Letter from San Francisco
Ballet Argentino
“Boccatango”
CalPerformances, Zellerbach Hall
Berkeley
March 8, 2006
Alain Buffard
“My Lunch with Anna”
ODC/Theater, San Francisco
March 17, 2006
Expressions Dance Company
“Virtually Richard3”
Stanford Lively Arts, Memorial Auditorium
Stanford
March 18, 2006
by Rita Felciano
copyright 2006 by Rita Felciano
On its first appearance at CalPerformances in 2000, Julio Bocca’s Ballet Argentino left behind the impression of a company with an identity problem. Half of the program was Ana Maria Stekelman’s, choreographing Astor Piazzola tangos. The rest came from a mix of contemporary ballet choreography, with the Pas de Deux from “Don Quixote” thrown in. With the exception of Bocca, these were young performers in not very good choreography.
Six years later, at least two of the problems seem to have been solved. For the company’s current tour, Stekelman choreographed a whole evening of what might be called Tango Nuevo. That at least unified the evening. Also the quality of the dancers is much improved, these were experienced, beautiful dancers. Yes, Bocca still is the star, and he still dances on, with, and under a table (“Invierno Porteno”). Except now he also partners a ladder (“Anos de Soledad”).
Stekelman has spent her career rethinking tango; some of those efforts—Carlo Sauro’s film “Tango” comes to mind—have been admirable. But “Boccatango” is not one of them. By introducing ballet and modern dance moves and stretching the genre’s use of space, Stekelman has indeed extended tango’s reach. But instead of deepening our understanding, she flattened it out. What used to be suggested—the sizzle between the partners, the underlying tension—now is just about spelled out. Literally flicking off partner a partner doesn’t have the same impact as the implied gesture. And why, if you have two men dance together—as it was commonly done in Tango’s early days—does one have to dance the part of the woman as Bocca did? Stripping to black underwear, and then turn the lights down to increase the “naughtiness” says more about beef cake and acrobatics than about eros.
Fortunately, the music’s intricately shifting sonorities and rhythmic complexities made up for some of the evening’s shortcomings. Piazzola’s “Oblivion” for a bandoneon and saxophone had a fabulously jazzy improvisational feel to it. However, for the rest of the first half, the Octango band was so badly amplified—the orchestra played live behind a curtain upstage—that it might as well have been on tape. The arrangement did not serve the otherwise excellent singers Noelia Moncada and Esteban Riera.
With the exception of a couple of solos, such as “Michelangelo” for one man and one hat, Stekelman’s approach was just too shallow. Unfortunately, “Boccatango” looked too much like than a vanity project for its still stunning star or a cash cow for a company in need.
“Déjeuner sur l”herbe” it isn’t, but Alain Buffard’s enchanting and at times hilarious film “My Lunch with Anna” has a similarly wonderful quality of blending landscape and protagonists for a sensuously attractive portrait of very different characters. (“Lunch” will be shown on April 2 at Danspace as part of Buffard’s “Mauvais Genre).
The people involved in this project are French dancer, and now film maker, Alain Buffard and dance pioneer Anna Halprin. In the eighties, having been diagnosed as HIV positive, Buffard had given up dancing. He returned to it in the nineties, encouraged by a workshop Halprin hade given in Freiburg, Germany, and a later one at Sea Ranch in Northern California. Ever since that time, he wanted to make and film a dance with Halprin. At least that’s what he thought he was about to embark on when he brought his camera crew to Halprin’s home in Kentfield, north of San Francisco. Halprin had different ideas.
In the opening shots of this 2005 film, the two of them are seen chopping lettuce in Halprin’s kitchen. You can see the tension rising; a stalemate is developing as she slides one of her “scores”—the model for the way she works—across the table to him. Next shot, they are sitting on that famous outdoor deck below the main house, flowers and lace table cloth in place. They are having lunch. It’s quite an extraordinary transition.
The rest of the film consists of four more lunches at locations deemed appropriate to the topics on which Buffard interviews Halprin. The setting is always the same, a small table elegant table and food for two (food stylist: Rana Stewart) and conversation to go with it. That’s where the mix of careful planning and serendipity, so characteristic of Halprin’s own work, kicks in to spice up this affectionate and intelligent tribute.
When talking about “City Dance”, filmed in Washington Square Park in San Francisco, the camera catches an elderly woman doing TaiChi. A tourist recognizes Halprin who gives out her website and then, without missing a beat returns to the topic at hand. The infamous cargo net incident at the Fenice in Venise, remembered over lunch deep in the redwoods, produces a food stealing monkey (Karl Gillick) whose antics simply become part of the conversation.
The most sensuously beautiful lunch takes place in the warmly lit yet stark environment of the Berkeley Art Museum, scene of Halprin’s most celebrated work, “Parades and Changes.” The camera work (Brett Rogstad, Jesse Oliver) is brilliant; overhead shots of that white square table pan to caress two figures (Lesley Ehrenfeld, Sherwood Chen) in the galleries, slowly taking their clothes off. Halprin, dark, responsive to Buffard’s disrobing, is slightly bent over, a wise woman, presiding over and participating in her own ritual.
Throughout its 52 minutes, the film mixes history—much of it well known by now—with instruction to Buffard on what happens when he lifts his arm, how her body responds to his, how to deepen kinesthetic awareness. Buffard, clearly admires Halprin, but there is not a whiff of obsequiousness in his gentle prodding about her work. These lunches, for all their antic humor, have a chronological trajectory. The last on takes place at Stinson Beach. It’s late in the afternoon. They are talking about Halprin’s work with seniors. Buffard is dressed in brilliant white, Halprin in a long star-studded coat. She is also wearing long white gloves—not unlike Ruth St. Denis, she didn’t do her nails—but because the Northern California coast can be very cold. Sheltered by a huge rock, the figures become very tiny. The shadows grow. As the sun is going down. Halprin takes off her coat and the two of them run towards the Pacific. It’s a lovely ending. I just wish they hadn’t added a written creed by Halprin. It looked like an imprimatur, unnecessary and just a little undignified.
The US premiere of Expressions Dance Company’s “Virtually Richard3” proved to be both fascinating and disappointing. Artistic Director and choreographer Maggi Sietsma of the Brisbane-based ensemble has said that she wanted to look at this early Shakespeare play—part history, part tragedy—from the perspective of its women protagonists—the ones left behind to pick up the pieces and the ones Laurence Olivier so clearly short changed in his classic “Richard III” from 1955. Sietsma’s other, maybe more obvious impetus, was the character of Richard himself—a fabulous stage villain and every actor’s dream. The choreographer chose specific moments—the wooing of Lady Anne, Clarence’s and the young princes’ assassinations, Richard’s coronation and his defeat—and fashioned them into a loosely assembled collage. Except for Richard’s, all the male parts, were realized by three dancers. They and the four women also functioned as a kind of Greek chorus.
Doing double, even triple duty required some fast adjustments in the mind, particularly when Ryan Males who had just died as Henry IV immediately showed up again, now as the unhappy Gloucester. But to have him do Richmond, the first Tudor king at the end, made sense; it showed continuity of history. More problematic were Zaimon Vilmanis and Jason Northam as “Richard’s Henchman”, i.e. the murderers. They also danced Buckinham, Tyrrel and various other sycophants, as well as the two young princes whom Richard had killed. Shakespeare’s cynical game playing between Richard and little boys, here became a baiting game in which Richard played the men’s dumb wittedness to the hilt as he tried to suck the life out their physical prowess. That reading was probably as far from Shakespeare as Sietsma could get.
“Virtually’s” great achievement—as was Shakespeare’s—was Richard. Dan Crestani, small boned and shortish—Lady Anne (Emily Amisano) towered over him—danced him brilliantly. Spastic and hyper, his physical deformity (a periodic limp and a lame left arm which he constantly massaged), were the least of his malformations.. Constantly on the move, he roamed the stage like an evil spirit, an animal hunting for prey. He’d jump everybody and hung on like a cancerous growth or an incubus. With tiny finger gestures and incessantly rubbing his hands, he drew a manipulative net of fear and fascination, waiting for the right moment to pounce. When his tough Queen Mother (Sally Wicks) stood up to him, he cowered, a Dickensian waif,showing off his disability and playing on her sympathy. There were a few missteps towards melodrama, the vampire kiss with young Elizabeth (Lizzie Chittleborough) and his death from self-strangulation looked over the top.
Unfortunately, most of “Virtually’s” choreographic capital seems to have been spent on the main character. The rest of this dance theater piece, which incorporated fragments of texts, video images, and a hodgepodge of a score, lived off generic choreographic. Highly physical, mostly on one level, and oddly timed. The wooing duet between Amisano and Crestani, for instance technically challenging, didn’t crystallize the cat and mouse game that Richard played with Anne’s mix of fascination and repulsion. Elizabeth’s searching solo for her children was repetitive but not hypnotic. Neither could you develop a feeling for the women’s collective mourning in the staccato moves of the stylized procession—to some terrific mozarabic music from Corsica—nor a sense of their anger and helpless fury in the more individualized dances. At best the choreography told the story but it didn’t bring to the forefront the underlying chaos and emotional turmoil.
Still, in addition to the excellent creation of Richard, there was at least one moment which suggested what “Virtually” could have been. The night before he dies, hunched over by fear and nightmares, Richard watched the “ghosts” of Elizabeth and Edward IV dance a simple, emotionally tender duet. The juxtaposition of this flowing little partner dance with his cramped and deformed body was a powerful metaphor for what Richard never allowed himself to have, and for a second he just wished he did, an attachment to another human being.
Volume 4, No. 11
March 20, 2006
copyright
©2006 Rita Felciano
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