Photo by Richard Finkelstein
Not all the recent news about theatrical productions concerns abrupt or premature closings. Amid the spate of somber announcements that began the year, there was one production—intimate in scale, yet lofty and un-harnessed in its imaginative ambition—that delivered the happy news of a substantial extension. Deservedly, the almost-didn’t-happen revival of Martha Clarke’s gloriously defiant of categorization Garden of Earthly Delights received a six-week extension beyond its scheduled mid-January closing date.
Clarke, the ever-surprising creator who moved elegantly from the dance world—where her offbeat earthiness and sweet-sad clowning was a mainstay of Pilobolus during its early years—to create her own brand of dance-theater. Garden, first seen in 1984, set the template for a series of exceptionally vivid and beautifully strange productions, often drawing on the visual arts or literature as their inspiration. In it, Clarke drew on the abundance of dense imagery—alluring to the horrifying—in Heironymus Bosch’s early-16th-century masterwork.
Revived after nearly a quarter-century, it fits beautifully into the intimate, slightly workaday confines of the Minetta Lane Theater, where its sensuously extravagant passages of aerial choreography can be experienced fully in all their sensuous abandon, rather than as a physical feat admired from afar.
The 11 bold and distinctive performers in Garden often take to the air to dive and circle and tumble lusciously, but they are also relentlessly earthbound much of the time, as Clarke explores the heavenly and the sinful, purity and filth. The dancers seamlessly—almost placidly—shift from rapturous scenes suggesting the harmony of unspoiled nature to those convincingly evoking the basest and most disgusting of human bodily functions.
First seen stalking delicately on all fours like unspoiled creatures witnessing the dawning of creation, they are transformed many times over the course of little more than an hour, through moments of fierce cruelty and degradation. Early on, the Garden of Eden is suggested as a sly snake (the wonderfully wild and luscious Gabrielle Malone) delivers the fateful apply to Adam and Eve. But there is always something else brewing in another corner of the stage. A moment later, a man takes flight, brandishing a blood-red flower at his crotch and laughing with fiendish delight.
Wild laughter—derisive, conspiratorial, dangerous—continues to reverberate, and the phallic imagery continues to be brandished as the piece winds its seamless way through both rapturous delight and boorish abasement. The performers are all wise, mature dancers capable of asserting their individuality and coloring a dramatic moment. They seem to be exploring and discovering as they go along, so that each new rise into the air comes as a surprise to them as well as us. They are both guileless and knowing, and the persuasiveness with which they present the moments of violence is magnetic and disturbing.
The three musicians, in addition of performing Richard Peaslee’s spare, intriguing score (which seems to channel medieval sounds) wander into the action at times. Their involvement, as well as the within-view attachment and release of harnesses by the performers themselves, add a refreshingly homespun aspect to the proceedings. Clarke requires only a few props—a tangled tree branch, a Georgia O’Keefe-like skull and, during the memorably bawdy and gross medieval-peasant section, numerous potatoes.
Costuming is simple (the performers spend most of the time in nude bodysuits). No technological wizardry or bombast is required when an unfettered imagination like hers takes flight.
Through March 1, Minetta Lane Theater, 18 Minetta Lane (betw. 6th Ave. & MacDougal St.), 212-307-4100; $40-$69.50.
