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===== The Independent Review: ADF Mainstage Season 2008: =====

What threatened to be “a year-long Festival of the Feet” when it was announced in March turned out better than we’d feared.
For the most part.

With some exceptions.

This version of our comprehensive season wrap is verifiably our last word on ADF Season 2008. With 1,100 more words than the story in our print edition (including our views on Meredith Monk, Maguy Marin, the Japanese Festival and Acts to Follow), this report has all the juicy stuff we couldn’t cram onto the pages of this week’s copy of the Independent Weekly.

Buy the ticket — click on “more” — and read the verdicts (in this and the next two posts). Then leave your reactions in Comments, below. As always, your replies won’t appear immediately, since we have to screen for spam. But all legitimate responses will be posted.

Split Stages, Split Decisions

ADF’s 2008 season instructed, frustrated — and occasionally, amazed…

Review by Byron Woods

The lovers’ most heartfelt wish can be put into one word. Here it is: Stay.
It’s no less true for those who deeply love the dance.

Stay, Zvi Gotheiner, Laura Dean, Doug Varone and Takuya Muramatsu: choreographers who brought us visions of darkness and light, stories of fearsome symmetry and equally fearsome chaos.

Stay, Yukari Ota and William B. McClellan, Jr., Shani Collins and Paul Matteson, Sara Procopio and Brooke Broussard: dancers whose singular presences embodied and conveyed ideals.

Stay, Promenade, Rust, Promethean Fire, Sweet Fields: works that comforted, challenged, prompted our consciences and inspired.

Stay and warn us further, Maguy Marin, though the tutelage be harsh.

Stay, students: David Brick, HeJin Jang, Kate Abarbanel, Yve Cohen, Yvette Luxenberg, Lorna Troost, Megan Harrold, Leah Ives and storyteller Dana Caspersen, whose most courageous movements, questions and experiments in choreography taught us much and helped to light the path ahead.

Stay, needed teachers: Dot Silver, Carol Richard. Your leaving here this past year leaves us less.

Stay, ghost, said Thomas Wolfe.

Stay, sang Paul Buchanan. Stay, and I will understand you.

“This could be a recipe for disaster,” I muttered to myself, gazing at the March press release which described a season full of shared-billing showcases for the 2008 season of the American Dance Festival. “Great: A year-long Festival of the Feet.”

Long-time dance-goers will recognize the name from the 2004 and 2005 seasons: hybrid evenings in which three companies performed different percussive folk dance forms on the same stage—Indian Kathak, tap and flamenco the first year; African, tap and Irish dance the year after.

No, it wasn’t a useless concept, and at least one worthy artistic conversation, between Pandit Chitresh Das and Jason Samuels Smith, began during those programs and continued long afterward (including here, during the 2006 season).

But we were appropriately critical of the slam segues that occurred at times when cultural worlds collided.

And we were even more critical of showcase programs content with presenting 20-minute sets by world-class dance groups—companies whose ranks had obviously been sharply reduced for the occasion. These seemed an affront to what should have been ADF’s standards of curation.

Then, on top of that, the festival charged the season’s highest ticket prices for nights containing the briefest amounts of actual dance on stage.

Small wonder we called it dance tourism on the (not-so) cheap at the time.

There were echoes of these issues during the 2008 season, starting with the opening night.

Yes, the Parsons Dance Company appeared—in the sole person of Davis Robertson, during the six minutes of Parson’s “floating” piece, Caught.

PARADIGM was similarly cut from a company of eight to its two co-founders, Carmen deLavallade and Gus Solomons, jr., for all of the 14 minutes they had on stage on June 30.

Though initially slated to perform two works on June 24, Khadija Marcia Radin and colleague Mahbud John Burton were permitted seven whole minutes to be with us in what was all too short a moment of Rapture, the same night others walked out on Maguy Marin’s hour-long umwelt.

Imbalance was the word as well for Ririe-Woodbury Dance Company as it briefly interjected the quirky choreography of Alwin Nikolais among Trisha Brown’s extensive sets in their June 12 concert.

In the same vein, Martha Clarke’s eight-minute Nocturne seemed a poorly rehearsed afterthought, designed to give Pilobolus a fig-leaf of deniability as the only company not forced to share an evening during the 2008 season.

But where festival management—and audiences—both got mugged repeatedly while walking down memory lane in 2007, this season’s track record on reconstructions was a lot better.

We savored Ailey II’s soaring interpretation of Alvin Ailey’s Revelations, and a particularly crisp rendition of Jose Limon’s The Moor’s Pavane. We then traced some of Doug Varone’s inspiration back to Limon’s not as frequently-seen solo, Chaconne, which effectively conveyed a nostalgia, but for the present moment.

Not that all works were as uniformly successful. If the movement vocabulary Eleo Pomare crafted for the mother in Las Desenamoradas seemed now only appropriate for an old Joan Crawford thriller (and simply bizarre when juxtaposed against John Coltrane’s music), McClellan’s embodiment of Talley Beatty’s 1947 Mourner’s Bench appeared heartfelt, lyrical, fresh—and still daring.

True, Trisha Brown’s evening didn’t put her best work forward, even in an anniversary season that claimed to “make the dances the star.” Her PRESENT TENSE seemed an almost monochrome affair when compared with works from The Trilogy, Five-Part Weather Invention, or her operatic cycle.

But Nikolais’ trippy projections, geeky sounds and oddly mirrored images thoroughly—and amusingly—defamiliarized the human body about a generation and a half before the word “deconstruction” was first coined, while his imaginative Tensile Involvement had dancers craft a stage-wide cat’s cradle with multi-colored elastic bands.

After last summer’s (perhaps deliberately) abortive attempts to place their work in inappropriate hands, I was unsurprised to see Eiko and Koma alone on stage again. Given the dangerous political posturing taking place at our nation’s borders, their 1989 work, Rust, provided a far too timely reminder of what bodies at an unfriendly border actually look like: discards, slowly twisting, caught on a chain-link fence.

Then came the lyricism and understated humor of Lar Lubovitch’s Concerto Six Twenty-Two. How far can we say we have truly come since 1986 when the frankness, love, sadness and final parting still silences us in the male duet at the heart of its second movement?

The answer’s much more obvious, however, when a similar question is applied to the Martha Graham works we saw. Though on opening night the damning word “petrified” showed up more than once in my notes on Steps in the Streets, the night after it was better. Still, the herky quality of movement kept reminding me of the factory scenes in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis.

Instead of seeing three couples in love in her Diversion of Angels, we saw three women—who weren’t that clearly differentiated—being worshipped and catered to at some length by laughably interchangeable drones. Was it really always thus?

Of the three works we saw, her earliest, Lamentations, was ironically the most “present.”

But the pre-show explication given by artistic director Janet Eilber suggested that Graham’s works were no longer able to clearly speak for themselves.

When the work was performed I asked, “Are we able to identify Steps in the Streets´ “clear political message” without these clarifying words? Come to think of it, can we identify that message even with them?”

Similar, and similarly uncomfortable, questions apply at this point to Meredith Monk’s Solo from Education of the Girlchild.

Patti Smith used the term “babelogue” – a discourse in some way associated with the tower of Babel – to title a spoken word piece on her Easter album. At first, Monk’s solo appears to be babelogue itself: an undecipherable vocal discourse superimposed on a relatively simple yet alien physical discourse.

Though these give the sense of having come from a lost, simpler folk culture that was only advanced enough to craft the dancer’s simple, folk-based garb, the granny glasses and the platinum wig which the dancer reverently takes off (after enacting a woman older than herself) contradicts such interpretation. So much for ethnographic authenticity.

Monk’s work seeks to show us the similarities between the maiden at the end and the crone at the beginning; but a feeling of harangue besets the lengthy, strident vocals of the mother’s section.

The question of necessity is raised: Does this work wish to communicate anything to us besides the alien quality of the depicted “culture’s” body language and tongue? Is the audience, in fact, cast in this work as some pre-verbal girlchild, one only able to apprehend the characters’ speech as music and nonsense syllables, and unable to comprehend the rest? If so, the point is made well before the monotonous and poorly tuned piano finishes its 35-minute cycle.

Another composer, John Cage, once famously said, “I have nothing to say, and I am saying it, and that is poetry.”

At this point, Monk’s Solo seems to strive far too earnestly for its impenetrability. Ironically, it tries far too hard only to say so little—and doesn’t seem worth the effort.

On the decidedly opposite end of sexual politics, Jiri Kylian’s Evening Song constituted one of the creepiest works of the season, and a wholly different cultural “education” of young women, as three men from the Limon company so gracefully—and systematically—limited the possible range of movements of the three women that were clearly their subordinates. So good were Kylian’s human border collies that they rarely even had to touch their charges—except for that telltale pat on the head toward the end. Pfeh.

Paul Taylor’s works gave us the good, the bad and the ugly. The Bach-fueled drama of Promethian Fire was thrillingly danced with full commitment, and his 3 Epitaphs still got laughs while showing some of the barriers modern dance has busted through.

These, however, came after Taylor’s muddy, formless, plotless—and pointless—Changes. Taylor’s incoherent work, which had absolutely nothing new or interesting to say about the 1960s, was publicly humiliated by being placed alongside Twyla Tharp’s Sweet Fields, a work with clear lines, an interesting and well-articulated vocabulary, and an artist’s unique revisioning of her source material, a set of sacred harp and shaker hymns.

Cleo Parker Robinson’s dance ensemble gave Donald McKayle’s 1951 inner-city, just-before-coming-of-age work Games the proper amounts of sass and pathos, the same night Doug Varone explored the gripping drama of a long-time marriage at the bitter end, in his 1988 short story in dance form, Home.

Though its slow beginnings now sound a bit like The Who, things accelerated soon enough in the reconstruction of Laura Dean’s 1980 work, Tympani. ADF dance student standout Megan Harrold defined a new magnetic center in the work as she whirled across stage.

Though it was only made in 1984, the reconstruction of Hanya Holm’s Jocose seemed much older: a tentative, fragile early fusion of ballet vocabulary and contemporary moves; a somewhat brittle joke by now, I fear.

If the multicultural cast toned down the orientalism in Erick Hawkins’ New Moon—but not Lou Harrison’s music—the cast still experienced systemic costume malfunctions when clothed in Melody Eggen’s reconstructions. The womens’ body coverings became see-through as they passed by David Ferri’s lights—when, that is, they didn’t balloon whenever the dancers whirled about, to repeatedly suggest the shape of an old McDonaldsland villain, the Evil Grimace.

Such are the hazards of art.

The new works were much more of a checkered outfit. Bill T. Jones regaled us with a cascade of images, moves and words in his springboard piece for next year’s work on Lincoln. It was technically as much a world premiere as Shen Wei’s newest—but not necessarily improved—thoughts on his 2004 bid at gesamptkuntswerk, Connect Transfer. If the new piece abridged his solo, late in the work, that would be useful, but the rest of these improved thoughts might bear thinking through again. Perhaps after the Olympics.

New-generation Butoh artist Muramatsu has clearly come into his own with the ghastly gosh, I am alive… The same cannot be said for Dai Rakuda Kan’s Secrets of Mankind. The goal of training dance students in Butoh is commendable. It is also clearly doomed to failure when it’s attempted over six brief weeks followed immediately by a performance. This was the second time in recent years when an audience got baby Butoh when it was expecting something else. Now that the same mistake has been made twice, there’s no reason it should happen again.

Not to be misinterpreted here: We note, with deep approval, that what student Jake Schlichting termed “Butoh boot camp” had largely convinced him to abandon his ballet classes to study abroad next year. Butoh training should obviously continue each year at ADF. The training group just shouldn’t be performing it on mainstage.

Mark Dendy’s new work led M.C. Escher and the audience through a Klein bottle or two in that riveting four-dimensional maze of a work he constructed, Preliminary Study for Depth: The Upper Half of High and Low. Darkness and Light, the new shadow work by Pilobolus with Basil Twist, put the audience through some changes too. Though it bore the hallmarks of a technology just being acquired, further study and development is clearly indicated.

Larry Keigwin’s jokes have gotten better—that or he’s battered down our resistance, it’s hard to tell. His new work, Air, was a party piece—even if his new composition for PARADIGM was ultimately not a laughing matter.

Gus Solomons, jr. and Carmen deLavellade are rightly revered in the dance world. We saw them humbled on this stage, clearly unable to fully execute the moves tasked them by Keigwin and Robert Battle in two other new commissions. The pair resorted to mugging their way through works. Then, in a post-show talkback, they revealed they had clearly told the choreographers they couldn’t begin to perform the works as originally crafted. All parties had thus been informed. Yet we saw what we saw. For shame.

Uncomfortable questions about curation were raised in other quarters as well. In a season devoted to “the riches of the modern dance repertory,” Aydin Teker and Khadija Marcia Radin’s work seemed totally out of their depth.

As a group, the recent works, those created within the last decade, were the most successful. In Zvi Gotheiner’s vision of Stravinsky’s Les Noches, a community divides itself into a series of couples in a process as compelling and stark as the composer’s own jagged polyrhythms; bravo. A cotillion far more savage than this—in a mental ward that could have been dreamed up by Tennessee Williams—took place in Robert Battle’s nightmare dance, Promenade.

Even harder to take—and significantly longer—was Maguy Marin’s umwelt. Its reflective panels, shaken by powerful wind generators at the corners of the stage, attempted to confront the audience with how precarious our current environmental situation is. It was tempting to read the work as placing her company members in a shelter, or ark of some sort, looking out at a gathering storm—and us, unprotected, in the open beneath it.

A demonstrative quartet danced out their differences in Ronald K. Brown’s Walking Out the Dark, while Doug Varone’s dancers splurged beneath a rising moon in Lux.

The chilling finale of the 2008 Season Review is here. Press more to read on.

The Japanese mini-festival brought notable work to this continent. Yukari Ota’s solo at the start of Dance Theatre LUDENS’ Against Newton 2 displayed a body whose various parts were simultaneously acting and being acted upon. As in the earliest iteration of Shen Wei’s Connect Transfer, you could see movement impulses traveling subcutaneously through the network of the body; rearranging and dancing its various parts before travel to other portions. Spellbinding.

A Butoh ringmaster seemed to lead Natural Dance Theatre’s Circus, which we saw in excerpts. When its ropes were pulled by company members, Uno-Man’s suspended big top suggested fantastic things: a giant underwater jellyfish, the waves of the sea itself. But on the ground, a frail performer gently embodies the grotesque, as a young man pursues her through a gauntlet of stylized carnies, roustabouts, clowns and a dog—one of the most moving characters in this cast of misfit toys.

Dance students give us hope. This crowd of did a lot of that. David Brick, of the Headlong Dance Theater, audaciously took us through an autistic child’s experiences in an early student showing, while managing to direct some pointed questions about which world was truly more dysfunctional, his or ours? Kate Abarbanel kept showing up at interesting places; credited with a hand in designing the installation of HeJin Jang’s intense thesis work, her slow, masterfully controlled bends, and gradual, upside down maneuverings deserved more respect than she got in a performance of Wendi Wagner’s thesis, …before. Yve Cohen nervelessly navigated the treacherous no-man’s land of gender (pun, and respect, both definitely intended)—and current savvy dance marketing moves—in separate student showings.

If I couldn’t fully make Dana Caspersen’s words synch up with her dancers’ filmed moves in the piece 1/1, the spoken word tale she told in a darkened room, which put a new spin on the myth of Athena, sent the same chills down my spine that the best work of Laurie Anderson does.

Yvette Luxenberg’s lecture provided a necessary corrective to the new—or was it old—correctness in cultural appropriation in dance, before HeJin Jang humbled us all at the conclusion of open skin inscribed by kneeling and scrubbing the cement floor with xeroxed photography of the surface of her skin. The moment silenced the crowd—before, one by one, they joined in this moving homage to the very hard work of those who have come before. What a way to end a season.

Here’s where we’d review the festival’s Acts to Follow concert series, devoted to North Carolina choreographers—or at least those choreographers willing to accept the comparative ghetto of a steamy, low-tech summer staging facility with peeling institution gray walls, and no theatrical lights or even the capacity for blackout. Oh, and don’t forget the low, low funding, insufficient to properly pay the dancers or transport them, their sets and properties to Durham.

But there were no Acts to Follow this year. With no warning, the unprofessional bone that the ADF had thrown to the locals in recent years (threatening to take it away from them if they weren’t appropriately grateful) was pulled, according to ADF press, due to the number of mainstage companies the festival was hosting this year.

In short, the moment it was inconvenient, it was gone. Such is the measure of the ADF’s commitment to regional artists.

Which is fine. After 75 years, the festival clearly knows how to professionally stage dance performances. It just hasn’t chosen to do so with North Carolina artists at any point in the past decade—even after half-heartedly soliciting funds for that purpose. On a whole, the festival’s actions telegraphed the level of their regard and sincerity years before dispensing with even the pretense. The insult to local artists has been duly received. It need not be repeated.

Next season—if negotiations conclude successfully—the American Dance Festival will be producing works in a brand-new Performing Arts Center in downtown Durham.

For years, festival management claimed its hands were tied in presenting the largest world-class companies like Pina Bausch’s Wuppertal Tanztheater, or William Forsythe’s Ballett Frankfurt (which by now has morphed into the Forsythe Company). No stage in Durham would hold them, they said.

Next year, they’ll finally have a stage that will. Which means that what we’ll see there—that we haven’t seen already—will finally be limited by the vision of the festival management and its competence in fundraising alone.

Though we already know a few of those visionary limits (see North Carolina artists, above), it should be interesting to see what the rest of them actually are.

We’ll look for you in the lobby. Hold the date: Thursday night, June 4, 2009.

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