IMPROPRIETIES
During rehearsals for the concert “Improprieties” at the Dance Center of Columbia College, one of the dancers stood onstage while the lights were being adjusted. Bored, he started to strike dramatic Martha Graham-style poses. The other dancers teased him, shouting “Angst. Give us some Graham angst.” The dancer, the youngest member of the company, didn’t know what “angst” meant. The other dancers teased more, saying: “You call yourself a modern dancer, and you don’t know what angst is?” The choreographer, Phil Martini, cut short the teasing. “Good,” he said. “Now you have the chance to become a good modern dancer.”
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First of all, it might be humorous. Royal Family is a satiric look at the British royal family. The drunken queen mother keeps falling to the floor in a stupor. A flirtatious princess never met a man she didn’t like. Chuck and Di always try to steal the spotlight from each other. The queen herself, played by spark plug Eileen Sheehan, is a ridiculous martinet, as well as a strangely tragic figure caught inside her role, as much marionette as martinet. Betty Kas, as the queen mother and flirtatious princess, showed herself a lovely comedienne.
The piece that follows modern-dance conventions most closely is Without. Four dancers (Allen, Crawford, Sheehan, and Hoffman) in black unitards move to minimalist music by Ennio Morricone. Press materials describe the piece as a young man’s struggle to accept his own death, and the effect of his struggle on the people around him. (Part of the proceeds for the concert went to the AIDS Alternative Health Project; the cause of death is easy to guess.) But this theme is difficult to grasp from the dance itself. The overall impression is of grave, slow movement. The young man’s anguish is not angst, because the dance focuses on the outer world, the man’s relationships to others. Perhaps the dance’s personal nature prevented Martini from communicating his idea clearly; if so, he would be following a long tradition of unintentional obscurity in modern dance.
