Musical America Blogs

By Rachel Straus

Larry Keigwin’s imagination is as unbound as an attention deficit disorder diagnosed savant. The retro electric pop band Fischerspooner and the drag queen entertainer Murray Hill have sought out his choreographic range. The Martha Graham Dance Company and the New York City Ballet Choreographic Institute commissioned him to make unconventional dances. The Radio City Rockettes employed him as an associate choreographer to shake things up.

On October 6 at City Center, The 38-year-old choreographer’s Megalopolis opened the Fall for Dance Festival’s Program 4 with a Pow! Keigwin’s 2009 work immediately channeled the haughty absurdity of Chris Rock in his infamous role as an interstellar-drag queen-DJ in the movie Fifth Element. Fritz Masten’s silver spacesuit costumes and the dancers’ extroverted antics—pelvic lassoing and Vogueing—screamed Halloween rave party. Keigwin’s work trafficked not in high art.

With 18 performers culled from Keigwin + Company and the Juilliard School’s senior class, Megalopolis upended any semblance of seriousness attached with concert dance. To Steve Reich’s Sextet/Six Marimbas and to excerpts from MIA’s World Town and XR2, Keigwin’s satiric dance referenced a dizzying array of places and people: Martha Graham’s ubiquitous traveling steps and arrow-shaped arms, club kids on stimulants, the antic roar of modern urban life, and nightclub dance floors where the hottest movers (momentarily) rule. John Travolta’s Tony Manero of Saturday Night Fever would have been proud.

Keigwin demonstrates in Megalopolis that he has enough choreographic finesse to develop a movement vocabulary that hangs together. Time will tell whether his choreography—which presently serves to pay homage to pop culture—will get sillier or more serious.

The second work on the program was María Pagés’s Soleá, which was made for the brother-daughter duo Carmen and Ángel Corella in honor of the inauguration of their Corella Ballet Castilla Y León. This Spanish ballet company, helmed by Ángel Corella, comes with backing by the Spanish government. Unsurprisingly, Soleá looks less like a dance and more like an advertisement for Corella’s enterprise, which will acknowledge native Spanish dance (its music, it sensuality), will present classical and contemporary ballet (as understood by the director who made his name with American Ballet Theatre), and will warm the cockles of audience’s hearts through technical virtuosity (Corella spins like a top).

The program also featured Russell Maliphant’s Afterlight Part 1. In its U.S. premiere, the solo performed by Daniel Proietto demonstrated how tricky it is to choreograph to Eric Satie’s Gnossiennes 1-4. The fin de siècle piano composition sucks the oxygen out of any room because of its power and simplicity. In the first section of the dance, however, Maliphant came close to matching the score’s stark, still quality. Proietto slowly rotated like a dreaming dervish under a well of light care of animator Jan Urbanowski and lighting designer Michael Hulls. The work, which premiered in London in 2009, is inspired by Vaslav Nijinsky’s geometric renderings, which he began drawing obsessively as he spiraled from the heights of dance fame into mental illness. Maliphant captures through darkness, repetition, and Proietto’s sweeping wingspan a sense of sailing into an inescapable place, which in Nijinsky’s case was a sanatorium, where he lived out the rest of his days.

The last work on the program was a world premiere by Jason Samuel Smith & Friends. RHYTHMDOME hung thinly on a story (told in voice over) about a doomed future where tappers and hip hop dancers have lost the means to communicate with each other. The dance appeared equally doomed in the first 10 minutes. Then, like a patient waking from a coma, the group dropped attempts at narrative continuity and got down to the business of tapping and breaking. The revelation came when both sets of dancers riffed off of each other’s rhythms. In the last minutes, the eight dancers found common ground: The tappers “breaked” with their feet; the breakers “tapped” with their muscle fibers.

I read Alan Gilbert’s blog and it made me tired. Then I looked at my daily to-do list and realized I’m not far behind  in the work-until-I-drop life in the arts.

Here’s yesterday’s list:

• Wrote a 1000-word article for Dance Teacher magazine about the prolific career of choreographer Robert Alton (c. 1903-1957). Alton created dances for Hollywood films, like “White Christmas” (1954) and Ziegfield Follies (1945), and for Broadway, including a revival of “Pal Joey” (1952), which won him a Tony award. He was a Christian Scientist, a brilliant mimic of choreographers (particularly Martha Graham), and could, according to Agnes de Mille, create choreography “at the speed suggestive of a radio sport commentator, with a whistle between his teeth.”

• Interviewed former Dance Theater of Harlem and Boston Ballet principal Tai Jimenez. Tai will participate in a panel I’m leading at the Juilliard School on October 26 about Bronislava Nijinska’s “Les Noces” (1923). Tai said that the person who stages this masterwork to Stravinsky’s score has a grave responsibility. Dance is an oral tradition. The vitality of a work can only be passed down from performer to performer. The stager should, she says, “see her self as a shaman who passes on her wisdom.”

• Emailed former Bolshoi Ballet and New York City Ballet principal Valentina Kozlova. I asked her to vet her quotes, which I compiled from two interviews done last week. I don’t want this technical wunderkind to think I’m sloppy. Valentina recently announced her decision to hold, with Boston Ballet Artistic Director Mikko Nissinen, an international ballet competition in Boston, beginning in May 2011. Valentina defected from the Soviet Union in 1979. Today she runs a conservatory and trains less than 50 young women in the Vaganova style that has served as the foundational training technique for countless virtuoso dancers, including Mikhail Baryshnikov and Natalie Markarova. I will write a cover story on Valentina for Dance Teacher’s January 2011 issue.

• Wrote dance historian Lynn Garafola, asking whether I was on the right track in my research of Isadora Duncan. My research is for Brooklyn Academy of Music. They contracted me to write a short piece on Duncan, “the mother of modern dance,” for a new book, under the W.W. Norton imprint, in celebration of the institution’s 150 anniversary. I only have 325 words to explain why Isadora was the bomb that broke ballet’s stronghold on opera house audiences.

• Wrote a roundup review for Musical America of three “Fall for Dance” festival programs (September 29 and 30, and October 1). I decided to feature four of the 12 works presented at City Center. My review is too long, but imagine if I wrote about each dance work. I’d be up all night.

Like Jonathan Franzen’s highly praised, recently released novel Freedom, Faye Driscoll’s There is so much mad in me craftily portrays human behavior that is as unlikable as it is recognizable. Driscoll populates her mad—which premiered last April and which was reprised by Dance Theater Workshop from September 22 to 25—with nine energetic, solipsistic, violent, sex-crazed young adults. They dance, sing, play, humiliate, rape and torture each other. Driscoll’s dark vision is leavened by her cast’s absurd antics.

On September 22, Driscoll’s 70-minute work began with Nikki Zialcita running in place while Mark Helland held her wrists behind her back. His lock impeded her forward progression downstage. Seeing her bobbing in place produced laughs. Zialcita is small and zophtic and looked under Amanda K. Ringger’s acid-colored lighting a bit like a Robert Crumb cartoon drawing. As the duet evolved in silence, Helland increasingly treated Zialcita like a plaything. Zialcita didn’t object; she squealed with pleasure as he held her throat. This frolic grew, like a glacial creep, disturbing.

The deliberate progression from light to dark and back again is what has put Driscoll on the downtown dance map (The New York Times named her previous work 837 Venice Boulevard as “one of the top five dance shows” of 2008.) Indeed, Driscoll knows how to craft an emotional arc. Her work goes somewhere. Usually it goes to the most cynical place.

In mad Driscoll demonstrates how human relationships are based in and comprised of aggression, manipulation, and victimization. In her third full-length work—structured through a series of vignettes with a Disco-esque sound design care of Brandon Wolcott—Driscoll’s theatricalized examples of human ickyness are thoroughly convincing. Adaku Utah impersonates a charismatic anger-management coach whose following is cowed and then rallied by her violent outbursts. They grow frenzied with delight. They jump up and down like cult members gone nuts. The scene was so convincing I forgot where I was. Then it turned silly through a unison aerobic dance.

Later, Driscoll created her own Abu Ghraib torture and prison abuse scene. There was nothing pat or overly theatrical about the scenario, which culminated with the Tony Orrico barking like a dog. When Orrico joined two lines of eight performers, jogging in lockstep formation like military trainees, Driscoll’s message was clear: This victim will become an aggressor; our species is heading toward its doom.

Despite this nihilistic embrace, Driscoll isn’t hanging up her hat or going the way of David Foster Wallace. After her cast took their bows, she announced the launch of a full-time company in her name. Perhaps her next work will concern the BP oil crisis, the Great Recession, and Lindsey Lohan’s troubles with the law. Being topical, Driscoll knows all too well, is titillating.