sarma

A clichéd start for any review of the Brooklyn Academy of Music 'Next Wave Festival' is to point out the oxymoron embedded in the festival's title and its programming politics. Usually, the 'Next Wave' that breaks at BAM's beautiful Opera House, or at the magesticial Majestic Theater, is a wave that has proven itself tobe already beyond its peak, a wave that will not raise many waves among audiences and critics. A glance through the program for this year's edition, the 11 th, reinforced the idea that this year, apparently, was not going to be an exception to the safe good-taste and somehow unadventurous avant- garde chic that typifies the festival. BAM's international choices fell on Pina Bausch's 'Two Cigarettes in the Dark' (publicised, by the way, as the "funniest Pina" so that the boat wouldn't rock so much), Saburo Teshigawara with 'Noiject', St. Petersburg's fabulous Maly Theater with 'Gaudemus' and finally the Nederlands Dans Theater I & 3. The Americans featured the commissioned premiere of Susan Marshall's 'Spectators at an Event', Bill T. Jones' 'Stil/Here' (also commissioned by BAM) and finally the Martha Graham Company celebrating the centennial of Graham.

Could this festival, had it happened in Europe, raise any kind of controversy other than one over its safeness? No, but this is the States in 1994, and strange things are happening in the dance scene.

The value of a festival is that it brings to the audience a context that is also a certain form f authorship regarding the esthetic moment it contextualizes. This edition of 'Next Wave', that spread from late September till mid December, contextualised itself under the sign of 'radicalism'. And indeed, because it is America and because strange things are indeed happening in the dance scene, despite its safe program, the conflicts and vivid debate inside American dance criticism today unexpectedly made the festival match its 'radicalism' after all and be a successful one. Everything is relative, and even with the apparent 'safe bets' in programming, radicalism became an anchor to discuss different (sometimes conflicting) esthetic projects in dance.

The next Wave Festival opened with a series of different programs featuring the Martha Graham Dance Company. Specially attractive were the reconstruction and revival of some long lost Graham dances of the 1930s. This was radical Graham, back to lire through a company that did its best to give an illusion of contemporaneity to its repertoire. The changes endured in dance in these past decades makes it hard to understand today where lies Graham's radicalism, in terras of politics of dance, (or even a political dance). It is fascinating to see how Graham's political radicalism lead to the exploration of dance and movement as a privileged art-form for social awareness. Those little masterpieces 'Lamentation', 'Chronicle', 'Deep Song', Steps in the Street', all presented at BAM, raised in their original presentations in the 1930s a political furore and enthusiasm hard to fully grasp today. Presently, the mythology of Graham freezes her as the creator of dance's modern technique. In the unacknowledged modernist terrorism in the American dance scene, where dance can only be but beautiful bodies hopping to melodious tunes (a position epitomised in a critic's words: "lf it moves I'm interested; if it moves to music, I'm in Iove."), the memory of Graham's political role is forgotten, and denied. An interesting survey done by a New York daily asked several dance personalities, at the beginning of the festival, why they thought Graham was 'radical'. From the president of BAM, to Ron Protas, artistic director of Graham's company, to choreographer Molissa Fenley, the answers were interestingly equal: she was a innovator, she had heen a radical, the radicalism lay in her technique. So political radicalism is watered down. But Graham's technique, the use of the feminine body as a body of strength, of profound physical power, her gestic vocabulary in the 1930s were more than 'new'. They were aimed to subvert not only dance and choreography but also the social context where they emerged. Critic Edna Ocko, writing in 1935, in the left wing journal 'New Theater', would say about Graham: "She has developed a science of modern dance movement which seems to make the body a fit instrument for expression. And this rigorous training presents itself to me, at least, as an admirable technic for the revolutionary dance [...] It embodies dramatic elements of militance and courage. Its most delicate moments are fraught with latent power. When the body stands, it seems immovable. The body in motion is belligerent and defiant. It seems almost impossible to do meaningless with this equipment. [...] This technic has produced dancers definitely aligned to the working-clas movement whose merits as directors, teachers, and soloists, cannot be gain-said." I find this passage (and one can find many others like this one) a fascinating example of how an important component of the legacy of Graham has been completely forgotten, and ultimately, denied. This denial has important consequences, as we will see, for the present state of American dance.

It could be argued that Ocko's is just a critic's view expressing the naive hopes of a long-gone era. I would argue that a critic's view is always complementary to the dance scene. With this in mind, I would like to proceed, and move to another 'radical' movement between criticism and dance promoted by BAM: 'Still/Here'.

Bill T. Jones premiered his last production 'Still/Here' at the end of the festival. His work resonates vividly with Graham's 1930s pieces, but in a sort of negative. If watching Graham's work provoked Utopian enthusiasm in Edna Ocko, not to see Bill T. Jones' last piece was more than enough for critic Arlene Croce of the 'New Yorker' to write a 6-page condemnation of the choreographer.

Bill T. Jones' project is a complex one. The preparation of 'Still/Here' involved what could be seen as a parody of the ethnographic process: to invade the intimacy of the Other in order to illuminate the Self. Jones' ethnographic realism led him to travel across the United States interviewing terminal patients, people for whom death is an everyday life companion: cancer patients, AIDS patients, HlV carriers, people suffering from degenerative diseases. Jones used excerpts of video and audiotaped testimonies to create a choreography where the persistent question is: how to live in a body that is already socially declared dead? The piece has important structural problems, particularly in the second part, where the charms of Ioud music and a more vivid, athletic, movement are pushed in, contributing to an epic whose sole purpose seems to be a standing ovation (Ioud electric guitar can do these things). Also, the whole project sometimes veers dangerously into the realms of less innocent projects of the American trash-culture of 'the real': the TV serials on 'real cops', 'real hospitals', 'real killers'. Nevertheless Jones masters intelligently the play with repetition and montage, to imply the weight of presentness, and his dancers achieve a perfect balance between the technical and purely emotional. Despite its problems 'Still/Here' is undoubtably a serious choreographic work, even with a formal conservative elegance about it, which makes it even more interesting to discuss Croce's 'blind review' of the piece.

Politics profoundly informs writing about dance, even when the explicit aim of the critic is to be apolitical and solely judge the 'aesthetic'. Croce's main argument is that Bill T. Jones puts himself beyond criticism when he decides to use "real dying people" in his work. The rationale is that Jones presents himself as a victim, his work as a victimized one, and therefore can only ask for the public's sympathy, never aesthetic judgement. Croce further claims that Jones follows Mapplethorpe, another explorer of the gullible public that denies to see "obscenity" in his work just because Mapplethorpe "is dying with Al DS." Jones would be just another manipulator Iooking for fame, bucks and glory before he (also) "dies of AIDS." It is only ironic that this critic's response to Jones' work reinforces the political intentions of the choreography: society kills the diseased body Iong before it is actually (physically) dead. I wouldn't like to make this a guide tour to BAM's 'Next Wave' through the eyes of the critics, but one last remark of Croce leads to another choreographer depicted as smartly surviving in the dance community only because she displays herself as a victim: Pina Bausch.

It doesn't make much sense to review 'Two Cigarettes in the Dark', a 1985 work by Bausch, but it is important to point out the almost unanimous lack of understanding and sometimes respect regarding the German choreographer amongst dance critics in America. It is a typical sign that all is not well in their sensibilities regarding anything that moves beyond the ideology of the sublime and the canons of postmodern modern dance. Croce has an interesting slip of the tongue in her dismissal regarding dance projects such as Bill T. Jones' or Pina Bausch's: if such works proliferate critics will become "expendable". It's all a question of who survives who, in the unacknowledged politics of dance.

Susan Marshall had an unfortunate premiere at the Next Wave Festival. Although interestingly experimenting with theater, her dance revealed repetitive and uninspired. Some dramaturgical aspects were interesting though: the use of photography as a conflation of being (in a way similar to Jones); the play with the idea of crowd and of hazard, of accidents, to comment on the predicament of our urban lives. But at the end of 'Spectators ...' one would mostly remember the magnificent interpretation of Gorecki's 'Second String Quaret' performed live by the Cassat Quartet.

And thus the tradition of chic avant-gardism, or radical safety, that informs somehow BAM's programs suffered an interesting, and perhaps unintentional, twist of true radicalism by means of the dialogue between the press and the choreographers. That the most interesting works programmed for this 11th edition of the festival were coming from outside of the States (Teshigawara, Bausch, 'Gaudemus') makes one wonder whether the curators at BAM have the aesthetic courage so much needed presently in the U.S. and truly engage in a wave to sweep the scene in radical American choreography. That would make BAM's 'Next Wave' the powerful dance event it ought to be.