Stephen Petronio, Lost At Sea

All this week, Stephen Petronio’s company has been anchored at The Joyce. It’s a special occasion, too: his company celebrates its 25th year, and the star choreographer wants to party. So what’s he done? Invited hot tickets like Nico Muhly to do the score and Cindy Sherman to design the outfits for an evening length work called “I Drink In The Air Before Me.” The title comes from Shakespeare’s “The Tempest” and the whole work evokes a maiden voyage gone awry. When I say something also ambiguously judgmental, like that it feels like a vivant tableaux of a shipwreck, I don’t mean that entirely in a bad way, either. Gericault would rejoice, and audiences might too. But, alas, only for awhile.

The fact is, Petronio let his collaborators steal his show. Muhly’s icy score, full of creaky pipe sounds, synthesized organs and a well-woven live wind-and-string ensemble, is remarkable. Muhly apparently met Petronio at a gym–they said this after last night’s talk-back session–and Petronio wanted to do something nautical. So Muhly created a very loosely structured score that emulates a weather pattern; a quiet interlude followed by a rapturous stormy center, which is then washed out by an iridescent choir-sung coda.

It’s a beautiful piece of work, and it’s obvious that the gauntlet Muhly threw down was a bit much for Petronio to handle. His stock-and-trade moves–darting swirls, rapid juts and jams of elbows, hips and hands–are just fine. But they can’t sustain an hour-length work like Muhly’s. You can tell he has a wider vocabulary, particularly in the rare instances when a pas de deux mingles in balletic poses. There are hints of grace and elegance elsewhere, too, and one only wishes he’d match more of it to the more tender sections of Muhly’s score. But he didn’t, and instead we get bored.

A few things keep us watching, though, like Sherman’s simple and soft, if sometimes ill-thought outfits. In one scene, the powder blue pajamas look great, but you can’t appreciate a dancer’s stallion torso or craning limbs in such suits. One guy just says the hell with it, takes his top off, and lets gawker’s gawk. Her thick navy-and-white stripe spandex pieces, in another scene, were a better choice. Now I don’t want to say that Petronio got intimidated by his guests, so I’ll just wonder out loud. Whatever the reason he got outshone, there’s no reason for it. Twenty-fears years means you’re good. You’ve built it, people want to come. Plus, he’s got more on his resume to prove his worth, all those years with Trisha Brown, collaborations with William Forsythe, and truckloads more with opera and ballet companies the world over. Now it’s his turn to sit down his dream team of collaborators, and say, Listen, I run the show.

Steph-o, if you’re listening, here’s wishing you a happy 25th, and hoping for a better party next year.

The Best Israeli Novelist You’ve Never Heard Of

My story from last week. It’s about one of Israeli’s most esteemed writers, Meir Shalev, who’s in town this week for the PEN World Voices Festival. Read my article. Or, better yet, read his books.

Will David Hare’s New Play Become Another “Seven Jewish Children”?

Anyone’s guess. But based on the excerpt Hare published in The New York Review of Books a couple of weeks ago, it won’t go down lightly. The Public Theater will show two of Hare’s new works, both monologues, in five performances beginning May 14.  One is titled “Wall” and another “Berlin.” The latter considers the fall of the Berlin wall, twenty years hence, while the other, “Wall,” focuses on Israel’s security barrier along the West Bank and Gazan borders. Ardent Israel supporters won’t find much solace in the piece, riddled as it is with Israelis who say they’re ashamed of it, and quotes by Sari Nusseibeh and The Hague that say it’s a land grab. But Hare is certainly more evenhanded than Churchill, whose ten-minute playlet “Seven Jewish Children” caused a considerable roe in the U.S. just weeks ago (see my post below). The NYRB excerpt of “Wall” features biting passages of Hamas torture techniques used on Palestinians it considers collaborators:

The victim is shown a wall on which a staircase is drawn, and at the top is a drawing of a bicycle. The victim is told to go and get the bicycle. He says he can’t get the bicycle because it’s a drawing. He is then told if he doesn’t bring the bicycle downstairs he will be beaten.

If Hare calls out the wall’s futility, he at least gives a fuller picture of the conflict. This was something Churchill was either unable or unwilling to do. Hare knows the Palestinians, particularly in Gaza, haven’t done themselves any favors, but he also knows the Israelis haven’t done much better. Hare revels in the ironies, quoting two enlightened Jews, Disraeli and Einstein, who were quick to point out how a powerful Jewish state might forget its history of victimization. And he lets Israeli novelist David Grossman, whom he interviews, have the last word: “And here, again, is the central paradox, the idea of Israel was that we should cease to be victims. … Survival becomes our only aim. We are living in order to survive, not in order to live.” Though gloved between the lips of an Israeli, still fighting words.

Stay tuned for the bout.

Is Caryl Churchill an Anti-Semite?

No. Read why I think not in this review of her controversial new playlet “Seven Jewish Children: A Play for Gaza.”  It caused a major row in England when it debuted at the Royal Court in February, and the controversy came and went last week in the U.S.  (Went, because it was only shown for three days at the New York Theatre Workshop, and two at the J Theater in Washington.)  But it still has legs in Britain, with the BBC recently announcing that it wouldn’t allow it to be screened on its station.  Anyway, you can read about all the drama, both in and about the work, in my earlier reported story as the play was still being performed, and of course the review I linked to above.

Sex, Water, and Protest: Three New Stories

Check out my three latest stories:

1. “Not-So-Kosher-Sex,” a profile of the filmmakers behind “American Swing,” a documentary about Plato’s Retreat, the notorious Manhattan sex club.
2. “Private History, Not Grand History,” a feature of the artist Peter Forgacs, whose film installation “The Danube River” recently opened in New York.  The work combines three narratives–Jews shipped out of Germany along the Danube River; poor German farmers sent back into the German interior on the same river, a year later, after Hitler gave their land to Stalin; and the Hungarian captain who steered and filmed both journeys.
3. “No Dancing Around the Issues,” my coverage of the protests surrounding Ohad Naharin’s BAM performance earlier this month.  Since January, anti-Israel protesters outraged over the war in Gaza have followed the choreographer across the country.  At the last leg of his tour, in Brooklyn, they showed up too.   (A pity they didn’t get tickets; the show inside was superb.)

No, I’m not from the shtetl, thank you.

Russia’s Jews are often thought to have either lived in shtetls or turned into Communists.  Which is true, but not totally.  The current Jewish Museum exhibit  on Chagall and the Russian avant-garde theater suggests otherwise, as do several new books.  Here’s my story on it.

And here’s some further reading:

• The exuberant review of “Ballet’s Magic Kingdom” in the New York Times’ Sunday Book Review. It’s a new translation of work by the great Russian ballet critic Akim Volynsky (ne Chaim Leib Flekser).

• Jed Perl’s review of the Chagall exhibit. Perl says Chagall was deeply spiritual, if not quite religious. And that he was in fact a master, contra the mod critical opinion.

• But Richard Dorment says that’s rubbish. Chagall was a phony. He was a cheap knock-off of Picasso, Braque and Malevich; his modernist touches were merely gloss; and he hadn’t a clue what the movement was really all about.

They report, you decide, and here’s more help:

Picasso’s “The Old Guitarist,” from 1903.

Malevich’s “Cow and Fiddle,” from 1913.

Chagall’s “Green Fiddler,” from 1913.

Remastered, from El Greco to Picasso

Some art talk: I couldn’t find the Spaniards last time I went to the Met, but after a visit yesterday to the Pierre Bonnard exhibit (see it, it’s worth the hype), I walked around and bumped into my boys–Goya, Zurburan, Velazquez, El Greco.  Good heavens, how have you been? And, my, how you’ve grown!

There aren’t many, but El Greco’s Toledo landscape alone is almost enough. It’s like looking through a pinhole camera with all that distortion, those cathedrals and low-slung homes either blurred or crystalline clear.  A somniferous illusion, yet so awake, so alive!  I still remembering seeing my first El Greco with my mom; I remember still all that verticality, those velvety purples, fuschias, shamrock greens. And, of course, that perpetual imbalance, as if van Gogh, Bonnard, and Munch all caught vertigo from him.

Jed Perl, The New Republic’s art critic, makes the point in the current issue that painters often strive for the exalted, the intense transcendent emotion we usually associate with religious feeling.

Lionell Trilling, Perl’s intellectual forebearer, made a similar observation: could it be that at the core of religion is just that peculiar human feeling we call transcendence? (Collected in the Trilling re-issue by the New York Review of Books).  It’s a profound human emotion, religious feeling, but is all the stuff we build around it, what we call organized religion, just edifice: the buildings, the diets, the books, the whole thing about God?

Back to El Greco, who, anyway, was a very pious man. You feel that religious intensity in the secular Toledo landscape just as you do in his religious scenes.
El Greco’s “View of Toledo,” 1600

Just look at his Toledo a little longer: the inky blue sky pierced by a blinding yellow-white light; that then ringed by foreboding grey clouds.  There’s even an omnipotence in the artist’s perspective, with those tiny wisps of people barely brushed in, toiling on a much more vast, verdant green ground. I wanted to sing my praise, Praised be he!

But, alas, who’s he? Greco or God?, Capital “H” or not?

Also, it was nice to see more clearly the El Greco – Picasso connection.  The Met’s got El Greco’s “Opening of the Fifth Seal” (MOMA has Pablo’s “Demoisselles”).  The placard for the Met’s “Seal” notes that Picasso studied it for a long time before starting “Demoiselles,” and immediately it’s apparent.

El Greco’s “Fifth Seal”

Picasso’s “Demoiselles”

You can see right away the parallel with El Greco’s three white women, proto-Cubist in pose. That is, they’re shown in completely unrelated perspectives.  If you look at Picasso’s “Demoiselles”, the riffing is uncanny. Pablo’s girls might as will be El Greco’s daughters, striking their masked pose.

And isn’t there some beauty in this: masters conversing over centuries; history as its own kind of muse. Just another pleasure of a visit to the Met.

Bech, Resurrected. (An Ode to Updike)

My story in this week’s Jewish Week comments on Updike’s great creation, Henry Bech. Rabbit is undoubtedly his greatest, but boy, it’s time we give Bech more due. Contra the character’s original purpose–to have a little fun mocking the literary establishment–the Bech stories ended up hitting all Updike’s key themes. That’s my argument, anyway. Read more here.

Ozick wasn’t happy with Bech.  In an essay, “Bech, Passing,” published in 1983, she wrote: ‘It is fairly on par with a comic novel about how slavery cretinized the black man. … Despite your Jewish nose and hair, you are — as Jew — an imbecile to the core.’

Also, Alice Tully Hall re-opens this Sunday, Feb. 22. Very exciting. And since medieval Sephardic fare is on the bill for the first night of performances, I got to write about it for The Jewish Week. Ever heard the case for music’s therapuetic power? Ain’t true, at least not when Arabs and Jews have to record together. Read about one such kerfuffle in my interview with Savall, here.

Will Hebrew Save Israel From Destruction? Two Professors Suggest So

Check out my story this week for The Jewish Week. It’s a review of two books, one by Bernard Avishai, the other by Ilan Stavans, both of which explore Hebrew’s centrality to the Jewish state. Avishai’s book “The Hebrew Republic” is the more political of the two, and he comes out throwing punches. That old issue — you can’t be both Jewish and democratic — is his focus. And he’s saying Jews gotta deal with it. If you want to keep Israel Jewish, then at least make Judaism something anyone–Arab, Russian, atheist–can enter. Hebrew, make everyone speak it. That’s his answer. Read more about my take on it here.

Also, keep your eyes peeled for Zadie Smith’s provocative essay in the upcoming issue of the New York Review of Books. (Not yet available online.)  Called “Speaking in Tongues,” the piece analyzes Obama’s ability to speak in several different dialects, and what it says about his, and Western society’s, self-made selves.  Smith, you might know, is a black Briton who went on to Cambridge. The early part of the essay talks about her conscious change in speech.  What’s strange is that she (and most people) get called out for speaking differently to different people.  But isn’t that part of the West’s tale?  It’s just a reflection of our rags-to-riches, up-by-the-bootstraps mentality.  Why hate?

Brother, I’m dying.

The wunderkind, Atul Gawande, writes about what’s wrong with America’s healthcare and how to fix it.  It’s in this week’s New Yorker.  He compares our system to other Western countries’–Britian, Canada, Switzerland (I believe), and France. 

Based on their paths toward universal coverage, he argues that we have to open up the various–and imperfect–government programs we already have to get everyone coverage.  That means opening up the VA system to non-vets, Medicare to people of all ages, and employer-based private coverage to the unemployed.

He attacks visionaries, on the left or right, who want to create a whole new system from scratch. Be pragamatic, he says, and work with what you got.  After all, other byzantine American systems have adapted just fine to monumental change: telephone lines went from analog to digital without tearing down posts.  Ditto for cable. Why not healthcare?

So, Gawande’s watchword is “pragmatism” (Obama!  You listenin’?!  Someone wants a job.) Build on what you got.

Also, read Marcia Angell’s hard-bitten piece from last month’s New York Review of Books.

It’s an overview of how doctors and pharmaceutical companies got us hooked on drugs.  Like Gawande, Angell’s a Harvard Med prof.  But unlike Gawande, who advised the Clinton admin, for better or worse, Angell was the editor of the New England Journal of Medicine. That matters.

Oh yes, and one more healthcare piece. It’s in this month’s Harper’s, and may curb Gawande’s enthusiasm. I haven’t read it, at least not yet, but with the title “Sick in the Head: Why America Won’t Get the Healthcare It Needs,” I’m assuming it’s not too cheery.