Work It: Sarah Michelson’s “Dover Beach”
Sarah Michelson’s “Dover Beach,” which I saw opening night in June at the Kitchen in New York City, began two years ago in Cardiff, Wales. Following a series of brief residencies and the performances of the work there, Michelson spent a year developing movement in New York before presenting “Dover Beach” in its current form.
The Kitchen version includes a number of fine professional dancers, but witnessing the piercing concentration and sharp effort of four young performers was the most arresting element of Michelson’s dance. She brought two of the girls she worked with in Cardiff to rehearse for three weeks in New York: Non Griffiths, 12, and Latysha Antonio, 11. The other girls, Allegra Herman, 11, and Sofia Britos, 12, are from New York.
The piece begins with a duet for Griffiths and Laura Weston, wearing matching 18th century-inspired men’s tights and coats by Elana Scelzi. The mostly unison movement includes openhanded reaching gestures, complicated—if not awkward—arm and torso movements, and long periods of visibly difficult extensions. Throughout the work, there is a feeling of great effort on the part of the performers. The dance looks like a thing to be conquered.
Michelson is interested, like others in post-modern art, in highlighting the effort in production rather than the seamlessness and beauty of the product. But, what is so compelling about repetitive, relentless (fruitless? joyless?) movement? Some would say, “nothing,” of course. But, I think there is something there. Contemporary artists’ interest in effort may have something to do with industrialization and our difficulty transitioning from people who make or do distinctive things from beginning to end to people who play a tiny part in a larger, more mechanical process of producing countless, identical things.
In dance making, though, the focus on effort seems to have an additional meaning. For Michelson and others, this kind of work (which is made of “work”) has a relationship to ballet. For all of us who have spent serious time studying and thinking about ballet, it’s not hard to connect “work”—repetition, effort and sweat—to the life of a dancer. In fact, somehow, this extreme amount of focus, time and energy are at the core of our love of the form. Even articulating this now, I feel a romantic sense of loss that I am not in the studio, working.
In an interview for Time Out New York, Michelson says that somehow the expenditure of effort is key. “You have to work and work and work, and in the work is the thing—somewhere.”
There is an idea that through this tremendous effort and concentration, something otherworldly will be produced. Not unlike practicing religion, we keep at it with the hope that something magical will occur. Sometimes this fills us with a feeling of futility, and once in a blue moon, it floods us with a fleeting moment of understanding and connection. Mostly, though, we are working and waiting.
Michelson’s use of girls, at first, seems exploitive. The tiny, hardworking and pensive Griffiths appears not to be in on the joke. She performs the non-organic movements and mimetic gestures she has been given with utmost sincerity. She is a workhorse, this girl. (Later, there is a horse, actually. In a surreal and comic moment, a man appears from the darkness wearing a poorly constructed horse head. But, I think this is beside the point.) Set to a score of piano, bells and ocean noises that sometimes swell to embarrassing levels, there is a sense that Michelson is making fun of the seriousness with which some dancers and choreographers take themselves.
As Griffith and Weston dance on the right two thirds of the stage, a woman in a black leotard performs a repetitive, back-and-forth turning pattern inside an ornate, yellow cage—part of a stunning set designed by Michelson’s long-time visual collaborator Parker Lutz. The set also includes what appear to be two rotating flotation devices with stage lights attached, turning like large fans. When the stage gets darker and the lights slowly come on, they are reminiscent of lighthouses cutting through a dark night.
It is during one of these darker moments, a period of dancing by Griffith and Weston, when their objectification wears away and their countenances become totally engrossing. The movement has not changed in any significant way, and the volume and tone of the music slip from laughable to dreamlike.
At various points during the duration of the piece, other leotard-clad performers join the dancer in the cage, the incisive Rebecca Warner. The movement in the box seems generally more balletic, though there is a clear relationship between the dancing inside and outside. At times, the groups share the exact same movement. But, throughout, the separation of the groups seems deliberate.
Even though Weston is not a child, there is something childlike about her. Her heart-shaped face and bright blonde hair seem cherubic. It is fitting that she remains mostly outside of the sectioned-off area. There is something pure and less cutting about her presence than the clearly ballet-trained Weston and Jmy Leary, who never steps outside of the box.
I think it is Weston and Griffith’s supreme persistence with movement that feels arbitrary and out of their comfort zone that begins to reveal a kind of underlying, effervescent innocence. What can be read, in the beginning, as an objectification of unawareness, suddenly feels like a glimpse at valiance and tenacity. The two performers reveal innocent passion. They do not need any reason at all to perform with undying vigor. Facing back in a rare pause, Griffiths undoes Weston’s ponytail and then undoes her own. She comes forward to look straight at us, her expression revealing no emotion but determination.
Watching “Dover Beach,” I found myself lamenting the departure of the person I was before I asked, “Why do you want me to do that?” Sorting it all out is part of growing up, of course. But, it is also hard and tiring. “Why” makes you stop when you could be moving fast and free. And every dancer knows that if you stop for just one minute, your work might just disappear, and you might never get back there again.