Seeing Things: March 2007 Archives

This article originally appeared in the Culture section of Bloomberg News on March 15, 2007.

March 15 (Bloomberg) -- It's nearly impossible to describe the work of Zvi Gotheiner -- an Israeli choreographer based in New York for two decades -- without resorting to the word ``lush.'' ``Earthy'' and ``robust'' leap to mind as well. ``Gertrud,'' given its world premiere last night at the Ailey Citigroup Theater by Gotheiner's 12-member company, ZviDance, has a goodly share of those qualities, and yet it misses its mark.

The piece is a tribute to Gotheiner's early mentor, Gertrud Kraus, a dancer, choreographer and visual artist who emigrated to what is now Israel from her native Vienna in the run-up to World War II. History remembers her primarily as a teacher and a key figure in the growth of modern dance in her adopted country. Period photographs reveal an impassioned lyricism in her dancing that must have made her an indelible presence.

Oddly enough, Gotheiner is unable to bring Kraus to life, either as an artist or as a human being. He has his dancers quote copiously from her wit and wisdom as they emulate her idiosyncratic methods in the studio. But the tone of these passages is so dry that Kraus comes off as little more than a beloved eccentric. When dancing is allowed to wrest attention away from the words, it looks like exercises in Gotheiner's style without any reference to what Kraus herself might have created.

Mutual Pleasure

The most moving segment is almost incidental: a brief, quiet duet for two women sharing an invisible cigarette and, by delicate implication, another mutual pleasure. The final scene -- in which the dying Kraus leans on her acolytes and views the sole existing footage of her own dancing -- is an unexpected and perhaps desperate resort to melodrama.

``Gertrud'' features projections that include Kraus's sketches of stick-figure dancers and abstract designs suggesting motion -- a hieroglyphics of dance. The music for the piece, by Scott Killian, is neither here nor there. Among the quoted Kraus utterances is this useful one-liner: ``Never walk around barefoot to Romantic music.''

Gotheiner's own signature, torn-from-the-earth effect operates magnificently in his 2006 ``Les Noces,'' set to the Stravinsky score. The 10 participants indulge in a cleverly crafted rush of escalating passions -- stamping, leaping, gesticulating, falling and shuddering. For the longest time, though, the choreography refuses to account for the specific characters Stravinsky had in mind in his celebrated evocation of the rituals surrounding an arranged marriage among Russian peasants.

Bride and Groom

When it does, different dancers rotate in the roles of the innocent bride and groom (same-sex matings duly honored) and the parents and friends who urge them on. The steps of the story, from the preparation of the bride and groom to the wedding night, are also left vague. So that while the physical action is thrilling, you're never sure what it's in service of.

The lure of Stravinsky's vigorous, colorful score is unfortunately irresistible. Bronislava Nijinska, the first to choreograph the music (in 1923), got it absolutely right; Jerome Robbins admitted that his version, in 1965, fell short of her level. Today's dance-makers refuse to recognize this evidence and persist in creating their own interpretations. I've seen three just this season. Could new dances to the score be outlawed for a while? If the state can legislate against trans fat, why not this contribution to our artistic life?

ZviDance is at the Ailey Citigroup Theater, 405 W. 55th St. at Ninth Avenue, through March 18. Information: +1-212-415-5500; http://www.92Y.org/HarknessFestival.

© 2007 Bloomberg L.P. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission.

This article originally appeared in the Culture section of Bloomberg News on March 5, 2007.

March 5 (Bloomberg) -- Intense and wiry, Paul Taylor's senior dancer, Lisa Viola, emerges from a circling ensemble dressed in white Sunday-best practice clothes for a solo of strange stymied gestures. She flings herself into backbends as if turning herself inside out, staggers forward on her knees in a stuttering rhythm, clasps her hands in prayer and wrings them like a person deranged by grief.

Taylor, whose company is performing at the New York's City Center, typically creates two new works a year, one gloomy and one upbeat. ``Lines of Loss,'' combines the dark with another of the choreographer's perennial fixations -- the grotesque.

The dance is constructed as a suite, its nine episodes set to plaintive music by a half-dozen composers whose careers span seven centuries. The 14th-century's Guillaume de Machaut is the earliest among them; the modernists are represented by John Cage, Alfred Schnittke and Arvo Part. Astonishingly, the common tone of the pieces makes them cohere. They form an almost seamless whole.

The choreography describes twin afflictions of profound physical incapacity and psychological devastation over the loss of one's beloved, the death of friendship, alienation from others, alienation from oneself. Several of the portraits are searing.

In one, Michael Trusnovec stands alone on stage as if he were the last person alive in a geography devoid of landmarks. He makes disconnected moves -- scratching at his body, lying down and bicycling his legs, waving his hand before his eyes, as if to confirm the terrible fact that he can't see or that the only thing to be seen is emptiness.

Pretzeled Twins

The central duet, for Viola and Trusnovec, has them dancing with their arms intertwined, like pretzeled, conjoined twins. Even when they separate briefly, as if for a breath of air, they seem doomed to an unspecified hell on earth.

Choreographically, the passage is a tour de force, at once horrible and beautiful. Finally they get some space between them, only to look more lost than ever. They walk off in opposite directions and, startlingly, turn to blow each other a kiss.

The piece begins and ends with a procession. Its eleven dancers enter single-file in silhouette against a backdrop of rough, thin black lines streaked horizontally over a white ground. In the final passage, ten of the dancers reappear in brilliant red cloaks and lie down in a snaking line that looks like a river of blood. The handsome designs are by Santo Loquasto; the evocative lighting, by the incomparable Jennifer Tipton.

Cop Out

That ending is a cop-out, though. The choreography, so ingeniously observed in places, quits before it has made a definitive point. Viola alone escapes the fate of the red- shrouded figures and walks quietly away. For some time, she's been one of Taylor's most favored dancers. Has he now cast her as angel, exempt from life's toll?

Tomorrow the company will give New York its first look at Taylor's new ``Troilus and Cressida (reduced),'' unveiled last April under the auspices of his alma mater Syracuse University. Reports from its touring venues suggest that the piece is one of the low-down comic works with which Taylor has continually peppered his repertoire. Here, tricked out in outlandish costumes, the dancers apply their athletic deftness and grace to the art of blundering in the fields of love and war.

The plot, such as it is, can be traced backward from Taylor through Shakespeare and Chaucer to Homer's ``Iliad.'' The idea of clowning around to Ponchielli's ``Dance of the Hours,'' of course, takes its cue from Walt Disney.

The Paul Taylor Dance Company is at City Center, W. 55th St. between Sixth and Seventh avenues, through March 18. Information: +1-212-581-1212; http://www.nycitycenter.org.

© 2007 Bloomberg L.P. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission.

This article originally appeared in the Culture section of Bloomberg News on March 1, 2007.

March 1 (Bloomberg) -- A woman with a blunt peasant's face steps out from a raggedy, 13-dancer line-up. ``This is `Composition Number 1,' in which my son was arrested,'' she announces before leaving the stage. Then all hell breaks loose.

The remaining dozen dancers enact a street melee seemingly initiated by a horrible onslaught from above. In a silence broken only by the grunts, gasps and stifled cries that accompany bodies fleeing, grappling and thudding to the floor, they display the results of a senseless conflict in which there are no heroes or enemies, only victims.

The message comes from William Forsythe. His newly formed Forsythe Company is performing ``Three Atmospheric Studies,'' an antiwar dance-theater piece prompted by events in the Middle East. It's a far cry indeed from the ``drastic classicism'' that made Forsythe famous. The choreographer -- American-born, though based in Germany for the past three decades -- declares it ``an act of citizenship.''

Politics and dance usually make uneasy bedfellows. But from Kurt Jooss's ``The Green Table'' (created in Germany in 1932 and still arresting) to Paul Taylor's 2005 ``Banquet of Vultures,'' choreographers have at times responded with vehement eloquence to what Goya so aptly termed and depicted, the disasters of war.

Forsythe both personalizes and objectifies these calamities. The plight of the mother, who slowly comes to realize that her son has been killed and is viewed by the authorities masterminding the combat simply as ``collateral damage,'' piercingly illustrates the fact that even a single death of this kind is one too many.

Menacing

Still, the scene I've described is an ingenious example of formal deconstruction. Its violent chaos is fragmented into brief start-and-stop segments that are refracted as if by a kaleidoscope.

``Composition No. 2'' is all talking, no dancing. Against a background of ominous bass notes, a man (Amancio Gonzalez) who seems at first pedantic, then quietly manipulative and menacing, translates into Arabic the mother's account of the experience in which her son vanished. Much is garbled in the translation; much is lost. As her plainspoken memory of the simple truth is destroyed, the mother -- vividly played by Jone San Martin -- becomes increasingly hysterical and grotesque.

Placed between the two conducting this fatal interview, an impassive art-professor type (David Kern) lectures on the similarities of composition between a Crucifixion painted by Lucas Cranach the Elder in the early 16th century and a 2005 Reuters photo of a bombed building, with people racing away as fires rage. (Both images, Forsythe's inspiration for the piece, appear in the program.)

War Victims

``Composition No. 3'' reprises the violent street scene and the lecture of the art professor, who now sorts through the fallout of cataclysm: ``Here's a ring -- with a finger still in it.''

A blonde pixie of a dancer (Dana Caspersen), her Texas- accented voice electronically deepened, represents an amalgam of recent and current American leaders. Addressing the almost inert mother at a photo op, she says, ``You have to understand that this not personal'' and ``Apart from the general state of emergency here, there's no cause for alarm.''

In its indictment of government-sanctioned destruction and murder and manipulation of the truth, ``Three Atmospheric Studies'' is sophomoric at times, but I like Forsythe as an angry man. His subject matter wins out over his earlier, overly intellectual sophistication. Here he seems engaged enough with his cause to allow awkwardness in his art. In the end, incomplete control may actually enrich it.

The Forsythe Company performs at the BAM Opera House, 30 Lafayette Ave., Brooklyn, through March 3. Information: +1-718- 636-4100 or http://www.BAM.org.

© 2007 Bloomberg L.P. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission.