I was glad to have seen this performance, but not because I enjoyed it. The approximately 70-minute collaboration features dance choreographed and performed by Benjamin Millepied to five piano pieces performed by Alexandre Theraud, plus a few video interludes. Before I dive into my dislikes, it's important to celebrate the ambition and risk these artists are taking. This is the kind of thing I want to see at Disney Hall; original, new creations. Millepied and Theraud's shouldering a full-length performance by themselves at Disney Hall is a remarkable undertaking and exactly the kind of thing that Minh and I aspire to do ourselves. It's also clear to me that my criticisms were not shared by others in the audience. The woman next to me was visibly moved multiple times and most gave a rousing standing ovation. Minh and I were in the minority, so in many ways this will be a review of myself as much as a review of Unstill Life. Onward...
In order of my reactions: Millepied's stage presence was surprisingly off-putting for me; I found his choreography monotone and directionless; the staging and dramaturgy felt superficial; and the choreography was a distraction from the piano.
We arrived early at the theater and took our seats to find Millepied warming up on stage. Using the piano as his barre, he kicked his legs. He sauntered across the floor and did graceful, lazy turns. He sipped water. The message was, "I'm just hanging out here." I myself have had a similar nonchalance performing with On Ensemble, where I might go out onto stage after the audience has begun seating, to do a last-minute check or place a water bottle. I might have even smiled at friends in the front row. For me at that time, it felt good to downplay an exaggerated reverance for the stage and an artificial difference between me and the audience. Sitting in the audience at Disney Hall, I was questioning my past self and wincing as I watched Millepied appear arrogant. His body language seemed to scream, "Look how comfortable I am with all these people here." The choice felt calculated and false and made me immediately skeptical.
Things went downhill from there, but not because Millepied isn't a great dancer. He is an absolutely beautiful mover. His turns and leaps and arm swings are graceful, as if the air around him is thicker than for the rest of us. But his choreography, for me, lacks purpose. My ideal dance gives the sense of a body in service of a choreographic thread. The whole of the body is committed to a message in movement and sensation and the dancer's ego is secondary. Here, I was unable to detect Millipied's underlying structure. I found myself surmising the choreography was created by arranging known movements from a list of impressive tricks. "Tour jete, followed by balance waltz... repeat." I found myself suspecting hubris; that there is no meaning here, only Millipied's enjoyment of himself. This reached a painful peak in his choreography for Schubert 4 Impromptus No. 2 where Millepied interrupts his dance with frustrated glances at the pianist and acted-exhaustion. The breaks felt so jarring to me, like he was throwing away the work. We all know dance is exhausting... we know this piano part is virtuosic... Why make this piece about pointing that out? I'm probably being overly harsh -- again, others were charmed -- but it felt like we were asked to see Millepied's experience of the dance and the music as more important than the music or the choreography itself. (Minh and I were similarly offended by his interpretation of Akiho's Seven Pillars with L.A. Dance Project.)
Voice-over, video, and live production were used throughout the performance, and to me, they felt similarly self-indulgent. The performance began with voice-over of the performers discussing their childhoods, steeped in the arts by musical and dance parents. These stories are one of my pet peeves, and I'll indulge a tangent to explain why. Stories of the "lifelong artist" are self-serving and irrelevant to the listener. First, I should admit that in this respect I carry personal baggage. After kicking me out of On Ensemble, Shoji and Maz leaned into a similar "taiko-since-childhood" story that felt designed to exclude me. In my leaving, On Ensemble's bio switched from a group "dedicated to the exploration of taiko" (open to all), to one that was formed by "childhood friends, taught taiko at ages 8 and 6" (open to only Shoji and Maz). I'm sure none of these artists intend to be exclusionary (I can imagine them saying, "Kris, I'm not thinking about how you're going to take it... I'm just telling my story...") but to me, these stories encourage "essentialist", competitive thinking. By giving importance to the fact that someone has been doing something for a long time, they encourage a lazy association of "years practiced" to "quality". They suggest a self-serving inevitability to their greatness. Audiences crave this kind of simple story -- it makes an artist unassailable and justifies ticket prices. Instead, I believe artists should speak in ways that encourage challenging questions and that reveal unique paths to greatness. We should talk about our work in ways that invite others in. Imagine this alternative... When asked about his history, a drummer I admire listed his lifelong sequence of influences. "Buddy Rich, Krupa, Bonham..." He lit up with love as he described them. He didn't say, "I started drumming when I was 3," though that would have been true too. He turned our love of him toward his love of others, and I found myself standing next to him. "I love Bonham too!" I came away excited to learn more about those drummers I hadn't heard of. His personal history is told in a way that is permeable, welcoming, and relatable. <end tangent>
At times Millepied dances in front of and behind a projection screen. It's best use was a subtle and pleasurable video effect (a monochrome version of the 70's "video feedback" effect), but it only simplified the choreography. It was sufficient to move slowly into and out of frame and trace a limb across the screen. Not quite dancing, but nice to watch. At its worst, the video was deeply distracting. A wireless digital camera was used, and the system introduced a tiny but significant delay. When Millepied was dancing in front of the screen, the out-of-sync projection was so uncomfortable to my eyes that I prefered to watch the pianist. But here too, I was thwarted. At one point in the show, Millepied took hold of the camera to control what we see on the screen: a shot from high above the piano keyboard, the inside of the instrument, a distant view from across the stage, Tharaud's upper body and face. None of the views added much to our understanding of the music but little Theraud was dwarfed by the glowing screen. That screen was filled with an uninteresting shot, Millepied sometimes blocking our view of the real Theraud, and the screen image amplifying the shakes of Millepied's hands to drown out the precision and grace of Theraud's. For me, it was only distraction, and led me to sad conclusions about modernity. "Even here we can't escape screens and wanting to film everything." Millepied could have simply sat with us to enjoy the music, like so many jazz musicians.
The best parts of the performance were entirely Alexandre Tharaud. A few times he dances alongside Millepied and what he lacks in vocabulary, he makes up for in honesty. Minh said, "He moves without artifice." The one time I was moved during the performance was during a "hand dance" by Tharaud. Millepied is holding the camera above Tharaud's hands on a black background. Tharaud's hands start clenched and then his knuckles gradually start to "crawl" forward. A single finger juts forward like a crustacean, and then more fingers, and soon the fingers are fighting each other to be first. It was the kind of original choreography with meaning that I craved the rest of the show.