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Michael
Clark Company: Stravinsky Project
31 October to 10 November
Philip
Moore piano
Andrew West piano
Michael Clark Company
Britten
Sinfonia
Jurjen
Hempel conductor
The
Guardian 4 stars ****
Judith Mackrell, 5 November
2007
I Do
is the final work in Michael Clark's trilogy of Stravinsky ballets, and
with this setting of the monumental score Les Noces, he demonstrates just
how profoundly the project has been all about the music. Visually, Clark
makes his point by prefacing the new work with a devotional short film
of Stravinsky conducting in old age. But much more significant is the
tribute Clark pays to Stravinsky by allowing the latter's music to push
his own vocabulary into such new and exploratory terrain.
On the one hand, I Do clamours
with references to the history of Les Noces. The scene is set with all
40 singers of the choir ranked on the sides of the stage, a human geometry
that is reminiscent of Nijinska's first staging of the ballet in 1923.
But as Clark elaborates on that geometry with his own 12 dancers, the
fiercely sustained patterns of his choreography seem to wrestle with the
choreography on fresh, visionary terms. Groups of bodies are slotted into
Rubik's Cubes of dazzling choreographic complexity, lines of jumping,
pumping dancers criss-cross the stage on a mechanistic counterpoint. Against
this driven backdrop, solos appear like rebellious gestures of freedom,
with classically shaped phrases pierced by studs of shiningly disruptive
detail, or blurred into sluttishness by gestures of languid sensuality.
Even
though the work offers no narrative, Clark never loses sight of the original
libretto, in which a peasant bride is led to her wedding as though to
a death sentence. It's not just the way he contains the dancers within
the collective machinery of the group, it's also the carefully judged
surrealism of the staging. At the beginning of the piece, Kate Coyne,
Clark's symbolic bride, is helped out of a giant, hollow, brightly painted
Russian doll - the prison of her childhood. She ends the piece muffled
inside a woven replica of the same babushka doll, from which only a triangle
of her frozen face can be seen.
I Do
closes an evening in which Clark's entire Stravinsky trilogy is performed.
Musically, it's an extraordinary event, but choreographically it's another
landmark. The quality of Clark's invention is still uneven - the luminous
austerity of O appears far more focused than Mmm ..., which seems to have
been drained of its original demolition energy. Yet as an extended, exposing
showcase of Clark's recent output, it demonstrates how fully the former
enfant terrible has become master of his formidable talent.
The
Times 3 stars ***
Debra Craine, 6 November, 2007
Michael Clark has been pursuing
Stravinsky ballet scores for a long time. In 1992 he created Mmm . . .,
his response to The Rite of Spring; two years later came O, set to Apollo.
Now, thanks to the three-year Stravinsky Project at the Barbican, Clark
has been able to complete his trilogy with I Do, set to Les Noces. What
would the famously maverick choreographer do with Stravinsky’s monumental
choral evocation of a Russian peasant wedding? The answer is to honour
its history by completely rewriting its present.
The first thing you notice is
the New London Chamber Choir divided on either side of the stage, (the
four soloist singers are in the pit). The choreography, set on 12 dancers,
takes place in front of and between the two halves of the choir. Clark’s
typically sensuous flair and agility with the classical language are here
showcased, but so too is a heightened desire to think in patterns (as
Nijinska did in her 1923 original), a tendency to couple dancers in the
traditional manner, and a compulsion to rebel against form whenever possible.
Like the music, the choreography possesses an atavistic fever and ritual
elegance (though no obvious narrative imperative), but, where Stravinsky
is serious, Clark indulges in the kind of provocative humour that has
always set him apart from his more sober-minded colleagues. The bride
(represented by wondrous Kate Coyne) emerges from a giant matryoshka doll
and when she’s attired for her nuptials she’s encased like a sausage in
what looks a giant knitted condom with bows, although I imagine it’s meant
to be the doll’s wedding finery. For all his purist instincts Clark the
prankster is still very much alive.
The programme also includes
O (serene playing from the Britten Sinfonia here), a work now more amorphous
but no less shining in its classical exposition and Cunningham-esque distillations;
and Mmm . . ., the evening’s only disappointment. Despite the pleasure
to be had in seeing Clark’s choreography forced into a more rhythmic certitude,
his response to The Rite of Spring now lacks the searing self-destructive
urges it displayed so convincingly in 1992.
The
Telegraph
Mark Monahan, 5 November 2007
You know you've witnessed something
special on stage when 25 minutes whizz by with the speed of a lightning
bolt and you sorely want to see it again, immediately.
Such was the impression left
by I Do, the third, final, all-new part of Michael Clark's three-year
Stravinsky project.
Set to Les Noces, and performed
at last with the earlier O (to Apollo) and Mmm… (to The Rite of Spring),
it serves both as a pungent climax to the trilogy and further confirmation
that Clark, 45, the former post-punk, bum-flashing, prosthetic-penis-wearing
enfant terrible of British dance, has matured into a choreographer of
rare brilliance.
Much as the four-part choral
ballet Les Noces (1923) was in fact a startling wedding between the wild
folk music of Stravinsky's homeland and the furious rhythmic urgency of
his modernist leanings, Clark's piece unites both his balletic training
and contemporary bent, and the formal meticulousness of O (an elegant
but restrained piece that suffers by comparison with Balanchine's) and
the primal energy of the glorious Mmm…?.
I Do is at once dark, celebratory
and sexually charged, as much a standoff between male and female as a
coming together.
There's a quote or two from earlier
in the triptych, as well as those trademark swivelling pelvises and flashes
of design-mischief (the bride emerges at the start from a huge Russian
doll, and appears at the end in a ludicrous full-length knitted cosy that's
at once sugar-sweet and decidedly phallic).
But the overriding sense is
of music flowing powerfully through the dancers (Melissa Hetherington
always the standout), of the small troupe grandly filling the stage, and
of a thrilling momentum building to a luminous, witty payoff.
Throughout the evening, the
music-making – all live – was excellent, with conductor Jurjen Hempel
coaxing silky string-playing from the Britten Sinfonia in Apollo, sharp
pianism in Rite, and sterling work all round in Les Noces. Close your
eyes and it could have been a concert performance. But my, what you'd
have been missing out on.
Does the new piece surpass Mmm…?
Not quite.
There's a giddy physical and
spiritual joy and variety to Clark's take on Rite (first seen in 1992,
and polished since last year's reworking) that marks it out as the most
seductive of the three.
But do I think that Clark is
now beyond doubt one of Britain's most important living creators of dance?
I do.
The
Financial Times
Clement Crisp, 5 November 2007
© The Financial Times
Ltd 2007
During the past three years, Michael
Clark has produced his versions of three dance-scores by Stravinsky. His
account of Apollo came in 2005, disguised as O . Last
year brought Mmm , which was his response to The Rite of
Spring . Last week gave us I do , which is his view of Les
Noces .
A significant fact in assessing
these Clark stagings, now presented as a triple bill at the Barbican,
is that each score boasts a strong dramatic armature: the birth of a god
and his realisation of his destiny; a tribal ritual that must produce
a culminating human sacrifice; Russian peasantry contemplating the old
village traditions that lead to marriage. This internal logic, this cogency,
Clark ignores.
He is most successful with
Apollo , whose music he explores in terms of clear, clean dance,
unfussed in its lines, often responsive to Stravinskian rhythm. I would
like, though, to see it danced with more elegance, more assurance, than
by his present cast, whose abilities do not inspire greatest admiration
anywhere in the evening.
Mmm , set to Stravinsky's
two-piano reduction of the score, makes little sense to me. The cast,
oddly clad in plastic skirts and with bits of tinsel stuck on their noses,
scurry and dip over the stage. The scenery is clever (mirrored panels
that revolve) and an active participant. The sacrificial dance is there,
with a topless danseuse and not too much exhaustion, but it comes as a
gratuitous act, dictated by music that has otherwise been neglected and
is bleached by the two-piano reduction.
This season's I do
toys with Stravinsky, and has the gall to open with film of the composer
conducting the closing pages of Firebird . The Noces
score is splendidly played and sung under Jurjen Hempel's baton (the bass
Julian Close tremendous in the closing scene), and perfectly establishes
Stravinsky's kaleidoscope of tradition and catchphrases, that folkloric
wealth of text and song. Clark seems to disregard every indication of
feeling and immutable social behaviour. His dances hint at couples united
and, of course, there is the unavoidable jokeyness, with the Bride emerging
from a Matrioshka egg, and a few bouquets flung into the audience. But
as with Rite , Clark skates and skitters over the gravity and
urgency central to these scores: here is lightweight stuff, confetti blowing
along in the wake of massive forces, glorious music.
The
Independent 3 stars ***
By Zoë Anderson, 6 November
2007
In I Do, Michael Clark's new
version of the Stravinsky ballet Les Noces, the music looms over the choreography.
The bold, plain set design, by Clark and Steven Scott, puts the chorus
on both sides of the stage. Between the two groups, a long catwalk pushes
away into backstage darkness.
Everything is literally framed
by the singing. While this heightens the effect of the extraordinary score,
with its churning, chanted rhythms, it also overshadows Clark's choreography.
I Do is the culmination of
Clark's Stravinsky Project, a three-year collaboration with the Barbican.
In one sense, it sees the unpredictable Clark back on track. One of the
finest dancers of his generation, Clark made his name in the 1980s with
a series of splashy punk spectacles. The mix included wild theatricality,
bared buttocks and Clark's own gift for movement, and won him an ardent,
loyal fanbase. Heroin addiction and a series of comebacks followed.
With the Stravinsky Project,
Clark has gone some way past a comeback, building a long-term programme
of new and revised works. He brought back his versions of Apollo –
under the title O – and The Rite of Spring, renamed Mmm..., framing
them with dances to punk music.
Those non-Stravinsky dances
have been the strongest element of this Project. The dancers stalked through
their linear poses, lucid and cool. For this last programme, Clark puts
all three Stravinsky works together.
The new I Do is the best of
them. Clark cuts between clear, abstract dancing and some quirky appearances
for the bride and groom. The bride makes her first appearance out of a
Russian doll, her shoulders wrapped in a bobbly knitted shawl. By the
time she and her groom are united, standing side by side in the distance,
the shawl has grown to something like a woolly mummy-case, encasing her
completely. It's odd enough to be striking.
The rest of the cast wear beige
body-tights, patterned with shiny markings. Crossed lines around their
calves echo the peasant costumes for the first version of this ballet,
choreographed by Nijinska in 1923. Throughout the Project, Clark has been
echoing and reinventing the past, well aware of other versions of these
scores.
He keeps the rest of the cast
moving through stark poses. His care for line, for clean articulation,
gives I Do most of its force: there's some of the intent of the earlier
punk dances. What it lacks is cumulative power. As Stravinsky's rhythms
build and build, Clark breaks off and starts again.
One sequence starts with women
lying at their partners' feet. Pulling them upright, the men fold down
to the floor: the whole couple are shifted through 90 degrees. There's
a long-limbed precision to that tilt, a lancing strength to the way the
women finish the phrase.
Clark has fine dancers, but
performances are variable. In that 90-degree tilt, some of these couples
swing coolly from one pose to the next; others make a few adjustments
on the way. The music rings out powerfully, performed by the Britten Sinfonia
and the New London Chamber Choir conducted by Jurjen Hempel.
The performance of O is strangely
pallid. Clark responds to Stravinsky's stripped-down music with plainer
dancing – you have to wait for Mmm... for the toilet-seat headdresses
and Hitler-moustached heroines. Minimalist is one thing, but bland is
another. In this revival of O, Clark casts Ashley Chen in his own old
role. As a star with the Merce Cunningham company, Chen was a dancer of
explosive force. Here, he's reduced to correctness. Mmm..., danced to
an oddly tinkly piano version of The Rite of Spring, has more bite.
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