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A Cure for I-Don't-Get-Modern-Danceitis By LAURA CARELESS
I am starting to recognize the symptoms. There are the weekend plans that magically accumulate when I suggest a trip to the theater to see a dance performance, or the look of desperation when my victim realizes that he is out of excuses to accompany me. I am developing a sensitivity to the deathly quiet beside me as the curtain goes up, which makes me squirm in the knowledge that my long-suffering friend is anticipating an evening of confusion and frustration. Then, sure enough, comes the pleading gaze when the lights come up, one that says, "Please, let's talk about what we're doing for dinner instead! Spare yourself the offense of my ignorance at what I have just seen!"
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| New Love Song Waltzes performed by the Mark Morris Dance Group. (Photo by Rosalie O’Connor) |
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To be honest, dancers, for the most part, would much rather be offended by hearing your negative opinion actually stated than have to diagnose another case of I-don't-get-modern-danceitis. Our greatest hope is that you will feel confident in your own interpretation of works such as the three richly physical and thematically varied pieces that will be performed this spring on the Juilliard Dances Repertory Edition 2005 concerts. Come safe in the knowledge that none of the dances on this year's program have an agenda beyond setting the stage alight with exuberant, evocative, and articulate movement. There may be social or political commentary to be found within the works, but they can be appreciated equally on a less cerebral level.Mark Morris puts the situation very simply: "I make it up, you watch it." That said, his New Love Song Waltzes (1982) was deeply influenced by the company community during the early days of Morris's now well-established Dance Group, when the dancers with whom he worked and lived were pushing themselves to their financial and physical limits to get his choreography performed. Tina Fehlandt, who is setting the piece at Juilliard and was an original cast member, explained that the dance echoes with "the love and support the dancers felt for each other, and he [Morris] felt for us" at that time, and that it also recalls the years the choreographer spent touring with a folk dance company, a similarly close-knit group of people. There are even some hints of folk dance movement in sections of the choreography, flowing directly from the "sense of inevitability" that Morris looks for in movement. "He doesn't work within a particular style," explains Fehlandt, "but creates an atmosphere, a little world, that is different for each dance that he makes. This extends your technique as a dancer, and makes movement that is difficult to execute appear natural."The music, Brahms's Neue Liebeslieder Walzer for four voices and piano (four hands), is the major driving force for the choreography, and the live performance by Juilliard musicians should propel the dancing into a new level of dialogue with the music. "Working with live music forces you to listen and respond, especially in this dance where the dancers and musicians are taking cues from each other," says Fehlandt. "It's not just a question of memorization." Working with singers is an extra treat for dancers, as both understand the "nakedness of execution" when there is no instrument (other than the human body) with a capacity to "protect you from your audience."
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| Ohad Naharin's Tabula Rasa, performed here by the Hubbard Street Dance Company; the work will be included in Juilliard Dances Repertory Edition 2005. (Photo by Todd Rosenberg, courtesy of Hubbard Street Dance Company) |
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Tabula Rasa—literally translated from the Latin as "blank slate"—is a work by Israeli choreographer Ohad Naharin to the music of the modern Estonian composer Arvo Part. Naharin's intense physical language is developed, in his Tel Aviv-based Bat'sheva Dance Company, through specific daily classes that cultivate dancers' abilities to approach movement in a very instinctual way. Adi Salant—who danced with the Bat'sheva Ensemble and then the main company for a total of seven years—had just three weeks not only to set the dance on Juilliard students, but also to impart her knowledge of a specific approach to movement, in order to have them learn "not from copying, but from trying to connect with an inner feeling." As she explains, "You are not showing forms, you are showing intentions; you have to use your fantasies, anger, happiness, so that you are full of life, not dry inside. You are really a human being, not acting. I would like to think that I am giving them something that they can use not just for this piece, but for any dance form." She says that Naharin never explains his works, feeling that the best expression of the dance is the work itself. It is up to the audience to "connect with the piece through their own humanity" and sensations of physicality, "where the energy is coming from and where it is going to."Limb's Theorem, Part III is the third and final section of a full-evening work, choreographed in 1991 by William Forsythe for Ballett Frankfurt, the company he directed at the time. (As of this January, he has his own company.) Jill Johnson, who has worked with Forsythe for 15 years and who set the work here at Juilliard, is becoming a familiar face around the Dance Division in response to a developing fascination, on the part of the students, for Forsythe's approach to movement. With a fluidity between disciplines encompassing architecture, engineering, music, and movement, Forsythe uses improvisational techniques that encourage a "cerebral and visceral balance." The basis for the movement lies in the classicism of ballet, essentially a series of pre-established body relationships and physical compositions. Forsythe's dancers then endeavor to explore the "what if?" of these structures in relation to their own bodies as well as the space around them, their part in the spatial composition or pattern, and in association with other dancers. "Dancers think about describing planes with their bodies, like every part of the body has the possibility to draw," says Johnson. You are not drawing on the body, but using it to draw with." The resulting movement has the morphing effect of a screen-saver—"like fractals, it's about mathematical but organic shifts." The choreography was also influenced by contemporary social dance, which has provided a nostalgia trip for some of the dancers, who were mostly pre-teens when Limb's Theorem was choreographed in the early '90s!
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| Dancers from Ballett Frankfurt perform William Forsythe's Limb's Theorem, Part III, in the 1990s. (Photo by Dominik Mentzos) |
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The sections of improvisation incorporated into the choreography are highly structured; the dancers learned entire sections of Limb's Theorem, Part I, as it contains information for improvisational parameters in a manner similar to a jazz musician's lead sheet. Nevertheless, Johnson stresses, "What you are seeing is truly a live process. The dancers are composing in real time." As a performer, however, it is important not to get stuck in the analytical side of the work. "You can't replace the ongoing process of practicing dancing. You go in with an intention and then surrender to your ideas, and the risk of submitting to your full, dancing body can be exhilarating and amazing."Dance Division Director Lawrence Rhodes hopes that "the depth and demands of the works will be specific and clarifying to what students already do" in their classes. His intent is to have them "exposed to the great work being created today by genius choreographers, who each have something unique about how they consider movement, music, space and humanity." It has certainly been a treat to wander the corridors of the third floor during breaks in rehearsals, and see such a diverse program of dance being prepared.
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Juilliard Dances Repertory Edition 2005
Juilliard Theater
Wednesday-Sunday, March 30-April 3
For time and ticket information, please see
the calendar.
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Next time a dance-zealot friend drags you out to the theater and demands a post-performance verbal response, try quoting the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (whose work has had great influence on William Forsythe), who said: "What can be shown, cannot be said." Dance is not necessarily intended to be understood and articulated by the brain, but can be trusted to move us in mysterious ways that—despite our individual differences of opinion and interpretation—can affect and unite us on a level that connects us as human beings in our human bodies.Laura Careless is a second-year dance student.
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