Suppose you bought from some strange little art gallery in SoHo or River North a wonderful, magical painting that–after you’d hung it up and were reclining in contemplation of it–suddenly began to play music.
Rapturous, vibrant music of the sort that might produce lively images in your mind, even if there were no painting to look upon.
And suppose further that, as you continued to gaze upon the painting and absorb the music, the human or animal figures on the canvas began to move about in extraordinary patterns that caused the painting to constantly recreate itself.
And suppose as well that there was not simply one of these wonderful, magical paintings available to you but a seemingly infinite multitude of them–paintings with music and movement that retold classic old fairy tales and Shakespearean tragedies, that could evoke the lyrical joys of cowboys in a rodeo or the painful beauty of a memorial for a dead princess.
This extraordinary experience is available to everyone. It is called the “dance.”
Dance is at once a visual and a performing art. Because of its multiplicity of dimensions and vivacity of expression, it is perhaps the most interesting art form we have.
Yet, for the lamentably large numbers of the uninitiated, the words “dance,” or worse “ballet,” produce only boring images of tightly bound up women in tutus tottering about on their toes or embarrassing ones of young men gamboling and gallumphing about in costumes anatomically correct to a fault.
As anyone will attest who has seen the Royal Ballet’s Darcy Bussell or Mikhail Baryshnikov in his prime or films of Chicago’s Maria Tallchief in hers, this is a ridiculous perception even as concerns classical ballet alone.
In terms of contemporary dance, such as that performed by the Israeli Batsheva Dance Company at last week’s opening of the Israel Festival at Washington’s Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, it’s utter nonsense.
Presenting the American premiere of its riotous new program “Anaphase,” the Batsheva Company provided this gun-owning, 82nd Airborne veteran, part-time West Virginia good old boy with more excitement than a dozen Bruce Willis action movies projected simultaneously–though at times that’s precisely what “Anaphase” seemed exactly like.
The opening sequence still has all the nerve centers of my brain thrumming. All 22 Batsheva male and female dancers, dressed identically in very Brechtian black suits and fedoras, sat in a semi-circle of wooden chairs on the hotly spot-lit stage. The musical accompaniment–what sounded like a battalion of Japanese Koto drums–commenced, and the seated dancers began excitedly responding to its staccato beats with increasingly violent gyrations, climaxing with a sequence in which they’d rise from their chairs in turn, in the manner of a stadium “wave,” explosively flinging back their arms and heads as though hit with machine gun bullets, then slumping down in their seats again. After other intricate repetitions of body movement, the machine gun effect would start all over again.
Until finally, with equal violence, the dancers began stripping away their clothes, emerging in dance costumes best described as androgynous underwear.
The rest of the program bounded off into myriad other directions–sensual, droll, comedic, tragic, solemn, mischievous, relentlessly gymnastic and very, very mysterious (as when a seemingly endless procession of black-suited, black-hatted, bare-footed dancers shuffled by across the darkly lit stage thumping plastic jugs together in unison.
It’s part Brechtian, part German Expressionism, part Rene Magritte Surrealism–and yet, something primeval, dance as old as the desert wilds of the Middle East, dance as the first form of human expression.
The Israel Festival–with all manner of dance, theater and musical groups, plus film and literature–will be at the Kennedy Center into April. Batsheva, which was founded in 1964 by Martha Graham and Baroness Batsheva de Rothschild, is touring the U.S. Friday through Sunday it’s at the UCLA Center for the Performing Arts in Los Angeles; Wednesday, at the University of Kansas in Lawrence; March 21 and 22, the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor.
America, of course, has its own fleet-footed free spirits. Among the freest and most effervescent is the Joffrey Ballet of Chicago, which recently featured a deft production of the 1917 Jean Cocteau, Erik Satie, Pablo Picasso collaboration “Parade,” that quite fixated me as the only manifestation of Cubism I ever really understood. You will find paintings with music and pictures that move in abundance in Joffrey’s stylish interpretation of “Apres Midi d’un Faun” by Claude Debussy, and their own lighthearted and aptly named “L’Air d’Esprit.”
No one has yet found a way to actually hang ballet dancers on a wall–though I suspect the Batsheva is working on it.
