Giving Shape to an Explosion: Sasha Waltz with Edgard Varèse

Continu. Photo courtesy of Alastair Muir

By Robert Jackson Wood

Sasha Waltz has a penchant for the spectacularly unnerving. In Gezeiten, at BAM in 2010, dancers navigated a flame-licked bunker at the end of the world. The earth tore itself apart underfoot, threatening to swallow the dancers whole.

In Körper, at BAM in 2007, concrete walls towered as in some dystopian underground airlock. Human beings became strange inertial things, writhing in naked piles, pressed against glass.

In her latest work at BAM, Continu—playing the BAM Howard Gilman Opera House December 4 and 5—the world is no calmer. A volatile hymn to the creative-destructive potentials of desire, it begins by “giv[ing] shape to an explosion,” in Waltz's words, an “original violence” that is one and the same with conception itself.

And yet in place of the end-times pyrotechnics of Gezeiten and the concrete dystopia of Körper is a rather different recipe for the foreboding: a bare stage, along with the music of Edgard Varèse (among others).

Harvey Oral History: Falling in Love with Modern Dance: Martha Graham

Martha Graham in Letter to the World, Kick, 1940, by Barbara Morgan

In the last oral history post, Harvey told us how falling for Martha led him to modern dance. Martha had been at BAM many times when Harvey got here in 1967, and Joseph wrote a slamming post about Martha Graham’s last public appearance—yes, at BAM.

Listen to Harvey talk about that performance.


HarveyOralBlog 008 MarthaVsHarvey by BAMorg

Martha Graham’s Last Dance

Martha  Graham

In the fall of 1970 Brooklyn overflowed with modern dance. As part of the Brooklyn Festival of Dance, BAM brought to the stage such heavyweights as the American Ballet Company, Merce Cunningham, and the Martha Graham Dance Company, which kicked it all off with seven consecutive days of performances from Graham’s repertoire.

While this was not the first time the Graham Company danced at BAM (it has performed here regularly since 1933), these performances were remarkable in that they were the first time Graham would not appear in her dances. Apparently, Graham did not want this fact publicized, and on October 2nd, the morning of her company’s premiere, a front page story appeared in The New York Times with the headline, “Martha Graham, 76, to Dance No More.” Harvey Lichtenstein, former BAM president, recalls that she was furious the entire day. That night, just before the curtain opened, Graham suddenly appeared onstage and then walked behind the curtain, through the stage door, and into the auditorium. Lichtenstein recalls that

“the minute the audience saw her, everyone was on their feet, absolutely jumping up and down and applauding and cheering. And she took a slow walk to her seat, a performer always, on stage or off. And the program began and she was fine, but she never danced on stage again after that.”

Harvey Oral History: How I fell in love with modern dance

Harvey swag from the BAM Hamm Archives

Listen to Harvey talk about falling in love with modern dance—how he became a dancer himself, and how he was involved at the New Dance Group and Black Mountain College, where he first saw a Merce Cunningham/John Cage happening.


Harvey-InterestInDance by BAMorg

Check out this student project on Black Mountain College that features an early "happening" video (at 3:51) with Cunningham, Cage, and Robert Rauschenberg, all of whom Harvey studied with at Black Mountain.

Lin Hwai-min and Cloud Gate Dance Theatre

By Robert Wood

Lin Hwai-min comes to BAM from October 12—15 with Water Stains on the Wall, a choreographic exploration of calligraphy.

Photo: Lin Hwai-min, by Chen-hsiang

Lin Hwai-min wears the East well. His choreography—a distillation of movement from the martial arts, ancient practices like Qigong and meditation, calligraphy, and other eastern traditions—combines elements so lyrically and seamlessly that it often seems as natural to the dancers as breathing itself. That would be the easy interpretation, anyway: Hwai-min, “Taiwanese to his core,” has translated that authenticity into works which speak to the essence of the island itself. It’s a lovely idea. But the truth is much more interesting, if far-travelled.

Lin Hwai-min—though born in Taiwan—actually came to Taiwanese culture by way of the West.

“In those years,” he recounts, speaking of the 60s, “the West meant the best. Tours in Taiwan, going to the US and eventually getting a green card was the goal for many young people. Reading Time magazine was a must for snobbish college students. The Beatles, Bob Dylan, and Joan Baez were our idols.”

The same went for dance. There was never a Fisher-Price tape recorder playing Peking Opera tunes by his childhood bedside, but there was the classic British ballet film The Red Shoes— which, after an initial viewing, Hwai-min claims to have watched 11 straight times.

Salinger, Hemingway, and Fitzgerald were also on the bill. (Hwai-min was a bestselling writer by 23). But as he recalls, the charm of the West—as least as represented in popular culture—had a shelf life. Disillusionment with the actual West as compared to the imaginary one led Hwai-min to begin reconsidering his preconceptions about the US and, eventually, about Taiwan as well. It was only then that he began looking eastward.

Way eastward. Post-Beatles and Time magazine, and after a whirlwind rediscovery tour around Taiwan, Hwai-min formed a dance troupe—Cloud Gate Dance Theatre—and named it after the oldest known dance in Chinese history. He stowed away the techniques he’d learned at Martha Graham’s studio, favoring movement directly linked to the Taiwanese experience. He had his dancers running through riverbeds, pushing and carrying rocks, in solidarity with the grueling labor of Taiwan’s original immigrant farmers—all to dispense with the cultural imaginary and reconnect his choreography to the bodily real.

38 years later, you can still feel the riverbed in Hwai-min's movement. The surface flows, but a calm, centered core beneath that surface—the wellspring of the meditator—always remains. It's only fitting that his latest work is about calligraphy, another practice so reliant upon the centered body to achieve its elegant, flowing effects.

Taiwan becomes Taiwan only from a distance. The river rivers with ease only over its secret stone. Take a look. And come see the show.