LC Fest: Japan's Takarazuka Revue takes on "CHICAGO"

Started by a railway magnate in 1914 to attract tourists to the hot springs town of Takarazuka, the all-female Takarazuka Revue has grown into a true cultural phenomenon, with a devoted fan base that clamors for the company’s sparkling adaptations of classic Western and Japanese stories, movies, and plays, and a cultural influence that extends into the realms of anime and manga.

--from "Takarazuka: A History"

Granted, I did not have the best vantage point for Japan's Takarazuka CHICAGO, seated near the rear of the Koch Theater's hall (my bad, I guess, for waiting too late to try for a press ticket). From there, I could see, very well, that Takarazuka Revue's cast--nearly all women, often taking male roles--had brought their sharpest knives to the Fosse (via Ann Reinking) banquet. But I couldn't make out facial expressions or the subtleties of gaze and body talk that usually connect and even bond me to performers and the characters they play. I struggled to recover some sense of the 1975 Kander-Ebb-Fosse musical I had seen and enjoyed only in its 2002 movie version. It didn't help to have to continually aim my gaze nearly to the ceiling, away from those distant faces, to catch whatever English supertitles I could catch. I felt lost and got lost more often than I'd care to admit.

At the outset, the CHICAGO of Takarazuka CHICAGO seemed sluggish. Post-intermission, though, it took on a certain charge, and I did get a kick out of Saori Mine (playing flashy, celebrated celebrity lawyer Billy Flynn) and the moxie of foxy Roxie Hart (played by Hikaru Asami) and Velma Kelly (Yoka Wao), our two vaudeville-era lady killers. But I did not really start rooting for Takarazuka Revue until the hard-working performers lowered the curtain on CHICAGO and gifted us with one their famous encores, a show in itself.

To Takarazuka Revue, "encore" does not mean one or two quick, rousing sendoffs. Oh no. It means a string of numerous songs, each a mini-production with different performers, about twenty minutes more of material--Takarazuka's own material, this time, and what material! Glittering light effects sweeping the theater's walls and ceiling; sexy, romantic tangos between women dressed to the nines; Vegas showgirl feather costumes and Rockettes-style lineups. It's also fun to notice how audience members, many of them Japanese or Japanese-American, recognize and hail specific players as they take the stage for their encore segments.

As I giddily discussed this, via Facebook app, with a Takarazuka fan who has seen the troupe in Japan, we hit on the same explanation for why these encores slay. It's really hard to separate how gaudily over-the-top they are from the exquisite technical excellence of the performances. Your brain instinctively says, "Wait, no. I can't believe this," but you're grinning. Confections coming after the dark meal of CHICAGO, they feel like acts of sincere generosity, feel-good rewards and guilty pleasures. Each number is bite-sized but packs a lot of calories, and everyone goes away richly fed.

The North American premiere run of Takarazuka CHICAGO continues at Lincoln Center Festival through Sunday. Remaining shows are:

Friday, July 22, 7:30
Saturday, July 23, 2:00
Saturday, July 23, 8:00
Sunday, July 24, 2:00

Note: The show runs roughly three hours with one intermission.

Get information and tickets here.

David H. Koch Theater
20 Lincoln Center Plaza, Manhattan
(map/directions)

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Lincoln Center Festival presents Rosas revival

Right before the evening's performance of Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker's Rosas Danst Rosas, I find myself seated behind a tall, big-headed man accompanied by his tall, big-headed friend--they tend to go about in pairs--and our section of rows facing the Gerald W. Lynch Theater's stage at a less-than-ideal angle anyway. I have never seen a Rosas dance live--only on video...theirs and Beyoncé's--but I'd hoped to see De Keersmaeker's stage in full. I longed to see De Keersmaeker's stage in full and to track the play of energies between bodies. I'd not expected to have to tilt way over in my chair at times, the way her dancers sometimes tilt in theirs, in order to follow some of the action. The first man's head, as things develop, will be precisely stationed in some crucial gaps between dancers--De Keersmaeker, Tale Dolven, Cynthia Loemij and Sue-Yeon Youn--bifurcating the choreographer's enigmatic arrangements at certain times. In a mood of revenge, I wildly fantasize going all Harlem Church Lady on this Lincoln Center Festival audience, leaving and coming back with a big ol' feathered hat and refusing to remove it. But you can't go out and come back--hat or no hat. De Keersmaeker won't let you.

My seat is way back in the packed theater, and the distance and frequently dimmish lighting (Remon Fromont) make it hard to read facial expressions, the kind that, on video, make a particularly striking segment of Rosas Danst Rosas look like a growing conspiracy among a clique of bored teenagers. Dolven's open, eager presentation and coltish energy carry most clearly, but I often glance at De Keersmaeker, who made this signature piece as an NYU undergrad and performs it now three decades later. I'm excited to see her dance, to see what this piece, born of her body and spirit, can tell me about this woman.

I find a solemn, closed face, what I can see of it, and a dutiful body. It does its work in the ensemble but does not show too much of itself amid the younger women. She tells me nothing. But when De Keersmaeker performs that repeated turning movement that looks like a flamenco dancer whipping a dress front and back, gripping it at her pelvis and tailbone--if you've seen the dance, I think you'll know what I mean--she shows an intensity that underlies everything. Underlies abstraction, repetition, synchronicity, motionlessness. Underlies melting and dissolution. Underlies uncertainty and self-consciousness. A dashing style, a passion and a power that turns the stage and all four physically, mentally vibrant women on it into an engine that, with Thierry De Mey and Peter Vermeersch's aggressive music, opens your head like nobody's business.

Lincoln Center Festival presents Rosas through July 16 with a schedule of performances of Rosas Danst Rosas (1983), Fase, Four Movements to the Music of Steve Reich (1982), Elena's Aria (1984) and Bartók/Mikrokosmos (1987) as well as several free public events. For further information, click here.

Gerald W. Lynch Theater
John Jay College
524 West 59th Street (between 10th and 11th Avenues), Manhattan
(map/directions)

Who's hot? Brazil's Tom Zé!

Tom Zé, a Brazilian Force of One, at Alice Tully Hall
by Jon Pareles, The New York Times, July 14, 2011

Theater of War

Set me as a seal upon your heart. For love is strong as death.

(Song of Solomon)

Bill T. Jones's Fondly Do We Hope...Fervently Do We Pray—which has concluded its New York premiere run at Rose Theater for the Lincoln Center Festival—is a work of heartbroken yet tenacious, resilient love.

Given its world premiere at Illinois's Ravinia Festival in 2009--the bicentennial of Abraham Lincoln's birth--this 90-minute, multimedia piece takes inspiration from the life and milieu of this American icon. But before leading us to Lincoln, Jones first draws our attention to Shayla-Vie Jenkins, a lovely Black woman dancing on a circular, spotlit extension of the main stage. She flows with delicate elegance through a seamless pattern of movements as a voice-over recording itemizes parts of the human body, from head to toe.

I am a Black woman, too, and as the voice calmly, caressingly listed these parts, my mind quickly flicked to the blood memory of the slave auction block. That thought flickered out just as swiftly, for I sensed that Jones wanted us to hold two other thoughts in reasonable balance. The first, to be sure, is that illusory, ephemeral flow of dance. The second is the sweaty, effortful reality that gives rise to dance, the discrete bodily structures working in concert to make the fantasy possible. With the auction image gone, I found this juxtaposition almost unbearably moving, a tribute not only to dance and dancers but also to the notion of the democratic body politic, forged from so many individual entities, each with distinct identity, history and concerns. Is the American ideal of a strong, united people capable of respect and harmony, a dream as illusory as a body dancing on a stage?

In examining the life of our nation's heroic, martyred president, Jones has said, he grappled with Lincoln's human complexities. This work touches upon some incidents from Lincoln's biography, including his assassination, but it does not engage with that complexity in any way specific to the man himself. Jones seems far more interested in repeatedly pulling back from Lincoln to afford a better view of the restless ghosts from those times that now float through our own. He recognizes something potentially dangerous—and because he's got an artist's courageous heart, potentially redeeming—in the flaring contentiousness of our political life today, when a man of African and European-American heritage now sits at the head of a country that once enslaved African people.

Long stretches of Fondly Do We Hope's ensemble movement, as well as some choreography for individuals, puzzled me. Most notably, Paul Matteson—who often assumes the Lincoln role—seemed, at best, unrelievedly pleasant. Matteson's moves are big and flung; he is hoisted and ported by the ensemble, as if riding atop a throne of marble. But this performer never transcends blandness, even when engaged in heated debate. But if Jones's movement had been more expressive in itself, it's still not clear that Matteson would possess the command to carry it. On the other hand, Asli Bulbul (in and out of her role as Mary Todd Lincoln) and Jennifer Nugent, like Jenkins, make the most of movement pieces that are perfectly cut, polished and displayed. I am tempted to think that Jones's intentions snap into sharper focus when the dancer is female, but Jenkins, Bulbul and especially the always interesting Nugent, really bring oomph to the challenge.

Although the choreography largely disappoints, the score astonishes. Jerome Begin, Christopher Antonio William Lancaster and George Lewis, Jr. contribute a rich blend of Americana in their original compositions and arrangements of traditional music, with delightfully beautiful singing by Clarissa Sinceno and Lewis. I appreciate the reticent simplicity of Bjorn Amelan's set design. The filmy, translucent curtain encircling the main stage reminded me of a screen pulled closed around the bed of a hospitalized patient, perhaps one injured in our Civil War or in Afghanistan. For long stretches, this curtain distanced us from the enclosed dancing ensemble.

Democracy can look like chaos. Is the body politic ill, broken? Is it actually in the frightening throes of a healing crisis? The visitor quietly entering a hospital room, wants to protect, to be gentle with, the patient suffering or recovering within.

Stay me, comfort me. For I am sick of love.

(Song of Solomon)

When Amelan's tender curtain parts, revealing a stand of white columns, it demarcates hallowed space set apart for the exercise of the ancient Greek ideals adopted by the founders of this nation. I wonder if we are still capable of “believing in great men,” as Jones says of himself in the work's text. I wonder, indeed, if believing in some great man out there is exactly what we need to be doing right now, but I trust Jones has entertained that thought, too.

“Lincoln is a story we tell ourselves,” says Jones's narrator, Jamyl Dobson. And just as Americans continue to interrogate and refine this narrative, Fondly Do We Hope...Fervently Do We Pray reportedly has been much reworked since its world premiere last year at Ravinia. Despite visual beauty in design and performance, the work is blunted by choreography dissociated from the work's complex ideas and copious text.

Lincoln Center Festival continues through next Sunday, July 25. For a schedule of the remaining programs and ticketing information, click here.

Do ya wanna funk?

Orchestre Poly-Rythmo de Cotonou Plays Funk

by Jon Pareles, The New York Times, July 12, 2010

Isherwood's 15-hour investment

'The Demons' - Peter Stein Takes Dostoyevsky to Governors Island

by Charles Isherwood, The New York Times, July 12, 2010

Dostoyevsky marathon set for Governors Island

12-Hour Dostoyevsky Play on Tap for Lincoln Center Festival

by Patrick Healy, The New York Times, March 10, 2010

Here's to "scragglier" dance!

Bill T. Jones Salutes His Friend Lincoln
by Claudia La Rocco, The New York Times, September 6, 2009

Winterizing our summer: Gat at Lincoln Center

Last night, Lincoln Center Festival 09 presented the New York premiere of Emanuel Gat Dance's Winter Variations--starring Gat, Roy Assaf and the stark, Gat-lit stage of LC's Rose Theater. I've never warmed to the old notion that art is Man's attempt to upstage the awesome works of Nature. But Gat and Assaf and that stage really did put me in a state of awe.

Winter Variations is grey tones and suspended moments, drones and bleak shadows, yawning space around men in uncanny, telepathic coordination, ornate simplicity, fluid, softness of motion, the treading of time into infinity. Also on the bill: Gat's Silent Ballet, in its North American premiere run. As in Winter Variations, Gat's innovative lighting design defines and electrifies the space and--with the dancer-and-audience-exposing lack of musical accompaniment, the ensemble's sifting and shifting, their attraction/repulsion, the movements' eccentric pacing--both draws one in and creates a visceral disorientation. Silent Ballet is interesting and handsomely performed, but Winter Variations is the fine instrument, one of the most exciting duets in my experience.

I urge you to see these exceptional works and performers tomorrow night or Friday, if you can still get tickets. Try here.