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Rockwell Matters Episode Transcript 11/26/07

Well it’s not even winter yet, and spring is bursting out all over. At least it was on a recent weekend when there were four, count ‘em, four different dance versions of The Rite of Spring on hand. This was not even counting memories of the [Maurice] Béjart, or Pina Bausch, or Emmanuel Gat or Shen Wei or especially Tero Saarinen versions. Saarinen being the Finnish choreographer whose Borrowed Light was such a hit recently at BAM. And that doesn’t even count Valery Gergiev opening up his residency at Carnegie Hall on December 1st with a program that concludes with, yes, The Rite of Spring. Of the various dance versions I missed the one by Bianca van Dillen, a Dutch choreographer at Dance Space. But I got the other three and they were interestingly linked. To the pride of place of course went the Berlin Philharmonic’s version up at the United Palace Theatre in Fort Washington which was a hundred kids, most of them black and Hispanic, running about the stage with the entire Berlin Philharmonic under Simon Rattle conducting.

It was pretty impressive, and it was impressive not only musically, but the British choreographer Royston Maldoom, who doesn’t call himself a choreographer (he calls himself an educator) has been doing this Rite of Spring project with kids all over the world for years. Most famously with the Berlin Philharmonic in 1993 with 250 kids in a converted warehouse which was made, subsequently, into a film. One could complain that the kids spend a lot of time running around athletically, but to no evident narrative purpose or technical purpose for that matter. And yet, their running around was pretty extraordinary and pretty well rehearsed and enlivened by the lighting, the set and the costumes curiously uncredited in the program. And the final dance of the goddess of the moon and the sacrificial virgin were quite thrilling. One wonders what the Reverend Ike, who spends most of his time in that church exhorting the faithful thought of turning it over to a pagan ritual involving sacrificial virgins. But hey, I guess it's rent money.

There was a curious connection between the sort of folk simplicity of the movements and Millicent Hodson’s much derided, except by me and others who admire it, attempted recreation of the Nijinsky original which was seen around town and on film and so forth. And I found the folk spirit of the Berlin version, Maldoom’s version, akin to Hodson’s. Then you had Yvonne Rainer at the Hudson Theatre doing something she called the RoS Indexical. Pardon the dialect, but sixty years ago Otto Klemper, ultra-Germanic conductor, was conducting the New York Philharmonic, explaining the inner meanings of Bruckner and one of the violinists piped up from the back, “Klemps you talk too much!” Well, in a way, Yvonne Rainer thinks too much. There’s constant inner jokes and clever little references like, for example, two of the people who rushed the stage at one point dressed in Nijinsky’s costumes and yet the whole thing had an element of dryness. She was attempting to create the circumstances of the riot in 1913 when Rite of Spring was first premiered, but she used a British documentary with plummy English accents instead of strident French ones. It just didn’t work. It had a kind of dry historical quality like some of the recreations of happenings in early dance events at the Performers ‘07 Festival, of which this Yvonne Rainer piece was also a part. Then you had Xavier Le Roy’s version at the Baryshnikov Arts Center and which he based a kind of dance on what he considered to be the inspiration of Simon Rattle’s movements conducting The Rite of Spring. Some people found this a little dry and didactic, a kind of you-have-to-pay-money-to-see-yourself-conduct-in-a-mirror kind of trip. Except that I found it fascinating because Le Roy had extended the thing into real dance moves.

And then finally you had Jerome Bell. Now Jerome Bell and Boris Charmatz and Xavier Le Roy are the leaders of the kind of post-modernist conceptual French dance movement which I find very interesting, although I find Bell the most interesting. Curiously, in ’99 Bell did a piece called Xavier Le Roy which in fact was choreographed by Xavier Le Roy but Bell claimed credit for it. His work is constantly cross-cut with challenging your expectations. Your expectations for dance, for authorship, performance. At the Dance Theatre Workshop he did “Pichet Klunchun and myself” a juxtaposition of a Thai dancer and himself. It was constantly fascinating. It made you think. It made you wonder as to what the nature of performance was. Especially since it was meant to be spontaneous, and yet, my wife was so fascinated by it she went back and saw it the next night, it was word for word the same. My dancing daughter out in Ohio saw it two or three days later and it was exactly the same. The guy is fascinating, Jerome Bell. He makes you think and that is as much a function of great art as visceral appeal.

This is John Rockwell for Rockwell Matters.

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