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-- Michael Scott Moore
Lord of the Dance
Les Enfants Terribles: Children of the Game. Score and libretto by Philip Glass. Choreography by Susan Marshall. Presented by Cal Performances at Zellerbach Hall, UC Berkeley campus, Oct. 17 & 18. Call (510) 642-9988.
Spirited by Jean Cocteau, the dance-opera Les Enfants Terribles: Children of the Game dissolves -- and reverses -- conventions of opera and, more broadly, theater. Singers commingle and share roles with dancers; the performance spills right into the pit, where Philip Glass and his fellow keyboardists pound out tunes next to a dancer's gesticulations or a singer's soaring lament; and, while the dance-opera adheres to opera's propensity for deluxe spectacle, the grandiosity here is a refraction of the characters' overblown and obsessive imaginations. The last in Glass' trilogy of Cocteau operas gets us inside the latter's psychological fascinations by exploding them onto the stage. This spectacle is inside-out.
In Cocteau's work, narcissism flirts with a desire to die. In Orpheus, the poet enters the world of the dead through a mirror. In Beauty and the Beast, Beauty's transcendent power comes to life in the shadow of the beast of night. In Les Enfants Terribles, brother and sister -- "two halves of the same body" -- obsess over their respective "other half" in the fantasies they bury themselves in.
Similar in effect to the original Enfants' claustrophobic interiors, the inexorably repeated small scales of Glass' score -- evolving so slowly that you only notice if you're concentrating -- set the tone for the dance-opera: There's no exit from the children's tight, dark world. But, like those few moments in the film when the siblings left their room, ephemeral melodies ride on top of -- and defy -- the score's boxed-in minimalism. It's as if these melancholic forays were running up the down escalator to hell: They're not going to overcome the drama's pull toward an annihilating conclusion, but they remind us how disturbed we might feel if we weren't submerged in it all.
The drama heats up quickly. The clear plastic screens separating us from the dancers and singers lift one by one. By the time the children's mother dies, reducing to zero the presence of adults, all the veils between the performers and us have been stripped away.
We're faced with a narcissistic play as absurd as it is ominous. The film conveyed the siblings' excessive investment in one another through the confined spaces they wrangled in; the dance-opera uses multiplication. Four Pauls (dancers Marlon Barrios Solano, Mark DeChiazza, and John Heginbotham, and singer Philip Cutlip) and four Lises (dancers Kristen Hollinsworth, Krista Langberg, and Eileen Thomas, and singer Christine Arand) climb all over one another to lay claim to a fragile bed. Lises ride the hips -- squeezing and hugging hard -- of Pauls. Some Lises strut and preen like animals staking territory while other Lises coolly stare and a few Pauls mope and flail about. Pauls line up to slap, and Lises to smack-kiss, an intruder -- a non-Paul/Lise. Pauls teasingly jab the forehead of Lises, who impassively wait for more. Doubled and redoubled, the monstrosity of the pair's affection and contempt for one another -- and for themselves -- becomes abundantly clear.
We know they'll ruin each other: It's cemented in their character -- and in our fascination. They'll never escape one another because we're not tired of them -- and if we aren't, why would they be?
But inside their annihilating fantasies, a new fact arises: Paul's death. To indicate we're no longer in the internal domain of "The Game," a curtain falls between the performers and us. We've been returned to basic surface realities -- things like the difference between being dead and being alive, between us and them. The clean division this coda exacts is Cocteau's worst nightmare. The fertile convergences that characterize Cocteau's work -- the bleeding of death into life, image into interiority -- rupture because Paul, and then Lise, are irreversibly dead. This rupture, more than simply the deaths themselves, is what makes Les Enfants Terribles a Cocteauian tragedy. So, stuck on the side of the living, we are hungover -- left numb. We stood at the lip of danger and then were forcibly rescued by dimwitted fact.
-- Apollinaire Scherr
Mark and Sean
"The Return of Mark Eitzel." By Mark Eitzel. Solo Pieces of the Quilt. Performed by Sean San Jose Blackman. Part of the Solo Mio Festival at Fort Mason Center, Sept. 17-Oct. 19. Call 392-4400. (Pieces returns, Nov. 1 & 2, at La Pena Cultural Center in Berkeley. Call (510) 849-2568.)
Two local artists who should get more attention played short but excellent gigs at the Solo Mio Festival, which ended two weekends ago. The first was Mark Eitzel, who gets some attention in the rock world, especially after the album he cut recently with Peter Buck, but wider audiences still don't know much about him. His records are full of moody, plushly produced songs, and his voice has the crooning romance of someone like Morrissey or Robert Smith from the Cure. The Solo Mio gig -- with no echoey drums, no soft piano accompaniment -- was totally different, maybe because having to deal with an audience up close made Eitzel nervous. He played an acoustic guitar, chatted, sang, and gossiped, sometimes in the space of one song. His rendition of "Cleopatra Jones" improved on the recorded version, to me, partly because he quit in the middle to make fun of his own guitar playing and then related a dream he'd had about his last tour, involving a clown. He finished the song only when he had nothing else to say.
