Photo: Deborah Boardman

Power, both physical and mental, was exalted at Philadanco’s Joyce Theater performance in May. Three works created for men, by men as part of the We Too Dance series highlighting African American men in dance, Back to Bach, Blue, and Sweet in the Morning, showcased the men’s strength, flair, and sassy theatricality. Two other pieces, Elegy and Steal Away, utilized symbolic choreography that incorporated metaphysical notions.

Several moments throughout the evening roused a sense of spiritual intimacy, most exemplified by Nathan Trice’s A Place of Peace, danced by Christopher L. Huggins. While three candles burned downstage, the percussive sounds of thumb harp combined with long ethereal tones for a haunting soundtrack. Huggins’s spastic gestures juxtaposed with smooth, elegant motions and meditative poses conveyed a sense of struggle with the outside world as well as within. At the end of the dance Huggins grew obsessed with one candle; with mesmerizing self-awareness he curled up beside it as the light grew dark. The moment recalled the human being’s primal affinity to light and its association with inner strength and serenity.

Steal Away, choreographed by Alonzo King, also featured mystical moments. In the closing scene a woman, her body limp and spiritless, emerged on stage supported by two male dancers. She began to dance but only within the constraints of the men. The bittersweet choreography culminated in the liberation of the woman’s soul; finally, she became capable of transcending her physical hardships. As she realized her ability to move beyond the pain with strength of the mind, rose petals fell from the sky and she laughed deliriously. A woman in a yellow dress danced out, graceful and free, symbolizing the freedom the spirit can achieve through transcendence.

While the company expressed poignant emotion through gentle, meditative choreography, the dancers also exhibited extreme physical energy. Though blatant weariness shrouded the male dancers in Eleo Pomare’s Back to Bach, Christopher Huggins’s Blue abounded with personality and exuberance. Elements of African dance combined with metaphors for the innocence of a boy and the maturity of a man. At one point the dancers acted like dolls; one soloed like a wind-up toy, full of ceaseless energy. A sequence of steps, leaps, pirouettes, rolls, and sexy poses prompted the audience to whoop with excitement. And in a final moment of dramatic delight each dancer took a turn in the spotlight. One walked on his hands, one did a split, and one jumped high in a straddle, threw the audience a look, and strode defiantly off stage.

(Updated on 7/26/04)

Photo: Eduardo Patino

The Joffrey Ensemble is a group of youngsters selected from the Joffrey Ballet School in order to allow young dancers to try their teeth on the masterworks of their craft and, at the same time, to create new works that will train them toward being able to cope with those iconic roles. If some of the young dancers still need a bit of work, others, like Rafael Ferreras in the Petipa “Pas de Slave” from Le Corsair, are already masterful. Kyle Coffman has a quieter and a younger performing persona than Mr. Ferreras, but already has excellent line and elevation and a calm and quiet charm that should develop into something wonderful in the near future.

The selection of choreography is generally well made. The dancers are able to handle the classics but, with the exception of Mr. Ferreras, they do not seem to be confident about their ability to do so. Igal Perry contributed the moody and sensual Nocturnes to the repertoire, which, however, didn’t need its second section. Mr. Lazar offered three pieces: Layers, to Mozart, which opened the evening; Rondo Brilliant, to Mendelssohn; and Surrender 2 Love, to a pastiche of Spanish, Brazilian, and Argentinean music, which ended the evening. Layers lacked overall focus and, in trying to keep up with the composer, got sidetracked in a lot of steps and a lot of comings and goings, although it did offer the dancers the opportunity to revel in their youth and in the sheer pleasure of dancing. Surrender, replete with smoke effects and dark lighting, again lacked overall form while alternating between too many steps and too few. While the dancers shone because of their youth in the first piece, they were too young to find the smoldering sexuality that might have ameliorated the last.

The training-ground concept of the Joffrey Ensemble is excellent and the dancers have generally been well chosen. The next step for Mr. Lazar is to focus on his choreography as he has focused on the creation of the company, so that his protégés can all shine as they should.

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

(Updated on 7/26/04)

American Ballet Theatre
Performed at The Metropolitan Opera House
Reviewed on 5/12/2004 by R. Pikser

The dancers of American Ballet Theatre work hard. They are athletic. They are clean in their execution. Yet, with a few exceptions, whether performing the hotly sexual and sexually stifled Pillar of Fire, the cerebrally humorous dances of Jiri Kylián, or the violent apache dance of Ann Reinking, While My Guitar Gently Weeps in Within You Without You, set to the ironic and gentle song by George Harrison, they somehow dance without passion and without connecting their brains to the extremes to which they are subjecting their bodies. One notable exception is Marcelo Gomes in Natalie Weir's Within You Without You, another section of the Harrison piece. Gomes is clearly trying to relate the idea of an internal search, embodied in the song, to the movements he performs, although the choreography's unrelenting athleticism and lack of dynamic variation do not offer him much help.

In Pillar of Fire, Xiomara Reyes, as the Youngest Sister, uses Anthony Tudor's evocative choreography well to create her innocently flirtatious character, as does Angel Corella, dancing the highly sexual Young Man from the House Opposite. To be fair, the Eldest Sister, the Maiden Ladies, and the Friend really do not have much to work with, but Amanda McKerrow as Hagar did not exploit the explosive tension the choreography offers her. For the rest, the only time the majority of the dancers seemed truly to be enjoying themselves was while cavorting across the stage in David Parsons's finale to Within You Without You.

The dancers of American Ballet Theatre are technically strong and can do all sorts of movements and perform in all sorts of styles. However, most of those who performed on Wednesday evening are not developing the exciting and chameleon-like nature that an artist needs in order not only to dance, but to internalize and embody many roles.

Artistic excellence? ***
Was it entertaining? ***
Was it inventive? **
Was it healing? **

(Updated on 6/28/04)

Real evil can be surprisingly dull, and artists portraying evil for political reasons certainly have a responsibility not to glamorize it. Yet at what point does truthful portrayal become a boring work of art?

I do not believe that art can do away with being aesthetically compelling without losing its truth. But French choreographer Maguy Marin seems to be trying. In April she brought her company to New York with les applaudissements ne se mangent pas ("One Can't Eat Applause"), from 2002. Critically the piece has been a success; the night I attended, a number of audience members left in the middle. Marin's piece is fascinating, but it's also terribly, inaccessibly boring-never a good idea for politically engaged art.

The title, taken from Eduardo Galeano's The Open Veins of Latin America, refers to the World Bank and IMF's "applause" when poor countries follow their drastic cost-cutting suggestions in order to get loans. Under this topical title, Marin has crafted an abstract portrait of a society in which fear is so ingrained as to have warped all normal human interactions. A gorgeous curtain of brightly colored plastic ribbons screens three sides of the stage, evoking the festive associations Latin America has for many outsiders; within this carnivalesque fence, eight dancers in street clothes evoke a society at the mercy of foreign exploitation and homegrown dictatorship.

Denis Mariotte's score alternates a buzzing hum with sudden outbursts of violent, chaotic noise. Stonefaced men and women interact, indifferent or hostile, or watch helplessly as others fall-always looking over their shoulders. People part the curtain to look out, then are suddenly seized and pulled through. A moment later, their limp bodies topple out. The most frequent embraces are of the dead.

This is powerful stuff, but it never builds. Does Marin think a narrative arc too bourgeois? The material is also uneven. Marin's narrative motifs develop out of a structure of pedestrian patterns: walking or running in plain, geometric lines. This strong fabric is pitted with dull, superfluous "dancey" sections, as if Marin is determined not to make beautiful movement out of her ugly subject matter. But the narrative parts are beautiful, and the dance passages detract from the work's conceptual impact by putting the audience to sleep.

At the end of the piece, the dancers bowed pokerfaced, seeming determined not to eat our rather lukewarm applause. I hope Marin will rework les applaudissements. We need politically engaged dance, and about 50% of this piece is superb. Alas, the other 50% reduces it to an abstruse curiosity-and surely that's not the point.

(Updated on 9/8/04)

Photo: Jonathan Slaff

What an amazing amount of lascivious creativity! What a plethora of ideas in staging! Director Brooke O’Harra, in this adaptation of Henry Fielding’s play, shows evidence of a truly twisted mind in the most laudatory sense of the words. The walls of the set are plastered with the same papier mâché the costumes are made of. The King has a horizontal board projecting from his chest so that every time he moves people must bow down to avoid having their heads smashed. Princess Huncamunca, with whom Tom is in love, has projecting wooden breasts seemingly made of dozens of spigotlike teats, like an udder gone mad. One courtier has breasts like horns bursting through her costume, and her brother has an erection of the same sort. On the video screens placed around the front of the stage, we see seemingly secret moments of the actors offstage, grimacing or tippling. Tom Thumb, the hero, is represented by a potato, or rather by potatoes, held by the actors and spoken for by them in turn, each having a different relationship to his or her potato, even as each of them loves, or hates, Tom for different reasons. There are even discourses on the implications of the tuber for the survival of the poor—pro and con. Shades of Dean Swift!

What, then, is the problem? That the creativity has overtaken the need to communicate. (Shades of Derrida!) Ms. O’Harra has chosen to make the text unintelligible by submitting it to a series of phonological distortions. The actors are so busy performing the sounds, which come out like Stockhausen, or tape recordings in reverse, that they have no time to create an emotional base. When we are treated to the mundane interchanges of the rehearsal process, the lack of energy or emotional truth belies the words of the presumed subtext.

Henry Fielding was eventually stymied in his playwriting by Sir Robert Walpole, the prime minister at the time, whom Fielding savaged in his satires. This production is on the right track. It has Fielding’s gusto, his bawdiness, and even a bit of his social critique. But it lacks bite and relevance. Perhaps it needed to be more up to date in its satire. As it is, much brilliance and work have been expended for their own sakes, rather than for the sake of saying something. That is not in Fielding’s tradition.

Artistic excellence? ***
Was it entertaining? ***
Was it inventive? ****
Was it healing? **

(Updated on 7/26/04)

Photo: Jonathan Slaff

Theater for the New City
Nossig's Antics
Performed at Theater
for the New City
Reviewed on 5/8/2004
by R. Pikser

Alfred Nossig (1864-1943) was, among other things, a writer, a sculptor, a literary critic, a philosopher, an active Zionist, and a socialist. On the eve of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising he was shot by the leaders of the resistance as a possible Nazi spy. One gleans some of this information from the play, but more in list form than in any way that has a bearing on what happens on stage. This nightmare farce has much repetition, starting at the top of the play, with Nossig being shot over and over again by unknown and different assailants. Another repetition is the interlingual, interdialectal pun on “Nossig,” “nossing,” and “nothing.” This is really what the play is about: nihilism, presented as the disconnected sequences of a dream, and the idea that we, like Nossig’s grandson, who needs to find out who the man really was, will always end up only within our own minds.

Author Lazarre Seymour Simckes may expose us to his subconscious mind, but he does not try in any way to take us into it, or into the mind of Nossig. A play based on dreams usually attempts to create a different kind of reality. Here we have only disconnect after disconnect and surface event after surface event. Since all three characters speak at breakneck speed, two of them in Yiddish, or Polish, accents so thick that we have problems understanding them, it seems that words are of no importance. Even (especially?) the character of the psychiatrist conveys the idea that all is mutable and that we can never perceive, much less understand, an event or an idea. What then, does this play give us? Nihilism. Nossing.

Director Crystal Field has used theatrical techniques from the world over—Bunraku puppetry, tumbling, stilt walking, and dance—to flesh out this nightmare world. If she has not elucidated it, perhaps she did not wish to or could not. The actors work well together. Unfortunately, in spite of all their hard work, the piece did not penetrate the mind of this reviewer.

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

(Updated on 7/26/04)

Photo: Gerry Goodstein

Theatre for a New Audience
Engaged
Performed at The Lucille Lortel Theatre
Reviewed on 4/28/04
by R. Pikser

Many of our readers have read, seen, or even performed in Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Ernest. W.S. Gilbert, best known as the librettist for Arthur Sullivan, wrote this satire in 1877, well before Wilde’s 1895 Ernest. Wilde’s play is a comedy of manners exposing the hypocrisy and shallowness of social pretensions and class connections. Though Gilbert’s characters are not quite as fleshed out as Wilde’s, Engaged is more bitter than Ernest because it is more real. The cast list, in which the central character, Cheviot Hill, is described as “a young man of property,” says it all. Cheviot and his money are the axis around which all the other characters spin. The Lowland Scots girl, Maggie, finds Cheviot irresistible because he can offer her a comfortable life. Her devoted lover, Angus, gives her up to Cheviot so she can have a comfortable life and accepts a monetary consideration because, after all, “£2 is £2,” as Maggie herself says. Belvawney, in the pay of Cheviot’s father, makes his living ensuring that Cheviot will not marry and squander the family forturne. Belvawney’s beloved, Belinda, will not marry him because he has no secure income. Cheviot’s betrothed, Minnie, while presenting herself as a pretty goose, is quite aware of how to handle her intended and what exactly he is worth. And Cheviot, though famously stingy, is the perfect example of the upper class man who need never discipline himself amatorially because his money permits him everything.

The performances are good, based loosely on the flamboyant nineteenth-century style in which the play was written, but with a definite undercurrent of emotional honesty. Jeremy Shamos is particularly enjoyable as the blissfully self-satisfied Cheviot, but then, he has the most material to work with. The other cast members have a good time under the rather restrained direction of Doug Hughes, who has kept the farcical elements under control rather than indulged them. And best of all, the topic of money is never untimely. How satisfying to see it made fun of.

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

(Updated on 7/26/04)

Photo: Carol Rosegg

Larry Kramer’s strident, impassioned play The Normal Heart was groundbreaking when first seen in 1985. The activist writer’s efforts to alert New York City authorities to the looming scourge of AIDS and get official help to fight it have been well documented. Having seen the original production, in the same space in which it has been revived now, I can attest that its power as a theatrical piece and the reality and threat of its message are as potent as they were 19 years ago. The end of the play, updated to reflect recent calls for legalizing gay marriage, still leaves the audience in tears and stunned silence.

The story chronicles the efforts of a successful writer, Ned Weeks, and a group of his friends, who slowly realize the growing horror of AIDS as more and more of their friends are afflicted with a terrible disease. The friends know a doctor who is also increasingly alarmed to see the same symptoms in scores of her young, gay patients, who all eventually die. Though she documents her findings, she can get no one to pay attention to her warnings, neither health officials, funders, or the young men she treats, who ignore her calls for celibacy, because she fears that intimate contact is the route of transmission.

Emotional speeches by each character review the history of the gay movement, from closeted fear to militant advocacy, and the reluctance of gays themselves to admit that the sexually free life they have finally embraced and champion may be what is killing them. However, the power of the play’s continued relevance is not just that the virus is still infecting millions, but that the writer also examines the search for belonging, community, relationships, and love that all people seek, no matter their sexual orientation. Each couple we meet struggles with identity and with acceptance, from loved ones to business associates. Some have formed stable, loving relationships and are devastated when their partners die.

As Ned Weeks, Kramer’s fictional counterpart, Raul Esparza is brilliant. Strident and abrasive, he powers through his interactions with friends and officials as he meets resistance to facing the truth of the developing epidemic. Indeed, every actor plays his part magnificently, with Joanna Gleason wonderfully effective as the caring, frustrated doctor, and Billy Warlock handsome and sweetly touching yet quietly powerful as the man with whom Ned finally finds love, only to lose him.

Leaving the theater one is graphically confronted with the reality, almost two decades later, that in a few years 200 million people worldwide will be infected with the HIV virus. Will it ever end?

Artistic excellence? *****
Was it entertaining? *****
Was it inventive? *****
Was it healing? *****

(Updated on 8/03/04)

A Noh Macbeth, Stripped Down to Its Essential Horror
Noh-Opera Macbeth


Performed at: Williamsburg Art & Historical Center
Reviewed on 4/9/04
by Tamsin Nutter

Among those working to bring Japanese Noh theater into the 21st century is composer Akiko Asai, whose fascinating production of Noh-Opera Macbeth strips the the play’s baroque plot twists and language down to its essential horror. Set austerely in a huge rectangular room, the opera, a fusing of contemporary Western-style opera and Japanese Noh, was sung in Japanese. (English libretti were available.) Akira Nishio’s dramatic lighting threw giant shadows on the white walls. Four musicians (Haruka Fujii, Yuri Yamashita, Chris Thompson, and Makia Matsumura) played a range of percussion instruments, including chimes, gongs, and a drum set, and a piano; Chi-Chung Ho conducted from behind the audience.

Rather like ancient Greek theater, in traditional Noh a chorus is used to give background or comment on events. Asai, an MFA composition student at NYU, uses her eight-person chorus not only to move the narrative along, but also to create rhythmic and atmospheric effects. The chorus surrounds Macbeth with sound as, representing the witches, they surround him physically; then, amid crashing percussion, they give tongue in a spine-tingling chaos of voices—it’s the decisive moment, when ambition overwhelms him. Although Asai has crafted some wonderfully effective arias and recitatives (notably the sleepwalking scene), the strongest music in Noh-Opera Macbeth is choral.

Theatrically, the production’s great innovation is to have split each of the three principal characters between a singer and a dancer. Macbeth and Macduff are sung by men and danced by women; Lady Macbeth is sung by a woman and danced by a man. The conceit is fantastically successful, not only in giving the music’s bombast a chilling undercurrent of Noh movement, but also in what it suggests about the characters. Macbeth’s voice (tenor Tetsuya Arime) is heroic and emotional; his body (the marvellous Ryoko Aoki) is subtle, cold, and murderous. Lady Macbeth’s voice (soprano Kyoko Nagasaki) is lovely and agile; her body (Genkuro Hanayagi) expresses her cruelty and artifice, her “heart of a man” willing to murder for ambition. This partnership is particularly compelling; the performers playing Macduff achieve less synthesis, although both are exceptional. Baritone Joko Ando’s dramatic delivery and animated facial expressions were engaging, but distracted from his character’s embodiment, danced with astonishing ferocity by Mikifu Hanayagi. In her first confrontation with Macbeth, a faint drumroll of thunder is heard, and the dancer’s eyes lift in a tiny, forbidding movement. All my hair stood on end.

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

(Updated on 10/20/04)