On Dance
JACOBS, LAURA
On Dance THE FORTIES AND BEYOND BY LAURA JACOBS After dutifully dumping quarters into the machine for a handful of lackluster seasons, Paul Taylor finally hit the jackpot. He...
...De Keersmaeker's troupe is entirely female...
...The quieter pieces focus on the absent "you" in many of the songs, and at these points Company B's grief creeps forward...
...Her fall offerings at the Brooklyn Academy of Music's Next Wave Festival, Palermo, Palermo and Bandoneon, were about soil and sex, respectively...
...Speaking in Tonguesis strongly narrative...
...as it is, we realize why Stone will never win her man...
...it might as easily have been titled "Forked Tongues...
...They scan like musical forms (a recent American premiere was titled Elena's Arid), and move ahead with a driving pulse...
...Taylor's use of silhouette to present his darker motifs is deftly aided by Jennifer Tipton, whose ingenious lighting throws the upstage into an eerie sepia tinted twilight zone that grants the dancers there anonymity...
...The resulting storybook images of heaven and hell could be part of Tongues' Sunday sermon...
...they swoop down like blackbirds in a field by Van Gogh...
...Coming from an avowed pagan, the two works contain a lot of religion...
...In Bandoneon, she includes a simple scene of couples dancing—except that the women are seated on the men's shoulders, crotch to face, creating a precarious, surreal mirage of sexual bliss and menace...
...Her women can be exhilarating as they rush the stage or thrust about in stiletto heels, running the men ragged...
...Suddenly, one turns to confront the other...
...you can hardly get enough of him...
...the people there, meanwhile, were struggling to stay alive on blood-soaked earth...
...Nevertheless, in this 10second about-face Taylor spins Company ? on its axis...
...Unfortunately, Taylor uses them to form a chamber-style melodrama with a generous dose of bile...
...In other words, wartime...
...TicoTico," an ode to a clock that won't tick fast enough to the 8 o'clock mark, is a star turn for Andrew Asnes...
...Company ? does not look like a major work, at least not like the hefty, "important" dances Taylor introduced in past seasons...
...There are some similarities in the use of expressionist conventions— speech and slow-motion—and in the fact that both choreographers direct "women's" companies (Bausch employs men in her dancetheater but they are secondary...
...Could there be a world without such destruction...
...The more abstract and expansive Gala Sun, in contrast, casts its dancers as God's children...
...It simply swoops into the '40s and, in the most glancing, ghostly of ways, invokes the present...
...He has the aerial clarity of Baryshnikov as well as a full-faced ardor the Russian lacked...
...When Taylor's men crumple to the ground they are falling in love and in battle—a double entendre that, in the age of AIDS, conveys a third association...
...Whatever the case, Company ? makes no obvious judgments, no politically correct points...
...They are lit like an Annunciation scene by La Tour...
...Besides providing ready access to a grand theme, however, the spiritual metaphor happens to be a workable one...
...Bausch looks at life under their state of siege and concentrates on its basic elements...
...Part of the national spirit then was stoicism...
...He also appreciates the hard hum of the Andrews Sisters: the lack of sentimentality, the sexual knowing, the gutsy, hopped-up beat...
...We understand that he is already gone...
...But rumor has it that Taylor's story is fiction, a bit of spice for the media...
...In an incomparable moment—profound for its economy and implication—the male half of the duet "There Will Never Be Another You" takes leave of his girlfriend by retiring toward the back, where a line of men march in stiff, slow, nightmare silhouette...
...I admire Bausch's art, even if I don't always enjoy it...
...Maybe it is the bounding conservatism of the last few years, the censorship issues and gag orders, that led Taylor to the dogmatic moralizing of Speaking in Tongues and his greeting card embrace of our wayward nature in Of Bright and Blue Birds and the Gala Sun...
...the men wear boxy, courtly three-piece suits (or they wear nothing at all, or dresses...
...Too bad Jeff Wadlington has neither the stamina nor the precision to put it over properly as the high point of the show...
...Yet where Bausch's pieces are loosely joined, free-association adventures, de Keersmaeker's dances have taut underpinnings...
...De Keersmaeker has assembled one of the most gorgeous and feminine troupes outside ballet, and in Stella she shows them off...
...Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker's work is often wrongly lumped into the Bausch school...
...In October she presented her latest work, Stella, at The Kitchen, a performance space on New York's Lower West Side...
...The men get the showstoppers...
...As he crosses into the dark, he quietly takes on their tin-soldier angles...
...I also have colleagues who, blinking an eye or watching Stone, missed it altogether...
...Nothing profound here, despite some critics' claims for its "moral vision...
...It clearly demands a ballet technique, one with plenty of elevation and snap...
...At her best, Bausch has no need for duration, the stage picture imprints itself forever...
...The music consists of World War II tunes by the Andrews Sisters, and the title is Company B. Explaining his inspiration, Taylor told interviewers he had left for the first rehearsal without an idea in his head, saw an Andrews Sisters album in a neighbor's trash, and decided destiny had spoken...
...In Company ? Taylor throws off the robe and slides into his dancing shoes...
...Certainly fate and a go-with-the-flow enthusiasm areevident in thenew work...
...Americans entered the War in Europe charged by the ideal of freedom...
...its characters are highly defined and polished renderings of company types...
...An inch further apart and the gesture would be meaningless...
...Within that musical frame Taylor's work spins out a series of solo, duet and ensemble pieces requiring an all-American hubris, a spitshine denial...
...The songs are a syncopated joyride of swift stops and cliff-hanging enjambments...
...In technical terms, though, the dancing is so fast and furious it seems to illustrate the kind of blind, heightened "leap" of those fanatics who do speak in tongues...
...An invigorating exploration of the rage inherent in female role playing, the piece is written in the choreographer's signature style: mathematically precise, high-speed guerrilla dancing fused with a sensual study of the female physique...
...One of her constants is dated clothes: The dresses have the worn look and bias styling of wartime rationing...
...Here is a kingdom, so to speak, of a choreographer who truly loves the body...
...I Can Dream, Can't I?" is an agitated reverie featuring Sandra Stone, behind whom two men move left to right in mirror step, a backdrop to her longing...
...Earlier, he had been much funnier and more honest on similar subjects—take Big Bertha (1970) for starters...
...Oh Johnnie, Oh Johnnie, Oh!," a dance for Patrick Corbin and seven females, is atop-speed lascivious reading, although the beleaguered Corbin plays it a little broad for my taste...
...This dance might answer, "dream on...
...Romantic love and physical appetite, the brio of youth as much as its dangerous attractions, course through Company B's veins...
...The relief is palpable as he allows his dancers to adopt a style—knee-swiveling, 1940s jitterbugging—that has its own vibrant associations...
...Both creations, though, show strain...
...Of course, the point is never stated squarely...
...If adance company is a microcosm of many communities, perhaps it best exemplifies a religious order, complete with prodigals and angels, outsiders and insiders, leaders and followers, the articulate and the elusive...
...But tempos tend to become so languid that they defy attention, and occasionally scenes last too long...
...Far from mimicking the self-disgust of Bausch's work, De Keersmaeker produces strict, sexual sonnets to long-limbed mistresses...
...High spirits and heavy breathing are the ostensible text, yet the real subject is death...
...He choreographed a little number for the Houston Ballet, transferred it to his own company, then successfully presented it at New York's City Center in October...
...Indeed, beneath the patriotism of Company ? something conscious and wary is at large...
...I am told that at one Saturday matinee the audience, a mosdy older crowd, applauded this moment, the subtext not escaping them...
...She has a first-rate eye for piercing imagery, a sense of structural subtlety, and a talent for visual as well as aural echoes...
...Time is their theme: time running out, lengthening and lost...
...Company ? opens and closes with the song "Bei Mir Bist du Schön," whose lyrics attempt to explain the title phrase ("bei mir bist du schön means you're grand...
...Speaking in Tongues (1990), an evocation of evangelism and its ills, depicts a congregation in thrall to a shadowy, Jimmy Swaggart-like preacher...
...Taylor followed that up with an even larger statement: Of Bright and Blue BirdsandtheGalaSun(1991), adynamic evening-length production divided between good and evil, light and dark...
...Stella lags at times, but its uncommon virtues—thematic concentration, vital and focused execution—compel one to be forgiving...
...Pina Bausch's work also has a '40s ethos, but it is depressed, European...
...Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy," mainly a series of leaps large and small, flies like a flag...
Vol. 74 • December 1991 • No. 13
