Bill T. Jones, Johannes Wieland, World of Tap, American Ballet Theatre
By Rachel Straus
When Bill T. Jones’s narrator began referring to President Obama in the same breath as Abraham Lincoln, I knew that Fondly Do We Hope, Fervently Do We Pray wasn’t going to be low on didactics. Jones is a preacher choreographer. His work about Abraham Lincoln has an agenda. It’s large scale and in your face. It’s also seeringly beautiful. To enjoy Fondly you’ve got to be okay with being lectured at.
Commissioned by the Ravinia Festival (and co-commissioned by the Lincoln Center Festival and Indiana University), Fondly was made for the bicentennial of Lincoln’s birth. I saw it on July 15 at Rose Hall. It premiered last September. Its message is clear: The United States is in the throws of political and cultural upheavals the likes of which we haven’t seen since Lincoln’s Civil War.
With ten young dancers, one tall, handsome narrator (Jamyl Dobson), and four instrument-exchanging musicians (including dynamo singer Clarissa Sinceno), Jones shapes a declaration about the circularity of history. He uses his acclaimed and favored structuring device: collage, which allows him to jump around historically and chronologically. One moment it’s the early 19th century. LaMichael Leonard, Jr.’s body parts—lips, gut, shoulders, buttocks—are being enumerated. His arms are lifted, one slightly higher than the other, to resemble Lady Justice. But something about this picture is off. Leonard’s palms face forward, like Jesus Christ on the cross. By the second time we see this image, we realize Leonard is on the slave block. He is being sacrificed to the marketplace.
In another moment, Antonio Brown performs a solo in a circular space that juts out of the Rose Hall’s proscenium while the narrator gives Jones’s biography. We learn that the Tony Award winner’s grandmother was probably a slave. Jones grew up with many, many siblings. When he went to Binghamton University, he discovered dance and met Arnie Zane. (The couple later founded their group, the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company).
Some dance people can’t stand that Jones boldly inserts himself into a work that isn’t specifically about him. Jones has defended his position, arguing on radio and in print that the mythology of Lincoln touches all Americans. This president and our perceptions about race in America are deeply intertwined. For Jones, Lincoln is an integral part of his narrative. Lincoln was the only white man that the young Jones was allowed to love.
Aside from Jones’s biographical presentation in Fondly, four other narratives make their way onto the circular stage designed by Bjorn Amelan. The last biography is of the 16th President’s wife Mary. Asli Bulbul strides and falls, the blood red underbelly of her skirt, designed by Liz Prince, flashes, and we learn from the narrator that the First Lady lost three of her four children before they became adults. Jones’s ability to weave together text, dance, and costume can be wonderful.
During Fondly only two audience goers departed the theater. I was surprised that there weren’t more. During one scene, sound designer Lindsay Jones cranked the folk, rock and gospel woven composition—arranged by Jerome Begin, Christopher William Lancaster, and George Lewis, Jr.—to rock concert sound levels. During this aural apex, Fondly felt hysterical, much like when a chef realizes she has added too many ingredients to a dish. At another hysterical moment, the dancers enacted a mock congressional debate on immigration, marital miscegenation, and money. They shouted. They gesticulated with pointy fingers. They did not dance.
Soon after Jones found his directorial footing. The company began flocking around four columns (which recalled the Lincoln Memorial) like carrion birds looking for a kill. Robert Wierzel’s lighting design projected their forms into giant-size shadows. The effect was of a massive riot. But then a strobe light began whirring and the circular scrim (think fishbowl designed by Philippe Starck) closed. On its front, dates from the time of Lincoln to 2098 ticked past. With these theatrical elements, Jones returned to creating by adding more, more, and more. It felt a wee gratuitous. But since I can’t think of a better ending for Fondly, I’m not condemning it. Since the work’s premiere, Jones has continued to tinker with his big, courageous, earnest oeuvre. Perhaps by 2011 its conclusion and its message, about what Lincoln means in the age of Obama and beyond, will feel less unwieldy. If that doesn’t happen, Jones should be commended for giving us a work that we can sink our teeth into. It tastes full of protein. It’s anything but anemic.
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On July 8, I went to Dance Theater Workshop in Chelsea. Devoted to less conventional performance fare than seen uptown, the organization was presenting four nights of Roadkill. The multi-media piece created by German choreographer Johannes Wieland trafficked in Samuel Beckett existentialism, home movie voyeurism, and homespun German nihilism. On the black box stage only two performers were fortunate enough to speak absurdly, engage in combat fights, and rip up pieces of paper.
The performers, Americans Eva Mohn and Ryan Mason, looked like they had just emerged, via the L train, from Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Hip in her thigh high boots and cool in his checked flannel jacket, we got double doses of the couple (who never engaged in anything remotely intimate) via a large screen, which projected a black and white film of the pair walking, running and lounging aimlessly on an empty, rain soaked, landing strip.
As is often the case with multi media dance, the live dancers and the filmed dancers occasionally enacted the same poses and movements. They became doubled, which is visually clever but is unfortunately becoming a multi media dance cliché.
Wieland, who has been the choreographer/artistic director of the State Theater of Kassel since 2007, became known to the New York downtown dance scene, following his 2002 graduate studies in dance at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. Previously, the choreographer performed with Béjart Ballet in Switzerland. Since emerging from NYU, Wieland has cast off all of his ballet training. His aesthetic sensibilities are firmly couched in contemporary European dance theater, which integrates theater and pedestrian movement, philosophy and text, self-examination and self-referentialism. Having seen a half dozen of Wieland’s dances, I can safely state that this choreographer mines a specific psychological space: the tortured state of our souls.
Like Beckett, Wieland works with repetition and abruptness. Unlike great interpreters of Beckett, Wieland’s dancers are not adept with language. They need more acting training. However, when they tumble and strike, shake like caged animals, and cut corner like robots, they demonstrate Wieland’s oddness and his questioning nature:
Should we spend our weekend on an empty landing strip (where we will get wet and become bored)? Should we give up on life? Should we shout? Wieland’s answer is to report through art the ambiguous angst of living. It’s provocative and tiring.
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On July 6 the City College of New York hosted a two-day conference called “The World of Tap Dance.” Brian Seibert, who writes for the New Yorker and the Village Voice, curated the marathon event. It included 133 film segments featuring tap, the first of which dated from 1894. While the temperature outside reached 103 degrees inside Seibert manned his podium for seven hours. He spoke intermittently to identify a dancer or to drive home his two points that A) Hollywood and Broadway’s racism undermined crucial contributions made by great black tappers into the 1960s, and B) well-known white tappers (Fred Astaire, Gene Kelly) stole from these greats and simplified their material.
My favorite film aired around 3 p.m. and came from the era titled “The Drought” (1950s to the mid 1960s). In a grainy video from Duke Ellington’s 1965 Sacred Concert, Bunny Briggs laid down a skein of notes with his feet. His taps’ fluency and speed resembled a concert pianist’s command of his fingers across a keyboard. Briggs tapped in concert with a singer and the Ellington orchestra. His dance space was minimal: no more than three feet wide and 10 feet long. He performed below the orchestra and above the featured singer, becoming integral to the sound and the scene. With minimal or no upper body swings, torques, or gestural exclamations, his energy had a ceaseless ease, much like the feeling of being transported on those horizontal escalators in international airports.
Briggs’s innovation—tapping as music—helped shape and define the careers of Gregory Hines in the 1980s and Savion Glover in the 1990s. Hines and Glover became international stars and their celebrity statuses helped tap get its second wind. Today tap is everywhere. On the second day of the conference, Siebert and others mapped out the international tap dance scene with performances, film and lectures.
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Anthony Dowell was the consummate British noble danseur. In 1961 he joined The Royal Ballet. Two years later he was chosen by Royal Ballet choreographer Frederick Ashton to create the role of Oberon in The Dream. Dowell’s combination of lightness and solidity, seamless technique and dramatic expressiveness, speed and balance fostered continual awe.
On June 30th, American Ballet Theatre principal dancer David Hallberg’s performed Dowell’s part, the Fairy King Oberon, with mercurial ease and fiery energy. While learning the role, Hallberg worked with Dowell. The transmission of certain key performance qualities—gestural, rhythmic, tonal—from one major dancer of his era to the next felt historic.
Besides working with Hallberg, Dowell staged the entire Ashton ballet, based on Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream, and created to Felix Mendelssohn’s concert overture (Op. 21), incidental music (Op. 61) and Wedding March.
Toward the end of this deliciously unified, hour-long fairy ballet (with shimmering, voluptuous sets by David Walker and shadowy glowing lighting by John B. Read), Hallberg performed a series of non-stop, interminably long, dastardly turns, which many have said only Dowell could do (because they were made on him). On the Metropolitan Opera House stage, these pirouette variations created by Ashton looked ready made on Hallberg.
Ashton’s decision to transform his male lead into a maniacal spinner wasn’t just an audience-pleasing virtuoso trick. It was a narrative conceit. Oberon’s spinning represents an act of potion making—his stirring into air magic. Once concocted his magic moves the mismatched couples, modeled after Shakespeare’s, back to their rightful partners. Then Oberon applies his magic to Titiana, the Queen of Fairies, which was performed by Gillian Murphy. On this night, the redheaded ballerina responded to being bewitched with uncommon elegant abandon.
As is often the case Ormsby Wilkins conducted. The Young People’s Chorus of New York City produced an angelic affect from the pit. The corps dancers, dashing in and out like Zephyrs, added to the enchantment. Also on this Ashton program was three of the choreographer’s partnering gems: Birthday Offering (1956), Thaïs Pas De Deux (1971), and The Awakening Pas de Deux (1970) from Sleeping Beauty.