On Dance
JACOBS, LAURA A.
On Dance SUMMER SHRIEKS AND SHTICKS BY LAURA A. JACOBS A man attired in military blue and red, shoulders thrown back, hands gripping imaginary reins, performs a high Spanish trot in a...
...Their week-long stint was disappointingly placid, leaving the impression that this traditionally great company is at low ebb right now...
...it served up little more than clichéd shrieks into the silence, de rigueur scatology, and anonymous beings with little that was human about them...
...Garden of Earthly Delights was based on a triptych by Hieronymus Bosch...
...Does anyone want to hear that...
...We knew we were in Clarke territory...
...One can hardly expect good performances from these dancers, so misguided and ungrateful are Nureyev's restagings of the classics...
...When they weren't harassing the females who came into their ambit, they ignored them...
...All her works are, like Lusthaus, denatured representations of something else...
...Bausch's devils runheavy risks of banality—we've seen and heard so much by now—but her idylls come out of the blue and catch us unawares...
...This was a stunning departure for Bausch, whose company usually performs on a surface strewn with dirt or rotting leaves...
...It was an image of enchantment, of buoyancy, of unbroken community—Eden as conceived by Lewis Carroll...
...In Miracolo Clarke once again collaborated with set and costume designer Robert Israel and lighting designer Paul Gallo...
...it is precisely what her dance-theater is about...
...They first came on stage in dresses, hopping through the flowers as if they were rabbits, and remained in charge of the action throughout...
...Most of the action consisted of transitions: a tender scene becoming violent, an expression of physical beauty curdling into ugliness, a moment of innocence undermined (as when a boy fed pasta to a Christ figure, who then left his cross a crazed, misshapen animal...
...None of this was in Lusthaus...
...the Oskar Kokoschkas, with their strange transparent film of gold...
...It marked the year's low point for classical ballet at the Met...
...None of this is supported by Tchaikovsky's music, but then Nureyev has never been one to listen very closely...
...By now an identifiable look has emerged: walls aslant, cones of gaseous light, shadows lengthening around corners, every object separate and a stranger to every other, as in a surrealist painting...
...Clarke's formlessness would not be so objectionable if her images had pungency...
...The gentle dancers of the Royal Danish Ballet kicked things off with two full-length works, Napoli and Abdalluh...
...The lack of structure in most of Bausch's pieces can be vexing: Repetition, the sole compositional device she consistently relies on, carries one just so far...
...no doubt Sigmund is spinning in his grave...
...The miracle here was that love ever developed at all, with sexual types as illsuited to each other as these...
...The Hunger Artist winged through a handful of Kafka stories...
...Bausch makes us feel this in the chaos she sets in motion—seemingly unbounded by the wings and proscenium (dancers come down into the audience from time to time)—as well as in her bizarre, recurring shticks, which are like never-ending vaudeville turns in hell...
...Immediacy has never been a problem for Pina Bausch...
...No less than novelists William Burroughs and Jerzy Kosinski, Bausch takes it upon herself to push limits, to play out the horrors whose potential is woven into our social practices, even our childhood games...
...Sex- and death-obsessed, they took turns making love with a skeleton...
...The full emotional presence she requires of them gives her works an upclose quality...
...People passed through and did odd, sometimes attractive things (theater critics were particularly enchanted with the naked bodies rolling in a sexual embrace...
...His admirers like to call his Swan Lake and Nutcracker "Freudian...
...Under Nureyev's direction Swan Lake has become a homosexual fantasy...
...A naked man wearing the head of a fish is alone on the stage, lying in a sea-bed of mist...
...Slowly one of his hands curls over, loses its thumb and becomes a cloven foot...
...There was a great deal of game-playing (including a particularly impassioned session of Redlight, Greenlight) and one-upmanship...
...The women appeared either nude and languidly self-possessed or costumed as fleshy flowers, exuding fragrant hysteria...
...I can't help wondering how these performers warm up in the wings—primal screaming...
...Take that woman strapped into an accordion and clad only in high heels and underpants who would promenade wordlessly through Carnations now and then...
...Bausch appeared to be saying: One of you wished for her, so here she is...
...Meanwhile, severe figures with German shepherds in leash patrolled the stage, checking passports from time to time...
...There was a point in Carnations when the dancers, seated in chairs whose backs were flush with the floor, held hands in a circle...
...His Nutcracker takes E. T. A. Hoffman to grotesque extremes, turning the adults into vampires and having the rats rip the clothes off Clara...
...Clarke filled the stage with mists and white walls and window sashes opening on emptiness...
...I must say I detected very little love in Carnations (but then I did not notice much in Miracolo either...
...Itgave us the director at her best, capturing the tone and texture of her subject with marvelous economy and some poetic impact...
...This two-hour-long intermissionless piece was originally titled-Premieres because, according to Bausch, it is about first loves, first times, etc...
...Notably distasteful was Glen Tetley's La Ronde for the Canadians, which transformed Arthur Schnitzler's wry fin desiècleconfection into a series of steely, vulgar grappling matches...
...theGustavKlimts, voluptuously materialistic...
...She kept turning up at the most absurd times...
...What Clarke has always lacked is immediacy...
...She has often said her dancers are chosen for their personalities as well as their body type and ability...
...The dancer-actors moved through this space in a kind of somnolent self-consciousness...
...Clarke had previously seen a larger version of the exhibit in the Austrian capital, and that was clearly her point of departure for the piece...
...Although the dance was created for the entire company, I remember it as belonging entirely to the men...
...the audience is drawn in willy-nilly, and spontaneity is secured...
...Its clowns were aggressive beasts—not products of devolution, as in Lusthaus, but creatures in their natural state...
...She can handle narrative deftly, as was evident in her version of The Seven Deadly Sins, but she is happier when relentlessly piling one sequence on top of another...
...Everything is permissible...
...Everyone faced the sky, flowers drooping over their heads...
...Bausch continually reminds me of the father's line in The Brothers Karamazov, a line that reverberates throughout the work of Dostoyevsky: "Everything is permissible...
...This summer Pina Bausch's company came to the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) as part of the first New York International Festival of the Arts...
...his back hunches and his trot is reduced to a crawl...
...It was like constantly being told, "No...
...The stage at BAM was literally covered with silk carnations...
...What it seemed to be mainly concerned with was the different ways adults remain children, and the longing they harbor to return to Eden, or to the womb...
...Alas, Miracolo was her weakest work to date in this respect...
...She seemed to be exploring how these two contrary qualities depend on and exploit each other...
...It also revealed her at her worst, telling us things we already knew or could learn better elsewhere—in this case from the art exhibit "Vienna 1900," on view at the Museum of Modern Art while Vienna: Lusthaus was being performed at the Public Theater...
...Amphetamines...
...Cut out the last half-hour, where Bausch digressed from this theme and concentrated too plainly on the performers as individuals, and Carnations would be one of her tightest, least obscure works, if not one of her more intense...
...Bringing the summer schedule to a close were the Royal National Ballet of Spain and the National Ballet of Canada, both second-rate companies...
...Bausch set up her series of vignettes to contrast states of innocence and cynicism, both past and present...
...But Cunningham forces no moral/psychological dilemmas on us, only formal ones...
...No surprises...
...Yet think of the paintings it unabashedly piggy-backed on: the Egon Schieies, in which stretched sinews under shrinking flesh proclaim theurgency of desire in a culture that treated it as art or folly...
...Dostoyevsky meant that whatever evil could be imagined might indeed be committed...
...We are grateful for them...
...A vibrating impressionist pink, Carnations recalled the field of poppies in The Wizard of Oz...
...From beginning to end it was cool and calculated—it contained nothing burningly resolute (Kokoschka), nothing gleamingly, repellently sated (Klimt), nothing close to madness (Schiele...
...True, we esteem the work of Merce Cunningham, whose structures evade us and whose disjointed, blithe convergences make Bausch's reiterations look positively homespun...
...He twists, he rolls, he tenses, all the while partially obscuredby thecurlingvapors...
...Admittedly, we got much the same in The Hunger Artist, but there it was accompanied by readings from Kafka—a most generous context...
...Miracolo began where the man on the Lippizaner left off...
...The center has not held, the hour of the rough beast has come round: Cultured, effete Vienna has given way to Hitler...
...Germany, of course, is haunted by the thought, and Bausch is surely an adequate antidote to any forgetfulness that might overcome her compatriots...
...On Dance SUMMER SHRIEKS AND SHTICKS BY LAURA A. JACOBS A man attired in military blue and red, shoulders thrown back, hands gripping imaginary reins, performs a high Spanish trot in a circle— a dressage rider on a Lippizaner...
...Miracolo d'Amore, the long-promised work that premiered this spring at the Public Theater, featured hump-backed commedia dell'arte clowns borrowed from drawings by Tiepolo...
...Clarke here went beyond mere artfulness: She touched on something deep, something —immediate...
...Ironically, audiences liked Lusthaus because it was so pretty and undisturbing...
...Still, she knows grimness is not all...
...Wecome from the ocean, the image said, and we must fight powerful currents to return to primordial breeding grounds...
...Only in one scene did Miracolo rise to memorability...
...That is a scene from Martha Clarke's Vienna: Lusthaus, the most successful of her acclaimed dance-theater creations, done last year in New York...
...His most ferocious moments come to us purified, as through a prism...
...The season was dominated by three weeks of the Paris Opera Ballet, with Rudolf Nureyev at the helm...
...I saw Carnations, one of the two works performed (the other was Viktor...
...Political ramifications were more than hinted at...
...Who was she...
...BACK UP AT staid old Lincoln Center, the Metropolitan Opera House's summer dance engagements were the most dismal in recent memory...
Vol. 71 • August 1988 • No. 14
