Au
Courant
Toronto Dance Theatre
"Sly Verb"
The Joyce Theater
New York City
Sunday, February 20, 2005
By Nancy Dalva
copyright
©2005 by Nancy Dalva
The Toronto Dance Theatre, accomplished and gifted, came to New York
last week with "Sly Verb" (2003), an idea-driven work filled
with surprisingly familiar elements. A wave of people some naked, some
dressed, pouring attractively out of the upstage wing on the right? Bill
T. Jones "Continuous Replay." On stage surgical manipulations?
(And hey, this was really gross, involving a supine woman in underwear,
a surgical attendant in the nude—nice bikini wax!—and an operating
team featuring a real time videographer and a "surgeon" who
drew blood from the lovely patient's finger with a lancet, swabbed saliva
from her open mouth, clipped her fingernail, and plucked a hair from her
belly, then fastening the items into a fetish. All seen on four screens
in close up, and in person at the front of the stage, if you could stand
to watch.) Zeitgeist city! Similar sights could be seen recently in Sasha
Waltz's "Korper" and more mutedly in Susan Marshall's "Other
Stories," to say nothing of on your television, where flipping through
the channels exposes you to all sorts of gruesome procedures which remind
you of why you didn't go to medical or dental school, to say nothing of
discouraging snacking.
The choreography is credited to the company's artistic director, Christopher
House, but it is also billed as "created and performed by" its
cast of ten. It is the usual length for these days, seventy-five minutes
with no intermission, but they are seventy-five long minutes, what with
the dancers getting dressed and undressed time and again, and barking,
and otherwise acting out. House's program note tells us—heaven knows
I did not somehow intuit this—that he was inspired by "Deane
Juhan's seminal text ‘Job's Body,' David Abrahm's ‘The Spell
of the Sensuous," and the remarkable life energy of my collaborators."
The work is about touch, at least that's what it claims. I wondered if
there wasn't some sort of self-consciously Canadian sub-textual intermix,
what with some French stuff on the soundtrack and in the air, and an outbreak
of what sounded like throat singing.
The outstanding male duet looked a lot like early Pilobolus, with cantilevering
and such, and most of the solos looked self-invented. What stays in the
mind are individual snap shots of bodies: a naked man seated on the floor
at the left, a naked man working himself into a mesh cage—the set
looked like something you could make with acres of aluminum foil and a
lot of time—and so forth. More fleeting but most interesting at
the time were the group sections that were just about dancing, as if inside
this dance, and these dancers, there was a clearer dance trying to get
out, a work not collaborative, but single minded, and only about itself.
If it is true, as I perversely believe, that inside every non-narrative
dance there is a narrative trying to get out, it is sadly less true that
inside every narrative piece there is a formalist structure lurking. But
such is the case here.
About the nudity, so limiting in this context, which is neither pornographic
nor private: Big hairy deal! Forget not sharing a stage with children
or dogs. What you really want to avoid is being upstaged by a penis, even
if it is your own. Clothes are good. And so is dancing.
Volume 3,
No. 9
February 21, 2005
copyright
©2005
Nancy Dalva
www.danceviewtimes.com
|
|
Writers |
Mindy
Aloff
Dale Brauner
Mary Cargill
Christopher Correa
Clare Croft
Nancy Dalva
Rita Felciano
Marc Haegeman
George Jackson
Gia Kourlas
Alan M. Kriegsman
Sali Ann Kriegsman
Sandi Kurtz
Alexander Meinertz
Tehreema Mitha
Gay Morris
Ann Murphy
Paul Parish
John Percival
Tom Phillips
Susan Reiter
Jane Simpson
Alexandra Tomalonis (Editor)
Lisa Traiger
Meital Waibsnaider
Kathrine Sorley Walker
Leigh Witchel
|
|
DanceView |
The Autumn Issue
of DanceView is OUT! (Our subscription link
is working again, so it's easy to subscribe on line!)
Robert
Greskovic reviews two new DVDs of Fonteyn dancing "Sleeping
Beauty" and "Cinderella"
Mary
Cargill on last summer's Ashton Celebration
Profile
of Gililian Murphy, reviews of the ABT Spring season, springtime
in Paris, reports from London and San Francisco
DanceView
is available by subscription ONLY. Don't miss it. It's a good
read. Black and white, 48 pages, no ads. Subscribe
today!
DanceView
is published quarterly (January, April, July and October)
in Washington, D.C. Address all correspondence to:
DanceView
P.O. Box 34435
Washington, D.C. 20043
|
|
|