"Borrowed Light"
Tero Saarinen Company and the Boston Camerata
Howard Gilman Opera House
Brooklyn Academy of Music
Brooklyn, NY
November 7, 2007
by Susan Reiter
copyright © 2007 by Susan Reiter
Discovering the shadowy figures within the dim, strikingly beautiful lighting of "Borrowed Light" felt like reaching into distant past to attempt a connection with lost rituals and beliefs. Tero Saarinen's inspired evocation of the Shakers' fervor, terrors and communal strength is a finely honed, rigorously shaped work whose elements cohere into seamless, searing purity. Dancers and musicians, all clothes in softly draped black, share the stage and inhabit one world. The stamping, swaying and dipping of the dancing; the unsentimental purity and charged rhythmic force of the music; the subtle, insinuating lighting -- all this, and more, combine and transcend into a memorably disciplined and completely unsentimental work.
Setting the tone, and initially instigating Saarinen's interest in creating a dance inspired by the Shakers, are the spare, gorgeous a capella songs performed by the eight singers -- four male, four female -- of the Boston Camerata. Twyla Tharp also fund inspiration in this music when she created her gently reverent "Sweet Fields" in 1966, but where her work -- while sharing the rigid separation of gender -- was open and airy, this one is enclosed and fervently grounded. (The two dances share one of the songs, "Virgins Clothed in a Clean White Garment," but Saarinen, working closely with Boston Camerata director Joel Cohen, gained access to archives of hundreds of Shaker melodies, some of them never published.)
The stage picture combines severity with luminous beauty. It gives the sensation of peering into a room filled with secrets, where rituals of purification and deep significance take place. A platform stage right offers an area where the singers often position themselves, in varying arrangements. Far upstage, a gently rising wide staircase -- initially not discernible, but gradually revealed once the lighting opens up to reveal a gleaming golden cyc and bathe the stage in warmth -- climbs from stage left to stage right. For much of the piece, isolated beams of light cross the stage, with seemingly no light coming from above.
The dancers -- also four women and four men, including Saarinen -- move with a fervent sense of communal pull, clearly carried along by the music's simple yet invigorating rhythmic pulse. There is a rigidity and containment to their action, yet also a great deal of dynamic momentum in the torso. The fall and recovery impetus of Doris Humphrey came to mind, as did her capacity for deeply humanistic portrayals of a community. As an ensemble, the dancers charge through space, often leaning forward while stamping or swaying with an intensity that communicates devotion that excludes earthly preoccupations. An arresting, vigorous male solo to a song about "carnal pleasures" built in intensity as the dancer's belted coat flew open, as though he had lost the battle to restrain and conceal all suggestions of the flesh itself. The expanding circle of surging movement, with singers as well as dancers creating the vivid imagery, embodied "The Great Wheel" with its message of inevitability and continuity.
Saarinen found ingenious ways to convey the strength that these people drew from one another and their shared beliefs, as well as both the beauty and the poignancy of such an isolated, restricted way of life. His and Cohen's research led them to the handful of Shakers who are all that remain of this devotional sect today. But in their artifacts, architecture, and music, they clearly have created their own vibrant legacy, and it is one that Saarinen draws form and transmutes with indivduality and utmost respect.