Sunset legacies

Boston Conservatory's Anna Sokolow tribute; Nicola Hawkins

by Marcia B. Siegel

At the dawn of modern dance, in the 1930s, individual expression was the goal of every modern artist. Perhaps it's just an accident that tremendous movers and makers like Martha Graham, Doris Humphrey, Charles Weidman, José Limón, and Hanya Holm were around at the time, or perhaps these were just the best from a field of lesser talents that history has deleted. But their work, what we can see of it, seems increasingly remarkable as generations of their devotees pass down their teachings and try to create in their spirit. Two concerts last weekend revealed this process as it's still going on.

At Boston Conservatory, the dance department dedicated its winter concerts to Anna Sokolow with the best possible tribute, a performance of a Sokolow work. Sokolow, who died this past March at 90, was the first important defector from Martha Graham's initial, all-female company. In an age of dissenters, she was a rebel's rebel -- a loner from the '40s till the end of her life. The abrupt dissonance of early Graham work found its way into her mature choreography, but she wanted her own dance to be more lifelike, less abstract. She developed a style based on intensifying everyday gestures to extremes attainable only through the dancers' total physical and emotional commitment. Reach until you teeter off balance. Jump so fast your teeth hurt. But this naturalistic body language was restrained and ennobled by her devotion to choreographic form, to music, and to the expressive uses of traditional dance technique.

Ballade (1965), which was directed for Boston Conservatory by Lorry May, is one of the sparest and least oppressive dances in Sokolow's canon. Set to Scriabin piano études, it's a lyrical essay on youthful longing and desire. It begins with two men and two women running past each other very fast, with their arms open. This simple image of running to embrace something but failing to recognize it sets up the idea of incompleteness for the entire dance. A couple hold hands crosswise, in a skaters' position, and step together -- but out of synchronization. Another couple appear and their pattern is out of phase with the first. Running and circling phrases are interrupted by sudden falls or little jumps into the vertical. The body contradicts itself when the legs surge forward but the head tilts up and back, so the runner can't see where he or she is going. And the dance fades out as the quartet stretch into relevé, reaching forward but immobilized on their toes.

Sokolow choreographed Ballade on the student ensemble at the Juilliard School, and it reflects her empathy for the confusions of young people at the time. The Boston Conservatory dancers didn't seem ready for the do-or-die investment that she always demanded, but I could say the same thing about almost every Sokolow revival I've seen in the past. It's not that contemporary dancers can't get to the edge but that Sokolow doesn't allow technical bravura to shield them from self-revelation.

None of the modern dancers built strong enough institutions to preserve his or her work from decay and disappearance. When the repertory isn't out there, imitations and sincere derivatives have to make the case. This aspect of a troubled legacy was represented by Jacqulyn Buglisi's new Liminal Crossing. Buglisi was a principal Martha Graham dancer in the 1980s but now does her own choreography. Set to a Philip Glass string quartet, Liminal Crossing used various Graham trademarks -- the "archaic" stalking males, the soft and decorative females, the duets with the languid acrobatic lifts, the earth-mother figure who makes her way through the scene with self-contained dignity.

Before the Martha Graham Company fell into legalistic limbo last summer, in a dispute between her chosen heir, Ron Protas, and the Graham board of directors, Boston Conservatory had given a very credible Appalachian Spring, and it counted on doing more of the Graham repertory. The facsimile provided by Buglisi didn't seem much of a challenge for the dancers or the audience.

Psalm (1967) was one of José Limón's lesser dances when he made it, a few years before his death, for his protégé Louis Falco -- it betrayed his weakness for massive, surging groups that drone on without real development. Intoned by an unnamed singer on tape, Eugene Lester's perfunctory percussion score, which mixes the Kaddish with a litany of World War II concentration-camp names (from The Last of the Just, by André Schwarz-Bart), boosted the import of the dance but didn't give it a readable form.

The piece was directed and reconstructed by Jennifer Scanlon of the conservatory faculty. Scanlon danced in the original cast, but it isn't clear who made the "Excerpts" version we saw. Limón's successors trimmed several of his overlong group works, and Psalm is one of them. It's meant as a tribute to World War II heroes and victims, but even in edited form it seemed empty to me.

The program also included Journey, a wafty series of pointe-work studies by Donna Silva for eight women in pink, to selections from Brahms's Liebeslieder and Neue Liebeslieder.

At the Cambridge Multicultural Arts Center, Nicola Hawkins was following another modern-dance æsthetic that prized naturalism over technical virtuosity. Hawkins studied at Britain's Laban Centre for Movement and Dance, which has carried on the work of the founder of German modern dance. Rudolf Laban, who emigrated to England in 1938, was a great theorizer, a seeker after the basic components of nonverbal expression. His teachings could be applied to any kind of human movement, not just dance, and his point of view can make for a dance that's democratic, inclusive, without elitist pretensions.

The five pieces on Hawkins's program all seemed to originate in ordinary experience that the audience could identify with. There was always a jolt of whimsy or eccentricity to take it out of the mundane, but not enough to make us uncomfortable.

Pedestrian movement manipulated like dance and finally transformed into dance was a strategy of the earliest American moderns as well as the post-Laban and postmodern dancers. Hawkins's brief solo Waltz of the Hedgehog made a clear connection to the form called "kinetic pantomime" that was perfected in the '30s by Charles Weidman. While Robert Asprinio played a couple of tidbits on the mandolin, Hawkins shuffled on like a bored kid. With a little more energy her scuffs became kicks, and she was soon kicking an imaginary ball, playing catch with herself and then with the audience. The game and the object continued to evolve into new circumstances and new opportunities to make bigger, dancier movement.

In Lily and Rose, Erin Gottwald and Jessica Reed were like twin sisters. Although their game might have started as dress-up, it led to a more than sisterly display of affection. But they soon reverted to the safety of their first movement theme, stepping slowly and rearranging their long skirts. Beth Eisenberg played her own score, a set of piano variations that started out like "Nearer My God to Thee" and morphed through Stephen Foster to The Fantasticks, always projecting a somber, long-lost sentimentality.

All the dances on Hawkins's concert had live accompaniments, but Evan Ziporyn's "Aneh Tapi Nyata" was something more than just background. Ziporyn directs Gamelan Galak Tika at MIT, and "Aneh Tapi Nyata" -- which he wrote for the Berkeley gamelan Sekar Jaya's 1992 tour Bali -- is a fusion work for an ensemble of strings, woodwinds, guitar, mandolins, and Balinese gamelan instruments. The microtonal registration of the gongs and marimbas combined with the more sustained and harmonically familiar Western instruments, all underlaid with an urgent pulsing, to make a vital new sound. Ziporyn also wrote the text; sung by Erin McCoy, it was about the feelings of travelers in a foreign culture.

Hawkins got the basic contrasty ideas of the music: the dualities between percussive and sustained sound, strong and light beats, clang and buzz. Two dancers seemed to check out the space and to be anticipating some event. Then two more dancers emerged. One, a bride I thought, was escorted and ritually prepared by the two attendants. The other was also a woman but perhaps was playing a man, as in Balinese ritual dances. They danced a kind of courtship and then were joined together by a shawl that the attendants draped over their shoulders. The movement wasn't rhythmically or pictorially like Balinese dance, but one of the bridal pair had big and emphatic steps whereas the other looked more "feminine." The attendants alternated between long, stretched-out moves and pattering runs.

There were two other pieces in the program, a small suite of dances to country music and a coy competition trio, but despite the variety of styles and subjects, the whole evening conveyed a sense of strain and careful placement. In spite of Hawkins's appeal to everyday experience, her downplaying of glitz and flash, the dancers (Erin Gottwald, Maggie Husak, Jessica Reed and Jes Shuford) always looked as if they were working hard to create ecstasy, surprise, discord, even chases that were meant to be playful.