How many pink toe shoes can (neo)avant-garde-oriented dance performances tolerate these days?
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In Yvonne Rainer’s AG Indexical, with a little help from H.M. (2006), Emily Coates wears precisely such toe shoes half of the time – unlike her athletically soled fellow dancers, Sally Silvers, Pat Catterson and Patricia Hoffbauer. In the main group compositions, the former prima ballerina of the New York City Ballet receives assistance putting her legs and feet in the right position. Sometimes a pirouette is turned; sometimes in a pas de trois her leg becomes a bridge beneath which one of the other dancers crawls. Sometimes the performers are preoccupied with stretching exercises.
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The performance takes its inspiration from the ballet Agon composed in 1957 by Igor Stravinsky. At the beginning and end of the piece, however, in addition to the above-described amusing group formations, we also find patterns of movement clearly based on the style of George Balanchine, who choreographed Agon, except that here the music ends with Henri Mancini’s Pink Panther theme.
Even the late Balanchine was aware that a successful performance requires virtuoso technique on the one hand and simply has to be a good media show on the other: the choreographies he composed for the New York Ballet in the 1960s explicitly took the TV cameras into account. AG Indexical virtually parodies the authenticating function of film/TV recordings as evidence of their own exemplariness. Twice a monitor is brought on stage, showing a historical recording of Agon – complete with poor sound quality. It serves both as a reference and a model for practice, when the ‘exemplary’ performance in classical tutus is shown to the public, or when Sally Silvers imitates the steps, her face contorted in concentration and her eyes glued to the screen. Even the applause for her slapstick-like antics comes from the television itself.
Every new performance of this work by Rainer is a new interpretation which becomes an (integral) element of the original and extends its history, a circumstance which becomes even more evident in the second piece RoS Indexical, premiered at the documenta 12. Before the curtain rises, for example, the sound track opening the performance comments: “There’s no turning back! And remember: whatever happens: keep going!” This admonition is followed by applause – again canned. The four dancers appear, take their places at a table, don headphones and begin humming to themselves.
This is the manner in which we first hearken the well-known musical motif which caused such a furore in 1913 when Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du Printemps (the acronym “RoS” stands for “Rite of Spring”) was first performed as choreographed by Vaslav Nijinsky – nobody suspecting at the time that Le Sacre would become a milestone in ballet history.
But where is Sacre’s “brute”, “primitive” repertoire of movements based on recourse to pre-Christian rituals? What has become of the act of sacrificing a maiden to the Earth? During the repetitions of the legendary ostinato, Rainer’s ballerinas prefer to sit down on the sofa, to stretch their legs rather than be heathenishly sacrificed. From the sofa, Rainer’s RoS Indexical responds to Nijinsky’s rebellion against classical ballet, manifested in his emphasis on proportions and corporeality with a macho-like flirt with the audience. But when the dancers stick their feet into cardboard Kleenex boxes printed with flower patterns, and black banners are lowered from the ceiling, printed on both sides with such phrases as: “if not now/ when?”, “sofa/ terror”, “Who? Me?/ refrain”, “change/ keep”, “taste/ fixate” – that is when outraged members of the audience get to their feet. “How can they charge money for this?” demands an elegant young blond woman, before she and many others indignantly go up to the stage. “Back to New York!” others call out.
This is the manner in which we first hearken the well-known musical motif which caused such a furore in 1913 when Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du Printemps (the acronym “RoS” stands for “Rite of Spring”) was first performed as choreographed by Vaslav Nijinsky – nobody suspecting at the time that Le Sacre would become a milestone in ballet history.
But where is Sacre’s “brute”, “primitive” repertoire of movements based on recourse to pre-Christian rituals? What has become of the act of sacrificing a maiden to the Earth? During the repetitions of the legendary ostinato, Rainer’s ballerinas prefer to sit down on the sofa, to stretch their legs rather than be heathenishly sacrificed. From the sofa, Rainer’s RoS Indexical responds to Nijinsky’s rebellion against classical ballet, manifested in his emphasis on proportions and corporeality with a macho-like flirt with the audience. But when the dancers stick their feet into cardboard Kleenex boxes printed with flower patterns, and black banners are lowered from the ceiling, printed on both sides with such phrases as: “if not now/ when?”, “sofa/ terror”, “Who? Me?/ refrain”, “change/ keep”, “taste/ fixate” – that is when outraged members of the audience get to their feet. “How can they charge money for this?” demands an elegant young blond woman, before she and many others indignantly go up to the stage. “Back to New York!” others call out.
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RoS Indexical blends various narrative fragments, seeking new interdependencies between music, visual realization and movement in the process. The stage movements fluctuate freely between silent film poses of the divine Sarah Bernhard, the miming of stone-throwing at the audience, grimaces à la Groucho Marx, the carrying off stage of the sacrificial “victim” by two folklorically costumed extras, and text fragments with reference to the here and now. Actually, the verbal sound tracks, attacks of the audience and the music itself were taken from the drama Riot of Rite, a reconstruction of the premiere of Sacre produced in 2006 for the BBC. RoS Indexical is thus concerned more with the rite of scandal and its significance for the media than with that of Stravinsky’s Spring.
With the candid introduction of the commonplace into art, the Judson Dance Theater, co-founded by Rainer in 1962, set out to sensitize audiences to real space and their own corporeality. The heterogeneous material included in the new works serves as the point of departure for reflection on the constitutive elements of performance: the (physical and mental) attitude of the public, the individuality of the performers, the realization in the media, the chains of association evoked.
Starting with the toe shoes.
With the candid introduction of the commonplace into art, the Judson Dance Theater, co-founded by Rainer in 1962, set out to sensitize audiences to real space and their own corporeality. The heterogeneous material included in the new works serves as the point of departure for reflection on the constitutive elements of performance: the (physical and mental) attitude of the public, the individuality of the performers, the realization in the media, the chains of association evoked.
Starting with the toe shoes.
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Elena Zanichelli
