Performing Arts

Just went last night. Beautiful.
During the first scene, I have to admit, my mind wandered a little. But I was completely drawn in by the second scene, and this lasted through the end of the show. I think mostly this was me getting used to the style (also, partly, the fact that the first scene is the busiest and least clear). So if you’re going tonight, give your eyes some time to adjust. Oh, and read the program notes, so you know the story.
Dhvee culminates in a battle between good and evil, between Rama and Ravana. Normally we try not to see things in such black-and-white terms, but there’s an undeniable compulsion about that struggle. Rama and his brother Lakshmana (Ashwini Ramaswamy and Amanda Dlouhy) looked like embodiments of rightness from their forthright faces to their open gestures, from their clear steps to their white costumes. Ravana (Tamara Nadel, I Gusti Ngurah Serama Semadi, and others–hey, he has 10 heads) was the opposite, with his stamping, his crimped fingers, and his awful echoing laugh. Even though I knew who would win, I felt in suspense–on the edge of my seat, even.
I loved that the ending took us back to the beginning–it left the story, for me, in an eternal present tense.
If anyone wants to follow up with discussion, here are some ideas:
• the dance/theatrical form here (perhaps considering how it broadens our ideas of dance)
• the story–why is the battle of good and evil such a compelling story for us, even now?
• cross-cultural comprehension (or lack thereof)

Check out Jay Gabler’s review in the TC Daily Planet.
Gabler comments on the difficulty of getting the full content and implications of the Ramayana from a brief summary. Right. . . I slogged through the Wikipedia entry without much success understanding the higher planes of the narrative. I can just add one element of clarity: embodiment is important in the narrative (and in the culture–I think that’s fair to say). So the doubled characters of Dhvee are in play with the story itself. . .
Gabler says something interesting about the classical tradition:

Both the challenge and the appeal of any classical tradition—think Western classical music, or classical ballet—lie in its practitioners’ commitment to enacting (at its best) profound expression within a strictly circumscribed vocabulary.

This is true–but I want to add a little to it–which is that the language of a classical form makes up a world. Ideally you cross into that world at some point; you cease to see the vocabulary itself.

I’m looking forward to Ragamala this weekend. Think of Dhvee as an immersion in sound, color, dance, acting, story, etc–the multifaceted performance arts of south Asia.
I was lucky enough to be at rehearsal on one of the first days when Ragamala (Mpls) joined forces with Cudamani (Bali). Translation, improvisation, everyone excited by everyone else’s art, and the gamelan crowded into the corner–if you’ve never heard one, you really have to. It’s an orchestra in itself.

I liked all the pieces that made up Feedforward. Eve Beglarian’s trombone score, a great mix of high school fanfare, cow noise, and ominous color; Karinne Keithley’s funny text; Kara Feely’s costumes, track suits dotted with sketches of glitter; the overall visual design, credited to a slew of people. I liked Neumann’s choreography–the slower bits more than the sport collisions, actually, the aestheticized tennis strokes, the ballet arms that flick or pop to something different, the deliberate strokes.

And I especially enjoyed the performers: Nead Medlyn and Matt Citron’s perfect comic timing, Andrew Dinwiddie’s solemnly hip-wiggling referee. Among some more conventionally beautiful movers, Taryn Griggs stood out. The beauties (long-limbed, athletic types) sometimes go right through their well-extended lines, but Griggs fills hers out. She has that quality which is often called intention: she appears to have generated the movement herself, to be making the decisions just as we watch her. I hear that Griggs is moving to town this summer–lucky us.

So I liked it all, and I mostly enjoyed myself. All the same, I didn’t find a coherent whole here, or anything particularly inventive on the large scale. A lot of desires and ideas appear to have gone into this, with the unfortunate result that the various desires and ideas overlap and erase each other. For example, I wanted to concentrate on the dancing but the voice-over had me more on the lookout for the next joke. I can imagine plenty of good things emerging from this, as the various collaborators either go their separate ways or pare down their joint art, and I had a perfectly enjoyable evening watching Feedforward, but I didn’t feel that chill of encounter, of change.

I’m feeling very emperor’s new clothes here. Er. . . that was dull. Irritating. Condescending. Adolescent. I’m sorry, that’s not a terribly nice way to begin. But the gloves are off, aren’t they?

In my experience (Friday) the “plants” were not nearly so obvious as in that NY review Galen pointed us to (thanks, Galen). The people behind me chattered non-stop and sang along, causing me to move halfway through, and there was some more misbehavior, but it only reached the level of annoyance/confusion. Since I came in three minutes before the show began and lost my program in the move, I never read the text. Oops. Perhaps that invalidates my entire comment. . .

Let me start over. What did Wampler want from the audience? What did she want to happen to us? We were all stirred up by the plants around us–some to imitation of their energy, some to irritation. So then we find out they were plants and feel, I don’t know, like chumps? Justified? Manipulated? Alienated? It’s not too hard to confuse, manipulate, or alienate, so I can’t see that as an achievement.

Clearly I’m getting nowhere in this response. I just don’t understand what Wampler wanted. In the continuing saga of performer-audience relations, her apparent level of frustration with the audience is. . . well, unreasonable? People have a limited range of things they are willing to do in public. They have their self-respect, they have their manners. Are these such bad things?

Start over (again). Perhaps this was meant to be cathartic and judgment free. Something for everybody: hate for the haters and love for the lovers, something to feel, to get into. That’s the most generous interpretation I can come up with. But even so. . .

People just aren’t that simple. Even audience members.

On the way out I told a friend that I just don’t think I have the gene to enjoy this kind of performance. That’s how it feels to me. Plenty of people in the audience loved the show, but I was left with the feeling I’d been watching an improv exercise–performed by a group of talented and enthusiastic people, no doubt, but still. . . I just didn’t see that anything happened here. The older sister did at last get to kiss a girl, but for a born-again that certainly wouldn’t be the end of it, and we didn’t see the end of it. All I could glean of overall shape is that the performance opened and closed with explosions.

I wonder about the “heartland” the TEAM presents here. Those kids weren’t recognizably Midwestern–at least, they didn’t exhibit any of the characteristics that I’ve come to know as Midwestern in the seven years I’ve been living here. Instead, they were just garden-variety hicks, the sort careless persons might imagine living anywhere in the US. In fact they rather reminded me of the stereotyped versions of Southerners that Midwesterners so love to put on. So at one level this performance read as a pretty easy skewering of some straw folks: the Midwestern born-agains, relentlessly ignorant, cloaking their own desires under religious or patriotic language, shopping at Walmart, etc.

Then again, the kids had their moments of nobility, and the Northeastern adults seemed pretty flawed themselves. I don’t know quite what the TEAM are up to here, or how it’s supposed to work on us. It didn’t work on me, at any rate.

This post refers to Galen’s post and Sally’s reply a bit, but I thought I’d separate it because I have a slightly different take.

First, I just finished my review of this for mnartists.org. Look for the review on Monday. I approached the performance from the cultural angle–what does this say about our ability to view dances from other cultures, etc–and I’m not going to rehash that in this post.

Like Sally, I wondered about the dialogue. How much were these two actually talking to each other? I got the sense that very little was actually going on during the performance–in two ways. First, they’ve certainly performed this plenty of times, and they have a routine, if not a script. But even taking the conversation at face value, would you really call that a conversation? Bel and Klunchun mostly refusing to understand each other, with only moments of artistic sympathy–really, it depressed me.

Also like Sally, I got stuck on this idea of risk versus purchase. The sniffy classicist in me wants to respond that there’s nothing wrong with knowing in advance what you are getting, that this is akin to the vital processes of rereading and revisiting, that knowing the outlines of what you’re getting prepares you to see more of the inside this time–and also that continually seeking new stimulation is characteristic of children and drug addicts. But I don’t think, on reflection, that Bel meant to rank gambling above purchasing.

Gambling–is that really what you feel you’re doing when you buy a Walker ticket? “They didn’t buy anything!” Bel exclaimed when explaining why disgruntled viewers don’t get their money back. All they bought was a chance. There’s something to that, isn’t there?

Speaking of disgruntled viewers, I did see a few people leaving before the end, and frankly I didn’t blame them. It was quite long for a lecture-dem type of thing, and I thought mostly aimed at the dance/contemporary performance crowd.

First, I want to explain that I am not writing formal reviews for Re:View. I still do that for mnartists.org and the Mpls-St Paul blogs, which is where you can find my formal review of this performance (look for it later today).

Instead, I’m going to use this space for more informal, glancing thoughts, and for questions.

“Wild Cursive”: I perceived each movement phrase as a sustained encounter between the brush and page. I clearly saw when the brush was lifted from the page–the pauses, the full stops. For me, this performance lives in the drama of the sustained phrase. How will the artist continue what he or she has begun? How will one movement evolve mindfully into the next? How will the artist continue to move forward in time without letting any of the myriad distractions time brings disrupt the impulse of the movement?

And, over time, I noticed the aggression here–not only the martial arts moves, the loud breath, the shouts from one performer–but the feeling of suspense, of each phrase as a battle with an unseen antagonist. I was reminded of the tightrope act of a line of poetry or a sentence in prose. Also, I noticed the isolation of the performers. Even when gathered in large groups, they all seemed to go on fighting their individual battles. Unison was no comfort. This sense of an ongoing struggle left me wondering–what, then, are the stops? Little deaths or little kills?

I’ve described them already as the moments when the calligrapher lifts the brush from the page, but this simply transposes the question to another artistic medium. Earlier yesterday I was with a group of poets, discussing the question “what is a line break?”–which is yet another way of posing the same question. So, let me ask you: what are the stops?

I’ll be back to discuss this further–or whatever else you’d like to discuss.

All right, a few days later I have a few more thoughts.

First, what interests me most about Quintett is its idea of an artwork’s shape. Some of the other pieces in the program seem more driven by movement exploration–let’s do this thing until we get sick of it–but Quintett has no such obvious framework. Instead, it works by suggestion, by intuition, the various moments of the piece attached to each other by the strange self-consciousness of the dancers. As an artwork, it’s not didactic, not statement-making, not “about” something, not attempting to cover all the aspects of something, not interested in thesis. A lot of works, in my opinion, run aground on the need to summarize, to pin down–Quintett is entirely free of this pull. And yet it feels motivated, whole. It’s an inspiration. How can we make something that is wildly various in style and mode and does not build to a conclusion, yet holds together on the inside?

My other thought is about ballet. Ballet is, importantly, a aesthetic system. Its rules describe a canon of beauty. To turn the leg out this way and point it, always with the toes extending the line of the leg and the heel coming back toward the ankle, is beautiful; to turn the leg in and sickle the foot is ugly. At least, that’s what ballet technique tells us. We’ve been talking a bit about the space-defining nature of ballet–its geometry–but we haven’t addressed its description of beauty. I see Forsythe as taking that standard of beauty and warping it this way and that way–not to be perverse, but because our imaginations have changed. We now see the purposely sickled foot as another form of beauty. We love complexity and difference where our ancestors longed for simplicity, universality. I’m oversimplifying, of course. But it’s worth remembering that ballet’s beauty arose in a time and place. What beauty fits this time and place?

I’m going to go back now and read through Dana’s articles (below on the “Walker Dance” blog). Has anyone read them yet? What do you think?

At intermission, a friend asked me what I thought. “At some level, it blows me away,” I said, “and at some level it leaves me cold.”

The blowing away comes from the movement. Yes, it’s fast. And absurdly articulated, as if the air were thinner on stage. And wildly inventive, with every joint moving, every possible twist explored. And marvelously complex, especially in the partnering. And various: movements are wobbly and interior one moment, ballet-straight and external the next. Almost always (the playful swinging of N. N. N. N. is an exception), the movement is muscular, impelled. Perhaps that’s what Dana meant by criticizing “decoration”: motion must come from muscle and momentum.

I also noticed Forsythe’s choreographic expertise. Entrances and exits are perfect, endings are good, and the stage pictures–the still shots the eye takes–are beautifully composed.

And, as I said earlier, this aesthetic appeals to me. Beauty, broken and disrupted, but never entirely gone; intellect moving, now sharply, now confusedly; a spareness about the stage and costumes (like Sally, I loved the look of the stage). I thought of driftwood, winter branches, calligraphy. I thought of the athleticism of an exegesis of a particularly thorny passage in Milton.

What left me cold? I kept losing my place, you could say. I wasn’t entirely engaged. I couldn’t tell why the pieces went on, other than to go on with the music or the formal exploration. I wanted more to hang on to.

But this was at intermission, before Quintett. I’m struggling to describe just what Quintett does; it’s a meta piece, dance about dance, but instead of closing the circle, Quintett opens it out. The dancers are aware of each other as dancers; they find reason to dance in formal exploration, yes, but also in the room, the music, in their moods, in their reactions to the characters they are all playing, characters that arise from and also feed their movements. Here, it’s not only motion that is muscular and impelled; it’s emotion as well. But then emotion and motion are joined here. I’m thinking of Casperson’s savage and joyful partnering, Jone San Martin’s desperate and jealous spasms.

I like the emotional environment Forsythe builds here: jealousy, wicked fun, voyeurism, dancers upstaging each other, the occasional pressure of unison, self-pity. It’s the dark side of performance, but it’s not campy; it feels real.

That’s it for now. I’d love to hear what someone else thought. I’m going to keep thinking about Quintett, though. I haven’t quite gotten down what I’d like to say about it.