Christopher Williams, who stunned many (and outraged others) with his brilliantly bizarre, fanciful and visionary Ursula and the 11,000 Virgins, can’t stay away from saints. Having given the women their due in that elaborate 2005 production evoking a first-century martyr and her followers, he is now presenting The Golden Legend, in which a cast of 17 downtown dance all-stars performs portraits of male saints inspired by a 13th-century text, Legenda Aurea Sanctorum.
“I’ve never been able to escape this medieval-to-Renaissance time period in my mind,” Williams admits with a laugh during a recent phone interview. The bio on his website describes him as “a curious alchemist who naturally dissolves boundaries between various art forms,” and his background and training are marked by experiments and adventures in visual arts, theater, puppetry and dance. “Since I was a tiny kid. I drew all sorts of fantastical scenes and sculpted things. I even put together a portfolio in high school, thinking I might go to a visual arts school.”
He ended up at Sarah Lawrence, intending to focus on theater, but already interested in synthesizing his myriad interests, chief among which was puppetry. During his junior year in Paris, he also studied at the Ecole Internationale de Théātre Jacques Lecoq and then took a year off from college to return and complete a degree there. Puppetry, mask traditions and acrobatics were among the courses. “My experience in Paris was a very pivotal point in my discovery of puppetry. At Lecoq, I really, for the first time, saw a marriage between visual arts and [performing] arts—in the sense that they could all be choreographic.”
Earlier works such as Ursula (for which he won a Bessie Award) and Portuguese Suite—as well as portions of The Golden Legend he has shown over the past two years—have marked Williams as a true original, unafraid of the grotesque and ribald. Mystical imagery, evocative and unexpected costuming, fantastical puppets and intensely focused performances combine in works that reveal what the New York Times’ John Rockwell described as “visionary imagination, both conceptual and choreographic.”
The Golden Legend is “the most ambitious work I have tackled,” he affirms. “It is a fruition of these several influences that I have been really inspired by—namely, visual arts (including prosthetic costume and puppetry), pure dancing and live early music. I made most of the material for the piece while I was in residence at the Ligurian Study Center for Arts & Humanities in Bogliasco, Italy—which just happens to be one village over from the birthplace of Jacobus de Voragine, the 13th-century archbishop who wrote the actual text.
“I’m making essentially 17 different dances that will be strung together in the performance. In reading the original text, you get a picture in your mind what some of these characters look like, or how they would be embodied. And really, this project was an opportunity for me to timidly ask all of these amazing performers, whom I have wanted to make material for, whether they’d be interested in doing a cameo appearance. That’s how it came about. I’d see a direct parallel between each of the personalities involved in the work, and one of these characters in the text. I’m trying to give a portrait-impression of some of the more interesting, curious, macabre or fascinating elements of these stories.”
In addition to the substantial cast (which also includes movement choruses and puppeteers), The Golden Legend involves numerous collaborators. It took five designers, including Williams, to create the costumes. The lighting design is by Joe Levasseur and set designs are by Tom Lee. Serious. Evocative live music is a standard feature of Williams’ works, and for this one, the score ranges form selections composed between the 13th and 15th century, to original compositions by Gregory Spears and Peter Kirn, performed live by select members of Lionheart, Anonymous 4 and the New York Consort of Viols.
As Williams describes aspects of the set and staging, careful not to reveal too much and remove an element of surprise, one wonders how DTW will encompass the expansive grandeur of his vision. He responds, “Good question. I’m still answering it!”
> The Golden Legend
May 12- 16, Dance Theater Workshop, 219 W. 19th St. (betw. 7th & 8th Aves.), 212-924-0077; 7:30, $10/$15.
