Russian poster for Boris Eifman’s ballet “The Pygmalion Effect”

DID I MENTION THAT I LOVED IT?

The Pygmalion Effect

Eifman Ballet of Saint Petersburg

Zellerbach Hall

Berkeley, California

A review by Christopher Bernard

Sometimes all I want to do in a review is say “I loved it, I loved it, I loved it” two or three hundred times (enough to fill a couple of pages and one or two smartphone screens), and call it a day. Who wants to analyze something you’ve just fallen in love with, especially a fairy tale straight out of “My Fair Lady,” with a Russian twist, a nod to Ernst Lubitsch, and a Viennese soundtrack? I just want to daydream, go over it in memory, laugh out loud again at the jokes, the galloping music, the inspired moves, the tender sentiments, the big heartedness of it all.

For example, the mysterious opening where a young woman lies curled up on the ground, asleep and abandoned outside a wealthy house, where she is tormented by erotic dreams of a man being worshipped by women, none of whom is herself. And the dream goes on, segueing into what we will learn is a long flashback. Beginning with:

A street suddenly packed with a score or so skittering demimonde types dancing their hearts out, a poor workhorse of a father (danced by a vigorous Dmitry Fisher) putting his daughter, dressed up in drag-prince costume military togs, to work collecting customers for his carriage service. The daughter is a tomboy gamine named Gala (the ravishingly graceful, lithe and witty Lyubov Andreyevna) with the tatterdemalion charm of an Artful Dodger who invents the dance’s insouciant heroine out of thin air and the champagne effervescence of a Strauss polka.

Or the Ballroom Contest, watched by an enthralled Gala, where sequins-draped ladies and their sharply attired consorts ravish the stage, trying to out dance each other with an athletic, competitive joyfulness until one of the couples, Leon (a commanding Oleg Gabyshev) and his partner Tea (an Amazonian sex goddess who rules the stage whenever she is on it, Alma Petrovskaya), at the point of achieving supreme perfection, slips and collapses, mortifyingly, across the stage.

Or the organized chaos when Leon, on his way home, is mugged by some of Gala’s lowlife confreres, and Gala, still in her boy togs, and showing her street chops to smartly punishing effect, saves the overwhelmed dancer, who, thinking her a good fellow to have in a pinch, takes her home for a post-pugilist celebration.

When lo! he discovers he is a she! Much is made of the attendant confusion. Leon, of course, takes her under his wing. The father finds out and sees an easy way to cadge some rubles via his little girl, and Gala falls ever deeper into an infatuation with the fellow she saved, and Leon, for a laugh, brings the graceless, galumphing, spectacularly over-dressed hobbledehoy to his dance class, where he conceives a bizarre plan to turn this bundle of grotesquerie and unconscious charm into a prize-winning dancer. He bets on it against the scoffing Coach (a properly sneering Igor Subbotin) and proceeds to prove his point.

Though not before nearly conceding defeat as he tries to mold this feckless ne’er-do-well into something half civilized, with not even an iota of success. At which point he gets a brain wave: fit her up with an all-body robotic armature, cap her with a neon helmet, and set her off with a remote control, a la “Die Puppe” (“The Doll,” Lubitsche’s famous silent film from the 1920s), and let his fingers do her dancing.

Which is just the final push Gala needs to get it, clicking into the dazzling dancer we in the audience have known all along she is, but only now the rest of the ballroom dancing crowd is forced to admit, as she and Leon dance off with the top prize of them all.

But what is this? Leon, our Henry Higgins, the aim and goal now of little Gala’s heart, now that he has won his bet, casts her off. What is she to him? A successfully made point. With the arrogance of the “creator,” he leaves her to her venal father, her mugger class, her gutter.

But she has been poisoned by her success. She can’t return to her old life. She is no longer that, she no longer can do that. She curls up on a street bench, lost between worlds, rejecting what she once was, dreaming futilely of what she might have had and what she might have been. We are back at the beginning. Leon visits her in her dreams. She does not realize he is the cause of her misery as much as of her peak of joy. She has become a prisoner of her love.

Boris Eifman choreographed this supremely charming ballet (which is being given its U.S. premiere in these performances through Cal Performances), and shows that there is still a place for a dance of pure pleasure. I suspect that all, or at least most, of his company, the Eifman Ballet of St. Petersburg, appears, and a more vigorous, graceful, and irresistibly happy group of dancers it would be hard to imagine. (One of the heady joys for an American is seeing this example of the Russian style of ballet dancing at its best: sharp, exuberantly athletic, and romantic, all at the same time. One gets an idea where Balanchine came from.)

The brilliant sets were by Zinovy Margolin, the deliciously louche costumes by Olga Shaishmelashvili. The effortlessly engaging music was, for the most part, by Johann Strauss, Jr., with a few numbers by Josef and Eduard from the same, copiously composing family, and a handsomely judged concluding contrast from tender, truthful, unsentimental Mozart.

_____

Christopher Bernard is co-editor and poetry editor of Caveat Lector. He writes on dance, drama, and art for Synchronized Chaos. His most recent book is the poetry collection Chien Lunatique.

His novel Meditations on Love and Catastrophe at The Liars’ Café will be out later this year.

Songs About an Old Man and the Daughter He Betrayed

Scene from “Songs of Lear” (Photo by Z. Warzynski)

Songs of Lear

Song of the Goat Theater

Zellerbach Theater

May 11-12, 2019

Berkeley, California

A review by Christopher Bernard

Tragedy can be said to succeed or fail by the power of its logic. And that logic, in the theater, is linear and rigidly chronological. It is as harsh and clear as a syllogism: if the folly of x happens today, then the horrors of y will happen tomorrow.

Attempts to break with linearity are in danger of spoiling the tragic effect: the catharsis – the purging of pity and terror – that lies at the heart of the peculiar satisfaction tragedy affords. Shattering and reshaping “the linear” has its own satisfactions, as can be seen in postmodern aesthetics at their most audacious and skillful, but the tragic effect is not always one of them. This basic strength, or weakness, of tragedy is exemplified in the work under review, which attempts to pierce to the “essence” of Shakespeare’s vision; though, as sometimes happens, when you strip away supposed inessentials, sometimes the essentials volatilize almost entirely away.

Not that the effect here is not theatrical in the best sense. And, as a work of music, it is completely successful. Here is a case where creating the right expectations is essential to effecting the right satisfactions.

“Songs of Lear,” which Cal Performances brought to Berkeley this weekend, is, in fact, not a work of musical theater so much as an oratorio with movement, sometimes pantomime, sometimes fiercely chthonic dance, and a narrator, a “guide” who sets up each scene; in the case of this performance, the warm and welcoming director, Grzegorz Bral. The music consists of a song cycle for soloists and chorus in twelve numbers, expressing some of the dramatic high points of Shakespeare’s drama; in one or two cases, inventing scenes implied by the story. It was developed by the Polish theatrical company Song of the Goat Theater, headquartered in Warsaw; the company was once under the aegis of the Grotowski Institute, and the influence of Grotowski’s explorations into what he called “objective drama” and voice work seems clear.

The work premiered at Edinburgh’s Fringe Festival in 2012, where it won several important awards. The music includes Renaissance church polyphony, Corsican folk music (a style immediately recognizable to aficionados of Bulgarian and other Eastern folk music, with which it has strong similarities), and original music by Jean-Claude Acquaviva and Maciej Rychly; the music moving from the historical western forms, which dominate early on, to complete domination by the even more ancient folk forms at the performance’s stark conclusion.

(To be strictly candid, the musical tapestry moves from a simple figure, performed at the very beginning to establish tonality among the (for the most part) a cappella singers, through the evolution described, back, at the very end of the tragedy, to a reiteration, with subtle elaboration, of that first simple figure, a musical symbol of the circularity of time and the eternal recurrence of history.)

As music and a form of dance, “Songs of Lear” is absorbing, often moving, with its sharp and soaring vocal lines, its engulfing polyphony, its driving rhythms, its stabbing emotions of love and loss and betrayal. But as an attempt to encapsulate one of the most searing dramas in theatrical history, I felt it distinctly over-reaching; like sign pointing earnestly at something called “Tragedy” rather than its overwhelming embodiment in the here and now. It may perhaps be better for the spectator to know nothing of King Lear before attending; you will have no expectations and therefore no disappointments.

Too much is left out for those burdened with memories of the play: the scenes of Lear’s madness on the heath, for example, which one waits for in vain; the subplot involving the Duke of Gloucester and his sons Edmund and Edgar; and much of the story involving the betrayals by Cordelia’s sisters, the hypocritical and stony hearted Goneril and Regan; Lear’s deepening madness itself is more hinted at than portrayed. What is meant to be “essence” can easily shrink to the merely schematic (an occasional fault of the Grotowski school of theater elsewhere).

Two further criticisms: first, the use of Latin and Christian liturgical polyphony. Shakespeare’s play is based on a legend going back to pre-Christian Britain; there is the merest hint of a Christian civilization in the play itself, and no hint of an afterlife in the play’s metaphysics. The play is starkly this-worldly; the religious haze created by the music early on suggests a possibility of transcendental redemption the play itself does not pretend to; even eliminates.

My second criticism is the “guide,” part lecturer, part narrator, a role that seems an afterthought and does not feel convincingly integrated into the production. I felt that either the role should be eliminated entirely or, if not eliminated, made an integral part of the presentation; in the performance I saw, the guide’s regular intrusions, instructions and underscorings of points being made, detracted from the tension that a drama of the magnitude of King Lear has every capacity to generate, even in a reduced version as presented here.

The twelve songs are performed by a dozen singers, half male, half female, some of the singers doubling on instruments. The emphasis of the songs is on the damaged relationship between Lear and his daughter Cordelia, played by three different women (if my count is accurate; at least, it is more than one), with another of the six women playing the Fool. The last felt like a mistaken bit of casting; not that the woman wasn’t fully equal to the part—she was—but the men onstage needed more to do; this is a feminist production almost to a fault. A younger man plays the vanishingly small role of the Earl of Kent, an older man the maddened, and maddening, old king.

We are warned in the program that this is a “non-linear” presentation of the play. So it is not a surprise that the “scenes” do not always follow those in the drama; for example, Cordelia dies before Lear goes mad, though in the play this happens in reverse; it is precisely Cordelia’s death that brings the old man back to reality. Lear’s mad ramblings on the stormy heath get short shrift – an odd decision, as those scenes are certainly among the most memorable in theatrical history. Lear without the heath is a little like Hamlet without his soliloquies; he just becomes one more crazy old codger abusing his family.

If you attend this production expecting an oratorio roughly based on the story of Lear and his daughter Cordelia, and forget the rest of the play – in other words, forget “King Lear” altogether, and just see “Songs About an Old Man and the Daughter He Betrayed” – you are likely to have a very satisfactory evening. I, unhappily, was unable to clean Shakespeare’s mad, demented domestic tyrant and the overwhelming violence of his fate from my mind. The music will carry you to music’s rapture; the discreet choreography has undeniable power; and the performers are altogether winning in both movement and song.

_____

Christopher Bernard is co-editor of the webzine Caveat Lector. He writes on dance, art, theatre and literature for Synchronized Chaos. His latest novel, Meditations on Love and Catastrophe at The Liars’ Cafe will appear later this year.

Primavera

By Christopher Bernard

The afternoon lies across the air

like a page of ice,

dazzling and shadowless.

You walk across it,

through it, beneath it,

looking for a crack in the light,

trying, without success, to hide.

The eyes you meet are gray as ashes.

The words you hear disappear like clouds.

A scarf lies abandoned on a curb.

Somewhere there is the sea,

a party’s laughter, and someone is singing,

and summer holds the night in its arms.

But not here, and not now.

You scratch on the ice a forgotten name for spring.

____

Christopher Bernard has published two volumes of poetry: The Rose Shipwreck and Chien Lunatique. He is co-editor of the webzine Caveat Lector.

Interior of Notre-Dame de Paris after the fire of April 15, 2019

A Memory of Notre-Dame

by Christopher Bernard

I had been traveling for many hours from Philadelphia when I was seventeen on my first trip to Paris as part of a package tour for high schoolers I had worked much of the summer the year previous to afford.

It was spring and, despite the exhaustion and excitement after the long journey (my first by plane), when we got to the hotel near the Place Bastille, I decided there was no way I was going to sleep before in some way meeting Paris face to face. So I took my handful of francs and my high-school French, snuck out of the hotel (unknown to our chaperones), scurried down the local Metro stop, and took the first subway to the Île de la Cité.

After arriving at my destination without dropping off despite my first experience of jetlag, I wearily climbed endless levels of exit stairs into the late afternoon. And stood, rooted to the spot, staring almost straight up at the austere towers and the façade known to every schoolchild, and saying over and over to myself for a long, sleep-deprived moment: “Notre-Dame de Paris, Notre-Dame de Paris, this is Notre-Dame de Paris,” before dreamily crossing over to the front steps, and ascending them while taking curious, creak-necked glances up at the tympanum, and then walking gingerly (I wasn’t even sure, as a non-Catholic, I would even be allowed in) through the entrance way – surprisingly small – into the dark, unexpectedly cool interior.

As I entered, the organ burst into music. No services were going on that I could see, and I supposed the organist was rehearsing for Sunday. But it was one of those moments of mystery and magic in one’s life that seem to happen with some frequency in youth, and then less and less often with passing time. My fatigue and caution seemed to fall away. I walked into the cathedral and remember taking a very deep breath, then walked into the music and shadows.

____

Christopher Bernard lives in San Francisco.

EXPLOSION IN THE CATHEDRAL

The Fire’s Journey: Part III: The Cathedral’s Work

By Eunice Odio

Translated by Keith Ekiss with Sonia P. Ticas and Mauricio Espinoza

Tavern Books

Eunice Odio

A review by Christopher Bernard

Eunice Odio, considered by many to be Costa Rica’s greatest twentieth-century poet, spent most of her life in Mexico City and published volumes of poetry as well as essays and short fiction; her most important work being El tránsito de fuego, “The Fire’s Journey,” which (and in particular the third part under review) brings to my mind, along with the psychological themes of C.G. Jung, the prophetic books of William Blake, with their wealth of creative mythology, epic dimensions, obscure allusiveness, complex rhetoric and intellectual demands, and even some of their political implications. The poem thus far (the concluding part four is slated for future release) has been brought into frequently brilliant English by Odio’s translator, the poet Keith Ekiss, with help from Sonia P. Ticas and Mauricio Espinoza – we are in their debt for bringing so much of the work of this poet finally to the attention of anglophone readers.

The third part of Odio’s monumental epic of creation of self and world can be read (thanks to the translator’s helpful introduction) without having read the first two, “Integration of the Parents” and “Creation of Myself.” But it would be disingenuous not to recommend doing so; a little homework in this regard can go a long way to warming the reader to the poet’s unique symbolic vocabulary, her rhetorical leaps and rapid shifts, and often elliptical lyrical flights. We enter a forest, with few paths opened for us, and dense with meanings, some of a deceptive clarity and simplicity, many evocatively obscure, under a skyscape of clouds and twilight and peopled by often only half-seen characters, of misty outlines and gigantic presence, forcefully symbolic, willful, fierce, like figures in a dream whose demands leave us unable either to wake up or sleep on.

I won’t pretend this part is as easy to take in as the earlier ones. Despite the cascades of brilliant details that illuminate every page, the poem can seem willfully obscure and confusing on first reading, though it unlocks its meanings less reluctantly upon reacquaintance.

The epic’s first two parts brought us the chaos and void of the beginning of all things, the cloudy retort of the void and the womb, followed by the creation of the poem’s central character, a poet, god, creator and sufferer named Ion, named after the complex figure from Greek mythology of notoriously ambiguous identity and birth.

Part three, “The Cathedral’s Work” (itself divided into three parts: “All Things Created,” “Opposite Dreams” [though “Opposing Dreams” might have made its contents plainer] and “The Cathedral’s Work”) throws us into a world that is in some obscure sense Ion’s responsibility: he partly creates, or at least assembles it, even as he is created by it. He (for Ion is definitely male) is called on by various members of the world to provide them with essential things: a horse, a bird, a stone; from the stone a column, a vault, a wall, an apse; in the end a cathedral.

Ion is at once namer of the world (for from his words beings come) and dreamer of the world:

4th MAN

Who is the man who sleeps?

5th MAN

A vagabond flung on the morning,

who else could he be?

6th MAN

Who is this ragged man?

7th MAN

I know the one who sleeps

3rd MAN

You know the one who lies asleep?

7th MAN

He is the maker of all things

Ion works in Gemini-like tandem with an older brother figure, introduced in part two, with whom he has a conflicted but essential relationship, Daedalus, named after the Greek inventor and builder of Minos’ famed labyrinth and the wings by which he and his son Icarus flew, escaping Crete – the “patron saint” of technology and distant, troubling father of Silicon Valley.

Various, obscure figures appear throughout the book – appear and usually disappear, never to be heard from again, at least in part three: for example, Gune and Andros (female and male humans) who open this part of the poem by asking Ion to help them, in their endless labor on the earth, by providing them with

A beast of uncontainable body—

an animal that’s gentle within

like a tree’s orbit in its shadow

firm outside

fully born in all its extremities

ivory hooves, curved and narrow

the voice long

reaching the pastoral stars without faltering;

hills and laborers hear it up high

all throughout

our afternoon

And Ion sends Daedalus to search and capture a creature that will meet their needs, and Daedalus goes forth and steals a horse:

. . . a flash, long as God’s syllables

and strong as day.

. . .

. . . so male, so transparently young

so exactly the heat of my thought.

. . .

The horse is truth.

There is a companion and helpmate in creation named Arkhos (his name based on the Greek root meaning “in the beginning,” although he appears to be a “son” of Ion).

There is Shed – a woman, though something like a female principle, a Jungian “anima” figure, who craves of Ion the knowledge of “what she wants.” There is Nebo the Seer, and a chorus of children, and a group of unnamed men (alluded to above) who demand to see the “bird” Ion has created from the word “bird” (“pajaro” in Spanish), then use the “stone,” which Ion found with Daedalus’s help, to kill it.

And there are many others, some only mentioned, others appearing and speaking: the father of Ion, Odon, as well as other sons of Odon, including Thauma (ancient Greek for marvel or wonder) and Logos (Greek for reason or “the Word,” as it appears in the opening lines of the Gospel According to John).

The relationship between Ion and these creatures remains tantalizingly ambiguous: are they separate creations (as it would seem at least some of them must be) or were they in some sense willed into creation by Ion? Ion himself does not seem to know: we may be in the presence of a god whose unconscious is as willful, wayward, yet fruitful, as the unconscious impulses of human beings. He calls himself “pluranimous” and, at one point, “possessed,” as by demons: “The Name of the Word is Legion”: he is single yet plural, one yet many, his many parts in conflict; a crowd of loneliness.

The climax of the poem is the creation of the Cathedral – a work of worship, containment and illumination for the spirit – but which is contaminated by a demonic presence (perhaps Ion’s “shadow,” to use the Jungian term) and must be demolished stone by stone, then rebuilt into its intended splendor in part three’s closing pages:

The sky pauses when you pass by, pure

unpredictable presence of the air, Cathedral,

capital of the heights, a straight delirious flower.

The sky pauses

when you pass by, as you become visible ecstasy

. . .

Oh, Cathedral, oh palace of flight!

Oh, edifice on its journey through dawn!

_____

Christopher Bernard is co-editor and poetry editor of Caveat Lector. He writes on dance, drama, and art for Synchronized Chaos. His most recent book is the poetry collection Chien Lunatique.

Scene from 17c, by Big Dance Theater

BURNING DIARIES

A review by Christopher Bernard

17c

Big Dance Theater

Zellerbach Playhouse

Berkeley, California

Diaries: those curious amalgams of introspection, examination of conscience, honesty (or the lack of it), performance of the self in the mirror of the mind, costumery of the soul, writing of one’s own story, exhibitionism, exploration, assassination, and secrecy. Some claim the modern diary—part narcissistic parade before oneself, part genuine confession of faults, part self-indulgence, part self-flagellation, which today has morphed, from the soul communing with itself into social networks’ exhibitionism and the genius for banality of writers like Karl Ove Knausgaard—was invented by Samuel Pepys.

Pepys was a Londoner, an administrator in the Royal Navy, and member of Parliament, who kept a regular diary for ten years, between 1660 and 1669, between the ages of 27 and 36, which was discovered and published to instant, and continuing, fascination by the public. People have been poking at Pepys ever since, with multiple editions, the earlier ones bowdlerized, the more recent ones even more complete than some might want, and including an online version, www.pepysdiary.com, which provides a typical entry for the day on which you visit (on the day I visited, it was the entry for December 14, 1665), and is constantly being annotated by fans and others.

One can find little to pity the poor fellow after exhibiting his own weaknesses with as much relish as this philandering, self-absorbed, self-promoting, epicene, self-deceiving, obsessive recorder of his own misbehavior—even if he never meant it to be read or (heaven forbid!) published!

Of course this begs the question haunting all diarists before and since: doesn’t every diarist secretly hope to be read, published, honored, become “famous”? (Full disclosure: I have been myself a more or less regular diarist since I was eleven.) Of course we do! We lie if we claim otherwise; at the very least, we hope some particular person will look it over with a sympathetic eye: a parent, a lover, oneself when old, God.

We rarely daydream about a critic, scholar, artist, interrogater who, though in all good humor, is as frank about you, sir, as you seem to be about yourself.

Which brings us to 17c, which, as part of its stimulating, and much-needed, RADICAL Women’s Work series, Cal Performances brought into town in mid-December: Big Dance Theater’s award-winning, dry-eyed exploration, witty send-up, and political meditation on Pepys’ voluminous self-revelation. And after the wave of political gains by progressive women in the last elections, it could hardly be more timely or more welcome.

The smart, juicy, often funny piece plays with dance, monodrama, dialogue, music, sketch comedy, play-within-a-play and mime to create a good-humored but well-deserved deconstruction of the life, as self-depicted, of the legendary diarist—and notorious disrespecter of women.

Pepys lays himself completely open to a feminist interrogation of his life: a compulsive philanderer, he is caught at least once by his wife in flagrante with the family maid, and he describes, briefly but indubitably, a rape. Both incidents appear in the piece, the first in an extended reading, updated to modern argot, in a very funny monolog by Paul Lazar, the second in a brief, devastating recitation of one of the diary’s darkest entries. Though, unfortunately, not its darkest.

For all the comedy, tragedy, and farce of Pepys’ depiction of his own life, the soul of 17c is not to be found there: that lies in the invisible words, the burning diaries, of Pepys’ wife, Elizabeth, or Bess, performed with grace and wit in a 2017 Bessie Award-winning performance by Elizabeth DeMent.

Bess’s silence plays in counterpoint to Pepys’ logorrhea. And the two come together in clash to reconciliation, to clash again, to bedward bliss to masculine displays of economic power parading as acts of contrition, until the fatal day comes when the diarist’s profound cruelty goes on display for all to see: when he discovers that Bess is also keeping a diary, rips out the pages one at a time, and at last burns them all. And he is not even ashamed to report it, though the irony of his action seems lost on him. He never seems to occur to him that the only way to spare himself eternal exposure would be to destroy his own.

The script sometimes suffers from a certain intellectual myopia (the claims in the introductory monologue that life and existence are “meaningless” are tendentious at best; my own response to such contemporary shibboleths is “prove it”) and from moral anachronism: that Pepys married Elizabeth when she was fourteen needs richer exploration than a flippant self-righteousness.

The otherwise intensely clever script was written and adapted by Anne-B Parson, and includes texts from Euripides, Eugène Ionesco, and Claire Tomalin as well as from the unperformed playwright and contemporary of Pepys, Margaret Cavendish, a stripped-down version of whose satirical and “radical feminist” play, The Convent of Pleasures, was performed as a play-within-a-play. Some of 17c’s most entertaining and perceptive scenes are based on the often wonderfully weird visitor comments from www.pepysdiary.com. The other players included sprightly Kourtney Rutherford and Cynthia Hopkins and a wittily voguing Mikéah Jennings.

EDITOR’S NOTE: On a personal note, Christopher Bernard was inspired to create this poem about Samuel Pepys after seeing 17c:

I Do Not Love Thee, Samuel Pepys

By Christopher Bernard

I do not love thee, Samuel Pepys.

Alas, and zounds! I cannot see

what all those readers see in thee.

Thou givest me, always, the creeps.

Inventor of the diary

as paper version of FB

in the seventeenth century,

I’ll give you that, most willingly.

But nothing more. He sows who reaps.

You are too close to that which keeps

me up all night. He dreams he leaps,

to drown, who can’t escape the deep.

We laugh, we glare.

But will we dare

when we’re laid bare,

and Samuel peeps?

He falls who cannot rise; he sleeps.

But acts are hard, and words are cheap.

I do not love thee, cannot bear thee.

In thee I see me, Samuel Pepys.

_____

Christopher Bernard is co-editor and poetry editor of Caveat Lector. He writes on dance, drama, and art for Synchronized Chaos. His most recent book is the poetry collection Chien Lunatique.

THE EYE OF THE BEHOLDER

Viktor De La Fuente, Justin Morrison, and Emma Judkins in Custodians of Beauty (Photo by Liz Lynch)

A review by Christopher Bernard

For beauty is nothing

but the beginning of terror . . .

—Rilke

Custodians of Beauty

Pavel Zuštiak and Palissimo Company

Zellerbach Playhouse

Berkeley, California

One of the many peculiarities of our post-postmodern age (though a clearer term for it would be “hypermodern”) has been the attempt to deconstruct (a polite word for “demolish”) certain terms of value that have come down to us through the ages of Western civilization: “truth,” “goodness,” “equality,” “freedom,” “liberal,” “democracy,” and the like.

One of the terms that has received special scrutiny in certain purviews of academia (where such demolitions are practiced, frequently under the innocent eyes of college students) has been “beauty.”

I always ask myself why such demolitions are performed: why would anyone want to deconstruct “truth” or “freedom” or “love”? Why would someone want to destroy “beauty”?

Knowing who will gain by such demolitions is often more fruitful than knowing who will lose. For, if we lost “beauty,” most people, I think, would agree that we would lose much that makes life worth living. But who would gain by it? One can understand why some feminists might, with good cause, resent “beauty,” since “beauty” has been used against women by men since the beginning of time: men have a weakness in worshiping beautiful women and despising ugly ones. And the most beautiful woman in the world knows that her beauty is only temporary: it is only a matter of time before she will lose it and fall into the worthless category of the ugly.

One common argument is that “beauty” creates “ugliness,” and that if we lost “beauty” as a value, we would lose “ugliness” as a pejorative. This, however, remains to be proved. It strikes me as, at best, unlikely: without “beauty” we would not lose “ugliness.” We would merely end up with nothing.

Which brings us to the modern dance performance, “Custodians of Beauty,” by Pavel Zuštiak and the NewYork‒based Palissimo Company, which was performed over a recent weekend in Berkeley as part of Cal Performances’ dance series.

This dance clearly belongs to the ongoing discussion of the meaning and value of beauty. “Custodians of Beauty” takes its title seriously and with less irony than one might have expected. Zuštiak’s dance is (as I read it) about exploring the boundaries of what we think of as “beautiful” and “ugly,” and breaking threw them, in order to find “beauty” where we might least expect to find it: for example, in industrial noise, in half-broken bodies, in mind-numbing repetition, pointless posturing and semaphores of nonsense, in asexual forms of nudity, in inelegance, cross-dressing, smoke and darkness and embarrassment and silliness and shame. There is even some dancing that pretends hard not to be—as dance is, for some of us, the very definition of classic forms of beauty.

And it almost succeeds. Though that “almost” is a bit wider than one might have hoped.

The roughly hour and a half work is broken into some fifteen to twenty scenelets, performed against two large movable  panels, one of them a greenish-gray, the other a heavy scarlet red scored over with Cy Twombly-like marks and scratches. The three dancers dance before and between the screens, often making alphabet-like shapes, or taking enigmatic poses, or deaf-mute signing; their shadows thrown in dramatic shadows against them, creating phantom crowds.

At one point the three appear, seminude, wrapped in and around each other, with rumps thrust in the air like mushrooms and, in a long choreographic tour de force, role together complexly across the stage, uncoiling limbs and exposing torsos without once revealing their faces, until at the very last moment they rise to a stand and turn to the audience, defiantly human after recapitulating an evolution from some primordial fungus.

Other scenes include words spoken, screened, sung: a song based on a poem by Emily Dickinson, words spoken to the audience (in one instance, three audience members were invited to the stage, and stood, awkwardly but good-naturedly, defying us to think them less worthy of attention than the dancers they momentarily replaced), words screened against the back wall; taken from what appear to be typical comments after an avant-garde dance performances, and echoing no doubt what some in the current audience were thinking or would share with each other after the show: “What was that? Did it mean anything? I almost . . . liked it.” This dance certainly displayed a good-natured sense of humor.

At one point the smoke machine was put to use, and a cloud of steam rose in the dimly lit auditorium, slowly dissipating over the audience’s heads. At another point, an enormous black screen was pulled over the heads of the audience, from the front row to the back, one row at a time by the audience themselves after being initiated by the dancers.

At another point, an extravagant shadow was thrown against the back screen and a man in a dress appeared, mincing grandly in defiance of classic attitudes of masculine beauty (always more conservative than the feminine).

And there was a spoof of a grand finale, as the three dancers trembled and shook and pogoed around the stage to dance-club music like wound-up puppets, before a coda where, in half-seen shadows, one of the male dancers strenuously waved a huge, indecipherable banner, though whether in triumph or in futile defiance we will never know.

I found my best experience of this dance while writing about it: while watching it, on the other hand, I often felt vaguely irritated, despite the first feeling of intrigue as each part began, then out-stayed its welcome. The dance as a whole would have been a feast if, so to speak, it had been closer to a snack; as it was, it felt undernourished, repetitious, and thin; editing it down to an hour would probably strengthen its overall effect. Also it was not quite as original as it intended: these motives and these moves I have encountered more than once since deconstruction’s hey-day in the 1980s and the advent of “antidance” in Europe over the last decade or more.

Pavel Zuštiak provided “direction, choreography and olfactory design” (though, to be frank, I failed to detect any untoward smells, good or bad), the simple but effective lighting was by Joe Levasseur, and the eerie, sometimes deliberately needling, and (when called for) effectively ironic music was by Christian Frederickson. The able, brave and vulnerable dancers were Viktor De La Fuente, Emma Judkins, and Justin Morrison.

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Christopher Bernard is co-editor and poetry editor of Caveat Lector. He writes on dance, drama, and art for Synchronized Chaos. His most recent book is the poetry collection Chien Lunatique.