Straight From The Arts

Random thoughts about watching and working in the arts, from HMS Media co-founder/executive producer Scott Silberstein

August 26, 2011

May The Force (of Dance) Be With You

I'm going to connect dance to "Star Wars" in a just a couple of easy moves, and tell you why I love endlessly watching them both.

I was thirteen when I went on my first date. "Star Wars" was all the rage -- this was when there was just "Star Wars," the first film, no Yoda, no Episode numbers, just "Star Wars." It was everywhere. So when working up the nerve to ask out the girl of my grade school dreams, I figured, what's more romantic than "Star Wars?" I'd already seen it four times, and couldn't wait for another opportunity. So my dad drove Tracy Green and me to the Showcase Cinemas, and in my nervousness I excitedly blurted out that this was going to be my fifth time seeing this movie. “Why would anyone want to see a movie five times,” she said. It wasn't even a question, it was a statement, of the, "Are you insane?" variety, and I knew I was already in trouble. She saw my passion for THE GREATEST MOVIE EVER MADE as a fatal geek flaw. I was doomed.

Had I had a little more moxie at the time, I might have retorted, “What do you mean, 'how could see this movie five times?' How could you not?” I mean, come on, when it comes to good times in a movie theater, you can’t do much better than the original “Star Wars." Fortunately my equally geeked-out dad loved “Star Wars” every bit as much as I did, and of the fourteen times I saw it during its first run, fully half of those screenings I shared with my dad (and sometimes my mom and sister, too). This was back in the days when movies only ran in a couple of theaters at a time, for months on end. “Star Wars” played in theaters for nearly a year and a half, so there was ample time to go back and catch another screening. My dad and I would always challenge each other to find something in this screening that we didn’t see in the last one, and “Star Wars” being one of the more richly imagined film worlds of all time, there was always something new. I’d jump up in my seat when I’d catch a new detail – a pair of tall spindly legs walking across the frame during the scenes on Tatooine, for example (how I could have missed that a 15-foot tall spider-legged alien had just walked in front of the camera?), or the dice that hung from the top of the Millennium Falcon cockpit, or the stormtrooper who conks his head on a security door, or… well, the list seemed endless.

I still love seeing movies, TV shows, plays, musicals, live music acts and dance pieces more than once (a good thing, too, because seeing shows more than once is something of an occupational hazard when you produce arts television for a living). If repeated viewings of movies and TV shows offer the opportunity to discover new things, you can imagine all the new discoveries to be had when you return to see something live for a second time. No two performances of any live show are ever the same – ever. That’s just as true of “Mamma Mia” as it is of an improvised set at The Second City. Live is live, and it’s never completely repeatable, even if it's tightly scripted, directed or choreographed.

Last night, at Night Three of The Chicago Dancing Festival at the Auditorium Theatre, the first half of the program was made up of three pieces I’d already seen, primarily because they were all by Chicago companies who appear on our stages regularly. Hubbard Street Dance Chicago has been doing Jiri Kylian’s “Petite Mort” for a decade or so, and because dancers’ careers are only so long, the cast of characters has changed in that time. Whether it’s a new James Bond, a new Hamlet or a new Doctor Who, you change the performer and you’re going to change everything. Part of the fun of seeing a dance company multiple times is seeing the different ways they relate to each other, night-to-night and year-to-year. I saw U2 at Solider Field a few weeks ago, and having seen them many times live and on film, I am constantly moved by the way the guys in the band take care of each other during every show, offering all kinds of support not only through their performances, but by a look here, a pat on the back there, even a kiss on the forehead. I felt that kind of support going on with this group of Hubbard Street dancers. “Petite Mort” is one of several pieces that Kylian set to Mozart, and it’s the second one Hubbard Street’s performed. The first, “Sechs Tanze,” is more overtly wacky and playful, and I’ll not only never forget how much I loved Hubbard Street’s rendition, I’ll also never forget how much I didn’t like it when seeing another well-known dance company (which shall remain nameless). How could that be? Same piece, same moves, same music, same costumes – could the performance really be that different? You bet. True to the Chicago style of art, Hubbard Street knows how to be about the piece more than about itself, and goes where the piece needs it to go, not where it thinks it will get people to like it. That’s a much better idea, because when you go actively seeking approval, it’s often harder to get. Hubbard Street knows how to inhabit a piece rather than make a piece inhabit them, and I always had that feeling but it took seeing another company do a work I’d seen them do for me to really get it. “Petite Mort,” a more sly, mysterious sensual work, requires a group of performers who are all willing to surrender themselves to the feel of the piece for it to work. There is no room for showing off at the expense of the choreography or fellow dancers, and whether you’re U2, making it more about the songs than the band, or Hubbard Street, making it more about the dance than the dancers, it’s powerfully romantic to watch artists in that state of sublime surrender.

River North Dance Chicago took the stage next, offering another performance of Charles Moulton’s “Nine Person Precision Ball Passing,” which we first saw in the festival Tuesday night. When you’ve got the word “Precision” in the title, you might imagine that this is one piece that’s going to be close to the same every time it’s done. Not so. I learned that River North’s Tuesday performance was one of a tiny few in the thirty-one year history of the piece (which has been performed by many other companies and as many as 60 ball-passers at a time) that no balls were dropped. I mean, literally, no balls were dropped; this piece requires each dancer, who never moves from their tic tac toe configuration, to skillfully and artfully engage in a series of choreographed actions in which differently colored balls are passed and tossed among the group in every way you can imagine, and then some. Last night, three balls were dropped (although the last one with such wonderful timing that it almost looked like a playful piece of punctuation to conclude the performance). And you know what? Even though it was performed less perfectly, I liked it more this time, perhaps because it was performed less perfectly.

Years ago, I produced a documentary about the Second City, documenting the creation of a Second City revue from first rehearsal through opening night, back when Tina Fey and Rachel Dratch were there. After screening the first cut, my director Matt Hoffman and I were left a little flat, and we couldn’t figure out why: every scene and every beat of the show was funny. The improvisers were brilliant, and the story was clear, but something was missing. What had we done wrong? It took Second City producer Kelly Leonard to point out what: “You never showed them failing,” he said. Without the possibility of failure, the stakes in our storytelling weren’t high enough to elicit the kind of tension and drama we knew it warranted, and that made the story less interesting. By inserting a single new sequence showing these brilliant comedic actors having one bad night in front of an audience, suddenly there was drama and tension. It was clear the Second City performers almost always did well, but simply by raising the possibility that they might not now made the doc genuinely compelling, and not just pleasantly funny.

So when the first ball of Thursday’s run of “Nine Person” got dropped, the audience visibly gasped in both sympathy and excitement. And suddenly, while this performance was clearly going to be less perfect than the last one, the stakes were higher. The audience was now more involved, palpably rooting for the dancers, instead of simply sitting back and enjoying them. It was a whole new experience than the one I’d had with the piece Tuesday. Of course River North was prepared for a dropped ball; they’re prepared for that likelihood and know how to get back into the sequence of the dance quickly and without major disruption. By the time they finished, the nature of the applause reflected this particular audience’s understanding that what the dancers had just done was hard, and we loved them all the more for it. Audience will get another look at this one at Saturday’s grand finale performance at the Pritzker Pavilion in Millennium Park – I wonder what will happen then?

Sometimes there are certain performers, or styles of art, that are so well known, well loved and often seen that we take them for granted. I’ve been a Beatles fan as long as I’ve been a “Star Wars” fan, and I love that music as much as anything I’ve ever heard. Yet when tickets to Paul McCartney’s two recent Wrigley Field shows first went on sale, I hesitated. McCartney’s work is so deep in my heart and soul that I just might take it for granted sometimes. It’d be nice, to see that show, I thought to myself, but I’ve seen him before, and sure, he’s incredible and all, but really, haven’t I heard and seen it all by now? Fortunately within a couple of minutes, the saner part of my brain slapped some sense into the rest of it and said, “Are you KIDDING? It’s Paul McCartney.” So of course I went both nights, and it was thrilling. We all might have known each song by heart, but if you were willing to step away from your nostalgia, you could feel that the performance were vital, electrifying and present, filled with surprise riffs, vocal improvisations, clever new arrangements, terrific new stagecraft and interaction between the band that had never happened quite the same way before and would never happen the same way again. If I were to describe a crowd of more than 40,000 people singing along to “Hey Jude,” it might sound like a cliché; if you were there, you know better.

There’s perhaps no more clichéd image in dance than the pas de deux of the classical ballet – the man in tights, the woman in pointe shoes and a tutu, the lifts, the turns, and so on. How many of these can you see and still get excited? If they’re as good as Joffrey Ballet dancers Victoria Jaiani and Temur Suluashivili performance of the “Giselle Adagio,” the answer is many. Many, many more. This is just a flat out gorgeous style of dance, and when given life by artists of this caliber, it just about always works, and this performance really worked for me. You can get chills by watching Paul McCartney stand up and sing “Yesterday,” and you can get them watching the Joffrey dancers fully inhabit this piece with power, grace, romance and dignity. No cliché’s here.

There were two other pieces on the program – Martha Graham’s “Embattled Garden” and festival co-founder and co-artistic director Lar Lubovitch’s “The Legend of Ten.” I already look forward to my second dates with these two pieces. I continue to wrestle with Graham’s work, completely appreciating it while having yet to fall under it’s spell, but I’m genuinely provoked and challenged by it, which means that I’m finding something fascinating and worth exploring, even if I’ve yet to walk away from a piece of hers feeling like I loved what I just saw. But it’s definitely doing something interesting to me, and I wonder what it will feel like next time. It’s so wildly stylized, the kind of modern dance that’s most easily parodied, and the kind that’s easy to do very badly. This wasn’t; it was presented with clear storytelling and precise performances, and if I’m yet to be won over to the style of dance, I’m definitely won over by these dancers. How will they impact me next time? What different aspects of this take on the story of Adam, Eve, Lilith and the Serpent in the Garden of Eden will hit me on my next viewing? Not sure, but I’m curious. One thought, though – I don’t mind program notes that give me clues about story and style, but, with due respect, please go a little easy on telling me that what you’re presenting to us is beautiful like nothing I’ve ever seen (I’m paraphrasing the program notes, but that’s more or less the gist). Do us both a favor and let me decide for myself. If in a match.com profile, someone offers me details and background about her life, what she does for a living, what she reads, what her family’s like, what she likes to do for fun – great. That’s the kind of info I need to decide if take a chance and respond. If on the other hand she’s writes that she’s the most beautiful woman I’ll ever meet and no one does relationships like she does, you know what, I’m not answering that ad. Love, like art, is too subjective for that, and I’d appreciate a little latitude to come to my own conclusions, thank you.

Lar’s piece was the one I’d really like to see again, because for all it’s interesting group movement, it was filled with so many individual character moments and interactions between the dancers that I’d like to sit up closer and see this one more intimately. Or see it with other dancers and see how they relate to each other. Or both. This was one of those pieces that reminded me how much I enjoy people watching. Every group of people has their own customs, behaviors and rituals, whether they’ve been together for decades or if they’ve just been thrown together to watch a performance at the Auditorium Theater. I’m fascinated by people’s unique rhythms and interactions, and what I glean from those non-verbal cues. Tina Fey and Steve Carrel have a great little scene in “Date Night” where they go out to dinner and play a game: one of them picks out a couple at a different table and just by watching how they’re dressed and how they move, the other has to make up their story and imagine their conversation. Sometimes watching dance is just like that, and just as much fun, and that’s what carried me through “The Legend of Ten.”

I'll never stop enjoying revisiting dance, theater, music and movies. You know, “Star Wars” comes out on Blu-Ray next month. There will be deleted scenes, new digital fixes and all kinds of previously unseen special features. I wonder what new stuff I’ll see this time?

The Chicago Dancing Festival continues Friday August 26 at 6pm with a program called "Muses," a lecture-demonstration and discussion with live performances, hosted by my good friend, dance historian and journalist Lucia Mauro, and featuring guest panelists Alejandro Cerrudo of Hubbard Street Dance Chicago, Janet Eilber of Martha Graham Dance Company, Bettie de Jong of Paul Taylor Dance Company and festival co-founder and co-artistic director Lar Lubovitch.

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