An Allegory Unfolds in the Air
CLOVE GALILEE floats 16 feet above the stage at the NYU Skirball Center, her legs cycling gracefully, her voluminous white dress billowing. She is rehearsing her starring role in Mabou Mines' latest theatrical extravaganza "Red Beads," most of which takes place in midair.
Some families spend Sunday afternoon going to the mall. Not the artistic and biological family at the core of Mabou Mines. Ms. Galilee, a trained dancer who choreographed her own part, is being put through her dangling paces by her father, Lee Breuer, an intense man in a small cap and baggy pants. The performer Ruth Maleczech, who sports a vivid red mane and plays her real-life role as the Mother in the piece, is in the audience, observing the action, which resembles a cross between "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" and a stark Cirque du Soleil. "It's incredible that I have the greatest gift a child can have, which is to grow up and have your parents become your mentors," said Ms. Galilee.
And then there is the extended family. Polina Klimovitskaya, who wrote the original fairy tale from which Mr. Breuer adapted this "performance poem," is also in the audience. Mr. Breuer first heard the story of "Red Beads" over 20 years ago, when Ms. Klimovitskaya, with whom he lived at the time, told it to their son, Alexander.
Along with a handful of others, including the puppeteer Basil Twist, they are in the midst of a technical rehearsal for the elaborate piece, which includes aerial choreography, Ningyo-buri-style puppetry, a live orchestra, choral singers and opera. The show, which has its premiere on Tuesday, requires 85 people (24 of whom are New York University students) to get off the ground. The music is composed by Ushio Torikai.
"Red Beads" is the allegorical tale of a girl's rite of passage to womanhood, a mysterious transition symbolized by her receiving a 13-bead red necklace from her mother. The story has obvious Freudian overtones; the rivalry with her mother for her father's attention is clear, and a major battle ensues before she manages to make the necklace her own. "Incest? Of course, it's about a transference of sexuality from the mother to the daughter at puberty," Mr. Breuer said.
Like most of Mabou Mines' pieces, "Red Beads" fermented for a long time. It was first performed as a straight play in Seattle in 1982, before having workshops at the Walker Arts Center and Mass MoCA several years ago. Mr. Breuer said the multi-layered work was one of Mabou Mines' most complicated creations. "I wanted to find this meeting ground where the symbolist take of Edgar Allan Poe that goes all the way back to these wonderful high camp ladies on mountains, with ravens on their shoulders and stuff like that," Mr. Breuer explained, in his intense staccato. "You know, this is Freddy in 'Friday the 13th,' when the father comes up with the pick and spade and pulls his daughter down into the grave. So in a way it's a Tim Burton kind of spoof, in a way it's camp, as well as being a very serious operatic statement."
Audiences expect no less from Mabou Mines, which began its experimental work 35 years ago, when Mr. Breuer, Ms. Maleczech, Philip Glass, JoAnne Akalaitis and David Warrilow founded the company and named it after a town in Nova Scotia. (Mr. Breuer's artistic collaboration with Ms. Maleczech goes back nearly 50 years, to when they were both studying at U.C.L.A.) Mabou Mines has done avant-garde work ranging from a sex-reversed version of "King Lear" (1990) to a lyrical "Peter and Wendy" (1996). Their most recent new production was "DollHouse" (2003) an interpretation of Ibsen's classic, in which the men were played by "little people," under five feet, and the women were unusually tall.
Mr. Twist's history with Mabou Mines goes back at least a decade. But it was in 1998, when Mr. Breuer saw Mr. Twist's cult hit "Symphonie Fantastique," an abstract aquatic puppet show, that he decided to ask him to be an artistic and conceptual collaborator on "Red Beads."
"At first Lee wanted to do it underwater, and it was like we need a million-gallon tank," said Mr. Twist. "And I advised him against it. And so after mulling over different stuff, we thought we'd try it with air. We wanted to get the fabric to have that kind of abstraction and weightlessness and lusciousness, just without the water."
Hoisted by the "fly team" backstage, Ms. Galilee is moved from stage left to right, on one of five separate tracks by the team's "lifters and travelers." "Three days before she was 13, the Child came down to breakfast, combed and clean, to find her Father going upstairs with a copper tray," whispers a disembodied voice. Behind her, a graceful double, Zoe Phillips, who is strapped into a similar harness, does the return trip. Meanwhile, the Father, played by Rob Besserer, is doing a Spider-Man number on the back wall of the stage.
As he climbs the wall on a vertical track, Ms. Galilee watches, moving her hands and arms like a marionette. She developed her character's movements based on the Japanese dance form Ningyo-buri, which she studied last summer in Japan. When she is not flying across the stage, she is carried and positioned by "master puppeteers." "It's very 18th century backstage," said Mr. Besserer, a Martha Clarke alumnus who did his own choreography, referring to all the people manipulating ropes and pulleys.
Equally challenging is the onstage manipulation of the fabric. While the aerial choreography is quite an eyeful, Mr. Twist's artful fabric puppetry gives "Red Beads" much of its visual magic - like "Symphonie Fantastique" but in the air and on a much, much larger scale.
"Working in air is totally different. It took us a while to find just the right kind of fabric - silk - and the right kind of fans to use," said Mr. Twist. "We ended up using very lightweight ones that could be angled like you would a flashlight at any point you want." In addition, Mr. Twist has incorporated large objects - stairs, a bed - that are placed under the fabric so that "they sort of melt and morph and everything remains fluid."
Up on the stage, Ms. Galilee continues her flight as Mr. Breuer directs this family parable. "It's critically important that I worked with the mother of my child and my child," he said. "I couldn't have done the piece the same way with other people where I did not have these references." Ms. Maleczech agreed. "There is a ground base of trust," she added. "It's in the air and it's going somewhere and you can trust where it's going." Not unlike "Red Beads."
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