Seeing Things: September 2008 Archives

This article originally appeared in the Culture section of Bloomberg News on September 19, 2008.

Sept. 19 (Bloomberg) -- The most rewarding number in Wednesday's opening night of New York City Center's annual Fall for Dance marathon came last: a dozen of the National Ballet of Canada's men magnificently performing Jiri Kylian's ``Soldiers' Mass.'' The dance was composed in 1980; its message, of the men's fear, courage, patriotism, bonding and hope so certain to be defeated, couldn't be more timely.

Beautiful, too, though not so understandable, was the world premiere of Thailand's Pichet Klunchun Dance Company in ``Chui Chai'' (``Transformation''). A handful of women create a golden glow in their elaborate robes, elegantly topped by headdresses with quivering spires. They manipulate their wrists, fingers and feet in the eloquent, grotesque style required by their tradition. A sole man, dressed in workaday black T-shirt and trousers, joins them: a wistful acolyte. The point remains unclear (other than the presenters' impulse to go global).

The curtain raiser was Shen Wei Dance Arts in excerpts from his 2005 ``Map.'' His work, which has many fans (I'm not one) tends to be more pictorial than ``dancey,'' often in slow-motion and self-consciously gorgeous. Though ``Map'' features swifter, more forceful action, I found it no more engaging than his other pieces.

It sets its 14 dancers in the pretentious backdrop's futuristic landscape. They transform from motionless blobs to triumphantly erect figures, then to agitated moves -- endlessly repetitious and void of choreographic interest -- in strict patterns that threaten to go on forever.

Keigwin + Company presented ``Fire,'' excerpted from Larry Keigwin's recent ``Elements.'' I cringed at its grade-school humor; the audience loved it.

Must-See Hula

There is plenty to look forward to on the other programs in Fall for Dance, one of the city's great culture bargains (every seat is $10 at every performance). First among the coming attractions that are Must Sees for me is ``The Gentlemen of Halau Na Kamalei.'' My knowledge of the hula is pathetically limited to the National Geographics of my childhood. I've never seen the emblematic Hawaiian dance done live and never even knew that men did it as well as women. Now's my chance.

With the San Francisco Ballet performing ``In the Night,'' Fall for Dance will offer a welcome opportunity to see how companies other than New York City Ballet dance works created by Jerome Robbins.

Suzanne Farrell Ballet, which, through its Balanchine Preservation Initiative, often revives Balanchine works long thought lost, will dance ``Pithoprakta'' to thorny music by the Greek composer Iannis Xenakis. The title role of this duet was created on Farrell in 1968; who but she, a superb teacher, should give it its afterlife?

And then there's the bicoastal contemporary choreographer Kate Weare, from whom great things are expected. Typically, she deals with intimate personal relationships, coupling fierce movement with subtle feeling. What she and her company make of them in ``The Light Has Not the Arms to Carry Us'' remains to be seen. Keep your eye on the redhead, Leslie Kraus, this year's Fall for Dance poster girl.

Through Sept. 27 at 131 W. 55th St. Information: +1-212-581-1212; http://www.nycitycenter.org.

© 2008 Bloomberg L.P. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission.

This article originally appeared in the Culture section of Bloomberg News on September 16, 2008.

Two San Francisco Ballet dancers perform during a routine. Photographer: Erik Tomasson/New York City Center via Bloomberg News

Sept. 16 (Bloomberg) -- Ten dollars for any seat in the house at New York City Center? That admission fee to the Fall for Dance Festival, Sept. 17 to 27, may be the biggest bargain of the dance season about to launch. Now in its fifth year, the series operates on the something-for-everyone principle. Each of its 10 performances offers a look at four or five different dance styles from ballet to modern, from America's tap to India's Odissi to Hawaii's hula (with an all-male company). Veteran dance fans as well as newbies flock to the shows.

Plain old classical ballet -- ominously pronounced as ``over'' by advocates of the new and edgy -- still has its ardent fans, if largely among the older and more traditionalist audience.

American Ballet Theatre holds forth at City Center Oct. 21 to Nov. 2, its engagement highlighted by an Oct. 31 tribute to Antony Tudor, who was the all-time master at turning feeling into flesh. The company's roster of male stars continues to astonish.

The New York City Ballet opens with a gala repertory evening Nov. 28, then segues into the economically essential five weeks of ``The Nutcracker,'' which George Balanchine thankfully infused with poetry and food for thought. Does one dare go without a child? Yes, and the experience may be enlightening.

Christopher Wheeldon, until recently the City Ballet's resident choreographer, is first among the dance-makers determined to update classical ballet rather than abandon it. He has recently branched out with his own group, Morphoses/The Wheeldon Company -- an ambitious name for a newcomer still in the pickup stage -- which will play at City Center Oct. 1 to 5.

Real People

America's oldest professional classical company, the San Francisco Ballet, has become a national and international contender under artistic director Helgi Tomasson. The troupe will be at City Center Oct. 10 to 18, with no fewer than three different repertory programs. The choreographers range from Balanchine, with whom Tomasson danced so unforgettably, through Tomasson himself to Mark Morris, who makes dancers look like real people, and the take-no-prisoners Jorma Elo.

Among the talents representing the 20th-century evolution of modern dance will be Lar Lubovitch, who is celebrating the 40th anniversary of his troupe, and the inimitable Garth Fagan (``The Lion King''). They couldn't be more different. Lubovitch is a purist with a romantic heart. Early works of his, set to scores by Steve Reich and Philip Glass, will be shown at Dance Theater Workshop, Oct. 30 to Oct. 4; a program emphasizing later creations, at City Center Nov. 5 to 9.

Contrasting Genres

Fagan, at the Joyce Theater Nov. 3 to 9, is an earthier artist, whose semi-balletic concert-dance impulses are infused with contrasting genres, like jazz and Afro-Caribbean. The long, lean and gorgeous Norwood Pennewell is Fagan's perennial muse, and the other dancers, animating role after role, seem to embody a fantasy family that exists in the mind's eye of the choreographer.

Post-modern work (by the anti-Establishment folks from Merce Cunningham onward) will abound, in wildly different guises. Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker favors the intellectual and minimalist, but she can make endless repetition with only the smallest variations as exciting as a brisk fall wind sweeping through town. Her program of works to Reich music is at the Brooklyn Academy of Music's (BAM) Howard Gilman Opera House Oct. 22 to 25.

Mixed Media

Eiko & Koma, at the Joyce Oct. 27 to Nov. 2, create eerie, slow-motion pieces that, like Butoh, are haunting reminders of death. Their latest effort, the evening-length ``Hunger,'' commissioned by the Joyce to celebrate its own 25th year, involves a pair of Cambodian painters in their hypnotic proceedings.

These days the ever more popular Bill T. Jones expresses his rage at injustice not only in words and movement, but also with a whole visual and musical cacophony. This mixed media for the new age should be evident in ``A Quarreling Pair'' at the BAM Howard Gilman Opera House, Sept. 30 to Oct. 4.

Be there.

New York City Center is 131 W. 55th St. Information: +1-212-581-1212; http://www.nycitycenter.org.

Dance Theater Workshop is at 219 W. 19th St. Information: +1-212-924-0077; http://www.dancetheaterworkshop.org.

The Joyce Theater is at 175 Eighth Ave. Information: +1-212-691-9740; http://www.joyce.org.

BAM's Howard Gilman Opera House is at 30 Lafayette Ave., Brooklyn. Information: +1-718-634-4100; http://www.bam.org.

© 2008 Bloomberg L.P. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission.

When I arrive at my friend Renée's house in Paris, she is knitting a small fleecy white garment. She embraces me, holds it up, and says, "It's for your grandchild-to-be." I'd written her that my first grand was on its way.

"You will be a wonderful grandmother," she declares.

Frankly, I see no reason why I shouldn't be. I adore children, always have. Playing and adventuring with them is one of my top three delights, and they respond to me in kind.

"And your grandchildren will remember you forever," Renée continues.

Well, now that's something else entirely. I see no particular reason why anyone should "remember me forever," least of all the young, who are typically absorbed in their own affairs. So I ask, "Why is that?"

"Parce-que vous êtes parfumée," she replies with wisdom-of-the-world assurance. (Because you wear perfume.)

Despite her use of the formal "you" in her native French, an old-fashioned indication of respect that she employs even with her beloved daughter-in-law, Renée, once my professor during her New York years, has become one of my most cherished friends--profoundly cultivated, innately elegant, and, far more important, a mistress of empathy.

As for the wearing of perfume, I come by it rightly. My mother always wore a fragrance, most often Ann Haviland's spicy "Carnation," while her elder sister, for whom my daughter is named (so you can imagine how I adored her), favored "Wood Violet," which echoed her sweet, self-effacing personality.

When I was about fourteen, growing up in deep, dark Brooklyn, my mother started taking me with her to the discount-perfume shop she patronized and allowing me to chose a scent for myself. I was finicky to the point of absurdity. At one session, the saleswoman, having proffered countless samples, all in vain, said, "Tell me, my dear, exactly what would you like your fragrance to smell like?"

"Soap," I answered on the instant, then immediately corrected myself. "I want it to smell as if I actually--naturally--smelled like that." (Our soap at home was Ivory. It did have a nice, fresh scent and, what's more, it floated.) I can't recall what we finally settled on that day. Fairly soon, though, rebounding from my "natural" phase, I moved into the realm of "Calèche," "Cabochard," "Antilope"--all three the antithesis of girlish, a mode I had come to despise.

In my later teen years, when I wore my clothes black, my long hair loose--Veronica Lake-style, my mother called it--and took a full ten minutes to layer my lashes with black French cake mascara, I wore Lanvin's "Arpège," it being so much more sophisticated, I still think, than "Chanel No. 5," synonymous with Gallic chic in the mind of the general public.

I can't believe I remember all this--I who have such indifferent recall--except for the things that constituted the pillars of my imagination: for instance, the names of all the dancers in the New York City Ballet when I first saw the company.

At college, inspired by Renée, with whom I studied medieval French literature, I wore Lancôme's "Joyeux Été," until the firm discontinued it. For me, that move was little short of tragic--I was far less disconcerted by the loss of a boyfriend that coincided with it. Eventually, I compromised for a while with the same house's "Magie Noire," but it wasn't it, and when a thing isn't it, it might as well not exist. For me, there's no such thing as a Mr. Almost Right in the realm of scent.

Just before and after my marriage, I wore Worth's "Je Reviens" (which used to be colored blue and stained your clothes, if you weren't careful). The name means "I will return." "Is that a promise or a threat?" my eventual husband used to joke.

And then, once I had begun writing about dancing, I discovered the old Guerlain fragrances. My favorite was "Mitsouko," not least because it had been Diaghilev's scent. Now favored by both men and women, it was introduced to me by my fellow dance writer Sally Banes and worn for decades by Balanchine's right-hand-woman, Barbara Horgan. I abandoned it finally when the formula seemed to become more synthetic or something that made it not quite true to itself.

After the eclipse of Guerlain, I practiced a kind of serial monogamy, returning to old favorites for months, even years, at a time. More successfully--since the old scents or I had changed and thus lost our affinity with each other--I discovered new creations. Some later-breaking favorites: The original Vera Wang fragrance that had no name except the designer's. "Armani for Women," a brash (and, in my case, deceptive) statement of cosmopolitan self-assurance. Issey Miyaki's "L'eau d'Issey" (back to the pure and subtle realm of floating soap). Calvin Klein's "Eternity" as well as the same firm's "Truth."

I haven't yet succumbed to the new fad for scents that evoke herbs, fruits, even sweets ( and exotic combinations thereof), concocted to gratify our time's raging lust for novelty. Are they merely perverse or perhaps the next step--after the "Poison" phase--in the feminists' repudiation of the innocent florals? After all, a Woman Warrior can hardly go around town (or to bed) smelling like a rose. Or so I assumed until, I was tempted recently by, of all things, Bulgari's tender, shy Rose Essentielle.

I don't know why people complain about the long waits at the airport nowadays. This limbo of ostensibly lost hours provides the perfect occasion to wile away time guiltlessly by trying out new fragrances--that is to say, new states of being. When you're surrounded by a just-discovered evocative aura, anything could happen. Anything.

© 2008 Tobi Tobias

This essay describes the celebrated funambulist Philippe Petit's "punishment" for his clandestine walk between the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center on August 7, 1974. The essay was first published by Dance magazine in November, 1974. It is reprinted here as a complement to my latest article for Voice of Dance, Sky High, which discusses James Marsh's recently released film chronicling the original event, Man on Wire. To read Sky High, click here.

We're walking to the park in the dead heat of the August night. In front of the path to the Delacorte Theater, public buses lurch to a halt, belching out gulps of carbon monoxide, flap open their doors to disgorge hordes of watchers, sightseers, neck-craners, a sweating sample of New York's multiglot millions. Bicycle riders, hunched over like racers, converge on the open entrance, zoom in slowly, persistently, buck the pedestrian mob by using their wheels as soft weapons. The children who have nagged me into bringing them fastwalk me down the path towards the lake. With every step there seem to be more of us.

We're here to witness a cruel and unusual punishment. Or is it entertainment? (I think of Nureyev saying, "We are paid for our fear.") Or is it art? The opening of the Delacorte Dance Festival, my assigned beat, has been postponed for an hour while Philippe Petit shows us how imaginatively justice can be served. Earlier this week, the French aerialist (from S. Ansky's The Dybbuk: "One day there came to Meshibach a troupe of German acrobats...") had the unlicensed temerity to string his tightrope between the 1800-foot twin towers of the World Trade Center ("...who gave their performance in the streets of town . . .") and walk gracefully through space. An absurd offense (a high crime? a misdemeanor?), of such daring and frivolity, you wouldn't think it punishable by a jail term, but apparently it is. Now District Attorney Kuh, in a politic ploy, is allowing Petit to pay for his infringement of the law's concept of order and safety by giving the people of New York--the mass non-élite--a command performance. By democratic decree, Petit will walk across Belvedere Lake, on a high wire, up across the dirty, shining water ("They stretched a rope across the river..."), up to the castle ("...and one of them walked along the rope to the opposite bank...").

"Here, here, here," the children cry, arriving at the edge of the dense, moving crowd that surrounds the edge of the silent, glittering lake. Beyond the water, a dark circle of trees in full leaf, their green turning black in the summer night, and beyond that a fringe of concrete points, the tips of New York's tallrise skyline. A white rope stretches wide in the air.

To our left, where the rope is anchored, a long, fragile ladder leans for the ascent; to our right, deep in the trees, is the castle, a turreted, mock-medieval tower, made fairy-tale true by dusk. The twelve-year old boy claims knowledge: "See those antennae at the top? They use it as a weather station." "Don't tell the girls that," I say, "you'll spoil it."

"We can't see, we can't see," the little girls wail, along with every underling in New York. They're wearing long dresses, elegant for dancing, and their long, waving hair hangs loose down their backs, to their waists--one blond Mélisande in sandals; one smaller, dark one. Their faces shine with eagerness and sweat; their dresses are sprigged with flowers. "Here, here," the boy yells, having found a vantage point. The girls hoist their skirts and scramble after him on to the back of an open, parked, pick-up truck. "¡ Mira, mira! Aquí!"--and they're surrounded. ("From all sides the people came running to behold this ungodly marvel...") From the center of that sudden mass of packed flesh, I hear one of the girls calling, in a small, frantic voice, "I still can't see," and the human mountain opens a chink for her, one of its voices chiding, "Y'all hush now, sweetheart. They ain't nothin' to see yet." Below, the more sedentary, middle-class crowd stakes out its grounded turf. Toddlers with ice cream-smeared faces sleep beside them, exhausted, in their flimsy strollers. Blacks hoist their babies onto their shoulders. The youngsters perch in the halo of afros, serene. We look up.

The sky is brown with pollution. It looks soft. Not a star in sight. The moon is three-quarters full, pale orange. Clouds drift across it, like cigarette smoke, blotting it out from time to time. Are the clouds moving or is the moon? The crowd sighs with impatience.

A huge TV camera--the all-seeing eye--is mounted over the heads of the people; it partially obscures our view. Higher, on slim poles, the arc lights illuminate the waiting circle. Moths, gnats, mosquitoes--all of New York's insect life on wings--swarm in the glare of the lights, in dizzy, blind spirals.

A crackle of static. Kuh speaks, loud-miked. The crowd is just tolerant. It's after the hour. He postpones the event--is he a showman after all, building anticipation, or has something gone wrong?--with credits (five hundred dollars from some-lady's-name; so-and-so who donated the cable and speaker system, plus a brazen-voiced band). Pairs of policemen thread their way through the crowd, watching everyone's hands. The cops nearest me seem benevolent enough, faces tolerant, muscles relaxed, with soft, beer-drinking paunches. Their weapons hang idle from their belts--a club, a gun, temporarily non-lethal. Can they assume we're a safe crowd? Between the band's brassy onslaughts, I call to the kids. They roll-call back, exasperated. What harm could come to them in this place?

And--suddenly--it's happening. Petit emerges out of the heads of the crowd, halfway up the ladder, a lithe, faraway man in white, flared trousers, silhouetted against the trees.

Reaching the rope horizon, he hesitates, waits several long moments, seems to go backward. Is it fear or a tease? And then slowly, cautiously advances out into nowhere, into sky, into lake-bottomed limbo. Then picks up a little speed, confidence seeming to come with it, finds a gait, a stride. To our astonishment, he walks like Marceau (only Marceau, I kid the children later, is a real artist, because he can do it on the ground), foot first, leading, almost exaggeratedly articulate, then the whole leg and the pelvis loping through; chest, shoulders, head slanted back, then flipping loosely in sequence after, in moving S-curves. Imagine a vertical worm.

He moves through the dark space. The crowd aahs and claps. Like a tiny, bright cut-out figure, against scenery by God and the New York Planning Commission; the little man in white is walking through the trees.

"This city is outrageous," the man in front of me says, shaking his head with perverse pride and pleasure. Petit progresses forward, carrying a long, willowy pole, holding it horizontally before him, balancing. It wavers and quivers. "Mommy, watch," my daughter's voice pierces out. I hear her, can't see her. "I'm watching," I assure the darkness. Petit nonchalantly slings the pole over his shoulder, and walks down the slim-line road like he's going fishing. ("...and in the midst of the crowd of onlookers stood the holy Balshem himself.") A happy drunk next to me blows his whiskey breath in my face, chanting a supportive litany. "He looks like he's not going to do it, but he's doing it. He's not falling. He's doing it."

Now for tricks. Reaching the end of the line, Petit turns--a flick-flip in the air. The rope reverberates with his weight and movement. It holds him up. His body, his life are hanging on that one thin line. Now he lies down on it, crosses his legs casually, so sleepy-easy it looks like his hammock, his bed. He tenses for a split instant, then, splaying the rope along his spine, he does a backwards somersault. Then another. And another. "Did you see that?" the boy calls out to me, excitedly. "No," I answer softly to myself. "I don't think so. I couldn't have seen that." Because where was he when he was off the rope? And how did he get back? ("His disciples were greatly astonished, and asked him the meaning of his presence there.")

Petit gathers his aplomb and strolls back slowly, still carefully, towards the welcoming ladder until he's within a few yards of it, then runs for home.

On his second journey out, he performs his adagio: boneless, spineless, pretzel convolutions over and under and around the rope in maneuverings undecipherable in terms of human limbs and locomotion, disregarding the givens of ordinary center and balance. He seems to have turned himself into an octopus, wrapping himself around the rope without touching it. The sequence of intertwinings is so concentrated and complicated, he almost loses the audience's attention. He stands and pretends he's falling. Half the audience gasps; half laughs. Now he's got them. Will he try a third trip? ("And the holy Balshem answered them thus...")

Home to the ladder and rests for a while. The near-satiated crowd is cautioned back from the ground wires, to remind them of the danger, the risk. Then, calmly, he sets out on his third and last journey. ("I went to see how a man might cross a chasm between two heights as this man did, and as I watched him I reflected that if mankind would submit their souls to such discipline as that to which he submitted his body, what deep abysses might they not cross upon the tenuous cord of life!")

They tell me Petit says in interviews, "When I see three oranges, I have to juggle them, and when I see two towers, I have to walk between them." Thicker and thicker the crowd swarms around him as he climbs, as the moth flies to the flame. Across the rope, out over the lake, and up and up, against the trees and sky, and now, now, now, he captures the castle.

He has bought his freedom back.

© 2008 Tobi Tobias