Martha Clarke's re-imagined dance-theater piece, with its themes demonic and divine, dominates the landscape at ADF

Orla Swift, Staff Writer

DURHAM - Dancer Robert Wersinger is in hell. For the past half hour, a demon has been whacking him with a tree branch, sending him into airborne flips over a pack of wild dogs. It's a terrifying place, this realm of the damned envisioned by choreographer Martha Clarke. Even a gentle cello can turn rabid and stab someone.

As the demon, danced by Elizabeth Parkinson, waits for Clarke's cue to send Wersinger back into the pack, she jokingly raises her branch to his neck.

“Oh, that's nice!” Clarke hollers in a high-pitched voice from the third row of Reynolds Theater. “That might even be better. From the neck.”

The new move is among many Clarke has added to “Garden of Earthly Delights,” her re-imagining of the 1984 dance-theater piece that lifted dancers high off the stage and left the audience giddy. Animating the figures from Hieronymus Bosch's 16th-century painting, Clarke danced her company from Eden to hell, which is where Wersinger and Parkinson are spending most of their time as the American Dance Festival approaches.

Almost two decades after it was last performed, Clarke's “Garden” dominates the landscape at ADF, which it opens with four workshop performances. Producers from New York and elsewhere are expected to attend with an eye toward arranging a New York run and international tour.

“Garden,” which first came to ADF in 1985, established Clarke as a genius of the American stage. She was one of the first directors to incorporate flight into her vision, and not in the utilitarian way that Broadway's “Peter Pan” used it in the '50s.

Her “Garden” characters get tossed around in the air as if by angry spirits. And her later projects used flight to enable dancers to move like animated characters, balancing precariously on objects or traveling 15 feet with every step. Her early experiments created a flight path followed by Carolina Ballet and Argentine choreographer Brenda Angiel as well as such Broadway shows as “Wicked,” “Mary Poppins” and “Tarzan.”

The “Garden” visuals were unforgettable, too, with dancers evoking herds of animals, forests and shadowy swamps, graphic scenes of lust, gluttony and violence. A trio in nude-looking unitards played period instruments from the late Medieval and early Renaissance eras.

“Garden” ran three times off-Broadway. Internationally it topped 500 performances, a rarity in modern dance. In Durham, it sold out 1,232-seat Page Auditorium on opening night of its ADF run, leaving the audience horrified but fascinated, according to The News & Observer's review by the late Nell Hirschberg.

But history is only part of what quickens pulses on the Duke University campus, where ADF is staging its 30th festival. There's an equal sense that this new “Garden” may yield fruits nobody has tasted before.

Home again

Clarke is clearly at home at ADF. Her two Pomeranians, Sofie and Pie, follow her everywhere, curling up for long naps in the aisles of Reynolds and occasionally barking halfheartedly at the technicians. Sofie even performed at ADF in “Vers la flamme,” Clarke's Chekhov piece, with Pie as her understudy.

Reynolds Theater wasn't what Clarke had in mind when she decided to remount “Garden” 2 1/2 years ago.

Her original impetus was a new off-Broadway venue called 37 Arts, with its flight-friendly architecture. When funding for a show there fell through, Charles Reinhart, who became ADF's director in 1969, suggested that ADF apply for an American Masterpieces grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to bring it to Durham. The grant came through.

Clarke's fondness for ADF is understandable. The festival helped shape her career, beginning with her acceptance into its summer school in Connecticut when she was a 15-year-old living in suburban Baltimore. Now 63 – today is her birthday – she recalls being so prone to tears in class that instructor Louis Horst jokingly dubbed her “Baby.” She returned for two more summers.

Those were tough but formative years, she recalls as she relaxes in the living room of Reinhart's west Durham home, where she and “Garden” dancer Sophie Bortolussi (aka “two-legged Sophie”) stay, taking turns cooking feasts for each other. As Clarke reminisces, she frequently erupts into cascading laughter that fills the house.

Her dance technique was raw back then, but her design sense was strong. One of her earliest memories is of rearranging fruit on the kitchen table to see how it looked in relation to the space around it. She later took to moving the furniture, much to her mother's dismay.

Her choreography calling came at ADF, when she saw a performance by Anna Sokolow's company, which was known for tackling dark and political themes.

By show's end, Clarke says, “I knew I wanted to do dance theater. I didn't want to just do pretty moves to lovely music. I wanted it to have some grit in it.”

Clarke later studied with Sokolow at the Juilliard School and joined her company. She was still a nervous dancer then, shaking constantly. But by the time she began dancing with Pilobolus in 1971, her courage and charisma were strong.

Reinhart saw Clarke's imprint on Pilobolus, now one of the most popular acts at ADF.

“She brought an element to them that they didn't have before, which was a theatrical depth,” Reinhart says.

Pilobolus created dances collaboratively. But Clarke found the atmosphere combative and grew increasingly uncomfortable with it. At a post-ADF party seven years after she joined the troupe, she jokingly held a lighter to her Pilobolus leotard.

That's when Reinhart and his wife, Stephanie, persuaded her to quit Pilobolus and make her own dances.

Dreams and elephants

“Garden” bloomed within a few years, and Clarke followed with other dramatic pieces that became must-see events in dance, opera and theater. Not all drew acclaim. Most infamous was “Endangered Species,” which featured a real elephant on stage.

But even that left its mark, notes Gideon Lester, interim artistic director at American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge, Mass.

“It's become a phrase in theater now: 'getting the elephant on the stage,' which means doing something completely impossible,” he says.

Lester has seen four Clarke theater productions, including “A Midsummer Night's Dream.” His company produced it in 2004, and he was the dramaturge.

“What's really striking about her work is that it lives in the world of dreams,” says Lester, who plans to see “Garden” this week. “It's full of beautiful imagery from the human unconscious, very surprising juxtapositions of not only human beings in relation with each other but also human beings and objects. She paints pictures with the human body in a very surreal, dreamlike way.”

Paul Kellogg, New York City Opera's retiring artistic director, is equally enamored. He saw the first run of “Garden” and donated $5,000 of his own money for the revival, which he hopes to help take to New York. He also headed New York's Glimmerglass Opera until last year, and he says her production of “The Magic Flute” there was the best he has ever seen.

Clarke is always exploring new ways a body can move, Kellogg says. She has a keen ear for the drama inherent in music, never overstating a theme. And she is adept with performers' voices, too – even in dance. Her “Garden” characters cackle, growl and shout.

She is “one of the greatest theatrical innovators of her generation,” he says. Her bold and evocative style is unmistakable. And anyone who sees her work cannot help but feel its impact.

The right notes

Clarke's collaborative process is running full throttle at Reynolds. Before the intensive Durham rehearsals began last month, her 10 dancers rehearsed for three weeks in a tiny New York studio. A few worked sporadically with her for several months before that.

Now comes the music.

Composer Richard Peaslee is one of only two original collaborators who Clarke asked to help create the revival; costume designer Jane Greenwood is the other.

But this cast has three more dancers than the old one did. And Clarke's New York rehearsals have yielded new scenes and additional aerial ideas. By the time Peaslee joins the company in Durham, it's clear that some of the old music no longer fits.

The musicians are trying to work out a plan. But Clarke is antsy. The day's rehearsal is almost over.

“I think it's better to try something than to talk about it,” she calls out to them.

Finally, they agree to improvise. They try a scene near show's end in which four dancers float upside down above the stage like sinners plummeting to their doom.

Maybe the moment calls for a bagpipe. Clarke asks musician Wayne Hankin what he thinks.

Hankin fetches his bagpipe, sits on a tree stump and plays a droning accompaniment. It's not quite what Clarke wants. She asks him to get a bigger bagpipe and to try walking across the stage as he plays, being careful not to tangle with a dangling dancer. The scene grows eerier.

This is how “Garden” develops. Clarke asks her performers lots of questions and leaves them room to explore. She likens them to silkworms, spinning threads that she trims and shapes.

“I work very much out of the people who are performing,” she says. “Who they are, how they move, what they think and where they come from really influences what I do with them.”

“Midsummer” was the same, Lester says.

“A lot of theater directors work through conflict and chaos, and Martha doesn't,” he says. “Martha creates circumstances in which people can do very good work and feel very good about it.”

Clarke's mellow demeanor belies the importance of Thursday's debut, which could make or break her shot at a New York run. She expects to be ready but only “by the hairs of our chinny-chin- chins.”

“It's kind of like having your fingers in an electric socket,” she says. “And I won't really know what I have until after seeing it.”

Whatever the outcome, she's happy for the chance to revisit the old “Garden” as a seasoned artist and see what else might grow there.

“I think the first time I had no idea what I was doing,” she says. “And now, for better or for worse, I have a craft.

“So in a sense, the piece does not feel like a remaking. It feels like this is where I am today.”

Staff writer Orla Swift can be reached at 829-4764 or orla.swift@newsobserver.com.

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