“Elena’s Aria”
Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker
Gerald W. Lynch Theater
New York, NY
July 13, 2014
by Martha Sherman
copyright © 2014 by Martha Sherman
“Elena’s Aria” is a dance made of women and chairs. At first glance, it seems that simple. The Lincoln Center Festival highlighted three of Anna Teresa De Keersmaeker’s early works: her breakout, “Fase,” (1982) and “Rosas danst Rosas” (1987) as well as “Elena’s Aria” from 1984. It was described as a transitional piece in which the choreographer was evaluating her work, playing with language (spoken texts) and film. Thirty years later, it was still compelling, but many of those elements seemed dated.
In “Elena’s Aria,” Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker matched five accomplished female dancers (including herself) in high heels with dozens of chairs and a small dance vocabulary. The dancers moved in and out of pairs and trios and over and around the chairs. Her familiar geometries – lines, circles, diagonals – framed the almost-two hour work, but as the dance progressed, its repetition and precision gave the folding and crumpling bodies both weight and emotional ballast.
The stage was filled with chairs. A long line of them backed up against the raw back wall of the Lynch Theater. Each was slightly different in cast, color, or character, but they were all just straight-backed chairs. The dancers were each slightly different, as well. Their dresses had different scooped necks or strap-widths, their hair was long or short, loose or free. In this rigorously patterned and regimented work, each managed to separate herself by a toss of hair, expression or the slight twitching idiosyncrasies that differentiated them. Yet in the end, they were all “just” women.
The chairs acted as a kind of chorus: two or three dancers moved across them in mixed twists, crouches, angles and pops. Like an increasingly quick and complex game of musical chairs, two dancers chased a third from her perch, or hopped over her to continue twirling as the first sat, legs primly crossed, until she jumped up to avoid being trampled. In the dark at stage right, was another group of chairs. Dancers rotated there to settle, with their backs to the audience, angled legs slanted backward, cloaked in shadow. It looked as if the offstage wing were visible, while the active dancing was brightly lit in the center De Keersmaeker designed her own lights, and used sharp contrasts througout.
The dancers moved in tight, provocatively sexy phrases – and the high heels exaggerated the suggestiveness. Whipping behind a chair, a dancer would slip down, barely touching the seat before bouncing up again – and circling around the next chair in the line. Moving in a pair or trio, the dancers posed with one foot hooked in front of the other, the pointy heel touching forward – then they did low, whipping kicks, a whiff of the fancy footwork of tango, tucking the pointed foot behind a calf, then back to the front.
There was also a large white circle chalked on the floor, as well as a reading chair and lamp on the downstage left apron, and an old 16 mm film projector near the front edge of the stage. Each small enclave offered moments of respite from the relentlessness of the women and chairs – a solo was danced in fitful sharp steps around the chalk circle, then morphed to a duet and a trio. The projector was used to show a black and white film of buildings being blown up and reduced to dust. In the reading nook, dancers took turns quietly reading passionate passages from Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky or Brecht.
The most trapped-in-the-80s moments were connected to the overwrought sexist images: five women in very high heels and sexy dresses that they often hitched up just below their crotches. They tossed their hair and periodically crumpled in feminine agony; a fan added Clairol commercial glamor. But these women weren’t weak; they swaggered and sashayed.
As the piece wore on, the women began to collapse, seemingly fatigued, into a shared visual line; the long diagonal of each dancer’s body slashed across her chair – miserable, but strong. The chairs were perfect partners: dependable, supportive, flexible (often moved where and when needed), as if in contrast to men.
Ugly movements morphed to beauty as they were repeated and became more familiar. At the close of De Keersmaeker’s own solo, which was danced across the diameter of the chalk circle, she landed on the floor, seated with her legs splayed in a wide “V” and her shoulders crumbled in misery. Later, when four of the dancers echoed her seated position, it was not a moment of defeat, but of stability. From their splayed seats, they were able both to twist and leap up to spin, or torque onto their backs on the floor, a shifting wave of movement anchored by that central “V,” all in a beautiful, exhausted swirl.
At the piece’s close, the dancers each brought a chair downstage, in front of the now-closed curtain. They sat, looking bored and tired, slouching, crossing and re-crossing their arms, rubbing their eyes. They were done. So is the era they seemed to reflect, with female imagery more quaint than descriptive.
copyright © 2014 by Martha Sherman