Between Terror and Desire

Dance Magazine, Oct, 2000 by Wendy Perron

Martha Clarke takes on Hans Christian Andersen--and it's no Disney musical

NOBODY KNOWS what to call Martha Clarke's work. Is it dance? Is it theater? Is it music with images? Is it performance art? Critics try to define it; audiences want to know what to expect. But it's a losing battle, because she changes all the time, surprising even herself.

Her most recent creation, Hans Christian Andersen, is playing at the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco until October 8. With songs by Frank Loesser (from the 1952 Danny Kaye movie) and book by Sebastian Barry (The Steward of Christendom), it is a musical. But it's unlike any musical you've ever seen. Actors tell stories while dancers fly; the setting is otherworldly; no sunny, optimistic message is waiting in the wings.

If you heard Andersen's fairy tales as a child, you remember the pull between desire and terror that could haunt you long after the end of the story. Clarke, with her overflowing imagination and slightly sinister edge, is a perfect match for Andersen. Jane Greenwood's costumes and Robert Israel's set take you back to nineteenth-century Denmark, and Barry's script intercuts Andersen's poverty-stricken life with his hallucinatory stories.

A founding member of Pilobolus in the early 1970s, Clarke later developed her own brand of physical theater that beguiled, startled, delighted and occasionally disturbed audiences. She would immerse herself in a time period to create a full-evening tapestry, interweaving imagery, movement, text, light and music. Recognized as a truly ground-breaking artist, she has given us unforgettable pieces such as The Garden of Earthly Delights (1984), based on the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch; Vienna: Lusthaus (1986), which depicts a pre-Hitlerian erotic decadence; and Vers La Flamme (1999), a poetic merging of Scriabin's music and Chekhov's characters.

Spending an afternoon with Clarke in her Manhattan apartment, I learned about her past, present and future while basking in her whimsical view of life and her hearty laughter. Clarke started out as a dancer but always thought in visual images. As a student at Juilliard School in the '60s, she revered ballet teacher Antony Tudor and composition master Louis Horst but didn't feel the call of dance as a single art. "I actually wanted to leave Juilliard, but my parents wouldn't let me," she says. She railed against the business-as-usual aspect of dance composition: "I never was that interested in steps, but in gestures and movements that came out of a story or an emotional context. I didn't want to just put together turns and leaps and arabesques because I think they always look like turns and leaps and arabesques."

She was drawn to Anna Sokolow's work, and began as an apprentice in her company while still a student. After a few years she felt a vague sense of confinement: "At that time, modern dance called for a dedication and a lifestyle that cut off certain things, like rolling in grass. So I left Anna's company, had a baby and moved to Rome, where I was mother and a wife." In musing about her changing desires, she says, "I wanted to be a painter; now I'm doing musicals, and I want to do film directing. I just keep moving on some kind of dirt road of my own, and I'll probably circle back to making dances. But I still have some wanderlust."

Her wandering has given her trouble with dance critics who like their dance straight up. But theater critics have heralded her work, calling it "hypnotic," "powerful" and "intensely erotic." Jack Kroll, writing in Newsweek in the 1980s, pronounced her "one of the most exciting artists to emerge in the new 'performance' theater." Frank Rich wrote in The New York Times that with Vienna: Lusthaus, she "tapped into everyone's wildest dreams."

Indeed, Clarke says she often has flying dreams, and in Andersen, she's letting it fly (as it were). All eight dancers are rigged for flying in different terrains. "Thumbelina is in the forest, with fairies falling out of trees; the Ice Maiden floats across mountains; and courtiers glide on the floor in 'The Emperor and the Nightingale,'" she says. (Though Andersen also authored the dance talisman "The Red Shoes" and Clarke loves it, she didn't include it, because she feels the story has been explored fully by other artists.)

Although Clarke has directed actors and singers in recent projects, she prefers working with dancers. "I love their intuition, sweetness, their way of living, way of moving, way of seeing," she says. "When you work with actors, it's often much more analytical, a lot of conversation. Dancers have the uncanny intelligence of animals."

And dancers like working with her. Rob Besserer, who has appeared in many of her projects, describes her process: "It begins when you come in the door. She's already watching, for instance, how you flop into your seat, how you stand around in a group. She doesn't tell you specifically what to do--to the point where you can sometimes go crazy. She walks around you and eventually, from her notes and your suggestions, she orchestrates it. It's sort of a sad moment when it has to crystallize. But in performance, you focus on the initial freedom."