1990 Continued
Alive Again
October 23
To abet the reconstruction of Lucinda Childs’s 1979 Dance, Lyon Biennale paid for a print of the Sol LeWitt film that was such an essential part and for a soundtrack to be added since the piece was originally formed with the Philip Glass Esemble live. At the Theatre National Populaire in Villeurban, Childs presented three of the final five sections of the piece omitting one of her solos and a finale section that had no film, plus Interior Drama, a work in silence from two years earlier. What a difference!
Interior Drama is intriguing in its subtly varied monochromatic patterns, but its tone is glum and unyielding. Dance, which works so splendidly with Glass’s chiming music, has a buoyant vibrancy and radiance. It seems filled with gladness. Minimalist, I suppose, in its conception, Dance transcends that appellation in the shining quality of its actual presence. Interior Drama Is smooth and uninflected, for five dancers with grimly set faces wearing simple pearl-gray outfits. I’ve respect for its dazzling exactness and complexity, for its mathematical rigor, but it’s as exciting as watching grandma knitting. The only sound is the padding, brushing rhythm of the soft shoes against the floor. The little bounces of two women’s hair seem positively frivolous. But at the biennale Interior Drama usefully established a context for Dance within Childs’s oeuvre.
In Dance, the movement, however restricted, seems free rather than under ideological constraint, and by itself, I think, is rather glorious. But Childs’s choreography is raised to a celestial level because of the exhilarating way the dance and music mesh. and because Sol LeWtlt’s film so enriches the perspective on the dancing. The action of the dance onstage and in the film proceeds simultaneously. LeWitt’s film is projected on a scrim in front of the stage: usually, the live performers are seen through it. The images change in scale from huge, full-screen figures to roughly life-size ones. Sometimes the images are only on the upper portion of the screen. sometimes the camera is overhead so we look down on the floor grid, sometimes there’s no filmic image at all.
The changes of scale and perspective are exciting and never arbitrary. When their figures are close in size, and the film floor coincides with the gleaming floor of the real stage, the filmed dancers seem to be really dancing with the live performers and their ghostly presences seem astonishingly vivid. With its brisk, low, frontal leaps and little skips, the curt drama of its entrances and exits, the flow of “Dance No. I” is sideways, purely lateral. In contrast, Childs’s solo (“Dance No. 4”) is most forceful when its deeply arcing paths are traced forward and back. Childs has to work harder than her elegant younger self in the film, but the contrast does no injury to the work. The clarity and polish of the current company—Kelly Slough, Emily Stern, Cathy Lipowicz, Janet Kaufman, Michele Pogliani, Janet Charleston, Doug Johnson, Garry Reigenborn, and Daniel McCusker—is remarkable, particularly in “Dance No. I .“ They generate sustained, unflagging, humming energy that lets them skim weightlessly over the floor. That the dancers on the film are from 11 years ago doesn’t matter at all; the steps and quality of execution in the film and live performance are so nearly identical. (Besides Childs, McCusker is the only one in the original film who also performed live in Lyon. And his legs are so free and quick you’d expect to see little wings on his ankles. like Mercury’s.)
When Angelin Preljocaj was an infant, his Albanian parents, headed for America, wound up waiting in France for a visa long enough to put down roots there. Now, for the biennale, the 33- year-old choreographer was commissioned to make a piece on the subject of immigration.
His Amer America is set in a vast, gloomy shed set about with crates, sacks, bales, metal drums (decor by Thierry Leproust, superbly lit by Jacques Chatelet). The stanchions at the rear of the stage locate the piece at harborside, with a sense of vague openness beyond. It’s an in-between place: perhaps Preljocaj’s four couples are waiting to leave; perhaps they’ve arrived but haven’t been processed. In any case, they’re nowhere. And the dance is largely about the frustration of having one’s life in suspension, of having no purpose but to rattle the bars of one’s cage. At the beginning of the piece, everyone’s asleep on the stacked bales; gradually the women slither down to the floor. The waking men pick them up and cradle them, but when they carefully set them down, the women topple over.
However, the women aren’t all weak or dependent. They have their own authority. In a circle, the men show off with stamps and slaps and quick, neatly scissoring Iegs. But the folksy eagerness dissipates, and the dancing becomes m re frantic, biting, overwrought, in a series of fierce, ambivalent duets for the couples, who cleave roughly to each other and recoil. The duets are crisp and savage, dangerously temperamental (rather akin to the material JoelIe Bouvier and Regis Obadia of Esquisse so relish). The women are sIung around, flipped over and shoved down abruptly. They give as good as they get, sometimes better. One woman smacks her partner in the back of the head as if he were an incorrigible dolt. Another whacks hers on the shoulders and throws him down.
But gentle, needy touchings mingle inextricably with the violence. They’ve got nothing to do but drive one another crazy One man goes around dropping sacks on the others and slaps another guy on the butt, looking to provoke something. A woman brings a bunch of sacks and sits on a mound of them. With nasty glee, the others—men first— snatch them out from under her. She can’t protect her hoard. The men and women toss the bags about, taunting her, till she’s left with just the sack she clutches in her arms, there’s a fierce rivalrous duet for two men: they lift their legs in insult like dogs pissing. The dancers balance control and abandon with dazzling expertise—Sylvia Bidegain, Magali Caillet, Christophe Haleb, Phillippe Madala, Katia Mèdeci, Xavier Nicklor, Florence Vitrac, Fredéric Werle. And Laurent Petitgand’s fine score creates an evocative and changeable musical atmosphere in a cinematic way. At the end, the dancers move the crates and sacks and, with a single purpose, build a great wall, sealing themselves off from the audience and from their pasts as well. Yes, in fact, Preljocaj established very little sense of past or future, no sense of troubles behind and dreams ahead.
Despite all the high, erratic emotion, and movement that was brilliant and to the point, the tone of the piece was unvarying, the tension at too constant a level. There was only the present in a limbo where feelings swung wildly but emotional development was stifled, Still, I was fascinated by the passionate relationships Preljocaj explored. If the subject of immigration proved to be only the jumping off point for Amer America, that was all right with me.
Biennale de la Danse de Lyon (September 26 through 28).
To abet the reconstruction of Lucinda Childs’s 1979 Dance, Lyon Biennale paid for a print of the Sol LeWitt film that was such an essential part and for a soundtrack to be added since the piece was originally formed with the Philip Glass Esemble live. At the Theatre National Populaire in Villeurban, Childs presented three of the final five sections of the piece omitting one of her solos and a finale section that had no film, plus Interior Drama, a work in silence from two years earlier. What a difference!
Interior Drama is intriguing in its subtly varied monochromatic patterns, but its tone is glum and unyielding. Dance, which works so splendidly with Glass’s chiming music, has a buoyant vibrancy and radiance. It seems filled with gladness. Minimalist, I suppose, in its conception, Dance transcends that appellation in the shining quality of its actual presence. Interior Drama Is smooth and uninflected, for five dancers with grimly set faces wearing simple pearl-gray outfits. I’ve respect for its dazzling exactness and complexity, for its mathematical rigor, but it’s as exciting as watching grandma knitting. The only sound is the padding, brushing rhythm of the soft shoes against the floor. The little bounces of two women’s hair seem positively frivolous. But at the biennale Interior Drama usefully established a context for Dance within Childs’s oeuvre.
In Dance, the movement, however restricted, seems free rather than under ideological constraint, and by itself, I think, is rather glorious. But Childs’s choreography is raised to a celestial level because of the exhilarating way the dance and music mesh. and because Sol LeWtlt’s film so enriches the perspective on the dancing. The action of the dance onstage and in the film proceeds simultaneously. LeWitt’s film is projected on a scrim in front of the stage: usually, the live performers are seen through it. The images change in scale from huge, full-screen figures to roughly life-size ones. Sometimes the images are only on the upper portion of the screen. sometimes the camera is overhead so we look down on the floor grid, sometimes there’s no filmic image at all.
The changes of scale and perspective are exciting and never arbitrary. When their figures are close in size, and the film floor coincides with the gleaming floor of the real stage, the filmed dancers seem to be really dancing with the live performers and their ghostly presences seem astonishingly vivid. With its brisk, low, frontal leaps and little skips, the curt drama of its entrances and exits, the flow of “Dance No. I” is sideways, purely lateral. In contrast, Childs’s solo (“Dance No. 4”) is most forceful when its deeply arcing paths are traced forward and back. Childs has to work harder than her elegant younger self in the film, but the contrast does no injury to the work. The clarity and polish of the current company—Kelly Slough, Emily Stern, Cathy Lipowicz, Janet Kaufman, Michele Pogliani, Janet Charleston, Doug Johnson, Garry Reigenborn, and Daniel McCusker—is remarkable, particularly in “Dance No. I .“ They generate sustained, unflagging, humming energy that lets them skim weightlessly over the floor. That the dancers on the film are from 11 years ago doesn’t matter at all; the steps and quality of execution in the film and live performance are so nearly identical. (Besides Childs, McCusker is the only one in the original film who also performed live in Lyon. And his legs are so free and quick you’d expect to see little wings on his ankles. like Mercury’s.)
When Angelin Preljocaj was an infant, his Albanian parents, headed for America, wound up waiting in France for a visa long enough to put down roots there. Now, for the biennale, the 33- year-old choreographer was commissioned to make a piece on the subject of immigration.
His Amer America is set in a vast, gloomy shed set about with crates, sacks, bales, metal drums (decor by Thierry Leproust, superbly lit by Jacques Chatelet). The stanchions at the rear of the stage locate the piece at harborside, with a sense of vague openness beyond. It’s an in-between place: perhaps Preljocaj’s four couples are waiting to leave; perhaps they’ve arrived but haven’t been processed. In any case, they’re nowhere. And the dance is largely about the frustration of having one’s life in suspension, of having no purpose but to rattle the bars of one’s cage. At the beginning of the piece, everyone’s asleep on the stacked bales; gradually the women slither down to the floor. The waking men pick them up and cradle them, but when they carefully set them down, the women topple over.
However, the women aren’t all weak or dependent. They have their own authority. In a circle, the men show off with stamps and slaps and quick, neatly scissoring Iegs. But the folksy eagerness dissipates, and the dancing becomes m re frantic, biting, overwrought, in a series of fierce, ambivalent duets for the couples, who cleave roughly to each other and recoil. The duets are crisp and savage, dangerously temperamental (rather akin to the material JoelIe Bouvier and Regis Obadia of Esquisse so relish). The women are sIung around, flipped over and shoved down abruptly. They give as good as they get, sometimes better. One woman smacks her partner in the back of the head as if he were an incorrigible dolt. Another whacks hers on the shoulders and throws him down.
But gentle, needy touchings mingle inextricably with the violence. They’ve got nothing to do but drive one another crazy One man goes around dropping sacks on the others and slaps another guy on the butt, looking to provoke something. A woman brings a bunch of sacks and sits on a mound of them. With nasty glee, the others—men first— snatch them out from under her. She can’t protect her hoard. The men and women toss the bags about, taunting her, till she’s left with just the sack she clutches in her arms, there’s a fierce rivalrous duet for two men: they lift their legs in insult like dogs pissing. The dancers balance control and abandon with dazzling expertise—Sylvia Bidegain, Magali Caillet, Christophe Haleb, Phillippe Madala, Katia Mèdeci, Xavier Nicklor, Florence Vitrac, Fredéric Werle. And Laurent Petitgand’s fine score creates an evocative and changeable musical atmosphere in a cinematic way. At the end, the dancers move the crates and sacks and, with a single purpose, build a great wall, sealing themselves off from the audience and from their pasts as well. Yes, in fact, Preljocaj established very little sense of past or future, no sense of troubles behind and dreams ahead.
Despite all the high, erratic emotion, and movement that was brilliant and to the point, the tone of the piece was unvarying, the tension at too constant a level. There was only the present in a limbo where feelings swung wildly but emotional development was stifled, Still, I was fascinated by the passionate relationships Preljocaj explored. If the subject of immigration proved to be only the jumping off point for Amer America, that was all right with me.
Biennale de la Danse de Lyon (September 26 through 28).
Allons Danser
October 9
While the weather turned suddenly from summer to fall in Lyon, that city’s fourth Biennale de la Danse - this one celebrating a century of American dance - played to mostly packed and enthusiastic houses. At Lyon’s biggest rock palace, Daniel Larrieu and his company, Astrakan - whose poetic and reflective Waterproof was presented two summers ago in a Columbia University pool - premiered Les Prophetes, a new and hermetic work, on themes related to the discovery and exploitation of the Americas.
In the slow but fascinating beginning, a woman clad in clownish layers of stiff, high-waisted skirts - like a mock Spanish princess - stands on a huge red cloth and gradually, gently, systematically pulls it to her with the toes of one foot; with her arm delicately raised, she gathers it into rivers of long creases, pinches the middle to form an hourglass shape, and eventually winds it all around her feet. Then everything goes to pieces. Fancifully costumed, Les Prophetes is a kind of bitter pageant, static and half-baked. The body of the piece consists largely of didactic references and perfunctory images that Larrieu fails to link. Movement is the least of it.
Under flamboyant and ominous skies, Elizabeth Schwartz frolicked in the verdant sculpture gardens of the 19th century Vila Gillet. Her subsequent indoor performances of evocations and reconstructions of Isadora Duncan, accompanied by slides of Rodin sculptures, is graver, but outdoors she evokes the giddy naiveté of those turn-of-the-century nymphs intoxicated with nature. She runs past us across the damp grass, then nearly swoons, overcome by languor, shielding her brow with a drooping arm. Beyond, a young couple pushes a baby carriage down one of the garden paths. After a series of buoyant, galumphing leaps, Schwartz is strewing marigolds, dribbling petals over her head. When she’s rather sapped and wistful, she effectively conveys a certain dated temperament and romantic attitude But her vigor isn’t quite convincing. She doesn’t have much strength in the torso, doesn’t get adequate support from her breath, and so isn’t very alive in her chest. She and her partner, Dominique Petit, clasp tree trunks ardently. I like the abandon of his deerlike leaps across the garden’s expanse. And when Schwartz presses herself moodily against a solid stone block, her passionate, wilted poses take on the authority of the stone itself, like a low relief of ancient workmanship.
In a spacious auction hall, part of a handsomely renovated former train station, the Gare des Brotteaux, members of the Vanaver Caravan lead a giant square dance and country-dancing ball. Wearing jeans and red bandannas, straw bonnets and Minnie Pearl hats, Stetsons and suspenders, the assembly of French ranch hands and farmers go bumping around the room doing right-hand round and do-si-do, gamely attempting steps and patterns they are learning on the spot with enthusiastic party spirit. It’s a wonder they didn’t turn up at the station in backboards.
The Lyon Opera Ballet’s “Dancing Zappa” started out as a project for several French choreographers to make pieces to music commissioned from Frank Zappa. But the choreographers approached found the resultant scores uncongenial for dancing and refused to participate. Ultimately the project fell to three Americans who were invited to make dances to existing Zappa music of their own choosing. The evening comes off better than you’d expect, considering how unsuitable the music really is. Lucinda Childs, still tagged as a minimalist, choreographed Perfect Stranger for the superb Jocelyne Mocogni and Pierre Advkatoff and 14 others to a 13-minute Zappa piece performed live by the Lyon Opera Orchestra, conducted by Robert Hughes. Childs chose not to have the dancers skate smoothly across the music’s face but to obey its rhythms while resisting its strident drag. Surprisingly, she created a skillfully constructed, sculptural, neoclassical ballet - though one that’s monumental, obstinate and excessively cold.
Karole Armitage’s Strictly Genteel used four recorded Zappa songs (including “Plastic People” and “Slime”) plus his Strictly Genteel conducted by Kent Nagano. What can I say? Armitage’s pretentious dances rip off the cliches of popular culture. Her humorless parodies seem without perspective or sensibility. The assaultive manners, the rudeness and fraudulent sexuality of the punching, kicking, crotch-in-your-face movement is simply insulting. The costumes (by David Salle, Armitage and various couturiers) matter a lot. The black ribbons of the women’’s point shoes, for example, appear to bind their ankles with casual but fetishistic cruelty. Men in white jumpsuits, black boots and derbies, and giant stuffed crotch protectors pair with dizzy girls in flimsy dresses with maribou trim. There are gauchos, and cowboys and dance hall girls, and go-go girls in metal and fringe.
Armitage must be smarter than this shallow work indicates. But her pretentiousness still exceeds her abilities to an embarrassing degree. The music sounds too much like second-hand stuff to be satisfying, but Ralph Lemon did a first-rate job in Bogus Pomp, a Zappa opus 25 minutes long that’s riddled with wrong turns, dead ends, and self-conscious musical wisecracks. Lemon made a moody, complex work for nine dancers in blue and purple hues, with both men and women appearing randomly and equally comfortable in pants or dresses. He sucks you into a world of loose and changeable emotions that are not conventional, casual, or reliable. At the beginning, seven dancers come onstage one at a time and stand modestly facing the audience. At the music’s opening fanfare, they walk off. Later, three women are crouching; their male partners standing behind them go into frenzies of frantic stamps and flings. The women kiss them, soothe them, make it all better. Then they back off, take a moment, and run hard at them, knocking them straight to the floor. I like the veering emotions, the occasional sluggishness, the collapsing extravagances, the weight and fullness of the dancing, and the strange, offhand personal incidents - like little kisses - that heighten the colors of the work and add a curious taste of the commonplace.
You never know where you are in the emotional geography of Bogus Pomp, but the constellation of movement and feeling at a given moment seems perfectly true. Sometimes that truth is astonishing. For example, the orchestra begins to mutter and yell while Jocelyne Mocogni holds a balance for a very long time. Philippe Lormeau picks her up over his shoulder, sets her down, then takes her place on demi-point. Suddenly he explodes in a flashing tantrum of every-which-way leaps, flings himself, kicks, snatches and tosses his skirt while hardly moving from one spot. His initiative explodes the gathered tensions, restores the balance that Mocogni’s cruelly extended balance steals. It’s so unexpected, so unjustifiable, so right.
September 13 through October 6).
While the weather turned suddenly from summer to fall in Lyon, that city’s fourth Biennale de la Danse - this one celebrating a century of American dance - played to mostly packed and enthusiastic houses. At Lyon’s biggest rock palace, Daniel Larrieu and his company, Astrakan - whose poetic and reflective Waterproof was presented two summers ago in a Columbia University pool - premiered Les Prophetes, a new and hermetic work, on themes related to the discovery and exploitation of the Americas.
In the slow but fascinating beginning, a woman clad in clownish layers of stiff, high-waisted skirts - like a mock Spanish princess - stands on a huge red cloth and gradually, gently, systematically pulls it to her with the toes of one foot; with her arm delicately raised, she gathers it into rivers of long creases, pinches the middle to form an hourglass shape, and eventually winds it all around her feet. Then everything goes to pieces. Fancifully costumed, Les Prophetes is a kind of bitter pageant, static and half-baked. The body of the piece consists largely of didactic references and perfunctory images that Larrieu fails to link. Movement is the least of it.
Under flamboyant and ominous skies, Elizabeth Schwartz frolicked in the verdant sculpture gardens of the 19th century Vila Gillet. Her subsequent indoor performances of evocations and reconstructions of Isadora Duncan, accompanied by slides of Rodin sculptures, is graver, but outdoors she evokes the giddy naiveté of those turn-of-the-century nymphs intoxicated with nature. She runs past us across the damp grass, then nearly swoons, overcome by languor, shielding her brow with a drooping arm. Beyond, a young couple pushes a baby carriage down one of the garden paths. After a series of buoyant, galumphing leaps, Schwartz is strewing marigolds, dribbling petals over her head. When she’s rather sapped and wistful, she effectively conveys a certain dated temperament and romantic attitude But her vigor isn’t quite convincing. She doesn’t have much strength in the torso, doesn’t get adequate support from her breath, and so isn’t very alive in her chest. She and her partner, Dominique Petit, clasp tree trunks ardently. I like the abandon of his deerlike leaps across the garden’s expanse. And when Schwartz presses herself moodily against a solid stone block, her passionate, wilted poses take on the authority of the stone itself, like a low relief of ancient workmanship.
In a spacious auction hall, part of a handsomely renovated former train station, the Gare des Brotteaux, members of the Vanaver Caravan lead a giant square dance and country-dancing ball. Wearing jeans and red bandannas, straw bonnets and Minnie Pearl hats, Stetsons and suspenders, the assembly of French ranch hands and farmers go bumping around the room doing right-hand round and do-si-do, gamely attempting steps and patterns they are learning on the spot with enthusiastic party spirit. It’s a wonder they didn’t turn up at the station in backboards.
The Lyon Opera Ballet’s “Dancing Zappa” started out as a project for several French choreographers to make pieces to music commissioned from Frank Zappa. But the choreographers approached found the resultant scores uncongenial for dancing and refused to participate. Ultimately the project fell to three Americans who were invited to make dances to existing Zappa music of their own choosing. The evening comes off better than you’d expect, considering how unsuitable the music really is. Lucinda Childs, still tagged as a minimalist, choreographed Perfect Stranger for the superb Jocelyne Mocogni and Pierre Advkatoff and 14 others to a 13-minute Zappa piece performed live by the Lyon Opera Orchestra, conducted by Robert Hughes. Childs chose not to have the dancers skate smoothly across the music’s face but to obey its rhythms while resisting its strident drag. Surprisingly, she created a skillfully constructed, sculptural, neoclassical ballet - though one that’s monumental, obstinate and excessively cold.
Karole Armitage’s Strictly Genteel used four recorded Zappa songs (including “Plastic People” and “Slime”) plus his Strictly Genteel conducted by Kent Nagano. What can I say? Armitage’s pretentious dances rip off the cliches of popular culture. Her humorless parodies seem without perspective or sensibility. The assaultive manners, the rudeness and fraudulent sexuality of the punching, kicking, crotch-in-your-face movement is simply insulting. The costumes (by David Salle, Armitage and various couturiers) matter a lot. The black ribbons of the women’’s point shoes, for example, appear to bind their ankles with casual but fetishistic cruelty. Men in white jumpsuits, black boots and derbies, and giant stuffed crotch protectors pair with dizzy girls in flimsy dresses with maribou trim. There are gauchos, and cowboys and dance hall girls, and go-go girls in metal and fringe.
Armitage must be smarter than this shallow work indicates. But her pretentiousness still exceeds her abilities to an embarrassing degree. The music sounds too much like second-hand stuff to be satisfying, but Ralph Lemon did a first-rate job in Bogus Pomp, a Zappa opus 25 minutes long that’s riddled with wrong turns, dead ends, and self-conscious musical wisecracks. Lemon made a moody, complex work for nine dancers in blue and purple hues, with both men and women appearing randomly and equally comfortable in pants or dresses. He sucks you into a world of loose and changeable emotions that are not conventional, casual, or reliable. At the beginning, seven dancers come onstage one at a time and stand modestly facing the audience. At the music’s opening fanfare, they walk off. Later, three women are crouching; their male partners standing behind them go into frenzies of frantic stamps and flings. The women kiss them, soothe them, make it all better. Then they back off, take a moment, and run hard at them, knocking them straight to the floor. I like the veering emotions, the occasional sluggishness, the collapsing extravagances, the weight and fullness of the dancing, and the strange, offhand personal incidents - like little kisses - that heighten the colors of the work and add a curious taste of the commonplace.
You never know where you are in the emotional geography of Bogus Pomp, but the constellation of movement and feeling at a given moment seems perfectly true. Sometimes that truth is astonishing. For example, the orchestra begins to mutter and yell while Jocelyne Mocogni holds a balance for a very long time. Philippe Lormeau picks her up over his shoulder, sets her down, then takes her place on demi-point. Suddenly he explodes in a flashing tantrum of every-which-way leaps, flings himself, kicks, snatches and tosses his skirt while hardly moving from one spot. His initiative explodes the gathered tensions, restores the balance that Mocogni’s cruelly extended balance steals. It’s so unexpected, so unjustifiable, so right.
September 13 through October 6).
Bach Sweets
May 8
Some of the dancing in Zvi Gotheiner’s 10 solos and duets to sections of Bach’s unaccompanied cello suites was superb, and it was a pleasure to see pieces in which traditional modem dance values were so alive. The Bach is marvelous but difficult music to choreograph to: its stark and ardent singing is hard to match.
In the light and spirited opening Prelude from Suite No. 6. performed by June Balish. for example. the rasping stridency of the bowing makes the dance seem too artificial and trivial. Amos Pinhasi. clasping the sides of his head with clawed hands, dances a Michelangelesque agony of bends and strains and twisting arms to the Minuets from Suite No. 2. To the Prelude and Sarabande from the same suite, Elisa King and Trey Casimir perform an intense, curving duet in which their bodies sometimes fold into heaps of brittle angles or fall wearily against each other. Casimir’s dancing is clean and satisfying. but there’s something curbed in King’s: emotional intensity seems to congeal her. To the Bourée from Suite No. 3. Ronit Zlatin (who has Rachel Ward’s sort of beauty) dances a whimsical saga of ephemeral emotions—of teasing, fickleness, and confusion—expansively and with appropriate spontaneity. Zlatin’s got a lovely lift to her body, a nice open chest, and sails into generous, shapely leaps. Exhibiting beautiful control, Margalit Beery plunges with the expressive line of Gotheiner’s dance set to the Sarabande from Suite No. 5. yielding to its jagged drops. broken arcs. and partial falls. In an exemplary, carefully phrased. and resonant performance that seems deeply personal, she lets the movement fill with its just measure of emotion. By contrast, Janie Brendel, in the Sarabande and Prelude from Suite No. 4, seems to be making comments, playing on the surface of the piece. She’s skillful, but hasn’t discovered much truth in the dance’s artifice. And she seems to lack strength in the center of her body, which contributes to a lack of conviction.
The final two sections were the richest, partly because the performers had such skill and authority. Arching and convulsing, writhing through gnarled poses, Eric Hoisington dances a disturbing, self-absorbed psychological portrait to the Prelude to Suite No. 5. He seems so be seeing himself in a distorting mirror. His image keeps dissolving and reforming: he’s a satyr, Dorian Gray, an itchy addict scraping at his arm. One moment he’s soaring gloriously through the air in buoyant leaps, next he’s an ape. Immediately after, the program closes with the Sarabande from Suite No. 6, danced by the ravishing Christine Wright. She gives full value and scope to every lyric gesture. The range of her dynamics and the subtlety of their inflection are remarkable. In a world filled with excellent dancers, it’s still rare to see someone who can put mind and heart and muscle and bone so much in tune.
At Eden’s Expressway (April 13 through 15).
Some of the dancing in Zvi Gotheiner’s 10 solos and duets to sections of Bach’s unaccompanied cello suites was superb, and it was a pleasure to see pieces in which traditional modem dance values were so alive. The Bach is marvelous but difficult music to choreograph to: its stark and ardent singing is hard to match.
In the light and spirited opening Prelude from Suite No. 6. performed by June Balish. for example. the rasping stridency of the bowing makes the dance seem too artificial and trivial. Amos Pinhasi. clasping the sides of his head with clawed hands, dances a Michelangelesque agony of bends and strains and twisting arms to the Minuets from Suite No. 2. To the Prelude and Sarabande from the same suite, Elisa King and Trey Casimir perform an intense, curving duet in which their bodies sometimes fold into heaps of brittle angles or fall wearily against each other. Casimir’s dancing is clean and satisfying. but there’s something curbed in King’s: emotional intensity seems to congeal her. To the Bourée from Suite No. 3. Ronit Zlatin (who has Rachel Ward’s sort of beauty) dances a whimsical saga of ephemeral emotions—of teasing, fickleness, and confusion—expansively and with appropriate spontaneity. Zlatin’s got a lovely lift to her body, a nice open chest, and sails into generous, shapely leaps. Exhibiting beautiful control, Margalit Beery plunges with the expressive line of Gotheiner’s dance set to the Sarabande from Suite No. 5. yielding to its jagged drops. broken arcs. and partial falls. In an exemplary, carefully phrased. and resonant performance that seems deeply personal, she lets the movement fill with its just measure of emotion. By contrast, Janie Brendel, in the Sarabande and Prelude from Suite No. 4, seems to be making comments, playing on the surface of the piece. She’s skillful, but hasn’t discovered much truth in the dance’s artifice. And she seems to lack strength in the center of her body, which contributes to a lack of conviction.
The final two sections were the richest, partly because the performers had such skill and authority. Arching and convulsing, writhing through gnarled poses, Eric Hoisington dances a disturbing, self-absorbed psychological portrait to the Prelude to Suite No. 5. He seems so be seeing himself in a distorting mirror. His image keeps dissolving and reforming: he’s a satyr, Dorian Gray, an itchy addict scraping at his arm. One moment he’s soaring gloriously through the air in buoyant leaps, next he’s an ape. Immediately after, the program closes with the Sarabande from Suite No. 6, danced by the ravishing Christine Wright. She gives full value and scope to every lyric gesture. The range of her dynamics and the subtlety of their inflection are remarkable. In a world filled with excellent dancers, it’s still rare to see someone who can put mind and heart and muscle and bone so much in tune.
At Eden’s Expressway (April 13 through 15).
Band-Aids
May 1
BACA’s April Hybrids series opened with an evening of pieces by Donald Byrd and Judith A. Jackson. Jackson started off a nervous. frantic, obsessive monologue that went on forever. She’s a performer I’d see again, but has no idea when to stop. Her daunting hour-and-a-quarter, mile-a-minute Pygmies in the Rain Forest\ - in which she talks about being evicted for not paying her rent, conjures up ancestral deities, screams at her therapist, has a meandering dream about mice, puts on a gorilla suit, worries about the environment - was twice as long as it should been, though its episodic structure would have made it a cinch to cut. The material that’s immediate, close to daily life—about the her desperate psyche, people begging for spare change (“you want money I don’t need”)—is clear, acid. and very tasty, but Jackson’s forest fantasies are hyperbolic, flabby. Starting late and going so long, she put the groups that followed at a disadvantage, as it happened.
Hone Chil’ Milk, a collaboration with Baltimore artists conceived directed by Donald Byrd, had such vitality, sharpness. and sage wit that it didn’t matter. Honey Chil’ takes a mean subject, the stereotyping of black women, and lays out its pain on a bed of laughter. The beginning’s very comfortable, sentimental and ludicrous: there’s a bossy, consoling. waddling mammy—five black women inside the same big dress—and a white song-and-dance man in a plantation suit (Christopher Eaves) throwing himself on the floor singing “Mammy.” But when one of the five women tries to be her own person, the mammy tries to cajole her back, and the blond massa brutally wrestles her to the floor. Then he crawls after one last nurturing mammy, and, after clinging to her like a needy infant, he rapes her. The transition is quick: the sudden ugliness takes your breath away.
Honesy Chil’ covers a lot of territory. In one of its lightest, sassiest sections——about “How come we got no real sisters on TV?”— Sheila A. Gaskins gets to riff on this subject. What a treat! She’s a power puncher and she’s on a roll. “Where they all get that long hair from?” she wonders. Where are the real sisters, “like me. who read you up and down”? And what about Jackie. and Diahann Carroll, and Oprah? “How fat was Oprah? She used to be on channel 13. Turn to channel 11 there still be part of her ass.” The women—Gaskins, Harriette Lane, Toni Richards, Joyce J. Scott. and VeIl L. Wheeler—are splendid performers. Melodramatic, caustic, savvy, full of beans, they insult and support each other, but despite the sass. and the ability they demonstrate to rebound, they don’t let us duck the pain that’s at the core of the characters they play. And it’s useful to be reminded what it’s like to be despised and patronized. to learn to loathe oneself, so be invisible. But these women aren’t gnawing on their bitterness. Honey Chil’s not about blame, though there’s plenty to share: it’s about being honest and having respect. about cutting the shit and moving on. It leaves no bitter taste, none of the guilt that presages more resentment and sullen inertia. Though it portrays suffering seriously, it turns grievances into jokes and prepares to put them behind us. Nightmares are remembered in Honey Chil’ Milk, but its concerns are about today.
The show’s final plea, “See me as I am,” is a little out of keeping with the piece’s tough and salty moxie, a little soft and sappy for these justly confident women who, maybe, don’t have to ask so nicely. But it is an essential point, exquisitely simple. Not too much to ask. And they’ve already given us eyes to do it. A bandaged-all-over woman meditating cross-legged in the first row of the audience (Ruth Ann Lundeberg) turns out to be just one of the characters who’ve suffered untimely death in Nina Martin’s Date With Fate. The others we just hear about, and the three mortals onstage, with their amusing smudges and bruises and haphazard bandages. have escaped any fatal mishaps. Their big question is: “Why me?”—meaning not “Why did my number come up?” but, usually, “Why didn’t it?” Why dumb luck—or whatever—helped you avoid something terrible is the pressing question in Date With Fate, perhaps because we’ve learned to expect the worst. and life has taught us that this isn’t paranoid—merely practical. We’re surprised, with our demented family backgrounds, that we’re even ambulatory, let alone functioning okay. How come?
On the whole, Martin’s piece deals with this subject best when it deals with it lightly, sarcastically, frivolously. When three irritating clowns. the agents of a careless cosmic maliciousness, gleefully bounce their giant dice off the torsos of Jason Childers, Randy Martin. and Theresa Reeves and knock them to the floor, the dazed victims don’t know what hit them, and the audience howls., But when Date With Fate is earnest, it’s leaden, even embarrassing. Why would anyone expect that death should strike according to some rational schedule based on age. merit, potential productivity, etc.? Do we still believe in Santa Claus? Would we be happier with chance eliminated from the equation? We know our bodies count every calorie: would we feel more secure knowing that we’d inevitably get what some cosmic authority decided we deserved? T
he imaginative ways we devise to cope with our doubts, the myriad ways we keep the faith despite our lack of it—that’s what’s interesting and entertaining. Not our dull feelings of impotence and our outraged sense of fairness. Our precious seriousness about ourselves makes us ridiculous. Fortunately, Date With Fate tips toward the ironic and acerbic. Childers, in particular, has a marvelous, sour monologue about his upbringing. He waddles like a baby and in a fine duet with Daniel Haley he’s born again and again pulled through Haley’s legs every which way. dangled upside down yelling. To us, he expresses his family’s disparaging view of him - an insidious, mealymouthed judgment that kills the soul by inches. And. with barely suppressed anger, in his own character, he voices thoughts that have assimilated that perspective. “I’m a late developer. Emotionally I’m not ready for the competition of real life. I’ll never make the first team. Some of those guys could crush me just by thinking about it!” But we only have to see Childers ooze contempt to know that he’s learned to mitigate the poison of those remarks, though they contaminate the atmosphere he inhabits. Date With Fate builds to a tumultuous climax in which the dancers, wearing partial casts and wielding crutches, stumble, vault, fling, collide, and rebound with a tenacious and triumphant vigor. But what stays in the mind are the fumblings of Martin’s innocents struggling to create meaning out of the idiocy of their lives.
BACA’s April Hybrids series opened with an evening of pieces by Donald Byrd and Judith A. Jackson. Jackson started off a nervous. frantic, obsessive monologue that went on forever. She’s a performer I’d see again, but has no idea when to stop. Her daunting hour-and-a-quarter, mile-a-minute Pygmies in the Rain Forest\ - in which she talks about being evicted for not paying her rent, conjures up ancestral deities, screams at her therapist, has a meandering dream about mice, puts on a gorilla suit, worries about the environment - was twice as long as it should been, though its episodic structure would have made it a cinch to cut. The material that’s immediate, close to daily life—about the her desperate psyche, people begging for spare change (“you want money I don’t need”)—is clear, acid. and very tasty, but Jackson’s forest fantasies are hyperbolic, flabby. Starting late and going so long, she put the groups that followed at a disadvantage, as it happened.
Hone Chil’ Milk, a collaboration with Baltimore artists conceived directed by Donald Byrd, had such vitality, sharpness. and sage wit that it didn’t matter. Honey Chil’ takes a mean subject, the stereotyping of black women, and lays out its pain on a bed of laughter. The beginning’s very comfortable, sentimental and ludicrous: there’s a bossy, consoling. waddling mammy—five black women inside the same big dress—and a white song-and-dance man in a plantation suit (Christopher Eaves) throwing himself on the floor singing “Mammy.” But when one of the five women tries to be her own person, the mammy tries to cajole her back, and the blond massa brutally wrestles her to the floor. Then he crawls after one last nurturing mammy, and, after clinging to her like a needy infant, he rapes her. The transition is quick: the sudden ugliness takes your breath away.
Honesy Chil’ covers a lot of territory. In one of its lightest, sassiest sections——about “How come we got no real sisters on TV?”— Sheila A. Gaskins gets to riff on this subject. What a treat! She’s a power puncher and she’s on a roll. “Where they all get that long hair from?” she wonders. Where are the real sisters, “like me. who read you up and down”? And what about Jackie. and Diahann Carroll, and Oprah? “How fat was Oprah? She used to be on channel 13. Turn to channel 11 there still be part of her ass.” The women—Gaskins, Harriette Lane, Toni Richards, Joyce J. Scott. and VeIl L. Wheeler—are splendid performers. Melodramatic, caustic, savvy, full of beans, they insult and support each other, but despite the sass. and the ability they demonstrate to rebound, they don’t let us duck the pain that’s at the core of the characters they play. And it’s useful to be reminded what it’s like to be despised and patronized. to learn to loathe oneself, so be invisible. But these women aren’t gnawing on their bitterness. Honey Chil’s not about blame, though there’s plenty to share: it’s about being honest and having respect. about cutting the shit and moving on. It leaves no bitter taste, none of the guilt that presages more resentment and sullen inertia. Though it portrays suffering seriously, it turns grievances into jokes and prepares to put them behind us. Nightmares are remembered in Honey Chil’ Milk, but its concerns are about today.
The show’s final plea, “See me as I am,” is a little out of keeping with the piece’s tough and salty moxie, a little soft and sappy for these justly confident women who, maybe, don’t have to ask so nicely. But it is an essential point, exquisitely simple. Not too much to ask. And they’ve already given us eyes to do it. A bandaged-all-over woman meditating cross-legged in the first row of the audience (Ruth Ann Lundeberg) turns out to be just one of the characters who’ve suffered untimely death in Nina Martin’s Date With Fate. The others we just hear about, and the three mortals onstage, with their amusing smudges and bruises and haphazard bandages. have escaped any fatal mishaps. Their big question is: “Why me?”—meaning not “Why did my number come up?” but, usually, “Why didn’t it?” Why dumb luck—or whatever—helped you avoid something terrible is the pressing question in Date With Fate, perhaps because we’ve learned to expect the worst. and life has taught us that this isn’t paranoid—merely practical. We’re surprised, with our demented family backgrounds, that we’re even ambulatory, let alone functioning okay. How come?
On the whole, Martin’s piece deals with this subject best when it deals with it lightly, sarcastically, frivolously. When three irritating clowns. the agents of a careless cosmic maliciousness, gleefully bounce their giant dice off the torsos of Jason Childers, Randy Martin. and Theresa Reeves and knock them to the floor, the dazed victims don’t know what hit them, and the audience howls., But when Date With Fate is earnest, it’s leaden, even embarrassing. Why would anyone expect that death should strike according to some rational schedule based on age. merit, potential productivity, etc.? Do we still believe in Santa Claus? Would we be happier with chance eliminated from the equation? We know our bodies count every calorie: would we feel more secure knowing that we’d inevitably get what some cosmic authority decided we deserved? T
he imaginative ways we devise to cope with our doubts, the myriad ways we keep the faith despite our lack of it—that’s what’s interesting and entertaining. Not our dull feelings of impotence and our outraged sense of fairness. Our precious seriousness about ourselves makes us ridiculous. Fortunately, Date With Fate tips toward the ironic and acerbic. Childers, in particular, has a marvelous, sour monologue about his upbringing. He waddles like a baby and in a fine duet with Daniel Haley he’s born again and again pulled through Haley’s legs every which way. dangled upside down yelling. To us, he expresses his family’s disparaging view of him - an insidious, mealymouthed judgment that kills the soul by inches. And. with barely suppressed anger, in his own character, he voices thoughts that have assimilated that perspective. “I’m a late developer. Emotionally I’m not ready for the competition of real life. I’ll never make the first team. Some of those guys could crush me just by thinking about it!” But we only have to see Childers ooze contempt to know that he’s learned to mitigate the poison of those remarks, though they contaminate the atmosphere he inhabits. Date With Fate builds to a tumultuous climax in which the dancers, wearing partial casts and wielding crutches, stumble, vault, fling, collide, and rebound with a tenacious and triumphant vigor. But what stays in the mind are the fumblings of Martin’s innocents struggling to create meaning out of the idiocy of their lives.
Belly Up
May 19 At Mulberry Street Theater (May 31 through June 3).
Best Foot Forward
July 17
The Silver Belles, a half-dozen women, most of whom once graced the Apollo’s chorus line, looked very fine indeed in silver pants suits and rakish silver derbies as they tapped onstage with a serene and saucy air, delivering plenty of savvy hip and knee action. The oldest, according to MC “Honi” Coles, is an unbelievable 85 years old. We should look so good.
Five members of the Copasetics (“Cookie” Cook, “Buster” Brown, “Brownie” Brown, “Bubba” Gaines, and “Phace” Roberts), wearing snappy striped jackets, strolled jauntily around the stage, gradually transforming their pedestrian steps into swing. “Buster” Brown topped his easygoing, lyrically-phrased solo turn with a gentle bump. Cook, taking over, planted a kiss on the top of Brown’s head, danced with silky sophistication, and, sprinkled some sand to rip through a fast, scuffling dance to “Easy to Love.” Cutup “Brownie” Brown, Cook’s onetime partner, wreaked comic mischief at every opportunity.
For New Tap Generation(s), his first-ever piece of choreography, 16-year-old Savion Glover trained 28 kids from Boston and Harlem (through a commission from Dancing in the Streets and the Boston Dance Umbrella) who danced like they meant it and lit up the Apollo stage. Dressed in cheerful casual duds, ranging in age from seven to 17, and built in every shape and size, these kids had worked for a few weeks with Glover (in Boston) or his dance captain Barbara Duffy (in New York) and danced like they’d been tapping for years. Inspired by Glover’s seriousness and commitment, these kids worked hard and happily to fulfill his high expectations, and turned in a proud and joyful performance.
Coles, maybe the most debonair gent alive, hosted Dancing in the Streets’s gala “Night of Tap at the Apollo” at the theater he’d managed for 6 years with a grace and offhand humor that really made it seem as homey so us as it was to him. Young and old, elders and novices, black and white, the dancers exemplified a tradition that, after a long and erratic period of disfavor, has gained new strength and respect in recent years.
Tap’s masters are revered; younger artists are carrying the art forward in a flood of creative invention. Manhattan Tap--Heather Cornell, Tony Scopino, Shelley Oliver, and the newest member, Guyana-born Herbin “Sweet Pea” Van Cayseele, who began dancing in Paris—is a wonderfully chipper and personable group. With erect carriage and a lively use of the arms and upper body, they achieve a bright dynamic. They’re very comfortable with the audience, and adept at tossing cascades of crisp, sassy, unison rhythms interrupted by vivid individual variations. Accompanied by David Leonhardt’s six-man ensemble, their intricate polyphony can tie your brain in knots. Design and symmetry are important to them too, like in a playful dance they do seated on four chairs in which they get their crisscrossed feet locked together, slither off their seats, and click their shoes against the chair legs.
While Leonhardt’s group played for half the acts, Jazz Tap Ensemble’s excellent musicians backed up other half. Jazz Tap opened with a drawling tease of a piece for Coles and Cholly Atkins that Lynn Dally described as “the slowest soft-shoe ever,” and followed up with the Condos Brothers’ challenging War Dance of the Wooden Indian, from a Betty Grable movie, performed by Mark Mendonca and Sam Weber in feather headdresses. Brenda Bufalino danced a sultry, sinuous and temperamental solo, an extraordinary extended variation to Charlie Parker’s “Yardbird Suite” deserving at least an Olympic gold medal. And she did a thoughtful, intimate solo, erupting with scattered bursts of energy, to “Round Midnight.”
“Maybe you’re tired,” she remarked, introducing it. “Rest. We won’t do anything special,” she coaxed, lying in her teeth. Bufalino’s performance was one of the wisest and most thrilling of the evening, but though she is a mesmerizing musician with brilliant footwork and seductive phrasing, her manner is unfortunate - slightly uncomfortable, forced. It’s hardly a major flaw, but while you can admire her - immensely - you can’t love her.
Sandman Sims began with loose, jogging, paddling moves. But a rueful hush came over his dancing as its spirit deepened. Then he set out his sandboard, noting that “35 years ago on this stage, in front of this mike, I got my name.” Working tight, scraping and grinding his soles in taunting acerbic rhythms, Sims gets chugging like a locomotive. Then a bunch of stagehands roll on Gregory Hines’s special miked floor. But Savion Glover takes first crack at it. It’s very resonant, capable of producing very deep, hollow, and almost metal-sharp sounds.
Glover in a big, loose shirt, dances with a lazy. blissful look, improvising with his eyes almost closed, dreaming. He is tap’s golden child, and, just entering his young manhood, he embodies its future. He’s a finely-tuned artist, he’s fully a kid. People love him not just because he’s ardent, sweet, a whiz, sheerly beautiful to watch, but because he’s a disciplined artist who seems completely entranced by his art. You watch him soaking in nourishment by dancing, and letting it all flow to the audience. Slipping and sliding, goofing, beating out glittering rhythms at a rocketing pace, fiercely stomping around on point, trembling like a bird, he lifts us up to share that ideal state in which giving is receiving and work is utter pleasure. There are no obstacles between us.
Gregory Hines, next up, is also someone the audience purely loves. Sally Sommer says he takes our ears on an incredibly radical aural journey and we just let him do it because we love him so. In his dancing he tears up the tradition and re-imagines what tap might be, speaking directly to the soul. Hines hauled Glover back for a gleeful, spontaneous duet with side-to-side scoots and clicking walks, then Coles called everyone one on for a final shimsham. “Heaven, I’m in heaven.”
At the Apollo Theater (July 2).
The Silver Belles, a half-dozen women, most of whom once graced the Apollo’s chorus line, looked very fine indeed in silver pants suits and rakish silver derbies as they tapped onstage with a serene and saucy air, delivering plenty of savvy hip and knee action. The oldest, according to MC “Honi” Coles, is an unbelievable 85 years old. We should look so good.
Five members of the Copasetics (“Cookie” Cook, “Buster” Brown, “Brownie” Brown, “Bubba” Gaines, and “Phace” Roberts), wearing snappy striped jackets, strolled jauntily around the stage, gradually transforming their pedestrian steps into swing. “Buster” Brown topped his easygoing, lyrically-phrased solo turn with a gentle bump. Cook, taking over, planted a kiss on the top of Brown’s head, danced with silky sophistication, and, sprinkled some sand to rip through a fast, scuffling dance to “Easy to Love.” Cutup “Brownie” Brown, Cook’s onetime partner, wreaked comic mischief at every opportunity.
For New Tap Generation(s), his first-ever piece of choreography, 16-year-old Savion Glover trained 28 kids from Boston and Harlem (through a commission from Dancing in the Streets and the Boston Dance Umbrella) who danced like they meant it and lit up the Apollo stage. Dressed in cheerful casual duds, ranging in age from seven to 17, and built in every shape and size, these kids had worked for a few weeks with Glover (in Boston) or his dance captain Barbara Duffy (in New York) and danced like they’d been tapping for years. Inspired by Glover’s seriousness and commitment, these kids worked hard and happily to fulfill his high expectations, and turned in a proud and joyful performance.
Coles, maybe the most debonair gent alive, hosted Dancing in the Streets’s gala “Night of Tap at the Apollo” at the theater he’d managed for 6 years with a grace and offhand humor that really made it seem as homey so us as it was to him. Young and old, elders and novices, black and white, the dancers exemplified a tradition that, after a long and erratic period of disfavor, has gained new strength and respect in recent years.
Tap’s masters are revered; younger artists are carrying the art forward in a flood of creative invention. Manhattan Tap--Heather Cornell, Tony Scopino, Shelley Oliver, and the newest member, Guyana-born Herbin “Sweet Pea” Van Cayseele, who began dancing in Paris—is a wonderfully chipper and personable group. With erect carriage and a lively use of the arms and upper body, they achieve a bright dynamic. They’re very comfortable with the audience, and adept at tossing cascades of crisp, sassy, unison rhythms interrupted by vivid individual variations. Accompanied by David Leonhardt’s six-man ensemble, their intricate polyphony can tie your brain in knots. Design and symmetry are important to them too, like in a playful dance they do seated on four chairs in which they get their crisscrossed feet locked together, slither off their seats, and click their shoes against the chair legs.
While Leonhardt’s group played for half the acts, Jazz Tap Ensemble’s excellent musicians backed up other half. Jazz Tap opened with a drawling tease of a piece for Coles and Cholly Atkins that Lynn Dally described as “the slowest soft-shoe ever,” and followed up with the Condos Brothers’ challenging War Dance of the Wooden Indian, from a Betty Grable movie, performed by Mark Mendonca and Sam Weber in feather headdresses. Brenda Bufalino danced a sultry, sinuous and temperamental solo, an extraordinary extended variation to Charlie Parker’s “Yardbird Suite” deserving at least an Olympic gold medal. And she did a thoughtful, intimate solo, erupting with scattered bursts of energy, to “Round Midnight.”
“Maybe you’re tired,” she remarked, introducing it. “Rest. We won’t do anything special,” she coaxed, lying in her teeth. Bufalino’s performance was one of the wisest and most thrilling of the evening, but though she is a mesmerizing musician with brilliant footwork and seductive phrasing, her manner is unfortunate - slightly uncomfortable, forced. It’s hardly a major flaw, but while you can admire her - immensely - you can’t love her.
Sandman Sims began with loose, jogging, paddling moves. But a rueful hush came over his dancing as its spirit deepened. Then he set out his sandboard, noting that “35 years ago on this stage, in front of this mike, I got my name.” Working tight, scraping and grinding his soles in taunting acerbic rhythms, Sims gets chugging like a locomotive. Then a bunch of stagehands roll on Gregory Hines’s special miked floor. But Savion Glover takes first crack at it. It’s very resonant, capable of producing very deep, hollow, and almost metal-sharp sounds.
Glover in a big, loose shirt, dances with a lazy. blissful look, improvising with his eyes almost closed, dreaming. He is tap’s golden child, and, just entering his young manhood, he embodies its future. He’s a finely-tuned artist, he’s fully a kid. People love him not just because he’s ardent, sweet, a whiz, sheerly beautiful to watch, but because he’s a disciplined artist who seems completely entranced by his art. You watch him soaking in nourishment by dancing, and letting it all flow to the audience. Slipping and sliding, goofing, beating out glittering rhythms at a rocketing pace, fiercely stomping around on point, trembling like a bird, he lifts us up to share that ideal state in which giving is receiving and work is utter pleasure. There are no obstacles between us.
Gregory Hines, next up, is also someone the audience purely loves. Sally Sommer says he takes our ears on an incredibly radical aural journey and we just let him do it because we love him so. In his dancing he tears up the tradition and re-imagines what tap might be, speaking directly to the soul. Hines hauled Glover back for a gleeful, spontaneous duet with side-to-side scoots and clicking walks, then Coles called everyone one on for a final shimsham. “Heaven, I’m in heaven.”
At the Apollo Theater (July 2).
Cool Fire
October 30
After three years in Minneapolis, Paula Mann (who used to co-direct Dudek/Mann Dancers) briefly checked into town to share a program with Chris Kaufman under the auspices of the Danspace Project. Her first of two group works, Paul’s Lounge, has an abruptness and bottled-up force, a dissatisfied ache built into the movement’s sharp swings and staccato gestures. It didn’t quite cohere and suggested an atmosphere it didn’t quite evoke. Stand in Wonder, set to Vivaldi, responded too heavily to the music’s eager spirit. Both these works are somewhat strained, like a person unhappy in his own body trying to pretend otherwise.
But a stark new solo, Question/Answer, which Mann performed with pianist/composer Drew Gordon, had authority. The piece is an expansion of an earlier solo, Push Dance, and pushing is a big part of it—big, sharp pushes and smaller ones like sputtering coughs. Mann’s moves often erupt suddenly, countering internal resistance, then subside into a kind of physical sullenness. Her arms spurt apart, then her body sways and she leans back. She pulls herself up, and quickly drops. I like her wary, sharp attack, her quick, cut-off flings. Oddly specific gestures—like the way she puts her fist to forehead, or makes light circles around her head that climax in tight pushes to the front, or seems to give a steady pull of a single hair—are convincing details of character. Gordon’s playing is good company: it’s carefully interspersed with the dancing, sometimes simultaneous. Sometimes—not too often—Mann’s gestures are in precise accord with him, turning notes into gnarled images.
I’ve always admired Chris Kaufman’s lightness and cool fire, and I loved JDF’s Dreamland, her almost offhand, contradictory duet for herself and Kevin Campbell. Deceptively casual in tone, it mingled refinement and awkwardness, grappling and blitheness in just the right measure. In this girl-catches-boy reverie, Campbell saunters in with loose swinging steps, letting his body bow into wobbly shapes. In a few moments, Kaufman follows him, roughly copying his moves, matching her body to his in a scooping little waltz. Suddenly, she lifts him, tackles him; he holds her but she slips through his arms. They move in unison with breezy legwork and easy, reeling hips to Tom Waits’s coarse, growling vocal. She’s awake to him with a kind of natural gaiety, and though Campbell plays an almost innocently unconscious partner, he’s caught her spirit in his own dancing. She picks him up and cradles him like an exhausted child that has to be carried from the car to his bed. Then she’s up, over his back, and sliding to the floor, where, with detached curiosity, she watches him stroll away.
Asking Mary, her solo, enacts a struggle that culminates in a violent coupling with an invisible spirit. Standing in plie, Kaufman pushes at her skirt, caresses her breasts through her rough robes, presses her hands against her body. She lets her torso swing around, as if surrendering her will and control, and drags herself forward. Kneeling, she slides her torso forcibly along the ground on a strict diagonal that she’s confined to. Violent tremblings, thrashings, wrenching stumbles leave her rocking on her back with her heavy robes shoved up, bundling { } torso, and her elegant legs gleaming bare and naked. I greatly prefer the refreshment of JDF’s Dreamland to the resolve of Asking Mary. But in both—in Kaufman’s choreography as well as in her dancing—I delighted at her rare and wonderful ability to combine refinement and technical accuracy with clumsiness, even crudeness , in ways that consistently illuminate the movement.
At Danspace Project St Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery (October 12 through 14).
After three years in Minneapolis, Paula Mann (who used to co-direct Dudek/Mann Dancers) briefly checked into town to share a program with Chris Kaufman under the auspices of the Danspace Project. Her first of two group works, Paul’s Lounge, has an abruptness and bottled-up force, a dissatisfied ache built into the movement’s sharp swings and staccato gestures. It didn’t quite cohere and suggested an atmosphere it didn’t quite evoke. Stand in Wonder, set to Vivaldi, responded too heavily to the music’s eager spirit. Both these works are somewhat strained, like a person unhappy in his own body trying to pretend otherwise.
But a stark new solo, Question/Answer, which Mann performed with pianist/composer Drew Gordon, had authority. The piece is an expansion of an earlier solo, Push Dance, and pushing is a big part of it—big, sharp pushes and smaller ones like sputtering coughs. Mann’s moves often erupt suddenly, countering internal resistance, then subside into a kind of physical sullenness. Her arms spurt apart, then her body sways and she leans back. She pulls herself up, and quickly drops. I like her wary, sharp attack, her quick, cut-off flings. Oddly specific gestures—like the way she puts her fist to forehead, or makes light circles around her head that climax in tight pushes to the front, or seems to give a steady pull of a single hair—are convincing details of character. Gordon’s playing is good company: it’s carefully interspersed with the dancing, sometimes simultaneous. Sometimes—not too often—Mann’s gestures are in precise accord with him, turning notes into gnarled images.
I’ve always admired Chris Kaufman’s lightness and cool fire, and I loved JDF’s Dreamland, her almost offhand, contradictory duet for herself and Kevin Campbell. Deceptively casual in tone, it mingled refinement and awkwardness, grappling and blitheness in just the right measure. In this girl-catches-boy reverie, Campbell saunters in with loose swinging steps, letting his body bow into wobbly shapes. In a few moments, Kaufman follows him, roughly copying his moves, matching her body to his in a scooping little waltz. Suddenly, she lifts him, tackles him; he holds her but she slips through his arms. They move in unison with breezy legwork and easy, reeling hips to Tom Waits’s coarse, growling vocal. She’s awake to him with a kind of natural gaiety, and though Campbell plays an almost innocently unconscious partner, he’s caught her spirit in his own dancing. She picks him up and cradles him like an exhausted child that has to be carried from the car to his bed. Then she’s up, over his back, and sliding to the floor, where, with detached curiosity, she watches him stroll away.
Asking Mary, her solo, enacts a struggle that culminates in a violent coupling with an invisible spirit. Standing in plie, Kaufman pushes at her skirt, caresses her breasts through her rough robes, presses her hands against her body. She lets her torso swing around, as if surrendering her will and control, and drags herself forward. Kneeling, she slides her torso forcibly along the ground on a strict diagonal that she’s confined to. Violent tremblings, thrashings, wrenching stumbles leave her rocking on her back with her heavy robes shoved up, bundling { } torso, and her elegant legs gleaming bare and naked. I greatly prefer the refreshment of JDF’s Dreamland to the resolve of Asking Mary. But in both—in Kaufman’s choreography as well as in her dancing—I delighted at her rare and wonderful ability to combine refinement and technical accuracy with clumsiness, even crudeness , in ways that consistently illuminate the movement.
At Danspace Project St Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery (October 12 through 14).
Couple Dances
November 6
Art Bridgman and Myrna Packer have been choreographing and performing together since 1978, and made their first baby early this year. As performers, however smoothly they work together— and they do—they’re most unlike. Bridgman’s a fine dancer who’s naturally expressive, so his movement always looks freshly invented, instinctively right—the most direct method of communication possible. He’s just a guy, but there’s something extraordinarily tactile about the way he moves. He’s also so readily transformed by a costume or the style of a dance that he appears to be someone else altogether. Put a tight cap over his hair and he’s 70 years old. Packer, on the other hand, is always herself—articulate, decisive, ever conscious of herself as a performer. In Lava Falls (Part 1) they describe in neutral terms what they’re going to do, first slowly and then with increased speed and voices overlapping. Then, to excerpts from one of Bach’s solo cello suites, they do it—standing facing on stools of different heights that make them equally tall. The moves that sounded so routine— “I catch you,”‘I lift you up,” “I touch your right hip”—are tenderly intimate in their plainness, and have enormous substance.
Kapahi, set to traditional Hawaiian hula chants, is a droll and crusty piece in many short sections divided by blackouts. In silhouette, we see Bridgman and Packer’s shoulders and arms wriggling wildly in a frantic gestural overture. He’s in and out, always dead serious, often pretending to be as minimal a presence as a stagehand. He vaguely outlines her body with his hands. Goes off. In my favorite part, he picks her up, puts her down in a squat. Goes off. She gets to do some nice undulations. Then he’s back: he blows lightly on her hands, makes them drop, blows on one knee and the other to shift them closer together.
The episodic new work, Duel, is set to music by Naaz Hosseini that includes repetitive string phrases laid over the melody of a Schubert song. Bridgman and Packer are in white outfits with tight caps, and initially—in a rather Eiko and Koma-ish mode—they’re clinging creatures that bend, grasp, around each other. In a double embrace, they shudder to the floor in a sequence of abrupt deepening plies. When she crouches in an overhead beam of light, he creeps over, pushes her off her spot. She gently butts him off with her head. Coming from underneath, he bucks her off. And they learn to get rid of each other faster and faster. Duel seems to track a relationship through a kind of evolutionary history, from a pre-human state of absolute mutual dependency, through separation and nagging conflicts, to a sophisticated teasing game in which each one nibbles a single green grape or some body part of the other and they mosey around the floor giving each other little kisses on the lips and aspirant kisses of mere air.
At Dance Theater Workshop (October 25 through 28).
Art Bridgman and Myrna Packer have been choreographing and performing together since 1978, and made their first baby early this year. As performers, however smoothly they work together— and they do—they’re most unlike. Bridgman’s a fine dancer who’s naturally expressive, so his movement always looks freshly invented, instinctively right—the most direct method of communication possible. He’s just a guy, but there’s something extraordinarily tactile about the way he moves. He’s also so readily transformed by a costume or the style of a dance that he appears to be someone else altogether. Put a tight cap over his hair and he’s 70 years old. Packer, on the other hand, is always herself—articulate, decisive, ever conscious of herself as a performer. In Lava Falls (Part 1) they describe in neutral terms what they’re going to do, first slowly and then with increased speed and voices overlapping. Then, to excerpts from one of Bach’s solo cello suites, they do it—standing facing on stools of different heights that make them equally tall. The moves that sounded so routine— “I catch you,”‘I lift you up,” “I touch your right hip”—are tenderly intimate in their plainness, and have enormous substance.
Kapahi, set to traditional Hawaiian hula chants, is a droll and crusty piece in many short sections divided by blackouts. In silhouette, we see Bridgman and Packer’s shoulders and arms wriggling wildly in a frantic gestural overture. He’s in and out, always dead serious, often pretending to be as minimal a presence as a stagehand. He vaguely outlines her body with his hands. Goes off. In my favorite part, he picks her up, puts her down in a squat. Goes off. She gets to do some nice undulations. Then he’s back: he blows lightly on her hands, makes them drop, blows on one knee and the other to shift them closer together.
The episodic new work, Duel, is set to music by Naaz Hosseini that includes repetitive string phrases laid over the melody of a Schubert song. Bridgman and Packer are in white outfits with tight caps, and initially—in a rather Eiko and Koma-ish mode—they’re clinging creatures that bend, grasp, around each other. In a double embrace, they shudder to the floor in a sequence of abrupt deepening plies. When she crouches in an overhead beam of light, he creeps over, pushes her off her spot. She gently butts him off with her head. Coming from underneath, he bucks her off. And they learn to get rid of each other faster and faster. Duel seems to track a relationship through a kind of evolutionary history, from a pre-human state of absolute mutual dependency, through separation and nagging conflicts, to a sophisticated teasing game in which each one nibbles a single green grape or some body part of the other and they mosey around the floor giving each other little kisses on the lips and aspirant kisses of mere air.
At Dance Theater Workshop (October 25 through 28).
Dynasty
February 13
Two of José Greco’s grown children, José Greco II and Carmela (who’s responsible for a good measure of the evening’s choreography), came across as the undeniable stars of Greco’s company by virtue of their own merit. They weren’t the only good dancers in the Joyce Theater program—there was, for example, the elegant Luis Montero, who first danced with Greco’s company in 1958—but they did have a special vividness. I admired the modest warmth of the guitarists, the virile singing and enthusiastic presence of cantaor Jesus Heredia. Greco Sr., stout but spry, and brimming with paternal good spirits, appeared in a few numbers, notably in a flirtatious Castilian folk dance in oom-pah-pah. time with the two bright, pint-sized girls of the company, Pepa Romano and Carmen Ortega, playing castanets and singing cheerfully in thin, nya-nya voices. In this, on the whole, Green seemed more like a fond uncle showing off his nieces, than someone who’s looking to make out with them.
Juan Olarte, José Luis Romay, and José Green II enter singly in Los Piconeros, dragging their feet like reluctant stallions, their heads aggressively bent. Their hands seem wonderfully refined, like weapons sheathed in velvet. Scowling, with an imperial profile, José II comes in with a snap of the head, a burst of big stamps, and a sense of reined-in emotions that could overwhelm him. Olarte’s tight, clipped footwork is fine; Romay seems a bit too cool and reserved.
José II suddenly snaps to his knees or drops into a deep backward arch and, well, simply sucks himself up off the floor. He’s got great charisma—composed of a brooding strength, the melancholy consciousness of the haunted heroes of film noir, and a kind of James Dean vulnerability. About 27 years old, he still seems innocent, perhaps too trusting. If you saw tears on his cheeks, you wouldn’t be surprised, and maybe you’d want to lick them off, And his articulate physicality, which seems basic to his character, carries these personal qualities into artistic form. The drama of his performance is not just a formal one, or a made-up one, but an inner struggle that seeks resolution in dance. This struggle doesn’t take over, but it’s a constant element that adds immeasurable substance to his performing. Jose Ill is tremendously compelling in his Farruca, beautifully supported by the two guitarists, José Cortes and Jesus Torres. A deliberate entrance leads to spins, sudden fierce stamps, unprompted plunges to the floor that pull erect with perfect smoothness. There are leaps that reverse in midair, brutal slides, triple turns that drop to the floor and rebound in a leap and a precipitous balance only to plummet again.
I like the lazy, fluting arrogance of his hands, the tease of his dainty tapping walks, the intuitive rightness of his line. I’m a sucker too for the way he—and Carmela—emerge smokily into their solos from a kind of dreamy, almost groggy slumbrousness. Carmela, a juicy, voluptuous babe in red ruffled silk slashed with white, pulls out the stops in her Solea. Slinking forward. arched back, with her hands curling, and sleepy eyes, she moves as if the air resisted her. Teasing is basic. Using her body as something flamboyantly displayed and ultimately withheld, twisting in spirals, wrapping herself with her train or scorning it. she builds the dance into a frothing, temperamental drama. She stamps it with the authority of her footwork, and flings her arms open at its climax.
Her Amor Gitano, a duet for herself and José II, is the usual missive from the Ooh. Take Me. Get Away! I Hate You School of Love. I’m not complaining, I’m a believer. Hollywood taught me long ago that extreme ambivalence is the signature of the real thing. Accompanying themselves on purling castanets in Intermezzo, Luia Montero and the lovely Pilar Serrano (in an exquisite, gauzy black costume suggestive of Goya’s majas) smoothly wind around each other with genteel symmetries, to music from Granados’s Goyescas. Alone, Montero performs Alegra with nobility almost disdain: He’s got a calm center, and wears his maturity well. I liked the way he carves a shape in space, his leisurely, controlled phrasing, and the sharpness of his terse kicks and brushes, subtle rocking steps, and crisscrosses that nearly catch behind the ankle. Most of all, I was struck by the clarity and amplitude of his arms. El Pinto, a feverish gypsy performer whose footwork can be stunningly fast and disciplined, snaps his fingers, throws himself into furious, messy turns and tantrums, blandly sings something about “sueno,” something about “corazon.” His several, very long series of tap variations are beautifully precise and measured, but otherwise he was too entranced with himself and emotionally sloppy for my taste.
Pint-sized Romano and Ortega are fluffed up in pink ruffles in Caracoles y Zapateados. They twirl their fans, toss their skirts. The piece evolves quickly into a chattering tap challenge followed by more extended percussive conversations. The women just come up to the shoulders of their partners, Olarte and Romay, who do their jackhammer damnedest. Plot-wise a little reminiscent of “Der Erlkönig” but based on a Federico Garcia Lorca poem. Romance de Ia Luna choreographed by Alessandra Greco and her father) is one of those heavy, dated, pieces. This one—with a text that’s intoned and sung—is about a child being taken to heaven by the moon in disguise. Even one of these oafish dramas is too many. But, all in all, Greco organized a good show. And, for one accustomed to a cooler spectrum of dance, the abruptly changing rhythms, temperamental intensities, and distinctive personalities of the program gave particular satisfaction.
At the Joyce Theater (January 30 through February 18).
Two of José Greco’s grown children, José Greco II and Carmela (who’s responsible for a good measure of the evening’s choreography), came across as the undeniable stars of Greco’s company by virtue of their own merit. They weren’t the only good dancers in the Joyce Theater program—there was, for example, the elegant Luis Montero, who first danced with Greco’s company in 1958—but they did have a special vividness. I admired the modest warmth of the guitarists, the virile singing and enthusiastic presence of cantaor Jesus Heredia. Greco Sr., stout but spry, and brimming with paternal good spirits, appeared in a few numbers, notably in a flirtatious Castilian folk dance in oom-pah-pah. time with the two bright, pint-sized girls of the company, Pepa Romano and Carmen Ortega, playing castanets and singing cheerfully in thin, nya-nya voices. In this, on the whole, Green seemed more like a fond uncle showing off his nieces, than someone who’s looking to make out with them.
Juan Olarte, José Luis Romay, and José Green II enter singly in Los Piconeros, dragging their feet like reluctant stallions, their heads aggressively bent. Their hands seem wonderfully refined, like weapons sheathed in velvet. Scowling, with an imperial profile, José II comes in with a snap of the head, a burst of big stamps, and a sense of reined-in emotions that could overwhelm him. Olarte’s tight, clipped footwork is fine; Romay seems a bit too cool and reserved.
José II suddenly snaps to his knees or drops into a deep backward arch and, well, simply sucks himself up off the floor. He’s got great charisma—composed of a brooding strength, the melancholy consciousness of the haunted heroes of film noir, and a kind of James Dean vulnerability. About 27 years old, he still seems innocent, perhaps too trusting. If you saw tears on his cheeks, you wouldn’t be surprised, and maybe you’d want to lick them off, And his articulate physicality, which seems basic to his character, carries these personal qualities into artistic form. The drama of his performance is not just a formal one, or a made-up one, but an inner struggle that seeks resolution in dance. This struggle doesn’t take over, but it’s a constant element that adds immeasurable substance to his performing. Jose Ill is tremendously compelling in his Farruca, beautifully supported by the two guitarists, José Cortes and Jesus Torres. A deliberate entrance leads to spins, sudden fierce stamps, unprompted plunges to the floor that pull erect with perfect smoothness. There are leaps that reverse in midair, brutal slides, triple turns that drop to the floor and rebound in a leap and a precipitous balance only to plummet again.
I like the lazy, fluting arrogance of his hands, the tease of his dainty tapping walks, the intuitive rightness of his line. I’m a sucker too for the way he—and Carmela—emerge smokily into their solos from a kind of dreamy, almost groggy slumbrousness. Carmela, a juicy, voluptuous babe in red ruffled silk slashed with white, pulls out the stops in her Solea. Slinking forward. arched back, with her hands curling, and sleepy eyes, she moves as if the air resisted her. Teasing is basic. Using her body as something flamboyantly displayed and ultimately withheld, twisting in spirals, wrapping herself with her train or scorning it. she builds the dance into a frothing, temperamental drama. She stamps it with the authority of her footwork, and flings her arms open at its climax.
Her Amor Gitano, a duet for herself and José II, is the usual missive from the Ooh. Take Me. Get Away! I Hate You School of Love. I’m not complaining, I’m a believer. Hollywood taught me long ago that extreme ambivalence is the signature of the real thing. Accompanying themselves on purling castanets in Intermezzo, Luia Montero and the lovely Pilar Serrano (in an exquisite, gauzy black costume suggestive of Goya’s majas) smoothly wind around each other with genteel symmetries, to music from Granados’s Goyescas. Alone, Montero performs Alegra with nobility almost disdain: He’s got a calm center, and wears his maturity well. I liked the way he carves a shape in space, his leisurely, controlled phrasing, and the sharpness of his terse kicks and brushes, subtle rocking steps, and crisscrosses that nearly catch behind the ankle. Most of all, I was struck by the clarity and amplitude of his arms. El Pinto, a feverish gypsy performer whose footwork can be stunningly fast and disciplined, snaps his fingers, throws himself into furious, messy turns and tantrums, blandly sings something about “sueno,” something about “corazon.” His several, very long series of tap variations are beautifully precise and measured, but otherwise he was too entranced with himself and emotionally sloppy for my taste.
Pint-sized Romano and Ortega are fluffed up in pink ruffles in Caracoles y Zapateados. They twirl their fans, toss their skirts. The piece evolves quickly into a chattering tap challenge followed by more extended percussive conversations. The women just come up to the shoulders of their partners, Olarte and Romay, who do their jackhammer damnedest. Plot-wise a little reminiscent of “Der Erlkönig” but based on a Federico Garcia Lorca poem. Romance de Ia Luna choreographed by Alessandra Greco and her father) is one of those heavy, dated, pieces. This one—with a text that’s intoned and sung—is about a child being taken to heaven by the moon in disguise. Even one of these oafish dramas is too many. But, all in all, Greco organized a good show. And, for one accustomed to a cooler spectrum of dance, the abruptly changing rhythms, temperamental intensities, and distinctive personalities of the program gave particular satisfaction.
At the Joyce Theater (January 30 through February 18).
Fowl Play
July 24
Without getting into any academic arguments, there’s plenty to squawk about in the Bolshoi Ballet’s Swan Lake. Mainly, it’s thoroughly dull. It’s not the fault of conductor Algis Zhuraitis, who fulfills the drama written into the music. But four choreographers are credited with having their fingers in this pie: Petipa and lvanov, of course, plus Alexander Gorsky, who messed around with the choreography in the early 1900s and overhauled it in the 1920s (among other things, he introduced the ballet’s major nuisance, the Jester), and the Bolshoi’s artistic director and chief choreographer, Yuri Grigorovich, who is the man on the spot and the chief offender, the man responsible for the deletion of the ballet’s crucial dramatic detail.
The opening choreography is so square and pedestrian, yet so irritatingly ingratiating, that you wind up watching the dancers’ faces wondering what they’re really thinking about. This establishes the tone of the evening. But what also drives you to narrow your focus is the horror of Simon Virsaladze’s sets: gloomy, patchy black and gold walls cut with narrow Gothic arches, like some cursed hall haunted by the undead, and a huge, clumsy cloth with a heraldic emblem that demands attention by ascending or descending just when your eyes should be elsewhere. The lakeside set is nearly as dreadful: the swans are discovered behind another shield-like, see-through cloth, looking like baby birds nesting in a basket. The scene around them, unrelievedly lit in dreary blue light, looks like a rocky moonscape, maybe the Badlands, or the gorge the fighters zoom through at the end of Star Wars. If there was a lake floating there in the murk, you couldn’t prove it by me.
Aleksei Fadeyechev, as Prince Siegfried, hangs in the air nicely, lands softly, achieves a beautiful form, but he’s just another pretty face—a thoroughly mild, entirely generic prince, mooning about Miss Right. Altogether, the Bolshoi’s opening night performances are careful and correct, without fire or imagination. Nina Ananiashvili is exquisite but measured as Odette, habitually mournful. I longed for Natalia Makarova, every detail of whose performance was about character—changing emotions shimmered through the phrases that facilitated their expression. But Ananiashvili dutifully repeats a routine that she knows by heart and could do in her sleep. She plays a single, oppressive tone, and her cohort of swans is equally woeful. If you close your eyes—and I nearly snoozed through the pas de deux!—you don’t miss anything. I mean, you know the story already, right? Fortunately, Ananiashvili does come alive as Odile—she’s quick, vibrant, glamorous, even sightly reckless, at last—but she’s not exhilaratingly wicked. She’s just a girl who wants to have fun. In this production, Siegfried doesn’t get a crossbow for his birthday (he gets a necklace!), and he doesn’t go hunting: the castle is just suddenly replaced by the lake-side, and the reptilian Von Rothbart seems to bring Siegfried on the scene by his sorcery as if inviting their future confrontation.
Oddly, the happy end, with Von Rothbart dying and his spell broken, doesn’t feel very different from the one where the lovers plunge into the lake and are united after death. Dead or alive, they wind up happy. The production doesn’t make enough dramatic or moral sense for it to matter. What’s unsettling though is that the ballet briefly turns into Giselle: Von Rothbart (as Queen of the Wilis?) tries to dance Siegfried to death, but then Odette puts herself between them to protect her lover. From behind her back, Siegfried repeats his vow of faithfulness, as if his unwitting betrayal didn’t count. And when Von Rothbart staggers to his island rock behind the scrim and croaks, the debilitating blue light recedes and the stage is bathed in a pink-amber blush. Mikhail Sharkov is spectacular in his aerial turns and leaps as the Court Jester, but the fellow is such a pest! And Aleksandr Vetrov is excellent as Von Rothbart, bossing the swans around with conjuring gestures, and invisibly witching Siegfried, mocking him by duplicating his steps. The vassals are tough-looking and warrior-like, though they don’t do much but lurk around, except for a celebratory group dance with goblets that prickle with spines like sea urchins.
Compared with these men, the Prince seems a total wimp, and his noble classical style—pliant and contained—is rather feminine for my taste. Two lively chicks in yellow (Maria Bylova and Natalia Arkhipova), the Prince’s Companions—does that mean Playmates?—brighten the castle’s gloom in a pas de trois with him. But—if he’s such a polite guy—why doesn’t he bother to watch the Hungarian, Spanish, Polish, etc.. dances of the five potential brides? (The Russian bride in particular, Elvira Drozdova, woke me up by really dancing.) He is around for their quintet so he can reject them, and his mother delivers the kiss-off with a somnambulistic thanks-for-coming, Then the brides gel to sit around with the other sticklike courtiers plastered against the walls like cardboard cutouts. The Prince’s Mother was my absolute favorite: even the Trocks couldn’t beat her. She’s a tall showgirl-type with red hair out of a spray can, slumbrous eyelids, droopy arms, and a hips-forward slinking walk. Excuse me, but this is nobody’s mommy— some aging Mafioso’s tootsie on the side, perhaps, or a woman who glides through her days on Prozac.
At New York State Theater (July 10 through 22).
Courtesy of the Canadians, I flew up to Ottawa to catch about one day of the Canada Dance Festival—not exactly my day of choice, but the only one I could manage. The piece I was most happy to see was
Karen Jamieson’s Passage, a site-specific work for the glass-enclosed National Gallery/MusIc des Beaux Arts— an architectural cousin, at least externally, of the Javits Center. I never saw the museum’s actual exhibition spaces, but just underneath its transparent carapace are many-storied shafts and corridors and ramps of stone, bare and without ornament. You can just imagine the Pharoah’s foremen whipping the Canadian workmen as they dragged huge blocks of marble or granite up the ramps.
For this rather cold, neutral environment, Jamieson developed an absorbing, Pied Piper-ish piece that mixed comedy and ritual and drew the audience up the entrance ramp to a vast. light-filled hail, through a narrow stone corridor or up another ramp to a small, but very high, balconied chamber, and back again to the museum’s main entrance. Why was it so satisfying? It was sensibly structured so that it didn’t matter if you missed part of it when the growing crowd inevitably blocked your view. The resonant, chiming score created a rich atmosphere that complemented the action in a general way without coloring it. The many guards trying to keep space clear for the dancers stayed pretty calm; they were firm in their directions, but never rude.
Furthermore, the museum was reasonably permissive. No authority had forbidden Jamieson to climb the huge, narrow columns via ropes because it night be dangerous. I watched her dancers race down a corridor making big. swerving loops, and letting their momentum carry them partway up the walls; nobody had said. ‘You can’t do that, you might scuff the walls.” While Jamieson hauls herself up one of the columns, four of the dancers perch in a window cut in the stone and fool around. Five or six dancers begin to crawl up the ramp, sometimes sliding backward as if it were glazed with ice, or haul themselves up in a line with the last guy hanging on to the coattails of whoever’s ahead of him, Two guys tumble backward, The girls who’ve arrived at the top run in place with their welcoming arms up in the air. Into the huge, glass room where people are tentatively milling about the dancers march, looking upward, awed, maybe suspicious. And as the guards press the public back to open a big circle in the middle, the dancers crawl in a pack. Suddenly some of them rush into the next chamber. Two run yelling up a long, stepped ramp: two others slide lazily, on their backs, down the railings of a flight of stairs, while another guy climbs those stairs. Then, they’re into the next corridor, a tomblike shaft. with the dancers bounding off walls, while the audience divides—-some heading up the ramp, others following at ground level, in a small, octagonal stone chamber, another ritual of bending and arching. shivering and trembling takes place.
The strong, formal geometry masks a sobering sense of introspection. The crowd clogs the little room; other faces peer down from the circular balcony overhead. Someone is again climbing an immense vertical column. The organlike pipings ringing in the space make it vibrant. A man in the center of the chamber dances a solo of falling and arching, reaching upward in pulsing spiral, and falling again. while four performers mixed with the crowd upstairs chant and utter cries. The dancer whirls and falls. springs and falls. Suddenly, the other dancers are whirling, staggering, leaping, down the ramp. and we rush after them. Jamieson used the museum space beautifully, responding to the space’s temptations with humor and recklessness, doing some of the athletic things we’re tempted to do in that kind of space but know we’re not supposed to.
Passage kept changing its character, becoming graver as we approached the inner chamber, but it had a kind of warmth and spontaneity of feeling that prevented it from becoming gimmicky or mechanical. And the sincerity of Jamieson’s excellent dancers—their commitment and enjoyment—gave it heart.
At National Gallery of Art, Ottawa June 28.
Without getting into any academic arguments, there’s plenty to squawk about in the Bolshoi Ballet’s Swan Lake. Mainly, it’s thoroughly dull. It’s not the fault of conductor Algis Zhuraitis, who fulfills the drama written into the music. But four choreographers are credited with having their fingers in this pie: Petipa and lvanov, of course, plus Alexander Gorsky, who messed around with the choreography in the early 1900s and overhauled it in the 1920s (among other things, he introduced the ballet’s major nuisance, the Jester), and the Bolshoi’s artistic director and chief choreographer, Yuri Grigorovich, who is the man on the spot and the chief offender, the man responsible for the deletion of the ballet’s crucial dramatic detail.
The opening choreography is so square and pedestrian, yet so irritatingly ingratiating, that you wind up watching the dancers’ faces wondering what they’re really thinking about. This establishes the tone of the evening. But what also drives you to narrow your focus is the horror of Simon Virsaladze’s sets: gloomy, patchy black and gold walls cut with narrow Gothic arches, like some cursed hall haunted by the undead, and a huge, clumsy cloth with a heraldic emblem that demands attention by ascending or descending just when your eyes should be elsewhere. The lakeside set is nearly as dreadful: the swans are discovered behind another shield-like, see-through cloth, looking like baby birds nesting in a basket. The scene around them, unrelievedly lit in dreary blue light, looks like a rocky moonscape, maybe the Badlands, or the gorge the fighters zoom through at the end of Star Wars. If there was a lake floating there in the murk, you couldn’t prove it by me.
Aleksei Fadeyechev, as Prince Siegfried, hangs in the air nicely, lands softly, achieves a beautiful form, but he’s just another pretty face—a thoroughly mild, entirely generic prince, mooning about Miss Right. Altogether, the Bolshoi’s opening night performances are careful and correct, without fire or imagination. Nina Ananiashvili is exquisite but measured as Odette, habitually mournful. I longed for Natalia Makarova, every detail of whose performance was about character—changing emotions shimmered through the phrases that facilitated their expression. But Ananiashvili dutifully repeats a routine that she knows by heart and could do in her sleep. She plays a single, oppressive tone, and her cohort of swans is equally woeful. If you close your eyes—and I nearly snoozed through the pas de deux!—you don’t miss anything. I mean, you know the story already, right? Fortunately, Ananiashvili does come alive as Odile—she’s quick, vibrant, glamorous, even sightly reckless, at last—but she’s not exhilaratingly wicked. She’s just a girl who wants to have fun. In this production, Siegfried doesn’t get a crossbow for his birthday (he gets a necklace!), and he doesn’t go hunting: the castle is just suddenly replaced by the lake-side, and the reptilian Von Rothbart seems to bring Siegfried on the scene by his sorcery as if inviting their future confrontation.
Oddly, the happy end, with Von Rothbart dying and his spell broken, doesn’t feel very different from the one where the lovers plunge into the lake and are united after death. Dead or alive, they wind up happy. The production doesn’t make enough dramatic or moral sense for it to matter. What’s unsettling though is that the ballet briefly turns into Giselle: Von Rothbart (as Queen of the Wilis?) tries to dance Siegfried to death, but then Odette puts herself between them to protect her lover. From behind her back, Siegfried repeats his vow of faithfulness, as if his unwitting betrayal didn’t count. And when Von Rothbart staggers to his island rock behind the scrim and croaks, the debilitating blue light recedes and the stage is bathed in a pink-amber blush. Mikhail Sharkov is spectacular in his aerial turns and leaps as the Court Jester, but the fellow is such a pest! And Aleksandr Vetrov is excellent as Von Rothbart, bossing the swans around with conjuring gestures, and invisibly witching Siegfried, mocking him by duplicating his steps. The vassals are tough-looking and warrior-like, though they don’t do much but lurk around, except for a celebratory group dance with goblets that prickle with spines like sea urchins.
Compared with these men, the Prince seems a total wimp, and his noble classical style—pliant and contained—is rather feminine for my taste. Two lively chicks in yellow (Maria Bylova and Natalia Arkhipova), the Prince’s Companions—does that mean Playmates?—brighten the castle’s gloom in a pas de trois with him. But—if he’s such a polite guy—why doesn’t he bother to watch the Hungarian, Spanish, Polish, etc.. dances of the five potential brides? (The Russian bride in particular, Elvira Drozdova, woke me up by really dancing.) He is around for their quintet so he can reject them, and his mother delivers the kiss-off with a somnambulistic thanks-for-coming, Then the brides gel to sit around with the other sticklike courtiers plastered against the walls like cardboard cutouts. The Prince’s Mother was my absolute favorite: even the Trocks couldn’t beat her. She’s a tall showgirl-type with red hair out of a spray can, slumbrous eyelids, droopy arms, and a hips-forward slinking walk. Excuse me, but this is nobody’s mommy— some aging Mafioso’s tootsie on the side, perhaps, or a woman who glides through her days on Prozac.
At New York State Theater (July 10 through 22).
Courtesy of the Canadians, I flew up to Ottawa to catch about one day of the Canada Dance Festival—not exactly my day of choice, but the only one I could manage. The piece I was most happy to see was
Karen Jamieson’s Passage, a site-specific work for the glass-enclosed National Gallery/MusIc des Beaux Arts— an architectural cousin, at least externally, of the Javits Center. I never saw the museum’s actual exhibition spaces, but just underneath its transparent carapace are many-storied shafts and corridors and ramps of stone, bare and without ornament. You can just imagine the Pharoah’s foremen whipping the Canadian workmen as they dragged huge blocks of marble or granite up the ramps.
For this rather cold, neutral environment, Jamieson developed an absorbing, Pied Piper-ish piece that mixed comedy and ritual and drew the audience up the entrance ramp to a vast. light-filled hail, through a narrow stone corridor or up another ramp to a small, but very high, balconied chamber, and back again to the museum’s main entrance. Why was it so satisfying? It was sensibly structured so that it didn’t matter if you missed part of it when the growing crowd inevitably blocked your view. The resonant, chiming score created a rich atmosphere that complemented the action in a general way without coloring it. The many guards trying to keep space clear for the dancers stayed pretty calm; they were firm in their directions, but never rude.
Furthermore, the museum was reasonably permissive. No authority had forbidden Jamieson to climb the huge, narrow columns via ropes because it night be dangerous. I watched her dancers race down a corridor making big. swerving loops, and letting their momentum carry them partway up the walls; nobody had said. ‘You can’t do that, you might scuff the walls.” While Jamieson hauls herself up one of the columns, four of the dancers perch in a window cut in the stone and fool around. Five or six dancers begin to crawl up the ramp, sometimes sliding backward as if it were glazed with ice, or haul themselves up in a line with the last guy hanging on to the coattails of whoever’s ahead of him, Two guys tumble backward, The girls who’ve arrived at the top run in place with their welcoming arms up in the air. Into the huge, glass room where people are tentatively milling about the dancers march, looking upward, awed, maybe suspicious. And as the guards press the public back to open a big circle in the middle, the dancers crawl in a pack. Suddenly some of them rush into the next chamber. Two run yelling up a long, stepped ramp: two others slide lazily, on their backs, down the railings of a flight of stairs, while another guy climbs those stairs. Then, they’re into the next corridor, a tomblike shaft. with the dancers bounding off walls, while the audience divides—-some heading up the ramp, others following at ground level, in a small, octagonal stone chamber, another ritual of bending and arching. shivering and trembling takes place.
The strong, formal geometry masks a sobering sense of introspection. The crowd clogs the little room; other faces peer down from the circular balcony overhead. Someone is again climbing an immense vertical column. The organlike pipings ringing in the space make it vibrant. A man in the center of the chamber dances a solo of falling and arching, reaching upward in pulsing spiral, and falling again. while four performers mixed with the crowd upstairs chant and utter cries. The dancer whirls and falls. springs and falls. Suddenly, the other dancers are whirling, staggering, leaping, down the ramp. and we rush after them. Jamieson used the museum space beautifully, responding to the space’s temptations with humor and recklessness, doing some of the athletic things we’re tempted to do in that kind of space but know we’re not supposed to.
Passage kept changing its character, becoming graver as we approached the inner chamber, but it had a kind of warmth and spontaneity of feeling that prevented it from becoming gimmicky or mechanical. And the sincerity of Jamieson’s excellent dancers—their commitment and enjoyment—gave it heart.
At National Gallery of Art, Ottawa June 28.
French Francs
August 14
At the Dance USA annual roundtable in Philadelphia in May, Bruno Verbergt, co-director of the Klapstuck Festival in Leuven, Belgium, remarked that he currently saw nothing interesting in American dance. Pressed for an example, he reluctantly cited Merce Cunningham’s company as one he would never invite. Verbergt’s position is extreme, but his negative feeling is one that’s fashionable now among European presenters (though Trisha Brown, for example, is among the few Americans who’s generally adored).
At this curious moment, Guy Darmet, artistic director of the Biennale, which has its fourth incarnation this fall, September 13 to October 8, has chosen to present “An American Story,” a mammoth festival celebrating American dance. Responding to Verbergt’s remarks, Darmet admitted that some French presenters are now cool to American dance, though France has been very welcoming in the past. The French have decided that American dance is old-fashioned and that New York is no longer the world’s dance capital. Though he’s an ardent champion of contemporary French dance, Darmet doesn’t believe that the public agrees with this notion. And in any case, he insists on his passion for American dance.
Of the Lyon festival he says, “It’s my American story,” and allows that it represents his personal enthusiasm. He admits that, for example, the French don’t usually get Paul Taylor’s humor, but he’s bringing Taylor’s company because he’s sure that in the right context, Taylor’s work will click with Lyon audiences. Too, he respects the fact that American modern dance has been central to the development of dance in this century, and has nurtured contemporary French dance directly. “Modern dance was born in America,” he remarks, “even if Loie Fuller and Isadora Duncan had their first great successes is Europe, as did Merce Cunningham and Trisha Brown.” Darmet has celebrated French dance and the German dance heritage in the previous two thematic festivals. Since one of his aims is to educate his audience, a festival centered on American dance is essential.
The Lyon Internationale Biennale de Ia Danse is built on the success of Lyon’s Maison de Ia Danse, a theater devoted to dance that Darmet has headed since its founding in 1980. When city officials were trying to resurrect a deteriorated summer festival with a projected $400,000 budget that other administrators felt was not enough with which to do anything, Darmet incautiously jumped in. Since dance ordinarily gets the short end of the financial stick, it sounded like big bucks to him. The first festival—in 1984— was ambitious; Darmet wanted to throw everything at his audience. There was Martha Graham and Merce Cunningham, Reinhild Hoffman, Jean-Claude Gallotta, Maurice Bejart, baroque dance, a Provençal folkloric evening, and films and videos. It was early summer: rain poured on the opening night program—Cunningham—which was hastily moved indoors, and it rained for Roland Petit. Cold weather caused the Graham company to cancel with the audience already in its seats. In spite of the setbacks, and a substantial budget deficit, the city deemed the festival worthy of support. But it was rescheduled to early fall, when you could count on good weather.
Putting a twist on the usual format for the 1988 Biennale celebrating 400 years of French dance, Darmet, with his assistant Michèle Luquet, organized a series of four balls, so that the experience of watching concert dance would be inked to the pleasure of dancing. These were raging successes. Two were small-scale, like folk dances, featuring traditional dances of Brittany, Berry, and the Auvergne. But people took to the idea enthusiastically, and came to the workshops held in the weeks and months beforehand to learn the dances. The two other balls are the sort of thing you don’t see except in old Hollywood costume dramas. The “Beauty and the Beast Ball,” held at a château in a forested park outside the city, was a costume ball of the sort not seen in decades, with everyone, including much of Lyon’s haut bourgeois society, richly outfitted in the most elaborately detailed fancies. People came to see and be seen, and were not disappointed. But the acme was the 19th century ball, held in the salons of the opulent prefecture on the banks of the Rhone. This was a ball of endless waltzing, of ladies in sweeping gowns partnered by pashas, aristocrats, and Confederate officers. People came to this ball to dance, and to be there was to be transported to another world.
Four balls—including a 1920s costume ball and a celebration of Harlem’s Savoy Ballroom—will highlight this year’s festival. But this time more people will know the dances already. Darmet himself was a hopper in the ‘60s. The budget for the fourth Lyon Biennale is $3 million. Nothing on this scale would be remotely possible in this country, even before the current chill. Lyon has invited the companies of modern dance masters like Martha Graham, Merce Cunningham (presenting four days of Events). Paul Taylor, Nikolais and Louis Dance, the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. There’ll be hoofers like Jimmy Slyde and Savion Glover, reconstructions of works of Isadora Duncan and Loie Fuller, a newly commissioned work by Trisha Brown, a reconstruction of Lucinda Child’s 1978 Dance (with the film by Sol LeWitt), Bill T. Jones and Stephen Petronio, the Limon company in a revival of Doris Humphrey’s Day on Earth, the Lewitzky Dance Company, the Miami City Ballet in Balanchine, the Jazz Tap Ensemble, and the Vanaver Caravan.
From Darmet’s home territory, the Lyon Opera Ballet will present new ballets to a Frank Zappa score, and Daniel Larrieu and Angelin Prejlocaj will offer works on American themes. If AmerIcan dance is bring sneered at and considered, by some, old-fashioned, it’s hard to know precisely what is meant. There are issues of taste that may be irreconcilable. Contemporary American dance, with its basic concern for movement per se, can be dismissed as formalist; European dance often links its images with a theoretical rationale. And young European choreographers instinctively give much more weight to theatrical production values than their American counterparts, too accustomed to working on the cheap. Bu,. probably most importantly, over the past 10 or 15 years great resentment has built because—though France and other Western European rations have welcomed American artists by commissioning and facilitating productions, supporting companies with touring dates, and organizing teaching residencies— there has been comparatively little reciprocity on the part of the United States.
Even now, we haven’t seer very much contemporary French work: L’Esquisse, Maguy Marin, Ris et Danseries, Monnier/Duroure when they were a team, the GRCOP on an unsuitable stage, Claude Brumachon, Daniel Larrieu’s swimming pool piece, Gallotta, who nobody saw at City Center, Regine Chopinot one night at the Palladium. We haven’t seen Joseph Nadj, Prejlocaj, Dominique Bagouet, Philippe Decoufle, Charles Pre-Ange, Josette Baiz, Francois Verret.... Who knows if their art can speak to us? It has not been within the ability of small American presenters to import foreign artists without substantial government or other extraordinary help, little of which has been available (though NEA grants recently became more flexible on this).
Furthermore, the obstructionist and entirely ignorant visa policy of the Immigration and Naturalization Service (conveniently remote in St. Albans, Vermont), which with infuriating regularity involves producers in pointless and costly delays and legal procedures in bringing foreign artists to America, creates a situation that makes the United States ridiculous in foreign eyes, and shames American citizens. In the past, when a French dance company appeared in the United States, the French government ministries normally footed the bill. When an American company appeared in France, France financed that also. This is unfair on the face of, it, though in the ‘70s and even the very early ‘80s, when French dancers and potential choreographers were still voraciously soaking up the lessons of American masters like Cunningham and Nikolais (via teachers and choreographers like Viola Farber, Carolyn Carlson, Susan Buirg, Ruth Barnes, and Robert Kovich, who became permanent or long-term residents) this situation was less offensive. There was an appropriate period of co-option and imitation, basic to the learning process. Western Europe became, to some degree, a cash cow for American companies that could barely survive on the mingy support they received at home.
But when French choreographers began to develop their own authority and the security of their own voices, a new situation was born. French choreographers had something to show America, but America responded with lukewarm interest. No one in Europe could understand that—with few exceptions, like Pina Bausch coming to the Next Wave Festival—there was no money in the United Stales to present European work. The United Stales is rich, right? This situation has left an inheritance of bitterness.
At the Dance USA annual roundtable in Philadelphia in May, Bruno Verbergt, co-director of the Klapstuck Festival in Leuven, Belgium, remarked that he currently saw nothing interesting in American dance. Pressed for an example, he reluctantly cited Merce Cunningham’s company as one he would never invite. Verbergt’s position is extreme, but his negative feeling is one that’s fashionable now among European presenters (though Trisha Brown, for example, is among the few Americans who’s generally adored).
At this curious moment, Guy Darmet, artistic director of the Biennale, which has its fourth incarnation this fall, September 13 to October 8, has chosen to present “An American Story,” a mammoth festival celebrating American dance. Responding to Verbergt’s remarks, Darmet admitted that some French presenters are now cool to American dance, though France has been very welcoming in the past. The French have decided that American dance is old-fashioned and that New York is no longer the world’s dance capital. Though he’s an ardent champion of contemporary French dance, Darmet doesn’t believe that the public agrees with this notion. And in any case, he insists on his passion for American dance.
Of the Lyon festival he says, “It’s my American story,” and allows that it represents his personal enthusiasm. He admits that, for example, the French don’t usually get Paul Taylor’s humor, but he’s bringing Taylor’s company because he’s sure that in the right context, Taylor’s work will click with Lyon audiences. Too, he respects the fact that American modern dance has been central to the development of dance in this century, and has nurtured contemporary French dance directly. “Modern dance was born in America,” he remarks, “even if Loie Fuller and Isadora Duncan had their first great successes is Europe, as did Merce Cunningham and Trisha Brown.” Darmet has celebrated French dance and the German dance heritage in the previous two thematic festivals. Since one of his aims is to educate his audience, a festival centered on American dance is essential.
The Lyon Internationale Biennale de Ia Danse is built on the success of Lyon’s Maison de Ia Danse, a theater devoted to dance that Darmet has headed since its founding in 1980. When city officials were trying to resurrect a deteriorated summer festival with a projected $400,000 budget that other administrators felt was not enough with which to do anything, Darmet incautiously jumped in. Since dance ordinarily gets the short end of the financial stick, it sounded like big bucks to him. The first festival—in 1984— was ambitious; Darmet wanted to throw everything at his audience. There was Martha Graham and Merce Cunningham, Reinhild Hoffman, Jean-Claude Gallotta, Maurice Bejart, baroque dance, a Provençal folkloric evening, and films and videos. It was early summer: rain poured on the opening night program—Cunningham—which was hastily moved indoors, and it rained for Roland Petit. Cold weather caused the Graham company to cancel with the audience already in its seats. In spite of the setbacks, and a substantial budget deficit, the city deemed the festival worthy of support. But it was rescheduled to early fall, when you could count on good weather.
Putting a twist on the usual format for the 1988 Biennale celebrating 400 years of French dance, Darmet, with his assistant Michèle Luquet, organized a series of four balls, so that the experience of watching concert dance would be inked to the pleasure of dancing. These were raging successes. Two were small-scale, like folk dances, featuring traditional dances of Brittany, Berry, and the Auvergne. But people took to the idea enthusiastically, and came to the workshops held in the weeks and months beforehand to learn the dances. The two other balls are the sort of thing you don’t see except in old Hollywood costume dramas. The “Beauty and the Beast Ball,” held at a château in a forested park outside the city, was a costume ball of the sort not seen in decades, with everyone, including much of Lyon’s haut bourgeois society, richly outfitted in the most elaborately detailed fancies. People came to see and be seen, and were not disappointed. But the acme was the 19th century ball, held in the salons of the opulent prefecture on the banks of the Rhone. This was a ball of endless waltzing, of ladies in sweeping gowns partnered by pashas, aristocrats, and Confederate officers. People came to this ball to dance, and to be there was to be transported to another world.
Four balls—including a 1920s costume ball and a celebration of Harlem’s Savoy Ballroom—will highlight this year’s festival. But this time more people will know the dances already. Darmet himself was a hopper in the ‘60s. The budget for the fourth Lyon Biennale is $3 million. Nothing on this scale would be remotely possible in this country, even before the current chill. Lyon has invited the companies of modern dance masters like Martha Graham, Merce Cunningham (presenting four days of Events). Paul Taylor, Nikolais and Louis Dance, the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. There’ll be hoofers like Jimmy Slyde and Savion Glover, reconstructions of works of Isadora Duncan and Loie Fuller, a newly commissioned work by Trisha Brown, a reconstruction of Lucinda Child’s 1978 Dance (with the film by Sol LeWitt), Bill T. Jones and Stephen Petronio, the Limon company in a revival of Doris Humphrey’s Day on Earth, the Lewitzky Dance Company, the Miami City Ballet in Balanchine, the Jazz Tap Ensemble, and the Vanaver Caravan.
From Darmet’s home territory, the Lyon Opera Ballet will present new ballets to a Frank Zappa score, and Daniel Larrieu and Angelin Prejlocaj will offer works on American themes. If AmerIcan dance is bring sneered at and considered, by some, old-fashioned, it’s hard to know precisely what is meant. There are issues of taste that may be irreconcilable. Contemporary American dance, with its basic concern for movement per se, can be dismissed as formalist; European dance often links its images with a theoretical rationale. And young European choreographers instinctively give much more weight to theatrical production values than their American counterparts, too accustomed to working on the cheap. Bu,. probably most importantly, over the past 10 or 15 years great resentment has built because—though France and other Western European rations have welcomed American artists by commissioning and facilitating productions, supporting companies with touring dates, and organizing teaching residencies— there has been comparatively little reciprocity on the part of the United States.
Even now, we haven’t seer very much contemporary French work: L’Esquisse, Maguy Marin, Ris et Danseries, Monnier/Duroure when they were a team, the GRCOP on an unsuitable stage, Claude Brumachon, Daniel Larrieu’s swimming pool piece, Gallotta, who nobody saw at City Center, Regine Chopinot one night at the Palladium. We haven’t seen Joseph Nadj, Prejlocaj, Dominique Bagouet, Philippe Decoufle, Charles Pre-Ange, Josette Baiz, Francois Verret.... Who knows if their art can speak to us? It has not been within the ability of small American presenters to import foreign artists without substantial government or other extraordinary help, little of which has been available (though NEA grants recently became more flexible on this).
Furthermore, the obstructionist and entirely ignorant visa policy of the Immigration and Naturalization Service (conveniently remote in St. Albans, Vermont), which with infuriating regularity involves producers in pointless and costly delays and legal procedures in bringing foreign artists to America, creates a situation that makes the United States ridiculous in foreign eyes, and shames American citizens. In the past, when a French dance company appeared in the United States, the French government ministries normally footed the bill. When an American company appeared in France, France financed that also. This is unfair on the face of, it, though in the ‘70s and even the very early ‘80s, when French dancers and potential choreographers were still voraciously soaking up the lessons of American masters like Cunningham and Nikolais (via teachers and choreographers like Viola Farber, Carolyn Carlson, Susan Buirg, Ruth Barnes, and Robert Kovich, who became permanent or long-term residents) this situation was less offensive. There was an appropriate period of co-option and imitation, basic to the learning process. Western Europe became, to some degree, a cash cow for American companies that could barely survive on the mingy support they received at home.
But when French choreographers began to develop their own authority and the security of their own voices, a new situation was born. French choreographers had something to show America, but America responded with lukewarm interest. No one in Europe could understand that—with few exceptions, like Pina Bausch coming to the Next Wave Festival—there was no money in the United Stales to present European work. The United Stales is rich, right? This situation has left an inheritance of bitterness.
Heads Up!
April 10
Hester and Hester
February 6
I suppose what Byron Suber did to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter in his frivolous I’m a Frayed Knot could, in part, be called deconstruction. But the term is too formal for what was more like inserting the hose in the wrong end of the vacuum cleaner. Mixing the historical with the contemporary, the mundane with the inflated, the essential with the conspicuously irrelevant.
Frayed Knot was a little unwieldy and more than a little silly, but parts of it had ferocious charm. The audience sat on the floor in the middle of P.S. 122’s auditorium while churchy organ music played and the action flowed in a ring around them. There were several platforms: a cabinet with a dim Victorian table lamp for the Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale’s study: a skinny waterfall of blue plastic where the guilty Rev, meets Pearl. his —unbeknownst to her—illegitimate daughter: a plank wall for Hester Prynne’s cabin with a window cut in it so that when anyone stands up, their head and shoulders are chopped out of the frame, and we watch, for example, only Hester’s bosom and her bright red A.
I never understood why there were two Hesters (Docious Godfrey and Vivian Ti-rmhle), since the other characters changed their colors with agility and slipped stylistically between then and now equally effectively. Near the end, both Hesters were hauled off to be fiercely quizzed by “To Tell the Truth” panelists determined to identify the real Hester. and I don’t recall that any conclusion was drawn. And I never understood who or what the presiding ghost—tartly played in flouncy white drag by Lee Kimble—was. And who was Suber, jumping around in his underwear, telling the joke whose punch line is the work’s title, about a piece of string trying to get served in a bar? I loved the look of the characters: the first Hester in her black cape and red slippers and stockings that match the red of her tips and her A. The gray-faced. ghoulish, caped Chillingworth. pressing his finger to his lips for secrecy. The big gold bows on Pearl’s shoes. Stacy Grabert plays Pearl, Hester’s idealized and irritatingly savvy brat. She’s leery when Dimmesdale wants her to give him a little hug; she instinctively knows he’s going to paw her, and, indeed, his caresses are unusually intense for fatherly affection.
Suber deals wonderfully with the characters’ duelling public and private personalities, using a lot of voice-over narrative and having the characters drift between an artificial, old-fashioned, sharp-edged British speech and more casual modem American usage to very droll effect. The characters also speak their inner thoughts in monologues in which they interpret themselves to themselves. The suppressed passions of the characters are far more rococo than those of mere melodrama. The highlights of the piece are satirical scenes about power and manipulation in relationships, and the torment of delusion, played on an operatic scale—like a sequence of episodes of Chillingworth’s (John Beal) and Dimmesdale’s (Jeffrey Fulvimar) violent attraction in which the “love” of the predator for his prey meshes with the conscious sinner’s long. mg to submit to an inflexible master. Dimmesdale, characteristically moping with his hand over the hidden A on his breast, wraps himself into arching or drooping postures of romantic agony and yearning; Chillingworth bangs on his table., twists into abrupt, angular poses, while raving about Dimmesdale’s beauty, his exquisite hairdo. Both express their cravings in the most erotic terms, though they’re as deliciously naïve psychologically as Glenn Ford in Gilda. They orate extravagantly, then bumble into the most offhand, noncommittal phrases when they actually encounter each other (“Hi. How ya doing?”) like guys pretending they haven’t been cruising each other. This is elegantly handled and never loses its savor.
Another favorite scene was one in which Suber, like an army recruit, is aggressively queried by Real (Sergeant Carter) who presses him with questions about why he’s afraid of intimate relationships. Sober snaps out the answers, Sir! Finally, as physically and emotionally depleted as a vampire’s victim, purged of his secrets, Suber sags longingly back. ward into Real’s arms, It’s a wonderfully sly depiction of the ecstasy of winning by losing. I’m a Frayed Knot is a clumsy package encumbered by some material that doesn’t fit at all. But the scenes that really work are in grand style.
Pilobolus cast a long shadow on the shared program of Peter Pucci Plus Dancers and Second Hand Dance Company in the Joyce Theater’s ManMade series. Pucci has danced with Pilobolus, so the influence is no surprise. Generally, the three guys of Second Hand (now plus a woman), based in Binghamton, are more concerned with tricky ways of interlocking and shifting balances— turning themselves into large scale, boinging, homemade toys—than the oozy metamorphoses, composite creatures, and murky psychological investigations of Pilobolus.
Pilobolus was always sexy. Second Hand is not; rather, it’s pre-adolescent in its chasteness. When I saw Second Hand before, I was entertained by their short, blunt, zany pieces. I found their assembly-line intricacies clever and amusing, There was charm in their combination of raucuousness and exactness, in the banal innocence of their humor, in their grunginess and lack of social grace. Of grace, period. But on the Joyce stage, they seemed shallow and dim. The two long sections of Moving to Mahler are amateurish and the movement dogs the music without inspiration or sophistication. The idea of merely “moving to Mahler” isn’t remotely enough for a performance. And the other new work, 99,000,099 Years Ago, which is set to a voiceover text of kids talking about dinosaurs, is embarrassingly in debt for its movement to Pilobolus’s Molly’s Not Dead.
Second Hand’s older pieces worked much better, but still seemed out of place. Except for The Weird Sisters (1988), which is so outrageous in one aspect that—without being about rebelliousness—it successfully violates our notions of what’s okay to do on a stage. The guys form a tight rosette, lying back across each other’s knees, and shriek waaah! waaah! waaah! like babies. They don’t know when to stop. Don’t they know enough to be embarrassed? Ultimately their excess is exactly right.
Pucci offered four skillful works: Roomers is a revised version of dance for five very “pregnant” women and their nervous husband set to Haydn’s sprightly Symphony No. 100. 1 was nicely handled, but I didn’t care much for its sitcom humor. In 13 x 13, a new solo, Pucci - in underwear briefs - jumps, claws, clutches, and whirls around with frantic, impulsive changeability within the spatial limits defined by square white groundcloth. He creates precise, traumatic atmosphere, but, although the quality of physical and emotional posture is compelling, not enough sense of character emerges to ground the piece.
Sylvan, an ambitious work for 22 in two large groups (first five couples, another dozen people in a wave), slow, flowing, jungly piece of giant caterpillar transformations in greeny light. There’s a solemn procession Iike a tribute to an ancient king and a human pea pod that opens and closes. Pucci devises intriguing forms and develops them deliberately, but the piece is unvarying in its pace and texture, His most satisfying dance was In the Garden, a duet from 1988 set to music by Charles lves, performed by himself and’ Ellen Sirot. In the Garden has many affinities with a Pilobolus piece like Moses Pendleton and Alison Chase’s Shizen, but has its own quiet beauty too. Paired, Sirot and Pucci sway, letting their arms form symmetrical loops that fold together, then fork open into smooth, elegant shapes. They gradually separate and the movement gets bolder, but each remains the focus for the other, Pucci and Sirot are especially fIne together: the delicately curved inflection of her movement contrasts and melds wonderfully with his more forthright style.
At P.S. 122 (January 12 through 14).
I suppose what Byron Suber did to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter in his frivolous I’m a Frayed Knot could, in part, be called deconstruction. But the term is too formal for what was more like inserting the hose in the wrong end of the vacuum cleaner. Mixing the historical with the contemporary, the mundane with the inflated, the essential with the conspicuously irrelevant.
Frayed Knot was a little unwieldy and more than a little silly, but parts of it had ferocious charm. The audience sat on the floor in the middle of P.S. 122’s auditorium while churchy organ music played and the action flowed in a ring around them. There were several platforms: a cabinet with a dim Victorian table lamp for the Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale’s study: a skinny waterfall of blue plastic where the guilty Rev, meets Pearl. his —unbeknownst to her—illegitimate daughter: a plank wall for Hester Prynne’s cabin with a window cut in it so that when anyone stands up, their head and shoulders are chopped out of the frame, and we watch, for example, only Hester’s bosom and her bright red A.
I never understood why there were two Hesters (Docious Godfrey and Vivian Ti-rmhle), since the other characters changed their colors with agility and slipped stylistically between then and now equally effectively. Near the end, both Hesters were hauled off to be fiercely quizzed by “To Tell the Truth” panelists determined to identify the real Hester. and I don’t recall that any conclusion was drawn. And I never understood who or what the presiding ghost—tartly played in flouncy white drag by Lee Kimble—was. And who was Suber, jumping around in his underwear, telling the joke whose punch line is the work’s title, about a piece of string trying to get served in a bar? I loved the look of the characters: the first Hester in her black cape and red slippers and stockings that match the red of her tips and her A. The gray-faced. ghoulish, caped Chillingworth. pressing his finger to his lips for secrecy. The big gold bows on Pearl’s shoes. Stacy Grabert plays Pearl, Hester’s idealized and irritatingly savvy brat. She’s leery when Dimmesdale wants her to give him a little hug; she instinctively knows he’s going to paw her, and, indeed, his caresses are unusually intense for fatherly affection.
Suber deals wonderfully with the characters’ duelling public and private personalities, using a lot of voice-over narrative and having the characters drift between an artificial, old-fashioned, sharp-edged British speech and more casual modem American usage to very droll effect. The characters also speak their inner thoughts in monologues in which they interpret themselves to themselves. The suppressed passions of the characters are far more rococo than those of mere melodrama. The highlights of the piece are satirical scenes about power and manipulation in relationships, and the torment of delusion, played on an operatic scale—like a sequence of episodes of Chillingworth’s (John Beal) and Dimmesdale’s (Jeffrey Fulvimar) violent attraction in which the “love” of the predator for his prey meshes with the conscious sinner’s long. mg to submit to an inflexible master. Dimmesdale, characteristically moping with his hand over the hidden A on his breast, wraps himself into arching or drooping postures of romantic agony and yearning; Chillingworth bangs on his table., twists into abrupt, angular poses, while raving about Dimmesdale’s beauty, his exquisite hairdo. Both express their cravings in the most erotic terms, though they’re as deliciously naïve psychologically as Glenn Ford in Gilda. They orate extravagantly, then bumble into the most offhand, noncommittal phrases when they actually encounter each other (“Hi. How ya doing?”) like guys pretending they haven’t been cruising each other. This is elegantly handled and never loses its savor.
Another favorite scene was one in which Suber, like an army recruit, is aggressively queried by Real (Sergeant Carter) who presses him with questions about why he’s afraid of intimate relationships. Sober snaps out the answers, Sir! Finally, as physically and emotionally depleted as a vampire’s victim, purged of his secrets, Suber sags longingly back. ward into Real’s arms, It’s a wonderfully sly depiction of the ecstasy of winning by losing. I’m a Frayed Knot is a clumsy package encumbered by some material that doesn’t fit at all. But the scenes that really work are in grand style.
Pilobolus cast a long shadow on the shared program of Peter Pucci Plus Dancers and Second Hand Dance Company in the Joyce Theater’s ManMade series. Pucci has danced with Pilobolus, so the influence is no surprise. Generally, the three guys of Second Hand (now plus a woman), based in Binghamton, are more concerned with tricky ways of interlocking and shifting balances— turning themselves into large scale, boinging, homemade toys—than the oozy metamorphoses, composite creatures, and murky psychological investigations of Pilobolus.
Pilobolus was always sexy. Second Hand is not; rather, it’s pre-adolescent in its chasteness. When I saw Second Hand before, I was entertained by their short, blunt, zany pieces. I found their assembly-line intricacies clever and amusing, There was charm in their combination of raucuousness and exactness, in the banal innocence of their humor, in their grunginess and lack of social grace. Of grace, period. But on the Joyce stage, they seemed shallow and dim. The two long sections of Moving to Mahler are amateurish and the movement dogs the music without inspiration or sophistication. The idea of merely “moving to Mahler” isn’t remotely enough for a performance. And the other new work, 99,000,099 Years Ago, which is set to a voiceover text of kids talking about dinosaurs, is embarrassingly in debt for its movement to Pilobolus’s Molly’s Not Dead.
Second Hand’s older pieces worked much better, but still seemed out of place. Except for The Weird Sisters (1988), which is so outrageous in one aspect that—without being about rebelliousness—it successfully violates our notions of what’s okay to do on a stage. The guys form a tight rosette, lying back across each other’s knees, and shriek waaah! waaah! waaah! like babies. They don’t know when to stop. Don’t they know enough to be embarrassed? Ultimately their excess is exactly right.
Pucci offered four skillful works: Roomers is a revised version of dance for five very “pregnant” women and their nervous husband set to Haydn’s sprightly Symphony No. 100. 1 was nicely handled, but I didn’t care much for its sitcom humor. In 13 x 13, a new solo, Pucci - in underwear briefs - jumps, claws, clutches, and whirls around with frantic, impulsive changeability within the spatial limits defined by square white groundcloth. He creates precise, traumatic atmosphere, but, although the quality of physical and emotional posture is compelling, not enough sense of character emerges to ground the piece.
Sylvan, an ambitious work for 22 in two large groups (first five couples, another dozen people in a wave), slow, flowing, jungly piece of giant caterpillar transformations in greeny light. There’s a solemn procession Iike a tribute to an ancient king and a human pea pod that opens and closes. Pucci devises intriguing forms and develops them deliberately, but the piece is unvarying in its pace and texture, His most satisfying dance was In the Garden, a duet from 1988 set to music by Charles lves, performed by himself and’ Ellen Sirot. In the Garden has many affinities with a Pilobolus piece like Moses Pendleton and Alison Chase’s Shizen, but has its own quiet beauty too. Paired, Sirot and Pucci sway, letting their arms form symmetrical loops that fold together, then fork open into smooth, elegant shapes. They gradually separate and the movement gets bolder, but each remains the focus for the other, Pucci and Sirot are especially fIne together: the delicately curved inflection of her movement contrasts and melds wonderfully with his more forthright style.
At P.S. 122 (January 12 through 14).
Homebodies
September 18
In a bare, freshly painted living room (peach and white walls, pale chartreuse trim), Steve Gross presented Crush and Glitter, a 50-minute duet with RoseAnn Spradlin to musical excerpts from Merchant/Ivory and Peter Greenaway movies that repeat again and again without resolution.
In this near-normal apartment setting, some of the moments of stillness or nearly arrested motion are the most oddly touching: Gross’s forearm opening a door into the dark room, or him staring through the windowpane with a sense of isolation or quiet longing. While a torchy voice sings, “1 need a good-time huggin’, good- time kissin’ man,” Gross, in a white undershirt and gray shorts, silently raises the blinds as he sinks slowly back to the floor, and sits on the sill to raise another shade. Then he stands, pressing his belly against the window. The tong begins again, coming from a different speaker, and Spradlin— dressed like Gross, but in a knee- length gray skirt—begins to move, with more refinement than him. pushing her buttocks up from the floor and sliding her body downward, creeping on all fours, then lifting and dropping her pelvis more and more sharply.
Eventually, worn by a dull anguish, she sits back against the walt. The song begins again, switching speakers again. Neither performer is the other’s satisfyin’ lover. In subsequent sections. Spradlin and Gross lean heavily on each other, taking turns standing on the window sill and tilting into the room until each must bear the other’s weight. When she tries to haul him around, he pulls her over. When she does a handstand against the wall, Gross holds her there by the legs so her torso curves, her arms release, and she dangles helplessly. Later, their interactions become fiercer, but for a long stretch the pace is listless and sullen, and the performers seem too impassive and self-absorbed. The action proceeds schematically, solemnly, step-by-step, like a demonstration for dullards. Gradually, their interactions become more effortful and desperate. She rams him against the wall and he returns the favor. He hoists her against the corner wall, then struggles to get her higher anti higher till her palms touch the ceiling. She curves her torso, angles against the wall, and starts to slide down till he’s got all her weight, her body bowed in his arms. Straining, panting, they grapple to the floor. He’s on his back, she’s stretched flat. thrust against the wall. He pushes her up off him again and again in a laborious, sexless parody of the sexual act: then, shifting underneath, she shoves him up and down, though he supports more of his own weight, bouncing off his hands. This is as much fun as digging ditches or splitting rocks.
Gross and Spradlin seem stupefied. In the last section, they’re dressed more formally, as if, perhaps. preparing to go out. She pulls in a long mahogany dining table: he dusts or waxes it: she puts two unsuitable chairs at either end, and lays a crocheted tablecloth on the table, but never unrolls it. From a carton, she takes a few pieces of porcelain dinnerware and sets them carefully on their sides, as if they were, perhaps, some kind of relics. For me, this part of the piece, so nearly routine in many respects, was the most mysterious because of how slightly but significantly it veered from the ordinary. Spradlin sits, and bends to put her face in a dish; there’s some water in it. Gross smoothly wets her hair, almost caressing it, then brushes it slick. The same music seems to have been repeating forever. Gross sits quietly now, leans his head over. Spradlin trickles water over his curls. Their careful, muted tenderness is touching, yet puzzling. The strange, low-key feeling of continuity pleased me.
At 252 West 30th Street (September 6 through 23).
In a bare, freshly painted living room (peach and white walls, pale chartreuse trim), Steve Gross presented Crush and Glitter, a 50-minute duet with RoseAnn Spradlin to musical excerpts from Merchant/Ivory and Peter Greenaway movies that repeat again and again without resolution.
In this near-normal apartment setting, some of the moments of stillness or nearly arrested motion are the most oddly touching: Gross’s forearm opening a door into the dark room, or him staring through the windowpane with a sense of isolation or quiet longing. While a torchy voice sings, “1 need a good-time huggin’, good- time kissin’ man,” Gross, in a white undershirt and gray shorts, silently raises the blinds as he sinks slowly back to the floor, and sits on the sill to raise another shade. Then he stands, pressing his belly against the window. The tong begins again, coming from a different speaker, and Spradlin— dressed like Gross, but in a knee- length gray skirt—begins to move, with more refinement than him. pushing her buttocks up from the floor and sliding her body downward, creeping on all fours, then lifting and dropping her pelvis more and more sharply.
Eventually, worn by a dull anguish, she sits back against the walt. The song begins again, switching speakers again. Neither performer is the other’s satisfyin’ lover. In subsequent sections. Spradlin and Gross lean heavily on each other, taking turns standing on the window sill and tilting into the room until each must bear the other’s weight. When she tries to haul him around, he pulls her over. When she does a handstand against the wall, Gross holds her there by the legs so her torso curves, her arms release, and she dangles helplessly. Later, their interactions become fiercer, but for a long stretch the pace is listless and sullen, and the performers seem too impassive and self-absorbed. The action proceeds schematically, solemnly, step-by-step, like a demonstration for dullards. Gradually, their interactions become more effortful and desperate. She rams him against the wall and he returns the favor. He hoists her against the corner wall, then struggles to get her higher anti higher till her palms touch the ceiling. She curves her torso, angles against the wall, and starts to slide down till he’s got all her weight, her body bowed in his arms. Straining, panting, they grapple to the floor. He’s on his back, she’s stretched flat. thrust against the wall. He pushes her up off him again and again in a laborious, sexless parody of the sexual act: then, shifting underneath, she shoves him up and down, though he supports more of his own weight, bouncing off his hands. This is as much fun as digging ditches or splitting rocks.
Gross and Spradlin seem stupefied. In the last section, they’re dressed more formally, as if, perhaps. preparing to go out. She pulls in a long mahogany dining table: he dusts or waxes it: she puts two unsuitable chairs at either end, and lays a crocheted tablecloth on the table, but never unrolls it. From a carton, she takes a few pieces of porcelain dinnerware and sets them carefully on their sides, as if they were, perhaps, some kind of relics. For me, this part of the piece, so nearly routine in many respects, was the most mysterious because of how slightly but significantly it veered from the ordinary. Spradlin sits, and bends to put her face in a dish; there’s some water in it. Gross smoothly wets her hair, almost caressing it, then brushes it slick. The same music seems to have been repeating forever. Gross sits quietly now, leans his head over. Spradlin trickles water over his curls. Their careful, muted tenderness is touching, yet puzzling. The strange, low-key feeling of continuity pleased me.
At 252 West 30th Street (September 6 through 23).
It’s Better With a Band
October 16
Trisha Brown’s 1983 Set and Reset remains an infinitely fascinating work, one of the masterpieces of the decade—what the hell!—of the century. Familiarity fails to diminish its surprises. At the excellent Theatre National Populaire, in Villeurbanne, the company swirled, dodged, and dived through the dance’s silken intricacies as if it were the easiest thing in the world. How alive and supple the dancers (Lance Gries, Gregory Lara, Carolyn Lucas, Diane Madden, Lisa Schmidt, Trish Oesterling, Nicole Juralewica, and Brown) are in this work! How their faces shine! The delight of the game is in them. They seem fully themselves in the dancing, so radiant and natural, flushed with the continuous achievement of breasting the dance’s challenges. With its devious sinuousness, its omnidirectional flights and meltings, bubbling jumps, Set and Reset seems to be a kind of living organism that the ensemble must create afresh each time. The ultimate slipperiness, all transition, seems to exist more in the synapses than the muscles.
It’s interesting to see Set and Reset followed by Line Up (1977) because they’re such contrasting works, You’d think there’d have to have been at least 30 years between these dances, not just six. Line Up is physically plain, though fundamentally subtle and cheeky, full of brain games and elusive tasks. It doesn’t partake at all of the sensuous, quirky lyricism of Brown’s later works, The audience - which up to a few years ago might have considered this low-key piece a put-on - gets with it right away. They clue into its wry humor, its warped geometry, its cagey severity. It’s a bit like that game where you try to slap your partner’s hands before he or she snatches them away. And the “Spanish Dance” that breaks the piece in two blows the audience away. It’s so damn simple, yet its humor never palls.
Five women are spaced equidistantly across she front of the stage. To Bob Dylan’s recording of “Early Morning Rain,” the woman at the right begins to advance with deliberate, hip-swaying steps, gradually raising her arms overhead with a Spanish air. She finally bumps into the motionless woman ahead of her, and her leg action gels the other moving too. And eventually, all five women, cIumped together belly to rump, hit the proscenium and come to a dead stop on the last note of the music. Every step of the process is immensely satisfying—from the initial inertia of each dancer to the dance’s tauntingly reluctant pace. You can’t believe that the women will finish on time. Recognizing the pattern and seeing it fulfilled is a perfect antidote to much of the other material in Line Up, where we can’t tell whether the goal of a section is accomplished or not, or whether a procedure is purposeful at all. The matter of Line Up just slips through the butterfingers of one’s mind.
In a press conference, Brown mentioned that her newest work, Foray Foret (commissioned by the Lyon Biennale de Ia Dance in cooperation with the Wexner Center, the Walker Art Center, Jacob’s Pillow, the Centre National de Danse Contemporaine at Angers, and other organizations), is gentler and quieter, less emphatic than the recent Astral Convertible or Newark. I’m not certain that was quite so on the first night, but in the subsequent two performances Foray Forêt relaxed, subsided, and Brown’s statement became true. For the first time. Brown has made a modular work with sections that may be moved around, though it’s being performed the same way throughout the company’s current tour (to Berlin. Antwerp, and Nimes). Brown planned to make a beginning, an end and to fool around with the middle, she said, but, “now I have two ends.”
And, “I reserve the privilege.” she noted, “to think again about the material and make a new section.” She kept mum about the music, which turned out to be a local marching band (la Fanfare Piston de l’Ecole Centrale de Ia ville de Lyon), 25 strong, that blasted their favorite tunes as they cheerfully marched around outside the theater (in the pouring rain opening night). Sometimes their playing was ever so faint, almost inaudible. But you could feel their strength when a door somewhere backstage was opened. One or twice I longed to have them come tromping across the stage. The plan is to get a local band in every town to play. The last night, the lack of a police permit for the musicians forced the sound engineer to simulate the effect of the band, and it was well done. Robert Rauschenberg designed the costumes—loose, gold pants for men and women, with the men bare-cheated and the women in sleazy see-through bras. The gold pants move well, but the women gradually change into other pants and squarish tops of stiffish silver material. Perhaps those silver outfits could get lost.
Foray Forét is not the dense confluence of movement that Set and Reset is, though it has the same fluid sensuality, the same touch and spring. Eight dancers burst out of a silhouetted cluster that appears to contain only four or free. Gathering in the center. some lean over, prevented from toppling by a partner (David Thomson holds Lisa Schmidt by her hips, Lance Gries pushes against Diane Madden’s buttocks); others keel gently off center with enough momentum to bring them back into balance on their own. Uncharacteristically, Brown repeats some sections intact. And throughout the dance are long moments of stillness when a single image resonates. The form of the piece at this juncture is curious in that in the final section it suddenly winds down to an extraordinary, emotional solo for Brown—the first solo she’s made for herself in several years. The dancers are in the wings. All that is seen of them (from the center of the auditorium at least) are slivers—elbows. feet, the mere edges of gesture. Brown has long been interested in the edge of the stage—but this is her most extreme use of it.
In Glacial Decoy, keeping the distance constant between pairs of dancers, Brown had movement appearing and disappearing into the wings to suggest an infinite line of dancers which we, in the theater, could only view a select segment. In Set and Reset the wings are transparent and we see the dancers waiting, preparing, finishing. We see the mechanics of the switches in which a dancer entering is yanked offstage and another takes his or her place in an instant, We see a woman dive partway offstage only to be caught, and held, with her inverted legs left in view. In the first solo, Carolyn Lucas lightly pushes her jaw side to side. outlines her facial profile with the edge of her hand. Wil Swanson, Lance Gries, and Diane Madden rush through from the corners: the men vanish, but Madder remains for a sober, unison duet with Lucas. In the lovely duet for Madden and Gries that’s hooked onto it. he quietly tilts her sideways almost to the floor. then sets her aright and bends and tips forward, taking his weight on his hands. Madden gently pulls him back by the waist. Then she tips forward herself, partway: her arms reach out tentatively and retract like the sensitive leaflets of mimosa as he restores her to center. Nicole Juralewicz leans out of a wing. Swanson holds her, gives a sharp push to her hip so her legs fly out. Madden races forward along one edge of the stage. From another wing, Swanson catches her in midair, twists her and sends her veering across the stage.
The freshness of the movement in Brown’s work has to do in part with its open-endedness, as well as its inventiveness and unpredictability. The movements are questions rather than statements, reactions and provocations within the pool of movement that the dance comprises. Their logic is not linear or bound by causality. Rather than products of suitable preparation, they seem invitations to possibility. For her solo, Brown wears shimmering, crinkly, veil-like sheathes—copper over gold—that flame under Spencer Brown’s lights. Of the other dancers we see only arms and ankles. The solo is fierce, disturbing, like a recalcitrant struggle with an elusive internal opponent. Or maybe the brain going blank.
Brown holds uncomfortable, hunched balances for a long time. like someone who has forgotten where she is, who she is or was, and won’t budge ill some light glimmers. The long pauses of the group sections pour their sense into the solo and support its logic. Her bold arms whoosh and slice, clear the decks, her fingers stiffen. There ‘s a sort of sullen, uncomprehending languor. Suddenly her whole body swings down and up, she ripples through huge, flapping jumps and whips around to fix her gaze on the palm of her hand; she shoves a flopping leg, holds a hand in front of her fingertips pinched lightly as if catching a word in her fingers. She freezes In a long balance with her arms and one leg reaching out to nowhere One hand drops to hold that extended ankle; it’s like the puzzling consolation of a total stranger. The fragments of movement we can see peripherally in the wings are Iike the remnants of a life that can only touch her at a distance. With amused frustration, Brown has remarked that “no matter how I try to keep the gesture pure, it’s rendered on the human body” and therefore becomes to some degree referential. Fortunately, in Foray Foret, purity evades her once again, and she has created a work that suddenly narrows and crests in a wave of emotion that doesn’t break until the lights go.
At Lyon Biennale de la Danse (September 22 through 24).
Trisha Brown’s 1983 Set and Reset remains an infinitely fascinating work, one of the masterpieces of the decade—what the hell!—of the century. Familiarity fails to diminish its surprises. At the excellent Theatre National Populaire, in Villeurbanne, the company swirled, dodged, and dived through the dance’s silken intricacies as if it were the easiest thing in the world. How alive and supple the dancers (Lance Gries, Gregory Lara, Carolyn Lucas, Diane Madden, Lisa Schmidt, Trish Oesterling, Nicole Juralewica, and Brown) are in this work! How their faces shine! The delight of the game is in them. They seem fully themselves in the dancing, so radiant and natural, flushed with the continuous achievement of breasting the dance’s challenges. With its devious sinuousness, its omnidirectional flights and meltings, bubbling jumps, Set and Reset seems to be a kind of living organism that the ensemble must create afresh each time. The ultimate slipperiness, all transition, seems to exist more in the synapses than the muscles.
It’s interesting to see Set and Reset followed by Line Up (1977) because they’re such contrasting works, You’d think there’d have to have been at least 30 years between these dances, not just six. Line Up is physically plain, though fundamentally subtle and cheeky, full of brain games and elusive tasks. It doesn’t partake at all of the sensuous, quirky lyricism of Brown’s later works, The audience - which up to a few years ago might have considered this low-key piece a put-on - gets with it right away. They clue into its wry humor, its warped geometry, its cagey severity. It’s a bit like that game where you try to slap your partner’s hands before he or she snatches them away. And the “Spanish Dance” that breaks the piece in two blows the audience away. It’s so damn simple, yet its humor never palls.
Five women are spaced equidistantly across she front of the stage. To Bob Dylan’s recording of “Early Morning Rain,” the woman at the right begins to advance with deliberate, hip-swaying steps, gradually raising her arms overhead with a Spanish air. She finally bumps into the motionless woman ahead of her, and her leg action gels the other moving too. And eventually, all five women, cIumped together belly to rump, hit the proscenium and come to a dead stop on the last note of the music. Every step of the process is immensely satisfying—from the initial inertia of each dancer to the dance’s tauntingly reluctant pace. You can’t believe that the women will finish on time. Recognizing the pattern and seeing it fulfilled is a perfect antidote to much of the other material in Line Up, where we can’t tell whether the goal of a section is accomplished or not, or whether a procedure is purposeful at all. The matter of Line Up just slips through the butterfingers of one’s mind.
In a press conference, Brown mentioned that her newest work, Foray Foret (commissioned by the Lyon Biennale de Ia Dance in cooperation with the Wexner Center, the Walker Art Center, Jacob’s Pillow, the Centre National de Danse Contemporaine at Angers, and other organizations), is gentler and quieter, less emphatic than the recent Astral Convertible or Newark. I’m not certain that was quite so on the first night, but in the subsequent two performances Foray Forêt relaxed, subsided, and Brown’s statement became true. For the first time. Brown has made a modular work with sections that may be moved around, though it’s being performed the same way throughout the company’s current tour (to Berlin. Antwerp, and Nimes). Brown planned to make a beginning, an end and to fool around with the middle, she said, but, “now I have two ends.”
And, “I reserve the privilege.” she noted, “to think again about the material and make a new section.” She kept mum about the music, which turned out to be a local marching band (la Fanfare Piston de l’Ecole Centrale de Ia ville de Lyon), 25 strong, that blasted their favorite tunes as they cheerfully marched around outside the theater (in the pouring rain opening night). Sometimes their playing was ever so faint, almost inaudible. But you could feel their strength when a door somewhere backstage was opened. One or twice I longed to have them come tromping across the stage. The plan is to get a local band in every town to play. The last night, the lack of a police permit for the musicians forced the sound engineer to simulate the effect of the band, and it was well done. Robert Rauschenberg designed the costumes—loose, gold pants for men and women, with the men bare-cheated and the women in sleazy see-through bras. The gold pants move well, but the women gradually change into other pants and squarish tops of stiffish silver material. Perhaps those silver outfits could get lost.
Foray Forét is not the dense confluence of movement that Set and Reset is, though it has the same fluid sensuality, the same touch and spring. Eight dancers burst out of a silhouetted cluster that appears to contain only four or free. Gathering in the center. some lean over, prevented from toppling by a partner (David Thomson holds Lisa Schmidt by her hips, Lance Gries pushes against Diane Madden’s buttocks); others keel gently off center with enough momentum to bring them back into balance on their own. Uncharacteristically, Brown repeats some sections intact. And throughout the dance are long moments of stillness when a single image resonates. The form of the piece at this juncture is curious in that in the final section it suddenly winds down to an extraordinary, emotional solo for Brown—the first solo she’s made for herself in several years. The dancers are in the wings. All that is seen of them (from the center of the auditorium at least) are slivers—elbows. feet, the mere edges of gesture. Brown has long been interested in the edge of the stage—but this is her most extreme use of it.
In Glacial Decoy, keeping the distance constant between pairs of dancers, Brown had movement appearing and disappearing into the wings to suggest an infinite line of dancers which we, in the theater, could only view a select segment. In Set and Reset the wings are transparent and we see the dancers waiting, preparing, finishing. We see the mechanics of the switches in which a dancer entering is yanked offstage and another takes his or her place in an instant, We see a woman dive partway offstage only to be caught, and held, with her inverted legs left in view. In the first solo, Carolyn Lucas lightly pushes her jaw side to side. outlines her facial profile with the edge of her hand. Wil Swanson, Lance Gries, and Diane Madden rush through from the corners: the men vanish, but Madder remains for a sober, unison duet with Lucas. In the lovely duet for Madden and Gries that’s hooked onto it. he quietly tilts her sideways almost to the floor. then sets her aright and bends and tips forward, taking his weight on his hands. Madden gently pulls him back by the waist. Then she tips forward herself, partway: her arms reach out tentatively and retract like the sensitive leaflets of mimosa as he restores her to center. Nicole Juralewicz leans out of a wing. Swanson holds her, gives a sharp push to her hip so her legs fly out. Madden races forward along one edge of the stage. From another wing, Swanson catches her in midair, twists her and sends her veering across the stage.
The freshness of the movement in Brown’s work has to do in part with its open-endedness, as well as its inventiveness and unpredictability. The movements are questions rather than statements, reactions and provocations within the pool of movement that the dance comprises. Their logic is not linear or bound by causality. Rather than products of suitable preparation, they seem invitations to possibility. For her solo, Brown wears shimmering, crinkly, veil-like sheathes—copper over gold—that flame under Spencer Brown’s lights. Of the other dancers we see only arms and ankles. The solo is fierce, disturbing, like a recalcitrant struggle with an elusive internal opponent. Or maybe the brain going blank.
Brown holds uncomfortable, hunched balances for a long time. like someone who has forgotten where she is, who she is or was, and won’t budge ill some light glimmers. The long pauses of the group sections pour their sense into the solo and support its logic. Her bold arms whoosh and slice, clear the decks, her fingers stiffen. There ‘s a sort of sullen, uncomprehending languor. Suddenly her whole body swings down and up, she ripples through huge, flapping jumps and whips around to fix her gaze on the palm of her hand; she shoves a flopping leg, holds a hand in front of her fingertips pinched lightly as if catching a word in her fingers. She freezes In a long balance with her arms and one leg reaching out to nowhere One hand drops to hold that extended ankle; it’s like the puzzling consolation of a total stranger. The fragments of movement we can see peripherally in the wings are Iike the remnants of a life that can only touch her at a distance. With amused frustration, Brown has remarked that “no matter how I try to keep the gesture pure, it’s rendered on the human body” and therefore becomes to some degree referential. Fortunately, in Foray Foret, purity evades her once again, and she has created a work that suddenly narrows and crests in a wave of emotion that doesn’t break until the lights go.
At Lyon Biennale de la Danse (September 22 through 24).
Ladies, Please!
February 20
The Trocks are in quite good form this season after seven years of out-of-town performances. A troupe of travesty ballerinas founded in the mid-l970s, Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo was a rebellious spinoff of Ekatherina Sobechanskaya’s Trocadero Gloxinia Ballet that dared to place a greater emphasis on choreography than on secret smiles and elaborate arrangements of tulle, rhinestones, and sequins opulent enough to dazzle the Tsar.
Still, they do preserve the old-world mystique of the ballerina— sadly decayed in our indiscriminate era— and their choreography frequently serves to exalt a ballerina’s poisonality. Hairy chests and armpits are givens - hardly worth mentioning as part of the evening’s mixture of subtle and slapstick comedy. The obvious jokes are about clunkiness, muddle, and about mocking the tinkles and thumps of the music by accenting their literalness. The cleverer stuff pays homage to its models by lovingly distorting the carefully observed original choreography and twisting the assumptions of the plot. So the performance is not just a skillful goof.
In Swan Lake, Act II, (1974), Von Rothbart (Dimitri Legupski/Mark Caine) tows the prop swan onstage like a proper serf. Ludmilla Bolshoya (Rusty Curcio), absolute prima ballerina of the troupe, as Odette, arrives in a flurry, cowers in a corner coyly waving bye-bye. Benno nearly shoots Siegfried with a crossbow whose arrow looks like a combination of a silver rocket and a dildo. The idle swan maidens twitch their heads and preen like jittery chickens. The cygnets—four of the least fragile demoiselles—trample relentlessly downstage like a harvester chomping through a field of grain. And in one of their choric interludes, the six-bird corps crosses the stage by alternating a version of the Australian crawl with the dog paddle. As Siegfried, Alexis Ivanovitch Letmontov (artistic director Natch Taylor) plays a vague, superannuated danseur noble with a flaxen wig and a thick midsection, making grand but indeterminate arm gestures and merely marking as many steps as possible, No need to wonder why Benno, the prince’s friend, got to lug the Swan Queen around back in 19th century St. Petersburg.
The glittering Bolshoya is dynamite, with good legs and a laser smile. She demurely plays “Who, me?” when given roses during the applause—then, ever practical, counts them. She’s terrific too in the Don Quixote pas de deux (1987), wearing patent leather hair and the obligatory spit curl. She can balance with impunity. Somehow, she swoops backward, moving in a blind upward curve, to be caught by the dubious Lermontov, and winds up sweeping the floor with her hands. She tucks her feet neatly beneath her in perky jumps, waving “Hi!,” as she peers coyly out from behind her fan. Saucily, she tips up her stiff red tutu to show us a little extra thigh. Hubba hubba. I adored her too in the new Black Swan (staged by Curcio, after Petipa), where Siegfried was just as ineffectual and even moonier.
But I think my favorite moment was the vision of Odette (Konstantina Kvetchskaya/Ronald Soucy), flapping and sobbing in distress, when the prince plights his troth to the wrong girl. Nina Enimenimynimova (Victor Trevino) is girlishly gay in Lori Beliove’s recent Isadora Deconstructed, but the piece is trivial and the moment when she strangles herself with her scarf is really too cheap a joke.
Ann Marie de Angelo’s In Kazmidity, made in 1982 for the Joffrey II, is a silly but opulent fantasy of mutant women (descended from unfulfilled ballerinas) who capture mortal men for unspeakable purposes. But Mike Gonzales’s costumes—particularly the insect men—are a knockout. And Enimenimynimova is a treasure as the Queen of the Kazmites, who lays claim to an American teenager, makes him her grateful sex slave, and turns him into a bug.
Peter Anastos’a Go for Barocco (1975), his smart Balanchine parody, works ingeniously, wrapping its lines into inextricable tangles, driving its ballerinas into whoops-a-daisy stumbles. Despite the low comedy, it becomes rather exquisite in the central adagio, with Margaret LowinOcteyn, D.B.E. (Tory Dobrin), and Natesha Notgoudenoff (Mike Gonzales). The frolicking, cliquish young girls studying at Madame Repelskii’s Terpsichorean Academy in Anastos’s Ecole de Ballet (1975), an entertaining pastiche that highlights bits of Etudes and Giselle, gaily throw themselves into the Charleston and jitterbug when Madame’s not looking. But they’re more demure at their recital, which climaxes in a pas de deux for the shy and squarish Kvetchskaya and the eager Adam Baum (Dobrin, looking like the Poet in Les Sylphides). When she heaves herself into his arms, the momentum carries them right into the wings.
Natch Taylor’s Gambol (1988) is a sprawling, somewhat hapless takeoff of (mostly) Paul Taylor, though Gerald Arpino and Jerome Robbins are also among its victims. I enjoyed its irrelevancies— like a woman in green who rolls violently across the stage, or a Japanese in red with a red umbrella who’s carried in and out on someone’s shoulders and never seen again. I most liked a long, lazy section where the men drift through, sometimes turning slowly, carrying the women overhead like icons. There’s one in an upside-down split; one in a very tentative squat on her partner’s shoulders, trying dismally to stand erect; one with her crooked legs up like a dead roach.
The art of Martha Graham was much more deftly and delightfully savaged than that of Taylor (Paul) in Taylor’s (Natch), Anarchic Heart (1986)—a rich stew most blatantly scavenged from Night Journey and Cave of the Heart. The Bette Davis aspect of Graham’s dramas and her arcane stylization make her an irresistible target. We have pseudo-Noguchi sculpture; a blind man thumping a staff and doing the deliberate, goose-step battements Graham mostly reserves for heroic jocks; a chorus of two ladies (Enimenimynimova and that long-legged lovely, Babushkina/James O’Connor-Taylor) in black dresses with snaky designs and towering hairdos, who carry leafy wands that look like antique wire carpet beaters. They thwack their thighs and cup their hands to make mystic signs that can be discerned as meaning “see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil,” A woman in red— escaped from Diversion of Angels perhaps?—breezes through, and reappears later as a sultry temptress. A woman in white (Lowin-Octeyn), after frolicking with her Husband (Klaus Yousaoupovtu/ Gregory Wolverton), clutches her belly, spreads her legs, unties a long, white umbilical rope from around her waist, and births a baby in a white bonnet from between her legs. Later, when her man betrays her with the Seductress (Notgoudenoff), she strangles the brat, and hangs herself with the cord.
The Trocks are masters of the art of the batting eyelash, the scornful glance, and of the attitudes of self-important impatience. They’ll get their due attention by pouting if they have to. Grace is rarely one of their achievements. But their commitment and surprising skill have earned them genuine popular success.
At City Center (February 6 through 18).
The Trocks are in quite good form this season after seven years of out-of-town performances. A troupe of travesty ballerinas founded in the mid-l970s, Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo was a rebellious spinoff of Ekatherina Sobechanskaya’s Trocadero Gloxinia Ballet that dared to place a greater emphasis on choreography than on secret smiles and elaborate arrangements of tulle, rhinestones, and sequins opulent enough to dazzle the Tsar.
Still, they do preserve the old-world mystique of the ballerina— sadly decayed in our indiscriminate era— and their choreography frequently serves to exalt a ballerina’s poisonality. Hairy chests and armpits are givens - hardly worth mentioning as part of the evening’s mixture of subtle and slapstick comedy. The obvious jokes are about clunkiness, muddle, and about mocking the tinkles and thumps of the music by accenting their literalness. The cleverer stuff pays homage to its models by lovingly distorting the carefully observed original choreography and twisting the assumptions of the plot. So the performance is not just a skillful goof.
In Swan Lake, Act II, (1974), Von Rothbart (Dimitri Legupski/Mark Caine) tows the prop swan onstage like a proper serf. Ludmilla Bolshoya (Rusty Curcio), absolute prima ballerina of the troupe, as Odette, arrives in a flurry, cowers in a corner coyly waving bye-bye. Benno nearly shoots Siegfried with a crossbow whose arrow looks like a combination of a silver rocket and a dildo. The idle swan maidens twitch their heads and preen like jittery chickens. The cygnets—four of the least fragile demoiselles—trample relentlessly downstage like a harvester chomping through a field of grain. And in one of their choric interludes, the six-bird corps crosses the stage by alternating a version of the Australian crawl with the dog paddle. As Siegfried, Alexis Ivanovitch Letmontov (artistic director Natch Taylor) plays a vague, superannuated danseur noble with a flaxen wig and a thick midsection, making grand but indeterminate arm gestures and merely marking as many steps as possible, No need to wonder why Benno, the prince’s friend, got to lug the Swan Queen around back in 19th century St. Petersburg.
The glittering Bolshoya is dynamite, with good legs and a laser smile. She demurely plays “Who, me?” when given roses during the applause—then, ever practical, counts them. She’s terrific too in the Don Quixote pas de deux (1987), wearing patent leather hair and the obligatory spit curl. She can balance with impunity. Somehow, she swoops backward, moving in a blind upward curve, to be caught by the dubious Lermontov, and winds up sweeping the floor with her hands. She tucks her feet neatly beneath her in perky jumps, waving “Hi!,” as she peers coyly out from behind her fan. Saucily, she tips up her stiff red tutu to show us a little extra thigh. Hubba hubba. I adored her too in the new Black Swan (staged by Curcio, after Petipa), where Siegfried was just as ineffectual and even moonier.
But I think my favorite moment was the vision of Odette (Konstantina Kvetchskaya/Ronald Soucy), flapping and sobbing in distress, when the prince plights his troth to the wrong girl. Nina Enimenimynimova (Victor Trevino) is girlishly gay in Lori Beliove’s recent Isadora Deconstructed, but the piece is trivial and the moment when she strangles herself with her scarf is really too cheap a joke.
Ann Marie de Angelo’s In Kazmidity, made in 1982 for the Joffrey II, is a silly but opulent fantasy of mutant women (descended from unfulfilled ballerinas) who capture mortal men for unspeakable purposes. But Mike Gonzales’s costumes—particularly the insect men—are a knockout. And Enimenimynimova is a treasure as the Queen of the Kazmites, who lays claim to an American teenager, makes him her grateful sex slave, and turns him into a bug.
Peter Anastos’a Go for Barocco (1975), his smart Balanchine parody, works ingeniously, wrapping its lines into inextricable tangles, driving its ballerinas into whoops-a-daisy stumbles. Despite the low comedy, it becomes rather exquisite in the central adagio, with Margaret LowinOcteyn, D.B.E. (Tory Dobrin), and Natesha Notgoudenoff (Mike Gonzales). The frolicking, cliquish young girls studying at Madame Repelskii’s Terpsichorean Academy in Anastos’s Ecole de Ballet (1975), an entertaining pastiche that highlights bits of Etudes and Giselle, gaily throw themselves into the Charleston and jitterbug when Madame’s not looking. But they’re more demure at their recital, which climaxes in a pas de deux for the shy and squarish Kvetchskaya and the eager Adam Baum (Dobrin, looking like the Poet in Les Sylphides). When she heaves herself into his arms, the momentum carries them right into the wings.
Natch Taylor’s Gambol (1988) is a sprawling, somewhat hapless takeoff of (mostly) Paul Taylor, though Gerald Arpino and Jerome Robbins are also among its victims. I enjoyed its irrelevancies— like a woman in green who rolls violently across the stage, or a Japanese in red with a red umbrella who’s carried in and out on someone’s shoulders and never seen again. I most liked a long, lazy section where the men drift through, sometimes turning slowly, carrying the women overhead like icons. There’s one in an upside-down split; one in a very tentative squat on her partner’s shoulders, trying dismally to stand erect; one with her crooked legs up like a dead roach.
The art of Martha Graham was much more deftly and delightfully savaged than that of Taylor (Paul) in Taylor’s (Natch), Anarchic Heart (1986)—a rich stew most blatantly scavenged from Night Journey and Cave of the Heart. The Bette Davis aspect of Graham’s dramas and her arcane stylization make her an irresistible target. We have pseudo-Noguchi sculpture; a blind man thumping a staff and doing the deliberate, goose-step battements Graham mostly reserves for heroic jocks; a chorus of two ladies (Enimenimynimova and that long-legged lovely, Babushkina/James O’Connor-Taylor) in black dresses with snaky designs and towering hairdos, who carry leafy wands that look like antique wire carpet beaters. They thwack their thighs and cup their hands to make mystic signs that can be discerned as meaning “see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil,” A woman in red— escaped from Diversion of Angels perhaps?—breezes through, and reappears later as a sultry temptress. A woman in white (Lowin-Octeyn), after frolicking with her Husband (Klaus Yousaoupovtu/ Gregory Wolverton), clutches her belly, spreads her legs, unties a long, white umbilical rope from around her waist, and births a baby in a white bonnet from between her legs. Later, when her man betrays her with the Seductress (Notgoudenoff), she strangles the brat, and hangs herself with the cord.
The Trocks are masters of the art of the batting eyelash, the scornful glance, and of the attitudes of self-important impatience. They’ll get their due attention by pouting if they have to. Grace is rarely one of their achievements. But their commitment and surprising skill have earned them genuine popular success.
At City Center (February 6 through 18).