Blow it Up: A Plan for Lincoln Center

 --  By Tom Phillips 

                                    

With the Holidays just around the corner, box offices were open today at Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, and the place was buzzing with...construction noise.  Philharmonic (now Geffen) Hall is being gutted again, with a scaled-down plan for renovation.  Across 66th Street the Juilliard School is also getting some kind of a makeover.

I have a better idea for fixing Lincoln Center. With federal infrastructure money flowing in to rebuild New York neighborhoods, try this: 

Blow it up. Tear it down. Bury it.  

Puppet Love at Lincoln Center

Sonezaki Shinju (The Love Suicides at Sonezaki)
Sugimoto Bunraku Puppet Theater
Rose Theater, Lincoln Center, New York
October 19, 2019

-- By Tom Phillips                                                                                                                                                           

"The Love Suicides at Sonezaki," which opened Lincoln's Center's White Light Festival last night, tells the tale of a young Osaka shop clerk and a teenage prostitute, who kill themselves rather than face life apart. It was banned in Japan in 1723 after a wave of copycat love suicides, and not performed again until 1955. The US premiere of this production showed us nothing so much as the chasm between the worlds of 18th-century Japan and 21st-century America.

That said, tribute must be paid to the brilliance of these Japanese puppeteers, practicing an art unknown in the West. Disappearing inside black shrouds, they work in teams of two or three to manipulate half-size human forms around the stage. The puppets' faces and hands are immobile, so it is just with body language -- subtle movements of the limbs, head and torso -- that they show an astonishing range of emotions: erotic passion, anguish, anxiety, rage, indignation both phony and real, amazement, disappointment, despair, and on and on: there's nothing humans feel that these wooden figures can't express. 

Hip-Hop Round-trip: London to NY

"Blak Whyte Gray"
Boy Blue:  Michael "Mikey J" Asante, Creative Direction and Music; Kenrick "H2O" Sandy, Choreography
Lincoln Center White Light Festival 
November 16, 2018

-- By Tom Phillips 

"Whyte" 

Members of Boy Blue held a post-performance chat last night after the US premiere of "Blak Whyte Gray," and it was a shock to hear their British accents. Their intense and acrobatic hip-hop dancing was straight from the streets of New York -- having made a round trip from east London.

Flipping the usual progression from darkness to light, this young British troupe gives us a three-part journey of liberation that starts with "Whyte" and ends with "Blak." The progress is upward, from a kind of enslavement to a celebration of strength and freedom.  But the opening depiction of present-day slavery seemed the most relevant to an American audience.

20th Century Unlimited: Beckett and Warhol in NY

"Waiting for Godot"
By Samuel Beckett, directed by Garry Hynes   
Gerald W. Lynch Theater, Lincoln Center, New York 
November 5, 2018 

"Andy Warhol -- From A to B and Back Again"
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York 
Opening November 12, 2018

Aaron Monaghan, Marty Rea 

In the mid-Twentieth Century, Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot” seemed like an end game. Two vagabonds meet daily by a tree, and hope for a deliverance that never comes. In Act One they decide to hang themselves, but can’t decide on the best method:

ESTRAGON:  Use your intelligence, can’t you?                        
Vladimir uses his intelligence. 
VLADIMIR: (finally) I remain in the dark.

Diversion arrives in the form of a master and slave, but their journey also appears to be heading nowhere. Master Pozzo torments his lackey Lucky, who babbles theological gibberish. Pozzo goes blind as they exit in Act Two.  Vladimir and Estragon continue waiting.

Monk on Monk

-- By Tom Phillips

As an artist Meredith Monk has never done just one thing at a time.  In “Dancing Voices,” which helped launch Lincoln Center’s White Light Festival this weekend, she attempts both a retrospective of her own career as composer-choreographer, and a transmission of her dharma to a new generation.    

“Dancing Voices” is divided into two parts.  Part One is a selection of her early experiments, from the Sixties to the early Nineties, performed with a chorus of young kids. Part Two is more recent, reflective works, with older children joining in. The first part was the most fun, and the most moving.

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.

The David H. Koch Nutcracker

-- by Tom Phillips



Battle scene from Balanchine's Nutcracker

When New York City Ballet and New York City Opera announced in 2008 that David H. Koch would donate 100 million dollars to renovate the New York State Theater, the opera called it a “transformative gift.” The ballet said it would “ensure the integrity of George Balanchine’s vision for the theater ..for decades to come.”  Three years later the renovation is complete.  But the opera company has left the building, now called the David H. Koch Theater, and Balanchine’s vision is in the dumpster.  Lincoln Center, conceived as a place where high culture would be available to the masses, is becoming just another exclusive haunt for the One Percent.