foot in mouth

Frederick Wiseman's La Danse: The Paris Opera Ballet--soon it will be all up and down the West Coast and in select cities in other parts of the country. Its stay at the Film Forum here in New York has been extended for at least another two weeks.

Agnès Letestu and Mathieu Ganio rehearse Genus, choreographed by Wayne McGregor. Photo courtesy of Zipporah Films and Film Forum.

Here is a chunk of my tiny Financial Times review, in which I fail to mention that the movie is long--not as long as some of Wiseman's flics but longer than most documentaries--about 2.5 hours--and it has a lapidary, reverential rhythm. Lots of shots of the building, which made me wonder whether the Paris Opera kept a relatively tight rein on what rehearsals Wiseman was allowed to watch or whether the participants were too aware of being filmed to meet his naturalistic needs. Anyway...here's what I did say:

Throughout High School, Domestic Violence and dozens of other patient, plainspoken portraits of institutions and the people who constitute them, American documentarian Frederick Wiseman adheres to cinéma vérité's strictest principles, eliminating the captions, voiceovers and quick cuts that function like a "proscenium arch in the theatre", he has pointed out.

But what about when his subject is theatre? In La Danse: The Paris Opera Ballet (which, as well as its run at Film Forum, will also be shown in selected theatres across the US, Australia and the UK), Wiseman trains his lens on inveterate performers--dancers turned rehearsal coaches and administrators--who erect proscenium arches wherever possible, to absurd, dizzying and poignant effect.

Rehearsing a dancer in Angelin Preljocaj's Medea's Dream in one of the studios under the Palais Garnier's gilded roof - its round windows admitting Paris's white, abstract light - the exaggeratedly polite former étoile Laurent Hilaire translates a tiny gesture as "tragedy, destiny, life". Then he quotes Cocteau. How grand! How French! And his remark "Your arms are in place, but only your feet are at work" possesses such prosodic equipoise that it takes a moment to realise it's an insult. "Sometimes, you don't know where you are," another rehearsal coach tells a hardworking dancer. Sometimes neither do we.

Most masked and disorienting is Brigitte Lefevre, the company's artistic director for the past 14 years - eons in byzantinely political Paris Opera time. You can measure this smooth operator's power by how much she talks. She meets her ballet masters to discuss young dancers' recalcitrance towards contemporary technique - a fiasco if the works here, by European dance-theatre mavens Mats Ek, Sasha Waltz, Pina Bausch and Preljocaj as well as the futuristic Brit Wayne McGregor, are any measure. She checks in with a hopeful novice. She introduces a choreographer to a maze of protocol. And always she talks for and over everyone else. When she's done, you have no idea who's left standing.

Meanwhile, the dancers, like ballet dancers everywhere, mainly keep silent.....

Treat yourself, if you're so lucky: you only have till Saturday, and Wednesday, the house was packed.

Some critics have been ambivalent--Gia Kourlas in the NY Times and Kathleen O'Connor at Danceviewtimes. I was enthralled, and set free for flashes of insight, from blast off to lights out.

O'Connor is a brilliant choreographer, but his Mommy and Baby dances (2006 and 2004, respectively) bothered me for all sorts of reasons, including their dourness and archness, their telling me things that made me think wearily, as if I were having the same old argument with the same tortured loved one, "I know, I know. But can we please, please talk about something else?" And I didn't catch last year's Rammed Earth, which perhaps belongs in spirit and method more to Wrought Iron Fog than to the previous work.

It hasn't been since 2002's Winter Belly (scroll about half way down) that I've felt this enlivened, excited, blessed etc. etc. etc. by an O'Connor dance.

Presenters: Jump on this dance. Your audiences will thank you.

Anyway, here's a bit of my Financial Times review:

From left, Daniel Clifton, Erin Gerken, and Heather Olson. Photo: Yi-Chun Wu for DTW.

A spirit of experimentation regularly drives Tere O'Connor's dances, but the abundance of invention in Wrought Iron Fog (running until Saturday) beggars the imagination - and feeds it.

The New York choreographer's dancers occupy a private sphere of play animated by mechanical compulsion and voluptuous whimsy. Matthew Rogers makes a steeple of his hands, throws back his head and twirls on his toes like a playground swing's unwinding chain. He does it again - for fun. Erin Gerken shapes her arms into a half-square, as if measuring a plot of air.

Soon others join her. In O'Connor's world, whimsy and compulsion are infectious. You catch them like the common cold - by being close by.

The hour-long work proceeds with the same serendipitous flow as a Cunningham dance. But where the late choreographer emulated the easy coincidences of pedestrian traffic and the instinctive herds and migrations of animals, O'Connor takes his cue from human consciousness - and unconsciousness. Watching Cunningham dancers, you don't think about the inner life; with Gerken, Rogers, Hilary Clark, Daniel Clifton and the mesmerisingly innocent Heather Olson, you can't stop thinking about it. These dancers are bursting at the seams with hapless interiority. Their worldly movement excites perplexity, remoteness, lust and glee in them; they are what you call characters.

For several years before Wrought Iron Fog, the characters were more neurotic than playful. The dances seemed bitter about.....

For the whole thing, click.

Next week: A few thoughts to accompany my review of Bill T. Jones's Lincoln project.

Karole Armitage is a choreographer who misses more than she hits, but even that bumpy track record didn't prepare me for Itutu, playing BAM for a mercifully short run this week.

Here are the first few paragraphs of my Financial Times review, out tomorrow:

If cultural appropriation didn't already have a bad name, Karole Armitage's Itutu (until Saturday) would give it one. That the choreographer doesn't notice that her troupe mixes with the charming and engrossing experimental Afropop band Burkina Electric like oil with water would be dumb enough. But to use the Burkinabè band members as props for her preening dancers is something else again. Has the lady not heard of colonialism?

At the start, Itutu diminishes the Africans only a little. Electric guitarist Wende K. Blass and singer-enchantress Maï Lingani flirt with a couple of dancers while strumming and singing, as if these antics and their music were on a par. The sound's overamplification buries the guitar's lilting melodies, but Armitage has a point to make: this isn't your average ballet.

Soon her slick crew is copying the moves of the band's own dancers, Vicky and Zoko Zoko, and depriving the steps of sense. When Zoko Zoko undulates from side to side, it's as if an electric wire were running through him. Burkina Electric includes dancers in its mix not to prove its choreographic mettle but to show us musical possession in the flesh. Armitage doesn't care. When she borrows, she takes without transforming or honouring.

Megumi Eda and Zoko Zoko

The disrespect culminates in a duet between Megumi Eda, the choreographer's favourite and most self-regarding performer, and the burly Zoko Zoko in which he serves as ballet barre, providing Eda with the leverage to power her leg overhead (for the millionth time). That Lingani can bring some gravity and humanity to Itutu, looking upon the dancers buzzing around her with the magnanimity and delight of a strict vegetarian towards flies, is a testament to the singer's star power.

Without the band....

For the whole thing, click here.

Your time would be much better spent at the Joyce this weekend, watching and listening to a Taiwanese troupe that specializes in bringing ancient dance and music forms to life. Here, some of the Financial Times review published today:

About a millennium ago in China, as the Song Dynasty was swallowing up the Tang, the statesman Han Xizai realised his political career was over and retreated to his mansion for a life of debauchery. When word spread of nights where "guests mixed with ladies, shouting in wild excitement", as one chronicler put it, Emperor Li Yu sent the court painter Gu Hongzhong to gather intelligence. Voilà "The Feast of Han Xizai", a painting with enough intrigue and side plots to make Gu Imperial China's demimondaine answer to Bruegel. Now hanging in the Beijing Palace Museum, the delectable 11-foot scroll has spawned imitations and tributes down the centuries.

The latest is a dreamily slow, meticulously constructed dramatisation by the Taiwanese music and dance troupe Han Tang Yuefu (at the Joyce until Sunday as part of Carnegie Hall's bicoastal festival Ancient Paths, Modern Voices). Like the painting, the dance forgoes the "shouting" for ladies singing, dancing, fluting and plucking the lute, and men drumming, flirting and, mainly, watching. Unlike the painting, no beds with rumpled sheets frame the circumspect action to hint at where it all is leading or has led. Nor do several mini-dramas transpire at once, in that loose, improvisatory rhythm of a promiscuous night that will inevitably bleed into morning. Rather, Han Tang turns "The Feast" into an extended ritual, with one part discretely following another.

The stagey approach damps the mood of possibility but doesn't destroy it. And it has little impact on what would always have been formal, such as the musical numbers. Mix the stir-and-beat rhythms of an ancient raga with the dissonance of Beijing opera, and you come close to the captivating idiom of the ancient Nanguan music that the lady flautists and lutenists play, each with her own kind, and the singers sing. Music is the show's star.

But Han Xizai's consorts - particularly the head concubine (Ho-wen Hsiao, pictured above) - aren't far behind. Above tiny, gliding steps, their heads bob like a marionette's: they seem always to be yielding.....

Click here for the whole shabang.

Mudan 175/39 by Garth Fagan. Photo by Paula Summit.

I don't think this year's Joyce season is the best showing of Fagan's work. There's only one premiere--the lovely Mudan--but even that wouldn't be a problem if the rep didn't also fall on the minimalist end of the Fagan scale.

Still, I admire the Rochester choreographer's aim and method enough to not much mind if one year is less revelatory than another. I want to avoid being one of those critics who uses an artist's previous seasons against him (that is, via invidious comparison). It should matter that this is Fagan's 39th year at his post.

Here's the start of my Friday review for the Financial Times:

Since founding his company four decades ago, Garth Fagan has lived and worked upstate, impervious to the fret and ferment surrounding novelty that absorbs our local choreographers. The resulting palette of often refreshingly démodé moods and methods is prominently on display this year at the Joyce (until Sunday), perhaps because of the subdued character of the season's premiere and featured repertory.

Shades of calculatedly guileless cheer or gloomy anomie dominate contemporary dance; Fagan - who mounted annual seasons downstate for years before achieving broad acclaim with a 1998 Tony for his Lion King choreography - prefers an easy, friendly cool.

The Jamaican émigré treats his wide array of music - jazz, ska, fusions of western and eastern classicism - as neither mood thermostat nor metronome but like a lover or brother whose drift he knows so well that he can dip in and out in unhurried conversation. Many dances today stop only long enough to implode; Fagan's can be brazenly slow, with the dancers become a garden of stone before they calmly carry on. He does not forgo steps for vectors of energy; he likes his shapes. A "Y" tilted off its axis, a body hinged forward or back at the hips, split leaps: he angles limb to torso in clean geometries. Most of the time, the shapes don't speak except to say "shape". Fagan is a proud formalist.

This year, I found myself wishing he were less proud....

For the whole review, click here.

I asked my friend and Foot colleague Paul Parish whether I could paste some of his review last week of Bill T. Jones's and Joe Goode's latest shows--Jones's is the big Lincoln fete we New Yorkers will be getting some side dishes from later this month at the Joyce--and he said, yes, please. 

There's all sorts of observations Paul makes that have me starting up with excitement--the unusual way he defines dance theater, his mix of admiration and skepticism for Jones "work[ing] your nerves," etc.  Here, from The Bay Area Reporter:  

It's just a coincidence that Bill T. Jones and Joe Goode, two major gay choreographers who deal with gay themes, have opened shows back to back (and at the same time as the national LGBTQ protest for Equal Rights in Washington, DC). Just a coincidence, but it feels portentous, like something's about to give. I have to say, I don't know which way things are going to break.

Not all dances are "about" something. There's a kind of pure-dance theater that is "just about the movement." But there is, at the other end of the spectrum, a kind of dance theater that's about life in the body: movement, physicality, relationship, sexuality, love, hate, anger. It's made of stylized, heightened action, is sometimes closer to acting than to "dancing," and can be gritty, naturalistic, even journalistic. Both Jones and Goode work this end of the spectrum, using gay themes that obviously grow directly out of their lives. Both of them rose to prominence in the AIDS era - i.e., when there was no cure in sight. Dancers then often performed as if there were no tomorrow.

Goode's breakthrough piece, 29 Effeminate Gestures, could have been the anthem of ACT UP. It put gay anger on the map in a new way that made him famous nationally. The pieces he made about his friends dying of AIDS melted your heart and made you love him, and won him New York's Bessie Award, their highest honor for modern dance.

Goode does not have HIV, but Jones does; back in the 1980s, Jones and his partner, Arnie Zane, who had AIDS and was dying, made dances about their relationship which were formally innovative and electrifying theatrical exploitations of personal material. I'm using the word exploitative retrospectively; at the time, it was a fighting word - who were critics to tell dying people that they were exploiting themselves? When Arlene Croce, the great critic at The New Yorker, did rebuke Jones for such self-abuse, she was destroyed in one of the great critical contretemps of that era, from which the dust has not yet settled.

Goode and Jones are both still here, and they've both made spooky shows - reverberating, echo-filled theater-pieces with some thrilling dance, moves that seem quite secondary to the words that careen like cannonballs in a war inside the psyche. Both resemble those dreams from which you can't wake up, where the sounds in your head set up a cacophony of tension, and you can't decide what they mean or what to do.

Goode's Dead Boys is a melodrama he's written for UC's Department of Theater, Dance and Performance Studies (where he's been invited onto the faculty). It centers on a young gay artist, kind of a loner, who lives in a boardinghouse with some friends, but suffers nightmares about gay boys being choked, beaten, drowned; he comes to find out they're real. Most of the action is psychodrama, and it's expanded and made eloquent by the shimmering, sad music of Holcombe Waller, the folk/indie Portland composer who's collaborated with Goode; the piece is not through-composed like an opera, but previews of it put me in mind of an opera like Dialogues of the Carmelites. The show opened the weekend of Oct. 10, and continues this weekend at Zellerbach Playhouse. David K.H. Elliott's visionary lighting creates haunting effects.

The actors (aside from Prof. Lura Dolas, who is tremendous as the landlady) are students, but they are talented. It remains to be seen how well they can maintain an atmosphere which requires so much suspension of disbelief, but the material itself is haunting, and, in the sketches I've seen so far, I recognize much of my own experience as a queer trying to sort out my identity, my hopes and fears, and find ways of connecting to others. I had to leave for DC before the show opened, but it seems very promising, and honest in its conception.

Honest Abe
Jones' ambitious Fondly do we Hope, Fervently do we Pray arrived at the Yerba Buena Center hot from its premiere last month at Chicago's Ravinia Festival, which commissioned a piece about the bicentennial of Abraham Lincoln's birth. It owes a lot to Ken Burns' Civil War documentaries and our familiarity with them. Jones quotes Lincoln like a preacher quoting Scripture, and bends old hymn tunes to his purposes.

It's dangerous not to praise Bill T. Jones. (Look what happened to Croce.) He's in a position to flip liberal guilt like a ju-jitsu artist, since he's both gay and African-American, and as a postmodern New Yorker, he's seen how his fellow artists in the visual media pay more attention to crafting their reputations than their pictures. The fascinating thing is that he really does play it close to the edge. He used to parody "I'm Chevy Chase, and you're not" by coming out onstage. He'd posture, strip down to a little white skirt or the altogether, and harangue the audience, "I've got AIDS, and you don't," and he'd get away with it. Or he'd get his mother onstage to sing a gospel song (she's great) and dance to that. He worked your nerves.

He's still doing that. The center of the piece is a poetry slam echoing the Lincoln-Douglas debate. He's on both sides of every question, even suggesting that he's got sympathy with states' rights.

A piece with so much discord requires powerful containing forces to keep it from exploding, and the organizing forces were glorious.....

For the whole thing: here.

I didn't do either in my review for the Financial Times tomorrow of the popular European choreographer Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui's Orbo Novo. There were other things, for which I felt distinct dislike, such as the dance's confusion about its stance towards its material (a woman entering nirvana by suffering--if that's even the right way to put it-- a stroke). It's okay for the choreographer to be ambivalent, but the ambivalence needs to be part of the work's structure rather than passed off surreptitiously on the viewers. 

So about that movement, Cherkaoui has devised an edgeless, Gumby style mosaic of motion. No limb ever straightens all the way; no phrase ever finishes, it simply subsides. After a while it makes me feel blurry. On the one hand, I've never seen anything quite like it before (though nearly). On the other, I don't really care if I see anything quite like it again.

Is newness so important that it doesn't matter what is new?

Probably.

Speaking of novelty and problems, I'd been listening to Saul Bellow's Augie March on CD and marveling over--everything, really, but I guess what I could land on as blowing my mind was the way he lined up adjectives, each one pushing and pulling against the ones nearby to create something entirely more alive than each would be alone. It infected me and I tried my own version. Couldn't pull it off.  

Here's a bit of the Cherkaoui review. (And here's the whole review): 

Like many ironists, Belgian choreographer Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui harbours a secret gushy heart, and in Orbo Novo it leaks out.

The fault may lie with the 70-minute work's inspiration, neuroscientist Jill Bolte Taylor's Oprah-endorsed account of chancing upon a world of peace, love and understanding: the right hemisphere of her brain. When a blood vessel burst in the chattering, contentious, obsessive-compulsive left half, "the little voice that says, 'Hey, remember to pick up bananas on the way home'," went mute, she writes, and left her "an energy being" floating in the here and now, "perfect, whole and beautiful".

This first stateside commission for Cherkaoui - from Cedar Lake, New York's answer to pointe-free athletico-conceptual European contemporary dance - begins by throwing up defensive barriers to Taylor's woozy utopia.....

For the whole thing: here

I go on to complain about the dancers. I know half the town adores the Cedar Lake crew--as do many professional dancers in illustrious New York companies--so what's wrong with me? There's something about them that seems professional in the bad sense: proficient, versatile, but insufficiently invested in the movement before them. I have no doubt they're invested in dancing, but I'm not convinced they care enough about what they're dancing. It's the liability of an ominivore rep company.

Here, though, some dancers I liked:

Golan Yosef, Jon Bond, Acacia Schachte, Jason Kittelberger. Photo by Julieta Cervantes.