“Beach Birds,” “Duo,” and “Grosse Fugue”
Lyon Opera Ballet
The Joyce Theater
New York
March 9, 2010
by Kathleen O’Connell
copyright © 2009 by Kathleen O’Connell
New dance is really nothing new in Lyon. Jean-Georges Noverre, one of ballet’s revolutionaries, published his seminal treatise Les Lettres sur la danse et sur les ballets there in 1760 and both danced with and choreographed for the Lyon Opera. The Lyon Opera Ballet, launched as an autonomous dance company in 1969, looks back by looking forward. Dedicated exclusively to “la danse contemporaine,” the company has amassed a repertory of both well-established and newly–commissioned work by contemporary choreographers as disparate in style and sensibility as Nacho Duato and Tere O’Connor.
The three works the company brought to its week-long run at the Joyce—Merce Cunningham’s 1991 “Beach Birds,” William Forythe’s 1996 “Duo,” and Maguy Marin’s 2001 “Grosse Fugue”—aren’t the newest of the new, but they made for a well-judged program. There was a minimum of portentous clap-trap (it was discreetly tucked into the program notes and bios), the dances fit comfortably on the Joyce stage, and while neither “Duo” nor “Grosse Fugue” are of the same caliber as Cunningham’s wondrous “Beach Birds,” they were well worth seeing in context: all three present images of movement stripped of human intention—for good or ill.
It was impossible to watch “Beach Birds” and not think of, well, beach birds. The curtain rose on ten dancers standing in silence with arms outstretched, swaying almost imperceptibly in the crepuscular glow of Marsha Skinner’s lighting. Dressed in color–blocked unitards—white from ankle to armpit, black from shoulder to fingertip—they looked like gulls hovering on a dawn breeze.
The sparse piano of John Cage’s “Four3” broke into the hush, and a dancer with her back to us slowly crooked an arm towards her waist and banked into a deep side bend atop a measured plié. Another spun softly to the center and eased an arm back with a creaturely ripple of the shoulder; a few more began to turn and hop. Soon the stage was alive with viral gestures that fragmented and recombined as the dancers coalesced, dispersed, and coalesced yet again into ever-reconfiguring clusters of movement. Sometimes they mirrored each others’ steps; sometimes they moved in counterpoint. Sometimes they twined in an interlocking balance, rocking slowly to and fro. Often they did nothing but stand poised on the brink of motion in shapes both steeped in stillness and shimmering with energy. It felt like the most present-tense dance ever made.
Neither anthropomorphized nor turned into metaphors, Cunningham’s birds just were. His potent evocation of a non-human, impenetrable otherness coaxed the eye into believing that it was observing movement unburdened by human emotion. The miracle lay in how deeply affecting that movement was nonetheless.
The company acquired “Beach Birds” just two years ago, and although they perform it with commitment, its fundamental stillness doesn’t appear to have fully settled into their bones. One dancer in particular layered on too much “face.” Gazing warmly at her companions, it seemed as if she’d had her heart set on being a swan maiden rather than a seagull.
Forsythe’s “Duo” looked like nothing so much as 13 minutes of deranged center work. Harshly lit and dressed in black leotards that were sheer from the hipbones up, two bare-legged women (Dorothée Delabie and Amandine François) worked their way from one end of the stage to the other in fierce combinations that extruded a mesmerizing compound of coiling torsos, thrust hips, and torquing limbs through a narrow aperture of basic classroom steps. (Thom Willems’ spare but evocative score was the dance’s backdrop, not its impetus.)
Forsythe’s way of manipulating the body—combined with costumes that all but guaranteed that the women’s breasts would be read as objects—gave the dancers a faintly creepy, not–quite–human quality; like Cunningham’s birds they were resistant to empathetic projection. Lying prone on the stage, one of the women slid her head and shoulders sideways towards her feet, rolled the opposite hip off the floor, folded her chest towards her knees, and slipped an extended arm under her outstretched leg; she looked as alien as a newborn foal.
The dancing seemed impelled by something other than the desire to move. The beautiful sweep of a fluid arm might terminate in a detached, mechanical swing, as if a spring had broken or a gear had slipped. The dancers might suddenly drop to the floor with a deadpan stare, strike a cardboard odalisque’s pose, then move on unperturbed by the interruption. Audible breaths were choreographed into the opening combinations as if respiration were something that needed to be programmed. The busy, impulsive rhythm of Forsythe’s phrases—they might decelerate, but they never breathe—undermined any notion that the women were dancing under their own agency. A sinister êcole de ballet, indeed.
The four women in Maguy Marin’s “Grosse Fugue” danced as if Beethoven’s music held them in a death grip. Sometimes it battled against gravity to haul them into the air; sometimes it conspired with gravity to nail them to the floor. When the music was animated, the dancers’ feet scuttled through desperate little jigs; when it was grave their arms dragged their resistant bodies across the stage.
If “Duo” presented the body as a precision instrument, “Grosse Fugue” presented it as a blunt one. The women—dressed in red, knee-length skirts and sleeveless tops—moved with slack limbs, plunging straight ahead into every movement with next-to-no torsion around their axes: turns often looked like little more than a full-body pivot undertaken solely to change direction. Heads and arms were flung against the air, feet were flung against the floor: the dance’s characteristic pulse was a heavy, heady bounce.
Marin’s choreography hewed so closely the the the music’s contours that the work threatened to devolve into glibness before three minutes had passed. Once it became clear that the women were going to be danced to death, it courted glibness in a different way: by going on too long about an idea that somebody’s already had. The music isn’t ideally structured for Marin’s purposes. There’s too much of it for such a thin concept and its overall structure isn’t conducive to a legible arc of of dancing, especially if one is going limit oneself to depicting its surface incident. The work was nonetheless full of punchy excitement—had it been five minutes shorter it would have been twice as satisfying.
The program was on the short side—if the company dispensed with the intermission we could have been out in a little over an hour—but that’s mostly a compliment. Another half-hour with these fine dancers would have been most welcome, especially if they’d brought along one of their own commissions by one of the newer voices we have yet to see in New York.
copyright © 2009 by Kathleen O’Connell
Top: Ruth Miro Salvador, Franck Laizet, and Denis Terrassetin in “Beach Birds”; photo by Jean-Pierre Maurin
Middle: Dorothée Delabie in “Duo”; photo by Michel Cavalca
Bottom: Lyon Opera Ballet in “Grosse Fugue”; photo by Michael Cavalca
