“Orbo Novo”
Cedar Lake Contemporary Ballet
The Joyce Theater
New York, NY
October 21, 2009
by Kathleen O’Connell
copyright © 2009 by Kathleen O’Connell
What’s up with the rage to dance about non-fiction? First there was William Forsythe’s take on Anne Carson’s essay “Decreation” at BAM. A week later at the Joyce, in came Cedar Lake Contemporary Ballet in the New York premiere of “Orbo Novo,” Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui’s take on neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor’s book My Stroke of Insight. Despite flashes of invention and beauty, neither project really worked. It’s one thing for a choreographer to be intrigued by an author’s ideas and to use them as a springboard for creation. It’s another to try to put those ideas into dance. The urge to make pointed reference to the source material is more problematic: it suggests that the dance can’t stand on its own; that it needs the crutch of someone else’s work to be intelligible. In the case of “Orbo Novo” the crutch got in the way.
My Stroke of Insight contains the seeds of good dance theater. Taylor suffered a stroke at age 37 and her book is an attempted first-hand account of what it’s like to have one’s mind subsumed into the brain’s right hemisphere—to be in the world without language, number, a sense of time, or a sense of self. She’s not entirely successful: much of what she experienced is beyond the easy reach of language and Taylor is neither poet nor philosopher. The ineffable is not beyond the reach of dance, however. Unfortunately, Cherkaoui not only elected to use Taylor’s words—including her syrupy paeans to “the deep inner peace circuitry of our right brain”—he too often resorted to cliché to forge choreographic links to her work.
The stage was dominated by Alexander Dodge’s unit set, which was made up of tall rolling panels of brick-red metal grid work that the dancers reconfigured into walls, cells, and dead-end passageways. In an opening prelude, Acacia Schachte and Jubal Battisti moved slowly across the near-dark stage together in silence, separated by Dodge’s imposing grid. They reached towards each other through the lattice work, gently entwining their arms and cradling each other’s heads. The music began to play the moment they made contact, the first of many blithely pedestrian gestures. Battisti disengaged and left the stage; Schachte began a solo. First she wove herself back and forth through the lattice work; once freed from its confines, she unleashed a wave of undulations, rolls, and recoveries that established the work’s characteristic style of movement.
She was replaced by Kristen Weiser and Battisti, who kicked off yet another prelude to the main choreographic action. Seated cross-legged at the front of the stage, they began a unison disquisition on the brain’s right and left hemispheres, decorating their recitation with carefully choreographed hand movements akin to the stylized gestures of Indian classical dance. They were soon joined by the other dancers, who—now standing and gesturing stiffly—began to narrate the events of Dr. Taylor’s stroke in relays of two or three at a time. When the narrative was done it was back to dancing.
The dramatization had its charms. Taylor’s account of her stroke—by far and away the best part of her book—is both harrowing and humorous. “I’m a busy woman. I don’t have time for a stroke!” she announces to herself when dawns on her that she’s having one. Cherkaoui wasn’t shy about underscoring the humor and a few moments of his multi-voiced staging effectively captured Taylor’s struggle to hang on to her left brain long enough to phone for help. The section was stylistically and tonally out of sync with the rest of the work and seemed air-lifted in to explain the dancing to us.
The dancing itself was built on series of vignettes structured like etudes. Cherkaoui selected a handful of simple gestures and motifs and worked them one by one into an unvarying matrix of undulating, wave-like movement. The gesture—an arm held stiffly away from the body, say, or a roll to a headstand—would be elaborated first by a soloist and then recapitulated by a large group moving in massed unison. If it wasn’t subtle, it was a sturdy enough device to keep the proceedings organized. What it didn’t do was provide sufficient variation in texture to let Cherkaoui speak for himself in anything other than a somber monotone.
Cherkaoui’s way of pulsing energy through the body was compelling in small doses, sometimes creating the neat illusion that the dancers’ centers of gravity were moving, not the dancers themselves. He sent Jason Kittelberger (and later Jon Bond) across the stage in an astonishing series of slow full-body rolls, springs, and flips that seemed to be generated by an external force completely outside of the dancers’ control. The effect was both visually stunning and emotionally gripping.
Too often, however, Cherkaoui plunked clichéd and trivially literal images on top of what might have been a fertile substrate for a richer exploration of states of mind too weird for words. Two men (Golan Yosef and Nickemil Concepcion) twined and tumbled awkwardly like conjoined twins to a faint, high-pitched hum. A woman (Soojin Choi) entered and, placing a hand on each man’s head, interposed herself between them like—wait for it—the corpus callosum. Music began to play and they whirled beneath her hands in harmony until she departed and they began sparring like Cain and Abel. In another vignette, a man and woman (Yosef and Harumi Terayama) stood in isolation in front of the latticework, their limp colleagues hanging through its openings like the victims of a bomb blast. The couple began to shiver with distressing violence; when they joined hands, their shivering stopped. It resumed a few minutes later, but this time was quelled when they released each other’s hands. Was Cherkaoui hoping to cancel out the initial cliché by turning it on its head or was he hoping to be clever?
Cherkaoui’s response to Szymon Brzóska’s evocative post-minimalist score was literal, too. His long chains of movement seemed extruded rather than shaped. They didn’t read like phrases—there was little build-up and release of tension—but they pulsed along with tidy regularity to either the music’s beat or its chord changes. When Cherkaoui wasn’t literal, he was predictably anti-literal. A long solo for Ebony Williams asked her to execute rapid-fire, whiplash undulations against slow-moving music.
The musicians—the Mosaic Quartet plus guest pianist Aaron Wunsch—played Szymon Brzóska’s evocative post-minimalist score behind a scrim placed well back on the dark stage; they were only occasionally visible through the gloom of Jim French’s murky lighting. The costumes added to the somber stage picture. Isabelle Lhoas dressed the dancers in a muted palette of street clothes that seemed vaguely of some other era: trousers, shirts, and vests for the men; long skirts alternating with cropped pants and shorter skirts for the women. Articles of clothing were doffed and re-donned throughout; eventually, the men stripped down to their tighty-whities.
Cherkaoui’s program notes tell us that the work “tackles issues of freedom, contamination, perspective, loneliness and enlightenment” and that it searches for “the perfect balance between left and right, between heaven and earth.” If he hadn’t told us, we might never have known.
copyright © 2009 by Kathleen O’Connell