THE PAIN OF RENUNCIATION: — and it’s a galvanizing pain. |
The Shaker hymn “Simple Gifts” has been appropriated for everything from exultant wedding recessionals to a ludicrous car commercial, but I don’t think anyone has ever heard it in quite the same way as young Finnish choreographer Tero Saarinen. “Simple Gifts” is the quaking heart of Borrowed Light, which received its US premiere at Jacob’s Pillow last week (July 19-23). Saarinen stages the song as a meditation thrown into emptiness. Flame-haired Ninu Lindfors is dressed like her fellows — men and women alike — in a severe black cassock softened only by a hint of petticoat. As if trying to determine and test its edges, her arms begin to circle around that dark silhouette, her hands batting at her head and face. Staggering forward, she looks over her shoulder; her fingers, curling and uncurling, do not know what to clutch. Saarinen isn’t celebrating simplicity; he’s exploring simplicity’s cost, the visceral pain of physical and emotional renunciation. Against the innocuous lyric “we shan’t be ashamed,” we are startled to learn that she is ashamed, and that this is a galvanizing pain.“Borrowed light” is an architectural term describing natural light channeled through interior windows. In Shaker architecture, this scheme allowed the community to extend its workday in the days before electric lights without the expense of candles. Saarinen borrows and channels Shaker music and public myth, too. In his Pillow Talk Wednesday afternoon, he said that that when he first encountered Shaker design and architecture, he found it oddly familiar, almost Scandinavian. Yet the functionalism of Shaker artistry has not led him to create a dance milieu nearly as scoured and pure as the combination of Shaker, Finnish, and even Japanese æsthetics (he has studied butoh in Japan) might imply. Borrowed Light wears raw feeling on its severe black sleeves.
“Simple Gifts” is the melody that runs through one of dance’s greatest collaborations, the famous Appalachian Spring score Aaron Copland made in 1944 as a “ballet for Martha” Graham, another choreographer with a taste for uncompromising distillation. Saarinen has been fortunate in his collaboration with Joel Cohen and the Boston Camerata. Finding the Camerata’s Simple Gifts: Shaker Chants and Spirituals in a CD bin in Lyon led him to zap an e-mail into cyberspace suggesting the two organizations work together. (For Cohen, what sealed the deal was seeing Saarinen’s version of Petrushka with the Stravinsky score played on dual accordions!) The men’s backgrounds and sensibilities are very, very different, but on stage the visions are complementary.
The Camerata singers instantiate the Shakers’ idealized visions: the Shakers’ clarity of spiritual vision is conveyed by the singers’ forthright a cappella, which carries across the air like bells pealing in good weather. The singers are part of the environment, sometimes sitting patiently on benches and bleachers that edge the back and one side of the stage, sometimes rising to walk calmly among the dancers. The combined companies are rinsed in a grainy, charcoal light streaming from a high “window” that resolves into a white square on the floor, Mikki Kunttu’s inspired design as much a character as the music and the choreography.
The choreographic patterns for Borrowed Light are built out of swaying, trudging walks very different from the fall-and-recovery of Doris Humphrey’s The Shakers (1931), which got Saarinen started on his Shaker-themed investigations more than a dozen years ago. The lunges don’t energize, they seem to keep the dancers from falling into some sort of abyss just beyond their steps, even when they’re transformed into little skipping sequences. Men crawl across the floor hauled by their fists, their lower bodies thumping behind them. Carl Knif yanks the sides of his coat as if trying to escape his own skin, and there’s a hint of masochistic self-flagellation, with the dancers striking their chests and thighs.
But the dancers are always in relationship with their aspirations, whether those are embodied in Deborah Rentz-Moore dipping into her thrilling alto range on the word “repentance” or soprano Anne Azéma opening and closing Borrowed Light like an angel of purity floating just out of reach.
