Tuesday 29 October 2019

Euro Concert Tour # 9: Classy Classics of Modern Dance

The formal concert tour/cruise is over now, but I added on a pendant in the form of a side trip to Stuttgart to watch two performances of another fascinating modern dance programme entitled "Classy Classics" by the Gauthier Dance company, resident dance company of the Theaterhaus in Stuttgart.  It's the first time I've ever visited this company in their home space.  It's a sizable hall created inside a factory building which appears to date from the 1950s.

My nephew, Robert Stephen, is a member of this company --
and one absolutely fantastic conductor!  (see below)

The programme was divided into two halves that couldn't have been more contrasted if you tried.

The first half consisted of a single work -- well, sort of -- entitled Decadance.  Before you go any farther, go back and read that title a little more carefully.

Choreographer Ohad Naharin, the dean of Israeli modern choreographers, has developed an intriguing and, for me, rather odd habit.  When one of his works is to be restaged, he also revises it by introducing one or more segments from other works of his.  In the end, the "work" becomes more of a salad of wildly contrasting sections which may, or may not, cast any illumination on each other.

Decadance is an extreme example of this habit, since it has been restaged in many modern dance companies since the original premiere in 2000.  As we saw it in this staging, the work lasted for 55 minutes.  By any standards, this is a challenging time span to try to bridge with any sort of coherence, whether narrative, thematic, or stylistic.

Naharin basically doesn't bother to try.  The "piece" is actually a compendium of multiple pieces performed back to back.  Sometimes the relationship between two adjacent pieces in the work points up some aspect of relation between them.  But just as often, there's no apparent connection at all.  

The closest equivalent to an overall theme for Decadance is to say that the focal point or "theme" of the work consists of all the contrasts of style, of pace, of energy, and of tone -- and that's a fairly bag-full-of-hot-air thematic statement.  Because Naharin's work incorporates some heavy-handed attempts at humour, perhaps the entire point of the thing could be to make fun of us for taking it seriously at all.

Maybe so.  But if that's the intention, then I've seen the point made much better by other choreographers in as little as 5 minutes.  

The ridiculously pompous narration, and the narrator-driven "seventh-inning stretch" for the audience, effectively bookend the work's most gripping and fascinating sections.  Once everyone has sat down again after the "stretch," my feeling of "we've seen all of this already, so show us something different" only gets stronger.

I realize that this is tough language from an amateur critic, but I did see the show twice so I'm twice as certain of my ground.   None of this commentary is to detract from the performance of the company in this carnival of eccentricity.  Individually, in pairs, in groups, they explored all the wildly divergent possibilities of energy and stillness, frenetic rushings and controlled slow-motion, meeting every test the choreographer could throw at them with complete assurance and finesse. 

And there's no question that Naharin's choreography at its peak is fascinating, full of rhythmic and structural possibilities that far too many modern choreographers fail to explore.  Here's one key example: a solitary woman struts in a posture which makes her hips look slightly dislocated, from back of the stage to front, then to the left, then to the back, and across the back to repeat the pattern.  At each corner she pauses and turns, like a soldier turning on a parade ground.  Meanwhile, other dancers enter the space in twos and threes, interacting, moving, some faster, some slower, in all kinds of directions -- entirely ignored by the woman strutting around the square.  This disjunction between the different kinds of movement so fascinated me that I didn't even notice the point when the strutting woman switched to a 45-degree angle across the stage until she was almost halfway across.

And who can forget the couple who move around the stage in a slow, stylized prancing motion, wearing enormously baggy red harem pants -- if that's the right name for them.  That limited prance was nothing if not unique.

In the end, I guess that the real problem with Decadance is the problem of the creator endlessly trying to reinvent the piece for each new company that takes it on by recycling his own earlier work, and in the process only watering down the whole slowly but inevitably -- and mercilessly. 

The second half of the programme was, for me, far more rewarding.  This consisted of four shorter works by four completely different choreographers, each with a distinctive and uniquely imaginative approach to the art of dance-making.  

Orchestra of Wolves, choreographed by Gauthier Dance artistic director Eric Gauthier, showed us exactly what the name said it would.  This comedic gem, danced to the famous opening movement of Beethoven's Symphony No. 5, brought modern dance into sharp collision with the classic comedic takes of Bugs Bunny, the Marx Brothers, and P.D.Q. Bach.  The six wolves of the "orchestra" make instrument-playing motions while pushing, gliding, and spinning across and about the stage on wheeled chairs -- something that many young children would love to get a chance to do.  The conductor, bunny tail popping ludicrously from under his tailcoat, begins the performance with complete assurance -- insouciantly filing fingernails with his baton during one sequence, for instance -- until the moment when he suddenly loses control of the orchestra. 

The ensuing chase scene can hardly be rivaled for playful energy or for sheer Keystone Kops humour. And why not?  The audience at the second performance I attended seemed uncertain whether laughter was allowed, but where is it written in stone that modern dance is not allowed to be fun?  The first audience I joined certainly took it as a cue to laugh merrily.

Following on this came a true classic of modern dance, the Herman Schmerman pas de deux by William Forsythe.  In this duo, Forsythe begins with a man dancing in modern style while a woman uses a style that blends modern motion with classical pointe work.  Before the piece ends, the two have moved through a multi-stage courtship ritual of a sort, and have largely adopted each other's movement styles.  With this dance, I could readily imagine all sorts of levels of meaning to read into the choreography, and by no means were all of them related to the art of romance.  The two dancers gave the work a reading of intensity and intention, where every moment and movement assumed real significance -- demanding equally intense attention from the audience. 

As a footnote, there's a rare synchronicity at work here.  I first saw Herman Schmerman in 1997, when it was staged as part of a cross-Canada farewell tour celebrating Karen Kain's retirement from dancing at the National Ballet of Canada (Kain herself did not dance in this work, but in another part of the programme).  On the day when I was going to see the first of two performances of this staging in Stuttgart, Kain announced her retirement from the Artistic Director's position at the National.  How weird is that?

The third work, Äffi, highlighted the signature and unconventional choreographic style of Marco Goecke.  This style calls for rapidly repeated movements of hands, feet, and sometimes whole arms and legs, while the body as often as not remains relatively still.  It goes beyond "shaking" -- in each Goecke work that I have seen, the operative word is "vibrating."  In this dramatic solo, three segments of varying length were paired with three songs performed by Johnny Cash.  Sometimes, Goecke's signature style can seem pointless or even contrived.  In the first song, though, paired with the undeniable pain and anguish in the singer's voice and words, the dancer's movement suddenly not only made sense but developed a powerful, indeed painful immediacy.  Sustaining that power across the succeeding songs merely highlighted the piercing anguish of the first number.  Although it seems at first rather distancing, the fact that the soloist mostly performed with his back to the audience also heightened the emotional intensity of the piece.  A memorable work indeed.

The programme ended with a work from a Spanish choreographer previously unfamiliar to me, Cayetano Soto.  Malasangre (literally, "Bad Blood"), is an ensemble work set to songs by "the Queen of Latin soul," La Lupe.  Again, power and energy are the highlights of the piece, with complex postures, movements and lifts the rule.  In faster passages, the dancing becomes a total whirlwind of high-speed motion -- yet always with clear intention.  This made for a climactic ending to a programme which demonstrated, in spades, the depth and ability of this company.

No comments:

Post a Comment