Review: The dirt on the Gaillard's dance season closer
The human condition is messy. During "The Rite of Spring," so was the Martha and John M. Rivers Performance Hall.
credit: “The Rite of Spring,” photography by Maarten Vanden Abeele
On Feb. 2 and 3, Charleston Gaillard Center topped off the fourth season of its ambitious, excellent dance initiative with “The Rite of Spring/common ground[s],” the stunning, gutting collaboration between the Pina Bausch Foundation, Senegal’s Ecole des Sables and London’s Sadler’s Wells Dance Company.
It has been touring the world and the States to wild acclaim, and represented the first time ever that these companies have been to Charleston.
Getting them here is testament to the considerable ambition of Gaillard President and CEO Leesa Frenkel, who has for the past three years trained her considerable focus on elevating the organization’s dance initiative.
It is one that has attracted crowds in the thousands during the pandemic outdoor performance of American Ballet Theatre’s ABT Across America on The Citadel grounds. And it includes the significant co-commissioning with the International African American Museum a new work from Dance Theatre of Harlem, “Sounds of Hazel,” which celebrated the life of jazz pianist and popular entertainer Hazel Scott.
When Frenkel walked onto the stage of the Martha and John M. Rivers Performance Hall, as she regularly does to welcome the audience, she cut a pleasant, congenial proposition. But I would not want to meet her in a half-empty theater. She is on a mission to hold the Gaillard to its own: to be a dynamic gathering place for all of the Charleston community.
Since her arrival to the Gaillard from New York City in 2021, I’ve seen the organization move heaven and earth to not only move ticket sales, but to create gatherings that are representative of the Charleston community. This past performance was no exception, with a lively, vibrant crowd that was an event before the main event.
And, Frenkel’s clearly not afraid to sling a little peat on that polished stage either. But more on that later.
Now on with with the show. First, co-choreographers Germaine Acogny, Senegalese French dancer, teacher and choreographer known as “the mother of contemporary African dance,” and Malou Airaudo, French choreographer and dancer, set a reflective tone in “common ground[s].”
The two artists inhabited the stage from the start, even poised, backs to the audience, side by side on stools center stage. Both in their 70s, they together brought to stage a solid century of combined skill and expertise, and registered as both commanding and vulnerable within the physical vessels of their decades-long devotion to dance.
To an ethereal score by Fabrice Bouillon LaForest replete with natural sounds and performed by a 10-piece ensemble, the two took up various spots on the stage, draped in long black dresses, grasping a tall, slender stick that at times joined them.
Forming one pattern after the next, standing apart as if two points on a constellation, then coming together in tender connection. At times one head would rest on the chest of the other, or one would carry the other’s weight in a striking interplay of phenomenal core strength and human frailty, maternal and muscular, defenseless and grounded.
Credit: “common ground[s],” photo by Maarten Vanden Abeele/
Poignant and fine, the work set a tone that was in striking contrast to what was to follow. That “The Rite of Spring,” Pina Bausch’s choreography for the mind-blowing Stravinsky work that ignited riot in 1913 in Paris, when Ballet Russes debuted it Theatre des Champs-Elysees.
In 1975, Bausch managed to blow minds once more.
I had sufficient back story about the production heading to Charleston Gaillard Center to be primed for an event. It had been a highwater mark of the New York City cultural season, appearing at Frenkel’s former stomping grounds of Park Avenue Armory and prompting even arts-saturated Manhattanites to plead for spare seats.
I had backstory on Bausch, too, whose epic productions at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) were the stuff of legend when I worked there — the 1985 production of “Arien” that entailed filling the Opera House stage with four inches of water, with audience members waiting for untold tk until it sufficiently heated for the dancers.
But, at BAM, we all knew that its executive producer, the great Harvey Lichtenstein, would accommodate Pina however she saw fit — such was reverence he held for the choreographer’s unflagging firmness of vision.
After the Charleston performance of Bausch’s “The Rite of Spring,” I was able to meet Salomon Bausch, the son of late choregorapher who continues the artist’s tradition as founder of the foundation. I asked him what was the most striking thing about his mother. It was the confidence she had in her work.
In 1975, her vision of “The Rite of Spring” was a seminal, genre-shattering event in the contemporary dance world. Now it was getting a new production that dived deeper still into its source.
I knew Frenkel had further engaged her local collaborators in this collective effort, gathering an entourage of key stakeholders to beat it up to New York among them Dr. Gretchen McLaine, Chair, Dept. of Theatre and Dance at the College of Charleston, which provided studio space and other resources ; Lindy Mandradjieff, founder, Dance Conservatory of Charleston, (who hosted a master class with the company); and Charlton Singleton, artist-in-residence emeritus at the Gaillard.
And, I knew the Gaillard technical staff was set to haul large bins of peat onto the pristine, state-of-the-art performance hall stage, piling it sufficiently thick for the ensemble to kick up a momental mess before our eyes.
And so they did, charging and lurching on stage, as if vigorously cultivating a field, and at the same time seeming to fight from being pulled back into the Earth themselves—as if survival itself was in the springtime air. The men, expressionless and bare-chested in black pants, moved in menacing, predatory unison. The women, in thin white slip dresses, scatter about them, growing increasingly frantic.
Stravinsky’s score soared with new urgency as it propelled more than 30 dancers, who were gathered from 14 African countries and spanned all levels of professional experience, selected for what each individually brought to the ensemble.
Among the work’s central figures was The Chosen One (performed by Khadija Cisse), a sole woman selected by the ever-advancing men to serve as a sacrifice to the gods, to seal the survival of them all through a primal, earth borne rite. Palpably terrified, she darts around, powerless to elude her fate as the men close in on her, to no avail.
They force onto her kinetic frame a red dress, one that has loomed on stage, carried about as an ominous swath of crimson cloth on an otherwise neutral-hue tableau. The tumult intensifies, whipped up by the ever-keening score, kicked up with the high-flying dirt, as the dancers become stained with the earth.
At its bracing culmination, the audience leapt from their seats with similarly wild abandon. They had been moved to the core, and dance has unleashed its visceral, vital power in Charleston once more.