William Forsythe Comes to BAM and the New York Public Library
September 30, 2009
Georg Reischl and Allison Brown in William Forsythe’s Decreation, photo by Dominik Mentzos
Next week, the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Next Wave Festival will present the innovative choreographer William Forsythe and his Frankfurt-based company in the US premiere of Forsythe’s Decreation. Inspired by an essay by poet Anne Carson, Forsythe used Carson’s writing as a starting point to explore, in choreographic terms, the poet’s thesis of the dissolution of the self in order to create space for something new. According to The Forsythe Company’s website, “Sound is transformed, weeps and soars through the throats, the bodies, which move in a constant, oblique tension.” In Decreation, the dancers interact with onstage cameras, their own projected images, and one another as they explore the progression of the soul.
In addition to seeing The Forsythe Company at BAM, the public has a chance to see William Forsythe in conversation at the New York Public Library on Friday, October 9th at 1 PM. Forsythe and the cognitive scientist Alva Noë will discuss consciousness as a kind of dance, as something that we engage in as opposed to something that occurs inside our brain. Tickets can be purchased online or at the NYPL box office two hours before the event.
Crowd-Pleasers, Inspiration, and History at Fall for Dance
September 27, 2009
Iyar Elezra and Bobbi Smith in Ohad Naharin’s B/olero, photo by Andrea Mohin
The sixth annual Fall for Dance festival, where all seats are just ten dollars, kicked off this past week at City Center. Not surprisingly, the opening program, performed on Tuesday and Wednesday, included easily digestible crowd-pleasers that bring audiences to their feet and (hopefully) persuade them to attend dance performances more than once per year. But the evening also offered an inspirational work by Israel’s Ohad Naharin and a history lesson: This year’s festival honors the centennial of the Ballets Russes and is presenting recreations and reinterpretations of some of the company’s original works.
One of these works was Vaslav Nijinsky’s Afternoon of a Faun, as performed by Boston Ballet. When this landmark work premiered in Paris in 1912, it caused a controversy and shocked audiences due to its erotic undertones, sexually explicit themes, and the final masturbatory gesture. The original program notes summarize the simple plot: “A faun dozes; nymphs tease him; a forgotten scarf satisfies his dream. The curtain descends so that the poem can begin in everyone’s memory.” Moving with the two-dimensionality that Nijinsky drew from Greek and Egyptian reliefs and vase paintings, Altankhuyag Dugaraa shifted between boyish flirtation and an animal-like prowl as he pursued the nymphs. His brief encounter with Lorna Feijoo, during which they barely touched, lacked nuance even though it was filled with erotic tension. In 2009 the piece seems remarkably tame, but Faun was considered revolutionary and is now viewed as one of the first modern ballets. It certainly deserved to be included in the festival, but on Wednesday evening, it didn’t provide the rousing effect that one expects from a festival’s opening piece.
Altankhuyag Dugaraa and Lorna Feijoo of Boston Ballet in Afternoon of a Faun, photo by Andrea Mohin
Paul Taylor Dance Company has appeared in the festival every year, and this time they performed a silly, often irritating work from their repertoire, Taylor’s Offenbach Overtures (1995). Blending theatrics and clumsiness, the cast of fourteen dancers mocked French manners and stuffy classical ballet. Laura Halzack and Orion Duckstein continually switched roles during their pas de deux, frequently leaving one of them hanging precariously in suspense while the other indulged in a solo. In another section that involved a duel between Michael Trusnovec and Sean Mahoney, mutual respect and adoration quickly replaced their machismo attitudes. Each section of the work is far too long to sustain interest, but this flashy, balletic spoof won the crowd over, and it certainly was an effective advertisement for Taylor’s three-week engagement at City Center this February.
Paul Taylor Dance Company in Offenbach Overtures, photo by Paul B. Goode
The other standing ovation of the evening went to tap sensation Savion Glover and the OtherRz in The StaRz and StRiPes 4EvEr for NoW. One by one, the four musicians emerged from the wings, with each adding another layer to the John Coltrane-inspired jazzy sounds. The instrument that was center stage, however, was Glover, whose tapping seemed to take on a life of its own. While conducting and interacting with the musicians (his back was to the audience for the majority of the piece), Glover explored the rhythms and intricacies of the music to phenomenal effect. He was briefly joined by two other tappers, Marshall Davis Jr. and Cartier Williams, and their trio and solos showed innovation and a wonderful sense of musicality. It was delightful to see the tappers and musicians in such good spirits, clearly thrilled to be at the festival and engaging with one another throughout their performance.
Savion Glover and the OtheRz, courtesy of Savion Glover Productions
Without a doubt, the most challenging – and thrilling – piece on the program came from Batsheva Dance Company. Choreographer Ohad Naharin’s B/olero is a richly textured duet for two women. To the unique sound of Isao Tomita’s synthesized version of Ravel’s well-known “Bolero”, Iyar Elezra and Bobbi Smith shifted between unison movements and phrases in which they echoed or fed off of one another. Soft, fluid torsos and moments of calm abruptly changed to aggressive, full-bodied attacks that ate up the space. The women were effortless as their articulate bodies transitioned between restraint and release. Although they remained deadpan throughout the work, the emotion embedded in their movement bubbled to the surface, eventually overflowing and captivating the audience along with the increasingly physical, interactive choreography. The catalyst for B/olero might have been unclear, but upon being swept up into this riveting work, it was impossible not to feel ecstatic. If only every Fall for Dance performance could be so inexplicably, wonderfully transformational.
On the Set of Opus Jazz: The Film
September 24, 2009
photos by Yaniv Schulman
Last week, I had the privilege of visiting the set of Opus Jazz: The Film, which recently resumed and completed filming after shooting the third section, “Passage for Two”, on the High Line about two years ago. The new film version of Jerome Robbins’ 1958 ballet is scheduled to debut on PBS’s Great Performances/Dance in America series in the spring of 2010 (for updates, visit the film’s website). For the past several weeks, the cast and crew worked at various locations throughout Manhattan and Brooklyn, including McCarren Park Pool and a school gymnasium in Carroll Gardens, and wrapped up filming in a beautiful 1929 Loews movie theater in Jersey City, where I had the opportunity to observe everyone in action.
As it turns out, the action involves a lot of waiting. Just as I arrived in mid-afternoon, a crew member announced that the sixteen dancers could take five, so they scurried off the stage and into the seats of the theater to check voicemails and text messages, nap, stretch, and re-caffeinate (they had been in the theater since 8 AM). The five minute break turned into a half hour delay as the crew worked on camera angle adjustments – the film is being shot from one camera – and consulted with Ellen Bar and Sean Suozzi (the film’s creators and executive producers), but the downtime gave me an opportunity to chat with some of the dancers, all of whom are members of New York City Ballet.
Cast members Amanda Hankes, Georgina Pazcoguin, Adam Hendrickson, Rebecca Krohn, Tiler Peck, and Andrew Veyette
I quickly learned from Craig Hall, an NYCB soloist, that the greatest challenge of filming was exactly what we were doing at that moment: waiting. The go-stop-go nature of shooting was an abrupt change from performing on stage, where the show must go on no matter what happens. Hall added, “The choreography is ingrained in our bodies and the dancers know what the ballet looks like”, but the film version is still a mystery. Between filming out of chronological order and the endless process of editing, the dancers have no idea what to expect. Other dancers agreed that filming doesn’t offer the instant gratification that comes with live performances, where the dancers are in control of the outcome, but Hall proudly stated, “I’m honored to be a part of this, and we’re all really lucky to have such a unique collaboration between dancers and the filmmakers.”
While sipping coffee, Adam Hendrickson added that the cast and crew have become a big, loving family, especially bonding during overnight shoots in a dirty warehouse (On his informative and entertaining blog about the filming process, he wrote, “To call it hazardous would be the understatement of the decade. It will be the craziest place ever danced in.”). He explained, “We’re normally sheltered at NYCB, but here we’ve had the chance to meet new people, watch them work, and be a part of it.” Aside from Sunday rehearsals in the studio and some guidance from Jean-Pierre Frohlich, an NYCB ballet master and member of the Robbins Rights Trust advisory committee, the film project is entirely separate from the company and the dancers used their summer vacation time for filming (they returned to their regular NYCB work schedules this week). Hendrickson admitted that it’s nice to feel distanced from the company, because when working with film directors Henry Joost and Jody Lee Lipes, “You want to do the ballet a certain way for them that might not be the same way you do it on stage at NYCB. The choreography hasn’t changed, but the vision is different.”
Rebecca Krohn
When the crew announced that they were ready to start again, the dancers headed toward the stage, all laughing and in good spirits in spite of the long hours and choppy schedule. As soon as the camera was rolling and the jazzy rhythms of Robert Prince’s score were audible, the dancers’ youthful energy, angst, and rebellious spirit – all at the heart of the ballet – were palpable. As an ensemble, their dancing reflected the description that appeared in the program when the ballet first premiered in June 1958:
Feeling very much like a minority group in this threatening and explosive world, the young have so identified with the dynamics, kinetic impetus, the drives and ‘coolness’ of today’s jazz steps that these dances have become an expression of our youths’ outlook and their attitudes toward the contemporary world around them, just as each era’s dance has significantly reflected the character of our changing world and a manner of dealing with it. N.Y. Export: Opus Jazz is a formal, abstract ballet based on the kinds of movements, complexities of rhythms, expressions of relationships, and qualities of atmospheres found in today’s dance.
Standing breathless on the stage of Loews after a full shoot of the final section, the dancers certainly embodied the spirit of the ballet, but Opus Jazz: The Film is not just a restaging of Jerome Robbins’ piece. It’s a reinvention – one that preserves the choreography and music while offering new costumes, a new backdrop, and a new medium that can reach a much broader audience than a theater can. The film wouldn’t exist without Robbins’ ballet, but the creative team is doing much more than simply transferring the steps to film. By showing respect to their predecessors while building on this timeless ballet with their own ideas and vision, the producers, directors, cast, and crew are making N.Y. Export: Opus Jazz their own and offering a unique contribution to dance and film.
All photos by Yaniv Schulman
The Fall Performance A-List
September 22, 2009
The New York Times dance critic and WNYC Performance Club founder Claudia La Rocco recently invited me and several other performers, critics, and arts enthusiasts to write about what we’re looking forward to seeing this fall in New York City. Check out the post to see what made the list. Then add as many as possible to your ever-growing list of shows to see this season. The fall offerings are diverse, and I was honored to share some thoughts along with several wonderful individuals involved in performance, including Wendy Whelan, Ada Calhoun, Damian Woetzel, and Ishmael Houston-Jones. But there are still plenty of other exciting shows to see this season. Stay tuned to Dancing Perfectly Free for many more previews and reviews in the coming weeks.
Lucinda Childs’ DANCE (1979), coming to The Joyce Theater in October, photo by Nathaniel Tileston
“This Could Be It” at The Chocolate Factory
September 18, 2009
Jillian Sweeney, photo by Alexandra Corazza
Jillian Sweeney, the original performer in Dance Theater Workshop’s Twitter Community Choreography challenges, has a new show next week at The Chocolate Factory. This Could Be It is a solo performance that explores who we are and who we think we are (third-person self-awareness) through “existentialism, radio waves, and breakfast cereal”. You can learn more about the show on Jillian’s blog, which documents the process of creating this new work.
Performed and choreographed by Jillian, and co-written with Jeffrey Cranor, This Could Be It runs from Wednesday, September 23rd through Saturday, the 26th at 8 PM at The Chocolate Factory in Long Island City. Tickets can be purchased online.
