Strike a Pose (There’s Nothing to It), and Dance, Priestesses, Dance
<First published online in the New York Times on August 23, 2007>
Like very high priestesses of separate and ancient religious cults, the dance soloists Pilar Rioja and Roxane D’Orléans Juste have come together to share a program, “2 Styles, 1 Passion,” at Repertorio Español. You could say that each in her own way is a dancer of the old school, at least in the sense that Randall Jarrell applies to a character in his novel “Pictures From an Institution” when he says, “And if her school had been any older it would have been dead.” It has been years since I have witnessed performances so wholly devoid of spontaneity and yet so anxious to indicate great artistry.
The Mexican-born Ms. Rioja, who bears a strong resemblance to both Alicia Alonso and Agnes Moorehead and evokes their acting, combines classical Spanish idioms and Martha Graham-type expressionism. Whenever she parts and bends her knees beneath one of her full-length dresses, it is a matter of brief suspense whether she will pick up her flounces and fan her calves with them, flamenco-style, or whether she means, in the theater critic Stark Young’s famous phrase about Graham, to give birth to a cube.
The suspense is more interesting than the result: Ms. Rioja is not much of a dancer these days, whether in Hispanic or modernist mode. Much of her limited energy is applied to standing, striking poses and projecting facial expressions. Occasionally she attempts some foot-tapping zapateado, but she lacks percussive force and her rhythm tends to crumble after the first eight taps.
Her general manner is severe and affectedly intense, and she likes to point a hand or a fan straight at the audience with a fateful glare. But the most alarming effect in her vocabulary is her smile, which, suddenly flashing into place mid-dance, looks as if it has been welded there.
She dances five of her own solos, all to live musical accompaniment by five Hispanic performers. I am sorry that at Tuesday’s performance I did not realize that the third and longest was “St. Teresa’s Poem,” a response to poetry by St. Teresa de Ávila; I kept thinking Ms. Rioja was Medea preparing at great length to kill her children. The others are “Lorquianas,” “Bambera,” “Tientos-Tangos” and “Bulerías y Rumba Flamenca.” This is, the program advises us, Ms. Rioja’s 35th season at Repertorio Español; it is to be assumed that some of the previous 34 have been fresher.
Ms. D’Orléans Juste is a modern dancer in the way that New York is new. In between Ms. Rioja’s numbers, she dances three solos, respectively choreographed in 1948 by the Mexican-born José Limón (“Chaconne,” to J. S. Bach’s in D minor, danced in trousers), in 1972 by Donald McKayle (“Angelitos Negros,” music by Manuel Álvarez Maciste, danced with bare midriff and skirts), and in 1948 by Daniel Nagrin (“Spanish Dance,” a modernist evocation of flamenco, also in trousers).
Like Ms. Rioja’s dancing, Ms. D’Orléans Juste’s is posey and thoroughly short on texture. Her manner, however, is exalted, rapturous, as if lighted up by her noble calling. She does not so much dance as give a master class, sketching the choreography’s shapes, directions and gestures, but above all its feelings. A pity that, like so many modern dancers today, she performs to taped music. The best ingredient of Ms. Rioja’s program is her musicians, though both the male singers sounded far less young than they looked.
Two birds, one stone: this is a wretched program. Sometimes a bad performance makes you wish you were watching a good Ballets Trockadero imitation of it, but this is one in which the performers seemed to be doing the Trocks’ work for them.
@New York Times, 2007