Seeing Things: May 2009 Archives

American Ballet Theatre / Metropolitan Opera House, NYC / May 18-July 11, 2009

Always an exceedingly star-conscious company, American Ballet Theatre opened its annual spring season (May 18-July 11, at the Metropolitan Opera House) with a pair that would be hard to beat: Caroline Kennedy and America's new First Lady, Michelle Obama, two of the gala event's Honorary Chairmen. Both made carefully prepared, mercifully brief, but urgently timely speeches emphasizing the fact the arts are not merely commercially important to America but absolutely essential to its culture. They said it like they meant it.

The full article appeared in Voice of Dance (http://www.voiceofdance.org) on May 23, 2009. To read it, click here.

Martha Graham Dance Company: Clytemnestra / Skirball Center, New York University, NYC / May 12, 15, and 16, 2009

Genius though she was--as a dancer, as a choreographer, and as the inventor of the only Western dance technique apart from classical ballet capable of training a dancer fully to professional capability--Martha Graham produced more than her share of weak, empty works, some of which even qualify as unintentional self-parody. There's no question, though, that a cluster of her finest efforts belongs to what is known as her "Greek Cycle."

Any susceptible dancegoer who has seen Cave of the Heart (1946), sprung from the myth of Medea and Jason; Errand into the Maze (1947), a gloss on the Ariadne and Theseus tale; or Night Journey (1947), which retells the Jocasta and Oedipus tragedy--when these works are rightly performed--knows he is looking at the soul laid bare. (Mentioning Graham's rendition of these couples' stories, I put the woman's name first, because Graham saw human experience from a woman's point of view--in other words, hers.)

This season, the Graham company, which has long known troubles almost worthy of the Greek myths, and is now led by Janet Eilber, has brought Graham's recently revived 1958 Clytemnestra to New York. Derived from Aeschylus's Oresteia and given a flashback-and fragmented treatment of time, the piece was a must-see at its creation, yet has been absent from the repertory since 1994.

Preview announcements for the troupe's May 12-16 engagement at NYU's Skirball Center (during which the piece was shown three times) as well as reviews from out of town, repeatedly described the work as the acme of Graham's Greek-related dances. Why? Because it's program-length, while the others I mentioned are succinct enough to be performed with two other works? Because its ruthlessness is positively gaudy? Many of the seven deadlies are covered and, Lord knows, the blood does flow, but violence, though it may contribute to grandeur--see The Iliad and The Song of Roland, literature that made me, a pacifist, understand the heroism and glory embedded in war--is not necessarily its equivalent. No, Clytemnestra can't claim to be among Graham's greatest Greek ventures; it's simply a helluva melodrama, filled with extremes of action, but short on depth, texture, and subtlety of emotion.

The company calls its present production a reconstruction. What does that mean? It usually means that the dance in question is recalled and remounted by means of first-hand evidence: memories of the people on whom it was made; dance notation scores; film or video of its premiere or early showings; still photographs; notes penciled into the score as aide-mémoires by the work's original rehearsal pianist; eye-witness accounts of early performances. Of course you see that these sources are listed in order of diminishing reliability, that they are incomplete and often shaky; and that, as time passed, the choreographer herself may have made changes in the dance.

So what have we got in the case of the present Clytemnestra? Something close to the original, claims Eilber, who had advisors that included company veteran Linda Hodes; a version that runs two and a half hours as it did when the dance was first created, compared, by radical example, to the 90-minute show shortened for a Dance in America telecast in the late 70s; the original costumes designed by Graham and dancer Helen McGehee, in place of the Halston outfits imposed upon the piece at one point; the original score by Halim El-Dabh, rife with voiced exclamations like "A mother's curse!"; the semi-abstract sculptural set created by Isamu Noguchi, whose innovations for earlier and far greater Graham works (among them Frontier; Seraphic Dialogue, and Cave of the Heart) are legendary, but who, for Clytemnestra, just feebly quoted himself.

The choreography reveals Graham quoting herself, too, with moves that are gorgeous--huge strides, with the heels pounding the floor like muffled blows; slow, fluid back falls that require thighs of iron and a snake-supple spine; hands rigidly cupped or emphatically striking the body. These were radical when Graham invented them years before, but cannot astonish here because she appears to be repeating them merely by rote, without the context that would make them fully expressive.

Expression is, indeed, the main issue here. On opening night in New York, it was obvious that the dancers had been rehearsed within an inch of their lives. Now they need to loosen up and, stylized and formal though the choreography is, allow themselves to look like individual people, each one in the throes of his or her particular passion. A few have already achieved this: Maurizio Nardi as Aegisthus, primarily, and also Blakeley White-McGuire as Cassandra and Lloyd Knight as Paris. Nearly all of the others, technically magnificent, I grant you, are working as if they were aiming for a perfect score on the SATs. The Furies--a small chorus of women in black--move in a unison so precise, they look like the Rockettes.

The big disappointment was Fang-Yi Sheu, for several years thought to come close in power and expression to Graham herself. Her incarnation of Clytemnestra shows that, wonderful as she is, this was never really so--that she lacks the seething passion that gave Graham's dancing its incontrovertible conviction and edge. As the tempestuous queen, Sheu is simply too weak in the departments of rage and lust, to say nothing of sheer athletic power. (Granted, a serious injury incurred a few years back may be responsible for this last.)

One of Eilber's "bright ideas" to make the dance accessible to the present-day audience involves small changes in the choreography. These are a mistake, unworthy of Graham's stern and vivid aesthetic, and should be dispatched to Hades immediately. Another is the addition of supertitles explaining who's who and what they're about at the moment. These should be unnecessary if the audience can be persuaded to read the program notes. The titles are tackily executed both physically and content-wise (the silly "Clytemnestra dwells on all that has happened," for instance) and inevitably suggest dumbing down. What 's more they're interspersed with signage like "Pause. 2 minutes," which leads you to expect "Restrooms to the left. Canteen to the right."

But the really grave problem with these ostensibly helpful messages is that they point out all too pertinently the fact that the dance itself doesn't tell you what you need to know. I'm reminded of a long-ago colleague who, confronting performances of early postmodernism, forbid himself to read any program notes until he was returning home on the subway. Invariably, beneath the rattle and screech of the clattering train, he'd find himself exclaiming sotto voce, "Oh, so that's what it was about!"

Despite my cavils, I'm very glad Clytemnestra is back in the repertory. When a dance is absent, it is soon forgotten. Present, it's there for the rising generation to learn and interpret. As for the current cast, I am fairly confident that, with ongoing performances, the dancers will make it their own.

© 2009 Tobi Tobias

Trisha Brown Dance Company / BAM Howard Gilman Opera House, NYC / April 29 - May 2, 2009

Trisha Brown, recently back at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, offered a show that indicates how she's moved from her beginnings to today, in a career that spans five decades.

One of the most wonderful aspects of her early work was its plainness. If the Shakers had had progeny, they might have been her ancestors. In the 1960s, Brown was a hero of postmodernism, as it came to be called, rejecting traditional concert-dance accoutrements, such as plot, emotion, musical accompaniment, decor, and costumes other than the sort of threads in which you washed the car. Quiet, smart as hell, witty, and determined, she had people walking down the facades of buildings, with the gawkiness of entry-level mountain climbers in reverse; communicating movements to one another from Soho rooftops (as if in a visual game of Telephone); making ordinary, often pointless tasks--like picking up a pile of sticks, one at a time, from a spot on the floor and moving them to a similar nondescript heap just several feet away--somehow thrilling.) Without ever indulging in self-congratulatory fuss about it, she embodied the shock of the new.

The 1968 Planes, the oldest work on the BAM program, looked back to these plainspoken dances, though it augments bare-bones movement with hyperactive film that jazzes up and, indeed, almost overwhelms the main, live action. (It also incorporates some music by Simone Forti, a fellow revolutionary.) This is the deal: a pale rectangular wall stands center stage. Pierced regularly by circles, it offers foot- and handholds to three women in jump suits, who ascend, descend, and travel slowly across it at a serene pace, with no destination indicated. The film starts out as a shaky, handheld camera-style view of urban detail animated by frenetic lighting, moves on to add color, and eventually becomes a travelogue of exotic lands. From time to time a pretty young woman in a pink leotard that nearly matches her skin, magnified way beyond life size compared to the live performers, straddles the space and performs supple back bends. Is she a latter-day Terpsichore?

Gradually embracing the elements that add conventional grandeur to dance, Brown moved toward opera-house acceptance, consistently doing so on her own terms. O złożony / O composite (the second element of the title is the French translation of the Polish first part) was created in 2004 for three étoiles of the Paris Opera Ballet (the French adore Brown). It was these top stars--Aurélie Dupont, Manuel Legris, and Nicolas Le Riche--who performed the piece at BAM in its American premiere. While the choreography is far from being top-notch, it was a pleasure to see how these mature ballet-made bodies absorbed the fluid style of the movement Brown gave them, while she in turn, who never studied classical dance, allowed them occasional steps from the technique they had perfected from childhood.

The best (and key) passage in the dance occurs early on and closes the piece as well. The two men face each other and walk softly with the woman's body held horizontally between them. Her body hides their supporting hands, so she seems to float. The balance of the dance, although each of the participants is given a little solo, is essentially an exploration of how delicately and intricately a physical ménage à trois can be managed. The territory might have been Ashton's, and he would have made it more tender and far easier to understand.

Brown's dance is accompanied by a meditatively melancholy score that Laurie Anderson based on poems by Edna St. Vincent Millay and Czeslaw Milosz and is danced before Vija Celmins's irresistible backdrop of a nearly black sky thick with stars (that is, étoiles).

The glory of the program was the 1979 Glacial Decoy, one of Brown's perfect collaborations with the late visual artist Robert Rauschenberg. Against a huge four-panel slide show of black and white Rauschenberg photographs of commonplace things, mostly rural, whose interest and beauty so often goes unnoticed, five women flitter back and forth along a cross-stage path that seems, on both sides, to go on into the wings where the audience can no longer see it. If that's not a metaphor for life, I don't know what is.

Rauschenberg costumed the women--angels? fairies? visions?--in filmy white nightgown-like dresses with dropped sleeves that fan out like little parasols, leaving the dancers' fine-boned shoulders bare. So what you see is a sculptural mass of uninterrupted flesh--head, neck, and shoulders--that proclaims warmth and vitality, while the rest of the body is cocooned in a cool scudding cloud.

There is no sound other than the ambient hum that makes a room come alive and the dancers' often emphatic footfalls. No other sound is needed.

In the world premiere slot in the program was L'Amour au théâtre (Love in the Theater) set to excerpts from Jean-Philippe Rameau's Hippolyte et Aricie, based on Racine's tragic Phèdre. Brown is slated to stage the full opera in France in 2010, and the choreography we saw will be dropped into that production in segments. The opera itself is rife with melodramatic situations, dense with strong human feeling. It's hard to say how Brown will fare with this vehement work and its violent passions. She has certainly progressed in her investigation of complex human relationships between O złożony and L'Amour au théâtre, and the segments we saw bunched into a whole in the latter will register more sharply when they're separated. Still, even this latest material leaves Brown needing to invent choreography that makes it clear that erotic love is not a merely a matter of tangling arms and legs, no matter how intricate.

© 2009 Tobi Tobias