In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Innovation Meets Tradition on Summer Dance Stages
  • Patricia Milder (bio)
Twelve Ton Rose (excerpt), You can see us, Foray Forêt, and L’Amour au théâtre, by Trisha Brown Dance Company, Bard SummerScape at the Fisher Center, Sosnoff Theater, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, July 8, 2010; Adyton by Rashaun Mitchell, and members of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company perform an Event with ETHEL at Mount Tremper Arts Summer Festival, Mount Tremper, New York, July 10, 2010; Chui Chai (Transformation), by the Pichet Klunchun Dance Company, at Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival, Becket, Massachusetts, July 18, 2010.

During a residency in the Catskills at Mount Tremper Arts, a nurturing creative hideaway that is part artist retreat and part performance venue, Rashaun Mitchell created Adyton. He developed it with fellow Cunningham dancer Silas Riener, and the two presented the work as part of the festival’s opening day celebration. This was the most important of the day’s three performances (the others were a Cunningham minEvent and a concert by the post-classical string quartet ETHEL) in establishing the tone of the Mount Tremper Arts summer season, which consists of new work by choreographers in residence. A relatively short geographical distance across the Hudson, if creatively worlds away, Bard’s SummerScape opened that same, heat-soaked weekend in early July with the Trisha Brown Dance Company performing recent works by Brown. The following week, Pichet Klunchun’s Dance Company performed an original Thai-modern fusion at Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival in Becket, Massachusetts.

At the Mount Tremper Arts opening, Mitchell’s piece, a meditation on dying inspired by the poet and critic Anne Carson’s most recently published book, Nox, was the most alive of the performances that day. It echoes the private feel and collage-like aspects of Carson’s elegy to her older brother, who died in 2000. New Directions, her publisher, beautifully reproduced what was originally a handmade scrapbook. The book comes in a box and the pages spread out like an accordion, which creates a tactile, pleasingly cumbersome reading experience that mimics the original cut and pasted version. Her writings are interspersed [End Page 51] with photos, international stamps, letters, paintings, passages from Herodotus and other memories of a brother she hardly knew (he was a drifter who, Carson writes, only called a handful of times over twenty-two years).

“There is no possibility I can think my way into his muteness,” Carson writes. Later, “prowling the meanings of a word, prowling the history of a person, no use expecting a flood of light.” The book is steeped in a certain dark yet familiar mystery, which comes across in Mitchell’s site-specifically molded piece Adyton as well. This work was essentially the dance portion of Mitchell’s second collaboration with Carson (also titled Nox, Latin for “night”), which they performed together a week later at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston. At this later performance, she and her collaborator Robert Currie stand on the stage projecting lights; her recorded voice plays, sometimes over itself. Alastair Macaulay wrote in the New York Times that Carson’s voice “stays high and quiet, only gradually revealing the force of its emotion through what’s said rather than through its delivery. Mr. Mitchell’s malemale duet, however, begins at a peak of intensity.”

When the audience streamed into Mount Tremper Arts’ intimate space on opening day, lit from the outside by natural light for the three o’clock performance, Mitchell stood in the frame of one large window to the right. His steady gaze was angled forward at a diagonal across the room, directed toward a window at the front edge of first-row floor seating. The audience followed his gaze to see Riener pulling himself into the room through an open window across the room. Behind him one could see the mountains framed, and a clear sky above them.

After dropping in to the room only inches away from the first row, Riener writhed on the floor. He was enacting a death, but the physical actions were more striking, more external than any real pain seems to ever appear. Mitchell knows his collaborator’s body well; the...

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