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Martha Clarke: Between Terror and Desire
- Wesleyan University Press
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152 | Martha Clarke: Between Terror and Desire Dance Magazine, October 2000 Not since my interview with Susan Sontag twenty-three years earlier did I have the sensation that every sentence my subject uttered was worth repeating. Martha Clarke was keenly in tune with her own psyche, and her fertile imagination spilled over in every direction . We laughed a lot. Nobody knows what to call Martha Clarke’s work. Is it dance? Is it theater? Is it music with images? Is it performance art? Critics try to define it; audiences want to know what to expect. But it’s a losing battle, because she changes all the time, surprising even herself. Her most recent creation, Hans Christian Andersen, is now playing at the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco until October 8. With songs by Frank Loesser (from the 1952 Danny Kaye movie) and book by Sebastian Barry (The Steward of Christendom), it is a musical. But it’s unlike any musical you’ve ever seen. Actors tell stories while dancers fly; the setting is otherworldly; no sunny, optimistic message is waiting in the wings. If you heard Andersen’s fairy tales as a child, you remember the pull between desire and terror that could haunt you long after the end of the story. Clarke, with her overflowing imagination and slightly sinister edge, is a perfect match for Andersen. Jane Greenwood’s costumes and Robert Israel’s set take you back to nineteenth-century Denmark, and Barry’s script intercuts Andersen’s poverty-stricken life with his hallucinatory stories. A founding member of Pilobolus in the early seventies, Clarke later developed her own brand of physical theater that beguiled, startled, delighted and occasionally disturbed audiences. She would immerse herself in a time period to create a full-evening tapestry, interweaving imagery, movement, text, light, and music. Recognized as a ground-breaking artist, she has given us unforgettable pieces such as The Garden of Earthly Delights (1984), based on the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch; Vienna: Lusthaus (1986), which depicts a pre-Hitlerian erotic decadence, and Vers La Flamme (1999), a poetic merging of Scriabin’s music and Chekhov’s characters. Spending an afternoon with Clarke in her Manhattan apartment, I learned about her past, present, and future while basking in her whimsical view of life and her hearty laughter. Clarke started out as a dancer but always thought in visual images. As a student at the Juilliard School in the sixties, she revered ballet teacher and choreographer Antony Tudor and From 2000 to 2004 | 153 composition master Louis Horst, but didn’t feel the call of dance as a single art. “I actually wanted to leave Juilliard, but my parents wouldn’t let me,” she says. She railed against the business-as-usual aspect of dance composition : “I never was that interested in steps, but in gestures and movements that came out of a story or an emotional context. I didn’t want to just put together turns and leaps and arabesques because I think they always look like turns and leaps and arabesques.” She was drawn to Anna Sokolow’s work, and began as an apprentice in her company while still a student. After a few years she felt a vague sense of confinement: “At that time, modern dance called for a dedication and a lifestyle that cut off certain things, like rolling in grass. So I left Anna’s company , had a baby, and moved to Rome, where I was a mother and a wife.” In musing about her changing desires, she says, “I wanted to be a painter; now I’m doing musicals, and I want to do film directing. I just keep moving on some kind of dirt road of my own, and I’ll probably circle back to making dances. But I still have some wanderlust.” That wandering has given her trouble with dance critics who like their dance straight up. But theater critics have heralded her work, calling it “hypnotic ,” “powerful” and “intensely erotic.” Jack Kroll, writing in Newsweek in the eighties, pronounced her “one of the most exciting artists to emerge in the new ‘performance’ theater.” Frank Rich wrote in the New York Times that with Vienna: Lusthaus, she “tapped into everyone’s wildest dreams.” Indeed, Clarke says she often has flying dreams, and in Andersen, she’s letting it fly (as it were). All eight dancers are rigged for flying in different terrains. “Thumbelina is in the forest, with fairies falling out of trees...