Tero Saarinen

Vera was in the mood for seeing dance, so we went to see the Tero Saarinen Company, a modern dance company from Finland that was appearing at the Joyce Theater.  ( I remember going there to see movies there in the 1970's.)  There were two pieces.  The first was a kind of generic modern Europe dance piece, with a collage-type sound track with lots of repetitive, beat-heavy sounds, and an excess of reverb that sounds very cool for about 2 minutes and then wears out its welcome.   Reverb is like salt; everyone wants a little bit of it, but too much is catastrophic.   There were six dancers, and some kind of story about contemporary relationships.   Lots of high tech lights and dry ice... and not much variety in movement.
The second piece was much more interesting, it was a solo danced to a complete recording of Stravinky's "Rite of Spring".   Stravinsky's music is so powerful that it is notoriously hard to choreograph; Pina Bausch's version is about the only successful one of have ever seen.   Saarinen's piece begins in darkness, and he moves extremely slowly, even as the music becomes more and more frantic.  Saarinen's solution, ultimately, is to kind of dance against the score;  when the sacrificial dance begins at the end, he stops moving entirely as a video is projected against his body and the very large sort of skirt he is wearing.   There are stunning effects with strobe lights at the end, so that as the music reaches its climax, what we see are occasional strobe flashes illuminating the dancer, and mostly darkness.  It was a provocative and contrary version of the Rite.   Unfortunately, hearing a recording of the Rite blasted at high volume on served to bring back memories of the extraordinary live performance we heard with Alan Gilbert conducting the NY Phil last fall, and the recording cannot compare.

The skirt:

With video projections: