34. Turnover: Ballet and Film Reviews by Cheryl S.
Analyzing the films Johnny Guitar and Desert Fury at the suggestion of the French entrepreneur Mme Beach, I have taken copious notes on the Joan Crawford and Mary Astor roles. I suppose my eventual ballet would be expected to show an authoritative ballerina defending her various rights, maybe to her corps de ballet? Perhaps some sort of territorial conflict would be illustrated and resolved in my choreography? I’ll have to talk with Liane about this when we have our next Skype chat. The French sensibility is both heady and so willful.
In the meantime, Master Raro reports that Albertine and Paco are hard at work each night on their performance art piece for MoMA’s new center for media and experimental works, the Kravis Space. (A&P’s plans for Chinese projects seem to be on hold because of Hong Kong riots and the latest coronaviral threat. Ditto for Louise’s pet movie plans.) A&P presumably aim for a spring premiere on Fifty-Third Street. As a current MoMA press statement has it, “Suddenly art could be anything, and everything could be art.” (My Louise says A&P will undoubtedly test that statement to its limit.) Master Raro keeps a stealthy eye upon the A&P rehearsals on the Tower’s thirty-fifth floor and relays that the feline corps de ballet has to be seen to be believed: spectacular.
My Sandy is looking for a small gallery in the meat-packing district to present our Master in their new dance solo, Oestrus. Louise is willing to allow this preview as long as the venue is indeed very obscure. I asked her what she thought of Sandy’s choreographic work. “Visionary,” was her reply. What, I asked, did she think of my Nekomata, in comparison? “Charming, charming, my dear,” was the answer. I have to think about those responses. (No self-doubts, just certain questions.) So many changes in store, and I welcome eventual certainties; indeed, Sandy and I are in serious holding patterns until Louise and Liane decide how to contract us (or not). As Master puts it, life is like an Antonioni movie, where every character is either frightened of change or represents some form of rapid turnover itself.
Talk about turning times! Sandy and I have been going to New York City Ballet’s winter season repertory performances. A matinee caught last week featured younger ballerinas in the lead roles of all three Balanchine rep works. This must be a sign of how deeply the company is experiencing a transitional state. Sandy was most taken with the casting of Danses Concertantes. Brittany Polllack took the ballerina role created in 1944 by Alexandra Danilova (revised or recreated in the 1972 Stravinsky Festival version of the ballet). Her partner (our 2020 Frederic Franklin) was Daniel Applebaum. Sandy says that Balanchine’s ballet reminds him of Frederick Ashton’s Scènes de ballet (1948), as an attempted reconstruction of The Ballet following the near collapse of European civilization from wartime havoc. What could be left of this noble art? Balanchine was able to use the brilliantly unpredictable, spikey music of Stravinsky’s concert score to suggest the possibilities still left in the remaining stylistic shards and formal fragments of The Ballet. He is able to resuscitate the victim under the banner of commedia dell’arte frolics, a return to gallantries suggested by the musical score’s mix of jazzy vaudeville rhythms and long-lined plangent melody. The scenery by Eugene Berman refers to the artist’s “Figures Among the Ruins” locales. Arriving from Europe and entering New York harbor in 1933, Balanchine is said to have eyed our Manhattan skyline and commented to a friend, “So you, too, have your ruins.”
The young Pollack knows how to keep her counsel amid the delicate Balanchine break-downs in classical decorum. She is particularly witty in the early pas d’action (marked “Con moto”). (Pollack also looked strong in a subsequent performance of Jerome Robbins’ Opus 19/The Dreamer.) Applebaum is a delightful dance stylist in what young Brits now call “bants” (ludic banter); as a New York choreographer I am, of course, a connoisseur of all courtly ridicule. (Another stylist in the current cast of Danses: Jonathan Fahoury in the fourth variation, marked “Tempo giusto”.) Balanchine and Stravinsky keep the mood of this ballet light and playful. But underneath, a serious issue is raised: artistic resurrection. When and where do we want to be reminded of the high-style past? To be in dialogue with such a tradition requires true courage. We have to go beyond mere revivalism. Balanchine did.
The young ballerina Mira Nadon now dances Monumentum pro Gesualdo and Movements for Piano and Orchestra. She brings a punchy attack to the surface of the two ballets, a skill which gets her through obvious technical treacheries. The challenge is to honor the shaping of the work in its underlying momentum and formal design, allowing passing surface punctuations the lightest of varied emphasis, as though near thrown-away decorations. Thereby, a fresh freedom is suggested from within the dance ritual. The ballerina must establish her own through-line on top of an “eccentric” choreographic plan. I am certain that Nadon will continue to work toward liberation. Monumentum evokes states of spiritual reserve and achieved calm. Movements carves out new areas of dance and musical time. There is a great deal here for a ballerina to explore.
What weakens much new choreography today is the tendency to shape dance materials on the surface, what is sometimes called the “facture” of the work. The contemporary dancer-maker often provides a performer with few transverse supports underneath. That is why we in the audience eagerly look for a ballerina who can discover her agreements with what lies below surface display. The younger generation (but not Sandy and yours truly) often goes for ready force and steady dazzle, perhaps hoping to distract the audience from what’s missing. Sandy says that much dance writing in the press has become an equivalent form of flash, publicity prose, replacing analysis with advocacy. Punchy surface dominates.
In Stravinsky Violin Concerto, Claire Kretzschmar is so skilled in Aria One, most of the movement tensions of the original Karin von Aroldingen role are missing. Casting is likely the problem here. The physical resistance that was once necessary for the role’s textured acrobatics has disappeared. And in Aria Two, the very talented Emilie Gerrity is passive aggression personified. She is the femme fatale who fascinates by doing little to seduce. She is too cool to lure. In this lies a fascination for both her partner and her audience. I am, of course, interested in Balanchine’s awareness of the hold of the feminine upon the male, or the male’s semi-conscious estimation of such grip. Wasn’t Balanchine the least bit embarrassed at the confessional aspect of his female portraits? He probably assumed we would understand where he stood as the inevitably observant artist-analyst or self-styled victim.
Sandy and I also caught Tiler Peck and Roman Mejia in Balanchine’s Allegro Brilliante and Sara Mearns’ debut in The Firebird. Both ballets depict the formation of social groups. Tiler Peck’s ballerina role galvanizes her followers – the corps de ballet (which otherwise would go around in circles without her lead) and her adoring partner (who sometimes stands apart to observe) – and she teaches them to be grateful for her brilliant dance example. In The Firebird, Prince Ivan battles monsters, falls in love with a princess, and forms an autocratic State, with some help from the supernatural Firebird. Peck and Mearns had no trouble convincing the audience of their individual authority, whether in helping to build a court or form a country. Their examples made me think of Danses Concertantes in a new way: in wartime, Balanchine was rebuilding an art from the remains of the day.
Sandy and I have been noticing how many contemporary movies deal with attempts to overturn the status quo or breach established boundaries. In Nadav Lapid’s Synonyms, a disaffected Israeli youth, Yoav (played by Tom Mercier), arrives in Paris avid to become a French citizen. He falls under the patronage of a well-to-do young couple who offer aid initially and then find ways to exploit him. Emile (Quin Dolmaire) is a blocked writer of fiction. He borrows “stories” from the Israeli youth. Caroline (Louisew Chevillotte) is a man-eating oboist who casually adds Yoav to her collection of sexual conquests. Synonyms is unsparing in its view of both raw émigré ambition and French attraction-repulsion before the Other. How can current Europe deal with engulfing immigration? The performance of Mercier as the Israeli lad has been praised internationally; it is his debut on film. He is referred to at home as the “French James Dean”.
The Assistant, directed by Kitty Green, documents the realization of a young woman (who dreams of one day becoming a motion picture producer) that the film industry casting couch continues in full operation in an age of Harvey Weinsteins. The movie is good at documenting the small humiliations of office work in a big city. Julia Garner’s down-turned mouth and pale visage as entry-level “Jane”, trapped in her job as assistant to another predatory entertainment mogal, will haunt the dreams of all future producers-in-training. The low definition of the film’s digital cinematography will send many a moviegoer to an optometrist. Even more blurred is the figure of Jane’s employer. He is kept at a discreet distance, a demanding voice rather than a physical presence. You need an appointment to confront this monster. The point of the film is its implication that a smallish industry (movie-making) is sustained by mutual blackmail between Old Boys on perpetual sexual prowl. “You may have something on me, but I can end your career dreams through sudden rumor or slow punishment.” This is show business: the devil wears a Sundance puffer.
In both Synonyms and The Assistant, the result of gate-crashing is a strong evocation of personal solitude. Instead of becoming part of a larger society, the individual is isolated in his or her struggle. The future is not comforting. As my favorite poet Lionel Johnson puts it in “The Dark Angel”, they proceed “into the Lone”.
Bertrand Bonello’s Zombi Child spends a great deal of time attempting to communicate the particulars of Haitian zombie folk rituals. The director cannot be accused of failing to show the difficulty of integrating such religious impulses into modern French society. What is weak in his film is its portrait of European school girls, including the Haitian teen, Mélissa (played by Wislanda Louimat), who hopes to join the larger European community. As long as we are in the sugar cane fields with the slave labor of drug-induced zombie-workers, we in the audience understand where we stand. But as soon as we are lectured by the lycée’s professor on the many failures of the French Revolution, the mind drifts. The implication is that the girls’ minds also wander. No wonder a contemporary student, Fanny (played by Louise Labèque), falls in self-punishing love with a gypsy boy (he comes complete with expensive motor bike) and has to consult a local French zombie priestess to exorcize his hold. Bonello has been good in the past on the subject of the contemporary young (see his Nocturama). But nothing quite convinces in the dialogue for the students in his new film.
Interestingly, Sandy and I are in agreement that the best new movie we have encountered is a sci-fi adaptation of H. P. Lovecraft’s story “The Colour Out of Space” (here retitled Color Out of Space). An alien force arrives courtesy of a meteorite that lands on a family’s woodland property in New England. The alien presence (seen as an ambiguous color or mixture of colors) poisons local water and crops and drives a pride of prize alpacas beserk. The family members (father, mother, two sons, and a daughter) rise to the occasion by becoming even more themselves in the face of the invasion, and there is a suggestion of a kind of cosmic merging between rampant visitor and game hosts, messy as the process can appear at first shock. There is one sequence involving a suffering mother and child that is deeply disturbing, but I mean that as a compliment because a type of Ur-surrealism was always meant to upset or radicalize its devotees. I am therefore forced to mention (and at Sandy’s insistence) such analogous incitements to felt horror as the films of Buñuel: Los Olvidados, El, and Nazarin.
Color’s director, Richard Stanley, is famous for having been fired after two days of work on the Marlon Brando The Island of Doctor Moreau. Now, twenty-five years later, Stanley has delivered a genre masterpiece that does honor to the film tradition and to Lovecraft. He has written his own modernized screenplay with Scarlett Amaris. Visually, Stanley has a talent for wrapping the environments of his film’s action around his performers – whether an idyllic landscape or a domestic interior. Setting is always immersive. The virtuoso cinematography is by Steve Annis. The sound design is by Olivier Blanc and the music by Colin Stetson. Not the least achievement of the movie is the performance of Nicholas Cage as Nathan, proud paterfamilias and defender of his country estate. Cage’s portrait is layered in unleashed compulsion, sly ventriloquial allusion, and dark humor – so that eventually you almost see him becoming the visitor from deep space right before your eyes. There is something Kabuki about Cage’s ready descent into the diabolical. And Stanley’s movie has its metaphysical ambitions, many of which it realizes. Aren’t all good films really meant for specialist audiences, depth-charged in their effect? If you have a taste for Lovecraft’s cosmic horror, I can’t recommend this movie highly enough. It overturns barriers and replaces its landscapes with aplomb. I understand that Stanley plans another H.P. Lovecraft adaptation next: The Dunwich Horror.
Master and I have been taking a Pilates class, where I spoke to him briefly about the mystery of A&P’s no-show on the night when we explored the couple’s lab residence. Master says he will speak to the Tower’s building supervisor, Mr. Pessoa. There may be a logical (rather than a Lovecraftian) explanation for the pair’s nocturnal disappearance.
C.S.
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