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DanceNOW Festival at Joe’s Pub

Thursday, September 6th, 2012

By Rachel Straus

Adam Barruch’s I Had Myself a True Love had my vote as the winner of the DanceNOW Challenge at Joe’s Pub. On September 5, Barruch’s competition was nine other choreographers. Just like a prime-time dance competition, the sold-out audience was invited to judge and pick a favorite. The challenge for the artists was  to create a work in under five minutes for the tiny cabaret stage which provides, in the words of producer Sydney Skybetter, “a clear concise artistic statement.” The odds were tipped toward Barruch. He was the only choreographer with two works on the program. Last year he was a DanceNOW winner. This year his new hyper-expressive solos to recorded music sung by Barbara Steisand opened and closed the hour-long evening.

At the smartly renovated Joe’s Pub, the boyish-looking Barruch danced from the gut. But his work wasn’t sentimental. It was intentionally overwrought. Like Pina Bausch, Barruch contasts sharp, vexed gestures with voluminous ones that wash over his body like a tidal wave. His small gestures—wrists curling up like a fern, fingers streching the lids of his eyes wide—become the places where Barruch dances a specific experience. To me it read as if he was seeing a horror and longing to transcend it. Barruch’s transcendence occurred through his loose-limbed body’s swirling and lunging and his speed that left behind distinct lines in space, like that of a painter’s brush. Barruch’s choice of Streisand songs I Had Myself a True Love and Lover, Come Back To Me grounded the two solos in a narrative. But unlike many Streisand dance tributes, Barruch’s didn’t stoop to camping this favorite diva. Instead, he channelled Streisand’s intensity and oddness through Charlie Chaplin-like facial expressions that expressed forlornness, hope and near madness.

Barruch studied for a year and a half at The Juilliard School and then launched himself as a choreographer-dancer in today’s hard knocks dance world. Multiple dance educational institutions have commissioned him to teach and make works. He has been a stand out in several group shows. Recently, the Alvin Ailey Foundation’s New Directions Choreography Lab invited him to be one of their initiative’s first recipients. Barruch is getting noticed.

As for the other artists, they made for an eclectic evening. Some were funny, others were earnest. If you feel like seeing new dance-theatre makers and voting for your favorite one, DanceNOW’s tenth anniversary Joe’s Pub festival continues (September 6, 7, 8 and 15). Producer-directors Robin Staff, Tamara Greenfield and Sydney Skybetter will help choose an overall winner of the DanceNOW Challenge. That artist will receive $1,000, a week-long creative residency, and twenty hours of New York City studio space. This prize is not Lotto, but these days dance artists need all the bits of help they can get.

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Seeing Dance (and Bullfights) in Spain

Monday, May 28th, 2012

By Rachel Straus

While the New York Times paints Spain as a country on the verge of collapse, the view from the streets of Madrid and Salamanca is quite different.

Yes, the restaurants are not as full, but that cannot be said of the bars. At Madrid’s Plaza de Toros de Las Ventas on May 27, the stadium was packed. Though the bullfights are a far cry from ballet or experimental dance, the posture of the toreadors (bullfighters) are inescapably similar to the stance of flamenco dancers: the arch of the back, the puff of the torso, the legs pressed together. The men even rise to relevé (the tips of their toes) before running toward the bull with flags that end in sharp knives. The overall experience is a bloody one. But unless you’re a vegetarian, you can’t escape being complicit in violence toward animals. Humans kill them for sustenance. Cows and chickens generally live lives of abject misery, and the process by which they come to urban tables is hidden. With the bullfight, the ritual reenactment of slaughter is raised to the level of art. The enormous animals are given names, have carefuly recorded family trees, and when they are about five years old, they fight for their lives to the accompaniment of live music. In rare cases, when one bull outsmarts a dozen gorgeously costumed men, in 15 to 20 minutes of fighting, the president of Las Ventas grants the animal its freedom. This winner returns to the countryside to grow old in privileged circumstances.

Plaza de Toros de Las Ventas

Compared to Madrid’s tickets prices for the bullfights (30 to 80 Euros), Salamanca’s Obra Social de Caja hosts performances and lectures about Spanish culture for practically nothing (3 Euros). Salamanca, an ancient city northwest of Madid that boasts the nation’s oldest university, isn’t known for its flamenco. But on May 24, the singer Sebastián Heredia Santiago performed for more than an hour at el Teatro de la Caja. Accompanied by guitarist Juan Antonio Muñoz, Santiago, known as the Cancanilla (the trickster) of Málaga, carried on an impromptu conversation with his fans in the audience. “Eres simpatico” (you are nice), shouted one lady. Cancanilla returned the compliment and thus began the love-in. Cancanilla, who has performed in the companies of José Greco and Lola Flores, and who looks like an amiable bullfrog because of the width of his throat, possesses a booming, plaintive voice that needs no amplification. He teased the audience, saying that he was going to get up and dance flamenco. I doubted the veracity of his statement, but Cancanilla kept his promise. What was astonishing was that this trickster can approximate the same nuanced power with his legs as he can with his lungs.

Sebastián Heredia Santiago

Unlike in the United States, Germany, and France, modern dance never flourished in Spain. That, however, does not mean that it doesn’t exist. On May 25, at Madrid’s El Huerto Espacio Escénico, modern dancer and choreographer Manuel Badás presented his one-man show Sebastián. The French-trained artist skillfully connects Saint Sebastian’s martyrdom with gay culture’s punishment of the body in its quest for physical perfection. Though it was not touched upon, gay men began pumping iron and obsessing about their abdominal muscles in increasing numbers with the AIDS crisis. Looking physically invulnerable, and sexy, was the community’s defense in the face of so many deaths.

Manuel Badás

In Sebastián, Badás creates a montage of stereotypical homosexual images: the drag queen with his five-inch heels, the cover model in white underwear, and the regular guy pouring over glossy male magazines, whose pages are riddled with advertisements for beauty pills and creams. Again and again, Badás transformed back into the martyr Sebastian. His stomach contracted as though struck by an arrow. His arms fluttered behind his back, like he was manacled and he was sprouting wings. He swirled across the floor, as though transcending rough terrain. Throughout, the music ricocheted between the past and present: from baroque hymns to classic American rock and jazz. Biblical quotes about Sebastian’s martyrdom were projected and Badás’ dancing became increasingly kinetic. In the last section, a recording of Billy Holiday singing Strange Fruit was heard. The young, lithe Badás lined up his glossy magazines in the shape of a cross. He tilted his body over a chair, becoming a strangely suspended fruit, one that has been martyred by today’s media-saturated forces.

George Bizet’s Carmen is a well-worn score. Flamenco companies, opera troupes, and car commercials have taken a bite out of the 1875 composition by the French (not Spanish) composer. On May 26 at the Teatro Nuevo Apolo, The Ballet Flamenco de Madrid ratcheted up the cliches associated with the Carmen story.

Veronica Cantos

Veronica Santos performed the title role. Choreographer Sara Lezana tipped her hat to Broadway by having her female flamenco dancers bare a lot more leg (and crotch) than is traditionally seen. Carmen is a tale of the gypsy femme fatale, who plays men against each other, has a taste for violence, and whose life ends tragically. She is stabbed to death by her soldier-lover Don Jose (Saulo Sanchez G). Instead of lamenting the vulgar aspects of this production (which could take up several pages), it’s best to mention what was worthwhile. Sanchez danced with elegance and emotional commitment. The decision to interpolate Bizet’s music with live flamenco, performed by a quartet of musicians (including a flutist), helped return Carmen back to Spain, the home of this wonderful art form.

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The Fortress of Being: John Jasperse’s “Fort Blossom revisited”

Saturday, May 12th, 2012

By Rachel Straus

In the women’s bathroom of New York Live Arts, each stall sported a small bottle of lower anatomy cleansing solution. Its odd presence must have been care of choreographer John Jasperse, whose erogenous zone oriented Fort Blossom revisited (2000/2012) held its New York premiere on May 9 in the Chelsea theater.

The hour-long work, for two nude male dancers (Ben Asriel and Burr Johnson) and two clothed female dancers (Lindsay Clark and Erika Hand), is not for the prudish. Anal cavities, penises and balls are seen, but after a while it ceases to be a big deal. Jasperse, who performed in the original production, expanded the length of his 2000 dance and changed the music to that of minimalist Ryoji Ikeda. Yet he keeps the work’s central conceit: the men are nude, the women are not.

Fort Blossom revisited hits all the proverbial buttons. In the work’s beginning, Asriel and Johnson simulate anal sex. Instead of a condom, they are physically separated by a translucent inflatable cushion, which deflates after five minutes of gentle bucking. Presenting and then pushing past (pun intended) the notion that a dance featuring two nude men must be about gay sex, Jasperse then tenders another idea. It is an aesthetic one. The women, dressed in red shifts, perform a slow, side-by-side unison duet. On their backs are red inflatable cushions, whose shape resembles butterfly wings. The upright women perform on a white floor. On the stage’s other side are the men who lie horizontally on a black floor. Later they form a cat’s cradle of sculptural positions. The contrasts between the two sets of dancers becomes conceptual rather than sexual.

When the men and women come together, it’s not the dramatic moment one expects. Instead Jasperse creates a human bumper car vision. With the inflatable cushions pressed to their bellies, the performers gleefully run and bounce off of each other. At the work’s end, they form a quartet and move in full-bodied spirals. After the pedestrian-like choreography from the previous 40-odd minutes, the last moments of Fort Blossom is a garden of delights. It no longer matters who is naked or clothed, who is male or female. The dancers momentarily escape the fortress of human labels. They soar through space, suspended on one leg with their arms floating behind, like kites in the sky.

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Lifting Ballerinas

Monday, May 7th, 2012

By Rachel Straus

Have you ever wondered what it would take to partner a female ballet dancer? The May 6 matinee at New York City Ballet was an excellent primer for anyone considering this question. In each of the four works from the All (Jerome) Robbins program, at the former New York State Theater, the male lead rarely left the side of his ballerina.

Robbins’s In G Major was a case in point. In the pas de deux section to Ravel’s eponymous composition, Tyler Angle lifted Maria Kowroski at least 25 times. In the end, Angle walked off the stage with Kowroski in a six-o-clock split, her head almost touching his. To create this pose, Angle benched pressed the tall ballerina above his head. Because of the pleasing geometry of Kowroski’s long line, and the ease of her form, my eye naturally moved to her. But it was Angle underneath who made this vision airborne—and magical. At the last moment, Angle’s arms looked like they were going to fail him. Fortunately, the stage wings were steps away.

Besides Robbins’s The Cage (1951), about a tribe of man-eating insect women who destroy one of their prey (Craig Hall), Robbins’s other ballets on the program showed the influence of Balanchine’s neoclassicism. In the Night (1970), In G Major (1975) and Andantino (1981) are plotless ballets. They feature a relationship, or relationships, between a man and woman, which is expressed through a pas de deux. Balanchine expanded classicism through the partnered duet. His lifts were far more complex than his predecessors Petipa, Fokine, and Massine. They didn’t just go up and down. They traveled. The woman changed poses in mid air. The lifts often began and ended in full-bodied motion. In Robbins’s three ballets, Balanchine-style partnering is evidence. The women sail through the sky like birds (and occasionally like fighter jets). The men below them propel their wings.

Of the male leads from In the Night, to music by Frédéric Chopin as performed by Nancy McDill, Robert Fairchild and Sebastian Marcovici stood out for their convincing portrayals of men in adoration of their women. While Fairchild played the young lover to Sterling Hyltin, Marcovici danced the steadfast companion to Wendy Whelan’s vexed, ambivalent character. Marcovici’s lifts expressed the unswerving nature of his love. While she thrashed and pulled away from, Marcovici carried Whelan aloft through her psychological storm. Their pas de deux was the highlight of the afternoon.

Back in 2007 a documentary about the recently retired New York City Ballet principal dancer Jock Soto was aired. Called Water Flowing Together, it contains a memorable scene in which the virile Soto is crumpled in a corner of a studio. With tears of exhaustion, Soto talks about how his arms ache. He says he doesn’t have the strength to lift another ballerina. Yet Soto wasn’t angry or resentful. He expressed exasperation with his ability to continue to make partnering look effortless, to make lifts symbols of the transcendent power of love.

The men of City Ballet, and male ballet dancers everywhere, may not have to dance on the tips of their toes or to suffer the same degree of competition as female dancers, but their job is no less easy. They literally carry certain ballets. Balanchine said “ballet is woman,” but ballet without men would strip the art form of humanity, and of its fundamental expression of being there for another.

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Artistic Freedom and Political Protest: Israel’s Batsheva Dance Company

Tuesday, April 24th, 2012

Note: This review marks the beginning of a new series dedicated to showcasing the best student writing from the Dance History class I teach at The Juilliard School.

By Eve Jacobs

Batsheva Dance Company’s March 7 performance of Hora started with a bang. Lots of them—on cans, drums, and the pavement outside of BAM’s Howard Gilman Opera House. Created in 2009 by Batsheva’s artistic director Ohad Naharin, Hora included sounds and ideas beyond the choreographer’s control. Adalah-NY protestors paraded signs: “BOYCOTT ISRAEL!” “DON’T DANCE AROUND APARTEID!” The anti-Israel activists distributed mock programs that read, “Batsheva Dance Company: Cultural Ambassadors for Israel.”  The slogan refers to former Minister of Affairs Arye Mekel’s “Brand Israel,” campaign, which, according to Adalah-NY, uses art to “show Israel’s prettier face.” Adalah-NY wants Israel to be thought of in the context of war, not art.

Despite the protests and the politics, Naharin’s Hora reflects neither. Nor does it draw on the same-named Israeli folk dance—a celebratory grapevine danced at weddings. This Hora is secular. The curtain rises on men and women in black outfits that expose their limbs. An extra-terrestrial neon green set encloses them on three sides. Ten dancers sit on a bench while one female’s movement becomes beautiful in its asymmetry. Other dancers join her gradually, yet there is no distinguishable pattern, and no basis for predicting their next actions. With this improvisatory quality, unison moments come as a surprise. The experience is like listening in on a conversation of eleven people who aren’t lying to each other. Hora rambles in a good way. It is at times poignant, silly, sexual, and nebulous—because that’s how life is. Naharin presents no code to unlock and no riddle to deconstruct. He presents irony, oddity, and incongruous events, giving the audience a chance to laugh, think, track patterns, and enjoy.

During the performance of Hora, the protesters outside the theater infiltrated the intended silences of the one-hour work. Poetry was interrupted by politics. Adalah-NY wants artistic containment of Israel, and Batsheva is a perfect target because of its widespread acclaim. The protesters hope to raise human rights concerns, but Naharin and his company aren’t warmongers. They are doing some of the most interesting work in the contemporary dance scene. In addition to Batsheva’s international tours, companies such as Hubbard Street Dance Chicago and Nederlands Dans Theater perform Naharin’s repertoire. Institutions like The Juilliard School and Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival offer classes in Gaga, Naharin’s sensation-based movement technique. Naharin’s influence on dance is immense. A group of protestors outside BAM cannot reverse that.

When you see Batsheva Dance Company, you’re supporting artistic freedom. Next time the company is in town, bypass the protestors and experience their kinesthetic wonderland.

Eve Jacobs is a second year student in The Juilliard School Dance Division.

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Crystal Pite’s Futuristic Choreography

Tuesday, February 28th, 2012

By Rachel Straus

Seeing The Matrix in 1999 made my heart sink. It wasn’t Keanu Reeves’s acting that depressed me; it was the advances in live action animation. In the final battle scene, Reeves and Hugo Weaving engage in mortal combat. With millisecond timing, they evade each other’s rocket-force punches by bending their head to their feet (like a slinky) and by levitating into the air (like a twister). How, I thought, can dance compete with this technological display of bodily virtuosity?

Then, ten years later, I saw Crystal Pite’s Dark Matters. Her choreography augured a new movement style, a Matrix-esque sense of physical wonder. On January 24 at Baryshnikov Arts Center (BAC), Pite’s choreography enthralled the audience. At the end of The You Show, made in 2010 with her company Kidd Pivot Frankfurt RM, Pite and her eight dancers received a standing ovation.

Photo by Chris Randle

Pite’s style is not lyrically based (like Isadora Duncan), predicated on the balletic idiom (as with George Balanchine), psychologically motivated (in the case of Martha Graham) or in rebellion against concert tradition (Judson Dance Theatre). Its subject is the futuristic body—that’s faster and more intricate than machines. In the beginning of The You Show, Peter Chu falls backward in slow motion onto the floor; he folds like an accordion. Later Cindy Salgado undulates her prone body off the floor—in a blink of an eye. These moments don’t look like stunt work. They are part of a skein of movement, which occurs in inner-space pitch darkness (thanks to lighting designer Robert Sondergaard). They create a dream-like world, which seems only possible in the imagination.

Because Kidd Pivot is celebrating its tenth anniversary, has been a resident company at Künstlerhaus Mousonturm in Frankfurt since 2010, and is only now giving its New York performance debut, Pite has become something of cause célèbre for New York dance-interested audiences. In describing her style, writers often allude to her seven years dancing in William Forsythe’s Ballet Frankfurt. But it’s reductive to see Pite’s work as merely a derivation of Forsythe’s. While Forsythe’s performers looked loopy and frenetic in recent works presented in New York (Three Atmospheric Studies and I don’t believe in outer space), Pite dancers never look out of control. Rather than resembling epileptic victims, they resemble Marine fighters.

In the program notes, Pite writes how The You Show derives from her “fascination with familiar storylines of love, conflict and loss, and the body’s role in providing the illustrative shapes of those stories.” While some observers might find Pite’s relationship theme as captivating as her movement vocabulary, I did not. The three sets of duets, and one group dance, all ended the same way: the significant other leaves the beloved. These departures began to feel a bit pat. What was not pat was Pite’s definition of a relationship in section two, titled “The Other You.” In the duet, Eric Beauchesne and Jiří Pokorný are the same people. Pokorný pushes his alter ego, Beauchesne, around. He resembles a ventriloquist with his dummy. The duet, to an array of atmospheric and classical music, including Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 14 in C Sharp Minor, seemed to reveal a deeper message: The dancer fights each day with her self. The enemy isn’t the other person; it’s the voice that says, “I want to rest!”

Photo by Michael Slobodian

Pite makes fun of this dancer-as-fighter conceit in the last section of The You Show. There, Jermaine Maurice Spivey dons a red cape and becomes a super hero. Later he fights Tron-style with his mate (Sandra Marín Garcia). Their mechanized armor is composed out of three dancers who weld their bodies to either Spivey or Garcia’s. The result is that Spivey and Garcia’s body mass quadruples to resemble armor-clad gladiators. Audience hooted with laughter, when they recognized that Pite was satirizing her combative style. But after this scene, Pite returned to her ardent tone. Four women danced Pite’s electric-shock gestures and buttery, spiraling, back bending floor-to-standing phrases with total seriousness. Their commitment to pushing their bodies beyond what most dancers deem possible is what made Pite’s The You Show entirely captivating. It’s what makes Pite’s choreography part of the zeitgeist, where conversations about the the blending of man and machine abound.

 

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The joys of the ballet spoof

Thursday, January 26th, 2012

By Rachel Straus

There is nothing like a good ballet spoof. At New York City Ballet’s January 21 matinee performance at Lincoln Center, the company danced Jerome Robbins’ “The Concert” (1956). Whether you get the inside jokes about famous ballets, Robbins’s jabs at ballet traditions—the good, bad and the ugly—directly communicate. Many of the high jinks in “The Concert” involve the corps de ballet. They aren’t a sisterhood of synchronous arms and legs, but a bunch of competitive ladies with faulty memories in respect to their steps. The prima ballerina, danced to perfection by principal Maria Kowroski, isn’t satisfied until she is tearing through space, emoting like a diva, and wearing ridiculous headgear (a blue pom-pom hat). Meanwhile the on-stage pianist, Cameron Grant, plays on a dust-covered piano. Dance studios boast some of the most broken down pianos around. These ancient instruments, which have tortured generations of musicians, are too often treated as good places for dancers to put their gear.

Photo by Paul Kolnik

As for the male dancers in “The Concert,” they are reduced to porteurs, carrying ballerinas to and fro as if they are store window mannequins. The motivation of the lead danseur, Andrew Veyette, is to kill his wife, Amanda Hankes, and to win the long-legged Kowroski.

“The Concert,” to Frederic Chopin’s piano sonatas, was made more than a half century ago, but its traditions (and relevance) hold fast. Competition between dancers, the primacy of the ballerina, men hauling female dancers above their shoulders: it’s all very 2012. An all-out audience pleaser, “The Concert” is a gem for any mixed bill program that needs a little leavening.

Two years before Robbins made “The Concert,” his younger colleague Michael Kidd choreographed a ballet spoof for Paramount Pictures called “Knock on Wood.” Kidd and Robbins cut their teeth as performers on Russian ballet. Both felt like imposters, being Jewish, not apprenticing to classical dance in their wee years, and failing to cotton to the big fairy tale ballet aesthetic. When Kidd left the ballet world in 1947 and became a sought after dance arranger for musicals, he used his Russian ballet experience to side splitting effect. In “Knock on Wood,” Kidd directed Danny Kaye to duck into a theatre, don a costume of a Slavic hero and ad-lib through a Russian ballet performance to escape from bad guns with guns. Kaye dances the flat-footed fool in some very saggy tights. He’s no aristocrat. Neither was Kidd. “I was never cut out,” he said, “for being the Swan Prince.” You Tube currently carries the Knock on Wood ballet scene. It’s a little over eight minutes long, but it feels like a flash.

Danny Kaye in "Knock on Wood"

Some ballets are meant to be serious, but are best enjoyed as comedy. Such was the case with an excerpt of Jeremy McQueen’s “Concerto Nuovo” (2009). Performed on January 24 for the Dancers Responding to Aids benefit concert at the Cedar Lake Contemporary Ballet Theater, McQueen set his all-female work to J.S. Bach’s “Concerto in D minor for Two Violins.” If ever there was a loaded piece of music in dance, it’s this concerto. Balanchine and Paul Taylor created their masterpieces, “Concerto Barocco,” and “Esplanade,” respectively, to this music.

Photo by Yi-Chun Wu

Young McQueen not only turns Bach’s concerto into background music for his grab bag of steps culled from ballet, modern, runaway modeling and the competition dance circuit, he states in the program notes that “Nuovo” is inspired by Balanchine’s “Concerto Barocco.” McQueen’s homage and convoluted dance phrases are so tasteless they’re funny. The white ruffled mini dress costumes transform the nine hard-working dancers into identical-looking prom queens. With a good editor, “Concerto Nuovo” could amuse more than offend. Dancing funny to J.S. Bach’s concerto holds promise. Some pieces of music bear too much history to be danced straight.

For more dance writing by Rachel Straus go to rachelstraus.com.

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“Pina,” Wim Wenders’ 3D Dance Film

Tuesday, October 18th, 2011

By Rachel Straus

“You just have to get crazier.” These words came from Pina Bausch, the late choreographer, whose dance troupe made the industrial city of Wuppertal, Germany an avant-garde theatrical destination for 36 years. In Wim Wenders’ 3D documentary “Pina,” screened on October 15 at Alice Tully Hall for the New York Film Festival, audiences got a taste of what Bausch’s crazy looks like. In one scene, a Bausch dancer walks through a park in a floor-length dress like a zombie queen. The woman careens to the ground, flat as a board. Right before smashing her face, her suitor scoops her up like a crane lift. Then she falls again, and again. The effect is part amusement ride, part suicide watch.

Bausch’s surrealistic collage-structured dances revel in the frightening, funny, fragile inner states of the human psyche. On Bausch’s stage compulsive disorders, misogynism, sadism, and run-of-the-mill cultural oppression cavort like lunatics at an insane asylum. Fortunately, Bausch chose her inmates well. Her cadre of dancers resemble one-of-a-kind flowers, grown in places as far afield as Brazil and Tokyo. Before one’s eyes, their limbs uncoil, tendril-like, always searching for something to grasp. Inevitably they fall. The metaphor is an obvious one, but Bausch won die-hard fans around the world with this trope in her 40-plus works. Her dances evoked desperate perseverance, in all of its illogical inanity. Her singular message was digestible because she made human effort, and failure, look beautifully irresistible.

Pina Bausch, 68, died June 2009, the night before Wim Wenders was to begin shooting their long-postponed film collaboration. Since 1985 Wenders, whose films include “Buena Vista Social Club,” “Paris, Texas,” and “Wings of Desire,” had been discussing with Bausch a project featuring her choreography. On stage Wenders explained that it wasn’t until he saw 3D film technology, he felt he could do Bausch’s work justice. Regular film, Wenders said, creates an “invisible wall” between the dance and the celluloid image. “Something,” he said, “did not work.” With that comment, Wenders invited the audiences to consider whether his 3D “Pina” does.

When Wenders’ 3D segments captured Bausch’s dancers on tramcars and busy roadways, in parks and glass houses, the film became bigger than life. The dancers’ gesture-driven performances in these hyper-pixilated landscapes grew mesmerizing with the sharp, glistening quality of the film. Among the rush of cars, swaying of  trees, and presence of pedestrians, the dancers became absorbed into a heightened but familiar reality, a piece with Bausch’s style of magic realism.

When the dancers were shot in the theater, however, Wenders encountered less success. His close-up camera work felt intrusive and aggressive. In one segment, Wenders’ camera closed in on a woman’s squirming back in Bausch’s 1975 “Rite of Spring.” By zeroing in on her struggle, Wenders made the moment personal instead of archetypal. In “Rite,” the cast resembles primitives. Their landscape is a dirt-strewn stage. The proscenium frames them the way an icon painting is framed by an architectural portal. The dancers become effigies; their individual features are abstracted through their unison, slicing movement.

Though Bausch’s performers occasionally saunter through theater aisles looking glamorous and talking to regular folk, when they represent universal beings, they do it on stage at at remove from the audience. Bausch didn’t offer ticket holders intimacy. She created a theatrical portal for her vision to be perceived. Her method was simple: She distanced the performer from the spectator. She created just the kind of wall that Wenders wants to permeate.

Whether 3D films like “Pina” will fan the flames of the American dance audience is much in discussion. Thus far a handful of 3D dance films have been produced, including The Kirov’s “Giselle,” Matthew Bourne’s “Swan Lake,” Michael Flatley’s “Lord of the Dance, and “Step Up 3D.” Turning a dancing body into a 3D piece of digitalia is fascinating, but whether it can compete with the power of live dance performance isn’t a slam dunk. When Wenders’ camera gave Bausch performers the space to disport themselves, he captured their beautiful craziness. He transmitted their quality of dangerous freedom. He didn’t come in for a close up. At these moments, I think, Pina Bausch would have been pleased.

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Forty Years: Eiko & Koma’s Retrospective Exhibit

Sunday, September 25th, 2011

By Rachel Straus

Forty years is a long time to make dances with just one other person. At the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, the avant-garde dance makers Eiko & Koma present “Residue,” an exhibit tracing their four-decade collaboration. From their beginnings in post-World War II Japan, to their first artistic success in Germany, to their decision in 1977 to become New Yorkers, Eiko & Koma have chosen a path less taken.

On view until October 30, their dance-based installation is illuminating and exhaustive, much like their live performances. In them their glacially slow movements are absorbed into ecological environments or naturalistic set designs, such as a mound of dirt, the trunk of a tree, or a flowing river.

Time in Eiko & Koma’s dance universe is not measured in minutes. But time needs to be mentioned in the context of this exhibit. To watch all nine of Eiko & Koma’s displayed films would require several days (or about 100 hours). But spending 20 minutes in their space can be transformative. The experience is similar to descending into a dark well. At its depth one finds a primordial universe, a world that prefigures the atomic bomb, the porn industry, and high-frequency stock trading. Eiko & Koma are drawn to big themes: birth, death, pain and perseverance. Their dances embrace the philosophy of permanent impermanence.

Peering into seven rectangular boxes at the exhibit’s entranceway is like becoming Alice in Alice in Wonderland. But instead of falling down a rabbit hole and shrinking, as Alice does, at the bottom of these boxes one finds miniature Eiko and Koma’s via recorded film footage. The dancers molt from one position into another. In one film they resemble tree creatures, in another they look like otters rolling in slow motion in the surf. In all they appear utterly vulnerable.

Eiko & Koma’s dances aren’t comforting to those seeking beautiful costumes and happy endings. That is why the installation in the center of the exhibit space proves so effective. It’s a mediation room. From a black reflecting pool of water looms a projected image of Eiko & Koma. Naked and in the fetal position, they look like twins in a womb. Around the reflecting pool are walls slathered with sand and bird feathers. They become vertical beaches, especially when the sound of wind and water emerges from the sound system.

Like Eiko & Koma’s dances, the ability to enjoy their exhibit depends on one’s perspective. Unlike most post-modern dancers, who traffic in irony, Eiko & Koma don’t have a sarcastic bone in their bodies. Their work pushes against the squall of modernity, particularly its speed. To walk through the exhibit space is to journey into Eiko & Koma’s dark imaginations. At the 40-year mark of their art making, they are not doing anything very different. Instead they’re delving deeper.

For more information about “Residue” go to: http://www.nypl.org/events/exhibitions/resideue-installation-eiko-koma

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The Copacetic Boat Ride

Wednesday, July 13th, 2011

By Rachel Straus

It’s not easy tapping aboard a moving vessel. But every year in celebration of Tap City! one-hundred plus tap dancers do just that on the deck of the Circle Line in celebration of a 62-year-old tradition: The Copasetic Boat Ride. The historical event kicks off the annual, week-long, internationally-attended tap dance festival, organized by American Tap Dance Foundation director Tony Waag.

On the ship’s main deck on July 5, a circle of dancers formed in front of a jazz band. Some stars of the tap world welcomed the swaying and rocking of the ship as a challenge. Despite the boat’s occasional lurches and vertiginous tilts, their hard hitting styles never softened. Watching Jason Samuels Smith and Tamii Sakurai hit the deck with their taps (rather than their faces) was as thrilling as seeing Lady Liberty up close and against the setting sun.

Despite the fact that tap is an American art form—whose development reflects the country’s evolution from colonial rule to slave nation to super power—the dance form has gotten short shift. Primarily developed through black dancers, its popularity has ebbed and flowed like the tide. Its high water mark of popularity came with the rise of film and America’s embrace of Hollywood musicals: 1910-1950. Then tap went into near extinction. But starting in 1949, a 21-strong ensemble of black male tap dancers, calling themselves The Copasetics, began performing on TV shows, back room bars, and river boats. While Broadway and Hollywood hired fewer and fewer tap dancers, The Copasetics helped keep the art form alive, hoofing it on land and sea.

In the 1970s, tap experienced a renaissance in concert with the American dance boom, which was catapulted by the creation of the National Endowment for the Arts (1965) and the Ford Foundation’s large grants to dance. During that time aging members of The Copasetics helped teach a new generation, which included Gregory Hines, Brenda Bufalino and Savion Glover. Hit Broadway shows like “Black and Blue” (1989) and Savion Glover’s  “Bring in ‘da Noise, Bring in ‘da Funk” (1996), which celebrated and delineated the history of tap, further fostered tap’s revitalization. Then in 1986 the American Tap Dance Foundation formed. Founders Brenda Bufalino, Tony Waag, and the late Charles ‘Honi’ Coles recognized that the tap dancing world needed a home, just as New York City Ballet fought for and established one at Lincoln Center in the 1965. The organization headquartered itself in lower Manhattan not far from the Circle Line pier.

The Circle Line isn’t an ideal place to see tap dancing. But to witness tap dancers, of all ages, abilities, and from far flung places, tap aboard a rocking ship has a certain poetic fitness. Tap dance’s history hasn’t been smooth sailing. Regardless, tap flows from generation to generation despite the fact that the art form has never been given its own theater or has been sanctioned by the power elite, as is the case with ballet and opera. Tap has been kept alive through the efforts of key individuals, like Tony Waag.  As he taught a tap class for beginners on The Circle Line boat, Waag’s sunny demeanor echoed tap great Bill Bojangles Robinson’s famous observation that “everything is copasetic,” or perfect. Perfection, according to Waag, isn’t about a perfectly executed phrase. It’s about finding a rhythmic groove and riding it for as long as you can.

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