Published in Attitude: The Dancer’s Magazine, Summer 2007
Of all writers, arguably none has been a greater friend to the dance than William Shakespeare. The sheer number of evening-length works based on his plays and sonnets (and their sources) confirm an enduring collaboration that hardly shows signs of abatement. It’s no wonder: the plots are compelling, and audience familiarity with the plays give choreographers ample license to diverge from these stories without fear that their essential fuel—tragedy, romance, and characters who embody the scope of human complexity—might dissipate when paired with the inimitable movement styles of Petipa, MacMillan, Balanchine, Lubovitch and countless others.
It’s a shame more dance makers don’t tread beyond the obvious choices—pretty pictures aside, do we really need another Romeo and Juliet? You’d think Shakespeare’s more complex works—eerily prescient, they convey the soothsayer within the poet—would appeal to a new generation, but as BAM’s executive producer Joseph V. Melillo observed in a recent New York Times article, with a few exceptions, contemporary choreographers are oddly reluctant to engage issues of politics and war, either directly or through a filter. Such statements fail to acknowledge the challenges of distilling such hot potatoes as Iraq into the kind of stage-worthy images that speak to the enormity of the quagmire. One could understand why the Bard’s history plays (not to mention his Julius Caesar and Coriolanus) don’t readily come to mind as vehicles for the dance—how, for heaven’s sake, to translate the brainy intrigues, the subtle coups and courtly backstabbing into an evening of potent movement?
One artist unafraid to tackle such complexities is the director/choreographer David Gordon. I was fortunate to catch his Pickup Performance Company’s production of “Dancing Henry Five,” mounted by San Francisco’s ODC Theater (the show is currently touring the country). The piece, first seen in New York in 2004, addresses the machinations of the Bush Administration and the mess of Iraq through the prism of Henry V; in the process Gordon creates a compelling evening that, though pocket-sized (barely an hour, a feat of gross economy considering most Shakespeare clocks in at 3hrs.), ably feeds the audience’s head while satisfying myriad potential for visually ravishing movement.
With the help of son Ain Gordon, the choreographer contributes original text that is part commentary on the play (most of Shakespeare’s scenes are humorously summarized), part rumination on the age-old science of war. Rather than watering down Shakespeare’s themes, it illuminates them—both writers seek an examination of those tendencies that repeat, the conflicts that get perpetrated, the spoils of sacrifice in the name of empire preservation. Gordon concludes that history teaches us nothing; when his narrator (played by his wife Valda Setterfield) explains how, in Henry V, the Archbishop of Canterbury concocts a lie (fueled by the dying wish of Prince Hal’s father that he “busy giddy minds with foreign quarrels”) to justify England’s assault on France, she points up the parallel caprices of the Bush Administration in an amusing aside that made the audience snicker in recognition.
Politics provide the heat, but Gordon isn’t content with mere proselytizing. It’s art he’s after, and it’s telling that Shakespeare is but one of the evening’s collaborators. The choreographer makes generous use of Laurence Olivier’s benchmark 1947 adaptation; here and there, dialogue from the movie wafts through the sound system, a detail that purposefully reminds us of Shakespeare’s bountiful gifts as a scene setter. When we hear the famous opening, “Now entertain conjecture of a time,” our awareness of ourselves as participants in the tale is made manifest, cued by the presence of the theater’s bare back wall and the skeletal props piled stage center like some addled tower of Babel. The music—from that great cinematic composer William Walton—is also courtesy of the film, but Gordon re-contextualizes it to great effect throughout, especially in the dream-like sequence depicting the British Fleet’s sail across the Channel, accomplished by Jennifer Tipton’s moody horizontal lighting, and upright dancers (representing ship mastheads) convoyed across the stage on the evening’s most versatile set element—blankets.
It’s one of many images that speaks with an eloquence equal to Shakespeare’s meter, and wrought by the simplest of means. Cyclonic patterns of dancers holding placards transition us from scene to scene; within the action Gordon gets dramatic mileage of everything from waltzes and march formations, to slow motion combat and elegiac tableaux, skewering them with angular arms, lunges and unexpected pivots. When the Dauphin sends England the insulting gift of tennis balls that launches the battle of Harfleur, Gordon serves up a colorful dance with giant balls lifted out of an Esther Williams routine. In the famous English lesson, Walton’s music underscores a delightful minuet filled with Delsarte-tinged mirroring gestures for the French princess Katherine (Karen Graham) and her waiting maid. But this production’s triumph is a St. Crispian’s Day montage that propels the action from the stoking of cannons, through tactile engagement with the enemy, to a final tragic image of discarded bodies piled high like rubble. Here, deployed with the type of stage vocabulary that pays homage to Brecht by way of Tommy Tune, time and space get cinematically redefined through lighting and a dizzying dance of bodies, poles and chairs that convey the exhilaration of battle, and its tragic aftermath.
In Setterfield, Gordon has found his muse of fire. Decked out in a triangulated gown emblazoned with rugby stripes (Gordon also designed the costumes), her Chorus haunts the evening like a Cassandra whose reasoned observations we heed. The character’s power lies in the actress’s gift for objectivity and empathy; one moment she’s keeping us abreast of the action with the dryness of George Jessel (as when she bemoans the prevalence of “friendly fire, which currently describes how we kill each other”), the next, wringing our hearts as she weighs the sacrifice of one side’s sons to war against the others—her impassioned “I want somebody else’s son to die” vaults us from abstraction to heartbreaking reality.
Other art forms—literature, film and the protest songs of such artists as Joni Mitchell, Neil Young and Rickie Lee Jones—have weighed in on our current overseas involvement with the kind of outrage not seen since the 60’s. Part Epic Theater, part polemic, and 100% relevant, “Dancing Henry Five” rightly deserves a place alongside William Forsythe’s “Three Atmospheric Studies,” Paul Taylor’s Banquet of Vultures,” and the overtly political works of Bill T. Jones. As the Iraq War stumbles along its complications have, if anything, deepened Gordon’s exploration of empirical arrogance and historical amnesia. Talk about holding a mirror up to nature (and our present U.S. folly up to the light): despite its Elizabethan trappings the piece feels ripped from today’s headlines, a tribute to the synergy that occurs when one artist reaches across the ages to commune with another. Let’s hope such daring inspires others to follow suit.