July 29, 2009 performance reviewed by Jocelyn McGrath.

To spend the evening with Les Grand Ballet Canadiens is something like being with a bunch of long lost cousins at a family reunion; there is a tribal sense of belonging without actually having met each other before. From the first image of a red, hazy sea of undulating arms in Four Seasons, to the raucous and earthy old world dance scene in Cantata, there is a primal connection. The roots of our cultural family tree go deep, deep into the Eden-like fields and valleys of the Four Seasons, deep into social and gender bonds of an old world village. 2014 Jacob’s Pillow schedule, Contact info. and links

Les Grands Ballets Canadiens, founded by Ludmilla Chiriaeff in 1952, is a progressive and eclectic ballet company with a long association with Jacobs Pillow. The company’s American debut was here 50 years ago, and since then they have returned many times. The company cultivates the highest level of artistry in a rich, contemporary ballet vocabulary, choreographed by Mauro Bigonzetti: graceful classical arms and leg extensions seamlessly transition to undulating spinal contractions and quirky, gestural hands. Other traditional boundaries are loosened. These are dancers with voices; they are heard as well as seen. They hum, sing, shout, and yip with delight. They beat their chests, clap and slap, and in one case, audibly blow air like the cherubs painted on a Renaissance ceiling, creating enough wind to roll an intertwined pair of lovers slowly offstage.

The first scene of Four Seasons is lush, a luxurious of sea of bodies (On a stage the size of the Pillow’s, twenty dancers is a sight to behold…). Arms wave in harmony, then differentiate, then couples form. Each couple abruptly embraces and then almost instantly springs apart, as if that one moment time has just reversed. This clutching repeats, rhythmically, percussively. The pointe shoes worn by the women in Four Seasons also become percussive—sometimes in a booming stomp, sometimes in the staccato rhythm of the quickly released releve. The female dancers firmly hold deep lunges on pointe—statuesque in the way of the Roman goddesses. Minimal, filmy costumes in nude and terra-cotta lead to thoughts of natural man and woman, to a time of primal, playful innocence. Humor is an important ingredient in making this familiar musical piece fresh.

The emotional texture of the second piece of the evening, Cantata, originates in the music, performed live by Gruppo Musicale Assurd. Composed of four women vocalists, they are one of the foremost performing troupes of traditional and popular Italian music. In the way flamenco instrumentalist and vocalists are integral to the art, these women sing and play while intermingling with the dancers on stage. Their voices, earthy and raw, lend hope and humanity to the darker themes of human relationships.

For this piece, the back of the stage is exposed, the huge, rustic wooden beams providing a perfect backdrop to a freewheeling old world village scene—a social dance perhaps, with all of the players on stage at all times either watching or dancing. The tenderness and authenticity of the songs balances the disturbing motifs: clustered group of women bite their fingers and hands; the men extend a claw of a hand, mouths wide open; a woman stretches both arms behind her, hands writhing. Women are carried by the men in a strange variety of ways—convulsing, or draped as if dead, or flipped sideways like a board, completely upside-down and then back again.

Though the gender relations are unsettled and tense, the dancers are literally straining alternately toward each other and then away, the emotional resolution lacking in the duets is ultimately found in a joyous full company celebration. Loose-limbed, with flinging hair, the wild energy mounts as the piece culminates in a raucous explosion. And this village is welcoming and generous—we are all invited to join the party—simply as members of the extended human family.

Each piece runs 40 minutes, with an intermission in between.

We are re-posting material relating to Merce Cunningham upon the occassion of his death, July 26, 2009: this reminiscence and review of Merce Cunningham Dance Company came to MASS MoCA that originally were published on NewBerkshire.com in 2000.

The Greenwich Village artists’ scene of the 1940s, as recalled by Frances Benn Hall.

When I graduated from the University of Wisconsin in 1941, I was so eager to dash off to seek fame and fortune in the arts world of Greenwich Village that I boarded the first train for Manhattan and told the college to mail me my diploma.

Getting a job, any job, proved difficult. I finally found a lowly clerical one in the garment district. It paid $17 a week – all my MA in theatre was worth at that time, and the job only obtained when I said I could give Sinclair Lewis as a local reference.

(During the previous Fall at college, I had been one of a group of fifteen to whom he taught creative writing. Only one member of our class seems to have achieved literary fame in later life; Howard Moss was for years poetry editor of The New Yorker.)

In those lean years, The Village still thronged with starving artists. Finding housing was easy. I quickly moved into the front room of a basement apartment on West 13th Street where my rent was $6.00 a week. I shared the kitchen and bath with two dancers from Martha Graham’s group. One had a tiny maid’s room in the back, and the other, Merce Cunningham, slept on a cot in the communal kitchen. Their weekly rent was even lower than mine.

Merce was already honored in the dance world and that Spring was performing the solo “Dear March Come In”; in Graham’s Letter to the World, but was not yet world famous as he would become, and thus as needy as the rest of us. He worked at his dancing like a demon, but he did find time to join, with me, a Village theatre group called The Bendukov Theatre Studio, to which we went evenings to work on, but never have money to produce, exotic plays such as Cummings’ him and Byron’s Cain.

Food was a big problem, and what little our pooled pittances could afford was stored in a small wooden ice-box in the kitchen to which the ice-man automatically came. However, it got to the point where his bill had mounted alarmingly, and because we could not pay it, we avoided meeting him. This had a negative side in that he kept delivering ice even when there was no food in the box.

I can remember standing in the kitchen beside Merce as he emptied the water from the drip pan into the sink and sadly remarked, “There goes another quarter.” In that long-ago Manhattan where a nickel was all one needed for the subway or for a boat ride across the harbor from the Battery to Staten Island, a quarter was not treated lightly.

Since I had a “real” job, I had more ready cash, meager though it was, than Merce usually had. However, once, rather hurriedly, he thrust a dollar bill at me and said, “Buy yourself something frivolous,” before he loped off to rehearsal in Martha’s studio over in a loft just north of Washington Square.

I took my dollar, boarded the 7th Avenue subway at the corner of West 12th, got off at Macys where in the basement bookstore I bought my first copy of James Joyce’s Ulysses. It now sits proudly among the three long shelves of Joyce books on my living room wall among several other copies of Ulysses I have since acquired. But it remains my favorite one because on the fly leaf I wrote the date and the words, “Something frivolous from Merce.”

Had I become the great writer Lewis had encouraged me to try to be, I would know that the above paragraph is my conclusion. However, I must add a coda to round out the picture.

My large front room also, when I was not sleeping in it, served us as a communal living room, and we sometimes held parties there. One night there was such a party at which I was not present. When I returned around midnight, the party had wound down, and the stragglers left so I could go to bed.

They had been having a bit wilder time than usual, and although none of my personal belongings were ever disturbed, that evening a young artist in his glee had painted a mural on my ceiling. It was not unattractive. I remember thinking it really quite good. It was a great angel with outstretched wings that covered most of the ceiling. I felt I could sleep with that angel hovering over me and went to bed.

However, my alarm woke me to a startling and embarrassing discovery. Lying in my bed, staring at the ceiling changed my perspective. That so innocent-seeming angel had been so painted that a foot-long pipe, relic of some long-ago light fixture, had become a giant phallus.

Life among the artists had become too much for me. After work that day, I found a room on West 12th Street with a nosy and prudish landlady, very fussy about keys and using the pay phone in the hall after 8 PM, but willing to rent me a room with which I could cope.

It was only recently, discussing those days with a Graham dancer who was present at that long-ago party, that I was reminded of a fact that I had forgotten: The young artist was named Robert Motherwell.

2014 Jacob’s Pillow schedule, Contact info. and links