Dance Two Ways

I timed a recent trip to New York City so I could see two of the world's great contemporary dance companies in one visit.  

“Hora”—Photo by Ilya Melnikov

Batsheva Dance Company was founded in 1964, but since 1990 has been the creative home of Ohad Naharin and his dance "philosophy/technique" known as Gaga. Naharin describes it as "an innovative movement language based on research into heightening sensation and imagination, becoming aware of form, finding new movement habits, and going beyond familiar limits." As with most dance, a description hardly captures the experience. Naharin’s "new movement habits" rearrange the human form into strange new anatomies via twists, angles and fully embodied gestures. The hour-long piece, "Hora," I saw at NYC’s Joyce Theatre featured a kitschy mix of synthesizer-ed classics--"Clair de Lune," "Ride of the Valkyries," "Also sprach Zarathustra"--accompanying a charged vocabulary that gave the snoozy music a palpable edge.

“Água”—Photo by Oliver Look

 A few days later, Pina Bausch’s Tanztheater Wuppertal offered a samba-saturated contrast to "Hora's" hard edges. Clocking in at just under three hours,  'Água" was developed by the company during a residency in Brazil in 2001. Like many of Bausch's works, it's a collection of idiosyncratic vignettes--some theatrical, some choreographic--here set against a full-stage backdrop of video images of Brazil's shoreline and rain forests. Languorous, sexy, in-your-face quirky, "Água" might offer a puzzle to those looking to decipher meaning or message from its odd assortment of skits, monologues, and luxurious movement (the women, as often in Bausch's work, make the most of a prismatic collection of satin ball gowns). True to its title, Água" ends with water: cascading from off-stage via an improvised sluice and spit-sprayed onto dancers who gyrated with pleasure.

Postscript: If you’re interested in Bausch’s work, be sure to read Jennifer Homans’ “appreciation” of the company in the New Yorker. Despite my thrill of seeing another Bausch work, she makes the case that the company is losing its connection to Bausch’s spirit since her death in 2009.

William Blake Two Ways.

The first part of Mickle Maher's There Is a Happiness That Morning Is, which just closed a run at Milwaukee's Next Act Theatre, is saturated with joie de vivre. Bernard (the rumpled and lovable Neil Brookshire) enters to deliver a lecture on William Blake's poem, "Infant Joy." We are his students, and he glows with the primordial ecstasy that also--he demonstrates--saturates the poem. His glow is not merely literary. The evening before, he and his longtime partner, Ellen, had sex on the campus lawn, in full view of the dean and many students. He has been euphoric ever since.

Neil Brookshire—Photo by Ross Zentner

We meet Ellen a bit later (passionate and hard-nosed Cassandra Bissell), delivering a lecture on Blake's "The Sick Rose." Appropriate to that darker poem, she smolders with anger. The dean has given the pair two choices--apologize or resign.

Cassandra Bissell—Photo by Ross Zentner

From Bernard's sunny innocence and Ellen's hard-bitten experience, Maher spins a funny and philosophical roundelay that gathers dramatic steam as it traverses questions of love, propriety, responsibility and academic freedom (in nimble rhyming couplets, no less).  Mary McDonald Kerr directs with a keen ear for the poetry and an appreciation of Maher's sense of dramatic ebb and flow. I'm sorry that travel and illness kept me from seeing this show until its closing weekend. Those who joined me during the run surely saw one of the Milwaukee theater season's real treats.

Severance

Everyone is waiting to see if Logan Roy and company self destruct in the final season of HBO’s Succession, which premiere’s March 26th. I’ll be watching, I suppose, even though I’m a little weary of the one-note, “which-dysfunctional-child-does-daddy-love-best” storyline. If you’re looking for a bit more imagination in your business-world satire, I recommend Severance. Apple TV+’s high-concept series stays pretty low-key through many of its early episodes. But Dan Erickson’s show keeps you hooked with a series of savvy reveals as the episodes click on. While waiting for those, you can jive on the Kubrick-style Steadicam shots, which snake through the hallways of the enigmatic corporation where four computer serfs do their mysterious number sorting. Or enjoy the razor-sharp satire of corporate culture, where employees are rewarded with occasional buffets of melon balls or deviled eggs, or feted with a 15-minute "Dance Party” that transforms their anonymous work space into a rec-room approximation of Studio 54.

Zach Cherry, Britt Lower and John Turturro in Severance.

But hang on to your microchips for the final episode, which builds up to several big reveals with the breath-catching precision of a postmodern Hitchcock. Of course, Sir Alfred wrapped up his stories in a neat two hours, knowing nothing of the that 21st-century form, The Cliffhanger. Erickson builds the suspense relentlessly through the final episode. “Severance” will have the online water coolers buzzing, and probably bring lots of folks back for season 2.

Great Scott

For years, the New York Times’ A.O. Scott struck a sweet spot among film reviewers. Flashes of wit and humor that rivaled The New Yorkers’ Anthony Lane without tipping into glibness. Canny aesthetic judgement that put him in the league of former New Yorker writer David Denby. And how many film critics could write magazine length critical assessments of authors like Joy Williams and Edward P. Jones. Scott, in fact, came to the Times film desk from a career as a book critic (New York Review of Books, Slate, Newsday). He’ll return to that world now, serving a critic-at-large for the NYT Book Review.

In his “Farewell to Movies” column (of sorts), he was kind enough to list five reviews that are representative of his over 2,200 print reviews at The Times. As they used to say on Siskel & Ebert, here are some clips:

“Frankly, though, I don’t see how any review could really spoil what may be among the most transcendently, eye-poppingly, call-your-friend-ranting-in-the-middle-of-the-night-just-to-go-over-it-one-more-time crazily awful motion pictures ever made. I would tell you to go out and see it for yourself, but you might take that as a recommendation rather than a plea for corroboration. Did I really see what I thought I saw?” (Reviewing the 2008 Will Smith vehicle, Seven Pounds.)

“She plucks images and stories from the world around her, finding beauty and nourishment in lives and activities the world prefers to ignore. She is a constant, funny presence in the film, providing piquant voice-over narration and allowing herself visual and verbal digressions on the state of her aging hands, the water damage on her ceiling and her portable camera's dancing lens cap.” (Reviewing Agnes Varda’s 2000 film, The Gleaners and I).

“…it’s also time for me to say my piece. And what I have to say is: Are you kidding me? To be worth arguing about, a movie must first of all be interesting: it must have, if not a coherent point of view, at least a worked-out, thought-provoking set of themes, some kind of imaginative contact with the world as we know it. Joker, an empty, foggy exercise in second-hand style and second-rate philosophizing, has none of that. Besotted with the notion of its own audacity — as if willful unpleasantness were a form of artistic courage — the film turns out to be afraid of its own shadow, or at least of the faintest shadow of any actual relevance.” (Reviewing Todd Phillips’s 2019 film, Joker.)

One and Donne

I wasn’t too familiar with the poetry of John Donne until I worked on a Milwaukee Repertory Theatre production of Margaret Edson’s Wit, which featured a literature professor who was obsessed with Donne’s inscrutable “Holy Sonnets.” Some of Donne’s work is still among the most cryptic poetry in English, but his life and art is made happily more accessible in Katherine Rundell’s Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne. The “data” on Donne’s life is sparse, but Rundell’s book sketches the outlines of a life that was as troubled as it was exultant. She sums it up in an inspiring conclusion:

“Donne was able to hold two conflicting truths ever in front of him: a kind of duck-rabbit of the human condition. Humanity, as he saw it, was rotten with corruption and weakness and failure - and even so it was the great light of the universe.

He gloried in mankind: if the inner world of each human was extended outwards, Man would be the giant, and the world the dwarf.' Few people would turn to Donne's poetry or prose, with its twisting logic and deliberate difficulty, for solace - but you might turn to him to be reminded that for all its horror, the human animal is worth your attention, your awe, your love.”

Have a good week.

Paul