Faux Musings

Compagnie Marie Chouinard

Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, Illinois

Orpheus and Eurydice by the adventurous Québécois dance troupe Compagnie Marie Chouinard opens with a series of stunning, evocative images, an arresting tableau of visual theatre that conjures demons as well as the divine, the erotic along with the evocative, fittingly marked with the signature of a frozen northland, not some steamy, tropical Elysian fields or fiery underworld. Fur boots against naked flesh, the sounds of geese passing overhead, white fur hats, and the silhouetted image of nude dancers in high-heeled clogs and strap-on prosthetic penises walking, posing, embracing like an erotic version of Matisse’s dancers or the skewed title sequence of a 1960s James Bond flick.

Marie Chouinard plays the clown as well as the choreographer in this tale; clowning that shares more with Beckett than Bozo; a tale that borrows as much from contemporary times as a mythological past. With ten dancers, two computer-controlled movable lights, and a battery of wireless body mics Compagnie Marie Chouinard transforms a bare stage into an evocative examination of the Orpheus myth, a clever dance perfectly timed to music and lighting cues—a shrinking circle of light, simple props, faintly intelligible vocalizations, a trace, a hint, of a myth, retold, replayed, transformed a thousand times, an old story that has left its indelible mark upon our psyche. The images draw us in: tableaus, vignettes, couples, trios, quartets combining costume with movement, humor with poignant observation, as if leafing through a sketch book of quirky pen and ink illustrations. And always that sense of loss, the receding image, looking back, and grasping at nothing.

Chouinard ‘s work fares less well with the ensemble pieces in the second half of the program. The simple isolated gestures and humorous asides lose their poignancy in larger, cacophonous ensemble settings and amidst the blare of Tibetan long horns and amplified stage sounds. The evocative nature of the imagery that proved so alluring becomes lost upon a crowded stage. At best, the disarray evokes Miró’s Harlequin's Carnival; however I can’t but help feel the loss of Orpheus as well as Eurydice, both the humor and the poetics that proved so seductive at first. Then again, perhaps that’s exactly the point.

Photo by Michael Slobodian, courtesy of the Museum of Contemporary Art.

House of Mind

Pat Graney Company, Seattle, Washington

Large, pillowy snowflakes float down to earth like autumn leaves in the still midnight air in the alley outside, visible through the wall of windows at the rear of the converted warehouse performance space, a fortuitous and altogether appropriate backdrop for Pat Graney’s new work House of Mind. Memory has been a constant theme in Graney’s work. In House of Mind memory takes center stage—childhood memories growing up in Chicago, memories of spaces, of clothing, of longing, and forgetting. Sensual memories, constructed memories, lingering memories.

House of Mind is as much installation as performance; Graney has transformed the raw warehouse space into a series of physical reflections, inquisitive memories that compel the viewer, the audience, to examine and construct their own memories. A wall of books, familial memorabilia, the ephemera of a long dormant police investigation. The evocative, staccato thwack of a manual typewriter resonates in the space. A steady stream of water trickles down a wall of found buttons. We walk among enormous dresses, as if from the perspective of a small child, and construct our own memories, a bed of sand beneath our feet, as Graney’s constructed memories unfold.

Graney and her collaborators (video designer Ellen Bromberg, composer Amy Denio, set designer David Traylor, and lighting designer Ben Zamora) conjure up a setting ripe with associative memories. Fragments of home movies and snippets of sound, the plaintive voice of Grace Slick singing “White Rabbit”, or Tommy James and the Shondells crooning “Crimson & Clover” combine with Denio’s music.

Five women (Michelle De la Vega, Sara Jinks, Jody Kuehner, Trinidad Martínez, and Jenny Peterson), dressed in a uniform of skirts and high-heels, cooking, cleaning, walking in careful, measured steps; the tap, tap, tap of heels upon concrete floor, the swish of each turn, the faint sound of a child heard in the background, the smell of a baking cake fills the air. Part inquiry, part evocation, Graney constructs dances from images of socially constricted domesticity and femininity circa 1966, each woman marking the space in synchronized movements, striking poses, and staggered, canonic repetitions. A dresser drawer becomes a room, an accordion, a bagpipe, a prop in a dance, the synchronized rearrangement of chairs a choreographed dance. There’s no father in these memories, no man in this picture, just the reconstructed memories of a mother’s world seen through her daughter’s eyes.

The Lastmaker

Goat Island, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, Illinois

Lin Hixson was the first choreographer I knew who structured bodies in space and time like a composer structures time, pitch, and timbre. All of the basic formal conventions were there twenty years ago in Goat Island’s first work Solider, Child, Tortured Man: repetition, inversion, canonic imitation, spatial displacement and orientation.

Goat Island created its own music, the Spartan space, the raw austerity only further drawing attention to the formal qualities inherent in the work. The absence of narrative structures—theater without storytelling—only heightened the audience’s reading of the work and our perception of each other. The logic unfolding in time with a minimalist aesthetic, the temporal and structural processes self-evident, the teleological impulse ever present, the movements repeated, examined, painfully as body hit floor, the raw immediacy and poetic irony of big sweaty men engaged in the most abstract and formal of dances.

Mind and body, the cerebral and the physical, Goat Island’s work confronted us, like all great performance does, with the disparity between our human aspirations and the physical realities of our existence: joy and humor contrasted with danger, frailty, fatigue, and pain, all played out mere inches away from our feet in the front row, the only row, of seats surrounding the Wellington Avenue Church gymnasium. For me, that balance of physicality and formalism, humanity and modernity, child and tortured man, defined Goat Island.

Hixson and Goat Island maintained that arc of investigation in subsequent pieces, but also began an exploration of language and gender that would, over time, emerge as a central focus of their work. Goat Island sought to become language—poetry—a play of dislodged signifiers and incongruous juxtapositions, the relationships of word, to image, to movement, to sound. Whereas previously Hixson had displaced bodies in space and time, now she displaced signifiers.

From We Got a Date through How Dear to Me the Hour When Daylight Dies when Joan Dickson and later Karen Christopher joined the original ensemble of Mathew Goulish, Gregory and Timothy McCain, each work moved more confidently into uncharted territory, exploring the boundaries between dance and theater, movement and text, immanent and exogenous forms. With the departure of the McCain brothers after a dozen years and the arrival of Mark Jeffery and Bryan Saner, the physicality that defined Goat Island’s early work gave way to different strategies.

For me, Goat Island’s performances always felt like painting: a scrap of text, a shattered image, a clip of sound, a repeated gesture, all splayed out upon the canvas, the connections tenuous, ironic, charged, the rough edges still visible. There was no place for aesthetic beauty in Goat Island’s work. The physical and formal rigor gave way to poetic juxtaposition: a theater of endlessly exploded metaphors.

More troubling though was the meta-theater surrounding Goat Island’s entire oeuvre, the quotation marks enclosing each “work”. Goat Island demanded the audience’s attention, or at least tacit acceptance of a social contract that imbued each work with a ritualistic quality, a monastic asceticism apropos of the context, but also exerted an overwhelming degree of control over how an audience read the work. Goat Island demanded your total involvement—ninety minutes, “no late entrances, no exits once the performance has begun”—and in exchange you would become a fellow traveler, a participant, on each journey. The meaning might be contingent, open-ended, and multivalent, but how you approached the work was tightly controlled.

This was the social contract we all entered into, a willing submission to be taken on a journey, destination unknown, in exchange for the promise of a sliver of insight, a new perspective, or revelation with each new piece. And willingly return again we did, to Wellington Avenue to experience a new Goat Island work every two years like swallows to San Juan Capistrano. Now, twenty years on, Goat Island presents their final work, The Lastmaker, at the MCA.

The Lastmaker begins with a story and an exposition, an explanation of the metaphor of the Hagia Sophia that serves as the basis for the theatrical conceit, a metaphor of reconstruction and re-contextualization, of “double buildings” and double meanings. That same fascination with relationships—uvezisa Goat Island chant—persists; absent is the physicality that formed the core of previous pieces. The Lastmaker is rooted in language and architecture not movement. Movement becomes a bridge between ideas, not the defining arc, the catalyst for successive explorations. Architecture becomes a metaphor for the construction of this final piece, space imagined, measured and modeled.

There’s an aura of finality that hangs over The Lastmaker, or perhaps the simulacrum of finality because there’s no resolution to this work, just an endless chain of juxtapositions: the reoccurring sounds of a galloping horse, the chirping of a mechanical bird, a country western singer crooning, a sledge hammer striking bent saw, the sound of Bach played on the piano receding into the distance, and most of all, the Hagia Sophia like some unassailable MacGuffin propelling the characters forward.

Final performances take center stage: the British variety show host Larry Grayson in his final performance as played by Saint Francis of Assisi, or the American comic Lenny Bruce; even Shakespeare makes his entrance, or more properly Henry V, by way of an obscure reference to that famous final speech delivered before battle on Saint Crispin's Day.

There’s an image toward the end of The Lastmaker when four Goat Island ensemble members strike tragic poses, arranged diagonally across the stage. The references are art historical, painterly, the composition formal. Amidst this wounded landscape, Saint Francis enters one last time and offers a prayer, at least the rhetorical language and architecture of a prayer; however, the content is ironically self-referential. In a way it’s a metaphor for the entire work; there’s no real closure here, but would we expect it of Goat Island? Instead, we’re left with one, final meditation on the idea of endings, an at once erudite and preposterous play on finality and the construction of the end. How apropos.

Spiegel

Ultima Vez, Sadler's Wells, London, England

I came to discover the work of Wim Vandekeybus and Ultima Vez over a dozen years ago by way of music when Lukas Pairon handed me a compact disc of his fellow Belgian Thierry De Mey. At the time, I surmised that with the exception of Merce Cunningham, American choreographers were of two minds when it came to selecting music: one, represented most visibly by Twyla Tharp, Mark Morris, and their acolytes involved recontextualizing familiar popular or classical musical selections in a mimetic and ironic fashion, the other, practiced by Lucinda Childs, Trisha Brown and countless other choreographers of lesser skill consisted of applying music to a performance as aural appliqué—the “music by the yard” school. Clearly Vandekeybus and  De Keersmaeker's choice of De Mey offered a divergent aesthetic, a prickly play of angular modernism and percussive rhythms that initiated a dialogue with the dance, music that refused to lie down wall-to-wall in muted earth tones.

Ultima Vez comes at you with a relentless determination, a raw, sensual energy that combines the fluidity and ensemble interplay of the Trisha Brown Dance Company at their best with the inventiveness and athleticism of De Keersmaeker’s Rosas. Spiegel, directed and choreographed by Vandekeybus, consists of six excerpts from earlier Ultima Vez works, performed straight through with no intermission. The selections ranged from What the Body Does Not Remember (1987), to Inmer das Selbe gelogen (1991), Bereft of Blissful Union (1996), 7 for a Secret Never to be Told (1997), In spite of Wishing and Wanting (1999), and “Inasmuch as Life is borrowed…” (2000).

Vandekeybus exploded onto the international dance scene in 1987 with What the Body Does Not Remember, a tour de force of precision ensemble choreography that toyed with the idea of danger. For the past two decades Vandekeybus and Ultima Vez have collaborated to create an impressive body of work infused with physicality, emotion, and intelligence that pushes the dancers to their limits, as both individual artists and ensemble. If the aesthetic ideal of ballet and pointe technique is to deny gravity, Vandekeybus seeks to confront us with it, playing with the charged tension between the imagined possibilities and physical realities of bodies in motion.

Panji Sepuh

Panji Sepuh was originally staged in Jakarta, Bali, and Melbourne in 1993 and '94 so I was surprised when Goenawan told me earlier this year that he planned to restage it. Not so much that the work didn't warrant a restaging, but I wondered whether such an ephemeral piece, clearly a work of its time and of the specific artists involved, could even be restaged—like mounting a new version of The Way of How twenty five years hence. However, after seeing the restaged version twice in Singapore this week, I can say that the work remains as powerful and haunting as when first produced a dozen years ago.

At its core Panji Sepuh is a ninety-minute work for seven female Javanese dancers and two male performers, accompanied by music for nine rebab (the traditional Javanese two-stringed bowed violin), three bowed gender (metallophones), and nine Javanese male voices, or gerong.  However, to call Panji Sepuh a dance piece with music is like labeling David Blaine a magician. Like Blaine, the work pushes at the uncomfortable edges of the performance genre examined to become something more. In this case, Tirtukusomo and Goenawan have mined the conventions of Javanese dance and tropes of Javanese society to create an imagistic, nuanced work of refined circumspection that subverts the traditional role of Javanese court dance as a projection of the Sultan's power and the object of his pleasure.

Like Martha Clarke's Vienna: Lusthaus (revisited) this restaging of Panji Sepuh revisits a haunting performance landscape of imagistic territory. However, this time round, Goenawan has chosen to amplify the critique of sexual politics that remained largely veiled in the original work. He's also taken the opportunity to refine and amplify the characterizations and in so doing make them both more specific and more universal.

Likewise, Teguh has used the occasion to create an elegant space for the piece to unfold within. Subtle, sloping lines, and an understated use of light and scrim and jasmine petals creates a space both referential but non descript. And heard within the context of Tony's entire oeuvre, it's fascinating to view Tony's compositions for multiple suling in Visible Religion, multiple viola for Stephanie Griffin, and the multiple rebab in Panji Sepuh all as part of one period in Tony's work from 1993 to '96.

Altogether, Panji Sepuh remains a powerful and evocative work that deserves to be seen in Europe and America. Whether U.S. or European audiences could decode the multiple layers of symbolism and political critique embedded within this deeply Javanese piece is doubtful: whether it ultimately matters is the question, for even without such background Panji Sepuh remains a fascinatingly beautiful piece of theater.

Kammer Kammer

Brooklyn Academy of Music, New York, New York

Kammer Kammer begins before the audience arrives. Anthony Rizzi, faux Forsythe, director doppelganger, addresses the audience as the dancers “rehearse”. Who’s the performer? Who's performing? Who's directing? "Curtain up!" Rizzi shouts. Of course there’s no curtain in sight. The curtains were drawn back long before the audience entered the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s opera house. Theatrical artifice implodes, conventions blur, space, line, and point of view constantly shift, the separation between physical space and mediated image obscured, our emotional connection with the performers always contingent, fleeting, dislodged again and again in William Forsythe's moving and wonderfully multi-layered dance-theater piece Kammer Kammer.

It’s the emotive power, the physicality, the beauty and precision of Forsythe’s choreography and his dancers that first ensnares you. An exquisite solo dance to a Bach violin toccata viewed both from the front and above. Simple duets evolving into beautiful trios, dancers hurling themselves upon a bed, over and under, rolling and bouncing, embracing, and grasping, falling away, and reclining, the movement captured by a camera mounted far above the stage contrasted with our vantage point from the side. There’s an intimacy combined with sexual energy and physicality in these dances, an evocation of sensuality as well as playfulness tinged with melancholy.

Yet Kammer Kammer is also a dance of perception as well as physicality, the movement extending to the constantly shifting rooms, walls, and floor, our point of view alternating between the wide-shot of the proscenium stage and the exquisitely framed close-up visible on the flat-screen video monitors suspended throughout the theater. Forsythe never lets you revel long in that perfect image; he immediately deconstructs it. The camera tracks in sync with the performers, then pulls back beyond that frame to reveal the crew, the artifice constructed, our point-of-view continuously transforming, the transition from three-dimensional space to mediated space seamless. We hold these contrasting images—the framed picture and the process of its fabrication on stage—in our minds and ask: what’s obscured, who’s left out, and why?

Forsythe weaves two tales of real or imagined homosexual love, one the story of a dejected lover (Rizzi) and an unnamed "rock star," the other an imagined film with Catherine Deneuve (Dana Casperson) as a French philosophy professor fallen under the spell of unrequited Sapphic love. Two stories of longing and unreciprocated love, intertwined, and played out in a series of settings: the hotel room, the office, a row of chairs, an exterior wall, inside a crowded subway car, the hand-held camera framing the imaginary space, raucous music and the sound of the subway train squealing. One scene transforms into the next, the disjuncture of story and form complete, the dialectic between performer and character never resolving. At a dinner party, Casperson’s character Deneuve chokes back tears, and lip-synchs into the microphone the old Lynn Anderson country song Cry. "Sing it Cathy," Rizzi shouts, two despondent souls, one in unrequited love. Deneuve gives up in desperation, drops the microphone, and walks off the stage weeping to end Act I.

Act II begins with the sound of a dog barking… and broken glass. A warning? Casperson (or is it Deneuve?) and Rizzi, the intermittent narrators. Lying on a bed, the wall behind Rizzi appears to melt away, the illusion and its construction unfolding before us. The video image dissolves, freezes frames, and stutters, digitally disintegrating time as well as the frame.

Like in his previous pieces—The Loss of Small Detail (1991), ALIE/NA(C)TION (1992), As a Garden in This Setting (1993), and Eidos:Telos (1995)—Forsythe and his remarkable company of dancers have succeeded in creating a work of beauty, physicality, intelligence, and hope, that extends the language of dance-theater in compelling and fascinating new ways.