NDT 2,San Francisco, Monday February 16

Talk about Under the Radar!

Rita Felciano gave me her spare seat to the sold-out, single performance of NDT II Monday, February 16, sandwiched between two engagements South and north of San Francisco. Margaret Karl, 11 years a San Francisco dancer, was responsible for public relations, abetted by Facebook, accounting for a third of ticket sales to see this eighteen dancer ensemble. At the door of the Palace of Fine Arts Theatre [celebrating its centennial February 20] were individuals murmuring “Ticket for sale?”

For a few, certainly for me, one draw was Benjamin Berends, Santa Rosa native, who studied with Tamara Stakoun and Gina Ness at Santa Rosa Dance Theatre, Richard Gibson and Zory Karah at Academy of Ballet, San Francisco,with Boston Ballet Trainee Program and Andre Reyes, before joining Smuin Ballet briefly, then dancing with the Trey McIntyre Project before it dissolved. With Marc Platt I had seen him as the prince in the Nutcracker one December, witnessing Marc’s approval and injunction to study hard, a treat not often witnessed of a one-time notable exhorting a future notable.

As a trivia collector, I noted that seven hailed from North America – two from Canada; eight from The Netherlands and nearby Belgium and Denmark; two from Japan; one from England, along with the fact that NDT’s artistic directors hail from England and Spain with one of its originals, Jiri Kylian from Czechoslovakia. Similarly, two works came from the artistic directors, one from Israel, one from Sweden. The dancers themselves have equal physical diversity, in excellent condition of course; one or two the women one would expect in the United States to elect dancing in modern dance companies. Hail NDT!

The group, dancing with wonderful ensemble sense,still have arrived fairly recently to their positions, five dancers joining in 2012, four in 2013, eight in 2014 and one just this January.

Johan Singer’s New Then, 2012, introduced half the company to five of Van Morrison’s songs with the expected results of vigorous if unexpected movements – bends, crouches, swivels in the hips, directional explorations in the arms and partnering. Boy-girl relationships scarcely enjoyed length or happy conclusion, though everything was this side of sinister.

Imre van Optsal and Spencer Dickhaus were paired in Shutters Shut, the 4 minute work by Sol Leon and Paul Lightfoot, 2003, set to a Gertrude Stein poem “If I told him: A completed portrait of Picasso.” I found it textually annoying, if the dancers were themselves contrasted in more ways than one. Van Opsal, a robust figured woman, contrasted with Dickhaus, slender to the point of being wispy; they were dressed in black and white swimsuit like leotards with the black on one body in the position of where it appeared on the other, quite appropriate for Stein’s repetitions, declaimed in her own voice.

Sara, created in 2013 by Sharon Eyad and Gail Behar, used seven dancers to Ori Lichtik’s music, and was dressed in skinlike unitards. It was not a work to linger in memory like the final number following intermission.

Leon and Lightfoot also created in 2003 a work to the second movementt of Franz Schubert’s Death and the Maiden String Quartet #14, titled Subject to Change. With four dancers in black suits, Gregory Lau, Benjamin Behrends, Richel Wieles amd Spencer Dichaus, the principals were Katharine van de Wouwer and Alexander Anderson, plus a square of red carpet, which the quarter unrolled before de Wouwer appeared and later manipulated counterclockwise at an appropriate moment, traditionally a symbol of death.

Alexander Anderson, a Juilliard graduate, Princess Grace recipient among other awards, was the death figure, stripped to the waist and graced with a most articulate, well-defined set of muscles, partnered de Wouwer dressed in a short filmy costume, hers a sweet-eyed, warm countenance, compliant in the embrace of the inevitable, if not wholly cognizant of the import. I found myself remembering George Balanchine’s La Valse and an Agnes de Mille work for the Joffrey, A Bridgroom Called Death, also to Schubert’s music. In both these earlier works the same fascination/ambivalence appeared. Anderson disappears; at the end de Wouwer stands alone, stage center on the red carpet, her attitude of wonder, ageless, supplicant and accepting.

Of the five works danced this memorable Monday evening Subject to Change has lingered longest in the memory. And the company? come again soon, please!

Historical Interlude

Anything about Paris – history, memoir, map – is a magnet for me, even though I’ve spent only three brief visits to The City of Light. Browser Books on the west side of Fillmore just before the #1 California bus stop on Sacramento, San Francisco, carries a fair amount of reading enticements. I want to mention one, just finished, because of its unexpected foray into dance history – the Diaghilev Era.

Specifically, the book is Paris at the End of the World; The City of Light During the Great War, 1914-1918, paperback, $15.99, ISBN #978-0-06-222140-7. The author, John Baxter, is Australian, a long-time resident married to a French woman, Dominique by name. He also has authored several other books on Paris, also biographies of several noted cinematographers.

Baxter was interested in World War I because his grandfather, Archie, volunteered for replacement Australian forces in 1916. The circumstances of the enlistment, his return, and later abandonment of the Baxter family became a trigger for his grandson’s tracing his steps in the Parisian world of the time. Each short chapter manages to capture vividly a sense of the times, a paperback to finish in as non-stop as daily routine permits.

I harbored a more personal interest in wartime Paris, also. Beyond the fact that my father joined the Canadian artillery as a replacement, also in 1916, a fact and resulting ambiance that hovered around the family during most of my childhood, I wrote about Josephine Redding, a young American volunteer nurse during the first year of the war, who died in a New York hotel room in 1915. Her diary provided perspective and fuel for Baxter’s descriptions.

Several years ago, I registered that Diaghilev premiered Leonid Massine’s Parade in Paris in 1917, and that World War I was still being fought not so very far away from Paris, some forty miles in fact. This information both thrilled and gave me a shudder. The Russian Revolution had started in February with the abdication of Czar Nicholas II and the effective loss of Russians fighting as the Communists endeavors to solidify their control of the former Russian empire.

On pages 217-219, Baxter records Jean Cocteau and Pablo Picasso’s trip made to Rome to pitch the idea of Paradeto Serge Diaghilev. True to his dictum, Etonne moi, “Astonish me”, Diaghilev bought the idea of a ballet roughly based on a traveling circus.

Chapter 31, “I Love a Parade,” pages 289-299, tells the story of the production. It has just about everything to qualify it for a zany Marx brothers feature; I think it’s safe to say it introduced the particular form of social chaos that came to be known as The Roaring Twenties.

For starters, this is the first account I have read placing Parade’s premiere at the Theatre du Chatelet in the afternoon; it was a charity matinee, wartime conditions ruling electricity and public transportation, even the number of times a theater could be open for performances. The 3K sized venue was jammed, thanks not only to Cocteau and Picasso, but also to Erik Satie; he was morose when horns and jostling milk bottles were added for effect.

The work was startling; Massine had incorporated ragtime, the cakewalk and the “one-step”, placing them on stage with a company noted for oriental exoticism,” Russian folk and fairytales. Anyone seeing Gary Chryst in the Joffrey Ballet’s revival understands some of the impact. Francis Poulenc was shocked and the music critics slammed the production. Cocteau was delighted; he had created a scandale to rival Sacre du Printemps. With the rumor that in certain loges love-making occurred during the performance, Baxter concluded the chapter, “It really was the hottest ticket in town.”

Draw your own examples in the contemporary dance world.