Speak, Memory

“Trying Times” was originally made in 1982.  It was set to Stravinsky’s “Apollo” and made during a time when Gordon saw Balanchine’s masterpiece often with the critic Arlene Croce.  The idea of memory was stitched into and on to the revival of work much as the addition of “remembered” to the title.  Early videos of the ’82 performances were projected on the back wall as counterpoint to the live action.  The videos were grainy and blurry, like our memories.  Often what was happening on the stage and the video were slightly out of sync. Somehow, it all made sense.  Nostalgia lingered over the performance as well.  Gordon isn’t young, and he’s looking at what he’s done as much as what he might do.  Gordon’s spouse and muse, Valda Setterfield, danced a solo as she had done in 1982, but disquietingly and poignantly she danced something completely different, forcing a comparison to 26 years previous.  She probably no longer had the smooth legato to sustain the relatively simple but elegant solo she once danced.

Gordon’s wit and wordplay comes from sharp observation and a keen ear.  As well as double entendres, he hears rhetorical devices (“I go” and “You know?” are but two) and throws them back at you in such a dizzying but clear fashion that it takes a while after watching “Trying Times” before you can speak normally without stumbling over every “you know.”

At one point a trio of men faced panels ruled with squares held by the other dancers.  It was obvious the men were standing in front of urinals and the one in the center, Niall Jones, was complaining about a date gone wrong with a woman.  She menacingly asked him to prove his love by biting on his tongue hard enough to draw blood.  The scene changed and the women did a brisk line dance and Karen Graham told the same story from her perspective.  Jones aggressively pursued her and she made that demand to get him to think about the price of what he wanted.  Both tales ended with the query, “But what does love have to do with blood?” The associations of love, blood and the disease called AIDS that we were only beginning to understand in 1982 stayed under the surface.  Graham and Jones danced in silence a simple, thoughtful duet that wound concert dance around human intimacy.

It was the high point of the evening, which then went into a long chunk of the “Apollo” score.  That was sacrilege and treason to his Judson Church colleagues in ’82 but if you’re from uptown rather than downtown and you know “Apollo,” there was less frisson.  A quarter of a century later even Yvonne Rainer relented and did a brilliant take on “Agon.” In “Trying Times,” Balanchine’s fecund invention is reduced to stillness and torsion.  Gordon’s vocabulary is post-modernism restricted to few gestures but his aesthetic is clean and buoyant. He nodded to Balanchine in deportment and upper body carriage, but also in a few tableaux, as when one man gave his hands to three women braced in a lunge.

“Trying Times” ended with a mock trial where Setterfield acted as counsel for the defense and Gordon was the absent judge for his treason from post-modernism. Graham’s complaint about talk, talk, talk was the funniest moment; Gordon’s work is as insider in its own way as ballet. (He sat on the panel of the NEA with Croce; she wrote a lengthy profile of him for “The New Yorker”) Setterfield makes an in-joke about “masterpiece grants” and the self-congratulatory ending –“He’s not a maverick he’s simply perverse” – was the weakest part of the piece, possibly because talking about oneself as an artist has become standard procedure in the ensuing quarter century.

Gordon used five professional dancers in the cast including Setterfield and company veteran Graham; eight students from Sharon Disney Lund School of Dance at CalArts completed the cast.

copyright © 2008 by Leigh Witchel
photos by Steve Gunther

top: Valda Setterfield in “Trying Times”
bottom: “Trying Times”