The principal subject of art has always been woman, but only in modern dance have women been an art’s principal creators. Consider: Isadora Duncan, Ruth St. Denis, Martha Graham, Mary Wigman, Doris Humphrey, Hanya Holm, Pina Bauch, Meredith Monk, Twyla Tharp.
Which—to use all the fingers of both hands—brings us to Deborah Colker and her superb company, which last performed here in 2004 in several memorable dances. One of them appeared to be a funeral rite in which everybody, women and men, walked slowly in a solemn line, holding candles and—presumably to show how naked we all are before death—naked to the waist. The other, better-known dance was “Rota” (created in 1997), in which, as the curtain came down, the dancers, in fetal position and clinging hard, were whizzing around and around on an accelerating Ferris wheel.
Colker and company were performing in São Paolo a few weekends ago, and we went to see what she’s up to. Germany commissioned her to do a dance about football (American soccer) for the 2006 World Cup, and she took part of that dance, titled it “Dynamo,” and paired it with an earlier work about rock-climbing, “Velox” (1995), to make an evening of sports dances.
Based on the dances I’ve seen, what strikes me as most remarkable about Colker’s work is something you see in most of the work of the women choreographers I’ve named: unisexuality. George Balanchine, the greatest 20th century choreographer, liked to say all ballet is about women. None of the women choreographers, with the prominent exception of Martha Graham, would say this of modern dance.
To emphasize the alikeness of women and men, Colker does the following:
1) She has them do the same things. As in ballet, men lift and carry women, but, unlike ballet, the women aren’t held up to be admired; they are held like bags of groceries, carefully but casually. Further, the women hold and carry the men. Men do clumsy, “ugly” things—squashing their faces against the ground while sticking their rumps in the air; women do the same things, alongside the men and often before the men do them.
2) Both sexes dress in the same or similar clothing, often tights. If the clothing isn’t black, men are as likely as women to be in bright colors.
3) The men and women are all young (none over 30, except for Colker) and of roughly equal height—5’ 6” to 5’ 10”, I’m guessing: tall for a woman, short for a man. The women are dark-haired, lean, and muscular; none has a big bosom. The men are more varied—some blond, some thin, some bulky with muscles.
4) Both men and women are thoroughly, indeed brilliantly, rehearsed. In most ballet companies—though no longer perhaps in the world’s best—the women are precise in mirroring one another’s movements (think of the Rockettes), while the men in the chorus are sloppier but forgiven because of their height and their having on average a decade less dance training. Colker insists the boys be as good as the girls.
5) There’s no “romance” between the sexes—no romance, period. Whereas classical ballet is romance-driven, lovers pining for each other, ecstatically meeting in pas de deux in a world that thwarts them and finally dooms one or both, in Colker’s dances men and women are pals, happy to kick a ball around or float up a wall (in harnesses, in “Dynamo”), but just as happy alone.
6) Because there’s no romance—or, to be blunt, no lust—impelling the dance, there’s no reason for men and women to chase one another in hope of sexual release. Instead, what we see are games and friendly play—running, kicking, floating, and climbing, in which, to repeat, the sex of the participant doesn’t matter. Dance as kinesiology, as dance history Suzanne Buckley says dismissively.
7) Because there’s no romance, no lust, et cetera, there’s no plot in Colker’s dances—and the tone isn’t tragic or nostalgic, as in most ballet, but quietly blissful. There are climaxes of a kind (remember the Ferris wheel) but they are purely technical: we never thought the wheel could go so fast or, in “Velox,” that so many people would climb on the rock wall at once or that anybody could do what the marvelous last woman, spider-like, does—climb under and beside and over other climbers, and hang on to the central climber and raise one arm and leg toward the audience to bring the curtain down.
Rather than picturing a world like our own, where desire and loss and nostalgia shape human psychology, which in turn shapes the gestures humans make—as happens in ballet and in dances made by men—Colker shows us a kind of heaven where everything is done for joy or curiosity or simply exercise, and there’s no risk of failure.
It’s for this reason that I wish her dancers smiled. One or two do, but slightly, as though overcoming instruction to wear the dancer’s characteristic deadpan expression (“Don’t look at my face. It’s what I do with my body that matters!”). We in the audience are smiling but we want the dancers to confirm that we should be, that they are really having as much fun as they should be, doing what they do.
In my discussion I’ve left out of account the one dancer who doesn’t fit into what I’ve said. He’s older than everyone else, taller, and bald with a fringe of gray. He’s also an amazing acrobat, able for example to lift himself from prone on the floor into a handstand. In “Velox,” he is the central climber off whose back the spider woman hangs.
But though different from the other men, he’s no more a sexual presence than they—no more than is jolly Mr. Clean of whom he looks to be the unsmiling younger brother. As he moves through the company, single-mindedly doing something different from the others, he is like a gym coach among students in a free-play period or an umpire for a game that hasn’t started. We in the audience aren’t troubled by his anomalous existence. For those of us older than the dancers—which is to say, 90 percent of the audience—he is our representative, the symbol that, however old, we belong (however oddly) in the paradise of the body Colker creates.
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