On Dance
JACOBS, LAURA A.
OnDance SEASONS OF EROS BY LAURA A. JACOBS As they age, Martha Graham's works seem to be moving further onto their distinctive terrain. Originally the very personal expressions of a great...
...The setting was underlit, almost cavernous, the mirrors giving it a glittering edge...
...Surely, though, bad sex is not the only way to express that prophecy...
...Shedoes not have strictly classical legs—her knees are too bony—but uses sheer muscle power to overcompensate...
...Stravinsky's score suffered throbs and twitches at Graham's hands last year (not to be confused with the rhythmic seizures that shocked the audience in 1913...
...Look ended with a pile of bodies moving amoeba-like across the floor, alone woman trying and failing to dive in...
...Gen Horiuchi, Eight More\ poker-faced focus, spotted endless pirouettes off the audience—but was a wind-up, empty center...
...In the "clockmaker" variation of Brahms' Variations on a Theme by Handel she was the emperor's golden bird—head twisting, arms swinging, warbling away with almost insolent prettiness—when Handel's theme appears to detour through acuckoo-clock and assume the frenzied tempo of the "minute waltz.' She made Jerome Robbins and Twyla Tharp's choreography a tour de force— no other dancer in the company could successfully combine brittleness and human frailty...
...The best segment, an adagio for Peter Boal, draped bolts of languorous movement over a strikingly serene port de bras...
...Calegari, by contrast, came off as a wood nymph, a sylvan enchantress with a bullying streak...
...Sex was also very much on the mind of a choreographer she influenced, Paul Taylor, whose season, at the City Center, came soon after hers...
...This not only allows him to pull off obscurity less portentously than Graham, it lets him work in a pastoral vein...
...Amoreintensefigurativeonanism animated Look, although gesturally it was even sparer than Domain...
...Byzantium concerned thecor-ruption of empires, the gold-plating of religion and art...
...a rare black orchid watching the night conic on...
...Finally, he lay down, and everyone else piled up on him...
...gestures that were daringly pregnant have come to look blunt: There is no place for a young dancer to go in such pieces as Cortege of Eagles, Herodi-ade, or even the visually sumptuous Episodes...
...Will become...
...Last Look was another finely crafted entry in the end-of-the-world genre...
...Taylor has light and dark sides, and his choreographic voice seems to swing between lyricism and the soiled beauty of narcissism—that is, when he isn't warning of doomsday and devastation, as he has been lately: Sunset, a tender, yearning dance set to a moody reverie by Elgar, treated of soldiers, their would-be girlfriends, and time forever charged with sorrow...
...It had little kinetic interest, but the audience loved Halston's bright ("Oh, the colors...
...she becomes solemn and upset...
...Taylor took a banal, overused religious conception of doom and pushed it to the maximum, as if to send up our limited perceptions of technology's destructive capabilities...
...Look revealed its consequences in outermost reality...
...Perhaps Calegari's most compelling part in the course of the NYCB's latest outing was that of the girl in Jerome Robbins' Afternoon of the Faun, a ballet about narcissism and the dance...
...Darci Kistler played the same role as a child-goddess, a lovely dawning aura...
...Graham's artistic devices now inhabit a realm reminiscent of Yeats' spiritus mundi: They are "unpurged images" of America's collective theatrical conscience...
...those jagged mirrors disrupted the view...
...Martins' ValseTristeandEightMore, two NYCB premieres, nicely demonstrated the two sides of his temperament: the distrustful romantic...
...Graham's esthetic features a powerful tension between the body's anatomical reality and the soul's muscles, which want to stretch toward a higher plane of existence...
...Humanity, he seemed to be saying, is partying its merry way to extinction...
...Large, triangular-shaped mirrors dominated the stage, obstructing visual continuity and mimicking the reflective windows of a silver city...
...In the second movement of the Stravinsky-Balanchine Symphony in Three Movements, for example, she conveyed the music's liquid properties, and Ihe pas de deux had the humorous formality of a mating in nature...
...Time, though, has dulled the blade...
...It consisted of twitches, jerks, throbs, and flying bodies, all remarkably orchestrated...
...Only after Mofid kisses her does she recognize the other emotions in the room...
...As a long-time teacher at New York's Neighborhood Playhouse she had an immeasurable influence on stage and screen actors, and thus on the way we "read" body movement in day to day life: The contraction says anguish...
...As Titania in the Mendelssohn-Bal-anchine Midsummer Night's Dream she lacked nuance, practically bashing her way past Balanchine's florid variations and relying on her infrared concentration to make it all work...
...Peter Martins' academic Rossini Quartets gave Calegari a chance to be subtly more beautiful...
...Suffice it to say that this version of Le Sacre brought to mind Nijinsky and Mallarme...
...At the New York State Theater recently, many of Graham's dances moved impenetrably across the stage, seancelike, where a generation or two ago they inspired trembling and fascination...
...Calegari responded to the first touch of her partner, Ashfin Mofid, by taking a sideways plunge through the air...
...Song, Graham's new dance, was based on the Song of Solomon and accompanied by eery woodwinds and revival-meeting organ riffs...
...McBride, ravishing in her backless black dress, seemed both wise and hungry—Marschallin awaiting one last visit from her Roscn-kavalier...
...It ended with her in that position, too, her back lo us...
...But the hauntingmoment came earlier: As the sky fell around a young man who kept returning to his own reflection, he jumped over bodies to get back to the mirror...
...Her body held in Mo-fid's circling arms, her eyes closed, you could see liberation flood her, feel her reaching into the abyss of solitude...
...For me, Le Sacre du Printemps was the masterpiece on Taylor's program...
...Donald York's music for Look was at times soaring and wondrous, resembling Steven Spielberg space music...
...Her repertoire could be a serious game of Dungeons and Dragons—the dragons being sexual, artistic or emotional freedom, the dungeons cultural mores and taboos...
...Rarely are we reminded, as we were in this particular instance, how beautiful a man dancing can be...
...I found the dance unremittingly tasteless...
...The interpretation was flamboyant, indeed risque, and for Calegari a fulfillment of sorts...
...These dancers, garbed in punkish party clothes and boiler suits, couldn't connect, nor could they get the big picture...
...Even testing her toe shoe, her thigh opened with unusual gravity, revealing its inner plane in pliant repose...
...chiffon harem outfits, all creases pointing to the crotch...
...The ballet began with McBride alone on stage, half-reclined out he floor as il'ga/ing into a pool...
...Triste is full of spiraling high notes (one remembers MeBride's zealous circular swoops on pointe, supported by Anderson) and inaudible rumblings—"Does he love me...
...She showed us what real concentration is...
...His earlier Eight Easy Pieces, a work for three corps women to Stravinsky piano music, always struck me as a mere exercise...
...This conflict gives her styli-zation its peculiar dynamics, for many steps in her technique seem to pull in opposite directions...
...Originally the very personal expressions of a great dramatic artist, today they appear to be relics of a past culture—the '30s and '40s— emphasizing great truths and.psycho-sexual frankness...
...Calegari would probably strike us as painfully thin if she were not so strong...
...It's big emotions—the earth is moving—or nothing...
...Taylor's dance was a triumph of compression—the sort that makes coal into diamonds—in the contemporary style...
...As for Valse Triste, it is precisely that: a tryst in waltz time for Patricia McBride and Ib Anderson...
...The whole performance was deeply introverted and sensual...
...Even in the short odes to love, her dancers are scarcely at home in their limbs...
...Of the many wonderful performances the New York City Ballet (NYCB) has afforded us recently, the mosl satisfying may have come from Maria Calegari, who has the hair color and languid self-possession ofagold-fish...
...She and Bart Cook, her partner, certainly clarified the influence of Balanchine's Bugaku here...
...Domain focused on the inner essence of narcissism—orgiastic, splendid, safe...
...the keening arms, agitation...
...I myself don't think it really matters—if they moved with any more gusto they might, like Rum-pelstiltskin, split...
...Anderson w as sincere and distant...
...The music is Sibelius' Valse Triste and Scene with Cranes, both from Kuolema...
...This piece, dealing with the overcompensations, the decorative zeal of the Rococo, permitted Cal-egari's own physical extremes—her hyperbolic arabesques, her fine darting pointes, the delicious trill of her hips during battu en I'air, the tremendous energies she generates in battement or developpe—to complement the dance's grand design...
...The disconnectedness of the space suggested a kind of anarchy—you wondered if there was any room to dance...
...and the wry, frequently cynical technician...
...The problem is that Graham's subject matter has not stood up well...
...In a nascent form the same anarchy permeated Taylor's Private Domain, where the stage was framed by drapes that formed barriers and metaphorical windows on the sexual kinks and qualms of the dancers, who hypnotically followed their pel-vises...
...the sideways-skittering feet, anxiety or fear...
...cheerleading for the joy of sex was never Graham's forte...
...Working in archetypes, she hewed steps out of urgent emotions, molded visual couplets from Greek and gothic tragedies...
...rather, she plumbed the irascible logic of the psyche, givingit a vocabulary of heavy, scythelike steps, as well as spasms and heavy-boughed lunges...
...Graham did not pursue narrative logic...
...While Martins has spun the dance out of wisps, its clamorous passions virtually overwhelm its slight choreographic line...
...Eight More is a similar work for three corps men, yet it has touches of the flashy cheek and odd musical wit that distinguished Martins' Calcium Light Night...
...His dancers are happier in their skins (a good thing, since many of his creations are only, though wonderfully, skin-deep...
...It is often said that the current members of Graham's troupe lack the emotional knowledge, the raw guts of those who preceded them...
Vol. 68 • June 1985 • No. 8
