1991 FINAL
August 6
The American Dance Festival in Durham, North Carolina, has undergone a kind of sea change in the past few years—a remarkable, growing internationalization. This year, the participants included dancers/choreographers from 41 countries, including Zaire, Pakistan, Korea, and the Soviet Union. And the festival closed with performances by the Guangdong Modern Dance Company, an impressive graft of American modern dance techniques and concepts on a Chinese stem. The company, in residence at the festival for three weeks, was founded by Yang Meiqi, director of the Guangdong Dance Academy in Guanghzhou (Canton) who attended the ADF in 1986 as part of the International Choreographers Workshop, and then, in concert with the ADF, sought government support to start a modern dance department and devised a program that stresses composition as much as technique. What a brave and risky vision! She recruited professional dancers in China and—with support from the Asian Cultural Council, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the USIA—the ADF provide a flow of American teachers (Sarah Stackhouse, Ruby Shang, David Hochoy, Lucas Hoving, Chiang Ching, et al.). Claudia Gitelman is headed there in the fall. The first class graduated a year ago, and, immediately after, the company made its debut in a program of original works. Even with the Chinese government’s tight grip, modern dance’s lonely outpost in China seems to be thriving. How odd it is that an art form that stresses individual expression and often subverts or at least questions establishment values, should appear to root so quickly and firmly in a culture that’s so intensely socialized, so group-oriented.
On the other hand, there’s nothing drab or uniform about these dancers. Just see how stylishly these resourceful young artists manage to dress. Our stereotypes, of course, are simplistic. The concert featured seven dances, all by current or onetime members of the company. What’s amazing is how solid the work is, even if much of it is derivative, and how naturally a full-bodied sort of dance vocabulary suits the dancers. Since the dancers/choreographers have been absorbing a wide range of dance styles and compositional approaches, it’s appropriate that the pieces reflect those experiences in their variety. But what the choreographers seem to have responded most strongly to, in a way, is the plastique of modern dance, its sculptural authority and beauty. Not angularities, or quirky articulations, or space-eating travel, or erratic spills, or impulsive flings—but the organic logic of full-body forms and cooperative patternings.
Using big, flat baskets and poles as essential props, Square Bottom Basket and Bamboo, a beautifully balanced opener composed by all the dancers, starts with stark, frozen images related to agricultural labor, and then goes into motion. In Impressions of Taiji, choreographed and performed by Qiao Yang and Qin Liming, the couple starts pressed back-to-back and explores shape-making relationships and the safety of balanced gymnastic designs. Initially they’re symmetrical or in unison, or formally pleasing in the way one curving body penetrates the other’s larger curves, but the dancers grow more ardent and clutching, while remaining always modest. We’re accustomed to work that’s not so neat and careful as this. The dancers mold themselves into forms that protect and resist one another in Shadow, by Huang Wenge and Huang Wencai. Performed by them and Su Ka, it’s a conceptually, unwieldy trio that starts out with a two-headed, fabric-wrapped, figure that recalls Pilobolus and Alwin Nikolais as well as Martha Graham’s stretch-jersey period. An extremely theatrical spectacle, Mountains, by Qiao Yang and Su Ka, featured two huge fabric swags, a stageful of smoke, beams of colored light, the dry sound of a wooden flute. It also seemed to take cues from Pilobolus in its decorative multi-person caterpillar and flower shapes, and a triangular human mountain as forbidding as a shark’s fin.
In contrast, Wang Mei’s Talking to Herself, eloquently performed by Ying Xiaorong, was a Spartan study in silence—except for the creak of wood—of a woman on a slanted wooden bed, disturbed, uncertain, restlessly tossing. Jerking up, whipping around, nearly falling off, she wrestles with herself and comes to no conclusions. To a turbulent rumble of sound, Situation, by two former company members, Zhangyi and Zhangli—twin sisters who were on loan from the air force—was the most forceful and moving piece on the program. Starting with a moving frieze of six women, each leaning back and holding the hair of the woman behind her, Situation depicts in formal and unspecific terms the terror women endure. However they break up as a group, they recombine like a herd whose members seek safety in anonymity. They wave their hands quickly in front of their mouths as if they’ve nearly burned themselves. They bring palpitating hands to their chests. All six cluster in a corner as if they know something they shouldn’t. There’s so much they can’t tell.
Wang Mei’s Tide, the skillful closing work (the only one set to Western music, by Jean Michel Jarre), rises to compelling climaxes, and, though its sequences build with a steady focus, there’s a pleasing lack of compulsiveness in the character of the sections and the way they’re linked. The dancers rush in one at a time to pace a big circle. Some begin to run ahead, and the movement cascades in a wide, dipping ring, like a spinning circle whose fulcrum loosens though its rim manages to hold. Tide is structured in many strong canons, on small boiling groups with their arms sweeping, exploding into leaps, or ripping around on their knees. At the end, two lines of dancers stalk from one side of the stage to the other. As a dancers reaches the wings, he or she turns to rush back through the ranks, like someone tagged in a game who must reach base to be home free. And from the wing into which they vanish, the dancers seem to renew their numbers and their strength inexhaustibly.
Overall, the dances demonstrate the Guangdong company’s commitment to craft. The choreographers are making the same discoveries other people on the same path have made. This is already a substantial achievement. Eventually, they must find their own, less generic subjects. Since there are worlds of information to be assimilated and transformed, there must be no rushing this process. In the meantime, the company’s glory is in the fresh, beautifully trained dancers who seem to bring the purest of hearts to their endeavor.
At American Dance Festival, Durham, North Carolina (July 18 through 20).
Enlarged to 18 dancers for his new piece, the Lar Lubovitch Dance Company presented an all-Mozart program as part of the Mostly Mozart Festival at Lincoln Center’s Avery Fisher Hall. Without wing space or a curtain or a flexible lighting system. Avery Fisher is hardly an ideal space for dance, but, with orchestra (the fine Solisiti New York, conducted by Randsom Wilson) located behind and above the dancers and partially masked by a black scrim borrowed from City Center, it worked surprisingly well. The setup, with six freestanding white Corinthian pillars, rearranged for each dance, gave the performance a certain attractive informality.
Lubovitch’s 1986 Concerto Six Twenty-Two, grounded by the touchingly supportive and restrained male duet in the slow movement (performed by Lane Sayles and Ido Tadmor) that off-sets the friskiness of the outer movements, was a kind of watershed. Last year’s reeling Just Before Jupiter, (previously titled From Paris to Jupiter and set to Symphony No. 40) is less inspired. But his new Sinfonia Concertante, made over a long period partly on the Pacific Northwest Ballet and partly on his own company, is a rousingly satisfying work. The costumes by Ann Hould-Ward are not particularly successful, at least in the unsubtle lighting available, but they’re an improvement on her even fussier designs for Just Before Jupiter, in which encrusted waistcoats and bodices and ruffly jabots top darkly gleaming, multicolored unitards. For Sinfonia Concertante the waistcoats are black, adorned with elaborate, metallic gold whorls, and the tights a duller charcoal with flamelike gold streaks on the lower leg that suggests speed. But the dance has none of the quaintness the costumes suggest.
Lubovitch swings to Mozart, responding to the music with happy inconsistency. He goes with its energies in different aspects, sometimes reflecting the varying densities of the orchestrations, or cuing into the instrumental conversations of solo instruments or small ensembles, or simply heeding the music’s flood and ebb, its weight and lightness in large phrases. To a degree, he avoids tight, pointed movements, the spiky geometry of allegro steps, the angular contrasts of poise and counterpoise. Instead, his dances bubble and flow and overflow.
In Just Before Jupiter, the soloists and the ensemble often drive each other off the stage, though their incidental manners are always gracious or playful. In Sinfonia Concertante (a score that Balanchine tackled back in 1947), the juxtapositions of the several groups are both subtler and stronger: the full, massive ensemble of 18, a sextet, and a quartet (Mia Babalis, Rebecca Rigert, Lane Sayles, and Dirk Platzek) that breaks down further into two couples, and, in the work’s quietest section, reduces to a responsive duet for the two women (matching the solo violin and viola, played superbly by Richard Rood and Mary Hamman) that eventually becomes perfectly still. The mass of dancers diminishes as several scoop up partners and disappear, leaving three couples (the sextet: Susan Shields, Ginger Thatcher, Suzanne Troiano, Christopher Johnson, Ido Tadmor, Edward Taketa) in purling patterns of waist-high and overhead lifts, swayings, and woozy swings that carry the women’s legs upward. Throughout, large groups replace small ones, or vice versa, with a breathless eagerness. The dancing restlessly swells and spills, eddies and whirls, with hardly a pause, despite the sometimes rapid replacement of one ensemble by another.
I like the way the music inhabits the choreography without inhibiting it. If the Mozart is, maybe, fatally glorious, Lubovitch takes it on pragmatically. He’s respectful and loving but not awestruck, and the resultant choreography uses the music without troubling to illustrate or analyze it. It’s not obedient, not circumscribed. It seems to nearly overreach itself, almost to rush ahead of the score. Among the fine dancers, Mia Babalis, with her swan neck ad long, ravishing limbs, miraculously combines boldness and fragility. Edward Taketa (formerly with Murray Louis and now in his first season with Lubovitch), is buoyant and dashing, nearly reckless.
Mostly Mozart, Avery Fisher Hall
The American Dance Festival in Durham, North Carolina, has undergone a kind of sea change in the past few years—a remarkable, growing internationalization. This year, the participants included dancers/choreographers from 41 countries, including Zaire, Pakistan, Korea, and the Soviet Union. And the festival closed with performances by the Guangdong Modern Dance Company, an impressive graft of American modern dance techniques and concepts on a Chinese stem. The company, in residence at the festival for three weeks, was founded by Yang Meiqi, director of the Guangdong Dance Academy in Guanghzhou (Canton) who attended the ADF in 1986 as part of the International Choreographers Workshop, and then, in concert with the ADF, sought government support to start a modern dance department and devised a program that stresses composition as much as technique. What a brave and risky vision! She recruited professional dancers in China and—with support from the Asian Cultural Council, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the USIA—the ADF provide a flow of American teachers (Sarah Stackhouse, Ruby Shang, David Hochoy, Lucas Hoving, Chiang Ching, et al.). Claudia Gitelman is headed there in the fall. The first class graduated a year ago, and, immediately after, the company made its debut in a program of original works. Even with the Chinese government’s tight grip, modern dance’s lonely outpost in China seems to be thriving. How odd it is that an art form that stresses individual expression and often subverts or at least questions establishment values, should appear to root so quickly and firmly in a culture that’s so intensely socialized, so group-oriented.
On the other hand, there’s nothing drab or uniform about these dancers. Just see how stylishly these resourceful young artists manage to dress. Our stereotypes, of course, are simplistic. The concert featured seven dances, all by current or onetime members of the company. What’s amazing is how solid the work is, even if much of it is derivative, and how naturally a full-bodied sort of dance vocabulary suits the dancers. Since the dancers/choreographers have been absorbing a wide range of dance styles and compositional approaches, it’s appropriate that the pieces reflect those experiences in their variety. But what the choreographers seem to have responded most strongly to, in a way, is the plastique of modern dance, its sculptural authority and beauty. Not angularities, or quirky articulations, or space-eating travel, or erratic spills, or impulsive flings—but the organic logic of full-body forms and cooperative patternings.
Using big, flat baskets and poles as essential props, Square Bottom Basket and Bamboo, a beautifully balanced opener composed by all the dancers, starts with stark, frozen images related to agricultural labor, and then goes into motion. In Impressions of Taiji, choreographed and performed by Qiao Yang and Qin Liming, the couple starts pressed back-to-back and explores shape-making relationships and the safety of balanced gymnastic designs. Initially they’re symmetrical or in unison, or formally pleasing in the way one curving body penetrates the other’s larger curves, but the dancers grow more ardent and clutching, while remaining always modest. We’re accustomed to work that’s not so neat and careful as this. The dancers mold themselves into forms that protect and resist one another in Shadow, by Huang Wenge and Huang Wencai. Performed by them and Su Ka, it’s a conceptually, unwieldy trio that starts out with a two-headed, fabric-wrapped, figure that recalls Pilobolus and Alwin Nikolais as well as Martha Graham’s stretch-jersey period. An extremely theatrical spectacle, Mountains, by Qiao Yang and Su Ka, featured two huge fabric swags, a stageful of smoke, beams of colored light, the dry sound of a wooden flute. It also seemed to take cues from Pilobolus in its decorative multi-person caterpillar and flower shapes, and a triangular human mountain as forbidding as a shark’s fin.
In contrast, Wang Mei’s Talking to Herself, eloquently performed by Ying Xiaorong, was a Spartan study in silence—except for the creak of wood—of a woman on a slanted wooden bed, disturbed, uncertain, restlessly tossing. Jerking up, whipping around, nearly falling off, she wrestles with herself and comes to no conclusions. To a turbulent rumble of sound, Situation, by two former company members, Zhangyi and Zhangli—twin sisters who were on loan from the air force—was the most forceful and moving piece on the program. Starting with a moving frieze of six women, each leaning back and holding the hair of the woman behind her, Situation depicts in formal and unspecific terms the terror women endure. However they break up as a group, they recombine like a herd whose members seek safety in anonymity. They wave their hands quickly in front of their mouths as if they’ve nearly burned themselves. They bring palpitating hands to their chests. All six cluster in a corner as if they know something they shouldn’t. There’s so much they can’t tell.
Wang Mei’s Tide, the skillful closing work (the only one set to Western music, by Jean Michel Jarre), rises to compelling climaxes, and, though its sequences build with a steady focus, there’s a pleasing lack of compulsiveness in the character of the sections and the way they’re linked. The dancers rush in one at a time to pace a big circle. Some begin to run ahead, and the movement cascades in a wide, dipping ring, like a spinning circle whose fulcrum loosens though its rim manages to hold. Tide is structured in many strong canons, on small boiling groups with their arms sweeping, exploding into leaps, or ripping around on their knees. At the end, two lines of dancers stalk from one side of the stage to the other. As a dancers reaches the wings, he or she turns to rush back through the ranks, like someone tagged in a game who must reach base to be home free. And from the wing into which they vanish, the dancers seem to renew their numbers and their strength inexhaustibly.
Overall, the dances demonstrate the Guangdong company’s commitment to craft. The choreographers are making the same discoveries other people on the same path have made. This is already a substantial achievement. Eventually, they must find their own, less generic subjects. Since there are worlds of information to be assimilated and transformed, there must be no rushing this process. In the meantime, the company’s glory is in the fresh, beautifully trained dancers who seem to bring the purest of hearts to their endeavor.
At American Dance Festival, Durham, North Carolina (July 18 through 20).
Enlarged to 18 dancers for his new piece, the Lar Lubovitch Dance Company presented an all-Mozart program as part of the Mostly Mozart Festival at Lincoln Center’s Avery Fisher Hall. Without wing space or a curtain or a flexible lighting system. Avery Fisher is hardly an ideal space for dance, but, with orchestra (the fine Solisiti New York, conducted by Randsom Wilson) located behind and above the dancers and partially masked by a black scrim borrowed from City Center, it worked surprisingly well. The setup, with six freestanding white Corinthian pillars, rearranged for each dance, gave the performance a certain attractive informality.
Lubovitch’s 1986 Concerto Six Twenty-Two, grounded by the touchingly supportive and restrained male duet in the slow movement (performed by Lane Sayles and Ido Tadmor) that off-sets the friskiness of the outer movements, was a kind of watershed. Last year’s reeling Just Before Jupiter, (previously titled From Paris to Jupiter and set to Symphony No. 40) is less inspired. But his new Sinfonia Concertante, made over a long period partly on the Pacific Northwest Ballet and partly on his own company, is a rousingly satisfying work. The costumes by Ann Hould-Ward are not particularly successful, at least in the unsubtle lighting available, but they’re an improvement on her even fussier designs for Just Before Jupiter, in which encrusted waistcoats and bodices and ruffly jabots top darkly gleaming, multicolored unitards. For Sinfonia Concertante the waistcoats are black, adorned with elaborate, metallic gold whorls, and the tights a duller charcoal with flamelike gold streaks on the lower leg that suggests speed. But the dance has none of the quaintness the costumes suggest.
Lubovitch swings to Mozart, responding to the music with happy inconsistency. He goes with its energies in different aspects, sometimes reflecting the varying densities of the orchestrations, or cuing into the instrumental conversations of solo instruments or small ensembles, or simply heeding the music’s flood and ebb, its weight and lightness in large phrases. To a degree, he avoids tight, pointed movements, the spiky geometry of allegro steps, the angular contrasts of poise and counterpoise. Instead, his dances bubble and flow and overflow.
In Just Before Jupiter, the soloists and the ensemble often drive each other off the stage, though their incidental manners are always gracious or playful. In Sinfonia Concertante (a score that Balanchine tackled back in 1947), the juxtapositions of the several groups are both subtler and stronger: the full, massive ensemble of 18, a sextet, and a quartet (Mia Babalis, Rebecca Rigert, Lane Sayles, and Dirk Platzek) that breaks down further into two couples, and, in the work’s quietest section, reduces to a responsive duet for the two women (matching the solo violin and viola, played superbly by Richard Rood and Mary Hamman) that eventually becomes perfectly still. The mass of dancers diminishes as several scoop up partners and disappear, leaving three couples (the sextet: Susan Shields, Ginger Thatcher, Suzanne Troiano, Christopher Johnson, Ido Tadmor, Edward Taketa) in purling patterns of waist-high and overhead lifts, swayings, and woozy swings that carry the women’s legs upward. Throughout, large groups replace small ones, or vice versa, with a breathless eagerness. The dancing restlessly swells and spills, eddies and whirls, with hardly a pause, despite the sometimes rapid replacement of one ensemble by another.
I like the way the music inhabits the choreography without inhibiting it. If the Mozart is, maybe, fatally glorious, Lubovitch takes it on pragmatically. He’s respectful and loving but not awestruck, and the resultant choreography uses the music without troubling to illustrate or analyze it. It’s not obedient, not circumscribed. It seems to nearly overreach itself, almost to rush ahead of the score. Among the fine dancers, Mia Babalis, with her swan neck ad long, ravishing limbs, miraculously combines boldness and fragility. Edward Taketa (formerly with Murray Louis and now in his first season with Lubovitch), is buoyant and dashing, nearly reckless.
Mostly Mozart, Avery Fisher Hall
Down to Earth
October 1
The Balinese kecak that a sudden downpour drove into the World Financial Center's Winter Garden one June Night felt particularly immediate and authentic because the emergency context made us all one - the eager performers from across the world and the damp, hyper audience members and casual bystanders crowding around. But you can't count on that kind of happy accident, and the program of the American Indian Dance Theatre now at the Joyce isn't structured to create any sense of communal feeling. Maybe it's just too sober and respectable. So, even if the carefully staged dances are perfectly accurate, we experience them with too dry an admiration.
With performers from 16 tribes, director Hanay Geiogamah has arranged a handsome, dignified, quick-moving program of dances from many tribes and regions, turned the front, truncated them, opened them up to our strangers eyes. I'm glad not to have to travel 2000 miles and stand all day under a bludgeoning sun to watch them. That would be a different, hopefully deeper experience, but what we're getting at the Joyce seems like more than a fair trade. If only if were less didactic, if only it were more than a visual and aural feast! The dances have to do with being on the living earth. Social or ceremonial, they share the flat footed, sometimes springy, stamps and shuffles, the crouched postures, the images of animals and birds. Dark-voiced chanting and drumming, punctuated by piercing cries and ululations, bind the evening together. It's of astonishing variety and the singing call out with soulful warmth.
The spectacular costumes, as colorful and fancy as fishing flies, aren't 19th century museum artifacts. Using sequins and glittering fabrics in electric colors - as well as leather, feathers,beads, and fur - they're made of materials available to people now. The spirit of the women seems fresh too, like in the Fancy Shawl Dance, where they do high stepping turns and kicks, quick little shuffles and crisscross steps, while flashing their bright, fringed shawls like wings. Every once in a while the one on the end, in red and gold, seems to be doing something awfully like the Charleston. In the Grass Dance warriors - splendid in lavishly fringed leggings, gripping fans of black feathers - stomp out their dancing ground. In the Tradition Dance Suite , the men, as magnificent as Kabuki lords, tilt and bend sharply. Wearing feather bustles and crested head dresses, they're more gaudy and fluffed up than the most extravagantly plumed mating cock. The women enter with bouncing steps and quiet authority, grandly swing the long curtains of fringes of their buck skinned dresses as their arms move in opposition. They're reticent as if they still know their place but a firm pride shines in them too.
In the Bear Dance on the Southern Utes of Colorado new to the repertoire we hear seeds rattling in a dry gourd, like the trickling of melting ice, before we see the bear that heaves and nods with clumsy grace. Three men scrape ridged wooden sticks to produce bass growlings. The wakening bear is a prelude to a courtship dance for four men and four women, seated in rows like shy teenagers at a school cotillion I like the wry sociability of this piece. It's Sadie Hawkins day: the women choose the men. They advance and retreat in lines, before breaking into modest couples who two-step around linked at the waist.
The new Northwest Coast Suite, however, seems dull and boring, perhaps because it's themes are merely stated without admiration or enough driving repetition. In the "Paddle Dance", eleven men and women do short, sharp strokes with wooden oars. In the "Spear Dance", five men in long grass skirts padding forward and back jab their spears, pull them back, and thrust again. In "Skokomish Ceremonial", the performers seems to be mostly milling about. It has no focus, no impetus. Jonathan Feather is astonishing in the virtuosic hoop dance, where, at speed, he gathers bunches of hoops onto his body in intricate, symetrical forms, build cats' cradle figures of arcs instead of lines. Smoke pours across the stage in the Eagle Dance, where the men stamp softly, softly flapping the narrow feathered wings that stretch across their arms and shoulders in slow, majestic beats. Too bad it's not until the very end in the Fancy Dance Suite, with the festive energy of its show off challenges that a welcoming community spirit begins to spill off the stage.
At the Joyce Theater (September 17 through October 6).
The Balinese kecak that a sudden downpour drove into the World Financial Center's Winter Garden one June Night felt particularly immediate and authentic because the emergency context made us all one - the eager performers from across the world and the damp, hyper audience members and casual bystanders crowding around. But you can't count on that kind of happy accident, and the program of the American Indian Dance Theatre now at the Joyce isn't structured to create any sense of communal feeling. Maybe it's just too sober and respectable. So, even if the carefully staged dances are perfectly accurate, we experience them with too dry an admiration.
With performers from 16 tribes, director Hanay Geiogamah has arranged a handsome, dignified, quick-moving program of dances from many tribes and regions, turned the front, truncated them, opened them up to our strangers eyes. I'm glad not to have to travel 2000 miles and stand all day under a bludgeoning sun to watch them. That would be a different, hopefully deeper experience, but what we're getting at the Joyce seems like more than a fair trade. If only if were less didactic, if only it were more than a visual and aural feast! The dances have to do with being on the living earth. Social or ceremonial, they share the flat footed, sometimes springy, stamps and shuffles, the crouched postures, the images of animals and birds. Dark-voiced chanting and drumming, punctuated by piercing cries and ululations, bind the evening together. It's of astonishing variety and the singing call out with soulful warmth.
The spectacular costumes, as colorful and fancy as fishing flies, aren't 19th century museum artifacts. Using sequins and glittering fabrics in electric colors - as well as leather, feathers,beads, and fur - they're made of materials available to people now. The spirit of the women seems fresh too, like in the Fancy Shawl Dance, where they do high stepping turns and kicks, quick little shuffles and crisscross steps, while flashing their bright, fringed shawls like wings. Every once in a while the one on the end, in red and gold, seems to be doing something awfully like the Charleston. In the Grass Dance warriors - splendid in lavishly fringed leggings, gripping fans of black feathers - stomp out their dancing ground. In the Tradition Dance Suite , the men, as magnificent as Kabuki lords, tilt and bend sharply. Wearing feather bustles and crested head dresses, they're more gaudy and fluffed up than the most extravagantly plumed mating cock. The women enter with bouncing steps and quiet authority, grandly swing the long curtains of fringes of their buck skinned dresses as their arms move in opposition. They're reticent as if they still know their place but a firm pride shines in them too.
In the Bear Dance on the Southern Utes of Colorado new to the repertoire we hear seeds rattling in a dry gourd, like the trickling of melting ice, before we see the bear that heaves and nods with clumsy grace. Three men scrape ridged wooden sticks to produce bass growlings. The wakening bear is a prelude to a courtship dance for four men and four women, seated in rows like shy teenagers at a school cotillion I like the wry sociability of this piece. It's Sadie Hawkins day: the women choose the men. They advance and retreat in lines, before breaking into modest couples who two-step around linked at the waist.
The new Northwest Coast Suite, however, seems dull and boring, perhaps because it's themes are merely stated without admiration or enough driving repetition. In the "Paddle Dance", eleven men and women do short, sharp strokes with wooden oars. In the "Spear Dance", five men in long grass skirts padding forward and back jab their spears, pull them back, and thrust again. In "Skokomish Ceremonial", the performers seems to be mostly milling about. It has no focus, no impetus. Jonathan Feather is astonishing in the virtuosic hoop dance, where, at speed, he gathers bunches of hoops onto his body in intricate, symetrical forms, build cats' cradle figures of arcs instead of lines. Smoke pours across the stage in the Eagle Dance, where the men stamp softly, softly flapping the narrow feathered wings that stretch across their arms and shoulders in slow, majestic beats. Too bad it's not until the very end in the Fancy Dance Suite, with the festive energy of its show off challenges that a welcoming community spirit begins to spill off the stage.
At the Joyce Theater (September 17 through October 6).
Dutch Treat
May 21
Huge horse chestnuts are blooming in white and pink spikes along the old canals of Utrecht. Each day gets cooler, and, late one afternoon, pebbles of ice fall out of the sky. It’s gray during the queen’s birthday celebration, when masses of people set out tables and blankets on the street to sell whatever household junk they want to get rid of - old clothes, ceramic swans, hideous lamps, knickknacks, sofas - as well as beer, sausages, sate, while music blares everywhere. It’s the week of Utrecht’s annual Springdance Festival, nine days long. Europe’s oldest modern dance festival - in existence since 1977.
Housed in four theaters, the festival features major international artists and companies - like La La La/Human Steps from Montreal and Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker from Belgium - and a number of “emerging” artists brought together to perform, take class together, see and discuss one another’s works, in a context that gives them unusual visibility because of the presence of the big guns. The young groups here are from Switzerland, Germany, Holland and Portugal - where contemporary dance is quite new because of Portugal’s relative poverty and cultural isolation. I’m sure the choreographers can all rap together about funding and training and production and the media, but I wonder what kind of dialogue - if any - they are having about one another’s works. If those sessions aren’t carefully focused, the participants are sure to avoid any mutual criticism.
As it happens, the performances by these younger artists are not generally strong. Jan Hessel’s Der Grens (The Border) opens with striking mages: he and Nanda Leenders crunch through paths of seashells in the dark, and then, covered in green-black feathers, perch on a metal bar where they shake and bounce very lightly, hunch as if fluffed up, just like birds. But the dance proceeds routinely once they hop onto the ground. An evening of works by ballet-oriented Dutch choreographers conveys how they are locked into their own isolation. In Maria Voortman’s Een Dans tot Slot, Deel I, four grim ballerinas in red toe shoes stalk and pose along individual lateral paths on a checked floor for half an hour, and a man appears several times carrying a candelabra. In Pieter de Ruiter’s tense bonBon, presse mais pas trop, Saskia Matern and Desiree Schneider get to writhe around in a highly sexual and emotionally dishonest duet between two miserably preoccupied women. Another balletic duet, a manipulative man-woman thing by Hans Tuerlings, is set to a brilliant reworking (by Martin Bon) of Stravinsky’s Le Sacre de Printemps for four pianos - Bosendorfer grands - one in each corner of the stage. How the responses in the music ring! Patrizia Tuerlings is witchy and brittle; Norio Mamyia, in top hat, red tailcoat, and gold vest - like a ringmaster or a magician - is insidiously subtle and sinister in his composure. He ties a red ribbon to Tuerlings’s ankle to mark her.
But all the balletic offerings in the festival seem to be primarily about an arrogant attitude and an ungiving, hard-edged style in which each step represents an unpleasant decision. Nowhere is there evidence of content, intuition, a love of dancing, or confidence in its expressive capacities. The choreographers seem to be using dance to score points in some other field altogether. The piece with the checkered floor could be a set up for an ad for a luxury automobile.
In contrast, the novice Portuguese work by Vera Montero and Joana Providencia is basically about movement - not sets, costumes, or vain concepts. Maybe inexperience and lack of money have helped kept them straight. In particular, Montero’s three-minute improvisation to Prince is pretty fresh. Helgi Musial - a member of the collective Tanzfabriek Berlin since 1981 - presents a multi-sectioned fist piece, Spiele fur Zwei (for himself and Sabine Lemke) that starts out as a kind of territorial challenge along a narrow strip but eventually wanders all over the place. Musial and Lemke’s glamour and athletic prowess are exhilarating. And what a buoyant jumper Musial is! In two leaps he’ll cross the puny stage, yet give no sense that the size of the space is restricting.
Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker, who is enormously respected and, rumor has it, will be taking over Mark Morris’s spot at the Theatre de la Monnaie in Brussels, has had a long and solid relationship with Springdance. I don’t get it. I mostly find her work pointlessly repetitious and assaultive, a brow-beating rehash of the formal ideas of the ‘60s. Wilder and crueler, and much more elaborately produced, but without any deeper insights and even less sympathy. The five women in her dramatic Stella display reckless, extreme behavior. They rant and whine, scream and giggle, rush about and slink away, put on and take off high-heeled pumps, slam doors, crash to the floor in a welter of gauzy fabric. Their accidents are convincing; the dancers are physically as relentless as the Terminator. Chop off their legs and they’d keep on coming. But their assertive, stereotypical characters are strained and atrophied; these are the kind of folks who remake the world in the image of the mental ell they naturally inhabit. What do they want from us?
To me, this self-glorifying atmosphere of hysteria and self-pity is poison. Growing out of one another, de Keersmaeker’s pieces are larded with references to previous works in her oeuvre (the costumes arrayed at the back of the stage for Stella, for example, are from Otone Otone). In theory, the dressing room set of Stella is the back of Achterland; the wall with the slamming door divides them. And music by Gyorgy Ligeti pervades both works. Achterland- november ’90 is a much brighter piece, even droll sometimes, and reshapes the dance material that seems so chaotic a part of Stella. There is no talking, no raving. There are chairs, of course, and platforms, and shoes, and dressing and undressing. The dancers throw themselves to the floor, roll, spring up, throw themselves down again. And again. But much of the dancing is literally cued to and energized by the superb playing of pianist Rolf Hind and violinist Irvine Arditti (music by Ligeti and Ysaye). The five women own the platforms or the squares of bright light beamed onto the square wooden floor (wonderful, opinionated lighting by Jean-Luc Ducourt and Herman Sorgeloos). Three men tumble and spill across them; they seem quite free of the neurotic characters the women haven’t quite discarded. Things subside between sections; chairs and platforms are casually rearranged, or swiped, and the lighting has teasing thoughts of its own.
But there’s room in this orderliness for a little disruption. Then, perhaps, movement erupts in tantrums or in strenuous dashes of kicking, sliding, rolling, skipping, wriggling at top speed. The men may rush through the hectic unison lines of the women, or vice versa. Or seated in their squares of light, the women may slice their arms, rap their knuckles, in a gestural dance of humdrum ritual. The women start out seated on chairs and wearing gray business suits; at the end, everyone is enthusiastically rushing forward in brightly colored, off-the-rack clothes, skirts unzipped, pants half on, shoes unlaced, shirts being tucked in.
Roxane Huilmand formerly danced with de Keeersmaeker. Hic et Nunc, for her new five-woman company, Ashka - with Peter Kubelka’s film, Arnulf Rainer sputtering blank-screen flashes as an entr’acte - is performed under a big skylight in the Akademietheater as day turns to night and the glow of lit tapers surrounding the stage takes over. Great work at the piano by Jean Luc Plouvier. But the declining light is so sleepy-making...
Wim Vandekeybus shows Die Eieruhr, a work in progress, between a 46-minute video and a concert by Pweter Vermeersch’s rock group, X-legged Sally. I love the brisk, lean aggressiveness of Vandekeybus’s work, its physical daring and urgency. But I hated witnessing a section in which a man drops one women at a time like a dead weight. I’m sure the women won’t break any bones, but will they discover some inexplicable internal damage 10 or 15 years from now?
After 10 years of solo work, Quebecoise artists Marie Chouinard turned seven dancers into herself in Les trous du ciel, her first group work. The dancers are ravishingly strange in costumes of ratty thermal undershirts with odd bumps, and a Ping-Pong ball-shaped genital - the same for men and women. They wear red eye make-up, metallic blue/green are feathered into their hairlines, red streaks mark their bare arms, huge swags of bushy hair dangle from their armpits, and their mouths are gold inside. They try to fly, struggle to articulate. Painted “primitives” - a tribe of possibly incestuous siblings given to barking, moaning, panting, chiming, squawking - they’re miked for sound and are subject to emotions that veer wildly.
In her solo pieces, Chouinard could go deep into inchoate personal mysteries. Les trous du ciel stays more on the surface, relating inexplicable incidents that are frequently marvelous - like a woman pounding gentle cries out of her own chest, or another having her feet dipped in blue paint, or a sad and foolish winter dance for Andrew Harwood. He leaps around with his empty sleeves flopping and his fingers - his arms are held straight down against his body inside his loose shirt - occasionally peeping out from under the shirt like multiple penises or the enlarged teats of an udder. I was fascinated by the curious customs Chouinard devised, b the intense responses of the dancers to one another, but each pungent episode only carried us further into exoticism.
The absolute treat of the festival was Dutch choreographer Beppie Blankert’s Charles, a 45-minute piece set to a loving selection of Charles Ives’s songs and piano pieces. This friendly, moving, though quite unsentimental work played in the early afternoon with daylight pouring in the big arched windows of a former church very much like St. Mark’s in-the-Bowery inside (though not remotely so beautiful). Blankert mingles her dances and concert with deceptive simplicity, creating a sense of easy camaraderie between dancers and musicians who stroll together, watch one another, occasionally quote remarks of Ives or good-humoredly chitchat for a moment in English or Dutch. They’re wearing casual shirts, vests, suspenders, hats - looking imprecisely dated, residents of a bygone Norman Rockwell America.
“Hey, Charlie,” shouts Fabian Galama to John Taylor across the room, who runs and jumps contentedly onto his shoulder, and stays up there in a crooked pose. Baritone Charles van Tassel stands with the unabashed elegance of the singer whose concern is his vocalizing rather than his physique, and, with Gerard Bouwhuis at the piano, gives vividly flavored interpretations of the songs. Galama and Taylor join van Tassel and whistle along with him, hats held over their chests, in the chipper song that begins, “We’re sitting in the opera house.” When they break up, Galama blithely hangs his hat on the back wall where there’s no hook. It falls to the ground unnoticed.
Galama and Taylor are superbly matched and contrasted. Their dancing has such virile open-heartedness and offhand, sweeping grace, yet it’s punctuated with quizzical glances, hesitations, listening pauses that keep it in dialogue with the small-town world this room represents. The delicacy with which their balances shift, the overall spaciousness of their movement is ravishing. The dancing is full of humor in its springy playfulness and temperamental rhythms, its crisp footwork, its easy boosts and leapfrogging jumps, its curiously bent and clambering lifts. The fleeting intermittent jokes - Galama’s coy, darting jumps behind Taylor, or the way an overhead lift evolves, leaving him flying perfectly horizontal over Taylor’s thighs - have just the right tone of challenge and palliness. The whole event is so beautifully, entirely, in tune.
Utrecht, Holland (April 27 through May 5).
Huge horse chestnuts are blooming in white and pink spikes along the old canals of Utrecht. Each day gets cooler, and, late one afternoon, pebbles of ice fall out of the sky. It’s gray during the queen’s birthday celebration, when masses of people set out tables and blankets on the street to sell whatever household junk they want to get rid of - old clothes, ceramic swans, hideous lamps, knickknacks, sofas - as well as beer, sausages, sate, while music blares everywhere. It’s the week of Utrecht’s annual Springdance Festival, nine days long. Europe’s oldest modern dance festival - in existence since 1977.
Housed in four theaters, the festival features major international artists and companies - like La La La/Human Steps from Montreal and Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker from Belgium - and a number of “emerging” artists brought together to perform, take class together, see and discuss one another’s works, in a context that gives them unusual visibility because of the presence of the big guns. The young groups here are from Switzerland, Germany, Holland and Portugal - where contemporary dance is quite new because of Portugal’s relative poverty and cultural isolation. I’m sure the choreographers can all rap together about funding and training and production and the media, but I wonder what kind of dialogue - if any - they are having about one another’s works. If those sessions aren’t carefully focused, the participants are sure to avoid any mutual criticism.
As it happens, the performances by these younger artists are not generally strong. Jan Hessel’s Der Grens (The Border) opens with striking mages: he and Nanda Leenders crunch through paths of seashells in the dark, and then, covered in green-black feathers, perch on a metal bar where they shake and bounce very lightly, hunch as if fluffed up, just like birds. But the dance proceeds routinely once they hop onto the ground. An evening of works by ballet-oriented Dutch choreographers conveys how they are locked into their own isolation. In Maria Voortman’s Een Dans tot Slot, Deel I, four grim ballerinas in red toe shoes stalk and pose along individual lateral paths on a checked floor for half an hour, and a man appears several times carrying a candelabra. In Pieter de Ruiter’s tense bonBon, presse mais pas trop, Saskia Matern and Desiree Schneider get to writhe around in a highly sexual and emotionally dishonest duet between two miserably preoccupied women. Another balletic duet, a manipulative man-woman thing by Hans Tuerlings, is set to a brilliant reworking (by Martin Bon) of Stravinsky’s Le Sacre de Printemps for four pianos - Bosendorfer grands - one in each corner of the stage. How the responses in the music ring! Patrizia Tuerlings is witchy and brittle; Norio Mamyia, in top hat, red tailcoat, and gold vest - like a ringmaster or a magician - is insidiously subtle and sinister in his composure. He ties a red ribbon to Tuerlings’s ankle to mark her.
But all the balletic offerings in the festival seem to be primarily about an arrogant attitude and an ungiving, hard-edged style in which each step represents an unpleasant decision. Nowhere is there evidence of content, intuition, a love of dancing, or confidence in its expressive capacities. The choreographers seem to be using dance to score points in some other field altogether. The piece with the checkered floor could be a set up for an ad for a luxury automobile.
In contrast, the novice Portuguese work by Vera Montero and Joana Providencia is basically about movement - not sets, costumes, or vain concepts. Maybe inexperience and lack of money have helped kept them straight. In particular, Montero’s three-minute improvisation to Prince is pretty fresh. Helgi Musial - a member of the collective Tanzfabriek Berlin since 1981 - presents a multi-sectioned fist piece, Spiele fur Zwei (for himself and Sabine Lemke) that starts out as a kind of territorial challenge along a narrow strip but eventually wanders all over the place. Musial and Lemke’s glamour and athletic prowess are exhilarating. And what a buoyant jumper Musial is! In two leaps he’ll cross the puny stage, yet give no sense that the size of the space is restricting.
Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker, who is enormously respected and, rumor has it, will be taking over Mark Morris’s spot at the Theatre de la Monnaie in Brussels, has had a long and solid relationship with Springdance. I don’t get it. I mostly find her work pointlessly repetitious and assaultive, a brow-beating rehash of the formal ideas of the ‘60s. Wilder and crueler, and much more elaborately produced, but without any deeper insights and even less sympathy. The five women in her dramatic Stella display reckless, extreme behavior. They rant and whine, scream and giggle, rush about and slink away, put on and take off high-heeled pumps, slam doors, crash to the floor in a welter of gauzy fabric. Their accidents are convincing; the dancers are physically as relentless as the Terminator. Chop off their legs and they’d keep on coming. But their assertive, stereotypical characters are strained and atrophied; these are the kind of folks who remake the world in the image of the mental ell they naturally inhabit. What do they want from us?
To me, this self-glorifying atmosphere of hysteria and self-pity is poison. Growing out of one another, de Keersmaeker’s pieces are larded with references to previous works in her oeuvre (the costumes arrayed at the back of the stage for Stella, for example, are from Otone Otone). In theory, the dressing room set of Stella is the back of Achterland; the wall with the slamming door divides them. And music by Gyorgy Ligeti pervades both works. Achterland- november ’90 is a much brighter piece, even droll sometimes, and reshapes the dance material that seems so chaotic a part of Stella. There is no talking, no raving. There are chairs, of course, and platforms, and shoes, and dressing and undressing. The dancers throw themselves to the floor, roll, spring up, throw themselves down again. And again. But much of the dancing is literally cued to and energized by the superb playing of pianist Rolf Hind and violinist Irvine Arditti (music by Ligeti and Ysaye). The five women own the platforms or the squares of bright light beamed onto the square wooden floor (wonderful, opinionated lighting by Jean-Luc Ducourt and Herman Sorgeloos). Three men tumble and spill across them; they seem quite free of the neurotic characters the women haven’t quite discarded. Things subside between sections; chairs and platforms are casually rearranged, or swiped, and the lighting has teasing thoughts of its own.
But there’s room in this orderliness for a little disruption. Then, perhaps, movement erupts in tantrums or in strenuous dashes of kicking, sliding, rolling, skipping, wriggling at top speed. The men may rush through the hectic unison lines of the women, or vice versa. Or seated in their squares of light, the women may slice their arms, rap their knuckles, in a gestural dance of humdrum ritual. The women start out seated on chairs and wearing gray business suits; at the end, everyone is enthusiastically rushing forward in brightly colored, off-the-rack clothes, skirts unzipped, pants half on, shoes unlaced, shirts being tucked in.
Roxane Huilmand formerly danced with de Keeersmaeker. Hic et Nunc, for her new five-woman company, Ashka - with Peter Kubelka’s film, Arnulf Rainer sputtering blank-screen flashes as an entr’acte - is performed under a big skylight in the Akademietheater as day turns to night and the glow of lit tapers surrounding the stage takes over. Great work at the piano by Jean Luc Plouvier. But the declining light is so sleepy-making...
Wim Vandekeybus shows Die Eieruhr, a work in progress, between a 46-minute video and a concert by Pweter Vermeersch’s rock group, X-legged Sally. I love the brisk, lean aggressiveness of Vandekeybus’s work, its physical daring and urgency. But I hated witnessing a section in which a man drops one women at a time like a dead weight. I’m sure the women won’t break any bones, but will they discover some inexplicable internal damage 10 or 15 years from now?
After 10 years of solo work, Quebecoise artists Marie Chouinard turned seven dancers into herself in Les trous du ciel, her first group work. The dancers are ravishingly strange in costumes of ratty thermal undershirts with odd bumps, and a Ping-Pong ball-shaped genital - the same for men and women. They wear red eye make-up, metallic blue/green are feathered into their hairlines, red streaks mark their bare arms, huge swags of bushy hair dangle from their armpits, and their mouths are gold inside. They try to fly, struggle to articulate. Painted “primitives” - a tribe of possibly incestuous siblings given to barking, moaning, panting, chiming, squawking - they’re miked for sound and are subject to emotions that veer wildly.
In her solo pieces, Chouinard could go deep into inchoate personal mysteries. Les trous du ciel stays more on the surface, relating inexplicable incidents that are frequently marvelous - like a woman pounding gentle cries out of her own chest, or another having her feet dipped in blue paint, or a sad and foolish winter dance for Andrew Harwood. He leaps around with his empty sleeves flopping and his fingers - his arms are held straight down against his body inside his loose shirt - occasionally peeping out from under the shirt like multiple penises or the enlarged teats of an udder. I was fascinated by the curious customs Chouinard devised, b the intense responses of the dancers to one another, but each pungent episode only carried us further into exoticism.
The absolute treat of the festival was Dutch choreographer Beppie Blankert’s Charles, a 45-minute piece set to a loving selection of Charles Ives’s songs and piano pieces. This friendly, moving, though quite unsentimental work played in the early afternoon with daylight pouring in the big arched windows of a former church very much like St. Mark’s in-the-Bowery inside (though not remotely so beautiful). Blankert mingles her dances and concert with deceptive simplicity, creating a sense of easy camaraderie between dancers and musicians who stroll together, watch one another, occasionally quote remarks of Ives or good-humoredly chitchat for a moment in English or Dutch. They’re wearing casual shirts, vests, suspenders, hats - looking imprecisely dated, residents of a bygone Norman Rockwell America.
“Hey, Charlie,” shouts Fabian Galama to John Taylor across the room, who runs and jumps contentedly onto his shoulder, and stays up there in a crooked pose. Baritone Charles van Tassel stands with the unabashed elegance of the singer whose concern is his vocalizing rather than his physique, and, with Gerard Bouwhuis at the piano, gives vividly flavored interpretations of the songs. Galama and Taylor join van Tassel and whistle along with him, hats held over their chests, in the chipper song that begins, “We’re sitting in the opera house.” When they break up, Galama blithely hangs his hat on the back wall where there’s no hook. It falls to the ground unnoticed.
Galama and Taylor are superbly matched and contrasted. Their dancing has such virile open-heartedness and offhand, sweeping grace, yet it’s punctuated with quizzical glances, hesitations, listening pauses that keep it in dialogue with the small-town world this room represents. The delicacy with which their balances shift, the overall spaciousness of their movement is ravishing. The dancing is full of humor in its springy playfulness and temperamental rhythms, its crisp footwork, its easy boosts and leapfrogging jumps, its curiously bent and clambering lifts. The fleeting intermittent jokes - Galama’s coy, darting jumps behind Taylor, or the way an overhead lift evolves, leaving him flying perfectly horizontal over Taylor’s thighs - have just the right tone of challenge and palliness. The whole event is so beautifully, entirely, in tune.
Utrecht, Holland (April 27 through May 5).
East is West
September 3
I can’t actually follow the plot underlying the evocative David Henry Hwang text that accompanies choreographer Ruby Shang and director Howard Silver’s film, Dances in Exile on Alive from Off Center. But actor B.D. Wong subtly slips between Eastern and Western, male and female personae, speaking - amused and a little distant - out of different cultural mindsets about the shrinking world, the desire to be the exotic Other rather than one’s own dreary self, and other perplexities.
The opening images are of vast, flashing advertising signs around Tokyo’s Shinjuku station, like in the opening of Blade Runner, while a group dances on a rooftop and their arms slash through the neon. Moments later, when Wong opens doors in a white corridor in Japan, we get brief, blazing glimpses of frenzied, black-clad dancers against a Greek Revival building in New York. Dances in Exile cuts back and forth between East and West, both scenically and textually. On a New York rooftop at night, the dancers’ huge, bold shadows leap up a building wall. In Japan a man in white slices, punches, jumps in front of a red torii, then several shiny cars roll across is space. Shang and the other women float and turn in steaming hot springs. In golden sunlight, the camera’s eye descends from the winglike, tiled roofs of a Japanese temple complex. A line of dancers do smooth, martial arm gestures in a temple courtyard. Shang and a man engage in a dry, twisting duet on a narrow bed in a hotel room overlooking a mid-Manhattan avenue. Four stiff, reticent young women, kneeling around a low table in a tatami room, move sharply, as if objecting to the conventions that circumscribe their lives, while Wong’s words make fun of Americans’ grotesque, sentimental obsession with personal feelings. Yet, “from my land of hard work and values,” he says, “I look to the decaying West with envy.”
Dances in Exile is richly complex and appropriately inconclusive. Visually it presents the confusion of cultural fragmentation and confrontation directly, and highlights it with the bright accents of commerce, like those Shinjuku signs and Barneys windows. A split second takes us from Tokyo to New York. Living and working in New York, born in Tokyo, daughter of a Chinese father and a Japanese mother, Shang knows plenty about the cultural inheritances that each claim their portion of the divided soul. But what she conveys most strongly, and poignantly, is a sense of inescapable loneliness and isolation. We keep glimpsing women looking lost or remote. The abrupt slicing, bending, twisting-around moves Shang so frequently choreographs have power, but they’re also pinned to center, ultimately neutralized and futile. Much as I loved Wong’s serene, beautifully composed performance, I’d have preferred Dances in Exile without the text, because Hwang’s clever, poetic contribution seemed much narrower than Shang’s conception. It all seemed to make perfect sense with the sound off.
Supposedly based on relationships among members of the Blooosmbury group, Brenda Way’s Loose the Thread, directed by Wendy Bair Slick and handsomely performed by ODC/San Francisco on the same Alive From Off Center program, inhabits the neutral ground of an ordinary studio stage and comes across as quite conventional. Unfortunately, the piece trades on the notoriety of the Bloomsberries without offering any insights into their aesthetic/neurotic doings. Who are these people meant to be, really? Not one is a crank! Can they possibly be English?
The dreamy lady is Virginia Woolf, I suppose, and, I guess the woman in man’s clothes whose kiss she barely avoids, but whose companionship she enjoys is Vita Sackville-West. Two sections work well: an extended friendly/romantic passage of three linked duets between men that opens with a deep gaze, turned three-quarters front, that serves to admit the viewer, and the very end, where the characters disappear diagonally upstage. There, Woolf rolls a ball after them, then a ball of white yarn, whose winding tail of thread she follows, balancing on the yarn as if on a high wire, and disappears into a lonely void. There are fine moments, like multiple images of the men leaping in, a flock of white birds, over the Virginia Woolf character, or a trio of women watched and occasionally clasped by men hanging about in the shadows.
Much of what happens in Loose the Thread, however, seems to be generic in design, an elegant but vague rhetoric of choreographic pattern and gesture. But with the series of male duets, accompanied by the trickling notes of a piano, we understand quite well what’s going on - in the briefly erotic contacts, horizontal archings that just touch the pelvis to the ground, slow dives across each other’s thighs; in the cool touches, clambers and balances, the narrow turns in which the danes come as close as gears about to mesh. There’s not much differentiation between one partner and another. No jealousy, no strain, no bad feelings. I like that promiscuous innocence.
I can’t actually follow the plot underlying the evocative David Henry Hwang text that accompanies choreographer Ruby Shang and director Howard Silver’s film, Dances in Exile on Alive from Off Center. But actor B.D. Wong subtly slips between Eastern and Western, male and female personae, speaking - amused and a little distant - out of different cultural mindsets about the shrinking world, the desire to be the exotic Other rather than one’s own dreary self, and other perplexities.
The opening images are of vast, flashing advertising signs around Tokyo’s Shinjuku station, like in the opening of Blade Runner, while a group dances on a rooftop and their arms slash through the neon. Moments later, when Wong opens doors in a white corridor in Japan, we get brief, blazing glimpses of frenzied, black-clad dancers against a Greek Revival building in New York. Dances in Exile cuts back and forth between East and West, both scenically and textually. On a New York rooftop at night, the dancers’ huge, bold shadows leap up a building wall. In Japan a man in white slices, punches, jumps in front of a red torii, then several shiny cars roll across is space. Shang and the other women float and turn in steaming hot springs. In golden sunlight, the camera’s eye descends from the winglike, tiled roofs of a Japanese temple complex. A line of dancers do smooth, martial arm gestures in a temple courtyard. Shang and a man engage in a dry, twisting duet on a narrow bed in a hotel room overlooking a mid-Manhattan avenue. Four stiff, reticent young women, kneeling around a low table in a tatami room, move sharply, as if objecting to the conventions that circumscribe their lives, while Wong’s words make fun of Americans’ grotesque, sentimental obsession with personal feelings. Yet, “from my land of hard work and values,” he says, “I look to the decaying West with envy.”
Dances in Exile is richly complex and appropriately inconclusive. Visually it presents the confusion of cultural fragmentation and confrontation directly, and highlights it with the bright accents of commerce, like those Shinjuku signs and Barneys windows. A split second takes us from Tokyo to New York. Living and working in New York, born in Tokyo, daughter of a Chinese father and a Japanese mother, Shang knows plenty about the cultural inheritances that each claim their portion of the divided soul. But what she conveys most strongly, and poignantly, is a sense of inescapable loneliness and isolation. We keep glimpsing women looking lost or remote. The abrupt slicing, bending, twisting-around moves Shang so frequently choreographs have power, but they’re also pinned to center, ultimately neutralized and futile. Much as I loved Wong’s serene, beautifully composed performance, I’d have preferred Dances in Exile without the text, because Hwang’s clever, poetic contribution seemed much narrower than Shang’s conception. It all seemed to make perfect sense with the sound off.
Supposedly based on relationships among members of the Blooosmbury group, Brenda Way’s Loose the Thread, directed by Wendy Bair Slick and handsomely performed by ODC/San Francisco on the same Alive From Off Center program, inhabits the neutral ground of an ordinary studio stage and comes across as quite conventional. Unfortunately, the piece trades on the notoriety of the Bloomsberries without offering any insights into their aesthetic/neurotic doings. Who are these people meant to be, really? Not one is a crank! Can they possibly be English?
The dreamy lady is Virginia Woolf, I suppose, and, I guess the woman in man’s clothes whose kiss she barely avoids, but whose companionship she enjoys is Vita Sackville-West. Two sections work well: an extended friendly/romantic passage of three linked duets between men that opens with a deep gaze, turned three-quarters front, that serves to admit the viewer, and the very end, where the characters disappear diagonally upstage. There, Woolf rolls a ball after them, then a ball of white yarn, whose winding tail of thread she follows, balancing on the yarn as if on a high wire, and disappears into a lonely void. There are fine moments, like multiple images of the men leaping in, a flock of white birds, over the Virginia Woolf character, or a trio of women watched and occasionally clasped by men hanging about in the shadows.
Much of what happens in Loose the Thread, however, seems to be generic in design, an elegant but vague rhetoric of choreographic pattern and gesture. But with the series of male duets, accompanied by the trickling notes of a piano, we understand quite well what’s going on - in the briefly erotic contacts, horizontal archings that just touch the pelvis to the ground, slow dives across each other’s thighs; in the cool touches, clambers and balances, the narrow turns in which the danes come as close as gears about to mesh. There’s not much differentiation between one partner and another. No jealousy, no strain, no bad feelings. I like that promiscuous innocence.
Ghosts
August 13
Three sections of Lucinda Childs’s 1979 Dance, the three accompanied by Sol LeWitt’s film, were presented in a pale revival as part of Serious Fun! At Alice Tully Hall. No blame to Childs or to the dancers, who were simply splendid. But LeWitt’s exquisite film, cast on a scrim in front of the dancers, was blurred, dimly projected ghost of itself. And the amplification system could only sickly groan the bass end of Phillip Glass’s score. What a disservice to Childs’s landmark work!
The loss of crispness, brightness, and authority in the film, whatever the reason, upset the vital visual balance in the partnership and dissolved the magic of the simultaneous play between film and live dancers, between huge images and small, between stopped images and moving bodies, between dancers fleetly passing across the stage floor and luminous figures crossing over their heads, between an overhead view down to the floor grid and a frontal view of the action. Still, how beautiful are the smooth lateral leaps, the coolly intricate skipping sequences that fold over one another, the deceptively simple duplicating, reversing, mirroring patterns that seem almost kaleidoscopic.
There’s much to admire in the easy poise of the dancers’ arms, their straight vertical torsos, the unfaltering, exhilarating clarity of their flashing legs. The elegant, repeating embroidery of Childs’s calculated patterns grants her dancers surprising freedom within a narrow range. Despite occasional loops and pauses, the choreography could be relentless; instead, the way the dancing skims across the accents of Glass’s chiming rhythms makes it lilting, almost carefree. The dancers don’t try to buck the relative anonymity of their parts. Instead they find more air, more stretch, more clarity without changing the force or scale or assertiveness of their dancing. The quick reach of Daniel McCusker’s feet and ankles in those sideways leaps in “Dance No. 1” is gleefully apt; Michael Ing’s eloquent balance of sharpness and reserve is reason to rejoice. The others too—Emily Stern Janet Charleston, Cathy Lipowicz, Janet Kaufman, Michele Pogliani, Geoffrey Nimmer, Garry Reigenborn—are superb. In Childs’s daunting solo, “Dance No. 4,” which moves in deep, straight lines and arcs, she dances in a smaller space, more quietly, a little more stiffly than on the film. When her energy dips too low, she seems slightly lost. But, on the whole, her performance is clean and unflinching though a dozen years have passed.
At Serious Fun! Alice Tully Hall (July 30 and 31).
Fourteen people linked to the Pilobolus-Momix-Martha Clarke extended family -presented a dozen short works, primarily solos, in “Motion Pictures” at One Dream, a basement theater in Tribeca. Many of the pieces were clever if gimmicky, but I particularly liked the work of Felix Blaska and Joseph Mills.
Mills (formerly of Momix), and with Erick Hawkins since 1990) presented two inventive solos. Crouching in Mano-Man, he traps his straight arms between thigh and calf, letting them be hind legs, and his feet his front legs - all four “feet” identical in yellow work gloves. He rocks, slides, kicks up his feet, scoots like a monkey, making it a challenge to discern which limbs are which, and bursts into backflips. In Untitled, only two alien flashlight eyes appear, mounted on a helmet, I suppose. Mills and his gleaming eyes, wafts gently within a roomy, inflated polyethylene sack like some luminous creature from the ocean deeps.
Felix Blaska came here from France a dozen years ago to work with Martha Clarke. His solo Maman - a richly compressed, painfully evocative piece of dance/theater, part dream, part memory - was reason enough for the whole evening. At first, he’s sitting stiffly, a book on his lap. As a locomotive chugs louder and louder, he breathes harder and harder, in the middle of a dream he can’t wake up from. The book drops from his lap, the lights black out, and ou hear the scream. “Maman” he never utters.
Right then I thought it was over. But he continues in a series of sometimes terrible, fragmentary episodes of evanescent, mingling emotions. He walks slowly, peering ahead and pushing his shoes before him with his bare feet. A phone rings; a butler brings him a pistol that he picks up like a telephone receiver and into which he speaks about loss, being cold and being beaten. Long, deep, lunging reaches recall the relentless driving motion of the train wheels.
He’s holding his hands up - or is he being held up He’s someone else, accusing, beckoning, and then he’s himself, being brutally smacked. Off comes his shirt, his pants, his briefs, and he cowers, covering his genitals, stamping with cold. I’m seeing concentration camp prisoners, prisoners of war, the train sounds evoke images of people in boxcars. He’s doubled over, his fists ram into his belly. At the end, he pulls his closed shirt upward over his head like a shroud. The gaping hole of his mouth vanishes into the neck opening to the shrill scream of a speeding train.
At One Dream (August 1 through 4).
Three sections of Lucinda Childs’s 1979 Dance, the three accompanied by Sol LeWitt’s film, were presented in a pale revival as part of Serious Fun! At Alice Tully Hall. No blame to Childs or to the dancers, who were simply splendid. But LeWitt’s exquisite film, cast on a scrim in front of the dancers, was blurred, dimly projected ghost of itself. And the amplification system could only sickly groan the bass end of Phillip Glass’s score. What a disservice to Childs’s landmark work!
The loss of crispness, brightness, and authority in the film, whatever the reason, upset the vital visual balance in the partnership and dissolved the magic of the simultaneous play between film and live dancers, between huge images and small, between stopped images and moving bodies, between dancers fleetly passing across the stage floor and luminous figures crossing over their heads, between an overhead view down to the floor grid and a frontal view of the action. Still, how beautiful are the smooth lateral leaps, the coolly intricate skipping sequences that fold over one another, the deceptively simple duplicating, reversing, mirroring patterns that seem almost kaleidoscopic.
There’s much to admire in the easy poise of the dancers’ arms, their straight vertical torsos, the unfaltering, exhilarating clarity of their flashing legs. The elegant, repeating embroidery of Childs’s calculated patterns grants her dancers surprising freedom within a narrow range. Despite occasional loops and pauses, the choreography could be relentless; instead, the way the dancing skims across the accents of Glass’s chiming rhythms makes it lilting, almost carefree. The dancers don’t try to buck the relative anonymity of their parts. Instead they find more air, more stretch, more clarity without changing the force or scale or assertiveness of their dancing. The quick reach of Daniel McCusker’s feet and ankles in those sideways leaps in “Dance No. 1” is gleefully apt; Michael Ing’s eloquent balance of sharpness and reserve is reason to rejoice. The others too—Emily Stern Janet Charleston, Cathy Lipowicz, Janet Kaufman, Michele Pogliani, Geoffrey Nimmer, Garry Reigenborn—are superb. In Childs’s daunting solo, “Dance No. 4,” which moves in deep, straight lines and arcs, she dances in a smaller space, more quietly, a little more stiffly than on the film. When her energy dips too low, she seems slightly lost. But, on the whole, her performance is clean and unflinching though a dozen years have passed.
At Serious Fun! Alice Tully Hall (July 30 and 31).
Fourteen people linked to the Pilobolus-Momix-Martha Clarke extended family -presented a dozen short works, primarily solos, in “Motion Pictures” at One Dream, a basement theater in Tribeca. Many of the pieces were clever if gimmicky, but I particularly liked the work of Felix Blaska and Joseph Mills.
Mills (formerly of Momix), and with Erick Hawkins since 1990) presented two inventive solos. Crouching in Mano-Man, he traps his straight arms between thigh and calf, letting them be hind legs, and his feet his front legs - all four “feet” identical in yellow work gloves. He rocks, slides, kicks up his feet, scoots like a monkey, making it a challenge to discern which limbs are which, and bursts into backflips. In Untitled, only two alien flashlight eyes appear, mounted on a helmet, I suppose. Mills and his gleaming eyes, wafts gently within a roomy, inflated polyethylene sack like some luminous creature from the ocean deeps.
Felix Blaska came here from France a dozen years ago to work with Martha Clarke. His solo Maman - a richly compressed, painfully evocative piece of dance/theater, part dream, part memory - was reason enough for the whole evening. At first, he’s sitting stiffly, a book on his lap. As a locomotive chugs louder and louder, he breathes harder and harder, in the middle of a dream he can’t wake up from. The book drops from his lap, the lights black out, and ou hear the scream. “Maman” he never utters.
Right then I thought it was over. But he continues in a series of sometimes terrible, fragmentary episodes of evanescent, mingling emotions. He walks slowly, peering ahead and pushing his shoes before him with his bare feet. A phone rings; a butler brings him a pistol that he picks up like a telephone receiver and into which he speaks about loss, being cold and being beaten. Long, deep, lunging reaches recall the relentless driving motion of the train wheels.
He’s holding his hands up - or is he being held up He’s someone else, accusing, beckoning, and then he’s himself, being brutally smacked. Off comes his shirt, his pants, his briefs, and he cowers, covering his genitals, stamping with cold. I’m seeing concentration camp prisoners, prisoners of war, the train sounds evoke images of people in boxcars. He’s doubled over, his fists ram into his belly. At the end, he pulls his closed shirt upward over his head like a shroud. The gaping hole of his mouth vanishes into the neck opening to the shrill scream of a speeding train.
At One Dream (August 1 through 4).
Hectic Heroes
November 26
Promises, promises. Canadian James Kudelka is a remarkably inventive choreographer but almost every work I’ve seen has been a disappointment, so willful in concept or lacking in overall stringency that it muffles and devalues his legitimate accomplishments. Too often he seems drawn to next-to-impossible music for his choreography. (I recall with particular alarm a grandiose program of two foundering pieces set to vast orchestral works by Brahms.)
Now, Kudelka has Fifteen Heterosexual Duets, to Beethoven’s “Kreutzer” Sonata, for violin and piano. The excellent members of the Toronto Dance Theater are madly busy with one another because Kudelka has crammed his dazzling dance with clever steps and gaudy lifts, but in the whole piece I can’t recall a moment when anyone looked at his or her partner. And if you think 15 of anything is too many, you’re right. Though the movement must give the dancers a gratifyingly challenging workout, the piece has no mental space, no space for consciousness; it’s all virtuosity and manipulation. I’d balked in annoyance at the snide implications of Kudelka’s deadpan, if absolutely accurate, title, as if same-sex duets were so wonderfully common that hetero duets had become remarkable. Anyway, I wasn’t so much amused. But the dance is just the straight goods - a series of complex and swift duets for varying partners, barely overlapping at the edges, sometimes with a dash of emotional icing or some folky verve.
Patricia Beatty’s First Music (1970), a sculptural monument to Martha Graham set to Charles Ives’s The Unanswered Question, was danced with devotion and authority by Miriane Braaf. The founders of the company (Beatty, Peter Randazzo, and David Earle) had all studied at the Graham studio (Randazzo danced with Graham for six years), and the company’s strong, flexible style is rooted in Graham training.
I’m not sure what to make of resident choreographer Christopher House’s The Court of Lions, set to several versions of a darkly springing Renaissance melody, though I enjoyed its exotic manners, its curbed force, and sprightly, circumspect teamwork. Sharp and unexpansive, the sporty divertissements in Court of Lions never override the music’s percussive rhythms. Clad in bright colors, the women with bare midriffs, and the men in short, martial kilts, - the squads of dancers seem like ancient athletes, hunters and huntresses who can pull together for a single purpose, like a pack of hounds. The men’s reaching jumps and low, loping runs contrast with the women’s quaint, pawing jumps, their docile, carved symmetries, yet each sex asserts a nice independence. The darker aspect come through in a ritualized duet embodying aspects of a duel: Laurence Lemieux and Bill Coleman face each other across the diagonal of an imaginary circle, and temperately declare their rivalry, like epic warriors out of Ariosto. They rock side to side. He seems to test the weight of his hands. Gradually, sidling, they shrink the distance between them, moving with strong sweeping limbs. Face to face, with competition and attraction mingling, she clings around his neck with as much desire to drain as to embrace him.
David Earle’s Dreamsend: A Melodrama in 12 Moving Pictures (1990), set to music by Webern, draws its inspiration from Cocteau’s Les Enfants Terribles, and, though it grows too macabre and confused, it has some marvelous material. In particular, there are a number of short, unfinished, yet tremendously atmospheric scenes in which one glimpses the brother and sister’s tumid isolation - like a locker room in which the boy (Christopher House) watches while others dress slowly, with cold suspicion; or a troupe of schoolgirls parading, jumping, and showing their undies,; or a golden, erotic coupling, which House, his sister (Braaf), and another boy (Graham McKelvie) observe, dreamily shucking their clothes. Among other children, House has his friendly overtures rejected; he’s whacked and shoved away by Michael Sean Marye, but he persists, wrestles, throws himself at the guy who knocks him down while others laugh. At a social, violent couples dance through one after another. There’s a meat rack of wallflowers, male and female. Everywhere, there’s a pungent sexual redolence, the mussiness of immoderate affections. And the malevolent crowd waiting.
At the Joyce Theater (November 12 through 17).
Promises, promises. Canadian James Kudelka is a remarkably inventive choreographer but almost every work I’ve seen has been a disappointment, so willful in concept or lacking in overall stringency that it muffles and devalues his legitimate accomplishments. Too often he seems drawn to next-to-impossible music for his choreography. (I recall with particular alarm a grandiose program of two foundering pieces set to vast orchestral works by Brahms.)
Now, Kudelka has Fifteen Heterosexual Duets, to Beethoven’s “Kreutzer” Sonata, for violin and piano. The excellent members of the Toronto Dance Theater are madly busy with one another because Kudelka has crammed his dazzling dance with clever steps and gaudy lifts, but in the whole piece I can’t recall a moment when anyone looked at his or her partner. And if you think 15 of anything is too many, you’re right. Though the movement must give the dancers a gratifyingly challenging workout, the piece has no mental space, no space for consciousness; it’s all virtuosity and manipulation. I’d balked in annoyance at the snide implications of Kudelka’s deadpan, if absolutely accurate, title, as if same-sex duets were so wonderfully common that hetero duets had become remarkable. Anyway, I wasn’t so much amused. But the dance is just the straight goods - a series of complex and swift duets for varying partners, barely overlapping at the edges, sometimes with a dash of emotional icing or some folky verve.
Patricia Beatty’s First Music (1970), a sculptural monument to Martha Graham set to Charles Ives’s The Unanswered Question, was danced with devotion and authority by Miriane Braaf. The founders of the company (Beatty, Peter Randazzo, and David Earle) had all studied at the Graham studio (Randazzo danced with Graham for six years), and the company’s strong, flexible style is rooted in Graham training.
I’m not sure what to make of resident choreographer Christopher House’s The Court of Lions, set to several versions of a darkly springing Renaissance melody, though I enjoyed its exotic manners, its curbed force, and sprightly, circumspect teamwork. Sharp and unexpansive, the sporty divertissements in Court of Lions never override the music’s percussive rhythms. Clad in bright colors, the women with bare midriffs, and the men in short, martial kilts, - the squads of dancers seem like ancient athletes, hunters and huntresses who can pull together for a single purpose, like a pack of hounds. The men’s reaching jumps and low, loping runs contrast with the women’s quaint, pawing jumps, their docile, carved symmetries, yet each sex asserts a nice independence. The darker aspect come through in a ritualized duet embodying aspects of a duel: Laurence Lemieux and Bill Coleman face each other across the diagonal of an imaginary circle, and temperately declare their rivalry, like epic warriors out of Ariosto. They rock side to side. He seems to test the weight of his hands. Gradually, sidling, they shrink the distance between them, moving with strong sweeping limbs. Face to face, with competition and attraction mingling, she clings around his neck with as much desire to drain as to embrace him.
David Earle’s Dreamsend: A Melodrama in 12 Moving Pictures (1990), set to music by Webern, draws its inspiration from Cocteau’s Les Enfants Terribles, and, though it grows too macabre and confused, it has some marvelous material. In particular, there are a number of short, unfinished, yet tremendously atmospheric scenes in which one glimpses the brother and sister’s tumid isolation - like a locker room in which the boy (Christopher House) watches while others dress slowly, with cold suspicion; or a troupe of schoolgirls parading, jumping, and showing their undies,; or a golden, erotic coupling, which House, his sister (Braaf), and another boy (Graham McKelvie) observe, dreamily shucking their clothes. Among other children, House has his friendly overtures rejected; he’s whacked and shoved away by Michael Sean Marye, but he persists, wrestles, throws himself at the guy who knocks him down while others laugh. At a social, violent couples dance through one after another. There’s a meat rack of wallflowers, male and female. Everywhere, there’s a pungent sexual redolence, the mussiness of immoderate affections. And the malevolent crowd waiting.
At the Joyce Theater (November 12 through 17).
Hold Me Down
May 14
What steps Demetrius Klein has taken since he last performed here in the fall of 1989! The Garden/Alone, the group piece he showed earlier that year in the narrow confines of the Mulberry Street Theater, still looks sturdy, and his dancers, who range in age from seven years to 30, perform it with infinitely more expertise. Blue (1990), a jaunty work to Hank Williams’s twangy heartache vocals, shows off its seven dancers nicely, but it pokes along with the beat, beat, beat of those songs. When Klein’s choreographic imagination is really humming, it’s not to be tied to comfortable rhythms.
Both of these pieces are skillful, workmanlike dances that sometimes wax brilliant, but they’re bound by prosaic conceptions. Foreigner, however, Klein’s new dance for an ensemble of 12, simply gushes in an inspired flood. Compactly built, neither modest not flamboyant in his persona, Klein seems sober and earnest, a nice, clean-living young man. Yet his dancing’s tastier than that - much more succulent than you’d expect. He’s astonishingly pristine and articulate, with a strong gift of phrasing, and the ability to modulate his power with great finesse. Sermon, a 1990 collaboration with percussionist Steven Keller, is a precipitous, jazzy, fiercely carved work, with a rich, assertive gloss of flicking, wiping gestures.
But its tedious text - excerpted from Handel’s “Messiah” - dissipates the dance’s passionate twisting impulses. Though Klein handles text effectively when he uses it to create characters (like the boy evangelist in The Garden/Alone), when he uses words to dispense philosophy and instruction, everything flattens. Klein’s body has more to say to us than the religious verses he may be riffing on. His own animal wisdom has more immediate value and more spiritual { }.
His other solo, L’Apres-Midi d’une Faune, with many formal nods to Nijinsky, is an exquisitely prolonged erotic reverie that moves in sequence through three pools of light. Bare-chested, clad in torn and faded jeans, Klein is languid, sudden, lush. Gently teasing himself, and taking his autoerotic satisfaction or reliving it with the utmost delicacy, he plunges into the light and, leaning on his hands, drops his pelvis to the floor in momentary bliss. He passes through the familiar Nijinsky poses in a twinkling. He seems to pluck words out of his mouth with his fingers, release them, and savor the fingers that did the job. At one point he seems to wonder if anyone’s watching. But his adolescent “faun” is almost shockingly innocent, utterly focused on unencumbered sensation. The notion that sex is dirty has never touched his mind.
In Foreigner, set to the biting Slavic nasalities of the women of Le Mystere des Voix Bulgares, Klein achieves a facility in craftsmanship way beyond that of his previous ensemble works. The structural bones cease to show, the sweep is exhilarating. The dance impulse is never stopped, and never forced. There’s so much going on in this complex, fluid composition. Yet Klein never has to regularize the action or slow it down to keep control. There’s no waiting. Events spill into each other with rapidity - not haste - and looseness. The intense Patrick Ryel and a woman speed-crawl across the floor. In an outpouring of many simultaneous duets, couples swing roughly, snap into each other’s arms, carry one another with quiet tenderness - like a man cradling a woman, or a young girl with her legs wrapped around a woman’s waist.
There’s a fierce and stunning solo performed with remarkable maturity by Debby Abramson - curving, wheeling, barely balancing. Can she be only 14? And where does she get that stamina? Meantime, two small girls lean together, there’s a slow quartet for four women, and another three do a strong, pliant dance of sweeping arms and bending torsos. Gestural language pours out of Abramson: she must speak. She seems possessed by divinity or by some desperate, certain knowledge. The dancing is simultaneously hectic and harmonious. There are violent, flinging altercations - particularly in a quartet for Ryel, Keller, Elissa Zetlzer and the fine young Jason Winters. Teams rush and groups splinter, yet there’s no deep sense of alienation or division. There’s an underlying sense of ritual in the devotional gestures of the hands and fingers, the ways arms will smoothly fold across the chest, as well as in the symmetrical gatherings along two movable benches and in sequential domino patterns of people pulling each other up or falling down. Ultimately, no one is excluded from the fold.
At Ethnic Folk Arts Center (April 20 through 22).
What steps Demetrius Klein has taken since he last performed here in the fall of 1989! The Garden/Alone, the group piece he showed earlier that year in the narrow confines of the Mulberry Street Theater, still looks sturdy, and his dancers, who range in age from seven years to 30, perform it with infinitely more expertise. Blue (1990), a jaunty work to Hank Williams’s twangy heartache vocals, shows off its seven dancers nicely, but it pokes along with the beat, beat, beat of those songs. When Klein’s choreographic imagination is really humming, it’s not to be tied to comfortable rhythms.
Both of these pieces are skillful, workmanlike dances that sometimes wax brilliant, but they’re bound by prosaic conceptions. Foreigner, however, Klein’s new dance for an ensemble of 12, simply gushes in an inspired flood. Compactly built, neither modest not flamboyant in his persona, Klein seems sober and earnest, a nice, clean-living young man. Yet his dancing’s tastier than that - much more succulent than you’d expect. He’s astonishingly pristine and articulate, with a strong gift of phrasing, and the ability to modulate his power with great finesse. Sermon, a 1990 collaboration with percussionist Steven Keller, is a precipitous, jazzy, fiercely carved work, with a rich, assertive gloss of flicking, wiping gestures.
But its tedious text - excerpted from Handel’s “Messiah” - dissipates the dance’s passionate twisting impulses. Though Klein handles text effectively when he uses it to create characters (like the boy evangelist in The Garden/Alone), when he uses words to dispense philosophy and instruction, everything flattens. Klein’s body has more to say to us than the religious verses he may be riffing on. His own animal wisdom has more immediate value and more spiritual { }.
His other solo, L’Apres-Midi d’une Faune, with many formal nods to Nijinsky, is an exquisitely prolonged erotic reverie that moves in sequence through three pools of light. Bare-chested, clad in torn and faded jeans, Klein is languid, sudden, lush. Gently teasing himself, and taking his autoerotic satisfaction or reliving it with the utmost delicacy, he plunges into the light and, leaning on his hands, drops his pelvis to the floor in momentary bliss. He passes through the familiar Nijinsky poses in a twinkling. He seems to pluck words out of his mouth with his fingers, release them, and savor the fingers that did the job. At one point he seems to wonder if anyone’s watching. But his adolescent “faun” is almost shockingly innocent, utterly focused on unencumbered sensation. The notion that sex is dirty has never touched his mind.
In Foreigner, set to the biting Slavic nasalities of the women of Le Mystere des Voix Bulgares, Klein achieves a facility in craftsmanship way beyond that of his previous ensemble works. The structural bones cease to show, the sweep is exhilarating. The dance impulse is never stopped, and never forced. There’s so much going on in this complex, fluid composition. Yet Klein never has to regularize the action or slow it down to keep control. There’s no waiting. Events spill into each other with rapidity - not haste - and looseness. The intense Patrick Ryel and a woman speed-crawl across the floor. In an outpouring of many simultaneous duets, couples swing roughly, snap into each other’s arms, carry one another with quiet tenderness - like a man cradling a woman, or a young girl with her legs wrapped around a woman’s waist.
There’s a fierce and stunning solo performed with remarkable maturity by Debby Abramson - curving, wheeling, barely balancing. Can she be only 14? And where does she get that stamina? Meantime, two small girls lean together, there’s a slow quartet for four women, and another three do a strong, pliant dance of sweeping arms and bending torsos. Gestural language pours out of Abramson: she must speak. She seems possessed by divinity or by some desperate, certain knowledge. The dancing is simultaneously hectic and harmonious. There are violent, flinging altercations - particularly in a quartet for Ryel, Keller, Elissa Zetlzer and the fine young Jason Winters. Teams rush and groups splinter, yet there’s no deep sense of alienation or division. There’s an underlying sense of ritual in the devotional gestures of the hands and fingers, the ways arms will smoothly fold across the chest, as well as in the symmetrical gatherings along two movable benches and in sequential domino patterns of people pulling each other up or falling down. Ultimately, no one is excluded from the fold.
At Ethnic Folk Arts Center (April 20 through 22).
How to Behave
April 30
Pep Ramos and Maria Munoz, who paired up as Mal Pelo in January 1989, turned up for one night at P.S. 122 on their way back to Barcelona. What they presented was Quarere, a mysterious duet, remote from the manners of civilization, redolent of leaf mold and crumbly earth. Perhaps an hour long, it’s about two people - somewhat feral beings - who have not formulae for relations, yet connect with astonishing delicacy of feeling.
We encounter Munoz and Ramis one at a time in long solos; eventually both inhabit the space for quite a while before coming to acknowledge each other a all. Dimly, warmly lit, the stage is set with a large, archaic wooden cradle, half-cylindrical and filled with water, and a thick, rustic post with several crossbars that extends from floor to ceiling. Munoz runs in with a soft, light, bouncing stride; something in her pockets - shells? nuts? - tattles each time a foot hits the floor. She hops, stops, toddles off. Coming back with a small gladstone bag, she thinks, mutters silently to herself, lopes around, goes away. Ramis drags in a small cage on a string. Like Munoz, he’s wearing some kind of chunkily cut suit that might be chic or might be a peasant’s Sunday best. Bold, yet evasive, he slides, spins, falls scoots alongside the cradle. Suddenly, he blows - almost hoots - in the air sharply a few times, like a deer barking an alert. He lands on the post, then climbs it and perches on the topmost bar. Munoz splashes the water in the cradle, then resumes her buoyant, dreamy chorus of spinning, hopping.
These two strange, personal, sensually direct and impulsive solos establish so much about the characters - their unsentimental closeness to the earth, their near wildness, their unique isolation, their caution. I’m strongly reminded of Eiko and Koma - though these guys are wearing clothing, aren’t involved in the kind of slow, grim, agonized transformation that the Japanese pair evolves, and the atmosphere is only quasi-primitive. What’s akin is the authenticity of the movement - its arcane appropriateness to the half-formed, half-human characters and their situation. We see them in quicker takes, coexisting like animals of different species whose territories can overlap because neither preys on the other or competes for food.
Munoz drops white shells from her pocket into the bag, then lays some in a line. Ramis darts in with slides and sharply angled moves, shaking a coffee pot till its hinged lid clanks. Indecisive, tomboyish, Munoz dances softly, almost turning around herself. From up on the post, Ramis tosses small objects into the water in the cradle. He hops around distractedly, puts his hands over his ears. You can feel their consciousness of each other swelling as they pretend they’re alone. Approaching her, he scoots around, blows at her, dives onto this hands.They have no idea how to behave; they’re the first creatures to invent a relationship, but an excited, happy nervousness buys them, embarrasses them. Facing each other, they lean forward and peer closely. Suddenly he blows around her face, nearly nips her nose. They’re as aggressive and backward as teenagers. He leaps onto her shoulder and she tosses him off with a shrug, like a horse might throw an importunate and skilled rider. After a couple of attempts, she ducks down when he runs at her, and then she’s down when he’s up, up when he’s down, probably secretly laughing. Then she jumps against his chest. Facing each other they swivel their heads around each other in an inquisitive, looping pattern. How freshly they enact their awkward exuberance! She nearly hits him. They get together in a twisty synchronous duet of follow-the-leader, playfully stalking each other. Kneeling, crouching, scooting, sliding, they keep close to the floor, enjoying their resilience. A vining, spinning, quick-footed solo for Munoz expresses most decisively the deep, sheer physical joy of their knowing each other. Gamboling, daffy, she springs into the air, wriggling like a giddy puppy going every which way at once.
How freely Munoz and Ramis build their connectedness, without ever summing up their relationship or nailing it down! And what a tender flux of emotions they express. They may stand together in contentment, turn sullen confused, reaffirm their independence in anger. Their aliveness and presence is extraordinary, with no false notes. If they’re frequently sure and eloquent, other beauties of their exploration are deliciously clumsy and sexy. She wipes her hair and brow with water in a small white bowl. He comes behind her, pulls his fingers through her wet hair. Endearing, dominating, tender, muddled, flushed, he slops her with water. Squirming, she sort of hugs him from behind, nuzzles his back. They don’t know how to fit together yet. It’s so messy, so foolish and real.
At P.S. 122 (April 15).
Pep Ramos and Maria Munoz, who paired up as Mal Pelo in January 1989, turned up for one night at P.S. 122 on their way back to Barcelona. What they presented was Quarere, a mysterious duet, remote from the manners of civilization, redolent of leaf mold and crumbly earth. Perhaps an hour long, it’s about two people - somewhat feral beings - who have not formulae for relations, yet connect with astonishing delicacy of feeling.
We encounter Munoz and Ramis one at a time in long solos; eventually both inhabit the space for quite a while before coming to acknowledge each other a all. Dimly, warmly lit, the stage is set with a large, archaic wooden cradle, half-cylindrical and filled with water, and a thick, rustic post with several crossbars that extends from floor to ceiling. Munoz runs in with a soft, light, bouncing stride; something in her pockets - shells? nuts? - tattles each time a foot hits the floor. She hops, stops, toddles off. Coming back with a small gladstone bag, she thinks, mutters silently to herself, lopes around, goes away. Ramis drags in a small cage on a string. Like Munoz, he’s wearing some kind of chunkily cut suit that might be chic or might be a peasant’s Sunday best. Bold, yet evasive, he slides, spins, falls scoots alongside the cradle. Suddenly, he blows - almost hoots - in the air sharply a few times, like a deer barking an alert. He lands on the post, then climbs it and perches on the topmost bar. Munoz splashes the water in the cradle, then resumes her buoyant, dreamy chorus of spinning, hopping.
These two strange, personal, sensually direct and impulsive solos establish so much about the characters - their unsentimental closeness to the earth, their near wildness, their unique isolation, their caution. I’m strongly reminded of Eiko and Koma - though these guys are wearing clothing, aren’t involved in the kind of slow, grim, agonized transformation that the Japanese pair evolves, and the atmosphere is only quasi-primitive. What’s akin is the authenticity of the movement - its arcane appropriateness to the half-formed, half-human characters and their situation. We see them in quicker takes, coexisting like animals of different species whose territories can overlap because neither preys on the other or competes for food.
Munoz drops white shells from her pocket into the bag, then lays some in a line. Ramis darts in with slides and sharply angled moves, shaking a coffee pot till its hinged lid clanks. Indecisive, tomboyish, Munoz dances softly, almost turning around herself. From up on the post, Ramis tosses small objects into the water in the cradle. He hops around distractedly, puts his hands over his ears. You can feel their consciousness of each other swelling as they pretend they’re alone. Approaching her, he scoots around, blows at her, dives onto this hands.They have no idea how to behave; they’re the first creatures to invent a relationship, but an excited, happy nervousness buys them, embarrasses them. Facing each other, they lean forward and peer closely. Suddenly he blows around her face, nearly nips her nose. They’re as aggressive and backward as teenagers. He leaps onto her shoulder and she tosses him off with a shrug, like a horse might throw an importunate and skilled rider. After a couple of attempts, she ducks down when he runs at her, and then she’s down when he’s up, up when he’s down, probably secretly laughing. Then she jumps against his chest. Facing each other they swivel their heads around each other in an inquisitive, looping pattern. How freshly they enact their awkward exuberance! She nearly hits him. They get together in a twisty synchronous duet of follow-the-leader, playfully stalking each other. Kneeling, crouching, scooting, sliding, they keep close to the floor, enjoying their resilience. A vining, spinning, quick-footed solo for Munoz expresses most decisively the deep, sheer physical joy of their knowing each other. Gamboling, daffy, she springs into the air, wriggling like a giddy puppy going every which way at once.
How freely Munoz and Ramis build their connectedness, without ever summing up their relationship or nailing it down! And what a tender flux of emotions they express. They may stand together in contentment, turn sullen confused, reaffirm their independence in anger. Their aliveness and presence is extraordinary, with no false notes. If they’re frequently sure and eloquent, other beauties of their exploration are deliciously clumsy and sexy. She wipes her hair and brow with water in a small white bowl. He comes behind her, pulls his fingers through her wet hair. Endearing, dominating, tender, muddled, flushed, he slops her with water. Squirming, she sort of hugs him from behind, nuzzles his back. They don’t know how to fit together yet. It’s so messy, so foolish and real.
At P.S. 122 (April 15).
In a Bubble
January 29
Shelley Lee trained at the Martha Graham-oriented London School of Contemporary Dance, founded a company in London in 1975, moved it to Scotland in 1979, and came to New York in 1985. With that grounding n Graham, it’s surprising to note how much her dances have of Merce Cunningham’s cool, leggy elegance. Even the frequent deep lunges and the floorwork - there’s a great deal of it, particularly in Approximate Attachments, recalling the arching, twisting shapes of Graham’s floor exercises, though lacking their pulse - don’t alter the overall straight and erect character of this work. Also, even in duets and groups, there’s a sense of the dancers as solitary. Thy don’t need each other; their contact shave few implications. Even their occasional coming into unison suggests only a harmony of spirits, a moment when individual consciousness can relax into the comfort of congruency.
Lee’s work is clean, polished, formal, authoritative, and beautifully performed by Martha Connerton, Brenda Daniels, Barbara Grubel, Fionuala Power, Tim Conboy, Keith Chamberlain and William Douglas. Time stops as we focus on the dancers’ plastique, their sculptural form. And the dancers’ consciousness of the volume of the room, their command of the space as far as the walls, makes that space - handsomely lit by Nicole Werner - shine. In her long, opening solo in Maize II (1990) - set to a score by Bruce Odland and Mark McCoin that includes moans, chatterings, whirrings, percussive vocalizations - Connerton is pristine, unruffled. Framing herself with her wrapping arms, posing briefly, using her legs with a sharp balletic geometry, she’s as well-mannered as Margot Fonteyn, curiously impersonal, without vanity. The poses are unassertive, mildly held, and seem designed to let any momentum recede. Daniels, Grubel, and Power replace Connerton in Maize’s second section, beginning in the arms-overhead stance she ended with, and all four dance in the ceremonious, canonical final section. From its extraordinary battements, to movements that curl the back and bring knees to { } lying back on the { } choreography { } range, though the dancers play through it so smoothly that the extremes are de-emphasized. There’s nothing earthy in their reclining: their leaps aren’t about buoyancy and freedom, but more, perhaps, about being bigger.
Forgotten Dance, a new duet for Power and Conboy set to excerpts from Bach’s cello suites for unaccompanied cello, has a restrained ardency. It’s fast, light, precisely punctuated - a dispute in which curving shapes pull the straight torso. But the couple’s hookups seem almost incidental, merely courteous. He gives her a hand or lifts her when she’s around. If she’s not, it doesn’t matter. And she uses him with the same brisk offhandedness. These are very Cunnningham manners. All three dancers share the same atmosphere - one with perfect temperature and no humidity, where nothing would age and nothing would rot. Approximate Attachments, the second premiere, is a long, challenging, relatively abstract work for six dancers that cracks apart about two-thirds through after a fade when everyone walks offstage. It returns at the very end to its opening configurations which makes it seem like a rambling journey that casually delivers you to your point of origin. Characteristically, Lee’s figures-in-a-landscape are imperturbable, though they’re not hard. Odland and Sam Auinger’s nice, cranky, environmental music (originally arranged as a sound installation for the castle of Linz, on the Danube) works well, as does a Froberger harpsichord piece that accompanies a duet for Chamberlain and Conboy. Douglas and Daniels have two fine duets. In the first, with its periodic alignments and symmetries, one feels the sensitivity of their influence on each other: when he holds his hand near her, it almost trembles. Lee creates a realm of safety where the slightest gestural detail seems to matter, yet probably has little effect on the whole. There can be no accidents here, and nothing unaesthetic can impinge on the dancing.
At Merce Cunningham Studio (January 10 through 12).
Shelley Lee trained at the Martha Graham-oriented London School of Contemporary Dance, founded a company in London in 1975, moved it to Scotland in 1979, and came to New York in 1985. With that grounding n Graham, it’s surprising to note how much her dances have of Merce Cunningham’s cool, leggy elegance. Even the frequent deep lunges and the floorwork - there’s a great deal of it, particularly in Approximate Attachments, recalling the arching, twisting shapes of Graham’s floor exercises, though lacking their pulse - don’t alter the overall straight and erect character of this work. Also, even in duets and groups, there’s a sense of the dancers as solitary. Thy don’t need each other; their contact shave few implications. Even their occasional coming into unison suggests only a harmony of spirits, a moment when individual consciousness can relax into the comfort of congruency.
Lee’s work is clean, polished, formal, authoritative, and beautifully performed by Martha Connerton, Brenda Daniels, Barbara Grubel, Fionuala Power, Tim Conboy, Keith Chamberlain and William Douglas. Time stops as we focus on the dancers’ plastique, their sculptural form. And the dancers’ consciousness of the volume of the room, their command of the space as far as the walls, makes that space - handsomely lit by Nicole Werner - shine. In her long, opening solo in Maize II (1990) - set to a score by Bruce Odland and Mark McCoin that includes moans, chatterings, whirrings, percussive vocalizations - Connerton is pristine, unruffled. Framing herself with her wrapping arms, posing briefly, using her legs with a sharp balletic geometry, she’s as well-mannered as Margot Fonteyn, curiously impersonal, without vanity. The poses are unassertive, mildly held, and seem designed to let any momentum recede. Daniels, Grubel, and Power replace Connerton in Maize’s second section, beginning in the arms-overhead stance she ended with, and all four dance in the ceremonious, canonical final section. From its extraordinary battements, to movements that curl the back and bring knees to { } lying back on the { } choreography { } range, though the dancers play through it so smoothly that the extremes are de-emphasized. There’s nothing earthy in their reclining: their leaps aren’t about buoyancy and freedom, but more, perhaps, about being bigger.
Forgotten Dance, a new duet for Power and Conboy set to excerpts from Bach’s cello suites for unaccompanied cello, has a restrained ardency. It’s fast, light, precisely punctuated - a dispute in which curving shapes pull the straight torso. But the couple’s hookups seem almost incidental, merely courteous. He gives her a hand or lifts her when she’s around. If she’s not, it doesn’t matter. And she uses him with the same brisk offhandedness. These are very Cunnningham manners. All three dancers share the same atmosphere - one with perfect temperature and no humidity, where nothing would age and nothing would rot. Approximate Attachments, the second premiere, is a long, challenging, relatively abstract work for six dancers that cracks apart about two-thirds through after a fade when everyone walks offstage. It returns at the very end to its opening configurations which makes it seem like a rambling journey that casually delivers you to your point of origin. Characteristically, Lee’s figures-in-a-landscape are imperturbable, though they’re not hard. Odland and Sam Auinger’s nice, cranky, environmental music (originally arranged as a sound installation for the castle of Linz, on the Danube) works well, as does a Froberger harpsichord piece that accompanies a duet for Chamberlain and Conboy. Douglas and Daniels have two fine duets. In the first, with its periodic alignments and symmetries, one feels the sensitivity of their influence on each other: when he holds his hand near her, it almost trembles. Lee creates a realm of safety where the slightest gestural detail seems to matter, yet probably has little effect on the whole. There can be no accidents here, and nothing unaesthetic can impinge on the dancing.
At Merce Cunningham Studio (January 10 through 12).
Keep It Hard
Sept October 15
Born in Mexico of Russian ancestry, Jose Besprosvany studied at Mudra, Maurice Bejart’s school in Brussels, and danced in Bejart’s company, before quitting to make his first work in 1984. Josef Nadj, born in Yugoslavia near the Hungarian border, was trained in martial arts, theater, and mime, and studied visual arts in Budapest, before settling in Paris in 1980. At the fourth biennial Festival International de Nouvelle Danse in Montreal, both presented works that were completely unalike except in their narrowly masculine character. Besprosvany’s Evento is formal, abstract, clean; Nadj’s fascinating Sept Peaux de Rhinoceros is a dreamlike quasi-narrative, a kind of exorcism, rooted in memory and morbid pain.
Evento (1986) - presented as part of the festival’s overview of Belgian dance - is a stringent, hard, precise duet for two men (Tobias Bausch and Marinos Tilios), set in part to sections of Beethoven’s Grosse Fugue and partly in silence, and danced between two halves of the audience in steep, facing ranks of seats. On stage are nine metal police barriers, three long tables, and a large white mat, and the dance proceeds formally from one location to the next. Poker-faced, in curt sequences of movement, the men bend, drop while raising one arm straight up, tilt sharply, push themselves up, hunch over the bars, hang by an elbow hooked over the pipe. They may make their way over the barriers by climbing or vaulting over in two or three quick, sighing bursts. From time to time, they give each other a brief, hard embrace that proves they are iron through and through. Sometimes one manipulates the other briefly, or one jumps up and is lifted, crouched, tipped, on the other’s shoulder. Beyond the barriers they treat each other more gently, but still with stiffness and great reserve. One touches the other’s shoulder and leans his head against him as if terribly weary or about to weep. But, in fact, there is no yielding. Emotions are simultaneously depicted and denied in the identical body shapes, the tense arm gestures, and the sharply terminated moves. On the tables, Bausch and Tilios sit facing opposite, shoulder to shoulder, almost ignoring each other. Yet one leans at 45 degrees or falls across the other’s lap. One reaches out his arm, lets it drop, and nearly falls after it. As a matter of routine, each saves the other from going too far. But no acknowledgment of need or gratitude in any form is appropriate. The iconic unwillingness, the solemn unresponsiveness, makes a huge drama of withholding. Not admitting emotion becomes a turn-on and a tease. On the gleaming field of the mat, sans Beethoven, they fall sideways several times, parallel to each other, and stretch out further in the next instant.
Right there the piece should have ended. Instead it went on to be exhaustive. Still, I admire Evento’s strictness, the clarity of its design, the consistent pitch of the dancers’ energy. The movements are intentionally very limited, but performed with intense concentration and beautifully meshed with the rhythmic attack of the strings in the Beethoven to take advantage of the music’s harsh impetus. Muscularly, the dance is about gripping, holding, keeping a hold on oneself, withholding. It’s conventionally masculine in the terms of its objective beauty and in the way it encapsulates moments in which potential emotions are stilled, ennobled, turned into sculpture, and killed dead.
Sept Peaux de Rhinoceros (1988) is based on the violent stories that poured out of his dying grandfather while Nadj witnessed his tormented demise. Nightmarish, reveling in a Boschian grotesquerie, with a folkloric aspect evoking eccentric earth spirits and icons of thoughtless power, Sept Peaux is very Middle European in its gloom, almost medieval in its cruel, erratic humor. I suppose some kind of narrative sense can be construed out of the work, but for me Sept Peaux - which may refer to the leathery skins we grow to inure ourselves to life’s scourgings - provides series of interwoven dramatic images, making light of horror, yet preoccupied with it. It’s an immersion into a fearful, male world of Kafkaesqe perils, idiocies and other obscure degradations. Though there are three women in the cast of nine, they’re relatively undifferentiated despite their intensity. The transitory schemes and dreamlike events - often nervously accompanied by drumming - are surreal (I’m reminded of Francois Verret’s arcane poetics) and obsessively detailed. The set and contraptions work in an intentionally crude manner, as if devised by scavengers - the tilted, skeletal birch trees that tremble, the open coffin that glides along the floor, then folds into a box with its sleeping corpse inside. And for characters, it’s as if Nadj dredged Dostoyevski novels for the poverty-demented, suffering scum on the bottom If you could smell the potently oppressive atmosphere, it would be slightly burnt and smoky, damp, fungal with the scents of fear and decay. Onto the dark and cavern-like stage, a man in a black robe, a priest, drags an old man in a cart who nibbles on something. Someone is asleep on top of a wall; the tarp that partially covers him slides off and exposes a woman on the fireplace below. A sacklike heap begins to stir, picks itself up and creeps along. Swathed in burlap, it’s a thick, gnome-like creature, with a carroty nose; it could be a mole, or even an owl. Two men and two women whirl with staccato urgency.
Often the dancing in Sept Peaux has a keen, single-minded, furious energy, as if to slice through the burden of ghastly knowledge and to escape. But it’s rarely expressive in a specific way. A headless man enters slowly; his hands have been chopped off, too. He’s a puppet, manipulated by the man in priest’s garb via a naked metal framework of braces and levers, and he kneels, offering his empty arms to a woman. A heavyset, thick-skulled lunk in a state of confusion shakes and bangs his head. Muddled but terrible dreams seem to mingle in the flow of brutal and pitiful images. The lunk and an older, bald priest capture a man in a brown coat. They shove a very long, T-shaped stick up the back of the coat and hoist him into the air where he dangles helplessly, as if being crucified. Two spies in green coats pop up, and there’s some Three Stooges comedy in the way they bump each other around. Through a window we see the bald priest with a hooded falcon that he carries into a pin spot center stage. (Later, an ominous emblem of aristocratic power, it perches on the priest’s head as he walks, flapping its wings to maintain its balance.) Two sloppy guys in old-fashioned bathing suits fight, with the bald priest grim and motionless between them. They snatch the two sides of his white collar to wipe off, and stuff them back into his neckline. Wearying after the second or third bout, with their anger dissipated and comradeship growing, they gently wipe each other’s cheeks. In the contaminated world Nadj evokes, fools and savages have to recourse but to inflict themselves on one another. Like the brainchild of a dozen incompatible inhabitants of a one-room apartment, Sept Peaux de Rhinoceros seems to come from a world in which privacy doesn’t exist.
Montreal, Canada (September 26 and 27).
Born in Mexico of Russian ancestry, Jose Besprosvany studied at Mudra, Maurice Bejart’s school in Brussels, and danced in Bejart’s company, before quitting to make his first work in 1984. Josef Nadj, born in Yugoslavia near the Hungarian border, was trained in martial arts, theater, and mime, and studied visual arts in Budapest, before settling in Paris in 1980. At the fourth biennial Festival International de Nouvelle Danse in Montreal, both presented works that were completely unalike except in their narrowly masculine character. Besprosvany’s Evento is formal, abstract, clean; Nadj’s fascinating Sept Peaux de Rhinoceros is a dreamlike quasi-narrative, a kind of exorcism, rooted in memory and morbid pain.
Evento (1986) - presented as part of the festival’s overview of Belgian dance - is a stringent, hard, precise duet for two men (Tobias Bausch and Marinos Tilios), set in part to sections of Beethoven’s Grosse Fugue and partly in silence, and danced between two halves of the audience in steep, facing ranks of seats. On stage are nine metal police barriers, three long tables, and a large white mat, and the dance proceeds formally from one location to the next. Poker-faced, in curt sequences of movement, the men bend, drop while raising one arm straight up, tilt sharply, push themselves up, hunch over the bars, hang by an elbow hooked over the pipe. They may make their way over the barriers by climbing or vaulting over in two or three quick, sighing bursts. From time to time, they give each other a brief, hard embrace that proves they are iron through and through. Sometimes one manipulates the other briefly, or one jumps up and is lifted, crouched, tipped, on the other’s shoulder. Beyond the barriers they treat each other more gently, but still with stiffness and great reserve. One touches the other’s shoulder and leans his head against him as if terribly weary or about to weep. But, in fact, there is no yielding. Emotions are simultaneously depicted and denied in the identical body shapes, the tense arm gestures, and the sharply terminated moves. On the tables, Bausch and Tilios sit facing opposite, shoulder to shoulder, almost ignoring each other. Yet one leans at 45 degrees or falls across the other’s lap. One reaches out his arm, lets it drop, and nearly falls after it. As a matter of routine, each saves the other from going too far. But no acknowledgment of need or gratitude in any form is appropriate. The iconic unwillingness, the solemn unresponsiveness, makes a huge drama of withholding. Not admitting emotion becomes a turn-on and a tease. On the gleaming field of the mat, sans Beethoven, they fall sideways several times, parallel to each other, and stretch out further in the next instant.
Right there the piece should have ended. Instead it went on to be exhaustive. Still, I admire Evento’s strictness, the clarity of its design, the consistent pitch of the dancers’ energy. The movements are intentionally very limited, but performed with intense concentration and beautifully meshed with the rhythmic attack of the strings in the Beethoven to take advantage of the music’s harsh impetus. Muscularly, the dance is about gripping, holding, keeping a hold on oneself, withholding. It’s conventionally masculine in the terms of its objective beauty and in the way it encapsulates moments in which potential emotions are stilled, ennobled, turned into sculpture, and killed dead.
Sept Peaux de Rhinoceros (1988) is based on the violent stories that poured out of his dying grandfather while Nadj witnessed his tormented demise. Nightmarish, reveling in a Boschian grotesquerie, with a folkloric aspect evoking eccentric earth spirits and icons of thoughtless power, Sept Peaux is very Middle European in its gloom, almost medieval in its cruel, erratic humor. I suppose some kind of narrative sense can be construed out of the work, but for me Sept Peaux - which may refer to the leathery skins we grow to inure ourselves to life’s scourgings - provides series of interwoven dramatic images, making light of horror, yet preoccupied with it. It’s an immersion into a fearful, male world of Kafkaesqe perils, idiocies and other obscure degradations. Though there are three women in the cast of nine, they’re relatively undifferentiated despite their intensity. The transitory schemes and dreamlike events - often nervously accompanied by drumming - are surreal (I’m reminded of Francois Verret’s arcane poetics) and obsessively detailed. The set and contraptions work in an intentionally crude manner, as if devised by scavengers - the tilted, skeletal birch trees that tremble, the open coffin that glides along the floor, then folds into a box with its sleeping corpse inside. And for characters, it’s as if Nadj dredged Dostoyevski novels for the poverty-demented, suffering scum on the bottom If you could smell the potently oppressive atmosphere, it would be slightly burnt and smoky, damp, fungal with the scents of fear and decay. Onto the dark and cavern-like stage, a man in a black robe, a priest, drags an old man in a cart who nibbles on something. Someone is asleep on top of a wall; the tarp that partially covers him slides off and exposes a woman on the fireplace below. A sacklike heap begins to stir, picks itself up and creeps along. Swathed in burlap, it’s a thick, gnome-like creature, with a carroty nose; it could be a mole, or even an owl. Two men and two women whirl with staccato urgency.
Often the dancing in Sept Peaux has a keen, single-minded, furious energy, as if to slice through the burden of ghastly knowledge and to escape. But it’s rarely expressive in a specific way. A headless man enters slowly; his hands have been chopped off, too. He’s a puppet, manipulated by the man in priest’s garb via a naked metal framework of braces and levers, and he kneels, offering his empty arms to a woman. A heavyset, thick-skulled lunk in a state of confusion shakes and bangs his head. Muddled but terrible dreams seem to mingle in the flow of brutal and pitiful images. The lunk and an older, bald priest capture a man in a brown coat. They shove a very long, T-shaped stick up the back of the coat and hoist him into the air where he dangles helplessly, as if being crucified. Two spies in green coats pop up, and there’s some Three Stooges comedy in the way they bump each other around. Through a window we see the bald priest with a hooded falcon that he carries into a pin spot center stage. (Later, an ominous emblem of aristocratic power, it perches on the priest’s head as he walks, flapping its wings to maintain its balance.) Two sloppy guys in old-fashioned bathing suits fight, with the bald priest grim and motionless between them. They snatch the two sides of his white collar to wipe off, and stuff them back into his neckline. Wearying after the second or third bout, with their anger dissipated and comradeship growing, they gently wipe each other’s cheeks. In the contaminated world Nadj evokes, fools and savages have to recourse but to inflict themselves on one another. Like the brainchild of a dozen incompatible inhabitants of a one-room apartment, Sept Peaux de Rhinoceros seems to come from a world in which privacy doesn’t exist.
Montreal, Canada (September 26 and 27).
Knockabout
April 23
I was exhilarated when I first saw Fragile Anchor, the big piece Randy Warshaw made in 1987, after leaving Trisha Brown’s company. But as its wrinkles became smoothed out in later performances, and some of the extraordinary original performers (Frey Faust and Joseph Lennon, for example) were replaced, too much of the wild airiness that ripped through it was lost. In January 1990, Warshaw overloaded his end of a shared program on the Joyce Theater’s “Manmade” series with two long works - Fragile Anchor and Event Horizon (1989) - that seemed to sprawl in that context. But just now, at the Kitchen, Warshaw offered a program that made a hell of a lot of sense - Event Horizon, much tighter and more forceful, and two substantial short pieces, 10 minutes or under, Captiva and Disappearance of the Outside.
I’m outrageously pleased about these two strong, compact works. Set to music by John King and Trio Bravo that sometimes drills like a jackhammer or blats and beeps, and sometimes dips into nostalgia via saxophone, Event Horizon seems almost like a different dance now. Warshaw’s choreography plays around with the music without surrendering to its force or temperament. Much of the dance is in terse bites, short-term stuff, with the dancers boldly, leaning, hopping, throwing their weight around, falling, being efficiently rescued at the last second, turning their backs and vanishing. It’s not for fun. They commit to knotted, contrived positions, and suddenly turn themselves inside out. They deliberately change direction, reverse impulses with no warning. Rather, an arm or a recalcitrant leg will throw a wrench into the flow of movement, deflect it, transform its energy. The teasing dynamic of the piece, with its skips and retards, its bolts from the blue and grindings down, is like a slap in the face. Event Horizon is a dance of snags, grabs, knocks and collisions that keep reorienting the movement, putting new spins on it, making it fizzle. It’s tough and blunt, zigzagging in its tensions, not accommodating. When things get quiet, they don’t relax; it’s only a sort of cease-fire. At one point Jose Navas, heading off-stage, yanks Meg Stuart’s arm and sends her flying slap into Jeff Lepore’s arms. In a brief duet with Susan Blankensop, Navas keeps close to her, but has to duck those slicing legs and arms. In a later duet, Lepore and Blankensop nearly hobble each other with the intensity of their challenges, yielding hardly any space at all in their falling, pressing, clutching, pushing. It’s great to be close up. Even though the dancers rely heavily on one another, the fact that they can absolutely count on each other makes them effectively, carelessly independent.
I can’t tell how much Event Horizon has been changed, but the dancers certainly didn’t have this authority when the dance was new. Lepore has achieved maturity, more power and expansiveness. Jennifer Lacey’s calm fearlessness is a great boon. I admire Allyson Green’s sweet clarity, Blankensop’s ravishing elegance. Navas, Warshaw (and Cristina Latici in the other two dances) are excellent. Stuart, however, disturbs me; there’s no sense of length carried through her upper back and neck, so she seems slightly hunched. With this attitude, her shoulders seem narrow, and give her an air of timidity and unhappiness, like a small animal being hunted, hiding.
Only eight minutes long, Captiva starts with a blast of David Linton bass that nearly blows you out of your seat. The women draw themselves up narrowly, hike their shoulders, prowl with a spooky elegance, pose with an upraised, limp wrist. The men, in half-leather, half-spandex or see-through pants, slide, hunker down, and the women leap as straight as spears into their arms, upside-down, balanced diagonally. The men restrain and tease their partners, holding them with firm pressure, exploring a bluntly erotic tension. Navas’s hands slide with casual possessiveness down Lacey’s body as he presses against her; his hands momentarily wrap her neck as if he might just strangle her. Disappearance of the Outside, to melodramatic music by John King, is an impressive quartet for four women - Lacey, Blankensop, Latici and Stuart, variously costumed, with Lacey in an effective, dark-gray, two-piece job, and Blankensop, cursed with a pretentious, glittering jumpsuit with a cutout back (costumes by Eva Goodman).
Disappearance has a beautiful, stern balance. In brief solos, big and full, the women are on- and offstage in seconds. Powerful leg swings, leaps, huge flings are interspersed with pauses and the suspended drama of an empty stage and silence. Latici’s in with little dicey moves. Lacey leaps from the wings with the suddenness of a swooping falcon, darts into a new stance with astonishing speed. The women’s assertive dancing is rich in inherent contradictions and broken impulses. But as music seeps into the piece, the women cluster and impinge on one another, begin to move as a constellation. There are abrupt leaps, links that break, leans and swings that test and temper their temporary dependency. But the actions of leaning and supporting slow them into succumbing to a deeper, yet impersonal intimacy. Fragile Anchor’s blissful fluidity and spontaneity owed much to Trisha Brown. Warshaw’s new pieces, constructed of sharper chunks and fragments, reflect a harsher, less forgiving character.
At the Kitchen (April 11 through 14).
I liked the humorous, taunting emotional texture of Via Theater’s The River Runs Deep. A grotesque and aggressive meditation on love and death, vaguely suggested by Poe’s The Masque of the Red Death, River embraces material from Wagner, Aeschylus, Hans Christian Anderson, Pirandello, etc. in seven scenes, musical interludes, two prologues, and an epilogue, conceived and directed - almost musically orchestrated - by Brian Jucha. It’s a sort of grisly, underground cabaret of trapped characters in postnuke isolation, waiting while their nightmares hunt them. A glamorized morass of masturbation and bloodletting, longing and desperation, it can be charming and amusing too, as lively as a nest of spiders. I’m weary of shocking characters, of posing and perverse insinuations. The characters’ insistent self-consciousness, their gaudy vices, seem as adolescent as the daily reality we inhabit. But I was moved by the haunting, mournful music, and, in particular, the aching singing of Megan Spooner. Tina Shepard was a powerful presence, dripping blood through IV tubing as she raved. And I loved the sour humor of Lisa Welti (was it she?) vigorously, tirelessly banging a fully dressed David Neumann every which way. By virtue of its relentlessly pumping physicality and the absence of dialogue, it got right inside your head so you couldn’t help but reconsider all you thought you knew about sexual relationships. In every instance, Neumann is a riveting performer, a potent danger ticking. He’s a few of my favorite things, especially in his long, dangerously courteous monologue from Pirandellos’ The Man With the Flower in His Mouth, Neumann’s manner is so unwaveringly simple that you wonder if his honesty masks a psychopath. You never know which way he’s going to jump.
I was exhilarated when I first saw Fragile Anchor, the big piece Randy Warshaw made in 1987, after leaving Trisha Brown’s company. But as its wrinkles became smoothed out in later performances, and some of the extraordinary original performers (Frey Faust and Joseph Lennon, for example) were replaced, too much of the wild airiness that ripped through it was lost. In January 1990, Warshaw overloaded his end of a shared program on the Joyce Theater’s “Manmade” series with two long works - Fragile Anchor and Event Horizon (1989) - that seemed to sprawl in that context. But just now, at the Kitchen, Warshaw offered a program that made a hell of a lot of sense - Event Horizon, much tighter and more forceful, and two substantial short pieces, 10 minutes or under, Captiva and Disappearance of the Outside.
I’m outrageously pleased about these two strong, compact works. Set to music by John King and Trio Bravo that sometimes drills like a jackhammer or blats and beeps, and sometimes dips into nostalgia via saxophone, Event Horizon seems almost like a different dance now. Warshaw’s choreography plays around with the music without surrendering to its force or temperament. Much of the dance is in terse bites, short-term stuff, with the dancers boldly, leaning, hopping, throwing their weight around, falling, being efficiently rescued at the last second, turning their backs and vanishing. It’s not for fun. They commit to knotted, contrived positions, and suddenly turn themselves inside out. They deliberately change direction, reverse impulses with no warning. Rather, an arm or a recalcitrant leg will throw a wrench into the flow of movement, deflect it, transform its energy. The teasing dynamic of the piece, with its skips and retards, its bolts from the blue and grindings down, is like a slap in the face. Event Horizon is a dance of snags, grabs, knocks and collisions that keep reorienting the movement, putting new spins on it, making it fizzle. It’s tough and blunt, zigzagging in its tensions, not accommodating. When things get quiet, they don’t relax; it’s only a sort of cease-fire. At one point Jose Navas, heading off-stage, yanks Meg Stuart’s arm and sends her flying slap into Jeff Lepore’s arms. In a brief duet with Susan Blankensop, Navas keeps close to her, but has to duck those slicing legs and arms. In a later duet, Lepore and Blankensop nearly hobble each other with the intensity of their challenges, yielding hardly any space at all in their falling, pressing, clutching, pushing. It’s great to be close up. Even though the dancers rely heavily on one another, the fact that they can absolutely count on each other makes them effectively, carelessly independent.
I can’t tell how much Event Horizon has been changed, but the dancers certainly didn’t have this authority when the dance was new. Lepore has achieved maturity, more power and expansiveness. Jennifer Lacey’s calm fearlessness is a great boon. I admire Allyson Green’s sweet clarity, Blankensop’s ravishing elegance. Navas, Warshaw (and Cristina Latici in the other two dances) are excellent. Stuart, however, disturbs me; there’s no sense of length carried through her upper back and neck, so she seems slightly hunched. With this attitude, her shoulders seem narrow, and give her an air of timidity and unhappiness, like a small animal being hunted, hiding.
Only eight minutes long, Captiva starts with a blast of David Linton bass that nearly blows you out of your seat. The women draw themselves up narrowly, hike their shoulders, prowl with a spooky elegance, pose with an upraised, limp wrist. The men, in half-leather, half-spandex or see-through pants, slide, hunker down, and the women leap as straight as spears into their arms, upside-down, balanced diagonally. The men restrain and tease their partners, holding them with firm pressure, exploring a bluntly erotic tension. Navas’s hands slide with casual possessiveness down Lacey’s body as he presses against her; his hands momentarily wrap her neck as if he might just strangle her. Disappearance of the Outside, to melodramatic music by John King, is an impressive quartet for four women - Lacey, Blankensop, Latici and Stuart, variously costumed, with Lacey in an effective, dark-gray, two-piece job, and Blankensop, cursed with a pretentious, glittering jumpsuit with a cutout back (costumes by Eva Goodman).
Disappearance has a beautiful, stern balance. In brief solos, big and full, the women are on- and offstage in seconds. Powerful leg swings, leaps, huge flings are interspersed with pauses and the suspended drama of an empty stage and silence. Latici’s in with little dicey moves. Lacey leaps from the wings with the suddenness of a swooping falcon, darts into a new stance with astonishing speed. The women’s assertive dancing is rich in inherent contradictions and broken impulses. But as music seeps into the piece, the women cluster and impinge on one another, begin to move as a constellation. There are abrupt leaps, links that break, leans and swings that test and temper their temporary dependency. But the actions of leaning and supporting slow them into succumbing to a deeper, yet impersonal intimacy. Fragile Anchor’s blissful fluidity and spontaneity owed much to Trisha Brown. Warshaw’s new pieces, constructed of sharper chunks and fragments, reflect a harsher, less forgiving character.
At the Kitchen (April 11 through 14).
I liked the humorous, taunting emotional texture of Via Theater’s The River Runs Deep. A grotesque and aggressive meditation on love and death, vaguely suggested by Poe’s The Masque of the Red Death, River embraces material from Wagner, Aeschylus, Hans Christian Anderson, Pirandello, etc. in seven scenes, musical interludes, two prologues, and an epilogue, conceived and directed - almost musically orchestrated - by Brian Jucha. It’s a sort of grisly, underground cabaret of trapped characters in postnuke isolation, waiting while their nightmares hunt them. A glamorized morass of masturbation and bloodletting, longing and desperation, it can be charming and amusing too, as lively as a nest of spiders. I’m weary of shocking characters, of posing and perverse insinuations. The characters’ insistent self-consciousness, their gaudy vices, seem as adolescent as the daily reality we inhabit. But I was moved by the haunting, mournful music, and, in particular, the aching singing of Megan Spooner. Tina Shepard was a powerful presence, dripping blood through IV tubing as she raved. And I loved the sour humor of Lisa Welti (was it she?) vigorously, tirelessly banging a fully dressed David Neumann every which way. By virtue of its relentlessly pumping physicality and the absence of dialogue, it got right inside your head so you couldn’t help but reconsider all you thought you knew about sexual relationships. In every instance, Neumann is a riveting performer, a potent danger ticking. He’s a few of my favorite things, especially in his long, dangerously courteous monologue from Pirandellos’ The Man With the Flower in His Mouth, Neumann’s manner is so unwaveringly simple that you wonder if his honesty masks a psychopath. You never know which way he’s going to jump.
Liberty Belle
February 19
Wearing a bright gold suit with a peplum deeply ruffled in the back, Carol Clements starts Chicken Tawk with extravagant, goofy freezes and a gawky, prissy, pecking chicken dance. It's forced, uncomfortable. It's not clear that she intends her bright, earnest awkwardness to be so nearly embarrassing. Then she cheerfully initiates our lesson in Chicken Tawk, a “language” —a body of slang, really—developed in Liberty, Texas. We [copy illegible] mod'n, pooty, and their use in sentences. Through rolling projections we're shown Liberty's location (somewhere southwest of Dallas, north of the gulf, and west of Louisiana) on a hand-drawn map, and the dubious new vocabulary words with their pronunciation and meanings.
Once Clements gets up steam, she's pretty charming, though on a long-term basis her perky chatter would wear anybody down. Calling up the world of Liberty in her explanations, she rambles into anecdotes: recalling the first time she, as a child, noticed a black child, remembering a boy that shot the side of his head off and how Clements and a girlfriend came to terms with the accident via the Ouija board. Like a grinning, precocious brat, she spins into an overeager tap dance. Lest [illegible] divorce, love triangles, murder. As the 40-minute program proceeds—accompanied by the blunt chords of William H. Clements' score, composed when he was 12 back home in Liberty—her speech becomes more enthusiastically, inscrutably Texan. Between rusty stories and vocabulary lessons, interwoven with Terpsichorean interludes, the pieces gets wonderfully hectic, gathering its themes into an almost symphonic climax. Clements swing the projector table around; we see Chicken Tawk sentences parsed, fancy diagrams, more words she's giddily skipping over. She takes a few moments out for fashion, walking into projected body outlines to precisely illustrate, for example, a word that refers to pants that are bunchy at the crotch. Or a word for pants that pull up into the crack of your behind. We're subject to a very funny, multiple-choice pop quiz on the words we've learned, and, sorry, one she bypassed. And she whips into a cheerleading routine doing high kicks, flipping upside down with [illegible] back [illegible].
At Dia Center for the Arts (January 17 and 18).
Wearing a bright gold suit with a peplum deeply ruffled in the back, Carol Clements starts Chicken Tawk with extravagant, goofy freezes and a gawky, prissy, pecking chicken dance. It's forced, uncomfortable. It's not clear that she intends her bright, earnest awkwardness to be so nearly embarrassing. Then she cheerfully initiates our lesson in Chicken Tawk, a “language” —a body of slang, really—developed in Liberty, Texas. We [copy illegible] mod'n, pooty, and their use in sentences. Through rolling projections we're shown Liberty's location (somewhere southwest of Dallas, north of the gulf, and west of Louisiana) on a hand-drawn map, and the dubious new vocabulary words with their pronunciation and meanings.
Once Clements gets up steam, she's pretty charming, though on a long-term basis her perky chatter would wear anybody down. Calling up the world of Liberty in her explanations, she rambles into anecdotes: recalling the first time she, as a child, noticed a black child, remembering a boy that shot the side of his head off and how Clements and a girlfriend came to terms with the accident via the Ouija board. Like a grinning, precocious brat, she spins into an overeager tap dance. Lest [illegible] divorce, love triangles, murder. As the 40-minute program proceeds—accompanied by the blunt chords of William H. Clements' score, composed when he was 12 back home in Liberty—her speech becomes more enthusiastically, inscrutably Texan. Between rusty stories and vocabulary lessons, interwoven with Terpsichorean interludes, the pieces gets wonderfully hectic, gathering its themes into an almost symphonic climax. Clements swing the projector table around; we see Chicken Tawk sentences parsed, fancy diagrams, more words she's giddily skipping over. She takes a few moments out for fashion, walking into projected body outlines to precisely illustrate, for example, a word that refers to pants that are bunchy at the crotch. Or a word for pants that pull up into the crack of your behind. We're subject to a very funny, multiple-choice pop quiz on the words we've learned, and, sorry, one she bypassed. And she whips into a cheerleading routine doing high kicks, flipping upside down with [illegible] back [illegible].
At Dia Center for the Arts (January 17 and 18).
Little Ease
December 3
Meg Stuart, who graduated from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts in 1986, and has been dancing with Randy Warshaw since then, was spurred to her first full-evening piece, Disfigure Study, by a commission from the Klapstuck Festival in Leuven, Begium. At the Kitchen, violinst/composer Hahn Rowe’s harsh, dark-grained music, performed live, gave unrelieved weight, perhaps too much, and intense, tightly focused lighting by Warshaw isolated the dancers in the gloomy void.
Some of the piece’s five sections are narrow but elaborate studies, like the opener, in which Francois Camacho dangles his feet, letting his legs twist, his feet caress each other. (Above the knees, his body vanishes into blackness.) Lying below him, Carlota Lagido strains to lift her head and chest, presses her cheek against his feet, rubs against his ankles, like the devotee of a moldering saint. In the closing section, the same two (both from Portugal), stand close to each other, facing in opposite directions, and he rudely runs his hand over her flesh - face, breasts, belly,legs - probing her with ignorant haste. Stiff and submissive, stifling her responses, she hardly moves. Rarely, she gets so distressed that she plucks his hand off her. Yet she’ll replace it, as if any touch were better than none, as if to instruct him that human contact can be something other than this blind tactile greed. In the in-place solo that opens that section, Lagido gobbles her hand, lets her crab fingers creep along her body, and snag under her arm. There’s a nearly fanatical, medieval sense that the body is a loathsome burden, a curse, something to be cast off. In the fraught, erratic adjustments, the urgent pulls to destroy, the body’s symmetry is portrayed as a deep, terrible, shaming awkwardness.
Stuart’s exhaustive, self-protective solo also evidences in the persistent twisting of the body, the way parts of it get stuck on other parts, the way more vigorous movement erupts spasmodically. Her head snuggles against her shoulder comfortlessly, the shoulder is jammed to the chin, she pushes against the back of her rib cage, all as if trying to find a bodily configuration that provides some ease. She suddenly drops, drops, drops to one side as if her bones were jelly. Or slips out of positions she’s momentarily locked into. Or flails and slashes her arms with floppy force. There are no shortcuts; Stuart takes us through every step of her painful, mechanical process.
A duet with Lagido - in which Stuart holds, drops, catches, twists Lagido’s head, slings her around, hauls her close, drags her like a rag doll - is hard-nosed in the same punishing way. Lagido gives herself over beautifully to this brand of manhandling, letting her body follow unquestioningly Stuart’s wrenchings. Yet to trust such obsessed manipulation, to allow oneself to be so totally a toy, is a kind of idiocy. The urgent fourth section is the dramatic focus of the evening, the most layered in complexity, and satisfyingly dynamic. Camacho, compact and eloquent, methodically holds himself, snakes his arms close to his body, falls with gusto, swiftly collapses. In the back, in very dim light, Stuart and Lagido roll, push up, roll, in unison. Then, while Camacho lies pretzeled on the floor, Stuart struggles toward him, doubling, folding, heaving her body across the floor, deprived of the proper use of her limbs. Whenever she gets next to him, he rolls away, flees faster and faster, and she follows, scrambling after, sliding, throwing herself, floundering like a fish on the deck of a boat, frantic for air. There’s a kind of acid joy in her determination. But it’s failure that absorbs Stuart - the body’s stubborn, fumbling thickness, its sticky desires and cruel inefficacies. And everyone is shown as damaged goods.
At the Kitchen (November 20 through 22).
Meg Stuart, who graduated from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts in 1986, and has been dancing with Randy Warshaw since then, was spurred to her first full-evening piece, Disfigure Study, by a commission from the Klapstuck Festival in Leuven, Begium. At the Kitchen, violinst/composer Hahn Rowe’s harsh, dark-grained music, performed live, gave unrelieved weight, perhaps too much, and intense, tightly focused lighting by Warshaw isolated the dancers in the gloomy void.
Some of the piece’s five sections are narrow but elaborate studies, like the opener, in which Francois Camacho dangles his feet, letting his legs twist, his feet caress each other. (Above the knees, his body vanishes into blackness.) Lying below him, Carlota Lagido strains to lift her head and chest, presses her cheek against his feet, rubs against his ankles, like the devotee of a moldering saint. In the closing section, the same two (both from Portugal), stand close to each other, facing in opposite directions, and he rudely runs his hand over her flesh - face, breasts, belly,legs - probing her with ignorant haste. Stiff and submissive, stifling her responses, she hardly moves. Rarely, she gets so distressed that she plucks his hand off her. Yet she’ll replace it, as if any touch were better than none, as if to instruct him that human contact can be something other than this blind tactile greed. In the in-place solo that opens that section, Lagido gobbles her hand, lets her crab fingers creep along her body, and snag under her arm. There’s a nearly fanatical, medieval sense that the body is a loathsome burden, a curse, something to be cast off. In the fraught, erratic adjustments, the urgent pulls to destroy, the body’s symmetry is portrayed as a deep, terrible, shaming awkwardness.
Stuart’s exhaustive, self-protective solo also evidences in the persistent twisting of the body, the way parts of it get stuck on other parts, the way more vigorous movement erupts spasmodically. Her head snuggles against her shoulder comfortlessly, the shoulder is jammed to the chin, she pushes against the back of her rib cage, all as if trying to find a bodily configuration that provides some ease. She suddenly drops, drops, drops to one side as if her bones were jelly. Or slips out of positions she’s momentarily locked into. Or flails and slashes her arms with floppy force. There are no shortcuts; Stuart takes us through every step of her painful, mechanical process.
A duet with Lagido - in which Stuart holds, drops, catches, twists Lagido’s head, slings her around, hauls her close, drags her like a rag doll - is hard-nosed in the same punishing way. Lagido gives herself over beautifully to this brand of manhandling, letting her body follow unquestioningly Stuart’s wrenchings. Yet to trust such obsessed manipulation, to allow oneself to be so totally a toy, is a kind of idiocy. The urgent fourth section is the dramatic focus of the evening, the most layered in complexity, and satisfyingly dynamic. Camacho, compact and eloquent, methodically holds himself, snakes his arms close to his body, falls with gusto, swiftly collapses. In the back, in very dim light, Stuart and Lagido roll, push up, roll, in unison. Then, while Camacho lies pretzeled on the floor, Stuart struggles toward him, doubling, folding, heaving her body across the floor, deprived of the proper use of her limbs. Whenever she gets next to him, he rolls away, flees faster and faster, and she follows, scrambling after, sliding, throwing herself, floundering like a fish on the deck of a boat, frantic for air. There’s a kind of acid joy in her determination. But it’s failure that absorbs Stuart - the body’s stubborn, fumbling thickness, its sticky desires and cruel inefficacies. And everyone is shown as damaged goods.
At the Kitchen (November 20 through 22).
Lust in the Dust
May 7
I love Michael O’Connor’s usual onstage persona: hooded, self-protective, meticulous, dorky, exceedingly dry. He knows he’s a born victim, so he’s strongly defended; every move and gesture is economical and sharp-edged with intent. Glaring like a cornered animal, he’s always defining his place, carving his space. He’ll suck your soul out with his eyes. In contrast, his partner Pam Quinn doesn’t ordinarily send off so many characterological signals, and her movement is bolder, cooler, less magically committed to producing a particular result. The combination always gives their duets, like the new Untitled, a satisfying texture In it, he’s initially guarded, contracted, circumscribing his head and body with his arms, warding off contact. But she grabs him, pushes, pulls, and abruptly forces him into a world of tumbling, crawling, rolling uncertainties.
Phone Sex, a conversation between a guilty priest with “ungodly thoughts” and “Isabella,” an attractive girl at the end of a 900 number, pits his constrictive need against her compliance and the rage that’s suppressed as she comes to identify with her role. Insidiously whispered by Quinn and O’Connor seated at microphones far away from each other, their exchanges are tightly controlled until they peak in a sadistic sexual/religious fantasy that provokes vengeful spewings from “Isabella.” Thoroughly objectifying each other, Quinn and O’Connor trade confessions and the power to grant forgiveness. But despite intense performances, the piece seems too schematic, its verbal savagery is as ugly as you’d wish, but it’s all brain and no real blood.
Black Air - an ambitious but { } Galas’s harsh, throaty keening, her fierce spittings and screeches - starts out with clammy caresses, wandering hands rubbing and touching. The movement is sluggish, the atmosphere thick. Quinn, alone, in a red outfit with lace-up arms, twists, convulses, scratches the floor in a feline way. The group advance,s bending, contracting in a dismally orgiastic choral statement too suggestive of those tiresome nymphs cavorting in the Venusberg, stupefied with endlessly satisfying sex. Yanking, heaving, the women surge and break and spasm in protoplasmic clusters. But their agonies are pretty mild compared with Galas’s thrillingly horrid sound. Things get quickly out of hand in Quinn and O’Connor’s quintessential and brilliantly devised The Naked and the Dead (1987), which is droll and grim, with sexuality at its center. Quinn’s the aggressor. Eagerly grinning, she methodically chases him while he timidly backs away. He shrinks and stiffens when she grabs him and pulls his pants down around the ankles. Struggling he presses his hands to her breasts almost unwittingly. And when he hobbles away, signing to her to leave him be, she’s wounded. That’s hardly the end of it. Soon they’re snarled on the floor, he’s got her in a knee lock, and they’re rolling in a heap of naked legs, crinolines and red panties. The dance’s initial images are so gleeful and biting that its murderously logical conclusion - he strangles her with his pants - seems comparatively routine and excessively dramatic. But with Quinn and O’Connor punishment for sexual activity is always somewhere in the air.
At Dance Theater Workshop (April 18 through 21).
I love Michael O’Connor’s usual onstage persona: hooded, self-protective, meticulous, dorky, exceedingly dry. He knows he’s a born victim, so he’s strongly defended; every move and gesture is economical and sharp-edged with intent. Glaring like a cornered animal, he’s always defining his place, carving his space. He’ll suck your soul out with his eyes. In contrast, his partner Pam Quinn doesn’t ordinarily send off so many characterological signals, and her movement is bolder, cooler, less magically committed to producing a particular result. The combination always gives their duets, like the new Untitled, a satisfying texture In it, he’s initially guarded, contracted, circumscribing his head and body with his arms, warding off contact. But she grabs him, pushes, pulls, and abruptly forces him into a world of tumbling, crawling, rolling uncertainties.
Phone Sex, a conversation between a guilty priest with “ungodly thoughts” and “Isabella,” an attractive girl at the end of a 900 number, pits his constrictive need against her compliance and the rage that’s suppressed as she comes to identify with her role. Insidiously whispered by Quinn and O’Connor seated at microphones far away from each other, their exchanges are tightly controlled until they peak in a sadistic sexual/religious fantasy that provokes vengeful spewings from “Isabella.” Thoroughly objectifying each other, Quinn and O’Connor trade confessions and the power to grant forgiveness. But despite intense performances, the piece seems too schematic, its verbal savagery is as ugly as you’d wish, but it’s all brain and no real blood.
Black Air - an ambitious but { } Galas’s harsh, throaty keening, her fierce spittings and screeches - starts out with clammy caresses, wandering hands rubbing and touching. The movement is sluggish, the atmosphere thick. Quinn, alone, in a red outfit with lace-up arms, twists, convulses, scratches the floor in a feline way. The group advance,s bending, contracting in a dismally orgiastic choral statement too suggestive of those tiresome nymphs cavorting in the Venusberg, stupefied with endlessly satisfying sex. Yanking, heaving, the women surge and break and spasm in protoplasmic clusters. But their agonies are pretty mild compared with Galas’s thrillingly horrid sound. Things get quickly out of hand in Quinn and O’Connor’s quintessential and brilliantly devised The Naked and the Dead (1987), which is droll and grim, with sexuality at its center. Quinn’s the aggressor. Eagerly grinning, she methodically chases him while he timidly backs away. He shrinks and stiffens when she grabs him and pulls his pants down around the ankles. Struggling he presses his hands to her breasts almost unwittingly. And when he hobbles away, signing to her to leave him be, she’s wounded. That’s hardly the end of it. Soon they’re snarled on the floor, he’s got her in a knee lock, and they’re rolling in a heap of naked legs, crinolines and red panties. The dance’s initial images are so gleeful and biting that its murderously logical conclusion - he strangles her with his pants - seems comparatively routine and excessively dramatic. But with Quinn and O’Connor punishment for sexual activity is always somewhere in the air.
At Dance Theater Workshop (April 18 through 21).
Manhandled
August 20
Brusque, choppy, compressed, and violent, Wim Vandekeybus’s Roseland, a jam-packed collage of material from three of Belgian choreographer’s theatrical pieces--What the Body Does Not Remember, Les Porteuses de Mauvaises Nouvelles (both Bessie winners, seen in New York at the Kitchen and BAM), and The Weight of a Hand—is an irresistibly effective video/dance. The music by Pierre de Mey and Peter Vermeersch—light, tight percussion, rapid piano, thin tootling variations—paces the piece beautifully. The camera is nosy, intrusive, sniffing out the nonstop action that’s set, in part, in what I took for a kind of warehouse or loading area (actually a decaying ballroom in an abandoned Brussels movie house). It has a broken floor; the rusted metal railings through which dancing is sometimes distanced give a feeling of spying, of passive cruelty. In another large space, a row of tall tree trunks that the dancers race between, and climb with spiked shoes to drop bricks on their pals, lines one side. The aggressive dancing is risky, modish stuff, and the perfunctory, demanding relationships of men and women involve no quarter, no mercy. There’s nothing yielding in them, though sometimes, when the action slows down, couples hold onto one another needily. There’s evident sexual heat in their clutchings. But that’s temporary, hastily dispelled.
A work of stark beauty and joylessness, Roseland works brilliantly on the small screen, packing it with actions as it shifts suddenly between color and black-and-white and juxtaposes episodes and images from the various dances. But, for example, the big, pale bricks that are tossed in the air and descend with terrifying rapidity have no weight in the video; the feel-up duet from the same dance, in which a man caresses his partner’s body with harsh objectivity, as if it were merely meat, loses some of its offensive intimacy when performed by three couples. We’re distracted from the woman’s simmering anger, and from our own discomfort with this leisurely routine that’s ruder than a frisk. One woman sits on a guy’s lap. He opens his crossed legs and lets her fall again and again. A man accosts a woman in a red top, taunts her with his grabbing hands. She recoils, fiercely turns on him, and they stomp and jump in a threatening duet of near misses. In the feel-up section it segues into, the women, as expressionless as soldiers in boot camp, stand with legs spread, arms outstretched, while their partners slide their hands over them. They’ve got to stand still for this treatment. When the women kick or flinch or break away, the men just yank them back. There’s a luscious, blurry relay in yellow/amber light—a guy running in a circle with gloriously long, loose strides passes a brick along to a blond woman, and she hands it on to someone else. Dancers balance on upended bricks or stacks of bricks, kick them, stumble over them. A white chair flies up. A brick heaved up becomes a floating red feather before descending again. There’s a sudden flare at a high window. The cutting is at breakneck speed. People throw bricks for a fast catch. They leap madly over one another, or run and crash getting out of the way. Someone who throws a brick straight up ducks sideways and someone else grabs it at the last moment. Or the thrower stands in place until, when it’s almost too late, a rescuer shoves him or her out of the way. A woman whirls with a jacket in her teeth. For a split second the screen bleeds into color, and the jacket turns red.
There’s an exaltation in the sense of recklessness, a sharp wit in the switchblade timing of the hectic catches and narrow escapes. If the slam-band editing exaggerates the illusion of chaos, the intricately meshing pattern of action is evident even in fragments. There’s a bitterly matter-of-fact exploitativeness in the fierce, hard-edged dancing. You see in it the same sexual power games played on the streets by lovers who quickly learn to hate each other and don’t know why. But in Vandekeybus’s work, anger is served cold, in clipped denial. Beneath the brilliant, relentless energy, the exhilarating confrontation with dangers that are always surmounted or escaped, there is a blackly “realistic,” reactive vision (like that from inside prison bars), steeped in contempt for the weak of a world in which you have to be hard, ironclad, indeed invulnerable, to endure. You can’t afford to feel. If you have to surrender your humanity, so what? Still, the do-or-die feats of timing, the crashing of body on body, the snatches and rescues are such a rush. I’m just not sure I like myself for liking it so much.
Brusque, choppy, compressed, and violent, Wim Vandekeybus’s Roseland, a jam-packed collage of material from three of Belgian choreographer’s theatrical pieces--What the Body Does Not Remember, Les Porteuses de Mauvaises Nouvelles (both Bessie winners, seen in New York at the Kitchen and BAM), and The Weight of a Hand—is an irresistibly effective video/dance. The music by Pierre de Mey and Peter Vermeersch—light, tight percussion, rapid piano, thin tootling variations—paces the piece beautifully. The camera is nosy, intrusive, sniffing out the nonstop action that’s set, in part, in what I took for a kind of warehouse or loading area (actually a decaying ballroom in an abandoned Brussels movie house). It has a broken floor; the rusted metal railings through which dancing is sometimes distanced give a feeling of spying, of passive cruelty. In another large space, a row of tall tree trunks that the dancers race between, and climb with spiked shoes to drop bricks on their pals, lines one side. The aggressive dancing is risky, modish stuff, and the perfunctory, demanding relationships of men and women involve no quarter, no mercy. There’s nothing yielding in them, though sometimes, when the action slows down, couples hold onto one another needily. There’s evident sexual heat in their clutchings. But that’s temporary, hastily dispelled.
A work of stark beauty and joylessness, Roseland works brilliantly on the small screen, packing it with actions as it shifts suddenly between color and black-and-white and juxtaposes episodes and images from the various dances. But, for example, the big, pale bricks that are tossed in the air and descend with terrifying rapidity have no weight in the video; the feel-up duet from the same dance, in which a man caresses his partner’s body with harsh objectivity, as if it were merely meat, loses some of its offensive intimacy when performed by three couples. We’re distracted from the woman’s simmering anger, and from our own discomfort with this leisurely routine that’s ruder than a frisk. One woman sits on a guy’s lap. He opens his crossed legs and lets her fall again and again. A man accosts a woman in a red top, taunts her with his grabbing hands. She recoils, fiercely turns on him, and they stomp and jump in a threatening duet of near misses. In the feel-up section it segues into, the women, as expressionless as soldiers in boot camp, stand with legs spread, arms outstretched, while their partners slide their hands over them. They’ve got to stand still for this treatment. When the women kick or flinch or break away, the men just yank them back. There’s a luscious, blurry relay in yellow/amber light—a guy running in a circle with gloriously long, loose strides passes a brick along to a blond woman, and she hands it on to someone else. Dancers balance on upended bricks or stacks of bricks, kick them, stumble over them. A white chair flies up. A brick heaved up becomes a floating red feather before descending again. There’s a sudden flare at a high window. The cutting is at breakneck speed. People throw bricks for a fast catch. They leap madly over one another, or run and crash getting out of the way. Someone who throws a brick straight up ducks sideways and someone else grabs it at the last moment. Or the thrower stands in place until, when it’s almost too late, a rescuer shoves him or her out of the way. A woman whirls with a jacket in her teeth. For a split second the screen bleeds into color, and the jacket turns red.
There’s an exaltation in the sense of recklessness, a sharp wit in the switchblade timing of the hectic catches and narrow escapes. If the slam-band editing exaggerates the illusion of chaos, the intricately meshing pattern of action is evident even in fragments. There’s a bitterly matter-of-fact exploitativeness in the fierce, hard-edged dancing. You see in it the same sexual power games played on the streets by lovers who quickly learn to hate each other and don’t know why. But in Vandekeybus’s work, anger is served cold, in clipped denial. Beneath the brilliant, relentless energy, the exhilarating confrontation with dangers that are always surmounted or escaped, there is a blackly “realistic,” reactive vision (like that from inside prison bars), steeped in contempt for the weak of a world in which you have to be hard, ironclad, indeed invulnerable, to endure. You can’t afford to feel. If you have to surrender your humanity, so what? Still, the do-or-die feats of timing, the crashing of body on body, the snatches and rescues are such a rush. I’m just not sure I like myself for liking it so much.
Mean Streets
June 25
Butoh artist Min Tanaka came to New York to present some site-related environmental work downtown at the Clocktower and P.S. 1 in Long Island City, and solo improvisations at Movement Research. But our streets—littered with the wrecked bodies of the homeless, jobless, and mindless—change the complexion of that work. Butoh’s no longer a freakish plunge into the super-primitive exoticism as novel as the flower that flourished in the nuked soil of Hiroshima, or a submersion in the Japanese unconscious, or a gaudy, intimate spectacle of extreme emotion riving the human crust. It’s too much like what’s daily in your face. The stricken social discards in the streets and subways turn Butoh’s gruesome face into mere naturalistic description. Well, almost.
Min Tanaka’s brand of Butoh, particularly his solo work, is ordinarily devoid of glamour and any grand theatrical effect. Outdoors he allows the natural (or unnatural) environment to penetrate him and dances in response to it. The quality of that response is internal and transformative; you won’t find him imitating architectural shapes or sentimentalizing the forms of organic growth. At Movement Research’s steamy Varick Street loft, he wears a shabby black suit that gradually becomes blotched with chalk, a neatly buttoned white shirt, clean white sneakers. At a glance, a quasi-respectable citizen. Entering, turned away from us, he clings to the doorjamb. Stooped he tests his feet, one at a time, pointing, setting his weight down, only then turning his head so we can see his whitened face and ashen hands. With his forearms dangling from his elbows like a marionette, his feet breaking at the ankles, his movement keeps grinding to a halt. With hunched shoulders that crunch his neck and broad arm gestures that seem meant to clasp something huge, he’s like a dim and awkward giant. Hesitant, bent, twisted, Tanaka is a creature who’s permanently dislocated—in his own body and in a world that’s as crazed as he appears to be. Stamping, hopping, moving jaggedly, waving at an open window, hopping from foot to foot in a wide stance, he’s as tragicomic a clown as any Samuel Beckett’s trapped survivors, and not at all dependent on our approval or understanding. He walks heavily, slumps on a chair, coughs. He takes off his sneakers, drops his head back, lets his mouth sag open, and his hands clench. He walks to the window and turns, zombielike, with arms lifted, his mouth a stupid hole, his face a mask of incomprehension. On gawky tiptoe, he peers forward, barely able to stay erect—his balance is so awry. But then he paces a tiny circle with almost courtly finesse. He plods to a corner to plug in a big floor fan—bless him! a breeze!—and the other, noisier one in the other corner. In big flopping movement, boneless and grotesque, he combines a profound feeling of empathy with the gleeful single-mindedness of a kid pretending to be an idiot monster. Ephemeral feelings pour through his body, possessing him briefly, barely taking hold. He’s questioning, broken, wary, unbelieving, racked. Or you can just watch expressions tickle through his soft hands as they curl or turn as the fingers close, or pulse, or turn clawlike. Then you sense the deep tender feeling in the center of the palm. And his hands fall open in helplessness, reach with effort, flatten in momentary surrender. Tanaka sits bent in the chair, a silver, spidery strand of drool hanging from his lips, his feet turned in. He pokes at his squinting eye. He puts his sneakers on, pulls the plugs on the fans, stumbles around in happy-go-lucky sprawling moves, his arms in a frenzy. He stamps, runs, as if checking whether his limbs still work, and smacks the ground. When he runs, with his legs boldly crisscrossing without tangling, it’s a glory of clumsiness, akin to levitation.
At Movement Research (June 9 and 10).
Butoh artist Min Tanaka came to New York to present some site-related environmental work downtown at the Clocktower and P.S. 1 in Long Island City, and solo improvisations at Movement Research. But our streets—littered with the wrecked bodies of the homeless, jobless, and mindless—change the complexion of that work. Butoh’s no longer a freakish plunge into the super-primitive exoticism as novel as the flower that flourished in the nuked soil of Hiroshima, or a submersion in the Japanese unconscious, or a gaudy, intimate spectacle of extreme emotion riving the human crust. It’s too much like what’s daily in your face. The stricken social discards in the streets and subways turn Butoh’s gruesome face into mere naturalistic description. Well, almost.
Min Tanaka’s brand of Butoh, particularly his solo work, is ordinarily devoid of glamour and any grand theatrical effect. Outdoors he allows the natural (or unnatural) environment to penetrate him and dances in response to it. The quality of that response is internal and transformative; you won’t find him imitating architectural shapes or sentimentalizing the forms of organic growth. At Movement Research’s steamy Varick Street loft, he wears a shabby black suit that gradually becomes blotched with chalk, a neatly buttoned white shirt, clean white sneakers. At a glance, a quasi-respectable citizen. Entering, turned away from us, he clings to the doorjamb. Stooped he tests his feet, one at a time, pointing, setting his weight down, only then turning his head so we can see his whitened face and ashen hands. With his forearms dangling from his elbows like a marionette, his feet breaking at the ankles, his movement keeps grinding to a halt. With hunched shoulders that crunch his neck and broad arm gestures that seem meant to clasp something huge, he’s like a dim and awkward giant. Hesitant, bent, twisted, Tanaka is a creature who’s permanently dislocated—in his own body and in a world that’s as crazed as he appears to be. Stamping, hopping, moving jaggedly, waving at an open window, hopping from foot to foot in a wide stance, he’s as tragicomic a clown as any Samuel Beckett’s trapped survivors, and not at all dependent on our approval or understanding. He walks heavily, slumps on a chair, coughs. He takes off his sneakers, drops his head back, lets his mouth sag open, and his hands clench. He walks to the window and turns, zombielike, with arms lifted, his mouth a stupid hole, his face a mask of incomprehension. On gawky tiptoe, he peers forward, barely able to stay erect—his balance is so awry. But then he paces a tiny circle with almost courtly finesse. He plods to a corner to plug in a big floor fan—bless him! a breeze!—and the other, noisier one in the other corner. In big flopping movement, boneless and grotesque, he combines a profound feeling of empathy with the gleeful single-mindedness of a kid pretending to be an idiot monster. Ephemeral feelings pour through his body, possessing him briefly, barely taking hold. He’s questioning, broken, wary, unbelieving, racked. Or you can just watch expressions tickle through his soft hands as they curl or turn as the fingers close, or pulse, or turn clawlike. Then you sense the deep tender feeling in the center of the palm. And his hands fall open in helplessness, reach with effort, flatten in momentary surrender. Tanaka sits bent in the chair, a silver, spidery strand of drool hanging from his lips, his feet turned in. He pokes at his squinting eye. He puts his sneakers on, pulls the plugs on the fans, stumbles around in happy-go-lucky sprawling moves, his arms in a frenzy. He stamps, runs, as if checking whether his limbs still work, and smacks the ground. When he runs, with his legs boldly crisscrossing without tangling, it’s a glory of clumsiness, akin to levitation.
At Movement Research (June 9 and 10).
Mothlight
October 29
It’s been more than two years since Dan Wagoner had a New York season. For a good chunk of that time he was working in England, as artistic director of the London Contemporary Dance Theater. That seemed an odd match: Wagoner has always been so distinctively American a choreographer because of his pervasive sense of the American past and the sense of home and belonging that has often nurtured his work. Then too, there’s its bluff humor, and blunt phrasings, that hard-sprung, thumping buoyancy and robust use of space. Wagoner’s Plod (1990) zips along at hazardous speed to a recording of Prokofiev’s “Classical” Symphony that seems incredibly compact (the piece is 17 minutes long; it seems about eight). The choreographer’s scheme kids the music good-naturedly but mercilessly; racing with it, punching the climaxes, popping the accents, breaking down the phrases into series of jerky angled articulations divided among the dancers, and then exploding. Never has Prokofiev’s music sounds so much like cartoon music. I like the slugging arms, the goofy contrast of stiffness and floppiness, the mechanical jokes. But the quivering individuals, with their noodly knees and wiggling elbows, are nearly as prone to nervous spells as River Phoenix in My Own Private Idaho. Like him, at the end, they’ve collapsed flat on the ground.
Fata Morgana (1989) is a dark-hued piece set to a half-dozen works by Charles Ives that stir up an unhappy confusion before rising to dubious triumph at the end of “From Hanover Square North at the End of a Tragic Day the Voice of the People Again Arose.” The dancers wear dark gray unitards with leatherette patches that look like gills or scars and twisted headbands that add a measure of anonymity. At the beginning they sit, huddling knees up, in clumps of two or three, each with their arms wrapped around their shoulders, almost as if tied in strait-jacket sleeves. I’m moved by the isolated figure Wagoner cuts in his several solos, gesticulating, cautious, turning this way and that, at a loss for what to do or where to go. You see the persistent ambivalence and mistrust in the arms that push one way, the face that turns another The poignancy of his relationship to the others is not that they’re hostile to him, but that he doesn’t matter. When he casts himself in the middle of the group, he’s turned and stuck head down like a cherry in a sundae. At the end, when the group is seated again in little clusters, Wagoner timorously finds a place among them, but twists his head aside at the last moment, still marginal in his own ind.
On opening night only, in a kind of chamber entertainment, composer/pianist William Bolcom and mezzo Joan Morris performed songs to some of the terse, perceptive poems of Wagoner’s longtime collaborator and friend George Montgomery, while Wagoner’s dancing wove intermittently in concise response. Montgomery’s thrifty, particular poems acutely prune and arrange the world to fit his eye and heart. Morris’s deft vocal wit admirably suited the wry, willful edge of Montgomery’s texts, and she proved herself a game mover. Dolly Sods: After the Flood, a premiere, is a kind of dream sketch set to Anton Webern’s Passacaglia and Five Movements for String Orchestra, with lighting by Donald Holder that shoots gleaming rays through a thin haze. The background that sometimes emerges suggests a twiggy forest, and a blurry double moon asserts a strange, luminous presence. There’s a romantic quality to Dolly Sods, a kind of fugitive compositional transparency, but I feel in it most strongly a kind of bereftness. And it has a strange affinity with the tender duet in Wagoner’s Changing Your Mind (inspired by the story of an American Indian couple during James Monroe’s presidency who committed suicide to draw attention to their people’s plight). In Dolly Sods, too, some fatal gloom hovers in the background, and bleeds out its emotional color.
At the Joyce Theater (October 8 through 13).
It’s been more than two years since Dan Wagoner had a New York season. For a good chunk of that time he was working in England, as artistic director of the London Contemporary Dance Theater. That seemed an odd match: Wagoner has always been so distinctively American a choreographer because of his pervasive sense of the American past and the sense of home and belonging that has often nurtured his work. Then too, there’s its bluff humor, and blunt phrasings, that hard-sprung, thumping buoyancy and robust use of space. Wagoner’s Plod (1990) zips along at hazardous speed to a recording of Prokofiev’s “Classical” Symphony that seems incredibly compact (the piece is 17 minutes long; it seems about eight). The choreographer’s scheme kids the music good-naturedly but mercilessly; racing with it, punching the climaxes, popping the accents, breaking down the phrases into series of jerky angled articulations divided among the dancers, and then exploding. Never has Prokofiev’s music sounds so much like cartoon music. I like the slugging arms, the goofy contrast of stiffness and floppiness, the mechanical jokes. But the quivering individuals, with their noodly knees and wiggling elbows, are nearly as prone to nervous spells as River Phoenix in My Own Private Idaho. Like him, at the end, they’ve collapsed flat on the ground.
Fata Morgana (1989) is a dark-hued piece set to a half-dozen works by Charles Ives that stir up an unhappy confusion before rising to dubious triumph at the end of “From Hanover Square North at the End of a Tragic Day the Voice of the People Again Arose.” The dancers wear dark gray unitards with leatherette patches that look like gills or scars and twisted headbands that add a measure of anonymity. At the beginning they sit, huddling knees up, in clumps of two or three, each with their arms wrapped around their shoulders, almost as if tied in strait-jacket sleeves. I’m moved by the isolated figure Wagoner cuts in his several solos, gesticulating, cautious, turning this way and that, at a loss for what to do or where to go. You see the persistent ambivalence and mistrust in the arms that push one way, the face that turns another The poignancy of his relationship to the others is not that they’re hostile to him, but that he doesn’t matter. When he casts himself in the middle of the group, he’s turned and stuck head down like a cherry in a sundae. At the end, when the group is seated again in little clusters, Wagoner timorously finds a place among them, but twists his head aside at the last moment, still marginal in his own ind.
On opening night only, in a kind of chamber entertainment, composer/pianist William Bolcom and mezzo Joan Morris performed songs to some of the terse, perceptive poems of Wagoner’s longtime collaborator and friend George Montgomery, while Wagoner’s dancing wove intermittently in concise response. Montgomery’s thrifty, particular poems acutely prune and arrange the world to fit his eye and heart. Morris’s deft vocal wit admirably suited the wry, willful edge of Montgomery’s texts, and she proved herself a game mover. Dolly Sods: After the Flood, a premiere, is a kind of dream sketch set to Anton Webern’s Passacaglia and Five Movements for String Orchestra, with lighting by Donald Holder that shoots gleaming rays through a thin haze. The background that sometimes emerges suggests a twiggy forest, and a blurry double moon asserts a strange, luminous presence. There’s a romantic quality to Dolly Sods, a kind of fugitive compositional transparency, but I feel in it most strongly a kind of bereftness. And it has a strange affinity with the tender duet in Wagoner’s Changing Your Mind (inspired by the story of an American Indian couple during James Monroe’s presidency who committed suicide to draw attention to their people’s plight). In Dolly Sods, too, some fatal gloom hovers in the background, and bleeds out its emotional color.
At the Joyce Theater (October 8 through 13).
Murk
March 12
Seeing a piece by Susan Rethorst is like entering The Twilight Zone. Usually, nothing terrible happens, but if it did, maybe you wouldn’t know it. Picture This (for four women - Vicky Shick, Erin Fitzgerald, Deborah Gladstein and Rethorst) is divided into many parts by blackouts, but there’s surprisingly little contrast between the sections, or, rather, the contrast is insignificant. Bogged down somewhere between thought and action, the women seem blank, as if they’ve been deserted and await only a wearisome future. Their occasional pedestrian gestures - holding the torso as if chilled, pressing a flat hand to the sternum or breast - seem to recognize, if anything,a lack of feeling or relationship. Rethorst tells us as little as she dares. Twice, she and another women lie down alongside each other and let their bent legs knock sideways, then Rethorst sits up and points. We feel their intimacy for the moment, and that something may connect these persons to a larger world. but no linkage is forged. What I often find mysteriously pungent in Rethorst’s work, I also find sullen, murky, and willfully obscure. I'm impatient with her chariness, her solemn half-heartedness. Now she has decided that movement can’t be abstract - that it has implications, associations. Fine. Those dreamy, unadmitted associations have always given her work a good measure of its intriguing aroma.
At the Kitchen (March 7 through 10).
Power Boothe's Wilderness (1988) presented in late-night showings at Dance Theater Workshop, is an ominous and resonant blend of film and live action in which we’re never quite sure who the characters are or what they might do. The woman (Catlin Cobb) is mostly docile, mostly absorbed in reading - a harmless pursuit no? - but threat is close to the surface. The man (John Fleming) who may be her husband or a strange visitor is sweet, full of untrustworthy anecdotes about his possibly made-up life as an anthropologist, but his double (played by Steven Fechter), lurking about the house via film, is like a voyeuristic creep from a German film of the silent era. The relationship of Fleming and Cobb is familiar but distant; they have no curiosity about each other. Wilderness is visually evocative and ambiguous, if overlong, but the text - by Fechter - seems too self-consciously contrived. Some of the story fragments it dishes up are entertaining or nicely confusing, but essentially the text schematizes the piece’s overlapping mysteries into puzzles that we feel we should try to unravel, like an Agatha Christie novel. However, the piece is at home with its own shadows; it’s a mystery that wants to stay mysterious. We need to be troubled by Boothe’s characters, not analyze the truth of their situation.
At Dance Theater Workshop (March 8 and 9).
Seeing a piece by Susan Rethorst is like entering The Twilight Zone. Usually, nothing terrible happens, but if it did, maybe you wouldn’t know it. Picture This (for four women - Vicky Shick, Erin Fitzgerald, Deborah Gladstein and Rethorst) is divided into many parts by blackouts, but there’s surprisingly little contrast between the sections, or, rather, the contrast is insignificant. Bogged down somewhere between thought and action, the women seem blank, as if they’ve been deserted and await only a wearisome future. Their occasional pedestrian gestures - holding the torso as if chilled, pressing a flat hand to the sternum or breast - seem to recognize, if anything,a lack of feeling or relationship. Rethorst tells us as little as she dares. Twice, she and another women lie down alongside each other and let their bent legs knock sideways, then Rethorst sits up and points. We feel their intimacy for the moment, and that something may connect these persons to a larger world. but no linkage is forged. What I often find mysteriously pungent in Rethorst’s work, I also find sullen, murky, and willfully obscure. I'm impatient with her chariness, her solemn half-heartedness. Now she has decided that movement can’t be abstract - that it has implications, associations. Fine. Those dreamy, unadmitted associations have always given her work a good measure of its intriguing aroma.
At the Kitchen (March 7 through 10).
Power Boothe's Wilderness (1988) presented in late-night showings at Dance Theater Workshop, is an ominous and resonant blend of film and live action in which we’re never quite sure who the characters are or what they might do. The woman (Catlin Cobb) is mostly docile, mostly absorbed in reading - a harmless pursuit no? - but threat is close to the surface. The man (John Fleming) who may be her husband or a strange visitor is sweet, full of untrustworthy anecdotes about his possibly made-up life as an anthropologist, but his double (played by Steven Fechter), lurking about the house via film, is like a voyeuristic creep from a German film of the silent era. The relationship of Fleming and Cobb is familiar but distant; they have no curiosity about each other. Wilderness is visually evocative and ambiguous, if overlong, but the text - by Fechter - seems too self-consciously contrived. Some of the story fragments it dishes up are entertaining or nicely confusing, but essentially the text schematizes the piece’s overlapping mysteries into puzzles that we feel we should try to unravel, like an Agatha Christie novel. However, the piece is at home with its own shadows; it’s a mystery that wants to stay mysterious. We need to be troubled by Boothe’s characters, not analyze the truth of their situation.
At Dance Theater Workshop (March 8 and 9).
Night Light
May 28
The weather’s steamy on Tuesday in D.C. but the skies are perilously changeable. A few drops fall in late afternoon; thunderstorms are predicted for later, but, in fact, they don’t happen. So just before nine Trisha Brown’s superb company is able to open Astral Converted (50”), her 50-minute re-working of material from Astral Convertible, in connection with the Robert Rauschenberg exhibit at the National Gallery of Art, on a stage at the foot of the museum’s steps. The audience dots the vast, grassy mall - the robust black masses of the avenues of trees, the small white and red lights of cars, occasional runners and bikers wearing reflective strips for safety, a chunk of the Air and Space Museum across the way. Some can see the Capitol dome way to the left, or the landing airplanes that regularly seem to pierce the center of the Washington Monument far to the left.
The tall aluminum racks of automobile headlights (running on car batteries) that Rauschenberg designed to illuminate Astral Convertible in situations with meager technical facilities make good sense here for the first time. The absence of overhead or frontal lighting plays tricks with the dancers’ faces and profiles, so I’m constantly mistaking one for another. Not that it matters. And John Cage’s score of occasional horn and woodwind toots (replacing Richard Landry’s for Convertible) is gentle and satisfying; the city’s hum, an occasional siren, the roar of the planes mingle nicely with the sporadic music, which is never silent for too long. Like Baby Bear’s porridge, it’s just right. The way the tones seem to hover in the night makes you agreeably patient. Which is fine, because in Astral Converted Brown takes her time more than ever before, and doesn’t let the dancing get really busy until about halfway through.
The piece is sparse, sometimes very quiet; you rarely have to choose what to look at. It opens with the floor-bound teams of dancers lying, leaning, lounging, crouching in rows, straight out of Convertible. I think, but then expands into thoughtful solos and unison sections. Lance Gries and Diane Madden get hoisted on push-brooms at the end of a duet, as they do in Astral Convertible, but the broom business - kind of a joke turned serious - is more fully worked in this piece. Three lighting stands from one side get shoved midstage - which makes about one-third of the stage quasi-offstage - and shoved again, and Madden and Gregory Lara soon are sliding those two brooms around their bases as if outlining their position. While Gries continues a long, reflective solo, Wil Swanson and Nicole Juralewicz creep forward, slither and roll; their subsequent moves are accompanied or restricted by the brooms that are as nearly underfoot as tag-along siblings. For a second, Madden and Lara stand their brooms upright, or lean them against Juralewicz’s and Swanson’s shoulders.
The piece gradually pulls itself off the floor and builds a kind of loose, weighted swing. Swanson whirls through a trio of men with their arms tilted. Lara hauls David Thomson across the floor in what seems like a transposition of the midair wall that opens Brown’s Set and Reset. Madden elucidates a long solo with the fierce authority of a Graham heroine, while four women hunch, bend and swing as they inch across the floor. Brown contrasts soloists and pairs against groups as humble as scenery. and poses segments where dancers get onstage only to be quickly bundled off against long, quiet solos and duets that survive multiple interruptions. There’s not much of the familiar, infectious ripping of gestures through the piece, but more and more the dancers snag and latch onto each other in a curious flow of balance and imbalance, meticulousness and accident. They knock each other, stick, form clusters spiky with limbs. The careful, pristine leans of the early part of the dance yield to bumping and no-fault, spongy crashes. The dancers spin into looping interchanges and loose tangles like knots that slip, then catch, then release some more. It was good to see Kevin Kortan maturing so quickly in the company. Carolyn Lucas was out due to an injury, and we missed her concentrated, animal presence. Everyone else was/is gorgeous: Madden, Gries, Swanson, Thomson, Juralewicz, Lara, delicious Lisa Schmidt, Liz Carpenter, Trish Oesterling.
Outdoors at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. (May 14 through 18).
The weather’s steamy on Tuesday in D.C. but the skies are perilously changeable. A few drops fall in late afternoon; thunderstorms are predicted for later, but, in fact, they don’t happen. So just before nine Trisha Brown’s superb company is able to open Astral Converted (50”), her 50-minute re-working of material from Astral Convertible, in connection with the Robert Rauschenberg exhibit at the National Gallery of Art, on a stage at the foot of the museum’s steps. The audience dots the vast, grassy mall - the robust black masses of the avenues of trees, the small white and red lights of cars, occasional runners and bikers wearing reflective strips for safety, a chunk of the Air and Space Museum across the way. Some can see the Capitol dome way to the left, or the landing airplanes that regularly seem to pierce the center of the Washington Monument far to the left.
The tall aluminum racks of automobile headlights (running on car batteries) that Rauschenberg designed to illuminate Astral Convertible in situations with meager technical facilities make good sense here for the first time. The absence of overhead or frontal lighting plays tricks with the dancers’ faces and profiles, so I’m constantly mistaking one for another. Not that it matters. And John Cage’s score of occasional horn and woodwind toots (replacing Richard Landry’s for Convertible) is gentle and satisfying; the city’s hum, an occasional siren, the roar of the planes mingle nicely with the sporadic music, which is never silent for too long. Like Baby Bear’s porridge, it’s just right. The way the tones seem to hover in the night makes you agreeably patient. Which is fine, because in Astral Converted Brown takes her time more than ever before, and doesn’t let the dancing get really busy until about halfway through.
The piece is sparse, sometimes very quiet; you rarely have to choose what to look at. It opens with the floor-bound teams of dancers lying, leaning, lounging, crouching in rows, straight out of Convertible. I think, but then expands into thoughtful solos and unison sections. Lance Gries and Diane Madden get hoisted on push-brooms at the end of a duet, as they do in Astral Convertible, but the broom business - kind of a joke turned serious - is more fully worked in this piece. Three lighting stands from one side get shoved midstage - which makes about one-third of the stage quasi-offstage - and shoved again, and Madden and Gregory Lara soon are sliding those two brooms around their bases as if outlining their position. While Gries continues a long, reflective solo, Wil Swanson and Nicole Juralewicz creep forward, slither and roll; their subsequent moves are accompanied or restricted by the brooms that are as nearly underfoot as tag-along siblings. For a second, Madden and Lara stand their brooms upright, or lean them against Juralewicz’s and Swanson’s shoulders.
The piece gradually pulls itself off the floor and builds a kind of loose, weighted swing. Swanson whirls through a trio of men with their arms tilted. Lara hauls David Thomson across the floor in what seems like a transposition of the midair wall that opens Brown’s Set and Reset. Madden elucidates a long solo with the fierce authority of a Graham heroine, while four women hunch, bend and swing as they inch across the floor. Brown contrasts soloists and pairs against groups as humble as scenery. and poses segments where dancers get onstage only to be quickly bundled off against long, quiet solos and duets that survive multiple interruptions. There’s not much of the familiar, infectious ripping of gestures through the piece, but more and more the dancers snag and latch onto each other in a curious flow of balance and imbalance, meticulousness and accident. They knock each other, stick, form clusters spiky with limbs. The careful, pristine leans of the early part of the dance yield to bumping and no-fault, spongy crashes. The dancers spin into looping interchanges and loose tangles like knots that slip, then catch, then release some more. It was good to see Kevin Kortan maturing so quickly in the company. Carolyn Lucas was out due to an injury, and we missed her concentrated, animal presence. Everyone else was/is gorgeous: Madden, Gries, Swanson, Thomson, Juralewicz, Lara, delicious Lisa Schmidt, Liz Carpenter, Trish Oesterling.
Outdoors at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. (May 14 through 18).
No Slack
June 18
Naked, a little edgy, Bill T. Jones came out to speak for a moment, then danced a long, grave solo of sequential poses apparently based on still photos, labeled verbally by Jones, and laced with autobiographical narrative. What a stern, critical and studiously passionate work! That was the opening of Jones's benefit performance for the P.S. 122 and Movement Research, titled Continuous Replay: A Rumination and a Memory, based on a piece Arnie Zane choreographed in 1977.
Then, beginning with Sean Curran, members of Jones's company - Arthur Avilés, Heidi Latsky, Leonard Cruz, R. Justice Allen, Andrea E. Smith - emerged singly, naked, and danced in a driving, rigorous routine of thrusting movement to revved up music. Their nakedness wasn't about showing off, and if it was shocking to anyone - which I doubt - that was beside the point. It said plainly, "We are who we are and we are not ashamed.” In the course of the evening everyone eventually put some clothes on, but Jones never wore a stitch. That was perverse in a way, yet it established Jones's nakedness as a complex statement that announced his vulnerability, made him an icon, and served him as a shield. Nothing can be taken from him: he's as humbled and as firm as Job scourged. Jones has the gift of being able to quell opposition with his charm, his sheer beauty, and physical virtuosity: he has a knack of shoving himself down your throat and making you like it. Savvy and manipulative, a thorny proposition if there ever was one, he invites - he dares - the audience to know him, to take him on.
Confronting his own immortality, with his righteous anger more tempered, Jones at 39 burns with a steadier flame. With too many companions gone, he's more mature, paternal, tender. Time is short, there's much to be done, yet Jones seems undespairing. He's never been modest or shy, he's always been demanding and able to take care of himself, but it's clear that he's committed to a broad, social/political/personal vision that's bigger than himself and seems mostly to have to do with looking at ourselves truthfully. Not closing our eyes. Not lying. In another nervy solo, cutting himself no slack, Jones danced while verbally keeping himself in the instant, deconstructing his material and commenting on the audience.
But the evening as not just about Jones, it was about the dancers and the delight they take in dancing and in each other. In the intriguing series of duet improvisations that closed the program, each dancer alone with Jones, they played with the teasing humor and affection that binds them individually and as a company. Avilés, whose composure and sculptural sense of his own body is so modeled on Jones's, was tricky in a gingerly duet in which he coyly evaded some of Jones's fatherly coaxings. Faithful Curran, with his punk hair and astonishing sweetness of character, is usually spry and fierce, a superhero in disguise, someone you can absolutely count on. Here he staggered about, warded off by Jones, in a clownish encounter. Strong and pliant, Latsky is someone Jones can throw around, but she matches him gloriously in grace and vehemence. R. Justice Allen's wiseass reluctance posed a cool, needling challenge to Jones's authority and dominating sexuality. The integration of mind and muscle in this work is pretty impressive. Jones has always been willing, even eager, to go out on a limb for his convictions, but now if that limb breaks he can just live in midair on his own sure power.
At P.S. 122 (May 31 and June 1).
Naked, a little edgy, Bill T. Jones came out to speak for a moment, then danced a long, grave solo of sequential poses apparently based on still photos, labeled verbally by Jones, and laced with autobiographical narrative. What a stern, critical and studiously passionate work! That was the opening of Jones's benefit performance for the P.S. 122 and Movement Research, titled Continuous Replay: A Rumination and a Memory, based on a piece Arnie Zane choreographed in 1977.
Then, beginning with Sean Curran, members of Jones's company - Arthur Avilés, Heidi Latsky, Leonard Cruz, R. Justice Allen, Andrea E. Smith - emerged singly, naked, and danced in a driving, rigorous routine of thrusting movement to revved up music. Their nakedness wasn't about showing off, and if it was shocking to anyone - which I doubt - that was beside the point. It said plainly, "We are who we are and we are not ashamed.” In the course of the evening everyone eventually put some clothes on, but Jones never wore a stitch. That was perverse in a way, yet it established Jones's nakedness as a complex statement that announced his vulnerability, made him an icon, and served him as a shield. Nothing can be taken from him: he's as humbled and as firm as Job scourged. Jones has the gift of being able to quell opposition with his charm, his sheer beauty, and physical virtuosity: he has a knack of shoving himself down your throat and making you like it. Savvy and manipulative, a thorny proposition if there ever was one, he invites - he dares - the audience to know him, to take him on.
Confronting his own immortality, with his righteous anger more tempered, Jones at 39 burns with a steadier flame. With too many companions gone, he's more mature, paternal, tender. Time is short, there's much to be done, yet Jones seems undespairing. He's never been modest or shy, he's always been demanding and able to take care of himself, but it's clear that he's committed to a broad, social/political/personal vision that's bigger than himself and seems mostly to have to do with looking at ourselves truthfully. Not closing our eyes. Not lying. In another nervy solo, cutting himself no slack, Jones danced while verbally keeping himself in the instant, deconstructing his material and commenting on the audience.
But the evening as not just about Jones, it was about the dancers and the delight they take in dancing and in each other. In the intriguing series of duet improvisations that closed the program, each dancer alone with Jones, they played with the teasing humor and affection that binds them individually and as a company. Avilés, whose composure and sculptural sense of his own body is so modeled on Jones's, was tricky in a gingerly duet in which he coyly evaded some of Jones's fatherly coaxings. Faithful Curran, with his punk hair and astonishing sweetness of character, is usually spry and fierce, a superhero in disguise, someone you can absolutely count on. Here he staggered about, warded off by Jones, in a clownish encounter. Strong and pliant, Latsky is someone Jones can throw around, but she matches him gloriously in grace and vehemence. R. Justice Allen's wiseass reluctance posed a cool, needling challenge to Jones's authority and dominating sexuality. The integration of mind and muscle in this work is pretty impressive. Jones has always been willing, even eager, to go out on a limb for his convictions, but now if that limb breaks he can just live in midair on his own sure power.
At P.S. 122 (May 31 and June 1).
On Thin Ice
March 19
Champion skaters Brian Boitano and Katarina Witt headlined an ice revue sans Disney characters or skating McDonaldburgers. Still, it wasn’t very much of a special event. Not just because the dancers didn’t do a lot of death-defying stunts, but because the evening - on the whole - exhibited a rather mediocre choreographic sensibility. The Boitano fan in front of me was in ecstasies - jumping up, screaming, waving - and was something of an embarrassment to her friends, but she gave me a better kick than almost anything on the ice.
The only consistent physical wit throughout the program came from Gary Beacom, whose subtle clowning - in his solos and in brief, transitional episodes - was smart, sharp, and rhythmically playful. What’s so appealing about Beacom, in part, is the delectable variety of his footwork, which rarely permits anything so straightforward as a glide, but which babbles along in an ingenious discourse of bobbing runs, neat jumps, slippery goings-nowhere treadmill effects, suave stumbles and strolls. He’s like an eccentric hoofer, on ice. All in black, he opens the second half with a spidery solo of hops, crouches, slithers, lurches, and squiggles. It must be great to be the one who’s not confined to making pretty shapes.
Mercifully, there was none of that collagey, tune-splicing stuff you hear in competition. But a most serious offense was that the lighting (by Ken Billington and Jason Kantrowitz) almost always obscured the field of ice with deep colors and blobby designs, while, of course, picking out the skaters in spotlights. What this achieved was to wither the sense of space. The effect was like a TV or movie camera than may close in on and isolate dancers from the actual space in which they’re dancing and site them instead in a shapeless void, where many of their actions - particularly those that gulp space - lose meaning because the physical context is nullified. With no stable points of departure or arrival, all that remains is the body’s pretty gesture. One of the pleasure of watching skaters is utterly simple - seeing them sail smoothly across vast stretches without effort. The fancy lighting greatly reduced even this cheap delight.
Lying down on the ice - belly down or belly up - sliding smoothly or dead-as-a-doornail still - seems to be a big thing this year. Alexandre Fadeev, wearing a black costume touched with golden glitter, is a wild man, doing leaps, prances, devilish turns, and tossing his mop of blond hair. Vladimir Kotin includes some great air spins in a solo amid a blanket of red and green lights and luminous, spaghetti clump effects. Caryn Kadavy skates a sex-kitten solo. Zippy Yvonne Gomez does those shades-of-Harriet-Hoctor backbend turns. Witt, cool and contained, has a regal and dramatic presence; Boitano is a pleasantly hot number who’s endearingly familiar with the audience. To “ { } Waltz.” he whizzes around, spins in the air, axels and changes gaits as cleverly as a Lippizaner.
But - though their skill and appeal is undeniable - Witt and Boitano don’t trouble to prove themselves artists in this program. Oleg Vassiliev flaunts Elena Valova in a one-armed lift, tosses her, and they glide together in a pulsing rhythm doted with leaps. If there were a fad for catered weddings and Bar Mitzvahs on ice, older coupes who’d studied at Arthur Murray’s would strive to skate like this. Barbara Underhill splays herself across her partner Paul Martini’s body, sits on his shoulder, drops into a death spiral, is lifted overhead arching backward. It’s a hokey, sexy duet, but everything works to make it exhilarating. Eve the quick rippling of Martini’s shirtsleeves in the { } Judy ---berg and Mchael Seibert’s adagio is slower and gentler in is weavings, in the uninflected way he takes her over his back, or she locks her legs around his waist. When she arches back, nearly prone on the ice, her hair catches the snowy scrapings from the surface and they spill in the light when she comes erect. Boitano and Witt’s final, fatal scene of Carmen is the usual I-loveyou/you-don’t love-me stuff. The end is clean and sentimental: everybody gathers in a big circle that opens into a sequence of looping circles. They open their arms and skate down the center of the ice in a V, and break as lights go red, aswirl with lollipop spots. The fans seem quite happy, but we’re happy enough idly watching amateurs at Rockefeller or Lasker or Wollman rinks.
At Madison Square Garden (March 1).
Champion skaters Brian Boitano and Katarina Witt headlined an ice revue sans Disney characters or skating McDonaldburgers. Still, it wasn’t very much of a special event. Not just because the dancers didn’t do a lot of death-defying stunts, but because the evening - on the whole - exhibited a rather mediocre choreographic sensibility. The Boitano fan in front of me was in ecstasies - jumping up, screaming, waving - and was something of an embarrassment to her friends, but she gave me a better kick than almost anything on the ice.
The only consistent physical wit throughout the program came from Gary Beacom, whose subtle clowning - in his solos and in brief, transitional episodes - was smart, sharp, and rhythmically playful. What’s so appealing about Beacom, in part, is the delectable variety of his footwork, which rarely permits anything so straightforward as a glide, but which babbles along in an ingenious discourse of bobbing runs, neat jumps, slippery goings-nowhere treadmill effects, suave stumbles and strolls. He’s like an eccentric hoofer, on ice. All in black, he opens the second half with a spidery solo of hops, crouches, slithers, lurches, and squiggles. It must be great to be the one who’s not confined to making pretty shapes.
Mercifully, there was none of that collagey, tune-splicing stuff you hear in competition. But a most serious offense was that the lighting (by Ken Billington and Jason Kantrowitz) almost always obscured the field of ice with deep colors and blobby designs, while, of course, picking out the skaters in spotlights. What this achieved was to wither the sense of space. The effect was like a TV or movie camera than may close in on and isolate dancers from the actual space in which they’re dancing and site them instead in a shapeless void, where many of their actions - particularly those that gulp space - lose meaning because the physical context is nullified. With no stable points of departure or arrival, all that remains is the body’s pretty gesture. One of the pleasure of watching skaters is utterly simple - seeing them sail smoothly across vast stretches without effort. The fancy lighting greatly reduced even this cheap delight.
Lying down on the ice - belly down or belly up - sliding smoothly or dead-as-a-doornail still - seems to be a big thing this year. Alexandre Fadeev, wearing a black costume touched with golden glitter, is a wild man, doing leaps, prances, devilish turns, and tossing his mop of blond hair. Vladimir Kotin includes some great air spins in a solo amid a blanket of red and green lights and luminous, spaghetti clump effects. Caryn Kadavy skates a sex-kitten solo. Zippy Yvonne Gomez does those shades-of-Harriet-Hoctor backbend turns. Witt, cool and contained, has a regal and dramatic presence; Boitano is a pleasantly hot number who’s endearingly familiar with the audience. To “ { } Waltz.” he whizzes around, spins in the air, axels and changes gaits as cleverly as a Lippizaner.
But - though their skill and appeal is undeniable - Witt and Boitano don’t trouble to prove themselves artists in this program. Oleg Vassiliev flaunts Elena Valova in a one-armed lift, tosses her, and they glide together in a pulsing rhythm doted with leaps. If there were a fad for catered weddings and Bar Mitzvahs on ice, older coupes who’d studied at Arthur Murray’s would strive to skate like this. Barbara Underhill splays herself across her partner Paul Martini’s body, sits on his shoulder, drops into a death spiral, is lifted overhead arching backward. It’s a hokey, sexy duet, but everything works to make it exhilarating. Eve the quick rippling of Martini’s shirtsleeves in the { } Judy ---berg and Mchael Seibert’s adagio is slower and gentler in is weavings, in the uninflected way he takes her over his back, or she locks her legs around his waist. When she arches back, nearly prone on the ice, her hair catches the snowy scrapings from the surface and they spill in the light when she comes erect. Boitano and Witt’s final, fatal scene of Carmen is the usual I-loveyou/you-don’t love-me stuff. The end is clean and sentimental: everybody gathers in a big circle that opens into a sequence of looping circles. They open their arms and skate down the center of the ice in a V, and break as lights go red, aswirl with lollipop spots. The fans seem quite happy, but we’re happy enough idly watching amateurs at Rockefeller or Lasker or Wollman rinks.
At Madison Square Garden (March 1).