What happened to the thread

I swear there was a thread started on this event -- with Witney Smith's review. I told a bunch of people to log on and voice their opinions. I was hoping that we might get a little controversy started and maybe make a little bit of a ripple in the black hole that passes for criticism in this city. Oh well.

But I'm a novice at internet stuff. There's no point in writing if you can't read what other people have written.

Oh Well

Here's my take on the concert.

There were two clear winners. Paul Taylor - the seventies, nice-guy choreographer who was doing pretty when pretty was practically illegal and Cynthia Pratt who managed to create an abstract form using dancers, only dancers, no fabric, no ferris wheels, no black outs and no dry ice.

The whole concert was enjoyable. Especially liked the extended canon, center stage line in the first piece, second section. The final duet in Argelina -- except that there was no chemistry between the partners. I know they were busy, but honestly why go to all the trouble of movement perfection if you're not going to add emotional content.

The dancing was lovely. The lighting was a delight. The costumes moved beautifully. And so on . . .

But Rainmaker (Pratt) was fascinating. I watched it without even knowing the title. I became absorbed in the chaos that mounted and mounted relentlessly, frequently changing directions, first one source then two sources then finally thrusting toward the center from four directions at once. She kept the chaos interesting by giving me clear focal points, at random intervals in unpredictable patterns, sometimes in the foreground, sometimes in the background. The asymetrical continuum of movement went on and on. Then suddenly, the music softened and the flow morphed to symmetry. All the force was channeled through a small opening and the compression increased the intensity as the large number of dancers aligned themselves with a seemingly irresistible drive towards order until all the dancers were slumped over in tidy little rows. The piece ended with the bodies straightening to standing and jumping.

I experienced the piece as a rush to war, the elimination of individuality through excessive agitation and redirection of energy from individual life to collective uniformity. The power of the presentation made me feel sick.

Then, after the dance was over, I read the title -- Rainmaker -- and saw that the dancers were like water drops and the piece was probably about atmospheric processes. Not the slightest bit scary.

O.K. So, Paul Taylor. Writing these thoughts is surely an exercise in futility.

Cloven Kingdom. Reading the program, there's a a quotation that helps you know what to notice (and what to think) . . "Man is a social animal," Spinoza, the heretical pantheist who probably was complementing man by aligning humans with the animal kingdom.

The piece opens with gestures of exaggerated elegance. So now we're back to the human condition, to our preoccupation with a flea on the ass of God. Quite soon we have Taylor's antithesis: animal sounds and simple animal hand movements. So right from the start, you know that the dance is going to contrast elegant facade with base instinct. Then, almost the opposite of Pratt's piece, we have Taylor's famous economy of movement -- maybe five movements in the whole piece (excluding the male section) repeated and varied so that the central images jump out like portraits against a beige background. So simple that even I could follow the theme and variation. It's fun to know what's going on from time to time. And the images were so clever and intriguing that the simplicity never became boring.

I'm going to stop writing now because it's really a waste of time -- but I did want to say how wonderful it was so see people moving in a masculine manner in dance concert. All boy, connecting to the ground with force, direct movement, center of gravity in the chest.

Yeah, well, one more thing, just in case someone else responds to this thread, one of the people there said that the dancers have never looked more professional. I agree. Their unison was fully blended, the kind of unison that a director gets when the dancers subjugate their personal virtuosity to the artistic statement. Their musicality read from the back of the hall so they were coached to modulate the force of their movements so that the phrasing was accentuated and uniformly so.