by Leigh Witchel
The final program for Fall for Dance involved enormous changes at the last minute. Sara Mearns took herself out of Molissa Fenley’s State of Darkness but Cassandra Trenary, who had danced it previously, was able to perform on short notice. And Mearns managed to make an appearance, though in a different work.
State of Darkness was originally done in 1988 as a solo for Fenley. Peter Boal danced it in 1999, which led to others doing it, including a filmed staging of the solo performed during the pandemic in 2020, by seven different dancers including both Trenary and Mearns. The score is Stravinsky’s epic The Rite of Spring, a hazard as well as a boon, not only because its length of over half an hour, but the raised expectations of working to one of the 20th century’s masterpieces.
State of Darkness has the feel, not of choreography created with an arc in mind, but of coming straight out of the body. The piece began with Trenary barefoot, standing in a spotlight in the back. She began to walk slowly, on high half toe, going to slow developpés as the music twitched. Walking the perimeter of a square, when the music began to tick, she did contractions.
Trenary’s accomplishment, not only getting through it but doing it with strong, precise execution on short notice, was extraordinary. That doesn’t make State of Darkness a great dance. There isn’t a lot of point to describing what happened. More of the same for the entire score. An amazing feat of endurance, and likely why it attracts dancers to the challenge. But also, it felt similar to the way some actors love roles where they have to completely change their appearance – it’s award-bait.
So it was a marathon, but was it more than that? State of Darkness was responsive to the music moment by moment, but not to Rite as a composition. You didn’t sense the score’s episodes, or its divisions. It’s one person moving for a very long time, an epic of music visualization, but not of a towering score’s structure or arc. The solo took a single aspect of the original Rite – the Dance of the Chosen One – and made the whole dance about the endurance of that section.
When Fenley set the solo during the pandemic, the backstory added meaning; State of Darkness done virtually by multiple dancers of different disciplines when we could not gather wasn’t just about endurance, but diversity and persistence. Here, there was also a great backstory; Trenary charging in and saving the day. But still, just watching it as was, there was a sense that Fenley turned Rite into a vanity project.
Hans van Manen’s Four Schumann Pieces, made in 1975 for The Royal Ballet, was almost as much of a marathon for the lead as State of Darkness. But that original lead was Anthony Dowell. It was danced here by Jacopo Tissi, fronting the Dutch National Ballet, where the ballet was first done the year after it bowed at The Royal. Tissi joined the company last year after rising to principal dancer at the Bolshoi Ballet, and leaving when Russia invaded Ukraine.
Like State of Darkness, Four Schumann Pieces was very much a star vehicle, and it also wasn’t an easy one. But it is an unapologetic one, tapping into all of ballet’s conventions about stars. Tissi began almost anointed, picked out by a spotlight while couples drifted across the stage, before he began sliding side to side. Unlike the continuity and restricted palette of State of Darkness, the opening of Four Schumann Pieces felt like a punctuated monologue: Stand. Double tour. And another. The rest of the cast passed back across the stage the other way.
Tissi’s mood changed only slightly; he seemed to enjoy being alone, but his character wasn’t fully clear. At several points he slid his hand through his hair, or daintily touched his shoulder. I’m not sure what that looked like on Dowell, on Tissi it recalled Rula Lenska in a 1970’s Alberto VO5 commercial contemplating a hot oil treatment.
When the men left, Tissi danced with the women, and when the men returned, Tissi finally sat down, but in full sight of the audience at the front, playing at lounging for the audience instead of actually getting to rest. The corps did a deep, exaggerated balancé as the group accumulated members in its side to side travels, a hint of how specific van Manen could be. Two women remained, standing downcast on either side of the stage with shoulders tensed: originally Lesley Collier and Jennifer Penney, here Olga Smirnova and Qian Liu.
Tissi danced with Smirnova first, laying her down supine. When he picked her up, Liu joined in. Smirnova went to the other side and struck that downcast pose, but with her back to us. The relationships were unstable and uncertain. Liu looked at Tissi as if she did not trust him. He returned to Smirnova, and kept lifting her across him as she stood, as if he were moving a pawn. Timothy van Poucke joined as if conjured by their thoughts. Tissi danced with him, then Smirnova, and everyone looked stricken. The men lifted both women, then flew apart into two couples.
Finally, Smirnova supported Tissi in an arabesque to a big lunge back, and at last he got to leave. The ensemble danced an allegro movement with quartets and solos; Tissi rejoined, racing through in piqué turns and tours. The work ended with a unison finale, and Tissi stepped forward to accept deserved applause.
Neither van Manen’s nor Fenley’s extended solos were about solitude. Long, lean and handsome, Tissi’s stamina was as amazing as Trenary’s. But instead of centering on this feat, as Fenley did, as ballet is wont to do, his stamina was downplayed or camouflaged. We even got faked out; at one point Tissi headed to the wings, but no, he stayed and doubled the five couples who gathered there. Few ballets give endurance pride of place among the virtues of a principal dancer.
Mearns did perform, but something more achievable when recovering from a minor injury: This Bitter Earth, which she was dancing in repertory at New York City Ballet with Tyler Angle. It looked much as it did earlier in the week. You could see why she made that decision, This Bitter Earth is portable, it’s short, it looks good on any stage, and she had Angle to help.
At the same time, it put a monkey wrench in programming. Putting This Bitter Earth after intermission instead of an excerpt from Smashed2 meant the stagehands had to set up the juggling piece (with a stage full of oranges) in an added, inordinately long pause.
Gandini Juggling is a London-based company founded by Sean Gandini and Kati Ylä-Hokkala in 1992. Its goal is to fuse juggling with other disciplines and the company lists Pina Bausch and Merce Cunningham as major influences. The group is working on a project with the Merce Cunningham Trust and Jennifer Goggans, who performed with the ensemble here as well. Given that a Cunningham dancer was one of the jugglers, the point wasn’t virtuoso juggling. Once or twice oranges got dropped.
You didn’t need to read the program notes that thanked Bausch to see the influence. If Pina Bausch led The Flying Karamazov Brothers, she would have made Smashed2. It looked less like fusion than tanztheater with juggling as an excuse.
You could see the Bauschiness from the get-go. As the curtain rose, there was a line of chairs and oranges looking as if they were scattered over the stage, but actually in neat rows. The cast filed on, seven women in little black dresses, two middle-aged men in nondescript blue suits. Completely deadpan. To canned harmonica music, natch. They had all the Bausch-isms down. One woman came forward and said in her best I-am-speaking-English-as-my-fourth-language accent, “Oranges and Watermelons. Enjoy!” The country music moved to classical and the cast juggled in unison, turning the stunt into choreography.
As with Bausch, the battle of the sexes was at the center. Smashed2 walked an edge of post #MeToo sexual harassment, but wasn’t single-minded about it. The men groped the women, but the women weren’t victims. They defended one another and shoved the men off. In the vaudeville skit tradition of Bausch, those episodes went on to something else with no memory or repercussion. The women also harassed one another. One woman took a rod and poked other women until they could no longer juggle, until she got to a final woman who persisted throughout.
It got even less Karamazov and more Bausch. The women unfastened their hair to let it fall, reached under their chairs and pulled out the watermelons, forming a kind of Busby Berkeley circle with their legs and the melons. The battle of the sexes raged in earnest; one of the men got slow-mo assaulted in revenge by the women. The fruit all got smashed, and when the excerpt started to losing itself in its chaos, it ended in a smear of fruit-flavored yuck.
Pina Bausch was also a mistress of endurance, ask any non-acolyte who has sat through three hours of her rambling skits. Smashed2 was an affectionate tribute to Bausch from fans who knew the material, but when doing tanztheater for the Fall for Dance masses, make sure your editing is as tight . . . well, tighter . . . than your juggling.
copyright © 2024 by Leigh Witchel
Fall For Dance Festival, Program 5
Four Schumann Pieces, State of Darkness, This Bitter Earth, Smashed2 – Dutch National Ballet, Cassandra Trenary, Sara Mearns & Tyler Angle, Gandini Juggling
New York City Center, New York, NY
September 28, 2024
Cover: Gandini Juggling in Smashed2. Photo © Marina Levitskaya.
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