Rosas,Akram Khan - Leigh Witchel

Birthdays and Repetitions

“Steve Reich @ 70”
Rosas/Akram Khan Company
Brooklyn Academy of Music
Brooklyn, NY
October 3, 2006

By Leigh Witchel
Copyright 2006 by Leigh Witchel

BAM kicked off both the Next Wave festival and a month-long celebration of minimalist composer Steve Reich’s 70th birthday on Tuesday night in grand opera house style. Minimalism has rarely looked so luxe.

The theater brought in two choreographers based in Europe for the occasion, one with a U.S. premiere, the other with an important revival. Anna Teresa De Keersmaeker performed “Fase, four movements to the music of Steve Reich”, which originally had its full premiere in 1982, though portions were made while she was a student at New York University. Akram Khan brought “Variations for Vibes, Pianos and Strings,” titled after its music, a commission by the London Sinfonietta in 2005.

“Fase” would have been fascinating if only for the endurance involved. Set to four of Reich’s compositions, “Piano Phase”, “Come Out”, “Violin Phase” and “Clapping Music”, it was about 40 minutes long and was danced by only two dancers. It was quite a feat, not just of endurance. Like the music, De Keersmaeker’s choreography consists of simple phrases that slowly mutate. The mnemonic and kinesthetic strategies needed to get through the piece in proper sequence were interesting in themselves. One felt for one of the dancers, the shorter and darker-haired of the two, who had two cracks in otherwise machine-like precision. During the first section she had to wipe her nose from the spinning. Later, she momentarily lost track of sequence but knocked her arm into the other dancer, shocking herself as much as us. That dancer experiencing those brief moments of human fallibility was De Keersmaeker herself. She performed in every single section (“Violin Phase” was a solo, the rest duets). She got time between each section to change costume and catch her breath, but at age 46 she was still able to sustain the dance she created a quarter century ago. Tale Doven, her companion in the duets, was a strong, reliable foil.

“Fase” is the sort of music visualization that ballet is able to do well with Baroque and Classical music and can’t accomplish with the minimalists (Jerome Robbins tried with both Reich and Phillip Glass; the work to Reich, “Eight Lines”, hasn’t stayed in repertory). Ballet’s vocabulary can’t accommodate the repetition in the music; De Keersmaeker mirrored it uncannily. In “Piano Phase” the two women moved laterally and spun moving one arm. Almost as imperceptibly as the music, they moved into and out of phase so that sometimes they were in unison and then briefly in opposition. The choreography was so spare and insistent that the work gained drama by well timed movements forward and back as well as extremely effective lighting design by Remont Fromont and Mark Schwentner that emphasized the lateral planes of the stage. “Come Out” had the two dancers seated in chairs, illuminated dimly by overhead lamps. They moved their arms round their heads and rotated slowly in the dim light. De Keersmaeker danced on the perimeter of a lit circle in “Violin Phase”. As the dance progressed, she suddenly exposed her briefs with a jump and a yelp. Even this, part hoedown and part Brueghel, became a movement motif. “Clapping Music” was danced in the lower body; small jogs and lifts onto the toes of the dancers’ sneakers. The dancers syncopated to create the most complicated and exciting design of the four dances.

Where De Keersmaeker created a parallel structure to the Reich, Akram Khan used the lush orchestral commission more familiarly and created a dance with it as accompaniment. “Variations” was a trio for three men, Khan, South African Gregory Maqoma and South Korean Young Jin Kim. The London Sinfonietta and its conductor, Alan Pierson, weren’t merely accompanists. Pierson, at stage left for most of the dance, interacted with the trio at times. The musicians and their insturments, arrayed along the back and stage right, were essential to the stage design.

“Fase” was a virtuoso test of endurance; “Variations” showed off the dancers’ virtuosity in movement. The three men snaked, punched and sped through quicksilver movement tinged with a martial style; part dancing, part kickboxing. At the most magical moment, Khan allowed the music to come forward and be the star. The dancers faced away from us and moved only their backs and arms, “conducting” the musicians in long arcing lines. The conductor moved to a waiting podium at center stage, also facing the back. Echoing the movements of the dancers related to those of the conductor, the music threaded throughout the stage.

All three dancers were very fine, but during much of the piece the frenzied movement looked as if the vocabulary was enamored of itself; many of the steps seemed to be there only because the dancers looked good doing them. Modesty isn’t one of Khan’s virtues. The piece began and ended with Maqoma taking center stage and speaking half a conversation, what one later pieced together as the responses to a phone interview about this dance where we could not hear the questions. It was an idea that was too clever by half. Like a conversation where the speaker seems to be allowing us to eavesdrop on his part deliberately and then manipulating his responses, it managed to shill for the choreographer and exclude the audience. The dance would have been better off speaking for itself. As with Khan’s other dances, the production values were simple but arresting. Fabiana Piccioli provided golden hued for them to dance in; Kei Ito’s wide-legged pants seemed influenced by traditional Japanese costume.

With its music and handsome design, “Variations” was far easier to watch than the austere and repetitive “Fase,” which was as much of an endurance test for the audience as the dancers. Reich has mellowed over the decades; “Variations” used the resources of a full orchestra as Khan used that of an opera house. The lofts and studios of the previous decades seemed far behind. Way back when, neither De Keersmaeker nor Reich were aiming for an ingratiating work. The insistence, persistence and rigor of both artists led to the work’s success. Like Reich, De Keersmaeker was determined to let something that was too little for too long keep going until too little for too long was exactly the point.

Photo: Rosas in “Fase, four movements to the music of Steve Reich”.

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Birthdays and Repetitions