Yvonne Rainer's Got Game at the Baryshnikov Arts ... - Pat Catterson

Most Popular | Most Recent Sign up
Log in
Dance
TOP
arts
STORIES
By Kaitlin Perrry
Blogs
The 56th Annual
OBIE Awards
Captured On
Film!
By Eric Grode
Features
The 56th Annual
OBIE's Nicely
Elaborate
Entrance
Share Like 4 retweet 0
Yvonne Rainer's Got Game at the
Baryshnikov Arts Center; the Royal
Danish Ballet Dances the Guggenheim
Emmanuelle Phuon and Sally Silvers join the veteran NYC artist, Nikolai Hübbe talks
about his company
By Deborah Jowitt Wednesday, Mar 23 2011
Comments (0)
The adventurous works of the 1960s and 1970s came to be identified as postmodern some time
after the question, “Is it dance or not?” had died. It’s interesting to see this earlier aesthetic
revisited by its creators or adapted by younger ones. For instance, a year ago this month, Trisha
Brown re-envisioned her 1974 Spiral Descent.What had been a two-minute descent round and
round three pillars via ropes and harnesses by three dancers in a shabby loft became Spiral,
magnified in the white vastness of Dia Beacon. Ten pillars, 10 ladders and ropes, 10 dancers in a
canon that prolonged and varied the simple act.
In 1963, Yvonne Rainer made a piece called We
Shall Run. A bunch of people in everyday
clothes ran around Judson Church in a clump. A
little over a week ago, when the Guggenheim
Museum Works & Process series present works
curated by Robert Wilson and made by artists
who’d been in residence at his Watermill Center,
Andrew Ondrejcak presented his Veneration I:
The Young Heir Takes Possession of the
Master’s Effects.For about a half hour,
beginning before the audience straggled in, he
ran in place—wearing only a jockstrap and so
beautifully lit that he looked like one of Wilson’s
VOOM video portraits—until he dropped,
exhausted.
Rainer herself, since going back to making
dances after decades as a filmmaker, has
returned to strategies of the 1960s that
interested her and some of her colleagues in
Judson Dance Theater. Early on, she
experimented with juxtaposing text to
movement to see how the combination affected
our perceptions, and she raised issues to do with
what constituted “performance” as opposed
either to process or to adamantly matter-of-fact,
illusionless behavior. Everyday objects like
mattresses might figure, along with ordinary-
Search Village Voice
Photo copyright Paula Court. Courtesy of Performa.
Yvonne Rainer's Assisted Living: Good Sports 2,
with Sally Silvers, Pat Catterson, Patricia
Hoffbauer, Emmanuèlle Phuon, Emily Coates,
Keith Sabado, Yvonne Rainer.
Details
Yvonne Rainer
Baryshnikov Arts Center
March 16 through 19
Works & Process: The Royal Danish Ballet
The Guggenheim Museum
March 20 through 21
Related Content
Susan Stroman Dukes It Out
February 16, 2011
DEEP THOUGHTS
April 27, 2011
The Decade's Best Dance
December 22, 2009
New York City Ballet Dancers Take to the
Streets—on Film
May 18, 2010
The Daily Ditching iPad-Only For Android App
ASAP; TBD.com Dismantled, Doomed
February 23, 2011
More About
By Chris Molanphy
A A A
Blogs
How Adele Is
The Music Biz's
2011 Redeemer
Viewed Commented
By Christian Viveros-Fauné
Features
Francis Alys
Enjoys a Little
Narco-Tourism
Most Popular Stories
The Intelligent Homosexual's Guide to Capitalism and
Socialism, With a Key to the Scriptures--Waiting and
Waiting and Waiting for Lefty
Tony Kushner's big new play at the Public offers lots of great
talk, but few keys to anything dramatic
Jerusalem Heads Into the Woods
Mark Rylance and Jez Butterworth mess with English folkdom
Gustav Metzger: Bad News Bearer
At e-flux, a veteran political artist finally gets his first New York
solo show
Best in Show: 'Richard Serra Drawing' at the Met
Museum
Plus: Almagul Menlibayeva at Priska C. Juschka; 'Drawing and
its Double' at the Drawing Center
Best in Show: Jerry Meyer at Denise Bibro Fine Art
Plus: Iva Gueorguieva at Ameringer/McEnery/Yohe and
BravinLee Programs
Village Voice on Facebook
Like
13,585 people like Village Voice.
More Most Popular>>

looking people.
Her Spiraling Down(2008) and her brand new
Assisted Living: Good Sports 2, presented at the
Baryshnikov Center by Performa, take such
tactics to a more theatrical level. For Spiraling
Email
to Friend
Write to
Editor
Print
Article
More About
Yvonne Rainer Emily Coates
Nikolai Hubbe Dance
Arts, Entertainment,
and Media
Down, Rainer drew movement images and text (spoken by Rainer on tape and by the performers
at a mic or during scuffles) from a long, eclectic list of sources that includes Fred Astaire, Marcel
Mauss, and Serena Williams. For Assisted Living, she collected sports photos, somewhat the way
Steve Paxton and Robert Rasuchenberg did for their 1964 Ja ville görna telefonera, and
distributed them among her dancers to generate movement.
What you see in the white-floored space of BAC’s Howard Gilman Performance Space are
extremely polished structures that nevertheless celebrate rough edges, thinking on the spot,
spontaneity, intellectual provocation, and an abiding delight in mischief. The four women who
perform Spiraling Downand whom Rainer dubbed the Raindears are a charmingly motley bunch
in terms of age, size, and shape: Pat Catterson, who presented her own choreography at Judson
Church in 1970 and is a tap artist as well; Brazilian-born Patricia Hoffbauer, best known,
perhaps, for her many collaborations with George Emilio Sanchez; Sally Silvers, who has been
choreographing and performing for 30 years; and youngest, Emily Coates, ex–New York City
Ballet, who directs the Dance Studies Program at Yale. For Assisted Living, they’re joined by
Keith Sabado, ex–Mark Morris, and the French-Cambodian Emmanuelle Phuon, who, like
Coates, was a member of Baryshnikov’s White Oak Dance Project. These are pros, up for
anything.
There’s quite a lot of friendly competitive scrimmaging in both pieces (especially in Assisted
Living, where you can at times almost see an unpredictable soccer ball rolling around among the
performers’ feet). You may not be able to identify Spiraling’s sources (nor should you try),
although they’re clearly visible—whether it’s Catterson hawking, spitting, and blowing her nose
like a ball player mid-game, Coates holding a leg improbably high, Hoffbauer as a monster
chasing a wailing Catterson (and then Silvers chasing Hoffbauer), or alarmed reactions out of
film noir (Silvers is divine as a wide-eyes heroine). Pinning the spoken words to the action is
equally challenging and not necessary, although it’s entertaining to hear Coates complaining
about the downside of testosterone shots: “Being horny is a nuisance.”
Rainer choreographs and orchestrates all this with astute theatricality in order to vary the effect
on our eyes and ears, grooming apparent—even illusory—randomness to function within a whole.
Her gamesmanship is even more evident in Assisted Living: Good Sports 2(the clever title is also
resonant). Lighting designer Les Dickerson has added three big Hollywood-style spotlights and
set designer Joel Reynolds has assembled a bunch of stuff, some of which—a tire, for example,
and a mattress—alludes to Rainer’s early dances. Dickerson, Reynolds, and Rainer herself move
stuff around. Dickerson spends quite a lot of time uncoiling an orange electrical cords so he can
drop to the floor and aim a tiny lamp at a portion of the action for a few minutes. By the end of
the piece, everything has been moved from a far corner to the opposite side of the performing
area.
Rainer keeps an eye on the proceedings and occasionally speaks (is that Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s
Julie or the New Héloïse she’s reading from?). As the work progresses, her commentary becomes
increasingly, if obliquely, attuned to today’s disastrous politics, wars, discrimination, and moral
smugness (there are alarming contemporary quotes re the Ku Klux Klan and the Protocol of the
Elders of Zion). As ironic counterpoint, a soprano voice filters into Quentin Chiappetta’s
electronic effects with the lyric, “Everything is beautiful at the ballet.”
Add New Comment
Sign in with an option below
Share
1 | 2 | Next Page >>
or if you don't have an account, please enter a comment and click Post As to comment as a guest
Michael Cesar Jason Duaine Mary Hana
Facebook social plugin
enter email
Slideshows
New York Nightlife
Guide
Big Apple Comic
Con 2011
The 56th Annual
OBIES
New York Classifieds
Find A Coupon
Popular Coupons
for free stuff, theater info & more!
buy, sell, trade (8,904) musician (3,475)
rentals (19,728) jobs (1,455)
Minx Release
Party at Bedlam
More Slideshows >>
personals (3,126) adult entertainment (54,415)
Search by Category
BUY 1 TAPA, GET 1 FREE
Cafe Espanol
172 Bleecker St.
New York, NY 10012
Search
Babies are FREE on Wednesday
SUNSHINE
143 E. Houston St.
New York, NY 10002
More Popular Coupons »

Most Popular | Most Recent Sign up
Log in
Dance
TOP
arts
STORIES
By Kaitlin Perrry
Blogs
The 56th Annual
OBIE Awards
Captured On
Film!
By Eric Grode
Features
The 56th Annual
OBIE's Nicely
Elaborate
Entrance
Share Like 4 retweet 0
Yvonne Rainer's Got Game at the
Baryshnikov Arts Center; the Royal
Danish Ballet Dances the Guggenheim
Emmanuelle Phuon and Sally Silvers join the veteran NYC artist, Nikolai Hübbe talks
about his company
By Deborah Jowitt Wednesday, Mar 23 2011
...continued from page 1
Comments (0)
The six performers spend quite a lot of time jogging around in squad or herd, sometimes holding
up their hands like paws and shaking them. Periodically, one of them falls out of the line or cuts
loose, but is picked up to rejoin the gang. Every now and then someone gives a verbal command,
like “batter” or “arms” or “jump,” that triggers a quick gesture on everyone’s part.
The goings-on are very engaging in all senses of the word, and they elicit responses you only
remember to think about later. Diving out of a vigorous solo, Catterson pants, “Who needs frontal
lobes?” The audience laughs. But would that be the frontal lobes whose function Wikipedia
defines as the ability “to recognize future consequences resulting from current actions, to choose
between good and bad actions (or better and best), override and suppress unacceptable social
responses, and determine similarities and differences between things or events”?
Near the end of this retrospective, forward-
looking evening, Rainer remarks, “Previously
she wanted to be looked at and admired. Now
she just wants to be admired.” I hear you,
Yvonne, and you are.
--------------------------
The ongoing Works & Process evenings at the
Guggenheim Museum deal with ideas and
developments in the arts, via performances and
conversations with artists. To give New Yorkers
a taste of what the Royal Danish Ballet will
perform in the U.S. in June after an absence of
over 20 years, artistic director Nikolai Hübbe
brought 10 RDB dancers to the Guggenheim. In
between excerpts from ballets that will be shown
at Lincoln Center’s David H. Koch Theater
(June 14 through 19), Hübbe talks—often
revealingly—with John Meehan, about the past
and future of the company (which numbers over
90 performers), his own past as a child student
and adult dancer in Denmark, and his tenure as
a stellar performer with the New York City
Ballet.
As one of the hundreds of scholars, critics, and
Search Village Voice
Photo copyright Paula Court. Courtesy of Performa.
Yvonne Rainer's Assisted Living: Good Sports 2,
with Sally Silvers, Pat Catterson, Patricia
Hoffbauer, Emmanuèlle Phuon, Emily Coates,
Keith Sabado, Yvonne Rainer.
Details
Yvonne Rainer
Baryshnikov Arts Center
March 16 through 19
Works & Process: The Royal Danish Ballet
The Guggenheim Museum
March 20 through 21
Related Content
Susan Stroman Dukes It Out
February 16, 2011
DEEP THOUGHTS
April 27, 2011
The Decade's Best Dance
December 22, 2009
New York City Ballet Dancers Take to the
Streets—on Film
May 18, 2010
The Daily Ditching iPad-Only For Android App
ASAP; TBD.com Dismantled, Doomed
February 23, 2011
More About
By Chris Molanphy
A A A
Blogs
How Adele Is
The Music Biz's
2011 Redeemer
Viewed Commented
By Christian Viveros-Fauné
Features
Francis Alys
Enjoys a Little
Narco-Tourism
Most Popular Stories
The Intelligent Homosexual's Guide to Capitalism and
Socialism, With a Key to the Scriptures--Waiting and
Waiting and Waiting for Lefty
Tony Kushner's big new play at the Public offers lots of great
talk, but few keys to anything dramatic
Jerusalem Heads Into the Woods
Mark Rylance and Jez Butterworth mess with English folkdom
Gustav Metzger: Bad News Bearer
At e-flux, a veteran political artist finally gets his first New York
solo show
Best in Show: 'Richard Serra Drawing' at the Met
Museum
Plus: Almagul Menlibayeva at Priska C. Juschka; 'Drawing and
its Double' at the Drawing Center
Best in Show: Jerry Meyer at Denise Bibro Fine Art
Plus: Iva Gueorguieva at Ameringer/McEnery/Yohe and
BravinLee Programs
Village Voice on Facebook
Like
13,585 people like Village Voice.
Andrew Subversive Cesar Natsuko Josef
Facebook social plugin
More Most Popular>>

allet buffs who have flocked to the three
Bournonville festivals that the company has
organized, beginning in 1979, I’m passionate
about this Danish institution. The Bournonville
repertory—what remains of it—is the closest
link we have to ballet of the mid 19th-century.
Email
to Friend
Write to
Editor
Print
Article
More About
Yvonne Rainer Emily Coates
Nikolai Hubbe Dance
Arts, Entertainment,
and Media
August Bournonville, the scion of a dancing family, took Auguste Vestris’s classes alongside
Marie Taglioni and wrote down the exercises before returning to Copenhagen, where he became
the Royal Danish Ballet’s director and choreographer.
What Bournonville fans almost worldwide love about his ballets—their sweet-tempered beauty;
their lovely, buoyant, intricate steps; their astutely conveyed drama; their casts that include
children and character dancers as well as quick-footed younger ones—is, let’s face it, old hat to
the Danes and a bit boring to many of the dancers. A company has to grow. The RDB’s next home
season includes Balanchine’s The Nutcracker, a Balanchine-Stravinsky evening, and an all-
Robbins program. The Guggenheim program offers a glimpse of Lost onSlow, a ballet by Jorma
Elo, the Russian-trained Finnish choreographer, whose works seem to be on every company’s
must-have list (Lost on Slow is coming to the Koch).
The difficult part for diehard Bournonvillians is accepting the belief that to keep the Danes
coming to see Bournonville ballets, the works must be periodically updated in terms of décor and
costumes, as well as emphasis and direction. In 1991, the artistically gifted Queen Margrethe II
redesigned costumes for A Folk Tale that altered what some felt to be an essential aspect of the
ballet. The 1834 La Sylphide that will be shown during the company’s U.S. tour may be the one
that Hübbe, as a guest choreographer, directed and had re-designed in time for the 2005
Bournonville Festival.
For the June tour, Hübbe put together Bournonville Variations, drawing on steps from the
handed-down, daily Bournonville classes. Bournonville was a charismatic dancer at a time when
men on stage were being disprized in Paris and elsewhere, and he made wonderful jumping,
beating steps for male dancers, and the excerpts from the work shown at the Guggenheim
featured five men, led by the exemplary Bournonville dancer Thomas Lund. These are not
bravura, Russian-style showpiece steps, but, oh, what bright displays of elevation and footwork,
performed with modest ease. No storms of pirouettes ending with an “I dare you to applaud”
lunge, just a multiple spin that the dancer ends poised for a second on the ball of one foot.
The ensemble also shows the Guggenheim audience two scenes from La Sylphide, the Pas de
Sept from A Folk Tale, the Tarantella from the last act of Napoli, and the “Jockey Dance” from
the otherwise vanished From Siberia to Moscow. The image Bournonville presents is one of a
moral and contented society born to dance in the celebrations that fill his ballets. At the
Guggenheim, watching these fragrant witty or tragic bits of dancing, finely performed, I find I’m
smiling.
I was particularly impressed by Amy Watson, whose combination of innocence and robustness
seems wonderfully suited to Bournonville’s steps, and she was also striking in a quirky duet from
Elo’s work, in which she was partnered by Jean-Lucien Massot. Lund and Alban Lendorf are a
fine pair as the two in-step but rivalrous jockeys with their little whips. Ulrik Birkkjaer is an
eloquent and sensitive James to Susanne Grinder’s playful (in Act I) and dying (in Act II) sylph.
Grinder, a tall slender beauty with long arms, is adept at looking otherwordly, but I found her at
slightly limp; in the little solo marked by a childish clapping of the hands, she sort of fluttered
hers in the air below her chin. Note to Danes: Please remember to pack the tambourines for
Napoliwhen you return to New York.Clapping hands are no subsititute!
Add New Comment
Share