1991 continued
10 Japandments
February 12
In its American debut, the Matsuyama Ballet, founded in Tokyo in 1948 by Mikiko Matsuyama - mother of the current principal dancer, producer, general manager, and chief choreographer Tetsutaro Shimizu - crammed the stage at City Center with dancers in Mandala, an opulent, sentimental extravaganza. It’s about an artist and “the girl of his dreams” (Moe, danced by Yoko Morishita), a secret Christian when Christianity was forbidden in Japan. Moe is kidnapped by gangster brothers with loud clothing and bristly hair who drag her to a village festival where she’s manhandled and flung on the ground like a crushed butterfly. Our hero Hokuba (Shimizu), is utterly taken with this ravishing victim, with her sad bourrees and fluttery arms. He wins her from the hoodlums in a rigged dice game, but they’re sore losers, and chase after the soon-to-be lovers. Moe drops her gold crucifix; everybody sees it and freaks. So samurai cops - 16 Darth Vaders doing sideways bunny steps, as quaint as the police in The Pirates of Penzance - join the hoods in their pursuit. What about the art part? Moe’s to be Hokuba’s inspiration for the central figure in the mandala he’s painting - it looks like a mural to me - but she’s not sure it’s kosher for a Christian to pose for Buddhist art. (I worry about these rocky moral questions, too.) Dozens of heavenly figures, like apsaras, emerge from the painting en masse and enthrone her in their procession, completing Hokuba’s artistic vision, then vanish. But when the posse finds the lovers, the demons from the paintings - ghoulish figures in shreds and glitter and ratty hair, rocking on their behinds - come to their defense and the gangster brothers wind up stabbing each other while the couple escapes again. But not for long. Set to exhaustingly dense, dissonant music by Yoshihiro Kanno, Mandala has lavish costumes by Kimiko Yaeda and decor by Hideyo Tanaka. Hokuba’s studio seems a huge, gloomy void, but what is that great hanging macrame piece? That huge portcullis? That giant mass of yarn hanging in a doorway? The village festival is Fokine’s Shrovetide fair without its lively swirl and bustle. There are lanterns, umbrellas, banners, and zillions of women in kimono-print tutus flapping their arms, going hippity-hop, nodding their heads, doing little kicks and skips. A bunch of warrior monks with spears hop through on wooden platform sandals. Girls prance while plucking their samisens. The aspara girls in the scene where the “mandala” comes to life wear shorty Marie Antoinette shepherdess dresses with panniers along with shimmering headpieces. Though the gangster brothers are rather traditional Kabuki figures, the black samurais are straight from Hollywood, even though Darth Vader’s shape may derive from medieval Japanese suits of armor. Shimizu can certainly stuff the stage with dancers, but he rarely give them anything worthwhile to do. The pas de deux and solos for himself and Morishita - his wife in real life - are shapeless, vague in intention, and use a baby lexicon of steps. Steps are the problem, because that’s what Shimizu choreographs. It’s as if he wants to show them to you one at a time. And because he doesn’t build them into intelligible phrases, the dancing is choppy, picky, meaningless. In terms of dramatic action, too, Shimizu can drive you nuts. In the gambling scene, Hokuba and all the other innocent villagers excitedly dance away from the betting board after he throws the dice, but before he’s looked at the throw. Come on! Where tradition dictates, Japanese aesthetics are refined and rigorous. However, beyond the safe terrain of their own conventions, the Japanese are in the soup like the rest of us.
At City Center (January 22 through 27).
In its American debut, the Matsuyama Ballet, founded in Tokyo in 1948 by Mikiko Matsuyama - mother of the current principal dancer, producer, general manager, and chief choreographer Tetsutaro Shimizu - crammed the stage at City Center with dancers in Mandala, an opulent, sentimental extravaganza. It’s about an artist and “the girl of his dreams” (Moe, danced by Yoko Morishita), a secret Christian when Christianity was forbidden in Japan. Moe is kidnapped by gangster brothers with loud clothing and bristly hair who drag her to a village festival where she’s manhandled and flung on the ground like a crushed butterfly. Our hero Hokuba (Shimizu), is utterly taken with this ravishing victim, with her sad bourrees and fluttery arms. He wins her from the hoodlums in a rigged dice game, but they’re sore losers, and chase after the soon-to-be lovers. Moe drops her gold crucifix; everybody sees it and freaks. So samurai cops - 16 Darth Vaders doing sideways bunny steps, as quaint as the police in The Pirates of Penzance - join the hoods in their pursuit. What about the art part? Moe’s to be Hokuba’s inspiration for the central figure in the mandala he’s painting - it looks like a mural to me - but she’s not sure it’s kosher for a Christian to pose for Buddhist art. (I worry about these rocky moral questions, too.) Dozens of heavenly figures, like apsaras, emerge from the painting en masse and enthrone her in their procession, completing Hokuba’s artistic vision, then vanish. But when the posse finds the lovers, the demons from the paintings - ghoulish figures in shreds and glitter and ratty hair, rocking on their behinds - come to their defense and the gangster brothers wind up stabbing each other while the couple escapes again. But not for long. Set to exhaustingly dense, dissonant music by Yoshihiro Kanno, Mandala has lavish costumes by Kimiko Yaeda and decor by Hideyo Tanaka. Hokuba’s studio seems a huge, gloomy void, but what is that great hanging macrame piece? That huge portcullis? That giant mass of yarn hanging in a doorway? The village festival is Fokine’s Shrovetide fair without its lively swirl and bustle. There are lanterns, umbrellas, banners, and zillions of women in kimono-print tutus flapping their arms, going hippity-hop, nodding their heads, doing little kicks and skips. A bunch of warrior monks with spears hop through on wooden platform sandals. Girls prance while plucking their samisens. The aspara girls in the scene where the “mandala” comes to life wear shorty Marie Antoinette shepherdess dresses with panniers along with shimmering headpieces. Though the gangster brothers are rather traditional Kabuki figures, the black samurais are straight from Hollywood, even though Darth Vader’s shape may derive from medieval Japanese suits of armor. Shimizu can certainly stuff the stage with dancers, but he rarely give them anything worthwhile to do. The pas de deux and solos for himself and Morishita - his wife in real life - are shapeless, vague in intention, and use a baby lexicon of steps. Steps are the problem, because that’s what Shimizu choreographs. It’s as if he wants to show them to you one at a time. And because he doesn’t build them into intelligible phrases, the dancing is choppy, picky, meaningless. In terms of dramatic action, too, Shimizu can drive you nuts. In the gambling scene, Hokuba and all the other innocent villagers excitedly dance away from the betting board after he throws the dice, but before he’s looked at the throw. Come on! Where tradition dictates, Japanese aesthetics are refined and rigorous. However, beyond the safe terrain of their own conventions, the Japanese are in the soup like the rest of us.
At City Center (January 22 through 27).
A Bestiary
April 9
Erick Hawkins Cantilever Two, on the opening program with his new Killer-of-Enemies: the Divine Hero, is full of dynamic movement that thrusts laterally across the stage. So there’s proof that he can employ a varied pace if he wants to. But in Killer-of-Enemies he’s chosen not to. The dance is leisurely, solemn, prosaic. For the story of a hero who, under the benevolent eyes of his ancestor, conquers his people’s enemies, dies and is reborn richer in understanding and in harmony with the world, its self-satisfied dullness is nearly fatal.
Based on a myth familiar to Hawkins from his childhood in the Southwest, Killer-of-Enemies’s story is not familiar to most of us, so we cannot take its meaning for granted and rejoice in its exquisite, streamlined pageantry. In the program, Hawkins writes: “It is about slaying the most enormous monsters of all, those inside the human heart...it is also about simply being alive with any freshness.” Certainly worthy content. But if the hero undergoes a deepening of his nature, we’ve got to experience the event in some way.
Yet, in Killer-of-Enemies, you’d never know anything happened at all, or what it is, or what its value might be. The world’s essential harmony seems unimpaired throughout: the marauding monsters the Young Man/Killer-of-Enemies (Michael Moses) overcomes are merely exotic visitors, as delightful as the fantastical illustrations in a medieval bestiary. When the hero trips and spills his red arrows, and they split a little sawtooth mountain apart, we observe a small change in the stage decor. Nothing more. Too confident, perhaps, of the story’s virtue, Hawkins doesn’t allow its seed to lodge in us. Instead, he cocoons its vitality by virtually eliminating any emotional immediacy, only gesturing towards human struggles. He drains its conflicts of drama smoothes them over, makes them merely beautiful encounters. The lessons learned cost nothing. If the Young Man has no particular character, no fear, how are we to understand his courage his accomplishment?
Over Alan Hovhaness’s aurally spacious score (played by a small orchestra conducted by David Briskin) and clouding the music’s integrity, two men on the side of the stage recite the text, written by Hawkins, in soporific tones. The text itself has the irritating clumsiness of the faux primitif, dropping articles and verbs in distressing emulation of “me, Tarzan you Jane” grammar. There’s little that they’re telling us that the very pictorial dancing doesn’t show. The hero is born, he battles monsters. Hawkins made some nice steps for the various creatures, but, on the whole, the steps only help to illustrate the characters’ identities. Te dancing is decorative, sometimes charming - unimportant. It doesn’t move the piece along. What has been excised from the story is the need that drives it. What remain are pretty pictures. But what pictures!
Ralph Dorazio designed a handsome set of sculptural forms that include a bonelike, dead-tree seat for Hawkins, who presides motionless over most of the dance, and the small mountain that breaks in two along its zigzag teeth. But Ralph Lee’s masks and costumes are pure genius. Suggesting kachina figures, fetishes and the stylized creatures drawn on Native American ceramics, these fantasy figures have incomparable elegance, poetry and mystery. Bare-chested, Killer-of-Enemies wears a sky-blue kilt. On is mask, a white hand shields his face, a white feather tipped with black stands erect, and from delicate splints behind his head, tassels of black air toss. Little Wind (Catherine Tharin), the hero’s lively companion, in a blue shift and footless green stockings, wears a flat, rectangular blue mask, creased vertically along the line of the nose, with a whiskery fringe that springs from the edges of the cheeks.
A number of the exquisitely simple masks share this kind of planar, nearly featureless face, but most have depth and airiness too, because they’re made of layers of flat shapes mounted behind one another to create a sculptural head. Yet they seem as light as kites. Spider Old Woman wears a contraption on her head, like the dark blue body of an arachnid, from which dangle long, slender, jointed rods - like legs - that clack dryly as they whirl in flimsy beauty around the dancer’s body. Changing Woman (Gloria McLean) appears in a long, white shift and a white headdress that seems to be made of nesting boxes adorned with dried thistles. From her arms dangle thin rods that she thrusts and drags. Big Owl, a “monster” with a big round face, has an open body of long, gently bent reeds, dotted with downy fluff, that hang freely from a collar to the dancer’s ankles. When Owl moves, she gives a toss, a fling,to some of the reeds so they flash upward. Monster Eagle has a giant yellow beak, an elaborate feather headdress, and fans of dark feathers in his hands. Huge-horned Big Giant stamps around with bear-trap jaws. Big Fly (Joseph Mills), who’s not a monster but a sort of helpful agency or facilitator, has horizontally striped red-and-back tights, a black-banded screen over his face, and small, dark, erratically snapping wings. A handy, peripheral character, that’s all he is, it seems. Yet at the very end he darts across the stage with quick beating jumps in the vanishing light. A sprite-like image of enduring liveliness, he’s like a flame that no ponderous moral vision can extinguish.
At the Joyce Theater (March 26 through April 7).
Erick Hawkins Cantilever Two, on the opening program with his new Killer-of-Enemies: the Divine Hero, is full of dynamic movement that thrusts laterally across the stage. So there’s proof that he can employ a varied pace if he wants to. But in Killer-of-Enemies he’s chosen not to. The dance is leisurely, solemn, prosaic. For the story of a hero who, under the benevolent eyes of his ancestor, conquers his people’s enemies, dies and is reborn richer in understanding and in harmony with the world, its self-satisfied dullness is nearly fatal.
Based on a myth familiar to Hawkins from his childhood in the Southwest, Killer-of-Enemies’s story is not familiar to most of us, so we cannot take its meaning for granted and rejoice in its exquisite, streamlined pageantry. In the program, Hawkins writes: “It is about slaying the most enormous monsters of all, those inside the human heart...it is also about simply being alive with any freshness.” Certainly worthy content. But if the hero undergoes a deepening of his nature, we’ve got to experience the event in some way.
Yet, in Killer-of-Enemies, you’d never know anything happened at all, or what it is, or what its value might be. The world’s essential harmony seems unimpaired throughout: the marauding monsters the Young Man/Killer-of-Enemies (Michael Moses) overcomes are merely exotic visitors, as delightful as the fantastical illustrations in a medieval bestiary. When the hero trips and spills his red arrows, and they split a little sawtooth mountain apart, we observe a small change in the stage decor. Nothing more. Too confident, perhaps, of the story’s virtue, Hawkins doesn’t allow its seed to lodge in us. Instead, he cocoons its vitality by virtually eliminating any emotional immediacy, only gesturing towards human struggles. He drains its conflicts of drama smoothes them over, makes them merely beautiful encounters. The lessons learned cost nothing. If the Young Man has no particular character, no fear, how are we to understand his courage his accomplishment?
Over Alan Hovhaness’s aurally spacious score (played by a small orchestra conducted by David Briskin) and clouding the music’s integrity, two men on the side of the stage recite the text, written by Hawkins, in soporific tones. The text itself has the irritating clumsiness of the faux primitif, dropping articles and verbs in distressing emulation of “me, Tarzan you Jane” grammar. There’s little that they’re telling us that the very pictorial dancing doesn’t show. The hero is born, he battles monsters. Hawkins made some nice steps for the various creatures, but, on the whole, the steps only help to illustrate the characters’ identities. Te dancing is decorative, sometimes charming - unimportant. It doesn’t move the piece along. What has been excised from the story is the need that drives it. What remain are pretty pictures. But what pictures!
Ralph Dorazio designed a handsome set of sculptural forms that include a bonelike, dead-tree seat for Hawkins, who presides motionless over most of the dance, and the small mountain that breaks in two along its zigzag teeth. But Ralph Lee’s masks and costumes are pure genius. Suggesting kachina figures, fetishes and the stylized creatures drawn on Native American ceramics, these fantasy figures have incomparable elegance, poetry and mystery. Bare-chested, Killer-of-Enemies wears a sky-blue kilt. On is mask, a white hand shields his face, a white feather tipped with black stands erect, and from delicate splints behind his head, tassels of black air toss. Little Wind (Catherine Tharin), the hero’s lively companion, in a blue shift and footless green stockings, wears a flat, rectangular blue mask, creased vertically along the line of the nose, with a whiskery fringe that springs from the edges of the cheeks.
A number of the exquisitely simple masks share this kind of planar, nearly featureless face, but most have depth and airiness too, because they’re made of layers of flat shapes mounted behind one another to create a sculptural head. Yet they seem as light as kites. Spider Old Woman wears a contraption on her head, like the dark blue body of an arachnid, from which dangle long, slender, jointed rods - like legs - that clack dryly as they whirl in flimsy beauty around the dancer’s body. Changing Woman (Gloria McLean) appears in a long, white shift and a white headdress that seems to be made of nesting boxes adorned with dried thistles. From her arms dangle thin rods that she thrusts and drags. Big Owl, a “monster” with a big round face, has an open body of long, gently bent reeds, dotted with downy fluff, that hang freely from a collar to the dancer’s ankles. When Owl moves, she gives a toss, a fling,to some of the reeds so they flash upward. Monster Eagle has a giant yellow beak, an elaborate feather headdress, and fans of dark feathers in his hands. Huge-horned Big Giant stamps around with bear-trap jaws. Big Fly (Joseph Mills), who’s not a monster but a sort of helpful agency or facilitator, has horizontally striped red-and-back tights, a black-banded screen over his face, and small, dark, erratically snapping wings. A handy, peripheral character, that’s all he is, it seems. Yet at the very end he darts across the stage with quick beating jumps in the vanishing light. A sprite-like image of enduring liveliness, he’s like a flame that no ponderous moral vision can extinguish.
At the Joyce Theater (March 26 through April 7).
A Bumpy Night
September 24
Jennifer Monson's Finn's Shed may be a piece if she says it is, but it doesn't feel like one to me. No big deal. It's four parts seem independent, although the first three sections share a lot of her characteristic flinging, roughhouse movement. Parts I and III are duets for Monson and long time colleagues Jennifer Lacey and John Jasperse. Part II is a sprawling quartet for four students from the center for Center for New Dance Development in Arnheim, Holland, set amid bales of hay and bundles of newspaper. And the final section, for all seven dancers, is modeled on the exhilarating, rhythmic, slapping, of the 13 male samen performers "Music and Dance of Sumatra" Aceh Minangkabau presented at the Joyce Theater last March. Charles Moulton's precision ball-passing pieces are incidental formal cousins, to the samen drills. Monson's try is a direct complimentary imitation. Building in complexity, the dancers -kneeling on a row of hay bales - rub their thighs, twist their bodies, then vary those twists alternately while developing fancier crisscross slapping patterns, tapping their fingers fast on their chest like birds beating their wings, and accompanying themselves with breath sounds. What the piece lacks, though, is the original's reckless joy or some equivalent spirit to lift it out of its mechanical realm.
The highlight of the evening was Monson's aggressive, nonstop duet with Lacey, which seemed at least partly improvised. Rambunctious, daring, with great relish for a mock battle, they're beautifully paired. They throw themselves over each other, balance in matching shoulder stands. Lacey mounts then crouches back like a lookout, and half topples, half flings her self off. They're heaving through the air competitions. Monson's duet with Jasperse has similar bold eagerness. They run at each other chest to chest and spin to the ground, fling at each other . He bounces her off her belly, crashes into her back. She scoots around at a safe distance as he prowls. Her instinctive physical humor is quietly evident. I do love the absence of good manners, but there seem to be a lot of little theatrical bits, too much flagrant affectation. Zeena Parkins, who's providing the music, is worth watching too, snuggling against her triangular electric harp as she pluck it with some kind of tool, and reaching sideways to press a button on her tabletop electronic equipment.
The quartet for the CNDD may be about the idea of community, but behavior on this level of impulsiveness and selfishness has nothing to do with real community based on shared purposes or values and virtues of compromise. It opens with doggy and Tarzan-like howling. Bales of hay and bundles of newspaper are rearranged and moved across the stage. The dancers in jumpsuits bellywhop and slide on them, fling them around, and make a mess. Solos yield to duets and free-for-alls where the dancers’ main objective seems to be to spoil things for one another. In this world of lurching anarchy, there's the blond girl in pale green who pushes herself up from the floor, but whose support keeps slipping. She springs and throws herself about and lands noisily, battering herself on the floor. She hauls the woman in blue off the floor, they pull, carry, and struggle with each other until the third woman (in orange) is drawn in, yanking them apart with no thanks. Red and orange roll over each other, crash and tumble. She leaps at him; he dumps her. While they knock themselves out, green and blue have a melodramatic fight in a back corner. For the most part here, awkwardness is no revelation. It remains merely awkward. Except for the odd opening solo for the man in red (Tuomo Kangasmaa), who moves with soft squats and unwieldy turns, bending and wobbling with a deliciously variable weightedness. Out of the blue Kangasamma creates a real character in movement. Feisty and lost, consistent in his wavering yes-and-no.
At P.S. 122 (September 12 through 15).
Jennifer Monson's Finn's Shed may be a piece if she says it is, but it doesn't feel like one to me. No big deal. It's four parts seem independent, although the first three sections share a lot of her characteristic flinging, roughhouse movement. Parts I and III are duets for Monson and long time colleagues Jennifer Lacey and John Jasperse. Part II is a sprawling quartet for four students from the center for Center for New Dance Development in Arnheim, Holland, set amid bales of hay and bundles of newspaper. And the final section, for all seven dancers, is modeled on the exhilarating, rhythmic, slapping, of the 13 male samen performers "Music and Dance of Sumatra" Aceh Minangkabau presented at the Joyce Theater last March. Charles Moulton's precision ball-passing pieces are incidental formal cousins, to the samen drills. Monson's try is a direct complimentary imitation. Building in complexity, the dancers -kneeling on a row of hay bales - rub their thighs, twist their bodies, then vary those twists alternately while developing fancier crisscross slapping patterns, tapping their fingers fast on their chest like birds beating their wings, and accompanying themselves with breath sounds. What the piece lacks, though, is the original's reckless joy or some equivalent spirit to lift it out of its mechanical realm.
The highlight of the evening was Monson's aggressive, nonstop duet with Lacey, which seemed at least partly improvised. Rambunctious, daring, with great relish for a mock battle, they're beautifully paired. They throw themselves over each other, balance in matching shoulder stands. Lacey mounts then crouches back like a lookout, and half topples, half flings her self off. They're heaving through the air competitions. Monson's duet with Jasperse has similar bold eagerness. They run at each other chest to chest and spin to the ground, fling at each other . He bounces her off her belly, crashes into her back. She scoots around at a safe distance as he prowls. Her instinctive physical humor is quietly evident. I do love the absence of good manners, but there seem to be a lot of little theatrical bits, too much flagrant affectation. Zeena Parkins, who's providing the music, is worth watching too, snuggling against her triangular electric harp as she pluck it with some kind of tool, and reaching sideways to press a button on her tabletop electronic equipment.
The quartet for the CNDD may be about the idea of community, but behavior on this level of impulsiveness and selfishness has nothing to do with real community based on shared purposes or values and virtues of compromise. It opens with doggy and Tarzan-like howling. Bales of hay and bundles of newspaper are rearranged and moved across the stage. The dancers in jumpsuits bellywhop and slide on them, fling them around, and make a mess. Solos yield to duets and free-for-alls where the dancers’ main objective seems to be to spoil things for one another. In this world of lurching anarchy, there's the blond girl in pale green who pushes herself up from the floor, but whose support keeps slipping. She springs and throws herself about and lands noisily, battering herself on the floor. She hauls the woman in blue off the floor, they pull, carry, and struggle with each other until the third woman (in orange) is drawn in, yanking them apart with no thanks. Red and orange roll over each other, crash and tumble. She leaps at him; he dumps her. While they knock themselves out, green and blue have a melodramatic fight in a back corner. For the most part here, awkwardness is no revelation. It remains merely awkward. Except for the odd opening solo for the man in red (Tuomo Kangasmaa), who moves with soft squats and unwieldy turns, bending and wobbling with a deliciously variable weightedness. Out of the blue Kangasamma creates a real character in movement. Feisty and lost, consistent in his wavering yes-and-no.
At P.S. 122 (September 12 through 15).
A Civil Tongue
June 11
Ugliness speaks for itself in Jane Comfort’s Deportment, choreographed by her and her company. In Part I (South), premiered last spring, bigotry—racism, homophobia—only sometimes bursts through the hypocrisy of genteel manners as Nancy Alfaro tries to learn the little gestural dances that distinguish our kind of people from the others. Cloying, singsong politeness masks an explosive nastiness. Any sweet remark becomes scary for what it’s likely to hide.
In Part II (North), Alfaro comes to New York where viciousness isn’t filtered by polite behavior. Showbiz sleazebags deceive and exploit her, upper-crust types talking through clenched teeth scorn her, her landlady doesn’t want to rent to her and her black boyfriend, and a white racist lowlife terrifies and rapes her. Mark Dendy is a scream as an outrageous transvestite hooker, who eventually gets savagely beaten by a client who wasn’t expecting a pecker and a pussy. Alfaro’s friends die of AIDS—Comfort presents three simple funerals—and a resentful society lady, “mourning” her decorator pal, insists “they” brought it on themselves. Comfort’s piece is meaty and strong, often wildly funny, and powered by dancing and a gift of gab that rings true. She doesn’t shy from violence or make it fashionably attractive. She faces brutal issues, uses words that are hard and offensive to hear, and doesn’t try to heal any wounds.
The first part intercuts Alfaro’s family experiences with excerpts from Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie, (Dendy is marvelous as the mother, Amanda Wingfield, as is Steven Petty as the gentleman caller), in a fantasy collage that flies high partly because its buttery Southern loquaciousness is so persuasive. So what if it’s bullshit? Part II (North) is more of a straight narrative, with flashes from the family down home, and it’s programmed to bring us down with a couple of hard bumps.
(North) is rather less effective than (South) because the material on the whole has a less personal flavor. The human landscape is more uniform and unambiguous: Though Comfort lines up a broader spectrum of characters, more of them are caricatures whom we can regard with detachment as totally despicable. The showbiz stereotypes, for example, are too familiar and exemplify too notorious a sexism for so clever a piece. But the acting/dancing performances are spectacular and right on the money. Alfaro losing her innocence; Dendy in a virtuosic range from the nostalgic Amanda to a seedy club owner to Alfaro’s bigoted, drunken father trying to get a queer to suck him off. Comfort, Scot Willingham, Petty, and Andre Shoals shine as an array of mostly rancid characters.
At P.S. 122 (May 17 through 19).
Ugliness speaks for itself in Jane Comfort’s Deportment, choreographed by her and her company. In Part I (South), premiered last spring, bigotry—racism, homophobia—only sometimes bursts through the hypocrisy of genteel manners as Nancy Alfaro tries to learn the little gestural dances that distinguish our kind of people from the others. Cloying, singsong politeness masks an explosive nastiness. Any sweet remark becomes scary for what it’s likely to hide.
In Part II (North), Alfaro comes to New York where viciousness isn’t filtered by polite behavior. Showbiz sleazebags deceive and exploit her, upper-crust types talking through clenched teeth scorn her, her landlady doesn’t want to rent to her and her black boyfriend, and a white racist lowlife terrifies and rapes her. Mark Dendy is a scream as an outrageous transvestite hooker, who eventually gets savagely beaten by a client who wasn’t expecting a pecker and a pussy. Alfaro’s friends die of AIDS—Comfort presents three simple funerals—and a resentful society lady, “mourning” her decorator pal, insists “they” brought it on themselves. Comfort’s piece is meaty and strong, often wildly funny, and powered by dancing and a gift of gab that rings true. She doesn’t shy from violence or make it fashionably attractive. She faces brutal issues, uses words that are hard and offensive to hear, and doesn’t try to heal any wounds.
The first part intercuts Alfaro’s family experiences with excerpts from Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie, (Dendy is marvelous as the mother, Amanda Wingfield, as is Steven Petty as the gentleman caller), in a fantasy collage that flies high partly because its buttery Southern loquaciousness is so persuasive. So what if it’s bullshit? Part II (North) is more of a straight narrative, with flashes from the family down home, and it’s programmed to bring us down with a couple of hard bumps.
(North) is rather less effective than (South) because the material on the whole has a less personal flavor. The human landscape is more uniform and unambiguous: Though Comfort lines up a broader spectrum of characters, more of them are caricatures whom we can regard with detachment as totally despicable. The showbiz stereotypes, for example, are too familiar and exemplify too notorious a sexism for so clever a piece. But the acting/dancing performances are spectacular and right on the money. Alfaro losing her innocence; Dendy in a virtuosic range from the nostalgic Amanda to a seedy club owner to Alfaro’s bigoted, drunken father trying to get a queer to suck him off. Comfort, Scot Willingham, Petty, and Andre Shoals shine as an array of mostly rancid characters.
At P.S. 122 (May 17 through 19).
Admit Nothing
July 9
Angelin Preljocaj, the young French choreographer, designs movement with a mean, crisp feel. He pits his dancers against one another in strife-filled situations where, often, their drive to make relationships founders on an unwillingness or inability to yield more than the absolute minimum to a partner. They’re all takers. The compulsion to preserve their strength, their refusal to suffer the weakness of loving, isolates his dancers in realms of conflict and ambivalence, where contact is usually terse, desperate, ferocious, and rejection immediately follows.
The two works Preljocaj offered at Florence Gould Hall, both from 1989, are very unlike: Un Trait d’Union is a spare and refined duet for two men whose relationship is compelling but extremely cautious. In Noces, set to a particularly unrelenting performance of the Stravinsky score (by the Choeur Contemporain d’Aix-en-Provence and Percussions de Strasboug, conducted by Ronland Hayrabedian), five women, five men, and five thrown-about bride dummies unpleasantly celebrate the automatic sexual union that perpetuates conventional society. Preljocaj’s work can be so steely, so acute and acerbic, that it should be in black-and-white.
His non-narrative scheme in Noces severs it from the program of Stravinsky’s music, but despite the variety of the dance’s energies—from frenzied abandon to weariness—it seems to have a single feeling tone. The raying light at the beginning exposes five men (Christophe Haleb, Phillippe Madala, Frederick Werle, Xavier Nickler, Prejocaj) hunched over on benches: they’re in white shirts, ties, black pants. The women (Silvia Bidegain, Magali Caillet, Helene Desplat, Florence Vitrac, Laure Trainini), wearing short dresses in dark velours, curtly announce themselves with a routine of factual gestures: they cover their mouths, touch their brows, shield their eyes, lightly pat their shoulders, coldly caress themselves.
The relationship of men and women is aggressive but perfunctory, devoid of affection or any particularity, and hardly sensual. One man or woman is as good as another. With brisk flings and sharp legwork, they yank one another around, switch places, embrace with quick impersonality. For these people, flexible bodies hide a quite inflexible core, and their glittering, hard-edged physicality seems to encase an inbred and frustrating obedience. They seem driven by need, incapable of choice. Noces is punctuated by formal rearrangements of the benches: the men tilt them on end, set them in a single line across the back, stagger them diagonally down the stage. Veiled, life-size cloth bride dolls are brought in and cuddled, discarded, flung about with astonishing fickleness by men and women alike. Preljocaj’s fatalistic ritual leaves no room for individual emotion: its mounting physical exuberance becomes a fury of denial. Again and again, without warning, the women leap onto and off the benches: the seated men jump up to quickly grab them out of the air, and they plunge to the floor together. Only the bride dolls, whose limp forms dangle atop upended benches at the finish, confess the depleted inner resources of the eviscerated dancers.
Un Trait d’Union has a narrower focus and it’s beautifully thought out. Alvaro Morell, leaning nearly horizontal, slowly pushes onstage a modern, upholstered chair, then slowly tumbles over it. He runs, arches over it, hunches his shoulder into it and pushes. He stands on the arms and the backrest, the seat cushion, rubs his face urgently against the armrest and plunges backward. He tilts the chair on end, slithers over it, and it tumbles on top of him. Christophe Haleb, seated on an old kitchen chair, lifts the upholstered chair off Morell, kicks him in the butt to get him up. And, from the floor, Morell simply pops up flat into Haleb’s arms like a film clip of someone being dropped run in reverse. Like a loop, really, because the pop-up sequence is repeated many times. The men dive and leapfrog over the chair and each other in knotty, passionate engagements, pushing and levering each other. Haleb flies into Morell’s arms. Their developing relationship, fiercely ambivalent, elegant in its attacks and challenges, is expressed in a sharp geometry of sudden pulls, graspings, abandonments, interrupted by stops. For a moment one will give way to his need of the other, like Haleb’s collapse into Morell’s arms in a flash of tenderness that neither can beat. Forget it, admit nothing, it never happened.
At Alliance Francaise’s Florence Gould Hall (June 20 through 23).
Angelin Preljocaj, the young French choreographer, designs movement with a mean, crisp feel. He pits his dancers against one another in strife-filled situations where, often, their drive to make relationships founders on an unwillingness or inability to yield more than the absolute minimum to a partner. They’re all takers. The compulsion to preserve their strength, their refusal to suffer the weakness of loving, isolates his dancers in realms of conflict and ambivalence, where contact is usually terse, desperate, ferocious, and rejection immediately follows.
The two works Preljocaj offered at Florence Gould Hall, both from 1989, are very unlike: Un Trait d’Union is a spare and refined duet for two men whose relationship is compelling but extremely cautious. In Noces, set to a particularly unrelenting performance of the Stravinsky score (by the Choeur Contemporain d’Aix-en-Provence and Percussions de Strasboug, conducted by Ronland Hayrabedian), five women, five men, and five thrown-about bride dummies unpleasantly celebrate the automatic sexual union that perpetuates conventional society. Preljocaj’s work can be so steely, so acute and acerbic, that it should be in black-and-white.
His non-narrative scheme in Noces severs it from the program of Stravinsky’s music, but despite the variety of the dance’s energies—from frenzied abandon to weariness—it seems to have a single feeling tone. The raying light at the beginning exposes five men (Christophe Haleb, Phillippe Madala, Frederick Werle, Xavier Nickler, Prejocaj) hunched over on benches: they’re in white shirts, ties, black pants. The women (Silvia Bidegain, Magali Caillet, Helene Desplat, Florence Vitrac, Laure Trainini), wearing short dresses in dark velours, curtly announce themselves with a routine of factual gestures: they cover their mouths, touch their brows, shield their eyes, lightly pat their shoulders, coldly caress themselves.
The relationship of men and women is aggressive but perfunctory, devoid of affection or any particularity, and hardly sensual. One man or woman is as good as another. With brisk flings and sharp legwork, they yank one another around, switch places, embrace with quick impersonality. For these people, flexible bodies hide a quite inflexible core, and their glittering, hard-edged physicality seems to encase an inbred and frustrating obedience. They seem driven by need, incapable of choice. Noces is punctuated by formal rearrangements of the benches: the men tilt them on end, set them in a single line across the back, stagger them diagonally down the stage. Veiled, life-size cloth bride dolls are brought in and cuddled, discarded, flung about with astonishing fickleness by men and women alike. Preljocaj’s fatalistic ritual leaves no room for individual emotion: its mounting physical exuberance becomes a fury of denial. Again and again, without warning, the women leap onto and off the benches: the seated men jump up to quickly grab them out of the air, and they plunge to the floor together. Only the bride dolls, whose limp forms dangle atop upended benches at the finish, confess the depleted inner resources of the eviscerated dancers.
Un Trait d’Union has a narrower focus and it’s beautifully thought out. Alvaro Morell, leaning nearly horizontal, slowly pushes onstage a modern, upholstered chair, then slowly tumbles over it. He runs, arches over it, hunches his shoulder into it and pushes. He stands on the arms and the backrest, the seat cushion, rubs his face urgently against the armrest and plunges backward. He tilts the chair on end, slithers over it, and it tumbles on top of him. Christophe Haleb, seated on an old kitchen chair, lifts the upholstered chair off Morell, kicks him in the butt to get him up. And, from the floor, Morell simply pops up flat into Haleb’s arms like a film clip of someone being dropped run in reverse. Like a loop, really, because the pop-up sequence is repeated many times. The men dive and leapfrog over the chair and each other in knotty, passionate engagements, pushing and levering each other. Haleb flies into Morell’s arms. Their developing relationship, fiercely ambivalent, elegant in its attacks and challenges, is expressed in a sharp geometry of sudden pulls, graspings, abandonments, interrupted by stops. For a moment one will give way to his need of the other, like Haleb’s collapse into Morell’s arms in a flash of tenderness that neither can beat. Forget it, admit nothing, it never happened.
At Alliance Francaise’s Florence Gould Hall (June 20 through 23).
Be Seated
November 19
Having overdosed on modern dance pieces about all the clever things you can do with a chair, I was leery of seeing Zvi Gotheiner’s new Chairs. But his hour-plus piece, using 11 non-folding wooden straight-backs and the same number of humans, gave me anther think. Instead of the precocities I dreaded, the chairs wee arranged and rearranged repeatedly, to provide physical boundaries and definition within the black-curtained space of the Merce Cunnningham Studio. In fact, their use gave broad form to the work - a suite of more-or-less dramatic solos, duets and quartets, linked by group sections and transitions that were relatively neutral in tone.
Chairs opens with a solo of sweeping, impatient, reaching moves for Cynthia Sigler, seated alone. Her striving carves deeply into the space around her, yet hardly takes her from the security of her base. Behind her in a quiet row sit the other 10 dancers, brightly various in attractive, differently-colored outfits (by Christina Giannini). Then, singly and severally, they dash forward and back, duck sideways, gather into sweeping lines, break into groups, lift their chairs up and down. Sitting again, they trade places hastily or slowly, pull their chairs forward while sitting, ti them over.
I like the spirited logic of the groups zigzag impulses. Five people drag chairs across the space, and observe from the sidelines while Linda Sastadipradja moves sharply, points her leg like and icepick, in a tilting, pressured solo. In a duet to Rachmaninoff of twining, swiveling interdependencies, Jeanine Durning and Nancy Happel walk with elderly steps, letting the rising clamor of the music flood beyond them, then catch them again as its intensity recedes. Fast and brilliant, Noah D. Gelber flashes about, smacks a chair loudly to the floor. With Jack Gallagher - twice his size - he introduces a thoughtful and perverse quartet f complex flavors - they’re meshed with a whirling duet for Sigler and Richard Siegal - where a satisfying, long-term pattern of casual belligerence builds, with Gelber relentlessly knocking the chair down and Gallagher righting it. Elisa King advances slowly down a corridor of light toward a chair that faces her while three groups smack out rhythms. Idly malignant, they come to touch her, poke her and shove her backward by pushing her breastbone each time she tries to step up on the chair. Finally, they just snatch it away. In a duet with Peter Anzalone, King and he construct a kind of crib of about eight chairs, and embrace obsessively. He keeps sitting up suddenly, with the alertness of someone who hears a burglar downstairs, then returns more deeply to their lovemaking, while the other dancers are drawn to them, creep to the edges of the bed, and place their hands on the chair legs.
To an excerpt from a Beethoven quartet is set a marvelous section for June Balish, three men (Anzalone, Gallagher, and Eric Bradley), and a row of three chairs. In her curving and ardent solo, Balish keeps returning to her seat, but when the men approach, they’re suddenly harmoniously linked with her in a quartet - sleepy, nodding, nearly fondling, but powerfully bound to the music’s themes - that ravishingly twines on and around the chairs. Perhaps even more beautiful is an in-place duet set to splendid, dark-toned church music. Bradley and Gallagher, standing closely on a single chair, wind around each other, arch, pull away, lean out. One drops on the other’s shoulder. Their arms dart and chatter with chaste avidity. Their pairing is luminous - erotic and holy.
I admire Gotheiner’s gift for internal composition, his skill at making individual dances that resonate through almost purely formal musical patterns of steps and gestures. But in Chairs the whole evening is also beautifully shaped, and the value of each individual dance is augmented by how it contrasts with what comes before and after. The musical contrasts work pointedly as well - Rachmaninoff preludes, Russian orthodox choral music, Scott Johnson’s John Somebody, excerpts from a Beethoven quartet and from theatrical soundtracks involving text. As a whole, too, the evening deepens in meaning, and as its fabric grows more and more substantial it becomes translucent rather than dense.
At Merce Cunningham Studio (November 1 to 3).
Having overdosed on modern dance pieces about all the clever things you can do with a chair, I was leery of seeing Zvi Gotheiner’s new Chairs. But his hour-plus piece, using 11 non-folding wooden straight-backs and the same number of humans, gave me anther think. Instead of the precocities I dreaded, the chairs wee arranged and rearranged repeatedly, to provide physical boundaries and definition within the black-curtained space of the Merce Cunnningham Studio. In fact, their use gave broad form to the work - a suite of more-or-less dramatic solos, duets and quartets, linked by group sections and transitions that were relatively neutral in tone.
Chairs opens with a solo of sweeping, impatient, reaching moves for Cynthia Sigler, seated alone. Her striving carves deeply into the space around her, yet hardly takes her from the security of her base. Behind her in a quiet row sit the other 10 dancers, brightly various in attractive, differently-colored outfits (by Christina Giannini). Then, singly and severally, they dash forward and back, duck sideways, gather into sweeping lines, break into groups, lift their chairs up and down. Sitting again, they trade places hastily or slowly, pull their chairs forward while sitting, ti them over.
I like the spirited logic of the groups zigzag impulses. Five people drag chairs across the space, and observe from the sidelines while Linda Sastadipradja moves sharply, points her leg like and icepick, in a tilting, pressured solo. In a duet to Rachmaninoff of twining, swiveling interdependencies, Jeanine Durning and Nancy Happel walk with elderly steps, letting the rising clamor of the music flood beyond them, then catch them again as its intensity recedes. Fast and brilliant, Noah D. Gelber flashes about, smacks a chair loudly to the floor. With Jack Gallagher - twice his size - he introduces a thoughtful and perverse quartet f complex flavors - they’re meshed with a whirling duet for Sigler and Richard Siegal - where a satisfying, long-term pattern of casual belligerence builds, with Gelber relentlessly knocking the chair down and Gallagher righting it. Elisa King advances slowly down a corridor of light toward a chair that faces her while three groups smack out rhythms. Idly malignant, they come to touch her, poke her and shove her backward by pushing her breastbone each time she tries to step up on the chair. Finally, they just snatch it away. In a duet with Peter Anzalone, King and he construct a kind of crib of about eight chairs, and embrace obsessively. He keeps sitting up suddenly, with the alertness of someone who hears a burglar downstairs, then returns more deeply to their lovemaking, while the other dancers are drawn to them, creep to the edges of the bed, and place their hands on the chair legs.
To an excerpt from a Beethoven quartet is set a marvelous section for June Balish, three men (Anzalone, Gallagher, and Eric Bradley), and a row of three chairs. In her curving and ardent solo, Balish keeps returning to her seat, but when the men approach, they’re suddenly harmoniously linked with her in a quartet - sleepy, nodding, nearly fondling, but powerfully bound to the music’s themes - that ravishingly twines on and around the chairs. Perhaps even more beautiful is an in-place duet set to splendid, dark-toned church music. Bradley and Gallagher, standing closely on a single chair, wind around each other, arch, pull away, lean out. One drops on the other’s shoulder. Their arms dart and chatter with chaste avidity. Their pairing is luminous - erotic and holy.
I admire Gotheiner’s gift for internal composition, his skill at making individual dances that resonate through almost purely formal musical patterns of steps and gestures. But in Chairs the whole evening is also beautifully shaped, and the value of each individual dance is augmented by how it contrasts with what comes before and after. The musical contrasts work pointedly as well - Rachmaninoff preludes, Russian orthodox choral music, Scott Johnson’s John Somebody, excerpts from a Beethoven quartet and from theatrical soundtracks involving text. As a whole, too, the evening deepens in meaning, and as its fabric grows more and more substantial it becomes translucent rather than dense.
At Merce Cunningham Studio (November 1 to 3).
Bedtime Stories
September 10
Three excerpts from Gilles Maheu and Montreal-based Carbone 14’s Le Dortoir (directed by Francois Girard, with original music by Bill Vorn and Gaetan Gravel) which was performed here at BAM’s LePercq space as part of last year’s Next Wave festival, are framed, in Alive From Off Center’s presentation, by a man sitting on an iron bed frame in a desolate warehouse space. He presses a revolver to his jaw in the beginning, and muses on his anguish in lines from Rilke at the end.
Perhaps, to those familiar with Maheu’s play, on which the dance/theater work is based, this means something. But in the context of this half-hour video, we don’t know who he is, or care. If the three adolescent dormitory segments we see here are his memories or fantasies, he’s still irrelevant. Near the ceiling, women come floating in, arms outstretched, through high windows. From overhead, we look down on the space restored - still bleak, but with the beds neatly made up, ordered in rows. Men, in white shirts and black pants, hold black shoes in their hands, listen to them as if hearing the ocean, balance horizontally on the ends of their beds, as if floating there. The women enter sleepwalking, and much of the dancing that ensues is formally patterned, in unison. For a long time we hear only long, slightly dissonant, descending chords in the strings (reminiscent of Arvo Part’s Fratres), and none of the scuffling, tapping, squeaking sounds of moving.
That partial, artificial hush creates a dreamlike aural sense, while the camera very slowly, steadily, pans the room moving counterclockwise. Never resting, slightly distant voyeuristic, it tracks the dancers with hypnotic tenacity. Then reality hits at a quickening pace with a drizzle of piano and nasal woodwinds that grow more excitable with the live sounds of feet clomping, shrieking, bed springs. The dancers vault over the beds, somersault, rush about, swing one another around, throw pillows, giddily strip down to their underwear, bellywop across the floor on pillows. The floor is littered with leaves. A nun’s entrance terminates their play. As facts about “Canada, history of” are being dryly recited in overlapping English, French and Spanish, the U.S.A. overwhelms them in a p.a. announcement of the Kennedy assassination. The camera starts to drift during a woman’s recital of biographical information on JFK. Dancers scribble on the blackboards, rush up or leap over others to scrawl something, hoist up whoever’s in their way, and rub their torsos against the slate to erase what’s up there.
For a moment, it’s Blackboard Jungle, minus the switchblades, but the action gets more aggressively self-renewing, more suggestive of protests and riots (to an exuberant Near-eastern song by Chaba Quarda Sghira) with some dancers randomly playing cops or demonstrators - roughly frisking others, tossing them to the other side of the room, yelling, wrenching them aside, shoving one another backward by the jaw. And everybody leaping at the blackboards and rebounding off. The energy is exciting, but again, isolated from a { } context. The topical aspect of all this makes it seem arbitrary, as it also did in the version at BAM. Then the liveliness loses its violent edge - a couple are whirling hula hoops, one guy spins a bed around the floor, as dancers flip away from its circle, leap or dive over it. One girl lies across its foot. Her visible upper body is still, like one of the floating women, and the room whirls dizzyingly around her. The very brief final section contains the piece’s most evocative moments. A couple is in bed, clothed, restlessly caressing. Then, she quietly slips away. There’s an extreme close-up of her shoulder and the side of her face as she climbs on the headboard. She pushes off like a swimmer, with no sense of urgency, and floats away through the open window.
Three excerpts from Gilles Maheu and Montreal-based Carbone 14’s Le Dortoir (directed by Francois Girard, with original music by Bill Vorn and Gaetan Gravel) which was performed here at BAM’s LePercq space as part of last year’s Next Wave festival, are framed, in Alive From Off Center’s presentation, by a man sitting on an iron bed frame in a desolate warehouse space. He presses a revolver to his jaw in the beginning, and muses on his anguish in lines from Rilke at the end.
Perhaps, to those familiar with Maheu’s play, on which the dance/theater work is based, this means something. But in the context of this half-hour video, we don’t know who he is, or care. If the three adolescent dormitory segments we see here are his memories or fantasies, he’s still irrelevant. Near the ceiling, women come floating in, arms outstretched, through high windows. From overhead, we look down on the space restored - still bleak, but with the beds neatly made up, ordered in rows. Men, in white shirts and black pants, hold black shoes in their hands, listen to them as if hearing the ocean, balance horizontally on the ends of their beds, as if floating there. The women enter sleepwalking, and much of the dancing that ensues is formally patterned, in unison. For a long time we hear only long, slightly dissonant, descending chords in the strings (reminiscent of Arvo Part’s Fratres), and none of the scuffling, tapping, squeaking sounds of moving.
That partial, artificial hush creates a dreamlike aural sense, while the camera very slowly, steadily, pans the room moving counterclockwise. Never resting, slightly distant voyeuristic, it tracks the dancers with hypnotic tenacity. Then reality hits at a quickening pace with a drizzle of piano and nasal woodwinds that grow more excitable with the live sounds of feet clomping, shrieking, bed springs. The dancers vault over the beds, somersault, rush about, swing one another around, throw pillows, giddily strip down to their underwear, bellywop across the floor on pillows. The floor is littered with leaves. A nun’s entrance terminates their play. As facts about “Canada, history of” are being dryly recited in overlapping English, French and Spanish, the U.S.A. overwhelms them in a p.a. announcement of the Kennedy assassination. The camera starts to drift during a woman’s recital of biographical information on JFK. Dancers scribble on the blackboards, rush up or leap over others to scrawl something, hoist up whoever’s in their way, and rub their torsos against the slate to erase what’s up there.
For a moment, it’s Blackboard Jungle, minus the switchblades, but the action gets more aggressively self-renewing, more suggestive of protests and riots (to an exuberant Near-eastern song by Chaba Quarda Sghira) with some dancers randomly playing cops or demonstrators - roughly frisking others, tossing them to the other side of the room, yelling, wrenching them aside, shoving one another backward by the jaw. And everybody leaping at the blackboards and rebounding off. The energy is exciting, but again, isolated from a { } context. The topical aspect of all this makes it seem arbitrary, as it also did in the version at BAM. Then the liveliness loses its violent edge - a couple are whirling hula hoops, one guy spins a bed around the floor, as dancers flip away from its circle, leap or dive over it. One girl lies across its foot. Her visible upper body is still, like one of the floating women, and the room whirls dizzyingly around her. The very brief final section contains the piece’s most evocative moments. A couple is in bed, clothed, restlessly caressing. Then, she quietly slips away. There’s an extreme close-up of her shoulder and the side of her face as she climbs on the headboard. She pushes off like a swimmer, with no sense of urgency, and floats away through the open window.
Bessies Eight
October 8
Because of a universal shortage of the green stuff, this year’s eighth annual New York Dance and Performance Awards (the Bessies) moved to the World Financial Center Winter Garden. About 2000 people turned up to celebrate 29 award winners who took home actual checks ($1000 in the choreographer/creator category, $500 in others) bankrolled by Morgan Guaranty Trust Company (which has backed the awards since 1983-84), The Village Voice, the Candy Jernigan Memorial Fund, and an anonymous donor. In case anyone had forgotten the forbidding political and economic climate for a moment, Jesse Helms had just argued that arts funding to the cities should be slashed. Impassioned speakers at the ceremony urged artists to take heart in the grueling fight against censorship and other repressive measures. Bessie Schonberg, for whom the awards are nicknamed, called on artists to have courage, to do more and do better, and promised that, at least, “we’ll all be very poor together.” John Killacky, curator of performing arts at the Walker Center in Minneapolis, failed to name his co-host, the irrepressible Reno, whose spontaneous motor mouth and nervous vitality gave spice to the proceedings. Killacky played her straight man, and tried to keep her on a short leash, hauling her in on her microphone cord. Since the acoustics were pretty dubious in parts of the hall, some presenters made a big deal, or a joke,of speaking very slowly to be better understood. I could hear perfectly well, but a palm tree stood between the lectern and me. Designer Liz Prince wore a gigantic gold headdress adorned with paintbrushes to give visual design awards to Sue Rees, Anthony Chase, Huck Snyder, and Mimi Gross, who came skipping down the aisle from miles back and won for her years of sets and costumes for Douglas Dunn. Mimi Goese presenting the composer awards, noted with solemn breathiness that “music is a beautiful thing,” and handed out awards to Tom Cora, Julius Hemphill and Pauline Oliveros.
Francis Mason, announcing a special citation to Yuriko for her superb reconstructions of Martha Graham’s early works, spoke of the “fire and burning calm” Graham had passed on to her. “What she gave me,” said Yuriko, who had been with Graham for 48 years, “I will give back to her company and to other young dancers.“ Carlos Gutierrez-Solana was honored for opening up the visual arts program at the New York State Council on the Arts during his tenure there. And Nancy Duncan, founder of CoDanceCo. was cited for “re-imagining the repertory dance company as a nurturing laboratory for choreographer and dancer alike.” Wearing mile-high platform shoes, Sean Curran, introduced by Killacky as “the man with the cutest butt,” came on with Norwod Pennewell of Garth Fagan Dance. Pennewell was easy and loose, scooting handily around the stage with some nice moves. Together they gave Bessies to performers Kyle deCamp, Paula Gifford (of Elizabeth Streb/Ringside), Chris Komar (with Merce Cunningham), Jeremy Nelson (with Stephen Petronio), Desmond Richardson (of the Ailey company) and David Neumann (with Doug Elkins), who did a litle footwork that matched Pennewell’s reciprocal moves nicely. Fagan and Ann Carlson presented choreographer/creator Bessies to Lora Nelson, Paul Clay and Cydney Wilkes for A Window on the Nether Sea; to Gusmiati Suid, Syekh Lah Genta and Atif Usman, for Music and Dance of Sumatra: Aceh and Minangkabau; Richard Elovich for Someone Else from Queens is Queer, Alice Farley for her body of work, including Black Water, Dan Froot for 17 Kilos of Garlic, David Gordon for The Mysteries and What’s So Funny, artist David Hammons for his body of work; James Luna for The Artifact and Take a Picture with an Indian; and Paul Zaloom for My Civilization. Brazilian percussionist Nana Vasconcelos performed and the Lavender Light gospel choir brought the evening to a close in mighty voice. But, more importantly what was the meaning behind the excerpts the Feetwarmers played while winners found their way to the stage? Dan Froot got “Mona Lisa,” Paul Zaloom got “Travelin’ Man.” Inquiring minds want to know.
At World Financial Center Winter Garden (September 20).
Because of a universal shortage of the green stuff, this year’s eighth annual New York Dance and Performance Awards (the Bessies) moved to the World Financial Center Winter Garden. About 2000 people turned up to celebrate 29 award winners who took home actual checks ($1000 in the choreographer/creator category, $500 in others) bankrolled by Morgan Guaranty Trust Company (which has backed the awards since 1983-84), The Village Voice, the Candy Jernigan Memorial Fund, and an anonymous donor. In case anyone had forgotten the forbidding political and economic climate for a moment, Jesse Helms had just argued that arts funding to the cities should be slashed. Impassioned speakers at the ceremony urged artists to take heart in the grueling fight against censorship and other repressive measures. Bessie Schonberg, for whom the awards are nicknamed, called on artists to have courage, to do more and do better, and promised that, at least, “we’ll all be very poor together.” John Killacky, curator of performing arts at the Walker Center in Minneapolis, failed to name his co-host, the irrepressible Reno, whose spontaneous motor mouth and nervous vitality gave spice to the proceedings. Killacky played her straight man, and tried to keep her on a short leash, hauling her in on her microphone cord. Since the acoustics were pretty dubious in parts of the hall, some presenters made a big deal, or a joke,of speaking very slowly to be better understood. I could hear perfectly well, but a palm tree stood between the lectern and me. Designer Liz Prince wore a gigantic gold headdress adorned with paintbrushes to give visual design awards to Sue Rees, Anthony Chase, Huck Snyder, and Mimi Gross, who came skipping down the aisle from miles back and won for her years of sets and costumes for Douglas Dunn. Mimi Goese presenting the composer awards, noted with solemn breathiness that “music is a beautiful thing,” and handed out awards to Tom Cora, Julius Hemphill and Pauline Oliveros.
Francis Mason, announcing a special citation to Yuriko for her superb reconstructions of Martha Graham’s early works, spoke of the “fire and burning calm” Graham had passed on to her. “What she gave me,” said Yuriko, who had been with Graham for 48 years, “I will give back to her company and to other young dancers.“ Carlos Gutierrez-Solana was honored for opening up the visual arts program at the New York State Council on the Arts during his tenure there. And Nancy Duncan, founder of CoDanceCo. was cited for “re-imagining the repertory dance company as a nurturing laboratory for choreographer and dancer alike.” Wearing mile-high platform shoes, Sean Curran, introduced by Killacky as “the man with the cutest butt,” came on with Norwod Pennewell of Garth Fagan Dance. Pennewell was easy and loose, scooting handily around the stage with some nice moves. Together they gave Bessies to performers Kyle deCamp, Paula Gifford (of Elizabeth Streb/Ringside), Chris Komar (with Merce Cunningham), Jeremy Nelson (with Stephen Petronio), Desmond Richardson (of the Ailey company) and David Neumann (with Doug Elkins), who did a litle footwork that matched Pennewell’s reciprocal moves nicely. Fagan and Ann Carlson presented choreographer/creator Bessies to Lora Nelson, Paul Clay and Cydney Wilkes for A Window on the Nether Sea; to Gusmiati Suid, Syekh Lah Genta and Atif Usman, for Music and Dance of Sumatra: Aceh and Minangkabau; Richard Elovich for Someone Else from Queens is Queer, Alice Farley for her body of work, including Black Water, Dan Froot for 17 Kilos of Garlic, David Gordon for The Mysteries and What’s So Funny, artist David Hammons for his body of work; James Luna for The Artifact and Take a Picture with an Indian; and Paul Zaloom for My Civilization. Brazilian percussionist Nana Vasconcelos performed and the Lavender Light gospel choir brought the evening to a close in mighty voice. But, more importantly what was the meaning behind the excerpts the Feetwarmers played while winners found their way to the stage? Dan Froot got “Mona Lisa,” Paul Zaloom got “Travelin’ Man.” Inquiring minds want to know.
At World Financial Center Winter Garden (September 20).
Black House
February 26
If Bebe Miller hadn't been a late entry to the “American Movement” series at City Center, maybe she would have thought better of choosing to represent herself with The Hidden Boy: Incidents From a Stressed Memory, since it's so uncharacteristic of her work.
On the face of it, Hidden Boy is author/composer/musician/director/designer Jay Bolotin's project, and though Miller and her company have a large part in it, she doesn't seem to have had much control. Otherwise why would she allow a black house, within which slides of Bolotin's woodcuts are often projected, to occupy the middle of the stage and pointlessly destroy the integrity of the space? (The house is only pushed out of the way in Act II so a statue of Daniel Boone as a giant smurf can be shoved out front while lights glare in the audience's faces.) The structure relegated the dancers—who came and went from time to time—to the sides of the stage. The musicians inhabit a space above that mausoleum, except for Bolotin, located downstage left with this guitar. In speech, Bolotin's harsh, growling voice has an intriguing Kentucky tang. His 15 or so songs plus additional narrative introductions create a morose and acerb atmosphere, but I only understood a couple of dozen words in an hour and 10 minutes, so I don't know what tales were sung or what incidents related, or what prompted Bolotin's occasional yowlings. Anyway, the mood wasn't a happy one.
Four of his woodcuts, reproduced in a program insert, are powerfully evocative, but if they had anything to do with what went on onstage, you couldn't tell it by me. What was onstage was a disconnected, bastard production. The dancers basically provided back up to Bolotin's obscure music-drama. Without them there would have been very little to look at, but the sour density of the music often drowned out the dancing, even when it had the force of unison movement. In their frequent but intermittent appearances, the dancers weren't given enough dramatic weight to bear, though sometimes their mysterious, forceful gestures, the way they lurched or lumbered, ran hunkered down or cast themselves about, was rich and ominous.
In a lovely, theatrical section in Act II, two long white ladders dropped from the flies, and Elizabeth Caron, gradually followed by other dancers, slowly snaked down from rung to rung. Earthy, exalted, drained in an early solo, momentarily as clumsy as a dazed child, Miller briefly sketched an interior drama that I had no way of linking with its narrative context or inspiration. She started Act II with another beautiful and curious solo; opening her arms swinging, recoiling, descending in a rickety way to the floor, drooping like an unstrung marionette. When she gently slides her hands against the floor like a lost creature, across the stage Earnie Stevenson does the same. Renee Lemieux presses against him. Caron, with a gaudy, smeared red mouth, swivels, rubs her thighs, staggers backward. Then everyone's on with those ghoulish, bloody mouths. Five of them single out Scott Smith, point at him, and witch him with their fingers. So the potential for dramatic involvement was there. The excellent dancers (don't want to omit Nikko Castro) were up to anything. My companion said she'd like to kill Bolotin. Works for me.
At City Center (February 13 and 17).
If Bebe Miller hadn't been a late entry to the “American Movement” series at City Center, maybe she would have thought better of choosing to represent herself with The Hidden Boy: Incidents From a Stressed Memory, since it's so uncharacteristic of her work.
On the face of it, Hidden Boy is author/composer/musician/director/designer Jay Bolotin's project, and though Miller and her company have a large part in it, she doesn't seem to have had much control. Otherwise why would she allow a black house, within which slides of Bolotin's woodcuts are often projected, to occupy the middle of the stage and pointlessly destroy the integrity of the space? (The house is only pushed out of the way in Act II so a statue of Daniel Boone as a giant smurf can be shoved out front while lights glare in the audience's faces.) The structure relegated the dancers—who came and went from time to time—to the sides of the stage. The musicians inhabit a space above that mausoleum, except for Bolotin, located downstage left with this guitar. In speech, Bolotin's harsh, growling voice has an intriguing Kentucky tang. His 15 or so songs plus additional narrative introductions create a morose and acerb atmosphere, but I only understood a couple of dozen words in an hour and 10 minutes, so I don't know what tales were sung or what incidents related, or what prompted Bolotin's occasional yowlings. Anyway, the mood wasn't a happy one.
Four of his woodcuts, reproduced in a program insert, are powerfully evocative, but if they had anything to do with what went on onstage, you couldn't tell it by me. What was onstage was a disconnected, bastard production. The dancers basically provided back up to Bolotin's obscure music-drama. Without them there would have been very little to look at, but the sour density of the music often drowned out the dancing, even when it had the force of unison movement. In their frequent but intermittent appearances, the dancers weren't given enough dramatic weight to bear, though sometimes their mysterious, forceful gestures, the way they lurched or lumbered, ran hunkered down or cast themselves about, was rich and ominous.
In a lovely, theatrical section in Act II, two long white ladders dropped from the flies, and Elizabeth Caron, gradually followed by other dancers, slowly snaked down from rung to rung. Earthy, exalted, drained in an early solo, momentarily as clumsy as a dazed child, Miller briefly sketched an interior drama that I had no way of linking with its narrative context or inspiration. She started Act II with another beautiful and curious solo; opening her arms swinging, recoiling, descending in a rickety way to the floor, drooping like an unstrung marionette. When she gently slides her hands against the floor like a lost creature, across the stage Earnie Stevenson does the same. Renee Lemieux presses against him. Caron, with a gaudy, smeared red mouth, swivels, rubs her thighs, staggers backward. Then everyone's on with those ghoulish, bloody mouths. Five of them single out Scott Smith, point at him, and witch him with their fingers. So the potential for dramatic involvement was there. The excellent dancers (don't want to omit Nikko Castro) were up to anything. My companion said she'd like to kill Bolotin. Works for me.
At City Center (February 13 and 17).
Brass Tacks
July 30
The threat of censorship has apparently made everybody want to rip off their clothes and wag their organs in our faces. Okay by me. But Los Angelena Joanna Went’s noisy B-4-Sin—sharing a Serious Fun! Program with Dancenoise—was strident, didactic, and hopelessly, insistently amateurish. She puts on a defiantly one-note, sloganeering, episodic costume spectacle with giant props and sculptural costumes: a singing vagina, frolicking hermaphrodites with cone-shaped tits and bright pink penises, a multicolored dancing figure with a serpent-headed prick that you could wrap around your shoulders like a boa. Men disguised as nuns pray madly to not think about their nether parts. Went squirts milk from tits that are the eyes of a Mr. Potatohead face she wears over her torso. It sounds pretty jolly, but in fact it was slovenly.
I did find endearing the forthright sign that claimed, “My Parents Never Fucked.” And the moment when Went transported a huge, soft-sculpture nude by bracing it with one arm and shoving her other arm up its anus was profoundly funny. Otherwise, the piece was an infantile pageant. Technically, I wonder if Tully Hall is any better equipped than a high school auditorium. The way the amplification system crudely blared Went’s screams from the corner of the proscenium didn’t help. One’s vacuuming, the other’s in a phone booth. Both are pregnant, but a rabbit cures them by popping their balloon bellies in a twinkling. They open their robes to give us a matter-of-fact glimpse of full, frontal nudity—Omigod!—before trying to punch each other silly in a boxing match.
Street-smart and cynically upbeat, brazenly self-assured, Anne Iobst and Lucy Sexton (Dancenoise) are perfectly at home on stage, and as ruthlessly casual in their use of it as they would be of their shared apartment in the East Village. So they create an exhilarating, slapdash atmosphere in which no urban, environmental, or mythological upheaval can disturb their hard-earned, working-girl coolth. At the root of their unexpected stability is the fact that they’re quick to resolve their frequent, sharp-tongued disagreements. “Y’know, you’re right,” one always admits to the other after an instant's consideration, and they roll on to the next issue: poverty, bad government, the military, fat, or feminine protection.
Whatever chaos may ensue, these girls can bring it down to earth with their skeptical practicality as surely as Joan Blondell or Eve Arden would have. Forget logic, Dancenoise’s genial It’s a Girl sprawls carelessly all over the map, despite many clever moments and some snappy, politically correct (though not in the dismal sense) one-liners. “Summer of ’91 and the pink slips are flyin’.” As is their almost-sufficient comment on the economy. “150,000 dead, let’s have a parade!” they quip. So much for the glories of the gulf war.
Guest star Gayle Tufts stands nude from the waist up as a sort of Venus de Milo. “Leave me alone. I’m art,” she snaps. Hapi Phace, another guest star, poses as Rodin’s Thinker. Later, modeling an I Love Prozac T-shirt, he gives Iobst and Sexton stuffed animals, then tries to hack them with a machete. Yvonne Meier cavorts wildly and spouts Schweizer-deutsch. A triumvirate of disco-ready Hindu deities searches for some ultimate something. But the most oddly touching moments in this piece are uncharacteristically low-key or quite peripheral—like Iobst and Sexton pacing and talking on the phone while “Witchita Lineman” plays. Or Tufts, disguised as Aida, vacuuming the stage and quietly fuming—making magic out of nothing. Ken Bullock, Stacy Grabert, Mike Ivesson, Gina Varla Vetro, and Jonathan Walker (more guest stars) gave fine support; Chris Cochrane and David Linton did a great job with original and borrowed music.
At Alice Tully Hall (July 16).
The threat of censorship has apparently made everybody want to rip off their clothes and wag their organs in our faces. Okay by me. But Los Angelena Joanna Went’s noisy B-4-Sin—sharing a Serious Fun! Program with Dancenoise—was strident, didactic, and hopelessly, insistently amateurish. She puts on a defiantly one-note, sloganeering, episodic costume spectacle with giant props and sculptural costumes: a singing vagina, frolicking hermaphrodites with cone-shaped tits and bright pink penises, a multicolored dancing figure with a serpent-headed prick that you could wrap around your shoulders like a boa. Men disguised as nuns pray madly to not think about their nether parts. Went squirts milk from tits that are the eyes of a Mr. Potatohead face she wears over her torso. It sounds pretty jolly, but in fact it was slovenly.
I did find endearing the forthright sign that claimed, “My Parents Never Fucked.” And the moment when Went transported a huge, soft-sculpture nude by bracing it with one arm and shoving her other arm up its anus was profoundly funny. Otherwise, the piece was an infantile pageant. Technically, I wonder if Tully Hall is any better equipped than a high school auditorium. The way the amplification system crudely blared Went’s screams from the corner of the proscenium didn’t help. One’s vacuuming, the other’s in a phone booth. Both are pregnant, but a rabbit cures them by popping their balloon bellies in a twinkling. They open their robes to give us a matter-of-fact glimpse of full, frontal nudity—Omigod!—before trying to punch each other silly in a boxing match.
Street-smart and cynically upbeat, brazenly self-assured, Anne Iobst and Lucy Sexton (Dancenoise) are perfectly at home on stage, and as ruthlessly casual in their use of it as they would be of their shared apartment in the East Village. So they create an exhilarating, slapdash atmosphere in which no urban, environmental, or mythological upheaval can disturb their hard-earned, working-girl coolth. At the root of their unexpected stability is the fact that they’re quick to resolve their frequent, sharp-tongued disagreements. “Y’know, you’re right,” one always admits to the other after an instant's consideration, and they roll on to the next issue: poverty, bad government, the military, fat, or feminine protection.
Whatever chaos may ensue, these girls can bring it down to earth with their skeptical practicality as surely as Joan Blondell or Eve Arden would have. Forget logic, Dancenoise’s genial It’s a Girl sprawls carelessly all over the map, despite many clever moments and some snappy, politically correct (though not in the dismal sense) one-liners. “Summer of ’91 and the pink slips are flyin’.” As is their almost-sufficient comment on the economy. “150,000 dead, let’s have a parade!” they quip. So much for the glories of the gulf war.
Guest star Gayle Tufts stands nude from the waist up as a sort of Venus de Milo. “Leave me alone. I’m art,” she snaps. Hapi Phace, another guest star, poses as Rodin’s Thinker. Later, modeling an I Love Prozac T-shirt, he gives Iobst and Sexton stuffed animals, then tries to hack them with a machete. Yvonne Meier cavorts wildly and spouts Schweizer-deutsch. A triumvirate of disco-ready Hindu deities searches for some ultimate something. But the most oddly touching moments in this piece are uncharacteristically low-key or quite peripheral—like Iobst and Sexton pacing and talking on the phone while “Witchita Lineman” plays. Or Tufts, disguised as Aida, vacuuming the stage and quietly fuming—making magic out of nothing. Ken Bullock, Stacy Grabert, Mike Ivesson, Gina Varla Vetro, and Jonathan Walker (more guest stars) gave fine support; Chris Cochrane and David Linton did a great job with original and borrowed music.
At Alice Tully Hall (July 16).
Bumpity-Bump
July 16
I was so impressed with David Parker’s We’re Not Married (a tap duet with Kathryn Tufano) at a DTW showcase last season that I was curious to check out the version he’s doing now with Jeffrey A. Kazin, and see what else he has up his sleeve.
As performed by Parker and Kazin on a program shared with Lynn Shapiro, We’re Not Married deals delicately with the standoffish balance of competitiveness and friendship when competition is a good part of what forges the bond. With Tufano, the piece seemed more about the touchy ups-and-downs of a comradely and competitive relationship that mingles affections—all in both cases deftly expressed through taps, slaps, and smacks.
Under has Mary R. Barnett in a black gown and Kazin in tailcoat and undershorts. Both are masking Parker, who’s underneath, in underwear (Barnett’s sitting on him). The couple’s got to accommodate themselves to Parker’s presence, and he often mediates their relationship. As awkward as it sounds, it’s a puzzling, contrived concept, but as Parker, who’s initially unseen becomes central to the piece, the odd geniality and moderation of his demands becomes increasingly intriguing.
A mostly prone duet for Parker and Kazin, the brand new Bang demonstrates Parker’s very dry, patient, cagey, sense of humor. They lie face down in dark suits. Alternately or simultaneously they arch their chests up, reach behind to smack their legs, bump backs, smack their hands on the floor. Parker rhythmically lifts his buttocks into the air and claps his hands together underneath. They pull each other over in brief wrestling holds, slide around pushing on their elbows and palms. Lying down, hands over heads, their snapping fingers send rhythmic bumps down their bodies in waves. But Bang is also smart about the way partners take cues from each other in a relationship, and there’s something dear in the solemnity of their teasing belligerence. In the spookily poignant finish, they lie ear to ear, on their backs, each with his head in the hollow of the other’s shoulder, and back and forth, in turn, endlessly transfer the other’s head from one shoulder to the other. To maintain even the minimal burden of this relationship requires a blur of incessant adjustments.
At Dia Center for the Arts (June 27 and 28).
I was so impressed with David Parker’s We’re Not Married (a tap duet with Kathryn Tufano) at a DTW showcase last season that I was curious to check out the version he’s doing now with Jeffrey A. Kazin, and see what else he has up his sleeve.
As performed by Parker and Kazin on a program shared with Lynn Shapiro, We’re Not Married deals delicately with the standoffish balance of competitiveness and friendship when competition is a good part of what forges the bond. With Tufano, the piece seemed more about the touchy ups-and-downs of a comradely and competitive relationship that mingles affections—all in both cases deftly expressed through taps, slaps, and smacks.
Under has Mary R. Barnett in a black gown and Kazin in tailcoat and undershorts. Both are masking Parker, who’s underneath, in underwear (Barnett’s sitting on him). The couple’s got to accommodate themselves to Parker’s presence, and he often mediates their relationship. As awkward as it sounds, it’s a puzzling, contrived concept, but as Parker, who’s initially unseen becomes central to the piece, the odd geniality and moderation of his demands becomes increasingly intriguing.
A mostly prone duet for Parker and Kazin, the brand new Bang demonstrates Parker’s very dry, patient, cagey, sense of humor. They lie face down in dark suits. Alternately or simultaneously they arch their chests up, reach behind to smack their legs, bump backs, smack their hands on the floor. Parker rhythmically lifts his buttocks into the air and claps his hands together underneath. They pull each other over in brief wrestling holds, slide around pushing on their elbows and palms. Lying down, hands over heads, their snapping fingers send rhythmic bumps down their bodies in waves. But Bang is also smart about the way partners take cues from each other in a relationship, and there’s something dear in the solemnity of their teasing belligerence. In the spookily poignant finish, they lie ear to ear, on their backs, each with his head in the hollow of the other’s shoulder, and back and forth, in turn, endlessly transfer the other’s head from one shoulder to the other. To maintain even the minimal burden of this relationship requires a blur of incessant adjustments.
At Dia Center for the Arts (June 27 and 28).
Cats and Dogs
January 15
I fell in love with Byron Suber’s title, The Despair of Shoes Waltz, and was disappointed and punished for that weakness. For quite a stretch after its first intriguingly clumsy dance, which ends in twitches and staggers, Suber’s verbose, wandering, hour-and-a-half-long piece seems to be about failing to make a piece. Not surprising, since he brings together eight hateful and uninteresting characters who have nothing to say to each other, whose witty repartee ranges from “fucking bitch” to “fucking asshole.”
In act one, the characters wear bright brocade dresses and coats and lavish platinum wigs evoking the era of some French Louis, but their behavior is uniformly disagreeable, entirely about mistreatment and contempt, expressed in the bluntest terms of adolescent rudeness. Stylistically, it’s too oafish and posturing, too coarse and effete, too thoroughly ill-natured, to make ineptitude charming. With shocking amateurishness, the characters yell and whine about how lousy they feel, how bored they are, how apathetic they are, how they loathe one another, how much they despise themselves. Somebody get the hook!
The shorter second act, a kind of twisted pastorale performed before a backdrop of a paint-by-numbers autumn scene with two deer, has some live moments. The characters trip off their costumes—the girls down to brown playsuits, the men to boxer shorts and T-shirts—and they begin confessing secret desires and secret shames. They swear mutual sympathy, then roundly turn on one another. This is the sort of material that Suber has a genuine flair for. He relishes the eccentric particulars of sexual compulsion and embarrassment, the specifics of betrayal and punishment, and in his zest he cannily exploits the grotesque behavioral truths that can be so painfully funny. One girl “loves” another’s boyfriend; Suber shyly admits to loving Tom Stephens and tries to get Stephens to fuck him (Stephens thinks guys kissing on the mouth is pretty weird), but starts squealing before he’s even touched; Stephens tries to rape Stacy Grabert; Ken Bullock tries to rape somebody. And all are punished by the mysteriously powerful and invisible dual-voiced Miss Trickle, who, for example, replaces Bullock’s arms with kitty-cat arms and his voice with a meow, and causes the most hated girl in elementary school to take over Stephens’s body.
At P.S. 122 (December 31 through January 6).
I fell in love with Byron Suber’s title, The Despair of Shoes Waltz, and was disappointed and punished for that weakness. For quite a stretch after its first intriguingly clumsy dance, which ends in twitches and staggers, Suber’s verbose, wandering, hour-and-a-half-long piece seems to be about failing to make a piece. Not surprising, since he brings together eight hateful and uninteresting characters who have nothing to say to each other, whose witty repartee ranges from “fucking bitch” to “fucking asshole.”
In act one, the characters wear bright brocade dresses and coats and lavish platinum wigs evoking the era of some French Louis, but their behavior is uniformly disagreeable, entirely about mistreatment and contempt, expressed in the bluntest terms of adolescent rudeness. Stylistically, it’s too oafish and posturing, too coarse and effete, too thoroughly ill-natured, to make ineptitude charming. With shocking amateurishness, the characters yell and whine about how lousy they feel, how bored they are, how apathetic they are, how they loathe one another, how much they despise themselves. Somebody get the hook!
The shorter second act, a kind of twisted pastorale performed before a backdrop of a paint-by-numbers autumn scene with two deer, has some live moments. The characters trip off their costumes—the girls down to brown playsuits, the men to boxer shorts and T-shirts—and they begin confessing secret desires and secret shames. They swear mutual sympathy, then roundly turn on one another. This is the sort of material that Suber has a genuine flair for. He relishes the eccentric particulars of sexual compulsion and embarrassment, the specifics of betrayal and punishment, and in his zest he cannily exploits the grotesque behavioral truths that can be so painfully funny. One girl “loves” another’s boyfriend; Suber shyly admits to loving Tom Stephens and tries to get Stephens to fuck him (Stephens thinks guys kissing on the mouth is pretty weird), but starts squealing before he’s even touched; Stephens tries to rape Stacy Grabert; Ken Bullock tries to rape somebody. And all are punished by the mysteriously powerful and invisible dual-voiced Miss Trickle, who, for example, replaces Bullock’s arms with kitty-cat arms and his voice with a meow, and causes the most hated girl in elementary school to take over Stephens’s body.
At P.S. 122 (December 31 through January 6).
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.