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Letter from New York
The Lincoln Center Festival
The Second Week, and “Grendel”
July 18-23, 2006

by Nancy Dalva
copyright ©2006 by Nancy Dalva

The notion of festival-as-think-tank was carried from the rich first week of the Festival into the varied panoply of offerings of the second,with Benjamin Bagby’s minimalist one man “Beowulf” following upon the maximalist Beowulf-based “Grendel” of the week before. A co-commission with the Los Angeles Opera, “Grendel,” seen at the New York State Theater, offered hugely complicated visual effects. The scenery is epic.

George Tyspin’s set is, in a word, overwhelming: a giant, stage filling hulking wall that reconfigures itself into various depressing environments, all fortress-like, all dark, all deeply depressing and claustral and scary. Furthering the nightmare, giant mutants rule the underworld that is Grendel’s. These larger than life-size creatures are all tattered, faceless, cloth, with exposed metal exoskeletons: part animal, part human, part robot, like escaped denziens from a post-nuclear disaster movie set in the early 11th century. These creatures that are arresting and memorable — indeed you can’t forget them even if you'd like to — just as the over-riding conceit is demoralizing, and demoralized.

The libretto is a post-Freudian reworking of "Beowulf," based on John Gardner’s 1971 novel of the same name, and also based on the original epic itself. The credit reads “Co-libretto: Julie Taymor and J. D. McClatchy." (Taymor is the well-known director of theater, opera, and film, whose credits include “The Lion King; she is also the co-designer, with Michael Murray, of the “puppets” for Grendel. McClatchy is a poet, writer of fiction, and translator — in other words, a man of letters — who has worked extensively as a librettist.) Their co-creation is a marvel of relativism, a story of good and evil reworked to have no moral — indeed really no point — other than that schoolyard traumas can precipitate adult mis-behavior on an epic scale. (Think “Carrie.”) There is no "good," and there is no "evil," just existential angst, and acting out. This is the stuff of nightmare, with nothing redemptive, and everything relative. and self-referential. The subtitle is “Transcendence of the Great Big Bad,” suggesting some of the humor with which the libretto is weirdly laced. Perhaps most upsetting, the libretto is also laced with appalling misogyny. This occurs in perhaps the most beautiful scene, when Grendel, who sees all that transpires in the human world he cannot attain, has just seen the good old King named Hrothbar take as his bride a young, flame-haired queen (played by the beautiful and graceful Laura Claycomb). Along with Grendel, we have watched her travel to the king across the water, put her hand to his face, and kneel before him. As he strokes her, she rises, lifting her skirts, and climbs onto his regal lap. Hence, we are told, “she warmed his bed through the charmed winter.”

And so Grendel (a Sorastro-type bass) lies dreaming of himself (deep voiced, misshapen) as golden-voiced and handsome, or at least handsomer, and floating on a lake (depicted, wonderfully, by what I think was digital imagery, white water projected on a black scrim, so that the boat floated in the air) in a golden Viking Barque. The Queen is at his side, their voices intertwining in sweet duet. Then he dares, in his dream, to touch her, and she knocks him out of the boat. Grendel awakes and goes on a rampage, vowing to take the Queen and “roast the ugly hole between her legs over an open fire.”

The lovely Queen’s courtiers are played by dancers, choreographed by Angelin Preljocaj. They are the antidote to the robotic monsters; they have the effect of lilies of the field, but there is too little of them. Their ranks also, not incidentally, provide the “hero,” who is, though of minor consequence to the tale, indeed Beowulf, played by Desmond Richardson. He retains his natively heroic mein and indisputable dignity despite a costume that consists almost entirely of painted on muscles and opening moves suited to a Ninja. His choreography seems lifted out of the Nijinsky “Rite of Spring,” and the music seemed to me to have echoes from the Stravinsky score, specifically the part for The Chosen One’s jumping scene.

Thus we get to the music, ostensibly the reason for an opera, but in this case, really it seemed an equal partner with the mise-en-scene and the concept. The composer, Elliot Goldenthal, writes for orchestra, theater, opera, ballet (he wrote the score for Lar Lubovitch’s ballet “Othello”), and for film. He is married to Julie Taymor and is her frequent collaborator. His tuneful and epic score has a soundtrack feeling, in the way it provides backdrop as well as foreground. It was extensively challenging to the principal character, the heroic anti-hero Eric Owens. His full evening turn that was, aside from whatever one might have made of the piece, a star turn. By the end of it, he was ragged.

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Consider, in contrast, the indefatigable Benjamin Bagby at the Laguardia Drama Theater, in his fourth appearance at Lincoln Center Festival. These included an early version of this magical solo evening. Bagby is a troubadour, accompanying himself on a six stringed harp based on the remains of an instrument excavated from a seventh century grave near what is now Stuttgart, Germany. (In other words, there is a serious tilt at authenticity.) The setting is a stool, a candle on a stand, and some simple lighting effects, so you can imagine yourself in a great hall lit by torches.

In fact, we cannot know what “Beowulf” sounded like, but from Bagby, I have some notion of what people might have heard, listening to storytellers sing their songs. I was surprised, and convinced, that "Beowulf" was an entertainment, and a happy one. Super titles provided translation from the Anglo Saxon, which Bagby has studied with Thomas Cable, author of a book called “The Meter and Melody of Beowulf.” Indeed, it is just this matter of meter and melody that made Bagby’s “Beowulf” so much like choreography — the interplay of his voice and his instrument over a set meter was very like a duet set to a score. His variations on possibilities — voice and instrument; voice; instrument; silence over beats; timing; phrasing–seemed happily inexhaustible. As, indeed, did he, for all the time it took to perform the uncut text of lines 1-1062 of the epic’s first episode, which comprises Beowulf’s defeat of Grendel and the subsequent celebrations. Benjamin Bagby sings joyously, and is a joy to hear, and to see. No relativism here: good conquers evil, and is rewarded.

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In the same week, at the La Guardia Concert Hall, Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company presented “Blind Date,” a work of enormous ambiguity, animated not only by the increasingly charismatic Jone, and also fine dancers, musicians, singers; a complex set design by Bjorn Amelan, and video by Peter Nigrini. The music included throat singing, vocals, percussion (Akim “Funk” Buddha); sitar and daf, which is a Persian frame drum, and throat singing (Neel Murgai); violin (Jurit Pacht); and laptop, violin, and piano (Daniel Bernard Roumain). This gives you some idea of the eclecticism, and the plot was equally complex. It involved the war in Iraq, and the lives of the dancers, and the notion of war itself, while also supporting the notions that underlie brotherhood, and teamwork, and dedicating oneself to a cause, a brotherhood, a greater good. Jones honors the notion of patriotism, but not the causes to which patriots are sent to die, unwitting.

Jones plays the sinister master of ceremonies, hooked on cigarettes. It’s true also that he’s still, blessedly, hooked on movement. There are several formal dances — purely post-modern — in this piece. Two are line dances — one horizontal across the back, one vertical, front to back — and both stand out clearly in the mind clearly, long after. A third dance involves the excellent company of dancers in swooping motion across the stage, in informal attire. Seemingly spontaneously, one calls out "Me!," and starts to fall. From wherever they are in the choreography of the moment (it might be improvised, I can’t tell, but the performing is full out and anything but tentative) they all rush towards the falling figure, to catch him or her. The action continues with calling and falling as one by one they depart the arena, until finally the sequence ends in a duet, with one dancer racing across the stage to catch the other. If that isn’t metaphor, what is?

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Over at the Rose Theater, you might also have found metaphor in the North American premiere of “Bones in Pages,” in which Saburo Teshigawara’s sculptural installation called “Dance of Air,” serves as set for his spooky “solo dance” (with two women listed as “participants.” ) There is also a particpating crow — quite, quite creepy — kept separate from us by a scrim. This bird hops over a great swath of shoes, around a lucite box containing stripped down chairs, and among pages scattered from books that are set into a wall so we see nothing but their pages, all yellow in the dim light. Most upsettingly, it clambers into a bowl of what looks like broken glass, all sharp fragments.

We first see Teshigawara himself with his head seemingly resting on these shards. (I was ready to close my eyes then and not re-open them.) The choreographer thence animates himself like a puppet, with a stiff spine, and limbs akimbo, isolated, pulled this way and that away from his torso. At one time he looked very much like Petroushka. An array of emotions seemed to play themselves across his body, and his mind, perhaps without his knowing what they were. He is an instrument, and his isolations and frenzies seem to seize him as the wind seizes leaves.

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Meanwhile, and in utter contrast, the Batsheva Dance Company moved into the New York State Theater with the cheerful and sweeping “Telophaza,” in which a seemingly endless company sweeps and re-sweeps across the stage in wave after wave, in costume set after costume set, to a soundscore so various you heard Bruce Springsteen and The Bollywood Brass Band within minutes of each other. The explosive, cheerful choreography — imagine schools of fish sweeping from your left to your right; or waves of a dance class, crossing the floor; or computer animated graphics, bobbing across your screen — is kaleidoscopic and colorful, yet leavened by real time projections of dancers who stand at the back in front of video cameras, which show them in close up, and in black and white. There is also a voice- over which gets the audience into the action, and on their feet,moving along with the dancers. From upstairs, you could look down into the house and see something utterly surprising: a mosh pit! The applause at the end was exuberant. This wasn’t a participation metaphor. This was simply participation. People loved it.

Photos (from top):
Eric Owens as Grendel and Desmond Richardson as Beowulf, in "Grendel." Photo by Stephanie Berger.
Raymond Aceto as Hrothgar and Laura Claycomb as Queen Wealtheow in "Grendel." Photo by Stephanie Berger. Benjamin Bagby in "Beowulf." Photo by Stephanie Berger.
Shayla-Vie Jenkins and Bill T. Jones in Jones's "Blind Date." Photo by Paul B. Goode.
Sabura Teshigawara- "Bones in Pages." Photo by Stephanie Berger.
Batsheva Dance Company in Ohad Naharin's "Telophaza." Photo by Gadi Dagon.

Volume 4, No. 31
August 21, 2006
copyright ©2006 Nancy Dalva
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