On Dance
JACOBS, LAURA A.
On Dance RIDING THE NEXT WAVE BY LAURA A. JACOBS THE CONCEPT of the Next Wave Festival, put on by the Brooklyn Academy of Music (bam), raises several questions. Are the artists supposed to be the...
...Live performances on traditional Irish instruments supplement the tape...
...One longs to see him in a traditional ballet...
...This full-company piece, in which Cunningham himself dances, has a robust family feeling...
...Some of the angels sport identical white masks and pleated robes reminiscent of old master paintings...
...Missing a protagonist we can identify with, Angels lacks resonance as a morality tale...
...others, perhaps of a lower order, have lizard faces and carry long, cone-shaped purses...
...The fourth New Wave Festival, now under way, is a streamlined affair, with an emphasis on chamber-scale works...
...If Clark's vision bears any resemblance to the real thing, then hell's awfulness may be its utter lack of ideas...
...Running side by side with The Angels of Swedenborg in a different bam space was another Next Wave presentation, No Fire Escape in Hell...
...The composer's incantatory voice, luminous and windblown, wells up from the music's center...
...A muscular workshop ambience fills the stage, from the wooden stools knotted with sweaters and leggings to the rehearsal rhythms of the choreography...
...Early in the Next Wave Festival, too, came Ping Chong's The Angels ofSwe-denborg, and I made sure not to miss it...
...The multi-membered, genital-painted Hell's Angel-style constructions really do situate the piece in a Boschian underworld on the cusp of Judgment Day...
...Inspired by the musings of the 18th-century Swedish scientist and mystic Emmanuel Swedenborg and the late Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges, Angels is premised on the notion that angels and devils derive from and are continuous with the human race...
...When does an artist become too mainstream for inclusion...
...She attempts to escape, but fails, and you are surprised at how saddened you are by her fall...
...As a choreographer, Clark is disappointing...
...As the man goes about his business in the office, Chong counterpoints his material concerns with spiritual play in the corral...
...It is most effective in those moments when we are drawn to Chong's curious choreographic images...
...Undaunted by these ambiguities, the festival has taken the approach of a young bride: something new, something borrowed (from Europe), something blue...
...One of the few effective elements of the ballet is the costume design by BodyMap...
...each has a unique personality drawn in the tilt of the head, position of the hands or spring in the step...
...Chong appeals to our nostalgia for a world so sentient and simply halved, and the measure of his success is the depth of the longing he uncovers in us...
...Stage right there is a small modern office fitted out with the latest in high tech equipment and a Times Square-style message board that flashes brand and place names connoting contemporary pleasures, along with Swedenborgian quotations...
...Dressing a glissade-jete in black latex does not make it demonic—that takes a choreographic context...
...Are the artists supposed to be the best at what they do or merely the most outrageous (or both...
...she spurred a great debate in New York over the beauty, or therapeutic power, of ugliness...
...Clark is a classical ballet dancer, formerly with the Royal Ballet...
...There meanings disclose themselves in their own good time and unassuming actions—such as Catherine Kerr wrapping her legs back around her partner with the fluid reflex of a sea anemone when he lifts her out of an arabesque— can be majestic...
...This is a score of sights and smells as well as sounds, resplendent-ly Joycean...
...His audience at bam, safety pins in ears and black-booted, were undoubtedly there for outre entertainment...
...The angels pass through their abstract patterns in the clean, ritualized style of Bugaku dancing, which lifts them to a common plane of energized sensation...
...Going to Bausch became a form of penance for some...
...Cunningham, in fact, invokes the spirit of his Events, those legendary evenings when he extemporaneously mixes passages from many of his pieces to create a new, boundless dance...
...You see the patterns as self-perpetuating, and hope nothing will happen to disrupt them...
...His much talked about feet are unusually arched, but of greater interest is the melting, adagio quality of his movement...
...The seduction is hushed and beautiful, an erotic pas de deux that involves no touching, save for the ravishing moment when he strokes her wings...
...Roaratorio is not one of Cunningham's sublime creations, but it is a warm and gala celebration of a once revolutionary, still powerful esthetic...
...One wonders what they would have made of Chong...
...by unde-fining dance and music—or rather, by allowing chance and mathematics to do the defining—this pair brought about the first wave...
...While it's hard to know what Madonna is committed to, other than maintaining her celebrity standing, it's pretty clear that Clark likes to dance, is good at it, and wants to do it as outrageously as possible...
...Though unexpected, the programing of their recent Roara-torio, Anlrish Circus on Finnegans Wake was fitting: Cunningham and Cage have been a major source of artistic values for nearly all the Next Wavers...
...Cage's music, raw and elegant, is compounded of ocean waves, squalling babies, tolling bells, machine noises, barking dogs, laughing, and, of course, old Irish tenors...
...Michael Clark, its choreographer and creator, is a British import who keeps his hair cut to the skin and has Madonna's gift for self-marketing...
...government), and the lighting, by Charles Atlas, is a jumpy fire and brimstone...
...They move in a series of rounds...
...Ear-splitting music thunders (from a tape—the Yugoslav musicians who perform live with Clark were denied visas by the U.S...
...Little more than variations on the theme of anarchy, it piles gestural cliche upon gestural cliche as it strives to shock with various simulated sex acts...
...Except for a unifying coloration, Roaratorio does not make a framework for itself, nor does it noticeably develop any choreographicmotifs.Itsimplyjoinsin the bustle and brew of Joyce's universe...
...How Chong establishes the angelic hierarchy through the repetition of minute gestures is a lesson in stage economy...
...The festival opened with " something old"—Merce Cunningham and John Cage, those perennial avant-gardists, in collaboration...
...Last year was heavy on the blue, with Richard Foreman's flamboyantly scatological Birth of a Poet and almost a month of Pina Bausch's sex-and-self-hate Tanztheater...
...No Fire Escape in Hell has all the fury of a radical manifesto with none of the articulation...
...One also wonders whether the j uxtaposition of A ngels and No Fire Escape in Hell was in some way meant to instruct...
...The dancers' movements pick up the piecemeal structure of the music: Here more than anywhere else Cunningham has cut his compositional lines before they extend too long, get too serious...
...Chong's opening night was half-filled...
...The way Roaratorio blends lightheart-edness with gravity may be peculiarly Irish...
...Chong presents us with a modern man, a descendant of Swedenborg, who is visited by these creatures and eventually falls under their spell...
...Roaratorio keeps starting over, again and again, yet it somehow manages to achieve moments of consummate clarity—as in a quiet passage of slow, abstracted dancing, evocative of couples on a ballroom floor, yet so much more bare and incisive in its deliberateness...
...Chong is probably the most coherent multimedia artist around (he's a lot less precious than Robert Wilson...
...Clark's amateurish compositional devices not only defeat the contributions of his collaborators, they wear away any lingering appeal in the overall conception of the ballet...
...The festival was all but swallowed up by the German expressionism it imported: Angst crept into everything, even the postmodernism, though much of the American dance—handsomely done up in architectural sets and futuristic costumes—was unfortunately empty to begin with...
...Taking a maternal turn, it is re-presenting several young American groups from earlier years, while continuing to take risks on artists from abroad...
...the audacious vehicles he concocts for himself put his gifts on view without extending or challenging them...
...Could the gracile master be reminding us that his works, for all their cool abstraction, their freedom from narrative and other traditional props, nonetheless come from the heart...
...Angels is particularly chancy, dealing as it does with an essentially religious theme—not the most fashionable angle these days...
...Clark's performances were all sold out long before the Festival began...
...And how daring, after all, can you afford to be when an opera house has to be filled...
...The angels' ambulations are mostly confined to a large white corral filled with feathers that resemble virgin snow...
...He is somewhat less successful in attaching a Swedenborgian persona to the man in the office: We are never quite convinced that the goings-on we witness in the corral are his visions...
...At one point a lone angel runs across the shadowed field behind the corral, lantern in hand, and a fallen angel, or devil, tall and glittering in green-black robes, engages, charms, and ultimately transfixes her...
...it is certainly rare on the stage today...
...His work, blending technology and psychology, takes odd and provocative chances...
...Given its American premiere at the bam, Roaratorio is slyly deferential and amazingly good-natured, especially considering the Sturm und Drang that has so often dominated the festival...
Vol. 69 • November 1986 • No. 16
