The Brooklyn Rail

Nell Breyer: What about stating the obvious? When there is significant institutional investment in the performing arts—i.e., France since the 1980s, with their “Centre Chorégraphique Nationaux (CCN)”¹—the field radically expands, creators explore, and new dances flourish. The French Dance Reflections Festival in New York this past fall, presented by jewelry company Van Cleef & Arpels, really brought this home to me. French public funding has underwritten significant dance research for thirty plus years, and, while this festival was privately funded, it featured several choreographers who benefited directly from public CCN resources over many years. In 2022, the French Cultural Ministry spent over 4.3 billion US dollars on the arts. By contrast, the US Cultural Ministry—of course there is no US Cultural Ministry—the National Endowment for the Arts, (the largest US federal agency funding the arts) spent 180 million US dollars on the arts (less than 4.5 percent of French spending) in that same year.

Emily Coates: All that is true. Yet I have a slightly different opinion of the festival. Good to see the good work in the lineup, but also feels simultaneously like a major post-neo-colonial-hijacking-through-cultural exports. And many of the usual suspects. But yes, the realization of choreographic visions on such large scales—however successful or not—is completely enviable at best and at worst a shameful indictment of the American arts economy, which is so impoverished as to be nonexistent. And we are made to wallow in our own society’s systemic failures, sitting there in our seats at every major dance venue in the city! I too am grateful for altruistic luxury goods.

Nell: Fair point.

But Reflections so successfully thickened the city’s landscape of dance this fall, that even non-festival performances—Okwui Okpokwasili’s adaku, part 1: the road opens, Trajal Harrell’s The Köln Concert, Olivier Tarpaga’s Once the Dust Settles Flowers Bloom—were buoyed by the breadth of choreographic approaches occurring in parallel. A shocking wealth of dance riches! The festival presented a throughline of ideas across generations and dance practices all accessible to mainstream audiences, while still featuring a more “experimental” and living-lab approach to movement generation.

Emily: I like your “living lab” take on it. Did I miss the part where they credited the American dance innovators?

Nell: Touché.

Emily: To be fair, the celebration of Lucinda Childs throughout the festival, in large and small scales, was wonderful. I have danced in her work, I know how it functions, and still I was astonished by her duet for the Dancing with Glass program at the Joyce, in her subtle shifts between pedestrian action and ballet steps, grounding the romanticism while leaving its remnants. But I have also watched French choreographers at times take credit for inventing aesthetic ideas that come straight out of 1960s American postmodern dance. The French have extended the wheel, not invented a new one. But who wants to haggle over origins? They’ve also been the ones to tell America that Lucinda Childs is an exceptional artist. Our country’s dance historical plight, from Isadora Duncan, Loie Fuller, Josephine Baker on up, is to remain willfully blind to greatness until the French say it’s so!

The innovations I saw in other works had to do with adding Frenchness: the erotic neck-sucking added to contact improvisation in LA(HORDE)’s Room With A View—that was new. Or the self-importance of Dimitri Chamblas’s choreographic tableaus in takemehome, when nothing important ever manifests. I have to credit Chamblas for sustaining thick pretentiousness so consistently across an evening-length work. The exceptions were Kim Gordon’s soundscape, which I found grittier and truer than the choreography, and Salia Sanou, whose dancing possessed weighty life experience, which moved me. Sanou is co-founder of the Centre de Développement Chorégraphique La Termitière (CDC) in Ouagadougou and has done invaluable work for dance there. I’ve taught at CDC with my Burkinabe collaborator Lacina Coulibaly. The younger dancers couldn’t match Sanou’s gravitas, despite contorting their bodies to no end.

Sorry to be so grumpy. I actually love everything French, lived in Brussels as a child, and have not one but TWO French ex-boyfriends! Maybe I just wish I had been born a French choreographer, so I too could explore my every desire. French choreographers do sometimes go astray.

Nell: I don’t entirely agree. Boris Charmatz’s Somnole is a mesmerizing solo. His physicality is playful and intelligent, with a rapid-fire, muscular articulation that hews to the backbone of his breath. Charmatz makes many very weird sounds. Nothing slick or self-important about them! His whistle floats over a dark, raw brick stage. His sound is the first thing we perceive, even before understanding what the noises are, or how they are produced from his body. In fact, his breath never leaves us. A peripatetic whistle is the only sound score²—fueling his dance, reacting to it, imagining, and accompanying it—everywhere, all at once.

Charmatz’s position as the new artistic director of Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch, has made him anything but rote. Power to his passion for provocative, outside-the-theater, large-scale projects (Musée de la danse, Association Terrain, or Wundertal/Sonnborner Strasse with two-hundred performers, six-thousand viewers, and a three-hour ‘dance marathon’), but this piece is the opposite. Its free flow of phrases pull “an undertow of daydreams,”³ amorphous forms, and energetic qualities onto the stage. His open-ended experiment is less about radical steps or structures, and more about intimate states of mind coming into focus over sixty non-stop minutes of psychological, theatrical, and physical imagination.

Emily: I’m sorry I missed that one. Boris Charmatz is a smart, thoughtful artist. I did however catch and love Rachid Ouramdane’s work, Corps extrêmes. The acrobats were spectacular—human scaffolding stacked three bodies high, flips from high above on the wall into each other’s arms, only to silently re-ascend to their starting position—activities made more uncanny because they were executed with so much quietude. Choreographing mindfulness isn’t new. But Ouramdane uses this strategy to amplify our cosmic interconnectedness with other humans as well as nonhuman life forms. He has taken his fascination with vertiginousness to a planetary scale. The breathtaking video in the beginning, of the lone tightrope walker outdoors, swaying on a thin strand above a deadly drop, and then the same individual emerging on a rope high over the stage. I’m cheering Ouramdane on, for altering my perceptions, for waking us up.

Nell: Such a strong pull into the present and the future. But dance also always exists with one foot in the past and one foot in the present—and relies (I would argue) so much more than the visual arts, on our collective, living memory. I appreciated the festival opening with a half-century old crowd-pleaser. Dance is one of those undeniable “greatest hits” of minimalism—a collaboration between Lucinda Childs (choreography), Philip Glass (musical composition) and Sol LeWitt (film) performed at City Center by the Lyon Opera Ballet for this festival. I am guilty of having made my own performance piece and dual-channel video installation over a decade ago that was inspired by this extraordinary collaboration, and I have to admit that Dance never seems outdated. It asks us to ask what makes a dance: steps, framing, (musical or choreographic) phrases, audience perspective? I also love how clearly it draws on a modernist lineage: from Bauhaus to Black Mountain, Cage and Cunningham to Judson and beyond. The Reflections Festival seems to make a good-faith effort to intersperse contemporary responses to canonical works with invitations to younger artists like LA(HORDE)(directing the Ballet national de Marseille), Chanon Judson, Justin Peck, Leonardo Sandoval, Bobbi Jene Smith, and Or Schraiber to respond on their own terms… Do you think dances should have an expiration date?

Emily: Not necessarily. But aesthetic languages do get exhausted. Boris Charmatz is a couple years older than I am—we are both trained in twentieth century dance and need to figure out what to do with that inheritance in order to make an imprint in our own work. Maybe that’s why I’m sympathetic to Ouramdane, who simply looked elsewhere—to tightrope walking and acrobatics—to choreograph attention. I also look elsewhere, by delving into texts, images, and historically marginalized voices in archives to create my performance projects, and I collage science into my writing and scripts. Same impulse: we’re all searching for the new, trying to expand the definition and potential of choreography, to speak to our existence, to define our global crises. I am unmoved by the vibrating, enervated, contorting movement of twenty-first century contemporary dance. It’s a display of virtuosity, but so what? It’s solipsistic. I want to see mature dancers, and hard-won life experience. LA(HORDE) reminded me of a French film I saw in the nineties, The Dreamlife of Angels. Also expressing youthful angst. French twenty-something existential fury has a hue. Alas it can also be ineffective. Nothing has changed. The dancers in their Room With A View walked off holding hands. The entire tentatively crumbling set should have collapsed. The choreography pulled back from truly addressing the threat, which felt much too easy, and ultimately fearful. That’s the French version of the apocalypse. But people do have a lot of good, gripping sex as the world comes to an end. So there is that.

Nell: Hah! There is. And to your point about radical invention in choreography, the festival’s de rigueur Loïe Fuller-inspired work by Ola Maciejewska, entitled Bombyx Mori, in theory, an homage to Fuller’s legendary Serpentine dance (1892)—is, in reality, pretty underwhelming. Fuller was as bleeding edge as it gets in 1890! She and her engineer-artist-scientist friends (Georges Méliès, the Lumière Brothers, Marie Curie, etc.) were not just proposing new ways of seeing physical dynamics, they were patenting their techniques and inventions.⁴ Early cinema, chronophotography, portable x-rays, and, in Fuller’s case, astounding visual effects were generated through her lab: the first use of electric lighting on stage, colored gels, and phosphorescence and, of course, her “ectoplasmic effusions”⁵ of silk in the form of dancers’ skirts. Fuller pushed live performance headlong into turn-of-the-20th-century experimentation. Technology and the body were radically re-examined, not only as tools for storytelling, but as tools for re-imagining how we exist, evolve, and understand ourselves through the moving image. Fuller expressed ideas from symbolism, art nouveau, and futurism. Her dances embodied changing perceptions of the human body and its locomotion—spurred by the advent of the moving image, proliferation of electrical lighting, the steam engine, the automobile, the airplane, and revolutionary new concepts like evolution and psychoanalysis.

Perhaps Bombyx Mori is a French deconstructionist analysis of Fuller’s dance-making, and perhaps Derrida and Deleuze would have enjoyed the painstaking dis/assemble and reveal in which each performer lays out their black fabric skirt, pleats it, folds it, and enters into it? For the rest of us, the performance feels anticlimactic. A missed opportunity. Today, we are experiencing another seismic shift in the nature of human actions. Machine learning, on the back of a globally networked era, is altering core tenets of our physical interactions; reformulating the impact and creative potential of our collective and individual movements. Bombyx Mori’s analytic aesthetic—its “house lights at full,” strong, antiseptic glare; its hanging microphones amplifying each performer’s every grunt and squeak—seem to focus on the recipe for, rather than the impact of, a dance without a human. With its mechanics methodically exposed, Bombyx Mori’s dancing does not really transcend the sum of its parts—in contrast to the way that I imagine Fuller’s swaths of spinning silk transported her audiences a hundred years ago.

Emily: I appreciate your Derridean generosity. I want to say, as we discuss the strengths and weaknesses of the different choreographic proposals, that the dancers I saw across the board in the festival were committed and brave. It’s possible to separate the talent from any shortcomings in a choreographic vision. I have high hopes for dancers in the twenty-first century. None more so than the extraordinary pan-African group of dancers that took on Pina Bausch’s The Rite of Spring, a collaboration between the Pina Bausch Foundation, École des Sables, and Sadler’s Wells. The thirty-eight dancers from fourteen African countries owned that Rite so fully that they manifested their own rules and logic and worldview.

I felt the dancers’ power and sharp individuality revealed the limitations to Bausch’s choreography, ultimately a late-1970s Germanic Eurocentric view of the primitive, with gendered biowarfare layered in. On Bausch’s dancers, the choreography looked like a crazed, psychotic escape. Transposed for the new company, the choreography revealed a meek primitivism that the contemporary dancers had to kill off, to transcend it as they did. I have always felt the strength of Pina Bausch’s creative proposals lay in how much she drilled down into the dancers she collaborated with. Her work as a living organism was about the peculiar intimacy she created with her ensemble: from her psychic imagination into mining theirs and back again into feeding hers. Her Rite of Spring did not travel well transnationally, in my opinion. It could not support breaking out of the sociopolitical—which is also to say, the personal—context of its creation. The dancers did a glorious job despite this hindrance.

Nell: I could not agree with you more. I was curious about the unconvincing effort to restage Bausch’s German expressionist choreography and why this piece was chosen to highlight such a spectacular ensemble of international artists? What a disappointment, given the ambition of the project and the power of the performers—seasoned and new! Igor Stravinsky’s gripping, modernist score, inspired by pagan Slavic rituals of human sacrifice in springtime; the unforgettable staging by Rolf Börzik⁶—a glowing, pile of thick, brown peat completely covering the floor—(its laying down, in this production, makes for a captivating entre-acte performance by Armory stage hands); and of course, the signature-Bausch flinging of arms, hair, and torsos in tight human clumps and frenzied unisons encircling the stage and eventually offering up that sacrificial performer… all this feels jarringly disconnected from the collected ensemble and the context of the Park Avenue Armory. Boxed into a relatively small swath of the 55,000 square foot Drill Hall—designed in 1877 for the 7th New York Militia Regiment’s military training and social gatherings—the Bausch choreography felt like an ineffectual “retrofit” that failed to draw out what made this unique international company of dancers and their upscale historically militarized surroundings, compelling and contemporary.

Emily: I would love to end on the duet between Germaine Acogny and Malou Airaudo. Acogny is known as the mother of contemporary African dance, and the founder of École des Sables. Airaudo was a long-time and much admired dancer in Bausch’s company. Their duet unraveled after the first few minutes into separate choreographic forays. But the hushed anticipation of the audience during the first few minutes stayed with me: they sat together on a bench, with their backs turned, and slowly, tenderly rested their heads and limbs on each other, and embraced. How desperately the audience wanted Acogny and Airaudo to tell us—to show us by dancing together—that the world would be okay. We can work together, we can absolve the sins of history, we can imagine a better future. The artists articulated this ambition in their title: common ground[s]. And in the very beginning of their dance, in that cavernous armory, with the sidelights casting their silhouettes as giant matriarchal deities on the side walls, just by sitting there together, they did it. They proposed an alternative vision of peace. It will be imperfect, and it is fleeting, but it is within reach, they seemed to suggest. I wanted to thank them for trying, then hug them, and cry.

1. In 1984, The French Ministry of Culture established a number of choreographic centers across France to support, “research, creation and production of an artist director[’s] creative work while inventing the modalities of existence of the CCN.” There are now 19 of these Centers across France, which have incubated a compelling roster of contemporary dance artists from the past 3 decades. https://www.numeridanse.tv/themas/expositions/les-centres-choregraphiques-nationaux
2. “Inspirations musicales:” https://www.borischarmatz.org/IMG/pdf/somnole_-_inspirations_musicales.pdf?1028/967650c5d2c32f7971803bbfe259b03ea56ce58e
3. Boris Charmatz, “Notes of intent,” April 2020, https://www.borischarmatz.org/?somnole-228#gallery-6
4. Fuller was also a pioneer in trying to protect choreographic innovation under US Copyright Law. She lost her effort to project her Serpentine dance from infringement in the case Fuller v. Bemis [Albany Law Journal, v. 46, 1892, p. 165-166] because her dance was deemed to be void of dramatic composition (no characters, narrative, emotional arc, etc.) Choreographic works were not explicitly protected by US Law until the Copyright Act of 1976. Cecilia Sbrolli, “Re-imagining Marie Louise Fuller’s copyright of dance in Fuller v Bemis,” April 10, 2019, https://ipkitten.blogspot.com/2019/04/re-imagining-marie-louise-fullers.html.
5. Brian Diller, “Serpentine Dance,” Frieze, Sept 30, 2014, https://www.frieze.com/article/serpentine-dancer.
6. Borzik was a set and costume designer for Tanztheater Wuppertal from 1973–1980. He died at the age of 35.

Presenting partners: New York City Center, NYU Skirball, New York Live Arts, Brooklyn Academy of Music, French Institute Alliance Française (FIAF), The Joyce Theater, Park Avenue Armory, Villa Albertine

Performances: Lucinda Childs’s “Dance”; La Horde (title); Giselle Vienne’s “L’Etang”; Munyaneza “Mailles”; Rachid Ouramdane’s “corps extreme”; Boris Charmatz’s “Somnole”; Ola Maciejewska’s “Bombyx Mori”; Dimitri Chamblas’s “takemehome”; Lucinda Childs et al. “dancing with glass”; Germaine Acogny & Malou Airaudo’s Common Ground(s); Pina Bausch “The Rite of Spring”

Curator: Serge Laurent, Van Cleef & Arpels’ Director of Dance and Culture Programs partners