Silly Hats and Serious Fun

Just back from a performance by Ririe Woodbury, Utah's homegrown modern company, now fifty years old. Amazing athleticism and verve. Six dancers, six pieces, very little downtime.

Okay, now I will start using complete sentences, since Twitter this ain't. It was a treat  to see the company perform in the lovely and intimate performance hall on the USU campus. I've heard a lot of chamber music there, but had my doubts about it as a dance venue. It does not have a traditional proscenium stage, and the floor area is small. For the small size of the troupe and the direct and personal styles of the choreography they presented, however, it worked well. In a physically challenging and complex piece by Ann Carlson ("50 Years"), the dancers provided the sounds as well as the movements, vocalizing rhythmically, and because the Perf Hall (yes, we call it that) is so acoustically sensitive, you could hear every gasp, grunt, inhalation, which gave a deep, visceral rootedness to the whole thing.

Ballet West, Petite Mort

Even if some of the pieces were of a lighter nature, this was serious dance. By this I mean, the dancers and the choreographers clearly approached their art with the intent to communicate something important and to engage with the big questions that dance allows us to ask. What does it mean to live in a human body? What are our relationships, through space, time, and gesture, to other people and to the non-human world? Where do feeling and thinking intersect, and what is the body's role as the vessel of both emotion and intellect? Modern dance, as Adam Sklute remarked at the pre-performance lecture at Ballet West that we attended the other night, can access interiority in ways that are denied to ballet, with its origins in court dancing and the world of public, social performances. Okay, those are my nerdish words, but that was what I took away from his description of the tension between the earthier, modern elements of Jiri Kylian's Petite Mort and the more formal, balletic passages. He did not say this either, but think that in that particular work the modern passages are about sex and the ballet passages are about the rituals that frame sex and civilize it, make it not just animal mating. (I mean, the piece is called Petite Mort, you know?)

Silly hat and silly headgear

But to return to this idea of seriousness, if I may. Ballet West's program included Firebird,  in a reconstruction of the version original to the company (it premiered under William Christensen's direction and with his choreography in 1967). It is not the first Firebird I have seen, nor will it probably be the last. Most people love this ballet-- it has that unbelievably memorable music, for one thing. But really, let us be honest; it is a frivolous thing, perhaps among the most frivolous items in the repertory of most major ballet companies. Act One, the hero runs around in the forest in a stupid hat, and some magic stuff happens. He catches and releases a magic bird with drag-queen eye-makeup. An enchanted princess dances with him. A bad magician and his creepy myrmidons show up. The bird saves the guy in the silly hat. Am I going out on a limb to say that this is not much of a story? Act Two is just a wedding, a group wedding, involving more guys in silly hats. My daughter, who had not seen Firebird  before, got the giggles about the Bishop's mitre. She had never seen its like and had no idea it signified "bishop" so to her it was just a conehead like thing.

The silliness of Firebird has its historical origins in the absurdity of modernism trying to seduce the public by going around with a tarted up folktale on its arm. The problem in 1910, as in 2013, is how to get audiences to come see ballet, and Diaghilev certainly had his finger on the pulse of popular sentiment. Thus, Firebird.

Bayadere: Dance of the Shades

Do not take this to mean I hate Firebird or that I think it is stupid. Not at all; most story ballets are profoundly silly in their narrative structure, their stock of cliched characters, and so forth. As in opera, lovers of the art form put up with a large dose of the ridiculous so that we can indulge our taste for spectacle at the same time we devour the technical and artistic merits of the performance (which are often somewhat divorced from the story). The presence of a ballet blanc in the middle of say, La Bayadere, really makes almost no sense in terms of the supposed cultural setting of the story, but also anchors the whole ballet to the history of the art form and to its essential aesthetic values.

However, really serious dance, it seems to me, has to get at something more than romantic claptrap or faux-folklore. It needs to bite into the business of being human in some really toothy way. I suppose I'm advocating some form of realism, which is tough for an art form based on ordering human movement and human bodies in ways that are clearly not the "workaday" ways that such things operate. But I really saw this seriousness in a few of the Ririe Woodbury pieces tonight, even when they were making me laugh. "50 Years" had the greatest number of passages in which the threads of humor and pathos were intertwined.

This is the cast I saw tonight. For a video, click here.

For example, at one point, the group, which has been moving almost as a single body, vocalizing in ensemble, suddenly breaks apart into a field of individuals, each making self-referential, inwardly directed movements and cawing, semi-linguistic sounds.

There is something comical about this brief attempt to break away from the hive mind, but also something tremulous and fragile about it. At another point, one of the dancers sneezes and all of the dancers collapse, hard, on the floor; the audience laughed, but there was tragedy in the total surrender to gravity as well.

Bill T. Jones. Serious Fun.

The funny thing is that some of the most serious dance of our time (Kylian, Carlson, Morris, Bill T. Jones) is also deeply humorous. I am not talking about inadvertent humor (stupid hats in Firebird), or campy humor (the cheesier parts of a Trocks performance), but real humor, in the Greek sense of a contest between lightness and sobriety, or maybe even between life and death, that exposes the absurdity of life at the same time that it produces a feeling of pleasure in being alive.