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Flash Review 2, 3-29: Art in Fact
William Forsythe's Sounds of Science
By Paul Ben-Itzak
Copyright 2002 The Dance Insider
ANTWERP -- While the work is hardly new, William Forsythe's pivotal
evening-length 1984 "Artifact," seen Tuesday at de Singel on
Frankfurt Ballet and closing there tonight, touches on several
fundamental questions hounding dance these days: What is it? What
happens when choreographers add spoken word to the mix? How does one
engage an audience? How does one attract a hip audience to the
ballet? What is ballet? Where does dance fit in the broader
aesthetic? When what is putatively a ballet, danced by a ballet
company, resembles Cunningham more than Classical ballet, is there
any point to categories within the field? When the declaiming in a
putative ballet is so strongly interpreted by the actors that the
work seems more drama than dance -- notwithstanding the facility of
the dancers and the intricacy of the choreography -- should a ballet
like "Artifact" even be critiqued as a dance? Or as a play that uses
dance? And if it is theater, is a dance critic even equipped to
evaluate the work, to know where it fits in the pantheon of theater,
and whether it is a true original or simply derivative?
To take the next-to-last question first: There are certainly more
dancers -- about 35 -- than actors in "Artifact." And the patterning
is more involved than the spoken script, which consists of a handful
of phrases repeated again and again. ("Step Inside," "Step Outside,"
"I remember everything," "I forget what I never" knew, "Can you see
what I'm hearing?," "Shall we not say what we have seen and always
never forget?", "Welcome to what you think you see.") Even if
deceptively simple, these references may not come from nowhere. While
an author does not seem to be credited in the program, my colleague
Rosa Mei caught possible allusions to T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land,"
such as in the oft-repeated references to rocks.
Normally when seeing dance with text, I don't think the text needs to
be confined to its literal meaning, but can be experienced simply as
the music for the dance. In "Artifact," though, Prue Lang's
fairy-tale diction makes her one of the two most compelling single
performers, the other being Forsythe muse Dana Caspersen. (A
central, rather ponderous dancer-character chalked in white,
portrayed by Agnes Noltenius, is simply an over-drawn dramatic
device). So apart from the pure dance section in which Caspersen
works her magic, it's hard to resist seeing this experience as a work
of theater, first. (This is not to dis the rest of the dancers, who
include Forsythe stalwart Allison Brown and the legendary Jodie
Gates, but rather to say that their deployment on stage sometimes
makes them seem secondary.) On the other hand, Forsythe's
choreographic hand is so considered that the dance in "Artifact," if
seen for instance in the context of a Broadway play, is much more
than one is used to finding in "the theater." What we have then is
two strong artistic elements. While they don't exactly clash, in only
the third of the four acts do they meld as equals; in the first the
dance is over-eclipsed, in what might be a Forsythe mind-fuck -- even
moreso for a 1984 audience which didn't know what it was getting into
with Forsythe, as we do. Lang repeats a few semi-sensical lines;
while her mellifluous British-accented tones makes the experience
more than tolerable, even pleasant, it's less easy to sit through the
microphoned, flat, calling attention to its own theatre-ness droning
of her partner, Nicholas Champion. On top of this, the dancing
appears mostly in shadow, producing the frustration born of wanting
to watch something -- this is William Forsythe choreographing, after
all, on the extraordinary dancers of his home company! -- and not
being able to see it. (A problem compounded by the dark lighting,
also designed by Forsythe. I know, I know, it's artistic, but if you
have to strain to see the performance, what's the point?!)
Part II merits more than a little discussion because it has been
adapted in and of itself by ballet companies around the world. Having
now seen it in the evening-length "Artifact," though, I'm perplexed
as to why Forsythe has permitted a cast-truncated, principals-only
version to be performed elsewhere. Or rather, as it's his to choose
to do so or not, I'm perplexed as to what this might say about the
integrity of the dance as a whole. Not integrity in the moral sense,
but in the sense of how integral each piece is to the whole. If you
saw "Artifact II" on Dance Galaxy at the Joyce a few seasons back,
you know it as a dance of two couples. In fact, the entire corps of
about 30 is involved in the enterprise, framing the couples. Of
course a corps does more than frame -- it is part of the picture and
even, in the hands of a Forsythe predecessor like Balanchine, it is
the picture! Indeed, as seen Tuesday, at the end of this section,
the dance-iest, the two couples return to the corps before marching
off.
It's a choreographer's prerogative to give permission to a company to
perform his dance in altered form, and of course understandable that
a small ensemble like Dance Galaxy could not have amassed the
personnel necessary for the original part II of "Artifact." But the
choice is puzzling because Forsythe's architecture, while exquisite
in the duet form, rocks on large groups, when various canons, of the
whole and on individuals' bodies, are set a -twirlin'. It's a pageant
really, and in some ways his maneuvers are more effective seen en
masse because then it's easier, at least for a non-dancer looking for
more than just inventive mechanics, to relate to the movement purely
as science, geometry. It takes on the thrill of Busby Berkeley. This
is when Forsythe most dazzles me. So why would he permit the
performance of a version which excises the corps, signalling that
it's not that essential after all?
Which is not to take anything away from the four principals in
Artifact II Tuesday -- Amy Raymond, Fabrice Mazliah, Thierry
Guiderdoni, and, most of all, the fiercely liquid Caspersen, who
gives roundness to what is, after all, pretty angular choreography,
with the woman constantly contracting into a sideways v as she holds
both of her partner's hands and keeps her feet close to his. As my
colleague Ms. Mei pointed out, her smooth sweeps were particularly
strong, considering that this is not the typical strong point of a
ballet dancer because of the specific muscles whose strength it
depends upon. Yet Caspersen exercised them with easy grace.
Where the all blends best -- spoken word/theater and dance -- is the
third part of "Artifact," a riot of declaiming, prop deconstructing,
actor unravelling and dancer recoiling and otherwise responding. As
Lang gets more and more wrought up about remembering, forgetting,
who's on the outside, who's on the inside, the rocks, the dust,
always the rocks, the dancers first cooperate, taking her
instructions, for instance, to "step inside!" behind the sparely
scrawled-on slabs in front of which they stand. But by the end of
this section, they are trying to escape -- and deliciously so, as a
tall female dancer in an oversized white t-shirt, her legs bared,
tip-toes en pointe across the back of the stage towards the exit,
making the shshshshs sign to her colleagues and beckoning them follow
her ("If we go quietly, maybe the madwoman won't notice! This
way!").
Notwithstanding that comic use of pointe, this is the section where
the dancers are most modernly employed, both in the disjointed,
Grenkian, warped, crippled way they move and simply in what they're
wearing, mostly hobo chic for the men and variations on leotards for
the women. By the end, rather too inevitably, Richard Siegel,
Frankfurt Ballet's designated ranter, is going at full steam, to the
point where a voiced-over director (Forsythe?) who's been giving
directions throughout ("So and so, leave; now so and so, enter")
shouts, as Siegel frantically pliets, "RIch, shut the fuck up!"
before the curtain falls.
Everyone has calmed down, initially, for the finale, but it's really
just a more controlled and mannered mania, as Lang, saying the same
things, increases her tempo and volume in the type of amplification
that suggests a supreme battle for self-control. The entire corps,
making way before, around, and behind her as she paces and stomps,
makes a more patterned response, arraying almost militarily in
various lines ("Dancers, fall in!"), inflected occasionally by more
individual, precise gestures, my favorite being the exquisitely timed
arrangement in which all lay down upstage, heads to us, and one by
one a dancer raises an arm on the left side of the line, another
immediately responds on the right, the wonder being in the simplicity
of the gesture. Musically here even the pianist, Margot Kazimirska
playing the composition of Eva Crossman-Hecht, stops and starts as if
also quaking, like the dancers, at Lang's every command. (I loved
this interchange, this call and stop if you will, by the way -- the
musician did not have even the option of being a passive
collaborator. The same team provided the music for the first section,
the second came from Bach as recorded by Nathan Milstein, and the
third was a Forsythe-produced sound collage.)
As artifacts go, it would be interesting if our reactions as
audiences (not just as critics) to William Forsythe's "Artifact"
could also be recorded at the various epochs of auditing. One of the
artifacts of most interest seems to be how we perceive a work that --
notwithstanding it's being designated a ballet and created on a
ballet company by a ballet choreographer -- eludes definition. If we
didn't know it was a ballet at the get, would we even call it this?
Or would we call it a play with dance? An abstract painting acted
out? A poem visualized? A fairy tale intellectualized? A madman or
woman analyzed? A dream realized? An insane asylum artified?
By way of a mini-artifact along these lines:
--I as a critic experienced this dance as described in the above
paragraph -- mentally stimulated most by what questions it raised
about the art of performing. Besides the dancing of Caspersen, which
always breathes fire and thus is always a joy to behold, and the
locuting of Lang, "Artifact" struck my brain but didn't really stick
in my heart. I don't know that it was moving in the same way that
Pina Bausch, these days anyway, is able to move with her brand of
multi-genre charming cacophony.
-- My dancer/choreographer/writer companion loved "Artifact" for
the geometry and literary allusions, for starters.
-- My dancer/choreographer/writer companion's non-dancer companion,
while not not crazy about it, was unmoved, most notably, by section
two with its two duets. (While the dancer/choreographer found these
exquisite, I'm in the middle even if somewhat elevated on the
effectiveness of these duets. They are fascinating to watch, but,
particularly if interpreted by a dancer without the warmth and joy
of Casperson, would they actually resonate and move me? I'm not
sure.) Our non-dancer friend did, however, like the third section --
the most cohesive dramatic and comedically. And the section that was
about more than the science of dance, the one in which Lang, goaded
by Champion, exploded, and the dialogue suddenly made theatrical if
not entirely logical sense, while the dancers were given the
choreography to respond. It was alive in the spirit, not just the
head.
This is rather the unique quandary -- the problem, if you will --
that Forsythe has set up for himself: He is working geometrically,
and philosophically, not with cold numbers or abstract words, but
with warm-blooded bodies. Those bodies themselves are flexible and
the dancers able even to neutralize themselves emotionally (by
appearance, anyway) in service of the work, to become lean mean
dancing machines. And maybe members of a certain, often
pseudo-intellectual cultural elite are able to get off on dissecting
the geometry as they are able to wax prolific on other types of
abstract art, in a code that sometimes confounds the rest of us
pedestrians. Music is math too, but it's still able to move. The
father of mathematical ballet, Balanchine, connected so strongly to
the music that even his non-narrative ballets move our hearts,
especially when the dancers themselves are moved. I don't know that
the ballets of William Forsythe -- at least what I've seen so far --
offer this kind of popular appeal. A nasty term, that -- and I hear
you saying that it's not an artist's job, and should hardly be his or
her ideal, to appeal to the masses. But the popular expectation of
being moved by a dance comes from a pretty honest, basic place: We
dance when we are moved. This is the connection that has somehow been
missed, and that I think of whenever I hear someone say they just
don't understand dance. What's to understand? It's the one art anyone
can experience -- if not always at a high artistic level, at least at
the visceral. So when a choreographer makes something so cold that
even after a long section where two couples are pretty much touching
their partners the entire time, some in the audience can still
remain unmoved in their hearts, no matter how stimulated they are in
their brains, I have to suggest, at least, that the dance of William
Forsythe more often than not achieves a certain level of artistic
provocation, choreographic breakthrough, and perhaps intellectual
stimulation, but may fall short as dance -- not in terms of what
dance means to dancers and critics, but to a large section of the
public.
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