Spring Awakening: A Sin of Omission (review)

Frank Wedekind's 1891 play Spring Awakening is hailed as a great critique of Victorian-era sexual repression and as anticipating expressionism and Epic Theatre. Long-banned, it is now probably best-known as a Tony Award-winning Broadway musical. Produced by Centripetus Theatre Company—the joint company of director Toby Bercovici and choreographer Madelyne Camera—this Off-Off Broadway production at the Looking Glass Theatre, whose mission is to present a "female vision" on stage, demonstrated that Wedekind's play is still relevant in the twenty-first century. This production did not meditate solely on the sexually repressive society, but also examined points of contact among children and between children and adults. Bercovici's unique vision was realized through the creation of four dances with Contact Improvisation sensibilities, as well as through a new ending. Camera's unique genre-breaking choreography captured the intellectual, emotional, and bodily paradoxes in ourselves, in society, and in life. Through dance and by having the children and adults played by the same actors, the teachers were portrayed as childish, petty, and comical in comparison with the maturing children. Bercovici and Camera, I argue, suggested that the children's newfound knowledge of sex forced the teachers to subconsciously recall that they themselves were once inquisitive children but that they repressed their own inquiries and desires. This production, then, focused not on the sexual repression of children, but on the adults' self-repressed inner-child.

Dancing school girls in Spring Awakening. (Photo: Centripetus Theatre Company.)

Camera's choreography demonstrated Contact Improvisation's core technique, "rotating point of contact," in all of the four dances. The literal and figurative points of contact in this choreography expressed a metaphorical collective unconscious. Through this choreography, the production deconstructed the notion of individuals (especially children) coming into contact with a powerful hegemony, and instead complicated individual/ group dynamics by revealing a kindred, communal strength in the face of personal and social isolation. Even when expressing pain, common and simultaneous gestures furthered the idea of communal strength and a collective unconscious: almost every actor/character, at some point in the show, wiped makeup off their face and rubbed it on their white clothes, dirtying the area of their torso, and all of the teachers literally held their own tongues at the same time after each repetition of the line "hold your tongue" during the inquisition of Melchior.

Camera's choreography embodied paradoxes. Wendla (Annelise Nielsen) performed a profound dance of binaries, which seemed to be Camera's modus operandi: of joy and horror, of innocence and knowledge, of lightness and great weight. In another dance, a schoolboy (Christian Hoots) and the now-come-to-life Desdemona (Linda Tardif) shared an erotic dance full of points of contact and departure. The connection and separation of the two actors in the dance signified the children's need for human connection, sexual connection, and connection to a body of knowledge, as well as their need for separation from their parents, school teachers, and an oppressive society.

Right before the teachers interrogated Melchior, they danced with appropriate accompanying music in a metaphorical circus performed by pompous though twisted mechanical beings. Sharing the mannerisms of toy soldiers, each teacher embodied both innocence, as a toy, and vileness, suggested in quasi-Nazi salutes. The dance was like a game of musical chairs turned upside down: when the music was chaotic but in clear tune, they marched in and out of unison, and when it changed to a giddy and frenetic mess of a tune, they all danced and played like little children. The teachers could not repress the child inside of themselves, even though they were clearly twisted by their power, as their faces were twisted with scorn. The dance was a physical representation of the inner turmoil of children aware of their inevitable transformation into adults like those who came before...