Photo by Li Huimin

From October 19-22, BAM will be presenting Beijing Dance Theater‘s Haze as part of the 2011 Next Wave Festival (tickets $30). Perhaps the most prominent contemporary dance company in China, BDT is helmed by choreographer Wang Yuanyuan, perhaps best known to broad American audiences for choreographing the opening ceremonies of the 2008 Olympics in Beijing. In Haze, Wang explores the complex and challenging nature of life in contemporary China, touching on the uncertainty affecting the global economy as well as the trauma following the devastating earthquake in Sichuan Province in 2008. We interviewed Ms. Wang via email.

I’m curious about the role of contemporary dance in today’s China. Who are your audiences and what is their attraction to the form? What are their expectations?

Contemporary dance is still not a mainstream art form in China currently: both the number of artists and audiences are very small. Most general Chinese audiences are still accustomed to seeing the result immediately or expect the artist to give answers somehow, yet this goes counter to the feature and essence of contemporary dance which requires the imaginations of the audience. Thus it is not easy in China.

The current audience of contemporary dance in China is mainly young or middle-aged people who have received higher education or with Western education background. Like all the other contemporary dance audiences in the world, they do expect the emotional shocks coming from the performance and the sympathetic response to the social reality and people’s spiritual outlook. But the number of this kind of audience is really small.

In the past, I know you’ve done a fair bit of state sponsored work, most notably the amazing opening ceremonies to the Olympic games. What kind of state support do the arts get? Are the arts seen as an important part of the larger economic and social development?

Firstly, I don’t think my creation for the Olympics opening ceremony is comparative with that I’m doing with our company. It’s no doubt that arts are playing more and more important roles in presenting the national image of China, but mostly they prefer large event and it’s different from the development of contemporary dance. There are many kinds of way for the government to support arts, but most resource are occupied by national-owned companies. Beijing Dance Theater is an independent company, normally we can apply for subsidy for new creation and some important international tour. Yes, as the government are paying more and more attentions on the cultural industry, arts should demonstrate larger and larger capacity in vitalizing the economy and social development.

Choreographer Wang Yuanyuan (photo by Han Jiang)

I understand your background is in classical ballet, which you pursued from an early age. What led you to expand into contemporary forms?

No, actually firstly my background is Chinese classical dance instead of ballet, then I turned to study choreography of contemporary dance. This was sometimes misunderstood by people because I had been working as contemporary choreographer at National Ballet of China since 1995. Of course, both the Chinese classical dance education of my early age and the contemporary dance education later have given me rich resources of body language, as well as great curious to experience the magic of body movement. Chinese dance pays attention on the dancers’ upper-body movement and inner emotion, while classical ballet focus more on the feet. Contemporary dance as a totally new mentality is the way that I’m thinking, and I express with the language that I grasped from Chinese dance and ballet.

In the past, you’ve worked with Chinese classics as base texts for your work–I’m thinking of something like Golden Lotus, for instance. Does Haze have similar influences, or is it a more direct and immediate response to the past few years?

I don’t think there is any influence of Chinese classics in Haze, which was created in 2009, inspired from the living reality in China and the mental uncertainty about future.  People are trying to find an exit in nowhere, to find the direction of heart.

If I understand correctly, Haze explores the human experience of the environmental and economic turmoil in China over the past couple years, as the nation struggles with the legacy of development and the effects of the global economic crisis. What kind of sense do people have of their ability to make positive changes to improve such conditions in China? What’s the social vibe?

Perhaps everybody will have quite different reaction, I have heard many kinds of understandings. It’s fine and, I feel, very interesting. It’s exciting that one piece will bring so many imaginations and understandings to the audience. Let’s explain a little about my inspirations.

The idea of Haze comes from the hesitation mentality of many contemporary Chinese.

It was started in May 12, 2009 when the large earthquake attached Sichuan province, China. The first part of the piece is “Light”. At that time, I watched a lot of videos and listened to a lot of descriptions, no matter hope or life, the first impression for the survivors is always light. Thus light is the first feeling of life and the hope of life. In dark we need light, we need the direction.

If “Light” is just a point, then the second part “City” is a network. Living in this world, in the city, you have to interact with all kinds of people and things. The network is your relations with them, and is also the surface you are daily walking on. To leave or to stay, to go forward or backward, you are always walking on this network. In Chinese, the pronunciation of “network” is the same with that of “maze”. In this complicated network, maze is always. That’s our portrait in the urban city, true to life.

And the third part is “Shore”. The city is sometimes like a lake, or as large as an ocean. Everybody is struggling and floating in it. Where is the real shore? The shore is the metaphor of the choices in our life, the numerous choices. Every choice occupies your time and space in your life, you cannot predict whether it is correct or not. In the fast changing world, before we give ourselves a conclusion, everything changes again.

I watched some video of the piece and was struck by how aggressively physical the movement is, with the dancers throwing themselves and falling hard on the padded floors. Where did that particular concept come from and what challenges did it present in terms of choreographing it?

On the stage, the whole dance floor is replaced by a large sponge with hard ground framed as the shore. This sponge enabled me a lot of unprecedented possibility.  During the creation, firstly I just wanted to use a smaller piece as a part of the stage. But when I stood on it, the unprecedented feeling of out of balance attracted me a lot. As the dancers are ever trained to find the balance in dance, they made great efforts to get familiar with it, during which I found many interesting movements. When we enlarge the area of the sponge, the fear disappeared stepwise. Thus, the mental and physical feelings are enabled to be identical at the same time. The physical condition becomes totally same with the mental condition that I want to express–this was a great discovery.

Actually, our pains mostly come from the fear–fear to fall down, fear to be hurt, fear to give the price, etc. But when our body get used to the sponge, when we get used to this feeling, we can find the balance and gain our confident and the sense of safety again. Further, we may even enjoy the feeling of falling down. We embraced the pain, accepted the fear, and to live with them together. In this moment, we win the true peace in our hearts.

You trained in the United States, where you went tp college. What impact did that have on your work and your approach? I often find that artists who train in two different cultural atmospheres find themselves navigating the two, with each background informing the artist’s understanding of the other. Has that been the case?

I think so. Sometimes when you jump out of the environment that you were familiar with and retrospect, you understand it better. When the two cultures infiltrate into each other, they combine and generate a new support.

In the past ten years, I’ve been always think and create with the combined support of the two cultures, or maybe, to me, they are not two cultures but a totally new way of expression. The Oriental culture may be my blood, and the Western culture is my body. In Golden Lotus, I am interpreting a Chinese classical novel in my personal way and with my personal experience.

What are your next projects going to be? What’s next for you as an artist?

The next project is also something about the personal response to the social reality. Currently my inspirations on the next project originated from the well-known Chinese writer Mr. Lu Xun‘s articles. The economy developed very fast in the contemporary China, yet there is great deficiency in people’s mind. This is quite similar with the China that Lu Xun described 100 years ago. Now I would like to shout with my dance on the stage as Mr Lu Xun was shouted with his words.

As a Chinese artist, as the artistic director of Beijing Dance Theater, I hope I could continue creating my piece freely, and I hope our company is able to survive. We hope more audience will come to the stage and understanding what we are thinking and presenting.

Popularity: 3% [?]

Tonight, BAM’s Next Wave Festival plays host to one of this season’s more intriguing entries: The Speaker’s Progress, a new theater work from director Sulayman Al-Bassam’s pan-Arab theater company SABAB (only through Oct. 8–get your tickets here). The third part of what the company calls the “Arab Shakespeare Trilogy,” which includes The Al-Hamlet Summit (2002) and Richard III, an Arab Tragedy (2007), The Speakers Progress is set in an unnamed contemporary Arab authoritarian state where theater and representation are banned. The story centers on a historical production, a version of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night from the 1960s, a previous era of political radicalization and upheaval. When documentation of the work comes to light and makes it a rallying point for the diverse, web-based opposition, the state cynically employs a formerly radical director, now an apologist, to reproduce and discredit the work, only to have the revolutionary zeal of the original infect its assailants. In other words, it’s a dark satire of political despair and inertia.

The trick is, SABAB was in rehearsal for the show in Damascus, Syria this last winter as what’s now known as the “Arab Spring” broke out, and that threw everything into flux. Writing in the Guardian this past March, al-Bassam noted of the show:

This black satire on the inertia that crippled the Arab world, intended as a bleak cry of despair, seemed in tune with some of the tides of discontent behind the revolutions. But, as events developed, the piece’s pessimism sat entirely–and blissfully–at odds with the new topographies of energy and hope emanating out of Tunis and Tahrir Square.

Even after re-jiggering the final 15 minutes of the show for the preview run, before partially re-writing the script, SABAB has been walking a tightrope artistically all year as they try to maintain a show with the capacity to speak to a broad audience while staying afoot of the near daily progress of political transformation in the Arab world. Earlier this week, I spoke to Al-Bassam over the phone at his hotel in Brooklyn, after playing email and phone-tag for a few weeks as the company completed a run in Beirut before setting off for New York.

“The Speaker’s Progress was originally conceived as a metaphor for the quest–the artistic quest–for freedom of expression,” he explained. “The shape of that original text was very strongly impacted by the events that were taking place around the creation of the work, as we were rehearsing the work in Damascus and later performing the work in Kuwait.”

“We needed to find a language, a meta-language, to describe this period of change, a meta-language that wouldn’t include necessarily a kind of news-like overview of what’s going on from day to day.”

Al-Bassam speaks with a crisp British accent, a tell-tale sign of his long engagement with the country, where’s he worked with the Royal Shakespeare Company and where he founded his original company Zaoum. A decade or more ago, though, he returned to his native Kuwait where he founded SABAB with a group of artists from around the Arab world to produce work.

“I returned to Kuwait ten years ago now, or more. It was a natural life choice progression,” he told me. “My own project, in terms of the development of a national theater structure and the infrastructure for a national theater in Kuwait, has been something that has taken up a lot of my own time and energy over the last ten years, without actually achieving success in that game. Kuwait offers several positive aspects in terms of creating this kind of body of international theater work.”

Asked what specifically keeps him in his homeland, he explained: “First and most important i think is probably the level of freedom of expression that is available in Kuwait. It has a written constitution which protects the rights of citizens to express their thoughts through various means, including artistic means. and that provides for a level of freedom of critique and thought and writing that is not really available at all in nearly all of the region apart from maybe Lebanon. So in that sense, there’s a very logicial, clear reason for me to base this pan arab work that brings together artists from different countries in Kuwait, because a legal protection [exists] to make the kind of work that otherwise I think would be more difficult to make in many other countries in the region.”

SABAB is perhaps best known for its Shakespearean adaptations/reinterpretations, of which The Speaker’s Progress is the third part of an aforementioned trilogy (for more info on The Al-Hamlet Summit, for instance, see the following interview on the UK’s Culture Wars website). As Al-Bassam told me, “Shakespeare has a significant heritage, I guess progeny, inside the Arab world from apolitial productions of Othello and Julius Caesar in that period the Fifties and Sixties, when the National Theater of Cairo, for instance, would present Shakespeare to sort of say, ‘We can do Shakespeare, too,’ in the same way the French can do Shakespeare or the Italians can do Shakespeare or the British can do Shakespeare. So that was all kind of a part of an aspiration culture.

“Also, and I think more significantly, Shakespeare has been used in the past few decades–actually since the late 19th century Shakespeare has been used by Arab theater makers, along with a host of other classical writers, to make political commentary and to make a kind of political theater that is about contemporary political issues concerning the theater makers, their audiences, their countries. And so there is also a rich heritage of that in the same way those Shakespearean texts were used extensively by Eastern European theater makers during the Cold War period. Shakespeare texts are a kind of mask behind which the theater maker hides in order to make his or her agenda.”

I couldn’t help but ask about the practical challenges of creating and producing the work today. Al-Bassam’s March missive to the Guardian was from Damascus; at the time, the tide of dissent was cresting in Egypt, whereas now Syria itself is convulsed with a violent crackdown as soldier defect to the side of protesters.

“When we were rehearsing this piece in January it was a different scenario in Syria,” Al-Bassam said. “And we’ve performed in the past in Syria, most notably our production of Richard III An Arab Tragedy at the Syrian opera house, to the Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad and his wife, who attended that performance. So Syria like many other countries in the region, is a place with many contradictions.

“Of course the current crisis that Syria is passing through makes everything very difficult and I think that it would be almost impossible to take up our rehearsal there at this point. We’re happy and thankful that our artists have been able to continue their work with us and be here in new york at this time”

Artisitically, it’s clear that SABAB is navigating a complex path–both a voice of political reflection and even dissent in a culture that is rapidly trying to re-shape itself. On the one hand, they’re producing work in and for that culture, but also creating theater that can stand on its own in an international, cosmopolitan context. Asked about that juggling act, AL-Bassam offered that “There times when the tension between creating authentic work that speaks to Arab audiences and that is able to speak in a sophisticated language that is layered, and those layers are obviously much more difficult to carry over into other cultures, particularly where audiences rely on sur-titles. So the process of layering is either misunderstood or obscured by the language barrier.

“Sometimes, for instance, satire is the first victim of that sort of thing. So satire, or what’s understood as satire by Arab audiences, may not necessarily read as satire to an audience less familiar with the signifiers that are being played. But at the same time that sort of binary obligation of making the work read to audiences familiar with a whole host of local and regional cultural signifiers and at the same time making it readable to an international audience that may have very little knowledge of the Arab world, or the knowledge that it does have is essentially gleaned from mass-media outlets, has allowed the work to develop in a positive way and in a unique. Because we’ve been very conscious and careful also not to allow the fact that our international co-production pattern and distribution pattern, not to allow that pattern to in a sense degrade or allow it to become ethnic postcards of the region in which cliches are repeated or used to make a superficial approximation of things. in that process cliche is an important element, and sometimes a useful element to begin a conversation.”

In closing, I asked what perspective, if any, Al-Bassam would like to offer his audiences coming into the show. “I guess finally that what comes out in the work, the ethical messaging or the answers to the questions that are raised in the work are not necessarily the biggest priority of the work,” he offered. “We’re not able to make simple political statements because I don’t think that the period that we’re in can actually tolerate or be truly represented by simple political statements”

Popularity: 4% [?]

Photo by Marie-Francoise Plissart

Going into Thierry Smits’/Compagnie Thor‘s To the Ones I Love (at BAM, through Oct. 1), I have to admit that I was least interested to see whether the piece would veer into the dangerously racially insensitive territory I feared it might. Here, for instance, is the company’s own description (keep in mind they’re based in Belgium, English not necessarily being the first language of the translator):

In To the Ones I Love, Thierry Smits puts nine dancers of African descent on the stage.  More precisely, for this choice is a vital one, he uses nine dancers whose complexions hark back to Africa.

Thierry Smits’s message is not political, however.  It deliberately sets out to be aesthetic and refuses all concessions to exoticism.  The principle is to set bodies used to “Western” choreographic techniques but nevertheless shaped by other traditions and dances in motion.  They dance in a white decor and are literally transported by Johan Sebastian Bach’s music, by its overflowing generosity and immense virtuosity.  The challenge is obviously to manage the unexpected outcomes of the meeting of different cultural references.

Mind you, I didn’t read this till it came time to preview the show, and reading it, I was left dubious. To say the least, using people for their “complexion” is risky territory, because of course it objectifies racial characteristics. Which the To the Ones I Love does, in fact, do. In the first full company sequence following the solo-based opening, we’re given the company of nine (mostly black, with a few lighter-complexioned artists mixed in) male dancers, shirtless, seated on rectagular blocks with their backs to the audience. For several minutes, we’re granted a pornographic look at the dancers’ (muscular, ever-so-slightly gleaming with a sheen of sweat) bodies as the company cycles through a series of fluid, abstract, mainly upper-body movements.

And I don’t use “pornographic” lightly, though it risks over-stating it a bit: think mainstream, Playboy (or -girl, in this case) porn, rather than the freaky online stuff. The images are only putatively erotic, due to the actual exposure of flesh; in practice, though, they’re flat, objectifying, but so blatant in drawing the gaze and so lacking in charged content that they can’t be called “erotic” anymore than a table or chair can be said to be “erotic.”

It’s treating a person like a thing.

So yes, there was a moment where I was waiting to see where this would go, because within the context of the piece, the choreographer, Thierry Smits, has in fact chosen to showcase black flesh in a purely aesthetic fashion. We won’t even have a misguided attempt at multiculturalism in this piece. Rather, it’s the “African” (scarequotes due to the fact that these artists are not, apparently, actually African, but rather of “African descent”) as object, to provide a (literal) visual contrast against the whiteness of the space. But then it went…well, nowhere.

To the Ones I Love is a great example of what–for lack of a better term, I guess–I like to call “dance-y dance.” Not just explicitly technique-based work, even work that slips into the solely academic-technique category, but rather work which has little or no interest in anything beyond itself. It’s dancing for the sake of giving you something pretty and exceptional to look at. And general insensitivity aside, I honestly can’t make more of Smits’ racial choices than he wants me to because it’s such a skin-deep piece (pun intended). It takes nearly 15 minutes before any of the performers have any meaningful physical contact with one another, and once they do, the human touch is rendered completely desexualized and desensualized. The nine very fit, adult, and it need be said, highly accomplished, male dancers interact with one another as innocently as children at play. Description quoted above aside, I saw no hint that Smits was interested in these dancers’ ethnic backgrounds at all, aside from a vague desire to see them incorporated into the visual schema. Which, furthermore, by the second or third switch between primary color-themed t-shirts (blue, yellow, red, green), was about as deep and engaging as a United Colors of Benneton ad from the Nineties.

In other words, it is in fact a completely abstract movement work. Which is not exactly my cup of tea, leaving me a bit uncomfortable with the negative feelings I have towards it. Maybe it’s just taste, right? But even so, I also like pretty and/or sexy people (of either gender) doing pretty things because people like to see pretty things. I like fun. But I found the work boring. Once–just one time in a slightly over hour-long piece–I saw the members of the company drop posture for a short phrase (very near the end) in a way that really stepped outside what I take to be a very obvious comfort zone, opening a whole world of possibilities. Otherwise, I really felt that To the Ones I Love was an uninspired and very shallow piece of dance.

Really, it was only during the solos that I had any sort of thrill in the piece. One or two of the dancers had a real evocative capacity, and it was in those moments that I most sensed the joy in movement that Smits stated was his purpose. But otherwise I was left generally bored. Perhaps it’s a bias on my part, but I tend to be more attracted to choreography that treats human beings like human beings, rather than manipulable stage objects, to be moved hither and thither in vaguely interesting formations. Which, again, is not to deny the accomplishment of the dancers, most of whom were very talented. Nor is it entirely to discount the idea that dance can’t just be something cool to look at. But this piece was too shallow and lacking in any sort of “wow” factor to get away with what it seemed to want to do.

Popularity: 2% [?]

It may not exactly be the kick-off of the 2011 Next Wave Festival at BAM (that was a couple weeks ago, depending on which part of the programming you’re referring to), but tonight is Culturebot’s first foray into it, with Belgian choreographer Thierry Smits’ Compagnie Thor presenting To the Ones I Love (through Oct. 1; tickets $40). It’s a tricky piece: using a score by Johann Sebastian Bach and extrapolating from balletic technique, Smits presents a work featuring nine black dancers that plays on references both to Africa and the Western tradition while claiming to avoid exoticism in favor of something that explores “the body in movement, the pleasure of dancing, and wants to share loving energy to the spectator.”

Popularity: 5% [?]

Over in Dublin, it looks like Gavin Quinn’s Pan Pan has worked wonders with Samuel Beckett’s 1956 radio play All That Fall. Irish Theatre Magazine has both an interview with Quinn as well as a glowing review of the show, which plays at Project Arts Centre though Sept. 2, both of which are well worth reading.

It’s a fascinating concept, because, as previously mentioned, it’s a radio play, and the Beckett estate being notoriously tight-fisted about any production that deviates from the established norm, it’s hard to imagine a production that’s not, as I recently described it, a Masterpiece Theater-version. As even ITM‘s critic Patrick Lonergan notes:

[P]erhaps the second important point [about the production] is how refreshing (and unusual) it is to be surprised by an Irish production of a play by Beckett – a writer whose works are usually treated so reverentially that they’re in danger of becoming museum pieces. While this is a very faithful rendition of the play, Pan Pan provide an experience that is genuinely different from anything you’ll have encountered in the theatre before.

Photo by Ros Kavanaugh

Overly protective literary estates should take note–preventing innovation in theatrical presentations of old plays is killing the oeuvres they purport to defend. The idea that an intelligent critic could be saying that about Samuel Beckett is a distressing thing; Beckett was one of the most innovative dramatists of the 20th Century, and was a product of a combative avant-garde that opposed canonization. Whatever the merits of his draconian prescriptions during his life (he once compared having  a woman perform in Godot to having a soprano sing a baritone part), by my recollection, he’s been dead for more than 20 years. If white directors like Bart Sher can now stage August Wilson, surely Mabou Mines should get to have their subway-car Endgame.

Anyway, the point is that under those circumstances, it’s hard to breathe life into Beckett, but Pan Pan has done it, apparently. It turns out that Pan Pan has staged a recording of the performance, in a room replete with rocking chairs and a charming if be-numbing lighting scheme. As Lonergan describes it:

[T]he surprise – and the real pleasure – of this production lies in the design by Aedín Cosgrove. As we enter the Project Space, we’re confronted not with a conventional performance area but with a room full of rocking-chairs. On the wall to the right of the entrance, there’s an enormous bank of lights, which flood the auditorium with a soft yellow and gold haze; on the left a smaller cluster of blue lights soften that mood. To sit between the two sets of lights creates the impression of occupying a space somewhere between an intense and interrogative sunlight and a comforting moonlight – and indeed as the performance progresses, the lights seem to shift us gradually from day to night…What Pan Pan have done, then, is to create a space that is almost entirely free of sensory distractions, allowing us to listen to the play with a profound concentration. That technique allows for a better appreciation of the text, but it also imposes upon the audience many of the sensations that are described by Maddy and the other characters: a sense of blindness, a feeling of isolation despite being surrounded by others, perhaps even a sense of abandonment in space.

Anyway, the entire review is well worth reading, as is Fintan Walsh’s interview with Quinn. Unfortunately I know of no plans for the show to head elsewhere once it finishes its run at Project, Dublin’s historic and rather lovely contemporary arts space, but New York won’t be lacking for Beckett this season. Not only will Dublin’s Gate Theatre be bringing in a production of Krapp’s Last Tape for BAM’s Next Wave, starring John Hurt (which, sadly, I suspect will be overly reverential–how could it not?), but Baryshnikov Arts Center is hosting Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord/Peter Brook‘s Fragments in November, which is surely one of the can’t-miss-it events of the season.
Update: It’s come to my attention (thanks to Sarah Bishop-Stone, thank you!) that Pan Pan will in fact be in NYC in November with The Rehearsal, Playing the Dane at the Skirball Center in November.

Popularity: 3% [?]

Leaving for work this morning, I was shocked to give just a little bit of a shiver as I stepped outside into the courtyard of my building. For the first time in what felt like ages, it could be reasonably described as “cool,” if not downright chilly in the shadow of my apartment building. And that can only mean one thing: fall is right around the corner.

Not that I’m sure we won’t have a good six to eight weeks of summery warmth left, but it’s true: we’re in the last full week of August, and next month is September, when the kids go back to school, the nights get cool and long, and finally, at long last, the fall performing arts seasons kick off.

For the next couple weeks, we’ll be profiling the upcoming seasons here, but it only made sense to start with BAM’s Next Wave Festival, for all intents and purposes the pinnacle of contemporary performance in the US. Beginning in mid-September though the holidays, BAM plays host to not only the standard set of globally noteworthy artists, but this year, also a couple very unique shows, once in a lifetime opportunities that shouldn’t be missed.

The performance series itself kicks off on Sept. 21, with Kronos Quartet‘s “Awakening: A Musical Meditation on the Tenth Anniversary of 9/11″ (through Sept. 24). So yes, it’ll be cheery. The performance features twelve compositions, ranging from an Iranian lullaby to a new arrangement of Einstürzende Neubauten’s “Armenia,” to Kronos commissions from composers like Michael Gordon, John Oswald, and Terry Riley. In proper Kronos fashion, it’s a global musicological response to inexpressible tragedy. Interestingly, though, it does not feature any of Steve Reich’s compositions from WTC 9/11, the album, recorded by Kronos, that recently caused a stir over its cover art.

Also notable in the series this year is the Merce Cunningham Dance Company on its farewell tour. Dec. 7-10, they present three separate programs of work spanning the iconic choreographer’s career, from 1968′s RainForest to 2003′s Split Sides. The shows demonstrate Cunningham’s breadth of collaborators, ranging from John Cage to Radiohead, Jasper Johns to Andy Warhol. It’s the third to last stop on the legacy tour, with the company heading across the pond to Paris before returning to New York for the final blow-out at New Year’s in the Park Avenue Armory.

But aside from that pair of truly unique events, the Next Wave program features plenty of amazing dance and theater. In October, the Berliner Ensemble brings Robert Wilson’s version of Kurt Weil/Bertolt Brecht’s Threepenny Opera to town (BE’s website, in German), which certainly counts as a can’t-miss, Robert Wilson and the Berliner Ensemble each being something any self-respecting performing arts lover has to see in his or her life (and, considering I’ve never been convinced Wilson is actually worth all the praise, it kills two birds with one stone–though final judgment has to wait until next year, for the re-staging of Einstein on the Beach, in the 2012 Next Wave Festival).

Big Dance Theater is presenting Supernatural Wife (Nov. 29-Dec. 3), an adaptation of Euripides’ Alkestis. Choreographer John Jasperse is back with Canyon (Nov. 16-19), a show that “plays with engineered disorientation, sensory overload, spaciousness, fractured connectivity, and rapture.” I can count two or three dance pieces I’ve seen in just the last year on the same (or similar) topics, so it’ll be interesting to see how the always imaginative Jasperse tackles it. But the really exciting dance presentation (aside from the obligatory Cunningham) is William Forsythe, who will be bringing I don’t believe in outer space (Oct. 16-29), an exploration of “absence made present,” if the description is to be believed. I have no idea what that’s supposed to mean, honestly, but Forsythe is, well, Forsythe. Love him or hate him, he’s one of the most distinctive choreographic voices on the planet, and I don’t believe in outer space promises to be a stunner.

Finally, I can’t help but end this little (and certainly incomplete–see here for the whole line-up; I didn’t even get to the Bergman or Ivo van Hove pieces) wrap-up by calling out what is personally my most anticipated show: the Gate Theatre (Dublin) presenting Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape, with John Hurt (Dec. 1-17). Yes, it’s giving Beckett the Masterpiece Theater treatment, to be sure, but Krapp is still an amazing show, Hurt a strong actor, and hell, I love Beckett.

Anyway, discounts are still available on season packages for Next Wave through the 29th, when the ticket prices jack up, so be sure to check it out by this weekend.

Popularity: 5% [?]

Photo by Susana Millman

Mark Morris has said, at as early as 14 or 15 years old, he wanted to compose a dance to the entire score of Tchaikovsky’s Casse Noisette, Op. 71 (The Nutcracker).   Twenty years later, as the director of dance at the Theatre de la Monnaie in Brussels, Belgium, with his company, the Mark Morris Dance Group as the resident dancers, he began to do just that.  And twenty years further on the timeline, we have the opportunity to see this stunning production as the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s final Next Wave Festival 2010 presentation.  It is one of Morris’s greatest achievements, a rare and special feat made all the more spectacular by the grand scale and the loving approach to the classic score.  What could be a satirical “take” on The Nutcracker in the hands of others is rather played out as a beautiful, bold, sensitive, nuanced, and totally earnest coming-of-age story – this IS the Nutcracker.   And, in a further treat for audiences, we get to see the man himself performing, as the central father figure, Dr. Stahlbaum – perhaps our only chance to see him on the stage today, especially disappearing into a role rather unlike his own grandiose being, the choreographer Mark Morris.

Morris has always said that the reason he makes up shows is so he has something he enjoys watching – in effect, he is simply building the show for his own entertainment, and then sharing with us –  and how lucky we are.  Is there a better “Waltz of the Snowflakes” in all the numerous productions?  I’m not so sure.  Morris is genius in this respect – rather than beautifully and evenly falling, as the snow does in Mr. Balanchine’s production (there is not the possibility for drama, then, no rhythmic punch though the effect is lasting and serene) – the snow comes up from the dancers’ fists, in bursts and clumps and sprays.  It seems, as one gets lost in the flurry, that these snowflakes, dressed uniformly in tutus and Soft-Serve headgear, are playing – it’s the way you would throw snow yourself – sure it’s fun watching the snow come down, but isn’t it even more so to run freely through the blanketed white, carousing and romping and wheeling.  It’s magical.

But this is of course not to say that there is anything less than extreme sophistication about this choreography.  One of the things often said about Morris’s work is that it feels like you could just run down the aisle onto the stage and join the action – there’s a democracy of the body, and a welcoming communal feel that keep people holding themselves back from charging forth and leaping into the throng.  This couldn’t be less true, however – and the choreography for the Snowflakes is a case in point.  Amidst your laughter and awe at the precise beauty of it all, you may or may not miss how incredibly complex, musical, structural and architectural the whole thing is.  Take away the snow and the costumes, and you’d still have a perfectly masterful dance.

Perhaps I’m revealing too much about my own psychology, but the inner child in me looks forward, with not a negligible amount of glee, to the moment when it is again acceptable each year to start listening to Christmas music, with Tchaikovsky being one of my favorites.  The Nutcracker score, though it inspires groans and eye rolls in plenty of circles, many with years-long associations to lackluster annual childhood productions, has nothing of this kind of effect on me.  It is sheer magic, and evocatively gorgeous.  I just can’t help myself.  And this, too, is what makes Morris’s production a gem.  I can’t believe it when I see it, but he’s able to give the entire first half hour of music – the party scene, the gift giving, the parents and children – a total 70s vibe that works as though Tchaikovsky meant it this way.  And though he’s using popular dance forms, and very open personal vernacular, Morris infuses each moment, each joke, with a musical reinforcement that makes it impossible not to appreciate.

This is not parody of the Nutcracker – this isn’t making fun at all, except perhaps at ourselves or our parents – the whole thing plays out almost like the pivotal key party in Rick Moody’s Ice Storm – everyone gets drunk and ribald and the whole thing nearly collapses into chaos.  It’s rather an expert staging of a groovy party scene, whether real to Morris or imagined, and all of it layered over Tchaikovsky’s lush score so expertly that there is no possibility of anomaly – the staging and music coexist with an elegance and refinement that renders it extraordinary.  The production design, which does an excellent job making this possible, is based on the work of sequential artist Charles Burns.

The coming-of-age aspect is what makes the show so powerful and emotionally relevant.  In other, former productions of the Nutcracker, the second act deals only with the magical land of the sweets, and Marie (danced impeccably by Lauren Grant) stays a child throughout – she doesn’t have a moment of recognition, and therefore neither can we.  However, in Morris’s approach, Marie begins an innocent girl, but something about what her Uncle Drosselmeier (William Smith III) gives her, in his Nutcracker gift, pushes her over the brink of girlhood and into the adult realm.  And her mother is wonderfully complicit in the development.  The Waltz of the Flowers begins with Mrs. Stahlbaum (the exquisite and hilarious John Heginbotham) gesturing offstage to the young heroine who has just exited, with open hand:  “My daughter…” she tells us, then turns around and makes the same gesture to a nearly vulgar depiction of a giant hanging flower – “…is about to be a woman.”  The floating set piece is vivid in its entendre, yet it ushers in the genius Waltz of the Flowers, at once an innocent Busby Berkeleyian show number, and also Mrs. Stahlbaum’s reckoning of the naive past with the erotic future.   In telling us this bit of story Mrs. Stahlbaum knows where Marie is headed, while the chorus of dancers (another completely serious and deeply beautiful dance of its own right) enjoy the bliss of color and youth.  Here they are dressed in Brussels sprouts caps and floral dress (throughout, the costumes by Martin Pakledinaz are truly sensational), each with a bright pink or orange or purple underskirting.

Later in the show, Marie and her heroic Nutcracker prince (the splendid David Leventhal) dance to the Sugar Plum Fairy music.  There are shudders in the strings, separated by a few beats, repeated several times again but separated by not so much – he kisses her hand on each, and it’s as though this zing of vibration is actually felt in her heart, or, perhaps with Morris, even lower.  And there’s a joke at the end – but it’s also serious and we all know the feeling – she eventually sticks out the other hand: she likes the way this feels, adulthood, love, and she wants more.  She knows it.  She’s changed, she’s alive in a new way, and there is a poignancy, a loss of childhood, but also an important gain of the kind of love we can’t ever get from our parents, far from the world of fairy tales and dreams and the like.  The Hard Nut gets to the heart of this matter of growing up, but in doing so along the way also renders us all children again, or childlike, in our awe. This dichotomy of feeling is what I love so much – there is always a push and a pull, a loss and a gain, but in the yearning for growth and understanding, there are many significant lessons learned – the things we most need are actually the closest to us, we just need that moment of clarity, the trial and error that brings us to eventual recognition.  The journey is paramount to the conclusion, and I afterwards coexist in a happy state of nostalgia and hope.

The Hard Nut

BAM Howard Gilman Opera House
30 Lafayette Avenue
Dec 15—18, 2010, 7:30pm
Dec 19, 2010, 3pm
Mark Morris Dance Group
Featuring the MMDG Music Ensemble with the Brooklyn Youth Chorus
Conducted by Robert Cole
Choreography by Mark Morris

Popularity: 3% [?]

SEEING WHAT NO ONE ELSE DID
Dance from Bucharest and Berlin

I spent the entire time watching Cosmin Manolescu & Serial Paradise Company’s Supergabriela at P.S. 122 with a blindfold on.  I didn’t do it intentionally, I just didn’t think I had a choice.   I had moments of anger, or perhaps more frustration, but then things kept happening.  I had been given a blindfold with everyone else waiting outside the theater, but if there was an instruction to remove the blindfold whenever I wanted, my date and I missed it completely.  Though we were separated at the door and led through our own blackness, we both, unaware of the other, remained masked, seeing and unseeing.

I had several blind interactions with the performers – one asked me to write a word about her on her body, with what I later learned was a tube of lipstick.  I wrote “SENSUAL”.  My date wrote “SMOKER”.  Later the same woman, perhaps, or another, asked “Do you have a cigarette?”.  I quietly said no, wishing somehow that I had, and she exhaled loudly and departed.  Later, I felt what I decided was an animal pelt being rubbed on my forearm.  Because of these, I was certain that the performers were aware of me wearing the blindfold.  I kept thinking, if they want me to take it off, they’ll tell me.  Much later, I heard snickers from some of the other audience members.  Perhaps they are taking people’s blindfolds off, one by one, slowly revealing themselves, the other audience members and the space.  Or, I imagined at some point, feeling hot light on my face and body, that I, in my place on the stage, had become part of the performance, and that if I took my blindfold off, as I at times longed to do, I would be faced with everyone in the audience looking at me, and laughing.  But this did not come to pass – rather, one of the women touched my hand, stood me up, and danced a tender slow dance with me, spinning herself around me, holding me close, hugging me, dipping herself, all the while shuffling her feet and leading us along.  And I realized it was one of the most beautiful duets I had ever experienced, and didn’t want it to end, and knew that it was only possible, like that, because I was blindfolded.

I ruminated on what I had read, prior to seeing the show, about how the piece was inspired by Cosmin Manolescu’s recent loss of his wife, Gabriela.  And I began to think about grief, what it would be like to lose someone I deeply loved, and to feel the extreme tension of their absence, and this gave me another frame in which to experience my near blindness (opening my eyes underneath the black cloth, I could see orbs of light, shape, and occasional color if a performer moved close to me).   This might be exactly what that torture of loss would entail – hearing the voice, smelling the lingering scents left behind, seeing the ghostly shape, color, haze.

There was a moment of big change, lots of shuffling around, chairs being moved, but mine did not.  People moved around me, as though I were the pillar around which they assembled, and a woman gently rubbed my thigh.  I decided I was being taken care of, and no matter how much it seemed as though I was the only one not seeing, at this point I didn’t want to.  I wanted the dark world of vivid imagination, relinquished control, heightened sensation, to the very end.

It was like watching a David Lynch movie – all the noir-ish-ness, the smoky songstress, the strangeness and confused erotic non sequiturs with no discernible narrative – and yet a world that left me thinking, quiet and pensive, long into the night.  My companion talked about his experience as a Mark Rothko painting – fields of color and light.  Either way, we both felt the magic of the dark.

———

I went to BAM on Saturday night having read Claudia La Rocco’s review of Sasha Waltz’s Gezeiten in the New York Times, and Andy Horwitz’s review here on Culturebot.  I’d heard from plenty of other people whose opinions I respect that it just wasn’t any good.  And, though it feels a little like admitting I voted for Bush (which I DIDN’T), I have to say, against the tide of popular and critical opinion, I liked it.

What I saw was a work in three big parts – part one, showing us human beings interacting with each other in peace.  A tranquil place of beauty and a little humor.  Then a giant terrible crash.  Part two – human beings interacting with each other in crises.  Not pretty.  They sense weakness, sickness, disease, plague in one another, and react as we humans do – with a selfish, brutish violence.  This develops into part three – human beings interacting with each other after surviving said horrific catastrophe.  Things are not the same.  Perhaps this is post traumatic stress disorder embodied, made theatrically larger than life.

From what I gather, one of the great problems was with duration.  And perhaps also with the non-sensical nature of the course of events.  Lots of effects were used – smoke, fire, part of a brick wall collapsing, the entire floor being ripped up, as though in earthquake.  Waltz definitely put her cast through most imaginable terrors.  What started out as a terrible world beyond the walls of this undefinable space, quickly became a horror within.  I saw more concrete references to scare tactics and torture, the darker side of group (dis)functionality, but things continued to become stranger and stranger still – like entering a filmic psych ward.

The piece most reminded me, abstractly, of Anna Halprin’s parades & changes, replays staged last year at Dance Theater Workshop, which was just awarded a BESSIE last month.  I felt similarly about this work and Waltz’s – there were many inexplicable, strange, visually interesting but durationally challenging episodes that pretty much led to nothing but itself. This seems to be the critique I have read about Waltz’s Gezeiten.  But for me, Waltz’s contextualization is what makes hers a stronger piece (though she has much to credit in Halprin’s seminal work before her – these pieces could be two branches of the same choreographic tree).  Her staging of the repulsive, creepy, strange and scary human psyche, the absolute darkest parts of us that we don’t want to admit are real, that in a state of emergency (which is almost always also a state of panic) allow us to become rabid creatures of dangerous self-protection and survival at all its repulsive costs – this is what I saw.  Sure, the choreography only lasts for about the first hour or so, and even then there isn’t much to be ecstatic about, but I don’t think this piece is really much about the dancing.  The metaphoric and abstract universe of the physical provide impetus for a more compelling psychological exploration.  And perhaps that is what makes so many of us uncomfortable – it is seeing our anxieties, our paranoia and the troubled realization of our blunt impulses, the sad but telling truth of our limitations and failures, that is too much to bear.

Popularity: 5% [?]

This weekend Culturebot saw three very different dance/physical theater pieces that included Peter Flaherty and Jennie MaryTai Liu’s Soul Leaves Her Body at HERE, Raoul at BAM, conceived and created by James Thiérrée, and Abigail Browde and Michael Silverstone’s This Time Tomorrow at the Duryea Presbyterian Church in Prospect Heights.

James Thierree in Raoul

Raoul is an extravagantly imaginative surreal solo in which James Thiérrée plays the title character. He lives alone in a ramshackle castle that is besieged from the outside. The show opens with a Raoul doppelganger running onstage through the audience and launching a one-man assault on the fortress. He tries to climb it but to no avail. From the beginning Thiérrée’s skill as a physical performer is in evidence as he scales the structure and then falls backwards, in slow motion, from the heights of the wall and onto the floor.

Finally he shakes loose the front wall which falls to reveal Thiérrée sitting – how did he do that!? – reading a book and listening to music. Immediately elements conspire to shake him from his home. Raoul is the story of one man against the forces of nature, embodied in the house that trembles and quakes and outside forces such as a huge fish puppet, a gargantuan jellyfish, a robot/tin fish and, finally, a puppet elephant. Thiérrée’s talents as a physical comedian are considerable. He takes the simplest objects – a ladle, a picture frame – and plays with them to create funny, absurdist images. Every object in the house is his nemesis and confounds even the simplest efforts at control. Thiérrée will pick up an object and physically riff on it, becoming at times a horse, sometimes an ape, sometimes just a cosmic naif wrestling with forces unknown. He dances around the stage, testing the boundaries of his small castle as it falls apart, daring out into the wilds only to be forced back.

It is difficult to categorize Thiérrée’s surreal blend of physical theater, magic, acrobatics and music. Raoul is pure theatrical imagination at play. Thiérrée creates a world where anything can happen and frequently does. But the magic is not only confined to his talents as a performer – he uses every theatrical tool at his disposal, including harnesses and cranes that send him aloft like a Flying Clown. Not coincidentally, Thiérrée is Charlie Chaplin’s grandson, and his physical style is reminiscent of the Little Tramp. He updates the physical style with flourishes of popular movement – nods at popping and locking and moonwalking – without every being crass or commercialistic. Raoul is every bit the modern, existential clown, a man beset by challenges beyond his control, yet valiantly rising to meet them.

On the day I went – Sunday afternoon – there were a considerable number of young people in the theater. Raoul is the kind of physical comedy that plays just as well for young audiences as adults, you can appreciate it on the level of pure physical comedy and you can appreciate the ideas that animate the character’s dilemmas. Great stuff and well worth the trip.

*****

Jennie MaryTai Liu in Soul Leaves Her Body

Saturday night took us to HERE Arts Center for Jennie MaryTai Liu and Peter Flaherty’s Soul Leaves Her Body which is a gentle, beautiful and touching multilayered hybrid dance/theater piece about love, loss and identity. The show begins with the presentation of a 13th Century Chinese folk tale about a girl who is promises to a young man in marriage. For some reason her mother opposes the marriage, even though it has been arranged, and the girl gets sick and dies. The characters in the play are performed by Leslie Cuyjet, Sean Donovan, Jennie MaryTai Liu, while the images of their characters in traditional Chinese garb are portrayed in a film that is projected onto moveable glass screens. The play is told as dance-theater and there are movement sequences interspersed with dialogue and film. The integration of the film effects is seamless and the live-film technique gives the work a dreamlike effect.

The second story is set in modern day Hong Kong and is told through a film. A young woman, Yan, is living with her sister and brother in a sampan after their mother dies and their uncles sells their apartment out from under them. The sister makes money through hustling at mah-jongg and they are soon in trouble with some gamblers that she has taken advantage of. On the run, Yan finds herself at her mother’s old apartment building where she encounters an old woman – at which point the filmed segment ends and we find ourselves back in the world of the dance/theater piece. The old woman shares her story of lost love and emotional abandonment with Yan, who shares her own stories.

The piece as a whole seems to be about the relationship between mothers and daughters, between our inherited histories and stories and how we carry them with us. The set, lighting and costumes are all wonderful. The piece has been in development for several years – co-creators Peter Flaherty and Jennie MaryTai Liu are HARP Artists -and they did a residency at EMPAC also. All the hard work and long development process shows onstage. This is a great example of the kind of hybrid work at HERE aspires to present on a regular basis, it is technologically impressive while being emotionally engaging and accessible.

****

On the other end of the technical spectrum was Abigail Browde and Michael Silverstone’s new dance/theater piece This Time Tomorrow, which we saw Friday in the basement of the Duryea Presbyterian Church where they have been artists-in-residence. This Time Tomorrow is a simple piece with no technical tricks, no video, no expensive staging but a lot of heart and talent.

The evening started at the Blue Marble Ice Cream shop on Underhill Avenue in Prospect Heights, where we sipped complimentary hot chocolate and waited to be escorted across the street. We entered through a side door and walked through the chapel – which has this amazing mural on the ceiling – the whole church has a very 70′s vibe. Then we walked down to the basement which was almost iconic in its simplicity and familiarity. It looked like a quintessential church basement that could have been anywhere in America and I immediately thought of the generic American settings of Richard Maxwell’s plays. Silverstone and Browde did a nice job of framing the stage area in such as way that it was almost as if the audience was onstage looking into the rec room/basement, reversing the audience-performer relationship.

Because of the perspective, looking at the church basement, I was expecting This Time Tomorrow to be some kind of commentary on the setting, something that would ground the work in its environment and speak to some of the ideas that it automatically brings forth in the imagination – community, spirituality, values, education, home. I imagined that what might ensue would explore, perhaps, the situation of a small group of characters trapped in a small space, something akin to the work of Jo Stromgren – something darkly humorous and physically inventive.

What I experienced was something far more abstract, a dance/theater piece with no spoken dialogue that explored ideas of social discomfort and the inability to communicate or connect. At times it was an existential clown show in which the characters mugged and gamboled for each other and the audience, dancing in jerky unison, amusing each other with physical absurdities as they wait for something that will never arrive.

The piece was created by Browde and Silverstone in collaboration with the performers Paola di Tolla, Ben Beckley and Dan Cozzens. The show opens with di Tolla onstage striking a series of pained poses and expressions of discomfort. She is soon joined onstage by Beckley and Cozzens who engage with di Tolla in a variety of choreographed sequences which sees them exploring the space around them in a variety of ways. At one point di Tolla engages the audience in existential charades with no known answers – the audience shouts out clues but it is hopeless, she has no way to communicate and we have no way to engage. They drag folding tables around, they carry bookcases, they exit and enter in a line, they pop in and out of doors around the space. A phone rings, unanswered. A different phone rings. One of the actors exits and returns in Shakespearean garb. At one point the audience is encouraged to clap along with the performers and keep a beat which eventually turns into applause and the actors take a seat in the audience. And then they return to the stage to continue with the chaos.

The performers are all energetic and game – they run around with vim and ardor but without any clear motivation. At times it seemed like they were acting according to a set of rules unknown to the audience – that they were performing a series of actions that were predicated on some idea that was not conveyed to the rest of us.

The audience I saw it with laughed a lot but I wasn’t always sure I was in on the joke.

Popularity: 4% [?]

I thought maybe it was me. I mean, I had only heard reverent, adoring things about Sasha Waltz’s work and her influence on other choreographers. But I asked around and discussed it with lots of people and consensus says that GEZEITEN was, at best, disappointing.

Gezeiten (Tides), is an evening-length work for 16 dancers with live cello accompaniment. The piece explores themes of destruction and renewal, investigating life’s transformation following catastrophe.

I had high hopes – especially during the first section which featured some beautiful images and imaginative choreography with great partnering. The dancers moved into and out of groups and pairs, lifted each other, carrying each other off and onstage. At one point each of the dancers held another aloft as they spun in increasingly accelerating circles which worked to great effect. The dancers moved precisely and athletically and the cello accompaniment added some emotional resonance.

However, the first section went on a little too long, only to give way to the second section which was an overly literal dramatic enactment of being besieged. A stranger appears in the group’s midst and they shun him as possibly disease-ridden, certainly dangerous. We see the effects of paranoia and xenophobia, we see the small group of people devolve into power struggles and dissension. This section goes on far too long and even when the stage catches fire it feels gimmicky and non-threatening. Finally the third section comes around, which is s surreal landscape of destruction and desolation. There are a few interesting, macabre images but overall it was tedious and undramatic. Structurally I suppose it was meant to move from order to chaos and explore issues of social decay, but it was taxing to watch. Finally the destruction concludes and there are three people – who had been dragged in as if in body bags – who are left standing, undulating on the stage like huge human larvae. An interesting image but it was too little too late.

One thought that came up in many of my discussions of the piece afterwards was “What if this hadn’t been at BAM?” I think if I had seen the piece performed by some random company in NYC I would have been more immediately dismissive of it as overwrought and poorly executed. But because of the frame and context it seemed to have a weight that I’m not sure it deserved. That being said, I could see glimmers of artistry and imagination, but nothing like what I’d been led to expect from people’s descriptions of Waltz’s Körper, which was apparently a work of unmitigated genius.

I guess I’ll have to wait for the next one from Ms. Waltz and hope for the best.

Gezeiten
Featuring Sasha Waltz & Guests
Directed and Choreographed by Sasha Waltz
Music by Jonathan Bepler and Johann Sebastian Bach
Stage design by Thomas Schenk and Sasha Waltz
Costume design by Beate Borrmann
Lighting design by Martin Hauk

BAM Howard Gilman Opera House (30 Lafayette Ave)
Nov 3, 5 & 6 at 7:30pm
Tickets: $20, 30, 45, 55

Popularity: 5% [?]