More criticism of the critics

At the suggestion of one commenter, I've decided to pull out of the comments on my "You knew this was coming" post the following response to those who wrote in urging a higher ranking for Carolyn Clay (left) of the Boston Phoenix:

Clearly Carolyn Clay has her defenders - and I'm certainly impressed by the poised, complex critical coiffures she's teased up, week in and week out now, for some thirty years. But I have to ask you folks - how would you describe her critical profile? To be a bit more pointed - do you even think she has one, beyond a need to always appear 'tasteful'? This is the problem with Clay - she writes more intelligently, I suppose, than the rest of her sorority, because she imagines the audience for the Phoenix is more educated, but is there an actual critical personality kicking around behind that calm façade? I confess I've no idea what's behind all the camouflage; she often seems to be typing up an elevated gloss on what she perceives as the educated consensus, and little more.

That's okay as far as it goes, I suppose, but I always think the most useful critics are the ones you feel you understand, if only because this allows you to put their raves and pans in some sort of context (as in, "oh they hated that, but they always hate that kind of thing, and I often like it"). And then there's the problem, as I've pointed out before, that when Clay does abandon the crowd, I often find she wanders out onto some weird critical limb that not only do I not understand, but which seems utterly unconnected to the rest of her work. Consider also that after thirty years of doing something, most people become known quantities - that Clay has remained so personally elusive might almost be the result of a strategy, which is a little strange to say the least.

And then there's the problem of a larger legacy, or critical stance, formed over the course of her career - but as far as I know, there's no book, no seminal essay, no nothing from Clay. And don't imagine there's been nothing to talk about: over the last thirty years, for example, the ART arrived in an explosion of challenging hits (Six Characters in Search of an Author, The King Stag) but then staggered and slowly failed. How did America's leading critic [Robert Brustein] go so wrong as an artistic director? There's also the rise and fall of Peter Sellars to consider, the struggle between the city's "real" theatre and its academic one, and I'm sure a half dozen other topics worthy of lengthy consideration. But out of Clay, over three decades, there hasn't been a peep on any of this. I know this sounds cruel, but this gap really represents an abject failure, not just of vision but of nerve.

What Mark meant; or, Dido and Aeneas 20 years on

It was almost twenty years ago that I saw Mark Morris perform the role of Dido in Dido and Aeneas, in the Cutler Majestic, opposite the great Guillermo Resto (at left). Craig Smith was in the pit, conducting Emmanuel Music, and Lorraine Hunt-Lieberson sang the role of Dido. It was the American premiere, and one of the dozen or so evenings of my life that I will never forget (that's probably true of a number of people there).

Now, of course, both Lorraine and Craig are gone, and Morris is no longer dancing; instead he took Smith's place in the pit at the recent Boston performances (and acquitted himself quite well, as we knew he would). And Dido went on without him (at least onstage), and without Craig, or Lorraine, or Guillermo (who has also left dancing), or actually any of the dancers in that first premiere. If that sounds mournful, well, it is; I think it's hard for many younger Bostonians to appreciate quite what the emergence of Mark Morris in Boston and Berkeley meant at the time, and how the now-departed stars of the Boston music scene contributed to bringing it about. Mark was the big news in dance, and after a controversial period in New York, and rejection by Belgium, his reputation was cemented by us. It was one of the Boston community's single greatest artistic contributions of the last few decades, and it was a thrilling time to be thinking about dance critically - it was one of those moments when new art appears in a form which one can tell in one's gut has an air of greatness about it, but which is still mysterious, which has yet to be explicated.

Not that you'd realize any of this from the local print response to Morris; Boston embraced him, but some local critics did not. Over at the Phoenix, for instance, Jeffrey Gantz is still pretending the revolution didn't happen. "Was it meant to be camp?" Gantz wonders cluelessly of Dido, which, like almost all of Morris, slips easily from tragedy to irony and back. Of course to be fair, Gantz was always hampered in his appreciation of Mark by what appears to be homophobia; he just can't see how dance could be about something other than skinny sylphs being partnered by studs in dance belts, and the cross-dressing in Dido still has him in a tizzy. Indeed, he actually writes: "when [Dido is played by] a man, this Dido and Aeneas represents the attempt of homosexual love to break free of external disapproval and internal guilt." I'm trying hard not to laugh as I read that, but I'm afraid I'm failing. Really, what a maroon. You'd think this was 1969 and Mark had choreographed The Boys in the Band. Earth to Jeffrey: Mark Morris, and gay men in general, are no longer plagued by "internal guilt," and even "external disapproval" is dying a rapid death. Indeed, Mark's famous turn as Dido wasn't so much revolutionary as a confident announcement that the revolution was over. He was a gay man crossing gender lines to play a woman in a company marked by general diversity of shape, race and size, for a dance audience for whom this was no longer a big deal. (Needless to say, Gantz doesn't like dancers of normal weights either, and even approvingly quotes James Woolcott's notorious putdown of Joan Acocella and Mark, "Joanie Loves Chunky" - need I point out that Woolcott himself is morbidly obese?)


Amber Darragh and Craig Biedsecker as Dido and Aeneas.

Okay, claws in. As I said before, time marches on; and even if Dido and Aeneas proves timeless, right now it's on the "cusp" of timelessness, when it must break free of its original cast (and political cast). These days, the double role of Dido and her nemesis is played by either a man or a woman, on alternating nights (Amber Darragh, above and Bradon McDonald, below). I saw Bradon, not Amber, in the Boston performances, so I can only vouch for the latest model of the "drag" take on Dido - and already, inevitably, there's a distinct difference in the piece because of Morris's and McDonald's differing personae. Where Mark was tragic in a larger than life way -and made almost a brassy Sorcereress - McDonald is delicate and more internal, and his Sorceress is more tormented and perverse. McDonald's presence draws the piece away from its original classical stance (indeed, much of its initial appeal was its demonstration that diversity and classicism could dance hand-in-hand), and further down the twisting road of psychoanalysis (always implicit in the doubled central role). As a result, the most resonant moment in the dance is now the chorus's lament "Great minds against themselves conspire," as Dido descends toward her self-destruction.



Dido and Aeneas, of course, is about more than merely Dido - indeed, in formal terms it's a handy guide to the tropes and quirks of Mark Morris, especially the tropes and quirks that drive people like Gantz crazy. Sometimes, when I'm watching Dido, I ponder whether this is something close to the synthesis of dance and theatre practiced by the ancient Greeks - not only does Mark swing confidently between individual and choral movement, but he's far less interested in the modernist abstraction than he is in straightforward communication, both of dramatic story and musical structure. Thus he usually choreographs directly to the beat (rather than dancing around it, like Balanchine), and his movement edges toward mime, as well as an intriguing kind of symbolic gesture that's really his own. Often in Morris, one senses a deployment of abstract gesticulation that has been organized according to the musical variation of the piece (in Grand Duo, for instance, the dancers move from what appears to be a gesture for "agriculture" toward one that might indicate "industrialization" or "information"). In Dido, there's not only this pure symbolism, but also chunks of American Sign Language worked directly into the choreography (as when Dido signs her desire to "forget" Aeneas). This, of course, is another nod toward cultural inclusion, but it's also an intriguing intellectual statement - this is dance that is literally communication.

Needless to say, this leaves the erotic spine of both romantic and modernist dance far behind, and perhaps that's what Mark's critics can't really get their heads around. But of course to many of us, that's what make him special - that great ideas and feelings can be communicated in dance sans the sexual structure of ballet, but instead through what amounts to a kind of apotheosis of folk dance, or shared experience (there's always an overwhelming sense of community in Mark's great dances, particularly in their sudden bursts of joy). Thus some longtime Mark fans worry that his newer dancers aren't as diverse in size and shape as they used to be - and indeed, they are getting a bit more homogenously thin and muscled. Of course they're also getting more technically adept - that's the trade-off, I suppose, that Gantz and his ilk might pounce on. But can't they at least see that it is, in the end, a trade-off, and that a certain disinterest in technical extremity - like his disinterest in sexual conformity - is, in a way, what Mark Morris means?

It may already be starting . . .

After posting Katie Couric's accusations of sexism in the media, I thought it only fair to publish an image of buttons recently sold at the Texas State Republican Convention. I said in my post on Katie that the U.S. had behaved in a more sexist than racist fashion during the Hillary/Obama dust-up. But that of course could change . . .

Who could have contempt for Contempt?

Brigitte Bardot acts up a storm in Contempt.

I'm late getting to the re-issue of Jean-Luc Godard's Contempt; I missed it when it briefly passed through town, and had to settle for the new Criterion DVD, which recently showed up on my doorstep via Netflix.

But now how I wish I'd seen it on the "big screen" (or at least the Brattle's screen)! For Contempt truly is a visual wonder - shot brilliantly in Cinemascope by Raoul Coutard, Godard's longtime collaborator, it reminds one of the ravishing glory that the widescreen was capable of. Coutard works miracle after miracle in the sun-baked expanses of a mysteriously depopulated Rome and Capri; imagine Antonioni in a sun-kissed palette of pastels and burning primaries, and you have something of the erotic charge of Contempt. All that and Brigitte Bardot's golden rump, too (above), contemplated often and at length - go on and tell me that's not Art!

Well, maybe it's not, but maybe it is - Contempt flips back and forth on that question, as it does on every question it considers, and it does nothing but consider everything, including itself. Indeed, in its cinephilic navel-gazing, Contempt seems to have popped out of some socio-historical time capsule; while contemporaneous works like, say, The Birds or Lawrence of Arabia seem somehow "timeless" to us now, Contempt feels hilariously of its period (1963, the era of 81/2 and L'Eclisse) the same way something like What's Up, Tiger Lily? does, because it's so drunk on its own arty assumptions.

To be fair, Godard's work always kicks up its heels with a wonderful adolescent verve (I hate to keep mentioning Antonioni, but Contempt is a bit like La Notte without the ennui). But the affectionate humor with which I viewed the movie was also cut with poignance - I can remember when I, too, thought cinema was a kind of operatic, world-cultural apotheosis funded by Carlo Ponti, and that Jean-Luc Godard could smash together Dean Martin, the Odyssey, and existentialism and somehow remake the world.

Of course now, it all looks ridiculous, and every time I saw Michel Piccoli wander through in his Dean Martin hat, like some costumed kid on his way to a Harry Potter party, I wanted to LOL. Godard's immature obsession with pop tropes both makes him entertaining and yet somehow undoes him over the long haul. Yes, yes, I know, they still take this kind of thing seriously in film school, but it seems, alas, that the world has moved on, and "cinema" is over, while the other fine arts have managed to struggle on - some limping, it's true, but all still definitely alive. And the great world masters with deeper roots in those other, older forms, like Bergman and Fellini (theatre) and, yes, Antonioni (literature) don't look quite as dated as Godard (even if, oddly, he's often livelier than they are). Nor have they been so sullied by fanboy critique (much less by homages from torture-porn auteurs like Quentin Tarantino, who named his production company "Band of Outsiders").

Still, maybe I shouldn't hold the fanboys against their idol (at left) - so Tarantino perverted his message, that's not Godard's fault. And at any rate, there's plenty for grown-ups to savor in Contempt. Brigitte Bardot, whose bruised, carnal pout works beautifully as an actor's choice here, manages an impressive poise as the love object who's also, apparently, supposed to represent not only Art but the "irreducibly real." (I know, I know, but go with it, okay? It's Godard!) Piccoli is inevitably overshadowed by Brigitte and her bum, but likewise underplays cleverly and manages to hold his own (still, you end up longing for Belmondo). Jack Palance chews the screen as the crass Hollywood shark who's producing the movie of the Odyssey at the film's center (he's prone to philosophical pronouncements from a Mao-like little red book, that is when he's not shouting, "I like gods! I know how they feel!"). The stunt-casting of Fritz Lang as the project's director doesn't quite pay off as much as you'd like, but Lang has at least one great moment when he gets back in the sullied saddle for yet another shot, muttering "You should always finish what you've started."

The plot has to do with screenwriter Piccoli (and, of course, Godard) selling out to Palance and his filthy lucre - to whom (and which) Piccoli/Godard also (somewhat) pimps out his wife, Bardot (Godard briefly dresses Bardot in a black wig, like his own estranged wife of the time, just so his little band of insiders can get all the parallels). Sorry for all those parentheses, but whenever I start writing about Godard, I suddenly itch to include a lot of them, along with hyphens and back slashes, and phrases like "the irreducibly real;" the director's crazy hermeneutics are a bit contagious. At any rate, the tiny betrayal in the center of Contempt leads to Bardot falling completely and totally out of love with Piccoli, which of course, given the glory of her aforementioned bum, is tragic in a way Lear and Hamlet could never have dreamed.

This leads to the inevitable Godardian sexual micro-drama back in the hotel/apartment (as always precisely rendered in its natural, aimless detail), as well a whole lot more criss-crossing metaphorical exegesis, some gorgeously moderne architecture, and the sun-splashed sea off Capri. But don't worry, it's all fun, not to mention always self-aware - in subverting his own Hollywood budget, Godard is clearly biting the hand of his own producers - and even self-mocking (whenever Piccoli begins to mis-interpet the Odyssey as his own psychodrama, we can hear Godard openly, and honestly, laughing at himself). The only wrong turn happens at the very, very end, in which Godard allows himself the revenge he refuses his factotum; but this is redeemed by a truly unforgettable closing shot of the Mediterranean which does, indeed, fuse both Ulysses's gaze and the camera's - and which closes with the command "Silencio!" (David Lynch fans, take note). At which point one does feel, before that glittering stretch of ocean, with its imaginary Ithaca somewhere in the distance, that there's really nothing more to say.

Simply resistible

Naomi Hubert and Jarrod Emick make Contact.

Theatre events like Contact always depress me, because they feel more like symptoms than shows. It's hard, watching this smorgasbord of relentlessly dirty dancing, not to feel dismayed at the suburban sexual frustration it both reflects and feeds. So I feel I must ask all the men who are dragged to the musical theatre by their girlfriends and wives:

Gentlemen, can't you get your ladies off a little more often? Please?

Because if you don't, I'll have to sit through more shows like Susan Stroman's "dance play" now at the North Shore Music Theatre. And so will you. I mean face it, we both see through these naive paeans to feminine egotism, with their pseudo-romance, their men who are either absurdly boorish or so horny they're suicidal, and and their dangerous babes with aerobic dance routines. And we both know heterosexuality never looked better than when homosexuals stage managed it. We gave you guys wit, charm, elegance, romance, and tunes you could leave the theatre singing. Susan Stroman and her ilk give you The Producers and "Simply Irresistible," which is something this musical definitely is not.

So come on. Give me a break. You can do it; hell, I've done it, and I'm gay. And if I can do it, so can you.

Of course maybe nothing can save us from Susan Stroman. Even with their sexual urges sated, the suburban women of the world may not be happy with the enchanting sophistication of Lorenz Hart or Cole Porter. Maybe they really are, as they often appear, utter beasts. But how will we ever know unless we try?

And in the meantime, I know what you're thinking; Susan Stroman isn't that bad. And she's not. I ask myself, if I didn't know this show won four Tonys, would I be as hostile to its mediocrity? Maybe I'd be intrigued by the meta-concept of the book's three vignettes, which toy with the deployment of dance as fantasy (the only dance that's free of role- or dream-play comes at the very last moment). Or maybe I'd be more amused by the final "surprise" at the end of each "story" (although only one of these, the first, is remotely a surprise).

But does any of that really make up for the fact that Susan Stroman is just not that interesting a choreographer? Yes, I know, she can work up funny production numbers; the set pieces in Oklahoma! were strong, and the extravaganzas in The Producers, with chorines coming out of filing cabinets and little old ladies dancing with walkers, were studded with cute ideas. But moment to moment, or step by step, as it were, Stroman's just a little dull. Once you get past the gimmick of each number, you realize she's not nearly in the same league as Twyla Tharp, or Bob Fosse - I'd say she's not even as good as Gower Champion. Stroman simply has no signature; there's no individual, inner life to the work, certainly not enough personality to build a whole evening around. But in Contact, which has been stripped of song and has only a rudimentary book, she's the main event, and you slowly realize Stroman's like Oakland: there's no there there. Instead, there's number after number straight out of Dancing with the Stars: lift, high kick, pelvis lock and long, sweaty stare. Ba-da-bing, ba-da-boom! Over and over again, at faster and faster speeds, until all I can think is, make it stop!

But it doesn't stop, and it doesn't help that little in this choreographic torrent feels original. Even when Stroman borrows something worth having, however, she doesn't have the sense to keep her numbers to the proportions of the piece she's copying. The last half of Contact, for instance, is brazenly ripped off from Cyd Charisse's turn in Singin' in the Rain (Stroman doesn't even bother to change the costume); but while Charisse and Kelly went at it for maybe ten minutes (and of course worked up some broad, but genuine, lyricism), Stroman hammers away at the routine like the Energizer Bunny, ringing changes on the same material for something like half an hour, all to an endless pastiche of greatest hits from everyone from Benny Goodman to the Beach Boys. Don't get me wrong; the dancers are dazzling - they always are at the North Shore - and Naomi Hubert alone makes you forget all about Cyd Charisse (there's also outstanding work from Sean Ewing, Sally Mae Dunn, and Matt Rivera).

But watching these talented folks is like watching racehorses pull trolleys; Stroman never bothers to give them real material, like a genuine swing number, or a jitterbug, or a tango; she only delivers more and more television-friendly dance-fusion calisthenics. Indeed, even though the first vignette's from Fragonard, and the last from Sex and the City, the dances tend to look the same, because Stroman doesn't seem to be able to abandon her idée fixe, the utter primacy of athletic sex (sorry, "romance"). Indeed, the one thing that's really interesting (at least historically) about Stroman is how centered she is on what my mother used to call "the bikini area." In Contact, perhaps taking off from the dirty joke hidden away in Fragonard's "The Swing" (at left), there's very little doubt just which part of the anatomy everyone wants to make contact with. Is this realism, or just a phase dance is going through, like theatre did with The Vagina Monologues? Who knows, but by the finale - which follows a poor little rich boy who's contemplating suicide - we can feel Stroman's asking us to believe that nookie isn't just what's for dinner, it's also some sort of spiritual goal, not to mention the only thing that can keep our hero alive. Gosh, will he make it? All I can say is, when he suddenly reappeared in a noose (ready to, yes, swing), my partner murmured, "Is the show over now?"

Which leads me to my next thought: Is the Sue Stroman moment at the North Shore over now? She'll be back to choreograph Show Boat, true, but that's a real show and she should do a good job within its confines. And after a slew of lackluster contemporary productions like Les Miz, The Producers, and now Contact, the North Shore seems to be awakening, as it were, from some sort of bridge-and-tunnel bad dream, and is returning to its roots with Show Boat, Putnam County Spelling Bee, and 42nd Street. Not a concept show in sight, and thank God - I want my North Shore Music Theatre back!

And so gentlemen, maybe you're off the hook.

This week's poem

Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird

by Wallace Stevens

I
Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the blackbird.

II
I was of three minds,
Like a tree
In which there are three blackbirds.

III
The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds.
It was a small part of the pantomime.

IV
A man and a woman
Are one.
A man and a woman and a blackbird
Are one.

V
I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendoes,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.

VI
Icicles filled the long window
With barbaric glass.
The shadow of the blackbird
Crossed it, to and fro.
The mood
Traced in the shadow
An indecipherable cause.

VII
O thin men of Haddam,
Why do you imagine golden birds?
Do you not see how the blackbird
Walks around the feet
Of the women about you?

VIII
I know noble accents
And lucid, inescapable rhythms;
But I know, too,
That the blackbird is involved
In what I know.

IX
When the blackbird flew out of sight,
It marked the edge
Of one of many circles.

X
At the sight of blackbirds
Flying in a green light,
Even the bawds of euphony
Would cry out sharply.

XI
He rode over Connecticut
In a glass coach.
Once, a fear pierced him,
In that he mistook
The shadow of his equipage
For blackbirds.

XII
The river is moving.
The blackbird must be flying.

XIII
It was evening all afternoon.
It was snowing
And it was going to snow.
The blackbird sat
In the cedar-limbs.


Born in 1879, Wallace Stevens spent most of his life working in law and insurance; he only became known as a great poet late in life, with many of his major poems published well after he turned fifty. "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" is from his first collection, Harmonium, published when he was 44, which also includes the classics "Sunday Morning," and "The Emperor of Ice-Cream."

Tell it like it is, Katie

Never thought I'd link to Katie Couric, but she lays it on the line here.