The Best American Poetry

Something very much like love: Sylvère Lamotte and Magali Saby dance “la faille” [By Tracy Danison]

Sylvère Lamotte, Magali Saby, “Danser la Faille”. Photo © Caroline Jaubert

I am still bowled over by the experience of Danser la faille, Sylvère Lamotte and Magali Saby’s conference dansée(“dance commentary”).

When Saby, whose mobility is severely impaired by myositis, a motor-neuron condition, and choreographer Sylvère Lamotte dance together it is … well … divine interaction.

Lamotte’s strong, attentive movement and gesture let him become a sort of lotus flower or socket into which Saby fits herself in order, first, to confide, then, to mix and share the tides and currents of energy within and between them.

So real and so obvious and so full of mutual attentiveness is their interaction that, for me and for other spectators, too, the duo’s dance seems as close to love manifest as can make no difference.

But, in the end, Lamotte and Saby’s Danser la Faille is more art, ability and complementarity than love.

Danser, I think, can only be an illustration of the “constant [physical, real] interaction” between us that Lamotte describes, for instance, in his L’Écho d’un infini (“Echo of an infinite”) or his Corps Constellaires as the essence of choreography and the “verticality” he cited as the essence of dance during the conférence.

Sylvère Lamotte, Magali Saby, “Danser la Faille”. Photo © Caroline Jaubert

“Verticality”, in two words, is the walking movement that characterizes, especially, human aliveness. The concept of a conference dansée (“danced commentary”) itself mirrors Lamotte’s belief that in ordinary life, too, as represented in choreography, human bodies are in constant [physical] interaction.

Danser la Faille is as moving as we believe only love can be because Lamotte’s choreography of carrying and holding one another shows how energy gets shared by “constant interaction”. Verticality is played out by Saby’s whole-body solo dance from her wheelchair. Saby’s disability – la faille (“the weak point” or “the inflection point”) – highlights the energy shared among us. Her very great ability lets her shape, amplify and project, heighten our consciousness of our own constant interaction and verticality – Danser.

Sylvère Lamotte, who became interested in mobility issues because of the delight in dance taken by a wheelchair-bound favorite aunt has been working formally with people with mobility impairments since 2012. Magali Saby’s myositis makes movement such as standing and walking problematic. She has been a professional actress and dancer since at least 2015.

Saby met Lamotte as a cast member for productions of Lamotte’s 2019 Tout ce fracas dance performance for Micadanses’ Bien Fait! 2022 program and its Faits d’Hiver 2023. Tous ce fracas (“All this fuss”) created with composer-musician  Stracho Temelkovski, also features Carla Diego and Caroline Jaubert, both of whom have mobility issues.I saw Echo d’un infini, which featured performers Brigitte Asselineau, Marie-Julie Debeaulieu, Paco Decina, Jean Charles Jousni , Sylvère Lamotte and Jean Yves Phuong, at Atelier de Paris / CDCN as part of the Faits d’Hiver 2019 program, Tout ce fracas at Micadanses in 2022 and Danser la faille at the Maif Social Club on 11 February 2023 as part of the Faits d’Hiver program.

La Biennale de danse du Val de Marne: “Célébration, transmission, imagination” + energy in creativity and happening [By Tracy Danison]

“Necesito, pièce pour Grenade”, Dominique Bagouet, Ensemble choregraphique Conservatoire de Paris. Photo © Laurent Philippe

Bordering Paris to the east and south, Vitry-sur-Seine in the Val de Marne department is a foot-of-the-wall town that was once the City of Light’s source for bricks. Like Bagnolet, where I now live, Vitry has a founding role in the development of contemporary dance in France.

Lorrina (Niclas) Barrientos, at the time director of Vitry’s Théâtre Jean-Vilar, and choreographer Michel Caserta set up La Biennale nationale de la danse in 1979, ten years after the late Jaque Charaund had set up Concours de Bagnolet, essentially launching the careers of many of today’s choreographic luminaries. Barrientos and Caserta aimed to bring together dance performance actors of all stripes and trends – much of which was getting its start in Bagnolet –  in one showroom.

The department of Val de Marne picked up sponsorship of Barrientos’ and Caserta’s La Biennale in 1981 and renamed it La Biennale de danse du Val de Marne. The department continues to assure the event’s long-term funding and survival through what would become today La Briqueterie - Centre de développement chorégraphique national du Val-de-Marne (CDCN). Lorrina (Niclas) Barrientos went on to found Les Rencontres Chorégraphiques Internationales de Seine Saint-Denis, in effect, internationalizing Charaund’s effort to open dance to new influences and wider audiences.

In the 2000s, in order to house La Biennale and its different dance development and dance-performance activities, Val de Marne transformed Vitry’s industrially historic but long-abandoned briquetrie (“brick works”) into today’s La Briqueterie.

La Briqueterie the building is a tour-de-force of restoration and historic conversion architecture. It highlights all the architecturally interesting and historic bits within a crowded urban space that was, in great measure, built to service the factory and its people, then mostly immigrants from Italy. Social history and architecture aside, it would be tough to find a better space to do dance performance of every stripe and trend than La Briqueterie.

This year’s La Biennale’s communication touts its themes of “la célébration, la transmission et l’imagination” as signaling continuing commitment to its historic mission of openness to the widest possible range of dance performance and creation. A glance at the venues, choreographers and performers featured, hints that that is justified bragging.

A deeper dive into the program and experiences of my chosen performances show that organizers, under a new director, Sandra Neveut, do what they say (and do what they say they have always done): focus on what distinguishes dance from other arts, recognize dance heritage and encourage dance creation.

“Dance”, Lucinda Childs, Sadler's Wells. Photo © Tristam Ranton

The heritage claimed is a pretty wide one, not so much in time as in the idea of it: between Lucinda Childs’ 1979 geometric Dance and a reconstruction of Dominique Bagouet’s 1991 Necesito, pièce pour Grenade, a dance meditation around the fall of Granada, last bastion of Al Andalus.

For Childs’ Dance, the ballet de l’Opéra de Lyon reprises a piece it adopted into its repertory in 2016 as an epitome of “pure” modern dance. The creative innovation is that a holographic projection lets us see the live performance quite literally side by side with, and through the lens of, the original. The effect is not just visually lovely, it’s intellectually intriguing, one of the only times I’ve seen video-technology work well with live performance.  

Lucinda Childs, a true American original, started bringing her purifying geometric twists to US ballet dance “tradition” to France in the late 70s – starting at the Avignon festival and then setting up in Paris. Dominique Bagouet, familiar with every dance trend and style of the 60s and 70s, brought Jaque Charaund’s Bagnolet to Paris. When Bagouet won first prize at the 1974Concours he’d already danced Balanchine repertory in Geneva, and studied or danced with Maurice Béjart in Brussels, Carolyn Carlson in Paris and Martha Graham, Merce Cunningham and Trisha Brown in New York. Dominique Bagouet died of AIDS in 1992.

In contrast to Childs, who is always very careful about getting her choreography (and music) into neat and entrancing parcels, Bagouet didn’t even write up his choreographies. He saw dance as a time-, people- and space-specific type of thing, was making a sort of “danse auteur”.

The contrast between the two masters is particular as well as general. Childs’ Dance is so thoroughly documented you can project an “original” on to it, while Necesito and his other works have to be “reconstructed” from observations and intentions in his notes and the experience of those who had danced them originally.

Necesito’s latest incarnation takes the form of Rita Cioffi, who danced the first Necesito, as well as many other pieces, with Bagouet and a band of young performers from the Conservatoire de Paris.

Between Lucinda Childs and Dominique Bagouet, there’s quite a lot of room for a range of approaches to dance performance. Then, again… Thinking over the La Biennale program – and going beyond the particular choices made by La Briqueterie’s new management,  I think all the performances on offer can fit, one way or another, into an approach that situates joyfully in middle and at both ends of La Biennale ’s heritage and mission.

I’d call that approach “energy in creativity”.  And I’d say that when all is sorted, energy-in-creativity is what Dominique Bagouet and Lucinda Childs have in common.

What I mean is that, whatever the approach, genre, trend or tradition a featured artist has chosen for their La Biennalecontribution, whatever the stated intention, they will focus their creativity on the “energy” (cf. “la célébration” and “l’imagination”) generated by their production. Let’s put it this way. In the end, La Biennale’s featured performances – all the creators have solid track records – are not about telling truths or showing beauty, but about what in the 60s they called “happening”.

“Necesito, pièce pour Grenade”, Dominique Bagouet, Ensemble choregraphique Conservatoire de Paris. Photo © Laurent Philippe

The choreographer that best exemplifies the energy-in-creativity-happening approach at La Biennale - La Briqueterie – and at other contemporary dance performance venues, too – is Aina Alègre. With its procession and parade, This is not “An act of love & resistance”, a 2022 creation and Alègre’s contribution, best brings into focus this approach that situates itself between unique expression à la Bagouet and pure form à la Childs.

Alègre’s piece finally “happens”, it seems to me, because of a “fitting process” that, in contrast to the practice of linking visual or narrative or symbolic logic or content, links each performer and each movement fragment, phrase and sequence according to the energy it generates.

The strength of Alègre’s “energy fitting process” and the effect the energy produces for the audience (“happening”) have a part, I think, in Alègre’s current success as a creator at La Biennale, surely, and more generally.

In view of the success of Alègre as both a thinking professional/activist – she, in tandem with Yannick Hugron, has been recently appointed director for the Centre Chorégraphique National de Grenoble (CCN2) , and charged with expanding dance presence in the communities of the region – and her choreographic creation, it is no accident that the original This is not “An act of love & resistance” will open the Atelier de Paris’ 2023 June Events program. She will also open the Festival de Marseille at la Citadelle de Marseille (Fort d'Entrecasteaux) with her Parades & désobéissances, a creation for 100 amateur dancers.

La Biennale comes only every second year, but La Briqueterie is a performance that happens all the time. Fans of the Movement Arts should keep a weather on it until La Biennale comes round again in 2024. 

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I saw Lucinda Childs’s “Dance”, music by Philip Glass in combination with a video of the original performance reconstructed by Marie-Hélène Rebois at Maison des Arts de Créteil (MAC) on 16 March 2023. The performers or substutes included Ballet de l’Opéra de Lyon dance performers Marie Albert, Jacqueline Bâby, Edi Blloshmi, Eleonora Campello, Noëllie Conjeaud, Katrien de Bakker, Yan Leiva, Brendan Evans, Jackson Haywood, Marco Merenda, Chiara Paperini, Lore Pryszo, Leoannis Pupo-Guillen, Anna Romanova, Albert Nikolli, Erík Sosa Sánchez, Giacomo Todeschi, Merel Van Heeswijk, with Jocelyne Mocogni as maîtresse de ballet. A. Christina Giannini made the costumes and Beverly Emmons did lighting; staging and scenario were put together by Hélène Louvart, Anne Abeille, Jocelyne Ruiz, with special effects by Philippe Perrot. I saw "This is not 'An act of love & resistance'", on 22 March 2023 at Théâtre-Cinéma Paul Eluard, Choisy le Roi.

How is Rebecca Journo’s “Portrait” like the proverbial hedgehog? It does tricks that count [By Tracy Danison]

"Portrait" by Rebecca Journo. Photo © Courtesy Collectif La Pieuvre

Not too terribly long ago, for my getting-ready-for-bed tirade, I was telling my partner that dance performance creators don’t pay enough attention to the effect they make on spectators. “I’m telling you, Karine,” I muttered, “They waste their time on their same-old same-old stories and politics”. … I pull my tee-shirt over my head, slide down my pants, shake them off my ankles, sit heavily on the bed. “Worse,” I growl, “They aren’t attentive enough to the psycho-physics of movement, visuals, traditional stagecraft and choreography, how spectators are affected by all that stuff… Of ourse you’ll say ‘All physics is perception’, won’t you?” …

I angrily pull off my socks, see the 12-for-2.99 crackerjack fabric has left lumps of damp black lint, very much like dirt, between my toes. “Imagine!” I exclaim, “Some even think there’s a fixed performance ‘language’. As if contemporary dance performance is some sort of as-yet unexplored Kabuki continent”! Yanking the quilt over my head, using a harsh if muffled stage whisper, I continue, “When all is said and done, Baby, these self-regarding dance performance creators think pretty much like the morality police: getting naked means getting naked! Getting naked is shocking! Off with your heads!” I am going to erupt with a “Tinkers, the lot!” content myself with a “Bah” when I catch the lightly snoring Karine out of the corner of my eye… Having vocalized my discontents, I decide instead to follow her into the gentling arms of Morpheus.

 

"Portrait" by Rebecca Journo. Photo © Maxime Le Blanc

The next day, Rebecca Journo’s Portrait (2023) performance piece hushed my tirading mouth.

She and her collaborators in her troupe Collectif La Pieuvre, at least, measure the effects of suddenness, sound, stillness and movement on spectators; what they measure they measure out with skill and judgment. They bring spectators along both with Journo’s narrative intention but also into the performance experience – we not only get her point, the experience of her piece gets us into new imaginative space.

The rapidity with which her combination of psychological noos, traditional stagecraft and visual choreography had me turning my mind toward the scary flimsiness of identity and the emptiness of image quite amazed me. There’s practically no run up to it. You sit down and, bang!, you’re in Portrait’s happening, experiencing through the contents of your own imagination.

Journo writes that Portrait is a study of “going from image to movement, emptying then filling the form,” like Cindy Sherman or the genius-and-young-suicide Francesca Woodman have done by creating “selfies” that point away from “self” to “portrait”, “image” or “pose”: Who’s there? Who are you? Who am I? Is there someone there?

• 
• 
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Journo shows what she means with a stage-occupying figure, drawn, it seems, from Modigliani’s 1918  Portrait of the artist’s wife – an intriguing image that expresses Modigliani’s affective perception and of which nothing remains of Jeanne Hébuterne, the wife in question. I’m assuming the link between Hébuterne and the portrait because Journo and her team use the portrait extensively in their promotion and because it hitches onto real stories into the performance line: in life, Hébuterne threw herself out of a window and died on 25 January 1920, the day after Modigliani’s death.  

However, the figure on the stage as figure is entirely sufficient as placed in the set and used in the scene is more than adequate to the performance. It occupies one of a row of three metal chairs slightly left of center. It, the chairs and the sound inhabit a maze of black, ceiling-to-floor sharp-angular-cut curtains and a right-front-stage “cabinet of visual commentary” which one sees is equipped with curiously heavy objects, including, for instance, a reverse magnifying glass. The stage is framed against white, contrast, light; scenarized lighting, with a yellowish, old-fashioned bulb tint is used for performers; acoustic space is filled by occasional sounds of what makes me think of creaking metal swings in a lonely playground and the irritating ruckus of scratchy-crashing electromechanical interference.

 

"Portrait" by Rebecca Journo. Photo © Courtesy Collectif La Pieuvre, Brasles

Performers suddenly appear and disappear in this unsettling maze of sharp straight angles, dark and light, creaks and scratchy squawk. They use a moonwalk-style that exaggerates and speeds up the top-front-back-bottom contrast and lends performers a certain slinky lizard-like visual that makes me think of Bram Stoker’s women vampires in his Dracula novel - the book attributes slithering to the count but my memory to his women. It seems to me then that the Portraitperformers, like Stoker’s women are pure pose, images of what isn’t seen or reproductions of what they believe others see; a vampire casts no shadow and has no reflection.

Who are Portrait’s performers/Dracula’s women? Stoker portrays his women as appetites – as reflexes. My thoughts on Journo’s cues can take things farther: people as performers as performances; in the end, they seem not much more than suitable simpers to show around. Identity not only depends on the purposes of a beholder, it may be nothing more than an echo of those purposes, an endless performance by an identity that is not more substantial than “performer”, an endless loop of selfies.

But it’s the connections not the intentions that are the genius in Rebecca Journo’s piece. Though she cannot, could not, know that I will frame Portrait with my memories of reading Dracula, she does know how to use her craft to push me in a particular emotional direction: recalling especially the emotions raised by chapter three of Stoker’s scary book: the frightening void behind the “revealing” image.

So, I come away from Journo’s Portrait as I came away from Dracula – deeply unsettled by all this identity stuff. Thinking, maybe the evil of Tik Tok’s “AI-enhanced” portraits is not so much imposing an unachievable identity on a fragile self as revealing there isn’t much more to that fragile self than an AI-enhanced selfie. And the “AI” is no such thing, to boot. It seems to me that realizing this is a lot more likely to send me jumping out of upper-story window than not having the price of a nose-job.

Rebecca Journo and her collaborators in the troupe Collectif La Pieuvre presented Portrait for the first time in Paris during the Faits d'Hiver 2023 program. On 9 February 2023, I saw it at Atelier de Paris/CDCN as staged and performed by Rebecca Journo herself,  Véronique Lemonnier, Vera Gorbatcheva and Lauren Lecrique, wearing costumes by Coline Ploquin, on  a set put together by Rebecca Journo and Guillemine Burin des Roziers, with sound by Mathieu Bonnafous and lighting and other effects by Jules Bourret.

Were it given to all to see into the heart of each! Pierre Pontvianne’s Motifs [By Tracy Danison]

Partner dance, the true illusion of being together. "Motifs" by Pierre Pontivianne. Photo © Lena Pinon Lang

Motif usually means “intention or motive”. For Pierre Pontvianne, I think, the word carries the connotation as well of “recurring pattern” or maybe “recurring sense”.

However the title may play, the Motifs stage is a wide-open, squared-off, white floor – a short luminous yellow hyphen of a line along with an occasional crash of disembodied sound to divide it. Spectators are seated in folding chairs all around, at one level with the distanced action.

"Motifs". Photo © Lena Pinon Lang

When a Man-Woman Duo commence the Motifs action, that hyphen of a dividing line is separating them; the crashes punctuate and progress the phrases of their movement.

As Motifs progresses, spectators take on the progressive intensity of b-girls and b-boys at a battle of clans absorbed by the developing performance of good friends and serious rivals.

I could feel Karine, my partner and a “b-kid” herself – “b” for “ballroom” not “break” – becoming more and more absorbed as the man-woman duo transforms into a couple, into the image or archetype (?) “The Couple Dancing”.

She becomes more absorbed in what is happening, starts feelin’ good.

I begin thinking that if Tango or Waltz or Break or any other partner or social dancing were just expert performance of a dance,

Motifs’ pleasant 50 minutes would be just that, couples Breaking, Tangoing or Waltzing. Her absorption, spectator absorption, spectator appreciation would be easy to explain.

But the happening and the intensity of appreciation are not so simple to explain. Dancing couples are not just “couples dancing” holding each other and suggestively wiggling butts. Partner or social dance or Beyoncé dance, for that matter, are also part of the movement arts, just more partnered-oriented and social.

When it comes to movement art, I think, partner and social dance lovers, whether b-kids at battle or b-grammas like Karine absorbed by contemporary dance, know Dance from dance by body experience. Whether they’re dancing or watching others dancing, spectators are loving the experience of the coordinated concentration of body and mind and the delicious emotions – friendship and rivalry – involved in dance through their most intense personal experience of dance.

"Motifs". Photo © Lena Pinon Lang

Spectators realize that success in social dancing – as is true, as I believe, for all dance – comes down to being there withan Other – being together.

This togetherness, though partial product of it, is quite beyond the holding and butt wiggling of physical performance.

So, I think, it’s the personal experience of being there with that guides the evidently deep spectator appreciation of Motifs.

"Motifs". Photo © Lena Pinon Lang

Pontianne, his lines and crashes, the passage from duo to couple, gets it right from the beginning. Karine and the other absorbed spectators automatically understand the beyond-words sense Pontvianne’s trying to get across, especially, they understand the sense of the luminous yellow hyphen of a line on the floor."

The sense of line-hyphen, the happening of it in the choreography, especially, lets spectators experience the complex-and-true illusion that social and partner dancing involves: dance can make a couple of a duo as much as can be, dance puts us together as much as can ever be.

Dance, Pontvianne’s piece choreographs very poignantly, even partner dance, even social dance, even Beyoncé TV dance, answers the existential complaint of a classical Athenian drinking song I learned at school: “O! Were it given us to open up the heart of each and read the mind within”.

So. Your delighted eyes were right, Anne! Bien vu, Karine, Spectators. Bravo, Pierre Pontvianne. Let’s keep dancing!

Pierre Pontivianne created Motifs in 2014. I saw it performed by Paul Girard, Marthe Krummenacher, with sound by Benjamin Gibert, lighting by Valérie Colas and with stage visuals by Pierre Treille at Atelier de Paris for the Faits d’Hiver program, 27 janvier 2023.

"A bona fide work of art . . ." Copland Dance Episodes at New York City Ballet [by Mindy Aloff]

The "long-footed godesss" Mira Nadon , aloft, and company in ‘Copland Dance Episodes’ Photo © 2023 Erin Baiano

People are talking about Justin Peck’s new ninety-minute ballet, Copland Dance Episodes, for thirty principals, soloists, and corps de ballet members of New York City Ballet. It is a bona fide standing-room only, standing-ovation hit and also aesthetically controversial. Against audiences excited by it as a work of non-narrative theatrical dance are some who register strong objections—or simply dismiss it as bland and inconsequential. I’ve seen it twice; the first time, I was among the objectors; the second time, I suddenly saw its parts anew and its references clearly. The second time, what had seemed blurry and unspecific suddenly snapped into a bona fide work of art, complete with fascinating textual engineering and a haunting visionary subtext. What originally had seemed to be mere repetition had the “mere” swapped out for “meaningful.” Both times, the dancers were thrilling, but the second time they also seemed in service of a statement larger than themselves—a chilling statement about the entire country. The structure of the libretto in the program—twenty-two chapters or sections, each with its own title-- gives a clue that, although there is no declared narrative, the ballet is not storyless. The fact that my second sighting of Copland Dance Episodes occurred the night of the President’s State of the Union address was purely coincidental.

The score for this ballet is derived from four of Copland’s most beloved compositions: the anthemic Fanfare for the Common Man and the dances Rodeo, Appalachian Spring, and Billy the Kid—in other words, Copland’s most popular music, all richly melodic and dynamically orchestrated and dating from the build-up to World War II and from the terrifying years of the war itself. All are also brilliantly optimistic sound paintings marked by brass and percussion, even Billy, whose drama is tied to the murderous costs of the country’s westward expansion. Justin Peck, a native of Washington, D.C., spent much of his childhood in San Diego and most of his young adulthood in New York. He’s partly a westerner biographically; however, the American West that Copland created was cleared, plowed, and barn-raised from the heritage of American song—“a couple of cowboy tunes,” he once told me in an interview, out west in Portland, Oregon: the kind of music that doesn’t need explanations to make its case with anyone who listens to it, thanks, of course, to its harmonic and rhythmic presentation by a student of Nadia Boulanger. NYCB’s orchestra, led by company music director Andrew Litton, played the Copland sumptuously, with pleasure and commitment.

Peck’s choreography responds to each of Copland’s long musical lines, canonic interludes, and unexpectedly accented phrases with the assurance of a person in his own home. He does not, like Balanchine, set up a conversation with the music; he marries it, registering its emotions and its tonal variety while also creating imagery that invokes “common man” situations, such as horseplay among peers, a romantic couple on a carousel, a trio who share space and light but not interior worlds. Toward the end of the ballet, when we’re listening to the part of Billy the Kid that creates a gunfight through percussion, the marvelously variegated lighting by Brandon Stirling Baker suddenly throws many crossing figures into silhouette (the section is titled “Shadowboxer”), and we’re rocketed out of one couple’s dysfunction into a hallucinatory enlargement--today’s gun-sickened streets of Newark or L.A., Dorchester or East New York. Manipulating light, space, and choreography, Peck effects astonishing transformations. A hand that is tendered in a moment of submission becomes, once grasped, the agent of disunion. A head gently resting on a heart (a detail that Peck has slyly plucked from Agnes de Mille’s Rodeo and recontextualized), placed on that heart once too often, lightly yet decisively becomes the lever for divorcement. A section that ends with several male figures Biblically pointing straight skyward is revised in a subsequent section that ends with several female figures pointing forward into the future on a forty-five-degree angle, and that image is subsequently revised by a group of male and female figures seated in a circle, each lifting one leg with the foot pointed (the circle invoking a nocturnal moment in Billy when Eugene Loring’s outlaw is triggered into ruminations by a campfire). Tiler Peck’s variation to the “Simple Gifts” tune from Appalachian Spring does not quite lasso the entire herd of conflicting emotions that animate the Bride of Martha Graham’s frontier-wedding masterpiece, but how charming the analogy is. Peck’s pairing and then uncoupling of the long-footed goddess Mira Nadon and />the elementally mutable figure of Taylor Stanley was, for me, a risk worth taking. Their duet, with its partnered cartwheel and little catch step piquantly sited on the music, is one of the loveliest of Peck’s I know, and the intensity of its communication through dance movement made me think of the works of Alexei Ratmansky, who is about to join NYCB as a choreographer in residence. Peck’s ballet is bathed in color as well as pure light: Greeting the audience is Jeffrey Gibson’s drop, both minimalist in its geometric targets and triangles and maximalist in its multicolored profusion of forms, as he puts it in the program “inspired by indigenous American artifacts with the lyrics and psychedelic palette of disco music.” The program also notes that although Gibson’s painting “fuses his Choctaw-Cherokee heritage and experience of living in Europe, Asia, and the USA,” its references “span club culture, queer theory, fashion, politics, literature and art history.” The cast is costumed in Ellen Warren’s leotards and tights, each person given a unique combination of deeply saturated, contrasting hues, with no single, overall colors allowed. Welcome to the twenty-first century. In case the audience forgets that’s where we are, the ballet opens on a tableau of the full cast, each person uniquely positioned and wrapped in a transparent tulle-like packaging. Nearly everyone then runs off into the wings to remove the wicked caul of yesteryear and returns in up-to-the-minute living color, bright-eyed with eagerness to, once again, embark on Peck’s westering of their spirits. 

Mindy Aloff's book of essays, Why Dance Matters, was recently published by Yale University Press.

[Editor's note: The New York City Ballet will perform "Copland Dance Episodes" during its spring 2023 season. Buy tickets here. sdl]

(Wide) Open Space at Etoile du nord, insight and a lot of pleasure [By Tracy Danison]

Cie Suzanne – “To Life”. Light and space inspired by Andrei Tarkovsky. Photo © filipfoto_avoiretadanser

The more often I go to dance and performance events at the Etoile du nord, the more often I want to go to events at the Etoile du nord.

For one thing, the dance performance programs that include artist question times, such as the Open Space program, are always full with young people, which makes me hopeful for the future of live performance. For another, it’s informative and stimulating to see and hear about what artists think might or should be put forward and why and how it might work for spectators.

Performer choreographer Joachim Maudet’s effort to use ventriloquism in a new solo performance, called Kid#1, for instance, got me thinking about the real, physical and psychological effects of movement and stage tricks on people. The ventriloquism – relocation of sound from source – along with an underpinning narrative about schoolyard bullying, manages to evoke really strong anxiety in me (and also, apparently, in the 8- or 9-year-old kid in the seat next to me).

The ventriloquism charges the pathos of the narrative with a certain menace as well as strengthens visual dislocations: in costume (adult dressed as kid – psychic confusion?), in place (on the floor – a sidewalk?), in posture (sat-sprawl – drunk or deranged?) and in sound (in addition to portentous music, the ventriloquism disembodies a confused mumble bubbles above or behind the adult-kid-drunk – bipolar?). The effect of the voice dislocation on the scene is to point the spectator away from the narrative theme and strongly towards the character. The former is full of pathos – How awful! – but the latter is downright dangerous – Christ, I hope he’s not armed!  

On the whole, this year’s Open Space program, at least from a spectator’s point of view, was much more visual or experiential than narrative.

For instance, Group Suzanne’s WIP To Life uses six people walking together alone and in different relations inside the light of a movie (especially referencing Soviet filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1979 classic, Stalker) in an experiment with (notions of) space in performance. Julien Rossin’s S'enembra explores the use of light in close-in body movement…. Nana Movemen’s evolving Jamais la fin looks mostly to the effect of repetitive movement on spectator visual experience, using what I think of as a “techno-quadrille” to “show the encounter of a masculine and feminine duo, mix them up and finally forget [that the two genders] exist”.

 

Collectif La-Ville-En-Feu – “Les Planètes”. Using dance performance to shape urban space. Photo © Julie-Folly_Belluard-Bollwerk

My favorite experiential-oriented WIP was Collectif La Ville en Feu’s Les Planètes. The collective – made up of performer choreographers Marius Barthaux, Thomas Bleton, Agathe De Wispelaere, Juliet Doucet, Jean Hostache, Louise Buléon Kayser, Giulia Dussollier, Myriam Jarmache, Simon Peretti and Garance Silve – has long been working Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring into the fabric of urban landscape.

Many of the collective’s members are or have been students of Nadia Vadori Gauthier, the choreographer, notably, of the well-known Une Minute de Danse Par Jour. Vadori Gauthier’s Une minute, created as it was in the wake of the Charlie-Hebdo terrorist murder-spree, affirms the right of people to animate and enjoy the city and its space. Rite of Springperformances are much in the same vein: a claim to enjoyment and pleasure in our public space. In contrast, the Les Planètes creation seems less to animate and enjoy space than to shape it, using performance as a tool to re-imagine it.

The collective's Open Space preview was a brisk and exciting taste of how the re-imagination might be done.

Without any warning, spectators are pushed outside and into a sort of exterior corridor between two fairly low-rise buildings. The ground space is crowded with shiny-leaf scritchy bushes, dry florist-style dirt and wood chips encroaching slabs of a concrete walkway, a notice board under a jiffy rain shelter. Above ground: a jumble of overhangs, metal struts and landings, catwalks, fixtures, chain-link accesses, intimations of roof-top equipment. It’s impossible to get a clear view.

The performers burst through up there, in the interstices. Spectators wriggle, stress and strain to see and hear as they jump and clamber, using the orchestral topography of Gustav Holst’s The Planets, a seven-movement suite with wordless chorus, as conceptual choreography and navigation.

They come slowly down. Spectators get out of their way. They conquer and carve out stages in the clutter and elbow-to-elbow bustle: fools and mad folk caper and roar, clump to make short, Planets-inspired drama and (a capella) sound and song. Fascinated, putty in their hands spectators try to follow them with our eyes, listen to what they can’t see… Just as they carve out stages from spectator space, they make them into stage hands and props.

Collectif la Ville en Feu’s ability to create and mold its performance space and master its spectators makes me think Les Planètes will be a different and wonderful experience of public art.  

Recommendation: "Why Dance Matters" by Mindy Aloff [by Stacey Harwood-Lehman]

Raphael Soyer Raphael Soyer (American, b. Russia, 1899-1987) "Dancing Lesson"

I've been reading Mindy Aloff's Why Dance Matters (Yale University Press, 2022) and was delighted to see this much deserved rave review by Willard Spiegelman in the Wall Street Journal (paywall). The range and depth of Mindy's dance scholarship is, frankly, astonishing. I've had the lucky experience of attending ballet performances with Mindy, and she even agreed to join me at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts to screen a film of an obscure ballet ("A Wedding Bouquet" by Fredrick Ashton with words by Gertrude Stein). Mindy's observations and insights have deepened my appreciation of ballet and now, having read Why Dance Matters, I am even more eager to contionue my exploration of the wide world of dance. 

About a third of the way through Why Dance Matters, you encounter several paragraphs that address the question "Why does looking at dance matter?" I've often left the theater having been deeply moved by a performance and desperate to hold on to the afterimages of what I've just witnessed only to have them slip away when city noise intrudes. Here's why, says Mindy:  "If you consider dancing seriously -- as something more worthy of your concentration than gazing at a Lava Lite -- then you quickly learn that even for a short, simple number there is quite a lot of information to take in, and to do so requires fast eyes, keen hearing, and a capacious memory. There are elements in any dance, regardless of the tradition or style, that are difficult simply to recognize as they go by, much less to analyze and then discuss, just as there are indeed layers of possible significance to poetry that begin to reveal themselves only after many rereadings." 

And later: 

Simply trying to appreciate what actually takes place in a dance -- the facts of dance action -- is hard enough. A more extreme brain workout is trying to witness what the dancers are doing while remaining aware of the theatrical effects or illusions their movement is intended for the audience to see. If the choreography is coordinated to a musical score, then to recognize and track points of coordination as they happen and be able to recall them later should earn you admission to Mensa. And trying to keep track of all of this while remaining receptive to whatever epiphanies of meaning the dance may provoke -- and perhaps while being overtaken by rapture, too--requires a type of multitasking in while your consciousness, so to speak, has one eye on the stage and one watching your brain be a brain. 

The reader is then invited to take a walk with Mindy among dances where "the multitasking might prove not only as usefull to brain health as sudoko but even more enjoyable."

Take the walk! Buy Why Dance Matters here. 

Dance matters. You already know this if you're a season ticket holder to the local ballet company. And it matters if you dance alone while dusting, or with your partner at a wedding or Bat Mitzvah. 

More than dancin’: "Partitions(s) - Du décollement des sentiments et des affects", Jean-Christophe Boclé [By Tracy Danison]

“Disparition(s): Partitions(s) - Du décollement des sentiments et des affects”, Jean-Christophe Boclé. Photo © Charlotte Anneix

The Partition(s) subtitle, Du décollement des sentiments et des affects (“On dis-attaching feelings and affects”) I think must mean something like “letting go” or even “purifying”. “Must” because it’s hard to describe the crystalline sensibilityJean-Christophe Boclé achieves for every element of and in this remarkable piece for four dancers – two men, two women – a double bass player at upper left stage and a cello player at lower right stage.

Boclé writes in his notes of an intention to let performers call up and show the primal movements that support the performance; he actually manages to do it.

On stage, Boclé sharpens ears with single sounds plucked from the smooth surface of the double bass’ thick strings. He choreographs movement that, at first, at least, has the feel of Liz Santoro’s neurologically-informed transistor-board promenades in such pieces as Mutual Information or Maps. As with Santoro, Boclé’s opening movements conjure the image of synapses, evoke the air of a mindful brain at rest and aware.

Then the movements shape together. At first, as with Santoro, they are intervals, crossings, parallels, angles. Then, symmetries. With composer Pierre Godard’s sound tickling and teasing, Santoro likes to build off these symmetries, to take an audience into fascination.

Boclé’s Partition(s) uses the psychic potential built up in forming the symmetries for a breakout from fascination to something like contemplative attention. I’m not sure how or at what moment, but as with Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker’s choreography for Steve Reich - Violin Fase, the regularity and precision of movement seem to go slightly awry, collapse away from themselves  – a quark sneezes? The spectator is aware of a change in psychic tone. After the change another sensibility reigns. The symmetries are understood as fractals.

On stage, in Partition(s), the spark for this change of sensibility seems to be within the potential of a sudden note from the double bass.

“Disparition(s) : Partitions(s) - Du décollement des sentiments et des affects”, Jean-Christophe Boclé. Photo © Charlotte Anneix

The new sensibility twists sound to music and music into physical and metaphysical phenomena and uncountable cross-pollinations. The sensibility around the flow of thoughts, ideas, feelings and emotions makes them all seem to mix and match more easily.

On stage, persons and couples alternate from deep contemplation to attentive lightness. Each of all – and I was somehow able to keep track of all this during the experience – each of all play with, move through, go around, leap over, spin under, fall into the expanding times, spaces, presences and imaginings. With that movement the spectator has the time to experience beyond words: movement is persons and persons are movement and times, spaces and presences, imaginings, incarnated liberty.

I can’t be more specific and flat-voiced than this: These are performers dancing around and about J.S. Bach. This is an experience of what complexity looks, feels, tastes, tastes and hears like.

Put Partition(s) on your bucket list.

I saw Partition(s): Du décollement des sentiments et des affects on 26 January 2023 at Carreau du Temple as part of the 2023 Festival Faits d’Hiver dance-performance program. Performers were Iris Brocchini, Marion Jousseaume, Gaspard Charon and Remi Gérard. Sound base was  Johan Sebastien Bach Cello Suites IV and V with Elena Andreyev
on cello and Gildas Boclé on double bass. For remarks on Faits d’Hiver programming see Santé, Bonheur! Joy! Imagination! Discernment! Thoughts on some upcoming dance and performance [By Tracy Danison].

Photographer Sarah Meunier does drag [by Tracy Danison]

Corrine works decadence at Cirque Eléctrique, a Paris cabaret. Photo © Sarah Meunier

When dancers and mountebanks were banned in the City of Light, while others quailed in their closets or pottered around snazzy country houses, Sarah Meunier was photo-reporting the Covid quarantine for The Best American Poetry’s “Beyond Words” section. In exclusive photos of a citizen sheltering in place, readers were able to experience Sarah’s unbreakable determination to lay bare the hidden realities of that “moment bizarre”.

 

Mlle Kiss is a hostess for hire. Photo © Sarah Meunier

Photographer Sarah Meunier has much more to reveal, including some girl cousins just up the road who have a taste for drag queens. A family person – no doubt acting in the same spirit that had me go spare shotgun for grampa Walter’s autumnal shoot in the black mud and rough hedge of northern Ohio and, no doubt, agreeing over a Sunday lunch – Sarah was induced to bring her camera along to places like Cirque Electrique, cabaret décadent, where the well-known cross-dresser queen Corrine plays out some of the best of contemporary Paris decadence in the best tradition of cabaret. So, even if you don’t care about Corrine’s sartorial fancies, Sarah says she recommends Cirque Electrique as especially good performance.

Sailor K loves making up. Photo © Sarah Meunier

Sarah’s approach has a way of getting at the flesh and blood of the people she’s photographing. She seems to want to put the on-looker face to face –  subject to subject – with the person depicted rather than to use technique to depict an (esthetic) interiority or quality in a looked-at object – subject to object. I am always aware that Sarah’s people eat, drink, laugh, dance, have job someplace. So, like me or you, Sarah Meunier’s drag-queens seem to be working their way through this, our vale of tears and guffaws.

France Gaule – bills herself as a part-time local icon. Photo Sarah Meunier

The au délà du reel  ethetic in the Sarah Meunier’s drag queen photos is in the light and color reference. She frames the drag queen work-a-day with exoticness by tweaking colors that bring out a 60s street placard or an advertisement in Lifemagazine. Come crowding unbidden into mind a bizarre mix of American place – empty desert, grey city –  and marketing iconography  – paperback potboiler covers,  Winston cigarette packages, Marliyn Monroe.

A published version of Sarah Meunier’s As You Like It collection can be purchased by contacting Galerie Manjari & Partners site or from Sarah Meunier’s Instagram page.

Sarah Meunier’s work on African animals is coming up at Manjari & Partners later in February 2023.

Thomas Hauert’s “Efeu”: Where do we end? [by Tracy Danison]

"Efeu" (Ivy) Thomas Hauert and cie ZOO. Photo © Bart Grietens

Choreographer and performer Thomas Hauert says one of his concerns over the years has been how people are in their world. Through a celebration of 20 years of working with the eight players of his cie ZOO, his dance performance How to proceed ((2018), focuses on interpersonal emotions and relationships. Hauert considers the performance  If only (2020), as an expression of a dark shadow lurking behind human relationships, crisis, chaos. Hauert says that the dance performance  Efeu (German for “ivy”), is, tentatively, the third piece in this ad hoc series on people in their world. I saw it at the Atelier de Paris 12 January 2023.

Efeu, Hauert says, opens on the creaturely situation of humans in the material world. He writes,

The movement of the human body as raw material contains in its essence the resistance to the most destructive and implacable forces of the universe. Life needs very specific and improbable conditions in order to be born and to survive. [Efeu is a] kind of ode to life, to the earth and its fragile atmosphere.

Efeu works. It happens. It belongs to its spectators.

The performance gets its form and, to big extent, its substance from the two very distinctive dances that open and close it.

As a couple, Hauert, who is also a performer, and Federica Porello open by turning and soaring  to Gino Paoli’s and Ornella Vanoni’s 1961 Italian hit Senza fine (Endless): You push our life along/Without a break/To dream/To be able to remember/What we have already experienced/Endless/You are an endless moment. God is me. And you too. We’re time and the rest. It’s us as does it.

Also as a couple, Sarah Ludi and Fabian Barba close the piece by dancing with Marvin Gaye’s jarringly sensual 1971 consciousness-raising hit Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology): Ah, things ain't what they used to be/Where did all the blue skies go?/ Poison is the wind that blows/ From the north and south and east.

The dances gain a single identity in the contrast between them. This is especially visible in what seems to be each woman’s particular talent. Porello’s ultra-polished turns are Ludi’s emotion as skin. Porello’s expressive movement makes you breathless, agape. Ludi’s perceptive or interpretative movement tears at your heart.

With its shared 60s Heaven and Earth or mind and body themes, the two (classic) hits complement into a single evocation of the concerns of the so-called Age of Aquarius (1967), which we have entered, by the way.

As a spectator, Efeu is a retrospective experience – you must look backward to understand your present emotion.

“Concert in the egg”, school of Hieronymus Bosch. Photo Wikipedia

When I remember Hauert’s and Porello’s dance and Paoli’s and Vanoni’s music, I remember that I’m with you, the Others, in the driver’s seat. We’re unstuck in time.

The emotion of Ludi with her partner and Gaye’s hit together send me tumbling through time: the first Earth Day in April 1970 – bowled over by  the sense in “ecology”- Doesn’t that mean the flower and the bee are one thing? And in 2023, many pretend that though the bees are dying off, the flowers will continue. As if we live in a Dollar Store.

In October, 1971 The Staple Singers released Respect yourself – and the kind of gentleman who want everything their way are in Congress, in Teheran, their missiles across the strait of Taiwan, their tanks snorting at the gate of Europe.

The image Efeu produces in my inner eye is Hieronymus Bosch’s “Concert in the egg”.

The opening and closing dances mean that Hauert’s piece, like an egg, has two distinct ends that invent it as an identity: give it an up, down, sides, a middle.

I’m not the first to point out that the spectator or holder of an egg chooses its place in the world. Also, while an egg is very tough, it’s very fragile: a chance blow and it may be a goner.

While the opening and closing of Efeu invented the concert of movement against and with “the improbable conditions” in which we “are born and survive on earth in its fragile atmosphere”, the containing space of that egg got me wondering.

If I am in the driver’s seat, unstuck in time with you, the Others, where, in the material world, do “I” and “we” physically end or begin?

Where is our body in respect to each other, to the fragile shell underfoot, to the fragile shell over our heads, to the air around us? Life is not just endless moments where we are not able to remember what we have already experienced, it is also a co-evolutive living experience – an ecology. If the wind is poison, it delivers poison and we react to that.

But Efeu has made me think: what if our breath is not just a delivery system or a symbol in some narrative of ourselves but, in a way that we haven’t yet understood, an inseparable part of us?

Our gut bacteria are not exclusive to our gut; they part of other ecologies, further off. And if the wetness on my skin is not just on my skin but my wet skin, like bacteria, is part of wetness everywhere?

And if this evolution we are forcing on the world we make is not just evolving that world but evolving us who make the world?

And in ways so subtle that we will never become aware?  …

François Gremaud & Samantha van Wissen’s “Giselle…”: A model classic [by Tracy Danison]

Samantha van Wissen. “Giselle… Comédie Ballet” by François Gremaud. Photo © Dorothée Thébert Filliger

Theater pieces always manage a “…triumph…” or a “… wonderful...” printed on the program. Could mean anything – “With thousands of slaves in tow, Julius Caesar brought his triumph to Rome…”; “It is wonderful, the persistence of the Ancien Régime …”

But quote me whole when I say of François Gremaud's and Samantha van Wissen’s Giselle… Comédie-Ballet that it gets inside the heads of today's and yesterday’s creators and spectators. Doing that, it touches at the heart of the famous classic Giselle, ou les Wilis: I listened with real interest and laughed at, too, what was effectively serious textual analysis and I gasped in spontaneous dismay when van Wissen-Giselle dropped dead. And that is certainly proof of wonderful performing inside a triumph of theatrical writing.

Giselle… Comédie-Ballet has the same plot as all the Giselles I’ve ever heard of – Act 1: disguised noble falls for peasant girl who dies tragically after learning truth; Act 2: dead peasant girl thwarts her own damnation and the vengeance of supernatural females called Wilis. Also, Gremaud  bases his Giselle…Comédie-Ballet on the script used for the Giselle, ou les Wilis première oof  28 June 1841 at the Paris Opéra by Jules-Henri Vernoy de Saint-Georges and Théophile Gautier.

Photo © Dorothée Thébert Filliger

Gremaud has modeled his Giselle… script as a palimpsest: you have to pay attention to warp, weft and splotches of the paper, not just the most recent print on it. At reading, the script shapes an indivisible, if pretty giddy, whole of parts.

Choreographer-performer Samantha van Wissen’s execution of Giselle… Comédie-Ballet is more than equal to the task of holding together the whole of Gremaud’s palimpsest, which includes bits of general history, social context, authorial intentions, writing, choreography, stagecraft, along with the points of view of historic observers and actors. into  Giselle… Comédie-Ballet.

Van Wissen uses a classic one-woman show format to turn the script into an amusing and instructive, even innovative, dance piece. 

Moving with that subtle, distinctly personal, body confidence of an accomplished dancer, van Wissen begins Giselle… by owning Giselle, ou les Wilis, the classic format, and Giselle, a character.  “Van Wissen”, she says, means “from Effacement” in Dutch, her native language. “Her” effacement alludes, she says, to one of the central issues raised by Giselle, ou les Wilis – which, one presumes, would include whether or not the effacement of Giselle is imposed or desired or self-imposed... Or just a literary intellectual’s will o’ the wisp.

Van Wissen goes on to demonstrate her ownership of the potential possible Giselles-Giselles through the piece, a significant pause here, a rising but always dulcet voice there for focus, but mainly letting spectators wander through, feeling they've decided questions and answers for themselves. 

Van Wissen dances: moves as she talks, talks as she moves.

Sometimes arch, sometimes not, she comments on topics as diverse as the historic association of pantomime and ballet, on librettist Théophile Gautier’s belief in the centrality of love, on the role of Bathilde, Giselle’s mom, or on the previous wild and European success of Italian Filippo Taglioni’s La Sylphide at the Paris Opéra, which, coincidentally, wink, wink, is chock full of hot but tragic and invisible gals, desirable, morally weak yet sentimental and well-set-up guys, betrayal, witchcraft, vengeance. The whole shtick of course flies about the woods in twilight.

Photo © Dorothée Thébert Filliger

Van Wissen demonstrates more than she says with hands and feet, pantomimes, mimes, dances, postures, figures, phrases…  Baulked lover, what a disguised noble as 19^th century ballet character looks like. Plays the leaping and twirling 15-year old Giselle, a dancing fool –  do you know, she has a weak heart? It’s a big worry for Bathilde.

For the spectator, Van Wissen’s dancer art brings all the comment and movement to a boil: showing Giselle, ou les Wilis creates Giselle… Comédie-Ballet. That’s that’s why I gasped at the mime of Giselle’s death. That’s why I and my partner walked out thinking of Giselle… Comédie-Ballet – as dance more than performance.

So, Gremaud's and van Wissen’s Giselle… is dance triumphant as well as well as literary or narrative art.

But I also think Giselle… Comédie-Ballet is pertinent to our times – by the thoroughness of its literary anatomy and in view of the needs of today’s spectators.

Remember van Wissen’s initial show-owning “effacement”? 

When all is said and danced, does the ultimate esthetic success of scripted Giselle, ou les Wilis turn on rubbing out the girl and/or the thrill of femmes fatales, or, like contemporary entertainment, are the words and clichés just a pandering mishmash of what some producers and mountebanks think attracts eyeballs?  Or is it a mix of its culture, commercial calculation and a desperate effort to talk about something universal and vitally important for human beings?

I come away from Gremaud and van Wissen’s Comédie-Ballet with the option of thinking it's the mix. At its heart, I'm with them, because it's clear that's what they think, too, "Giselle", as a concept, comes down to putting love, Love, capital L, on stage. In the end, it takes very little actual tweaking of Giselle, ou les Wilis to make that clear, too.

If the developer behind the Madame Butterfly I saw the other day had taken the care François Gremaud has taken with Giselle (…), I wouldn’t still be regretting the wasted 100 euros.  I wouldn’t be wondering about the state of mind of the opera’s creative developer, either.

Photo © Dorothée Thébert Filliger

Holy Cow! This Butterfly I saw was like stumbling into a screening of an irony-less Springtime for Hitler! Talk about bearing up under the White Man’s Burden. I can enjoy the pre-war works of novelist Louis Ferdinand Céline, a notorious racist and active anti-Semite. I can cite certain esthetic ideas of the social-climbing weasel Martin Heidegger, even knowing he was making love to Hannah Arendt even as he prepared to throw her, as well as his Jewish colleagues, under the Nazi bus. Still, there’s no way I can explain away that Madame Butterfly I saw that evening, in Germany, of all places.There’s just no rationalizing possible.

In the same vein, building on somebody’s graduate thesis about effaced “romantic heroines” and the long history of bootstrap-moralizing by rich American patrons and in the name of cleaning up historic misogyny, Akram Khan has recently managed to conjure Giselle, ou les Wilis as The Little Girl Who Could, switching the focus of the play from the sweet nebbish character of Giselle to the bracing message telling us that all a sillikins girl needs to do to undo eight thousand years of patriarchal oppression is show some dam' gumption.

I know the proverb about beggars, wishes and horses, but all the same, I am thinking now that if Khan had seen Gremaud’s Giselle… Comédie-Ballet, he might have considered using Gremaud's approach to controversial classics to do Madame Butterfly instead. Butterfly fits Khan’s esthetic mood better. More important, if Giselle, ou les Wilis turns around Love, capital L, Butterfly surely turns around Power, capital P. Imperial and patriarchal Power, to boot. There’s certainly room for a little female pushback in the opéra's narrative dynamics. Even a little American-style girl-gumption might actually do the trick! 

Let’s hope somebody produces Gremaud’s Giselle… Comédie-Ballet for international audiences – in English.

Beggars, mount up! Let’s especially hope that other aspiring classic controversy re-creators have a look at what Gremaud has achieved with his Giselle… Comédie-Ballet. 

“Giselle… Comédie Ballet” by François Gremaud was produced at the Théâtre de la Bastille with solo dance and performance by Samantha van Wissen with musical accompaniment by  Léa Al-Saghir or Anastasiia Lindeberg (violin), Tjasha Gafner or Antonella de Franco (harp), Héléna Macherel or Irène Poma (flute) and Sara Zazo Romero (saxophone). A printed libretto is available. I saw it on 6 January 2023. 

Santé, Bonheur! Joy! Imagination! Discernment! Thoughts on some upcoming dance and performance [By Tracy Danison]

Entanglement: Jann Gallois and Rafael Smadja perform Gallois’ “Compact”. Photo©Cie Burnout

Happy 2023. Best wishes. For this year, I propose taking it as it comes and, for what’s left, letting the heart decide.

This past New Year’s Eve I watched 18-year-old Ukraine refugee acrobat Sofia Kotetens gorgeously, meticulously tie herself in the emotional knots of Amy Winehouse’s Back to Black. It seemed to me that Kotetens asks rather than orders her body along for her acrobatic dances. I concluded that the process was: she seeks her body’s joy in being alive, finds it and gifts it to spectators. None of this challenging, overcoming herself stuff in Kotetens; it gets me down, this idea that the flesh is problematic.

Joy in the body was on my mind the other day, too, before the holidays, when I was getting ready for my contemporary dance class.

I had just got my codpiece and tutu in place when the notable choreographer and dance performer Jann Gallois blinked into the hallway I was using as my dressing room. The two pieces that made me a permanent fan of Gallois remain references for me: Compact and Diagnostic F20.9. The one is around body to body, the other, mind with body.

I asked Jann what she was up to? She told me, a piece around joy.

Later in the same afternoon, after class and after I had spent some time in front of a mirror feeling pretty good while assuming my inelegant fat back and handsome old-man’s man-tits, one of my dance-class mates invited me, along with my classmates to her house for the apéro.

“Nos Corps Vivants”, Arthur Perole. Photo©Festival Every Body

Once we all had drinks in hand, she raised her glass. Santé, Bonheur! she cried, clinking hers against her partner’s. Easy with a glance, this genial host managed to look each of us in the eye as she touched her glass against each one of ours in turn.

I thought: Santé. Bonheur. Health. Happiness. Full stop. Full stop. That about covers it, doesn’t it? No Happiness without Health, no Health without Happiness.

Which reminded me that no quark is un-entangled; when I look into the cat box, coincidence turns into synchronicity.

Jann Gallois’ joy, my dance class, my assumption of fat back and man-tits, my genial host’s “Health. Happiness.” and Sofia Kotetens’ pleasure are the media of my major choices for dance performance in this – what was formerly – deep winter.

I look in the box again and feel some strange attractors.

Choreographer François Gremaud is performing an analysis of Giselle and her wrongs – is she wronged or is a peasant dying from heartbreak an advance in consciousness? He and dance-performer Samantha van Wissen put their lamp up to the libretto of the famous ballet, one of the gothic-est stories  this side of the Castle of Otranto.

Gremaud and van Wissen have apparently cooked up a one-woman show with dance combo to do it. 

Within an even decade, this year is an odd number so I think it’s appropriate to complement classical gothic ballet analysis with future possible rituals.

Ritual and art use the sublime to link us here-below to us yonder. The performer choreographer-cum-freelance curator Agnes Gryczkowska has put together Au-Delà: Rituels pour un monde nouveau, (“There Beyond: rituals for a new world”), a multi-creator, multi-craft exhibition modeled as an “initiation” evoking archaic, contemporary and future ritual through ceremonies, gestures, objects and crafts linking “earth energy” and Life. Sounds like a study in the sacred. At Lafayette Anticipations from 15 February - 7 May 2023.

Man-tits? Why the “man”? Why not just “tits”? “My big tits”.

And why do I care? Why have I always cared?

Because the body is the theater of the mind. Festival Every Body, at Carreau du Temple between 17 and 21 February 2023 for its second edition, bills itself as a dance and performance focused on the “contemporary body” – the body’s place in society.

It’s that, sure, but, as dance performance rather than blah-blah, it’s more: an exercise in dance as imagination with introspection.  

In a world made up of cat boxes turning coincidence to synchronicity, what’s the truth and what’s the lie?

To help me with that, I’m going to see as much as I can of Festival Faits d’Hiver, from 16 January 2023 to 18 February 2023. The festival celebrates its 25^th season with a program built around and honoring the dancer and choreographer Thomas Lebrun. According to Christophe Martin, Faits d’Hiver’s main programmer, Lebrun represents par excellence the inventiveness with ability that represents the goals of the festival as an institution.

Martin runs the dance-performance organization Micadanses and is also the esthetic force behind it – Bien Fait! Micadanses’ end-of-residence dance-performance program, about which I’ve written recently, consistently puts out pieces that make sense – not always entertainment but always art (Micadanses: Try some of this Surprise. Tastes like Imagination).

When all is said and done, I’m looking forward to studying Martin’s discernment in the new creations on offer during the festival. I mean “discernment” more as Samuel Johnson’s dictionary defined it: not “taste” but as an ability to tell the difference between the “real” and the “fake”. And I mean “real” and “fake” as Lana Del Rey (National Anthem), defines them. I don’t think every performance on the bill will fit my expectations. I don’t think I won’t sometimes walk out baffled. But thanks to the discernment that goes into festival’s selections, I do think I’ll always come away with something more in my mind and spirit than I went in with.

Have you ever seen the goddess dance? Dorothée Munyaneza does Radouan Mriziga’s “Akal” [by Tracy Danison]

Dancer, singer, choreographer Dorothée Munyaneza. Photo © Maya Mihindou

Believe it or not, my critical skepticism evaporated when I saw the golden horns.

A second before, Akal’s mythology is contrary to fact, its suppositions stretched beyond belief.

Dorothée Munyaneza’s golden horns? Macbeth’s AK47.

A second after, the priestess of Neith is processesing to center stage.

Keats is absolutely right: beauty is truth and truth is beauty.

The form, shape, color, size of the horns is beautiful.

Beautiful, their weight and balance lends their truth to the professional experience of choreographer, singer, poet and dance performer Dorothée Munyaneza.

Munyaneza’s well-crafted steps and gestures point the geometry of the body and its mechanics, link them to the geometry of heaven and the dance of its movement. Her trained voice ripens in the thrill of words that seem to stand earth and heaven, bring us all into the presence of the sacred.

As we walk through the cold, feeling dreamy, we wondered how to fit Munyaneza’s invocation of the sacred into our dance experience.

Why was the beauty there? How did the truth come out?

Karine, my partner, tells me she thinks of Akal as a concert, a long arrangement of movement that transfixes you with sound and stories savory with bits of sense and vision. Munyaneza, it seems to her, repeats phrases of movement until the audience turns them to dance, reforms and redoes figures of sound – rustling, tinkling, words, verse, notes, periods – until you see the goddess in the hymn. Talking in the bus shelter, others agree with Karine.

But I see Akal as a concept – a by-the-rules Aristotle-type cathartic script captured by Mriziga’s choreography and Munyaneza’s collaborative execution.

The concept is then powered on the nests of complex memory in audience members. Or the sacred, the longing for a joining of heaven and earth, may be as universal as the need for catharsis, an archetype.

 

Dorothée Munyaneza, Akal, Atelier de Paris CDNC. Photo © Senda Jebali

As to Aristotle, archetypes and nests of memory and the truth in Akal: some years back, Karine and I were hiking. We ran into a young woman almost a girl squatting head-in-hands at the side of our path. She was dissociated, frightened but functional; we guessed she was going through a waxing psychosis, probably her first time. I know something about that, so we talked a little. She brightened, joined us walking until, around about nightfall, we came to our b&b.

The young woman chose to camp in a little stand of trees not far off. Early next morning, as we dressed, we saw her through our window, through the foggy dark, leaning against a tree. We asked her to share our breakfast.

Festival Signes d’Automne 2022 at the Belleville Swan # 2: Off-the-cuff creativity and new perspectives from Korea [by Tracy Danison]

Shadows and robots from “Homo Lupiens” by Kyung Shin Kim, produced for “Festival S.O.U.M. - Soirée de co-création Franco-Coréenne,” 2022, Regard du Cygne. Photo © Timothée Shin

Off-the-cuff cooperative creativity and fresh consideration of the familiar was on show in every performance during studio Regard du Cygne’s two-day Soirée de co-création Franco-Coréenne with Festival S.O.U.M. this past Fall. S.O.U.M. is an international contemporary dance outfit with a mission to show off contemporary dance performance creations from Korea.

I was deeply impressed by the quality of the program’s cooperative work, but, especially, I was intrigued by the approaches to the show (choreography) and tell (intentions) parts of S.O.U.M.’s dance performance pieces. I had not given it much thought before the Regard du Cygne’s Soirée, but, since, at its most basic level, contemporary dance performance is about an individual experiencing movement, it’s going to show and tell especially about individual experience of culture and its perspectives.

And that’s what I felt each piece on the Soirée de co-création Franco-Coréenne program did: show and tell contemporary dance performance through the filter of experience of a culture that I do not know. Let me put it this way. When I first came to France, I kept bumping into familiar things and fumbling with familiar purposes because, while things look very much the same everywhere, measures are different. In high good humor and without the bruises, of course, my experience of the work of our friends from Korea, resembles that: I was reminded to keep adjusting for difference.

The first-day features were Couleurs and Want, both co-creations put together during a three-day residency at the Regard du Cygne.

Couleurs, by Sun-Hoo Yoo, a choreographer and dance performer from Korea and Marco Chenevrier, a dancer, actor and performer working between France and Italy, was a sort of high-culture “game show” that engages spectators and performers alike in interpreting movement and sound. Yoo told me that she and Chenvier built Couleurs into the frame of one of her existing choreographies.

Performed by visiting dancer Seisung Lee and Paris cellist Aurore Daniel, Want – which I noted down as a “musician-dancer interactional-orbit performance: an atom” – was, as far as I know, an original, put together during the Belleville residence. It was wild. I do like a punk cello. 

With audience members walking in the seating and on the edges of the stage and with active spectator and performer input required, as a performance, Couleurs was a risk. Yoo and Chenevier improvised choreographies for music that audience members chose as other audience members conspicuously interpreted their own feelings with colors on a whiteboard. The new-met artists went on to do performances that Yoo called, “Two soli in the shadow of one another and two duets in which we meet”.

Notably, despite their differences and short acquaintance, at no time did Yoo or Chenevier “step ahead” or “pull the partner along” or “step out” or “trail behind” inside their duo.

Elan with punk cello from “Want” by Seisung Lee and Aurore Daniel, produced for “Festival S.O.U.M. - Soirée de co-création Franco-Coréenne,” 2022, Regard du Cygne. Photo © Johan Marimoutou

After the performance, I felt sure that Yoo and Chenevier shared a choreographic approach that owes a lot to circus and cabaret as well as to a taste for risk in search of authenticity. I also thought I understood that when Yoo says, “Two soli in the shadow of one another…”, she means something like “dancing where one of us is the shadow personality”, not “one of us in the background”. Also, when she says “… and two duets in which we meet”, she’s deliberately situating “duet” as “one dance from two dancing” rather than “a dance by two persons”. In other words, Yoo and Chenevier’s notable ability to stay in sync was not just professional courtesy but a parameter of their choreography (and maybe of Yoo’s framing choreography). They were not just “there with” each other (with a margin for the personal expression of each), but were “there with because (the other is also there)”. Synchronicity, not synchronousness.  

I felt cabaret, circus, risk and, especially, the will to synchronicity in Want, too.

Want’s program notes say, “[Seisung Lee and Aurore Daniel] found [and then pursued and realized] a common thirst to allow their feelings and sensitivities to escape into the exterior world through their movement and sound”.

They did, too, by getting into breathless showman mode even as they pursued the intensely personal effort to fire up between them a synergy of body, instruments, movement and sound in person-to-person engagement. Seisung Lee danced into Aurore Daniel’s musician space (seeking out not just the music but also the person producing it). Daniel, her cello quivering and panting, opens out into Lee’s dance space (inhabiting not just Lee’s dance but also his élan).

On the second day, for the program’s made-in-Korea performances, beyond the showmanship and the search for synchronicity I also found in the co-creations, there seemed to me to be differently-framed perspectives or unexpected conclusions from the same information, different ways of using things, along with casual innovation in performance usages.

Drawing energy from a new universe in “Elegant Universe” by Sun-Hoo Yoo, produced for “Festival S.O.U.M. - Soirée de co-création Franco-Coréenne,” 2022, Regard du Cygne. Photo © Timothée Shin

For instance, Kyung Shin Kim’s Homo Lupiens (“anagram man”), uses ambiguous human-machine costuming and “robot gestural” to ask about the “Homo Meta” scrambled into the Homo Faber that is currently struggling to re-imagine Homo Sapiens… Could it be that Homo Sapiens are the damned robots they seem to want very much to create?

Instead of the elaborate makeup and grimacing of the clown figure I am used to, Histoire d’un Clown by Jae-Heon Choi and Ji Min Lee with the Mousai Dance Company, hide behind those porcelain-looking fixed-face masks I associate with Japanese theater. They do a clown act that is half vaudeville, half stand up …

Eunhye Ku’s See-Saw smoothly mixes hip hop and contemporary phrases inside what looks to me like a “battle format”: damned interesting. With a four-person team, Ku evokes present “see” & past “saw” and, as he writes, “Through dance, two complementary actions alternate to move them forward, out of view. A touch touches…I aim to create links.”. Which all sounds to me like somebody trying to add serious torque to my way of thinking about “ying & yang”…

And so it went through the whole S.O.U.M. program: new takes on familiar things, new takes on new things and unfamiliar familiarities, whether Eunhye Ku’s See-Saw or Marco Chenevier’s solo Bach sonate
e danzate, where hedances “either a physical concert or a sound choreography” or … Sun-Hoo Yoo’s Elegant Universe solo.

In Elegant Universe, Yoo’s active and sensual dance flowers before a single straight-backed musician (or philosopher of sound), formal in what I suppose is a “traditional” gown, who makes …  “sounds to consider by”: drawn-out notes from a – I suppose to be a “traditional” – hand-drum, gong-bell and paper-rustler. Yoo says of this dance performance, “We empty ourselves and draw energy from a new universe in order to pass on its hope and beauty to Earth.” And it was that, I felt that, and more; it finished by getting a gay laugh from me.

So, this France-Korea co-creativity sphere in Belleville turns out to be a good idea and an enlightening one. I hope Regard du Cygne plays host again next year (and the year after that).

In the meantime, put S.O.U.M. on your bucket list. It may be coming to a dance venue near you.

Festival Signes d’Automne 2022 at the Belleville Swan # 1: a right approach, time and place for contemporary dance [by Tracy Danison]

“Wel come” by Joachim Maudet with Pauline Bigot and Sophie Lèbre, cie Les Vagues, produced for “Festival Signes d’Automne” 2022, Regard du Cygne. Photo © Jean Gros-Abadie

I ended the 2022 edition of the Signes d’Automne program at studio Regard du Cygne with a performance called Wel come by Joachim Maudet. On the corner of rues de Belleville and Pixerécourt in Paris’ Belleville neighborhood, “Regard of the Swan” has been hosting contemporary dance and performance since the 1980s. It continues the mission with brio.

Maudet’s work as a choreographer and performer is a good example of the little studio’s promotion of (I think so anyway) an Isadora Duncan-inspired “creative dance performance for all” agenda. Wel come succeeds a mix of slow and no movement and ventriloquism with a just-right spice of light, sound and space. In short, the work impresses with a thoughtful and respectful grasp of ordinary human perception and its choreographic uses; gets spectators musing and laughing.

In addition to Maudet’s creation, this year’s Signes d’Automne included two days of a “Festival S.O.U.M. - Soirée de co-création Franco-Coréenne”, an encore of Générations by Fabrice Ramalingom (a piece featured in The Best American Poetry this past spring), and a legacy retrieval in Julie Dubois’s l’Isa\dora Duncan, in which Dubois dances from her personal trove of (Isadora’s adopted daughter) Lisa Duncan’s work.

On the menu as well were the recurring adult and kid versions of “Spectacles Sauvages” – presentations of new creations or of productions new to Paris. This year, a last minute call gave three creditable new creations and one truly astonishing stand-up performance piece: Mécanique de l’invisible, by Gaëlle Gillieron; Parasite et bottes-de-plume, a very physical duo of … What? … “Behavioral typology”,  by performers Simon Peretti and Marius Bathaux; and Débordement, a choreography-music creation with Delphine Jungman and Aston Bonaparte performing with original music by Patrick Biyik. As a finale, En pièce jointe, a performance tour de force by Armande Sanseverino and Gaël Germain which brilliantly shows how things go when the digital stream stutters. To cap things off were events such as the conversations among dancers and spectators hosted by dancing philosopher Karima El Amrani and the Regard’s perennial “Family Day”, this time featuring Le Lapin et la Reine (“The Queen & the Rabbit”) in (French) Sign, hosted by dancer and choreographer Nina Vallon.

“En pièce jointe” by Armande Sanseverino and Gaël Germain, produced for “Spectacles Sauvages”, Signes d'Automne 2022, Regard du Cygne. Photo © Jean Gros-Abadie

There’s a lot to say about each one of these varied performances, initiatives and events, but for my money, Fall 2022’s top bill goes to the two-day “Festival S.O.U.M. - Soirée de co-création Franco-Coréenne”. Festival S.O.U.M. is a (South) Korean contemporary dance outfit. The Soirée turned on mixing movement artists from Korea and locals in short co-creative residences and producing the results on the first evening – the artists had no previous experience of one another – and following on the next day with pieces from the repertoires of the visitors. It was a decided audience and an esthetic success.

Both a distant image of dance performance innovation and an echo of Regard’s dance-performance-for-all mission, the two-day Soirée held up a made-in-Korea mirror to a lot of what the studio tries to achieve on its own turf.

A general hunger for new stuff aside, people from the Europe culture sphere seem open to cultural production with a perspective from Korea – witness the film Parasite or the TV series Squid Game. Why not contemporary live-performance?

Like Taiwan, another place rooted in a strong and vibrant traditional culture that’s managed to transition into a liberal society, Korea’s seems a happening place for global contemporary culture. Unlike contemporary work from Taiwan, before Regard du Cygne’s program, the only live performance from Korea I have been able to get to know is the Zumba version of Gangnam Style – and I did that all on my own.  I think my situation in respect to live performance culture from Korea, let alone contemporary dance from Korea is pretty typical. So, good job for my culture, Regard programmers.

“Couleurs” by Sun-Hoo Yoo, Marco Chenevier produced for “Festival S.O.U.M. - Soirée de co-création Franco-Coréenne,” 2022, Regard du Cygne. Photo © Jean Gros-Abadie

Whether in co-creation with locals or previously developed work, lovely and intriguing splashes of unfamiliar culture graced S.O.U.M.-inspired performance. But contemporary Dance, capital D, was clearly what was happening for everybody, performers, choreographers and spectators alike. S.O.U.M. choreographers and performers are full owners of a “global” art of contemporary dance, which like break dance, or hip-hop, is a world dance mode, by definition exotic for nobody and open to all.

As I say, Festival S.O.U.M. - Soirée de co-création Franco-Coréenne was an initiative with the right approach at the right time. Regard du Cygne was the right place to do it.

Regard is one of the last dance places, maybe the last independent contemporary dance place, in Paris intramuros where you can still see heretofore “untested” talent and movement art creativity. But the studio’s all-woman management and staff are not just prepared to look at and even take a chance on what an untested creator has got up to, the venue is optimized for the task. Taken materially and morally, Regard du Cygne creates the sense of “being-there-with”, the key, for me, to appreciating, especially, new, untested work.

Regard du Cygne is a materialization of an intimate setting.

Its railroad-flat style ticketing, reception, kitchen and bar area, along with a well-apportioned performance space of polished parquet, bare stone and ancient beams are better than functional. Seating on good Lego-block-like bleachers is perfectly adequate to the usual slightly-less-than hour-long dance performance, is flexible and wastes no space; light, sound, visuals and acoustics are as good as any.

An interior door at the top of the performance space leads into a building that serves as a back-stage and as dressing and stock rooms. Most important, perhaps, the building serves as the upper wall to the central cobblestone courtyard. The courtyard overflows with green, mostly flowering, plants; furnished with some camp tables, chairs and a bench, it’s a natural meeting space for spectators and creators alike.

Intimate, professional, unique, with deep roots in Paris’ contemporary dance performance scene, Regard du Cygne was the perfect venue for a debut of contemporary dance-performance from Korea.

I hope it becomes a permanent anchor point for Festival S.O.U.M.

From theater to performance: “Waiting for Godot” in Ivana Muller’s “Slowly, slowly … Until the sun comes up” [by Tracy Danison]

*Peter Woodthorpe asked Beckett one day what “Waiting for Godot” was really about: 'It's all symbiosis, Peter, it's symbiosis,' he said. Woodthorpe played Estragon in the first British production. - Wikipedia. Photo © Atelier de Paris

When I was a student in the mid-70s, Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot was to modern theater what Macbeth was to modern tragedy. How did the Vôlkischer Beobachter headline the Warsaw Uprising? That’s it, Godot was “A Reminder & a Symbol!”.

Or so it seemed to me.

At the very least, a fellow felt obliged to at least recognize references to merit a place at the department cocktail.

In fact, at some point in the late 60s, I’d been precociously corrupted by my late brother, Peter, already a student. We shared a taste for literature and vast distrust of those set above us.

Peter had introduced me to Godot up on our old Victorian-style house’ widow’s walk. We used in those days to sometimes hoist ourselves up there to smoke cigarettes. Good view and absolutely safe from fretful busybodies.

At the time, I was swatting away to make a “cloud chamber” – promoted by my Dad’s Scientific American as an easy way to prove in your own home that atomic particles do exist. From there, I expect I hoped to show that Jesus was just an undisgested bit of beef and that sex was just fine.

Peter was learning Godot for English and brought the playbook up there with us.

I had a cursory look and, for commentary, made a rude noise.

But Peter said, not for the first time, something like, ‘No, no, you’re wrong,’ stood up, straightened himself and read a few lines while galooting (carefully!) on that narrow patch of lead, tin and slate of a perch. From further talk and his intensely sincere galoots, I managed to understand that, in his opinion, Godot wasn’t about what was or wasn’t said so much as howthe performers were in saying it. Also it was a really good play.

When I later saw Godot on stage, as my brother predicted, I did get carried away by the shuffles, glances, pauses, postures and bits of chat. And it was a really good play for that not for whatever flakey story it was telling.

This walk down lit-crit memory lane is owing to thoughts following on Ivana Müller’s performance-theater piece, Slowly, slowly… Until the sun comes up. Also involved: Atelier de Paris, a chat with a fellow spectator, a few hurried words with Müller herself and a pretty long bike ride through woods and town at night.

I went to see Slowly, slowly…  without many expectations; I avoid reading the notes before a performance. The only work I had seen from Müller, as far as I can recall, is Hors-Champ (Off-field), an in situ performance, part of Lafayette Anticipations’ Echelle Humaine 2019 dance-performance program.

Before going into Slowly, Slowly… space, spectators must, at a minimum, get rid of their socks and shoes and put on clean socks. This done, they enter the space: long benches set in a square around a large performance space. Swathes of beige or grey cloth fabric cover spectator benches and performance space alike.

Just as in life, Ivana Müller’s “Slowly, Slowly… Until the Sun Comes Up”, ends when the performers roll up the bedclothes. Photo © Atelier de Paris

Taking my place, I had the impression of leaning over a sunken space… like a wrestling or orchestra pit.

A variously zippered full-cover tarp let Slowly, Slowly’s three performers – two men and a woman – pull out and use long strips of different-colored material for activities in the course of the performance.

The piece ends when the performers roll up the tarp.

Three minutes of dialogue into Slowly, Slowly and Waiting for Godot popped into my head. While performers try to smooth out wrinkles or straighten or dress up in the fabrics nearest them or pulled out from under the tarp, Slowly, Slowly’s dialogue turns mostly around performers’ dream monologues. The monologues, and short commentaries related to them, are allusive and evasive, crafted to avoid conclusions. Performer verbal and physical interactions point toward patterns and place and then, since there are no theres there to worry over, simply change the subject, vary words and syntax and indirection a little.

Three minutes after realizing this, it occurred to me that Ivana Müller’s performance space had re-created in my mind the “sleep and rassle pit” – you could sleep there any old way you wanted ­– my folks put into the family’s summer cottage. And because it puts physical place in the place of story place – no street corners, no chance meetings, no slaves, no masters: no literary clichés, no ongoing other stories to pursue (WTF? A sleep-rassle pit? What’s that mean? What story’s that from?) – that’s all very different from Godot.

And 10 minutes after I realized this … I was completely carried away by the shuffles, busywork, glances, pauses and postures and savoring the bits of pointless content in the chat. Chat that felt much more like my son’s text messages than Estragon and Vladimir’s cracker-barrel philosophizing. And all in the comfortable framework of a private memory, evoked by Müller’s psycho-socially- informed, as opposed to literary-politically-informed, stagecraft.

Once the performance was over, the person sat next to me, a performance scenarist as it turned out, took the performance completely in stride, volunteering among other sharp observation and praise, that she also sloughed into memories of sleep-overs: an experience of positive feeling, a sense of moments of friendship and intimacy.

When I told Ivana Müller that I’d been struck by the Waiting-for-Godot in her Slowly, Slowly…, she told me she was unfamiliar with Beckett’s play.

I believe Müller.

My brother, though dead, was wholly right to look at Godot as about being how, rather than saying what. Then contemporary and later critics, along with Becket himself, on the other hand, thinking that the piece was about how to say what, were only almost right.

It is the greatest modern play but that is because it resembles theater so little and contemporary performance so much. It’s a transition piece.

Beckett struggled to get where he goes and struggled even more to understand where he’d got to.*

Seventy years after Godot – and still without a critical framework for un-narrative to account for it!  – Ivana Müller just doesn’t need to think too much about shaping movement, place and sound to make “performance-dance” that gets beyond words.

Have I mentioned that Slowly, Slowly … Until the sun comes up, as well as Samuel Beckett’s number, has that special piquant that makes good performance?  Put Ivana Muller’s Slowly, slowly … Until the sun comes up on your bucket list and you won’t go wrong.

… and Débussy, too: Josephine Tilloy, Thi Mai Nguyen, Lisbeth Gruwez & Claire Chevallier

“Prémisse”, Thi Mai Nguyen. The Princess soliloquizes the “commemoratio dilemma”. A man of infinite jest. Photo © Danny Willems

Etoile du nord and Théatre de la Bastille recently gifted me a little trinity of dance jewels: Josephine Tilloy’s Evila and Thi Mai Nguyen’s Prémisse at Etoile and Lisbeth Gruwez who danced pianist Claire Chevallier’s Débussy’s Piano Works at Bastille.

Keep them all in mind.

Evila and Prémisse were part of Festival ZOA, Zone d’occupation artistique, a woman-centered production effort that is new to me and, at view, full of promise.

Because politics or culture issues tend to come down to positions, they don’t usually work for me as themes in movement art. I say this as a person who supported Bill Clinton’s position on criminal justice and now wonders every night how much of that cop’s weight on George Floyd’s neck was mine.

Anyhow, as poet Robert P. Tristram Coffin noted: “Alexander Graham Bell did not invent the telephone!”. It’s is life experience plus imagination what does that. Movement art is the art of experience plus imagination. So movement art can’t really get across unrealized “positions” or “points-of-view”.

With well-thought out visual choreography and physical talent, Evila and Prémisse manage get to get well beyond positions and points of view to experience shared with spectators and a broad space for imagination. With the same result, like a magician who bears a flame in the palm of her hand, Lisbeth Gruwez manages to turn an interpretation of Débussy’s Piano Works into a moment where personality, material, movement and sound are music.

Josephine Tilloy’s Evila works on the plan of Wildman Fischer’s Merry go round (1968): once you realize that the up and down is intimately linked to the round and round, in the head a light comes on. Tilloy puts onto a carrousel and in harness and swimsuits the three delicate be-tutu-ed dancers who usually go up and down under glass with the minutes and hours on the mantelpiece. The carrousel turns and turns and these objects – they are objects! –  of housewifely charm churn to objects of sexual fascination, females, pole dancers, orderless cluster-fuckers… If I’ve got rollout, scenario and imagination all undone and mixed up, blame the transparency of the choreography. Also its effect: an existential nausée in the sense Sartre meant it – This here here is a construct.

Considering the affinity men and women generally feel for each other, the deliberate, enforced inequality of women and men puzzles me. Apart from forcing humanity into the roles freed-man overseers, camp guards, prisoners and, as Christine & The Queens put it, “Half-ladies”, inequality strangles love.

I think Thi Mai Nguyen’s pointing the baffled affinity from first to last explains a large part of my strong feeling for Prémisse (“Beginning”). The show notes of begin with “Kali est sans limites, s‘éclatant sur la piste de danse. Une main d‘homme la prend, elle le fait danser.” It is a really lovely solo dance performed with (an seeming preternaturally) beautiful body to a choreography that’s meant, I think, as narrative mime.
What I saw on stage was woman discovering desire, then its traps: dress, nakedness, affinity, dance, love … not a relationship… a situation she must, can’t, doesn’t want to, escape. Instead of sleep, she discovers blood and a bodiless male head in her bed … She must compose herself with that… situation, too… turns the dead head on its head, births it, turns the man into her baby, herself from object of love to giver of love – very psychoanalytic. But the long and short of it is that Thi Mai Nguyen’s dance makes a myth for today’s Kali  – paints a dilemma and its impossibilities that grabs the spectator by the throat. Good stuff.

As to Débussy’s Piano Works and its magician.

Gruwez’s “solo” is actually a quartet of pianist Claire Chevallier in play, Débussy’s music, the personality of Chevallier’s Erard pianoforte and the dance between Gruwez herself and Chevallier-the-pianist-at-play.

It’s been a while – and between pandemic, Putin’s war and the rising tempo of climate catastrophes, what a while it’s been! – so I can’t say if Dancing Bob Dylan was the last time I saw Lisbeth Gruwez perform or if it’s just the particular pleasure at the memory that makes me think so. However it may be, the magic she uses for Claire Débussy’s Piano Works is very similar to and has very much the same result as Dylan.

Gruwez has a choreographical sense grown out of what I think of her “casually precise” intensity. I’ve watched her off-stage in a crowd. She’s John Keats’ Empathy, smoking cigarette after cigarette, La Part de l’Autre moving within and away from friends, fans and strangers alike. Her intensity, I think, is made from an uncanny awareness of both what is on her plate and just how it gets eaten: awareness of the qualities of the space around, awareness of the presences of its human and not-human inhabitants, of phenomena happening, awareness of her own proprioceptive processes. It’s this casually precise intensity that makes me remember her dancing Dylan: a process of going from understanding the great poet, dancing his rhythm, seeing his images, to caressing the moment of making.

In Piano Works – Débussy, Gruwez uses her casual precision to show – as a magician shows a miraculous flame burning in the palm of her hand –  pianist Clair Chevallier within the complex of relations of people, things and sounds that shape into “music”.

For my money, in Piano Works, it’s opening the piece by “unsexing” herself and Claire Chevallier that works the initiating spell of the performance. Casually undoing an expectation about the duet, unsexing unlocks other energies: the same effect as Lady Macbeth’s invocation. Other energies make it easy to believe what you want to see, makes seem be.

Other energy enables dramatic tension, which, gives Gruwez the chance to casually and precisely distance herself from her interpretative role to give the performance its autonomy. Gruwez, who has strong natural equilibrium mixed with years of body training, wears a set of tippy-slippy deck shoes to falsify that. As well as the visual dissonance, the resulting slight physical tension has her say to onlookers, “I’m not interpreting Débussy, see. I incidentally heard a snippet of Preludes (or something!) from a window by chance open to the rain – makes me wiggle a little. I’m out for fags, actually”. In other words, forget the magician, look to the palm: there’s Chevallier’s straight back, concentration, her attention, her regard, herself, her bench, her limber fingers listening, hands like bobbins weaving the discerning sound of that ancient, enormous, looming piano. Piano Works – Débussy is itself. The moment you see is its music.

Whether she’s made of sugar and spice and intensity casual and precise, as I’ve suggested, or something even finer, Lisbeth Gruwez is a performer to see.  Be sure to look on her troupe’s site if you’re out exploring in France – you might catch her in one of those surprising local culture spaces. 

Ballet de Lorraine Season 2022-23 #2: a tale of sentiment and feeling [by Tracy Danison]

Loîc Touzé’s "No Oco". Photo © Laurent Philippe

There’s a lot of contrast – in chronology, in genre, in philosophy – in Ballet de Lorraine’s 2022-23 season. I expect that’s why it has opened with Loîc Touzé’s No Oco  (Portuguese for “Not empty”) and Maud Le Pladec’s Static Shot. Though the choice of Le Pladec, born in 1976, and Touzé, apparently not born on any particular date in any particular year, is played by the ballet communicators as generational, the contrast goes to what dance does and how the choreographer gets to it.

Loîc Touzé and Maud Le Pladec are and were both top-line dancers. Le Pladec has danced for Touzé choreographer among many other of today’s frequently billed dance folk. Touzé danced for the Paris Opéra from an early age before getting out of classic dance and into real work. The shared starting point is important because the one and the other choreographer have the dancer’s attitude that dance is enough. Dance is a natural phenomenon. The spectator will naturally follow if the dancer dances right, according to the wordless but universal alphabet.

Touzé’s dance appeals to my un-worded sentiments. I’ve had a faible for Touzé since I saw, in quick succession, his Form simple, a dance through the Goldberg variations and Je suis lent,”I’m slow”, Touzé’s Conférence dansée (“Danced Talk”) on his life in dance.

In Goldberg, Touzé manages to locate the sheer deliciousness of Bach’s freed-up creative flow by invoking the sounds and movements of his (Bach’s) time. Je suis lent is like contemplating one of my own possible lives. In both, the choreography turns dance movement so personal that it becomes an invitation to share the moment, if not the skin, of the performer. In both these creations and others, music is danced over. It is not a background but a tool for adjusting how movement is understood.

The same intimacy-producing approach is at work in Ballet de Lorraine’s version of Touzé’s No Oco. From a stage cut in half by a long and broad bench (like a frontier), performers casually experiment a ceaseless and unstoppable flow of relationships over musics recalling different rhythms of life … It just seems to happen…

Like a lot of things here-below, No Oco ends in a rather haunting a capella.

Maud Le Pladec’s dance appeals to my un-worded feelings.

Maud Le Pladec's "Static Shot". Photo © Laurent Philippe

In contrast to Touzé, Le Pladec is, as her presentation video, Créations 2009-19, tends to show, for performers and spectators alike, mostly exhilarating. Where Touzé uses music to gentle spectators into attention to performer movement, Le Pladec uses it to thrust her performers and, with them, spectators, into a physical and visual kaleidoscope of thrusting arms, stomping feet and untamed hearts: feeling, not sentiment.

When she’s obliged to put on heels, Karine sometimes will parade around the room pumping her butt and crying ironically, “Fuck me! Fuck me!” Essentially, that’s what Static Shot does: parades around shouting “Fuck for peace! Fuck for love! Fuck for fun!”. Except it’s no joke. Performer and spectator share a shot of pure energy – the eroticism is an incantation, not the thing itself.

Static Shot, as close as you can get to a hip-hop chorus-line march with majorettes without actually being a hip-hop chorus-line march with majorettes, flows pure energy (through music) into the natural sensuality of fit, willing bodies and envelops spectators in an attentive fugue.

Static shot is good stuff. Also it reminds audiences that contemporary dance is earth and air, that it handles feeling andsentiments certainly as well as break and ballet. Better, maybe, because freer.

Put Maud Le Pladec and Loïc Touzé on your bucket list.

Ballet de Lorraine Season 2022-23 #1: the easy confidence of lovers [by Tracy Danison]

 

View of Stanislas Square from the Opéra National de Lorraine. Architecture, culture, venue, the city of Nancy’s a little jewel of a big provincial town and a good place to be. Photo Patrick Maheul

A few hours watching Ballet de Lorraine interpret Loîc Touzé and Maud Le Pladec in Nancy’s opera is luxury – quality art, choreography, culture, lovely venue, a little jewel of a big provincial town with nice shops and restaurants, friendly people.

The neat and spacious neoclassical-cum-art deco city is a good place to be.

If Nancy opera director Petter Jacobsson and his crew are working with the tourist board to bring weekenders to the city, they’re doing a job that merits twice whatever the contract might say. But, in a wobbly-minded act of panicky post-Covid foot-shooting, I am sorry to say, the regional authorities have just cut Jacobsson’s already-strained budget by 10% across the board.

There’s no other ballet company with quite the group vibe of the Ballet de Lorraine. They radiate the easy confidence of lovers. Whether at their home in Nancy or on tour, I come away from a Ballet de Lorraine performance feeling as if I’ve made acquaintance – acquaintance with somebody else’s sense of the world.

I think this sense is down to the company’s diversity. Not so much a diversity of morphologies, postures, ethnicities. That’s just a mirror of France today. More important, “diversity” seems for them an expression of the right to be who one is on stage: an individual person, a distinct person, even in a group of individuals.

"No Oco", Loïc Touzé. Photo © Laurent Philippe

Their performance style certainly gives the person space.

The company doesn’t seem to work so much to a standard as within parameters: through a mix of individual interpretations and a will to fuse talents, they seem to work towards a cumulative act of imagination rather than to an ideal enforced by instruction and correction. The result is that I find myself less admiring the execution of a phrase than waiting for what comes next. As a narrative of movement, they are more thriller than romance.

There is something of the high-wire acrobat ethic in the Ballet de Lorraine: in the end, good performance, group confidence and staying whole amount to the same thing. I am thinking especially of Machine de Cirque, the Québec troupe whose approach ensures that “mistakes” come out as exciting “variations” on their flow of titillating antics, at least for the audience.

"Static Shot", Maid Le Pladec. Photo © Laurent Philippe

Click to get a taste of Ballet de Lorraine’s “perfection in execution” through time and mix of choreographies.

Ballet de Lorraine’s 2022-23 season has opened with program 1 featuring Loîc Touzé’s No Oco  (Portuguese for “Not empty”) and Maud Le Pladec’s Static Shot.

Both pieces have in part at least been created as part of the opera’s celebration of the community of creators, performers, artisans and citizens that make it up and carry it forward. Program 2, in April 2023, also feature new creations, Rarity, by Adam Linder and Dancefloor, by Michèle Murray. Program 3, in May and June 2023, will do a mix of modern dance legend, commemoration, remix, contemporary, invited repertory and classy hip-hop – Sounddance, For Four Walls, Air Condition, Un Boléro, Cela nous concerne tous (“This concerns everybody”) and Earthbound. I am looking especially forward to Un Boléro, choreography by Dominique Brun and François Chaignaud, noting that Chaignaud’s Souflette got me appreciating old-style camp. Also, he’s always wild, or tries to be.

Ballet de Lorraine (and its host city) are worth a train ride.

Diversity is the key success factor behind Ballet de Lorraine: the right to express the individual person within the company’s endeavor. 

Diversity is the key success factor behind Ballet de Lorraine: the right to express the individual person within the company’s endeavor. 

 

Selling on the edge, g’bye hoopla and two contributions: Rituel N°5, Françoise Dupuy, Laura Sheleen & Elizabeth Regina [by Tracy Danison]

The humus fanatic has it right. Once dead, our contribution evolves. Photo © Romy Alizé

Rituel N°5: La Mort by Émilie Rousset and Louise Hémon produced at the Atelier de Paris earlier this month drolely and elegantly highlights how commercial culture manages to spew up a honey-mouthed and optimistic “business of death”. It has a wonderful cast, too – Barbara Chanut, Mohamed El Mazzouji, Anaïs Gournay, Manon Hugny, Damoh Ikheteah, Tom Pezier, Arthur Rémi, Ophélie Ségala. Together, they deftly negotiate esthetic and useful multimedia into a quick stand-up theatrical style. Special kudos to a pale blonde enthusiast for humus-processing corpses (Manon Hugny) and to tubby-tummy Kevin’s pre-sales “aperitifs of death” (delivered by Tom Pezier).

Rituel 5 reminded me that a lot of well-known figures, with more or less laboriously managed hoopla, have lately been shuffling off the mortal coil.

I’m particularly thinking here of the late Queen Elizabeth II, celebrated for discretely holding her nose and dispensing charity with cypher-like poise! All for nearly three-quarters of a century! Duty, it’s called. The woman’s remains enjoyed a seemingly infinite state-subsidized swan song: “Je meurrss, je meurrrrssss, je meurrrrrrrrssssss”. Cats! Or, rather, Corgis!

It’s a shame that funerals like the defunct British queen’s suck up so much otherwise obviously available social oxygen, leaving us all that much more stupid.

The distraction of the famous funeral makes it hard to remember that the dead do contribute more than fat fees for thepompes funèbres and the lawyers. That’s because, in a certain way, Rituel N° 5’s pale-haired humus-fanatic has it right. The dead are destined for the humus bin. That is, once dead, our contribution is freed up to evolve autonomously.

Settling back on my blood-red Recamier, turning my eyes skyward, I descry three types of dead: empty dead, personal dead and spiral or Fibonacci dead.

If the UK’s late queen has symbolized poised nose-holding these many years, dead, she’s as empty as Wednesday evening’s rubbish barrel. Dead, public projections seek more lively targets, such as her boy, Charles; although a very expensive one, absent the symbol, her husk, royal as may be, is a husk and she’s got a place among the empty dead.

The personal dead are just the opposite of the empty dead, who have been, essentially, public receptacles. The personal dead affect the matters around which one arranges one’s own life – I think of the personal dead as adding an un-calculable heft to a person’s skipping stone just at it smacks the water. Or as an analogy of entanglement, the phenomenon that lets two separate things be in the same place at the same time and very evidently different.

Among the recent personal dead, Françoise Dupuy, 97 years old, checked out in mid-September. She was, along with her husband, the still-living Dominique, teacher to and choreographer for many of France’s now-senior and influential choreographers and dancers. She’s buried in Père Lachaise, where all mourners slip into the lost funeral scene from Les 400 Coups for a time. Dupuy believed, I have been told, that dance exists to let a body be authentically themself.

A couple of months back I had the pleasure to interview Laurence Bertagnol about her open-to-all-comers “research” dance group. Laurence now runs the dance and music program at Conservatoire de danse et de musique Erik Satie Bagnolet, the place where Jaque Charaund developed France’s contemporary dance scene with his Ballets pour demain and Concours de Bagnolet. Françoise Dupuy taught Laurence Bertagnol to dance.

When Laurence and I met again at the opening of the Regard du Cygne’s Journée de Matrimoine celebration, her mouth twisted in a mild consternation, Laurence told me she was feeling Dupuy’s death. She explained that, although she had broken with her many years ago, Dupuy was her “other mother”, her “dance mother”. With a sigh as soft as a cat’s laugh, Laurence adds that she had always been fearful lest Dupuy and her birth mother should meet… She broke with Dupuy, because, she says, “I wanted to dance like me.”

In the way the “arms” of a galaxy define it as a galaxy distinct from a spray of stars, the spiral or Fibonacci dead link the vastly different into vast units. That’s why shapes and things in the universe describe as forms of infinite spirals or Fibonacci series.

I learned about this while – or, perhaps, because – my late brother and I were munching celery stalks in the kitchen at my folks’ one night. As I now know, certain dead among us also descry as spirals or Fibonacci series.

Just the day before getting the news about Françoise Dupuy from Laurence Bertagnol, I was also at the Regard du Cygne, to attend an homage to Laura Sheleen, of whom I had never heard. Laura Sheleen died not forgotten in 2021 under Covid lockdown in a far-suburban Ehpad –établissement d'hébergement pour personnes âgées dépendantes – a public old folks home.

I supposed that, like Françoise Dupuy, Laura Sheleen, who came to France after dancing with Martha Graham, was a teacher and choreographer, one of the personal dead for the pretty large crowd of people participating in the homage.

She is that, surely, for life-witnesses such as, among others who danced and explored the world of the mind with Sheleen, Amy Swanson, founder and recently-retired director of the Regard du Cygne or Viviane Thibaudier, a Jungian psychoanalyst or Anna Alexandre, a specialist in theater therapies and behavior psychology or, again, Jabrane Sebnat, a sufi dancer and a psychotherapist.

But, as I began to listen and then to read through the little front-back photocopied program, I realize that Sheleen was one of the spiral dead, one of those whose contribution describes the shapes of the world: a powerful advocate of and innovator in understanding the function of dance chez nous. Through dance, Sheleen worked with myth, masks, movement and space on the problem of individuation. Not forgetting Eve Alexandre’s excellent short films on the application and effect of Sheleen’s approach(es), professional-witnesses for her contribution were enthusiastic working psychiatrists, behavior, dance and theater therapists …

According to a German architect anthropologist who happened to be sitting next to me, Sheleen is especially known for her work on the role of space in “proprioception” – knowing where you are.

In an act of illuminating synchronicity, the remarkable choreographer and dancer Yasmine Hugonnet clarified this idea the next day in her new performance, La Peau de L’Espace (“The Skin of Space”), premiered at Lafayette Anticipations, 16 September. Hugonnet says, if I understand her, that proprioception is a feedback loop rather than a plug-in: you need space around to know where your body is but your perception creates and recreates that space. You can’t get it going by plugging in a model. In the same way that a water pump has to be primed with water, proprioception takes priming with movement, gesture and place. Sheleen’s contribution helps people on the autism spectrum or with behavior difficulties or psychoses find a better space in the world.

Happy trails all.

"Double Agents: Lynn Chu and Glen Hartley" [by Kelly Jane Torrance]

<<< As first-years [at the University of Chicago], Lynn Chu, AB’77, JD’82,and Glen Hartley, AB’77, met in Social Sciences 101—and began a conversation about books and ideas that shows no signs of ending.

Hartley recalls the course’s “wonderful teacher,” Donald Levine, AB’50, AM’54, PhD’57. He has even more vivid memories of his feisty fellow Burton-Judson resident. “Lynn was always very good at debating,” he says. “I’m a very argumentative and opinionated person,” Chu agrees. He studied English, while she majored in geography and went on to the Law School. A shared love of the written word brought them together, personally and professionally.

Today, Chu and Hartley are married and are the principals of Writers’ Representatives. The literary agency’s client list includes some of the country’s most talked-about thinkers: Harold Bloom, Norman Podhoretz, Clarence Thomas, Amy Chua, to name just a few. A number are notable UChicago alumni, such as historian Gertrude Himmelfarb, AM’44, PhD’50, and New York Times columnist David Brooks, AB’83, and faculty, like law professor Richard Epstein and Divinity School professor Jean Bethke Elshtain.

The agents are trailblazers in the book industry. Chu blames their agency for “perpetrating the formula” of the book proposal after a page of advice for their clients got handed around and began to be used by first-time authors. Chu is known as a tough negotiator, to the glee of clients and, sometimes, to the chagrin of editors. Publishers “are not worth three times the author in terms of the contribution to this enterprise,” she bluntly says about electronic royalty models. She’s worked hard to help scuttle the recent Google Book Search settlement, arguing that the terms were unfair to authors.

Chu and Hartley are passionate about their work but got into it by something of an accident: Hartley wanted to see a favorite writer back in print. He was marketing manager at Cornell University Press when he discovered English novelist-poet John Cowper Powys. “I eventually tracked down the rights to the agency in London, and that agent granted me the right to represent the estate in North America,” Hartley explains. “We sold two books to Harper & Row, and Lynn negotiated those contracts while she was in law school.”

When Chu graduated, the pair moved to New York. She worked as a lawyer in corporate securities while he continued in publishing, first at Simon & Schuster, who asked him to stop moonlighting as an agent, and then Harper & Row.* There Hartley helped open a new division devoted to software, but the publisher folded it without even releasing its star product: the late science fiction legend Thomas M. Disch’s Amnesia, billed as the first interactive novel and eventually published by Electronic Arts. “It was before its time,” Hartley says of the work. His section shuttered, he decided to change careers—with his wife. Writers’ Representatives was born in 1985.

“Thanks to the University of Chicago, I had a great deal more sophistication than anyone else out there. Every publisher was a mess at the time. The contracts were ridiculous,” Chu recalls. The legal documents tended to be one-size-fits-all. “We saw that we could do a lot in terms of ginning up competition, using the market to serve our clients’ interests better.” Agents and publishers alike have attained a higher level of sophistication in the past two decades, she says.

Writers’ Representatives has many of the country’s top conservative intellectuals as clients. But Chu and Hartley weren’t on the right themselves when they started. “Glen and I both realized that we were not conventional left-liberals by approximately 1986,” Chu says.

Their political transformation was a reaction to intellectual currents in academia. “I never had any exposure to structuralism or deconstruction as an English major,” Hartley says. But at Cornell, he promoted some of the earliest books on the subjects published in America. “I was fascinated at first, but then sort of repulsed.” When researchers discovered four years after Yale deconstructionist Paul De Man died in 1983 that he’d written for Nazi-controlled newspapers in his native Belgium, the couple asked a friend from Ithaca, poet David Lehman, if there was a book in the scandal. “And he wrote a brilliant book, called Signs of the Times, that was one of our early sales to Simon & Schuster,” says Hartley. Around the same time, some scholars wanted to extinguish “the whole concept of a canon, which is like doing away with the Core curriculum,” Hartley notes. “That led us to Harold Bloom and our suggestion that he try to write a book on the canon. That became his book The Western Canon.”

Many clients are also friends. Which helps, because in Manhattan being a classical liberal, as Chu describes herself, can be a challenge. She talks with a laugh about being “cold-shouldered” and “axed from all parties for being conservative.” She might be jesting, but Writers’ Reps has lost clients because of its principals’ politics. When Chu published a poem in defense of the Iraq War in Harper’s, Toni Bentley, author of The Surrender: An Erotic Memoir, changed agents.

That’s a rare occurrence, however. Other clients speak of Hartley and Chu glowingly. “They’re part of the literary world, not the world of percentages and negotiations and deals,” says David Gelernter, a professor of computer science at Yale and cultural commentator whose books include Drawing Life: Surviving the Unabomber. “Lynn has a lot to say and speaks passionately and prophetically—she’s kind of a literary prophet. Glen is quiet until he has the exact truth in his sights and then speaks memorably. They’re one of the leading literary couples in New York—in other words, in the world.”

Andrew Ferguson, a senior editor at the Weekly Standard, refers to them in the acknowledgements of his latest book, Crazy U: One Dad’s Crash Course in Getting His Kid into College, published last year: “They combine to create the ideal agent with a one-two punch that strikes fear into the stony hearts of publishers and inspires gratitude in the trembling heart of a writer.”

The couple work and live in a light-filled apartment in the West Village with an Airedale, a wirehaired pointing griffon, and a new chocolate Labrador retriever puppy. Books are everywhere, the overflow spilling into the hallways. “The physical reality of books is still relevant,” Chu says with a wry grin. Hartley says their life is “like a continuing education. Lynn and I continue to debate like we would have in classrooms in Chicago.” Chu differs with that assessment, a little. “Glen has good taste in books. Anything he likes is good.”

from Core, College Magazine of the University of Chicago. The Writers' Representatives agency also represents (or has represented) A. R. Ammons, Jacques Barzun, Nicholas Basbanes, Wayne Booth, Tom Clark, Douglas Crase, Michael Dirda, Gearld Early, Victor Davis Hanson, Manuela Hoelterhof, Eric Jager, Roger Kimball, Hilton Kramer, Sue Mingus, Diane Ravitch, and Ruth Wisse.

* Correction: Lynn Chu worked in corporate and entertainment law at Rosenman Colin Freund Lewis & Cohen. The firm merged some time ago into Katten Muchin, whichis now called Katten Muchin Rosenman.  Judge Rosenman was the right hand man to FDR during the New Deal and WWII period.