The following review is courtesy of Lightsey Darst, dance writer/critic
Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker
Once
Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker walks onto a stripped stage. She kicks off her shoes with the house lights still up, announces "Once," and begins--slowly. She bends her knees, the level of her head sinking slightly. She balances on one leg, the other stretched out, pointing foot barely above the ground. She's getting acquainted with her positions, bouncing, testing. The positions themselves are just shy of ballet--straight lines, straight torso, with the turnout a little neglected, the leg in a middle angle between side and back. The artificiality of dance steps (an artificiality generally forgotten or concealed) is highlighted by her wandering attention (she looks around the audience, looks up when a woman coughs), her loose gestures, and her occasional falls from position into--is it disbelief?
She walks to a turntable and pretends to start the music--Joan Baez in concert. Now she starts her dance sequence over, more quickly, with more conviction. She's performing it now--but the fact of performance adds to the artificiality, because now she directly addresses us, miming, faintly singing words along with the record. It's as if we are deaf and she is our interpreter. Or--this impression grows as De Keersmaeker works her way through the record, pausing between songs, sometimes struggling to remember which song comes next--as if she's our hostess at a disastrous party and she has declared that she must dance Joan Baez for us, that we must listen and love. Miming and mouthing the words, De Keersmaeker's either making fun of the music, being ironically literal, reductively stripping words down to their gestural equivalents (the heart a tap on the chest)--or she's honoring its simplicity. She's either a cynic or a true believer, but this dichotomy doesn't hold, because cynicism and irony pushed to their zenith break and reveal vulnerable love, or resemble love so closely we cannot tell the difference. Is De Keersmaeker reminding us that once we were satisfied with something simple--one body dancing to music? Is she redefining, regaining the sublime? The music, folk songs which alternately seem to tell the one true story and then again seem trite and melodramatic ("for men must work and women must weep"), only amplifies the question.
But as De Keersmaeker goes on other questions enter. If this is all we are going to get, one woman dancing splendidly but haphazardly to Joan Baez, is this enough? Is the material worth this treatment--and, if not, what material would be? (This last is an important question, given that many dances are simply more fully performative and more eye-dazzling renditions of music.) De Keersmaeker shows signs of the performer's or the hostess's exhaustion, yet she keeps dancing as if possessed. Steps--a high kick, a defensive squat--repeat, and we begin to grow tired of the evolutions of even this capable and architectural body. With each repetition, each new song, the whole thing begins to look more and more like the mania of grief or of a captive zoo animal. The mind wanders. Where is this going? you might ask yourself. What are we getting to?
After three or four too many songs (De Keersmaeker could cut a few without losing anything), Baez winds up with "The Battle Hymn of the Republic," urging her audience to sing along. The stage lights and the music fade to nearly nothing; voices in the McGuire Theater audience take up the slack, singing "Glory, glory hallelujah" as De Keersmaeker goes through her steps. It feels like an ending. But then Baez sings an encore, "God on Our Side." Whether Baez intended this or not, "God on Our Side" is a slap to those who sing "The Battle Hymn," because "The Battle Hymn" itself is an anthem of holy war. De Keersmaeker goes on dancing as images of conflict are projected onto the back wall of the stage. The music ends, she takes her dress off, and keeps on dancing--the same steps in the same attitude--to nothing but static and images of war. She would dance this way, it seems, to anything, any music, any image. The idiocy of art--that it eats up whatever's there, is a blank body waiting to interpret--ripples outward from De Keersmaeker's nude, war-splashed torso, out into the audience. We are fools to have come again to see art, thinking that something would happen. The world happens; art parrots it back, changing nothing. Art is merely a defense mechanism, an instrument of our denial.
And yet the sheer inevitability of art is a place to begin. What is it in us that compels us to understand the terrible things we've done? And what if, De Keersmaeker suggests by her own maniacal mirroring, this force became action, not reflection?