Tag: William Forsythe

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More Voices on Morphoses

So, the first round of Morphoses reviews are flowing in. Thank you Tobi Tobias for saying what I was trying so very hard to say way too late at night (there are plusses and minuses to writing immediately after a performance: on one hand the “afterimages” in Arlene Croce speak are the most vivid and fresh that they’ll ever be, but on the other sometimes your brain needs to chew things over a bit). Particularly resonant with me was Tobias’s paragraph about Wheeldon not engaging the emotions of his audience, or even perhaps himself. And thank you, Ms. Tobias for giving me one brief glimpse into the value of “Slingerland.”

One thing Tobias mentions that struck me: she says that she doesn’t know if Wheeldon’s desire to give the dancers too much free reign in the dances’ creations is a good thing. I’ve now heard several choreographers (Jorma Elo, Wheeldon, and most recently Nacho Duato — promise I’ll get to that review today!) say that the way they work is that they have some vague notion of what they want when they go into the studio, they choose the music, they have a general idea in mind, then they let the dancers go and figure it all out, discover the movement and how best to convey that idea. Helen Pickett even said at a Works & Process event that she lets her dancers improvise right on stage, during the actual performance. So what is the choreographer then? The music selector, the originator of the basic idea? I’ve heard theater and film people laugh when someone asks if they’d thought of a co-director. No way, they all say, there’s got to be one person and one person alone behind the helm of a project or everything just gets all confused and there’s no “voice” to the work and meaning is lost. I wonder if that’s partly what’s happening to me, I can’t always make sense of things in dance because there are too many interpretations going on at once on that stage and there’s no single voice or authority (ie: that of an older person with life experience and well-developed artistry) in control?

Anyway, I so would have liked to have gone to the Morphoses open rehearsal yesterday, but unfortunately couldn’t take off work. Kristin went and wrote a bit about it — apparently it was a rehearsal of Mesmerics, one of the pieces on Program 2, wherein Wheeldon corrected and instructed dancers on the movement, but it doesn’t seem that he talked about his process. There was an audience give and take but Kristin didn’t write anything about. I always like to hear what audiences have to say about something, what others get and don’t get and what they want to understand and know from an artist. Oh well, maybe next time I can go. Damn work interfering with my blogging life!! Also, maybe Works & Process can institute a little audience Q & A into their programs in the future?

Here’s Sir Alastair’s review. He echoes others, saying that the most notable thing about the company thus far was the fame of the dancers (true), but also adds that in his opinion, Wheeldon doesn’t take seriously enough his female dancers, makes them too passive. It’s an interesting take and something I hadn’t thought of.

Joel Lobenthal in The Sun gives a very fair, balanced review saying Wheeldon may not be the “great white hope” of ballet but is nevertheless a young, very talented choreographer “still in the process of finding himself.”

Apollinaire’s Newsday review is also fair and balanced (as always with her), and I love this paragraph in particular: “The sculptural twining of limbs yields imagistic sparks, but they don’t light a fire this time. Wheeldon seems to have gotten carried away by his own dexterous invention.” So, my “meaningless weird abstract shape after meaningless weird abstract shape” gibberish expressed much more eloquently 🙂 She also gives me more to understand regarding Forsythe.

By the way, speaking of my phrasing, James Wolcott linked to my write-up (so wonderfully nice of him!!), calling it “a trembling ordeal of terror worthy of the Simpsons’ Halloween special” as I found myself “buried under a paper mache rock slide of ‘meaningless weird abstract shapes,’ and live[d] to tell the tale.” Hehehehe, I couldn’t stop laughing. I guess it did sound like a nutty Simpsons-esque Halloween cartoon! Good, imaginative writers can make things sound so nice… (Off the topic of Wheeldon but on the topic of Wolcott, he has an entertaining, socio-cultural history of the Twist in the November Vanity Fair.)

And here is Philip, who said what I thought he would, focusing on all of the great dancers involved in the program (although he is also a big opera lover and talked about the beauty of the music a bit too).

Here’s a Washington Times review.

Here’s what Ballet Talk balletomanes had to say.

And, in case I left something out, here is a fuller list of reviews, including those from London, where Morphoses premiered in September.

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Morphoses' First Full Program: A Complete and Utter Bore, Unfortunately

And anyone who has been reading my blog for the past couple of weeks knows it pains me to say that. But unfortunately tonight was one of the most mind-numbing, boring nights I’ve ever had at the ballet. And I was looking so forward to it! Maybe too much…

First of all, when I referred earlier to Christopher Wheeldon as a genius, I meant the Christopher Wheeldon who’s choreographed some of my favorite ballets for NYCB, like “Scenes de Ballet” his first, “An American in Paris,” “Carousel,” “Klavier,” “Evenfall.” What happened to him? Not that I like everything syrupy sweet — definitely not — but those ballets had meaning you could latch onto, a storyline even if slight, SOMETHING. Tonight was like an extended Rorschach test, and even those can be more fun assuming you’re with someone who’s oversexed and keeps seeing genitalia in everything. Tonight was completely meaningless weird abstract shape after completely meaningless weird abstract shape after completely meaningless weird abstract shape. I’m not stupid, can you please engage my mind, Mr. Wheeldon? One abstract piece fine, but a whole night of them is insulting; I have better things to do. I probably shouldn’t say it that way: I mean that I just get tired of visuals all the time; can a dance-maker alternate the visual with the intellectual? I just don’t know what I’m supposed to be getting out of all this abstraction and it gets so frustrating when that’s all there is.

Second, regarding my earlier pronouncement of Wheeldon a genius: I think either I need to stop going to the Guggenheim Works & Process things or else I need ONLY to go to those, because everything looks so different on that small stage and in that intimate setting. All of these ballets tonight were not only abstract but when they weren’t pas de deux they utilized very few dancers, and I think either these dancers didn’t know how to dramatize or project or emote, or else the stage was just too vast and the audience too far away to really see any subtlety, to make any sense of anything. Either Wheeldon needs to make larger-scale works for a larger stage or keep these smaller scale ones and put them in a more intimate setting.

Okay, first on the program was “There Where She Loved,” a piece which I’d just raved about after seeing it at the Guggenheim. Unfortunately, the only part of it that was really compelling was the part that they staged at Works & Process. The whole is about 20 times longer and it’s so long and drawn out, it really loses its steam; it’s just completely boring. And by the time we get to the good part which I’d seen earlier (and was waiting and waiting and waiting for), I was so on the verge of falling asleep I almost missed it. To be sure, there was one earlier sweet little pas de deux evoking young love danced by Sterling Hyltin and Gonzalo Garcia whose charm is likely due to its prettiness (lots of “awwwwws” in the audience), but it only lasted a couple of minutes.

Second was “Tryst Pas De Deux” which was danced by just-retired Royal Ballet legend Darcey Bussell, and Jonathan Cope. All I could see in this ballet was: two people come out onstage, regard each other, walk toward each other with purpose (making me momentarily intrigued), but then simply begin doing lifts, making a series of abstract shapes with their connected bodies. Then it was over.

Then came William Forsythe’s “Slingerland.” From what I’ve seen of his work, Forsythe is a choreographer who really respects the intellect of his audiences; he’s a very smart man and he really gives you something to chew over with his dances. And everytime I’ve seen anyone other than his own company perform his work: it’s a no-go. I wish if others were going to put on something of his, they’d work directly with him, let him coach the dancers. He has something very specific in mind and if the dancers or the person who staged the piece isn’t in on it, the audience certainly isn’t going to be. The way this came out here, it was now Wendy Whelan and Edwaard Liang who walked out onstage, regarded each other, then proceeded to make weird meaningless abstract shape after weird meaningless abstract shape with their bodies.

Next was “Prokofiev Pas De Deux.” What can I say: more abstract shape after abstract shape, although these shapes were more traditionally balletic than awkward, and the female lead was danced by Tina Pereira, who is one of the few exceptions to what I said above in terms of dancers not really knowing how to emote, dramatize or project. Other exceptions to that are: Sterling Hyltin, Gonzalo Garcia, Ashley Bouder (for sure!), Michael Nunn, and sometimes Wendy Whelan and Maria Kowroski depending on the piece. Unfortunately, for anyone who wasn’t there tonight, you’re not going to get to see the affecting Ms. Pereira because she’s being replaced by Alina Cojocaru for the remainder of this program.

Next was “Dance of the Hours.” Okay, I’ve never seen this one, but, according to the Playbill, it is taken from La Gioconda, Act III from 1876. The audience found this funny, and I easily got the idea that it was a riff, a joke on something, but I didn’t know what. Because of the way the magnetic Ashley Bouder dramatized it, I laughed along with everyone else, but the problem I feel is that if Wheeldon wants to draw new audiences to ballet through his work, he has to make sure everyone gets the joke. The humorous riff is a lot funnier if you have a sense of what is being “riffed” of course. And the program doesn’t tell us.

Then last was “Fools’ Paradise,” another Rorschach test, this one involving several dancers instead of just two. At one point Maria Kowroski came alive, she had a series of abstract, awkward shapes, but she had a real intention to them, her body was making a shape for a reason, and believe me the entire audience in my section leaned forward almost simultaneously. Dancers: please understand, we can tell when you think, when you’re not just doing a series of steps by rote. Unfortunately, within 15 seconds she’d disappeared into the wings.

In the New York magazine article, which I linked to in my last post, the writer frames the piece by showing Wheeldon’s venture from the perspective of a very young girl who happens in on a rehearsal, presumably the kind of new viewer Wheeldon wants to attract. The little girl likes sports, not ballet, which she knows nothing about. Wheeldon invites her in, lets her watch. At the end of the first performance, he asks her if she likes ballet now. She says no. He asks her if she likes ballet dancers, she smiles and nods yes. He says, “well then you like ballet.” But is that true? I think that’s a big part of what goes on in the ballet world right now. People are connecting to their favorite dancers. Do NYCB fans really love Balanchine and all that his ballets stand for, or are they connecting with their favorite dancers? Would I like “Clear” and “In the Upper Room” and “Sinatra Suite” as much if they weren’t danced by Marcelo Gomes and David Hallberg and all of the ABT faces and bodies and personalities that I’ve come to know and love over the past few years? I don’t really know; I’ve never seen those ballets performed by anyone else. Maybe part of the reason I wasn’t so enthralled with tonight’s program is that Wheeldon has used many dancers with whom I’m not familiar; I’m positive Philip is going to have a completely different take when he sees the program tomorrow night, and I’ll bet you he focuses mainly on his favorite dancers and not on Wheeldon’s work. Is this a good thing though? I want to get something from the choreography; I want the choreography to speak to me, the same way Forsythe’s choreography does, not just the dancer. Otherwise, I’ll only ever want to see ABT. And, how will new fans be made, who don’t already love these dancers, who don’t already have favorites? In my opinion, there’s far too much, almost absurdist, abstraction in contemporary ballet, that speaks to no one. On Friday afternoon, at his open rehearsal, Wheeldon really should spend a good deal of his time explaining to young newcomers exactly how they are supposed to read these ballets, exactly what they are supposed to get out of them. Because I’m almost positive that, with this program, no new fans will be made.

Anyway, I feel badly disliking my evening as much as I did, since I had such high hopes. As I said at the beginning of this post, maybe I had been looking too forward to this, with all the hype. So, the good thing is, if you’re reading this and haven’t yet seen Morphoses and are going to, now you’ll have this nasty review in your mind and can think how off the mark that crazy blogger was, how it’s not at all as bad as she said it was, she was just nuts. So there, I just made your enjoyment of it that much better 🙂

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David Michalek's "Slow Dancing": A Good Idea But Poorly Executed (*Update in Bold)

Hehe, my friend, Ariel Davis, a young journalist currently in NYC for an internship with a big magazine, emailed me bright and early yesterday morning to tell me that we were quoted in the NYTimes! Of course I immediately scoured the article. Well, we weren’t actually quoted, in that our names weren’t listed, but we were the ones exclaiming, “he looks like a god,” the top quote in Claudia LaRocco’s write-up of the opening night of the Slow Dancing films I’ve been mobile-blogging about for about the past fifty posts now. (I promise to stop soon with the cell phone blogging; it’s just so exciting, in its own way). Anyway, the “god” Ariel and I were speaking of was Herman Cornejo of course 🙂

Anyway, I’m going to see it several more times before it leaves NY, but so far my thoughts are that the project is a great idea that has some real kinks to work out.

For starters, Lincoln Center is really annoying me and if I was Michalek I would be pissed. Slow Dancing starts at 9 p.m and continues until 1:00 in the morning; Midsummer Night Swing ends at 10:00 p.m. But after the MNS band stops playing, Lincoln Center really shuts down: the alcohol and snack bars all close shop, making it impossible to enjoy a drink with friends while watching the films, and, more seriously, a very noisy cleanup begins. The Aquafina guy noisily dismembers his metal booth then hauls it all, bit by bit, to a huge garbage-like truck waiting, motor running, in the nearby taxi cab lane; the bar guys clinkily clear bottles and glasses from their shelves; garbage collectors noisily bag trash and load it onto little trucks, which they drive dangerously through the crowd darting in and out and around groups of people, sometimes even honking if you don’t see them coming — how’s the audience supposed to focus on the film with all this crap going on? You feel like Lincoln Center’s telling you it’s time to go home now, show’s over, you’re out past your bedtime. Until July 29th, when this exhibit ends, could they possible re-arrange clean-up schedules? It’s hugely disrespectful to the artist and his audience.

As for the project itself, I think it’s a great idea and it seemed to work well when I saw it indoors at the earlier Works & Process event at the Guggenheim Museum, but for some reason, it’s not as exciting outdoors on the huge Plaza. I think part of my being so captivated at Guggenheim stemmed from the fact that I know and love all three dancers who were showcased that night: Wendy Whelan (ballerina of New York City Ballet), Herman Cornejo (American Ballet Theater), and Desmond Richardson (Complexions). But the vast majority of the dancers participating in the whole project I don’t know, or at least don’t recognize.

As LaRocco alludes to in her article, not a lot of the people on the Plaza for Midsummer Night Swing paid much attention to the films, unfortunately. Several heads did turn when the screens first lit up, and people watched for the first couple of minutes, but when they couldn’t see very much happening, they returned to their own fun. LaRocco bemoans that these social dancers, themselves participating in Dance, are ignorant of those on the screens, many of them the greats of ballet and modern dance.

Well, why should those dancers, having such a blast learning to dance themselves, stop what they’re doing in order to worship these people on the screens, whom they don’t know? Might someone, perhaps, tell them who they are?

From what I’ve seen so far, here are my critiques of the project:

1) No one knows who the dancers are and no one is bothering to tell them. If they’re not going to have easily available pamplets listing the names and credentials of the dancers, with pictures, could they run the names and a brief word about who they are somewhere prominent on the screen, at least at the start of each performance? Names humanize people. I’ve noticed this watching people watching filmed ballroom dance competitions — people who aren’t really seriously into the art of ballroom just kind of glance at the screen and look away after all of a minute — there are far too many people out there on the floor at once, it’s too much to take in, it’s confusing and nonsensical.

But once names are placed over the dancers (briefly, not for the entire time the camera’s focused on them of course), people pay much more attention, even if they’ve never heard the name before (which is highly likely). You think, ‘oh that couple’s obviously from Russia with huge names like that,’ ‘oh a Japanese couple,’ ‘wow, another Russian; a lot of Russians in ballroom, who knew…’ ‘oh wow, those are the national champions, yeah, they are really good,’ etc. etc. Names humanize. A little bit of info goes a long way.

Update: I went again tonight (Sunday), with Oberon, and found that there are little Lincoln Center playbills near the entrance to the State Theater, along with a poster, both giving the names and a brief background of each dancer next to his or her picture. I still like the idea of printing the names somewhere on the screens though! Also, I met Wendy Whelan tonight — she’s a very sweet person! Here is a picture of her and Oberon. Awww 🙂

2) There are either too many of the same types of dancers or there’s not enough variety and spontaneity in the rotations. At several points, there are two to three dancers shown all at once who are all doing modern. This is boring and reductive. Also, can everyone not be dressed exactly the same? Wendy Whelan and Janie Taylor are ballerinas but they’re both dressed in the same silky flowing gowny things as about ninety percent of all the women. To someone who doesn’t know dance, it could be confused with yet more modern. Couldn’t at least one be in a tutu and on pointe. And, could someone do a fouette or multiple pirouettes? The movement is too much the same. It would be much more interesting if there was, say, in the middle a classical ballerina on pointe in a tutu doing fouettes, then say the African dancer guy on one end, and maybe William Forsythe doing his modern on the other end; then shift in the next sequence to the bellydancer, adjacent to the head-spinning break dancer, and sandwiched in between, the drag queen; then next sequence, say the guy on the crutches, the pregnant woman, another ballerina; or have a ballerina surrounded by a strong ballet guy and one of the modern women. Just make sure there’s variety in every sequence of three. That makes it interesting and it’s more of a celebration of Dance, in its rich variety.

3) I realize the point of the project is to show movement in extreme slow motion, but I feel that it is too slow. At points you can’t even see the dancers moving at all. This actually may be a glitch in the film, because at some points I think the films have actually stopped for a while — sometimes even for as much as a full minute. This is confusing to the audience, who is already perplexed enough trying to figure out, as LaRocco illustrated with one couple’s conversation, if there actually is movement. Possible technical problems aside, though, the movement is generally still too slow. Instead of people admiring every detail of the body in motion, every ripple of a muscle, the audience just gets bored, especially if the dancer isn’t “flashy” enough. These past couple days I’ve become most fascinated with Glem Rumsey, who dances here as his flamboyant drag persona “Shasta Cola.” I find myself waiting for him to come on because I know I’m going to be most entertained. In contrast, one of the dancers I was most excited to watch was Janie Taylor. Yet, I find myself getting unexpectedly bored when she’s on here. She does nothing really over-the-top; no spectacular balletic feats. Even that crazy hair flip that generated a lot of press talk pre-show opening — it’s nothing; I almost missed it. There’s no appreciation for subtlety when the movement is this weighted down. The guy on crutches is initially intriguing because you’re wondering what he’s going to do, but you get bored and stop watching when he takes so long to get going. All of a sudden you look back and him and he’s in the air. You think, ‘oh wow,’ but it still doesn’t hold your attention for long because it takes a number of minutes for the guy to do one rotation. You lose interest. Same thing with the Whirling Dervish. Slow-mo can have a very dramatic effect, but not when it’s this slow.

My own personal favorites are Herman Cornejo, Desmond Richardson, William Forsythe, and the aforementioned Rumsey, all of whom, excepting Rumsey, I’m pretty sure I like simply because they’re already so familiar to me. I’m bringing a bunch of friends to the show over the next couple weeks, many non-dance-goers, so will be interested to hear what they think, who their favorites, if any, are. Will most definitely report back!

In the meantime, I’ve started an album on the photo page; I expect to add more pictures, but here are the first few.

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Baryshnikov @ doug varone

Baryshnikov @ doug varone

Originally uploaded by swan lake samba girl via mobile.


Baryshnikov @ Doug Varone‘s Dense Terrain at Brooklyn Academy of Music. Ha ha, I know it’s only the back of his head, but I swear it’s him! Was sitting two rows down from me!! Interesting performance, not sure what to make of it… but it was very thought-provoking and full of meaning, interesting movement, dealt with difficulties of communication through language, was very dramatic, violent in parts, provocative music, somewhat political but not obviously so and message was not simplistic, used multimedia, reminded me a bit of Forsythe…

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Dance as Performance / Dance as a Way of Life: "Dancing-on-View" at the Baryshnikov Arts Center

Last night, I was invited to a final rehearsal of “Dancing-On-View,” a four-hour-long series of modern dance pieces created by choreographer and former Twyla Tharp muse, Sara Rudner (who shows herself in one piece here to be, still, an amazing dancer). The performance, which will be this Sunday, May 13, from 5 to 9 p.m., is very low-key and informal — guests do not have to stay for the entire four hours but may come and go as they wish. And, because it takes place in a studio (at the Baryshnikov Arts Center) and audience members sit in chairs and cushions set up along a back wall, you really get the sense that you’re eavesdropping on a rehearsal — on real dancers taking the floor and performing a solid routine, but also just relating to one another, joking around and even bickering with each other, in the way dancers do.

The dancers — about 15 or so and all women — take turns taking the center and performing a routine, practicing at the back barre, speaking and laughing with each other on the sidelines (and sometimes in the center as well), and even sitting on the floor and taking a small class in, for example, facial expressiveness. At points, several of these things are happening on the floor at once. That “Face Clinic,” for instance, happens in one corner of the stage at the same time as a solo is being performed on another part, and a duet in yet another. The “face clinic” instructor tells the students, all making very amusing faces by the way, to pay no mind to the dancing, just as the soloist, commanded from a director on the sideline to “invade the circle,” begins dancing right into the students. It’s hilarious!

I made it about 3 1/4 hours — it’s hard to sit for 4 hours straight — and most of my favorite pieces came around hour three (the playbill breaks the pieces down by Hour, instead of by Act). In addition to that “Face Clinic,” I liked Laurel Dugan’s sharp, nimble turning moves in “Circles,” and a fun solo, “Crazy,” performed by Rachel Lehrer, a very fast-moving, humorously expressive dancer. Another dancer who caught my eye was Megan Boyd, who I thought was just a great mover and reminded me a bit of Dana Caspersen of William Forsythe’s company.

My favorite piece came at the end of Hour 3 and was performed by Rudner herself. Rudner took the center and begin making these beautiful, fluid, continuous turns all around the floor, while talking a bit about what it was like to work with Tharp “back in the day.” She then asked people to ask her questions. Hesitantly, audience members did: who were Rudner’s favorite dance teachers, where else would she live if she couldn’t live in New York, what was her first memory, how would she describe the next few steps she performed, etc. And as she completely improvised the answers, her movements would reflect and inform those answers. For example, when she gave her “first memory” as “swimming,” she made swimming-like movements; when asked where else she would live, she stopped in her tracks and stared — she’d never lived anywhere besides NY and never would…

After attending this, my curiosity piqued, I read up a little on the event and found a blurb in The New Yorker Magazine saying that Rudner organized her first such Dancing-on-View in 1975 when she was still herself dancing for Tharp. Her purpose was to “break down the distinction between dance as performance and dance as a way of life,” says the blurb. (Read more here.) Yep, it certainly does make you think about that. It’s a really unique experience. Tickets are $15. For reservations and more info, call 212-674-8194. Go!

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You Made Me a Monster

Last night, I went to see another piece by Forsythe, this time at the Baryshnikov Arts Center. My usual dance friends were all busy, so I managed to convince my friend and fellow co-worker, Jonathan, who rarely goes to dance events, to accompany me. This task proved to be quite difficult since the website described the work as involving “audience participation.” When you’re a ballroom dancer and you invite your very dance-shy friends to socials at your studio promising them they can simply sit and watch all the action, only to get there and have everyone and their dog dragging them kicking and screaming out onto the dance floor, then go and invite them to an audience participatory dance event, they simply won’t trust you. I had to promise him on my life that this was a world-class concert dance company and the only ones doing the actual dancing would be the professionals.

Anyway, You Made Me a Monster was, like Three Atmospheric Studies, dance theater, and involved not only dance but other elements of theater as well, this time sculpture, sound effects, and words (this time not spoken but written, and projected from a video monitor onto a screen). The theme was the devastating effects of cancer on the body.

A group of 80 of us walked into a room where about 10 or so tables were set up, each bearing a partially constructed model of a human skeleton made from cardboard pieces. Guides divided us into smaller groups, took each group to a different table, and directed us to build off of the partly put-together puzzle, but not in a logical way. In other words, a spine should not resemble an actual spine, but the audience-member should twist and bend the carboard bone so that it made an artful design, then attach it to the model not where it “should” go on a “normal” human body, but in a more unconventional, surprising place. If we liked, we could also take some of the pieces of white paper below the table and trace the shadows made by the distorted model body.

Okay. Can you pick the lawyers out of the art crowd?… Yes, with us, this proved almost as bad as if we’d been asked to dance. While everyone else at our table enthusiastically went to work, Jonathan and I looked at each other, picked up a cardboard piece, looked quizzically at it, surreptitiously regarded the instructions we were told to pay no attention to, looked at each other again hopeless confusion covering our faces. Beginning to stress out about looking like a couple of idiots, I finally shrugged my shoulders and started bending and twisting a femur. Jonathan frowned at what I think was a collarbone, then put it down and excused himself to go to the bathroom for the next ten minutes. He’s never coming with me to a “dance event” again, I know it… In the end, I contributed to our table’s body by placing a very long, twisty bone protruding straight up from the center. It looked more amusing than anything else.

About ten minutes into our “body-building” project, shrill, screeching sounds began to emerge from the speakers, and dancers, three in all, came out, approached a table (each a different one), and began conveying through movement the design we’d created with our “bodies.” Their movement was much like that of the mother and diplomat’s assistant that I described in Three Atmospheric Studies — twisted, distorted, and contorted to grotesque, misshapen effect. I recognized the dancers from Atmospheric Studies, since I’d just seen it.

Funny thing, Matt Murphy had told me one of his favorite dancers from Atmospheric Studies was “the bald guy.” That man was one of the dancers here. I hadn’t noticed him much at Atmospheric Studies, since he didn’t “play” one of the main characters. Here, he took my breath away. Matt was so right! Dancers … they do notice dancing! With me, I guess supreme dance skill has to be shoved right in my face for me to see it…

After finishing at the tables, the dancers went to the front, stage area, and danced behind three separate stands each holding a piece of paper with a tracing an audience-member had made of the shadows of their model. They resembled musicians playing instruments while reading music sheets.

Behind them was a screen, onto which was projected a series of sentences, each running across the screen one by one. This use of words was somewhat ineffective to me. Every once in a while, I’d see solitary words or phrases that shouted-out to me, like “xenophobia,” “seeds of one’s internal destruction,” “reproductive organs were removed,” “grasp of space … uncanny, delirious,” “repulsive, occult, lethal,” Aliens” etc. etc. But I couldn’t focus on the words because that would take my concentration away from the dancers, and I didn’t want to do that. So, I only got an intermittent sensory effect from various words or sentence parts, without understanding how they fit together into a fuller narrative. I would have much preferred the words to have been spoken. There were sound effects blaring over the speakers as well, but to have the words on top of the sound effects would have enabled me to better understand them, since I feel that sounds can better compete with each other than visuals. You can only look at one thing at a time!

I noticed right before leaving that the pieces of paper on top of and underneath the tables contained those same sentences. I snatched one and put it into my bag. I’m not sure if they were there for us to take, but I’m very glad I did, because I read it on my subway ride home, and it made the performance all the more sorrowfully compelling to me. A man, whether it’s Forsythe I’m unsure, tells about his wife’s illness then death from cancer of her reproductive organs. The woman, a dancer, had been bleeding profusely, obviously weakening her and making her unable to perform. Her doctor, who happened to be a woman, told her it was just that she was dancing too much — obviously a judgment laced with sexism and devastatingly destructive medical inaccuracies — something with which a few of us are just a bit familiar. He goes on to talk about what a “dance genius” his wife was: “She had been able to reach into the profound heart of dancing and bring it to light…” The two were working on a piece about xenophobia, in response to several murders of political refugees in Germany. She had likened her cancer to xenophobia, which “constitutes a fear that the seeds of one’s internal destruction reside in a foreign body…” One thing I love about Forsythe is his ability to merge and analogize seemingly disparate things to shed new light on both. The “story” ends when, years after the woman has died, the man and his children began to assemble a cardboard jigsaw puzzle-like model of a human skeleton given to the wife before her death by a friend. They did not follow instructions, however, but “randomly bent, folded and attached the various intricate pieces until there was a model of something I understood. it was a model of grief.”

Amazing writing central to the piece that I thought should have been more central to the performance. As Jonathan and I were walking to the subway, I said that the dancing seemed one-note to me. He said he thought it was thematic and he enjoyed it overall and didn’t need a narrative with a big-bang climax. It WAS thematic and I didn’t need those things either, but I still wished there would have been something beside all the images of distorted, mangled, devastated bodies. I wished there would have been some beauty somewhere. I guess I found that in this writing, which was beautifully written. I just don’t know how many people saw the pieces of paper to pick up before leaving, so I don’t know how many people missed out on it.

One last note, on gender: two of the dancers here were men, one a woman. I thought it was interesting that Forsythe used male dancers to portray a woman’s illness from a feminine form of cancer. He also used female dancers in traditionally male roles in Atmospheric Studies — ie: a diplomat. This is interesting to me, this kind of playing with gender roles and assignments, unless I am reading too much into it. However, there was one line in this written story that struck me. After the woman’s cancer-ridden reproductive organs were removed, the man says, “I noticed afterward, she no longer smelled like a woman.” He goes on to talk about how, once she started on a course of radiation therapy, she began to “bend” “los[ing] the ability to fully lengthen her body” as a dancer must. So, the cancer depleted her of both her ‘womanness’ and her ‘dancerness’ — the two things that defined her, at least to the man (who is the one, after all, left to speak for her). But the line about the reproductive organs and “smelling like a woman” bothered me. It’s horrible for a woman to lose her reproductive organs — it’s horrible for anyone to have to lose any of their organs — and I definitely think doctors have been too haste to recommend hysterectomies and mastectomies and have done so out of pure and simple laziness over having to deal with the complexities of our bodies. But what exactly does ‘a woman’ smell like? Do we all smell the same? Are we all one thing, are we all defined by the same thing — our reproductive organs?

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Can (Or Should) Dance Have "(Political) Meaning"?

As with DEATH IN VENICE, I’m totally late in writing this (blasted briefs, annoying job!), but better late than never, right?… On Thursday night, Dea and I went out to BAM to see THREE ATMOSPHERIC STUDIES choreographed by American-expatriate-in-Germany, William Forsythe.

I’ve seen excerpts of Forsythe’s work before, but this was the first full-length piece I’ve seen by him, and I had no idea what to expect, but I absolutely LOVED it. Instead of pure dance, it was German ‘dance theater’ (“tanztheater”) so there was dialog, as well as acted-out or talked-about images, in addition to movement. There were three “studies” (ie: Acts). In the first, a woman comes out and tells the audience that the scene is going to be about the arrest of her son, and she points to the dancer, wearing a bright red shirt, who is portraying that character. Aside from that, the first scene consists entirely of dance, and, from there, becomes rather chaotic and remains so throughout. Dancers violently grab each other, hurl themselves at each other, jump on each other, throw each other, run from each other, fight, fear and comfort each other. It was honestly really amazing to me that no one got hurt. I also attended a pre-performance discussion at which Forsythe spoke a bit, and one audience member asked him if he considered whether his dancers would be injured and he assured us that dancers have a “very meticulous” sense of time and space. There was no music (apart from the dancers’ heavy breathing which acted as a kind of natural sound effect), so he must have been making a huge understatement! If someone was one millisecond of time or one milimeter off on floorspace, they or the person they were hurling themselves at at full force and lightening speed could have really got whacked. When I dance, I count my music by the beats; still baffles me how they all kept such exacting time with no music?…

At various points, the dancers momentarily freeze to make painting-like tableaux. It wasn’t until the second scene when the woman whose son had been arrested began speaking to a translator to tell her version of the events that I realized that, because there was so much violent commotion in the first scene and because I was so in awe of the amazing ways the dancers manipulated the floor and moved their bodies, I’d totally missed ‘the story’ of the arrest. Forsythe had said that one of the ideas he wanted to play with was our ability as an audience, both in the theaters of dance and of world affairs, “to pay attention”. I realized that I’d failed that test, and had no idea how the arrest happened, even after the woman had specifically pointed out to me what I was supposed to watch for!

So, in the second scene, the woman tries, unsuccessfully, to give her account to a translator so that she can make a police report. The language barriers, the fact that there simply are no words for certain concepts or objects (“you say ‘bird’, I can give you ‘airplane’ … for ‘castle’ how about ‘apartment building'”) is a metaphor for the severe limitations of language to connect people. At the same time that this dialog is happening, there’s a dancer in the middle, speaking and illustrating with movement, the content of several different photographs and paintings. Sometimes his words overtake the woman’s and the interpretor tries unsuccessfully to translate his descriptions of the images into words as well. There was a lot of confusion as to the meaning of this, but to me, it was a way of saying that we can be bombarded with so many images that, ironically, they ultimately prevent us from empathizing with the subjects depicted in them. Forsythe said another thing he wished to explore was “compassion fatigue” — how the multiplicity, and perhaps sensationalism, of images of others’ suffering exhausts our ability to feel compassion for them, and results in drowning out the truth depicted therein. So the image becomes more important than the reality. At the end of the second scene, the woman, interrupted by the dancer’s voice describing yet another “composition” cries out, in frustration, “which composition are we on now?”

The most powerful, disturbing part of that scene was toward the end, when the woman rises from her chair and moves around the stage, contorting and distorting both her body and voice in quite grotesque ways. That frightening distortion I thought graphically illustrated both her emotional devastation and the impossibility of her truth being told because of the distorting effects of images and language. Forsythe is known for exploring the relativity of truth. Perhaps he is saying pure movement is the best way of getting to truth?

I guess the last “study” is the most “political” if you want to call it that — at least in terms of it echoing a current, specific geopolitical situation. There has been a bombing and the woman, whose whole village has now been destroyed, is so devastated she can now hardly move. A man is struggling to hold her up. A dancer portraying a diplomat tries to console the woman, telling her (rather amusingly at times) the bombing has been for the good of the community, etc., and a dancer whom she (interestingly, the diplomat is played by a woman) points to as her assistant (also a woman) conveys the diplomat’s words through dance. The assistant’s body-distorting, somewhat grotesque movements, reminiscient of the woman’s in the second scene, evince the ludicrousness of the diplomat’s words and their powerlessness to explain, defend, or console.

I found that the combination of the dialog, images, and most importantly, the brilliant movement, made me think about all of those ideas that were explored — the relativity of truth and its vulnerability to reduction to false images, the effect of bombardment of images on the observer’s attention span and ability to connect to the subject, and the distorting effect of language. And I felt the theatrical combination of the three art forms was more powerful than one alone. Discussion of this piece has centered on whether dance can (or should) provide political commentary. But I’m unsure of the reasons for this focus. I think this ballet was ‘political’ in the sense that everything is political — the word comes from the word “polis” — the people, after all — so anything that has as its subject matter human beings, is to an extent ‘political.’ But I was compelled to think about the issues mentioned above, not that war is bad or the current situation in Iraq is the U.S.’s fault or something simplistic and obvious like that. In general, I think it’s far more productive to talk about the ideas presented by a work of art than whether they are political.

Anyway, today Ashley commented on Matt’s blog as well, posing some more interesting questions related to the Forsythe discussion underway there: what meaning professional dancers as opposed to audience members with little or no dance training extract from a ballet; whether non-dancers can understand pure movement in the same way pro dancers do; and, if non-dancers don’t comprehend pure movement, what then attracts them to the ballet — particularly the contemporary, story-less ballets and modern dance? I thought those queries were really intriguing, particularly in light of viewing this work. I, for one — someone with very little dance training — don’t “understand” pure movement at all, and don’t really try to either. The contemporary story-less ballets that I enjoy, I enjoy because I love watching the dancers move in amazingly beautiful ways. But then, the dancers have to be really really good. And, in fact, sometimes they have to be dancers with whom I’m already familiar. I don’t know if I would have loved “Clear” which ABT recently did, if David, Max, Angel, and Jared were not dancing it; I don’t know if I would have liked “Meadow” as much if it wasn’t Marcelo and Julie performing. I need to connect to the dancers, especially with story-less ballets (which is why I think books like “Round About the Ballet,” magazine interviews, and websites like the Winger are so important to promoting ballet and concert dance).

I think a lot of dance fans also go to the ballet for the sensual experience: they perhaps enjoy Balanchine, for example, because they savor the feminine beauty, the pretty, dulcet charm of his ballets. I prefer ABT’s celebration of masculine (including both male and female) beauty and strength exuded by the ballets they present. I think people often go for the sensations the experience, the way the ballets make them feel, rather than to make them think. But then, for me, Forsythe is a welcome change to all that, at least once in a while. I think I’ve been seeing so much contemporary ballet of the “Clear” and “Meadow” variety during ABT’s recent City Center season, I was quite starved for more — to be given a chance to use my mind, to be compelled to decipher meaning, at points rather complex. That’s me, anyway. Very interesting to ponder just what it is that draws non-dancers who presumably derive no solid ‘meaning’ from pure movement to concert dance though…