 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
The event begins and ends outdoors. As the audience mills about on the terrace, a welcoming introduction cites Ariadne, Arachne, and Niobe as personages one might encounter in the course of the performance. This spurs the viewers to connect the imagery they will see with the mythology they all know (all Greek schoolchildren study the ancient myths). After a choral section with striding women bearing stones atop their heads like twenty-first century Caryatids (noble and upright sculptures of women serving as roof-bearing columns), and “revolutionary” dancers striking poses of effortful work, the piece wends its way into the building, where spectators break into smaller groups and view a series of installations. In the room where Raymond Duncan did his weaving, we see a woman at a treadle sewing machine, stitching on the voluminous dress she is wearing. The dress is too cumbersome to maneuver with any ease. Continually irritated with her impossible task, she tries, in a subsequent outdoor dance to a ratchety sound score, to move her own constantly collapsing joints. She finally slinks off, dragging the weighty material of her clothing behind her Prior to their work on Her Topia, Brown and Hannah generated the image of the “Black Widow” through reflecting on the violence perpetrated by and on veiled women in the Middle East. They asked, “How do we consider the body in the era of the body as a bomb?” In relation to Isadora, the Black Widow suggested Arachne, the woman-turned-spider. For Hannah and Brown this sewing figure, with her “mismanaged” dress, is akin to a spider spinning her own web. She recalls the kinds of spiders who consume their own young, evoking the image of Isadora as a dominating mother to her students, several of whom she adopted.
Another section of the work unfolds in two adjoining smaller spaces. In each stands a veiled woman, one in deep crimson, the other in white. As the audience observes them from the periphery, the willowy red figure walks slowly, pausing now and again, perching along a line of stones. She balances a weighty stone on her head, on her shoulder, and finally [/ultimately] on her recumbent belly. One wall refracts her shattered image in strips of mirror as a video of water, reduced to a high contrast abstraction, sluices down the opposite wall. The veiled white dancer, seen through a glass partition, presents an enigmatic jumping doppelganger. With its plays of light and dark, and changing degrees of transparency, reflection and solidity, the experience of this installation was richly mysterious. As a viewer, casting one’s glance in any direction frames a different, richly layered visual field, evoking a feeling of mysterious depth. I was reminded too of Bill Viola video works that focus on the primordial and transformative forces of fire and water. Hannah and Brown, both New Zealand natives, were struck by the ways in which many cultures, including their country’s Maori, hold myths of women being turned to stone. The Greek incarnation is Niobe, who is turned to stone after her children are murdered as punishment for her arrogance. Following the accidental death of her own biological children, Isadora saw herself as a Niobe-like figure.
If viewers don’t know that the veiled woman in red is Niobe, they surely would sense the weight of her suffering. Yet the main dancer performing this challenging role did not know how to perform with such emotional depth and structural simplicity, and seemed to suffer from the lack of careful guidance that a more luxurious rehearsal process might have provided. As a theatrical experience what might have been quite powerful easily became unglued. Knowing how to approach such a task is exactly what Isadora could teach. Her tragic loss created a lasting well of deep grief that transmuted into a resoundingly powerful performing presence. The Niobe installation in Her Topia refers to this Isadora, and it was this space that, for me, attempted to tap most profoundly into the Duncan legacy and legend. The young, lyrical Isadora was already fueled by a tempestuous emotional life. She selected pieces of music—Chopin nocturnes, Beethoven symphonies—to match her own transporting feelings of rapture and grandeur. She felt before moving, and, as an older performer, she became intrigued with the possibility of holding her audience transfixed without moving outwardly at all. Isadora wrote about what would turn out to be her final performance on July 8, 1927: “How to make an audience stop breathing? How to hold three thousand people hanging with you on that one note which you musicians mark in your scores with a fermata—meaning you can hold as long as you like? Yes, to have your audience remain breathless as long as you yourself remain on the stage mute and immobile. That is true art, and I believe at that matinee I achieved it for the first time.” From many accounts of her performing it seems she invariably did hold audiences captive. Her gestures rang true. Viewers identified with her and were buoyed by her performances. Referring to the middle-aged Isadora, Agnes de Mille wrote: “Isadora could match any monument. She could match life. And yet at the time she was an overweight woman who at frolicsome moments seemed almost inept. Anyone else doing similar things would have been downright ridiculous. Isadora was never ridiculous. Isadora raised her arms and the stars rocked.” Hannah and Brown chose to focus on certain of Isadora’s many roles—feminist iconoclast, political revolutionary, tragic figure, artist of expansive vision. I, in turn, began to focus on the aspect of Isadora which seemed most compelling to me, and which I felt to be absent from Her Topia: Isadora’s capacity to be moved and thus move others, implying the presence of an inner journey of emotional discovery as much as artistic process of performance image-making. She sought movement from her depths to find one true gesture after another. She was not afraid to wait in stillness for something real to come. And she included her audience in her quest for the ecstatic, the transcendent, and the profound, holding up to us a mirror in which we could see ourselves as fallible, vulnerable, and noble, all at once. The more I watched tapes, read, and conversed about her, the more I longed to see her myself, to see what it was that made students in cities from Budapest to Berlin to Paris unhitch the horses from her carriage and carry her through the streets. |
||
