MAKE IT LOUDER

Confession: when I bought tickets to see Macbeth at the Armory it was with little interest in the Tragedie of Macbeth, its contemporary retelling, Shakespeare in general, or immersive theater. It was to witness Kenneth Branagh fill the Drill Hall with his voice. I will listen to him perform under just about any circumstances ( bizarre, goofy, politically dubious). His voice gives great pleasure. When he speaks I’m reminded how beautiful English can be, and how expressive male voices can be.

This production gives us a lot of Branagh, who wears his rough red stubble, tartan shawl and leather breeches well. But the sound mix seems to hold his voice lower than that of the other actors. And he rushes through his words, glossing over the language and also the drama. When, at the end, he’s told that Lady Macbeth is gone, he starts right into the famous “Tomorrow tomorrow tomorrow” soliloquy and then, suddenly, the speech, and his grief, are done.

This production doesn’t value language. The play has been squashed to two hours, cutting out chunks of dialogue including “Eye of newt, and toe of frog/Wool of bat, and tongue of dog." The transitions between scenes are brisk, and several other actors also rush through their words. Though they speak clearly it’s too quickly for the sounds, and the meanings, to stick. Without pauses Shakespeare’s language, for someone like me, who has no special literary knowledge, is a finely-wrought and pointless lyric.

One voice breaks through. Richard Coyle, who plays MacDuff, has a clear, direct voice whose rhythms sound authentically Scottish. It’s the voice of a good, strong man; when we hear it we believe that he is a natural soldier and that he himself would make a good king. When MacDuff receives news that his wife and child have been taken he stops in mid-step, and this small rupture expresses grief more fully than even his words do. It’s exciting each time he appears, and moving each time he speaks. Why don’t I feel this way about Macbeth?

Photograph by Stephanie Berger, courtesy of Park Avenue Armory.

June 28, 2014 by Nalina Moses

ANIMAL ATTRACTION

For someone who devoted his life to the female form, making dresses that slithered over their hips and caressed the back of their necks, and dipped down around the valleys of their collarbones, the Met’s exhibit honoring Charles James is curiously bodiless. We see some archival photographs of women in the dresses. But we don’t see film or video of women in the dresses as they enter the room on an escort’s arm, curtsy before a dance partner, or collapse into a chaise lounge, as we imagine women wearing them would.

The garments are draped stiffly on headless, limbless dress forms that are lifted off the ground on platforms, and lit sparingly with pinpoint LED lights. Undoubtedly this is to highlight their sculptural richness, and their elaborate draping and construction. Displayed this way, in the dimly lit basement gallery, James’ day dresses and coats are gorgeous relics. The lights have a cool bluish cast that drains the reds and yellows, and all of the softness, from the fabrics. These clothes look like they’re carved out of stone.

But something different happens in the ground floor gallery, where the ball gowns are displayed. These garments have rigid vertical symmetries and profiles that, typically, pull tight at the waist and swell extravagantly at the hips and hem. They look like living things. Not like women, really, but like fragile and exotic creatures who live short, brilliant lives. From a distance, when seen all at once, the array of dresses feels like an exhibit at a natural history museum . These lustrous shells could be prehistoric insects recovered from a dig, blossoms brought back from an Amazonian expedition, or deep sea crustaceans that cannot survive the light of day. The dresses have a strong biological charge. Not in the way that they reshape women into what will make them attractive to men, although they might do that, subtly. Rather they transform the women who wear them into another species altogether, giving them a fantastic, superhuman armature to put on over her own. That transformation would be wondrous to see.

Image of Beyond Fashion courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum.

June 27, 2014 by Nalina Moses

PATTERN LANGUAGE

A wall text at the Met’s Charles James exhibit, Beyond Fashion, uses the word “Jamesian” to describe his work. It startled me because the word typically refers to author Henry James, whose legendary, novella-long sentences are crafted with an arch, meticulous prose, in which each comma, clause and conjunction inflects meaning importantly. But even when taking this literary meaning, “Jamesian" rings true. In another wall text, just a few feet away, Charles James makes the connection himself: "Cut in dressmaking is like grammar in language. A good design should be like a well-made sentence, and it should only express one idea." This formal clarity – where each small element of a design contributes essentially to its overall effect – is true of his garments.

There is no fat, no unnecessary seam or line, in any of the clothes on display. They have no obvious embellishments or extravagances: no visible fasteners, no floral patterns, no checks or stripes. And only one piece here (a ballgown) uses embroidery. Instead, the garments really on piecing – on the placement of seams – for effect. This, and this alone, gives the garments structure and character. If tailoring is a language, then James is working with a distilled vocabulary. In any one of his ball gowns the placement of a shoulder seam, the slope of a lower bodice, the curve of a princess seam, are subtly and powerfully expressive.

The awesome clarity in the tailoring – its language-like order – is clearest in those garments that are asymmetrical. Most of James’ ballgowns are rigidly symmetrical, following the line of the human body. But some of his day dresses have symmetrical skirts and asymmetrical bodices, as if they’ve been twisted at the waist. Their tops, like a sari or shawl, are made with a stretch of fabric that’s been thrown over the shoulder and pinned down on the other side. In relation to their severe silhouettes, these measured, cautious asymmetries are disruptive. They give a special life to these garments, acknowledging the character – a streak of eccentricity, a disruptive inner force – of the designer, and also the woman who might wear them. Here a hem that dips lower on one side, a collar that stands in front of the other, or a lapel cut wider than its partner, becomes high drama. Now that’s Jamesian.

Image from Beyond Fashion courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum.

June 25, 2014 by Nalina Moses

SHOWTIME

The Met Costume Institute’s blockbusters are, typically, hot stuff. They lead visitors through a maze of small chambers tricked out with theatrical sound and light effects, luring them in another world: the streets of 70’s London, Nan Kempner’s closets, or the dreams of Alexander McQueen. Stepping back out into the museum at the end is a bit like stepping out of a movie matinee, a bit disorienting and sad.

In contrast this year’s show, Beyond Fashion, devoted to the work of Charles James, remains super-cool. The exhibit was designed by architects Diller Scofidio + Renfro (DS +R), who are best known for their high-concept work, and for the Highline in Chelsea.

DS +R break the display into two large galleries, one in the basement with day dresses and coats, and one on the ground floor with evening gowns. The garments are displayed conventionally, on raised platforms and pedestals. Small video cameras on robotic arms buzz and whir about them and broadcast real-time details to giant screens along the perimeter of the basement gallery, and monitors on the pedestals in the ground floor gallery.

The exhibit is a handsome one. The organization of the rooms is generous and lucid. Display stands and cases have been crafted subtly, so that they don’t distract from the garments, and meticulously, to honor James’ dressmaking ethos. There’s a gorgeous, cube-shaped, clear acrylic vitrine that holds a quilted white silk bolero. Its sides are fitted with jewel-like precision, held together by tiny embedded silver screws.

But when I saw the exhibit, early on a Sunday morning, visitors were gathering around the screens rather than the dresses. If the seam at the lower back of a gown is divine, then why not draw attention to that seam, instead of sending a live video stream of it to a screen just below it? The whole experience is a bit a little like going to Yankee Stadium and watching the game on the Jumbotron. Sometimes the videos shows us things about the dresses that we can’t see. There are dazzling animations to explain how these complexly constructed garments are pieced together, and x-rays showing the layers of materials they are assembled from. But video technology is so central to this exhibit that it holds us one step away. Why can’t we turn off the screens and look at the dresses?

Image of Beyond Fashion courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum.

June 23, 2014 by Nalina Moses