On Dance
JACOBS, LAURA A.
On Dance LANGUISHING IN MOTION BY LAURA A. JACOBS when Jean Coralli and Jules Perrot's Giselle premiered in Paris in 1841 it was immediately taken up by the poets of the day—Theophile Gautier,...
...It is as if an intergalactic giant were relating the first half of this century to a gurgling baby giant...
...It's an alchemy of mathematics, music and light...
...I wish MacMillan had displayed more originality of this sort...
...Everybody seems to love watching this long horizontal of light (which we know to be a bed) slowly lift into a vertical position and levitate up into the flyspace, buoyed on the wave of a soprano voice...
...Unfortunately, Act Two—village dances and sword fights, plus one short trip to the altar —stops things cold (it is, in a word, orange...
...Since her work has always looked adimensional to me, the flatness was no surprise...
...To judge from the interest stirred by news of the bam production, we continue to hunger for images of the invisible...
...Following ABT tradition, the new production gives you the feeling of being slower, mustier, than it really is...
...Sometimes, notably in her opening scene and party dance, Harvey's overly flashy port de bras made her Juliet appear interestingly high-strung and eccentric...
...It is a blatant, dreamy withdrawal—she does it three times—and so unsettling and childlike that it surprises even as you watch for it...
...For all that it shows us, it explains nothing...
...There was lots of talk, too, about "time and space...
...Theassemblagesarecannyenough...
...sylphs and spirits, frills on the medieval model, had become longing transfigured...
...The pattern became dismally predictable after a minute or two...
...MacMillan's dominant motif for Juliet has her chest arched back in abandon and vulnerability, her legs swept off the floor behind her in an arabesque or supported lifts...
...Prokofiev's sophisticated 1935 score, with its recurring leitmotifs and orchestral foreshadowing (those atonal shrieks that blast the air), is oracular: omniscient, yet always hinting...
...Prokofiev said that he conceived of his score in operatic terms, and his storytelling is clearer than that of most choreographers...
...That slowness captivated in 1976, and aficionados have long equated it with beauty...
...KENNETT MACMILLAN'S Romeo and Juliet, staged by the American Ballet Theater (ABT) as this season's big production, is not bad...
...avant-garde or antiestablishment...
...It is the hum, turn and roar of the opera's circulatory system...
...The link is not accidental, for soon Juliet will look just as dead...
...The swoons and clutches you see in most love duets have been shaped, tempered to the music, where Prokofiev's refined, angelic strings become suddenly, helplessly tumescent...
...This could be the fault of designer Nicholas Georgiadis' dully efficient sets: three massive curling stairways, each topped with a brooding triptych of arches...
...Similarly, the steamy orchestration of the love scene is oddly present in the fatally wounded Mercu-tio's last dance...
...his conceptions are as sternly, if not clinically, poeticized...
...Now her movements have snowballed into defiance and risk...
...The Capulets' rocky theme turns like a millstone...
...I couldn't help thinking of them when I subsequently saw the rereleased Walt Disney Pinocchio, jammed with intricate, animate clocks and other timepieces, ticking, gasping, about to split their celluloid skins like grapes, or atoms...
...The shimmering, perpetual rhythms and microscopically shifting repetitions are simultaneously tinny and liquid...
...The show-stopper, though, referred to as "the flying bed," comes late in Act Three...
...His expansions and contractions of scene are not fundamentally different from those we have witnessed in other experimental theater, dance or multimedia work...
...Wilson's eye is as accomplished and precise...
...Elsewhere I saw very little connection between Wilson's movement concerns and Childs...
...But Childs appeared to be choreographing in an imagined magnetic field, punning with the space, an idea that leads only to tedium...
...Its second, "white" act—performed in white tutus, and signifying the presence of supernatural elements —was a nether world of disconsolate energies and lingering forms that seemed to extend the boundaries of what could be real...
...Einstein on the Beach boils, cools, hardens, and boils again...
...Many of the gilt and brocade costumes are equally heavy, better suited to opera...
...On Dance LANGUISHING IN MOTION BY LAURA A. JACOBS when Jean Coralli and Jules Perrot's Giselle premiered in Paris in 1841 it was immediately taken up by the poets of the day—Theophile Gautier, Novalis, Heinrich Heine...
...Silky and tactile, it's a pas de deux the dancers eat up...
...Einstein on the Beach, revived last month as the grand finale of the Next Wave Festival at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (bam), feeds similar wishes and superstitions...
...Over time it begins to have the sensation of memory oscillating into tone, and maybe into emotion...
...Perhaps the most resonant aspect of Einstein is the time it takes to move, change, evolve...
...Their pieces could have come from any village square and are performed in joyless, albeit painstaking fashion...
...Standing in the caboose and looking out into the past, elegant newlyweds— or are they illicit lovers?—suggest subliminal, elegiac tumult, a visual mixing of memory and desire...
...Childs' dances took place on a cleared stage, or as the program put it, in a field, and gave the feeling of being set in a vacuum...
...Glass' score is essentially futuristic, and in this respect it seems to rub off on, even burnish, Robert Wilson's outsize images as each lumbers across the stage, complete with minutiae that stick and scratch no less than barnacles...
...They are merely larger, longer, more focused, or sometimes more diffuse...
...Except for the wonderful train, with its choreography of breakthrough and doom, Einstein is a victim of its own entropy...
...You note with fascination the precarious balance of line and volume in Act One's train sequence, where formality born of clarity is the key...
...The ABT does not have a ranking partnership to match the Royal Ballet's Lynn Seymour and Christopher Gable, or Margot Fonteyn and Rudolf Nurey-ev, who starred in both the 1965 premiere and the film...
...Prokofiev, I think, would have applauded...
...Mac-Millan views the drama as "the tragedy of a passionate and willful girl," hardly a daring perception...
...She portrayed an intelligent, clear-sighted Juliet, and her psychological pacing was finely calculated...
...Aside from Marian-na Tcherkassky, MacMillan has therefore cast the ABT production by rotating the company's younger dancers in the leads...
...masterpiece or monster...
...Previously performed only twice, at New York's Metropolitan Opera in 1976, the Robert Wilson/Philip Glass collaboration had passed into myth...
...spins and momentary poses, Childs singlemindedly matched the music beat for beat, mirroring some of its overlapping phrases, while missing its elasticity...
...One wishes they took his cues...
...Whenever face to face with dilemma, Juliet draws up onto pointe, poker-faced, and bourrees backward away from the problem in a strange, wide arc...
...The choreographic development helps to unify and expedite the ballet...
...The ballet was their universe squeezed into a ball...
...Its nether world is etherized rather than ethereal...
...Filtered through our deference to Albert Einstein's implacable genius, his difficult humanism, Wilson's details—for instance, a gyroscope floating cryptically across the stage on a wire—acquire an academic and often precious weight...
...you can hear its tetchy rhythms through the love theme, and ultimately echoing in the funeral march...
...Nor did it help that the dances were not performed well...
...Act Two's train scene, with a luminous moon in the blue night sky passing mutely through its phases, speaks epochs: This is the kind of midnight that keeps poetry pounding in our breasts...
...At Boston's Wang Center, where I saw Romeo and Juliet, Cynthia Harvey danced Juliet with her usual velvet strength and clarity but pushed too hard for effect...
...Finally, even though the production is anchored in period the dancers have skirted the strictures of Renaissance deportment...
...Endlessly shuffling and reshuffling the same small bunch ol'stepx...
...Flailing her arms at rigid angles, traveling jazzily along the balls of her feel, she was a drum majorette sans baton, or a mime crazily telling the same story (later, in the jail scene, she actually repeated one story some 40 times...
...You are drawn in by the technique: the opportunity to see a fleeting moment of languor, ortoglimpsea secretive process such as a flower opening in quotidian time...
...I would say the definition has been radically stretched...
...Then there is the wearying color scheme: orange, from gold to burnt umber...
...they stalk and linger as disconsolately as wilis, ballet's haunting women...
...Nonetheless, if you can stand another Romeo and Juliet you might as well seethisone.lt contains some fine things, and the balcony scene is practically a raison d'etre...
...moreover, fields are flat...
...Indeed, the biggest mystery in Einstein is how it can be so elemental, strange, even grand, and still be so inconsequential...
...Glass' music swims, flies, charges over mountain, under glass, through a beehive...
...What Wilson establishes is a triangle of spectacle, observation and cognition—the mental play rebounds between audience expectations and the stage, instead of going from theaudi-ence to the stage to the unknown...
...Although her dances went with the score structurally, they lacked its sense of adventure, of landscape...
...Through it all, as if an artist's signature, a conch shell sits stage-right, evoking the tides, the inner ear, the delicate mystery of interiors...
...That may be why Wilson's images do not have the drama of surrealism: They are not churned up from his or anyone's psyche...
...Einstein is officially billed as "An Opera in Four Acts,'" and it surely owes much of the attention it has received to Philip Glass' crystalline music...
...While her phrasing lacks Harvey's finish, her conception was richer...
...To me the tempo is mesmerizing the way slow-motion or time-lapse photography is...
...everything besides Romeo and Juliet is touched by clay...
...He does everything but underline them...
...One imaginative touch deserves special mention...
...Amanda McKer-row made a competent debut in the role...
...It is simply very conventional—and thus a disappointment coming from England's "psychological" choreographer...
...The opening also was preceded by extensive discussion in the press: Was Einstein opera or theater or dance...
...Yet Einstein does not draw you into an obsession the way, say, Giselle or even Pinocchio does...
...We could beat ground zero...
...Each dancer is insulated in a pocket of air, automatically creating a system of shifting geometric tracks: diagonal passages leading into circles, horizontals fraying into waves...
...That's pushing it...
...When the sooty train clatters on stage for the third time in naif profile, its cargo unknown, the sudden feeling is of malevolence...
...For the production at the bam Lu-cinda Childs, a member of the '76 cast, rechoreographed the dance numbers, originally done by Andrew de Groat...
...Then, as the train draws away Wilson recircuits the image by having the woman pull a gun on the man, a bit that is at once reminiscent of The Maltese Falcon, Tess of the d'Urbervilles and Tosca...
...You realize you have seen some of these steps before— in Juliet's dance with Paris, for example—but earlier she was obedient, decorous...
...Accompanied by a "libretto" consisting solely of numbers and solfege syllables, what we hear frequently sounds like a choir of silver ball bearings, or voices eddying as if they were marbles rolled in the hand...
...Happily, she retained her '76 Act One solo, and it was the best dance of the long evening, all percussive fury on a single diagonal...
...Compared with the other self-contained, almost opiated court dances, the pas de deux's ornament and energy is baroque: It celebrates the heroics of sexuality...
...Wilson does have a gift for the fertile image...
...Susan Jaffe was far stronger in the role...
...These Romantics were engaged by the spiritual transactions between the visible and invisible universes, and Giselle joined the two realms through illusion...
...they amount to illustrations for a history lesson...
...Yet is this so dissimilar to Giselle's weightless, bloodless dancing in the ballet's second act, when she is mere form, pallor and unearthly passion...
...It can't, because it is too static for imagination to soar...
...The four-and-a-half-hour work has no narrative shape beyond a handful of simple sketches involving a train, a trial, a jail, and a spaceship...
...For baby's sake, he settles on big objects: Hence the choice of Einstein as a focal point, with those heavy associations, that sum of symbols...
...at other times, particularly in the more dramatic sequences, she overacted to the point of appearing hysterical...
...In the bam program Roger Copeland writes that "by demonstrating that our notion of what constitutes' spectacle' is wholly relative to our perceptual frame of reference, Wilson, like Einstein, had radically redefined our conception of time and space...
...If the piece is about anything, however, it is, like Giselle, about visual illusions: The cones of shadow, the probable and improbable movements, are simply contemporary forms of ghosts...
Vol. 68 • January 1985 • No. 1
