Demon of Experiment

The Leading Lady dances. All the characters always dance. They do when David Gordon sets to work. The mischievous writer, director, and choreographer mashes up a Pirandellian whirlpool in his latest work Beginning of the End of the. . . .With real-time leading lady/wife Valda Setterfield and masterful cast of his Pick Up Performance Co(s), Gordon loops fifty years of art/life around Luigi Pirandello’s transitory theatre of life. The rhythms of this incongruous confection pour out of Setterfield and Gordon’s intangible partnership as they stir up Pirandello’s wandering souls bounding out of three texts: A Character’s Tragedy(1913), Six Characters in Search of an Author(1921), and The Man with the Flower in His Mouth(1922). Fluencies between fictional dilemmas and personal foibles forge a wellspring of uncertainties. In characteristic fashion, the ingredients are chopped up, tossed, and whisked into choreography of sound, sight, movement, and dialogue. Never sure where Pirandello leaves off and Gordon comes in—and the inverse—theatrical ruse churns away the edges of . . . well, everything. Entanglements of memory, roles, and stages intervene and crack Pirandello’s mirror of theatre ( teatro dello specchio) as Gordon melts the threshold separating play-world from real-world where “death, drama, and tragedy” scatter mortal petals.

New York’s intimate Joyce Soho, hub for new and experimental dance, hosted the world premiere of Beginning of the End of the . . .with a month-long run in June. Gordon, now seventy-eight years old, is no stranger to circulating within beginnings and endings. A probing whimsy has been part of the choreographer’s postmodern movement assemblages since his beginnings with the Judson Dance Theater in the 1960s. Over the decades, he’s carved out an emulsifying dance/theatre process that winks back on itself. Recapitulation is part of a regenerative vocabulary that sifts around each piece for its unique form as live art. Recycled phrasing, props, and self references ghost an effervescent slippage. Folding chairs resurface in altered context over the years: Chair(1974), Nine Lives(1982) and Eugene Ionesco’s The Chairs(2004). More recently, mining pieces from dramatic texts and musical motifs expel all too ordinary absurdities. Responding to the aftermath of 9/11, Dancing Henry Five(2004) picked through Laurence Olivier’s 1944 film version of Shakespeare’s Henry Vand William Walton’s score for the movie to kindle the art of war and history. The sixty-minute Beginning of the End of the . .. hints back to the use of rolling scene flats and outside intrusions unhinging disarray in Framework(1983). Pirandello’s contemporary Giacomo Puccini supplies the musical armature in two works: 3 Minuets in A Major for String Quartet(1892; 1898) and Crisantemi(1890). Here, they are buried in an idiosyncratic artistic soil.

Pirandello’s novella A Character’s Tragedy(alternately titled The Tragedy of a Character) braces intersecting screens that shake themselves loose of modern theatrical conventions. Considered a precursor to Six Characters, the story relates how every Sunday morning the author would spend several hours with the characters from future short stories. But the creative session always turned to mayhem when other characters from books the author read intruded. And so the inner sanctum of artistic process triggers mind-melding twists. Taking my seat mere minutes before the first movement begins I may have missed a beat. Gordon is already perched at a work table on a low upstage platform under the soft glow of a desk lamp, hand at script, in the role (and not) of the Author/Director. Be assured, authorial effacement is part of the texture. His partner is present too. The Leading Lady/Author’s Wife dances alone to a minuet from Puccini’s string quartet. The shared space of bare stage and work place presage the layered transparencies that unlace variations and motifs from the minuet’s ABA structure. Juxtapositions that elide “roles” mesh absence to presence in ways that suddenly flare or abruptly burn out. Setterfield’s “routine”—a graceful sweep of the...