Brawn Over Brain
Compañía Nacional de Danza
Nacho Duato’s Gilded Goldbergs, Gnawa, Por Vos Muero Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Theater, San Francisco CA
February 25, 2008
Compañía Nacional de Danza in Nacho Duato's Gnawa. Photo courtesy of San Francisco Performances.
The popularity of Madrid-based Compañía Nacional de Danza, since 1990 under the artistic direction of Nacho Duato, remains a bit of a mystery. A Northern California company debut at UC-Davis in November, 2002 left a mixed impression. What that evening told me was that nothing would ever compel me to sit through Duato’s appalling Castrati again in this lifetime and that work dominated the first program of the San Francisco Performances engagement, the troupe’s bow in this city. The second rep bill, seen Saturday, Feb. 23 at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Theater, at least promised nothing as excruciating as that historically ill-informed descent into homoerotic Grand Guignol.
But nobody can deny Duato’s appeal. His dances have entered the repertories of the world’s major ballet institutions, including American Ballet Theatre and San Francisco Ballet. In fact, Gnawa, the central work on Saturday’s San Francisco Performances-sponsored program, was commissioned in 2005 by Chicago’s Hubbard Street Dance. Dancers seem to adore Duato’s choreography. The balletic aspirations and the weighted Grahamisms suggest a species of liberation from the classroom. What you see in his style is, fundamentally, an off shoot of the modern ballet lingua franca popularized by Jirí Kylián, in whose Nederlands Dans Theater Duato served as both performer and resident choreographer for several years.
In truth, the dancing was never less than commanding Saturday. The 29 performers, who come from international backgrounds, include rugged guys, whose undraped physiques Duato delights in showing off, and women who fuse thin as reeds configurations with molten torsos. What these dancers couldn’t provide was any appreciable expressive latitude. Duato’s choreography has an annoying way of suppressing his performers’ personalities, rather than revealing them.
What irks most about Duato’s style, for all its raw physicality, is its inability to transform itself in the presence of different musics. The choreographer, at least from the evidence Saturday, favors episodic scores, bits of sound often drawn from disparate sources. That tendency, that unwillingness to plot movement over extended spans of time, lends an episodic quality to the choreography. Saturday’s assortment of dances ranged over a decade, and the best of it, somewhat depressingly, could be found in the earliest essay, the enthralling 1996 Por Vos Muero.
Compañía Nacional de Danza in Nacho Duato's Por Vos Muero. Photo courtesy of San Francisco Performances.
Everything works here. Duato’s music includes carefully selected scores from the 15th and 16th century Spanish and Catalan repertoires punctuated by a recorded reading of a contemporaneous poem by Garcilaso de la Vega. The six couples, who seem to materialize from and disappear into a series of pillars, suggest a society in which courtliness is the only quality that prevents them from sinking into barbarism. Civilization comes down to a series of formal encounters by the women in long skirts and the men, suppliants in corset-like costumes that leave their legs exposed. The swirling couples arrive in what seems one single creative exhalation.
Yet, if you spend an entire evening with Duato’s dances, you find mannerism often substituting for genuine stylistic depth. The American premiere of the 2006 Gilded Goldbergs for 10 dancers falls too soon into predictability. On Robin Holloway’s compelling reharmonization of Bach’s keyboard masterpiece, Duato overlays a muddled scenario about the pangs of creativity. At the beginning, a composer figure (Isaac Montllor) wrestles with the pages of a musical score. At the end, the principal woman (Ana Teresa Gonzaga) opens the innards of a suspended piano and a sheaf of paper descends upon her.
What separates the two incidents includes mass groupings (usually upstage), fiery unisons, limb-isolating duets, low sweeping extensions and too many floor rolls for comfort. Duato’s choreography misses flow, but, occasionally, the material can soar. A male palm-patting duet may have been an afterthought, but the episode looks spontaneously wrought and all the more delightful for it. You can make what you will of the Montllor-Gonzaga duet, in which she first embraces him, then kicks his supine body.
The same vocabulary (minus the hint of sado-masochism) permeates Gnawa, which marshals 14 dancers in a paean to the descendants of Moroccan slaves who infiltrated Spanish culture; that much can be deduced from Duato’s inflated program note. The rhythmically striking traditional music yields an odd candlelight procession and tepid attempts at exoticism. But there seems little effort to explore the folkloric lexicon suggested by the music. It goes by in a blur, which I don’t believe was the intention.
San Francisco Performances will conclude its dance season April 19-20 at YBCA Theater with Doug Varone and Dancers. http://www.performances.org (415) 392-2545.
