On the Dutch hothouse and the blossoming of dance, cont.

3/15

Photo of Hell by Laurent Ziegler

The unison dancing is feathered, just slightly out of synch. An arm is higher on this dancer, a leg arcs wider on that, a choreographic choice that prizes individuality. The tall bearded man and the shorter, compact woman, though each bald, look worlds different, especially near the end of the piece when everyone dances naked.

The whole enterprise confronts us with a myriad of possible interpretations of the meaning of "hell." Is dance itself one version of hell?—triple pirouette hell (the tyranny of perfection), merciless/endless jump hell, dance-'til-you-drop Red Shoes hell? Is hearing a classical warhorse for the zillionth time hell? Or, in choreographing to Beethoven's Fifth, does Greco manage to refresh our hearing?

Despite the fact that much of the dancing, punishing as it is in its speed and demand, was riveting, my initial take on Hell was uncomprehending. It looked glam and felt pretentious and superficial. This impression was reinforced by how Scholten and Greco play with notions of fashion and fame in a magazine called Hell that they created in tandem with the performance. In it, the dancers are photographed in designer clothes and one "ad" features the (actual?) new perfume, "Extremalism." This evoked for me psychologist Abraham Maslow's notion that "self-actualizing" self-expression will only take place after a host of other needs are met, including those for food, shelter, safety, belonging, and so on; I thought, "you have to be really well taken care of in terms of Maslow's hierarchy of human needs to be able to indulge in such an arcane game."

In time, I could better perceive the ironic distance Greco and Scholten took from their material and from the act of creation altogether. It reminds me of the detachment witnessed in a Cunningham/Cage collaboration. Their use of chance might be seen as presaging Greco/Scholten's posture of dance as a "locus of reflection." Hell, rather than seeming a controlled "product," reads more as an accumulation of possibilities, with a mysterious unfathomability that even its makers appear to be studying in order to penetrate.

In part, what brought me around to taking full pleasure in the work's irony and intelligence was recognizing that Greco and Scholten are ready to subvert expectations at any moment. At the end of a condensed version of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, for instance, the dancers bow and exit the stage. The audience hesitates, unsure that this is the ending. Nothing happens. Audience claps. Then the true ending comes, through a simulacrum—more dance to classical music, this time Debussy played on a fuzzy-sounding electric guitar, and then, as the dancers get fully into their now familiar clump, hanging their heads and executing unison whip turns, there's a sudden break, silence, and lights out. It's rude. And right.

Photo of Hell by Laurent Ziegler