Archives for 2009

Chunky Move: Mortal Engine / BAM Howard Gilman Opera House / December 9-12, 2009

Chunky Move, founded in 1995 and still led by Gideon Obarzanek, comes to us from Down Under, or Oz, as some people call Australia.

The troupe’s name indicates its original purpose–to invent dance productions that contrast with the rarefied artifice and elegance of ballet. (Originally trained in that classical genre, Obarzanek, who masterminds the group’s works, is decidedly in recovery.)

Of the Chunky Move programs I’ve seen in New York, my favorite is Tense Dave (a collaboration by Obarzanek, Lucy Guerin, and Michael Kantor), awarded a Bessie in 2008.

Especially after seeing Mortal Engine, I’m mystified by the fact that the items in Chunky Move’s repertory are so dissimilar, so different in subject, style, and tone to one another. This may be (at least in part) the result of collaborative creation. Often the makers of the movement, the set (in Tense Dave, for instance, the “stage” consists of a huge compartmentalized turntable), as well as the light, sound, costumes, and electronic gimmickry have near-equal prominence. I’d bet, too, that the performers have a lot to say about what goes on; though silent, they look articulate.

Mortal Engine is a giant step away from Tense Dave; it doesn’t even call itself a dance. According to the press release, it’s a “multimedia performance work using movement- and sound-responsive visual projections to portray an ever-shifting, shimmering world that defies the limitations of the body. A web of lasers and video projections react to the dancers’ every movement, creating a layer of virtual choreography superimposed over its physical manifestation.” Fancy talk, but you get the idea. Needless to say Mortal Engine has no definitively fixed form; it’s new every night.

So what actually goes on in the one-hour (and too long at that) intermissionless piece? On a huge tilted floor, raked toward the audience, a remarkably supple, mostly recumbent woman in a sheer-topped gray leotard curls and splays her body as if it were well-nigh boneless. After a long passage of this bravura elasticity, she’s approached by five crawling bodies bathed in inky shadows that appear to menace, even swallow, her. A section of the tilted floor is then engineered to a near-vertical position and she stands alone before it, illuminated by light so bright your eyes cringe as you watch. Next, the light fragments into a phalanx of splinters that surround her. The whole business reminded me of Joan of Arc’s trial and burning at the stake. Wondering why I had to find a familiar narrative for stage action that its creators surely conceived as abstract, I realized that what I was being offered was simply insufficient. The media were multiple, as promised, but the result was thin–and trite to boot.

In another “scene” a man and woman move as if they’re making love, at first calmly, with a voluptuous laziness, but then in a confusion of thrashing arms and legs. Apparently, not even love can save the day.

And so it goes. Shadows are always present, in one way or another, threatening vulnerable victims. Often these “ghosts” leave their image for a while, even after the figures casting them have shifted position. Later, broken down into confetti-size particles, the dark matter seems to be an element the bodies exude, infecting the world around them, or one that has inexplicably materialized from nowhere to entrap the bodies present.

The frequent alternative to these versions of dark is blinding light–sometimes as whole-body haloes or pictographs of death by electric shock, at others as patterns that trap the bodies in an inescapable maze. Sections are given over to the light alone, which forms swiftly morphing linear patterns. All the while, the sound hums, growls, throbs, buzzes, or emits static–as if it were intent upon drowning out reasonable discourse or the music of the spheres.

Finally, the show moves into a very Ayn Rand apocalyptic mood. A fog spills over the bodies onstage and invades the auditorium, accompanied by a faint smell of incense (or is it hot cinnamon toast?). A triangle of green light divided into beams and topped with a glaring spotlight (a postmodern Christmas tree sporting its star?) follows the path of the fog. After this business is given extended play, a lone figure goes stumbling towards the intense green light atop the triangle, as if to its perilous destiny. Then, in an abruptly conjured peach-tinted glow, two figures embrace. Oi vey!

It’s possible that Chunky Move’s productions fall into one of two opposed categories: Down Home or Outer Spacey. Tense Dave belongs to the first group, showing the messy drama of a confused or obsessed human being awkwardly making his way through life. Mortal Engine–cool, objective, and galactic–reminds me of nothing so much as Alwin Nikolais’s dances. Nikolais operated in the pre-electronic theater days of the mid-twentieth century, but all the concepts are the same as Mortal Engine‘s, in particular the treatment of the human body as just one of many equally fascinating elements in the universe, such as mercurial effects of sound and light. Granted, the result is occasionally magical, but it hardly provides emotional satisfaction.

© 2009 Tobi Tobias

By Christopher Caines, guest contributor

Imagine that Sol Hurok had telephoned the director of a slightly down-at-heel, raggle-taggle, time-traveling vaudeville troupe one day and said, “Parker! Listen: I need a Christmas show! A Nutcracker! Pronto! My Russians canceled. I can get you a couple weeks of one-nights. If you deliver, maybe we can make it an annual thing. Can you do it?”

Parker looks around the studio. The troupe has a ragbag assortment of old props–some beat-up top hats and tails, a red feather boa, a fan, silk flowers, sunglasses, a flashlight, a tiny fake Christmas tree for holidays on the road, a stack of maple-leaf-red knit watch caps left over from a winter tour to Ontario, plus bubble wrap to pack it all up in. There’s a Chinese takeout container from somebody’s lunch. Tap shoes? Got ’em. Plus a trunk full of battered toe-dancing shoes the dancers found, left behind on a railway platform by one of the Ballet(s) Russe(s) on a whistle-stop tour that Parker’s group crossed paths with in Des Moines or somewhere. Luckily the troupe does have the right music: a stack of 78s including a set of this Tchaikovsky fellow’s Nutcracker Suite–though a few of the disks are scratched, broken, or missing. But luckily the stack includes some novelty arrangements of the same music that might fill the gaps. Best of all, the troupe has a bunch of terrific dancers: many shapes and sizes–not like a corps de ballet–but all strong movers, smart, ace rhythm, big heart. Maybe a few old friends might be enticed out of the stables as guest artistes, and maybe Parker can get some kids from somewhere–Christmas show, gotta have kids. The Nutcracker . . . it’s about this wooden doll, right . . . ? “Sure,” Parker says to Hurok. “We can do it.” And so, in my fantasy at least, David Parker and the Bang Group’s Nut/Cracked was born.
In fact, Parker’s wryly affectionate take (and double-take) on the holiday ballet classic was not commissioned by Hurok, but by an Italian producer in Genoa in 2003. The piece was next presented in an abridged form at Dance Theater Workshop in January 2004, and returned for a box-office-record-setting two-week run at DTW the following December. Since then the Bang Group has performed the work (in many versions, with casts of varying sizes, on stages ranging from the tiny to the large) around New York City and the country for seven seasons–adhering to the spirit, if not the letter, of the laws of vaudeville. Nut/Cracked has racked up more than 150 gigs, which is remarkable for a non-ballet company’s Christmas dance show, and the work returns to DTW for three matinees starting December 13. The piece often includes guest dancers, and this year, I will be one of them, lending a hand (or a hoof) to an old friend and colleague by appearing in a couple of sections.

I readily agreed when David asked me to dance in Nut/Cracked because I had laughed so hard watching it in 2004. Not only that, but I grew up in a small Canadian city that had no Nutcracker–in my youth, North America still had such cities–and I neither saw nor danced in a production of the ballet as a child, unlike legions of my fellow dancers (including, over the years, many members of my own company). I’ve always felt a bit deprived by my Nutcracker-less childhood. That ballet, of course, opens the magic doorway into dreaming of dancing, and dancing, or a least dance-going, for countless millions. But not for me. At long last, I’ll get to dance in a Nutcracker.

Sort of. For while Nut/Cracked is not a Not-Cracker–that is, it is not an anti-Nutcracker–it is nonetheless not The Nutcracker. Although all the music for the show comes from or is adapted from Tchaikovsky’s score, Nut/Cracked sets aside entirely the ballet’s story and characters: no Marie/Clara/Masha, no Fritz, no Herr Drosselmeier, no Mouse King, no Dewdrop or Sugarplum Fairy or Snow Queen–no Nutcracker, even. Still, they all hover, like ghosts, in the work’s shadows. For Nut/Cracked is a palimpsest: knowledgeable viewers will see through the nut’s cracks to the traditional ballet, and to ballet conventions and mannerisms that are being sent up in some of the numbers. Yet the piece does not rely for its comedy on an audience that knows The Nutcracker at first hand and will get all the to-the-trade jokes. Nut/Cracked‘s humor ranges from the insinuating through the subtle to the very broad, often all at the same time; you can enjoy it no matter what you know about ballet or any other kind of dance, and the work is both good fun for those who adore Christmas, oddly satisfying to those who hate the season, and a tonic for people like me who simultaneously love and dread it.

Parker is not at all the slightly naïve entertainer I have depicted in my fantasy genesis story of his work, but a highly self-aware artist; moreover, his take on the tale is, in Schiller’s terms, a sentimental rather than a naïve work–though in our modern sense of the word, it is not sentimental in the least. Indeed, Nut/Cracked is sly, occasionally arch, and packed with knowing allusions not only to traditional stagings of the score but to other ballets as well–not to mention revivals, quotations, paraphrases, and fond parodies of, among other things, modern and “postmodern” dance, breakdancing, clogging, soft-shoe (in bare feet), Saturday Night Fever-style disco, and the all but lost art of toe tap. The work revels in its mongrel vocabulary, its hybrid vigor, its inclusive taste. The dancing overflows with jokes (many of the in- and/or running varieties), slapstick, gags, pratfalls, visual puns–and a bisl of shtikele too: the silk bouquets in the “Waltz of the Flowers” induce an allergy outbreak among the cast; the skating rink where the “Waltz of the Snowflakes” is set has some treacherous patches the Zamboni must have missed. The traditional Nutcracker is also a comedy: a dramatic entertainment that ends, at least symbolically, in a marriage (as opposed to one that ends in death, which would make it a tragedy). Yet Parker’s Nut/Cracked represents a different order of comedy entirely.

In order to prepare properly for my roles, I thought it might be wise to revisit the “real” Nutcracker. Luckily, I live in New York City, and thus can go straight to the top: Mr. B. And so I found myself in the newly renovated David H. Koch Theater at Lincoln Center on opening night, the Friday of Thanksgiving weekend, at New York City Ballet’s George Balanchine’s The Nutcracker^TM, as the company currently bills its annual holiday spectacular, a ballet I had not seen for several years. Premiered in 1954, Balanchine’s Nutcracker is not the country’s oldest full-length version (the San Francisco Ballet holds that honor, with a production originating in 1944), but it is acknowledged by many critics and balletomanes to be the greatest, not to mention the direct source or inspiration for countless other productions. Balanchine’s is likely also the closest in spirit and in detail of dance and mime to the original, premiered in 1892, with a scenario devised by Ivan Vsevolozhsky, director of Russia’s Imperial Theaters, and his ballet master, Marius Petipa, for the Maryinsky Theater in Saint Petersburg, but choreographed by Petipa’s assistant, Lev Ivanov, when the master fell ill.

Viewing The Nutcracker again I was struck above all by its moral seriousness, lightly borne. The choreography, and NYCB’s mise-en-scène in most ways, constitute an exquisitely crafted entertainment; it’s easy to see why families who can afford it make the ballet an annual holiday tradition. Yet the sense that the ballet offers more than entertainment is present from the overture, not only in the way that the music vaults across the whole range of emotion in the score, but in Rouben Ter-Arutunian’s frontcloth, which shows an angel reaching with both hands toward a star. It is worth remembering that this Christmas star, which reappears above the towering pine forest in the last measures of the climax of act 1, the “Waltz of the Snowflakes,” to guide the child heroine and hero into the visionary realm of act 2, glisters not over Toys”R”Us: it shines over the Savior’s manger bed in Bethlehem. And although all of Balanchine’s work persuades me that the Virgin Mother of God meant much more to him than the Father or the Son ever could, nonetheless The Nutcracker remembers at some level that Christmas is not only a holiday, but a holy day. We should never forget that Balanchine was a man of faith, and not faith in music alone, but a professing member of the Orthodox Church. How else to explain the Russian child angels, each bearing an unadorned miniature Christmas tree, who glide about the stage on tiptoe in patterns of immaculate symmetry with their stiff conical skirts swaying like church bells, to welcome Marie and her little prince to the Land of Sweets?

Balanchine’s Nutcracker, like the original Maryinsky version, is a ballet for and about children, and also a work designed to give children of all ages seriously training for the profession roles to perform. Yet the vital purpose of childhood, in Balanchine’s world, is to grow up, to learn to be an adult. In act 1, we see the children who are invited to the Christmas party at the Stahlbaums’ cozy bourgeois home–gemütlich and gutbürgerlich both–as they are schooled in adult ways, above all, by dancing. At first, parents and children dance their quadrille-like figures together, with the adults guiding their offspring through the steps and patterns and showing them the appropriate manners: how to approach a partner, how to bow, how to offer a hand, how to accept one. Thus instructed, the children are soon able to dance unattended at stage left while their parents dance opposite. The children’s realm is a miniature parallel replica of the adults’. Eventually, the two groups evolve from unison to counterpoint, as the children dance their own independent figures without guidance. Metaphorically–or more precisely, metonymically–the parents have begun to impart an entire aesthetic and moral education. (The theme is underlined in the mime action too, as Marie’s scene-stealing naughty younger brother, Fritz, is repeatedly scolded for his misbehavior.) Later, when corsages are distributed to the males of the assembled company, the little boys gravely offer them to their partners, just as their fathers do. As Arlene Croce wrote in 1974, Balanchine’s act 1 is “taken for granted because it’s so simple and ‘has no dancing.’ It contains the heart of his genius.”

In act 2, Marie and Drosselmeier’s nephew, restored to himself after being transformed into the Nutcracker Prince (the nutcracker doll brought to life to do battle with the Mouse King and his army), do not dance, but sit enthroned high above upstage center to watch the divertissements Balanchine has devised, which include young dancers drawn from many levels of the School of American Ballet. Symbolically, act 2 is a wedding celebration; we remember the crucial bit of mime in the party scene in which Drosselmeier (as least as portrayed by Robert LaFosse, whom I saw in the role) reveals to the audience that he is plotting the union of Marie and his nephew, and the way the two little dancers walk up the aisle through the evergreen cathedral at the close of the snow scene. But Marie is only eight years old. Though she wears a tiny bridal veil throughout act 2, she is celebrating, not her marriage to her gallant young friend, but the future promise of it–Marie is playing house on a very grand scale. Dancing functions in The Nutcracker just as the ballet itself functions within the repertory of a company that maintains a school–like City Ballet, and like the Maryinsky: as a realm of necessary experience, yes, but above all as a realm of noble aspiration. Below them on the stage, Marie and her prince behold dancers of all ages, from the tiny Polichinelles (darling French clowns) who emerge from under Mother Ginger’s skirts, through the adolescent corps of Candy Canes, to Dewdrop (one of the work’s two ballerina roles) and her Flowers. The long path that leads from early lessons to apprenticeship to mature artistry is laid out, step by step, in a series of images of dancerly accomplishment. Yet Balanchine also vouchsafes to Marie secrets of adult life that no child could ever consciously understand, which she can only keep and ponder in her heart, as the Gospel of Luke tells us Mary meditated upon the events of Christmas night. “The annual Nutcracker has become a liturgical event,” Croce wrote in 1969, “one whose deepest significance we celebrate in our hearts and try to keep our children from knowing.”

In Balanchine’s theatrical universe, to become a dancer–and, especially, a ballerina–is the noblest of all human destinies. It demands great sacrifice; in a certain way, it may even demand the sacrifice of childhood itself. Moreover, all children must at some point leave childhood behind, and while they may know or guess what that mysterious leave-taking will look like, they cannot know how it will feel. In the music for the Sugarplum Fairy’s grand pas de deux with her Cavalier–and only here, in the entire ballet–Tchaikovsky allows adult passion to brim, overflow, and cascade as from a dammed lake of tears. The plangent melody, at first ruminating, then soaring, is deeply shaded by tragic knowledge of indefinable loss. As the melodic motif contracts, rising urgently in pitch and volume, striving to cadence, then crests and wanes, we recognize too the tremor of erotic knowledge. “Listening, we see, we touch,” Croce wrote in 1986, “until we hardly know whether it is the tympani we hear or the hammering of our own hearts.” Tellingly, perhaps, this is the only segment of the score of those that Parker sets that his comedic purposes forbid him to approach on its own terms (whereas he otherwise highlights rhythmical details of the score’s music-box-like textures that strictly balletic treatments sometimes blur), and for which he must resort to Nut/Cracked‘s sole truly sardonic, even caustic ironies. Only classicism at its purest may reach for the star Tchaikovsky hangs high before us.

When I write that Nut/Cracked represents a different order of comedy from Balanchine’s Nutcracker, and that it is a work of Schillerian sentiment, I mean that the two works are suffused with different kinds of self-awareness. The Nutcracker is self-enclosed within the visionary realm of classicism. Gleaming through Balanchine’s ballet are reflections and refractions not only from the Petipa-Ivanov original, in which Balanchine himself danced as a child, but from the other great Tchaikovsky-Petipa ballets, Swan Lake and The Sleeping Beauty, as well as Sylvia and Coppélia, whose scores by Léo Délibes Tchaikovsky revered. Indeed, the whole history of ballet as a theatrical art form and a spiritual endeavor shines through the fabric of Balanchine’s choreography, above all in “Snow,” “Flowers,” and Sugarplum’s pas de deux. There is something of Dr. Coppélius in Drosselmeier, with his giant mechanical dolls, for example, and of Swan Lake‘s Von Rothbart too. Sugarplum’s adagio echoes Sleeping Beauty‘s “Rose” adagio. Balanchine’s Nutcracker is a duplicate in its structure of his Midsummer Night’s Dream (which ballet-goers may see at NYCB immediately after The Nutcracker closes in January–a nice programming touch): a densely plotted first act that leads to an all-divertissement second act in ritual celebration of marriage; The Nutcracker‘s act 2 likewise echoes the wedding dances that close The Sleeping Beauty and Sylvia. I could go on. The cultural background of The Nutcracker is ballet itself.
The background of Nut/Cracked, however, is in part the reception of ballet in the United States and the role that The Nutcracker has played in that story over the course of the last century. (Americans’ first exposure to any part of the ballet was in a production entitled Snowflakes starring Anna Pavlova in New York in 1915: the habit of devising spectacles including excerpts from The Nutcracker originates from within ballet, not outside it.) The pop/jazz treatments of Tchaikovsky to which Parker sets the first half of his evening (corresponding structurally, but not thematically, to Balanchine’s act 1 before the “Snow” scene) offered him a side door into Tchaikovsky’s imposing score via the fiercely syncopated percussive vocabulary that is this tap dance-based choreographer’s native dialect. The records also roughly chart the naturalization of the immigrant European aristocratic dance form in the United States, as they range from charming, daffy kitsch (smooth choral arrangements with cute lyrics by Fred Waring and the Pennsylvanians), to playful but serious jazz recompositions by Raymond Scott, Glenn Miller, and Duke Ellington, who address Tchaikovsky more or less as an equal, as a fellow composer.

The cultural background of Nut/Cracked is equally the American (and worldwide) Christmas Industry, which of course includes the country’s 300-plus current productions of The Nutcracker–and for New Yorkers and our holiday tourists, includes Balanchine’s masterpiece. In this sense Parker’s work has what I can only call a meta-theatrical dimension. Nut/Cracked acknowledges the annual consumer frenzy of Christmas, complete with pandemic bad faith, commodity fetishism, stress, envy, greed, disappointment, shopping and wanting and getting and not getting and returning and “re-gifting”; gruesome Xmas Muzak that starts in October; compulsory contributions to the economy and equally compulsory fun; pious, prefabricated sentiment; the ritual sterile debate about the season’s “commercialism”; the obscenity of year-round Christmas stores; and such traditions, more honored in the breach than in the observance, as getting blasted at the annual office party and making a pass at a co-worker.

Beyond its craft–the flowing ensembles, the meticulous development of gestural motifs, the intricate percussive counterpoint, the close attention to the music’s structural changes–the best thing about Nut/Cracked is its good spirit: a lot of “Let’s put on a show!”–but something more, too. For all its wisecracking, Nut/Cracked reveres ballet, which remains within the work an ideal realm of aspiration–perhaps more glimpsed than seen. Classicism is cracked, but not broken. The dancers are forever crashing nimbly to the floor as the choreography, turning on a dime from some cherished Cecchetticism secretly embedded in a buoyant petit allegro enchaînement to a waltz-clog or the Charleston or the Funky Chicken, pulls the flying carpet out from under the dance. More than anything else, Nut/Cracked makes fun of itself, and in so doing allows us to find humor in the predicaments we put ourselves through every year at Christmastime.

Christopher Caines is artistic director of the Christopher Caines Dance Company. He is currently at work reviving ARIAS, the evening-length work with which he founded his ensemble in 2000, for spring 2010 performances.

David Parker and the Bang Group perform Nut/Cracked at Dance Theater Workshop, December 13, 19, & 20 at 2 p.m. New York City Ballet presents George Balanchine’s The Nutcracker at the David H. Koch Theater at Lincoln Center through January 3.

© 2009 Christopher Caines

Dear Readers,
I will be working in Copenhagen NOV 17 through NOV 30 and not posting on SEEING THINGS until my return. Meanwhile, please continue to send your Comments on the pieces already posted, especially recent reviews and all of the PERSONAL INDULGENCES essays; I will post your Comments as soon as I can.
tt

Morphoses/The Wheeldon Company / City Center, New York City / October 29 – November 1, 2009

Three years ago, when Christopher Wheeldon left the security of his position as Resident Choreographer at the New York City Ballet to form his own small company, Morphoses, his head was full of extravagant dreams about making classical ballet new for the 21st century. He even fulfilled some of them. But the economic downturn has thwarted his progress. Ballet companies, no matter how modest in scale, cost major money, and donors are feeling poor these days. Which brings us to the nagging question of whether or not Morphoses is really worth saving–at all costs, so to speak.
The full article appeared in Voice of Dance (http://www.voiceofdance.org) on November 4, 2009. To read it, click here.

Frederick Wiseman’s La Danse: Le Ballet de l’Opéra de Paris / Film Forum, NYC / November 4-17, 2009

The ticket line at Greenwich Village’s Film Forum November 4-17 for Frederick Wiseman’s latest grand-scale documentary, La Danse: Le Ballet de l’Opéra de Paris, will surely contain as many dance fans as film buffs. And I suspect the local dance crowd will enjoy the movie more. It offers extensive, if necessarily fragmented, footage of the Paris Opera Ballet’s remarkable skills, and the celebrated French company rarely visits the States. Dedicated movie-goers, especially those familiar with Wiseman’s complete body of work, are likely to be disappointed.

Wiseman’s earliest films–shot in black and white, which suited his subjects and his style–still remain his most meaningful works. He treated his topics lawyerly (prior to his film career he was a lawyer).

From his first film, the harrowing Titicut Follies (1967), in which he treats Massachusetts’ State Prison for the Criminally Insane, he piles up the evidence point by point like a star prosecutor, allowing concrete facts alone, unadorned by appeals to sentiment–or, indeed, any explication whatsoever–to reveal the obvious verdict.

Later in his film career, he was lured by the siren song of color, even later by the fiction that “everything is beautiful at the ballet,” which brought him into my own field, dancing. In 1993 he examined American Ballet Theatre; recently, the Paris Opera Ballet. In both films, he coolly inspects the dance company as an institution, but without much point that I can discern.

La Danse finds him applying his familiar tactics: He opens by placing the institution he’s scrutinizing in context. We see a stunning series of freeze-frame shots of Paris, moving closer and closer to the opulent Palais Garnier, where the phantom of the opera held sway, at least fictionally, and which the Paris Opera Ballet has long made its home. (Now it has a second home at the Bastille, about which the less said, the better, and Wiseman says nothing.) Throughout the film, these shots of the city and the Palais Garnier’s dark, claustrophobic underground corridors are repeated, but not as a respite from intense emotion, while giving emotion a wider and more natural vein, as Ozu used shots of wind-stirred trees and the like, but instead–well, why actually? La Danse has no easily discernable drama or intention. It just goes on “forever” (158 minutes, to be exact), then peters out.

Oddly, Wiseman doesn’t dwell on the gaudy magnificence of the Palais Garnier’s public spaces–the gilt, the marble, the mirrored halls, the bronze statues, the crystal chandeliers; we eventually catch glimpses of them as the camera follows a cleaner–but throughout Wiseman emphasizes the gloomy corridors and winding passageways of the interior, the flooding in the lower regions where fish have set up housekeeping, as well as the no-better-than-institutional studios and offices.

As soon as Wiseman has oriented us to the particular domain he’s chosen to examine–as always, in his films, a world in itself, sealed off from a wider reality–he introduces the people who inhabit these nondescript backstage spaces: the dancers, the element most likely to seize a viewer’s attention. We see them taking the daily morning class essential to professionals and then learning or rehearsing or being coached in their roles.

The dancers’ bodies are exceedingly svelte, lithe, and strong–capable of marvels. These dancers are the survivors of a rigorous schooling from about age eight and an equally rigorous weeding out of the pupils not up to standard, throughout the decade that it takes to turn a child with the right anatomy and unquenchable desire into a professional dancer. The POB dancers’ technical prowess is stupendous, but everyone seems to take it for granted, and we never see how it came about; nothing is shown of the academy in which these “acrobats of god” are trained, though it is a unique institution in itself.

In the company’s studios, the ever-present coaches clearly make a dancer’s professional life that of an eternal student. They are forever being corrected, in order to attain some Platonic ideal of execution. These elders who supervise the rehearsals, usually once leading dancers themselves, are encyclopedias of information about how things were done in the past and what might be achieved now. Their bodies have thickened, their legs have lost their spring, but their eyes have become piercingly sharp.

As is typical of Wiseman, not one of the dancers or coaches is named. Similarly, the ballets we see excerpts from are not named; their choreographers unidentified, though some of them appear on camera to coach their own work. (Apart from the familiar nineteenth-century classics, the choreography is nothing to write home about.) This information is revealed only in the Shaker-plain closing credits, another Wiseman hallmark.

Wiseman’s familiar use of anonymity while revealing both personality and job description is best effected in the scenes involving Brigitte Lefèvre, the Paris Opéra’s director of dance–in other words, POB’s boss. Her calm yet steely authority and well-calculated empathy for her dancers (she was once one of them herself) emerge gradually but unmistakably from the several scenes in which she’s the focal point. You don’t know her name or exactly what she does, but you know what she is.

Wiseman persuades us to understand Lefèvre solely from how she behaves in a series of different situations in which she deals with dancers, repertory, casting, company policy, and money. This is no mean achievement.

It’s also in the scenes involving the administration that we begin to realize the grand scope and complexity of the POB as an institution. Wiseman also covers the scenic department, where thick but deft fingers are pictured adding gleaming paillettes to the tulle or velvet of a costume, the sewing crew working under short white tutus that are suspended from the ceiling like so many chandeliers. The more pedestrian aspects of a life in dance are recorded too, as in a view of the company’s cafeteria that, amusingly, offers us freeze-frames of dishes like the ones we accepted, faute de mieux, in college.

The film progresses from work in the studios to rehearsals onstage in an auditorium hauntingly devoid of spectators. All of these activities and the behind-the-scenes work as well–a studio being spackled and painted, the dancers having their make-up applied–are arranged as a collage in time, but the elements are bricks without mortar to make them adhere, to build something. What does Wiseman himself derive from all the material he’s presenting to us? What are we to make of it?

Damned if I know.

Towards the end of this seemingly endless film without drama, climax, or even resolution, there’s a stirring, extended excerpt of a performance, by Delphine Moussin, of Medea murdering her children in Angelin Preljocaj’s eponymous ballet. And there’s been a very brief shot of the public entering the lobby of the Paris Opéra, with its exquisite curving double staircase, but to the best of my recollection, we never witness a dance being viewed by the public it’s meant for. And, sadder yet, we never hear it applauded.

© 2009 Tobi Tobias

American Ballet Theatre / Avery Fisher Hall, Lincoln Center, New York City / October 7-10, 2009

Avery Fisher Hall, Lincoln Center’s main concert venue, lacks an orchestra pit, wing space, and a floor suitable for dancing. Musicians performing there stay put once onstage, limiting their motion to decorous walks to and from their places. Not for them phenomenal steps requiring a floor that cushions sleights of foot or a safe landing spot for leaping exits at race-car speed. Nevertheless American Ballet Theatre was installed at Avery Fisher for a four-day engagement, October 7-10.

The full article appeared in Voice of Dance (http://www.voiceofdance.org) on October 14, 2009. To read it, click here.

The Forsythe Company / BAM Howard Gilman Opera House / Brooklyn, NY / October 7-10, 2009

William Forsythe made his name creating ballets with an eye to pushing the art conspicuously forward, as Balanchine had done. Nowadays he makes concoctions that are so hard to appreciate, detractors find them empty, showy, foolish, inexplicable, or all of the above. It’s not that I think he should retrace his early steps.

Artists must not – cannot, actually–imitate their past. They need to move ahead to find their own future. I just wish I understood and liked Forsythe’s recent work better.

Decreation, which Forsythe and his devoted troupe brought to BAM’S Howard Gilman Opera House for an October 7-10 run, is not so much a dance as a dance cum postmodern drama cum installation cum performance art cum . . . well, you get the idea.

Forsythe’s idea is that the world is in pretty hopeless shape. While its inhabitants obsess about communication, connection, empathy, and even love, he tells us, their actions invariably disintegrate into the cruel and bizarre. Though he keeps his stage tidier than the colossal-mess-loving Pina Bausch–even the dancers’ clothes, shmatas you could clean the garage in, are fastidiously keyed to a subtle sky-and-earth palette–Decreation recalls the themes of her angst-driven earlier works.

The piece opens with a narrator standing behind a translucent box (also used as a projection screen, part of the media mix the choreographer favors), playing the dual role of defense attorney and accused. Her lines, delivered in a voice cracked with rage, alternate so swiftly between the two characters, they’re barely intelligible.

The effect is like that of a particularly hostile Punch and Judy show.

In general, the sound is unbearably raucous, with overlapping verbal provocations accompanied by intermittent music played onstage and crackling static. The static may be there to remind us that everything we say nowadays is being recorded as info in the public domain, to be received by unsympathetic listeners. Occasional silences fail to bring relief; they only make one woman’s low moaning audible.

As for the movement in the piece, it’s usually violent and grotesque (angular, spasmodic, writhing)–and endlessly repetitive. The groupings, though, are so handsomely arranged, it’s hard to believe that the anatomical incoherence represents authentic feeling.

Images suggesting sexual abuse abound. One pathetic figure often reappears, clutching one of her breasts with her right hand and her crotch with her left. She is the Eternal Female Victim, until she slips out of a contorted confrontation with two men, leaving them to undo each other.

Ten minutes into the one-hour show, you feel as if you’ve stumbled into a loony bin, albeit one that boasts high-end design and a façade of braininess. The latter comes across in exchanges like this one: He says, “Everything is beautiful and nothing hurt.” But she says (he reports), “Everything hurt, everything that was beautiful.”

And then there’s the persistent variation on this theme: “I might prefer to love another more than I love you. What would you do?” Only the libretto of one of the gayer Mozart operas could make such business viable, and then it would bubble with fun. Here it’s rendered with pensive solemnity, reiterated so often you wonder why the guy at the receiving end doesn’t counter with “Gimme a break already!”

In the final segment, the huge round table that loomed in the background is stripped of its formal dinner paraphernalia (crystal, china, sumptuous white cloth) and dragged forward, folding chairs placed to rim its periphery. The whole overwrought cast congregates, seated, for one last blast. Of course a distraught woman mounts the table (remember the Béjart Boléro?) and–oh, never mind. We’ve all been there before.

© 2009 Tobi Tobias

Often the visual arts will make a dance fan feel he or she is in the presence of dancing that doesn’t move through space and time, but is dancing nonetheless, or at least its cousin. The actual dance pickings seemed slim this year, as summer slid into autumn. This is often the case, but never fear; we’re already beginning to be bombarded with choices. Still I thought I’d grant myself a busman’s holiday and see what the picture people were up to. The ambitious exhibitions at the grandest museums have long runs, so shows that I missed during this spring/summer’s hectic dance season are still up. The permanent collections of such museums remain more or less permanent, though the big museums can never display all they own at one time. For this piece, I treated myself to four offerings currently on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Vermeer’s renowned work The Milkmaid, on loan from Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum, is the centerpiece of a special exhibition that runs through November 29. It’s joined by the Met’s own five Vermeers and other works, sometimes borrowed, related to it through the time, locale, and subject matter of their composition. The juxtaposition teaches a tough, true lesson about every art: competence enhanced by energy differs radically from sheer genius. None of his Netherlandish contemporaries in the seventeenth century holds a candle to Vermeer.

Painted in the late 1650s, The Milkmaid shows a robust young woman who, from her rough clothes with their rolled-up work sleeves, her setting, and her action–standing at a table heaped with various magnificently crusty breads, carefully pouring milk from an unglazed clay jug into a low glazed bowl of the same material–is clearly a domestic servant. The simple room she stands in holds little but the woman, the breads–some roughly torn into pieces for the bread porridge she’s probably concocting–and a few culinary objects.

Two elements, however, suggest an additional dimension: a small foot warmer behind her (imagine the heat creeping upwards when it’s used) and a sketch of Cupid shooting an arrow from his bow among the Delft tiles set where the chalky wall behind her meets the floor. An art aficionado of the time would easily have recognized these as emblems of erotic love. Today the ordinary viewer may not notice them or think of their meaning, but surely, if he simply looks hard and steadily at the woman herself, he will suspect, from what Vermeer shows him, that she has a secret inner life, which lures him into contemplating what it might be. The very light in the room–coming only faintly from the window to her left, which contains a small broken panel (can it possibly suggest lost virginity?), while she and her work are bathed in a cool glow from an invisible source to her right–gives an uncanny luminousness and mystery to this sturdy woman.

In this, and in nearly all the pictures of his maturity, Vermeer shows himself to be the master of the beauty of silence, composure, and introspection. As in sublime adagio dancing, his pictures create an atmosphere of suspended breath. And as in most long-lasting ballets, a sense of a profound yet unspecified inner life, subtle and elusive, is exuded by Vermeer’s solo figures. Even his couples and somewhat larger groups intimate–in addition to their social relationships (lovers or seducers and the women they desire; mistress and maid)–something of each figure’s half-hidden self.

Like dancing–even when it’s abstract–Vermeer’s paintings are an instructive and poignant example of expression without words, without even specificity. They are examples of the enigmas that give the greatest art its soul.

The justly celebrated photographer Robert Frank (1924 – ) focuses on the unvarnished truth about ordinary people, a subject explored in the early works of choreographers like Trisha Brown (in her early, bare-boned “task dances”) and Mark Morris (in the motley types of his first dancers’ bodies and his combining pedestrian moves with codified technique). Compellingly, Frank reveals his have-not subjects as they are, stripped of the appearance or behavior more privileged people use as a mask, attempting to present themselves to the world as they would like to be seen.

The Met’s current exhibition of his work, “Looking In: Robert Frank: The Americans” centers on the book of that name published a half- century ago, showing each of its 83 subtly riveting images with a generous addition of related material. The Swiss-born photographer, who emigrated to the States in 1947, drove a used Ford along a route that crossed the country twice in the mid-Fifties, shooting a vernacular America. He greatest sympathy seems to lie with the poor and with African-Americans–people with little power, financial, social, or political, so that their status ranges from the utterly ordinary to one that can’t help arousing the viewer’s pity. If these pictures are harsh, it’s because life is harsh, and often lonely, though the images include gaiety and human bonding as well as pathos.

Rich folks, the ruling classes, are naked in their pretensions in Frank’s images. But this photographer doesn’t preach, at least not openly; he records. Quoted in the show’s wall text, he says: “I am always looking outside, trying to look inside, trying to say something that is true. But maybe nothing is really true. Except what’s out there.” It’s reality he’s after. He grabbed it using a casual style that allowed low light, blurry focus, grainy images, and unconventional composition, according to Frank’s wishes and situation. This iconoclastic aesthetic had a major influence on photographers who came after him. And surely any dancer-choreographer who attempts to start building a vocabulary and a pattern for dance-making from scratch–Isadora Duncan, Martha Graham in her early career, Laura Dean–flouting traditional rules in pursuit of her or his own vision, is Frank’s kindred soul.

If Frank’s work is rooted in life’s reality, the paintings and drawings of Antoine Watteau, which dominated French art in the first quarter of the 18th century, present (or, more accurately, imagine) life as artifice.

In the Met’s current “Watteau, Music, and Theatre,” the elegance and poise of the body’s poses and the figures’ consciously graceful self-presentation (exuding charm tempered by a regretful melancholy); the soft titillation of an erotic subtext; and the evocation of Cythera, the Greek island considered Venus’s birthplace, thus an idyllic land of pleasant dreams, are seen in musical and theatrical settings. One can readily think of them rendered in a ballet–The Sleeping Beauty being the most obvious–or compare them to delicate, fragile porcelain figurines.

As a dance writer I can’t fail to mention the well-known picture by Nicholas Lancret (a follower of Watteau, though without his emotional power), which is included in the exhibition. It features the celebrated ballerina Marie Camargo in a garlanded skirt whose hemline she raised slightly above prevailing tradition so that the viewer might see her trim ankles in action. Nevertheless it’s another work in the show, a Watteau brimming with atmosphere, that continues to seize my imagination and refuses to let it go. Called Mezzetin, (after the commedia dell’arte character), it shows a seated man past his first youth playing a lute in front of what seems to be a theatrical drop curtain hazily depicting a generic leafy park sheltering the obligatory marble statue.

Perhaps this man once trained as a dancer; his exquisitely muscled lower legs are sheathed in silver stockings that emphasize their admirable form. Lavish fabric–of lush texture and an intense rose hue–dominates his costume, from his generous hat and cape to the outsize rosettes on his shoes. By contrast, his hands, fingering his musical instrument, are grotesque–even deformed–reddened and gnarled as if to represent the result of the life-long practice necessary to a musician or dancer who aspires to the rank of artist. The backward tilt of his body, especially his head, and his faraway gaze suggest a haunting nostalgia for beauty that must vanish–in art and in love–and self-indulgence in that gentle, bittersweet melancholy as well. Forget The Sleeping Beauty; think, instead, of Balanchine’s Emeralds.
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It’s easy enough to call upon Degas to illustrate the connection between the visual arts and dancing, since dance was one of his primary subjects. But in the Met’s several rooms of this artist’s dance works, part of the museum’s permanent collection, we meet with the several aspects of Degas that exist. There are the pictures–in oils, pastel, or charcoal–of the female Paris Opéra dancers in performance; the studies of these dancers in rehearsal (notice their frequent boredom), in class (where they often stray from classical correctness), or at rest (where their exhaustion affects us viscerally); the bronze casts of small wax figures showing some of the oddest postures dancers assume, often while doing no more than examining the sole of their foot; and the drawings, often studies for work yet to be realized, Nearly all of these tell us that, at heart, Degas was not an artist of the pretty–as collections of reproductions on note cards often insist–but, at his truest, exercised the ruthless pair of eyes and deft hand of an anatomist. My favorite image in this last category–it burned itself into my brain long ago, though I can’t recall where I saw it–is a charcoal on, I think, blue paper, of an ankle and foot, in a soft ballet slipper. The foot is turned out and seen from behind. It is absolutely accurate, so the position seems very strange, especially as it’s unattached to a body that would give it a context. It is a perfect emblem of ballet.

On my Met visit I cottoned most to the over-familiar bronze figure of a child dancer (one Marie van Goethem) who was a student–one of the “little rats”–at the Paris Opéra. Strangely, the nearly life-size figure (first created in wax ca. 1880; cast in 1922) is adorned with some fabric: she wears a ragged-edged dancing skirt of coarse weave ending just above the knee, while the bronze braid that falls down her back is tied with a long-streamered bow of faded pink satin ribbon. Her right leg is thrust forward, as in fourth position, but it’s loose-kneed and takes no weight, as if she were “at ease,” between the more strenuous efforts of her trade. Her arms are pulled straight behind her back, hands clasped, the pose emphasizing her touching slenderness. The most eloquent part of her is her head, tilted defiantly upward with unquenchable pride.

She made me think of the little girls of the New York City Ballet’s academy, the School of American Ballet, each with her pluck, her self-assertion, and her desire to have the world understand she is a member of the elite and that though she may be a mere–oh, let’s say–advanced-beginner in her exotic trade, she has at least been selected as worthy of training, and her aspirations are sky high.

© 2009 Tobi Tobias