Year: 2013

by Juliet Neidish

Kun-Yang Lin’s dance career spans decades and has been recognized by awards and grants both in his homeland, Taiwan, and in the U.S.  His choreography has been seen around the world. After joining the dance faculty at Temple University, Kun-Yang Lin made the decision to transfer his company’s base of operations to Philadelphia, facing the challenge of creating a new dance company from the ground up.  As it turns out, Mr. Lin has managed to extend his local artistic outreach even beyond the university and his dance company.  His CHI Movement Arts Center built from an abandoned warehouse in South Philadelphia is now a thriving multi-purpose studio offering an array of movement classes, studio rental, and performance opportunities, as well as being the training and rehearsal space for his company. Five years is a very short time to develop a strong, cohesive dance company with a significant following.  And yet, this is what director Lin has most certainly achieved.

Kun-Yang Lin/Dancers (KYL/D) celebrated its first five years with a retrospective concert presented at the renowned Painted Bride Art Center in Philadelphia.  (November 7-9, 2013)  In this concert, the company presented six of Mr. Lin’s works dating from 1993- 2001.  Four of these were Philadelphia premieres.  The one new piece on the program was choreographed by company member Olive Prince.

Each of his achievements — full-time university post in dance, active dance company, and community arts center — is a feat in itself in these times of high rents and scant funding for the arts.  In fact, the whole notion of the single choreographer dance company, the model that basically served to build the entire genre of American modern dance, has all but disappeared in recent years.  It had been the norm for dancers who wanted to start their own companies to teach dance classes in which they honed and then chose their company members while at the same time building up an audience.  Having one’s own studio or loft in which to teach, rehearse and perform, made possible the long hours of training and rehearsal process needed to develop and transmit a personal choreographic style.   Recently, as choreographers have found themselves less able to afford their own studios, they turn to renting space by the hour.  With rental rates soaring and a dearth of adequate spaces, choreographic process has been undermined.   A home for a dance company has become rare, and therefore, so has the institution of the small dance company.  At one point, the idea of the “pick-up company” made famous by choreographer David Gordon, was a novelty.  But now fewer and fewer choreographers even try to maintain their own company, and must pick their lot of dancers on a per performance basis.  Contemporary dance has adapted and good work is still made, rehearsed and performed.  Dance alliances and shared performing spaces are beginning to pop up and establish themselves.  And as is normal and natural, dance and performance styles are always evolving.  However, what does seem like one of the liabilities of making dance today is the challenge for a choreographer to transfer fully his/her own personal style or nuance to all of the performing dancers.  Now dancers come to the work as “ready-mades”, or — as Susan Foster once said — paralegals, as opposed to those who historically had the luxury of experiencing ongoing training and molding by the choreographer-director.

As Lin has been able to build (rather than dismantle) a company with a home base, what connected all of the pieces in his retrospective, were dancers who were highly fluent in his particular movement style. Nine dancers performed in this concert, many of who were quite young, and yet they all presented Lin’s work with a full understanding of his vision.  This was very satisfying.  Despite differences in age and prior experience, each dancer found a strong personal relationship to the work.  And although the work required strong, grounded technique, their technical proficiency alone was not what made this company stand out.  It was rather that each dancer in each piece was able to create an invitational entryway into Lin’s poetic dance vision.

Except for the sprawling group piece, “Shall We…?” (2001), the other choreographies by Lin were solos or duets.  Each encapsulated an intriguing snapshot or perhaps, brief poem.  While the works were rich and engaging for their abstract movement design, each also hinted at something particular within the realm of human existence.  For example, the notion of challenge or fortitude in “Butterfly” (2000), or secret tenderness in “The Song that Can’t be Sung” (1999).  The works are portrayed through an interesting use of movement timing.  There are brief bolts of fast sequences that lead to quieter swells.  It is almost as though the quiet movement directs us to follow a trail or trace of the fast segment as it threads into the slower passage.  And yet, despite the speed, the dancers were able to articulate the fast movement with a visible precision that normally is not so clearly present at such a fast pace.  I soon discovered that like finding the little gift inside a box of Cracker Jack, each piece contained at least one arresting visual feat in the way of a thoroughly unique balance or lift.  When least expected, the “Ah” moment would crystalize and then immediately go away.  Aside from only a mere allusion to a story in each piece, another reason for their poetic quality is that they take place without a traditional beginning, middle, or end.  Each seems to begin already in progress and then simply fade out.  Mr. Lin’s choice to use strong music, i.e. music that we are always aware of, tends to create a soundscape that envelops the dance.  Music is not danced to but lived in.  The musical background is an integral part of the vision, as is the lighting by Stephen Petrilli — both elements enhance this mysterious choreographic world.

I found Ms. Olive’s piece “to dust” (World Premiere), a strong complement to the program.  She possesses a marvelous ability to create unusual patterning of the seven dancers as she placed them across the stage.  The stage remained alive throughout as asymmetrical patterns kept refiguring.  The aesthetically pleasing brown and grey costumes lent a feeling of autumn leaves infused with conversational attitudes expressed through the body language of the dancers.

The audience at Painted Bride clearly connects deeply with this work.  I would be interested in seeing the direction of Mr. Lin’s new work.  Since these dancers, new to his older work were so well versed in interpreting it, I can only imagine the synchrony they could have with work made specifically on and for them.

The second two programs of the Boris Charmatz’s Three Collective Gestures series on offer at the Museum of Modern Art were more easily accessible to contemplation and hence to enjoyment than the first (see my previous review in this column). Levée des conflits extended/Suspension of Conflicts Extended (October 25-27, 2013) was performed in the Atrium with its natural light and with spectators gathered on all four sides. Twenty-four dancers worked within the closely circumscribed movement material of 25 choreographic items. Charmatz’s inspiration can be seen to derive from what dance critic and historian Sally Banes identified as “analytic postmodern dance” of the 1970s, which she characterized as “reductive, factual, objective … emphasizing choreographic structure and movement per se” (Terpsichore in Sneakers p. xx-xi). It began as solos but soon led to groups of diverse individuals working their way ultimately into a tight circle yet remaining independent and autonomous as the soundscape became increasingly violent and apocalyptic. The diversity of movement patterns, body types, and approaches to performance was engrossing to observe. From the initial calm there was a buildup not only of numbers but of tension yet this occurred without acceleration. The shifting soundscape by Olivier Renouf, along with a patterning shift in space, was largely responsible for the dramatic change. Charmatz is a wonderful curator in his selection of dancers and his ability to communicate his vision to them.

The program note presents Suspension of Conflicts Extended as a durational piece: “a hybrid form of choreographic exhibition and installation”. While it is true that one can observe it from many angles and, due to repetition, see the same elements in multi-faceted ways as if the dancers were sculptural objects, and while it is also true that almost all the performers appeared to be exhibiting the movement rather than to “performing” it (although exhibition is itself a performance), I was not convinced this work engaged in any particular way with the relation of dance to the museum as much as it was a choreographic work felicitously placed in a museum site.

It was the final work of the series, however, Flip Book (October 1-3, 2013) that reengaged with the theme of dance and the museum and added another layer to the relation of contemporary dance to its own history using the museum as a backdrop. For this work MoMA constructed a stage platform and provided very appropriate lighting and seats on risers, which agreeably transformed the Atrium into a space for performance without it being in any way an explicitly proscenium situation. It was interesting and refreshing to experience the Atrium in this different way so complementary to the performance.

Taking as a point of departure David Vaughan’s book Merce Cunningham: Fifty Years (1997), which covers the choreographer’s career by decade with many beautiful photographs as well as text, Charmatz has explained the genesis of his idea: “It occurred to me that this collection of pictures was not only about his projects, but that it formed a choreography in itself that had little to do with the work of Cunningham except inasmuch as it replicated certain images. I started to wonder if we could invent a single piece from this ‘score’ of pictures – if the book could in fact be performed from beginning to end.”  The photograph becomes a quote or citation from which to generate a new work, much in the spirit of the recreation of Vaslav Nijinsky’s Afternoon of a Faun – d’un faune . . . eclats — by the Knust Quartet in France (2000). That Charmatz, formerly a member of this group, took this approach makes sense because the Quartet was similarly engaged in finding what dance, removed from us today, could mean now. This implies transformation. The assumption is that a gulf separates the then from the now. As Isabelle Launay has written in an illuminating article about the Knust Quartet, contemporary French dance was involved during the 1990s in a critique of the oral transmission of dance. “The challenge of citation to the prestige of oral person-to-person transmission of a dance has introduced a new way for contemporary artists to relate to and re-embody past works” (Isabelle Launay, “Citational Poetics in Dance: … of a faun (fragments) by the Albrecht Knust Quartet, before-after 2000,” Dance Research Journal 44/2 (Winter 2012)). In Flip Book, the citation is the photograph, the fragment of evidence from which to fashion a new work. While Flip Book appears to be a hommage to Cunningham it bears in actuality very little resemblance to his work.

So, the point is not at all to replicate Cunningham either in movement or as a still image and for this reason Flip Book qualifies more as a reenactment than a reconstruction. As Rebecca Schneider has remarked in her book Performing Remains: “The ‘still’ in theatrical reenactment – especially in the heritage of tableaux vivants – offers an invitation to constitute the historical tale differently” (London: Routledge, 144). While French dancers of the 1960s and 1970s who saw the Merce Cunningham Dance Company in France at its first appearances there in 1964, 1966, and 1970, made the obligatory pilgrimage to New York as part of their formation, French dance since the 1980s has been standing on its own two feet. It is more than anything else this distance to which Flip Book testifies, even in a rather tongue-in-cheek manner by pretending that movement can be extracted from still images.

And perhaps this is, after all, in the avant-garde spirit of Cunningham. Carrie Noland has recently written about the Merce Cunningham Dance Company Legacy Plan, asking: “Can a corpus of controversial works and ideas be preserved for posterity without betraying the fundamental impulse of an intentionally self-exceeding experimental art?” (Carrie Noland, “Inheriting the Avant-Garde: Merce Cunningham, Marcel Duchamp, and the ‘Legacy Plan,’” Dance Research Journal 45/2 (August 2013), p. 85). Noland also explains that Robert Swinston, Director of Choreography of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company since Cunningham’s death, “believes that accuracy in reconstruction is essential” (p. 88). From this perspective, Charmatz’s quotations of the photographs would be considered a slight. Indeed, Alastair MaCauley, in his review of Flip Book, has called it “an act of desecration” (“Using a Familiar Device to Dance out of the Past: Page by Page,” in The New York Times, November 5, 2013).

So, it is interesting to consider Flip Book in the context of two other events in France that also brought Cunningham to public attention in the last year. First, the restaging of a Cunningham work originally commissioned by the Paris Opera in 1973: Un jour ou deux. In an article entitled “L’affaire Cunningham” (Le Nouvel Observateur, October 29, 2012), Raphaël De Gubernatis recalls the daring move to invite Cunningham, John Cage and Jasper Johns to create an evening-length work for the Paris Opera Ballet. Musicians were outraged at Cage and the dancers threatened to strike; the public was turned off. Also in 2012, but unnoticed by the grand public, the world of French contemporary dance was convulsed by the appointment of Robert Swinston as director the Centre National de Danse d’Angers (CNDC), replacing Emmanuelle Huynh, another alumna of the Knust Quartet. A letter sent to the Mayor of Angers (April 26, 2012) protesting this appointment and signed by 667 dancers and choreographers, states: “It seems to us that this change, if it happens, would in fact be regressive, especially if its principle idea is to concentrate on the teaching of a single technique, one aesthetic, one name. Of course, we respect the work of the formalist structure developed by Merce Cunningham in contemporary dance history, but to make it the principal choreographic ‘motor’ of a school and a national choreographic center seems neither opportune nor appropriate. Our dance has never been constructed around the figure of the ‘master’, but instead by a way of thinking, making thought into action, not focused on a single heritage.”

I saw Flip Book twice, and given the variations in the sound score both performances were substantially different. In the second, the dance seemed to come to life among the performers, but also became further distanced from Cunningham’s style to a large degree. Although the sound was at no point Cagean, in the second iteration it was particularly unlike Cage. Premiered in 2009, the year of Cunningham’s death, Flip Book could be considered symptomatic of the situation of Cunningham’s legacy in France today. The passage of time has burnished admiration of his choreography at that bastion of conservatism that is the Paris Opera, but has engendered ambivalence toward the necessity for technique — for the “getting it right” under the watchful eye of the master — that one choreographer’s style inevitably imposes, and with which Cunningham has become associated as a modernist master. It is precisely this ambivalence that Flip Book exemplifies and that, like it or not, is actually its subject.

French choreographer Boris Charmatz is presenting three different programs this fall at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City under the umbrella title: Three Collective Gestures (October 18-November 3). In many ways, he is taking on the whole contemporary issue of the relation of dance to the museum. In his first offering, 20 Dancers for the XX Century, Charmatz has curated twenty dancers, each one presenting a solo or solos by twentieth-century choreographers. Some of the works are well known and some are relatively unknown. The solos were announced for between noon and 5pm, during which time one could find them in numerous locations in the museum, popping up unexpectedly and serially throughout MoMA’s five floors and garden. This format has its charms: there are architectural cut-out effects in MoMA thanks to which one suddenly spies a space two floors down, particularly interesting to look at when the cut-out frames a dancing body. But, then, dance constitutes a sort of light diversion in the process of navigating the museum, which, in the case of MoMA, is a bustling public space. The format also proved to be chaotic and frustrating of any attempt to learn what one was seeing.

And, the conditions of performance in this setting have to be challenging for the dancers: the floors are hard and in many cases the public streams past the dancer to a nearby staircase. The Atrium, on the other hand, is sufficiently large to constitute an area the dancer can exploit to his or her advantage, but the problem of the unforgiving floor remains here as well. I was most moved, however, by seeing Gus Solomons performing his solo in homage to John Cage in the garden next to a Giacometti sculpture. It made me think that the dialogue between dance and visual art was an important aspect of twentieth-century dance. (A recent exhibition at the Centre Pompidou in Paris pointed to this connection). The historical connection of dance to the visual was also brought home by MoMA’s recent show “The Invention of Abstraction” in which dance – albeit not live dance – was prominently featured.

Sitting in the orchestra of New World Stages on 50^th Street in Manhattan on Labor Day eve – I am sinking into my seat which seems to sag backward before the small stage – on which are situated a couch and a chair covered in drop cloths spattered with paint. Behind this sketchy furniture looms a grey framework of a wall (scenic design by Alice Walkling). In the dim light everything, including my seat, seems to be sagging: for the moment, an incomplete stage set, a backstage that might have been placed (hastily) on stage. This is a play, as it will turn out, that will not, or that is not meant to take place. It, too, is sagging. Its characters do not descend into madness: they are mad from the first instant.

Tennessee Williams’ The Two-Character Play, in its current New York City run, is what is known as a “difficult” play. But, please, go see it before it ends its run this fall. Although even by his standards a change of direction, it is quintessential Tennessee Williams thanks to the stunningly brilliant realization of the play’s characters by Amanda Plummer and Brad Dourif. Ben Brantley of the New York Times gave it a rave review – right on! – but, he added, he wasn’t sure of the play’s integrity: “I certainly can’t defend it as a cohesive or entirely original work of art” wrote the critic (New York Times, June 21, 2013). I would like to take this as a point of discussion because I heartily disagree. I first came upon the text in 1988 and was sufficiently impressed and haunted by it to choreograph a dance theater work inspired by it. I felt its formal structure was powerful enough to be translated into another (relatively wordless) medium.

Granted one cannot parse the plot. The Two-Character Play shows it characters actively constructing and deconstructing the play they will perform, the boundaries of which are unstable. The status of “the play” is always in question yet the performance of it is riveting. Originally written in 1967, redone under the title Out Cry in 1971, and then reworked yet again under its original title in 1973, this is probably its first successful production. Williams was taking extreme risks in making this not only a play about actors, but a play for actors – one that wagers on the actor’s generating force to convey narrative. Here, the notion of acting – the pathos of performance — itself is put into question thanks to the formal integrity provided by semantic polarity. It is a play about people who go in and out of acting and revealing their life. Plummer and Dourif grasp effectively and profoundly the complexity of the principle conceit: this is and is not a play. The characters seem to create the play, and in this sense the title is quite precise: The Two-Character Play means a play existing only through and by means of its two characters. It is a play for which the characters are script, and the script characters. Of course, it suggests Beckett, Pinter, and Albee – all playwrights who were going beyond the genre in which Williams had excelled in the 1950s. But, does this make it unoriginal? As to cohesiveness: the traditional dramaturgical standards do not apply.

It is too often assumed that because Williams went into relative decline by the 1960s and, like the characters of this play, was subject to emotional breakdown, his work also declined. But, The Two-Character Play is a reflection of the world he was living in as well as an attempt to deal with it in dramaturgically different terms. He was pushing himself creatively. There is a purposeful uncertainty throughout concerning whether or not the brother and sister – Felice and Clare – are actually performing a play. To appreciate this, one has to accept a formal questioning of the conditions of theatrical representation – a stage representing a room, which may be the room in which the play is to take place, or may represent a room that can never be a stage but instead a house in which our characters are imprisoned, but might equally be an empty theatre where a play might be staged at any moment. The closeness of Felice and Clare is reminiscent of Williams’ The Glass Menagerie, but also Suddenly, Last Summer (when the main character is threatened with a lobotomy to which the author’s own beloved sister Rose was subjected). Although Williams remains within the terms of his own poetic universe and personal obsessions, he likewise fashions something willfully beyond realist theater. This does not mean he had lost his mind, but rather that he was continuing to examine closely personal experience while also questioning at a formal level his ability to represent it on stage. There is a sharp contrast between the personal and the formal that could be put down to madness, but which is also structuring for the play. Is this in fact so new for Williams? Had he not also experimented radically in 1953 – in the midst of his greatest successes – with Camino Real, a play that also took many risks and did not win over the public.

Plummer and Dourif who stage an intimacy between themselves that cuts through the dividing line between theatricality and the real support Williams’s questioning. They exist in a very private world of brother and sister – imaginative, competitive, tender and somewhat erotic – so that the indeterminacies of the text as well as its abrupt shifts seem to be located in this private subjective experience. They make of privacy a performance and thus live out the failure to make the play take place as the very condition of its performance. At the same time, they are extremely theatrical – they seem actually, as characters, obsessed with their own theatricality – outbursts that lead to dead ends. The transitions and shifts of mood in the vocal timbre, rhythm, and physical expression are particularly subtle, and constitute, I dare say, the very fascination of these translucent and masterful performances. These characters are character shifters: old and young, nostalgic and terrified, creative and blocked, aggressive and tender. So, here we have a structure of contradiction that is lived through before us and that supports the uncertainties of the play itself as play. And, the actors impeccably embody this structure. The structure of the play that some claim is missing is articulated by the acting itself.

The characters do feel they are constructing a play – a scripted entity that they alter and reject as it comes into being. They discuss whether the play is a play; they produce the play as a psychological entity that cannot take place because it is a psychological trap. They discuss what should be cut, how one can “get lost” in the play, or “dry up” in the play. Scripting is a form of being and thinking. They motivate a text that performs failure in order to stage psychological paralysis and damaged subjectivity. In short Williams’ experiment with form is replete with a psychological dimension of paralysis, fear, and incipient collapse that impedes on the formal investigation. The question of whether a play is there is a question the characters talk through, and even seem to live. “A simple lie is one thing,” remarks Felice. “But, the opposite of the truth?!”

 

The Humanities Research Institute of the University of California at Irvine is celebrating its twenty-fifth anniversary; the commemorative poster shows the members of the research group Choreographic History, convened by Susan Leigh Foster. They are (left to right): Lena Hammergren, Mark Franko, Susan Foster, Linda Tomko, Marta Savigliano, Heidi Gilpin, Randy Martin, Nancy Reuter, Peggy Phelan, and Sally Ness. It occasioned this reminiscence:

It was 1993 and I had barely arrived in Santa Cruz from the east coast to take up my position as Assistant Professor of Dance at UCSC when I found myself at Irvine for half a year with my dance scholar colleagues in the Choreographing History research group.  Susan Foster had arrived at UCR a few years earlier, but we had already met in New York during the 1980s where we shared a study group, informally called the New York Study Group. The Choreographing History group was sometimes referred to between us as a continuation of the earlier entity. (Richard Bull playfully accused us of trying to take our act to Broadway).

I felt something freeing about writing on dance in California even though the dance I was writing about was not from California. I had already been browbeaten for writing on dance in a literature department at Princeton University, and New York seemed too invested in its institutional histories, ones that could not make space for “free” thinking but was bound up in perpetuating its own myths: the myths of the great dance institutions that had made history since the 1930s and the myths of the great east coast universities that dance did not exist: a vise of anti-intellectualism and anti-experimentalism (read: anti-dance as an intellectual discipline). The spaces of California worked for me at this moment as an antidote to such unpleasant and arbitrary restrictions, and the residency at UCHRI was the very embodied situation of this newly won sense of freedom. These were heady days for dance studies as it emerged from the carapace of dance history and redefined dance theory in relation to many varieties of cultural and critical theory. The theoretical horizon seemed unlimited (and, actually was unlimited) and Southern California seemed the proper geographical locus for this emergence.

Our meetings and discussions were intense and I remember moments when we seemed to be touching on something particularly subversive and the door was shut as we all faced each other like conspirators. These were perhaps also slightly comical moments, and meant as such, but they engendered a frisson or at least a kind of acknowledgment of a revolutionary potential. I think one can make this out in the group mood of the photo. There was certain self-aware edginess to the whole enterprise as we did not quite know exactly where we were going, but felt we were co-conspirators. There were many dinners after these long seminars and we went on into the night; it was exciting and also exhausting. It was out of that seminar that we published the collective volume Corporealities. Dancing, knowledge, culture and power (London: Routledge, 1996). I think the Choreographing History residency was extremely generative of the work of all involved for years to come.

A work like this reveals a lot about the day- to- day challenges of a dancer. In a particularly charming segment, he tells us what was going through his head while doing the never changing daily warm-up designed by Cunningham that Andrieux executed relentlessly before each rehearsal for the 8 years he was with the company. While fully demonstrating the exercises, he commented for instance on which section always hurt his body, or which one was so boring that he inevitably found himself thinking about what he would eat for dinner that night. Incredibly interesting was his blow by blow of how Cunningham actually choreographed in his latter years when he was too old to show the steps to his dancers. As Andrieux told it, Cunningham, sitting on a chair, would use only words to explain the movement that he had already made up on his special computer program. First he would describe what the leg would do (swing leg in front, place down in plié). Then what the torso would do while the leg was doing the previously set movement (flat back parallel to floor). Lastly, he would describe the arm, for which there were pre-classified positions (for example, round, low, side or straight high, diagonal). Finally, the dancer would have to painstakingly put all these directives together step by step to make movement. This seemed like the most counter-intuitive and cerebral method imaginable for trying to learn a dance. Andrieux also spoke of his insecurity and emotional frustration as a dancer for Cunningham, who was known since the founding days of the company to rarely give his dancers feedback, corrections or encouragement.

What was extremely enlightening was how grandly subjective autobiography can be.  When I watched the section from the Cunningham repertory (extracted from “Biped”) that Andrieux had chosen to illustrate the technique, it was a selection that was quite a-typical of Cunningham’s oeuvre, requiring tight, hurling jumps starting from a crouched position of the body that hovered close to the floor.  It almost did not look at all like a Cunningham sequence and I found that choice of selection rather odd until I realized that the dance segment was performed precisely at that point in the piece in order to demonstrate how physically difficult and frustrating the Cunningham work was for much of the duration of his stay with the company.  My realization became even clearer when he chose to perform a section from a piece by Trisha Brown that he had danced in the Lyon Opera Ballet post Cunningham.  After telling us how much kinder the work of Brown was to his body, he chose to show something from her more Cunningham-derivative period, which he did indeed dance with a lightness and ease that was missing from the “Biped” segment as well as from the short solo from Cunningham’s “Suite For 5” which Andrieux said he was eventually able to feel freer in over time.

“Cédric Andrieux” and the other works in Bel’s autobiographical series (Véronique Doisneau (2005) was the first), ask the dancers to tap into the wide range of skills that are honed during the training of a strong and complete dancer. These pieces reveal clearly that when separated from the act of dancing, one can see that a seasoned dancer has acquired skills in acting, timing, communication through body and voice, the crafting of details and of finish, and perhaps of most importance, an ability to tap into and access resources from a vast imagination. In watching dancers perform, what is not always obvious is that despite the look of ease, excellent dancers are in fact using all of these skills when they dance.

Andrieux’ performance skills are riveting during the segment he performs from Bel’s, “The Show Must Go On” which he learned during his tenure at the Lyon Opera Ballet. It was at this time that he first worked with Bel. In this piece, Andrieux informs us that there are no steps, no set choreography, and therefore no physical pain or stress on the body. In it, the large company was asked to stand onstage and mimic in their own way the words to various pop songs. To Sting’s song, “Every Breath You Take”, Andrieux walks to a place downstage left and does not move from there. While the song plays, we hear the famous lyrics, “Every breath you take/Every move you make/Every bond you break/Every step you take/I’ll be watching you” while Andrieux gazing outward, remains stone still except for miniscule moves of his eyes which turn his head ever so slightly and very, very slowly to pan the theater from one side to the next. This is Andrieux thus, “watching” the audience. I say this is riveting because at once he is doing so little and so much. Holding our gaze, he is performs with an intensity unlike anything we’ve seen so far while hardly moving his body. Compared to the calm, deadpan of the overall storytelling, mixed with the full-out rendering of the prior complicated choreographies, this final segment, though intended to appear pedestrian, is one of complete artifice which smolders, seeming like it is about to explode from within. And yet what is actually revealed is that from out of his tense, buzzing inner core, all of a sudden comes a brightly glowing smile that radiates from a face that we now realize despite having made us laugh and chuckle, has not yet ever smiled until now. This was a tour de force finale to a piece which took its audience happily on a life journey thanks to the skill, inventiveness and rigorous collaboration between two artists. A special thanks to the French Institute Alliance Française along with the partnership of France and New York-based presenters of the “French Highlights” program, for offering this free performance at the Florence Gould Hall on January 10, 2013.