Reviews 1990
Some magic - even the simple illusions created almost entirely by an audience’s willingness to believe - is even more amazing once the secrets are revealed, because we find ourselves consciously acceding to the power and meaning of the metaphor. But Pendleton rarely permits us this deep pleasure. He doesn’t trust us to go along with him, so he busily tosses new tricks at us. Some of them are marvelous but in each case, once disillusionment sets in, there’s no returning to a state of innocent receptivity.
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Respect
December 25
Phyllis Lambut earned her spurs in Alwin Nikolais’s company over 20 years, danced with Murray Louis as well, and is now celebrating her own company’s 20th anniversary. Lamhut is a practical- minded, outspoken woman— funny, insistent, ballsy. In her work she’s neither fashionable nor dated; she never was touted as the hottest young choreographer, and now it’s too late. She’s been around, she’s honed her skills, she’s respected. But however traditional her craftsmanship and her concern for it, Lamhut’s awake in today’s world, and when the spirit moves her, she’ll take on anything.
Actually, her concert at St. Mark’s wasn’t about issues. One piece, Unit, was a vigorous excerpt from her 1980 Passing; the new Cavatina was a moody, atmospheric piece for five mature women wandering in psychic space; and the second premiere, Cleave, was a modern folk dance celebrating the shattering of the Berlin Wall. All the pieces had live music by Robert Moran, and the evening ran about 50 minutes with barely time for a breath between dances. The trick was, I guess, to use different dancers in each piece: half-a-dozen dancers who’ve danced with Lamhut over the years performed Unit, eight members of the Limon Company did Cleave, and Sally Gross, Deborah Jowiitt, Lone lsakson Rhodes, Linda Tarnay, and Lois Bewley appeared in Cavatina. (lsakson, a former principal with the original Harkness Ballet. has been retired since 1971; Jowitt has only recently resumed performing occasionally.)
Lighting designer Dave Feldman sets the mood for Cavatina with shadowy light that seems filtered through heaven. Moran’s cooing, repetitive music has sweet eeriness, but eventually grows almost mournful. The five women—wearing loose, gauzy garments (by Lois Bewley) in tones of red and pink—wander in, thoughtful, altogether unhurried. Almost idly, they gently bend, tilt, look around, wriggle their shoulders, sink into their hips, and sway, in a totally female kind of meditation in the body. The women are isolated within themselves in a way, which can give them a forbidding, haughty quality. And in their distance, they have a siren-like quality too, though there’s no one to tempt. Yet there is a deeper sense of mutual participation: they all have knowledge that they must inevitably share.
Jowitt suddenly flutters her hands, Gross rushes around, swirling. Tarnay prowls the space, or lies back like a reclining statue of Ariadne, Bewley and Gross run with tiny stamping steps. lsaksen moves with a sinuous lightness, tenderly alert; she seems more an outsider, more uncertain than the others. I can hardly wait for Jowitt and Tarnay to get together, they’re both so tall and authoritative. And there they are standing straight—like pillars, like sisters.
Cleave opens with brisk pacing in right-angled patterns, and neat, skipping footwork. The floor patterns twine; the group divides into pairs that rush on a bubbling triplet rhythm with torsos bending sharply, arms in angular designs, and cursory little lifts. In two lines, the dancers make a wall, leaning together, almost dovetailing their bodies. Then, facing, they push at each other, pressing hand to hand. Their wall is unifying, not divisive, and after this formation the whole dance loosens into duets and trios with a kind of reckless excitement augmented by the percussive thrust of the music—a bit too suggestive of Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana here.
Cleave is more intricate and joyful than Unit, but it doesn’t have its naked formality and economical strength. The music for Unit starts with a low rumble that turns into throbbing. The dancers, wearing costumes of dark velour, stoop over, their torsos bob and twist. Since there’s no sense of choice or will, only regularized action, the performers aren’t quite people, though they’re not mechanical either. In their plodding cluster, they move at a steady pace, but veer out of it in arcs. Their variations are relentlessly, arithmetically satisfying, and Lamhut provides a wry tease when their unison movement routinely jogs out of synch.
Unit is a handsome work, totally unsentimental in its depiction of cooperation, as gratifying as a military parade. The dancers— Andrea Borak, Candice Christakos, Natasha Simon, Gael Stepanek, Steven Iannacone, Rob O’Neill - are excellent, and thy know Lamhut’s style inside out.
At St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery (December 6 through 9).
[Title]
Remember the 1950 movie of King Solomon’s Mines, and that incredible Watusi dancing? Well, Pearl Primus’s Impinyuza (1952) provides a fine stage version of that astonishing movement of the Ishyaka dancers of Rwanda, though the gorgeous Ailey men aren’t 11 feet or however tall those guys in the movie were. Wearing long, white, wrapped skirts patterned in black geometrics, fringed collars and headdresses of long white hair that they swing sharply, they delicately grasp their spears or sticks. With arrogant languor, bounding and clanking ankle bells, they dance with an extreme feminine elegance. Long undulations ripple through their bodies. They plunge lazily into aching lunges; essay juicy, thumping prances; toss their heads so their headdresses swish blithely.
The dozen dancers include Andre Tyson, Dereque Whiturs, Desmond Richardson, Dwight Rhoden, Wesley Johnson III, Aubrey Lynch, Jonathan Riesling, Antonio Carlos Scott. Beautiful, invulnerable, they make their solemn entrances prouder than kings. They’re almost reluctant in their stalking and prowling, in the lovely suspended moves that may give way to sudden shakes, or hot little runs. The suspension in the movement makes it seem impossibly lazy. These warriors won’t scare anyone to death, but if beauty could kill, you’d be meat in a second.
At City Center (December 4 through 30).
Phyllis Lambut earned her spurs in Alwin Nikolais’s company over 20 years, danced with Murray Louis as well, and is now celebrating her own company’s 20th anniversary. Lamhut is a practical- minded, outspoken woman— funny, insistent, ballsy. In her work she’s neither fashionable nor dated; she never was touted as the hottest young choreographer, and now it’s too late. She’s been around, she’s honed her skills, she’s respected. But however traditional her craftsmanship and her concern for it, Lamhut’s awake in today’s world, and when the spirit moves her, she’ll take on anything.
Actually, her concert at St. Mark’s wasn’t about issues. One piece, Unit, was a vigorous excerpt from her 1980 Passing; the new Cavatina was a moody, atmospheric piece for five mature women wandering in psychic space; and the second premiere, Cleave, was a modern folk dance celebrating the shattering of the Berlin Wall. All the pieces had live music by Robert Moran, and the evening ran about 50 minutes with barely time for a breath between dances. The trick was, I guess, to use different dancers in each piece: half-a-dozen dancers who’ve danced with Lamhut over the years performed Unit, eight members of the Limon Company did Cleave, and Sally Gross, Deborah Jowiitt, Lone lsakson Rhodes, Linda Tarnay, and Lois Bewley appeared in Cavatina. (lsakson, a former principal with the original Harkness Ballet. has been retired since 1971; Jowitt has only recently resumed performing occasionally.)
Lighting designer Dave Feldman sets the mood for Cavatina with shadowy light that seems filtered through heaven. Moran’s cooing, repetitive music has sweet eeriness, but eventually grows almost mournful. The five women—wearing loose, gauzy garments (by Lois Bewley) in tones of red and pink—wander in, thoughtful, altogether unhurried. Almost idly, they gently bend, tilt, look around, wriggle their shoulders, sink into their hips, and sway, in a totally female kind of meditation in the body. The women are isolated within themselves in a way, which can give them a forbidding, haughty quality. And in their distance, they have a siren-like quality too, though there’s no one to tempt. Yet there is a deeper sense of mutual participation: they all have knowledge that they must inevitably share.
Jowitt suddenly flutters her hands, Gross rushes around, swirling. Tarnay prowls the space, or lies back like a reclining statue of Ariadne, Bewley and Gross run with tiny stamping steps. lsaksen moves with a sinuous lightness, tenderly alert; she seems more an outsider, more uncertain than the others. I can hardly wait for Jowitt and Tarnay to get together, they’re both so tall and authoritative. And there they are standing straight—like pillars, like sisters.
Cleave opens with brisk pacing in right-angled patterns, and neat, skipping footwork. The floor patterns twine; the group divides into pairs that rush on a bubbling triplet rhythm with torsos bending sharply, arms in angular designs, and cursory little lifts. In two lines, the dancers make a wall, leaning together, almost dovetailing their bodies. Then, facing, they push at each other, pressing hand to hand. Their wall is unifying, not divisive, and after this formation the whole dance loosens into duets and trios with a kind of reckless excitement augmented by the percussive thrust of the music—a bit too suggestive of Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana here.
Cleave is more intricate and joyful than Unit, but it doesn’t have its naked formality and economical strength. The music for Unit starts with a low rumble that turns into throbbing. The dancers, wearing costumes of dark velour, stoop over, their torsos bob and twist. Since there’s no sense of choice or will, only regularized action, the performers aren’t quite people, though they’re not mechanical either. In their plodding cluster, they move at a steady pace, but veer out of it in arcs. Their variations are relentlessly, arithmetically satisfying, and Lamhut provides a wry tease when their unison movement routinely jogs out of synch.
Unit is a handsome work, totally unsentimental in its depiction of cooperation, as gratifying as a military parade. The dancers— Andrea Borak, Candice Christakos, Natasha Simon, Gael Stepanek, Steven Iannacone, Rob O’Neill - are excellent, and thy know Lamhut’s style inside out.
At St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery (December 6 through 9).
[Title]
Remember the 1950 movie of King Solomon’s Mines, and that incredible Watusi dancing? Well, Pearl Primus’s Impinyuza (1952) provides a fine stage version of that astonishing movement of the Ishyaka dancers of Rwanda, though the gorgeous Ailey men aren’t 11 feet or however tall those guys in the movie were. Wearing long, white, wrapped skirts patterned in black geometrics, fringed collars and headdresses of long white hair that they swing sharply, they delicately grasp their spears or sticks. With arrogant languor, bounding and clanking ankle bells, they dance with an extreme feminine elegance. Long undulations ripple through their bodies. They plunge lazily into aching lunges; essay juicy, thumping prances; toss their heads so their headdresses swish blithely.
The dozen dancers include Andre Tyson, Dereque Whiturs, Desmond Richardson, Dwight Rhoden, Wesley Johnson III, Aubrey Lynch, Jonathan Riesling, Antonio Carlos Scott. Beautiful, invulnerable, they make their solemn entrances prouder than kings. They’re almost reluctant in their stalking and prowling, in the lovely suspended moves that may give way to sudden shakes, or hot little runs. The suspension in the movement makes it seem impossibly lazy. These warriors won’t scare anyone to death, but if beauty could kill, you’d be meat in a second.
At City Center (December 4 through 30).
Prestidigitation
December 18
In a dark, greenish costume, Sanghi Wagner wiggles her toes and takes small, jittery steps with her thighs pressed together. She lounges sideways on one hip like Ghislebertus’s sculpture of Eve, as the pitches of a taped song keep decaying in a vaguely noxious way that creates mild anxiety. When the lights brighten, she holds her nose and dances the Jerk. Set to three Korean pop songs (Wagner was born in Korea, raised here), Wagner’s solo, Mermaid Medley, was a too-private opening to her program at P.S. 122. The piece isn’t held together by the usual pleasures of a medley; there’s no surprise in the slide or jump from mood to mood, and Wagner can’t count on our familiarity with and fondness for the material. Still, it prepares the audience for the quiet eloquence of the works that follow.
In Inverted Ghosts: A Companion Piece, a duet with Vicky Shick (who stands a head taller than Wagner), they interweave their arms, lean and rest against each other, match and mirror each other in careful, unhurried unison to soft, chiming music by Melon. They step sideways to a tango beat, as Wagner repeatedly clasps Shick’s waist lightly. The dance is an amicable essay in close harmony. Even in such a cautious piece. Shick’s transparency is astonishing, Her dancing is so full of self- knowledge yet so modest that it seems to reflect your private experience. Almost unwitttingly, you read yourself in her.
Wagner’s big work, Pinhole Ghosts: An Alchemic Dance, is a charming and taciturn theater piece. As the glockenspiel tinkles. a tall black box like a phone booth or photo booth, with diamond and rectangular holes in it and a curtained doorway, revolves onstage. When it comes to rest in a downspot, the light pouring into it makes its cracks glow. John Hagan (in formal wear, and looking as harmlessly genial as Joe E. Brown in Some Like It Hot) and Shick emerge in a decorous little dance of balances and swaying steps. He gives her a single rose; she drops it; he searches for it automatically in a spiraling curve that doesn’t go low enough. They’re like clockwork figures. In the same pattern of tendering and dropping, she drops a handkerchief, he drops her white glove, she drops a dollar bill. After a blackout, there’s an older woman in Shick’s place (Scotty Snyder, in identical clothing). Hagan gives her a white rose, and it falls from her hand.
Pinhole Ghosts has a sly, affectless air, yet it’s a vehicle for magic. A disembodied hand poking out of a second black booth prepares a trick involving glasses of water variously poured and mixed to turn milky, then ruby red, then clear. But the transformations are presented as a game of tacit one-upmanship between Snyder and Hagan, not as tricks. Then there’s a hat trick with a burning tissue; Snyder drops the tissue, like before. The small box they’ve used as a table creeps forward a few inches. and she and Hagan replay some of their business with imaginary objects; and then she’s gone in a blackout—we’ve flipped worlds again—and Snyder’s in her place.The tall bIack booths begin to promenade. The little box turns, and begins to tiptoe on childlike feet (Lana Lin). When it settles, two little magnetic music box figures approach each other and glide around on top.
Edward Ratliff’s music, with its music box fragility and its sad, sour brass and accordion; Matthew Buckingham’s set; and Laura Drawbaugh’s costumes evoke a solemn but pleasant eeriness. The piece’s repertoire of toylike motions, the bland demeanor of the characters, the switching women, the sudden downscaling of the human couple to tiny flat skaters about two inches high detail a space at the juncture of several worlds where matter slips and slides.
At P.S. 122 (November 29 through December 2).
In a dark, greenish costume, Sanghi Wagner wiggles her toes and takes small, jittery steps with her thighs pressed together. She lounges sideways on one hip like Ghislebertus’s sculpture of Eve, as the pitches of a taped song keep decaying in a vaguely noxious way that creates mild anxiety. When the lights brighten, she holds her nose and dances the Jerk. Set to three Korean pop songs (Wagner was born in Korea, raised here), Wagner’s solo, Mermaid Medley, was a too-private opening to her program at P.S. 122. The piece isn’t held together by the usual pleasures of a medley; there’s no surprise in the slide or jump from mood to mood, and Wagner can’t count on our familiarity with and fondness for the material. Still, it prepares the audience for the quiet eloquence of the works that follow.
In Inverted Ghosts: A Companion Piece, a duet with Vicky Shick (who stands a head taller than Wagner), they interweave their arms, lean and rest against each other, match and mirror each other in careful, unhurried unison to soft, chiming music by Melon. They step sideways to a tango beat, as Wagner repeatedly clasps Shick’s waist lightly. The dance is an amicable essay in close harmony. Even in such a cautious piece. Shick’s transparency is astonishing, Her dancing is so full of self- knowledge yet so modest that it seems to reflect your private experience. Almost unwitttingly, you read yourself in her.
Wagner’s big work, Pinhole Ghosts: An Alchemic Dance, is a charming and taciturn theater piece. As the glockenspiel tinkles. a tall black box like a phone booth or photo booth, with diamond and rectangular holes in it and a curtained doorway, revolves onstage. When it comes to rest in a downspot, the light pouring into it makes its cracks glow. John Hagan (in formal wear, and looking as harmlessly genial as Joe E. Brown in Some Like It Hot) and Shick emerge in a decorous little dance of balances and swaying steps. He gives her a single rose; she drops it; he searches for it automatically in a spiraling curve that doesn’t go low enough. They’re like clockwork figures. In the same pattern of tendering and dropping, she drops a handkerchief, he drops her white glove, she drops a dollar bill. After a blackout, there’s an older woman in Shick’s place (Scotty Snyder, in identical clothing). Hagan gives her a white rose, and it falls from her hand.
Pinhole Ghosts has a sly, affectless air, yet it’s a vehicle for magic. A disembodied hand poking out of a second black booth prepares a trick involving glasses of water variously poured and mixed to turn milky, then ruby red, then clear. But the transformations are presented as a game of tacit one-upmanship between Snyder and Hagan, not as tricks. Then there’s a hat trick with a burning tissue; Snyder drops the tissue, like before. The small box they’ve used as a table creeps forward a few inches. and she and Hagan replay some of their business with imaginary objects; and then she’s gone in a blackout—we’ve flipped worlds again—and Snyder’s in her place.The tall bIack booths begin to promenade. The little box turns, and begins to tiptoe on childlike feet (Lana Lin). When it settles, two little magnetic music box figures approach each other and glide around on top.
Edward Ratliff’s music, with its music box fragility and its sad, sour brass and accordion; Matthew Buckingham’s set; and Laura Drawbaugh’s costumes evoke a solemn but pleasant eeriness. The piece’s repertoire of toylike motions, the bland demeanor of the characters, the switching women, the sudden downscaling of the human couple to tiny flat skaters about two inches high detail a space at the juncture of several worlds where matter slips and slides.
At P.S. 122 (November 29 through December 2).
Plane Figures
December 11
The opening of Ballet Hispanico’s 20th anniversary season was full of good wishes, but the program was disappointingly flat. Artistic director Tina Ramirez has built a skilled and generous professional company, but too much of repertory is flashy and superficial. It may please audiences, but it can’t challenge them much.
George Faison’s new America, to two songs by Ruben Blades and a medley by Julio Iglesias, just didn’t make a lick of sense dancewise, though it Is striking set in the form of a headlight-blinking Volkswagen beetle by Pepon Osorio, witty and colorful costumes by Bernard Johnson, and gleaming performances by Jose Costas, Pedro Ruiz, and Eduardo Vilaro. What’s offensive about a piece like this is that it seems like so little thought went into it on the part of the choreographer. Faison can do better, and Ballet Hispanico deserves better from him. I admire the three men in their peacocking solos, but there’s no sense of any relationship among them. Aren’t they supposed to know each other? What I remember is how much they puff up and preen, because Faison’s routine material gives them nothing substantial to build roles on.
Graciela Daniele’s Stages, the second premiere, is a behind-the- scenes ballet, but not the kind that glamorizes classroom practices and turns them into theater. It shows the development of a young girl from starting ballet class to becoming a dancer working with a choreographer to an immersion in her own popular dance traditions (grinding hips, shaking shoulders, and long, ruffled skirts), to her triumphant integration of them in her own (!!) choreography, whereupon the dancer/choreographer (Nancy Turano) is miraculously transformed into director Tina Ramirez, dancing center stage. Stages has a wryly humorous aspect, as in the first part when two groups of dancers work out: each group of four carries a dowel several feet long, pretending it’s a barre, but sometimes, for convenience, sticking it between their legs. The second section is a pas de deux for Ruiz and Turano that’s constantly being fixed up and interrupted by the self-involved “choreographer,” Costas, who eventually takes over altogether with Turano—even romancing her in an impersonal sort of way—but finally strolls away at the end with his pal Ruiz. Though there are many deft and droll touches in Stages, it’s smug and fake, and the homage to Ramirez it embodies, though kindly intended, is much too self-congratulatory in this context.
Vicente Nebrada’s lnez de Castro (1988) takes the 14th century story of Dom Pedro of Portugal and his lover (with whom he had four children and to whom he claimed to have been secretly married) and reduces it to a vague and sprawling tale of jealousy. She was killed, probably for political reasons (she was Spanish, and her brothers were gaining too much influence), by three of his father’s advisers. And when Pedro succeeded to the throne—according to legend, if not fact—he had her exhumed and crowned queen (and had the two murderers he could catch eradicated horribly). Dom Pedro built a remarkable shrine to her at Sta. Maria de Alcobaça, where their carved sarcophagi lie as opposite sides of the transept so the lovers will, supposedly, face each other at the moment of their resurrection.
The subject seems perfect for ripping off José Limón’s The Moor’s Pavane, but instead of using that economical model (which Nebrada skirts) or setting up the drama some other way, Nebrada has his nobles parading around, making empty gestures, under a vast chandelier. He uses a potentially expressive vocabulary that manages to express very little indeed. It’s plain that Alfonso’s not keen about Inez, but it’s Pedro’s scheming fiancêe, Blanca (Kathryn Ross), who plots with the assassin, a gleefully malevolent snake - definitely the presiding genius of the piece - dazzlingly danced by William Elias.
lnez (Turano) endures falterings and spasms in her lonely death throes, and gets to be limp in one of those shades-of-Romeo and Juliet corpse pa de deux with the bereft Pedro (Ruiz). When Alfonso dies and is toted off, Pedro carries lnez’s body up some steps and sets a crown on her head. We should be squirming. But rather than the macabre culmination of Pedro’s love, or a grotesque way of humiliating his noble, Nebrada presents a wan and clumsy bit of window dressing.
At the Joyce Theater (November 27 through December 9).
The opening of Ballet Hispanico’s 20th anniversary season was full of good wishes, but the program was disappointingly flat. Artistic director Tina Ramirez has built a skilled and generous professional company, but too much of repertory is flashy and superficial. It may please audiences, but it can’t challenge them much.
George Faison’s new America, to two songs by Ruben Blades and a medley by Julio Iglesias, just didn’t make a lick of sense dancewise, though it Is striking set in the form of a headlight-blinking Volkswagen beetle by Pepon Osorio, witty and colorful costumes by Bernard Johnson, and gleaming performances by Jose Costas, Pedro Ruiz, and Eduardo Vilaro. What’s offensive about a piece like this is that it seems like so little thought went into it on the part of the choreographer. Faison can do better, and Ballet Hispanico deserves better from him. I admire the three men in their peacocking solos, but there’s no sense of any relationship among them. Aren’t they supposed to know each other? What I remember is how much they puff up and preen, because Faison’s routine material gives them nothing substantial to build roles on.
Graciela Daniele’s Stages, the second premiere, is a behind-the- scenes ballet, but not the kind that glamorizes classroom practices and turns them into theater. It shows the development of a young girl from starting ballet class to becoming a dancer working with a choreographer to an immersion in her own popular dance traditions (grinding hips, shaking shoulders, and long, ruffled skirts), to her triumphant integration of them in her own (!!) choreography, whereupon the dancer/choreographer (Nancy Turano) is miraculously transformed into director Tina Ramirez, dancing center stage. Stages has a wryly humorous aspect, as in the first part when two groups of dancers work out: each group of four carries a dowel several feet long, pretending it’s a barre, but sometimes, for convenience, sticking it between their legs. The second section is a pas de deux for Ruiz and Turano that’s constantly being fixed up and interrupted by the self-involved “choreographer,” Costas, who eventually takes over altogether with Turano—even romancing her in an impersonal sort of way—but finally strolls away at the end with his pal Ruiz. Though there are many deft and droll touches in Stages, it’s smug and fake, and the homage to Ramirez it embodies, though kindly intended, is much too self-congratulatory in this context.
Vicente Nebrada’s lnez de Castro (1988) takes the 14th century story of Dom Pedro of Portugal and his lover (with whom he had four children and to whom he claimed to have been secretly married) and reduces it to a vague and sprawling tale of jealousy. She was killed, probably for political reasons (she was Spanish, and her brothers were gaining too much influence), by three of his father’s advisers. And when Pedro succeeded to the throne—according to legend, if not fact—he had her exhumed and crowned queen (and had the two murderers he could catch eradicated horribly). Dom Pedro built a remarkable shrine to her at Sta. Maria de Alcobaça, where their carved sarcophagi lie as opposite sides of the transept so the lovers will, supposedly, face each other at the moment of their resurrection.
The subject seems perfect for ripping off José Limón’s The Moor’s Pavane, but instead of using that economical model (which Nebrada skirts) or setting up the drama some other way, Nebrada has his nobles parading around, making empty gestures, under a vast chandelier. He uses a potentially expressive vocabulary that manages to express very little indeed. It’s plain that Alfonso’s not keen about Inez, but it’s Pedro’s scheming fiancêe, Blanca (Kathryn Ross), who plots with the assassin, a gleefully malevolent snake - definitely the presiding genius of the piece - dazzlingly danced by William Elias.
lnez (Turano) endures falterings and spasms in her lonely death throes, and gets to be limp in one of those shades-of-Romeo and Juliet corpse pa de deux with the bereft Pedro (Ruiz). When Alfonso dies and is toted off, Pedro carries lnez’s body up some steps and sets a crown on her head. We should be squirming. But rather than the macabre culmination of Pedro’s love, or a grotesque way of humiliating his noble, Nebrada presents a wan and clumsy bit of window dressing.
At the Joyce Theater (November 27 through December 9).
Home Free All
December 4
CoDanceco, the excellent company Nancy Duncan directs but doesn’t choreograph for, has commissioned over 50 works during its eight years of existence, and just presented three recent pieces—by Sondra Loring, Ann Carlson, Margarita Guergue—at Dance Theater Workshop. Loring’s Duplication, a duet for Janet Lilly and Lissy Trachtenberg, proceeds at a sober pace, yielding again and again to the inertia of pauses and slumps. But the stage floor is set with little gray cloth dolls lounging about in various positions (Loring is credited with set design). And the piece climaxes with two, then dozens of similar tiny dolls with polyethylene parachutes failing from he ceiling. A final little figure plummets straight down without a chute.
I liked the showers of dolls, and the seated dolls that awaited them, but I have no idea how the duet was intended to relate to any of that. Likewise, in Ann Carlson’s very agreeable Flag, I didn’t see much significant connection between the set and the dancing. And in Flag it’s a more serious business. The set is a huge American flag that covers the floor like ground cloth. A droll group nine dancers in brown outfits. grunting uh huh uh, or hah hah hah hah, runs across it like a pack of cartoon dogs and runs out. They’re in and out and in again. They clump in a corner, looking a little uncertain. They step backward, cover their eyes, shriek and fall as if felled by violent sneezes. They pat themselves, and laugh themselves silly. Later, they pat the flag, kiss it, rush about. They hug in hetero and homo pairs (plus one loner) and rock in clinches on the floor.
I think Carlson means to reclaim America and our flag for all of us from the possession of narrow-minded “patriots.” The flag represents the America that’s the ground under our feet and the air we breathe, as well as the notions we carry of justice and fairness, and the realities of hypocritical politics and sleazy economics. But, for the most part in Flag, I experienced only the antics of a jolly, noisy chorus of dazed innocents, moving with a giant flag underfoot—no disrespect intended.
For me, everything that mattered was in the end of the piece: Carlson’s clear, silvery voice, on tape, speaking the words of the Declaration of Independence, while that red, white, and blue emblem lay before us, a field of stars and stripes. Carlson made it a pleasure to listen to the text: to its clear, practical analysis of the purposes of government from the perspective of those governed, and wonder what all that might mean for us today. How fresh and concise those old thoughts seem! and how challenging!
Margarita Guergue’s Tanteo, with music by her frequent collaborator Hahn Rowe, is that rarity, a dance whose title suggests the character of the work. It means, according to the program, “an intuitive calculation, the probing of unknown terrain, the feeling out of a person or situation.” And there is that sense of sizing things up, of watchful curiosity. The seven dancers wear vivid costumes by Liz Prince: black jackets with short or mid-length skins or pants in red or red-and- black. One guy wears great, dippy shorts with big colored flowers as simple as dots. The dancers start in a bunch, treading the floor, bending, maybe kneeling, moving backward and forward, keeping lively with the music’s tight rhythm. Then they jump into terse duels and trios with bold, insinuating contortions and switchblade extensions. Janet Lilly and Fausto Matias have an interrupted duet: in one part she yanks him up to land against her upper chest, then he pulls her, and she him. Guergue is deft at getting people on and off, and the theatrical savvy of her movement reminds me, a little weirdly, of Bob Fosse.
The piece goes on long enough to waver in focus and become wearisome. The jackets come off. There’s a more precisely urban pulse and a nastier atmosphere; this is the jungle of cities. The dancers whirl apart, look desolate, smack a hand to their foreheads, press a hand to their breasts. Lilly curls her fingers in lascivious greediness. There’s a tough intensity, a sense of dark expectancy; people cast looks to the sky as if alien spacecraft hover.
At Dance Theater Workshop (November 15 through 25).
CoDanceco, the excellent company Nancy Duncan directs but doesn’t choreograph for, has commissioned over 50 works during its eight years of existence, and just presented three recent pieces—by Sondra Loring, Ann Carlson, Margarita Guergue—at Dance Theater Workshop. Loring’s Duplication, a duet for Janet Lilly and Lissy Trachtenberg, proceeds at a sober pace, yielding again and again to the inertia of pauses and slumps. But the stage floor is set with little gray cloth dolls lounging about in various positions (Loring is credited with set design). And the piece climaxes with two, then dozens of similar tiny dolls with polyethylene parachutes failing from he ceiling. A final little figure plummets straight down without a chute.
I liked the showers of dolls, and the seated dolls that awaited them, but I have no idea how the duet was intended to relate to any of that. Likewise, in Ann Carlson’s very agreeable Flag, I didn’t see much significant connection between the set and the dancing. And in Flag it’s a more serious business. The set is a huge American flag that covers the floor like ground cloth. A droll group nine dancers in brown outfits. grunting uh huh uh, or hah hah hah hah, runs across it like a pack of cartoon dogs and runs out. They’re in and out and in again. They clump in a corner, looking a little uncertain. They step backward, cover their eyes, shriek and fall as if felled by violent sneezes. They pat themselves, and laugh themselves silly. Later, they pat the flag, kiss it, rush about. They hug in hetero and homo pairs (plus one loner) and rock in clinches on the floor.
I think Carlson means to reclaim America and our flag for all of us from the possession of narrow-minded “patriots.” The flag represents the America that’s the ground under our feet and the air we breathe, as well as the notions we carry of justice and fairness, and the realities of hypocritical politics and sleazy economics. But, for the most part in Flag, I experienced only the antics of a jolly, noisy chorus of dazed innocents, moving with a giant flag underfoot—no disrespect intended.
For me, everything that mattered was in the end of the piece: Carlson’s clear, silvery voice, on tape, speaking the words of the Declaration of Independence, while that red, white, and blue emblem lay before us, a field of stars and stripes. Carlson made it a pleasure to listen to the text: to its clear, practical analysis of the purposes of government from the perspective of those governed, and wonder what all that might mean for us today. How fresh and concise those old thoughts seem! and how challenging!
Margarita Guergue’s Tanteo, with music by her frequent collaborator Hahn Rowe, is that rarity, a dance whose title suggests the character of the work. It means, according to the program, “an intuitive calculation, the probing of unknown terrain, the feeling out of a person or situation.” And there is that sense of sizing things up, of watchful curiosity. The seven dancers wear vivid costumes by Liz Prince: black jackets with short or mid-length skins or pants in red or red-and- black. One guy wears great, dippy shorts with big colored flowers as simple as dots. The dancers start in a bunch, treading the floor, bending, maybe kneeling, moving backward and forward, keeping lively with the music’s tight rhythm. Then they jump into terse duels and trios with bold, insinuating contortions and switchblade extensions. Janet Lilly and Fausto Matias have an interrupted duet: in one part she yanks him up to land against her upper chest, then he pulls her, and she him. Guergue is deft at getting people on and off, and the theatrical savvy of her movement reminds me, a little weirdly, of Bob Fosse.
The piece goes on long enough to waver in focus and become wearisome. The jackets come off. There’s a more precisely urban pulse and a nastier atmosphere; this is the jungle of cities. The dancers whirl apart, look desolate, smack a hand to their foreheads, press a hand to their breasts. Lilly curls her fingers in lascivious greediness. There’s a tough intensity, a sense of dark expectancy; people cast looks to the sky as if alien spacecraft hover.
At Dance Theater Workshop (November 15 through 25).
Double Trouble
January 29
In their 1988 duet Partners Who Touch, Partners Who Don’t Touch, Sara Pearson and Patrick Widrig dumped eggs, many colored gobs of Jello, spaghetti, and sugar on the floor and sprayed the whole gaudy mess with Reddi Whip. There’s nothing so exhilaratingly messy in their new piece, Heimweh (Homesick), directed by Widrig, which has a similar episodic and erratic form. It’s more consistent and somber in tone and has none of the earlier work’s archness.
Pearson has previously worked with the idea of dance as diary, using daily incidentals to give a canny perspective on relationships. But these two pieces are more troubled than ever, more abstract than anecdotal. Part of Heinweh’s gravity has to do with the way echoes of the past adhere to it. The report card pluses that Widrig draws on a blackboard suggest a field of cemetery crosses. Pearson smugly erases the middle crosses and writes MILCHEBUEB, translates that underneath as sissy and, her eyes gleaming, underlines it two, three, four times. Widrig spreads out a long green cloth, then sets out rows of stubby plastic crosses. When he's got over half arranged, Pearson - dancing with stormy, forceful swings - carelessly or maliciously slides into the cloth, only knocking over a few pieces and rumpling the fabric at first, subsequently creating greater and greater havoc.
As a performer, Pearson is humorous, harsh, earthy, resilient; there’s no nonsense about her and she surely wouldn’t stand for much. Widrig, capable of equal boldness physically, seems a gentler soul. Dissatisfied, disrespectful, Pearson’s instinctive reaction is to wreck something; Widrig exercises power by withdrawing. The piece’s events mostly illustrate how whatever draws them together also drives them to furiously assert their separateness, to pointlessly compete, and how much they - and we, too - relish the immediacy of any destructiveness we can wreak short of the fatal. So much more bitingly savory and decisive than the give-and-take of getting along!
They can be funny together, and cautiously tender, but often they’re barely amicable. Each makes aggressive, teasing demands that the other cannot satisfy. And they are lost to each other in their solos: tumultuous, punchy, convulsive episodes of flings, dives, slides, rolls that are defiant and determined in their obliviousness. But Pearson and Widrig also press, bump and shove against, slither over, and lie on each other, expressing an almost impersonal need for companionship, a desire as basic as wanting to sleep under a heavy blanket for the simple comfort of its weight.
At P.S. 122 (December 15 through 17).
In their 1988 duet Partners Who Touch, Partners Who Don’t Touch, Sara Pearson and Patrick Widrig dumped eggs, many colored gobs of Jello, spaghetti, and sugar on the floor and sprayed the whole gaudy mess with Reddi Whip. There’s nothing so exhilaratingly messy in their new piece, Heimweh (Homesick), directed by Widrig, which has a similar episodic and erratic form. It’s more consistent and somber in tone and has none of the earlier work’s archness.
Pearson has previously worked with the idea of dance as diary, using daily incidentals to give a canny perspective on relationships. But these two pieces are more troubled than ever, more abstract than anecdotal. Part of Heinweh’s gravity has to do with the way echoes of the past adhere to it. The report card pluses that Widrig draws on a blackboard suggest a field of cemetery crosses. Pearson smugly erases the middle crosses and writes MILCHEBUEB, translates that underneath as sissy and, her eyes gleaming, underlines it two, three, four times. Widrig spreads out a long green cloth, then sets out rows of stubby plastic crosses. When he's got over half arranged, Pearson - dancing with stormy, forceful swings - carelessly or maliciously slides into the cloth, only knocking over a few pieces and rumpling the fabric at first, subsequently creating greater and greater havoc.
As a performer, Pearson is humorous, harsh, earthy, resilient; there’s no nonsense about her and she surely wouldn’t stand for much. Widrig, capable of equal boldness physically, seems a gentler soul. Dissatisfied, disrespectful, Pearson’s instinctive reaction is to wreck something; Widrig exercises power by withdrawing. The piece’s events mostly illustrate how whatever draws them together also drives them to furiously assert their separateness, to pointlessly compete, and how much they - and we, too - relish the immediacy of any destructiveness we can wreak short of the fatal. So much more bitingly savory and decisive than the give-and-take of getting along!
They can be funny together, and cautiously tender, but often they’re barely amicable. Each makes aggressive, teasing demands that the other cannot satisfy. And they are lost to each other in their solos: tumultuous, punchy, convulsive episodes of flings, dives, slides, rolls that are defiant and determined in their obliviousness. But Pearson and Widrig also press, bump and shove against, slither over, and lie on each other, expressing an almost impersonal need for companionship, a desire as basic as wanting to sleep under a heavy blanket for the simple comfort of its weight.
At P.S. 122 (December 15 through 17).
You Shouldn’t Have!
July 3
Half-undressed, Linda Mancini stumbles into her surprise party, a realm of taped voices and an empty stage littered with balloons. For me? You shouldn’t have! (But of course you should’ve. And what about presents? Are there presents too?) On her large-featured, open face, she registers beautifully surprise, delight, embarrassment glittery little upwellings of greed. Unfortunately, Cake, the first of three party pieces in her solo program at P.S. 122, “Not Entirely Appropriate,” gets a little bogged down in uncomfortable feelings and ambivalence.
But not Bouquet, in which a bride—glowingly lit by Roma Flowers - responds rapid-fire to a battery of bright congratulations and admiring comments that gradually become insidious warnings about real estate and separate bank accounts. Female enthusiasm for the groom—Isn’t he handsome? Isn’t he big?—gets Mancini’s hips rolling heavily, like a ship in a storm. We know what kind of big they’re talking about. Mancini’s eager cheerfulness becomes more and more desperate and thin as her well-wishers bombard her with cynical advice, but the piece ends before she cracks.
In Grace, the perfect hostess glibly rattles off several hundred rules for polite behavior at dinner. Then disgraces herself as she, garbed in one end of the tablecloth, rolls drunkenly up the elegantly set banquet table. The trouble with Grace is that Mancini’s ladylike etiquette lesson is droll, and her equanimity so practiced that her misbehavior would have to be much more outrageous, or, perhaps, truly awful, to top it. One satisfying, very low-key element of the show is the quiet transitions in which Lori E. Seid and Jim Diaz, in dim light, rearrange Mancini’s costumes and set up her props as carefully and concentratedly as the assistant puppeteers in Bunraku.
In Mancini’s last piece, Not Entirely Appropriate, prompted, I assume, by the NEA battle with the pro-censorship bastards, Mancinj hangs naked, upside down by her feet in front of the flag, washing her bloody hands, and shoving a shirt, which keeps sliding down around her head, up to cover her crotch. The image of her struggling fitfully to cover her “shame” is a poignant one (particularly since Mancini is able to expose herself without getting embarrassed, showing off, or pretending she’s not naked). The torment in her face is moving too. But the piece seemed too emblematic. The strongest work, Applicant, was, in a way, the coldest. As tape-recorded voices read letters explaining why Linda Mancini is being refused bank loans and grants, Mancini stands at a table slicing and chopping vegetables with the deft efficiency of a sushi chef. The mealymouthed, earnest politeness of the letters becomes more and more disingenuous and unpalatable. Meanwhile, with unswerving focus, she bashes stuff up in a blender, slices the heads off several fish, fries the fillets, and makes fish tacos. They smell very good, but they’re a pitiful show for such proficiency and commitment. What a waste of talent and skill! When she beheads those fish, is the anger of those myriad rejections being focused into the cutting blows? Or is she merely efficient?
Mancini’s grim face gives us nothing to go on. But the life she’s enacting certainly isn’t her dream come true.
At P.S. 122 (June 14 through 24).
Half-undressed, Linda Mancini stumbles into her surprise party, a realm of taped voices and an empty stage littered with balloons. For me? You shouldn’t have! (But of course you should’ve. And what about presents? Are there presents too?) On her large-featured, open face, she registers beautifully surprise, delight, embarrassment glittery little upwellings of greed. Unfortunately, Cake, the first of three party pieces in her solo program at P.S. 122, “Not Entirely Appropriate,” gets a little bogged down in uncomfortable feelings and ambivalence.
But not Bouquet, in which a bride—glowingly lit by Roma Flowers - responds rapid-fire to a battery of bright congratulations and admiring comments that gradually become insidious warnings about real estate and separate bank accounts. Female enthusiasm for the groom—Isn’t he handsome? Isn’t he big?—gets Mancini’s hips rolling heavily, like a ship in a storm. We know what kind of big they’re talking about. Mancini’s eager cheerfulness becomes more and more desperate and thin as her well-wishers bombard her with cynical advice, but the piece ends before she cracks.
In Grace, the perfect hostess glibly rattles off several hundred rules for polite behavior at dinner. Then disgraces herself as she, garbed in one end of the tablecloth, rolls drunkenly up the elegantly set banquet table. The trouble with Grace is that Mancini’s ladylike etiquette lesson is droll, and her equanimity so practiced that her misbehavior would have to be much more outrageous, or, perhaps, truly awful, to top it. One satisfying, very low-key element of the show is the quiet transitions in which Lori E. Seid and Jim Diaz, in dim light, rearrange Mancini’s costumes and set up her props as carefully and concentratedly as the assistant puppeteers in Bunraku.
In Mancini’s last piece, Not Entirely Appropriate, prompted, I assume, by the NEA battle with the pro-censorship bastards, Mancinj hangs naked, upside down by her feet in front of the flag, washing her bloody hands, and shoving a shirt, which keeps sliding down around her head, up to cover her crotch. The image of her struggling fitfully to cover her “shame” is a poignant one (particularly since Mancini is able to expose herself without getting embarrassed, showing off, or pretending she’s not naked). The torment in her face is moving too. But the piece seemed too emblematic. The strongest work, Applicant, was, in a way, the coldest. As tape-recorded voices read letters explaining why Linda Mancini is being refused bank loans and grants, Mancini stands at a table slicing and chopping vegetables with the deft efficiency of a sushi chef. The mealymouthed, earnest politeness of the letters becomes more and more disingenuous and unpalatable. Meanwhile, with unswerving focus, she bashes stuff up in a blender, slices the heads off several fish, fries the fillets, and makes fish tacos. They smell very good, but they’re a pitiful show for such proficiency and commitment. What a waste of talent and skill! When she beheads those fish, is the anger of those myriad rejections being focused into the cutting blows? Or is she merely efficient?
Mancini’s grim face gives us nothing to go on. But the life she’s enacting certainly isn’t her dream come true.
At P.S. 122 (June 14 through 24).
Women on the Move
October 2
Deborah Riley, a lean machine who used to dance with Douglas Dunn, has been artist-in-residence at Dance Place in Washington. D.C., since 1987. Dealing often with issues concerning women, much of the choreography she showed on Dance Theater Workshop’s Out-of-Towners series seemed tame, without much reach, and sometimes made me long for abandon.
Set to taped texts of fragments from naïve travel adventures, the 1987 duet Crimson Ramblers, made and performed with Diane Frank (with whom Riley’s collaborated for 13 years), was a kind of journey in several chunks. I enjoyed their comradely crawling, rolling, swimming interactions, their jiggly jumping, their hopping onto each other, their good-natured, clumsy flailings. But, playful and prosaic, the piece seemed to be compiled of too much aimless raw material.
Riley’s 1989 Eve’s Monologue/Girl Devil Dancing (concept and music by Linda Fisher) is a solo for Riley as Lilith in a shreddy orange unitard slashed to expose an underlayer of fabric in a scale-like pattern. The piece starts strong—with Riley lithe, sensual. animal- and snake-like in her movements—but then stretches into a long echo of swings and bends, serpentine gestures and daffy skips. without much point except, perhaps, the exhilaration of the rebel. I’m inclined to prefer Riley’s work when it’s a trifle didactic.
I admired Countdown 2000 (concept and direction by Riley), made in celebration of the 10th anniversary of the United Nations Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women. An eloquent actress, Joni Lee Jones, announces the names of a number of international women’s organizations with thrilling enthusiasm just for their existence, and speaks about the UN Decade for women and the three great conferences that focused its aims. The seven dancers (four women, three men), in various white garments ornamented with touches of exuberant Third World fabrics, have a great look. They generally mix it up as equal partners, but sometimes ugliness divides them along sexual lines. For example, when Jones talks about sexual harassment and rape, the women touch themselves and curl forward while the men circle them ominously. Although the movement is rarely physically compelling, the piece has a satisfying solid integrity. The brave end is hopeful, without a trace of irony. We are urged to look “to the year 2001, and see woman and men on equal terms.” And, to Riley’s credit, rather than seeming foolishly optimistic, that suggestion seems inspiring.
Eye to Eye deals with women’s relationships to other women, most vividly mothers and daughters, and its taped conversations are informal discussions of those relationships, replete with personal anecdotes. In the strongest image of the piece, related to the idea of living through one’s children, a mother embraces her two daughters, crushing them to her: they attempt to wriggle away. but are pulled back. This occurs early. and, unfortunately, nothing that follows is so urgent and specific.
Malafemmena Cuddle, as realized by Riley and her partner Mary Beth Flournoy from a series of drawings by Remy Charlip, is humorous, lavish, and rides on an air of friendly challenge. To hoarse-voiced Gabriela Fern’s outrageous recording of “Malafemmena,” the dancers drape over or collapse under one another, and swoon into wilting arabesques. They clutch their heads. flagrantly pose like deco ladies, let their arms blossom into oversize gestures.
Apparently out-of-character, the dancers seem for the first time to be whole people In Shifting Perspectives (1990), Mary Buckley, Flournoy, Anne McDonald, Katie Moreman, and Lee Richmond provide a low-key foreground of comfortable engagements while Robert Lunow cogitates and leisurely paints a fat vertical blue line, a green arc, yellow mass. Clad in bright, solid colors—pink, chartreuse, yellow, orange, red—the women’s dancing registers primarily as a constant rearrangement of large blobs of color. It’s often Cunningham-esgue in its go-here-do-this, go-there-do-that format, but rather juiceless. All rather pleasant and neutral, sort of polite. Can’t that guy slap the paint on any faster? How long is this piece going to be, anyway?
But suddenly the lines in the painting transform into a message: “ ? NO MEN.” Lunow dashes forward, whips out a pistol, and shoots the dancers in a split second, in comic reaction to his own question. But Riley doesn’t trust us to put together the surprise killing and our laughter, and be appalled. Instead, there’s a blackout, voiceover, and slides with the names of the 14 women who were murdered in Montreal by a psycho who blamed feminists, for his problems. So the audience is cheated of its own response and dulled with information it already knows.
At Dance Theater Workshop (September 17 and 18).
Deborah Riley, a lean machine who used to dance with Douglas Dunn, has been artist-in-residence at Dance Place in Washington. D.C., since 1987. Dealing often with issues concerning women, much of the choreography she showed on Dance Theater Workshop’s Out-of-Towners series seemed tame, without much reach, and sometimes made me long for abandon.
Set to taped texts of fragments from naïve travel adventures, the 1987 duet Crimson Ramblers, made and performed with Diane Frank (with whom Riley’s collaborated for 13 years), was a kind of journey in several chunks. I enjoyed their comradely crawling, rolling, swimming interactions, their jiggly jumping, their hopping onto each other, their good-natured, clumsy flailings. But, playful and prosaic, the piece seemed to be compiled of too much aimless raw material.
Riley’s 1989 Eve’s Monologue/Girl Devil Dancing (concept and music by Linda Fisher) is a solo for Riley as Lilith in a shreddy orange unitard slashed to expose an underlayer of fabric in a scale-like pattern. The piece starts strong—with Riley lithe, sensual. animal- and snake-like in her movements—but then stretches into a long echo of swings and bends, serpentine gestures and daffy skips. without much point except, perhaps, the exhilaration of the rebel. I’m inclined to prefer Riley’s work when it’s a trifle didactic.
I admired Countdown 2000 (concept and direction by Riley), made in celebration of the 10th anniversary of the United Nations Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women. An eloquent actress, Joni Lee Jones, announces the names of a number of international women’s organizations with thrilling enthusiasm just for their existence, and speaks about the UN Decade for women and the three great conferences that focused its aims. The seven dancers (four women, three men), in various white garments ornamented with touches of exuberant Third World fabrics, have a great look. They generally mix it up as equal partners, but sometimes ugliness divides them along sexual lines. For example, when Jones talks about sexual harassment and rape, the women touch themselves and curl forward while the men circle them ominously. Although the movement is rarely physically compelling, the piece has a satisfying solid integrity. The brave end is hopeful, without a trace of irony. We are urged to look “to the year 2001, and see woman and men on equal terms.” And, to Riley’s credit, rather than seeming foolishly optimistic, that suggestion seems inspiring.
Eye to Eye deals with women’s relationships to other women, most vividly mothers and daughters, and its taped conversations are informal discussions of those relationships, replete with personal anecdotes. In the strongest image of the piece, related to the idea of living through one’s children, a mother embraces her two daughters, crushing them to her: they attempt to wriggle away. but are pulled back. This occurs early. and, unfortunately, nothing that follows is so urgent and specific.
Malafemmena Cuddle, as realized by Riley and her partner Mary Beth Flournoy from a series of drawings by Remy Charlip, is humorous, lavish, and rides on an air of friendly challenge. To hoarse-voiced Gabriela Fern’s outrageous recording of “Malafemmena,” the dancers drape over or collapse under one another, and swoon into wilting arabesques. They clutch their heads. flagrantly pose like deco ladies, let their arms blossom into oversize gestures.
Apparently out-of-character, the dancers seem for the first time to be whole people In Shifting Perspectives (1990), Mary Buckley, Flournoy, Anne McDonald, Katie Moreman, and Lee Richmond provide a low-key foreground of comfortable engagements while Robert Lunow cogitates and leisurely paints a fat vertical blue line, a green arc, yellow mass. Clad in bright, solid colors—pink, chartreuse, yellow, orange, red—the women’s dancing registers primarily as a constant rearrangement of large blobs of color. It’s often Cunningham-esgue in its go-here-do-this, go-there-do-that format, but rather juiceless. All rather pleasant and neutral, sort of polite. Can’t that guy slap the paint on any faster? How long is this piece going to be, anyway?
But suddenly the lines in the painting transform into a message: “ ? NO MEN.” Lunow dashes forward, whips out a pistol, and shoots the dancers in a split second, in comic reaction to his own question. But Riley doesn’t trust us to put together the surprise killing and our laughter, and be appalled. Instead, there’s a blackout, voiceover, and slides with the names of the 14 women who were murdered in Montreal by a psycho who blamed feminists, for his problems. So the audience is cheated of its own response and dulled with information it already knows.
At Dance Theater Workshop (September 17 and 18).
Woman With Two Pricks
March 27
Marie Chouinard is revered by Quebecois choreographers. She’s in a league of her own. Wasn’t she the first to pee or vomit onstage? Didn’t she do a piece where she rolled around in oil and invited an audience volunteer to come home with her? Or is that just legend?
What’s clear is that this immensely potent solo performer from Montreal is ready to go as far as her art requires. Her two extraordinarv solos at the Kitchen—STAB (1986) and L’apres-midi d’un faune (1987) - contain nothing that could offend by being too grossly real. Savage and infinitely refined, they are terrifying, exhilarating, mysterious, immediate, and, sometimes, deeply nourishing to the imagination.
In STAB (Space, Time, and Beyond), she’s naked except for a G-string. Her body’s painted Mercurochrome red up to a line across her nipples. As retro and heroic as Conan the Barbarian, she’s got on clanky, gleaming. falling-apart metal shoes, and an old leather aviator’s cap with a huge. smooth, flexible horn projecting from the top of it that makes a most efficient phallic nightmare. Chouinard is miked, and the sounds of her deep, raspy, labored breathing, her terrible gurgles and howls and screeches, the scrape of the horn’s end on the floor, are as dread and intimidating as the soundtrack of Alien—the pumped-up sounds of one’s own fear.
Chouinard’s drama may be overblown, But the alien beast is in her, or is her, and her performance is a kind of self-exorcism. Slamming her metal shoes against the floor, pressing her hand against her chest, her chest against the floor, Chouinard proceeds at a very deliberate pace. The woman flaunts that immense prick sprouting from her head; it’s a crucial aspect of the form she presents to us and marks her as unnatural. It’s part of her arsenal, but it may govern her too; she’s not herself until she’s free of It. I crabbed when smoke began to fill the Kitchen during the long intermission (Chouinard had to get all that red scrubbed off), but as soon as her L‘apres-midi d’un faune began, in a green mist, its necessity was evident.
Faune is a gripping work, exquisitely visualized, in which structure and content are identical, It refers to Vaslav Nijinsky’s 1912 ballet, and is performed in a costume that comments both on his costume and his musculature. But Chouinard eschews Debussy’s music and uses instead a sound score of mechanical clanking and bestial groaning (by Janitors Animated and Silvy Panet-Raymond) that evokes the atmosphere of gloomy, dripping dungeons. (In both works, plenty of credit must go to Chouinard’a collaborators—lighting designer Alain Lortie, costume designers Louis Seize, for STAB, and Luc Courchesne. for Faune—as well as the rehearsal directors, or “exterior eyes” who helped her see that what she was making was what she intended.)
Built on a vocabulary drawn from photographs of Nijinnky’s poses, Faune is presented in sequences of moves, largely in profile, that, with thrilling formality and immediacy, create the faceted perspectives of Cubism. Chouinard’s faun is a vastly stylized creation, with one thigh and instep and the opposite calf dramatically built up to suggest thick muscles. Nails project from one shoulder and a thigh, and ram horns curve out from her head at different angles. The creature has an assertive, if oblivious, sexual quality and a weird charm that would have intrigued Cocteau. Chouinard ripples from pose to pose in incremental moves, twists her body in opposition, reverses direction sharply—all with great precision and electric intensity. A sharp, slanted beam of light appears, its shape clearly etched in the smoke, ending in a small bight square on the floor, She flicks her hands in it, and it vanishes, She trembles before a second, parallel ray that has appeared behind her and moves cautiously toward it, before turning back to the first, which has reappeared. As she plunges into it, both beams disappear.
Thus begins a long, teasing game between the faun and these cold, luring beams the sight of which fill her/it/him with near-ecstasy, though every light is extinguished at a touch. Chouinard slinks through slouchy postures with staccato curving gestures, though her figure is always sculptural and authoritative. Her faun has the irrational mythic power of the Minotaur, though that power is channeled into behavior as playful as that of a monkey, and her creature can be almost Pavlovian in its automatic responses to the stimulation of light. Yielding to the promise of delight, the faun is helplessly drawn to bright things. In a long, vertical triangle of light, she breaks off one horn with a silent crack, With it she stabs the beam, which suddenly multiplies. Wind sounds howl. Chouinard squats and attaches the upcurved horn to her pubis, then approaches each of the three slanting rays that remain. The music growls, clanks, and rumbles as she thrusts her hips into the first beam. Crouching, she somehow turns the penis red, and advances on the remaining lights. The last opens into a broad, welcoming double beam, which she thrusts into exultantly; then she drops convulsively to the floor in a gentle shower of glittering silver shards.
Jeff McMahon’s 70-ish-minute solo Discontents is a kind of tour de force. Pouring himself into an almost nonstop rap, McMahon funnels through his convulsing psyche every source of moral, social, and psychic distress in this impossible world, He speaks in the opinionated, compulsive personae of many unreconciled Jeffs, like members of a big, argumentative family who feel entitled to run one another’s lives and obliged to express their opinions an every subject. His themes range from the hole in the ozone to the hole in his soul, from the struggle to keep going to the inability to stop, from the charm of the foreign to the hatred of the exotic when it lives next door. If he’s touched by a shoeshine boy in Oaxaca, McMahon wonders cynically, “What if he lived in my neighborhood, in my little slice of poverty paradise?” He riffs on greed, AIDS, power, sex, racism, “Thank you for making me Caucasian and not Asian,” babbles a grateful Jeff, “for putting me on this side of the Rio Grande, on this side of the race war,” And he taps cheerily, singing “Old Black Joe.”
A genuine crank, deeply disturbed by humanity’s race to destruction, McMahon wallows in ambivalence and radiates waves of frustration and a desperate sense of futility. He probes the multifarious rifts in the social and psychic fabric and forces them a little wider. Discontents is an activist dance/theater work: McMahon wants us disturbed enough to do something. But before too long, he takes on so much more than we can bear to think about that his concerns begin to cancel out. He’s right, I think, that we have to deal with everything now, all at once: heartbreak, lying, ignorance. wetlands, rain forests, garbage, meanness, disease, war. We’re all too good at pretending everything will work out if we can only stick our heads in the sand long enough.
McMahon revels in sinuous, twitchy, flicking moves, and his tracks through the space are in narrow corridors. Dropping, swinging. slouching, he is fascinating to watch, He has a slinking, surreptitious quality even when he’s perfectly straightforward. He usually looks like he’s sideways through a doorway almost too narrow for his body. If he doesn’t show much of a range in his dancing, it’s partly because he never is actually sidetracked: his terrier grip on his material never relaxes. His amazingly fluid, sharp talk is, to some degree spontaneous, improvised; he’s worked through this material over and over again. But at high intensity, a small rhythmic snag or a remark that’s the least bit pretentious becomes disproportionately jarring. McMahon pairs the decay of the urban infrastructure with the deterioration of the body in slides of skyscrapers (visual design and lighting by Stan Pressner) mingled with diagrammatic cross-sections of the human body with the circulatory system colored red and blue. In another series of slides we see one pallid rose again and again in almost the same position and a hand reaching, reaching, never grasping it. The slides are shown on screens that McMahon pulls down and then pulls back and up so each hangs in a gentle curve like a sail, breaking the rectangle of the stage and expressing in its shape alone an ease that contrasts marvelously with McMahon’s thrust.
At one point, somewhere in the middle of the piece, McMahon walks forward, angling from side to side. There’s a lushness his movement. “Una furtiva Iagrima” is being sung on tape, his hands curl around him. He smiles. It’s the first time in the piece he sees us, though he’s looked at us from the first. It’s a tiny but momentous kind of occasion, but it’s much too late. I needed to feel his full being much earlier, know who was inside him besides the frantic man. ‘What I want.” he says, “is the voice of reason, the reign of terror, absolute anarchy.” While he’s creeping along the back in beautiful, slow, sliding progress, he suddenly flops down, unable to keep going. It’s maddening. We need the satisfaction of seeing him move from start to finish sometime without interruption, divagation. We need to see him committed as well as flipflopping, ambivalent, backtracking, changing his mind.
At the Kitchen (March 1 through 4).
Marie Chouinard is revered by Quebecois choreographers. She’s in a league of her own. Wasn’t she the first to pee or vomit onstage? Didn’t she do a piece where she rolled around in oil and invited an audience volunteer to come home with her? Or is that just legend?
What’s clear is that this immensely potent solo performer from Montreal is ready to go as far as her art requires. Her two extraordinarv solos at the Kitchen—STAB (1986) and L’apres-midi d’un faune (1987) - contain nothing that could offend by being too grossly real. Savage and infinitely refined, they are terrifying, exhilarating, mysterious, immediate, and, sometimes, deeply nourishing to the imagination.
In STAB (Space, Time, and Beyond), she’s naked except for a G-string. Her body’s painted Mercurochrome red up to a line across her nipples. As retro and heroic as Conan the Barbarian, she’s got on clanky, gleaming. falling-apart metal shoes, and an old leather aviator’s cap with a huge. smooth, flexible horn projecting from the top of it that makes a most efficient phallic nightmare. Chouinard is miked, and the sounds of her deep, raspy, labored breathing, her terrible gurgles and howls and screeches, the scrape of the horn’s end on the floor, are as dread and intimidating as the soundtrack of Alien—the pumped-up sounds of one’s own fear.
Chouinard’s drama may be overblown, But the alien beast is in her, or is her, and her performance is a kind of self-exorcism. Slamming her metal shoes against the floor, pressing her hand against her chest, her chest against the floor, Chouinard proceeds at a very deliberate pace. The woman flaunts that immense prick sprouting from her head; it’s a crucial aspect of the form she presents to us and marks her as unnatural. It’s part of her arsenal, but it may govern her too; she’s not herself until she’s free of It. I crabbed when smoke began to fill the Kitchen during the long intermission (Chouinard had to get all that red scrubbed off), but as soon as her L‘apres-midi d’un faune began, in a green mist, its necessity was evident.
Faune is a gripping work, exquisitely visualized, in which structure and content are identical, It refers to Vaslav Nijinsky’s 1912 ballet, and is performed in a costume that comments both on his costume and his musculature. But Chouinard eschews Debussy’s music and uses instead a sound score of mechanical clanking and bestial groaning (by Janitors Animated and Silvy Panet-Raymond) that evokes the atmosphere of gloomy, dripping dungeons. (In both works, plenty of credit must go to Chouinard’a collaborators—lighting designer Alain Lortie, costume designers Louis Seize, for STAB, and Luc Courchesne. for Faune—as well as the rehearsal directors, or “exterior eyes” who helped her see that what she was making was what she intended.)
Built on a vocabulary drawn from photographs of Nijinnky’s poses, Faune is presented in sequences of moves, largely in profile, that, with thrilling formality and immediacy, create the faceted perspectives of Cubism. Chouinard’s faun is a vastly stylized creation, with one thigh and instep and the opposite calf dramatically built up to suggest thick muscles. Nails project from one shoulder and a thigh, and ram horns curve out from her head at different angles. The creature has an assertive, if oblivious, sexual quality and a weird charm that would have intrigued Cocteau. Chouinard ripples from pose to pose in incremental moves, twists her body in opposition, reverses direction sharply—all with great precision and electric intensity. A sharp, slanted beam of light appears, its shape clearly etched in the smoke, ending in a small bight square on the floor, She flicks her hands in it, and it vanishes, She trembles before a second, parallel ray that has appeared behind her and moves cautiously toward it, before turning back to the first, which has reappeared. As she plunges into it, both beams disappear.
Thus begins a long, teasing game between the faun and these cold, luring beams the sight of which fill her/it/him with near-ecstasy, though every light is extinguished at a touch. Chouinard slinks through slouchy postures with staccato curving gestures, though her figure is always sculptural and authoritative. Her faun has the irrational mythic power of the Minotaur, though that power is channeled into behavior as playful as that of a monkey, and her creature can be almost Pavlovian in its automatic responses to the stimulation of light. Yielding to the promise of delight, the faun is helplessly drawn to bright things. In a long, vertical triangle of light, she breaks off one horn with a silent crack, With it she stabs the beam, which suddenly multiplies. Wind sounds howl. Chouinard squats and attaches the upcurved horn to her pubis, then approaches each of the three slanting rays that remain. The music growls, clanks, and rumbles as she thrusts her hips into the first beam. Crouching, she somehow turns the penis red, and advances on the remaining lights. The last opens into a broad, welcoming double beam, which she thrusts into exultantly; then she drops convulsively to the floor in a gentle shower of glittering silver shards.
Jeff McMahon’s 70-ish-minute solo Discontents is a kind of tour de force. Pouring himself into an almost nonstop rap, McMahon funnels through his convulsing psyche every source of moral, social, and psychic distress in this impossible world, He speaks in the opinionated, compulsive personae of many unreconciled Jeffs, like members of a big, argumentative family who feel entitled to run one another’s lives and obliged to express their opinions an every subject. His themes range from the hole in the ozone to the hole in his soul, from the struggle to keep going to the inability to stop, from the charm of the foreign to the hatred of the exotic when it lives next door. If he’s touched by a shoeshine boy in Oaxaca, McMahon wonders cynically, “What if he lived in my neighborhood, in my little slice of poverty paradise?” He riffs on greed, AIDS, power, sex, racism, “Thank you for making me Caucasian and not Asian,” babbles a grateful Jeff, “for putting me on this side of the Rio Grande, on this side of the race war,” And he taps cheerily, singing “Old Black Joe.”
A genuine crank, deeply disturbed by humanity’s race to destruction, McMahon wallows in ambivalence and radiates waves of frustration and a desperate sense of futility. He probes the multifarious rifts in the social and psychic fabric and forces them a little wider. Discontents is an activist dance/theater work: McMahon wants us disturbed enough to do something. But before too long, he takes on so much more than we can bear to think about that his concerns begin to cancel out. He’s right, I think, that we have to deal with everything now, all at once: heartbreak, lying, ignorance. wetlands, rain forests, garbage, meanness, disease, war. We’re all too good at pretending everything will work out if we can only stick our heads in the sand long enough.
McMahon revels in sinuous, twitchy, flicking moves, and his tracks through the space are in narrow corridors. Dropping, swinging. slouching, he is fascinating to watch, He has a slinking, surreptitious quality even when he’s perfectly straightforward. He usually looks like he’s sideways through a doorway almost too narrow for his body. If he doesn’t show much of a range in his dancing, it’s partly because he never is actually sidetracked: his terrier grip on his material never relaxes. His amazingly fluid, sharp talk is, to some degree spontaneous, improvised; he’s worked through this material over and over again. But at high intensity, a small rhythmic snag or a remark that’s the least bit pretentious becomes disproportionately jarring. McMahon pairs the decay of the urban infrastructure with the deterioration of the body in slides of skyscrapers (visual design and lighting by Stan Pressner) mingled with diagrammatic cross-sections of the human body with the circulatory system colored red and blue. In another series of slides we see one pallid rose again and again in almost the same position and a hand reaching, reaching, never grasping it. The slides are shown on screens that McMahon pulls down and then pulls back and up so each hangs in a gentle curve like a sail, breaking the rectangle of the stage and expressing in its shape alone an ease that contrasts marvelously with McMahon’s thrust.
At one point, somewhere in the middle of the piece, McMahon walks forward, angling from side to side. There’s a lushness his movement. “Una furtiva Iagrima” is being sung on tape, his hands curl around him. He smiles. It’s the first time in the piece he sees us, though he’s looked at us from the first. It’s a tiny but momentous kind of occasion, but it’s much too late. I needed to feel his full being much earlier, know who was inside him besides the frantic man. ‘What I want.” he says, “is the voice of reason, the reign of terror, absolute anarchy.” While he’s creeping along the back in beautiful, slow, sliding progress, he suddenly flops down, unable to keep going. It’s maddening. We need the satisfaction of seeing him move from start to finish sometime without interruption, divagation. We need to see him committed as well as flipflopping, ambivalent, backtracking, changing his mind.
At the Kitchen (March 1 through 4).
Wilted Lilies
January 23
New York Theater Ballet, the first dance company to perform in the bare little Dimson Theater in Zeckendorf Towers off Union Square, opened the first of two repertory programs with a rendition of Anton Dolin’s Pas de Quatre that seemed stylistically right but juiceless and feeble. I enjoyed the coy charm of the rival ballerinas’ eentsy steps in unison, but too often the ladies seemed inappropriately stiff and doll-like. Despite their queenly obliviousness of each other, what was missing was the necessary grandeur and vitality—crucial on a small stage with no proscenium, and in a production accompanied by rickety recorded melodies.
Edward Henkel’s Dance Roads, a premiere, costumed with versatility by Sylvia Taalsohn, is a long moony piece for eight that starts like a comedy about touring with lots of props, genial muddle, and dancers dropping in and out of practice. But it turns into something more vague and dated, full of meaningless incident and soupy feelings. Lola Bewley showed two works. From 1961, there was Pi r (originally made for the First Chamber Dance Quartet, which she cofounded), a quick, wicked lampoon of Balanchine’s moderns Stravinokyan style to music by Edgard Varkse that seems to include instrumental groans and facts and mouse squeaks. The three dancers—Jeff Moen, Keith Michael, and sirenlike Linda Lutzai—stalk important(y into awkward positions and weird clumpings Balanchine fortunately missed. But some of the angular contortions Bewley devised have their own unlikely beauty, like a flip that deposits Lutzai backwards over the men’s joined arms, with her lower legs crossed, and reads: “Oops. Is this what I meant?”
Some developments seem to amaze the undaunted dancers, like a knot of bodies that comes undone, leaving Lutzai oozing down the outer edge like a child on a playground slide. Even Balanchine’s naive sort of vulgarity is replicated with aplomb like when Moon pokes his head through Lutzai’s legs like a nosy squirrel. The women wear, black gowns and the men tails in Bewley’s Short Subjects, a pleasant ballroom piece to seven songs recorded by Bobby Short. It’s got its share of sauciness and romantic swaying a Ia Fred-and-Ginger. Maybe the nicest number is “Down in Mexico,” with jaunty Osamu Uehara fizzing with good spirits, while a party goes on behind him. Sylvia Nolan and Henkel dance “How Could We be Wrong?” with gentle intelligence. And “Don’t Bring Lulu” is a flashy Charleston with the men hopping. and Lutzai as a giddy girl known to exceed the limits of polite behavior. Pas de Quatre nearly turned its ballerinas into crones. Dance Roads engulfed the dancers in a cloudy blur. What was essentially right about Short Subjects was that it freed the dancers to perform with verve and confidence.
At Dimson Theater (January 3 through 13).
New York Theater Ballet, the first dance company to perform in the bare little Dimson Theater in Zeckendorf Towers off Union Square, opened the first of two repertory programs with a rendition of Anton Dolin’s Pas de Quatre that seemed stylistically right but juiceless and feeble. I enjoyed the coy charm of the rival ballerinas’ eentsy steps in unison, but too often the ladies seemed inappropriately stiff and doll-like. Despite their queenly obliviousness of each other, what was missing was the necessary grandeur and vitality—crucial on a small stage with no proscenium, and in a production accompanied by rickety recorded melodies.
Edward Henkel’s Dance Roads, a premiere, costumed with versatility by Sylvia Taalsohn, is a long moony piece for eight that starts like a comedy about touring with lots of props, genial muddle, and dancers dropping in and out of practice. But it turns into something more vague and dated, full of meaningless incident and soupy feelings. Lola Bewley showed two works. From 1961, there was Pi r (originally made for the First Chamber Dance Quartet, which she cofounded), a quick, wicked lampoon of Balanchine’s moderns Stravinokyan style to music by Edgard Varkse that seems to include instrumental groans and facts and mouse squeaks. The three dancers—Jeff Moen, Keith Michael, and sirenlike Linda Lutzai—stalk important(y into awkward positions and weird clumpings Balanchine fortunately missed. But some of the angular contortions Bewley devised have their own unlikely beauty, like a flip that deposits Lutzai backwards over the men’s joined arms, with her lower legs crossed, and reads: “Oops. Is this what I meant?”
Some developments seem to amaze the undaunted dancers, like a knot of bodies that comes undone, leaving Lutzai oozing down the outer edge like a child on a playground slide. Even Balanchine’s naive sort of vulgarity is replicated with aplomb like when Moon pokes his head through Lutzai’s legs like a nosy squirrel. The women wear, black gowns and the men tails in Bewley’s Short Subjects, a pleasant ballroom piece to seven songs recorded by Bobby Short. It’s got its share of sauciness and romantic swaying a Ia Fred-and-Ginger. Maybe the nicest number is “Down in Mexico,” with jaunty Osamu Uehara fizzing with good spirits, while a party goes on behind him. Sylvia Nolan and Henkel dance “How Could We be Wrong?” with gentle intelligence. And “Don’t Bring Lulu” is a flashy Charleston with the men hopping. and Lutzai as a giddy girl known to exceed the limits of polite behavior. Pas de Quatre nearly turned its ballerinas into crones. Dance Roads engulfed the dancers in a cloudy blur. What was essentially right about Short Subjects was that it freed the dancers to perform with verve and confidence.
At Dimson Theater (January 3 through 13).
White Bread
May 29
David Parsons eloquently combines strength and flexibility in the body of a major American hunk, but his latest dances are rather pretty and flat. Last time I saw his company, two summers ago, I was impressed by what I thought was a serious approach to the craft of choreography. But his recent works have little substance. It’s dismaying too that he’s allowing himself to play so much the prince in his dances, so much an object we can admire. Is he getting stuck up? His company seems to be touring very successfully; does that necessarily indicate a fatal flaw? It may be so.
The Envelope, a 1984 comedy, is remarkable in this context for the single-mindedness and intensity of the joke in which a crew of hunched, hooded people—cousins of the creatures in Paul Taylor’s Three Epitaphs—attempt to pass along or hold on to or get rid of a missive. Caught, the sensational 1982 solo in which flashes of light capture Parsons constantly midair, is a brilliant idea, beautifully executed. Sleep Study, from 1987, is a wry group piece for seven snoozing dancers gently rolling and adjusting their positions for maximum comfort. And when they halfheartedly awake, their rumpled figures loosely stagger and melt back into the floor. These works are lean and tightly focused.
But Radio NYC, a 1990 improvisation to changing audio channels, is more amazing for what’s coming over the airwaves than for Parsons’s predictable responses to it. Three Courses (1987) is a tart but lukewarm piece for three couples. Whispering, smiling, they parade around flaunting their teatime pinkies, take rapid bows that are as convulsive as sneezes. If the men fling themselves to the floor, the women blithely tread right over them. But if the subject of manners provides some of the thematic material for the dance, Parsons doesn’t give it any real bite. Elysian Fields (1988) is more confusing. Parsons casts himself at a luminous angel, slashing sword in hand, who sets the cast members randomly against one another. At first, they swoop harmoniously like a flock of birds, flowing gently from one side of the stage to the other like creatures who barely exist as individuals and naturally form a colony. Parsons brings out swords for everyone, and the piece (with fight direction by Randy Kovitz) turns into a free-for-all of stabbing, parrying, kneeing, and shoving, accompanied by grunts and outcries. Scot Willingham becomes the main focus. and Parsons, isolated from most of the fray, coolly does him in, whereupon the women—who moments before were zealous warriors—make nice over his corpse, with placid, depersonalized leg extensions. But then Willingham’s alive again, gently caressing or jerking off his blade, getting angry, laughing nastily. Gail Gilbert, the fiercest of the swordswomen, smacks two swords together cackling giddily, and does battle again with Willingham while a chorus of four acts as a cheerleading squad. At the very end, Parsons, the only one left standing, raises his arms in triumph over the heap of bodies beneath him.
Nascimento, another new piece. to music by Milton Nascimento, is full of breezy, attractive dancing that glides and ripples in easy, twining patterns. Wearing bright, loose clothes designed by Santo Loquasto, the dancers gaily spin, skip, and sail through the air clicking their heels. In the middle of the piece, Parsons and Gilbert back toward each other very slowly from opposite sides of the stage. With exceeding slowness, they turn toward each other. One hundred years pass till they embrace, another 100 till they kiss. The dancers—Jaime Martinez, Elizabeth Koeppen, Victoria Lundell, Cynthia Westaway, and Ivan Wolfe, besides those already mentioned—are excellent. And Howard Binkley’s lighting serves Parsons handsomely. But too much of what Parsons is doing is perfectly pleasant and mindless, without much character or perspective.
At the Joyce Theater (May 15 through 20).
David Parsons eloquently combines strength and flexibility in the body of a major American hunk, but his latest dances are rather pretty and flat. Last time I saw his company, two summers ago, I was impressed by what I thought was a serious approach to the craft of choreography. But his recent works have little substance. It’s dismaying too that he’s allowing himself to play so much the prince in his dances, so much an object we can admire. Is he getting stuck up? His company seems to be touring very successfully; does that necessarily indicate a fatal flaw? It may be so.
The Envelope, a 1984 comedy, is remarkable in this context for the single-mindedness and intensity of the joke in which a crew of hunched, hooded people—cousins of the creatures in Paul Taylor’s Three Epitaphs—attempt to pass along or hold on to or get rid of a missive. Caught, the sensational 1982 solo in which flashes of light capture Parsons constantly midair, is a brilliant idea, beautifully executed. Sleep Study, from 1987, is a wry group piece for seven snoozing dancers gently rolling and adjusting their positions for maximum comfort. And when they halfheartedly awake, their rumpled figures loosely stagger and melt back into the floor. These works are lean and tightly focused.
But Radio NYC, a 1990 improvisation to changing audio channels, is more amazing for what’s coming over the airwaves than for Parsons’s predictable responses to it. Three Courses (1987) is a tart but lukewarm piece for three couples. Whispering, smiling, they parade around flaunting their teatime pinkies, take rapid bows that are as convulsive as sneezes. If the men fling themselves to the floor, the women blithely tread right over them. But if the subject of manners provides some of the thematic material for the dance, Parsons doesn’t give it any real bite. Elysian Fields (1988) is more confusing. Parsons casts himself at a luminous angel, slashing sword in hand, who sets the cast members randomly against one another. At first, they swoop harmoniously like a flock of birds, flowing gently from one side of the stage to the other like creatures who barely exist as individuals and naturally form a colony. Parsons brings out swords for everyone, and the piece (with fight direction by Randy Kovitz) turns into a free-for-all of stabbing, parrying, kneeing, and shoving, accompanied by grunts and outcries. Scot Willingham becomes the main focus. and Parsons, isolated from most of the fray, coolly does him in, whereupon the women—who moments before were zealous warriors—make nice over his corpse, with placid, depersonalized leg extensions. But then Willingham’s alive again, gently caressing or jerking off his blade, getting angry, laughing nastily. Gail Gilbert, the fiercest of the swordswomen, smacks two swords together cackling giddily, and does battle again with Willingham while a chorus of four acts as a cheerleading squad. At the very end, Parsons, the only one left standing, raises his arms in triumph over the heap of bodies beneath him.
Nascimento, another new piece. to music by Milton Nascimento, is full of breezy, attractive dancing that glides and ripples in easy, twining patterns. Wearing bright, loose clothes designed by Santo Loquasto, the dancers gaily spin, skip, and sail through the air clicking their heels. In the middle of the piece, Parsons and Gilbert back toward each other very slowly from opposite sides of the stage. With exceeding slowness, they turn toward each other. One hundred years pass till they embrace, another 100 till they kiss. The dancers—Jaime Martinez, Elizabeth Koeppen, Victoria Lundell, Cynthia Westaway, and Ivan Wolfe, besides those already mentioned—are excellent. And Howard Binkley’s lighting serves Parsons handsomely. But too much of what Parsons is doing is perfectly pleasant and mindless, without much character or perspective.
At the Joyce Theater (May 15 through 20).
What, Me Worry?
April 24
Ready to open his company’s month-long 35th anniversary season at City Center five days from our meeting, choreographer Paul Taylor is surprisingly calm. His three-year-old springer spaniel, Budd, is popping straight into the air to about shoulder height, but Taylor’s manner is almost laconic. “What, me worry?” might be his motto. This minute, composer Don York may still be desperately busy redoing orchestrations for the new full-length piece, Of Bright & Blue Birds & the Gala Sun, but Taylor’s part is in the bag. Was the scale of such a long piece intimidating?
“Naaah,” he drawls, in his most country-boyish manner. “You just put a lot of short pieces together and you have a long one.” Taylor’s facetiousness, his wide- eyed faux naivete, are part of his natural charm. You can almost believe he just got off the bus from Podunk on his first visit to the big city. He hardly presents himself as a master who’s choreographed some of the most memorable dances of this century. And his odd innocence is quite genuine: you sense that he’s trying out his ideas and sincerely believes— at least until he mulls them over for a second—whatever words come out of his mouth. He’s an actor who surrenders to the character of the moment.
But he’s a complicated, slippery fellow, and is hardly so easy to know as he pretends. For a while now, he’s been having a romance with the notion of anonymity. I guess he’s well- known enough for the idea of blending in, being invisible, to have some appeal. “I’m going to be a hermit,” he says. “I just want to do my dances and shut up.” Maybe. But maybe he wants to be a mysterious presence, adored by his public from afar.
“There’s the matter of recognition, too,” he says. “There are two things about that. One is that it seems to be more ‘gentlemanly’ not to sign your work. The artisans that built the wonderful cathedrals didn’t, and I like that idea, I think it’s kind of big.” Of course, Taylor’s work—spun all too literally out of his guts—is quirkier and more personal than those stone edifices. His unmistakable signature is in the shapes of his dance phrases and the patterns in how they’re linked, in the atmosphere of his dances, in the juicy musculature of his dancers’ bodies. For Taylor, the troubling aspect of being recognized in person may be in his inclination to please. He‘s flattered, he says, if someone recognizes him on the street. But it makes him self-conscious and uncomfortable, too.
“I try to do what I think is proper and expected,” to live up to the image that strangers appear to have, “but it takes a lot of energy if it goes on for long. It saps me.” He often balks at being photographed and swears that the most recent set of photos are the last he’s ever going to take. I have trouble understanding why, though I know most people feel awkward in front of a camera. Taylor doesn’t think thai his reluctance is a matter of vanity, of an unwillingness to be seen (and to see oneself aging). For him, it seems to be question of privacy, of being pinned down.
“Many people,” he says, “have a kind of ancestral memory that when you have your picture taken it’s like magic and the person who takes it owns your soul. Well, there’s a grain of truth in that—if it’s a good picture. Your body, like your mind, is full of secrets. And some of the secrets you don’t give away.” Long pause. “You sell ‘em.” Yes, he’s joking, but. . . . It’s curious.
In his 1988 autobiography Private Domain, Taylor talks with unabashed honesty and deft humor about his dancing and touring years with Martha Graham and his own company, up to the onstage collapse at Brooklyn Academy of Music that ended his performing career in 1974. Taylor tells all, but he remains hard to nail down, elusive as a chameleon who achieves invisibility by methods even more primitive than instinct, And he’s got other escape plans cooking. Like a little leave of absence."
“I think it would be good for the company. They’re perfectly capable of managing on their own, with maybe a little advice. But let ‘em try it and learn, because someday I might take a long leave of absence. “I’m not going to die. I will never die, that’s absolutely certain. I’ve decided that. But I might want to take a break every once in a while and I think it would be very good for everybody to know exactly how this business works and try it themselves.” Then he sneaks in the kicker: “They’ll also appreciate me more when I return.”
“You’re a slave to the work and the people involved in the work. Anyone who has a dance company knows there are times when you feel like you’re locked up in a torture chamber, Because, you see, we have to depend on other people to do our work, and working with people can be awfully difficult.” Yet rehearsals this year have been a joy, says Taylor. Why? “I’ve had some help from a psychiatrist.” he says, laughing. “I’ve been happy. I’ve spent more time laughing and joking with the dancers, making the atmosphere light, and I think they work better that way. I don’t harp on them much and let ‘em bother me."
“I had very serious depression. Unfortunately I wasn’t manic depressive. I only had the down side, I didn’t get the ups. For a while, most of the time, it was like my ulcer. The acids were pouring into me, usually caused by all the aggravation that having a company involves. Finally, that got to the point where they operated on me so I didn’t have that constant pain anymore. That was a big help. But I almost died.” The graver and more painful the subject, the more blithe Taylor’s manner becomes. “The ulcer popped, ate a hole in my stomach. It was an emergency operation and I was in the hospital for quite a while, I went down to 80 pounds from 180.”
You went down what?
“Eighty pounds. I was hooked up to like seven catheters. This happened the day I finished Speaking in Tongues in the fall of ‘88. It was the last rehearsal, I had to work double-time to complete it so it was a real strain. And when I finally finished, my body just let go. “I don’t usually go to dance concerts,” Taylor says. “I like to read. I see a movie occasionally. I never look at television. I like to do things with my hands.” What inspires him most are people—his dancers, people he meets, and strangers whose behavior he observes. And the world of nature. “It’s one miracle after another,” he says. “This bug”—he points to a huge insect, maybe 10 inches long with pale chartreuse wings, framed on his wall— “someone gave me yesterday. I saw it in Paris and wanted it but I couldn’t afford it. It was only $10 but I’d already bought a bunch of beetles so I was running low on cash. That’s a kind of walkingstick from Malaysia. I’m going to find out all about it. And I’ve gotten interested in bees. I’ve got a hive out on Long Island and I’m reading up on them, on what we know and don’t know about them and how their society works. I love it because it makes you more aware that human beings are just a part of the picture, a small part. And that there are the most remarkable things going on around us, things that are so different from what we think and how we are.”
“The part of my work that I love best,” says Taylor, “is the work in the studio with dancers. That to me is what it’s all about. Even seeing the dance on the stage for the first time and getting it there in the theater with the lights and all the stuff it needs around it is not as interesting. Of course, we wouldn’t be doing any of it if we weren’t going to show it. I mean, you can’t dance in a closet."
“In dancers, I look for people I think I’ll like, both as people and as physical presences. Now, I love beautiful flaws in people. It makes them more human and I can relate to them easier, People with perfect looks intimidate me. And I need people who want to do the job. They have to come that way with that need and that preference. And I look at their eyes and I try to guess if they’ll fit with the existing group of dancers especially as people."
“Usually, they’re very good together. They develop a kind of group mind. Tell one something and they all know it. One will have an opinion and they all agree. It’s kind of strange. And even stranger is that I can lift one finger in rehearsal when they’re running the dance to give a person a correction and, without me saying anything, and with their backs to me, they will react and do what I had in mind. It happens day after day. It isn’t that they seem to pay all that much attention to me really. They’re usually busy talking to each other.
“I’m very fond of my dancers, and I feel responsible for them though I’m not sure I like all that responsibility. I don’t try to delve into their personal lives and I don’t ask prying questions, but I always know if something is bothering them. And I want to be of help—I mean, they’re mine. They need taking care of in a way—not as babies, but as mature people. We all do. And, the quality of the dance and the dancing depends upon the company’s morale. I know that my spirit, and my attitude, and how I feel, rubs off in rehearsal. But distance is very important. Don’t get too close. It’s like being the captain of an old sailing vessel where the crew was all together for a long time in a small space. That’s the way we are."
“I’m so proud of them, They inspire me, I don’t expect always to get along with them, or they with me. And there are days when we can all hate each other, That’s allowed. But our mutual interest is what’s holding us together. There’d be no company if there wasn’t that spirit. There never would have been."
Ready to open his company’s month-long 35th anniversary season at City Center five days from our meeting, choreographer Paul Taylor is surprisingly calm. His three-year-old springer spaniel, Budd, is popping straight into the air to about shoulder height, but Taylor’s manner is almost laconic. “What, me worry?” might be his motto. This minute, composer Don York may still be desperately busy redoing orchestrations for the new full-length piece, Of Bright & Blue Birds & the Gala Sun, but Taylor’s part is in the bag. Was the scale of such a long piece intimidating?
“Naaah,” he drawls, in his most country-boyish manner. “You just put a lot of short pieces together and you have a long one.” Taylor’s facetiousness, his wide- eyed faux naivete, are part of his natural charm. You can almost believe he just got off the bus from Podunk on his first visit to the big city. He hardly presents himself as a master who’s choreographed some of the most memorable dances of this century. And his odd innocence is quite genuine: you sense that he’s trying out his ideas and sincerely believes— at least until he mulls them over for a second—whatever words come out of his mouth. He’s an actor who surrenders to the character of the moment.
But he’s a complicated, slippery fellow, and is hardly so easy to know as he pretends. For a while now, he’s been having a romance with the notion of anonymity. I guess he’s well- known enough for the idea of blending in, being invisible, to have some appeal. “I’m going to be a hermit,” he says. “I just want to do my dances and shut up.” Maybe. But maybe he wants to be a mysterious presence, adored by his public from afar.
“There’s the matter of recognition, too,” he says. “There are two things about that. One is that it seems to be more ‘gentlemanly’ not to sign your work. The artisans that built the wonderful cathedrals didn’t, and I like that idea, I think it’s kind of big.” Of course, Taylor’s work—spun all too literally out of his guts—is quirkier and more personal than those stone edifices. His unmistakable signature is in the shapes of his dance phrases and the patterns in how they’re linked, in the atmosphere of his dances, in the juicy musculature of his dancers’ bodies. For Taylor, the troubling aspect of being recognized in person may be in his inclination to please. He‘s flattered, he says, if someone recognizes him on the street. But it makes him self-conscious and uncomfortable, too.
“I try to do what I think is proper and expected,” to live up to the image that strangers appear to have, “but it takes a lot of energy if it goes on for long. It saps me.” He often balks at being photographed and swears that the most recent set of photos are the last he’s ever going to take. I have trouble understanding why, though I know most people feel awkward in front of a camera. Taylor doesn’t think thai his reluctance is a matter of vanity, of an unwillingness to be seen (and to see oneself aging). For him, it seems to be question of privacy, of being pinned down.
“Many people,” he says, “have a kind of ancestral memory that when you have your picture taken it’s like magic and the person who takes it owns your soul. Well, there’s a grain of truth in that—if it’s a good picture. Your body, like your mind, is full of secrets. And some of the secrets you don’t give away.” Long pause. “You sell ‘em.” Yes, he’s joking, but. . . . It’s curious.
In his 1988 autobiography Private Domain, Taylor talks with unabashed honesty and deft humor about his dancing and touring years with Martha Graham and his own company, up to the onstage collapse at Brooklyn Academy of Music that ended his performing career in 1974. Taylor tells all, but he remains hard to nail down, elusive as a chameleon who achieves invisibility by methods even more primitive than instinct, And he’s got other escape plans cooking. Like a little leave of absence."
“I think it would be good for the company. They’re perfectly capable of managing on their own, with maybe a little advice. But let ‘em try it and learn, because someday I might take a long leave of absence. “I’m not going to die. I will never die, that’s absolutely certain. I’ve decided that. But I might want to take a break every once in a while and I think it would be very good for everybody to know exactly how this business works and try it themselves.” Then he sneaks in the kicker: “They’ll also appreciate me more when I return.”
“You’re a slave to the work and the people involved in the work. Anyone who has a dance company knows there are times when you feel like you’re locked up in a torture chamber, Because, you see, we have to depend on other people to do our work, and working with people can be awfully difficult.” Yet rehearsals this year have been a joy, says Taylor. Why? “I’ve had some help from a psychiatrist.” he says, laughing. “I’ve been happy. I’ve spent more time laughing and joking with the dancers, making the atmosphere light, and I think they work better that way. I don’t harp on them much and let ‘em bother me."
“I had very serious depression. Unfortunately I wasn’t manic depressive. I only had the down side, I didn’t get the ups. For a while, most of the time, it was like my ulcer. The acids were pouring into me, usually caused by all the aggravation that having a company involves. Finally, that got to the point where they operated on me so I didn’t have that constant pain anymore. That was a big help. But I almost died.” The graver and more painful the subject, the more blithe Taylor’s manner becomes. “The ulcer popped, ate a hole in my stomach. It was an emergency operation and I was in the hospital for quite a while, I went down to 80 pounds from 180.”
You went down what?
“Eighty pounds. I was hooked up to like seven catheters. This happened the day I finished Speaking in Tongues in the fall of ‘88. It was the last rehearsal, I had to work double-time to complete it so it was a real strain. And when I finally finished, my body just let go. “I don’t usually go to dance concerts,” Taylor says. “I like to read. I see a movie occasionally. I never look at television. I like to do things with my hands.” What inspires him most are people—his dancers, people he meets, and strangers whose behavior he observes. And the world of nature. “It’s one miracle after another,” he says. “This bug”—he points to a huge insect, maybe 10 inches long with pale chartreuse wings, framed on his wall— “someone gave me yesterday. I saw it in Paris and wanted it but I couldn’t afford it. It was only $10 but I’d already bought a bunch of beetles so I was running low on cash. That’s a kind of walkingstick from Malaysia. I’m going to find out all about it. And I’ve gotten interested in bees. I’ve got a hive out on Long Island and I’m reading up on them, on what we know and don’t know about them and how their society works. I love it because it makes you more aware that human beings are just a part of the picture, a small part. And that there are the most remarkable things going on around us, things that are so different from what we think and how we are.”
“The part of my work that I love best,” says Taylor, “is the work in the studio with dancers. That to me is what it’s all about. Even seeing the dance on the stage for the first time and getting it there in the theater with the lights and all the stuff it needs around it is not as interesting. Of course, we wouldn’t be doing any of it if we weren’t going to show it. I mean, you can’t dance in a closet."
“In dancers, I look for people I think I’ll like, both as people and as physical presences. Now, I love beautiful flaws in people. It makes them more human and I can relate to them easier, People with perfect looks intimidate me. And I need people who want to do the job. They have to come that way with that need and that preference. And I look at their eyes and I try to guess if they’ll fit with the existing group of dancers especially as people."
“Usually, they’re very good together. They develop a kind of group mind. Tell one something and they all know it. One will have an opinion and they all agree. It’s kind of strange. And even stranger is that I can lift one finger in rehearsal when they’re running the dance to give a person a correction and, without me saying anything, and with their backs to me, they will react and do what I had in mind. It happens day after day. It isn’t that they seem to pay all that much attention to me really. They’re usually busy talking to each other.
“I’m very fond of my dancers, and I feel responsible for them though I’m not sure I like all that responsibility. I don’t try to delve into their personal lives and I don’t ask prying questions, but I always know if something is bothering them. And I want to be of help—I mean, they’re mine. They need taking care of in a way—not as babies, but as mature people. We all do. And, the quality of the dance and the dancing depends upon the company’s morale. I know that my spirit, and my attitude, and how I feel, rubs off in rehearsal. But distance is very important. Don’t get too close. It’s like being the captain of an old sailing vessel where the crew was all together for a long time in a small space. That’s the way we are."
“I’m so proud of them, They inspire me, I don’t expect always to get along with them, or they with me. And there are days when we can all hate each other, That’s allowed. But our mutual interest is what’s holding us together. There’d be no company if there wasn’t that spirit. There never would have been."
Valorous Women
January 16
Carmen de Lavallade’s staging of Sarong Paramaribo, a solo her teacher Lester Horton created for her in 1950, has a sweet power. She arranged it for five women—April Berry, Dana Hash, Sarita Allen, Elizabeth Roxas, and Debora Chase (at the performance I saw)—wrapped in lavish red-and-gold brocade sarongs (costumes by José Coronado) with long trains that they dramatically and frequently kick back or aside, flashing the heaving fabric as a primary theme of the dance. The disdain of that action advertises the women’s capability; it proclaims their skill at managing a hindrance that might trip them up. These are not the docile, trembling girls of the tropical East who hope only to please. Highly desirable, they’re not dragon ladies either, though their arms cruelly carve the space in their winding moves and their hands flick with the dangerous potential of a youth with a switch blade.
But they are not sexually threatening. Without deporting a traditional role, these women demonstrate their authority and worth. The piece mingles elements of Indonesian dance with African, and when de Lavallade performed it at the Ailey 25th anniversary some years ago, Sarong had a gentler, more insinuating quality overall. But with five bold women—staggered in alignment but usually dancing in unison—the dance is a challenge to the audience, an occasion to rise to.
Darci Kistler, Kyra Nichols, and the female corps were particularly glorious when New York City Ballet returned to its regular repertory January 2 with a superb performance of Balanchine’s 1935 Serenade. But the men, Jukka Aromaa and Leonid Kozlov, shockingly cloddish and mannered, were a blot on the ballet. Nichols, Stephanie Saland, and Maria Calegari were exquisite in Jerome Robbins’s In the Night. Calegari gave an intensely hushed quality to the slow, coiling turns near the end of the first duet, as though she weren’t disturbing s single particle of air. Alexandre Proia and Jeppe Mydtskov were competent if unresponsive partners to Calegari and Nichols, but Otto Neubert countered Saland’s wild ambivalence with outstanding dullness. So it was impossible to Imagine what eccentric impulses could be drawing that ravishing, impetuous woman back to him again and again. Jerry Zimmerman’s playing of the Chopin was a little drippy, too.
The men came up aces, at last, in Balanchine’s Symphony in Three Movements. That was Peter Boal, Damien Woetzel, and Jock Soto. And Helene Alexopoulos and Melinda Roy were fine too. But Heather Watts was a disaster; and she spoiled a very good ballet. It’s a shame to pick on her, but her alignment is horrifying—the way the middle of her back is forced forward!.-—and there was no lift in her body. That, combined with a costume ill suited to her, made her look as embarrassingly out of place as a dumpy, middle-aged mom cavorting with her daughter’s friends. The belt of the pink leotard destroyed what figure Watts has, and she had the wit to remove it for the second movement duet with Soto. Doesn’t anyone oversee these things? Couldn’t all the lead women have scrapped their belts? If that might have marred the integrity of the uncredited costumes (what about the way they take perspiration stains!), it would have been far less cruel to Watts and less damaging to the ballet.
At City Center (December 6 through 31).
Carmen de Lavallade’s staging of Sarong Paramaribo, a solo her teacher Lester Horton created for her in 1950, has a sweet power. She arranged it for five women—April Berry, Dana Hash, Sarita Allen, Elizabeth Roxas, and Debora Chase (at the performance I saw)—wrapped in lavish red-and-gold brocade sarongs (costumes by José Coronado) with long trains that they dramatically and frequently kick back or aside, flashing the heaving fabric as a primary theme of the dance. The disdain of that action advertises the women’s capability; it proclaims their skill at managing a hindrance that might trip them up. These are not the docile, trembling girls of the tropical East who hope only to please. Highly desirable, they’re not dragon ladies either, though their arms cruelly carve the space in their winding moves and their hands flick with the dangerous potential of a youth with a switch blade.
But they are not sexually threatening. Without deporting a traditional role, these women demonstrate their authority and worth. The piece mingles elements of Indonesian dance with African, and when de Lavallade performed it at the Ailey 25th anniversary some years ago, Sarong had a gentler, more insinuating quality overall. But with five bold women—staggered in alignment but usually dancing in unison—the dance is a challenge to the audience, an occasion to rise to.
Darci Kistler, Kyra Nichols, and the female corps were particularly glorious when New York City Ballet returned to its regular repertory January 2 with a superb performance of Balanchine’s 1935 Serenade. But the men, Jukka Aromaa and Leonid Kozlov, shockingly cloddish and mannered, were a blot on the ballet. Nichols, Stephanie Saland, and Maria Calegari were exquisite in Jerome Robbins’s In the Night. Calegari gave an intensely hushed quality to the slow, coiling turns near the end of the first duet, as though she weren’t disturbing s single particle of air. Alexandre Proia and Jeppe Mydtskov were competent if unresponsive partners to Calegari and Nichols, but Otto Neubert countered Saland’s wild ambivalence with outstanding dullness. So it was impossible to Imagine what eccentric impulses could be drawing that ravishing, impetuous woman back to him again and again. Jerry Zimmerman’s playing of the Chopin was a little drippy, too.
The men came up aces, at last, in Balanchine’s Symphony in Three Movements. That was Peter Boal, Damien Woetzel, and Jock Soto. And Helene Alexopoulos and Melinda Roy were fine too. But Heather Watts was a disaster; and she spoiled a very good ballet. It’s a shame to pick on her, but her alignment is horrifying—the way the middle of her back is forced forward!.-—and there was no lift in her body. That, combined with a costume ill suited to her, made her look as embarrassingly out of place as a dumpy, middle-aged mom cavorting with her daughter’s friends. The belt of the pink leotard destroyed what figure Watts has, and she had the wit to remove it for the second movement duet with Soto. Doesn’t anyone oversee these things? Couldn’t all the lead women have scrapped their belts? If that might have marred the integrity of the uncredited costumes (what about the way they take perspiration stains!), it would have been far less cruel to Watts and less damaging to the ballet.
At City Center (December 6 through 31).