MARCIA B. SIEGEL

Gongs with robot

MARCIA B. SIEGEL — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 16:30:10 GMT

Gamelan Galak Tika does crossover
The Balinese gamelan, a close-knit ensemble of percussion, flute, and voices, preserves some of the oldest music in the world as an essential part of ritual and secular occasions.

MASKED MAN I Made Bandem danced all the different roles in the traditional Topeng.

The performance space of MIT's Broad Institute Auditorium last Saturday afternoon looked like the scrap pile at the local recycling center. Strewn over the floor were keyboards, laptops, cables, microphones, and the tuned brass bowls and low metallophones with ornate carved bases that make up a gamelan orchestra. This hodge-podge set the stage for a program of new and traditional works by Gamelan Galak Tika introduced by artistic director Evan Ziporyn.

The Balinese gamelan, a close-knit ensemble of percussion, flute, and voices, preserves some of the oldest music in the world as an essential part of ritual and secular occasions. Although its sound and organizing structures aren't anything like Western music, the gamelan can embrace cross-cultural influences and modern interpretations. New sonic adventures like these electronic collaborations keep renewing the tradition and warding off cultural paralysis.

Saturday's concert began with four new musical encounters. Midori Matsuo's ssss began with bursts of melody from a few instruments, almost delicate trills and pulses that got cut off on the way to sustained rhythm. Gradually more instruments joined, and they all worked up to an accelerating clamor that broke off and left a long reverberation. Then the piece moved back to a sparse coda.

Po-Chun Wang's Rice Combo featured quiet gongs and electronic voices, and the assurance that if you listened carefully, you'd become a great cook.

For Mars Rover & Snow White, Matsuo played a Western drum kit, with Larisa Berger on keyboard, Megan Tsai on double bass, and the composer, Christine Southworth, sampling vocals. As the rest of the gamelan pitched in, you could detect a basic rock beat substituting for the typical Balinese syncopations and jittery changes of speed, and the loopy vocals drifting in and out sounded like scat singing.

Evan Ziporyn has designed a small "beta gamelan" that's tuned in just intonation so that it can work harmoniously with Western instruments. For Agak-Agak, composer Ramon Castillo added an electrified bass (played by Blake Newman), an accordion (Matt Ven Brink), and an EWI (electronic wind instrument) that looked like a squared-off clarinet and was played by Eric Nugent.

But the star of Agak-Agak was the Heliphon, a tall stack of cylinders spiraling down a pole in the shape of a double helix. This robot lit up charmingly with tiny blue and green lights in response to its fellow players while emitting an assortment of sounds that must have been generated by the live musicians — clear dinging patterns like a xylophone or a celesta, low drones and organ chords, and a faraway chatter, maybe the Helicon's memories of a crowd of its siblings on another planet.

Dynamos

MARCIA B. SIEGEL — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 23:42:16 GMT

Philadanco at the ICA
The four pieces on the program that Philadanco brought for its Boston debut last weekend at the Institute for Contemporary Art were all-dance numbers showcasing a troupe of highly polished, supercharged dancers.

ENEMY BEHIND THE GATES: Bad timing?

The four pieces on the program that Philadanco brought for its Boston debut last weekend at the Institute for Contemporary Art were all-dance numbers showcasing a troupe of highly polished, supercharged dancers. Except for one sextet of women, each work marshaled 10 or more members of the company's 16-person roster. Despite the jam-packed choreography and the unremittingly high-performance intensities, by the end of the evening they looked even more revved up than they'd been at the start.

Founded in 1970, Philadanco is Philadelphia's answer to Alvin Ailey, a company of mostly African-American dancers who've mastered the gamut of contemporary styles. Their choreography comes with messages of uplift and reflection, but the dances themselves — at least the ones we saw here — don't detour us away from the pure pleasures of physicality. They differed in big issues of style and mood, but all the choreographers were working with small chunks of group arrangements, people streaming in and out with little to distinguish them from their companions.

The program started with a revival of the late Gene Hill Sagan's 1983 Ritornello, which is choreographed to a familiar score with a daunting predecessor. Bach's Double Violin Concerto is also the music for George Balanchine's Concerto Barocco, a classic in the ballet repertory. Sagan's alternative was enjoyable if not profound.

Four men and six women used a hybrid vocabulary of ballet and modern-dance steps — fast chaînû turns, running, skipping, stag jumps borrowed from Martha Graham. The arms were always in motion, curling and spreading in an effect that modern dancers like Paul Taylor have used to extend and glamorize the non-balletic body. To the slow second movement, two couples danced almost entirely in tandem. When the men weren't tipping the women up in odd, angular lifts, they made pliant plastique shapes to set off the women's pointe-free bourrûes, arabesques, and developpûs.

Rennie Harris proposed a social history in Philadelphia Experiment, but the theme of slavery and its legacy of urban despair was assigned to photographs projected on the backdrop and a singer insistently exhorting us to remember past abuses. The dance itself was a fast, punchy montage of hip-hop, boogie, and sassy street attitude. It looked like a chorus for a music video or a rap show to me.

At the end, as the audience screamed its head off, the stage lights came on again. A leader (unidentified as such in the program notes), who'd strutted around and solo'd during the piece, pumped up the audience even more as the cast returned for a long, choreographed encore with more boogieing and little specialty bits.

Steps . . . and more steps

MARCIA B. SIEGEL — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 16:47:36 GMT

Boston Conservatory and BoSoma make dance work hard
Martha Graham’s Steps in the Street doesn’t look anything like a dance of the 21st century, but at the end of Boston Conservatory’s fall program last weekend it fit right in.

AFFIRMATION: Adrienne Hawkins’s Whoa-Man 360 recalled Alvin Ailey’s character studies.
Photo by Liza Voll.

Martha Graham’s Steps in the Street doesn’t look anything like a dance of the 21st century, but at the end of Boston Conservatory’s fall program last weekend it fit right in. The audience cheered wildly for the seven-minute dance that begins in silence, then explodes in a tremendous feat of jumping for 10 women who exit with their energy still unspent, as one outsider strides in the opposite direction. The redoubtable Yuriko, a Martha Graham dancer in the 1940s and now a principal reconstructor of the early Graham works, came to Boston with her daughter Susan Kikuchi to stage the dance.

Together with the choreographer, Yuriko brought Steps in the Street back from oblivion in 1989, just two years before Graham’s death. It must not be accidental that the Conservatory’s program left out the date of the original choreography (1936). Three-quarters of a century renders a dance practically an antique, and I guess the producers wanted to stress this dance’s modernity — its minimalistic repetition and relentless physicality. From its first performances by the Graham company in New York, the revival has wowed audiences, but its connection to history is a bit cloudy.

A contemporary film by Julien Bryan served as the basis for the 1989 revival, but the film was silent and couldn’t encompass the full-stage choreography, which had to be re-imagined by Graham and Yuriko. No one could find the original music, by the American composer Wallingford Riegger, so another Riegger score was applied. This was Riegger’s 1940 orchestration of the two-piano score he’d written in 1935 for the Variations and Conclusion to New Dance, by Martha Graham’s pioneering contemporary Doris Humphrey. To Riegger’s polyrhthyms, Humphrey created a stirring and original dance for a group with soloists in counterpoint. Now orchestrated for flamboyant brasses, percussion, and strings, the infectious rhythms have subsided, and the dancers pound away on an underlying regular beat.

The Boston Conservatory dancers Thursday night performed Steps in the Street with clenched determination, loud exhalations of breath, and a thudding heaviness. I don’t know why they aren’t able to relate in their own terms to the themes of the dance, “Devastation — Homelessness — Exile,” or why they don’t simply do the work of the dance, without having to telegraph that they’re working at it. Their long black dresses and black head-wraps, and Linda O’Brien’s moody lighting, gave the whole thing an air of grim desolation. Steps in the Street was one of many modern dances to come out of the depths of the Depression, and all the vestiges of the period that I’ve seen speak of survival, resoluteness, even hope — not at all the downbeat qualities the Conservatory dancers drew from Graham’s jumping dance.

Conflict and convergence

MARCIA B. SIEGEL — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 21:51:39 GMT

Bill T. Jones and Celtic Tap at the ICA
Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company’s Another Evening: Serenade/The Proposition is an elegant layering of dance, design, music, and words.

ANOTHER EVENING: Bill T. Jones’s new work extrapolates from familiar Lincolnian issues to the
still-smoldering troubles of our time.

Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company’s Another Evening: Serenade/The Proposition is an elegant layering of dance, design, music, and words — and like its title, it doesn’t necessarily convey one overall message. Shown last weekend at the Institute of Contemporary Art, the hour-long work is the first in a projected trilogy built around Abraham Lincoln’s bicentennial birthday, which will be celebrated next year.

Bill T. Jones doesn’t list himself as choreographer for Another Evening and he doesn’t dance in it, but as artistic director and no doubt conceptualizer, he’s imprinted the piece with his wide-ranging civic concerns. Of all dance artists, no one is engaged more seriously with the moral and social crises of our culture. This new work, which he premiered last summer at the American Dance Festival, extrapolates from familiar Lincolnian issues — slavery, racial discrimination, the divided Union — to the still-smoldering troubles of our time: all of the above, plus cultural polarization, violence, international power games, endless war and destruction. Jones doesn’t suggest a solution to any of this except, possibly, a new coalition of difference.

It isn’t his way to name his issues directly. AIDS/HIV, one of his subjects for years, isn’t explicitly mentioned, but the piece is dedicated to the company’s long-time collaborator, actor Andrea Smith, who died of the plague in July. When one of the dancers was carried out by his companions, I remembered a similar cortège for an infected dancer in Jones’s 1989 D-Man in the Waters.

Although there’s dancing all the way through it, Another Evening feels more like a polemic, or a very advanced form of pageantry, where the goal is to bring people’s attention to big ideas in a positive way. It’s a signifying piece, a testimony, a memorial, rather than a revelation.

Two podiums flanking the stage are occupied by a singer (Lisa Komara) and a narrator (Jamyl Dobson), who deliver chapter and verse. The dancers walk out, do their phrases assertively, and leave, with every point made, every image crystallized. Dobson reads pieces of 19th-century oratorical uplift and instruction interspersed with thoughts about the meaning of history from what may be Bill T. Jones’s autobiography.

The set, by Bjorn Amelan, comprises six white pillars that suggest the classic portals of cultural and government institutions. Symbolic democracy becomes submerged in video projections of bombed-out cities and dead soldiers (by Janet Wong). Eerie lighting effects (by Robert Wierzel) make the pillars appear on the verge of toppling over. The façade of a mansion looms up behind them, and flames are raging in the windows.

Floor show

MARCIA B. SIEGEL — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 00:00:43 GMT

Sara Hook at Harvard
Sara Hook explains the title of her cabaret piece Salad Days as a reference to youth and indiscretion.

PATRIOT ACT UP: Mary Cochran was the perky drum majorette who’s transitioned from football field
to ballet stage.

Sara Hook explains the title of her cabaret piece Salad Days as a reference to youth and indiscretion. At Harvard Dance Center on Saturday night, quite a lot of the evening looked more like grown-up and decadent. Hook’s New York–based group featured former Paul Taylor dancer Mary Cochran and three other women, with David Parker as a guest artist, in five brief portraits choreographed over the past 10 years.

What really held the parts of the evening together for me was Hook’s take on female performers. As distinct characters or anonymous dancer-dancers, they all appeared flawed, flummoxed, but determined to scramble over any choreographic hurdle.

Cochran opened the performance with Patriot Act UP (2004), as the perky drum majorette who’s transitioned from football field to ballet stage in things like George Balanchine’s Stars and Stripes. To a rousing drumbeat and a Sousa march, Cochran ripped through a precision routine, one mechanical move to the beat, an encyclopedia of struts and prances, head tilts, simpering smiles, lifted shoulders and phony salutes. Driven to keep up with the music, she worked feverishly to please, pulling one foolish prop after another out of her jacket as she grew more strained and artificial.

Rue (1998) did have a quality of naïveté, and it most closely suited the ingénue roles Cochran played so memorably in the Taylor repertory. To Schubert’s “Du bist die Ruh” (sung on tape by a sweet soprano), Cochran wafted with a sort of deranged romanticism. Wearing a dilapidated long tutu and a pink Dynel wig, she conveyed the raptures of a lovelorn but slightly unsteady ballerina. In the midst of some breathy advance, she’d fall flat, recover awkwardly, go on again until the next stumble. At the end of the song she staggered out backwards, still pleading with both hands to her invisible lover.

Three vignettes made up The Valeska Trilogy, a homage, or perhaps a satire, invoking the transgressive Weimar cabaret performer Valeska Gert. Cochran first played an adorable but unsteady music-hall entertainer, with banal ballet enchaînements. Then came cheap exhibitionism, as she lashed from kitschy Charlestons to auto-erotic writhings. Finally she subsided into a desperate proto-modern dance.

Ambling

MARCIA B. SIEGEL — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 23:34:08 GMT

Caitlin Corbett’s dance for the masses
Tom’s Wealth: A Dance for the Masses , which premiered last weekend at the Tsai Center, is about the physical equivalent of these toys and talismans.

TOM’S WEALTH: Mr. Sawyer’s assets got translated into movement by everyday people.

The assets of Tom Sawyer, as quoted by Caitlin Corbett from Mark Twain, consist of worthless objects you could pick up and stick in your pocket, broken treasures you can’t throw away, and a motherless animal or two. Tom’s Wealth: A Dance for the Masses, which premiered last weekend at the Tsai Center, is about the physical equivalent of these toys and talismans.

Corbett has been working for a year or so with some 30 “non-dancers” of all ages and types. From the way she deployed them among the members of her own company, Leah Bergmann, Erin Koh, Rebecca Lay, Kaela Lee, and Marjorie Morgan, I gather she takes the word “masses” in a sociological sense: dance for the common man, not dance for crusading crowds at a rally. She’s attracted to simple movements and the beauty of ordinary souls.

For this variegated group Corbett seems to have chiseled down a movement style I remember as being quite complex into some brief, basic, and low-intensity combinations of arm gestures, skips and runs, turns and falls. The five company dancers make the lexicon more elaborate, and subgroups of the masses develop it through repetition or doubling.

One phrase ends with a fall onto the back, arms and flexed legs hanging in the air above the body. You get to see this robotic shape many times during the piece. When the dancers turn on their sides, the same pose looks entirely different, more three-dimensional. And when several people fall into it at once, the stage seems to acquire a set of horizontal levels.

Corbett’s choreographic structures are more interesting than the simple body movements that convey them. In frequent counterpoint patterns, a large group of people move in unison or stand in place while a few individuals weave through them. The five company members do a long sequence of arm semaphores, back falls, and vigorous arm swings that carry the whole body out into a leg extension or a side jump. Five more dancers arrive and do their version of the phrase in canon with the first group.

In one sequence, a dancer has a shadow behind her doing the same movements. At some point the shadow steps in front, but instead of getting to be the leader, she falls and her partner steps over her. The shadow dance resumes as before.

Still doing it

MARCIA B. SIEGEL — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 21:00:25 GMT

A Chorus Line at the Opera House
In the finale of A Chorus Line , 16 dancers do a precision routine against a mirrored backdrop that makes them seem like a cast of thousands.

ONE SINGULAR SENSATION? The premise may be dated, but the staging continues to look great.

In the finale of A Chorus Line, 16 dancers do a precision routine against a mirrored backdrop that makes them seem like a cast of thousands. Created by production teammates director/choreographer Michael Bennett, scenic designer Robin Wagner, and lighting designer Theron Musser, this is one of the all-time great images of the musical stage. In the touring edition of the show now at the Opera House (through 12 October), it’s been re-created under the direction of Bennett’s long-time associate Bob Avian, and it still glitters.

The show-biz gypsy’s highest aspirations are ironically fulfilled in this glamorous but banal chorus of high-shouldered, hat-doffing kicks and anonymity. A Chorus Line has no plot, really, only the stories of the hopefuls as they’re put through their paces by a hardbitten director, Zach, and his dance captain, Larry. The initial workshop process, during which Bennett coaxed real chorus dancers to pour out the painful personal stories that were developed into the script, has become as much of a legend as the show itself.

A Chorus Line isn’t about the great American success story — a star-is-born sort of thing. Instead, it’s about modest talent, hardship, desperation, getting old, and what you do for love. More than three decades after its premiere, the show is still entertaining, but I’m not sure the triumph of the little guy is still a poignant theme. Or that even dancers do anything for love any more.

The show begins with a stageful of boys and girls [sic] in practice clothes running through dance combinations as Zach scans them to make the first cut. They sing about how they need this job, but what we learn as Zach interviews them is that they probably don’t need the money so much as the personal validation. They’ve all constructed some identity for themselves, and dancing is what makes them feel real.

In 1975 we didn’t know much about teenage sexual experiments, abusive parenting, surgical body enhancement, or the homosexual underground — at least, nobody talked about those things in a mainstream show. Under Zach’s sadistic prodding, the auditionees reveal these intimacies as part of their tryout. Their stories now seem not quite ordinary but not quite shocking, either. As played by Michael Gruber, Zach seems more sympathetic, almost likable, and — miked to the max — the show plays for its surface glamor and expertise rather than its darkness.

Koozåpalooza

MARCIA B. SIEGEL — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 20:48:15 GMT

Cirque du Soleil at Bayside
The show could almost have been a metaphor for the national state of boisterous excitability.

It’s been pretty noisy around here the last few weeks. What with the Olympics, the conventions, the hype, the punditry, and the outraged blogomanes of all persuasions, the whole country’s been engulfed in a non-stop slugfest, and even the spectators compete for who yells the loudest. Koozå, the new Cirque du Soleil extravaganza, doesn’t provide any relief.

Pitching its big tent at Bayside Expo Center, Koozå opened last Friday for a month-long run (through October 12). The show could almost have been a metaphor for the national state of boisterous excitability. Not a soothing evening, with the band’s volume cranked way up over the ambient air-conditioner whine of the tent, and the clowns running around shouting and farting into their mikes, and the audience having the shrieks on cue.

The only time things calmed down was when Yao Deng Bo, with Zen-like concentration, stacked up eight chairs one by one. After making sure each new chair was precisely lined up, and testing his own balance, he’d slowly heave himself into a single-hand stand with his legs in a split, or unfold into some other improbable posture. He never cracked a smile until he lowered the chairs to his helpers and jumped to the floor.

Koozå isn’t a theme show like some other Cirque du Soleil creations. It’s just a line-up of circus acts — acrobatics, juggling, oddball specialties — linked together by a chorus of dancers and the ever-annoying clowns. Of course the costuming is gorgeous — yes, Cirque du Soleil proves that even a unitard can be gorgeous. With dazzling lighting effects, the simple set opens out like a set of billowing sails, and the one-ring space seems to expand and contract to suit each new marvel.

The trapezes and trampolines and platforms get rigged and moved about with terrific efficiency by invisible techies and the cast members themselves. Teamwork is crucial to these daredevils. The audience may scream at the acrobat who pulls off a triple somersault in the air, but it takes all 13 members of the “Teeterboard” closing number to see that the tumbler gets a good launch and comes back to earth alive.

Dainty cabaret

MARCIA B. SIEGEL — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 19:09:32 GMT

Keigwin + Company bring the elements to Jacob’s Pillow
Larry Keigwin’s genial take on the perennially popular theme of the four elements (water, fire, earth, air) didn’t add anything profound to the cosmic intelligence.

“EARTH”: This element was defined by reptilian movement.

Larry Keigwin’s genial take on the perennially popular theme of the four elements (water, fire, earth, air) didn’t add anything profound to the cosmic intelligence. Performed by his company last week in Jacob’s Pillow’s Doris Duke Studio Theatre, Elements consisted of 16 individually titled sketches, each about four and a half minutes long, with no more substance than the foam that inspired them.

Keigwin can extract great mileage out of a tiny idea, like the contemporary choreographer he most resembles, David Parker. But unlike Parker, he doesn’t make the leap from mundane comedy to the sublime reaches of absurdity. “Water” introduces the company, who are clad in bath towels and seemingly nothing else. As they step in and out of a line-up, discreetly rearranging the towels, we’re longing to see one miscalculation, but the choreography prevents any untoward exposure. By the end of the fourth “Water” droplet, when we’ve given up on this, the last dancer does flash his butt, just as he’s disappearing into the wings.

In between these coy moments, Ying-Ying Shiau (“Sea”), in a teeny weeny polka-dot bikini, is partnered by three men in terrycloth bathrobes (accompanied by Cole Porter’s anything-but-coy “Let’s Do It”), and Alexander Gish (“Spa”) imitates Carmen Miranda in a towel and a towel turban. Liz Riga hands him restorative bottles of water, and he thinks up silly things to do with them before handing them back.

The first part of “Fire” seemed to be riffing on the idea of movement that swirls upward, enhanced by the extended sleeves on the dancers’ costumes (“Flicker”). To a Chopin Nocturne, Jenn Freeman, Nicole Wolcott, and Julian Barnett (“Simmer”) face what might be an invisible dressing-room mirror, trying out stagy postures and faces. Implicit rivalries get quickly extinguished. Wolcott spins from one spotlit area of the stage to another (“Burn”). Patsy Cline is singing “Crazy” but Wolcott is mouthing different words, maybe angry ones.

“Earth” summons up reptilian movement. Keigwin’s solo, “Gecko,” was the one authentically weird dance of the show. The audience Thursday night gazed uncomfortably at his darting tongue, his quick, predatory gestures, his distended yet withdrawn limbs and shoulders. The other dancers extrapolated his lizardly quickness into group dances and a slippery, circling solo by Liz Riga (“Dragon”).

Legs plus

MARCIA B. SIEGEL — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 19:06:30 GMT

Aspen Santa Fe at Jacob’s Pillow
Aspen Santa Fe Ballet’s program at Jacob’s Pillow last week sampled four choreographers while showing off the dynamic 11-member company.

“AWWW, CUTE”: Itzak Galili’s Chameleon didn’t go much farther than that in its social commentary.

Aspen Santa Fe Ballet’s program at Jacob’s Pillow last week sampled four choreographers while showing off the dynamic 11-member company. The dances, all made during the last decade, revealed some limitations of contemporary dance style.

You’d expect that access to every and any kind of technique would make for exciting dancing. That, of course, has been the assumption of contemporary dancemakers for decades, but the process has reached a kind of stasis that’s broken only by some exceptional choreographer. We get lots of moves, lots of surprises, beautiful bodies, but no serious challenges. The style functions fine with the audience, which knows it’s seeing something that’s more refined than a TV dance show but just as kicky.

Helen Pickett’s Petal, commissioned for Aspen Santa Fe and premiered last winter, was a stream of ballet-inflected duets and formations for four women in bright yellow swimsuits and pointe shoes and four men in blue muscle shirts and pants. The usual situations got played out: neatly structured choruses, duets that looked like struggles, a trio where two men manipulated a woman. During small encounters and formal movement displays, people would exit determinedly, as if they had important things to do off stage. They’d slip back in and begin some new phrase off to the side while something else was going on.

Pickett’s movement called attention to its balletic foundations with anti-balletic misalignments and feistiness, none more or less distinguished than the others. The dancers often looked as if they were wriggling out of voluminous, ill-designed garments.

Jorma Elo also tries to make unusual movement. His 1st Flash (2003), to Jean Sibelius’s super-romantic Violin Concerto, was a collection of energetic shapes and gestures. At the beginning, dancers rushed on stage, stopped, shook their hands violently, and went away. The whole dance goes in bursts like this. The dancers always seemed to be building up to a stop, or collecting energy to begin moving again from some scrunched or angular position.

There’s not much emotional or physical throughline to this spasmodic process. I seized gratefully on moments that bore some social nuance. Two women looped and relooped their arms around each other’s arms, finding tricky new spaces to cut through. They seemed to be involved in this game, and perhaps in each other, until a man ran over and cut between them. He shoved one of the women away and took over the loop game. None of them seemed fazed.

Soft power

MARCIA B. SIEGEL — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 15:12:36 GMT

Sara Rudner at Concord Academy and the ICA
It's neither a set piece of choreography nor an improvised free-for-all.

WORK IN PROGRESS: Nothing in these “Dancing-on-View” performances looked like any known
dance technique, but it all looked like dancing.

Sara Rudner has been making “Dancing-on-View” since 1975. Last week, she brought this extraordinary work to Concord Academy Summer Stages Dance and the Institute for Contemporary Art. “Dancing-on-View” is neither a set piece of choreography nor an improvised free-for-all. You could call it a series of gambits and structures, an evolving research into how bodies can be maximally expressive and minimally stressed, a generator of lifetime dancing pleasure.

For four showings in the Concord Academy dance studio and two long afternoons at the ICA, Rudner assembled nine New York colleagues and eight Boston dancers. They’d been working here together for the past three weeks to produce 35 phrases or chapters of movement. One imagines the segments could be performed in random sequence, collage fashion, but on Wednesday night at Concord and Saturday at the ICA they were done in the same order, and the event took us through build-ups and cooldowns, surprises, reprises, and conclusions, as in a conventional dance piece. Except for the informality.

“Dancing-on-View” imposes a curious duality. We look at super dancers performing with tremendous accomplishment, and at the same time we see them at ground level, as explorers committed to the idea that there’s always more to be learned about themselves and their collective enterprise. Everything has an air of being in progress. To achieve perfect ensemble coordination, they stop and rehearse tiny chunks over and over. They show us refined beginnings and endings, but the endings are provisional, the beginnings continuations. Dancers replace other dancers, learn one another’s roles. The piece will go on into the next decade or the next century.

The audience is thoughtfully provided with a “menu” of items. One dancer sits at the side with a stopwatch to announce the title of each new segment and give the names of featured dancers, so we can learn who they are. Emily Beattie, Kellie Edwards. Carey Foster, Sunny Hitt, Amelia Mitter-Burke, Catherine Murcek, Marissa Palley, and Megan Schenk made up the Boston contingent. The New Yorkers were Megan Boyd, Ashley Byler, Erin Crawley-Woods, Peggy Gould, Anneke Hansen, Rachel Lehrer, Lynne Schlesinger-Ruedeman, Maggie Thom, and Lori Yuill. Plus the incomparable Rudner.

Post-traumatic earth

MARCIA B. SIEGEL — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 15:59:32 GMT

Eiko + Koma and Tere O’Connor at Concord
With the most unassertive, seemingly egoless moves, Eiko & Koma can evoke the sensations and moods of a universe.

RAMMED EARTH Tere O’Connor’s piece examines social behavior as quirky, brainy, and possibly
purposeless.

“Beauty Ecstasy Serenity Anxiety” is how Margaret Leng Tan inscribed the CD liner notes on some of the music she played for Eiko & Koma’s Mourning last Thursday at Concord Academy Summer Stages Dance. Those words could have described not only the powerful piano pieces by John Cage, Bunita Marcus, and Somei Satoh but also the dance itself. With the most unassertive, seemingly egoless moves, Eiko & Koma can evoke the sensations and moods of a universe, and Tan matched them in theatrical as well as musical intensity.

As she strokes a prepared piano, with each key tuned to two tones that produce eerie overtones (Cage’s In the Name of the Holocaust), you look at a leaf-covered ramp and a high, indeterminate brown shape with leaves or shreds of bark peeling off its surface. Two bodies lie in the leaf litter, their heads straining back toward the audience. Shadowing this tableau was my own unforgettable picture of the World Trade Center collapsing on 9/11.

All of Eiko & Koma’s concerns are in this first image: the fusion of human and natural worlds; the stillness; the mysterious open metaphors that slowly shift under changing light and sound and movement. Mourning is based on some of their earlier pieces, like Offering, which was seen at Northeastern University in 2003. But in a way, you could say all their pieces are one piece, with slight changes of focus. The constant element is their earthbound, polymorphous movement.

As they begin to edge toward each other in the leaves, you can see distinct differences between them. Koma’s moves are effortful, spasmodic. He seems to be working against himself even when he’s covering a minute distance or giving in to gravity. Eiko slips through the slowest, oddest rotations. She seems to have no joints, but there are times when she looks broken, her limbs dangling or horribly wounded. Both of them are naked except for black furry sacks that encase their torsos. You hardly ever see their faces, and they never stand upright on their own two legs.

Koma often seems like some lumbering animal, butting Eiko’s curled-up body from behind or reaching out an inarticulate hand to touch her. She claws at bunches of leaves. She slides onto him, hurls into him without using her arms. They make tiny moans and toothy hisses and grunts. They keep colliding in some kind of sexual need, then rolling apart.

Modern romantics

MARCIA B. SIEGEL — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 21:36:10 GMT

Mark Morris’s Romeo & Juliet ; Lar Lubovitch at the Pillow
Romeo & Juliet, On Motifs of Shakespeare is less of a statement than a supposition: what if we did it a different way?

ROMEO & JULIET The dances seemed repetitious and less interesting than the way he staged
the story and the characters.

Mark Morris’s displaced romanticism is the perfect high-art solution for our times. Morris believes in happy endings, but he probably doesn’t trust them. He reveres great music but shields us from its passions with caricature and formal gesture. In his new production of Romeo and Juliet, the subject is love, but the word always has quotes around it. Widely celebrated in advance of its premiere last weekend at Bard College, this Romeo carries a cautious subtitle, directing us not to take the Shakespearean icon literally. Romeo & Juliet, On Motifs of Shakespeare is less of a statement than a supposition: what if we did it a different way?

Two years ago, Princeton musicologist Simon Morrison discovered that the majestic score of Sergei Prokofiev, which has fueled many balletic interpretations, had been doctored to satisfy the guardians of Soviet political correctness. Prokofiev intended something more modest and less traditional, something that overturned Shakespeare to grant the star-crossed lovers a life together — or an afterlife.

The composer practiced Christian Science, and his ambiguous 1935 ending may have transported the protagonists from the material plane that constitutes temporal life to a place where there can be no suffering or separation. Perhaps the spiritual tinge of this reversal offended Soviet atheism. It’s not clear how Prokofiev and his collaborator, theater director Simon Radlov, would have translated their philosophical and social conception if the authorities had allowed it to be produced. By the time the revised music was choreographed five years later, by Leonid Lavrovsky for Konstantin Sergeyev, Galina Ulanova, and the Kirov Ballet, the lovers died tragically and the feuding families reconciled over their bodies, as Shakespeare decreed.

Morrison reconstructed the original score, which is thinner in orchestration than its puffed-out Sovietized version and differs in many other respects from the ballet we know. I’ll leave it to the music scholars to trace the restorations and diversions, but the dance aspect is original with Morris. This is not a period retrieval, like Millicent Hodson’s 2005 constructivist interpretation of Le pas d’acier, another Prokofiev score that was never produced as he originally intended. Instead, Morris has choreographed a dazzling theater piece that comments on Shakespeare’s play, with previous balletic renderings of the play and the whole genre of large-scale 19th-century story ballets in mind as well.

Prodigies old and new

MARCIA B. SIEGEL — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 19:03:48 GMT

Tharp’s Rabbit and Rogue at ABT, Ratmansky and Robbins at NYCB
Tharp’s dances almost invariably have a euphoric effect on their first audiences, even when they miss their mark and don’t hold up over the long run.

RABBIT AND ROGUE: In Twyla Tharp’s metaphysics, dancing can transform chaos into utopia.

NEW YORK — Five minutes after the curtain came down on Twyla Tharp’s new ballet, Rabbit and Rogue, at the Metropolitan Opera House, a woman waiting for a bus was on the phone telling a friend to buy a ticket. “You have to see this!” she exclaimed. “This is the most phenomenal thing I’ve ever seen.” On the bus, another woman saw me looking over the program and asked what the story of the ballet was. Her friend thought it was an abstract ballet, and their discussion continued.

Next day the critics were savage, but it tells you something about a ballet when the audience leaves the theater with questions.

Tharp’s dances almost invariably have a euphoric effect on their first audiences, even when they miss their mark and don’t hold up over the long run. Rabbit and Rogue followed in the direction of her recent work, preserving the exhilarating, non-stop virtuosity she’s able to pull out of dancers, and sparking some speculation about “meaning” through her use of character devices.

Rabbit and Rogue, which premiered June 3 and ran for a week during American Ballet Theatre’s spring season at the Met, has two male leads, two secondary couples, a tertiary quartet, and a 12-member corps de ballet. It’s as formally structured as In the Upper Room or Tharp’s last ballet for ABT, Variations on a Themeby Haydn (2000), but it’s more than pure form. Tharp admitted in an interview that the leading men represent contrasting brothers, or the conflicting sides of one personality, but beyond that she wouldn’t elaborate on a private throughline that could encompass anything from dysfunctional families (hers, anyone’s) to cosmic evolution.

The surface of the ballet yields little help on that level, and though I might intuitively try to read her mind, during my one viewing I kept coming across a different set of markers. Early on, I realized that Danny Elfman’s gamelan-influenced score was insistently driving the dancers. The ceaseless momentum prevents you from being anything more than stunned, before the next stunning thing occurs. The whole stage seemed to be in perpetual motion, like a movie chase that never ends, only shifts camera locations.

Before the dance was done, I decided that Tharp was constructing the work with a movie editor’s technique, cutting back and forth from one set of characters to another. Each set plays its own role and sometimes interacts with the others, but what you pay attention to is the individual movement clusters, the dancing designs as they unfold. It’s like a TV serial, where three or four plot elements arise, break off, intersect, separate again, and maybe resolve, within an hour’s installment.

Dido's fate

MARCIA B. SIEGEL — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 19:05:38 GMT

Mark Morris at the Majestic
Henry Purcell might not have approved Mark Morris’s contemporary take on Dido and Aeneas, but he probably would have recognized it for its formality and anti-naturalism.

Henry Purcell might not have approved Mark Morris’s contemporary take on Dido and Aeneas, which the Celebrity Series brought to the Cutler Majestic Theatre last week, but he probably would have recognized it for its formality and anti-naturalism. The opera, completed by 1689 and based on what was little more than a footnote in Virgil’s Aeneid, concerns the betrayal of Dido, the queen of Carthage, by one of the great explorer warriors of ancient times. A jealous Sorceress tricks Aeneas into forsaking his lover. Dido proudly rejects his offer to ignore his own destiny and stay with her. When he sails away, she immolates herself.

The opera condensed mythology’s elaborate plot line, omitting the storms and shipwrecks, the politics of Mediterranean empires, and the rivalries of the gods, to concentrate on a love affair stained by fate and character flaws. Mark Morris reduced it even more, to eliminate the costumes, sets, and dances of Purcell’s Baroque period. For his production, now almost 20 years old, he devised a modern masque for dancers in black sarongs and sleeveless tops. What’s “authentic” about this Dido and Aeneas is its formal movement style and the choreographic interaction of chorus and principals. And the fact that it honors the music even though the fine singers and orchestra of Emmanuel Music, conducted by Morris himself, were out of sight of the audience.

All the stage movement is severely stylized, even the pantomime gestures that resemble their literal antecedents. When it begins, two women are seated stiffly on the ends of a bench. Behind them, nine other dancers are standing in a line. During the overture, the chorus advances downstage with rapid but imperceptible tiptoe steps and grandiose arm gestures. Like everything else that follows, each gesture is self-contained and bang-on a musical beat, and carved into the surrounding space like a frieze on a Greek amphora.

Dido’s confidante Belinda (Maile Okamura), shaking her hands at the end of outstretched arms like someone shooing away chickens, urges her friend to shake off her despondency and welcome Aeneas (Craig Biesecker). When the hero arrives, the chorus dances and the lovers move closer together with an almost stealthy eroticism. It’s like a standard ballet counterpoint between principals and ensemble, but the visual and rhythmic relationship is also a dramatic one.

Where the chips fell

MARCIA B. SIEGEL — Wed, 28 May 2008 13:51:56 GMT

Marjorie Morgan, Karl Cronin, Lucinda Childs, and Boston Ballet
Dance history reverberated across Boston during the past few weeks, affirming that how we live now owes a lot to how we’ve chosen to remember — and forget.

MARJORIE MORGAN Dancing Deborah Hay, she makes her whole body available to what her mind
and imagination suggest every moment.

Dance history reverberated across Boston during the past few weeks, affirming that how we live now owes a lot to how we’ve chosen to remember — and forget.

As part of the Dance Complex’s Tuesdays at Noon concerts in honor of Dance Month, Marjorie Morgan and Karl Cronin performed works by postmodern dance pioneer Deborah Hay. Boom Boom Boom and The Runner aren’t set dances but interpretations. In workshops with Hay (Morgan attended one in 2000, Cronin in 2007), dancers acquire a set of open-ended instructions they can carry out as they wish. There must be hundreds of ways to get from stage right to stage left in two minutes. Every solution is another dance, individualistic and unrepeatable.

Morgan entered the space crouched over, with branches attached to her head, and in her hands a small baton and a dry-sounding rattle. Like an animal of indeterminate species, or maybe a menagerie of beasts one after the other, she prowled the space. Her attention was riveted on adjusting her balance, moving parts of her body in microscopic but precise directions, registering how every shift made her feel. Her movement and pre-verbal exclamations seemed to be generated by these interior promptings, and each gesture held the seeds of another image.

Marjorie Morgan makes her whole body available to what her mind and imagination suggest every moment. You couldn’t possibly recover the sequence of her journey, or the oddness of her movement, the pleasure and surprise of it, and the dread.

Karl Cronin, a tall, thin young man, wore a knee brace over one trouser leg, and one sock and one bare foot in rubber clogs. His dance was also a succession of ideas, but they seemed almost deliberately chosen, not inevitably connected though unforeseen like Morgan’s. His movement looked less fictitious, more technical — repeated beats of one foot, scuffling walks, wordless syllables, musical phrases in different registers. I decided somewhere in the middle of the dance that his feet were behaving differently from each other, maybe even holding dialogues with each other. It turned out he’d been dancing with an injury.

Combat and rain

MARCIA B. SIEGEL — Tue, 13 May 2008 15:58:40 GMT

Nai-Ni Chen at John Hancock Hall
Taiwanese choreographer Nai-Ni Chen danced with Cloud Gate Dance Theater before moving to New York in 1982, and her work, like theirs, is a suave amalgam of traditional Chinese elements and modern dance.

UNFOLDING: An escalating group counterpoint of dominance, submission, and recuperation.

Taiwanese choreographer Nai-Ni Chen danced with Cloud Gate Dance Theater before moving to New York in 1982, and her work, like theirs, is a suave amalgam of traditional Chinese elements and modern dance. Chen’s company of 10 dancers appeared Saturday night at John Hancock Hall, sponsored by the Foundation for Chinese Performing Arts. The program demonstrated how the traditions can nourish contemporary dance, with practical tools like movement and symbolic objects as well as philosophical and literary themes.

Chen’s movement style was showcased in the opening piece, Raindrops, for four women. Wearing pastel silk halter-top jumpsuits with flying panels of silk front and back, the women clustered together at first, revolving and lifting their arms with palms upraised. They skimmed across the floor in tiny sidesteps and tilted swirls, their torsos undulating in elegant zigzags and curves. With small sudden jumps or abrupt tumbles to the ground, they’d interrupt their swift trajectories, then recover.

The music, by three composers (Henry Wolff, Robert Rich, and Sainkho Namtchylak), changed from high, resonant bells to deep gamelan gongs to rhythmic drumming with Jew’s harp and electronics. After the meditative beginning, the women danced with rice-paper umbrellas, possibly celebrating the rain they’d been praying for. Then they returned to their quick running and jumping patterns for a lively celebration.

Following Chinese dance conventions, Chen’s men and women almost always dance separately, or at least in separate styles. But though the women looked decorative and moved in small spheres most of the time, they never looked cute or doll-like to me. In fact, with the incorporation of martial-arts skills, they could oppose the men in contests of attack and evasion — a duet or a duel with fans in The Way of Five — No. 2, an escalating group counterpoint of dominance, submission, and recuperation in Unfolding.

To show the classical roots of these encounters, Chen included a dance for an acrobatic warrior from China’s Kunqu opera, as adapted and performed by Yao-Zhong Zhang. A former actor with the Shanghai Kuan Opera troupe, Zhang stomped on his platform shoes, stroked the long feathers streaming out of his headdress, and twirled two spear-like batons while doing helicopter turns.

Drama manqué

MARCIA B. SIEGEL — Mon, 12 May 2008 18:48:28 GMT

Leine & Roebana at the ICA, Contrapose at Green Street
Sporen , by the Dutch company Leine & Roebana, had two false beginnings before settling down to an hour of movement exploration.

SLIGHTLY BROKEN: The simplest of the works that Contrapose presented were the most successful.

Sporen, by the Dutch company Leine & Roebana, had two false beginnings before settling down to an hour of movement exploration. The company’s performances at the ICA last weekend completed CRASHarts’ dance offerings for the season. Leine & Roebana pushes the body to drastic extremes. The risk is all physical. Emotional implications stay safely under the control of the individual dancers, with sound and lighting effects spinning theatrical shocks and climaxes around them.

For 15 minutes or so, as the audience enters, dancers are casually strolling around the performance space, pausing to inspect us with long, wary stares. They seem to expect something of us, and they don’t have much hope of getting it. They don’t seem particularly eager to entertain us. They just accept this as a situation to be gotten through. I read this episode as a performance of the axiomatic neutrality and naturalness with which the postmodern dancers of three decades ago approached dancing.

Just as we begin to accept the idea of a no-win confrontation, we’re attacked by a sudden blackout of all the lights in the theater and a deafening crash.

When the stage lights go on again, the dancers are leaving and, in a soft glow to a soprano and lute song by Henry Purcell, an androgynous dancer (Tim Persent) begins a solo. The dance doesn’t have much to do with Purcell’s lament (“O Solitude”), but the audience is appeased and ready for Persent’s energetic gesticulating, spurts of bent-over locomotion, and occasional breakdance stunts. Through all his revolutions, he manages to face away from us most of the time.

His meditation, if that’s what it is, is rudely terminated by another explosion. In a strip of harsh light, a woman persistently wrenches her arm out of its socket, with screams and crashes hammering down on her, and us.

As the performance went on, these artificial jolts to the system subsided, and the movement continued in sets of extended variations on a few body challenges. A woman stood in place and swiveled her pelvis, letting her upper body rest above it. As the pelvic circles expanded and exaggerated, they propelled her arms out into space. Other women joined in this exercise, their torsos rippling and undulating quite unnaturally. Three men applied themselves to the same idea, emphasizing the chest instead of the hips.

Decoding Balanchine

MARCIA B. SIEGEL — Tue, 06 May 2008 20:29:07 GMT

Nancy Goldner on Mr. B
Nancy Goldner’s diminutive new book about George Balanchine’s choreography is deceptively readable.

DECEPTIVELY READABLE: Just because Goldner makes Mr. B seem transparent doesn’t mean her book isn’t sophisticated.

Balanchine Variations | by Nancy Goldner | University Press of Florida | 144 pages | $24.95

Nancy Goldner’s diminutive new book about George Balanchine’s choreography is deceptively readable. Goldner, who’s reviewed dance regularly for the Christian Science Monitor, the Nation, and the Philadelphia Inquirer, writes in an almost conversational voice that makes Balanchine seem transparent, easy to understand. But the simple appearance of the text belies an astute and highly sophisticated observer.

Goldner is a lifelong New Yorker, a devotee of New York City Ballet. Her gem of a book on NYCB’s 1972 Stravinsky Festival serves as both memento and sourcebook for that remarkable event. Balanchine Variations revisits some of the Stravinsky successes of 1972, along with 18 other ballets, from the 1928 Apollo to Ballo della Regina of 1978. The essays are based on a series of lectures Goldner has given over the past decade, along with former NYCB principal dancer Merrill Ashley, under the auspices of the Balanchine Trust and the Balanchine Foundation.

Preserving their original intent as a kind of primer for balletgoers, the essays also constitute a lesson in how many ways there are to write about ballet. None of the chapters adopts a “critique” or review format, yet almost every ballet summons a different treatment, suggests a different focus. This demonstrates the versatility of Balanchine, but also the ingenuity of Goldner.

Sometimes her approach is historical. She traces the evolution of Serenade, Balanchine’s first ballet in America, with a capsule history of changes and revisions in the choreography over nearly 75 years. A committed balletomane, she amuses herself by looking at a video of Concerto Barocco several times to see whether she can catch Balanchine in “a sag, or error in judgment”; she concludes that the ballet is perfect.

She asks questions, sees mysteries, speculates about things that don’t reveal themselves on the surface in the strange, semi-narrative La Sonnambula. She explores Balanchine’s brand of Americana in Western Symphony, then decides that attitudes and gestures, like the cowboys doffing their hats, aren’t what really define the choreographer’s Americanism. Instead, Concerto Barocco, The Four Temperaments, and the Stravinsky ballets are better indicators of his affinity for jazz, “the one uniquely American thing to which Balanchine was drawn.”

Fusion forms

MARCIA B. SIEGEL — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 13:34:39 GMT

Lorraine Chapman, Kinodance, Black Grace
Modern dancers who aren’t tethered to a specific technique can forage the whole world for useful movement and effects. We saw three completely different examples recently.

BLACK GRACE DANCE COMPANY: The core
language is a display of unrelenting male
power.

Modern dancers who aren’t tethered to a specific technique can forage the whole world for useful movement and effects. We saw three completely different examples recently.

The week before last, Lorraine Chapman’s Here to There, sharing a program with Kinodance at the ICA (sponsored by CRASHarts), took an affectionate look at some pop-culture clichés, with sideways pokes at America the Brave. Chapman invited Marcus Schulkind and David Parker to share choreographic responsibilities with her. It was Parker’s campy sensibility that prevailed in the piece, but Schulkind’s thoughtfulness and Chapman’s physical nerve made for a seamless mix.

The dance opened with a solo for Chapman (by Parker) to John Philip Sousa marches and a tarantella. Chapman has the unusual gift of stylization. She can make you see a drum majorette, a music-hall floozie, a marathon runner, and a dozen other tintypes with a tilt of the shoulder, a turned-out heel, a well-placed glance. The solo was long, but before you could tire of it she’d introduce some new take on the music. At some point she was singing — out of breath but full-out — “There’s no business like show business,” to the tune of “The Star Spangled Banner.” The point is not just to make fun of all this iconography but to celebrate spunkiness and the persistence of belief in the face of perversity.

To a fragment of Arvo Pärt’s Sanctus, a line-up of eight more dancers appeared in a glum procession, with their arms draped over poles that rested on their shoulders. David Parker crossed the stage in front of them, to declare in the voice of destiny: “Long before the dawn of time . . . man danced.” The dancers turned their burdens into walking sticks and swung into a perky chorus line.

From there, the whole thing tumbled into a show-biz crazy quilt, with most of the familiar items turned inside out. Group line-ups in modes from funky to flagrant wove it all together. There were fake jungle dances, a tap dance instantly mangled, a hearty singing of “Over the Rainbow” accompanied by melodic thumps to the thighs and chest. Shreds of Fred Astaire, Esther Williams, Yma Sumac, Jimmy Cagney, Georg Frideric Handel, H.M.S. Pinafore, and who knows what else sped through the proceedings and vanished again.

The chorus ended up on their knees, stripped to their skivvies, possibly praying, possibly sobbing, but you could imagine them getting right back up and starting another stanza.