Archives for October 2004

If you’ve dropped in for the first time after having seen the www.terryteachout.com URL mentioned in today’s New York Times Book Review, welcome to “About Last Night,” a 24/5 blog (today’s posting is a special exception) hosted by artsjournal.com on which Terry Teachout writes about the arts in New York City and elsewhere, assisted by the pseudonymous Our Girl in Chicago, who writes from…Chicago.

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All our postings from the past seven days are visible in reverse chronological order on this page. Terry’s start with “TT,” Our Girl’s with “OGIC.” In addition, the entire contents of this site are archived chronologically and can be accessed by clicking “ALN Archives” at the top of the right-hand column.

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I wrapped up my foliage-related travels this afternoon so that I could hear Wesla Whitfield at Danny’s Skylight Room tonight. I just got back. Wow! I’ll be writing about her opening night in next Sunday’s “Second City” column, so I don’t want to steal my own thunder, but if you’re loose on Saturday or Sunday, go hear her. Nobody–but nobody–sings standards better.

For more information on Wesla, go here.

For more information on Danny’s, go here.

If you can’t go and want to hear what you’re missing, buy this CD.

See you Monday.

Picking up where I left off:

For a dance about hell set to music from hell, Dante Variations is impressively chipper. A considerable portion of the piece is frankly comic: one solo dancer gamely performs with her hands tied behind her back, one with shackles on his ankles, another trailing something from one foot (or perhaps suffering a hot foot). These sections veer toward cuteness, however; they rely a milligram too heavily on props and conceits for their charm. The darker sections of the dance make a stronger impression. Especially wonderful are the pyramidal tableaux in which the dancers freeze at curtain-up and curtain-down, like figures in a lurid frieze; and the fantastical Boschian creatures, built out of dancers, that lumber and menace throughout. Intensifying the whole thing is the jaw-dropping lighting by Jennifer Tipton. Sometimes she bathes the back of the stage in darkness that a dancer can all but disappear into, eerily remaining just faintly discernible; at other points she lights the stage in such a way that the dancers cast giant shadow monsters–no bunnies here–on the back wall. These effects are nothing less than fantastic, and go a long way toward making the piece so deliciously like nightmares.

And then Promethean Fire. Ah, hell. How am I going to write about this dance without sounding like a publicist? Here goes nothing.

In an interesting bit of sequencing, Taylor followed his dance about hell with a dance that is widely believed to be about 9/11. I first saw Promethean Fire in New York City last March, so I knew what I was in for Sunday night. And I didn’t know. This dance is so powerfully beautiful, I can’t imagine ever being truly ready for it, even if I’m lucky enough to see it a dozen times. It does seem to be about the attacks. But the dance is also more universal and more abstract than that; what it mostly represents is the complex of emotional responses those events provoked. Or, to put it still more generally, the kinds of emotional responses they provoked. I doubt that Taylor set out to choreograph on 9/11; rather, he seems to have written a dance that unavoidably reflected the psychic ground he inhabited in the months following the attacks.

What was that psychic ground? Suffering and shock are in the dance, and consolation, love, renewal. I honestly don’t know how to describe its content any more specifically. It was beautiful and thrilling to watch. I alternated between trying to read it–knowing as I did that it had been pegged as Taylor’s 9/11 dance, and being as I am the type that looks for the story in everything–and being saved from thought altogether by the over-the-top beauty of the thing. A couple of times during those brain-dead spells, I thought of a flower opening. Something inexplicably but inarguably, factually gorgeous.

But Terry, I think I’ve been skirting your question:

But it happens that you saw a Taylor dance, Promethean Fire, which is widely thought to make oblique but nonetheless intelligible reference to the events of 9/11. Did you see such allusions in Promethean Fire? And if so, how did they affect your response to it? Inquiring co-bloggers want to know.

Well, when you put it that way…yes. I saw fire, falling, and collapse in the dance. Just in glimpses, but there all the same. And on paper, you know, that sounds as though it could be such a terrible idea. But you feel the same way I do about the dance. So–to bat the ball back to you again–why does it work? I have a notion about this, beyond the simple fact of Taylor being a genius. But I kind of want to hear what you think.

I returned to Manhattan, picked up today’s Wall Street Journal, and what did I see? Me, writing about the Roundabout Theatre Company’s revival of Reginald Rose’s Twelve Angry Men and the New Group’s production of Michael Murphy’s Sin (A Cardinal Deposed).

I liked Twelve Angry Men in spite of myself:

For those unfamiliar with the plot (there must be a few of you out there), “Twelve Angry Men” tells how a New York jury decides the fate of a minority-group teenager accused of stabbing his father to death. At first the vote is eleven to one in favor of conviction, but the lone dissenter, played here by Boyd Gaines (“Contact”) and in the film by Henry Fonda, is determined to convert his furious colleagues, one at a time. Each of the jurors, who are identified only by numbers, is presented as an ethnic or cultural stereotype–an unintentionally absurd touch, seeing as how the script, in earnest ’50s style, seeks to persuade us that the defendant is a helpless victim of circumstances

“Efficiency of a practically flawless kind may be reached naturally in the struggle for bread. But there is something beyond–a higher point, a subtle and unmistakable touch of love and pride beyond mere skill; almost an inspiration which gives to all work that finish which is almost art–which is art.”

Joseph Conrad, The Mirror of the Sea

Tonight I walked by someone’s elaborately ready-for-Halloween house in my neighborhood, Hyde Park. Four fresh faux graves graced the front yard. Two of the inscriptions on the gravestones:

SEE, I

TOLD YOU

I WAS

SICK!

and

BETTER

HERE

THAN

EVANSTON

I giggled all the way home.

As Terry mentioned, the Paul Taylor program I saw Sunday night at the College of Du Page’s McAninch Arts Center included Taylor’s great 2002 dance “Promethean Fire.” The other dances on the program were “Klezmerbluegrass,” in its world premiere, and “Dante Variations,” another new dance that premiered earlier this year. This was my second time seeing Taylor’s company at the comfy McAninch Center. Despite the longish drive from Chicago, it’s a nice place to see a performance. There’s not a bad seat in the house.

“Klezmerbluegrass” was vivid and delightful, alternating jubilant sections danced by the ensemble with more wistful solos and duets. The group parts reminded me of two of my all-time favorite dances, Eliot Feld’s “The Jig Is Up” and “Skara Brae,” both of which are set to traditional Irish music and make me want to dance all the way home. The ensemble parts of “Klezmerbluegrass” had that same care-extinguishing exultation about them, which never felt very far away, even during the most brooding solo. Commissioned by the National Foundation for Jewish Culture (with support from the McAninch) to commemorate 350 years of Jewish life in America, Taylor’s new dance convincingly celebrates the capacity of the communities we form to blunt the occupational angst of individual existence. It doesn’t, much to its credit, pretend that they can cure it.

I have more to say about the other two dances on the program, especially “Promethean Fire,” but it will have to wait a bit. I’m blogging sub rosa right now, and I don’t want to push my luck….

“C. D. paused under the archway, breathing dedicatedly. Picture if you will a C. D. gone mad. A bull in a china shop–an aesthetic bull that is–a bull run mad on aestheticism. For if American education had struck him as eclecticism run mad he was striking me as aestheticism run mad. His eyes shone and darted about ferociously coveting all they beheld. His mouth salivated (at least he licked it several times in a kind of mopping up gesture), his hands clenched and unclenched, his brow perspired; a most unnatural fever seemed to have overtaken him. And then he got a grip on himself, marched boldly into the room, took a good look around him and relaxed. And he looked upon everything and he looked everywhere in that old man’s way of his that struck me now as being also so very like that of a very young baby–so lovingly, so gently, so wonderingly. But with an avidity too, that avidity special to C. D. A hungry look cast upon each object of beauty as it flowed and filled and satisfied the innermost reaches of his soul. His eyes would seize upon the object with the impatience of youth, then–here was the difference–come to terms with it; set it down: the eyes avidly picking up each beloved object in salutation–putting it down gently in farewell. Eyes look your last! Strange old man, heart-breaking, heart-broken old man–to be so moved by the polish of wood, the curve of a chair-leg, the glint of crystal, the fade of Aubusson. As though he were missing it all already. There. There. Don’t mind so much; don’t let yourself miss it.”

Elaine Dundy, The Old Man and Me