December 16, 2007

Robyn Orlin, leave me alone

I would classify myself as somewhat of an introvert when it comes to interacting with the dance world. I’ve never been that dancer who buzzes with endless energy and attends dance events with ‘zest.’ And when it comes to choreography, my preferences all have to do with subtlety, composition and understatement. This is why attending Robyn Orlin’s Confit de Canard last night at the CND was like being forced to participate in cheery, nightmarish activities at Christ Camp.

I should have known better. Though not having had seen her work yet, I knew she routinely provoked audiences with her in-your-face performance art. “Just go,” I told myself, thinking that I might as well see it just to know what it is. To make matters worse, I was in an emotionally sedated mood yesterday, and could have been happy just staying at home relaxing and listening to my new favorite “fuck it”album, In the Red, by Michael Dracula.

Briefly, Robyn Orlin is a South African choreographer who whose first performance took place in Johannesburg in 1980 against Apartheid, and whose studies then led her to the London Contemporary Dance School and the Chicago Institute of Art. Confit de Canard, her closing performance after a year-long residency at the Centre National de Danse, had so much potential, as she had invited a slew of interesting South African artists (including two Zulu dancers and a lyrical opera singer), French dance students who had worked with her during her residency at CND, and even two male dancers from the Ballet de l’Opéra National de Paris. Let’s just say that she hasn’t a shortage of funding… You’d think with this delightful cast of artists, you might create something, well, delightful.

But no. The majority of the performance resembled a messy group improvisation of cokeheads. You dancers can all picture it: an improvisation class where everyone searches for their inner clown, resorts to cracked out, contorted movement, and speaks absurdist nonsense. All at the same time. No direction. Again, for someone who enjoys subtlety, this was excruciating. The performers, who are constantly mingling with (re: harassing) the audience seated on the studio floor, occasionally slammed into me and even threw some sort of styrofoam peanuts into my eyes. Awesome.

The only moments she manages to create anything noteworthy is when she tones it down with two duets between Ann Masina, the robust South African singer, and each Opéra ballet dancer. In these simple, beautiful duets, you are confronted with interesting poetic visuals about her native country. A video image of a shantytown lingers on the back scrim as lion-masked Wilfried Romoli dances a sinewy dance to Masina’s powerfully sweet soprano voice. In the other duet, the scantily-clad Yann Bridard lays draped over Masina’s lap, resembling a fascinating, interracial Pietà. They are dressed in Orlin’s typical colorful, playful costumes, as if a drag queen had stumbled around the stuffed animal section of F.A.O. Schwartz.

Unfortunately for the rest of the performance, you are enthusiastically herded (like Christ Camp) to different studios in the beautiful CND, undergoing constant yelling, blaring soccer fan horns, and a performance artist incessantly yacking into a megaphone. Hell, hell, and hell.

A megaphone is funny only if it’s not used two feet in front of your face.

I recently read a CND interview with Orlin in which she had some interesting things to say. She noted that at a performance she attended at the Théâtre de la Ville in central Paris, there was not one black person in the large audience, despite Paris’s diverse population. Even during Confit de Canard, she attempts interesting discourse (the Zulu dancers try to sell you things before the performance begins; the woman with the megaphone pokes fun at the foremothers of modern dance: St. Denis, Duncan and Graham; etc.), but it is all too frenetic and mismanaged to have any sense of weight.

During the final celebration in the building’s foyer, the audience watches from above as the performers party to generic techno music on the ground floor. As we stared down to the concrete floor three stories below, my friend turned to me and correctly added, “It would be a good moment to commit suicide.” Consider it a participatory gift to your performance, Robyn. And in one last Christ Camp gesture, the dancers gesticulate for you to come down and dance with them! I’m sorry, Robyn, I just can’t do it.

One Parisian revue called Robyn an “eccentric rebel,” while another article summed up her work with the title, “Complete Irritation.” As for me, Ms. Orlin, your performance made me want to shoot heroin. I hope you’re happy. It’s too bad you flew in all those lovely artists only to use them in a poorly directed, psychotic group improvisation. You mean well, but you end up just driving us to drink.

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December 7, 2007

Gwen Welliver, I miss you!

As any technique class taker knows, a superb, experienced dancer does not necessarily make a good pedagogue. This has been my major frustration taking drop-in courses here in Paris, at the Centre National de la Danse. The CND offers technique classes to professionals at the state-subsidized rate of five euros (fantastic!) and draws in dancers and instructors from all over France and Europe. Unfortunately, with my New York bias, most of these instructors teach a movement style that is slightly out of date or just plain uninteresting to me.

I am realizing now that I was spoiled in New York. Here in Europe, you have incredible, modern centers for dance (the CND alone is an unimaginable resource), but not very many exist in the same city. In New York you have Movement Research and Dance New Amsterdam, for example, who host a constant slew of people actually involved with current events or who have very valuable movement styles to teach. I feel the classes I take here are very 1990s-heavy (re: attitude-y, modern jazz-like dance) and just now starting to tap the vein of neutral-body-rendering techniques such as the Alexander Technique.

P.A.R.T.S., the most notable modern dance school for young European dancers in Brussels, is very much rooted in postmodern instruction, frequently drawing on Trisha Brown cohorts and similarly influenced artists. However, I feel that its founder, Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker, is also stuck in the 90s; her latest creations have little immediacy and relevance to today.

This is all to say, despite its fantastic dance resource and constant bill of performers, Paris is not a place for dancers who want to develop their modern technique. Perhaps this is because Europe still sticks to a conservatory mentality. As a male dancer who began at age 19, I’ve had anything but a conservatory-style formation. I’ve scraped my dance training together from university technique courses, summer dance festivals and the hodge-podge drop-in classes in downtown Manhattan. After much disappointment and frustration, I have come to appreciate those dance classes in which you actually grow.

I therefore miss workshops by the lovely, pedagogically gifted Gwen Welliver, whose articulate, structured teaching style was first-rate. By the end of a five-day workshop, you feel like you’ve made significant, tangible progress in the quality and clarity of your movement. Instead of being force-fed a lengthy frenetic phrase in the last twenty minutes of each class, you work with the same material each day, enabling you to really settle into your body.

Today in class with Carole Gomes, we had a great, integrated warm-up, where I felt grounded, loose and open, only to end the class with a jerky, obviously scraped-together phrase that betrayed all the qualities that we just spent an hour and a half developing. My consequent crummy mood I know did not come from that infectious dance class bug, poor self esteem; it came from the disappointment of a potentially enlightening class gone astray.

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November 25, 2007

Raimund Hoghe, Bolero Variations

crédit photographique - Rosa Frank

I have bad news for dance audiences. As if contemporary dance works weren’t unpopular enough, they’ve recently gotten much less spectacular. Literally.

I imagine that the average viewer of Raimund Hoghe’s work throws their arms together and says,“That’s not dance,” or at the very least loses interest and walks out during the performance (which several dozen spectators did on Saturday night, a remarkable event considering it took place at the forward-thinking Pompidou Center). It’s understandable. If you want to see fantastic leaps, daring physicality or even significant amounts of movement, Raimund Hoghe is not your man. For the beauty of Raimund Hoghe’s work is not in its seemingly minimalistic choreography, it is in its honest, inescapable embrace with reality.

Anyone who has seen Hoghe’s short, deformed body, or who similarly does not fit into “normal” physical proportions, can understand what drives him to create. “Throw your body into battle”, from Pier Paolo Pasolini, was the quote that inspired Bolero Variations, and he does so with unapologetic sincerity.

Hoghe here tackles yet another musical cliché: Ravel’s Bolero (after working with Swan Lake and the sacred Le Sacre… I repeat myself on this website: Must every choreographer hack up a Rite of Spring?). But instead of sticking to Ravel’s work, he pieces together different examples of the bolero, a genre of Spanish dance from the 18th century inherited from South America. Such, the performance trampses from bolero to bolero, from Eydie Gormé & Trio Los Panchos to Maria Callas to Benny Goodman to Tchaikovsky. He includes several interpretations of Ravel’s Bolero, including an amusing sound recording from Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean’s ice dancing performance at the 1984 Olympics in Sarajevo (commentator remarks included, e.g.: “Here comes the triple lutz!”) and what sounded like an kabuki version on traditional Asian instruments. (A motley musical compilation similar to those of Pina Bausch, for whom Hoghe served as dramaturge from 1980 to 1990 in Wuppertal.)

But what he should have named the work was actually another Ravel piece, Pavane pour une infante défunte, which had the minor role of both introducing and closing the performance. The softly lilting, plaintive melody (“Pavane for a dead princess”) best describes the overall mood of the work, as the dancers meander through each bolero.

One might assume that the average dance interpretation of Bolero, which can be described as one big crescendo, would culminate in some fantastical explosion of dance theatricality or virtuoso (re: Maurice Béjart), heaven forbid Spanish sets or costumes. Hoghe’s is anything but a crescendo. He totally ignores it, opting for monotony instead.

This is not to say there are no dynamics. In fact, the minor dynamic changes cued by the shifting boleros are what kept any sort of momentum going in the work. (Though his patience-testing slowness I believe is what weeded out some spectators.) For instance, a section of slow, minimalist arm work was refreshed by a sarcastically whimsical fox-trot which was followed by a poignant duet between Hoghe and his favorite on-stage partner, Lorenzo de Brabandere, who dipped strips of plaster into a bowl of water and pasted them onto Hoghe’s shoulder –an obvious metaphor (cast, injury) that perhaps suggested more (armor, battle).

The five young male dancers and one female dancer, even though never pushed to excessive physicality (or much at all), are evidently well-trained and beautiful movers. This helped enhance the minimal movement that did exist, and even when I understood that it wasn’t the point, as a dancer I admit I wanted to see more. Even during the most spicy or lively South American bolero, he never strays from anticlimactic reality; dancers don’t “perform” for the audience, they walk off the bare stage only to do some shy, unforced movement on the sidelines. At intermission, when the lights are up and the audience is chattering away, Hoghe promenades around the Grand Studio’s periphery like a despondent security guard. Or a weary soldier. The wingless stage is lit from above with a clean rectangle, clearly defining an onstage/offstage border, outside of which dancers often stand unhidden to the audience. (Lighting design by Johannes Sundrup and Hoghe)

Raimund Hoghe has nothing to hide, nor is he trying to prove anything. He is known for removing his shirt at some point in his choreography, though in my opinion, his onstage presence is powerful enough (re: deadpan) before he even shows us the stark reality of his body. But it is necessary. He is precisely throwing himself into battle- the battle being our eyesight. Whether we choose to hide it or not, we all gawk at the deformed face or handicapped person on the bus or in the subway. Hoghe’s inescapable presence onstage forces us to deal with our own plastered conceptions of abnormality.

One thing that remains unclear for me is the role of the one female dancer, who definitely was secondary in relation to the others. I wasn’t sure if her sidelines status was a statement or an afterthought. She wore tispy, seemingly uncomfortable high heels throughout the performance which were finally removed in the last scene -an interesting detail- but her presence still remains for me an undeveloped subtext.

There is much more to his creation than I mention here; I write about them more from a choreography/movement perspective and less from a performance/art angle, which may be more suitable classification. In any case, he is not concerned with fitting into the dance world nor with achieving success. On his website he explains, “It is important to be able to work and to go your own way –with or without success. I simply do what I have to do.”

Raimund Hoghe’s work is for anyone who has ever felt like an outsider –who has ever looked at others’ supposed “normality” and knew something was wrong. But when I say his work is literally less spectacular, it does not in any way reduce its profundity. It is simply that he rejects any sort of “spectacle” –a refreshing change from so many performances.

Lately, I have personally been fed up with all the advertisements polluting every surface of every wall in cities like Paris or New York, thousands of inevitable images storming into our unconscious, poisoning us with smiling, white straight couples, impossible standards of beauty, and countless things that we “need.” This is why I was quick to shed my secret yearning to see more “dance” and let Hoghe and his dancers take their time and share something very poetic, drastically honest, and quietly resistant.

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November 22, 2007

Dance + Words = Good (Daniel Nagrin, part one)

This winter in Paris, the Centre National de la Danse (CND) invited Daniel Nagrin as a part of a series entitled, “Dance and Resistance,” a set of performances, conferences and colloquiums on political dance activity in New York since the 1930s. The New Dance Group will be highlighted, which was a collective of dancers and workers formed in 1932 who critiqued social injustice, war atrocities, class alienation and sexism through their dances. Works will also be performed of Anna Sokolow, Charles Weidman, Helen Tamiris, José Limon and Donald McKayle as well as present-day companies such as Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company, together sharing their own take on the theme of one of the series’ expositions, “Dance as a Weapon.”

Daniel Nagrin (born in 1917) trained with Martha Graham and Anna Sokolow among others, and was an active member of The New Dance Group. Six of Nagrin’s solos were performed Saturday evening by Shane O’Hara, now the artistic director for Nagrin’s foundation, and following the performance, four dances on film were screened in Mr. Nagrin’s presence, which allowed for a post-viewing commentary.

All of this is to say (!), during the Q&A session, which was assisted by a translator and available headsets for the audience, Nagrin responded to the French crowd’s questions with candor and typical New Yorker frankness. Nagrin admitted he had braced himself for a French intellectual onslaught, and he was correct in his preparation. In response to one audience member’s inquiry into the theme “Dance and Resistance” (a theme Nagrin himself did not choose to be classified under), he stunned the crowd by rejecting the proposed idea, then saying austerely, “Words are gorgeous. But, they are also very dangerous.” This silenced the French audience member and other subsequent questions. You could have heard a pin drop.

I mention this portion of the session because it brings up a monolithic difference in the dance cultures of France and the United States: the act of dialectics. I have been living in France for over one year now, and the sheer difference of the amount of cultural and theoretical discussion has been stupefying. The French are a loquacious population, and not only do they converse more than the average American, their dialogue is usually more logical and well-constructed.

This is quite a change from New York, where talking about dance usually resorts to informal, qualitative jargon, most of the time just marginally descriptive or just plain creative. This has its own merit, as it is may be truer to non-spoken movement than trying to relive dance through words. (I remember Susan Rethorst mentioning an experiment with Tere O’Connor where they gave each other feedback with movement itself, purposefully avoiding any verbal interaction.)

Since I am not dancing much at the moment, I’m taking advantage of this intellectually rich environment, slowly delving into texts and theories, most of which aren’t dance-related. Whether I realize it or not, these readings and discussions will affect what I might create later on. And even though I believe the beauty of dance is in its unspoken expression, being able to speak about it logically and constructively can only enhance its credibility as an art form. So, I both respect and criticize Daniel Nagrin for rejecting those harmless questions: as the creator of his works, he is the first to decide what they are, yet on the other hand he dismisses a discussion that could have been, well, pretty darned interesting. But at 90 years old and unable to move without a cane, I think you can do whatever the hell you want… (granted you are not some untried Nazi general.) Nagrin didn’t leave the stage without graciousness, however; at the final applause, he turned verklempt and thanked the audience tearily. This even caused some tears of empathy in my own stoic self, for we dance artists work so hard for so little, and Nagrin certainly deserved more than the modest recognition he received that night in a small dance studio in the outskirts of Paris.

22 novembre 2007

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November 22, 2007

Choreographic Decisiveness (Daniel Nagrin, part two)

In these days of post-postmodern dance (can I say that?), a good sense of composition –of craft- is hard to find. I’m beginning to be a little concerned with my own cursory image of “modern dance,” for when I need to reach into my head for a thumbnail portrait of today’s dance works, I pull out an image of an “edgy” multimedia-laden dance that, when I’m honest with myself, is loosely composed, largely uninteresting and ultimately forgettable.

Choreography, which is based on composition, depends on clear choices. It is precisely these choices that are lacking in much of today’s modern dance works. We see it all the time: a messy manoeuver, a thoughtless transition, repeated phrases as if to say, “I didn’t know what to do next!” Let’s face it: these are the signs of LCS: Lazy Choreographer’s Syndrome.

Two things were particularly refreshing to me when watching Shane O’Hara interpret six Daniel Nagrin solos at the Centre National de la Danse on Saturday. The first was the self-evident choices in the choreography, six solos dating from 1948 to 1970. I wondered to myself how long it had been since I had seen a work from the pre-postmodern era, and being someone who usually steers away from “dancey dance,” I was refreshed and pleased with Nagrin’s choreography. Every gesture, every facial expression had been clearly chosen, and in today’s context of loose contemporary dance, this was outstanding. Instead of hearing a lengthy, pieced-together speech, I was being presented with a simple, concise sentence.

The other notable detail was Shane O’Hara’s facial expressions, or, I should say, another clear choreographic choice. We all are familiar with the typical modern dance zombie stare– a look that declares, “I AM DOING MODERN DANCE.” So often it is the unchosen default for today’s choreography, and one often neglects the fact that a dancer’s eyes, brow and mouth are an entire new set of limbs and possibilities. The face is a part of the body that I don’t see much of in performances lately, and O’Hara was as skilled in his facial techniques as he was in his spinning and leaping.

This is not to say that a dance must employ facial expressions; a clear example is Shen Wei’s successfully abstract Rite of Spring. (Though, must every choreographer do a Rite of Spring?) Wei specifically chooses the void expressions on the dancers, who resemble not humans but soulless pawns in an unfeeling, abstract game of chess. Rather, I am simply reminding myself that the face is included in the big sac of choreographic material. “What are you going to do with the face?” I remember being asked in choreography class. “Where do you want me to look?” dancers often asked.

What’s more is that Nagrin’s expressive facial choices were far from excessive theatricality or mime. Especially in a piece like Wordgame, a Cartoon (an excerpt from The Peloponnesian War, 1968), where the cut-up and rearranged gestures were interspersed with maniacal facial distortions, all of which coherently commented on the squandering mess of the Vietnam War. (A piece that was not an irrelevant program choice…) The music, by Erik Salzman, was a fascinating score of atomic bomb audio clips, human grunts and electronic bleeps, indicative of the spliced analog recordings and sine wave beeps of early electronic music. And lo and behold, Nagrin had composed each element of the dance to a T, for in the last minute, his movements neatly coordinated with the irregular sound blurps –an impressive, clean detail.

In Strange Hero (1948), O’Hara embodies the mob-like character with gusto, tramping all over the stage to the pounding bass ostinato– fun, suspensful post-big-band jazz by Stan Keaton and Pete Rugolo. Yet instead of a straightforward narrative, Nagrin pieces together a gesture here and a fall to the floor there, a menacing grimace here and a smoky attitude there. Again, in a way that is not corny dancetheater, but wry commentary.

When asked at the later Q&A session about working largely with solo pieces, Nagrin said that where many choreographers feel isolated when working alone in a studio, he felt that by himself it was always crowded. The six solos I saw were entertaining and refreshingly concise. The sweet products of a tasty choreographic decisiveness.

22 novembre, 2007

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