Photo: dancers Ricardo Rique-Sanchez and Saya Harada in Anna Sokolow's ODES.
Sunday November 13, 2011 - Believe it or not, I'd never been to the Merce Cunningham Studio down on Bethune Street until today. The studio will be closing their doors at the end of the current year. Today Sokolow Theatre Dance Ensemble presented their revival of Anna Sokolow's ODES there along with two other works by the choreographer, a solo in Sokolow style, and some fascinatingly rare film footage of Ms. Sokolow teaching ODES.
The Cunningham space is remarkable, the dancing area far larger than that of most of the City's studio venues; this allowed the large cast of ODES to move with freedom. Just stepping off the elevator, one is whisked into another world where the very air is redolent of the sweat and dreams of decades of dancers who have worked there. Although the afternoon was blemished by annoying late seating and by the man next to me who wrote copiously throughout the performance, I felt an extrordinary connection to the dancers and to the dance.
The afternoon commenced with a solo entitled TWO PRELUDES which Sokolow created in 1985. Pianist Amir Khosrowpour played the Rachmaninoff live and dancer Melissa Birnbaum gave a radiant performance, capturing the ecstatic qualities of the movement and suffusing the steps and gestures with an intense yet calm sense of the spiritual.
Equally uplifting was the 1975 solo AT THE STILL POINT OF THE TURNING WORLD in which dancer Lauren Naslund, svelte in sky-blue body tights, paused from time to time in the trajectory of the dance with her extended hand gesturing to some distant point on the horizon. On the sidelines, Jim May read texts drawn from T S Eliot's Four Quartets. In the dancing of both Ms. Naslund and Ms. Birnbaum, a feeling of deep commitment to the Sokolow style was palpable: a commitment which, as we will see in a film shown later, the choreographer insisted upon.
Kokyat and I visited an ODES rehearsal earlier this Autumn where he took the above photograph of Jim May, one of Anna Sokolow's dancers who is the founding force behind Sokolow Theatre Dance Ensemble and their efforts to preserve and perform the Sokolow repertoire. Today Jim performed a self-choreographed solo entitled PASSAGE; set to Rachmaninoff and danced in a shaft of light, this solo provided not only a touching view of a mature dancer moving with pride and devotion, but also a direct connection to Sokolow offered by one of her true acolytes.
As a rare and riveting interlude, a film of Anna Sokolow teaching ODES to dance students at Ohio State University in 1966 shows the choreographer exhorting the dancers to give of themselves not just physically but emotionally. As they execute various moves and gestures from the piece, Sokolow upbraids, coaxes and commands them by turn. To hear her speak is simply fascinating.
However the Ohio State performance turned out, I cannot image that it looked any better than today's production of the work. Majestic in its very simplicity, the timeless qualities of ODES are evoked by Edgard Varese's often angular and elemental musical paintings. The dancers, a collective of unique individuals forged into a team by Jim May and Ms. Naslund, gave the kind of emotionally-connected dancing that the choreographer so passionately sought. And while I feel it's likely she would have continued to ask for more and more from the dancers along the way, right up to the moment the performance started, I also think she would have been pleased with the outcome.
In the central pas de deux, dancers Luis Gabrial Zaragoza and Yayoi Suzuki (above, rehearsal photo by Kokyat) move in tandem to the sounds of Varese's Density 21.5 played live by flautist Roberta Michel.
Above: Anna Sokolow. As ODES came to a close, I thought it likely that she would have been gratified to see her work still vivid and well-appreciated today. In 2012, Sokolow Theatre Dance Ensemble will be preparing the choreographer's setting of Berg's LYRIC SUITE. It was at a performance of this work in April 2010 where I was first bitten by the Sokolow bug. I look forward to seeing it again and hopefully following the developmental process.
In preparing this article I came across this quote; it struck me as wonderfully apt:
“If a dancer dances – which is not the same as having theories about dancing or wishing to dance or trying to dance or remembering in his body someone else’s dance – but if the dancer dances, everything is there. . . Our ecstasy in dance comes from the possible gift of freedom, the exhilarating moment that this exposing of the bare energy can give us. What is meant is not license, but freedom. . .”
~ Merce Cunningham (1952)