On Dance
JACOBS, LAURA A.
On Dance YEAR-END OFFERINGS BY LAURA A. JACOBS December is the month of The Nutcracker. Even at Macy's shoppers find the ubiquitous Gershwin medleys replaced by the "Waltz of the...
...There are echoes here of Walt Disney's movie classic Fantasia, especially in the "Dance of the Reed Pipes...
...Although the couple tends to perform nude, or wrapped roughly in sackcloth or muslin, there is nothing pedestrian about their useof stage space(and in the Lepercq, height...
...Hoffmann—edged dramatically in black, in mourning for a dream—is a self-contained world...
...Mikhail Baryshnikov's rather unsatisfactory version for American Ballet Theatre at least understands this catch...
...And in Thirst Eiko and Koma's wanting is heroic...
...Technically, Thirst is masterful...
...glitter is thrown, rose petals are strewn, and the dancers pop out of giant inanimate objects (a teapot, a cabbage) that are wheeled in...
...Eiko lets her head drop deeply back, as if to leech moisture from the sky...
...the organ plays on and the Bride of Frankenstein walks in—Rome burns and Nero fiddles...
...The lighting, running from various whites to yellow gold, effectively completes a sun-bleached, bled out, crumblingly dry stage picture, weak with wanting...
...The Nutcracker may rival The Red Shoes in providing the initial contact most people have with classical ballet...
...Both represent a romantic completion...
...If a choreographer hears all this, as George Balanchine did, we have a poetic event...
...Wilson has transplanted the epic from Babylonian times to what looks like Victorian England and has turned Gilgamesh (Martin Wuttke) into an idiot savant à la Pee Wee Herman...
...He is a wise man seeking truth, or perhaps a character in a fairy tale being sorely tested...
...Drosselmeyer, danced by Alexander Grant, is not only a ham, but smarmy to boot...
...Thirst is tough, sinewy, with a strong, clear current all the way through...
...His foot scratching along in the sand is a locust's cry...
...The Nutcracker, again...
...But the puppets are not at all out of line with the ballet...
...Tree, the BAM premiere, is different from Eiko and Koma's other dances in that it sits more squarely in Western traditions of myth...
...Even at Macy's shoppers find the ubiquitous Gershwin medleys replaced by the "Waltz of the Flowers" and the Trepak dance...
...Gilgamesh, in red velvet, babbles hysterical dadaist nonsense about marrying a whale...
...As he slowly disrobes we see that he is painted like Eiko...
...The looming backdrop of Thirst is a panel of fabric batiked a faded gold, a suggestion of ancient opulence in a now barren land, and the floor is covered with sand...
...A bed of leaves lies at its roots, and in these leaves is Eiko, back to the audience, naked, spreadeagled...
...Come to think of it, Gilgamesh's attraction to Enkidu, the man/beast, is not unlike Siegfried's to Odette, the Swan Queen...
...Tchaikovsky's music is shapely yet straightforward, tactile yet almost fearfully aware of time's winged chariot (we fly through the many scenes of Act I; only in Act II did Tchaikovsky and Petipa allow for some leisure...
...As part of the Sixth Annual Next Wave Festival at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), Eiko and Koma brought their double bill Thirst and Tree to the Lepercq Space in December...
...Nor is humor...
...She lolls with a faune's utter satisfaction, then nestles at the roots in so larval a position we no longer know what she is...
...Robert Wilson's latest work, The Forest, also premiered as part of the Next Wave Festival, is a retelling of the Gilgamesh epic, a return to nature apparently, but not too much...
...Ignore The Nutcracker's darker intonations, though—as too many productions do in striving for sweetness and light—and it ceases to have emotional resonance...
...But it is impressively seamless and it gives us Wilson having some fun...
...Thehigh and low pitches of existence are what Eiko and Koma listen for, what their bodies respond to...
...he can't keep his hands off Clara, and it's very disconcerting—you wish he would simply disappear...
...But despite the unrelentingly bleak sensations it gives off, the couple has dressed Thirst in shades of transcendence, and have seen fit to end it with an image of hope...
...Absent until now, Koma comes to the tree wrapped in a cloth...
...Much of its choreography is uninspired, and the ballet is costumed in sour, indeed sickly tones (the color of candies left too long in a pocket...
...In fact, it's hard to imagine either of them smiling...
...Cleverness is not in their ken...
...No, The Forest is not an important piece of theater...
...The son of a wealthy shipbuilder, he is surrounded by advisers and servants, and watches his workers from a huge conservatory window (shades of Louis XVI...
...You can't watch them in any kind of hurry, or expecting any overt or particularly literate messages...
...At its best Byrne's music has a plush, ravening tone that is not inappropriate here (and is thankfully unpretentious...
...The choreography is said to be " after the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo 1940 production...
...But both equate desire with fate (a twist on Novalis' pronouncement, "Character is destiny") and seem to say, as did Jung, "fantasy is not nothing," it makes us grow...
...The work is dominated by a huge leaf-covered tree trunk that hangs from the fly space...
...They are the same breed...
...she is all neck, a sight that might be beautiful if it weren't so horrifyingly needy...
...The company also knows enough to bypass sentimentality for what is macabre in the story (when the mice overrun the living room, it'saflood, a swarm, a horror) and for what is unearthly...
...Wilson allows himself to be more offthe-wall than usual, and in collaboration with composer David Byrne, this strangely works...
...This was another of Robert Joffrey's final projects, and a sentimental journey it is...
...The Salzburg Marionette Theatre presented aNutcrackerin New York— as well as The Magic Flute and The Barber of Seville—during its recent brief engagement at Lincoln Center's Alice Tully Hall...
...These two dancers are an acquired taste...
...Still, his reworking of the grand (Sugar Plum) pas de deux, his making it a pas de trois in which Clara transfers her affections from the patriarchal Drosselmeyer to the Nutcracker Prince, has its ear to Tchaikovsky...
...Following a run of mixed repertory, the Joffrey Ballet presented its year-old Nutcracker for three weeks at the City Center...
...It was another triumph for invention slowed almost to a standstill, and for ravishing imagery spun out of air and time...
...Where Nutcracker is surreal, The Red Shoes is plain mad...
...The two frequently reach out for each other, and it almost seems that their hands are moving right through one another's body...
...Certainly it is the more hospitable experience...
...Such highbrow derision notwithstanding, the composer's luminous love letter to E.T.A...
...The connection is not specious, considering the similarities between cartoon animation and puppets: the common attempt to be human, the superhuman potential...
...Thirst and Tree make an excellent complementary pairing for a program —the one parched, the other succulent...
...Eventually, he lies down near her, hiding or hibernating...
...The design is souped up...
...Wilson just goes with his instinct to rein in all the parallels— the Gilgamesh epic and Industrial England, the Faust legend and German romanticism—and drive them like a fourin-hand...
...Death is folded into the music's downward chromatics and where Balanchine sees this pas as the apogee of a vision, its most vital imagining before a dissolve into reality, Baryshnikov sees it as the death of sexual innocence...
...Except for the grand pas de deux, however, the dances that matter have been choreographed by Gerald Arpino, blandly...
...They are opposites texturally as well...
...Clara and her brother are danced by adults who try, and fail miserably, to mix with the rest of the children...
...Fire and brimstone billows in the conservatory...
...they are merely extending the metaphor, so that we see where everything was heading from the outset—to the realm of the ideal and, of course, the impossible...
...The wind that has replaced the insect sounds in the background gives us the feeling that Koma has been blown in by something fateful, or maybe instinctual...
...That's the problem...
...In this case a portrait of the home of the young artist in Act I, the fruits of his imagination in.Act II...
...Everyone at the company with two cents seems to have put them in, and the passing nods to other productions create an air of whimsicality, not to mention self-indulgence...
...Her body is painted with smudges of red and brown, reminding us of the similarly splotched Faune in Nijinsky's L'Après-midi d'un faune...
...The piece is about the grace of going on with nothing, and it may mirror the setting Eiko and Koma often find themselves in at the start of each new work...
...Given a proper production, the ballet is perfect theater and far more stageworthy than its holiday competition, Dickens' A Christmas Carol...
...His mother, icy and commanding, could be Siegfried's mother in Swan Lake...
...The whole effort is such a cloying, dispassionate mess that by the time we get to the grand pas, which uses the standard Ivanov choreography—majestic, dignified, risky— we are worn to distraction...
...No real Sugar Plum Fairy could dance as the Salzburg's ballerina does, balancing endlessly in arabesque en pointe with no support, jetéing over clouds...
...The Act II finale is among the most rapturously interwoven sequences that I have seen in a long time, a pastiche of crazy associations...
...the workers pull angrily at their ropes...
...A list of wrongs should suffice...
...Tree has a twilight delicacy about it, and story dimensions that impress themselves so lightly upon the movement as to hardly leave a fingerprint...
...Eiko and Koma not only sustain the single note of thirsting for an astonishing 35 minutes, they make us feel its reverberations as cosmic theater...
...As a result, this pas de deux, all heart and held breaths, looks overscaled and out of place, and the ballet is robbed of its climax...
...Koma moves with a slow heaviness that makes every inch exhausting...
...Tis the season, too, when Tchaikovsky-bashing reaches its peak...
Vol. 72 • January 1989 • No. 1
