51. Approximations: Revived Dances on Video, reviewed by Sandy
Cheryl and I are refining the details of our new Visions, a suite of solo dances on the subject of Joan of Arc to the music of Franz Liszt. Whenever I give notes to Cheryl, I inevitably use words to circle about the core “meaning” of the individual dance, a delicate matter in mid-process. When the dance is finished and performed before an audience, there will then be time enough for what will be called “interpretation” – for that is what such verbal sallies represent, approximations of the gist of the dance matter. Reviewers can take over at that point. Professional ballet coaches can resurrect at their best. If you circle the subject with enough precision and imagination, the dancer (or the audience) may be able to triangulate from your commentary an emerging central motif or theme, glimmering on the eventual horizon. At least that is what good coaching and criticism aim to accomplish. (Perhaps that is why so many contemporary dance critics sound like wannabe coaches.) The dance remains itself, but rationales for our various responses can vary widely in acumen and savor. I’m now inevitably functioning as coach-critic of my and Cheryl’s new dance as we refine its particulars. My notes can only approximate or encourage what the dance qualities were originally in my imagination and in Cheryl’s pressured responses. But taken as approaches to fugitive impulse and variant shaping, they obviously have their practical value.
I’ve come to realize that only if you wish for solitary appreciation of the best art can you be “against interpretation”. As soon as you formulate a reaction to a work, you are interpreting it. And since you are often using a shared “language” to make your mental comment, you are evoking a ghost of the secret sharer. You can then decide whether literally to transmit your insight to others. By using words (or even alternative gestures) to describe an aesthetic response, you may be starting another by-way toward further creation. (And what’s wrong with that?) “Against interpretation” can mean, at its most restrictive, “for solitude” and “against further artistic production”. That kind of restriction can result in a Great Silence during intermissions at the ballet. And perhaps even a near stoppage of classical invention.
I am moved to these thoughts by watching dance streaming on the Internet these pandemic days. Studio 5 from City Center recently presented a coaching session that illustrated how effective the uses of “interpretation” can be in restoring an old dance to new life: Stephanie Saland’s exacting session coaching Tiler Peck in Jerome Robbins’ two-minute solo for the Girl in Green from Dances at a Gathering. Peck is extraordinarily responsive to such coaching, and Saland – who distinguished herself in ballerina roles by Robbins and Balanchine during her twenty-one years on stage at New York City Ballet -- uses a wide range of techniques to approach the dance under inspection.
In this case, the solo is identified with one of NYCB’s beloved dancers, Violette Verdy (who originated it and in fact became an extraordinary coach herself). Saland emphasized how sensitive and precise Verdy’s balletic footwork was (Verdy was Paris-trained). There is a pas de bourrée transition for the Girl in Green that allows the ballerina’s cultured pointes to reveal themselves in all their half-pointe beauty. It’s like that moment in the Verdy solo in Balanchine’s Emeralds, where she is allowed to lift her tutu in front to frame her footwork. Saland also pointed out how plastic the Robbins’ solo can become in the performance of a veteran. Actually, there is a video on YouTube that shows the mature Verdy in Girl in Green. She has transformed the dance into something like a dramatic characterization, I believe at some distance from its underlying scaffolding. Saland emphasized how the skeleton of the dance awaits the “flesh” that a performer can ultimately reveal around and about its dance core. How interesting that Robbins (the taskmaster) would allow a Verdy her freedoms. Although, come to think of it, perhaps that is the very subject of this particular dance.
To my eye, there is a Leonid Massine-like style to the Girl in Green solo, not only meditative and improvisatory but with suggestions of a self-agented “drive” – very like the take-no-prisoners impulse behind Massine’s own performances, which one can see in films and videos. The influence of Massine upon Robbins would probably have taken effect during his days dancing with Ballet Theatre. There is a sort of cat-like awareness of the audience – an almost animal indifference and a slyly granted brief acceptance – that I discern in Massine’s presentation of his performing self. A version of this is in Girl in Green. But most young dancers today would not necessarily know the stylistic marks of Massine the performer. A coach may have to find a way to evoke them by other means.
That later Verdy video is declamatory, almost oratorical in its delivery of a dance persona, and this contradicts something she once said about the difference between dancing Balanchine and Robbins. Balanchine, Verdy suggested, is the danced equivalent of singing lieder or delivering an operatic aria. Robbins, on the other hand, is like muttering to yourself, an artful mumble, the opposite of a grand presentational style. (Robbins loved to tell his veteran dancers to “take it easy”.) Possibly the Verdy of the video is attempting to lift her dance out of self-communion toward a heightened public delivery and to create a “character” thereby that contrasts with all of the other denizens of Dances at a Gathering. Robbins may have been impelled to include NYCB’s unique ballerina in his ballet’s personnel, and so a special opportunity had to be created for her.
That would make the Girl in Green solo a good example of a choreographer creating a work out of the unique dance persona which the performer’s repertory and range have outlined suggestively to the dance-maker’s eyes and which he can make more visible in a new work. It is also a good example of how the materials of such a choreographer are not mere classroom qualities in the classical vocabulary; they are the transformed versions of such a palette which has emerged from the advanced art and technique of the individual ballerina. It is from such a highly cultured source that we choreographers make dances.
There is a rare French video of Violette Verdy coaching Paris Opera Ballet dancers in Balanchine’s Liebeslieder Walzer. In those sessions Verdy draws upon her background of French ballet training and her grasp of the Romantic conventions of social dance, how human “relations” are built into the very texture of the ballet’s dance movement, as well as Balanchine’s poetic impulse in the individual roles and partnering. Verdy’s overview of the ballet is what impresses. Stephanie Saland obviously has a special insight into Robbins’ over-arching themes and methodology. She contextualizes the Girl in Green solo through her large grasp of Dances. One wonders if Saland herself received any direct coaching from Verdy during the young ballerina’s early years at the company and before Verdy’s retirement.
In coaching Tiler Peck, Saland drew upon a variety of allusions to disciplines familiar to today’s dancers, for example, martial arts, biomechanics, yoga. This approach contrasts with those ballet coaches who use the “This is what I see” formula for advising a performer, a presumably objective technique that can avoid giving a dancer necessary information in physical or movement terms. Dancers may wish to be given solid advice on how to produce a detail in a dance. In the Studio Five program, Saland was careful to deal with the “how” as well as the “what”. And Tiler Peck – currently at a peak of artistry in her work at NYCB -- was quick to reply to Saland’s suggestions. The two seemed on a common wavelength.
Saland identified the solo’s references to popular culture, evoking Astaire’s and Rogers’ action-response partnering moves; and a punctuated passage, she pointed out, was “very Fiddler on the Roof”. The Robbins solo is a little catalogue of many of the dance styles available to him throughout his careers on Broadway and at the ballet. Broadway encouraged a mélange of dance fashions out of its roots in revues and music-hall spectacle. I suspect that Robbins retreated to NYCB whenever he wished to refine his materials and to restrict his palette. There are some of us who even respect his Broadway contributions over his balletic achievements.
And Saland was not afraid to use verbal metaphor in describing a dance quality. “It’s like a vortex” she suggested to Peck in order to emphasize the repetition and climax in a passage. When considering the Robbins style overall, Saland indicated his play with lower and upper body articulation, sometimes in sync, sometimes in tensed opposition. This lively upper body gloss on what the balletic legs are doing is one of the marks of a demi-caractère style. (Lincoln Kirstein was particularly aware of Robbins’ predilection for this balletic mode.) And Balanchine may have been impressed with the invention that Robbins was able to wrest from such an approach. “How does Jerry do it?” Mr. B asked one night of a dancer while both were watching Dances from the wings. Balanchine may have been remarking such a self-imposed reliance on demi-caractère and how much Robbins was able to draw from the style.
What the eventual Saland-Peck version of the solo suggested to me is that the Girl in Green is imagining all the theatrical personae that she may one day evoke through future choreographies. Tiler Peck herself has recently shown an interest in dance-making. She can possibly identify with that topic. I have seen only a limited number of her recent choreographies (and those only on video), but I can already admire the way she presents her dancers – as though their dance personae are under close inspection and will be treated with respect by the dance-maker in their derivation and tradition. As a result, you meet new versions of Tiler Peck’s dancers. They are recognizably themselves and yet freshly seen. How interesting that it might take a lead ballerina to make vehicles out of the balletic tradition for her fellow dancers at the company in 2020.
The Saland-Peck video also suggested how a dancer makes an inherited work her own. (In this sense, the resultant approximation becomes a new dance with a close relation to the original.) The ballerina must invest the work with a clarified image that grows out of her own most discriminated choices. A good dance leaves a memory image that is composed partially of motifs from the plastic outlines unique to the individual performer. In classical dance they may be derived from her sculptural qualities or from her dance movement, which is distilled from her versions of a rhythmic impulse and from her achieved temporal continuity. This enriched extract is what is missing from most choreographies for ballerinas today (if you ask me). The images left behind by too many new dances may be “innovative” notionally but remain unrelated to the already achieved dance personae of the individual executants and to their tradition.
Needless to say, I hope to follow more close collaboration between artists like Stephanie Saland and Tiler Peck. They have lifted the discussion of serious balletic values to a new level on the Internet.
Another recent video – The Philadelphia Matter – 1972-2020 – has been available on the Philadelphia Fringe Festival Internet website for free viewing and will continue to show through October 4. The program contains excerpts from three works by the postmodern American choreographer, David Gordon: Song and Dance (1979, reworked 2020), Close Up (1979), and Chair (1974). A variety of current dancers who have worked with Gordon are featured, but we also see clips of Gordon and his wife Valda Setterfield in past performances that now have an archival feel to them, mostly because of the quality of the video image, which has changed over the decades. I was pleased to see the older footage because it corrects many mistaken assumptions (especially by European dance makers) as to the nature of the Judson Church-influenced schools of local choreography from the 1960s and 1970s. Gordon’s work is much more acerbic and much wittier than the versions of the postmodern we see in new twenty-first century dances that claim a place in that lineage. For that reason, The Philadelphia Matter, has a serious reason to parade its accomplishments, both recorded and revived.
The other reason to watch is to see the dancer Valda Setterfield. How smart of Gordon to have a wife so articulate (verbally and bodily) and so stylish. Stephanie Saland was one of those ballerinas produced by New York City Ballet who always brought a sense of style onto the stage, a sensitivity to evident, immediate choice-making. I’m referring in the examples of both Setterfield and Saland not only to their ability to become a part of a dance work’s world of choice-making but the sense of meeting a current sensibility in full flower on the stage, in temperament, dress, and artistry. It’s equivalent to meeting a “real person” in what we call our real lives. Watching Setterfield in Close Up and in Chair, you sense her background in dance (especially her years with Merce Cunningham) even when she fits herself into her husband’s quite different theatrical and choreographic forms. There is a kind of immediate commitment in her movement with Gordon that is unique – a trust that is also a kind of tacit guidance. Agile as Gordon’s mind is (and we get plenty of that in his verbal sallies), his physical persona can take on an overbearing quality when pushed. And yet there is his wife, Valda, complicating the visual effect with movement qualities that lighten the joint delivery, finding a more direct gesture in the midst of the choreographic ironies, locating a sentiment beyond the verbal. Setterfield guards the work from becoming overdetermined and twee.
The Gordon theater-dance language is a kind of code that has been created over decades of practice and formulation, and The Philadelphia Matter provides a guide to breaking that “code”. I know a kind of viewer who resents being asked to overview such a project, but it is really no different than following a contemporary painter as she or he moves through various styles and methods toward finding a personal idiom. What is required is a kind of patience and a kind of persistence in seeing the world through an artist’s eyes as those organs locate new objects of contemplation and possible understanding. I suppose the paradox in this case is the speed with which dance moves from mode to mode, matter to matter, in contrast to the long-term devotion of the dedicated artist, in this case Gordon’s (and Setterfield’s) half-century of persistent regard, now marked in a video document of only one-hour’s duration. The single real criticism I have of the program is my lack of patience for insistent video graphic design. Approximating Gordon’s playful nonsense patter with screen-filling texts that repeat the choreographer’s verbiage can feel overbearing and quite superfluous.
Does video art ever evidence anything like a real “style” in its own terms and out of its own range of technology? Perhaps it would take a new Andy Warhol to discover that missing element, just as it takes a Valda Setterfield to make you notice its media absence. Just a question.
Cheryl is anxious for me to see the early sound movies of Nancy Carroll on the Internet. They are mostly pre-Code, she says. Now there was a new medium in search of both style and content. Even its approximations toward those ends were and are fascinating. I’m there.
S.
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