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Reviews

Bay Area Report

Sasha Waltz, Sekar Jaya, Nederlands Dans Theatre, Ballet San Jose Silicon Valley, Robert Moses’ Kin, Company Chaddick

by Rita Felcianol
copyright © 2001 by Rita Felcianol
Spring 2001

Not surprisingly, given the precarious venue situation, fewer young choreographers and small companies have been presenting their work this late winter. On a positive side, the studio crunch has released much welcome energy among dance activists. They are directing it towards rather ambitious long-term solutions, involving government-supported, affordable studio and performance spaces.

German choreographer Sasha Waltz (February 2), in her second appearance in as many years, brought her greased lightening Allee der Kosmonauten to the Zellerbach Hall in Berkeley. The piece grew from Waltz’s research (door-to-door interviews) in one of those monstrous housing projects which, at the time they were built in the '50s were considered the height of progress in East Berlin. She centered her action in one living room in which a family of five tries to survive without rubbing each other raw.

The focal point was a sofa, at once a battleground, island of calm and place to be laid. The members of this dysfunctional clan fought over the newspaper, a space on the couch, the music they listened to. Emotionally crippled, they moved like puppets, stalking, waddling and falling over each other and the furniture. Every once in a while, as if someone had pulled their strings, they exploded into rage, and slammed their bodies against the concrete wall that kept them captive. Elliot Caplan’s admirable videos suggested a life outside though if one looked closely, it was full of people just like those in the apartment.

This was skillful choreography, detailed and astute, from the first nervous ticks that sent the son off his perch, to the heel-clicking women on their backs, and a grumpy slump into which the father repeatedly sank. Waltz impressively built the pressure which sent these characters into ever more convulsive, but perfectly synchronized twitches and twirls and very realistic fist fights. Much of the vocabulary looks as if it came from early Hollywood, the Keystone Kops to Buster Keaton. And that ultimately was the problem with Allee. Despite its excellent craft, the work was thin. One walked away from it the way one would from the Sunday comics.

Over the years the twenty-two year old Gamelan Sekar Jaya (February 16), also at Zellerbach, has evolved from an enthusiastic group of amateurs to an ensemble of excellent professional musicians and dancers whose members include American as well as Indonesian artists. In recent years this ensemble—like others that explore non indigenous arts—has begun to broaden its repertoire through collaborating with artists from sister disciplines, such as Kathak dancer Chitresh Das or Body Percussionist Keith Terry.

Kawit Legong: Prince Karna’s Dream is Sekar Jaya’s most ambitious and by most successful journey into the world of cross-genre collaborations. Directed by Ellen Sebastian, based on a concept by I Ketut Kodi and with movie-screen sized projections by Indonesian puppet master Larry Reid and his ShadowLight Productions, Kawit Legong dramatized the origin of Legong, the dance for young girls performed in Bali once a year as part of a religious celebration. The seventy-minute work proved to be enchanting on many levels. With live singers and dancers, the gamelan players on stage, and an expanded concept of shadow imagery, its most endearing quality stems from its fresh contemporary look even as it retained the spirit of fable telling.

A gently humorous dancing lesson with arm corrections for the two little girls, choreographed by Ni Ketut Arini, a specialist in female Balinese dancing, would have been recognized by young dancers across the world. Shakespeare’s groundlings would have loved the central fight between the evil spirit and his attendant witches who, in a parody of modern dance, looking like chewbaccas. The final fight between the prince and the witch ended in a splendid stalemate: the Balinese believe that evil cannot defeated by the sword, only by dance.

While Gamelan Sekar Jaya packed Zellerbach, Nederlands Dans Theatre (February 20), proved that Bay Area audiences, as one fellow critic remarked, are provincial, or at the very least have short memories. They may be forgiven since this was this company’s first appearance in twenty-two years. Still it was appalling to see that these remarkable artists had to perform for barely two-thirds houses for much of the five-day run.

Forgotten Land (1981) and its simple straightforward sensibility looked a little dated but its musicality and clarity still speak volumes. Opening with a haunting image a people walking towards a rising sea, you’d think that Britten had written the music to Kylian’s expansive and churning choreography instead of the other way around. The work’s flying lifts, the stretched leaps on the diagonal, the spiraling into the ground and Graham contractions may be familiar, still Kylian’s mastery of organizing his material remains breathtaking.

The more recent Wings of Wax (1997), with its startling stage set of a tree hanging upside down being circled by a spotlight, impressed in part also because it so successfully employed music from radically different sources (Heinrich von Biber, John Cage, Philip Glass and J.S. Bach). From its initial ice skating moves and small hand gestures, the women’s contrasting stepping in place to each man’s frantic solo until all exploded into a jerky despair, the piece inexorably moved along a single trajectory. The narrative purports to be inspired by Icarus’ failed flight towards the sun, with the spotlight representing the sun. I found this revolving circle of light oddly comforting; it recalled, not the sun to which it has often been compared, but a lighthouse’s beam which unceasingly looks for who might be lost.

Sarabande (1990), a sextet, which led directly into Falling Angels (1989), for eight women, however, choked on its own theatricality. Screaming, fist shaking males, stripped of their baroque dresses, crouched and leaped in unisons from which individuals periodically would explode. Intended to evoke some kind of primitive behavior set up to contrast with Bach’s serene order, this was an intriguing concept perhaps. Its realization, despite receiving a ferocious performance, however, fell flat. Falling Angels, on the other hand—to a live performance of Steve Reich’s masterful Drumming—was breathtaking. Its syncopated footwork, the braiding arm and cygnets patterns, and the way the changing formations sometimes just slightly anticipated Reich’s phase shifts, simply were exhilarating.

Considering what they have had to put up with—abrupt demise of operation as Cleveland San Jose Ballet and rising from the ashes as Ballet San Jose Silicon Valley (February 23, San Jose Center for the Performing Arts )— a few missteps could be expected. One of them was Flemming Flint’s Phaedra, paired with Gaité Parisienne. On the surface a good match: a tragedy of substance and a comedy of bonbons.

Unfortunately, Flindt’s Phaedra didn’t measure up even though the Danish choreographer has some skill in setting up theatrically effective images. Taking his cue from Greek vase paintings, he flattened bodies, with arms angled at shoulder height, had them step in profile either singly or in overlapping and cross-stepping unisons. At one point the women attendants’ running steps evoked a billowing cape for Phaedra while lifted knees and fisted arms called up a robust, brotherhood of hyper virile men. While none of these ideas are original, they did set a promising frame work for the tragedy.

Phaedra recounts the story of the Greek queen who falls in love with her son Hyppolitus. The theme echoes in the Old Testament with Joseph and Porphyra, John the Baptist and the wife of King Herod; in modern times Eugene O’Neill picked the idea up in Desire under the Elms.

Two things made Flindt’s take more than a little problematic. He chose to tell through eighteen mostly short scenes which created a sense of disjointedness; also his vocabulary was so generic that it barely managed to outline the drama. The choreography for Phaedra, a long limbed Joanne Jaglowski, was particularly thin and painful to watch. Her heaving and writhing was one of theater’s more gauche moments as was her death scene in which she threw herself against a cage of spears to be carried off aloft. However, Ramon Moreno’s Hyppolitus, with his Prodigal Son size leaps and an earnest budding masculinity, did about as much has he could with the thin material he had to work with.

Gaité Parisienne, despite its less than stellar performance, was a delight. The company is down to 30 dancers and incorporates a number of inexperienced newcomers and apprentices. Massine’s intricate steps and tempi were a stretch for them. Still this oldie received a spirited and intelligent reincarnation. Nahat has a wonderful knack for enriching the background details (his first act Nutcracker is one of the best that I have seen). Little fights, flirtations, drunken interchanges, squabbling with the waiters etc. made for a lively stage picture without distracting from the soloists. Maydee Pena, as the glove seller, was properly starry-eyed though her prince charming, Sean Kelly looked like carved from balsa wood. Karen Gabay as the soubrette, in the Flower Girl part, and particularly Raymond Rodriguez as the arm-flitting and quick-stepping Peruvian felt and danced their roles with gusto. Most of the ensemble numbers, however, need work. The intricately designed fight scene, with its delicious Rossini-inspired music, had received the kind of attention that the rest of the work will still have to get.

Robert Moses’ Kin’s sixth annual season (March 11, Cowell Theater) showed the twelve-member company in its best form ever. Moses, still a hauntingly expressive solo dancer, has always excelled with duets and trios which allow him to dip into a vocabulary that ranges from the ballet to urban street forms. Until recently larger forms appear to have eluded him. That’s no longer true; last year’s Lucifer’s Prance, which did undergo some revisions, was as explosive as it was solid. The big new work, Back Doors and Dirt Roads, though it needs a pair of sharp pruning shears at this point, has a good chance to reach the same benchmark.

An almost filmic quality pervaded Lucifer’s opening shot; tiers of intertwined couples created a sense of voluptuous space; at once architectural but also precarious. Movement within stasis seemed to be the tenor of this first section as Moses worked contortions and serpentine lines to Philip Glass’ steady beat. In the second fiercer but also more fragmented half, the dancers at times looked like creatures from Bosch, pulling on each other’s limbs or sticking their heads into odd places, the whole inexorable process being presided over by a fierce Amy Foley.

A hard edge of maybe hunger, maybe self-absorption sharpened the sociability of the new Dirt Road and Back Doors (to various blues). These couples tried to connect by grabbing, holding and exploring body parts as if they were a territory on which to alight. Pain and humor seemed to coexist as people collapsed, were being dragged and crawled along the edge of the stage. The work is still somewhat unwieldy yet the collective drive in these robust yet fleeting physical encounters is impressive, and the way Moses works the timing sequences is. Most impressive was Ramon Ramos Alayo, high-stepping across the stage faster than Road Runnner on speed.

3 Quartets for 4 and the Second is Two, which also needs seasoning, started out by nailing Bach’s beat into floor until its four dancers (Alayo, Ching, Tianne Trias and Brian Grannan) opened up into partnerings which appeared to show off the women’s virtuosity. More than to its choreography—in which the women flutter and flit around like ghosts—the all female Humm owed its buoyant élan to the glorious “There is a Balm in Gilead.” Also programmed, in addition to the two-part Lone, was Moses’s signature piece, Shard, a still powerful introspective solo, most impressive for the way it between physical and emotional gears.

These days, particularly in a city where release is queen, Company Chaddick is a rarity, an ensemble in which inventive and full-bodied movements are spun together like golden threads. Chaddick reminds us of just how expressive modern dance can be.

Invocation (2000), nominally a quintet though the performers never coalesced into unit, opened like a stream in which luscious swings and stretches followed a preordained path and then settled into stillness. It was followed by a hand-in-hand duet in which a partner sank into the floor only to rebound and be whisked off. Chaddick’s own solo started with a pumping hand gesture; at first the movement stayed closed to the body but then expanded into arabesques and ronds de jambe all the while aiming for an upward thrust. A frolicking duet, built on game structures, rounded off this satisfying work.

The new Hard Drive took a jab at ambition at work. In the past Chaddick has made other efforts at satirizing contemporary life; it’s not her forte. The piece did showcase another of Company Chaddick’s assets: excellently trained dancers with strong individual personalities. Punctuated with verbal marketing clichés and psycho babble Drive opened on a group of people jabbering around a table, recalling immediately, of course, Kurt Jooss’ Green Table . The most intriguing of the subsequent episodes paired tiny and super brisk Heather Tietsort with a somewhat more lumbering Matt Boyd. Their quirky couplings created a smooth counterpoint to their marketing strategy banter. For the end the ensemble reassembed with a sense of foreboding as if Big Brother was about to descend.

The other premiere Ask No More treaded dangerous territory, dangerous because behind its luscious appeal lured the specter of sentimentality. But Chaddick stayed away from easy emotionalism. Supposedly celebrating womanhood, the dancers in diaphanous white gowns, the piece had a Pre-Raphaelite look to it and reminded me also of Julia Margaret Cameron’s photographs. Set against images of permanence— sand dunes, a century plant, a sea of red maple leaves—Ask caught these draped females in intensely private moments. Sitting, rearranging themselves, their poses gradually gave way to lifts and spirals, twirls and exalted turns. One of the piece’s charming ideas, presented without a trace of irony, was its inclusion of two males. They fit in just fine.