1991 continued
Oof!
June 4
Elizabeth Streb makes a virtue out of doing things the hard way. She designs spectacular, narrowly focused, rather brutal scenarios involving walls, heavily cushioned mats, suspension devices, and human bodies. Bodies that thwack against one another and against the equipment in elaborate, formal variations calculated to test endurance rigorously. Her stuff is thrilling, numbing, frightening, but the most delicate timing is crucial. Wait a moment too long, and you’re history. Grunts, moans, gasps, added to the miked whack of flesh on flesh or flesh on wood, create a vivid aural environment. Streb’s dances could justifiably be performed halftime at hockey games, except that they’re cooperative, not competitive, and no actual blood is spilled. The setups are painstakingly and satisfyingly involved; however efficient, it can require a chunk of time just to set the mats properly. In Soaring (1990), the three flyers - Streb, Paula Gifford and Christopher Batenhorst - are helped into strapped harnesses that flare from their hips like Saturn’s rings. The atmosphere seems grim, fatalistic. They climb a huge, black pipe scaffolding, hook themselves into single cables that dangle from the ceiling grid, and swing free. Up there, yanking on an array of hanging wires studded with balls they can easy grip for control, they swing neatly, splay out, flail, jackknife suddenly, hang upside down, rock and bob, link together long as an eel and roll. I like best the drama of the moment when they‘re all swinging forward and back, looming and receding, just before they let go of the stabilizing wires and fling themselves upward against the grid as if they’ve discarded any support at all. In the upbeat Dive, a premiere, a knee-high cross of mats is arranged, and stacks of thin white paper set out in various spots. Then 11 dancers in brightly colored unitards fling themselves headlong through bursting sheets of paper, in elegant, patterned sequences. The action reminds me of an exhilarating piece from a few years ago in which dancers dove off a scaffolding in tumultuous cascades, each casting him or herself where someone else had landed a second before. But Dive is more celebratory and not so perilous. In Groundlevel, another new work, and I’d guess from the utterances torn out of the performers, the most exhausting one, Gifford, Batenhorst, Mark Robison and Adolpho Pati tumble and pile up on a thick mat tilted slightly back to front. The dancers heave on, leapfrog, flop, arrange themselves in stacks and rows, struggling and wriggling to change the direction or position of their bodies, forming square designs in every possible horizontal and vertical way (pairs do it by bending their bodies into L’s). Groundlevel is (like Wall, the opening work), one of my favorite kinds of Streb work - clunky and laboring. Full of fussing, messiness, and adjusting for position It’s funny because its agonized struggles become so grotesquely extravagant, like when the four performers balanced in headstands try to back up incrementally from the front of the mat. Effort is so absurdly disproportionate to accomplishment. In Wall, also new, Streb, Gifford, Batenhorst, Robison, and Pati hurl themselves loudly against a backboard at various angles - straight up, sideways, flat - and drop and scramble away before the next body hits. Or they hang there, piling one on another. Two hang from the top edge, a third twists and is caught on their bent calves. Somebody is bundled up to the top, and the others get underneath, upside down, and try to support him as he slides slowly down. They plop belly-to-back into a people sandwich. Some scramble over the back, and walk down the front until they must let go and jump. I like the reverberant thumps of the striking bodies. I love the way effort is glorified in Streb’s work. I’m so glad I’m not up there.
At the Kitchen (May 15 through 19).
The highlight of DTW’s latest “Fresh Tracks” showcase was Floored, a lazy and rambunctious acrobatic duet by Lisa Race and Ginger Gillespie. Its surprising peak was a moment when Race exited, Gillespie yelled “Wait!” and yanked her back. In Clearing House, Peggy Peloquin rolled back and forth, fast and slow, through a circle of crackling onion skins, until hundreds of handsome onions galloped in from the wings, rumbling as they rolled, cluttering her space. Roseane Chamecki’s trio, Joelho, had a nice texture. I like Evelyn Velez’s quality, too, in her piece about her transition from a revue dancer. I particularly enjoyed the pink feathers that blew in from one wing, and Rafael Lopez’s ineffectual attempt to sweep them up.
At Dance Theater Workshop (May 7 through 21).
Elizabeth Streb makes a virtue out of doing things the hard way. She designs spectacular, narrowly focused, rather brutal scenarios involving walls, heavily cushioned mats, suspension devices, and human bodies. Bodies that thwack against one another and against the equipment in elaborate, formal variations calculated to test endurance rigorously. Her stuff is thrilling, numbing, frightening, but the most delicate timing is crucial. Wait a moment too long, and you’re history. Grunts, moans, gasps, added to the miked whack of flesh on flesh or flesh on wood, create a vivid aural environment. Streb’s dances could justifiably be performed halftime at hockey games, except that they’re cooperative, not competitive, and no actual blood is spilled. The setups are painstakingly and satisfyingly involved; however efficient, it can require a chunk of time just to set the mats properly. In Soaring (1990), the three flyers - Streb, Paula Gifford and Christopher Batenhorst - are helped into strapped harnesses that flare from their hips like Saturn’s rings. The atmosphere seems grim, fatalistic. They climb a huge, black pipe scaffolding, hook themselves into single cables that dangle from the ceiling grid, and swing free. Up there, yanking on an array of hanging wires studded with balls they can easy grip for control, they swing neatly, splay out, flail, jackknife suddenly, hang upside down, rock and bob, link together long as an eel and roll. I like best the drama of the moment when they‘re all swinging forward and back, looming and receding, just before they let go of the stabilizing wires and fling themselves upward against the grid as if they’ve discarded any support at all. In the upbeat Dive, a premiere, a knee-high cross of mats is arranged, and stacks of thin white paper set out in various spots. Then 11 dancers in brightly colored unitards fling themselves headlong through bursting sheets of paper, in elegant, patterned sequences. The action reminds me of an exhilarating piece from a few years ago in which dancers dove off a scaffolding in tumultuous cascades, each casting him or herself where someone else had landed a second before. But Dive is more celebratory and not so perilous. In Groundlevel, another new work, and I’d guess from the utterances torn out of the performers, the most exhausting one, Gifford, Batenhorst, Mark Robison and Adolpho Pati tumble and pile up on a thick mat tilted slightly back to front. The dancers heave on, leapfrog, flop, arrange themselves in stacks and rows, struggling and wriggling to change the direction or position of their bodies, forming square designs in every possible horizontal and vertical way (pairs do it by bending their bodies into L’s). Groundlevel is (like Wall, the opening work), one of my favorite kinds of Streb work - clunky and laboring. Full of fussing, messiness, and adjusting for position It’s funny because its agonized struggles become so grotesquely extravagant, like when the four performers balanced in headstands try to back up incrementally from the front of the mat. Effort is so absurdly disproportionate to accomplishment. In Wall, also new, Streb, Gifford, Batenhorst, Robison, and Pati hurl themselves loudly against a backboard at various angles - straight up, sideways, flat - and drop and scramble away before the next body hits. Or they hang there, piling one on another. Two hang from the top edge, a third twists and is caught on their bent calves. Somebody is bundled up to the top, and the others get underneath, upside down, and try to support him as he slides slowly down. They plop belly-to-back into a people sandwich. Some scramble over the back, and walk down the front until they must let go and jump. I like the reverberant thumps of the striking bodies. I love the way effort is glorified in Streb’s work. I’m so glad I’m not up there.
At the Kitchen (May 15 through 19).
The highlight of DTW’s latest “Fresh Tracks” showcase was Floored, a lazy and rambunctious acrobatic duet by Lisa Race and Ginger Gillespie. Its surprising peak was a moment when Race exited, Gillespie yelled “Wait!” and yanked her back. In Clearing House, Peggy Peloquin rolled back and forth, fast and slow, through a circle of crackling onion skins, until hundreds of handsome onions galloped in from the wings, rumbling as they rolled, cluttering her space. Roseane Chamecki’s trio, Joelho, had a nice texture. I like Evelyn Velez’s quality, too, in her piece about her transition from a revue dancer. I particularly enjoyed the pink feathers that blew in from one wing, and Rafael Lopez’s ineffectual attempt to sweep them up.
At Dance Theater Workshop (May 7 through 21).
Playing in Traffic
August 22
Watching several of the recent Alive From Off Center dance programs, I’m struck by how chopped to bits the dancing is, sliced into morsels for the viewer with an approaching-zero attention span. I suspect this doesn’t represent just an aesthetic point of view, but, more disturbingly, a presumption that viewers don’t want to watch movement, possibly aren’t capable of it. It’s probably true that most viewers must be titillated constantly, but if all tv is to be made for the MTV audience, then who needs PBS? Sometimes this kind of quick cutting, fragmenting technique is appropriate, as in Wim Vandekeybus’s Roseland. Susan Marshall’s Contenders, directed by Mark Obenhaus, is filled with ravishing, athletic images, in hazy indoor daylight. But, because the movement relationships are so subordinated to the montage of camera images, it sinks into a sort of lethargic desolation when the editing stops providing so many of the customary kicks. Repeated from last year, Doug Elkins’s It Doesn’t Wait (also directed by Obenhaus), airing on WNET, August 26 at 11 p.m.), shot in the streets, in traffic, delivers tiny dance episodes that erupt among trucks and cars that constantly block out and swallow the dancing.
Ordinarily, Elkins’s savvy work is a sort of collage of shards in myriad styles anyway, a dizzy, up-to-the-minute assemblage on non-sequiturs butting together, busy commenting, and cross-referencing movement quotes. “If you think too much, your brain will explode,” is a Jewish maxim I grew up with. Elkins is one of the few choreographers who perhaps needs to worry about this. To intercut his inherently fragmentary choreography so heavily with vans and trucks and strolling strangers makes the dancing incoherent. That is, is these bits of Elkins were replaced with other bits of his, it would hardly matter.
Superficially, It Doesn’t Wait bears comparison with Marta Renzi’s 198 You Little Wild Heart, which has several sections in which dancing is undercut with or happens among parked or moving trucks and cars. But in Renzi’s piece, those vehicles are integrated musically and visually into the composition; they’re part of the larger dance phrases. In the Elkins piece they’re just a gimmick. Because Elkins seems to toss off material with a giddy, careless air, it may appear that it can be treated indiscriminately. But that’s exactly wrong. Elkins’s dances take a long time to click just because he juggles so many incongruous elements and keeps them flying around. It’s virtually a little miracle when everything falls into place, so whatever delicate and mysterious psychic glue holds it all together must be respected. But it could be that the dancing in It Doesn’t Wait is just selected raw material and there’s no dance there at all?
Alive from Off Center, WNET (August 12 and 26).
Laura Dean Dancers and Musicians’ smooth sailing in three dances (Inner Circle, Magnetic, and Sky Light) greatly pleased the outdoor audience at Damrosch Park, though I found myself not differentiating much between one piece and another. Dean’s pristine dances, strongly performed, rinse out the brain nicely, but I’m not convinced that her works provides a very gratifying solution to the problem of making a dance. Generally, I like the contrast between rapid drumming and comparatively slow movement, but, for example, in Inner Circle, the musical patterns, though brilliantly (and tirelessly) executed by Jason Cirker and Matt Spataro seem rudimentary, too predictable to be aurally engaging. The elements Dean plays with in Inner Circle are appealing - the ever-popular spinning,m accompanied by arms dropping upcurved from the shoulder or carving vertical or horizontal S-shapes or reaching out and up in a V; the sharp swing of the hips invitingly presented by the hands dropped to hip level; fierce little step-kicks; strong, challenging shimmying; rolling fists There’s a tight walk with hard chest and the elbows pulled back. Dean’s mystical Rockettes feed in cumulatively, blend into unison or flat, symmetrical patterns, slow down and gently speed up in relation to a steady rhythm, shift in and out of simple canon. And the whirling black skirts scallop in the air with remarkable formal elegance. What bothers me about Dean’s dances is that they’re too damn easy in the calm way they build and relax, stay pretty no matter what. When one activity goes on long enough, we switch to some variation or diversion. Ultimately, we’re pacified, but we’re literally going in circles. If her work is free of causality, she often seems to merely ignore the potential for development in the pieces’ incidental snags, fails to solve the mushy, transitional eddies between segments. When, early in Sky Light, the clustered dancers twist, leap and dark in unison lie a squad of gallant warriors, I want something to happen out of the excitement of that gathering, not merely have the energy redirected. Maybe I resent the overriding primacy of pattern. In one aspect, Dean’s work has a healing quality - its communal forms, its humming, symmetrical patterns, its renewing energies. Everything’s always hunky-dory. But too frequently I think she’s choreographing with a New Age blindfold. I find myself thinking of her as a sort of Penelope, periodically, in the course of a dance, unraveling the threads of her weaving to keep things at an unthreatening level. If so, that’s cheating.
At Lincoln Center Out-of-Doors (August 13 and 14).
Watching several of the recent Alive From Off Center dance programs, I’m struck by how chopped to bits the dancing is, sliced into morsels for the viewer with an approaching-zero attention span. I suspect this doesn’t represent just an aesthetic point of view, but, more disturbingly, a presumption that viewers don’t want to watch movement, possibly aren’t capable of it. It’s probably true that most viewers must be titillated constantly, but if all tv is to be made for the MTV audience, then who needs PBS? Sometimes this kind of quick cutting, fragmenting technique is appropriate, as in Wim Vandekeybus’s Roseland. Susan Marshall’s Contenders, directed by Mark Obenhaus, is filled with ravishing, athletic images, in hazy indoor daylight. But, because the movement relationships are so subordinated to the montage of camera images, it sinks into a sort of lethargic desolation when the editing stops providing so many of the customary kicks. Repeated from last year, Doug Elkins’s It Doesn’t Wait (also directed by Obenhaus), airing on WNET, August 26 at 11 p.m.), shot in the streets, in traffic, delivers tiny dance episodes that erupt among trucks and cars that constantly block out and swallow the dancing.
Ordinarily, Elkins’s savvy work is a sort of collage of shards in myriad styles anyway, a dizzy, up-to-the-minute assemblage on non-sequiturs butting together, busy commenting, and cross-referencing movement quotes. “If you think too much, your brain will explode,” is a Jewish maxim I grew up with. Elkins is one of the few choreographers who perhaps needs to worry about this. To intercut his inherently fragmentary choreography so heavily with vans and trucks and strolling strangers makes the dancing incoherent. That is, is these bits of Elkins were replaced with other bits of his, it would hardly matter.
Superficially, It Doesn’t Wait bears comparison with Marta Renzi’s 198 You Little Wild Heart, which has several sections in which dancing is undercut with or happens among parked or moving trucks and cars. But in Renzi’s piece, those vehicles are integrated musically and visually into the composition; they’re part of the larger dance phrases. In the Elkins piece they’re just a gimmick. Because Elkins seems to toss off material with a giddy, careless air, it may appear that it can be treated indiscriminately. But that’s exactly wrong. Elkins’s dances take a long time to click just because he juggles so many incongruous elements and keeps them flying around. It’s virtually a little miracle when everything falls into place, so whatever delicate and mysterious psychic glue holds it all together must be respected. But it could be that the dancing in It Doesn’t Wait is just selected raw material and there’s no dance there at all?
Alive from Off Center, WNET (August 12 and 26).
Laura Dean Dancers and Musicians’ smooth sailing in three dances (Inner Circle, Magnetic, and Sky Light) greatly pleased the outdoor audience at Damrosch Park, though I found myself not differentiating much between one piece and another. Dean’s pristine dances, strongly performed, rinse out the brain nicely, but I’m not convinced that her works provides a very gratifying solution to the problem of making a dance. Generally, I like the contrast between rapid drumming and comparatively slow movement, but, for example, in Inner Circle, the musical patterns, though brilliantly (and tirelessly) executed by Jason Cirker and Matt Spataro seem rudimentary, too predictable to be aurally engaging. The elements Dean plays with in Inner Circle are appealing - the ever-popular spinning,m accompanied by arms dropping upcurved from the shoulder or carving vertical or horizontal S-shapes or reaching out and up in a V; the sharp swing of the hips invitingly presented by the hands dropped to hip level; fierce little step-kicks; strong, challenging shimmying; rolling fists There’s a tight walk with hard chest and the elbows pulled back. Dean’s mystical Rockettes feed in cumulatively, blend into unison or flat, symmetrical patterns, slow down and gently speed up in relation to a steady rhythm, shift in and out of simple canon. And the whirling black skirts scallop in the air with remarkable formal elegance. What bothers me about Dean’s dances is that they’re too damn easy in the calm way they build and relax, stay pretty no matter what. When one activity goes on long enough, we switch to some variation or diversion. Ultimately, we’re pacified, but we’re literally going in circles. If her work is free of causality, she often seems to merely ignore the potential for development in the pieces’ incidental snags, fails to solve the mushy, transitional eddies between segments. When, early in Sky Light, the clustered dancers twist, leap and dark in unison lie a squad of gallant warriors, I want something to happen out of the excitement of that gathering, not merely have the energy redirected. Maybe I resent the overriding primacy of pattern. In one aspect, Dean’s work has a healing quality - its communal forms, its humming, symmetrical patterns, its renewing energies. Everything’s always hunky-dory. But too frequently I think she’s choreographing with a New Age blindfold. I find myself thinking of her as a sort of Penelope, periodically, in the course of a dance, unraveling the threads of her weaving to keep things at an unthreatening level. If so, that’s cheating.
At Lincoln Center Out-of-Doors (August 13 and 14).
Present Tense
April 29
Lance Gries has been dancing with Trisha Brown’s company since 1985 and he’s been enormously valuable in her work. He seems to possess a native insight into her movement and has the capacity to convey the infinite flavors of her choreography. But his performing in Brown’s recent season reached an impossible level. There was so much space within his dancing it seemed as if he were in another kind of time altogether, a place where single seconds tick by infinitely slower but things happen just as quickly. His is the kind of dancing-wise, yet at the very edge of abandon-that makes you wonder what we’re talking about when we talk about the body and what it can achieve, because what we’re seeing so transcends our mundane, quantitative conception of the physical. In (Stain) The Eleventh Hour, presented at The Kitchen, his idea was to spend 11 hours dancing in its black-walled space, lacing its void with the invisible marks of action, habilitation, and memory, and then let the audience in. In the program, he explained, “I have been working in the theater since 10 in the morning. I brought with me some bricks, some phrase material, and some general structural ideas. My job was to ‘stain’ the space through improvisation and repetition of structured activities.” When we arrived, the space already felt broken in and filled with a certain vibrant residue of activity, comfortable and intimate in its disarray. Gries himself was already somewhat worn down. The stage was strewn with occasional bricks, some in a stack, some in a heap. There was a black folding chair that cracked before the evening was done. Gries beset himself with obstacles and obeyed some rules we never learned and didn’t need to. Early on, when he changed from black sweat pants into silky red trousers (maybe that was the official beginning), Gregory Lara began to assist as a kind of timekeeper by quietly putting bricks from the heap into sacks. The occasional scrapes and clinks and sandy crunches made a nice dry accompaniment. When each sack was full Lara dropped it, and Gries instantly stopped whatever he was doing to run and grab it and plank it in the far corner. With nothing fancy and no tricks, Gries’s evening was a meditative, internal one - and remarkably tender throughout. Delicacy and care were inherent in his deep, slow swings, near caresses, slides, crawls, reaches, but he was never fussy or unmanly. Whatever he was up to, he kept coming home to center. The risks he was taking were not about abandon or extravagance, but about reaching from inside himself, allowing his body to achieve its length, and staying true. I don’t understand all the little routines he’s involved in. Why he stands on the chair, or why he steps down, or sits. Why he thoughtfully rearranges a few bricks, or topples one or two. But these rituals have the simplicity of the humble things you do habitually, almost blindly-like kneeling at an alter or dropping your voice at a solemn gathering. He pads around and staggers, balances on some bricks, slowly slides one sideways with his foot. He tucks one brick against his belly as he folds up; it drops with a clunk when he stretches out. He stumbles crossing the plain of bricks with his eyes closed. It’s shocking, painful, makes us flinch, and it happens often throughout the evening. If it’s a penance, it’s also a way of keeping the situation out of his control by making the environment unreliable. And Peter Greenbaum’s superbly imaginative lights are with him all the way. What’s the small pleased smile of his face about? Stepping on the bricks, teetering, pausing, he remains surprisingly unwary, responding to his accidents with resilience. The physical dangers may seem pretty, but, really, we are watching him again and again free himself from fear, or simply refuse to be inhibited. Holding a brick in one hand, with the other in a loose fist, he gently taps his middle, his chest, his forehead as if acknowledging his body’s wakefulness. He draws a chalk shape around himself, and , struggling, head to the ground, he continues drawing. He climbs on the chair, and stands erect, swaying and jiggling slightly. We’re aware of the tiniest inflections of his balance. Seated, he pushes the chair against the sticky, corrugated resistance of the floor. Then he contrasts that with the limber generosity of loosely scoping arms and shoulders. His deep plies go intentionally awry, the weight sinking first into one knee. Gries’s evening was almost monastically bare and strict. Restricting his arms and range, he presented himself almost shyly. Embracing uncertainty, he cut himself loose from whatever we might have expected, to dance with grave dedication and without defense.
At the Kitchen (March 14).
Lance Gries has been dancing with Trisha Brown’s company since 1985 and he’s been enormously valuable in her work. He seems to possess a native insight into her movement and has the capacity to convey the infinite flavors of her choreography. But his performing in Brown’s recent season reached an impossible level. There was so much space within his dancing it seemed as if he were in another kind of time altogether, a place where single seconds tick by infinitely slower but things happen just as quickly. His is the kind of dancing-wise, yet at the very edge of abandon-that makes you wonder what we’re talking about when we talk about the body and what it can achieve, because what we’re seeing so transcends our mundane, quantitative conception of the physical. In (Stain) The Eleventh Hour, presented at The Kitchen, his idea was to spend 11 hours dancing in its black-walled space, lacing its void with the invisible marks of action, habilitation, and memory, and then let the audience in. In the program, he explained, “I have been working in the theater since 10 in the morning. I brought with me some bricks, some phrase material, and some general structural ideas. My job was to ‘stain’ the space through improvisation and repetition of structured activities.” When we arrived, the space already felt broken in and filled with a certain vibrant residue of activity, comfortable and intimate in its disarray. Gries himself was already somewhat worn down. The stage was strewn with occasional bricks, some in a stack, some in a heap. There was a black folding chair that cracked before the evening was done. Gries beset himself with obstacles and obeyed some rules we never learned and didn’t need to. Early on, when he changed from black sweat pants into silky red trousers (maybe that was the official beginning), Gregory Lara began to assist as a kind of timekeeper by quietly putting bricks from the heap into sacks. The occasional scrapes and clinks and sandy crunches made a nice dry accompaniment. When each sack was full Lara dropped it, and Gries instantly stopped whatever he was doing to run and grab it and plank it in the far corner. With nothing fancy and no tricks, Gries’s evening was a meditative, internal one - and remarkably tender throughout. Delicacy and care were inherent in his deep, slow swings, near caresses, slides, crawls, reaches, but he was never fussy or unmanly. Whatever he was up to, he kept coming home to center. The risks he was taking were not about abandon or extravagance, but about reaching from inside himself, allowing his body to achieve its length, and staying true. I don’t understand all the little routines he’s involved in. Why he stands on the chair, or why he steps down, or sits. Why he thoughtfully rearranges a few bricks, or topples one or two. But these rituals have the simplicity of the humble things you do habitually, almost blindly-like kneeling at an alter or dropping your voice at a solemn gathering. He pads around and staggers, balances on some bricks, slowly slides one sideways with his foot. He tucks one brick against his belly as he folds up; it drops with a clunk when he stretches out. He stumbles crossing the plain of bricks with his eyes closed. It’s shocking, painful, makes us flinch, and it happens often throughout the evening. If it’s a penance, it’s also a way of keeping the situation out of his control by making the environment unreliable. And Peter Greenbaum’s superbly imaginative lights are with him all the way. What’s the small pleased smile of his face about? Stepping on the bricks, teetering, pausing, he remains surprisingly unwary, responding to his accidents with resilience. The physical dangers may seem pretty, but, really, we are watching him again and again free himself from fear, or simply refuse to be inhibited. Holding a brick in one hand, with the other in a loose fist, he gently taps his middle, his chest, his forehead as if acknowledging his body’s wakefulness. He draws a chalk shape around himself, and , struggling, head to the ground, he continues drawing. He climbs on the chair, and stands erect, swaying and jiggling slightly. We’re aware of the tiniest inflections of his balance. Seated, he pushes the chair against the sticky, corrugated resistance of the floor. Then he contrasts that with the limber generosity of loosely scoping arms and shoulders. His deep plies go intentionally awry, the weight sinking first into one knee. Gries’s evening was almost monastically bare and strict. Restricting his arms and range, he presented himself almost shyly. Embracing uncertainty, he cut himself loose from whatever we might have expected, to dance with grave dedication and without defense.
At the Kitchen (March 14).
Reeling
November 5
The dancing is clear, unequivocal, rational; the films are poetic, fanciful, gritty. So Lorn MacDougal and Alain Le Razer’s program of animations and film/dance collaborations makes for an often beautiful but weirdly ill-matched evening. Le Razer’s films are about transformation, or rather, their life is in the witty fluidity of anthropomorphic and architectural forms, in the contrasts and inversions of light and darkness. The dancing, exquisitely sharp and agile, is about stasis; eve when abstract, it’s illustrative and referential, nailed to non-movement ideas and hampered by a didactic formality. The films are illustration, yet the image sequences are protean in their surreal, defiant logic. Between the viewer and the whimsical mind of the artist/filmmaker there seem to be no barriers. MacDougal performed with Martha Graham, Phyllis Lamhut, Don Redlich, Lee Connor and others; Le Razer has a more mixed resume: he studied painting and sculpture at L’Ecole des Beaux Arts, animation at the NYU Film Institute, and was a member for several years of Daniel Nagrin’s Workgroup. In Erosion, a black-and-white film from 1979, buildings - ancient, exotic, modern - are filled in and blotted out, eons of construction are buried in crosshatching, bleached away in puddling spills of white light. A blacktop road is laid down over the waste. Ozymandian monuments appear, and blink out. The basic landscape is like the flat-horizoned void that’s home to Krazy Kat. Distillations (1990), dedicated to Lee Connor, strains to distance sentiment. MacDougal emerges from rocking absorption, reaching or arching with a sudden urgency whose immediate sweep seems to leave little residue of feeling. She creeps, pushes backward, thrashes, feels her way with charged fingers. In a film that pans warehouses, trucks, freight cars, she’s leaping near a highway, passing through a garden with bare weeping willow branches hanging in her path. If experience has been rarefied into essences in this piece, too little of the impure source remains to give it flavor. Film and dance segments usually alternate in the new 2 Figures Against, inspired by the political and social changes in Eastern Europe. In the dance, there’s a glum sense of moving onward, and a feeling of impersonality. That this man and this woman represent multitudes gives the dance aspect a kind of schematic coldness. But in the film, neither the complexities of the past nor contradictory levels of experience are forgotten. In drawn images, that are overlaid and gnawed away. emerging from and returning to darkness, figures thrust their arms in protest. A tank swivels its cannon into position on the dancers, then explodes. Fat, official faces in square windows watch like Big Brother. Embracing figures circle with an aura of energy melt together, turn into a bird, and fly out the window. In The Sealed Room (1988), the camera pulls back from a nighttime view out the window to an empty white room in which Le Razer, live, feels his pristine way, while the walls and floor fold and buckle. He strides smoothly in place in Stroll (1990), while a projected landscape of tenements and futuristic buildings and pastel walls passes behind him. Both these works are deft exercises. But the buoyant, spacious, washily colored visuals of Stroll presage the exhilarating lyricism of the 1991 A Shrimp’s Eye View, which has no live action but a delicious familial warmth and levity. A long-legged, pink-and-blue man carries an infant in one hand. His blue hands tenderly massage the child, who floats into a playpen. There are smooth, blobby cars, a plane the baby grabs. Trousers waltz around, a wooden chair rocks, the sleeves of an orange shirt make the kid welcome The space is white and curves without perspective; it’s empty but it feels like home. I want to see MacDougal’s neck stretch out eight feet long. I want her to turn into a car. Le Razer’s flexible, giddy visual imagination makes the constraints of real bodies almost unbearable.
The dancing is clear, unequivocal, rational; the films are poetic, fanciful, gritty. So Lorn MacDougal and Alain Le Razer’s program of animations and film/dance collaborations makes for an often beautiful but weirdly ill-matched evening. Le Razer’s films are about transformation, or rather, their life is in the witty fluidity of anthropomorphic and architectural forms, in the contrasts and inversions of light and darkness. The dancing, exquisitely sharp and agile, is about stasis; eve when abstract, it’s illustrative and referential, nailed to non-movement ideas and hampered by a didactic formality. The films are illustration, yet the image sequences are protean in their surreal, defiant logic. Between the viewer and the whimsical mind of the artist/filmmaker there seem to be no barriers. MacDougal performed with Martha Graham, Phyllis Lamhut, Don Redlich, Lee Connor and others; Le Razer has a more mixed resume: he studied painting and sculpture at L’Ecole des Beaux Arts, animation at the NYU Film Institute, and was a member for several years of Daniel Nagrin’s Workgroup. In Erosion, a black-and-white film from 1979, buildings - ancient, exotic, modern - are filled in and blotted out, eons of construction are buried in crosshatching, bleached away in puddling spills of white light. A blacktop road is laid down over the waste. Ozymandian monuments appear, and blink out. The basic landscape is like the flat-horizoned void that’s home to Krazy Kat. Distillations (1990), dedicated to Lee Connor, strains to distance sentiment. MacDougal emerges from rocking absorption, reaching or arching with a sudden urgency whose immediate sweep seems to leave little residue of feeling. She creeps, pushes backward, thrashes, feels her way with charged fingers. In a film that pans warehouses, trucks, freight cars, she’s leaping near a highway, passing through a garden with bare weeping willow branches hanging in her path. If experience has been rarefied into essences in this piece, too little of the impure source remains to give it flavor. Film and dance segments usually alternate in the new 2 Figures Against, inspired by the political and social changes in Eastern Europe. In the dance, there’s a glum sense of moving onward, and a feeling of impersonality. That this man and this woman represent multitudes gives the dance aspect a kind of schematic coldness. But in the film, neither the complexities of the past nor contradictory levels of experience are forgotten. In drawn images, that are overlaid and gnawed away. emerging from and returning to darkness, figures thrust their arms in protest. A tank swivels its cannon into position on the dancers, then explodes. Fat, official faces in square windows watch like Big Brother. Embracing figures circle with an aura of energy melt together, turn into a bird, and fly out the window. In The Sealed Room (1988), the camera pulls back from a nighttime view out the window to an empty white room in which Le Razer, live, feels his pristine way, while the walls and floor fold and buckle. He strides smoothly in place in Stroll (1990), while a projected landscape of tenements and futuristic buildings and pastel walls passes behind him. Both these works are deft exercises. But the buoyant, spacious, washily colored visuals of Stroll presage the exhilarating lyricism of the 1991 A Shrimp’s Eye View, which has no live action but a delicious familial warmth and levity. A long-legged, pink-and-blue man carries an infant in one hand. His blue hands tenderly massage the child, who floats into a playpen. There are smooth, blobby cars, a plane the baby grabs. Trousers waltz around, a wooden chair rocks, the sleeves of an orange shirt make the kid welcome The space is white and curves without perspective; it’s empty but it feels like home. I want to see MacDougal’s neck stretch out eight feet long. I want her to turn into a car. Le Razer’s flexible, giddy visual imagination makes the constraints of real bodies almost unbearable.
Sound and Fury
March 5
Two skillful recent concerts for me down. Barbara Hofrenning’s triple bill sponsored by Danspace Project at St. Mark’s in-the-Bowery was gleaming and artful but all too facile. Rob Brown’s passionate full-evening piece at P.S. 122, Conversations in a Whisper, went nowhere. What’s the matter? Hofrenning’s Combing the Will was a solo of clever vocalizations dovetailed with eccentric action. Hofrenning herself is elegant self-possessed, and dryly witty, as hopelessly upper-crust as Katharine Hepburn in the ‘30s - classy, and somehow pristine even when she’s acting coolly demented. Bt the piece, like much of what she showed in this concert, was essentially a very highly developed amalgam of theater exercises - virtuosic, perverse, and curiously smug. Under the Rule of Thumb, with a stellar cast - Frank Conversano, Kimberly Flynn, Scott Heron, Christopher Jacobson and Hofrenning - was presented through a Danspace program whereby works premiered in one season are performed again after maturing through successive performances, touring and reworking. It’s a sensible and praiseworthy idea, but Thumb only made me wish I’d seen the first version so I’d know what had altered and progressed in the process. In her group works, Hofrennning pastes together choreographic (and vocal) fragments and non sequiturs in a teasing, collagey and sometimes tumultuous way. But this technique is no challenge to her; instead of waking us to unexpected similarities or contrasts, jogging our perspectives, or making us consider novel relationships, Hofrenning uses this method to organize a glossy entertainment package. At first it seems potentially astonishing, intelligently phrased and paced, composed with a keen and accurate eye, and pleasantly tart. But Hofrenning’s cleverness - her stock in trade - eventually inures us to surprises, and these recent pieces end by eating their own tails. In One Hand Takes From the Other, developed as part of “Working in the Kitchen” and to be performed March 1 and 2, people sit and applaud as one woman screams and hops down the altar steps one at a time. Two men rush and fling themselves across the floor. At an apple-green table, two women rock back in their peach chairs, pull socks from their bosoms and toss them backward. A young woman sets out several crude building models on the floor. Three people slip and stagger and throw themselves around the table in the midst of some drunken drama while the other four periodically applaud some event that’s not happening. Women stamp around in high heels. Conversano, seated, howls along with the singer on a flamenco tape. If some of this is amusing, and some pretends significance, all of it is gratuitous game-playing. This kind of thing stops being fun when it becomes an obvious waste of resources. Hofrenning’s using a Mercedes engine to run a lawnmower. Her admirable control of her material, her ability to vary and freshen it, and to tack bits together, keeps her in familiar territory, where, unfortunately, novelties and game-playing become tiresome and epiphanies are a dime a dozen. She’s always hauling out the whole bag of tricks. I’d give a lot to see her commit herself to a couple of ideas and squeeze them dry. At St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery (February 14 through 17). In Conversations in a Whisper, Ron Brown is struggling with a weight of sexual/emotional material but he hasn’t found quite the appropriate choreographic tools. And, to, his aims are divided - while he’s trying to show something that’s important to him, he also wants to create an effect. For some reason, these aims don’t happen to coincide and, at the moment, he’s better at the effect part. That he’s inherited - from Jennifer Muller - a theatrical but dangerously romanticized vocabulary doesn’t help. It’s hard to get at the truth - whatever it may be - with devalued or counterfeit gestures. Brown’s choreography mingles a fast, assertive, voluptuous style of dancing - at first, the rush of it gives it reason enough for being - with the intimacy and distraction of quasi-ordinary gestures like wiping your mouth or rubbing the corner of your eye. One girl nuzzles her head affectionately under another girl’s armpit. Michael Jahoda takes Brown’s hand in his mouth like a dog with a newspaper. These ”ordinary,” pensive gestures suggest an earthier, more intimate reality than the dancing shows us. The lavish dancing is not, in fact, particularly expressive, though its temperature is calculatedly hot. What really happens happens in the glances, in the touches, in the interstices when the dancing stops. The pervasive “tango attitude,” the air of mingled sexual interest and belligerence, seems mere wish fulfillment. About 40 minutes into Conversations, the piece connects solidly, but only temporarily, in a duet for Brown and Renee Redding Jones that begins with a fast, whirling unison and then breaks into an ill-tempered flood of fierce, ambivalent incidents. Warding off, clutching, cringing, striking out, shoving, recoiling - the flay each other with their rage and need. She wipes his face; they taste each other’s fingers. She wants to be shut of him, but he keeps pursuing. We don’t know what’s biting him. They hold each other’s faces, both unwilling partners in this long, bitter exchange. By the second half, the vigor of the movement no longer seemed sufficient to justify it. I felt that I was watching creatures so caught up, so busy striving to forcibly express an undefined something, that they have no opportunity to experience themselves. And I thought of the wretched girl in the red shoes who couldn’t stop dancing.
At P.S. 122 (February 15 through 17).
Two skillful recent concerts for me down. Barbara Hofrenning’s triple bill sponsored by Danspace Project at St. Mark’s in-the-Bowery was gleaming and artful but all too facile. Rob Brown’s passionate full-evening piece at P.S. 122, Conversations in a Whisper, went nowhere. What’s the matter? Hofrenning’s Combing the Will was a solo of clever vocalizations dovetailed with eccentric action. Hofrenning herself is elegant self-possessed, and dryly witty, as hopelessly upper-crust as Katharine Hepburn in the ‘30s - classy, and somehow pristine even when she’s acting coolly demented. Bt the piece, like much of what she showed in this concert, was essentially a very highly developed amalgam of theater exercises - virtuosic, perverse, and curiously smug. Under the Rule of Thumb, with a stellar cast - Frank Conversano, Kimberly Flynn, Scott Heron, Christopher Jacobson and Hofrenning - was presented through a Danspace program whereby works premiered in one season are performed again after maturing through successive performances, touring and reworking. It’s a sensible and praiseworthy idea, but Thumb only made me wish I’d seen the first version so I’d know what had altered and progressed in the process. In her group works, Hofrennning pastes together choreographic (and vocal) fragments and non sequiturs in a teasing, collagey and sometimes tumultuous way. But this technique is no challenge to her; instead of waking us to unexpected similarities or contrasts, jogging our perspectives, or making us consider novel relationships, Hofrenning uses this method to organize a glossy entertainment package. At first it seems potentially astonishing, intelligently phrased and paced, composed with a keen and accurate eye, and pleasantly tart. But Hofrenning’s cleverness - her stock in trade - eventually inures us to surprises, and these recent pieces end by eating their own tails. In One Hand Takes From the Other, developed as part of “Working in the Kitchen” and to be performed March 1 and 2, people sit and applaud as one woman screams and hops down the altar steps one at a time. Two men rush and fling themselves across the floor. At an apple-green table, two women rock back in their peach chairs, pull socks from their bosoms and toss them backward. A young woman sets out several crude building models on the floor. Three people slip and stagger and throw themselves around the table in the midst of some drunken drama while the other four periodically applaud some event that’s not happening. Women stamp around in high heels. Conversano, seated, howls along with the singer on a flamenco tape. If some of this is amusing, and some pretends significance, all of it is gratuitous game-playing. This kind of thing stops being fun when it becomes an obvious waste of resources. Hofrenning’s using a Mercedes engine to run a lawnmower. Her admirable control of her material, her ability to vary and freshen it, and to tack bits together, keeps her in familiar territory, where, unfortunately, novelties and game-playing become tiresome and epiphanies are a dime a dozen. She’s always hauling out the whole bag of tricks. I’d give a lot to see her commit herself to a couple of ideas and squeeze them dry. At St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery (February 14 through 17). In Conversations in a Whisper, Ron Brown is struggling with a weight of sexual/emotional material but he hasn’t found quite the appropriate choreographic tools. And, to, his aims are divided - while he’s trying to show something that’s important to him, he also wants to create an effect. For some reason, these aims don’t happen to coincide and, at the moment, he’s better at the effect part. That he’s inherited - from Jennifer Muller - a theatrical but dangerously romanticized vocabulary doesn’t help. It’s hard to get at the truth - whatever it may be - with devalued or counterfeit gestures. Brown’s choreography mingles a fast, assertive, voluptuous style of dancing - at first, the rush of it gives it reason enough for being - with the intimacy and distraction of quasi-ordinary gestures like wiping your mouth or rubbing the corner of your eye. One girl nuzzles her head affectionately under another girl’s armpit. Michael Jahoda takes Brown’s hand in his mouth like a dog with a newspaper. These ”ordinary,” pensive gestures suggest an earthier, more intimate reality than the dancing shows us. The lavish dancing is not, in fact, particularly expressive, though its temperature is calculatedly hot. What really happens happens in the glances, in the touches, in the interstices when the dancing stops. The pervasive “tango attitude,” the air of mingled sexual interest and belligerence, seems mere wish fulfillment. About 40 minutes into Conversations, the piece connects solidly, but only temporarily, in a duet for Brown and Renee Redding Jones that begins with a fast, whirling unison and then breaks into an ill-tempered flood of fierce, ambivalent incidents. Warding off, clutching, cringing, striking out, shoving, recoiling - the flay each other with their rage and need. She wipes his face; they taste each other’s fingers. She wants to be shut of him, but he keeps pursuing. We don’t know what’s biting him. They hold each other’s faces, both unwilling partners in this long, bitter exchange. By the second half, the vigor of the movement no longer seemed sufficient to justify it. I felt that I was watching creatures so caught up, so busy striving to forcibly express an undefined something, that they have no opportunity to experience themselves. And I thought of the wretched girl in the red shoes who couldn’t stop dancing.
At P.S. 122 (February 15 through 17).
Spirit Life
March 12
Musicians Warren Smith, Thurman Barker, and Charlie Morrow fill Dance Theater Workshop with percussion and the moans of a ram’s horn for quite a while before the lights go down and Pat Hall-Smith’s Silent Echoes begins. They don’t exactly sanctify the space, but the music they make begins to sound like the place’s natural atmosphere. The sandy rattles, gentle hootings, ululations, and carnival rhythms lighten the spirit without being invasive. Then Hall-Smith enters covered in a red veil and, like a priestess, scatters imaginary seeds from a basket, while making a circuit of the stage. “Ne-hey-iyyy,” she sings, and, with repetitions, her voice grows sharper, more nasal. She sits, dashes imaginary water over her face, and, on the video screen behind her, another Pat Hall-Smith appears, dressed for a 9-to-5 job, busy at an office desk. The live Hall-Smith, with her hair twisted up, wearing a purple skirt and an ornate belt with pink feather bundles dangling, is meantime plunging into a frightening experience of possession. Gripping a branch, she’s pulled around by it like a dowser by a divining rod; she lurches, is dragged to the floor, undulates, arches back, trembles. Suddenly she manages to fling the stick away, runs, and covers her ears, while Morrow’s weird vocalizations seem to pursue her in her flight. Pat Hall-Smith is a powerful, committed performer, but if Silent Echoes seems in some ways too schematic, racked between ritual and drama, it’s because the tensions of the form itself generate a measure of frustration. Hall-Smith’s enactment of a sort of regenerative ceremony, while giving authority to her inner transformations, keeps us at a distance. The flow of her emotional experience must keep yielding to the formal stages of a ritual journey that maintains its own pace. On one level, we witness the impassioned portrayal of a woman who’s harrowed and uplifted and we want to rush it along, yet we must submit to the event’s stately progress. She shivers, shakes, pants, gasps. She flings herself into a split. Her movements are surging, effortful. At one moment, she’s nearly choking or vomiting. Then she’s on all fours, then up on her feet but cramped and bent, then erect but stiff and jerky. She lifts a leg with her hands to heave it into a big step, she twists, screams, falls. On the screen she’s dancing in a field, swaying with the wind. These images are intercut with office procedures, and then she’s in the same field whirling in her business suit, and next her co-workers push papers at her to be typed now, now, now. She’s jumping wildly, jiggling around the conference table, blowing a conch shell. Mara Alper’s excellent video work is crucial to Silent Echoes and is expertly integrated. It’s the video images that place Hall-Smith in the spirit-killing routines of the ordinary world as well as in a visionary one. They open up her experience, graft it onto the only other people we see, and grant those office robots humanity instead of writing them off. With difficulty, two threads of Hall-Smith’s life are melting together. Her dancing shadow is cast upon the video. There’s a waterfall. Hall-Smith’s live gestures curl and soothe, while the musicians make whirring sounds with bull-roarers and gently rattle a cymbal. Her hands move in serpentine ways to stir the air. She seems taller, more lifted. She’s her own woman, even if she’s given herself to another spirit. With elegant, slow writhings and gentle shakes, she takes a branch which is blossoming with feathers and paints the air, sweeps the space with it. She whips it around, whirling and leaping in a fierce purification. And in the video she walks into flames. There are cavernous monster sounds, perhaps the deep, harsh music of a Bunraku chanter. Hall-Smith takes on a martial character with squats and warning gestures, with kicks and slices, with the wheeling arms and pulsing bounds of warrior, bowman, charioteer. In the video, her coworkers (four white men, one Asian woman) cover their faces. Then they’re dancing with her in the field. One man gives her the conch; she puts it to her mouth and blows, and the video dance continues amid flames to a percussive crescendo. Live, Hall-Smith shakes, trembles, shimmies. Before, she seemed closed—the narrow force of her will is a constant in this piece—but now that’s not so. She seems less insistent about who she is, a bit looser, more exuberant, released.
At Dance Theater Workshop (February 21 through 24).
Musicians Warren Smith, Thurman Barker, and Charlie Morrow fill Dance Theater Workshop with percussion and the moans of a ram’s horn for quite a while before the lights go down and Pat Hall-Smith’s Silent Echoes begins. They don’t exactly sanctify the space, but the music they make begins to sound like the place’s natural atmosphere. The sandy rattles, gentle hootings, ululations, and carnival rhythms lighten the spirit without being invasive. Then Hall-Smith enters covered in a red veil and, like a priestess, scatters imaginary seeds from a basket, while making a circuit of the stage. “Ne-hey-iyyy,” she sings, and, with repetitions, her voice grows sharper, more nasal. She sits, dashes imaginary water over her face, and, on the video screen behind her, another Pat Hall-Smith appears, dressed for a 9-to-5 job, busy at an office desk. The live Hall-Smith, with her hair twisted up, wearing a purple skirt and an ornate belt with pink feather bundles dangling, is meantime plunging into a frightening experience of possession. Gripping a branch, she’s pulled around by it like a dowser by a divining rod; she lurches, is dragged to the floor, undulates, arches back, trembles. Suddenly she manages to fling the stick away, runs, and covers her ears, while Morrow’s weird vocalizations seem to pursue her in her flight. Pat Hall-Smith is a powerful, committed performer, but if Silent Echoes seems in some ways too schematic, racked between ritual and drama, it’s because the tensions of the form itself generate a measure of frustration. Hall-Smith’s enactment of a sort of regenerative ceremony, while giving authority to her inner transformations, keeps us at a distance. The flow of her emotional experience must keep yielding to the formal stages of a ritual journey that maintains its own pace. On one level, we witness the impassioned portrayal of a woman who’s harrowed and uplifted and we want to rush it along, yet we must submit to the event’s stately progress. She shivers, shakes, pants, gasps. She flings herself into a split. Her movements are surging, effortful. At one moment, she’s nearly choking or vomiting. Then she’s on all fours, then up on her feet but cramped and bent, then erect but stiff and jerky. She lifts a leg with her hands to heave it into a big step, she twists, screams, falls. On the screen she’s dancing in a field, swaying with the wind. These images are intercut with office procedures, and then she’s in the same field whirling in her business suit, and next her co-workers push papers at her to be typed now, now, now. She’s jumping wildly, jiggling around the conference table, blowing a conch shell. Mara Alper’s excellent video work is crucial to Silent Echoes and is expertly integrated. It’s the video images that place Hall-Smith in the spirit-killing routines of the ordinary world as well as in a visionary one. They open up her experience, graft it onto the only other people we see, and grant those office robots humanity instead of writing them off. With difficulty, two threads of Hall-Smith’s life are melting together. Her dancing shadow is cast upon the video. There’s a waterfall. Hall-Smith’s live gestures curl and soothe, while the musicians make whirring sounds with bull-roarers and gently rattle a cymbal. Her hands move in serpentine ways to stir the air. She seems taller, more lifted. She’s her own woman, even if she’s given herself to another spirit. With elegant, slow writhings and gentle shakes, she takes a branch which is blossoming with feathers and paints the air, sweeps the space with it. She whips it around, whirling and leaping in a fierce purification. And in the video she walks into flames. There are cavernous monster sounds, perhaps the deep, harsh music of a Bunraku chanter. Hall-Smith takes on a martial character with squats and warning gestures, with kicks and slices, with the wheeling arms and pulsing bounds of warrior, bowman, charioteer. In the video, her coworkers (four white men, one Asian woman) cover their faces. Then they’re dancing with her in the field. One man gives her the conch; she puts it to her mouth and blows, and the video dance continues amid flames to a percussive crescendo. Live, Hall-Smith shakes, trembles, shimmies. Before, she seemed closed—the narrow force of her will is a constant in this piece—but now that’s not so. She seems less insistent about who she is, a bit looser, more exuberant, released.
At Dance Theater Workshop (February 21 through 24).
Swan Dive
July 23
If Swan Lake is one of dance’s classical masterpieces, it’s also a big bloated clunker of a ballet. It’s like a garment that’s been remodeled so many times it doesn’t fit anybody. Great performers at its center can lift the ballet to the emotional and imaginative realm where it’s meant to be, but usually what we get is a hodgepodge, a giant terpsichorean circus, and Anthony Dowell’s production for the Royal is one of those. In most any version, there are all kinds of maddening bits of nonsense: like Von Rothbart advising his wicked daughter every other minute in the Act III pas de deux. She’s his daughter, isn’t she? She knows how to seduce a man. And Prince Siegfried is just begging for it anyway. I always wonder, too, about the extra swans in dark, immature plumage who suddenly turn up lakeside for the bad news in Act IV. Where have they been? In this production, updated to the late 19th century, the Prince and Benno still go off to shoot swans with the traditional crossbows. Crossbows? Mightn’t rifles make more sense? The men don’t fire the damn things anyway. We should be grateful, however, that the pull-toy swan cutouts usually yanked across the back of the stage during the overture are absent. The sets and costumes designed by Yolanda Sonnabend are perhaps the production’s most confining and disastrous element. The excitement of the great ensembles is dampened by the lack of space around them. The first act’s autumnal garden is rather lovely, with its huge rickety bronze gates, its cozy arbor, and its bustling activity. The Act III ballroom is something else again—a vast, sleazy, basement nightclub, or the Phantom’s lair. It’s as malevolently colorful as an iridescent oil slick on macadam, someplace lavish and grimy and not amusingly so. The lake acts, II and IV, are veiled and murky, like evocations of swamp scum as designed by some Art Nouveau jeweler. Overhead hangs a huge winglike, black form, an oppressive symbol of Von Rothbart’s domination. The whole thing makes you feel as if you’re trapped in a gloomy, cobwebby attic. The lake is not to be seen in Act II, though there is the gold filigree outline of a supposed chapel in which Von Rothbart (Derek Rencher)—looking like a blond gorilla—lurks (when we can see him more clearly in the same guise in Act IV, he’s actually a heavy-shouldered sort of falcon, no, an owl). In Act IV, the lake becomes barely perceptible—a five-foot puddle with a rock in it. There’s a lot of wonderful and effective byplay developed between incidental characters in Act I—like the boisterous cadets who drink too much—which makes the world of the court seem lively and mundane in the festive style of a Viennese operetta. But we never return to the “real” world again, which throws the ballet perilously off balance. Instead of being a normal fairy-tale place where reality is suddenly invaded by the supernatural and shattered, the ballroom is an instant nightmare. When Von Rothbart rushes in with his huge entourage of black-veiled trolls, nobody seems to think they’re odd, though a few ladies do seem startled by the two creepy Velazquez dwarves whose skull heads he idly fondles. Once Siegfried has been precipitated into the world of the irrational, he hardly surfaces again. His blatant disinterest in the six marriageable princesses (dressed drably alike as no one would who wished to be noticed) is downright rude; his love for Odette may have transformed his inner being, but his brush with dark powers has already blinded and contaminated him. Incidentally, there was much to like as well. For instance, Monica Mason leading the Czardas with partner Guy Niblett; it was immensely satisfying to see a mature performer, no fragile blossom she, allowed to dance with accuracy and vigor, not just mope around as someone’s doddering mother. With his sharp, buoyant cabrioles and kicking runs, their gossipy knottings and unwindings, Nicola Roberts and Simon Rice were deliriously bubbly in Frederick Ashton’s fresh Neapolitan dance in Act III. And both evenings’ teams of dancers in the Act I pas de trios—Deborah Bull, Karen Paisey, and Errol Pickford; Fiona Brockway, Nicola Roberts and Tetsuya Kumakawa—were a delight: the men exuberant in the air, the women clever and precise. The pas de trios has a coherence and freshness that makes it a pleasure in itself, (David Bintley’s subsequent waltz, glittering with elegant symmetries and neat conceits, just seems like filler.) The playful second-night girls (Natalie Wright and Christen Schultz, from the School of American Ballet Summer School) who gaily spin and topple the silly old drunken tutor were also marvelous. At the premiere, Viviana Durante was a forceful, determined Odette/Odile, who contorted into marvelously designed, expressive shapes entirely without expression except for a fixed, passionate moue. She seemed cramped and cold in the role, as if she were trying to nail it down through technique and will alone. Her legs were assertive and brilliant below the knees but were not very alive through their whole length. Since she paid no attention at all to the Prince, it was impossible to believe in the love story. As Odette, she seemed to be a woman who sees an admiring man as a convenient way out of a bad situation. If the scenario were played out, Odile could have been the woman to save him from a passively manipulative schemer. But the Black Swan had no more character than the White, though both were very like his mother, a snooty, manipulative bitch (Genesile { } Rosato) who’s only content was being stroked by her handsome son. As Durante’s Siegfried, Bruce Sansom was charming, innocent, attentive—perhaps slightly reckless but a very nice boy. Zoltan Solymosi, who partnered Darcey Bussell the second night, was more dashing, experienced, very possibly a bit of a rake. Both were excellent, with Solymosi the more commanding presence in the Act II pas de deux. Bussell was lovely in her second act, though she couldn’t wriggle her arms with Durante’s serpentine deftness or do those eloquent little feathery pawings convincingly (in fact, her hands were rather paddly in that sort of animal gesture) But she has an expansive serenity. Touching, responsive, her Odette seems a little lost but has preserved her innocence despite her hard lot working all day as a swan. Bussell’s physical scope is large and her chaste arabesque is generous and pure. She seems almost to sigh when she finishes a round of pirouettes. When she places her hand in the Prince’s to continue her beats, she makes the gesture a tender vow of absolute trust. But her mime has no urgency and is full of empty pauses; it’s as if the Prince were hard of hearing and had to be spoken to very slowly in one-syllable words. As Odile, Bussell shoots her leg right into the air so you know she intends to be very brazen. She’s a sweet seductress, but not much of a vamp, just a good girl trying to be bad, the kind who chokes on her first cigarette. Both Bussell and Durante, despite their technical security, separate their acting from their dancing except for occasional meaningful glances. Whatever few concessions they make to acting happen in the moments in between. And when they’re not busy, the role simply slips off them, as if they’ve quite forgotten who or where they are.
At Metropolitan Opera House (Season July 8 through 20).
If Swan Lake is one of dance’s classical masterpieces, it’s also a big bloated clunker of a ballet. It’s like a garment that’s been remodeled so many times it doesn’t fit anybody. Great performers at its center can lift the ballet to the emotional and imaginative realm where it’s meant to be, but usually what we get is a hodgepodge, a giant terpsichorean circus, and Anthony Dowell’s production for the Royal is one of those. In most any version, there are all kinds of maddening bits of nonsense: like Von Rothbart advising his wicked daughter every other minute in the Act III pas de deux. She’s his daughter, isn’t she? She knows how to seduce a man. And Prince Siegfried is just begging for it anyway. I always wonder, too, about the extra swans in dark, immature plumage who suddenly turn up lakeside for the bad news in Act IV. Where have they been? In this production, updated to the late 19th century, the Prince and Benno still go off to shoot swans with the traditional crossbows. Crossbows? Mightn’t rifles make more sense? The men don’t fire the damn things anyway. We should be grateful, however, that the pull-toy swan cutouts usually yanked across the back of the stage during the overture are absent. The sets and costumes designed by Yolanda Sonnabend are perhaps the production’s most confining and disastrous element. The excitement of the great ensembles is dampened by the lack of space around them. The first act’s autumnal garden is rather lovely, with its huge rickety bronze gates, its cozy arbor, and its bustling activity. The Act III ballroom is something else again—a vast, sleazy, basement nightclub, or the Phantom’s lair. It’s as malevolently colorful as an iridescent oil slick on macadam, someplace lavish and grimy and not amusingly so. The lake acts, II and IV, are veiled and murky, like evocations of swamp scum as designed by some Art Nouveau jeweler. Overhead hangs a huge winglike, black form, an oppressive symbol of Von Rothbart’s domination. The whole thing makes you feel as if you’re trapped in a gloomy, cobwebby attic. The lake is not to be seen in Act II, though there is the gold filigree outline of a supposed chapel in which Von Rothbart (Derek Rencher)—looking like a blond gorilla—lurks (when we can see him more clearly in the same guise in Act IV, he’s actually a heavy-shouldered sort of falcon, no, an owl). In Act IV, the lake becomes barely perceptible—a five-foot puddle with a rock in it. There’s a lot of wonderful and effective byplay developed between incidental characters in Act I—like the boisterous cadets who drink too much—which makes the world of the court seem lively and mundane in the festive style of a Viennese operetta. But we never return to the “real” world again, which throws the ballet perilously off balance. Instead of being a normal fairy-tale place where reality is suddenly invaded by the supernatural and shattered, the ballroom is an instant nightmare. When Von Rothbart rushes in with his huge entourage of black-veiled trolls, nobody seems to think they’re odd, though a few ladies do seem startled by the two creepy Velazquez dwarves whose skull heads he idly fondles. Once Siegfried has been precipitated into the world of the irrational, he hardly surfaces again. His blatant disinterest in the six marriageable princesses (dressed drably alike as no one would who wished to be noticed) is downright rude; his love for Odette may have transformed his inner being, but his brush with dark powers has already blinded and contaminated him. Incidentally, there was much to like as well. For instance, Monica Mason leading the Czardas with partner Guy Niblett; it was immensely satisfying to see a mature performer, no fragile blossom she, allowed to dance with accuracy and vigor, not just mope around as someone’s doddering mother. With his sharp, buoyant cabrioles and kicking runs, their gossipy knottings and unwindings, Nicola Roberts and Simon Rice were deliriously bubbly in Frederick Ashton’s fresh Neapolitan dance in Act III. And both evenings’ teams of dancers in the Act I pas de trios—Deborah Bull, Karen Paisey, and Errol Pickford; Fiona Brockway, Nicola Roberts and Tetsuya Kumakawa—were a delight: the men exuberant in the air, the women clever and precise. The pas de trios has a coherence and freshness that makes it a pleasure in itself, (David Bintley’s subsequent waltz, glittering with elegant symmetries and neat conceits, just seems like filler.) The playful second-night girls (Natalie Wright and Christen Schultz, from the School of American Ballet Summer School) who gaily spin and topple the silly old drunken tutor were also marvelous. At the premiere, Viviana Durante was a forceful, determined Odette/Odile, who contorted into marvelously designed, expressive shapes entirely without expression except for a fixed, passionate moue. She seemed cramped and cold in the role, as if she were trying to nail it down through technique and will alone. Her legs were assertive and brilliant below the knees but were not very alive through their whole length. Since she paid no attention at all to the Prince, it was impossible to believe in the love story. As Odette, she seemed to be a woman who sees an admiring man as a convenient way out of a bad situation. If the scenario were played out, Odile could have been the woman to save him from a passively manipulative schemer. But the Black Swan had no more character than the White, though both were very like his mother, a snooty, manipulative bitch (Genesile { } Rosato) who’s only content was being stroked by her handsome son. As Durante’s Siegfried, Bruce Sansom was charming, innocent, attentive—perhaps slightly reckless but a very nice boy. Zoltan Solymosi, who partnered Darcey Bussell the second night, was more dashing, experienced, very possibly a bit of a rake. Both were excellent, with Solymosi the more commanding presence in the Act II pas de deux. Bussell was lovely in her second act, though she couldn’t wriggle her arms with Durante’s serpentine deftness or do those eloquent little feathery pawings convincingly (in fact, her hands were rather paddly in that sort of animal gesture) But she has an expansive serenity. Touching, responsive, her Odette seems a little lost but has preserved her innocence despite her hard lot working all day as a swan. Bussell’s physical scope is large and her chaste arabesque is generous and pure. She seems almost to sigh when she finishes a round of pirouettes. When she places her hand in the Prince’s to continue her beats, she makes the gesture a tender vow of absolute trust. But her mime has no urgency and is full of empty pauses; it’s as if the Prince were hard of hearing and had to be spoken to very slowly in one-syllable words. As Odile, Bussell shoots her leg right into the air so you know she intends to be very brazen. She’s a sweet seductress, but not much of a vamp, just a good girl trying to be bad, the kind who chokes on her first cigarette. Both Bussell and Durante, despite their technical security, separate their acting from their dancing except for occasional meaningful glances. Whatever few concessions they make to acting happen in the moments in between. And when they’re not busy, the role simply slips off them, as if they’ve quite forgotten who or where they are.
At Metropolitan Opera House (Season July 8 through 20).
Taking Off
December 10
Jennifer Muller has always attracted gorgeous dancers to her standard, but her dances themselves, full of virtuosic and overly clever material, usually deflate midway, snarled in their own glamorized excess and volubility. In the stunted 1978 Lovers (a series of four contrived duets), the dancers are always reaching for the extravagant pose, too preoccupied with amorous calisthenics for there to be any emotional substance. Lovers is all pretty pictures and technical difficulties. But typically irritating in Muller’s work is the aura that pretended feelings cast around the dancing. Emotions are decorative; there’s rarely any commitment to their meaning, so their force peters out before the dancing does. I was sorry to see last year’s RIGHTeous About Passing (on the Left) falter, because, though it goes nowhere, it was headed that way with fluency and some panache. Mingling street dance and “jazz” with her virtuosic vocabulary, Muller creates a neighborhood of cool, sassy, young people who treat one another carelessly. Michael Jahoda as someone just on the very fringe of the shifting cliques has several tough, flashy, altogether spectacular solos, there there’s a kind of blankness to his character. John Brooks is grittier. The other six have a snappy attitude, but Brooks is a man with a history. I’m very partial to Brooks’s performing style, the insight that informs his dash and reach. H’s been with Muller since 1983, and he’s a dancer who almost inevitably justifies his steps and links them into a genuine role. Muller uses him beautifully in a new solo, Regards, to several Tracy Chapman songs, that’s more down to earth than usual, grounded in Brooks’ s characterful performance as a longer who has knocked about and been knocked about. Brooks, face down on the floor, breathing, drags himself forward, stretches, rolls over. There’s a kind of darkness behind his eyes. He seems scarred, but not beaten, someone who has maybe lost the few people dear to him, yet it willing to proceed without a shred of optimism. On the bum, he stalks angrily, slumps, whirls - the tails of his jacket flying out like wings. His gestures are abrupt, his arms shoot out to the side, he crouches, topples, spins in hunched or limping turns. He falls and lies on the ground, trembling with strain. Yet in the third song (“All You Have Is Your Soul”) he stops for a moment, sits, thinks. What to do? Eventually, some racketing distress in him settles down. There’s nothing sweet in the moment, nothing in his situation has improved - but the splinter of ice in his heart may have melted. Brooks’s new Flight School is a fine, clearheaded ensemble work for six, refreshing because it’s never too literal and there’s no hocus-pocus. Amiable and unpressured, the dancers, wearing blue-black tank suits, crew up, swing their arms, and dive off an upstage bench, each in his or her own time. There’s a friendly poolside informality in their gatherings, an eagerness for accomplishment, but no sense of competition and no strict regimentation, though some sequences fall into neat domino patterns. I keep thinking of swimmers (sometimes the dancers thrust themselves forward like swimmers kicking off the pool’s edge, and sometimes they rest like members of a tam waiting their turn), though their arm swings and big leap are indicative of flight, as are the ways a dancer will be lifted into the air, or carried, spread-eagled, over someone’s back. Brooks uses the stage space with an easy formality, reserving the back corner for the preparations for those aerial forays. With the fresh uncomplicatedness of the dancers’ relationships, and the grace with which the movement unfurls, Flight School has an elegant almost Apollonian balance. What a light hand Brooks demonstrates!
At the Joyce Theater (November 19 to December 1).
Jennifer Muller has always attracted gorgeous dancers to her standard, but her dances themselves, full of virtuosic and overly clever material, usually deflate midway, snarled in their own glamorized excess and volubility. In the stunted 1978 Lovers (a series of four contrived duets), the dancers are always reaching for the extravagant pose, too preoccupied with amorous calisthenics for there to be any emotional substance. Lovers is all pretty pictures and technical difficulties. But typically irritating in Muller’s work is the aura that pretended feelings cast around the dancing. Emotions are decorative; there’s rarely any commitment to their meaning, so their force peters out before the dancing does. I was sorry to see last year’s RIGHTeous About Passing (on the Left) falter, because, though it goes nowhere, it was headed that way with fluency and some panache. Mingling street dance and “jazz” with her virtuosic vocabulary, Muller creates a neighborhood of cool, sassy, young people who treat one another carelessly. Michael Jahoda as someone just on the very fringe of the shifting cliques has several tough, flashy, altogether spectacular solos, there there’s a kind of blankness to his character. John Brooks is grittier. The other six have a snappy attitude, but Brooks is a man with a history. I’m very partial to Brooks’s performing style, the insight that informs his dash and reach. H’s been with Muller since 1983, and he’s a dancer who almost inevitably justifies his steps and links them into a genuine role. Muller uses him beautifully in a new solo, Regards, to several Tracy Chapman songs, that’s more down to earth than usual, grounded in Brooks’ s characterful performance as a longer who has knocked about and been knocked about. Brooks, face down on the floor, breathing, drags himself forward, stretches, rolls over. There’s a kind of darkness behind his eyes. He seems scarred, but not beaten, someone who has maybe lost the few people dear to him, yet it willing to proceed without a shred of optimism. On the bum, he stalks angrily, slumps, whirls - the tails of his jacket flying out like wings. His gestures are abrupt, his arms shoot out to the side, he crouches, topples, spins in hunched or limping turns. He falls and lies on the ground, trembling with strain. Yet in the third song (“All You Have Is Your Soul”) he stops for a moment, sits, thinks. What to do? Eventually, some racketing distress in him settles down. There’s nothing sweet in the moment, nothing in his situation has improved - but the splinter of ice in his heart may have melted. Brooks’s new Flight School is a fine, clearheaded ensemble work for six, refreshing because it’s never too literal and there’s no hocus-pocus. Amiable and unpressured, the dancers, wearing blue-black tank suits, crew up, swing their arms, and dive off an upstage bench, each in his or her own time. There’s a friendly poolside informality in their gatherings, an eagerness for accomplishment, but no sense of competition and no strict regimentation, though some sequences fall into neat domino patterns. I keep thinking of swimmers (sometimes the dancers thrust themselves forward like swimmers kicking off the pool’s edge, and sometimes they rest like members of a tam waiting their turn), though their arm swings and big leap are indicative of flight, as are the ways a dancer will be lifted into the air, or carried, spread-eagled, over someone’s back. Brooks uses the stage space with an easy formality, reserving the back corner for the preparations for those aerial forays. With the fresh uncomplicatedness of the dancers’ relationships, and the grace with which the movement unfurls, Flight School has an elegant almost Apollonian balance. What a light hand Brooks demonstrates!
At the Joyce Theater (November 19 to December 1).
The Gospel According to Whim
February 5
Bread to the Bone, a dance and music improvisation series organized by Donna Uchizono and Margarita Guergue that started life upstairs at the Knitting Factory, moved into St. Mark's in-the-Bowery for two nights, with two separate casts. The first night began with a plan, something to hang onto if things didn't click, but when it all ran along quite happily, the ground rules got ditched. There was the audience along one side, the three musicians—Samm Bennett on percussion, Butch Morris on cornet, Hahn Rowe on amplified violin—directly across, and, in between, a three-ring circus of [illegible] trios in separate pools of light. The dancers wear the shapeless togs they're so at home in: Irene Hultman in a green Eagle 82 sweatshirt, Uchizono in a black sweater and printed skirt over tights, David Thomson in orange and black, Bebe Miller—with her impressive mop of gold-tipped dreads—in green and gold undershirts, David Zambrano in really ugly, loose, possibly threadbare, gray cotton pants. Jeremy Nelson, Renee Lemieux, Amy Pivar, and Guergue are just as casual. But really, they look fine, appropriate for the task at hand; it's important that they feel like themselves so that their interactions may be as true as can be. The evening begins warm and easy, with the dancers getting comfortable with each other, taking the measure of their partners. They're not exactly “performing” in the usual sense, though they're subject to the audience's critical eye. They can ignore us, and sometimes that may be important to their concentration, but they may also—as they [illegible] We're not a neutral crowd that must be won over; we're like the guys in the bullpen, potential players. Maybe I'm overstating the sense of connection, but we feel like members of the same community. No one knows what's going to happen. Any long improvisation is riddled with idling, with fumbling, with dancers working at cross purposes—so no one expects a triumphant display. What we're looking for is responsiveness, spontaneity, invention, honesty, impetuousness, humor—dancing that's unpredictable, that surprises the dancers as well as the audience, and is entirely of the present moment. Dance improvisation rarely exhibits the extended virtuosity musicians are capable of, but then dancers are dealing with a more complex and confusing instrument, the whole body, in an untrustworthy moment environment—one's that's constantly in flux going in myriad directions. The dancers' task is [illegible] who, listening with the skin, staying in touch, and the session's complexion can change anytime. Anybody's great idea can be circumvented in an instant. But having such fine, attentive musicians establishing a kind of ground and feeding in their own ideas helps to hold things together, and also seems to keep the dancing from getting introverted or too brainy. Nelson slides into Pivar and knocks her down. Thomson, Miller, and Hultman slither around. Zambrano's feet flick and tease like a switchblade in the hands of a nervous punk. He embraces a collapsed Nelson while they knot their legs together in a sneaky, trip-up maneuver. Howls and harsh cries come form Bennett; Rowe's hunched over the string of his amped violin; creamy sweet, muted tones issue from Morris's horn. Guergue, Uchizono, and Lemieux swoon together. Nelson, Pivar, and Zambrano rumble, and Pivar gets allover shivers. Most engagements are brief, fickle. Uchizono and Guergue do some galumphing skips. Thomson and Hultman jump together, bumping chests, again and again, laughing and sometimes getting knocked down. Miller could nose in, but she's got the sense to keep out of the fracas. Things quiet down, the lights brighten, and the dancers confer and regroup or, rather, ungroup. From here on, everything up for grabs. What happens is playful, but it's not about game playing. The dancers talk, mutter, or give one another instructions if they need to. They know that in a pinch someone, somehow, will save them. Probably. They have the constant opportunity to initiate relationships or detach from them with no blame. Thomson tangles with Zambrano in some whirling aerial roughhouse that dribbles off into a light, offhand kick in the behind. Zambrano's mischievousness and Thomsons's fiery delight in a challenge become identified as elements we can count on. Four dancers disappear, and things get dreamy. Pivar and Lemieux swing and turn with dizzy lyricism. Several people run around the space, then four are crouched and bouncing. They split into pairs: Uchizono and Nelson collapse, Zambrano and Hultman crash. Zambrano and Miller dance a duet of little kicks, and a bit later he's doing bumps and grinds and shaking his butt with the power of a jackhammer. Uchizono breaks into a long, gleeful riff of her own—stamping, punching, snapping her head, shaking her skirt in a frenzy. Most everybody's lying in a slowly moving heap in quiet darkness pierced by the low call of Morris's cornet. Guergue gets an ankle lock on Hultman's head—they're red-faced and sweaty now—and Thomson drags them both away. Zambrano gently plops Lemieux into an audience member's lap. Thomson and Guergue clown in social dance position, and Lemieux dances with another member of the audience—dancer Nikki Castro. Pivar moves with sharp, slicing limbs; Thomson, with a vaguely giraffe-like saunter, tracks her. When Zambrano accidentally bangs his head in a somersault, Uchizono and Miller come to the rescue and haul him off. They're still dancing quietly when Bennett starts dismantling his drum set piecemeal. And dropping metal objects on the floor. I guess that's a cue. No one has forgotten that necessities like food and shelter are in short supply and a new war is underway. But for this evening we're part of an ideal world where dancers participate in a brave, generous, freewheeling model of cooperation that allows, and encourages, their independence.
At Danspace Project St Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery (January 18 and 19).
Bread to the Bone, a dance and music improvisation series organized by Donna Uchizono and Margarita Guergue that started life upstairs at the Knitting Factory, moved into St. Mark's in-the-Bowery for two nights, with two separate casts. The first night began with a plan, something to hang onto if things didn't click, but when it all ran along quite happily, the ground rules got ditched. There was the audience along one side, the three musicians—Samm Bennett on percussion, Butch Morris on cornet, Hahn Rowe on amplified violin—directly across, and, in between, a three-ring circus of [illegible] trios in separate pools of light. The dancers wear the shapeless togs they're so at home in: Irene Hultman in a green Eagle 82 sweatshirt, Uchizono in a black sweater and printed skirt over tights, David Thomson in orange and black, Bebe Miller—with her impressive mop of gold-tipped dreads—in green and gold undershirts, David Zambrano in really ugly, loose, possibly threadbare, gray cotton pants. Jeremy Nelson, Renee Lemieux, Amy Pivar, and Guergue are just as casual. But really, they look fine, appropriate for the task at hand; it's important that they feel like themselves so that their interactions may be as true as can be. The evening begins warm and easy, with the dancers getting comfortable with each other, taking the measure of their partners. They're not exactly “performing” in the usual sense, though they're subject to the audience's critical eye. They can ignore us, and sometimes that may be important to their concentration, but they may also—as they [illegible] We're not a neutral crowd that must be won over; we're like the guys in the bullpen, potential players. Maybe I'm overstating the sense of connection, but we feel like members of the same community. No one knows what's going to happen. Any long improvisation is riddled with idling, with fumbling, with dancers working at cross purposes—so no one expects a triumphant display. What we're looking for is responsiveness, spontaneity, invention, honesty, impetuousness, humor—dancing that's unpredictable, that surprises the dancers as well as the audience, and is entirely of the present moment. Dance improvisation rarely exhibits the extended virtuosity musicians are capable of, but then dancers are dealing with a more complex and confusing instrument, the whole body, in an untrustworthy moment environment—one's that's constantly in flux going in myriad directions. The dancers' task is [illegible] who, listening with the skin, staying in touch, and the session's complexion can change anytime. Anybody's great idea can be circumvented in an instant. But having such fine, attentive musicians establishing a kind of ground and feeding in their own ideas helps to hold things together, and also seems to keep the dancing from getting introverted or too brainy. Nelson slides into Pivar and knocks her down. Thomson, Miller, and Hultman slither around. Zambrano's feet flick and tease like a switchblade in the hands of a nervous punk. He embraces a collapsed Nelson while they knot their legs together in a sneaky, trip-up maneuver. Howls and harsh cries come form Bennett; Rowe's hunched over the string of his amped violin; creamy sweet, muted tones issue from Morris's horn. Guergue, Uchizono, and Lemieux swoon together. Nelson, Pivar, and Zambrano rumble, and Pivar gets allover shivers. Most engagements are brief, fickle. Uchizono and Guergue do some galumphing skips. Thomson and Hultman jump together, bumping chests, again and again, laughing and sometimes getting knocked down. Miller could nose in, but she's got the sense to keep out of the fracas. Things quiet down, the lights brighten, and the dancers confer and regroup or, rather, ungroup. From here on, everything up for grabs. What happens is playful, but it's not about game playing. The dancers talk, mutter, or give one another instructions if they need to. They know that in a pinch someone, somehow, will save them. Probably. They have the constant opportunity to initiate relationships or detach from them with no blame. Thomson tangles with Zambrano in some whirling aerial roughhouse that dribbles off into a light, offhand kick in the behind. Zambrano's mischievousness and Thomsons's fiery delight in a challenge become identified as elements we can count on. Four dancers disappear, and things get dreamy. Pivar and Lemieux swing and turn with dizzy lyricism. Several people run around the space, then four are crouched and bouncing. They split into pairs: Uchizono and Nelson collapse, Zambrano and Hultman crash. Zambrano and Miller dance a duet of little kicks, and a bit later he's doing bumps and grinds and shaking his butt with the power of a jackhammer. Uchizono breaks into a long, gleeful riff of her own—stamping, punching, snapping her head, shaking her skirt in a frenzy. Most everybody's lying in a slowly moving heap in quiet darkness pierced by the low call of Morris's cornet. Guergue gets an ankle lock on Hultman's head—they're red-faced and sweaty now—and Thomson drags them both away. Zambrano gently plops Lemieux into an audience member's lap. Thomson and Guergue clown in social dance position, and Lemieux dances with another member of the audience—dancer Nikki Castro. Pivar moves with sharp, slicing limbs; Thomson, with a vaguely giraffe-like saunter, tracks her. When Zambrano accidentally bangs his head in a somersault, Uchizono and Miller come to the rescue and haul him off. They're still dancing quietly when Bennett starts dismantling his drum set piecemeal. And dropping metal objects on the floor. I guess that's a cue. No one has forgotten that necessities like food and shelter are in short supply and a new war is underway. But for this evening we're part of an ideal world where dancers participate in a brave, generous, freewheeling model of cooperation that allows, and encourages, their independence.
At Danspace Project St Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery (January 18 and 19).
Tony Scopino
March 12
The dancer, Tony Scopino, who co-founded Manhattan Tap five years ago and danced with Gail Conrad for six years before that, died March 12 of AIDS. Rambunctious and charming onstage, he came across as the smart and friendly kind of guy who might play the hero’s sidekick in a ‘50s movie - but he could lay down taps with a passion. “He was so much fun to be onstage with,” says Heather Cornell, co-artistic director of Manhattan Tap, “and solid as a rock. He was the person you could always call.” When Scopino became too ill to perform, just a few months ago, his pals couldn’t bear to get another tapper to fill in; they replaced him with a sax player. What a loss.
The dancer, Tony Scopino, who co-founded Manhattan Tap five years ago and danced with Gail Conrad for six years before that, died March 12 of AIDS. Rambunctious and charming onstage, he came across as the smart and friendly kind of guy who might play the hero’s sidekick in a ‘50s movie - but he could lay down taps with a passion. “He was so much fun to be onstage with,” says Heather Cornell, co-artistic director of Manhattan Tap, “and solid as a rock. He was the person you could always call.” When Scopino became too ill to perform, just a few months ago, his pals couldn’t bear to get another tapper to fill in; they replaced him with a sax player. What a loss.
Tough Love
January 22
Looking at Karen Heifetz's brief new solo, Barren Limbs, set to an excerpt from Vivaldi's The Four Seasons, I wonder why she's dissipating whatever drama there may be in the slow, controlled movements that sweep around, stretch her, and warp her torso with tension. I wonder why the movement seems so tame, even curtailed. When she reaches out, for example, her arm already contains the fatal knowledge that it will not find what it seeks. the intention of the gesture is flawed, false, from the beginning. So there can be no surprise, no real disappointment. Too much of Amos Pinhasi's What the Sand Told (1986), a duet for himself and Márgolit Rubin-Beery, set to the endless crashing of waves, is dreamy, solemn, and dynamically flat. In one of the rare moments that does not seem foretold, Rubin-Beery is best, squatting, turned away from us, slashing her arms in the air. There's nothing routine in the way she does it; it's not an illustration or a memory but a live moment of frustration, anger, whatever, in which she's trying to make something happen. She does not yet know the future; nothing's settled; she's still a player. She expects what she's doing to be effective. The firm way she fulfills the action, the urgent and varying dynamics she reveals in the moment make it compelling. She's not showing us one large moment with one feeling, all conflicts resolved, but a comment packed with contending emotions. But I don't know what meaning Pinhasi intends in her sketch: I hope that she's not just being a tree in the wind. Dia Center for the Arts (January 10 and 11). I was only able to stay for half of the concert that prompted these thoughts. But they were aggravated by a bitter, comedic performance of solo and duet pieces—part of a work-in-progress, Full Moon Over Altoona---by Paul Rajeckas and Neil Intraub that were anything but vague, dealing with weird or painful situations—illness, fixation, sexual shame, breaking up—inexplicit and precise physical and verbal terms. These concise but complex pieces circle their subjects from several perspectives, but never lose direction. I felt that Rajeckas and Intraub's material had been argued out and stripped down. I didn't wind up wondering what they meant or thinking they should have gone further. I wish Pinhasi's and Heifetz's dances seemed to have undergone as stringent a process, and been similarly flayed on their way to completion. They need to be made of sterner stuff.
At Theater Club Funambules (January 10 and 17).
Looking at Karen Heifetz's brief new solo, Barren Limbs, set to an excerpt from Vivaldi's The Four Seasons, I wonder why she's dissipating whatever drama there may be in the slow, controlled movements that sweep around, stretch her, and warp her torso with tension. I wonder why the movement seems so tame, even curtailed. When she reaches out, for example, her arm already contains the fatal knowledge that it will not find what it seeks. the intention of the gesture is flawed, false, from the beginning. So there can be no surprise, no real disappointment. Too much of Amos Pinhasi's What the Sand Told (1986), a duet for himself and Márgolit Rubin-Beery, set to the endless crashing of waves, is dreamy, solemn, and dynamically flat. In one of the rare moments that does not seem foretold, Rubin-Beery is best, squatting, turned away from us, slashing her arms in the air. There's nothing routine in the way she does it; it's not an illustration or a memory but a live moment of frustration, anger, whatever, in which she's trying to make something happen. She does not yet know the future; nothing's settled; she's still a player. She expects what she's doing to be effective. The firm way she fulfills the action, the urgent and varying dynamics she reveals in the moment make it compelling. She's not showing us one large moment with one feeling, all conflicts resolved, but a comment packed with contending emotions. But I don't know what meaning Pinhasi intends in her sketch: I hope that she's not just being a tree in the wind. Dia Center for the Arts (January 10 and 11). I was only able to stay for half of the concert that prompted these thoughts. But they were aggravated by a bitter, comedic performance of solo and duet pieces—part of a work-in-progress, Full Moon Over Altoona---by Paul Rajeckas and Neil Intraub that were anything but vague, dealing with weird or painful situations—illness, fixation, sexual shame, breaking up—inexplicit and precise physical and verbal terms. These concise but complex pieces circle their subjects from several perspectives, but never lose direction. I felt that Rajeckas and Intraub's material had been argued out and stripped down. I didn't wind up wondering what they meant or thinking they should have gone further. I wish Pinhasi's and Heifetz's dances seemed to have undergone as stringent a process, and been similarly flayed on their way to completion. They need to be made of sterner stuff.
At Theater Club Funambules (January 10 and 17).
Tripping
October 22
Jean Claude Gallotta’s Les Mysteres de Subal (1990) isn’t a particularly strong work, yet it’s very likable and rather sentimental. Still based in Grenoble, he’s surrendered the direction of its Maison de Culture. Gallotta declares Subal “a tribute to travelers everywhere, from the sailor at port of call to the dreamer who travels inside his head.” It partakes of Gallotta’s affection for illusion or benign deception and his liking for anthropological make-believe and exoticism. Like many of his pieces, it celebrates bodily appetites, and emotional, sexual relationships in their peculiar quai-familial and tribal forms, though, as is often the case, Gallotta himself impishly hovers around the edges (muttering into a hand mike) - a skittish, ambivalent participant who gingerly puts one toe in now and then. Subal is described in the program as a sequence of 21 whimsical and accurately uninformative episodes that might well have appealed to Erik Satie. It’s set somewhere charmingly seedy, and mistily lit with subdued but nightclubby garishness in green and magenta. The men are garbed like companionable pirate beachcombers, and the women have a gypsyish air with their independent manners and their flouncing, kilt-like skirts. There have been some changes in the company since I saw it last, and now there are two tall skinny fellows with dark, curly hair who could maybe pass for Gallotta and help keep his identity a source of modest confusion. Henry Torgue and Serge Houppin’s excellent score may be delicately captivating or strident, and often evokes a nostalgic soupiness, with sweet longing hovering in long Mantovani chords. Houppin, in short pants and a tam, plays his electronic keyboard at the edge of the proscenium. The main features of Jean-Yves Langlais’s wonderful set - though it’s difficult to see all its details clearly - are a long, lacquer-red table and an open ring of tall posts, suggesting totems or whirligigs, adorned with sculpted storybook scenes in bright colors, a suggestion of myth derived from the toy box. We’re in the world of Dr. Doolittle and Surabaya Johnny. Subal’s a queer circus of the ordinary, featuring show-off acts that involve no remarkable feats. The dancers stagger around hooked to chars by their ankles. They hold pink plastic cups in their teeth like pig snouts. They rush diagonally, and vault into lifts in which the women are held by the crotch. As the table is turned on its side, or upside down, the women walk its edge as if it were a balance beam. Men and women gleefully slide on their bellies atop the long table, and when the men telescope into a daisy chain the women pry them apart, borrow their caps, and matter-of-factly caress their genitals through their pants. Standing together, the men arch backward and spill into a pileup; the women caress their faces and stick their noses into the men’s open mouths in a ritual act of discomfiting intimacy. Gallotta’s vulgarity is always tactile, warm, filled with curiosity. A man in a white dust mask begins an erotic duet with Deborah Salmirs, but first he puts a mask on her too, though nothing could make a Gallotta piece seem hygienic. A bald man leads and supports a thin, curly-haired man who’s blindfolded and wearing a pink pointe shoes in a slow, thoughtful promenade. Ratty, bearded Robert Seyfried - a Gallotta old-timer - rudely imitating he shakes and wiggles of the preceding mambo, has an endless exasperating laughing fit. But when he collapses in a crise, everybody fusses over him and in their fumbling they haul the wrong guy onto the table. Then, in a marvelously silly section that’s worth the whole piece, the women turn their attention to Seyfried. They peel his clothes off and give him a loincloth of lettuce - something green and leafy anyway - in which he does an oafish hula. They coyly wave and roll about. They smile, run, make seductive moues; completely adorable, he leaps, like a paunchy gazelle, after them. God’s gift to women, he nuzzles whomever he grabs. When they al sit at the edge of the table, he knocks them gently backward with his wide-stretched arms. He poses, sticking out his belly, which they find irresistibly kissable. Despite Gallotta’s penchant for what’s fantastic and playful, emotionally he plunges for the sweat and flab of reality. He can imagine loving someone imperfect without a shred of embarrassment. But with its high colors and shabby, beatnik charm Subal is still a kind of nursery voyage. A child’s voice keeps whispering in Gallotta’s ear.
Festival International de Nouvelle Danse, Montreal Canada (October 1 and 2).
Jean Claude Gallotta’s Les Mysteres de Subal (1990) isn’t a particularly strong work, yet it’s very likable and rather sentimental. Still based in Grenoble, he’s surrendered the direction of its Maison de Culture. Gallotta declares Subal “a tribute to travelers everywhere, from the sailor at port of call to the dreamer who travels inside his head.” It partakes of Gallotta’s affection for illusion or benign deception and his liking for anthropological make-believe and exoticism. Like many of his pieces, it celebrates bodily appetites, and emotional, sexual relationships in their peculiar quai-familial and tribal forms, though, as is often the case, Gallotta himself impishly hovers around the edges (muttering into a hand mike) - a skittish, ambivalent participant who gingerly puts one toe in now and then. Subal is described in the program as a sequence of 21 whimsical and accurately uninformative episodes that might well have appealed to Erik Satie. It’s set somewhere charmingly seedy, and mistily lit with subdued but nightclubby garishness in green and magenta. The men are garbed like companionable pirate beachcombers, and the women have a gypsyish air with their independent manners and their flouncing, kilt-like skirts. There have been some changes in the company since I saw it last, and now there are two tall skinny fellows with dark, curly hair who could maybe pass for Gallotta and help keep his identity a source of modest confusion. Henry Torgue and Serge Houppin’s excellent score may be delicately captivating or strident, and often evokes a nostalgic soupiness, with sweet longing hovering in long Mantovani chords. Houppin, in short pants and a tam, plays his electronic keyboard at the edge of the proscenium. The main features of Jean-Yves Langlais’s wonderful set - though it’s difficult to see all its details clearly - are a long, lacquer-red table and an open ring of tall posts, suggesting totems or whirligigs, adorned with sculpted storybook scenes in bright colors, a suggestion of myth derived from the toy box. We’re in the world of Dr. Doolittle and Surabaya Johnny. Subal’s a queer circus of the ordinary, featuring show-off acts that involve no remarkable feats. The dancers stagger around hooked to chars by their ankles. They hold pink plastic cups in their teeth like pig snouts. They rush diagonally, and vault into lifts in which the women are held by the crotch. As the table is turned on its side, or upside down, the women walk its edge as if it were a balance beam. Men and women gleefully slide on their bellies atop the long table, and when the men telescope into a daisy chain the women pry them apart, borrow their caps, and matter-of-factly caress their genitals through their pants. Standing together, the men arch backward and spill into a pileup; the women caress their faces and stick their noses into the men’s open mouths in a ritual act of discomfiting intimacy. Gallotta’s vulgarity is always tactile, warm, filled with curiosity. A man in a white dust mask begins an erotic duet with Deborah Salmirs, but first he puts a mask on her too, though nothing could make a Gallotta piece seem hygienic. A bald man leads and supports a thin, curly-haired man who’s blindfolded and wearing a pink pointe shoes in a slow, thoughtful promenade. Ratty, bearded Robert Seyfried - a Gallotta old-timer - rudely imitating he shakes and wiggles of the preceding mambo, has an endless exasperating laughing fit. But when he collapses in a crise, everybody fusses over him and in their fumbling they haul the wrong guy onto the table. Then, in a marvelously silly section that’s worth the whole piece, the women turn their attention to Seyfried. They peel his clothes off and give him a loincloth of lettuce - something green and leafy anyway - in which he does an oafish hula. They coyly wave and roll about. They smile, run, make seductive moues; completely adorable, he leaps, like a paunchy gazelle, after them. God’s gift to women, he nuzzles whomever he grabs. When they al sit at the edge of the table, he knocks them gently backward with his wide-stretched arms. He poses, sticking out his belly, which they find irresistibly kissable. Despite Gallotta’s penchant for what’s fantastic and playful, emotionally he plunges for the sweat and flab of reality. He can imagine loving someone imperfect without a shred of embarrassment. But with its high colors and shabby, beatnik charm Subal is still a kind of nursery voyage. A child’s voice keeps whispering in Gallotta’s ear.
Festival International de Nouvelle Danse, Montreal Canada (October 1 and 2).
Tug of War
April 16
At the Downtown Art Co. on East 4th Street, there’s not much leeway on the square stage; brick walls press directly on its sides. It feels as exposed as a boxing ring. This works fine for Up, the newest and most tightly wrought of four works presented by Hilary Easton. Set to music by David Van Tieghem, Up is a dance for two couples - Nancy Sakamoto, Scot Willingham, Eric Diamond, and Barrie Raffel - in changing combinations. Concerned with pulling and shoving, obstinacy and persistence, bolstering and collapsing, it starts out as a kind of nagging exercise in willfulness, but quickly forges indissoluble links of physical obligation and becomes inevitable without becoming predictable. Willingham and Sakamoto are up first, while the second couple rests against a wall. Pushing, pressing, clutching, tumbling, moving in and out of sync with a sinewy elasticity, they’re tough and reluctant. Periodically, they try to involve Diamond and Raffel by pulling them, or yanking them on by the legs, but, initially, these maneuvers fail against the pair’s softly, slippery resistance.
I like this dance’s muscular coils, the cold-eyed formality of its structure. When Willingham and Sakamoto finally draw the others in, the dance becomes a slowly snowballing business of grappling and collapsing, of briefly resting, of bolstering partners who deflate and give way when left alone. Their entanglements get tougher, in the way a wad of gum gets denser and less pliable when chewed too long. These saggings and proppings and optimistic pulling-ups, these departures and separations that don’t quite happen, knot the dancers together and transform into grudging waves of surging energy that build into up-and-over-the–shoulder lifts. The sensuous, recalcitrant, even sullen style of the interactions has a weird, caring charm, a kind of blunt responsibility, a quality of commitment that is unquestioned. These aren’t happy bondings, but I wonder if in coping with the sufferings of friends with AIDS, we’ve learned not to let go of one another lightly. We may hate the reasons why we are so bound together, but the necessity of hanging together is undeniable.
At Downtown Art Co. (March 28 through 30).
At the Downtown Art Co. on East 4th Street, there’s not much leeway on the square stage; brick walls press directly on its sides. It feels as exposed as a boxing ring. This works fine for Up, the newest and most tightly wrought of four works presented by Hilary Easton. Set to music by David Van Tieghem, Up is a dance for two couples - Nancy Sakamoto, Scot Willingham, Eric Diamond, and Barrie Raffel - in changing combinations. Concerned with pulling and shoving, obstinacy and persistence, bolstering and collapsing, it starts out as a kind of nagging exercise in willfulness, but quickly forges indissoluble links of physical obligation and becomes inevitable without becoming predictable. Willingham and Sakamoto are up first, while the second couple rests against a wall. Pushing, pressing, clutching, tumbling, moving in and out of sync with a sinewy elasticity, they’re tough and reluctant. Periodically, they try to involve Diamond and Raffel by pulling them, or yanking them on by the legs, but, initially, these maneuvers fail against the pair’s softly, slippery resistance.
I like this dance’s muscular coils, the cold-eyed formality of its structure. When Willingham and Sakamoto finally draw the others in, the dance becomes a slowly snowballing business of grappling and collapsing, of briefly resting, of bolstering partners who deflate and give way when left alone. Their entanglements get tougher, in the way a wad of gum gets denser and less pliable when chewed too long. These saggings and proppings and optimistic pulling-ups, these departures and separations that don’t quite happen, knot the dancers together and transform into grudging waves of surging energy that build into up-and-over-the–shoulder lifts. The sensuous, recalcitrant, even sullen style of the interactions has a weird, caring charm, a kind of blunt responsibility, a quality of commitment that is unquestioned. These aren’t happy bondings, but I wonder if in coping with the sufferings of friends with AIDS, we’ve learned not to let go of one another lightly. We may hate the reasons why we are so bound together, but the necessity of hanging together is undeniable.
At Downtown Art Co. (March 28 through 30).
Wet Dream
July 2
I almost saw La Nit, a raucous, bawdy, if rather harmless production by Els Comediants—a 20-year-old Catalan street theatre/music collective whose members live communally. At the beginning, a guy in a starry coat danced with a warmly illuminated, floating lunar sphere. Then, the company—in black stocking masks with white ears and noses—hauled a glittering net out of a carton, and as they stretched it out and raised it over the audience it captured my glasses and kept them hovering 20 or 30 feet overhead for the entire show. So practically all I saw was the organized confusion of brightly colored blobs moving about while loud voices shouted to one another, mostly in Catalan.
More than Els Comediants’ brusquely earthy comic material, I was partial to the poetic visuals that, at their best, had some of the dreamlike quality of Winsor McCay’s turn-of-the-century cartoon, Little Nemo in Slumberland. I could make out, for example, through the telescopic pinhole of my fist, a giant floating moon-face, with rolling eyes and pursed mouth that puffed out white balloons, which were caught by a woman and popped by a white figure whose body, like a smooth Michelin man, inflated hugely. I liked that best, but have been accused of liking whatever was really big.
If Els Comediants’ excellent performers are essentially clowns, the actors and musicians of the 10-year-old, all-male, Barcelona based troupe La Fura dels Baus seem more like dangerous and maniacal hoodlums. Amid a nervous and exuberant sold-out audience of 500 each night at Kaufman-Astoria Studios, their Suz/o/Suz mingles violence and tenderness in a barbaric initiation that climaxes in a water fight. I like how directly Fura sets up the situation. The lights black out so that audience know to be afraid, be very afraid. As lights come up, one by one, half a dozen eccentric, metal kinetic sculptures rigged to clang and rattle chime in with their clattery music. So you know you’d better keep the eyes in the back of your head open and that these guys’ wits are sharp.
Suz/o/Suz is not nearly so scary and unpredictable as Tier Mon, which I saw in Zagreb in spring 1990, but it’s a much messier piece—with colored powders and sheep entrails flying through the air (it was in the contract that the meat, which the cast rips with their teeth, had to be fresh), shreds of lettuce and watermelon, and buckets of water leaving the floor strewn with crud. One guy came seriously prepared in a yellow raincoat, goggles, and a helmet. For the rest of us, no way you didn’t get at least a little wet. The fire department, with its rigid safety rules, surprisingly permitted Fura to do all their usual pyrotechnical effects, and determined, after the first night, that the fire truck parked right outside was really not needed. Accompanied by powerfully, crashing music, the snarling, gladiatorial face-offs illuminate an aggressive, rebellious, but double-edged masculinity that’s almost as eager for slavish submission as for dominance. However garish the contests, to yield is sufficient, slaughter is not required.
Suz/o/Suz is filled with savagely beautiful moment, like the men prowling the overhead grid in jockstraps, white shirts, and ties, and then descending, one at a time, on knotted ropes to the floor where they discard their few civilized accoutrements. Or a chest beating flour fight from rushing metal wagons. Or two men solemnly facing each other with blazing standards. Or the initiates flailing in harnesses dangling from the tops of steel towers of rickety scaffolding. The hushed section for two naked men, each curled like a fetus in his own huge water tank, while their attendants tend to them and yearn for contact with the, is complex and magical. The attendants poke their poles in, touching or moving the immersed bodies, then suck the blunt end that touched flesh. They press against the glass, plunge into the water themselves, sending it heaving over the top. When the man/infants emerge, all the denizens get delirious, racing around the space in sloshing, mobile bathtubs, emptying the tanks through fat hoses so the water gushes forth in a world-class pissing contest.
The glorified violence and coarseness of La Fura dels Baus is appalling and thrilling. The perils of being trampled by rogues or splattered with animal guts seem insignificant against the legitimate excitement of Fura’s brute physical vigor and freedom from social rules that permit only a narrow and much-simplified range of human expression. Fura’s pieces force us to experience the logic the most degraded behavior, and express, in part, an unconditional taste for life no matter how ugly or humiliating.
At Battery Park City, South Garden (June 13 through 17).
I almost saw La Nit, a raucous, bawdy, if rather harmless production by Els Comediants—a 20-year-old Catalan street theatre/music collective whose members live communally. At the beginning, a guy in a starry coat danced with a warmly illuminated, floating lunar sphere. Then, the company—in black stocking masks with white ears and noses—hauled a glittering net out of a carton, and as they stretched it out and raised it over the audience it captured my glasses and kept them hovering 20 or 30 feet overhead for the entire show. So practically all I saw was the organized confusion of brightly colored blobs moving about while loud voices shouted to one another, mostly in Catalan.
More than Els Comediants’ brusquely earthy comic material, I was partial to the poetic visuals that, at their best, had some of the dreamlike quality of Winsor McCay’s turn-of-the-century cartoon, Little Nemo in Slumberland. I could make out, for example, through the telescopic pinhole of my fist, a giant floating moon-face, with rolling eyes and pursed mouth that puffed out white balloons, which were caught by a woman and popped by a white figure whose body, like a smooth Michelin man, inflated hugely. I liked that best, but have been accused of liking whatever was really big.
If Els Comediants’ excellent performers are essentially clowns, the actors and musicians of the 10-year-old, all-male, Barcelona based troupe La Fura dels Baus seem more like dangerous and maniacal hoodlums. Amid a nervous and exuberant sold-out audience of 500 each night at Kaufman-Astoria Studios, their Suz/o/Suz mingles violence and tenderness in a barbaric initiation that climaxes in a water fight. I like how directly Fura sets up the situation. The lights black out so that audience know to be afraid, be very afraid. As lights come up, one by one, half a dozen eccentric, metal kinetic sculptures rigged to clang and rattle chime in with their clattery music. So you know you’d better keep the eyes in the back of your head open and that these guys’ wits are sharp.
Suz/o/Suz is not nearly so scary and unpredictable as Tier Mon, which I saw in Zagreb in spring 1990, but it’s a much messier piece—with colored powders and sheep entrails flying through the air (it was in the contract that the meat, which the cast rips with their teeth, had to be fresh), shreds of lettuce and watermelon, and buckets of water leaving the floor strewn with crud. One guy came seriously prepared in a yellow raincoat, goggles, and a helmet. For the rest of us, no way you didn’t get at least a little wet. The fire department, with its rigid safety rules, surprisingly permitted Fura to do all their usual pyrotechnical effects, and determined, after the first night, that the fire truck parked right outside was really not needed. Accompanied by powerfully, crashing music, the snarling, gladiatorial face-offs illuminate an aggressive, rebellious, but double-edged masculinity that’s almost as eager for slavish submission as for dominance. However garish the contests, to yield is sufficient, slaughter is not required.
Suz/o/Suz is filled with savagely beautiful moment, like the men prowling the overhead grid in jockstraps, white shirts, and ties, and then descending, one at a time, on knotted ropes to the floor where they discard their few civilized accoutrements. Or a chest beating flour fight from rushing metal wagons. Or two men solemnly facing each other with blazing standards. Or the initiates flailing in harnesses dangling from the tops of steel towers of rickety scaffolding. The hushed section for two naked men, each curled like a fetus in his own huge water tank, while their attendants tend to them and yearn for contact with the, is complex and magical. The attendants poke their poles in, touching or moving the immersed bodies, then suck the blunt end that touched flesh. They press against the glass, plunge into the water themselves, sending it heaving over the top. When the man/infants emerge, all the denizens get delirious, racing around the space in sloshing, mobile bathtubs, emptying the tanks through fat hoses so the water gushes forth in a world-class pissing contest.
The glorified violence and coarseness of La Fura dels Baus is appalling and thrilling. The perils of being trampled by rogues or splattered with animal guts seem insignificant against the legitimate excitement of Fura’s brute physical vigor and freedom from social rules that permit only a narrow and much-simplified range of human expression. Fura’s pieces force us to experience the logic the most degraded behavior, and express, in part, an unconditional taste for life no matter how ugly or humiliating.
At Battery Park City, South Garden (June 13 through 17).
Wings
November 12
Icarus at Night. What a great title! I love its wishful, melancholy overtones, the possibilities it gives you to chew on - including the notion that at night his wings wouldn’t have melted. Christopher Gillis is becoming a skillful choreographer, but his newest work, Icarus at Night, for a dozen dancers, is something of a puzzle.
To the purling flow of the first and final movements of the Opus 18 Brahms Sextet, he has created a moody, evocative, and ambiguous piece with himself at the pivot, though usually more as a reflective than an active agent. Six men in gray tights, bare-chested or in tattered undershirts that suggest crash landings (costumes by Ginger Blake), form a kind of dream squadron, of which Gillis is maybe the captain. As the only man who’s fully dressed, in street clothes, he’s clearly not in the thick of the action, though he’s plainly the filter for their experience. If he’s really there.
Gillis can be very subtle in intermingling dreams and memories, and we’re not looking at a narrative,but a shifting psychic and temporal landscape (lit by Jennifer Tipton to augment our uncertainties). Gillis, sleeping center stage, stretches an arm and leg, like a wing, and so do the six men - Joao Mauricio, Jeff Wadlington, David Grenke, Andres Asnes, Thomas Patrick, Patrick Corbin - lying nearby. The men are comradely without being buddies; one hand behind their backs, the other on another’s shoulder, they rock together without force. Yet a pall troubles, ripples through the atmosphere periodically, and gradually worsens. Mauricio falls alongside Gillis, rests his head against his knee. Subsequent collapses are more extreme, and more gradual: he may sink for a moment, lean against Gillis’s shoulder, sag, drop, and wind up cradled in Gillis’s arms. Separating himself from a cluster of comforting women, Mauricio, on his feet, spasms in the upper torso like one of Michaelangelo’s writhing “slaves.” He seems to be slung downward, losing his footing, and left to crawl.
But there’s a huge dose of inappropriate, pretty sentiment in Icarus. The obvious problem is the women. What are they doing here? Cathy McCann is grand and calm - a goddess, an angel; Mary Cochran whizzes about in the kind of uptempo firefly stuff Taylor commonly gives her to do. The others (Constance Dinapoli, Caryn Heilman, Rachel Berman Benz) scamper in and out, get lifted overhead, but their presence is trivial. Whatever drama may be absorbing the men, the women haven’t the slightest clue. Really, they’re all in some other dance. Wounded men, sturdy comrades, consoling women, inevitably suggest AIDS, but that’s only one thread in Gillis’s ambitious piece. Dancers plunge and mesh with the familiar Taylor scoots, side leaps, tilts and open-V arms. They cross in limping runs or in a surge of boosted cabrioles and spread-eagle leaps. Wadlington is hoisted up by the mass of men, and stands high in straining triumph before being fatally swamped. Gillis’s static friezes can be as thoughtful and idealized as Poussin groupings. There are strong solos for all the men. And in Gillis’s fine solo for himself - reaching, twisting, casting arms to heaven - he writhes in frustration tainted with pleasure. Gillis taps into deep currents and mostly trusts where they take him.
It’s not the moodiness of Icarus at Night that flaws it, but that its darker emotional fumblings feel true and its forced moments of brightness merely conventional. Opening the program, Taylor’s once bright Aureole (1962) looked soft and spongy, too smoothed out, though Andrew Asnes was rosy and buoyant in the part that was originally Dan Wagoner’s. Unfortunately Elie Chaib is no longer capable of Taylor’s old role: it’s simply beyond his technical powers now and it’s no pleasure watching him fight this losing battle. His interpretations always reduced the role to its pictorial elements, but even that vision has crumbled. It’s time Taylor looked at Aureole unsentimentally and took charge of it.
Speaking in Tongues closed the program. A new television version (re-conceived by Taylor, director Matthew Diamond and designer Santo Loquasto) is to be broadcast November 6 at 10 p.m. on WNET. It’s visually beautiful, opened up spatially and to zillions of lively camera angles, bathed in color, and splendidly performed, but I definitely prefer Tongues frontal and claustrophobic. Matthew Patton’s taped score, which works well enough in a theater where its presence has weight and immediacy, seems repetitive and thin in the privacy of one’s home where it merely nags the viewer. The lack of any ambient sound further distances the performance needlessly.
At City Center (October 22 to November 3).
Icarus at Night. What a great title! I love its wishful, melancholy overtones, the possibilities it gives you to chew on - including the notion that at night his wings wouldn’t have melted. Christopher Gillis is becoming a skillful choreographer, but his newest work, Icarus at Night, for a dozen dancers, is something of a puzzle.
To the purling flow of the first and final movements of the Opus 18 Brahms Sextet, he has created a moody, evocative, and ambiguous piece with himself at the pivot, though usually more as a reflective than an active agent. Six men in gray tights, bare-chested or in tattered undershirts that suggest crash landings (costumes by Ginger Blake), form a kind of dream squadron, of which Gillis is maybe the captain. As the only man who’s fully dressed, in street clothes, he’s clearly not in the thick of the action, though he’s plainly the filter for their experience. If he’s really there.
Gillis can be very subtle in intermingling dreams and memories, and we’re not looking at a narrative,but a shifting psychic and temporal landscape (lit by Jennifer Tipton to augment our uncertainties). Gillis, sleeping center stage, stretches an arm and leg, like a wing, and so do the six men - Joao Mauricio, Jeff Wadlington, David Grenke, Andres Asnes, Thomas Patrick, Patrick Corbin - lying nearby. The men are comradely without being buddies; one hand behind their backs, the other on another’s shoulder, they rock together without force. Yet a pall troubles, ripples through the atmosphere periodically, and gradually worsens. Mauricio falls alongside Gillis, rests his head against his knee. Subsequent collapses are more extreme, and more gradual: he may sink for a moment, lean against Gillis’s shoulder, sag, drop, and wind up cradled in Gillis’s arms. Separating himself from a cluster of comforting women, Mauricio, on his feet, spasms in the upper torso like one of Michaelangelo’s writhing “slaves.” He seems to be slung downward, losing his footing, and left to crawl.
But there’s a huge dose of inappropriate, pretty sentiment in Icarus. The obvious problem is the women. What are they doing here? Cathy McCann is grand and calm - a goddess, an angel; Mary Cochran whizzes about in the kind of uptempo firefly stuff Taylor commonly gives her to do. The others (Constance Dinapoli, Caryn Heilman, Rachel Berman Benz) scamper in and out, get lifted overhead, but their presence is trivial. Whatever drama may be absorbing the men, the women haven’t the slightest clue. Really, they’re all in some other dance. Wounded men, sturdy comrades, consoling women, inevitably suggest AIDS, but that’s only one thread in Gillis’s ambitious piece. Dancers plunge and mesh with the familiar Taylor scoots, side leaps, tilts and open-V arms. They cross in limping runs or in a surge of boosted cabrioles and spread-eagle leaps. Wadlington is hoisted up by the mass of men, and stands high in straining triumph before being fatally swamped. Gillis’s static friezes can be as thoughtful and idealized as Poussin groupings. There are strong solos for all the men. And in Gillis’s fine solo for himself - reaching, twisting, casting arms to heaven - he writhes in frustration tainted with pleasure. Gillis taps into deep currents and mostly trusts where they take him.
It’s not the moodiness of Icarus at Night that flaws it, but that its darker emotional fumblings feel true and its forced moments of brightness merely conventional. Opening the program, Taylor’s once bright Aureole (1962) looked soft and spongy, too smoothed out, though Andrew Asnes was rosy and buoyant in the part that was originally Dan Wagoner’s. Unfortunately Elie Chaib is no longer capable of Taylor’s old role: it’s simply beyond his technical powers now and it’s no pleasure watching him fight this losing battle. His interpretations always reduced the role to its pictorial elements, but even that vision has crumbled. It’s time Taylor looked at Aureole unsentimentally and took charge of it.
Speaking in Tongues closed the program. A new television version (re-conceived by Taylor, director Matthew Diamond and designer Santo Loquasto) is to be broadcast November 6 at 10 p.m. on WNET. It’s visually beautiful, opened up spatially and to zillions of lively camera angles, bathed in color, and splendidly performed, but I definitely prefer Tongues frontal and claustrophobic. Matthew Patton’s taped score, which works well enough in a theater where its presence has weight and immediacy, seems repetitive and thin in the privacy of one’s home where it merely nags the viewer. The lack of any ambient sound further distances the performance needlessly.
At City Center (October 22 to November 3).