“Uugghh!” to the Opera: Christopher Williams unzips “Hen’s Teeth” at DNA

below (from left): Storme Sundberg, Emily Stone, Ursula Eagly, Jennifer Lafferty, Hope Davis, and Adam Weinert
All photos by Paula Court
“Uugghh!”

says the “prince” as he lands, more or less in a heap, on the stage.

And then again, “Uugghh!”

Each entrance brings titters, giggles and outright laughs from the audience in the theater at Dance New Amsterdam. But not from the six half naked young women who continue craning their necks and torsos and cooing and squawking in swan or goose like warbles. In their meandering line behind which this somewhat startled individual male interloper arrives now and later, each time as if having fallen down a hole. Storme Sundberg, Jennifer Lafferty, Kira Blazek, Hope Davis, Emily Stone and Ursula Eagly remain unruffled, regal; one might say serene if not for the frank and focused intensity of their demeanor.

Above: Hope Davis and Ursula Eagly twist and squawk

The women have assembled after entering in a procession marked by repeated backward arabesque leg extensions; a procession that recalls, twists and tweaks that of the 32 ballerinas in the “Kingdom of the Shades,” scene from the ballet La Bayadere. Bedecked in gold tinged costumes embellished with feathers, they have preened open
and plucked off their long sleeved bodices with their teeth revealing the shapeliest breathing collection of breasts, torsos and backs I think I have ever seen.


Above: Ursula Eagly and Hope Davis in opening sequence

Gaining his feet, the primary color clad courtier (Adam H. Weinert) makes his way in balletic lunges and leg extensions from his fallen entrance towards the front of stage where he locks eyes with the feathered femme fatale who has led the procession (Sundberg). Facing downstage toward the audience, she lights up with the electricity of their connection, and the two find themselves carried into an exhilarating extended flying duet by the other five bird-women. The swoops and twists of the swirling lifts culminate as the three supporting the swain execute a deft fly-under between the bridging pair holding high his swan, then vanish all into the wing pursued by audience applause.

Right: Adam H. Weinert with his prince on

Had Christopher Williams’ world premiere of “Hen’s Teeth” ended here, I feel certain that we would have all gone home happy. But the choreographer/costumer/ringmaster and, in this case, troubadour harp player’s vision and ambition demands almost as much of his audience as it does of his artistic collaborators. I find it necessary to slow down my theatrical rate of expectation to that of his more measured medieval sense of time.

As if to reinforce this, the work has been set to a moody score by composer and conductor Gregory Spears, who triples as the electric organ player in the 10 piece ensemble who perform, live and visible, in the large offstage area to the right of the two fluted columns that delimit the stage space in front of the audience. That score takes the form of a Requiem Mass sung in Breton, Middle French and Latin by the likes of half the cast of Anonymous 4 (Ruth Cunningham and Jacqueline Horner-Kwiatek) and 4 members of the acclaimed male a cappella vocal group Lionheart (Michael Wenger, John Olud, Lawrence Lipnik, and Kurt-Owen Richards.

Above: Ursula Eagly plucks off her top

Williams’ work requires patience. He do go on. The choreography from him that I have seen to date lives on the edge of wearing out its welcome, and in this concert it often steps over the line, challenging, perhaps taxing, the audience to remain engaged. Yet I appreciate the time and space he gives us to think and associate under the inspiration of his just–as-provocative imagery. The ephemeral nature of youth, youthful beauty and prowess, of love, of all life lies at the heart of this meditative pageant.

As he has done with past shows, Williams has included Requiem’s lyric in the program. The prelude intimates narrative. The translation reads:

A very long time ago
When hens had teeth…

Listen, if you will,
And you will hear a pretty tale.

As realized by the exquisite ensemble, the music bespeaks the mastery and majesty of human heart and mind as it rises to the constant occasion of loss.

If the tale of the lovers carries the sensation of flight in sensual beauty and hope, the rejoinder comes in the form three crones, powerfully embodied by Joan Arnold, Grazia Della Terza , and Alison Granucci. These heavily costumed apparitions, with their bald pates and their beard-like masks that, like an Islamic niqab, leave only the eyes uncovered, dance as if through mist and mud or clinch their entire bodies around the stage’s columns, their long crooked green fingernails seeming to claw the flesh of fluted steel.
Joan Arnold, Alison Granucci, and Grazia Della Terza as the crones based on the ancient Greek Graeae

The denouement of these contending tableaux comes in an extended counterpoint, as first three of the “swans” return, their torsos now swaddled in rope-mesh tunics. From behind their line, the swain re-enters with his “uugghh” and thud, as love inevitably falls to earth. The finale finds the crones displacing this quartet. They enter encased in stiff reliquary-like sarcophagi of various lengths, each of which has a different devotional door that they one at a time swing open exposing a human and vulnerable face, a breast, a forearm.

As striking, vivid and fastidiously fashioned images such as the reliquaries can be – reminiscent in their communicative quality of the Scout-encasing ham in the film version of To Kill a Mockingbird -- Williams’ creativity with costuming can sometimes get in his way. The crones’ masking and headpieces limit movement and expressive possibilities, as do the tunics on Sundberg, Eagly, and Lafferty. (The program lists Andy Jordan as the designer of the evening's costuming, with additional elements by Williams and Carol Binion.)

I admire Williams’ thematic mash-ups even when they don’t quite cohere cogently. I see this as less the case with “Hen’s Teeth”, than I did with the program’s opening work-in-progress tentatively titled “Gobbledygook.” Here the stark naked and brilliantly choreographed Weinert meets a black painted plywood wall at the back of one side of the stage space before he is met with the bare chested, hakama pants wearing Eikazu Nakamura. Nakamura sidles in near the back of the stage at the audience’s right while the blue-lit Weinert, starting prone at our feet, probes gravity and his wall like caterpillar seeking a chrysalis hook. In their single stark moment of interaction the Japanese dancer helps his hapless partner find his sticking place by pinning him to the wall with a hand around the throat.

Above: Adam H. Weinert in "Gobbledygook." All photos by Paula Court

The two intensely introverted solo sequences that follow for Nakamura have the feel of esoteric ritual, the second adding an armor-like vest made of woven reeds over the hakama. Only had you picked up press material, consulted DNA’s web site, or had the time and sense to ask the choreographer or one of the dancers post-show, would you be likely to know that the ritual incarnates an imaginary version of the Buddhist segaki rite that concerns itself with personal atonement and easing the suffering of the wandering (slithering?) dead.

You might further have discovered, perusing these same sources, that “Hen’s Teeth” incorporates imagery inspired by the mysterious flying women found in a Breton fairytale preserved by 19th century folklorist François-Marie Luzel, the Graeae, or three swan-like crones of ancient Greek myth who share only one eye and one tooth between them, and that associated with the display of holy relics in the middle ages. Who knew?

When does such elucidating information become t.m.i. (too much information)? I ask simply because Williams generous and admirable inclination to edify his audience can sometimes backfire to limit the literal minded. I, for one, enjoy not knowing until I want to know. I then enjoy using the tools that the creator has placed within easy reach, including himself. In the meantime, I have not been prevented from intuiting a reference to Matisse’s La Danse in the midst of the topless sextet, or the choreographer’s wicked way of tilting with Petipa’s Swan Lake imagery.

In the program credits, Williams can seem to be everywhere at once. But I find it intriguing that only the press notes for “Gobbledygook” mention him alongside the program-credited David Griffin as the source for the piece’s intricate electronic sound score. This artist belongs in the opera house, and I predict that it will only be a matter of time until he lands there. That seems the only place that his production values and vision can live in uncomfortable equilibrium with the support; artistic, technical, production and financial, that will allow them all to reasonably complement or at least successfully co-exist in creative competition.

If the creator’s obsession as a medievalist may initially obscure this path to the stage, his devotion to music and spectacle makes his breakthrough, for me, a matter of when and not if. Given his ability to render, he can, like the young Robert Wilson, devise collaborative operas of his own. His vast visual frame of reference, and his dexterity in presenting both male and female form, often startlingly yet insouciantly nude in ways that allow us to recover our endless fascination and sense of humor surrounding this mortal coil, point to a future on today’s big screen performance stage.

Jacqui Kerrod, on pedal harp and Elizabeth Weinfield on baroque viola performed admirably along with the rest of the music ensemble. The excellent lighting across the board can be credited to Amanda K. Ringer. DNA’s Artist in Residence program continues to impress.

"You're not nice!" : remembering Pina Bausch

I stood in the stage right wing of the BAM Opera House watching the brilliant performers of Tanztheater Wuppertal in their dresses, suits, button shirts and pants slide on their butts through 3 inches of water along a diagonal line from the back to the front corners of this full-stage puddle.

All hell had broken loose. Lively music percolated the scene. Elsewhere on the lake, company men and women ran on and off in dresses piling clothes on a line of women seated in chairs. Two scale model triple-masted galleons sailed towards each other across the water from opposite wings. Coming amidships they simultaneously fired full volleys, and this caused their paper sails to burst into flame.

As the sliders moved and stopped, moved and stop they found themselves constantly splashed by a lithe young woman who ran from one to another with seeming abandon. Suddenly the woman they all called Pina stood at my shoulder.

By the time of this third BAM performance of her 3 hour Arien, I already understood what her presence onstage portended. Something must have seemed off to her from her customary aisle seat in the last row of the house orchestra section. Never one to wait, she had arrived backstage to sort things out.

Taking the splasher aside, she spoke intently and rapidly to her in German, her smokey voice rumbling with low passion and no-nonsense energy. The object of her attention had not performed in this role during the first two shows, and this must have represented the dancer's debut as a torturer. Breaking into English, Pina capped off her coaching. "Remember," she exhorted with a rising emphasis, "you are not nice!"

Philipina "Pina" Bausch would never hesitate to challenge you. She has famously been quoted as saying "I'm not interested in how people move, but in what moves them."

Wild thing, like many others, particularly performers, choreographers, theater artists, filmmakers, and writers across two generations, your evening-length dream scapes moved me. You could be in equal parts inspiring and exasperating; encouraging and intimidating; exhilarating and cautionary; horrifying and incredibly funny.

I remember theater artist Robert Wilson's pithy one sentence appreciation of your poignant and hilarious 1980, the elegy you and your company created in the wake of the loss of your late lover and collaborator Rolf Borzig. The afternoon after we both had seen its opening night in your Next Wave series at BAM, I asked for his reaction. Measuring his phrases, his Texas-sized smile brightening to include wonder and glee, he intoned with increasing volume and incredulity,

"I can't believe how those dancers
could do comedy
in English!"

Truly no language of humanity has proved beyond your reach.

I had already seen your Rite of Spring, and Cafe Muller and perhaps even Bluebeard. (The sequence escapes me.) But 1980 opened a door for me.

Without really understanding why, I had spoken up for another balcony ticket when it became available the night of my conversation with Wilson. As the second 3 1/2 hours of your waking dream began to wash over me, I witnessed the beguiling Beatrice Libonati crouch to kiss the green sod that covered the stage, just as she had several times the evening before. But this time her plaintive and now reliably predictable repeated declaration made me suddenly shiver. For when she looked up as if in wonder at the end of her task to declaim her lilting Italian-accented, "This piece of meadow is six kisses wide," it finally hit me that you had taken us to the grave site. And a piece that had been merely been an intriguing and pleasant semi-comic diversion the evening before now became a piquant meditation.

I watched again one of your achingly gorgeous women -- for no matter how pretty or feminine, your girls, like you, always had steel -- amble deliberately across the back of the green as if reviewing the line of six suited men who had formed up near the left corner. They had all dropped trou and stood, bare ass to us, as she regarded with frank, evident and unhurried curiosity the sexual endowment of each one in turn. "These must be the pallbearers," I told myself, touched beyond tears by the candid humanity of the moment. I stand as one of them today, a witness in honor of you.


More to come.

Hero/Worship: Christopher Williams' Saints Kick the Habit and Come Dancin' In

An arch bishop dances in bemused little skips adorned by flicking wrists, a sword thrust through the mitre that crowns his head. A holy man, stark naked except for the wreath caressing his temples, turns around and spreads his cheeks to show the congregation his asshole. Three times. Then after repeated poses recalling Rafael’s David he hurls himself upon a griddle made out of the arms of six stout men only to be tossed, joyously, as if in a blanket, and go back to posing.
Above: Luke Miller as St. Laurence about to hurl himself on the griddle formed by the male chorus: Sydney Skybetter, Bryan Campbell, Arturo Vidich (left group);
Philip Montana, Brandin Steffensen, Clay Drinko (right group). Already enthroned in the background from l to r Chris Elam as St. Christopher, Rommel Salveron as St. Pancras, Glen Rumsey as St. George, Julian Barnett as St. Vincent of Saragossa. `````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````Photo by Paula Court.

A woman screams before a man painted green and dragging a dragon’s matching tail, his head in a helmet crested with teeth. After a tussle with an armored saint, the dragon finds himself collared and led off by the woman on a leash. A group of black-veiled acolytes then rushes to wipe up the green body makeup on the white stage floor. A flock of puppet birds attends the wanderings of a friar and ends by stretching red ribbons with its beaks from anchorages at his stigmatic wounds.

I could go on (and on). On May 15, beginning with simultaneous formal processions down both aisles of the theater inside Dance Theater Workshop, I witnessed a 3-hour-long dream scape come to life in dance form. And if you want an absolutely stunning, remarkably comprehensive, concise and graceful explication of the goings on in Christopher Williams’ The Golden Legend, including the name and role of each of the 35 dancers, I recommend Deborah Jowitt’s review.

Glen Rumsey as St. George wrestles Dylan Crossman's dragon.
Photo by Paula Court

Let’s face it: saints, almost by definition, conjure the kind of obsession, fanaticism, obstinacy and foolhardiness that we tend to regard as insane. Giving themselves over to a power or ideal greater than themselves, they endure temptation, humiliation, torture, and embrace death and dismemberment, often in spite of social and political mores, in obeisance to a greater good. When we perceive that good, we lift up such people as heroes and martyrs and lionize their devotion. When we don’t, or they go off the moral rails, we recoil from their enormities as lunacy or terrorism. Either way, they make themselves hard to ignore and break through our complacent stupor.

Photo by Yi-Chun Wu
The Golden Legend, a meditation on the lives of 17 (or 23 depending on how you count) early Christian male saints, somehow put me much in mind of the day of 9/11 and those immediately following. As I circumambulated the shattered parts of my city, I kept running into the armed men and women standing sentinel at the edges of the “frozen zone” around ground zero. I eyed them and their guns warily, out of long habit, and wondered a bit resentfully just who or what they had been sent to protect and why. Yet along with most of my fellow citizens, I found myself newly appreciative of these gendarmes’ poise as potential heroes, and the sudden usefulness of their stance of moral certitude and physical fortitude in this battered landscape.

Many of the heroes and saints (if any) had already been crowned with tragic and brutal death. Others still labored behind those barricades, or would soon turn their attention to the cause of redeeming lost lives in testaments of moral introspection, social outreach, healing and political activism. Many artistic voices seemed momentarily stilled as we struggled to catch our breath and reconnect with some essential truths about our lives on this planet.
Julian Barnett hurtles earthward as St. Vincent of Saragossa
Photo by Paula Court.

Soon a whole decade will have passed. For the majority of that time Williams has been at work on his lives of the saints. Ursula and the 11,000 Virgins, produced in 2005, and in preparation for over a year previous to that, provided the distaff predecessor to and template for The Golden Legend. In a time of new crisis, in which many of the lessons of those days 8 years ago already seem in need of relearning, he arrives with a piece that challenges glib and conventional wisdom in so many significant ways.

Beginning with the full cast processional and closing with a similar formal recessional, everything about the work, save the choreography of the 17 individual dances that form its spine, has been produced on a scale rarely, if ever, seen these days in the “downtown” dance world. Williams seems to have that rare and precious ability to dare everyone and everything around him to dig more deeply and defy previous and accepted levels of expectation. This includes DTW, whose facilities and resources have been pushed to their limits, his audience, which must acclimate to the work’s deliberative pace across its 3 hour length and those, like myself, who may take weeks wrestling over a fitting response.

Holding their halos (above): David Parker as St. Thomas of Canterbury and Reid Bartelme as St. Giles advance with the other saints in the country dance style processional. ````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````Photo by Paula Court.

The talents of what constitutes an all-star team of male contemporary dancers stretches to meet Williams’ imagining of the selected saints. These have been sketched from the telling of Jacobus de Voragine, Archbishop of Genoa and author of the 13th century Legenda Aurea Sanctorum (Golden Legend of the Saints,) the book that launched the Williams’ opus. But the choreographer also has behind him a history of Western visual art that depicts these same stories, reaching back through iconography and medieval and renaissance painting and sculpture.

Like panels in Marcel Duchamp’s Large Glass the planes of sainthood fracture in the course of the work and branch off in unexpected directions. ```````Photo by Yi-Chun Wu. Here we have a collared Rommel Salveron as St. Pancras, beheaded under the Emperor Diocletian in 304. He is attended by the blue-faced Keith Sabado and Nicky Paraiso, who flank Pancras and embody saints Mamertus and Gervasius, fellow “Icemen” in the liturgical and seasonal calendar. These seconds also recall mortals, perhaps not so intimately tickled by the finger of the divine. In the course of their scene, Sabado re-enacts the legend of the man who swore falsely on the martyr’s tomb. Now he literally can’t keep his hand off Salveron’s head. Paraiso finds himself forced to follow their tortuous interlocked dance about the stage singing as he goes.

Photo by Paula Court
Chris Elam, as St. Christopher, backs onto stage with Coco Karol on his shoulders so that under their shared costume they take on the form of a monstrous mythical giant. Slipping out of this beastly overcoat, the two, each costumed in lamb leotards complete with tails and pink-eared headpieces, execute a cruciform lift, a birth-like calving, and a series of oral explorations on their way to their crossing. Thus from an earlier pagan myth emerges that of the apocryphal Christian “bearer of Christ,” still the patron saint of cities and countries. What would it be like to taste the lamb of God?

Gus Solomons, Jr. appears as St. Saint Dionysius the Areopagite/St. Denis, with his head literally in his hands. Encased in another of the piece’s fantastic costumes, he dances under a banner “To the Unknown God” held aloft by Alberto Denis and Carlton Cyrus Ward. `````````````````````````Photo by Yi-Chun Wu.
These two evoke the saint’s fellow martyrs St. Eleutherius and St. Rusticus. The trio also hints that even a patron saint of France, one of the 14 “holy helpers,” must have needed, as we do, heroic helpers of his own. Their dancing leads us towards the liberating delirium of unity with the divine.

In each of the visually arresting episodes, the movement has been tailored to the imaginative possibilities of a story, a dancer or dancers, and a visual and/or musical touchstone. The latter range from those composed for the piece by Peter Kirn and Gregory Spears to the medieval hymns, antiphons, laude, motets, and conductus written in praise of each saint that make up the bulk of the sound accompaniment. Dating from as early as the 12th century, this music emanated in voice and on traditional and modern instruments from a consort of 11 tucked into a tiny front corner just offstage. It added immeasurably to the sense of suspended time and continuous present moment that attends the unfolding of the Legend.

The musical ensemble, which featured members of Anonymous 4 and Lionheart among other illustrious players and singers, contributed to the strength and precision of the piece as surely as did the extremely strong and versatile choruses of 6 male and 5 female dancers/puppeteers. So did Tom Lee’s exquisitely reserved set of 17 high-backed chancel chairs that face each other in single lines along both sides of the performance space as if across a Cathedral choir. Each chair’s red velvet upholstered seat will enthrone a principal saint at the conclusion of his turn on the stage. From this perch, he will join the audience as witness to the subsequent The puppeteers, including (l to r) Kate ` ` ` ` ` episodes until a formal bow and reces-
Brehm, Erin K. Orr, Lake Simons elevating ` sional parades this venerable dance
their demons. `````````` Photo by Paula Court. ` company through the congregation
` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` again.

The metaphorical significance of this watchfulness cannot be overstated. Like
the saint he portrays, each of these dancers has achieved an individual renown born of unrelenting and solitary devotion to a way of life. This religious dedication has found him often at odds with the accepted modes of validation that predominate in American society, particularly as they relate to men’s work. Williams allows us to watch them watch each other create a collective testament that transforms and transcends the sum of its parts.

Beyond its utility and craft as a formal framing device, the choreographer’s stylization of this action subtly reminds us of our collective interdependence, and the human hunger for interconnection that we felt so strongly in the days after the terrorist attacks. He redeems and reinvigorates the role of live theatrical dance as a vital mode for acknowledging and even celebrating this existential fact; these needs and desires.

The creator’s fingerprints can be seen everywhere in a litany of collaboration. His co-credits extend to the beautifully realized costumes (designed and built with Carol Binion, Andy Jordan, Ciera Wells, and Michael Oberle) and the magical puppets (with Eric Wright and Lake Simons). And when did you ever see a performance that in addition to two early music researchers (Susan Hellauer and Williams) lists a medieval hagiography consultant (Thomas Head)? The scholarly contributions of these collaborators manifest in the music and text translations and choreographer’s notes that make up the majority of the 32-page program insert accompanying the piece. The notes represent Willams’ cogent gloss of relevant details taken from the lives of the saints as presented in his source text. It provides yet another point of entry for exploration and appreciation of The Golden Legend as an imaginative response to our Western moment.(l to r) Aaron Mattocks as St. James the More, Luke Miller as St. Laurence, Reid Bartelme as St. Giles, Stuart Singer as St. Eustace, and Chris M. Green as St. Jerome in the recessional. ```````````````````````````````````````````````Photo by Paula Court.

Only Joe Levasseur’s exquisitely nuanced lighting seems to belong to one designer alone. The collective nature of the entire theatrical enterprise, and its analogous relationship to the possibilities of cooperative action, became palpable and moved me in ways I haven’t felt onstage since the Broadway productions of Angels in America and Copenhagen. The multi-dimensionality, scale, scope and quality of the work recalls that of such artists as Meredith Monk, Robert Wilson, William Forsythe, Pina Bausch and Bill T. Jones.

The Golden Legend stands as a fitting return gift to and redemption of the sacrifices of those who stand guard over our “homeland security.” By whatever means they serve, they insure the freedom that brings us saints as well as corporate Ponzi and steroid sinners. The challenge falls to us as to which merits our own sacrifices and devotion in attention, blood and treasure.

Like other contemporary American artists, and many U.S. families, Williams has gambled himself into the bondage of credit card usury. His thrall has come in pursuit of a singular dance theater vision. The fact that he has forged his chains in a field that offers virtually no chance for the gamble to pay off in a material, and therefore, by extension, a status sense for either him or his art form hardly makes him a saint. But if it were ever to come to a question of that, perhaps The Golden Legend might be cited as one of the requisite miracles.