Theos-Talk Archives (July 1999 Message tt00039)

For those who wish to -- here is another stupid slander of HPB to respond
to.
Nicholas
************************************

Of marvels
The Village Voice; New York; Apr 6, 1999; Deborah Jowitt;

Volume:  44
Issue:  13
Start Page:  137
ISSN:  00426180
Subject Terms:  Dance
Dancers & choreographers

Personal Names:  Shapiro, Danial
Smith, Joan
Dlugoszewski, Lucia
Hwang, Koosil-ja

Abstract:
Jowitt discusses new works by Lucia Dlugoszewski, Danial Shapiro and Joanie
Smith, and Koosil-Ja Hwang. Shapiro and Smith's "Notes From a Seance"
explores the world of a Victorian cult practicing sexual freedom as a key to
self-knowledge.

Full Text:
Copyright Village Voice Apr 6, 1999

For years, choreographer Erick Hawkins and composer Lucia Dlugoszewski
explored each other's minds and serene yet breath-caught sensibilities. His
dances conversed with her music. She might let a burst of motion fall into
silence, or create a thunderstorm on the piano while a dancer delicately
picked his way across the stage. Her compositions created a landscape for
his poetic, but never romantic, visions of idealized nature.

On one of the Hawkins compangs programs during its recent season at
Playhouse 91, the 1961 Early Floating was followed by the 1988 Cantilever
Two. For the first-lean and beautiful-the composer plays the "timbre piano;'
bowing its strings, altering their sound with objects. It's a delicious
surprise when a wisp of a waltz floats from the keyboard and the dancers
acknowledge it with their feet. In Cantilever Two, while the dancers leap
like dolphins, Dlugoszewski plays the keyboard as if she were shaking down
the universe.

In addition to showcasing dances by the late master and pieces sketched out
at the time of his death and staged by Dlugoszewski, the season also marks
Dlugoszewski's official debut as a choreographer, with two solos for the
marvelous Pascal Benichou and a group work. The ensemble passages of her
Radical Ardent were a bit smudgy at the first performance, and the
musicians-bass trombonist David Taylor, "multiple percussionist" William
Trigg, and the composer-looked slightly on edge. But the core of the dance,
a series of male-female duets, is sound as a nut, and the music caresses
them, deliciously undercutting sweetness with a slightly raucous or abrasive
touch. In the small theater, your eye travels from the complicit bodies to a
musician shaking a sheet of paper or tinkling little glass chimes.

The duets don't travel much; these people are more interested in exploring
the terrain of each other's bodies and the spaces between them. Their
eroticism is without violence or urgency. Lara Bujold hangs by her knees
from Louis Kavouras's clasped arms, and while he swings her gently, she
brushes the ground with her cheek. Although Beth Simon keeps diving onto
Sean Russo for the sheer pleasure of it, the duets are notable for the
partners' equality. Joy McEwen leaps onto Rod Rufo, but she also carries
him. Every surface of the body seems to generate a mild charge. Rachel
Margolis walks up Kavouras's prone body, pressing her feet into his calves,
his thighs. Carrying Georgia Corner, Peter Kyle rakes his fingers down her
leg as if he were combing it. Benichou places his hands on the floor, one by
one, palms up, for Katherine Duke to step on. A composer makes a successful
beginning as a choreographer. Amazing!

Among the dedicated performers, a few stand out: Bujold-warm, supple, and
aware; Kyle with his bold reach through space; Benichou, intensely alive;
and Kavouras, who performs Hawkins's solo in Early Floating with a fine
blend of soft muscularity and sudden decision.

IN THE SECOND half of the 19th century, science nibbed unwilling elbows with
charlatanism. People frequented seances for both solace and thrills.
Hypnotists staged public displays. It's this world that the husband-and-wife
team of Danial Shapiro and Joanie Smith evokesoften brilliantly-in Nots Fm a
Seance.

They focus on the theosophist Mme. Helena Blavatsky-not as a writer of
mystical-intellectual tomes, but as the leader of a cult practicing sexual
freedom as a key to self-knowledge. The opening brings to the Joyce stage
the atmosphere of near hysteria and repression. Rapt onlookers in Victorian
attire surround Mme. B. and her crystal ball. A chaise longue is backed by
potted palms whose fronds filter the light (Matt Lefebvre designed the set,
Joanne Trakinat the period clothes, and Sean Murphy the lighting). A
chandelier rises and descends at odd moments. Tadeusz Majewski
plays-marvelously-music by Chopin, Beethoven, et al., his live notes
erupting from a taped score by Scott Killian that includes high, distant
voices and other spooky sounds. Paul Selig's text, read by Gayton Scott with
the careful elocution of a British schoolgirl, takes the form of letters
from a new devotee, who gradually sheds her prudishness to become, perhaps,
the medium's successor. Susie Bracken plays this young woman, awed when Mme.
B. (Smith) befuddles her with arcane card tricks, sensationally abandoned as
she's flung about and entwined in many arms. Discarding their confining
clothes for Lynn Steincamp's exotic silky lounge attire, the performers
sling themselves into temporary embraces the way marathon runners grab cups
of water from onlookers and dash on. The couch spins as if those lounging on
it were dizzied by their own sensuality. Shapiro, as Mme. B.'s helper and
paramour, rouses John Beasant III to mad-dog fury with his card play, but
most of the time he handles the women, notably Kelly Drummond Cawthon.
Running, shaking, tumbling into fits, sliding into candlelit orgies presided
over by Mme. B., the performers-including Midori Satoh, Mathew Janczewski,
and Wilson Mendieta-are spectacular.

Shapiro and Smith slightly overdo the loose-limbed wildness. Editing and
direction might make Notes and its timely and subtle anticult message even
more compelling as theater. I regretted that, once the Victorian clothes
were off, they never appeared again, and the connection between public image
and behind-closed-doors fanaticism was lost.

Belaboring good ideas is these gifted choreographers' Achilles' heel.
Shapiro's new solo Shtick takes an agonized look at an unsuccessful borscht
belt comedian. While he gestures, efusive yet doll stiff, we hear the
overloud stutter of an electronically layered and fragmented voice (score by
Scott Killian) apologizing endlessly in many different ways. You want to
scream for someone to shut him up or turn down the volume. (Killian's score
also includes, effectively, laughter, drumbeats to cue pratfalls, and Henny
Youngman jokes.) Shapiro matches his dancing to the taped sounds. He's loud
with his body; I wish he'd show us the private cringing, the still horror
behind the brashness.

KOOSIL-JA HWANG'S press kit is held together by nuts and bolts and covered
in bubble wrap. An apt metaphor for her imaginativeness and the combined
fragility and toughness of her ideas, it doesn't provide many clues to her
often stunning but inscrutable Meoyscan. But then, as a theme, "memory" is
dandily permissive, able without apology to process fragments of personal
and cultural history belonging to the choreographer and collaborating
performers: Mary Spring, Margaret Hallisey, Kathryn Sanders, and Michael
Portnoy. Live video (by Benton Bainbridge), prerecorded video (by Caspar
Stracke), music (by Hwang), and lighting (by Carol Mullins) compound the
hallucinatory fervor of images and words. Since these are memories, we don't
have to bother wondering what it means when Portnoy lip-synchs Jerry Lewis
on the loose in an executive suite (in the film Errand Bay), or becomes a
cow for Hallisey to look at askance. We can enjoy the curiousness of
Hallisey singing an Irish song in a high, windy voice, her face pressed to a
pane of glass held by Spring and Sanders.

Screened images dance with live ones. VVhen Spring sits and tilts her head
or bends forward, the filmed autumn woodland behind her tips in sync with
her altering perspective. Events combine weirdly. Sanders give what turns
out to be a golf lesson while Hallisey wanders about punctuating it with
little beeps. Portnoy delivers a whacked-out lecture on the avant-garde,
referring to the "Pina Bausch Conservatory for Flower Arrangements," and
vowing intensely, "I will not change the floor for the ceiling" Spring and
Sanders as unruly kids (little outfits pinned to their fronts) act up at a
family dinner; Dad (Portnoy) keels over, and Mom (Hallisey) returns pregnant
and stepdances barefoot. A seemingly tender trio for the women becomes less
so when you realize two are manipulating the third by her head.

Watching Mescan is like flipping through a family album of people's dreams.
Not binding them togetner, but what pictures.


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