Dance: Alvin Ailey at City Center

Alvin Ailey has long been my favorite dance company. I like to say that when God created man, he created Ailey dancers; certainly, this is humanity achieving its full genetic potential, at least so far as the physical body is concerned. I still feel this way about the quintessential Ailey dancer, but dare I say that the company is not what it was ten years ago, when I saw Revelations for the first time? The program for December 15, 2010 was perhaps just poorly chosen, or even poorly rehearsed. Perhaps the inclusion of live musicians from Jazz at Lincoln Center was a distraction for the dancers, or the producers. Perhaps Judith Jameson is quite tired now, ready to pass her baton to successor Robert Battle. I am looking forward to his tenure, for his featured choreography this evening reminded me of the essence of Ailey: humanity, a thing raw and divine.

The evening began with Three Black Kings, a 1976 work of Ailey's, unfortunately showcasing the worst aspects of the era and the choreographer. The three sections, inspired by King Balthazar, King Solomon, and Martin Luther King, clearly evoked none of these characters, but were instead a confusing parade of slow and plodding extensions and hero-worshipping gestures. It wasn't until after I read the program during intermission that I understood the structure (one given not by Ailey, but by composer Duke Ellington). In this case, I think a less illustrative presentation would have been more successful.

The program improved with Episodes, a piece choreographed by Ulysses Dove in 1987. Unlike the previous piece, this one highlighted the best qualities of its era. Think of a very elevated Flashdance, and you will have some indication of the tone of Episodes. A dark stage with strong bands of light and a spare, booming score by Robert Ruggieri create a plot-less space for conditioned bodies to appear either singly or in pairs, raging alone or against each other. There are undercurrents of hardened sexuality—not sensuality—that I imagined pushed the 1980s envelope, and remain powerful now, if not shocking as then.

Onto In/Side, the Robert Battle-choreographed solo performed exquisitely by Jamar Roberts, the creature I told you God fashioned when he molded Adam from the mud. This was the shortest piece of the evening—Roberts danced for the duration of Nina Simone's Wild is the Wind—but one in which every moment was sacred and to be savored. Here, the body is something organic and foreign, animal and alien, earthen and electric. Tissues are networked with synapses, and a human emerges from the womb of the earth enormous, ungainly, tipping at the precipice, grasping for his inherent nobility. For three entire minutes, my breath stopped still in my throat. This is what humanity is, is meant to be, when you strip away television and cars and jobs and suits and houses and cell phones and all of that crap, even books, and criticism, and philosophy, and nobler intellectual pursuits. This is ur-choreography. This is what we are, raw: deeply emoting bodies, grasping in the dark.

The show would have done to finish on this strong point, but instead, Billy Wilson's 1992 The Winter in Lisbon was tacked onto the end. This is a not particularly interesting or meaningful piece, a Latin-flavored bit of fluff, the kind of thing I've seen done before—and with far better result—by Ballet Hispanico and others. Most offensively, the piece featured "Moe," the one eyesore in the company, who desperately needs a haircut, along with some intensive training to drop his shoulders and raise his extension. I do not know why he is a part of the company. He stood out, even in Three Black Kings, as being out of rhythm with the rest of the group. His chest hunkers in, rather than radiating proudly, as an Ailey dancer's must. Even in his press photo, his head juts forward of his shoulders, like a turtle's, rather than sitting proudly on his neck, like that of every other dancer's. He was so distractingly bad as to appear to be an emergency understudy, but it seems he has danced with the company since 1994. Perhaps it is time for him to retire.

Dance: Voices and Dance within the Americas, at the Guggenheim's Works and Process

This night, the Guggenheim presented three short pieces by three different choreographers: one American (though his biography describes Jonah Bokaer as "an international choreographer") and two Cubans, Judith Sanchez Ruiz and Maray Gutierrez.

Gutierrez could not make it to speak on the panel, and Eduardo Vilaro, Ballet Hispanico's new Artistic Director, took her place, though he didn't have much of interest to say. The real star of the night was Ruiz, who danced in her piece before joining the panel. With energy as buoyant and vibrant as her barely-controlled curly mop top, Ruiz described, in a charming foreigner's English, her interest in the Cuban American feminist performance artist Ana Mendieta. I know Mendieta's work, though I had never thought much of it, and was fascinated by Ruiz's ability to do what I thought Mendieta, like many politically-inclined artists of the '60s and '70s, was never able to do: make work successful on interconnected aesthetic, physical, and emotional levels, in addition to and in support of the intellectual-political intention.

Ruiz collaborates with Korean-born, New York-based artist Sun Kwak for this piece, which starts with Kwak's "signature expression." Kwak, shoeless, small, and dressed in black, armed with a massive roll of wide, black tape, attaches the free end to the center of the stage front, and pulls the tape across the stage, choosing a line, bending one leg to reach down and smooth and flatten the line she has created, tearing the tape when the line is complete, and beginning again. Her work is rhythmic and repetitive, with minor variations and subtle flourishes. After she works for some time, two dancers (one of them Ruiz), step out, and begin to dramatize Kwak's patterns, playing with the artist's gestures, mimicry, variation, improvisation. This builds until Kwak completes her "drawing," and leaves the stage; another dancer eventually enters.

Ruiz's piece is distinctly feminine, even if her intention is feminist—she described during the panel discussion her interest in Medieta's meditations on "women's work," which is rather refreshing after the somewhat indulgent images of liminal masculinity presented by Bokaer in his Filter, also inspired by the work of an artist: Cuban-American photographer Anthony Goicolea, who takes a place on stage as a dancer. Goicolea's multiple-self portraits are beautiful and haunting, some of the most impressive staged photography I've seen, but I thought Bokaer's piece failed to capture the full promise/threat of the artist's photographs. The stage was dotted with gold-leafed, bare-branched miniature trees (Goicolea's creations) and offered a see-sawing platform at its center, allowing the look-alike dancers to play gently with weight and gravity as the "floor" moved. But the dance, perhaps too faithful to the photographs, relies too heavily on tableau, and felt stilted rather than silent, oppressed rather than suppressed. The rich underchurnings of Goicolea's photographs, strange to say in this movement-art, are missing. It's Ruiz instead who conveys the pre-eruption of bottled emotion with her trembling bodies.

The final piece of the evening, Puntos Suspensivos, further carried this perhaps unintended theme of suppressed and exploding emotions, but only one of the six dancers honestly embodied the piece's intention. Toward the end, the dancers slowly stepped forward, stretched across the stage in a horizontal line. Cued by the music, one at a time and apparently at random, a body would recoil as if shot and fall to the ground, then get up and walk forward again. The soloist's body moved in clear response to this invisible trauma, but every other dancer anticipated her moment, acting instead of reacting, dropping instead of falling.

Dance: The Music of David Lang Interpreted at the Guggenheim's Works and Process

I saw this show six weeks ago, but haven't yet forgotten my surprise that two pieces of music by the same composer—the so-called laws of nature and forced march by David Lang—could be so different. The aim of the program was rather to demonstrate how differently two choreographers might interpret this music, offering first Jessica Lang's (no relation) interpretation, then Pontus Lidberg's, displayed on the bodies of the same dancers from Morphoses. And yet, while there was certainly a difference to be seen in the choreographer's linear tone, it was far more subtle than the overt difference in the two musical selections each were given to work with.

Lang composed the so-called laws of nature for a percussion ensemble, providing in the score instructions for creating the "instruments" with which to make the sounds. The resonant eastern chimes are actually the vibrations of teacups, which plink and tinkle with the organic delicacy of rain on a wind-free lake. While Jessica Lang ties her dancers to the staccato rhythm of these sounds and Pontus Linberg to the length of their reverberations, both choreographers work in a modern, sensorialist vocabulary. To find a parallel in painting, Lang uses the bolder lines of the Expressionists, and Lindberg the softer insinuations of the Impressionists, but the intention is shared, and the styles are only separated by a decade, and a taste of hardship.

The audience's hardship is in being assaulted not just once, but twice, by the interminable forced march, a meandering piece for virtuoso electric guitar which Lang gleefully admitted was an experiment in extending a phrase, forced into a march's time signature (and enforced by a loathsome snare), for as long as possible. The choreographers were given freedom in ordering the musical selections, and Lang chose to begin with the so-called laws and conclude with forced march. Our respite was only for the short duration of conversation between the choreographers and composers before we were again subjected to forced march, for Lidberg chose to use it first, perhaps in hopes of getting it out of the way, and then assuaging us with the softer patterns of the so-called laws. Unfortunately, after sitting through forced march twice, our nerves were raw and frazzled, and no balm could do them any good—even the magical, color-changing costumes that echoed for Lidberg the mid-night blooming of a flower that only shows itself every hundred years, and which showed itself to him while he was choreographing the piece.

Dance: Maa: A Ballet by Kaija Saariaho, Choreography by Luca Veggetti at the Guggenheim's Works and Process

I was previously unfamiliar with both Kaija Saariaho and Luca Veggetti, but bought tickets (as I generally do) to all of this season's Works and Process shows involving dance. While I enjoyed the dancing, though, Kaija Saariaho's composition absorbed me more fully, the bodies onstage merely echoing faintly the deeper sensations the music inspired in me. The evening began with a piece for four dancers and a live harpist, but the vibrations that impregnated the air were and were not the sounds of a harp. The skittish rhythms and unsettling tone progressions were not those that flow mellifluously from a typical harp. The musician's visage expressed the screwed concentration of a violinist playing something by Steve Reich, rather than the beneficent glow that typifies the classical harpist. The music was intellectual, architectural, vast, and though without what one would call "melody," extremely beautiful. How surprising, then, when the composer revealed herself for discussion, an elderly, fragile thing with orange hair and a smear of red lipstick.

Saariaho explained that what we had heard was not merely harp, but harp processed through live electronics—the source of the sound's vast "-scape."* Maa was composed in 1991, as a ballet in seven parts for choreographer Carolyn Carlson. Saariaho described her artistic differences with Carlson with the generosity that comes, in part, from age—originally imagining the piece for seven dancers, Carlson ended up casting 24; agreeing with Saariaho that the piece would be abstract, she eventually inserted narrative drama. Veggetti, on the contrary, uses seven bodies with no narrative outside of the dialogue between the shapes of the music and the shapes of their bodies. . . perhaps to such an extreme it becomes a fault.

What Veggetti said of consequence during the interluding panel discussions was the importance of casting dancers with skill, aside from the artistic and emotional openness to try something new. Skilled indeed—sometimes restrained by that skill—are his dancers, the majority of which are Julliard students or graduates (as are the musicians—what a disturbingly talented lot of young people). Frances Chiaverini, a great**, tall dancer, combining somehow the sleek, heavy musculature and subtle force of a thoroughbred and a panther, nevertheless stands out amongst the group; to her, of course, goes the solo ...de la Terre.

Veggetti prizes ballet's long, high leg and proud, upright head. Never, not once, did a dancer drop her head into a movement, giving into the sensuous abandon I prize in the best practitioners of contact/release. That said, from modern dance he takes the liquid torso, the element of chance (his dancers danced not in shoes, and not barefoot, but in thin, slippery socks, in which they could run across the stage, sliding to a stop), and an interest in inter-body counterbalance. The more interesting moments of choreography are the architectural pauses, where one dancer uses two other bodies, firmly planted, to push herself slowly into a floating arabesque, or some other root-to-rise expression.

But after this evening, I won't look for Veggetti's work again; it is fine enough, but in a world of many dance-makers, not sufficiently compelling. Saariaho, contrarily, has completely captivated me, and I have already begun seeking recordings of her echoing, mysterious music, and wondering when I will be able to see her newest opera, Émilie (a monographic monodrama on the female mathematician and physicist Marquise Émilie du Châtelet, who also happened to be Voltaire's mistress).

*My description, not the composer's.

**as in "big"

Dance: Christopher Wheeldon's Estancia at the New York City Ballet (with Danses Concertantes and Brahms-Schoenberg Quartet)

Tuesday, June 1st was the second showing of Estancia, one of seven new ballets commissioned this season by the New York City Ballet under the "Architecture of Dance" rubric, for which Santiago Calatrava has created the sets. I expected something modern, kinetic, and minimal. I've seen Wheeldon's work before, and while he is too much of a traditionalist for my tastes, for the antiquarian NYCB, he's a young Turk, more interested in static shapes than traveling jumps. Estancia is the first time I've seen him revert to one of ballet's most cloying traditions: plot. Though it can't be much longer than 20 minutes, this ballet proposes a love story in the Argentine Pampas, between a city boy and a country girl, the latter rejecting the advances of the former until he proves his manhood by conquering one of the region's wild horses.

Strictly choreographically, Estancia offers a few stunning passages. The five dancers in the roles of wild horses embody that particular equine breath, the trembling chest, pawing feet, and tossed head of the wild creature that first refuses to be conquered, until its spirit is broken, and its feet fall into a measured trot once the bridle is fitted. In partnering horse-dancers with people-dancers, Wheeldon creates exceptionally fresh and captivating pas-de-deux, impressionistic sequences of shapes describing not only the physical interaction of the human and equine body, but the exchange of power between the two. This break from the standard pas-de-deux, in which the male dancer supports the female as she turns innumerable circles around herself, is very welcome.

That said, the piece is not so modern as we might have hoped. I would have happily watched 20 minutes, 40 minutes, an hour of plotless human-equine interactions, but this wouldn't satisfy the typical NYCB audience. But, because this is a piece set in the country, the jeweled and feathered pomp native to the theater would not suffice either. Wheeldon takes recourse, oddly, to the free-wheeling sun-and-dust palette of Rodgers & Hammerstein. Estancia has the feeling of a ballet sequence in a Broadway show staged in the 1950s, Carousel or Oklahoma!; Estancia! would in fact be a title more fitting in tone.

As for Calatrava, what is his contribution? Not the kinetic, architectural sculpture I had expected, but a watercolor-esque painted backdrop of swaying grasses and a few stark palms. The show is beautifully lit, and as the action occurs over a 24 hour period, the backdrop does glow beautifully with the first pink light of dawn, when the city boy and country girl wake up to find themselves lovers, and discovered.

I can forgive Estancia for not meeting my expectations, for it interested me nevertheless, but cannot forgive NYCB for sandwiching the piece between two antiquated Balanchine pieces, the first a parade of harlequin-like trios who present us with their "charming" escapades as if we were royals and they our court entertainers, and the last an example of that airless jeweled and feathered nonsense, an interminable series of emotionless drawing room postures better suited to a fancy-dress photo shoot than the stage of art or entertainment. What is the point of commissioning new works, bringing together contemporary artists, if you are going to then subject your audience to offensively outmoded selections both before and after, poisoning both any anticipation and any lingering sweetness from the piece that is new? Fie.

Dance: The Sleeping Beauty at New York City Ballet

The only thing I have to compare NYCB's The Sleeping Beauty with is Disney's The Sleeping Beauty, which isn't quite fair, especially when taking into account the fact that I haven't seen the Disney movie in over twenty years, and unlike favorites like The Little Mermaid, probably only saw it once. In fact, I think I saw the Joffrey Ballet's The Sleeping Beauty twenty years ago as well; it was my first time going to a performance in New York, and my mom asked me whether I wanted to go to the ballet, or to see something called Cats, which would have tap dancing. (At the time, I took both ballet and tap lessons every Saturday.) I chose the ballet, but changed my mind a few days later. "Mom," I said, "I've decided that actually I would rather see Cats." "Oh, honey," she told me, "It's too late; I've already bought the tickets." We went to see The Sleeping Beauty and I fell asleep. The next year, and the five or six years after that, we went to see Cats. I bought the soundtrack and the book of T. S. Eliot poems it was based on, and after memorizing all the words, I would perform the songs for my mother. Freshman year of high school, I was still shameless enough to perform both songs and dances from Cats with a classmate for a kind of mandatory extra-credit project in our honors English class. Our teacher was disappointed that we didn't discuss any of Eliot's other work. At the time, I didn't know he had any other work to speak of.

The New York City Ballet generally offends my sensibilities. Aside from the fact that all the dancers are very, very white, all the pas-de-deux are for heterosexual couples, and most of the bodies on stage are tasked to stand prettily in a semi-circle while the two principles perform breathtaking feats, there is the repressed airlessness of extreme control that pervades the performance. Never does a dancer test her limit on stage, or even approach the extreme. Everything is measured, perfectly rehearsed, calculated. Modern dancers have more play in their ribcages, and a wider range of expression across their faces, but they also have more flexibility in their technique: every movement is exploration, rather than execution, and a performance is no different, at least in that sense, than a rehearsal. And so, where the NYCB must offer a full orchestra, expensive moving scenery, and heavy costumes with hand-embroidery and rhinestones that can be seen from the highest balcony to impart any drama, real drama reveals itself when all of this is stripped away and the body expands to fill that space.

Then again, the performers in Cats wore some pretty extravagant costumes as well. In fact, there was one enjoyable pas-de-deux in The Sleeping Beauty. In the final Act, when Princess Aurora marries the Prince, a number of couples perform short dances in their honor. One of these couples was a pair of, yes, cats, who had license to jump and frolic and flirt, their exuberance no longer suppressed by their humanity.

Dance: Ethan Stiefel and His Students at Guggenheim's Works and Process

The Works & Process season is generally a well-curated cross-section of performance arts, but this year, they are scraping the bottom of the proverbial barrel (or courting some nepotistic donor). Last night was literal amateur hour: undergraduate students from the University of North Carolina School of the Arts joined their new Dean, Ethan Stiefel (Principal Dancer, American Ballet Theater). Ethan was interviewed by Matthew Murphy, an UNCSA alumnus who danced with ABT as well, and then by Larry Keigwin (of Keigwin + Company), whom Stiefel brought to UNCSA as a guest artist.

Perhaps because Stiefel spoke more as an administrator than as a dancer, his comments were not particularly interesting. In fact, and perhaps egged on by Murphy's own cavalier attitude, he seemed rather flippant about the process by which he was recruited for the role. Keigwin is a fascinating and very of-the-moment choreographer, but his presence didn't add much depth to the discussion; it was ultimately an excessively cheerful puff-piece, driven by banter that (Keigwin's excepted) rang falsely.

And the dancing was almost unmentionably bad. The choreography, by UNCSA faculty, was either embarassingly dated (like Tangled Tango, something one would expect to see on an early-80s episode of The Muppet Show), clearly outside the dancers' ability (in the Pas de Deux from Le Corsaire, the girl almost fell over twice during her turns, and the boy was not yet strong enough to manage the dramatic lifts; his entire body was buckled and trembling, and I was certain that he was doing damage to his lumbar spine), or so infantile that one would expect it at one's children's school talent show (like the Four Cygnets section from Swan Lake).

I realize that these are young dancers in training, and so I do not want to be cruel. It is the Guggenheim's responsibility to present performers of a certain caliber, not children playing at pretend. And as a somewhat cruel aside, dancers of the same age at Russian ballet academies are far more accomplished (and do not sound like stomping cattle when they cross the stage in pointe shoes—the Cygnets almost sounded like tap dancers). It is Stiefel's responsibility to instruct his students on the proper diet for dancers, as well as to train them much harder, both physically and theatrically (did I mention that they all wore virtual death masks?).

Keigwin's Natural Selection, shown in an abridged version to accommodate the limits of the small theatre and the traveling students, was the sole piece of watchable choreography in the evening's program. But the dancers were visibly straining, and simply could not do many of the jumps. I do think that, as students, they should be working on repertory this challenging, but they should certainly not be performing it, at least not in New York, at the Guggenheim, for a paying audience. At the show's end, were they flushed with pride, having danced on a real stage in the big city, or were they red with shame, for having shown their big thighs and flat feet to what is arguably the toughest audience in the world?

Dance: Morphoses, Choreography & Design at the Guggenheim's Works & Process

So far as New York is concerned, Christopher Wheeldon is ballet’s golden child, the choreographer anointed by Diaghilev’s ghost to save his ancient religion of pointe and pomp from shoeless oblivion. Wheeldon still sets dances to Stravinsky, still commissions extravagant costumes, and still believes that no show is complete without a romantic pas-de-deux. Compared to the general NYCB standard, Wheeldon’s choreography is rather fresh, though I could do without his preservation of the trappings.

Those trappings were actually the focus of Sunday’s Works and Process program, featuring Wheeldon along with designers Isabel and Ruben Toledo, who collaborated on his ballet Commedia (a suite of riffs off Diaghilev’s Pulcinella, a ballet inspired by the characters of the even older Commedia dell’arte tradition), creating harlequin-like costumes (white unitards painted with black diamonds, colorful capes and masks, long black gloves and short tulle skirts) and an enormous painted backdrop of stylized faces that peer down at the dancers, scaled by the painting to the size of puppets.

This vision, too, is rather refreshing for ballet—traditionally as scene-stilted as opera, where the performers are dwarfed by parapets and fake trees and all other varieties of distracting nonsense. With Commedia, Wheeldon managed to include just enough trappings to satisfy the old guard, while keeping the stage clear enough for more modern minimalists. It was a small disappointment to find that this was motivated more by his limited budget and need to travel, rather than by a brave refusal to buy into a tired tradition.

Also on the topic of disappointment, I admit that I’m not a fan of Toledo’s costumes—I don’t like the hard geometry of the diamonds in black and white against the soft fantasy of the frothy tulle skirts in cantaloupe and mint green. I don’t like the red cape against the lime cape, or the red mask set against the lavender one. The designer’s intention was to create a kind of mayhem, an unintentioned chaos of color, but in the quiet, elegant theatre at the Guggenheim, that kind of visual noise is unwelcome.

Stravinsky, too, is always unwelcome to my ears, but when the music was off, and Wheeldon was demonstrating a kind of mock mini-rehearsal, working with a pair of dancers from NYCB on a short pas-de-deux, I bought at last into the choreographer’s magic—as a dancer, at least. In denim pants and button-down shirt (and striped socks once he did away with his boots in frustration), Wheeldon’s half-movements were more saturated with elegance than the dancers, performing fully and in flexible attire. The mere toss of Wheeldon’s hand, the implied line of his extended torso divulges a radiating grace that made the other dancers suddenly appear amateurish, unstudied, like teenagers at a high school talent show. If he’s going to single-handedly save the genre, he had better teach his dancers to move the way he does.

Dance: Batsheva's MAX at BAM

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Dance: NYCB Emerging Choreographers at the Guggenheim's Works & Process

Works & Process couldn’t have chosen two more different choreographers to showcase for their New York City Ballet’s Emerging Choreographers program. Unfortunately, the difference was not merely in style, but also in quality, a choice that served only to embarrass the immature Melissa Barak, whose silly dance looked like the winter recital of a small-town ballet academy compared to the awe-inspiring, fiercely seething work offered by the more self-possessed Douglas Lee.

Works & Process offers a protean format in which works are rarely shown in full. Instead, a choreographer might choose to show a long series of snippets, discoursing on each in between, or to stage a 90 minute rehearsal or demonstration for the audience, the dancers never actually “performing” the work as it will eventually be set for stage. This night’s program began with a lengthy rehearsal staged by Barak, followed by a preview from Lee’s new ballet (LifeCasting, which premieres at NYCB on the 22nd), followed by a performance of the sections earlier rehearsed by Barak and her dancers.

Unfortunately, this granted the bulk of the program to the nattering Barak, whose youth is of course forgivable, but whose inarticulateness is not. (Perhaps it would be more fair to blame moderator Ellen Sorrin for both inane and immaterial questions and an unwillingness to cut off the meandering Barak, or to blame the program’s creator for giving the bulk of discussion and performance time to the less interesting of the two speakers and creators.) Barak’s compositional concerns, it seems, remain entrenched in the child’s dream of growing up and becoming a ballerina. During the rehearsal, each of her decisions were made with the comment, “Oh, that looks pretty. Let’s do it that way.” I do believe she even encouraged her dancers to be “more cutesy.” She invoked the dual gods of frippery—George Balanchine and Jerome Robbins—who have equally contributed to the dated wreckage that is the NYCB.

Lee, however, who comes to us from the Stuttgart Ballet, promises that there is indeed a future for ballet, on a fast trajectory away from pomp, priss, and paint-by-number emotions. While his ballet features four solos by the extraordinary Robert Fairchild (who dances like a raging phantom made simultaneously of steam and steel), a principal with the NYCB, Lee includes more pas-de-troix than pas-de-deux, searing combinations of bodies that tangle in and out of each other, and rarely, if ever, places any action center-stage, using space as equitably as he uses bodies—it is hard to tell which, of his eleven dancers, are principals, soloists, etc. There is, thankfully, no prolish corps de ballets. Lee seems to have taken this lesson, along with the lesson of the mobile torso, from modern dance. And yet, Lee’s work doesn’t feel exactly contemporary. Pointe shoes preserve a dramatic line; the work recalls the stylized angst of German Expressionist painters’ portraits: terrified eyes, extenuated limbs, balanced asymmetry. I cannot wait to see the work in its entirety.

In conversation, Lee was politely dismissive of Barak, barely acknowledging her outright. She mentioned, when asked about her choice to become a choreographer, that she more fell into it, and still considered herself primarily a dancer (she danced with NYCB for nine years, and now dances with the Los Angeles Ballet). When asked a similar question, Lee made a point of calling himself a choreographer who also dances (he is a principal with the Stuttgart), rather than the reverse. Perhaps if Barak one day makes the same transition, she will emerge from Balanchine’s skirts and create something more relevant.

Movies: Dance of the Enchantress

Though I’m not certain what I expected, Dance of the Enchantress did not meet my expectations. Not a full-length recording of a single performance, nor an instructive documentary, the film serves more as a meandering touchstone, shifting from shot to shot of varying Mohiniyattam rehearsals and performances, cut with the occasional shot of rain or still pond, and a dancer’s wistful eyes, intimating, but never offering, narration. The film’s subtitles provide translation of the music’s lyrics, which narrate a rudimentary bur surprisingly ardent love story, but one without the depth or continuity to keep the audience engaged. The dancers are not given time on screen to differentiate themselves from each other so that, in their matching consumes and gestures, they become disappointingly interchangeable. And so, our focus shifts from and back to the film, our eyes constantly following the women’s measured movements, our imaginations wandering. We learn little, feel less, and have been lulled into a kind of pleasant stupor by the time it’s over.

Dance: DD Dorvillier's Choreography, a Prologue to the Apocalypse of Understanding, Get Ready! at Dance Theatre Workshop

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Dance: Arvo Pärt at the Guggenheim's Works & Process

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Movies: Tanz und Ekstase: Alain Platels VSPRS (VSPRS: Show and Tell)

When VSPRS: Show and Tell began, I was certain it would be awful. I am predisposed to dismissing conceptual and ugly art out of hand, and VSPRS was both—seasoned by the heavy dose of pretension required to put something so conceptually ugly onstage. The first dancer, shot from behind, shuddered compulsively while masticating an entire round of French bread, never swallowing, with the apparent goal of putting the entire thing into his mouth at once. At last, another dancer came onstage; he wore a suit and performed a series of compulsive ticks to shrug himself out of and back into his clothes. The next dancer, a woman in fire engine-red tights and black high heels, performed an inelegant, vampy flamenco (a dance I don’t care for from the most acclaimed, much less the theatrically indulgent, muddling novice). The fourth dancer, another ugly, big-bottomed woman, whose long, black hair hung free, had drawn herself a unibrow, and, like the woman in tights, was ranting. She rattled off a (somewhat amusing) poem about her poo-poo, but, strangely enough, did not gain my affection.

This was perhaps unexpected, as filmmaker Sophie Fiennes had before cut away to a discussion of the piece by a sympathetic audience, one member of which said that the woman in the unibrow had moved her to tears. This was a frumpy Frenchwoman (VSPRS is choreographed by the French Alain Platel, performed by the French ballets C. de la B., and the film was, thus, shot in France) whose looks did not suggest an appreciation for avant-garde theatre, so my expectations were for something more accessible. Instead, the stage, covered with an undulating, stringy backdrop to suggest something organic and internal (perhaps the inside of the mind, perhaps the inside of the digestive tract), on which a fascinating ensemble of world musicians, led by the blind violinist Tcha Limberger and including the strangely appealing, bald and black soprano, suggested a kind of Freudian gesamptkunstwerk.

The next two dancers won me over, for not only did they not speak, they also danced. Certainly, the other performers to this point had “danced,” technically, but these two (who I later discovered both worked in the circus) did astonishing things with their bodies, that brought me to quick tears of jealousy and joy, longing and ecstasy (ecstasy would become an important word, but I felt the intimations of it already). These two, who used their arms as second sets of legs, shifting with the most natural ease from right-side-up to upside-down to, seemingly, inside-out, undulated, with exquisite delicacy, terrifyingly slowly, over and across and through each other, an asexual mating ritual of no creature we know, subaqueous, feline, invertebrate. Their dancing was beautiful—not the pretty, easy beauty of the prima ballerina in her tutu turning endless pirouettes, but raw, animal beauty—the human body performing at it’s physical limit to express visceral truths that remain just out of the reach of words.

Each of the dancers, though, had words to describe the work, and by cutting to conversations in the dressing room between groups of dancers, with and without their choreographer, or the occasional one-on-one interview (always by the choreographer, never the filmmaker), we begin to gather a better understanding of the piece—why the majority of the dancers shudder with ugly tics, and why the recorded audience members had been moved to tears. The dancers had studied old footage of the emotionally disturbed, spent time practicing the movement and speech of the deranged. Each has created his or her own kind of mad character, who, at the dance’s climax, trembles with increasing force to a kind of shared apex (their hands, at the beginning of this “ecstasy,” rubbing at their genitals). The dancers describe the work as incredibly freeing—they’ve accessed the dark recesses of their own minds and emotions, tapped into them for every performance, so that the work is deeply personal, a manifestation rather than a construction. The physical release created by the more than ten minutes of trembling contractions required by the ecstasy leave them essentially naked, yielding, liberated, fresh. This knowledge enabled me to better appreciate the work as a whole, but I still kept my focus, when possible, to the circus dancers, to the rail thin ballerina with ragged hair who assumed the posture of a crucified Christ, and to the other dynamic, young dancers who worked primarily with their bodies rather than their voices and faces. Concepts are fine, but dance ultimately must always be primarily about the body, rather than the mind.

Movies: Ballerina

I have never been a fan of classical ballet, finding the music soporific, the choreography repetitive, and the dancers rigid. In its traditional form, it is an art that constantly affirms outmoded gender and class relations. But Bertrand Nostrand's intimate documentary, which follows five Russian ballerinas for three years, managed a rare feat: it changed my mind about the entire thing.

This is Nostrand's first feature-length documentary, and certain aspects of it (the title sequence, the generalization-laden voiceover narration) are a bit rough. Nevertheless, Nostrand cuts to the quick of the most important thing: the dancing. Filming at school, in rehearsals, and on stage, Nostrand shows the obscene amount of work that these girls do. Russian ballerinas are not in any way coddled, and a very telling interview with a French (male) ballet dancer, highlights the difference between Russian and European training, technique, and style. The Russian dancers are given more responsibility at an earlier age; they therefore mature more quickly. Perhaps more importantly, they dance with more spirit than their European counterparts. Rather than being clones, they have very distinct personalities, which they bring to their roles, acting as much as dancing. Though this may sound unfair, Nostrand's footage backs it up: there is nothing rigid about these dancers; their faces are open and expressive (rather than spackled with paste-up smiles like Americans), and their arms and torsos bend with exaggerated curves, stylized lines that recall the twisted, anxious bodies drawn by Egon Schiele.

The Kirov Ballet's style, too, is instantly discernible as far more expressionist and manered than the dry, pompous designs of the Balanchine-obsessed New York City Ballet. Balanchine may have been from the same city (and the Kirov certainly stages his work), but Nostrand's footage of ballets choreographed by Petipa (La Bayadère), Grigorovich (The Legend of Love), and especially Fokine (Schéhérazade) demonstrate a shared, distinctly Russian sensibility that leaves Balanchine the odd man out.

Of the five dancers that Nostrand singles out, four are stunning: the snaky Diana Vishneva, an "older" dancer who brings a dark, seasoned grist to her work; the equally dark Ulyana Lopatkina, who after a two-year break to nurse an ankle injury and have a daughter not only reestablishes her previous technique, but also acquires a new soulfulness not typical in ballet; the impish Evgenia Obraztsova, whose limpid eyes and open face are the most innocent you will ever see in a dancer of her intelligence and technique; the elegant Svetlana Zakharova, whose extravagant arms and neck make even Swan Lake worth watching. The fifth dancer, Alina Somova, is young, and her dancing still seems unsteady to me; she lacks the endearing naivete of Evgenia Obraztsova's expression, while her legs, like a filly or fawn, still falter. Nostrand does good work, though, recording her rehearsals, where the Director says simply, dismissively, again and again, "I don't like it," without giving much more helpful feedback. Her will, then, is stronger than her legs, as is the will of each of these other dancers. I wonder if any art requires so much work, physical and emotional. Certainly not film-making.

Dance: Garth Fagan at the Joyce

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Dance: Fall For Dance Festival

Now in its fifth year, the Fall For Dance Festival, featuring ten nights of six programs of four to five companies each for the absurdly low price of $10 per ticket, is popular enough that obtaining those tickets is infuriatingly difficult. I've had increasingly worse seats each year (this was my third; read about my second here), and wish that City Center would beef up their server for the flood of frenzied internet purchasers logging in at 10:59 the day that tickets go on sale; because of their poor system, the September 19th show, featuring Merce Cunningham, sold out before I could log in. And so, I bought tickets for each other program, and herein follows a discussion of what I saw.

I knew nothing about Shen Wei walking into the show, but was thrilled to see the company perform a highly structured modern piece called Map, set to a gorgeous Steve Reich soundtrack. The choreography was rigorously musical, a meditation on the workings of hips and shoulders (I sometimes wonder whether this kind of choreography appeals to anyone other than dancers themselves—without narrative or prettiness to grasp onto, unless one has a vested interest in studying what the body itself knows, this kind of work could appear impenetrable). With a threatening, almost cancerous tone, as the dancers' gray bodies broke into clusters, the piece fell apart at the end, as the dancers walked around with their arms flailing. The Fall For Dance Festival has a somewhat regular structure for each show, generally opening with a big modern piece. BeijingDance/LDTX is another company I knew nothing about, but their piece, The Cold Dagger, was equivalent to Map; set to a beautifully ugly composition by Henryk Górecki, with a large group of dancers dressed in black and white floor-length gowns (men and women both wore full skirts), the bodies recalled chess pieces in a violent struggle between groupthink and isolation. Again, to a dancer, the piece was dramatic, stunning, rich in physicality and, more than Map, socio-politically meaningful, but perhaps still elusive, masked, or even truculent to the uninitiated. I think that [bjm_danse] Les Ballets Jazz de Montreal's Les Chambres des Jacques, with its cobbled soundtrack ranging from Vivaldi to the Cracow Klezmer Band and its fresh-faced dancers clad in white, flouncing peasant shifts with colored bodices was much more accessible, while the choreography was equally if not more interesting for the audience and challenging for the dancers (more the men than the women, who seemed to be showcased less). The staging, utilizing square spotlights to highlight different groups of dancers at different times, added to the visual appeal, but ultimately, the piece was perhaps too light, too musical, too fun, too empty. Here I am in danger of insinuating that dark is deeper than bright, but I will come back to that thought in a bit.

The FFD program has space enough for smaller companies to do smaller pieces; there are a number of solos, duets, and trios sprinkled in that give perhaps lesser-known dancers quite a hefty audience. Sheron Wray (whom I perhaps not unfairly mistook for Camille Brown, who performed in last year's festival) danced Harmonica Breakdown; like Brown's piece last year, the music was so good that it upstaged the dancing (which was fine, but a bit repetitive). Kate Weare Company showed The Light Has Not the Arms to Carry Us, an amalgam of a solo and a duet that didn't fit together at all—while the solo was very gut-based (think Martha Graham), the duet was cooler, more cerebral (think Merce). Both Kate (in the duet) and the female soloist danced beautifully (if Kate was a bit more rigid), though Kate's male partner seemed rather too lunkish to carry off her choreography; ultimately, there was little to bind these pieces, and little for the audience to hold onto for later.

Fang-Yi Sheu's Single Room, a disturbingly too-erotic piece, showcased Sheu's acrobatic flexibility, balance, and control (think Circque de Soleil) Sheu is a beautiful dancer with particularly gorgeous feet, but the porno-sax music and the masturbatory writhing against the table (an obvious structural metaphor for a bed) made the piece seem rather cheap. Contrast Sheu's cool and effortless gymnasticism, though, with something deeper: Talia Paz in Love. With the spindly, erotic elegance of a long-legged spider, Paz completely hypnotized the audience so that we barely noticed how repetitive (and frankly, uninteresting) the choreography (and music) were. It didn't matter, though; I would pay money just to watch Paz walk down the street. Her body is perfectly refined; she seems to have control over every last nerve ending, surging with a lush je ne sais qua even to the surface of her skin. Here is a woman who defines visceral dancing: she is everything I want in a dancer. Little surprise that she comes from Batsheva Dance Company.

Two crowd pleasing male duets came from Richard Siegal/The Bakery with The New 45 and The Lombard Twins with Lombard Play Piazzolla—The Dance Concert, but as far as I'm concerned, neither lived up to their promise. With liquid, animation-like whimsy (as in, I've only ever seen cartoons able to move this way), Ayman Harper and Mario Zambrano started strong; the music was a jazz suite and their groove was unstoppable. . . until they (or should I say their choreographer) ran out of steam; here was a piece that needed a strong editor to cut out all dead space in between the maddeningly fantastic dancing. The Twins, by contrast, were over choreographed, and desperately needed a shot of the funk that powered the Bakery dancers. Perhaps never has such physically virtuosic dancing left me so cold. These guys are completely ripped and have complete control over every micro-movement, but they are soulless automatons. Even their choreography had soul, but these so-called hip-hop/street-inspired dancers could not get down (as Robin Dunn always says during her hip-hop classes, the funk is in the floor—you've gotta get down low to be funky). And, on the topic of not being able to get down, Keigwin + Company performed a very disappointing rendition of (my least favorite of the Elements series) Fire, in which a very non-funky Julian Barnett replaced the very funky Samuel Roberts in Walk it Out, turning what, with Roberts, seems a modern embrace of hip-hop into a modern critique of hip-hop—how surreal to see that happen.

Each FFD program includes a traditional dance of national heritage, and I will admit that these are not usually my favorite. The all-male hula group The Gentlemen of Hälau Nä Kamalei performed an indolent piece called Kahikilani, which tells a surfer's love story (involving much more chanting than dancing) without any of the vigorous jumping and squatting I expect from Polynesian dancing. The Pichet Klunchun Dance Company performed Chui Chai, another storytelling piece, in which five females, weighed down by ornate and heavy gold costumes showcased the painstakingly slow traditional dance of Thailand, mannered, imperial, and decorative. This dance, which relies on hand gestures and flickering eyes to tell the story, is ill-chosen for the City Center space, where no one but the front section of the orchestra and perhaps the first rows of the dress circle are close enough to note these subtle details. For the rest of the audience, the piece only became momentarily dynamic with the introduction of a male dancer, in lightweight black pants and tee shirt, who was actually free to move, and who moved with the beautiful, loose freedom of a modern dancer (his choreography, oddly, echoed the movements of the Shen Wei dancers). While theoretically the juxtaposition of the traditional and non-traditional dancing seems interesting, I felt only an anti-imperial insistence, certainly not the actual intention of the piece. (More on this later as well.) Similarly, the traditional Indian dancing of Madhavi Mudgal in Odissi: PRAVAHA was too gestural and mannered to be at all captivating (when I see dance, I want to see whole bodies moving!) Mudgal enlisted the younger Arushi Mudgal to dance alongside her for the piece's second half, and she was definitely more fun to watch—her movements sharper, deeper, executed with more bounce and zest—but ultimately, this kind of movement is not athletic enough, doesn't engage with space enough, and again, insists on storytelling (this time perhaps less narrative, but still an "invocation," an offering, to Shiva (the Indian Lord of Dance), rather than a self-centered (and I mean that in a positive way, a centering-in on the self, on one's own body) exploration or expression). Had she not brought along a group of excellent live musicians, I would have had nothing on which to focus, except for the sensual insinuations of young Arushi's green hips.

I will stop here to discuss Garth Fagan Dance's From Before, even though this modern, New York-based company does not fit the traditional heritage dance category. This is because From Before is a contemporary study of traditional African and Caribbean dance, a piece that looks to be what Merce Cunningham might distill after studying traditional African movements. I will admit that my skin bristled when reading about this piece (the program's notes read, "extracting the essence. . . discarding ritual trappings, allowing the movement to speak for itself); the phrase "ritual trappings" is rather strong, potentially offensive. But as soon as the (all black) cast came onstage, in their neon colored, liquid chrome bodysuits, in the deep squats and tilted angles of Horton and Dunham techniques, with rolling and pulsing pelvises and ribs, their bodies what God intended when God made bodies (if God made bodies): in a Godly image. Though the choreography lagged here and there during short pauses and breaks, this was the best FFD performance of the year, with the most stunning dancers and the most physically-captivating choreography. Other "traditional" companies should make a study of this kind of distillation; Garth Fagan succeeds at what Pichet Klunchun seems to have been pushing toward: making traditional movement relevant.

One thing that keeps traditional dance irrelevant is its adherence to ancient, backward class and gender relations; I already intimated the erotic servitude of women implied in Mudgal's piece, and railed against the imperialism celebrated by Pichet Klunchun, whose dancers are so weighted down by gold threads and crowns that its no wonder they can only move their hands and eyes, and so slowly at that. But ballet is another traditional dance that always infuriates me, both in its inequality (highlighting two principal dancers, while the rest of the company functions as movable scenery) and its hyper-traditional treatment of gender. The two pas de deux I saw this year, one from the Houston Ballet and choreographer George Balanchine (Tchaikovsky Pas de Deux) and one from the Oregon Ballet Theatre and choreographer Christopher Wheeldon (Rush), were equally tedious in their reconstitution of the heteronormative man-spins-woman, man-lifts-woman, man-supports-woman-while-woman-lifts-leg pas de deux formula. Wheeldon has failed to impress me before, but between these two pieces, his was the more interesting, if only because his dancers wore more contemporary black and blood-red unitards than the flouncy, BeDazzled costumes of the Houstonians. Wheeldon's choreography, in fact, could have been interesting if his dancers performed it more staccato; they seemed to be more interested in being pretty than vamping it up and creating real drama.

But even more offensive than the pas de deux was another Balanchine piece, Pithoprakta, performed by The Suzanne Farrell Ballet. Pithoprakta is a kind of modern ballet, debuted in 1968 and set to Iannis Xenakis' eponymous music from 1955. Now. For reasons I've just established, I like to see ballet being broken more than anything else. Think, in 1968, what Balanchine must have been feeling, watching someone like Merce Cunningham dancing to the music of John Cage. Pithoprakta is his response: a lewd caricature of what his backward, pea brain thought Cunningham et al. were doing. But this flat-footed parody of modern dance fails to please fans on either side of the modern-ballet divide: it's awkward, ugly, snarky, and still manages to get mired in ballet's worst tendencies (the showcasing of principal dancers, the stiff, inorganic torsos, the preening, emotionally vacuous prima ballerinas who can barely crack a fake smile). What a travesty. Balanchine's inside-jokey choreography, which attempts to satirize modern's interest in full-body contact and spatial play, only serves to show how little ballet people understand modern dance, and the choice of Xenakis' grating score discloses that the man little understood the potential for beauty in modern music as well.

Dare I continue to rail against ballet and discuss the unintentional farce that was the National Ballet of Canada's Soldiers' Mass? This all-male piece, premiered in 1980 in the Netherlands is, particularly in these times when our country actually is at war, conceptually embarrassing: a theatrical, naive paean to a kind of heroism that doesn't exist, never existed, outside, perhaps, of literature and film, the only places where war can be noble, honorable, lofty, and fought for ideals. Everything about this piece—the choreography, the staging, the costumes, the healthy, corn-fed bodies of the dancers—is a fantasy, Dickensian in its elevation of suffering, of sorrow, to a meaningful end. Contrast this delusion with Hofesh Shechter Company's Uprising, another all-male (modern) dance that discloses, in its raw, primal physicality, the reality of war: the darkness, the turpitude, the sickness. War is violence, and violence is perversion. Shechter is an Israeli who danced with the Israeli Batsheva; while I cannot praise Batsheva and Artistic Director Ohad Naharin's GAGA method highly enough, and while the palpability of Shechter's message is an effect of his GAGA training, I must also express my certainty that Shechter's cold-eyes look at war, at fighting, comes from being an Israeli. It is difficult to watch this piece and not think of checkpoints, of questioning, of bullying. It is impossible not to think of America's own flirtation with secret torture and abuse of prisoners. It is impossible not to think of renegade terror cliques: small groups of terrified young men with nothing to live for but the hope of tremendous suicide, taking out as many "enemies" as possible. And in the tussling, random grouping, and escalated slapping Shechter here displays, we see illustrated with perfect clarity how war happens: by confusion, by ignorance, by rage, by snap judgments, by the escalation of the thump-passed, and it's gritty, and it's scary, and it gets you in your belly, where it sinks you down (while the Canadians are aiming for your heart, to pull you up). This is where I come back, as promised, to my implication that dark is deeper than bright. Perhaps I've decided that it is.

Dance: Keigwin + Company: Elements at the Joyce

Going to see a piece entitled Elements: Water, Fire, Earth, Air, one has a certain set of expectations. Going to a show put on by Keigwin + Company, one also has a set of expectations. These two sets do not exactly match up. But Larry Keigwin, with his invincible wit, eclectic ear for music, and playful relationship with movement manages to turn the crusty old trope on its head, creating four suites of dances that have the audience giggling for two straight hours.

The first and last suites, Water and Air, are the two more literally translated pieces (in Water, the dancers wear towels, and bathe and drink from bottles of Poland Spring; in Air, they dress as flight attendants and pilots, and dance with silver wheeling suitcases against a backdrop of bright blue sky dotted with puffy clouds). These are the crowd-pleasers, and they are, indeed, quite clever and amusing. The real dancing, though, happens during Fire (the weakest of the four) and Earth (an oblique relation to the element, in which the dancers take on the vamping attitudes of lizards in dances called Gecko, Chameleon, Dragon, and Iguana, dancing low to the ground, making faces and flicking their tongues).

Fire fails, mostly, due to its "straight" interpretation; rather than literalize the element in a pun, as he does with Air, or in a product, the way he does with Water, Keigwin dresses his dancers as actual flames for Fire, and the piece, particularly the first dance, Flicker, wanders into the territory of meeting, too easily, our expectations for an interpretation of the elements. It lacks evolution of thought. In Burn, though, dancer (and Associate Artistic Director) Nicole Wolcott does a stunning job "burning" to Patsy Cline; all dancers should be noted for their theatricality throughout, but hers is a face that can make a piece all on its own, even though her dancing is equally powerful. Keigwin makes one brief foray into hip hop as well during Fire, in Flame, (danced brilliantly by Samuel Roberts) to instant rap classic Walk it Out. Having been a hip hop dancer before I ever took a modern class, and noticing that Keigwin started his career as a back-up dancer for Downtown Julie Brown, I must commend him for going there, but I wish he would have gone farther and stayed longer. Further integration between the modern and hip hop moments of the dance would have made it stronger (modern timing works against or apart from the music, while hip hop works right on the beat; dancing modern dance to hip hop music only works if the choreography accords with the beat). I'd like to see him do an entire hip hop show.

While Earth is, by far, the sleeper favorite, I have the least to say about it (except that Dragon, danced by Liz Riga to Stormy Weather, is by far the weakest moment of the entire show, the song and mood of the choreography departing completely from both the earth and lizard themes, Ms. Riga's costume being a pink plaid abomination (when every other costume in the show is pitch-perfect), and the piece being, ultimately, just boring, which Keigwin really never ever is. I imagine that one of his other dancers, the doll-like, flexi-bendy Ying-Ying Shiau, or the emotive Nicole Wolcott, might just maybe make it work, but as performed, the piece drags. Otherwise, Earth is perfect, culminating in a four-person dance to Whip It that is somehow as vitalizing and fresh as that song itself is.

At the end of Air, a kind of encore, called Wind, is danced by the entire company to a stunning Philip Glass piece (Channels and Winds), in which dancers run on and off stage amongst raining pink balloons. This is not the first time I've seen the Philip Glass/balloon combination from Keigwin, but it works, gorgeously, and is the one bit of "serious" (that is, not funny) dance in the show. Earth, I think, will stay with me longer, but Wind is there for those more old-fashioned dance-goers, who expect leaps and jumps and big, free movement. And for that, it beats the hell out of the New York City Ballet.

Dance: Compagnie Heddy Maalem

Shockingly, this was my first ever show at the Joyce, which, though it offers the best in contemporary dance performance in the city, does not offer the kinds of cheap tickets to which I usually gravitate. Since my mom was in town, though, I splurged, and treated us to a show about which I knew nothing featuring a company about which I also knew next to nothing. The Joyce website handily provided a 60 second video of the show, which I watched without sound, and found interesting enough. The blurb did mention that the music would be Stravinsky's Rite of Spring, which should have caused some concern, but I went ahead anyway.

Compagnie Heddy Maalem's choreographer is a (white) Algerian; his dancers are beautifully-trained, atypically shaped Africans from six different countries, including Nigeria, Senegal, Mali, and Mozambique. Their costumes were spare and simple: solid-colored bras and hot pants for the girls, short shorts for the men (two men, separated from the group for semi-narrative purposes, wore longer, baggier shorts), and showed every incredible inch of flesh: obscenely round bottoms, massive thighs, bouncing breasts, wickedly latticed abdominals—these are stunning human beings. Much of the choreography required slow and languorous movements, and the dancers had stunning control.

The choreography did not, though, provide the dancers with any opportunities to show off their more balletic training, and I think that this is why the audience responded so strangely. The show was not classically beautiful, nor particularly pleasant, to be honest. The original Rite of Spring, choreographed by Nijinsky for Stravinsky, was offensive to audiences for its blatant sexuality, its bent knees and natural (unpointed) feet, and its non-idealized depiction of peasantry (it was, I mean to say, Courbet to the expected Bougereau). Maalem works in Nijinksy's tradition; this Rite is also (I would imagine much more so) blatantly sexual—at one moment, the entire group of dancers even forms an orgy-like cluster, one male and one female at the core, where he holds her head to his hip while thrusting, the other dancers reaching out to stroke each other's bodies. He has, though, a strong eye for creating tableaux, and at moments like these, where the dancers would solidify into a sequenced and horizontal block, slowly writhing, classical beauty (the kind we identify with a gestural painting like Da Vinci's Last Supper) does materialize, despite the palpable sexuality. Less moving are what I would call the marching sequences, in which the dancers, in regimented rows, prance across the stage in various formations. I believe this also derives from the Nijinksy, but it was neither beautiful nor interesting.

The final scene is a solo by one dancer who, in semi-darkness, to a slow-rising crescendo of electronic noise, at first seems barely to move, until a tremble rises up from within his body. It's a small tremble, and he shakes, and shakes, more and more, with increasing violence. The music mounts, and he dances more and more violently, as if unable to control something within his body. I couldn't help but read this as an expression of some sickness: the Ebola virus bleeding in his belly—pain, suffering, agony, Africa. At that moment, all the previous scenes fell into place as expressions of life on that continent today: militarism, group-think, violence, chaos, disease, sex, hunger (at one moment, a female dancer points at the tallest man's belly, where he makes, unbelievably, his individual abdominals metrically tremble and roil); despair. And I realized that never had I seen such relevant choreography (Ailey comes close, but even in their real-est moments, they still aestheticize black suffering for the delectation of white audiences.) If, of course, I'm not reading it incorrectly. I left that night with such incredible gratitude to the dancers, who were all sweet smiles during their curtain call, who have to work with such emotionally challenging material, for a generally bewildered audience that expected either traditional African dance or a more aestheticized impressionism.

Dance: Dance Brazil

I was training in capoeira for about six months before I found out that the constant, throbbing pain in my right shoulder was a tear in my supraspinatus and a bout of raging bursitis, and had to temporarily quit (I am still in quit-mode, and my athletic activities are now limited to these lame rotator cuff exercises that I have to do with a green stretchy piece of rubber). So, going to see Dance Brazil, where twenty steamy young Brazilians, whose bodies demonstrate what God had in mind when God created bodies, slink and slip and jump and kick and do such acrobatic feats as turn cartwheels without hands, made me more sad than anything, except for maybe angry that I couldn't go to class the next day and get my inspired ass kicked by my inspired teacher (who was also at the show). They did a few little samba pieces, too, but for some reason I wasn't at all inspired to go take a samba class (even though that would probably be a lot more safe for my shoulder). I just really want, more than anything right now, to be able to glide and slip and flip like these people. They are amazing.