Over the next couple of months I would like to report True News on creators and performances worth looking out for. A concept for a True News Mechanism came to me during the most recent unprecedented heat wave.
An individual whispers his or her sensory experience into the True News Mechanism’s reception trumpet. True News processors use the same COBOL X12-49A algorithm that enabled Jesus a smooth resurrection. Forty acres of glistening brass tubes offer honest whisperers designer glimpses of those dark gears that grind toward the True. Mechanism engineers heave suspect fabulators into the relentless mesh. There they go from being parts of the problem to being parts of the solution.
Metaphorically speaking, Hang Huang, who runs the English-language dance and travel blog DanceVisa, Catherine Zavodska, a culture influencer who heads up DanseAujourdhui, a dance-appreciation community that offers culture-oriented events and tourism, along with myself are the first persons to whisper into the Mechanism.
Catherine and Hang have a deep and abiding love for dance performance. Hang seems always to see where a performance is coming from, has the knack of seeing where the depths and weights of a performance lie. Catherine has more useful knowledge about dance than I could ever hope for; she always knows how to measure creative effort and execution.
With the aid of Catherine and Hang, the Mechanism and myself can report its first eight bits of True News from dance performance: eight well-loved pieces from the Paris Season 2018-2019. These include Ohad Naharin’s Decadance, performed at the Opéra Garnier, Ousmane Sy’s Queen Blood, performed at La Villette last Winter; Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui’s Faun, performed at the at the Opéra Garnier last Fall; Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker’s Violin Fase, her initiation piece revolving around Steve Reich’s music of the same name, danced by Yuika Hashimoto, renewed last Fall at Lafayette Anticipations; Oona Doherty’s Hard to be Soft – A Belfast Prayer at Atelier de Paris in Spring 2019; and Damien Jalet’s Vessel, also last Spring; Noé Soulier’s exceptionally moving, almost-baroque Les Vagues, produced at the Palais de Chaillot last Fall; and Crystal Pite’s Season’s Canon, equally last Fall at Opéra Garnier.
Catherine Zavodska and I both well-loved Cherkaoui’s [Après-midi d’un] Faun[e]. The piece got me thinking about how Maurice Béjart and Rammallzee (‘The rhythm [dance] that breaks’) find shared culture space, but Catherine saw an orgasm in it. She is surely closer to Nijinksky’s intention. Her idea is that Cherkaoui has a talent for working performance “movement” from the ground up (as in break-dancing) then pushing it beyond “choreography” to discover (experience the unknown of), or uncover (experience beyond), a “real thing”, in which the performance is a visual, physical and emotional meeting point of spectator and creator intention.
The Mechanism has identified four, including Faun, of the eight well-beloved pieces as visual, physical and emotional real things. Catherine delighted in Decadance, performed by the junior rank of the Opéra de Paris ballet, calling it “true” thing with “neither beginning nor end”, outside of time, as “a letting go”, “a jubilation”. Touched by the deep realness of the performance, the Mechanism observes, last year I wrote of Crystal Pite’s Season’s Canon “… Way down there where once was Hell, I saw a man picking up a woman and knew that picking Karine up just like that [would make] her mine forever.” And. Ahh, God. There’s Noé Soulier’s Les Vagues. The choreographer’s sense of poetic schwerpunkt is penetrated and perfumed by the consistent kairos of movement. My performance note reads: “… and suddenly she says, gesture like an Egyptian – gestures that emphasize, underline, give meaning to her words rather than be words:
I begin to long for/A language lovers use/ Broken words
Inarticulate words / Like the shuffling of feet/ On the pavement
I have to tell you, it still makes me cry.
A burgeoning real thing also lies behind a focus on the particularness of a performance.
Catherine, for instance, sees “choreography” as the mesh of music and movement, not just movement with or to or around music as I often do. So, Cherkaoui’s achievement in Faun would be more about completing Débussy’s erotic impulsion than, as I feel it, about fleshing out the sense of Mallarmé’s poem. When Hang speaks of the performance of Violin Fase that he attended as “exceptional”, he is also using a particularity to speak of achieving a real thing performance. He points to de Keersmaeker’s “danced commentary” as key. Injured and unable to dance herself, as originally scheduled, de Keersmaeker came on to the performance floor to talk with spectators in the wake of the Hashimoto’s 15-Minute performance. As she talked, her movement physically, visually, emotionally doubled Hashimoto’s dance; she effectively (re-)created it as a “real thing”.
Critical focus, the Mechanism suggests, can even switch from the performance itself to the experience of uncovering or discovering the real thing. Hang characterizes Oona Doherty’s Hard to Be Soft – A Belfast Prayer as a “discovery” by display of impressive ability and energy. That’s entirely on target. Doherty, whom I discovered myself at her exceptional pictogram-performance Lazarus and the Birds of Paradise for Rencontres chorégraphiques internationales 2016 is a stochastic calculus of Hollywood musical, avant-garde contemporary dance and cinéma noir altered for performance theater. It puts across an extremely powerful performance-pictogram of the emotional state of Northern Ireland’s humans.
Ousmane Sy’s Queen Blood and Damien Jalet’s Vessel can also be looked at as real things uncovered or discovered. Vessel, according to Hang, uncovers “a new genre” of dance performance. Hang feels that Jalet, known for innovative scenography (Skid, which featured at Palais de Chaillot in the Fall, very nearly literally had performers dancing (vertical) on a wall) creates a new body language that pushes the performance into a thing identifiably new. Queen Blood, according to Catherine, discovers a “conductor” within a choreographer. The all-women cast of Sy’s piece is made up of distinct individuals (so much so that I, for one, “forgot” their status as female and “remembered” their status as individual during the performance.). Sy’s choreography and directorial approach conduct rather than direct or manage the performers of his cast, solo and together. That is to say that under Sy’s “baton” each performer is a separate instrument of distinct sound and role, uncovering dance movement as corporal music.
For each of us, these eight pieces were True News, real things that you can share through our eyes. Mark the Creators on your bucket list as talent worth seeking out and the performances as new eyes to see through they made just for you.