Deborah Hay and Yvonne Rainer
"If I Sing to You"
"Spiraling Down"
Baryshnikov Arts Center, New York
November 17, 2009
by Tom Phillips
Copyright 2009 by Tom Phillips
Irony is about the distances between things, and it gets better with age. Yvonne Rainer has been making art and writing about it since the 1960s, and in the process she has attained an awesome ironic distance, which she displays in her new piece “Spiraling Down.” It’s about the distance between then and now, the discipline it took to get from there to here, and the gap between the artist and the present-day world she contemplates. “Spiraling Down” might refer to the state of the world, or it might also be the process of exploring the artist’s unique, living memory.
In the program Rainer offers a long list of her “sources, references and inspirations,” heavy on vintage films and classical music but also including Elvis Presley, Lily Tomlin and Serena Williams. What do they have in common? Maybe just a total commitment to their own gestures, however mundane or even silly. That’s what Rainer gets from her four knowing dancers, Pat Catterson, Emily Coates, Patricia Hoffbauer and Sally Silvers.
“Spiraling Down” begins with the four women, in sneakers and casual workout gear, running around the stage in close formation, three running backward sandwiching one running forward, to the soundtrack of a memoir by a marathon runner. This earnest, exacting workout is followed by shout-outs to the cool stuff of the new century, as in “You-Tube! Wo-ow!!”
At this point in the dance I began chuckling with delight, feeling we were in the presence of satire so deep and yet so gentle that it enabled these dancers to mock their own behavior without condemning themselves or anyone else. The chuckling intensified, and began to spread around the audience, when the soundtrack switched to Ravel’s “Bolero,” and the dancers shuffled around in circles with a determined head-down, soccer kick-step. If the Olympic skaters Torvill and Deane defined “Bolero” for the bombastic 80’s, Rainer has somehow nailed it for the muddled 00’s. Were they soccer moms, or just walking a labyrinth to nowhere?
Rainer and Deborah Hay were both founders of the Judson Dance Theater that kicked off a revolution in dance in the 1960s. Hay’s new work “If I Sing to You” seemed to hark back to those days, or maybe to the 70’s, when they were trying to work out just what went wrong with the 60’s. Six female dancers, three crossed-dressed as men, move in awkward isolation, scattered around the stage but apparently held by the glue of the group. Their gestures toward community are disrupted by outbursts of emotion, first a sexual courting ritual that devolves into a cat fight, then a menacing fit of anger.
This dance builds up to where most begin, with the dancers gingerly taking hands, and one couple trying a stiff, awkward two-step. But the barriers to interaction seem too steep for anyone to get further than that.
“If I Sing to You” is still an elegant piece of minimalism. The six dancers provide all the sound themselves, most of it in cries, whispers and mumbling in an unknown tongue, with long interludes of silence. Jeanine Durning in particular was able to transform the scene with barely audible mutterings and changes in facial expression. She also provided the most striking images of the piece during the sexy scene, when she slammed herself against a wall in wild frustration, then raked her crotch with a wall phone, one of the few props available in the warehouse-like Baryshnikov Arts Center. An hour of that kind of action would have been hard to take, but as an outburst amid the whispers, it packed a wallop.
Copyright 2009 by Tom Phillips
