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  • Terpsichore Talks:Two New Dance-Dramas
  • Jay Rogoff (bio)

For two centuries, audiences have watched dance performances under the assumption that dancers don't talk. They convey imagined emotions through a huge range of gestures that do not, as a rule, include speech. Despite the love-agonies of Swan Lake's Siegfried and Odette or the pas de deux's erotic tensions in George Balanchine's Agon, dancers do not voice the work's feelings, but express them through the choreography, aided by the music. Balanchine even jokes about dancers' silence in his great early ballet Apollo. The muse Polyhymnia, representing mime, dances her solo variation with her finger to her lips, but at the end, unable to contain her exuberance, she shouts—a pizzicato Stravinsky chord provides the only actual sound—then covers her mouth in shame and turns her knees inward like a rebuked child. On the rare occasions when ballet dancers do speak, in Balanchine's Slaughter on Tenth Avenue, say, or Jerome Robbins's West Side Story Suite, it feels as though another art form has invaded the theater—as in fact it has, since the choreographers excerpted these works from their classic Broadway musicals. As mashups of drama, song, and dance, musicals resist formal purity and rigid rules, and while works by Rodgers and Hammerstein, Frank Loesser, and Stephen Sondheim occasionally reach the opera stage, for the most part the genre aims to entertain without posing as serious art; our traditional label "musical comedy" suggests an expectation of frivolity.

Last year saw a new trend in dance, serious theater pieces incorporating choreography alongside dramatic texts, and I wondered whether these new dance-dramas would integrate the dancing with the play in a seamless expressive web, set up a tension between the two as equally powerful aesthetic modes, or render the dancing secondary to the more persuasive realism of actors delivering dialogue. In fall 2011, Big Dance Theater brought Supernatural Wife, an adaptation of Euripides's Alkestis, to the Brooklyn Academy of Music's Harvey Theater, where I watched the December 2 performance. The next afternoon I caught Martha Clarke and Alfred Uhry's Angel Reapers, an evocation of the Shakers, at Manhattan's Joyce Theater. Both pieces run about seventy-five minutes, and in both the tyranny of the spoken word often relegates the dancing to an illustration of the text. Still, moments arise in each play when the choreography acquires great affective power and provides singular moments of illumination.

There is nothing really new about dance-drama, since in our earliest Western plays—the ancient Greek tragedies—a chorus sang and danced, commenting on the characters' actions and fate. Euripides, then, presents [End Page 413] a logical platform for a modern dance foray into this ancient form. Supernatural Wife, created by Big Dance Theater's co-directors, Paul Lazar and choreographer Annie-B Parson, uses as its text excerpts (at times almost sound-bites) from Anne Carson's contemporary translation of Alkestis (available with her versions of three other Euripides tragedies in her 2006 collection Grief Lessons). Alkestis, queen of Thessaly, has volunteered to save her husband, King Admetos, from death by dying in his place, and in return she makes him promise to "Become now [our children's] mother in place of me" and never remarry. Admetos blasts his father, Pheres, for refusing to die for his son, and, in spite of his mourning, welcomes and entertains the visiting Herakles so as not to violate the requirements of hospitality. Discovering that Alkestis has died, Herakles descends into the underworld to retrieve her for his host, tempering the tragedy with a happy ending.

Its combination of art forms turns Supernatural Wife into a complicated game of engagement and detachment, and its most engaging element is the dancing. It sweeps us immediately into the play's imaginative realm, with the full cast of six moving, jumping, and whirling; we meet them as dancers before we understand them as characters. Two men enter the large circle—the arena—where the main action unfolds (Joanne Howard designed the set) and begin hopping, left, right, left, right. They maneuver their hands in strange hieroglyphics to signal our transportation...

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