On Dance
JACOBS, LAURA
On Dance OF ANGELS AND WITCHES BY LAURA JACOBS At the beginning of this century, ballerina Anna Pavlova inflamed the hearts of women and girls everywhere. Embodying dance's strange...
...skirmishes, Finley does a brief prelude, a sort of fireside chat in which, warming to the audience, she tells the story of a country that banned all forms of art...
...Ironically, Isadora died at veil's hand—she was strangled when a large neck scarf, carelessly flung, caught in a wheel of her car—but not before creating indelible images of rebellion...
...Nevertheless, the tales she told in Grave made her a pariah...
...Kirkland trusts others with trepidation, Farrell with abandon...
...Her voice quavers like a pipe organ, rears up and shimmers à la Jimmy Swaggart as she tells stories that cite a litany of evils: niggardly government, sexually abusive men, alcoholinduced violence, sins against the innocent...
...the dessert bobbles amusingly, then begins to bleed through the fabric...
...Both new works are prosaic and rather charmless...
...Reading The Shape of Love, the pressure of her quest reminds us of her most effective classical dancing...
...Finley invokes the tradition of female objectification and then defiles it...
...Embodying dance's strange spirit of zoomorphism (the dragonfly and the swan were her most famous affinities) she expressed a form of liberation exclusively thedomain of ballet...
...Curious to see what all the fuss was about, I caught Finley during her recent engagement at the Joyce Theater in Manhattan's Chelsea district...
...The combination inspired Balanchine's choreography for her and satisfied his need to see dancing in the present tense...
...The ensuing outcry doubled her bookings...
...In the section entitled "Life of Lies" she drops two molds of red Jell-O into each bra cup...
...As a canny friend said, "The thing she has going for her is that things stick to chocolate...
...It was a directive she understood and embraced, a great notion that helped her express the sense of risk and relish which were equal halves of her dancing...
...Ultimately, she looks virtually clothed and as outlandish as a Las Vegas magician...
...Where Kirkland is self-righteous, however, Farrell is smug...
...Taking advantage of her...
...At various stages she also sprinkles herself with chopped nuts, alfalfa sprouts (because they remindher of sperm), and Christmas tinsel...
...At the same time, Isadora Duncan was flipping of f her sandals and stripping down...
...It has resulted in her being denied a National Endowment for the Arts...
...Kirkland's The Shape of Loveis, actually the sequel to Dancing on My Grave, a book that rocked the dance world because of its irreverent bucking of Balanchine and its sex-drugs-and-ballet revelations...
...She explains complex adult attachments and defections in fairy-tale terms...
...In recent months, the dichotomy has spun out in palpable form...
...At most, we gain some understanding of the enigmatic Farrell, if only by attributing her omissions to her grace and delicacy...
...If you share her beliefs, the performance is a depressing reading of woes, utterly lacking in cleverness...
...She may have danced with scarves, but she rent the poetic veils that classical ballet had so artfully arranged over its sexuality...
...Following the ascent and adoration of the solitary woman is one of many ways to chart the course of dance history...
...Finley never moves beyond confrontational complaint...
...When the actual show begins, Finley's face hardens and she swoops into her monologue with a rhetorical style that recalls the snake-oil sensuality of a TV evangelist...
...The perfect asymmetry of Pavlova and Isadora was replaced in mid-century by that of Margot Fonteyn and Martha Graham—the pure and the penitent, respectively...
...If you disagree with her views, this show will not change your mind...
...Yet instead of focusing on the book's featherweight analysis and what this says about the author, many reviewers have chosen to laud Farrell's uplifted vision—her eyes trained unblinkingly on Balanchine, God and the stage— and contrast it with what they perceive to be Gelsey Kirkland's gutter view...
...She would like to stamp out both princess and sorceress, angel and witch...
...Publication of the ballet autobiographies of Suzanne Farrell and Gelsey Kirkland has triggered startlingly automatic responses from reviewers, with Farrell emerging as the angel and Kirkland the witch...
...Its consistent superficiality is totally at odds with the quixotic, flashing character of her dancing, and it frequently reads like an attempt to reassert the facts of her own legend (the usual fare of ballet memoirs, but from Farrell...
...she is a performance artist with a feminist agenda...
...Farrell's Holding On to the Airis not very good...
...It too was unrelenting in pursuit of crystallization, determined to transform idea into deed...
...Although Kirkland was critical of everyone, she was hardest on herself, admitting her shattered idealism and desperately low self-esteem...
...suddenly she and her foodstuffs were everywhere, including conservative Lincoln Center...
...From the title on, the evening is aggressive—and therein lies its weakness...
...Thus these two great dancers were polarized by the essential difference of their approaches...
...Within this paradigm, there seem to be two distinct paths: the straight and narrow and the primrose...
...She repeats end-lines with headshaking, amen conviction, and edges climactic moments in the gulping hysteria of a tent-show follower about to see the light or faint...
...Farrell reached that pinnacle without questioning, without raising doubts...
...Even jaded New Yorkers sat up and noticed when she stood naked and smeared canned yams up her rear—an act of spitin-your-eye defiance...
...Ballet does not easily lend itself to explanation and analysis, but Kirkland was tenacious...
...Her statement is clear: Coated in sexual convention and prejudice, she is no longer herself...
...She's a fudgesickle, the living embodiment of Yeats' mournful lines: "Love has pitched his mansion in/The place of excrement...
...Finley's latest show, We Keep Our Victims Ready, can claim infamy...
...At the same time, Finley punctuates her points by layering herself with food...
...When it comes to women dancing, even in 1990, some approaches appear to be more palatable than others...
...And the slow accumulation of answers—why, say, a step must be performed precisely this way, or what Juliet here is trying to tell Romeo—led, finally, to clarity on stage, to the one true moment...
...The second book picks up where the first left off (marriage and kicking drugs) and chronicles, with the same unflinching detail, Kirkland's continuing love-hate relationship with her recalcitrant body and demanding art...
...But then both ballerinas are egotistic know-it-alls (perhaps a prerequisite for ballerinahood...
...Scandal and pandemonium were her bread and butter...
...This cartoon account of her own experience with censorship is chummy and ingratiating, building audience support...
...Kirkland's title articulates her eternal search for logic and meaning in a nonverbal art that is, on the clearest day, elusive...
...It is an adequate device for demonstrating self-love and hate, sexual pleasure and abuse—but that's all it is, a device...
...Her show is static, the theatrical equivalent of a sit-in (and not merely because she is always sitting...
...Her title is a phrase Balanchine issued in the imperative—"Hold on to the air" —when advising her on how to manage a difficult step sequence...
...Victims is an intermissionless 90 minutes divided into three sections...
...Karen Finley is not a dancer...
...It is simply loud and dogmatic, with a striking, inflammatory gimmick...
...Moreover, her account of the deep, platonic and esthetically provocative relationship she had with choreographer George Balanchine—the reason most people will want to read what she has to say—aggrandizes their "love" without trying to understand it...
...grant, making her one of four previous awardees caught by the obscenity net...
...Finley has been appearing in New York City for the past few years, and though never quite controversial (with performance art, almost anything goes), she did achieve notoriety...
...But because Farrell's truth rose out of order, because she did not challenge established values, she wears the halo...
...We Keep Our Victims Ready pits the rich, strong and male against the poor, weak and female...
...This is especially true in ballet, where acquiescence is de rigueur, and is reflected in the reception accorded the authors...
...In "Why Can't This Veal Calf Walk" she scoops soft chocolate out of aheartshaped box and covers her naked body with it...
...The food is forced to do all the visual work...
...it engages on a crude literal level...
...As for the brouhaha stirred by the ???, Finley's Victims is not obscene...
...Finley's passion is in her sledgehammer polemics, not in structure, subtlety or the pursuit of epiphany...
...While Pavlova was a mix of the animal and intangible, a satin bow neatly tying the elements of her beauty, Duncan was pure Homo sapiens, loose haired and earthy at that...
Vol. 73 • October 1990 • No. 14
