sarma

Talk about biting off more than you can chew! Last week I saw dances by - let's see - Don Meredith, Monk Hay, Yvonne Hoving, Rainer Tharp, and ... you see what I mean? Groggy. OK. let's start out with the ladies of the avant-garde and their concerts at the Billy Rose. Twyla Tharp, Meredith Monk, Yvonne Rainer, and Deborah Hay (represented by one piece on Rainer's program) all have considerable intellects - although Monk enjoys letting her id run rampant over hers. They have constructed new and very influential theories about making dances; indeed, I find their works often more exciting as illustrations of theories than for their own sakes. That is, I watch with interest how the thing is done, wonder what material will appear next. It's like being a spectator at a pleasant, small, not very competitive game: "How's she going to get out of this one?"

Although the four women work very differently, it might be worth noting the few things that they appear to have in common, and in common with quite a few other contemporary artists. One is a concern with process, with incorporating the creative process into the resultant work. Who said "the subject of art is art"? Thus Tharp's Excess, Idle, Surplus - a Reconstruction is performed to tapes of a rehearsal; the dancers count from time to time; Tharp herself claps a beat or occasionally stops perplexed in the middle of a movement. The difficulty of remembering and reconstructing the original dance becomes an integral part of the new version. Monk uses process for her particular brand of irony: at one point in 16 millimeter earrings, her taped voice describes the movement that she thinks the section calls for (it sounds terrific), but Monk herself is doing some deliberate, heavy stuff-her feet stubbed into fuzzy, encumbering slippers.

They're concerned with the relation between actual clock time and artistic time, even sometimes to the point of trying to deny the latter. Tharp prints the length of minutes for each dance on the program. Monk tells you that she is going to hold a pose for two minutes and does so. All of them - willing to be thought boring - let a thing go on until it has exhausted most of its possibilities. Images and energies borrowed from sports appear all the time: Rainer's complicated, but relaxed jogging-rhythm patterns; the way all of them use a plain, easy walk to get from one peak section to another; a lot of "go," “and”, “one" verbal signals between dancers. Needless to say, in none of these dances does anyone pretend to be someone he is not or act out anything contrary to the flow of the proceedings.

Twyla Tharp has changed a lot since I last saw her work in 1966. She has purged her dances of almost every element but movement. Two out of three at the Billy Rose were performed in almost total silence; I counted only one deliberately illusory use of lighting effects and one prop-a small red chair. Her all-female company is stylishly costumed by Robert Huot-uniform for each dance, varying from dance to dance. Tharp's mathematical space ratios, the chaste atomism with which she sprinkles her dancers all over the stage, their rarely colliding orbits, the purity of their attention on the movement give her dances an almost Spartan feel-a super-cool college of vestal virgins. And this despite the beauty and richness of her movement. She has been able to do what I thought might be impossible; she has transferred her own incredible style to her company. This style - speaking very superficially - involves acquiring a strong classical technique and then learning to fling it around without ever really losing control. The dancing is difficult, quirky, beautiful, stylish. She varies the amounts of it though. Disperse, for example, in two of its sections uses only walks and variations on one turn. The new work After 'Suite' has a softer fuller style, half-created I think by the lovely afterflow of sleeves and pantlegs on Huot's beige jumpsuits. I thought After 'Suite' a fine dance; I liked the way brief duets and trios floated out of the mass of independent particles and then floated back in. Tharp has some marvelous dancers-she'd pretty well have to have. I was especially pleased by Sara Rudner's pure line; the impudent, almost biting way with which Theresa Dickinson attacks things; little Sheila Raj's generally winsome style. But this isn't fair ... they were all good.

Meredith Monk isn't pure or Spartan at all - except perhaps in her carefully limited style of moving. She fills her theatre pieces with objects and sounds and films. Most of these have a super-personal emblematic value. Her stage becomes a kind of macro-microcosm of her own person - small areas within her externalized, blown up, and projected on the stage. She herself moves, speaks, and sings through this private and fantastic playroom. You almost feel that it would collapse if she left the stage. She rarely does, and often when she does Phoebe Neville - identically costumed and billed as a stand in-takes over. Once, a woman walked across the stage, stopped center, said to us, 'I'm Meredith's mother," and walked away. I like Monk's humor, her outrageous justapositions, her confiding vulnerability. I also admit to being bored, irritated, dismayed some of the time.

16 millimeter earrings is a particularly thorough and inventive foray into Monk's world; it's the piece in which she puts a paper lantern thing over her head, and a film of her face is projected onto it. Earrings also has a great ending. Monk, wearing a ruby-red wig, sits for a moment on a white box with ruby-red streamers blowing up out of it. She then gets in a trunk and closes the lid while a colored film is shown of a doll standing and then toppling over in a burning enclosure. Monk raises the trunk lid and stands dimly naked-silhouetted against the last flames.

Recently Meredith Monk has been experimenting in different kinds of spaces. The Billy Rose didn't give her much leeway, but she did manage some "lobby exhibits" in the form of people reading by flashlight inside corrugated cardboard "houses." During each intermission, a few emerged until at the end of the evening they were all out and lying on the debris of their huts.

With Yvonne Rainer, I've discovered that once I fit my body rhythms into her easy lope, she makes me feel good. Her dances are big, clever, nicely silly games, and her dancers are adults unselfconsciously at play. Most of Rainer's pieces are in the form of a string of little sections, each built around a kind of motif. I'm happiest when she keeps the changes coming at a fairly good clip. She called her Billy Rose evening Rose Fractions. A few of the things in part one I'd seen before or seen in different form. I love the two trios - one male, one female - who, arms around each others' waists, perform given movements in a given direction, but in an order they decide on. They back-somersault, run or walk in several different ways, crumple sideways to the floor, crawl over and under each other, and so on. The night I went, the film of Arnold and Paxton playing with the white balloon (already seen on the DTW program at Riverside Church) was shown simultaneously with a pretty ugly sex film shot by a hard-core camera. All of a sudden the two in the original film seemed terribly innocent in their nakedness, and also civilized to the point of being jaded on their chic white couch. I suspect this is another of Rainer's uses of pornography to clear the decks, or to point up the actual innocence of much that is called dirty. I also thought it wry of her to have Becky Arnold wallow erotically in a pile of unread books or Barbara Lloyd cuddle down on a "horse" that was later used for nice vaults and balances. The patterns Rainer makes with some of her simplest movements are deceptively complex. The evening ended with Trio A from The Mind is a Muscle - that longest dance phrase in living memory. It was first performed by relative non-dancers in silence, then (pepped up by the Chambers Brothers) by four dancers, then by everyone (still to music), including the unscheduled Valda Setterfield who performed the tour de force of learning it as she went along. It was fascinating and exciting, and I could kick myself for not learning Trio A too.

While I've still got breath: Deborah Hay contributed 26 variations of eight activities for 13 people plus beginning and ending. That's a title as well as a description. The people were 13 attractive young women in street attire. The activities involved walking forward to stage left, running backward to stage right (in various overlapping patterns), walking up three ramps, posing, walking back down, or jumping off. As in all Hay's pieces that I've seen: simplicity, severity, easy-going movement tension, yet subtly drill-like patterns. Interesting that the girls were seen in profile almost throughout the thing-leaving a curious, inscrutable impression.

Some people were outraged or bored by the avant-garde performances, which is - I think - as it should be. These dancers are venturing in a new direction; if their work is delightful to a mass audience, then it is not de facto avant-garde. It's the business of the avant-garde to be astringent and uncompromising to keep us from getting too comfortable with the old forms. The rest of us may never reject all our ideas about dance, but we'll sure as hell re-examine them. We may even follow wholeheartedly in the new direction; then after 10 years or so, the new avant-garde will revolt against us.