Falling in Love
Fall for Dance Festival
City Center
New York, New York
September 28-29, 2004
By
Nancy Dalva
copyright
© 2004 by Nancy
Dalva
published October 4, 2004
Tuesday,
September 28, 2004:
"Agon"/Dance Theatre of Harlem
"Continuous Replay"/Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company
"Ricochet" and "Wild Blue Yonder"/STREB
"Dose"/David Neumann
"How to Pass, Fall Kick and Run"/Merce Cunningham Dance Company
Wednesday,
September 29, 2004:
"Embattled Garden"/Martha Graham Dance Company
"Kiss"/Susan Marshall & Company
"Ordinary Festivals" (excerpt)/PEARSONWIDRIG DANCETHEATER
"Elastic Perspective" (excerpts)/RUBBERBANDANCE GROUP
"Solea"/Noche Flamenca
Even
before the first curtain—of thirty!—went up on the New York
City Center Fall for Dance Festival, the event was a spectacular success.
Fully sold out houses, for six nights, right up to the rafters. That Holy
Grail of audiences, a truly mixed crowd. Lots and lots of students, dancers,
choreographers, designers, and a host of nostalgic habitues of the old
Delacorte Festival, which in like manner once served to introduce audiences
to a broad swathe of dance. There were also camp followers. Of these last—the
fans—the Dance Theatre of Harlem boasted many, on hand to get a
last glimpse of the company before it goes on a financially induced hiatus.
Perhaps it wasn't the wisest move to present DTH in George Balanchine's "Agon," but it was an interesting one. Sadly, Arthur Mitchell's company lacks a cohort sufficient to the ballet's demands, lacking in particular a strong male for the pas de deux—which, ironically, was originated by Mr. Mitchell himself—though Tai Jimenez was lithely divine in the female role first danced by Diana Adams. Nonetheless, this is the theater where "Agon" was first danced (on November 27, 1957) and to see it on this stage is to appreciate it anew. What looks spiky and attenuated on the stage at Lincoln Center looks like intricate modernist clockwork in City Center. The entire piece has the feel of a fantastic puzzle. At its conclusion, Mr. Mitchell took bows with his troupe with the dignity of a deposed monarch, and the house reverberated with cheers.
This
was as nothing to the response to Bill T. Jones's 1989 restaging of Arnie
Zane's 1978 piece called "Continuous Replay," a kind of canonic
accumulation of simple, supple gestures that progress across the stage
from left to right (with a leaping crossover added at the back about two
thirds of the way through) on an increasing number of people who are all
naked. As the stage fills, the movement seems to travel across the dancers
in waves, like wind on water, and the resulting stage pictures can be
quite beautiful. Many of Mr. Jones's former company chose to join in the
nudity; one brought along a serious, little girl (whose presence was disturbing
to some, what with her wandering around eye-level in a forest of private
parts gone public). The aura of the piece is one of grave capering–very,
very 1970s—girlish church giggles broke out in the house only at
the opening. For the rest—after a time, the dancers don random garments
(a top here, a bottom there), first black, then white—the house
was rapt.
STREB
followed, with much ado concerning the placement of her various equipment
pieces. "Wild Blue Yonder" seems to be about launching yourself–whether
into thin air, or on a quest, or into some kind of inner space. It takes
place on a trampoline, and is not best seen from above, which unfortunately
is the vantage point of much of City Center. The moment when the performers
bound off their tightly sprung trampoline and dolphin onto the mats below
is a thrill best experienced at ground level. "Ricochet" is
based on a simple premise: a transparent wall stops performers in the
middle of an action. To my eye, it doesn't seem as if the STREB troupe
hurtles at this divider, which is placed between us and them. It looks
as if they are jousting towards something altogether else, and the wall
gets in the way. Elizabeth Streb has herself journeyed some distance from
her intellectually astringent beginnings, but even in the work she now
calls "pop action," metaphor can lurk.
Closing the night's bill—after a vaudevillian before-the-curtain entr'acte by David Neumann, a lounge lizardish dance man performing to taped song—was the Merce Cunningham Dance Company in "How to Pass, Fall, Kick and Run" (see How To). Having seen this piece in the past year in Chicago and Washington, D.C., I found it to look a bit tired here, and Mr. Cunningham, as one of the narrators of the John Cage stories which accompany the jaunty movement, was visibly frail. His appearances now evoke the late David Warrilow's memorable performances in Beckett–"Krapp's Last Tape," in particular. The piece is very much of its time—which was the mid-sixties—and thus falls, temporally, between "Agon" and "Continuous Replay." No matter the ups and downs of this particular rendition of "How To," the most compelling aspect, to me, was knowing that young audience members were seeing, in his great old age, one of the signal modernists of the 20th century. "I saw Merce Cunningham, " they will be saying, one hundred years after he made this dance, "at the turn of the century."
They won't, however, be able to say they saw Martha Graham—though
those who returned to the festival for the second night did see "Embattled
Garden," which dates from a year after "Agon." You either
like seeing her worthy descendants in the Martha Graham Dance Company
carry on Graham's work, or you prefer to look at grainy black and white
film of the originals. I didn't think Graham looked like Graham even in
those last years she was still alive, which was presumptuous of me in
the extreme, as it is to say that I can't believe this unbalanced, glamorous,
and fastidious production has the allure of the real deal, though Virginie
Mécène has the moves. One audience member said to me later
that he thought the closing flamenco by Soledad Barrio and her company
had some of the heat he intuited in the Graham, but didn't feel.
"Kiss" is a novelty act—lovers suspended from ropes in
harnesses, swooping around to Arvo Pärt. (Equipment dancing seems
to have taken its place alongside, say, ballet, modern, and post-modern
dance in the minds of the festival programmers.) It's an attractive enough
work, despite a perfume ad sensibility.
The other two numbers on the second night's bill were novel to me—and
I just adored them, which to me justified the entire festival proposition
right there. To attend in order to see something one already liked quite
a bit, and in the process discover something new—well, how great
is that? "Ordinary Festivals" has the feel of that marvelous
musical "Most Happy Fella" . It is some sort of harvest celebration,
with music by "Nuova Compangia de Canto Populare" that makes
you want to book passage to Italy in time for the grape harvest. The conceit
of the number involves many, many, oranges—first tossed by the cast
to the choreographers, Sara Person and Patrik Widrig, who catch them on
knives. There follow a fabulous stomping and jumping dance on a carpet,
lots of rolling and running, and more fun with fruit. Everyone wears Widrig's
black and white costumes right out of the Sicilian segments of "The
Godfather," and the whole thing is entirely agreeable and entertaining,
and the oranges smell wonderful, though one wonders what the piece is
like at full evening length. At the least, I'd like to find out.
RUBBERBANDDANCEGROUP
was also new to me. They are a collective who mix hop-hop and classicism,
which sounds awful, but turns out anything but. This is because the dancers
have excellent technique and line—you can see the ballet and the
break dancing in surprising and supple equilibrium, not so much fused
as intermingled, each distinctive. Victor Quihada's 2002 "Elastic
Perspective" was especially grand when set against traditional classical
music, whether Prokofiev's "Romeo and Juliet" or "La Traviata."
There was wit in this, and imagination. Again, I don't know how long such
work sustains itself over the long haul. (You never wonder that with,
say, "Agon.") Maybe it's the next big thing, the real multi-culti.
At any rate, it is intelligent, which is a big thing in and of itself.
Photos:
First: "Agon" pas de deux;Tai Jimenez, Kip Strum. Photo:
Joseph Rodman.
Second: Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company. Photo: Lois
Greenfield.
Third: "Wild Blue Yonder." Photo: Scott Suchman.
Fourth: Patrik Widrig. Photo: Dona Ann McAdams.
Fifth: RUBBERBANDDANCEGROUP. Jayko Eloi, Emmanuelle Le Phan, Victor
Quijada (bg) and Anne Plamondon. Photo: Louise LeBlanc
www.danceviewtimes.com
Volume 2, No. 37
October 4, 2004
Copyright
©2004 by Nancy Dalva
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