Art and Politics, part II

I went to the Houston Ballet on Saturday night. It was a long and rich program. It started with what, in Houston, I call the "obligatory Balanchine piece," Sérénade on music by Tchaikovsky. That's the piece that they have to dance so that the blue-haired ladies and the men with the sterling silver banknote clips don't run away screaming.

(Actually, I'm way too harsh: the Houston Ballet has become much better since Stanton Welch took over as choreographer-in-residence, and the audience is now also much more diverse in terms of age, gender, looks, etc. But I digress...)

The second piece was Swan Song by Christopher Bruce, on a score by Philip Chambon. The third piece was The Core, Welch's rendition of Gershwin's Concerto in F for piano -- a piece set in post-war New York that was boisterous and colorful and funny and had a wonderful decor and costumes, but a little too close to Jerome Robbins' Fancy Free for comfort, especially since the latter is danced to music by Leonard Bernstein, who is certainly Gershwin's heir.

But it is Swan Song I want to talk about. Curtain up: three male dancers -- two dressed in khaki slacks and shirts, clearly a uniform, standing on both sides of the third man, seated on a chair, wearing a red tee shirt and blue jeans. Almost from this first tableau, and certainly after the first moves, you get the point: two torturers and their victim. The scenes of simulated violence alternate with the prisoner's dreams of escape, and with his attempts to placate his enemies by obeying their commands -- in a brilliant metaphor, this is symbolized by the victim repeating his captors' footwork after them.

I found the piece mesmerizing because of the dancers' skill, but hard to watch because of the evocation of brutality and hopelessness. At one point, the torturers pick up their victim by the legs and hold him upside down, clearly mimicking the act of half-drowning him. With the recent discussion of waterboarding of terrorism suspects by the CIA, this was frighteningly relevant. I was also impressed by the fact that the dancer who played the victim actually looked scared when he was sitting in the interrogation chair at the beginning. Now there is always a bit of acting in most dance routines, but perhaps because of how serious the subject was, his acting seemed more compelling than usual.

After the performance, there was a small "meet the performers" opportunity in the Wortham Center's "Green Room." It was actually poorly attended, perhaps because 10 p.m. is bed time for Houstonians. Three of the dancers were conversing with people. I noticed principal dancer Connor Walsh, still wearing his sailor's costume from The Core, but whom I recognized as the "victim" in Swang Song. So I went over and asked him how it felt to dance on this subject, and whether he was totally focusing on his moves or thinking about the theme of the piece at the same time. He told me that actually, the piece is physically brutal to the dancer: he does get thrown around a lot, and said that "it's a long and difficult piece, and as it progresses I feel more and more tired, and I actually hurt from all that's happening. So it is very realistic to me, and the look of exhaustion and pain is really not faked. Right now, I am bruised all over." I mentioned noticing that he really looked scared at the beginning, sitting in the chair between the other two guys, and he said "thanks for mentioning that, but in a sense it's because I really am scared of what is about to happen."

We didn't discuss the relationship with current events -- Mr. Walsh only said something very short about "how this is so important right now." By then, someone was waiting to talk to him, so I got him to sign my program and I went on.

Oh, I forgot to mention that when the ovation had ended after that piece, the man sitting next to me in the theatre had turned to me and said, in a tentative way, "what was that about?" As I was trying to recover my breath after feeling so tense during the piece, I didn't burst out as I might otherwise have done ("what do you mean, you idiot, what was that about?). I just calmly said "torture." And he said "oh." I guess if you can't recognize a metaphor for torture (and believe me, it wasn't that hard to "get it"), you're probably not the kind of person who will think much about what the U.S. is doing to itself when the Attorney General refuses to say what his position on waterboarding would be if it came up to him for a decision on its legality! I just think I know which party the gentleman in seat 29-3 is going to vote for...

Yup, art and politics, once again.