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The Forsythe Company
“Three Atmospheric Studies” by William Forsythe
Cal Performances, Zellerbach Hall, Berkeley
February 22, 2007

Sydney Dance Company
“Underworld” by Stephen Petronio
Mondavi Center for the Performing Arts, Davis
March 2, 2007

Stephen Petronio Company
“Bud Suite,” “Bloom,” “The Rite Part”
Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco
February 9, 2007

by Rita Felciano
copyright ©2007, Rita Felciano

Two separate UC campuses recently sponsored performances by two dance companies with works of similar intent but different approaches and subsequent results. Stephen Petronio’s “Underworld” for the Sydney Dance Company apparently was inspired by 9/11; Forsythe’s “Three Atmospheric Studies” by the war in Iraq and, specifically, by war photographs and a painting each by father and son Lucas Cranach. Both choreographers had to grapple with translating emotion-filled content to the stage without stepping into an agit-prop mode, the surest way to beach artistic aspirations.

Forsythe’s “Studies” works as extraordinarily well not because of the triptych’s anti-war stance but despite of it. Forsythe managed the rare feat of holding volatile
content and strict structure in tension so that the two inform each other. Each of the three sections develops a strong internal trajectory that seems to veer from clarity towards uncertainty. The way these forces work themselves out gives “Studies” its bone-chilling strength; watching it becomes deeply disturbing and wholly satisfying.

The opening—which the Company apparently also performs separately—is choreographically the most fascinating. Movement originates in any part of the body—often in the shoulder—and travels throughout the dancer. In the course of the section, people become increasingly spastic and disoriented. And yet there is also circularity in the filmic quality of its stop-action rhythm. Certain motives return again and again as if put on rewind. Two women repeatedly hook up to circle the stage together; a tall man melts to the floor; the son is re-arrested, sometimes even with no cops in sight; Yoko Ando corpse-like lies down on exactly the same spot. It’s a crucial image which will return in the finale.  You get a sense of recurring nightmares. Yet new elements also shift the focus of attention and raise the sense of disorder. A “legless” man scoots on his hands; another blissfully skips among the bodies. A finger points, and then all of a sudden, many do. People no longer search the sky in unison but try to find the reason for what’s happening within themselves and among each other. What used to be clear has become unintelligible.

The second movement, in which the Mother tries to get the facts nailed down about the fate of her son, pursues a similar trajectory towards less and less certainty. It starts minimally with Jone San Martin as the Mother and Amancio Gonzalez, the Translator, engaging in a tense game of verbal ping pong. What should be a process of clarification becomes one of obfuscation. Interestingly,  Forsythe straddles the line, never making it clear whether Gonzalez is manipulating the process or whether he is also caught in a macabre game of semantics in which the message and its carrier become indistinguishable.

David Kern, as the art historian who explains a war photograph in terms of the lines of perspectives strung up in the background, adds an additional layer of intentional confusion. The scene probably needed more than just the two talking characters; a non-visual representation of a war scene was a way to add that additional layer. But I am not convinced that it worked dramaturgically.

In the last scene, Forsythe pulls out all the stops. San Martin is not standing under the cross as the Mater Dolorosa of the Cranach paintings but leans numbly against a blank wall against which dancers throw themselves in suicidal ferocity. Kern returns as the meticulous scientist engaging in an absurd task, pinning down the patterns of cloud formations. Assembling facts about another storm, the detonation of a bomb, is much easier; his “just the facts” reporting is detailed, dry and committed.

Dana Caspersen as the civilian-calming military official offering platitudes to San Martin is both an over the top and brilliant dramatic stroke. Giving this pretty, petite woman a male military speech pattern, including a southern accent, creates a highly effective dissociation between speaker and speech. The text, at times almost eerily echoes the Administration’s damage control babble. But the tone sounds false. What was needed here was some of Swift’s sarcasm in “A Modest Proposal” or the fierceness of Mark Twain’s “The War Prayer”. This was banal. But perhaps Forsythe had that kind of nauseating quality in mind.

Not banal was the finale in which Forsythe turns Cranach’s iconography inside out. Gonzalez, the Translator, “walks” a corpse-like San Martin downstage, spreads her on the floor and cradles her head. It’s a traditional pieta, except that the mother has been turned into the crucified.

I am not sure whether this triptych as a whole is quite as well structured as it could be, but I am more than willing to take Forsythe’s word for it. Maybe it’s just one more case for what he wants for an audience: walk into the theater not knowing anything and walk out knowing less. Uncertainty as a principle.

Sydney Dance Company commissioned Petronio’s high octane “Underland” in 2003 when its director Graeme Murphy and Janet Vernon took a sabbatical. Petronio wanted to work with Australian singer/song writer Nick Cave whose music sounds like a mix of Leonard Cohen and Bob Dylan with a note, I think at least, of self-mockery thrown in.

At sixty minutes and for nineteen technical powerhouse dancers, this was an opportunity for Petronio to create differently arched choreography than he normally does for his own much smaller ensemble. He chose an elaborate multi-media format with a three-screen video set up by Mike Daly whose densely collaged images derive from natural as well as man-made catastrophes. Long-time collaborators Ken Tabachnik did the lighting design and Tara Subkoff/Imitation of Christ the body-highlighting costumes.  Paul Healy and Tony Cohen patched together the aural bridges between Cave’s eight songs. The result is an at times affecting look at a world gone to hell that fuels its emotional punch as much from Cave’s some times maudlin ballads as from the strength of Petronio’s choreography.

Fast-paced, non-stop, Petronio keeps the show going on a very clipped paced with small ensembles punctuating larger group choreography where he uses the dancers almost like a corps de ballet. Endless unisons of overlapping trios blanket the stage, sometimes in counter point with each other, sometimes in simple sequences. While it is great to see the individuality of these extremely different dancers shine in flying leaps or stiff-legged stalking, the device works best as a visual palate-cleansing but dulls with over-use.  

“Underland” starts on a phantasmagorical note with Chen Wen descending head first down a cargo net—both on video and live to Cave’s brooding lyrics when Bradley Chatfield, a strong, stocky dancer, twirls onto the stage for a furious whipping duet with Chylie Cooper. It’s in the smaller-scaled numbers that Petronio’s wit and imagination brings the energy to a boiling point. A trio of women leaping straight towards us in ‘Wild Wild World’ as light bulbs in the video shatter into myriad pieces; a surprising circus number in which tiny women are manipulated like batons; a testosterone driven but ever so elegant quartet for husky men in ‘Stagger Lee’ and maybe, my favorite, a courting quartet for two couples in ‘The Ship Song’. Petronio lined the dancers up downstage and choreographed the whole thing in place. Dancers touch all over, lean across a partner, re-align themselves, bend over, reach and finally kiss. It’s a beautifully timed game of delicate sensuality.

Difficult to take seriously was the finale to Dylan’s ‘Death is not the End’ in Cave’s rousing version that sounded like a revival meeting’s stomp song. The dancers who had been in flaming red costumes to something about Christ and the carpenter switched to white and flocked in with jumping rope arm gestures like a would-be saved congregation. Could it have been meant as camp?

Earlier in the month Petronio’s own company in San Francisco also chose an evening of pieces set to another strong balladeer, Rufus Wainwright, who has his own fascination with religiously inspired music. “Bud Suite’s” opening duet for two remarkably alike looking males to ‘Oh What A World’ reminded me of Aristophanes’ claim that love is the result of man having been bifurcated and the two halves always trying to fuse again. Shooting away from each other yet hanging on, the dancers seem to determined merge their bodies. ‘Vibrate’s’ tutu-clad hand-holding female quartet struck a more lyrical note while ‘This Love Affair’s’ melting torsos and spiraling energy appeared particularly responsive to Wainwright’s wistful tunes. “Bloom”, to a live performance by the San Francisco Girl’s choir of a setting of ‘Lux Aeterna’ included settings of Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson poems. The choreography didn’t seem to be especially music-inspired but Petronio’s extraordinary dancers would have been awe-inspiring had they performed in silence.

‘The Rite Part’ (an excerpt from the 1992 “Full Half Wrong’), however, did depend on the music, a very smart combination of key sections of Stravinsky’s score pushed into electronics by composer Mitchell Lager. Petronio rich choreography honed close enough to the original narrative to keep it intelligible, particularly in the circle dances and a fierce prolonged solo for the victim. This is an imaginative strong interpretation whose fractured energy includes a redolent earthiness --hips rolling, legs dropping and edgy shoulder stands included—which grows straight out of the music.

Photos:
Top: "Three Atmospheric Studies". Photo by Dominik Mentzos.
Bottom: "Underland". Photo by Jeff Busby

Volume 5, No. 9
March 5, 2007

copyright ©2007 by Rita Felciano
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