Cogito: John Branch

FILM

 

 

Upstream Color: Mysterious Shade

Somewhere out there, this joke must already exist: Why did Shane Carruth take nine years to release his second film? He was waiting for people to figure out his first one.

That first film was Primer (2004), a time-travel tone poem whose mundane surfaces hint at, but often hide, exotic strata beneath. Stating its running time as 77 minutes is misleading, considering how many people have felt they needed to watch it again. It begins simply enough. A couple of engineers (with the biblical names Abe and Aaron) stumble across a novel physical effect while tinkering in a garage. At first, they’re friendly collaborators, but, as they scale up their device and explore its uses, they begin to disagree and then to distrust each other. For part of its length, then, Primer resembles a tech-world chronicle—akin to some real company histories—with a garage-made style to match.

That production style remains consistent throughout; its tiny budget mandated shooting on Super 16 with no retakes. Everything is carefully reckoned and sometimes visually memorable, even if the sound could’ve been cleaner and the lighting smoother. But the story, tangled from the outset by an intermittent voiceover narration that seems to speak from a future time, becomes more elliptical as it progresses. The film shows only a part of the full story; figuring out the rest depends on catching clues. Writer-director Carruth has always known exactly how intricate it is. He declared in a 2004 Village Voice interview (village voice), “Two viewings seem to do it, but I can’t say you have to see it twice; that’s so pretentious.” Some fanatical fans have seen it many more times than that, written lengthy exegeses (including an entire book, now out of print and converted to a blog ( primer), and diagrammed the film’s looping timelines (for instance, timelines). Not surprisingly, the proliferating diagrams led to a parody timeline (see lower right at parody).

He made Upstream Color in much the same way, beginning with the circumstances of its production. Having tangoed fruitlessly with Hollywood over another project (A Topiary, now abandoned), Carruth went back to solo mode for this one, doing without film-industry financing, influence, or distribution. By now a skilled practitioner of DIY methods, he again wrote, directed, and acted in the film, along with serving as director of photography and composer. Upstream Color looks and sounds better than Primer, undoubtedly the result of more time and money, but it’s still a pretty small-scale venture. Shooting again took place on Carruth’s home territory, in the vicinity of Dallas, Texas, and as with Primer the film itself is location-independent—it happens someplace, that’s all.

There are also many differences between Carruth’s two films. The easiest thing to say about Primer is that it’s a time-travel story, whereas there seems to be no easy thing to say about Upstream Color, unless it’s to mention the “mind-control pig worms,” as I think one viewer called them, which are more obvious than they are important. Come to think of it, that’s kind of a clue.

Primer isn’t really about time machines or time travel; the story’s reliance on high-efficiency implication (little is seen, much is implied) have simply made it possible for viewers to think so. Figuring out what really happens, which involves multiple versions of the film’s two engineers, is such a challenge that fans have gotten caught up in that. But Primer is really more concerned with the consequences, ranging from the physical to the moral, for anyone who uses one of its time machines.

Likewise, the plot of Upstream Color employs something that, broadly speaking, is technological: a worm that, like some real-world parasites (and many plants), affects the behavior of anyone who ingests it. When it’s forcibly given to a young woman named Kris (Amy Seimetz) near the start of the film, it induces a state of suggestibility that allows the man who forced it on her to empty her bank account. She finds a way to get past the immediate consequences, and she meets a man named Jeff (played by Shane Carruth), to whom the same thing has happened. You can get caught up in trying to make sense of the film’s events, even though, this time around, Carruth is much less elliptical in presenting them: it’s pretty clear what happens. You can also, much more than with Primer, get caught up in the film’s surfaces: the repeating visual and behavioral echoes, the sonic fantasia to which a few minutes are devoted, the rhythms of the editing, the Eno-esque music, and the film’s overall feel, which is suggestive, elusive, and mesmerizing.

But my sense, after seeing Upstream Color once and pondering it for a few days, is that Carruth isn’t really concerned with people, pigs, worms, and orchids. His film is about less concrete matters: suffering at the hands of others, being driven to desperation, achieving a degree of restoration, taking refuge in and with another person, finding oneself partly merging with a loved one, discovering an unlikely replacement for something lost. (That may sound like a recovery memoir, which is probably irrelevant.) This level, one degree abstracted from the visible action, is where the film engages and moves you. Regarded this way, it’s like descriptive music, which isn’t about the musical events per se but instead portrays characters (Elgar’s “Enigma Variations”) or evokes a scene (the storm in Beethoven’s “Pastoral Symphony”).

Or… Upstream Color is about proper versus improper uses of people and the natural world. The character called Thief must be wrong in using the worm for financial gain, and taking advantage of Kris is not a proper use of her. One of the characters is mysteriously named Sampler; though he helps restore Kris to herself after the worm episode, he also perpetuates the life cycle of those worms. How he benefits isn’t clear, but he appears to use people for his own ends, as he uses nature. He finds or creates sounds so he can capture them (that is, sample them), whereas Kris and Jeff do this merely to appreciate them.

Or… much like Primer, this new film is about the consequences for people, and even for other living things, of a technology—in this case, the practical applications of that worm species.

Maybe Upstream Color is about one more thing as well. The New Yorker’s Richard Brody wrote that the worm “induces a state of bewildered suggestibility.” This is akin to some of the effects of film in general, though cinematic enchantment is usually something other than bewildering. In any case, Brody’s is an apt description for what Shane Carruth’s new venture does.

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Fearless Predictions
Bedlam at the Access and More

Hamlet and Saint Joan (in alternation through April 7, Bedlam, Manhattan): Last spring, one of New York theater’s nifty little trick questions was to ask friends if they’d heard about the small-cast Saint Joan running on Broadway. The explanation lay in the location of the Access Theater, where the Bedlam company performs—it’s on lower Broadway. The production was no gimmick: it vivified Shaw’s historical drama in an unconventional staging that used only four actors and placed scenes on the stage, in the seats, and even in the lobby. (See my review at St. Joan.) Now Bedlam is reviving that show and also tackling Hamlet with the same four actors. Though I haven’t attended yet, it’s a good bet that the same committed and imaginative rethinking that burnishedShaw has been applied to Shakespeare. http://www.theatrebedlam.org/#!tickets

Hamlet (March 15–April 13, Yale Repertory Theatre, New Haven): Paul Giamatti, a graduate of the Yale School of Drama, returns to New Haven to play the melancholy Dane. The American film complex turns many actors of broad ability into narrowly defined commodities—“pigeonholing” is the term—but it hasn’t done that with Giamatti. He’s virtually a chameleon, so there’s no telling what he’ll do with this role. Giamatti, now in his mid-40s, probably won’t be the youngest Hamlet you’ve seen, which may make the prince’s recent studies in Wittenberg problematic, but different editors and even different editions differ on how old the character is. As with Juliet and others, anyone who’s the right age may be too immature for the role. Sarah Bernhardt, who ignored gender as well as age when she took the part, may have overreached, but at least she knew that playing Hamlet didn’t depend on externalia. http://www.yalerep.org/on_stage/2012-13/hamlet.html

Pierrot Lunaire(March 28–30, Yale Cabaret, New Haven): Yale Cabaret shows are single-weekend productions created by Yale School of Drama grad students, not to be confused with the longer runs and mixed student/professional creative teams used in other shows at the school or at Yale Rep. This event will present a theatrical staging of Arnold Schönberg’s song cycle, which is currently enjoying a handful of performances in honor of its centenary year. It can be argued that the entire 19th century was decisively killed off during the second decade of the 20th by events as varied as the Great War, the sinking of the Titanic, and the immense cultural ferment in Vienna, which produced Pierrot Lunaire. It’s a groundbreaking piece for solo voice and small ensemble that employs Sprechstimme (a cross between speech and song) and abandons traditional Western tonality, though without adopting the full rigors of serialism, which Schönberg developed later. Bonus: the Yale Cabaret, true to its name, always offers food and drink. http://yalecabaret.org/cab-16

Silkwood (March 20, Signature Theatre, Manhattan): One of three films written, in part or in full, by the late Nora Ephron that are being presented in the Signature Cinema series this spring. Silkwood dramatizes the story of Karen Silkwood, a factory worker who met a mysterious death after trying to call attention to problems at a Kerr-McGee plutonium-processing plant. Superficially akin to Norma Rae and The Insider, it differs from both in taking a more ambiguous view of its central character, which makes it more admirable in my book. It was mostly shot near Dallas, Texas, rather under the radar, to keep Kerr-McGee from catching wind of it and trying to shut it down; surprisingly for anything that involved director Mike Nichols (not to mention Cher, or Meryl Streep, though she wasn’t then the monument she has become), the tactic seems to have worked. Personal note: I worked on the shoot as an extra and appeared in a short but crucial moment. Signature Theatre tickets

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Film:
Zero Dark Thirty: Let the Light In!

Few people have been nonplussed by Zero Dark Thirty. I haven’t done a survey, but as far as I can tell, its viewers have fallen into one of two camps. There are those who see it in terms of the art of film, most of whom admire it, and those who view it in terms of journalism or history, by which standards it seems universally to fail, mainly on the torture issue. I think they’re both wrong, for a combination of reasons. (Be warned: spoilers ahead.)

• Point 1 on torture: the facts of the matter aren’t clear. Journalist Steve Coll, in a long discussion for The New York Review of Books (http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/feb/07/disturbing-misleading-zero-dark-thirty/), states that “most of the record about the CIA’s interrogation program remains secret.” Coll also reports that officials with access to the classified record disagree on the role that torture played in the CIA’s hunt for Osama bin Laden. Given such vast uncertainty about what actually happened, it’s hard to see how anyone can be sure (as Coll is, despite his own admissions) that Zero Dark Thirty is wrong or even misleading.

• Point 2 on torture: the movie isn’t clear either. In one sequence, we see a prisoner named Ammar being tortured without revealing anything. In a later sequence, the central character (Maya, played by Jessica Chastain) and her partner drop the torture, treat Ammar to lunch, and falsely tell him he gave them information that helped foil an attack; he then reveals a handful of names pertaining to something else. This information leads ultimately to bin Laden’s courier—the key to locating bin Laden himself—but the movie is ambiguous on why Ammar talked. Was it because the torture loosened him up? Because he’s willing to help once he’s had a square meal?Because he was tricked? We can’t be sure. Later, a man named al-Libi is tortured but reveals nothing; Maya assumes that means he’s hiding something important. In those cases and others, the movie makes clear that torture was employed by the CIA (until it was decisively banned), but it’s ambiguous on whether torture directly produced useful information.

• It’s only a movie. A former CIA employee named Nada Bakos complained at length in Pacific Standard online (http://www.psmag.com/legal-affairs/how-true-is-zero-dark-thirty-a-former-operative-weighs-in-51659/) about the many ways Zero Dark Thirty deviates from her knowledge and experience of how the CIA worked during the bin Laden search. Steve Coll encapsulated many of her objections in one sentence when he wrote that the film “[tells] the story of the decade-long bin Laden hunt, which involved many hundreds of CIA officers and military personnel, primarily through the experience of a single analyst.” This is the same kind of condensing done by countless TV and film dramas about medicine, trial law, and police work. Does a hospital doctor watch House and then gripe that diagnosticians don’t also run MRIs, take fluid or tissue samples, or do lab work? Not if (s)he is smart. Nor should any of us mistake Zero Dark Thirty for history or journalism.

 • It fails not as fact but as fiction. Director Kathryn Bigelow said, in a December 17, 2012, Talk of the Town piece for The New Yorker ( http://www.newyorker.com/talk/2012/12/17/121217ta_talk_filkins), “the film doesn’t have an agenda, and it doesn’t judge.” That’s just the problem with what she and screenwriter Mark Boal created. Critic Richard Brody, writing for the magazine’s Front Row blog (http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/movies/2012/12/richard-brody-on-the-deceptive-emptiness-of-zero-dark-thirty.html), described Boal and Bigelow’s method this way: “The movie’s pseudo-objectivity is a willful ambiguity of a very distinct sort; its willful rejection of the inner life is a posturing stance of cool, an attitude of no attitude.” (Brody goes on to say this stance “may be the fault of André Bazin”; film-theory adepts may enjoy that part of his essay.) The film’s attitude of no attitude, its refusal to judge, set viewers adrift in a tide of mere facts. In a manner of speaking, the characters don’t care about what they’re doing—we know little of what they think or feel, except that they’re dedicated to their jobs—so it’s hard for us to care either.

In this respect, Zero Dark Thirty suffers in comparison with a film such as Hostel, which I saw on TV recently. Writer-director Eli Roth’s “shabby  little shocker” (a term once applied to the opera Tosca and just as true here) opens with a title that reads “Quentin Tarantino Presents,” which led me to expect stylized violence that’s not to be taken very seriously. But Hostel gives you something that Boal and Bigelow’s magnum opus doesn’t: an angle on the characters. The men who wield instruments of torture in Hostel go about their business with varieties of sadistic glee. That’s nothing great in terms of an inner life, but at least they have one, and you can react to it. By contrast, the first thing my filmgoing friend and I decided about Zero Dark Thirty is something neither of us expected for such an admired and talked-about film: it was very boring, followed by less boring.

A 2010 book by David Shields proposed the concept of “reality hunger.” That’s a subject for another discussion, except for this: we ought to know what kind of reality we’re hungry for. What kind of life are we hoping to grasp in our books, movies, TV shows, and plays? Despite the issues involved, Zero Dark Thirty is pretty exclusively concerned with mechanical life, material life, the life of bodies and bullets and bombs. There’s more to life than that.
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Making Music (Almost) Forever:
Elliott Carter

Composer Elliott Carter, who died on November 5^th, barely a month short of what would’ve been his 104th birthday, continued to write and even to get out until recently. He attended a New York Philharmonic premiere of one of his pieces in June and completed his most recent work in August of this year.

Little more than a year ago, I saw Carter in public at one of the Works & Process events in the fall 2011 Guggenheim Museum schedule [guggenheim program]. The program gave five of Carter’s pieces, written between 1990 and 2008, to each of two young choreographers, Emery LeCrone and Avichai Scher. I had heard some of the music at one of LeCrone’s rehearsals and was nearly lost in its rhythmic and metrical complexities, but LeCrone and Scher, mastering that challenge, created dances that illuminated the music from two disparate angles, LeCrone dramatizing a kind of searching quality in the scores and Scher picking up on a lively, spritely spirit in the music. While their choreography was enjoyable as well as admirable, Carter himself was probably the real star of the evening, and at the evening’s end, he stood (with some difficulty) to acknowledge the applause of everyone present.

Though I’m not musically trained and know almost none of Carter’s other work, I gleaned a few impressions from that occasion. His longevity surpassed even that of those nearly eternal conductors of which the music world has seen many. And his compositional inventiveness was hard to compare to anything. Carter seemed to have an evergreen spirit: there was no sign (to me at least) of “late style” in any of the pieces performed that night, though he had been writing for 50 years or more when he produced them. What I heard, in short, was five examples of the “uniquely fresh … solutions for each musical situation” that composer Tod Machover spoke of in a reminiscence remembering carter of studying under Carter in the 70s.

Carter’s long run can be attributed to the Fates, those goddesses imagined by the Greeks to spin as well as finally to cut the threads of an individual life. But the use that Carter made of his allotted time–apparently never tiring in his work, much less stopping–was an accomplishment the rest of us can admire and hope to emulate.
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Einstein: Beached at BAM

In the 70s and 80s, Einstein on the Beach left people feeling they were on a hypnotic drug, but by the end of its current reincarnation, it left me wanting to do drugs.

Einstein on the Beach might be called an instance of total theater (if you separate that term from the particular use to which Richard Foreman has applied it) or of Wagnerian gesamtkunstwerk. It employs text, music, and theater arts, giving equal weight to all of them: minimalist music by Philip Glass, direction and design by Robert Wilson, and minimalist choreography by Lucinda Childs. (All of them worked on the present staging, which is apparently a pretty close recreation of the original; it began a world tour in March that will run into next spring.) The playbill is cagey on the origin of its words, crediting Glass with “music/lyrics” on the first page while later attributing the text to Lucinda Childs, Samuel M. Johnson, and Christopher Knowles and assigning copyright for the libretto to Robert Wilson. Wherever they came from, it does have words in the form of speeches and stories; there’s also a fair amount of the vocalise style that Glass often uses. First performed in 1976, Einstein on the Beach returns now and then to bedazzle or bedevil us, most recently at BAM in September.

The opera evokes elements of Albert Einstein’s life and work. A figure resembling him plays violin and sticks his tongue out. Glass-walled elevators relate to Einstein’s thought experiment regarding a beam of light passing through a moving elevator; one elevator appears to us to be horizontal, including its occupant, and the other appears to be vertical, which relates to Einstein’s dethroning of privileged points in space. (Only in a gravity field or in relation to a given point can one say anything is up, down, or horizontal.) Clocks and watches remind us that there is no absolute measure of time either. Much of the stage movement is slowed down—maybe another suggestion that time and motion are relative.As if it might otherwise be forgotten, which I doubt, the production also reminds us of Einstein’s connection with nuclear weapons. Valiantly upholding the “beach” end of the deal, a single conch shell now and then stands, or rather sits forlornly, on the stage.

But something about this piece of total theater strikes me as totalitarian. It cares little if at all what you think while you watch and listen. The volume level in many sections is high and unvarying. The set sometimes moves around more than the stage performers do. The strange symmetry and stark (often black-and-white) contrasts of the visual elements attract the eye in some fundamental way, as the musical rhythms and repetitions do the ear. Yet it’s easy to ignore because it’s not really about anything. Einstein on the Beach defies reflection, as if trying to one-up Susan Sontag’s “Against Interpretation” essay: interpret this!

It’s easy to see in it certain modernist fascinations: with machines and the mechanical (many of the performers’ movements appear mechanical), with mechanical production or reproduction (all of the sounds, including the human voices, are delivered to us through electro-mechanical means). It achieves a kind of flatness in not representing anything other than itself, and its surfaces and volumes remind us of the discovery of geometry by modernist painters. The whole thing, in fact, resembles some kind of machine of mysterious purpose.

There’s much I haven’t mentioned: the very odd courtroom scene, with its speech about men but not women being equal before the law; the cheap-looking little spaceship that moves on a wire; the lovers-on-a-train scene (which might be vaudevillian fun if it lasted two minutes, but it’s more like 20); the dances (which use some numerical cleverness but aren’t as hypnotic as they used to look, according to my companion); the “space machine” whose back wall reminded me of LED calculator displays; and more. Amid the tedium of its four-hours-plus, there are wonders to some of the stage images.

Einstein on the Beach seems to me an experiment to test the possibility of abstraction in opera. Other representational arts had begun an abstract turn years earlier, so in a way it was high time, even past time, for opera to try. I’d have to be much wiser, and/or bolder, to presume to judge what the experiment showed. But Einstein on the Beach, which once seemed so various, so beautiful, so new, today appears dull, indulgent, and annoying.

Einstein’s twin paradox comes to mind: this opera left and came back to us nearly unaged, but we’re older now. And nowadays there’s never a drug dealer around when you want one.

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Between Two Worlds:
Alif the Unseen

G. Willow Wilson’s first novel is a fabulously complex piece of work. It tells a tale steeped in magic, in which wonders are worked as much by fanciful human technology as by a host of jinn from Islamic mythology. Its plot relies on the discovery of a presumably fictional book written in Arabic, called Alf Yeom wa Yeom (the Thousand and One Days), but that’s a book that an actual French Orientalist claimed to have read and translated in the late 17th century, and his translation—if it wasn’t his invention—still exists. The novel seems to be an adventure fantasy, but it’s so well grounded in the real that in some ways it anticipated the Egyptian revolution. (Wilson delivered the manuscript to her publisher just before protests began in Tahrir Square, in February 2011.) Though it’s hard to describe, it’s easy and just plain fun to read.

At the center of its dizzying mix is a young hacker in an unnamed, present-day Persian Gulf emirate. He doesn’t like his given name and is known to everyone by his online handle of Alif. Though the author labels him a “hacktivist” in a short introductory note, at first his aims aren’t moral or political but merely commercial. He’s a gray hat, selling online concealment and other defenses to whomever is willing to pay: “a coterie of bloggers, pornographers, Islamists, and activists from Palestine to Pakistan.” Alif is against censorship, but he’s not really for anything.

So he resembles Rick, the bar owner played by Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca: like Rick, the uncommitted Alif needs to find some courage. It’ll help if a woman is involved, of course, and in Alif’s case there are three. Intisar is the upper-class woman he loves at the outset, who soon breaks up with him but gives him a parting gift. Dina is an Egyptian and his childhood friend, who lives next door and has taken the veil. And then there’s a woman referred to only as “the convert,” an American student who has adopted Islam and is something of an expert in ancient books.

The bad guy is a state security figure that the gray hats have nicknamed the Hand of God. The Hand hijacks a highly capable program Alif had written, which works almost magically well without Alif’s understanding why, and traces it to our hero. Alif is soon on the run, accompanied by Dina.

The tale has already been more elaborate than I’ve let on. The first chapter, numbered zero in the manner of computer coding, is set in Persia long ago and depicts the writing of that book called the Alf Yeom. It’s dictated under duress by a jinn who has been caught in a spell, and the old man who has summoned the creature translates it into Arabic as he writes it down.

Now, Alif finds that the gift Intisar has just sent him through Dina is that same book. He doesn’t know what it is or why Intisar bestowed it on him. (Eventually he decides it encodes a kind of knowledge that he can use in a program.) He and Dina need protection while he figures things out. They seek it from someone known as Vikram the Vampire, whom they think is merely a “black-market thug.” They find he has yellow eyes and very peculiar legs; Alif is perplexed, but Dina realizes right away Vikram is a jinn. (He proves to be mercenary but good-hearted, like Signor Ferrari, Sydney Greenstreet’s character in Casablanca.)

As should be clear by now, the dimensions of Alif the Unseen are political, cultural, and technological, but also theological and fantastic. Wilson’s story abounds in oppositions, some of which end up being united. Among the oppositions: life online versus life on the streets, aliases and nicknames versus real names, the veiled versus the open, the natural or “real” world versus the supernatural, the seen versus the unseen. Much of the book is devoted to depicting a realm that’s ordinarily unseen by humans and that’s populated by jinn, marids, sila, and the like. Though these are figures in Scheherazade’s tales in the Thousand and One Nights, jinn (apparently the broad term for them all) are named in the Koran, as Dina pointedly tells Alif. Like angels, they’re imaginary unless you take the word of your holy book that they’re real. Wilson’s perspective isn’t either-or but both-and: the jinn are both figures from fable and real.

That dual perspective probably comes from Wilson’s life. Born in the West and raised by atheist parents, she converted to Islam (just as one of her characters did) and now divides her time between Egypt and America: two worlds. She has written journalism, a memoir, a graphic novel, and comics. She doesn’t mention any of this in her introduction. But she does make clear that in this novel she wished to address three audiences she has kept separate: geeks, literary-political types, and Muslims.

It’s hard to decide how to take some of the details, such as those involving computers. An ordinary desktop simply isn’t going to overheat, melt, and catch fire when it’s asked to work too hard—it’ll either plod ahead or balk. However, if it’s running a program that’s part magic, there’s no telling what it might do, and that shift into the fantastic left me uneasy.

How to take the novel as a whole is another tricky question. In my view, it ends too well, and the characters we favor fare too well, for Alif the Unseen to be taken entirely seriously. And yet the novel isn’t entirely fanciful. Much of the setting, characters, action, and themes tie the book to contemporary, observable reality.

Graham Greene originally classified some of his fictional works as “entertainments,” feeling they weren’t serious enough to be called genuine novels. He later relabeled them, deciding they were just a different kind of novel. G. Willow Wilson’s first work of fiction is akin to Greene’s entertainments: it’s a fantastic tale that’s also a serious-minded novel.

[A longer version of this review has been posted at Goodreads]
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At the Olympics: Then and Now

The modern Olympic Games are many things: a form of public entertainment reminiscent of the Roman circuses, an exercise in marketing, a display of TV craft and technology, a form of contest between nations, supposedly an invitation to tourism, and often an attempt at urban regeneration. (They’re sometimes financial boondoggles as well.). What they’re not is a good likeness of the ancient games on which they’re supposedly modeled.

Take the torch relay, for instance, and the carrying of a so-called sacred flame into the arena. That wasn’t even part of the modern games when Baron Pierre de Coubertin launched them in 1896. It was actually invented by Germany for the 1936 Berlin meet, often called the Nazi Olympics, and the ceremony was documented by Leni Riefenstahl for her film Olympia. (Understanding of the original Greek games owes much to German classicists; it’s ironic that the modern ones owe something to a different breed of Germans, to put it nicely.) The ancients had no need to carry anything sacred, flame or otherwise, to Olympia; the site itself was sacred. Pelops, an ancient mythical hero who won his bride in a chariot race, was venerated there. Far more important than that, though, the site and the games themselves were dedicated to the cult of Zeus—the athletic festival was in fact also a religious one—and his temple dominated the site.

The Greeks had more than one major sporting contest of this kind. In the first rank were the Sacred and Crown Games—held every four years at Olympia (the oldest and most honored of these gatherings) and at Delphi—along with biennial games at Nemea and Isthmia. Other, more local games arose as well, for instance at Athens, as time passed and Hellenic culture spread around the eastern Mediterranean. But Olympia maintained its primacy, even after the Romans took over Greece; Nero, following a long line of aristocrats, tyrants, and kings, deigned to compete there in a chariot race. (He was awarded the prize, despite falling off and failing to complete the course.)

Women, perhaps not surprisingly, had no role in these contests and little if any place among the spectators. (They weren’t participants in the first modern games either.) Married women were expressly forbidden to enter; one who actually did attend Olympia in disguise would have been put to death, but she was the daughter and sister of Olympic champions.

The modern games have become such a big business that name designers often sign up to fashion the uniforms for major national teams. For the 2012 London Olympics, Ralph Lauren outfitted the American team, Stella McCartney the British, and Giorgio Armani the Italian. (Surely I’m not the only one who finds this hard to detect.) In the ancient Olympics, what did they wear? Except for the charioteers, who donned a robe, the athletes wore nothing.

The London 2012 leviathan features 36 categories of sporting events, though some could be condensed (see list at events); such is the lineup over time that it’s hard to remember what’s in and what’s out. The ancient Olympic games began with a single foot race and, once they reached their full form, remained stable for centuries at five categories: chariot racing and other equestrian contests, the pentathlon, simple foot races, wrestling and related events, and a concluding race in battle armor.

There’s no end of other differences between what the Greeks did and what we do. (Readers wanting to learn more can consult Nigel Spivey’s The Ancient Olympics.) In Greece, athletics were an integral part of training for warfare, achieving physical beauty, even attaining the moral good. Philosophers knew and discussed all these conceptsand were often found at gymnasiums themselves. (When’s the last time you met one at your gym?)

Our winners may appear on a Wheaties box, but theirs became the subject of poems and statues. And the comfort we take for granted today is a far cry from the conditions for spectators at Olympia; they were so unpleasant that a disobedient slave might be threatened with the punishment of being sent there to watch. But the most telling difference was that, during the Olympic Games, a truce among all the city-states of the region was usually observed. The peace was grossly violated at least once, though, when a territorial war broke out at the site during the festival.

There are similarities,however. Our modern habit of paying lip service to pure and peaceful competition among athletes is undermined by the obvious fact that everyone tallies medal counts for their countries. In this the Greeks felt much the same; rival city-states not only competed through their athletes, but also in the monuments they built at the site to their winners.

There’s one thing about our modern games that I admire, and it echoes one aspect of Olympia. Then, as now, athletes competed for a prize with no material value: the prestige of being named victor. That honor often brought the Greek athletes substantial benefits elsewhere, as it does for competitors today, so the point may be moot, but somehow it warms my heart. In this at least, Baron de Coubertin got something nicely right when he re-invented the games of old for the present day.

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Vanya in Soho

In introducing his account of life at Walden Pond, Henry David Thoreau wrote, “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation,” adding for good measure that “From the desperate city [they] go into the desperate country.” That’s pretty much what Chekhov dramatized in Uncle Vanya, the subtitle of which is Scenes from Country Life in Four Acts. The play’s main characters are caught up in a swirl of unfulfilled desires, carrying their unhappiness with them, wanting life to be somehow other than what it is.

Everyone’s routines are interrupted when the professor and his pretty young wife arrive from the city, intending to live on the estate run by Vanya and Sonya, and for weeks little gets done. They weren’t content before—too little money (for the professor and Yelena, his wife) or too much drudgery (for Vanya, Sonya, and Astrov, the country doctor)—but idleness doesn’t suit them either. The possibility of love appears, then vanishes like a bursting soap bubble. In the end, the professor and Yelena find country life unlivable, and the others return to the familiar, dulling grind of their work. If Thoreau’s image of quiet desperation differs from the conclusion of Chekhov’s text, it’s only that Chekhov weaves in a handful of sounds, and even those are muted in the production of the play running through August 26 at Soho Rep.

Much has been made of Annie Baker’s new adaptation, possibly a little too much. Unlike Paul Schmidt, who in the late 90s published a volume of 12 Chekhov plays in colloquial American-English translations, Baker’s not a Russian scholar herself, so—as playwrights often do—she based her work on a literal rendering, by Margarita Shalina. It’s easy to see from Baker’s other writing that she has an affinity for Chekhov, but her collaborator deserves credit too. It’s also easy to hear some flavorful word choices—the noun “creep,” for instance—that catch American usage better than Schmidt does. And there are almost no Bakerisms in this show, only a few signs of her fondness for silences (beyond Chekhov’s own) and a reminder of her use of songs (as in The Aliens). What she has done best, though, is conceal her work, make the language not noticeable (a condition in which no translation lives for long).

What’s really exciting at Soho Rep is the levity and the production design. Chekhov described three of his major plays as comedies and termed Three Sisters a drama; it was Stanislavsky who viewed all four as tragedies, and for some time his influence on American theater was sufficient to make that view widespread. I’m not sure it’s behind us yet, but Sam Gold’s staging for Soho Rep gives us ample laughs. Admittedly, there are some untidy moments. For instance, Vanya’s wild pistol-waving and shooting at the professor is hampered by a trapdoor entrance both actors must use (the pistol, by the way, looks oddly like a Colt .45 Peacemaker). And quick blackouts rather than slow fadeouts would’ve been neater—fades feel a little too heavy. But we get a good overall sense of what Paul Schmidt called the “heartbreaking ridiculousness” of the characters’ behavior.

The special appeal of this production depends as well on Andrew Lieberman’s setting: we’re inside a wooden A-frame, seated on all four sides of the main playing area, with some of the action an arm’s length away. It’s not a purely environmental set. The roofing is pierced by cutouts for lighting, and large illuminated block letters spelling out the play’s Russian title in Cyrillic hang on the wall at one end. While being invited to feel we’re sharing a country house with the characters, even cooped up in it with them, we’re also reminded that this is a theater and we’re watching a play. Similarly, the costumes (designed by the protean Annie Baker) and the furnishings have a rough-and-ready contemporary feel, but this time the songs are all in Russian, and the text retains Russian character and place names as well as a few other words. We could be somewhere upstate today, but we’re also in Chekhov’s time and place.

Chekhov’s characters number nine, though some have little to do—he cared less for casting costs than today’s American playwrights usually must—and Baker hasn’t cut a soul. Nor are there any star turns among the players. If you notice differences among them—more moment-to-moment details from Michael Shannon’s Astrov, say, or a special satiric edge from Peter Friedman’s professor—that’s only because actors are different, and in close quarters their styles and qualities become more tangible. The finely polished ensemble effect of this cast is lovely to see. It’s just another of the many beauties in Soho Rep’s Vanya. tickets

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Fearless Predictions

Codebreaker—Alan Turing’s Life and Legacy (through July 31, Science Museum, London): Mathematician Alan Turing was long neglected, even unknown, except among computer-science students and other digerati (novelist William Gibson included a Turing police force in his 1984 novel, Neuromancer). Turing is no longer unknown. His World War II contributions to cracking Axis codes at Bletchley Park became celebrated as details were declassified. The test that bears his name, a way of judging whether a machine displays human-like intelligence, is now familiar, and even his more abstract work is better recognized, as in the recent book Turing’s Cathedral.To observe the 100th anniversary of his birth, London’s Science Museum has assembled an exhibition combining personal notes with artifacts from his career. museum

Far from Heaven (July 19–29, Williamstown Theatre Festival): Musical adaptations may be the riskiest of artistic endeavors (ditto as financial investments). With an original show, no one can say it compares badly to its source, whereas an adaptation has to measure up to it,as well as to provide fresh depth or perspective. Yet hope springs eternal. In this new show, the 2002 film, written and directed by Todd Haynes (as a smart and lovely rejuvenation of 50s melodramas à la Douglas Sirk), is being adapted by Richard Greenberg (book), Scott Frankel (music), and Michael Korie (lyrics). All three have done good work before: Greenberg in a number of plays, Frankel and Korie in the songs for Grey Gardens. But reputation counts for nothing once the curtain rises—what will matter is whether this show works. schedule

Dido and Aeneas (August 22–25, Mark Morris Dance Group, Mostly Mozart Festival): Choreographer Mark Morris is not only highly musical and very inventive in his movement choices but also one of the greatest classicists since George Balanchine, frequently employing the genre’s virtues of balance, proportion, and symmetry. In Dido and Aeneas (1989), he crafted a stylized, moving dance-drama set to Purcell’s opera, with the singers and musicians in the pit. The vocalists include Stephanie Blythe; Morris himself, once unmatched in the dance role of Dido, has now retreated to the pit to conduct. Tickets are limited, so act fast.    —JEB
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Cogito: John Branch










Emery LeCrone: In Motion

With dance, sometimes it’s the music itself that gets me, sometimes it’s the movements (the opening of Balanchine’s Symphony in Three Movements or the closing of Tharp’s In the Upper Room), sometimes it’s the geometry as patterns form and reform, and sometimes it’s a depiction of drama (Robbins’s The Cage, for instance). This may too schematic, but it has its uses. With the dances of the young New York–based choreographer Emery LeCrone, what I like most is often the drama: a sense of dancers as people suggesting social positions and relations.

Sometimes I don’t see it right away. She made a duet this year called II. (the period is part of the title), in which the man and woman move in unison for what seems like a long time before their partnering finally begins. In mid-April, when I saw it on a Columbia Ballet Collaborative program, I didn’t know how to take it. When I saw it again, in LeCrone’s showcase at a City Center studio at the end of May, it made more sense because a dramatic analogy occurred to me: this is a couple whom we see mostly in public, where they face the world perfectly in sync, but sometimes they get a private moment–and then their roles diverge, each enabling the other to do what he or she does best.

In Unchained Melodies, which I saw first in a Barnard program this spring and then in LeCrone’s showcase, there’s a stronger sense of social roles being assumed or abandoned. Set to seven popular songs of the 60s―Patsy Cline’s “Crazy,” Roy Orbison’s “Crying,” Tammy Wynette’s “Stand By Your Man,” etc.―it uses seven women in long, solid-color dresses (and complementary heels for part of the work), but it doesn’t depict the affairs of the heart that the music suggests. It’s more about the constraints imposed on middle-class American women of the Far from Heaven or early Mad Men period. They sit in chairs and perform semi-mechanical gestures, as if practicing lessons in deportment, or they get up and do some ballroom-style dancing with each other, maybe rehearsing a part they’ll play with men. Sometimes they get to cut loose in a solo; more than once they go sprawling to the floor as if life has, for a moment, nearly wrecked them. Their melodies, to put it simply, are seldom unchained.

LeCrone’s most complex and compelling work (among those I’ve seen) was a dance she made for a Works & Process presentation at the Guggenheim last October. The program’s idea was simple: give the same difficult music―five knotty, unrelated pieces by Elliott Carter―to two choreographers, LeCrone and Avichai Scher, and see how they respond. Using five dancers and employing some modernized ballet vocabulary, LeCrone’s piece, With Thoughtful Lightness, responded to the music’s moods without trying to track it closely. Highlights: romantic moments in the first trio, including some swooning lifts of NYCB dancer Megan LeCrone (Emery’s sister); a duet in unison in which Megan LeCrone and Gabrielle Lamb didn’t echo each other so much as harmonize; and a solo for Lamb that was rather a knockout.

One of LeCrone’s strengths is solos like that. She seems quickly to grasp a particular dancer’s best qualities and to choreograph for them. What she did for Lamb last fall, she did for Drew Jacoby in a solo crafted for the APAP Showcases in January. Among other qualities, Jacoby has killer legs, and we sensed their tensile strength in this solo. Using your dancers well, making them look good (and not just your dance), is one of the many things that’s expected of choreographers, but LeCrone does it better than some young dancemakers do.

The May showcase was one result of a City Center fellowship that includes studio space and other resources over the course of a year. Another result was a dance premiered that night called Við Vorum, for an ensemble of men―seven men, as it happens, making this a parallel to the seven-woman Unchained Melodies. In contrast to the restraint and overall gentility of that work, this one unleashed its dancers in a display of male strength and athleticism. It also seemed to unleash LeCrone, reminding me a little of the men’s parts in Paul Taylor’s Cloven Kingdom (minus the satire), and maybe even of the propulsive energy often seen in Jiři Kylián’s works.

I’m unsure whether she has much taste for the musical past. She’s used a surprising number of contemporary composers: the eternal modernist Carter; many of the minimalists and post-minimalists, such as Terry Riley, Steve Reich, Philip Glass, John Adams, Arvo Pärt, David Lang, Julia Wolf, Michael Gordon, Michael Nyman; the wide-ranging Joby Talbot, kind of a neo-Romantic in what I’ve heard; and some electronic types such as Zoë Keating, Max Richter, and Chris Clark. The Dead White Guys of classical tradition haven’t gotten much attention: a little Bach, plus Mendelssohn and Glière. Will that change? We’ll see.

LeCrone seems to be driven: 38 works in eight years, including 12 in the last nine months. So when I asked her, after her May showcase, what was next on her schedule, I expected some reference to a break. Instead, she answered, “Juilliard,” which has commissioned her to make a work for a program in late fall.

I’ll be watching.
Emery LeCrone  Web site
Emery LeCrone  Videos

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