Men peeing in their
pants; a round of buck naked Slip ’n Slide; re-enacted torture and images
lifted from Abu Ghraib—and still
the most shocking thing about the final New York performance of Keith
Hennessy’s shambolic “Turbulence” was how tedious it was. If Hennessy and his
troupe had purposely set out to interrogate the hegemony of performance art
cliché, it couldn’t have been done better. Earnest palaver
about our process? Check!
Grating soundscape? Check! Tired emblems of interpersonal violence? Metaphors
so trite we can’t possibly mean them? Jejune reliance on audience disgust? Check! Check! and Check! Hennessy—pissed off by
bank bailouts and offshore tax shelters, tanked up on Naomi Klein’s The Shock
Doctrine and Judith
Halberstam’s The Queer Art of Failure—wants to
provoke a communal response to the depredations of world capitalism. But if this is what the theater of revolution looks
like, it’s no wonder the bankers are still lining their pockets.
DD Dorvillier’s “Danza Permanente,” which received its New York premiere last
week at The Kitchen, is—quite literally—Ludwig van Beethoven’s String Quartet
#15 transcribed for four color-coded dancers performing (mostly) in silence. The
argument is that 45 minutes of music by Beethoven—“a deaf man,” as the program
notes remind us—can be embodied in 45 minutes of silent movement. Well, sort of.
The end result of Dorvillier’s painstaking efforts—and it is clear that she and
her dancers have worked hard on this project—is a schematic diagram of someone
else’s masterpiece rather than a work of art that can stand on its own.
In 1989, Mark Morris—then a Brussels-based enfant terrible with the resources of the Théâtre Royal de la Monnaie to hand—choreographed a danced version of Henry Purcell’s opera “Dido and Aeneas” and infamously cast himself as both its tragic heroine—Dido, the legendary queen of Carthage—and her arch-nemesis, the Sorceress. He retired from the role in 2000 and for a time put “Dido” in mothballs. Six years later, he revived the work and it has remained in his company’s active repertory ever since, with at least one performance run presented somewhere every year. For most of that time Amber Star Merkens and the recently retired Bradon McDonald have performed the dual lead on alternate nights. It’s been a dozen years since Morris relinquished the role—he’s been out for longer than he was in—and still a surprising amount of the buzz in advance of the work’s sold-out return to New York kept circling back to the fact that someone other than Morris would be dancing.
Doug Elkins talks in hypertext. His exuberant pre-performance analysis of “Mo(or)town/Redux”—a retelling of Shakespeare’s “Othello” set to Motown hits—gleefully double-clicked links to Cholly Atkins, Yvonne Rainer’s “Trio A,” and a Soul Train ad for Afro Sheen featuring the ghost of Frederick Douglass. The reference to Rainer may seem like one rabbit hole too many, but once the work of Cholly Atkins has been dropped into your brain, you can’t watch Robert Alexander’s famous film of “Trio A” and not think of The Temptations. Elkins’ pre-performance performance was every bit as engaging as the dance that followed it: when it comes to matters of provenance, pop culture, and the happy surprise of a previously unremarked connection, he’s hugely entertaining—and dead serious.
At the beginning of “Twin Pines,” dancer and veteran choreographer Keely Garfield nestles up against a tree stump—one of the half-dozen or so scattered around the performance space in mute testimony to some sort of arboreal apocalypse—and lays her head down on its raw top. Anthony Phillips, dressed in black, sits on another stump nearby testing the weight of a very real ax. Ever so softly, Garfield begins to sing the opening verse of the Beach Boys’ “Don’t Worry, Baby.”
By the time she gets to “I don't know why but I keep thinking / Something's bound to go wrong” you don’t need to know anything about Chekhov’s gun to know that sooner or later that ax is going to go off, and it won’t be pretty. But you giggle anyway. And when the other cast members—Phillips, Brandin Steffenson, and musician Matthew Brookshire—join in the refrain, you can’t help but giggle some more. Don’t worry, Baby? What have you been smoking?
At 9:00 PM on New Year’s Eve, just two and a half years after the death of its founding choreographer, the Merce Cunningham Dance Company gave its last-ever performance, and brought to an end both its valedictory Legacy Tour and fifty-eight years of legendary dance-making. The company—still dancing with disciplined power and intensity—marked its passage into history by mounting one of its trademark Events in the Park Avenue Armory’s colossal Wade Thompson Drill Hall, and presented it six times over three evenings. However much one might have ached for a last glimpse of vanishing repertory instead—please, just one more “Roaratorio,” one last “CRWDSPCR”—a newly-minted Event was the right choice. It paid fresh homage to Cunningham’s embrace of contingency and immediacy and to his enthusiasm for collaboration across artistic disciplines. It laid a feast of still-remarkable choreography before us. But most of all it celebrated the company’s fourteen dancers, splendid to a one as soloists and magnificent as an ensemble. They well deserved the honor: Cunningham’s work will live on in some fashion or other, but it’s hard to believe that we will again see it performed by dancers so attuned to its requirements and so palpably, touchingly alive in their commitment to its rigorous beauty.
No boldface names, no new ballets, no must-see swans—not even a role debut to pique the interest of those in the know. Just a plain-old New York City Ballet mixed bill that even the most determined of marketing departments couldn’t wrap in a gimmick. There was nothing to see but a couple of masterworks, well danced—and nobody to see it but a warmly appreciative audience. Good ballets, good dancing: in a just world, that would be gimmick enough.
“Duets,” “Squaregame,” and “Inventions MinEvent” Merce Cunningham Dance Company & Merce Cunningham Repertory Understudy Group Lincoln Center Festival Merce Fair Frederick P. Rose Hall New York, NY July 16, 2011 (Afternoon session)
The Merce Cunningham Dance Company’s Legacy Tour has done more than offer a last look at some of the great choreographer’s notable works before the troupe disbands at year end. It’s also making the case—especially through its revivals—that many of these works can and should be preserved in active repertory somewhere once Cunningham’s own company is gone. Not merely because the works are the products of genius, but because the average dance-goer, and not just adepts, might genuinely enjoy watching them. The three works performed as part of the Lincoln Center Festival’s Merce Fair—“Duets” (1980), “Squaregame” (1976), and “Inventions MinEvent”—weren’t just accessible, they seemed designed to help even a novice dance-goer see what all the fuss is about.
Alina Cojocaru could probably win your heart dancing Aurora in ratty practice clothes on a bare stage, but even she and Johan Kobborg—last minute substitutes for Natalia Osipova and an injured David Hallberg—can’t rescue ABT’s troubled production of “The Sleeping Beauty” from its various excesses and deficiencies. At least their lovingly danced and theatrically rich portrayals of Aurora and Prince Désiré on Wednesday evening did provide a balm for the show’s self-inflicted wounds.
The Royal Danish Ballet is one of the world’s oldest ballet companies and—whether it’s entirely thrilled by the privilege or not—the conservator of a world-class trove of artistic treasure: the dozen or so surviving works of the great 19th century choreographer August Bournonville. Other companies occasionally program “La Sylphide” and excerpts from “Napoli”—the two Bournonville works the RDB brought to New York as part of its 2011 U.S. tour—but the opportunity to see them performed by dancers bred to the rigors of Bournonville’s unique idiom was not to be missed. One can debate the merits of the other works on offer during the engagement—Fleming Flindt’s “The Lesson,” Jorma Elo’s “Lost on Slow,” and a Bournonville pastiche stitched together by Artistic Director Nikolaj Hübbe and company principal Thomas Lund—but while just about everyone seems to have an Elo these days, only the Danes, who rarely come here on tour, really have Bournonville. Life ain’t fair.
