Dances: After You, The Green Table, Partita 2

Thanks to our friend Santa (who recommended it), we went to see a program by the American Ballet Theater.  I had always associated the ABT with ballet stars and Swan Lakes, but this program was completely different.  It began with a newly commissioned work by Mark Morris entitled "After You", set to Hummel's "Septet".   This was one of Morris's very music oriented works, and was delightful to watch and hear.  As always, Morris works very closely with the music in ways which are both very obvious and not so obvious.   It was not seemingly a profound work, with its rather bland appearance, but, at the end, you want to see it again.  I was also fascinated by Hummel's music, which also seems to have more going on than what appears on the surface.  A critic called the piece an "anti-ballet", I suppose meaning that it rejects many of the typical conventions of classical ballet (Virtuosity, male-female partnering, etc.), but for me, since I don't normally experience these conventions, the idea means nothing.   It's a Mark Morris piece!
Quotes from Mark Morris:

Notes to his dancers:  “ ‘Dazzling.’ ‘Breathtaking.’ You don’t have to do those slogans so it looks like the ABT calendar,” he said. “I want to know that there is a human being doing it.”

“I want it to be enjoyable. It’s a choreo-musical experience, and that’s it.”

Note that the men and the women have the same costumes:

There was also a pair of pieces dating from the 60's called "Monotones" by Frederick Ashton, set to various orchestrations of Satie's piano music.  (The Satie pieces were also joined together to make a continuous score.)  The dance was a slow and mesmerizing experience; Ashton was supposedly inspired by the first images of astronauts floating in space in the 1960's.  The movement did have a wonderful floating quality to it, and the Satie with its simple and non-developmental quality served this idea very well.

The highlight, though, was Kurt Jooss's "The Green Table", an antiwar ballet dating from 1932, set to music composed specifically for the ballet by Fritz Cohen (a two piano score).  Interestingly, the dance was inspired by the same frieze in Lubeck that inspired the Thomas Ades "Totentanz" that we heard last spring.   It is a narrative ballet, with a dancer playing "Death".  Since I know so little of dance history, the piece was a revelation;  the movements in what has been called an expressionist style were striking, especially those of Death and those of the women who are made to suffer the consequences of mankind's obsession with war.  Some of the women's gestures reminded me of expressionist paintings or Schiele drawings.  You really feel the impact of the Death character, who sometimes suddenly appears out of darkness to grab his victims. The piece begins and ends with opposing groups of diplomats or one percent types  gesturing at the green table with great ridiculousness.  The music was excellent as well.  At times it evoked the contemporaneous silent film scores, and was quite dissonant when it needed to be.

Death:

The green table:

We also saw (again thanks to Santa!) a piece entitled "Partita 2" by Anna Teresa De Keersmaeker.    The piece begins with a solo violinist walking on a bare stage.   The lights go completely out, the theater is in absolute darkness, and the violinist begins to play Bach's Partita #2 for violin solo.   This goes on for quite a while, and was a remarkable experience just by itself.  I often close my eyes when I listen to music; in this case, the closing was done for me.   For a dance show, this is a radical gesture.  After about 15 - 20 minutes of the partita, the violinist stops in the middle of a movement and walks off stage.  The light gradually emerges, and the two dancers, Keersmaeker and her co-creator, Boris Charmatz, begin dancing in total silence.  Though of course you still have the music of Bach in your head.   After an equally long stretch of dance in silence, the violinist re-enters the stage, and then we have music and dance together.   The violinist starts the Bach all over again, and then we gradually see some parts of the choreography that we have already seen recur, only this time with the music.  The choreography itself is quite minimal, and not dramatic in any conventional sense.  Lots of movement in circles around the stage, and many small gestures.  But to my eyes (and ears), it was mesmerizing; Keersmaeker is an extraordinary dancer.    Vera and Santa were less impressed.   The piece as a whole seems to be very much about structure, and also about how we hear and see Bach's music. (Somewhere in an interview Keersmaeker or Charmatz commented about the fact that no one has ever made a great piece in choreographing to Bach's music, forgetting Balanchine's "Concerto Barocco")    I found the whole experience to be fascinating, and would happily go and hear and see it again.   Though I must confess that I did not like the violinist's style of playing Bach, especially in the opening section.  It was of the romantic, tempo shifting style; with exaggerated slowing down and speeding up.   Bach purists would have shuddered.  (The movements in the Bach are each titled with dance forms, not that Bach expected anyone to dance to them.)  Curiously, though, I didn't mind the same style of performance when it occurred with the dance.