Letters from London:
William Forsythe and Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker
Sadler's Wells
Nov 1, 2006
By
BARBARA NEWMAN
barbara@voiceofdance.com
VoiceofDance.com 2006
The Forsythe Company in Three Atmospheric Studies. Photo by Dominik Mentzos.
This was spooky. William Forsythe's Three Atmospheric Studies opened in London the same night Cory Lidle's plane flew into a New York apartment building. One echo of the dreadful events of September 11, 2001, filled the television news; another filled the stage at Sadler's Wells.
Like a small boy with a mouse, for years Forsythe has been taking dance apart to find out how it works. Ignoring the rules of physical logic, he reassembles it in unexpectedly expressive ways that have themselves defined new rules for others to follow. The distorted music, video and speech that partner his choreography often prove more alienating than enhancing to the final effect. In this piece, the movement itself packs such a wallop that he could easily have dispensed with everything else.
Three Atmospheric Studies addresses world politics rather than artistic ones. A powerful response to the ongoing conflict in Iraq, it starts with a simple statement, "Composition 1, in which my son was arrested," that sends the dancers hurtling helter skelter across a vast, bright space. It only takes two frantic steps forward, a sudden freeze, and two hurried steps back to establish a pervasive sense of fear and uncertainty. Eyes dart in all directions, heads swivel nervously as these anonymous victims race for safety and stumble into one another's arms, often recoiling at the moment of contact to backtrack along their original path.
There was no music--only the sound of their stockinged feet and labored breathing. As the pace quickened and then slowed, isolated images emerged from the organized chaos, throwing individual experiences of the event into simultaneous focus.Though one figure slipped repeatedly from the grasp of two others, his recapture seemed inevitable and his ultimate escape impossible.
A vital respite from the welter of rash impulses and second thoughts, Part II replaced action with dialogue. In a nearly static duet, the initial speaker carefully described the arrest to a bureaucrat, who translated it, word by word, into Arabic. During their increasingly frustrated exchange, another man told the same story in terms of color and mass, painting it on the air before him in broad strokes.
The Forstyhe Company in Three Atmospheric Studies. Photo by Dominik Mentzos.
Flowing straight into Part III, the woman's speech and gestures grew grotesquely misshapen, almost unintelligible, and her limbs became catatonically rigid and heavy as lead. Around her, mangled, twisted bodies littered the floor, arms feebly raised to protect their head. Every time the dancers tried to stand, abrupt blasts of sound hurled them back to the ground, where eventually they could only be moved by others.
No one spoke to the grieving mother but a cheerful diplomat, whose rhetoric might only have soothed a politician. "Everything that happened here," he said, "happened because we planned it. Apart from the general state of emergency, there's no cause for alarm." Verbal irony aside, Forsythe made his point with such choreographic eloquence that the work's terrifying immediacy and the dancersagonizing vulnerability still haunt me.
Can success spoil choreographers? It's been extremely kind to the Belgian dancemaker Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, whose reputation is better than ever, but international exposure and acclaim have neither freed her imagination nor inspired her best work. I've just seen four of her dances in rapid succession, each one newer and less interesting than the one before.
At the Barbican late in September, De Keersmaeker and Tale Dolven performed two sections of her Fase, four movements to the music of Steve Reich (1982) that caught the elusive, addictive purity of minimalism to perfection. The women walked and turned side by side, taking their momentum from their swinging arms, now in unison, now in close canon, now facing the same way and then as mirror images.
Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker/Rosas in Fase, four movements. Photo by Herman Sorgeloos.
Like Reich's pulsating insistent music, they altered each phrase by tiny increments, subtly changing speed and direction as his repetitive sequences evolved. The man beside me squirmed with boredom and irritation, but I found the seamless match of music and movement compelling in its constantly surprising variations.
Several weeks later, De Keersmaeker's company Rosas appeared at Sadler's Wells as one of the principal attractions of Dance Umbrella, offering one program of new work, which I missed, and another of three repertory pieces. Accompanied by the Duke Quartet, these were danced in the order of their composition and named for their music--Bartok's Quartet No. 4 (Quatuor No. 4), Beethoven's Grosse Fuge, and Sch'nberg's Verkl'rte Nacht respectively.
Quatuor No. 4 (1986) expanded the minimal vocabulary of Fase to cover more space, but the cast of four women still moved in tight formation and predominantly in unison. A defiant opening section of smooth spinning and flat-footed jumps gave way to a sequence of heel-clicking, like a game of tag, and a whispery strut. After the women circled the stage on tiptoe, walking and rocking daintily in a mysterious hush, they slid into a flippant, teasing finale. As spare and stringent as the music, somehow this dancing sharpened my ears to its subtleties, not by illustrating it note for note as in Fase, but by skipping lightly along its impulses and replicating its shape and scale.
The Grosse Fuge, on the other hand, totally overpowered De Keersmaeker's mathematical ingenuity, though in 1992 she supposedly made movement that corresponded to every note. The six men and two women who crashed to the floor by twos and threes, rolled this way and that and sprang back to their feet seemed to be hurling themselves against a brick wall. By deliberately confronting Beethoven with a dance language "based mainly on the movements of falling down and getting up," she also chose to tackle the music's monumental grandeur with trivial tools.
Verkl'rte Nacht (1995) looked even more trivial, despite Gilles Aillaud's evocative setting of pale treetrunks and scattered scarlet leaves. Inextricably linked in my mind with Tudor's Pillar of Fire, the score surges with nuances of emotion, from veiled reticence to extravagent passion. As if resisting its romantic intensity, De Keersmaeker responded with an exercise in duets and spirals. "'She wants to go down, he wants her to spiral up': that was more or less the task the dancers had," she has explained. And that's more or less all she showed us, throwing in some side falls and feverish running for good measure.
Trying to meet great musical compositions on equal terms is a risky business for choreographers. However bravely they approach it, they must know deep down that they're playing with fire, so they can't be surprised if they get burned.
