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Hot Pepper

Hot Pepper, Air Conditioner, and the Farewell Speech
chelfitsch Theater Company
Japan Society, New York
January 6,2012

by Tom Phillips

The scene is a featureless white room with a table and four chairs in an office building, where temporary workers take their lunch. Three temps in their mid-twenties are literally writhing in discomfort over their assignment: to organize a farewell party for a fourth.

"Does anyone have an opinion? asks the man, trying to determine what kind of restaurant they should go to, and how much they want to pay. But no one is willing to offer a real opinion, and no one seems to care much about the departing worker, Erika. So the conversation devolves into what kind of food each of them would like at their own farewell party, which could come at any time. In the end they decide that instead of their own feelings or desires, they should rely on dining tips from a popular Japanese magazine, "Hot Pepper."

So begins the chelfitsch Theater Company's take on Japan's young adults, the generation that grew up in the period of Japan's economic collapse and its long, continuing aftermath. Unable to start a real career amid the economic uncertainty, they drift from one temporary position to another, resentful of those with established lives but unable or unwilling to demand anything for themselves.

They act this out in a unique choreography devised by director Toshiki Okada – standing off-balance and constantly shifting position, bending and rocking, gesticulating with hands and feet, with or without reference to what they’re saying. One woman talks energetically as she walks balanced back on the heels of her pumps, then sits down to relax with her chair tipped precariously to the rear, feet propped against the table. She uses a fan to flip through the pages of the magazine. “Hot Pepper” is the sort of material you don’t really read, just breeze through.

“Air Conditioner,” the second of the three skits, shows us the life of some of the older, permanent workers. A man and a woman exchange bitter complaints over the arctic temperature in the office, and he suggests the solution is for her to call the police. But his body language – bending over, pulling his tie erect and trying to look up her skirt – indicates a different solution. At one point he blurts “I could help you with this problem, Makiko!” but that’s as far as he gets. She pulls her skirt down over her knees, and they repeat their aimless griping to no effect.

The story ends with “Farewell Speech,” in which Erika appears to tell her colleagues how much they have meant to her. She singles out one for her kindness in allowing her to use a dab of detergent. Then she proceeds to act out the story of her last day on the job, which began with her accidentally stepping on a crying, dying cicada on her doorstep. Fortunately, a stray cat came along to eat the squashed bug, so she wouldn’t have to clean it up with disposable chopsticks when she went home that night. A lucky day for Erika. And thank you all so much for everything.

Okada’s triptych is a dense combination of dialogue and gesture, set off by subtly shifting light patterns, and a background sound score that moves from traditional Japanese music through contemporary pop into a skittering jazz saxophone that wails through Erika’s final monologue. It was first presented in 2009, and the longer it lasts the more of an indictment it delivers to a nation that has stranded its youth in an economic and social limbo.

And what nation is that? In the dying days of 2011, I spent a few days in Zuccotti Park, occupying Wall Street. And many of the young protesters I met were over-prepared, underemployed young people who were unable to start a real career, drifting from one temporary gig to another ….

"Hot Pepper" continues through January 14 at Japan Society

Copyright 2012 by Tom Phillips
Photograph by Julie Lemberger

Battle of the Nutcrackers: the Subway Series

The Nutcracker

American Ballet Theater

Brooklyn Academy of Music, New York

December 14, 2011

by Tom Phillips

Like many New Yorkers, I grew up with George Balanchine's The Nutcracker, and have seen it so many times that it defines the ballet for me. So it came as something of a revelation to take the subway to Brooklyn and find a different conception of Tchaikovsky's classic. American Ballet Theater's new version, choreographed by Alexei Ratmansky, is settling into its second Christmas season at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, a worthy rival -- and a sharp contrast -- to Balanchine's Nutcracker at Lincoln Center.

Basically there are two kinds of Nutcrackers. In form, Balanchine's is an old-fashioned "suite ballet," a string of set pieces attached to a story that's not taken too seriously, and never resolved. It ends with the heroine still dreaming. Ratmansky's is more of a symphonic drama -- the story of a girl's awakening to romance and sexuality, with all its anxiety and danger. Here the story never goes away, and it ends in a literal awakening, back to adolescent angst and anticipation.

Down to Earth

Wooden
Laura Peterson Choreography
HERE Arts Center, New York
November 9, 2011
by Tom Phillips
Copyright 2011 by Tom Phillips

Laura Peterson is as much an installation artist as a dancer/choreographer, and “Wooden’ is her biggest project to date – a dance set in a large indoor space, half of it covered by a live lawn and the other half a hard floor with limbs of dried-out driftwood suspended from the ceiling. The dance takes place in two parts, with the dancers changing over from the lawn to the floor, and the audience going the other way.

It’s her biggest project, but in another way her smallest. Petersen’s interest is not so much in human interaction but in the play of forces that underlie it. She seems to find her subjects through a microscope, one that has grown steadily more powerful over the years. In her first major production “Security” her company became bug-like creatures who crawled around after each other in instinctive fits and starts. In “I Love Dan Flavin” her dancers moved stiffly, falling and rising like the ones and zeros of computer code. Now in “Wooden” she and her three fellow dancers move like sub-atomic particles, circling and bumping, clumping and separating, rolling and tumbling. She plays with all the number combinations possible in a group of four – sometimes separating out one dancer for what looks like an improvised solo piece – a structure that reminds us of the role of chance at every level of existence. It also reminds us of how much we have in common with sub-atomic particles, and celestial bodies that move according to laws, but have their own quirks and quarks, and odd ways of dancing around each other.

Occupy Wall Street Living Theater

Occupy Wall Street
Zuccotti Park, New York
October, 2011

by Tom Phillips
Copyright 2011 by Tom Phillips

Back in the 1960s, The Living Theater set out to dissolve the boundaries between performance and audience, politics and theater, and ultimately life and art. Against the backdrop of war and cultural turmoil, it would take its anarchist and pacifist message out into the audience, confronting it with nudity and diatribes against social injustice. Ideally, the culmination would be for the audience to join with the cast, and bring the protest into the streets. The Living Theater thrilled some people and annoyed others; I was in the latter camp. I couldn’t take seriously an actor in a loincloth haranguing me about our mutual oppression, especially when I’d paid ten dollars for a ticket.

Fifty years later, “Occupy Wall Street” has succeeded in creating a true living theater, by coming at it from the other side. It’s a show, a spectacle, but it begins in real life, uses no actors, directors, script, or choreography, sells no tickets, and at least in my case, drew me in without applying any pressure or coercion.

Back in the USSR

"The Bright Stream"
American Ballet Theatre
Metropolitan Opera House, New York
June 11, 2011

by Tom Phillips
Copyright 2011 by Tom Phillips

The Soviet Union was a great historical tragedy, but it was also a joke, set up by the Communist Party's project of creating a new human species, the "new Soviet man" or "Homo Sovieticus." Believing in the inheritance of acquired traits, the Soviets set about training the masses to give up all of humanity's vain and selfish desires, so that their children would be completely generous, hard-working, patriotic and self-sacrificing. "The Bright Stream" acknowledges the goal but is also in on the joke, which is why heads rolled when it was first produced in Leningrad in 1935. Today, 20 years after the collapse of Soviet communism, everyone is allowed to laugh, but we still like to dream of a nobler world, and that's why Alexei Ratmansky's revival of "The Bright Stream" is a hit from Red Square to Broadway. I wanted to see this particular performance because of the cast -- the only one with a Soviet-born ballerina in the lead role. ABT is loaded with Soviet natives, but for some reason only Veronika Part is among those dancing the heroine, Zina. Comrade, she was perfect.

Junior Prom

Le Tombeau de Couperin; Duo Concertant; The Seven Deadly Sins; Vienna Waltzes
New York City Ballet
David H. Koch Theater, Lincoln Center, New York
Saturday, May 14, 2011

by Tom Phillips
Copyright 2011 by Tom Phillips

The most sumptuous of New York City Ballet's productions -- Vienna Waltzes -- has been looking a bit run-down in recent years. It didn't need new sets or costumes -- these are as magnificent as ever. What it needed was a whole new cast, and that's what it got on Saturday. No fewer than seven of the company's younger dancers made their debuts in the main roles, with results that ranged from promising to thrilling.

Abstraction and Redemption

Balanchine Black & White
Episodes; Le Tombeau de Couperin; Symphony in Three Movements
New York City Ballet
David H. Koch Theater, Lincoln Center, New York
May 4, 2011

by Tom Phillips
Copyright 2011 by Tom Phillips

Just when you're ready to give up on New York City Ballet and their vain attempts to be cool in the 21st century, they turn around and do something that shows why they exist, and why they are a national treasure. Opening its spring season with a week of Balanchine's black and white abstract ballets, the company reminds us of its raison d'etre as the original home of some of the greatest, most definitive art of the 20th century. On Wednesday evening they revealed three Balanchine masterpieces, to music by three 20th century masters -- Webern, Ravel, and Stravinsky.

More than ten years into the next century, we can just begin to see the 20th in perspective, and the enormity of its effects on the human race. Among these were a series of technological innovations that began to replace face-to-face human communication, and quantum leaps in the violence of warfare, so that what was once a branch of politics carried out by professional soldiers became a system of slaughter threatening every soul on earth. Abstraction began in art as a retreat from the horrors of reality into the purity of form, and in most cases it produced a sad, dehumanized, weird and soulless kind of art. But in the hands of the greatest artists of the century it became a redoubt of civilization itself, where the values of humanity – harmony, compassion, peace – could be hidden and preserved. You can see it, however faintly, in the faces of Picasso’s disassembled subjects, or in the roar of the wounded bull in his Guernica. And you can see it, again and again, even in Balanchine’s most severe abstractions.

Nowhere is this clearer than in Episodes, set in 1959 to the weird, sparsely orchestrated music of Webern. Nothing could be weirder than the first three sections, pas de deux for couples who seem to have lost their ability to connect in normal ways. The most striking image was amplified by the long-limbed couple of Ask la Cour and Teresa Reichlen – she upside-down and behind him, arms around his waist, her legs and his arms forming a giant set of horns above his head. Staggering in and out of their separate, unstable spotlights, they could be refugees, like Balanchine and his fellow expatriates, blown across the world by revolution and war. Or they could be kids who simply have no idea what’s happening to them, or what to do about it. Wendy Whelan and Sebastien Marcovici followed with a duet in which the woman is completely manipulated by her partner, but in a detached manner that suggests she is no more to him than a tool or a toy.

But Balanchine does not leave us here. In the final Ricercata for 16 dancers, based on Bach’s “Musical Offering,” we hear violins sing at last. And we see the calm, rational gestures of classical ballet, albeit in a stark and colorless landscape. In this section Sara Mearns seemed to understand perfectly that she was the bearer and restorer of something precious, and said it all in a simple, generous arabesque. At the end, the dancers stand in a deep contraction, heads down, then open up to face the audience, palms front as in a benediction. Peace be with you.

Still, Episodes leaves us feeling a bit queasy, as if the finale might have been tacked on to spare us the horror of an empty conclusion. A more profound redemption may well be found in Balanchine’s Tombeau de Couperin, set in 1975 to music of Ravel. Usually this suite of square and contra dances, set in a double quadrille for 16 corps dancers, is treated as a light diversion, a small gift by Balanchine to his corps de ballet. But can we really ignore that these gentle, communal revels are set to a piece of music Ravel wrote to commemorate six friends who died in World War One, that while the tempos are gay the modes of the music are mournful, that the title itself refers to death, that the dancers are dressed in black and face each other at all times, not the audience? The gaiety we see is precisely that of a memorial service, at a decent interval after a death, where the community renews itself in the basic ceremony of civilization, the dance. Seeing Tombeau is like watching from the side at a country dance where everyone knows each other and knows what to do, where the figures are performed not for the audience but for one’s partner and the others in the dance. The layers of reference are manifold: it’s Ravel’s homage to his slain friends, and to Couperin and French Baroque style; it’s also Balanchine’s homage to Ravel, to French formalism and American spunk -- the twin roots of the square dance -- to his company and his dancers, to the redemptive power of dance itself. If Episodes redeems weirdness, Tombeau goes even further -- it goes all the way, redeeming suffering and death.

The 16 celebrants had just the right proportions of formality and fun. Their lines were not always straight, but that doesn’t matter. Ashley Laracey looked like she was having more fun than anyone else, and that’s all right too. There’s one like that at every dance.

Symphony in Three Movements has its roots in World War Two; Stravinsky supposedly wrote part of the music in response to newsreel footage of Nazi soldiers. Amidst today’s wars it can still inspire “shock and awe” with its squadrons of menacing invaders, its signal corps and radar patterns, its helicopter leaps onto center stage. All this is the context for a central pas de deux that is one of Balanchine’s weirdest and most chilling. I can’t match the description written by critic Paul Gellen after the 1972 premiere, so I’ll quote it: “the dance isn’t combative, but they never appear to give in to each other with total weight and harmony; they’ve forgotten how to make love. The air around them is all oxygen, cold and clear. Too pure. The pas de deux ends with (the ballerina) posed against her partner’s side, arms uplifted like frozen snakes – a modern Shiva.”

Symphony in Three Movements must be danced with the speed, efficiency and ferocity of an amphibious assault, and unfortunately it was not at this performance. Daniel Ulbricht and Tiler Peck had energy and elevation as the first couple, but not the lethal intent that’s needed for their landings. In the second rank of soloists, only Georgina Pazcoguin opened fire. And in the pas de deux, Jared Angle was strong but too dominant over the waif-like Janie Taylor, who looked more like a victim than a destroyer.

Balanchine Black & White runs through next Tuesday, kicking off a short spring season that is long on NYCB’s 20th–century legacy. To judge by the large audience’s response to this program, black and white is back in style. In any case it will be around for centuries to come, hopefully right here where it was born.

Copyright 2011 by Tom Phillips

Bugaku at the Beach

Miami City Ballet
"Fanfare," "Bugaku," "Theme and Variations."
Naples Philharmonic Center for the Arts
Naples, Florida
February 15 and 16, 2011

by Tom Phillips
copyright 2011 by Tom Phillips

“Flower and plant have no conscious will,” wrote Samuel Beckett of Proust’s representation of sexuality. “They are shameless, exposing their genitals.” I thought of this while mesmerized by Haiyan Wu and Isanusi Garcia–Rodriguez performing Balanchine’s “Bugaku.” Like stamen and pistil, they were drawn inexorably to each other, then crushed together by a force beyond them. Wu indeed was shameless, splaying her crotch at the climactic moment, yet at the same time impersonal and demure as a daffodil. You don’t have to be Asian to dance “Bugaku,” but it probably helps. The Chinese-born Wu brought a delicacy and calm to this ceremony that I have never seen from a western dancer. And she brought out the brilliant hybrid nature of this 1963 creation – bold classic ballet steps wedded with the turned-in, half-hidden gestures of eastern dance.

A Sexy New Year

Contemporary Dance Showcase Japan & East Asia
Japan Society, New York
January 7, 2011

by Tom Phillips
copyright 2011 by Tom Phillips

Asian dance has never been short on erotic charge, but up to now it's been implied rather than stated.  No more:  the new element at Japan Society's Contemporary Dance Showcase this year was hands-on erotism.  It's still tentative and modest, but at least in one new dance from Taiwan, it was exciting precisely because of its modesty.  It was, and looked like, something new. 

Contemplating Kung Fu

SUTRA
Rose Theater
Lincoln Center, New York
November 4, 2010

by Tom Phillips
Copyright 2010 by Tom Phillips

A sutra is a Buddhist scripture, a discourse of the Buddha intended to transmit some ultimate wisdom or insight. If that was the goal of SUTRA, a dance piece presented as part of Lincoln Center’s White Light Festival, it failed. But it failed in spectacular fashion, and its mix of contemporary music, dance and Kung Fu succeeded in thrilling a mixed crowd of curiosity-seekers including some adolescent boys.