Yesterday, standing on top of the roof of the Harry S. Truman Centre for Peace at the Mount Scopus campus of Hebrew University, an Israeli colleague of Richard's showed us an area to the east known as E1. Perhaps the most potent symbol of Palestinian-Israeli divisions in the West Bank, it stretches from the edges of East Jerusalem annexed in 1967 to Ma'ale Adummim, a large Israeli settlement located east of the pre-1967 green line. In between is an Arab village, several Bedouin encampments and perhaps the busiest and most controversial police station in all of the Middle East.
The settlements are especially sensitive politically, as their further expansion would effectively encircle Arab East Jerusalem, dividing it from the rest of the West Bank and preventing contiguous access between Palestinian-controlled areas in the north (Ramallah) and the south (Bethlehem). This obviously makes it much more difficult to reach agreement about permanent borders in the region, something likely not lost on US Secretary of State John Kerry, who has come to town just as we're leaving to try to kickstart the stalled peace process, with Netanyahu's heel-dragging on halting further settlements like Ma'ale Adummim being a main order of business.
The roof of the Truman Centre actually gives one a 360-degree view of Jerusalem and the surrounding Judean Hills, and Menachem also showed us the hill due south which is Herodium, resting place of King Herod the Great, who gave the Jews the Second Temple, but was also a dutiful servant of Rome. These complexities are brought out in a superb exhibition on the man currently running at the Israel Museum. The region's great builder, Herod's architectural legacy--including Masada (which I visited the day before), the port of Caesarea (with its hippodrome and ampitheatre, and currently home to the region's current imperial prefect, Prime Minister Bibi), and of course the Temple Mount/Haram Ash-Sharif in Old Jerusalem--is itself historically contiguous with present-day ethnic and religious tensions. This is perhaps nowhere more materially evident than in the controversial and heavily monitored Mugrabi Gate walkway one must take to get from the Jews' holiest site in Jerusalem--the Western Wall--to the Arabs'--the Dome of the Rock and the Al-Aqsa Mosque. The gate was to have been on the agenda of UNESCO inspectors during a planned tour of the Temple Mount/Haram Ash-Sharif until Israeli officials cancelled the visit, contending the Palestinians had overly politicized the issue.
Myself, standing on the Truman Centre roof, I couldn't help thinking that the intersections and oppositions between the three major religions that have historically staked their claims to the region could be explained in part by the inhospitable landscape, each's follwers emerging out of the surrounding desert to vie for control of Jerusalem and its valuable watershed. At the very least, given how unyielding the earth generally is here, it is no wonder that Judaism, Islam, and Christianity all had to invent heavenly paradises.
Kerry certainly has his work cut out for him, just like previous American envoys. And it's hard, given what we've seen, not to feel cynical (worst, most despair-inducing image: the colour-coded water tanks atop residents' houses--white for Israeli, black for Palestinian--in order to indicate or guard against, as the case may be, rocket attacks).
But then again, like I did in the Dead Sea two days ago, hope floats. It's been a very instructive trip, but now it's time to go home.
P.
Friday, May 24, 2013
Sunday, May 19, 2013
Travels with David Beckham, Zinedine Zidane, and Ohad Naharin
At breakfast at our hotel in Tel Aviv two days ago, I read in the Jerusalem Post--following an item about Toronto mayor Rob Ford apparently being caught on video smoking crack (!)--that David Beckham was retiring from the football pitch at age 38. Funny how Becks has remained such a trusted traveling companion all these years (see chapter 3 of World Stages, Local Audiences for more about what I mean by this), his global brand iconicity punctuating the performance (and the politics) of some of my more significant trans-Atlantic voyages.
Appropriate, then, that at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, which is currently featuring a retrospective of Scottish artist Douglas Gordon's work, I should have lingered longest over Zidane, the film he co-directed with Philippe Parreno (see my entry two posts ago on his conceptualization of the Duchamp show at the Barbican in London). Using 17 synchronized cameras, Gordon and Parreno follow the French footballer in real time throughout the course of a single match. It's mesmerizing, even at its most banal, when Zidane is just standing around with nothing to do (which happens to be a lot of the time). So recognizable with his bald pate, Zidane here gets a media memorialization befitting his athletic genius, unlike the famous head-butt that marked his exit from the 2006 World Cup and, as it turned out, from professional competition.
Zidane is one of the few visible Arabs I have so far seen in Tel Aviv, virtual or otherwise. Granted, our movements have mostly been confined to the more touristic enclaves of the city. However, I am surprised at the extent to which the Jewish and Arab populations remain segregated here, with the latter clearly the underclass (along with Africans and Fillipinas) that, together with foreign dollars, keeps this false economy afloat. Even the most casual and superficial of glances at the heartbreaking state of disrepair in which most of the Bauhaus-designed buildings of Tel Aviv's UNESCO-designated White City find themselves (although the bucolic photo below belies this statement), or at the numbers of young people who are clearly unemployed, indicates that, beyond money for the military, there is almost no infrastructural support in Israel.
Of course the cultural divide in the region was not always the norm. The old port of Jaffa stands as testament to a time when Arabs and Jews lived and worked and played side by side, a legacy whose traces remain in a shared architectural style, shared cuisine, shared gestures and shared warmth of human interaction. All that came to an end, however, with the Balfour Declaration (there's so much for which we can blame the British), one consequence of which was the founding of the first settlements of what would eventually become Tel Aviv by Jews fleeing the Arab uprisings in Jaffa. Today the Arab Hebrew Theatre of Jaffa works to repair some of the consequences of that history (see photo below) and, sitting a stone's throw from where Perseus is said to have rescued Andromeda from the rocks to which she had been tied by her father, speaks eloquently to the power and politics of performance.
Those first settlements of Tel Aviv in the 1920s were in the area known as Neve Tzedek, which today retains its turn-of-the-century charm (narrow winding streets, old low buildings opening onto hidden courtyards), only now supplemented by trendy boutiques and restaurants. Tucked away along Shabazi Street in this area is the Suzanne Dallal Centre, home to Batsheva Dance Company, whose current world premiere, The Hole, by Artsitic Director and choreographic genius Ohad Naharin, Richard and I took in last night.
The piece is site-specific, made in direct response to the unique and intimate Varda Hall, where Batsheva performs much of its work. To this end, the hall--which I imagine is a fairly standard square studio space, has in this instance been transformed into an octagonal, with an eight-sided elevated stage in the middle, and with the audience distributed evenly around it. The action, however, begins above and behind the audience, as, soon after the lights dim, eight male dancers emerge from hidden crawl spaces and begin a sequence of simple, spotlit unison movements on narrow platforms. During the course of our 360-degree survey of the men, the women emerge, stealthily crawling upon the stage, each taking an odalisque position at one of its eight lips, head in hand, knees bent and hanging over the edge. In sync, each woman lifts her upper leg, eventually letting herself fall onto her back in a kind of supine toe-to-toe plié, before lifting her right leg over her left, letting it fall with a thud to the floor, and twisting herself into a panther pose and crawling to the next side of the octagonal. This continues for a full turn or more around the stage, the eight women above eventually being joined by a ninth below, her initially unnoticed appearance just one indication of how much there is to take in with this piece.
The Hole is essentially a showcase for Batsheva's female dancers, and Naharin has composed some stunning sequences for the nine-member corps that in their simplicity, repetition and canny combining of kinespheric and scenic space give everyone in the audience an up-close view of what's so captivating about expertly executed unison movement. Of special note in this regard is the section in which the women lie down together on successive lips of he stage, their legs hanging over the edge. They then repeat a sequence of serial movements, raising their heads, lifting their torsos, bending an elbow, turning onto their sides, and finally lifting themselves up one by one to move, in a hunched position, to the next side of the stage, where they will repeat the same sequence all over again. That, at this point in the piece, harpsichord music by Couperin is playing on the soundtrack only adds to the hypnotic effect.
Elsewhere, each of the women is given a chance to shine in improvisational solos, as walking counterclockwise around the edge of the stage they one by one take their turn in the centre, angling their limbs asymmetrically not just to their individual bodily cores, but to the geographical nexus of the group as a whole. Bearing this out, after each woman has had her chance to develop a unique movement phrase, the group devolves en masse into a riot of competing physical stylings and poses, with several of the women actually interrupting, blocking, or otherwise seeking to thwart their fellow dancers' movements.
The men, stuck on their platforms, do their best to compete for our attention, at one point erupting into preening, vogue-like, look-at-me poses that end with them shirtless, tongues hanging out, shamelessly soliciting our voyeuristic gaze. I understand that at occasional performances Naharin switches things up, putting the men on stage and the women against the walls. I have no idea if the choreography remains the same; regardless, it would be interesting to compare the effect. Not least because the men and women, who do interact at certain points from the distance of their respective spatial positions in a literal call and response manner, eventually come together--or at least partly, and not altogether predictably.
I refer to the fact that the men, having dispappeared at a certain point into the walls from which they first emerged, later reappear above us, crawling out in turn from what looks like a giant sewer pipe and spidering out onto the maze of metal pipes that sits just below the ceiling of Varda Hall. While the women continue to dance below, the men lie in wait, eventually slipping their bodies through the pipes to hang by their arms above the women. However, only one of them drops down to the stage, thereafter enacting a tentative duet with one of the women, neither partner quite knowing what to make of the other, nor what to do with their limbs, their respective reaches always exceeding--and just missing--the other's grasp. When the men lower themselves from the rafters a second time, the one among them who releases himself is caught by the women, from whose embrace he then seeks to free himself, flinging himself off the stage, only to be caught by the women again and again. They do not wish to tear him apart, like crazed Bacchanites, nor lure him to his death like the vengeful Wilis from Giselle. Rather, they introduce him to one among them, and this time the two opposite-sex bodies come together in a quietly affecting duet that ends with the men remaining above dropping little crystals that pop and crack when they hit the stage floor. Wedding rice? Hail stones? The meaning isn't immediately clear. Still, the piece ends on a graceful note, as the men lower eight swings onto the stage, which the women promptly climb upon, progressively launching their bodies out over the audience as the lights slowly dim.
As this closing image suggests, The Hole is perhaps more visually memorable than choreographically coherent, Naharin clearly in thrall to the site for which he composed the work. But there can be no denying the power of seeing the Batsheva dancers on such an intimate scale in their home venue. A performance memory of worked-through situatedness to cherish, and to set alongside--if not entirely dispel--the starker images of ethnic and religious division and uprootedness I have accumulated since moving from Tel Aviv to Jeruslaem, from whence I write this blog entry.
P.
Appropriate, then, that at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, which is currently featuring a retrospective of Scottish artist Douglas Gordon's work, I should have lingered longest over Zidane, the film he co-directed with Philippe Parreno (see my entry two posts ago on his conceptualization of the Duchamp show at the Barbican in London). Using 17 synchronized cameras, Gordon and Parreno follow the French footballer in real time throughout the course of a single match. It's mesmerizing, even at its most banal, when Zidane is just standing around with nothing to do (which happens to be a lot of the time). So recognizable with his bald pate, Zidane here gets a media memorialization befitting his athletic genius, unlike the famous head-butt that marked his exit from the 2006 World Cup and, as it turned out, from professional competition.
Zidane is one of the few visible Arabs I have so far seen in Tel Aviv, virtual or otherwise. Granted, our movements have mostly been confined to the more touristic enclaves of the city. However, I am surprised at the extent to which the Jewish and Arab populations remain segregated here, with the latter clearly the underclass (along with Africans and Fillipinas) that, together with foreign dollars, keeps this false economy afloat. Even the most casual and superficial of glances at the heartbreaking state of disrepair in which most of the Bauhaus-designed buildings of Tel Aviv's UNESCO-designated White City find themselves (although the bucolic photo below belies this statement), or at the numbers of young people who are clearly unemployed, indicates that, beyond money for the military, there is almost no infrastructural support in Israel.
Of course the cultural divide in the region was not always the norm. The old port of Jaffa stands as testament to a time when Arabs and Jews lived and worked and played side by side, a legacy whose traces remain in a shared architectural style, shared cuisine, shared gestures and shared warmth of human interaction. All that came to an end, however, with the Balfour Declaration (there's so much for which we can blame the British), one consequence of which was the founding of the first settlements of what would eventually become Tel Aviv by Jews fleeing the Arab uprisings in Jaffa. Today the Arab Hebrew Theatre of Jaffa works to repair some of the consequences of that history (see photo below) and, sitting a stone's throw from where Perseus is said to have rescued Andromeda from the rocks to which she had been tied by her father, speaks eloquently to the power and politics of performance.
Those first settlements of Tel Aviv in the 1920s were in the area known as Neve Tzedek, which today retains its turn-of-the-century charm (narrow winding streets, old low buildings opening onto hidden courtyards), only now supplemented by trendy boutiques and restaurants. Tucked away along Shabazi Street in this area is the Suzanne Dallal Centre, home to Batsheva Dance Company, whose current world premiere, The Hole, by Artsitic Director and choreographic genius Ohad Naharin, Richard and I took in last night.
The piece is site-specific, made in direct response to the unique and intimate Varda Hall, where Batsheva performs much of its work. To this end, the hall--which I imagine is a fairly standard square studio space, has in this instance been transformed into an octagonal, with an eight-sided elevated stage in the middle, and with the audience distributed evenly around it. The action, however, begins above and behind the audience, as, soon after the lights dim, eight male dancers emerge from hidden crawl spaces and begin a sequence of simple, spotlit unison movements on narrow platforms. During the course of our 360-degree survey of the men, the women emerge, stealthily crawling upon the stage, each taking an odalisque position at one of its eight lips, head in hand, knees bent and hanging over the edge. In sync, each woman lifts her upper leg, eventually letting herself fall onto her back in a kind of supine toe-to-toe plié, before lifting her right leg over her left, letting it fall with a thud to the floor, and twisting herself into a panther pose and crawling to the next side of the octagonal. This continues for a full turn or more around the stage, the eight women above eventually being joined by a ninth below, her initially unnoticed appearance just one indication of how much there is to take in with this piece.
The Hole is essentially a showcase for Batsheva's female dancers, and Naharin has composed some stunning sequences for the nine-member corps that in their simplicity, repetition and canny combining of kinespheric and scenic space give everyone in the audience an up-close view of what's so captivating about expertly executed unison movement. Of special note in this regard is the section in which the women lie down together on successive lips of he stage, their legs hanging over the edge. They then repeat a sequence of serial movements, raising their heads, lifting their torsos, bending an elbow, turning onto their sides, and finally lifting themselves up one by one to move, in a hunched position, to the next side of the stage, where they will repeat the same sequence all over again. That, at this point in the piece, harpsichord music by Couperin is playing on the soundtrack only adds to the hypnotic effect.
Elsewhere, each of the women is given a chance to shine in improvisational solos, as walking counterclockwise around the edge of the stage they one by one take their turn in the centre, angling their limbs asymmetrically not just to their individual bodily cores, but to the geographical nexus of the group as a whole. Bearing this out, after each woman has had her chance to develop a unique movement phrase, the group devolves en masse into a riot of competing physical stylings and poses, with several of the women actually interrupting, blocking, or otherwise seeking to thwart their fellow dancers' movements.
The men, stuck on their platforms, do their best to compete for our attention, at one point erupting into preening, vogue-like, look-at-me poses that end with them shirtless, tongues hanging out, shamelessly soliciting our voyeuristic gaze. I understand that at occasional performances Naharin switches things up, putting the men on stage and the women against the walls. I have no idea if the choreography remains the same; regardless, it would be interesting to compare the effect. Not least because the men and women, who do interact at certain points from the distance of their respective spatial positions in a literal call and response manner, eventually come together--or at least partly, and not altogether predictably.
I refer to the fact that the men, having dispappeared at a certain point into the walls from which they first emerged, later reappear above us, crawling out in turn from what looks like a giant sewer pipe and spidering out onto the maze of metal pipes that sits just below the ceiling of Varda Hall. While the women continue to dance below, the men lie in wait, eventually slipping their bodies through the pipes to hang by their arms above the women. However, only one of them drops down to the stage, thereafter enacting a tentative duet with one of the women, neither partner quite knowing what to make of the other, nor what to do with their limbs, their respective reaches always exceeding--and just missing--the other's grasp. When the men lower themselves from the rafters a second time, the one among them who releases himself is caught by the women, from whose embrace he then seeks to free himself, flinging himself off the stage, only to be caught by the women again and again. They do not wish to tear him apart, like crazed Bacchanites, nor lure him to his death like the vengeful Wilis from Giselle. Rather, they introduce him to one among them, and this time the two opposite-sex bodies come together in a quietly affecting duet that ends with the men remaining above dropping little crystals that pop and crack when they hit the stage floor. Wedding rice? Hail stones? The meaning isn't immediately clear. Still, the piece ends on a graceful note, as the men lower eight swings onto the stage, which the women promptly climb upon, progressively launching their bodies out over the audience as the lights slowly dim.
As this closing image suggests, The Hole is perhaps more visually memorable than choreographically coherent, Naharin clearly in thrall to the site for which he composed the work. But there can be no denying the power of seeing the Batsheva dancers on such an intimate scale in their home venue. A performance memory of worked-through situatedness to cherish, and to set alongside--if not entirely dispel--the starker images of ethnic and religious division and uprootedness I have accumulated since moving from Tel Aviv to Jeruslaem, from whence I write this blog entry.
P.
Tuesday, May 14, 2013
What the #!&?
Writing from the Levant (in Istanbul en route to Tel Aviv), trying to understand what happened in the BC provincial election.
Did the pollsters just get the numbers terribly wrong, or did Christy Clark's relentlessly negative campaign work on a gullible electorate?
Four more years of that woman and her Cheshire grin: it makes one despair for the arts, for education, for the environment, for everything I thought I was supporting in casting my ballot early.
P.
Did the pollsters just get the numbers terribly wrong, or did Christy Clark's relentlessly negative campaign work on a gullible electorate?
Four more years of that woman and her Cheshire grin: it makes one despair for the arts, for education, for the environment, for everything I thought I was supporting in casting my ballot early.
P.
Thursday, May 9, 2013
Theatre Machines: Helen Mirren and Alan Turing
The news in London theatre right now is the Queen's row with the drumming protestors. It seems that during a recent performance of The Audience, Peter Morgan's new play about Elizabeth II's weekly meetings with a succession of her Prime Ministers, Dame Helen Mirren, once again winning plaudits and awards for playing the monarch (she won her Oscar for The Queen, also written by Morgan, and has just taken home an Olivier Award for this West End performance), interrupted the proceedings to walk off stage and out the door in order to tell off a crowd whose drumming could be heard inside. No hard feelings on either side, and the incident has been preserved for posterity on film, as the protestors had invited along a documentary film crew. Indeed, given the recent announcement that the real Queen would be cutting back her foreign travel and ceding more responsibility for such duties to Charles, the whole event gives rise to an intriguing--and no doubt far more entertaining--alternative to said plan: send Dame Helen instead!
We haven't gone in for any of the big West End shows on this trip, opting instead for our one live performance outing so far to see an intimate musical about Alan Turing called The Universal Machine, currently on at the tiny New Diorama Theatre near Regent's Park. I confess that it first peaked my interest because I thought its writer and director, David Byrne, was that David Byrne, and that the former Talking Heads frontman was opening his second experimental musical in as many months on this side of the Atlantic following the rapturous reception his take on Imedlda Marcos, Here Lies Love, has received at the Public Theatre in New York. Turns out, however, the David Byrne who is the Artistic Director of the NDT is somebody completely different, although equally gifted, it would seem, when it comes to developing and staging a new work of musical theatre about a complicated biographical subject who only wanted to be loved.
The Universal Machine, with a score by Dominic Brennan, and starring the terrific Richard Delaney in the lead role, condenses the story of Turing's tortured genius into three main episodes: his time as a public schoolboy at Sherbourne, where his immersion in advanced theoretical physics and mathematics is matched only by his youthful infatuation with an older classmate, Chris; his work at Bletchley Park during the war, where, building upon his earlier prototype for the Universal Turing Machine (the forerunner of the modern computer), he was instrumental in developing electromechanical techniques for cracking coded messages sent by the Nazis on their Enigma Machine, thus saving millions of Allied lives in the Battle of the Atlantic; and his postwar conviction for gross indecency, which resulted in his chemical castration and eventual suicide from cyanide poisoning.
Byrne uses snappy narrative exposition and stylized movement sequences to telegraph in an effective and economic manner these major plot points, while at the same giving us a series of quiet--and quietly moving--scenes between the emotionally conflicted Alan (who longs to build a machine that can feel for him) and those with whom he has his closest, those still coded, relationships: Chris at school; the co-worker from Bletchley he almost marries; and, of course, his mother Sara (the brilliant Judith Paris), who counselled her son to deny he was gay, and who later refused to believe he committed suicide, saying as much in print as Turing's first biographer.
Stylistically, the songs also straddle this structure, sometimes (as with a traditional chorus) functioning as an extension of the narration, or else commenting on the action, and sometimes offering us more insight into the interior life of our characters, especially mother and son. And herein lies my one, somewhat serious, quibble with the piece as it currently stands. Sara, as played by Paris, is such a dominant presence whenever she's on stage, and the song she sings and later reprises to convince herself to believe her "white lies" about her son is so emotionally climactic, that she tends to thwart a full empathetic connection on the audience's part with her necessarily withholding son, despite Delaney's own heartbreaking solo about the stolen moments of intimacy he steals with the young men he meets on his yearly trips out of repressed Britain.
Given Sara Turing's role in constructing--and simultaneously obfuscating--the posthumous narrative
around her brilliant son, there may be some biographical justification for this choice. However, in theatrical terms, it does mean that our spectatorial loyalties remain divided, with Alan's interior emotional life as a gay man remaining at war with his public persona as a war hero.
Let's hope that a full pardon eventually remedies that. In the meantime, The Universal Machine remains a richly satisfying work on a number of levels. And, having seen it, it will make all the more enjoyable our trip to Bletchley Park tomorrow.
P
We haven't gone in for any of the big West End shows on this trip, opting instead for our one live performance outing so far to see an intimate musical about Alan Turing called The Universal Machine, currently on at the tiny New Diorama Theatre near Regent's Park. I confess that it first peaked my interest because I thought its writer and director, David Byrne, was that David Byrne, and that the former Talking Heads frontman was opening his second experimental musical in as many months on this side of the Atlantic following the rapturous reception his take on Imedlda Marcos, Here Lies Love, has received at the Public Theatre in New York. Turns out, however, the David Byrne who is the Artistic Director of the NDT is somebody completely different, although equally gifted, it would seem, when it comes to developing and staging a new work of musical theatre about a complicated biographical subject who only wanted to be loved.
The Universal Machine, with a score by Dominic Brennan, and starring the terrific Richard Delaney in the lead role, condenses the story of Turing's tortured genius into three main episodes: his time as a public schoolboy at Sherbourne, where his immersion in advanced theoretical physics and mathematics is matched only by his youthful infatuation with an older classmate, Chris; his work at Bletchley Park during the war, where, building upon his earlier prototype for the Universal Turing Machine (the forerunner of the modern computer), he was instrumental in developing electromechanical techniques for cracking coded messages sent by the Nazis on their Enigma Machine, thus saving millions of Allied lives in the Battle of the Atlantic; and his postwar conviction for gross indecency, which resulted in his chemical castration and eventual suicide from cyanide poisoning.
Byrne uses snappy narrative exposition and stylized movement sequences to telegraph in an effective and economic manner these major plot points, while at the same giving us a series of quiet--and quietly moving--scenes between the emotionally conflicted Alan (who longs to build a machine that can feel for him) and those with whom he has his closest, those still coded, relationships: Chris at school; the co-worker from Bletchley he almost marries; and, of course, his mother Sara (the brilliant Judith Paris), who counselled her son to deny he was gay, and who later refused to believe he committed suicide, saying as much in print as Turing's first biographer.
Stylistically, the songs also straddle this structure, sometimes (as with a traditional chorus) functioning as an extension of the narration, or else commenting on the action, and sometimes offering us more insight into the interior life of our characters, especially mother and son. And herein lies my one, somewhat serious, quibble with the piece as it currently stands. Sara, as played by Paris, is such a dominant presence whenever she's on stage, and the song she sings and later reprises to convince herself to believe her "white lies" about her son is so emotionally climactic, that she tends to thwart a full empathetic connection on the audience's part with her necessarily withholding son, despite Delaney's own heartbreaking solo about the stolen moments of intimacy he steals with the young men he meets on his yearly trips out of repressed Britain.
Given Sara Turing's role in constructing--and simultaneously obfuscating--the posthumous narrative
around her brilliant son, there may be some biographical justification for this choice. However, in theatrical terms, it does mean that our spectatorial loyalties remain divided, with Alan's interior emotional life as a gay man remaining at war with his public persona as a war hero.
Let's hope that a full pardon eventually remedies that. In the meantime, The Universal Machine remains a richly satisfying work on a number of levels. And, having seen it, it will make all the more enjoyable our trip to Bletchley Park tomorrow.
P
After Duchamp
At the Barbican Centre in London (where Richard and I are currently), as part of their "Dancing around Duchamp" season, the art gallery is showcasing through June 9th a stunning show called "The Bride and the Bachelors." It highlights the influence of Marcel Duchamp on John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Robert Rauschenberg, and Jasper Johns, as well as the creative exchanges Duchamp's work and friendship fuelled between the four younger artists across a variety of media.
A highlight for me were the sets that Johns and Rauschenberg designed for several of Cunningham's dance pieces, including Walkaround Time (1968), which Johns based on Duchamp's Large Glass, a replica of which serves as a centrepiece to the exhibition. Then there's the string of bicycle wheels and chairs that Rauschenberg designed for Cunningham's Travelogue (1977), an homage to Duchamp's first readymade, which I featured in The Objecthood of Chairs, and the sight of which here (again, not the original) nearly caused me to burst into tears.
Also featured are several of Cage and Duchamp's scores, excerpts of which play throughout the show, along with other audio compositions, including metteur-en-scene Philippe Parreno's recordings of dancers' feet as they perform Cunningham's choreography. In lieu of an actual live dance performance (which happen on Thursdays and weekends only), this was the next best thing.
My only complaint is that gender and sexuality were completely absent from the narrative of this show, notwithstanding the coded "bachelors" reference in the title, and despite the images of Duchamp as Rrose Selavy throughout the show. Having just come from the Man Ray show at the National Portrait Gallery, where images of a young, very beautiful, and very androgynous Duchamp were abundant, it struck me that one of the additional appeals of this creative genius to four young gay artists in 1950s America would have been the way he made the performance of sexual identity a central part of his oeuvre.
Also on in the Curve Gallery on the ground floor of the Barbican is an installation by Vancouver artist Geoffrey Farmer called "The Surgeon and the Photographer." Made up of hundreds of hand puppets "dressed" with cut-out images from second-hand books and magazines collected by the artist, and supplemented by a found audio score and projected visual index of Farmer's source images, the work is a dizzying mash-up of iconographic human "types." I had seen an earlier version of this work at the National Gallery of Canada in 2009. Here, in expanded form, and juxtaposed against Duchamp, it takes on added significance. A major work by a major artist.
P
A highlight for me were the sets that Johns and Rauschenberg designed for several of Cunningham's dance pieces, including Walkaround Time (1968), which Johns based on Duchamp's Large Glass, a replica of which serves as a centrepiece to the exhibition. Then there's the string of bicycle wheels and chairs that Rauschenberg designed for Cunningham's Travelogue (1977), an homage to Duchamp's first readymade, which I featured in The Objecthood of Chairs, and the sight of which here (again, not the original) nearly caused me to burst into tears.
Also featured are several of Cage and Duchamp's scores, excerpts of which play throughout the show, along with other audio compositions, including metteur-en-scene Philippe Parreno's recordings of dancers' feet as they perform Cunningham's choreography. In lieu of an actual live dance performance (which happen on Thursdays and weekends only), this was the next best thing.
My only complaint is that gender and sexuality were completely absent from the narrative of this show, notwithstanding the coded "bachelors" reference in the title, and despite the images of Duchamp as Rrose Selavy throughout the show. Having just come from the Man Ray show at the National Portrait Gallery, where images of a young, very beautiful, and very androgynous Duchamp were abundant, it struck me that one of the additional appeals of this creative genius to four young gay artists in 1950s America would have been the way he made the performance of sexual identity a central part of his oeuvre.
Also on in the Curve Gallery on the ground floor of the Barbican is an installation by Vancouver artist Geoffrey Farmer called "The Surgeon and the Photographer." Made up of hundreds of hand puppets "dressed" with cut-out images from second-hand books and magazines collected by the artist, and supplemented by a found audio score and projected visual index of Farmer's source images, the work is a dizzying mash-up of iconographic human "types." I had seen an earlier version of this work at the National Gallery of Canada in 2009. Here, in expanded form, and juxtaposed against Duchamp, it takes on added significance. A major work by a major artist.
P
Saturday, April 27, 2013
Ballet BC's Giselle
This weekend's world premiere of Ballet BC's new Giselle at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre is the culmination of four years of painstaking restructuring and determined reinvention for the company under the inspired leadership of Artistic Director Emily Molnar. Pushing the company's repertoire in ever more innovative, contemporary, and international directions in a succession of bold and distinctive mixed programs that showcased the depth of talent and individual personalities of its dancers, in many ways Molnar's next logical step was to revisit the classical repertoire and find a story ballet that the company could make all its own. Hence resident choreographer José Navas's commission to update Giselle for the twenty-first century. After last night's performance I can say that, conceptually, Navas has accomplished this task brilliantly. I just wish there was more dance.
Navas has commented extensively in print in the lead-up to the premiere about the paradox of him, Cunningham-trained and steeped in abstraction, tackling one of the iconic tutu ballets and dealing with pantomime. At the same time, he has admitted how the process has, among other things, given him a new admiration for the pointe shoe and the elongated silhouette of the ballerina that comes with it. Which made it all the more surprising last night that apart from the opening sequences of the piece, Giselle (Maggie Forgeron) and the corps of female dancers were in socks, despite spending much of their time in relevé. Perhaps this had to do with the fact that one of Navas's conceptual innovations was to have the men in the corps join the women to make up the Wilis in Act 2. Or maybe this was his natural deconstructive aesthetic meeting classical technique half-way, literally on demi-pointe. Elsewhere, there were conscious allusions to the preparation-execution-release sequencing of ballet's signature moves, as when, for example, Albrecht (Alexander Burton) lifts Giselle at the waist in Act 1 and her feet remain turned out, in first position, or when, in Act 2, the Wilis hoist their leader, Myrtha (Makaila Wallace), aloft while she remains in a deep plié. Indeed, all four of the principals, even Hilarion (Gilbert Small), are lifted in similarly iconic poses throughout both acts, at once isolating them as representative ballet types (the doomed romantic heroine, the glib and oblivious hero, the mysterious stranger/villain, the magical priestess) and as characters subservient to this particular plot.
And it is in terms of the love triangle at the core of Giselle that Navas makes his most interesting changes to the ballet's story, writing in his very comprehensive and intellectually compelling choreographer's note that "in our day, class or status functions less persuasively as an obstacle to love than sexuality does." To this end, rather than Giselle having to choose between the unattainable nobleman Albrecht whom she desperately loves and the peasant Hilarion whom she does not, Navas makes Albrecht and Navas gay lovers and Giselle the woman who threatens to come between them. Again, I think this absolutely works on a conceptual level, and Forgeron, Burton, and Small are all dramatically compelling in their roles. But in terms of the movement they share (at least in Act 1), I was frankly surprised at how little there was and, when it did happen, how pedestrian it seemed. As Giselle, Forgeron spends a lot of time breaking up the hand-holding of Albrecht and Hilarion and generally stumbling around on stage uncomprehendingly. Burton and Small separately and together have moments where they demonstrate their proficient jetés and entrechats. But Forgeron, sans pointe shoes, gets narry an arabesque, let alone the series of dramatic fouettés that in the original staging one might expect would accompany her frenzied dancing of herself to death. To be sure, this relates to another of Navas's changes to the plot, namely that Giselle kills herself (with a knife she finds in Albrecht's coat, and given to him at the top of the piece by Hilarion) rather than dying from a weak--and presumably broken--heart. But the fact that this action takes place while Forgeron is seated on a chair was one more frustration for me.
I get that in stillness there might yet be an abundance of movement (physical and emotional), and that the broken lines of Forgeron's steps reflect not just her character's fragile psychological state, but also a whole history of formal conventions for the female dancer that Navas is subjecting to critique. And, along those lines, it did surprise me the extent to which, last night, I craved adherence to those conventions. The reason for this, I think, is the one element to which Navas, in his program note and in publicity for the piece, claims he felt he owed absolute fidelity: Adolphe Adam's music. When, at different points in the score, there is a crescendo of strings signifying a moment of dramatic intensity, we are cued to expect a similar virtuosic display of movement. Over and over again in Navas's staging--most notably during Giselle's death at the end of Act 1--that doesn't happen. Indeed, the most satisfying moments for me in Act 1 were when the principals were off stage, with Navas providing members of the corps an opportunity to display some amazing physical pyrotechnics. Relatedly, the moment in Act 2 I found the most moving was the duet between Forgeron's Giselle and Wallace's Myrtha that was performed in silence.
Let me be clear: there is so much in this production to admire, including its overall design, which includes stunning video projections and set design by Lino, gorgeous costumes by Linda Chow, and lighting by Marc Parent. And Navas has clearly thought deeply not just about his Giselle's relationship to the original, but also to the entire history of dance since. For example, in the choice of a member of the corps to "play" Giselle at the beginning of the piece--and in her symbolic disrobing--we witness an allusion to Pina Bausch's chosen sacrificial victim in her Rite of Spring. This reference was additionally reinforced for me at the end when the simple white shift Forgeron is wearing is removed to reveal her naked torso, sinewy and muscled like one of Bausch's female dancers, but also like that of the young boy whom she would become were she able, and were it to mean she could then keep her Albrecht.
Moments like these, when the politics of gender and sexuality combined with the poetry of dance, were many last night, and always kept me engaged. I look forward to grappling with the work's layers and complexities even further as it is remounted in the coming years.
P.
Navas has commented extensively in print in the lead-up to the premiere about the paradox of him, Cunningham-trained and steeped in abstraction, tackling one of the iconic tutu ballets and dealing with pantomime. At the same time, he has admitted how the process has, among other things, given him a new admiration for the pointe shoe and the elongated silhouette of the ballerina that comes with it. Which made it all the more surprising last night that apart from the opening sequences of the piece, Giselle (Maggie Forgeron) and the corps of female dancers were in socks, despite spending much of their time in relevé. Perhaps this had to do with the fact that one of Navas's conceptual innovations was to have the men in the corps join the women to make up the Wilis in Act 2. Or maybe this was his natural deconstructive aesthetic meeting classical technique half-way, literally on demi-pointe. Elsewhere, there were conscious allusions to the preparation-execution-release sequencing of ballet's signature moves, as when, for example, Albrecht (Alexander Burton) lifts Giselle at the waist in Act 1 and her feet remain turned out, in first position, or when, in Act 2, the Wilis hoist their leader, Myrtha (Makaila Wallace), aloft while she remains in a deep plié. Indeed, all four of the principals, even Hilarion (Gilbert Small), are lifted in similarly iconic poses throughout both acts, at once isolating them as representative ballet types (the doomed romantic heroine, the glib and oblivious hero, the mysterious stranger/villain, the magical priestess) and as characters subservient to this particular plot.
And it is in terms of the love triangle at the core of Giselle that Navas makes his most interesting changes to the ballet's story, writing in his very comprehensive and intellectually compelling choreographer's note that "in our day, class or status functions less persuasively as an obstacle to love than sexuality does." To this end, rather than Giselle having to choose between the unattainable nobleman Albrecht whom she desperately loves and the peasant Hilarion whom she does not, Navas makes Albrecht and Navas gay lovers and Giselle the woman who threatens to come between them. Again, I think this absolutely works on a conceptual level, and Forgeron, Burton, and Small are all dramatically compelling in their roles. But in terms of the movement they share (at least in Act 1), I was frankly surprised at how little there was and, when it did happen, how pedestrian it seemed. As Giselle, Forgeron spends a lot of time breaking up the hand-holding of Albrecht and Hilarion and generally stumbling around on stage uncomprehendingly. Burton and Small separately and together have moments where they demonstrate their proficient jetés and entrechats. But Forgeron, sans pointe shoes, gets narry an arabesque, let alone the series of dramatic fouettés that in the original staging one might expect would accompany her frenzied dancing of herself to death. To be sure, this relates to another of Navas's changes to the plot, namely that Giselle kills herself (with a knife she finds in Albrecht's coat, and given to him at the top of the piece by Hilarion) rather than dying from a weak--and presumably broken--heart. But the fact that this action takes place while Forgeron is seated on a chair was one more frustration for me.
I get that in stillness there might yet be an abundance of movement (physical and emotional), and that the broken lines of Forgeron's steps reflect not just her character's fragile psychological state, but also a whole history of formal conventions for the female dancer that Navas is subjecting to critique. And, along those lines, it did surprise me the extent to which, last night, I craved adherence to those conventions. The reason for this, I think, is the one element to which Navas, in his program note and in publicity for the piece, claims he felt he owed absolute fidelity: Adolphe Adam's music. When, at different points in the score, there is a crescendo of strings signifying a moment of dramatic intensity, we are cued to expect a similar virtuosic display of movement. Over and over again in Navas's staging--most notably during Giselle's death at the end of Act 1--that doesn't happen. Indeed, the most satisfying moments for me in Act 1 were when the principals were off stage, with Navas providing members of the corps an opportunity to display some amazing physical pyrotechnics. Relatedly, the moment in Act 2 I found the most moving was the duet between Forgeron's Giselle and Wallace's Myrtha that was performed in silence.
Let me be clear: there is so much in this production to admire, including its overall design, which includes stunning video projections and set design by Lino, gorgeous costumes by Linda Chow, and lighting by Marc Parent. And Navas has clearly thought deeply not just about his Giselle's relationship to the original, but also to the entire history of dance since. For example, in the choice of a member of the corps to "play" Giselle at the beginning of the piece--and in her symbolic disrobing--we witness an allusion to Pina Bausch's chosen sacrificial victim in her Rite of Spring. This reference was additionally reinforced for me at the end when the simple white shift Forgeron is wearing is removed to reveal her naked torso, sinewy and muscled like one of Bausch's female dancers, but also like that of the young boy whom she would become were she able, and were it to mean she could then keep her Albrecht.
Moments like these, when the politics of gender and sexuality combined with the poetry of dance, were many last night, and always kept me engaged. I look forward to grappling with the work's layers and complexities even further as it is remounted in the coming years.
P.
Friday, April 19, 2013
Three Sisters at The Cultch
Anton Chekhov's Three Sisters is a play I adore, and one I've taught many times (in various translations/adaptations by contemporary playwrights, for whom the task is almost a career rite of passage). But until last night I had not seen a live professional production. Mercifully, that gap in my theatre-going experience has been filled by director Jane Heyman and The Only Child Collective's moving staging of the play, on at the Vancouver East Cultural Centre's Vancity Culture Lab through this Saturday.
Full disclosure: Jane is a former PuSh Board colleague; her daughter, Jessie Johnston, who produced the show, is a current PuSh Board colleague; and I donated money to the wildly successful indiegogo campaign that Jessie has used to underwrite much of the production's costs. Not that mother or daughter would expect anything less than a full and honest critique.
One of the most amazing things about Three Sisters, written at the turn of the twentieth-century, is how contemporary it continues to feel. And I'm not just referring to the feelings of ennui, melancholia, and frustrated ambition afflicting Olga, Masha, and Irina, three beautiful, intelligent women suffocating in the provinces, forced into soulless marriages and mind-numbing jobs while the men around them--their brother Andrei included--continue to enjoy the entitlements of their gender. What over-educated female millennial facing the current job market--and perhaps the prospect of moving back in with her parents in the suburbs as a result--wouldn't be affected by this? But the freshness of the play has as much to do with Chekhov's structural and dramaturgical genius as with the universality of his themes. So, for example, the twin themes of love and work that remain dialectically entwined in the Prozorov sisters' minds as sources of aspirational longing and hopeless despair are consistently played out in scenes that juxtapose public "philosophizing" (to use Vershinin's term) about their possible and/or anticipated rewards with private self-recrimination about the much more pedestrian realities such fantasies belie.
Key in this regard is Act 3, set in the enclosed and cramped interior space of Olga and Irina's bedroom, following the fire that ravages much of the town. The entire cast tramps through the room at one point or another, symbolically trampling what remains of the sisters' dream to return to Moscow. In Heyman's staging, we witness all of this in quietly and affectively physical ways: in Irina's (Rachel Aberle) disgust at the grit and grime Dr. Chebutykin (Richard Newman) has left on the washcloth used to dry his hands; in an exhausted Olga's (Manami Hara) cradling of the aged servant Anfisa (Rosy Frier-Dryden); in Masha (Emma Slipp) greedily stealing kisses with Vershinin (Bob Frazer) while her husband Kulygin (David Bloom) dozes in the corner; and in Irina and Olga burying themselves under their bedclothes as Andrei (Alex Rose) tells them he has mortgaged the house to pay his gambling debts and that they need to be nicer to his interloping wife, Natasha (Adele Noronha).
My only complaint is that the exclusively stage left blocking of these scenes, combined with an awkwardly placed upstage screen, made it difficult to see much of the action. I get that Heyman was emphasizing how impossibly small the sisters' world has become, and that this serves as a visual contrast to the final act, set in the Prozorovs' garden, which ironically does not open out onto new vistas for any of the sisters. But sightlines in the tiny Culture Lab are already difficult enough. If you add a full house (a tough problem to have, I know), then for those sitting audience left as I was, for much of Act 3 you'll be craning your neck.
Oh yeah, one other thing: the actor playing Tuzenbach (Brahm Taylor) was far too handsome. Otherwise, this is a warm and wise production, with a skillfully updated text by Amiel Gladstone that sounds at once idiomatically contemporary to a 21st-century ear and faithful to Heyman's period staging. I am grateful for having been given the opportunity to spend such quality time with two of my favourite theatrical families: the Prozorovs and the Heyman-Johnstons.
P.
Full disclosure: Jane is a former PuSh Board colleague; her daughter, Jessie Johnston, who produced the show, is a current PuSh Board colleague; and I donated money to the wildly successful indiegogo campaign that Jessie has used to underwrite much of the production's costs. Not that mother or daughter would expect anything less than a full and honest critique.
One of the most amazing things about Three Sisters, written at the turn of the twentieth-century, is how contemporary it continues to feel. And I'm not just referring to the feelings of ennui, melancholia, and frustrated ambition afflicting Olga, Masha, and Irina, three beautiful, intelligent women suffocating in the provinces, forced into soulless marriages and mind-numbing jobs while the men around them--their brother Andrei included--continue to enjoy the entitlements of their gender. What over-educated female millennial facing the current job market--and perhaps the prospect of moving back in with her parents in the suburbs as a result--wouldn't be affected by this? But the freshness of the play has as much to do with Chekhov's structural and dramaturgical genius as with the universality of his themes. So, for example, the twin themes of love and work that remain dialectically entwined in the Prozorov sisters' minds as sources of aspirational longing and hopeless despair are consistently played out in scenes that juxtapose public "philosophizing" (to use Vershinin's term) about their possible and/or anticipated rewards with private self-recrimination about the much more pedestrian realities such fantasies belie.
Key in this regard is Act 3, set in the enclosed and cramped interior space of Olga and Irina's bedroom, following the fire that ravages much of the town. The entire cast tramps through the room at one point or another, symbolically trampling what remains of the sisters' dream to return to Moscow. In Heyman's staging, we witness all of this in quietly and affectively physical ways: in Irina's (Rachel Aberle) disgust at the grit and grime Dr. Chebutykin (Richard Newman) has left on the washcloth used to dry his hands; in an exhausted Olga's (Manami Hara) cradling of the aged servant Anfisa (Rosy Frier-Dryden); in Masha (Emma Slipp) greedily stealing kisses with Vershinin (Bob Frazer) while her husband Kulygin (David Bloom) dozes in the corner; and in Irina and Olga burying themselves under their bedclothes as Andrei (Alex Rose) tells them he has mortgaged the house to pay his gambling debts and that they need to be nicer to his interloping wife, Natasha (Adele Noronha).
My only complaint is that the exclusively stage left blocking of these scenes, combined with an awkwardly placed upstage screen, made it difficult to see much of the action. I get that Heyman was emphasizing how impossibly small the sisters' world has become, and that this serves as a visual contrast to the final act, set in the Prozorovs' garden, which ironically does not open out onto new vistas for any of the sisters. But sightlines in the tiny Culture Lab are already difficult enough. If you add a full house (a tough problem to have, I know), then for those sitting audience left as I was, for much of Act 3 you'll be craning your neck.
Oh yeah, one other thing: the actor playing Tuzenbach (Brahm Taylor) was far too handsome. Otherwise, this is a warm and wise production, with a skillfully updated text by Amiel Gladstone that sounds at once idiomatically contemporary to a 21st-century ear and faithful to Heyman's period staging. I am grateful for having been given the opportunity to spend such quality time with two of my favourite theatrical families: the Prozorovs and the Heyman-Johnstons.
P.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
