Dancing on the Sacred Ground (highbrow dance on TV)

I went to college in western Massachusetts, but at that time in my life I was very far away from dance, trying to get it out of my system (but still doing pirouettes in the kitchen when no one was watching). This really is a shame because it means I never went to Jacob's Pillow, never applied to work there as a summer intern (or a cook), and thus I missed out on the opportunity to see, just to name a few:

 

The opening and closing image of the documentary

• Laura Dean 
• Mark Morris
• Hubbard Street Dance Company 
• Judith Jamison  
• Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane & Company 
• Merce Cunningham
• Trish Brown

The list goes on and on. Fortunately, by the time I went to graduate school I had come to realize that one could go and be in the audience at a dance performance and not spend the whole time feeling regretful. Berkeley brought in a lot of good companies, and student tickets were if not cheap relatively affordable.

But I missed Jacob's Pillow, and for that I am sorry. I just watched this very well made documentary from Dancing at Jacob's Pillow -- Never Stand Still that aired last summer (but that is still streaming on the PBS website) that follows the history of the site and has tons of fabulous footage of performances, workshops, and rehearsals by dancers of every stripe. What really struck me was how "the Pillow" becomes a kind of United Nations of movement, with everything from experimental approaches to Brazilian social dance to multimedia performance art, classical ballet to slapstick (Bill T. Jones narrates).

That's my kind of place.

To me it sounds like heaven on earth, a place to live and breathe dance amidst the not-inconsiderable beauties of the Berkshires, a place where the audience is likely to be as possessed by dance as are the dancers. I think one might have to go back to Greek theater to find a parallel situation where the performers and the audience alike are essentially votaries dedicated to something much bigger than themselves, something powerful and weird and transporting

The word that springs to mind, listening to Suzanne Farrell or Paul Taylor, or Judith Jamison, or any one of the other luminaries interviewed in the film, is enthusiasm. They are deeply, seriously enthusiastic in its primal sense,of rapturously possessed by a force larger than the individual self. And dance does inspire that kind of ecstatic devotion; this is just as true of Abby Miller and her crew of dance moms as it is of whirling Dervishes, though in very different ways.

Because too much is never enough when one is an enthusiast, I also had to watch this Great Performances film of Paul Taylor Dance Company in Paris, which aired last spring. I saw them once at Zellerbach Hall, and I do not remember the program but I do remember walking away feeling stunned by how effortlessly his dancers seemed to produce movement at extremely high voltage for sustained periods of time. The first half of the film features Brandenburgs, which he describes in a little interview segment as being about "gallantry."

It is (of course) set to Bach, and who can resist the Brandenburg Concertos? Well, not I, anyway. The costumes must be mentioned too; they were designed by Santo Loquasto and they are absolutely perfectly in harmony with the choreography, the music, and the serious fun of the piece. The materials are rich and velvety, trimmed with gold, but not ostentatious or flashy -- both in cut and hue they remind me of later sixteenth-century court dress, with its somber colors and austere tailoring belying the incredible expense of the materials. The colors, too, seem at once sober and sumptuous; all of the dancers wear jewel-like greens ranging from peridot for the main male dancer, to deep emerald for the male corps, and a sort of mossy, dark jade for the three women, whose skirts must be cut on the bias to move as they do, like water.

Parisa Khobdeh

As for the choreography, you really just have to see it. Taylor is so adept at striking a balance between the classically trained bodies of his dancers and the vocabulary of "classic" modern dance while also throwing in these wonderful little cadenzas of more vernacular, almost Buster-Keatonish awkwardness. So, for example, in the final ensemble movement, the dancers are arrayed on the stage in a echt-Petipa inverted wedge, doing classical pirouettes and beaten jumps at a staggering pace (well, I would be staggering), throwing in a sequence of Graham-esque semi-contracted développés (while turning, natch), and then they suddenly interject this funny little phrase that I can only describe as wobbling like a Weeble, all while grinning broadly. They are having so much fun that I wanted to do a sort of Alice-through-the-flatscreen thing and join them up there. Whooooheee!

Michael Trusnovec clearly never works out.

What amazing artists. And they are also among the most beautiful people I have ever seen. The lead male dancer, one of Taylor's stars, is Michael Trusnovec, and though his official biography on the company's website claims that he is from Yaphank, on Long Island, this must be wrong. He was actually not born, but carved from marble and placed on the pediment of a mid-fifth century BCE temple to Apollo, but at some point got enthused and now appears to have more muscles, sinews, and contours in his chest, back, and abdomen (he is shirtless) than anatomically possible. Meanwhile Parisa Khobdeh claims to be from Plano but looks like she walked in through the door from Middle Earth, where she, and not Liv Tyler, was the real
Arwen.

The second half of the program is a ballet dedicated to Walt Whitman, and featuring the music of Poulenc. Very different, but also very moving. Watch these films! You will not feel you have wasted your time.