Slouching
Towards California
"California"
choreographed by John Jasperse
BAM Harvey Theater
Brooklyn, New York
December 7-11, 2004
by
Nancy Dalva
copyright
© 2004 by Nancy Dalva
“Yes, Virginia,” Francis P. Church told a young reader on
the editorial page of The New York Sun at the end of 1897, “There
is a Santa Claus.” I write to offer a corresponding assurance for
the end of 2004. Yes, reader, there is a zeitgeist.
How else to account for the weird samenesses among diverse works presented
in seasons, in festivals, on mixed bills? No where more so than at the
Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Next Wave Festival, where two choreographers—otherwise
unrelated—recently crossed their stages with red rope. With Angelin
Preljocaj and his ballet company, it was yarn, serving as some sort of
symbolic connective device, with reference to viscera. With John Jasperse,
it was heavy duty appliance cords, drawn slowly onto the stage by a kneeling
dancer, signifying who knows what?
It’s as if someone sprinkled Butoh dust over all the choreographers
in the West, infecting them with an urge towards fetal imagery, disrobing,
slow motion, and devices suitable for bondage, which can combine to induce
nausea in the susceptible, and to make one think “Oh, this again,”
at the most unlikely sights. Some years, it’s fruit. Some years,
it’s tanks of water. One really bad year, it was live birds. ( At
least I think the chicken and the peacocks were the same year. The birds
blur.)
But about the extension cords. The choreographer needed them to power
up the leaf blowers, which he needed to move around the serenely crumpled,
origami- like, mutable sculpture by Ammar Eloueini that is the decor for“California,”
a work for five dancers, including the choreographer. There are also four
pianists on stage, and four “foley artists ” (who employ various
devices that produce sound but are not conventional instruments), playing
original music by Jonathan Bepler. (You only have to hear what sound like
seed pods rattling to think of John Cage, but this composer, unlike Cage,
seems to be drawn to a certain conventional pleasingness to the ear, and
to a certain cuteness, as when, at the end, the musicians let some balls
they have been employing roll into the middle of the dance.) The dancers
and musicians are united in their apparel, namely blue jumpsuits, until
such time as the dancers (this was entirely predictable) molt, revealing
mottled undergarments. Moths in lamplight, the lighting designed by the
choreographer and Joe Levasseur.
John Jasperse himself looks particularly larval and pallid, which is nothing
new with him, nor is his way with intense duets where the interpenetration
of limbs and entangling of torsos delineate a desire to merge not merely
corporal, but spiritual. He’s an oddball with a knack for oneness.
Less so for five-ness. This choreographer has shown himself time and again
to be uninterested in rhythm or structure, for which he substitutes slow
motion, high concepts, and a knack for postures that suggest a readiness
for medical intervention. Forget the arabesque, and assume the position.
An occasional duet played against a trio; the incorporation of contact
improvisation into theatrical dance. These are devices, not elements of
a larger, over-arching movement picture. Yet the dramatically lit stage,the
dramatic set, the music full of stillness, and the dancers fully focused
as they assume their ungainly postures, all these make this work transcendent,
to some.
Pale flesh, pale light, eerie noises, a ghostly set like a deconstructed
moon. Dancers tip-tip-tiptoeing about in cobalt overalls, rolling on the
floor, prone on their stomachs, slowly, slowly, slowly raising their behinds
into the air, like hypnotized mechanics. What’s one man’s
trance is another man’s torpor. You either fall in love in “California,”
or you fall asleep.
Volume
2, No. 46
December 6, 2004
www.danceviewtimes.com
Copyright
©2004 by Nancy Dalva
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Writers |
Mindy
Aloff
Dale Brauner
Mary Cargill
Christopher Correa
Clare Croft
Nancy Dalva
Rita Felciano
Marc Haegeman
George Jackson
Gia Kourlas
Sali Ann Kriegsman
Alexander Meinertz
Tehreema Mitha
Gay Morris
Ann Murphy
Paul Parish
John Percival
Susan Reiter
Jane Simpson
Alexandra Tomalonis (Editor)
Lisa Traiger
Meital Waibsnaider
Kathrine Sorley Walker
Leigh Witchel
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