by Leigh Witchel
“Fase” is a tour de force – literally. Made in 1982 by Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker when she was only 21, two dancers power through more than an hour of Steve Reich’s seminal minimalist music. The piece is both obsessive and precocious.
De Keersmaeker has performed this work since its premiere, and now more than three and a half decades later, she’s not dancing in it for the first time. Two new casts of women performed the piece in New York.
Part of the attraction of “Fase” is its difficulty. In four parts with brief breaks (plus a long one for one of the dancers while the other performs a solo), it’s a marathon for the body, mind and memory. The dancers must keep track of steps that repeat, but like the music, gradually “phase” and vary. The work is paced to be prodigious, but possible.
The opening “Piano Phase” is the longest part. Reich juxtaposed two repeating phrases that gradually shifted: a shorter one in the bass line, a longer in the treble. Wearing simple light colored shifts, Yuika Hashimoto and Laura Maria Poletti cut a similar figure to one another: slender with their hair secured in neat, wispy ponytails. They relied throughout the piece on visual as well as auditory clues to navigate. Looking at one another, they nodded, then started rotating, swinging their arms to perpendicular.
The simple phrases moved in a track, revolving and stepping from side to side. Strong horizontal lighting designed by Remon Fromont projected a shadow trio behind the duo. For all the clockwork motion, Hashimoto and Poletti didn’t seem mechanical, yet. But they didn’t quite seem human either; even their hesitation and rubato seem predetermined.
“Fase” was less about dance and more about change and mutation. Tune out for a bit, and you’d find that the women’s rotation went from unison to opposition while you were away. That move into asynchrony took accurate musicality from both dancers: going out of unison when unison is the most logical outcome takes skill.
After several minutes the women drifted forward into a lit corridor. The movement developed sudden fits, like a boxer feinting, and the rotations become punctuated with tight pulled-in arms and sharp inhalations of breath. A second sortie forward led the duet to track briefly in the front before returning to the middle, then the back to finish. The women stopped moving and faced us as the stage went to black.
The second section shifted to stools at the front of the stage, with a small lamp hanging above each. “Come Out” used a taped voice loop. The two dancers sat on stools in darkness with a small lamp hanging above each, and their arms bent and flicked. Hashimoto rotated a quarter turn from Poletti to begin the phasing. Their phrasing was fluid; the combination used the torso movement in it to naturally impel the turning. But it didn’t look like something from nature. The women bent forward and up, and now it felt like machinery. They turned their heads to one another, and their arms moved forward and back like shifting gears.
They had changed clothing, into heavy heeled shoes, as well as shirts and pants, and looked like assembly line workers. “Fase” is now more than three and a half decades old, and this is where it showed its era – it was made before we had left analog and mechanical objects behind. Reich’s sampling wasn’t digitally created; the taped recording was manipulated. The feeling of the two women, their outfits, the constricted space and the movement recalled “Modern Times,” or even the comic assembly line sequence in “I Love Lucy.” Within a few minutes, the voice, which had said a sentence or two, was down to a repeating loop of a syllable that sounded like the ambient hum of equipment.
There’s more context. Reich’s score was composed in 1966 as part of a fundraiser for the Harlem Six, in the wake of racial violence and police brutality in New York City. De Keersmaeker didn’t ignore that. The music petered out and the women brought their arms down to a sudden clenched fist.
The third section, “Violin Phase,” was the section De Keersmaeker originally made as a solo for herself. In half light, Hashimoto moved in fits and starts until the stage brightened enough for us to see the perimeter of the circle she traveled. Her arms swung free or balled and the section ended by bringing her hands sharply in.
The final section, “Clapping Music” was the shortest; a coda without a finale. Wearing white sneakers again, the women began upstage in a tight frame of light, swinging their arms forward and back, bending their knees sharply to go on their toes. Within a few minutes the phrase started to drift forward out of the light and progressed in a slow migration. When the women reached the lamps at the front, they were done. They took their bows glowing with perspiration. A part of the thrill for the audience is the endurance test of the ballet. The women were applauded at the end as if they ran a race in front of us.
“Fase” is unusually mature for an early work. De Keersmaeker nailed the point of minimalism – the repetition. At the same time, as bare bones as the production is, she negotiated a method to carry an audience through 70 minutes, using not just the slow variation from Reich’s score, but spatial and costume changes.
The dance is also a time capsule of that era. Six years after “Einstein on the Beach,” De Keersmaeker placed minimalism not in the opera house, but the loft. Around the same time Jerome Robbins was trying to incorporate minimalism into ballet, creating “Glass Pieces” to Philip Glass in 1983 and essaying Reich two years later in “Eight Lines.” Though “Glass Pieces” is still in active repertory, neither of them were really satisfactory. By nature ballet isn’t minimalist. The pitfall Robbins fell into that De Keersmaeker didn’t was the temptation of a vast movement palette.
And yet, even though “Fase” broke new ground, it’s a familiar work, particularly decades on. This is music visualization, plain and simple. Just of a different genre.
copyright © 2019 by Leigh Witchel
“Fase, Four Movements to the Music of Steve Reich” – Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker/Rosas
New York Live Arts, New York, NY
September 26, 2019
Cover: Yuika Hashimoto and Laura Maria Poletti in “Fase.” Photo © Anne Van Aerschot.
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