danceview
a quarterly review of dance

Reviews

From Opera Ballet to Judson Church

by George Jackson
copyright © 2001 by George Jackson
Spring 2001

People who never go to dance performances often see dance in other contexts, both on stage and on screen. What’s shown there—except in musicals which have a full dance life of their own—can give audiences diverse, odd and incomplete impressions of the state of choreography and dance technique. During the first four months of the 2000/2001season, my encounters with “stylized, elaborated movement” in the theater ranged from the trite to the thrilling.

In the opera La Juive by Fromental Halevy, there’s dance music that suggests a 19th century ballet divertissement. Yet choreographer Beata Wrzosek of the Teatr Wielki in Poznan, Poland (Halevy’s hometown), used these quite extensive measures to stage a 20th century nightclub act. Undoubtedly, the idea was to focus on sensuality. Wrzosek did this almost single-mindedly, for although the men were allowed a few leaps that gave evidence of classical training, the women were employed solely as beautiful bodies. Such a dance scene that stands apart from the rest of the production, which was more in keeping with the conventions of Halevy’s day, begs to be cut by management should economies be called for.

Not that obedience to tradition necessarily results in high art. Washington (D.C.) Opera’s production at Kennedy Center of Jules Massenet’s Don Quichotte was rented from Europe, along with Mariano Brancaccio’s choreography for himself, partner Monica Artino and a corps that in this instance was local. The dances showed stereotypic gypsies who tried to enliven a static, undramatic version of the Cervantes story. In both the Halevy and Massenet, there was also the old problem of opera, that the dancers look like a different species of beings than the singers. A solution is to have the dancing done by singers — which gives rise to yet other difficulties. Singers, even those who have had dance training, of necessity carry themselves differently than dancers.

It takes a shrewd choreographer or stage director to make them move effectively for movement’s sake. Even though the dancing singers I encountered this year were directed tastefully, in no instance was the dancing anywhere close to full-out. Also for the Washington Opera, Roberto Oswald’s direction of the white gowned Kundry and her companion Flower Maidens in Richard Wagner’s Parsifal had these seductresses swaying simply but aptly in so-called Greek or Isadora Duncan style. For Wagner’s Rheingold at the Zurich Opera, Robert Wilson was more ambitious. He stylized the singers’ posing and moving in an abstracted Kabuki way, to stunning effect. For the first time in my exper-ience Wagner’s protagonists appeared on stage in a manner befitting their superpassionate natures. Presumably, in future seasons Wilson will extend this concept (which isn’t new) to the following three operas of the Ring cycle.

Also at the Zurich Opera, in Richard Strauss’s Salome, director Kusej’s [note: no other name given] Dance of the Seven Veils had Salome (agile soprano Stephanie Friede) merely squatting about while a gaggle of mechanical baby dolls crawled out of the wings and kept on crawling awkwardly until they wound down and “died”. It was disgusting infanticide — intentionally so, though that’s not the type of disgust composer Strauss and playwright Oscar Wilde seem to have had in mind. Other choreographed stagings were bursting out all over Zurich. Memory, a video-opera premiered at Theater Neumarket, was based on a documentary about old people remembering their first experiences of sex and war. To minimalist music for string quartet by Harald “Cosmic Baby” Bluechel, three young actors interact with screens showing taped images of the old people and real-time images of themselves. The actors also dance, acceptably, MM Gruber’s disco choreography, and the result of all this multimedia wasn’t gimmicky but rather touching in the way age and youth were merged. Also, something that wasn’t quite opera, drama or dance but choreographically theatricalized chamber music took place in an old industrial building where several halls now serve as rehearsal spaces for Zurich’s official theaters. In one of these, the Zurich Playhouse mounted a double bill of Arnold Schoënberg’s Pierrot Lunaire and Olivier Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time. The action added by director Christoph Marthaler was sparse: Graham Valentine, as the principal Pierrot, was shown having a schizophrenic fit and, in End of Time, a line of listless people stood waiting to be weighed. The pacing and mood of these occurrences was the opposite of distracting. They helped in focusing on pieces of music that are still challenging decades after they were composed.

Goethe’s Faust consists of two plays. The first is deft and full of meaning, the second is difficult and dense with meaning. A new staging by the Stanislavsky Theater Studio at the Chruch Street Theater in D.C. asked the question whether the two dramas can be con-densed into one, with dance and mime used to substi-tute for the missing words. The answer is no! Other problems, too, plagued the production — such as thick accents. Yet the choreography by Irina Tsikurishvili was intriguing. She is a former ballerina from the Republic of Georgia and her movement ideas are as direct and simple as Mark Morris’s when he’s illustrating thought and action. However, there wasn’t time for choreographic development due to the production’s rapid pacing—still another sort of constraint that gives audiences unfamilar with all-dance performances a diminished view of what dance can do.

Never not clever, David Gordon scripted and directed “PastForward” without trying to recapture time past—at least not in a literal way. This produc-tion, being presented by the White Oak Dance Project during the 2000/2001 season, tries to get at dance history indirectly, by telling the story of an explorer in a strange land. Some of the dances he finds there differ drastically from those with which he was familiar at home. Being inquisitive, the explorer not only immerses himself in the new choreography at hand but also wants to know how these dances came about. So begins his quest to discover their origins and antecedents. What he uncovers is an entire tradition.

Of course, the explorer is Mikhail Baryshnikov, arguably the Soviet ballet’s ultimate virtuoso, and the history he wants to understand is that of American postmodernism, arguably the farthest out form of motion theater since Isadora Duncan et al. invented modern dance over a hundred years ago. The big bang that gave rise to this postmodernism happened at Judson Memorial Church in New York City’s Greenwich Village during off hours when dancers gathered there. True Judson didn’t last long — the first few years of the 1960s. It was over before Baryshnikov defected from the USSR.

While it lasted, though, Judson was perpetual revolution. Works were seldom “revived”, and if they were, they could look radically different. The parti-cipants’ looks changed too. These people tried all sorts of styles, ideas and fashions, yet they were discrimina-ting omnivores. Their dances were neither crass nor chaotic because they took only a few degrees of free-dom in each piece. Those few degrees were enough to guarantee that outcomes were surprising. Admittedly, repetitive sequences occurred within some works. This, though, wasn’t due to habit or an inability to think up a sufficient number of new things. It had the purpose of helping to discard disguises such as portraying a character, expressing a mood or even assuming the role of just being a performer. Above all, the Judson people weren’t performing, they were inventing themselves. Repetition, rehearsal, game playing and imitations of every day actions done at great length or over and over again also helped viewers to pass beyond boredom and begin to see what was happening: dancers engaging in acts of discovery about other people and their own state. The Judson people were after truth, personal truth!

That’s where “Past Forward” seemed false. It was a performance, an imitation of art, not one of life. Even the stratagem of presenting Judson dance as seen through Baryshnikov’s eyes didn’t make what we saw pulsating and personal. The evening I went (Nov. 10) started out on its worst foot. Entering the Lisner Auditorium in DC, one was confronted by a cluster of people doing a movement improvisation in and about the customer crowded lobby. Supposedly, the thematic material was Simone Forti’s 1970 (post-Judson) Scramble, but it looked as amateurish as most dance student improvs look these days. Forti’s 1960 (Judson-era) Huddle, on stage later, looked no better. The performers were White Oak dancers and George Washington University dance students, with the latter dominant. At Judson, no one looked amateurish because no one was pretending i.e., performing. They were all practicing. Other choreography presented on the Lisner stage was by Steve Paxton, Deborah Hay, Yvonne Rainer, Trisha Brown , Lucinda Childs and Gordon — pretty much the Judson pantheon. White Oak’s dancers — Raquel Aedo, Baryshnikov, Tadej Brdnik, Emily Coates, Rosalynde LeBlanc, Michael Lomeka, Emmanuele Phuon — performed these pieces professionally, changing unrepeatable, irretrievable. events into respectable repertory.