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Jock Soto retires from the New York City Ballet’s stage on June 19 at the age of 40, after 25 years with the company. For the latter part of that period he has been extolled as a partner—as if that were his main (even sole) virtue, as was, essentially, the case with the company’s Conrad Ludlow in the past and Charles Askegard today. Yes, Soto’s an astute, often sublime, partner, but—having been around when he first showed up at the School of American Ballet and set the corridors abuzz with excited whispers: “Have you seen the new boy? Down the hall, taking class. He’s amazing !”—I think back to him as a dancer.

Memory is a tricky thing. Led by sentiment—for an artist’s personality, for the terrain on which he operated, for the sheer accumulation of history—it can transform dross into gold. So I looked for more concrete evidence of the qualities I remembered in Soto from the early part of his career and found them, where you can see them too, in a videotape of The Magic Flute, choreographed by Peter Martins for the School of American Ballet’s Annual Workshop Performances in 1981. It was right after these performances that Balanchine invited the 16-year-old playing Luke, the male lead, to join the corps of the New York City Ballet.

The ballet itself is a charmer. Like Ashton’s La Fille mal gardée, the model of the genre, it’s a romantic pastoral comedy. Martins adds to the mix a commedia dell’arte element that he no doubt absorbed in his youth from the traditional pantomimes given in Copenhagen’s Tivoli Gardens.

The adolescent Soto recorded here is utterly disarming, and not just because of a frank, luminous smile that is well-nigh irresistible. Of course there are plenty of raw edges in the performance. He’s gawky here and there, unpolished, impetuous, giving himself over to a very simple joy in the moment. You could say he’s only a kid, though no adolescent in serious training for a career in ballet can be simply a kid. Granted, there’s no sign here of the gravitas that would distinguish Soto’s mature work, but the nascent professional is already evident. His placement is very secure and very beautiful. In motion, he’s not merely fluid but also extremely, if casually, graceful. His dancing is consistently soft and floating. On take-offs and landings, his feet seem to caress the floor. (After one lovely solo passage, his fellow students, breaking stage decorum, come out of character and applaud him.) He takes his acting responsibilities seriously and carries them out naturally, as if he’d discovered that Luke had a personality not too far from his own.

The gift for partnering is apparent, too, lacking only the fine-honed skills and increasingly sensitive intuition that experience would bring. Self-confident, Soto exudes a quiet assurance that, vis-à-vis his partner, he will be in the right place in the right way at the right time. Along with this technical aplomb, he displays an easy sympathy toward his lady (the 18-year-old Katrina Killian—tiny, light, and quick) as well as a devotion and respect that might well be termed chivalric. He knows how to frame her, creating an aura around her like a halo, and he knows how to get the hell out of her way. Close-up shots reveal his large, capable hands and strong back. When supported pirouettes are on the agenda, he’s an enabler first class. You can see how, even in these early days, he “roots” his partner, stabilizes her in her most precarious positions and dangerous moves. He’ll stand at a slight distance—waiting, alert, ready—and then simply move in and become her center.

It should be remembered that it was Martins himself who chose Soto to play Luke. Perhaps he recognized the similarity between them as dancers, both in the buoyant, cushioned solo work and the suave partnering. There’s little physical resemblance between them. Martins was tall, blond, Greek-god beautiful. Soto is of medium height, jet-haired and olive skinned, with an Aztec cast to his features. His build is undeniably stocky, with a larger head and shorter neck than classical ballet, obsessed with harmonious proportion, prefers for its princes. Soto’s distinctive anatomy would eventually add to his onstage presence not merely dignity but also intensity, enhancing a key aspect of his temperament—a darkness and ferocity that seized the viewer and refused to let him go.

Now Soto’s audience must let him go, with thanks.

For succinct bios of Jock Soto, along with lists of ballets created for him and the many other roles he danced with the New York City Ballet, use these links:
http://www.nycballet.com/about/print_sotobio.html
http://www.sab.org/faculty_soto.htm

Photo: Steven Caras: Jock Soto, rehearsing Peter Martins’s The Magic Flute for the School of American Ballet’s Annual Workshop Performances, 1981

© 2005 Tobi Tobias

New York City Ballet / New York State Theater, Lincoln Center, NYC / April 26 – June 26, 2005

One way or another, gala programs must be striking. This season, the New York City Ballet’s boldly shunned both Balanchine and Robbins, the guys who give the company its raison d’être, for five new additions to its repertory—all choreographed by current members of the home team. Three of these pieces were duets that could be taken, obliquely, as windows on the state of dance today, at least on NYCB turf, and the state of love in these postmodern times.

Albert Evans’s Broken Promise, set to Matthew Fuerst’s Clarinet Quartet, lets you see what’s best about Ashley Bouder: the diminutive, taut body—fueled by extravagant but implacably controlled energy—creating sharp, intensely vivid images in the vast space of the State Theater stage. Her costume, by Carole Divet, suggests what keeps some observers (like me) hesitant about joining her growing fan club. It’s a sleeveless, backless, cleavage-baring white leotard gaudily studded with giant rhinestones, and it makes her look like a Russian gymnast who’s a sure bet for the gold. At first Stephen Hanna seems to be there only to support her when needed, conveniently disappearing when he’s not. Then he gets some of his own high-octane stuff, though it’s interrupted when she hurtles out of the wings to throw herself at him—literally. Their duets look like physical competitions, sometimes friendly, sometimes hostile, and when the last moves of the dance posit them as lovers bedding down, you’re startled to realize that all that previous athletic bravura must now be understood as foreplay. What this piece says about love is that the sedentary among us should hie ourselves to the gym, pronto, or we won’t stand a chance.

Benjamin Millepied’s Double Aria, first performed by his chamber group, Danses Concertantes, in 2003, takes its name from its music—Daniel Ott’s Double Aria for Violin Alone. (Choreographer and composer have collaborated several times and are now preparing a piece for the School of American Ballet’s annual showcase in June.) Double Aria puts the violinist (Timothy Fain) onstage so that he’s all the more a partner in the proceedings and, indeed, sometimes a soloist, as the dancers fade in and out of the picture. These dancers are an extravagantly (almost eccentrically) long-limbed pair, Maria Kowroski and Ask la Cour. We see them first, then again at intervals, in silhouette, a tactic that emphasizes their shape, as do the repeated vertical undulations and complex intertwinings Millepied assigns them. Kowroski is subjected by her partner to a certain amount of fling-and-drag—a tactic that has cropped up frequently in new pieces at NYCB. I suppose nothing personal is implied when the work purports to be abstract, though—you know how it is—some viewers might just take it personally. The structure of Double Aria wasn’t entirely clear to me, but, giving it the benefit of the doubt, and knowing that Millepied is French-born and French-trained, I thought that it might be one of those subtly clever schemes French intellectuals dream up. Waiting for the enlightenment that might come with a second viewing, I enjoyed the air the dance had of being a sketch spontaneously improvised to the seductive meandering of the music. What it tells us about love—or, at any rate, a “relationship”—is that it needn’t engage the soul.

Edwaard Liang’s Distant Cries, to a plangent Albinoni score, was first seen earlier this season in the repertoire of the chamber group Peter Boal & Company. Danced here, as it was there, by Boal and his frequent partner Wendy Whelan, it is tinged with the dancegoer’s knowledge that Boal will retire from performing in June and leave for the West Coast to direct Pacific Northwest Ballet. Liang’s choreography and Whelan’s increasingly sensitive interpretation of her role suggest themes of loss and grief. (The idea of something irreplaceable’s coming to an end is a particularly big deal at New York City Ballet, going straight back as it does to the death of Balanchine.) Liang uses his dancers wisely, capitalizing on Boal’s reticence and purity and Whelan’s ability to look utterly fragile and malleable without fully concealing a fascinating will of steel. The choreography, if not remarkably innovative, is reasonably adept and unaffected, marred only by some inexplicable peculiarities—suddenly flexed feet in an otherwise classical context and a repeated phrase for the arms that looks as if it should mean something, but doesn’t. What it tells us about love is that, no matter how devoted, it doesn’t last. Of the messages offered by the three duets, this is the only one to interest itself in tenderness.

Two offerings on the program, by the company’s most frequent providers, supplied some expansiveness to contrast with the restricted duet form. In his Tālā Giasma, set to the Estonian composer Pēteris Vasks’s Distant Light: Concerto for Violin and String Orchestra, Peter Martins returns to the concerns of his Eros Piano: A man—perhaps searching for an elusive ideal love, perhaps merely a passerby distracted in the humdrum course of his life—encounters more than one alluring but mysteriously remote lady and finds it impossible to opt for this one or that.

This time there are three women (Sofiane Sylve, Darci Kistler, and Miranda Weese), and they appear to be goddesses, or at least nymphs. Sheathed in palely tinted body stockings, they dance in Mark Stanley’s delicate dawn light. When the man (Jared Angle, replacing the injured Jock Soto) first comes upon them, they are a benign sisterhood, inclined to lyricism. Once he engages with them singly, their individual temperaments surface. Sylve becomes demonic, thrillingly so. Weese displays an implacable strength, but it is cool and remote, while Sylve’s vehemence is sensual. Kistler remains gentle and tender, almost pleading with the man to love her, rewarding him, when he responds, in dulcet terms agreeably tinged with pathos. The three come and go, with the man expressing his confusion (or is it frustrated longing? or dismay?) in solo passages, then masterminding a final quartet. Still he never arrives at a choice, and the ballet ends with him standing behind the women’s recumbent bodies, his arms raised toward the heavens.

The choreography makes much of the women’s extravagant extensions and some sudden, dramatic drops from a supported position on pointe to the floor, as if to claim that modern-dance turf for classical ballet, which traditionally adheres to an aristocratic verticality. Otherwise, it’s pretty much business as usual, including the quotes from Balanchine. Here they’re mostly from Apollo (about another fellow who comes upon a trio of lovelies) and are far too many and too literal, co-opting verbatim text only to sully it. It might also be observed that Balanchine has his hero make a clear selection among the three muses, so there can be a central duet that is key to the firm shape of the ballet. Martins’s piece seems too long, I think, because it is diffuse.

Tālā Giasma also connects, obviously, to Nijinsky’s L’Après-midi d’un faune and, not so obviously, to Bournonville’s A Folk Tale, in which, long ago as a young principal with the Royal Danish Ballet, Martins played the hero, Junker Ove. On the surface the golden youth of everyone’s dreams, Ove is nonetheless a troubled soul, at odds with his destined bride—and rightly so; she turns out to be a troll. He eventually meets his proper match—all sweetness, light, and purity of heart—but not before he has been set upon by the supernatural Elf Maidens (cousins, you might say, of the wilis in Giselle) whose first appearance, rising from a trapdoor in a dense fog, is as a single woman who suddenly, terrifyingly, morphs into three. I’m not saying Martins was consciously thinking about A Folk Tale when he made Tālā Giasma; I’m saying that what one has seen and done remains irrevocably a part of one’s equipment.

Christopher Wheeldon’s An American in Paris, the only new piece on the program to boast décor and a sizeable cast, was no doubt an attempt to send ’em home entertained. Despite the blandishments of the Gershwin score, I slunk home depressed at the conspicuous emptiness of the dance and worried about the possibility that Susan’s Stroman’s Double Feature, which reportedly sold a good many NYCB tickets last year, might be evolving into a regularly used genre, in which a popular vintage movie is co-opted for vacuous shenanigans. Balanchine was no fool. He understood the need for a cheerful program closer. To fill this slot he created ballets like Western Symphony, which was colorful and lighthearted and—for people who cared about that sort of thing—had real choreography. Wheeldon’s effort has innumerable reference points, four drops by Adrienne Lobel ( faux-Cubist takes on tourists’ Paris—a Seine-side quay, the picturesque rooftops, et al.), and lots of pointless agitation.

Damian Woetzel, playing Gene Kelly, gets to mingle with the requisite generic types of Paris in the fifties: pert jeunes filles; young matrons in straw hats and gloves; anonymous guys in berets; a lady of the night; several gendarmes; a nun and her Madeleinesque charges (only three, so the “twelve little girls in two straight lines” effect was blown); and a cyclist (on his machine) taking a break, no doubt, from the Tour de France. He also gets to dance a bluesy duet with his sweetheart-in-pink (Jenifer Ringer, who curls around him like a kitten) and enjoy a little encounter on the side with an adorably saucy Carla Körbes, who emerges from a unisex gang of street toughs. None of this has any originality as dancing. And then we find out (surprise! surprise!) that it was all a dream. After raiding the film for a few basic situations—and failing to develop them—Wheeldon still counts on our transferring our nostalgic affection for the movie to his pallid show. Gimme a break!

Photo: Paul Kolnik: Jenifer Ringer and Damian Woetzel in Chrisopher Wheeldon’s An American in Paris

© 2005 Tobi Tobias

Mark Morris Dance Group / BAM Howard Gilman Opera House, NYC / April 19-23, 2005

This year, the Mark Morris Dance Group brought no brand-new, grand-slam work to its annual season at BAM. The sole novelty was a piece that had its premiere last fall, way west, in Berkeley, California. But it’s a honey. Rock of Ages, set to the adagio movement of Schubert’s Piano Trio in E flat, is a small, quiet dance that, like meditative deep breathing, expands the consciousness until it seems to reach the deepest feelings and an ever-widening understanding of how the world works.

Its population of four, plainly dressed, enters one by one from the four corners of the stage, briefly converges at the center of the space, then moves on (though a pair pauses briefly, side by side), each person simply continuing along the diagonal path prescribed by his or her first step. The ending reiterates this action, which is clearly the simple message of the dance: We exist alone; we meet when we occupy a common space; we interact in passing, our identity left essentially unaltered; we part—because it is only natural that we should.

Dominating the dance are brief phrases that, after their original impulse, slow and then coalesce into sculptural poses; these, having registered, melt into the succeeding phrase. Certain gestural motifs keep repeating as if they were lodestars. In one, the dancer turns her/his back to the audience, extends one leg behind herself diagonally and stretches her arms behind her back, hands clasped. She turns her head to one side, tipping it downward as if to examine the earth, then suddenly twists it to the other side, and upward, as if scanning the sky. (I thought of 9/11. How could you not?) Elsewhere, a single dancer faces the audience dead on, legs wide, knees deeply bent, arms extended horizontally, as if measuring the space or rooting herself to mark it as significant.

The dancers seem to traverse the stage at random (though even the most casual examination of the choreography reveals that their placing and timing are exquisitely plotted). Encountering one another, they don’t appear so much to be relating as singular personalities with private agendas as simply participating in the same event or sharing, almost anonymously, a common feeling. (Again I thought of 9/11. How could you not?) Occasionally they cluster–in pairs, occasional trios, even all four together, but only very briefly, for the stream of the dance is very fluid—then quickly regroup, exit, reappear. They look into the distance a lot, occasionally at each other, in a prevailing state of self-contained contemplation. Some swift and airborne things happen, too, but they’re just accents placed by a master well aware of the pitfalls of self-indulgence.

The whole dance emanates from the music as if Schubert’s sublime trio were—on this particular playing—being rendered as a quartet. The choreography has a calm, fated feeling; everything that happens is presented as acceptable and accepted, on a plane that lies beyond the tumult of contradiction. I wanted it to go on forever; when it was over, I wanted to see it again right away.

In the engagement’s four performances, eight dancers, ranging from veterans (among them, Joe Bowie, whom followers of the troupe love like family) to a relative newbie (the heavenly Rita Donahue), rotated in the four roles—in different combinations. Morris is the last choreographer on earth to consider his dancers interchangeable. But they are replaceable, instructively so. The shifting distribution of personnel—a tactic used in other parts of the repertory as well—shows any spectator on a repeat visit how a choreographic text, while remaining stable, is significantly inflected by the performing artists essential to bringing it to life.

This one-program engagement also boasted a burnished production of Morris’s 1995 Somebody’s Coming to See Me Tonight. Set to familiar songs by Stephen Foster, it illustrates Morris’s great gift for continually shifting tone within a single work, deepening the overall effect of the choreography by playing one mood against another or, more typically and wonderfully, intertwining them to reflect the way in which real life experience sends us multiple simultaneous messages. At the time of their composition (the mid-1840s to the mid-1860’s), Foster’s songs reflected prevailing sentiments in genteel American culture. Subsequently they came to be considered over- (even nauseatingly) sentimental. Nowadays they’re hailed as examples of classic Americana. Revealing the profound shadings that bodies can lend to words, Morris constructs scenes that find innocent tenderness in love and a final (even welcome) peace in death. Abutting or coexisting with these echt-Foster evocations are ironic takes on the lyrics that infuse them with bawdy humor or irrepressible gaiety (as in the polka that’s rendered in square-dance formations with an odd man out) and an underlying sense of life’s tragic dimension. Like almost all of Morris’s choreography, the piece is immaculately structured, with patterning at once surprising and satisfying in the way Balanchine’s is. The dancers, attentive to details of gesture and feeling, make it luminous.

The program was completed by Silhouettes, a disquisition on mirror-imaging, as well as From Old Seville, a riff on the excesses and beauties of flamenco style, which is too short, and Rhymes With Silver, a glorification of its Lou Harrison score, which is far too long. Seville featured Morris, who, though growing ever more portly as he winds down his performing career, is as rhythmically acute as ever, and Lauren Grant, a tiny, swift, well-muscled blonde, who refuses to be upstaged by the boss. Silver employed just about everyone but Morris, and, if there’s a grander heterogeneous troupe of dancers around, I’d like to know where it is.

Photo: Susana Millman: Michelle Yard and Craig Biesecker in Mark Morris’s Rock of Ages

© 2005 Tobi Tobias

Trisha Brown Dance Company / Rose Theater, Lincoln Center, NYC / April 13-16, 2005

Celebrating her company’s 35th anniversary and adhering to her ongoing impulse to “make it new,” Trisha Brown devoted the second of the two programs she presented in Lincoln Center’s Great Performers series to recent work. The brand new piece that copped all the advance notice was how long does the subject linger on the edge of the volume . . . , an experiment with motion capture technology that had its premiere at Arizona State University where it was developed. (Brown co-opted the title for her piece from an overheard remark made by a techie on the project. Her maverick imagination found a wry poetry in it.)

What’s going on here? Well, to put it as simply as possible, both the ever-shifting visual imagery projected onto a scrim that veils the stage and the sound score are generated by computers receiving information from sensors attached to some of the seven dancers’ costumes (gleaming unadorned unitards in sapphire or vermillion). The images, in white sparked with bright red, consist of lines (and, subsequently, geometric shapes) that smudge, like skywriting, a few moments after they appear. Of course these animated graphics are distracting, though that’s partly because dance viewers aren’t used to scenography with a mind of its own (even if the intelligence is conspicuously artificial). The minimal score, on the other hand, is barely there.

Meanwhile, the dancers are doing the most remarkable things, many of them diverging from the vertical, the bodies leaning, lunging, jackknifing, plunging or sliding to the floor, arms, legs, and torsos rising to the challenge of tasks hardly within their original job description. Other aspects of the action derive from commonplace gesture and the groupings of crowds, this pedestrian material, absorbing in itself, unemphatically offset by some odd and beautiful lifts. Of all the Trisha Brown dances (and anti-dances) I’ve seen over the years, this one seems the most abstract, the most like Merce Cunningham’s work. The visual designs, however, bring to mind the mid-twentieth century explorations of Alwin Nikolais—all done, it should be noted, with unsophisticated equipment but quite similar results.

Occasionally the visuals get so feisty, you hardly notice the dancers, who at those moments appear small, insignificant, all but obscured, as if graffiti had been sprayed over them. Even when the images are more subdued, the scrim necessary for their projection thwarts the dancing, making it look more like something seen on TV than live performance. Tellingly, all the articles I read in advance of the New York premiere—the experiment was clearly a publicity magnet—made almost no mention of the particulars of the choreography. Elizabeth Zimmer, writing for the Village Voice, reports that the youngish techno-artists participating in the project complimented the 68-year-old Brown on having “a digital sensibility.” Has choreographic intelligence, I wonder darkly, become insufficient?

Two earlier works filled out the program. Geometry of Quiet, created in the aftermath of 9/11, is muted, intimate, infinitely tender. Its rarefied music, by Salvatore Sciarrino, played onstage by the flautist Mario Caroli, evokes a slew of natural sounds such as breathing, ocean waves invading and receding from the shore, wind in a vast tunnel, bouts of coughing, and fragments of birdsong. Jennifer Tipton’s lighting creates a perpetual dawn in which the sun seems veiled—as if by fog or clouds in the sky or smoke rising from the earth. Christophe de Menil has dressed the six dancers in the white of angels and medical personnel, and Brown herself has framed the stage in panels of rippling white cloth, giving the dancers long translucent stretches of the fabric that they pull toward the center of the space to suggest shelters or, perhaps, sacred areas.

Delicacy is the watchword of this dance. Like Agnes Martin’s paintings, it records a spectrum of subtleties. In an atmosphere of rapt attention, the dancers execute their small precise gestures, their infinitesimal shifts in weight and placement in the space. Many of the movements suggest succor—body clasping body, bodies gathering in small, tight clusters. Very occasionally, the action becomes angry, even ferocious, but these passages are so brief and their execution so fastidious, they never contradict the overall mood. At the heart of the piece lies a duet for a small man and a tall woman. Its leitmotif of discrete phrases that resolve in sculptural poses suggests that the experience of a moment may have an ongoing life in history. The fact that this duet is echoed immediately by a second couple (in which the heights are reversed) reinforces a complementary idea—that individual experience expands into communal experience. At the finish of the piece, the pale light finally fades altogether, much more swiftly—as in much of human existence—than one would have expected.

I have a predilection for art in this exquisite vein, and I liked Geometry of Quiet very much. A colleague sitting next to me found it exasperating.

Present Tense, made in 2003 but new to New York, offers a good example of Brown’s divine fluidity—the aspect of her choreography that streams directly from her own body, her unique physical temperament. Set to selections from John Cage’s Sonatas and Interludes for Prepared Piano, it opens with a long male solo (handsomely danced by Neal Beasley) full of squiggles and loping. The dance then unfurls into a septet that, using a typical Brown tactic, moves laterally in and out of view, much of the action concentrated on the peripheries of the space. The choreography makes canny observations on how people combine or bond, especially when they’re supporting each other’s bodies, either in pairs or larger groups. Eventually the participants help each other soar aloft, outstretched limbs slicing the air.

I thought the proceedings were intermittently funny, but the audience didn’t respond along these lines, at least not overtly, remaining reverently still, as if awed by the evening’s air of a visit to the cutting edge. And yet the dance was, at the very least, playful, the brightly clad bodies repeatedly trying out moves or spatial relationships, then shaking their heads no and nodding them yes, like little dolls set in motion by a playful inventor in a toy landscape. Present Tense actually has a landscape—a backdrop by Elizabeth Murray depicting a Keith Haring-like figure neatly sandwiched between the treetops of a forest and low-hanging dark clouds in what I assume is a faux-naif comment on the human condition.

Photo: Tim Trumble: Members of the Trisha Brown Dance Company in Brown’s how long does the subject linger on the edge of the volume . . .

© 2005 Tobi Tobias

Martha Graham Dance Company / City Center, NYC / April 6-17, 2005

The trouble with Martha Graham is that, alive or dead, the lady can’t be relied on. She is, indisputably, one of the key choreographers in the history of Western dance. The Martha Graham Dance Company’s current City Center season, restricting itself almost entirely to carefully shaped productions of masterpieces like Primitive Mysteries, Appalachian Spring, and Errand Into the Maze, proves this point anew. However, more often than not, the work of the last third of Graham’s long career was inflated and vague, almost to the point of self-parody, and thus hardly worth conserving in the active repertory. So the viable Graham canon is limited and, though the power of the company rests with the great old works, neither the troupe’s audiences nor its dancers will accept having their experience confined solely to these pieces.

For this reason, the current directors, Terese Capucilli and Christine Dakin, commissioned their first new work for the group—from Martha Clarke. Emerging from Pilobolus in the seventies, Clarke choreographed and directed for major ballet and opera companies and created independent productions that led to her copping one of those MacArthur Awards that lets folks think of you as a genius. The Graham assignment resulted in Sueño (Dream), inspired by the Goya etchings collected as Los Caprichos (1799) and Los Desastres de la Guerra (1810-1814)—mordant depictions of the evils rampant in Spanish society and, by implication, in humanity at large.

Clarke has a fervid imagination (a quality Graham shared without letting it overwhelm her), and an insatiable appetite for the grotesque. Sueño is extravagantly picturesque. Its eleven haunted figures inhabit a very dark stage, where set and costumes are restricted to a palette ranging from black, through ash gray and silver, to a spectral white. The dancers’ wildly moving shadows create menacing silhouettes on huge mottled panels placed at rakish angles, the constant unsettling fluctuation of the forms augmented by the women’s loose-hanging hair and ragged skirts. In the same vein, the frenzied movement is intermittently accompanied by laughing, screaming, raucous shouting, sinister whispering, and, at one juncture, the antiphonal hand-clapping of Spanish dance.

Image upon image whirls before our eyes, depicting violence, sexual depravity, grief, despair, decay—and the near manic pleasure the participants take in their own dissolution. The populace scuttles around in the gloom, doing forbidden things or having horrific things done to them, spying gleefully on one another’s nasty diversions.

All this, performed with vigor and abandon, is stunning for a few minutes. It looks like the introductory passage to a heady, menacing film—after which you’d, quite naturally, expect incident, character, and finally some semblance of story to emerge from the atmospheric vortex. In Sueño this never happens. Although a few specific incidents stand out in the general mêlée—the rape of a redhead by three men, a vicious confrontation between a matador and his human bull/slave—they are very brief, a matter of seconds. For the most part, the piece goes on for over twenty hectic minutes without rendering anything more than a Carnival in Hell ambiance. Towards the end, as if Clarke had suddenly realized she’d produced nothing of conventional dramatic substance, one man mounts a precarious towering panel, his neck wrapped in a hangman’s noose. He harangues the small crowd of death-infatuated revelers below, then leaps from his perch to his “death” (flying effects by Antigravity). Clarke resurrects him after a bit, and he laughs hysterically, his hands clutching a pair of clanging bells.

Franco Piersanti’s score, Riccardo Hernandez’s set, Donna Zakowska’s costumes, and Christopher Akerlind’s lighting all contribute mightily to Clarke’s intended effect. The effect, however, though initially ravishing, does not constitute a dance. It has little of the quality of Graham’s landmark works—no governing passion, for one thing; no redemption, for another—and, for that matter, little relation to Goya, who never treated the morbid as if it were intoxicating décor.

The real choreographic event of the season turned out to be the revival of Graham’s 1943 Deaths and Entrances, an evocation of the turbulent lives of the Brontë sisters, its emotional climate as roiling as that of Emily’s Wuthering Heights. The piece centers on one of the sisters (originally danced by Graham herself, and whom we can take to be Emily, the one cursed by genius, Charlotte and Anne being merely immensely gifted). This figure works out her terrible conflicts and achieves some sort of ecstatic resolution in a matrix peopled by her sisters, incarnations of their three child selves, rival suitors evocatively called The Dark Beloved and The Poetic Beloved, a pair of auxiliary gentlemen, and an enigmatic collection of props. A transparent goblet, an enormous seashell (the kind that lets you hear the ocean’s implacable waves in the cleft formed by its swollen pink labial folds), and a pair of phallus-like chess pieces are manipulated by the dancers as if they, at least, knew exactly what the objects signified.

The dance has been re-costumed by Oscar de la Renta, and the gowns for the women are ravishing. They provide just enough period reference to make them probable and a huge dose of svelte glamour that connects them to the present day. Their palette—cinnamon, red violet, and black-striped bronze—gives off a sullen glow and makes an erotic object of the dancers’ skin, astutely bared at the neckline and shoulders. Referencing mid-nineteenth century dress, the construction is thick and elaborate at the pelvis, while the skirts trail behind just a little, surging and swirling as the women’s rapacious extensions and tormented swiveling animate them. (The Three Remembered Children’s schoolgirlish dresses are a little overwrought—Lolita-ish, if you take my meaning—but then adults cast as children almost always appear faintly obscene.)

Graham scorns plot for this piece and refuses even to make her characters and their feelings specific enough to be labeled. Yet she manages to sweep away the viewer susceptible to her methods and concerns. I, for one, having read my share of Brontë novels, could easily imagine the three sisters cooped up in the ill-fated family’s home near the wild moors, writing away and dying of TB, entertaining visions of romance and passion as the grave beckoned to them.

The movement Graham invented for the piece is particularly disturbed (and disquieting). The super-energized disjunctive phrases, with single gestures set in relief, look as if desire and anguish, storming the barricades of repression, had finally unleashed their lethal force. Graham convinces you here, as she does in all her top-notch tragic works, that the only life worth living—even if it invites chaos and leads to annihilation—is an existence at emotional extremes.

Miki Orihara, who is having a splendid season—in Appalachian Spring, her Bride brings tears to your eyes—is terrific as the Emily figure. She depicts longing and loathing ferociously, yet remains infinitely delicate. In one solo passage, having lost both the Dark and the Poetic Beloved, she appears to be a fragile, priceless piece of porcelain that suddenly shatters. Then, in the next moment, as if through an immense effort of will, she composes herself, absorbs her tragedy, internalizes it, and becomes, body as well as face, a mask—invulnerable because she is unreadable.

Orihara’s beautiful performances are topped only by those of Fang-Yi Sheu, the most gifted interpreter of Graham to appear in decades. Sheu shares with Orihara the ability to create a character through an intimate involvement with the persona and the situation and, at the same time, to portray that figure objectively. No mean feat, this; it’s like using Method and Classical acting techniques simultaneously. Her dancing per se offers dozens of things to admire. Her small willowy body seems infinitely fine-boned and malleable, yet her strength is steely and her projection intense. Details? In Errand Into the Maze, you watch, fascinated, as she enters the metaphorical labyrinth, her feet, like some feral creature’s, pacing out the path traced by an undulating rope laid along the floor. The body seems to float, almost formless, above these precise, stalking feet, as if in a trance. In Cave of the Heart, she gives her Medea hands that work like prehensile claws and a torso and pelvis overtaken—spontaneously, it would seem—by spasms that spell out jealous rage. But it’s the overall effect that’s most astonishing. Sheu makes you feel that there’s nothing learned or calculated about what she’s doing on stage. It’s as if the dance is inhabiting her, making her its vehicle—as if she had relinquished herself to Graham’s imagination. If you can get yourself into the neighborhood of the City Center, go see her. Right now. This sort of dancing is rare, and it doesn’t last forever.

Photo: John Deane: Miki Orihara and Tadej Brdnik in Martha Graham’s Deaths and Entrances

© 2005 Tobi Tobias

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The RÉUNION DES MUSÉES NATIONAUX (The National Museum Association’s Photographic Agency) offers a photographic catalogue of some 200,00 holdings of French museums. It can be searched by artist, country, period, subject, and so on. You can make a personal album of your favorites on the site. New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art and D.C.’s National Gallery have similar services, but the French one is the most ambitious and extensive. Text in English as well as French.
AddALL is an ultimate umbrella for finding used and out of print books online. It doesn’t have the atmosphere of Foyle’s, Powell’s, or even the Strand, but it will give you every opportunity to need yet another bookcase.
PROJECT GUTENBERG More books.No bookcase required.Over 6000 free electronic texts.
CALLIGRAPHY LESSONS ONLINE Learn the italic hand and make yourself legible. Don’t miss the animation.
Color charts of HERBIN INKS. If you have to ask, you’ll never know.
THE NEW YORK TIMES Because it’s there.

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Jérôme Bel: The Show Must Go On / Dance Theater Workshop, NYC / March 24-26, 2005

The advance word on Jérôme Bel (French-born and -trained, well traveled globally), made him out to be a bad boy—a renegade, an iconoclast, a threat to Things as They Are. Sort of a latter-day incarnation of early postmodernists like Yvonne Rainer of the celebrated refusal that began “No to spectacle no to virtuosity, no to transformations and magic and make-believe.” Or of Merce Cunningham, whose tactics were truly radical, truly assaultive. Turns out, as we discovered at the post-performance Q & A and reception for The Show Must Go On, M. Bel’s a sweet leprechaun of a guy. And the show he puts on is tame, rather old hat (undertrained, casually costumed performers, mining awkwardness for all it’s worth, have been engaging audiences in staring contests for decades now), and intermittently charming. God only knows what’s been riling spectators since its premiere in 2001. Well, just in case you were curious but couldn’t get in—it was a hot ticket—I’ve blogged it. Here you are.

They make the house dark and we, the prospective audience, get cooperatively quiet. The way it’s s’posed to be. And then we sit listening to a recorded pop song without anything to look at. For quite a long time. The song—Tonight, tonight—favors kitsch sentiments.

Then more darkness. And silence. And then another pop song. Still nothing to look at. With nothing else to do, we recall who and where we were when that music, those lyrics were always in the air.

Very, very slowly, the stage space brightens a little. There’s no one in it.

The stage is quite bright now. Still no one there. A third song starts. I guess the idea is that if you look at nothing for a very long time, you’ll be fascinated by anything that finally shows up. There’s some truth in this, but you’re less likely to perceive wonders in vacancy when you know some director type is using the sensory-deprivation strategy as a gimmick.

Finally, eighteen people in relaxed, occasionally rakish, street clothes saunter on, string themselves out in a ragged horizontal line and . . . just stand there. Doing nothing more than looking around. Mostly at us.

As they let their gaze shift, their heads travel a little, not much. Or they shift their weight, just a little. We examine them back.

Few of them are handsome in any conventional sense. Even fewer are securely at home in their bodies. The program labels them actors, not dancers, but they look more like a bunch of pedestrians for whom performing is far from second nature.

Suddenly, a big event: a few moments of club dancing. Some of the actors turn out to be spectacular movers after all, fluent and pulsing with rhythm. Others are so-so. A few are pathetic.

Then it’s back to 98% stasis. And staring.

I like to move it, move it. One guy moves the curtain behind them. Others jiggle the looser parts of their flesh—beer belly, slack thigh, luscious breast—as if they were Jell-O. A petite woman animates her splendid mop of curly hair. One man works on his privates, his hand decently under his trousers. (This must be a substitute for a more in-your-face act reported from abroad. Welcome, dear polyglot troupe, to the land of the New Puritanism.)

A woman deaccessions layers of her clothing at top speed, stripping down to a plainspoken black bra and bikini, then, keeping up the pace, gets dressed again, then undressed, then . . .

I don’t need a man. At the first sound of these lyrics, all the guys split. The women work on their port de bras and other signature ballet moves. Few, it would seem, have gone beyond Advanced Beginners level in this traditional discipline. I imagine we’re supposed to realize how interesting they all are in their effort or awkwardness or whatever and be moved by it. But the gorgeous blonde breast waggler in Ugg boots and a flirty patterned skirt steals the show. Ballerina Girl. She’s all Kirov Dying Swan fabulous doing her adagio, and she’s got a face (Russian? Polish?) made for the movies. Note to self: Find out her name. [Carine Charaire.]

The sound-and-light man who’s been operating at the front edge of the stage, practically in the lap of the front-row viewers, abandons his post, ambles lackadaisically into the middle of the space, and, turning his back to us, begins—Private Dance—a private little dance of his own. No sooner does he launch into it than the femmes depart. He amps up the sound, fashions himself a spotlight, steps into it. In due time, having gotten performing out of his system, he reassumes his regular duties.

The others return to deliver a more or less unison routine of pulsing gestures, jumping a quarter turn as the phrase repeats so as to face north, east, south, and west sequentially. They do this long enough for you to memorize the phrase and take it home with you. After this mini-aerobics class, they stand in place, catching their collective breath, once again examining the audience. We return the favor. They are, most of them, utterly ordinary. So are we. This is not a deeply fascinating state of affairs. Neither, in Bel’s hands, is it a theatrical one.

I don’t believe in an interventionist God. They couple up and embrace, then walk around seemingly at random, next—I don’t believe in the existence of angels—couple up again, also seemingly at random. The third time they embrace, they stay that way in silence until the next song begins.

This show goes on and on. I think maybe we’re at the halfway mark.

One member of each couple manipulates his/her partner like a dance teacher molding a student into an approximation of ideal posture. Then one supports the other in precarious leaning positions. Few are adept at this or even comfortable doing it, but they persist, mild-tempered descendants of Sisyphus. The persistence—the doing of the assigned task despite the absence of skill—seems to be the point. (Clever of Bel to maintain an amiable air as he strikes his blow against classicism.) One fellow, who has gradually assumed the role of dance captain or scout master, parts the back curtain so the rest of them can walk off into a space that’s safe from our eyes, then follows the last figure into this sanctuary. Or trap. (After all, they might cease to exist if we weren’t looking at them.) Somehow, this passage is touching, perhaps because it evokes so many theatrical and actual exits we’ve witnessed.

The empty stage goes dark, apart from a streak of light from under that back curtain. (Is the gang partying in there?). Now the spectators are bathed in red light. La vie en rose. Are we supposed to ogle each other as if we were providing the entertainment? Most of the audience fails to respond to the invitation, stares straight ahead at the dark, empty stage, studiously examines its program. Blackout. Total darkness throughout the theater while the recorded music plays steadfastly on. Well, we refused to look at each other, we insisted upon staring at a stage devoid of life. Now we can continue to gaze outward at nothing whatsoever or look inward at—what? No one lights a candle, not even a teeny-tiny pocket flashlight. (Certainly not a Zippo—it’s against the fire laws and, besides, we’ve given up smoking). No one curses the darkness. European audiences, those advance reports said, were not so tame.

Strips of light glow faintly along the aisles. Music starts up only to be ruthlessly cut off. The Sound of Silence. We’ve been put on spare rations. People just laugh. Is it so remarkable that no one gets overtly angry? The proceedings aren’t radical enough to get anyone passionately engaged. Indeed, veteran onlookers (including me) experienced this kind of stuff in boot-camp form in the sixties.

The full cast line-up reforms—pretty straight and tight now—at the front edge of the dance floor. Glaring light pours down on the stageside bodies and spills over onto us. Few of them, more of us, smile. They stand with their arms at their sides or locked behind their backs. I’ll be watching you. Even M. Son et Lumière is staring at us. You don’t need no Bible. Just look in my eyes. One by one the performers give up and walk off.

The group returns equipped with portable disk players and earphones. Son et Lumière rises from his tech table and gives them a conductor’s gesture for starting. They click their On buttons. So now we’re watching them standing still, listening (presumably) to music we can’t hear.

They start singing out phrases. If they’re singing what they’re hearing, everyone is listening to his/her own tune. Each repeats her/his phrase over and over again. Apart from a septet that shares a single player, everyone has his/her own one-track mind.

They drift off, leaving one of their number behind—I’m still standing—then reassemble to sing Killing Me Softly With His Song. Now they lie down, feigning sleep, with their mouths shut, while the song continues and we realize they’ve been lip synching. Was this possibly the last, but not the first time they had us fooled?

When Bel and his admirers talk about his work, the words conceptual and ironic come up a lot. I don’t think Susan Sontag, a high priestess in these domains, would have applied them to this simplistic, ingenuous show. Still, I wouldn’t have missed it for the world. Its good humor was mildly diverting and, after all, one must keep up with the times.

Photo: Briana Blasko: Members of the cast of Jérôme Bel’s The Show Must Go On

© 2005 Tobi Tobias

. . . and while I know a woman who learned Greek at ninety there are nevertheless some skills, like ballet dancing and gum chewing, which can only be mastered by the very young.
— Jean Kerr, Penny Candy
Now that my hair is white, and my years of life ahead are growing fewer, I think that the pains I have taken over dancing have not really been pains, and I must study harder, much harder.
— Onoe Kikugoro VI (familiarly called Rokudaime), in Ben Bruce Blakeney, “Rokudaime,” Contemporary Japan, 18
When people grow old they must be dull. Dancing can’t go on for ever.
— Anthony Trollope, Can You Forgive Her?
When you do dance, I wish you / A wave o’ the sea, that you might ever do / Nothing but that.
— William Shakespeare, The Winter’s Tale

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Matthew Bourne: Play Without Words / BAM Harvey Theater, NYC / March 15 – April 3, 2005

Matthew Bourne, who has relentlessly been creating new takes on golden holies (Nutcracker, La Sylphide, Cinderella, and—the one that made it to Broadway—Swan Lake), insists in interviews that his work, if it’s dance at all, is for people who don’t like dancing. Yet a number of well-known dance critics, both American and British, have been dancing around it, clapping their hands, and Bourne has won enough awards to require a dedicated trophy room. Now his Play Without Words—which copped an Olivier in 2002, when it was created for the Brits’ National Theatre—has come to town. I like dancing; should I have stayed home?

No one in his right mind would praise Bourne for choreography per se. The weakest element of Swan Lake, it is virtually absent from Play Without Words, which deals mostly in highly stylized mime pumped up with show biz moves, the mix paying little heed to musical structuring. Ostensibly Bourne’s appeal lies in his vivid theatricality and his transgressive bravado. (That flock of gorgeous, vicious boy swans in Swan Lake is typical.) I’m not entirely convinced, or entertained, by either.

Play Without Words takes off from Joseph Losey’s memorable 1963 film The Servant. The ominous screenplay by Harold Pinter tells—in words and even more provocative silences—the black tale of a privileged fellow who hires a “man” (a combination butler-housekeeper-valet) who, playing upon varieties of erotic desire laced with class struggle, proceeds to undo his master. Each of these chaps has a woman in his baggage. Our deplorable/unfortunate hero comes equipped with a fiancée, though neither member of that cold couple has the wits to acknowledge that the gentleman is, at the very least, bisexual. The servant, having made himself indispensable in the household, introduces his “sister” as a maid. The irresistibly provocative miss is, of course, the servant’s bedmate; her real job, to consolidate working-class power by seducing the boss, which she does, ironically, with genuine pleasure.

Bourne captures none of the film’s Turn of the Screw atmosphere, its all but palpable air of half-concealed desire, corruption, and menace. His equivalents of the four main characters are tepid, sometimes two-dimensional to the point of caricature. He himself may have found his efforts insufficient, since he casts three dancers, often performing simultaneously, in each role. This persona-in-triplicate scheme makes for a crowded stage and some confusion, though it reveals Bourne’s ability to direct traffic in ways that are visually effective. He has also added a fifth persona, a hefty blue-collar guy who clearly can have any woman he wants, and does. (This character, Bourne’s publicist explained to me, is a composite derived from other movies of the period.)

The Losey film’s pervasive and haunting motif of the characters’ spying on one another translates largely as simplistic farce in Play Without Words. Still, a couple of Bourne’s scenes are clever and genuinely amusing, in particular a double duet of the master being undressed—for a bath, of course, what were you thinking?—and dressed by his man. One passage—in which man and master all but destroy each other, then reconcile—achieves some authentic human depth, making you understand that they’re the most symbiotic lovers in the piece. Yet for the most part, though Bourne is touted as being a dynamic storyteller, Play Without Words fails to convey its characters’ motivations and feelings. It doesn’t even deliver a clear plotline. No wonder the show often grows tedious. Yes, even the change-partners-and-dance sexual exploits involving the kitchen table.

The production boasts a pleasant jazz score by Terry Davies and a Red Grooms-ish set by Lez Brotherston who also provided the early sixties costumes, including stiletto heels that, astonishingly, don’t for a moment faze the handsome ladies in the show.

I’m left wondering if Play Without Words isn’t simply a sign of our times, in which the creative powers-that-be assume their audience needs to be lured by shock tactics—the raucous, the garish, the forbidden, extremes of novelty for novelty’s sake. Surely the insistent use of these means, which quashes the virtues of sincerity and subtlety, is self-defeating. Most of today’s audience is already beyond shock and, what’s more, benumbed by the ever-escalating onslaught.

Photo: Richard Termine: Sam Archer and Steve Kirkham as master and man in Matthew Bourne’s Play Without Words

© 2005 Tobi Tobias

Glamour: Fashion, Film, Fantasy / The Museum at FIT, NYC / February 15 – April 16, 2005

Camille; directed by George Cukor; starring Greta Garbo, Robert Taylor, and Lionel Barrymore; gowns by Adrian; Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1936

Any theory that may lie behind Glamour: Fashion, Film, Fantasy, the current FIT exhibition curated by Valerie Steele and Fred Dennis, pales in face of its simple, captivating reality. It’s essentially a huge room peopled by row upon row of mannequins wearing gowns that, like the movies and the stars they’re associated with, provide a blessed antidote to reality. To make sense of this uninflected panorama of extravagant gorgeousness, you instinctively seek out a few objects (as the pros call them, though the word is a pitiful choice) that were meant for you—not for your body, but for your imagination. And then, inevitably, you zero in on the single one that speaks to you most particularly. Or—who knows, the art of costume employs so much witchery—perhaps it chooses you.

The item with which I bonded was a gown by Adrian, created for Greta Garbo to wear in George Cukor’s Camille. Executed in black velour, it has a reticent cut—a demure sweetheart neckline, a snugly fitting bodice. From the trim waistline, a generous skirt falls with cushioned weight, extending slightly at the back as if to hint (only hint, mind you) at a train. A spray of black tulle capping the shoulders suggests a pair of wings, the gown’s sole concession to the frivolity of lightness. A modest “brooch” formed from bits of crystal and metal, is anchored dead center on the bosom, like a family heirloom dutifully displayed. But, shooting out a few slender bronze rays, letting fall a sprinkling of minute sparkles that might be stars, it introduces the idea of a celestial universe. This theme expands—explodes, actually—on the skirt, which looks as if a lavish and reckless hand had flung a galaxy across it. The glittering, gleaming incrustation contains clusters of crystals in myriad shapes—squares, rectangles, elongated diamonds, teardrops, five-pointed stars—and graduated sizes. Raised squares and domed circles are emphasized by marcasite-style frames, while flocks of small and even smaller pewter gray sequins create the illusion of stardust. This evocation of a galaxy recalls the work of Schiaparelli’s “Zodiac” collection (with its extravagant beading by the House of Lesage), but where Schiaparelli’s fantasy glories in its ostentation, Adrian’s treatment is more innocent, like something out of a child’s dream.

The gown is quietly and extraordinarily beautiful. It also turns out not to have been used in the film. After much inquiry around town, initiated by a puzzled query on my part, it has been relabeled to indicate that it’s simply one of several variations proposed for the occasion. But I didn’t know that when I fell in love with it, and afterwards, as in most such affairs, there was no going back.

From the sheer pleasure of gazing at this object, I went compulsively further, as writers will. What could be more fitting for a dance fanatic, after all, than to screen the film for which the gown was designed, to see it in motion?

The wardrobe Adrian created for Garbo in Camille demonstrates the fantasy side of a designer equally renowned for the subtle, witty tailoring of ostensibly Plain Jane tweed suits. It is ravishing piece by piece. What’s more astonishing, though, is the use of the costumes, in sequence, as a metaphor for sublime beauty haunted—and finally extinguished—by death. (Should anyone in the Western world still be unaware of the fact, let me say that the heroine of Camille succumbs to TB—a scourge that art has somehow associated with high romance.)

Marguerite Gautier—the lady of the camellias, as Alexandre Dumas calls her in the novel that spawned not just this film but Verdi’s La Traviata and minor but poignant ballets by Ashton and Tudor—habitually arrays herself in the white of her signature flower. She may be a kept woman, we’re given to understand, but once she encounters Armand Duval she experiences genuine, selfless love, and the white comes to stand for the purity and innocence of romance free from corruption.

After their initial encounter, Marguerite invites Armand to her birthday celebration, to which, as we see first in close-up, she wears a gown that’s an enormous froth of white tulle, like beaten egg whites. It’s offset only by a single but striking ornament—a huge black bow pinned between her breasts like a “scarlet” letter, signifying death. Moments later, when she’s captured in a long shot, standing and then dancing, we see that both bodice and skirt are sparsely strewn with large glittery paillettes in the form of stars, an indication that the heavens are her inevitable realm. The gown’s drooping gauzy sleeves, dance aficionados will enjoy noting, might belong to the ethereal costume of a Romantic-era ballerina.

Further on in the film, another white gown—far less diaphanous than the first, as if the air had been sucked out of it—bears two smaller black bows, one under the other, like a sign with a definite yet still undecipherable meaning. Thin lines of black edge the shoulders, the décolletage, and the giggly puffed sleeves as well, like a warning—indeed, an omen.

Marguerite’s health deteriorates. She and Armand retreat to the country where they deceive themselves into thinking she will be cured by a life of idyllic simplicity and calm in the fresh air. In the horse-drawn carriage taking them to their rural destination, she’s swathed in a black coat and hat that refuse to reflect a single ray of light. Only a white scarf at her neck recalls a happier time. Black has become the dominant hue enveloping her, white reduced to a minor presence.

At the cottage, shortly before the arrival of Armand’s father, who will persuade Marguerite to sacrifice her love to her lover’s future, she wears a modestly long-sleeved, full-skirted white dress. As if to reinforce the image of decorum, the camera keeps steadfastly away from her throat, the locus, in other scenes—when Garbo flings back her head in abandon—of nudity abandoning itself to erotic pleasure. The chaste outfit in which Marguerite receives her lover’s parent—and submits to his request, which means ultimate self-sacrifice—is slashed by a black waistband anchored by a tight bow at the center, its long inky streamers streaking down the ballooning skirt with the assured ruthlessness of the incision made by a scalpel in the hand of an autopsy surgeon.

Attending the wedding of Armand’s luminously virginal sister, Marguerite extinguishes the white of her dress with a black bonnet and stole, to which she subsequently adds a black pelisse that might as well be a shroud. (White, after all, is for untouched brides, whom a wedding’s witnesses are forbidden to rival.) These cover-ups, very Victorian, are the only ugly garments in the film. Restitution will be made for this incursion by Garbo’s final costume, a pure white nightdress designer-cut for a saint. Standing to greet the lover returned to her at the last moment, the expiring heroine tucks a single white camellia into its waistband. In the black and white film the petals edging the blossom suggest the black borders on the creamy letter paper the Victorians used for death announcements and ensuing condolences.

Meanwhile, at the end of the scene in which, breaking her heart, Marguerite sends Armand away by telling him she prefers the man who formerly kept her, she wraps an enormous length of white fabric around her, turning her body into a narrow fluted column, a premonition of an effigy on a tombstone.

Now comes the passage I had been anticipating so eagerly. Having renounced her liaison with Armand, Marguerite has returned to the lover who previously supported her hectic life in the demimonde. She appears with her protector at a raucous soiree, where Armand, returned, encounters her just as she is being insulted by her escort. All cool subtlety, Armand reprimands his unworthy rival, then triumphs over him at the gaming table, making a killing at his expense. Then, in bitterness and barely contained rage, he hurls the money he has won at Marguerite, so that the huge, crumpled bills spill down the length of her dress.

I assumed that, in this scene, Garbo would be wearing the gown I’d fallen in love with at FIT. But no. She’s dressed in a gaudily elaborated version of it—the paillettes scintillating everywhere, the decoration on the bodice amped up, the black tulle that had been confined to the sleeves not merely augmented and fluffed out there but also extended over the entire garment, closely wrapping the gown and, by implication, the body, like the netting used to surround an offering of luxurious chocolates. Undeniably, this version of the costume is metaphorically correct. On the surface, Marguerite has been reduced to the status of luxury goods, available to anyone who can afford her. But the costume used in the film neglects the pathos of her situation, while the gown on display at FIT, grasping it so truly, is not merely beautiful but deeply touching as well. Of course, even to consider my claim, you have to believe that a dress—nothing more than a few yards of cunningly cut black velvet, a little jet tulle, and a shower of sparkles—can have emotionally persuasive power. The proposition can’t be argued. It has to be succumbed to.

Photo: Irving Solero: Adrian: Movie costume for Greta Garbo in Camille: Black velvet and tulle with beads and embroidery; The Museum at FIT; Gift of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Inc.

© 2005 Tobi Tobias