|
Go
back to Flash Reviews
Go
Home
Flash Dispatch, 7-11: An American
Dance Fan in France
In Montpellier, it's Back to the Future
By Paul Ben-Itzak
Copyright 2001 The Dance Insider
MONTPELLIER, France -- So, dance
insider, it's midnight Monday, and I'm strolling down the most dangerous street
in the most dangerous town in France, with the widest grin on my face. I'm smiling
because ahead of me walk my protectors, the two most beautiful women in Montpellier
this summer, swinging my DJ gear between them and leading our return expedition
to La Chapelle. M&M, as we'll call them, caught my DJ act Sunday night. It was
just a small part of the "happening" at La Chapelle's After-Shave salon, the unofficial
after-party of the Montpellier Danse festival. The encounter was enough to remember
each other when we met again Monday afternoon at the old Dominican Church off
Espace Charles de Gaulle, where Compagnie MC2 Luc Maubon performed "Langages Oublies,"
also not an official part of the festival but a beneficiary of the "all-dance,
all-the-time" spirit that intoxicates this Southern city every year. I asked my
new friends to the performance of Catherine Diverres, one of seven formal or informal
spectacles I saw this week. I also caught Emmanuelle Huynh's prop-impelled, land
of the unrestrained duet-grapple dance, an all-Jiri Kylian evening from the Netherlands
Dance Theater, and planned and impromptu dance and dance and music performances
at La Chapelle that amplified the official events, as well as solidified for me
that this town, at this time, is very much like what NYC must have been in the
1960s, when ballet boomed and Judson birthed.
Unfortunately, in both the ballet
realm and a specific segment of the post-mod arema, NYC dance has in some respects
fossilized. Instead of the Joffrey's "Astarte," we get David Parsons's "Pied Piper"
-- which is not a knock on this ballet, but on what is today considered risk.
And in the place of the disarming humanism of Jerome Robbins, we get the safe
Robbins light of Christopher Wheeldon. While the French incorrectly dismiss American
modern dance as stuck in the past and unevolving (the only American modern companies
they seem to program here are White Oak, Merce, Trisha Brown, the Ailey, and Bill
T. Jones), such a dismissal ignores all the dance-theater and dance-music-theater
sub-genres which have moved in a totally different direction than Judson. They
are perhaps correct that "new" dance created in the Judson vein hasn't really
extended it but is content to aim to revive it. We get lots of earnest efforts
whose ideal seems to be to recreate the technical level of Judson, but perhaps
forgets that what made Judson Judson was the period context: by sending a bunch
of pedestrians walking across the stage and calling it choreography, Steve Paxton
was issuing a defiant "fuck you" to the uptown glam-fest: You dress it up, we
strip it down. You neo-classicize it, we de-dance it. Ironically, dance created
in this style today is not about fuck-you but fealty.
What the French seem to have done
in this vein is extended the boundaries, specifically, to a land where there are
no boundaries between the performers. A French friend explained to me this week,
in a over steak Roquefort and some kind of fishy compote thing, in a cafe above
the Montmartre Cemetary, that French people don' have that one-yard privacy zone
around them that Americans and particularly New Yorkers do. (In Harlem once, my
simply stepping ahead of someone elicited an ominous "Don't walk in front of me!"
; in Paris's Gare de Lyon train station Saturday, a woman practically shoved me
aside to step ahead of me, and seemed to think nothing of it. Most of the sidewalks
here are about as wide as the addition being added to my ol' 8th Street sidewalk
this month.) In the grappling of Huynh's dancers, seen Sunday at Studio Bagouet,
and in the work of Leonardo Montecchia and others seen several days running at
After-Shave, it wasn't just that dancers wrestled with each other, but that they
did it with such ease and seamlessness and casualness. A hurdle was not dramatically
packed, it just happened, again and again. In a penultimate scene of Huynh's "Distribution
en course," the deadpan Christian Rizzo steps and jumps all over and straddles
various parts of Rachid Ouramdane. The only hint we get that this is particularly
significant is not from any profound glances, but from the increased panting of
the dancers. If these dancers had anything in common with their American post-mod
counterparts, it was their joyless neutral expressions all the more noticeable
since what they did for much of this ballet is play with hundreds of props gradually
dismantled from a roving kiosk. In an exquisite pre-amble, the kiosk had dogged
Huynh, suggesting in after-image, anyway that this mobile was full of objects
which had haunted Huynh till she couldn't stand it and decided to ask her dancers
to do something to them. Sometimes I liked this neutrality as when Julie Nioche
yawningly opened a bag of walnuts and then dropped them en mass down her shirt,
or when Rizzo blew a condom up and then put it over his head. Sometimes I wanted
them to show some sign that they were enjoying this play.
As in all of the dance theater seen
this week, lighting was anything but generalized in patches; the whole concept
seemed to change for every scene. We started with a disk, with a whole, shifting
mobile in the sky, the way the sun (or perhaps an electric light) shone through
it, the angles, altering the shadows and thus the mood and what we saw. later
a panel of more than 20 search lights on the side was all that illumined a breakneck
sequence where five dancers find various ways to pile on each other. They no sooner
started then it was time to start again (imagine a musical chairs inspiration,
only where they object is not to land on a chair but to land on each other, in
different ways.) These groupings strive to be different and distinct each time.
At the conclusion of one tableau, Rizzo, his head and a hand popping out from
under, reaches across, Twister-like, to grab a foot, as if it is this which will
finally hold the assemblage together.
All the while the lights are diminishing
in number, 'til suddenly, without us realizing how it happened, only two on the
vast panel at the side are illumine the action, which finally, after a centipedral
formulation stretching from the front to the back of the stage, shows signs of
slowing down. One man carries another off.... We even hear a door close offstage
as if they've left the building. The lights slowly dim until Elise Olhandeguy
quietly leaves.
The lighting played rather a breathtaking
role, too, in the outdoor, late-night concert of Catherine Diverres at Cour Des
Ursulines, in the cloister and we do mean cloister, as in right out the middle
ages of the Ursulines. This complex is where Mathilde Monnier has her Centre Choreographique
National of Montpellier. Diverres heads the centre of Rennes and Bretagne. (Hmm...are
you getting a leitmotif here, dance insiders? Despite what the testosterone-heavy
recent NYC France Moves festival might have you believe, there ARE talented, original,
international caliber women choreographers in France too, mon ami!) Diverres work
is distinct from that of her modern colleagues, marked by an almost painfully
(that's a compliment) angelic lyricism. We saw this in the sweeping legs and gentle
shoulder inclines of Isabelle Kurzi, who alternated solos with the more brittle
Carole Gomes. Then came the piece de resistance.
A somewhat frail-built woman in elegant
black gown Diverres herself appears in this piece to be tangling with ghosts of
others in her past, and also internal ones. She rushes forward to meet them, arms
imploring, even as her body quivers. A French dance teacher friend found this
solo, "Stance II," too Grahamian for her tastes, by which I think she meant melodramatic.
But I found it heartbreaking, conjuring, as I think Graham at its best does, one's
own demons, even ones I was tangling with that very moment. Such as: How do you
respond in the present, without the interference of past experience? Do you maybe,
as Diverres finally seemed to do, come to an accommodation, an understanding,
recognizing that these demons are part of you, but that you will go forward anyway?
Speaking of the dark side, on my
first night at the festival, I was wondering whether a whole evening of Jiri Kylian
could engage me. In the U.S.A., our exposure to the work of Kylian is more or
less limited to "Petite Mort." Indeed, even as they boast about the acquisition
of a Kylian ballet as proof that they dare to dare, U.S. ballet companies proscribe
our viewing of Kylian's work to the somber side. Well, after seeing the Nederlands
Dans Theater's all-Kylian "Colorful Black and White" program Saturday at the Opera
Berlioz le Corum, I'm here to tell you that Mr. K. also has a wacky side, a Pilobolan
side, even a Forsythian abrasive side.
The evening began conservatively
enough with the straightforward "No More Play" and the requisite "Petite Mort"
(you know, the one with the ballooning skirts on poles and the swordplay at the
beginning.)
But the anti was quickly upped in
part two, with "Sarabande," in which about six men cavorted like angels sent to
earth, the sound of their movement and their speech amplified. (Think "Dogma,"
where God speaks so loud She tries not to speak because you couldn't survive it.)
By the end they are simply playing. Paired with this ballet was "Falling Angels,"
in which about the equal number of women breakdown one of Steve Reich's drumming
compositions, played at an increasing pitch by Arthur Cune, Peter De Vries, Hanz
Sonderop, and Jacob Good.
The evening ends merrily, with "Sweet
Dreams," in which to Kylian's innovative combinations the challenge of doing them
with a tennis ball in one's mouth is now added, and "Sechs Tanze," in which a
succession of swains try to tame a battery of shrews. Everyone is powdered up,
so that anytime one dancer smacks another on the butt, a cloud of smoke puffs
out. The big looped dresses on poles with wheels are brought back, driven by a
man who cuts off the head of another; or, in an echo of Pilobolus's Tall Women
Duet, a very tall man whose dress conceals that he's standing on another's shoulders.
When the show ended, my French dance
insider companion remarked that what we'd seen was very academic, by which I think
she meant strictly classical. (It was not a dis -- she enjoyed the program.) It
struck me then that the ballets of Kylian, which U.S. ballet companies use to
give their repertoire modern street cred -- "See, we ARE living in the 21st century!
" -- is the most conservative end of the ballet spectrum in France. I came to
the right place!
On the more radical end, we have
what I hied to after the NDT performance -- the happening at La Chapelle. What
Etienne Schwarcz, assisted by Francois Ceccaldi, has created in this vast chapel
is an ongoing happening. Some performances he knows about in advance -- a choreographer
or a chamber group will call and announce it is coming by tonight -- while some
just happen on the spot. When no guests are performing, Schwarcz, an accomplished
musician and composer, and Ceccaldi hold forth in the booth with state of the
art equipment, creating one of the most avant-garde ambiances to be found not
just in Montpellier, but anywhere in the world. An African musician performed
one afternoon; by the evening they had remixed him.
On Saturday at La Chapelle, I saw
a grappling duet between Leonardo Montecchia, an Argentinean export, and Corinne
Duval, who bumped up against each other torso to torso, giggling, and climbed
about each other. Earlier, Julien Gallie-Ferry sermonized from a pulpit in an
alcove high above the floor, turning his hands into arguing puppets and plopping
a vase over his head to mute his raving gibberish, while Clemence Galliard fled
around the whole space. On Monday, Montecchia pushed and pulled with Eva Jouret,
who on Sunday gave a simply elegant modern vignette of a performance, to trancey
music mixed by Ceccaldi. Montecchia meanwhile slithered under the chair of a the
violinist of a chamber trio; suddenly the other violinist started singing in a
haunting, mystic alto. Monday Montecchia grappled, easily, with another male dancer,
then tangled more lightly with Eva Jouret, this time to a larger musical ensemble
that swung from Bulgarian to gypsy music to flamenco.
I don't quite know the term for the
type of dance I saw at La Chapelle, but it is a distinct style -- perhaps a more
intimate practice of Contact Improv. Here, when two bodies touch, it is not imbued
with Extra Significance and exclamation marks -- it is just natural, more simple.
From a dance perspective, what struck me most about Montpellier -- from the "academic"
art of Kylian in the vast Corum to the black box prop and lighting experiments
of Huynh's Compagnie Mua, to Diverres's outdoor dreamscape, to the Caegian/Cunninghamian
music-dance collaborationists of Luc Maubon's church performance, to the happening
frolics of La Chapelle -- is the simplicity of it all.
I feel like one must have felt being
in NYC in the 1960s, present at the birth.
P.S. An exception to the simplicity
was a class given by Rita Quaglia of Lluis Ayet's company to 20 students selected
from around the world for Atelier du Monde, new at this year's festival and co-sponsored
by public monies under the auspices of AAFA, kind of France's National Endowment
for the Arts, except with a more international mission and perspective. What started
as deceptively simple -- Quaglia had the dancers lying on their backs, stretching
arms and legs up -- turned into a rising, turning, falling, and rising again drill
that makes David Grenke look like a pansy! Quaglia's approach is in itself a performance.
After starting with a light and kindly manner, her own physical urgency increased
as she rushed around the room to give corrections, even as dancers were falling
out right and left.
P.P.S. This just in: Etienne Schwarcz
reports that last night's closing "after-shave" after party "was a marvelous evening.
very many people, things happening the whole time, much artistic 'coming together,'
a big, warm, 'happening,' with the end of the evening smooth Indian sort of sitar
music, after a huge percussion session, electronic wild music, and many dance
performers. It was a sort of gathering from all the little things of the 10 days
coming together, and swelling up to the last night's celebration. It was quite
incredible to see so many people floating!"
Editor's Notes: PBI's travel to and
lodging in Montpellier was paid for by the Montpellier Danse festival. To read
more about La Chapelle and the festival, by Shena Wilson, click
here.
Go
back to Flash Reviews
Go Home
|
