The piece got my attention, not only for the coyness of its almost gossip-column short-form, but because Peter Handke is one of a handful of theater artists who are recurrently referenced in a book some dear friends of mine recommended to me that I have been worming my way through over the past couple weeks: Hans-Thies Lehmann’s Postdramatic Theater, a text that has been available to most of Europe and other parts of world for nearly a decade, but that has just this year been published in an English translation.

The book concerns the strains of theater from the 1960s to the present that step out of the traditional dramatic relationship with theatrical texts and presentation. From what I’ve read, Lehmann’s idea is that the conventional idea of “drama” is foregone (at least to a large degree) in favor of a more conspicuous theater of materiality that is less concerned with promoting the illusion of a contained universe separate from the reality of the audience, but is in fact more interested in using concrete realities, which can include text and emphasizes recognizing the performer/audience relationship, to establish a purely theatrical form that is not subjugated to the expectation of conventional narrative.

Elizabeth LeCompte and The Wooster Group are New York’s leading practitioners of this kind of theater. They are already frequently mentioned in Lehmann’s text. My own reaction to The Wooster Group’s “Hamlet” confirms Lehmann’s descriptions of what he considers postdramatic (no hyphen). In the sense that an actor is called to generate and encapsulate a false other, that is, to play a character, Scott Shepherd’s “Hamlet” cannot actually by called his Hamlet, in the way you would say “I liked so-and-so’s Hamlet,” which is a way of saying you liked his interpretation of the fictional dramatic character. In “Hamlet,” The Wooster Group’s performance is mediated (mostly) by Richard Burton’s iconic filmed stage version. That is, their performance substitutes, for a script, an edited version of the film, which you see simultaneously. So the primary source of direction is from the sound and images from the film (including the camera work), rather than from Shakespear’s text. You are, in fact, not watching “Hamlet.” It’s a trick for The Wooster Group not to change the title, which they normally do when tweaking the classics. A trick that apparently duped The New York Sun’s Eric Grode, whose review descends deeper and deeper into reminiscent histrionics.

Grode seems unable to adjust to the new mode of viewing. He writes, “The core company does what it can to carve out its own vision of “Hamlet.” Mr. Shepherd…has none of Burton’s fleshy voluptuousness; instead, he gives his Hamlet a more laconic, vaguely Southern intonation…” Again, I have to argue that not only can’t we call Mr. Sheperd’s performance a version of “Hamlet” the character, we also cannot call The Wooster Group’s production any kind of “vision of ‘Hamlet.’” It simply is a different object altogether, one that is not bound to the drama that we know as “Shakespear’s Hamlet.”

Another writer who is mentioned by Lehmann is Sarah Kane, whose most notable theatrical text is probably 4.48 Psychosis, which came to BAM in 2005 in an infamous French adaptation starring Isabelle Huppert, a performance that a close friend of mine calls the worst thing she has ever seen in her entire life, but that I liked very much.

4.48 Psychose, as it was billed, used Kane’s text as a primary source, which makes it markedly different from The Wooster Group’s approach, the cause being that Kane wrote her text with a postdramatic idea in mind, even if she had not yet come to know or accept Lehmann’s term before her suicide in 1999, whereas Shakespeare’s work is the quintessence of a drama-theater text.

In his review in The New York Times, Charles Isherwood quotes Sarah Kane as writing “Just a word on a page and there is the drama,” which seems to imply that Kane still liked the idea of drama. Isherwood’s review also presses a thumb on the conflict Kane’s play presents to both theater makers and audiences alike. How do you separate the theatrical from the dramatic when staging a postdramatic text, and how does the audience relate to it?

Isherwood seems to suggest that it isn’t possible to achieve a postdramatic situation onstage. He writes, “Ms. Kane took negation to such a strange extreme that her “play” seems to function, for this critic at least, as a renunciation of theater itself.” This passage quite literally exposes Isherwood’s conviction that drama is analogous to theater, and that by dispensing with one (the play), you necessarily lose the other (the theater). These kinds of critical stresses are particularly evident of a postdramatic aesthetics, because they attempt to objectify theater, thereby separating out drama (or traditional narrative) as merely one of several modes of theatrical communication, which can be dizzying to the observer who cannot let go of the expectation of dramatic narrative.

I would consider Nature Theater of Oklahoma a practitioner of postdramatic theater, as Lehmann describes it. Their critically hailed “No Dice,” which I reviewed here, found its text in the transcripts of phone conversations. But the key factor in determining their “postdramatic” status is that they did not manipulate the transcripts in order to supply a false sense of narrative continuity, as, say, happens in the collage theater of Charles Mee (see our review of Iphigenia 2.0). Instead, NTO allows a purely theatrical form to emerge without bending to the needs of traditional dramatic necessity. And yet, the work had its own thrust, its own logic that carries from beginning to end, effectively generating a unique theatrical identity that is still able to communicate meaning.

It’s also interesting that a lot of the ideas I’m coming across in Lehmann’s book are evident in much of contemporary dance. No doubt, the innovation of dance-theater has allowed at least a couple generations of dance artists to approach theater from a mainly physical direction, which can effectively preempt the formation of “character” as dramatic theater understands it. One could also argue that dance is a predramatic form, meaning, the anthropological origins of dance can probably be traced to an age before the idea of drama had even been invented. Perhaps, however, the same could be said of theater.

But all genres of theater–including music–underwent the dramatic overhaul at some point in Western culture. Ballet took it to new extremes until Balanchine broke out of it with abstraction, whereas Martha Graham’s dance seemed to cement the necessity of drama in dance. Merce Cunningham obviously razed that habit, and there went the rest of post-modern dance.

But the dispensing of narrative is only one step dance has had to take in order to break with dramatic expectations, or to narrow it down to one, the expectation of theater (even dance) to invent an autonomous reality on the stage. Dance has done this mainly by homogenizing the physical attitude of dancers, or, by inventing style. You find this from Merce to Brown to Morris and in a lot of other, even more contemporary artists; Jeremy Wade’s instinct in his first ensemble piece, “..and pulled out their hair,” was to train his performers to learn how to imitate the style of his own solo work. But there are other dance artists that, while maybe making their performers do the same actions on-stage, they are not enforcing them to do it in a homogeneous way, or through mannerism.

Tonal homogeneity seems essential to expectations of dramatic theater. And dance has historically adopted this expectation, thereby adding one more layer of connectivity to drama. One of the chief characteristics of “No Dice” was that each performer adopted their own idiosyncratic manner of performance, donning disparate accents that came and went randomly, proving that by breaking the expectation that a performer’s tone will be consistent from beginning to end of the work, the viewer’s attention is drawn to the fact that the adoption of manner is a choice, and therefore, material.

Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du Printemps (The Rite of Spring) is probably one of the most mulled-over works of dramatic dance literature. Artists who take up the work have not only to deal with its history, but with the fact that is was designed with a story. What is interesting is that, when contemporary artists stage “The Rite of Spring,” they always use Stravinsky’s music, but frequently dispense with that narrative. Yvonne Rainer and Xavier LeRoy’s “Rites” abandoned the fable of the virgin sacrifice, although this choice alone did not guarantee either success in the end. (I understand that Yvonne Rainer was attempting to do something similar to The Wooster Group, by using the soundscore of “Riot at The Rite” as her score, but she did not, as The Wooster Group does, use it as a fundamental text. In RoS Indexical, the film’s audio component was simply draped over an already limp performance.)

Nicholas Leichter’s “Rite of Spring,” performed with the Brooklyn Philharmonic in 2007, totally eschewed the traditional story and came up with its own abstract substance (if that isn’t the paradox at the center of postdramatic theater: abstract substance).

By the time I saw Stijn Celis’s “Rite,” staged in January at Cedar Lake Contemporary Ballet, I wasn’t even looking for Stravinsky’s original plot. And for me, it wasn’t there. But that didn’t stop Alastair Macaulay at The New York Times from doing so, writing, “Do you like how nothing happens in this ‘Rite’ but suspense? The dance of death in other ‘Rites’: so vieux chapeau! Ah, but yes, you have seen why we have five women but only four men! No Chosen Maiden — we end by leaving one maiden unchosen, and yes, she was the loner at the start too, so yes, this is a cycle.””

It would be a mistake to assume that perhaps the ultimate postdramatic take on Stravinsky’s work would be to stage it without either using the original story or the original music. Because postdramatic technique seems not to be about negation, as Charles Isherwood sensed, but is rather about the positivization of a text source that is not traditionally dramatic, be it an original text or media source.

Is Lawrence Van Gelder’s paragraph a positive sign that a postdramatic dialog might be creeping into New York’s critical discourse? Well, not on its own. Because what is important for us to ask about the rumors of Peter Handke’s piece, where the performers have no dialog, is, Then what are they doing on stage? They could just as easily be miming a very traditionally structured narrative (which is what bad dance-theater can end up being). Here again, it is not simply the absence of spoken language that would make this work postdramatic. How is Handke’s script composed? What relationship does it assume with the audience? How does it utilize theater to convey experience? These are the questions New York’s critics need to be asking in order to seriously engage these new ideas, not just gossiping about an idea that on the surface seems sensational.

For B & R

This review is going to be difficult to write, not because I can’t find anything to say, but because I know what I’m going to say goes against four decades of critical praise for the “granddame of postmodern dance,” Trisha Brown. Staging a trio of works from the last eighteen years, Brown comes to The Joyce Theater backed by some critically substantial artist collaborators. But the results of these collaborations, touted largely in the Ms. Brown’s print materials, are more impressive on paper than they are in reality, where they are often distracting, fruitless, and in one case, just plain awful. I would try to make the case for looking past these “external” elements in order to really take in the dance, but the recurrent presence of the gaudy and the futile, for me, called into question Ms. Brown’s general taste level and artistic commitment. This is certainly a position I wasn’t expecting to find myself in, especially after having enjoyed her company’s performance last summer at Lincoln Center, and considering the magnitude of Brown’s artistic celebrity and lauded history.

Foray Forêt is a much anticipated revival of a work created in 1990 but not seen since 1994. The work is billed as the fourth collaboration between Brown and visual artist Robert Rauschenberg, which is where the problem starts. The old guard of dance artists should be just as mindful of updating the visual elements of their repertory pieces. It isn’t just opera and ballet that can look hopelessly outdated and dusty.

In the case of “Foray Forêt”, Rauschenberg’s costumes are frumpy, iridescent gold and silver numbers that frequently obscure the female dancers’ upper bodies. The men get to dance topless, wearing only flowy genie pants. I don’t see what the costumes have to do with the forest, or adventure, or, more importantly, the dance. They look like the futuristic-chic outfits one would have seen in the latter days of Star Search. But worse, they disrupt the reception of the dancers’ bodies, which are given the dual task of executing Brown’s patented virtuosic fluidity with newer (at the time), more subtle vernacular movements that seem to be always competing with bunches of gold lame, or whatever they’re made of.

The projection on the back wall was harmless; shifting patches of lights that looked liked colorful suggestions of forest shadows, or more to me, patterns of the human iris. But even these never really set the dance, which did its best to stand on its own despite their unwieldy entrapments.

The work opens with a copse of dancers, swirling, shifting, limbs extended in little lifts while others simply stop, facing some other direction. Here, Brown is the better visual artist, breaking the flatness of the stage with plumes of movement conceived with the spherical orientation of the body in mind.

In a solo that followed, Judith Sanchez Ruiz simply stood out as dancer of remarkable control and expression. Her acute attention to what Brown calls the “delicate aberrations,” or subconscious movements, was engrossing, a level of performance she maintained throughout the piece. Todd McQuaid and Tony Orrico also turned in lovely performances.

The work continues with hermetic variations of these ideas; the group chaos moments with small, concentrated partnering, including some unexpectedly visceral lifts, and even one awesome move where a woman and three men jump toward each other in the air; the men sandwich the woman with their chests and she spins 180 degrees, landing perfectly. There were also some wonderful uses of the wing space–the dancers mostly off-stage, darting their extremities just into the theater–which also confirms Brown’s genius for expanding the audience’s perception of the performance area.

But the dance’s forward momentum was slowed by one of the other external conceits of the work: The inclusion of the Columbia University Marching Band playing live music from the lobby.

Soon into the dance, you can detect a vague ruckus somewhere in the theater. Eventually, the noise grows and you hear that it’s the sound of the band and that they are in the lobby (so from where I was sitting, they were literally beneath my seat). It was definitely a titillating idea, but the band remained there, never materializing, simply playing one John Philip Souza tune after another; with the exception of the final tune, an uncredited rendition of Eurythmics’ “Sweet Dreams.” Go, Downtown!

The thing is, there hundreds of things that could have been done with the band; things that could have really given them a well-worked presence in the piece. Instead, the choice to include them felt more like that home grown conceptualism that may have gone far enough in the sixties (I felt the same way about Yvonne Rainer’s “RoS Indexical’), but that today simply does not stand up to scrutiny. We don’t want to see your idea, Ms. Brown, we want to see the work of art. Things continued downward from here.

“If You Couldn’t See Me” is a concept solo from 1994. It also happens to be set to one of the worst piece of music I have ever heard in my life. No question.

In the work, a lone female dancer performs with her face always facing upstage, so you never see it, hence the title. But when I read in the program notes that the concept was to have the dancer always have her back to the audience, highlighting the spine as some sort of abstract, architectural reference point, and then I see the work, and not only is the defining factor the upstage turned face–as the spine is continually in flux in Brown’s choreography, and not always visible–but Robert Rauschenberg’s bland costume, a cream dress with two draping panels in front and back, literally cuts the spine in half. This is supremely contradictory to the stated mission and a dark sign that these artists are more content with their ideas than they are concerned for making their work. Just saying.

To make matters much worse–nay, intolerable–Robert Rauschenberg “composed” the score, which amounted to little more than Bob sitting at his synthesizer set on “organ” mode, tinkering away at the keys, and simply improvising the way someone who doesn’t know how to play a keyboard would improvise. Annoyingly brash electronics tones suddenly jut through a quiet collection of mostly diatonic pitches. There is no discernable musical logic, not even by the standards of chance or indeterminacy. Quite to the contrary, Rauschenberg seems to be stuck in trying to make real things happen, so you get random triads mixed with predictable clusters and surprisingly cheesy tonal moments.

And again, this all seems to reflect on Ms. Brown’s capacity to make artistic choices. She chose to let Robert Rauschenberg compose the music. She is the director. The responsibility of the final product lies on her shoulders. The question is, how much does she still care about making work that is truly groundbreaking, that is impeccable in its construction, meticulously conceived, and that utilizes the maximum resources she has at her disposal?

Leah Morrison, as the soloist, was obviously wonderful, but honestly, I could barely appreciate her artistry because of the crappy score. Robert Rauschenberg has no business writing music, and someone should take his instruments away. The music was surely insulting to Ms. Morrison’s gifts, much like the costumes from “Foray Foret” were to the entire ensemble.

“I Love My Robots,” a piece Ms. Brown made last year, took up the final portion of the program. The robots, designed by Kenjiro Okazaki, are two small boxes from either of which protrudes an eight-or-so-foot card board pole, which sways as the little boxes, controlled by remote control, move around the stage in a combination of circular and perpendicular patterns.

It wasn’t the most successful piece physically, which I would have to give to “Foray Forêt,” but Ms. Brown’s knack for changing the terms of our perception of the body was in affect. The way the “robots” (I don’t know if you can call them robots since they are remote controlled; I believe robots are supposed to function on their own) keep the bodies in a state of spatial flux is appealing.

A collage score by another big name collaborator, Laurie Anderson (at least she is a musician), was interesting, with Antony Hagerty’s voice murmuring occasionally through sound bites of random noises and string instruments.

Costumes by Elizabeth Cannon weren’t terrible, but still seemed questionable as a collection of cut-off sweat suits in opposing earth tones. I found the belled capri sweat pant to be particularly ill-conceived.

After a lengthy but nicely danced duet by Todd Lawrence Stone and Hyun‑Jin Jung, a shadow of a figure is seen passing almost invisibly along the upstage wall. It is Ms. Brown. She disappears off to the left, the stage clears, and then she re-enters to finish the piece with a solo; well, trio, if you count the robots.

I’m not going to write specifically about what Ms. Brown does on-stage. The choice to dance at 70 is a major one, and one that could be done well. I have no qualms with the idea. But, as much as Ms. Brown may be hailed for using limitations to generate groundbreaking ideas, here, she falls short.

For me, a young observer of dance who does not have the institutional, cultural, or historical indoctrination that others in the dance community may have, the power of Ms. Brown’s presence alone was not enough to woo me. I wanted more. I wanted to see her design a work of conceptual grit and formal complexity that addressed her body and that communicated something about her experience as a dancer; as a dance creator in her later years; as a living legend. Instead, you get about ten minutes of meandering physical musings that leave you empty handed.

Simply put: I expected more.

Performance of the Year: PS22 Chorus singing “Dragon” for Tori Amos

With a single video, the kids chorus of PS22 (check ‘em out on our blog roll) on Staten Island became internet celebrities, and proved that children’s voices can make even the most vagi-centric song sound like an anthem for world peace.

Outrageous Moment of the Year: Ann Liv Young and Family’s “The Radio Show” @ Rush Arts

Let’s just say, if dance aficionados out there are questioning whether or not Ann Liv Young is a choreographer, wait till they try to digest her parental habits. The inclusion of her four day-old infant as a performer/prop at the Rush Arts gallery back in September made this critic nervous and prompted our second most-read posts ever!

Dance of the Year: Jerome Bel’s “Pichet Klunchun and myself” @ DTW

Fuck. This one was tough. Just so’s you know, the short list included…David Neumann’s Feedforward (hot), Tere O’Connor’s Rammed Earth (cool), Batsheva’s Three (fierce), and Jeremy Wade’s first ensemble piece …and pulled out their hair (crazy!). But somebody had to win, and, more than Bel’s lyric conceptualism and sophisticated execution, the heartfelt emphasis on civil understanding tipped the scales.

Best Orchestral Performance of the Year: Pierre Boulez and the Lucerne Festival Orchestra @ Carnegie Hall

Seriously, the best sound out of an orchestra we have ever heard in our entire lives, and Mahler’s Symphony No. 3 is no cakewalk. Some people think a teenage muppet bouncing off the podium is what will save concert music. Boulez kind of proved that its really music of the highest caliber that will save it, that is, if anything needs saving.

Best Opera of the Year: “The Marriage of Figaro” @ The Met

We’re going with our gut on this one. As much as we wanted to give this to Carmen (just cuz it was so much fun), The Met’s Le Nozze di Figaro wins the prize for its truly sophisticated set design and solid cast–including lispy American starlet Lisette Oropesa and the awesome Vanke Vondung in her Met debut–and for keeping opera alive and full of the breath of theater.

Best Theater Experience: Nature Theater of Oklahoma’s “No Dice”

If we hadn’t seen this little mini-masterpiece of theater just two weeks ago, we would have given this award to Mexican company Teatro de Ciertos Habitantes’ De Monstruos y Prodigios, which was a riotous tour de force that questioned beauty, fame, and fashion. But the sweethearts of the zany Nature Theater of Oklahoma won us over with their child-like exuberance and mad acting skills. The Wooster Group’s Hamlet was a close third, but, to be honest, we’re still digesting that one. I mean…we didn’t even blog about it.

Let Down of the Year: Yvonne Rainer’s “RoS Indexical”

Is it possible to write too much about a bad thing? Maybe. Click here for the the uber list of posts we dedicated to this let-down of the millennium, or what we’ve dubbed “The Yvonne Rainer Drainer.” This thing was an SBD all the way, and it doesn’t help its cause when certain douche bags try to rush to Rainer’s defense.

Let Down of the Year – Honorary Mention: Lucia Poop, Beethoven Compressed, Dismantled, Doll Parts, and the choreography for Harry Partch’s Delusion of the Fury at Japan Society: It was just…awful.

YouTube of the Year: She without arm, he without leg – ballet – Hand in Hand

“Dancing For Your Limbs” is the perhaps more (in)appropriate title. Either way, this glorious number is set to a song that won’t leave you (…ever), and is cheered on by perhaps one of the most actively disinterested audiences on record.

Top Post of the Year: FIRST WORD REVIEW, The Met’s “Iphigenie en Tauride”

Who the F knew that a review of a new production of an obscure Gluck opera by The Met would bring down the most hits out of any post we have ever written, far surpassing the other front runners, the aforementioned, and…the little post that could.

Newcomer Critic of the Year: Britney

Despite stellar contributions to this site from Sidekick and L.A. correspondent, Benn Widdey, the Newcomer Critic of the Year Award goes to Britney Spears for her candid, gum-smacky, and mostly sober cameo critique of Elliott Carter’s 99th Birthday/music concert at the Miller Theater.

Douche of the Year: Alastair Macaulay

Whether he’s trodding up to Lincoln Center for an evening to mainline more ballet than most humans could possibly ever digest in an entire lifetime, lecturing little Barnard dancers about the future of an illusion, or whether he’s whisping off away to Paris for like…ever, handing over some prime media real estate to the French for some inexplicable reason (seriously, folks, what’s up with that?), Alastair Macaulay is the dance critic we love to hate, and hate to love. He’s received both awards of praise and the big old douche. And, to tell the truth, his awful writing about Merce Cunningham, way back when, is what inspired us to start this blog. Perhaps we can say then that, like Golum, even the creepiest, slimiest, smelliest creature in Middle Earth can still be responsible for a modicum of good in the world.

Critic of the Year: Claudia La Rocco

Is anyone surprised? I mean, seriously, come on! You know, we may have given her a douche and a half over the past seven months (you know we did it out of love), but the fact remains that her writing on dance (and even a little theater) is the sharpest, most insightful you will find. Not only does she tend to go for the really edgy shit, but she expects the highest level of professionalism from artists and isn’t smoke-screened by reputations or hype. She also totally knows how to take down some god-awful piece of shit in like two seconds flat. And even though we accused her of being old and crusty (which, you know, we might have been not right about), she’s turned out to be a critic (with a darling speaking voice) we love to read and write about, and our affection for her work has even landed her one of the most awesome nom de blogs out there: You can call her L. Ro.

And now, the award you’ve all been waiting for…

Blog of the Year: Counter Critic

We told you not to be surprised. I mean, think of it this way. In that one America’s Next Top Model episode, there were like four chicks left, and scary Tyra asked each of them, one at a time, who had the most potential to be America’s Next Top Model, and like, the only one who didn’t say herself, totally got the boot (probably a Prada boot, still a boot). So, we’re shining with vaseline confidence here and giving our blog the biggest award there is out there ever in the entire history of human awards (that even includes the Gold, Frankincense and Mhyr that the baby Jesus won from the wisemen). Thanks to our gloriously bored-at-work readers for keeping loyal and chatty. Douches to all who got catty. And try not to forget us while we go on vaca. We might even check in every now and then. And maybe, if you’ve bought presents for everyone else this year, you can treat yourself to the Counter Critic RSS Feed, which will let you know each and every time we decide to post something awesome and stupid. Do it for yourself. Do it for the world.

Happy Holidays, everyone.

It’s pretty rare these days that one critic will call out another critic for his/her work. Well, okay, except for here at Counter Critic. So how awesomely surprised were we when we found out that hacky old retard with an Arts Journal blog, John Perreault, sent a flaming bag of shit Timesward, aimed at none other than C.C. BFF and genius critic, Claudia La Rocco, for her piece–which we found hot and delicious–on what we have now dubbed the Yvonne Rainer drainer, RoS Indexical?

Perrault calls L. Ro. “untalented” and “poisonous” while blaming her for why “dance lost its edge” in the art world. He goes further to mislabel her as “conservative.” If Perreault read dance reviews at all, he would know that La Rocco’s schtick is a taste for the cutting edge plied to a relentless expectation of artistic rigor. I’m pretty sure her arguments against Rainer were that the piece was neither rigrous, nor at the cutting edge, and that, in fact, the whole RoS affair has its conceptual head firmly lodged up the ass of the 1960s: We’re paraphrasing, of course.

At any rate, there’s only one hope for douchey gossipmongers who can’t let go of a decade that often couldn’t see beyond its own infantile taste for self-satisfaction–let’s all say it together: GET OVER THE 60s!