Last night I saw the performance again. I paid very close attention to Fenley's 34 minute solo piece, State of Darkness, danced once again by Jonathan Porretta. (Rachel Foster danced it on Friday night.)First all of let, me say that Porretta did an extraordinary job of holding the piece together and sustaining the crowd's interest for over half an hour. And I am convinced that he brought the work as much energy and nuance as it was possible to receive. But what about the movement itself? Was it up to the challenge of Stravinsky's complexity and discord? And did the piece have any sort of compositional integrity to unify its 34 minutes? My feeling, after last night, is no.
The piece captured my attention for about the first eight minutes. "Where is this going?" I asked myself. But soon enough, as the music grew increasingly varied and complex, the energy slacked off and the movement remained rudimentary and repetitive. Porretta knows how to make the most of stasis, but the deck was simply stacked against him here.
There is much talk about the courage of Fenley, who, as both a dancer and choreographer, took on Stravinsky's high Modernist composition all by herself. Perhaps this made more sense in 1988, but nearly twenty years later it looks a bit more like hubris. This is not because she is unworthy to interpret this great master of 20th Century music; it is because of the way she interprets him. Instead of presenting it to us in a way that speaks to our current age, she attempts to capture the heroic romanticism of the period in which it was written.
Contemporaries of Fenley, such as Tharp or Morris, would never do this. Tharp's sense of irony and Morris's casualness and simplicity of tone allow them to express something decidedly contemporary when choreographing to music from the remote (or recent) past. Because of this, they never come across as pretentious conduits of dead high-culture icons like Fenley.
I ran into critic Suzanne Beal in the press room at intermission after wards and we found ourselves talking, strangely, about the virtues of Cindy Sherman. Thinking about Sherman and her take on history, Fenley's work suddenly seemed hopelessly retrograde to me.
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Jim Demetre
Artdish Editor
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posted 05-30-2007 10:56 PM
