WHERE THE CHIPS FELL
By: MARCIA B. SIEGEL
Boston Phoenix, 5/28/2008
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.
Deborah Hay, a founder of the legendary Judson Dance Theater in the 1960s, is now based in Austin, where she's extended the ideas of her early "people dances" into meditative and New Age practices centering, activating the unpremeditated potential of the body. Judson dance attracted a diverse population of seekers, and Lucinda Childs was a member of that clan. Through their teacher, Robert Dunn, they claimed John Cage as a spiritual mentor for finding alternatives to ballet and modern dance. Ordinary movement, objects, and sounds could be the materials of artmaking; a game or a photograph or a collage could establish the structure for a dance. You could be a trained dancer or a civilian. Hay and Childs have drastically different temperaments and approaches, but the inclusive Judson ζsthetic has served them well.
Childs was in town for a showing of a new documentary film about her by French filmmaker and archivist Patrick Bensard. After the Coolidge Corner Theatre screening, a benefit for Green Street Studios, Childs talked with writer Iris Fanger. The film shot in France, New York, and Martha's Vineyard, where Childs lives when she's not on the road traces a long, unconventional career. Like Deborah Hay and almost all the other Judsonites, Childs didn't aspire to maintain her own dance company. Although she had an active ensemble of dancers who created her dances of the 1970s, she's worked as a freelance choreographer, dancer, and actor, mostly in Europe, for the past three decades.
The documentary, with archival clips, performance and rehearsal footage, and thoughtful comments by Childs, centers on three works that represent the phases of her work. Carnation (1964) made a deadpan mockery of women's preoccupation with domestic objects kitchen implements, hair curlers and revealed Childs as a brilliant satirist. Einstein on the Beach (1976) began her association with Robert Wilson and Philip Glass, in the early stages of their immense careers. Dance (1979), with music by Glass and film by Sol LeWitt, created the paradox of "minimalist" choreography framed as a stage spectacle.
Childs and Hay started out with countercultural ideas about stripping away artifice, decadence, sentiment, and ego investment to focus on the basics of performing. Whereas Hay strove for naturalism and freedom to realize one's own creativity, Childs put stripped-down dance materials into formal patterns dictated by musical structure, with a performing style based on her own reticent, elegant presence.
As later generations absorbed postmodernism, these instincts eventually proliferated again into ego, virtuosity, and excess. Boston Ballet's final program of the season climaxed with Philip Glass & Twyla Tharp's 1986 In the Upper Room, an example of minimalism gone backwards into dazzling audience appeal. For six men and seven women, the dance combines extremes of rigorous form, ongoingness, and pure movement as subject matter. It's a driven exercise in technique ballet steps and pointe work, sneaker-clad athleticism that continually recombines its forces in new ways for 40 minutes and leaves the audience flattened with exhaustion and pleasure.
An energizing workout for the dancers, In the Upper Room pushes their endurance and their concentration to the limit. At Sunday afternoon's performance I thought the dance's clockwork mechanism was slipping a little. Tharp's fantastically difficult lifts and split-second timing were blurred. Some of the dancers, especially the leading Stompers, Melanie Atkins and Lia Cirio, grinned a lot and hammed up their roles like hoofers in a two-bit tab show. Tharp's lieutenant, Keith Roberts, who staged this revival, must have approved these liberties, but one thing In the Upper Room doesn't need is "expression" from the dancers.
Actually, the other two great repertory works on the program, George Balanchine's Concerto Barocco (1941) and Antony Tudor's Dark Elegies (1937), don't need that either, and except for the smily corps de ballet in Barocco, the dancers were more restrained.
Balanchine liked to cast apparently mismatching dancers as the two soloists in Concerto Barocco a big dancer versus a small one, a blonde and a brunette. Sunday afternoon's Romi Beppu and Misa Kuranaga contrasted in more subtle ways. Beppu is a tight, small mover, Kuranaga inhabits a quick, global space. Kuranaga conceives the movement three-dimensionally, carrying her body through the whole arc of a direction change, while Beppu brings an extension of leg or arm to its limit, then finishes the path in a straight line.
Roman Rykine partnered Beppu beautifully in the second movement, keeping her turning smoothly in promenade arabesque, and setting her down without the slightest bump after lifts. His attention never left her, even when he was shepherding the eight other women through intricate daisy chains.
It was Larissa Ponomarenko who showed me the heart of Tudor's choreography in Dark Elegies. To the Kindertotenlieder of Gustav Mahler (sung by baritone Philip Lima), Tudor devised strangely attenuated, angular movement for the community that comes together to grieve for its lost children. In the second song Ponomarenko performed almost dispassionately, as if these constricted shapes, brittle crumpled lifts, and frantic running steps were completely natural, not artfully designed at all.
I was unexpectedly moved to tears by this performance of the ballet, perhaps thinking of what happened to the children in China and Myanmar. But I was also remembering one of the great Tudor interpreters of our time, Sallie Wilson, who died 3 May in New York. Dark Elegies will always carry her imprint in my mind.
And the next day I learned we'd lost Jimmy Slyde, 80, who died 16 May. Slyde, who lived in Hanson, Massachusetts, was a stalwart of the tap community. I saw him first in the Tap Happening, in a tiny stage in a seedy Times Square hotel in 1969, helping ignite the tap revival that he was to fuel with his joyous levitations for another 40 years.
Copyright © 2008 The Phoenix Media/Communications Group
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