Pina Bausch's Next Move

Today the world lost another great dancer, performer, artist, and icon, contemporary choreographer and visionary, Pina Bausch. I reviewed her recent work, Bamboo Blues only a few months ago.

I've always loved this clip - from A Coffee with Pina by Lee Yanor.

Here's an excerpt.

H. Art Chaos WTF?

Just came back from the H. Art Chaos show - the fourth performance in American Dance Festival's lineup "Where Ballet and Modern Meet".

I was promised "provocative and powerful dance as you've never seen it before" but throughout the evening, I felt I had indeed seen it before - in high school dance competitions, in soap operas, in heavy metal concerts, in melodramatic opera scenes, in the circus.

H. Art Chaos is, ADF assures us, "one of Japan's top dance companies" but I found the work almost unwatchable. In the first piece, Flowers of the Bones, a woman begins dangling from the ceiling in a harness to eerie horror-movie music. She writhes and bounces, thwacking her arms and legs well beyond their natural range of motion, and finally descends where she is met by a chorus of other thwackers. The costumes were kind of cool - long mermaid tails that spouted confetti but overall the piece was empty affect...kind of like suicidal hair-dancing.

The movement language seemed to borrow from martial arts, kabuki, maybe a little butoh in the white-faced aesthetic, ballet, and...drill team? Layouts, split leaps, fan kicks, and (yes) chair dances that climaxed with all of the chorus draped over their chairs backwards, one hand extended towards the audience. WTF?

The second piece was Rites of Spring, first performed in 1995. More of the same - virtuosic solo dancer twacks some more while her oppressive chorus throws chairs of her. She slits her wrists, climbs into the bath tub, then emerges from the bath tub, spins really fast in the air on a harness, and then gets back into the bath tub. More hair dancing.

Sakiko Oshima, director of HAC include the following in the program: "While refusing to be placed in advance, we explore artistic ecstasy through chaos."

Umm. yes.

I can't help but feel that something was lost in translation. Like the liner notes and the explanations of the pieces in the show, the language was garbled. Clearly someone somewhere thought it had artistic merit. What piece/cultural context/background info/translation am I missing?

Let me know.

Advice from Ohad

Last night Ohad Naharin joined the ranks of great choreographers like Martha Graham, Merce Cunningham, Alwin Nikolais, Alwin Ailey, Bill T. Jones, Mark Morris, Trisha Brown, and Pina Bausch in recieving the Samuel H. Scripps ($50,000) Award for Lifetime Achievement.

He accepted the Scripps award before Cedar Lake Contemporary Ballet performed Decadance (2007) which includes sections from ten of his earlier pieces. But before leaving us to a buffet-style helping of his choreography, he directed the following words to all the dancers in the audience:

(from the words I scrawled on my program)


Get rid of all mirrors - I lived -- years without mirrors.

Copy...yet only copy the good things.

Feel free to change your mind.

Spend time outdoors, look at the sky.

Be silly - not stupid. Be able to laugh at yourself.

Have no secrets. Live and dance like you have nothing to hide...

...and if you win an award, make a short speech.


Decadance, July 25, 2009, Durham Performing Arts Center, Durham, NC.

Emanuel Gat: Winter Variations

Photo: Mia Alon

Two men stand off-center on a massive swath of stage. Dressed alike in blue-gray shirts and drab pants, they begin by hardly moving, accompanied by an ever-increasing drone of speakers suspended overhead.

They match, mimic, and mirror each other like shadows, brothers, friends, or two parts of one soul in an hour-long duet that progresses from separation to junction, from gentleness to violence, from grace to awkward stumbling, exploring the potential of simple movements like walking on knees.

Winter Variations, created and performed by Emanuel Gat and Roy Assaf, premiered yesterday at Duke's Reynolds Theater as part of the American Dance Festival. Set to music by Schibert (Die Krahe), Strauss (Four Last Songs), The Beatles' (A Day in the Life), and Riad al Sunbati (Awedt Eini ala Rouyack), the movement was often gestural and tactile - rooted in simplicity but woven with complexity. As the dancers walked on their knees in arcs around the stage they crossed in and out of the harshly lit areas on stage. Often they crawled into dark spots but were never totally obscured. As the lighting changed, or as they moved to different areas of the stage, their bodies changed too. Upstage in blinding illumination, their edges sharpened, moving like line-drawings in a brilliant rectangle that served as a counterpoint to the vast shadow that covered the upper area of stage. Only minutes earlier they had traded shirts in the cover of that near darkness.

Moving throughout light and shadow, space and time, music and silence, the two men anachronistically illustrate relationships: with self, other, and outside.

ADF: May We Have This Cyberdance?

Reporting from Durham, North Carolina!

Check out American Dance Festival's Blog Project: "May We Have This Cyberdance" / "Dance of the Day" by Mark Dendy and ADF faculty and students.

Today is Cyberdance inauguration day! Keep checking back for daily dances.

http://www.americandancefestival.org/cyberdance/