MARGARET BEALS
May 29, 2016
Margaret Beals’ following consists largely of friends. Stepping into the Cloud
House Studio, I never heard of her; stepping out, I was offended I hadn’t studied her
in dance history, though newly befriended. Margaret Beals: Films and Stories
highlights pieces prefaced by gymnastic recollections. Known for sidesplitting
improvisations, Friday’s screening was both set and no laughing matter – dances to
Sylvia Plath’s final poems.
Beals’ opening remarks, spiced with preemptive comic relief, spoke casually
of a way of working that is today endangered. On a convenient detour to Plath’s
estate while visiting England, a dismissive “Let her have ‘em” from Ted Hughes
resulted in Beals obtaining the rights to Ariel for five years, used fully to create the
piece with Lee Nagrin and Brooke Myers.
Appropriately titled Stings, the 1978 film features Beals, 30, temporally
between Nagrin, 40, and Myers, 20, performing in an audience-less studio shot by
Ping Chong on 16mm. Despite archival purposes, Chong choreographs his single
camera’s continuity, centering on a body part and zooming out, eschewing shot
establishment.
The cleanly organized suite assigns one poem per section. Choreography is
neither melodramatic nor cold, distilled with motifs of tip-toe walking, sweeping
bourées under limp torsos, slow-motion whiplashes, spiraled sit-ups, and
determined limb extensions within elegant épaulement, distorted by sharp
directional changes. Angst festers under the surface as poise is portrayed atop
rickety foundations.
Three generations of bodies generate a sculptural approach to partnering in
which weight is rarely shared, but layered. In silence, Beals and Myers share unison
so close in proximity they are equal parts body and shadow. Motifs, however, hardly
vary. The work is a sternly naïve fugue, on a circular assembly line that juggles
prime forms. In Ariel, Nagrin speaks sitting upstage center in a straddle, tessellated
in Daddy, where she and Beals do the same, silently behind one another while Myers
takes the text, unwaveringly intelligible thanks to physical restraint.
The trio wields poison dart voices, harkening to, but not impersonating,
Plath’s iconic delivery. Through rigorous movements and backwards facings, vocal
clarity is such that one might suspect lip-syncing if that weren’t actually more
difficult. Beals finds voice and movement equally kinetic. The face is kept neutral
such that the voice can do what it needs; the words’ sounds resonate in space just as
concentrated movement allows meaningful resonance to words themselves.
Much of Ariel is externalized self-loathing – attacking others in a reversely
vicarious fashion. Plath does not seem to loathe her “self” however, but the
situations to which her physical manifestation subjugates her. There is a
performative conundrum when dancers with livelihoods depending on bodily
construction and preservation are tasked with expressing the destruction of
another. The trio, however, is not meant to be Plath. All three drop into her mental
arena, seeking understanding without succumbing to the same compulsions that led
the poet to put her head in an oven. Beals’ dance, told through bodies, is not about
the body at all, but, rather, where else the spirit could reside.
EYE ON THE ARTS, NY -- Jonathan Matthews
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