On Dance
JACOBS, LAURA A.
On Dance CHALLENGING BALLET'S NUMERICS BY LAURA A. JACOBS when Merce Cunningham created Arcade for the Pennsylvania Ballet last year as part of the National Choreography Project, he did not...
...They really are in another world...
...In its physical aspect it is even decorative, yet the underlying philosophy is clearly one of discipline and logic...
...The Pennsylvania dancers are gorgeously wound up, full-throated mechanisms who perform as though in a palace instead of a ruin...
...But Force Field, costumed in white and lit in shades of heavenly blue, takes an outward direction—into the ozone layer...
...Accompanied by an ominous darkening of the stage, the scene is both comic and terrible...
...Its Orientalizing set and costumes seemed to equate industrial progress with Zen selflessness...
...In New York Cunningham strives for a weighty, even brusque effect...
...It's a heightening effect, physically and dramatically—Cunningham theater at its enigmatic best...
...As our surprise at this maneuver wears off, we find ourselves transfixed by the gorgeously jackknifed line of this dancer's elevated body...
...Cage's music here sounds like a synthesized Celtic jig...
...Force Field consists of a series of movement motifs which, though expertly layered and segued (to another Reich score), seemforcedintothedesign...
...He is all legato continuity...
...When Arcade entered the repertory of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company during its March run at New York's City Center, it was apparent to those who had seen the original performance in Philadelphia that a radical translation had taken place...
...Set to John Cage's anticlassical pings, knocks and tickings (which had some Philadelphians clucking aboutalack of melody), Arcade employs Cunningham's usual lexicon of steps and a syntax of arithmetically arranged movement phrases...
...Arcade thus exemplifies the principle implicit in all of Cunningham's work: A structurally sound dance takes care of itself...
...So fascinating is their close-limbed journey—apotheosized as an exploration of the celestial space around the ballerina, her aura—thatwe unconsciously write off the larger group of dancers opposite...
...she, a crescendo and rest...
...The dancers, costumed simply in black tank leotards, realized curvilinear limb and body arrangements while pursuing floor patterns that defined an angular grid...
...In recent years Dean has been heavily influenced by ritual dance and movement...
...Night was unsettling because its Utopian atmosphere was belied by a rhythmic drive connoting dread anonymity...
...Neartheendof Grange ?Ve a startling shift in visual levels occurs: A woman is abruptly raised up by a group of men, as if she were a figure about to be placed on a pyre...
...a plie is not simply a bent knee, it is pillowy, questioning...
...It was, rather, one of tone and priorities...
...On a broader level, solos and duets are inflected to bring those who dance them forward, like main subjects in a bas relief...
...The vision it offers of small measures coping with spatial vastness has an equanimous and soothing tone...
...With each shift in pattern, the momentum dissipates...
...The discontinuity of tone hinted at the experience of a sudden mental flowering...
...Single file lines came out from each side of the stage in a gradual, inevitable tread, as if drawn to forbidden fruit...
...Choreographed to a brooding score by Steve Reich, it successfully combined turbulence with aloofness...
...The Cunningham performance flattened those curls into tensile currents, thereby reducing the dance to its dramatic underpinnings...
...Wherever a ganglion or heart should be, Force Field has a computer chip...
...Impact marked a distancing from the more atavistic side of ritual, from the brawn so to speak...
...Instead, he fashioned a work of mystery and depth that would do honor to the Pennsylva-nians' repertoire and, ultimately, to his own...
...Force Field, the work Dean choreographed for the Joffrey Ballet this season, pales in comparison...
...One simply can't trace this dance's mechanics back to a moment of conception, as one could, say, with Night, a masterpiece Dean made for the Joffrey back in 1980...
...Fielding Sixes, displaying undiminished loveliness, has returned to the Cunningham repertory...
...Yet at the same time it made a sly comment on contemporary ballet, whose increasingly athletic demands threaten to turn dancers into pyrotech-nical drones...
...In fact, her dance last year for the Brooklyn Academy of Music's Next Wave Festival, was lucid and beautiful...
...She steps defiantly out of row, chases and shoves him, then returns to line...
...Meeting center, the pairs erupted into a spiky, asymmetrical step that carried them downstage...
...The many hiatuses in Cage's music also inspire a pervasive feeling of quiet that is picked up by the decor: a pale gray backdrop, dove-gray unitards with big white X's on them, and a obelisk downstage right that accentuates the cryptic nature of Cunningham' s choreographic strategies by casting a steady shadow over the dancers...
...Dean is at her best when she situates her dances in metaworlds, hypothetical states of being...
...He staggers clumsily, perhaps lost or despondent...
...They float through the dance and then evanesce...
...Though hardly lacking in complexity, Fielding Sixes doesn't etch any precise images or display rhythmic fireworks...
...While the steps are diminutive, mostly skips, jetes and emboite turns, the field of space commanded is immense and constantly changing...
...Night had an idea at its core: how an individual can become absorbed into a steely group dynamic...
...Cunningham's dancers follow the various paths like bloodhounds tracking down a Platonic ideal...
...aura Dean, if less consistent than Cunningham, is in many ways equally intriguing...
...It seems astonishingly naive to glory in escalating orders of energy the way Force Field does.OrisDean perhaps trying to insinuate yet another criticism of contemporary ballet...
...Classical ballet considers chance an intrusion, as the Pennsylvanians demonstrate...
...The difference in the two performances was not one of commitment...
...Consider the contrasting treatment of the following passage: In Philadelphia a woman moves upstage right, closely shadowed by a man who encircles her in a tight chain of steps, rearranging her as he goes: simultaneously, three pairs move in unison on the other side of the stage...
...More pinball alley than classic architectonic, A rcade defies ballet's neat geometries, whacks its numeric systems out of orbit...
...One suspects they are bits of Cunningham's own history: his childhood, his years in other companies...
...Indeed, the Cunningham troupe's departure from the Pennsylvanians' style and esthetic philosophy was so great that, were it not for the common costumes, set, music, and title, one might fail to notice it was the same work...
...A world premiere, Grange Eve, was also on the City Center bill...
...When the pace slowed, toward the middle, we saw the tempo of human pondering...
...A developpe is not only unfurled lovingly, it breathes deeply at its height...
...The ballet dancers performed with a characteristic com-pulsiveness that yielded a highly articulated Arcade replete with ornamental curls, crests and moments of intrigue...
...And where Phrases ventures brazenly onto indeterminate terrain, Grange Eve confines itself to reassuringly familiar ground...
...The dancers move in perhaps the most symmetrical and uniform floor patterns ever choreographed by Cunningham, putting us in mind of some ghostly clan doing a boundless reel...
...The passage, purposefully rendered prosaic, resonates now in a modern way, the way of Beckett...
...Her most powerful dances seem to intimate that the only direction left for us to go is inward—provocative news for an avant garde festival...
...For Cunningham, in fact, the two are equivalent: Time means the working of chance, which is the consummate organizer of hierarchies and cares little about tradition...
...The obelisk that looms in both productions signals time and hierarchy as Arcade's deep concerns...
...Physical proximity is simply one of many measures of affinity among his dancers...
...Once we have seen this dance it gently lingers, Brigadoon-like, in the recesses of our minds...
...they are trained to locate and accent the swell within a phrase...
...Though their steps were fast and exacting, requiring a dispassionate attack, the dancers never resembled automatons...
...they could both be described as "refined" or "deliberate" without equivocation...
...Such productions are as close to spectacle a la Cecil B. De Mille as Cunningham gets...
...For them, all steps are not created equal...
...Almost all of the company's members are brought on and off stage in a steady melodious manner that at times results in choking visual density...
...Exquisite passions don't figure...
...Hard to forget is the sequence in which a young woman bullies a man about the stage, amid a group of dancers who stand in forest rows facing the audience...
...Grange Eve is playful in character, possessing neither Phrases' ambiguities nor its quality of aggressive self-enhancement (in Phrases Cunningham makes rumination look lush...
...This dance is forever starting over, like a video game...
...The patterns traced out by the dancers— squares, circles, etc.—are easily grasped...
...Where Impact was grave, Force Field is glib...
...An esthetic point has been forced and made...
...Our attention is fixed on the lone couple, whose painstakingly coordinated movements imply deep intimacy...
...Impact's mood spun out like a spider's uniquely fine and unbreakable skein...
...She is able to endow these worlds with psychological reality by exploiting her understanding of ritual dance...
...It depicts both the surging quality and abrupt leaps of inference that are characteristic of human reasoning...
...A kind of furious innocence is at its reins, steering the dancers, who are part ion, part angel, into ever changing and always unintelligible patterns...
...Nor did he saddle it with merely another program filler...
...With the circumflex of delicate comovement removed from the isolated couple, our attention is freed to take in the other pairs as well...
...Although Arcade does not have a breath of a story, it nonetheless manages to convey a sense of the past and to suggest the quality of ripeness we associate with ballet...
...Self-contained events materialize in Grange Eve like objects in a seance...
...This is one of Cunningham's large-canvas creations, recalling last year's Phrases...
...On Dance CHALLENGING BALLET'S NUMERICS BY LAURA A. JACOBS when Merce Cunningham created Arcade for the Pennsylvania Ballet last year as part of the National Choreography Project, he did not patronize the company by giving it a cellophane-wrapped popularization of his own style...
...He makes some overt references to technique, yet it is the network of veiled allusions to narrative structuring that gives this piece its self-referential character...
Vol. 69 • June 1986 • No. 9
