composing—2

And then there is the new music... 

For each 3Seasons performance, one Vivaldi season is dropped and the corresponding section of Byron Au Yong's just minted suite of the same name is substituted. 

The new composition is difficult and strange to ears accustomed to Vivaldi, especially for dancers who had learned Olivier's choreography, which is so very connected to the Vivaldi score. On first hearing, the dancers found it "different," "unnerving," "jangly," "weird,"  "not to my taste." 
It bothered them. 
The new composition has same number of measures, the same tempos as the Vivaldi, but they said, "I can't hear it," "it doesn't make sense," "I don't recognize it."
All were  game to try, though!

And in whatever season Byron's version is substituted, the lighting, like the dance, also follows patterns established for Vivaldi. As lighting designer Michael Mazzola observed, "the new music recontextualizes things in a very jarring way. It is hard." 

 It was hard, too, for the musicians to get in sync with the dancers.

—even including Jimmy, the dancer/sometime musician ...

 

The challenge remained considerable for all three performances, because the dancers had very little exposure to any of the new music ahead. Rehearsals with Byron's score were few and brief, and it wasn't known until shortly before a show which season would be substituted. The same challenge faced Jill Hanson, stage manager in charge of lighting cues. 

But sometimes,  unexpectedly, Byron's composition took on a certain manic or sneaky, skewed relation to Vivaldi, so that in a peculiar way it fit, even elucidated the original.

On opening night (Friday), "Autumn" was danced to the new music. Because that season begins with a jaunty sextet of three women and three men, Byron's rollicking soundscape— which had an old-fashioned amusement park feel to it, with toy piano and a pronounced tune and rhythm—established a mood of cheerful, good-natured, even innocent fun. 

 

But on Saturday "Summer" was substituted instead. In Olivier's interpretation, summer is the heaviest month. The sultry, hot atmosphere of the season (at least in some parts of the world) infected the choreography. This is the sequence that begins with Kaori (perhaps representing humanity or the earth or nature?) laboriously dragging objects attached to her by ropes across the stage...

..and ends  
with the "rape" scene.

Byron's harsh, jagged music created a grim, despairing mood, so that when Vivaldi returned in "Autumn" and the three couples flirted and cavorted, their moves now appeared artificial, cynical, soulless. And the final moments of "Winter" felt tragic. At least to me. 

But why do any of this? The Vivaldi music, although so familiar one almost has trouble hearing it sometimes, is undeniably beautiful, finely crafted, full of contrasts and wonderful melody. What is the point in throwing it off balance, tossing it away?

The question brings us to the very core of 3Seasons. Surely more now than in any other time of our lives—because of global weather changes and our greater awareness of other parts of the planet with different climates—we experience the seasons as much less predictable or automatically comprehensible/stereotypical than they used to be.

The point, Olivier's central idea with this piece, and Byron's too, is to take us, through the dancers, beyond our comfort zone, beyond the beautiful music we have grown up with and become overly accustomed to. In this era, because of its incredible electronic connections, there is virtually no such thing as isolation any more, even if we wish for it. We can't help but be impinged on by catastrophes like Haiti's earthquake—or styles halfway across the globe.  

In fiction these days, there is a suspicion of any story that has too happy an ending. The same is often true in other arts. In a certain odd way, I think, by introducing at the outset the knowledge that the known is going to be disrupted, Olivier somehow gives us permission to enjoy the elegant and ordered music. 

Not that he has, by any means, made merely pretty dances. A great deal of this work is enigmatic, harsh, off-kilter. By suiting it so perfectly to the Vivaldi score, harsh themes are rendered comprehensible, in a way even beautiful. But if you add to that another layer of uncertainty, a musical landscape with the same temporal shape but an altogether different feel, everyone—the viewer, like everyone involved in making the performance—has to start again from scratch, an exercise that might make us delight in returning to the original Vivaldi or thrill to an unexpected, realigning jolt. 

As for the dancers, the new music affected their relations in performance. I overheard one (Jonathan?) speak of hearing the footfalls of another entering behind him, and using that as his cue. 
Ty said, "we look to each other more, listen to the flow of breathing." Several mentioned how they needed to pay more than usual attention. One remarked that "we have to depend on each other." For lack of the usual aural prompts, the dancers have to reconnect, in new ways, with each other, with the live music, with the audience. 

Perhaps we, as viewers, have to do the same...

lighting

Michael Mazzola 

is a master of light. 
He is hesitant to talk about how he uses "photons to evoke feelings both emotional and physical—which then perhaps these might be articulated into intellectual constructs—but as it’s so transitory, nailing it down seems so difficult."  

Difficult but far from impossible.

The lighting designer deals with space and time, especially in dance. Michael talks about liking to architect a space with lighting, so that it coincides with the physical action of dance and becomes mysterious, enchanting, bold—consonant with whatever mood the piece needs to invoke. The lighting for Whim W'Him's first show began, he says, with interchanges with Olivier and information about the space in which the piece would take place. From these two separate piles of information, he constructed a box of tools. 

Light follows the choreographic impulse. This whole show is danced on a white floor. Michael and Olivier agreed without saying that the brightness of white floor and cyclorama can almost be too much for audience connection, but it allows for wide range and subtle play of mood:

X stasis begins in white, clean, clear, almost brittle light, to reflect (literally and figuratively) the choreography. Through the next three duets, the texture of background and floor lighting changes. Color is introduced. Relationships become less reserved, more complex, perhaps more equivocal, until at the end a thudding heartbeat pulses through music dance and the blood red of costumes and light explode in 'Cardiac Arrest'...

 

 

In FRAGMENTS the backdrop is dark. Color resides mainly on the two dancers' wonderful skirts—one in blues, one in yellow—which fly up, swirl, waft down, caught in mid-air by light. And then there is the riveting solo, where Vincent sheds skirt and artifice and dances, through slow, revelatory contortions, body stripped, spirit bared and burnished by the light...

 

3Seasons, says Michael, "had a tight vocabulary, particularly a way to push in a slightly literal sense of weather—and what weather can evoke, both emotionally and intellectually."

     The use of white light, from cold to warm.

     Texture on the cyclo. 

     Interior vs exterior space.

In one solo 3Seasons, again of Vincent, he is lifted by other dancers and set on a new path several times. The stage transforms into darkness, but he follows a path of light in his triangular trajectory across downstage (audience) left to right, upstage, diagonally downstage and again across. The first time he moves straight across it is into the light; on his return, in the same direction, the light is behind him. The interesting thing about facts like these is that, perhaps more than any other single element of the show, lighting adds a crucial layer of mood, of which the audience is often only unconsciously aware. 

In the penultimate bit before the "dirty hands" sequence when Kaori ends up in the garbage can, the skin of Jim, the hoarder, glistens with gold and lavender light. This was not anything that Michael had ever done before. Olivier helped him find what was needed by saying, "I need mystery, it's the most beautiful piece of music." There is also a very nice transitional moment where the company walks stage right to stage left. They go slowly. It takes a whole minute. The light and music gets stormy then glows on the bodies of the dancers. "That passage of time is exquisite," says Michael. "I can feel it in my eyeballs." 

But marvelous as the still photos are in capturing dancers' individuality and moments of the dance, they are frustrating because they cannot show passage of time...

Although a recording (Joshua Bell) of the Vivaldi score was used in these shows—for all three seasons where Byron Au Yong's compositions weren't performed—one aspect is always live. Or rather, although there is software that can lock in the sequence of lighting cues, there is much more to it. 

"It is easy to be off by less than 1/2 half a second and not achieve the desired result, even though a lighting computer is being used—accurate to 1/100 of a second, says Michael Mazzola. “No matter how wonderful each cue is, the lighting is dependent upon the stage manager to execute the calling of the cues such that they are placed at the optimum possible location in time, so the lighting state and the movement/music coincide” to produce the precise desired meaning. 

“It’s still a very human action driving the cueing.” 

 

An example: in the segment known to the dancers as "the kiss," Kylie and Ty move sinuously around the stage their lips pursed toward each other but barely not touching, the movement of the rest of their bodies informed and informed by their lips. Before this sequence, Ty leaves Kylie and strides diagonally downstage, she pursues him. A spotlight goes on when she gets there, but the real moment for the lighting cue is when he turns toward her. In these slight but significant instances, when the stage manager places light in exact relation to the music and movement, the layers of lighting build up and lead to...magic.

timing/performing

The question of time—how there never seemed to be enough of it—was brought up by many of the collaborators on 3Seasons, Olivier as well. Since all the dancers were busy with many other commitments, it was a constant struggle to get them in one place long enough not just to learn steps and sequences of movement—which are often very odd, unexpected, and hard to do—but to practice them together, to Olivier's exacting standards. The curious versions of Baroque dresses some of the dancers wear, strange props, and the tension of the whole new musical aspect of the piece (see future e whims posts), along with the usual jitters of opening night added to a company premiere, all added to the usual pre-performance stress.

I thought rehearsals had shown what the dancers really could do.

 

But lighting adds magic, and the energy on stage before an audience was phenomenal.

The real thing was...The Real Thing!

•The scintillating X stasis, with its 5 duets (one of them a funny and oddly affecting pas de deux of Chalnessa with a dressmaker's dummy), whose final movement is not called "Cardiac Arrest" for nothing.

•FRAGMENTS, which combines a blaze of bravura dancing, a heart-rending and soul-baring solo, and a triple spoof on opera, ballet, and gender stereotypes, all to some of Mozart's best beloved vocal music—so beloved it needs to be reimagined to really be heard.

 



 

And then 

the premiere of 3Seasons, a tribute to the strength of this budding company, the dedication and professionalism of its co-creators. Despite crammed rehearsal schedules, many-layered relations between WhimW'Him members, and a shoestring budget, the company has shown a high level of mutual understanding, and an unusual ability to pull together a complex, highly physical program with panache, finish, and a level of civility/ camaraderie one would normally expect only with much more rehearsal and/or a far longer time dancing together.

Up soon: 
•a profile of Michael Mazzola and his lighting wizardry
•what changing the music in one of the sections did to 3Seasons on successive nights
•a conversation with costume designer Michael Cepress 
•Kim and Adam Bamberg on their new-found talent for photographing dance
•updates with more pictures plus information about the dancers and their current projects...

reacting

Three performances by Whim W'Him, then I went immediately out of town and have spent three days caring for a baby. Intriguing to compare a four month old, barely able to grasp a toy dangled in front of her and get it in her mouth, to the incredible body control of the strong, adept dancers I've been watching these past few weeks. What a long way she has to go! But then she does one of her full-body smiles, and I think what a long way dance has to go...

Whim W'Him and its first production—reviews, in print and online, run the gamut from fulsome praise by Rosie Gaynor in The Financial Times and Stephen Church's encomium in the Seattle Times to the muttering of Anne Lawrence on the On The Boards blog and growls of Jen Graves of The Stranger. More recent posts by Marci Silman and Sandi Kurtz on artdish, along with the SunBreak comments of Jeremy M. Barker, are more nuanced. 

It fascinates, and to some sense discourages me, how even now—close to a century after the inception of modern dance—there is still such hostility between two "camps." 

An article on dancehelp.com describes well the genesis of this disconnect:  

Hanya Holm, 1929 

"The artists of modern dance have been known to pride their selves on taking the polar opposite road than of ballet. Ballet is the story of  organization, symmetrical movement, traditions of companies, theatres as well as individuals. Modern dance on the other hand, is almost entirely the story of the personalities, spirits, quirks and hearts of individual dancers who devise their own philosophies, and set their own unique styles....
Modern Dance began in America early in the 20th century when the predecessors of the artists we know today, began their own rebellions against both the formality of ballet and the predictability of popular show dancing of the period. Their techniques and styles were very different; what they had in common was dissatisfaction with the options then available to dancers and the ultimate goal of conveying to their audiences a sense of  inner and outer reality – an aim that still inspires modern dancers today."

In the past few decades cross-fertilization has improved the technique and physical range of contemporary dance, while ballet has incorporated some of the greater expressivity and flexibility of modern. But still much is to be gained by openness in both directions. 

What draws me to Whim W'Him is a serious (and humorous) dedication to exploring both worlds, without prejudice or foregone conclusions. Among other things, Olivier Wevers's investigates hands, arms, upper bodies, faces in motion; he combines earthbound movement and the pointe shoes usually associated with airiness and the attempt to conquer space; and he tweaks the boundaries of gender, truly "conveying to [his] audiences a sense of inner and outer reality. To my mind and taste—and admittedly it is to a large degree a matter of taste—one can say something exciting and new without being "cutting edge" to the point of leaving the audience bleeding. 

dancing—Lucien

 
 Lucien Postlewaite

is an elegant classical dancer, 
the epitome of clarity in motion.





I asked him what his role is in the process—aside from dancing and being Olivier's spouse. "To tie up any loose strings," he replied, "and to be a second set of eyes." Especially in tech week, when Olivier often has been involved in questions of lighting, costumes, or Byron's new music, Lucien has acted as a sort of "energy co-ordinator."

 


Originally Olivier was going to choreograph a particular solo for Lucien and send it by Skype to him in New York, where he was dancing just after the new year with a group from Pacific Northwest Ballet at the Joyce Theater. But there never was enough time. It was finally completed Thursday, after company class at PNB. What had made things more  is the fact that PNB rehearsals for The Sleeping Beauty, where he will dance the prince were also going on simultaneously. That's an awful lot of role switching to undergo in the course of a day or a week, even for a strong and versatile dancer.

We haven't actually had much time to talk with travel and all his intense activity, so more of Lucien's ideas later. 

For now, let a few photos do the talking...

 

dancing—Jonathan

Jonathan Poretta    

was also another one of those who encouraged Olivier to branch out on his own. 

Jonathan projects a tremendous intensity in his dancing. 
He's fast and athletic and full of the joy of movement.






From the beginning Jonathan was excited to work with new and different artists. It's challenging and difficult, he says, because you have the same work methods as the dancers you're used to working with. And it's a matter of style, too. "With ballet dancers, you can fall into place—we all start in the corps, where you have in common that you are all trying to be exactly together. With modern dancers, it's more individual from the get-go, the more individual the better." 

From unfamiliar dancers, "You can learn a lot," he says. "We watch each other." He calls it "a great group, all so talented." Jonathan likes the idea of what the dancers and Olivier call "the connection section," as a metaphor. They curl and sway and wind among each other in a chain, each different and distinct, but all connected to each other.

 










Like some of the others, Jonathan says he wishes there was more rehearsal time. For him, there was even less of it back in June because he was going back east to teach at the Pennsylvania Youth Ballet. "It never really freaks me out, though," he says, and I get the impression he loves the challenge of it all.
 

Jonathan, too, emphasizes how specific Olivier is as a choreographer—"He's the most, or one of the most ever—to the point where I want to smack him sometime!" 

But it's also obvious, from how he takes up Olivier's suggestions/corrections and incorporates them enthusiastically, that Jonathan rises to the bait and revels in that very precision.  

For more of Jonathan's professional bio: 

http://www.whimwhim.org

Second photo from the top from Pacific Northwest Ballet