3. Quarantined: A Review of “Suspiria” (2018) by Louise Ebersdorf
I swear I’m not Tilda Swinton under yet another pseudonym. As you may have heard, I once owned a ballet company here in New York City, and my old friend Florian always suggested that I record an oral history of the enterprise for the Library of Performing Arts Dance Collection. And the editor of this site invited me to review a new movie by Luca Guadagnino. So here is the combined result, transcribed by Pippa, my bright personal assistant. You’ll soon understand why I have treated these subjects in tandem.
I always wanted a ballet company of my own, and when I found a property (an abandoned livestock arena in the meat packing district), I had a jewel box of a theater erected on the site with my name above the marquee (“The Louise”), complete with proscenium, maximum fly-space, and an orchestra pit for fifty players. The house was in deep red and gold. It took eleven months to build, decorate, equip, and open, and I was so pleased. On adjacent landfill I built rehearsal spaces, administrative offices, and a pier spa, everything to keep the twenty-two classically trained dancers happy. The Ebersdorf Ballet was born.
In the meantime I searched for a creative team from Europe and finally got the highest recommendations for a couple from the Bayonne Ballet, famous for its Basque ballerinas. That’s how Albertine and Paco entered the picture. I rue the day they showed up and immediately removed my treasure’s plush orchestra seats in order to “produce” in the round with folding chairs and risers. That was the first sign. When the pointe shoes from Paris were mysteriously lost in transit, Albertine pronounced, “No problem, we improvise bare feet!” That was the second sign. And then The Louise opened with Paco’s original creation, Abattoir. Third sign. It wasn’t what I would call ballet at all, not as we have known it in my America. The music was heavy metal from a massed ensemble of French-manufactured electric guitars played by batty Goth types hanging out in the flies. The brave dancers were covered in plastic wrap and bar codes, feathers and string. Half the audience exited almost immediately at the premiere, the worst night of my life. I suppose I should have monitored more rehearsals, but my many prescription drugs often caused me to fall asleep in my wheelchair. And my compromised hearing didn’t help. I missed all the signs.
Albertine and Paco were under an air-tight contract, so I agreed they could try again. And again. Paco had such choreographic ambition (Objectifications, Token Passion, Incantation, Duende Dude), and Albertine was so imperious and spellbinding in her black floor-length studio skirts. The local press was not kind. I truly felt sorry for the dancers, who responded to my sympathy (and financial beneficence) with multiple injuries and lawsuits. We disbanded after three seasons.
My lovely theater is now used for fundamentalist church services and MAGA political rallies, although the Whitney Museum has recently inquired about renting it as a venue for its expanding “dance curations”, even offering an A&P retrospective. (Over my dead body.) And since there was a little matter of some funds that disappeared along with the ambiguous legal residency of two “aliens” (you can say that again) in our great country, the lucky pair became my semi-permanent caregivers, accepting the iron rod of American justice and accompanying me to screenings and opening nights now that my mobility is limited.
Which leads me to the film Suspiria. (Talk about limited mobility! Our world is small.) I want to congratulate the Italian director, Guadagnino, for having critiqued an invasive style of European dance that I had to deal with as a native entrepreneur and ballet producer. He has hit the target dead center. I think the clue that gave it all away was the film’s central prop: meat hooks. (Did this Italian-born master somehow hear about my New York company? Is my story not unique? And there’s that coincidence of the credited name: one role that Swinton plays as “Lutz Ebersdorf”.) What the movie would suggest (and my experience confirms in spades) is that we may need mass inoculations or a cultural wall to block a growing epidemic of Non-Ballet and make our theatrical shores safe again. This sort of thing may play as balletic over there in Europe, but it won’t fly here, let me tell you.
My assistant Pippa has pointed out that the 2018 Suspiria screenplay interprets the featured EuroDance in Lacanian terms. Jacques Lacan was a French (!) psychoanalyst (neo-neo-Freudian) who conceived the idea of the Mirror Stage in child development; it’s when an infant can recognize its separate self in a mirror reflection. And, lo and behold, there is a key scene in the new Suspiria staged in a Berlin dance academy studio lined with hundreds of mirrors. Lacan also posited the concept of the idealized fragmented body; and, believe it or not, there’s a sequence in that same studio where a dancer’s physical instrument is broken into CGI fragments by the violent remote-control choreography she is put through by the school’s dance director, Madame Blanc (also played by the versatile Tilda Swinton).
When I tell you that the choreography in the film (credited to Damien Jalet) is two parts Martha Graham, ten parts Pina Bausch, and eighty-eight parts martial arts, you’ll begin to get the picture. It’s the mirror image of my Paco’s socko-jocko style of dance making, very un-ballet. (As I recall there was a good deal of flamenco in Paco’s choreography. He called it his Massine gene.) The film’s Lacanian EuroBallet turns out to be perfect for describing a neurotic atmosphere, and you may not be surprised to hear that under its influence the dance group in Suspiria comes to a bad end. Reminiscent?
Two things really impressed me. When Tilda Swinton as Madame Blanc gives notes and aesthetic TED Talks in rehearsals, she is the very image of Albertine in full caftan fig. My jaw dropped. What an actress! And the film’s script draws parallels between power plays backstage in the dance academy and in modern German history. Pippa says this movie explores psychohistory, like Bertolucci’s 1900. The new film would thus be an elaborate tribute to the aging Bertolucci from a younger film director.
The Suspiria screenplay illustrates Lacan’s ideas about hysteria, how it functions out of an appropriation of the Other’s desire. When the subject (the young American dancer Susie in the film) demands an oracular answer from her authoritative Other (Madame Blanc), she functions as a student-hysteric who needs reassurance and who shows a Neurotic Tendency through her very questioning. Out in the streets of 1977 Berlin (which is the period of the movie’s narrative) there are riots over the Red Brigades’ demands: needy types everywhere! The movie would thus suggest that the historical German reliance on a fascist Fuhrer or a communist State is a version of mass hysteria writ large. That means entire populations have endorsed the desires proclaimed by political Others. You see how Lacanian psychohistory works. That sort of totalitarianism would never happen here.
When Susie (danced and acted by Dakota Johnson) and Madame Blanc trade roles in the film, Susie becomes the new leader of the academy, and Blanc/Swinton comes to a very bad end, indeed. (At least I think that is what happened. I may have fallen asleep and missed a plot point. Luckily my Pippa watched and caught the gist.) It may be a little high-handed of Guadagnino and his scriptwriter (David Kajganich) to suggest that all those American funds poured into post-war Germany made us that country’s eventual designated Other – at least until Merkel’s replacement comes along. Susie is definitely the dance academy’s savior in the movie. No more EuroHysteria by the end credits. Susie has become very calm, very reassuring, almost Other-worldly. There’s even a snippet of her distributing indiscriminate balm as the credits end. Maybe she’s the iron fist in a velvet glove? Anyway, she appears ultra-American, ultra-generous, ultra-benign. Like me. What a movie!
Perhaps a Lacanian interpretation works as well for my personal ballet chronicle here in the States. Albertine and Paco always said that their dance was an art of ceaseless questioning.
Historically speaking, things indeed turned out American happy-ending for A&P. They eventually got their citizenships, and they are now downstairs on the thirty-fifth floor of my building in my maximum security Cat Farm nurturing my twenty-two gorgeous prize-winning felines. Paco says he is researching a new performance art piece under laboratory conditions. I always smile and reassure him when he talks that way. He and his wife (they eventually tied the knot) spend days and nights in the nude, crawling on their hands and knees to facilitate communion with my precious pets in what they term Cat Language. I can vouch that their investigations are thorough. My two researchers claim to have entered the mental space of our furry familiars using video replays. They insist there have been cognitive breakthroughs. I keep a supply of expensive gourmet cat food available for all concerned.
A&P promise that the recordings they have made of inter-species dialogues during shared catnaps will revolutionize society. Those seemingly contented purrs are not necessarily what you think. A&P plan an eventual on-site showing to be entitled Catalytics. We will see about that. In the meantime, my creatures are happy, groomed and soothed and encouraged in their every whim. To an outside eye, watching through one-way mirrors and video surveillance, the lab appears calm.
But perhaps my purring kittycats have become an inter-species Other.
L.E.
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2. Inappropriate Behavior: A Review of American Ballet Theatre by Cheryl S.
My friend Sandy works lobby concessions, and I am an administrative assistant, which is what they call ushers now at movie theaters, especially houses that screen independent and foreign language films. Sandy got me this job when I graduated from the High School of Performing Arts last spring. Sandy graduated in dance in 2010, but I suppose I look better scanning tickets (currently I’ve been one more young New York actress looking for stage work), so he’s behind the counter selling popcorn, and I’m exposed to The Public all afternoon and part of the night. Sometimes I have to deal with a benefactress of the theater, an elderly woman in a wheelchair who has been known to berate and beat her caregivers in attendance during the movie. With a cane. Very Inappropriate Behavior, if you ask me.
Sandy explained that there is a long tradition here at Lincoln Center of ushers getting opportunities. One became a foster parent for a murderess’ child. (I’d like that.) One became a scenic designer. And one became an American Female Ballet Choreographer. So I took this job, and we’ll see.
Last week Sandy got free tickets for a matinee performance of American Ballet Theatre from this guy (not gay) who said he would like to publish a review of the company on the internet written by a member of the younger generation. Sandy is not a professional writer (but he is gay), so I told him I would write the review if he would give me pointers on the dance skills on display and provide editorial advice. (Sandy is also a great typist.) I have had a lot of dance training, both at HSPA and as a child, including beginning pointe work, but my physique tends to weight, so now I’m an actress. And Sandy really does know his dance. He is already a professional, just out of work. So here is my/our report. I’m happy to say that no one hit anyone with a cane in the ABT audience.
The program began with the revival of a 1947 ballet to the music of Mozart by George Balanchine, which was the real reason Sandy said we should go. The great Balanchine made the ballet for his then wife – Maria Tallchief – and for a younger ballerina – Tanaquil Le Clercq – whom he would marry eventually after divorcing Tallchief. (Balanchine had five wives and several mistresses over his career.) Sandy calls it one of the choreographer’s Harem Ballets, which is not so politically incorrect as you might think because people saw things differently in those days. In other words, they had a different idea of Inappropriate Behavior, then. Sandy explained that Balanchine was a poet and sometimes a playboy and a sometimes broken-hearted lover. I can certainly identify with the last. But in Symphonie Concertante he is making a ballet about two of his most important ballerina muses and making sure you see them through his eyes. And I mean see them! Talk about exposure!
Sandy and I noticed that SymCon shows the women off using what is called in ballet class the Directions of the Body. In fact, Balanchine uses what is known as effacé (French for open) and croisé (closed) positions like a visual code throughout. One of the ballerinas is associated with the solo violin in the Mozart score (at ABT’s matinee it was Stella Abrera), and she is given wonderful effacé moments. And the other ballerina (here, Gillian Murphy) is the solo viola of the music, and she is given croisé positions. (We think it would originally have been Le Clercq for effacé and Tallchief in croisé.) The ballerinas “talk” to one another out of this code, sometimes in unison, sometimes in staggered sequence, sometimes trading the positions, tossing them back and forth, playfully. It’s like watching a living video game. You can become dizzy at the variety of what Sandy calls the “choreographic permutations”.
The result is that you also get lots of pointe work (which I love) and lots of suspense, because Balanchine doesn’t overuse the beautiful effacé moments, for example in arabesques. They are often saved for climactic touches, and he builds and builds tension out of many contrasting ways to show the dance movement in and out of croisé. When an effacé climax comes, it is fresh and surprising. And the croisé moments are always as much movement as poses. That is fascinating. I can’t get over it. The decisions are so quick and fast.
When the male partner (called the cavalier) comes on in the second movement, he lets the ballerinas travel up into the air by lifting them – low controlled arcs that cover the stage and are really hard to make look effortless. But Alexandre Hammoudi was very responsible: he made the women appear light and undistressed. So happy does he make them that the ballerinas eventually have a violin-viola cadenza section (no orchestra, no male partner, just two instruments and two ballerinas) toward the end of the second movement that suggests that they have refined their dance to a new level of intimacy and intricacy. It’s like seeing two dance figures melding into one right before your eyes – in something like slow motion. That is magical. I got shivers up my spine. This kind of thing is what only ballet can do.
(Some critics might insist that this union represents a man’s dream that two women whom he loves should get along with one another in the harem. Maybe. But I say, that’s as it should be in a ballet. Ballets are for controlled dreaming.)
Sandy says that some people see the cavalier as being like the Harem Master in the second movement. It’s true that he appears to be ready to find new talent in the corps: all those possible future female partners. Twice he even brings two new corps women onto the stage as though they are candidates for violin-viola pairings. But somehow in this work it seems appropriate. The corps women are being presented. The ballet ends with the original ballerinas dancing in front of their corps and their partner.
I think this ballet is about how a performer – maybe all women and men – have to be there out front, exposed, really present or presenting themselves, like I am when I scan tickets at my current job. There is no way you can escape self-presentation, as my Mute Simulations teacher – Mr. Simpkins – used to say. We read a lot of Baudrillard in his class, and Simpkins warned us as performers not to be Virtual but to be Emergent, not to be Hyper-Real but to be Authentic. Balanchine’s ballerinas are continuously being what in art class is called modeled and contoured. They emerge right off the stage, so to speak. Like 3-D or maybe 4-D. I was impressed. So was Sandy. The dancers were excellent. And Authentic.
The program continued with a new ballet by Jessica Lang called Garden Blue to music by Dvorák. It took place on what the scenery made look like a beach with various sculptural elements which the dancers manipulated or occupied. There are three couples (male-female) and a ballerina soloist (this was Christine Shevchenko). At first, I assumed that the ballet was about a cargo cult, where debris from a crashed airplane had adversely affected a local tribe: the last remaining unaffected member among the natives being the ballerina soloist. She seemed to be distressed about something, and watching a human population around you turn into manipulative acrobats would be disconcerting.
But then I decided that the ballet might be about Nature retaking all the designs that human beings have imposed on her over the millennia. In other words, it’s an aggressive Green Ballet, and it’s time for Nature to get payback. That would mean the three couples and the soloist are triumphant natural processes against all those sculptural human artifacts (designed by Sarah Crowner). Maybe the soloist is some kind of emergent life force, very science fiction. This kept me attentive for a few minutes, but the new ballet is very long. The women used pointe work, but it’s fairly simple in comparison to the Balanchine ballet we had just seen. Christine Shevchenko is beautiful. I would like to see more of her (literally), especially in something classical. When Sandy and I talked about the new ballet afterward, we decided that it was confused in its conception. Good ballets make their intent known almost right from the moment the curtain goes up. Like the Balanchine. Sandy says it’s part of their decorum.
I decided that this was enough ballet for one afternoon. Besides, Fancy Free by Jerome Robbins completed the program, and it has no pointe work. So Sandy and I went to Starbucks.
ABT has a current program encouraging the need for more female choreographers, and I would love to try to make a ballet myself, especially one in toe shoes. Sandy could be my assistant. I could use all I learned in Mute Simulation classes. Maybe a Baudrillard-inspired ballet. When ballet dancers work on their pointes for years, they ought to use them intensively in new works. Since I am female, I know something about that, even though I never got beyond early Intermediate Ballet in my training.
I plan to set this vocational project as my new personal goal. I will go back into ballet class. Sandy says he will help me. I want to thank him for his contributions to this review, which were thorough and intuitive, like a good dance partner. He has helped present me as a writer. You see what an afternoon at the ballet can do for you. It can give you a whole new idea of Appropriate and Inappropriate Behavior.
This could be my opportunity.
C.S.
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1. All Will Out: A Conversation with Florian
This interview was conducted in New York City at The Little Owl near midnight on a rainy autumn night in October, 2018.
BV: You were always known among New York balletomanes as the Ancient of Days. And yet here you are.
Florian: I am the resident Hermit peeking out of his deer park cave. Behold the man. Or what’s left of him. I may take a quick look and then retreat to the dank depths.
BV: It’s been over thirty years since you held forth. Why so long?
Florian: As they say in China, “In hot weather one doesn’t eat raw ginger”. Speaking truth to power demands subterfuge and patience. Don’t you find?
BV: As Pilate asked, “What is truth?”
Florian: The truth is the spark that my favorite ballerina struck with her pointes last night at the ballet.
BV: Developments Choreographic require much time? Even decades?
Florian: One watches and one records. All will out. I’m happy with a little police protection in my safe house.
BV: Like Rushdie. You’ve seen much. You never forget. You’ll confide.
Florian: For you, dear boy, I’ll “tell all”. Time passes, power devolves.
BV: You would know. You have always patrolled the past.
Florian: Perhaps too much so. One doesn’t want to be mistaken for Penderton in Reflections in a Golden Eye, pawing those keepsakes from the locked drawer. (Brando was good at that in the film.) No, one must resist retrospection of the clammy sort.
BV: We live in a period when new ballets claim relentless innovation.
Florian: Most of those works say more about the plight of their makers, who have not seen enough and lack fantasy. You and I have seen too much. We have no illusions. I am “not reconciled”.
BV: So much to avoid at the ballet?
Florian: There’s the fellow who does weak-tea Massine. And there’s the fellow who does Doug Elkins on Xanax. And there’s the one who keeps channeling MacMillan. And there’s the ever-persistent McGregor – that movement fetishist who keeps on claiming to be Wayne McGregor. Not much stylistic variegation on offer. Dance idioms can become at length self-limited, opioid.
BV: The usual suspects keep being passed around, from company to company. One A.D. meets another A.D. in the airport lounge.
Florian: That late morning sunlight in the pitiless windows. That bleary view through the second gin-and-tonic. Oh, hello, darling, fancy meeting you here. Coming or going? Current favorites passed about like trading cards: young choreographer-collectibles. But such human merchandizing is old news, isn’t it, especially among European companies where the talent-share is a ritual of ballet life? Must stock the slave ship! It explains a lot about European ballet.
BV: It’s American regional and international pickups. All those commissions from pickup artist A.D.s.
Florian: Jet travel has a lot to answer for. As with operatic voices. “She opened her mouth and nothing came out.” They opened their ballet season and nobody danced.
BV: Young choreographers can’t say no to yet another six-week commission in central Asia. Two generations of artistic directors have dropped the ballet ball?
Florian: When they haven’t dropped ballet itself. Look at the Europeans. Their ballet companies have been turned over to modern dance leaders. Cheaper. No toe shoes to purchase. And it’s so trendily “anti-elitist”, so dedicatedly multi-media, so thoroughly postmodern.
BV: And the ballet classics become ghettoized in the reps. As one coach recently told a young classically attuned choreographer, “Your work had better be at least as good as Petipa!”
Florian: Inspirational, that. Yes, why make a new ballet out of the tradition when you can cobble an “innovative” work that deliberately contradicts every aspect of that tradition but relies on the classical training of the dancers to provide a surface sheen? Underneath, the material has nothing to do with any balletic past that I can identify. No real dance construction, no relation to the musical score, no sustained ballet technique. Just a trained performance “Look”. So P.O.B. That international patina has become the balletic CGI that gets an audience through the rigors of so-called “innovation”. Certain young, desperate dancer-technicians eat it up. Certain presenters are wowed. How are they to know better at this point? And new audiences won’t sense the difference. Sprung acrobatics replace artistry. Balanchine commented on an equivalent situation. “But you must remember,” he explained, “Béjart has his glamor.”
BV: Brigitte Lefèvre imposed this approach for many years at the Paris Opera Ballet.
Florian: To little effect besides a cluttered repertory and a distracted audience. Something for a clueless Wiseman to film. Take a youngster to an equivalent Justin Peck effort today, and the reaction will be, “Un…wha?” To patrons of our lavish footwear emporia, the dance sneaker can look antediluvian. It’s bespoke or naught for today’s collectors. Where is the choreographic Pete Davidson?
BV: U.S. ballet choreographers are uninformed, inexperienced?
Florian: And their mentors are impatient and fickle. There is misidentification of real talent and limited dedication to fostering it. Ten years? Twenty years? Difficult to find.
BV: And little adult thought in the choreography?
Florian: There’s always little professional thought at the ballet now. Companies ask audiences to pay top dollar for student work. Etudes get a pass. There are few substantive new roles for ballerinas because the star of the ballet today is the baby choreographer. It’s all ensemble because there is no real focus on the ballerina.
BV: Standards have dropped.
Florian: They usually do. Balanchine once said that he and Ashton might occasionally make a bad ballet but they never made incompetent ballets. Today’s infant wonders give us sugared piffle. Perhaps one day they will rise to the production of a bad ballet.
BV: Too much of the confessional? As in bad modern dance?
Florian: Ballet tyros are very generous with themselves. They even cry on cue when interviewed. They make speeches.
BV: No restraint?
Florian: The young are self-disadvantaged. The sign of incompetence is the lack of humor, wit, irony, an informed point of view in the dancing. Please, no tears. We get such seriousness of intent. (As in most dance writing these days. So middle school.) What can the young be but stubbornly sincere, soapbox earnest? All that same-sex self-congratulation! On stage? Been there, done that. Time to move on, dear. There are exceptions, of course. Apollo was made by a young man.
BV: When should a dancer start making dances ideally?
Florian: Early. No later than the late twenties. By forty they might have something to offer.
BV: And they must be identified early and supported across decades.
Florian: Of course. No crash courses. No residences. No institutes. No short-changing mentorships.
BV: Long-term apprenticeships are the only way.
Florian: Like the downtown careers of certain moderns here in New York.
BV: Who?
Florian: Elkins, who has returned to the New York stage. Unfortunately, he no longer performs himself. Those were the days. And Sydney Skybetter hasn’t presented his work for a time. He made one believe in American concert dance all over again. Then there’s that fellow who presides at the New School, the one who made a Not-About-AIDS-Dance; he’s a romantic ironist of the first water. And there’s that one local ballet choreographer whose concert contained witty dances from a Rodgers and Hart suite and a neo-classical work of architectonic reach and density: Fracture. That ballet predicted the state our States are in.
BV: You still get around. The uptown ballet companies are contentedly oblivious. Spared prophecy and adventure.
Florian: I don’t think their leaders get out much. They expect talent to come to them. As if. Ballet managements now depend on unconfirmed rumor.
BV: They are well on their way to abject curation.
Florian: Without serious work in process, their institutions are already museums. The labor is easier, I suppose. And repetitious. The art of ballet becomes Suspiria 2.
BV: But the dancers?
Florian: City Ballet has six dancers I’m fascinated with. ABT has one ballerina who guards standards. There are a few others coming up. But there are lots of romps out there. We know today’s performing artists primarily through old ballets. Audiences have trained themselves to skip or indulge the new. It’s a kind of folk wisdom to look the other way.
BV: Did you make it to the latest NYCB fashion gala?
Florian: The one moment I remember was when a ballerina threw herself upon the bottom step of a “surrealist” stairway leading nowhere, an image of benumbed hopelessness that summed it up. I think the Koch Theater audience identified with her plight. The opening and closing ballets that night had nothing to do with the company’s tradition. A modern import is now the unwitting “exotic number”. The ballerina who is a classical stylist and who is unsupported by material related to her tradition can’t work a miracle -- especially at American Ballet Theatre. To have an art form, you have to have mature ballet choreographers. Not an endless line of the missing in action. Sorry. I need my snifter of brandy before bed.
BV: Back to the cave?
Florian: Where’s the check? We must continue this. I won’t wait decades. I promise.
BV: We hold you to your word.
M.P.
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