Swan Lake, Montana

bluebird, bluebird

Alicia Markova as Bluebird. Photo by Carl Van Vechten. October 6, 1940.

from "The Truth About God" by Anne Carson

God's Work

Moonlight in the kitchen is a sign of God.
The kind of sadness that is a black suction pipe extracting you
from your own navel and which the Buddhists call

"no mindcover" is a sign of God.
The blind alleys that run alongside human conversation
like lashes are a sign of God.

God's own calmness is a sign of God.
The surprisingly cold smell of potatoes or money.
Solid pieces of silence.

From these diverse signs you can see how much work remains to do.
Put away your sadness, it is a mantle of work.

Lone Ranger Religion

Disguised as a book review, this witty discourse on Lone Ranger Religions by my professor friend in NYC discusses issues of spiritual authority among the Big Three versus the polytheists. Harry (writing under an alias here) is a leader in the drug decriminalization movement and one of the sweetest iconoclasts I know. Although only half Irish, he can soberly drink any of you under the table and regale you with stories until your eyes close and the drool is leaking out of your mouth. He is currently doing research on the relation between national marijuana arrest rates and race. Makes San Francisco look pretty damn good. Watch out New Yorkers; beware Minneapolis.



ENOUGH WITH THE 'ONE GOD' STUFF


By James Foley, AlterNet. Posted September 23, 2006.

Sam Harris's book "The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason," which won the 2005 Pen Award for nonfiction, develops a smart, knowledgeable polemic about the growing dangers of all religious ideologies. Although I love Harris' rant, my personal obsession has long been with how weird monotheism is. Monotheism insists there is but one god, a man of course, alone in the universe for all eternity. Even as a child, I found this to be a crazy idea.

The Greeks and Romans, the Hindus, and the Egyptians all imagined many different gods who hang out together, the way people throughout the world do. These cultures envisioned social gods with busy existences who like pleasure, food, sex, art and other good things of life. As with people, the social ties among the gods loosely constrain their destructive impulses. Mostly these gods are so involved with each other they only sometimes notice the lesser beings, just as people only sometimes notice their household animals. The multiple gods of great cultural systems, and the gods and spirits of many tribal cultures as well, are familiar, understandable. They project the human world into the sky, the same way science fiction does (except, of course, science fiction understands it is offering fiction).

But monotheism posits one omnipotent, lonely sucker all by himself -- "the sky god" as Gore Vidal once called him. The first five books of the Hebrews' Bible reveal, not surprisingly, that the sky god is often angry, jealous, vengeful, and even murderous -- regularly toying with, manipulating and punishing the puny beings he creates to worship and amuse him. Not surprisingly, he's a self-absorbed ascetic who invents for his "children" bizarre, impossible-to-comply-with rules governing a multitude of tiny details of daily life. Sometimes he goes berserk about minor infractions; frequently he ignores major violations of his own rules. He's the original bad father, threatening awful punishments, with no wife, lover, siblings, friends, co-workers, neighbors or relatives to reign him in.

Early Christians and then Muslims added to monotheism the great creative innovation of the promise of eternal life. A person gets to live forever if, and only if, that person closely follows the sky god's rules. This made monotheism much easier to sell, especially when coupled with the offer of extra credit toward salvation for converting others. It also made monotheism fantastically effective in motivating, inspiring, controlling and ruling people. Fueled by the monotheists' inexhaustible missionary zeal, in nearly 2,000 years this peculiar ideology has spread throughout much of the globe.

Here in the high-tech futuristic 21st century, the punitive, vengeful, sky god is as strong and legitimate as he's been in a long time. Modernity, it turns out, was no cure for monotheism. If anything, it increases extremism, especially -- but never only -- among the dispossessed. And now in the Middle East we have the volatile blend of pissed-off Jews, Muslims, and Christians, each convinced they possess an a iron-clad mandate from their one and only angry god. Mixed in as well are many weapons, lots of oil, and the dangerous, born-again idiocy of George W. Bush and other prominent Republicans. All this is concentrated on the turf that monotheists everywhere see as their origin, their home, their "holy land."

Present-day America's most popular form of lunatic monotheism -- fundamentalist, evangelical Protestantism (and especially end-of-days Christianity with tens of millions of believers convinced that Jesus is returning soon) -- is deeply obsessed with the holy land. Crazed Christian fundamentalists love it when crazed Jewish warriors battle it out with crazed Islamic warriors. The Pat Robertsons regard the wars as win-win and ordinary believers see them as signs that the saved will soon be lifted to heaven. Unfortunately, these fundamentalist Christians now have enormous influence over the foreign policy of the most powerful nation in the world.

Most monotheists want governments to punish people who fail to obey some of the sky god's ascetic rules. Even moderate, middle-of-the-road monotheists -- like the Roman Catholic Church -- pressure governments to criminalize and punish homosexuality, drug use and abortion. The large and growing numbers of Christian, Muslim and Jewish fundamentalists have far grander ambitions.

Inevitably, some prominent believers turn out to have long been hypocrites, liars and secret sinners -- adulterers, gamblers, drug users, homosexuals. But hypocrisy poses no threat to the monotheists who say the hidden sins demonstrate the awful power of the evils they battle. The self-righteous condemn the sins, of course, but they actually approve of the lies, insisting that "hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue -- to the one heavenly lord.

Monotheists, especially in scary and desperate times like our own, easily hate other monotheisms and often loath variants of their own brand. And while they have often been happy to butcher polytheists by the wagonload, monotheists do not ordinarily hate polytheists (except when armed and dangerous). Traditionally, monotheists have regarded pagans as primitive or backward peoples who just don't know any better. But they, the other monotheists and the apostates, do know better, or should.

The historic battles within monotheism are legendary: Hebrews vs. Christians, Sunnis vs. Shiites, Catholics vs. Protestants, Lutherans vs. Calvinists, Church of England vs. dissenters, Puritans vs. Baptists, and so many others. Currently some Islamic extremists have a hard time deciding who they despise more: Is it the evil Christian and Jewish heretics, or is it the evil Muslims heretics? So much heresy, so little time.

For monotheism, it always comes down to heresy, to the rejection of orthodoxy. Starting perhaps with Zoroastrianism, each monotheism itself began as a heresy, instantly generating its own orthodoxy. Heresy -- free thought and choosing to reject the rules -- is the primal offense against the monotheists' conception, and love, of their solitary deity.

The chief authoritarian ideologies of the 20th century were secular and even anti-religious. They are not gone, but they are exhausted. Now, in our global warming, nuclear bomb-loaded world, especially in the United States and the Middle East, we face an older, far more popular and durable ideology: the angry god as mandate and role model.

Like Mark Twain, Bertrand Russell and others before him, Sam Harris insists that the basic premises and literal texts of monotheism are so authoritarian and repressive that people who believe them also easily and frequently support all sorts of other repressive causes. For evidence, see the last 2,000 years of history, or tomorrow's newspaper.

at the crossroads

I’m not a regular to the Ethnic Dance Festival—for years it has had to compete with the school play, the orchestral recital, a birthday celebration or the annual end-of-the-school-year getaway booked 12 months in advance.

But kids grow, the school schedule changes, and now that the children in question are teenagers, the getaway no longer seems as tantalizing as it once did. Life evolves. Cultures do too.

That, at its heart, is the essence and genius of the Ethnic Dance Festival, conceived in 1978 by the San Francisco Hotel Tax Fund as the first multicultural, city-sponsored dance festival in the country: culture evolves. The founders may not have had their philosophy entirely sorted at the outset, and in the 80s the Festival sometimes threatened to adopt the milquetoast tone of “It’s A Small World, After All”. But it was only a matter of years before the wisdom of anthropologists and the knowledge of dance preservationists joined with the ethnic pride and physical joy of local community dance troupes to fashion a festival with cultural sophistication as well as down-home fun. Today, it is nearly as much a part of San Francisco’s psyche as Bay to Breakers or Halloween in the Castro

This year I made it to Program 2 (out of three programs) and I was reminded how valuable and often spellbinding the Festival is. If you don’t believe that the Bay Area is both a crossroads and repository for dance traditions from around the globe, glance at the three-week lineup. You’ll quickly know better.

Saturday’s program was a seamlessly executed wave of dance that ran the gamut from the sublime (Hearan Chung) to the dutiful (Kantuta, Ballet Folklorico de Bolivia) to the improbably adept (Barbary Coast Cloggers). Nothing stays long on stage, so if your taste is threatened or you don’t like the sight of nimble beer bellies jiggling above clacking feet, all you need do is take a cat nap and in 10 minutes, max, the next act is up. And if “act” seems like a misplaced term here, it isn’t. The Festival has nurtured a form that straddles vaudeville’s parade of skits and entertainments and the more sober procession of high art. It’s a style that has breathed light-heartedness into the art scene even as it insists on the highest production values.

I won’t catalog the entire gamut from the Festival’s second Saturday. The preponderance of it was good, largely convincing, and when it wasn’t, the dances were nevertheless interesting, and occasionally that was thanks to the very ways in which they fell short.

For instance, I had difficulty with “Oya: The Female Warrior” by the Afro-Cuban Arenas Dance Company but was oddly grateful for the internal conversation it spurred. The movement in the dance is drawn from the mystical Orisha tradition originating in Nigeria and brought to Cuba by African slaves. It’s a dance style that is as demanding as it is sensuous. It ripples and athletically bounds, often at the same time, and requires a sinuous authority to shape the body into both the dancer and the danced. The steps are a means to transformation, not the end point.

To their credit, the troupe gave it their all, and the central dancer in a rainbow-hued skirt danced up a minor dust storm. But they as a group they never captured the mysterious wonder of dance as mystical ritual. Part of it had to do with physical limitations--several performers had tight or unruly shoulders and spines that trapped the action in the upper body. These dancers either under- or over-performed the steps with an almost earnest sense of industry. (As a coping mechanism, this struck me as quintessentially American.)

But more centrally, the question arose: how do American dancers tackle dance that is fundamentally animist? Few among us access nature’s spirit world with any fluency; most among us don’t even believe such a world exists. Can dancers from our culture be taught to embody spirit messengers from the realm of tornados, thunder and lightening? Or are the religious dimensions of the steps doomed? And If the mystical dimension leaks away from the dance, is it still Afro-Cuban dance, or is it truer to call it Afro-Cuban-American dance? So then, if the Orisha soul fades, can American dancers fill those Orisha steps with some new spirit? The ferocity of global warming, perhaps? The anger of distant war?

Call me a degraded purist, but I’m a sucker for the dances at either end of the pole—the happy fifth cousin to the original that has burrowed back into the form from our place of louche secularism and found something holy and hot, or the sublime gem of a still living tradition. The fifth cousin was Hui Tama Nui’s “Nui, The Tree of Life.” The gem was Hearan Chung’s “Shin Kai Deh Shin Mu.”

The young women of Hui Tama Nui, short, tall, rail-thin or undulantly chubby, rotated their hips and ferociously rocked their pelvises back and forth below their coconut-cup bras and raffia skirts with a combined pride in their bodies and in their mastery of movement. They also danced their group line dance with a sensual frankness heartening for any feminist wondering if women really can successfully take back eros from the seedy maw of the porn industry (and soft-porn advertising), and endow it with Dionysian glory. These performers can and did, and the men in the troupe celebrated right alongside them. The women pulled it off with what struck me as a post-post-modern sensibility—they seemed to know they were re-inhabiting Polynesian dance, but they did so without an ounce of vamping, self-consciousness or apology. Their awareness played on their faces, and they cannily revealed that, as young women, they were navigating the difficult shoals of sexuality, power and joy by drawing on ancestral tradition. Not only were they finding their way but they were celebrating en route. Quite an accomplishment in the age of Paris and Brittany.

I first met Chung for an interview in her South Bay apartment some years ago, and although she could only mark her movements that day, her marrow-deep mastery of Korean dance showed in every bend of the knee, lift of the wrist and bow of the head. Her musicality was impeccable, and she decoded some of the mysteries of Korean dance rhythms and the importance of the breath to the movement arc and courtly, 4/4 meter. Not even her jeans and tee shirt or her extreme modesty diminished the impact of her artistry or could hide her standing in Korea as a "holder of important invisible properties". Seeing her on stage some weeks later deepened the impression: Chung is a sublime artist, like gold in a fast stream.

For Program 2 she performed “Shin Kai Deh Shin Mu,” a shamanistic dance that draws on ancient Korean practices and contemporary shamanist, or muist, rites. Historically, shamans in Korea have been women, called mudang, and they are the ones who mediate between realms and assist the dying on their journey into the world of souls. According to the program notes, every aspect of Chung’s solo was rife with symbolism, from her layered white robe, her headdress, the white cloth she unfurled (the path of the soul) to the paper wands with their wavey tresses that represented money to abet the spirit’s passage. When she shook those wands she was keeping the devil at bay.

While few of us in the audience could say precisely what the symbolic import of each element was, Chung plunged us exquisitely and quietly into another realm where the air, the earth and the light seemed filled with gnosis. She flicked her sleeves, threw her hands up then let them descend slowly, eyes cast down, the material and immaterial now magically bound. She conjured, then rested, dashed then pulled herself up. The rising and falling, the fast moves and rests were acts that offered access to another world, like the magic door Ofelia draws and penetrates in “Pan’s Labyrinth.” And even if we didn’t know precisely what that world was or we deny other realms even exist, Chung made us believers in the power of dance to communicate what words alone can’t say.

Learned Hand

"The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure it is right."

Judge Billings Learned Hand, 1944, US Court of Appeals, Second Circuit, 1924-1951.

pierre le feu

Pierre (aka Le Fou) is on fire now that he has a new home. I think of it as his master suite (some might call it a double wide) with the equivalent of four sofa beds (three dowels reaching end to end and one blanched manzanita branch) and an all-night diner off in the corner near the sunken bath (a silver soap dish).

Although getting him to move was more work than getting the men here to sweep, I ingeniously mated the old cage door with the new, took all the bells and whistles out of the small green loaner and put them into the suite. I then tantalized him with an entire spray of millet (= to a big fat belgian chocolate bar),

Next I laid on the floor, under the glass table, facing the ceiling and waited. I also watched. He'd peek into the doublewide then back off, stand behind the green bars and look longingly in at the canary seed. It reminded me of ballet satire, although which I can't say. I'll have to leave that to the Trocs. Soon he dipped his beak into the new air, but then retreated and affected nonchalance, as though the new cage might disappear if he let on he knew it was there, waiting for him.

I admit that at this point I thought briefly about social theories of control (Foucault), behavior modification (I'm putty in the presence of mint ice cream), and how we discuss freedom as though it were the ultimate Big Mac, this most paradoxical and elusive of virtues. But then Pierre took the leap and he was in. Freedom, he made clear, includes the large cage that protects him from the predator while offering lettuce, seed, water and space enough to dash from wing to wing. Like a young dancer on the Opera House stage, the small fellow stared out with an air of awe and wonderment, watching the trees and listening to the distant trills. Then, for the next hour he flew across his cage. During periodic intermissions, he swelled happily and sang.




The Greeks tend to have multiple words for things that matter, like beauty and friendship. I went in search for the roots behind the word "freedom." Here's a bit of what I discovered at http://wihaz.wordpress.com/2007/05/06/on-freedom-ii/:

"The old Germanic words “free” and “freedom” can be traced to the Indo-European *prijos, meaning “dear”, “beloved”, “one’s own”. Akin to this word are the Sanskrit priyas and the Persian (Avestan) fryo, which have the same meaning.

When it comes to Celtic and Germanic sources, we can find the Welsh rhydd, “free” and the Germanic (Gothic) frijon, “to love”, “to be fond of”, frijaz, “beloved”, “belonging to the loved ones”, “not in bondage”, “free”, freis, “free” and freihals, “freedom”, as well as the Old English freo, “wife”. As I mentioned in my Hex magazine article Days of the Week , it has been suggested that the original meaning of *frijaz was probably something like ”from the own clan”, from which a meaning ”being a free man, not a serf” developed.

Also related to the Indo-European root word *prijos are the Gothic frijonds, the Old English freond, the English friend and the German Freund. It has been suggested that in Celtic and Germanic cultures these words were applied to the free members of one’s clan (as opposed to slaves). There is also a connection with the Old English freod, “affection, friendship”, friga “love”, friðu “peace” and the Old Norse friðr and Frigg “wife of Odin”, literally “beloved” or “loving”.

When one seeks and finds the cultural connections of these words and their derivatives, a clearer picture emerges. The terms “free” and “freedom” are revealed to be closely connected not to the modern selfish notions of “doing whatever one wants”, but to communal living and to finding the most intimate expressions of one’s relationships with their loved ones, family, clan, tribe, or nation. This is understandable as real freedom can only be meaningful in the context of society, as the ancient pagan ideas on freedom and responsibility have attested.

When it comes to those who think that new, modern definitions of freedom are better suited for them, I might add that they can always look at the Greek word idios, meaning “one’s own”, “private”, from which comes the word idiot, “the man who thinks of nothing but his own interest”."

ReCreation

Dance En Creation
SF International Arts Festival
Program II
Robert Moses’ Kin
Compagnie Li-Sangha
Mhaise Productions
May 26, 2007


It was 9:30 pm on a Saturday. After finding a seat at Dance Mission for the late performance in the final days of the SF International Music and Dance Festival, I flipped through the program. I turned the pages this way, and then turned them back. I repeated the action in reverse, then started all over again. I looked at Iris’ booklet, thinking my program had fallen out, or that I was handed the wrong set of papers. But, no, we seemed to have the same thing--a cover with inserts for each of the three different companies about to perform. With nothing else to do, I poured through the background information, and buried in each page I found the key--the names of the dances to come.

I admit I would have preferred a concise road map of the performance with dance names and the list of dancers in the order in which they appeared. That’s what I’m used to and what I have come to expect. And while I urge the organizers to improve their programs next year (especially to jettison the mission statements that cluttered the press packet), as I was driving back to the East Bay over a freeway span miraculously rebuilt in mere weeks, I saw that there was something noteworthy in the fact that my expectations--or to be even more precise, my presumptions--had been challenged by this small matter.

We in the West can get pretty uppity about how things should be. Pretty soon we start levitating above people who do it differently or for whom the world happens to work in another way. In a festival dedicated to the African Diaspora, the matter of the hard-to-find program line-up became a symbol of how so many of us automatically assume the world should function--efficiently and with consummate linearity. Often implicit in such expectations is the naive as well as arrogant belief that these values represent the highest good. We trust that others around the globe (or even at home) agree with them (even if these same people don’t know they agree). If their ideas truly differ we may decide there’s something wrong with them, and, in the worst case, they become our enemy. That may mean we need to start a campaign against them--enemies being dangerous--and possibly invade and thereby liberate them from their benightedness. This is the childish but deadly logic of imperial power. And it can manifest itself over small things as well as large.

Driving home along that stretch of freeway, which circles above the sewage plant, I noted how happy I was to have a sutured road and a functioning sewage plant: I’m not one to scorn modern engineering. But I’m not one to ignore the role of scientific breakthroughs, like the compass, in the rise of colonialism, either, or the microchip in the current plunder of the Democratic Republic of Congo for coltan, a by-product of columbite tantalite. This is a mineral that, refined, turns into $100 a pound heat-resistant powder vital for cell phones, VCRs and computer chips. These thoughts led me to contemplate how no continent has suffered as Africa has suffered from the arrogance, racism and greed of empires or empire wannabes, whether Portuguese, French, British, Dutch, Italian, Belgian, U.S., Soviet or Chinese, while benefiting so little from modern technological advances, modern infrastructure and modern democracy.

This line of thinking wasn’t on the night’s agenda exactly, but the ghosts of 600 years of colonialism haunted the theater in an evening of often beautiful and sometimes chilling dance. The spirits were violently and explicitly present in the intensely physical work by Compagnie Li-Sangha in a dance entitled “Mona-Mambu,” where the quixotic, vicious life in Congo-Brazzaville was embodied as shards that seemed ready at almost every instant to fragment into perilous chaos. In keen contrast, the South African duo Mhayise performed a mythopoetic duet about initiation in the midst of what seemed like the conquest of the Transvaal by European settlers--figures implied by the sound of galloping horse hooves and the neighing of animals as they reared. This pair quietly evoked the power of life cycles to adapt and persist amid the destructive forces of history.

While the myriad faces of Africa (a multiethnic world as layered and complex as our own) were richly captured by the two troupes, Robert Moses' new untitled work gave us a view of the Diaspora in the New World. Full of depth and quiet, melancholic beauty, Moses’ composition sifted African dance steps and Indonesian lunges through his modern movement vocabulary. The result was a thoughtfully recombined and deeply contemporary vision of our own multiethnic reality.

Li-Sangha put together a perfect storm of elements: humor, competitiveness, sexuality, sorrow, play and explosive fury in a posse of young men. Their performance incorporated various languages, multiple dance styles and different approaches to politics, from the ballot box to internecine warfare to pack behavior that slipped from light-hearted to deadly and back. If you’ve seen contemporary crafts coming out of Africa, ingeniously created from junk like bottle caps and old flip flops, you’ve found artifacts that ply time-honored craft with post-industrial detritus. It’s that reinvention of old world amid the new--and the provisional character of reinventing from so little--that Li-Sangha evoked in their dance.

French language dominated the piece, interspersed with an African language I couldn’t name. Death lurked in the shadows, around the bend, even threatened metaphorically in the ballot box. Bach was juxtaposed with a joyous Congolese rendition of Catholic prayer, which ran up against the sounds of a Pygmy jaw harp. The Bible was contrasted to the Koran, drum percussion to the percussive battery of machine gun fire. The Congo, the troupe was telling us, is a land of tense, even irreconcilable oppositions. Tension was broken with humor and then retightened by uncertainty, whether in “shootings” that proved to be horseplay, which, ultimately, may or may not have been deadly, or an ominous ballot box that contained, in the end, not ballots but beer. This relieved anxiety on the one hand but heightened it as the hope of democracy shattered.

The physical language had the same crazy-quilt and paradoxical charge, brazenly athletic one moment (threatening or merely dynamic?) and ritualized the next; intensely modern, yet rooted in a deeply African understanding of the expressive body as an instrument to be played from crown of the head to flat of the foot. As a group, Li-Sangha also conjured up the legions of bright, bored and mischievous youth in any modern city, with the difference that these guys find themselves suddenly thrust into the anarchy of warfare. They made us feel the tenuousness that haunts ravaged and underdeveloped countries as no dance has communicated to me before. They also physicalized the unconquerable nature of the human spirit, which has almost as much need for laughter and invention as for food. According to the program notes, choreographer Orchy Nzaba named the piece for a Congolese expression that means the ability to see reality with clear-sightedness. It was an apt name.

Mhayise Production’s “Umthombi,” meaning “male adolescent,” approached the afflictions of colonialism with a timelessness and ritualized beauty, along with an adept use of silence, that reminded me of butoh’s response to the abomination of the A-bomb. Choreographer Musa Hlatshwayo, tall and elegant, danced beside the small, boyish Ngceba Nzama, an 11th grader from Durban, who attends the Sivanada Technical High School in KwaMashu. From the sounds of an owl, water and a distant drum to the clouds of flour that filled the air toward the end of the work, “Umthombi” honored life’s cycles. Colonialism existed as an unseen force, as cruel and impersonal as drought, or blight, and, as such, part of the existential challenge of a people to endure, outsmart and overcome their conditions.

Hlatshwayo, the initiator and elder, was dressed in ceremonial, rustic fashion, while Nzama was outfitted in shorts and a one-shouldered shirt reminiscent of the Prodigal Son but also contemporary. The older man led the way with calm, even detached wisdom, while the frightened younger man, in a mix of initiatory fear and situational terror, mirrored the older dancer in jerky, unraveling spurts, like someone jumping out of his skin or attempting to disappear. Yet transformation for the young man was underway, and this was apparent through a sense of journeying propelled by a large, even mysterious, purpose. Physically we saw the initiatory process take place as Nzama’s hand grew progressively more expressive and his arms became eloquent and wing-like, like a molting bird.

Moses has a great gift for shaping space with elegance and subtlety, and here he combined that with his sophisticated approach to music; the music served both as a map for the dance and as counterpoint to the dance’s internal rhythms. The effect, with shadows lancing the stage space, dancers performing West African steps of gathering or cleansing with an air of remembering, was to create a quiet pensée on the Diaspora. Full of ancestral echoes, the movement was not denatured but reimagined. As in Moses' very best work, it signaled a wistful belief in the transubstantiation of historic pain and sorrow into living beauty.

Pierrot Le Fou

I asked for a bird, and received a Parisian Canary. For the moment I'm calling him Le Fou, since, as Sasha says, he looks crazy, like something perpetually trapped in a windtunnel. He's tiny and his feathers are yolk yellow, white, charcoal and bark brown, all scrambled about in a frilly whirl that ought to become inspiration for next spring's fashion. He came to us wounded--his girlfriend, maybe sensing his impending departure, attacked his foot, and he dripped small amounts of blood on his perch during his first 24 hours. All the same he began singing the very day he arrived, which I took as a sign that he approved of his new surroundings. He's warmed to the call of sparrows and finches through the open door, and hasn't seemed to mind the crasser caterwaul of the foot-long crows that appear like inky blots in the air above the garden. (For the moment, the jays have disappeared.) I take him out in his cage for air, but worry as the overfed robins and the wily squirrels begin circling in. Animal curiosity or something more predatory? I don't wait to find out. I bring Le Fou inside.

This morning I put on the radio, having read that this species loves classical music. Now Fou is singing in loving, if independent, accompaniment. The song that projects grandly from his tiny mouth is exquisitely pitched and variously phrased. He inquisitively chirps as though to say--So? So? and then launches into complex arias. Right now the local classical station is playing a segment called "For The Birds," and Fou is alternately silenced and provoked to elaborate song. He really let go during the Swan Lake Waltz No. 2.

The Parisian Canary is solitary, timid and a bit high strung. I know the type.

His flying is limited to a great deal of horizontal dashing, the kind Mark Morris' dancers often do in chorus. And then of a sudden he'll flutter his wings with flourish, also like one of Mark's dancers, and remind you that beauty, joy and pleasure arrive suddenly, like bubbles from below, and just as suddenly are gone.

Mourning/Doves

A week ago I noticed commotion in the palm tree outside my window. I moved to the glass slowly and watched two creatures darting to and from a branch. A pair of mourning doves were frantically carting plant matter to the tree and hastily building a nest. But what a nest. Twigs seemed to spill out into a shapeless and carelessly crafted shanty, like shelter one would erect, stranded in the woods, as a hurricane rolled in. Next thing, the lady bird sat down, swelling like a cartoon of herself. What happened to planning? I wondered.

The idyll was short-lived. The neighboring bluejays didn't take kindly to the interlopers. Within hours they began strafing the area around the tree and screeching with ballistic aggression that, at times, resembled a diabolical "Hah". Mr. Mourning Dove stood anxiously on the edge of the palm frond, nervously watching Ms. Dove. Was there a military action in the works--a skirmish, perhaps? Or, worse, an outright territorial dispute? I had no doubt that the jays, twice the size of the doves and with a belligerent disposition to match, would win.

The next day the nest was deserted.

Expect To Feel Your Legs: Notes on a Winter Butoh Performance

It’s disarming when the familiar becomes strange (as when you’ve been sitting too long and can’t feel your legs). And that’s what happened the night in February I was unable to find the 2800 block of wily Mariposa Street. This is a street that appears and disappears rather randomly along its route. It didn’t help that every instinct in me was off that night and each turn I made ill-begotten. Even my map made a mess of things, and the young gas attendant with his broken English and intelligent eyes steered me badly. When I found the theater, 10 minutes past show time, just up from the gas station, I mentally hit myself in the head.The theater had been hiding in plain sight.

As happens, my weird circumnavigations were soon echoed by the alogical, discursive but resonant journey taken by Shinichi Iova-Koga in the solo show Milk Traces. Iova-Koga is the founder of inkBoat and a performer of preternatural expressiveness and sensitivity.

I think of his brand of butoh as the visual corrollary of reading cuneiform writing with the help of a faded translation key. His works resemble the efforts of other butoh artists, but what sets him apart is how he’s willing to plunge deep enough into the unconscious to reach the strange terrain of the archetypical, endowing single instants of experience with waves of meaning and often disturbing beauty. With little fanfare, these moments can take one to the stratosphere and back, leading to such discursive thoughts as the nature of space/time and whether, as some physicists think, multiple dimensions exists simultaneously, folding in on each other like origami or the cerebral cortex. Could that mean that Iova-Koga’s poetry is able to touch some other space/time in a dimension at our elbows? At moments, as when he sat on an aluminum chair back and peered into an old suitcase, took out a delicate tea cup and drank, it seemed he did.

Here is a man who can fall over backwards in a chair repeatedly and make each instance newly clownish and shocking. He rolls and, tied to a vine of red cloths, finds his physical limits anew. His leaps are brought up short by the tether that smacks him back to his starting place. But rather than leaving us with a reductive image of freedom versus entanglement, Iova-Koga creates a deeper, more nuanced picture of leaving and return--a cycle in which bounding and rebound are equally valid, of comparable interest, and unspoiled by Romantic hierarchies.

Objects, too, are given poetic richness, from an egg and an onion to the almost physical sound of crickets. Kimono are not mere kimono; they are mythical coats oddly cut, layered or suspended. They echo a culture, its practices, its codes and the breach of those codes. They are also just the simple things themselves.

If one had any doubt that this is a master poet who can pluck runes from the air and make them materialize before us, Iova-Koga produced a small blackboard as the haunting performance came to an end and began to make crisp chicken scratches on it. Before long words took shape out of the chaos of lines: WHERE ARE YOU? I WAIT.



inkBoat performs a new work, Our Breath is as Thin as A Hummingbird's Spine, in July in SF.

From inkBoat’s website:

“Each motion or action should contain physical or psychological risk. Don’t be a technique automaton! Only a dance on the edge of control reveals the honest life. Fall into everything (or nothing). Our work is to transform (sometimes abruptly, sometimes gently) the space within the body. The mind is a place with a lot of mud. Learn to shine from within that mud.

Following imagery and surrendering to the moment, we’ll work in solo, duet and group improvisations. Through intensive reduction, our personal body reality and existence clarifies to reveal beauty, grotesqueness and humor.

Work with necessary tension, releasing the unnecessary to let the dance become permeable and malleable. We work from the center (tanden) to move the far-reaching limbs. Develop listening in relation to time, space and motion.

Expect to feel your legs."

The Hunger Artist

"So I found / that hunger was a way/ of persons outside windows/ that entering takes away." Emily Dickinson

No one who attended Thursday’s production of Humansville, or any other night’s for that matter, saw exactly the same show, not because some were privy to disasters or bits of tawdriness others missed. It was because director/choreographer Joe Goode, maker of wry, ambling tales of quotidian yearning, gave us choices—of doors to enter, scenes to view, order to follow and narrative organization to build as we progressed from one Humansville vignette or moment to another. The instructions were simple: enter by one of two doors. Walk around for a half hour. Each segment would be repeated three times, presumably affording all viewers a chance to see each of the dramas. Then take a seat.

I chose to enter via the park, having an old allergy to crowds, and as I made the choice I was already embarking on a self-conscious assessment of why I was choosing what. I plunged into the darkened Forum space and immediately encountered cellist Joan Jeanrenaud on a small platform. Standing a long time listening to her haunting harmonic composition, I nearly forgot that time was limited. I snapped to and headed off to my right, disarmed to find that her music, thanks to the soundman Greg Kuhn, was even bigger miked into the adjacent area. There I found a comically static and visually complex scene with Marit Brook-Kothlow and Felipe Barrueto-Cabello, impassive and chair-bound, as the anguished-couple-who-will-never-meet-soul-to-soul.

Soon I understood that it was precisely this kind of dislocation of sound and image that gave an edgy charge to the installation. Several times I noted in myself a Pavlovian hunger to scramble after what was hidden from view yet heard, suggested in fragments in a mirror, or filmed one place and projected elsewhere. Human yearning was built into the very physicality of the installation and endowed Humansville with juicy paradoxes. The conceptual framework also gave the production heft, making vignettes feel more substantial.

Since his artistic beginnings in the Bay Area, Goode’s work has been obsessed with the questions of what does it mean to be a gay man who hungers for intimacy? What is true desire? What is intimacy between men, between gay men and women? In Humansville, Goode asserts there is connection in the mere effort to connect.

Although solemn-faced Brook-Kothlow and Barrueto-Cabello were seated four feet from each other and never interacted, their shared plight did, to a degree, connect them. A projection of the moon hung above to their right, and words accumulated over each head: “patient” for Brook-Kothlow; “itchy” for Barrueto-Cabello; “gives everything” for her; “too upset to notice” for him. The anguished face of a woman in a headscarf crying an extended, silent cry flamed up. The sadness of the lovers’ dilemma, the frustration of human longing—it was all there. But Goode is not one to get too lugubrious. On an opposing screen, video images of a seductive woman appeared: “Touch me,” she insisted. People touched. “Thank you,” she replied. “Touch me here,” she continued. “Thank you,” she purred.

My next foray led me to a place where irony and American gothic merged in prototypical Goode fashion. Around the corner, Jessica Swanson was holding court in a suburban 50s bedroom (lattice and rose wallpaper), personifying a shrill Bobby-soxer with a routine of iconic pin-up gestures, gasps and coos that she engaged when not on the phone to her boyfriend. A little window in the set allowed passersby to peer into the scene. Simultaneously, we could overhear a harpie (Patrica West) screeching in another alcove to a maitre’d about botched reservations, forshadowings, perhaps, of the teenager as middle-aged woman.

Further on, two men (Melecio Estrella and Alexander Zendzian) dressed in only boxers were installed in adjacent cells with what seemed to be Piramus and Thisbe-style holes through which to talk. Although trapped and separate, one asked the other how he’d managed to escape. They hurled themselves against the floor and wall, performed neck stands and heaved and fell. Slender rectangular windows in the rear wall let us see audience members passing along a hallway dividing the installations. Suddenly we all became voyeurs, peering in on the action, as well as the viewed.

As part two got underway, the audience seated, Jeanneraud resumed her composition, echoing the beginning. We were presented with video images of the lovers’ faces merging in an oddly literal fashion, a presage of the over-earnest hunger for connection that stuck to part two like flypaper.

That hunger was especially apparent in Goode’s voiceover. He brought us back to the theme of unbounded female giving versus male withholding, but with a smarmy tone that suggested there’s more to the story than even he knows, a recurring problem in his texts: “She makes me believe that sharing is possible,” he gushed. The tale about a sexy young guy (Estrella) playing peek-a-boo by the pool with aging peepers was similarly undigested, combining snarky cleverness with emotional piety.

But much of the ensemble dancing was forthright, and the company, with the addition of Andrew Ward, moved with a new sinewy power. The hightlight was Brook-Kothlow plastering her flesh inch by inch against elegant Barrueto-Cabello’s. In fact, it was one of the loveliest and more naked studies of human yearning I’ve seen in years. Set design was brilliantly realized by Erik Flatmo, with video design by Austin Forbord, lights by Jack Carpenter and costumes by Wendy Sparks.

BTW: Humansville is a real city in Missouri, population 946.

Oxbow Incident

Oxbow is a remarkable visual arts high school nestled along the Napa River in Northern California. The brainchild of arts patron Ann Hatch, it has been in full swing for almost a decade and draws students from around the country. About 45 teenagers attend at a time, progressing through various media in 11-hour days (academics are also required) that span a single semester. Weekends home are discouraged; discipline is a must. End-of-the-semester projects are white-knuckle events as serious as college-level shows.

Situated at the looping bend in the river, the school puts young artists under the tutelege of noted painters, sculptors, printmakers and mixed media artists, all the while making sure they eat according to the gospel of Alice Waters. It echoes the Ox-Bow School of Arts on the shores of Lake Michigan, which is affiliated with the Art Institute of Chicago. It also alludes to Thomas Cole's 1836 painting entitled The Oxbow.

A friend of mine, Emma, is just finishing her semester there, and Sunday three of us visited the campus to view the students' final projects. As we moved from beautiful studio to beautiful studio (designed by architect Stanley Saitowitz) we discovered that the young artists had undertaken daring personal and philosophical explorations, pushing their skills hard and striving for real mastery and depth. Repeatedly the projects revealed sharp young minds passionately focused, expressively fluent. I found their courage inspiring.

And as a dance person, I found the recurrent presence of the body in the show a thought-provoking surprise. The arts have changed radically since the advent of AIDS. As bodies began to disappear at a staggering rate, especially in the arts world, the body was no longer a second-rate player that could be taken for granted but the first and most important game in town. Whether sick or well, diminished or pumped up, the body began to be portrayed in rich and complex ways in the years that followed, and narrative became a kind of robe that revealed and obscured the form. That trend has lasted: embodied art is everywhere.

As I thought about this, I realized that the renewed primacy of the body in visual arts harkens back to the rebellions of the Bay Area School painters (led by Richard Diebenkorn, David Park, Elmer Bischoff, and Joan Brown to name a few) against Abstract Expressionism. These painters, many of whom were vets of WW II, saw the body as central to humanism in a post-Hiroshima/Auschwitz world. Today, in an increasingly violent and uncertain world, we're once again forced back to first principles; the body is where we begin.

Oxbow's kids, with not a whit of sentimentality, claimed the body with this kind of exigency, and the human form, whether in mixed media, video, paint, or sculpture, was presented as the single verifiable if still elusive reality. As our current last frontier (there will always be a new last frontier), the body is the place where culture, economy, religion, sexuality and ethics intersect. As such, it is the figurative as well as metaphoric battleground for conflict. It is also the place of redemption. These young artists seemed to know that, and their faith in the body was amazing.

Oh Henry

David Gordon’s Pick Up Performance Co(S.) Production in Dancing Henry Five
ODC Theater, San Francisco
May 17 2007

The questions Thursday were posed like the opening of a Polish joke: how many dancers does it take to perform a four-hour Shakespeare history play about a feckless war, and how long does it take them to do it?

“Dancing Henry Five” by David Gordon, eminent-grise of post-modernism, answered with sly simplicity: it takes seven dancers (plus three large dolls), a nimble narrator, and a healthy hour. No joke.

As straightforward as that sounds, Gordon’s Shakespeare reduction was created from parts as polished as old bone and put together with a comic and elegant sense of design. It dropped what was inessential (the battle of Harfleur) and kept the critical (the devastating rout of the French at Agincourt). Enormous care went into the parade of hand-held signboards that alerted us with fanfare that the show was beginning, into the flow of chairs in space, into how cloth billowed and a trio of men stood upon moving fabric like heroic ships, window frames became field tents, dancers waltzed, and irony flowed. The result was pared-down drama that succeeded in being poignant, wise and sweetly cheeky.

“Dancing Henry Five” concerns one of Shakespeare’s sorrier tales of vanity, hubris and benightedness and how, together, they find company in an almost endless war designed to strengthen a politician and church’s position at home. Greed was a primary motivator—King Henry V was manipulated by the Archbishop of Canterbury to drop progressive legislation and encouraged to seek money from abroad. In other words, he was to attack France to let the English forget their financial woes. To add nuance to the goings-on, Gordon uses as his starting point an already reduced Laurence Olivier film version of the play, which was created as a bit of propaganda during WW II. So when Setterfield speaks in tandem with dialogue from the film we get a deft conceptualist overlay of how the same events can be read anew in another age.

Our Henry at the helm is the once naughty Prince Harry, Harry of the pub and the whorehouse. As you’ll remember, he was the happy bad boy who hung out with bawdy Falstaff in Henry IV until a conversion experience and a crown turned him into a self-righteous Henry V, who renounces his dying hedonist friend and copes with the nation’s complexities through a mix of duplicity and bellicosity. The parallels to our dry-drunk born-again President are obvious yet sophisticated and made by ethereal narrator Valda Setterfield, whose lanky body is a mix of vaudevillian and May Queen. And although she ironically warns us from her station on a ladder that these are Gordon’s opinions, not hers, we believe by her knowing delivery that they’re every bit hers as well.

Before much ado, the work dives in with exquisitely simple sets that the company recycles (ladders, folding chairs, large rectangles of stripey fabric) and delectable lighting (Jennifer Tipton) to deconstruct without an ounce of jargon the messy business of Henry Five and, by association, George Two. Setterfield, who’s been married to Gordon since the 60s and is a former Ballet Rambert and Cunningham Company dancer, has the right sophistication for such a bare-bone task. With swirling pace, she moves us from point to point, compressing, summing up, letting us know what’s been omitted, drawing the parallels so the company of mostly men can sweep in and assume their posts as soldiers, countrymen and kings. They fight by way of percussively striking poles against the ground, creating a poetically spare sense of menace and foreboding. They set up long window frames as tents amid shadows and vermillion light. As for the additional women in the cast, the beautiful pixyish dancer Sadira Smith, who brings her own magic to the action, and the smooth-limbed Karen Graham inject a keen feminine irony into the proceedings, while William Walton’s symphonic score keeps us aptly locked between the clear dance beats of the Renaissance and the emotional tempests of the violent 20th century.

Gordon, who has been absent from the Bay Area a woefully long time, gnaws on the work’s contradictions deftly, like a clown who is both erudite and detached and loves chiseled language as he loves starkly elemental dance. As a contretemps between wary Renaissance states, for instance, we get the quintessential post-mod-ironic exercise: a dance with balls (a “screw off” from France in the form of a gift: a cache of tennis balls), here offered as a courtly dance that expands with the accretion of tasks (throw orange ball plus move; throw orange ball, move plus bounce once; throw orange and green balls, move, bounce twice etc….).

The dancers, dressed in striped rugby shirts with extra sleeves, upside down or draped as overskirts, plus 15th century-ish caps, were able to blend the present and past with apt irony, from the touching and canny minuet between Setterfield as English language tutor and Karen Graham as Catherine of Valois, preparing for the amorous side of political siege (“Big weddings are hell to pull off,” Setterfield remarks with typical piquancy); to the depiction of battle in which both England and France lose half their forces. Tadej Brndnik performed Henry with the right mix of boyish self-importance and wry likeability. (Other performers were Lloyd Knight, Eli McAffee, Guillermo Ortega and David Zurak.) The dancey rhythms of Walton livened up the action with suitable irony of its own and gave 21st century weight to the 15th century action.

We’ve heard the question often these last years: how does an artist make art about our dire time? Gordon’s luminously unaffected dance theater, created in 2004, offers what seems like an almost forgotten and indisputably sagacious response: he locates our tragic compulsion to repeat, often manipulated by blind self-interest couched in the name of larger good, and shows its wryly tragic results. The excuses change, the weapons grow more deadly, and the costs escalate, but the outcome is the same: death and sorrow. In the very finest dance, the elements also change, but the results don’t: beautiful movement and no small pool of enlightenment. Dancing Henry Five gave us both.

Sound Moves

Meredith Monk. May 16 2007. Kanbar Hall, San Francisco

Meredith Monk is an avant-garde aborigine. Now in her 60s she reinvents every imaginable kind of sound, whether it’s Tuva throat singing, Pygmy ululation, Bantu clicking, Balkan harmonies or the rhythms and noise of the natural world. Lucas Hoving used to tell the story of Monk in comp class at Sarah Lawrence where he taught and she went to college. When he asked his students to invent a movement phrase with a body part leading, for instance, the dancers would perform recognizable modern dance shapes, aping Graham or Limon. Monk, instead, he said, cocked her head to the side, yanked her ear up, and in a high-pitched clutter of syllables led herself across the dance floor like a wayward child being handled by an angry teacher. Hoving roared with laughter and knew instantly that Monk had a rare and magical imagination. In the ensuing decades she’s built a sound landscape so richly textured and vividly colored, so imaginatively wild and weird, that a program of Monk is both playful and also mystically austere. It reminds me of a laughing crow on the New Mexico mesa or in an otherwise empty cave.

As the intimate evening got underway in the packed Kanbar Hall, she said that the voice is the first instrument, and it is the perfect instrument to transverse gender, age, species and state. She was dressed in a simple, elegant red dress overlaid by a sheer black handkerchief-cut jacket for the first set, her long braids falling behind her, her face a mix of elf and priestess. In the second half she changed to white, and the vibrations of the color added apt counterpoint to her first playful then more mournful sets.

It was an evening of many old favorites and an audience of dance and music family—literally as well as artistically: one song was dedicated to her niece, who was in the audience. The concert opened with excerpts from “Songs from the Hill” (1977), “Light Songs,” and “Volcano Songs” and in the second set included “Traveling” (1973), “Gotham Lullaby” (1975), “Madwoman’s Vision” from her 1988 film “Book of Days,” and segments from her opera “Atlas” (1991). In 2003 she was invited by Rosetta Life, a British hospice project to work musically with the dying who wished a last public act of expression. From that she built a funny-sad list of “lasts” to a series of minimalist, hypnotic chords called “Last Song”—last song, last breath, last minute, last ditch, last dance. Monk’s own partner, Mieke van Hoek, had died the year before of cancer, a loss that upended everything in her own life, Monk said, even calling into question her role as an artist.

In her use of the voice, movement is a given, not only because she learned to move and sing through the integrated methods of Dalcroze Eurythmics, but because sound to her is a form of movement. For Monk everything in nature has its own rhythmic and harmonic reality as it does for Kathak artists, and she makes us see the sonic dance that she hears all around her, her voice bending notes with exquisite delicacy, sound circling because of her ability to alter its trajectory, music lurching and sputtering, skipping and flying, words breaking down into their elemental sonic parts. Narrative is replaced by what she calls mosaics of meaning, and emotion isn’t applied as much as it is unearthed from humble yet virtuosic bits of sound looped round and round until they envelop us in resonances that nudge, soothe or tickle. The effect is to bring us back to long-ago memories of made-up languages and elaborate vocabularies of nonverbal noises; to take us back all the way to where we began as preverbal creatures inventing and decoding meaning, riffing with a sonically busy world.

Notes on Don Q Tuesday, May 2

(Don Q’s the deluded romantic who gave his name to a venerable condition: quixotic—fine poetic word for dreamy, unrealistic, impulsive (from cuixot, Catalan for thigh or horse’s ass, which Don Q is, along with sweet and valiant.))

A delicious Don Quixote.

But four years out I’m still trying to determine if it’s objectively possible to be anticlimactic in the first scene of an evening-length ballet production when nothing precedes it. If so, Don Q hit pay dirt in 2003 when a tall skinny guy with an unwieldy body sat reading dreamily upstage while turning some pages of a book. That was it. We could hear the narrative machinery grinding: “WE HAVE TO TELL YOU THAT THIS IS ABOUT AN ECCENTRIC MAN WHO READS TOO MANY ROMANTIC TALES. It is also A STORY. IT IS DERIVED FROM THE FAMOUS NOVEL.”

Back then I thought the conceit was the problem—and at bottom it is, since there’s nothing dramatic about reading a book or being dreamy. But on Tuesday the intro’s new layers of intention, weight, and comic timing revealed the secret of good theater: when Kirill Zaretskiy added irony and drama to each of Don Q’s gestures he made the physical language large and sweetly absurd, bringing some imagination to what used to be a clanking void. It changed those minutes from dead to animate, ponderous to gently daft, and prepared us for the slapstick of the altogether hilariously down-to-earth Sancho Panza (Pascal Molat) dashing in, skidding on one leg, trying to hide with a leg of stolen ham or lamb under the table. Even though the Spanish housewives following the thief were too decorous for the job (its own little anticlimax), they couldn’t extinguish the fire ignited by Panza and his boss.

With the mechanics more adroitly out of the way, the company was free this year to let loose. And did they—with more Morris than Moorish bravura, perhaps, but buckets of bravura all the same. Not only did the principals, demi-soloists and corps comport themselves with a sparkling liveliness, they also seemed to have enormous fun. Without that, Don Q is just another excuse for a string of stunning folk-inspired set pieces.

This year most of those set pieces were stunners. Stand-outs were Ruben Martin as the matinee idol Espada in Act I, who uses his cape somewhere between kitschy accoutrement, magician’s tool and dangerous weapon. Frances Chung and Dores Andre as Kitri’s friends were powerhouses in the making, although they're not ready to throw caution to the wind--they're still trying to sublimate their considerable technique to sheer expression. (Chung, in particular, seems on the edge of consistent artistic daring.) In Act II, Hansuke Yamamoto as the Gypsy Leader had crisp command of his tempestuous grand allegro, a command that seems to grow with every new stage appearance. Sarah Van Patten’s Mercedes performed the back-bending renversés with sultry bombshell beauty and devoured the stage with vixen plasticity (let’s see her next time as Kitri). In Don Q’s Dream, Yuan Yuan Tan was an ethereal Queen of the Driads and Elizabeth Miner danced Cupid as sweetly and delectably as butter icing.

Act I brought us the gorgeous if somewhat too serious band of Toreadors who offer glamour to the folk proceedings the way Kitty Carlisle’s arias class up A Night At the Opera. They’re just this side of goofy, as everything in commedia dell’arte is and should be. Magnify that solemn hauteur bullfighters’s have—these are guys whose job puts them face to face with death, after all—and their incongruity as a dancing sextet would be both more dramatic and more delightful.

As for Tina LeBlanc and Gonzalo Garcia--think thrilling sparklers as opposed to exploding fireworks. Each time they stepped out of the crowd to perform, they pulled the ballet together rather than overwhelmed it, which was one of the reasons this Don Q. was so memorable. The other was the sheer magic of their dancing.

LeBlanc may not have a scintilla of Catalan blood in her, but she performs an ingenuously scrappy Kitri more bright and earthy than fiery and utterly believable as the young woman who has a plan for her future wildly at odds with her father’s designs. She wants to marry the delectable barber Basilio (and is able to keep the slightly callow boy in his place along the way); dad plans to pawn her off on the absurd but affluent fop Gamache (in hilariously send-up by Damian Smith).

The buzz in some quarters is that only Lorena Fejoo is truly suited to the role. That’s like saying there’s only one Giselle (Carlotta Grisi? Alicia Alonso? Gelsey Kirkland?). LeBlanc’s no gypsy, and she certainly doesn’t have Lorena Fejoo’s Roman nose, flashing temper, and arrogant tilt of head. LeBlanc may have more Euclidian purity to her dancing than the role actually needs, and her arms in high 5th suffer some droop here and there. But there's no female dancer in the company right now more musical than she, with so vast a spectrum of color to that musicality. LeBlanc creates a world of characters that rise up effortlessly from steps and gestures invested with precise shape, limned rhythm, and luxuriant rubato. Slicing through the air as brilliantly as a diamond-encrusted scalpel, she lets warmth, humor and generosity pour through the spaces she cuts. If Fejoo’s Kitri is volcanic, LeBlanc’s is sweet water on hot stone. Two brilliant dancers. Two brilliant Kitris.

Gonzalo Garcia, the fair Spaniard, dancing his last role in his career at SFB, met LeBlanc, chiseled step for chiseled step, hot pirouette for hot pirouette, and winning disposition for winning disposition. His circling leaps read as dizzying love and youthful energy, his perfectly placed jumps as eros in action. He’s a similar dancer to LeBlanc—his mathematically clean placement is the sluice through which whatever character or role he inhabits can flow. Here, that technical purity gave depth and torque to his boyish vanity and slightly prankish air. As scenes piled up, I began to see the charming Garcia and buoyant LeBlanc as the Celtic face of Spain, with Fejoo and Boada embodying its moodier, Moorish attitude. There’s nothing misplaced about that, either. The Spanish Garcia looks more Celtic than Arab, and why shouldn’t he? Spain is the intersection of wave after wave of invaders. The Celts poured in in the 9th century BCE to establish Celtiberian culture. They were followed by Phoenicians, Carthaginians, Vandals and Visigoths. Muslim Arab-Berbers didn’t arrive until 700 AD.

In a big ballet, the structure is typically pyramidal with the few star characters populating the top of the structure, and the masses at the bottom, holding up the whole thing facelessly. Because of its meandering structure and picaresque style, and perhaps because small characters assume sudden great importance, as often happens in novels, Don Q has a loose and egalitarian quality, and the company approached it this year as a communal undertaking, rather like Mark Morris’ Sylvia. The dancers seemed to love being on stage together and delight in the silliness as much as the virtuosity. For me, it’s precisely this insouciance and camaraderie that shows the modern face of SFB the best.

(Note to Helgi: how about a series of Sunday matinees, call them A Dance Tasting, and offer us comparative works: Moorish then Celtic looking versions of Don Q’s duets; Balanchine’s Square Dance followed by Merce Cunningham’s Grange Eve; Fokine’s The Dying Swan and Ratmansky’s spoof of same, or other similar pairings.)

On The Retirement of Muriel Maffre, Shapeshifter

Dear Muriel,

Thank you for years of glorious dancing. Thank you for your bravery and humility. Thank you for cutting your hair. For seeming to treat each occasion on stage as another experiment, another chance to learn something additional about the music, your partner, the phrasing, the color of the moment, or even how far it would take you to get your endless leg to its seeming far off destination. The miracle is that you never gave control a compulsive or brittle look. You made it Olympian and grand. Love, death, sex, humor, sorrow, mystery and plain old hoofing--you brought it all to the stage.


What has made your dancing sublime is that you always treated your extraordinary intelligence as your starting point rather than your endgame. Each time you took on a role you devoured then metabolized it into spare, eloquent physical expression, and so you evolved into one of the least sentimental, most luxuriously Spartan and frequently hilarious dancers in the company.

In the early years I got to watch you refine your technical arsenal, hone your musical clarity and find the means to let your body play without impediment. I don’t remember which year it was, but one season you came before us with all your parts assuredly in place. It was then that I realized you were no longer dancing, you were shapeshifting. That ability to totally morph from Myrtha to Odette to the dominant woman in Agon to Ratmansky’s ruined Pavlova brought us a large world of extraordinary women. Your long fearless body occupied it with heroic grace. Grazie infinite.

Forsythe Saga

“...the decline of Rome was the natural and inevitable effect of immoderate greatness. Prosperity ripened the principle of decay; the causes of destruction multiplied with the extent of conquest; and, as soon as time or accident had removed the artificial supports, the stupendous fabric yielded to the pressure of its own weight....”
Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire


I like to think of William Forsythe this way: he’s the choreographer who took the neoclassical baton from Balanchine, discovered its value as a social weapon, and then sprinted in a fast pair of Nikes into the 21st century yelling “revolt.” What else would a self-respecting American leftist baby boomer choreographer from Long Island do?

At the beginning of his career Forsythe danced with the Joffrey Ballet, then found his way to the Stuggart Ballet in Germany, eventually gravitating to and upending the Frankfurt Ballet, which he cast as an incendiary neoclassical company unafraid of blaring music, glaring colors and dance positions that had more to do with assembly lines and S & M chambers than palaces and opera houses.

Thanks to a willingness to take apart and remake ballet vocabulary in a way that smashed the traditional hierarchies of head, torso, legs, Forsythe has had more in common with modern dance experimenters than most ballet reformers. He’s also somebody who could moonlight as a lecturer in neoMarxist philosophy if he needed extra cash. In fact, over the years, reading his program notes has been sometimes like a slog through an especially opaque article in the journal Telos, and it has always been a relief when the dancing superceded the ideas they were meant to embody. But even when his intellectual bent leads to tendentious art, Forsythe deserves great credit for thinking philosophically and politically in an art form that, quite honestly, prefers its ideas to be decorous, or at least unobtrusive, and can punish those who get too brainy, too spiritual or too political while exalting those whose ideas are downright flimsy.

All the same, “Three Atmospheric Studies,” a political cri de coeur against the war in Iraq, was a stark reminder that the choreographer can be so driven by abstract ideas that he’s undone by them. Here he seemed to lose faith in the fact that the best dance is a physicalization of feeling-thought, not just thought, and that it has to be kinesthetically absorbed by the viewer’s body not merely her brain. Literature, decor and sound can be added to the mix, or a heady problem posed and solved. It can be brainy and even difficult. But in the finest dance--and Forsythe has authored plenty of fine dances--movement itself transmits the dna of that which needs to be communicated. In “Studies,” which premiered in the U.S. at Cal Performances in February with the new Forsythe Ballet, Forsythe got the dance’s dna confused with dna of a class on French and German social theory.

Forsythe designed “Studies” as a triptych inspired by two early Renaissance paintings,“Crucifixion” (1538) by Lucas Cranach the Younger, “Lamentation Beneath the Cross” (1503) by Lucas Cranach the Elder, and a photo of a boy being carried by soldiers following a car bombing in Iraq. The first two panels share the title “Clouds after Cranach,” referring to the ominous formations behind the crucified Christ, although clouds are equally apt for section three (called, simply, Study III) where truth is clouded by imperial propaganda and a whole lot of deafening noise.

While each of the three panels can stand on its own, put together, read left to right and then backward in time, right to left, they form a fragmented portrait of innocence in the clutches of chaos and power. Linked by a filament of a plot, “Atmospheric Studies” tells a fractured tale of a melee on a city street. That is followed by a mother’s efforts to secure the truth of events about her son, the elusiveness of truth, and an imperium’s nihilistic drive to swathe truth in good-old-boy Newspeak.

Sinuously danced by 12 unflagging dancers, Composition One occurs in a stark, almost antiseptic atmosphere, punctuated by brash overhead lights, a white floor, and a vast black backdrop. Dancer Jone San Martin steps forward. She is wearing a sleeveless pink fitted dress that looks lifted from the 60s, and speaks to the audience like a narrator out of a morality tale, announcing what has already taken place, will take place again, and perhaps will always take place: “This is Composition One, in which my son was arrested.” Her “son” is a dancer in red, and we are alert to watch him as the controlled chaos begins.

The gorgeous group starts running and falling to the sound only of of their ever-quickening breathing and dashing footfalls, and all are decked out in khakis and bright tee shirts. Sliding, careering, stopping short, wrenching their arms behind them, they fly across the stage this way and that, falling into painterly groupings of elastic, momentarily frozen tableaus, repeating the patterns in mirror image, going at it again at new angles. They run from attackers, look at the sky, point, dodge, fall and cower.

Sounds good, but there was a problem: while it looked like a virtuosic contact improv summit, it had none of the intrinsic danger and surprise of improv. That's because Forsythe’s molten movement appeared carefully choreographed and safely stylized; it also had a story to communicate (innocent people accidentally trapped by armed forces in a street) and an almost agit prop impulse in telling it. By contrast, the stream of consciousness of contact improv and its unknowable flow drives it to be deeply sensual, intuitive, as well as analytical, like jazz. Real improvisation would have injected a level of risk into this piece that was sorely missing.

Perhaps had the dancers been costumed in a babel of clothes styles--head scarves, khameez, jeans, ties--the segment might have read differently and better. But dressed as they were in ordinary Western youth street garb, no terror in sight, the scenario accumulated a disturbing recherche quality--college kids at the barricades in Paris ‘68, or a 1981 demonstration against the war in El Salvador. In an interview, Forsythe said he turned for inspiration to Cranach’s own insertion of Renaissance German elements, like clothes, into the first century Passion drama. But Cranach interpolates competing visual realities that give the composition multiple layers of meaning; Forsythe offers only one.

More critically, Forsythe failed his own challenge. The Cranach paintings communicate the quiet, timeless despair of an iconic mother, the gruesomeness of the archetypal innocent’s murder by the state, and an air of fury in nature itself. Yet Forsythe offered us no comparable experience of awe and terror. The movement in Composition One was too fluid and the impulses too controlled to capture the mystery of large forces or the true brutishness of violence. So, before long, death became little more than the negative and fairly inert space around the movers. And it was this inability to represent death in any palpable awe-inspiring way that gave this segment a disembodied quality. Ironically, it is, in large measure, the perils of disembodiment that are at the heart of his critique of our society and the war.

That made it especially interesting that, in the fiercely cerebral Composition Two, we actually got a brief taste of death’s ice and heat. Rendered as theater, with only the most minimal movement, the composition was built around two primary figures, dancer San Martin, the mother of the missing child, and Amancio Gonzalez, the official to whom she’s gone to locate her son. A third and shadowy figure, the long-limbed David Kern, hung around the periphery like an annoying academic, describing and analyzing the mechanics of the compositions--lines of sight (literalized as white rope lines converging in a single point in the background) and events from competing perspectives. Although Forsythe used him as a cool foil, he was a walking embodiment of how reductive and tedious cold-blooded analysis is.

San Martin anxiously sat in a chair in the same snug dress as before the investigation got underway. She said such phrases as “my son was arrested,” “in the street,” and the official, a careful man at a long table, searched like a writer or a philosopher for the comparable phrase in Arabic, reshaping her words or correcting her misperceptions in order to make one reality and language fit the dictates of another. He was digging for a common truth. He was also establishing control.

As information tediously accumulated, and the perspectives of the melee grew like Rashomon's tale, the officer finally informed her--and us--that the boy has not been apprehended and jailed, as the mother assumed; he’s been inadvertently killed. At this point, the heartless facticity of truth shot forth, and Forsythe drove home to the audience a small nail of shock and sorrow. San Martin soon liquified before our eyes, her body twisting inward, her words becoming disfigured as she tried madly and vainly to reassert her assumptions about Composition One. Truth seeking descended into ambiguity. Was the death an accident? Was he really dead? Within the tight confines of these terms, Forsythe played with meaning and reality like a cat pawing a mouse, and he tackled complexity quite gamely.

But as meaty as this interlude was, it added up to a brainy exercise about war as the relation of power to the control of symbolic systems, communication as “translation” and “translation” as a form of power, since those who control the means of communication are believed to be those in power. Rather than leading us into an arena beyond political theory, where the subject would be human experience in the face of war, he kept us, albeit nimbly, in the lecture hall.

Study III made matters worse. Here the lines of perspective from part two materialized into a solid, obliquely angled structure. A devasted San Martin slumped in a chair along its southern side, while to the northeast, facing us, hung photos of clouds that Kern attempted to analyze, like an intelligence officer scouring incidentals in the hope of snagging some important bit of data. He soon moved on to cold-blooded list making--where and what body parts he could find scattered around the bomb scene--a finger here, a limb there. Dancers, meanwhile, flew through a door in the building and smashed into the walls with a mix of fecklessness and symbolic heft. Was the structure the imperial intrusion of the U.S.? Jesus’ tomb? Or, more simply, the obdurate and impenetrable character of events? Noise filled the theater (sound score by Thom Willams). One dancer created cacaphonous noise by breathing into a microphone. I put tissue in my ears.

Then the work slipped into agit prop. A Texas-twanging good old boy (think George Bush), locked in the body of tiny blonde Dana Casperson, oozed good-buddy Newspeak through a voice-altering transmitter, like Laurie Anderson on a right-wing bender. “Ma’am,” s/he drawled not unkindly to San Martin, the word fanning out into three syllables, “there’s no cause for alarm.” Orwellian platitudes washed over us like magnolia-scented sludge. Pontius Pilate was probably never quite so unctuous, but the parallels to Rome in Judaea, circa 26 BCE, screamed out. (Pilate thought he was a nice guy, too.). But Forsythe ultimately minimized the enormity of the global crisis by battering us with the particular tics of this empire. He needed to go further, deeper. He didn’t, or couldn’t.

Not even the last gesture read cleanly. Forsythe’s Mary, San Martin, was reduced by events to a Petrouchka-like puppet and led downstage by Kern, who then held her head in his lap, inverting the historic depiction of the Virgin Mary, who embraces her son with exquisite anguished tenderness in Michaelangelo’s Pieta. Interestingly, “pieta” refers to a practice that derived from the Roman Empire in the years after the crucifixion, referring to the act of prostrating oneself with emotion, love and great fear before the Roman gods. Imagine an Iraqi mother--any mother, for that matter--allowing herself to be prostrated before the forces that killed her son? The State is not that powerful. Nor is it eternal. And by reducing the mother figure to a position of total collapse, Forsythe obliterates one last opportunity to show the endless capacity of the human spirit to resurrect itself in the face of even the most heinous atrocities. And in that way, our deepest truths fell prey to grimly narrow political notions in “Three Atmospheric Studies.”

Pitching Hay

Friday March 30
ODC Theater, San Francisco
"Mountain"


Deborah Hay is a hard one to catch. Years ago, she used to roll into town, often in the summer, and have a quiet interlude at Dancers Group/Footwork. She’d offer a workshop. Give a performance. And slip away. Appropriate to a performer whose work took the A out of art and reclaimed the exalted in the ordinary, she didn’t advertise much, if at all, as though you had to be drawn to her by rumor, magnetism or chance. I’d see a flyer, contemplate the moment, then I’d miss her, and each time I felt regret. I’d seen a couple of her group pieces, but long wondered what other kind of treasure this choreographer-Zen-naturalist might conjure. Now I know.

Hay hails from Brooklyn, and she eventually crossed the bridge to Manhattan and trained with James Waring, Merce Cunningham and Mia Slavenska. She performed with the Cunningham Company in 1964 when that small band of gypsies traveled through Europe and Asia. Then, as part of Judson, she became one of the juggernauts that broke out from the Cage/Cunningham experiments and further exploded the rules of modern dance. Hay is the one most renowned for breaking down the barriers between trained and untrained performers. She migrated to Vermont, then eventually to Austin, Texas, taking an approach to dance that had a conceptual as well as Zen bent—long, deep projects culminating in performance with or without an audience. From these she turned to solo work designed in collaboration with highly trained dancers. That’s where Friday night comes in.

She named the piece “Mountain” and set it on three superb dancers from Seattle, who worked with Hay over a period of a month in Bellingham, Washington: Peggy Piacenza, Gaelen Hanson and Amelia Reeber. The mountain that inspired Hay was Mt. Rainier, which, if you’ve ever flown the Northwest corridor, rises up out of the Cascade Volcano Belt with a majesty and vehemence that is almost shocking. That specific geological formation, however, was not literally the subject or point of the piece; it was the hidden life and ever-changing nature of a mountain that grabbed her.

But the idea of a mountain was just the starting point. The dance destination, half of it choreographed by Hay, the other half crafted as three solos created by each dancer from material performed in the first half, suggested all sorts of mountain-like qualities—triangular, difficult, enigmatic, weird and powerfully constructed. Put forbidding in there, too. I realized as I watched the intrigue going on in the gallery space that it had been a long time since I’d seen dance that forced the imagination open so whimsically and boldly. It was movement that defied, again and again, easy reduction, like texts by Gertrude Stein or an early Bruce Nauman video. Yet, as far as I was aware, only two people left the theater, and even they hung in most of the way.

Leaving childhood is, in part, to forget how strange existence is. Yet, from the moment the three dancers appeared bedecked in cottony stuff—poodle-like on the ankles of one, running like a raccoon tail or Mohawk on another, like stray fluff on the head of a third—it was clear that Hay not only hasn’t forgotten but is driven to plumb that strangeness. “Mountain” began with layers of wacky Northwest echoes of pioneers and Native Americans, trailer trash and call girls. The trio, each distinct and exquisitely expressive, performed non-virtuosic movements with enormous virtuosity, moving together but intensely apart so that the space they occupied seemed to grow denser by their presence. It’s hard to say what they did--they zipped, turned, squiggled, fell. One who wore a conical cap with the cottony stuff on top, like a zany princess, said “Quit” and fell to the floor. At times they used props--small hand bells, a tambourine, rattles. But they were employed with such unexpected flourish that it was slapstick and dreamy both.

Amelia Reeber I think it was muttered words with a grizzled intensity-- “… rip, thrash, hack, thrash”--like you’d imagine a small, wizened forest creature growling, or a child inventing the utterances of a frog that had watched Lewis and Clark scouting the woods. Whatever they said, because of the dislocated aspect of their sounds, assumed gnomic import. And then, while the eye rested on a familiar fourth position placement, the mind took in something deeper--an existential position, a place of rest and beauty that seemed only accidentally related to ballet.

The solo portion upped the ante and washed over us like three beautiful arias performed in a lost language, each weird, stunning and evocative, whether it was Amelia Reeber’s with her fire backdrop and cotton-covered skateboard, Peggy Piancenza’s Brunhilda/Sacagawea, or Gaelan Hanson’s exquisite boho Indian/cowgirl, which she performed with flawless integrity and physical grace. It made me think of kids making a divine cake with nothing but a bit of dust and endless honesty.

PAS du tout

In high school: began and nearly ended my dancing life with jazz on pointe taught by a crazed Austrian, dancer Felicity Foote. No prior training of any kind. Next her ballet class, making matters worse. Escaped after two years to an outpost of the Hartford Ballet where Madame Laurent, formerly of the Ballet Russes, taught Russian technique. Exposed through master classes to Alvin Ailey, then Paul Taylor. On to college where Helen Priest Rogers, an early Graham dancer and co-founder of the Dance Notation Bureau, taught us the fundamentals of contraction, release and dance notation. Also with her pageboy and intelligent earnestness, exposed us to proper bluestocking bohemianism. Dropped out and studied at Manhattan School of Dance with Margaret Craske and Dorothy Hill, combing through Jill Johnston’s reivews in the Voice for deeper grasp of the avant garde. Discovered Yvonne Rainer. Listened obsessively to John Cage’s 1950’s prepared piano works, Duke Ellington and Charlie Parker. Fled West. Found Beth Jahn, formerly of the Metropolitan Ballet, studied with Marni and David Wood and encountered Cunningham technique for the first time at Margy Jenkins' studio. Spent 10 years studying and dancing with Brynar Mehl, protege of Craske and former dancer in the Cunningham Company. Began writing about dance in 1984 when I founded In Dance at the SF Bay Area Dance Coalition. Was the dance critic for the East Bay Express for 12 years, the Oakland Trib for 6, SF Weekly for 3, part of the SF Chron stable of part-time dance crits for 1.5. and have contributed to The NYT and online to danceviewtimes. Edited various sections of Dance Magazine and launched Young Dancer. Also contributed a chapter on Lucas Hoving to an anthology on Jose Limon. Look forward to writing a book on dance.