TWO BY TWO

Like designers, choreographers each work most brilliantly at one particular scale. For Christopher Wheeldon that scale is certainly the pas de deux. A current program at NYC Ballet’s Here/Now festival showcases four of his well-known dances, and the one that stands out is Polyphonia, a work for eight dancers set to ten short piano pieces by Gyorgi Ligeti. Here the dancers remain in pairs, and their pulsating, cyclical coming together and breaking apart is thrilling. Each piece has its own distinct mood: wild, elegaic, jittery, ecstatic, melodramatic. Yet the movements are all of a piece, and each one stays in the mind.

The couples, all male-female, are not romantic – they aren’t burdened with any narrative. Instead their bodies approach one another, become entangled with one another, and move apart from one another like objects governed by physical force. When the man and woman join they become one instrument, one organism, one blossom, one many-limbed beast. They move in unison, slowly, cutting surreal figures in profile, which are held for precious seconds with syntactical clarity. They spin together rapturously and then, entropically, split apart. There is, as each piece concludes, a separation, and with it, an eery cessation. It’s as if staying still is a kind of death.

Everything about Polyphonia feels exactly right: the blank shadowed backdrop the dancers move against, the ripe plum color of their costumes, the troupe of eight, and the cerebral, investigatory quality of the music. The two dances that open and close the evening’s program, Mercurial Manouevres (set to Shostakovich) and American Rhapsody (set to Gershwin) each employ larger numbers of dancers, many of them paired, with principals performing in front of an undulating backdrop of supporting performers. Compared to the ravishing precision and strangeness of the pairs in Polyphonia, these spectacles fall flat.

Photograph by Alice Pennefather, courtesy of NYC Ballet.

May 10, 2017 by Nalina Moses

CONCRETE DREAMS

Wandering aimlessly through a museum, with breaks as needed for food and drink, is my idea of heaven. But I couldn’t exit the The Dali Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida, quickly enough. The facility, designed by HOK, opened in 2011 to house the largest private collection of Dali works outside of the artist’s own, which are housed in their own museum in Figureras, Spain.

The St. Petersburg museum is strange without being arresting. It’s a four-story concrete block with blue-green geodesic bubble windows. This metaphor – the subconscious erupting from the conscious, the biological from the mechanical, the fantastic from the banal – is a facile one, and entirely fitting for Dali. But it’s an extremely difficult one to render skillfully in architecture. The forms’ proportions and expression are clumsy. The concrete shell has the feeling of a generic utility building, housing switching machines or parked cars. And the window’s triangular panes are mounted on a steel frame that feels unnecessarily heavy.

The building’s greatest flaw is its small, pinched scale. I visited on a Sunday afternoon, when there were long lines at the ticket booth, the gift store, the restroom, the courtyard cafe, and the elevators. The central atrium was noisy, warm, and smelled of stale food. The galleries were oppressively crowded, so that a visitor had to wait several minutes to find a clear view to each painting. The niches where Dali’s monumental paintings are hung, including The Discovery of America by Christopher Columbus, don’t give them enough breathing room, and can’t contain the crowds waiting to look at them, who spill into adjacent galleries. Spending more than a minute with each work, in contemplation, is simply not possible. The grand, squiggling, spiral stair at the center of the atrium is too small to allow visitors moving up and down to pass each other easily, and too large to allow visitors on the ground floor to move around it easily.

Dali’s large paintings, like The Discovery, are orchestrated magnificently, with overlapping perspectives that offer imaginative depth, dreamy, erotically-charged forms, and obsessive, classical craftsmanship. There’s none of any of this to be found in the building.

Photograph courtesy of HOK.

May 06, 2017 by Nalina Moses

DRESSINGS

A show of dresses at FIT, Paris Refashioned: 1957-1968, illustrates the shift in that city from couture craftmanship to mass market trends. It also, powerfully, illustrates the lasting iconic power of the shift dress. Virtually all of the garments on display are a variation of this simple profile: beaded with pearls at the yoke, draped with ostrich features at the skirt, assembled with princess seams, edged with ruffles, layered over a poorboy sweater, paired under a matching bolero, crafted in boucle, cut from vinyl, covered in a sea of shimmering plastic palettes.

The exhibit, mounted handsomely in the large basement gallery, allows about fifty dresses to be appraised all at once, like a crowd of savvy young women setting out for a party, or a protest. Yet each garments is entirely different from the next, its own species, with its own texture, ornaments, and piecing. While the dresses here are all small sizes, they offer a silhouette that’s flattering for women of all ages, sizes and shapes. Their tailoring is relatively simple, making it easy for home sewers and high street brands to mimic high fashion looks And, because they aren’t customarily worn by men, they make an indelibly feminine garment. (Though this dress’ use as the international symbol for women on restroom doors is, right now, becoming obsolete.)

Like the pitched roof of a single family house or the egg-swell of the Edison lightbulb, the profile of the A-line dress seems resistant to technological and sartorial change. Trends in athleisure and high-performance fabrics hint at a future of uni-gender (or nongendered) head-to-toe bodystockings. But the shift dress remains vital. The west has no signature female costume – no caftan, kimono, or sari – and this garment, more than any other, fits the bill.

Pierre Cardin, “Cosmos” dress, 1967, gift of Lauren Bacall. Photo courtesy of FIT.

April 29, 2017 by Nalina Moses

FIERY

The architecture students at The Cooper Union have constructed John Heyduk’s Jan Palach Memorial on the ground right outside their classrooms. The work, conceived in 1971, is a pair of ten-foot cubes capped with forests of ten-foot spikes. The House of the Suicide has a dull grey finish and spikes that tilt outwards, as if in flames. The House of the Mother of the Suicide has a black finish and spikes that stand up straight, as if in alarm. Both are hollow, shed-like structures, framed with wood 2X4’s, and have small doors at ground level so that crouching adults can enter and exit. The Houses stand about twelve feet apart on the paved plaza, slightly askew, just like the Twin Towers.

Heyduk designed the Memorial in response to the 1968 death of Jan Palach, a Czech student who lit himself on fire in front of the National Museum in Prague to protest the Soviet occupation. In a letter written beforehand, Palach explained that he wanted his action to draw attention to the struggles for free speech and against Soviet propaganda. Today, in a culture with protected free speech, Heyduk’s work has special relevance. Government misinformation is used to bolster policy, and marginal voices are continually discredited.

But can architecture carry political protest? For someone who doesn’t understand Heyduk’s intentions, or Eastern Europe politics, the Houses are still powerful icons. Their architecture communicates political anxiety in an almost telegraphic way. These are shelters without visible entrances and windows. They stand isolated from one another. And their profiles are charged with emotion: fear, shock, horror.

Memorial is an exemplary modest urban intervention. With footprints no larger than newsstands, the Houses have a strong sculptural presence; no one walking through Cooper Square can miss them. These unassuming structures don’t posses the gravitas of important public sculpture or proper architecture. They have a fresh unfussy finish, with pronounced plywood seams and steel bolts. They sit directly on the paving, without a pedestal or foundation, and feel as if they could be blown away by a storm. Some people walk between them without stopping, some step back to photograph them, and others approach them slowly to investigate further. The Houses are vivid public characters, crafted from nothing more than plywood and paint, and a powerful idea.

April 09, 2017 by Nalina Moses