More on TBA in Portland, Oregon

The Portland Institute for Contemporary Art calls this annual September festival "tba" aka time-based art, and most of the time, the dance and performance art that gets presented under the shrieking labels of "hot," "cutting edge," "on fire," (this year's fifth-anniversary marketing buzz words) is pretty ephemeral and probably intended to be.

Thursday's opening extravaganza, 100 give or take Portland citizens in a movement choir singing songs about the Migration of Birds composed by San Francisco's Rinde Eckert, was pleasant enough, but scarcely worth sitting on the hard bricks of Pioneer Courthouse Square for close to an hour. It was a lovely September evening and the city looked its best, but the music was close to inaudible and while the movement–flapping to remind us of birds for example–was fun, it wasn't something I'd bother to see or hear again.

Certainly "Map Me," seen on Friday night, the contribution of Belgian-born couple Charlotte Vanden Eynde and Kurt Vandendriessche, performed nude, is time based. For one thing, Vanden Eynde is pregnant–slender nevertheless–so the shape of her body will not last. It takes a kind of raw courage or perhaps total self-absorption to stand naked before a room full of strangers, even if you're using your body as a screen for projections, which may account for the nearly clinical detachment with which this pair performed. Still, the work is intensely visual and in some respects rooted in art history: at one point they look as if they'd been sculpted in marble by Phidias; at another, they resemble paintings by Lucas Cranach, minus alas those wonderful hats.

In the end, I found that while I was impressed by the craft, and repelled by some aspects of this duet in the buff–a segment in which the couple attached strings to genitals and breasts in order to, as a Sesame Street style label card read, "Join Me" was one; another in which the sound of power tools and projections of what appeared to be sheet metal workers accomplished "Fix Me" for Vandendriessche was another–"Map Me" ended up being curiously dehumanizing, and its cutting edge decidedly dull.

But on Saturday night, in Portland's most elegant theater, the teal upholstered, cherry-paneled Newmark in the Performing Arts Center, Baryshnikov danced in the beautiful work of Donna Uchizono, and the art became timeless.

"Leap to Tall, " with music by Michael Floyd and Iva Bittova and lighting design by the masterful Robert Wierzel, was commissioned by the Baryshnikov Arts Center and premiered last year at Bard College. The trio is certainly a vehicle for Baryshnikov, capitalizing on his classical training and skewing it to be about him as a dancer of rare talent and intelligence, one with a truly intellectual bent. At 59, he can no longer do the exuberant grand jetes and multiple (and my God precise) pirouettes that made him a superstar when he left what was then the Soviet Union for the artistic freedom of the West. Nor does he wish to. In this thoughtful, considered work, he "leaps to tall" indeed with the flex of a wrist, angular arms, a rapid, perfectly controlled series of bourrees into the wings, and a small, perfectly timed jump into the waiting arms of Hristoula Harakas and Jodi Melnick, lovely dancers both of them.

There are no fireworks here; just centered lightness and wit, a modest offering that knocks your socks off. Working with Twyla Tharp and Mark Morris, as Baryshnikov has done for many years, has paid off–there are no other ballet stars who have ever been able to make the shift from classicism to contemporary work as he has; dancing as brilliantly in their work and now Uchizono's as he did in such war horses as Don Quixote. His body may be time based; his artistry is timeless.

"State of Heads," which opened the program, is arguably more innovative choreography than that of "Leap to Tall," beginning with an explosive crashing sound and a man in a white suit standing motionless stage rear center, bathed in white light Soon he is joined by two women, also dressed in white, moving extremely slowly from each wing. As they join him, they look up, heads tilted, their arms moving stridently, making you wonder what they're reacting to. The piece would seem to be about our uneasy place in the world and our vulnerability to the decisions of our heads of state. Much of the movement for Levi Gonzalez, Carla Rudiger, and Rebecca Serrell is awkward, off kilter, occasionally downright gawky. And some of it, because of composer James Lo's score, no doubt–Uchizono's musicality puts her to some degree into mainstream modernism–has a latino flavor. The dynamics of this rather mysterious trio make the viewer stay alert, you don't want to miss what comes next, and it needs to be seen more than once. Which makes it not so time based.

–Martha Ullman West


Photo: Charlotte Vanden Eynde & Kurt Vandendriessche, from http://www.pica.org/tba/tba07/default.aspx

Notes from Portland, Oregon's TBA Festival

Reggie Watts

For five years now, TBA (aka Portland Institute of Contemporary Art's Time-Based Art festival) has sent viewers scuttling from club to theater to gallery to warehouse and round again. Then at the end of the evening, everyone gathers in and around the Works, TBA's own (temporary) club, for eating, drinking, dancing, and conversation.

Provocative juxtapositions lurk below the surface of much of the festival: grafitti/gallery, street/stage, process/product. The Suicide Kings' In Spite of Everything casts the punch, power, and profanity characteristic of spoken word in the mold of a relatively conventional theatrical narrative. Individual texts address the experience of matters this culture addresses only reluctantly—the spiritual cost of minimum-wage labor, gang life, adolescent alienation, child sexual abuse and adult sexuality—in language of brutal beauty. Quite possibly, we viewers need the fragile container of the larger narrative—the police investigation of a high school shooting—and the piece's conventional staging to render its fearsome, fearful core bearable.

Though equally self-aware and self-referential, Reggie Watts' Disinformation inhabits the world of a very current, socially acceptable topic of discourse—ecological disaster. Sly non-sequiturs, a variety of voices and personas, ad spoofs, and crisp, spontaneous beat-boxing and b-girling create an entertaining, if not particularly challenging, performance.

Next up: Andrew Dickson's Sell Out and The Living Word Project: the break/s by Marc Bamuthi Jospeh, director of In Spite of Everything.

- Cerinda Survant

VIDEO: Walk It Out, Fosse

Thanks to Andrew Sullivan's Daily Dish for pointing us to this mashup weirdness!

Rolling Stone : Rock and Roll Daily Up to the minute breaking news from the world of music, from the editors of Rolling Stone.

The Real Jailhouse Rock: Why the Prisoners Dance to "Thriller" By Caryn Ganz on Rock News American prisoners lift weights in jail. Filipino inmates re-create the choreography from the most definitive music video in history. Why? "Inmates say to me: 'You have put my mind off revenge, foolishness, or thinking how to escape from jail, or joining a gang,'" says Byron Garcia, a government security consultant in the Phillipines. Garcia explains that dancing is mandatory for all inmates (except the ill or elderly) at the Cebu Provincial Detention and Rehabiliation Center. Garcia initially had inmates marching along to "Another Brick in the Wall," then required them to groove to the Village People's "YMCA" and "In the Navy" before moving on to songs from films like Sister Act and a Queen track. Inmates apparently inquire how many YouTube hits their clips have earned (1.3 million for the "Thriller" video so far), and say the dancing is theraputic. Hopefully nobody reenacts Oz plots when they find out what's up next: "Ice, Ice Baby." Comments

DANCE: Orff With Our Heads

The Washington Ballet
Morphoses, choreographed by Christopher Wheeldon
Carmina Burana, choreographed by Septime Webre
Kennedy Center, Eisenhower Theater
Through April 1

In either creating or viewing dance to Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana, the first encumbrance is the crust of camp that adheres to the music from every horror-film preview that’s featured it, plus its unseemly Nazi associations. (Though Orff’s own stance toward the Reich is murky, he had the misfortune of being one of its favorite composers.) I confess that I can’t hear Orff’s “O Fortuna” without recalling Cherry Red Productions’ 2001 show Seven Deadly Dwarves, in which one mini-play, Carmina Pirhana, featured a sexy pet fish that went bonkers every time she heard that overripe choral concoction.

It’s doubly—or maybe even triply—impressive, then, that Septime Webre’s Carmina, originally choreographed for American Repertory Ballet in 1999, cagily eludes our intellectual firewalls to gradually but memorably touch our hearts. It does so by theatrically embracing both the jackboot and related camp associations, then deconstructing them while simultaneously critiquing Teutonic culture. If that sounds like a lot to pull off in a ballet, it is. Then again, Webre’s got 24 musical sections to do it in, not to mention a company in fine form, and the talented Cathedral Choral Society, with the Children’s Chorus of the Cathedral School, under the direction of J. Reilly Lewis.

In Regan Kimmel’s powerful set design, the singers, in monks’ robes, line stories of rafters around the stage, facing out at us and creating a space that one might associate—through the work’s figurative epochs, and depending on Vandal’s superb costumes and Chenault Spence and Joshua Michaels’s mercurial lighting—with a dungeon-like monastery, a coliseum ground, a cabaret stage, a circus ring, and a ballroom. (Associations may differ by background and age. Consult your analyst before viewing.) Orff’s text was discovered in a monastery. At first thought sacred, it turned out to be, as Webre put it in brief pre-performance remarks, “dirty songs by wayward monks” celebrating springtime, love, and sex. Amen.

Rui Huang (on the Thursday night performance under review here) descends as Fortuna in her chain-suspended steel wheel, at once goddess-like and captive (there’s a Fritz Lang-tinged S&M frisson to much of the staging). From there, Webre plays off the text’s origins and the context of Orff’s work, and takes us on an odyssey from robed self-flagellation to fairly disrobed slap-happy beer-garden hooliganism, bending, on the way, both genders and genres. Oversized Elizabethan hoop skirts and paned balloon breeches, along with orange and pink and jet-black wigs feature prominently in the fun, as do quasi-Vaudevillian broom and chair routines.

But while good gaudy diversion, that all functions primarily to disarm and deconstruct the Orff and strip it to its—Who knew? Or rather, who remembered?—potent emotional core. There we find the superb athleticism of principals Jared Nelson and Jason Hartley, among others, in their punishing aerial and floor work; Brianne Bland in a heartbreaking, disturbing rag-dollish solo before a group of brutalizing men; and wonderfully tender pas de deux between Elizabeth Gaither and Runqiao Du, and Laura Urgellés and Chip Coleman. Those are just a few of many highlights. Soprano Laura Lewis, tenor Robert Baker, and baritone Stephen Combs not only sang gorgeously, but did so at times under somewhat perilous and distracting circumstances, wheeled around on their own (slightly creaky) risers. (If they have weird dreams over the next several months about serenading construction crews, it will be no mystery.)

Ultimately, in her chained wheel, Fortuna ascends—again, reigning but also seemingly bound (O, images of Lara Croft, Tomb Raider, be gone, ye foul pop-culture detritus!)—leaving us to wonder whether we’re constricting her, disappointing her, or evolving toward her, however inevitably or wisely. But in this spectacularly imaginative work, Orff’s fortune is a more definitively happy one. Webre revives, if not redeems, him. And maybe it’s just the spite of one generation removed from an Austrian refugee, but the degeneracy the Nazi critics might have spied here looked all the more lovely and liberating to me for that presumed disapproval. And who’s to say, but I think those monks drinking late into the night and scribbling away by candlelight would have enjoyed it too.

*

First but not least, the evening began with the company premiere of Christopher Wheeldon’s Morphoses. Sona Kharatian and Luis Torres, and Jade Payette and Jared Nelson were excellent, though the women somewhat heavy-footed in their pointe work. Violinists Tom Chiu and Conrad Harris, violist Wendy Sutter, and cellist Danielle Farina performed György Ligeti’s String Quartet No. 1, a chilly but intriguing work that takes vaguely Romantic tropes and classical chords, setting them on edge with scratchy dissonances and rhythmic jokes. That’s fitting accompaniment to the couplings and uncouplings among the four dancers. From their start, lying on the floor in a crossroads pattern, each couple passes energies back and forth, one partner rigid when the other’s slack, catching each other sometimes anti-classically by the abdomens, tumbling through and over one another in connection and disconnection. Each unit of two at times seems to pass its energies to the other duet, doubling the ocular bets by coupling the couples.

Further, the simple orange and brown costumes themselves couple with timidly venturing and retracting Etch A Sketch lines formed on the backdrops in Kathleen Tracy’s staging under the blood-warm lighting designed by Mark Stanley and Joshua Michaels. The result, overall, is a quite fascinating living linear abstract art work. Ballet with modern synapse, modern with balletic discipline, it’s an absorbing curiosity that teases us to see more as the acclaimed former New York City Ballet choreographer himself morphs into entrepreneur and his own troupe morphs into Morphoses: The Wheeldon Company.

-A.C.K.


Photo by Richard Greenhouse: Jason Hartley in Carmina Burana. Courtesy of the Washington Ballet.

DANCE: An Impressive Premiere

Elizabeth Gaither and Jonathan Jordan
in "In the Upper Room"








The Washington Ballet
Eisenhower Theater, The Kennedy Center
"In the Night," "oui, non," "In the Upper Room"
Through Oct. 29


By Alexander C. Kafka

A thrilled audience said an unmistakable "oui" to the Washington Ballet's world premiere Wednesday night of artistic director Septime Webre's "oui, non." The clever cabaret odyssey featured not only the talents of the company in great form, but also those of the acclaimed singer-actress Karen Akers, who, as a particularly poised on-stage chanteuse, was a vital part of both the work's visual and musical composition.

In Elizabeth Peyton's evocative set design, upper stage right Akers and her exceptional accompanists—pianist Don Rebic and bassist Jon Nazdin—stirringly rendered eight French cabaret standards associated with the likes of Edith Piaf and Jacques Brel. Opposite them, stage left, is the young, inquisitive, pale face and arms of a reclining young man, painted by Holly Highfill in a sort of Parisian poster style on the backdrop. Depending on the song, the scrim and Clifton Taylor's delicate lighting reveal or re-conceal the rest of the painted young man's body, his red shirt melding with the shade of Aker's elegant strapless gown. Subtle drips of paint on the backdrop image are echoed in the traces of red on the dancers off-white costumes, designed by Vandal.

With the dancers' makeup-paled faces, the effect is at once lovely and slightly foreboding. It is as though they've emerged from the world of the painted young man. The pallid tones, and the faint blood suggestion of the reds mix memorably into the musical palette of romance hard-won, volatile, fleeting, and wistfully recalled. The echo is of tenuous ties, fleeting eras, and mortality.

And just what do we make of this young man in the background anyway, gazing at us almost testingly? Is he voyeur? Are the dancers figures of his imagination? Of his dreams? Might we even take the leap and interpret him as the alter ego of Webre himself?

In couples, trios, or small groups, the dancers treated graciously Webre's seasoned blend of ballet and jazz, which ranges from almost raucously spirited in "Sympathique," in which Brianne Bland is lofted and tossed boyantly and gamely about by Jason Hartley, Jonathan Jordan, and Jared Nelson; to quasi-acrobatic in the "Padam, Padam" trio of those same three men; to the intensely intimate "Ne Me Quitte Pas," exquisitely partnered by Nelson and Elizabeth Gaither. In a smart, sensitive, and strangely apt touch, four dancer couples don't dance at all but simply cluster around Akers, now center stage, for her typically refined but quite straightforward contralto rendering of Brel's "La Chanson Des Vieuxs Amants." It's as if, in the painted poster world of the boite du nuit, word is deed is movement is music, all part and parcel of this peculiar parlor of cuddles and quibbles, ardor, coquetry, and tristesse.

There were some minor rough edges to the ensemble work, as in "Mon Dieu," but, mon dieu, it was nothing to get worked up about and I'd much prefer those rough edges to sacrificing even an ounce of the great gusto with which the dancers approached this challenging and richly textured choreography. Other companies will line up, I suspect, for permission to use this work. And they should. They will regret rien.

Lovers are also the focus of "In the Night," Jerome Robbins' elegant 1970 consideration—to Chopin Nocturnes here superbly performed by Scott Dettra—of the variations and evolutions of romance. We meet three couples, who dance before a starry backdrop. Let us call them, in order of appearance, the Orbits (Gaither and Nelson), who circle each other in sweet, somewhat agitated desire; the more stately Parallels (Erin Mahoney-Du and Runqiao Du), who move that way, often literally and figuratively in step; and the quite tense Centrifugals (Sona Kharatian and Luis Torres), who seem to have a stormier relationship of partings and reunitings, mismeasurings, belittlings, and embellishings. In dapper suits and dresses of browns, rusts, blacks, and grays, the three couples eventually encounter each other and mingle a bit, and it's a revelatory few moments because it's only upon that interaction that they seem to comprehend their coupleness and retreat into their separate intimacies with a new maturity and calm. In all, a cultured, thoughtful, and insightful work, delivered here with fine pace, grace, and emotional conveyance.

Topping off this extraordinary evening was Twyla Tharp's demanding 1986 work "In the Upper Room," the title drawn (I learned from Suzanne Carbonneau's helpful program notes) from Tharp's feeling, on hearing a Mahalia Jackson gospel song, that it seemed "to climb so high it pushed through the roof" like "an empty attic, a place of last resort, where one takes one's treasures and puts them up for very special public view."

The nine-section work is set to a wonderful score by Philip Glass. (I know we called it, controversially, minimalism back then, but now that pop radio consists of former boy- and girl- group members huskily talking dirty to their drum boxes, this music sounds positively lush.) The striking Santo Loquasto-designed set actually is minimalistic, except that it's buffered in a constant and quite thick fog-machine cloud from which the dancers emerge, and into which they disappear, with quick and quiet dispatch. They are costumed in striped suits that simultaneously hint at prison, Vaudeville, and a pajama party. But as Jennifer Tipton's recreated lighting becomes gradually brighter and more distinctly beamed—almost in the style of a Renaissance heavens-and-earth painting—the black and white stripes give way to at first spots, then patches, then whole outfits of bright pink and salmon shades.

The choreography's speed; its idiomatic mix of ballet, modern, circus, majorette, and lindy type movements; the dancers' somewhat manic, jubilant, and other-worldly energies; and the accompanying music, light, and costume colors have a profound and cumulative intoxicating effect. To me, the dancers appear to be some slightly other species freed from whatever prison, immaturity, false maturity, overwork, or other exploitation they've just fled from. Footed in assorted sneakers and ballet slippers, coming and going in a relentless and complicated scheme of shifts, groupings, and movement tropes, it's as if they'd taken Merce Cunningham, Paul Taylor, Barnum & Bailey, and the Dallas Cowboy cheerleaders hostage, given them too many espressos, and locked them in a gymnasium until they created a dance they could all sign off on.

The company became these creatures in great spirits and great form, capping with athletic confidence an evening that was, from start to finish, a genuine treat.