Entering the Ted Shawn Theatre, we were offered a pair of ear plugs in a little plastic bag, along with the warning that there would be loud music. This was an unexpected but fitting introduction to an evening full of revelation, not only auditory, but in form and substance of the dance.
Once inside, the theater was utterly quiet as CEO and Artistic Director Pamela Tatge entered the stage, paid her customary and heart-felt tribute to the native American peoples on whose land Jacob’s Pillow sits, and then graciously introduced Eric Gauthier, the Canadian founder of Gauthier Dance, now celebrating its 15th anniversary. Mr. Gauthier walked us through the cornucopia of the evening’s dances, from a man playing a woman with a cello bow during the two-and-a-half minutes of a Bach cello suite, through the ABCs, Swan Cake, a very different take on Swan Lake, and to the iconic Minus 16. He suggested a surprise ending, but didn’t tip us off.
But this talk hardly prepared us for what was to follow:
- Really loud music, in keeping with Gauthier’s belief that the members of his company needed to lose themselves in the music in order to draw from within themselves their own distinctive and instinctive original movements.
- An abundance of mist and fog in nearly every dance, with spotlights piercing it from dramatic angles, yielding a sense of mystery and anticipation of the unexpected, including stunning examples of really soft music, such as pianist Artur Rubinstein’s deeply affecting performance of a Chopin waltz, and cello virtuoso Anner Bylsma’s sensitive treatment of a movement from Bach’s unaccompanied suite.
- A preoccupation with deeply human struggles in intimate relationships, including violence from a man toward a woman in a long pas de deux, in which she doesn’t just run and leave, and a tableaux of three women, two of whom have ostracized a third.
- An intermission that wasn’t really an intermission, with a brilliant dancer clad in a black business suit, studying the audience and responding delightfully in mime to questions and comments put to him, notwithstanding the din of chatter from those unaccustomed to or bewildered by such an interlude.
- Delightful self-mockery and ironic humor relentlessly infecting nearly everything, from the essential ballet positions and movements to Orthodox religious observances.
Often one didn’t know whether to laugh or to cry. Underpinning the choreography appeared to be a deep and critical social perspective, undoubtedly resonating to current affairs in Israel, whence most of the evening’s choreographers and several of the dancers came. Politics—and their frequently devastating consequences—were definitely not off the table for this evening of Gauthier dance.
“Violincello” opens to a Bach-like figure in period costume seated with a cello bow in hand and a woman stretched upright on his knee. With the bow, he “played” the dancer as she, seemingly without protest, twists, turns, and upends herself at the command of his other hand, accompanied by a quiet and subtle interpretation of a movement from Johan Sebastian Bach’s Unaccompanied Cello Suites.
Underneath the humor of the “woman-as-cello” trope and the loveliness of the music and movement, however, we felt uncomfortable. All is not well with the distinguished classical music icon’s treatment of his figurative instrument. Sexual violence is suggested as he passes his bow over her inner thighs and repeatedly across her genitals.
She expresses distress but is pulled back by her musician master. Unable to escape, she appears to pretend that she is aroused. For those of us who have worked on battered women’s issues over the decades, we know this scenario well.
Were she to indicate her intention to leave the relationship, she approaches the most dangerous time for a battered woman. It is here that most battered women’s homicides occur.
Many battered women sense this danger, or have heard explicitly from their abusers that if they can’t have them, no one else will.
Victims use the psychological defense of denial to justify to themselves remaining in the relationship. To this former psychologist and still active consulting pediatrician, in whose Boston Children’s Hospital outpatient clinic one of the country’s first battered women’s advocacy programs was started in 1985, the impact of this depiction of Johan Sebastian Bach’s and his victim/instrument’s behavior was, in a word, creepy.
This stunning, vigorous solo, breathtakingly danced and acted performance by Shori Yamamoto was a tour-de-force through an alphabet of words, both from the dance and the human vocabulary. Both a depiction and a round of send-ups of traditional dance terms and commonplace words, which Yamamoto uttered as expressive asides. For example: “En Pointe” followed by “Ennui,” with a hilarious facial expression of the latter; or the balletic leap of a “Jeter” versus the French, “Jeter” for “throw into the garbage”; or an “Arabesque” versus “awkward.” All demonstrated evocatively in breath-taking speed. You get the idea!
Finally, all movement collapsed. With “WXYZ,” Yamamoto fell flat on his back on the stage. The ABCs of human existence will exhaust us all.
“Point” (2022) is a portrait of three women in relationship with each other. The triangle poses problems: Who belongs and who is left out? Can a threesome exist in harmony?
The three female figures, clad in long white leotards, dance sinuously with each other in fog before a black background. Two of them exclude a third, who several times appears to fall backward, unconscious from her distress. At the last minute, the other two women prop her up. Left ambiguous is what comes next: compassion, reconciliation, harmony, instability? Can she survive at all in the face of the shame of ostracism?
The first half of the program concludes with “Swan Cake.” At first, we thought this was a parody of “Swan Lake,” but it seemed more like a depiction of “Let them eat Cake.”
“Swan Cake,” also immersed in fog, was a riot of dance, the whole company, exiting and entering, each in their own ragtag garb, pulsing to the music with their own movements, and then, sometimes, suddenly, converging into synchrony. The antithesis to the classical, upper-class fairy tale of “Swan Lake,” these were the ordinary folks, seeking their own identities and dreams. “Swan Cake” is both a celebration of humor, idiosyncracy, and exuberance in dance, and a reminder that dance and dreams are for everyone.
“Swan Cake” was musically illuminated by a vivid Cha Cha beat on joy, and a high level of noise from scrapers, piccolo, tenor sax, and electric organ, bursting forth with a forceful sweep down its keyboard along with appropriate gyrations and stomps. The impact was a wild abandon.
As the curtain fell for intermission, one dancer, Shawn Wu, clad in a black suit and fedora, strolled in front of the curtain. Nonchalantly, he gazed into the audience, smiling back as people smiled a bit nonplussed up at him. He was a friendly guy, and as we were in the front row, we waved and grinned a bit at him, too. Why was he there? What about the boundaries between performance and audience? Was this performance? We were a bit off-balance, but he remained, strolling from one side of the stage to the other. Just a nice guy, where he belonged, but not quite when.
When the curtain rose for the second half of the formal, accustomed sequence, Shawn Wu back flipped into a different world. He continued for a good 10 minutes with a mix of sinuous floor work and impressively athletic low lifts, and yet more delicious mime reminiscent of Charlie Chaplin.
Behind Wu, 13 chairs set in a horseshoe across the stage were filled with figures in the same black suits and black fedoras, yet now, clearly, the Orthodox of the choreographer’s Israel. They sat prayerfully, synchronously, at times hunched over their folded hands, at times expanding upright, as though davening in holy prayer.
Gradually, however, their movements expanded, from sitting to standing, from standing on the floor to standing on their chairs, from standing on their chairs to flinging off their clothes: first jackets, then shirts, then shoes, divesting themselves, it seemed, of the garments of formality, convention, tradition, and exclusion. What remains unanswered is whether this is the orthodox divesting themselves, or Israeli society divesting itself of the power of the orthodox. At the front of the stage is one figure on all fours, ostensibly the rabbi, resisting the change, huddled and grieving against the unloosening of the bonds of tradition and power.
“Pas de Deux” begins with an assault: His hands locked together into a double fist extended in front of his body, the male dancer advances on the woman, who recoils from him, until his fists push into her vulnerable body. Notwithstanding this trauma, they remain in relationship, twining around each others’ bodies as the renowned countertenor Andreas Scholl sings the sweet and compelling Andante from Nisi Dominus. As in “Violincello,” the relationship between love and violence remains unanswered.
All these ups and downs affected the audience deeply, it appeared, but the tension was broken with a finale to end all finales. Still in suits and fedoras, the full company filled the stage with wild, exhuberant dance. Then several leapt off the stage and into the audience, pulling hapless women from the audience back with them onto the stage. Their previously single lines burst into a vigorous, partly improvised crowd dance, which devolved into increasingly sexy, undulating movements by the audience members’ suited partners, eventually with their lying prone on the floor. The audience women, remaining standing, didn’t quite know what to do, and all but one left the stage. The one remaining member of the audience, a handsome older woman, had been lifted into the arms of the former ostensible rabbi. The audience cheered, rose to its feet, and joined the company in joyously clapping to the pulsing beat of the music as all the dancers, at the top of their lungs, sang along with the simple four bar hip-hop line. Speaking for ourselves, we never felt the need to use those kindly offered ear-buds.
