The Play’s the Thing (Some Thoughts on “Dancing Henry V,” Jeremy Wade, and the end of the NYCB Season)

Do you ever go to a performance not really knowing what to expect, essentially unprepared? This doesn’t usually happen to me—I like to read up on what I’m about to see, to prepare my eyes and ears. But just recently I let myself go a bit, and that may be part of the reason why one particular piece, the revival of David Gordon’s “Dancing Henry V” (performed at Montclair State University last week) hit me so powerfully, right between the eyes.

In a way, I was more than prepared. I knew one of the dancers, Robert La Fosse, with whom I serve on the committee for a dance award. And I’m a great admirer of another member of the cast, Valda Setterfield, from seeing her in videos of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company in the sixties. I had also heard the music (William Walton’s incidental music for the Lawrence Olivier film of “Henry V”), albeit long ago, In an added twist, Walton also happens to have been married to my aunt, Susana, who died not long ago.

So I was both prepared and unprepared. As the performance began, the stage was covered with artfully scattered detritus: a ladder, rubber balls, doors, and other random stuff, which the seven players busily cleared away. Valda Setterfeld climbed atop a ladder contraption (later used as an outlook, a stairway, a platform) and began to clarify the “rules” of the show: she explained that this was a one-hour version of Shakespeare’s four-hour play, that she would perform the role of “[David] Gordon’s chorus,” that the characters would wear rugby uniforms– striped shirts and black shorts—for no particular reason, and that she would periodically be commenting on the play’s underlying themes. She clarified that any judgments she voiced were not hers, but David Gordon’s (who is her husband). Then the dancers returned, holding placards with their names on them. And the action began, with the scene in which Prince Hal rejects his old friend and partner in crime, Falstaff. The dancers walked, wrestled, played drunk, and cavorted in various ways. It amounted to a kind of simple dance-mime, very plain, somewhat reminiscent of the way in which Mark Morris often comments on both music and words in his dances, as in the recent, stunning, “Socrates.” But here, the movement was freer, more pedestrian, less consciously choreographed, more matter-of-fact. Each dancer did it in his or her own way; some were more extroverted, some more natural, and some imbued each movement with a more classical beauty.

And yet, for all this plain-spokenness, there were sudden moments of incredible poetry. Three of them stick in my mind. One is Robert La Fosse’s face as he peers through a window—actually, a rather roughly hewn cardboard cutout of a window—at the figure of his dying friend Falstaff, played by Setterfield. She lies on a table, covered with a blanket. Sitting up slightly, Setterfield points out that in the play, Prince Hal refuses to acknowledge the dying Falstaff, pointing out, archly, that “no-one is more moral than a born-again moralist.” But the archness of the meta-commentary is belied by La Fosse’s face, which is rent with guilt and sadness, and by Walton’s sorrowful dirge. La Fosse, a great dancer-actor who performed with both NYCB and ABT, as well as on Broadway, has a face that can express six or seven emotions at once, and leave a clear impression on the eye, like the French actor and mime Jean-Louis Barrault. (You should see La Fosse in the role of Drosselmeyer in NYCB’s “Nutcracker.” Unforgettable.)

Another moment: as the English soldiers approach France (upon which Hal has declared war) by ship, across the English Channel, Gordon creates a most stunning image. Three dancers, each standing on a blanket, are pulled across the stage. They slide, smoothly, almost in slow motion, hands on their hearts, eyes fixed on the horizon. Out of next to nothing (standing figures, a blanket, a person to pull), Gordon creates an image of astonishing beauty, abetted by Walton’s stirring music. (If only movies today had scores like this!)

And the third: Knowing that she may soon be forced to marry Hal, Princess Catherine of Valois (played by Karen Graham) asks her lady in waiting (Setterfield, again) to teach her a few words of English, “just in case.” As Setterfield and Graham embark on their English lesson, they do a little courtly dance. Meanwhile, in the voiceover, Catherine repeats the words for hand, finger, nails (“noylse”), skin, elbow, etc. As she adds each new word to the sequence, she starts again from the beginning  (in the style of “The Twelve Days of Christmas”). How happy Gordon must have been when he heard this! For the accumulated words are phrases, easily translatable into phrases of movement. The dance includes unobtrusive allusions to each of the body parts mentioned; as the list of words gets longer, so does the phrase of movement. In a way, it’s reminiscent of Trisha Brown’s solo “Accumulation.” The voiceover, meanwhile, is a clip from Olivier’s 1944 film, with René Asherson in the role of Princess Catherine. It manages to be both touching and artificial, with English actors playing French characters pretending to speak broken English. And yet, when combined with Walton’s lilting incidental music, and Gordon’s simple, mimetic dance, it all conspires to create a multilayered, touchingly innocent scene.

Therein, to me, lies the greatness of this piece. Yes, it is a savvy commentary on unnecessary war (in the play, Prince Hal invades France mainly because he is miffed with the French king). Yes, it is a call to consciousness—at one point, the Chorus (Setterfield) points out that to hope for one’s own son’s survival in war, one must hope for the death of someone else’s son. This is noble and true, though (intentionally) at odds with the patriotic purpose of Olivier’s film of Henry V, which was made during the Second World War. This repurposing of Olivier’s film (and Shakespeare’s patriotic play) in what is essentially an anti-war piece, creates an interesting tension. But beyond the message, as a work of theatre, Gordon’s ingeniousness lies in the layering of its various elements, which range from the sublime to the completely mundane: Olivier’s elegant, high-pitched voice; Shakespeare’s lush, potent language; Walton’s delicate, refined music; the actor/dancers’ dignified pantomime and simple, pleasing patterns around the stage; the flimsy sets, reminiscent of family theatricals; the oddly sporty rugby uniforms. When one reads in the program that all the props and clothes are taken from Gordon’s other shows, one thinks, “of course!” The whole performance feels intimate and unassuming, like a show put on by a very, very talented, clever family of theatre folk in their living room. Somehow, it just works. It makes you want to re-read the play, re-watch the movie. And see more work by Mr. Gordon.

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What a contrast with the Heather Kravas / Jeremy Wade shared evening I had seen earlier in the week at Danspace! About the Kravas piece, the less said the better. But I was there mainly to see Jeremy Wade; I’d caught a performance a few years back, and was intrigued. He is a remarkable performer, able to twist his body and expression into the most contorted, tortured, almost inhuman shapes, distorting joints and exuding a hysteria verging on possession. A talent like this deserves to be put to good use. Alas, Wade’s “Fountain” in no way extends his range and instead distracts with pointless acts of faux-naïf audience participation. The piece opens with Wade breathlessly describing the space of St. Mark’s Church, its gray carpets, its stained-glass windows, its lofty altar (“whoa!” he screams). Yes, we get the point, it’s a special place. Then he asks the audience to come forward in a close circle, after which he begins one of his tormented solos, falling hard against the floor, twisting his torso against his lower body as if to tear himself asunder, breathing laboriously, moaning. His eyes are wild; he stares from one uncomfortable onlooker to another. But, powerful as this is, the solo is not very different much from the one I saw a few years ago: the same raw energy, the same anguish. No new ideas. After he recomposed himself, Wade, back form the Underworld, asked the audience to walk to the walls of the church and hum, the better to feel the communal experience in this sacred space. This feel-good moment had no discernible connection to what had come before. Was it meant to be taken at face value? I’m not sure. The audience embarrassedly complied. So much effort and intensity, and all for this? Further proof (as if any were needed) that content, ideas, and form do matter.

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The New York City Ballet fall season ended with several performances of Balanchine’s evening-length “Jewels,” “Square Dance,” and “La Sonnambula,” and Christopher Wheeldon’s pas de deux “Liturgy.” (The very last performance of the season was a farewell to the much-loved veteran dancer Charles Askegard.) Regarding “Liturgy,” all I can say is that though it probably relies a little too much on atmospherics and on Arvo Pärt’s quivering score for its spiritual overtones, it also perfectly captures Wendy Whelan’s soulful presence, the way no movement is ever empty or devoid of meaning and thought. As she traces semaphores with her arms, tilting her head back to peer up at some kind of divine presence, her imagination fills the theatre, and we see what she sees.

On the evening I saw “Square Dance” (Oct. 5), this most buoyant of ballets was joyfully (and energetically) danced by Megan Fairchild and Anthony Huxley, and a strong, ebullient corps (Troy Schumacher, Lauren King, and Devin Alberda were especially notable). Fairchild looked downright luminous, her feet as twinkly and her jumps as sprightly as one could ever desire. She also has a playful femininity that works perfectly here. Huxley, in the adagio pas de deux and male solo, was quietly precise, searingly attentive. It’s interesting to see him building the blocks of this enigmatic solo. Now, he just needs to let some madness creep in. I finally caught a performance of “La Sonnambula” with Janie Taylor as the Sleepwalker, a role she débuted last season. She looked truly otherworldly, with her empty eyes and weightless arms (just like the “rag doll” variation in “Episodes.” Her bourrés, backward, sideways, and forward–as if blown by a wind–could still be a touch smoother, creamier. And what a pleasure it was to see Jennie Somogyi in the role of the Coquette. She has the most beautiful shoulders in the business, and how she uses them! They can express sensuality, womanliness, deception, and anger, depending on how she angles them. Another dancer we don’t see enough of, Jenifer Ringer, brought just the right perfume to “Emeralds”; her stroll about the stage in the “walking” pas de deux looked like just that, a quiet walk in the fragrant night. Ringer forces nothing, letting the music, and the stories it tells her, carry her along. Equally natural, Charles Askegard’s turn as the cavalier in Diamonds (to Sara Mearns’ queen) was a typical Askegard performance: relaxed, gentlemanly, secure. He was wholly unperturbed by Mearns’ stormy, full-out dancing; with him, she could be herself. At the end of the ballet, as kneeled to kiss her hand, the two of them shared a quiet, almost teary glance. As Balanchine famously said, when you put two people together onstage, there’s always a story.

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