 |
| Sara Mearns in "Dances of Isadora" |
A Marathon of Self-Restraint
March 22, 2018
Last night Sara Mearns appeared as a guest artist of Paul Taylor's Modern Dance ICON Series at the Koch Theater, whamming her way through "Dances of Isadora," a group of 10 solos created by Isadora Duncan between 1900-1924 that ran 25 minutes. Lori Belilove, the Founder and Artistic Director of The Isadora Duncan Dance Foundation and Company, consulted with Mikhail Baryshnikov when considering whom to cast, and he recommended Mearns, perhaps as a result of the astounding versatility that she has demonstrated throughout her career as a ballet dancer. While Duncan hated ballet and for many years her followers discouraged ballet dancers from attempting to perform it, many ballerinas throughout the 20th century were unable to avoid the temptation, such as Maya Plisetskaya and Carla Fracci. Their success or failure is of little relevance; Duncan's art is too closely tied to the context in which it was created to have the powerful impact on today's audience that it did in her time. A rebellion against Victorian aesthetic and moral constraints, it now lacks the ability to shake audiences to the core. With the myriads types of dance that evolving at the moment, we are more apt to associate Duncan with her unique personality. Her art has become synonymous with her celebrity.*
In reality modern dance preceded Duncan in Europe before and after the turn of the century with Francois Delsarte's revolutionary ideas about movement, Emile Jacques-Dalcroze's theory of Eurhythmics, Rudolph Laban's theory of the purpose of motion and Mary Wigman's Ausdrȕckstanz. Such pioneers were exploring the relationship between dance and social states of being long before Duncan began flitting about Upper class drawing rooms half-naked. Greatly influenced by Jacques-Dalcroze, Vaslav Nijinsky had begun creating unique works for Diaghilev's Ballets Russes by 1913 in which he responded to dance theory that rejected the concept of the "dancing body" in ballet. The very art form that had made him a star had become something that no longer held any technical challenges for him; inevitably he would rebel and attempt to expand his horizons. In his ground-breaking ballet, "Le Sacre du Printemps," he implemented a new system of movement that returned energy to the body instead of extending it or dissipating it. Lincoln Kirstein would later proclaim him the "Father of Modernism."
Thus, it is impossible for today's audiences to experience the shock value that Isadora's art had in her time, nor its power. The task facing any ballerina taking on Duncan's work in 2018 and performing it at the Koch Theater is a challenging one. Mearns steeped herself in Duncan’s technique in preparation for performance. The by-product is a unique form of movement that adds a new dimensions to Duncan's spirited celebration of the impulse to move. Mearns used her artistry to deliver a series of solos that actually reminded audiences why Isadora matters. The sheer lack of vanity in her interpretation of "Dances of Isadora" was a welcome change from the veneer of preening self-absorption and technical strain so prevalent in ballet today. It is hard to imagine another ballerina capable of approaching this material with the same integrity.
Belilove both staged and directed "Dances of Isadora," and also designed the set, a bare stage with a low, flat ramp upstage shrouded in semi-darkness. Cameron Grant accompanied Mearns on a grand piano placed downstage right, and the collection of pieces he played reflected Duncan's superb taste in music--solos by Frederick Chopin, Franz Liszt and Johann Brahms. Belilove also created Mearns' costume, something that proved to be her weakest contribution to the evening. Barefooted in a sheer, bright pink gown that barely trailed the ground, the Balanchine dancer who has been heralded "New York's pre-eminent ballerina," initially looked short legged and stiff, pink straps criss-crossing her chest binding her torso so tightly that, at a glance, she seemed the antithesis of Duncan's cult of free movement. The skirt was open from the hip to the ankle in several places, allowing Mearns to move freely, but lacked shape and volume and emphasized her total absence of hips. The drapery lacked the tiered grace of the Grecian robes that we have come to associate with Duncan's art. It is ironic that Mearns, who has made a career at the New York City Ballet by overcoming her body type, also fails to possess the ideal Duncan body type. The latter is a female figure that is pear-shaped with the weight falling at the hips, just below the solar plexus, the place from which Duncan believed all human movement emanated. In her pink fright of a dress, Mearns resembled a short-legged totem pole wrapped up in too much fabric. The moment she began to move, however, everything changed.
Standing upstage and center at the start of Prelude Op. 28., No. 4 by Chopin, Mearns wore a long, heavy sash over one shoulder and stood, motionless, deeply connected to the music. Appearing to stir only when the impulse seized her, she began to dance about the stage, her strong, supple legs carrying her everywhere she went with ease and fluidity, her arms rippling overhead in beautiful, voluminous shapes that triggered sensations normally evoked by rushing brooks and voluptuous waterfalls. Although Mearns conformed to Duncan's limited vocabulary of movement, her port de bras is something that only a gifted, superbly-trained ballerina can do. Many of the solos continually demanded that Mearns turn on a dime on demi-point, raise one bent leg in the air and lean backward with her face tilted upward. This move was repeatedly achieved as Mearns changed directions in rapid succession. No easy feat. When the fast footwork accelerated, she whirled, skipped and flitted about the stage, executing a series of intricate steps rapidly on demi-point. Like a child dancing at the edge of the surf at the seashore, she gazed down at her feet, delighting at the movement of her splashing in the sunlit water.
Occasionally called upon to work with scarves of various sizes and weights, Mearns demonstrated an expert level of proficiency, swirling huge swatches of fabric about like an able bodied shape shifter, inventing images of fans, flowers, birds and so on out of thin air. While dancing to the Gypsy Mazurka, Op. 68, No. 2, by Chopin, she moved closer and closer to her accompanist, her strawberry-blonde hair adorned with flowers, and continued to expand her use of the space downstage. When she performed Les Funérailles by Lizst, she donned a long, dull purple coat, signaling that the solo was a dance of mourning. Toward the end of the final solo by Brahms, Waltz, Op. 39, No. 15, she tread upstage center in a slow, dainty series of turns, raising her arms overhead as she scattered rose petals in circles on the ground beneath her—a gesture using one of the standard motifs of nature primary to Duncan’s art.
In Mearns’s capable hands, “Dances of Isadora” seemed a meditation in restraint and excess in which she was alternately dynamic and static. She demonstrated a complete mastery of personal emotion in everything she did, reversing recent impressions of her as a "Dionysian" force gone awry in her work as a ballerina with the New York City Ballet. Rarely taking more than 15 seconds between each solo to rest, sometimes dancing straight through from one solo to the next, her stamina over the course of 25 minutes was astonishing. Whether in constant motion or profoundly still, her heart pulsed at the center of everything she did. At times the music was so rapturous that I wondered whether Mearns felt the urge to bust loose from the limitations of Duncan’s vocabulary and unleash her supernatural technical prowess. But no, she restrained herself, dancing first and foremost in response to the music, the striking simplicity of Duncan’s “moves” providing her with a direct means by which to express a wide range of feelings.
Many trends in art are simply a direct reaction to ideas, schools of thought or movements that preceded them. With regard to Duncan, it is worth considering the wise words of Edith Grossman, the foremost translator of Spanish into English in literary fiction in the 20th century: "There is no progress in art." Grossman suggests that a stylistic trend should not be equated with an innovation and that the criterion that makes a work of art valuable remains constant throughout the ages, whatever the medium. Duncan's theory of dance is based on personal experimentation conducted in a vacuum. Her sophistication came with celebrity and however much she traveled, she rarely developed much regard for other forms of dance or other ways of life than her own, continuing to isolate herself and to divide people in dance, rather than unify them. With this in mind, Mearns' interpretation of "Dances of Isadora" is an impressive achievement. Her willingness to steep herself in Duncan's limited vocabulary and remain faithful to the internal process of Duncan's technique was consistent throughout her entire performance. By challenging herself to tread Duncan's unique path of simplicity and intensity, Mearns demonstrated that she has learned that it is unnecessary to overdo things in order to express herself. Who would have thought that Duncan, of all dance masters, would be the one to temper the “Dionysian” emotionalism that has recently been said to riddle Mearns's work at the NYCB?
______________
*
At the turn of the century, Duncan and her brother ran freely about the streets of Paris in Grecian robes and sandals, unmolested. Soon she enchanted the Upper classes by dancing barefoot in their drawing rooms while wearing flimsy gowns, injecting a breath of fresh air and sex into in the stilted, regimented lives of people who craved novelty. She talked of the importance of unshackling oneself from the chains of tradition, materialism and sexual repression, but had no problem with the discipline required of classical music, which she used to great effect to elevate her art. By the time she had an audience and a following she was being kept in luxury by a wealthy industrialist. She fled Europe following the death of her children and headed for Communist Russia with a lover. There she founded a dance school, hoping to manifest the vision she spoke of in The Art of the Dance. She wrote to a friend, "My art was the flower of an [E]poch, but the Epoch is dead and Europe is the past. These red tunic kids are the future." But her school would fall into obscurity and fizzle out, one of many experiments that met their demise within the doomed span of the The Soviet Union. Three years later, at the time of her death, she returned to Europe and met her sudden death in a car accident.
