Postmodern Cabaret Susan Marshall and Doug Varone at Bard By: MARCIA B
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Postmodern cabaret Susan Marshall and Doug Varone at Bard By: MARCIA B. SIEGEL 7/10/2007 5:00:12 PM SAWDUST PALACE: Deadpan but sexually suggestive. The Spiegeltent at Bard College fits into two big trucks and can be raised in a couple of days by a crew of workers. But it isn’t your average Big Top. Imported from Belgium and installed on the Bard campus for the summer, the Spiegeltent houses a small thrust stage surrounded by folding chairs and outer rings of tables and booths. With its mirrors and stained- glass inlays, its woodwork and swags of crimson, the Spiegeltent evokes some popular café in fin-de-siècle Europe. Susan Marshall and Company opened it last week with a cabaret show, Sawdust Palace, that will run through this Sunday as part of Summerscape 2007 at Bard. There’s also an impressive line-up of theater and musical events in the Fisher Performing Arts Center, and it was kicked off last weekend by Doug Varone and Dancers. Designed by Frank Gehry and opened in 2003, the spectacular Fisher Center is like some giant floribunda rose made of sculpted steel over an exposed industrial-grid superstructure. Its assertively modern fantasy shape, the æsthetic opposite of the Spiegeltent, houses two concert-hall theaters, a vaulting, coiling lobby space, and ancillary facilities. For the audience, the Fisher Center promises grand, exquisitely calibrated artworks, masterworks. The Spiegeltent offers intimate entertainment, gemütlich conversation, a drink, a bite to eat, nothing fancy. Spearheaded by Bard’s extraordinary musician-president, Leon Botstein, Summerscape and the Bard Music Festival this year are foraging around the theme of “Edward Elgar and His World.” The composer’s long lifetime (1857–1934) encompassed a huge chunk of culture and cultural change, and it’s being represented this summer by concerts, films, operas, and academic presentations highlighting, among others, George Bernard Shaw, J.M.W. Turner, the Pre- Raphaelites, Oscar Wilde, Gilbert & Sullivan, Michael Powell/Emeric Pressburger, and the greats of modern English music. It’s enough to make you move to the shores of the Hudson for the next six weeks. Neither Susan Marshall nor Doug Varone appeared to be immersed in Elgariana, but Elgar’s music was played live in the dances they made with commissions from the Fisher Center. Sawdust Palace, a 90-minute program of “featured acts,” displayed a reserved but romantic sensibility that suited the composer who could write heroic symphonies and sentimental parlor songs and everything in between. As Sawdust Palace begins, it seems self-consciously deadpan, postmodern, even introverted. Stephen Gosling takes the audience unawares, bowing stiffly by the baby grand piano, and Petra van Noort steps into the space wearing a slinky silver gown. Gosling follows her, and they slowly turn to face each other. He puts his arms around her and picks her straight up. She doesn’t move as her carries her to the piano. He sits down at the keyboard with her in his lap, and she wraps her legs around him. He begins to play Elgar’s Salut d’amour. He has to shift her slightly when she gets in the way of his hands; she occasionally nuzzles his ear. The following 19 skits, to Elgar tunes and recorded kitsch, are all done in this unperturbed manner, and to varying degrees they’re all sexually suggestive. Luke Miller stands in place making huge, thrusting, meaningless gestures, interrupting himself to take gulps of water and finally splashing what’s left in the pitcher on himself. Kristen Hollinsworth tries to mop up after him (the music is a trumpet mambo recorded by Pérez Prado), but she’s hooked to a wire. She won’t give up swiping at the floor with a chenille towel even when Miller is pushing her through the air. Joseph Poulson and Darrin M. Wright dance a side-by-side duet, stepping and swinging, arms around the shoulders. They seem no more than easy companions, except that they glance at each other from time to time, Wright with an open-faced pleasure, Poulson with a glint of “What if?” This little dance is taken up later by the others, extrapolating finally into a partner-switching grand finale for the five dancers. With new costume bits — frowzy fringes and glittery straps, whole outfits, many of which get discarded or destroyed in the course of battle — the dancers enact bizarre encounters, some tender, some hilarious. Wright and Miller do an erotic duet with one man on the floor and the other hanging upside down in the trapeze. Miller and Poulson play a mysterious game in which Miller is allowed to — or has to — touch something red. Poulson tweaks open his shirt to reveal a red undershirt, then plants pieces of red duct tape on the floor. He leads Miller down into the audience, straight toward my friend, who’s wearing a red blouse. Miller’s hand hovers six inches from the blouse. Then they retreat. Susan Marshall can string together nonsensical actions just verging on plausibility and build them into funny anticlimaxes. Poulson and Wright prepare to serve tea, attended by Hollinsworth and van Noort, who are lying on the floor beside them. Familiar implements appear from unexpected places and get misused, reverentially. It’s as cryptic as a Japanese tea ceremony. Marshall’s company members are masterful at committing themselves to absurdity. The more ludicrous the task, the more involved they get. When Hollinsworth, strategically covered with feathers, seduces Poulson to the accelerating dance music from Zorba the Greek — well, you have to see it to understand why the number is called “Chicken Flicker.” VICTORIOUS: The agony of World War I? Doug Varone’s company of eight accomplished modern dancers is in the public eye a lot these days, though his work is altogether more conventional. Varone danced with the José Limón and Lar Lubovitch companies before starting his own group in 1986, and his movement style shows that influence in its rhythmic drive, in the swing and flow of movement through the whole body. In the opening dance, Castles, which is set to Prokofiev’s Waltz Suite, you could also see how much Varone has embellished those basic energies with flowery gestures, reverses, interrupted impulses, and traveling floorwork. Nothing in this dance took me to the drama implied by its title, or its music, which Prokofiev drew from his Cinderella ballet and his War and Peace and Lermontov film scores. Varone seems preoccupied with making extravagant movement, and the more literary ideas he talks about in interviews don’t make themselves evident on stage. What does strike me is the physical stamina and daring of the dancers. Victorious, Varone’s new piece, is set to the Elgar Cello Concerto in an arrangement for cellist (Zuill Bailey) and pianist (Robert Koenig), who were placed on opposite sides of the forestage, to give us a stereophonic but unmiked musical treat. The dance began with a long solo for Natalie Desch. She seemed drawn to the floor, somehow agonized, twisting, spurting, running, thrusting, one complex move at a time, almost always starting with a breathless, quick impulse. Stephanie Lapis and John Beasant III seemed in desperate conversation in the second movement, echoing the music’s skittering and lingering phrases. Awaiting a reply, one of them would freeze in some improbable, corkscrewed position while the other squirmed. The music turned romantic, and Daniel Charon, Ryan Corriston, and Eddie Taketa went off balance, fell, rolled, twisted on the floor, helped each other up, scrambled a short distance, fell. Although they were wearing white suits, they reminded me of soldiers in the trenches of a World War I movie. Desch and the other dancers joined them, and she ended the piece, running toward the audience, still agonized. Eddie Taketa took the central role in the last piece, Lux (2006), which was set to Philip Glass’s The Light. Taketa led the full company in more twisting, sliding, rolling, gesturing, running movement. As the dancers streamed across the stage, veering into denser clusters and frenetic, pseudo-tap dances, I remembered the pristine airborne crossings and open torsos of Lucinda Childs’s Dance (1979), which also is set to Philip Glass’s music. What a lot of layers have been piled onto the minimalists’ clear objectivity since then. Whatever the audience may have inferred from Varone’s movement ordeals, the dancers were acclaimed as heroes. .