Braving the elements

Dance Umbrella's aerial show; the Royal Swedish Ballet's Ballets Suédois

by Marcia B. Siegel

We often think of dancers as superhuman, more beautiful and accomplished than the rest of us. Their bodies are perfectly honed to execute tremendous feats that remain in their muscle-memory banks for years. They can make an instantaneous physical response to a visual or mental stimulus, and they can coordinate with their fellow movers, sometimes even without being able to see who's behind them. Despite these extraordinary attributes and skills, they always seem to be looking for ways to transcend what few limitations remain.

Dance Umbrella's final presentation of the season, in mid June at the Emerson Majestic, featured several varieties of "aerial dance." This is not a single form or technique but a shared quest for a range of movement that isn't defined by one's relationship to the ground. The eight companies I saw on the first evening were working within two related aerial traditions: the aesthetics of circus and acrobatic athletes and the arranged risk-taking of rock climbers, high-wire stuntmen, and Evel Knievel. Aerial dance isn't new to the theater or the experimental dance scene either. I thought most of the groups were working on refinements of very simple strategies tested around the late '60s and early '70s in Trisha Brown's equipment pieces (Planes, Walking on the Wall, Man Walking Down the Side of a Building). By now, aerial dance has become one component of a whole genre of spectacle ranging from Cirque du Soleil to Elizabeth Streb's Ringside.

Streb, by the way, has developed a portable set, called a box truss. Adapted from the structures used for rock concerts, it contains and supports the many flying, falling, diving, tumbling, multidimensional effects that constitute her dance. In New York last week I heard a "tech talk" about that elaborate, environmental grid. It was being installed in the Winter Garden of the World Financial Center, where Streb and company are conducting a three-week, six-hour-a-day public rehearsal residency.

For all its diversity, the Dance Umbrella program seemed tame compared to Streb's drastic and demanding work. Of course, it takes training and courage to strike beautiful poses and change your grip from hand to ankle to crook of the knee while swinging or hanging upside down on a wire -- I would not dream of doing it. But this seemed to be the extent of technical and aesthetic aspiration for many of the works, and in the end they began to look alike.

Pilar Cervera of Fura, which is based in Barcelona, used a red silk cloth that she tied into slings and knots to stand in and lean out of and sometimes drop from, as she melted from one shape to another. At various times she looked like a snake charmer, a Hindu goddess, and an exotic dancer. She finally fashioned the cloth and herself into a six-pointed star. This piece, Catorze ("Fourteen"), set an Orientalist tone of exquisite exhibitionism that carried over into several other things.

Axis Dance Company's Descending Cords (directed by Joanna Haigood) had two people on a revolving ladder going through a series of continuous, complementary and possibly amorous shapes -- I thought of Susan Marshall's 1987 Kiss, where the dancers floated apart and together harnessed to the ends of two cables. In another part of the Axis space, two other dancers wafted in tandem on two almost invisible swivel chairs. And two men sensually partnered each other on a swing trapeze in Bodyvox's One, which was choreographed by Eric Skinner to romantic music from Songs of the Auvergne.

Only a few pieces emphasized movement as something more than the maneuvers required to create decorative or metaphoric effects. Jo Kreiter showcased her upper-body strength in Test, throwing herself at an upright pole, climbing it, winding around it, fastening herself perpendicular to it. The program closed with David Parsons's sensational solo Caught, which was danced by Jaime Martinez. Using a hand-held switch, Martinez activated a strobe light every time he hit the peak of a jump, so that he made himself seem to be levitating. But the most physical and riskiest event of the evening was a pre-performance cliff caper by four people from Project Bandaloop (based Out West somewhere), who scaled down and rappelled off the side of the Castle at Park Plaza, stopping rush-hour traffic and collecting an awestruck crowd on Arlington Street.

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The following week I went to Washington, where I caught up with the Royal Swedish Ballet, which was touring to only two places in the US with an amazing program of reconstructions from the celebrated but almost totally extinct Ballets Suédois.

Avant-garde dance disappears fast. It either fades as soon as its novelty wears off or it serves, like Trisha Brown's early work, to open up new and increasingly sophisticated genres. Self-styled dance archeologists Millicent Hodson and Kenneth Archer have been bringing the dance history of the early 20th century to life for more than a decade. Hodson researches and directs the choreography; Archer re-creates the designs. They've resurrected works by Nijinsky, Balanchine, and now the Ballets Suédois' Jean Börlin.

Seeing the program at the Kennedy Center (it was premiered last summer in Stockholm) was like entering a time machine. When they're performed at all, period pieces tend to get tucked in among more familiar fare, as if producing companies were afraid we'd forget what they really do. It was Robert Joffrey who sparked a serious interest in the choreographic heritage of ballet, but after his death, in 1988, the 125-year archive he built up -- including Hodson's monumental re-creation of Le sacre du printemps and 14 others from the period 1910-1940 -- quickly disappeared again.

Joffrey never got around to the Ballets Suédois, but he might have, after working his way through the choreographers of Diaghilev's Ballets Russes -- Fokine, Massine, Nijinsky, Nijinska, and Balanchine -- plus the German expressionist Kurt Jooss. A rival of the Ballets Russes though much less durable, the Ballets Suédois (1920-1925) was arguably more experimental, and democratic, than Diaghilev's enterprise. Bankrolled by its founder, Rolf de Maré, it didn't have to cultivate an audience as strenuously as the Ballets Russes. De Maré employed the modern painters and composers of the time, but all the choreography was done by Börlin, who had neither the physique, the virtuosic ability, nor the inclination to work in a neoclassical direction. This means that the Ballets Suédois didn't acquire either the elitist clientele or the long-term critical cachet that the Russes did. With only one choreographer, who died only five years after the demise of the company, the repertory didn't spread out beyond its original venue. Nothing but bits were filmed, and until now, nothing survived.

Hodson derived her stagings of Within the Quota (music by Cole Porter, designs by Gerald Murphy), Dervishes (Aleksandr Glazunov, Georges Mouveau), and Skating Rink (Arthur Honegger, Fernand Léger) from existing visual materials, musical scores, written accounts, interviews with surviving dancers, and a dancer-scholar's immersion in the sensibility of her subject. We can't know how authentically they replicate the originals, but probably they're the closest thing we'll ever get. They certainly tell us more about the Ballets Suédois' aesthetics than the other reconstruction on the program, Ivo Cramér's El Greco, which followed Börlin's scheme of animating famous paintings and connecting the tableaux into a story but used an expressionistic movement and mime and seemed more modern than 1920.

Within the Quota, where a Swedish immigrant lands on American soil and meets up with every stereotyped character a European would have recognized from movies and shows of the time, was interesting mainly for the simultaneous, clashing rhythms and keys of Cole Porter's score. Dervishes replicated what we still see in traditional Sufi ceremonies, with hints of personal relationships underlying the ritual patterns of the five dervishes and the five soldiers who pass by, become intrigued, and join in the whirling dances but finally capture the devout practitioners.

Hodson has spoken a lot about the cubist intentions of Skating Rink. Fernand Léger's geometric set and costume designs are set in motion by the large group of simulated rollerskaters, who glide continuously in big and small circles and cut-up linear tracks while various characters emerge to enact their stories. This is a big and interesting ballet, more than you can grasp at one viewing, and I hope the Royal Swedish will keep it in repertory.

A couple things that struck me about the program were the range of thematic sources and the attempts to distinguish all the dancers. Even the 24 members of the corps de ballet in Skating Rink had titles designating their occupation, their class, and sometimes the color of their costumes, so the audience could pick them out. In these four ballets, at least, we can see that the Ballets Suédois' idea of modernism was not limited to reformulating traditional ballet classicism with the same polarizing social set-ups. Class boundaries are much more permeable; people are recognized for what they do, not the status into which they were born. The subject matter could be ethnological, as in Dervishes and many other folk-dance ballets Börlin devised, and religious themes could be quite specific. The dancers looked more convinced about all this than many other performers in supposedly updated classical ballets.