The
Heartbreaking Strangeness
of Tere O'Connor
Tere
O'Connor Dance
Yerba Buena Center for the Arts
Thursday, Sept 4 and Saturday Sept 6
reviewed by Ann Murphy
Last Thursday night, in the new International Arts Festival's
opening dance salvo, Tere O'Connor Dance made its first
Bay Area appearance. The company showed San Francisco
what we've long been missing. Plenty of choreographers
are dramatists, a few are essayists, and monologists
are legion. The rarest are the poets, and New York's
O'Connor is one of them. This bard of dance has a fairy
tale take on modern, classical and vernacular movement
that encapsulates a world of magic and darkness and
shows us the heartbreaking strangeness of being human.
Winter
Belly and Choke, the two works on Thursday's
program established O'Connor up front as a choreographer
of undiluted curiosity, wit, delicacy and a deep, almost
woeful bitter sweetness. His dances have a beautiful,
animal aliveness; they often make us laugh the way the
physicality of Chaplin or Keaton does.
Saturday's world premiere, Lawn, a 70-minute
tale of a Hun-like witch (O'Connor in a long platinum
wig), woods, lawns, garbage, houses, freeways and the
bizarre underpinnings of human impulse, with filmic
décor by Ben Speth and sound by James Baker,
displayed O'Connor's daring invention.
Winter
Belly was a gem, and of the three works, the one
I found most satisfying and complete. Upstage in a short
half-circle were 12 bare-branched, tear-shaped trees,
like the spindly London plane trees that grow in many
New York's sidewalks. Stage right, dancers stood transfixed
in a warmly lighted circle. A man (O'Connor), lying
on his side, bicycled his legs in a beautiful frenzy
to the sounds of halting, melancholic prepared piano
(James Baker with excerpts of Sofia Gubaidulina's work).
When the emotionally detached circle broke the crowd
stood facing the audience and felt the air between its
upraised fingers, like winter residents rubbing at the
snow falling. They skated across the stage in beautifully
clunky gliding motions as they looked skyward, woodenly
transfixed but hopeful. They rubbed their wrists together,
nervously, tenderly. People exited then entered again
with ghostly discretion. They jerked their arms in post-modern
angst then flopped to the ground.
Scenes
alternated between dream and reality, loneliness and
often cruel playground-esque engagement, as the time
two dancers mechanically volleyed the head of a third
dancer between their hands like a basketball. The downstage
dancer smiled a dislocated smile at us as though to
say: look! It doesn't break! In one of his many masterful
alternations between frenetic movement and poignantly
simple action, O'Connor sent a dancer in a relentless
circle like Giselle, her desperate but elegant rounds
growing slightly smaller with every rotation until she
collapsed in the center. That led to a defiantly limp
rag doll dance followed by a sextet tiptoeing in like
brittle Willis looking for deadly company. Winter in
O'Connor's world is an existential state of translucent
beauty, unpredictable encounters of animal intensity
and inevitable aloneness.
Choke
was more decidedly focused on cultural critique and
more pointed but narrowly specific as a result. Imagine
the operatic schema of body language from "Sex
and the City" combined with the mad gesticulations
of folks on an urban street screaming into their cell
phones, hailing cabs, smoking, chewing one another out,
munching on their own flesh, barking, and licking. Beneath
the often shrill physical language people share and
the individual idiosyncrasies that are weird as well
as hilarious, O'Connor seems to finger a deep bafflement
and a wanton though child-like blindness in what we
do without either glorifying or loathing it. Choke
may have felt less mysterious than Winter Belly,
but it mirrored human mechnicalness and artifice with
such deft compassion that it had lots of us laughing
out loud.
Lawn
combined the dreamscape of Winter Belly and
the cultural skewering of Choke. The dance
started with a video loop on a screen framed by a thicket
of leaves in which members of the company were beautifully
captured alone in mundane activity, from chopping vegetables
to working on a computer, to holding a remote in a slightly
fidgety hand. The archetypal was also comically present
in the darting figure of a hag in the film who peered
out from behind trees, ran in double time across majestic
expanses of lawn, captured a stray paper napkin from
two picnickers and eventually adorned a tree in napkins.
With
rare skill, O'Connor used the visuals as another layer
of the dance so that the images didn't seduce us over
the live performers but conversed with them and pushed
the vague narrative along. Lawn rambled, although
none of the action was without craft. The arc was long
and meandered between the different spaces (stage and
video), and different times (past filmed time which
becomes everpresent time and the fleeting now of danced
time). While much about Lawn seemed magical,
the dance felt around for the poetic more than it found
it. Part of the problem was the specificity of the film
images containing buildings and street scenes and roadways.
These didn't really transcend the banal except vaguely.
When they did, it was largely through juxtaposition
with the magical goings-on in the dance or the wonderful
interface of filmed and danced narrative. It can't be
easy to match the depth and weight of O'Connor's highly
faceted, concrete but richly symbolic dance language.
The more abstract frames of sky or sea or long shots
of parkland did this best. But as dense and inventive
as Lawn was, it was also less nimble than the
other two dances in revealing what O'Connor really feels
about fields and trees, garbage, housing starts, lovers,
or hidden forces darting behind trees.
But
even when the ends are not quite seamless, O'Connor
never gives up his seemingly casual brilliance and unobtrusive
virtuosity. At every turn he cloaks his movers in milky
distillations of ballet and modern dance, as if the
real soul of dance now lies in the memory and facsimile
of established forms, not their exact replication. Coupés,
bourrées, sautés and triplets, African
undulations and Cunningham- or Graham-style contractions
all have a wacky bleached-out look, as though after
so many years of exposure they've begun to fade and
even fall apart. Was that a decomposed bit of Swan
Lake one wonders? Was that a nod to Martha? On
top of these ennervated steps he adds gestures of such
inexplicable relevance that his dances start to feel
like the danced equivalent of silent films but from
your dreams. Plenty of choreographers use sign language
or other gestural codes but the gestures remain decorative
and don't translate. By contrast, O'Connor has his dancers
rub their wrists together frenetically and they resemble
teenage suicides or blood brothers; they make cat's
cradles with their fingers, play hand games like eight-year-olds,
and suddenly we're plunged into an enchanted distillation
of ordinary life.
O'Connor
also has a musicality that is deep and knowing. (His
own dancing has a faun-like elegance that he effortlessly
enshrouds with music.) Consequently, his choreography
is truly dancey even though the actual steps are full
of ennervated geometries and hypnogogic detachment.
He also finds no transition or pattern too insignificant
to ignore. Phrases are crafted with a shining but melancholic
intelligence. Movements are performed with a precision
drained of romantic style and classical elegance then
refilled with a quirky, vernacular grace. It's like
the haunting simulacrum of ballet your friends might
perform in a dream.
But
O'Connor doesn't stop there. He colors these dreamy
goings-on with sexy fibrillations, tops them with weird
and funny facial expressions, or unravels them through
the application of child-like literalisms, as when dancers
head downstage in Winter Belly with their arms
held in earnestly hyperextended second positions, the
way beginning ballerinas so often do.
Unlike
other postmodernists who have tamed modern dance and
ballet for edgy ends, O'Connor isn't tainted by the
nihilism that bleeds on so many dancemakers through
a thousand different exit wounds in the culture. Without
getting shrill or snarky he shows us the wounds, the
gorgeous red blood, and the unfathomable oddities we
engage in. He's a cultural critic who has a long view
of the human condition and finds it both comically and
sadly terminal.
copyright
Ann Murphy 2003
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