Retrospectives and New Beginnings

Sourcing Stravinsky. A dance performance by multiple choreographers. Dance Theater Workshop, New York, April 20–22, 2006. Meg Stuart, Benoît Lachambre, and Hahn Rowe, Forgeries, Love, and Other Matters. Dance Theater Workshop, April 27–29, 2006.

The Sourcing Stravinsky program curated by Annie-B Parson at Dance Theater Workshop raised the issue of postmodern dance's relationship to the heritage of traditional dance. Stravinsky's long life, his residence in both Europe and America, and his famous association with Balanchine all make him a reference point for this kind of retrospective appropriation. Each of five choreographed works made its individual response, both in idiom and concept, to Stravinsky's work. This provided the audience with a wide gamut of imagery and movement. It also raised questions about whether Stravinsky's music, and the dance associated with it, are, as symbolic forms, "period styles" and whether they can or should be reperiodized with respect to our own time.

The first performer, Cynthia Hopkins, established exactly this paradigm for Stravinsky in her extraordinary combination of speech, movement, and theatricality. Hopkins entered the stage in a metallic, space-age costume and assumed the posture of a therapeutic analysand, addressing the audience as "Dr. Cook." Hopkins tells Dr. Cook that she is exploring a never-implemented 1953 collaborative project between Stravinsky and Dylan Thomas concerning the conquest of earth by space aliens. The title of Hopkins's piece, "Tsimtsum," referring to the Kabbalistic idea of God's self-constriction in order to create the world, is exemplified by the confined space, designed by Jeff Sugg, which took up about one-fifteenth of the available stage. Hopkins's performance, accompanied by her own music, largely consisted of a spoken-word monologue. Yet, it still was dance, as dance is a medium that puts the body in question. The effect was a combination of Laurie Anderson's deadpan musings and Richard Foreman's hyperkinetic, deliberately alienating imagism. Hopkins, whose previous large-scale work, the operetta Accidental Nostalgia, speculated on the delights and sorrows of amnesia, is also performing a memory play here. There is nostalgia for the possibility of collaboration between two famous modernist creators (Hopkins noted that Thomas died early of drink, a few blocks to the south of where she was performing) and the possibility of a kind of space-age futurism that seemed realizable then.

Yet Tsimtsum, with its sense of the apocalyptic collapse of this envisioned techno-future as expressed visually by Hopkins casting off the metallic space costume for more autumnal garb, seems a consciously post-9/11 performance piece. Her musings on "responsibility and irresponsibility" indicate a more sober environment, one in which creativity cannot, as a kind of utopian predicate, simply assume a social vacuum. Tacitly, this argues for a less charismatic conception of the artist, though Hopkins does clearly admire the bravado of Stravinsky and Thomas. Hopkins's body language becomes less meticulous and formulated. Her movements become more spontaneous and emotionally accessible to the audience. At the end of the piece, she subsides into a chair in a corner of the stage, seeming exhausted, yet also resolute, in a paradox that grasps the creative contraction of the title, Tsimtsum.

Hopkins, by the end, was wearing a red dress instead of a space suit, as the set itself is transmuted, resembling a cross between a bordello and an airport hangar. There was also a sense of release and of healing, Hopkins tells the audience that "you are no longer Dr. Cook," that their temporary therapeutic role—and the performance—is over. But was the point that the patient had reassembled an integrated Stravinskian memory? Or had she purged herself of the Stravinskian illusions of the past?

The Collective, featuring Rennie Harris, employed hip-hop choreography and Asian inflected costumes as well as a Japanese performer in their piece, Heaven. At first, four female dancers attired in black held the stage. Unlike Hopkins, who utilized a deliberately hemmed...