On Dance
JACOBS, LAURA
On Dance MATURE TALENTS BY LAURA JACOBS Jerome Robbins' Broadway, now running at New York's Imperial Theater, had one of the longest rehearsal and preview periods (26 weeks) in the...
...His voice, initially pleasant and forgettable, is now thick, choked with confusion...
...They are like tired Magi (one of them is later carried by in a crucifix pose), and they form the slow, sure, adagio heart of a work that seems to say, speaking for all of Cunningham, "a dance is a journey...
...Food is currency here...
...The allusions may put a more human face on dance, but it is neither particularly helpful nor wise to begin looking for them everywhere...
...After the "found" props of Cargo X and the spartan setting of Five Stone Wind, the season's third premiere, Fields· and Figures, comes as sheer galvanizing spectacle...
...It is impossible to miss Berkoff's point about the grossness of consumption, or the coy etiquette...
...But it's the threesome Cunningham returns us to...
...I? recent seasons critics have been observing, perhaps a bit wishfully, that autobiographical, expressionistic, even narrative elements seem to be turning up more frequently in the dances of Merce Cunningham...
...It is said of Robbins that he is able to carry the story through the dance.That's true...
...They keen, rail, sigh, eat—oh how they eat —with a forceful and often noisy pantomime...
...Otherwise the show is rather plain and straightforward, with dapper, growly-voiced Jason Alexander smoothing us over the bumps...
...He takes part in a few songshe's superb in "Comedy Tonight"— and acts as a sort of stage manager, introducing and commenting on the numbers...
...Both works dissolve stage realities into the elemental...
...Ballet superstar Mikhail Baryshnikov has made the trip from Lincoln Center to Times Square, too...
...A huge gold-leafed medallion hanging downstage right, turning of its own weight, catches the spotlights and reflects them blindingly...
...Concurrent with his aging, creations like Quartet, Pictures and Fabrications seem to reflect the choreographer's concern about notions of physical presence and absence, his own place in a dance and the artist's place in his art...
...Still, if not as a cohesive show, as history lesson or nostalgic time travel Jerome Robbins' Broadway does deliver...
...One can see why in this sense "osmosis" is a compelling mantra for Cunningham, the man who said "Dancing is like water," and for whom collaboration isamysteryprocess.with score, set and steps created in isolation from one another, only to coalesce, in the fixed duration of performance...
...Even more impressive is the delicacy of its wit and the sharp, surprising immediacy of the chase scene...
...The dancer's leotards, ribbed to match the background, accentuate an effect of depth...
...He is endlessly inventive, yet knows not to be too inventive...
...The dancers, in those leotards that link them to the deep-sea space, appear to swim in schools—four to be exact...
...Robbins has always been a visibly facile, even glib choreographer, a dubious gift that lends itself better to big musicals than to his ballet efforts (he has been a house choreographer at New York City Ballet since 1949...
...The only other performer of star quality is Charlotte d'Amboise, who is a fast-and-happy Anita in West Side Story and a brash Peter Pan...
...Baryshnikov simply wanted to try the role, and it turns out he is very good...
...The long evening does not really flow, however, although the individual dances seem to roll off like loaded dice—deft, confident, right on the music...
...I am not sure why Robbins felt he needed to import Robert La Fosse and Alexia Hess from the New York City Ballet...
...The family's sole bread winner, the son Gregor is also consumed...
...The cyclorama is ribbed grey and blue horizontally—the feeling is like Venetian blinds at dusk—and the stage is so hazy you think there is a scrim...
...Berkoff's arduously mapped out production is too strictly reductive to allow for philosophical roaming, despite Gregor's questions about existence...
...Baryshnikov manages to deepen the character of Gregor at the same time that he is becoming not-Gregor...
...Not that the work adapted and directed by Steven Berkoff couldn't have been put on without the dancer...
...Fields and Figures starts out as a big, bursting, tongue-in-cheek salute to modern painting—as if the dancers have been plopped into a Klee...
...But the pleasures here are those of artifice...
...They languorously stride across the stage, sag to the floor in a heap, lean against each other at halfmast, a rhyme of those three red reeds...
...A work's dimension as pure form— its patterns, tempos, velocities, densities, weight—constitutes its primary impact and interest...
...Then it grows stern...
...I can't think of anyone performing the role more movingly...
...JRB is not an extravagant production...
...Upstage left three giant red tendrils waft imperceptibly...
...It's a "greatest hits" lineup of famous production numbers from beloved Broadway musicals: West Side Story, Gypsy, Fiddler on the Roof, Peter Pan, the list goes on...
...Critics who have said any dexterous actor could duplicate his performance have failed to appreciate the muscular pitch and sophisticated tempos of his conception...
...The first field is made up of three dancers who move with narcoleptic slowness...
...Nevertheless, connections and references have been loosely floated of late, notably in the case of pieces like Grange Eve, with its quirkily humorous ballet-school combinations, and Fabrications, whose spelling-bee circles of women evoke a wartime weariness and absence of men...
...The family members are caricatures straight out of a Charles Addams cartoon...
...CargoXis sweet and sour, trifling and serious, a neatly contained little work that, as the title implies, bears unknown freight...
...At dance's end indoors, Merce is alone on stage in a purple leotard that blends so perfectly with the cyclorama it threatens to disembody him...
...Its simple prop, a backstage ladder, eventually suggests a gravestone, and what begins as a stagedoor serendipity ends as an act of mourning...
...Add the clashing barnyard din of Ivan Tcherepnin's score and tracking the dancers is harder still...
...thus in the Fiddler segment they are shaggy, in Gypsy tacky, in West Side Story tough, and in A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum really silly...
...First performed outdoors in Avignon, France, it is about transformations meteorological and existential...
...He himself might respond that the dances never opposed such readings, they merely did not reinforce them...
...Duchamp, of course, was referring to perception and the process of receiving light, making art...
...Both are, in rather aloof fashion, requiems...
...Baroachnikov" crowed one...
...They give generous, ofteninspired support by concentrating the plot, as in the dances from West Side Story, or crystallizing it, as in "The Small House of Uncle Thomas," the Siamese dance from The King and I. This musical in miniature doesn't contain a misstep, so sure is Robbins' eye for shape and placement...
...The headlines for the reviews of Metomorphosis, currently at the Ethel Barrymore Theater, tell the whole story...
...It is a dance of contradictions, so finely tuned and compressed that it suggests the stillness of an objet d'art (one remembers it whole), despite the many startling Crescendos and great hushes...
...He is clever, yet not overly so...
...JRB contains nothing new...
...Much time went into restoring the dances and arranging them attractively, so that an intrinsically disjointed format would have some flow...
...Part of what is great about his work in the theater is its street smarts...
...Unusually overdesigned for Cunningham, it seems to crowd and dwarf the dancers...
...Five Stone Wind could not be less like Cargo X. It is a perilously open, extended dance of 55 minutes...
...His numbers never overwhelm the book, warp the context, or break the continuity...
...The set shocks...
...Baryshnikov bring his powerful concentration and explosive edge to bear on that role...
...To overly picturesque/narrative readings of Cunningham dances, Fields frames a fitting response that Tcherepnin's music, The Creative Act—Heterophonies on a text of Marcel Duchamp, actually enunciates: Amid the babble only one word is fully and repeatedly audible—"osmosis...
...Two of this season's three New York premieres further demonstrate that mortality is a preoccupation...
...The other groups are quicker, allegrooriented...
...That is testimony not only to Robbins' legendary perfectionism but to the wealth of material he had to choose from in designing this show...
...The costumes were kept as close to the originals as possible...
...Moreover, La Fosse's bland cuteness, the irritatingly prissy jut of his chin, leaves one puzzling over how Robbins could cast him as Tony in West Side Story...
...Berkoff treats the story of Gregor Samsa's strange transformation into a dung beetle as an allegory in shades of grey, with shadow-play techniques (freeze-frames and silhouettes) and theater-of-cruelty overtones...
...A friend quickly dubbed Fields Merce's Star Trek dance, but it is Cargo X that has a sci-fi strangeness...
...In Baryshnikov's body the persona of Gregor gains weight and complexity in transformation, while physically he becomes quicker, lighter, more reflexive...
...Baryshnikafka" quipped another...
...And "design" is the key word here...
...similar productions of it have been done in Europe...
...If anything, a strain of elegy has entered the Cunningham repertory and, in a strong way, ripened it...
...Since for ballet dancers projection is bound up in subtleties of technique and musicality—they are not taught to "sell" numbers—a Broadway setting frequently fades them out...
...On Dance MATURE TALENTS BY LAURA JACOBS Jerome Robbins' Broadway, now running at New York's Imperial Theater, had one of the longest rehearsal and preview periods (26 weeks) in the history of the Great White Way...
...In the end, when Little Eva ascends the stairs to heaven, you feel Robbins' ascent...
...Probably "fields" is the better word (Cunningham makes an ironic pun of the title—it is the inanimate objects that are the "figures...
Vol. 72 • April 1989 • No. 7
