by Leigh Witchel
Female choreographers vied for top billing with Mother Nature at the Battery Dance Festival this year. The festival switched downtown locales and due to structural repairs, Wagner Park, with its extraordinary views of the Statue of Liberty, wasn’t available. But at Rockefeller Park, the backdrop of harbor and sunset only got more magical and moody, as the sky and the weather darkened with a storm that threatened, but did not arrive.
The program changed each night, and was dedicated that performance to 20th century female choreographers. The show began with a tribute to dance maker Jennifer Muller, who died earlier this year at age 78. Her “Miserere Nóbis” was set to Samuel Barber’s “Agnus Dei.” The piece is a rearrangement of his “Adagio for Strings,” a remix that was heartfelt, lovely and very familiar.
So was the choreography. The cast of nine was dressed in black skirts. The women wore narrow black tube tops, everyone wore red socks and had their heads covered with somber black caps. They looked like displaced people from a hot climate. The dancers reached, stretched and huddled until one woman, then another, broke away to pitch forward, or embrace.
Marching or shuffling, one person moved, the rest followed. The outdoor stage was not the ideal setting for this. You could tell the piece was meant to be performed in darkness, and it needed the pressure and focus of a stage and proscenium. Though the clouds provided magical effects later, at the opening of the show, the sky was overcast and the lighting was flat.
At the score’s big moment, everyone laid down and contracted. The piece tried for exaltation, but like the Barber which has been so overplayed, it was predictable and diffuse. When the full cast came forward in a line and reached out, putting their hands to their faces and silently screaming, “Miserere Nóbis” went from familiar to cliché. This work may have been the the most logistically practical of Muller’s dances to stage, but it wasn’t the strongest advocate for her legacy.
Loie Fuller’s techniques as a performer and dancemaker were theoretically simple but they’re still effective. She draped herself in a huge circle of fabric that she manipulated with sticks extending her arms’ reach to turn herself into a looping and swirling sculpture.
Jody Sperling took a free approach to Fuller. The two pieces she showed weren’t attempting to preserve specific choreography. Instead Sperling used Fuller’s methods in design, choreography and stage craft to create her own works.
Besides having branches painted on Sperling’s costume, who knows what “American Elm” had to do with elms. The dance was more about the billow and flow of the fabric as it rippled, and with elms or without, it was one great shtick.
Sperling returned for a second solo, “Piece for a Northern Sky.” Instead of tree branches, this costume used concentric circles, and sometimes the arms were held together instead of always opposed. Most of the work was done by the costume – the rest was keeping it in motion. But the solos weren’t long and didn’t outlast their invention or interest. “Piece for a Northern Sky” also had the benefit of a magnificent twilight. Fuller was a pioneer of using lighting effects, and the comparison between how the natural lighting changed the two dances performed about 45 minutes apart was engaging in itself.
Two different companies presented works from the legacy of Isadora Duncan, both not just restaging her work, but reimagining it.
Lori Belilove and the Isadora Duncan Dance Company closed the evening. Belilove built on two of Duncan’s history-laden dances, the “Marche Héroïque” made during World War I, and “Varshavianka“ made after the First Russian Revolution of 1905. Belilove added her own ideas to create her “Tribute to Ukraine,” where she has ancestry.
Her Duncan was rooted in the choreography as well as the situation. Dancers galloped in pairs, summoning those behind them, pointing the way. One woman urged the others on into a march with a raised fist. A woman in a babushka brought in flowers during an interlude to electronic music; the other women gathered the flowers as she walked off. Then Belilove subbed in the Ukrainian national anthem as a woman came on bearing the flag and urged the dancers, as fallen warriors, to rise.
Catherine Gallant’s Dances by Isadora presented a Duncan impelled by emotion. “Valse Brillante” was almost the stereotype of Duncan’s work, a quartet of women in draperies wafting about, doing balancés and jumping in attitude.
The “Valse Brillante” is also the waltz Jerome Robbins used in “Dances at a Gathering” for the most daring section, where a woman gets tossed in a double air turn. Both “Valse Brillante” and “Dances” use the dance impulse of Chopin, but Robbins’ Chopin seems meant to be viewed in a theater, and about the experience of performing. As Gallant saw it, Duncan’s Chopin seemed about the experience of dancing.
As a bridge between “Valse Brillante” and the “Grand March,” Gallant entered first in silence, then used the famous Chopin prelude that Michel Fokine used in “Les Sylphides” and Robbins used in “The Concert.” Here it felt like a blessing of the space. Fokine also saw this music as about the space: he had the ballerina hover, listening. The prelude was as brief as possible here; the music wasn’t repeated before Gallant raced off and the music (originally Schubert) switched to George Walker. The Walker, on a recording, was fully orchestrated. You think of Duncan’s work as done to solo piano, probably the easiest choice logistically for her and other early 20th century performers.
Six supplicants in beige robes walked a slow diagonal with slow posturing and heavy arms. A soloist mourned in the center, as the others looked away downcast. The six women crossed the soloist in offering as she knelt, then rose. “Grand March” was made after the tragic deaths of Duncan’s children, and its somber mood seemed like a diptych to Muller’s “Miserere.” As Gallant showed Duncan, the work was not about virtuosity, or even training, but feeling.
Seeing Duncan’s work a century on makes one crave context. She’s inspired not just choreographers, but filmmakers as a forerunner of feminism and a political activist. These performances felt like the tip of the iceberg of an unbound life.
The Duncan acolytes went for reinterpretation. Five Denishawn rarities, works made by modern dance pioneers Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn, previously produced and here introduced by Audrey Ross, were reconstructed. Ross explained later that the records of the pieces all came from the same main source, Jane Sherman, a Denishawn dancer who died in 2010 at the age of 101.
St. Denis’ “Waltz/Liebestraum,” from 1922, grew out of an improvisation at a party where the pianist went from the familiar Brahms waltz, and drew it out by continuing on with Liszt’s “Liebestraum.” How often were the musical choices of the early soloists based on the practicality of what music was familiar to pianists?
The solo, done here by Christine Dakin, felt like a link from St. Denis to Duncan, after all, it was the same Brahms waltz Ashton used to embody Isadora. The ingredients of a solo dance at the time were familiar: waltzes and draped fabric. In its improvisation, the solo, again, was less steps than the construction and display of a mood. Nature cooperated; by that point the sky had turned pearl gray and was swollen with clouds that created a moody, phenomenal backdrop. Luckily there were no more than a few drops of rain all evening.
Shawn’s dances were more structured. “Floor Plastique” was made around 1916 by Shawn for the Denishawn school’s students, and was done here by the dancers of Limon 2. Gender was unimportant; they worked in unison, reaching and stretching. The piano piece, by Edward MacDowell, seemed almost like a bedtime waltz.
“Choeur Dansé,” from 1926, was a trio of women in simple white shifts: the free dance link to Duncan’s gamboling nymphs. But Shawn’s take, at least as interpreted here by Dances We Dance, was more athletic. The women pranced but also did jetés, and departed from unison to set a dancer against the other two. Another brief work, it ended with a quick jeté into attitude.
“Incense,” from 1906, was one of Ruth St. Denis’ best known solos, and there was a lot to digest. It knocked right up against the same stereotypes as “La Bayadère”; St. Denis saw the Indian temple dancer as a repertory opportunity of glamorous mystery. Katherine Crockett posed wraith-like draped in rose silk, rippling with liquid arms and carrying a brazier. She sprinkled crushed incense in two onstage urns and they started smoking. After a few minutes, even outdoors, we could smell it.
Shawn’s “The Cosmic Dance Of Siva” pushed exoticism even farther, to somewhere akin to the Bronze Idol solo. This was added to “La Bayadère” by Nikolai Zubkovsky in 1948. There’s little to no chance of Shawn’s work directly influencing post-war Soviet choreography, but there were many links in the costuming and postures. It was both coincidence and a confirmation of how Western choreographers saw Indian dance.
Shawn’s solo began with an Indian-ish pose with Antonio Fini on a stool, standing one leg with a small drum in one hand. The dance moved through positions in attitude, and once Fini left the stool it headed into head isolations, but a sensationalized Western take on them. Fini returned to the stool for a final relevé.
Both solos were great examples of stagecraft. But there was little authentic in either. Apart from using leg bells as in Kathak dance, “The Cosmic Dance Of Siva” was essentially Western technique, and used often as a closing number. Like Zubkosky’s showpiece variation, it connected with its audience.
“Incense” was set to a pretty but sentimental piano study by Harvey Loomis, who was known for incorporating Native American themes in Western composition, which fit with St. Denis’s ambitions. St. Denis imagined that “Incense” was based on Hindu ritual.
There’s a lot to think about here – our pioneers weren’t perfect. Still, how much weight do we put on that very obvious fact? If you think we’re going to stand up to the withering gaze of a future generation, good luck. Yet it’s important to know, for example, that St. Denis was originally inspired in her Egyptian dancing by a poster for cigarettes. India and Egypt occupied much the same spiritual, fantastic, and largely made-up place in her imagination.
In around an hour and a half, with the elements opting to fitfully cooperate, the festival managed to survey a century of (mainly) women’s work in dance. Muller’s company showed her work as a monument. Sperling showed us how Fuller made dances. Gallant and Belilove had different takes on what Duncan meant. And, with work rarely seen, we reopened by a crack a window on what Denishawn did.
That seemed a far more important point than how we judge them.
copyright © 2023 by Leigh Witchel
Battery Dance Festival
Rockefeller Park, New York, NY
August 17, 2023
Cover: Jody Sperling in “Piece for a Northern Sky.” Photo © Steven Pisano.
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