Self-indulgent showcase
Giannandrea Poesio
Winterreise Barbican British-born Antony Tudor was one of first 20th-century dance makers to turn to the classical song cycle for a new choreographic work. Since the creation of his 1937 Dark Elegies, to Mahler's Kindertotenlieder. many choreographers have tackled the same type of musical composition, albeit with different degrees of success. Although Mahler's lieder seem to have prompted the largest number of choreographic creations, dance works have also been set to Richard Strauss's Four Last Songs, Wagner's Wesendoch Lieder, as well as to a number of Schubert's and Schumann's songs and song cycles.
The relationship between sung music and danced movements has never been an easy one. Predictably, the completeness of the music/poetry/singing combination that inform any of the mentioned lieder has often turned any choreographic addition into an unnecessary and frequently debatable surplus, although there have been exceptions.
Undaunted by the prospect of dealing with what is usually regarded as choreography-resistant music, contemporary dance's high priestess Trisha Brown is the latest of a select number of choreographers to demonstrate that, after all, works such as Schubert's Winterreise can be effectively translated into dance.
Brown's approach is not as spectacular or visually rich as any of the previous choreographic adaptations of the same song cycle. Her transliteration of Schubert's masterpiece is intimate and intentionally unflashy; as such, it can be interpreted as the outcome of an in-depth reading of both the work and the performing context, namely the concert hall.
In line with some of the most distinctive formulae of her production — she is often billed as a pioneer of postmodern dance — Brown has thus opted for what is mostly an unobtrusive, fairly linear and provocatively naive set of movements. Three dancers from her company, Brandi L. Norton, Seth Parker and Lionel Popkin, move swiftly round the white-clad stage, creating all sorts of forms and shadows in which the viewer can find visual references to the sung text. Their actions frame and complement those of baritone Simon Keenlyside, who displays good dance skills on top of the more familiar, world-renowned and acclaimed vocal ones.
He is the Wanderer, the Romantic hero of the poems who, barefoot like the organgrinder of the last poignant song of the Winterreise cycle, walks on the tortuous path of life, ignoring, like the protagonist of the eighth song, the icy snow under his bare soles. In keeping with the canons of American postmodern dance, he performs a wide range of steps and movements, which combines pedestrian, everyday ideas with more complex and refined ones. He also jumps with unique prowess and drive (thus dispelling the old myth that singers can't move); he crouches, heartbroken, under the piano splendidly played by Pedja Muzijevic, and delivers some songs while assuming the most awkward and challenging — that is from a singer's point of view — positions.
Yet such a display and such an exploitation of combined talents soon become tiresome, with dire results for the dramatic build-up of the song cycle. By the time we reached the last four songs, I felt a tremendous urge to shut my eyes and let my emotions soar with the music. Alas, I did not, for obvious reasons, thus having to endure what, in my view, was a rapidly spiralling deflation of the whole performance..
Repetition is one of the tenets ot wfrar has now become a well-affirmed choreographic genre; as such, the repetition of specific movements and ideas is intended to make provocative statements or, more simply, to challenge traditional notions. But the repetitiveness that informs Brown's Winterreise is neither provocative nor challenging, and comes across as the inevitable flaw in a show that relies too much on an artist who, despite being a fine mover, does not manage to be as charismatic a dancer as he is a singer.
The bitter, overall impression, is thus of a perfectly built show — with unique lighting provided by the unparalleled artist Jennifer Tipton that ends up being a rather self-indulgent one-man showcase. According to the programme note, the idea for this performance came originally from Keenlyside, who had appeared in Brown's debatable staging of Monteverdi's Orfeo in 1998. No comment ...
Previous page
