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Review 2, 1-14: Horseplay
In Garfield's Green Pastures
By Nancy Dalva
Copyright 2003 Nancy Dalva
NEW YORK -- Quite a
few years ago, on a mixed bill at the Cooper Union, two slender,
grey satin slip-clad women emerged on the shallow stage to dance
a silky duet, formalist, sleek, hot, and cool. Their faces were
different -- imagine Imogene Coca dancing with Margot Fonteyn --
but their bodies remarkably alike: slender, small boned, with long,
pretty legs. They could have been sisters; they could have been
lovers; they could have been witches.
Last week, on the opening
night of Keely Garfield Sinister Slapstick at the Joyce Theater
(part of Altogether Different, January 3-19), the curtain went up
on the same pair, only now they were wearing summer shifts, and
now they were engaged in a power struggle. They appeared to be acting
out a mother-daughter relationship, but you could have seen it differently,
especially if you didn't read the program first. (I didn't. Sometimes
I just like to see what I see, and not what I have been told I am
going to see.)
I found the duet, called
"My Mother was a Four-Alarm Fire" and dating from 1998, enchanting,
and the "new" specificity (all that role playing) provocative, in
a "What did that make you think of?" kind of way. The dancers were
Keely Garfield and her longtime dancing partner Rachel Lynch-John,
both of whom have Cunningham training in their background, which
would account for the formalism.
As the evening went
on, it occurred to me that the qualities I valued in Garfield (and
Lynch-John, who is a beautiful dancer) were not necessarily those
most enjoyed by the majority of Garfield's audience, or, indeed,
necessarily those of most interest to herself. For second on the
bill was a premiere of a number called "Deep," which is a deconstruction
of "The Wizard of Oz." Even though I know the movie backwards and
forwards (to say nothing of the book), it took me a while to realize
Garfield -- whose primary role was Dorothy -- was also playing a
witch, and that both Glinda and the Wicked Witch of the West were
ladies in summer dresses, dancing (cool, elegant) duets with male
partners. I would say that the duet is definitely Garfield's form,
but that wouldn't begin to take into account her erotic pas de deux
with Larry Goldhuber, who did a combined Jackie Gleason-John Goodman
schtick as the Wizard (sort of), wearing an emerald green suit and
a bad wig. And a beard. Their coupling took place in an inflated
silver swimming pool (which also served, rather cleverly, if you
like that sort of thing, as the upturned house from Kansas, among
other things), with their feet sticking up from the depths. Just
in case we didn't know what was going on, Garfield mounted one edge
of the pool, and Goldhuber bounced up and down on the opposite side,
so that she rose and fell with his exertions. This must be what
Garfield means by "sinister slapstick," and it has its audience,
though I'm not a fan. Among the other devices brought into play
was doubling -- except that it was quadrupling, so that there were
four Dorothys.
That's a lot of ruby
slippers, but I missed Toto.
There were, actually,
more than four pairs of red shoes. Across the front of the stage
was arrayed a variety of vermilion footwear: ruby platforms, ruby
sandals, ruby baby shoes.... This deployment of props reminded me
of an arrangement of little houses Art Bridgeman and Myrna Packer
used in a piece at Dance Theater Workshop (a good long while ago),
though of course their aesthetic is quite different from Garfield's.
Another familiar element was a motif of thumb sucking, a memorable
specialty of The Bang Group's David Parker and Jeffrey Kazin, in
their ribald and subversive signature duet (choreographed by Parker).
I guess that, as Balanchine
said, "if you live in water you become a fish," for there was yet
another familiar element in the last number on Garfield's program,
called "Free Drinks for Ladies with Nuts," and dating from last
year. That element would be wedding gowns, worn by the three women
in the cast (Garfield, Lynch-John, and Lisa Wheeler), who are runaway
brides -- at least that's what I think they are. The use of the
dresses reminded me at once of Ann Carlson, who has made such potent
use of bridal attire, but, the work itself doesn't remind of Carlson,
any more than it did of Parker, or Bridgeman and Packer. ( It would
seem that these ideas get into a kind of downtown -- shall we say
DTW? -- group subconscious.)
In this number, Garfield
employs bluegrass, which she does not really appreciate in the same
buoyant way she does the old American popular standards (Connie
Francis, Dusty Springfield, Ella Fitzgerald) she used in her first
piece. Otherwise she would never have used a bluegrass band, Rachelle
Garniez and the Sin City Scramblers, which has a woman doing Bill
Monroe covers. (Garniez substitutes a soprano howl for that "high
lonesome sound" inimical to the music. I find this toxic, but I'm
a purist.) There were also some little horses, which also reminded
me of the little Bridgeman-Packer houses. Choreographers, take note:
If you put ten plastic ponies on stage, the viewer will spend the
time leading up to their use wondering just when they are going
to come into play. As to why, I think it has something to do with
the identification of adolescent girls with horses -- their freedom
to run, their manes of hair. Or maybe it has to do with the music,
which took a turn for country western.
All of this content
and context -- family, Oz, the female psyche -- makes for a kind
of dance theater pitched to an in-crowd of the like-minded. To my
mind, this kind of horseplay fences you in, but ineluctable formalism
isn't everybody's idea of heaven and green pastures.
Nancy Dalva is the senior writer for 2wice.
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