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Letter from New York

The Lincoln Center Festival
Opening Week
Streb vs Gravity (World Premiere)
Grendel
Druid Synge
Symposium: Expanding Dance with Elizabeth Streb, David Gordon, Yvonne Rainer, and Jennifer Tipton
Gat
New York, NY
July 12-15, 2006

by Nancy Dalva
copyright 2006, Nancy Dalva


Hot, hot, hot. Hell, hell, hell. The world overheated and exploding, the city overheated and, on one block between Madison and Park Avenues, exploded. But this: the plaza at Lincoln Center filled with the marvelous music of Midsummer Night Swing, with couples dancing all over the place, and every constituent theater — and three more annexed for the occasion — filled with dance, theater, opera, and somehow, marvelously, world enough and time not merely to take it in, but to talk about it, to appreciate the very endeavor of creativity, and respond. In other words, festival as think tank: a place to fill up your mind, your eye, and refuel for whatever comes next. High octane, and essential. If I didn’t live here, I would come here for this. At the front of the plaza, to the left, you will see as you enter a huge sculpture apparently formed of water craft, hovering overhead like a space ship. Find whatever metaphor in this you like — or just look up, and laugh.

This is the Festival’s 10th Anniversary. Nigel Redden, its director, notes that “The Lincoln Center Festival has developed a history of presenting new versions of myths and legends from various traditions.” And what do we find? That myths and legends spring from something deep within us, speak to us communally. So look up at those boats, beached in a clump up in the air: however we arrived, we’re in the same place, now.

Peat fires, poetry, gloom, drink, the roar of the sea, bleak humor, the most musical brogues, language high and low at once, and outsize personalities: this was Galway’s Druid Theater Company playing all the plays of John Millington Synge in a day and night called “DruidSynge.” A total immersion in a world I couldn’t wait to escape, not because it wasn’t rendered well, but because it was rendered so very well. This right after “Grendel,” another entire world, and one of two festival offerings based on Beowulf. The other, a one-man show called “Beowulf,” runs this coming week, so more about both later. It’s funny, isn’t it — no Beowulf, and now two at once. Art fads. Remember when New York was wall to wall, theater to theater “Dybbuk”? So that the name became a verb, and people said, “I’m all dybukked out?” Then it was “Orpheus and Eurydice,” over and over, here and everywhere, modern dance choreographer’s directing Eurydice. Or so it seemed.

The dance offerings for the Festival’s opening week offered one evening of novel invention — this was “Streb vs Gravity;” and one of the familiar made new. This was Emanuel Gat Dance, with a duet to three songs from Schubert’s “Winterreise,” and a quintet to Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring.” Both known to me, again and again, as scores for dances; and both made new to me, by a choreographer with a deep and intrinsic musicality, different in nature from any I’ve thought about before, and perhaps any I’ve actually encountered. He responds not to text, not to notes, but to something under them — to some resonance. To the Schubert, with Dietrich Fisher-Dieskau’s beautiful baritone, and Gerald Moore at the piano, he responds just as one would at home, listening to the music and living to it. It is elastic, alive, totally aesthetic and pure: the notes, not the words, nor the associations; pure sound, met with pure movement. The duet, for Gat and Roy Assaf, who neither lift each other nor touch, except when standing side by side, seems to me — and non-narrative works are always personal in their suggestions to individuals — about partnership. How a couple can mirror each other, parallel each other, chase each other in fun, crouch down together as if pressed from above or without. Gat was always the leader, it seemed to me, but there was no exercise of power. He merely moved first. Then again, I knew he was the choreographer, so perhaps I imposed this upon the work. It doesn’t matter. He’s a formalist (as is Streb, by the way), and by now if we don’t know, we ought to, that formalism does not shut us out. It let’s us in as we are, in the moment, to meet the dance.

As “The Rite of Spring” began, there was Latin music being played just accross 10th Avenue and up the stairs to the Lincoln Center Plaza. Synchronicity! For Gat hears in the score the sound of salsa. He hears a syncopation, a slipperiness I guess. At any rate, he hears dance music. Not to mince words or appreciation, I totally adored this piece, which unfolded to me like a series of puzzles, like a series of variations on a game like “musical chairs.” (Not that there were chairs, but with the idea that when the music stops, there’ll be an odd girl out.) For atime, the conceit was two men partnering three women, slipping seamlessly from one to the next. But that changed, and changed again. I kept waiting, and waiting, with baited breath and totally engaged curiosity, my mind following, and my ear delighting in what my eyes were taking in, for the resolution. How would it happen? Quietly, at the end, when one of the three silky-haired, black dancing dress clad, barefoot women put up her hair, and lay down on the Rothko-looking red carpet that was the arena for most of the dancing. Those already there got up — I thought they were resting there, though I did read a piece which suggested they had been shot. But to my mind, being chosen meant sobering up, in effect, and stopping dancing. Becoming prim. Not hearing the salsa in the Stravinsky. You can bet I’ll hear it from now on. My ears will let my hair down.

That the Streb was novel to me, in particular, is no small thing, for I’ve followed her work since its inception, and written about it often. Hers is an enterprise I’ve long appreciated, and long found interesting. And yet, there, in the LaGuardia Drama Theater, Elizabeth Streb seized me by the heart. In the middle of a program of what she calls “Action Events” — work made around pieces of equipment, with bodies pushed to the maximum and the least decoration or sentiment imaginable, there came, as the penultimate work, the number called “Ripple.” It involves a tape, stretched across the stage created by the entire world contained within the box truss that is the Streb set, and set-up. It so happens that it is something called, I think, a “truck strip,” and it has 16, 000 pounds of pressure on it at either end. As Streb explained at the really wonderful — in fact extraordinary — seminar about her work on Saturday, this bland-looking yellow tape “wants you off.”

And so, to stay on it, dancers need help. They need partners. In all of her previous work as I’ve seen it, partners are equal. They take turns. They cue each other. All of the enterprise is common. All are strong. Men, women; women, men. Teamwork is the essential in the work for no one’s getting hurt. The movement, however beautiful, is the result of pitching the body against something — gravity here. Streb launches people into space, and something stops them. A transparent wall stops people who run at it and jump towards it, as if it weren’t there. The floor stops those who launch themselves off platforms, or off wheels. If people try to balance, together or alone, something extrinsic or intrinsic will battle them; alone or together, they will tilt at or collude with physics, and the physical. Yet here, for this once piece, there was something else: there was dependency. In trios, with one person walking the tape, and two others helping. In duets, the same. In the middle, one woman in arabesque, held and then lifted up and revolved, like a ballerina on a music box. And to Prokofiev, of all people. Not “Romeo and Juliet,” but as poignant — in fact more so, because this was music from Jacqueline du Pres, on her cello, than which there is nothing more poignant in music, though there are things as poignant.

“When I see ballet,” Streb said at the symposium,” I always have this thought in my head. ‘Put her down.’ Or, ‘Leave her alone, she’s fine.’ But I chose this out of reverence for people who need help at different times....promenade, arabesque...Why not? I’ve studied for 30 years, it is in my vocabulary.”

And then David Gordon said, “People who make art talk to each other; people who see art talk to each other; people who make art talk to people who see art. We are not little islands. It’s important that there are lots of responses to things.”

This was the Festival vibe in a nutshell. During their conversation, Gordon, Rainer and Tipton responded to the Streb, and she answered, in a way I’ve not heard at such a public panel. As in a think tank. Questioning — for instance, did she need the music? Did it change the experience? What did adding extrinsic sound do to work that was previously so self-contained? “How does it and doesn’t it, if you will, work?” asked someone, probably David Gordon again. Tipton felt the work was somehow made “bigger than human,” saying “It made me sad, in a way.” She liked best the piece I liked least, a piece the dancer, master teacher, and Merce Cunningham repetiteur Meg Harper had also liked. Harper found the repetitions in “Orbit,” two dancers swinging low around a pole from ropes, like horizontal maypole dancers, “poetic,” where I merely grew impatient. Tipton found therein “definite time; definite rhythm, relentless in a way.” In my mind, I looked at it again. Give me their eyes next time. Those boats are still on my mind. I think about the Festival, the symposium, the wonderful sidewalk conversations, the not wanting to go home but to keep connected.

Maybe they’re waiting for us, those boats up in the air, out of reach, but not so very much. It isn’t that we’ve arrived. It’s that, together, we might set sail.

Photos:
Front page, fourth and fifth photos by TomCaravaglia of STREB Extreme Action in STREB vs. GRAVITY.
First photo, of DruidSynge, is by Keith Pattison.
Second photo, by Gadi Dagon, is of Emanuel Gat Dance in Emanuel Gat's "Winter Voyage."
Third photo, by Gadi Dagon, is of Emanuel Gat Dance in the N.Y. premiere of Emanuel Gat's "The Rite of Spring."

Volume 4, No. 27
July 17, 2006

copyright ©2006 Nancy Dalva
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