During a single week last month, I took my Hunter College freshmen to two dance events: a rehearsal of Mark Morris’s Mozart Dances at the Mark Morris Dance Center in Brooklyn, and one of the premiere performances of Christopher Wheeldon’s Morphoses/The Wheeldon Company at City Center. This, to judge by the resulting discussion, gave them all they really needed to know in order to watch dance intelligently.
Unlike the professional critics (who may have been swayed by friendly feelings towards Wheeldon himself, as well as an understandable desire for something new to happen in the ballet world), my students were distinctly unimpressed by the Morphoses evening. “The dancers can certainly do amazing things with their bodies” and “I don’t know much about ballet” were the polite non-committals I got in response to my queries on the evening itself. But later, in class, they were much more forthcoming. They objected to the way the dances didn’t go with the music (or perhaps to the way the chosen music was unsuited to dance: they weren’t sure which). They liked certain of the poses the dancers took, but felt that in the end it was all posing, more gymnastics than dance. They also mildly deplored, though without a trace of politically correct stridency, the manner in which the men did all the heavy lifting and hauling — the lifted objects being mainly the women dancers, who were variously clutched, activated, and strummed as if they were mechanical dolls or musical instruments. One student backhandedly praised the final piece, Mesmerics, by remarking that at least it was more interesting to watch the eight onstage cellos playing Philip Glass’s music than it was to watch Wheeldon’s dancers.
Contrasting Mark Morris’s ensemble to the Wheeldon group, my class noted that the former had obviously worked together for a long time, and as a result the Morris dancers were “harmonious,” “precise,” and “loose.” (I am not making any of this up; those were their exact words.) My students were very impressed with the strength of the women — they commented, in particular, on the “iron thighs” of the tiniest dancer — and they were enchanted by the thrilling moment when one man ran diagonally up the stage and flung himself into the arms of another. They thought they could detect the shadows or suggestions of a story — a pointing finger asking a question, a delicately held container that collapsed into nothingness, a harried line of briefcase-bearing businessmen striding to work — but nothing, they agreed, as definite as a plot. Instead of plot, there was pattern: they were all able to describe, in minute detail, the passage in Mozart Dances in which an open circle of dancers looped around itself, with the curved line passing under an arch of hands and losing a single dancer on each loop. (They may have been helped, in this close scrutiny of form, by hearing Morris’s constant instructions called out to the dancers as they rehearsed.)
Towards the end of the discussion, one of my students said, “You know how Mark Morris told his dancers not to dance as if they had memorized the steps, but to surprise him, to make it feel new? Well, the Wheeldon dancers looked as if they had memorized the steps.” Someone else then observed that, whereas Morris had been able to say about several specific gestures “This is the first time we see that in this dance,” all the movement in the Wheeldon piece was at once so repetitious and so indistinct that you could never pinpoint a “first” time for anything.
Christopher Wheeldon, in his interviews, is always talking about how he wants to lure young audiences back to ballet, and he has added numerous bells-and-whistles (brief rehearsal films before each dance, projected titles, offstage meet-the-dancer sessions) to produce this effect. Perhaps he should try offering them some good choreography.
*
A critic I much admire, Daniel Mendelsohn, has written a largely negative review of the Met’s Lucia di Lammermoor in the pages of the New York Review of Books. I attended that opera (in fact, according to mutual friends, I attended the very same performance as Mendelsohn), and I found the production enormously satisfying. Is this just a matter of different tastes applied to the same perceptions? Or have I missed something that Mendelsohn saw — or vice versa? Even what we heard seems to be in dispute, for he describes Nathalie Dessay’s voice as merely “coolly agile,” whereas I thought it was astonishingly, transcendently beautiful. But his real objections are to the acting (anesthetized and inexpressive, he thinks) and to the directing (which he labels insufficiently forceful at best, meaningless at worst). I, on the other hand, thought that the director, Mary Zimmerman, whose primary experience has been with plays, did a remarkable job of turning a potentially ludicrous plot into something credible and moving. She was able to do so, in part, because Nathalie Dessay could carry off a realistic, almost naturalistic version of her role: what Mendelsohn takes as inexpressive, I take as numb with sorrow, fear, and madness.
Complaining that Zimmerman senselessly updates the piece to the Victorian period, Mendelsohn nonetheless singles out for special praise a moment when the wedding party is assembled for a photograph — not something that could have happened, technologically, before the Victorian period. He seems not to have noticed the way the carefully framed sets (sometimes we see only a small rectangle of forest or garden or castle, placed within a larger blacked-out rectangle) echo not only the conventions of the photograph, but also the conventions of the book. Donizetti’s opera is, famously, based on Walter Scott’s popular Bride of Lammermoor, and references to it have appeared in such novels asMadame Bovary, Anna Karenina, and (fleetingly) The Leopard. Zimmerman is reminding us of these literary associations even as she is pointing out to us the difference between a staged event and a book. Among other things, a staged event — and particularly an opera — must cope with the fact that styles of expressed emotion change over time, so that what seems truthful or authentic in one era will come off as exaggerated or fake or excessively manipulative in another. Whereas a novel seeps into our brains almost subliminally, an opera prances across our consciousness, demanding that we actively take things in: through eyes and ears, brains and hearts, spoken word and musical line, scenery and accompaniment. If we are more likely to object to being manhandled in this way, perhaps we are also more likely to submit completely — as I did — once we have been won over.
*
There has been a lot of Shakespeare around New York this fall, and most of it is less appealing than it should be. BAM’s much-ballyhooed King Lear, starring Ian McKellen, was adequate but no more — and given the amount of talent onstage, that is shocking. Even more shocking was the fact that the Public Theater thought it was a good idea to host the Wooster Group’s atrocious Hamlet: not Hamlet at all, as it turned out, but Elizabeth LeCompte’s narcissistic, dictatorial mangling of the film of Richard Burton’s classic stage performance, with Rocky Horror–style live actors onstage in front of the partially erased movie. Tearing out of the auditorium in a rage, I was almost ready to swear off all “experimental” Shakespeare productions, until I remembered that the best Shakespeare I had seen all fall (the best theater I have seen all fall) was a one-night-only, free-admission, three-person version of The Tempest, staged in a deconsecrated synagogue called the Angel Orensanz Foundation on the Lower East Side. The piece, directed by Jim Calder in collaboration with the actors, was called Tempest Tossed, and it left out large portions of Shakespeare’s dialogue, coming in at a slender ninety minutes or less. Ariel was played by a strip of orange silk fluttering on a stick, to the accompaniment of an actor’s high, witchy voice. All three actors took on multiple roles (to the point where one of them had to clasp hands with herself in the final reconciliation scene), and this turned out to be highly instructive, for it it revealed the extent to which The Tempest itself is composed of discrete three-character scenes, cobbled together almost vaudeville-style into a larger romance plot. The double and triple casting (Caliban also being the surly Boatswain, for instance, as well as one of the King’s less-than-brilliant courtiers) also illuminated the extent to which Shakespeare’s own characters mirrored and doubled each other. In other words, Calder’s and his actors’ vigorous redoing of the play was somehow extremely true to The Tempest, not only at the structural level but also at the emotional one, so that when Prospero delivered his final lines to the audience, asking to be set free by our hands, I found I had tears running down my cheeks.
— November 2, 2007