The weekend: “We scattered til our head hurt”
Mercy, mercy, did we scatter this weekend! We scattered til our head hurt, we scattered til Michael Chabon uttered the last sentences of his lecture Sunday night, we scattered back in time as we watched Mary Oslund’s Bete Perdue, we even scattered at the now-only-newish Bond flick Quantum of Solace. The latter was hard. How many words were actually in that script, anyway? 500 or so? If that? Dear reader, we scattered anyway. We were scattering fools.
The return of Bete Perdue: I went to opening night of the re-dance of Mary Oslund’s spring show. I’m in favor of re-dances, by the way. For those who haven’t seen the choreography, which let’s face it, is 99.999 percent of the metro area, it’s a chance to come in from the cold. Those of us who have seen it get another look — and memory being what it is (a miracle, sure, but so totally unreliable), we need it.
I posted on Bete Perdue before, so I’ll just add a few thoughts: 1) I thought Oslund had changed it some, eliminating some longer solos, replacing them with more group dancing. The eagle-eyed Martha Ullman West said it was longer by 10 minutes, but I didn’t clock it. 2) Friday night it might have been danced more crisply. My operant theory: Go to the last night of a local dance performance, and you will miss opening night jitters/mishaps and second night emotional troughs. 3) I noticed the Obo Addy-Katie Griesar music more than I had before, and I mean that in a good way. I understood it as an organizing principle of the dance, and enjoyed its subtlety and rhythms (Obo!). 4) Individual dancers didn’t respond directly to those rhythms, but the dance as a whole did. Oslund moved our eyes around the stage more or less quickly by the rhythm of her animation of groupings of dancers. A very sophisticated effect. 5) The two amuse-bouche that opened the program were captivating — funny, quick, then deeply felt. Made me want a meal of small plates. Here’s the Catherine Thomas review on OregonLive.
Let us solace ourselves with loves: Quantum of Solace is James Bond, still in love, still suffering for the loss of his beloved Vesper in Casino Royale, and doesn’t that Daniel Craig make a good brooding and thus doubly dangerous Bond? Sure he does. But the movie is SO twitchy with action scenes, Craig’s face is so passive, that I yearned for just a touch of Roger Moore’s insouciance in the face of danger and attractive women. Please, sir, just one bad pun? For old times’ sake? By the way the Proverb from which the line at the top of the item was taken (Proverbs 7:18, Scatter is so biblical) is about a young foolish man taken in by a “strange woman” and it doesn’t end well for Bond, er, the young man: “For she hath cast down many wounded: yea, many strong men have been slain by her. /Her house is the way to hell, going down to the chambers of death.” O, boy…
Chabon on families (his): Speaking of biblical injunctions, novelist Michael Chabon declared his position early in his talk at Congregation Beth Israel Sunday. “I really can’t stand the God of Abraham,” he said. He was talking specifically about circumcision (in a very amusing way), but what he was really talking about was the modern family and its contentments.
His lecture was sweet and funny and autobiographical, pausing to take in the usual subjects that bedevil parents, especially fathers — the way they so easily are reduced to walking cliche machines, for example. Chabon has four kids and they provided the material for the lecture, they taught the lessons, they inspired the fear and occasional melancholy and contentment he talked about. My favorite line: “Children collapse time and space around them.” The story he told to illustrate this was about his daughter Sophie’s Bas Mitzvah: In the full excitement and flush of ritual, he told her, “This is our life happening and it is happening right now.” Children are an invitation into the Right Now, and what I took from Chabon is that in the Right Now, there aren’t so many regrets.
My second favorite line came during the Q&A, when someone asked him where he started his novels, beginning, middle or end. “I start at the beginning, and that’s as far as I ever get.”
Congregation Beth Israel has a full schedule of lectures as part of its 150th year celebration, and Scatter colleague David Sarasohn is right in the thick of it. We hereby offer our Scatter thanks to the Congregation and to him!
November 24th, 2008 at 8:13 pm
Eagle-eyed I may be Barry, at least that’s what i strive for, but I’m not dead certain Oslund added ten minutes to Bete Perdue; I didn’t clock it either. On the other hand, it felt like ten more minutes and that’s not good. I thought the first time around the piece was damn near perfect, taut, elegant–my God is her movement elegant these days. This time, some awkwardness and aggression had been added, an unnecessary and jarring ingredient, like dumping tabasco sauce in a light, delicate veal stew. I too heard the music in new ways, making me think Oslund was using music in much the way Balanchine did–the dance is a visualization of it.
November 24th, 2008 at 9:14 pm
Aggression, I’m not sure. I noticed some “spasms” I don’t remember, enough to constitute a signal of sorts. The one in my head the most is a sudden shake by Rinda Chambers. And now that I think about it, some new collisions. Which could read as “aggression” I suppose. The intricate unison movements didn’t seem quite as crisp to me as before, and they are crucial to the dance — unison, but danced in the moment by each performer, and so each movement, each dancer, a little different, and so conveying something, at some level, a little different. How fragile these dances are!
November 25th, 2008 at 8:01 am
With Oslund’s choreography, I’m usually captivated by the whole–the ensemble work, the pairings, the pairings of pairings–rather than the work of any single dancer. That was true on Sunday night, but my focus also kept gravitating toward Keely McIntyre who captured Mary’s gestures in exquisite detail and with such precision that I felt like I was seeing her familiar vocabulary afresh. I’m still processing other observations.
November 25th, 2008 at 9:49 am
If I assembled my all-star lineup of Oslund dancers over the past two decades(!), McIntyre would be in it — precision and detail, yes, and she also has quickness, power and that essential, perhaps unteachable, kinetic intelligence that solves movement problems at the micro level and then knits those solutions into the movement phrase and the dance as a whole. I wish I’d seen it again on Sunday night (but then I would have missed Chabon…)
November 25th, 2008 at 6:36 pm
OK. We have official confirmation from Mary Oslund herself that Bete Perdue is the same length this time as last time — though she added some more movement, she eliminated some still spots to compensate.
November 25th, 2008 at 9:13 pm
And I for one missed those still spots; eliminating them changed the emotional tone. I have duly apologized, in case y’all are wondering, to the artist for thinking she’d lengthened the piece.
November 25th, 2008 at 9:20 pm
Ms. Oslund seems genuinely unruffled by comments about her dances at this point, one more thing I admire about her! Wish it was dancing again THIS weekend so I could clear up some of these things in my head!
November 26th, 2008 at 9:26 am
The piece was also missing Eric Nordstrom this time around. With seven dancers instead of eight, Mary had to distribute his part among the others. I think I counted four dancers who were being Eric at one time or another. But a few years ago it would have been almost impossible to find a dancer who had any time off stage. Mary’s work of late has shifted to more manageable clusters of trios and duets, at least IMO. I remember never being able to take in all of what was happening on the stage because there were often 8 dancers doing 8 different things.
November 26th, 2008 at 9:54 am
I was missing Eric Nordstrom as it happens–he’s such a fluid dancer. But I’d like to say that at both the earlier performance and this most recent “revised” one I was extremely impressed by Jim McGinn, couldn’t in fact take my eyes off him. I too admire Ms. Oslund’s attitude about critical discourse–she has always encouraged it, but with true artistic integrity, listens carefully then does what she does. That’s as it should be it seems to me.
November 26th, 2008 at 10:31 am
Right, thanks, I should have mentioned that, Jeff. Going from 8 to 7 makes it a “new” dance in many ways, just by itself. I don’t know about the “population” distribution on the stage in Bete Perdue v. previous dances.
I think in the past, yes, every dancer onstage was engaged in something, and if you were following this trio, you were missing that duet, though eventually they would collide and re-form. I think that still happens, but Mary is leading us around the stage by the way and timing with which she animates each “clump” or solo. And so it feels more “controlled” — though if you resist her suggestion and keep following the dancers she has led you away from, they are still doing something interesting.
I ascribe the “total dancing” approach to the influence of Merce Cunningham on Oslund, and that helps me think about it and relax as it happens. But, then again, I could be all wrong…
November 26th, 2008 at 11:00 am
Jeff, thanks for the insight on the redistribution of parts from eight to seven. I spotted Eric Nordstrom in the audience on Sunday night, but didn’t connect that he should have been on stage! It probably needn’t be said, but your lighting was, as always, brilliant and illuminating — and I’m not using those adjectives in their narrowest and most literal senses.
March 4th, 2010 at 10:23 pm
[...] between bat mitzvah and bas mitzvah, Amen and Omeyn, ShabBAT and SHAbbes. See also Sephardi. …Art Scatter Blog Archive The weekend: We scattered til …The story he told to illustrate this was about his daughter Sophie’s Bas Mitzvah: In the full [...]