foot in mouth: April 2009 Archives

Here's the review of mine I promised to link to--in the wonderful Financial Times,  where the dear, charming Hilary Ostlere used to write.

Please click!

One of the heavenly tangles in Nearly Ninety (dancers Silas Reiner, Holley Farmer, and Koji Mizuta; Photo: Andrea Mohin/The New York Times)

A few followup notes:

So we critics agreed about one thing, at least, that Nearly Ninety's set by architect Benedetta Tagliabue was massively obtrusive. (Tonya Plank kindly lists all the reviews that have been printed or posted as of yesterday.)

I also agree with Alastair Macaulay in the Times that the number of hapless collaborations--with musicians and particularly artists--has grown in the last several years. The big problem for me is when the companion arts push in a narrative or social direction, precisely where Cunningham doesn't go. (I'm thinking of the Robert Gober slides at the last Joyce Event and Mikel Rouse's folkish songs, with words, for eyeSpace.)

Perhaps Cunningham's age is partly responsible for the bad fits. The artists and musicians he grew up with--artistically, I mean--are mainly dead (Rauschenberg, Cage, Tudor, Feldman). They shared his aesthetic and understood the requirement of his theater--that dancing is the most fleet of the arts and needs to be protected from intrusions in a way that sound and set don't. So if you're going to have a set that covers the whole stage--make it as ineffable as the dance (e.g., Andy Warhol's silver mylar pillows for Rainforest.) If it's going to constrain the dancers, make that constraint something that the choreographer can work with (the rubber bindings for Crises). Same with a set that partially eclipses the dancers. (Rauschenberg's Impressionist costumes that blend with the Impressionist backdrop for Summerspace was a magical effect.)

To work Tagliabue's massive structure into the dance, Cunningham would have had to start way before nearly 90 and end way after (Nearly 95, anyone?) Remember how, to create Ocean, he considered the movement from all 360 degrees of the circular stage? Tagliabue's structure would have offered equal challenges. Without the time for them, this shiplike skeleton reduced Cunningham's multidimensional, anti-proscenium orientation to two dimensions: back and forth, along the lip of the stage.

The music worked for me precisely because it honored Cageian principles and Cageian clarity. (About a decade ago, Sonic Youth did a whole Cage "cover" album, so they're no strangers to the man.) It brought to mind birds rising en masse from a wire, calling into the air; the scrape of industrial metal against metal on an icy early morning; and sometimes just a languid tune on an electric guitar played as if in a livingroom. The musicians attended lovingly to the dance.

I think, as critics, we need to be careful that we're not simply knocking the collaborations' looseness--that Cunningham lets the artists and musicians do what they will. Or if we are, we need to know it.

A not very tender document of the most tender of duets, with Jennifer Goggans and Daniel Squire. In the background a 3-D elaboration of shadows of the monster set behind the scrim (Photo: Andrea Mohin/The New York Times).

PPS: A little more on the pathos of opposite impulses I mentioned in my review: it's why I'll miss Daniel Squire as much as Holley Farmer. He makes a gripping drama out of staying upright. When he does those iconic sideways Cunningham curves, it's as if the earth were calling.

Both he and Farmer distinguish themselves in the company with the contrasting dynamics that play across their body. At the end of Squire's typically angular Cunningham arms are hands with relaxed fingers. Cunningham has said, "Drama is contrast"--and here it is. Squire's body bends as tautly as a bow, but his head turns loosely and sharply. With Farmer, it's her head that reposes regally atop her spine while her torso prickles with twitchiness.

The postcard for Vicky Shick's Glimpse--commissioned by the Extremely Hungary Festival and Danspace Project at St. Mark's Church, which presented the dance last weekend--is a photo of a worn Hungarian-English dictionary opened to a page of ps: pelda to pince. Penz follows pentek as money does Friday only to take off on a byway: pep (pulp; the flesh pitted of structure). That's how the soft, sensual Glimpse works, too.

A woman rolls her shoulder, and the motion ripples all the way down her spine through the sexy smile of a hip to a loose foot. She swings her arm before her, where it grazes the earlobe of the dancer facing her and, like an electric current, moves through him. A relationship has formed: between the shoulder, arm, and fingers of one person and the earlobes and spine of another, and thus between two people. The exchanges in Glimpse give off an at once jaunty and ominous air.

The riveting dancers--I was especially glued to Hungarian Hedvig Fekete, the blessedly ubiquitous New Yorker Christine Elmo, and Shick--mix fluid articulation with mildly theatrical insouciance. The movements communicate like a person talking to herself out loud before an imaginary audience. The effect is slyly comic. Shick finds the place where private musing meets public wanting, wondering, and inching forward toward another.

Improbably for someone long associated with the deeply structural and plotless Trisha Brown, for whom she danced and for whom she now teaches, Shick makes dance theater. But in keeping with her inheritance, its origins are strictly physical; it emanates from the body's joints.

Shick thinks associatively; her association for movement traveling through the body is clusters of stories that do not grip one's mind, or the people involved, but instead arouse a suspended state of attention--a readiness for epiphany or communion--as beauty does.

Critics have long praised Shick, who premieres work every couple of years in downtown spaces, for her subtlety and suggestiveness. They talk of her "elegance." They don't mention her good manners, but she has those, too. In Still Lives, at The Kitchen in 2000, with Juliette Mapp and Jodi Melnick arresting and unflinching, Shick sat on the sidelines like a maid waiting for her bell. Occasionally she rose to fuss over the set or the women's stiff, gorgeous costumes. Her subservience--an accessory to her own creation--was excruciating.

In Glimpse, former Trisha Brown dancer Diane Madden performs that role, entering at intervals to offer crystal shot-glasses of brandy to the dancers. But it's no accident that the help brings hard liquor here: Glimpse possesses a frankness, a bawdiness of intent, that I haven't seen from Shick before--and it's as welcome as a stiff drink. 

Two years ago, "at the risk of offending the entire modern dance community" (she probably did), the excellent Lisa Rinehart wrote a highly critical review of Shick for the Danceview Times. The softness of meaning in Shick's work was driving Rinehart crazy. The occasion was Plum House (A Cartoon) and Repair at Dance Theater Workshop (DTW), but the review was far-reaching.

And brutal, like shaking someone who is softly crying until her teeth rattle. But (after recoiling) I had to admit there was something unfinished about the dances of Shick's I'd seen. The problem for me wasn't meandery meaning as much as decorousness--just a few steps removed from the delicacy for which Shick is justly beloved. Her gentility can shade into a self-apology that she seems only half-conscious of; it can linger in the shadows like an anxious mother keeping tabs on her voluptuous, heedless daughter.

Glimpse endows that mother-servant with the hard flesh of will; we can see her clearly now--a powerful counterspirit to a dance so ripe, it's just this side of bruised.