On Dance
JACOBS, LAURA
On Dance FOLK MOVEMENTS BY LAURA JACOBS Because they often contain highly esoteric and idiosyncratic movement, modern and postmodern dance challenge the viewer. By contrast,...
...Both subjects converge in the Eagle Dance, the most lustrously pictorial work on the program...
...The style she originally developed, so revolutionary in the Ballet Russe-besotted '30s and '40s, has evolved into an exercise in spleen, anguish and futile hopes, impervious to delicacy and wit...
...She still makes her steps as basic as always, only now she has added a bit of ballet to the mix...
...Ultimately, though, we witness a brilliant, multilayered interpretation of Glass' music, as well as a breathtaking foray into speed and intensity...
...As one of the primary forces in an American postmodern dance that has greedily absorbed ethnic, and Eastern influences, the company exhibited a number of affinities with the previous visitors...
...Childs has said that Mayday synthesizes formal and narrative elements, but we do not feel the pull of narrative, merely a disengaging, uncertain tone...
...Dance is, in fact, represented here as inseparable from life...
...Along with fellow postmodems Laura Dean, Tricia Brown, David Gordon, and the magisterial Merce Cunningham, Childs stressed from the beginning a simplicity bordering on the pedestrian...
...nostalgia is comforting...
...Dressed in shades of red, white and blue, the work moves from one tableau to another in a blur that some critics have kindly called "Joycean...
...With all 200 members of the uniformed chorus present at all times, the stage was too cramped to accommodate more than an evening of reprise bits we had seen better rendered by the Moiseyev and the Georgian State Dancers...
...He holds the drum sideways so that it looks like a wheel, and the point is made: As inventions go, the two are equally important...
...The following week (September 19October 1) the American Indian Dance Theater opened the fall season at the Joyce in lower Manhattan...
...It is sad to watch: Graham's alphabet of motion, the foundation of American dance, has become a waxy exaggeration of itself, pretentiously solemn, yet theatrically souped-up...
...Lively, colorful and innocent, it is based on archaic customs out of sync with today's global village...
...No thoughts ofthat kind, alas, were inspired by the U.S...
...A provocatively suggestive work, you could say it captures the essence of the program...
...It is thus far removed from stylization or a codified technique...
...Later in the evening, the vital role played bytheideaof circularity in American Indian cosmology receives a more elaborate expression in the Hoop Dance...
...In a nice juxtaposition, the Lucinda Childs Dance Company arrived next (October 10-15) at the Joyce...
...Since the religious notions of ascendance and transcendence are closely identified with the physical act of flight, the recurring bird imagery and all those gorgeous feathers remind us of the spiritual content and ritualistic origins of so much Indian dance...
...Grands jetés and multiple pirouettes were out...
...Isadora Duncan would have spurned such ruins...
...He should stick to the early Graham story dances that always get a radiant glow, a whiff of life, from his pouncing natural attack...
...Four men wearing the black and white wings of bald eagles that have a span of about six feet move languorously about, dipping and folding their wings in unison...
...A rational hierarchy of steps was out...
...Although several critics compared them with the garb of Kabuki, the similarity is limited to scale...
...Flamenco's intensities are calculated flare-ups, premeditated thrusts of argument...
...That is its appeal, of course...
...Indeed, the performance made me remember why I don't go to see the Graham company much anymore...
...One wonders if Robert Wilson, too, did not learn something about tempo and scale from the Japanese...
...But the profusely feathered, lightweight, discordantly colored costumes of the Indians follow the dancers like ancestral spirits, accenting and amplifying movement, making it sacred...
...Mayday, the premiere on the program, looks diffuse next to the hungry arithmetic of "Dance #1...
...A young man creeps stealthily from the wings onto a darkened stage, where he locates a shallow drum—a bit of skin stretched over a circular rim...
...The chorus itself was noteworthy for its rhythmic nuance and sheer power, rather than harmonic subtlety—or any other sort of subtlety for that matter...
...Speed and attack are the measure of virtuosity...
...The title itself refers to the rustic communal play of Maypoledances, and, intriguingly, to danger...
...The American Indian Dance Theater, combining traditions from the Dakotas, the Southwest, the Great Plains, and Canada, presents us with a dance language that has no formulated grammar or consciously developed lexicon...
...debut (September 12-17) of the Alexandrov Red Army Song and Dance Ensemble at the New York City Center...
...The advance promotional material touted magnificent costumes—and they were...
...Lit a watercolor blue, the stage fills with billowing clouds...
...The performers appear promisingly on a smoky stage that has light coming down onto it as if through cracks in the ceiling...
...The fabulous, origami-like constructions of Kabuki—boxy, angular, encasing—hinder movement...
...Wearing diaphanous shifts and twirling in place, encircled by hand-held banners, they give the impression of pointing to dance history, to Isadora Duncan and her outdoor ceremonies...
...The dancers can emote—and they do, to the skies—but they cannot articulate...
...The piece is not formally constructed...
...Now her stage is an Ozymandian rubble of Egyptian profiles, Siamese squats and Cretan porpoise leaps...
...Mikhail Baryshnikov, in blue leggings, danced at the work's first showing and lent the evening some glamour, but the role was so flat even he could not save it...
...Disappointingly, these turn out to be lost allusions...
...It consists almost entirely of hops, bounces, a little balancing, and some off-axis spinning, with no pretense of connecting steps...
...The dancer finally spins into a perfect sphere of hoops, then bursts forth from it...
...It is strange to think that Martha Graham, who spent many summers in the southwestern United States observing and being inspired by Indian ritual and dance, has since the 1960s lapsed into a heavy, rigid technique that is completely antithetical to that influence...
...Unlike, say, flamenco, another folk form whose small movements are simple, Indian dance is not essentially rhythmic...
...Her former sharpness and coherence have dissolved...
...Rarely, though, do they expand the possibilities of dance, let alone alter our sense of its purpose...
...Be it the Moiseyev Ballet from the Soviet Union or the Ballet Folklorico from Mexico, the surprises of folk companies are athletic and sometimes poetic...
...Today Dean is the doyenne of glitzy ritual, Gordon's minimalism mainlines pop culture, and Brown's work is increasingly a flashy pyrotechnical display—but Childs remains quiet and uneffusive...
...it drifts in a state of permanent power, evoking an ideal fusion of animal instinct and human will...
...American Document, the premiere, exhibits leaden qualities in dismaying abundance...
...The stories it tells almost always involve symbolic struggles that end with victory on the battlefield or with the attainment of wisdom...
...By contrast, national dance is a stable, accessible form...
...At first it seems an obvious minimalist drill: Simple phrases are danced back and forth across the stage and slowly become more complex...
...The seeming spontaneity of the heel hitting the floor is the final effect of the way spine, hip and knee work in icy concert above...
...Whereas flamenco channels its wild energies into explicitly communicative moments, the structure of Indian dance, no less than its dream-borne content, appears to rise out of the unconscious...
...Simultaneously hopping and turning to a quick beat, a single dancer begins with one hoop, fluidly gathers up perhaps a hundred more, and manipulates them into ever-changing configurations...
...Still, there are enlightening moments that call our attention away from all the virtuosic tricks...
...So was music, pretty much, except for the eventual addition of drumbeats and the loopy melodies of Steve Reich and Philip Glass...
...The intense concentration required by the creations of such contemporary performers as Eiko and Koma is similarly traceable to Kabuki...
...The first offering enacts a creation-myth that has music and dance as its primal elements...
...She also continues to draw imagery from nature, as in her flower dances of 1987, and to explore the intricacies of repetition and multiplication in such pieces as "Dance #1 " fromZ)a«ce(1979), performed at the Joyce...
...Actually, it is a catch-all of Graham cliches punctuated by Cecilia Peck's readings from American texts, which are drowned out by the music...
...It is fascinating, for instance, to watch the Russian folk troupes that have come to this country recently and reflect upon the influence their conventions have had on classical ballet through figures like Igor Stravinsky and Sergei Prokofiev, Sergei Diaghilev and George Balanchine...
...A single drumbeat produces pictures of flowers, birds, beasts...
...Nevertheless, we had further evidence of this when the Martha Graham Dance Company opened its season at the City Center (October 3-22...
...When the soloists, many of them with world-class voices, stepped forward to sing, they seemed to enter a vacuum...
...This was "greatest hits" programing, with no attempt to frame the numbers in a context...
...Ten years after "Dance #1" Childs seems less to have gone beyond it than to have backed off, sideways...
...They flag us to the subtext of every work on the program: the acceptance that man is not above or below nature, he is one with it, part of an unbroken circle...
Vol. 72 • October 1989 • No. 16
