danceview
a quarterly review of dance

Writers' Archive

Paul Parish

Frankfurt Ballet at the Zellerbach
Ballet From Hell

BY PAUL PARISH
The Daily Californian
Friday, June 16, 1989

The Frankfurt Ballet, which played to packed houses at Zellerbach Hall last week-end, makes ballet look like a teen-age ritual- like wearing a walkman or dressing in black or making up your face deadly pale and wearing lipstick the color of dried blood.

It's a whole look - they'll be in black bustiers, like Madonna, with sheer black tights that suggest some Victorian underwear fantasy. In this realm, toe shoes - black, with black socks - don't call up the usual vibes, but seem like what you'd have to be wearing to get in the door. These dancers make the rotation of the thighs (i. e., turnout, the basic distortion that ballet imposes on the body) look no stranger than the bent-knee stance of the jitterbug or the pogo. It's not only not strange, it's cool to do it.

William Forsythe, the American choreographer who directs the company, makes ballets that ask dancers to let us see how scrumptious it feels to rotate the thigh from deep in the hip socket, so that the inner thigh comes forward, using muscles deep in the loins to make this happen. The steps are linked so that the rotation is caressed - the phrasing goes where the body would want it to. Forsythe de-emphasizes the look of turned-out feet and rivets your attention on the pelvis, as if this were rock and roll, and then sets the arms thrashing and the legs and back twisting into gorgeous, implausible curves. The ballets are made so that the dancers get to enjoy their turnout, so that it feels deep in the groin as hot and bluesy as rock 'n' roll dancing.

"I was the best rock and roll dancer in my high school," Forsythe told an interviewer over the week-end. To my eye, the robotic, driving look that makes his ballets so widely hated by critics - who call them "vile" - comes from his assimilating the controlled convulsions of break-dancers, rappers, and punk-rockers -- -the pop dances of the last twenty years, which all look mechanical and driven).

Forsythe never dropped out of rock. (His favorite dancing music, he told the same interviewer, is now David Linley and Prince.) Forsythe is a white kid, 38 years old, from Long Island. He uses the "held" pelvis of '70s rock and not the "start a little movement in your sacroiliac" snaky pelvis of bluesy rock

Forsythe's ballet training was at the Joffrey Ballet, which was the first ballet company to make rock ballets, like Gerald Arpino's Trinity. Trinity had its premiere here at Zellerbach during a Joffrey residency at UC almost 20 years ago. I hear people were hanging off the balconies during the curtain calls.

Trinity exploited rock; it was (and is) great trash. The Joffrey was also the first company to work with post-modernists who were thinking about American pop dance and making smart dances in the idiom. Twyla Tharp's Deuce Coupe was the first great (or good, or witty rock ballet - or so I hear, I never saw it.

Well that's the background, sort of. The kind of rock Forsythe uses leans to the performance-art side, with texts bristling with nonsequiturs and thick with sub-text.

The two shows we saw in Zellerbach had the same shrewd programming strategy - make the audience sorry they came, and then make it up to them. The opening piece on both nights had dancers dressed in tight black bicycling shorts, moving like automotons; it began before you realized it, looked nihilistic, and ended long after you wanted it to. The second piece, by contrast, looked intimate and the third was light and animated and dressed in clothes.

If you were not there Friday night, you can not imagine what we endured during "The Questioning of Captain Scott" - not even if you consider that Scott froze to death on his way to the South Pole. Bare stage - pipes, I-- beams, heavy equipment showing, with tables left and right. The table on the left supported a video monitor that showed us what a camera on the right was filming - a man sitting, answering questions.

("Were there survivors?" "No."
'Were there witnesses?" "No."
'What was your latitude?")

The long piece made you want it to end; no one who saw it will ever forget the woman who stood center-stage and barked 100 times, each time circling her face with her hands. The piece forced you to look around for something to entertain yourself with -- sometimes it felt like waiting for the last bus back from San Francisco sometimes it felt like the dentist just said there's more decay in this tooth than he'd thought.

It was ballet from hell: but somewhere in the midst of this I saw a man dancing like I've never seen before - it was Tom McManus, who moved in strange bent arcs and could pull himself out of twisted lunges as if it was just the rhythm that did it. Dancers, like athletes, awaken kinesthetic re-sponses in audiences.

Steptext, the second piece Friday night, showed glorious, cantilevered balancing by a woman in red tights - she'd sweep her thighs into curves that looked like Arabic being written in three dimensions. This piece contrasted with the other by making you think about wanting to see some action come to an end and have a perfect shape. It became poignant when the lights went out on a man who had been inscribing perfect arcs in mid-air before he finished his phrase. It was not a mis-cue, it was-the point.

My favorite piece showed three bored people sitting around a table, looking like they'd love to be swept away in some adventure, oblivious of the fantastic creatures in black tights who entered and hovered, floated, cavorted, and darted about in the shadows around them. The absurd text began (in a Cockney accent) "I knew something was up when the carnival ride turned into a UFO." It was preposterous; the fairy world was all around them, invisible, except to us. I loved it.