Like a Waterfall
November 13
I hate it when the oldest piece on a program is the one I like best. I only caught half of Susan Tenney’s concert at the Dia Center for the Arts, but that included two premieres and a work from 1984 (as well as Ney Fonseca’s new Saudade), in addition to her 1982 Five Moments to Imagine—the piece I actually liked.
Sculptural and severe, Five Moments was terse and elegant, with each of its still, solemn scenes separated by an alarming blink of red light and a blackout. In each brief episode, in which very little obvious happens, Tenney creates an isolated, untouchable domestic world—life in a bubble. In one scene, she and Fonseca sit back- to-back in chairs, reading. In another, they chatter wordlessly with rapid gestures. In the last, their chairs are toppled and they stand apart. When they reach their hands toward each other and clasp them together, their arms begin to writhe involuntarily and a sudden strong pulse in their hands shivers their bodies. Tenney and Fonseca perform with quiet assurance and economy that let the piece’s ambiguities resonate.. Each “moment” has an immaculate inner stillness that begs to be shattered.
At Dia Center for the Arts (October 25 and 26).
Two of the works on Movement Research’s recent program pairing a half-dozen choreographers and composers seemed like working drafts, and, throughout the program, the fact of interdisciplinary collaboration didn’t appear particularly significant.
In Tamar Rogoff’s Blurred Boundaries, in which Felicia Norton treads and convulses to the mutterings, whispers, and aural scribbles of Cebello Morales, the body is a demanding conundrum, becoming more emphatically sexual and physically self-obsessed.
In Gatchers, with live music by plugged-in bassoonist Leslie Ross, Linda Austin and Jackie Shue manipulate cardboard mailing tubes in ways that may be carefully designed, dryly humorous, or calculated to make an obstacle course of the floor. Shue spins around holding tubes in her hands and under her arms. Austin balances some on her palms and drops them with a clatter. Both balance on the strewn tubes like a couple of loggers. Austin sets up a row of tubes leaning against the wall, and knocks them down by crawling through the tunnel they make. The business with the tubes is entertaining, but as it goes on I wonder what it’s in aid of. Shue seems uncertain, which makes her awkwardness charmless. Austin’s a deft mover, but I’m too aware of the concentration in her tense, pinched face.
Cydney Wilkes’s two solos— Angel Animal and Just Tell Me What You Want—are more solid.,rooted as much in the imperturbable, deadpan character she always presents as in the distinctive way she moves. Although her taciturnity lets you suspect an underlying humor, nothing overt surfaces. Her dancing never seems to affect that dry, elusive persona. Angel Animal is floorbound. But Wilkes creeps over her territory lightly, with great finesse. Rather monkey-like in her understated acrobatics, she scoots, squats, sidles, rotates gravely, and tumbles into cautious shoulder rolls. The shape of her movements mingles a primitive crudeness with extreme delicacy—like the way her pointed feet will meet together in an arrow to place a subtle accent in the dance phrase. Meanwhile, Zeena Parkins’s taped score accompanies Wilkes with a litter of tinkles. plunks, blurts, and bleats to make a wry commentary. There’s something very complicated in Wilkes’s simplicity. The carefulness and thoughtfulness of her movement seems rooted in suspicion of an untrustworthy world. It’s as if she were someone who’d been struck too often for no reason, but who refuses to prepare to duck a sudden blow.
Just Tell Me What You Want pairs Wilkes’s dancing with her recitation of a rambling text by Eileen Myles that ranges from the names of cities and states to gay politics and details of a lesbian murder of the 1890s. The text adds a strong flavor, but its changing themes and varying relationships to the movement sometimes make it distracting, The movement has range, though it’s not about steps. With its swings, smooth backing-up handstands, crawls, flings, loping runs, sudden bounces, it remains a mode of thinking. Wilkes’s delivery gives it a casual logic, though nothing she does is illustrative of the text. But there’s something intimidating about Wilkes in her plainness, something that says “hands off”—an insistence, a kind of invulnerability, a sense that she cannot be budged. So when, at the end, she declares a praise song to pussy, “My lover’s pussy is a battle cry, is a prayer, is loud, is wealthy, on TV, has a sense of humor, career...,” the assertion of sexual identity and power is particularly exhilarating. “I always...put my pussy in the middle of trees," says Wilkes, “like a waterfall."
At Ethnic Folk Arts Center (October 27 through 29).
I hate it when the oldest piece on a program is the one I like best. I only caught half of Susan Tenney’s concert at the Dia Center for the Arts, but that included two premieres and a work from 1984 (as well as Ney Fonseca’s new Saudade), in addition to her 1982 Five Moments to Imagine—the piece I actually liked.
Sculptural and severe, Five Moments was terse and elegant, with each of its still, solemn scenes separated by an alarming blink of red light and a blackout. In each brief episode, in which very little obvious happens, Tenney creates an isolated, untouchable domestic world—life in a bubble. In one scene, she and Fonseca sit back- to-back in chairs, reading. In another, they chatter wordlessly with rapid gestures. In the last, their chairs are toppled and they stand apart. When they reach their hands toward each other and clasp them together, their arms begin to writhe involuntarily and a sudden strong pulse in their hands shivers their bodies. Tenney and Fonseca perform with quiet assurance and economy that let the piece’s ambiguities resonate.. Each “moment” has an immaculate inner stillness that begs to be shattered.
At Dia Center for the Arts (October 25 and 26).
Two of the works on Movement Research’s recent program pairing a half-dozen choreographers and composers seemed like working drafts, and, throughout the program, the fact of interdisciplinary collaboration didn’t appear particularly significant.
In Tamar Rogoff’s Blurred Boundaries, in which Felicia Norton treads and convulses to the mutterings, whispers, and aural scribbles of Cebello Morales, the body is a demanding conundrum, becoming more emphatically sexual and physically self-obsessed.
In Gatchers, with live music by plugged-in bassoonist Leslie Ross, Linda Austin and Jackie Shue manipulate cardboard mailing tubes in ways that may be carefully designed, dryly humorous, or calculated to make an obstacle course of the floor. Shue spins around holding tubes in her hands and under her arms. Austin balances some on her palms and drops them with a clatter. Both balance on the strewn tubes like a couple of loggers. Austin sets up a row of tubes leaning against the wall, and knocks them down by crawling through the tunnel they make. The business with the tubes is entertaining, but as it goes on I wonder what it’s in aid of. Shue seems uncertain, which makes her awkwardness charmless. Austin’s a deft mover, but I’m too aware of the concentration in her tense, pinched face.
Cydney Wilkes’s two solos— Angel Animal and Just Tell Me What You Want—are more solid.,rooted as much in the imperturbable, deadpan character she always presents as in the distinctive way she moves. Although her taciturnity lets you suspect an underlying humor, nothing overt surfaces. Her dancing never seems to affect that dry, elusive persona. Angel Animal is floorbound. But Wilkes creeps over her territory lightly, with great finesse. Rather monkey-like in her understated acrobatics, she scoots, squats, sidles, rotates gravely, and tumbles into cautious shoulder rolls. The shape of her movements mingles a primitive crudeness with extreme delicacy—like the way her pointed feet will meet together in an arrow to place a subtle accent in the dance phrase. Meanwhile, Zeena Parkins’s taped score accompanies Wilkes with a litter of tinkles. plunks, blurts, and bleats to make a wry commentary. There’s something very complicated in Wilkes’s simplicity. The carefulness and thoughtfulness of her movement seems rooted in suspicion of an untrustworthy world. It’s as if she were someone who’d been struck too often for no reason, but who refuses to prepare to duck a sudden blow.
Just Tell Me What You Want pairs Wilkes’s dancing with her recitation of a rambling text by Eileen Myles that ranges from the names of cities and states to gay politics and details of a lesbian murder of the 1890s. The text adds a strong flavor, but its changing themes and varying relationships to the movement sometimes make it distracting, The movement has range, though it’s not about steps. With its swings, smooth backing-up handstands, crawls, flings, loping runs, sudden bounces, it remains a mode of thinking. Wilkes’s delivery gives it a casual logic, though nothing she does is illustrative of the text. But there’s something intimidating about Wilkes in her plainness, something that says “hands off”—an insistence, a kind of invulnerability, a sense that she cannot be budged. So when, at the end, she declares a praise song to pussy, “My lover’s pussy is a battle cry, is a prayer, is loud, is wealthy, on TV, has a sense of humor, career...,” the assertion of sexual identity and power is particularly exhilarating. “I always...put my pussy in the middle of trees," says Wilkes, “like a waterfall."
At Ethnic Folk Arts Center (October 27 through 29).
Looking Backward
March 13
In To Sow and To Sweep, Tamar Rogoff made a tender if fragmentary epic based on the voiceover memories of an elderly woman. Marika Blossfeldt, bare-breasted and wearing panties and a belt of seven baby dolls representing the narrator’s seven children, takes a sack of Vitarroz, pours out the large, hourglass outline of a woman’s body with tiny feet, and dances a fierce but somewhat hermetic solo—wheeling her arms, poking her tongue into her cheeks, rolling side to side with her body clenched, feeding grains into the mouths of the babies—to the windy roar of music by Cebello Morales. Then she sweeps up, puts on an old-fashioned persimmon dress and lipstick, and again draws a woman of rice, and a man next to that. Genial Gary Onsuni appears—Mr. Right if ever there was.
As Nat Cole sings “For Sentimental Reasons,” he smiles, swings her smoothly, helps her climb onto his shoulders, where she poses with a proud smile. They walk carefully inside the drawings—he inside the woman’s shape, she in the man’s. The business with the rice develops with beautiful and patient coherence. Gently scooping some from the body’s outlines, each draws in the genitals of the other’s sex, and curls up inside the figure. Onsum grows restless—he twitches, fails, claws, goes rigid, and steals away after carrying her from her home in the man’s shape into the woman’s, her own. What’s being suggested—does he just leave her, does he go to war, does he die?
There are puzzling gaps in the narrative, but the feelings carry me along. Later, Onsum comes back, so he didn’t die. But Blossfeldt brushes away the male shape, draws two children beside the woman, and sweeps them into her broad outline. The feeling of the family is created with a light arid deft touch. A young child, seven-year-old Debby Brand, runs in followed by Rogoff’s 12-year-old daughter, Ariel Rogoff Heitler. They look alike enough to be real sisters. The little one hopscotches through the figures, and both sweep up the rice. Blossfeldt reappears in a fur coat and hat, and we’re taken to a recital where Heitler performs Isadora Duncan’s Butterfly Etude (to Chopin, staged by Lori Belilove) and Chopin’s Barcarole, Opus 60 (choreographed by Belilove) with gracious and innocent clarity, free of any trace of emotional freight.
Though I didn’t understand the relevance of these dances. I found them lovely. (I’d always imagined that the Isadorables would have been intolerably cute, but Heitler has made me think again.) Many events are unexplained, like Blossfeldt having a convulsive, raging fit, smacking her coat against the floor, stripping off her dress and shoes. But the family interactions are delicate and touching. After the “recital,” the little Brand runs up to take a bow in her Sister’s place. Heitler swings sweetly into Onsum’s arms just as in his duet with her “mother.” They all throw rice over Heitier as she runs off into the wings, getting married, I guess, and then over the little one as she goes too. A film by Cathy Weis shows Blossfeldt and an 86-year-old woman whose keen eye peers at us from the wrinkled landscape of her face. But despite the ebb of physical vitality, memories—however erratic—may remain green, and Rogoff evokes them with a timely and gentle nostalgia.
At 14th Street Dancenter (February 24 and 25).
In To Sow and To Sweep, Tamar Rogoff made a tender if fragmentary epic based on the voiceover memories of an elderly woman. Marika Blossfeldt, bare-breasted and wearing panties and a belt of seven baby dolls representing the narrator’s seven children, takes a sack of Vitarroz, pours out the large, hourglass outline of a woman’s body with tiny feet, and dances a fierce but somewhat hermetic solo—wheeling her arms, poking her tongue into her cheeks, rolling side to side with her body clenched, feeding grains into the mouths of the babies—to the windy roar of music by Cebello Morales. Then she sweeps up, puts on an old-fashioned persimmon dress and lipstick, and again draws a woman of rice, and a man next to that. Genial Gary Onsuni appears—Mr. Right if ever there was.
As Nat Cole sings “For Sentimental Reasons,” he smiles, swings her smoothly, helps her climb onto his shoulders, where she poses with a proud smile. They walk carefully inside the drawings—he inside the woman’s shape, she in the man’s. The business with the rice develops with beautiful and patient coherence. Gently scooping some from the body’s outlines, each draws in the genitals of the other’s sex, and curls up inside the figure. Onsum grows restless—he twitches, fails, claws, goes rigid, and steals away after carrying her from her home in the man’s shape into the woman’s, her own. What’s being suggested—does he just leave her, does he go to war, does he die?
There are puzzling gaps in the narrative, but the feelings carry me along. Later, Onsum comes back, so he didn’t die. But Blossfeldt brushes away the male shape, draws two children beside the woman, and sweeps them into her broad outline. The feeling of the family is created with a light arid deft touch. A young child, seven-year-old Debby Brand, runs in followed by Rogoff’s 12-year-old daughter, Ariel Rogoff Heitler. They look alike enough to be real sisters. The little one hopscotches through the figures, and both sweep up the rice. Blossfeldt reappears in a fur coat and hat, and we’re taken to a recital where Heitler performs Isadora Duncan’s Butterfly Etude (to Chopin, staged by Lori Belilove) and Chopin’s Barcarole, Opus 60 (choreographed by Belilove) with gracious and innocent clarity, free of any trace of emotional freight.
Though I didn’t understand the relevance of these dances. I found them lovely. (I’d always imagined that the Isadorables would have been intolerably cute, but Heitler has made me think again.) Many events are unexplained, like Blossfeldt having a convulsive, raging fit, smacking her coat against the floor, stripping off her dress and shoes. But the family interactions are delicate and touching. After the “recital,” the little Brand runs up to take a bow in her Sister’s place. Heitler swings sweetly into Onsum’s arms just as in his duet with her “mother.” They all throw rice over Heitier as she runs off into the wings, getting married, I guess, and then over the little one as she goes too. A film by Cathy Weis shows Blossfeldt and an 86-year-old woman whose keen eye peers at us from the wrinkled landscape of her face. But despite the ebb of physical vitality, memories—however erratic—may remain green, and Rogoff evokes them with a timely and gentle nostalgia.
At 14th Street Dancenter (February 24 and 25).
Losing Touch
February 27
Steve Gross showed two curiously logy new works along with two pieces from 1989 in his recent concert at P.S. 122. Last year’s Frauen Gold, named for an alcoholic nerve tonic for ladies, and accompanied by taped testimonials from women whose mothers relied on the stuff, was excellently performed by RoseAnne Spradlin. She looked fragile and composed, all too conscious of taking life’s daily scourges without a murmur and without storing up bitterness.
But I didn’t really get the point of Gross’s six-minute solo, Pool (1989), encapsulating the bland life of a thoroughly innocuous man. The movement, too, is pretty harmless, though there’s one emphatic moment when Gross, half-kneeling, swings his arms trying to establish enough momentum to pull himself up. But even his failure to do this doesn’t matter enough. Gross plays another sad and ineffectual guy in his new solo, Reach Out and Touch Someone, set to phone sex recordings and framed by Linda Ronstadt’s sugar-sweet singing of “What’ll I Do.” Gross’s delicate and ambivalent physical responses to the persuasions of guys describing what they look like (“26, horny.., clean-shaven”) and what they like to do are wry. Sometimes he nods answers under his breath, or timidly mimics their descriptions. He hangs onto one of the pillars in the space with the tension of the quietly desperate, and leans stiffly back with a kind of numb, aching loneliness he won’t really give way to. The piece ends with Gross, who wears a loose black T-shirt, doing plies so his genitals periodically peep out underneath—literally letting it all hang out. In exposing himself, the character seems to identify entirely with his passivity and withdraws almost as far as he can from seeking a real lover or sex partner.
Gross looks stupefied (in Pool also), as if he’d been hit upside the head too many times. Is this intentional, or is he just nearsighted? In any case, it’s hard to care much about any character who seems so dulled or numb. There is some beautiful ensemble work in Gross’s long group piece, Voice, Ascending, but its pace is slow and almost unvarying. The steady rhythm can be hypnotically compelling and periodically absorb you in a rather unconscious way, or, as easily, make you nod off. There are some striking images—like the initial lineup of six nude men and women, led by Spradlin in a sheer, angelic shift, carrying an apple, or the black fur heap out of which a women gradually creeps. But too many of the images and actions seem unspecific in intention or remote in their references, so not much can grab you or plant its hooks in your memory.
Because the whole piece has nearly the same tone. it’s hard to know how or why one element is connected to another. And the work’s thick, lulling quality tends to keep one from asking questions of it. I was moved, though, by several sections, including a sequence in which four women, in pairs, press one another to the floor by the shoulders with tender force, repeatedly change places, and progress across the apace at a deliberate pace. And I liked another part in which six dancers take hands in a line, and run forward, folding up, crumbling slightly. They freeze in place, then watch as Spradlin smoothes her hands down her body. Two that have fallen roll away, and the four remaining run a few steps forward, sinking as before, then hold still, and again lose half their number. But the whole evening felt like Gross had sanded down too many, rough edges, sacrificed too much detail. Maybe the reverse is true, and he never sought to make his general ideas sufficiently particular. In any case, what was missing was any kind of urgency and presence—the vivid immediacy of precise flavors.
At P.S. 122 (February 9 through 11).
Steve Gross showed two curiously logy new works along with two pieces from 1989 in his recent concert at P.S. 122. Last year’s Frauen Gold, named for an alcoholic nerve tonic for ladies, and accompanied by taped testimonials from women whose mothers relied on the stuff, was excellently performed by RoseAnne Spradlin. She looked fragile and composed, all too conscious of taking life’s daily scourges without a murmur and without storing up bitterness.
But I didn’t really get the point of Gross’s six-minute solo, Pool (1989), encapsulating the bland life of a thoroughly innocuous man. The movement, too, is pretty harmless, though there’s one emphatic moment when Gross, half-kneeling, swings his arms trying to establish enough momentum to pull himself up. But even his failure to do this doesn’t matter enough. Gross plays another sad and ineffectual guy in his new solo, Reach Out and Touch Someone, set to phone sex recordings and framed by Linda Ronstadt’s sugar-sweet singing of “What’ll I Do.” Gross’s delicate and ambivalent physical responses to the persuasions of guys describing what they look like (“26, horny.., clean-shaven”) and what they like to do are wry. Sometimes he nods answers under his breath, or timidly mimics their descriptions. He hangs onto one of the pillars in the space with the tension of the quietly desperate, and leans stiffly back with a kind of numb, aching loneliness he won’t really give way to. The piece ends with Gross, who wears a loose black T-shirt, doing plies so his genitals periodically peep out underneath—literally letting it all hang out. In exposing himself, the character seems to identify entirely with his passivity and withdraws almost as far as he can from seeking a real lover or sex partner.
Gross looks stupefied (in Pool also), as if he’d been hit upside the head too many times. Is this intentional, or is he just nearsighted? In any case, it’s hard to care much about any character who seems so dulled or numb. There is some beautiful ensemble work in Gross’s long group piece, Voice, Ascending, but its pace is slow and almost unvarying. The steady rhythm can be hypnotically compelling and periodically absorb you in a rather unconscious way, or, as easily, make you nod off. There are some striking images—like the initial lineup of six nude men and women, led by Spradlin in a sheer, angelic shift, carrying an apple, or the black fur heap out of which a women gradually creeps. But too many of the images and actions seem unspecific in intention or remote in their references, so not much can grab you or plant its hooks in your memory.
Because the whole piece has nearly the same tone. it’s hard to know how or why one element is connected to another. And the work’s thick, lulling quality tends to keep one from asking questions of it. I was moved, though, by several sections, including a sequence in which four women, in pairs, press one another to the floor by the shoulders with tender force, repeatedly change places, and progress across the apace at a deliberate pace. And I liked another part in which six dancers take hands in a line, and run forward, folding up, crumbling slightly. They freeze in place, then watch as Spradlin smoothes her hands down her body. Two that have fallen roll away, and the four remaining run a few steps forward, sinking as before, then hold still, and again lose half their number. But the whole evening felt like Gross had sanded down too many, rough edges, sacrificed too much detail. Maybe the reverse is true, and he never sought to make his general ideas sufficiently particular. In any case, what was missing was any kind of urgency and presence—the vivid immediacy of precise flavors.
At P.S. 122 (February 9 through 11).
Memories
May 22 At City Center May 1, 6, 12).
Men at Work
November 20
After a decade of collaborating, Terry Creach and Stephen Koester’s explorations of male dancing are richer and more fearless than ever. It’s not that they’re physically riskier, but they seem more spaciously conceived. Cast in the abstract, about give-and-take and the leap into the void that trust is, the dances are hardly cool. Without fixing on the matter of personal attachment, they’re about—on one level—the constant play of feelings as expressed in rushing to, jumping on, clinging to, hanging from. They take as a basis the equality of power we assume in dancers who’re the same sex and about the same size.
You’d think maybe watching them all this time we’d know a bunch of intimate stuff about these guys, but no, their dances aren’t personal. What we know is that they’re pretty reliable, that if you’re flying in the air, they’ll probably catch you before you land on your head. Their dances are about timing and daring, confrontation and caring, about tossing roles aside. About how various we can be with one another. And it’s interesting how recklessly and thoroughly their harmony is sustained.
Running (1989) is an elegant work, with a handsome set by Sue Rees that leaves about one-third of the sanctuary of St. Mark’s free and suspends 10 slanted poles in the remaining two-thirds, so that Creach, Koester, Kevin Campbell, and Eddie Martinez must swing and whirl through it like a slalom. The driving bass ground of Robert Een’s cello matches the regular thump of their footfalls. (Een’s music, live, with Carter Burwell on accordion and Hearn Gadbois on percussion, is rich, supporting. and beautifully performed.) Roma Flowers’s lighting seems to make the air thin; it turns cold, then lets a kind of green sunlight seep into the space. A solid, leisurely solo or group run that breaks into reverse or lightens with the elation of a spurt of little leaps forms the genial basis of Running. First, Kevin Campbell lopes on, then casually vaults over a lunging figure into the arms of two companions. And the others amplify the theme with rolls, swings, lifts and catches, backward drops into someone’s ready arms amid the poles they hardly notice.
It’s all as companionable as square dancing, yet the dancers perform with the seriousness and modesty of collegiate wrestlers. They fly back, as if seated, into a partner’s arms, balance across his shoulders, slide over his shoulders and down his back, or swing his body at a steep diagonal. The space broken by the poles seems to invite more complex relationships than the open area, yet the pleasures and obligations of physical engagement in Running generate their own forward thrust. The atmosphere of Rough House, a new duet for the choreographers, is tougher and more rivalrous. Flowers’s lights cast sharp geometric shapes on the floor where Koester lies arched backward, uncomfortably twisting, pushing up, holding still. First a watcher, Creach crawls over, interlaces his body with his recumbent partner. He moves in short phrases, methodically locking in grappling positions. Then their pace accelerates with sudden scrambles, buttings, heaves over the shoulder. They exhibit a kind of sinister patience too, occasionally observing each other like you might watch a struggling hornet you’ve just partially squashed. Mostly, Creach has the upper hand: when he’s got Koester upside-down at waist level, he drops him further with a jolt. Late in the dance, they’re moving along side by side: whenever Koester tries to stand, Creach presses him down by the neck almost absentmindedly.
I like the rude dynamic of their trips and flings, the grudging tenderness, the moody scenes of attack and ambush. Yet there’s a deep agreement in the darkness of their spirits and the way their relationship fluctuates to achieve its grim and tentative balances.
At Danspace Project St Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery November 1 through 4).
After a decade of collaborating, Terry Creach and Stephen Koester’s explorations of male dancing are richer and more fearless than ever. It’s not that they’re physically riskier, but they seem more spaciously conceived. Cast in the abstract, about give-and-take and the leap into the void that trust is, the dances are hardly cool. Without fixing on the matter of personal attachment, they’re about—on one level—the constant play of feelings as expressed in rushing to, jumping on, clinging to, hanging from. They take as a basis the equality of power we assume in dancers who’re the same sex and about the same size.
You’d think maybe watching them all this time we’d know a bunch of intimate stuff about these guys, but no, their dances aren’t personal. What we know is that they’re pretty reliable, that if you’re flying in the air, they’ll probably catch you before you land on your head. Their dances are about timing and daring, confrontation and caring, about tossing roles aside. About how various we can be with one another. And it’s interesting how recklessly and thoroughly their harmony is sustained.
Running (1989) is an elegant work, with a handsome set by Sue Rees that leaves about one-third of the sanctuary of St. Mark’s free and suspends 10 slanted poles in the remaining two-thirds, so that Creach, Koester, Kevin Campbell, and Eddie Martinez must swing and whirl through it like a slalom. The driving bass ground of Robert Een’s cello matches the regular thump of their footfalls. (Een’s music, live, with Carter Burwell on accordion and Hearn Gadbois on percussion, is rich, supporting. and beautifully performed.) Roma Flowers’s lighting seems to make the air thin; it turns cold, then lets a kind of green sunlight seep into the space. A solid, leisurely solo or group run that breaks into reverse or lightens with the elation of a spurt of little leaps forms the genial basis of Running. First, Kevin Campbell lopes on, then casually vaults over a lunging figure into the arms of two companions. And the others amplify the theme with rolls, swings, lifts and catches, backward drops into someone’s ready arms amid the poles they hardly notice.
It’s all as companionable as square dancing, yet the dancers perform with the seriousness and modesty of collegiate wrestlers. They fly back, as if seated, into a partner’s arms, balance across his shoulders, slide over his shoulders and down his back, or swing his body at a steep diagonal. The space broken by the poles seems to invite more complex relationships than the open area, yet the pleasures and obligations of physical engagement in Running generate their own forward thrust. The atmosphere of Rough House, a new duet for the choreographers, is tougher and more rivalrous. Flowers’s lights cast sharp geometric shapes on the floor where Koester lies arched backward, uncomfortably twisting, pushing up, holding still. First a watcher, Creach crawls over, interlaces his body with his recumbent partner. He moves in short phrases, methodically locking in grappling positions. Then their pace accelerates with sudden scrambles, buttings, heaves over the shoulder. They exhibit a kind of sinister patience too, occasionally observing each other like you might watch a struggling hornet you’ve just partially squashed. Mostly, Creach has the upper hand: when he’s got Koester upside-down at waist level, he drops him further with a jolt. Late in the dance, they’re moving along side by side: whenever Koester tries to stand, Creach presses him down by the neck almost absentmindedly.
I like the rude dynamic of their trips and flings, the grudging tenderness, the moody scenes of attack and ambush. Yet there’s a deep agreement in the darkness of their spirits and the way their relationship fluctuates to achieve its grim and tentative balances.
At Danspace Project St Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery November 1 through 4).
Mysteries of the Organism
January 9
Moses Pendleton, Momix’s founder and mastermind (and a founder of Pilobolus before that), is an illusionist, a nervy man with a zany visual imagination who barely pauses to be serious. He’s a whiz at deflecting life with a wisecrack. Momix’s program at the Joyce Theater featured 13 short pieces and one new half hour work, Pendleton’s Fantasy on a Variation on a Theme, set to the rich moody current of Benjamin Britten’s Variation on a Theme of Frank Bridge, with the choreographic credit shared, as usual, with company members. The visual beauty of much of Momix’s work is undeniable, but too many of the company’s dances are choreographic one-liners, curious visual deceptions involving distortions of undulating organisms, or exhaustive explorations of all the clever things you can do with a particular prop.
The problem with many of these pieces is that they lose their potency once you understand the workings of the illusion. And often the elaboration of the gimmick - mixing dross and gold almost indiscriminately - becomes disappointing. Essentially, that’s because the tricks are meaningless. Pendleton routinely avoids building on the implications and resonances of his images; he so often uses transformation as an evasion rather than an astonishing achievement. It’s obvious he’s damn clever, but I wonder why - out of frightening cynicism or wariness of any sentiment? - he insists on throwing sand in the audience’s eyes.
Some magic - even the simple illusions created almost entirely by an audience’s willingness to believe - is even more amazing once the secrets are revealed, because we find ourselves consciously acceding to the power and meaning of the metaphor. But Pendleton rarely permits us this deep pleasure. He doesn’t trust us to go along with him, so he busily tosses new tricks at us. Some of them are marvelous but in each case, once disillusionment sets in, there’s no returning to a state of innocent receptivity.
In Pre Face to Previews (1986), the first image of a dancer’s legs narrowly lit by a flashlight, quivering like the vulnerable flesh of an oyster about to be chomped, is delectable, but add the thorax and truncated, back-tilted head nodding, and then another set of legs and some kitschy behavior, and mechanics have replaced mystery. Until, that is, in the darkness, the head of one appears far above the other’s legs, like one immensely tall creature, and the top languidly floats away from the bottom. In Medusa, (1985), a tall, pointed figure in white drapery (Cynthia Quinn) races around. It’s intriguing when she, or it, starts to become rounder at the top, wider, shorter. Then you realize there’s an umbrella under the cloth, the novelty evaporates and you’re watching a beautifully executed exercise.
I wouldn’t mind seeing Quinn’s When We’re Alone (1988) retired. It’s a ballroom duet for her and a dummy that looks like the open-mouthed corpse of Truman Capote or that of Pendleton is his white Momix outfit. The trivial Elva (1987) has the voice of Elvis Presley singing “Blue Suede Shows,” as Pendleton’s face mouths the words on a TV monitor that’s the head of an over-size, blue-suited, guitar-strumming figure. But E.C. (1982) is a mostly ravishing and inventive suite of shadow dances with transforming figures and body parts inflating and shrinking, appearing and vanishing. A head detaches and floats like a balloon, then becomes heavy as a boulder. Hands become spiders; arms, flower stalks. A tiny child slowly descends from the sky like a gift into a tiny mother’s arms. At the end, the shadow of a dancer smashes again and again into the screen,, breaking its surface into chaotic ripples. In the brilliant Brain Waving (1983), in which no humans are visible, a series of curves are sent coursing through a fat rope stretched across the stage. A little one chases a big one. Waves shoot across faster, then melt into others sent from the opposite end. Finally, a weakening series of waves just can’t make it, and flop closer ad closer to where they started. Even after what you thought was the last feeble try, there’s another, even funnier and teenier twitch in the rope.
Skiva (1984) - by Pendleton, Danny Ezralow, Jamey Hampton and Morleigh Steinberg (three of the four founding members of Iso, a Momix spinoff) - is a beautifully controlled duet for dancers on skis, able to lean and bend extraordinarily because of their extended base of support. In Venus Envy (1986), Lisa Giobbi and Quinn inhabit a clamshell, appearing at first - as its grumpy “mouth” opens and closes - to be a single, queerly jointed being. One’s arms entwine with the other’s legs and they swish from side to side. Their eight arms and legs ray outward like a sun. Reclining, one reaches to scratch “her” thigh miles away on the other side of the shell. In Spawning (1986), four women bourree around or fold themselves over four balloon/eggs, waddle with them between their legs, and ride giddyap horsie. At the end, they lie back holding the balloons between their teeth and release then one by one t o float straight up into the sky. It’s a lovely moment, and you can be sure if it hadn’t been the end it would have been spoiled by some irrelevant follow-up.
Alan Boeding’s Circle Walker (1983) is an excellent, single-minded work in which, to interplanetary music, Boeding steers a huge, rocking, rotating sculpture of his own devising. He rides within it as it moves in arcs and S-curves, slings himself through its apertures, flies out horizontally as it turns. Circle Walker is cool and modern, yet it echoes old-time “aesthetic” dancing in the curved, windblown poses that facilitate the dancer’s journey.
Pendleton’s premiere, Fantasy on a Variation on a Theme, is a haunted cousin of Debut C, which he made for Pilobolus not long ago. I admire the substance and ambition of the piece, the compelling beauty and intelligence of its visuals (marvelous slide projections by Pendleton and lighting designer Neil Peter Jampolis), and Pendleton’s wise choice of music, even though Britten’s work is too long for what the choreographer has to say. Fantasy opens with a dramatic stage composition that immediately shatters: through black-and-white projections of what might be a blow-up of Pendleton’s face, then a Venetian scene, we see a priest standing with a white butterfly trembling nearby, a nude man who erupts out of a crouch and vanishes, a woman in a white gown, turning. Bare-chested men in whirling black coats come and go, a woman in red gloves snakes her arm over the priest’s shoulder, the women in white gently shoves the other dancers away. A woman in a ruffly red dress takes a few steps sideways but the dress stays where it is, and hen starts dancing on its own. Fantasy in the title makes all things allowable, but only in theory.
Too many of the dance’s events are irrelevant diversions. But the piece has a solidity and thrust nonetheless. The projections are crucial. Their morbid eloquence adds a grand perspective ad sense of dimension to the piece. We watch the dancers through a leaded-glass window with a drooping plant in front of it; a wall of bricks; a monstrous, eroded stone face; a honeycomb; a staring face; 19th century portraits; weathered gravestones; flowers; drawings of birds. More and more the piece harps on death - not, usually, in a frightening way. At one time, however, rows of dancers collapse behind the priest and he backs away through the corridor of bodies, grimacing. And there’s an eerie, surgical threat in a quiet, spidery creature melded of two women that lurks with legs wavering while a group of men twitch across the stage. But there’s sense of consolation in the old tombstones, in the numerous slides of flowers that follow, in the vision of bleached grasses around one gravestone that, as the image brightens, nearly obliterates the live performers. At the end, as Jampolis’s lights fill the stage with a golden haze, the dancers scoot quickly through, the priest wheels with the woman in white - the butterfly he’s inadvertently captured, the vision of reconciliation he’s achieved - safely curled on his back. Despite flaws and wanderings - and the flatness of some of the choreography - the force of much of what’s gone before justifies this moment.
At the Joyce Theater (December 27 through January 7).
Moses Pendleton, Momix’s founder and mastermind (and a founder of Pilobolus before that), is an illusionist, a nervy man with a zany visual imagination who barely pauses to be serious. He’s a whiz at deflecting life with a wisecrack. Momix’s program at the Joyce Theater featured 13 short pieces and one new half hour work, Pendleton’s Fantasy on a Variation on a Theme, set to the rich moody current of Benjamin Britten’s Variation on a Theme of Frank Bridge, with the choreographic credit shared, as usual, with company members. The visual beauty of much of Momix’s work is undeniable, but too many of the company’s dances are choreographic one-liners, curious visual deceptions involving distortions of undulating organisms, or exhaustive explorations of all the clever things you can do with a particular prop.
The problem with many of these pieces is that they lose their potency once you understand the workings of the illusion. And often the elaboration of the gimmick - mixing dross and gold almost indiscriminately - becomes disappointing. Essentially, that’s because the tricks are meaningless. Pendleton routinely avoids building on the implications and resonances of his images; he so often uses transformation as an evasion rather than an astonishing achievement. It’s obvious he’s damn clever, but I wonder why - out of frightening cynicism or wariness of any sentiment? - he insists on throwing sand in the audience’s eyes.
Some magic - even the simple illusions created almost entirely by an audience’s willingness to believe - is even more amazing once the secrets are revealed, because we find ourselves consciously acceding to the power and meaning of the metaphor. But Pendleton rarely permits us this deep pleasure. He doesn’t trust us to go along with him, so he busily tosses new tricks at us. Some of them are marvelous but in each case, once disillusionment sets in, there’s no returning to a state of innocent receptivity.
In Pre Face to Previews (1986), the first image of a dancer’s legs narrowly lit by a flashlight, quivering like the vulnerable flesh of an oyster about to be chomped, is delectable, but add the thorax and truncated, back-tilted head nodding, and then another set of legs and some kitschy behavior, and mechanics have replaced mystery. Until, that is, in the darkness, the head of one appears far above the other’s legs, like one immensely tall creature, and the top languidly floats away from the bottom. In Medusa, (1985), a tall, pointed figure in white drapery (Cynthia Quinn) races around. It’s intriguing when she, or it, starts to become rounder at the top, wider, shorter. Then you realize there’s an umbrella under the cloth, the novelty evaporates and you’re watching a beautifully executed exercise.
I wouldn’t mind seeing Quinn’s When We’re Alone (1988) retired. It’s a ballroom duet for her and a dummy that looks like the open-mouthed corpse of Truman Capote or that of Pendleton is his white Momix outfit. The trivial Elva (1987) has the voice of Elvis Presley singing “Blue Suede Shows,” as Pendleton’s face mouths the words on a TV monitor that’s the head of an over-size, blue-suited, guitar-strumming figure. But E.C. (1982) is a mostly ravishing and inventive suite of shadow dances with transforming figures and body parts inflating and shrinking, appearing and vanishing. A head detaches and floats like a balloon, then becomes heavy as a boulder. Hands become spiders; arms, flower stalks. A tiny child slowly descends from the sky like a gift into a tiny mother’s arms. At the end, the shadow of a dancer smashes again and again into the screen,, breaking its surface into chaotic ripples. In the brilliant Brain Waving (1983), in which no humans are visible, a series of curves are sent coursing through a fat rope stretched across the stage. A little one chases a big one. Waves shoot across faster, then melt into others sent from the opposite end. Finally, a weakening series of waves just can’t make it, and flop closer ad closer to where they started. Even after what you thought was the last feeble try, there’s another, even funnier and teenier twitch in the rope.
Skiva (1984) - by Pendleton, Danny Ezralow, Jamey Hampton and Morleigh Steinberg (three of the four founding members of Iso, a Momix spinoff) - is a beautifully controlled duet for dancers on skis, able to lean and bend extraordinarily because of their extended base of support. In Venus Envy (1986), Lisa Giobbi and Quinn inhabit a clamshell, appearing at first - as its grumpy “mouth” opens and closes - to be a single, queerly jointed being. One’s arms entwine with the other’s legs and they swish from side to side. Their eight arms and legs ray outward like a sun. Reclining, one reaches to scratch “her” thigh miles away on the other side of the shell. In Spawning (1986), four women bourree around or fold themselves over four balloon/eggs, waddle with them between their legs, and ride giddyap horsie. At the end, they lie back holding the balloons between their teeth and release then one by one t o float straight up into the sky. It’s a lovely moment, and you can be sure if it hadn’t been the end it would have been spoiled by some irrelevant follow-up.
Alan Boeding’s Circle Walker (1983) is an excellent, single-minded work in which, to interplanetary music, Boeding steers a huge, rocking, rotating sculpture of his own devising. He rides within it as it moves in arcs and S-curves, slings himself through its apertures, flies out horizontally as it turns. Circle Walker is cool and modern, yet it echoes old-time “aesthetic” dancing in the curved, windblown poses that facilitate the dancer’s journey.
Pendleton’s premiere, Fantasy on a Variation on a Theme, is a haunted cousin of Debut C, which he made for Pilobolus not long ago. I admire the substance and ambition of the piece, the compelling beauty and intelligence of its visuals (marvelous slide projections by Pendleton and lighting designer Neil Peter Jampolis), and Pendleton’s wise choice of music, even though Britten’s work is too long for what the choreographer has to say. Fantasy opens with a dramatic stage composition that immediately shatters: through black-and-white projections of what might be a blow-up of Pendleton’s face, then a Venetian scene, we see a priest standing with a white butterfly trembling nearby, a nude man who erupts out of a crouch and vanishes, a woman in a white gown, turning. Bare-chested men in whirling black coats come and go, a woman in red gloves snakes her arm over the priest’s shoulder, the women in white gently shoves the other dancers away. A woman in a ruffly red dress takes a few steps sideways but the dress stays where it is, and hen starts dancing on its own. Fantasy in the title makes all things allowable, but only in theory.
Too many of the dance’s events are irrelevant diversions. But the piece has a solidity and thrust nonetheless. The projections are crucial. Their morbid eloquence adds a grand perspective ad sense of dimension to the piece. We watch the dancers through a leaded-glass window with a drooping plant in front of it; a wall of bricks; a monstrous, eroded stone face; a honeycomb; a staring face; 19th century portraits; weathered gravestones; flowers; drawings of birds. More and more the piece harps on death - not, usually, in a frightening way. At one time, however, rows of dancers collapse behind the priest and he backs away through the corridor of bodies, grimacing. And there’s an eerie, surgical threat in a quiet, spidery creature melded of two women that lurks with legs wavering while a group of men twitch across the stage. But there’s sense of consolation in the old tombstones, in the numerous slides of flowers that follow, in the vision of bleached grasses around one gravestone that, as the image brightens, nearly obliterates the live performers. At the end, as Jampolis’s lights fill the stage with a golden haze, the dancers scoot quickly through, the priest wheels with the woman in white - the butterfly he’s inadvertently captured, the vision of reconciliation he’s achieved - safely curled on his back. Despite flaws and wanderings - and the flatness of some of the choreography - the force of much of what’s gone before justifies this moment.
At the Joyce Theater (December 27 through January 7).
Prodigal Son
March 6
The dancing in Ron Brown’s Sockets, a duet with Melinda Welty, is spectacular, gorgeous. He’s virile and elegant, she’s strong and clear; both of them are firmly centered and challenge one another with assurance. The dance is a blaze of sudden leaps and lifts and chases, of clutches and pushes and little evasions. She brushes his shoulders, then leans away. He grabs her face, her thigh. Their emotions are fickle, erratic, impatient. After a while, it’s plain that these emotions aren’t theirs at all; rather, the emotions are a kind of spicy ornamentation.
Next, from 1987. is a work with a clearer direction. It’s a solo for Brown accompanied by taped phone messages from friends, end a variety of occasional musical selections. Roughly, and with much uncertainty (he takes his shoes off, puts them back on, takes them off. for example), stumbling forward periodically as if shoved from behind, he crosses the stage along four lateral paths, each one upstage of the last. Each time he’s wearing less clothing, until, at the last, he’s entirely nude. We can see that his life is carrying him someplace he’s reluctant to go; but it’s disconcertingly unclear what he’s responding to. What are the ghostly memories that seem to embrace him? What terrors provoke his stumbles and flings to the floor? What ambivalences prompt his nervous rockings? What desire inspires his ecstatic, backward curving, angel spins?
In his new group piece, Tendrils, Brown is lavish with movement for his eight dancers (three of whom—Angeline Wolf, John Brooks, and Michael Jahoda— dance with Jennifer Muller/The Works as does he). But the dance seems almost compulsively spun out: it’s long enough and meandering enough in its connections to fray into several separate dances. In many ways, Tendrils appears to be a piece about webs of shifting relationships, set to the bare. heart-piercing stridencies of Arvo Part’s music, but there seems to be no rationale to the temporary bondings and partings. The dancers handle and support one another carefully, but there’s something indiscriminate in the ways the little clusters keep rearranging themselves, as if who anybody is doesn’t matter.
These people aren’t members of an abstract corps executing a choreographic geometry, they’re men and women—but few consequences attend their interactions. Early on, John Brooks has a tense duet with Jahoda: holding on, they lean apart, and Brooks, with Jahoda’s support, swings to the floor. One cradles the other: Brooks snakes his arm around Jahoda’s neck in a gesture that’s half protective, half possessive. Then, enough of that—though there’s a reprise toward the end. In between, we see Jahoda carrying another guy, Brooks in a duet of twitching urgencies and broken gestures with Wolf. Not that partners have to be faithful forever in a dance, but I like to believe that it means something when people come together or part. There’s an ardent quality to the movement, a swing and suspension, yet the people flood into, out of, and through the space in their flimsy groups like flocks of pigeons fearful of alighting very long. Maybe it’s the loneliness and alienation of the deracinated that Brown is illustrating. A sense of indifference and anonymity sometimes makes the dancers seem to be moving restlessly among the invisible dead. For me, Brooks’s dancing provided Tendrils’ only solid ground. With his eyes solemnly lowered. as if drawn into himself, he seems to battle quietly with his fate— stumbling, beating the air, flinging his, arms apart, scrambling, falling, running in a circle with a limping but unflagging step. But nothing he does seems hasty or unconsidered, A gentle, sober manliness and fineness of character give unswerving inner logic to Brooks’s performance. Brown is a young choreographer with breathtaking style. He has passion, intelligence, and a talent for devising dynamic movement. But his prodigal impulse is to say everything at once.
At P.S. 122 (February 16 through 18).
The dancing in Ron Brown’s Sockets, a duet with Melinda Welty, is spectacular, gorgeous. He’s virile and elegant, she’s strong and clear; both of them are firmly centered and challenge one another with assurance. The dance is a blaze of sudden leaps and lifts and chases, of clutches and pushes and little evasions. She brushes his shoulders, then leans away. He grabs her face, her thigh. Their emotions are fickle, erratic, impatient. After a while, it’s plain that these emotions aren’t theirs at all; rather, the emotions are a kind of spicy ornamentation.
Next, from 1987. is a work with a clearer direction. It’s a solo for Brown accompanied by taped phone messages from friends, end a variety of occasional musical selections. Roughly, and with much uncertainty (he takes his shoes off, puts them back on, takes them off. for example), stumbling forward periodically as if shoved from behind, he crosses the stage along four lateral paths, each one upstage of the last. Each time he’s wearing less clothing, until, at the last, he’s entirely nude. We can see that his life is carrying him someplace he’s reluctant to go; but it’s disconcertingly unclear what he’s responding to. What are the ghostly memories that seem to embrace him? What terrors provoke his stumbles and flings to the floor? What ambivalences prompt his nervous rockings? What desire inspires his ecstatic, backward curving, angel spins?
In his new group piece, Tendrils, Brown is lavish with movement for his eight dancers (three of whom—Angeline Wolf, John Brooks, and Michael Jahoda— dance with Jennifer Muller/The Works as does he). But the dance seems almost compulsively spun out: it’s long enough and meandering enough in its connections to fray into several separate dances. In many ways, Tendrils appears to be a piece about webs of shifting relationships, set to the bare. heart-piercing stridencies of Arvo Part’s music, but there seems to be no rationale to the temporary bondings and partings. The dancers handle and support one another carefully, but there’s something indiscriminate in the ways the little clusters keep rearranging themselves, as if who anybody is doesn’t matter.
These people aren’t members of an abstract corps executing a choreographic geometry, they’re men and women—but few consequences attend their interactions. Early on, John Brooks has a tense duet with Jahoda: holding on, they lean apart, and Brooks, with Jahoda’s support, swings to the floor. One cradles the other: Brooks snakes his arm around Jahoda’s neck in a gesture that’s half protective, half possessive. Then, enough of that—though there’s a reprise toward the end. In between, we see Jahoda carrying another guy, Brooks in a duet of twitching urgencies and broken gestures with Wolf. Not that partners have to be faithful forever in a dance, but I like to believe that it means something when people come together or part. There’s an ardent quality to the movement, a swing and suspension, yet the people flood into, out of, and through the space in their flimsy groups like flocks of pigeons fearful of alighting very long. Maybe it’s the loneliness and alienation of the deracinated that Brown is illustrating. A sense of indifference and anonymity sometimes makes the dancers seem to be moving restlessly among the invisible dead. For me, Brooks’s dancing provided Tendrils’ only solid ground. With his eyes solemnly lowered. as if drawn into himself, he seems to battle quietly with his fate— stumbling, beating the air, flinging his, arms apart, scrambling, falling, running in a circle with a limping but unflagging step. But nothing he does seems hasty or unconsidered, A gentle, sober manliness and fineness of character give unswerving inner logic to Brooks’s performance. Brown is a young choreographer with breathtaking style. He has passion, intelligence, and a talent for devising dynamic movement. But his prodigal impulse is to say everything at once.
At P.S. 122 (February 16 through 18).
Quartet
April 3
Four generally sweet-natured works presented by Movement Research offered some striking images but too much structural limpness In her ElisaBitangelo, Elizabetta Vittoni—in a white, mid-thigh playsuit with pink hearts on the behind and a kind of paper tiara—tries to push into the air from a mat covered with gravel. Her smooth but crab-like moves, her hobbled jumps, have a kind of curious contentment. There’s hardly a tinge of regret in her failure to get off the ground.
In Knee Deep Stacey Hinden and Valerie Vitale look ready for a pajama party, in white smock tops and loose pants Hinden falls langorously again and again, Vitale counters with little swively, sharp, retracting moves. Hinden starts to throw herself around vigorously, then gets logy while Vitale’s hopping urgently, and both swoon together in pale lemon light. There are lots of responsive and supportive linkages between the women - leaning, tugging, sitting cosily on each other’s knees— mixed with spasms, wriggles, bends, smooth deflations, and moves that gently go awry with a nice surprise. But the piece exists in a permanent present: there’s no sense of moving forward and too much time is spent swiveling around sort of getting in the mood. The women’s outfits make them seem more ample, statuesque than they really are, like a pair of pally Roman matrons. I liked that.
Standing on a chair in his Victim of Hollywood, James Adlesic removes a mask and suit revealing a green slit skirt and blouse and another half-mask on his face, while Sinatra sings “My Way.” Adlesic leaps off the chair for some sexy-type, spinning-around TV dancing. He comments dreamily on the perfect beauty of screen actresses of the ‘50s and his own purported likeness to Lana Turner. In a lovely, arch gesture, he scratches lipstick across one eyelid and out to his hairline and, as he moves, draws lipstick circles on his face and seam lines down the backs of his legs. He flaunts himself in a crude, trashy way with hard wriggles, an aggressive saunter, pelvic thrusts, but he seems more and more just a poignant misplaced creature with a careless body and a smeared mouth. Despite his paltry outrageousness, Victim’s final moments are tragically beautiful, with Adlesic reduced to the wreck beneath the glamorous delusions. Disheveled, with sopping hair, he slides the straps off his shoulders slips out of the skirt. Sitting, he cuts off his pantyhose below the knee to soak his feet in a bucket. One nylon foot becomes a cap and with big thread he begins to sew the thigh of the hose to the cap with spastic, shivery gestures.
Desideri’s Doppia Coppia (Double Couple)—part of an ongoing project, “Ponte Ponente P” - opens with an intriguing scene: a panel-like, rectangular hammock arrangement strung across the space, another rope tied to an upright piano where São Nunes lies on her belly with a small leather suitcase on her back. Charles AlIcroft, looking very conventional, rather like a headwaiter, comes on with David Friedman who’s soundlessly playing an accordion. Nunes stands up on the piano, bends over the edge. Allcroft tosses aside the rope like an amiable doorman, bids Nunes an enthusiastic welcome She’s odd and changeable. like some kind of peculiar sprite, and he’s quite taken with her, though perplexed—rather like William Powell bringing Ann Blyth home to his bathtub in Mr. Peabody and the Mermaid. Nunes leaps on Allcroft like a pet that’s adopted him, and he’s wonderfully accommodating and ingratiating in a boob-like way. But when the piece fades into the next scene, with Desideri singing, Friedman wandering around in a hooded garment like some moping priest, and the women laconically opening accordions and letting them dangle, it loses shape and focus.
Four generally sweet-natured works presented by Movement Research offered some striking images but too much structural limpness In her ElisaBitangelo, Elizabetta Vittoni—in a white, mid-thigh playsuit with pink hearts on the behind and a kind of paper tiara—tries to push into the air from a mat covered with gravel. Her smooth but crab-like moves, her hobbled jumps, have a kind of curious contentment. There’s hardly a tinge of regret in her failure to get off the ground.
In Knee Deep Stacey Hinden and Valerie Vitale look ready for a pajama party, in white smock tops and loose pants Hinden falls langorously again and again, Vitale counters with little swively, sharp, retracting moves. Hinden starts to throw herself around vigorously, then gets logy while Vitale’s hopping urgently, and both swoon together in pale lemon light. There are lots of responsive and supportive linkages between the women - leaning, tugging, sitting cosily on each other’s knees— mixed with spasms, wriggles, bends, smooth deflations, and moves that gently go awry with a nice surprise. But the piece exists in a permanent present: there’s no sense of moving forward and too much time is spent swiveling around sort of getting in the mood. The women’s outfits make them seem more ample, statuesque than they really are, like a pair of pally Roman matrons. I liked that.
Standing on a chair in his Victim of Hollywood, James Adlesic removes a mask and suit revealing a green slit skirt and blouse and another half-mask on his face, while Sinatra sings “My Way.” Adlesic leaps off the chair for some sexy-type, spinning-around TV dancing. He comments dreamily on the perfect beauty of screen actresses of the ‘50s and his own purported likeness to Lana Turner. In a lovely, arch gesture, he scratches lipstick across one eyelid and out to his hairline and, as he moves, draws lipstick circles on his face and seam lines down the backs of his legs. He flaunts himself in a crude, trashy way with hard wriggles, an aggressive saunter, pelvic thrusts, but he seems more and more just a poignant misplaced creature with a careless body and a smeared mouth. Despite his paltry outrageousness, Victim’s final moments are tragically beautiful, with Adlesic reduced to the wreck beneath the glamorous delusions. Disheveled, with sopping hair, he slides the straps off his shoulders slips out of the skirt. Sitting, he cuts off his pantyhose below the knee to soak his feet in a bucket. One nylon foot becomes a cap and with big thread he begins to sew the thigh of the hose to the cap with spastic, shivery gestures.
Desideri’s Doppia Coppia (Double Couple)—part of an ongoing project, “Ponte Ponente P” - opens with an intriguing scene: a panel-like, rectangular hammock arrangement strung across the space, another rope tied to an upright piano where São Nunes lies on her belly with a small leather suitcase on her back. Charles AlIcroft, looking very conventional, rather like a headwaiter, comes on with David Friedman who’s soundlessly playing an accordion. Nunes stands up on the piano, bends over the edge. Allcroft tosses aside the rope like an amiable doorman, bids Nunes an enthusiastic welcome She’s odd and changeable. like some kind of peculiar sprite, and he’s quite taken with her, though perplexed—rather like William Powell bringing Ann Blyth home to his bathtub in Mr. Peabody and the Mermaid. Nunes leaps on Allcroft like a pet that’s adopted him, and he’s wonderfully accommodating and ingratiating in a boob-like way. But when the piece fades into the next scene, with Desideri singing, Friedman wandering around in a hooded garment like some moping priest, and the women laconically opening accordions and letting them dangle, it loses shape and focus.
Raggedy Andes
November 27
Federico Restrepo and Natalia Correa sleep on the darkened stage under a yellow blanket. When they stir, to the quiet roar of taped voices and the playing of conga and berimbau (the music is by Ivo Aruajo, Justin Rogers, and Gildo Pedreiro), and struggle up, we see, under black light, thin blue faces, pink lips, lumpily muscled blue bodies, pink nipples, and mops of stringy orange hair. They’re stuffed figures attached to the invisible, black-clad bodies of Restrepo and Correa. There’s a blue baby too, a creature solely of stuffed fabric.
Restrepo’s Cosecha (The Han-serf) is a vital piece of puppet theater, popular in style, telling the story of a campesino family caught in the middle of military action (in the form of lights and sound effects like the beating of helicopter blades) and driven from home. They settle where green plants hang from the ceiling, turn to raising coca, and lose their integrity and self-sufficiency. What’s marvelous in this is not the story, which becomes enfeebled because the characters’ situation becomes too ambiguous to explain wordlessly and because the performance’s festive quality so overrides its message. But the experiences of the characters are so vivid and immediate, uncluttered by ratiocination, that we feel with them even while we recognize their unlikeness to ourselves. The moments that talk to us best are simple, like the dim clink of empty cans when the family runs out of their airlifted (a shopping bag descending from the ceiling) food supplies or lie about stupefied and disgruntled after a drunken party. The human figures have a peculiar surreality.
There’s a compelling combination of helplessness and power in these muscle-backed rag-doll bodies. Physically, their bunchy limbs—bow legs and skinny arms—can bend drastically and we read the characters’ emotions in their bald shapes, in the attentive tilt of their heads, in the bobbing dynamism of their movements, in their cowering or despondent stillnesses. The figures have an intensely erotic explicitness too, expressing need and desire with shameless simplicity. Restrepo’s piece pulses with folk rhythms; there’s an almost constant hubbub of movement, though there’s not much expressive variety. Everything bounces, everything jiggles, everything wriggles. The corn they plant grows like a skinny Audrey II. Even the trees are bopping, and the coca plant, yanked upward by a wire, practically giggles in its dancing spurts of growth. This throbbing vitality is at the heart of Cosecha.
The live members of the Butoh-influenced collective Brilliant Epoch—presented on the same program—met when they participated in workshops for Natsu Nakajima’s Sleep and Reincarnation of last season. They don’t cover themselves in ash in their new piece, Fresh Ruins, nor do they move with the characteristic aching drag of Butoh performers, which should make their work easier to take. But Ruins lacks Butoh’s inwardness, its commitment to memory and the unconscious. What are we to make of a woman rolling in a headless figure on wheels like an upright vacuum cleaner? Or another woman in red velvet with a lantern contraption mounted on a skateboard? Or Hyun Yu Lee in a bridal gown, crashing sideways, stiff as a board? Or the group of dancers in black, in a state of ecstatic neurosis, bouncing like overwrought Chinese scholars or Yeshiva bochers drunk on Talmud?
A Butoh artist turns him- or herself inside out for you; the members of Brilliant Epoch, only half in love with deformity, just change their costumes to the accompaniment of a mishmash music/sound collage. Their spooky behavior seems as conventional as anything in ballet, their discontinuous vignettes too self-consciously artful. Altogether, Brilliant Epoch seems more concerned with clever designs than with inner states. With their twisting, witchy bodies and gnarled hands, they present themselves more as denizens than as citizens. But all they’re managing to invent is Halloween.
La Mama E.T.C. (November 7 through 18).
Federico Restrepo and Natalia Correa sleep on the darkened stage under a yellow blanket. When they stir, to the quiet roar of taped voices and the playing of conga and berimbau (the music is by Ivo Aruajo, Justin Rogers, and Gildo Pedreiro), and struggle up, we see, under black light, thin blue faces, pink lips, lumpily muscled blue bodies, pink nipples, and mops of stringy orange hair. They’re stuffed figures attached to the invisible, black-clad bodies of Restrepo and Correa. There’s a blue baby too, a creature solely of stuffed fabric.
Restrepo’s Cosecha (The Han-serf) is a vital piece of puppet theater, popular in style, telling the story of a campesino family caught in the middle of military action (in the form of lights and sound effects like the beating of helicopter blades) and driven from home. They settle where green plants hang from the ceiling, turn to raising coca, and lose their integrity and self-sufficiency. What’s marvelous in this is not the story, which becomes enfeebled because the characters’ situation becomes too ambiguous to explain wordlessly and because the performance’s festive quality so overrides its message. But the experiences of the characters are so vivid and immediate, uncluttered by ratiocination, that we feel with them even while we recognize their unlikeness to ourselves. The moments that talk to us best are simple, like the dim clink of empty cans when the family runs out of their airlifted (a shopping bag descending from the ceiling) food supplies or lie about stupefied and disgruntled after a drunken party. The human figures have a peculiar surreality.
There’s a compelling combination of helplessness and power in these muscle-backed rag-doll bodies. Physically, their bunchy limbs—bow legs and skinny arms—can bend drastically and we read the characters’ emotions in their bald shapes, in the attentive tilt of their heads, in the bobbing dynamism of their movements, in their cowering or despondent stillnesses. The figures have an intensely erotic explicitness too, expressing need and desire with shameless simplicity. Restrepo’s piece pulses with folk rhythms; there’s an almost constant hubbub of movement, though there’s not much expressive variety. Everything bounces, everything jiggles, everything wriggles. The corn they plant grows like a skinny Audrey II. Even the trees are bopping, and the coca plant, yanked upward by a wire, practically giggles in its dancing spurts of growth. This throbbing vitality is at the heart of Cosecha.
The live members of the Butoh-influenced collective Brilliant Epoch—presented on the same program—met when they participated in workshops for Natsu Nakajima’s Sleep and Reincarnation of last season. They don’t cover themselves in ash in their new piece, Fresh Ruins, nor do they move with the characteristic aching drag of Butoh performers, which should make their work easier to take. But Ruins lacks Butoh’s inwardness, its commitment to memory and the unconscious. What are we to make of a woman rolling in a headless figure on wheels like an upright vacuum cleaner? Or another woman in red velvet with a lantern contraption mounted on a skateboard? Or Hyun Yu Lee in a bridal gown, crashing sideways, stiff as a board? Or the group of dancers in black, in a state of ecstatic neurosis, bouncing like overwrought Chinese scholars or Yeshiva bochers drunk on Talmud?
A Butoh artist turns him- or herself inside out for you; the members of Brilliant Epoch, only half in love with deformity, just change their costumes to the accompaniment of a mishmash music/sound collage. Their spooky behavior seems as conventional as anything in ballet, their discontinuous vignettes too self-consciously artful. Altogether, Brilliant Epoch seems more concerned with clever designs than with inner states. With their twisting, witchy bodies and gnarled hands, they present themselves more as denizens than as citizens. But all they’re managing to invent is Halloween.
La Mama E.T.C. (November 7 through 18).
Replaceable You
May 15 At Dance Theater Workshop (April 25 through 29).
Room Service
June 5
A couple 01 years ego Tim Buckley quit dancing after a knee injury. Maybe he was wondering, too, about the sense of pursuing a career that guaranteed he’d always be living hand to mouth, Anyway, he had some surgery, healed nicely, and now he’s back choreographing and dancing up a storm. Trouble is, he’s in Chicago. Fortunately, there are airplanes. His new piece, Mr. Inbetween (made in collaboration wills dane- era Jeanette Welp. Kay Wendt LaSota, Lydia Charaf, and Bryan Saner), is wildly elliptical, smashingly funny, and heartbreaking.
The constant narrative factor is Buckley, who’s trapped in the square black room that is the stage. We see him wearing an oversize, black and white, jail-stripe shirt studying a book of black and white abstract illustrations, sitting on a black and white chair constructed of two halves of quite different design. Other characters—also wittily dressed in black and white oddments—walk on and off freely through four white doors—two on each side— which will not open for Buckley no matter how he tugs or rattles their knobs or sneaks up on them or beats himself against the woodwork. If he almost slips through an open door, someone rushing in will push him back. Or someone will raise a hand in a gesture for Buckley to halt: naturally polite, he does, as the door shuts in his face. Once a giant blob composed of two or three dancers in a black fabric sack blocks a doorway and threatens him with its pseudopodia: he backs off, after nearly taking a whack at it with his book. What’s the matter with him? Why is he shunned? Why is he trapped? Did he do something wrong?
He doesn’t get it. He’s quiet, but he wants the others to and include him. He tries to interest the other dancers in his book and they wind up appropriating it, as well as his chair (both of which they grab from one another as well). He tries to join them in their dancing, and stumbles along in and out of sync. They give him occasional, blasé acceptance, but he’s infinitely marginal, almost invisible to them. Though, to us, he’s the solidest of beings, he simply doesn’t count. Flinging one another around. falling, shoving, flipflopping, and casually manhandling one another with a joyous recklessness, the dancers are fully engaged with each other. They’re often rude and utterly selfish, but they don’t hold grudges. They reel into chains of tumbling sculptural arrangements that threaten to become utterly chaotic but always resolve in fatigue or synchrony of feeling. Early on, Buckley’s chair (balanced on. knocked over) is an integral element. Soon after, four of those split-personality black and white chairs are part of a heaving, rolling, yanking. climbing. dragging melee.
Mr. Inbetween is rich in contrasts. renewing its energies in a satisfying, errant flow from wild groups to introspective solos. from rambunctiousness to melancholy, tenderness to ferocity. puzzlement to anger—from subtle behavioral comedy to the most gleefully destructive slapstick. Buckley’s loneliness provides a constant perspective. The other characters are as whimsical in their actions as total strangers whose lives we happily know nothing about. Like animated creatures, they survive their direst conniptions without any sign of wear and tear. In one section. pairs of dancers scream at one another from opposite doorways. opening and slamming their doors with each remark, reaching a ferocious vocal pitch that’s both terrifying and ludicrous. Then one pair, LaSota and Charaf, emerge with long black and white poles. smashing them against the ground. LaSota—who looks like she was brought up to be nice—becomes an absolute terror going after Saner, splintering the pole on the floor as Saner dodges wildly out of her way and Buckley cowers behind some chairs.
A good girl gone bad, LaSota’s relish for this is especially thrilling. In this safe context where nothing seems really evil, the purity and joyousness of the violence is exhilarating. Saner, Charaf, and WeIp appear from time to time muffled in wonderful goofy disguises with their faces hidden: WeIp’s in heavy veils and a red silk robe: Saner’s in a red hat and a ruffly apron: and Charaf, apparently armless, hides inside a yellow jacket with dangling sleeves and a stupid bonnet. They munch crackers and dribble the crumbs on the floor. LaSota, in a lab coat, acting like a cross teacher scolding recalcitrant schoolchildren, makes them spit out whatever’s left and show that they’ve got nothing in their hands. Charaf looks particularly uneasy at this moment, sort of shrugging, as if having no hands were an error of taste. When LaSota then teaches them a silly little dance of kicks and wavy hand movements, Charaf’s tiny, coy shoulder moves comment deliciously on the busy wriggles she can’t possibly do. At one point, these three are dangling from the theater’s wraparound balcony. Saner’s grip seems incredibly tenuous. Buckley’s grateful for their silent company, pleads for them to talk to him, to say anything, to stick around. “What’s the light like up there?” he asks. He’ll say anything. Then he wonders aloud what he’s done to be trapped in this room when everyone else can move freely in and out. Was it something he did? Something he said? What if he gets to the other side and it’s the same? And he’s the same? No. It couldn’t be.
Buckley’s questioning is unbearably poignant, and the mute, disinterested presences upstairs emphasize the hopelessness and irrationality of his isolation. Not long after, a door opens and a small black blob whomps onto him, knocks him down, and does him in. The four dancers come in, look down at him. Suddenly, he is present to them. “Hey, are you okay?” they ask. And while he gets up and departs the stage, they look concernedly at the spot his body occupied.,unable to tell that he has gone.
At MoMing Dance and Arts Center, Chicago (May 10 through 20).
A couple 01 years ego Tim Buckley quit dancing after a knee injury. Maybe he was wondering, too, about the sense of pursuing a career that guaranteed he’d always be living hand to mouth, Anyway, he had some surgery, healed nicely, and now he’s back choreographing and dancing up a storm. Trouble is, he’s in Chicago. Fortunately, there are airplanes. His new piece, Mr. Inbetween (made in collaboration wills dane- era Jeanette Welp. Kay Wendt LaSota, Lydia Charaf, and Bryan Saner), is wildly elliptical, smashingly funny, and heartbreaking.
The constant narrative factor is Buckley, who’s trapped in the square black room that is the stage. We see him wearing an oversize, black and white, jail-stripe shirt studying a book of black and white abstract illustrations, sitting on a black and white chair constructed of two halves of quite different design. Other characters—also wittily dressed in black and white oddments—walk on and off freely through four white doors—two on each side— which will not open for Buckley no matter how he tugs or rattles their knobs or sneaks up on them or beats himself against the woodwork. If he almost slips through an open door, someone rushing in will push him back. Or someone will raise a hand in a gesture for Buckley to halt: naturally polite, he does, as the door shuts in his face. Once a giant blob composed of two or three dancers in a black fabric sack blocks a doorway and threatens him with its pseudopodia: he backs off, after nearly taking a whack at it with his book. What’s the matter with him? Why is he shunned? Why is he trapped? Did he do something wrong?
He doesn’t get it. He’s quiet, but he wants the others to and include him. He tries to interest the other dancers in his book and they wind up appropriating it, as well as his chair (both of which they grab from one another as well). He tries to join them in their dancing, and stumbles along in and out of sync. They give him occasional, blasé acceptance, but he’s infinitely marginal, almost invisible to them. Though, to us, he’s the solidest of beings, he simply doesn’t count. Flinging one another around. falling, shoving, flipflopping, and casually manhandling one another with a joyous recklessness, the dancers are fully engaged with each other. They’re often rude and utterly selfish, but they don’t hold grudges. They reel into chains of tumbling sculptural arrangements that threaten to become utterly chaotic but always resolve in fatigue or synchrony of feeling. Early on, Buckley’s chair (balanced on. knocked over) is an integral element. Soon after, four of those split-personality black and white chairs are part of a heaving, rolling, yanking. climbing. dragging melee.
Mr. Inbetween is rich in contrasts. renewing its energies in a satisfying, errant flow from wild groups to introspective solos. from rambunctiousness to melancholy, tenderness to ferocity. puzzlement to anger—from subtle behavioral comedy to the most gleefully destructive slapstick. Buckley’s loneliness provides a constant perspective. The other characters are as whimsical in their actions as total strangers whose lives we happily know nothing about. Like animated creatures, they survive their direst conniptions without any sign of wear and tear. In one section. pairs of dancers scream at one another from opposite doorways. opening and slamming their doors with each remark, reaching a ferocious vocal pitch that’s both terrifying and ludicrous. Then one pair, LaSota and Charaf, emerge with long black and white poles. smashing them against the ground. LaSota—who looks like she was brought up to be nice—becomes an absolute terror going after Saner, splintering the pole on the floor as Saner dodges wildly out of her way and Buckley cowers behind some chairs.
A good girl gone bad, LaSota’s relish for this is especially thrilling. In this safe context where nothing seems really evil, the purity and joyousness of the violence is exhilarating. Saner, Charaf, and WeIp appear from time to time muffled in wonderful goofy disguises with their faces hidden: WeIp’s in heavy veils and a red silk robe: Saner’s in a red hat and a ruffly apron: and Charaf, apparently armless, hides inside a yellow jacket with dangling sleeves and a stupid bonnet. They munch crackers and dribble the crumbs on the floor. LaSota, in a lab coat, acting like a cross teacher scolding recalcitrant schoolchildren, makes them spit out whatever’s left and show that they’ve got nothing in their hands. Charaf looks particularly uneasy at this moment, sort of shrugging, as if having no hands were an error of taste. When LaSota then teaches them a silly little dance of kicks and wavy hand movements, Charaf’s tiny, coy shoulder moves comment deliciously on the busy wriggles she can’t possibly do. At one point, these three are dangling from the theater’s wraparound balcony. Saner’s grip seems incredibly tenuous. Buckley’s grateful for their silent company, pleads for them to talk to him, to say anything, to stick around. “What’s the light like up there?” he asks. He’ll say anything. Then he wonders aloud what he’s done to be trapped in this room when everyone else can move freely in and out. Was it something he did? Something he said? What if he gets to the other side and it’s the same? And he’s the same? No. It couldn’t be.
Buckley’s questioning is unbearably poignant, and the mute, disinterested presences upstairs emphasize the hopelessness and irrationality of his isolation. Not long after, a door opens and a small black blob whomps onto him, knocks him down, and does him in. The four dancers come in, look down at him. Suddenly, he is present to them. “Hey, are you okay?” they ask. And while he gets up and departs the stage, they look concernedly at the spot his body occupied.,unable to tell that he has gone.
At MoMing Dance and Arts Center, Chicago (May 10 through 20).
Shake!
July 10
Robert Mugge’s film, Kumu Hula: Keepers of a Culture, the first dance film on Alive From Off Center’s summer season (to be aired on WNET July 15 at 10:30 p.m.) surveys the many surviving traditions of hula chant and dance in Hawaii. It’s a useful introduction for someone who knows zip about hula except for grass skirts, ukuleles, and undulating hips, but it’s not very helpfully organized. There’s no inkling of the relationships between the styles of different islands, very little on the purposes of the dances. I got a kick out of a buoyant and joyous Aerobics Hula, danced by three truly hefty gals, whomping around, bending and reaching, running in place, wheeling their arms, shaking their butts. Another modern hula showed that familiar, inviting, rather submissive aspect of the hula, with girls dancing with softly curling hands and gently swaying hips, accompanied by mellow falsetto yodeling. In contrast, the old dances are virile, a little stern in performance, yet, on the whole, the teachers speak about them sentimentally or with well-meaning pomposity. I loved the rootedness and force of, for example, a traditional dance and chant for men in orange skirts and shirts who smack sticks together sharply and execute stamping footwork that involves pulling one foot up at a slant and occasionally leaping sideways. Or a group in heavy red garments whose driving performance requires deep, abrupt turns and fierce thrusting and pulsing motions. There’s a hunched-over dog dance from Molokai, a turtle dance from Lanai, a lizard dance from Maui in which the seated dancers beat little drums attached just above the knee. But I wanted to know much more about these dances than that they were old.
Matt Mahurin’s very short film, Hammer (on a program titled “Music Transfer” July 29 at 10:30 p.m.), has a tremendous impact. It’s not a dance film, but a lyrical series of black-and-white images to gospel and rap versions of “Take This Hammer.” The camera slowly, smoothly notes three young black kids dancing in the street, an old man having his head shaved, soapy water washing over automobile windshield, a kid swinging his younger brother, and many more images that in their variety and simple truthfulness affirm the value of life at its most ordinary. Mahurin’s tender attention gives a sense of intimacy that’s never invasive or grasping. He touches his subjects tightly but lets us recognize them—or ourselves in them. The way the camera passes on leaves them free, their momentary presences like gifts from the soul.
Highlighting a program (airing late summer) of three dream-dances is Joelle Bouvier and Regis Obadia 's
La Chambre. A woman (Nathalie Million) seated in a large room repeatedly arches back, heaves her torso forward, spreads her legs sharply. Seven women sitting on chairs suspended high on the wall echo movements and emotions. The women move suddenly, almost strongly enough to throw them off their narrow seats, then sit motionless. Million convulses, plunges to the floor, rolls obsessively; the women on the wall contract sharply, open their legs. Every move seems compelled by force that’s not merely in them, but in the very atmosphere. The women are tilted in their seats at a steep angle when a wind blows through, and at a brutal crash of thunder they’re standing precariously. To continued rumblings, they climb down, and down, and from the sides of the room, they bend back flinging their arms upward, heave forward, and plunge to the ground, courting exhaustion. They pull their skirts tightly across their hips, then open them with the snap of a sail caught in a cracking wind. It’s raining, pouring; they throw their arms open overhead and thrust them down. And Million is left alone in a desert. La Chambre is beautifully done although the video lacks the extraordinary crispness of the original film—and is hard, clenched frustrated emotions are fiercely portrayed. Movement bursts through inertia again and again; and yet there is is completion, satisfaction, or accommodation. Even weariness allows no letup. Rain falls; no thirst is quenched; the desert takes over in an instant.
Robert Mugge’s film, Kumu Hula: Keepers of a Culture, the first dance film on Alive From Off Center’s summer season (to be aired on WNET July 15 at 10:30 p.m.) surveys the many surviving traditions of hula chant and dance in Hawaii. It’s a useful introduction for someone who knows zip about hula except for grass skirts, ukuleles, and undulating hips, but it’s not very helpfully organized. There’s no inkling of the relationships between the styles of different islands, very little on the purposes of the dances. I got a kick out of a buoyant and joyous Aerobics Hula, danced by three truly hefty gals, whomping around, bending and reaching, running in place, wheeling their arms, shaking their butts. Another modern hula showed that familiar, inviting, rather submissive aspect of the hula, with girls dancing with softly curling hands and gently swaying hips, accompanied by mellow falsetto yodeling. In contrast, the old dances are virile, a little stern in performance, yet, on the whole, the teachers speak about them sentimentally or with well-meaning pomposity. I loved the rootedness and force of, for example, a traditional dance and chant for men in orange skirts and shirts who smack sticks together sharply and execute stamping footwork that involves pulling one foot up at a slant and occasionally leaping sideways. Or a group in heavy red garments whose driving performance requires deep, abrupt turns and fierce thrusting and pulsing motions. There’s a hunched-over dog dance from Molokai, a turtle dance from Lanai, a lizard dance from Maui in which the seated dancers beat little drums attached just above the knee. But I wanted to know much more about these dances than that they were old.
Matt Mahurin’s very short film, Hammer (on a program titled “Music Transfer” July 29 at 10:30 p.m.), has a tremendous impact. It’s not a dance film, but a lyrical series of black-and-white images to gospel and rap versions of “Take This Hammer.” The camera slowly, smoothly notes three young black kids dancing in the street, an old man having his head shaved, soapy water washing over automobile windshield, a kid swinging his younger brother, and many more images that in their variety and simple truthfulness affirm the value of life at its most ordinary. Mahurin’s tender attention gives a sense of intimacy that’s never invasive or grasping. He touches his subjects tightly but lets us recognize them—or ourselves in them. The way the camera passes on leaves them free, their momentary presences like gifts from the soul.
Highlighting a program (airing late summer) of three dream-dances is Joelle Bouvier and Regis Obadia 's
La Chambre. A woman (Nathalie Million) seated in a large room repeatedly arches back, heaves her torso forward, spreads her legs sharply. Seven women sitting on chairs suspended high on the wall echo movements and emotions. The women move suddenly, almost strongly enough to throw them off their narrow seats, then sit motionless. Million convulses, plunges to the floor, rolls obsessively; the women on the wall contract sharply, open their legs. Every move seems compelled by force that’s not merely in them, but in the very atmosphere. The women are tilted in their seats at a steep angle when a wind blows through, and at a brutal crash of thunder they’re standing precariously. To continued rumblings, they climb down, and down, and from the sides of the room, they bend back flinging their arms upward, heave forward, and plunge to the ground, courting exhaustion. They pull their skirts tightly across their hips, then open them with the snap of a sail caught in a cracking wind. It’s raining, pouring; they throw their arms open overhead and thrust them down. And Million is left alone in a desert. La Chambre is beautifully done although the video lacks the extraordinary crispness of the original film—and is hard, clenched frustrated emotions are fiercely portrayed. Movement bursts through inertia again and again; and yet there is is completion, satisfaction, or accommodation. Even weariness allows no letup. Rain falls; no thirst is quenched; the desert takes over in an instant.
Siren Songs
August 7
Tall, lean, smaIl-breasted, elegantly formed, with a pale face topped by a brash crew cut, Brenda Daniels is amazing: you can’t take your eyes off her. It’s not that she’s striking and rather odd; her extraordinary technical eloquence paired with the expressiveness of her limbs—the sheer physical generosity of her performance. You expect something drier.
Daniels (who has been teaching technique at the Merce Cunningham Studio since 1985) presented two dances for eight women— Irises, a premiere, and Damage, from earlier this year. In Irises, to a score by Marc Farre that reiterates pines from a poem by Kate RaIey about voyeurism and constraint (“If she took off her dress, I’d follow it with my eyes to the floor”), Daniels moves slowly in a self-absorbed way, turning slightly, bending, quietly dropping and opening her hands. Cut to four dowdy housewives in fuzzy pink slippers who set out their Jell-O-making equipment on little tables, prepare it with hammy exactitude, and sip the green liquid from champagne goblets.
Four broads in red heels, chartreuse-and-black striped minidresses, and CDs perched on their heads like saucy ‘30s chapeaux saunter in, tough and smug. They sashay in front of the seated housewives who stare at them in fascination. Then everybody lugs off the tables, chairs, bowls, spoons. Daniels, in a purple unitard, has a long solo—cool and intense, arrogant and unrushed. When joined by all the other women— Mary Lisa Burns, Kristina Harvey, Calla Jo, Amy Schwartz, Connie Sullivan, Paula Swiatkowski, and Henrika Taylor—in shades of lilac and purple, each in her own quiet space, Daniels still compels the eye unmercifully. Her body arches and curves without yielding, but without hardness, Yet there’s a worm in the apple, and an underlying ache heightens the perfection of the winging arms, the extravagant legs. Damage was more coherent and severe: an aggressive and calculated piece for a chorus of women wearing white T-shirts and black tights and massed in a blunt wedge. The group sections alternate with solos for Jo, Swiatkowski, and Daniels. Marked with a trickle of redness oozing from one ear, the women turn, arch up sideways as if wrenched from the floor, crouch like threatening birds, and sink down semi-prone, bent over one leg like the Swan Queen.
To a military sound-off, they execute a sort of workout of big extensions, slow turns, and bent torsos that intensifies with the increasing volume of Jonathan Larson’s music, Daniels’s choreography makes much of high contrasts: in the scale and shape of movement (straight against bent, extended versus pulled-in), in speed, in the shifting character of she dancers’ attention from belligerence to preoccupation. The solos are to familiar songs. Calla Jo’s very slow, sulky solo to “Only You” (the Platters) suddenly turns fast and messy, and then congeals. The chorus returns in two sullen, accusing teams. Swiatkowski, dancing to a swinging Sinatra rendition of “They Can’t Take That Away From Me,” smiles deceitfully, and keels backward. The chorus comes back in two lines, slithering their arms upward, smacking their hands down. They seem almost to caress themselves without touching. To Dinah Washington’s version of “Our Love Is Here To Stay.” Daniels dances the final, fascinating solo with glistening spaciousness in the body. The precise way her high extension breaks and folds in; the clarity and balance of the low, circular swing of her leg; the way her snaking legs seem to weave impossible knots in the air are simply breathtaking.
At Cunningham Studio (July 19 through 22).
An ice rink was the ideal place to be on the sweltering summer night when Ice Theatre of New York, which has been around since 1984, did a brief benefit performance at Sky Rink. I saw about half. Guests Almut Lehmann and Herbert Wiesinger, in glittering black outfits that exposed lots of skin, did a flashy, seux duet— standard ice-show fare.
But the two pieces by company co-director Rob McBrien that I caught were less obviously virtuosic and tricky, more in tune with Ice Theatre’s subtler choreographic objectives. Valery Levine-Thomas and Cathy Martini, members of the company, performed an intricate duet of tight, twining steps in Shook Foil, creating linked vortices of movement that release briefly into synchrony and symmetry. In the opener, set to incredibly sIo-ow Mozart, Ken Moir plays a rank amateur who wobbles, stutters, falls. His legs slide apart of their own volition till he’s nearly flat on the ice. lIe points himself in one direction, but his skates veer off somewhere else. When he acquires more skill, occasionally becoming a veritable swan, he builds authoritatively to totally inept transitions. Noting his crisscrossed feet and collapsing ankles, his thin bravado, it’s hard to believe he’s faking.
At Sky Rink (July 19).
Tall, lean, smaIl-breasted, elegantly formed, with a pale face topped by a brash crew cut, Brenda Daniels is amazing: you can’t take your eyes off her. It’s not that she’s striking and rather odd; her extraordinary technical eloquence paired with the expressiveness of her limbs—the sheer physical generosity of her performance. You expect something drier.
Daniels (who has been teaching technique at the Merce Cunningham Studio since 1985) presented two dances for eight women— Irises, a premiere, and Damage, from earlier this year. In Irises, to a score by Marc Farre that reiterates pines from a poem by Kate RaIey about voyeurism and constraint (“If she took off her dress, I’d follow it with my eyes to the floor”), Daniels moves slowly in a self-absorbed way, turning slightly, bending, quietly dropping and opening her hands. Cut to four dowdy housewives in fuzzy pink slippers who set out their Jell-O-making equipment on little tables, prepare it with hammy exactitude, and sip the green liquid from champagne goblets.
Four broads in red heels, chartreuse-and-black striped minidresses, and CDs perched on their heads like saucy ‘30s chapeaux saunter in, tough and smug. They sashay in front of the seated housewives who stare at them in fascination. Then everybody lugs off the tables, chairs, bowls, spoons. Daniels, in a purple unitard, has a long solo—cool and intense, arrogant and unrushed. When joined by all the other women— Mary Lisa Burns, Kristina Harvey, Calla Jo, Amy Schwartz, Connie Sullivan, Paula Swiatkowski, and Henrika Taylor—in shades of lilac and purple, each in her own quiet space, Daniels still compels the eye unmercifully. Her body arches and curves without yielding, but without hardness, Yet there’s a worm in the apple, and an underlying ache heightens the perfection of the winging arms, the extravagant legs. Damage was more coherent and severe: an aggressive and calculated piece for a chorus of women wearing white T-shirts and black tights and massed in a blunt wedge. The group sections alternate with solos for Jo, Swiatkowski, and Daniels. Marked with a trickle of redness oozing from one ear, the women turn, arch up sideways as if wrenched from the floor, crouch like threatening birds, and sink down semi-prone, bent over one leg like the Swan Queen.
To a military sound-off, they execute a sort of workout of big extensions, slow turns, and bent torsos that intensifies with the increasing volume of Jonathan Larson’s music, Daniels’s choreography makes much of high contrasts: in the scale and shape of movement (straight against bent, extended versus pulled-in), in speed, in the shifting character of she dancers’ attention from belligerence to preoccupation. The solos are to familiar songs. Calla Jo’s very slow, sulky solo to “Only You” (the Platters) suddenly turns fast and messy, and then congeals. The chorus returns in two sullen, accusing teams. Swiatkowski, dancing to a swinging Sinatra rendition of “They Can’t Take That Away From Me,” smiles deceitfully, and keels backward. The chorus comes back in two lines, slithering their arms upward, smacking their hands down. They seem almost to caress themselves without touching. To Dinah Washington’s version of “Our Love Is Here To Stay.” Daniels dances the final, fascinating solo with glistening spaciousness in the body. The precise way her high extension breaks and folds in; the clarity and balance of the low, circular swing of her leg; the way her snaking legs seem to weave impossible knots in the air are simply breathtaking.
At Cunningham Studio (July 19 through 22).
An ice rink was the ideal place to be on the sweltering summer night when Ice Theatre of New York, which has been around since 1984, did a brief benefit performance at Sky Rink. I saw about half. Guests Almut Lehmann and Herbert Wiesinger, in glittering black outfits that exposed lots of skin, did a flashy, seux duet— standard ice-show fare.
But the two pieces by company co-director Rob McBrien that I caught were less obviously virtuosic and tricky, more in tune with Ice Theatre’s subtler choreographic objectives. Valery Levine-Thomas and Cathy Martini, members of the company, performed an intricate duet of tight, twining steps in Shook Foil, creating linked vortices of movement that release briefly into synchrony and symmetry. In the opener, set to incredibly sIo-ow Mozart, Ken Moir plays a rank amateur who wobbles, stutters, falls. His legs slide apart of their own volition till he’s nearly flat on the ice. lIe points himself in one direction, but his skates veer off somewhere else. When he acquires more skill, occasionally becoming a veritable swan, he builds authoritatively to totally inept transitions. Noting his crisscrossed feet and collapsing ankles, his thin bravado, it’s hard to believe he’s faking.
At Sky Rink (July 19).
Six Pack
June 12
The recent “Fresh Tracks” showcase at Dance Theater Workshop was a mixed bag. The strengths of the program were, on the whole, not in its dance aspect, and most of the pieces needed to be taken a step further.
Gonnie Heggen—a member of the School of Hard Knocks since 1988—is so odd and personable that she hardly needs to do more than chew gum, and in Hug the Lump she does just that, nervously stuffing her mouth, tossing the wrappers, and smiling guiltily. Long-limbed with short blond hair, and wearing outdoorsy shorts, sensible shoes and white ankle socks, she looks like some kind of Alpine Boy Scout. Dancing in a desultory, gawky way, sometimes posing like some noodIy showgirl, she delivers lackadaisical kicks and angular gestures while building to a screwed-up kidnapping joke. Though I enjoy her style, her piece doesn’t add up to much. She’s the whole story.
In Alexis Eupierre’s My Friend Died and I Couldn’t Cry, Eupterre stands, eyes closed, in an outlined square for the duration of the piece while around him four dancers flutter tissues to the floor, then rip them out of the boxes faster and faster as their anger rises. The dancers drop backward, writhe, sit up, fall over, keel sideways: standing up. they start to jiggle and jump around on flat feet. Their behavior repeatedly becomes obsessive. Moving hurriedly forward and back with little zigzag jumping steps, they begin to bump and crash, but when three of them gradually come to rest, one of the women cannot stop. A man (Eric Bradley) hugs and comforts her. But she stays rigid, resistant, and he twists her from side to side, swings her with inexplicably increasing harshness. My Friend Died builds in a linear, blocky way. Eupierre’s illustrations of locked-in distress make the dancers mechanical, so the sequence of action seems arbitrary. The immovable dead man has value only as an icon: the dancers aren’t actively linked to him. Of course, based on the title, the piece is about disconnection, the temporary inability to feel one’s own feelings. But Eupierre’s choreography just sketches the surface of a painful subject: he needs to work it more.
Christopher Beck’s Breakway, a solo for Elise Long, is a study of a woman cracking and coming apart, but for all its gestural force, it’s illustrative and doesn’t allow us inside her. Taking high, hard steps in place, swishing her long black skirt; or skidding forward, then staggering back with arms wheeling: or cowering, rodentlike, pinched with fear and suspicion; or spinning, with her long, red- gold hair aflame around her, Long gives a strong performance. But the piece curves back to its beginning, sealing her too easily in inaccessibility.
Patricia Hoffbauer’s Lunch is a crazed comedy of family life, a jagged mix of affection and viciousness that’s exuberantly energized, zany. and quite unfocused. But Hoffbauer is gorgeous in her fast-talking, rabid, maternal ambivalence, Peter Richards endearing in his soaring leaps and abrupt humiliations as the father, and Tina Dudek finely honed as the frequently spiteful daughter. Ken Bullock plays the son as an oaf but, fluffing and scratching, takes a marvelously precise birdbath, splashing himself with water from a goldfish bowl.
In Ruth Fuglistaller’s Shingle, three short figures facing back in what appear to be overcoats (actually three women in big bunchy skirts, bent over so we only see them up to the waist) harmonize on vowels, speak urgently, and then, with the sound of a splash, slowly sway. Over the course of eons they come erect so we see their naked backs: they sag and twist, lean, drop to a squat and move slightly, in hunched poses. They’re like relatively static natural objects—a little like Eiko and Koma with some clothes on—but nothing happens to illuminate the tedium. The whole vocal beginning, in particular, seemed irrelevant.
Doug Cooney’s Dancing Like My Father was the most finished and substantial work, with a sharp-edged and very witty spoken text coupled with slides of Cooney’s father as a handsome young husband and parent. Dressed in a suit and tie similar to what we see his father wearing. Cooney raves about his father and tells stories illustrating how little they knew each other. He demonstrates his father’s bottom-heavy slouching stance, and deluges us with his own irritatingly numerous scholastic merits while doing “a dance of approval—a dance that never ends,” with hopping balances that keep toppling forward, Overall, Cooney’s choreography is bright, though characterless; the crucial story’s in the text and in his passionate telling. Yet he manages to carry the tale beyond his mania. “I’ve got hate in my heart,” he admits. “I’ve got hate in my heart, but my heart is very big.”
At Dance Theater Workshop (May 30 through June 2).
The recent “Fresh Tracks” showcase at Dance Theater Workshop was a mixed bag. The strengths of the program were, on the whole, not in its dance aspect, and most of the pieces needed to be taken a step further.
Gonnie Heggen—a member of the School of Hard Knocks since 1988—is so odd and personable that she hardly needs to do more than chew gum, and in Hug the Lump she does just that, nervously stuffing her mouth, tossing the wrappers, and smiling guiltily. Long-limbed with short blond hair, and wearing outdoorsy shorts, sensible shoes and white ankle socks, she looks like some kind of Alpine Boy Scout. Dancing in a desultory, gawky way, sometimes posing like some noodIy showgirl, she delivers lackadaisical kicks and angular gestures while building to a screwed-up kidnapping joke. Though I enjoy her style, her piece doesn’t add up to much. She’s the whole story.
In Alexis Eupierre’s My Friend Died and I Couldn’t Cry, Eupterre stands, eyes closed, in an outlined square for the duration of the piece while around him four dancers flutter tissues to the floor, then rip them out of the boxes faster and faster as their anger rises. The dancers drop backward, writhe, sit up, fall over, keel sideways: standing up. they start to jiggle and jump around on flat feet. Their behavior repeatedly becomes obsessive. Moving hurriedly forward and back with little zigzag jumping steps, they begin to bump and crash, but when three of them gradually come to rest, one of the women cannot stop. A man (Eric Bradley) hugs and comforts her. But she stays rigid, resistant, and he twists her from side to side, swings her with inexplicably increasing harshness. My Friend Died builds in a linear, blocky way. Eupierre’s illustrations of locked-in distress make the dancers mechanical, so the sequence of action seems arbitrary. The immovable dead man has value only as an icon: the dancers aren’t actively linked to him. Of course, based on the title, the piece is about disconnection, the temporary inability to feel one’s own feelings. But Eupierre’s choreography just sketches the surface of a painful subject: he needs to work it more.
Christopher Beck’s Breakway, a solo for Elise Long, is a study of a woman cracking and coming apart, but for all its gestural force, it’s illustrative and doesn’t allow us inside her. Taking high, hard steps in place, swishing her long black skirt; or skidding forward, then staggering back with arms wheeling: or cowering, rodentlike, pinched with fear and suspicion; or spinning, with her long, red- gold hair aflame around her, Long gives a strong performance. But the piece curves back to its beginning, sealing her too easily in inaccessibility.
Patricia Hoffbauer’s Lunch is a crazed comedy of family life, a jagged mix of affection and viciousness that’s exuberantly energized, zany. and quite unfocused. But Hoffbauer is gorgeous in her fast-talking, rabid, maternal ambivalence, Peter Richards endearing in his soaring leaps and abrupt humiliations as the father, and Tina Dudek finely honed as the frequently spiteful daughter. Ken Bullock plays the son as an oaf but, fluffing and scratching, takes a marvelously precise birdbath, splashing himself with water from a goldfish bowl.
In Ruth Fuglistaller’s Shingle, three short figures facing back in what appear to be overcoats (actually three women in big bunchy skirts, bent over so we only see them up to the waist) harmonize on vowels, speak urgently, and then, with the sound of a splash, slowly sway. Over the course of eons they come erect so we see their naked backs: they sag and twist, lean, drop to a squat and move slightly, in hunched poses. They’re like relatively static natural objects—a little like Eiko and Koma with some clothes on—but nothing happens to illuminate the tedium. The whole vocal beginning, in particular, seemed irrelevant.
Doug Cooney’s Dancing Like My Father was the most finished and substantial work, with a sharp-edged and very witty spoken text coupled with slides of Cooney’s father as a handsome young husband and parent. Dressed in a suit and tie similar to what we see his father wearing. Cooney raves about his father and tells stories illustrating how little they knew each other. He demonstrates his father’s bottom-heavy slouching stance, and deluges us with his own irritatingly numerous scholastic merits while doing “a dance of approval—a dance that never ends,” with hopping balances that keep toppling forward, Overall, Cooney’s choreography is bright, though characterless; the crucial story’s in the text and in his passionate telling. Yet he manages to carry the tale beyond his mania. “I’ve got hate in my heart,” he admits. “I’ve got hate in my heart, but my heart is very big.”
At Dance Theater Workshop (May 30 through June 2).
The Bessies Strikes Back
Fifteen thousand smackeroos!” shouted Bebe Miller, misreading an index card while announcing the cash award for choreographers/creators at the 1990 Bessies, given at a ceremony at the Brooklyn Academy of Music September 12. Too bad she had to be brought back to reality—$1500. But $15,000! “Wouldn’t that be something!” she said, practically gasping from her brief plunge into fantasy. Morgan Guaranty Trust sprung for the awards ($500 in other categories), as they have for the past seven years, and The Voice kicked in for three special citations.
“What I like about the Bessies,” remarked cohost (with Jerri Allyn) Laurie Carlos, “is I always understand what everybody’s wearing. I come in here and get an affirmation of my own fashion statement.” Barefoot, lighting designer Roma Flowers took a year to make it from the balcony (where latecomers were exiled) to the stage to pick up her Bessie. “Holy Toledo!” said Louise Smith. who received an award for her performance in Ping Chong’s Brightness. Garth Fagan sent a fax, read graciously by the elegant Mary Hinkson, once Fagan’s teacher at the Graham studio. Rob Besserer read a fax too, from Mark Morris in Belgium, who received an award for his staging of Purcell’s opera Dido and Aeneas. “I’m busy rehearsing with my fabulous dancers,” wrote the pleased Morris. “‘Dido “is a dance I like and I have a really big part.” Dancer Jonathan Riseling, in Russia with the Ailey company, had asked his father to accept his award. A dad! At the Bessies!
“I’m a farmer,” he said, and the audience applauded. “We think we’re part of the future,” he continued. despite the hard times farmers (as opposed to agribusiness) have been having with the government for years. “In our area we’ve lost 710 out of 750 farms in the past 12 years.” But in his affirmation he made common cause with an audience enraged with Congress’s submissiveness to pro-censorship loudmouths.
The Bessies, officially the New York Dance and Performance Awards, are not ordinarily very controversial. But this year they became a hot potato when Karen Finley, and then Danitra Vance, withdrew as hosts because Philip Morris was a partial sponsor of the event, to the tune of S16,000 - $16,000 that didn’t go to the Helms Museum. For a while, the Bessies almost didn’t happen, while David White (executive director of Dance Theater Workshop) and the 23-member Bessies committee decided how reactive or politically correct to be.
Ultimately the event went off, with anti-Helms forces in full attendance. GET SMART’s “cigarette girls” and “Marlboro men” leafleted against Helms, crediting Philip Morris for its support of performing and visual arts but assailing it for its support of Helms’s re-election campaign and its ostensible contributions to the Helms Museum. (‘What’s going to be in it?” asked Rich Rubin of ACT UP from the stage, while three men in KKK robes stood behind him, arms folded. “Blank canvases?”) Composer/saxophonist Lenny Pickett. presenting the music awards, noted that musicians are not immune from the perils of censorship and likened its withering effect to the extinction of species in a rainforest. David White, vehemently emphasizing the scope of the chill emanating from Washington, reminded us that Dayton-Hudson had pulled its support from Planned Parenthood just a few weeks ago. He urged the audience to make sure that New York Senator Alphonse D’Amato (who tore up the Serrano catalogue on the Senate floor) would not be reelected and called on Philip Morris to transfer its financial support of Helms to his opponent, former Charlotte mayor Harvey Gantt. Gantt’s campaign was represented outside BAM too. And Karen Finley, naturally not present, assigned the $1500 of her award to Gantt’s campaign.
Inside the theater, the audience was galvanized and strengthened by the calls to arms and the sense of mutual support. As Black-Eyed Susan said in her tribute to Ethyl Eichelberger, who died of AIDS just recently, “We must protect each other.”
Pennies went to choreographer/creators Margarita Guergue and Hahn Rowe for We Were Never There, Eiko and Koma for Passage, Ulysses Dove for Episodes, Robbie McCauley for Sally’s Rape, Karen Finley for We Keep Our Victims Ready, Wim Vandekeybus for Les Poetes de Mauvaises Nouvelles, Mark Morris for Dido and Aeneas, and to Pat Oleszko and Garth Fagan for sustained achievement. Performers Arthur Armijo (of Susan Marshall and Dancers), Victoria Finlayson (of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company), Penny Hutchison (of the Mark Morris Dance Group), Jonathan Riseling (for his performance in Judith Jamison’s Heal), Louise Smith, and Gail Turner, longtime member of Meredith Monk/the House) were honored.
Visual design awards went to lighting designer Roma Flowers and Suzanne Poulin; Liz Prince and Matthew Yokobosky were recognized for their costume and set designs: and composer awards went to Hans Peter Kuhn (for his score for the collaborative Suspect Terrain at PepsiCo Summerfare), A. Leroy and Mimi Goese (for their score for Wendy Perron’s Last Forever), and Max Roach for sustained achievement. Deborah Jowitt presented a special citation to Annabelle Gamson for her powerful reconstructions of the works of Isadora Duncan and Mary Wigman over the years. Martha Wilson received a Bessie for her steadfast support of performance artists in her direction of the much harassed Franklin Furnace.
Eiko spoke with great warmth about Beate Gordon, the third recipient, who runs the Performing Arts Program of the Asia Society, thanking her for her “motherly guidance” and passionate commitment. She noted that in 1945 Gordon had worked with those formulating Japan’s democratic constitution and saw to it that women’s rights were upheld in that document. “Looking at her,” said Eiko, “I’m amazed at how much a person can be.” The long event was warped and stretched by the polities of survival. Too many people had to en- press their thoughts and feelings about the censorship issue and the threat to gay and lesbian artists, so by the time the performer and choreographer/creator awards roIled around, numbers of people who might have hoped to have dinner while it was still Wednesday had disappeared. But all that passionate. desperate talking from the stage was important, and proved the truth of David White’s contention that the Bessies provides a vital occasion for the members of a diverse and scattered community of artists (plus audience members, critics, administrators, collectors, whoever) to gather together and talk to one another.
In the course of the evening, four dancers of Elizabeth Streb/Ringside bashed themselves against a wall and padded floor in Spacehold. Paul Zaloom, using commonplace props, zanily held the participants in the NEA controversy up to ridicule. The Flirtations sang in a tribute to those who’ve died of AIDS and those still fighting to live. Before the final performance—Susan Marshall’s hypnotic Kiss, performed by Arthur Armijo and Kathy Casey—the audience was reminded to turn the talk into action.
“What I like about the Bessies,” remarked cohost (with Jerri Allyn) Laurie Carlos, “is I always understand what everybody’s wearing. I come in here and get an affirmation of my own fashion statement.” Barefoot, lighting designer Roma Flowers took a year to make it from the balcony (where latecomers were exiled) to the stage to pick up her Bessie. “Holy Toledo!” said Louise Smith. who received an award for her performance in Ping Chong’s Brightness. Garth Fagan sent a fax, read graciously by the elegant Mary Hinkson, once Fagan’s teacher at the Graham studio. Rob Besserer read a fax too, from Mark Morris in Belgium, who received an award for his staging of Purcell’s opera Dido and Aeneas. “I’m busy rehearsing with my fabulous dancers,” wrote the pleased Morris. “‘Dido “is a dance I like and I have a really big part.” Dancer Jonathan Riseling, in Russia with the Ailey company, had asked his father to accept his award. A dad! At the Bessies!
“I’m a farmer,” he said, and the audience applauded. “We think we’re part of the future,” he continued. despite the hard times farmers (as opposed to agribusiness) have been having with the government for years. “In our area we’ve lost 710 out of 750 farms in the past 12 years.” But in his affirmation he made common cause with an audience enraged with Congress’s submissiveness to pro-censorship loudmouths.
The Bessies, officially the New York Dance and Performance Awards, are not ordinarily very controversial. But this year they became a hot potato when Karen Finley, and then Danitra Vance, withdrew as hosts because Philip Morris was a partial sponsor of the event, to the tune of S16,000 - $16,000 that didn’t go to the Helms Museum. For a while, the Bessies almost didn’t happen, while David White (executive director of Dance Theater Workshop) and the 23-member Bessies committee decided how reactive or politically correct to be.
Ultimately the event went off, with anti-Helms forces in full attendance. GET SMART’s “cigarette girls” and “Marlboro men” leafleted against Helms, crediting Philip Morris for its support of performing and visual arts but assailing it for its support of Helms’s re-election campaign and its ostensible contributions to the Helms Museum. (‘What’s going to be in it?” asked Rich Rubin of ACT UP from the stage, while three men in KKK robes stood behind him, arms folded. “Blank canvases?”) Composer/saxophonist Lenny Pickett. presenting the music awards, noted that musicians are not immune from the perils of censorship and likened its withering effect to the extinction of species in a rainforest. David White, vehemently emphasizing the scope of the chill emanating from Washington, reminded us that Dayton-Hudson had pulled its support from Planned Parenthood just a few weeks ago. He urged the audience to make sure that New York Senator Alphonse D’Amato (who tore up the Serrano catalogue on the Senate floor) would not be reelected and called on Philip Morris to transfer its financial support of Helms to his opponent, former Charlotte mayor Harvey Gantt. Gantt’s campaign was represented outside BAM too. And Karen Finley, naturally not present, assigned the $1500 of her award to Gantt’s campaign.
Inside the theater, the audience was galvanized and strengthened by the calls to arms and the sense of mutual support. As Black-Eyed Susan said in her tribute to Ethyl Eichelberger, who died of AIDS just recently, “We must protect each other.”
Pennies went to choreographer/creators Margarita Guergue and Hahn Rowe for We Were Never There, Eiko and Koma for Passage, Ulysses Dove for Episodes, Robbie McCauley for Sally’s Rape, Karen Finley for We Keep Our Victims Ready, Wim Vandekeybus for Les Poetes de Mauvaises Nouvelles, Mark Morris for Dido and Aeneas, and to Pat Oleszko and Garth Fagan for sustained achievement. Performers Arthur Armijo (of Susan Marshall and Dancers), Victoria Finlayson (of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company), Penny Hutchison (of the Mark Morris Dance Group), Jonathan Riseling (for his performance in Judith Jamison’s Heal), Louise Smith, and Gail Turner, longtime member of Meredith Monk/the House) were honored.
Visual design awards went to lighting designer Roma Flowers and Suzanne Poulin; Liz Prince and Matthew Yokobosky were recognized for their costume and set designs: and composer awards went to Hans Peter Kuhn (for his score for the collaborative Suspect Terrain at PepsiCo Summerfare), A. Leroy and Mimi Goese (for their score for Wendy Perron’s Last Forever), and Max Roach for sustained achievement. Deborah Jowitt presented a special citation to Annabelle Gamson for her powerful reconstructions of the works of Isadora Duncan and Mary Wigman over the years. Martha Wilson received a Bessie for her steadfast support of performance artists in her direction of the much harassed Franklin Furnace.
Eiko spoke with great warmth about Beate Gordon, the third recipient, who runs the Performing Arts Program of the Asia Society, thanking her for her “motherly guidance” and passionate commitment. She noted that in 1945 Gordon had worked with those formulating Japan’s democratic constitution and saw to it that women’s rights were upheld in that document. “Looking at her,” said Eiko, “I’m amazed at how much a person can be.” The long event was warped and stretched by the polities of survival. Too many people had to en- press their thoughts and feelings about the censorship issue and the threat to gay and lesbian artists, so by the time the performer and choreographer/creator awards roIled around, numbers of people who might have hoped to have dinner while it was still Wednesday had disappeared. But all that passionate. desperate talking from the stage was important, and proved the truth of David White’s contention that the Bessies provides a vital occasion for the members of a diverse and scattered community of artists (plus audience members, critics, administrators, collectors, whoever) to gather together and talk to one another.
In the course of the evening, four dancers of Elizabeth Streb/Ringside bashed themselves against a wall and padded floor in Spacehold. Paul Zaloom, using commonplace props, zanily held the participants in the NEA controversy up to ridicule. The Flirtations sang in a tribute to those who’ve died of AIDS and those still fighting to live. Before the final performance—Susan Marshall’s hypnotic Kiss, performed by Arthur Armijo and Kathy Casey—the audience was reminded to turn the talk into action.