Striking athleticism, powerful lifts, fluidity, precision, and muscular sensuality defined much of this expansive performance. Here are a few of the many highlights.
Performances ranged from voluptuous modern small group ensembles, through classical ballet—both in straight-forward period fantasy and in parody—to the soul-stirring cadences of tango.
In this exquisite, seemingly formal dance sequence, female dancers wear identical tilty lime orange skirt discs in a parody of classical tutus, with the classical steps performed in what feels like double-time! But all is perfectly precise. The effect is breath-takingly delightful.
Astor Piazzola’s marvelous evocation of the music of tango makes use in this performance of both groups of couples and one stunning male solo. To Astor Piazzola’s “Hora Cero,” a whizz-bang ensemble of claves, percussion, and scraping gourds, energized an ensemble of 12 couples, whose energy and delight summoned Black Lindy Hop and the heritage of tap dance, so familiar to Pillow audiences in the audacious hands of dancer and choreographer Michelle Dorrance.
The women are en pointe in contrast with the hard shoes that give pointed emphasis to the grace and, indeed, often maturity of female tango dancers, both young and especially old. Expanding ballet into tango, or vice versa, allowed for a large ensemble, choreographed version, yet we missed the deep, individual subtleties of old-fashioned traditional tango.
In one brilliant solo in the tango sequence, Young Gyu Choi, clad in black like all the men in five tangos, thrillingly conjured the essense of male power, as rising from the depths to the music of a suite by obscure Dutch composers, taken from a London Symphony performance: Eloene, Aubert, Drigo, Helsted, and Minkins.
He spiraled and turned ceaselessly, as though summoning from the depths of his human experience a dark core, a duende, if you will, that spoke to everyone—alone in one’s existence, searching for meaning and connection, but never quite getting there.
The evening was received with a deserved, sustained ovation from the full house. It was a performance full of revelations and convincing innovations.
These marvelously disparate yet connected performances from unexpected sources reminded us of our own experience in touring the Netherlands in the mid-1970s to the early 1990s:
Here is our own story of performing in the Netherlands and its significance to us.
Approximately 23 percent of the land mass of the Netherlands is below sea level. Driving around this region, as we have done in many concert tours from the mid-1970s to the early 1990s, one is impressed when, for example, on the roads beneath sea level, one looks up and sees boats and barges high above, and on the roads constructed on the dikes, looking down on a vast flat terrain of farmland and small villages.
On these tours, in the era of long playing records, as opposed to this evening’s well broadcast digital recordings, musicians would sell these LPs to both fans and amateur and semi-professional musicians. This was the time of a traditional New Orleans jazz revival that extended from Scandinavia through western Europe, It provided glorious opportunities for American musicians with top players and authentic improvisational styles to sell their stuff.
We traveled with the New Black Eagle Jazz Band, which had 30-some LP recordings, on major and smaller labels (Phillips, Stomp Off, Black Eagle, and Dirty Shame, whose “On the River” was nominated for a Grammy in 1973), as well as with such prominent, well-recorded stars as pianist Butch Thompson of “Prairie Home Companion”; banjo virtuoso and vocalist Jimmy Mazzy, whose duo recording with Eli earned a laudatory review in the Sunday New York Times (along with a photo of Eli and his tuba); and Joe Muranyi, the brilliant clarinetist in the last iteration of Louis Armstrong’s All-Stars in the 1960’s.
Among the many Dutch bands who styled themselves after the Black Eagles, was one in a resort town, which made a recording and actually imitated, note-by-note, our own improvised arrangements. It may have been wooden and lacking in verve and spontaneity, but we took it as a lovely compliment.
They invited us to perform, prior to which we were served dinner, seated with our musical counterparts. Eli, next to the tuba player, asked him what he did by day. He replied, in perfect English, “You wouldn’t understand.”
Eli asked, “what do you mean, I wouldn’t understand?” He replied, I work for the regional housing authority, where we survey the housing needs of the population, families with children, elders needing supportive care, single adults, people with disabilities. Then we plan for and construct the necessary housing, in the most comfortable and elegant arrangements our architects can devise.”
This communitarian spirit goes to centuries of pulling together against the rising seas, especially the North Sea, where now an enormous mechanized structure raises sunken components to create a long barrier when high water threatens. A road constructed on this dike allows visitors to descend by elevator into the depths and observe the mechanism. At the end is a museum of all the available methodologies to control water for the entire country, along with a large diorama of every dike, windmill, wetland, pasture, and road of the entire country. Some of the windmills are used for other purposes, like grinding grain into flour, and these are appropriately labeled. As with the Guide Michelin restaurant guide, this road and its terminal museum are “vaux le voyage.”
This communitarian spirit is expressed in another impressive way in villages, towns, and cities across the country. Where in the United States and elsewhere in Europe windows and curtains block what goes on in our homes from public view, here, by contrast, clear plate glass allows the public to see in. Literally, one can see family life as it proceeds, or, in other words, we are welcomed in.
Visitors are often stunned by this openness and generosity, which goes to the need to pull together against the constant threats to survival imposed by the rising seas. It goes back centuries to when a community effort was needed to sound the alert and take action together against danger that affects all of us.
