Order?

Ruth Birnberg puts the question

by Marcia B. Siegel

Opening her concert at Green Street Studios, Ruth Birnberg told a story about a Coke machine that was supposed to deliver a cup, some ice, and then the drink but messily malfunctioned. The moral of her tale seemed to be: "Order is everything." But after a moment's thought, she reconsidered -- did she really want order? The three dancers who accompanied this fable, Once upon a Summer Day, sprang and rolled and gestured, connecting and reconnecting the same movements in different circusy shapes. Birnberg seemed to be working along the same formal but fractious compositional lines as Daniel McCusker, with whom she shared the past two split weeks at Green Street.

Birnberg says her new dance, Gaspard de la Nuit, draws on the texts by Aloysius Bertrand whose nightmare allure inspired Ravel. In an opening solo, she suggested Ondine, the water sprite disastrously in love with a mortal. A smallish but elongated woman, Birnberg moves big, with outstretched arms and sweeping spirals that propel her through space or along the floor. But there's often a conflicting tendency to focus inward, so she looks as if she weren't completely convinced about these expansive ventures. The moves become increasingly agitated and eccentric toward the end of the solo.

In the second part of the music, Gibet, Birnberg climbs onto a wooden vehicle that resembles a railroad work cart but also is crude and somehow sinister. Daniel McCusker and Leslie Shafer Koval join her. Slowly, suspiciously, they inspect the terrain, close by and way out beyond the studio, and slowly Koval and McCusker pump on a lever that makes the cart roll a few feet. When they get part way across the floor, they raise a sail and a hidden projector throws pictures onto it. These photographs by Andre Kertész might be snapshots of long-ago family members -- children, men in suits and hats talking together. After a picture has been on for a while, one of the people starts to fade, till a white silhouette takes his place in the group.

I wondered whether Birnberg was thinking about the Holocaust in this elaborately staged scene. A "gibet" is a gallows. Bertrand's poem imagines the whispering of insects reconnoitering the corpse of a hanged man, and the piano tolls a funeral bell throughout a progression of moody chords. Nothing else in the dance is quite as evocative as this trancelike journey, but in the last section, Scarbo, McCusker slips away after a struggle with Koval. He just disappears, like the ghost in Bertrand's poem, which makes itself known only by elusive sounds and shadows.

I thought this piece, hovering on the brink of specificity and not making light of anything, was Birnberg's most effective statement of the order/disorder paradox. Elsewhere she can seem deceptively sweet, as in Soliloquy, where six women in filmy gray pajamas tenderly meet and just as tenderly abandon one another in swooping, swirling, aspiring, supporting, never resolving patterns. I thought the dance only nominally related to Debussy's Nocturnes (Nuages, Fêtes, Sirènes), which paint visual pictures as well as tonal ones.

When Birnberg gets literal with her taste for intrigue, she brings out the absurd but not the macabre. Witness, a 1997 piece to Stravinsky's Concerto for Two Pianos, is based on the board game Clue. Six dancers in brightly colored clothes are confined to squares of light at first. Later they're released from their cages and move around the space. Alone or in small groups, they mime activities that don't seem connected. One person compulsively digs -- a garden? a grave? There's an agitated tea party. Two persons seem to be busy enacting the perils of Pauline. Birnberg rushes and jerks around in a droopy white satin nightgown, as if trying to raise a warning, but of what and to whom we don't know. In a long climactic scene, everyone throttles everyone else, and then they combine all their gestures, ominous and ordinary, into one formal dance pattern.

Even the choice to use live music hints at Birnberg's appreciation of illogic. Yukiko Takagi played Ravel's Gaspard; her duo pianist for the Debussy and Stravinsky was Vernon Robison. Although it was great to hear the music live, the dance succumbed to its enchantment only in Gaspard. Otherwise, we might have been listening to folk songs or rock and roll.