{"id":1202,"date":"2012-12-09T12:54:20","date_gmt":"2012-12-09T17:54:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/?p=1202"},"modified":"2012-12-29T11:02:24","modified_gmt":"2012-12-29T16:02:24","slug":"lie-there-my-art","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/2012\/12\/lie-there-my-art\/","title":{"rendered":"Lie There My Art"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Prospero (Eric Beauchesne) regarded by some of the “replicas” at the end of Kidd Pivot’s The Tempest Replica<\/em> by Crystal Pite. Photo: Ge\u00f6rg Baumann<\/p><\/div>\n

I don\u2019t think of myself as purist about Shakespeare. I\u2019m fine with Laurence Olivier inserting a line from Christopher Marlowe\u2019s Tamburlaine<\/em> into his Henry V<\/em> film and loved David Gordon\u2019s Dancing Henry V. <\/em>\u00a0I\u2019m okay with the 1995 film of Richard III<\/em> that equates its murderous dynasties with the Third Reich.\u00a0 <\/em>I relished a years-ago Shakespeare and Company production of Much Ado About Nothing<\/em> that was laid in a Banana Republic, and I tolerated (just) Kenneth Branagh\u2019s presentation of Love\u2019s Labour Lost<\/em> as a musical. I\u2019ve sat through Romeo and Juliet <\/em>ballets ranging from marvelous to tacky.<\/p>\n

But I\u2019m baffled by Crystal Pite\u2019s 2011 The Tempest Replica<\/em> for her Canada-based company, Kidd Pivot\u2014in part by her choice of this most philosophical of Shakespeare\u2019s plays to turn into dance, omitting all nuances of the characters’ motivations. In her wonderful Dark Matters <\/em>(2009), Pite made brilliant use of puppets, and it\u2019s perhaps inevitable that she would see Shakespeare\u2019s Prospero as a kind of puppeteer, using his magic powers to manipulate the enemies who years ago set him and his tiny daughter, Miranda, adrift in a boat. Now, the ruler of a more or less deserted island, he aims to regain his title as Duke of Milan from his usurping brother and wed Miranda to a king\u2019s son.<\/p>\n

In the first part of The Tempest Replica, <\/em>as seen at the Joyce Theater, Prospero has copies of seven of the play\u2019s characters to maneuver into a happy ending. Although Eric Beauchesne as Prospero is dressed in nondescript contemporary work clothes, the four other male characters wear white shoes, shirts, and business suits; their hands are gloved, and their entire heads covered with white masks shaped like outsized, streamlined bike helmets (costume designer: Nancy Bryant). These personages are the King of Naples (Jir\u00ed Pokorny shares the role with Jermaine Maurice Spivey); his son, Ferdinand (Spivey); his brother, Sebastian (Bryan Arias); and Prospero\u2019s traitorous brother, Antonio (Yannick Matthon), with whom the king is in league. Miranda (Cindy Salgado) is similarly swathed (but with a skirt). So is Prospero\u2019s resentful, conniving slave, Caliban (Pokorny), and his devoted sprite Ariel (Sandra Marin Garcia). They all resemble well-kept mummies, and tend to move jerkily at Prospero\u2019s magical commands or as a result of Ariel\u2019s tricks.<\/p>\n

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Prospero (Eric Beauchesne) making stand-in boats with a tempest in mind. Photo: Ge\u00f6rg Baumann<\/p><\/div>\n

While the audience is entering the Joyce during Kidd Pivot\u2019s 11\/29 through 12\/1 run, Prospero kneels at the front of the stage, folding sheets of paper into a fleet of little boats. When the house lights dim and Ariel enters (not yet masked), he gives her one. This presumably is his way of commanding this temporarily indentured spirit to conjure up a phantom storm that will cast his enemies safely ashore on his island (at a distance from Ferdinand, whom he plans as a husband for Miranda). Ariel takes the paper boat, crumples it, and jams it into her mouth. Crash! Pow!\u00a0 Owen Belton\u2019s score kicks in with the sounds of disaster\u2014splintering timbers, lashing waves, breaking glass.<\/p>\n

Now begins the evening\u2019s most theatrically rousing scene. Set designer Jay Gower Taylor,\u00a0 projection designer Jamie Nesbitt, and lighting designer Robert Sondergaard have indeed created a storm. Behind wind-tossed seas projected on a thin, rippling curtain and amid flashes of lightning, the four travelers reel and stagger and fall and grab onto one another. When it\u2019s over Beauchesne pulls the curtain down and wads it up.<\/p>\n

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Prospero (Beauchesne) “telling” Miranda (Cindy Salgado) the tale of his forced exile. Photo: Ge\u00f6rg Baumann<\/p><\/div>\n

Pite treats this first part of The Tempest Replica<\/em> as a kind of further boiled-down Cliff Notes version of Shakespeare\u2019s plot\u2014minus a number of characters, and with few subtleties. The tale of treachery that brought Prospero and the child Miranda to the island years ago unfolds in a brief, not very clear little film peopled by silhouetted figures. Anyone who doesn\u2019t know the play and hasn\u2019t read the program synopsis might be baffled. The live action is similarly succinct, the movements jerky. Prospero brings up Miranda by getting her to copy his gestures. Caliban shows his status by groveling at Prospero\u2019s feet and being kicked away. Prospero moves Miranda\u2019s legs, one at a time, to make her walk to where Ferdinand is. One look at each other\u2019s blank white faces and the two kiss. Oh, no! Too soon!\u00a0 Prospero freezes Ferdinand.\u00a0 The labor he then devises for his son-in-law-to-be is simply moving one white rock, which is immediately pulled back to its original place (one nice touch: the young prince, unused to labor, keeps getting one hand caught under the heavy rock he\u2019s setting down, and he has to tip it to extricate his fingers).<\/p>\n

With similar brevity, Pite reveals through gestures such matters as the sorrow of the king, who believes his son drowned, and the conversation in which Antonio tempts Sebastian to parricide. Belton\u2019s score, with the help of sound designers Alessandro Juliani and Meg Roe, not only keeps echoing and blustering around them; it provides creaks, crashes, the metallic clash of a sword being drawn, and other sounds to point up gestures. The projected letters that announce each act and scene we\u2019re about to watch succeed one another rapidly. When we need more clueing into the history of the various relationships, we\u2019re given projected silhouettes (Caliban, saved by Prospero once tried to rape Miranda, hence his slave status). Despite its brevity, this stretch of Shakespeare in dumbshow is far longer than Shakespeare\u2019s crucial pantomime in Hamlet. <\/em><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/em>In the second part of The Tempest Replica<\/em>, the characters\u2014now unmasked and in ordinary clothes\u2014are occasionally helped along by a spoken line of text from the play or a projected one. But in watching this part, I begin to hunger for subtleties that might enrich those white mannequins that sped through the plot. It\u2019s not just Shakespeare\u2019s poetry I crave, but his insights into character.<\/p>\n

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Prospero (Beauchesne) disciplining Caliban (Peter Chu in an earlier cast). Photo: Ge\u00f6rg Baumann<\/p><\/div>\n

In Pite\u2019s choreography, emotions tend to trigger violent dances. Dancers hurl themselves at the air, at each other, at the floor\u2014their arms flailing, their legs whipping around. The movement doesn\u2019t reveal much more than rage and suffering, except in a sweetly playful duet for Miranda and Ferdinand. Also, the audience hasn\u2019t had time to attach the \u201clive\u201d characters to their replicas. Clearly it\u2019s Arias as Caliban who dances monstrously and is violently subdued by Prospero.\u00a0 But I am not always sure who\u2019s agonizing with whom.\u00a0 At one point, I think for several moments that Prospero is combatting a doppelganger. And what is Ferdinand upset about? The fact that he thinks his father the king drowned? Just when you expect the waters to run deep and rinse the characters into full-colored life, the plot hits the shallows and only reveals them as terrifically skilled and expressive dancers.<\/p>\n

There are some provocative and\/or magical effects in Pite\u2019s Tempest<\/em>. At one point, the shipwreck is rewound. In the second part, Miranda runs to the downstage corner and agonizes over the sinking that she sees in the distance, just as her replica did (this time, however, Prospero comforts her). But Pite also plays perplexing games with contemporary allusions. The Miranda and Ferdinand replicas jive at their wedding to suitable music. In the second part, a cocktail party replaces the magical disappearing banquet that Ariel makes happen (via projections) in the first part. A doorbell rings, sirens pass. Once, Ariel struts along on tiptoe, and the sound score mimics the sound of the high heels she\u2019s not wearing. How cool is that? But why?<\/p>\n

The first glimpse we have of Miranda in The Tempest Replica<\/em> is of her lying face down in an awkward position. She\u2019s asleep; Prospero awakens her. But at the end of the piece, when Shakespeare\u2019s island ruler abjures his magic, Pite has the four men\u2014garbed again as replicas\u2014enter and, after a brief skirmish, lift Prospero and lay him down in the same position in which Miranda slept. Then they stand and look down at him. Is this the playwright drained of life by the efforts of his genius?\u00a0 Perhaps. The Tempest<\/em> is arguably considered to be Shakespeare\u2019s last play, and he died about five years after writing it. Or maybe this moment is Pite\u2019s visualization of lines from Prospero\u2019s great Act IV speech about life and theater: \u201cWe are such stuff\/ As dreams are made on; and our little life\/ Is rounded by a sleep.\u201d\u00a0 Poetry comes in many guises. Would that there was more of it in Pite\u2019s Tempest.<\/em><\/p>\n

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I don\u2019t think of myself as purist about Shakespeare. I\u2019m fine with Laurence Olivier inserting a line from Christopher Marlowe\u2019s Tamburlaine into his Henry V film and loved David Gordon\u2019s Dancing Henry V. \u00a0I\u2019m okay with the 1995 film of Richard III that equates its murderous dynasties with the Third Reich.\u00a0 I relished a years-ago […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1203,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[99],"tags":[509,511,515,514,510,513,516,512],"class_list":{"0":"post-1202","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-dance-theater","8":"tag-crystal-pite","9":"tag-eric-beauchesne","10":"tag-jamie-nesbitt","11":"tag-jay-gower-taylor","12":"tag-kidd-pivot","13":"tag-owen-belton","14":"tag-robert-sondergaard","15":"tag-the-tempest-replica","16":"entry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1202","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1202"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1202\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1203"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1202"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1202"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1202"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}