27. Widdershins: Ballet and Film Reviews by Cheryl S.
Since I was eager to teach my new dancer, Master Raro, the Nekomata partnering role that Paco was to perform with Albertine (and may still), we got permission from dear Louise to use the Tower’s thirty-fifth floor dance studio two afternoons last week. Of course, I wanted Sandy on hand to observe and contribute notes, especially to encourage him toward new ideas for the video he’ll shoot if A&P ever decide to end their strike and get back to work. It was strange returning to the space, not only because it reminded us of what we had failed to bring to completion over the hiatus but also because of the nocturnal Open Door adventure that Master and I had the week before (see my Blog 24). Of course, it was inevitable that I would ask Master to let me inform Sandy about the specifics of that evening. He finally agreed. (I think the usually understated Master has enjoyed getting back to performing and enjoying the material I’ve made.) Sandy was all ears.
Once informed, Sandy – being the true live-wire among us – begged to be allowed to investigate the curious situation downstairs: the door to the A&P lab that should have been safely closed. At first Master was hesitant to approve, but Sandy was insistent, and though I was just as curious and fascinated, I had to restrain myself so as not to overwhelm or embarrass Master. Here was Sandy’s plan: he would hide himself overnight in the central observation room of the studio behind its two-way mirror and see what is going on (if anything) after hours. Master eventually capitulated, probably because he felt the ploy would lead nowhere. So Wednesday last, Master conducted Sandy into the hidden vantage and double-locked him in at 7:00 p.m., first securing the observation room itself and then locking the big laser-latched door out front. When the night was over, Master was to return at 7:00 a.m. to liberate Sandy from his overnight perch. Twelve hours later, my Sandy indeed had a story to tell when the three of us met for breakfast at the Blue Bottle around the corner.
Sandy reported that at first he almost fell sound asleep from growing boredom, but his iPhone (muted) helped him to stay awake. The studio space was lit by a single night-lite, filtered through the chamber’s two-way mirror. The observation room itself was kept black except for the light from the iPhone screen. Nothing. More nothing. And then about 3:00 a.m. the door of the studio that led to A&P’s lab opened, and there was an explosion of felines into the dance studio, followed by Albertine, berobed in black! Sandy was wide awake at their entrance. He reported that A. walked to the center of the room and slowly began to turn in place, like a dervish. The twenty-one cats watched her at first and then began to circle around her, all in the same direction, as her acceleration increased. And the cats kept up at speed! Sandy called it a “widdershins” (counter-clockwise) turn and circle, and the amazing thing was that the felines seemed almost trained to propagate A.’s central spin. This went on for, like, fifteen minutes, Sandy insisted. He almost got dizzy from the maelstrom. When Albertine finally slowed to a stop in the middle of her vortex, the cats did, too. And then she walked slowly back into her lab and the animals followed her, as though used to the nocturnal ritual. Albertine reappeared in the darkness of the portal and carefully closed its door. That could explain why Master and I found it open when we made our recent secret foray into the lab. Albertine may have forgotten to cover her tracks on another night.
Sandy claims that a widdershins turn is meant to cast off or exorcise whatever needs to be ridded from an environment, at least in certain esoteric cults. He encountered this particular concept watching underground films about the magus Aleister Crowley, but Sandy never expected to see such a ritual in real life. “Maybe Albertine’s a witch,” offered Master. I suggested she is working on choreography for a performance art work. (MoMA’s new performance space may have inspired A&P toward further creation.) Sandy theorized that, for all we know, the observed ritual may be carried out every night as a practical means of giving the animals much-needed exercise. Maybe because of lack of sleep, Sandy seemed shaken by his discovery – so unlike him. We three agreed to think about whether to inform Pippa about the spectacle (much less our Louise). Master thinks our employer would not be surprised at the news, although she might be upset at our snooping under her very nose and without her knowledge. Master and I don’t want to lose our jobs. When we parted, Master said, “This is all very Jacques Rivette.”
I decided to take Sandy to a matinee at American Ballet Theatre. (Watching dance always calms him down.) The repertory program began with the complete version of the great Balanchine’s Apollo, with the god danced by the young Korean-trained soloist Joo Won Ahn. It was Ahn’s second appearance in the role after an earlier debut. Sandy and I were very impressed by his interpretation. Ahn is alert to the rhythms of the choreography and to Stravinsky’s score. There is a lively weight in his attack that brings a dignity to the role. And his arms and back are eloquent in ways that other male dancers attempt but without Ahn’s precision and economy. Ahn’s dancing suggested fresh ways to approach a classic work.
Sandy holds that Balanchine’s ballet is about the arrival of a new god – the shock of his coming, the way he lays waste to old ways of perceiving things, and the new, terrifying knowledge that he brings. The ancient world referred to such an event as an “epiphany”, a term invented to honor the sudden insight that must arrive from bravely encountering such a god and his aborning truth. The advent of such knowledge usually takes a new form, sometimes even a style of chthonic “anger” or rejection toward an older world that has resisted the arrival of a novel, dynamic presence. (“Widdershins”, indeed.) Yeats referred to such an event as the approach of a “rough beast”. You can intuit something of the concept in the old folk saying: “The truth came to light of itself.” An awareness of the birth of such an earthshaking volatility is sometimes termed an “apparency”. In the old Chaldean world view, the number 7 was associated in numerology with the idea of such a fundamental forthcoming, the recognition of new authority, as in the phrase “heir apparent”. Balanchine has exactly seven dancers in his Apollo: the god himself, three muses, two handmaids, and Leto, the god’s mother.
Balanchine plays with the quicksilver, but manifest, imagery of the dances in this ballet. The shapes and allusions in its movements and poses appear and disappear lightning-fast. This aspect of the work reminded Sandy and me of types of Oriental theater which stress appearance and disappearance, for example certain exquisite theatrical effects in Kabuki. There are Japanese films that use the rapid opening and closing of domestic sliding doors to substitute one figure with another. I was also reminded of those Japanese puzzle boxes which have hidden chambers accessed through sliding panels. Balanchine even uses a sudden dramatic blackout after the birthing scene. What is going to be revealed further – and what will its style and form tell us? Balanchine has Apollo hop down from beneath the stairway when he is born; and the Muses hop off stage laterally when they exit before their solos. I wonder if Balanchine saw examples of such basic effects – perhaps in Russian folk theater – when he was a student in Saint Petersburg?
The idea of theatrical “presence” has its magical, even mystical implications for stage spectacle. Did we see what we thought we saw? So many details in the movement scamper by. Which reminds me: Sandy says that there is a version of Apollo called Apollo smitheus. In ancient Greece, mice were indulged in temples dedicated to Apollo and to Aesclepius, the healer. The creatures were there to feed the holy snake that was used for prophecy in Greek religion. Thus, the Balanchine Apollo may be a ballet “mouse” who grows up. That would explain why the choreographer sometimes referred to the role as representing the god as a “little devil”, a mischief-maker or demiurge. The role would then involve a being who is obscured or hidden at first and then become super-evident: a god apparent.
It would also explain why the birth scene for Leto is en face. Sandy says that the elder Balanchine is reported to have found her opening labor contractions to be “too Martha Graham”, but the sequence indicates how dedicated Balanchine could be to presenting what needs to be seen in terms of spectacle. “You have to show,” he would sometimes tell junior choreographers. (Noted.)
The two handmaidens initiate the process of unwrapping the infant Apollo from his swaddling clothes. They rotate in a widdershins direction, and then the god does multiple pirouettes turning clockwise en dehors, finishing the self-disclosure out of the indicated physical process. Apollo has discarded his divine placenta to finish his release into the world. (Rather like those ghostly Giselle hop-turns that allow her to shuffle off her mortal coil.) This brings up the question of whether the godling is “taught” during the ballet. Stravinsky insisted that Apollo at birth already possesses all of his divine attributes. But Balanchine’s stage spectacle uses gestures and reactions that can indeed suggest instruction. Or perhaps the god is reminded of his innate gifts rather than enduring their inculcation. We are watching not the interaction of balletic “characters” but individuated steps in a process of a progressive apparency. The educational metaphor allows the choreographer to introduce intervals in the complete unveiling of the new god. A seeming act of instruction is not “personal” but rather descriptive of a further power of the god. He is eventually fully presented in all of his aspects.
The handmaidens ceremonially present his lute to the godling, and his initial strumming evokes the three Muses, who appear magically at corners of the stage. The Muses are presentational in their style of address to the situation: they frame their faces within upraised arms en haut. But, interestingly, Calliope and Polyhymnia are individually shy before the god. Only Terpsichore confronts him directly and makes a point of revealing how such address can lead to his own ability to appear fully before mortals and fellow divinities.
The first two solos for the two Muses are formally conventional. Calliope (muse of epic poetry) depends upon lyric inspiration, and we see its impact and the power of the divine afflatus upon her. When she needs to replenish such a gift from its source, in the middle of the solo we see Calliope’s search for new inspiration. But when this muse attempts a further poetic statement, it turns out to be deficient in eloquence. Spent, Calliope approaches Apollo with caution. She turns her head away as she presents her latest effusion; the god also averts his face.
Polyhymnia is the muse of mime. Her technically demanding solo before Apollo shows off her virtuoso dance abilities, which are displayed with one hand silencing her voice with an upraised finger before her lips. Her mistake at its finish is to “vocalize” accidentally – rather like those disappointing dance works where performers resort to actual earthbound words in the middle of their movement. Apollo rejects Polyhymnia’s effort by shielding himself with both hands and turning his face away.
Terpsichore’s solo is not generic. It is very Balanchinian. So direct are the dance’s contents that the god is given full evidence of the virtues of the presentational. She begins her dance by holding her miniature lyre overhead, part of a frame for her countenance. Terpsichore’s opening movement phrase involves looking under an upraised arm with a tour-chassé out of the brief pose. She repeats the phrase as though indicating how direct a gaze can be. (Interestingly, some Eastern peoples employ lowered gazes in social address; perhaps Terpsichore is a Westerner.) Toward the end of her solo, she performs a lunge-pivot which then evolves into a presentation of an arched pointe pressed upon the stage floor. The ballet choreographer Matthew Brookoff referred to this conceit in his essay “Terpsichore’s Secret” (Ballet Review, 32.4, Winter, 2004), a close reading that I consulted and recommend highly. The Muse boldly approaches the god and then invites him to join her in discovered mastery of self-display.
The god’s great subsequent solo begins en face – no hiding. It confesses its dance metaphors (toreador, eagle, tightrope-walker) fully. There is no poetic blur about their suggestion of power and autonomy. ABT’s Joo Won Ahn has a dynamic stability in this solo and eloquently plastic arms and hands in the “electric signage” moment. Although Ahn is classically articulated in his limbs, he is also able to strike home with a sudden unitary effect through the full length of his figure. He launches Apollo’s arrows straight to their target.
In the central pas de deux, as Apollo reclines on the stage surface, Terpsichore steps across the pair’s joined arms into an arabesque and then promenade-turns widdershins into a deep penchée. She thus bows before the god, issues an invitation, and, upon his consent, leads him onto the dance floor. In their pas de deux, Apollo returns the lesson learned and “presents” Terpsichore as his partner.
In the ballet’s coda, following a brief duet for Calliope and Polyhymnia, Terpsichore enters between them so that her sister muses frame her news of the god’s growing presence. And now Apollo “slides” from the wings onto the stage and unleashes those brilliant airborne twists. He has become Apollo architectons, an integral part of the ballet’s Attic landscape and its extension into the complex play of artistic form. Balanchine allows him a jazzy syncopation in his advances and retreats, forward and back, before the Muses and the audience.
In this ballet’s final scene, the call from Father Zeus indicates that Apollo must now present himself on high as a new god. He heeds the call from Beyond. He must ascend Parnassus toward the abode of the gods and take his place. The Muses will watch him depart knowing that they have participated in a process that permits his acceptance among the higher council.
Interestingly, the ABT repertory program ended with Deuce Coupe in which choreographer Twyla Tharp is studiously “non-presentational” in a Judson Church ensemble style, except when she presents a ballet vocabulary “in quotes”. When Tharp attempts classical movement outside a meta-frame, she can become verbose and inflated, as Master Raro reports she does in her new work for ABT this season, A Gathering of Ghosts.
Sandy and I also took in the new Robert Eggers film, The Lighthouse. Eggers was the director of the 2015 movie The Witch, which I admired enormously. The new movie appears to be inspired, at least in its basic situation, by the 1929 Jean Grémillon film, The Lighthouse Keepers. (Grémillon was not only one of the greatest celebrants of dance on film as a director but also a composer of movie music, or so Master Raro advises.)
Eggers uses the silent film aspect ratio for his new movie and intense black-and-white cinematography. He has put his two male characters in a lighthouse through more than a month of extended isolation and close proximity, and the result is psychological cliché. The most predictable moment is when Willem Defoe’s older Thomas almost kisses Robert Pattinson’s young Ephraim on the lips, which leads to extended ultra-violence. Eggers’ 2019 audience is way ahead of him. The young fans of horror-film bloodshed are not going to be satisfied by exaggerated mayhem over such an issue. Perhaps what Eggers’ chiaroscuro cloaks is the director’s own inability to formulate a directorial style of address toward depicted homosexual relations. But if you evoke such a subject, you have to show it fully, as Balanchine advised. What could be preventing Eggers from presentationalism at the movies in 2019? Perhaps the horror film genre itself has become limiting for directors like Eggers and Ari Aster (Hereditary, Midsommer). Today’s public is much more adult than such movie-makers realize. Eggers and Aster may suffer from an “adolescent” sense of their themes. What price must we pay for an auteur’s rejection of his own demons, if that is what they are? Many of us saw Ingmar Bergman’s Hour of the Wolf years ago. Now there was a cinematic exorcism.
Which brings me to the obvious question hereabouts: What situation is hidden in the laboratory on the thirty-fifth floor of Ebersdorf Tower? Where were Albertine and Paco on the night they left the lab door open and Master Raro and I explored the premises? Perhaps Albertine is, indeed, planning a performance art work of her own, one involving twenty-one felines? Master, Sandy, and I must pool our thoughts. The truth will out!
C.S.
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