On Dance
JACOBS, LAURA
On Dance DOGGED DUALISTS BY LAURA JACOBS Paul Taylor's two new offerings for his latest month-long engagement at the City Center, Minikin Fair and Speaking in Tongues, continued his...
...These two deviant roles aside, he unquestionably has assumed a patriarchal aura...
...It is impossible to imagine a season without him...
...Jaffe, in fact, has never looked more mindlessly overblown...
...If by the end of Act I we are not aware of these questions (or of Siegfried's Romanticnihilism, however nascent), we're not going to understand ho w or why Odette answers them in Act II...
...Taylor was reportedly bowled over by Patton's evocative track, which layers bits of distantly heard radio music, storm-warning static, ominous pedal chords, angelic choral work, water droplets, and televangelist rhetoric...
...Like ABT's old David Blair/Oliver Smith rendition, it is a fairly conservative reading of Tchaikovsky's Romantic ballet...
...Taylor is dazzling when he is subversive...
...Although Tongues is not a masterpiece, as some have hailed it, forapiece about 50 minutes long it is impressively structured and gains depth from Matthew Patton's strongly atmospheric tapecollage...
...And there are cameos of familial tenderness, delicate oneto-one gestures such as a hand laid upon an arm or a head upon a breast, that likewise stud Taylor's Baroque music dances...
...If anything, Mikhail Baryshnikov's interpretation of Marius Petipa and Lev Ivanov's traditional choreography intends to make the action more logical...
...On the fingers of one of his hands the word "love" was tattooed, and it wrestled with "hate" on theother...
...What follows is a series of dances portraying forms of conversion, coercion and, ultimately, corruption...
...Christine Dunham, in her turn as Odette, paired with Bolshoi guest Andris Liepa as Siegfried, looked beautiful and danced with thoughtful immediacy, but lacked elegance in legato and a mastery of scale...
...Taylor's reverend is somewhat less malevolent than Mitchum's—in fact, Chaib and Gillis may be stand-ins for the choreographer, whose repertory could be compared to a church where forces of good and evil battle...
...A year ago, the antidote to Brandenburgs, with its contemplation of divine order and passionate camaraderie, was the poisonous, sexual zoomorphism of Counterswarm, a title suggesting an evening of the score, a counterbalancing...
...But viscerally they do not work, because Tchaikovsky was making points about good and bad faith, not dual natures...
...I like the naturalistic ending, too, when the swan-maidens, released from their spell by Odette's self-sacrifice, become conscious of their newly regained human forms...
...since they are left underdrawn, to be fleshed out by the audience's recollection of the past stagings, the lightness of the surroundings further washes out the characters...
...Gillis is now in so many productions that he is practically the linchpin of the repertory...
...The soapbubble pastels and relentless clowning of Minikin Fair are featherweight compared to the expressive heaviness of Tongues, costumed by Santo Loquasto in earth tones of dust-gray to burnt brown...
...Seriousness is worn without pause, and that wears us out...
...No Taylor man, or woman for that matter (including the incomparable Kate Johnson), has the rich fertile curl and gargantuan stretch within a phrase that gives Gillis his grace and strange gravity...
...The jumps and twitches we identify with Last Look accent the orgy scene and the pastor's solos, thus communicating both the conventional anarchy of sex and the existential anarchy of a religious zealot unmoored from righteousness...
...Taylor's double-dealing charm recalls the preacher played by Robert Mitchurn in the movie Night of the Hunter...
...In addition, Baryshnikov has taken Odile out of a black tutu—the better to trick Siegfried with...
...Gillis also took on the role of the Father in Big Bertha, and it is crushing to watch him degenerate into evil...
...The dance is set in a high school gym / meeting hall...
...and a mask dance, in which each dancer wears two faces, has been introduced into Act III...
...That is the Taylor Speaking in Tongues could have used...
...Tongues literally ends on the floor, with the dancers on their backs, pulling folded-up chairs over themselves like coffin lids...
...When Taylor premieres more than one work in a season he seems to feel compelled to present extreme dichotomies: faith and disbelief, innocence and experience...
...its impact does not come near the pornographic implications of the Father's shirttails hanging out in Bertha...
...Both these masquerades are meant to foreshadow Von Rothbart's dirty deed, the substitution of his daughter Odile for Odette at the ball...
...This pastel conception would work well enough if the interactions of Prince Siegfried, theQueenMother, Benno, and the Tutor were more sharply delineated...
...Curly haired, Celtically handsome Christopher Gillis is the more sympathetic preacher, though Elie Chaib's large, stark profile lends a portentous, unbending tone to his less sensitively danced performancethatisequallyright...
...As a result, the traditional Black Swan pas de deux boasts a more Odette-ish silver swan...
...Amanda McKerrow and Wes Chapman, both sterling classicists, were the waitedfor couple...
...He's simply amazing in Brandenburgs and A Musical Offering, also partofthe City Centerprogram...
...American Ballet Theater (ABT) opened its 49th season at the Metropolitan Opera House with a new production of Swan Lake...
...PierLuigi Samaritani, who has designed an effectively gothic lakeside and a sophisticated Act III ballroom, opens the ballet in a kind of Never Never Land: The castle park is shades of lilac rinsed in gold and could have come out of The Sleeping Beauty...
...Apparently it was assumed that everyone knows the story, or that it would be told with such clarity no one would need a synopsis...
...One can admire, though, the positively spooky opening of Act IV, with the swans palely rising out of a thick bed of mist—a bit of Transylvania in the Rhineland...
...Big Bertha, revived this year, touches on no less unsettling a subject—incest specifically and, more broadly, the cozy innocence of the American dream...
...His ardent, technically acute understanding of Taylor's style grounds every dance he appears in...
...Tongues is admirably sustained and performed, yet there is something flat about it...
...I miss the glamour of the black, the thrill of a spider spinning her web of deceit, and I fail to see what the production has gained by the change...
...The first is a madcap Medieval romp on the green, the second a sinister exposition of the use and abuse of religion (bits from Jimmy Swaggart's sermons vein the taped score...
...He is not merely keeping the equilibrium—it's as if he's loading dances into the Ark in complementary pairs...
...there are no overt Freudian interpolations or relevance-enhancing anachronisms...
...It isn't that the two ever play on the same program, or that audiences somehow demand the sweet with the sour...
...Curfew strikes as the preacher's black silhouette eclipses a harsh light coming in the door...
...Some interesting cadenzas notwithstanding, though, the production plays slightly off-key...
...Much has been made over the lack of a scenario in the Met Stagebill...
...If the moral questions raised by the brooding, lengthy Tongues are ponderous, then, lo, the midsummer silliness of Minikin Fair is the airy relief...
...Big Bertha leaves you floored...
...Folding chairs break the space...
...Unfortunately, Act I is so vague in temporal placement and character definition that this Swan Lake never recovers...
...Why is Siegfried melancholy, and what does he seek...
...Tongues needs some relief and greater compositional involvement from Taylor, who here seems to have worked with his mind but not his heart...
...On Dance DOGGED DUALISTS BY LAURA JACOBS Paul Taylor's two new offerings for his latest month-long engagement at the City Center, Minikin Fair and Speaking in Tongues, continued his tradition of presenting a bright work in tandem with a dark one...
...For all that he slights these important early characterizations, the idea of identity does occupy Baryshnikov on a thematic level...
...Taylor exploits his various choreographic styles to telegraph his points of view...
...This punchless image is a weak writer's workshop ending (ashes to ashes / death of individualism...
...On opening night Susan Jaffe and Ross Stretton were, respectively, vulgar and dull...
...they brought passion and intellect to the roles, albeit not originality...
...When Elie Chaib or Christopher Gillis, who alternate as "A Man of the Cloth," appear in the shadowy doorway of Speaking in Tongues, legs apart and chin up.attractively monolithic, you can't help thinking of Mitchum, who also cast along and weirdly charismatic shadow...
...Nevertheless, it is shockingly funny and uproariously overscaled, biting into the apple and spitting seeds at the audience...
...Overreaching in places, stunted in others, the ABT's well-intentioned new Swan Lake lacks soul...
...This is a community under siege, and mostly happy to be so...
...he has an adolescent's heightened responses and kooky logic, a gowith-it momentum in the steps...
...Taylor's treatment of his subject, despite glimmers of sympathy for the minister and his deluded followers, is trite...
...In Act I Siegfried teases his tutor (Alexander Minz in a thin, foppish portrayal) by donning a mask that looks like the later-to-appear evil magician Von Rothbart...
...Everyone freezes...
...The curtain rises on a high school hop...
...Granted, Patton's score does not allow much room for wit, yet the nimble Taylor has never had trouble working around that kind of obstacle in the past...
...Rather, this habit of Taylor's appears to transcend program policy and reflect his vision of repertory as an elastic, animate world striving for wholeness...
...The interlocking patterns and strict formality borrowed from ritualistic works like Ruins and Profiles are used in the full group dances to metaphorically signify the closed circulatory system that is this society...
...An incoherent biblical text (a sort of writing in tongues) covers the planked walls, its readability depending on the focus of Jennifer Tipton's dooming, lancing lighting...
Vol. 72 • June 1989 • No. 10
