Nancy Dalva

"Cedric Andrieux"

September 18-19, 2009

CEDRIC ANDRIEUX AT THE JOYCE

 

Don't miss  this post-modern  danseur noble in his  one-man show at the Joyce Theater Saturday at 8 pm and Sunday at 2 pm.

  

Cédric Andrieux joined the Merce Cunningham Dance Company in 1999 (dancing first here in New York with Jennifer Muller),  and left in July,  2007 to join the Lyon Opera Ballet.  On June 20^th of that year, on the most beautiful late spring day, we were on a bus returning back to the city after the outdoor dress rehearsal for a Cunningham Event at Philip Johnson's Glass House in Connecticut.

It had been a true fête champêtre, with the dancers sunning on a hill after lunch, and then resuming the long pair of stages connected by a walkway, with the woodland opening behind them like a day dream. On stage, they seemed to have come out of the forest. Just as, In Cunningham's Ocean, they seemed to come out of the sea.  

 

 

 In either element, Andrieux could take dominion. He could be Poseidon, he could be Orlando in the Forest of Arden. Just in doing the steps and making them as big as they could be, he could summon up a world. This is the Cunningham magic, and Andrieux was an adept.  

  "Ive been in New York for 10 years," he said at the time, "dancing Merce's work for nine years. I didn't think there's anyone else in this city who could bring me to as may levels as Merce did. But I want to dance different characters--which is why I chose Lyon. Because what I need in my career is diversity."

"I'm glad to be going back."

"It comes with a sense of apprehension a little bit, because I haven't lived my adult life there. It is mostly a lifestyle choice. I feel at a place where I've done the pieces I wanted to do, and I've done them enough."

 "I leave with no regrets, and I feel very fortunate about the experiences I've had in this company. I feel very at peace, and that's great. I feel very lucky that I got to dance for Merce Cunningham. On top of the experience, he opened so many doors for me."

"At the end of the day, it gave me freedom to explore different ways of approaching movement."

Andrieux was looking forward to dancing a wide repertory in Lyon, including works by Trisha Brown, Maguey Marin, William Forsythe, and Jérôme Bel. He was moving into an old apartment building with a balcony, a five minute walk from the opera house, and an eight minute walk from "an amazing outdoor market."

 Later that spring, Merce --named by the French first a Chevalier and then an Officier of the the Légion d'Honneur--would say, "From childhood I always wanted to see France. Not just Paris but the North, South, East, and West of France."

One of Cédric's favorite roles was Merce's own in "Suite for Five."

He performs a section of it--as if quoting his own earlier performance-- in this "visual autobiography" conceived and directed by Bel, telling the story of his dancing life from his first training in France though his last three years in Lyon.

This is the fifth in a series of pieces Bel describes as "questioning the experience and the knowledge of performers." (The first, about a member of the corps de ballet of the Paris Opera, was shown here in its film version at the Baryshnikov Arts Center.)

Last year in Paris, on a memorial program for Cunningham at the Theatre de la Ville, Andrieux performed the Cunningham section of his piece.

 Standing alone on the unadorned stage in his practice clothes, Andrieux spoke quietly into a microphone fastened somewhere on his shirt. (There he spoke French; here he will speak English.)

'Je m'appelle Cédric Andrieux, " he began.

He was still, modest, plain, and in fact the exact opposite  to what he had been with Cunningham: a master of projection.

His intensity, his gaze, his ability to appear large in any context--these were some of his qualities dancing with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company.  He was focused, he was ardent, he was there. 

And he was completely, compellingly present in this piece too, but not by sending himself out into the house.

Instead, he drew his audience in. Somehow, he reversed the polarity.

In the course of the work, he performs what feel like sketches, very clear, of two of his  Cunningham roles--the "Suite" part he loved, and a solo from "Biped." Without music, without decor, just the steps.

I hadn't thought I'd see Cedric in this work again, but there he was, drawing it out of his memory of that dancing, and so it seemed, out of mine.

That's a kind of magic, too, an Andrieux magic.

Even if you don't know this work he's danced in before, you can know it now, though the medium of this event, and it will stand for itself, as itself.

Il est Cédric Andrieux.

photos: dressing room, Jamie Roque de la Cruz; Cédric  Andrieux and Andrea Weber in "Ocean," Stephanie Berger; performance, Herman Sorgelos
                                                                          

 

 

 

The Legacy Tour: Hello, Columbus

One day we're speeding though sunshine, and the next day we're slogging through snow.

                                                                                          Merce Cunningham

COLUMBUS, OHIO--The Merce Cunningham Dance Company left New York yesterday and flew through sunny skies to this cloud covered, snow drifted university town, where--as chance has it--their long goodbye begins. Billed as The Legacy Tour,  this series of bookings will take the troupe though several continents, through two years, through airports and train stations, through birthdays and holidays, and through some 17 works in their repertory-- some again and again and then again, some for the first time in decades.  Tonight, here, they will perform a work Merce Cunningham made in 1960 and performed in himself. It is called "Crises."  Then, after intermission, they will dance "Split Sides," the work that plays with chance procedures in front of the audience. Before each performance, dice are thrown (at the premiere, the tossers included Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns) to determine the order of the dance, which is made in two parts; and also to determine the orders of the sets; the musical scores; the costumes; and the light plots. There are two choices for each element, resulting in some exponential number of possible outcomes.

The allure of this complicated gambit is that it illustrates one of the core Cunningham tenets: dance, decor, and music are separate entities, conceived apart, having in common duration of time and occupation of space at the time of the performance. Whatever the outcome on any given occasion, it's a delicious dance, with some of the dishiest duet material in the canon, and with scores by Radiohead and Sigur Ros, it's perhaps especially suited to a university house. (Why not see a kind of dancing you've perhaps never seen while hearing music by bands you already like a lot? ) Each made a score just for this work, and they played live when the work opened, in 2003. Here's the backstory, with a diary of the first four performances and the various ways the results of the chance operations affected the experience of the piece CHANCES ARE .

How excellent is it that each of the two sets can be felt to represent a climate? What will it be tonight? First winter, then summer? Will the dancers be set down in their tropical costumes in an arctic environment, or will they wear their winter branches costumes in their winter set? We'll see. It's a strange thing, this beginning of an ending. But we aren't there, yet. We're here.  Curtain's at eight. As Merce said:

                  We begin again... Ready, everybody?

photo courtesy Hugo Glendinning

Merce Cunningham quotations are from the interview transcripts from Mondays with Merce

( transcript copyright Nancy Dalva & The Cunningham Dance Foundation)

Neil Greenberg on Merce Cunningham: "There's nothing else like it in the world"

 

Neil Greenberg with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company |photo Kristy Santimyer-Melita



Last September, Neil Greenberg came calling at Westbeth, at the 11th floor studio he called home from 1979-1986, the years he danced with The Merce Cunningham Dance Company. He watched some rehearsal of "Nearly Ninety," Merce's last work. He stepped out onto the floor and taught current company members a combination (see above). And he sat down for an interview for "Mondays with Merce." Film from that day is part of the latest episode of that series, all available free online at Mondays with Merce .

 Greenberg returned to New York City (he teaches now at the University of California at Riverside, where he's a Professor of Experimental Choreography) in late October, to dance in the Cunningham Memorial at the Park Avenue Armory--you can see film of that day in Neil's "Mondays with Merce," as well as film of Neil in his own wonderful choreography and in archival footage of the Charles Atlas/Merce Cunningham films "Channels/Inserts" and "Coast Zone."

Here's an excerpt from the transcript of Neil Greenberg's "Mondays with Merce" interview.

Neil Greenberg: I kept seeing Merce’s work after I left the company. Kind of had to. I mean for personal nurturance...There’s nothing else like it in the world.

Nancy Dalva:     And what does it give you?

Neil Greenberg: What does Merce’s work give me? It’s such a perceptually cleansing experience for me to sit in the audience and experience a Cunningham work...In any Cunningham work,  my perceptions feel so exercised, and it’s  that experience of walking out on the street afterwards and colors are brighter!  And all qualities, all experiential qualities are just more pronounced, more articulated. That’s the other thing that it does. It really articulates experience so that all of the component parts of any moment are all just so distinct   and heightened. You know,  it’s the thing that Cunningham told us as dancers: Make it as much as it can be without making it something else. So as an audience member out there, when I’ve seen a Cunningham work, life gets that way. Life-- without it being something else, without having to throw meaning onto the moment-- I can just experience the moment. A little more fully. A little .. well, just better. So that’s part of what I love about the work.

To see Neil in conversation, just click here: MwM 009: Dancing for Merce, with Neil Greenberg .

copyright Nancy Dalva 2009 (interview excerpt copyright Nancy Dalva and the Merce Cunningham Dance Foundation)

Merce Cunningham, 1919-2009

The sky crackled with lightning last night, the air rattled with thunder, and at home, peacefully, in his sleep, Merce Cunningham joined with the elements so natural to him: the earth, the sky, the water, and the air.  Those birds he drew--they could fly, as he once could, and as, until his last week, he set his dancers to doing. He said recently that choreography had become, for him, "a habit of mind." We were talking, then (for "Mondays with Merce"), about how he could choreograph now that he could no longer move--as in like manner Beethoven composed when he could no longer hear.... As movement was taken from him, his dancers gave it back to him. So direct, their process with Merce: thought into movement, with nothing intermediary. These past months, he was tired; but he was game. He never stopped laughing, at himself as much as anyone or anything. To the end he was  gallant and courteous with visitors, and clear. Always clear, like those green eyes that could look as blue as the sky on a cloudless day.  I asked him this: "Merce, how is it that without music, without narrative, and with your using chance procedures to remove yourself, to keep from imposing your personality on the movement, that your dances are so passionate?" "Because," he said, "I love dancing!"
copyright 2009 Nancy Dalva
photo courtesy Hugo Glendinning

THIS WEEKEND IN NYC, JUNE 20-22

Dance by Neil Greenberg at DanceTheaterWorkshop

I recommend that all fans of Neil Greenberg--and anyone who doesn't know his work--see DANCE BY NEIL GREENBERG (www.neilgreenberg.org) at DanceTheaterWorkshop, on Friday and Saturday nights, at 7:30 pm. (www.dtw.org )

The evening includes Greenberg's excellent Quartet with Three Gay Men, first seen here in 2006, with Neil in the cast. This dance was made using videotape of Greenberg, edited by him, with the dancers acquiring his movement from the tape, and then his editing of this live material. The score is by RuPaul, and the wonderful composer-harpist Zeena Parkins. Here it is played on tape.

Parkins, joined by two other accomplished harpists, sits center stage--well, just off center to your right--in Greenberg's new work, Really Queer Dance with Harps. This dance can be seen as a culmination of 15 years of collaboration among the choreographer, the composer, and the lighting designer Michael Stiller. It can also be seen as a beginning of something new.

In other words, this is a transitional work. Here you see Greenberg doing the following things for the first time in his own work: using traditional partnering devices; having dancers touch; using material derived from others. None of these things is in itself very novel, but in Greenberg's diaristic canon, they are inaudible bombshells. The full length (50 minute) fantastically entertaining and lovely commissioned harp score is the first music to which Greenberg has listened before making his work, rather than working alongside or before the music. At least that is how I understand his process from a fine after-performance discussion lead by DTW Artistic Director Carla Peterson. Thanks to her, and to Executive Director Stephen Greco, for running this show over two weeks.

Greenberg is a dear figure to those who have followed his career. His work is personal, and one responds to its openness, its wit, its joy, and its released danciness with pleasure that is also personal. This opening out into new territory shows just how clearly Greenberg has previously drawn in his boundaries, set up his parameters, and claimed his own turf. What remains from his years dancing with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company (1979-1986) (and I can still close my eyes and see him, way up in the air, feet  tracing needlepoint designs in space) is nothing of the outline, nothing of the content, and certainly nothing obvious from the technique or devices.

What remains is the wonderful connectedness of dancers who learn their work in silence, who rely on each other for cues, who must be attentive at all times to one another, as the question of who is cuing switches depending on who is in front,  who can be seen by whom, from where, and when. And just where is front? As in real life, front is whichever way one faces.

As Ezra Pound writes in his Pisan Cantos, "What thou lov'st well remains...."How good it is to have Neil Greenberg back in New York to wrap up the spring season at DTW. It's a better city with him in it.

Click on images  for larger view of the dances. Photos by Julieta Cervantes

Compagnie Maguy Marin at the Joyce Theater

Get out--or go buy--some earplugs, and catch Umwelt, Marguy Marin's (www.compagnie-maguy-marin.fr ) terrific show--for that's what it is-- at the Joyce Theater, Friday at 8 pm, Saturday at 2pm and 8pm, and Sunday at 2pm and 7:30pm. (www.joyce.org)  True, her partner Denis Mariotte's  soundscore (live electric music involving some rope played off a large fishing reel, across three prone electric guitars, and taken up by a pulling device, with the resulting sounds AMPLIFIED, to put it quietly, by a real-time computer process) is repellingly loud, causing after-ringing in some. But that--and the concomitant tumult from the perpetual wind tunnel, running from left to right (the rope is drawn from right to left--sound from every direction, sound and motion)--are mere environment for a dance that is about being an environment. A world onto itself. The program quotes Beckett, and otherwise explains at length what the choreographer would not explain during an extremely opaque q. and a. after Wednesday's performance. 

Symbols, what symbols? The woman with the dead pheasant in her mouth dragging it around as if she is a dog? The man with rabbit ears doing this and then that? The people in crowns? The baby dolls? The changing clothes? The constant appearance and reappearance of the nine people in the cast in varying combinations, in varying garments, or partial garments, or no garments?

 

The mirrored panels, staggered across the stage in two rows, with another wider screen of them at the back---what do they mean? Well, for one thing, they mean that the dance is entirely episodic, like a film cut into bits, and reassembled seemingly at random. Either life transpires as continuous scenes cut up, or life proceeds in fits and starts of occurrence and recurrence--but always with amplification, with something new.

New as this piece progresses are the constantly accumulating costumes--so many overcoats!--so many hats! wigs!--many discarded, some blowing off. The performers are the same. They stand in between the panels at the beginning of the work, which is about an hour long, and they stand there at the end. In between, they have separate moments, when the lights change, and the environment seems quieter, and each, in his or her own turn, stands and gazes at us. These solos, for that is what they are, are a recognition. We see them, they seem to see us.

Who is more implacable? The performer,paused for a moment in the frenzied accumulation of the piece; or the viewer, hands cupped over ears, daring the work to do something, to say something, to change something, to want something, to give something, to take something, to be something.

It can't go on. It does go on.

Click on images for larger views of the piece.  Photos by Ganet.

 

TRISHA'S BACK

If you go out in the woods today
You're sure of a big surprise.
The Teddy Bear’s Picnic

The Trisha Brown Dance Company shimmered into the Joyce Theatre in New York (from February 5-10) with a revival of “Foray Foret,” first performed in 1990 at the Dance Biennale in Lyon, France. Hence the bi-lingual title, though the forest suggested is clearly here. This is established by the work’s novel score: an indistinct, offstage American marching band, heard intermittently. They are playing John Philip Sousa. The hoopla  of the everyday world goes on, at a distance, muffled yet cheerful.

Most of the piece transpires in silence, or silences–as if quietude could lap at you like waves. The dancers, too, are slippery. There are novel partnering strategies, and novel forms of coalescence, as if the dancers were released from a single blob of mercury, and inclined to recombine. There is a silvery calligraphy of small gestures, and the signature Brownian loft of leg, of arm, and the sweep of larger gestures that have no conclusion, but simply waft off into the choreographic aether.

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This blog is for Nancy Dalva's Letter from New York, and other pieces.