Stormy Days with Josephine/Fragments
—Simple Separations
Meg Wolfe/Barbara Mahler
Performed at Danspace Project ­ St. Mark’s Church
Reviewed on 11/14/04
by Celeste Sunderland

With aristocrats losing their heads at the drop of a dime, the 18th century was a scandalous time for love. And the Empress Josephine Bonaparte must have been a handful for one little man, Napoleon. With Stormy Days With Josephine, choreographer Meg Wolfe examined the famous couple’s tumultuous relationship through postmodern movement blanched in baroque.

Abstract scenarios represented aspects of human nature, hinting at repressed, underlying feelings people have for others, the anguish of abandonment, and the freedom of personal liberation. A metaphor for the pent-up frustration one encounters with sudden changes in social standing, such as Josephine experienced upon her coronation, occurred in the opening scene. One dancer gingerly avoided a bunch of lemons that had been dropped upon the floor, eventually aiming her stomping feet at the fruits, squashing them, building aggression to the point of finally taking one in her hands and tearing it apart to the music of Lyris Hung’s electric violin.

What better way to escape the confines of an imperial household than through sex? As the music became baroque, a civilized minuet careened into lesbian fantasy. Female dancers pawed at one another. One pair rolled off in an erotic tumble. When Napoleon made his way out, looking ridiculous in period costume, he didn’t have much of a chance against the estrogen orgy. Josephine collapsed with her lover and in a terribly uncivilized segment of choreography, Napoleon ran out, leaped over them, and fell over the edge of a platform.

In a swank but puzzling turn of scenery, the stage became a nightclub with potted palms and piano music. A dancer in black suit and top hat moved gracefully to “Sophisticated Lady,” followed by a video of Napoleon frolicking in the still water of a rocky bay. Off to the side, Josephine poured an unidentified substance onto her hands and wrists and licked it off. Napoleon walked frantically in circles center stage. Though the group created interesting scene changes, confusion surrounded most of this piece.

Barbara Mahler’s Fragments—Simple Separations was performed first, setting a theme of personal perseverance, where the line between resistance and indulgence is very thin. Featuring excerpts from Shostakovich’s String Quartets, the piece showcased strong dance technique. Striking choreography occurred while two women matched movements on the ground. They longed for rest but could only stay in one position for a moment before flailing into another pose.

For the most part, movements rocked with pendulum-like momentum, except during slow adagio sequences, when limbs extended with much control, and poses were held for great lengths. To end the piece, Mahler climbed into a handstand feet first up a pillar, weight supported by her palms pressed to the floor—an unlikely approach to the final destination, but why not? Very little makes sense in this new era of freedom and technology. Vive la liberté!

(Updated on 6/9/05)

Dora Theatrical Company

Senpo Sugihara,
The Japanese Schindler

Performed at:
Reviewed on 10/24/04
by R. Pikser

In 1939, career diplomat Chiune “Senpo” Sugihara was Japanese consul in Kaunas, Lithuania. When Nazi Germany invaded Poland and sent thousands of Jews fleeing for their lives, some of them came to neutral Lithuania. No country would take them in; the Dutch consulate did give them visas to Dutch Curaçao, but these were technically valueless, since occupied Holland presumably could no longer issue visas. Against explicit orders from his Foreign Ministry, Sugihara, pretending not to notice the non-validity of the Dutch visas, wrote thousands of transit visas so as many Jews as possible could escape soon-to-be-occupied Lithuania, cross the USSR, and at least have a chance to get to the Netherlands Antilles.

Koichi Hiraishi’s version of Mr. Sugihara’s story focuses not only on him, but on two escaping Jewish families. If Senpo Sugihara himself is drawn in rather restrained fashion, the families provide the small events, the bickering and humor, the negative outlooks and the hopeful ones that bring a human scale to the terrible events all these people are living. Moreover, the play is not about the goodness of a single man, but the degree to which each of us is responsible for our fellow human beings. When Sugihara, his consulate closed and his safety compromised by the invading Soviets, finally boards the train to his new posting in Berlin, he can honestly say that he has done everything that he could. Those members of the self-organized Jewish Refugee Committee who gave their lives so that others could escape can say the same, as can the Sugiharas’ Chinese cook, returning home to fight the invading Japanese. Even the consular secretary, not a very noble person, somehow learns to surpass his limitations. Senpo Sugihara, too, is seen to have moments of doubt, and needs his wife’s firmness of vision to shore him up. The play is truly about the connectedness of all of us. The leisurely pace of the direction by Mr. Hiraishi and Shoichi Yamada gives the audience time to reflect on the extent to which we ourselves can say, with Mr. Sugihara, that we have done everything possible to save the lives of those who need our help to survive.

(Updated on 2/9/05)

Okinawa Kumiodori


Reviewed on on 10/2/04
by R. Pikser

American readers may not be familiar with the history of Okinawa, the group of southernmost islands of the Japanese archipelago. In the 14th century, the islands formed the independent kingdom of Ryukyu. Later, Ryukyu fell under first Chinese, then Japanese, influence, and eventually was absorbed by Japan as a prefecture. The United States still maintains many army bases on the Okinawan islands, presumably as a residue of World War II.

In the 18th century the king of Ryukyu solicited the development of court dance, and Kumiodori was developed. The contact with China, Korea, and Japan led to elements of these countries’ art forms (Noh, Kabuki, Chinese opera, Kyogen, and puppet theater) being blended into Kumiodori, along with elements of traditional indigenous dances concerned with agricultural rituals. Kumiodori includes acting, singing, and dance, all performed in the most controlled and stylized of fashions. In fact, one of the main techniques seems to be absolute control and absolute invariance of dynamics, rhythm, and attack. This was true of the dances in the first half of the program and also of the stylized chanting and movement in the excerpt from the play, "Nido Tekiuchi," that formed the second half of the program. For a Westerner it was unnerving to see the unvarying facial expressions and body language of two boys while they spoke of their excitement at setting off to kill their father’s murderer and while they tearfully (according to the words) bid their mother good-bye. The musicians and singers accompanying the play had an interesting role in that they not only enriched the action, but sang of what was going on in the characters’ minds, belying the rigidly calm exteriors of the actors.

One can only wonder what moves a culture to be so in need of total control of the outward expression of mind and body. Okinawa Kumiodori clearly demands more study and exposure than a one-night concert before it can even begin to be appreciated.

(Updated on 3/10/05)

Pina Bausch Tanztheater Wuppertal

Für die Kinder von Gestern, Heute und Morgen (For the Children of Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow)


Reviewed on on 11/20/04
by R. Pikser

Pina Bausch is an extremely intelligent woman who is clearly trying to tell us something. What that something is may be arguable. At the start of this piece, which takes place in a completely white box with gaping black openings right, left, and upstage, two men sit beside each other on a table. They neither look at each other nor acknowledge each others’ presence. Yet when one of them is about to topple off the table, the other, at the very last moment, just manages to save him in a spectacular, teetering balance. Neither one reacts to what has happened, though they repeat the same event several times. The two major themes of the piece are thus presented: lack of connection yet people coming through for each other at the last moment in times of crisis. People reach out to each other; they are responded to or rebuffed; they experience pain and isolation. But when they are about to fall, someone—not necessarily the person they had reached out to—saves them.

Für die Kinder is constructed of theatrical-type events with props, or small dialogues, interspersed with po-mo solos that, with minor variations, all seem to be the same solo. The dancers are wonderfully trained, lithe and light, yet the solos express nothing other than po-mo’s general solipsism. Perhaps this style was chosen to express the lack of connection, but the opening sequence shows that, with thought, more visceral communication could be used to express the same thing. The dialogues, short as they are, are much more telling than all the beautiful movement. The scenic variations of moving walls and sand castles are interesting and provide the information that life is hard, no matter our surroundings.

Ms. Bausch has an interesting mind and, though some of what she shows us may not be totally clear, she, like her dancers, is reaching out and hoping she—or we—will catch the other. Her message to the children is not a happy one, but it is honest.

(Updated on 3/10/05)

American Ballet Theatre

Performed at: City Center
Reviewed on 10/31/04
by Celeste Sunderland

American Ballet Theater brought some Halloween magic to City Center during its October 31 matinee performance. As Angelina Ballerina took the stage for the world premiere of Kevin McKenzie’s The Ballerina, little girls in fairy wings and princess crowns squealed with delight. The oversized white mouse in pink tutu emerged from behind the curtain to greet the audience between pieces, and eventually found herself in the spotlight, sharing the stage with a bemused Veronika Part and Maxim Beloserkovsky. Lacking the typical ballerina physique, Angelina interrupted the passionate drama going on between the two principals to carry out her own choreography with sweet concentration, and even snuck in a lift.

The company also included some classical choreography among the juvenile entertainments. Herman Cornejo danced the part of the rose and Xiomara Reyes the young girl in Michel Fokine’s enchanting Le Spectre de la Rose. Reyes beautifully took on the role of the dreamy girl remembering the magic of her first ball, swooning in her chair, sniffing languidly at her rose, and finally dancing with its spirit. Cornejo recalled Nijinsky’s passion as he sauntered demurely around the room before making that infamous and majestic leap out the window.

Themes And Variations, featuring Gillian Murphy and Marcelo Gomes in Balanchine’s choreography, opened the performance. Gomes made up for his unremarkable power with fantastic grace. Joined by Murphy’s clean, expressive lines, the two resembled a pair of porcelain figurines in their slow pas de deux that incorporated many fine balancing points. Regal and poised, the corps brought an aristocratic, Russian flair to the stage, as they demonstrated great strength and flexibility.

Grand Pas Classique, with Michelle Wiles and David Hallberg followed. With bold style and exquisite balance, Wiles impressed with frequent arabesques held en pointe for many moments, while Hallberg’s muscular legs executed glorious leaps.

The brass section moved up from the pit to flank the stage for the last piece, Sinfonietta. Jiri Kylian’s choreography for five movements focused on the synchronicity found in nature. The dancers' fluid costumes and wispy movements matched the watercolor hues of the rolling hills of the backdrop. Wavelike scenarios where one dancer’s leap ended in a pirouette followed by another dancer, and another, mimicked the organic beauty of deer prancing through long grass, or the erratic yet perfectly composed flight patterns of birds.

(Updated on 3/3/05)

Photo: Carol Rosegg

Pan Asian Repertory Theatre

Mom, Dad, I’m Living with a White Girl


Performed at: Church of St. Paul and St. Andrew
Reviewed on 10/16/04
by R. Pikser

Mark Gee, who may well be partly derived from playwright Marty Chan, is young and second-generation Chinese, and all he wants is to integrate himself into the larger Canadian society and leave his roots behind. His white girlfriend, Sally, a script reader, is currently working her way through an outrageous B-movie spy story that exploits every racist stereotype from Sax Rohmer through Jackie Chan. In Pan Asian Repertory Theatre’s new production Mom, Dad, I’m Living with a White Girl, this ridiculous movie script forms the subtext to Mark’s relationships, not only with his parents, but with the sinophilic Sally herself. As the youngsters struggle to define themselves and those relationships, they deal with the added burden of Mark’s parents’ disapproval. The Gees don’t want him homogenized into Greater Westernness, and in fact Mark himself, deep down, is not quite sure that’s what he wants either.

Director Ron Nakahara has once again turned the empty space of the intimate chapel at the Church of St. Paul and St. Andrew into a magical theater space. The script tends to get bogged down in its central joke—the terrible thrall in which the son finds himself to the power of the Yellow Claw, represented by his mother who, it turns out, is herself in thrall to her position as an immigrant. The blocking, often imaginative, could have been developed further to avoid a feeling of repetitiousness. The actors romp through the script with great good humor, but they too have been allowed to maintain their characters at the one level at which they are written. While this is not a grave sin in the B-movie sections, if in the more serious sections the actors had worked against the script’s limitations, they would have done a great service to this play, better preparing the audience for the depth and understanding shown in the last scene. This intelligent play tries to be more than a sitcom, and merits an extra assist from its cast. Just as it is, though, it is funny, thought provoking, and a pleasure to see. It poses never-ending questions for members of minority groups that perhaps can never be answered, but which must be dealt with, over and over again. Sometimes the need comes from the inside and sometimes the need is imposed from without, but the tension is always there, for well or ill.

(Updated on 3/8/05)

Photo: Sonoko Kawahara

The 2004 ChekhovNOW Festival with Crossing Jamaica Avenue

The Cherry Orchard: Firs' Dream

Performed at: The Connelly Theater
Reviewed on 11/7/04
by Celeste Sunderland

Gender is irrelevant in the realm of solitude, as director Sonoko Kawahara established in her adaptation of Anton Chekhov’s famous play, The Cherry Orchard: Firs’ Dream. Chekhov’s male butler Firs becomes a female housekeeper played with feverish demureness by Dawn Eshelman, who after serving the same family for two generations, finds herself floating, with brief acknowledgment, through a tumultuous household. Eventually, she is forgotten altogether, left alone in the winter chill outside a locked and abandoned house.

Part of the fifth annual ChekhovNOW Festival at the Connelly Theater, the play began with this scene, in the original the last, setting a tone of misplaced settlement and forlorn nostalgia. A sparse stage amplified the stark individuality of each of the characters, portrayed by a talented group of actors, who are introduced brusquely through unfolding scenes, like the eccentric relatives that creep out of the woodwork for holiday dinners. Except this crew is bubbling with personality peculiarities, every single one of them just a bit mentally offbeat; their emotional hankerings emerge as the group convenes at the family home.

Rachel Neuman played the wild governess Charlotta with sassy gloom. The children are all grown, but she hangs around entertaining with ventriloquism and magic tricks. David Altman was politely funny as quirky clerk Epihodov, declaring his “one misfortune every day.” And Esra Gaffin was memorable as the feisty maid Dunyasha. They’re all held together by Ryubov (Kathleen O’Neill Toledo), the proper, delirious mother, who escapes the death of her child by running away to Paris with her lover, and upon returning to the ancestral home is beside herself with the idea of hawking her beloved cherry orchard to money-hungry hackers. But alas, what choice is left when the money’s gone? Ryubov must bid adieu to the only constant in her life, dutifully bursting with pink blossoms in the spring, standing still and serene beneath a glistening white coat in winter--the blow is devastating for the already fragile-minded woman.

The most beautiful sequence occurs at the end. As Firs falls into slumber, she finds herself center-stage as delicate, pink petals fall from above. She is happy and smiling as the others join her, laughing and playing, dressed all in white, grabbing at the petals and tossing around a pink chiffon sheet. All minds are finally at peace. No anguish over lost pasts, no turmoil over unrequited love, no more fear for the future.

(Updated on 2/9/05)

School of Rock

Reviewed on 10/28/04
by Taro Enjoji

School of Rock, a release from last year, is impressively directed by Richard Linklater and stars Jack Black of There’s Something about Mary and Shallow Hal fame. Duey Finn (Black) is a guitarist in love with rock music. While dreaming of an unprecedented major debut, he ends up getting kicked out of his own band. The seldom-employed Duey is even about to be kicked out of his apartment by his close friend and roommate, Ned Shunibury (Mike White), for not paying his rent. That’s when Duey answers a phone call meant for Ned, offering a good job at a private elementary school; masquerading almost by accident as Ned, Duey gets the job and becomes a substitute teacher. At first our hero is enthusiastic about the job, but the school turns out to be a lot more strictly managed and less freewheeling than he had imagined. Duey doesn’t intend to be a real teacher, but events conspire against him: Passing the music room by chance, he notices that his own students have musical talent. So, somewhat clumsily, he starts working with the kids to realize his own dreams through them. How do you suppose Duey and his students finally end up?

When this film came out, contrary to expectations it got a lot of repeat customers. School of Rock was number one at the box office for four weeks running in New York, and became a huge hit around the country, earning around $90 million in the first month. Overall, the acting and photography improved with every shot. Jack Black, who’s also the frontman for the band Tenacious D, performs all his own musical scenes, and the casting for the children’s roles avoided typical Hollywood child actors—the number one requirement was the ability to perform music. School of Rock lacks the usual preachy quality of movies about education, going in a completely different direction than one might expect from the school setting. This type of hero is rarely seen in American movies, and Duey’s childlike heart and the process of his and the children’s growth together is portrayed with humor, giving us the kind of movie that can be thoroughly enjoyed by young and old, male and female alike.

The songs performed by Jack Black in the movie have also been issued as an album (which Black also produced), a collection not just for rock fans, but which anyone who likes music can enjoy.
My strongest feeling after seeing this movie was, “I wish a teacher like this would turn up in Japan some day!”

(Updated on 3/2/05)

HBO Films/Fine Line Features

La Niña Santa

Reviewed on 10/11/04
by R. Pikser

Although not Cannes or Sundance, the New York Film Festival is still a prestigious venue where time and space are made for young filmmakers. La Niña Santa (The Holy Girl) was written and directed by Lucrecia Martel, a promising newcomer invited back to the 2004 NYFF, this time with the influential Pedro Almodóvar as one of her executive producers. Certainly this film about the senses, sensuality, and sexuality is tightly made from the point of view of the interrelationship of themes to images, and certainly it has moments of Almodovarian titillation.

A sister and brother, Helena and Freddy, own a small, European-style hotel, with rooms of a size appropriate for sleeping, not entertaining. Helena and Freddy live in these rooms, so they spend some intimate, casually sensual moments in bed together, complaining about their ex-spouses and trying to sort out their lives. Helena’s stolid daughter, Amalia (Maria Alché), and her buddingly salacious friend Josefina (Julieta Zylberberg) are discovering their sexuality while titillating themselves with the exquisite mental torments of possibly dedicating themselves to Jesus. Into this hothouse atmosphere spills a medical conference at which the uptight Dr. Jeno (a suffering Carlos Belloso) agonizes over the incipient perversions he hasn’t the courage to fully indulge.

The setup is interesting, as is the filmic technique of truncated shots suggesting the inconclusiveness of the characters’ emotional yearnings. But we are thrown into the middle of these lives with no explanation. We spend time and energy trying to figure out what is going on without learning anything about the characters. Perhaps if Ms. Martel were surer of what she wanted to say, she would not have shied away from clearer presentation. She has tried to substitute formal elements for substance, but a film about people must have both. A film about incompleteness cannot leave the viewer feeling incomplete.

In Flowers for Diana, an eight-minute short by Reynald Bertrand accompanying La Niña Santa, the film crew trails after a belligerent freeloader as her friends and family extricate themselves from her temper tantrums. We are not sure whether she is psychotic and falling apart, whether she is just a self-centered bitch, or whether the film is a put-on—but the filmmakers are clear in what they want to show and in how they want to show it. Unlike La Niña Santa, Flowers for Diana is exactly as long as it needs to be and does everything it needs to do.

Artistic excellence? ***
Entertainment? ***
Inventiveness? ***
Healing power? ***

(Updated on 3/8/05)