Reviews 1991
Jennifer Muller’s company has a lot going for it. Her choreography spits out eloquent phrases, her dancers plunge headlong in a popular ecstatic mode and whip themselves into seductively rococo shapes. The eleven members of her company are excellent and so gorgeous any susceptible person would want to be them, or have them. So why is her work so profoundly depressing?
Because it’s so dumb. |
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).
Close Your Eyes
September 17
For Sondra Loring’s Last Sleep (i wouldn’t dream of going), P.S. 122’s second-floor space is set out for audience naptime, with pillows and blankets on the stepped platforms. Under silver-blue lights, we listen to recorded whispers, mutterings about sleep and dreams. But in the trio that begins when the lights go down, and the insubstantial atmosphere dissipates, the dancing has no subject but itself. To sonorous music by Frederic Klatz and Carlo Nicolau, the dancers - Loring, Lissy Trachtenberg and Laura Oguiza - bang their heads, dangle arms, loosely dip and swing, vault over one hand, bump shoulder-to-shoulder, deflate suddenly as if the sand has run out of them. Yet their purposes are vague, and the effect of the piece as a whole is of a gentle sloshing, with no stringency at all. Not quite, I think, Loring’s intention.
Born in Germany, Ilse Pfeifer came here in 1987 to work with Zero Moving Company in Philadelphia, and demonstrates an expressive and theatrical orientation in the linked episodes of her mocking Le Monde Fatal des Femmes. Holding a light to her face, she gives a bit of a multi-lingual Joel Grey Cabaret welcome that seems trite and overeager. Then, kneeling, making coy puppets of her hands, she lets her witty fingers walk and strut down and up and down her thighs to a Latin beat, and off onto the floor - all with enormous charm.
She affords us whiffs of various characters, with her sudden pratfalls, slow lops, an awkwardly undulating camel walk, and staggers done half on tiptoe, half on flat foot. She steps on her own feet while masking her uncertainty with an ingratiating smile. The pacing of the piece, however, is oddly tentative; overall there’s just no zip, and no particular sense in the way activities are juxtaposed or connected. She sings a Tom Waits song (about making it) in a dull voice: I don’t know why. But there are some fine moments in Monde Fatal, like the long section in which she again holds a clamp-on light in front of her face. It makes her features gleam extravagantly and casts huge distorting shadows on a crinkled white screen. Her shadow body swivels, swells and shrinks, her tits loom over her shoulders like mountains and vanish as her belly rises, in a gaudy, clownish display of female caricatures that’s teasing, hallucinogenic and accusatory.
Jaime Ortega’s segmented group work, Firewalk, set to a slowly building drama in percussion by R. Weis, may be unwieldy and confusing, but it’s also substantial. It opens with a nude male solo, and succeeding trios and duets are engineered into a sort of big machine of dancing.
I puzzle about the extreme variety of the costuming - why the first man is nude, why another (or maybe it’s the same guy, the nude solo’s pretty dark) wears a little black skirt. Several women and two bare-chested men are in filmy harem pants. One woman is in a sheer top that shows her breasts. What’s important about the way the dancers are distinguished?
There seem to be fragments of plot situations and relationships that disconnect or recede or go out of focus. In an intimate woman’s duet, the one behind manipulates the other by the waist, twists her, drops her down, pushes her forward. The duet evolves into a unison dance of reaches and soft falls, and when a third woman joins in the color again changes with sudden springs, sharply flung arms, arching falls. Two men in those harem pants turn, vault over each other, swing in one another’s arms - ample and generous. Two others jump in with wheeling legs, boosted jumps, strongly counterbalanced leans and lunges, embraces. (Dean Sweeney is particularly clear and spry.)
The alternating duets and small group sections gradually coalesce. In a corner behind that busy mass of whirling legs and rolls and lifts, a man and a woman lean, fall, convulsively embrace. Then the man is wrenched away, almost off-handedly. The deserted woman (she’s the one who is manipulated in the earlier duet) pushes her clothes off, and falls backward as the music crashes. It’s a strikingly personal moment. But what the hell is happening?
At P.S. 122 (September 5 through 8).
For Sondra Loring’s Last Sleep (i wouldn’t dream of going), P.S. 122’s second-floor space is set out for audience naptime, with pillows and blankets on the stepped platforms. Under silver-blue lights, we listen to recorded whispers, mutterings about sleep and dreams. But in the trio that begins when the lights go down, and the insubstantial atmosphere dissipates, the dancing has no subject but itself. To sonorous music by Frederic Klatz and Carlo Nicolau, the dancers - Loring, Lissy Trachtenberg and Laura Oguiza - bang their heads, dangle arms, loosely dip and swing, vault over one hand, bump shoulder-to-shoulder, deflate suddenly as if the sand has run out of them. Yet their purposes are vague, and the effect of the piece as a whole is of a gentle sloshing, with no stringency at all. Not quite, I think, Loring’s intention.
Born in Germany, Ilse Pfeifer came here in 1987 to work with Zero Moving Company in Philadelphia, and demonstrates an expressive and theatrical orientation in the linked episodes of her mocking Le Monde Fatal des Femmes. Holding a light to her face, she gives a bit of a multi-lingual Joel Grey Cabaret welcome that seems trite and overeager. Then, kneeling, making coy puppets of her hands, she lets her witty fingers walk and strut down and up and down her thighs to a Latin beat, and off onto the floor - all with enormous charm.
She affords us whiffs of various characters, with her sudden pratfalls, slow lops, an awkwardly undulating camel walk, and staggers done half on tiptoe, half on flat foot. She steps on her own feet while masking her uncertainty with an ingratiating smile. The pacing of the piece, however, is oddly tentative; overall there’s just no zip, and no particular sense in the way activities are juxtaposed or connected. She sings a Tom Waits song (about making it) in a dull voice: I don’t know why. But there are some fine moments in Monde Fatal, like the long section in which she again holds a clamp-on light in front of her face. It makes her features gleam extravagantly and casts huge distorting shadows on a crinkled white screen. Her shadow body swivels, swells and shrinks, her tits loom over her shoulders like mountains and vanish as her belly rises, in a gaudy, clownish display of female caricatures that’s teasing, hallucinogenic and accusatory.
Jaime Ortega’s segmented group work, Firewalk, set to a slowly building drama in percussion by R. Weis, may be unwieldy and confusing, but it’s also substantial. It opens with a nude male solo, and succeeding trios and duets are engineered into a sort of big machine of dancing.
I puzzle about the extreme variety of the costuming - why the first man is nude, why another (or maybe it’s the same guy, the nude solo’s pretty dark) wears a little black skirt. Several women and two bare-chested men are in filmy harem pants. One woman is in a sheer top that shows her breasts. What’s important about the way the dancers are distinguished?
There seem to be fragments of plot situations and relationships that disconnect or recede or go out of focus. In an intimate woman’s duet, the one behind manipulates the other by the waist, twists her, drops her down, pushes her forward. The duet evolves into a unison dance of reaches and soft falls, and when a third woman joins in the color again changes with sudden springs, sharply flung arms, arching falls. Two men in those harem pants turn, vault over each other, swing in one another’s arms - ample and generous. Two others jump in with wheeling legs, boosted jumps, strongly counterbalanced leans and lunges, embraces. (Dean Sweeney is particularly clear and spry.)
The alternating duets and small group sections gradually coalesce. In a corner behind that busy mass of whirling legs and rolls and lifts, a man and a woman lean, fall, convulsively embrace. Then the man is wrenched away, almost off-handedly. The deserted woman (she’s the one who is manipulated in the earlier duet) pushes her clothes off, and falls backward as the music crashes. It’s a strikingly personal moment. But what the hell is happening?
At P.S. 122 (September 5 through 8).
Female Trouble
December 31
A strong and immaculately balanced performer, Susan Osberg presented three solos at Dia, two of them rather wobbly. Intricacies, to a musical collage using water sounds and music by Alvin Lucier and Malcolm Goldstein, is a dance meditation of satisfying composure. Osberg remains tireless, unfazed, cool - though the piece does go on. Winston Roeth’s set design - three rectangular panels hung one below the other on each side of the space, and two toward the back - charges Dia’s clean, blank space with energy. Blu - who has always been a magician when working with limited equipment - does an elegant job of lighting.
Kneeling, hands over her eyes, Osberg begins with a confident, improvised chant that sounds almost Japanese. She scrolls her hands, opens her arms, and, rising, supports the melody of curving arms on a smoothly shifting base of squats and gentle lunges. There seems to be nothing personal in her actions; it’s as if she’s fulfilling a ritualized sequence of forms. She picks up two slender rods - I see them first as spears - from the floor, and, whispering exclamations, swings them, gets them whirring. One touches the floor delicately, the other’s in the air. Then she wields them in great arcs, makes their tips meet and uses them to dowse the space.
Setting the rods aside, with sweeping, sickling gestures, with gestures of separation, she spirals and bends in smooth, weighted curves. A sweeping leg announces big turns and flat spins. The hum of the music in the room seems to move from ear to ear, then throbs. Unflagging, Osberg keeps her whole choreographic edifice suspended in a spacious present.
She’s a striking presence, and one can forgive her a lot. But Body Talk, to Miles Davis’s rendition of Gershwin’s “The Man I love,” is a little, well, embarrassing. Particularly her urgent speaking, “I love you,” etc., given various readings, none of them convincing. Though when Osberg begins to break the words up and deliver them like scat, and stops trying to persuade, something almost starts to happen.
I mind that there’s neither sympathy nor humor in Body Talk. It just scores off an easy victim - the poor primping sucker waiting to be run over by romance. Wearing a loose, gleaming silver top over drab black pants, Osberg moves slouchily, snakily, cute. She saunters, poses, pushes insistently. “Why don’t you love me?” she asks. I guess I don’t believe in any of this: it’s too reliant on caricature, too little out of control, too superior. A babble of movement would be nice. The pace of the music, that lively bass, is miles ahead of her. And I want to see that silver top made to ripple and shine.
Flesh, a new piece, is too large a subject, pulling together the mythic female, politics, religion...mothering, sex. Osberg spits anger for the rape of the earth the degradation of woman’s body, largely through three or four poems spoken with hasty force, mostly on tape. Not surprisingly, you can only grasp the sense of an occasional pressing phrase. Landscape slides (by David Hendricks) of a flat, Western highway, a narrow gorge in Zion, a swampy river, a sunset, a snowy path, in the woods, further muddy Osberg’s intention.
The piece is all over the map. In the beginning, Osberg wears a red velvet dress and a translucent bluish mask. Shifting side to side, running back and forth, her movement becomes more ardent and receptive, with reaches and whirlings, while the text describes bleak scenes of military detritus and contamination. Discarding the mask, she sits in a wooden chair, holding a big heart. She shuffles images of woman in her scary aspects - stern as a hawk, cruel and shrewish. She sticks out her tongue with childish spite, swims across the chair, spies through her hands. There’s lots of gestural illustration of the poem images, but the internal logic of the movement is weak.
Only a few moments are immediate, and they seem to erupt out of isolation, out of a kind of grandiose litany of protest Like when she takes a globe of the world from between her knees, clasps it to her breast, holds it between stiff arms and sweeps it weightily around her. When suddenly she sprawls upside down in the chair as if locked in a gynecologist’s stirrups. When she abruptly pulls her red dress up and exposes her strong, pale legs. Those moments mean more than all the rattletrap talk.
At Dia Center for the Arts (December 13 and 14).
A strong and immaculately balanced performer, Susan Osberg presented three solos at Dia, two of them rather wobbly. Intricacies, to a musical collage using water sounds and music by Alvin Lucier and Malcolm Goldstein, is a dance meditation of satisfying composure. Osberg remains tireless, unfazed, cool - though the piece does go on. Winston Roeth’s set design - three rectangular panels hung one below the other on each side of the space, and two toward the back - charges Dia’s clean, blank space with energy. Blu - who has always been a magician when working with limited equipment - does an elegant job of lighting.
Kneeling, hands over her eyes, Osberg begins with a confident, improvised chant that sounds almost Japanese. She scrolls her hands, opens her arms, and, rising, supports the melody of curving arms on a smoothly shifting base of squats and gentle lunges. There seems to be nothing personal in her actions; it’s as if she’s fulfilling a ritualized sequence of forms. She picks up two slender rods - I see them first as spears - from the floor, and, whispering exclamations, swings them, gets them whirring. One touches the floor delicately, the other’s in the air. Then she wields them in great arcs, makes their tips meet and uses them to dowse the space.
Setting the rods aside, with sweeping, sickling gestures, with gestures of separation, she spirals and bends in smooth, weighted curves. A sweeping leg announces big turns and flat spins. The hum of the music in the room seems to move from ear to ear, then throbs. Unflagging, Osberg keeps her whole choreographic edifice suspended in a spacious present.
She’s a striking presence, and one can forgive her a lot. But Body Talk, to Miles Davis’s rendition of Gershwin’s “The Man I love,” is a little, well, embarrassing. Particularly her urgent speaking, “I love you,” etc., given various readings, none of them convincing. Though when Osberg begins to break the words up and deliver them like scat, and stops trying to persuade, something almost starts to happen.
I mind that there’s neither sympathy nor humor in Body Talk. It just scores off an easy victim - the poor primping sucker waiting to be run over by romance. Wearing a loose, gleaming silver top over drab black pants, Osberg moves slouchily, snakily, cute. She saunters, poses, pushes insistently. “Why don’t you love me?” she asks. I guess I don’t believe in any of this: it’s too reliant on caricature, too little out of control, too superior. A babble of movement would be nice. The pace of the music, that lively bass, is miles ahead of her. And I want to see that silver top made to ripple and shine.
Flesh, a new piece, is too large a subject, pulling together the mythic female, politics, religion...mothering, sex. Osberg spits anger for the rape of the earth the degradation of woman’s body, largely through three or four poems spoken with hasty force, mostly on tape. Not surprisingly, you can only grasp the sense of an occasional pressing phrase. Landscape slides (by David Hendricks) of a flat, Western highway, a narrow gorge in Zion, a swampy river, a sunset, a snowy path, in the woods, further muddy Osberg’s intention.
The piece is all over the map. In the beginning, Osberg wears a red velvet dress and a translucent bluish mask. Shifting side to side, running back and forth, her movement becomes more ardent and receptive, with reaches and whirlings, while the text describes bleak scenes of military detritus and contamination. Discarding the mask, she sits in a wooden chair, holding a big heart. She shuffles images of woman in her scary aspects - stern as a hawk, cruel and shrewish. She sticks out her tongue with childish spite, swims across the chair, spies through her hands. There’s lots of gestural illustration of the poem images, but the internal logic of the movement is weak.
Only a few moments are immediate, and they seem to erupt out of isolation, out of a kind of grandiose litany of protest Like when she takes a globe of the world from between her knees, clasps it to her breast, holds it between stiff arms and sweeps it weightily around her. When suddenly she sprawls upside down in the chair as if locked in a gynecologist’s stirrups. When she abruptly pulls her red dress up and exposes her strong, pale legs. Those moments mean more than all the rattletrap talk.
At Dia Center for the Arts (December 13 and 14).
Higher
December 24
This year’s edition of the next Wave Festival closed on a high with Griot New York, a collaboration in eight sections between choreographer Garth Fagan, whose brainchild it was, Martin Puryear, and jazz composer/trumpeter Wynton Marsalis. It’s pretty unusual to see a major collaboration that isn’t just a big noise. Here, the visual, musical and kinetic elements, independent in perspective yet miraculously attuned, augmented one another in ways that created a sense of spacious purpose. Fagan’s choreography, with its whimsical daring, dug into and glanced off the music. Puryear’s witty, smoothly genial sculptures fiddled with our sense of scale and located the dancing in that still, eternal place where watches melt. (Oddly, his giant sculptures ceased to be a feature halfway through.) Marsalis’s live jazz score, performed by his septet, impelled and supported the dancing like some ravishing, racketing urban engine.
Puryear’s large sculptures give a dimension of earthy fantasy: a huge clay water jug hangs suspended from the flies in the exuberant, rocking first section; then an enormous graduated chain lies on the stage, while Norwood Pennewell, flat on his back, creeps and struggles along, arching and flexing. The references to real-life pain and the nightmares of history, like Puryear’s slave chain, are detached. There’s nothing in Griot New York of guilt and debt and blame. It’s not argumentative. In the long run, Fagan’s people, whatever misery and joy, good and evil, have gone into the mix, are not crippled by the burdens of the past or the injustices of the present. There’s such an essential fullness and breadth of feeling to their being.
Puryear also designed a pair of smooth, monumental boots; a skinny, immensely steep, free-standing white staircase that shrinks toward infinity; a giant hoe that I thought was a double electrical socket with a fat yellow tube running into it. In the section with the hoe, “Bayou Baroque,” Natalie Rogers dances a slow undulating meditation, suddenly droops, crunches. Twitching and wriggling, she pulls a black cloth off the hoe handle with her foot, covers herself, and wanders off. And bent-over couples, on zigzagging feet, enter like spiders.
Occasionally, Fagan gets literal. In “Down Under,” to a dark bowing on the bass, A. Roger Smith walks on stiff legs, falters, crawls. Others, wearing lumpy smocks,enter, jerky and ghoulish, like the lepers in Ben-Hur. The dancers lie alongside one another in a crawling heap, a mass of writhing legs and arms that rolls toward and away from the steps, without anyone getting a foot up. Two men, one lying across the other’s lap, slide across the stage. One cradles the other’s head. You see the homeless, AIDS, the beckoning insult of the white staircase - too precarious for anyone to climb.
Fagan’s technically demanding dance is synthetic, sometimes a goof, rhythmically intricate, delicate, detailed, fierce - fusing contemporary modern and traditional African and Carribean elements in a seamlessly articulated, immensely sophisticated style. His 16 dancers - including Natalie Rogers, Valentina Alexander, Bit Knighton, Steve Humphrey - blithely handle the most dramatic dynamic fluctuations, yet they never show off, they just grow more luminous. Norwood Pennewell is perhaps the most genuinely lighthearted of all, with an amazing delicacy of inflection and inner poise. He’s like someone who never had a bad day, never held a grudge. Just watching him is a balm to the spirit.
For Pennewell and Alexander, Fagan resurrected a ravishing duet from his 1982 Daylight Savings Time. In “Spring Yaounde,” she twines over him, they rock and sway together. Tender, synchronous figures, they’re exquisitely matched, immensely modest in their absorption. He hauls her gently over his hip. They kneel head-to-head and roll their interlocking profiles up and down as an agile trumpet tears your heart to shreds.
Griot New York is enormously confident and festive, without an ounce of despair or a drop of rhetoric. Despite the figures that doggedly stumble and fall, nothing, no one, is isolated, no one is lost. Its multifarious influences meld together, yet retain their identify and flavor. In the broadest, most exhilarating way, it’s an embracing, community-building work.
At Next Wave Festival Brooklyn Academy of Music (December 4 through 7).
This year’s edition of the next Wave Festival closed on a high with Griot New York, a collaboration in eight sections between choreographer Garth Fagan, whose brainchild it was, Martin Puryear, and jazz composer/trumpeter Wynton Marsalis. It’s pretty unusual to see a major collaboration that isn’t just a big noise. Here, the visual, musical and kinetic elements, independent in perspective yet miraculously attuned, augmented one another in ways that created a sense of spacious purpose. Fagan’s choreography, with its whimsical daring, dug into and glanced off the music. Puryear’s witty, smoothly genial sculptures fiddled with our sense of scale and located the dancing in that still, eternal place where watches melt. (Oddly, his giant sculptures ceased to be a feature halfway through.) Marsalis’s live jazz score, performed by his septet, impelled and supported the dancing like some ravishing, racketing urban engine.
Puryear’s large sculptures give a dimension of earthy fantasy: a huge clay water jug hangs suspended from the flies in the exuberant, rocking first section; then an enormous graduated chain lies on the stage, while Norwood Pennewell, flat on his back, creeps and struggles along, arching and flexing. The references to real-life pain and the nightmares of history, like Puryear’s slave chain, are detached. There’s nothing in Griot New York of guilt and debt and blame. It’s not argumentative. In the long run, Fagan’s people, whatever misery and joy, good and evil, have gone into the mix, are not crippled by the burdens of the past or the injustices of the present. There’s such an essential fullness and breadth of feeling to their being.
Puryear also designed a pair of smooth, monumental boots; a skinny, immensely steep, free-standing white staircase that shrinks toward infinity; a giant hoe that I thought was a double electrical socket with a fat yellow tube running into it. In the section with the hoe, “Bayou Baroque,” Natalie Rogers dances a slow undulating meditation, suddenly droops, crunches. Twitching and wriggling, she pulls a black cloth off the hoe handle with her foot, covers herself, and wanders off. And bent-over couples, on zigzagging feet, enter like spiders.
Occasionally, Fagan gets literal. In “Down Under,” to a dark bowing on the bass, A. Roger Smith walks on stiff legs, falters, crawls. Others, wearing lumpy smocks,enter, jerky and ghoulish, like the lepers in Ben-Hur. The dancers lie alongside one another in a crawling heap, a mass of writhing legs and arms that rolls toward and away from the steps, without anyone getting a foot up. Two men, one lying across the other’s lap, slide across the stage. One cradles the other’s head. You see the homeless, AIDS, the beckoning insult of the white staircase - too precarious for anyone to climb.
Fagan’s technically demanding dance is synthetic, sometimes a goof, rhythmically intricate, delicate, detailed, fierce - fusing contemporary modern and traditional African and Carribean elements in a seamlessly articulated, immensely sophisticated style. His 16 dancers - including Natalie Rogers, Valentina Alexander, Bit Knighton, Steve Humphrey - blithely handle the most dramatic dynamic fluctuations, yet they never show off, they just grow more luminous. Norwood Pennewell is perhaps the most genuinely lighthearted of all, with an amazing delicacy of inflection and inner poise. He’s like someone who never had a bad day, never held a grudge. Just watching him is a balm to the spirit.
For Pennewell and Alexander, Fagan resurrected a ravishing duet from his 1982 Daylight Savings Time. In “Spring Yaounde,” she twines over him, they rock and sway together. Tender, synchronous figures, they’re exquisitely matched, immensely modest in their absorption. He hauls her gently over his hip. They kneel head-to-head and roll their interlocking profiles up and down as an agile trumpet tears your heart to shreds.
Griot New York is enormously confident and festive, without an ounce of despair or a drop of rhetoric. Despite the figures that doggedly stumble and fall, nothing, no one, is isolated, no one is lost. Its multifarious influences meld together, yet retain their identify and flavor. In the broadest, most exhilarating way, it’s an embracing, community-building work.
At Next Wave Festival Brooklyn Academy of Music (December 4 through 7).
Silver Linings
December 17
The long first half of Maria Benitez’s program at the Joyce was a monument of sullen preoccupation. But after the intermission, how the cloud lifted!
In the opening grabber, Formas e Imagenes, four dancers in a cluster let their floating, insinuating hands curl and uncurl to a slow trickle of guitar notes, occasionally letting a kick or a thrust knee trouble the slow build to a precise, military delivery of rapid-fire stamping. Yet the unison work, the symmetrical patterns of the choreography lead to a series of dances so strangely monotone that almost the whole first half seemed glum and unspontaneous. Alfonso Simo’s stubborn Solea seemed blured and bullheaded a storm that never broke. There was something thick, clogged about his pent-up attitude, and he used his hands in a mitteny way. With her nose in the air, and only the wariest teasing, Monica offered an Alegrias just as stern and unbending. I wonder now if they were simply forcing, trying to convince beyond their conviction.
Reaching extremely, then folding herself and her grief in her shawl, Benitez in Reflexiones performed one of those sculptural modern pieces in the mold of Graham’s classic Lamentation that brings into neat, iconic balance the forces of distress and consolation, yearning and submission. Benitez’s ardent vocabulary is in a way too tempting, so handily does it mesh deep emotion with reserve, twist expression into intense withholding Yet this is the sweet and acerb taste we crave; proof that flamenco’s practitioners carry wounds that ever heal and knowledge that poisons sleep.
One of the elements that can be irritating - if one is no swept up into the drama or the formal contrasts of the dances - is the ritual way each moody variation or fatal deal plays out, each episode closing before the next begins, with no shortcuts, no gliding segues, no crashing devolutions. All impetus subsides, though the pause may be breathless with expectation. You could have inserted commercials between the sections of Joaquin Ruiz’s Aires de Silencio, a cousin to Lorca’s The House of Bernarda Alba, but I succumbed to its methodical pace and ripe color. Benitez stands commandingly in a long, crimson velvet dress with a bejeweled bib. Two younger women (Monica and Ramona Carduno) are curled in chairs like cats, their hair loose and massy, and wearing lush, ruffled red and gold robes of patterned silk, girdled with wide, flowered waistbands (costumes by Leanne Mahoney and Bobbie Culbert), suggesting a kind of deshabille. It’s as if the young women never go outside. Their limp, lush forms are eroticized by the lavish fabric.
Benitez intimidates them, then exits solemnly in a diagonal corridor of blazing light. Two admirers (angel Atienza and Simo), who augment their stern footwork by striking the tips of their canes against the floor, attend the girls., but Benitez returns, gets rid of them, and the girls knock their chairs down with unreflective, adolescent spite. Benitez is humanized in a duet with Ruiz, the dead lover or husband she regrets, who appears and disappears behind her and moves in consonance with her. She lays her head back n his shoulder; silently mirrors his footwork.
I like that Benitez’s authority is intermittent, not crushing. That the girls are resilient, ever ready to ignore her or dispute her will.
The second half of the program warmed up instantly. Ruiz’s Alegrias transformed the evening by its bright assertions His recklessness was a joy, as was his wicked heelwork, the light efficacy of his darting hands. Skipping, teasing, softly stalking, slapping his thighs, surprising us with crazylegs stunts, he ripped apart the solemn fabric of what preceded. Next, the ensemble - slumped around a round wooden table in Mario Maya’s companionable Flamencos de la “Trinia” - clapped choruses of accelerated rhythms. Atienza darkened the atmosphere again in his Taranto. Tough, compact, scowling, his hair a mop of ringlets, his jacket tossed to the floor, Atienza thrust downward in vehemence bordering on contempt, while his chest, shoulders and curving arms were held aloof, and his gloating hands wound delicately around his torso.
More than ever before, I loved Benitez in her astonishing Solea. She seemed to toss aside the proud attitude, she endured the grim confrontation with self and found a passionate gaiety that was even more exposing. Her costume (by Bobbie Culbert) was perfect too: a black dress with almost invisible glittering beads at her breastbone, a subtle, diagonal band of scarlet fringe at the waist, and a shining white shawl with huge embroidered red roses that she soon discarded. Her lazy, haunted gaze pierced through the present moment to some other time, and the agony written n her face seemed to echo what she saw.
Through the journey of her dance, she defined herself - and not narrowly. Beautiful yet rawboned, wonderfully lithe, she didn’t give a damn about modeling her looks, and abandoned the regal and tragic poses that provide a mask of composure. Instead, she turned her skin inside out in a dance of vivid and slippery contrasts; she became playful, demanding, carefree, iridescent. No mere role can hold her now.
At the Joyce Theater (December 3 through 15).
The long first half of Maria Benitez’s program at the Joyce was a monument of sullen preoccupation. But after the intermission, how the cloud lifted!
In the opening grabber, Formas e Imagenes, four dancers in a cluster let their floating, insinuating hands curl and uncurl to a slow trickle of guitar notes, occasionally letting a kick or a thrust knee trouble the slow build to a precise, military delivery of rapid-fire stamping. Yet the unison work, the symmetrical patterns of the choreography lead to a series of dances so strangely monotone that almost the whole first half seemed glum and unspontaneous. Alfonso Simo’s stubborn Solea seemed blured and bullheaded a storm that never broke. There was something thick, clogged about his pent-up attitude, and he used his hands in a mitteny way. With her nose in the air, and only the wariest teasing, Monica offered an Alegrias just as stern and unbending. I wonder now if they were simply forcing, trying to convince beyond their conviction.
Reaching extremely, then folding herself and her grief in her shawl, Benitez in Reflexiones performed one of those sculptural modern pieces in the mold of Graham’s classic Lamentation that brings into neat, iconic balance the forces of distress and consolation, yearning and submission. Benitez’s ardent vocabulary is in a way too tempting, so handily does it mesh deep emotion with reserve, twist expression into intense withholding Yet this is the sweet and acerb taste we crave; proof that flamenco’s practitioners carry wounds that ever heal and knowledge that poisons sleep.
One of the elements that can be irritating - if one is no swept up into the drama or the formal contrasts of the dances - is the ritual way each moody variation or fatal deal plays out, each episode closing before the next begins, with no shortcuts, no gliding segues, no crashing devolutions. All impetus subsides, though the pause may be breathless with expectation. You could have inserted commercials between the sections of Joaquin Ruiz’s Aires de Silencio, a cousin to Lorca’s The House of Bernarda Alba, but I succumbed to its methodical pace and ripe color. Benitez stands commandingly in a long, crimson velvet dress with a bejeweled bib. Two younger women (Monica and Ramona Carduno) are curled in chairs like cats, their hair loose and massy, and wearing lush, ruffled red and gold robes of patterned silk, girdled with wide, flowered waistbands (costumes by Leanne Mahoney and Bobbie Culbert), suggesting a kind of deshabille. It’s as if the young women never go outside. Their limp, lush forms are eroticized by the lavish fabric.
Benitez intimidates them, then exits solemnly in a diagonal corridor of blazing light. Two admirers (angel Atienza and Simo), who augment their stern footwork by striking the tips of their canes against the floor, attend the girls., but Benitez returns, gets rid of them, and the girls knock their chairs down with unreflective, adolescent spite. Benitez is humanized in a duet with Ruiz, the dead lover or husband she regrets, who appears and disappears behind her and moves in consonance with her. She lays her head back n his shoulder; silently mirrors his footwork.
I like that Benitez’s authority is intermittent, not crushing. That the girls are resilient, ever ready to ignore her or dispute her will.
The second half of the program warmed up instantly. Ruiz’s Alegrias transformed the evening by its bright assertions His recklessness was a joy, as was his wicked heelwork, the light efficacy of his darting hands. Skipping, teasing, softly stalking, slapping his thighs, surprising us with crazylegs stunts, he ripped apart the solemn fabric of what preceded. Next, the ensemble - slumped around a round wooden table in Mario Maya’s companionable Flamencos de la “Trinia” - clapped choruses of accelerated rhythms. Atienza darkened the atmosphere again in his Taranto. Tough, compact, scowling, his hair a mop of ringlets, his jacket tossed to the floor, Atienza thrust downward in vehemence bordering on contempt, while his chest, shoulders and curving arms were held aloof, and his gloating hands wound delicately around his torso.
More than ever before, I loved Benitez in her astonishing Solea. She seemed to toss aside the proud attitude, she endured the grim confrontation with self and found a passionate gaiety that was even more exposing. Her costume (by Bobbie Culbert) was perfect too: a black dress with almost invisible glittering beads at her breastbone, a subtle, diagonal band of scarlet fringe at the waist, and a shining white shawl with huge embroidered red roses that she soon discarded. Her lazy, haunted gaze pierced through the present moment to some other time, and the agony written n her face seemed to echo what she saw.
Through the journey of her dance, she defined herself - and not narrowly. Beautiful yet rawboned, wonderfully lithe, she didn’t give a damn about modeling her looks, and abandoned the regal and tragic poses that provide a mask of composure. Instead, she turned her skin inside out in a dance of vivid and slippery contrasts; she became playful, demanding, carefree, iridescent. No mere role can hold her now.
At the Joyce Theater (December 3 through 15).
Snows of Yesteryear
January 1
Inside P.S. 122 it’s winter. Heavy white paper covers the stage floor, the walls have been painted white, snow is heaped gently around the bases of the fluted Corinthian support pillars and against the radiators. Rented chairs for the audience are white, too. (These, unfortunately, are the wretchedly designed plastic folding chairs made by Krueger that can give you a backache before the performance even starts.) The performing space is entirely open. You hardly notice Ann Carlson hunched in a chair in the far corner, disguised as an old woman in a blue-gray coat, clunky black shoes, black gloves, and a mouse-brown wig. She gets up heavily and walks with tiny, hesitant steps into the light. Her face is wrinkled and dull, her fingers move with a nervous, methodical gesture. She stops, heads back toward the corner to pick up a small bouquet. We hear the voiceover mutterings of a funeral prayer (the score of recorded material was made by collaborator Andy Kirshner). There’s a scream, and then the unmistakable cry of a baby comes out of Carlson’s throat. She keeps taking those tiny steps. She pants, the baby inside her cries out again, and another voice from within her soothes the baby with a [line illegible].
Carlson’s vocalizations are as blood-curdlingly freakish as those in The Exorcist, only in her the disconnected voices of innocence speak from the body of experience. And Carlson’s utterances are wonderfully, disturbingly convincing. But as she ages, and interacts with an aural tour of some of the low points of the past 40 years (including pretentious, speechifying presidents, news announcements, commercial jingles), no particular character emerges from her impersonation and therefore no firm perspective on the events through which she drifts. From Carlson, we hear the voice of a child speaking gibberish that’s only beginning to be language; we hear grunts, laughter, sniffles, murmurings, and the raging “No! No!” of an angry child. She calls “Red Rover, Red Rover’s [two words illegible] over. She responds to the whine of the Emergency Broadcast System running a test. The voice of a teacher, perhaps herself, says, “I’d like you to raise your hand if you’ve something to say.” It’s as if Carlson’s a radio tuned to the random past, and Kirshner’s score serves to spin her dial. After 10 minutes and the first impressive vocal shocks, I’m content to watch the static stage picture. But if anything is going to happen, I want it to happen now. But it’s another 25 till Carlson totters, stumbles, falls, and spills her flowers. She lies there perfectly immobile, then, on all fours, searches for something, and stands erect and dignified, straight despite her dowager’s hump. At last there’s a single presence on stage. She seems clear-eyed; her wrinkled face looks out into the hard present.
At P.S. 122 (December 14 through 22).