Miracle on 76th Street: Denishawn Dances Again

Denishawn
Dances by Ruth St. Denis & Ted Shawn 
The Theatre at St. Jean's, New York  
October 2, 2021

-- By Tom Phillips 

Ted Shawn and Ruth St. Denis are known as the "mother and father of American Modern Dance," but the works they created  and performed have been lost for years.  All that remained were dusty photographs and flickering, black-and-white films.  It was a case study in the ephemeral nature of dance--- until it all began again.  

The idea originated with veteran dance publicist Audrey Ross -- once a dancer --  who recruited an all-star cast of friends, supporters, students and protegees to excavate the attic of the past, and re-create the the dawn of Denishawn.  Several years in the making, the project was put on hold by the pandemic. It finally went up last week---from a theater in a church basement, a 21st-Century resurrection.  

It began at the beginning, with a new generation of dancers.  Seven nubile nymphs from the Limon2 company performed Shawn's "Floor Plastique," a heretical piece circa 1916 done  entirely on the floor.  As recreated by choreographer Henning Rubsam, the piece contains the fundamental gestures of a new era -- contraction and release, shifting weight and momentum.  Denishawn dancers Martha Graham, Charles Weidman and Doris Humphrey would elaborate these gestures into new styles and schools of movement.  In the bodies of the Limon apprentices, 1916 and 2021 came together -- two violent turning points, vortexes of desire and despair.   

Shawn and St. Denis looked far and wide for different ways to move, and found them in exotic places -- India, Java, Japan.  Ballet legend Valentina Kozlova re-created St. Denis's "Incense," based on Hindu ritual, with actual incense and authentic feeling.  Antonio Fini brought the Hindu god of destruction Shiva off his pedestal and into motion, ending with the deity's signature delicate balance. Bradley Shelver performed Shawn's "Japanese Spear Dance" with the controlled rage of ritual fighting.  And Peiju Chien-Pott seduced the entire audience in a slinky silk gown, in St. Denis's version of a court dance from Java. 

A lively post-performance chat centered on an objection to Denishawn's appropriation of other cultures. Dancers defended the work -- this was not hootchy-kootchy Orientalism but anthropological adventure,  an attempt to give western dance a global vocabulary.  The most subtle talkback came from Puerto Rican Nuevayorker Arthur Aviles, who performed Shawn's "Danse Americaine." The piece makes fun of a small-time dude, who like Frank Zappa's "Dancing Fool," thinks he's really something. Even in a too-shiny green suit, Aviles gave the character dignity -- OK, he's a naive narcissist, but he's really being his "best self."   

The program concluded with a solo waltz, a piece that originated when Ruth St. Denis spontaneously began to dance at a party, and the pianist couldn't stop playing, going seamlessly from  Brahms to Lizst, extending the moment. The dancer was former Graham great Christine Dakin, the pianist Jonathan Howard Katz.  The performance was inspired, alive, authentic.  As Faulkner wrote--- the past isn't dead.  It isn't even past.    

-- Copyright 2021 by Tom Phillips .  

On the Altar of Art

Mearns Rehearsing "Narcissus"

The Art of Isadora
Lori Belilove and the Isadora Duncan Dance Company
Joyce Theater, New York
June 19, 2017

A prophet may always be without honor in her home country, but Isadora Duncan may finally have won respect in America.  It happened last night at a jam-packed Joyce Theater, where a famous ballerina gave a boost to a sworn enemy of ballet.  Isadora would have been amazed.

Sara Mearns of New York City Ballet joined the Isadora Duncan Dance Company, briefly, for a solo to Chopin's "Narcissus."  Duncan's choreography has probably never been performed with the articulation, power and speed Mearns brought to it. It was exciting, electric, especially the upsweep of her moving turns. But it wasn't strictly Duncanesque.  

Serenade at Eighty

-- By Tom Phillips

Eighty years ago this week, a new art form was brought forth on this continent.   On June 10, 1934, George Balanchine and Lincoln Kirstein’s fledgling School of American Ballet performed the first ballet choreographed on and for American dancers – Balanchine’s Serenade.  It was the beginning of a revolution, but not the kind that anyone expected.  

  

When Balanchine arrived in America in 1933, a refugee from imperial Russia, no one was clamoring for a new classical ballet with music by Tchaikovsky.  These were the depths of the Great Depression, the heyday of John Steinbeck in America, and Socialist Realism in Russia.  The arts were expected to reflect the social and political struggles of humanity.  Modern dance seemed much closer to the spirit of the time.  And the main figure in modern dance was Martha Graham, whose whole career had been a revolt against the ballet tradition.

Serenade starts with a tableau that could have been created by Graham.  Seventeen girls stand in blue light, their feet straight ahead.  One arm is raised, the hand flexed toward the vertical. Balanchine reportedly told them they were “blocking the moonlight.” The position is un-balletic, the expression anti-romantic; but suddenly it begins to transform.  The wrist curves and circles overhead, then diagonally across the center line of the body, followed by the gaze; the arms form a ballet position at the hips. Then, without warning or preparation, seventeen pairs of feet suddenly turn out from parallel to first position. The floor squeaks in protest. The movement is abrupt, almost violent -- not an impulse from within, but a discipline imposed from outside. Graham herself said the first time she saw it, tears sprang to her eyes. “It was simplicity itself,” she said, “but the simplicity of a very great master.”

Next the heads lift, the arms rise and spread out, and the torso lifts as the right foot points to the side.  The dancers breathe and expand, no longer blocking the moonlight, but open to the world in front of them.  The sequence could end here, but it doesn’t. Balanchine – who talked of “forcing” beauty out of human material — closes the feet, crossing the ankles to the fifth position. The arms again rise and spread, but this time the bodies reach beyond the vertical, looking to the sky. “Blocking the moonlight” has been transformed, step by step, into ballet, into an opening toward the heavens.  Balanchine’s young ballerinas have yet to move from their places, or even bend their knees, but they have already foreshadowed the drama to come: the transcendence of modernism by classicism.