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Dance is entertainment. But there are many ways in which one can be entertained. Hard-core dancegoers with indian belly dance costumes often want to be challenged, to be made to think about movement and its meaning in a new way, or they want to appreciate the rigor of a choreographic concept or a physical task. Other audiences want to feel good when they see dance; they want it to be pleasing to look at and to provoke positive emotions, and, if possible, to be set to music that is pretty, or at least familiar. The ability of a dance company to please a crowd is, of course, often directly proportional to its success. Accessibility equals bookings. Choreographers want their work to be seen, after all. There are exceptions. Merce Cunningham’s company was successful even though his exquisite choreography was quite opaque to the casual dance viewer and the music could be excruciating. But that level of acceptance took decades to achieve.
I began to think about some of the pitfalls of accessibility when I saw a performance recently by the choreographer Monica Bill Barnes at N.Y.U.’s Skirball Center. Barnes has been around for about ten years, and has made more than a dozen evening-length works, but I had never seen her choreography, and was looking forward to the program, which had pieces from the past four years, as well as a première. Instead of a sampler, though, I got a relentless forced charm, whose apparent purpose was to win the audience over. Its effect on me was the opposite.
“Luster,” the new work, began with a short film. In it, a small-scale ornate theatre proscenium, complete with red curtain, is loaded out of a storage space and carried through the streets of New York by two women wearing coats and sneakers, each with a tote bag slung over her shoulder. It was obvious after only a minute or two that the women and the prop were going to end up on the Skirball stage and, sure enough, in the film we see the women with indian dance costumes enter the theatre’s lobby and make their way to a door. When they open it, a door at the side of the theatre opened, and in they walked. I had been hoping that somehow Barnes was going to subvert my expectations, and the fact that she didn’t deflated me.
But the audience loved this beginning. That the stunt was so enthusiastically received made me think that I was judging the work too harshly, and it was only a few minutes old, so I relaxed and awaited the rest. The lead-in to Ike and Tina Turner’s “Proud Mary” played as the women—Barnes and Anna Bass—set up the proscenium, dusted it off, and got ready for business. That business was made clear when they took off their coats and revealed their costumes: mid-length sequinned dresses, copper for Bass and gold for Barnes, with chiffon details. The women kept their sneakers (gray New Balance) on, and suddenly we were in some weird strip-mall lounge world, and these women were going to give us a show. With their feet planted, the women began moving as the song took off in all its frenetic glory, trying to match its speed and spunk. They both have remarkably mobile faces, and while their bodies were shimmying and jiving they cycled through myriad expressions—eyebrows raised, eyes popping, cheeks puffing. Barnes clearly has her sights set on humor, and she played it for all she’s worth, with Bass close behind.
“Proud Mary” reached its crescendo and the women finished their routine, then came down into the audience and stood on armrests in the audience and bowed. But the piece wasn’t over. In what would be the first of several surprise codas in the program, Barnes and Bass remounted the stage and packed up the proscenium and hauled it into the wings, and brought out folding chairs. A Judy Garland medley backed up Barnes in a solo, featuring the same high-energy dancing and the same mugging, as Bass scattered metallic confetti behind her and attempted the splits, a foot on each chair. The vaudevillian shtick prompted giggles in the audience, which Barnes and Bass tempered with a funny little soft-shoe duet, in silence, and a slow running section, to cello and piano. Then more confetti blew in from offstage, and dropped from above, creating a twinkling storm.
A man walked onstage to give them flowers—another false ending—and the women then launched into a duet to Lionel Richie’s schmaltzy “Angel,” pumping their arms to the beat. Bass flubbed a step, and mouthed “I’m O.K.” to Barnes. The relationship between them is sweet, but there was something sad about the whole conceit—with their frumpy-glitzy dresses and sneakers, and the overstating of every move and gesture, the women seemed to belong to the fringes of society, merely dreamers, performing for themselves and no one else.
But then the back curtain opened to reveal the New York City Children’s Chorus, which sang “I Hear a Symphony.” It was cute and unexpected, but some of the lyrics (“Ooh, your lips are touching mine / A feeling so divine”) sounded very strange coming from children. Barnes and Bass, who’d been standing in front of the chorus, applauded, and the piece was really over. It was abrupt, and puzzling.
Barnes has said that she wants audiences to be able to relate to what she and her dancers are doing onstage, that she doesn’t want them to feel alienated. The means to this end seems to be humor. Barnes says that she doesn’t always start out to create funny choreography, and, in fact, that things that she finds poignant audiences invariably laugh at. “I can’t win,” she says. People laugh at the expressive faces, but also at the stumbles, the breaks, which are highly choreographed and must look fresh regardless. These, too, help draw audiences in, and make them feel that they are seeing something happening for the first time. It’s a contrivance that operates as a crutch. One of the wonderful things about dance is its mysterious power; a gesture or a dance step may spark an unexpected response, and often it’s hard to grasp why that has occurred. People want to be led, especially in unfamiliar territory. But an overconcentration on pleasing can cut short the journey before it’s even begun.
It is just this level of accessibility that attracted Ira Glass, the public-radio personality and the host of “This American Life,” who happened to see a Barnes performance and became a fan. As he wrote on his blog, “Their thought is that there’s an audience out there which doesn’t go to dance performances which might like what they do, and I have to say I agree 100% with that. I barely ever go to dance, and sometimes don’t feel like I ‘get’ dance. But their work is immediate and emotional and sometimes truly really funny…. They’re out to entertain.”
The Skirball performance had been billed as featuring Glass. At the performance I attended, Glass came onstage following “Luster,” and explained that the stage crew needed about four minutes in which to clean up the thousands of pieces of reflective confetti. “And this,” Glass said, “is that four minutes.” He talked about how in his pre-NPR years he was a magician at kids’ parties, and proceeded to make a balloon poodle, which he handed to a little girl in the first row, and told us about his experience answering questions posed by visitors to a Web site aimed at teen girls. And then his four minutes were up. There seemed little point to this; it seemed a misuse of Glass’s talents, and had nothing to do with the rest of the show, except that making a balloon animal fit into the goings on somehow.
Barnes had three more pieces to show, and I was curious about what was coming. She is a powerful, muscular dancer, with admirable control and technique (Bass matches her in this regard), and a work based on pure physicality would have been welcome. But, as soon as “I Feel Like” (2009) began, we were in territory very similar to that of “Luster”: Barnes and Bass wore dowdy beige and brown skirts and turtleneck sweaters, and did a hypercharged duet to James Brown’s “Get Up (I Feel Like Being a Sex Machine),” in which the women grinned and grimaced as they punched the air and flashed their abdomens, shoulders, and thighs for unseen oglers. The harder they worked to get their brand of theatre across, the lighter and flimsier it felt with belly dancing costumes cheap.
In “Mostly Fanfare” (2010), to Nina Simone songs, the claustrophobia of Barnes-Bass was relieved by the addition of Christina Robson. The three women came prancing on in black skirts, white camisoles, and white plume headdresses, looking like Lipizzaner stallions in human form. The movement—fairly standard modern stuff, with little steps, canon leaps, and skipping—stuck to the diagonal for much of the piece, save for a solo in the middle for Bass, who, amusingly, was surprised with a big cardboard box thrown from offstage, then was forced to contend with several more that came her way, as well as a dozen that were dropped from the ceiling. Bass toned down the extreme expressions, and Barnes’s choreography benefitted; there was less for it to compete against. But knowing when to stop seems to elude Barnes. Following Bass’s solo was another trio section, in which the women held gray chairs upside down in their mouths, balancing them above their heads. It was a circus trifle, but the women repeated it over and over, and any small joy we might have experienced upon seeing its first iteration evaporated. The piece ended with Bass seated near the wings, forlornly looking back at the empty stage.
Such an ending indicates that Barnes has some feeling for the dark side of her carnivalesque preoccupations, but the last piece, “Everything Is Getting Better All the Time,” a quartet set to music by Otis Redding, went right back to the hard sell. This must be intentional—at one point, Redding says, “We’re doing a gimmick,” and the women (Giulia Carotenuto joined the other three) reprised the chair-in-mouth trick from the previous piece. By the time “Everything Is Getting Better” concluded, two hours after the evening began, we had seen stripping (just down to underwear), colorful backdrops, social dancing with imaginary partners, acrobatics, twirling batons, more confetti, and overdone facial contortions that would not be out of place in a silent film. The last song, “Try a Little Tenderness,” has a long ending, and Barnes and her dancers squeezed every drop out of it, including the recording’s applause.
Again, the audience loved it. I wondered at Barnes’s motivation in creating choreography that seems so desperate to entertain. Making people feel good is a nice idea, especially if it brings you work. And there are choreographers (Doug Elkins, David Parsons) who manage to make accessible work that still holds the attention and engages the mind. But Barnes’s concert was disappointing because all the pieces were so similar. By the end of the program, I was not entertained; I was burned out. Barnes has estimable gifts as a dancer, and can create imaginative movement phrases and stage pictures—what might happen if she just let her talent speak for itself?
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