn up. The people that you, in a sense, baptize, who’ve never seen a ballet before, will come and they’ll love it.”
Think Pink!
November 7
Singing Takarazuma anthems with tunes like the commercial jingles that drill into the brain - Takaraz’ka, TakaraZOO-ka, Takaraz’ka, TakaraZOO-ka - Japan’s huge, immensely and dismayingly popular all-girl revue took over Radio City Music Hall. As home of the Rockettes, and opulently tacky holiday stage shows, it was the ideal venue.
Takarazuma is all sugar candy - from its gooey “Japanese” first half to its sentimental American second half so reminiscent of Ziegfeld shows, with their staircases and plumed showgirls, and the soppy, opulent Broadway shows depicted in ‘30s movies. In the “Japanese” part, it’s not always so clear to a gajin whether the girls are meant to be girls or beautiful young warriors, but in the Western section, the dashing, stiletto-thin “men”, with their hair slicked down and their elegant, hoodish manners, are oddly hot. The women who play women only get to be pretty and sweet and graceful, but the young women in male drag get to express an exhilarating aggressiveness Japanese women must generally mask.
The level of delusion achieved by Takarazuka is stupendous. Part one features “traditional dances set to modern music,” opening with the jolly “Takarazuka March,” a tune with the impetus of “Roll Out the Barrel,” while masses of women in red, white, and blue kimonos on and in front of a huge red staircase flap their fans and twirl umbrellas under a mass of red autumn leaves. We see the orchestra elevated for a second before sinking back into the pit forever, so we know the musicians are live, but the music sounds taped anyway, and appears to come from nowhere in particular. Moments later, we get our first lesson in Japanese tradition: “Snow melts, clouds hide the moon, petals fall. That is our sense of beauty. That is the soul of Japan.” Oh.
The Japanese obviously adore dewy, unconscious caricature of themselves, this pretty, utterly innocent side of the divided Japanese soul. I suppose we’re not much different in the way we like to see ourselves as ingenious, freedom-loving good guys no matter how much our behavior individually and as a nation may call that into question. But if Westerners were to present Japanese material in this debased way, we’d term it racist stereotyping. So, modest girls run around with fans to twinkling music. A bulky, masked “Noh dancer’” moves somberly in front of a massive statue of Buddha to Puccini-like music, heavy on the strings, and “summons” a bunch of young Japanese cossacks, warrior boys in stiff black hats and knee boots, and a couple of girls in pink who swish long white scarves. A dozen platinum blonds in white outfits must be snowflakes in the introduction to a dance of a traveler reflecting on her life and remembering her lost lover.
In “The Cherry Flower” first-act finale, eight women in red play the traditional song “Sakura, Sakura” on kotos. Then seven satin-clad warriors are revealed like Erte statuettes arranged on platforms— but they turn out to be just girls. The overhead space is filled with masses of pink blossoms. We continue to hear more inflated variations of the tune, including a bubbly synthesizer version and a soupy dramatic version. Gradually but relentlessly, the piece builds exactly in the manner of Ravel’s Bolero, accumulating masses of dancers and singers as it adds percussion. A huge, golden Mercedes-Benz grille rises at the back of the stage. No, it’s a golden temple. And long strings of red lanterns descend from above. The dancers catch the lights on their flashing silver fans. Alternately, they reveal American stars-and-stripes kimono sleeves, and their song becomes a sort of klezmer version of the signature Takarazuka march.
I preferred Takarazuká’s nostalgic, never-was, candy floss AmerIca to the Japanese part of the show in which they blithely despoil their own revered culture. Their romantic American images all come from show-biz fantasy anyway, and the numbers seem like appropriate, if daft, homages. When women in enormous, whIte, leathered headdresses and a dozen “men” in top hats and tails parade down an illuminated staircase, singing, of course, “A Pretty Girl Is Like a Melody,” it’s Victor/Victoria to the nth degree. And who wants to argue with a kick line of 32 squealing girls wearing gold and white. plumes and flaunting their juicy thighs?
I thought “Keep Young and Beautiful” was a pink ‘30s boudoir scene with the star in a dressing gown, but what I mistook fern huge round bed was a ladies’ compact in whose tilted mirror we see - from above - about a dozen prone girls waving their fans. Tres Busby Berkeley. With 16 men in pink top hats and sequined tail suits in attendance, Mito Hibiki, with mirror in hand and spit curls plastered on her forehead, sings the Harry Warrren/Al Dubin song— “Keep young and beautiful, if you want to be loved.” Even the cosmetic industry would be embarrassed to state this idea quite so baldly today. Two “men” pedal out two upright pianos mounted on bicycles, and, with a couple of girls, sing through verse and chorus of “Play a Simple Melody” in cheery harmony possibly hundreds of times. Sixteen pairs of legs from the knees down step and cross on a huge keyboard for “Shaking the Blues Away.” In the endless finale, the women are so hampered with hoop skirts, feathered and plumed sunburst shoulder pieces, they remind me of the pack-burdened market women of the Andes.
At Radio City Music Hall (October 25 through 28).
Singing Takarazuma anthems with tunes like the commercial jingles that drill into the brain - Takaraz’ka, TakaraZOO-ka, Takaraz’ka, TakaraZOO-ka - Japan’s huge, immensely and dismayingly popular all-girl revue took over Radio City Music Hall. As home of the Rockettes, and opulently tacky holiday stage shows, it was the ideal venue.
Takarazuma is all sugar candy - from its gooey “Japanese” first half to its sentimental American second half so reminiscent of Ziegfeld shows, with their staircases and plumed showgirls, and the soppy, opulent Broadway shows depicted in ‘30s movies. In the “Japanese” part, it’s not always so clear to a gajin whether the girls are meant to be girls or beautiful young warriors, but in the Western section, the dashing, stiletto-thin “men”, with their hair slicked down and their elegant, hoodish manners, are oddly hot. The women who play women only get to be pretty and sweet and graceful, but the young women in male drag get to express an exhilarating aggressiveness Japanese women must generally mask.
The level of delusion achieved by Takarazuka is stupendous. Part one features “traditional dances set to modern music,” opening with the jolly “Takarazuka March,” a tune with the impetus of “Roll Out the Barrel,” while masses of women in red, white, and blue kimonos on and in front of a huge red staircase flap their fans and twirl umbrellas under a mass of red autumn leaves. We see the orchestra elevated for a second before sinking back into the pit forever, so we know the musicians are live, but the music sounds taped anyway, and appears to come from nowhere in particular. Moments later, we get our first lesson in Japanese tradition: “Snow melts, clouds hide the moon, petals fall. That is our sense of beauty. That is the soul of Japan.” Oh.
The Japanese obviously adore dewy, unconscious caricature of themselves, this pretty, utterly innocent side of the divided Japanese soul. I suppose we’re not much different in the way we like to see ourselves as ingenious, freedom-loving good guys no matter how much our behavior individually and as a nation may call that into question. But if Westerners were to present Japanese material in this debased way, we’d term it racist stereotyping. So, modest girls run around with fans to twinkling music. A bulky, masked “Noh dancer’” moves somberly in front of a massive statue of Buddha to Puccini-like music, heavy on the strings, and “summons” a bunch of young Japanese cossacks, warrior boys in stiff black hats and knee boots, and a couple of girls in pink who swish long white scarves. A dozen platinum blonds in white outfits must be snowflakes in the introduction to a dance of a traveler reflecting on her life and remembering her lost lover.
In “The Cherry Flower” first-act finale, eight women in red play the traditional song “Sakura, Sakura” on kotos. Then seven satin-clad warriors are revealed like Erte statuettes arranged on platforms— but they turn out to be just girls. The overhead space is filled with masses of pink blossoms. We continue to hear more inflated variations of the tune, including a bubbly synthesizer version and a soupy dramatic version. Gradually but relentlessly, the piece builds exactly in the manner of Ravel’s Bolero, accumulating masses of dancers and singers as it adds percussion. A huge, golden Mercedes-Benz grille rises at the back of the stage. No, it’s a golden temple. And long strings of red lanterns descend from above. The dancers catch the lights on their flashing silver fans. Alternately, they reveal American stars-and-stripes kimono sleeves, and their song becomes a sort of klezmer version of the signature Takarazuka march.
I preferred Takarazuká’s nostalgic, never-was, candy floss AmerIca to the Japanese part of the show in which they blithely despoil their own revered culture. Their romantic American images all come from show-biz fantasy anyway, and the numbers seem like appropriate, if daft, homages. When women in enormous, whIte, leathered headdresses and a dozen “men” in top hats and tails parade down an illuminated staircase, singing, of course, “A Pretty Girl Is Like a Melody,” it’s Victor/Victoria to the nth degree. And who wants to argue with a kick line of 32 squealing girls wearing gold and white. plumes and flaunting their juicy thighs?
I thought “Keep Young and Beautiful” was a pink ‘30s boudoir scene with the star in a dressing gown, but what I mistook fern huge round bed was a ladies’ compact in whose tilted mirror we see - from above - about a dozen prone girls waving their fans. Tres Busby Berkeley. With 16 men in pink top hats and sequined tail suits in attendance, Mito Hibiki, with mirror in hand and spit curls plastered on her forehead, sings the Harry Warrren/Al Dubin song— “Keep young and beautiful, if you want to be loved.” Even the cosmetic industry would be embarrassed to state this idea quite so baldly today. Two “men” pedal out two upright pianos mounted on bicycles, and, with a couple of girls, sing through verse and chorus of “Play a Simple Melody” in cheery harmony possibly hundreds of times. Sixteen pairs of legs from the knees down step and cross on a huge keyboard for “Shaking the Blues Away.” In the endless finale, the women are so hampered with hoop skirts, feathered and plumed sunburst shoulder pieces, they remind me of the pack-burdened market women of the Andes.
At Radio City Music Hall (October 25 through 28).
Personal Best
May 30
The handsome little Florence Gould Hall at the Alliance Francaise seemed inadequate when the Groupe de Recherche Choreographique de l’Opera de Paris inaugurated the space. The stage looked too small, and the apron resounded whenever anyone jumped. But it seemed spacious and solid enough for Doug Varone’s fine company. He presented three New York premieres on a program of six works. Two of those new pieces are first-rate.
Varone, who danced with the Lar Lubovitch Dance Company for eight years and formed his own group in 1986, has the rare knack of translating his special qualities as a dancer into his choreography without condemning his performers, to copycatism. The traits that make his dancing so vivid—his exuberance, his taste for abutting casual and formal elements, his flickering thoughtfulness and abrupt decisions, the jazzy feel of urgent impulses that suddenly vanish—are preserved in the architecture of his pieces. An instinctive musicality, lyrical phrasing, and the succulent use of weight all enable drama to subtly emerge from the dancing itself.
Ever Faithful, a suite of dances set to three Mozart concert arias recorded by Kathleen Battle, is the one weak work. The first section is a foppishly jealous trio for Bonnie Wong, Larry Hahn, and Matthew Cazier, the second an impetuous duet of caresses and secrets for Nancy Coenen and Mary Govern; and the last a declarative, tragicomic solo of operatic emotions for a red-lipped Varone. One of his problems in this choreography is that he tried to be funny, and the trying shows. What’s missing, too, is the delicate, accurate observation of behavior that informs his other dances.
Set to Christopher Hyams-Hart’s excellently sharp, pressing music, Varone’s Taken Pieces (1988) is a rueful, disquieting group work for six dancers who often seem like many more by virtue of their power and authority. Clad in dull reds and browns, the dancers (Cazier, Coenen, Govern, Hahn, Wong, and Gabriel Masson) create formal rows and clusters that break apart, that open and snarl together. Their movements are at once vigorous and perfunctory—short, tough swings, brief catches and terse embraces, claspings that save one partner from a fall, twisted poses. At one point, Govern quickly feels Cazier’s face, as if taking his measure, learning who he is before he disappears. There’s a sense of restless energy, anger that hasn’t quite surfaced. No relationship can be sustained. The movement never settles or rests, except momentarily. The occasional weak, close-to-the-body gestures seem suggestive of shame. Varone paces all this beautifully and keeps the stage action unpredictable. In the final blackout, the group suddenly hauls Govern—no particular scapegoat— upside down, like a carcass in a slaughterhouse.
Home, a painful duet for Varone and Govern, reminded me of Susan Marshall’s very different Ward because of the intense, warily perceptive way it examines a relationship. The dances’ subjects are entirely different, but both choreographers use gesture and movement with the greatest economy and acumen to detail the psychology of the situation. There are two chairs. Govern sits on one, wearing a sweater. Varone stands, hands in his pockets. Something has happened. Throughout, if one sits the other stands; if one cautiously approaches, the other turns sway. Their gestures toward each other are usually brief and mostly peter out. He uneasily brushes her shoulder, when he takes her hand she leans strongly away. They lie together like spoons, muscles suddenly clenching. Some huge, irreconcilable, private grief has come between them, something they can’t even mention. The repeating harmonies of A. Leroy’s melancholy strings, effectively underscore their small, hopeless efforts at rapprochement. When they stand, draw close, and appear to kiss, his hand insinuates itself between them—I think—and covers her lips. She holds her hands against her diaphragm, and shudders tightly. A near embrace makes them jerk apart from the shock. At the end, she stands, holding his shoulder so he can’t get up. Then he’s up, she’s down, and they awkwardly take hands over her shoulder. Nothing more will ever be possible.
At Alliance Francaise Florence Gould Hall (May 13 and 14).
The handsome little Florence Gould Hall at the Alliance Francaise seemed inadequate when the Groupe de Recherche Choreographique de l’Opera de Paris inaugurated the space. The stage looked too small, and the apron resounded whenever anyone jumped. But it seemed spacious and solid enough for Doug Varone’s fine company. He presented three New York premieres on a program of six works. Two of those new pieces are first-rate.
Varone, who danced with the Lar Lubovitch Dance Company for eight years and formed his own group in 1986, has the rare knack of translating his special qualities as a dancer into his choreography without condemning his performers, to copycatism. The traits that make his dancing so vivid—his exuberance, his taste for abutting casual and formal elements, his flickering thoughtfulness and abrupt decisions, the jazzy feel of urgent impulses that suddenly vanish—are preserved in the architecture of his pieces. An instinctive musicality, lyrical phrasing, and the succulent use of weight all enable drama to subtly emerge from the dancing itself.
Ever Faithful, a suite of dances set to three Mozart concert arias recorded by Kathleen Battle, is the one weak work. The first section is a foppishly jealous trio for Bonnie Wong, Larry Hahn, and Matthew Cazier, the second an impetuous duet of caresses and secrets for Nancy Coenen and Mary Govern; and the last a declarative, tragicomic solo of operatic emotions for a red-lipped Varone. One of his problems in this choreography is that he tried to be funny, and the trying shows. What’s missing, too, is the delicate, accurate observation of behavior that informs his other dances.
Set to Christopher Hyams-Hart’s excellently sharp, pressing music, Varone’s Taken Pieces (1988) is a rueful, disquieting group work for six dancers who often seem like many more by virtue of their power and authority. Clad in dull reds and browns, the dancers (Cazier, Coenen, Govern, Hahn, Wong, and Gabriel Masson) create formal rows and clusters that break apart, that open and snarl together. Their movements are at once vigorous and perfunctory—short, tough swings, brief catches and terse embraces, claspings that save one partner from a fall, twisted poses. At one point, Govern quickly feels Cazier’s face, as if taking his measure, learning who he is before he disappears. There’s a sense of restless energy, anger that hasn’t quite surfaced. No relationship can be sustained. The movement never settles or rests, except momentarily. The occasional weak, close-to-the-body gestures seem suggestive of shame. Varone paces all this beautifully and keeps the stage action unpredictable. In the final blackout, the group suddenly hauls Govern—no particular scapegoat— upside down, like a carcass in a slaughterhouse.
Home, a painful duet for Varone and Govern, reminded me of Susan Marshall’s very different Ward because of the intense, warily perceptive way it examines a relationship. The dances’ subjects are entirely different, but both choreographers use gesture and movement with the greatest economy and acumen to detail the psychology of the situation. There are two chairs. Govern sits on one, wearing a sweater. Varone stands, hands in his pockets. Something has happened. Throughout, if one sits the other stands; if one cautiously approaches, the other turns sway. Their gestures toward each other are usually brief and mostly peter out. He uneasily brushes her shoulder, when he takes her hand she leans strongly away. They lie together like spoons, muscles suddenly clenching. Some huge, irreconcilable, private grief has come between them, something they can’t even mention. The repeating harmonies of A. Leroy’s melancholy strings, effectively underscore their small, hopeless efforts at rapprochement. When they stand, draw close, and appear to kiss, his hand insinuates itself between them—I think—and covers her lips. She holds her hands against her diaphragm, and shudders tightly. A near embrace makes them jerk apart from the shock. At the end, she stands, holding his shoulder so he can’t get up. Then he’s up, she’s down, and they awkwardly take hands over her shoulder. Nothing more will ever be possible.
At Alliance Francaise Florence Gould Hall (May 13 and 14).
Pardon My Drawl
July 25
There’s nothing frivolous about Joelle Bouvier and Regis Obadia’s Un Imprudent Bonheur (A Reckless Happiness); the title is bitterly ironic. Though I think the force of the piece was somewhat curbed by the size of the stage at Alliance Francaise’s Florence Gould Hall, and it ended quite satisfactorily several times before it actually ended, it had an unsentimental, willful power. The superb music and sound collage by Patrick Roudier made heavy use of instrumental operatic excerpts whose extravagant outpourings matched the dance in emotional scale.
Imprudent Bonheur takes place in a kind of desolate waiting room atmosphere, some neutral place where suitcases are stacked for imminent departure. In semi-darkness, as the introduction to the third act of Tosca plays and gives way to a sweet tenor voice singing a romantic song very softly, Obadia puts on a shirt, tucks it in, then puts on a black, double-breasted jacket. He fades back into the shadows, suddenly bursts into a slicing spin, and grabs his throat. Bouvier, her torso collapsed across a small, wheeled table, pushes it across the floor. Bells toll, a train screams. Eric Goizet whirls in with Isabella Roncaglio, and smoke billows over the audience. Bouvier and Obadia seek no quarter and give none in the piece’s many scnes. When Bouvier, who’s standing around wearing a black dress or slip—whichever it is, it says “I don’t give a damn how I Iook”—calls, “Hup!” Obadia drops the suitcase he’s holding. He runs over, grabs her with one hand, between her legs. abruptly turns her upside down, puts her down, and returns to place.
Again and again she calls him and he comes, more and more reluctantly till, once, he won’t budge. When he cornea again—she runs to different parts of the stage to call him—he swings her roughly. Neither ever turns off to the other’s insistent needs or taunts or longings. The clouded, intoxicated look on Obadia’s face and the assurance gleaming in Bouvier’s make plain their thoroughgoing complicity. Obadia swings Roncagho wildly, and Goizet whirls Bouvier, while Lilo Baur begins to call out, “Darling!” The women busy their heads in the men’s chests, grab their collars. “Darling!” Baur shouts— assertively, desperately, hopelessly—becoming increasingly desolate, eventually sitting on a suitcase calling like an abandoned child. Her wretchedness becomes almost unbearable. Some of the episodes are quiet and poetic, such as one lunar vision in which Roncaglio walks onstage slowly, dressed as a bride, with white balloons floating above her. She kneels, climbs out of the dress, which remains half-suspended by four balloons, and walks sideways on tiptoe with four balloons still attached to her. She removes her slip, which floats in place with two balloons.
Lastly, she discards her veil, leaving it, too, hanging in midair. In the cruelest section, Roncaglio, in her bride outfit, climbs on a little table. Obadia pulls out a leash attached to the table and jerks it sightly, then harder, She kneels, then stands, as he circles her, yanks the table, drops the leash, She crumples into his arms. Then she’s back on the table, and, as music from Samson et Dalila builds climax on climax, he begins to whirl the table around the stage terrifyingly fast, controlling it with two leashes. When he lets her come to rest, he climbs on the table with her, and standing straight like some stupefied, wedding-cake couple, they rotate slowly in contrary directions to the tolling of a bell. I admire the uncompromising, raw toughness of l’Esquisse’s work, that masculine and absolute commitment to the emotions and the hash they make of our lives. I think of Bouvier and Obadia in a harsh, clutching duet to a sour, flat tango played on a wind-up Victrola—he holds her tightly in turns lifting her by her waist and under her jaw. Or recall him whirling her with his head bent as if he’s about to chomp into her neck. There’s nothing moralizing or politically correct about the images they send us from the psychic battlefront of the unrelenting sex war. They look the horror straight in the face and know it by name.
Down at Duke University in Durham, where it wasn’t even sweltering, I caught two informal programs from the American Dance Festival’s International Choreographer’s Workshop and Commissioning Program, which this year hosts 20 choreographers from 18 nations in Latin America, Africa, Eastern Europa, and Asia for a six-week session. (Western Europeans need not apply, due to USIA restrictions,)
Exquisite Sheema Kermani of Pakistan, where dance was banned for a dozen years, danced the sensuous, reverential Manglacharan, a floral offering and prayer in Odissi style, and Indra Utama of Sumatra was eloquent in the rhythmic Rantak Along Babega. Abelardo Gameche of Venezuela offered an intriguing duet for two men pressed front to back, tenderly moving together, and gradually learning to separate, to find individuality possible. Chen Wei Cheng of Taiwan, whose spectacular elevation and presence struck me earlier in a ballet master class taught by Nikolai Boyarchikov (director of Leningrad’s Maly Theater, who taped his soles and taught in bare feet), danced a crawling, slowly rippling solo, The River, in which he struggles to be born. Oscar Naters of Peru presented a short, Butoh-ish trio reminiscent of Dai Rakuda Kan for three staggering, yanking women in tattered outfits and ratty hair. In Just Stay, Anton Reza Bernal, from Mexico, trembled and convulsed in an intense solo given form by the emotions that wracked him, And in one section of Retazos (Remnant), a patchwork dance by Chileno Octavio Menesea, heavy-set blond woman in a chartreuse dress whipped a nearly nude man across the back with a wet towel, promising him in advance she’d never hurt him, Caressing his back in the erotic aftermath, she was so sorry. Though it was disagreeable to watch, through role reversal, Meneses’s piece inadvertently commented effectively on the abuse of women. Too bad it had to abuse a man to do it.
Outdoors, on a square cement area in front of the auditorium, without any special illumination, the last piece of the first evening left half the audience with tears trickling down their faces. Obviously prompted by the terrible events in Beijing, Jin Xing’s memorable, 25-minute Crying Dragon, with himself as soloist and a chorus of 28 non-English-speaking Korean girls (from a group of 52 attending as students), commemorated the events in Tiananmen Square with formalized anguish and solemn beauty.
A student at the Guangdong Dance Academy in Guangzhou (Canton), which has China’s only modem dance program (established in 1987 in collaboration with the ADF), principal dancer for the Liaoning People’s Liberation Army Song and Dance Ensemble from 1982 to 1987, and a graduate of the People’s Liberation Army Art Institute in Beijing, 21-year- old Jin has been studying dance in the U.K since last September on a ten-month scholarship. In white shifts, with their black hair loose, the women glided across the hall’s porch and moved onto the plaza on a diagonal path. Jin, also wearing white, traditionally a funereal color in China, and with his mouth bound, knelt and arched backward in the center of the space. Some of the women separated from the moving line, then circled back to their places as the line crisscrossed the area, En masse, the women knelt behind him, bending forward, their hair covering their faces as he crouched forward. He flung forward the enormous white sleeves of his costume, and fell slowly backward as the group swayed ever so slightly behind him. Jin whipped his sleeves around in ribboning arcs as the women spread evenly throughout the space and sat quietly. He ran to the porch, sleeves rippling behind, then flung them high. He staggered forward as the women moved back, but two women took hold of him and pulled him along. Removing his shirt, they left him to stagger forward, where he burst into a flamboyantly lyrical solo to homesick-making music. From behind the pillars of the building, the women darted out—falling, staggering, running, whirling, tossing their hair—while Jin faltered into stumbles. and whirling leaps. The women rolled down the steps, with their mouths bound, and their outer garments came loose as they threw themselves around. Jin crouched in front. And as they fell in double row, he crawled between them. There wasn’t one false moment.
At Alliance Francaise Florence Gould Hall (July 6 through 9).
Oh, To Be in England
April 18
Come August, Dan Wagoner, much of whose work has affirmed the traditional, rural America where he grew up, heads off to England to—sort of—take over the artistic direction of the London Contemporary Dance Theater, founded by Robin Howard and Robert Cohan over 20 years ago.
“I’m not really quite sure,” he says, “how it came about. I’ve choreographed for them before, and Bob and have stayed in touch. He’d been hinting for a long time. It’s been an insidious possibility. Finally he asked me formally I was interested in becoming artistic director. Since I had no notion of leaving the U.S. this seemed totally out of the question. ‘Come have a look,’ he said.” LCDT is a large, well-established company with its own school (rooted in the Graham technique) and a big budget.
“They need someone to work with the dancers, coach them, and make the bulk of the repertory. I’ve never chosen other people’s pieces for repertory before. When you’re a choreographer it’s hard to be that interested in anybody else’s work.” Having made a preliminary decision, Wagoner shilly-shallied. Facing “the task of moving to London and taking on a lot of new chores seemed more than I could do, and I tried to weasel out. Then Richard Johnston—the new executive director, who took over from Robin—came to New York to talk to me. He saw my studio, my company. He encouraged me to keep my establishment here and not think right away of a long-term commitment. ‘Come, work for us, start a project,’ he said, ‘and we’ll go from there. Let’s not be done in by some major three-year plan.’ So some of my dancers have already been there this winter setting dances and teaching technique.”
Cohan has been wanting to retire for some time, and he’s hoping that with Wagoner installed he’ll be able to withdraw. But Wagoner seems an astonishing choice simply because he’s such a homebody, so apple-pie. Wasn’t anybody in England suitable for the job? Choreographer Siobhan (Sue) Davies, who came out of the school and the company, and had been assistant director, might have been a logical choice. “Bob brought this company to life,” says Wagoner, “and half of him wants to stay. He wanted to be sure that someone he felt compatible with took over, someone who might keep some of his work in the rep. Other people, I think, wanted to make sweeping changes, like oust the Graham technique—to change everything. I don’t know if I can fit in and do what I want to do. But there’s tremendous goodwill on the part of the dancers and the administration. And some of my own board thinks it will be good exposure for my work and might even strengthen my base here."
“I’ve choreographed for four or five companies in London, and I like the English dancers. But I can’t imagine that I could completely settle there to work. Of course, the company setup is exactly what I wish I has in New York. To keep my company going here has been an incredible struggle and so it should be easy in a way to pick up and leave. This job means more money than I’ve ever been paid before. There are 18 dancers, there are sets, costumes, videos, machines, studios. The company carries all of its lights. computer dimmer boards, marley floors with it. It’s very properly done. Bob Cohan had a vision. He knew it all had to be well-done and he hasn’t settled for anything less He’s established a very fine company, and they’re just asking me to walk into the fruits of all this hard work and make a repertory that people will want to do well and be excited about. So I’m saying I’m going to go. I can’t get out of it now can I?"
“New York is hostile to art. When I came here you could live in the niches and crevices of the economy. Now if you did that you’d be homeless and on the street. You have to participate in the economy. Then you worked all day at a regular job and worked with Merce or Martha at night and never asked what you might be paid for a performance. So that’s changed. You can get angry and leave the city or keep your life together and do your work. I like to be inventive about making my life work. To keep it all together takes the same artfulness and bravery as to make a dance."
“We’re squandering our natural resources. We don’t value and treasure the impulse to be an artist or a dancer. It makes parents nervous. There’s no clear course how to prepare yourself, but the impulse is divine and needs to be treasured and championed. Our culture could be turned around completely if we began to think that way.”
How will he keep his company going? Wagoner has often found the business of running a company discouraging. Running two has got to be worse. But he’s trying not to think too far ahead. On the company’s last tour, his dancers performed without him, and he’s trying to arrange a repertory that can work when he’s not around. “The older members are willing to direct, rehearse, and organize. Later on I’ll try to figure out how to divide my time and work with the dancers here."
“I couldn’t have conceived of this a year ago. I’m trying to let go of detailed things I can’t really control and to be more positive with my own energy. Aging has made me more aware of my own immortality—I mean my mortality. Its silly to hold onto things you can’t do anything about. Just plunge in. “I’m still terrified that FI’m committed to this project. I love my home in West Virginia. I’m very American. Maybe what they feel they want for the company is my Americanism. I don’t know. I have no idea how my work will be received there. I’m expecting the worst. They may want to be rid of me within a month. And then I’ll just cry.”
Come August, Dan Wagoner, much of whose work has affirmed the traditional, rural America where he grew up, heads off to England to—sort of—take over the artistic direction of the London Contemporary Dance Theater, founded by Robin Howard and Robert Cohan over 20 years ago.
“I’m not really quite sure,” he says, “how it came about. I’ve choreographed for them before, and Bob and have stayed in touch. He’d been hinting for a long time. It’s been an insidious possibility. Finally he asked me formally I was interested in becoming artistic director. Since I had no notion of leaving the U.S. this seemed totally out of the question. ‘Come have a look,’ he said.” LCDT is a large, well-established company with its own school (rooted in the Graham technique) and a big budget.
“They need someone to work with the dancers, coach them, and make the bulk of the repertory. I’ve never chosen other people’s pieces for repertory before. When you’re a choreographer it’s hard to be that interested in anybody else’s work.” Having made a preliminary decision, Wagoner shilly-shallied. Facing “the task of moving to London and taking on a lot of new chores seemed more than I could do, and I tried to weasel out. Then Richard Johnston—the new executive director, who took over from Robin—came to New York to talk to me. He saw my studio, my company. He encouraged me to keep my establishment here and not think right away of a long-term commitment. ‘Come, work for us, start a project,’ he said, ‘and we’ll go from there. Let’s not be done in by some major three-year plan.’ So some of my dancers have already been there this winter setting dances and teaching technique.”
Cohan has been wanting to retire for some time, and he’s hoping that with Wagoner installed he’ll be able to withdraw. But Wagoner seems an astonishing choice simply because he’s such a homebody, so apple-pie. Wasn’t anybody in England suitable for the job? Choreographer Siobhan (Sue) Davies, who came out of the school and the company, and had been assistant director, might have been a logical choice. “Bob brought this company to life,” says Wagoner, “and half of him wants to stay. He wanted to be sure that someone he felt compatible with took over, someone who might keep some of his work in the rep. Other people, I think, wanted to make sweeping changes, like oust the Graham technique—to change everything. I don’t know if I can fit in and do what I want to do. But there’s tremendous goodwill on the part of the dancers and the administration. And some of my own board thinks it will be good exposure for my work and might even strengthen my base here."
“I’ve choreographed for four or five companies in London, and I like the English dancers. But I can’t imagine that I could completely settle there to work. Of course, the company setup is exactly what I wish I has in New York. To keep my company going here has been an incredible struggle and so it should be easy in a way to pick up and leave. This job means more money than I’ve ever been paid before. There are 18 dancers, there are sets, costumes, videos, machines, studios. The company carries all of its lights. computer dimmer boards, marley floors with it. It’s very properly done. Bob Cohan had a vision. He knew it all had to be well-done and he hasn’t settled for anything less He’s established a very fine company, and they’re just asking me to walk into the fruits of all this hard work and make a repertory that people will want to do well and be excited about. So I’m saying I’m going to go. I can’t get out of it now can I?"
“New York is hostile to art. When I came here you could live in the niches and crevices of the economy. Now if you did that you’d be homeless and on the street. You have to participate in the economy. Then you worked all day at a regular job and worked with Merce or Martha at night and never asked what you might be paid for a performance. So that’s changed. You can get angry and leave the city or keep your life together and do your work. I like to be inventive about making my life work. To keep it all together takes the same artfulness and bravery as to make a dance."
“We’re squandering our natural resources. We don’t value and treasure the impulse to be an artist or a dancer. It makes parents nervous. There’s no clear course how to prepare yourself, but the impulse is divine and needs to be treasured and championed. Our culture could be turned around completely if we began to think that way.”
How will he keep his company going? Wagoner has often found the business of running a company discouraging. Running two has got to be worse. But he’s trying not to think too far ahead. On the company’s last tour, his dancers performed without him, and he’s trying to arrange a repertory that can work when he’s not around. “The older members are willing to direct, rehearse, and organize. Later on I’ll try to figure out how to divide my time and work with the dancers here."
“I couldn’t have conceived of this a year ago. I’m trying to let go of detailed things I can’t really control and to be more positive with my own energy. Aging has made me more aware of my own immortality—I mean my mortality. Its silly to hold onto things you can’t do anything about. Just plunge in. “I’m still terrified that FI’m committed to this project. I love my home in West Virginia. I’m very American. Maybe what they feel they want for the company is my Americanism. I don’t know. I have no idea how my work will be received there. I’m expecting the worst. They may want to be rid of me within a month. And then I’ll just cry.”