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In the Sanctuary

"O,O"
(premiere)
The Deborah Hay Dance Company
performance: Jeanine Durning, Neil Greenberg, Miguel Guttierrez, Juliette Mapp, Vicky Schick
Saturday, January 28, 2006, 8:30 and 10:30
Sunday, January 29, 2006, 7:30 and 10:30

by Nancy Dalva
copyright ©2006 by Nancy Dalva

 

"A little place of mystic grace..."
        William Dunkerly, (lyrics, "Amid the Traffic of the Ways")
 
I saw it once, and all I wanted to do was see it again. So I did. I saw Deborah Hay's "O,O" four times over two nights. This was a run sold out before it began, with two late evening performances added. The beautiful space of St. Marks Church has never been better used for dance, and The Danspace Project (which commissioned the piece with support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Baryshnikov Foundation, and a roster of the enlightened) should be begged to bring it back. So you can see it. And so, really, so I can see it again.
 
 In the airy, stained glass windowed, vaulted-ceilinged,  pillar-divided luminous box that is the Church of St. Marks-in-the-Bowery, which the Danspace Project calls home, Deborah Hay premiered her newest work, in which she does not appear, having removed herself like a Cheshire Cat, leaving an echoing Zen laugh behind. "O,O" which transpires in what must be about an hour, contains aspects of Hay's performance practice in group work and as a soloist–the noodling physicality, the yumminess, the loose phrasing, the otherworldly presentness, the utter generosity, the weirdness—and to tell you what it is (rather than what it isn't) had proved near impossible. (It's very resistant to traditional critical means, at least my means. How wonderful is that? It's as if I'd whispered Surprise me, and been heard.) Nonetheless...
 
Years ago, Deborah Hay made a dance called "Heaven/below."  This would be a good title for "O,O" (a sound breathed out by the dancers, in the middle of the piece). The work is pre-verbal, though full of words. You gradually yield yourself up to it–or you find it esoteric, inscrutable, and find its ordering mechanisms occult. Yet they are not. For one, the dance is ordered by light, devised by Jennifer Tipton.  For another, it is ordered by koans, devised by Hay, who taught the performers the work without ever demonstrating it. The five  are themselves choreographers: Jeanine Durning, Neil Greenberg, Miguel Gutierrez, Juliette Mapp, Vicky Schick. They perform in their own distinctive personas and styles, but given over to Hay's physical direction.  The result is devastatingly transparent, really out there. These people throw themselves off some kind of psychic cliff for her.
 
The level of self exposure here is near perilous, as it always is when dancers fully invest themselves in movement that carries no imposed narrative, but teems with its suppressed potential.( Not so much resistant to metaphor, as the result of metaphor.) Here, the choreographer has so disappeared herself–that Cheshire Cat thing--that all is in the telling. The teller and her tale recede. This is process presented as choreography, this is choreography informed by process. All such a bore, usually. But with these performers, not. The only thing I can think to compare it to is Steve Paxton, dancing the "Goldberg Variations."
 
Each performance of this work is different, but it all happens in the same order, in the same environment. There are choices–who does what first, who wears black and who wears white. (All in various street clothes, and all in self-selected footwear–black boots for Neil, downtown Mary Janes for Vicky, dorky loafers for Miguel, gold ballet shoes for Juliette, monk's slippers for Jeanine.) Also, the dance moves around in the space—the same figures repeat from performance to performance, but differently skewed. It's all in the round, but the space is a rectangle. (Go figure.) All of the decisions seem subject not to whim, but to some singular yet joint impulse. (I've yet to figure that out, but I am not sure it needs to be.)
 
"O,O" transpires episodically, in changing light that fills the stage, the eye, the mind, leaving your pupils dilated. Light that is  cyclothymic, pastoral, with the rhythm of breathing, of breath held, of dusk, of dawn,  Each of the dance's many sections is the performance of a Hay koan, a parable in movement, if there can be parables without narratives, devised by her after months of solo work in her studio.
 
One of these sections centers on  the chanted phrase "You are the only one" first voiced by Vicky Schick, then taken up by all, overlapping but individual, until, at the last, Jeanine Durning is singing it out clearly.  As they sing/speak separately and overlappingly, they do the same movement, the same activity. Then one breaks out of phase, or another. This is more or less the general procedure, with  occasional coalescences into limpid or hypercharged groupings.
 
At one point: after a black out, a diagonal. Whoever's on the east end–and the order changes with each performance–starts a nutty abandoned dance in place, like one of those demented dogs in a Booth cartoon. (A real freak out.) Slowly, this obsession travels down the line, as each waits to join in, to break out.  In place.  All solos. At the first Friday performance, Schick is on the far end, and waiting for the action to hit her is like waiting for a wave to hit the beach. Each iteration of this sequence—each time I saw it—is distinctive, and each fantastically amusing. Another group section:  a gently stomping circle dance, where each is free to break forth–Neil is first, in a signature jig, the others each according to his or her own.  In the final version, Vicky is doing a ballet barre, Neil 's dancing the phrase with the right and left transposed, Juliette's taken the lead and is insistently invariable....
 
Then there's the section where they beep and chirp and make a sound score, moving all the while, or not moving. And a section of primal screaming, Juliette in full throated abandon. A section of Miguel keening to the heavens—or calling upon God—with the rest silently screaming along while grouped like classical sculpture, from which they emerge like survivors of some ghastly event, maybe natural, maybe man-made.
 
A  section of babble, of speaking in tongues: A moment when—having never danced together before this work–Schick jumps and Greenberg holds her up in his arms, as she murmurs down at him, and he turns his open countenance up to hers. It's the only lift in the entire piece, and it is all tenderness, all affection. The real deal, transcendent. They are divine together. Their final performance was the least intentional. (Here's what Frost meant by "the most of it." )  At the end of the last performance, some time after that tender lift, when exhaustion had transmuted into release, Vicky (the proprioceptive adept) and Neil (the preternaturally alert) bumped into each other. A few minutes later, Schick tumbled towards Gutierrez, whose arms extended to catch her. All the while, the other two carried on. Juliette  flipped up her skirt. Then she was on the floor, and it was up around her waist. Jeanine's  bird woman  cage door was wide open. (You understood, now, that when she puts a scarf over her head at the end, she's quieting her song.) This  final tumult was all wonderful, all cumulative, and all blissfully, marvelously funny.
 
Of them all, Miguel Gutierrez has traveled the farthest. He's gone from being a soap opera to being naked, emotionally speaking. (Something I've seen him aspire to before by actually being undressed, but with ironic sneakers and a wig.) Simpler and simpler, realer and realer, braver and braver. He will take this back, I think, into his own work, and I am eager to see what he will do, unmasked.

Except, of course, for me. I've traveled, too. From spectatorship, to retreat from the light, to a visceral engagement, to as utter a responsiveness and transparency as I can attain while retaining the freedom to enjoy it all. And additively: the pleasure of knowing what comes next–more or less. No more comparisons. No more contrasting. Now, I just want to look. Jeanine's projection, Juliette's wildness, Neil's wit, Vicky's unicorn reticence,  Miguel's sincerity.
 
While hardly the usual thing with performances by virtuosi, this dance takes up residence in your body. There are lessons in it—you can feel them—for daily life. You can, indeed in some way you must, try this at home: Noodle yourself around the kitchen table, singing a song of nothing. (You are the only one, you are the only one, you are the only, only one.) Exhale, at a tempo like that of light fading frm the white sky of midsummer. Then put your hands on the body of a being you love—child, pet, spouse, lover, the face of God–-and despite all that has happened, and happens, and will happen, murmur, "Nanu, nanu. Nanu, nanu." This is the blessing of the body, and the body's blessing. Breath, connection, surrender. And laughter, too. As the literary scholar Philip Weinstein says, "The real is not narrative." And yet.
 
The Lyon, France premiere of "O,O' will be June 9-10, 2006, with seven French choreographer-performers. This French "O,O" will also be presented at the Festival d'Autonne in Paris in 2006. The Deborah Hay Dance Company looks forward to a presentation of the New York and the Lyon versions of the work as two halves of a single program.

Volume 4, No. 6
February 13, 2006
copyright ©2006 Nancy Dalva
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last updated on February 13, 2006