“six a breast” at CorningWorks

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In one of the vignettes in Corning Works’ new dance theater piece six a breast, dancer Sally Rousse twists and contorts her arms and legs on and around a trapeze-like swing hanging low to the ground. “Sorry!” she occasionally blurts out, in a vaguely familiar, business-like tone. Twist, contort, swing, “Sorry!” What is it that is so familiar about this scenario? And then, with her last “Sorry!”, the penny drops: she mashes the clear plexiglass seat of the swing against her breast, and the connection between her tortured contortions and the awkward discomfort of the annual mammogram (in which, my dear young and/or non-female readers, the boobies get squeezed between two plexiglass plates, often accompanied by brisk, unconvincing apologies from the tech whose job it is to make that squeeze as tight as possible) pings into place.

Leave it to dancer/choreographer Beth Corning to find such an off-kilter way to capture the indignities not just of a medical diagnostic ritual, but also a host of other (mostly mundane) tortures and torments women find themselves subject to. Makeup, domestic chores, body and skin care routines, and social expectations that women be nice, nurturing, and perpetually sublimate their rage – all these and more are grist for Corning’s dance mill, which takes the absurd and turns it into a series of sublime meditations on gender roles.

In addition to the exquisitely elegant Rousse, Corning is also joined on stage by collaborator Laurie Van Wieren. The three performers bring personality and idiosyncracy to the piece, like a female set of Marx Brothers or Stooges. Corning is the smart-ass clown; Van Wieren plays the befuddled, clumsy member of the trio; while Rousse is the dignified “straight man.” Some Corning performances are more theater than dance; not this one. Rousse’s virtuosity in ballet is on full display, and in places – particularly, in a vignette that might be subtitled “spinning her wheels,” – the beauty of her line and posture is breathtaking.

The evening is structured as a series of skits or circus acts, some solo, and some featuring two or three performers. Each skit captures facets of the female experience with wit and irony, sometimes in ways it’s difficult to put your finger on. For example, in one, Rousse traverses the stage with a basket full of eggshells; she tosses them on the floor in front of her and walks tiptoe on them. The metaphor here is clearly “walking on eggshells,” yet her mood is not one of anxiety, but pleasure, and when Corning – cleaning up behind her – steps on one of the shells herself, there’s a sense of wicked pleasure in the act. The image conveys something complicated about our relationship to these absurdities – perhaps that we’re so comfortable with what’s expected of us that we begin to fail to see how absurd the situation is.

Cleaning is a running theme throughout the performance – Corning materializes a wad of paper towels out of tiny purse to mop up spilled water in one of the early skits, and then later, in a perceptive commentary on the way women are socialized to be near-constantly vigilant about the cleanliness of their space, Van Wieren picks up a bit of schmutz from the floor mid-dance. (I’m willing to bet there wasn’t a woman in the audience who didn’t nod in recognition at both of these gestures; I’m certainly guilty as charged). Another running gag takes up the mystery of how to properly fold a fitted sheet (hint: it requires either magic, or seduction). The tension between our “domestic” and our “non-domesticated” selves is also a repeated theme, captured perhaps most vividly in a dance in which Corning’s body seems split between a barefooted “madonna” and a high-heeled “whore,” weighed down by jangling pots, pans, and babies beneath a transparent hooped skirt.

The costumes, designed by Corning and Lindsey Peck Scherloum, are stunning – all white, mostly transparent, and endlessly inventive in shape and texture. The monochrome white of the costumes beautifully supports the sublime-ridiculous mood of the danced vignettes. But with the final vignette – a presentation of Beckett’s one-act play Come and Go – we suddenly get color, as the performers come on in long coats of mustard, deep purple, and bright red, with elaborate matching hats covering all but their mouths. The visual image Corning achieves with the costuming of this final piece is striking; but even more remarkable is Corning’s simple but powerful staging. She has an intuitive understanding of how to fill out the pauses in Beckett’s work, and the result is a wry take on the way women use gossip and information to jostle for power among their frenemies. The final image of the night – of three women joined in the knowledge of having betrayed each other – feels like an apt, if bittersweet, coda to the evening’s reflections on the female experience.

“What’s Missing” at CorningWorks

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CorningWorks

I probably failed to fully comprehend what Corning Works’ new dance work, What’s Missing, is about.

But that’s okay, because – as a disembodied voice repeatedly reminds us, in what is simultaneously a conjuration and conjugation of absence – what you see is imperfect, what they do is imperfect, we are flawed, we will fail to see, we are all wrong, and this performance will fail to resolve.

L to R: Beth Corning & Donald Byrd

What’s Missing may, in fact, be the most clear-eyed, and most despairing, artistic response to last year’s election that I’ve seen to date. How do you make meaning in a world of alternative facts and near constant disinformation? Co-choreographers and performers Donald Byrd and Beth Corning’s answer is a kind of resigned anxiety, expressed in hands coming to frantic, fluttering life on their own, in dance sequences that hesitate, stutter, and shrug, and in the fragmentation of the audience’s perception.

The piece is a series of solos and duets structured by the repetition of a thematic movement sequence in which the two performers come together on a white bench, join hands, connect, disconnect, spoon on the floor, and break apart. Each time this sequence is presented, the bench is placed in a different place on the all-white stage, which means that audience members sitting on three sides of the space have a different perspective on the movement each time (and also have a different view than others in the audience). Ushers encourage you to split apart from the person you’ve attended the performance with, the better to be able to compare perspectives after the show. Both of these are ideas that work better in theory than in practice: it wasn’t hard to extrapolate what the movement looked like from another person’s point of view, and if there were small differences in detail from repetition to repetition, my suspicion is that it would have been difficult for most spectators to recall and compare them with their companions in any case. Nonetheless, the bigger question the staging choice begs – the question of how it is that we can all be looking at the same thing and yet seeing it in very different ways – is clearly a politically urgent one, and Corning’s interest in finding a dance metaphor to pose it is a laudable one.

What’s perhaps most striking about this piece, however, is its decision to confront the world of alternative facts with what feels like an anti-response. “This performance will not change anything,” the voice says, robbing art of one of its presumed functions. In its exploration of the contours of the rabbit hole down which we have collectively tumbled, What’s Missing seems to propose that we are in a moment in which art must retreat from meaning in order to make sense of the world.

“Remains” (CorningWorks)

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Beth Corning’s Remains is short – barely an hour long – but the themes it explores are oversized, and linger. The one-woman dance piece is an elegaic homage to the people in her life who have gone – and, by empathetic extension, to those we’ve lost in our own lives.

Beth Corning. Photo Frank Walsh.

Britton Mauk’s scenic design looks a lot like my attic: a wall of cardboard boxes forming an upstage backdrop, their contents seemingly strewn all around the audience space. Christmas lights, books, shirts, pillows, bric-a brac: all those things that get collected in a life, treasures stored, only to become the junk we have to deal with when the original owner is gone. Anyone who’s had to clean out the family home after grandparents or parents have aged out or passed away will recognize the sinking feeling of nostalgia, regret, and emptiness such detritus stirs.

Dressed in a long white coat, pale pants, and white shoes (costume by Sonya Berlovitz), Corning introduces the departed: her father, her mother, the large extended family around the dinner table, a lover, her childhood self. In a series of short vignettes, we see how patterns of movement define a person’s essence, how they change over time, what gets lost and what remains. Iain Court’s lighting schema is dark – rectangles of light define playing spaces, echoing the shapes of the boxes and tables, and Corning often moves in and out of the light, appearing and disappearing like the ghosts she dances with. Corning conjures objects from among the boxes, and imbues them with the spirits of the dead. In a particularly poignant scene, a jacket allows her one last embrace from her father.

Phrases projected on the wall of boxes offer touchpoints for reflection: “There never seemed enough of you to go around”; “How did it get so late so soon?” At times the sentiment felt a bit too on-the-nose – this work has less of the mystery and metaphor that I usually find most compelling in Corning’s work. But I can’t think of another local artist who is so intrepidly and bravely taking on the subject of aging and offering audiences the opportunity to linger a while – to remain, as it were – with the losses that inevitably come as we grow older.

“Right of Way”- CorningWorks

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In the opening scene of Beth Corning’s new piece Right of Way, Corning dances a pas de deux with a series of descriptive words that are immediately recognizable as “gendered”: positive terms that get used to describe men (like “strong” and “virile”) cascade and cavort with the more negative attributions given to women (“overbearing”; “slut”; “bitch”). The words draw her on; she pushes back. Her body is shaped and pressured by the language; she tries to shove the words aside.

It’s an eloquent opening for a piece that seeks to examine the performative nature of gender identity. Taking more than one cue from Judith Butler, Corning’s opening emphasizes that gender roles are pre-scripted for us by social expectation; from there, Right of Way proceeds to demonstrate – through a series of short dance-plus-spoken-word vignettes – Butler’s central insight that gender is an act, a series of socially constrained and compelled performances that fabricate the fiction of a gender identity.

Corning’s partner in this work is the terrific local drag artist Jezebel Bebbington D’Opulence. In the first half of the show, both dancers appear sans makeup and glitz, in matching drab shapeless costumes, a move that signals clearly their refusal to “perform” a gendered identity, even as a voiceover insists on asking subjects how they identify themselves. But social expectations aren’t easily refused; a solo by D’Opulence reveals the challenges she faced growing up as a girl in a boy’s body in Puerto Rico, and another featuring Corning centers on the ways women, needing to be ever-vigilant of their safety, are refused the “privilege of obliviousness” that gives men full access to public space.

The second half of the show throws the performance of gender into high relief. D’Opulence emerges like a butterfly out of a cocoon, a Tina Turner lookalike in a bright red bra, tight sequined dress, and fantastically high spiked heels, and proceeds to read from Butler about how drag exemplifies the performative nature of gender identity. The incongruity between D’Opulence’s glam presence and the density of Butler’s prose is amusing, but I’m not sure we needed Butler to get the point: D’Opulence’s subsequent near-flawless lip-sync of Turner’s Proud Mary, juxtaposed immediately after by Corning’s rather less successful attempt to strut around in a tight skirt and high heels “doing” sexy womanliness cements the point home in a more spectacular manner. Femininity’s a performance, and just because you’re born with the right plumbing doesn’t mean it comes easy to you.

“Beckett & Beyond” at CorningWorks

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At one point in Beth Corning’s new dance theater piece, Beckett & Beyond, the three dancers – Corning, Yvan Auzely, and Francoise Fournier – gazelle around the space, lifting their hands rhythmically in unison. It’s a joyous, transcendent moment of flow; they’ve captured something, together, that links them in shared purpose and accomplishment. And then, just like that, it’s gone: the energy dissipates, the gestures don’t match, the flow has slipped their grasp, and what felt triumphant now feels like a hollow echo. The dancers find themselves back in their own little mundane worlds, with only the memory of that instant of flow to drive them on.

In many ways that moment is a microcosm for the structure of Corning’s piece, which – taking inspiration from two short plays by Samuel Beckett – juxtaposes the tedium of repetitive action and non-action with electrifying flashes of insight and connection. And wouldn’t most of us agree that this is essentially what life is all about? That is: fleeting moments of blissful, in-the-moment connectedness (or mastery, or sheer joy) that punctuate long stretches of striving for, and either failing to achieve or losing grasp of, those moments?

Yvan Auzely

Beckett & Beyond opens with Beckett’s “Act Without Words II,” a piece that involves two large sacks and a “goad” (a long stick). The goad prods the first sack, and a dancer (Fournier) emerges – she is depressive, slow, a physical and psychological mess. She sighs, prays, takes a pill, dresses, picks up the two sacks, attempts to drag them off stage, gets about a step along, stops, undresses, takes another pill, prays, sighs, and gets back into her sack. The goad prods the other sack, and another dancer (Auzely) emerges – he is energetic, precise, and efficient, and he goes through his rather more complicated preparatory regime before picking up both sacks and dragging them a step or two, reversing his actions, and getting back in the sack. Another goad, the first dancer reappears, repeats her actions – and so it would go, we must realize, ad infinitum. The goad will get longer and longer, the two sack-inhabitants will never know of each other’s existence, the dragging of the sacks will never end, and the Sisyphean nature of existence is comically laid bare.

Riffing on this opening, the original choreographic movement that follows presents a bittersweet take on the question “what happens between life and death?” Dressed in costumes reminiscent of the clowns in Waiting for Godot, the three dancers build small vignettes and variations on that theme. Images recur: the red rope that tethers Corning to an unseen master becomes an enormous cat’s cradle for Auzely’s acrobatic solo, and also (in a rather haunting and resonant sequence) a clothesline on which Fournier hangs clothes that signal past lives, clothes which she “births” from under her enormous Beckettian overcoat. The dancers collide, connect, and disperse, and in the process they find those all-too-evanescent instances of aliveness that slip out of reach the moment they try to hold them.

The third movement consists of Rockaby, another short play by Beckett featuring a “prematurely old” woman, a rocking chair, and the woman’s recorded voice. The repetitive text, which represents the woman’s internal monologue as she reaches the end of her life, here takes on the quality of a bedtime story for a child refusing to fall asleep, and the woman’s insistence on “more” after each long pause links her end-of-life refusal to obey the command “time she stopped” to the toddler’s desire for more time in the day. Rockaby demands the kind of patience not every audience member can muster (a teenager behind me in the audience on opening night could be heard to protest “No!” after the third or fourth time she cried out “more”), but it also rewards that patience with a heightened awareness of our own ticking clock, and of our own experience of – and use of – the time we are given.

There is sadness here, but also a wry humor – Corning invites her audience to ponder how little of life we really live without getting sentimental or new age-y about it. The Beckettian humor is underlined by Stephanie Mayer-Staley’s whimsical set, which is arrayed with cartoon-like white clouds that are reminiscent of the surrealistic landscapes of René Magritte. Iain Court’s lighting design establishes a variety of moods and textures, from playful to sombre to eerie, and, as always, Corning has set the work to terrific music (by MaryEllen Childs, Kronos Quartet, and Meredith Monk). The cleverly comical postscript to the piece – in which the first act is reprised, with a pair of young dancers (Taylor Knight and Anna Thompson) in the sacks – hammers home both how unique Corning’s vision is, and how much the maturity and experience of her company’s “over-forty” dancers add to the work. For while the younger dancers are fine performers in their own right, it was also clear that they are merely at the very beginning of the long, difficult, and Sisyphean journey that has produced the depth, richness, and complexity in the performances given by Auzely, Fournier, and Corning herself.

“At Once there Was a House” by CorningWorks and “Endless Lawns” at the REP

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CorningWorks, The REP Professional Theatre Company

Beth Corning describes her new dance piece At Once There Was a House as “a zany theatrical ride exploring the question of ‘whatever happened to DICK & JANE?’” I’m not sure that description aptly describes the work she has created. While I have no doubt that the insular vision of ideal American family life represented in those old grade school reading primers was the original impetus behind the piece, the work presented at the New Haxzlett this weekend (a revamped and enlarged version of a piece she originally created a decade ago) seems less interested in answering that particular question than in opening new questions about how occluded our interior lives can be, not just to others, but also to ourselves.

At Once There Was A House features six performers – four professional dancers (Corning herself, Michelle de la Reza of Attack Theater, Tamar Rachelle Tolentino of Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre, and Yoav Kaddar, head of dance at WVU) along with actor John Gresh and musician Jackie Dempsey. Although not all six move with equal grace and skill, each performer brings enormous charm, charisma and energy to the work; Dempsey, in particular, is a sly and engaging actor who connects winningly with the audience. The six performers present characters who appear to have gathered for a high school reunion (variously named “Jane” and “Dick”), and the piece proceeds as a series of vignettes that exposes their inner yearnings, anxieties, and strivings.

Beth Corning & John Gresh

As in previous works, Corning demonstrates a sure eye here for the metaphorical image that captures ineffable and complex inner states – the unstable picket fence in an early moment, for example, or the lyrical disjuncture between an intimate pas de deux and a mundane description of a typical morning’s breakfast taken from Don DeLillo’s novel The Body Artist. But the vignettes felt more tenuously held together in this piece than in some of Corning’s previous works; the story logic was much more disjointed and dreamlike. At some times, that dream felt like a nightmare – the vignette in the middle of the piece featured a house on fire center stage, for example – and at others, like a strange moment out of a Keystone Cops film (Gresh runs around the stage chased by a mat of artificial grass in one of the more absurd moments of the evening). And as with any dream, what it was “about” felt enigmatic and elusive, touching on issues of identity, loss, aging, and the impossibility (and, perhaps, undesirability) of recapturing the past.

The collision of the past into the present is also a central thematic concern of Anthony McKay’s new play Endless Lawns, which is getting its world premiere at The REP under the direction of Gregory Lehane. The title refers to the landscaping challenge presented by “High Chimneys,” the glamorous Connecticut estate on which twins Torch and Flo Gregson (Laurie Klatcher and Cary Anne Spear), daughters of a wealthy film star, grew up. As a teen Ray (Jason McCune) had a summer job mowing the estate’s endless lawns and watched from atop his riding lawnmower as the girls entertained elite beaus like Torch’s boyfriend Graham (Mark Staley), the son of her father’s lawyer. Now Ray is the manager of the local Kmart, and Torch is his employee and girlfriend – the sisters, having been disinherited by their alcoholic and abusive father, are barely clinging to the socioeconomic ladder they once proudly stood atop. The play’s conflict is set in motion when Graham – also no longer a member of the New England aristocracy – suddenly returns after a thirty year absence and upends Torch’s hard-earned equilibrium.

Jason McCune and Laurie Klatscher; photo Jeff Swensen

McKay tells a story that has comic and tragic turns, and Lehane and the ensemble make the smart choice to keep the dialogue and tone light and lifted and let the tragic moments take care of themselves. The ensemble is terrific, in particular Laurie Klatscher, whose Torch starts the play as a woman who seems to have come to contented terms with the crappy hand she’s been dealt and then, after being suddenly reminded again of all she’s lost over the past thirty years, finds her priorities and dreams realigned by end of play. It’s a complicated, rewarding emotional journey, and Klatscher shows us every nuance of it.

Like Corning, McKay offers an opportunity to reflect on the many ways we “can’t go home again”- both literally and figuratively – in his theatrical exploration of a pair of sisters who can neither live the life their childhood promised nor fully escape it.

“Parallel Lives” (CorningWorks, at the New Hazlett Theater)

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Parallel lines are defined as two lines in a plane that do not meet. They can be infinitesimally close to each other, but the defining condition of parallelism is that they extend into infinity, in both directions, without ever touching. Parallel Lives, a new dance piece created and performed by Beth Corning in collaboration with Arthur Aviles, takes this condition of parallelism and applies it as a metaphor for human (dis)connection in the digital age. The choreography uses movement, props, visual projections, music, and human voice to explore how technology, in connecting us with others at a distance, seems also to foster an inability, or lack of desire, to reach out and touch those who may be as close as the other side of a shared wall.

Beth Corning and Arthur Aviles in “Parallel Lives”

Like much of Corning’s work, the piece does not aim for narrative clarity; Corning’s strength as a storyteller and choreographer lies in her deployment of ambiguous and multivalent metaphor. Two people inhabit spaces separated by a thin wall of scrim – his space is in front, hers in back. Are they neighbors? Friends separated by a great distance? Total strangers? Lovers? We don’t know, and it doesn’t matter. Their lives are parallel, not just spatially but also in terms of their activity. As the piece begins, each is doing something (he is watching a football game on television, she is folding laundry) while also addictively staying “connected,” in a perpetual multitasking frenzy of texting, selfie-taking, email-checking, web-surfing, and tweeting. Their spaces are marked by parallel stamps of consumer-culture’s anonymizing influence: both have iphones and Macbooks, personality-less gray furniture from Ikea, and identical white coffee cups. As the piece progresses, they unwittingly trade spaces, awaken momentarily from their digital stupor, make an attempt at something resembling real intersection and interconnection, and eventually wind up back alone in their parallel spaces, reabsorbed in their screens and windows. Was it all a dream or fantasy? Or have their devices led them to prefer the digital relationship’s physical solitude over the hazards and uncertainties that accompany making physical and emotional connections in the flesh? Again, we don’t know, and it doesn’t matter.

Corning’s skilled choreography and performance is marked by her trademark sense of whimsy and humor and her ability to craft evocative and powerful stage images: for example, one image in particular that stays with me is Corning, lying on a table, intimately curled up with her laptop (an image that says alot about how many of us feel about our computers!). But Arthur Aviles is the real revelation in this piece. The 51-year-old dancer brings a lovely, gorgeous eloquence to the movement; there’s deep experience in his body. His work here proves Corning’s point, in forming “The Glue Factory Project,” that mature dancers have new things to bring to dance, even if their bodies are less strong and supple than in their youth (although Aviles himself seems not to have lost much athleticism or flexibility with age). Another highlight of Parallel Lives is the projection art (Akiko Katani) and projection design (Hsuan-Kuang Hsieh), which dances along with Aviles and Corning on the screens, providing a two-dimensional visual counterpoint to, and commentary on, the choreography’s three-dimensionality. At times the projections can be taken for digital information zooming through the air; at others, they are an abstraction of a video game; at others, simply parallel lines traversing the space; and, in the end, rain, or static, or the daily white noise that keeps us from really communicating with others. Like the dance itself, the projections are purposefully sketchy and ambiguous, inviting a ruminating exploration rather than a definitive answer.

The piece has some flaws. The opening section of the dance, which establishes the two characters’ obsession with, and addiction to, their various screens and devices, is overly long and grows tiresome; as uninteresting as it is to be in the company of someone who will not stop using their smartphone, it’s even less interesting to watch two performers do the same for too long. Moreover, the rules governing use of the human voice in the work are confusing and unclear: in some moments a dancer may speak, and in the following mime speaking; or mime singing in one scene and then sing aloud in another. This literal miming is jarring and unfortunate in a work that otherwise makes powerful use of the body to express in more abstract ways. For once Corning and Aviles start really dancing (to a terrific selection of music ranging from pop tunes to classical), their exploration of how connection can be “so close and yet so far away” is both stirring and thought-provoking.

“Recipes Our Mothers Gave Us” / CorningWorks

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That women have complicated relationships with their mothers, and with the way their mothers raised them, is the kind of cliché that is also a truism (and vice versa). I know many mothers, including my own, who deliberately and desperately worked to parent differently than their mothers (with varying degrees of success); I also know many (and I include myself in this group) who never thought that becoming their mother was even a possibility, and then catch themselves in the act of parroting their mothers and marvel at how they could have become someone so different than who they always thought they were. The scripts go deep; they are, as Beth Corning’s new dance-theater piece oberves, like recipes for favorite family dishes, handed from generation to generation, replicated but never precisely remade, recognizable but with a slightly different piquancy.

Recipes Our Mothers Gave Us presents a series of vignettes on this theme, performed by three veteran dancers (Maria Cheng, Beth Corning, and Francoise Fournier). The metaphor of the “recipe” – as a series of instructions, as the basis for a final product, as, in its root meaning, “something received” – plays out in pieces that explore the instructions we absorb from our mothers, the ingredients we mix to put a life together, the tools we wield to shape ourselves, and, in a final poignant dance, the pressures of the familial and societal “melting pot.” The evening is structured more as a collage than coherent narrative, taking excellent advantage of what I see as one of Corning’s great strengths as a choreographer and composer, her thought-provoking use of contrast and juxtaposition. A repeated sequence, for example, juxtaposes a soothing lyrical lullaby with a dance marked by fretful and anxious movements, evoking associations with both the mundane (the baby who can’t or won’t fall asleep) and the profound (the thoughts and doubts we can never quiet in our own heads). One of the show’s most effective contrasts on opening night was purely serendipitous:  Corning, having lost her voice to laryngitis, had to whisper her lines into a microphone, and since many of those lines are repeated by the other performers either in another language or in a slightly modified form, it gave the impression that her whispers were “prompts” to the other performers, and that they, in a sense, were echoing or puppeting her thoughts and words. As unintended as this effect was, it served the thematic and emotional tenor of the piece beautifully, reinforcing the ways our mothers remain subliminally in residence in our heads, “whispering” their recipes even if we think we no longer hear them (or think we are no longer paying any attention to them).

Working with material that is both true and cliché has its risks, and some of the vignettes are more successful than others in helping us glimpse the strange in the familiar. A sequence in which the three performers compete in a challenge to mix together the ingredients for a happy life, and then sabotage each others’ “dishes” by removing key ingredients and substituting others wittily captures both the sheer impossibility of crafting a life (well, really, a dish, a work of art, a piece of writing…anything) exactly as you imagine it, and the competitive mentality that makes happiness so elusive. A later sequence about sex, on the other hand, is less successful in putting familiar stereotypes under scrutiny, and consequently feels less revelatory. But overall the performance is moving, and its strong effect on the audience prompted me to reflect on how correct Corning is in her observation that these recipes seem as if they are written into our DNA: men and women, old and young, we all seem to be perpetually mixing and remixing the ingredients and instructions we received from our mothers.