Author (#9)August 2003 Archives

Summer used to be the season of doldrums in the dance world. Not so anymore on the New York dance scene, though this is clearly contrary to nature. We need a rest before the jam-packed fall season. We need a laid back stretch of time in which we watch dancing, if at all, in the country, where—at Jacob’s Pillow, for instance—its intensity is relieved by greenery, picnics, desultory antiquing, indolence. But no. This summer, as in several summers past, there was unremitting action in town. And this year some of it came from choreographers ranking among the field’s hardest hitters, Mark Morris and Twyla Tharp. The city rebelled. What, after all, did you think caused the Big Darkness? Folks just didn’t want to see things for a while.

My own body rebelled, too, and I succumbed to what the doc called “a little summer flu.” Consulted after I’d spent two days in a semi-conscious state, unable even—oh horror of horrors—to read, let alone get myself up, dressed, downtown, and inside a theater, he prescribed the regulation antibiotic. The drug did its job, as drugs tend to do. I then had to recover from the drug. More than a week has gone by without my really noticing it.

Meanwhile, however, I’ve managed to do two things. Thing One: I’ve stocked the two databases (those items running down the right hand column of this page) under the rubric of TOBIAS ELSEWHERE. Now, should you be so inclined, you can catch up with the ESSAYS and REVIEWS I’ve been writing in that lovely land called “elsewhere” that are electronically accessible. Since the future of dance writing, increasingly shunned at print venues, clearly lies in the realm of electronic publication, I’ve been directing my writing life accordingly.

Thing Two: I’ve sorted out the mountains of press releases luring me (and perhaps you) to dance action that will take place locally between Labor Day and the winter solstice. My chief Go Sees through Hallowe’en: Ballett Frankfurt (choreography by William Forsythe), Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) Opera House, Sept 30-Oct 4; U Theatre: "The Sound of Ocean," BAM Harvey, Oct 7-11; Suzanne Farrell Ballet, New Jersey Performing Arts Center, Oct 11, Brooklyn College, Oct 12 mat.; Merce Cunningham Dance Company, BAM Opera House, Oct 14-18; Ballet Nacional de Cuba, City Center, Oct 15-19; Susan Marshall & Company, BAM Harvey, Oct 21-25; Ronald K Brown/Evidence, Joyce, Oct 21-26; American Ballet Theatre, City Center, Oct 22-Nov 9; Reggie Wilson/Fist & Heel Performance Group, Joyce, Oct 22-Nov 1; Curt Haworth, Danspace, Oct 23-26; Ririe Woodbury Dance Company performing works by Alwin Nikolais, Joyce, Oct 28-Nov 2; Noche Flamenca, Lucille Lortel Theater, Nov 1-30 (previews Oct 29 & 30). More—much more—later.

For the middle two weeks in September, I’ll be in Copenhagen, where I plan to report on the Royal Danish Ballet, which will, conveniently, be offering a pair of programs during my stay that epitomize its split personality. The first is a “heritage” program featuring a new production of the incomparable Romantic-era choreographer August Bournonville’s La Sylphide. The staging has been entrusted to Nikolaj Hübbe, who, like many of Denmark’s spectacular male dancers, eagerly left his native land and company as soon as he could (he’s spent the major part of his performing career as a principal dancer with the New York City Ballet), but has, blessedly, never really severed his bond with the homeland. The second program will showcase the work of three balletic postmodernists. The Danes, who, despite the smallness of their numbers, have made uncanny achievements in several fields—dancing, literature, science, fine art, and, spectacularly, design—nourish a chronic inferiority complex. In dance, they’ve been yearning to get “with it” for the past seven decades, even if the illusion of contemporaneity required rejecting or despoiling the unique heritage that defines them. The company, looking ahead to 2005, when it will celebrate the 200th anniversary of Bournonville’s birth, is polishing up the master’s extant works, learning to love the old while forging ahead with the new.

After Copenhagen, I’ll begin reporting on the busy New York scene, where it looks as if the lights will be on full force.

© 2003 Tobi Tobias

SEEING THINGS invited dancers and dance aficionados (as well as mere pedestrians) to respond to this question: Some would say that dancing is the cruelest profession, all but guaranteeing grueling work, physical pain, poverty, and heartbreak. Yet the field has always been rich in aspirants willing to dedicate their lives to the art. Why?

The first group of responses was posted July 28th. Here is a second group.

METTE-IDA KIRK writes:
Dance and music are among the most beautiful gifts humanity has been given. And when the dancer experiences what it means to phrase a movement, what possibilities of expression it contains, she will focus passionately on bringing the choreography to life. Yes, pain, obstacles, and endless work are a part of this process, but when it succeeds, the reward is catharsis. (Translated from the Danish by TT)

MAIDA WITHERS writes:
Why dedicate one's life to dance and encourage others (company members and students) to do the same? Because-
. . . dance offers a high unequalled by any other experience I have known.
. . . it is the most immediate way to access every fiber of our being.
. . . the wanderer in me wants to see the world, and dancing my way around the world is a passport to living.
. . . it gives me a forum in which I can encounter others.
. . . making dances and performing dances documents all aspects of our lives, charts our past, and predicts our future.
. . . the music is there.
. . . all these costumes need someone to make them work properly.
. . . dancing is what I know how to do.
. . . my heart keeps making me do it.

DANA TAI SOON BURGESS writes:
Why dance? Because I realize that nothing else in the world can satisfy my need to express inner perspectives, hidden longings, and repressed desires. Creating dances is my way of presenting my thoughts three-dimensionally. Because dance is a field in which mentorship continues to thrive. Watching information move from dancer to dancer, from generation to generation, I feel I'm part of a larger tradition. This process quiets my mind and answers questions about the passage of time and the ephemeral nature of life. Because in a dance studio I can be totally present in the moment, with a focused mind and body. I can't manage that anywhere else, no matter how often I try to meditate, burn incense sticks, or listen to tapes of the ocean! There is something fundamental about the process of dance that allows me to tap into the collective unconscious, to find calm in moments of calamity.

A last word, from MARTHA GRAHAM:
I am a dancer. I believe that we learn by practice. Whether it means to learn to dance by practicing dancing or to learn to live by practicing living, the principles are the same. In each it is the performance of a dedicated precise set of acts, physical or intellectual, from which comes shape of achievement, a sense of one's being, a satisfaction of spirit. One becomes in some area an athlete of God.

Mark Morris Dance Group, Mostly Mozart Festival / New York State Theater, Lincoln Center, NYC / August 4-6, 2003

Adding dance to Lincoln Center’s Mostly Mozart Festival for the second year in a row, the Mark Morris Dance Group performed four works from its repertory—nothing new, but most of it pretty damned wonderful.

When Morris himself danced Cupid, enabling a rural swain and his lass, in the 1993 “A Spell,” I thought the piece (set to songs by the Renaissance madrigalist John Wilson) a mere bagatelle. Now that the role has been handed on and its outrageous archness—there goes Mark again!—toned down, I see that far more is happening here. After the period of romance and lust, flirting and fucking in the country lanes frequented by Shakespearean peasantry, the lovers become entirely postmodern—us, in fact. And the woman, tragically, wants far more than her baffled partner can offer, more than she can, herself, put a name to. Long before the dance ends, Cupid has vanished.

Created in 1981 and revised in 1984, “Gloria” (named for its Vivaldi score) was—and remains—a major triumph. Morris reveals in it a key aspect of his character—profound empathy with the human condition. We are, by virtue of being human, maimed and doomed, he suggests to us. And, he goes on, we are, also by virtue of being human, capable of salvation—or, more simply, unreasoning aspiration, hope, and joy. “Gloria”’s ten dancers stagger, fall, and continue relentlessly in their path, crawling awkwardly and painfully, in a jagged rhythm. Elsewhere they run and leap exultantly, as if miraculously restored, by stubborn devotion, to the fluency of physical and spiritual well-being. The choreography operates by responding to the structures in the music with action that can be described in simple, concrete terms. It dictates no emotion. Yet it elicits deep feeling from the spectator because of Morris’s great gift for knowing, about movement and gesture, what, how much, and when.

“V” (to Schumann’s Quintet in E-flat major for Piano and Strings), was clearly the “big” work on the program—the spectacular item in terms of scale and punch, meant to assure the general audience it was getting its money’s worth. Ever since its premiere in 2001, though, I’ve felt that I’m in a minority of one among Morris's admirers. Well, two, the other being my companion at the theater last night. Most Morris enthusiasts claim that “V” equals—even tops—his masterworks of the previous two decades. Not to my eyes.

“Ah, but—“ interjects my companion, who was equally unimpressed by the choreography. “But what?” I challenge. “The dancers.” There she has me. About these glorious creatures—each unique—I have no reservations. More about them, I hope, another time.

© 2003 Tobi Tobias