Music Audiences

Posted on June 17, 2007 by Wendy Lesser

After many visits to Avery Fisher Hall, I’ve decided that the real problem with the New York Philharmonic lies neither with the orchestra nor with the performance space, but with the audience. (There may be a secondary problem involving the conductor, but I won’t go into that here: suffice to say that you would do well to look out for occasions when a guest-conductor is visiting.) Under the excellent Riccardo Muti, who led the Philharmonic in a concert of Cherubini, Beethoven, and Hindemith on June 12th, the orchestra was at its brightest and clearest: precise without being rigid, delicate yet full-toned, and able to cover a range of musical styles competently and gratifyingly. The Cherubini was a mere aperitif, but it did its appetite-whetting job perfectly well. The Beethoven—the Emperor Piano Concerto, with Lang Lang as the soloist—was obviously intended as a crowd-pleaser, and please it did, to excess, with Lang Lang strutting his stuff up and down the keyboard. As a performer, he seems under the delusion that his strength lies in the fast, loud, showy passages, whereas his real ability comes through in the softer, slower, quieter moments, which he is able to fill with tension and feeling. No matter; the audience loved him equally well in the piano-pounding bits—in fact, I think they loved him better in those bits—and he earned at least four rounds of thunderous applause, complete with the standard (for Avery Fisher) standing ovation. Usually I interpret this move as advance preparation for the mass stampede to the subway, but in this case, since it was only the intermission, I guess they really meant it.

I wouldn’t have found this annoying if the audience hadn’t then responded to the program’s second half—a rare performance of Hindemith’s one-act opera, Sancta Susanna—with such churlish resistance. Granted, the Hindemith is a weird piece, with a heroine who, like a Freudian hysteric, tears off her clothing to offer herself to an apparition who may be either Christ or Satan, depending on whose observations you believe. At least, so I gathered from my intermittent glances at the supertitles; I was too gripped by the sight of Riccardo Muti going wild with the orchestra to follow the plot very closely. Hindemith’s score is both passionate and unsettling, with novel sound effects (a single piercing tone, for instance, that the characters hear and comment on) and frighteningly loud interludes that purposely overpower the singers. The New York Philharmonic entirely lived up to Muti’s ambitious aim in programming this unusual piece, and a Berlin or Brooklyn audience would have roared with excitement at the end.

The Avery Fisher audience acted, instead, as if it had been sold a spoiled piece of meat. As the opera stormed to its sudden close, there was a brief, surprised silence and then the kind of feeble applause that this crowd sometimes produces between movements. This time, though, it was not a mistake, but a willful rejection. About two-thirds of the house leapt to its feet without clapping at all, and the rush toward the exit was lemming-like. We outnumbered appreciators stood clapping our hearts out, but we couldn’t make a dent against the sound of mass disapproval. “You call this music?” is what their hastening footsteps conveyed.

The reason I blame this specifically on the Avery Fisher audience is that, at approximately the same time, I witnessed a vastly different response to equally difficult music in two other New York venues. At Carnegie Hallon June 14th, the Emerson Quartet played (among other things) Shostakovich’s Fifteenth Quartet, which the composer had instructed his original musicians to play so slowly “that flies drop dead in mid-air, and the audience starts leaving the hall from sheer boredom.” In fact, two or three people did leave their seats during the long first Adagio, but rather than irking me, as such behavior usually would, this seemed merely to confirm Shostakovich’s intentions. The rest of us remained rapt and silent (no program-rustling, no coughing, no chattering to seatmates) for the full thirty-six minutes of the all-Adagio piece. The Emersons are fond of saying about the Shostakovich quartets that they fully come to life only in front of an audience, and this seems to me to be true. Much as I love the Emersons’ own recording of this piece, it’s just not as great the two live performances I’ve heard them give—this year at Carnegie Hall, and last year at Alice Tully. In both cases, the hush that greeted the achingly sad ending—the way the final notes trailed off into a silence that the musicians and the audience held together—added something to the music that went beyond anything a CD could ever provide. And at Carnegie, in particular, the brilliant placing of the Shostakovich between Bach’s final fugue and Beethoven’s Grosse Fugue made all three pieces sound new again, as the audience (to judge by its hearty ovation) evidently appreciated.

The other good audience I encountered in recent weeks was the small crowd assembled to hear the last Movado Hour concert of the season. I’ve already raved about this series of free one-hour concerts, staged (with the accompaniment of drinks, snacks, and nightclub tables) in the fourth-floor studio of the Baryshnikov Art Center; but nothing I say can really do the experience justice. The June 5th concert, featuring the pianist Pedja Muzijevic, the soprano Lucy Shelton, and the Brentano String Quartet, started with George Crumb’s Apparition and moved on to Brahms’s Piano Quintet. The performers were as good in the haunting, fragmented, new-music mode as they were in the gorgeous classic, and the youngish, unstodgy audience—in stark contrast to their Avery Fisher counterparts —loved both pieces equally and showed it with smiling, vigorous, entirely un-self-congratulatory applause. The Movado Hour is, admittedly, one of a kind. Writers, dancers, and musicians, lawyers and businesspeople, the retired and the over-employed, all mingle in this setting to get one hour of pure pleasure that costs them nothing. Perhaps the free admission has something to do with the casual, knowledgeable enthusiasm with which this audience greets excellent music—not gracelessly, not unthinkingly, but as if they deserve to hear the best. And so they do.

— June 17, 2007

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A Month of Performances

Posted on March 29, 2007 by Wendy Lesser

It occurred to me that it would be useful to chronicle the live performances I saw in New York during just the past four weeks. March 2007 was not an unusual month, in that the number of events I attended was pretty typical of my stints in this city, and the quality of what I saw was neither vastly greater nor significantly lower than average. But I did discover several new things, and I managed to experience a few transcendent high points along with the predictable lows.

Going to see live performances is one of the most expensive indulgences there is — it is basically like betting, in that you have to lose often in order to win big occasionally — so my commentary will inevitably touch on the subject of money as well as on art. Some of these tickets I paid for myself, and some were given to me as press seats, but that too is part of my standard New York life, since no one who is not independently wealthy could afford to go to this many performances on a regular basis without the benefit of press seats. And that is a shame, because the performances are, after all, meant for the general public and not for us critics.

Sunday, March 4: Holy Trinity Church was advertising what appeared to be a free “vespers concert” of Bach and Buxtehude trios and passacaglias, so I headed up to 65th Street and Central Park West. Imagine my dismay when I realized that what I had wandered into was a full-scale Lutheran service, complete with a platitudinous sermon about how we can all transcend our greatest fears. When the collection tray came around, I resentfully plunked down two bucks. But my irritation was assuaged by the stupendous final Bach Passacaglia and Fugue, a piece of music which will certainly outlast the God it was written for.

Wednesday, March 7: The Paul Taylor Dance Company was doing its regular spring season at City Center, and cheap tickets were available on theTDF website, so I bought a good seat in the orchestra for about $25. I had seen recent Taylor but had never seen Esplanade, his famous 1976 work set to several Bach compositions, so I selected one of the few programs that featured it. The first two pieces on the program, Dante Variations andSunset, were nice but not thrilling, so I was completely unprepared for the revelation of Esplanade. It is quite simply one of the best modern dances of the late twentieth century, and you can see that the current Paul Taylor dancers are aware of this: they are at their best in this dance, managing to move with both precision and abandon, always timing their rapid steps and vigorous gestures exactly to the stirring Bach rhythms. It was a complete joy to see, and it permanently altered my feelings about Paul Taylor.

Thursday, March 8: I had read that Michael Imperioli — that’s Christopher, to you Sopranos fans — was starring in a new play calledChicken in a small Chelsea theater named Studio Dante, and general-admission tickets were available for only $35 (as opposed, say, to the $100 you have to pay for Broadway trash). Studio Dante is actually the brain-child of Imperioli and his wife, the stage designer Victoria Imperioli, and since there are only sixty-five seats in this tiny gem of a theater, it is obvious that they are making less than no money off this labor of love. The first thing you notice, coming in from rather grungy West 29th Street, is how beautifully designed the small lobby is, and this quality carries over into the theater itself. The sixty-five French Empire chairs (I don’t know what I’m talking about here, but they are some kind of fancy chair with a period pedigree) and all the faux-marble details make you feel as if you have wandered into some kind of theatrical paradise, where luxury and affordability are astonishingly combined in one intimate space. I sat in the very front row, where I could practically touch the actors, all of whom were at least as good as Imperioli (and that’s saying a lot). The play itself was neither good nor bad, but that too is saying a lot, in the barren world of New York theater; I can’t remember the last time I saw a new play that I didn’t hate. (Yes, I can: it was one of Adam Bock’s, and I saw it last fall, in an equally tiny theater.) Chicken, by Mike Batistick, is your basic kitchen-sink drama about appealing, annoying losers, except that it went way beyond the kitchen sink in its commitment to dirty realism — there was actually a live rooster onstage most of the time. (The plot centered around cock-fighting.) Sharon Angela, Raul Aranas, E J Carroll, and the other actors — all, except Imperioli, previously unknown to me — were terrific in their roles; in other words, the play was good enough to allow them to become believable characters. But the main pleasure of the evening came from the vitality and generosity of the offered experience: six actors appearing before sixty-five audience members, performing their hearts out for peanuts and the love of the art form, while we sat in French Empire splendor and breathed it all in.

Friday, March 9: The Movado Hour at the Baryshnikov Arts Center has provided some of my favorite chamber-music experiences in New York, so I am always delighted when another of these concerts rolls around. Like Studio Dante, this is high-class stuff in an intimate setting — in this case, far west on 37th Street and then up four floors to what is usually a dance studio. Tickets are free, but you have to reserve exactly a week in advance, so it can be hard to get a place. Once you do, though, you are home free: drinks, snacks, and excellent music, all served up in a cabaret-like setting that is simultaneously elegant and informal. In this case, violinist Jennifer Frautschi led a group of talented string players in a program that culminated in Schoenberg’s Verklaerte Nacht. The piece itself was wonderful, but I could have done without Frautschi’s long-winded exposition beforehand. “Just play it!” I wanted to tell her, and finally they did.

Sunday, March 18: I had seen Edward Hall’s Propeller company the last time they visited Brooklyn, with their astute production of The Winter’s Talein 2006, so I needed no extra encouragement to revisit this all-male Shakespearean troupe. This time they were bringing The Taming of the Shrew to BAM, and I was particularly curious to see how they dealt with that nearly unperformable play. It makes sense that having Kate played by a man would fix some of the script’s inherent problems, but that explanation doesn’t fully account for this production’s astonishing success. I would guess it was due, in part, to the decision to retain the play’s original frame — in which a drunken lout, Christopher Sly, watches a play called The Taming of the Shrew that is put on entirely for his benefit — as well as to the merging of Sly and Petruchio, both played with rude, despicable vigor by Dugald Bruce-Lockhart. And this kind of theatrical cleverness (cleverness in the deepest sense, so profound it becomes wisdom) ran through the whole production, so that you could sense at every moment that someone had sat down and said to himself, “What is going on here, and how are we supposed to feel about it?” That someone is, I suppose, Edward Hall — though even his directorial brilliance would be useless if he did not have such remarkable actors at his disposal. The members of this amazing ensemble manage to be at once male and female, Elizabethan and modern, speaker and singer, stage-hand and acrobat. Their very bodies are at the disposal of the text, so that when Simon Scardifield becomes Kate, even the delicate movements of his bare foot display his rebellious, feminine nature. I doubt that this play could ever be done better, by anyone.

Wednesday, March 21: I had already seen Bartlett Sher’s production ofThe Barber of Seville when it premiered at the Met last fall, and had enjoyed it immensely, but I wanted to go back once again, mainly to savor the performance of Peter Mattei as Figaro. So this time I bought a standing-room place at the back of the orchestra for $20, plus a $5.50 telephone fee. (If I had showed up at least three hours before the 7:30 curtain, I might have had a chance of getting one of the 200 orchestra-section rush seats available for the same $20 price, but this way I was sure of my place in advance, and with no additional expenditure of time. Since I was in the front row of standers and had a nice plush-covered bar to lean on, it was actually a reasonable bargain, and I heartily recommend it to all those who do not want to fork out either $175 or three hours of their valuable time.) Joyce DiDonato, who was playing Rosina, was even better than Diana Damrau, the soprano I saw last fall, and John Relyea was an acceptable substitute for Samuel Ramey in the bass role of Don Basilio. Mattei was as graceful and full-voiced and charming as ever, though I felt he was mugging a bit, as if the recent high praise for his performance had caused him to go over the top — but then, this Figaro is the sort with an eye toward his audience, as the built-out extension of the stage and Figaro’s frequent use of it make clear. The only catch is that this added platform seriously muffles the orchestra, which is encased within and below it: not a good thing, if you are there primarily to hear Rossini’s glorious music. I am still not entirely sure how I feel about Sher’s production. It is better and smarter than many otherBarbers I have seen (this delicate confection is easy to wreck with a heavy hand), but it has an over-ripeness at its core that may not wear well over time.

Thursday, March 22: In the three or four visits I have paid to Danspace at St. Mark’s Church, I have seen only one performance (by David Gordon and his company) that I really liked, so I was not expecting much. But the title of Cristina Moura’s solo piece, Like an idiot, seemed promising. The promise was not, however, fulfilled. This was one of those talky dance-theater pieces that never really got off the ground; there was nothing in it I would have called dance, and very little that was even interesting as movement. Luckily it cost only $15 and was over in forty-five minutes. Afterward, the Manhattanville College girls sitting on cushions in the front row (they had come in a clump, with their teacher) turned to each other in bewilderment. “I didn’t get it, did you?” said one, in a rather grumpy tone with which I completely sympathized. “I got parts of it,” said another, and then offered, “It was full of symbolic meanings.”

Saturday, March 24: Everything drew me to this concert of the New York Philharmonic: the guest conductor, Colin Davis; the program, which included Haydn, Mozart, and Schubert; and most of all the guest pianist, Mitsuko Uchida. I had most recently heard Uchida in November at Zankel Hall, where she and the Brentano Quartet gave a stellar rendition of Schumann’s marvelous Piano Quintet, and I would say that twice every six months is just the right interval for encountering Mitsuko Uchida’s playing: not so often that you take it for granted, but not so infrequently that you forget one iota of how great she is. This time she was the definite stand-out in the program, and indeed its only high point. The Haydn and Schubert symphonies (the 85th and the 4th) were played sensibly, respectfully, and a bit dully, with not much variation in tempo or volume. Only when Uchida came out for the Mozart piano concerto (No. 19 in F) did the concert truly come alive — but that interlude was so thrilling that it made the whole evening worthwhile. In this context, Davis’s calm reticence made sense, as if Uchida had purposely chosen a blank white wall against which to display her beautifully colored technique.

Sunday, March 25: Under the joint guidance of David Finckel and Wu Han (a married couple who are also, respectively, a cellist and a pianist), the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center has been getting more and more adventurous in its programming. This late-afternoon concert at Alice Tully Hall consisted of a wide range of pieces — from Mozart’s Quintet in E-flat Major to Hindemith’s Kleine Kammermusik of 1922, with works by Debussy, Stravinsky, and Elliott Carter in between — that all featured wind instruments. In choosing this oddball “March Winds” concert, I was reassured by the presence in the cast list of CMSLC stars like Anne-Marie McDermott (on the piano) and Fred Sherry (on the cello), but in fact the best piece was the Hindemith Opus 24, No. 2, which used neither of them. Listening to the witty, exciting voices of the flute (or sometimes piccolo), oboe, clarinet, bassoon, and horn as they wove together the parts Hindemith had written for them, I felt the piece cried out for a Mark Morris dance to be choreographed to it — and then I remembered that Hindemith had in fact provided the music for one of my favorite Balanchine works, The Four Temperaments. Why can I never remember that I like this composer so much until I am forced, by CMSLC’s intelligent programming or its equivalent, to hear him again? The only flaw in the concert was its conclusion, a Grand Nonetto by a now-unknown (with good reason) nineteenth-century composer named Louis Spohr. The melodies were so irritatingly repetitive that I couldn’t get them out of my head for hours; it was like picking up a bad cold from a friend and not being able to shake it for weeks.

Tuesday, March 27: Edward Scissorhands, advertised as part of BAM’s spring dance program, was exactly what I expected it to be — a mildly amusing evening of cleverly devised narrative and brilliant moments of spectacle, but with virtually no good dance. I had seen Matthew Bourne’sSwan Lake and enjoyed it without deeply admiring it; even at that early stage, it was clear that Bourne had an extremely limited dance vocabulary which he was expertly deploying to produce various effects (detailed story-telling, political point-making, guffaw-inducement) that are normally outside the realm of dance. But Edward Scissorhands is even more limited — in part because the music is much worse (Danny Elfman as opposed to Tchaikovsky) and in part because the dancing is essentially restricted to two very basic styles, teen-dance-party vernacular and ballroom/romantic pseudo-ballet. The dancers are better at the vernacular mode, which means that the heroine, Kim Boggs, looks much livelier when she is bopping with her juvy creep of a boyfriend than she does during her romantic interludes with Edward: definitely not the effect you want, if the dancing is supposed to express the work’s central emotions. (The problem is exacerbated, of course, by the fact that Edward — in this case, Richard Winsor — is severely hampered in his dancing by those floppy, oversized scissorhands. But then, Bourne should have foreseen exactly that obstacle when he thought about adapting this particular plot.) Throughout the performance I was aware of seriously missing Johnny Depp, and I also kept wondering why Matthew Bourne has chosen to call himself a choreographer at all. Spectacle-maker, charade-producer, mime-artist, yes; but does he really think he is inventing the same sorts of new relations between music and movement that are the stock-in-trade of real choreographers?

Wednesday, March 28: Rossini is always a gamble at New York City Opera. Several years ago I saw a lovely, imaginative Viaggio a Reims there, followed a few weeks later by a completely boring Barber of Seville. This new production of La Donna del Lago is, unfortunately, one of the duds. A lot of the blame can be laid with the composer himself: Donna belongs firmly among his dull, “serious” operas, with a plot inadvisably borrowed from Walter Scott, a ridiculous group of cardboard Scottish characters, largely uninspiring music (except in a few good arias), and a heavy, inauthentic somberness substituting for Rossini’s native wit. But Chas Rader-Shieber’s production, which was static to the point of enervation, did not help. Nor did the variation in the quality of the singing: Robert McPherson and Laura Vlasak Nolen were excellent in their smaller roles of Rodgrigo and Malcolm, but the titular “Lady of the Lake,” Alexandra Pendatcharska, could hardly be heard over the orchestra. Such discouragements do not discourage me, however; all opera houses have their ups and downs, I’ve found, even the fabled Berlin Staatsoper, where I have thrilled to a brilliant Italiana in Algeri one week and walked out on a stupidFidelio the next. So I will be back at NYOC in a couple of weeks to see their production of Flavio, which — given their fine track record with Handel — offers reasonable grounds for hope.

I started by saying that this past month was a typical one, but there is one way in which it was not: I did not walk out of anything. I am a great walker-outer, which sometimes deprives me of good things (I would have missed the Bach Passacaglia if there had been an intermission before the sermon), and sometimes saves me from death-by-boredom, or worse. So the fact that there were no walk-outs this March does suggest that I was dealing with an unusually good selection of performing-arts events. Still, in most ways this was a lot like many other four-week periods in New York. The best things took place in small locations, or were European imports at BAM, or were revived from the distant or not-so-distant past. Talking on the part of people who should have been silent (musicians, dancers, pastors) was the bane of my existence. Dancers and dance companies, with a few notable exceptions, generally failed in their mission — that is, their use of movement was less interesting or engaging than what was to be found in ostensibly non-dance forms like the Propeller’s Shakespeare. And then there were the echoes and repetitions linking performances that were otherwise unconnected, including multiple appearances by Bach, by Rossini, by Mozart, and even by Dante (though in his case in name alone). That too is standard: in a capital city like New York, nothing ever stands alone, and much of the interest lies in the way the individual productions fit, strangely but satisfyingly, into the larger tapestry.

—March 29, 2007

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Teaching the Arts

Posted on January 12, 2007 by Wendy Lesser

This past fall I taught a course called “New York and the Arts” at Hunter. My students were freshmen in the CUNY Honors College, which meant that, on the basis of their academic promise, they had all been granted a free ride for four years—not only subsidized tuition, but also no-cost housing, a reimbursement for books, a free laptop, and even a monthly Metrocard. Of the twenty kids in my class, five spoke Russian, three others were from the Indian subcontinent, three were African-American, two were Italian-American, one was Asian-American, one was a Conservative Jew, and one, I think, was Persian. In other words, though they were mostly drawn from the greater New York City area, it was quite a varied bunch.

“New York and the Arts” is a required course for Honors College freshmen, but I wanted it to seem like a purely pleasurable elective. I had been given a free hand in designing the syllabus, so I decided to structure it around the idea of “good and bad art.” Not only would this help the students develop their own aesthetic convictions, I conjectured; it would also cover those inevitable occasions when my semi-blind selections from the universe of available art offerings turned out to be duds.

The only problem with this idea, in practice, was that we barely saw any bad art. Needless to say, I saw plenty of it on my own, over the course of the fall season—the appalling Sarah Michelson dance piece called Dogs, for instance, and the unspeakably awful Broadway musical Spring Awakening, to give but two examples from an array of performance disasters. But my students seemed to function as an amulet against terrible art: everything I took them to was golden.

We saw American Ballet Theatre perform The Green Table with David Hallberg in the starring role of Death; we saw Bartlett Sher’s production ofThe Barber of Seville, with the marvelous Peter Mattei playing Figaro; and we saw Gidon Kremer, along with two extremely talented young associates, perform chamber music in the magical setting of the Baryshnikov Art Center’s fourth-floor studio. In modern dance, we attended the opening night of Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker’s and Akram Khan’s BAM performances for Steve Reich @ 70—not my favorite pieces of the year, but clearly an exciting event. In search of visual art, we went to the Frick Museum, the Metropolitan Museum, and a selection of Chelsea photography galleries chosen by the students themselves. To sample the world of New York publishing, I took them on a fieldtrip to my own publisher, Pantheon Books, high atop the glassy Random House skyscraper, and then downtown to the homey, historic offices of New Directions. For an inside view of a life in the arts, I invited a retired Mark Morris dancer, Guillermo Resto, to come speak to the class about his work and experiences. And when, at the end of the semester, I gave them a choice about how to spend the last of the money in our ticket budget, they chose an evening at Bargemusic, the floating concert hall in Brooklyn.

The results, it seemed to me, were phenomenal. I started with a classroom of kids who had barely been to anything before (none of them had evenheard of the Frick, only one had seen an opera, and very few had ever attended any kind of dance or classical music performances), and I ended up with a group of people who were enthusiastic, vocal critics of the arts. Most of the time, when I teach, I have the feeling that I am merely supervising the natural evolutionary process: the good students do the good work they would have done anyway, the others do otherwise, and my function is nil to invisible. But this time I actually sensed that I was introducing students to a world they didn’t know about—and, more to the point, that they were taking it in wholesale. The class discussions were exciting almost to the point of chaos: far from having to elicit opinions from these kids, I had to keep them from overpowering each other. And the freshness of their perceptions was something that never ceased to amaze me.

“Why do the musicians walk off and then on again during the clapping?” they asked me after the first chamber-music concert we attended, and I was forced to reflect on the conventions of applause. “Why are the words in Italian when the setting is Spanish?” they sensibly wondered about The Barber of Seville, initiating a conversation that led from Beaumarchais and Da Ponte to the differing traditions of French, German, and Italian opera. “How can this place be non-profit when it’s obviously so rich?” they said about the Frick mansion, leading us into a whole discussion about the relationship between money and art. Everywhere we went, they caused me to see things with new eyes, because for them everything was part of the performance—the misplaced kick that caused an ABT dancer to ruffle her colleague’s skirt, the chandeliers that retreated up toward the ceiling at the Metropolitan Opera House, the fluid, jazzy physical gestures of the vibraphonist who accompanied Gidon Kremer. If I was introducing them to the arts, then they were doing the same for me.

Each of their final papers was on a different subject, because the students all used this opportunity to zero in on what had mattered most to them. One wrote about the way the modern architecture of places like Lincoln Center and the Baryshnikov Art Center played with and against the classical music performances that were set within them. Another reflected on the difference between watching a performance of The Barber of Seville and listening to a recording of it over and over. A third focused on the moment of silence that preceded important transitions in specific dance and musical works, and a fourth noticed how a sense of anxiety—the sense that “something could go wrong”—added to the heightened experience of watching a live performance in a small space. One adventurous student even explored the parallels between the minimalism of Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker’s Reich-inspired dance and the minimalism of Sean Scully’s Wall of Light paintings at the Met. These, perhaps, were the standouts. But even the students who didn’t write brilliant papers absorbed and gave back an enormous amount in the course of the semester. There was no one, I felt, who remained completely unchanged by the work we had done together (if you can call such pleasures “work”).

The minute the class was over, I rushed to the Hunter Honors College office and asked to teach the class again next fall. I have no illusions that subsequent semesters will exactly duplicate the delights of this one. For one thing, I will have done it before, whereas this time, as one of my students pointed out, “we were all freshmen together.” But even if the form of the course is familiar, the contents will be new each time. We might even see some bad art next year, and be able to work that into our conversation. And whatever we end up seeing, I now know that I can trust my students to make the experience as fresh for me as it is for them —a side-benefit so huge that it makes me want to urge every critic to teach “New York and the Arts,” or its local equivalent.

—January 12, 2007

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Dream Opera

Posted on October 1, 2006 by Wendy Lesser

There is something about Handel’s operas and oratorios that stimulates an astute inventiveness in modern-day directors. Or so it seems, at any rate, from the five fully staged productions I’ve attended in the last three years. Of these, one was a dud, one was a fascinating near-miss, and three were all-out terrific — amazing odds that have not been matched, in my experience, by any other composer.

The latest in this series of triumphs is New York City Opera‘s production of Semele. From the libretto (written by William Congreve, with emendations by John Milton and Alexander Pope) to the title role (performed with antic grace by the beautiful Elizabeth Futral), everything about this production is first-rate. And though the onstage talent is superb, a great deal of the credit must go to those who conceived of the production — namely, the director Stephen Lawless, along with his set and costume designer, Anthony Baker, his lighting designer, Pat Collins, and his choreographer, Lynne Hockney. Each of these people contributed to a central vision which is so powerfully unified that it seems to be Handel’s — if one can imagine a Handel who, at the ripe old age of three hundred or so, could work out the parallels between the royal politics of the early eighteenth century and the presidential affairs of the late twentieth.

Lawless’s brilliant conceit is to transpose the Olympian court of Jove and Juno, which in Handel’s time stood in for the Hanoverian house of George II and Queen Caroline, to the Camelot of JFK and Jackie. Jove’s mortal love-interest, Semele (a heroine borrowed from Ovid, but with a brassy, ambitious patina imposed by Congreve), thus goes from being George II’s German-born mistress to the Kennedys’ Marilyn Monroe, and the jealous Juno acquires a pill-box hat. Hefty Secret Service men in dark glasses surround Juno and (as needed) clear the stage; the bright flashes ofpaparazzi cameras, wielded by the ever-resourceful chorus members, stand in for the lightning bolts hurled by Jove. All of this may sound forced or silly in my description, but the analogy has been so fully thought through that everything works: even Jove’s embodiment as an eagle — alluded to in the libretto when he flies down to earth to capture Semele — reappears in the form of the Presidential Seal.

This successful transposition would be nothing more than a good trick, however, if the opera itself lacked a solid core. What propels this production of Semele, finally, is the deep emotional reality that fuels the opera’s plot. Like virtually all Handel plots, it involves the behavior of obsessives (which is why it makes sense that Handel characters have to repeat their lines over and over), and here they have been given appropriately obsessive emotions: luxuriant self-indulgence and burning ambition on the part of Semele, unbridled lust on the part of Jove, equally unbridled jealousy on the part of Juno, and pathetic, soul-destroying envy on the part of Semele’s less attractive sister, Ino. But the true genius ofSemele‘s construction, in psychological terms, lies in the fact that the roles of Juno and Ino are played by the same soprano (in this case, the marvelously persuasive Vivica Genaux). Not ony does this double casting account for Juno’s ability to disguise herself as Ino in the crucial scene where she tricks Semele into asking for her own death; it also gives a powerful meaning to the end of the opera, when Ino is left free to marry Athamas, the suitor Semele left at the altar when she took off with Jove. Browbeaten and black-clad, Genaux’s Ino is evidently in love with Athamas from the start, but is too shy or oppressed or hopeless to do anything about it. Yet the whole arc of the opera — Jove’s abduction of the bride, Juno’s carefully engineered deception, and the annihilation of Semele when she sees Jove in his immortal form — seems, at the end, to be a product of Ino’s unconscious wishes; and the fact that she is both the reporter of Semele’s fate (in her Ino incarnation) and its manipulator (in her Juno incarnation) only strengthens this impression.

The things that lie behind superficial appearances — the unconscious wishes, the hidden jealousies, the secret stratagems of the spurned, the private lives of public rulers — are at the heart of Semele, and the production at New York City Opera makes the most of that fact in its staging. We begin by looking at a relatively bare, shallow stage set up for a chorus and four soloists, with an organist seated in their midst; a sign tells us that we are about to witness “Semele, A Secular Oratorio.” The unsuspecting audience member might be forgiven for thinking that he is about to endure three hours of stand-alone, stilted singing. But no sooner have the singers appeared onstage, all clad in black and white to match their surroundings, than a screwball comedy element enters in. Semele misbehaves from the start: she won’t enter on cue, but needs to be dragged on by her father (played by the wonderful baritone Sanford Sylvan, who also doubles as Somnus, the God of Sleep); she won’t open her score when it’s time for her to sing, and instead voices her complaint as if she has just made it up herself; she won’t marry the chosen bridgegroom, Athamas, and openly prefers her lover Jove. And then, when Jove comes down to rescue her, all hell breaks loose, and the set cracks open to reveal the Olympian universe behind the false front — in color now, like the land to which Dorothy descends after leaving drab Kansas in The Wizard of Oz.

Here, in a three-sided room that moves forward to meet our gaze, Jove indulges Semele but also keeps her prisoner. Here Ino comes to visit her sister, carried there as a gift from Jove. Here, in perhaps the most musically thrilling moment of the opera, the back wall glides open to reveal the instrumentalists seated behind the set (the gods behind the gods, as it were). And here Juno enters like a tempting worm, offering the platinum-haired Semele a series of false mirrors that show her as a goddess and stellar celebrity. The movies and their gossip industry are pertinent here, for they were both the making and the breaking of the actress on whom this Semele is modeled. When the slip-clad body of the dead Semele lies across her bed at the end, captured in the flash of the same cameras that initially fed her self-regard, we cannot help but think of Marilyn Monroe’s sordid death scene.

How are we supposed to feel when Semele dies? “Happy, happy!” sing the resilient chorus members, who by this time have taken up their public role and stand behind the reunified Juno and Jove. But even without Lawless’s explicitly pessimistic staging (Jove spies a new platinum blonde in the crowd), we might sense that this song is heavily ironic — or, if not ironic, then insufficient to the complicated feelings the opera has aroused in us. Handel’s Semele is not a purely innocent victim, like Ovid’s, but she is nonetheless a victim of forces beyond her control. Whether these forces lie inside or outside her — whether we choose to call them ambition, self-love, and uncontrollable lust, or Juno, Somnus, and Jove — is up to us. But Handel cannily suggests that the choice doesn’t much matter, because we are all subject to their influence, just the same.

—October 1, 2006

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A Different Kind of Reality Show

Posted on September 12, 2006 by Wendy Lesser

Last night I saw a rather amazing movie called Paper Dolls. If I told you it was a documentary about Filipino transvestites taking care of old people in Israel, you would think you didn’t want to see it. But you would be wrong. Paper Dolls is neither preachy nor grotesque. It is made by an Israeli, but it is not pro-Israel: in fact, it uses this tiny and seemingly eccentric corner of Israeli life as a way of looking at the whole culture (ours as well as Israel’s) from an odd and telling angle. The film is as powerful as a novel, in emotional terms, and as subtle as a short story — that is, it trusts us, the audience, to pick up the necessary information and make the necessary judgments. Its portrayal of character is grippingly complex and yet in some curious way nearly instantaneous: we leave the theater feeling we know these people well, though we have barely peeked into their lives.

The movie’s success is largely due, I suspect, to the intelligence and sensitivity of its young director, Tomer Heymann. Though he apparently set out to make a film about that perennial documentary concept, The Other, in the form of these not-real women who call themselves “paper dolls” precisely to signal that unreality, he soon found himself enveloped in their story, and his presence on the screen turns out to be an essential part of the narrative. Tomer Heymann is like the anti–Michael Moore: his investigative method is gentle and delicate, the epitome of negative capability. This is not to say that he shuns directness (“But what do you do with your dicks?” he asks one of the transvestites, and gets a detailed answer), and he is by no means a pushover: when one of the Filipinos gets arrested as an illegal immigrant, he calls up the prison authorities and heatedly asks, “Can I come visit him?…Well, who can I speak to who isnot just a small cog?” But despite his strength in moments like these, Heymann conveys an overwhelming quality of softness—not something we are used to seeing in Israelis of any political stripe. It becomes clear, when we see him onscreen, exactly how he won the confidence of these foreign transvestites and converted them from “subjects” into “friends.”

What we see, in the course of the movie, is a small community of Filipino cross-dressers who hang around the Central Bus Station in Tel Aviv. They take care of frail old people during the day (having been brought to Israel precisely to do this kind of work—that is, to fill a role that the Israelis are unable or unwilling to fill), and at night they meet to perform a song-and-dance act in various transvestite dives. There are five whom we get to know well: Chiqui, Giorgio, Cheska, Jan, and Sally. In addition to following them about during their off-hours, Heymann shows us scenes of them with their elderly charges, where the primary impression conveyed is one of tenderness. This kind of labor is not just a way to earn money (though it is, crucially, that); the Filipino “guest-workers” happen to be very good at care-taking, and they put their hearts into their work.

Some hearts respond more deeply than others. At the center of the movie is the almost filial relationship between Sally (perhaps the most appealing of the transvestites) and Chaim, the old man she takes care of. Chaim cannot speak—throat cancer has claimed his voice—but he writes things down for Sally to say on his behalf, and she has learned Hebrew well enough to read what he writes. He corrects all her little grammar errors, too, and takes the trouble to teach her more Hebrew by having her read aloud from the poetry of Yehuda Amichai. This relationship stands in sharp contrast to the obliviousness of most of the other old people (a Hasid with Alzheimer’s, a paralyzed man, a wheelchair-bound wreck in a skull cap) who are served by Filipino caregivers. But whether the difference lies in Chaim’s personality or in Sally’s, or in some unpredictable combination of the two, remains an open question.

Paper Dolls is not afraid to look at the seamier side of life in Israel. A bomb explodes in the region of the Central Bus Station, and foreign residents are urged to go to the hospital for care; a television report assures them that they will not be prosecuted for being illegal. Later we see the immigration police sweeping over the area and making arrests. A nasty cab-driver spits venomous comments about these “disgusting” creatures who are neither man nor woman, and passers-by cast superior, unfriendly looks at them. A well-meaning but rather sleazy impresario tries to spiff up the Paper Dolls’ act by converting them into Japanese geishas; they try it out once, at a big-time gay nightclub, but soon decide that the heartless limelight is not for them, and they retreat back into their own warm community. This sense of warmth, against a background of poverty, discrimination, and violence, is perhaps the movie’s most startling characteristic; it is not sentimental, but it will probably make you cry.

Paper Dolls will not be playing soon at a cinema near you. After it leaves the Film Forum in New York, it is scheduled to continue on its journey to various international film festivals, searching for its audience. But try asking for this movie, in whatever way you can, and perhaps it will someday come your way.

—September 12, 2006

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Javier Marías’s Dance and Dream

Posted on July 11, 2006 by Wendy Lesser

This past week I’ve been reading Javier Marías’s Your Face Tomorrow: Dance and Dream, the second volume in his projected trilogy, which New Directions, his regular American publishers, are bringing out in this country. If you’ve never read any Javier Marías, this is probably not the place to start. (For that, I would recommend A Heart So White or perhapsAll Souls — both excellent, both still in print from ND and therefore readily available from your local good bookstore, if such a thing still exists in your neighborhood.) But Your Face Tomorrow is shaping up to be one of the great fictional achievements of the century, so sooner or later you too, if you have not already done so, will want to climb aboard this slowly moving, heavily laden bandwagon.

The first volume, subtitled Fever and Spear, left us with a proverbial cliffhanger, as we waited for the narrator and protagonist, Jacques Deza (also known as Jack or Jaime or Jacobo or, very occasionally, Iago), to answer the door on a rainy night in London. How Deza got to London from his native Spain, and what exactly he is doing there, I leave it up to you to find out. Suffice to say that he is separated from his wife, Luisa (all wives in Marías fictions are called Luisa), about whom he thinks often and fondly; and he is working at least temporarily for some kind of shady agency that requires him to “interpret” people — not from one language to another, though he does that too, but to interpret their very character, their motives, their possibilities, frequently on the basis of a single short meeting. This agency, which is run by a rather monstrous but also fascinating man named Tupra (also known as Reresby, or Ure, or Dundas, depending on the circumstances), seems to have deep connections both with private corporations of the most dangerous type and with secret governmental departments like MI5 and MI6.

That sounds thrilling, I know, and Your Face Tomorrow is indeed thrilling, but not necessarily in the way you are expecting it to be. Very little happens; much gets pondered, or remembered, or reconsidered; and by far the most attractive and compelling aspect of the work lies in the distinctive thought processes of its narrator. Once you have been drawn into Deza’s complicated, digressive, and richly allusive way of thinking about the world, you will barely be able to tear yourself away.

This is even more true of Dance and Dream than it was of Fever and Spear — perhaps because the shape of the whole project is clearer now, perhaps because Deza himself has become more familiar to us over time, or perhaps because the proportion of event to reflection has increased ever so slightly, to the point where the balance between the two is now perfect. The feeling that infuses Dance and Dream is a strange mixture of suspense and suspension. You will be desperate to move forward, to find out where it is all leading, but at the same time you are likely to feel endlessly engrossed in the present sentence or the particular page (often the same thing, since Marías’s sentences tend to go on at Proustian length).

If you have read other Marías works, including the anti-novel Dark Back of Time as well as the more straightforward fictions (but I use the word “more” advisedly, since nothing by Marías is absolutely straightforward), some of the material in this new book will be familiar to you, and it will seem to be resurfacing in much the same way your own recent dreams and distant memories do. This will be true even if you have only readFever and Spear, which came out in America last year, and which puzzled many longtime Marías fans. We lacked the experience, at that point, to understand where he was taking this book. But now the book itself has become our experience, holding us aloft in its own watery element, preventing us from drowning in its sea of new ideas and observations, “suspending” us in yet another sense.

I would be remiss if I did not mention that Dance and Dream is hilariously funny in places. This is especially true of the moment — a very extended moment, lasting scores if not hundreds of pages — when Deza encounters a compatriot of his, one Rafita De la Garza, in a loud, expensive disco in London. De la Garza, whom we have already met and despised in Fever and Spear, is some kind of diplomat, a minor attaché, not to mention an idiot, a buffoon, a moron, a “dickhead,” a crude, obnoxious fellow to whom all women are merely “a bit of pussy” or something worse. He is dressed, when our narrator meets him at the disco, as some kind of cross between a black rapper and an escapee from a Goya painting, complete with an oversized earring and a ridiculously empty hairnet, or “snood,” as he calls it when speaking of it to Deza. (The translation, by the brilliant Margaret Jull Costa, is superb throughout, careening as it does from the demotic to the archaic with barely a pause for breath.) The pace of the narrative invariably picks up when De la Garza appears, if only because the level of vitriol that Deza feels toward him is so high. Reading these passages is like encountering the hateful characters in Jane Austen or the objects of Lucky Jim’s scorn — always the best part of a certain sort of serious English comic novel. And for a while we imagine, happily, that we are occupying just that sort of novel, until suddenly (or at least it feels sudden, but really it takes dozens of pages of preparation) we are frighteningly plunged into the kind of brutality that characterized, say, the atrocities of the Spanish Civil War. The analogy is not mine: Marías makes it explicit by drawing in the recollections of Deza’s beloved, humane father, interleaving terrifying stories from Spain’s twentieth-century history with the much later incidents set in England. By the time De la Garza has both suffered and escaped horrific violence, we are so morally exhausted, and at the same time so literarily satisfied, that we are almost relieved to have the volume end in another gentle cliffhanger.

Comparisons between Your Face Tomorrow and Proust’s multi-part masterpiece have already been made by several critics, and they are not amiss. But what is remarkable about the two volumes that are already out — and particularly Dance and Dream, which has fewer obligations to scene-setting and therefore more chance to venture forth in all directions — is the way the author combines the coarse materials of our contemporary, fallen, corrupt existence with the highest literary techniques of the past. This is first-class literature that includes among its subjects the Botox-infused face of a well-known movie star, the look of a bathroom designed for the handicapped, the thrashing dance style of a cocaine-addled dandy, and the sinister yet endearing qualities of aging Oxford dons. It is a book that derives from Ian Fleming as well as Shakespeare, from last night’s television show as well as Spain’s (not to mention the western world’s) first novel. It is of our time and of no time in particular, and I am willing to bet that it will still be here when most of what is published this year has dissolved into dirt.

—July 11, 2006

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Mark Morris and the Idea of Camp

Posted on June 15, 2006 by Wendy Lesser

I would never have thought to put the two together. But that is my point: we hardcore admirers of Mark Morris’s choreography see nothing at all campy about it, and yet many other viewers (including some people who like his work just fine) apparently feel otherwise.

I did not fully realize this until this past March, when an acquaintance who had attended one of the “Month of Mark” anniversary performances at the Brooklyn Academy of Music came up to me after the show. Knowing he was not a Morris regular, I was eager to proselytize.

“Didn’t you love it?” I said of the particularly stellar pair of dances to which we had just been treated.

“Well, it was okay,” he answered, “but it was just so camp.”

I suppose I would have been taken aback in any case, but I was especially surprised because the pieces we had just seen were Four Saints in Three Acts and Dido and Aeneas. What, if anything, was camp about either of those? Four Saints admittedly has some humorous bits (a lone dancer turned away from a club-like entrance to which everyone else is officiously admitted; the St. Ignatius figure skimming sideways across the stage, like an icon on a conveyer belt, in synch with a rapid burst of Stein-speak), but unless anything funny or anything by Gertrude Stein counts as camp, I don’t see it.

The argument is even weaker in the case of Dido and Aeneas, which is one of Morris’s most starkly beautiful and touching pieces. In its recent BAM incarnation, Dido’s classically rigorous structure was more visible than ever, because Morris—who used to dance both the role of Dido and the role of the Sorceress—had for the first time given away his two parts, one to a woman and one to a man. There were losses entailed in this changing-of-the-guard, but there were also gains. Without Morris to draw your eye every time he was onstage, you could actually see the precise details and careful symmetry of the other dancers’ steps. And though I missed the presence of Morris himself—and missed, as well, the implications of the traditional double-casting, whereby the victim of the tragic love affair was also the manipulative destroyer of that affair—I understood that this version had a clarity and purity that offered us something new. Amber Darragh made a lovely, sorrowful Dido; if she was almost too humorless, too virginal in her strong, archaic beauty, well, that was one reasonable interpretation of the role. And Bradon McDonald was simply outstanding as the Sorceress. If I had not been present to witness it, I could not have believed that another dancer could do this signature Morris part with so much personality, so much power, so much delicacy, and such an amazing combination of raging narcissism and utter self-abdication. McDonald disappeared into the role and became something magical, like Yeats’s dancer-from-the-dance: pure Sorceress, with only a hint of humorous tribute paid to the other marvelous dancer who had originated this role. So, yes, a man was playing a female part in Dido—but if that is camp, then all of Shakespeare and most of baroque opera are also camp, and I don’t think we want to go that far, do we?

Mostly, when people call something camp, they mean that it is so bad it is good—bad becomes good because we, with our superior sensibility, can laugh at it. This is so counter to anything Mark Morris is doing, or has ever tried to do, that I find it remarkable anyone could even think to apply this notion to his work. He is always trying to make something good (I am tempted to capitalize Good—that’s how important such discriminations are to him). Usually he succeeds; and on the few occasions when he fails, the result is never laughably bad, but frustratingly difficult to absorb. In fact, Morris’s least successful dances are, in my opinion, the least likely to be called camp, because they leave the audience feeling blank. It is the ones that provoke laughter in some and tears in others that are most often saddled with this label. And for those of us who lean toward tears (in the snowflake scene of The Hard Nut, for instance, or the final dance of Going Away Party, or the moment when the eponymous nymph learns she’s been duped in Platée), nothing is more annoying than the laughter of Morris’s so-called fans. We want to leap out of our seats and smother them; we want awed silence, not knowing chuckles and hoots of I-get-it appreciation. We take our Mark Morris seriously — perhaps too seriously — and we resent it when other people do not.

One of the most stalwart members of the taking-Mark-seriously club was Susan Sontag. Like Woody Allen hauling Marshall McLuhan out from behind a post to settle a stupid argument in Manhattan, I wish I could call upon the author of “Notes on ‘Camp'” to testify in person that Mark Morris’s work is not campy. In the absence of the person (who was for many years a board member of the Mark Morris Dance Group, and to whose memory one of the new pieces presented in the Month of Mark was dedicated), I am obliged to resort to the essay itself.

I probably hadn’t re-read it since about 1971 and, as with so many things read in one’s youth, my memories of it were not entirely accurate. For one thing, I had no idea Sontag was so ambivalent about her subject. “I am strongly drawn to Camp, and almost as strongly offended by it.” This, it turns out, is one of the best things about the essay, for it enables her to see her subject from both inside and out.

It is also, from this distance, a movingly personal document. “Ordinarily we value a work of art because of the seriousness and dignity of what it achieves,” commented this extremely serious young person (she was about thirty when she wrote the essay). But “one cheats oneself, as a human being, if one has respect only for the style of high culture, whatever else one may do or feel on the sly.” The thought of the youthful Sontag sneaking off to have her lighthearted enjoyment on the sly is very endearing. Camp, it seems, offered a way of releasing oneself — specifically, her self — from the bonds of the eternally moral and high-minded. “The whole point of Camp is to dethrone the serious,” she finally comes right out and says. “Camp is playful, anti-serious. More precisely, Camp involves a new, more complex relation to ‘the serious.’ One can be serious about the frivolous, frivolous about the serious.” As someone who was not temperamentally drawn to the comic, in life or in art, Sontag apparently valued Camp in part because it enabled her to laugh.

“Notes on ‘Camp'” has been treated, since it first appeared in 1964, as the very opposite of the tentative jottings Sontag intended to give us — as, on the contrary, a fixed and scholarly definition of the idea of Camp. In a sense, I am treating it this way myself, by mining it for nuggets that I can use to defend Mark Morris. I go down her checklist — androgyny, yes; extravagance, yes; the glorification of character, yes; but failed seriousness, no; out-of-date, no; good because it’s awful, no; completely naïve or else completely self-conscious, no — and arrive at the conclusion that, weighed in the balance, Mark Morris is not camp.

But to tally things up like this is to misread both the essay and its relation to Morris’s work. Sontag had not seen Mark Morris dance when she wrote “Notes on ‘Camp'” (he was eight years old at the time, and was not to form his company for another sixteen years), but something of what made her write that essay also made her able to love his work when she later saw it. “Camp is generous. It wants to enjoy…Camp is a tender feeling,” she wrote. Susan Sontag did not, as a rule, manifest tender feelings, but Morris’s work allowed her to indulge in them without shame.

At the time Sontag wrote her essay, Camp was a largely homosexual sensibility. Perhaps it still is (though certainly some of the cliquishness has declined as the word itself has gone lower-case). Is this what people mean, then, when they say that Mark Morris’s work is camp? Are they simply saying it seems gay?

It is easy to imagine and even to point to homosexual art that is not at all camp — Robert Mapplethorpe’s photos, for instance, or the poetry of Allen Ginsberg. But I am uncomfortable with the very notion of homosexual art. Is this a Jewish essay I am writing, or a female one? I would hope not, though I happen to belong to both those categories. Does the fact that Mark Morris is a very outspoken, out-of-the-closet, occasionally outrageous gay man mean that his art is necessarily gay? I have always assumed not. But perhaps I am being prudish in my refusal to allow this in: since everything else in the world is brought into Mark Morris’s capacious dances, why not his own homosexual identity?

Well, of course it’s there. It is pretty near impossible, for instance, to imagine a straight choreographer inventing, much less performing, the role of the Arabian Princess in The Hard Nut — a part that Morris himself has always danced, in see-through veils and come-hither eye makeup. There is certainly something exaggerated and epicene about the role (to use two of Sontag’s definitional terms). But I would call the overall effect histrionic rather than camp. A small child would find the dance funny; there is no need for adult knowingness to come into play. When we laugh at this role, we are laughing not at the artifice of a man dressed as a woman (something that is not inherently funny, as Diane Arbus’s photos make clear), but at the performance of a brilliant clown who can use his eyes alone to project expression all the way up to the balcony seats. Our laughter, in this respect, is naive and unthinking rather than contrived and sophisticated — though I doubt the two kinds of laughter can ever really be separated in that way, for laughter must always have an element of the natural and the unwilled if it is to be real laughter for ourselves, and not just display for others.

I have left aside the whole question of Mark Morris’s special mixing and matching of male and female dancers. But surely it is not a sign of campiness that his women dancers occasionally lift his men, or that the men sometimes wear toe shoes and skirts. The stage has always been a place where we can become something other than what we physiologically are. And yet our origins can’t be transcended completely: dance, in particular, depends on the physical constraints and talents that individual dancers were born with. It is the interplay between these two modes, the given and the created, as well as the tension produced by their conflict, that makes Mark Morris’s work endlessly interesting.

Morris himself has always been the most fascinating and powerful dancer in his own company, but this year, during the entire month-long celebration at BAM, he performed in only one piece. The dance wasFrom Old Seville, which Morris choreographed for himself, Lauren Grant, and John Heginbotham in 2001. Heginbotham, who is brilliant as St. Ignatius in Four Saints, uses nothing but his dramatic talent in this role: he stands to the side of the stage, pouring drinks, waggling a cigar in his mouth, and casting knowing glances at the other two. But Morris and Grant, as the male and female Spanish dancers seducing each other in an Andalusian bar, really dance.

It is important to the dance that Morris is very large and Grant is very small, and it is equally important that his gestures are extremely masculine whereas hers are utterly feminine. At nearly fifty years old, Morris can still perform a role like this one beautifully. He is sexy and funny and graceful and ludicrous all at once — just as undiluted masculinity is — and as he accompanies his rapid-fire steps with the furious click of his castanets, he is full of intense purpose even as he seems to be enjoying the hell out of himself. The dance makes nonsense of such categories as comic and serious, artificial and natural, naïve and sophisticated, tender and mocking. It is the farthest thing possible from camp. But it is also, I suspect, exactly what people mean when they call Morris’s work camp. We can’t both be right, can we?

— June 15, 2006

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