Riverrun - Project Arts Centre- Dublin Theatre Festival

Riverrun  is a very difficult show to describe or analyze.  Which . . . considering the source material is James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake, is not exactly a surprise.  You can’t exactly call it abstract, but it is a piece where you really sit there and let yourself flow along with it.  It is stark but expressive sound, movement, light, evocation, but it leaves behind plot and pretense at single unified meaning.

 As a theatrical work it manages to lay bare the connection between Joyce and Beckett, but this literary history is nearly irrelevant, a bit of intellectual background in the shadow of the immediacy of the artistic achievement happening on the stage. The words and their maybe meanings were physically embodied by Olwen Fouéré’s mesmerizing performance. The space was very simple and spare, evoking the sinuous lines of a shoreline or riverbank in a very minimalist fashion. At the centre of the stage was a microphone stand, bent and twisted like driftwood. The floor was speckled with white like sea foam. But largely the effect was created by sound, light, and Olwen Fouéré.

I don’t think this work of theatre can be separated from the performance or the performer.  Fouéré is a spectacular actor in all aspects, and her control was exquisite. She would shift with her movement, a turn of the light, a change of voice and expression, into an aged man, a beautiful statuesque woman, a gargoyle.  In front of our eyes, she transformed herself. In interpreting the words of Finnegan’s Wake, she embodied them, bringing meaning and momentary clarity.  Physically Fouéré was in near constant movement, a controlled tension that was riveting, working with the constant flowing breath of the sound.  At times, due to the control of her movement I felt underwater. Her breath, voice, body, eyes in the light, all together became the physicality of words. 

With them and the words with herself. 

Abstract but full of meaning of some sort – powerfully evocative. It was the physicality of breath. The liquidity of sound. The river reaching its source and destination.

Mrs. Warren's Profession -- The Gate Theatre

Mrs. Warren's Profession by George Bernard Shaw at The Gate Theatre, Dublin.

Directed by Patrick Mason

Costume and set design by Francis O'Connor

Mrs. Warren’s Profession is a play that I know very well but had never seen before.  I’ve studied it.  I’ve written papers on it.  I’ve taught it.  I was very excited to finally get to see it.  Shaw’s 1893 play skewering the social and economic institutions that necessitate and profit from the exploitation of women in the sex trade is an extremely sharp script, and it really doesn’t pull its punches.  It’s funny and dramatic, balancing witty entertainment with very clear and challenging didacticism.  That’s really one of the amazing things about Bernard Shaw.  It’s never a question of trying to balance art and political speech with him, they’re one and the same.  His plays are funny, dramatic, intensely political, educational arguments that are highly entertaining and engaging.  They, provoke you to think, challenging you to examine the basis of society while making you laugh.  I had a very strong mental image of some of the characters, and of the setting going in.  The difference between my interpretation and the director’s was jarring.  I found myself strongly disagreeing with some of the directorial decisions and the production design in particular.  

On to the good points: the acting was excellent.  Some of the characters weren’t how I expected them to be (huzzah for differing directorial interpretations), but it generally worked very well.   Sara O’Mara’s Vivie I found intensely grating at first.  I never saw as many false smiles in my head, and her voice at the beginning drove me up the wall. But, the interpretation of the character really grew on me.  Vivie’s voice and mannerisms developed throughout the play in a way that added depth.  Sorcha Cusak’s Kitty Warren was pitch perfect, complex, layered, and provocative.  However, at the end of it, Vivie’s scathing judgment of her as a “conventional” woman seemed an accurate assessment.  The scenes between mother and daughter were exceptionally strong. The Frank in my head has always been more innocently feckless, while Tadhg Murphy’s Frank was much more sleazy and self-aware.  It did work, but Vivie and Frank didn’t have much chemistry and I couldn’t really see why either the Vivie in my head or the Vivie on stage would be at all attracted to the Frank on stage. David Yelland’s Sir George Crofts was delightfully dislikeable, and Philip Judge’s Praed was wonderfully sympathetic throughout.

The costumes were lovely, and Francis O’Connor must have had fun with the millinery.  Kitty Warren’s hats were brilliant, amusing, and oh so in character. 

And now on to my complaint:  The director (Patrick Mason) and set designer (again Francis O’Connor, whose set design for My Cousin Rachel was stunning) appear to have thought Shaw’s message wasn’t clear enough, that his didactic drama needed to be supplemented with self-aware distancing effect to constantly remind the audience that this is a play with a Political Message, and that that Message is About Prostitution, and This Is Still Relevant.  And in trying to make sure The Message was clear to the audience, I think they blunted its sharpness of Shaw’s script and kind of missed the point.

My biggest disagreements were with two things in particular:  the set design and the addition of voiceovers of “The Voice of Bernard Shaw” reading excerpts of his essay (a preface to a later edition of the play text) about the play’s reception, which accuses the censors and the theatrical establishment in general of being complicit with the same immoral institution that Shaw exposes in the play.

The set was a high concept set – drab industrial greys, bare boards, and a Statement of a backdrop: a collage of photographs of female sex workers from various eras, in various states of dress/undress reminding the audience constantly of the two unspeakable words in the play:  “fallen woman”, in case you had somehow forgotten that the major tension in the plot arises from Vivie’s discovery that her mother’s fortune – and all the money supporting her own education and status – first from prostitution and then as the manager of several *ahem* “private hotels” on the continent.  The thing is, and the thing I believe this production missed, is that prostitution is really the minor point of the play.  Shaw uses it (as he uses weapons manufacturing in Major Barbara) to point up what he believes is the truly immoral societal institution that prostitution is only a symptom of.  Prostitution is the least immoral thing in the play.  Rather, the true immorality is in the system that profits from the exploitaton of others.  This was also a problem with the drab industrial greyness.  See, the majority of the play is set in the English countryside.  And you need the idyllic pastoral location as a visual contrast to point out exactly how deeply the rot of exploitation and hypocrisy is spread.  It’s not just the urban scene of the women in lead factories and brothels that depends on the exploitation of the poor (and poor women in particular), it’s the country house with a garden full of flowers, the picturesque village rectory, the institutions of church and nobility that profit from and thrive on the exploitation of women.  

Downstage-left was a old-fashioned speaker, which got highlighted between scenes as extracts from Shaw’s essay were read in voiceover between scenes (like, as my sister in law mentioned, a director’s explanatory commentary on a DVD extra).  The effect was a pseudo-Brechtian attempt to drive the message home, and it was frankly too much.  The play does stand on its own.  Supplementary contextualization and argument are great, but they don’t belong in the middle of the play.  And Shaw doesn’t work like Brecht.  I’m aware that, having studied this play and written papers on “Shaw and the Woman Question”, having read the essay excerpted in voiceovers between scenes,   I’m likely a good bit more knowledgeable about the context and politics of the play than the majority of the audience, but I think it makes its point clearly enough without the extra background.  Frankly, I felt like the director /production designers didn’t trust Shaw to be able to make his own argument.  And if you can’t trust the brilliantly cantankerous GBS to make an argument, you’ve got a problem.

Text and Adaptation II - The Corn Exchange's adaptation of Joyce's Dubliners

Speaking of adapting impossible to adapt texts to the stage.  Would you like to try it with a collection of short stories by James Joyce of all authors?  Not me thanks!    (And, sacrilege I know, I'm not exactly a humongous fan of Joyce to begin with.  I respect his body of work, but aside from Portrait of the Artist, I don't actually like it very much.  Well, I seem to like the bits of Ulysses that everyone else hates and hate the bits that everyone else loves .   I'm contrarian like that.) So, how was an adaptation going to put together multiple stories into a coherent stage play?  Generally a play tends to require a plot an audience can follow and invest in.  It doesn't necessarily have to follow the unities, but a collection of short stories doesn't really suffice as a single play.

And yet . . .

Clearly, I was a bit apprehensive about this one.   I'd recently seen a student production of just one of the short stories into a short play, and I'd been singularly unimpressed.  Just that one short story, with its single defined . . . um . . . plot, had been interminable.   And Oh. I was really afraid that they'd be too precious with The Text of Allfather Joyce and end up doing what I think of as a "Let's read an audiobook on stage"  sort of adaptation, where you can't lose the bloody narration even though the action on stage should really be able to take care of a good deal of that (since that's the point of showing rather than telling).  Because Joyce of course is all about the words, so you just plunk as many of the words as you can into the mouths of the actors and they narrate themselves while acting. (This, by the way, is something I really respect Neil Bartlett for avoiding in his effort to adapt Dorian Gray, even if I was ultimately disappointed in the result.)   It's a peeve.  It drives me nuts.   And it's pretty much what the Corn Exchange did.  And yet . . .

Really, this should have been a prime example of " Adaptation: You Are Doing it Wrong!"  And yet the sheer excellence of the ensemble, their vivacious, varied, complex and passionate performances, won me over completely.  A production that could have easily been overburdened by that precious conceit of having  actors narrate what they're doing while doing it was instead a glorious riot of characters, of people's lives weaving in and out of each others.  Of Dubliners.  The characters you still pass in the street, described, performed, and illuminated by the skill and physicality of the acting, the giddy comedy and deep pathos of the performances.

There was another thing the Corn Exchange had going for them here, and that was the audience and place.  I honestly doubt this particular "adaptation"  would work anywhere near as well anyplace else.  However, here, they were presenting The Dubliners to the Dubliners, and part of the magic of the production was the realization that all around me, through the litany of street names being narrated/walked, those around me were remembering/narrating their own journeys down those same streets . . . even if some of the names have been changed a bit.  There's a sense of "I know this place." "I know these people."  A communal recognition that even I, a foreigner not yet here ten years, felt a bit of.  It was fostered by the feeling of close-knit ensemble that the cast presented, but even already crossing the barrier of time, I don't think that sense could be fully replicated out of place.

A last Kudos to the visual design.  It was a detailed yet relatively simple, beautifully flexible set and lighting design, and it was extremely effective, managing to capture place and tradition, modernism and flux.  

Text and Adaptation I - The Picture of Dorian Gray at the Abbey Theatre

(This was written upon viewing a preview performance.  I understand things can change and performances can settle from previews into the official run, but I'm not a paid reviewer and I doubt my observations would have been too different a week later.  I will, however, be revisiting the play further into the run. )

I'll say this for Neil Bartlett's adaptation of The Picture of Dorian Gray as commissioned for the Abbey Theatre.  It was an ambitious project.  He took seriously the import of trying to put such a complex, slippery text onto the stage.  When it comes down to it, while the basic plot is quite dramatic, it's not the basic plot that stands out from the many Faust stories and doppelganger narratives in the Gothic mode. Rather, it's a text that drowns itself in the beauties of words, revels in paradox, reference, lists, and layers of words, building an effect that takes as much mystique  Although the story has caught our collective imagination to the point of entering the folklore of vernacular reference, it is far from a simple text to adapt.

One of the natural questions in adapting this work, of course, is how to represent the central image of the changing portrait.  This was done very deliberately with a lot of metatheatrical mirroring but a frame mirroring a blank.  In fact, the only "picturing" reflection of Dorian was glimpsed in his repeated viewing of himself in a hand-mirror (we had excellent seats, but the Abbey's house is well-set-up enough that I wouldn't be surprised if a good portion of the audience got a bit of his face through the mirror at some pont).  However, the metatheatrical mirroring was very explicit, to the point of commentary on the difficulty of adapting the material to the stage.  The elaborate red drapes that eventually covered the portrait  mirrored the proscenium stage curtain — an effect heightened in its metatheatricality by the addition of gold footlights that reflected the gold frame of the "portrait".   This was paired with the only nod to the preface, the statement that "all art is quite useless" made in unison by the full cast in Greek Chorus style.

   The staging itself was pared down, minimalist and largely monochromatic, with a blank-stage/black wall set highlighted by a few baroque touches, particularly the frame for the "portrait" (which remained un-pictured and rather changed from cloudy gray to black blank in a way that reflected the bare, black painted theatre wall.

  In tone, at least, the play was sterile.  In style, it was a jumble.   Everything and the kitchen sink got thrown in when it came to dramatic technique.  There was a Greek chorus (unfortunately not very in unison), explicit narration, leaders of the chorus (male and female respectively) using microphones to directly address the audience, characters who gave asides to the audience, and on occasion the near constant interruption of a buzzer calling the performers back to the "stage".  There was even a bit of a suggestion of standup-comedy.    The Chorus remained throughout the play, observing, narrating and commenting, occasionally commenting.  And, fair enough.  That's one way to answer the question of what the heck you do with staging such a language-heavy text.  However, it was far from seamless. The Chorus often carried things forward in a telling-not-showing manner, also seeming sinister and judgmental in their tone. On one hand, the Chorus was possibly an inspired way to try to work in the sheer complexity of the words in the novel.  On the other hand, I was not impressed by the effect.  It ended up quite disjointed, with a mix of Gothic ghost-story and  modern black box theatre with a bit of Verfremdungseffekt.   It was like a mix of The Woman in Black (Gothic ghost story) and Pippin (existentialist, metatheatrical musical comedy).  However, it didn't even have the overt sexuality of something like Pippin (I'll digress on this further later). In fact, for an adaptation of such a scandalous and sensual book, one that recognized Wilde's riff on Pater's Marius the Epicurian regarding curing "the soul by the senses the senses by the soul" -- repeating it more than once to be sure the audience caught and remembered the line -- it was oddly austere.  It was, frankly, a laboured, disjointed, mess despite the way the visual design hammered home the framing motif in a mirroring unity of elaborate golden frame/costume/proscenium and footlights, dark cloudy "portrait"/stage / chorus-spectator that makes the audience complicit and comments on the "use" of art and theatre. 

One of the problems was that of genre.  The Picture of Dorian Gray is a Decadent novel . . . in fact, it is one of the defining texts of the Decadence.  It's also a tale of the supernatural in the Gothic mode, one which is so well-known that it's entered the common mythology of reference in the English language.  But, Wilde's iteration of a Faustian doppelganger narrative using a supernatural portrait didn't capture the imagination simply because of the Gothic narrative, but because of everything surrounding it.  Bartlett's adaptation is clearly aware of this.  It's incredibly aware of the difficulty of adapting a novel that revels in the opulent beauty of words, that digresses into lists of furniture and possessions, that holds a life outside of the text in its importance to Wilde's life as evidence of his own "corruption" when Wilde was on trial. 

In fact, I think that the greatest weakness of this adaptation was the complete lack of Decadence. And this was one of the biggest problems with the staging.  For all the mirroring of stage and picture, there was no evocation of the decadent sensuality of the book.  The elaborate and baroque cataloging, the exquisite lists of objects and nearly erotic love of language was replaced by a black box.  In fact, the "garden" passage in which Dorian is first symbolically seduced by the idea of "curing the soul by the senses the senses by the soul" may be the singularly least erotic or seductive seduction scene I have ever witnessed.    And also, oddly, considering that homosexual content was made explicit rather than symbolic homoeroticism in a rather homosocial context (Lord Henry kissed Dorian, Dorian forces a kiss onto his valet -- the staging leaving the implication of rape as well)  there was a distinct lack of eroticism.  Also, in the timing of the (added) kiss between Lord Henry and Dorian, the (added) (implied) rape of "Victor" the valet, in the explicit connection of Basil's passion for Dorian infusing every line and color of the painting, and in the rather orgasmic staging of Basil's death, it ended up that homoeroticism / queerness was actually linked to corruption and evil.   To put it mildly, this is oddly heteronormative for an adaptation of this book.  (My sister-in-law didn't quite see this at first, but when I listed these things all together at intermission (just after Basil's murder), she saw exactly where I was coming from.  And speaking of moralistically heteronormative, there was also a repeated use of the Chorus reciting the paternoster, (this started with Basil's exhortation to Dorian to repent when he sees what the portrait has become, and Dorian stabbed him just as "deliver us from . .  ." and then after Basil Dies "Amen".  Ah.  Just checked the programme/ script.  The stage directions call for Dorian to have stripped down to the waist so as not to get blood on his clothes (in actuality, they had him remove his coat but kept him in a white shirt that he wiped his bloody hands on after):   

"DORIAN stabs BASIL in the neck and holds him in the chair while he bleeds out.  Some of the CHORUS amplify his death-throes making them sound strangely sexual; others implacably finish the Pater Noster as BASIL slowly and messily dies." 

I didn't notice the "strangely sexual" noises so much, but that direction  reinforces my sense that the production was uncomfortably linking homosexuality with corruption/evil.  Ick.  I haven't read adapter/director Neil Bartlett's introduction yet.  I'll probably do that tomorrow but I suspect this wasn't  intended.  (In which case, major fail in pattern recognition on a creator's part).

While Bartlett's production does manage to retain the Gothic sensibility that is also part of The Picture of Dorian Gray, it doesn't manage decadence.  Rather, it ends up with more moralistic repression than should ever be associated with The Picture of Dorian Gray.  Part of this is the stark, pared back, near-monochromatic staging.  However, what I found truly disturbing was the pattern that was created by the portrayal of desire and sexuality in different relationships.


A bit of a digression:  Pippin is a Steven Schwartz Musical originally directed and choreographed by Bob Fosse in which the titular son of Charlemagne searches for meaning in life.  He is led and tempted throughout by the Leading Player (accompanied by a chorus of players) as he tries everything: war, revolution, sex, settling down, love, trying to find his "corner of the sky".  At the end, once everything has left him frustrated and unsatisfied, he's shown the "grand finale" in which he can immolate himself.  When a player demonstrates it, it's just a trick.   But, when he does it, it'll be real (he backs off and is left stripped of the "magic'" of theatrical accoutrements on an empty stage . . . but, ya know, alive and feeling "trapped" with a love interest):

Note that golden frame in the background.  That's the device for the finale, and that's exactly where I went when I saw the frame of Dorian Gray's portrait, and then it was completely confirmed and amplified by the sleight of hand of the ending.  Okay.  Pippin is one of my favorite musicals (very possibly my all-time favorite musical), so it's not an insult to say I was reminded of Pippin.  But, the sleight of hand of the portrait and Dorian Gray's death at the end paired with that gold frame reflecting back on the audience, and what works for a Musical Comedy ironically commenting on "everyman's" search for meaning in life (and ultimately our preference for an unfulfilling life over dying), doesn't work for a "Serious Drama" adaptation of a decadent novel.  It's again a question of genre.  What is pointedly a cheap trick in Pippin ends up feeling  like a cheap trick in Dorian Gray  (one which again evokes overtly religious symbolism as the newly aged Dorian presenting himself to the audience with arms raised almost as if he's on the cross . . . and then turns it into the showman's bow before he collapses dead).    Pippin also pointed up other parallels where Dorian Gray fell short: decadence and sex.  Pippin is also clearly metatheatrical and comments on its own genre quite a bit in a way that points back to the audience.  It is also pretty stripped down in its staging, but it still manages to be decadent.  Bob Fosse's staging and choreography are both cynical and riotous, oozing with sex and sensuality while giving a nudge and wink.  But, this is done with the passion and inverted precision so characteristic of Fosse's ouevre (and in this case performed to the hilt by a cast including the incomparable Ben Vereen and Rita Moreno).  The send-up of musical comedy in musical comedy is riotously anarchic and deliciously amoral.  Pippin had much more of the Wildean artistic disregard for the moralistic in art that somehow didn't make it into this Dorian Gray. 


Praise where praise is due, however.  The acting ranged from good to spectacular.  Tom Canton, making his professional debut as Dorian, is stunning in an exceptionally difficult role.  He is not only perfectly physically cast, he manages a seamless mix of Narcissus and Faust with an energy and subtlety that are truly impressive. Frank McCusker's was also excellent as Basil, and Jasper Britton's Lord Henry Wotton was masterful and versatile. (Although the casting of McCusker and Britton ignored the novella in a typical misinterpretation of age . . . it's explicit in the text that Lord Henry is a young man at the beginning . . . specifically, Dorian Gray is attracted to the "tall, graceful young man who was standing by him" with a "low languid voice that was absolutely fascinating" and "cool, white, flowerlike hands".  Britton, while he showed a great versatility and range, started with a solidly middle-aged character that moved into infirm age with the passage of time.  In fact, the script explicitly states a 20 year age difference.  This may seem rather nitpicky, but it makes a big difference in the question of influence and the pederastic suggestion of the age difference forces interpretations of male love and "influence" in the play that I believe betray the text.  The relation between a middle-aged active seducer of a youth is entirely different to the variety of relations suggested by three aesthetic young men enacting variations of male desire and voyeurism while flinging themselves on divans, recumbent in gardens, etc.)

Some people will love the production.  I suspect, however, that most of those people will not be Wildeans.  It's not just that we are an opinionated lot, though opinionated we are.  It's that we're passionate about the interface between surface and symbol. We soak ourselves in the intricacy of reference and the seduction of words.  This production was entirely too blatant and heavy-handed with its symbolism while at the same time lacking focus, working the wrong genre, and creating a pattern linking homosexual desire to corruption and evil (which is so entirely un-Wildean that I can't even).

The overtly theatrical commentary inherent in the play suggests to me that Neil Bartlett clearly knows and has come to terms with the fact that adaptation, like translation, is and always will be an act of betrayal.  So, how do you solve a problem like Dorian Gray?  Is it simply an impossible text?

Why I hate Matthew Bourne's Swan Lake: A Rant

(Rant Warning:  very strong opinions ahead.)

So, Matthew Bourne's Swan Lake is one of those "Visionary Re-imaginings" of a much beloved classic.  Considering how much I love Béjart's Sacre du Printemps, that does not mean I will automatically hate it. I'm picky about "reimaginings" and believe you need to respect the source material to do it right, but I don't dismiss them out of hand.

A good while ago, I spent way too long on YouTube comparing versions of the Danse des petits cygnes pas de quatre.   From what I remember, aside from squeeing over the precision in the Paris Opera Ballet video, I started pondering the different presentations of gender in the Trocks version and in the Matthew Bourne version.   I found a lovely quote from the artistic director of the Trocks, talking about how they weren't mimicking femininity in dressing in tutus and dancing en pointe, but that they were expressing variations of masculinity.

"The company is not trying actually to emulate females. It's a company of fifteen male dancers who are, and however you want to define the word "male".  But , the male dancer in Ballet is really known for an aggressive attack, and that's how we try to approach these roles. So, just because we're in a tutu doesn't mean we're not male.  It doesn't mean that we're not expressing different kinds of masculinity.  And that masculinity can be a very wide range." 
--Tory Dobrin, artistic director of the Trocks, interviewed in a radio interview in Brisbane in 2002. http://www.trockadero.org/from-the-director.html

  I just generally love the Trocks to begin with, but I found this statement really insightful in its commentary on gender portrayal in interaction with the traditions of Ballet and of Camp.

  In the meantime, I wasn't as impressed with, the Matthew Bourne version, because the complete lack of straight lines pretty much came off like a stereotyped "limp wrist" expression of gay masculinity.  There's nothing inherently wrong with that expression of masculinity, but the fact that what is basically a comedy drag act (that is also a group of excellent dancers) seemed to have a far more nuanced portrayal of gender in dance kind of bugged me.

So more recently, I saw the whole ballet on TV.  My opinion stands.  The Trocks are a much better, less reductive examination of gender in ballet form.  When it comes down to it, Bourne, in (re)creating a gay Swan Lake, creates a misogynist narrative with serious "mother issues" (come on! stereotypical overpowering, controlling mother much?) plus a gauche and annoying -- and then dead -- rejected girlfriend figure.  Yay for reductive stereotypes.  And Bourne's choreography all too often epitomizes "limp wrists". In this ballet at least, Bourne seems constitutionally incapable of allowing straight lines into his choreography.  Some of the lines are beautiful, but can we have variation please?  One of these things without the other might be acceptable (again, there's nothing inherently wrong with a limp wrist), but the overall effect is not positive for anyone.  Particularly when you add in the Prince character having a mental breakdown.  There's a tragic love story, and there's a tragic love story that makes homosexuality an impossible to survive tragedy, with Mommy Dearest as the villain and a dead disposable girlfriend to top things off.

And now to get to what really pissed me off . . . well two things:

1.)  From watching his Swan Lake, Bourne doesn't respect ballet.  I'm not saying I expected him to work in the mode of classical ballet when "re-imagining" one of the most famous ballets of all time -- it's pretty hard to escape Petipa -- but Bourne chose to create a ballet within a ballet section in which he had a wonderful opportunity to create a tribute that would highlight his difference from the overshadowing tradition, and which could have been a lovely commentary on the different styles and the development of the art form.  Instead, Bourne gave the most hideously ugly broad caricature of ballet that I've seen on stage.

Another funny thing:  One of the reasons that 20th century ballet moved away from the story ballet into more abstract "pure" dance --  we dumped the traditional sequences where the dancing stops for stylized mimed explanations of the plot because it stopped the dancing and ballet should be able to stand on its own.  (What was Balanchine's quote?  "The important thing in ballet is the movement itself, as it is sound which is important in a symphony. A ballet may contain a story, but the visual spectacle, not the story, is the essential element.")  This Swan Lake, however, had less actual dancing than the "traditional" versions.  It had lots of walking and exaggerated "acting" that took up a lot more time than the traditional mimed bits of convention.  And you know what?  The walking and mimed "acting" were boring.  I want dancing.

2.)  Which brings me to what pissed me off the most:  Bourne doesn't respect Tchaikovsky.

Let me back up to the beginning, and the basic history / common "everyone knows" wisdom about Swan Lake that I learned I don't know when.  The first production of Swan Lake  was an absolute flop.  Tchaikovsky composed it quickly on commission, but (as I learned it) the choreography was done independently of the music and didn't suit the powerful, emotive score that Tchaikovsky composed at all.  One of the things that made the Petipa / Ivanov revival such a success was the musicality of Petipa's choreography.  It's iconic because it fits so perfectly.

A lot of Bourne's choreography pretty much ignores the music.  He only pays attention to dynamic build or the sense of line or quality of movement that the music gives when it suits him.  Instead, he actually has his dancers shouting "HOORAH!" and laughing over the music. Obviously, his concept is more important than the synergy of beautiful sound and beautiful movement telling a powerful story. Um, no.  Just no.  This kind of carry on pretty much destroyed any chance of me just getting to squee over a very strong cast of male corps de ballet dancers, which should always be a pleasure to watch, even if the women don't get much of a chance to dance at all.

. . . and I think that's about that.  To say more I'd have to watch it again.  There were bits I liked and absolutely beautiful moments, but they kind of got overwhelmed by my general irritation.

Fabulous Beast's "Rian" and Donka: A Letter to Chekhov

Rian and Donka: a Letter to Chekhov

(previously posted on keestone.livejournal.com)

This evening, I got a standby ticket to see Fabulous Beast Dance Company's Rian. I'm glad I didn't drag anyone with me. 

Now don't get me wrong, Fabulous Beast is a very good ensemble of dancers.  I have no gripes with their technique or artistry.  And there were some excellent pieces within the concert as a whole.  But I think the concept behind Rian was fundamentally flawed, it lacked anything other than the concept to unify it, it was static, disconnected, and at least 45 minutes too long.  I got bored.  And if I of all people get bored watching dance, that's a bad sign.

I suspect I'm a bit synaesthetic in my physical response to the shape of music. It's probably why I'm so passionate about dance.  When I listen to music I love, I love to close my eyes and watch it take shape, watch it dance.  (I nearly had a fit when I saw the Fantasia 2000 "Rhapsody in Blue" set-piece. Can't they hear that's a curved line?!?)  It's also probably why I so vehemently hate some music. I mean, I can't listen to distorted electric guitar because it makes me physically ill, and I don't feel like I'm exaggerating when I talk about certain repetitive heavy beats being the equivalent of hitting me in the head with a baseball bat over and over.  So when it comes to dance, I get pissy when the the movement doesn't fit with the sound.  I got pissy this evening -- not at every piece, but enough to make me less appreciative of the very good dancing.  The concept of the piece was generally flawed in this.  Rian  mixed Modern dance with Irish Trad. music.  Occasionally it worked --  when the music wasn't actually Trad. music for instance, or in some slower, Sean-nos style songs (one of which was beautifully choreographed with three women mostly moving very little except for their arms, while one woman moved more) -- but mostly it didn't.  There's a very good visual equivalent of the "diddly-idly" jigs and reels, and that's the stiff, percussive movement of traditional Irish step dancing.  Not that I want a repeat of Riverdance for a concert performance of dance to Irish music, but the curved, smooth, breath-movements paired with the jigs and reels made me feel like they got the wrong place and the dancers should have been at a Jefferson Airplane concert at the Fillmore, but they somehow got plunked down in a trad. session while still hearing the psychedelic rock.   Except for that one point when I really really wanted the couple dancing to just break into a Lindy Hop, because they had the perfect swing and partnership for that even if the music had nothing to do with it.

So, I got pissy.  And then I got bored.  The choreography lacked dynamism. It was very much one level. The evening overall didn't have any structuring movement; it was just a concert, a bunch of songs thrown together.  For two hours.  Without intermission.  I started checking my watch about an hour in, but I had no idea when it was ever going to end because there was no build, no climax, just another song starting.  Some things might have worked better if they'd been before or after other things, but in any case there was entirely too much of the "music starts, one person starts a repetitive series of movement, another person runs up and joins in, wash, repeat.  As in, like half of the choreography was that.  Yawn!  And then there were a few absolutely beautiful moments, and I got pissy because the rest of it could have been of that caliber but it wasn't.

That's enough of that.

Last Saturday, was Donka: A Letter to Chekhov, which really only had tenuous connections to Chekhov but was beautiful, spectacular, and really enjoyable.  It basically mixed the kind of acrobatic performances you'd see in something like Cirque du Soleil with clowning (of the more traditional commedia-inspired action, not of the painted faces . . . although there were big shoes at one point), with some absolutely stunning set-pieces and shadow play.  Its only real flaw in my opinion, was that there was a bit too much talking, part of which was trying to a more clear connection to Chekhov. Just give me the pretties!

But here!  a video!




And that's it for now.

16 Possible Glimpses -- Marina Carr

(previously posted on keestone.livejournal.com)

So.  16 Possible Glimpses.  The first night of actual performances.  Not opening night, but the first preview performance of the world premiere, so there will probably be some changes still.  What do I think? As often happens with Marina Carr's plays, I come out thinking I really need to contemplate it more and wanting to see it another time before I can really say something meaningful.  There's always so much in them.  They're dense, in a good way.  Richly layered and highly symbolic, leaving me with a feeling of depth and power.  It's "a series of dialogues and domestic scenes" rather than a more traditionally written play with a linear plot and unified narrative, so it takes up until nearly the end for the shape of the play to reveal itself.  The first scenes and last scenes link and you come full circle.

16 Possible Glimpses has been 10 years in the works.  Beloved thinks it's the best Marina Carr play he's seen yet.  (I'd probably lean more towards Woman and Scarecrow for its sheer power and poetry. But, I think 16 Possible Glimpses would probably balance very well with Woman and Scarecrow as two sides of facing death.) It's definitely more accessible than some of her other work.  I mean, it's a Marina Carr play without incest and/or suicide.  It's gentler than most of her other plays.  It's beautiful, tender, and full of humour. and it's more clear than ever that she sees death as very much a part of life, not as an ending.  There is a soul-guide character in this play, like the Ghost Fancier in By the Bog of Cats or Scarecrow in Woman and Scarecrow, but Chekhov's Black Monk is even more clearly a friend.    It's very clear that she loves Chekhov, and that she sees him as a great soul.  That would have been obvious even if we hadn't attended a talk before the play in which she totally geeked out about Chekhov in interview.

Technically, it's very interesting.  In the pre-show talk, Carr made it very clear that the title is non-literal.  "Why 16 Possible Glimpses?  I like the number 16, I like the word possible, I like the word glimpses."   There aren't sixteen scenes, there aren't sixteen cast members, it was just a number she liked for the title. She focused a lot on the word "possible" as a reminder that she wasn't writing a literal biography either, but a response to "her" Anton Pavlovich Chekhov  (I like "her" Chekhov").  But the "16" and "Glimpses", I think, come into the technical side of things.  16 is a nice, large number for plurality, and what Carr and director Wayne Jordan have done is give you multiple visual perspectives using cameras projecting different angles of what is happening on stage on the backdrop and occasionally on a scrim in front of the action.  16 may not be literal, but we were definitely literally given multiple possible glimpses.  Sometimes it worked better than others, and some of the cut scenes were a bit distracting, but some of those will probably have been ironed out by the time previews ended.  Sometimes it was stunningly effective dramatically speaking.   On a bit of a tangent, there seem to be two emerging trends at the festival this year: site-specific theatre, and the use video projectors (blah blah blah multimedia experience).  I'm a little resistant to both, not because I think they're a bad thing, but currently they seem to be way too faddish. And like many things that are faddish or overused, they're often used to use them and not because they are the best technique for the desired effect.  And often, the logistics are just not thought out well enough and it distracts from the effect.  Here, though, the use of projected video really did seem integral, and it I think it added layers and depth to the overall experience.