Childs's "Dance' and Koner's "Farewell' at the Fringe (1st

Philadelphia's Live Arts/Fringe Festival has received national recognition for its presentation of compelling new theater, dance and inter-disciplinary performance. But this year, two historic works of modern and post-modern dance shone forth as stars of the Festival.

Two revivals—of Lucinda Childs's Dance (1979), in collaboration with composer Philip Glass and visual artist Sol LeWitt, and Pauline Koner's The Farewell (1962), the signature work of a lesser-known, older modern dance choreographer— revealed how outstanding works of art retain their power over time. The two pieces demonstrate why revivals deserve a presence in contemporary performance-focused Festivals.

In the early '60s, Lucinda Childs was a co-founder of the experimental Judson Dance Theater in New York's Greenwich Village. Her radical innovation was to deconstruct received notions of what dance constituted, stripping down the inherited dance vocabulary of classical ballet by choosing a limited number of discrete steps or task-determined movements. Props, costumes and movements all derived from everyday life. Through repetition and structural variations, Childs and others re-invented and re-energized dance, returning a lyrical elegance that dance's formulaic accretions had often lost.

The Philip Glass connection

For Dance, Childs found kindred spirits in Philip Glass, whose own musical experimentation favored evolving, repetitive chords, and in Sol Lewitt, a conceptual and minimalist visual artist. Lewitt first filmed the dancers rehearsing in a studio, and then concurrently screened that footage on stage when the same dancers performed on stage, synchronizing the dancers on film with their stage movements.

The hour-long Dance, which fully inhabited the Kimmel Center's Perelman space, bursts forth in streams of white-clad dancers across the stage, propelled by the tidal rhythmic currents of Philip Glass's sound. In the face of this synthesized music, which connoted some primal force of industry as much as of nature, and which could prove overwhelming in a dance setting, Childs insures a remarkable lightness and grace of movement in her dancers, who move like surfers speedily gliding and weaving amidst torrents of cavernous waves.

"'Not pissing on the art'

The brilliance of Childs's work rests in part on her use of just five or so basic steps out of classic ballet, manifesting the point made by the Village Voice dance critic Deborah Jowitt in her related talk here on the Judson artists: that unlike Dada artists, this group of post-moderns were not "pissing" on the art that preceded them but respected it as they developed their new art forms out of the past.

One of the Judson artists' innovations was the inclusion of pedestrian and vernacular movement drawn out of our everyday movements of walking or running. These quotidian gestures, rooted in the Duchampian ideas of John Cage, speak to the universality of movement and art-making.

Children's skips

I first saw Dance at the Bard College festival a summer ago. On seeing it again in Philadelphia, I observed that Childs's reduction of the ballet vocabulary, stripped of its historical artifices, produced runs, skips and turns, bringing her choreography closer to the vernacular actions from which dance inexorably derives. Thus Childs's repeated use of a chassé— a three-part, step-together-step movement, with skipping glides across the stage— evoked the play and lightness of children's skips and runs, breaking down the artificial divides between movement on and off stage while it generated its own artful elegance.

When Dance debuted in 1979, the audience saw the same dancers in LeWitt's film and live on stage. The film, which sometimes fills the entire scrim on which it's projected, is often also divided into split-screen segments, and includes mesmerizing frozen images, abruptly stopping the rush of time amidst the continuing movement of music and live dance.

Today, the LeWitt film offers us the ghostly presence of the 1979 dancers, moving gracefully in gym sneakers, juxtaposed with the 2010 dancers who wear toe-accentuating jazz shoes. Rarely does a film or video in dance itself become the dance as does the LeWitt work here; its changing camera perspectives activate our own viewing to the point that we the audience almost become part of the dance.

The juxtaposition of the same movement between historic and contemporary performers reminds us not only how transitory this art form is but also that there is a dance history with its own continuities. Beyond this richly metaphoric presence of dance film and live dance, the physical differences of past and present were also manifest.

The filmed dancers of the 1979 company were generally less muscular than their contemporary counterparts. By comparison, the earlier dancers had more release in their upper torsos and arm swings; the current company danced with a more static holding of "presented" extended arms, although maintaining, overall, the intended playful lyricism that is the heart of this work.

Slipping in unnoticed

The reconstruction of Pauline Koner's The Farewell, presented by Gwendolyn Bye's Dance Fusion group and danced by this month's Rocky dance award winner, the stellar Janet Pilla, was presented with much less fanfare than Childs's Dance. It slipped into the Fringe part of the festival under the singularly nondescript program title of "Joint Concert" at Drexel's Mandell Theater. It clearly warranted greater visibility and audience support.

Koner (1912-2001), an older contemporary of Childs, was a maverick of the early modern dance world who preceded the post-modernist movement created by Judson Dance Theater alum. (It was interesting to hear Childs, at her pre-performance talk, refer to her own generation as the "middle moderns".)

Koner studied ballet with Michel Fokine, the groundbreaking Russian choreographer, and learned East Indian and Spanish dance techniques. She even pulled an Isadora Duncan by touring the Soviet Union solo from 1932-34. In 1945 Doris Humphrey became Koner's mentor, working with Koner to clarify her own choreographic ideas. Humphrey introduced her to Jose Limon, with whom Koner became a special guest artist for 15 years, choreographing her own solos in Limon works like the Moor's Pavanne through the '50s and '60s.

"'My dybbuk'

Although Koner's legacy work is archived at the Jose Limon Foundation, since her death in 2001 no New York-based or other group outside Philadelphia has reconstructed her work. It's a testament to Bye's commitment to classic modern dance (with support from the Pew Foundation's Dance Advance) that Dance Fusion recently began to present Koner's work— for example, Barren Sceptre, a joint Limon and Koner dance performed with gusto by Pilla and Meredith Rainey, formerly of the Pennsylvania Ballet, and Concertino.

The Farewell, created in 1962, is an elegiac solo in four movements in memory of Doris Humphrey, who died four years earlier. Just as Childs's Dance wedded her choreography to Glass's music, so too did Koner's choreography seem fated to join the equally elegiac final movement, Der Abschied (The Farewell), of Gustav Mahler's orchestral song cycle, Das Lied von der Erde ("Song of the Earth"). Koner once remarked to Dance Magazine that "Since her death, Humphrey inhabits me; she is my dybbuk."

Pilla's moves, with costumes

Danced evocatively by Pilla, the Koner work's sections embrace farewells to earth, youth, love and life. Pilla brings markedly different moods to each section, characterized by four dazzling costumes derived from Koner's original designs. Two of these were recently reconstructed by Martha Chamberlain, the Pennsylvania Ballet's multi-talented principal dancer, who used pink and red for the youth and love sections.

Whether it is in the exuberance of the youth section, the sensuality of the love section, or the ominous leitmotif of pending death, Pilla embodies the emotional states of the dance. Using changing tempos, Koner designed sweeping arcs and movements of arms, legs and backbends that shift to furtive, fluttering gestures of hands and fingers reflecting anxious introspection.

The subtlety and precision of Pilla's movement rivets the audience's concentration. And to these post-modern-trained eyes, which all too easily view with irony the emotional over-expressiveness of classic modern dance, the economy of movement here, and the commitment of this performing artist, kept the work alive and timeless in an irony-free zone.

Channeling the author

The performance of The Farewell also reflects the major contributions of Evelyn Shephard, who had herself danced this role as a member of the Koner company between 1977 and 1981. Without a living choreographer or a film recording, dance reconstructions rely on dedicated artists like Shephard who can channel the choreography with feeling and exactitude. This was the first performance of the work where, between sections, Koner's Mahler-inspired poems (which Koner called her "inner songs") were screened on stage and served as complementary interludes within the performance.

A festival that can present great dance classics of Childs and Koner alongside many of the best of the area's younger generation of choreographers (in the Live Arts program titled "8") is doing right by its audiences and our artistic heritage.♦


To read another review of Dance by Janet Anderson, click here.
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