Reviews 1989
But it is the unfussy communal feeling that is so astonishingly satisfying, with ample space for individuality, and the sense of mutuality that so often prevails in Wagoner’s dances. From a slow, waltzing line, the group turns to snake in and out and to circle, then compresses into a paddling, hugging line out of which, moments later, arms begin to unwrap, to stretch and reach out. In this congenial, multi-faceted world, there seems to be a tacit awareness that one person’s sudden claims on another will be acknowledged, not denied, and that reasons and explanations will not be required. It must be heaven.
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The Inside Dope
December 26
Compactly built, Steve Krieckhaus moves with astonishing agility and scrupulous exactness. Unpredictable yet deliberate, he has the reticence of a martial artist whose body gives no warning of its next move, and then, almost abstractly, assails his target. His deceptively uncomplicated, low key almost affectless manner is that of he classic midwesterner (he was raised in Missouri) and almost nothing personal appears on the surface of his work. Krieckhaus doesn’t give anything away. Under that innocent boyish face could lurk a psychopath. There’s just no telling.
Based in Philadelphia where he’s an active teacher of contact improvisation, Krieckhaus hasn’t been fooled by his devotion to contact into thinking that just noodling around is okay. His very dry sense of humor, his keen sense of absurdity give his work a searing edge of mental alertness, almost a teasing quality.
His dancing is a kind of thinking in sensations. Four of the half dozen fine and quite different solos he showed at P.S.122 were full of suave surprises mingling a radiant fluidity and gentle levity with abrupt deflations, momentary suspensions, changes of weight, suspicious glances, sudden warps and crunches. He’s constantly swiveling and tasting the odd little angles his body parts can slip into. Sometimes it’s as if he’s wriggling through a forest of vaporous obstacles, like a safecracker eluding heat sensors and electric eyes.
The fifth piece of the evening, Servo, illuminated what Krieckhaus is up to. In it he crawls onstage with a penlight in his mouth, hauling himself over the small yellow moon it casts on the floor to a table and chair, Sitting then, looking studious, he begins to speak about some confusing physical ailment that gradually turns out to be a problem with his car— poor gas mileage and backfiring. In his verbal investigation of the carburetor, exploring its innards with his finger, he describes its sensitive inner parts and lubricated surfaces with such tactile vividness that it becomes charged with sexuality and wry humor. That text mates wickedly with Krieckhaus’s broadly illustrative, coolly knowing movement, his teasingly blank innocence. But more than that, his detailed examination of the motor translates into concrete, objective terms much of the mysterious character of his dancing: it’s like the macroscopic probings of a delicately poised interior landscape that he holds very sharply in his mind.
The text for the closing piece, Bridge - which speaks eloquently of experiencing one’s physical aliveness - makes even more transparent his gift for giving outward form to hidden processes. “There was an airplane taking off inside of me. There were cars moving inside of me.” Continuing, he says. “And there I was inside of me! There I was, climbing and falling, folding and plunging, scooping, tumbling, spinning...inside of me.” No wonder this guy dances with heart-stopping immediacy.
At P.S. 122 (December 6 through 10).
Compactly built, Steve Krieckhaus moves with astonishing agility and scrupulous exactness. Unpredictable yet deliberate, he has the reticence of a martial artist whose body gives no warning of its next move, and then, almost abstractly, assails his target. His deceptively uncomplicated, low key almost affectless manner is that of he classic midwesterner (he was raised in Missouri) and almost nothing personal appears on the surface of his work. Krieckhaus doesn’t give anything away. Under that innocent boyish face could lurk a psychopath. There’s just no telling.
Based in Philadelphia where he’s an active teacher of contact improvisation, Krieckhaus hasn’t been fooled by his devotion to contact into thinking that just noodling around is okay. His very dry sense of humor, his keen sense of absurdity give his work a searing edge of mental alertness, almost a teasing quality.
His dancing is a kind of thinking in sensations. Four of the half dozen fine and quite different solos he showed at P.S.122 were full of suave surprises mingling a radiant fluidity and gentle levity with abrupt deflations, momentary suspensions, changes of weight, suspicious glances, sudden warps and crunches. He’s constantly swiveling and tasting the odd little angles his body parts can slip into. Sometimes it’s as if he’s wriggling through a forest of vaporous obstacles, like a safecracker eluding heat sensors and electric eyes.
The fifth piece of the evening, Servo, illuminated what Krieckhaus is up to. In it he crawls onstage with a penlight in his mouth, hauling himself over the small yellow moon it casts on the floor to a table and chair, Sitting then, looking studious, he begins to speak about some confusing physical ailment that gradually turns out to be a problem with his car— poor gas mileage and backfiring. In his verbal investigation of the carburetor, exploring its innards with his finger, he describes its sensitive inner parts and lubricated surfaces with such tactile vividness that it becomes charged with sexuality and wry humor. That text mates wickedly with Krieckhaus’s broadly illustrative, coolly knowing movement, his teasingly blank innocence. But more than that, his detailed examination of the motor translates into concrete, objective terms much of the mysterious character of his dancing: it’s like the macroscopic probings of a delicately poised interior landscape that he holds very sharply in his mind.
The text for the closing piece, Bridge - which speaks eloquently of experiencing one’s physical aliveness - makes even more transparent his gift for giving outward form to hidden processes. “There was an airplane taking off inside of me. There were cars moving inside of me.” Continuing, he says. “And there I was inside of me! There I was, climbing and falling, folding and plunging, scooping, tumbling, spinning...inside of me.” No wonder this guy dances with heart-stopping immediacy.
At P.S. 122 (December 6 through 10).
Say Goodbye
December 19
Since 2977, Nancy Zendora has been making dances of meditative resonance. From Butoh she learned how to get inside movement instead of thinking in terms of physical shapes and forms, and how to slow movement down. She’s also been inspired by dreams and the atmosphere of ancient ruins. In “Movingsoundconcert 9,” at St. Mark’s Church, she presented three short dances. In the first, Eeeyah!, with composer/performer Brenda Hutchinson periodically screaming that call and giving a booming whack on a bass drum, Zendora, found kneeling, twists her head. She walks with her arms loosely wriggling. With a sharp wrench, she lets them release into quick reaches. Hutchinson recites the names of friends and acquaintances who’ve died, and rings a little bell. Bending sideways, Zendora takes little aide steps amid an aural cascade of whispers. She performs with a placid authority, a contained inner strength, yet she appears not just vulnerable, but endangered. And she has the gift of quietness: the ability to do very little and allow a spiritual echo to reverberate.
Her Waltz, performed by Leslie Yancey, was so brief it vanished without registering, but Inscriptions for a Cylinder Seal was a solid and mysterious piece for three women. Using images that sometimes recollect the profiles on Mesopotamian seals, Zendora creates a formal ritual with a cautious aura of drama. Three women are lying on their sides. Sue Perschino pivots on her hip, walking her feet around with small steps, then crawls and prowls like a big cat. Anne Lall and Yancey rest their china on their hands, then slowly pull themselves toward her and rest in a circle of light. Perschino spins slowly with open arms; Yancey and Lall move more sensuously, quietly reaching. But something remains aloof, withheld. The three gather themselves into a trio, and their unity is what we’ve been waiting for, their arms curving overhead, their crescent jumps, their slow, steady turns. They walk away from us, taking a few steps, twisting from side to side and glancing backward again and again. As if something’s on their trail; as if a sound that rings in their memories might just be here and now.
Jan Gero performed two solos inspired by Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray - one by himself and one by Laura Schandelmeier. His own solo involves huge, projected portraits by Susan Unterberg and occasional text by Keith CrandalI. Seeing Gero juxtaposed with Unterberg’s images of his grossly deteriorating face is strong medicine. Compared with that bloating, pustulant horror, slides of Aubrey Beardsley’s more sexually outrageous prints seem redundant, and Gero’s runs and staggers, his struck attitudes and tumbles, seem inadequate. All he gets to show is Dorian’s fear and conceit, which don’t require that much amplification, Schandelmeier’s Dorian is a smaller piece, more focused on the character’s wretchedness, and set to the bitter ecstasies of a work for violin by Ernst Bloch. Pressing his head into his hands, smoothing his hands down his body, twisting, dropping down, Gero wrestles himself into gestures of woe. He heaves and dives with the desperation of a fish gasping in sir. Yet here I missed a rationale.
Forget those sentimental dances of sputtering, bewhiskered Hassids stomping around in spiritual ecstasy. Eschewing nostalgia, Amy Sue Rosen has taken this material and made something witty, Studies for Discipledom, part of a work in progress. Except for one, all of Rosen’s Talmudic scholars on the road to wisdom and exaltation are danced by young women, clad in the requisite black coats and hats. In the first part, to klezmer music, a “youth” wheels in his master on a hand-dolly. While the youth sits under a sagging muslin sack supported by two sticks, and gently shakes flour out of it onto his own back, the master dreams. In the second part, nine scholars mount a long ladder slanted at a low angle. They plod up slowly, rung by rung. They lean and tilt, sway as one, as if on shipboard. They raise their hands, palms upward, in a gesture of helpless ignorance, bring their hands to their cheeks with worry. And when the leader leaps off the end of the ladder, everyone follows.
In the third part, an assault team of Dominika Borovansky, Tina Clark, Gina Sebastiano, and Ann Sullivan scale four ladders leaning against the altar wall. Like black bats, with wings folded, they seem to dangle. They perch there, extend their legs snappily, bounce lightly kicking their shoes together. As the music becomes more and more exuberant, they bubble quietly, hopping daintily from side to side on the rungs. Its sweet and very cheeky—a sort of Talmudic kick line.
At St. Mark’s Church-in-the-Bowery (November 30 through December 3).
[Title - Alvin Ailey]
The opening night of the Alvin Ailey company’s season was planned as a gala, but, with Ailey’s death on December 1, it was reworked into a tribute to him. His dancers did him mighty proud.
The mayor-elect, David Dinkins, said a few routine words commemorating Alvin Ailey, as if he had no idea who or what Alvin Ailey was. The chairman of Ailey’s board assured us that “the board decided to continue his legacy,” that the company and school Ailey founded would continue. What! Can there have been any question about it!? Philip Morris was praised for its continued financial support. In the memorial context, it seemed inappropriate to have to hear how grateful we are - even though we are. At least the gracious Carmen de Lavallade, who’d known Ailey since high school, managed to speak a little about the person.
But when the dancing really took hold the evening began to rock and roll, and to celebrate Ailey as it was meant to. There was Marilyn Banks’s sober intensity in Witness, Dudley Williams’s eloquent striving in “A Song for You” from Love Songs, the dazzling muscle power of five sizzling men in “Mean Ol’ Frisco” from Blues Suite. Welding control and abandon, Renee Robinson gave a righteous, blazing performance of the third section of Cry that set the audience afire.
You can count on Revelations to set things right anytime. And, oh Lord, what dancing!—Elizabeth Roxas’s heartstopping lyricism in “Fix Me, Jesus”; Banks, April Berry, and Gary DeLoatch in “Wading in the Water”; David St. Charles, Dereque Whitura, Desmond Richardson—emerald torsos gleaming against the red drop—bringing spectacular élan to the whirlwind leaps and spins of “Sinner Man.” Then those gossipy women came on carrying their stools and waving their fans and we were in the final countdown. The audience didn’t wait even a moment to start clapping in “Rocka My Soul.”
When it was all over, the performers looked happy and shaken. In vague but touching confusion the dancers, guests, friends, stagehands, who knows who, assembled onstage in front of a huge slide of the gorgeous young Ailey. White and yellow mums were handed around, and were strewn in front of his image, while people danced and embraced in a muddle of exhilaration and loss. After the stage was deserted, one of the yellow ladies from the final section of Revelations came back. Someone in street clothes held her close with his arm around her shoulders. She carefully set down the white flowers she had forgotten to leave, and backed away, tucked safely under her friend’s arm.
At St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery (November 30 through December 3).
Since 2977, Nancy Zendora has been making dances of meditative resonance. From Butoh she learned how to get inside movement instead of thinking in terms of physical shapes and forms, and how to slow movement down. She’s also been inspired by dreams and the atmosphere of ancient ruins. In “Movingsoundconcert 9,” at St. Mark’s Church, she presented three short dances. In the first, Eeeyah!, with composer/performer Brenda Hutchinson periodically screaming that call and giving a booming whack on a bass drum, Zendora, found kneeling, twists her head. She walks with her arms loosely wriggling. With a sharp wrench, she lets them release into quick reaches. Hutchinson recites the names of friends and acquaintances who’ve died, and rings a little bell. Bending sideways, Zendora takes little aide steps amid an aural cascade of whispers. She performs with a placid authority, a contained inner strength, yet she appears not just vulnerable, but endangered. And she has the gift of quietness: the ability to do very little and allow a spiritual echo to reverberate.
Her Waltz, performed by Leslie Yancey, was so brief it vanished without registering, but Inscriptions for a Cylinder Seal was a solid and mysterious piece for three women. Using images that sometimes recollect the profiles on Mesopotamian seals, Zendora creates a formal ritual with a cautious aura of drama. Three women are lying on their sides. Sue Perschino pivots on her hip, walking her feet around with small steps, then crawls and prowls like a big cat. Anne Lall and Yancey rest their china on their hands, then slowly pull themselves toward her and rest in a circle of light. Perschino spins slowly with open arms; Yancey and Lall move more sensuously, quietly reaching. But something remains aloof, withheld. The three gather themselves into a trio, and their unity is what we’ve been waiting for, their arms curving overhead, their crescent jumps, their slow, steady turns. They walk away from us, taking a few steps, twisting from side to side and glancing backward again and again. As if something’s on their trail; as if a sound that rings in their memories might just be here and now.
Jan Gero performed two solos inspired by Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray - one by himself and one by Laura Schandelmeier. His own solo involves huge, projected portraits by Susan Unterberg and occasional text by Keith CrandalI. Seeing Gero juxtaposed with Unterberg’s images of his grossly deteriorating face is strong medicine. Compared with that bloating, pustulant horror, slides of Aubrey Beardsley’s more sexually outrageous prints seem redundant, and Gero’s runs and staggers, his struck attitudes and tumbles, seem inadequate. All he gets to show is Dorian’s fear and conceit, which don’t require that much amplification, Schandelmeier’s Dorian is a smaller piece, more focused on the character’s wretchedness, and set to the bitter ecstasies of a work for violin by Ernst Bloch. Pressing his head into his hands, smoothing his hands down his body, twisting, dropping down, Gero wrestles himself into gestures of woe. He heaves and dives with the desperation of a fish gasping in sir. Yet here I missed a rationale.
Forget those sentimental dances of sputtering, bewhiskered Hassids stomping around in spiritual ecstasy. Eschewing nostalgia, Amy Sue Rosen has taken this material and made something witty, Studies for Discipledom, part of a work in progress. Except for one, all of Rosen’s Talmudic scholars on the road to wisdom and exaltation are danced by young women, clad in the requisite black coats and hats. In the first part, to klezmer music, a “youth” wheels in his master on a hand-dolly. While the youth sits under a sagging muslin sack supported by two sticks, and gently shakes flour out of it onto his own back, the master dreams. In the second part, nine scholars mount a long ladder slanted at a low angle. They plod up slowly, rung by rung. They lean and tilt, sway as one, as if on shipboard. They raise their hands, palms upward, in a gesture of helpless ignorance, bring their hands to their cheeks with worry. And when the leader leaps off the end of the ladder, everyone follows.
In the third part, an assault team of Dominika Borovansky, Tina Clark, Gina Sebastiano, and Ann Sullivan scale four ladders leaning against the altar wall. Like black bats, with wings folded, they seem to dangle. They perch there, extend their legs snappily, bounce lightly kicking their shoes together. As the music becomes more and more exuberant, they bubble quietly, hopping daintily from side to side on the rungs. Its sweet and very cheeky—a sort of Talmudic kick line.
At St. Mark’s Church-in-the-Bowery (November 30 through December 3).
[Title - Alvin Ailey]
The opening night of the Alvin Ailey company’s season was planned as a gala, but, with Ailey’s death on December 1, it was reworked into a tribute to him. His dancers did him mighty proud.
The mayor-elect, David Dinkins, said a few routine words commemorating Alvin Ailey, as if he had no idea who or what Alvin Ailey was. The chairman of Ailey’s board assured us that “the board decided to continue his legacy,” that the company and school Ailey founded would continue. What! Can there have been any question about it!? Philip Morris was praised for its continued financial support. In the memorial context, it seemed inappropriate to have to hear how grateful we are - even though we are. At least the gracious Carmen de Lavallade, who’d known Ailey since high school, managed to speak a little about the person.
But when the dancing really took hold the evening began to rock and roll, and to celebrate Ailey as it was meant to. There was Marilyn Banks’s sober intensity in Witness, Dudley Williams’s eloquent striving in “A Song for You” from Love Songs, the dazzling muscle power of five sizzling men in “Mean Ol’ Frisco” from Blues Suite. Welding control and abandon, Renee Robinson gave a righteous, blazing performance of the third section of Cry that set the audience afire.
You can count on Revelations to set things right anytime. And, oh Lord, what dancing!—Elizabeth Roxas’s heartstopping lyricism in “Fix Me, Jesus”; Banks, April Berry, and Gary DeLoatch in “Wading in the Water”; David St. Charles, Dereque Whitura, Desmond Richardson—emerald torsos gleaming against the red drop—bringing spectacular élan to the whirlwind leaps and spins of “Sinner Man.” Then those gossipy women came on carrying their stools and waving their fans and we were in the final countdown. The audience didn’t wait even a moment to start clapping in “Rocka My Soul.”
When it was all over, the performers looked happy and shaken. In vague but touching confusion the dancers, guests, friends, stagehands, who knows who, assembled onstage in front of a huge slide of the gorgeous young Ailey. White and yellow mums were handed around, and were strewn in front of his image, while people danced and embraced in a muddle of exhilaration and loss. After the stage was deserted, one of the yellow ladies from the final section of Revelations came back. Someone in street clothes held her close with his arm around her shoulders. She carefully set down the white flowers she had forgotten to leave, and backed away, tucked safely under her friend’s arm.
At St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery (November 30 through December 3).
Faces of Stone
December 12
Jiuta-mai, noted in the Asia Society’s program as one of the most stringent forms of Japanese dance, developed among the aristocrats of 17th century Kyoto and seems designed for initiates only. It particularly minimizes expression and restricts the spatial range of movement to the area of one tatami mat. In a tradition where controlling any evidence of emotional upheaval and maintaining a neutral mien have been essential matters of decorum, jiuta-mai is particularly subtle. To an outsider, it’s largely an art of denial. And, in a state of interested noninvolvement, one viewed Suzushi Hanagi’s performance at the Asia Society with judgmental objectivity, without even knowing what standards ought to be applied.
“The ability to convoy a sense of spaciousness within such a confined area, and to be able to express violent passion with control and by means of the smallest gestures is at the heart of the art of jiuta-mai,” the program explains. So we are looking primarily at what’s not there—a sense of space that is suggested, and passion that is barely indicated. The style is so exclusive, so perverse and hermetic: systematically distilled like a homeopathic potion in which virtually nothing of the active agent remains except a memory. I think of Greer Garson’s remark to Frieda Inescort in Pride and Prejudice, “If you want to be really refined you have to be dead.”
Suzushi Hanayagi is quoted as saying, “When I perform, I keep my body firmly lowered and dance, not with my hands or feet, but with my spirit. The essence of Jiuta-mai, I think, is to overcome the ego and thus dance in a spirit of selfless enlightenment.” A fine principle, but it’s enactment is hardly perceptible. Yuki (Snow), which she performs, deals with the state of mind of a geisha who has been abandoned by her lover and becomes a nun. (A program note establishes the context of the piece and provides a translation of the accompanying song.) In whiteface and an elaborately coiffed wig, with reticent grief etched into her stony face, Hanayagi dances in a white kimono belted with a black, checked obi. Her movements are reserved and quiet, carefully rising or sinking, twisting so the kimono snails around her legs, tilting her head. She handles her translucent black umbrella delicately. Solidly rooted and fixed in her character she seems imperturbable. Nothing could alter the set of her prim red lips But the gestural vocabulary provides no entrée and the withholding of personality in the performance makes it seem dutiful and empty. A somber, meditative mood is apparent but I can’t respond to any of the specifics.
Young Suzusetsumsi Hanayagi, who studied with Suzusetsu Hanayagi, performed Echigo jishi, a lively boyish kabuki dance from 1811, in which the performer changes from one character or creature into another. In Shiki No Yamauha (Mountain Woman of Four Seasons) Suzusetsu Hanayagi wears a blue and white kimono and her severe hair in a long tassel down her back to dance the story of an old woman, a former courtesan, spending her old age in contemplation of nature. Her long face with its grave expression is even more mournful than Suzushi Hanayagi’s in Yuki, and quite as immutable, but she doesn’t seal us out. Walking in a circle, she twists partway round, and looks out with a searching gaze that contains neither longing nor expectation. She lets her head wobble, gestures gracefully with gently flexed or curling hands, plays lightly with a gold fan that she sometimes raises to shade her face, performs homely activities that are nearly identifiable. Suzusetsu Hanayagi is a middle-aged woman, perhaps a little older than Suzushi, her real-life sister, and this heavy, sober dance suits her very well.
In the final piece, Tomomori, choreographed and performed by Suzushi Hanayagi, she incorporates elements from forms of classical Japanese dance, as well as from Bunraku. Based on a scene from Yoshitsune Sembon Zakura Daimotsu no Ura no Dan in which Taira no Tomomori, after losing a sea battle, ties an anchor to his body and jumps into the sea. Tomomori is the strongest piece on the program. Supported by the splendid Bunraku singing of Sumidayu Takemoto (on tape) the piece has an impressive forthrightness and a sense of narrative power. In the dignified trouser role, clad in black and gold, Hanayagi, with her jaw rigid and her upper chest and shoulders rather stiffly held, conducts herself with masculine formality and bold assurance. But Takemoto’s extraordinary full-blooded chanting is so vital and urgent that his gloriously growling, rasping, squeaking, strangling, gulping recitation could easily carry the piece on its own.
[ Title ]
Blondell Cummings is a chameleon—at one moment, a washed-out drab and an instant later ravishingly beautiful brimful of energy. She’s outsize and brilliantly clear in the mimetic gestures she uses to tell her stories. Her body has the same dynamic capacity for transformation as her rubber face. What’s also remarkable is her assertiveness—in both the physical way she makes her presence felt and in the bold, humorous fashion in which she confronts the audience without positing a hostile relationship.
Tom Thayer, who plays the cabbie opposite her passenger in 3B49 is a splendid match for Cummings in the fullness of his energy, the precision of his timing and control and the clarity of his intention. Cheeky, savvy, cynical, they make quite pair. In her solo For J.B., the first section of a work in progress about Josephine Baker, Cummings takes a more discursive, atmospheric, naturalistic approach to her subject than in 3B49. She shows us a sleepy young woman full of dreams and yearning doing daily chores—pumping water. hauling wood, washing clothes in a washtub. You can see her imagining herself elsewhere in the saucy way she’ll carry the laundry basket on her head or on her hip, shake her butt while banging up a tablecloth, slowly raise one leg while hanging up a dress. You see how young she i, and how readily her imagination possesses her in the dippy little finger plays the distracts herself with, using her index fingers like puppets, then letting her hands fly into scribbly duets in the air. When she tries on a glamorous hat and feather boa that must belong to the lady of the house, and smooths a long green dress against her body, you know the die is cast. A train whistle confirms that she’s ready to change her fate.
Cummings’s big group piece, Relationships: Good and Not So Good, is almost an hour long. In six sections plus various interludes, it has wonderful material in it, but moves rather prosaically. Though the performers—Thayer, Yvonne Essandoh, Ching Gonzalez, Lisa Wheeler, Susan Mi-lani, and Giovanna Agostini—are excellent, one misses Cummings’s amazing vigor and gut conviction. In the several party scenes, the dancers’ exaggerated gestures can seem too artificial despite their skill and enthusiasm.
Much of the piece cleverly examines relationships between races by asking voiceover questions of the dancers and the audience—a consciousness-raising method both pleasurable and revealing. “What brand of beer do black people drink?” “True or false: Do white people smell funny?” “Would you adopt a baby of another race?”“If you have ever had sex with a person of a another race, move to the left.” We see the dancers’ uncertainty (did they? should they admit it?) and the way the sticky moments are quickly dispelled. In a short,witty section aimed at testing assumptions, Wheeler, Essandoh, and Gonzalez’—a white woman, a black woman, a Filipino man—stand in individual spotlights. We’re asked to “match the object with the appropriate ethnic group:” sandals, fried chicken, poodle, sunglasses, handgun, tight pants, computer, crucifix,mop. The dancers smile to themselves, glance overtly or tartly at each other, look guilty. It’s very subtly done. When the program’s over, I’m trying to figure out who’s who. Of the dancers I don’t know, Agostini must be the tall one who spoke Italian. But which is the ‘black” name: Lisa Wheeler or Yvonne Esaandoh?
At Asia Society (November 17 and 18).
Jiuta-mai, noted in the Asia Society’s program as one of the most stringent forms of Japanese dance, developed among the aristocrats of 17th century Kyoto and seems designed for initiates only. It particularly minimizes expression and restricts the spatial range of movement to the area of one tatami mat. In a tradition where controlling any evidence of emotional upheaval and maintaining a neutral mien have been essential matters of decorum, jiuta-mai is particularly subtle. To an outsider, it’s largely an art of denial. And, in a state of interested noninvolvement, one viewed Suzushi Hanagi’s performance at the Asia Society with judgmental objectivity, without even knowing what standards ought to be applied.
“The ability to convoy a sense of spaciousness within such a confined area, and to be able to express violent passion with control and by means of the smallest gestures is at the heart of the art of jiuta-mai,” the program explains. So we are looking primarily at what’s not there—a sense of space that is suggested, and passion that is barely indicated. The style is so exclusive, so perverse and hermetic: systematically distilled like a homeopathic potion in which virtually nothing of the active agent remains except a memory. I think of Greer Garson’s remark to Frieda Inescort in Pride and Prejudice, “If you want to be really refined you have to be dead.”
Suzushi Hanayagi is quoted as saying, “When I perform, I keep my body firmly lowered and dance, not with my hands or feet, but with my spirit. The essence of Jiuta-mai, I think, is to overcome the ego and thus dance in a spirit of selfless enlightenment.” A fine principle, but it’s enactment is hardly perceptible. Yuki (Snow), which she performs, deals with the state of mind of a geisha who has been abandoned by her lover and becomes a nun. (A program note establishes the context of the piece and provides a translation of the accompanying song.) In whiteface and an elaborately coiffed wig, with reticent grief etched into her stony face, Hanayagi dances in a white kimono belted with a black, checked obi. Her movements are reserved and quiet, carefully rising or sinking, twisting so the kimono snails around her legs, tilting her head. She handles her translucent black umbrella delicately. Solidly rooted and fixed in her character she seems imperturbable. Nothing could alter the set of her prim red lips But the gestural vocabulary provides no entrée and the withholding of personality in the performance makes it seem dutiful and empty. A somber, meditative mood is apparent but I can’t respond to any of the specifics.
Young Suzusetsumsi Hanayagi, who studied with Suzusetsu Hanayagi, performed Echigo jishi, a lively boyish kabuki dance from 1811, in which the performer changes from one character or creature into another. In Shiki No Yamauha (Mountain Woman of Four Seasons) Suzusetsu Hanayagi wears a blue and white kimono and her severe hair in a long tassel down her back to dance the story of an old woman, a former courtesan, spending her old age in contemplation of nature. Her long face with its grave expression is even more mournful than Suzushi Hanayagi’s in Yuki, and quite as immutable, but she doesn’t seal us out. Walking in a circle, she twists partway round, and looks out with a searching gaze that contains neither longing nor expectation. She lets her head wobble, gestures gracefully with gently flexed or curling hands, plays lightly with a gold fan that she sometimes raises to shade her face, performs homely activities that are nearly identifiable. Suzusetsu Hanayagi is a middle-aged woman, perhaps a little older than Suzushi, her real-life sister, and this heavy, sober dance suits her very well.
In the final piece, Tomomori, choreographed and performed by Suzushi Hanayagi, she incorporates elements from forms of classical Japanese dance, as well as from Bunraku. Based on a scene from Yoshitsune Sembon Zakura Daimotsu no Ura no Dan in which Taira no Tomomori, after losing a sea battle, ties an anchor to his body and jumps into the sea. Tomomori is the strongest piece on the program. Supported by the splendid Bunraku singing of Sumidayu Takemoto (on tape) the piece has an impressive forthrightness and a sense of narrative power. In the dignified trouser role, clad in black and gold, Hanayagi, with her jaw rigid and her upper chest and shoulders rather stiffly held, conducts herself with masculine formality and bold assurance. But Takemoto’s extraordinary full-blooded chanting is so vital and urgent that his gloriously growling, rasping, squeaking, strangling, gulping recitation could easily carry the piece on its own.
[ Title ]
Blondell Cummings is a chameleon—at one moment, a washed-out drab and an instant later ravishingly beautiful brimful of energy. She’s outsize and brilliantly clear in the mimetic gestures she uses to tell her stories. Her body has the same dynamic capacity for transformation as her rubber face. What’s also remarkable is her assertiveness—in both the physical way she makes her presence felt and in the bold, humorous fashion in which she confronts the audience without positing a hostile relationship.
Tom Thayer, who plays the cabbie opposite her passenger in 3B49 is a splendid match for Cummings in the fullness of his energy, the precision of his timing and control and the clarity of his intention. Cheeky, savvy, cynical, they make quite pair. In her solo For J.B., the first section of a work in progress about Josephine Baker, Cummings takes a more discursive, atmospheric, naturalistic approach to her subject than in 3B49. She shows us a sleepy young woman full of dreams and yearning doing daily chores—pumping water. hauling wood, washing clothes in a washtub. You can see her imagining herself elsewhere in the saucy way she’ll carry the laundry basket on her head or on her hip, shake her butt while banging up a tablecloth, slowly raise one leg while hanging up a dress. You see how young she i, and how readily her imagination possesses her in the dippy little finger plays the distracts herself with, using her index fingers like puppets, then letting her hands fly into scribbly duets in the air. When she tries on a glamorous hat and feather boa that must belong to the lady of the house, and smooths a long green dress against her body, you know the die is cast. A train whistle confirms that she’s ready to change her fate.
Cummings’s big group piece, Relationships: Good and Not So Good, is almost an hour long. In six sections plus various interludes, it has wonderful material in it, but moves rather prosaically. Though the performers—Thayer, Yvonne Essandoh, Ching Gonzalez, Lisa Wheeler, Susan Mi-lani, and Giovanna Agostini—are excellent, one misses Cummings’s amazing vigor and gut conviction. In the several party scenes, the dancers’ exaggerated gestures can seem too artificial despite their skill and enthusiasm.
Much of the piece cleverly examines relationships between races by asking voiceover questions of the dancers and the audience—a consciousness-raising method both pleasurable and revealing. “What brand of beer do black people drink?” “True or false: Do white people smell funny?” “Would you adopt a baby of another race?”“If you have ever had sex with a person of a another race, move to the left.” We see the dancers’ uncertainty (did they? should they admit it?) and the way the sticky moments are quickly dispelled. In a short,witty section aimed at testing assumptions, Wheeler, Essandoh, and Gonzalez’—a white woman, a black woman, a Filipino man—stand in individual spotlights. We’re asked to “match the object with the appropriate ethnic group:” sandals, fried chicken, poodle, sunglasses, handgun, tight pants, computer, crucifix,mop. The dancers smile to themselves, glance overtly or tartly at each other, look guilty. It’s very subtly done. When the program’s over, I’m trying to figure out who’s who. Of the dancers I don’t know, Agostini must be the tall one who spoke Italian. But which is the ‘black” name: Lisa Wheeler or Yvonne Esaandoh?
At Asia Society (November 17 and 18).
Double Your Pleasure
November 28
On opening night, in his new two-part piece, Telling a Story, Garth Fagan isolated its separate sections—a dance for women and a dance for men— by an intermission. I’d guessed he intended that the sections (which are also performed independently) not comment too strongly on one another, that we not focus too much on the contrasts between the excitement and push of the women’s section (A Shorthand of Sensation) and the quiet introspection of the men’s part (A Precis of Privilege). Second night, the intermission was eliminated; and now, once again, it has been restored. Fagan wants the audience to have time to reflect on the women, to prevent the men from stealing their moment. He knows how short our memories are. Still, even with no pause, and despite formal similarities and shared movement themes, the two pieces don’t incline one to make comparisons about men-versus women. As a rule, Fagan’s work doesn’t invite generalizations.
Bucket’s Program A--Prelude, Oatka Trail, Telling a Story, and Time After Before Place—is altogether superb and the dancers, always so fully present, are performing with extraordinary eloquence and fire, even for them, Excellent new warm lighting by C.T. Oakes for Oatka Trail emphasizes the piece’s introspective dramatic qualities. And Time After, with its spectacular weaving of African and European movements, is out of sight.
The new work, set to music by Miles Davis, is more first-rate Fagan—thoughtful,individual, sober, demanding, inquisitive, unlike anything anyone else could’ have made. Not surprisingly, Telling a Story doesn’t tell a story, and the alliterative titles of the sections don’t give ready clues to their meaning. Sensation introduces the women alone or a few at a time, individually and whimsically attired (costumes by Zinda Williams), then brings them all onstage at the end in a wildass fling of assertive independence, each on her own private trip. Privilege starts with five men onstage, wearing tights and bright, loose shirts. One by one they begin to move very simply—slowly dropping an arm, gently swinging a leg—quietly, dreamily, against gently plucked and chiming instrumentation. Later, Fagan spins out a series of solos for them.
There’s something sketchy and curt in the elaboration of each piece. Despite their moments of excitement, they have a broken dynamics, they don’t swell to climax or culminate in any comfortable way. Instead, they seem to chop away at themselves.
Starting with a smart run, Natalie Rogers’s aggressive opening solo in A Shorthand of Sensation introduces a lot of the piece’s movement material: the shimmying thighs that thrust the body upward, countered by a sudden slump and drop of weight into the feet; the slow, melancholy, vulnerable lowering of the arm; the slow swing of the bent leg opened further with a gentle whack against the inner thigh; the scrappy, frantic, punching turn that’s like one of Keith Haring’s cartoon figures having a fit. When Rogers plunks herself down and starts brushing her hair, two tall, leggy women—Valentina Alexander and Sharon Skepple—pick up those movement themes, augmenting them with writhing arms, bold crisscrossing jumps, tilted balances, gentle head rolls. Three smaller women (Rogers, with Rebecca Gose and Bit Knighton) take over—shaking their knees, snapping their snaking arms, scooting sideways, suddenly posing.
Throughout, dynamic impulses are initiated or abandoned with no excuses. For all the quirky mutability of the movement, the women dance with absolute tacit authority, gallantly riding and resisting the pressure and lure of the Miles Davis music. And C. T. Oakes’s assertive lighting shows similar assurance, even brass, in the way it predicts, or even seems to dictate, upcoming changes in tone.
The solos are abruptly separated by blackouts: there’s a sharp, twitchy, jerking one for Alexander Gose... does those crisscross jumps and curled-up rolls; Skepple swings through a sequence of whirls and unbelligerent karate kicks; Knighton, with her helmet of knife-blade hair, speeds through fast, dating moves and a stream of lightning chaikié turns. And then everybody’s out there all at once, scattered around the stage, dancing in spiky bursts, fierce and dissnnected— even chaotic. Whatever elements seemed to link the dancers have been eradicated. If Fagan started with a half-finished puzzle, he finishes with just some of the pieces.
In A Precis of Privilege, five men - Norwood Pennewell, A. Roger Smith, Steve Humphrey, Richard Boydston, and Mark Luther - start motionless, then move only a little. In dreamy slo-mo, Pennewell slowly raises a leg. Humphrey drops his arm, Smith bends over, with his back flat and arms outstretched. They seem to be hovering in isolation, lost in space while we’re hearing the sustained soulful ache of Davis a horn. Intermittently Pennewell does a wild pop-up jump, wriggles madly; Boydston bursts into whirling jumps; sinuosity invades Humphrey’s torso and arms. Smith scoots smoothly along the back. Several of the men erupt in that gaga, punching turn and Boydston tosses some colored swatches out of nowhere.
In individual solos, Boydston revels in big jumps; nice, sneaky, leaning back, giant-step walks; “wanna fight?” gestures and fast, padding footwork. Pennewell wriggles coolly up and down wearing a secret smile, scooting sideways, jumping. He seems all arms and legs. Quick, galumphing leaps and spins twist him into a Nilotic stance, with one arm wrapped inside his shirt; and one ankle hooked behind the other. Luther, Humprey and Boydton whizz in-and-out in teasing virtuosic displays. Curiously, there’s a soberness to all this, a low key but pervasive sense of mortality, that Penewell’s contrary, knowing, Reims-angel smile does nothing to diminish. Like its alter-ego companion piece, A Precis of Privilege draws no conclusions. Ultimately, it presents us with fascinating shards of human experience and leaves us responsible for restoring the whole.
At the Joyce Theater (November 14 through 25).
On opening night, in his new two-part piece, Telling a Story, Garth Fagan isolated its separate sections—a dance for women and a dance for men— by an intermission. I’d guessed he intended that the sections (which are also performed independently) not comment too strongly on one another, that we not focus too much on the contrasts between the excitement and push of the women’s section (A Shorthand of Sensation) and the quiet introspection of the men’s part (A Precis of Privilege). Second night, the intermission was eliminated; and now, once again, it has been restored. Fagan wants the audience to have time to reflect on the women, to prevent the men from stealing their moment. He knows how short our memories are. Still, even with no pause, and despite formal similarities and shared movement themes, the two pieces don’t incline one to make comparisons about men-versus women. As a rule, Fagan’s work doesn’t invite generalizations.
Bucket’s Program A--Prelude, Oatka Trail, Telling a Story, and Time After Before Place—is altogether superb and the dancers, always so fully present, are performing with extraordinary eloquence and fire, even for them, Excellent new warm lighting by C.T. Oakes for Oatka Trail emphasizes the piece’s introspective dramatic qualities. And Time After, with its spectacular weaving of African and European movements, is out of sight.
The new work, set to music by Miles Davis, is more first-rate Fagan—thoughtful,individual, sober, demanding, inquisitive, unlike anything anyone else could’ have made. Not surprisingly, Telling a Story doesn’t tell a story, and the alliterative titles of the sections don’t give ready clues to their meaning. Sensation introduces the women alone or a few at a time, individually and whimsically attired (costumes by Zinda Williams), then brings them all onstage at the end in a wildass fling of assertive independence, each on her own private trip. Privilege starts with five men onstage, wearing tights and bright, loose shirts. One by one they begin to move very simply—slowly dropping an arm, gently swinging a leg—quietly, dreamily, against gently plucked and chiming instrumentation. Later, Fagan spins out a series of solos for them.
There’s something sketchy and curt in the elaboration of each piece. Despite their moments of excitement, they have a broken dynamics, they don’t swell to climax or culminate in any comfortable way. Instead, they seem to chop away at themselves.
Starting with a smart run, Natalie Rogers’s aggressive opening solo in A Shorthand of Sensation introduces a lot of the piece’s movement material: the shimmying thighs that thrust the body upward, countered by a sudden slump and drop of weight into the feet; the slow, melancholy, vulnerable lowering of the arm; the slow swing of the bent leg opened further with a gentle whack against the inner thigh; the scrappy, frantic, punching turn that’s like one of Keith Haring’s cartoon figures having a fit. When Rogers plunks herself down and starts brushing her hair, two tall, leggy women—Valentina Alexander and Sharon Skepple—pick up those movement themes, augmenting them with writhing arms, bold crisscrossing jumps, tilted balances, gentle head rolls. Three smaller women (Rogers, with Rebecca Gose and Bit Knighton) take over—shaking their knees, snapping their snaking arms, scooting sideways, suddenly posing.
Throughout, dynamic impulses are initiated or abandoned with no excuses. For all the quirky mutability of the movement, the women dance with absolute tacit authority, gallantly riding and resisting the pressure and lure of the Miles Davis music. And C. T. Oakes’s assertive lighting shows similar assurance, even brass, in the way it predicts, or even seems to dictate, upcoming changes in tone.
The solos are abruptly separated by blackouts: there’s a sharp, twitchy, jerking one for Alexander Gose... does those crisscross jumps and curled-up rolls; Skepple swings through a sequence of whirls and unbelligerent karate kicks; Knighton, with her helmet of knife-blade hair, speeds through fast, dating moves and a stream of lightning chaikié turns. And then everybody’s out there all at once, scattered around the stage, dancing in spiky bursts, fierce and dissnnected— even chaotic. Whatever elements seemed to link the dancers have been eradicated. If Fagan started with a half-finished puzzle, he finishes with just some of the pieces.
In A Precis of Privilege, five men - Norwood Pennewell, A. Roger Smith, Steve Humphrey, Richard Boydston, and Mark Luther - start motionless, then move only a little. In dreamy slo-mo, Pennewell slowly raises a leg. Humphrey drops his arm, Smith bends over, with his back flat and arms outstretched. They seem to be hovering in isolation, lost in space while we’re hearing the sustained soulful ache of Davis a horn. Intermittently Pennewell does a wild pop-up jump, wriggles madly; Boydston bursts into whirling jumps; sinuosity invades Humphrey’s torso and arms. Smith scoots smoothly along the back. Several of the men erupt in that gaga, punching turn and Boydston tosses some colored swatches out of nowhere.
In individual solos, Boydston revels in big jumps; nice, sneaky, leaning back, giant-step walks; “wanna fight?” gestures and fast, padding footwork. Pennewell wriggles coolly up and down wearing a secret smile, scooting sideways, jumping. He seems all arms and legs. Quick, galumphing leaps and spins twist him into a Nilotic stance, with one arm wrapped inside his shirt; and one ankle hooked behind the other. Luther, Humprey and Boydton whizz in-and-out in teasing virtuosic displays. Curiously, there’s a soberness to all this, a low key but pervasive sense of mortality, that Penewell’s contrary, knowing, Reims-angel smile does nothing to diminish. Like its alter-ego companion piece, A Precis of Privilege draws no conclusions. Ultimately, it presents us with fascinating shards of human experience and leaves us responsible for restoring the whole.
At the Joyce Theater (November 14 through 25).
Dear Dad
November 21
Down in Lake Worth, Florida, once reputed to be the geriatric capital of the world, Demetrius Klein works with quite a young company (one of its members is 13, another l5) and I was amazed, at P.S. 122, how much more skilled those performers have become since March when I saw. them at the Mullberry Street Theater. As dancers, Klein and the other man in the company, shaven-headed Patrick Ryel, are far more compelling than the women. Ryel’s speed, focus, and conciseness are striking. But you can hardly tear your eyes away from Klein. A sensual, miraculous dancer, his every move is fully wrought and interpreted, beautifully phrased, precisely weighted, brilliantly executed. Though Love or Perish isn’t made to show him off, it certainly does.
Set to a tape collage that includes text and selections from Brahms’s Neue Liebeslieder Walzer, Love or PerIsh contains too many sentimental patches, but it’s nonetheless an artful, moving piece expressing Klein’s genuine distress at how we treat one another. It opens with the recounting of an incident in which an old man falls down in the street and people simply step over his body. Not so shocking, at first; here we step around and ignore bodies every day. But Klein’s guilty horror suddenly makes our casual, daily inhumanity appalling. And the somewhat provincial way he voices it makes it even worse. “How could we have done such a thing? I mean, really!”
Klein handles his dancers smoothly and decisively, and their ensemble dancing is often rapid—almost hectic—but trusting. Duets in particular are full of gentle moments, cradlings, leans, and near falls. The personal focus on Klein’s family life—his tender feeling for his wife, dancer Kathleen Johnson-Klein, and her for him—can be awkwardly confessional, too thirty-something. But it also makes possible Love or Perish’s most powerful and resonant section, a passionate bounding, spinning, sliding solo of exquisite delicacy by Klein preceded by him talking about falling asleep on his grandmother’s couch as a child, and being carried to the car by his father, who seemed amazingly big and strong to him. Then he relates how amazingly strong his carrying his own young son makes him feel. He and his father are about the same size, he muses “not very big at all.”
At P.S. 122 (November 3 through 5).
Down in Lake Worth, Florida, once reputed to be the geriatric capital of the world, Demetrius Klein works with quite a young company (one of its members is 13, another l5) and I was amazed, at P.S. 122, how much more skilled those performers have become since March when I saw. them at the Mullberry Street Theater. As dancers, Klein and the other man in the company, shaven-headed Patrick Ryel, are far more compelling than the women. Ryel’s speed, focus, and conciseness are striking. But you can hardly tear your eyes away from Klein. A sensual, miraculous dancer, his every move is fully wrought and interpreted, beautifully phrased, precisely weighted, brilliantly executed. Though Love or Perish isn’t made to show him off, it certainly does.
Set to a tape collage that includes text and selections from Brahms’s Neue Liebeslieder Walzer, Love or PerIsh contains too many sentimental patches, but it’s nonetheless an artful, moving piece expressing Klein’s genuine distress at how we treat one another. It opens with the recounting of an incident in which an old man falls down in the street and people simply step over his body. Not so shocking, at first; here we step around and ignore bodies every day. But Klein’s guilty horror suddenly makes our casual, daily inhumanity appalling. And the somewhat provincial way he voices it makes it even worse. “How could we have done such a thing? I mean, really!”
Klein handles his dancers smoothly and decisively, and their ensemble dancing is often rapid—almost hectic—but trusting. Duets in particular are full of gentle moments, cradlings, leans, and near falls. The personal focus on Klein’s family life—his tender feeling for his wife, dancer Kathleen Johnson-Klein, and her for him—can be awkwardly confessional, too thirty-something. But it also makes possible Love or Perish’s most powerful and resonant section, a passionate bounding, spinning, sliding solo of exquisite delicacy by Klein preceded by him talking about falling asleep on his grandmother’s couch as a child, and being carried to the car by his father, who seemed amazingly big and strong to him. Then he relates how amazingly strong his carrying his own young son makes him feel. He and his father are about the same size, he muses “not very big at all.”
At P.S. 122 (November 3 through 5).
Love Kills
August 8
In 1978, London Festival Ballet brought to New York Rudolf Nureyev’s opulent, doom-laden Romeo and Juliet, with its atmosphere of social upheaval. It was a juggernaut of a production, with massive sets, but the choreography was its least remarkable aspect. The pas de deux in particular, possibly influenced by Nureyev’s work with Martha Graham, were knotty wrestling matches that kept the dancers mucking around on the floor.
Eleven years later, London Festival Ballet (as of June, officially called the English National Ballet) opens its first New York engagement since then with another Romeo and Juliet: Frederick Ashton’s ravishing version. Created in 1955 for the Royal Danish Ballet, it was seen here in 1956 and 1965, and thought to have been lost. It was reconstructed 30 years after its premiere by Niels Born Larsen (the original Tybalt) who owned some home movies of it, and London Festival’s artistic director Peter Schaufuss (whose mother, the late Mona Vangsae, was the original Juliet), with Ashton’s skeptical good wishes. Ashton was afraid the production might seem dated, and if the result had not been to his liking,, he had the right to insist it be scrapped. But it deservedly received his blessing.
Ashton’s Romeo is a gracious, musical work, choreographed to Prokofiev’s programmatic score (with some cuts and adjustments) - but largely hewing to its dramatic line - before any of the influential Russian versions had been seen in the West. Ashton’s is more decorous, less sweepingly sensual, than the Kenneth MacMillan version in the repertories of American Ballet Theater and the Royal Ballet, but it is ultimately even more heartbreaking because of its intimacy and the way mimetic details reveal the characters, particularly in the third and final act. Ashton’s ballet focuses tightly on the tragedy of the young lovers, not so much on the family feud and the turmoil in Verona’s streets. When Romeo and Juliet are dead, the drama is done. There are no witnesses, there is no formal reconciliation.
Peter Rice’s efficient and versatile set features a stage-wide loggia, with stairs in the center or at the sides, combined with various airy or luxuriant backcloths and curtains through which we can often see approaching or retreating characters - like Juliet rushing through the night to Friar Lawrence’s cell, her flimsy shawl aflutter. Her bier in the Capulet’s vault is a more ornate version of her bed and placed in exactly the same spot. As Tybalt, Nicholas Johnson is sly and agile, not the barely tamed gangster he usually appears to be. Kevin Richmond plays the role as a much more demonic feline creature. The Nurse, superbly played by Freya Dominic, shows none of the customary bawdiness and susceptibility to flattery, though she’s hearty and affectionate, and not to be trifled with too familiarly. As Paris, Patrick Armand is not a cool, stiff aristocrat, but an eager youth, not far from Juliet’s own age. If Romeo hadn’t shown up, she might well have fallen for him.
In the same role, Martin James is more conventionally standoffish and proud. Maximiliano Guerra is confident and technically impressive in the role of Mercutio, but Alessandro Molin is also marvelous, with exquisite feet and nice ballon, and captures Mercutio’s lightheartedness wonderfully. Molin was deliciously choosy in a flirtatious dance with Juliet’s friends, and filled with gaiety in two duets with his vivacious lady-love, Livia (Leanne Benjamin). He and Craig Randolph as Benville were particularly convincing as Mutt and Jeff pals in the second night. As played by Alexander Grant or Niels Bjorn Larsen, Lord Capulet is a virile, commanding figure, capable of fearsome anger, like when Juliet is recalcitrant about marrying Paris, but there’s no meanness in him. Lady Capulet’s (Lynne Seymour or Kirsten Ratov) affection for Juliet is never in doubt, though she must yield to her husband’s iron decision. And there’s none of those nasty implications about her maybe being Tybalt’s mistress. She enters in company with her husband when Tybalt’s killed, and her ferocious grieving for a precious kinsman doesn’t seem out of proportion since, across the stage, Romeo is howling over Mercutio’s corpse. Twice, Seymour attacks Romeo and has to be ripped off him. The sheer bulk of the splendid robes of the older characters give tremendous weight to their actions. Bu it is the clarity and conviction of their mime and their experience at playing character roles that enables them to convey great and complex emotions very simply.
How satisfying it is to have the benefit of the enormous authority and theatrical finesse of these great, mature artists! And their presence gives this Romeo and Juliet a kind of social rootedness that is invaluable. The men evince an almost elemental native force: the solemn Prince of Verona (Frank Schaufuss) indicating that strife must end, Lord Capulet hurling the Nurse out of the way in his rage at Juliet. That three of these dancers appeared in the original production (Frank Schaufuss as Mercutio, Niels Bjorn Larsen as Tybalt, Kirsten Ralov as Livia, Mercutio’s girlfriend) gives extra savor to the event. The corps floods into the first street scene garbed in bright, autumnal colors... When pairs of men from the rival houses accidentally bump, their encounter turns into an instant brawl of elbow-jabbing, kicking, shoving and tumbling until, as it magnifies, Benvolio and Tybalt face off with short swords, swinging aloft hooked onto each other’s arms. Juliet is carries downstairs into the ballroom on a wave of her friends, and is introduced to Paris.
Crashing the party, Romeo, Mercutio and Benvolio dance a buoyant, boyish trio. Immediately afterwards, when the lovers meet, they push their palms together as if each is testing the reality of the other, and Romeo sweeps Juliet off. Paris, shortly joined by the corps men, executes a variation commencing with tightly assertive entrechats and asymmetrical jumps that, initially, seem to embody his annoyance. Juliet’s duet with Paris, occurring minutes later, and consisting of assisted turns and slow, arrowing lifts, is hardly pro forma. It has a suspended, dreamy quality but it’s socially appropriate. Her steps are daintier in scale than his. The last time she turns into arabesque penchee, Schaufuss, as Romeo, suddenly grabs her hand and kisses it, to the consternation of her partner (Matz Skoog’s Romeo, the second night, does no such thing).
The lovers’ next meeting is flirtatious and coy. They hardly know what they’re doing. When Romeo kisses her hand, she runs away and he leaps after her. Supported by him, her unfolding leg sweeps through a slow double turn. In a swelling spiral that opens like a flower. Later. she chases him, and when she plucks off his mask, they realize how serious they are. Their facing arabesques are a pledge. But as they run to each other and she presses him to her breast, Tybalt intrudes. The first Tybalt exhales alcoholic breath at Mercutio. Second night, Mercutio recoils from Tybalt’s foul smell. No one in the crowd is fooled by Mercutio’s offhand manner after being pierced by Tybalt’s blade. Romeo’s revenge is enacted quickly: Benvolio tosses him a glove which he slams at Tybalt. He takes a last inhalation of a flower brought to him by Juliet and lets it fall. In a moment, he and his enemy are dueling all over the stage; then Tybalt rolls down the steps to his death.
Schaufuss as Romeo is ardent and reckless; Matz Skoog is paler in the role. From the moment of Mercutio’s death on, Schaufuss is torn apart, gasping and appalled, like a condemned soul from Michaelangelo’s Last Judgment. Even when he’s being wooed back to bed by Juliet, he seems racked by the gruesome turn his life has taken. Twenty-one-year-old Susan Hogard’s Juliet seems very young, vulnerable and initially impetuous; but trouble makes her determination strong and unwavering. Trinidad Sevillano, 20, dances the role with more self-possession than Hogard; she has the deceptive fragility and eloquence of a Gelsey Kirkland. Juliet is released into streams of limping, pleading runs, capped by tantrums of beating and stamping when her parents announce their marriage plans for her. Sevillano turns cold, almost somnambulant, in the presence of Paris. But Hogard’s acting is more richly detailed. She staggers backward when Paris bows to her, as if he’s struck her, and wrenches her hand from his polite kiss. She cringes when she has to assent to the marriage, and when her satisfied parents leave the room she nearly shrivels up. Juliet drifts back to the friar’s cell on a stream of sideways bourrees as if she’s already a ghost - actually, like one of the Wilis in Giselle’s second act. (Mercutio’s death staggers also evoke Giselle’s.)
The tomb scene moves with amazing rapidity. Romeo’s woeful entrance with its twisted movements and a heavy walk, his terse, useless pas de deux with Juliet’s limp body. Then Paris rushing in with an armful of lilies, like Albrecht. Their fight, Paris’s death, Romeo taking his dose of poison, collapsing at the bier, Juliet waking, wandering, fearfully thorough the vault, tripping over Paris, keening over Romeo, sucking at his empty poison vial, then choosing the dagger, and dying. Followed by darkness and the curtain. No social amenities, no soothing of the spirit.
At the Metropolitan Opera House (July 25 through August 5).
As a fan of Marta Renzi’s 1981 WGBH video to Bruce Springsteen songs, You Little Wild Heart, with its tender, astonishingly accurate view of rough-edged teenage intimacies and rivalries, I wasn’t surprised to love Renzi and John Sayles’s half-hour Mountainview, filmed at a seedy rural tavern in Rockland County, and set to popular and country music - by Aretha Franklin, Marvin Gaye,Tammy Wynette, the Stanley Brothers, Springsteen and more.
Mountainview brings together an eclectic cast of dancers, actors, kids, babies, one old gent and one barfly from a hot afternoon through the next day’s picnic and parting of the ways. Some of the people appear to know each other, others are lovers, locals or transient strangers. A mixed bag of unusual suspects, they come to share dancing in which their individuality is enhanced and bonds of affection are casually forged or reinforced. The dancing is popular in feeling, but has the physical weight, singular warmth and slippery playfulness characteristic of work.
A key theme is the way the dancers kind of hang back and go slow, enjoying that teasing delay to which we kind of hang back and go slow, savor pleasure to come. Languid, boisterous, eccentric, pushy, the movement stays true to the music—living fully in it, deeply at home. Emotions and complications float right up to the surface, where they fade in importance—like when you can’t remember what you thought you were so mad about, And what comes through is the comfort and sweetness of loving and liking and being with people whom you allow to mean something to you.
Tom Grunewald and Cathy Zimmerman keep trying to make out in his old pickup. I love it when she slides over him into the cab, and nips right out the other, grinning. Inside the bar, Renzi occasionally comes between them as the “other woman,” When juicy Christine Philion and brand-new hubby Nathaniel Lee drive up, she drops her suitcases and garment bags and heads straight for the bar. Mary Shultz and her man, Fred Holland who can’t seem to talk about what’s bothering him, put aside their troubles when he follows her into the tavern, comes up behind her, and slips his arms around her. Everybody’s particularly glad to see Joanne Callum, whose confident presence turns the place on. She flings her motorcycle jacket to the floor, tosses her pink vest to Jane Alexander who’s behind the bar, pulls Shultz onto the dance floor, then Lee, then pal (Carolyn Grossman). Marta Jo Miller bumps the jukebox for a new tune, Grunewald and Renzi push and roll over each other in a friendly, wrestling sort of dance, Her hand spiders up his back and neck; she nuzzles down his torso. Watching, Alexander seems to be weary and vaguely disapproving, but begins to shine when Holland pulls her onto the dance floor, then Shultz partners her, then Grunewald. By this time, Alexander is involved enough to be smiling like a million bucks and shaking her hair free, Jim Desmond, sucking at a beer, hangs out in the wings happily imitating the dancers. Zany Doug Elkins and dippy Chisa Hidaka pop in and roughhouse with Jace Alexander (Jane’s real-life, grown-up son), and when things wind down, Elkins is still rippling arms and torso through some break-dancing moves, I miss all these people already, and I don’t even know them very well.
Alive From Off Center, aired on WNET August 7.
In 1978, London Festival Ballet brought to New York Rudolf Nureyev’s opulent, doom-laden Romeo and Juliet, with its atmosphere of social upheaval. It was a juggernaut of a production, with massive sets, but the choreography was its least remarkable aspect. The pas de deux in particular, possibly influenced by Nureyev’s work with Martha Graham, were knotty wrestling matches that kept the dancers mucking around on the floor.
Eleven years later, London Festival Ballet (as of June, officially called the English National Ballet) opens its first New York engagement since then with another Romeo and Juliet: Frederick Ashton’s ravishing version. Created in 1955 for the Royal Danish Ballet, it was seen here in 1956 and 1965, and thought to have been lost. It was reconstructed 30 years after its premiere by Niels Born Larsen (the original Tybalt) who owned some home movies of it, and London Festival’s artistic director Peter Schaufuss (whose mother, the late Mona Vangsae, was the original Juliet), with Ashton’s skeptical good wishes. Ashton was afraid the production might seem dated, and if the result had not been to his liking,, he had the right to insist it be scrapped. But it deservedly received his blessing.
Ashton’s Romeo is a gracious, musical work, choreographed to Prokofiev’s programmatic score (with some cuts and adjustments) - but largely hewing to its dramatic line - before any of the influential Russian versions had been seen in the West. Ashton’s is more decorous, less sweepingly sensual, than the Kenneth MacMillan version in the repertories of American Ballet Theater and the Royal Ballet, but it is ultimately even more heartbreaking because of its intimacy and the way mimetic details reveal the characters, particularly in the third and final act. Ashton’s ballet focuses tightly on the tragedy of the young lovers, not so much on the family feud and the turmoil in Verona’s streets. When Romeo and Juliet are dead, the drama is done. There are no witnesses, there is no formal reconciliation.
Peter Rice’s efficient and versatile set features a stage-wide loggia, with stairs in the center or at the sides, combined with various airy or luxuriant backcloths and curtains through which we can often see approaching or retreating characters - like Juliet rushing through the night to Friar Lawrence’s cell, her flimsy shawl aflutter. Her bier in the Capulet’s vault is a more ornate version of her bed and placed in exactly the same spot. As Tybalt, Nicholas Johnson is sly and agile, not the barely tamed gangster he usually appears to be. Kevin Richmond plays the role as a much more demonic feline creature. The Nurse, superbly played by Freya Dominic, shows none of the customary bawdiness and susceptibility to flattery, though she’s hearty and affectionate, and not to be trifled with too familiarly. As Paris, Patrick Armand is not a cool, stiff aristocrat, but an eager youth, not far from Juliet’s own age. If Romeo hadn’t shown up, she might well have fallen for him.
In the same role, Martin James is more conventionally standoffish and proud. Maximiliano Guerra is confident and technically impressive in the role of Mercutio, but Alessandro Molin is also marvelous, with exquisite feet and nice ballon, and captures Mercutio’s lightheartedness wonderfully. Molin was deliciously choosy in a flirtatious dance with Juliet’s friends, and filled with gaiety in two duets with his vivacious lady-love, Livia (Leanne Benjamin). He and Craig Randolph as Benville were particularly convincing as Mutt and Jeff pals in the second night. As played by Alexander Grant or Niels Bjorn Larsen, Lord Capulet is a virile, commanding figure, capable of fearsome anger, like when Juliet is recalcitrant about marrying Paris, but there’s no meanness in him. Lady Capulet’s (Lynne Seymour or Kirsten Ratov) affection for Juliet is never in doubt, though she must yield to her husband’s iron decision. And there’s none of those nasty implications about her maybe being Tybalt’s mistress. She enters in company with her husband when Tybalt’s killed, and her ferocious grieving for a precious kinsman doesn’t seem out of proportion since, across the stage, Romeo is howling over Mercutio’s corpse. Twice, Seymour attacks Romeo and has to be ripped off him. The sheer bulk of the splendid robes of the older characters give tremendous weight to their actions. Bu it is the clarity and conviction of their mime and their experience at playing character roles that enables them to convey great and complex emotions very simply.
How satisfying it is to have the benefit of the enormous authority and theatrical finesse of these great, mature artists! And their presence gives this Romeo and Juliet a kind of social rootedness that is invaluable. The men evince an almost elemental native force: the solemn Prince of Verona (Frank Schaufuss) indicating that strife must end, Lord Capulet hurling the Nurse out of the way in his rage at Juliet. That three of these dancers appeared in the original production (Frank Schaufuss as Mercutio, Niels Bjorn Larsen as Tybalt, Kirsten Ralov as Livia, Mercutio’s girlfriend) gives extra savor to the event. The corps floods into the first street scene garbed in bright, autumnal colors... When pairs of men from the rival houses accidentally bump, their encounter turns into an instant brawl of elbow-jabbing, kicking, shoving and tumbling until, as it magnifies, Benvolio and Tybalt face off with short swords, swinging aloft hooked onto each other’s arms. Juliet is carries downstairs into the ballroom on a wave of her friends, and is introduced to Paris.
Crashing the party, Romeo, Mercutio and Benvolio dance a buoyant, boyish trio. Immediately afterwards, when the lovers meet, they push their palms together as if each is testing the reality of the other, and Romeo sweeps Juliet off. Paris, shortly joined by the corps men, executes a variation commencing with tightly assertive entrechats and asymmetrical jumps that, initially, seem to embody his annoyance. Juliet’s duet with Paris, occurring minutes later, and consisting of assisted turns and slow, arrowing lifts, is hardly pro forma. It has a suspended, dreamy quality but it’s socially appropriate. Her steps are daintier in scale than his. The last time she turns into arabesque penchee, Schaufuss, as Romeo, suddenly grabs her hand and kisses it, to the consternation of her partner (Matz Skoog’s Romeo, the second night, does no such thing).
The lovers’ next meeting is flirtatious and coy. They hardly know what they’re doing. When Romeo kisses her hand, she runs away and he leaps after her. Supported by him, her unfolding leg sweeps through a slow double turn. In a swelling spiral that opens like a flower. Later. she chases him, and when she plucks off his mask, they realize how serious they are. Their facing arabesques are a pledge. But as they run to each other and she presses him to her breast, Tybalt intrudes. The first Tybalt exhales alcoholic breath at Mercutio. Second night, Mercutio recoils from Tybalt’s foul smell. No one in the crowd is fooled by Mercutio’s offhand manner after being pierced by Tybalt’s blade. Romeo’s revenge is enacted quickly: Benvolio tosses him a glove which he slams at Tybalt. He takes a last inhalation of a flower brought to him by Juliet and lets it fall. In a moment, he and his enemy are dueling all over the stage; then Tybalt rolls down the steps to his death.
Schaufuss as Romeo is ardent and reckless; Matz Skoog is paler in the role. From the moment of Mercutio’s death on, Schaufuss is torn apart, gasping and appalled, like a condemned soul from Michaelangelo’s Last Judgment. Even when he’s being wooed back to bed by Juliet, he seems racked by the gruesome turn his life has taken. Twenty-one-year-old Susan Hogard’s Juliet seems very young, vulnerable and initially impetuous; but trouble makes her determination strong and unwavering. Trinidad Sevillano, 20, dances the role with more self-possession than Hogard; she has the deceptive fragility and eloquence of a Gelsey Kirkland. Juliet is released into streams of limping, pleading runs, capped by tantrums of beating and stamping when her parents announce their marriage plans for her. Sevillano turns cold, almost somnambulant, in the presence of Paris. But Hogard’s acting is more richly detailed. She staggers backward when Paris bows to her, as if he’s struck her, and wrenches her hand from his polite kiss. She cringes when she has to assent to the marriage, and when her satisfied parents leave the room she nearly shrivels up. Juliet drifts back to the friar’s cell on a stream of sideways bourrees as if she’s already a ghost - actually, like one of the Wilis in Giselle’s second act. (Mercutio’s death staggers also evoke Giselle’s.)
The tomb scene moves with amazing rapidity. Romeo’s woeful entrance with its twisted movements and a heavy walk, his terse, useless pas de deux with Juliet’s limp body. Then Paris rushing in with an armful of lilies, like Albrecht. Their fight, Paris’s death, Romeo taking his dose of poison, collapsing at the bier, Juliet waking, wandering, fearfully thorough the vault, tripping over Paris, keening over Romeo, sucking at his empty poison vial, then choosing the dagger, and dying. Followed by darkness and the curtain. No social amenities, no soothing of the spirit.
At the Metropolitan Opera House (July 25 through August 5).
As a fan of Marta Renzi’s 1981 WGBH video to Bruce Springsteen songs, You Little Wild Heart, with its tender, astonishingly accurate view of rough-edged teenage intimacies and rivalries, I wasn’t surprised to love Renzi and John Sayles’s half-hour Mountainview, filmed at a seedy rural tavern in Rockland County, and set to popular and country music - by Aretha Franklin, Marvin Gaye,Tammy Wynette, the Stanley Brothers, Springsteen and more.
Mountainview brings together an eclectic cast of dancers, actors, kids, babies, one old gent and one barfly from a hot afternoon through the next day’s picnic and parting of the ways. Some of the people appear to know each other, others are lovers, locals or transient strangers. A mixed bag of unusual suspects, they come to share dancing in which their individuality is enhanced and bonds of affection are casually forged or reinforced. The dancing is popular in feeling, but has the physical weight, singular warmth and slippery playfulness characteristic of work.
A key theme is the way the dancers kind of hang back and go slow, enjoying that teasing delay to which we kind of hang back and go slow, savor pleasure to come. Languid, boisterous, eccentric, pushy, the movement stays true to the music—living fully in it, deeply at home. Emotions and complications float right up to the surface, where they fade in importance—like when you can’t remember what you thought you were so mad about, And what comes through is the comfort and sweetness of loving and liking and being with people whom you allow to mean something to you.
Tom Grunewald and Cathy Zimmerman keep trying to make out in his old pickup. I love it when she slides over him into the cab, and nips right out the other, grinning. Inside the bar, Renzi occasionally comes between them as the “other woman,” When juicy Christine Philion and brand-new hubby Nathaniel Lee drive up, she drops her suitcases and garment bags and heads straight for the bar. Mary Shultz and her man, Fred Holland who can’t seem to talk about what’s bothering him, put aside their troubles when he follows her into the tavern, comes up behind her, and slips his arms around her. Everybody’s particularly glad to see Joanne Callum, whose confident presence turns the place on. She flings her motorcycle jacket to the floor, tosses her pink vest to Jane Alexander who’s behind the bar, pulls Shultz onto the dance floor, then Lee, then pal (Carolyn Grossman). Marta Jo Miller bumps the jukebox for a new tune, Grunewald and Renzi push and roll over each other in a friendly, wrestling sort of dance, Her hand spiders up his back and neck; she nuzzles down his torso. Watching, Alexander seems to be weary and vaguely disapproving, but begins to shine when Holland pulls her onto the dance floor, then Shultz partners her, then Grunewald. By this time, Alexander is involved enough to be smiling like a million bucks and shaking her hair free, Jim Desmond, sucking at a beer, hangs out in the wings happily imitating the dancers. Zany Doug Elkins and dippy Chisa Hidaka pop in and roughhouse with Jace Alexander (Jane’s real-life, grown-up son), and when things wind down, Elkins is still rippling arms and torso through some break-dancing moves, I miss all these people already, and I don’t even know them very well.
Alive From Off Center, aired on WNET August 7.
Barbarians
January 24
In Mark Taylor’s Xanadu The Millions, his inspirational sources should have fallen away altogether. Nothing of Marco Polo’s account of his travels is included. But segments from Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities (in English as well as Italian and Chinese) voiceover, seem too literary, inflated, precious. The occasional texts don’t seriously flaw the work, but they tend to be superfluous or to narrow what Taylor so deftly shows in movement.
Presented in a wide alley of space that divides the audience and makes the opposite press of faces and bodies the backdrop for every viewer, Xanadu has a singing vitality and an exoticism that’s in no way nostalgic and owes nothing to Cecil B. DeMille or Jack Cole. Composer Elise Tobin, playing amplified cello (and often joined by Paul Steven Ray on bass guitar and synthesizer) deepens the three-part dance with a moody, haunting atmosphere. In the first section, “Missives From Cities Unseen,” the eight dancers, like naturally arrogant barbarians, wear costumes (by Elizabeth Morgan) of metallic gold fabric with vests or skirts of fur or leopard or tigerskin patterned cloth. Andy Wollowitz, who plays Khublai Khan to Gary Galbraith’s Marco Polo in the early part of this section, wears a rolled, black headband that turns his dark hair into a Tartar cap. Marco and Khublai sit and palaver silently. Kneeling, they twist, recline, and swivel, moving in unison as their minds meet in Marco’s descriptions of faraway parts of Kublai’s empire. The other excellent dancers - Jennifer Keller, Kevin Kortan, Hopal Romans Mary Williford, Nancy Gilbride, and Susan Hoffman - present themselves one by one, then run, turn, swing, slide to the floor, and rebound with the aggressive lyricism characteristic of this piece. As Wollowitz listens, Galbraith holds a secret tight in his fist, then releases it like a captive bird. They roll after each other, vault over one hand, and formally embrace.
The narrative speaks of Marco’s exquisite descriptive pantomimes for Kublai’s benefit,of Khublai’s dreams, and crossfades into overlapping Italian. In an erotic, belligerent women’s trio, quick flights alternate with momentary perchings. They’ll suddenly writhe or twist away, rush about, step over one another’s backs. and cast imperious glances. Then, men and women running, circling, and dodging the haphazard obstacles of other bodies, jump straight up to be clasped quickly in each other’s arms. They balance upside down on their hands, legs splayed in the air. Wollowitz flies up onto the shoulders of several clustered dancers, which initiates a series of pileups forming bridges, mountains, arches, under which someone may dangle; a flood of images - in no way literal - that evoke a tumultuous landscape like the streams and gorges and precipitous rocks of a Chinese scroll.
“Province,” the second section, a duet for Taylor and Williford, is the heart of the piece, and is an intense and wary exploration of switching sexual dominance and serious game playing. Wearing big gold robes, they’re seated on a black-mirrored platform at the side of the playing space. Under the robes, which they discard, they wear mid-calf black pants and sheer sleeveless black tops (sexy on her, foolish on him). Taylor rides her back, pushes her. She catches him on her shoulder, then lowers and cradles him like some fatal burden. Moments later, she mounts him, jerks her hands under his neck as if preparing to let his blood. Her grave, inscrutable face gives nothing away. Several times they return to the platform where, as they slowly tangle, they watch themselves in a round mirror one of them holds. Continuing, he prowls forward on all fours with his butt in the air, then rolls over, frozen, contracted, with his hands and feet clenched into claws. She slithers under him as he slides across her. Later, she slides down his upstretched legs, briefly rests in his grasp. Perched on her back, with his fingers placed delicately on her forehead, he tugs her head very slightly, assertively, backwards, letting her know precisely how dangerous he might be. They use each other with forthright, measured savagery.
In the vigorous final section, titled “Xanadu,” the Eastern flavor of the dancing becomes more pronounced in the twisting arms and shoulders that seem almost Balinese, the frequent bent-kneed stance, the sharp, clever hands, the way the heel is brought onto the calf. It’s a rich triumphal display that cuts loose in terms of movement. Taylor, Williford, Wolllowitz and Kortan swing and grapple, flip and wheel over one another at a hectic pace.
In a way, “Xanadu” explodes on a new level of action, like Twyla Tharp’s “The Golden Section” does at the end of The Catherine Wheel - but it doesn’t quite take off. The work’s intriguing atmosphere evaporates, leaving only the exhilaration of intricate and violent exercise.
At P.S. 122 (January 6 through 8).
In Mark Taylor’s Xanadu The Millions, his inspirational sources should have fallen away altogether. Nothing of Marco Polo’s account of his travels is included. But segments from Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities (in English as well as Italian and Chinese) voiceover, seem too literary, inflated, precious. The occasional texts don’t seriously flaw the work, but they tend to be superfluous or to narrow what Taylor so deftly shows in movement.
Presented in a wide alley of space that divides the audience and makes the opposite press of faces and bodies the backdrop for every viewer, Xanadu has a singing vitality and an exoticism that’s in no way nostalgic and owes nothing to Cecil B. DeMille or Jack Cole. Composer Elise Tobin, playing amplified cello (and often joined by Paul Steven Ray on bass guitar and synthesizer) deepens the three-part dance with a moody, haunting atmosphere. In the first section, “Missives From Cities Unseen,” the eight dancers, like naturally arrogant barbarians, wear costumes (by Elizabeth Morgan) of metallic gold fabric with vests or skirts of fur or leopard or tigerskin patterned cloth. Andy Wollowitz, who plays Khublai Khan to Gary Galbraith’s Marco Polo in the early part of this section, wears a rolled, black headband that turns his dark hair into a Tartar cap. Marco and Khublai sit and palaver silently. Kneeling, they twist, recline, and swivel, moving in unison as their minds meet in Marco’s descriptions of faraway parts of Kublai’s empire. The other excellent dancers - Jennifer Keller, Kevin Kortan, Hopal Romans Mary Williford, Nancy Gilbride, and Susan Hoffman - present themselves one by one, then run, turn, swing, slide to the floor, and rebound with the aggressive lyricism characteristic of this piece. As Wollowitz listens, Galbraith holds a secret tight in his fist, then releases it like a captive bird. They roll after each other, vault over one hand, and formally embrace.
The narrative speaks of Marco’s exquisite descriptive pantomimes for Kublai’s benefit,of Khublai’s dreams, and crossfades into overlapping Italian. In an erotic, belligerent women’s trio, quick flights alternate with momentary perchings. They’ll suddenly writhe or twist away, rush about, step over one another’s backs. and cast imperious glances. Then, men and women running, circling, and dodging the haphazard obstacles of other bodies, jump straight up to be clasped quickly in each other’s arms. They balance upside down on their hands, legs splayed in the air. Wollowitz flies up onto the shoulders of several clustered dancers, which initiates a series of pileups forming bridges, mountains, arches, under which someone may dangle; a flood of images - in no way literal - that evoke a tumultuous landscape like the streams and gorges and precipitous rocks of a Chinese scroll.
“Province,” the second section, a duet for Taylor and Williford, is the heart of the piece, and is an intense and wary exploration of switching sexual dominance and serious game playing. Wearing big gold robes, they’re seated on a black-mirrored platform at the side of the playing space. Under the robes, which they discard, they wear mid-calf black pants and sheer sleeveless black tops (sexy on her, foolish on him). Taylor rides her back, pushes her. She catches him on her shoulder, then lowers and cradles him like some fatal burden. Moments later, she mounts him, jerks her hands under his neck as if preparing to let his blood. Her grave, inscrutable face gives nothing away. Several times they return to the platform where, as they slowly tangle, they watch themselves in a round mirror one of them holds. Continuing, he prowls forward on all fours with his butt in the air, then rolls over, frozen, contracted, with his hands and feet clenched into claws. She slithers under him as he slides across her. Later, she slides down his upstretched legs, briefly rests in his grasp. Perched on her back, with his fingers placed delicately on her forehead, he tugs her head very slightly, assertively, backwards, letting her know precisely how dangerous he might be. They use each other with forthright, measured savagery.
In the vigorous final section, titled “Xanadu,” the Eastern flavor of the dancing becomes more pronounced in the twisting arms and shoulders that seem almost Balinese, the frequent bent-kneed stance, the sharp, clever hands, the way the heel is brought onto the calf. It’s a rich triumphal display that cuts loose in terms of movement. Taylor, Williford, Wolllowitz and Kortan swing and grapple, flip and wheel over one another at a hectic pace.
In a way, “Xanadu” explodes on a new level of action, like Twyla Tharp’s “The Golden Section” does at the end of The Catherine Wheel - but it doesn’t quite take off. The work’s intriguing atmosphere evaporates, leaving only the exhilaration of intricate and violent exercise.
At P.S. 122 (January 6 through 8).
Stormy Weather
September 26
Personal Calamities Rub Up Against Natural Disasters is a sly and elegant piece of work. In 10 episodes, it focuses on the personal situations we cannot control, the haphazard blows life whimsically and unfairly deals us—and treats them with both gravity and wit.
The piece—for Goode and his excellent, San Francisco-based company of six—combines fierce dancing, a sophisticated use of props and miniaturized sets, and the repeating, rhythmically phrased delivery of a text (usually spoken or crooned by Goode, often to music). Several sections feature small landscape constructions (visual designs by James Morris) in which a natural calamity is enacted, like a cloudless midwestern scene across which Goode or Elizabeth Burritt blow streams of dust, or a model of a frame house set on a hillside over which Goode pours the contents of a watering can while describing a flood that destroyed his grandmother’s home. The mournful, pitying quality that pervades his speaking is so unctuous it can be almost sneering. A strange bird in a porkpie hat, the gangly Goode is creepily sweet and solicitous in “#1, inappropriate/no wonder,” talking of a sad family and a lonely withdrawn childhood in a dreamy, singsong voice that’s terribly insinuating. He speaks the text in equal, plaintive phrases in descending tones that suggest hopelessness and weary submission. He drowns his grandmother’s house twice and gradually raises the dripping can over his own head. Goode uses his words to evoke a dismal atmosphere, but I wish his vignettes were sharper in their characters and incidents—more fleshed out.
In the quiet second half of “#1” Goode eloquently dances out the fragility of being human. Slouching slightly, swaying, hunched, his mouth partly gaping, he plays the steady, invisible tragedy of a character made somehow useless. Using limp hands, a swinging foot, soft reaches that don’t attempt much, he’s like a sail gone slack. He just doesn’t know he’s broken. Wayne Hazzard is compelling and economical in ”#2 car crash.” Couples fling. and tumble recklessly fast. Goode, at a mike in the back, recalls “the taste of metal in my mouth”. Hazzard’s alone; his energy is tense, contained, compressed. He clutches one hand to his shoulder, grabs his mouth, sinks forward to the floor. We see him do this again and again; around him the group periodically reenacts its frantic mayhem. Repeatedly, Hazzard twists his legs slightly sideways, does two deliberate push-ups that seem like the coldest possible sexual act, suddenly bounces sideways with a thud.
“#3, doris in a dustbowl” is a nasty frolic about failed romantic expectations, with Burritt in bridal chiffon and Goode in a white suit, standing in for Doris Day and Rock Hudson. As she announces endlessly how she thought life would be, and topples over on a chrome-and-plastic kitchen chair, he sprinkles her with flour, sifts it over her, blows it on her with an electric fan. Scoured by reality, her insubstantial dreams (monogrammed bathrobes, fuzzy sweaters, splendor in the grass) give way to disappointment, grime, and desperation. “I don’t have little romances that work out,” she cries. “I can’t keep a boyfriend. I don’t fly to Paris on a whim!” In “#5, a hailstorm of personal defects,” Goode and Hazzard futilely resist guilty fits of clawing, twitching gestures before they empty trays of ice cubes over each other’s heads.
In “#6, jump,” Jean Sullivan, surrounded by a blindfolded group, stands on a stool brightly trying to rev herself up enough to leap off. In “#8, anything can happen,” which reprises the feeling of “#1” but is about being an outsider, Goode is as oozingly sincere as a horror show host. He reminds us that nowhere is safe, that we are vulnerable even “beyond the indignity of feeling.” In “#10,a walk in the woods,” Goode watches three miniature Christmas-tree forests burn with bright “flames” of tattered cloth. To the sounds of rumbling, and of avalanche, Liz Carpenter and Peter Rothblatt throw themselves against a black wall in “#4, love in a landslide,” one of the work’s strongest sections. Gasping, coughing, slumping for a moment, ferociously twisting, thrashing at each other, they whack themselves against the wall, beat themselves up with almost no respite. In “#7, she’s so nervous,” Suellen Einarsen starts off using the L-corner of the wall in a frantic, fearful solo that keeps her flinging against it. Turns finish with her smacked against it. When she pushes off, to the drumming of a rainstorm, she’s rolling, bounding, crawling, spilling, flipping over the floor, as if it were zapping her with electric shocks.
I was uncomfortable with the evasiveness and truncated phrases of Goode’s writing, but, despite my reservations, he combines the visuals, sound score (assembled by Erik Walker), text, and dance in a polished and beautifully modulated work that exposes pain with humility and without sentiment. And whether the dancing in The Disaster Series is so placid it seems drained, or violent (without the usual cruelty), Goode’s artful movement probes extremes with explicitness and dexterity and never shies from meaning.
At Dance Theater Workshop (September 9 through 17).
Personal Calamities Rub Up Against Natural Disasters is a sly and elegant piece of work. In 10 episodes, it focuses on the personal situations we cannot control, the haphazard blows life whimsically and unfairly deals us—and treats them with both gravity and wit.
The piece—for Goode and his excellent, San Francisco-based company of six—combines fierce dancing, a sophisticated use of props and miniaturized sets, and the repeating, rhythmically phrased delivery of a text (usually spoken or crooned by Goode, often to music). Several sections feature small landscape constructions (visual designs by James Morris) in which a natural calamity is enacted, like a cloudless midwestern scene across which Goode or Elizabeth Burritt blow streams of dust, or a model of a frame house set on a hillside over which Goode pours the contents of a watering can while describing a flood that destroyed his grandmother’s home. The mournful, pitying quality that pervades his speaking is so unctuous it can be almost sneering. A strange bird in a porkpie hat, the gangly Goode is creepily sweet and solicitous in “#1, inappropriate/no wonder,” talking of a sad family and a lonely withdrawn childhood in a dreamy, singsong voice that’s terribly insinuating. He speaks the text in equal, plaintive phrases in descending tones that suggest hopelessness and weary submission. He drowns his grandmother’s house twice and gradually raises the dripping can over his own head. Goode uses his words to evoke a dismal atmosphere, but I wish his vignettes were sharper in their characters and incidents—more fleshed out.
In the quiet second half of “#1” Goode eloquently dances out the fragility of being human. Slouching slightly, swaying, hunched, his mouth partly gaping, he plays the steady, invisible tragedy of a character made somehow useless. Using limp hands, a swinging foot, soft reaches that don’t attempt much, he’s like a sail gone slack. He just doesn’t know he’s broken. Wayne Hazzard is compelling and economical in ”#2 car crash.” Couples fling. and tumble recklessly fast. Goode, at a mike in the back, recalls “the taste of metal in my mouth”. Hazzard’s alone; his energy is tense, contained, compressed. He clutches one hand to his shoulder, grabs his mouth, sinks forward to the floor. We see him do this again and again; around him the group periodically reenacts its frantic mayhem. Repeatedly, Hazzard twists his legs slightly sideways, does two deliberate push-ups that seem like the coldest possible sexual act, suddenly bounces sideways with a thud.
“#3, doris in a dustbowl” is a nasty frolic about failed romantic expectations, with Burritt in bridal chiffon and Goode in a white suit, standing in for Doris Day and Rock Hudson. As she announces endlessly how she thought life would be, and topples over on a chrome-and-plastic kitchen chair, he sprinkles her with flour, sifts it over her, blows it on her with an electric fan. Scoured by reality, her insubstantial dreams (monogrammed bathrobes, fuzzy sweaters, splendor in the grass) give way to disappointment, grime, and desperation. “I don’t have little romances that work out,” she cries. “I can’t keep a boyfriend. I don’t fly to Paris on a whim!” In “#5, a hailstorm of personal defects,” Goode and Hazzard futilely resist guilty fits of clawing, twitching gestures before they empty trays of ice cubes over each other’s heads.
In “#6, jump,” Jean Sullivan, surrounded by a blindfolded group, stands on a stool brightly trying to rev herself up enough to leap off. In “#8, anything can happen,” which reprises the feeling of “#1” but is about being an outsider, Goode is as oozingly sincere as a horror show host. He reminds us that nowhere is safe, that we are vulnerable even “beyond the indignity of feeling.” In “#10,a walk in the woods,” Goode watches three miniature Christmas-tree forests burn with bright “flames” of tattered cloth. To the sounds of rumbling, and of avalanche, Liz Carpenter and Peter Rothblatt throw themselves against a black wall in “#4, love in a landslide,” one of the work’s strongest sections. Gasping, coughing, slumping for a moment, ferociously twisting, thrashing at each other, they whack themselves against the wall, beat themselves up with almost no respite. In “#7, she’s so nervous,” Suellen Einarsen starts off using the L-corner of the wall in a frantic, fearful solo that keeps her flinging against it. Turns finish with her smacked against it. When she pushes off, to the drumming of a rainstorm, she’s rolling, bounding, crawling, spilling, flipping over the floor, as if it were zapping her with electric shocks.
I was uncomfortable with the evasiveness and truncated phrases of Goode’s writing, but, despite my reservations, he combines the visuals, sound score (assembled by Erik Walker), text, and dance in a polished and beautifully modulated work that exposes pain with humility and without sentiment. And whether the dancing in The Disaster Series is so placid it seems drained, or violent (without the usual cruelty), Goode’s artful movement probes extremes with explicitness and dexterity and never shies from meaning.
At Dance Theater Workshop (September 9 through 17).
Spooked
May 23
Tina Dudek and composer David Van Tieghem got in over their heads in putting together The Ghost Writer, a dance/theater piece with not much dance. It seems like a project that started out as a lark and then got complicated.
Van Tieghem as beautiful energy on stage. He’s dashing - moving with a zany, rubber-legged quality inside his oversized suit - as the ghostwriter of the title unsuccessfully trying to write a novel in an old New Jersey seaside house. Some of the props are a kick—like empty shoes that walk across the floor, or a bedstead whose headboard is made of spirally wires that Van Tieghem twangs as he thrashes among the bedclothes. Tacky old songs, late ‘40s commercials, and other stuff that comes over the gleaming, red plastic Deco radio, create a fragrant, funny, nostalgic atmosphere. The bright, confident visitors add spice and diversion—Linda Mancini; as her ongoing character “Angelina Contadina,” playing the landlady; Hilary Easton as a nosy and flirtatious next-door neighbor; DTW’s production manager Phil Sandstrom as delivery man; Lisa Love as Van Tieghem’s old girlfriend; and Damon Pooser as one of a group of friends dropping in from New York. I love when the guys team up to sing, “Get Wildroot Creme-Oil, Charlie,” and all the guests follow up with a tight, rhythmic chorus of flapping and smacking gestures. Dudek plays a 19th century ghost wait. tag for her whaler husband with inscrutable solemnity. She intrudes on Van Tieghem sometimes, but with no obvious purpose. Since he is the exact image of her long-dead husband, you’d expect her attentions to him to be warmer, but her presence is both disruptive, stiff, and vague. When, at one point, she dances, the sharp, swinging material is too abstract to have any function in the piece.
There’s nothing at all spooky in The Ghost Writer. But the crucial element that’s entirely missing is a convincingly romantic atmosphere to offset and balance the giddy nostalgia of the period gimmicks and references. To set a sentimental tale in a frivolous context celebrating the consumer goods of 40 years ago is a tasty, airy idea, but everything’s got to hum along. When it gets pedestrian or dragged out, the naked mechanics become painful. Any snag and the whole thing poops like a cold soufflé.
I don’t know what music—if any--Patricia Cremins omitted from the recording of the Verdi Requiem she used to accompany her ambitious group work The Big Gulf, but it can’t have been much. What was curious was to have an introduction and several sections danced in silence. Why was some dancing supported by music and some not? For most of the piece, she used the Verdi as background, for atmosphere, and linked the dancing to it only loosely. The advantages she surrendered were the music’s dramatic momentum and its structural integrity.
Still The Big Gulf had merit in its uncluttered scope and amplitude. There’s a grave and moving early sequence in which a dancer rolls down the center steps of Washington Square Church’s altar, crawls back up, bumps down again, then rolls in an arc to the steps at the side of the altar. He crawls up them, and rolls center to come down those front steps gently, resting on each one. Other performers roll in, up the aide steps and down, and two others crawl in from the audience. The effect, of melancholy striving, is a distant reminder of Gustave Dore etchings of the flood in which serpentine masses of human bodies swarm for the high ground. There’s a violent and tender duet to the “Rex tremendae” in which a man flings his partner sway without letting go of one hand, by which he roughly rips her back. In a simple, very beautiful solo for Henry Montes to “Salva me,” he passionately runs and runs in a big circle, but always with a sense of covering new ground; his arms seeking. In one of the later reprises of the Dies Irae, there are the terrors of beating hands, clawings at the mouth, that recall Michelangelo’s fresco of The Last Judgment. The Sanctus and Agnes Dei were choreographed for the nine teenagers of the Coupé Dance Company of Rockland County. and those sections were nicely integrated. Most of the imagery was tender, caring. placid, even consoling, and the dancing unforced. Halle Markle was particularly lovely.
Tina Dudek and composer David Van Tieghem got in over their heads in putting together The Ghost Writer, a dance/theater piece with not much dance. It seems like a project that started out as a lark and then got complicated.
Van Tieghem as beautiful energy on stage. He’s dashing - moving with a zany, rubber-legged quality inside his oversized suit - as the ghostwriter of the title unsuccessfully trying to write a novel in an old New Jersey seaside house. Some of the props are a kick—like empty shoes that walk across the floor, or a bedstead whose headboard is made of spirally wires that Van Tieghem twangs as he thrashes among the bedclothes. Tacky old songs, late ‘40s commercials, and other stuff that comes over the gleaming, red plastic Deco radio, create a fragrant, funny, nostalgic atmosphere. The bright, confident visitors add spice and diversion—Linda Mancini; as her ongoing character “Angelina Contadina,” playing the landlady; Hilary Easton as a nosy and flirtatious next-door neighbor; DTW’s production manager Phil Sandstrom as delivery man; Lisa Love as Van Tieghem’s old girlfriend; and Damon Pooser as one of a group of friends dropping in from New York. I love when the guys team up to sing, “Get Wildroot Creme-Oil, Charlie,” and all the guests follow up with a tight, rhythmic chorus of flapping and smacking gestures. Dudek plays a 19th century ghost wait. tag for her whaler husband with inscrutable solemnity. She intrudes on Van Tieghem sometimes, but with no obvious purpose. Since he is the exact image of her long-dead husband, you’d expect her attentions to him to be warmer, but her presence is both disruptive, stiff, and vague. When, at one point, she dances, the sharp, swinging material is too abstract to have any function in the piece.
There’s nothing at all spooky in The Ghost Writer. But the crucial element that’s entirely missing is a convincingly romantic atmosphere to offset and balance the giddy nostalgia of the period gimmicks and references. To set a sentimental tale in a frivolous context celebrating the consumer goods of 40 years ago is a tasty, airy idea, but everything’s got to hum along. When it gets pedestrian or dragged out, the naked mechanics become painful. Any snag and the whole thing poops like a cold soufflé.
I don’t know what music—if any--Patricia Cremins omitted from the recording of the Verdi Requiem she used to accompany her ambitious group work The Big Gulf, but it can’t have been much. What was curious was to have an introduction and several sections danced in silence. Why was some dancing supported by music and some not? For most of the piece, she used the Verdi as background, for atmosphere, and linked the dancing to it only loosely. The advantages she surrendered were the music’s dramatic momentum and its structural integrity.
Still The Big Gulf had merit in its uncluttered scope and amplitude. There’s a grave and moving early sequence in which a dancer rolls down the center steps of Washington Square Church’s altar, crawls back up, bumps down again, then rolls in an arc to the steps at the side of the altar. He crawls up them, and rolls center to come down those front steps gently, resting on each one. Other performers roll in, up the aide steps and down, and two others crawl in from the audience. The effect, of melancholy striving, is a distant reminder of Gustave Dore etchings of the flood in which serpentine masses of human bodies swarm for the high ground. There’s a violent and tender duet to the “Rex tremendae” in which a man flings his partner sway without letting go of one hand, by which he roughly rips her back. In a simple, very beautiful solo for Henry Montes to “Salva me,” he passionately runs and runs in a big circle, but always with a sense of covering new ground; his arms seeking. In one of the later reprises of the Dies Irae, there are the terrors of beating hands, clawings at the mouth, that recall Michelangelo’s fresco of The Last Judgment. The Sanctus and Agnes Dei were choreographed for the nine teenagers of the Coupé Dance Company of Rockland County. and those sections were nicely integrated. Most of the imagery was tender, caring. placid, even consoling, and the dancing unforced. Halle Markle was particularly lovely.
Singtime
March 7
In two duets from 1988, Boneyard and Jungle Breath, Daniel Lepkoff and Paul Langland play expert games with sound and gesture. Through responsive vocalizations, they build vocal sounds into climactic structures, then bend, abandon, collapse, or twist them into variant forms, to the accompaniment of commentary by the hands and upper body.
In Boneyard, soft hand and curling arm movements join the dance of their light, high voices. A breathy shhhh brings the performers swimming onto their sides. Voiceless breath sounds accompany drifting moves of limp hands and swishing legs. In a later portion of the piece, Langland rubs Lepkoff’s sternum, then taps it hard. Lepkoff looks down, to where Langland has so assertively addressed him, puzzled. Continuing a developing conversation of aggressive inquiry that’s on the approximate level of Me Tarzan, you Jane. he does the same to Langland. Then Langland pushes his finger into Lepkoff’s shoulder. Lepkoff pushes Langland’s breast. Langland pokes Lepkoff’s chest, then his nipple, and Lepkoff sinks dreamily backward. Jungle Breath, a suite of vocal explorations that starts with monotone uh uh uhs is potentially wilder. The initial sounds have a boinging quality. The rhythmic intervals get closer, sounds begin to overlap, and their pitches vary more widely. Langland and Lepkoff match each other with ha ha has and ah ah ahs that, as they mount in frequency and shrillness, start the audience laughing. Next the pair drop into a foul, growling aaah fit to scrape the crud out of their throats. Staticky, mechanical clicks from Lepkoff gradually become a kind of extended, delicately modulated belch that contrasts with Langland’s aaah. A simple gestural pattern alternating flat hands and fists plays against responsive mmms. They bounce, twist, fall. Face to face. very close. they do a panting song like old Eskimo ladies.
The intensity and speed of the mingling, overlapping rhythms deepen the seamless curve of their song, make it more urgent, almost desperate, as pumping gusts of air in and out of the upper chest becomes difficult and erupts in sputters of little coughs. These are fascinating. virtuosic exercises, but they rarely become more than clever. For all their expressive color and apparent range, they touch only the intellect. Perhaps the problem is in the way each miniature essay is turned on and off. Lepkoff and Langland keep things too tasteful and restrained, tempting us with release but never getting carried away. I didn’t make much of Image Gestures, improvised by Dina Falconi, Felice Wolfzahn, Lauri Nagel. and Lepkoff, under Lepkofl’s direction, and with live music played by Serge Gubelman, who wandered the space blowing a huge, growling wind instrument. or bowing across the metal cage of what looked to be a lantern.
Lepkoff—who has been improvising for at least 15 years and has worked closely with Steve Paxton—can be a marvelously soft, flexible performer. But Image Gestures seemed unlike him—indecisive and tight, studied rather than spontaneous. Because this kind of event is not presentational, the audience must be empathetic, in cahoots with the dancers, to get the good of it. What’s required on the part of the performers—besides their skill in moving and their affinity with one another—is generosity of spirit. But Image Gestures seemed mingy, offering only clues to what it might have been. I like Wolfzahn, who has a gentle, ethereal translucency, and Nagel, who was the only performer to show some spirit, as if she were present in heart and mind. Falconi was new to me, and nothing at all happened in the long solo where she mostly crouched with her jaw set. I wondered if the dancers were inhibited by a conceptual structure that provided apparent security while preventing them from really riffing. Who knows? Maybe it was just an off night.
P.S. 122 (February 17 to 19).
In two duets from 1988, Boneyard and Jungle Breath, Daniel Lepkoff and Paul Langland play expert games with sound and gesture. Through responsive vocalizations, they build vocal sounds into climactic structures, then bend, abandon, collapse, or twist them into variant forms, to the accompaniment of commentary by the hands and upper body.
In Boneyard, soft hand and curling arm movements join the dance of their light, high voices. A breathy shhhh brings the performers swimming onto their sides. Voiceless breath sounds accompany drifting moves of limp hands and swishing legs. In a later portion of the piece, Langland rubs Lepkoff’s sternum, then taps it hard. Lepkoff looks down, to where Langland has so assertively addressed him, puzzled. Continuing a developing conversation of aggressive inquiry that’s on the approximate level of Me Tarzan, you Jane. he does the same to Langland. Then Langland pushes his finger into Lepkoff’s shoulder. Lepkoff pushes Langland’s breast. Langland pokes Lepkoff’s chest, then his nipple, and Lepkoff sinks dreamily backward. Jungle Breath, a suite of vocal explorations that starts with monotone uh uh uhs is potentially wilder. The initial sounds have a boinging quality. The rhythmic intervals get closer, sounds begin to overlap, and their pitches vary more widely. Langland and Lepkoff match each other with ha ha has and ah ah ahs that, as they mount in frequency and shrillness, start the audience laughing. Next the pair drop into a foul, growling aaah fit to scrape the crud out of their throats. Staticky, mechanical clicks from Lepkoff gradually become a kind of extended, delicately modulated belch that contrasts with Langland’s aaah. A simple gestural pattern alternating flat hands and fists plays against responsive mmms. They bounce, twist, fall. Face to face. very close. they do a panting song like old Eskimo ladies.
The intensity and speed of the mingling, overlapping rhythms deepen the seamless curve of their song, make it more urgent, almost desperate, as pumping gusts of air in and out of the upper chest becomes difficult and erupts in sputters of little coughs. These are fascinating. virtuosic exercises, but they rarely become more than clever. For all their expressive color and apparent range, they touch only the intellect. Perhaps the problem is in the way each miniature essay is turned on and off. Lepkoff and Langland keep things too tasteful and restrained, tempting us with release but never getting carried away. I didn’t make much of Image Gestures, improvised by Dina Falconi, Felice Wolfzahn, Lauri Nagel. and Lepkoff, under Lepkofl’s direction, and with live music played by Serge Gubelman, who wandered the space blowing a huge, growling wind instrument. or bowing across the metal cage of what looked to be a lantern.
Lepkoff—who has been improvising for at least 15 years and has worked closely with Steve Paxton—can be a marvelously soft, flexible performer. But Image Gestures seemed unlike him—indecisive and tight, studied rather than spontaneous. Because this kind of event is not presentational, the audience must be empathetic, in cahoots with the dancers, to get the good of it. What’s required on the part of the performers—besides their skill in moving and their affinity with one another—is generosity of spirit. But Image Gestures seemed mingy, offering only clues to what it might have been. I like Wolfzahn, who has a gentle, ethereal translucency, and Nagel, who was the only performer to show some spirit, as if she were present in heart and mind. Falconi was new to me, and nothing at all happened in the long solo where she mostly crouched with her jaw set. I wondered if the dancers were inhibited by a conceptual structure that provided apparent security while preventing them from really riffing. Who knows? Maybe it was just an off night.
P.S. 122 (February 17 to 19).
Seattle Slew
June 6
Invited to check out the Seattle cultural scene for a couple of days, I saw the giant downtown hole in the ground that will one day be the new home of the Seattle Art Museum. An electrical substation painted in pastel colors next to a whimsical display of whirligigs made of throwaway appliance parts; Scott Burton’s stone seats on a pleasant terrace at the edge of Lake Washington: and contemporary Northwest art in the lobby, restaurants, and bars of the Sheraton hotel I had maybe the best coffee anywhere, including Italy. It didn’t even rain much, and my last full day was clear. I watched a whale blow in the Hood Canal near the Olympic Peninsula, and Mt. Rainier was out—a snowy, floating ghost of a mountain.
A Schubert evening sponsored by the Seattle Camerata featuring pianist David Golub and soprano Erie Mills enticed a varied audience and could hardly have been lovelier. The Seattle Repertory’s Truffles in the Soup, updated from Carlo Goldoni’s The Servant of Two Masters by director Dan Sullivan, was too heavy-handed a caricature, but Doug Schmidt’s elaborate cartoon set of a Little Italy street scene kept me fascinated for at least one full act.
Kent Stowall’s Swan Lake for the Pacific Northwest Ballet thrilled most of the audience, and it’s a pretty robust bush-league production, but Stowall has weird musical instincts. In Act I he’s got dancers flitting around to music that’s made for a procession, and then he keeps hem standing around while the music takes wing. Taking her first shot at the role of Odette/Odile, Colleen Neary had to force her performance and there was little convincing warmth between her and Siegfried (Thordal Christensen). She also had the habit of hyperextending her foot in arabesque, which frequently marred her line. Unlike the gorgeous, glossy blackbird of a Von Rothbart appearing in American Ballet Theater’s new Swan Lake, the ominous, lurking, middle-aged gent (Sterling Kekoa) PNW provides could be from the KGB, and I liked that. The flapping, bourreeing swan maidens are very effective, but Siegfried’s hunting chums look like they’re about to strafe them with semiautomatic weapons when she rushes up to bid them hold. Swan Lakes are guaranteed to be full of details that make no sense. Like the way Rothbart cozies up to the Queen Mother and shares the throne with her. In ABT’s production, he doesn’t even bother to chitchat. You’d think she’d have the impertinent bugger tossed out, even if he’s going to be an in-law.
In Seattle, I wondered about the six debutantes from among whom Siegfried is supposed to pick his bride. They’re such nice/well-behaved clones, one for all and all for one, as if it doesn’t matter to them who he chooses. Of all the dancers I particularly enjoyed Hugh Bignay, who gave a rich characterization as the tippling old tutor and danced the Neapolitan Dance in Act III with brio. I liked the clarity of the first act set on the castle ramparts, and the spindly, autumnal forest of Acts Il and IV, but Act III—in a hideous red Gothic hall with stag horn trophies on the walls and stiff Renaissance Venetian dignitaries in a gallery—invited claustrophobia. The mechanical swans we’re accustomed to see gliding across the rear of the stage dive-bomb the lake like Messerschmidts in this production—an amusing change, though equally kitsch. And at the end, poor Odette is still stuck in her swan’s body and Prince Siegfried is in a state of collapse. I’m not crazy about the usual apotheosis, but I do prefer having my final image of Odette as human being rather than a zooming decoy.
On the Boards is a presenting organization with a spacious black box theater located on the second floor of a building owned by the Most Worshipful Sons of Haiti (a black Masonic organization) in a low-income district that, in Seattle, passes for a slum. They presented the premiere of Llory Wilson’s This Cordate Carcass, a tight-lipped, moving piece of work. Inspired by the life and works of Mexican painter Frida Kahlo, it was co-commissioned through the National Performance Network by On the Boards, Philadelphia’s Painted Bride Art Center, and Dance Theater Workshop (where it’s scheduled to be presented next May). For this unsentimental collaboration, set and lighting designer Beliz Brother designed three 12-foot, freestanding copper poles which the dancers spring onto, and a huge, four-poster installation—a little like the bottom of a radio tower— with overhead handholds. The sculpture suggests both an elaborate torture instrument and the bed in which Kahlo passed too much of her life, painting with the canvas above her. Crippled by polio as a child, Kahlo had her spine splintered in a bus accident in 1925 and spent most of her years bedridden, on crutches, or in a wheelchair, and died in 1954, a year after her right leg was amputated because of gangrene.
But This Cordate Carcass isn’t primarily a piece about pain, and it’s not really biographical. It’s about coping and pressing onward. In a dozen sections, Wilson creates a { } work that is both exhilarating and heartbreaking. In several of them, the five dancers (all women: Gretchen Junker, Kathleen Kelly, Katherine Petersen, Rhonda Summer, and Wilson) spring high onto the copper poles and poise against them, lock themselves around them, lean their necks against them, or spiral slowly downwards. Once, three of the dancers cling with their legs while their arms dangle back piteously, like spitted offerings. Often a single dancer will be carried or gently manipulated by two partners. The movement throughout is twisted, distorted, wobbly, rocking, but it’s never feeble. There’s a comic Day of the Dead skeleton dance in black light - all jerking and thumping to the metallic percussion and squeaky cackles of Rachel Warwick and Arturo Peal’s score. Later, three dancers in soft dresses with flowered borders turn, hop, and waltz like proper ladies. But, on the whole, the sections involving the set or other props are the most compelling. Wilson has a severe solo that begins with her hanging from the hand-holds on the tower. Around her torso, she wears an apparatus of white straps that resembles a kind of surgical brace and to the front of her leotard is painted a vertical rectangle that seems to be cruelly bleeding around the edge. Then she’s carried on the shoulders of two other dancers, and drops backward. She sits, falls over, rolls back up, and writhes stiffly, like something irrevocably warped. A long sequence of projections (by Lisa Farnham) on a vertical panel shows an eloquent series of body prints—some the merest fragments—of the dancers. Some imprints have the immediacy of hurried calligraphic brushwork; in others the heaviness of the inked body creates a mournful fossil record. Viewing print after print makes a gentle occasion for meditation in the middle of the piece—a time when sorrow can sneak up on you.
The most indelible section is a solo for Kelly using those aluminum crutches that lock around the wrist, and wearing point shoes mostly covered by her tights. Bent over, crunched, leaning back or forward, she hauls or swings herself along. She raises a sickled leg high and plunges forward. dragging her body. Her progress is singleminded and passionate, heaving with strain, yet with no wasted effort. The gymnastic display on the poles is assured, neat, precise—a kind of smooth conquest. Gradually, in a very cool and subtle way, the poles the dancers throw themselves against and perch upon come to represent the metal that speared Kahlo’s body yet couldn’t defeat her spirit.
At Seattle Center Opera House (May 17 through 26).
Invited to check out the Seattle cultural scene for a couple of days, I saw the giant downtown hole in the ground that will one day be the new home of the Seattle Art Museum. An electrical substation painted in pastel colors next to a whimsical display of whirligigs made of throwaway appliance parts; Scott Burton’s stone seats on a pleasant terrace at the edge of Lake Washington: and contemporary Northwest art in the lobby, restaurants, and bars of the Sheraton hotel I had maybe the best coffee anywhere, including Italy. It didn’t even rain much, and my last full day was clear. I watched a whale blow in the Hood Canal near the Olympic Peninsula, and Mt. Rainier was out—a snowy, floating ghost of a mountain.
A Schubert evening sponsored by the Seattle Camerata featuring pianist David Golub and soprano Erie Mills enticed a varied audience and could hardly have been lovelier. The Seattle Repertory’s Truffles in the Soup, updated from Carlo Goldoni’s The Servant of Two Masters by director Dan Sullivan, was too heavy-handed a caricature, but Doug Schmidt’s elaborate cartoon set of a Little Italy street scene kept me fascinated for at least one full act.
Kent Stowall’s Swan Lake for the Pacific Northwest Ballet thrilled most of the audience, and it’s a pretty robust bush-league production, but Stowall has weird musical instincts. In Act I he’s got dancers flitting around to music that’s made for a procession, and then he keeps hem standing around while the music takes wing. Taking her first shot at the role of Odette/Odile, Colleen Neary had to force her performance and there was little convincing warmth between her and Siegfried (Thordal Christensen). She also had the habit of hyperextending her foot in arabesque, which frequently marred her line. Unlike the gorgeous, glossy blackbird of a Von Rothbart appearing in American Ballet Theater’s new Swan Lake, the ominous, lurking, middle-aged gent (Sterling Kekoa) PNW provides could be from the KGB, and I liked that. The flapping, bourreeing swan maidens are very effective, but Siegfried’s hunting chums look like they’re about to strafe them with semiautomatic weapons when she rushes up to bid them hold. Swan Lakes are guaranteed to be full of details that make no sense. Like the way Rothbart cozies up to the Queen Mother and shares the throne with her. In ABT’s production, he doesn’t even bother to chitchat. You’d think she’d have the impertinent bugger tossed out, even if he’s going to be an in-law.
In Seattle, I wondered about the six debutantes from among whom Siegfried is supposed to pick his bride. They’re such nice/well-behaved clones, one for all and all for one, as if it doesn’t matter to them who he chooses. Of all the dancers I particularly enjoyed Hugh Bignay, who gave a rich characterization as the tippling old tutor and danced the Neapolitan Dance in Act III with brio. I liked the clarity of the first act set on the castle ramparts, and the spindly, autumnal forest of Acts Il and IV, but Act III—in a hideous red Gothic hall with stag horn trophies on the walls and stiff Renaissance Venetian dignitaries in a gallery—invited claustrophobia. The mechanical swans we’re accustomed to see gliding across the rear of the stage dive-bomb the lake like Messerschmidts in this production—an amusing change, though equally kitsch. And at the end, poor Odette is still stuck in her swan’s body and Prince Siegfried is in a state of collapse. I’m not crazy about the usual apotheosis, but I do prefer having my final image of Odette as human being rather than a zooming decoy.
On the Boards is a presenting organization with a spacious black box theater located on the second floor of a building owned by the Most Worshipful Sons of Haiti (a black Masonic organization) in a low-income district that, in Seattle, passes for a slum. They presented the premiere of Llory Wilson’s This Cordate Carcass, a tight-lipped, moving piece of work. Inspired by the life and works of Mexican painter Frida Kahlo, it was co-commissioned through the National Performance Network by On the Boards, Philadelphia’s Painted Bride Art Center, and Dance Theater Workshop (where it’s scheduled to be presented next May). For this unsentimental collaboration, set and lighting designer Beliz Brother designed three 12-foot, freestanding copper poles which the dancers spring onto, and a huge, four-poster installation—a little like the bottom of a radio tower— with overhead handholds. The sculpture suggests both an elaborate torture instrument and the bed in which Kahlo passed too much of her life, painting with the canvas above her. Crippled by polio as a child, Kahlo had her spine splintered in a bus accident in 1925 and spent most of her years bedridden, on crutches, or in a wheelchair, and died in 1954, a year after her right leg was amputated because of gangrene.
But This Cordate Carcass isn’t primarily a piece about pain, and it’s not really biographical. It’s about coping and pressing onward. In a dozen sections, Wilson creates a { } work that is both exhilarating and heartbreaking. In several of them, the five dancers (all women: Gretchen Junker, Kathleen Kelly, Katherine Petersen, Rhonda Summer, and Wilson) spring high onto the copper poles and poise against them, lock themselves around them, lean their necks against them, or spiral slowly downwards. Once, three of the dancers cling with their legs while their arms dangle back piteously, like spitted offerings. Often a single dancer will be carried or gently manipulated by two partners. The movement throughout is twisted, distorted, wobbly, rocking, but it’s never feeble. There’s a comic Day of the Dead skeleton dance in black light - all jerking and thumping to the metallic percussion and squeaky cackles of Rachel Warwick and Arturo Peal’s score. Later, three dancers in soft dresses with flowered borders turn, hop, and waltz like proper ladies. But, on the whole, the sections involving the set or other props are the most compelling. Wilson has a severe solo that begins with her hanging from the hand-holds on the tower. Around her torso, she wears an apparatus of white straps that resembles a kind of surgical brace and to the front of her leotard is painted a vertical rectangle that seems to be cruelly bleeding around the edge. Then she’s carried on the shoulders of two other dancers, and drops backward. She sits, falls over, rolls back up, and writhes stiffly, like something irrevocably warped. A long sequence of projections (by Lisa Farnham) on a vertical panel shows an eloquent series of body prints—some the merest fragments—of the dancers. Some imprints have the immediacy of hurried calligraphic brushwork; in others the heaviness of the inked body creates a mournful fossil record. Viewing print after print makes a gentle occasion for meditation in the middle of the piece—a time when sorrow can sneak up on you.
The most indelible section is a solo for Kelly using those aluminum crutches that lock around the wrist, and wearing point shoes mostly covered by her tights. Bent over, crunched, leaning back or forward, she hauls or swings herself along. She raises a sickled leg high and plunges forward. dragging her body. Her progress is singleminded and passionate, heaving with strain, yet with no wasted effort. The gymnastic display on the poles is assured, neat, precise—a kind of smooth conquest. Gradually, in a very cool and subtle way, the poles the dancers throw themselves against and perch upon come to represent the metal that speared Kahlo’s body yet couldn’t defeat her spirit.
At Seattle Center Opera House (May 17 through 26).
Screwballs
March 14
Second Hand Dance is three guys from Binghamton whose vigorous, acrobatic performing style has some affinity with early Pilobolus. But Second Hand - Greg O’Brien, Andy Horowtiz and Paul Gordon, each identified in the program by the length of his hair or lack of same - is not involved with transformations of oozing organic forms; they organize their bodies into intriguing contraptions after models that are more mechanical and architectural.
Still, their movement per se isn’t rigid; they don’t try to be funny by imitating mechanical precision. Their dances are spiked by sudden shouts, or peculiar gestures, like spooling hands and wiggling, come-hither fingers. The don’t defy the laws of physics in the screwy ways they manage to interlock their limbs or establish queer, precarious balances, but you’d expect their bodies to protest. This is not the sort of stuff that happens with magical ease; it’s plainly effortful. And once they’ve knotted themselves into some impractical clump, some part of someone will start to tilt or roll or swivel, like a piece of equipment performing an absurd exercise.
At one point in Exhibit A, they hump across the floor like an accordion crossed with a worm. In From the Depths, where they’re tilting, falling over slowly, one at a time, forward and backward, they remind me of a mimeograph machine in action. Their sobriety and assurance doesn’t convince me that these are rational people. But Second Hand’s range is greater than this. In Say Goodbye to Angel, a disturbing and beautiful solo, O’Brien - the tall bald one - wearing broken shoes, half-on, half-off, rocks awkwardly. When he turns, a shoe comes off. He smiles, flings himself softly while tenderly laying his head on is arm. Sweet and unpredictably moody, even dangerous, he probably can’t walk and chew gum at the same time. He kicks his shoes off viciously, circles one of the pillars at the edge f the the space while leaning against it. He pulls his hands from his pockets and spills whatever be comes up with—pennies, paperclips—on the floor, in a puzzling gesture of generosity and helplessness. I found Ease, a solo performed by Paul Gordon, intriguing too. It doesn’t move around much. He starts rubbing his neck and shoulders, then moves into easy twists, rubbery curves, swerves, and small swoops, and finishes asleep.
But Second Hand’s trio, Moving to Mahler, to the first movement of Symphony No. 1, misses, and their square relation to rhythm doesn’t help. According to the program, the company’s name derives from the source of their costumes, props, and sets: yard sales, flea markets, and dumpsters, I guess that’s no lie. In To Arms!, our heros, wearing striped pj’s and nightcaps, run and bound around, butt chests, and whack each other with big, padded, mandolin-shaped bats. Then they slip on their armor, which looks like three wastebaskets of basted-together wooden scraps. They drop them over their heads like oversize pinafores and stagger around, weave in and out, and whirl with the bottom panels flaring like tutus-cum-rotary saws.
For the astonishingly goofy Clackers, where they take on sharply contrasting personalities, they’ve tied triangular wooden pieces under their buttocks and wooden blocks to their ankles and rap them together loudly as they dance. I like the way these guys revel in willful immaturity and amateurism. They’re probably brain surgeons and rocket scientists in real life.
At P.S. 122 (February 24 to 26).
Second Hand Dance is three guys from Binghamton whose vigorous, acrobatic performing style has some affinity with early Pilobolus. But Second Hand - Greg O’Brien, Andy Horowtiz and Paul Gordon, each identified in the program by the length of his hair or lack of same - is not involved with transformations of oozing organic forms; they organize their bodies into intriguing contraptions after models that are more mechanical and architectural.
Still, their movement per se isn’t rigid; they don’t try to be funny by imitating mechanical precision. Their dances are spiked by sudden shouts, or peculiar gestures, like spooling hands and wiggling, come-hither fingers. The don’t defy the laws of physics in the screwy ways they manage to interlock their limbs or establish queer, precarious balances, but you’d expect their bodies to protest. This is not the sort of stuff that happens with magical ease; it’s plainly effortful. And once they’ve knotted themselves into some impractical clump, some part of someone will start to tilt or roll or swivel, like a piece of equipment performing an absurd exercise.
At one point in Exhibit A, they hump across the floor like an accordion crossed with a worm. In From the Depths, where they’re tilting, falling over slowly, one at a time, forward and backward, they remind me of a mimeograph machine in action. Their sobriety and assurance doesn’t convince me that these are rational people. But Second Hand’s range is greater than this. In Say Goodbye to Angel, a disturbing and beautiful solo, O’Brien - the tall bald one - wearing broken shoes, half-on, half-off, rocks awkwardly. When he turns, a shoe comes off. He smiles, flings himself softly while tenderly laying his head on is arm. Sweet and unpredictably moody, even dangerous, he probably can’t walk and chew gum at the same time. He kicks his shoes off viciously, circles one of the pillars at the edge f the the space while leaning against it. He pulls his hands from his pockets and spills whatever be comes up with—pennies, paperclips—on the floor, in a puzzling gesture of generosity and helplessness. I found Ease, a solo performed by Paul Gordon, intriguing too. It doesn’t move around much. He starts rubbing his neck and shoulders, then moves into easy twists, rubbery curves, swerves, and small swoops, and finishes asleep.
But Second Hand’s trio, Moving to Mahler, to the first movement of Symphony No. 1, misses, and their square relation to rhythm doesn’t help. According to the program, the company’s name derives from the source of their costumes, props, and sets: yard sales, flea markets, and dumpsters, I guess that’s no lie. In To Arms!, our heros, wearing striped pj’s and nightcaps, run and bound around, butt chests, and whack each other with big, padded, mandolin-shaped bats. Then they slip on their armor, which looks like three wastebaskets of basted-together wooden scraps. They drop them over their heads like oversize pinafores and stagger around, weave in and out, and whirl with the bottom panels flaring like tutus-cum-rotary saws.
For the astonishingly goofy Clackers, where they take on sharply contrasting personalities, they’ve tied triangular wooden pieces under their buttocks and wooden blocks to their ankles and rap them together loudly as they dance. I like the way these guys revel in willful immaturity and amateurism. They’re probably brain surgeons and rocket scientists in real life.
At P.S. 122 (February 24 to 26).
River’s Edge
September 12
Trisha Brown revived her 1973 Raft Piece for Battery Park City’s North Cove. One of her subtle and low-key accumulation pieces, it was performed only once before, on the lagoon of the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, 15 years ago. The overflow audience here, which had already claimed its seats on the flat and in the bleachers near the World Financial Center’s glassed in Winter Garden, left their places, and streamed around the cove to watch four prone women in white quietly signaling as they bobbed and drifted apart on their individual rafts against the glittering action of little breeze-whipped waves.
”They’re in kayaks,” I heard one passerby (mis)inform his companion. At a distance, you could barely distinguish moving arms from legs. And quickly the remaining natural light began to fade. This must have been quite a different situation from the Walker on a wet day. There was glorious competition from the sunset and the illuminated Colgate clock on the Jersey side, and from the strolling audience, It didn’t take long for a strong, steady wind to run the rafts into the shadow of the southern river wall. From where I was, first one, then another, vanished behind a huge sailing yacht docked there. At that point, you had to be directly across the cove or looking down from the promenade on that wall.
Time out to walk around to a better spot. I could see one dancer directly below me and another wedged into a corner near one of the jetties that narrow the cove’s entrance. As I looked straight down the deliberate sequential repetitions of the piece seemed insanely contrary in relation to the whimsicality of the water surface and the dipping wooden square on which the dancer lay. Raising her head, lifting her arms, twisting one leg over another she seemed to perform an exercise an sheer compulsion.
In this fragmented context, so full of distractions, it was hard to look at Raft Piece with much sense of its continuity over time. My inclination was to see it as a work of kinetic outdoor sculpture: something essentially constant that you observe from several perspectives Then you move along. The format of the evening was awkward: get seats, leave them, return to find them. There was a lot of bustle, but, happily, no fights or big arguments about who had been sitting where. Still, it might have been better to have separated the performances. I think Raft Piece would have been more effective in full daylight in an atmosphere of less intensity.
Astral Convertible, Brown’s recent collaboration with Robert Rauschenberg (visuals) and Richard Landry (music), was beautifully performed but for long stretches it seemed too velvety, merely pretty. The open air has a diffusing effect on performances that don’t directly address the audience (unless we’re very close, actively defining the event). It’s as if a veil comes down between us and fuzzes the connections so it’s harder to feel the quality of the dancing, harder to register details. The problem isn’t actually a visual one; it’s more that the 3-D world commands attention, even if all that’s calling is the breeze on our cheeks. Still the result is lulling and generalizes the experience of the work. The four metal racks with lights and sound producing equipment occasionally blinking and bleating in response to the dancers may or may not have been working properly. Either way, it doesn’t matter.
The eccentricity of Rauschenberg’s lights is an easy distraction, and from any distance at all, the racks look like the adjustable shelving a business might use for storing old files. Outdoors, Landry’s music - a complex mix of bug noises, electronic gabbing etc — also seems like a stew that meshes too easily with the noises of the actual environment { } the roar of a passing plane, whose reflected lights also climbed-the windowwalls of skyscraper as if it were flying upwards through the building. The one long moment that held my attention was a sweet, steady harmonic that balanced against insect whirrings.
There is nothing in Astral Convertible that catches you off guard, even though Brown’s use of her dancers as crawling, swinging teams is novel, and various cheeky ways of bumping a partner keep cropping up. Its well honed movement logic brooks no argument. Diane Madden’s rather austere but supple solo and a duet for Madden and Lance Gries jump out with special intensity and the last few minutes are electric. But the women seem almost too conforming in their luscious rituals of curving, swinging, bending, recovering. Brown’s men—Wil Swanson, David Thomson, Gregory Lara - are more vividly differentiated; the buoyancy of their jumping, the tilting angles of their limbs, their voluptuous solidity break up and refresh the women’s honeyed moves. The company is marking its 20th anniversary this season and women have been around since the beginning. Though Brown has used men in her company for about a decade they’re the newer toys.
At World Financial Center (August 30).
Trisha Brown revived her 1973 Raft Piece for Battery Park City’s North Cove. One of her subtle and low-key accumulation pieces, it was performed only once before, on the lagoon of the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, 15 years ago. The overflow audience here, which had already claimed its seats on the flat and in the bleachers near the World Financial Center’s glassed in Winter Garden, left their places, and streamed around the cove to watch four prone women in white quietly signaling as they bobbed and drifted apart on their individual rafts against the glittering action of little breeze-whipped waves.
”They’re in kayaks,” I heard one passerby (mis)inform his companion. At a distance, you could barely distinguish moving arms from legs. And quickly the remaining natural light began to fade. This must have been quite a different situation from the Walker on a wet day. There was glorious competition from the sunset and the illuminated Colgate clock on the Jersey side, and from the strolling audience, It didn’t take long for a strong, steady wind to run the rafts into the shadow of the southern river wall. From where I was, first one, then another, vanished behind a huge sailing yacht docked there. At that point, you had to be directly across the cove or looking down from the promenade on that wall.
Time out to walk around to a better spot. I could see one dancer directly below me and another wedged into a corner near one of the jetties that narrow the cove’s entrance. As I looked straight down the deliberate sequential repetitions of the piece seemed insanely contrary in relation to the whimsicality of the water surface and the dipping wooden square on which the dancer lay. Raising her head, lifting her arms, twisting one leg over another she seemed to perform an exercise an sheer compulsion.
In this fragmented context, so full of distractions, it was hard to look at Raft Piece with much sense of its continuity over time. My inclination was to see it as a work of kinetic outdoor sculpture: something essentially constant that you observe from several perspectives Then you move along. The format of the evening was awkward: get seats, leave them, return to find them. There was a lot of bustle, but, happily, no fights or big arguments about who had been sitting where. Still, it might have been better to have separated the performances. I think Raft Piece would have been more effective in full daylight in an atmosphere of less intensity.
Astral Convertible, Brown’s recent collaboration with Robert Rauschenberg (visuals) and Richard Landry (music), was beautifully performed but for long stretches it seemed too velvety, merely pretty. The open air has a diffusing effect on performances that don’t directly address the audience (unless we’re very close, actively defining the event). It’s as if a veil comes down between us and fuzzes the connections so it’s harder to feel the quality of the dancing, harder to register details. The problem isn’t actually a visual one; it’s more that the 3-D world commands attention, even if all that’s calling is the breeze on our cheeks. Still the result is lulling and generalizes the experience of the work. The four metal racks with lights and sound producing equipment occasionally blinking and bleating in response to the dancers may or may not have been working properly. Either way, it doesn’t matter.
The eccentricity of Rauschenberg’s lights is an easy distraction, and from any distance at all, the racks look like the adjustable shelving a business might use for storing old files. Outdoors, Landry’s music - a complex mix of bug noises, electronic gabbing etc — also seems like a stew that meshes too easily with the noises of the actual environment { } the roar of a passing plane, whose reflected lights also climbed-the windowwalls of skyscraper as if it were flying upwards through the building. The one long moment that held my attention was a sweet, steady harmonic that balanced against insect whirrings.
There is nothing in Astral Convertible that catches you off guard, even though Brown’s use of her dancers as crawling, swinging teams is novel, and various cheeky ways of bumping a partner keep cropping up. Its well honed movement logic brooks no argument. Diane Madden’s rather austere but supple solo and a duet for Madden and Lance Gries jump out with special intensity and the last few minutes are electric. But the women seem almost too conforming in their luscious rituals of curving, swinging, bending, recovering. Brown’s men—Wil Swanson, David Thomson, Gregory Lara - are more vividly differentiated; the buoyancy of their jumping, the tilting angles of their limbs, their voluptuous solidity break up and refresh the women’s honeyed moves. The company is marking its 20th anniversary this season and women have been around since the beginning. Though Brown has used men in her company for about a decade they’re the newer toys.
At World Financial Center (August 30).
Reality Wrecked
May 16
Otrabanda’s Quasi-Kinetics, written and directed by Roger Babb, is a richly whimsical fantasy that tips and teeters on the very edge of reality. Michael Fajans and Nick Fennel’s huge telescoping set allows us to see three playing areas, one behind the other—simultaneous worlds that may extend out to infinity like the rooms in facing mirrors.
In a bare living room containing a nacreous plastic chair that occasionally glows, a low round table on which sits a red plastic glass that pops over, and a plastic garbage can with a mind of its own, Mary Shultz and Paul Zimet share a sweet if wiggy domesticity. Behind their curtains is a roughly similar room, with an inflatable red chair and tipped-over table, inhabited by a lively, giddy trio of dancers—Susan Milani, Nancy Alfaro, and choreographer Rocky Bornstein—who initially copy and multiply Shultz’s actions. And beyond, through a large opening rounded at the corners like a TV picture tube, is a nighttime, subtropical suburban garden inhabited by John Fleming.
In the course of the evening, the weirdly familiar characters from the second and third spaces invade the living room, and everyone begins to move reasonably freely from one space to another, sometimes by creeping under the stage. Fleming’s part, in a perverse dialogue with Zimet, is to undermine Zimet’s perceptions by diabolically interpreting a scene of giggly innocence in paranoid terms. In the work’s final moments, the whole set contracts in a trompe l’oeil Bunraku effect. But no, it really squeezes together, till Zimet and Shultz are crammed on a piece of stage about one foot deep. It’s a little like the moment in a fairy tale when you ask for one wish too many, and rocket back to penury, sadder but wiser. Not having received any advance warning about the meaning of this happening, Shultz and Zimet just look nonplussed.
As in last year’s Brain Cafe, things are not often what they seem, and perhaps Roger Babb’s text thrives too well on ambiguity and suggestion. Brain Cafe had a sharper edge, too, and honored the intense fragility of human relationships with an exhilarating combination of tenderness and ruthless honesty. Much of Quasi-Kinetics is about uncertainty, about how we see things, try to understand them, and struggle to incorporate them into our own story in some passably rational way. The characters are always coming up with fanciful theories.
Built on quicksand, Quasi-Kinetics keeps even its most basic premises vague: though Shultz and Zimet appear to be a couple in their own home, so innocent is their contact that they also seem like chance acquaintances having their first conversation. Shultz says she can’t take her eyes off him, and shows him—in a deliciously naive but characteristic demonstration—that even when she uses her hand to turn her head away, her eyes refuse to follow. The characters are always looking for confirmation of their experiences, trying to identify with one another, to recognize and be recognized. ”Did that ever happen to you?” Zimet asks.
Wonderfully susceptible to transcendent experiences, so are they also apt at re-creating them—like when Zimet describes the bliss of seeing a blue heron (though maybe it wasn’t a heron, and it might not have been exactly blue). “Sometimes you see something so beautiful it makes you forget everything,” he says, and ravishingly imitates the “languor of its flight” with a heavy, undulating flap of his arms. The dancing binds the performers to the earthbound reality of tables and chairs, and provides the physical energy for transformation, while the dialogue transports the Zimet and Shultz characters { } “Lately, I seem to be experiencing just myself,” he says. But she finds a vigorous kind of freedom and kinship with the visiting women. They picnic, pulling loaves of Italian bread and bottles of seltzer out of holes in the tilted table, and gobbling while they whirl and jump around. During the bacchanal, bouncing on the red chair, Shultz is swallowed by it. reappears with her arms waving, disappears again. A giant garbage can whizzes through and the women scramble out of the way. Zimet is panicky about Shultz’s fainting state and tries to resuscitate her—though clearly she’s just ecstatically dazed—and he yells to get the furniture cleared. He shoves the inflatable chair through the floor, Bornstein and Fleming haul the table up on pulleys, and, in the quiet time just after, the women skate through cleaning the floor with mops attached to their ankles.
Though it’s sometimes hard to be sure about what’s happening on the surface here—let alone what’s going on underneath and what it all might mean—it’s easy enough to go along for the ride. There’s a lushness to Quasi-Kinetics that has to do with the size and elaborateness of the set and the high-spirited bounce of the dancing that facilitates the transitions between the various spaces. It eventually infects and then carries Zimet, whose gentle alienation and fluctuating perceptions are at the center of the piece, into a kind of transformation that he barely notices and hardly trusts. Dancing around with Bornstein he realizes that something special is happening to him. “This is what’s supposed to happen,” he exclaims. “This is real,” But at the end, when Shultz notices how he’s changed—his expression’s new, he’s not holding his breath—he pooh-poohs it. “I’m the same person. I look the same. This is still me, isn’t it?” The compressing set provides the final twist.
Otrabanda’s Quasi-Kinetics, written and directed by Roger Babb, is a richly whimsical fantasy that tips and teeters on the very edge of reality. Michael Fajans and Nick Fennel’s huge telescoping set allows us to see three playing areas, one behind the other—simultaneous worlds that may extend out to infinity like the rooms in facing mirrors.
In a bare living room containing a nacreous plastic chair that occasionally glows, a low round table on which sits a red plastic glass that pops over, and a plastic garbage can with a mind of its own, Mary Shultz and Paul Zimet share a sweet if wiggy domesticity. Behind their curtains is a roughly similar room, with an inflatable red chair and tipped-over table, inhabited by a lively, giddy trio of dancers—Susan Milani, Nancy Alfaro, and choreographer Rocky Bornstein—who initially copy and multiply Shultz’s actions. And beyond, through a large opening rounded at the corners like a TV picture tube, is a nighttime, subtropical suburban garden inhabited by John Fleming.
In the course of the evening, the weirdly familiar characters from the second and third spaces invade the living room, and everyone begins to move reasonably freely from one space to another, sometimes by creeping under the stage. Fleming’s part, in a perverse dialogue with Zimet, is to undermine Zimet’s perceptions by diabolically interpreting a scene of giggly innocence in paranoid terms. In the work’s final moments, the whole set contracts in a trompe l’oeil Bunraku effect. But no, it really squeezes together, till Zimet and Shultz are crammed on a piece of stage about one foot deep. It’s a little like the moment in a fairy tale when you ask for one wish too many, and rocket back to penury, sadder but wiser. Not having received any advance warning about the meaning of this happening, Shultz and Zimet just look nonplussed.
As in last year’s Brain Cafe, things are not often what they seem, and perhaps Roger Babb’s text thrives too well on ambiguity and suggestion. Brain Cafe had a sharper edge, too, and honored the intense fragility of human relationships with an exhilarating combination of tenderness and ruthless honesty. Much of Quasi-Kinetics is about uncertainty, about how we see things, try to understand them, and struggle to incorporate them into our own story in some passably rational way. The characters are always coming up with fanciful theories.
Built on quicksand, Quasi-Kinetics keeps even its most basic premises vague: though Shultz and Zimet appear to be a couple in their own home, so innocent is their contact that they also seem like chance acquaintances having their first conversation. Shultz says she can’t take her eyes off him, and shows him—in a deliciously naive but characteristic demonstration—that even when she uses her hand to turn her head away, her eyes refuse to follow. The characters are always looking for confirmation of their experiences, trying to identify with one another, to recognize and be recognized. ”Did that ever happen to you?” Zimet asks.
Wonderfully susceptible to transcendent experiences, so are they also apt at re-creating them—like when Zimet describes the bliss of seeing a blue heron (though maybe it wasn’t a heron, and it might not have been exactly blue). “Sometimes you see something so beautiful it makes you forget everything,” he says, and ravishingly imitates the “languor of its flight” with a heavy, undulating flap of his arms. The dancing binds the performers to the earthbound reality of tables and chairs, and provides the physical energy for transformation, while the dialogue transports the Zimet and Shultz characters { } “Lately, I seem to be experiencing just myself,” he says. But she finds a vigorous kind of freedom and kinship with the visiting women. They picnic, pulling loaves of Italian bread and bottles of seltzer out of holes in the tilted table, and gobbling while they whirl and jump around. During the bacchanal, bouncing on the red chair, Shultz is swallowed by it. reappears with her arms waving, disappears again. A giant garbage can whizzes through and the women scramble out of the way. Zimet is panicky about Shultz’s fainting state and tries to resuscitate her—though clearly she’s just ecstatically dazed—and he yells to get the furniture cleared. He shoves the inflatable chair through the floor, Bornstein and Fleming haul the table up on pulleys, and, in the quiet time just after, the women skate through cleaning the floor with mops attached to their ankles.
Though it’s sometimes hard to be sure about what’s happening on the surface here—let alone what’s going on underneath and what it all might mean—it’s easy enough to go along for the ride. There’s a lushness to Quasi-Kinetics that has to do with the size and elaborateness of the set and the high-spirited bounce of the dancing that facilitates the transitions between the various spaces. It eventually infects and then carries Zimet, whose gentle alienation and fluctuating perceptions are at the center of the piece, into a kind of transformation that he barely notices and hardly trusts. Dancing around with Bornstein he realizes that something special is happening to him. “This is what’s supposed to happen,” he exclaims. “This is real,” But at the end, when Shultz notices how he’s changed—his expression’s new, he’s not holding his breath—he pooh-poohs it. “I’m the same person. I look the same. This is still me, isn’t it?” The compressing set provides the final twist.