Receiving the Mantle: Mark Dendy Dances

Mark Dendy, Dream Analysis, Dance Theater Workshop, New York, and other spaces, 2000.

With Dream Analysis, Mark Dendy makes the strongest claim to Charles Ludlam's mantle in the more than ten years since the pioneer performance artist and founder of the Theatre of the Ridiculous died. Ludlam knew the importance of giving the audience something to identify with before entering the "transformation" stage or sending it up. Camille's entrance in wooden shoes was not just an auditory gag echoing the "heroine's" hairy chest, it reflected Ludlam's awareness of the sabot, the footwear whose discomforts many nineteenth-century farm girls (their way of life destroyed by factories, including--very early on--shoe manufacturers) fled for Paris's demimonde.

The awfulness of the AIDS crisis, which presupposed no tomorrow for performers and audience, the economic and intellectual anxieties which have found expression in resignation to rather than endorsement of popular culture, "identification" based on non-identity (e.g., feminism by men; queer theory by straights) and serving the aestheticized politics of academia, have undermined the common ground from which performance springs. Masterworks of our decade--whether specialized performers such as John Kelly or spectacular impresarios such as Bill T. Jones--underscore the absence of historical resonance. Their strengths do not admit the dime store romanticism (not that far removed, after all, from Joseph Cornell's of the preceding decade) that was essential to Ludlam.

The far shore from Ludlam's Ridiculous was the continent of Trisha Brown, most especially in her Water Engine (with Accumulation). Brown's simultaneous performance of two exclusive tasks within the upper and lower zones of her body while narrating a mutually incompatible story complemented Ridiculous laughter and was an antidote to minimalist singularity of task. Mark Dendy sails the ocean between the two. Dream Analysis descends from surrealism's cadavre exquis, moving from one association to the other--movement cuing verbal expression cuing visual imagery cuing movement cuing symbolism. The primary characters are The Boy (David Drake) and his mother (Dendy); the analyst who doubles as Aunt Winnifred, the Mother's twin (Bobby Pearce); The Priestess of Myth and Nijinsky's Split Half (Dendy); The Priestess' Reflection (Richard Move); Nijinsky (Lawrence Keigwin). All of this doubling leads to the (il)logic of the pun, shared by the Ridiculous and the Sublime.

Dream Analysis is a rich pastiche, a two-and-a-quarter-hour dance with spoken text or drama with dance. Texts--verbal, musical, or movement--are both original and reconstructed. Nijinsky's autobiography and Martha Graham's epigrams weave through Biblical exhortations, reconstructions of revolutionary dance events, Judy Garland pantomimes, and a wicked recasting of "The Trolley Song" as "The Prozac Song." Nijinsky's inversions of classical ballet vocabulary is cut with "involuntary" movements (like Peter Sellers in Dr. Strangelove); Graham rolls on the floor and plunges à la her characteristic modernism; Judson Church exercises provide the background to falls and leaps. The level of performance in all areas is high, the versatility we assume characterized Jacobean performances.

The ballet work is accomplished (Dendy choreographed a Swan Lake for Dortmund, Germany, in 1999). His Nijinsky references Brown in the "breaks" in the character, but one senses that this portrayal also conveys the essential nature of the Russian's performance. "Graham" ("The Priestess"), however, doesn't work from her interior voids--from the solar plexus--contractions aren't complete (which might have something to do with the large males performing the part), although the concept is identified and homage paid in a speech on chakras. "Graham" is too light on her feet, forcing the spot-on vocal impersonation and the textual collage of Martha's writing to do double work. Posture subsumes gesture in her performance, while the two retain a tense balance in the Nijinsky. Thus, the response is more likely: "Isn't that Barbara Morgan's photograph from Lamentations or the c'hoop-ah (what else to call that strange bridal bower) from...