DANCE REVIEW: Unity of music, dance, violence, and hope in Oona Doherty OD Works at Jacob's Pillow

Before the performance, a “happening“ occurred outside the Ted Shawn Theater at Jacob's Pillow. A crowd, forewarned, had gathered in anticipation.

In 1986, we traveled to Belfast, Ireland, with The New Black Eagle Jazz Band to play at the Queens University arts festival. The band was placed at a nice hotel, surrounded by a high, chain-link fence, topped by barbed wire.   We entered through the front door, overseen by an armed guard in a booth.

We took the opportunity—as things seemed quiet—to walk several blocks to the downtown shopping area.   We were shocked by shattered glass on the store fronts and littering the sidewalk.

When the time came to leave the hotel for our performance, we were carried in a van with an armed guard sitting next to the driver.

We performed in a tent, adjacent to another in which “The Merchant of Venice“ was being performed by the Royal Shakespeare Company. The concert was well attended and received.

The following day, we drove up to Bushmills, where, cascading stepwise down the hillside to the ocean, is a stunning geological formation of large hexagonal basalt columns called “The Giant’s Causeway,” a Unesco World Heritage site.

We then proceeded to a motel on the outskirts of Derry, where the band was booked to perform for a jazz club in the center of the city. Because of the danger of attacks and bombings, once again, the band was escorted in a van with an armed guard next to the driver. Wives could not attend.  In a low brick building in what appeared to be an industrial area, about 50 men were waiting—and gave us a generous reception.

On returning to the motel, we learned that the train tracks into Ireland had been bombed. Consequently, as the band had a commitment to perform the next night in Dublin, the men decided to make the drive with an armed escort, hopefully avoiding trouble spots. The wives left on the train to the border, disembarking and boarding a bus that routed them around the bombed area and onto another train at the other side to continue their journey to Dublin.

This prepared us for better understanding this evening’s performance.   Before the performance, a “happening“ occurred outside the Ted Shawn Theater at Jacob’s Pillow. A crowd, forewarned, had gathered in anticipation.   A large sedan drove up the path, blasting rhythmic music. The burly driver stopped the car, opened the trunk, and female dancer Sati Veyrunes tumbled out.   Falling to the ground, she was at first immobile and seemed stunned. But she quickly rose to her feet and careened around the onlookers wildly, articulating loud but indistinguishable utterances. As she wove through the crowd, the driver jumped into the car and drove away. She ran after, yelling “Don’t leave me,” this, fully understandable.

We entered the theater to a stage with the curtains open, a black background, and a pile of trash overrunning a workman’s cart in the back corner. With spotlights shining into the audience, Sati Veryrunes, in the same dusty, scruffy black sweats, continued seamlessly from outside to contort, writhe, and tumble to Rui Da Silva’s “Touch Me.” Originally danced by Oona Doherty herself, Veryrunes’ presentation was so replete with profound and idiosyncratic flourishes that it was impossible to imagine another dancer in her place. Throughout the dance, Oona Doherty delivered a narrative voice-over of comments, aphorisms, exclamations, and exhortations—some hardly intelligible and too many to fully follow. Taken together, they created a sense of a person in an overwhelming environment, in constant motion, seeking to find her way.

In her bio, Doherty noted that she was kicked out of Catholic school, where she had danced “because of drugs. I worked as a waitress, and for the first time, I missed dancing.” That brought her back to school, but to the extent that this dance is autobiographical, one could feel the oppression and the struggle.

“Works” is intended both as an adjective and a noun.

And music and dance are totally integrated in Doherty’s oeuvre. Each dancer must attend specifically to the musical score—even as they express their own interpretations of the dance.

Doherty’s choreography is about the demand for unity and unison, its breakdown and reformation. Unison in her vision is an ultimate and continuous compromise, in which each member must struggle to maintain their individual “work” in the service of the community—however that is defined.

Her choreography is overlaid with urgent individual memories and apposite expostulations that quote religious instructions and insist on proper religiously descended behavior.

Often, these are indecipherable, but frequently they are not. But the expostulations are nearly always jarring—and intrusive, conveying the knowledge that one never escapes the traumas of childhood and their triggers through one’s life.

Who are we, they ask, if not the products of a continual search for clarity, as individuals, alone in our search for connection and meaning both in relation to the impositions of society and its institutions, and in relation to individuals and communities important to us?

Some of the most affecting divergences from the unified ensemble occurred when individuals were offered the embraces—indeed love—by others in this international company of diverse race and gender. There were threesomes and foursomes in search of—and ultimately finding—succor and comfort in the face of the cruelty, often inflicted in bewildering randomness, throughout the powerful offerings of the evening.

Striking examples of the integration of music and dance pervaded this performance.

After the initial “happening” outside the Ted Shawn Theater, where Sati Veryrunes rolled out of the trunk of a car blaring loud music, the music sustained into the theater, where the program began without the usual introduction by Executive and Artistic Director Pamela Tatge (which took place after the intermission).

“Hope Hunt and the Ascension into Lazarus,” originally choreographed in 2016, soloed Sati Veryrunes, in many guises, each with its own powerful musical underpinnings.

To the above music, Sati Veryrunes interjected spoken and shouted verbal expostulations as she danced. Not all made sense. Here are a few examples:

And with yet another change of musical atmosphere, Veryrunes’s demeanor and movement also changed dramatically, to become dreamlike, floating, in another world.

To the emphatic beat in this music, Sati Veryrunes shouted “Hope! Hope! Hope! Hope!”

Suddenly, the stage lights faded to black. As the lights rose again, they revealed Veryrunes, clad now in luminous white in fetal position on the stage. Slowly, she rose, embodying Lazarus as he was raised by Christ from death. As eloquently expressed in the program notes, “Lazarus rises as the concrete bird of Paradise. An attempt to reconstruct the stereotype of the disadvantaged male, and raise it up into a Caravaggio bright white limbo, it looks to make the smicks, the spides, the hoads, the gypsies, the knackers into the birds of paradise. It is a hunt for hope …”

As the dance continues, Veryrunes appears to transform into an angel, especially when, palms forward and arms extended, she falls back, as though making an offering of herself. One senses an acute sense of awareness of man’s sins and a compassionate concern to enlighten their senses of themselves, perhaps to abandon the “hard man” posturing.

Although the movement of this dance is toward resurrection, Doherty believes that her connection to her home grounds her. As the program notes cited from an interview, “I’m really serious about myself, and a pain in the ass sometimes. That’s why I like Belfast: it keeps you normal. The artists are amazing, but they don’t let you be an idiot.”

In addition to keeping her “normal,” Belfast and its inhabitants also serve as an inspiration for her. In another quoted interview about “Hope Hunt and the Ascension into Lazarus,” Doherty talked about how she was inspired by watching the people around her. “I’ve been watching lads in the streets in Belfast, having a carryout and messing about. I’ve been watching how they move.” She goes on to say she embodies them and inserts herself. She mimes them, and then melts – and then shifts into becoming “a hard man” once again.

Yet, even with resurrection, the harshness of the world reasserts itself. Overlaying the exquisite liturgical music above, Sati Veryrunes utters strident expostulations of orders by religious authorities, as though she is back in the classroom as a traumatized child. She shakes her head dramatically, screwing her facial expression to one of rage, twisting, falling backward, stumbling, holding her hands up beseechingly, then walking forward, pointing upwards. Police sirens sound from the PA system.

Then, suddenly, darkness, and Intermission.

After the Intermission, the splendidly nuanced interpretation of the Adagio Sostenuto movement of Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 2 provides the setting for a group of 12 dancers in identical indigo uniforms who must each contend with the realities of oppression and forced conformity to social expectations. These “hard men” also seem to yearn for sources of comfort, perhaps expressed by Rachmaninoff’s warm melodies.

This conflict pervades the first part of Oona Doherty’s masterpiece, “Navy Blue.”

The dancers, of varied ages and genders, parade in military formations, lining up, marching in parade ground patterns, but frequently gaze at one another balefully and aggressively. The processions break apart as individuals can’t or won’t keep up, fall, struggle, and fight.

Still, more soothing music sounds, seemingly in contradiction, signifying hope as opposed to the ensuing relentless beat of Ricky xx’s sendup or recasting of the Rachmaninoff.

In a devastating central scenario, oppression takes arguably its worst form.

The group of 12 weave among each other in center stage as a gunshot rings out and one falls down, dead. Then another, then another, until one dancer, a female, is left. Standing frozen, her face trembles more and more violently exclaiming, “No, no, no,” before she, too, is murdered. Now all lie dead upon the stage.

Notwithstanding the horror, and the expansive silence punctuated by the gunshots, now a lovely Mozart sonata plays.

Is this a symbol of hope, or of an imagined better life after death? One feels confused, because the emotions—and questions—are deeply in conflict.

The second part of “Navy Blue” offers a more optimistic perspective on men and their prospects for productive personal development.

Again, to quote Maura Keefe’s informative and perceptive Pillow Notes, “Ballet dancer turned writer Matthew Polluch appreciates Doherty’s musical sensibility in Navy Blue, observing, ‘Doherty understands music—rhythmically and melodically. There are many moments of music visualization—literal communications of rhythm, emotional suggestions of melody, and also stillness.’ Doherty herself would agree, noting, ‘You’re going to hate me for saying this, but music is the highest art form. Higher than dancing. And we shouldn’t say that because we’re fighting for a tiny cut of the old Arts Council pie, and I know some choreographers work in silence, the mad bastards, but as a choreographer you could do your whole career as a bow to say thanks to music.’”

“That said,” Maura Keefe continues, “no choreographer with Doherty’s vision makes dances that only bow to the music. They propose and they query. They celebrate and devastate. She both invites us in and taunts us, as dancers furiously gesture, and fall, hover, recover, and spin off again.”

The sublime struggle for personal meaning is somewhat resolved toward the end of “Navy Blue,” as individual expostulations over marvelously eloquent lifts, embraces, and feats of physical strength and athleticism convey a sense of hope for all men in the deep, rough, indigo darkness. The stars above are noticed, admired, and blessed.

And the audience acknowledged the beauty and insight of the performance with a well-deserved ovation.

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