"Einstein on the Beach"
Zellerbach Hall, Cal Performances
Berkeley, CA
October 26, 2012
by Rita Felciano
Copyright © Rita Felciano 2012
Watching a legendary work for the first time means committing to a perilous journey, with possible wrong turns, confusion about directions, fears about missing essential landmarks or, in this case, anxiety about submitting oneself to a marathon experience. Four and-a-half hours without a break? Not even Wagner asked that of his audiences. And I like Philip Glass about as much as I appreciate Wagner: digestible in small doses, very small doses. So did joining some 2,500 patrons, many of whom appeared to be on a pilgrimage, mean having to having to join the faithful? I would not have moved from my seat if I had been paid to do so.
Glass' score was another surprise. It is rich, nuanced with sonorities that range from softly intimate to grandiose and threatening. Most importantly it underlines "EInstein's" theatrical impetus. With no narrative, no characters and garbled language, the performers become highly stylized action figures. In their two-dimensional quality, they looked sometimes as if drawn by an animator. The chug-along locomotive and the bus looked as if they had driven out of a child's picture book.
In a pre-performance lecture Lucinda Childs, apparently, explained that for this production she and Robert Wilson had closely collaborated. Wilson, who had brought an extensive dance background to the project, designed most of the work's gestural language while Childs chorographed the two pure dance sections in the current version. She originally created her own 'Patty Hearst' solo, now performed by Kate Moran.
Despite its rigor, Wilson's physical language enlivened "Einstein" with an easy-spirited buoyancy. Much of it was designed for hands, prominently used in Asian, but not Western traditions. Typing looked like water spattering on a hot griddle, tapping fingers suggested impatience while waiting. Other meticulously realized every-day gestures--writing, counting, scratching-- blossomed into finger dances in the chorus' counting sections. Some of that looked like nursery rhyme games children play with their hands.
The 'Night Train' scene stood for its sheer brilliance. It was tight, eloquent and poetic. Designed for the Man (Gregory R. Purnhagen) and the Woman (Helga Davis), it supposedly evoked a courting scene between Einstein and his first wife, Mileva Maric. Standing on the floating train's rear platform, these formally dressed Victorians moved like clock figures, stiffly and jerkily in tiny increments. He never looked at her while she tried to get his attention. Finally their hands touched. The door opened and they stepped back inside their mechanism. That's when she pulled a gun with a smirk on their face. Maric never did pull a gun on her husband but she did divorce him. This scene was so much more potent as a statement on feminism than the Judge's long-winded sermonizing that sounded dated.
In the Patty Hearst-inspired section, Moran realized Child's solo of quick transformation from heiress, with the requisite pearls, into a handcuffed prisoner, smoothly and with great assurance. It was the more impressive because she had to realize the quick wardrobe changes while delivering a monologue and without a Kabuki artist's "invisible" assistant.
Still there was a reason why "Einstein's" two pure dance sequences provoked spontaneous applause. They were inspired. Where the rest of the work was highly theatrical and sometimes difficult to get your teeth into, Childs' choreography was transparent, brilliant in its clarity and yet full of constant surprises. Her dancers, looked more human than anything else that happened on stage. The first with the easy grace of its overlapping patterns and fleeting encounters might have been seen on a French court. The second dance's hanging arms and fleet feet had an almost folkloric quality as one would see in Irish dancing. This was geometry at play, abstract, logical, complex and pure, and everything grew out of the music. The only thing that came close to it all evening in terms of pure movement was a white horizontal beam one end of which began to rise ever so slowly until it stood up straight. The triumph of the vertical it was, be it the Physics, Ballet or Human.