Summer things

Donald Byrd and Paul Taylor at the Pillow

by Marcia B. Siegel

Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival is in the midst of another boom season, with two featured attractions running every week, plus a load of informal showings, talks, and add-ons. Under directors Liz Thompson, Sali Ann Kriegsman, and now Ella Baff, who migrated across the country after being program director at the University of California/Berkeley's Cal Performances, the Pillow has ascended into one of its peak eras as a vacation-culture haven in the Berkshires.

Last week the Paul Taylor Dance Company was doing two programs of repertory and Donald Byrd/The Group showed Jazz Train, a three-part work made in collaboration with jazz composers. Byrd's piece made me ask many questions about the nature of jazz, dance, and jazz-dance collaboration. Jazz Train was famously funded and co-commissioned by too many big-name pockets and presenters to list here. The composers represented a pretty good cross-section of contemporary jazz: Max Roach, Vernon Reid, and Geri Allen. But the collaborative part looked as if it had happened by satellite. Each set of dancers and musicians seemed to be taking off on its own ideas; the aesthetic intersections must be on the map of outer space.

Donald Byrd invites us to think about these aesthetics in a program note linking the eclectic roots of jazz in the African and European experience to American cultural diversity and adaptability. Byrd's own dance background has given him a big range of stylistic options, and he's developed a vocabulary that fuses the showier aspects of jazz dance with the flashy proclivities of ballet. This vocabulary doesn't change from one part of the dance to another, though the musical foundation does.

In Jazz I Max Roach plays an extended solo (the music is on tape) of endless inventions and changes in rhythm, pacing, and the organization of the different instruments in the drum set. You could say this is intuitive music, improvisational, the drummer almost following without volition where the music leads him. But it's also a deeply intellectual immersion that Roach is committed to, as he probes the arcane, almost ungraspable possibilities of his craft.

The dance charges over the surface of this with a hard-hitting complexity and phrasing of its own. The eight dancers face the audience in a wedge shape that becomes a sort of signature for the whole piece but that, as any dance audience knows, is already a signature from Alvin Ailey's famous Revelations. The whole of Jazz I seems to be a demonstration of ways to dance this distorted, balletic vocabulary of Byrd's. Stretching into arabesque then scrunching the torso, spinning and leaping then twitching out one hip and splaying the hand, the dancers do everything straight out to the audience, except when a profile shows the line better. People hunch around or poke their chins out in funky attitudes. There are duets where the women are lifted and manipulated by the men, sometimes in decorative shapes, sometimes in lumpy knots or crotch-to-the-audience splits. The dynamic is frenetic all the time.

Virtually nothing about this movement changes in Jazz 2, which has antique Grecian costumes and more than a suggestion of homoerotic inversion. Vernon Reid's music for an unusual ensemble of trumpet, guitar, keyboard, and electronics seems at first new-agey but later merely perfunctory, as if Reid had run out of ideas about what to do with minimalism. The dancers walked, ran, and chased one another on tiptoe. Two women flirted and simpered, as if lesbians couldn't escape the cute mannerisms demanded by hetero sex; two men looked deep into each other's eyes and ventured a few forbidden embraces. Later they all turned into burlesque nymphs and satyrs.

Geri Allen's music for Jazz 3 assumed different moods and periods but, unlike the Max Roach, lingered long enough on each one to sustain a rhythm for dancing. But again the choreography went its own way. The premise here, a little more literal than the first two sections, was a roadhouse, maybe down South, where people cruise for partners, issue invitations by pushing their pelvises back and forth, and dance together with much rubbing of bodies and grabbing of butts. One duet in this mechanically passionate mode is set to a meditative number where a singer compares love to addiction.

In mid piece the music shifts to a pseudo-African mood, and the dancers revert to nature, adapting their moves so that the tiptoe walks and stuck-out chins, together with flapping arms, turn them into wading birds. After this interlude, they're back in the dive again, being social and gesturing with straw fans, just like the churchgoers in the last part of Revelations.

Possibly I've stressed the eccentricity of Byrd's dance more than I should. His staple movements and propelling impetus are those of ballet laced with the stock jazz kinks of Ailey and Bob Fosse. I'm all for new fusions and inventions of movement, but I didn't see how Byrd's idiom was seriously revamping jazz. Up to now, I've thought jazz meant at least two things I didn't see in this dance: a demanding beat or rhythm with variations and embellishments, and/or an ensemble feeling that encourages individual invention without sacrificing the basic rhythmic or harmonic structure. Byrd neither adopts the new ideas of his composer-companions nor avoids the clichés of the jazz dance that came before him.

Paul Taylor offered two upbeat favorites on the program I saw -- Arden Court (1981), to the English Baroque composer William Boyce, and Esplanade (1975), to Bach violin concertos -- plus a newer, knottier work, The Word, with a score by David Israel. Perhaps prompted by promotional statements, the press has assumed that The Word is about the dangers of religious conformity, but the Biblical epigraph in the program, "For our God is a consuming fire," could mean many things. The section of the Letter to the Hebrews from which this line is taken exhorts the faithful to accept God's punishment as a test and a prelude to their heavenly reward. Taylor has worked this theme before, and not approvingly, in Speaking in Tongues, but I wasn't sure just what was the message in The Word.

The 11 men and women are dressed identically in kneepants, high-collared shirts, ties and suspenders, and thick white stockings and black orthopedic shoes laced tight over the ankles, with their hair slicked down. They're all wearing red lipstick, which made me think of the description of Martha Graham that Taylor read from his autobiography at a pre-performance talk. The dancers, who look to me like boarding-school pupils in the Weimar Republic, alternately punch the air with their fists and drop to their knees in prayer. After some time, a snakelike figure in a green leotard enters, gnashing her teeth and making fierce faces. This presence (Lisa Viola) seems to exist on a different plane, weaving in and out of the masses without making much change in their behavior, which has been standardized before she appears.

Much of the dance isn't formed in my memory; what remains are expressionist, asymmetrical bodies and ceremonial rearrangements of the group. No one that I can remember actually harms anyone else, but idol figures mount the shoulders of their peers only to fall into abject postures. At the end, Viola confronts a line-up, seems to be trying to get them to follow her, but then gives up and follows or drives them out. Whatever it means, The Word seems a pale and formal version of half a dozen more outspoken Taylor dances.

The Taylor company now lends itself to formalism and mass display, and it doesn't play up the more personal, introspective possibilities of his choreography. Esplanade looks like a different dance to me in this interpretation. There's a Dance in America videotape with most of the original cast that I know almost by heart, and though dances have to be rethought to stay alive, I wonder about the particular way the present company conveys this dance.

Esplanade is a textbook example of how everyday movement and gesture can be converted into pure dance movement. Walking, waving, glancing over the shoulder, stopping short and turning a corner -- these ordinary actions with just the slightest push from a musical idea take on the rhythmic lilt and spatial breadth, and eventually the virtuosic capabilities, we expect from dancing. It all seems perfectly natural, up to the point when we realize a transformation is taking place. The Taylor company now does it the other way around. The imagery is dance from the beginning, and the company sells the mimetic implications the way ballet dancers do. Placing the emphasis this way makes Esplanade so much more conventional than it was.

Arden Court also looked bland, but the piece has never had any shadowy implications. Its theme of contrast, announced right off as Andrew Asnes walks serenely through a capering group, is carried from one duet to another -- for example, one partner revolves in place, the other scurries around him. Later, six men do slow supported acrobatics, but there's always one facing the wrong direction. Taylor's wit doesn't need the reinforcement of toothpaste smiles.