by Leigh Witchel
[Disclaimer: David and I have been friends for years.]
Sometimes, karma works out just right. David Parker paid a debt to posterity by adding work by two of his predecessors, James Waring and his teacher at Bard College, Aileen Pasloff, to The Bang Group’s chamber performance at the 92Y. He got repaid with interest: a beautifully composed evening, a shadow box of a performance filled with iridescent marbles and tumbled gemstones.
Waring was a polymath, he danced, he choreographed, he wrote, he composed, he designed costumes, he made collages. He taught at the School of American Ballet. And he worked in the mail room at Time-Life to be able to do all these things.
Quoting Pasloff, “In the 50’s his influence was felt throughout the arts . . . he had the ability to bring artists of different disciplines together. He was the founder of Dance Associates with the writer David Vaughan . . . there were classical dancers like Tanaquil LeClercq and Ruth Sobotka . . . modern dancers like Paul Taylor, Marian Sarach and Alec Rubin, composers and musicians that included John Herbert McDowell as well as the writer Edwin Denby . . . Jimmy was self-educated, but he was a mentor to many of us including David Gordon, Valda Setterfield, Toby Armour, Yvonne Rainer and Lucinda Childs. Jimmy paid for my first rehearsal studio and then took me home and fed me.”
He was one of those artists who form the warp and woof of culture rather than the surface pattern. Artists like him, those who are never famous but absolutely essential, are always in danger of disappearing from memory. They never should.
The lights rose on Waring’s “12 Objects from Tender Buttons,” created in 1972. Amber Sloan stood facing Parker, dancing as he read Gertrude Stein’s “Tender Buttons.” In monologue, it sounded like directions for mixing pigments.
Wearing ochre bell bottoms, Sloan raced in tight, angular motions to Stein’s words, and waited while prepared piano by McDowell played in a tinny uncredited recording. It turned the usual idea of dance on its head: music became stasis, and words provoked movement.
Waring’s approach to Stein was utterly different than Frederick Ashton and Lord Berners. They used her words for whimsy. “Tender Buttons” was incisive and commanding, an instruction manual of nonsense with absolute authority.
Waring moved alongside the words rather than following them. Sloan pointed her finger to her palm at the word “nothing” to close a phrase. It wasn’t mime; rather it traveled a parallel path. As Parker intoned “beautiful, beautiful, beautiful, beautiful . . .” Sloan came to the floor and the lights went out in an ending as abrupt and refreshing as a sudden burst of lemon.
Solos are easy to make, but devilish to make well. They have to elevate beyond what feels good to the choreographer. Waring made dances like a miniaturist makes a painting; tensely efficient and making sense both as technique alone, and as meaning behind the technique.
“Octandre,” to Varèse, was made in 1958 for Pasloff and reconstructed by her. Nic Petry came in as if scouting alien territory – sweeping from side to side or stamping into a crouch. The vocabulary was as academic as expressive, with hints of ballet – emboîtés and temps de flèches. Petry pointed to the sides and upwards in surprise – his location was as much of a mystery to him as to us. Reaching backwards slowly, he made it to center stage as the lights went out.
Parker’s own “Settling Scores,” a quintet to music by Morton Feldman, made perfect sense right after “Tender Buttons.” You could see the correlation in the episodic phrasing and the Pinter pauses.
At the outset, the work moved from dancers scattered across the floor like random molecules to a neat geometric square with different people at the center. Parker, known for his work with percussive dance, began the dance with tap phrases like short expostulations – queries or responses. It was an analogue for speech, with the silences having as much weight as the sounds.
Laced through this was the danse d’école, quadrilles, attitudes, turns and leaps into one another’s arms. As the piece went on the phrases were less like speech and took on their own volition; Caleb Teicher let loose in a whirling combination. Yet the relationships were still fraught. One person drummed on another’s back, but they didn’t unlock their embrace. Two others played patty cake, but got blocked at the last minute. Everyone revolved round themselves as the lights went down.
Along with the Waring solos, Parker included a duet by Pasloff. The Y also hosted a program the same weekend honoring Pasloff with dances made by and on her (including “Octandre” and “April and December” by Remy Charlip).
“Nocturne for Bob,” to Chopin, was the cleanest dance by Pasloff we saw. Two women, in pale shifts, held bouquets of daffodils, reaching and posing slowly with them as if they were floral torches. The double solo was made more spatially interesting by having the dancers at right angles to one another.
The piece worked better in a mixed evening than it did the night before in the Pasloff evening. Known as a dancer and beloved as a teacher and mentor (she headed Bard’s dance department for 26 years), she wasn’t really a choreographer, at least from the pieces on view. Waring’s dances had not only narrative, but choreographic design. Pasloff’s works felt like Isadora Duncan’s scarf dances or Anna Pavlova’s poppies: recital works concocted by dancers to give them something to perform.
Parker’s “Running With Scissors” was another quintet with percussive work and a molecular feel, but in bare feet rather than tap shoes. After stop and go phrases in silence, Stravinsky’s “Piano-Rag-Music” began. The vocabulary held but the phrasing settled into Stravinsky’s, which had its own kind of starting and stopping . . . but without ever really stopping.
Parker has a bunhead streak – besides tap, he used neat ballet vocabulary, tight beats and soaring jumps. “Running With Scissors” also stopped abruptly and you never knew when it was going to end. As in the “Piano-Rag-Music,” the close was a tasty surprise.
“Enough,” from 2004 to bombastic Rachmaninoff, showed a side of Parker that is utterly his own, his nutty sense of humor. It parodied the passions of the music by taking it with rubber-chicken literalness. A phrase would thud to a close and Parker would punctuate it with people grasping hands bang on the last note. If that wasn’t enough to tip you off, Jeffrey Kazin gave pained ballerina face as he suffered, suffered, suffered. Parker’s attitude to Rachmaninoff in “Enough” recalled more than anything Marilyn Monroe and Tom Ewell in “The Seven Year Itch.”
The evening finished with “Song & Dance,” a solo for Teicher that Parker made to Mozart’s “Rondo alla Turca.” Well, it wasn’t actually to it, it conjured the Mozart from Teicher’s stamps, taps, claps and moves as if he was making up the phrases as he went along. The short, wry piece boxed up the diorama of an evening neatly: rhythm, narrative and humor collided and finally came to rest.
copyright © 2019 by Leigh Witchel
Under the Skin – Redux – January 12, 2019
The Bang Group
92Y Harkness Dance Center, New York, NY
Cover: Amber Sloan and David Parker in “12 Objects from Tender Buttons.” Photo © Elizabeth Schneider-Cohen.
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