The first jolt was the dancers. Instead of Platonic sylphs and fauns the quintet was made up of grownups: tall, introspective Pat Catterson has been dancing for Rainer since 1969, extroverted Keith Sabado was with Mark Morris in the 1980s. Each had distinct personalities: there was the elegant one (Emily Coates), the earthy one (Patricia Hoffbauer), and the beauty who makes funny faces (Emmanuèle Phuon).
In contast to ballet, Rainer doesn’t require the dancers to put a lot of effort into making their moves look effortless. They make a point of going about appointed tasks without caring about how they look. Of course this is, itself, a theatrical gimmick. These are not improvisations. Rainer’s method is to choreograph intricate solos, which are performed in unison, repeated solo, passed from performer to performer, and repeated again with variations.
Rainer’s usually discussed in terms of her intimidating virtues—seriousness, conceptualism, rigor—so it can be a surprise—and relief!—to discover her work is so entertaining. She puts on a good show. High-minded she may be, but she’s not a snob; she’s avid for any kind of movement that’s meaningful, whether it comes from modern dance, ballet, sports, Broadway, social dancing, mime or slapstick. She collages them all together, and adds to the mix tasks the dancers perform on stage. The dancers also speak to the audience, reciting texts from a dizzying array of sources, from Proudhon to Wikipedia. She also has a fondness for silly old novelty songs, snatches of which ring out at odd moments.
The mood constantly fluctuates, from anguish to hilarity—sometimes both occuring simultaneously. The pretense that the dancers are just ordinary folks is exploded by the clarity with which they execute these transitions. They arrest your attention by making some gesture breathtaking, then, with perfect aplomb, execute a tricky pratfall, ... and then go on to something else. Their physical grace acts as the glue, holding together the disparate gestures, words, allusions, moods. It was an astonishing performance.
Assisted Living: Do you have any money? (2013) began in darkness, with recorded cacophony. Then the dancers wheeled out a white sofa on which Rainer sat primly as she barked a side-show tout's spiel: “Come one, come all! … See live bodies on stage!”
The quintet executed in unison an intricate routine eight times, each time with variations, shouting out non sequitor questions: “What do you mean by that?” “What do you think you’re doing?” “Is this the right apartment?” Then the dancers separated, and each—sometimes in couples—performed their own turns, as Rainer watched from the proscenium. As they danced, they recited texts about the 2008 recession, 9/11, anarchism, among other topics. The dances were not necessarily illustrations of the words. Sabado did a beautiful pas de deux with Phuon while outlining the basic points of Keynsian economic theory. The artist Simon Leung came up out of the audience and performed Rainer’s 1966 Trio A, on stage, as if auditioning. They way Rainer stood and watched him perform was itself moving.
Inventorying the elements of the performance makes it sound incoherent, but the beauty of Rainer’s art is that it wasn’t. Each event unfolded gracefully into the next with a pleasing variety: abstraction alternating with mime, seriousness with clowning. At one sublime moment they all came together, as Rainer sat on the sofa reading from a paper dismal facts about the American prison industry while the dancers one-by-one helped each other in leaping over the sofa to a mattress on the other side. Most of their attempts were failures, so they landed on Rainer’s head or lap while she was trying to be “serious”. It might be the perfect summation of what her theater is about.
The new work being premiered this weekend, The Concept of Dust, or How do you look when there’s nothing left to move?, employed the same elements to very different ends. One difference is that for most of it there was a score, Gavin Bryars's, “The Sinking of the Titanic.” This slow, quiet, heartbreaking music defined a mood of elegy and introspection. As did the texts—Mid-East news, commentary, and meagre factoids about the history of Islam, taken from displays at the Metropolitan Museum. The dancers engaged in solo exercises, but often clumped together in scrums. The solos were graceful: it was much more like conventional dance, and even seemed to echo older classics: both Balanchine’s dark Ivesiana and Cage/Cunningham’s cheerful How to Pass, Kick, Fall and Run (both Balanchine and Cage came up in the dialog).
The effect was ambivalent: as much as the scrums evoked rugby and light-hearted horsing around, they also evoke images of disaster victims supporting each other.
Supporting one another seemed the theme of Dust. The only prop was a pillow. At different times throughout the piece, a dancer brought the pillow to another, and held it while the other collapsed onto it, down to the stage floor. It was at once expressive of the most intimate tenderness, but also terrifying—an image of breaking down.
The theme was restated at the end, when dancers, in groups of three or four assembled themselves in impossible, off-balance positions, in which they could only remain upright by holding on to each other: support = tension + strength of bond.
The performances are diaries of contemporary life. On the one hand, there’s the news, the voices, the words that yank us back and forth. On the other hand, there is the solace—what should be the solace—of our physical self, providing feet to make contact with the ground, and hands to hold other hands with.
[Image: photo of the original production of Assisted Living by Ian Douglas]