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.

Girl-positive ballet: inconceivable?

Oh no, no, no!

A while ago in response to something I had read about how local and regional ballet companies need more marketable repertoire, I proposed, facetiously, a ballet based on The Hobbit, but this article from the Guardian on Disney’s now-in-development stage play version of The Princess Bride got me thinking; wouldn’t THAT be fun as a ballet? My ballet teacher, a long-time member of our civic ballet, tells me that the company is pretty constrained as to what it can perform and still break even once sets, costumes, and the cost of the theater rental are taken into account (nevermind the dancers… they’re not paid!). Nobody will come see anything strange or unfamiliar (just to give the full sense of what this means… they decided they couldn’t do “Don Q” because the story was not recognizable to local ticket buyers). Basically, they’re stuck with anything Disney has already done as a film, e.g. Sleeping Beauty. Oh, and Nutcracker, of course. They do a mean Dracula some Octobers, and they also have an Ashton-esque Cinderella, an Alice in Wonderland, a Coppelia (a bit challenging for the locals), and a few other things up their puffy sleeves. But, as she noted, it’s tough. As a dancer, she admits to being a weensy bit bored with Beauty in particular. And who on earth would blame her?

So, what about Princess Bride? It has all the classic elements. Princess? Check! Dashing hero? Check, check! Court scenes? Got em! Comic interludes and potential for silly stage business? Fezzik, Vizzini, and Inigo Montoya at your service! But, and this is a big but… there are an awful lot of boy roles and really, in the end, Buttercup is the only girl role worth mentioning. So, maybe not. 

Wuv, twue wuv!

Ballet, as George Balanchine opined, is woman. Or at least, in regional and local ballet companies, ballet is mostly girls between the ages of 15 and 22. So, lots of stuff for the corps to do, some nice solo work for your more accomplished students, and not too many male roles, please. I take a light tone, but it is a real challenge and a serious one if you’re trying to keep ballet alive in a smaller community, such as ours. I have huge admiration for the woman who founded our civic company 30 years ago and has kept it, and the school, together all this time. She must be exhausted. But she doesn't look it.

One of the attractions of The Princess Bride is its humor, and the way it spoofs the conventions of the fairy tale. On the other hand, there’s nothing particularly feminist, girl-positive or radical about it. Buttercup has always seemed a bit of a blockhead, really. So maybe it is no loss that it will not be coming to a ballet stage near you any time soon. 

Which leads me to the question of whether, given that story ballets are the inevitable sustenance of community-based ballet in vast swathes of this country, there are ANY good alternatives to the entrenched, Romantic, anti-feminist tenor of so much of this stuff. Alison Bechdel, the subtly subversive cartoonist and graphic novelist, proposed a test of films for real commitment to their women characters. The test is simple. For a film to be feminist

Alison Bechdel

1. It has to have at least two [named] women in it

2. Who talk to each other

3. About something besides a man

This is hardly a new thing – I think she first put this out in her great cartoon strip “Dykes to Watch Out For,” in the mid-eighties, but recently it has become the meme-of-the-moment and has taken on a life of its own with various media watchers who monitor recent films, track the record of independent versus Hollywood films, look at the historical trajectory of films that do and do not meet this standard… Evidently the Swedish National Film Board has adopted it as a ratings standard.

Many, though not all, ballet stories would fail, even if you replace “dance to each other” and even though for at least two centuries traditional narrative ballet has been mostly populated by women.  Number three would get them. Some examples:

• Giselle has at least two named women (Giselle, Myrtha, Bathilde) and Giselle and Myrtha do a lot of mime-talk. But, sigh, what do they talk about? Albrecht, the cad! 
• Raymonda features not only Raymonda, but also her dour aunt, Sybille, her friends (who have names) and the White Lady (is that a name? I’m not sure), and they do a dire amount of pantomime. But, again, it all has to do with men… good ones, bad ones, and so forth
• La Fille Mal Gardée features Lise, her frustrated parent Simone (does it count when a woman character is played by a man???), and more than half of the stage time in most modern versions seems to be taken up with Keystone Kops pratfalls that pass for communication (or miscommunication) between the protagonists. However, all of Lise’s interactions with her mother focus on their battle of wills about whom Lise will marry… Colas or the buffoon Alain?

Feminist tales are rare enough, and ballet-friendly feminist tales even rarer. The most perfect and simple of all feminist fairy tales, Robert Munsch's Paper Bag Princess features only a girl, a dragon, and a petulant prince named Ronald, so it would not adapt well to the needs of a small company with many little girls eager to go on stage. A friend of mine, maybe it was a Girl Scout camp, had a book called Tatterhood, which included only traditional folktales that featured strong heroines who did not sit around waiting for a prince. 

Lauren Mills, "Tatterhood and Isabella Dancing"

Several of those would make interesting ballets, not least the title tale, from Norway, weird in the way that Scandinavian folktales so often are. It has a queen who, with the help of a witch, overcomes her infertility and gives birth to twin daughters, the elder ugly and fey, the younger beautiful. But the younger sister falls victim to a goblin prank (they steal her head and replace it with that of a cow), and the elder must rescue her (or rather, her head). On their way home after the successful rescue, they are guests of a king and his son. The king falls in love with the younger sister and proposes to her, but she will only marry him if Tatterhood maries his son, and it takes quite a bit to convince the prince to take this ugly, goat-riding, wooden-spoon-wielding hag as his bride. In the end he relents. As they ride home from the wedding (a double wedding! a story-ballet waiting to go nuts!), he is dejected, and gently, Tatterhood manipulates him into asking her questions. Why does she ride a goat? A goat! This is no goat but a beautiful horse! He looks, and it is! Why does she carry a spoon? It is not a spoon, but a silver fan! Why does she wear that dreadful hood? What hood? You mean the golden crown? Why is she so gray and hideous? Me? Gray? Hideous? In fact she is more beautiful than her sister… 

Would this pass the Bechdel test? Maybe not. Except for Tatterhood nobody has a name in the original version. In Lauren Mills' retelling (from which I borrowed the illustration above) the younger sister is Isabella, a good name for a pretty girl. But there is plenty of discussion between women about subjects other than a man. For example, the Queen woos the witch to reveal her secret method of (man-free) conception, and Tatterhood must negotiate with her mother to be allowed to rescue her sister. And ultimately, though it does conclude with a marriage, one has the sense that Tatterhood, and nobody else, is running the show.

I think my daughter would agree... this is not all that inaccurate, at times.

The problem with all this is that Disney has never made Tatterhood into a film and therefore nobody will buy tickets because they do not recognize the story. Once upon a time, I would have despaired that Disney would ever make a film about a girl who pretty much takes charge, and not only that, but does not feel in any way obligated to gracefully resign agency at the very climax of the story (uh, Tangled, Pocohantas, Mulan, anyone?). However, with the most recent entry in the "Disney Princess" genre,  Brave, a twinkle of hope has dawned. There you have a Bechdelian feast – the main romance, after all, is between the girl and her mother, and while their initial interactions do primarily concern either Merida’s marriageability or her potential marriage partners, ultimately, their discourse shifts and they are mostly concerned, painfully, wrenchingly, and horribly concerned, with understanding one another and learning some mutual sympathy. 

The most heartbreaking panel in any cartoon, ever.

Bechdel’s own graphic novel, Are You My Mother? (a follow up to the tragic and yet hilarious Fun Home) covers precisely this emotional territory too, though predictably in a less sanguine vein than Brave. That is to say, Bechdel’s mother never really turns back into a person, having become a bear. But neither does she threaten to eat her daughter... she just stops giving her a goodnight kiss when she is seven. Seven!

From The Princess Bride to Are You My Mother by way of the challenge of dancing to your audience in a small town in the West? Jeez, I love the freedom of the blog format!

Pas de ménage-à-trois

There is an apocryphal story about Aristotle and Phyllis, the consort of Alexander the Great, that goes back to the Middle Ages, though its exact origins are unclear. The tale relates that the philosopher, having cautioned his pupil, Alexander, to avoid spending too much time on the carnal delights of his mistress, was in turn beguiled by the lady, who resented his intrusion. He became so infatuated with her that he eventually propositioned her, but she denied him, saying that unless he could prove his love was not just lust, she would have none of him. She demanded that to demonstrate his devotion, he come crawling on hands and knees to her bedchamber, where she would ride him like a horse. He complied. Phyllis then ratted the old fellow out to Alex, who threatened to kill him, but being canny (and this being a moralizing exemplum), Aristotle retorted something to the effect of, “If an old, wise man such as myself can be so deceived by woman’s wiles, then all the more reason a young man such as yourself should be wary.” We don’t hear what happened to the “devious” Phyllis.

As a woman, I feel some sympathy for her – this horny old guy, a sort of echt-creepy-professor type, not only cautions her boyfriend off her, but then tries for some grabass himself. Her scheme is perfect in its irony – playing on the expectation of female lustiness and sinfulness, she exposes masculine lust.

This little copper alloy aquamanile (hand-washing pitcher) from the southern Netherlands, ca. 1400 captures the piquant erotics of the tale nicely. Phillys is so pretty and willowy in her low-cut gown with its stylish, fluttering sleeves, and Aristotle wears an expression at once forlorn and goofily blissful as he strikes his posture of servitude. Her touch on his head is almost fond, as if she is stroking his wiry hair, the way one might pet the mane of one’s favorite horse. But the hand on his derrière is less innocent.  

Whether she is spanking him or simply goosing him, it’s an intrusive, sexual, and transgressive gesture. Especially so when one picks up the pitcher by its handle (her arm) and lifts his posterior high into the air in order to pour water from the spout, which projects from Aristotle’s chest. Let’s not forget, either, that Phyllis’ gown falls heavily over her relaxed legs, delineating the spread of her thighs quite clearly, and Aristotle wears a daringly short doublet and tight hose for an older gent (usually, the longer the beard, the longer the robe).

The dance-like quality of this object proceeds from the way it captures, in gesture, the entire essence of the story: the humiliations and pleasure of desire, the perceived dominance and pretty cruelty of women, the reduction of the sexually striving body to mute, manipulable materiality. Additionally it is so clearly an object meant to be handled and to move in space (how else would the water pour out?) and to be the lynchpin of a brief, but significant ritual of secular life – one person pours, another washes hands. Even the master/servant dialectic embedded in the narrative (and delightfully inverted in Phyllis’ mastery of the Great Master) and in the object, plays with the situation in which the pitcher would have been used; the servants pour, the masters wash, but in manipulating the object, controlling the flow, the servants are essentially in charge.

If I had any choreographic talent or opportunity (even without the talent), I would take this object, and the tale to which it refers, as a point of departure for a short ballet, three movements. The first has three dancers, the lovers and the figure of wisdom who intrudes and attempts to disrupt their idyll; music, Purcell’s overture to The Old Bachelor. The second explores the wisdom figure’s anguished realization of desire, and is set to that plangent Monteverdi madrigal, Si dolce e’l tormento. And finally, the seduction and exposure: Handel’s Lascia ch’io piangia (which is musically in some ways a mirror image of the Monteverdi), with a coda from the final section of The Old Bachelor.

But, since I’m unlikely ever to have the skill, time, resources, or outlet for such a project, for now, I leave you with this, from Mario Bigonzetti’s ballet, Caravaggio. It’s more somber than what I have in mind, but the seventeenth-century music and the pas-de-trois dynamic is right.

Simple Gifts

“Dancing is one of the purest and simplest expressions of joy, and I feel a moral responsibility to enjoy it.” –Rick Owens, designer (interview in Harper's Bazaar, October, 2013)

Okay, so perhaps Monsieur Owens is talking about his clubbing lifestyle in Paris, but still, I have to say, he gets it right. The joy is why I dance. What other motivation could I have, at my age, with my particular physical and artistic limitations? I like the idea though that it is one’s moral responsibility to seek pleasure, to enjoy this thing. Is that really a moral position? 

On second thought, perhaps he means that the moral component to it comes in at the level of the purity and simplicity. Certainly, those are values quite often associated with morality in more than one of the world’s religious and/or philosophical traditions; Buddhism, say, or Stoicism, or Cistercian monasticism, and the list goes on. What is it about pure and simple that seems so Good? Is it that in an environment of the pure (Unadulterated? Unclouded?) and simple (Straightforward? Absence of complexity?) it is difficult to hide the little evasions and doublings-back that constitute the fertile soil of dishonesty, deception, and fraud?

Can you tell that I’ve been spending my time with a moralizing treatise (my academic research, of late)?

Simplicity and ballet have a, well, complicated history. On the one hand, to be “classical” is, as I always discuss with my novice art history students, to subscribe to an irreducible aesthetic, an unadorned, “pure” realization of an ideal. No furbelows or curlicues allowed, no excesses of ornament, expression, or eccentricity admitted. The Parthenon, not the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus.

With ballet, I suppose, this means the essentials of form: turnout, pointed feet, the extended leg, the stable pelvis, the fluid port-de-bras, the deep flexion of the plié, the weightless, yet carefully held balon. Balanchine, the great “neo-Classical” choreographer, got this; to be classical, one must constantly return to a strict interpretation of the canon, even if at moments one departs from it. In Serenade, the  corps stands in its ranks on stage at the opening of the piec,e right arms raised almost in a gesture of ad locutio, everything perfectly classical, from their high chignons to their long, white tutus, except for this: they are turned in, parallel, standing flat. But suddenly, on the downbeat of measure ten, having executed a gnomic port de bras, they all turn out to first position, and it has always seemed to me that that moment, really, is when the ballet begins. It says, “now we’re dancing, now we are classical, and everything before this was just prefatory.”

L'Allegro: Folksy fun... seriously.

If the rule of classicism is simplicity, lots of ballet just fails to make the cut, and this is not necessarily a bad thing. Mark Morris, for example, does not choreograph “classical” ballet, and I don’t think he set out to do so. Instead, there is something vibrant and robust about his anti-classicism (whether we’re talking The Hard Nut or L’Allegro), something loose and fresh and Dionysian about it that makes one wonder what the big deal is about the Parthenon anyway. Who wants Athena when one can have a bacchanal? I actually prefer his brand of anti-classicism to Twyla Tharp’s or Alvin Ailey’s, which always seem more mannered and anxious to me; I think of them as being good students who have something to prove about their individuality and their ability to think outside the box, while Mark Morris is like that kid in the wrong sneakers and the bad haircut who just doesn’t give a damn and yet manages to be the Big Man on Campus anyhow. He's that guy dancing at the Phish concert who is all sweaty and spazzy and yet magnetic -- everyone wants to dance near him because the joy is just sloshing all over the place like silly string. And of course this is all an illusion, since in fact Morris' company is ultra-disciplined and nothing about what they do is haphazard.

No question: that's classic Martha Graham.

This really comes through if you compare how Morris treats folk themes to how “folk” was transformed by Martha Graham, who was so damn earnest about classicism and simplicity it almost makes me dizzy. I’m thinking, in particular, of the high-Modernist dudgeon of Appalachian Spring (maybe parts of it were meant to elicit chuckles, maybe not, I cannot decide). There’s a great film of this, available on You Tube thanks to DanceOnFilm (http://www.youtube.com/user/danceonfilm?feature=watch), and you can decide for yourself if it’s just dated, or if that Preacher and his Worshipers aren’t meant to be just a little bit satirical?

Still, at its heart Appalachian Spring is classical in the way that Modernism is classical; serious, lucid, and formal. The original sets were by Isamu Noguchi, for heaven’s sake! It doesn’t get more classical than that. Even Graham’s vocabulary of movement, while not ballet, is founded on the same kind of control, regulation, and economy of gesture that is the basis of ballet. I particularly notice this in the pas-de-deux sections between the Bride and the Groom, which after all are just another version of the classical ballet pairing of cavalier and ballerina, with the same old theme of love and its endless potential to deliver both delight and pain.

In any case, if one ever had any doubts as to the classicism-rooted-in-simplicity values implicit in Graham’s modernism, one has only to examine the theme of the score she commissioned from Aaron Copland. The whole thing revolves around the Shaker hymn, “Simple Gifts,” by Joseph Brackett (contrary to popular opinion, the tune is not just some anonymous folk tune – some musicologists even think that Brackett borrowed the theme from the English Renaissance composer William Byrd). 

Regardless of the origins of the song, or Copland’s awareness of them, “Simple Gifts” is itself a song both about dancing and for dancing to. According to Belden Lane, in Landscapes of the Sacred: Geography and Narrative in American Spirituality (1988), Shaker communities conceived of dance not just as an expression of spiritual fervor, but as a staking-claim to the territory of this world for the Lord, an essential labor through which the terrestrial and the heavenly spheres were aligned and brought together. 

 

The lyrics clearly articulate this idea of the relationship between ritualized movement, joy, and sacred space; “to bow and bend… to turn will be our delight, till by turning, turning we come ‘round right.”

Eighteenth-century Shakers boogie down

'Tis the gift to be simple, 'tis the gift to be free

'Tis the gift to come down where we ought to be,

And when we find ourselves in the place just right,

'Twill be in the valley of love and delight.

When true simplicity is gain'd,

To bow and to bend we shan't be asham'd,

To turn, turn will be our delight,

Till by turning, turning we come 'round right

The Sufis had the same idea: “We come spinning out of darkness, scattering stars like dust,” says Rumi. 

Medieval line dance?

And so did the medieval Christian mystics, or whoever it was who first conjured up the idea of Jesus as the “Lord of the Dance,” made popular by the English lyric, “Tomorrow Shall Be My Dancing Day,” that many composers (in my mind, most notably Gustav Holst) have set to music. All that seems to be certain is it predates the Reformation, and that in late medieval England, parishes organized dancing processions to raise money in order to keep the church buildings and properties from going to pieces. So dancing was literally spinning a web of security around the sacred places of the parish (see Audrey Douglas, “Owre Thanssynge Day: Parish Dance in Salisbury,” Folk Music Journal, 6 (1994): 600-616).

So maybe Rick Owens is onto something really profound, something that all those Baptist ministers caricaturized in such films as Footloose completely misunderstand. Dancing is fundamentally moral, because it is joyful, because it is simple, because it is pure. 

An afterthought…

I’m not sure where Miley Cyrus and twerking fit into all this, but perhaps she is just, in her way, helping to delineate the sacred landscape of contemporary pop culture. To bow and to bend she is certainly not ashamed!