![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/10\/AJ-Hoghe-obi.jpg\" "\\"Raimund")
<\/a>Raimund Hoghe (L) and Takashi Ueno in Hoghe’s Pas de Deux<\/em>. Photo: Julieta Cervantes<\/p><\/div>\n Dance doesn\u2019t happen in a vacuum. One evening, I\u2019m at the Baryshnikov Arts Center\u2019s Howard Gilman Space\u2014glancing from time to time at the night city glowing outside two big windows, listening to some rich recorded music, and watching a delicately intense, sometimes barely moving dance by two people that traverses two hours without intermission.\u00a0 The next night I\u2019m in another theater named after the same generous patron, BAM\u2019s Howard Gilman Opera House. This time, the music is loud and calamitous, the dancing ferociously, exhaustingly physical. The piece, a spectacle lasting about 70 minutes, is bursting with action yet depicts a society in stasis.<\/p>\n I\u2019m talking about Raimund Hoghe\u2019s Pas de Deux<\/em> (co-presented by the French Insitutute Alliance Fran\u00e7aise and choreographed, in part, during a residency at BAC) and Hofesh Shechter\u2019s Political Mother<\/em>. The two are twanging together in my brain, their differences thrown into relief by proximity. Would the music for Political Mother<\/em> have seemed less abrasive had I not been listening to Bach, Mahler, Gershwin, Fred Astaire, and others the evening before? Does Pas de Deux <\/em>seem, in memory, gentler than it was because of the fiercer choreography the following night?<\/p>\n Pas de deux: a stroll for two. Also a ballet delicacy for aficionados of virtuosity. Hoghe opts for the former but alludes slyly to the latter from time to time. Like any pas de deux, his duet is a study in differences and similarities, an interplay of powers. Hoghe is a small man\u2014not young, not old. He has a crooked spine. It\u2019s interesting that performing (he is also a writer of consequence) has changed his body over time. His posture seems straighter, his hump less noticeable than it was when I first saw his work. He often juxtaposes himself to younger performers. His partner in Pas de Deux <\/em>is Takashi Ueno, a slender Japanese dancer in his early thirties with a limber body and ease in moving it. The men have cultural differences too (Hoghe is German). How they signify these differences\u2014watchfully, tenderly, questioningly, playfully\u2014is moving and enlightening.<\/p>\n Ueno lifting Hoghe (not your standard pas de deux). Photo: Julieta Cervantes<\/p><\/div>\n The music is a crucial part of the piece, rendering the simplest moves more complex. A soprano aria from Mozart\u2019s Cantata Grabmusik, <\/em>K.42, is heard in the distance when Ueno enters from behind the audience and walks toward the back of the big studio theater. He walks slowly and carefully, partly because he\u2019s wearing geta<\/em>\u2014 those traditional Japanese sandals that elevate the wearer by means of two parallel slabs of wood\u2014and partly because he is dribbling liquid from a long-handled cup down his left arm. As he passes the sidelights, his fingertips glint like diamonds, and he leaves a trail of drops that don\u2019t seem ever to dry.\u00a0 Hoghe enters a little later, from the opposite side, also wearing geta<\/em> (these must be muted in some way; they don\u2019t clack as they usually do). He\u2019s carrying a parasol. As the two men meet at the back of the performing area, you think about the little waterfall meeting the umbrella. But it doesn\u2019t.<\/p>\n The performers in Pas de Deux <\/em>rarely touch, although a couple of times they hold hands or nestle their temporarily shirtless backs together. Ueno lifts Hoghe several times in somewhat awkward and unbeautiful ways (a token nod to the ballet pas de deux form). More often they act upon each other mediated by fabric or air. They enwrap themselves in sashes like Japanese obi <\/em>and use them to bind themselves together. Each in turn lifts his partner\u2019s arms by picking up his shirt at the elbow or making him rise on tiptoe by lifting his collar (Gershwin\u2019s Rhapsody in Blue,<\/em> swelling and rippling with its tremendous fervor, plays against the quietness of the act). Circling the room, the two keep running to meet in the center with a little hop; they raise their right hands as if to clap them together in a folk-dancey high five, but don\u2019t make the contact.<\/p>\n Raimund Hoghe. A sash becomes a hat. Photo: Julieta Cervantes<\/p><\/div>\n There\u2019s a humorous aspect to this relationship. Smiling, Ueno runs and leaps around and around a circle, occasionally stopping and looking questioningly at Hoghe, who stands at the center\u2014affable, but making small, brusque gestures to indicate that Ueno should keep going. Once, Ueno wraps a wide sash around his waist, ties it, then steps out of it. Hoghe picks it up, puts in on his head, and strolls about, flourishing a tiny but long-stemmed flower as if it were a cigarette holder. This while Audrey Hepburn is singing \u201cMoon River,\u201d followed by Judy Garland with \u201cI Love Paris.\u201d<\/p>\n Some of the simplest scenes burgeon with possible meanings. When they stand close together, Ueno slightly behind Hoghe, and each moves one arm in an individual fluid pattern, I imagine at first that they\u2019re writing something on air; if so, it\u2019s the same words over and over. Those sensitive, many-times repeated gestures have the tendrilly look of plants.That image resonates much later when there is talk of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and a woman\u2019s soft voice says that for a chemical reason, on the twentieth day after the explosion, plants began to flourish and flowers bloomed, even as people died from the radiation (shortly after we hear the terrible explosions, a passage from Mahler\u2019s \u201cResurrection\u201d symphony seems both to question and soothe).<\/p>\n Ueno’s adagio balance on one geta<\/em>. Photo: Julieta Cervantes<\/p><\/div>\n The references to those devastating bombings enter the quiet sparring as a shock. It\u2019s unnerving at first (too tremendous an event to be domesticated in art). But the end of World War II is as much a part of Ueno\u2019s history as are the sashes and the sandals\u2014items of clothing that, by the way, aren\u2019t used just as cultural artifacts. When each of the performers holds a long piece of cloth (a potential obi<\/em>) by one end, he draws it gently along in such a way that one man\u2019s strip of fabric slides over the other man\u2019s like a caress. Ueno dances with an uncannily lyrical slipperiness; when he does so while wearing the geta<\/em>, he can slant forward, braced by the tipped sandal. Hoghe, who was born in Wuppertal and served as Pina Bausch\u2019s dramaturge for ten years, has a German dance heritage to display, which he does, in part, by walking around, holding up to the audience an iPad bearing a long-ago film of a woman dancing; it\u2019s Gret Palucca, one of the important figures in 1920s and 1930s German modern dance, whose school was closed by the Nazis because she was Jewish.<\/p>\n Hoghe and Ueno are both wonderfully sensitive performers, masters of the nuances of gesture. But their differences are fascinating too. Ueno is without any unnecessary tension. Sometimes he\u2019s so deep in thinking and feeling the music that he\u2019s almost somnambulistic. Hoghe is as alert as a bird, waiting, watchful, charged in his stillnesses.<\/p>\n It isn\u2019t easy to sit in a not-too-comfortable theater seat for two hours watching a work this spare and low-keyed, and now and then a few people leave. On Wednesday, October 10th, late in the performance, one major figure in American dance education, now frail and in her 90th<\/sup> year, exited the theater with such small, steady, contained steps that she seemed, for a few moments, to be paying homage rather than walking out.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Members of Hofesh Schechter Company in Political Mother<\/em>. Photo: Julieta Cervantes<\/p><\/div>\n Hofesh Schechter\u2019s Political Mother<\/em> begins with a ritual death and ends with an artificial rebirth. A dimly spotlit man (Chien-Ming Chang) in samurai attire commits seppuku <\/em>in a thoroughly grisly manner. It takes him several agonized seconds to die after he has managed to push the sword all the way through his body. The final moments of the piece rewind its action (in abbreviated form) back to the beginning. Chang is just rising as the curtain falls.<\/p>\n Interpret this image as you will. A society decrees codes of behavior that must be followed?\u00a0 Schechter\u2014 born and raised in Israel, now resident in Great Britain\u2014damn near killed himself making this, his first evening-length work, but rises to the next challenge?<\/p>\n What he created in the 2010 Political Mother<\/em> is a spectacle built on the theme of oppression, and in the world of this piece, every inhabitant is either in a state of agitation that comes close to being out of control, or is stumbling around anesthetized. Many of Lee Curran\u2019s brilliant lighting effects resemble searchlights\u2014whether designed to seek out rebels, gaudy-up a rock concert, or to call attention to an event such as a Hollywood premiere.<\/p>\n<\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a>