E-Mail This Article to a Friend Lessons for the Middle World Robert Wilson in New York, David Dorfman at Concord BY MARCIA B. SIEGEL
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Toward the end of Robert Wilson’s I La Galigo, which is based on the ancient Sulawesi creation myth, the ruling gods return to the Upper and Lower Worlds, displeased with the way their delegates have been running things. Æons later, the two descendants of opposing racial streams finally meet and join together. Their destiny is to repopulate the Middle World, without the intervention of the gods. The end is the beginning. Creation is ongoing, the myth tells us, and so is the struggle.

Like the Mahabharata, the Ramayana, or the Odyssey, I La Galigo, which was staged last week at the New York State Theater for the Lincoln Center Festival, encompasses the story of mankind — the relationship between people and nature, the power of the gods and the dangers of defying the gods, the endless search for serenity in a world of temptations. There were a few moments in the three-hour performance when my courage almost failed, but I never lost interest in it as an absorbing visual and theatrical experience.

Dramaturg Rhoda Grauer encountered I La Galigo while doing research in Sulawesi. A former television producer and administrator of the Dance Program at the National Endowment for the Arts, Grauer is now based in Bali making documentary films. It’s she who adapted the sprawling and almost extinct pre-Islamic epic to a modern narrative. The centuries-old text and the traditions associated with it — including the ability to understand its language — are deteriorating. Grauer learned parts of it through oral translations. Having begun to assemble one of its many story lines, she interested Robert Wilson in bringing that to the stage. The production, with a cast of about 50 Indonesians, has been seen in Singapore and Europe during the past year.

Like most Robert Wilson works, I La Galigo displaces us from our mundane concerns and asks us to penetrate levels of memory, spirituality, and perception that we usually keep in the Off position. A synopsis of scenes gives an outline of the main events, but the few lines of dialogue are conveyed as supertitles. A Bissu priest, Puang Matoa Saidi, sits at the side of the stage throughout, dressed in gleaming satin and turning the pages of a weatherbeaten volume, intermittently chanting in the Bugis language.

The central characters Grauer selected from the epic are Sawérigading and Wé Tenriabéng, fraternal-twin grandchildren of the gods of the Upper and Lower Worlds. They love each other, but incest taboos forbid them to marry. Eventually, they marry others, and it’s their children who go into the godless Middle World to start again. The genealogy of all this is complicated, but what matters is that though the gods control everything, their children often disobey them, and the world suffers the consequences — war, hardship, and exile.

The story as told here is a personal one, even though the persons are demi-gods. Across the great historic sweep of the epic, the ill-fated twins withstand their desire for each other. Sawérigading crosses the ocean to marry another beautiful princess, Wé Cudaiq. Vain and demanding, she refuses to have him, so he’s obligated to make war on her kingdom. She accepts him to save her country, but she swears never to look at him in the daylight. She gives birth to a son, I La Galigo, but before she can have the child destroyed, Sawérigading resuces him and they both flee. Years later, Wé Cudaiq sees both of them at a cockfight. In the daylight at last, she and Sawérigading fall in love. I La Galigo sets out on his own journey.

All this unfolds in a series of images and actions alternating, as the story does, between slowly evolving situations and sudden disturbances. Wilson’s staging has many elements that you can recognize from other Indonesian theatrical forms — scenes in shadow play, massed groups of soldiers in formal combat, roly-poly clowns, processions — but he hasn’t tried to create a "Pan-Indonesian" style. The dancing (directed by Andi Ummu Tunru, a traditional dancer and native of Makassar, South Sulawesi) is sometimes a variant of the local dance forms and sometimes newly created for the piece.

The acting style — stiff and declamatory and occasionally clumsy or childlike — took me back to the olden days of postmodernism and Wilson’s early pieces, Deafman Glance and The Life and Times of Sigmund Freud, when the avant-garde was conducting a thorough purge of naturalistic theater and its appeal to our sympathies. Here, the characters’ human fallibilities are offset by the way they move; they’re superhuman, after all, and perhaps we’re not supposed to get too close.

There are terrific Wilsonian images, though none of the spectacularly strange happenings that marked his early productions. The unborn twins wrapped together in a fetal embrace. The haughty princess, appearing first as a doll beyond a sea of white gauze. A cockfight staged as a noisy slugfest between hand puppets made of the men’s yellow headcloths. The Rice Goddess, an old woman in green, implacably gesturing with a dark green fan while four women do a ritual dance in a square around her. Perhaps Wilson’s theater has grown more accessible, but he still makes accomplished visions.

There was a magical reward the next night at David Dorfman’s concert, which opened the Concord Academy Summer Stages Dance series. Dorfman finished a solo at the beginning of his 2004 Lightbulb Theory and went upstage to where a column of dim lights had been hanging. He touched it and the lights flew apart, swinging in a glowing canopy above the dark stage. The audience gasped with pleasure.

I hope it’s not too great a stretch to say Dorfman has something in common with Wilson, a sense of resilience and continuity. For both of them, life and the dance go on, preserving the lessons and lore of one generation into the next. Where Dorfman differs is in his compassion. His dance looks quite self-generated, not governed by any specific technique but susceptible to many, and, especially, respectful of the other people who dance with him.

In his Lightbulb solo, dressed in trousers, collarless shirt, and a long coat, he seemed to be exploring the space around himself, with enormous swings, rotations, releases, and an expectant look on his face, as if eager to see where the next move would take him. He reminded me of a jolly Jewish uncle. At the piano, Michael Wall played some chords and sang what could have been phrases from a Victorian parlor song in a high, breathy tenor.

Dorfman at some point fell, sprang up again, fell again, and tugged his coat around himself, preparing for death, I assumed. He leaped up again and then walked forward, his whole body undulating, ascending. After a pause, he read some remembered stories about his father. The light bulbs levitated after that.

But then five more dancers arrived, Dorfman watching from the side aisle of the theater. They plugged through a long, aerobic, chorus-line routine, comradely and smiling, ignoring one who faltered. This was followed by many more little numbers, duets and solos, that seemed to be about managing to keep going as a group when they were in fact individuals and not always ready to collaborate. Parts of Dorfman’s solo kept sliding to the surface of their movement.

In approaching some calm, Dorfman and Lisa Race danced a duet of tremendous intimacy suggesting there’s much more to a relationship than sex. Both are big, sturdy, agile dancers, and they threw themselves at each other with complete confidence, even humor. Once he ran in a circle as she swam no-handed across his shoulders. You could see some of the partnering skills of contact improvisation in what they were doing, but also the pleasure of showing off and the satisfaction of being near each other.

The company also performed Dorfman’s new Older Testaments, which began like a zany kids’ piece and ended with all six dancers, mostly undressed, packed into a transparent house not much bigger than a telephone booth.