I follow the work of the Ballet de Lorraine, so I took the fast train to Nancy, the troupe’s seat, to see its Spring 2023 premiers, Adam Linder’s Acid Gems and Michèle Murray’s Dancefloor. Stepping on to the platform, I walked down the short Neo-plastic and LED hallway, then crossed the entry-hall-commercial-court and out into a broad plaza.
Behind me, essentially unchanged since 1856, the station’s sober façade of yellowish brick with a big clock surmounted by the ducal arms partially hides the contemporary interior. Up a slope and straight ahead, the old town. To my left, the Tour Thiers, after Adolphe Thiers, founder of the fabled Third Republic: the fall of Napoleon III, the loss of Alsace & Lorraine, the Commune, Prussians on the Champs Elysées, the Belle Epoque and all that jazz. The thing might be La République’s pecker were a republic made of glass and metal. Just beyond, where the old town starts, the Art Nouveau restaurant Excelsior, serving decent meals off clean and quality linen since 1911. To the right, the 1920s-something Printemps department store. An Art Déco battle wagon. And then, straight ahead, between and slightly behind the restaurant and the battle wagon of consumption, an amazingly pleasing, almost-baroque façade.
The difference between Art Déco and Art Nouveau is mostly flowers.
It all fits together, somehow. Teases time. Pleases the eyes. Intrigues the brain. It's a mirror of what the Ballet de Lorraine does for me.
That’s what the guest creators Murray and Linder do, too: fit people and genres and times together. Murray’s Danceflooruses interpersonal interaction (on a dance floor) to explore how people fit themselves together. Linder’s Acid Gems, using George Balanchine’s 1967 Jewels extravaganza as inspiration, “explores the possible links between dance genres, styles and their influences”.
Meanwhile, in New York, the Ballet’s choreographic duo Petter Jacobsson and Thomas Caley are celebrating Merce Cunningham with their 2019 re-birthing of Cunningham and John Cage’s obscure 1944 dance-play For Four Walls. The Jacobsson-Caley couple aims to fit the Cunningham-Cage piece’s “history and our history with Merce” and identify some of the crackle in a creative and romantic entanglement. For Four Walls, is playing at New York University’s Skirball Center for the Performing Arts on 21 & 22 April 2023.
Criticism and esthetics are largely matters of trying to figure out how things fit. I’ve been thinking a lot about how varied dance genres, gestures and postures are fit together. I’ve imagined choreographer Aina Alègre conjuring up an “energy fitting process”. I imagine her plucking fragments and phrases from a big box, fitting them by trial and error until she gets the buzz and crackle of her choreographic happening just right.
I look at Murray’s and Linder’s work in the same light. Like Alègre, they’re practicing “energy fitting”; talking about dealing with forms, genres, vocabularies, fragments and phrases is certainly pertinent, but in the end, it’s all just a nod to the past by masters who are working out a new approach to movement.
Coming away from Dancefloor, I’d say Murray feels dance performance is as human encounter does. Wobbling out on weakened knees from Acid Gems, I was convinced that Linder had demonstrated the real power of movement by making a parody of dance history.
At view, I thought of Murray’s dance floor as a lake. Around the banks of the lake, in shadow, clumps of people in street clothes chat and gaze and wait for an encounter. The scene as a whole – people-in-waiting-people-encountering – is suspended in what is almost white noise: the beatless, rhythmless sound of an absorbing tension, like the skin of water or like ice. The clumps of people show and meet and glide, take form on the tension. As spectator, I see dance in the encounters. In the end, I can pick out very little identifiable dance gesture, posture or fragment or phrase (though if Murray’s premise hadn’t worked so well, I might have been able to).
A (rather small) audience gives Adam Linder’s hard-driving 30-minute Acid Gems three very hard-driving curtain calls. That enthusiasm is because Acid Gems works as a spectacle and dance: because of the acid-head hues and flashes soaking the stage, because of its crowd of dance performers in au corps that run from blood-red to obscene-skin and because of a strong, attractive beat. Because each dance performer has an individual grasp of their own movement and how they and their movement fit in with their fellows. …
Distance, movement, color, sound, all carefully calculated to suck the spectator into the fray. But I feel that, as choreographer, Linder has ensured that every element of the scene has its own metric and this goes for bodies and their parts and their movement perimeters. Toes and feet, butts and hips, backs and bellies and bounds and leaps, leaping and bounding, brushing and touching and curling and crossing might seem to move from fragment to phrase, from mazurka to cluster fuck and back again but that's only what can be said – the vocabulary of dance … What happens is the happening of movement, beyond words but not beyond sensibility. Like Balanchine’s Jewels, Gems is spectacle, but like no Balanchine spectacle ever seen, because while Jewels is show-dance, Gems is movement that happens.
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Catch the Ballet de Lorraine in France this summer
4 May 2023 Valenciennes - Le Phénix Scène nationale: Maud Le Pladec’s “Static Shot”, Tatiana Julien’s “Decay”; Petter Jacobsson & Thomas Caley, “For Four Walls”
22 May 2023 Paris - Musée de l’Orangerie - Trisha Brown’s “Twelve Ton Rose” - Petter Jacobsson & Thomas Caley’s “Access to pleasure”
28 June 2023 Paris - Le Carreau du Temple, Petter Jacobsson & Thomas Caley’s ”Discofoot”
1 July 2023 Nantes - Cours Franklin Roosevelt (Town Center Nantes) - Petter Jacobsson & Thomas Caley’s “Discofoot”
10-11 July Paris - Musée du Louvre - Maud Le Pladec’s “Static Shot”
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