35. Catechisms: NYCB and “The Lodge” reviewed by Pippa Hammet
Another dream! And Murr as its only begetter? Last Thursday evening, my dedicated tomcat and I were in our usual bedtime positions – yours truly curled up in my four-poster, with Murr stationed above and behind me on the headboard, ever watchful of his mistress. In my dream, I found myself being led by him up the steps in what appeared to be an interior fire stairwell. Up and up my lithe guide took me, from floor to floor in diminished light. Now and again Murr would pause and look back at me, checking my progress, urging me on. We passed from landing to landing, on some of which there was the odd cardboard box of kitchen utensils, including what appeared to be silver spoons. Finally, after what seemed a dream eternity, we found an ultimate door marked “EXIT’ ahead of us. Murr stopped, turned, and stared at me, which I took to mean that my dream-self should give it a try. The heavy door opened, and, lo and behold, we were on the windy roof of Ebersdorf Tower! I recognized it by the scooped postmodern crenulations around the parapet and the massive central sculpture of the black oil well derrick-styled communications tower. Underneath the rigging, swathed in what looked like gleaming oilcloth, a female figure stood gazing into the distance -- Albertine!
My Murr turned to me, as though recommending his prize catch of the evening, and as he swung about, my pet seemed to grow in size, becoming a six-foot feline rearing upright on two mammoth hind legs before my astonished eyes. When Murr swung his forward paws back toward Albertine, she caught sight of the two of us. Drawing herself up to an immense height, Albertine boomed one word: “Behemoth!” Murr received the affront on his hind quarters, meeting the terrible tribute. At which point, I awoke. I twisted in my bed and looked behind me. There my Murr sat on high, steadfast and regulation-sized. I was utterly shaken. It wasn’t easy to fall asleep after such a vision, I can assure you.
I’ve told no one about the dream. I’m concerned Mme Sesostris or Master Raro would make too much of it – and Louise too little. So, as a distraction, I grabbed our genius Sandy, and we caught a new movie, The Lodge, which has been advertised as a horror film, but which can be taken additionally as an artful psychological study of paranoia. (How perfect for my mood!) Riley Keough (the actual granddaughter of Elvis Presley) plays a stepmother-to-be, Grace (as in “Graceland”), trapped in a snowbound lodge with two youngsters – a brother and sister – who loathe her as principal cause of their late mother’s recent suicide. Their father, Richard (played by Richard Armitage), had once asked for a separation from the wife-mother, Laura, after falling in adulterous love with Grace. Laura had proved unable to reconcile herself to losing her husband and took her own life. Richard now asks Grace to spend time at the lodge over Christmas holiday with the two children in preparation for his coming marriage with her. He then leaves the three alone together to get to “know” one another while he finishes up business back in the city. A winter storm descends and traps the trio for the duration.
I will not be giving away too much when I confirm that The Lodge has a ghost story aspect. Laura had decorated the lodge with religious art. A portrait of the Virgin Mary looms over the family dining room table. As the movie tightens its grip on Grace, the teenage Aidan, and young Mia, you can interpret certain supernatural events as the revenge of the dead wife-mother against her replacement-to-be. But Grace also has a backstory. She is the only survivor of a religious death cult originally led by her father, the founder of a community that committed mass suicide under his ministerial direction. Grace regularly takes medications to help her deal with this past. The story we witness may therefore also represent the young woman’s descent into a guilt obsession over the omnipresent suicides throughout her life.
On one level, The Lodge becomes a conflict between the potential stepmother’s paranoia and the children’s shared desire for revenge. The obvious model would be Gaslight. In its emphasis on Grace’s suffering, the new movie also resembles Bergman’s Cries and Whispers. The two youngsters are played by Jaeden Martell and Lia McHugh. Both keep their dignity as they limn helplessness and youthful depravity. The lodge becomes a torture chamber, and even Grace’s attempt to escape (she runs out of meds) leads to further punishments. Martel’s Aidan becomes a wily opponent to Grace, rather as Miles appears eventually to take on the governess in Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw. Back and forth, the pair engage in suspicions and taunts. Together, they improvise a catechism of psychological terror, tit for tat, whether self-induced or imposed from without. After all, one possibility is that Aidan is under the control of his dead mother’s spirit and the instrument of her revenge from beyond. The performances by the three leads are sensitive to such nuances.
The movie is directed by Severin Fiala and Veronika Franz, who have a talent for atmosphere, graded suspense, and an interest in obsessive states. (They co-directed 2014’s nip-and-tuck Goodnight Mommy.) The movie’s cinematography by Thimios Bakatakis emphasizes varieties of cryptic ebonies and darkling scarlets. As experienced in a theater, the sound design by Paul Lucien Col includes subtle uses of directionality and a wide dynamic range. When the ice on the surface of a local lake gives way, the aural effect is tectonic.
The two directors also have a skill for motivic rhythms, especially the patterning of window views of endless snowscapes, the recurrent appearances of that religious portrait, the ominous utility of the icy lake, and various quotations from home videos and classic movies on the television, before the lodge’s electrical power fails. The entire middle of the film is sustained with such rhythms: its plot slows and thickens in the artful repetitions. In extremity, Grace begins walking toward a nearby town through the snowstorm. She comes upon an icon-shaped building. No one answers her poundings on the door. But do we not glimpse a figure through a window that looks like the dead cult-leader, Grace’s father? On such ambiguities the film constructs itself.
The very real aesthetics of The Lodge mitigate its fantastic gloom and despair. Of all the recent films that feature the physical humiliation of a lead actress (Hereditary, The Babadook, The Nightingale), this film haunts one. It accomplishes exactly what it sets out to do.
At New York City Ballet, the new Alexi Ratmansky ballet, Voices, puts its female dancers through a gauntlet, but I doubt the choreographer knows what he is after. There are a number of collaborative dialogues here: (1) recorded verbal texts by famous women, including Agnes Martin and Nina Simone; (2) a musical setting of those voices by composer Peter Ablinger, excerpted from his Voices and Piano; (3) Ratmansky’s choreographic response to the texts and musical settings; and (4) the dancers of New York City Ballet, who add a performance layer to the work. (There are also the set and costume designs by Keso Dekker and an electronic read-out of the spoken vocal lines projected against the backdrop, but one has to stop somewhere.) The recorded verbal texts are basically inaudible. The Ablinger imitations of the voices add nothing to them. Ratmansky’s dance movement is another example of how devoid he can be of imagination, dance idiom, and tact. The attempt at primitive imitation inevitably smacks of literalistic ambition on the part of both composer and dance maker. And the variety of dance profiles in the five female solos (Sara Mearns, Megan Fairchild, Unity Phelan, Georgina Pazcoguin, and Lauren Lovette) suggests a choreographer in desperate search of a personal dance idiom – specifically a modern dance language, not one derived from the classical ballet tradition – rather than the use of a developed movement language to say something. In Voices, Ratmansky is in Freudian dialogue with himself: “What does a ballerina want?” His answer: “A voice.” He should know.
Once again in a modern work that calls itself a “ballet”, there are no real roles for the lead dancers and the “star” is the choreographer. Will this contemporary syndrome never end?
In addition, we once again have Ratmansky’s imposition of his own masculine dance style upon a group of advanced NYCB women, creating an effect of ballerinas imitating a narrow concept of modern-ballet flash out of a mediocre male technique. The audience is basically watching five failed danseurs. It is as though Ratmansky longs to create something equivalent to William Forsythe’s attack-oriented idiom but resists that last vulgar punch. (There is even a Forsythean tribute-trick with the falling house curtain at the end of Voices.) The dance finale of the ballet, with a male contingent amid the women, as though accepting them into the boys’ club, is especially unconvincing.
If, thanks to the new cult of dining out at trendy restaurants, there is now a kind of “food porn” advertising livid viands, what Ratmansky effectively sells the NYCB audience is “ballet porn”. I don’t mean the kind of thing Boris Eifman brings to City Center – soft-core sensational treatments of literary and ballet classics and historical figures. And I don’t mean the movie Black Swan. No, Ratmansky gives you something like the cinematic close-ups of plated culinary masterpieces in Luca Guadagnino’s 2009 film, I Am Love. Ratmansky (rather like Forsythe) is able to put a lurid facsimile of ballet on stage without the interposition of advertising prose or a recording medium. Koch Theater audiences are supposed to salivate before the spectacle of five women struggling to look like ballerinas against all the Ratmansky odds – and always failing. You may recall that I Am Love’s wealthy Milanese heroine (played by Tilda Swinton) ends up abandoning her palazzo and cohabiting in a local cave with her young chef-lover.
Happily, NYCB has revived Balanchine’s 1947 ballet for Mary Ellen Moylan, Haieff Divertimento. The ballet is arranged to offer its public a glimpse of a ballet class, as though Balanchine wished to produce a miniature Konservatoriet. The lead ballerina uses her partner for support as though doing early morning exercises at the barre, especially beats and brushings with the lower leg. Later, she emerges alone for a solo that suggests adagio work in center. And the ballet ends with everyone in courtly allegro combinations. The ballerina exits alone at the final curtain as though heading down the hall for yet another class or rehearsal.
As Sandy points out, the motif of pas de cheval-like brushings of the lower leg – a stirring of the immediate space -- is expanded for the men’s group section, where they perform creaturely petit allegro enchaînements just above the floor, as though stroking the air. And the ballet’s women graduate to fleet pointe work, both in unison and with their partners. Each lift onto pointe is an air-cushioned reflex. The clarity of dance movement, the ability of the choreographer to present it in the “round”, and the resultant modeling of the women’s figures are outgrowths of school of Petipa. Balanchine enunciates a modern variant of that tradition. He suggests that stylistic growth will be made possible through a prepared artistic soil.
Balanchine’s version of ballet derives from an understood past, continues that lineage, and aims at a future even in the aborning present. As a result, a personal dance idiom permits formal shapings toward immediate ends. Balanchine is here in dialogue with a true, pre-Soviet Russian tradition. The underlying rhythm throughout is question and response. Unity Phelan made a pliant and touching effect in the lead ballerina role. Divertimento’s final image is of a ballet and a cavalier reaching for something real.
I see that in the American version of The Financial Times, Balanchine’s little ballet has been declared no “keeper”. This is possibly intended as a recommendation for management to discard the work. It may also be a pointed reference to the low number of Balanchine revivals from the distant past that New York audiences were allowed to see during the years of Peter Martins’ stewardship. Martins basically froze the repertory as it stood at Balanchine’s death. (He allowed a revival of the Divertimento in 1993 and then put the work in storage. The Financial Times’ writer would second Martins’ judgment?) What is typical of this style of imperative dance reviewing is its tacit assumption that a primary role of the reviewer is to offer advice to those who run a ballet company. This is the level to which dance writing has descended in our city.
I helped dear Sandy send a rehearsal video of his solo, Oestrus, to Le Swing. Mme Beach was away (she’s in deepest Siberia, looking for new dancers for her Paris company). The video was therefore directed to Isabella Belladonna, lead ballerina, ballet and martial arts mistress, and resident choreographer of Le Swing. I didn’t tell Sandy about my dream.
P.H.
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