Masters at Work - Voloshky/Morris at Bryn Mawr

I spent two afternoons in the darkened theater at Bryn Mawr considering what the difference is between a competent or even great artist and a brilliant one and why some traditional folkloric music and dance is moving to me on a level more primal than anything the post-moderns could ever serve up. Being the daughter of a square and folk dance caller who was thrown into the maelstrom of dancing grownups from a very young age certainly has a lot to do with it. But I don't think you need that kind of  connection to feel this dancing in the soul-stirring way that I do.  

In creating a new dance for Voloshky Ukrainian Dance Ensemble, Mark Morris looked very closely at the regional dances the group performed for him. He absorbed their movement language, making use of distinctive moves. But more importantly, their ethos – of a community of dancers, portraying moments in the lives of their village, their ‘tribe’—is one Morris has been incorporating in his own dances all along. He has credited his early Balkan dancing as being formative, and not only for the experience of repeating circles and lines and rhythmic patterns. The unity of the group, their social exuberance, factored strongly. 

Our age can be one of virtual more than physical connection.  So to see dancers and musicians cooperate so fully in representing a vision of human togetherness that is at once geographically specific and  completely recognizable is a reminder of where we came from; the ur-past we share. Hearts are full; hearts are broken. Young men display their prowess, and women theirs—fiddling as if on fire, and singing in tones that will pierce any reserve. There are reasons to shout and stamp and swirl and run. It’s the full catastrophe of human experience in dance, instrumental music and song. 

The spatial patterns and tricky steps in the traditional works are something Morris understands and makes full use of. But where the Ukrainian dances are comparatively clean and direct, his new Carnival, set to Saint-Saens, has rounded edges and more sly humor. His themes recur in a satisfying way. A full lyricism that sustains itself by breathing the music for sustenance is his hallmark. And with the Ukrainians, it reaches full flowering in a new way.  

Watching Morris rehearse his dance with both dancers and musicians is to see an artist move a performance from wonderful to sublime. He teases out voices, he insists on exact angles and changes arcs of emphasis. It’s a god-in-the-details thing, and the details he drives for, like dancers adding one movement beat on to the very end of a dance after the musicians finish, are the flourishes and distinctions that make the whole gleam. 

The two halves of this show, one traditional but choreographed by a now-89 year old Ukrainian master, Anatoly Kryvochyzha, and one choreographed by what Alastair Macaulay called one of the “foremost living choreographers” in last Sunday’s New York Times act as a conversation across geography and time. For Voloshky to dance something contemporary requires Morris to look to the past. It offers us a chance hear the echo of their and our histories in the ever-so-ecstatic present.


Show info here.

Remy=Love

Remy Charlip spoke directly to the child in us. Tenderness and joy was the message.

Somewhere in high school I discovered his books. Maybe it was because of his affiliation with the Cunningham Company and teaching at Sarah Lawrence College (I had friends who studied Creative Dramatics with him). The books felt intoxicating; a liberation for mind and heart. In Thirteen he gave us hypertext before it had been invented. On each page there’s one drawing from each of thirteen visual stories that progress through the book. You can regard one page, you can follow one story start to finish (the falling leaf, the sinking ship), you can linger on the detail and luminosity of his water colors. What in the line and rendering of recognizable things made them so magical? 

I often think about the relationship of ‘what’ to ‘how’ in performance. Materials are one thing, the way they are enacted another. The latter determines how we read the materials. I have the idea that the state of mind of the person doing the thing translates into how we experience it. A person with a desire to offer us the richness of the world around us, and the knowledge of our own preciousness somehow translates that into line and color and sequence. Or dances. We feel it.

The drawings from Remy’s Air Mail Dances provide a visual record of sequences he asked dancers to create, full of loopy, delicious interactions. Two or more people twine and twirl, curving buoyantly, joyfully.  One version of a dance like this was shot on video from above with dancers on a bed, sheets and all. 

It was in Remy’s work that I first saw Eva Karczag. He revealed the exquisite animal she is through a device allowing us to observe her body mechanics: she crawled across the upstage of the old Dance Theater Workshop with rubber balls beneath each of her hands and feet. To progress forward, she kicked or rolled a ball forward and placed hand or foot down to stop it, a foot or so ahead each time.  Funny. Slow. Elegant. 

That was Remy. He was a guest teacher in the Netherlands where I got to know him beyond page and stage. That was where I sensed a darker side too. While I can’t swear it’s so, my sense is of him is as a wounded healer. He venerated the body and became a transformative teacher of Alexander technique. He venerated creativity and creation.

Thank you, Remy. You remain here with us, encouraging our wilder flights of imagination, our reveling in our senses and our care for each other.

Fort Blossom's Peaceable Kingdom

Photo: Maria Anguera de Sojo

As someone who has been around at the birth of landmark dance – contact improvisation, Trisha Brown classics – I know the feeling that some works are paradigm-shifting. What exactly makes them so is hard to pinpoint until time has elapsed. John Jasperse’s Fort Blossom revisited (2000/2012) belongs in that camp. Right now I think it’s because Jasperse has crafted a work that’s exquisite but tough, and formalism and felt humanity become unlikely but well-suited bedfellows.

Fort Blossom’s world begins as one of contrasts butting up against one another: the stage floor is half black/half beige, its two women are clothed and two men naked, its movement is hinged and robotic or full of a testing-out kind of exploration. By the time it concludes, after two long duets, one for the women, one for the men, and a final extended section for them all, distinctions co-exist peaceably and a kind of euphoric settledness has descended.

In its opening image, Ben Asriel inchworms prone across the stage, buttocks rising and pressing forward, as Lindsay Clark and Erika Hand, in tomato-colored A-line frocks, perform a unison duet. It’s full of sudden drops and architectural placements of their limbs in curious relationships to the squarish orange plastic bubbles each dons and wears like a goofy backpack. Ryoji Ikeda’s pulsing electronica with throbbing low tones and high pitched bleeps augments the futuristic feel. These women are on display, as plastic people, with perfect make-up, hair just so, hinging at the hips to peek-a-boo at the audience through their own legs while their red panties show, or walking slowly upstage on tip toe. They are objects worthy of admiration and perplexing, all at once. Their building and rebuilding of beautiful shapes, like so many block towers, satisfies.

Meantime Burr Johnson has found his way downstage, and lies atop Asriel, placing a clear plastic inflatable between them. As it deflates, Johnson’s hips grind and thrust. Seeing these men’s buttocks, genitals, squish onto each other, and later, their feet lifting each other’s scrotums, is far from dance as I conventionally think of it. Yet the slow, felt deliberateness of their action is riveting. The men are lithe and gorgeous, each muscle defined as in a textbook, their assholes, and all else, presented matter-of-factly, but definitely, in our face.

The men’s duet of Fort Blossom moves through phases from clinical and dispassionate to erotically charged, and takes its time to evolve and deepen, in the way that lovers might take a full afternoon exploring each other’s bodies. In complete silence its dynamics shift from slow and careful to more jagged or spasmodic.

If the first part of Fort Blossom seems to establish a never-the-twain-shall meet world, the second part erases those borders to find a place where the men and women settle into a mutual ‘creature-ness.’ They play, childlike, to Japanese samba, thwacking each other with their bubbles, falling, kerplunk, onto them or tossing them, spinning. That euphoria fades, like air seeping out of a balloon. The men then partner the women and all join in a long sweep of an upright phrase that’s continually tumbling into new curving pathways, like a twisty mountain road. Often hooking into momentary mirrorings, they slip along, and then brake, tumbling floor-ward at one moment, taking time for an ever-so-slow leg circle that eeks into reverse at another. With Ikeda’s elegiac harmonies, the effect is breathtaking.

At each step of the way, Fort Blossom seems to ask “How might we do this together?” Finding pleasure, experiencing difference and edge, parallel play, mutuality, and synergy: All these aspects of how humans are in each other’s company are rendered with aching directness. And counter to its seeming dystopian beginnings, Fort Blossom concludes with good news: our interchanges have value and tenderness and despite their challenges, serve us.

Dance, with bodies as its medium rather than paint or notes, is very directly about human beings even when it purports to be about space and shape. Fort Blossom revisited (2000/2012) is a study in human difference and complementarity. Its four dancers butt against, play off, ignore, and explore each other and ultimately settle into an easy co-existence, richer for each other’s presence. As a model of behavior, it’s hopeful. And the craft that went into shaping its often-changing and mysteriously moving atmosphere is prodigious.

Fort Blossom revisited (2000/2012), John Jasperse Company, Bryn Mawr College, February 24-26, 2012. No further performances.

Writer’s note: I Coordinate the Bryn Mawr College Performing Arts Series which presented this production.

And Your Meaning...

“But while the dancing was high quality, it was difficult to discern much meaning out of the piece.”

Is it reasonable for a dance critic to make a statement like this? In my view, writing in the era before Judson, let alone Cunningham, perhaps yes. But the assumption that likely underlies the statement−that dance is supposed to “mean” something that the choreographer presents in a way you can parse and give language to−is off-base today.

The piece in question is John Jasperse’s Canyon. After reading the full review of which this one statement is a part, I penned the following:

“I can’t tell you why I trusted choreographer John Jasperse when he placed the audience on air mattresses supine to look up at dancers doing risky weight-sharing partnering directly over us in Prone (2005). Likewise the “meaning” of Canyon, like so many messages that arise in dreams, I accept as a given without needing to know precisely what it is. Audiences and critics looking at dance today are invited to stay open for signals, to allow layers of imagery to build in our memory like so much visual poetry. That challenge evokes the excitement of a worthy mystery, a whodunit one hasn’t yet unraveled, but may well. And however it works out, the pleasure of dwelling in the rich world of signals can be, in itself, plenty.”

Jasperse is wonderfully articulate on this issue in a recent profile.

And then, wanting to share some of the meaning I gleaned in the work, I did something I haven’t ever done before in the seven years I’ve been writing about dance in Philadelphia: sent the newspaper an unsolicited review of something that a reviewer already covered. To be clear, I don’t think the work is without areas that need tightening or clarifying. But in 200 words what seemed most vital was to offer a way IN. My review wasn’t used, so here it is:

Canyon. John Jasperse’s newest work vacillates between the time when dancers, full-bodied and capable, make their bold marks on space, and the time when they stop. Its six fine dancers leap, swirl and whoosh across the stage in satisfying waves of changing groupings, or crash and dive, later giving way to times when their bodies are less ready for deployment. They crumple, they sag, or pensively await further instructions. The implied cycles – rehearse and rest, exert and surrender to exhaustion– are reminiscent of the arc of a dancer’s day, or life. In Canyon intimacy, doubt, camaraderie, and tenderness have their place too. And then, what are the messages coming from a deep interior or a faraway power that cause the dancers to pause, looking to the distance, or listening internally?

Jasperse often messes with conventions of staging and here turns the white dance floor askew in the curtainless cavern of the space. Tony Orrico’s design includes a white cube on wheels, creaky and scuttling, that decorates the floor, or walls, with zig-zags of fluorescent green tape, like the trail of a modernist snail.

Along with surges in light, Hahn Rowe’s magisterial score evokes a grand, sometimes thunderous existential question mark. And then it’s back to simple scratchings and settled tones. So it goes. The big moments and the small ones. The grand dance and the inexorable move toward stillness.

FIN

A Fair for Merce

Great artists generate devoted communities. On line waiting for the elevators to Lincoln Center's Rose Theater in July, former dancers with the Cunningham Company were overheard comparing notes on who and what they’d seen earlier in the day - so and so from one era, that one from a later time.

Rather than casting many glances back, my experience of the evening segment of the day-long Merce Fair was about looking and hearing anew. Perhaps knowing that there will be no more Cunningham choreography, one is automatically drawn deeper into what there is, and that opens the mind.

It was on film that I first heard Merce explain his understanding of how music, dance and decor functioned for him in contemporary performance. As with a streetscape where one witnesses a bird in flight while hearing the scream of a firetruck, the elements cohere through their simultaneity and our processing. Whatever we make of the interrelationship is what we make of it. So it was ideal to have the music associated with Merce’s work performed in the Allen Theater with a massive window wall gazing out on a vibrant slice of Central Park South.

And the revelations in that music! As a very young dancer I was put off by these male composers’ scratching and unlovely sonic contributions from the pit. Here, it became fascinating to hear one distinct sound at a time played on a succession of percussion instruments in Cage’s “One,”and spellbinding to try to parse Alvin Luciers’ score for piano and hovering theramin-like doppelganger. And magic - a man at a computer whooshing his hands mysteriously behind a laptop’s screen to produce whorling, dense and dramatic flights of sounds.

My sometime perception of “coldness” in the work was utterly dispelled in Duets and Squaregame, the dances offered by the company. How interesting that Robert Swinston, the company's Director of Choreography, chose to revisit works from one narrow band of time - late 1970’s and 1980 - that are structurally exquisite, and with less seeming randomness than many.

Squaregame takes place on a demarcated white square, dancers temporarily deposited at its far corners, watching in formal groups, then joining in unison ventures.

Rashaun Mitchell, at the work’s beginning and end displays a perplexingly deep sensuality. How can it be? While Merce’s clarity and exactitude are there in spades, so are a fleshy fluidity and thoughtfulness. Cunningham himself seemed to dance with the curiosity of someone to whom the dance was happening, as though he were the subject on which the experiment of this dance were being conducted. Mitchell dances as though the movement were his voice; his wobbly knees or big reaches, without any artifice or extraneous additions, conveying a physical vulnerability or spatial interest.

I’ve heard people say that Mitchell can “channel” Merce. What I see is the channeling of Merce’s authority, and one-pointedness. But how the movement sits on his more substantial frame is different altogether - more rounded, more tender.

Duets plays a trick of continuity. With its cascade of pairings performing distinct tasks, one all hyperdrive lockstep dashes, another a duet without touching, we wonder which of the many pairs might be carrying a through line. But the center continually shifts, as though a spotlight is scanning for the heart of the matter. All the pairs are the heart as we see at the end, when in a stunningly dense minute of finale, every duet mobilizes, pauses for a settled moment, before the density kicks back in and the lights switch out.

That black out ending, used in both works, serves as a reminder that a flow can be turned off, like a faucet. It’s turned off when our proverbial glass is quite satisfyingly full, but just before any hint of overflow.

Earlier, the Fair had animated multiple contiguous spaces with diverse events.The group of attendees learning Field Dances threw themselves into their task, delighted with the open-endedness, through Merce’s structure, of making their own choices. A girl - not more than 8 - flitted among the big folks, tipping sideways facing them, placing hands on their shoulders.

Passersby happened on the floating Mylar Warhol pillows, tossing them back skyward..

The Archive represented a carefully winnowed selection from a vast collection of books, papers and photographs. Handsome hanging panels with photos and text offered both a crash course in Merce and collaborators ,and new information for those already familiar.

The film illustrating the process of creating the “Dancer 1 2 3” drawings was screened alongside the drawings themselves. With Merce revisiting a Cagean concept twenty years after Cage himself worked with it, what’s fascinating is to see how he interacts with the dancers - how he offers refining instructions, how his seeing the results generates something new on the spot.

At the Merce Fair, we were given the fitting option of choreographing our own event, wandering in and out of film screenings, or music performances, or learning a dance, or reading, looking, conversing with friends, until finally enjoying a come-together moment watching the culminating performance. It was a party Merce would have thoroughly enjoyed.

For a series of photos, visit here.

Messages from Meredith

In 1975 I had been under the spell of Judith Dunn and Steve Paxton, both former Cunningham dancers and Judson Church pioneers, for four years. At Bennington College it was their ethos that held sway. Dance was performed as task, as an everyday kind of activity that involved investigation and rigor but certainly not emotional “expression.” Judith Dunn exhorted me to wipe that grin, or whatever, off my face, saying “let your body say it instead.” And, when confronted with potential sexual rumblings and arousal in the newly birthed form of contact improvisation, Paxton exhorted dancers not to play the “gland game.”

Then along came Meredith Monk. For a week of workshops, Monk had us embody our most disgusting habits, sink deep into sensation with exercises from Alexander technique, and, strange for dancers at that time, make sound. These activities confused me. How could the worlds of formalist post-modernism and fleshy, tender hearted and unabashed expression co-exist? Like a koan, that question has dogged me since.

Another week of workshops and performances some thirty six years later at Bryn Mawr College has provided, if not a complete answer, a chance to sit again with the deeper questions raised by Meredith Monk’s work, and to speak with her about them.
Her evolution as an artist has involved a refinement and a rich flowering more than any shifts of course. The fusion of elements – voice, film, movement, into striking stage pictures and ultimately moving theater is unchanged. Today she collaborates more, handing over the authority for pieces of the production to a visual artist for instance – Ann Hamilton. Her musical palette has broadened with complex instrumentations. But the purity, the depth, and the power of what she does has only grown with time and water under the bridge.

Today Monk is a Buddhist. Although in 1975 she had not yet found a formal practice or teacher, her starting place – one of compassionate regard for human beings and their experience, both painful and delightful, is in line with the Buddhist stance. People without any spiritual allegiance can recognize something fundamentally sane in her position as a performer. Although she herself features, it is never about her. Rather, she has always understood how to position herself as an everywoman, with an approach to physicality that reduces action to its simplest skeletons. She becomes like an animation of herself, effectively communicating that the work is about US.

Although ‘dance’ was the rubric that Monk was often categorized under, her approach to it was never in line with those who practiced movement for its own sake, conveying its own meaning. Rather, movement for Monk is what animates her onstage personalities, be they the quirky ladies of “Education of the Girlchild,” or the elegant celebrants of “Songs of Ascension.” Movement is life, and a body in motion is one conveying a story about how it is to be alive on this deeply troubled but spectacular and potentially benevolent earth.

MoMA's Space, Pioneered

photo Ruby Washington for the NYTimes

When Frank Gehry purchased an old power station in 1970’s Soho, he was eager to see it populated with dancing. The long narrow space was brought to life in the fog-drenched premiere of Trisha Brown’s Opal Loop. Examples of similar synergies of architecture and dancing abound. But topping the list in my book is the recent animation of the Museum of Modern Art’s five story atrium with early works by Brown, another in the long list of her Company’s terrific 40th anniversary events.

Trisha Brown’s work with 10’ sticks and pedestrian rulegames, as well as her very refined explorations of movement designed to ‘hit’ designated points on a cube, could not be better suited to the soaring space. Works like Sticks, Scallops and Locus revel in the play of shifting angles and formations as dancers conform to or slither around imagined or actual boundaries. These dances are architectural from the get go.

Tasks are transparent: ‘balance a stick at a perfect 45 degree angle while sliding from a stand to supine.’ ‘Trace arcs around the perimeter of the space while moving shoulder to shoulder with other dancers who might chose arcs of unpredictable sizes.’
And then, in the interpretations of the onlookers next to me– ‘move within the confines of a square taped on the ground.’ Locus, if seen as fulfilling only this intention, is only partially understood. Is it important that the audience knows that Diane Madden’s every move is in relation to 27 points on her cube? That she takes four passes through, hitting the same sequence of points each time? And that a lot of the movement is the result of layering together two or more contradictory imperatives, making for curious internal ripples and wild splays? However you see it, Madden’s delivery of Locus is silky and clear, like pure water.

Changing into bright red clothing, she is the one who initiates the ‘telephone’ game of largely upper body action that is Roof Piece Relayered. In the five story atrium, 10 dancers play a game easy enough for us to trace, but one we can never see fully, as they are placed on every side, in windows and ledges at every level. One dances in a long notched opening set in an otherwise pristine white wall with a delicate white Calder mobile sailing just behind. One dances on a catwalk so high in the air, we see from underneath.

The audience member has the wondrous opportunity of framing each view for herself. This task is simple when standing in the atrium. But as soon as you decide to venture onto higher or lower levels, the choices and views take on much greater complexity.

To reach the openings into the atrium, you pass great artworks, and look through them at the dance. The dancers—red, sculptural—assert an exhilarating parity with Cornell, Rothko and Duchamp. They are art works up close, with viewers coming right to the edges of their marked off ‘stage’ spaces. Unlike the interior of the Guggenheim Museum where all of the space is always in view, the Modern’s punched out windows and balconies allow you to see partially into the big opening; then you pass through ‘closed’ spaces before the view opens out again. The effect here is of watching the performance by encircling it, and of a building that functions as a lens for performance. When passing between one opening and another, the knowledge of a performance going on, but hidden, is tantalizing. The sense of space in relation to dance explodes outward.

Recalling Brown’s predeliction for returning to rework great ideas, it’s not unlike what we experience when, in Forêt Foray (1990), Brown sets a marching band to circling the outside of the building in which the performance takes place. A dance of the mind.