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Dear Readers,

I will be working in Copenhagen NOV 17 through NOV 30 and not posting on SEEING THINGS until my return. Meanwhile, please continue to send your Comments on the pieces already posted, especially recent reviews and all of the PERSONAL INDULGENCES essays; I will post your Comments as soon as I can.

tt

Morphoses/The Wheeldon Company / City Center, New York City / October 29 - November 1, 2009

Three years ago, when Christopher Wheeldon left the security of his position as Resident Choreographer at the New York City Ballet to form his own small company, Morphoses, his head was full of extravagant dreams about making classical ballet new for the 21st century. He even fulfilled some of them. But the economic downturn has thwarted his progress. Ballet companies, no matter how modest in scale, cost major money, and donors are feeling poor these days. Which brings us to the nagging question of whether or not Morphoses is really worth saving--at all costs, so to speak.

The full article appeared in Voice of Dance (http://www.voiceofdance.org) on November 4, 2009. To read it, click here.

Frederick Wiseman's La Danse: Le Ballet de l'Opéra de Paris / Film Forum, NYC / November 4-17, 2009

The ticket line at Greenwich Village's Film Forum November 4-17 for Frederick Wiseman's latest grand-scale documentary, La Danse: Le Ballet de l'Opéra de Paris, will surely contain as many dance fans as film buffs. And I suspect the local dance crowd will enjoy the movie more. It offers extensive, if necessarily fragmented, footage of the Paris Opera Ballet's remarkable skills, and the celebrated French company rarely visits the States. Dedicated movie-goers, especially those familiar with Wiseman's complete body of work, are likely to be disappointed.

Wiseman's earliest films--shot in black and white, which suited his subjects and his style--still remain his most meaningful works. He treated his topics lawyerly (prior to his film career he was a lawyer).

From his first film, the harrowing Titicut Follies (1967), in which he treats Massachusetts' State Prison for the Criminally Insane, he piles up the evidence point by point like a star prosecutor, allowing concrete facts alone, unadorned by appeals to sentiment--or, indeed, any explication whatsoever--to reveal the obvious verdict.

Later in his film career, he was lured by the siren song of color, even later by the fiction that "everything is beautiful at the ballet," which brought him into my own field, dancing. In 1993 he examined American Ballet Theatre; recently, the Paris Opera Ballet. In both films, he coolly inspects the dance company as an institution, but without much point that I can discern.

La Danse finds him applying his familiar tactics: He opens by placing the institution he's scrutinizing in context. We see a stunning series of freeze-frame shots of Paris, moving closer and closer to the opulent Palais Garnier, where the phantom of the opera held sway, at least fictionally, and which the Paris Opera Ballet has long made its home. (Now it has a second home at the Bastille, about which the less said, the better, and Wiseman says nothing.) Throughout the film, these shots of the city and the Palais Garnier's dark, claustrophobic underground corridors are repeated, but not as a respite from intense emotion, while giving emotion a wider and more natural vein, as Ozu used shots of wind-stirred trees and the like, but instead--well, why actually? La Danse has no easily discernable drama or intention. It just goes on "forever" (158 minutes, to be exact), then peters out.

Oddly, Wiseman doesn't dwell on the gaudy magnificence of the Palais Garnier's public spaces--the gilt, the marble, the mirrored halls, the bronze statues, the crystal chandeliers; we eventually catch glimpses of them as the camera follows a cleaner--but throughout Wiseman emphasizes the gloomy corridors and winding passageways of the interior, the flooding in the lower regions where fish have set up housekeeping, as well as the no-better-than-institutional studios and offices.

As soon as Wiseman has oriented us to the particular domain he's chosen to examine--as always, in his films, a world in itself, sealed off from a wider reality--he introduces the people who inhabit these nondescript backstage spaces: the dancers, the element most likely to seize a viewer's attention. We see them taking the daily morning class essential to professionals and then learning or rehearsing or being coached in their roles.

The dancers' bodies are exceedingly svelte, lithe, and strong--capable of marvels. These dancers are the survivors of a rigorous schooling from about age eight and an equally rigorous weeding out of the pupils not up to standard, throughout the decade that it takes to turn a child with the right anatomy and unquenchable desire into a professional dancer. The POB dancers' technical prowess is stupendous, but everyone seems to take it for granted, and we never see how it came about; nothing is shown of the academy in which these "acrobats of god" are trained, though it is a unique institution in itself.

In the company's studios, the ever-present coaches clearly make a dancer's professional life that of an eternal student. They are forever being corrected, in order to attain some Platonic ideal of execution. These elders who supervise the rehearsals, usually once leading dancers themselves, are encyclopedias of information about how things were done in the past and what might be achieved now. Their bodies have thickened, their legs have lost their spring, but their eyes have become piercingly sharp.

As is typical of Wiseman, not one of the dancers or coaches is named. Similarly, the ballets we see excerpts from are not named; their choreographers unidentified, though some of them appear on camera to coach their own work. (Apart from the familiar nineteenth-century classics, the choreography is nothing to write home about.) This information is revealed only in the Shaker-plain closing credits, another Wiseman hallmark.

Wiseman's familiar use of anonymity while revealing both personality and job description is best effected in the scenes involving Brigitte Lefèvre, the Paris Opéra's director of dance--in other words, POB's boss. Her calm yet steely authority and well-calculated empathy for her dancers (she was once one of them herself) emerge gradually but unmistakably from the several scenes in which she's the focal point. You don't know her name or exactly what she does, but you know what she is. Wiseman persuades us to understand Lefèvre solely from how she behaves in a series of different situations in which she deals with dancers, repertory, casting, company policy, and money. This is no mean achievement.

It's also in the scenes involving the administration that we begin to realize the grand scope and complexity of the POB as an institution. Wiseman also covers the scenic department, where thick but deft fingers are pictured adding gleaming paillettes to the tulle or velvet of a costume, the sewing crew working under short white tutus that are suspended from the ceiling like so many chandeliers. The more pedestrian aspects of a life in dance are recorded too, as in a view of the company's cafeteria that, amusingly, offers us freeze-frames of dishes like the ones we accepted, faute de mieux, in college.

The film progresses from work in the studios to rehearsals onstage in an auditorium hauntingly devoid of spectators. All of these activities and the behind-the-scenes work as well--a studio being spackled and painted, the dancers having their make-up applied--are arranged as a collage in time, but the elements are bricks without mortar to make them adhere, to build something. What does Wiseman himself derive from all the material he's presenting to us? What are we to make of it? Damned if I know.

Towards the end of this seemingly endless film without drama, climax, or even resolution, there's a stirring, extended excerpt of a performance, by Delphine Moussin, of Medea murdering her children in Angelin Preljocaj's eponymous ballet. And there's been a very brief shot of the public entering the lobby of the Paris Opéra, with its exquisite curving double staircase, but to the best of my recollection, we never witness a dance being viewed by the public it's meant for. And, sadder yet, we never hear it applauded.

© 2009 Tobi Tobias

American Ballet Theatre / Avery Fisher Hall, Lincoln Center, New York City / October 7-10, 2009

Avery Fisher Hall, Lincoln Center's main concert venue, lacks an orchestra pit, wing space, and a floor suitable for dancing. Musicians performing there stay put once onstage, limiting their motion to decorous walks to and from their places. Not for them phenomenal steps requiring a floor that cushions sleights of foot or a safe landing spot for leaping exits at race-car speed. Nevertheless American Ballet Theatre was installed at Avery Fisher for a four-day engagement, October 7-10.

The full article appeared in Voice of Dance (http://www.voiceofdance.org) on October 14, 2009. To read it, click here.

The Forsythe Company / BAM Howard Gilman Opera House / Brooklyn, NY / October 7-10, 2009

William Forsythe made his name creating ballets with an eye to pushing the art conspicuously forward, as Balanchine had done. Nowadays he makes concoctions that are so hard to appreciate, detractors find them empty, showy, foolish, inexplicable, or all of the above. It's not that I think he should retrace his early steps. Artists must not - cannot, actually--imitate their past. They need to move ahead to find their own future. I just wish I understood and liked Forsythe's recent work better.

Decreation, which Forsythe and his devoted troupe brought to BAM'S Howard Gilman Opera House for an October 7-10 run, is not so much a dance as a dance cum postmodern drama cum installation cum performance art cum . . . well, you get the idea.

Forsythe's idea is that the world is in pretty hopeless shape. While its inhabitants obsess about communication, connection, empathy, and even love, he tells us, their actions invariably disintegrate into the cruel and bizarre. Though he keeps his stage tidier than the colossal-mess-loving Pina Bausch--even the dancers' clothes, shmatas you could clean the garage in, are fastidiously keyed to a subtle sky-and-earth palette--Decreation recalls the themes of her angst-driven earlier works.

The piece opens with a narrator standing behind a translucent box (also used as a projection screen, part of the media mix the choreographer favors), playing the dual role of defense attorney and accused. Her lines, delivered in a voice cracked with rage, alternate so swiftly between the two characters, they're barely intelligible.
The effect is like that of a particularly hostile Punch and Judy show.

In general, the sound is unbearably raucous, with overlapping verbal provocations accompanied by intermittent music played onstage and crackling static. The static may be there to remind us that everything we say nowadays is being recorded as info in the public domain, to be received by unsympathetic listeners. Occasional silences fail to bring relief; they only make one woman's low moaning audible.

As for the movement in the piece, it's usually violent and grotesque (angular, spasmodic, writhing)--and endlessly repetitive. The groupings, though, are so handsomely arranged, it's hard to believe that the anatomical incoherence represents authentic feeling.

Images suggesting sexual abuse abound. One pathetic figure often reappears, clutching one of her breasts with her right hand and her crotch with her left. She is the Eternal Female Victim, until she slips out of a contorted confrontation with two men, leaving them to undo each other.

Ten minutes into the one-hour show, you feel as if you've stumbled into a loony bin, albeit one that boasts high-end design and a façade of braininess. The latter comes across in exchanges like this one: He says, "Everything is beautiful and nothing hurt." But she says (he reports), "Everything hurt, everything that was beautiful." And then there's the persistent variation on this theme: "I might prefer to love another more than I love you. What would you do?" Only the libretto of one of the gayer Mozart operas could make such business viable, and then it would bubble with fun. Here it's rendered with pensive solemnity, reiterated so often you wonder why the guy at the receiving end doesn't counter with "Gimme a break already!"

In the final segment, the huge round table that loomed in the background is stripped of its formal dinner paraphernalia (crystal, china, sumptuous white cloth) and dragged forward, folding chairs placed to rim its periphery. The whole overwrought cast congregates, seated, for one last blast. Of course a distraught woman mounts the table (remember the Béjart Boléro?) and--oh, never mind. We've all been there before.

© 2009 Tobi Tobias

Often the visual arts will make a dance fan feel he or she is in the presence of dancing that doesn't move through space and time, but is dancing nonetheless, or at least its cousin. The actual dance pickings seemed slim this year, as summer slid into autumn. This is often the case, but never fear; we're already beginning to be bombarded with choices. Still I thought I'd grant myself a busman's holiday and see what the picture people were up to. The ambitious exhibitions at the grandest museums have long runs, so shows that I missed during this spring/summer's hectic dance season are still up. The permanent collections of such museums remain more or less permanent, though the big museums can never display all they own at one time. For this piece, I treated myself to four offerings currently on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Vermeer's renowned work The Milkmaid, on loan from Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum, is the centerpiece of a special exhibition that runs through November 29. It's joined by the Met's own five Vermeers and other works, sometimes borrowed, related to it through the time, locale, and subject matter of their composition. The juxtaposition teaches a tough, true lesson about every art: competence enhanced by energy differs radically from sheer genius. None of his Netherlandish contemporaries in the seventeenth century holds a candle to Vermeer.

Painted in the late 1650s, The Milkmaid shows a robust young woman who, from her rough clothes with their rolled-up work sleeves, her setting, and her action--standing at a table heaped with various magnificently crusty breads, carefully pouring milk from an unglazed clay jug into a low glazed bowl of the same material--is clearly a domestic servant. The simple room she stands in holds little but the woman, the breads--some roughly torn into pieces for the bread porridge she's probably concocting--and a few culinary objects.

Two elements, however, suggest an additional dimension: a small foot warmer behind her (imagine the heat creeping upwards when it's used) and a sketch of Cupid shooting an arrow from his bow among the Delft tiles set where the chalky wall behind her meets the floor. An art aficionado of the time would easily have recognized these as emblems of erotic love. Today the ordinary viewer may not notice them or think of their meaning, but surely, if he simply looks hard and steadily at the woman herself, he will suspect, from what Vermeer shows him, that she has a secret inner life, which lures him into contemplating what it might be. The very light in the room--coming only faintly from the window to her left, which contains a small broken panel (can it possibly suggest lost virginity?), while she and her work are bathed in a cool glow from an invisible source to her right--gives an uncanny luminousness and mystery to this sturdy woman.

In this, and in nearly all the pictures of his maturity, Vermeer shows himself to be the master of the beauty of silence, composure, and introspection. As in sublime adagio dancing, his pictures create an atmosphere of suspended breath. And as in most long-lasting ballets, a sense of a profound yet unspecified inner life, subtle and elusive, is exuded by Vermeer's solo figures. Even his couples and somewhat larger groups intimate--in addition to their social relationships (lovers or seducers and the women they desire; mistress and maid)--something of each figure's half-hidden self. Like dancing--even when it's abstract--Vermeer's paintings are an instructive and poignant example of expression without words, without even specificity. They are examples of the enigmas that give the greatest art its soul.

The justly celebrated photographer Robert Frank (1924 - ) focuses on the unvarnished truth about ordinary people, a subject explored in the early works of choreographers like Trisha Brown (in her early, bare-boned "task dances") and Mark Morris (in the motley types of his first dancers' bodies and his combining pedestrian moves with codified technique). Compellingly, Frank reveals his have-not subjects as they are, stripped of the appearance or behavior more privileged people use as a mask, attempting to present themselves to the world as they would like to be seen.

The Met's current exhibition of his work, "Looking In: Robert Frank: The Americans" centers on the book of that name published a half- century ago, showing each of its 83 subtly riveting images with a generous addition of related material. The Swiss-born photographer, who emigrated to the States in 1947, drove a used Ford along a route that crossed the country twice in the mid-Fifties, shooting a vernacular America. He greatest sympathy seems to lie with the poor and with African-Americans--people with little power, financial, social, or political, so that their status ranges from the utterly ordinary to one that can't help arousing the viewer's pity. If these pictures are harsh, it's because life is harsh, and often lonely, though the images include gaiety and human bonding as well as pathos.

Rich folks, the ruling classes, are naked in their pretensions in Frank's images. But this photographer doesn't preach, at least not openly; he records. Quoted in the show's wall text, he says: "I am always looking outside, trying to look inside, trying to say something that is true. But maybe nothing is really true. Except what's out there." It's reality he's after. He grabbed it using a casual style that allowed low light, blurry focus, grainy images, and unconventional composition, according to Frank's wishes and situation. This iconoclastic aesthetic had a major influence on photographers who came after him. And surely any dancer-choreographer who attempts to start building a vocabulary and a pattern for dance-making from scratch--Isadora Duncan, Martha Graham in her early career, Laura Dean--flouting traditional rules in pursuit of her or his own vision, is Frank's kindred soul.

If Frank's work is rooted in life's reality, the paintings and drawings of Antoine Watteau, which dominated French art in the first quarter of the 18th century, present (or, more accurately, imagine) life as artifice.

In the Met's current "Watteau, Music, and Theatre," the elegance and poise of the body's poses and the figures' consciously graceful self-presentation (exuding charm tempered by a regretful melancholy); the soft titillation of an erotic subtext; and the evocation of Cythera, the Greek island considered Venus's birthplace, thus an idyllic land of pleasant dreams, are seen in musical and theatrical settings. One can readily think of them rendered in a ballet--The Sleeping Beauty being the most obvious--or compare them to delicate, fragile porcelain figurines.

As a dance writer I can't fail to mention the well-known picture by Nicholas Lancret (a follower of Watteau, though without his emotional power), which is included in the exhibition. It features the celebrated ballerina Marie Camargo in a garlanded skirt whose hemline she raised slightly above prevailing tradition so that the viewer might see her trim ankles in action. Nevertheless it's another work in the show, a Watteau brimming with atmosphere, that continues to seize my imagination and refuses to let it go. Called Mezzetin, (after the commedia dell'arte character), it shows a seated man past his first youth playing a lute in front of what seems to be a theatrical drop curtain hazily depicting a generic leafy park sheltering the obligatory marble statue.

Perhaps this man once trained as a dancer; his exquisitely muscled lower legs are sheathed in silver stockings that emphasize their admirable form. Lavish fabric--of lush texture and an intense rose hue--dominates his costume, from his generous hat and cape to the outsize rosettes on his shoes. By contrast, his hands, fingering his musical instrument, are grotesque--even deformed--reddened and gnarled as if to represent the result of the life-long practice necessary to a musician or dancer who aspires to the rank of artist. The backward tilt of his body, especially his head, and his faraway gaze suggest a haunting nostalgia for beauty that must vanish--in art and in love--and self-indulgence in that gentle, bittersweet melancholy as well. Forget The Sleeping Beauty; think, instead, of Balanchine's Emeralds.
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It's easy enough to call upon Degas to illustrate the connection between the visual arts and dancing, since dance was one of his primary subjects. But in the Met's several rooms of this artist's dance works, part of the museum's permanent collection, we meet with the several aspects of Degas that exist. There are the pictures--in oils, pastel, or charcoal--of the female Paris Opéra dancers in performance; the studies of these dancers in rehearsal (notice their frequent boredom), in class (where they often stray from classical correctness), or at rest (where their exhaustion affects us viscerally); the bronze casts of small wax figures showing some of the oddest postures dancers assume, often while doing no more than examining the sole of their foot; and the drawings, often studies for work yet to be realized, Nearly all of these tell us that, at heart, Degas was not an artist of the pretty--as collections of reproductions on note cards often insist--but, at his truest, exercised the ruthless pair of eyes and deft hand of an anatomist. My favorite image in this last category--it burned itself into my brain long ago, though I can't recall where I saw it--is a charcoal on, I think, blue paper, of an ankle and foot, in a soft ballet slipper. The foot is turned out and seen from behind. It is absolutely accurate, so the position seems very strange, especially as it's unattached to a body that would give it a context. It is a perfect emblem of ballet.

On my Met visit I cottoned most to the over-familiar bronze figure of a child dancer (one Marie van Goethem) who was a student--one of the "little rats"--at the Paris Opéra. Strangely, the nearly life-size figure (first created in wax ca. 1880; cast in 1922) is adorned with some fabric: she wears a ragged-edged dancing skirt of coarse weave ending just above the knee, while the bronze braid that falls down her back is tied with a long-streamered bow of faded pink satin ribbon. Her right leg is thrust forward, as in fourth position, but it's loose-kneed and takes no weight, as if she were "at ease," between the more strenuous efforts of her trade. Her arms are pulled straight behind her back, hands clasped, the pose emphasizing her touching slenderness. The most eloquent part of her is her head, tilted defiantly upward with unquenchable pride.

She made me think of the little girls of the New York City Ballet's academy, the School of American Ballet, each with her pluck, her self-assertion, and her desire to have the world understand she is a member of the elite and that though she may be a mere--oh, let's say--advanced-beginner in her exotic trade, she has at least been selected as worthy of training, and her aspirations are sky high.

© 2009 Tobi Tobias

My father was a doctor, a general practitioner--G.P.--as his type was called back then when it was very common. Regular patients called him "Dr. Bill," instinctively combining honorific with nickname to indicate their respect and affection. At the age of 12 he had emigrated from Russia to the States with his mother and siblings, his father having preceded them. His name is listed in the archives at the Ellis Island Museum: "William S. Bernstein, Russian (Jewish)."

His first job in America was driving a laundry truck. Needless to say, he was rapidly learning English and simultaneously attending school. His formidable mother commandeered the notion that the Jews were "the people of the book" and gave the claim her own interpretation. (Originally, "the book" meant only sacred texts.) But my grandmother, as practical as she was pious, knew that a successful formal education was essential to making one's way up the ladder economically and socially. Her husband fully, and sternly, agreed. With rueful amusement, my dad told the tale of going to his father to announce with delight that he had received the grade of 98 percent on an important math test, only to receive the reply "And what happened to the other two percent?"

In due course, my father earned an undergraduate degree at Cornell University, a medical degree from Long Island College Hospital, and hung out his shingle. From the time of my earliest recollections, his office and our family living quarters were under the same roof in a workaday Brooklyn neighborhood. He made house calls, even in the middle of the night if the situation required it, and if the poorer people who consulted him couldn't afford even his modest fees, he didn't charge them.

Though he may not have been a specialist, like a surgeon, he had a specialty: He was a crackerjack diagnostician. Example: Our local friends tended to congregate casually on our front porch. My parents and I were sitting there one afternoon with a bunch of them when Herbie Bass strolled by. A sturdily built fellow in his mid-twenties, he was the son of a woman in my mother's mahjong group. Flashing his splendid smile, he stopped to say hello, but didn't take the seat offered him, making it clear that he was about to move on to a more exciting scene. My father, with his keen analytic eye, didn't waste a moment on small talk or even on a "How are you?" "Come with me," he commanded Herbie, hailed a cab, half dragged the astonished young man into it, and away they drove, at law-breaking speed. Later that day we found out that my father had sensed that Herbie was bleeding internally from an ulcer. Any delay and he might have been dead. Instead, thanks to my father, he lived, and eventually--irresistible smile flashing, olive skin glowing, hazel eyes glinting--married the girl he was no doubt on his way to see that fateful day. Or so I like to believe.

Shortly afterward, Carl Feldman, a self-effacing man who lived down the street in a shabby house, was diagnosed with a cancer rushing toward its terminal stage, and my father had a long talk in our living room with Carl's lovely wife, Jeannette. (Faint southern accent, jet hair, dark wondering eyes, and skin like that of a peach, with a velvety texture and a pink tint at the cheekbones.) Her looks were so delicate, her manner so gentle, it seemed criminal to tell her the terrible truth of the situation. But my father did, within my hearing, as it happened. (Patients and their dear ones never objected to my presence, even in the consulting room. I must have seemed so young and innocent as to be invisible or uncomprehending.)

My father told Jeannette about her husband's prognosis as sympathetically as could be possible under the dire circumstances. And he adhered to it, insisted upon it unwaveringly--science was science and hopeful lies were anathema--during a miraculous six-month remission, in which Carl would sit on a bench in front of his home every afternoon, playing in the sun with his two beautiful little daughters, replicas of their mother, if more lively.

When Carl finally died, my father didn't attend the funeral, as a devoted family doctor in that time and place would be likely to do. My father didn't go to funerals; he couldn't bear to. He was an assiduous servant of Life, enemy of Death, and did not lend himself to Death's pageants. He told me once that he had been spurred to become a doctor after watching a half dozen of his siblings die in infancy from diphtheria in the Old Country.

Of course eventually he had to go to his own mother's funeral or never face his family again. (Five other siblings had survived, married, and procreated. The entire clan, presumably by fiat, gathered together every Sunday afternoon at my imperious grandmother's apartment.) At the synagogue for the services, I remember my adamantly non-observant father, leaning stiffly forward on the front bench reserved for the chief mourners, eyes fixed on my Orthodox grandmother's raw wood coffin as, in the ritual symbolizing bereavement, the rabbi pinned a strip of black grosgrain ribbon to his lapel, then slit it halfway through with a large sharp-bladed scissors. And I remember his striding angrily away from the soggy burial ground the moment the graveside rituals finished, a high wind riffling his thinning hair and the slashed ribbon, tears streaming down his craggy face.

My father was not given to crying. The only other time I saw him breaking down like that was after he examined my glamorous Aunt Flossie, when she came to him, too late (was her delay due to modesty? to fear?) with bleeding from the vagina and he found her far advanced with cancer in her "women's parts," as the family would say later. While the patient dressed in his office downstairs, my father joined her husband (my beloved Uncle Harry), who had waited out the examination with my mother (his younger sister), and me (the child who silently absorbed everything) in our living quarters above. As he climbed the stairs towards us, I leaned over the banister and saw that he was weeping. Tersely he delivered his diagnosis, referred to an operation that clearly held out no hope, and poured out two shots of his best whiskey for himself and Uncle Harry. I don't remember hearing the usual Jewish toast as they raised their glasses and downed their first aid for shock in the customary single gulp: Le'chayim! (To life!).

My father's own death came too soon. He was only 59. Chronically overworked, he tried to overlook his developing heart condition, resorting occasionally to nitroglycerine tablets for the angina and, absurdly, pacing the living room when he remembered he should exercise. Even after his initial heart attack, he might have been spared if he hadn't insisted upon rising from his hospital bed to supervise a pressing project--the building of a nursing home inspired, ironically, by his new-found interest in geriatrics. It wasn't until a decade later that I realized how alike we were (I'd always assumed I took after my artistic mother, who was also easier to love), determined to work until we dropped to fulfill our vision of what could be accomplished with zeal and luck.

© 2009 Tobi Tobias

Mark Morris Dance Group in the Mostly Mozart Festival 2009 / Rose Theater, Lincoln Center, NYC / August 19-22, 2009

Mark Morris, who shares top honors (with Paul Taylor) as America's greatest living choreographer, is at mid-career, but maybe no longer at the top of his game.

The full article appeared in Voice of Dance (http://www.voiceofdance.org) on August 25, 2009. To read it, click here.

Have you noticed that ballets that are inarguably choreographic disasters often improve after a few performances? This happens, I think, once the piece has been danced before a public audience and the performers have finally admitted to themselves that "there's no there there." Then they take the hapless creation into their own hands, recognizing that it's up to them to do what they can to rescue it.

It's not that they change the choreography noticeably, though they may intensify the phrasing and the shifts in emphasis between light and shade. It's more, rather, that they learn to "sell" the piece to the public by believing in it, much in the way a parent or other committed guide bolsters an ill-endowed or wayward child.

They give it extra and more intently focused physical energy, more psychic communication between dancer and dancer or among groups of them. They animate areas of the stage that before looked empty or dead with its lifeless figures standing lackadaisically where the choreographer has placed them, without awakening their consciousness, as if waiting for a bus. They attempt to discover what the choreographer intended this particular ballet to be "about" and make it their own vision. Not for a moment now are they content, as they appeared to be at the ballet's premiere, to be satisfied with simply going through the motions.

The feeble ballet may have the grace to vanish permanently from the repertory at the end of the season or after one last try in the following season, but meanwhile you've got to admire the dancers for their resourcefulness and generosity of spirit in the face of fiasco.

© 2009 Tobi Tobias

This article originally appeared in the Culture section of Bloomberg News on July 27, 2009.

July 27 (Bloomberg) -- Merce Cunningham, the American choreographer revered for his continual reinvention of dancing, has died. He was 90.

He died in his sleep last night in his Manhattan apartment, according to Leah Sandals, a spokeswoman for the Merce Cunningham Foundation.

A compelling dancer himself, Cunningham created a body of work that questioned the traditional premises of dancing, providing unique answers that were both baffling and beautiful.

"What interests me is movement," Cunningham said in a 2005 interview with Bloomberg News. "Not movement that necessarily refers to something else, but is just what it is. Like when you see somebody or an animal move, you don't have to know what it's doing."

Some aficionados found Cunningham's work inscrutable. Others found it absorbing and wholly original in the worlds of modern and classical dance. Watching it could be like taking a quiet walk alone, open to the fluctuating qualities of landscape and weather. To some admirers, it was the only game in town.

Cunningham never made things easy for his audience. His dances shunned narrative and character. They were simply about dynamic human bodies moving in space. Occasionally the work assaulted the spectator. The 1964 "Winterbranch," with its Sisyphean movement, its darkened stage from which lights shone full blast into the viewers' eyes and its abrasive La Monte Young score had people exiting the theater in droves.

Placing the Music

Steadfastly, Cunningham kept dance, music, and decor separate entities, co-existing in time and place. He would inform the composer of the required duration and that was that. The dancers in a new work usually first heard the score that would accompany them at the dress rehearsal of the piece.

In creating a dance, Cunningham sometimes turned to the "I Ching," the Chinese system based on rolling dice. Injecting an element of chance into his work, he said, expanded his choreographic choices that might otherwise be limited by habit. Zen philosophy, with its emphasis on the present moment, and a keen sensitivity to nature also informed his work.

Mercier Philip Cunningham was born on April 16, 1919, in Centralia, Washington, the middle son of three born to Clifford Cunningham, a lawyer, and his wife, Mayme.

While his two brothers followed their father into legal careers, Cunningham found his path through a neighbor, Maude Barrett, a retired vaudeville performer. Cunningham took classes at Barrett's local dance school, starting with tap. With Barrett's daughter as his partner, he performed at auditoriums and fairgrounds.

Meeting Martha Graham

After high school he attended George Washington University in Washington, D.C., then returned home after his first year. In 1937 he enrolled at the Cornish School in Seattle (now Cornish College of the Arts), which prepared students for the concert stage. He planned to be an actor but kept studying dance, including a class on Martha Graham's work, taught by a former member of her company.

It was during his second stint of summer classes at Mills College in Oakland that he met Graham, who invited him to join her company in New York.

A marvelous dancer, agile and fluent, yet with a commanding intensity, Cunningham danced with the Martha Graham Dance Company from 1939 to 1945. His roles ranged from March in the Emily Dickinson piece, "Letter to the World," its feather- light jumps seemingly impelled by gusts of spring wind, and the damnation-and-hellfire Revivalist in "Appalachian Spring."

New Vision

He began choreographing -- solos, mostly -- in the 1940s and formed his own company in 1953, at the legendary Black Mountain College.

Unlike Graham, who invented her own rooted-to-the-earth, gut-sprung vocabulary, Cunningham borrowed mostly from his mentor's opposite -- classical ballet, which emphasizes balanced, harmonious proportions, elegant verticality and the illusion of ease. He gave the style wry new twists.

Cunningham set his early works to familiar music, particularly that of Erik Satie, but the choreographer's most significant musical collaborator was the avant-gardist John Cage, who was also his life partner for half a century. Cage died in 1992.

Along with David Tudor, another early participant in Cunningham's enterprise, Cage came to favor music that was created at the performance, played on electronic instruments. Cunningham also worked with outstanding visual artists whose forward-looking sensibilities overlapped his own, among them Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Mark Lancaster, Frank Stella and Andy Warhol.

Painted Birds

"I don't try to tell them what to do," Cunningham told Bloomberg TV about working with other artists. "I much prefer that they use their way of thinking and imagine, so that something would be added to this joint working that no one of the three of us -- the dance, the music and the decor -- could predict."

Cunningham created a large body of drawings on his own, mostly of birds and animals. Every morning, he got up and made one. The Margarete Roeder Gallery in New York City, where the works appeared over the years, has a Cunningham exhibition on view through July 31.

Athletic and Magisterial

High points of Cunningham's seven decades of dance-making include "Summerspace" (1958), with its dancers streaming past Rauschenberg's pointillist backdrop in leotards that match it; the exuberantly athletic "How to Pass, Kick, Fall and Run" (1965); "RainForest" (1968), where the dancers move like jungle creatures among Warhol's silvery helium-lofted pillows; "Sounddance" (1975), which seems to launch its performers into a violent intergalactic world; "Points in Space" (1986-1987), which takes its title from Einstein's declaration that there are no fixed points in space; and "Ocean" (1994), a magisterial piece that has its dancers framed by concentric rings -- the spectators and, behind them, the musicians.

He described "Ocean" this way in a November 2008 interview with Bloomberg's Muse TV: "It's like being in a bath of sound, because it comes from every source around you. In doing it, you find out something else about dance, something that you never thought of before. I always look forward to seeing what that will be."

Besides repertory works, Cunningham created one-time-only 90-minute "Events." These were collages -- of old dances, excerpts from his repertory and new material -- in which several unrelated passages often occurred in the performance space at once, with clusters of dancers taking different points as front, accompanied by a sound score devised for the occasion.

Chance and Change

The productions underlined Cunningham's faith in chance and change. They had a practical purpose, too, allowing his work to be seen in sites other than theaters. Events, untitled except for number (#1 was in 1964), occurred in venues ranging from the ruins of Persepolis in Iran to Cunningham's own studio in Greenwich Village, where a wall of windows, revealing the cityscape, often as the sunlight gradually faded, became the dancers' backdrop.

Today Cunningham's work is considered the great link between the so-called Mid-Century Moderns (from Graham and her contemporaries to Paul Taylor) and the postmodern choreographers who emerged in the 1970s such as Twyla Tharp, rebelling against traditional theatrical conventions.

Though his company had perpetual financial strains, Cunningham was showered with awards during his long career. Among the most prestigious were New York City's Handel Medallion, the Kennedy Center Honors, a MacArthur Fellowship, the Golden Lion of the Venice Biennale and the rank of Officier of the French Legion d'Honneur.

Attracted Talent

Cunningham attracted dancers of extraordinary capability for his company. Chief among them was Carolyn Brown, whose intelligent book about her two decades with the troupe, beginning with its inception, "Chance and Circumstances: Twenty Years with Cage and Cunningham," was published in 2007.

Even in his last years on stage, while crippled by arthritis, Cunningham riveted an audience's attention. In his 1999 one-time-only duet "Occasion Piece," although severely restricted mobility, he managed to upstage Mikhail Baryshnikov.

In middle age Cunningham already looked older than his years and eventually came to resemble a cross between magician and guru. He was deeply intelligent, a loner at heart though always friendly in his behavior, witty, perceptive and forever devoted to "making it new."