{"id":5457,"date":"2018-01-19T18:39:47","date_gmt":"2018-01-19T23:39:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/?p=5457"},"modified":"2018-01-20T09:13:45","modified_gmt":"2018-01-20T14:13:45","slug":"what-makes-a-body-seem-new","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/2018\/01\/what-makes-a-body-seem-new\/","title":{"rendered":"What Makes a Body Seem New?"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Guggenheim Museum’s Works & Process series presents two works by Jodi Melnick on January 14th and 15th.<\/p>\n

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Jodi Melnick in One of Sixty-Five Thousand Gestures<\/em>, choreographed by Trisha Brown and Melnick. Photo: Robert Altman<\/p><\/div>\n

I didn\u2019t try to count the gestures in One of Sixty-Five Thousand Gestures<\/em>, a 2012 collaboration between Trisha Brown and Jodi Melnick. Nor did I think about the \u201cone\u201d of the title while Melnick was dancing alone on the small stage of the Guggenheim Museum\u2019s Peter B. Sharp Theater during one of the museum\u2019s Works and Processes events. This is not dancing as an exhibition or dancing that mimes a story; it\u2019s dancing as a way of life. To music by Hahn Rowe that\u2019s watchful, delicately assertive, Melnick muses and considers space and her body\u2019s possibilities. She\u2019s almost always on the move, and the full plum-colored tunic that she wears billows slightly in her wake. The garment by Yeohlee Teng evokes (but doesn\u2019t reference) Isadora Duncan\u2019s long-ago \u201cGreek\u201d attire.<\/p>\n

What Melnick devised with Brown, who died last March (how I miss her!), has the air of a dreamy, veering soliloquy. She may dance loosely, lope a little, flutter, then restrain herself and concentrate on a small, exact move or two. Sometimes her gaze will shift in one direction, while her shoulder pulls her elsewhere, and her feet delay a decision. Yet these currents are all part of the same looping stream. Rowe\u2019s score, like her choreography, moves between density and sparseness. The space becomes alive for her. You don\u2019t need to know what she\u2019s thinking; you can see that she is<\/em> thinking.<\/p>\n

The piece, dedicated to Brown and her husband, Burt Barr (also deceased), acts as a prelude to Melnick\u2019s NEW BODIES<\/em> (2016), commissioned by Works & Process. The title might more aptly refer to new mindsets as well. The adventurous performers, who have been working on this project with Melnick for some time, are Jared Angle, Sara Mearns, and Taylor Stanley\u2014 all principal dancers in the New York City Ballet (Stanley replaced injured corps de ballet member Gretchen Smith partway through the process). So here are these fantastically skilled classical dancers being more. . .well, natural, more themselves, but also doing choreography that demands a different kind of thinking. For sure, it has nothing to do with looking elegant and poised at every minute.<\/p>\n

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L to R: Sara Mearns, Taylor Stanley (seated), and Jared Angle in Jodi Melnick’s NEW BODIES<\/em>. Photo: Robert Altman<\/p><\/div>\n

The performers\u2014finely lit by Joe Levasseur and costumed by Marc Happel\u2014are very close to us in this handsome, intimate, semicircular theater; no orchestra pit separates us from them. Robert Boston, who composed one of the pieces accompanying the dance, sits at a harpsichord very close to one bank of spectators, and when NEW BODIES<\/em> begins, Stanley is crouching on the opposite side of the curving stage, within touching distance of the front row. The first thing he does is turn his back on us and look at Ellsworth Kelly’s large, dark gray, three-sided art work, Wright Curve<\/em>,\u00a0 on the wall beside him. Really look at it, before he rises and walks onto the stage proper. As he reaches stage left, he pushes one of the wall panels, and, surprisingly, it fans out; it\u2019s still moving as he continues out of sight. A lovely way of suggesting that we take nothing for granted.<\/p>\n

How often do we see Mearns sit at the front of a stage, look at us, gaze into where an orchestra pit might be, and lie back for a short rest?\u00a0\u00a0 Never. Until now. The steps that she performs so beautifully at the former New York State Theater usually draw our eyes to a clear image; Melnick asks for a more complex one, a rediscovery of everydayness. When the two men enter and begin to make gestures with their arms, it\u2019s as if they\u2019re having a conversation. Vibrating sounds set the three in action, and, of course, they dance wonderfully, but they make their unison leaps look almost tossed off, their high-swinging legs just part of a day\u2019s work.<\/p>\n

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Jared Angle catches Sara Mearns in Jodi Melnick’s NEW BODIES<\/em>, part of the Guggenheim Museum’s Works & Process series. Taylor Stanley at back.
Photo: Robert Altman<\/p><\/div>\n

Melnick organized her choreography imaginatively. The three slip fluently from unison into diversity and back again, playing games with our eyes. Each dancer has a moment alone. They work in silence or to music (Boston\u2019s sympathetic commissioned piece, Gy\u00f6rgy Ligeti\u2019s jangling, vibrating Continuum for Harpsichord<\/em>, and Heinrich Biber\u2019s passionate 17th<\/sup>-century Passacaglia<\/em>, which violinist Monica Davis plays on one of the stage\u2019s side extensions). You notice moves that might be unusual in the ballet world: one person, say, slumping backward and being caught under the armpits by another and hoisted to his\/her feet; Stanley sliding his chin down Mearns\u2019s outstretched arm; two people sitting to watch the third dance; the men beginning a sequence at the back of the stage on all fours. The dancers intersect in unusual ways or support one another in \u201creal\u201d ways, rather than in ones designed to look beautiful or show virtuosity. They are dancing for us, of course, but not for<\/em> us; they have their own voyages of discovery within Melnick\u2019s scrupulous patterns.<\/p>\n

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Jodi Melnick’s NEW BODIES<\/em>. L to R: Jared Angle supporting Sara Mearns, Taylor Stanley alone. Photo: Robert Altman<\/p><\/div>\n

The design for the evening is smart and sly; Melnick is not going to bring her trio to a climax and then, after applause, cut to a panel discussion. Violinist Davis is still playing while Gretchen Smith appears for the first time, bringing in a chair; later she fetches a couple of microphones. Angle, Mearns, and Melnick also enter with chairs and cluster them; then, sitting, they push even closer together, one person\u2019s foot in the opposite person\u2019s lap. (You can imagine this as a compressed symbol of how closely they\u2019ve worked together on NEW BODIES.<\/em>) They do a few moves. Then Mearns gets tipped out of the group and remains, uncomplaining on the floor, one leg on her chair.<\/p>\n

Melnick unperturbed: \u201cSarah, you okay?\u201d No answer. I guess it\u2019s no coincidence that Melnick then describes a heart attack in alarming detail, after which she reminds us that Mearns didn\u2019t display any of those symptoms. Mearns starts to move. \u201cSee, she\u2019s fine,\u201d says the choreographer, as if there\u2019s never been any question of that.<\/p>\n

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NEW BODIES<\/em> segues from dancing to talking about dancing. L to R: Jared Angle, Gretchen Smith, Sara Mearns, and Jodi Melnick. Photo: Robert Altman<\/p><\/div>\n

Before we know it, Melnick and the three dancers are sitting in a semi-circle with Boston and Judy Hussie-Taylor, executive director of Danspace Project, who\u2019s moderating what has nonchalantly become a panel. And they talk and say smart things about what they\u2019ve been doing. For these accomplished ballet dancers, comparisons are inevitable between the sessions with Melnick and their work in the New York City Ballet. As Smith pointed out, none of them tonight presented his\/her usual onstage persona\u2014one made to reach across distances to crowds sitting in an opera house with the expectations that such a setting induces. Ballet has a fairytale history to live up to, no matter how much contemporary life has altered it, and fans would have it no other way. What we at the Guggenheim applauded strenuously, however, was not just the imaginative choreography and the splendid performing but the fact that the dancers were whole-heartedly expanding their understanding of the art that they love and practice daily.<\/p>\n

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The Guggenheim Museum’s Works & Process series presents two works by Jodi Melnick on January 14th and 15th. I didn\u2019t try to count the gestures in One of Sixty-Five Thousand Gestures, a 2012 collaboration between Trisha Brown and Jodi Melnick. Nor did I think about the \u201cone\u201d of the title while Melnick was dancing alone […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":5459,"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":[199],"tags":[2498,2887,2892,108,768,2011,2890,137,2889,141,1931,110,327,2888,2891],"class_list":{"0":"post-5457","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-postmodern-views","8":"tag-gretchen-smith","9":"tag-guggenheim-museum","10":"tag-hahn-rowe","11":"tag-jodi-melnick","12":"tag-joe-levasseur","13":"tag-judy-hussie-taylor","14":"tag-marc-happel","15":"tag-new-york-city-ballet","16":"tag-robert-boston","17":"tag-sara-mearns","18":"tag-taylor-stanley","19":"tag-trisha-brown","20":"tag-tyler-angle","21":"tag-works-process","22":"tag-yeohlee-teng","23":"entry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5457","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=5457"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5457\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5466,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5457\/revisions\/5466"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5459"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5457"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5457"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5457"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}