One can’t complain about seeing a great performance at the Metropolitan Opera House, and last season I saw two: Handel’s Giulio Cesare and Poulenc’s Dialogues of the Carmelites. Both had delectable all-star casts—including Natalie Dessay, Alice Coote, and David Daniels in the Handel, Felicity Palmer, Patricia Racette, and Isabel Leonard in the Poulenc—and both were seriously beautiful, intelligently staged opera productions that brought out all the emotional nuances of each musically compelling moment.
Obviously, being there in person at a performance like this makes a difference. But the question is, how much of a difference? Even if you have good orchestra seats, you tend to feel you are watching a self-contained event from afar. It matters to you that the opera singers and instrumental musicians are there in the flesh, but that effect only goes one way. Your presence does not really impinge on the performance at all. In fact, the auditorium is so large that you barely seem to be in the same room with the performers, and in some ways (though certainly not in all ways) this distance makes the experience a bit like watching a movie. Given that you can actually see these excellent productions as HD movies—for $25 as opposed to the $187 or more your orchestra seat will cost you—it is not surprising that the Met is losing some of its former New York–area opera-goers to the local HD screenings.
That will never happen at Le Poisson Rouge, the Gotham Chamber Opera, or the Mark Morris Dance Center. When you go to see a performance at one of these smaller venues, you get something in addition to the skill of the performers and the intelligence of the directors or choreographers. What you get is a kind of two-way communion with the artwork. In such cases, you and the performers occupy the same shared space, and it’s not just that you are seeing and hearing them in the flesh: you are there in the flesh too, and your visible self is part of what they see when they look around them. Simply by virtue of sitting in your seat and paying close attention, you become an important part of the scenery that shapes their performance.
Of course, this communion can only take place if the performance is good enough. Luckily, it often is. New York, at any rate, is so filled with talented musicians, singers, and dancers, either resident or visiting, that some of them can generally be lured to places that seat only a couple hundred people. And though most of these up-close performers will not have crowd-drawing names like Dessay or Daniels, a few might even be artists you have heard of.
I had heard of Lil Buck before I saw him at Le Poisson Rouge last April, but only because he had been on the Fall for Dance program I attended at City Center eighteen months earlier. That time I went to see the better-known performers on the roster, and it was only after I saw this skinny black kid in tennis shoes perform a piece called The Swan to music by Saint Saëns that I realized this was what I had come for. By the time Lil Buck arrived at Poisson Rouge this spring, that brief performance had made him famous on YouTube, so the tickets to the April 2 event were like hen’s teeth—a scarcity not helped by the fact that his live accompanist on this occasion was Yo-Yo Ma. When you added in performances by Brooklyn Rider and the Galician bagpiper Cristina Pato, plus the world premiere of a new piece by Philip Glass (who naturally had to attend his premiere in person), you got an event that was packed out almost before the tickets went on sale. I was so anxious to see it that I actually bought two standing-room places—and if you know how miserly we press people are, you will understand how extreme an act that was.
The evening was as thrilling as I expected it to be. Lil Buck’s dance form, which is called jookin’, involves turning every bone in his body into water, rising balletically onto the “points” of his tennis shoes, morphing from slow grace to antic speed in the blink of an eye, and otherwise marking every beat of the music with a unique, distinctive gesture. In his performance at Poisson Rouge, he was often accompanied by another jookin’ dancer called Prime Tyme (their real names, by the way, are Charles Riley and Ron Myles, and they are cousins); having two of them to watch made it clear how much individual style inflects this kind of dance. It also helped that we got to see Lil Buck against a range of musical backgrounds, from the Saint Saëns to the Glass cello solo to Persian, Bulgarian, and Galician folk tunes as well as jazz and classical pieces for string quartet. The stage was small, but a segment of it extended out into the audience as a runway, and the two dancers used this extra space mightily, making us all feel as if the boundary between performers and audience was sliver-thin.
A runway also featured in this spring’s Gotham Chamber Opera production, which took place at a high-end downtown burlesque club called The Box. I have seen and loved Gotham performances before (their Signor Bruschino, done at the Henry Street Settlement House about six years ago, remains one of my favorite Rossini experiences of all time), but nothing prepared me for the wild physicality, the almost slapstick hilarity of this production of Eliogabalo. This rarely performed seventeenth-century opera, composed by Francesco Cavalli, might conceivably be tedious if performed in grand-opera-house style: the music, though pleasant, is not really enough to write home about, and the cast of obscurely-named characters could easily become drably confusing. But in the quaintly naughty and old-fashioned setting of The Box, the opera positively rushed out and grabbed us. The sexual shenanigans of the Roman emperor Heliogabalus were displayed in all their tinseled glory (tinsel being the primary and in some cases the only costuming worn by the performers), and each of the emperor’s servants, victims, concubines, and righteous opponents possessed a highly distinct character as well as a specific way of connecting with the surrounding audience members. One singer, for instance, would always trip on the runway and sprawl in the faces of the nearest diners (The Box, like Poisson Rouge, allows you to gobble and slurp even as you watch and listen); another would casually sample bits of their food and drink between arias.
None of the performers was known to me beforehand, but they were all good, and some were marvelous. Emily Grace Righter, as the heroic Ales-sandro, had a mezzo-soprano voice of stunning richness, along with a confident stage manner that was endearingly and persuasively masculine. The tenor John Easterlin, who played the buxom Lenia, gave a Lady Bracknellish wit and strength to his Pantomime Dame role. (Cross-dressing was both a feature of the casting and a feature of the plot, which made for some great operatic moments.) Every word the singers sang was enunciated so clearly that you could practically learn Italian on the spot, though if you didn’t, there were projected supertitles to help you. I think this clarity wasn’t just a result of the singers’ excellent diction; it was also because they were so close to us that they didn’t have to force the volume to the point where it distorted their words, as normal opera singers often have to do. I came out onto the street afterward feeling exhilarated and delighted, as if this charmingly intimate theatrical experience had been designed and performed just for my pleasure. And yet that doesn’t quite do justice to the collaborative sense of joy—an atmosphere in which those diners sitting close to the runway and those observers leaning down from the nearby balconies were also, for the rest of us, part of the show.
A sense of community also informed the spring concert of new works at the Mark Morris Dance Center, in part because the tiny audience filling the bleachers in the fourth-floor studio space necessarily included many Mark Morris regulars. We lucky ticket-holders were treated to three dances I had never seen before (including two world premieres) and one old favorite, The Office. Of the three new ones, the stand-out for me was A Wooden Tree, a strange, funny, moving work set to recorded music. In this case, the recordings—a rarity in Mark Morris’s work these days—consisted of scratchy, amateurish-sounding songs performed by the late Ivor Cutler, an oddball Scotsman who made up his own weird lyrics and quirky tunes. His songs bear exactly the same relationship to traditional folk songs as Mark Morris’s dances do to traditional modern dance: recognizably related, but in a cracked, personal way, with a slight self-mockery blending almost invisibly into extreme seriousness. Because of this inherent affinity, Morris was able to capture the precise tone of the Cutler songs in his series of stark, gesture-filled, purposely awkward, emotionally intense dances. He was assisted in his sounding of these depths not only by his own marvelous dancers, but also by the incomparable Mikhail Baryshnikov, who took a central (though never a starring) role. Baryshnikov, always surrounded by the other dancers, used both his advancing age and his singular access to dramatic pathos as a way of intensifying the feeling that was already present in each piece. One can hardly imagine the work being performed without him.
Yet Morris always wants his dances to be transmutable to other casts. For this program, for instance, he created a new duet to Henry Cowell music called Jenn and Spencer, danced by Jenn Waddell and Spencer Ramirez. Will it be theirs in perpetuity? No. The choreographer insists that it will always be called Jenn and Spencer, but that doesn’t prevent its being performed by another pair. Does this mean that the new dancers will have to imitate the style of the originals? Hardly. The Office, for instance, is a dance that has changed its performers and therefore the specifics of its style many times, even as it maintains a certain ineffable overall feeling. I originally saw it nearly twenty years ago, with Morris himself as one of the diminishing gang of six dancers; about a decade later, I was watching on the occasion when Bradon McDonald first took over the Morris role and made it his own. For this recent concert, the new dancers, even though they learned the dance partly by watching tapes of their forerunners, had clearly been instructed to bring their own styles to the rhythmically complicated, folk-dance-ish parts. This they charmingly did, rendering full justice to the complexities of the Dvorak score.
Many of these same individually vigorous and vigorously individual dancers also appeared in Crosswalk, the large piece that ended the evening. A wild patterning of eleven dancers constantly regrouping themselves (you can imagine the self-imposed difficulties that arise when a symmetry-loving choreographer chooses to work with a prime like eleven), this dance to Carl Maria von Weber’s Grand Duo Concertant for clarinet and piano occasionally felt too large for its small stage. But that only added to the pleasure one felt at sitting smack in the middle of this world premiere. I suspect Crosswalk will play better in a large hall than the intimate, intense Jenn and Spencer; perhaps it will even play better than the remarkable Wooden Tree, which needs us to be close enough to read faces. But I am happy I got to see it this first time in the fourth-floor rehearsal studio, the space where it was born. That, among other things, is what the small venue gives us: the sense that we are witnessing the original creative impulse at the very moment when it flames up into performance.
Wendy Lesser edits The Threepenny Review. Her tenth book, Why I Read: The Serious Pleasure of Books, will be out in January from Farrar, Straus & Giroux.
