You gotta have a gimmick, right? Clearly Daniel Ezralow, Artistic Director of the LA-based Ezralow Dance, thinks that when it comes to Gypsy Rose Lee's maxim, the more the merrier. In Open, which--ha, ha--"opened" the 2018 Chutzpah! Festival last night at the Rothstein Theatre, gimmick after gimmick is trotted out in attempt to mask the empty ideas and utter lack of choreographic distinction at the heart of what is essentially a succession of brief dance-theatre vignettes. Roped-off boxing ring? Check. Potted palm trees? Check. Finger puppets? Check. Black and white face paint? Check. Mismatched costumes? Check. And let's not forget the supra-gimmick of the constantly moving screens, the locomotion of which was perhaps the most technically accomplished physical activity of the entire evening.
To be fair, the eight dancers are trying very hard. But it is clear that most are not classically trained and that they come from more commercial dance and musical theatre and even circus arts backgrounds. And then there's the fact that the choreography is itself better suited to a cruise ship than a concert stage. Ezralow clearly subscribes to the So You Think You Can Dance school of physical expressiveness: Faster! Bigger! More! And don't forget the costume changes. The partnering is especially clumsy and genitally awkward, with the lifts of the women more in line with the look-at-what-we-can-do posing of ice skating than the structural plot pointing of ballet. This was especially notable in an early man-at-beach-meets mermaid sequence and then later in what I can only describe as a gold laméd tribute to physique posing. (During the latter the women behind us burst into uncontrollable laughter.)
It would be one thing if this were all being done with a wink and a nudge, if Ezralow was taking the piss out of his audience. After all, he does pair most of the vignettes with iconic musical compositions by Chopin, Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, and Bach, among others. However, I could detect absolutely no irony at work in the juxtaposition of musical and dance scores. Indeed the Prokofiev-themed homage to Romeo and Juliet was utterly sincere, which just made it that much more painful to watch--especially as the Robbinsesque choreography was so derivative. Likewise, a gum-booted line dance to Bach was clearly undertaken with the utmost seriousness, and was not meant as a burlesquing of either artistic variation.
The programming of Open is a real head-scratcher. Normally the dance presentations at Chutzpah! are reliably rewarding, with Mary-Louise Albert bringing in top international companies and also showcasing amazing local talent. This work is definitely the worst piece I have seen at the festival, and ranks among the poorest dance performances I have ever attended. How it continues to tour in the way it does is beyond me.
P
Showing posts with label Norman Rothstein Theatre. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Norman Rothstein Theatre. Show all posts
Friday, February 16, 2018
Sunday, January 21, 2018
PuSh 2018: Radio Rewrite at the Norman Rothstein Theatre
At last year's PuSh Festival, Turning Point Ensemble Artistic Director Owen Underhill put together an amazing program of music that situated the compositions of rock star Frank Zappa alongside the work of Edgard Varèse and John Oswald. For this year's festival he's done something similar, pairing work by Radiohead guitarist Johnny Greenwood with pieces by Olivier Messiaen, Christopher Butterfield, and Steve Reich. The concerts just concluded a two-evening run at the Norman Rothstein Theatre last night.
I had no idea that Greenwood had such an interest in classical and orchestral music, let alone that he had composed numerous pieces for the ondes martenot, an early electronic instrument invented in France after WWI that Messiaen favoured, and which looks like a keyboard and sounds a bit like a theremin. Two ondes martenots were on stage last night and guest TPE artists Estelle Lemire and Geneviève Grenier were featured soloists on all but three pieces. These included a world premiere, Short Room, by local composer Christopher Butterfield, and a new arrangement by Lemire of a 1937 piece by Messiaen, Dieuxième Oraison.
I was most taken with the sound of the ondes martenot when it was paired with the wind instruments, especially the lone french horn in Butterfield's piece. It really is a remarkable instrument and once again I am grateful to Underhill and TPE for bringing to audiences' attention its unsung musical history and influence.
P
I had no idea that Greenwood had such an interest in classical and orchestral music, let alone that he had composed numerous pieces for the ondes martenot, an early electronic instrument invented in France after WWI that Messiaen favoured, and which looks like a keyboard and sounds a bit like a theremin. Two ondes martenots were on stage last night and guest TPE artists Estelle Lemire and Geneviève Grenier were featured soloists on all but three pieces. These included a world premiere, Short Room, by local composer Christopher Butterfield, and a new arrangement by Lemire of a 1937 piece by Messiaen, Dieuxième Oraison.
I was most taken with the sound of the ondes martenot when it was paired with the wind instruments, especially the lone french horn in Butterfield's piece. It really is a remarkable instrument and once again I am grateful to Underhill and TPE for bringing to audiences' attention its unsung musical history and influence.
P
Thursday, February 26, 2015
Vanessa Goodman and Idan Sharabi at Chutzpah!
Last night at the Norman and Annette Rothstein Theatre, the Chutzpah! Festival presented a double bill of dance. The evening opened with the premiere of a new work by local choreographer and SFU Contemporary Arts alum Vanessa Goodman. Wells Hill takes its name from the street in Toronto where Marshall McLuhan lived before moving to Wychwood Park, and where he wrote three of his most famous works: The Gutenberg Galaxy, Understanding Media, and The Medium is the Massage. (It helps that I live with, and was sitting beside, a noted McLuhan scholar.) Goodman takes inspiration from McLuhan's ideas about mass communication and, especially via his collaborations with Glenn Gould, how media affect the ways we produce and consume art.
To a recording of Gould performing The Goldberg Variations, a sextet of incredibly gifted Vancouver dancers (Lara Barclay, Lisa Gelley, James Gnam, Josh Martin, Bevin Poole, and Jane Osborne) begin moving in formation stage right, their deconstructed white tuxedo shirts and grey skirts and slacks evoking elite private school uniforms (the costumes are by Deborah Beaulieu), an image reinforced by the evocative floor and overhead florescent lighting design by James Proudfoot. The five dancers, initially tightly grouped and moving their arms synchronously and geometrically to frame their heads and torsos, slowly break apart and fan out across the stage. At this point, Barclay begins weaving in and around them, our focus drawn to her different movement patterns, the amount of space she is covering relative to the others, and, in this instance, the deliberate showcasing of her virtuosity. If dance is a performance medium that also in some senses performs us, Goodman seems to be asking, in this opening sequence, a key structural question: how, to paraphrase W.B.Yeats, do we separate the dancer from the dance?
This parts/whole, content/form equation was what I kept focusing on throughout the remainder of the piece. For example, following the opening group sequence we get a gorgeous duet between Gnam and Poole; as they finish, they move upstage, making way for the pairing of Gelley and Osborne. As kinetically compelling as the the downstage duo is (and these women are truly exceptional movers), our attention is necessarily divided between them and the upstage duo, a reminder that in contemporary dance our awareness and sensory-motor perceptors are being hailed in multiple ways, and often simultaneously. So too is it when Martin joins the group a bit later in the piece; he is moving differently than the others, more fluidly, and as he floats in and out between the others' bodies we cannot help but follow his progress. Finally, there is the stunningly arresting final tableau that Goodman gives us: Barclay, having first been grabbed from behind by Gelley, is steered stage left, as one-by-one the other dancers attach themselves to her body (and to each other) from the wings, manipulating her limbs like she is a marionette (an image with obvious dance-world resonance). However, Gnam remains apart from this group, dancing a solo in counterpoint to the larger group machine.
A lot is going on here. On the one hand, Goodman seems to be suggesting that if the dancer's body is a medium, then it is the choreographer who ultimately works it over. But sometimes even the most disciplined bodies can resist being conscripted for a particular message--hence Gnam dancing alone off to the side. Then, too, the dance-as-performed works on us (including kinaesthetically), a reminder that in the feedback loop of communication it is the audience that completes the circuit of both the medium and the message. This is something Gould recognized. Influenced by McLuhan, he famously gave up live performance for the perfectibility of the recording studio. But he never forgot who was at the other end of "his master's voice," that his records needed to be played and listened too. (Gould and McLuhan both appear at various points in screen projections curated by Goodman and Ben Didier). Likewise, in this very smart and important new work, Goodman recognizes that if, in McLuhan's words, "Art is anything you can get away with," that art nevertheless demands a response.
Idan Sharabi's Interviews/Makom is a set of twinned works based on a series of conversations the choreographer conducted with Israeli residents (and members of his own dance company) based on the concept of home. Excerpts from the interviews play throughout both pieces and in Makom (Hebrew for "a place") dancer Ema Yuasa, originally from Japan, speaks about her feelings of displacement--even after eleven years, and despite pursuing her dance dreams--living in Holland. Interviews, the newer of the pieces, is staged first; the conversations, recorded during the most recent conflict in Gaza, are filled with moments of quite tension that the dancers occasionally respond to through physical gestures. For example, when Sharabi makes a reference on the tape to the balled up fists of the woman he is talking to, we see Sharabi and fellow dancer Dor Mamalia shake their own fists at each other on stage. Later, in Makom, another interview subject also references his hands, stating that he routinely walks with his hands in his pockets as a defence against having to shake anyone else's hand. At this point, we see Mamalia take off his pants, turn them inside out, and put them back on, the interior flaps of his front pockets now plainly visible to us.
These moments of theatricalizing the interview tapes were less satisfying to me than the otherwise mostly non-representational movement. All the dancers (the fourth of whom is Dafna Dudovich) are superb in interpreting Sharabi's alternately propulsive and flowing choreography. The complex floorwork in both pieces is a particular highlight, with the dancers sometimes sinking liquidly into jointless splits and at other times throwing themselves aggressively onto their backs, legs and arms angled awkwardly about their torsos. The threat of violence is never far from the surface in both works, with a transfer of chokeholds between Sharabi and Mamalia featuring in the first part, and with Sharabi moving Yuasa about rather wildly by the back of her neck in the second part.
Trauma--the trauma of exile and migration, as well as the trauma of a homeland that is contested and under perpetual siege--is an important through-line in Interviews/Makom. And, as Diana Taylor has noted with reference to theatrical responses to Argentina's Dirty War (in The Archive and the Repertoire), the structuring motif of trauma, like that of performance, is repetition. Thus it should come as no surprise that Interviews and Makom are to a certain extent mirror halves, with the male and female dancers further twinned along gender lines. Sharabi and Mamalia begin both pieces by walking from the wings onto the stage (in the first work backwards and more slowly, in the second facing front and much more quickly), eventually meeting in the centre and extending but not touching their hands. The women, however, never dance together. Instead, they exchange over the course of both pieces each other's roles. Yuasa lies prone upstage left at the beginning of Interviews, before eventually taking a seat in the audience to watch the proceedings--including, eventually, Dudovich dancing up a storm alongside both men--along with us. In Makom the women's positions are reversed: it is Dudovich, likewise initially lying inert on the stage floor, who watches Yuasa and the men from the audience. Maybe this was Sharabi's comment on the important role of the witness in traumatic events; but his explicit gendering of this role was a concern for me, as was how much less, as a result, the women had to do relative to the men.
While both pieces had moments of outright silliness, Makom, created first but staged second, was far lighter in tone. This is a reminder that trauma can produce moments of spontaneous comedy, not least in bodily eruptions of what Henri Bergson would call "mechanical inelasticity" (when, for example, our brain tells us to do one thing, and our body responds by doing the opposite). There were many funny moments when one marvelled at the apparent incongruity of what the very elastic bodies of Sharabi's dancers were able to do. That said, I was a bit surprised by the degree to which Makom elicited outright guffaws from some quarters of the audience, including for the songs of Joni Mitchell that Sharabi incorporates into the score.
Sharabi, in his choreographer's notes, admits that for him Interviews/Makom is still a riddle. I tend to agree, and while I'm not all that concerned that the riddle be solved, I would suggest that as the piece evolves not only should it be edited for length (each half is about 10-15 minutes too long), but also for the overall quality of feeling the choreographer is seeking to provoke in his audience.
P.
To a recording of Gould performing The Goldberg Variations, a sextet of incredibly gifted Vancouver dancers (Lara Barclay, Lisa Gelley, James Gnam, Josh Martin, Bevin Poole, and Jane Osborne) begin moving in formation stage right, their deconstructed white tuxedo shirts and grey skirts and slacks evoking elite private school uniforms (the costumes are by Deborah Beaulieu), an image reinforced by the evocative floor and overhead florescent lighting design by James Proudfoot. The five dancers, initially tightly grouped and moving their arms synchronously and geometrically to frame their heads and torsos, slowly break apart and fan out across the stage. At this point, Barclay begins weaving in and around them, our focus drawn to her different movement patterns, the amount of space she is covering relative to the others, and, in this instance, the deliberate showcasing of her virtuosity. If dance is a performance medium that also in some senses performs us, Goodman seems to be asking, in this opening sequence, a key structural question: how, to paraphrase W.B.Yeats, do we separate the dancer from the dance?
This parts/whole, content/form equation was what I kept focusing on throughout the remainder of the piece. For example, following the opening group sequence we get a gorgeous duet between Gnam and Poole; as they finish, they move upstage, making way for the pairing of Gelley and Osborne. As kinetically compelling as the the downstage duo is (and these women are truly exceptional movers), our attention is necessarily divided between them and the upstage duo, a reminder that in contemporary dance our awareness and sensory-motor perceptors are being hailed in multiple ways, and often simultaneously. So too is it when Martin joins the group a bit later in the piece; he is moving differently than the others, more fluidly, and as he floats in and out between the others' bodies we cannot help but follow his progress. Finally, there is the stunningly arresting final tableau that Goodman gives us: Barclay, having first been grabbed from behind by Gelley, is steered stage left, as one-by-one the other dancers attach themselves to her body (and to each other) from the wings, manipulating her limbs like she is a marionette (an image with obvious dance-world resonance). However, Gnam remains apart from this group, dancing a solo in counterpoint to the larger group machine.
A lot is going on here. On the one hand, Goodman seems to be suggesting that if the dancer's body is a medium, then it is the choreographer who ultimately works it over. But sometimes even the most disciplined bodies can resist being conscripted for a particular message--hence Gnam dancing alone off to the side. Then, too, the dance-as-performed works on us (including kinaesthetically), a reminder that in the feedback loop of communication it is the audience that completes the circuit of both the medium and the message. This is something Gould recognized. Influenced by McLuhan, he famously gave up live performance for the perfectibility of the recording studio. But he never forgot who was at the other end of "his master's voice," that his records needed to be played and listened too. (Gould and McLuhan both appear at various points in screen projections curated by Goodman and Ben Didier). Likewise, in this very smart and important new work, Goodman recognizes that if, in McLuhan's words, "Art is anything you can get away with," that art nevertheless demands a response.
Idan Sharabi's Interviews/Makom is a set of twinned works based on a series of conversations the choreographer conducted with Israeli residents (and members of his own dance company) based on the concept of home. Excerpts from the interviews play throughout both pieces and in Makom (Hebrew for "a place") dancer Ema Yuasa, originally from Japan, speaks about her feelings of displacement--even after eleven years, and despite pursuing her dance dreams--living in Holland. Interviews, the newer of the pieces, is staged first; the conversations, recorded during the most recent conflict in Gaza, are filled with moments of quite tension that the dancers occasionally respond to through physical gestures. For example, when Sharabi makes a reference on the tape to the balled up fists of the woman he is talking to, we see Sharabi and fellow dancer Dor Mamalia shake their own fists at each other on stage. Later, in Makom, another interview subject also references his hands, stating that he routinely walks with his hands in his pockets as a defence against having to shake anyone else's hand. At this point, we see Mamalia take off his pants, turn them inside out, and put them back on, the interior flaps of his front pockets now plainly visible to us.
These moments of theatricalizing the interview tapes were less satisfying to me than the otherwise mostly non-representational movement. All the dancers (the fourth of whom is Dafna Dudovich) are superb in interpreting Sharabi's alternately propulsive and flowing choreography. The complex floorwork in both pieces is a particular highlight, with the dancers sometimes sinking liquidly into jointless splits and at other times throwing themselves aggressively onto their backs, legs and arms angled awkwardly about their torsos. The threat of violence is never far from the surface in both works, with a transfer of chokeholds between Sharabi and Mamalia featuring in the first part, and with Sharabi moving Yuasa about rather wildly by the back of her neck in the second part.
Trauma--the trauma of exile and migration, as well as the trauma of a homeland that is contested and under perpetual siege--is an important through-line in Interviews/Makom. And, as Diana Taylor has noted with reference to theatrical responses to Argentina's Dirty War (in The Archive and the Repertoire), the structuring motif of trauma, like that of performance, is repetition. Thus it should come as no surprise that Interviews and Makom are to a certain extent mirror halves, with the male and female dancers further twinned along gender lines. Sharabi and Mamalia begin both pieces by walking from the wings onto the stage (in the first work backwards and more slowly, in the second facing front and much more quickly), eventually meeting in the centre and extending but not touching their hands. The women, however, never dance together. Instead, they exchange over the course of both pieces each other's roles. Yuasa lies prone upstage left at the beginning of Interviews, before eventually taking a seat in the audience to watch the proceedings--including, eventually, Dudovich dancing up a storm alongside both men--along with us. In Makom the women's positions are reversed: it is Dudovich, likewise initially lying inert on the stage floor, who watches Yuasa and the men from the audience. Maybe this was Sharabi's comment on the important role of the witness in traumatic events; but his explicit gendering of this role was a concern for me, as was how much less, as a result, the women had to do relative to the men.
While both pieces had moments of outright silliness, Makom, created first but staged second, was far lighter in tone. This is a reminder that trauma can produce moments of spontaneous comedy, not least in bodily eruptions of what Henri Bergson would call "mechanical inelasticity" (when, for example, our brain tells us to do one thing, and our body responds by doing the opposite). There were many funny moments when one marvelled at the apparent incongruity of what the very elastic bodies of Sharabi's dancers were able to do. That said, I was a bit surprised by the degree to which Makom elicited outright guffaws from some quarters of the audience, including for the songs of Joni Mitchell that Sharabi incorporates into the score.
Sharabi, in his choreographer's notes, admits that for him Interviews/Makom is still a riddle. I tend to agree, and while I'm not all that concerned that the riddle be solved, I would suggest that as the piece evolves not only should it be edited for length (each half is about 10-15 minutes too long), but also for the overall quality of feeling the choreographer is seeking to provoke in his audience.
P.
Sunday, March 2, 2014
Ate9 dANCEcOMPANY and Donald Sales/Project20 at Chutzpah!
In the as yet still young history of 21st-century contemporary dance, someone will surely have to write a study on the world-wide influence of Ohad Naharin. Already at this year's Chutzpah Festival, courtesy of LA's excellent BODYTRAFFIC company, we have seen the choreography of two well-known Bathsheva alums, Barak Marshall and Hofesh Shechter, on the Norman and Annette Rothstein stage. Last night it was the turn of Danielle Agami's Ate9 dANCEcOMPANY, also based in LA (where they seem to be found of majuscule letters).
Agami is an acclaimed teacher of Naharin's Gaga method, and it shows in her choreography, which is as physically contortionist as it is conceptually rigorous. Mouth to Mouth, which Chutzpah! audiences are getting a sneak peek at in advance of its official LA premiere in April, features backwards crab crawls, hip-to-head leg extensions while hopping across the stage on the opposite foot, convulsive floor works, and all manner of double and triple-jointedness. Each of the dancers is mesmerizing, not least as a result of their unusual costumes, which include bolero jackets paired with underwear, a version of leather lederhosen, and a burgundy jersey dress deconstructed before our eyes via two sets of sewing shears at the outset of the piece.
At the centre of the action is Agami herself, distinctive in her shaved head and so wonderfully dextrous in demi-point. There is a moment, near the end, when Agami pauses to receive a kiss from each of her dancers. Far from obeisance, however, I interpreted the gesture--especially in light of the work's palindrome-like title--as a representation of the always mutually sustaining relationship between choreographer and performers, the dancers and the dance. And the fact that post-performance I saw Crystal Pite in animated conclave with Bryan Arias and Yanick Matthon, two of the dancers in her company Kidd Pivot (preparing for the remount of The Tempest Replica at SFU Woodward's next week) more or less confirmed this.
The second piece on last night's double bill was gR33N, a new work by Donald Sales' Project20 Company. The former Ballet BC star (alongside Pite) is also on stage throughout the piece; however, unlike Agami, he is mostly sedentary, dressed in a hospital gown and confined to a leg cast and chair positioned upstage. Three nurse-orderlies--Sarah Brinson, Katie Cassady, and Rebecca Margolick--do the bulk of the movement, dancing singly and in unison, in sequences of structured improvisation and overt pantomime, to a varied sound score built around original music by local composer (and Pite favourite) Owen Belton.
The colour green's associations with illness--signaled most materially by the bright lime backlighting that accompanies the exchanges between Sales and his doctor (Fred Middleton)--are juxtaposed with sequences that explore, mostly playfully, other feelings linked to this particular palette, including envy, greed, and innocence. Overall, the work itself feels a bit young and not fully ripened at this stage; it could definitely do with some editing. And one, of course, wishes that Sales, in his brief ambulatory forays downstage, would occasionally join his three muses in some more physically locomotive movement.
At the same time, I was also fascinated to watch Sales watching his own choreography being performed. Here's hoping he liked what he saw.
P.
Agami is an acclaimed teacher of Naharin's Gaga method, and it shows in her choreography, which is as physically contortionist as it is conceptually rigorous. Mouth to Mouth, which Chutzpah! audiences are getting a sneak peek at in advance of its official LA premiere in April, features backwards crab crawls, hip-to-head leg extensions while hopping across the stage on the opposite foot, convulsive floor works, and all manner of double and triple-jointedness. Each of the dancers is mesmerizing, not least as a result of their unusual costumes, which include bolero jackets paired with underwear, a version of leather lederhosen, and a burgundy jersey dress deconstructed before our eyes via two sets of sewing shears at the outset of the piece.
At the centre of the action is Agami herself, distinctive in her shaved head and so wonderfully dextrous in demi-point. There is a moment, near the end, when Agami pauses to receive a kiss from each of her dancers. Far from obeisance, however, I interpreted the gesture--especially in light of the work's palindrome-like title--as a representation of the always mutually sustaining relationship between choreographer and performers, the dancers and the dance. And the fact that post-performance I saw Crystal Pite in animated conclave with Bryan Arias and Yanick Matthon, two of the dancers in her company Kidd Pivot (preparing for the remount of The Tempest Replica at SFU Woodward's next week) more or less confirmed this.
The second piece on last night's double bill was gR33N, a new work by Donald Sales' Project20 Company. The former Ballet BC star (alongside Pite) is also on stage throughout the piece; however, unlike Agami, he is mostly sedentary, dressed in a hospital gown and confined to a leg cast and chair positioned upstage. Three nurse-orderlies--Sarah Brinson, Katie Cassady, and Rebecca Margolick--do the bulk of the movement, dancing singly and in unison, in sequences of structured improvisation and overt pantomime, to a varied sound score built around original music by local composer (and Pite favourite) Owen Belton.
The colour green's associations with illness--signaled most materially by the bright lime backlighting that accompanies the exchanges between Sales and his doctor (Fred Middleton)--are juxtaposed with sequences that explore, mostly playfully, other feelings linked to this particular palette, including envy, greed, and innocence. Overall, the work itself feels a bit young and not fully ripened at this stage; it could definitely do with some editing. And one, of course, wishes that Sales, in his brief ambulatory forays downstage, would occasionally join his three muses in some more physically locomotive movement.
At the same time, I was also fascinated to watch Sales watching his own choreography being performed. Here's hoping he liked what he saw.
P.
Friday, October 26, 2012
Aszure Barton's Underwater Dreams
Canadian-born, New York-based choreographer Aszure Barton is back at the Norman and Annette Rothstein Theatre this week with her own company, Aszure Barton and Artists, as part of a Chutzpah! Plus event. The 70-minute Awáa, set to a contrastive strings and brass score commissioned from the Russian violinist Lev Zhurbin and the Canadian saxophonist Curtis MacDonald, was created by Barton while she was an artist-in-residence at the Banff Centre, and features video projections (by multi-talented company dancer Tobin Del Cuore) filmed in the Centre's pool that Barton was inspired to shoot after a particularly vivid dream.
The work certainly has a dream-like, underwater feel to it, especially in the way Barton's bold visual style and sense of theatrical whimsy are married to her seven amazing dancers' impossibly fluid movements, in which arms and heads and torsos extend and ripple out from the body's core like seaweed swaying at the bottom of the ocean floor. A sense of buoyancy is imbued in everything from one dancer's simple toe-rise and modified port-au-bras to the full company's simultaneous shifting of their weight from one hip to another as, sitting with legs outstretched, one foot resting on the other, they drag themselves horizontally across the stage, much like a line of sea crabs.
The company itself is made up of six male and one female dancers, and if there is a thematic through-line to the piece it would seem to revolve around motherhood and masculinity (the title Awáa evokes the sound of both a baby's cry and young child's pronouncing of "water"). In this, Barton's episodic compositional style is both a strength and a weakness, as inevitably some set-pieces--particularly the duets between the riveting and charismatic Lara Barclay and successive male partners--feel more thematically integral and choreographically complex than others. Indeed, the group scenes between the men seem to me to retreat from what I thought would have been a logical opportunity to explore the homosocial dynamics of male bonding, particularly in relation to the mother figure. There are no explicit sequences of male partnering in the piece.
Instead, over and over again the fluidity and ambiguity of male sexuality in Awáa is displaced onto Barton's trio of African-American dancers, who in a bravura sequence late in the piece together reference African tribal dance, Supremes-style girl group shimmying, and the sashaying of drag ball voguing. It was thrilling to watch, but when upon exiting the stage one of the dancers shouts out an Alvin Ailey-esque "Take me to the river," one wonders if Barton isn't trading a bit too heavily on cultural stereotypes.
Such, of course, are the risks of tapping so directly into the unconscious. We can never be sure where our imaginations will take us. We can only applaud Barton for daring to go there--and for inviting us along for the ride.
P.
The work certainly has a dream-like, underwater feel to it, especially in the way Barton's bold visual style and sense of theatrical whimsy are married to her seven amazing dancers' impossibly fluid movements, in which arms and heads and torsos extend and ripple out from the body's core like seaweed swaying at the bottom of the ocean floor. A sense of buoyancy is imbued in everything from one dancer's simple toe-rise and modified port-au-bras to the full company's simultaneous shifting of their weight from one hip to another as, sitting with legs outstretched, one foot resting on the other, they drag themselves horizontally across the stage, much like a line of sea crabs.
The company itself is made up of six male and one female dancers, and if there is a thematic through-line to the piece it would seem to revolve around motherhood and masculinity (the title Awáa evokes the sound of both a baby's cry and young child's pronouncing of "water"). In this, Barton's episodic compositional style is both a strength and a weakness, as inevitably some set-pieces--particularly the duets between the riveting and charismatic Lara Barclay and successive male partners--feel more thematically integral and choreographically complex than others. Indeed, the group scenes between the men seem to me to retreat from what I thought would have been a logical opportunity to explore the homosocial dynamics of male bonding, particularly in relation to the mother figure. There are no explicit sequences of male partnering in the piece.
Instead, over and over again the fluidity and ambiguity of male sexuality in Awáa is displaced onto Barton's trio of African-American dancers, who in a bravura sequence late in the piece together reference African tribal dance, Supremes-style girl group shimmying, and the sashaying of drag ball voguing. It was thrilling to watch, but when upon exiting the stage one of the dancers shouts out an Alvin Ailey-esque "Take me to the river," one wonders if Barton isn't trading a bit too heavily on cultural stereotypes.
Such, of course, are the risks of tapping so directly into the unconscious. We can never be sure where our imaginations will take us. We can only applaud Barton for daring to go there--and for inviting us along for the ride.
P.
Saturday, September 17, 2011
Let There Be Light
In his curtain speech last night at the Norman and Annette Rothstein Theatre--where Patrick Street Productions' mounting of Adam Guettel and Craig Lucas' The Light in the Piazza is in previews (it opens next week and runs until October 9th)--director Peter Jorgensen said they were still tweaking things. One would be hard pressed to see what more needs tweaking, so flawless is virtually every aspect of this production.
The Light in the Piazza was first developed as a co-production between Seattle's Intiman Theatre (where, before its recent troubles, Lucas was for a time an artistic associate) and Chicago's Goodman Theatre before moving on to Broadway in 2005 in a production directed by Bartlett Sher that won several Tony Awards. The musical is based on the 1962 MGM film starring Olivia de Havilland, Rossano Brazzi, and a young George Hamilton, which was in turn based on the novel by Elizabeth Spenser. The story concerns an American mother and daughter, Margaret and Clara Johnson, traveling in Florence in the 1950s. There they encounter a young Florentine, Fabrizio Naccarelli, who is immediately smitten with Clara. Clara returns Fabrizio's attentions, but Margaret is determined to put an end to the liaison as she fears that Fabrizio will discover that the 25 year old Clara's luminous innocence and pure joy with life is in part related to her mental handicap, a childhood brain injury having left her with the emotional and developmental skills of a 12 year old. However, after Margaret meets Fabrizio's family and has a chance to observe the blossoming relationship between the two young lovers, she changes her mind and starts to believe (much to the fury of her husband, Roy, who has remained at home in the States) that marriage to Fabrizio might be Clara's one true chance at happiness.
Not the typical stuff for a sunny Broadway musical, but then the piece is arguably more akin to an intimate chamber opera (and this cast's voices are up to that challenge), complete with a string heavy score and largely recitative lyrics (the only place the work falls down in my mind, with Guettel too often substituting rhyme, or words of any kind for that matter, with sung scales or even humming). Lucas' book manages the tricky feat of being at once utterly sincere and wisely knowing, with several witty asides delivered directly to the audience letting us in on the thoughts of the women in particular, especially Margaret and, in the second act's memorable opening number, "Aiutami," Signora Naccarelli. Indeed, although on some levels The Light in the Piazza operates as a fairly conventional love story, Lucas manages not only to imbue the entire proceedings with a proto-feminist tone (in addition to Margaret's and Signora Naccarelli's musings on their feckless husbands, we also have daughter-in-law Franca's despair over the wandering eye of Giuseppe, Fabrizio's older brother), but also some subtle queer cynicism about the happy-ever-after of heterosexual romance: see, again, Franca's Act 1 lament, "The Joy You Feel."
All of these complexities are brought wonderfully, impeccably to life by the PSP cast and crew. The performances are, without exception, superb. As Clara, Samantha Hill not only has a soaring soprano, but an eager expressiveness in her face and body that manages to convey her character's as yet undimmed sense of wonder and openness to new experiences, including love. By contrast, one of the marvels of Katey Wright's performance as Margaret is seeing how her steely outward protectiveness toward her daughter masks serious internal misgivings and regrets about her own happiness, and how both are slowly transformed as she awakens not just to Clara's joy but to Signor Naccarelli's charms. To this end, Wright's Act 2 reprise of "The Beauty Is," a song sung by Clara in the Uffizi in Act 1 as she is stirred by all the gorgeous art works around her, is at once shattering and soul-stirring. All of the Naccarellis nail not only their spoken Italian accents, but their sung ones as well. Kudos especially in this regard to Adrian Marchuk as the lovestruck Fabrizio; his Act 1 solo, "Il Mondo Era Vuoto," demonstrates, both vocally and gesturally, just how truly gripped by Cupid's arrow our hero is. As Signor Naccarelli, the amazing David Adams brings just the right combination of old-world charm and gravitas to the patriarch who is not above doing some romancing of his own. Heather Pawsey and Dana Luccock, as Signora and Franca Naccarelli, respectively, have smaller roles, but each makes her presence keenly felt when on stage and both get moments in the spotlight to display their operatic pipes. As the comic lothario Giuseppe, Daren Herbert doesn't get a musical solo, but he does get the evening's only dance one, and he makes the most of it.
The orchestra, under the direction of pianist Sean Bayntun, are on a raised platform upstage throughout the performance, and they were perfectly in synch with each other, and with the performers, throughout. A simple, moveable set of frames designed by Lance Cardinal successfully conveys the multiple perspectives of and on display in the work, and Alan Brodie's subtle backlighting of many of them helps bring this out even further. Finally, a standing ovation for costume designer Jessica Dmytryshyn, whose tailored dresses and suits perfectly capture the glamourous world of postwar Italy. The shoes worn by the brothers Naccarelli are alone worth the price of admission.
All of this is brought to life under the assured and even-handed direction of Jorgensen, who highlights the sentiment without overplaying it, and who keeps things moving in real theatrical time while somehow managing to transport us into the dreamtime of Clara and Fabrizio's impossibly possible romance.
Go see this show with someone you love.
P.
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