There were no signs of rioting in Berkeley last Friday night at Cal Performances' Available Light, the prestige modern-dance event of the season. Berkeley co-commissioned the revival of this famous 1985 piece years ago. They could not have anticipated how it would look in the light of the post-election ascendancy of the petit-bourgeoisie. They intended it as a birthday present to its composer John Adams, Berkeley's most famous artist-resident, who turns 70 next week. A huge crowd turned out �" mostly paper, I'm afraid, but Zellerbach's lobby mezzanine was full. When they all filed into the auditorium, they found curtain up, revealing Frank Gehry's amazing set. We eyed it warily. It seemed to carry an electric charge, with ominous possibilities.
The scene mirrored the house: a mezzanine floated above the main floor, supported on open-work pillars; five cages made of pipes, mostly upright, with a stabilizing pair crossed on the diagonals. These dark lines prophesied dance to follow, which proceeded at every moment either in gridlike lines or on the diagonals. Dancers in silhouette appeared in the spaces between them, then took their places like pegs on a pinochle board. Eleven of them, in squads, dressed in red, white, and black. The picture reminded me of the pterodactyls falling into formation at the end of Jurassic Park. The dancers walked to place with an ordinary gait, but from then on, no step they took was ordinary, and the paths they took were rigorously confined to the geometry of an invisible grid. As if they were electrons moving in a microprocessor, they moved in set paths till some invisible switch reversed their direction, stopped them completely, or spun them onto another diagonal altogether. The upper deck was sometimes empty.
Lucinda Childs, who designed the dances, was perhaps the most famous of the three in 1983 when the LA Museum of Contemporary Art first bespoke the piece. The museum, still a-borning, did not even have a building of its own yet, and the dance was first performed for lack of a better place in a disused factory, which had a ring of skylights around the top that were used to light the piece, with floodlights from outside.
Childs had famously kept up the radical criteria of the postmodern dancers, no "meaning" but what lay in the movement itself. Though she used the balletic idiom of Merce Cunningham, which is not pedestrian and has a Cartesian beauty in its own right, still, it's as austere as the Pythagorean theorem. For the first 15 minutes, no leg rose higher than 30 degrees, and the dancers never took one step sideways. As the musical mood shifted, she added scuttling sideways steps, and some high extensions, but it wasn't til the second movement that she introduced a step that hopped. She refused to court the audience (as her mentors Merce Cunningham and Yvonne Rainer had done) with anything as tawdry as a climax. No "sell-out" tricks �" no feel-good references to daily life or to romantic love, no recognizable gestures. There's not one pas de deux, not even a smile of recognition from one dancer to another. It's all pure movement in space and time, no one step that's more important than another, though someone might leave the ground floor and move up to the alto plano.
Matias Tarnopolsky, Director of Cal Performances, got rounds of applause, speaking before the piece began, when he said they'd hewed to the theme of Berkeley Radicals by keeping it pure. Then the show started, and we saw what he meant. They danced impersonally, using a tiny vocabulary of maybe 25 steps, recombined like genes in chromosomes. Their phrases took shape in straight lines with tiny rhythmic changes, mirroring the "points of light" curtain of shimmering sounds that Adams had created in his avowedly minimalist music.
Adams has said he composed the score "on a Casio keyboard, bought at Macy's" while on retreat at the Djerassi Foundation ranch in 1983. It's a 50-minute postmodern Pastoral Symphony in two movements, describing a winter landscape enshrouded in mists, curtained in rains, buffeted with winds, but often shimmering and almost unmoving. He called it "Light over Water." The second movement begins with slow trills, drawn out to heavenly length, punctuated with a two-note motto that put me in mind of the "nightingale and cuckoo" coda in Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony .
The choreography has a prismatic, crystalline clarity slightly belied by the dancers. Because her idiom is unique, Childs has not been able to attract dancers of the first caliber technically. There were weak ankles, unstretched knees, hunched shoulders pockmarking the unison, a problem in a piece of such austerity, where the steps recur over and over, and costumes reveal every flaw. It was originally danced in jumpsuits, which billowed out on the turns, danced with a life of their own. The dancers need to move like a flock of birds. Though some danced better than others, the lack of precision made for raggedness. This was not a fatal flaw, since the choreography itself is beautiful, and the idiom, which uses archaic positions (arms in Cecchetti-first position, the fingertips brushing the sides of the thighs, feet in Charlie Chaplin stance), is so difficult to master, one has to be grateful there are dancers willing to commit to it.
It was wonderful to see this. The culture may be changing very fast now. None of us can afford to ignore the economic difficulties of life, a luxury the postmodern dancers could indulge. "We didn't need money," Remy Charlip once told me. "We didn't have to pay rent, and food you could scrounge." Their aesthetic depended on that.