sarma

I'm always astounded by the controversy that the work of Erick Hawkins generates. Usually, before I even get to a concert of his, I've already been bombarded with the impressions of others: disciples, associates, ardent supporters cannot help raving; others call me on the phone with tirades against Hawkins. How to keep an open mind? Is there, indeed, such a thing? It's the same at the end of the actual concert: scattered booing competes with the storm of bravos. And there I sit in the middle - happy, applauding - feeling that both boos and bravos are antithetical to the carefully wrought, non-showy dances that Erick Hawkins makes.

Trying to write criticism involves stepping into all sorts of shoes. I can understand why some people can't swing with Hawkins. The first time you see him can be a little like your first visit to a fine Japanese restaurant; all those small elegant dishes - a slice of white radish and a watercress frond floating in a bowl of clear soup - make some people think longingly of a hunk of steak. On the other hand, I can also understand why people intrigued and delighted by the exquisite understatement of his best works can become cultish about him.

As an audience, we have been conditioned, I think, by 19th century theories about the sublime and the beautiful. The sublime is supposed to be large, stormy, a bit ragged or wanton with form. The beautiful is decidedly a minor category. At one time, aestheticians tossed works into one classification or the other with rigorous zeal. Perhaps those who scream for Hawkins are trying to say that peaceful beauty, imaginative elegance can be sublime, that an artist needn't be tempestuous to be major.

Hopefully cultivating objectivity all the way from the Village to 125th Street, I went to see Erick Hawkins's new Black Lake - one of a series of dances offered during a week season at Riverside Church, which was sponsored by PLAY, a group of Columbia students and faculty members. If you like Eight Clear Places - as I do - you'll like Black Lake, because it's eight clear places in the sky. The black lake is the night sky, and the dancers are those beings that briefly populate it: the setting sun, a star, night birds, the moon, a comet, thunder and lightning, the Great and Little Bears, The Milky Way. These sections are small ceremonies that emerge and disappear into darkness. One lovely idea that shapes the whole dance: Hawkins and three other people, half-masked and dressed in black, are like fragments of sky that can conceal the astral bodies so that they can appear to gleam fugitively, as if from behind clouds. Black Lake is like a mysterious ritual from the first moment when Hawkins ties a mask on Beverly Brown (as the sun setting) until the last when all the dancers slowly untie their own masks.

Black Lake is excellent Hawkins, a quietly magic experience. It is ceremonious; it is oriental in several other ways too. Although the dancers make curving paths through space, they always seem to take their own space with them; this gives a curious privacy to their movements. Also the various changes of direction on the body resolve or come to rest (like dissonance into consonance) when the dancer is facing the audience; this imparts a cut-out clarity to the design. There is sly humor in Black Lake, in the sequence for the two bears. There are also some subtly stirring dynamics.

Black Lake, as a matter of fact, has sections that are dynamically more interesting than anything by Hawkins that I've seen. Beverly Brown's solo as the setting sun has a kind of imperious rage, a controlled sputtering; her zig-zag lightning paths around Hawkins, as the ponderous summer thunder, have the same unexpectedness. Her performing had a beautiful clarity. But in Black Lake, I think Hawkins has used his company in a very full way; each dancer is given a chance to shine - Hawkins himself no more than the others, and they respond by giving their best. Nancy Meehan danced the moon and the first star with her customary translucence. (I had noticed, too, that in Early Floating, hers was the only face that had that lovely quality of relaxed attentive ness: Robert Yohn's was too closed-off, Hawkins's too tense - telegraphing the stress of the movement to come.) Yohn and Kay Gilbert have made great strides as performers, and their duet as the bears had a clever shambling charm about it. I am pleased when a choreographer who is a strong dancer feels that his company can execute his ideas well enough for him to merge into the texture of a dance with them. Some are never willing to relinquish that stellar position even for a moment.

As usual, Hawkins had the collaborative support of Ralph Dorazio and Lucia Dlugoszewski. Dorazio's straight simple robes and squared-off, slit-eyed masks enhanced the mystery and the ceremoniousness. Dlugoszewski's music was performed by an ensemble (violin, clarinet, percussion, piano) conducted by Gerard Schwarz. The composer managed the piano and a score of other things with her usual sensitivity, but the texture of this whole work seems denser than some of her music. The score has a kind of tempestuousness, as if it were creating a mass of scudding clouds for the dance to float on.