Shakespeare’s Scottish Dame: Ambition in Motion
<First published online in the New York Times on September 7, 2007>
In a week when the New Dance Group has been in the news for a lawsuit over control of dances by its modernist choreographers, it is good that the American Dance Guild, which opened its weeklong season at the Hudson Guild Theater on Wednesday night, is offering a chance to see one of those dances.
Mary Anthony, now in her early 90s, founder and director of Mary Anthony Dance Theater in 1956 and an influential teacher, created “Lady Macbeth” back in 1948. An extended solo in two episodes, depicting Shakespeare’s Scottish dame in versions of her two main monologues, it opens with Lady M., dressed in full-length medieval gown, reacting to the news in her husband’s letter by dwelling on a few gestural ideas (“the throne,” “the crown”) with obsessive reiteration. This part of the dance reaches its conclusion when she finally takes her place on the throne, legs parted wide, breathing fast and deep.
For the second section of the solo, Lady Macbeth removes her gown without leaving the stage (revealing a dancer’s leotard beneath), is helped by a maid into a yellow nightdress, is given a candle, and at once moves into the famous sleepwalking scene. Curiously, despite the racked and brooding nature of her thoughts here, the dance becomes less obsessive, not more: the main change is in her loss of force. She places the candle on the floor, and it becomes one of her main points of focus. The solo ends, the dancer outstretched on the floor, with one last beseeching gesture toward the candle before she folds into death.
The original music and scenery for this dance are lost; Ms. Anthony reconstructed this solo in 1999, fitting it to music that was composed decades after the 1948 premiere, Arvo Pärt’s “Fratres.” The timing is now so neat that you wonder if much choreographic revision has occurred, but “Fratres,” for all its color and atmosphere, has become so well known in other contexts that it robs “Lady Macbeth” of distinction.
Ms. Anthony’s heroine is danced with cool objectivity by Mary Ford, and Shakespeare’s character is made entirely recognizable. But not very remarkable. Since 1948, there have been Lady Macbeths — Maria Callas in Verdi’s opera, Isuzu Yamada in Kurosawa’s film “Throne of Blood,” Judi Dench in Trevor Nunn’s Royal Shakespeare Company production (recorded for television) — who have branded audiences with new insights into this character. Ms. Anthony’s, by contrast, seems merely a good study along previously established Martha Graham-type lines: a strong woman recycling a few strong gestures in her psychological fixation.
Still, this was the most authoritative work of the 10 that the American Dance Guild presented on Wednesday night. The repertory changes each night: “Lady Macbeth” will be performed again tonight, while Merce Cunningham’s “Signals” is danced by his Repertory Group apprentices at the two other performances (including tomorrow’s).
None of the dances are bad. Most, like those by Judith Moss (“Surge”) and Anne Burnidge (“Conversation Pieces”), are rather well constructed. If you were a choreography student, you would surely be commended for having made any of these; if you were a choreography teacher, you could show most of them to your students or colleagues and hope for congratulation.
In the case of Adrienne Celeste Fadjo’s “Muse (Excerpts),” the theatrical concept would give any dance college something to cluck about for days. A sculptor transforms her nude model, facing front, into white sculpture before our eyes. Meanwhile an all-female dance, more natural-looking and more artistically complex than this statue, proceeds stage left. Unfortunately, the actual dancing is forgettable.
All these pieces establish a climate all too well known in modern dance: studentlike; serious; worthy; mainly heavy-footed; theatrically tepid.
@New York Times, 2007