Calligraphy
If any choreographer could be called an apostle of darkness, it is Anna Sokolow. She holds a merciless light over man's terrors, subjecting them to a kind of artistic third degree. They talk, all right. This she does without consistent identification of a dancer with one character. Her characters are Anyman and Anywoman swept from one peak of emotion to the next. Governed by her particular genius for group design, the result is a kind of calligraphy of feeling.
The program that her company performed in the current Brooklyn Academy festival included a scaled-down version of Odes (originally choreographed for the Juilliard Dance Ensemble, which at that time had a huge group of dancers); Memories, a supposedly new dance with distinct links to another that Miss Sokolow created for the Juilliard group; "Steps of Silence, new to New York; and Tribute.
Tribute is just that - a dance epitaph for Martin Luther King. Brief, stark, elegaic. I t has the same feeling as a verse composed by a fine writer for a friend's tombstone: not that writer's best work, but certainly heartfelt and as funerary verse goes, a damn good poem.
Steps of Silence, performed against music by Anatol Vieru, opens in darkness. The voices of the eight dancers emerge one by one, reciting fragments of poetry, prose. Spotlights come on and isolate each dancer in a circle of light. From then on, the grouping and separating and regrouping of dancers proceeds at a fierce pace. Scurrying solos into scrabbling duets into flights into wary groups. Men and women shake and wrench at each others' arms. A man works his way between two who seem about to fight to the death; it is he the mediator who fails. Finally an invisible wind releases a storm of torn newspapers into the bleak stage. The dancers, resisting fruitlessly, are blown into a limp pile in the center of the stage.
Odes and Memories are similarly despairing, although the former has one fluttering lyrical duet. I like Odes very much and find Memories less satisfying. Still, there is one strange, decadently beautiful section in "Memories" in which veiled men and groups of girls extravagantly garlanded with flowers twine around three individuals smothering them in a sinister parody of growth.
Sokolow has her own approach to dance movement. She uses highly trained dancers and demands difficult things of them. But you sense that she wishes to keep her performers looking very human and natural at all times. This is especially evident in the way she choreographs arm movements. The dancers' arms rarely move for the sake of design. Mostly they hang down or are simply held out to the side. Sokolow saves them, in a sense, to function in dramatic gestures - to reach, pray, claw, clutch the head - to fall into positions that express emotions in an immediately recognizable way.
After these four Sokolow dances, the audience slumped exhausted from the theatre. There's no catharsis in her art because positive action either doesn't exist in it or is obviously doomed to failure from the start. Her dancers are victims, pounded through the dances, beaten down when they raise their heads. They stare offstage at invisible forces out to get them - offstage and out at you the audience. Sokolow has put you in the bad guy's seat doing this to her people, and she will not let you off the hook.