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I should have mentioned Neil Greenberg's show at DTW already, as I've never seen anything by him I haven't liked, if not been deeply moved by. (I'm going Friday, tonight--and may have more to say later). Thankfully, Foot in Mouth contributor Eva Yaa Asantewaa reminded me, with this rave on her blog:

Everybody's thrilled by and writing about Neil Greenberg's new Really Queer Dance with Harps, and you should really queerly or otherwise see it--especially for the radiant trio of harpists, led by composer Zeena Parkins, at the golden heart of the piece. But my own really queer heart has gone and continues to go out to Quartet with Three Gay Men, the 2006 work danced by Greenberg, Luke Miller, Antonio Ramos and Colin Stillwell. It's just--hooray!--11 minutes, and some of that time is spent dancing to RuPaul's "Supermodel (You Better Work)." Can't go wrong, in my book, with RuPaul. And it's a fantastic dance, too, like a prism breaking Greenberg into four avatars who render his spacious movement with luscious, queerforward simplicity. Oh, did I mention it's only 11 minutes? Brevity, the soul of wit.

Dance Theater Workshop 's got Dance By Neil Greenberg through Saturday. Click here to watch a clip of Quartet with Three Gay Men (it's number 4 in the slideshow). Also click here for tickets, preview articles, more rave reviews, and an Artforum piece by Greenberg himself that's really smart. Greenberg should be a big star; the fact that we can see him and his incredible, eccentric dancers up close and for $25 (or less) is amazing for us, whatever it says about the situation of the artist in America. So, Enjoy!

 

Photo by Erin Baiano; borrowed from The New York Times.

I try not to resort too often to the common blog tactic of letting other writers do the work, but I won't be able to get anything up until next week and my colleague Joel Lobenthal, of the New York Sun, has written a wonderful tribute to the exceptional Wendy Whelan, of New York City Ballet. So I can't resist. Enjoy! 


Whelan and retired principal dancer Jock Soto in Christopher Wheeldon's "Polyphonia." Photo by Paul Kolnik for New York City Ballet.

I've seen many exciting ballets in the last few weeks--and I knew if I didn't write about them soon (all of them), I'd forget what I was thinking. So this roundup is altogether too long. In order not to fall into a stupor, perhaps you should read it in installments. The photos serve to separate the parts.

 

About Alexei Ratmansky's "Concerto DSCH," my friend Elaine exclaimed, "It's so real!"

    Of course, it's not real, it's ballet. But Ratmansky's eye for what people do together--become voyeurs, perpetrators, flirts, attention-hoggers, rivals, accidental lovers--is so wise and funny that he seems to have lifted scene after scene from life and translated it more perfectly than possible with translation into ballet. It's like when Marge and Homer Simpson become pilgrims--exactly as they've always been except now they're on the Mayflower.

    At one point late in the ballet--the score is Shostakovich's urbanely witty, then brooding, then buoyant Piano Concerto No. 2 in F major--a horde of dancers bursts onto the stage with little flat-footed hops, and everyone laughs, not only because the boing in the step is funny but because, performed en masse, it answers the drama that the dancers have just intruded on. You feel glee --and relief--to find aspects of humanity so instantly recognizable, no matter the language they're spoken in.

    It's tempting to compare Ratmansky to all the other choreographers I admire, not because he's derivative--not at all--but because he ratifies ballet's history by extending it. The choreographer whom he most reminds me of, though, is Jerome Robbins. (I swear, I had this thought before the Robbins festival at New York City Ballet began. Specifically, it was Ratmansky's "Bizet Variations," with its shades of the three rival sailors in "Fancy Free," that clinched the connection for me. That was during the BAM run this winter of Nina Ananiashvili's State Ballet of Georgia, which commissioned the ballet.)

    Ratmansky also makes a real place of the stage. He also is preoccupied with the psychology of the group and of the individual in the group; he also understands the corps not as a corps proper but as a bunch of people, whose relation to one another is constantly in flux. He also recognizes the punctuating power of exits and entrances (like the last word in a sentence or in a line of poetry). Most of all, he succeeds where Robbins desperately wanted to, but only sometimes did: he develops a language that jettisons conventional signs (for Robbins, the "cool" finger-snapping, the maidenly curtsying, the folksy jigs) for what those signs originally conveyed, before they became commonplace. Too often, Robbins got stuck in the middle, retaining the gestures while lifting them from their social context, so they quickly devolved into shtick. Ratmansky saves himself by inventing his own gestures. (He loves inventing steps as only perhaps Balanchine did, and he's got a keen sense of their evocative oomph.) Because the moves are never exactly what you'd see in the world, they offer it with wit and insight.

    On the same program-- it's called Here and Now--is "Rococo Variations," Christopher Wheeldon's last ballet as the company's resident choreographer. I dismissed it at its premiere this winter as even more frou-frou than its Tchaikovsky score, but now, on a third viewing, it seems to have deepened, grown full of mood. Of course I want to think Wheeldon went to work on it, fixing the transitions so that it now feels of a piece, but probably I'm the one who's changed.

    It's embarrassing to be so inconsistent. If I love a piece at first sight, I rarely love it less on a second go, but the other way around happens too often--especially, for some reason, with Wheeldon and Mark Morris.

    It took two visits before I could stand Morris's "Sylvia" and "Mozart Dances." Five for "V." (Believe me, I would have given up by then if the dance hadn't appeared on mixed bills.) Two for Wheeldon's "American in Paris." But I'm not sliding from admiration to adoration here, I'm leaping from impatient dislike to swoony love--a vast distance. 

    Maybe it's a musical thing. Both Wheeldon and Morris respond in detail to their scores, and when their interpretations depart radically from my own dreamy visualizations, I spend the first visit or two simply adjusting--reading the words but not grasping the sentences. I'm glad to have the luxury (the free tickets!) to come again.

Last chance for "Rococo Variations" and "Concerto DSCH" this season: Thursday, 8 pm, State Theater, Lincoln Center. Orchestra, 3^rd and 4^th ring seats still available. Nycballet.com. (The program consists of four ballets; the ones in the middle are bad, in my humble opinion. You could take a break for dinner and come back for the Ratmansky.) 

 

 

 

Speaking of being quickly dismissed--and of music revisited--British choreographer Michael Clark didn't get many reviews for his two programs to Stravinsky scores, presented last week at the Rose Theater as part of Lincoln Center's Great Performers series. So it's nice that the trusty old Times sent a reviewer to both programs--except they sent the same reviewer, Claudia La Rocco, and she didn't like either show! (Once it was clear that Clark irritated her, it was nuts to subject her--and us--to a second drubbing. The Times should have sent someone else.)

    Where La Rocco saw meagerness, sterility, and stale, '80s outrageousness, I found a lot to be intrigued by. (I only saw the second program, which featured "Mmm..." to Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring" and "I Do"--pictured above--to "Les Noces.") But that's neither here nor there: we're entitled to our different views. I do take issue, though, with the bind La Rocco puts an artist in who wants to respond to dance history or even just the music of dance history.

    She concludes her review of "I Do" and "Mmm..." with,

There are neat touches throughout the two works. But Mr. Clark is going up against history here, and neat doesn't quite do the trick.

    If Clark had followed the usual plot line of the ballets, the result would likely be derivative, if not hokey (see: Robbins' "Les Noces"). Instead, he acknowledges the scores' canonical status by assuming we know the story and allowing himself to take a more oblique approach, and he's accused of skirting the issue ("neat touches"). What, then, is there for him to do? This music cries out, as it always has, to be danced to, and we critics should be careful not to muffle that cry.

    For what it's worth, "Mmm..." and "I Do" seemed to me mainly modest and serious (albeit with kinky embroidery), intent on approaching the music in both highly conceptual and highly kinetic and spatial terms (these last two deliciously bound): a difficult approach, which does indeed make success unlikely, but a worthwhile one for its being so unusual.

    While the conventional response to the rhythmic bombast of "Rite" and "Noces" is to meet it beat for beat with percussive steps, Clark translates rhythm into an angularity of the body. The dancers move in flat, Cunninghamesque tilts with right-angled arms. The pieces' necessary texture comes by way of flurries of steps, turns that go against sense, torsos softly abandoning their clear lines to gyre and implode, entrances and exits that materialize unexpectedly (half the time through rotating mirrored panels at the back, which open onto a cement back wall and spotlights beaming directly into our eyes. Ingeniously creepy.).

    The penchant for the planar is very British contemporary-dance-- Richard Alston and Russell Maliphant have it, too--and Americans tend to find it a bit bland. Our strict angles--our Cunningham--is Cunningham, who is more explosive, more suddenly still, whose palette is both larger and more detailed. But the love that the Brits have for the most basic of Cunningham shapes--as if it were a miracle to flatten the body into an X or a Y, how much juice even in that!--is touching and contagious.

    I found the attention the Clark pieces invited was very like that of Cunningham dances, which have no narrative or dramatic arc, either. You get absorbed in the details and are not waiting for anything in particular. But with Clark, anyway, the devastatingly dramatic just may occur. "I Do" ends with the dancers in a tangle on the floor under sickly yellow light, as if they had been downed by poison gas and curled their limbs in to die. (Ah, the spectacle of forever after!) The bride, bedecked in what looks like a tea cozy cum dildo, stands above the wreckage. Trauma and drama presented as incident may be at odds with Stravinsky's "Rite" and "Noces"--all about anticipation, both of them--but so much the better.

Here's a one-minute clip from "Mmm..."  No more Michael Clark for Americans this year, but the company will be touring the Stravinsky fare to Luxembourg, Marseille, Suffolk, and Belfast this summer and fall. Click here for itinerary.

Twyla Tharp's "Rabbit and Rogue" for American Ballet Theatre is all anticipation. You keep waiting for the cartoon roustabouts Rabbit and Rogue and the Balanchinean corps slipping along behind them to either more fully converge or more completely diverge--rather than this semi-demi relationship.

    The premiere last week polarized critics, with more hating it than loving it. I fell somewhere in between, struck when it was over (and it is long) by what a feat it is to make a ballet--a real ballet, which this is, yes--without being struck by wonder at the ballet itself. I was never bored (though I did give way to exhaustion by the very end, having been in a state of anticipation for nearly an hour). But finally it seemed less than the sum of its parts.

    And parts "Rabbit and Rogue" certainly has. The corps is liquid and evanescent, very much in the mode of Tharp's last ballet for American Ballet Theatre, "The Brahms-Hayden Variations," with whatever meaning one derives arriving via the senses. The rapscallions Rabbit and Rogue, on the other hand, belong to the kind of cartoon world that needs a plot. I couldn't find one, but my Artsjournal colleague Tobi Tobias could (hers is my favorite among the reviews I read):

The pair [Rabbit (Herman Cornejo) and Rogue (Ethan Steifel)] sets out to see the world, accompanied by a colorful mix of music by the film composer Danny Elfman. Well, a postmodern idea of the world: They visit Hell, where Gillian Murphy and David Hallberg, alternately quarreling and making love, are the central patrons of a with-it nightclub where the required dress is black, skimpy and spangled. (Outfits by Norma Kamali.)

Next stop is Heaven, a peaceable kingdom, all white gowns and silver trousers, reigned over by Paloma Herrera and Gennadi Saveliev. In this place, one might find serene compatibility, even true love, perhaps bliss. Then the worlds commingle, as in real life.

    I did have the idea that our heroes existed in a different zone from everyone else, though primary colors for R and R, with the black and white for the rest, would have helped. But even this might not have been enough, because for the corps to tell a story, Rabbit and Rogue need one as well, and nothing really happens to them. (Have you ever met a cartoon character who wasn't defined by action? After all, what else do they have?) Rabbit and Rogue, endearingly danced by Cornejo and Steifel, end up seeming like filler in the neoclassical ballet Tharp actually wanted to make.

    Their antics might have at least employed cartoon rhythm. Film composer Danny Elfman's score has been disparaged for "lacking distinction," and it is a hodgepodge. But it starts out with a color and chug--one rhythmic pattern overlapping the next--that demands to be adhered to: Elfman is as dictatorial at the start as his hero Prokofiev. And still Tharp doesn't listen. Given how many of her early works depend on comic timing, it's surprising to find her deaf to it here. Perhaps she had to make the bulk of the dance before the score was finished.

    Besides the corps moving as silkily as a school of fish, the other unalloyed pleasure is Gillian Murphy as half of a "Rag" couple with the acclaimed David Hallberg. Tharp brings out Murphy's silent-movie-star charm; the ballerina returns the favor by inspiring Tharp's most interesting steps.

After roving across Japan and Korea, "Rabbit and Rogue" hops into Orange County in August. Click here for details.

 

Photos in order of appearance: "Concerto DSCH" by Paul Kolnik for the New York City Ballet; Michael Clark Company in "I Do" to Stravinsky's "Les Noces" for Lincoln Center Great Performers, photo by Stephanie Berger; and "Rabbit and Rogue" by Rosalie O'Connor for American Ballet Theatre.

 

To those of you who check in regularly: Thank you, I'm honored. And I apologize for the lull here.

I have a backlog of ballets I'm eager to respond to: Alexei Ratmansky's incredible premiere for New York City Ballet; Michael Clark's worthy Stravinsky nights at Lincoln Center Great Performances, too easily dismissed by the Times (the only paper to review it, I think); Tharp's admirably epic and somehow opaque "Rabbit and Rogue" for American Ballet Theatre, also given a Times beating (I detect a pattern here); and some more thoughts on Robbins--how much he tells you by his dancers' exits and entrances--as the Robbins festival at New York City Ballet continues. But I won't let myself do any of that until I finish a pile of paying work. So, we'll see how much you care by the time I get around to it.

In the meantime--or  in any case--check out regular Times contributor Claudia La Rocco's omnivore blog The Culturist on WNYC's web site: interesting stuff.

And if you're wanting some reflections on ballet while we're in the midst of the spring season, here are a few pieces from the Foot vault: me on "Serenade" (apropos of nothing, I know); and me on what can be done about ABT's "The Sleeping Beauty." Perhaps they have done it! (It's being reprised this month at the Met.)

La Mama is a casual kind of place. I've shown up to review a dance version of "Medusa" without anyone mentioning that there would be lots of talking--in Japanese. Or, a couple of Sundays ago, only half the advertised performers actually performed. The other half had gone the day before.

This easy spirit is perfect for the La Mama Moves festival, which just finished up (sorry!) its glorious three weeks. The festival was experimental in the root sense: artists goofing around.   

On the Mavericks in Motion program on May 18, the pieces made especially for the occasion--and probably in short time--were dopey, gross, brawling, oozy, highly allusive, and very much of the moment. (Heather Olson's solo, excerpted from her Dance Theater Workshop premiere in March, "Curious Awake Not Possible," was naturally more polished. I don't know what I would have thought of the drama as a whole, but this part, with the always-splendid Olson doing the dancing, possessed a compelling oddness and clarity.)

Aaron Draper's "Fruitshake Polaroid" calls to mind food commercials--all of them--where food fills in for some other appetite. A man and woman dance, romance, and stuff their faces with Ho-Hos.

You may say, okay, I get how that's gross, oozy, and allusive, but new? The references in the other dances aren't of recent vintage, either: not the psychedelic light shows or the grunge spirit that cinematographer Ray Roy's "Red Light Special" brings to mind, nor the cassette tapes featured prominently in Julian Barnett's "Sound Memory." But what does feel current is the very plenitude of retro allusions--the ease with which the choreographers borrow from the past. 

"Red Light Special" sets the scene with a video screen behind the dancers multiplying them tenfold in red and green as they move sluggishly in the flesh. It comes into its own when pasty-faced Roy, in boxer shorts, and his two lady companions, in hoodies and underpants, plunk down in a row of institutional metal folding chairs and spread their legs, subway style.

Roy is getting off in a clammy, crackhead way on the nearness of them, while they, looking slovenly and hung over, are maintaining a heavy-lidded glumness, like he found them that day at the Laundromat after someone had stolen their clothes. If the American Apparel models let some natural light into their fluorescent cubes, it might look like this.

As I've complained on Foot more than once about the lack of movement invention among youngish choreographers, I should say that they are keen on the social realm. My favorite example on Sunday--the whole year, even--was Julian Barnett's "Sound Memory (work in progress)." 

The piece gives off such light in its unfinished state that you worry it might lose more than it gains by being completed. (Then--nature abhorring a vacuum--you figure out what might be gained and stop worrying.)

The dance begins in the pitch black. Someone empties a box of cassette tapes onto the floor and scoots them one by one across the space. It turns out that cassettes dropped and scattered make a sound so distinct that you can identify it in the dark. "Sound  Memory" calls up many things that have lain in the dark.

You may only remember a song's words and tune after it begins, but you usually know in advance how it will make you feel. It's as if the song were unwinding from you as much as from the tape: a reverse déjà vu, the song on tape imagined while the song in you is real. Sometimes the experience is inverted: you realize you've forgotten how much pleasure a song has given, over and over again. For weeks or months or years while you were thinking of other things, it held that pleasure, like someone holding a place for you in line.

That mix of certainty and anticipation--everything will proceed in order, and you will have to, you will get to, take it bit by bit--is specific to tape-playing. With an iPod or even with a record player (God forbid!), no one ever has to wait. And with an iPod, you can choose not only a particular tune but even randomness. (What kind of randomness is it, anyway, if you get to choose it?) Tape-playing has us wait for what we can't quite remember until it arrives.

"Sound Memory" gets at this boredom and relief, private memory and collective ritual, by very simple means. Three dancers (Barnett, Patrick Ferreri, and Hanna Kivioja) take turns picking cassettes off the floor, stuffing them into their individual boom boxes, and dancing alone to the song.

Years ago, these songs spent months in heavy rotation. Most of them are like the Counting Crows' "Mister Jones": dumb lyrics ("...and I felt so symbolic yesterday") and a dumb yet catchy beat. The dancer occasionally seems to be responding to the lyrics. More often, the song is only a point of departure--departed from so long ago, no one could possibly follow the path back.

Whenever someone says a dance is left open to our imaginations, I'm pretty sure I won't like it. Doesn't all dance do that? So what does it mean to announce it? "Sound Memory" doesn't leave the dance open to our imagination, it explores what an imagination does with what gets handed to it. The encodedness of this dancing is funny and to the point.

The dances to the individual songs could have been more distinct from person to person and song to song. My friend Elaine hoped Barnett would deploy a quasi-Cunninghamesque method as he proceeded: make a bunch of short dances, some of them to specific songs and some of them randomly assigned a song. The dancers then have this enormous repertory of dances in their heads--as we have song memories in ours--which they call up on the instant when a tape is picked off the floor.

What was amazing and rare was the texture--the way the dance fell in and out of formality. Sometimes it was antitheatrical: the dancer picking up a tape and plunking it in the player in a thoroughly pedestrian way, or losing the thread of his improvisation midway and just diddling around. And sometimes it was tightly rehearsed--the dancers tumbling over each as they progressed along a diagonal late in the piece. Usually when dances alternate back and forth like this, it means the choreographer doesn't know what he's doing. Here, it felt like listening to tapes: sometimes you're just listening and sometimes you're remembering. Sometimes it's in real time and sometimes it has the smooth patina of dream-memory. "Sound Memory (work in progress)" is the raw and the cooked together. 

Look for Julian Barnett's "Sound Memory" at Danspace Project at St. Mark's Church in March.

****** 

"Sound Memory" made me think of all sorts of mental habits that current technology has made obsolete.

When you called someone before there were answering machines, you imagined the person walking to the phone, which was grafted to the wall or planted on a surface. If it kept ringing--and you could let it ring for as long as you wanted--you imagined the empty house and no one hearing the ring except maybe the dog, if he was home. And what did it mean to him?

Then there was being called--the mystery of it. You had no idea who it might be, and you had time to think about it. Nothing was going to happen if you didn't answer on the fourth ring except maybe the person would hang up. There was no answering machine to make you feel like a cheat. If you didn't want to answer, you could count the rings and extrapolate how much this person really wanted to talk to you (or maybe your sister, mother, father, or brother.)

In the second house I grew up in, people didn't call much, though they did come by--my mother's friends and the enticing friends of the artist who lived in our basement.

The basement arrangement was supposed to be temporary--the artist moved in because his girlfriend, who lived next door, had dumped him. But he was there for years, until another girlfriend took him in.

The basement, which mainly consisted of a carport, had no windows. When he wanted outside light, he'd open the carport door--his front door--and hang out in the driveway, him and his paint-speckled friends. The subject of his paintings, were, appropriately, cars. Big cars, little cars, red cars, blue cars.

When he got drunk, he would call--and call and call and call and call. It was like having the troll who usually stays under the bridge move in. You could practically hear him dialing before the ringing began.

My father didn't live with us, so he was the person I most looked forward to hearing from. For a year after he died, when the phone would ring I'd be halfway through anticipating it was him before I remembered it couldn't be.

Then I moved away to college, and there was nowhere to anchor that tense, achy hope to.

The phone and the home and the hope were of a piece for me, but I wonder whether in this evermore portable world the imagination binds itself more and more loosely to places and things. 

"At Large" is bursting with ideas, dances, experiments in approaching the audience and the world--probably too much of everything, with some of the connecting threads too thin. But how nice for a change, this rigorous excess rather than the usual dour minimalism or clubby encodedness (like a party where every cluster is a closed circle--to you, anyway, as you wander, with plastic cup of bubbly water in hand.) Bauer herself, who's not even 30, is the perfect exemplar of her aesthetic-- a bold, big-boned, luscious, comic dancer, elastic in her morphing from Broadway to hiphop to bharatanatyam to a modern-dance windy tangle of moves. The world is her oyster--and she invites us in.

Anyway, you only have until tonight, Saturday, to catch it. At the Chocolate Factory Theater, 5-49 49th Ave., Long Island City, Queens. Visit Dtw.org for details. 

 
One prong of the "At Large" project--the show is only one aspect --is a lovely pocket-sized booklet that we all get a copy of when we attend the show. A whole bunch of dancers and choreographers respond to questions with potentially no end to answers, such as "Why do you dance?" "Why do you make dances?" "Why do you go to see dance?"

The answers get less interesting as they go. Almost everyone has something striking to say about why they dance. For example: "I dance because I started dancing when I was three and it's become a condition" and "Becoming a dancer was a way to give a body to my life, because I was very ghostly." Fewer people get much out of watching other people dance. Most regard it as a professional obligation. Here's a wry example: "[B]eing in the field for a long time, it's very rare but sometimes dance performances, the performers, the dances, can....touch me." Hee hee. I also love this response: "I'm looking for a complexity I understand, not a complexity that I feel I should understand and don't." Down with guilt-inducing obscurantism!

Speaking of which and otherwise apropos of nothing, here are a couple of sentences from the eminently grouchy cultural critic Theodor Adorno. The book is his turgid yet intriguing Aesthetic Theory. It has been lying around my apartment for a long while, and I have finally assigned myself a couple of sentences a day. Each sentence is its own puzzle--with the one preceding and following not helping much. As for these two from page 6, I know what he means...

The basic levels of experience that motivate art are related to those of the world from which they recoil. The unsolved antagonism of reality returns in artworks as problems of form.  [Emphasis added.]

I received this email recommendation from freelance dance writer Lori Ortiz of  exploredance.com and the Performance Arts Journal yesterday:

 

Hi Apollinaire,

 I saw Douglas Dunn's press preview of "tanks under trees" last night. The show runs through Sunday at his SoHo loft, which he has turned into a theater with stadium seating. It's an opportunity to see amazingly evocative dancing by Dunn, Liz Filbrun, Paul Singh, and Christopher Williams--dancers we can never see enough of. Also if you haven't heard poet Anne Waldman read, there's another must-see. She moves among the dancers and is totally invested. It's completed by Mimi Gross's paintings--real, made with a brush-- and has live cello and percussion.

 I am telling you about it because it's one of only two companies I've seen this season that directly addresses Iraq. (The other is Rebecca Kelly Ballet.) It is so important that some artists are attentive. Although  "tanks under trees" is mostly about environmental doom, it ends strongly on an upbeat. The dance is loaded and energizing. Even palliative.

 Lori

 

Apollinaire responds: Lori, thanks for the heads up. Yes, Douglas Dunn's dances can be wonderful--and his dancers always are. Readers, take note.

I'm always on the lookout for dances that address Iraq, too, directly or indirectly. Recent ones I've seen have included Los Angelena Victoria Marks' "Not About Iraq Dance" at Danspace (intermittently effective--still, worth seeing), British-Bangladeshi Akram Khan and Belgian-Moroccan Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui's astounding "zero degrees" at City Center and, yesterday, French Algerian Rachid Ouramdane's "Far...," which goes the route of most young choreographers vis a vis the war: a lot of lying around plus some variation of shaking in place. (Ouramdane's shaking was more fluid than most: a variation on hiphop popping and locking.)

Alastair Macaulay of the Times was very impressed, but he hasn't been here long enough to be worn out by the inertia. Inertia is the new movement, as the glossies might put it. It was interesting for the first couple of years, but by now it would be better to say something than to say over and over again that you are too traumatized to say anything. When everyone's doing this, it may be just as heartfelt as when only one person is, but it doesn't feel that way.

"Far..." compensates for the movement cliches with its use of voice and face and web of space. The heart of the piece is spoken testimonies--very relaxed, conversational--from the choreographer's mother, plus other people Ouramdane's age also viewing the war through the semi-obscured lens of their parents. The Vietnam War, as it happens, but we get the connection.

While we hear the person on tape, a door-shaped screen at an oblique angle reveals a part of his face--like the memory we're getting only some shadowy version of. On the floor are mirrors like midnight lakes, as if we were looking down on a map of a terrain bleached of color and light. A skein of strings only one shade lighter than the gray ground--subtle, flickering in and out of consciousness--webs between these dark reflective surfaces. Everything is bathed in Pierre LeBlanc's midnight-blue light. The club music that alternates with the speaking ricochets across the space, too. I like Macaulay's point that the piece journeys through a collective unconscious (though I would say it's a semiconscious).

  About war pieces or the lack thereof, Lori, I'm surprised there aren't more movement works, given how bodily warfare is. A choreographer could do so much with the ducking, the scrambling, the marching, the machismo, the intimidating, the torturing and being tortured, the barreling around in Humvees, the being blown up. I know, I know: someone's going to say this is a hokey idea, and presumptuous to imitate a war we're so removed from. It doesn't have to be hokey, though. If you unloaded the movement from its generic meanings, took it apart piece by piece to see what the movement itself said, there might be something there. Or a choreographer could do the opposite--work with the cartoon notions of the foreigner and us the "rescuers,"  as in the "South Park" boys' brilliant, hilarious animated movie "Team America."

But choreographers would have to be interested in movement. The current generation of experimentalists mainly isn't. I probably would have liked "Far..." more if it hadn't reminded me that contemporary choreographers with structural or conceptual savvy invariably offer mostly muttery moves.

Is speaking through movement (about something other than one's muteness) now considered an uptight thing--the exclusive domain of nerds and dorks?


UPDATE, Monday a.m.: Lori Ortiz and Foot contributor Eva Yaa Asantewaa offer interesting responses here.


Photo of Rachid Ouramdane in "Far..." by Julien Jourdes, borrowed from the New York Times.

When you're feeling refreshed, there's also my son of "Watermill" post, on Robbins' "Dybbuk," here.

So, while Robbins' "Watermill" (1972) has something of a story but you don't know why it matters (see the last post), "Dybbuk's" meaning and pathos are perfectly clear, even if the plot you worry you're supposed to be following isn't.

 
Of the two problems, I'll take the second every time. After all, even with "Swan Lake," I can't entirely decode the mime. But when Odette is describing how she ended up a swan, I do understand there's a good reason for her terror. With "Dybbuk"--in which Robbins was trying to devise a form in between story ballet and dramatic but storyless ballet, as he was for "Watermill" --all there is to feel and think is available to you once you get an idea of how the piece works. "Dybbuk" is more a commentary on the story than a telling of it. It helps to know the story--and then not worry about it.

 Solomon Ansky's "The Dybbuk" inspired the dance. The canonical 1914 Yiddish play is about two children whose fathers pledge to one another at birth. The boy, eventually a religious scholar, dies when he discovers the girl's father plans to marry her to a rich merchant. His spirit possesses her until she also dies, to join him.

 In "Dybbuk," the male chorus (excellent, with special kudos to Sean Suozzi) plays several parts in turn: the mystics who teach the boy, the angels of this fated love, and the village elders who will not let the dybbuk possess the girl, Leah, until an archangel bears down on them. Sometimes it's not clear who is who, but the confusion serves a purpose, suggesting that these ties that bind like the tefillin snaking around the cabalists' arms (costumiere Patricia Zipprodt wonderfully reimagines customary Chasidic--and angel--garb) are constrictive but also protective, loving but also punishing. Talk about ambiguity!

Janie Taylor as the possessed. On Sunday Joaquin De Luz, a dramatic, crazed spirit, plays opposite her again. Photo by Paul Kolnik for the New York City Ballet.

Janie Taylor (yay! she's back!) as the doubly betrothed Leah brought out all that conflict by stretching ballet form--in arcs and lines of yearning and despair--almost to the breaking point.

 The dance wasn't well received at its 1974 premiere, which makes some sense. "Fiddler on the Roof" could be a hit because it mainly skirted the whole religious question for the safer domain of ethnicity, while "Dybbuk" dips right in. But now that even the religion of what was once dubbed "the world of our fathers" seems less terrible--after all, how many of us even have fathers who wrapped their arms in tefillin for morning prayer?-- I don't understand why it's not better liked.

 You have one more day--Sunday matinee--to give it a try. It's part of a fantastic triple bill, "Bernstein Collaborations," with Robbins' sailor dance "Fancy Free" and a really excellent compaction of "West Side Story" that the choreographer created a few years before he died. People left the theater humming.

 

Cheap standby tickets for students. Go to nycballet.com for details.

Sometimes when a Jerome Robbins ballet is making me cringe, I think of Deborah Jowitt's observation in her wonderful Robbins bio that if the choreographer felt a conflict between Broadway and ballet--the standard take on his career--it was only because of a more fundamental opposition he set up for himself: between theatrical effect and "the delicious ambiguity that dance permits," she says.

The problem is, it's a false dichotomy. Theatrical effect and poetic ambiguity aren't opposites, they're on the same continuum. Ambiguity, metaphor, feeds off the concrete just as much as storytelling does. Robbins' misunderstanding of what people who are anxious about it tend to call "abstraction" caused him all sorts of trouble--including "Watermill," which reappeared last Friday at New York City Ballet after a deserved rest of nearly two decades.

 

Nikolaj Hubbe in "Watermill."  Photo, Paul Kolnik for New York City Ballet.

"Watermill" involves a middle-aged man tripping on his life. (The captivating Edward Villella originated the role in 1972; for this run, NYCB has recruited the recently retired Nikolaj Hubbe, whose beautifully ravaged body is perfect for the part.) Reclining among bundled stalks of marsh grass, the man hallucinates his frisky youth, love affairs that went on without him, and a beautiful woman (Kaitlyn Gilliland) hypnotically brushing her hair. Teiji Ito's flute and percussion score sets the meditative tone.

If a stranger said, "I love a woman who brushes her hair," he'd still be a stranger. You'd want to know, Is it the untangling of her tresses, the sensuality of the strokes, the ritual of hygiene, the way she inclines her head--what? Or, because you'd know too little to begin with, you wouldn't want to know anything. Even with its protagonist in his underpants, the most naked thing about this ballet is Robbins' earnest conviction that he's saying something by leaving so much out.

Choreographers are still making this mistake--supposing that if they keep things open, they're giving us more freedom to imagine. Imagination doesn't need freedom, it needs something to dig its claws into. And Robbins proves again and again with his unabashedly theatrical work ("Fancy Free" and "Afternoon of a Faun," for example) that he knows this. He knows that the situation and the steps--the denotation and the connotation--don't run on separate tracks. He knows that you don't have more of one when you're missing the other.

But he forgets nearly everything when he's trying to be an Artist, rather than just make a dance.

 

What, you still want to see it?  As part of the Robbins celebration at New York City Ballet that lasts through June (33 Robbins ballets on 10 distinct programs), "Watermill" plays once more, this Thursday, with the ebulliently goofy "Four Seasons."  Cheap standby tickets for students. Go to nycballet.com for details.

Readers have wanted to know why I haven't said anything about all the critic layoffs these past several weeks.

 Here's Claire Willey from San Francisco (to represent you all!):

 Apollinaire-

 I was saddened that nobody has spoken up about the nationwide loss of fulltime dance critics. Deborah Jowitt has lost her place at the Village Voice, Lewis Segal was dismissed from the Los Angeles Times, and Laura Bleiberg is leaving the Orange County Register. Newspapers are on the decline.

It seems that there is no money for a full-time critic in any major newspaper except the NY Times. There is an overwhelming number of "media outlets," but each seems more dubious and unverifiable than the last.

Where does this leave the dance community? How will our art change with the loss of the knowledge and provocation of our major critics? How are Youtube, Myspace, and Facebook affecting dance? When everyone has a say, then whom do we trust? And if no one reads the major newspapers, then how can we reach the larger community?

There has been some vast changes over the last 10 years, and yet it seems that we are facing some of the same problems. I'd love to hear your feedback.

Thanks! Claire

 Dear Claire,

Before I chime in, here's my friend Paul Parish, irregular Foot contributor, who seconds your emotion and answers some of your questions. His email arrived about the same time as yours: 

Sat last night behind Louis Segal at the final program of San Francisco Ballet's New Works Festival, commiserated with him, and this morning read the following letter in the New Yorker [in response to this great article by regular Nation contributor Eric Alterman]:

Alterman's predicted demise of the newspaper is premature. Newspapers are still making good money while firing staffers or offering them buyouts. An industry that has garnered profit margins of twenty-five to thirty per cent--figures that other businesses could only dream about--flies into a panic when the margin dips to seventeen per cent. Do newspaper executives really believe that they can cure their ills by reducing their news holes and closing bureaus? In my view, as someone who has spent many years as a newspaperman and as a journalism professor at New York University and at California State University, Long Beach, a glaring failure of newspapers is in not making their importance known to the public. While the television, movie, and other industries inundate us with information about their exploits, newspapers are mostly silent about themselves. The newspaper industry and individual newspapers could well benefit today from the assistance of public-relations firms that are able to tell the story of newspapers that they themselves unfortunately don't--that they produce news coverage unlike any other medium. --M. L. Stein, Irvine, Calif.

It totally confirms my sense of why dance critics of the stature of Jowitt, Zimmer, Segal are getting fired. First the publishers are making the position untenable, then they blame the critic and take the position away. Cynically. It's just a business decision. They make more money that way. Stein is naive to think that the papers need better PR. They are flying under the radar--nobody will call them on their duty to inform the public if everyone thinks they're dying. But in fact democracy as we know it, for a 9-figure population, depends on common knowledge and real reporters saying to the best of their knowledge what they know and following up on developments -- not giving their opinions nor the weird and delightful things they'd like to think nor the Scenes We'd Have Liked to See....

Niche-things (blogs and Youtube) are taking up the Mad Magazine function very well, and Stewart and Colbert are great at it, and it has its place as a safety valve, but it is not a substitute for agreement-- and democracy requires us to agree to put up with what most people agree to do, even if it goes against what we think, believe, want. But to do that depends on everybody getting intelligible intelligence. The place of the arts in this is in training the sensibility so we know what bullshit tastes like when we're being fed it.

your friend in California,
Paul

Claire,

I'm with Paul most of the way. A few other thoughts, though. First, the reduction to freelance status of Jowitt and Segal, and the departure of Laura Bleiberg (perhaps she saw the writing on the wall) are terrible developments. Really depressing. I only haven't said so here because at this point the loss felt inevitable.

As Foot contributor Eva Yaa Asantewaa pointed out on her own blog more than a month ago, this shoe is not the first but nearly the last to drop, after the dance pages of newspapers and magazines have been halved or eliminated and a precedent set for dance criticism's irrelevance. The less there is of it, the less need there is for it, because criticism gains traction by numbers.

Whether she recognizes it or not, every critic has a particular philosophy of criticism from which she writes; when we read two excellent critics responding to the same work differently, we develop a philosophy of our own, "so we know what bullshit tastes like when we're being fed it," as Paul so vividly puts it. When, on the other hand, there's only one take on a show, then the review can really only function as a report or an opinion. It means less, dance means less, and then--as Paul points out--editors can justifiably decide they don't need any reviews anymore. A terrible chain of events.

Criticism was the secular, humanist answer to Talmudic commentary and Christian sermon: all advance by various species of beautiful argument.

And what will come next? On a good day, I think, Surely something new. On a bad, that argument will go the way of archery.

Which brings me to your question,

There is an overwhelming number of "media outlets," but each seems more dubious and unverifiable than the last. When everyone has a say, then whom do we trust? 

 I would say, trust writers who give you some idea of how a dance's meaning is made or impact created. Avoid writers who repeat truisms that art would likely question--you know, peppering their reviews with words like "elegant" and "beautiful" and "feminine," as if this weren't exactly what dance were trying to figure out again and again (what is elegant? What is beautiful? What is feminine?).

 As for your question--

Where does this leave the dance community? How will our art change with the loss of the knowledge and provocation of our major critics?

 --I wonder how much critics have ever affected the art. That they have affected its audience, I have no doubt.

 This being a blog, I should end by saying something about the wonderful World Wide Web. Well, I do think it's wonderful, as it enables me, for example, to write pieces I can't get paid for. (See here and here.)

 And advertisers are gravitating to the Web, so maybe writers will someday get paid. But probably not dance writers--because of the "world wide" part. Say you are the Joyce Theater, and you want to advertise a show on Tobi Tobias's Seeing Things blog here at Artsjournal. Readers may already be dance enthusiasts--good for the Joyce--but they're likely to be spread across the country--not so good. An art form as grounded in place as dance may have a hard time getting advertisers to transfer to the Web.

 And without pay, writers can only do so much. You can't be a Sunday writer if you're going to be any good. And if you don't have a trust fund or a well-paid partner, that's basically the time you'll have. So even formerly undubious writers will soon become dubious.

 Well, this has been a cheery post, hasn't it? And I have succumbed to complaining about our circumstances, which I started this blog to counter. But things have changed. A year and a half ago, I thought there was something we writers might do to improve our circumstances. I don't think so anymore.

UPDATE TUESDAY: Eva responds to a timely essay by Minnesota freelance dance critic Camille LeFevre here. (See comments for a taste of Eva's post, and the link to the essay she's responding to.)