'Enfants Terribles' at GMU
MykahllC
Review of 'Enfants Terribles' by Sarah Kaufman, appearing in the Washinton
Post, Monday, November 24th.
"We've had modern dance and spoken narrative, modern dance and singing,
certainly modern dance and and Philip Glass, a favorite composer of many a
choreographer. Now that Glass has teamed up with dancemaker Susan Marshall, we
have modern dance and OPERA--and if that seems at all incongruous, impenetrably
stuffy or oddball, you haven't seen the remarkably lucid artistic hybrid 'Les
Enfants Terribles.'
"Subtitled 'Children of the Game,' the 100-minute work was created by
Glass and Marshall as a 'dance opera spectacle,' incorporating Marshall's
swirling choreography, onstage keyboard accompaniment by Glass and two others,
and vocals from four singers, one of whom acts as a narrator. The story moves
along with plenty of surtitles, or rather midtitles, as they often are
projected smack in the middle of the action on a transparent scrim across the
stage.
"This past weekend's performances at George Mason University were the last
of a multi-city tour of this work. It's the final installment in Glass's
trilogy inspired by the films and novels of French avant-garde artist Jean
Cocteau. Glass's two previous compostions, 'Orphee' and 'La Belle et la Bete,'
named for Cocteau's films, were purely operatic. But spurred by Cocteau's
example--he was a master of many art forms, painting and playwriting among
others--Glass wanted to broaden his artistic reach in the concluding work, and
turned to Marshall to add movement.
"It sounds like heady stuff--a collabortation of the cerebral, innovative
Glass, the intellectually elite Cocteau and Susan Marshall's ephemeral world of
dance. But the outcome is conceptually clear and highly accesible without
losing a tantalizing sense of mystery. Key to this is Marchall's seamless
weaving of all the elements into one immediate, breathless rush.
"You're plunged into the surreal from the first moments, when one
topcoated dancer after another whisks across the stage, buffeed by imaginary
winds. The narrator (Hal Cazalet) tells of Paul and Lise, an adolescent brother
and sister 'like two halves of the same body,' who live together in one room,
sealing themsleves off from the outside world. It's clear that something very
wrong is going on; there's darkness in the churning piano, and violence in the
movement. The stage fills with dancers skidding on from the wings on their
backs, tumbling over one another, reeling backward; everything is off-balance,
wavering between up and down. There is a constant snowfall above the
proscenium, delimiting what's real from unreal, natural from unnatural.
"Marshall, who also directed the work, cast three dancers and a singer to
play each sibling, a brilliant concept for this tale tinged with fantasy; it
was like seeing multiple exposures of the same film. Sometimes all moved in
unison, sometimes they went in different directions to convey mixed impulses
and contradictory urges.
"Her choreography is marked by a rippling fluidity; the performers were in
ceaseless motion. At times the motions seemed only to echo one another, at
others the stage was at a roiling boil of activity, with pushing, pulling,
running, stomping. And the singers were smoothly swept up in it; but for the
singers' headsets it was not always apparent who were the dancers and who were
not. Philip Cutlip as the singing Paul had a luxuriously full-bodied baritone.
Christine Arand, who sand Lise, was clear-voiced but her great authority lay in
her stage presence; she prowled like a calculating tigress, engineering a fatal
deception with icy zeal. Robert Wierzel's lighting and costumer Kasia
Walicka-Maimone's exquisite flowing dressing gowns were gorgeous contributions
to the otherwise spare set.
"I had minor quibbles: At one point there was an unnecessary strobe
effecr, and the ending, which was spelled out long before it happened, was
weak. Glass's music was not as thematically rich as in, say, his scores for
Twyla Tharp's 'In the Upper Room' or for the films 'Koyaanisqatsi' and
'Powaqqatsi.' But its melodrama was right for the occasionally campy,
silent-movie quality of this work.
"Great credit is due the excellent cast, seven dancers from Susan Marshall
& Company and four singers (Valerie Komar in addition to those named above), as
well as pianists Nelson Padgett and Eleanor Sandresky and music director
Beatrice Joma Affrom. Glass, who gave the show over to an extraordinarily young
cast--none looked older than 30--presided over all like a benevolent grandpa at
a bang-up birthday bash."
Michael Craig Washington D.C.
Email: Myka...@aol.com