On Dance
JACOBS, LAURA A.
On Dance PLAYFUL CONSTRUCTION BY LAURA A. JACOBS Many of choreographer David Gordon's best dances are fired by word/movement ideas that connect with andmomentlyilluminate the murkier waters of...
...Lighting designer Jennifer Tipton bathes the adagio section in a nostalgic golden glow...
...If Gordon does see these corps dancers as kids dawdling around the piano, he underestimates them...
...It begins when principal dancer Mar-tine van Hamel, emerging from the left wing, walks across the stage in little toe-steps...
...Field, Chair and Mountain moves more slowly than previous Gordon works, the hair-trigger associations speech brings to dance being absent...
...Hetreats Harlem's dancers the way Jerome Robbins has portrayed them—as perennial "ballet kids...
...I can't help thinking the ballet would have been more fascinating if it had focused on van Hamel...
...The uniformity is odd, considering how sensitively Gordon tailors dances for his own company members...
...Gordon would have done well to take advantageof this precisionandheft, for they surely are elements in piano moving...
...Perhaps the problem is the blowzily inattentive music, or that Gordon is more interested in smoothing the surfaces of this airy Oriental puzzle box...
...A screen inches out behind them...
...Whatever, in Field Gordon has given us a molehill instead of a mountain, although he has done it with aplomb...
...Van Hamel is not made to look more beautiful in her precarious work on the chair, nor does her perch amplify the pointe shoe and its possibilities...
...That puts them on one plane— a highly unusual sight in ballet, heightened by their lying across the chairs and stretching horizontally through the air like a school of fish...
...When she takes the stage she storms it like Myrtha of Giselle, yet she is never fully revealed to us...
...Movers opens with a mild jam session around a piano pushed onstage by the dancers...
...Gordon's musical chairs shtick resurfaces toward the end in a sequence around the piano...
...Field is in other respects a trifle schizophrenic, too...
...Gordon has left nothing extraneous or unchoreographed, nor has he overchoreographed...
...Gordon breaks the path of the dance in this short prologue...
...Displaying his penchant for the pun, Gordon has extended the title into a discourse on ballet.The chair is a tease, thought-provoking and somewhat ominous because it rests between two landscapes—one alluding to the composer John Field, the other to adapting his tempestuous if rather conventional music to ballet's mountainous terrain, with its dynamic of upsurge and momentum...
...Halfway through we come to the best part of the dance: a jivey rag full of curlicues that roll and unroll on the dotted musical note...
...The rest proceeds in cycles: The ballerina and her partner (Clark Tippet) dance, then the corps, a soloist, then the pair again...
...Troy Game, the inappropriate prelude to Giselle on some of this season's programs, may be a tasteless flaunting of pecs and flanks, but at least it considers the dancers as individuals and exploits their physical gifts...
...A woman poised in an arabesque on the piano is a reference to Field's van Hamel atop her chair...
...The third section is brightly lighted again...
...Movers' dancers are anonymities, all doing the same slices and curves regardless of whether or not they are suited to them...
...Or he might have built on DTH's concern for classical propriety (a characteristic that sometimes mars their performance of Balanchine's ballets, where a freewheeling, high-stakes exactness is demanded...
...The chair serves both as the ballerina's pedestal and an exaggerated representation of the confining stage-space ballet dancers must inhabit...
...The dancers wear sunset-colored, Greek-style dresses and leggings...
...Movers can claim none of these qualities...
...From the start its dancers plunged into classics, cultivating their low-income, highbrow audience with illustrative ballets lik t Forces of Rhythm and Dougla, rather than " fun" ones like Robbins' Interplay...
...The spikey battements and attitude-turns make her seem larger than life...
...The corps members march out carrying chairs that they dance with and around...
...He has choreographed his indecision right into the dance, and then tried to unify it by loading the right wing (northward on the Met stage) with a magnetic force...
...One dancer nudges another out of place, creating a chain reaction much like the catfood commercial where each cat is moved on to the next bowl...
...His nonchalance is infuriating...
...His world-weary sophistication expresses bitter elegance...
...Certainly in Movers he has short-changed them...
...For all of its flaws, Field is full of ideas that translate visually and keeps pace with themusic...
...It employs the usual Gordon arcs and circles, the frequent crisp arabesques, and the couples shaving smoothly off one another like carpenter's curls...
...Two weeks after ABT's season ended, Dance TheaterofHarlem(DTH) opened at the Met...
...Van Hamel looks volcanic when she reappears, keyed to the fortissimo piano...
...The way Gordon keeps recycling this mechanism you would think it had some sort of cosmic significance...
...It also is his weightiest, most ample dance to date...
...As Gordon muses on the usual lack of horizontal movement, he gives the piece a directional drift that carries it always from left to right, suggesting the flow of writing...
...In Monk's music the lazy dissonance and outward plainness mask inner structural rifts...
...But the impetus she builds on is blunted at the end...
...Gordon has syncopated the action simply...
...In any event, the culmination causes us to lose sight of Field's overall progression...
...The DTH corps is a community in Legend, bound by technical precision and dramatic heft, and by their joint sense of time, place and decorum...
...In addition, the stiff-jointed folding chairs slyly evoke our stiff workaday world: compared with the fluid dancers draped and languoring in them, our own movements seem clumsy and tense...
...Gordon can't decide whether to treat the music in a guise of cool classicism, warmer romanticism, or light-of-day pragmatism...
...An inevitable shift i n gears occurs...
...The costuming is certainly odd: pale blue tunics to begin with, orangy chiffon Greek dresses in the adagio, and nightshirts with tights in the end...
...They have the camaraderie of people who work together, but here one senses they are relaxing before really going to work (i.e., to dance aGiselleor an Agon...
...Van Hamel, hardly off-stage, is followed by a gaggle of dancers similarly dressed in light blue who mimic her steps in playful spills and doodles...
...along with Monk, he leaves plenty of space around the notes...
...There is a musty emptiness at the heart of this ballet...
...It is not a provident reminder...
...The effect is more one of moodshift thanscenicadvancement...
...Movers was followed on the program by a consummate performance of Agnes deMille's Fall River Legend, apro-duction ABT should envy...
...Furthermore, it always makes use of the ABT's bag of tricks...
...This sensation expands the music, dramatizing its gusts and reticences...
...Gordon seems to have only picked up on Monk's casualness...
...Jennifer Tipton's lighting has the murky feel of a nightclub in the late afternoon...
...The curtain falls as she reaches upward, in sousus, exultant and relatively secure...
...Ultimately, a large painted backdrop is pulled up behind the screen to reveal a mountainside studded with small fairy-taleeastlesand folding chairs...
...Gordon's use of the prop points up another of ballet's quirks: a tendency to objectify...
...I'veseenfew other companies work with such conviction and attention to detail...
...Worse, their introduction, albeit the-matically justified, is an academic imposition that runs counter to the dance's instinctive tug...
...This summer, in choreographing a new work for the American Ballet Theater (ABT)—his first mainstream audience—he has focused on visual rather than verbalprowess...
...Yet this Oriental balance within huge elements (like a Japanese hillside hut poised in the mouth of a tidal wave) may be what gives the ballet its coolness, its distance...
...After making various floor patterns with the chairs, the corps sets them in a zig-zag that rhymes with the screen's jagged edge...
...Although weget some beautiful figurative movements, the dance is never without its insistent tide...
...reaching across the entire stage, it reinforces the ballet's panoramic sweep and creates a sense of delicate artifice...
...The conclusion of Movers, an arrangement of arabesques cresting above the crowd, similarly seems to quote from Four Temperaments...
...Some critics have complained that Field is both conventional and postmodern, that it should have only one fully integrated sensibility...
...On Dance PLAYFUL CONSTRUCTION BY LAURA A. JACOBS Many of choreographer David Gordon's best dances are fired by word/movement ideas that connect with andmomentlyilluminate the murkier waters of contemporary sensibility...
...They also have a new David Gordon ballet, Piano Movers, set to five taped Thelonious Monk solos...
...An experienced choreographer should realize a work usually develops its own will (but maybe that's the difference between a choreographer and a dance-constructionist, as Gordon insists on calling himself...
...She is capable of moving with drama and architectural clarity...
...When the chairs are brought in, the effect is anticlimactic...
...Throughout, Gordon treats the body as a sculptural rather than a theatrical weight: The men lift women as if they were furniture, recalling the woman carted offstage in Balanchine's TheFour Temperaments...
...These become bourrees and then, on the first note of the piano, galvanize into a developpe that shoots toward the right wing as resiliency as a compass needle...
...An actual playing of musical chairs here reminds one of theTharpish lift-whoever's-nearest approach to partnering in the first section...
...In the first two sections she exhibits steady, full-sail force...
...Field is busy, but it is strangely uneventful as well, a series of drifts and peaks that never go over the top...
...For a dancer of her magnitude, the last section is the equivalent of foot-binding...
...Van Hamel, atop a chair, is supported by Tippet from the ground in a lengthy pas de deux...
...But Dance Theater of Harlem has never been a frivolous company...
Vol. 68 • August 1985 • No. 10
