by Leigh Witchel
Say the word “masterpiece.” You might think of how Schumann exclaimed when he reviewed Chopin: “Hats off, gentlemen, a genius!” Zvi Gotheiner’s “The Art of Fugue” is a masterpiece – in an older sense of the word – the accomplished work an artisan made that showed the skills to permit entry into a guild.
Bach created this score, and Gotheiner the work named for it, late-career, so they “joined their guilds” decades before. But even so, both are rigorous, bracing explorations that demonstrate full command of the form. “The Art of Fugue” wasn’t an investigation of Bach, but of its title: a deep dive into the art of the fugue, only in movement. Hats off, gentlemen, a craftsman.
Gotheiner’s long dance, for four men and four women, began with the cast bringing out folding chairs. For a good work, that wasn’t a good sign; folding chairs are one of the great clichés of dance. Happily, Gotheiner followed Bessie Schönberg’s rule about props: the chairs weren’t mere decoration, but used consistently as part of the dance.
All the dancers were barefoot, wearing simple active wear. Caitlin Javech clapped a rhythm, Doron Perk responded. It was Bach’s fugue theme, as if they were trying to work it out. When clapped, the Bach was reduced to rhythm without harmony.
The cast began moving with a loose vocabulary. The movement had a free, fluid quality but ranged from loping or shuffling to sometimes, sharp, placed extensions. The dancers understood Gotheiner’s spacious movement style. They should; Gotheiner gave the dancers collaborative credit for the choreography.
The phrases felt as if they were built out of in-studio improvisation. You would think the movement palette would have gotten repetitious but there was enough variation in attack and volume; sometimes to a stomp, other times a tight, finicky phrase. It was well-edited; Gotheiner used phrases like Bach did: keeping them inside a finite realm, adding carefully and bringing back material thoughtfully. Instead of feeling eclectic, it managed to feel integrated and purposeful. In his assembly, Gotheiner added the counterpoint to the music’s theme.
A recording started of a string chamber ensemble. Bach’s manuscript was published in open score without prescribed instrumentation, but it’s most often played on a keyboard instrument. However, the quality of strings suited the movement’s fluidity more than a keyboard would have. Two women walking in counterpoint to the other dancers’ broader movement formed a ground.
The soundtrack moved from the source Bach to Scott Killian’s music that riffed electronically on it. Josh Higgason’s video designs were ingenious and integral to the evening. Matilda Mackey began a solo, and a camera capturing her dancing projected her time-lapsed image multiplied by six – like the voices of a fugue. The video added vertices to Alison Clancy’s dancing as if she were moving through a landscape of webs that became entangled by her movement.
There was a more typical and predictable chair dance around the midpoint of the work, with three chairs lined up facing away from us, and the dancing behind them. For a short while it felt as if the work bogged down and might not be able to work itself out. But that point of sagging was brief and the signposts reappeared.
A group number was fashioned out of a long phrase set to Killian’s low chords. Javech had a solo, running and leaping among the chairs scattered, to electronics that sounded like a bug zapper. The group returned to music that sounded like a repeat, but with broader and more expansive movement. It was a reminder that on this journey, we had gone somewhere.
We heard keyboards for the first time in an expressive solo for Ching Ching Wong that degenerated into a battle with her folding chair. Perk took up Wong’s solo, offered his hand to Javech and pulled her into a semi-circle. Dancers switching off as in musical chairs made sense for the same reason: it built out of what came before. Wong ended the dance alone, walking off, leaving her chair to the darkness.
Even in excerpt with interpolations, the danger of using “The Art of Fugue” is that it’s sprawling. Bach is a challenge to any choreographer: he doesn’t need you. The score, fourteen fugues and four canons of increasing complexity that take well over an hour to play, was not completed at the end of Bach’s life. It’s in both senses of the word a masterpiece, but it’s been argued that it was composed less for performance and more of an intellectual exercise. The pleasure from it is akin to an expert clock maker taking you aside and opening the back of one of his most marvelous objects to show you the gears. It seems at first like a miracle, all the parts seem to be operating on their own, but looking more closely, you can see that all the machinery is working in concert. And that is an even greater miracle.
Gotheiner’s accomplishments are that he managed to make a dance worthy of the music, and one that does the same thing in parallel to it. There’s a similarity to William Forsythe: both men can make dances that harness the two most basic pleasures of dance – movement and rhythm. But like Forsythe at his best, Gotheiner went long, and the work built into more than that. It joined with the Bach to open up the back of the piece, show you the structure and build, and how it all worked. It was a dance that showed you how dances are made.
copyright © 2021 by Leigh Witchel
“The Art of Fugue” – ZviDance
New York Live Arts, New York, NY
November 11, 2021
Cover: (L to R) Matilda Mackey, Caitlin Javech, Evan Fisk, Doron Perk, and Ching Ching Wong in “The Art of Fugue.” Photo credit © Steven Pisano.
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