Martha Graham’s work was prominent in the New York dance world of the 1930s in the wake of her innovative Primitive Mysteries (1931). Yet, her reputation grew exponentially beyond the confines of dance and the New York art world after the premiere of American Document (1938) followed by its national tour in 1939. This is, paradoxically, a work that the Martha Graham Dance Company may be reluctant to perform today in a version close to the original. It was highly anti-fascist and popular front, very related to the political issues of the day, and critical of the history of the United States. Graham’s national reputation took hold at this time, and she was noted not only for her choreography and dancing but also for her political stance in the pre-war moment. It is paradoxical that this occurred by and through a work that is considered to be of little artistic value today. To some American Document might indeed appear old-fashioned or too specific to its time to merit revival, yet I think in this time of political uncertainty Graham’s anti-fascist work –done without updating the context and streamlining the aesthetic to be faster and brasher to account for what is assumed to be the audience’s diminished attention span —  may prove most successful. The obscuring of democratic traditions and the perverse rhetorical prevarications of our present political climate has more than a little resemblance to the period that saw the rise of fascism. Dance can be exciting precisely when it is not updated, not commented upon in the process of performing it. But, to understand such works and to convey them effectively to an audience demands a deep historical and theoretical grasp on the director’s part – one that might not have existed at the time of the premiere either on the part of the artists or the public — and an ability to translate that historical perspective into immediate artistic terms. Martha Graham in Love and War is not, however, a book about the revival of dances, but rather a study of Graham’s work between 1937 and 1953 – arguably her most productive period – that attempts to envision the work as it originally appeared. So, for example, I interpret Appalachian Spring as a wartime work (it premiered in 1944 during World War II). There is an awareness and fear of war that pervades the work despite the temporal indeterminacy Graham so carefully practiced by implying it took place during the Civil War of the previous century.  In reality, the presence of the Civil War, in particular of the Escaped Slave character who was cut but yet retained in the Revivalist, as well as the presence of the abolitionist John Brown beneath the Husbandman, allowed Graham to imply an earlier popular front politics critical of injustices in American life in the guise of a patriotic wartime ballet. This analysis was possible by examining the scenarios she wrote for Aaron Copland in preparation for the work. Copland wrote his score for some characters that did not make it to the stage (another is the Indian Girl). But none of them entirely disappeared. I theorize this kind of choreographic process as one of character compression, which leads to a use of the archetype in postwar works.

Graham’s scrapbooks housed at the Library of Congress seem to have saved every bit of ephemera concerning her career, all meticulously cut out and pasted in, probably by her mentor and musical director Louis Horst. They allowed me to reassess her relationship to advertising and popular culture as well as the media interest in her as a complex public figure as of the early forties. The newspaper clippings show that her Graham was taken up as a politically influential international figure by the early forties. With the entry of the US into World War II, however, she was enlisted in the war effort as an example of “productive femininity”. It was at this point that her fame grew at the expense of a distortion of her personal and artistic personality. Her role was to reassure the working woman she would not sacrifice their femininity to the war effort. The war brought women into the work place but also reinforced gender stereotypes by virtue of the conformism that invariably accompanies wartime mentality. After the war, Graham turned to Greek myth and characters such as Jocasta, contradicting the more wholesome wartime image that had been constructed of her with a more perverse image. If her original positioning in the media had been political, the notoriety she gained during the war was at the expense of her fierce independence as a woman artist. By the end of the decade she was out of touch with the new consumerism that pervaded American society, but a sacred monster of the theater who drew large audiences. The one goal she retained since her first popular success in 1938 was to reach as broad a public as possible without compromising her modernist aesthetic, and by the mid forties she achieved this goal with the unheard of two-week Broadway season.

This was in no small measure thanks to the efforts of her dance partner and lover Erick Hawkins who first came to her work in 1938. In addition to dancing in her company, serving as a company manager, booking agent, technical director, and general factotum, Hawkins, who had graduated with a major in classics from Harvard, brought a knowledge of the myth culture of ancient Greece (Hawkins read Greek) that was most useful to Graham. He also dreamed up the first scheme for fund raising in the dance world and executed it successfully. Their relationship was, however, in many ways a tormented one. Although Hawkins was demonized in Agnes de Mille’s biography Martha for walking out on Graham in London in 1950, the correspondence between Hawkins and Graham tells a different story.

But, then there were the myth works of the immediate post-war era that made an appeal to the themes sanctioned by psychoanalysis as universal – notably the Oedipus complex explored in Night Journey (1947). How could she reconcile a fascination with myth so identified with Nazi fascism — think of Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympia, which also premiered in 1938 – with her own anti-fascist stance? This was a mystery to unravel. Her well-known interest in Jung only aggravates this question as recent scholarship has shown Jung’s involvement with Nazism during the Second World War.

Knowing that Graham was a voracious and serious reader of modern literature and psychology I thought it possible to unearth the logic behind choreographic thinking in many of her artistic choices, influenced by her extended literary ruminations. But, could her reading be tracked? Of course, there were clues. Bertram Ross (one of her lead dancers) said she was reading Esther M. Harding’s Psychic Energy while choreographing Night Journey. Might her library have survived her death intact? Certainly, the publication of The Notebooks of Martha Graham (1973) was a strong indication that her choreography was linked to a practice of writing and reading, even though the Notebooks are often quite difficult to decipher.

Portrait of Martha Graham (courtesy of the Music Division, Library of Congress. Photographer unidentified).

Also key to Graham’s work of the immediate postwar era were Otto Rank and Erich Fromm. She had actually consulted with Fromm – and some say had an affair with him – in 1946. Fromm popularized, to some extent, key ideas of Rank. Graham quoted both men in her notes. Although her connection to Freud is often touted, Graham was much more up to date: she was a choreographic post-Freudian. Her myth works dealt with the cultural value of incest, the demystification of the Oedipus conflict, and the revalorization of the mother in psychoanalytic theory, something principally attributed in psychoanalytic literature to Rank’s The Trauma of Birth. Although Graham did read Jung, one should differentiate between the influence of psychology and psychoanalysis in her work. She underwent an extended analysis with Frances G. Wickes, a prominent New York Jungian, in the early fifties. Paradoxically, her analytic experience did not lead to further myth works but to her only anti-myth work, Voyage (1953). All but disappeared from the annals of Graham performance, yet Voyage (retitled Theater for Voyage in 1955) set to a score by William Schuman deserves to be rediscovered – perhaps even on the stage.

By Juliet Neidish

The Whitney Museum of American Art not only revealed its commitment to time-based art by choosing lots of it for its 2012 Biennial, but also extended its definition of the genre beyond de rigueur video and performance installations, to include dance, theater, film and music. With the Biennial still on-going, it’s not yet clear how, if at all, placing these various types of performance in this particular museum setting will affect the viewing experience or the making of such time-based work, other than to expose it to a primarily visual arts-going public.

The selection of Charles Atlas’ film, “Ocean” (2011), was however, an exciting example of how the museum setting can provide an arena that not merely displays a non-static canvas, but actually adds to its fulfillment. Charles Atlas, a pioneer in film and videography, has a long history of collaboration with dance, including having worked closely with Merce Cunningham since the mid-1970s. “Ocean” is a dance Cunningham premiered in 1994, in a theater-in-the round of the Cirque Royal, in Brussels. In 2008, at the age of 89, Cunningham took on the major project of restaging it outdoors, in the huge Rainbow Granite Quarry in Minnesota before an audience of 4,500 spectators. Atlas’ vision was also big: with a 5- camera team he shot all 3 performances to create one vast film mirroring the immensity of both the quarry (the setting of the piece) and the ocean (the subject of the piece). The otherwise bare, 4th-floor Whitney gallery provided a wall- as- screen large enough to match his vision. Light chairs were strewn around for viewers. Only a small amount of light was maintained for the negotiation of audience entrances and exits.

Still from the film "Ocean" (2011). Courtesy: Merce Cunningham Trust.

The film begins with the technical crew engrossed in building the theater interspersed with clips of The St. Cloud Symphony warming up. An electronic score by David Tudor merges with Anthony Culver’s Cage-inspired orchestral score played high above the audience by the 150-piece orchestra. We get a strong sense of this massive, open-air quarry into which the circular stage and its apparatus will seemingly have to be placed. Reiterating Cunningham’s conceit that their is no one vantage point from which to view a piece, Atlas, while letting us bask in the piece in its entirety, will also give us cuts from different facings and distances, sometimes splitting the screen to show several views at once. From the minute the first dancer appears onstage, pensively feeling his way through his steps, we know that we are up front and center. And not long after that- side and back and split-screen.

Still from the film "Ocean" (2011). Courtesy: Merce Cunningham Trust

But a marvel of the film is that you sense much more than just closeness. It is grippingly dimensional, heightening your awareness of skin, muscles stretching, and even an eye scanning furtively for an approaching dancer. It made me feel able to see exactly how a dancer’s anatomy was able to work the Cunningham technique. For example, how the power a fully pointed foot when directed into the air was the main dictator of strength throughout the entire body. And how that foot could set off a pulley system allowing the thigh rotating in the hip socket to turn the whole body over to face a different direction. The skin-tight ocean-blue spandex unitards worn by the 13 dancers, both revealing and encasing their muscles, also led the eye in this kind of body reading. The Atlas camera work allowed me to see when a dancer was not totally “on their leg” and how they negotiated to correct or deal with imbalance. This, of course, is part of a dancer’s prowess as a performer, and the piece does go on for 90 minutes without stop, but it is rare to feel almost as if you are in the dancer’s brain following their every move. This 2008 manifestation of the nearly 60 year-old Merce Cunningham Dance Company was a strong one. The dancers breathed as one, phrased as one, and all the while offered glimpses of their own, individual presences.

Still from the film "Ocean" (2011). Courtesy: Merce Cunningham Trust

Having recently seen the Martha Graham Company, I began to think about why Cunningham dancers stay so fresh, so aesthetically contemporary, yet adhere to all that has marked the Cunningham dancer throughout the decades. The current leadership of the Graham Company seem to have concluded that an audience today won’t “get” Graham, unless it is jacked-up to a frenzied pace, performed with an intent to indicate and underline its narrative, and even to parody and comment upon itself while it is being danced. The result produces something quite different from the weight, timing, and abstraction, which has historically communicated story and subject so uniquely and poetically. The Limon Company, which has tried to stay religiously traditional, has in effect locked out a contemporary connection to who they are today and as a result, often appears staid or old-fashioned. The Cunningham dancers up until now have maintained vibrancy without making overt alterations to the fundamental tenets of the Cunningham technique. Now that the company has officially disbanded as of December 31, 2011, according to the plan formulated by the Cunningham Trust in concurrence with the wishes of Merce Cunningham before his death in 2009, we will have to wait to see how the effects of the Cunningham presence will continue to extend into the future.

Still from the film "Ocean" (2011). Courtesy: Merce Cunningham Trust

A very large fourth floor gallery space was emptied out for Michael Clark’s Who’s Zoo? at the Whitney Biennial (April 7, 2012) in order to look and feel like a performance space. The audience was directed to sit on the floor at one side of the gallery all for the forty-minute show. The performing area was extremely wide although not comparably deep, and was symmetrically framed by two entranceways at either side serving as wings for the performers. Charles Atlas’s lighting and video projections for Clark on the back wall would create a sense of depth for the choreography as the piece progressed, which from the start privileged the use of diagonals for very practical reasons. The space used in this way was far from ideal as the intimacy of viewing dance in a museum was undermined by the lack of space in depth and hence of perspective. The performance style of the dancers, in addition, seemed more inclined to projection to an audience further away. Despite this impediment, the visual qualities of the space were extremely “clean”. A laser-like lavender line cut horizontally across the white wall we faced, joining the two entranceways.

Kate Coyne in Michael Clark Company Who’s Zoo?, March 28, 2012 at 2012 Whitney Biennial, Photograph © Paula Court

 The walls were white, the marly floor was black; copious lights hung unobtrusively from the ceiling, which was high enough to render the technical apparatus virtually invisible, as in most theaters. In short, I was not terribly aware I was in a museum except for the challenge of crowd management briefly imposed on museum staff.

Clark’s company boasts six excellent dancers and himself. Three men and three women appeared initially as two species – two men in black leotards and the other four dancers in glowing orange. The music initially made this feel like a late sixties so-bad-it’s-good sci-fi film. The choreography seemed derivative of Cunningham although Clark injects arresting torso shifts that project a sensuality into the classical figures. Later on, all six sport stylish zebra like leotards. It would seem Clark is presenting his performers as dancing creatures – hence the zoo. Or, perhaps, he is saying dance always already takes place in/as an atrophied museum of its own fashioning. Clark’s own presence offered a useful counterpoint as he hovered on the outskirts in pedestrian garb fulfilling his reputation as the bad-boy of British contemporary dance.

The two male dancers in black worked in rhythmic unison, occasionally partnering each other. In fact, most of the choreography mimicked the musical rhythms. The title Who’s Zoo? suggested the dancers were creatures to be observed in their habitat and introduced in this way a sense, perhaps, of the natural history museum. Some kind of critique of the museum was being suggested here, doubtless, but it lacked focus. The title’s question also suggested the reading: Who is Who? – which could be understood to ask: Who is the audience and who the performer? Or, who is the human and who the animal? Understanding the question this way was underlined by the participation of many amateur dancers — called “untrained volunteers” in the program — Clark used in counterpoint to his professional and highly trained company. The program stated somewhat naively this was “an attempt to expand what our experience of movement can be.” One could, however, consider the untrained volunteers to be the third species on stage, one with which the audience might identify as the amateurs coped with their fairly basic rhythmic unison assignment.

Michael Clark Company Who’s Zoo?, March 28, 2012 at 2012 Whitney Biennial, Photograph © Paula Court

In the final section, a vocalist in green face paint and blue jeans took center stage to underline a grotesque presence hinted at marginally by Clark from the start. The performance from here on devolved into an acid rock concert as Darren Spooner bleated “Maggot Brain” deafeningly into a mike and any notion of choreography faded from view. This gesture in conjunction with the sci-fi ambiance, and the unfocused critique lent a dated feel to the proceedings. The sci-fi parody blunts the museum critique and leaves us wondering what is going on. Does dance in the museum need to acknowledge the institutional site of its performance? Or, should it transform the museum into a theater? Neither of these tendencies were realized by this performance, but both remained as unresolved questions.

 A few days later I attended the conference “Making Time: Art Across Gallery, Screen and Stage” at UC Berkeley’s Arts Research Center. Here were assembled a group of artists, curators and academics to discuss the presence of time-based art in museums. I was honored to be on a panel to discuss “Dancing in the Museum.” with Jonah Bokaer, Judy Hussie-Taylor of the Danspace Project, and Ralph Lemon. (The entire conference will soon be available on line at: arts.berkeley.edu). Sabine Breitwieser, curator of Media and Performance Art at MoMA, expressed the view that dance now finds itself in the museum because dancing bodies display skills and are attractive to look at. Shannon Jackson, director of the Arts Research Center, assured the audience in introducing our panel that we would make the deceptively simple “dancing in the museum” scenario more complicated.

The fields of visual art creation and the curation of art, film, dance and theater were well represented at this conference through an interdisciplinary discussion where no one discourse dominated the conversation. I noted that some curators are aware dance brings the public into the museum. Choreographers and companies are aware that museums are the new performance producers on the block with a big budget. The question of the museum as a site of display in which moving bodies challenge previous definitions of what it means to exhibit art objects and material culture was stimulating. This is uncharted territory. Curators seem to be anxious to learn more about dance and its histories; artists are aware that time-based models of art in some ways contradict the institutional mandate to preserve and display art; scholars are examining notions of liveness and objecthood in relation to exhibition and performance.

Donya Feuer, dancer, choreographer, director, filmmaker and teacher, died in Stockholm on November 6th, 2011. Her innovative approach to movement across several media and her poetic control of detail in performance had a powerful effect on theatre and dance in Stockholm for over forty years. A highly collaborative artist, her ideas and methods were influential on those with whom she worked: Paul Sanasardo, Pina Bausch, Ingmar Bergman, Ted Hughes, Mats Ek, and many other choreographers, dancers and actors. Her long career began with dance in the United States, but expanded into theatre, opera and film in Sweden.

Donya Feuer, portrait (Stockholm, 1960s)

Donya Feuer was born in Philadelphia on October 31, 1934. Her mother, Pauline Feuer, was a noted social worker and activist. She received her early dance training from Nadia Chilkovski, the well-known left wing modern dancer and dance educator. Feuer was a scholarship student at the Juilliard School of Music in New York City and then became an apprentice in the Martha Graham Dance Company; she danced with Graham on tour to Asia in 1955. Her choreographic career began upon leaving Graham in 1955 to found Studio for Dance with Paul Sanasardo in New York City. Her first important dance work was Dust for Sparrows (1958). Her partnership with Sanasardo included making and performing works for a remarkably talented group of young children; they also worked with dancers such as Diane Germaine, Manuel Alum, and Pina Bausch to produce a series of striking and original ballets: In View of God (1959), Laughter After All (1960), Pictures in Our House (1961), and the multiple evening Excursion for Miracles (1961).

Feuer went to Stockholm in 1963 initially to teach dance; she trained Mats Ek and Niklas Ek both of whom premiered in her work. She soon was choreographing productions directed by Alf Sjöberg and Frank Sundström. Her work with Sundström in 1965 on Peter Weiss’s Marat/Sade was hailed as groundbreaking. She was officially invited to join the Kungliga Dramatiska Theatern (Royal Dramatic Theatre) in 1966 as a choreographer and in 1967 she was appointed director. From then on she became closely associated with the theater work of Ingmar Bergman who facilitated the creation of her Dans Kompaniet (Dance Company). Bergman encouraged her to stage dance evenings at the Dramaten, which she did working with composer Ulf Björlin and set designer Lennart Mörk; Bergman first worked with Feuer himself when he directed Lars Forsell’s Show (1971).

Feuer became indispensable to Bergman’s work for the theatre upon his return from Germany to Sweden in 1984. She made important choreographic contributions to his productions of Shakespeare’s Kung Lear (1984), Mishima’s Markisinnnan de Sade (1989), and Schiller’s Maria Stuarda (2000). Much of Bergman’s late theater work relied upon Feuer’s ability to make movement that determined the production’s physical language and expressive range without drawing attention to itself as dance. She brought some of these productions to the Brooklyn Academy of Music in New York. In 1996 Bergman created the role of Talata for her in his production of the opera Bakanterna.

But Feuer also directed groundbreaking productions of her own at the Dramaten, including Shakespeare’s Stormen (1968), Lars Noren’s Fursteslickaren (1973), Kristina Lugn’s Det vackra blir liksom över (1989), and Pejlingar (1978), a solo for Karen Kavli made up of a montage of Shakespearian roles. It was out of this production that she got the idea for “a play that Shakespeare never wrote”, and inspired Ted Hughes to write, Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being, which was originally drafted in 150 letters he sent to Feuer over several months. In consultation with Hughes, Feuer went on to create a series of productions based on an experimental approach to Shakespearian text without plot between 1991 and 1995 with Will’s Company. This project, known as “In the Company of Shakespeare”, led to a teacher-training program implemented in secondary schools throughout Scandinavia. In 1998 she received the Stads Heders Prize in recognition of this work with children on Shakespeare and performance.

Feuer directing "In the Company of Shakespeare"

In addition to this, Feuer introduced modern dance to Sweden in the mid 1960s, and staged a series of influential dance productions that included the psychedelic pop ballet Love Love Love for the Culberg Ballet, Spel för museet (at the Historiska Museet, 1965), Ett spel om formal och mäniskor (for Swedish television, 1967), Varg rop (1971), Gud lever och har hälsan (1971), and ej blot til lyst (1985). She collaborated with Per Jönsson on Three Dances (1991) in which she danced. And she created a series of dance films beginning with the experimental De fördörnda Kvinnornas Dans (Monteverdi’s The Ungrateful Women) filmed at Faro with Bergman in 1973. This was followed by two films about Nijinsky for which she enlisted the participation of Romola Nijinsky, and created longer films on the dancer’s passion, notably Dansaren (The Dancer), which premiered at the Berlin Film Festival in 1994 and was nominated for an Academy Award. Feuer also created a number of experimental dance films in the 1970s for Norwegian television. Her work in dance was recognized by the Carina Ari Gold Medal in 1996.

She is survived by her son, Magnus Love Feuer of Los Angeles, California.

The Merce Cunningham Dance Company completed another lap in the countdown of its Legacy Tour toward the end of this year when it will give its final performances in New York City. The last work Cunningham choreographed for his company, Nearly Ninety², was given a single performance to a packed house at Stanford University’s Memorial Auditorium on November 1, 2011. Cunningham (who died in 2009 at the age of 90) seems in this work to have prefigured his own passing but the initially somber mood made of exceedingly slow movement progresses subtly toward a sense of quickening and light until it can practically no longer be contained on the stage. The idea of this piece as a choreographic farewell is rendered more poignant by the decision of the Cunningham Trust to terminate the company after its world tour in able to devote attention to teaching and licensing his work to other companies. This strategy to ensure the survival of his work on the stage is the first of its kind in the modern dance field. The audience was very aware it was seeing his last work for the last time: last squared, as it were. Even the Merce Cunningham Dance Foundation archive, presently housed at Westbeth in New York City, will be ‘disbanded’ when its holdings are donated to the Dance Collection of the New York Public Library. As explained by archivist David Vaughan in a post-performance discussion, the final activity of the Foundation is the creation of ‘dance capsules’ containing all the information necessary to reconstruct his works. In some sense, Nearly Ninety² was itself a living and breathing dance capsule.

MERCE CUNNINGHAM, photo by Mark Selige

The double sense of an ending – a last work performed for the last time by the choreographer’s company – invested this performance with a sense of finality, and was dramatic and affecting as a memorializing gesture. Yet, Nearly Ninety² was actually ‘reconstructed’ for this final performance from the original, which suggests a certain encapsulation of memory at work even prior to the dissolving of the Company. Nearly Ninety² was apparently something quite different at its premiere at BAM in 2009. In the 2011 staging there was no eight-ton set center stage concealing the musicians, and on top of which a solo was performed: only a bare stage filled with the comings and goings of thirteen dancers in newly designed costumes. It was a version of late Cunningham as purist and suggests the trope of the artist who, at an advanced age, had the distinct ability to distill the essence of his art in an ascetic gesture – one thinks of Johann Sebastian Bach’s cycle Art of the Fugue, completed as he was dying, and whose score was in need of being sorted out posthumously.

MERCE CUNNINGHAM DANCE COMPANY / "NEARLY NINETY 2" 2009 (Melissa Toogood, Brandon Collwes, Dylan Crossman) Photo by Anna Finke

I had been struck once once before at the Company’s memorial concert (Park Avenue Armory, New York City, October 28, 2009) at how, despite the chance procedures Cunningham was known for using in the compositional process, he nevertheless remained accountable for (if not intentionally responsible to) each pairing of bodies, each angle from which shapes emerged out of movement, in sum, for each visual and kinesthetic moment of his work as it was set before us. Despite its openness of meaning and continuous experimentation and discovery Cunningham’s work displayed a deliberate quality as well. In a time when improvisation and new collaborative techniques for setting dances abound he sustained a sense of choreographic craftsmanship that is becoming a rarity in the contemporary dance scene. This would be particularly true of Nearly Ninety² in that here, as director of choreography Robert Swinston explained in the post-performance discussion, Cunningham did not use computer software in making this dance. Nearly Ninety² shows a hands-on commitment to the creation of choreography, which displays Cunningham’s mastery of theme and variation at multiple levels of the choreographic construction.

MERCE CUNNINGHAM DANCE COMPANY / "NEARLY NINETY 2" 2009

The importance of lighting and the subtle evolution of the sound score by John Paul Jones and Takehisa Kosugi make it a chromatic piece that begins in a somber darkness peopled by dancers in grey leotards against a black backdrop as they enter couple by couple: the women perform beguilingly smooth double or triple attitude turns and then proceed to hunched over développés devant in plié, as the men arch with one hand to head and perform the duties of partnering in an almost balletic sense. The couples accumulate and the sense of how the shapes change occurs as much through canon as through the sheer accumulation of bodies. The play of mass and line (both in the individual and the group) is the watchword, as well as a certain structural counterpoint: the work begins with a remarkably sustained slowness and somberness – balances and supports extended so long that the dancers fairly droop from the pull of gravity. Once the back scrim lifts to reveal a searing crack of yellow light spilling over the floor the ambiance has begun to change through imperceptible degrees (possibly a metaphor for time itself). Such gradual but still stark changes of light are a constant, and make the dancers stand forth as if they were insects displayed on glass as the work progresses from an almost melancholy slowness to progressively paced attack and speed until they virtually fly off the stage at the end to an incandescent dawn.

The choreographic retrospective of Yvonne Rainer’s work now underway at the Dia Art Foundation in Beacon, New York (October 22-23, 2011) is an important event for audiences interested in Yvonne Rainer’s dance and the development of the sixties choreographic avant-garde. Two other installments will follow in February and May 2012. Yvonne Rainer, who recently published an autobiography (Feelings are Facts. A life) and more recently still a collection of poems (Poems) is expanding into a figure of immense artistic stature and vitality even while we are given a chance for retrospection. The Dia: Beacon retrospective is an integral part of Rainer’s return to dance from film first announced in 2000 by her production After many a summer dies the swan: Hybrid for the White Oak Dance Project, and then by a number of new works for the stage: AG Indexical, RoS Indexical, Spiraling Down, and Assisted Living: Good Sports II. This retrospective, which privileges dance, comes after Yvonne Rainer: radical juxtapositions 1961-2002 exhibition, which opened at the Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery (Philadelphia) in 2004.

Yvonne Rainer, Trio A, 1966. Performed as part of “This is the story of a woman who…,” Theater for the New City, New York, 1973. Photo: © Babette Mangolte (All Rights of Reproduction Reserved). Courtesy of Broadway 1602, New York.

What distinguishes the Dia retrospective is the revival of works that have been overshadowed by her iconic Trio A (1966), which was filmed in 1978 and actively preserved (as discussed by dancer Pat Catterson in her essay “I Promised Myself I Would Never Let It Leave My Body’s Memory” in Dance Research Journal, 2009). The return at Dia of Rainer’s first dance work, Three Satie Spoons (1961) as well as her Three Seascapes (1962) and Chair/Pillow (1969) not only adds to our experience of Rainer’s art and to our understanding of its historical impact, but bring it all before our eyes in the present. What makes this re-performance uniquely successful is the fact that most of the cast has been working with Rainer over the past ten years or more. Hence there is not the sense of removal from the original inspiration. The program was also effectively assembled with only short pauses and a flexible cast of five to assure both variety in the performance of Rainer’s solos for herself and an ingenious framing of the variations on Trio A.

Three separate dancers – Emily Coates, Pat Catterson, and Patricia Hofbauer —performed Rainer’s solos for Three Satie Spoons to Satie’s Gymnopédies. The lyricism of the music was contrasted with the deliberate holding of the physical motifs and the pedestrian manner in which the dancer moved in and out of them. Given the famous aversion of the performer’s gaze from the audience that characterizes Trio A, it is interesting that in Three Satie Spoons the gaze of the dancer does frequently meet that of the audience. Coates, as Rainer’s original notes indicate, stretches her mouth with her index fingers, performs a long flexed-foot attitude, a long arabesque, places her hands squarely on her hips, and draws one foot up to her pelvis in a difficult balance. (These notes can be found in Rainer’s first book, Work 1961-73). Catterson’s solo contains some port-de-bras that suggest a ballet aesthetic (she was studying ballet with Mia Slavenska when she made this piece), but done from a squatting position, and other very sculptural placings of the arms and hands about the face as well as an energetic leg extension and pivots hovering close to the floor. Catterson’s attitude is more internal and contemplative than Coates who almost seems confrontational, yet is still molded by modern and balletic dance poses that she also mocks. The third solo by Hofbauer has the dancer giving space to the vocal (squeaks), one line of text – “The grass is greener when the sun is yellow” – and, finally one long sustained “ah-oow ah-ooo” that manages amazingly to harmonize with the music. Most interesting here is that Rainer posed herself distinct technical challenges as a dancer that are implicit in yet different from the terms of the material she is also backing off from. She was rebelling against the perceived excesses of both ballet and modern dance. There is a sense that Rainer wished to trap movement in the materiality of time, which endeavor demands a great deal of technical control. There is nothing ‘light’ about Three Satie Spoons either in its intentions or its execution. There is humor, irony, poetry, and iconoclasm (of a slightly tamer nature than we find with the uncompromising minimalism of Trio A). The rebellion is there though in a less doctrinaire form.

Hofbauer performed the solos of Three Seascapes. In the first section to Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto #2 she runs in a blue raincoat making square patterns with sharp angles. Hands in pockets, she descends to the floor and lies on her side. The hands in pockets expose or show the effort it takes to go down and up without hands; she repeats the exercise over and over from different angles and in different spaces on the stage. The mechanics/technique are not hidden. In the second solo to a grinding sound score from La Monte Young’s Poem for Chairs, Tables, Benches, etc. Hofbauer snakes across the stage on one leg with the other leg limply in the air with dangling arms and antsy facial expressions that never settle into a coherent expression. This collusion with the audience about the dancer as subject who remains distant from the theatricality of subjectivity and its conventional codes, adds another dimension that is both satirical and political. While she had remained alienated from the florid emotional cues of the Rachmaninoff score by refusing to assume an expressive relation to the music in the first solo, cacophonous sound provides the background for the second solo. The third solo begins in silence when Hofbauer drops a pile of white tulle on the floor – the ultimate classical ballet signifier –and places her raincoat on top of it. She then proceeds to collapse into the tulle while emitting breathtaking shrieks. I believe she does this three times. The screams are powerful, the tulle potentially engulfing, and the sense of panic intense. These falls are all the more shocking in their explosive affect as they are done as a repeatable task.

Yvonne Rainer, Trio A Pressured (In the Midnight Hour), 1999— 2011. Performance at Dia:Beacon, Riggio Galleries, Beacon, New York. Saturday, October 22, 2011. Performers: Pat Catterson, Emmanuele Phuon, Emily Coates, and Keith Sabado. Photo: © Paula Court. Courtesy Dia Art Foundation, New York.

 The different variations on Trio A that followed were all the more fascinating in the light of these earlier solos. This, of course, was the solo in which no phrasing was to be evident, in which no movement was repeated, in which a series of denials were enacted regarding the performer in relation to the audience, and which was performed for a little over four minutes in total silence. Keith Sabado performed it first (the first time I had seen it performed in its entirety by a male dancer); Pat Catterson then performed it in reverse or retrograde; Emily Coates then performed it ‘forward’ with Keith Sabado following her, attempting to keep looking at her in the eye as she continued through the movement; and, finally, it was performed simultaneously but non-synchronously as Trio A Pressured by all four performers to the Chamber Brothers’ In the Midnight Hour. The variations have all been done before in recent performances, but to see them one after the other also added striking new dimensions to this iconic piece. In Facing I noticed that when the Sabado follows Coates around, the effect was to accentuate the solo’s changes of levels (when her gaze is to the floor he had to be lying on the floor to meet it). Moreover, his movements about her introduced a trace movement that, while even more pedestrian than her approach, because it was unconstrained by choreography at the primary level, began to introduce rhythmic and energetic dynamics around and about the soloist’s neutral performance (Rainer has theorized this as “neutral doing”). With the Midnight Hour quartet, it seemed that certain twitchy movements were highlighted by the beat of the music and put their neutralized aspect into question. In both cases, that which the choreography denies in its famed minimalism was rendered vivid by its contrary. This also begins to suggest a certain unconscious of the choreography.

Yvonne Rainer, Trio A Pressured (Facing), 1999— 2011. Performance at Dia:Beacon, Riggio Galleries, Beacon, New York. Saturday, October 22, 2011. Performers: Emily Coates and Yvonne Rainer. Photo: © Paula Court. Courtesy Dia Art Foundation, New York.

The final excerpt, Chair/Pillow for the entire ensemble was explicitly rhythmic unison dancing with chairs and pillows as objects. This piece opened out the formalist experiments of the sixties into a more theatrical arena. It served to confirm the point already made, which was that Rainer’s exploration of the materiality of movement that one might want to call choreographic minimalism was many sided and continues to resonate. Another work of the sixties, We Shall Run (1963) is announced for the May 12^th program.

Yvonne Rainer, Chair/Pillow, 1969. Performance at Dia:Beacon, Riggio Galleries, Beacon, New York. Saturday, October 22, 2011. Performers: Keith Sabado, Patricia Hoffbauer, Emmanuele Phuon, Emily Coates, and Pat Catterson. Photo: © Paula Court. Courtesy Dia Art Foundation, New York.

I’m going to be speaking at the Rose Auditorium at Cooper Union School of Art on October 20 at 6:00 pm.  Here are the details:

Although Michel Foucault never wrote of dance as an example of a bodily discipline in the classical age, he did affect the art of contemporary ballet through his influence on the work of choreographer William Forsythe. This talk interprets Foucault’s influence on Forsythe up until the early 1990s and also examines how Forsythe’s choreography ‘responded’ to issues of agency, inscription and discipline that characterize Foucault’s thought on corporeality. Ultimately, it asks whether Forsythe’s use of Foucauldian theory leads to a reinterpretation of inscription in Foucault.

The recent production of Lully’s Atys at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in New York City (September 18-24, 2011) has been remounted from the 1986 co-production of William Chrystie’s Les Arts Florissants and Francine Lancelot’s historical dance company Ris et danseries in collaboration with the director Jean-Marie Villégier. Atys burst on the scene (Florence, Paris, New York) at the height of the baroque revival in music and dance of the 1980s. Baroque specialist Philippe Beaussant called it “a sort of miracle” in his entry on the opera for the Encyclopaedia Universalis (1988). Atys first came to New York in 1989 with a return engagement in 1992 when it appeared to be the apogee of what was possible in the evocation of seventeenth-century tragédie lyrique, the operatic form most associated with the reign of Louis XIV. Rather than further stimulate the baroque music and dance revival of the eighties, it may have actually stalled it. The lavishness of the production values simply could not be matched by other productions of this repertory.

Clearly it would be hard to top this production’s budget, which was able to give us a seventeenth-century spectacle as only heretofore imagined. The patron who financed this revival, Ronald P. Stanton, said the first Atys had changed his life and he wanted to see it once more before he died. Originally produced by a king, only a millionaire can now produce Atys. This revival stands out among all baroque revivals as the most opulent, and therefore closest to the kind of spectacle of which it is an example. Atys has aged well. The concept has even been refined by the production team and comes across now with greater clarity than it did twenty years ago. Or, possibly, we are just better positioned now to understand it. Whatever the case may be, awareness of time passing lies at the core of this production as a concept and constitutes what one might call its effective baroque machinery.

With a dramatic libretto by Philippe Quinault and music composed by Jean-Baptiste Lully in 1676 Atys tells the story of a love quadrangle. The hero Atys is in love with Sangaride who is betrothed to his best friend, King Celenus. The goddess Cybèle is in love with Atys and reveals her love to him in a dream, which is the occasion for a remarkable choreographic interlude. Atys is a variant of Adonis who also refused to requite the love of a goddess, and was thus condemned to die (Atys kills himself). The sorrowful Cybèle turns Atys into a pine tree to commemorate her lost love. The drama is Cornelian in its geometrical symmetries and Racinian in its exploration of restrained but corroding passion. The severity of neoclassical tragedy is expanded out into operatic form. That is to say it adds excesses to the formal quality of French tragedy, but also illuminates French tragedy through those very excesses that are foreign to it. In this way, Atys becomes baroque for us today: an irregular pearl of immense beauty and poignancy that fits nowhere but draws on multiple traditions within the French seventeenth century.

The technique of recitative with basso continuo tells a story while maintaining the musical interest. The vocabulary of la belle danse, so unlike classical ballet and closer to court reality, is integrated with the narrative. This research into historical performance practices conjoined with the brilliant direction of Villégier is the artistic bedrock upon which the production relies. There are some noticeable differences from the earlier production. For one thing, Francine Lancelot is no longer with us (she died in 2003). The dances are reconstructions of the original choreography by her former assistant Beatrice Massin with her Compagnie Fêtes Galantes. Lancelot’s dancers gave us a weight and timing that seemed much closer to an earlier period, which contributed a layer of theatrical gravity that is missing in the more energetic and muscled style of Massin’s company. The star turn of Jean-Christophe Paré in his magical solo as Morphé is not reproducible by anyone. And, all the singers are new. Yet, the interview with Chrystie and Villégier and their individual essays published in the May 2011 Paris program testify to a maturation of the concept that is reflected on stage.

Despite the baroque quality of its profusion the production feels more unified and more powerful now than it did twenty years ago. Atys is made up of many potentially disparate elements that seemed in 1989 to be competing for precedence, but which now appear to be integrated into a larger concept. Despite the contribution of musical and choreographic expertise the production succeeds as spectacle. And, for this reason, music critics cannot really convey why this work succeeds the way it does. The sumptuous costumes, the large number of singers on stage, and the postmodern touches (the absence of furniture, a row of heads at the top of a backdrop, severe black, white and silver palette) as well as Lancelot’s choreography that takes off from the sources to add further layers of expressionism as performed by professional dancers, all make Atys powerful without seeming anachronistic.

The entire action transpires in one room at Versailles, which set designer Carlo Tommasi has even provided with a ceiling. The drama of characters entering and exiting through doors rather than coming on and off stage from the wings underlines the unity of place associated with French classical tragedy. Villégier has spoken of the king and his entourage gathering in the royal apartments to listen to excerpts of Lully operas in concert version. This was the director’s point of departure in setting the work at Versailles twenty years after the historical performance of Atys had taken place. The king had already stopped dancing and the court was shrouded in a mood of morose asceticism. The dream scene is a visualization of what the court might have imagined as the earlier performance of Atys in happier times.

The story thus unfolds as a ritual of memory in which the dream dispatched to Atys by Cybèle takes place in a golden aura of light while the surrounding opera is in somber black with glints of silver that complement the lush curls of white wigs. The dream is the nostalgia of the court for youth in the heyday of its earlier enthusiasm for court ballet. The present is cold and nocturnal whereas the dream rediscovers the light of day. This wonderful baroque conceit offers a model for our relation to the performance itself, which is bathed its own past as well as in ours. Our relation to this production is conditioned in more ways than one by the past: the 1980s compared to today; the 1650s compared to the 1670s.

Lancelot’s choreography should be acknowledged. Although based on historical reconstruction, it makes some successfully daring departures from conventional historical vocabulary. Atys may have given us some of Lancelot’s best choreography. It ventures into expressionistic areas that, by the end, mirror the mood of the drama itself.  I am thinking in particular of the final scene of mourning in which the dancers remodeled baroque steps and gestures, almost pulling them out and blowing them up to a heightened level of suspension, sustained pause, and tension. This theatricalizes them and burns them into our memory. For the first time, the dancers are in black, shedding their role as divertissement and entering into the thick of the drama. It is a striking moment in which dance, music and narrative mesh to highlight the properly spectacular quality of baroque performance. Now, almost twenty years after the premiere in a very changed world, this production allows us to take a second look at our own conception of the baroque and the postmodern since the eighties.

For anyone wanting to recapture the original version, filmmaker Jacques Rozier recently revealed at a Paris screening that he had done a multi-camera shoot of Atys during a 1986 performance at the Montpellier Opera. I attended a screening of a rough cut last June at the Action Christine in Paris. Rozier is seeking the funding to do the final edit that will restore the first Atys. The film promises to be brilliant because it will not only capture the beauty of the original performance but will also view it from every possible angle in the cavernous Montpellier Opera house. It shows us performers backstage, the feats of the stagehands, and the crazy baroque impracticality of the theatre, as well as the style of the original.