Miro Dance Theatre's "Punch,' and PIFA's trifecta

Insiders groused that the first Philadelphia International Festival of the Arts (PIFA) allocated way too much of its Annenberg $10 million gift for marketing and Kimmel Center operations, and not enough for new artistic work in its other Philadelphia venues. Scuttlebutt also had it that the Festival lacked artistic direction, aside from its vague overarching theme of "Paris 1910-1920."

Even if this critique contained some truth, the "Let a thousand Parisian flowers bloom" approach to festival making— especially in a city with fulsome cultural talent— opened the way to many outstanding productions and exhibitions, such as the Basil Twist puppet theater Petrushka; the Ballet X and Wilma Theater re-imagining of Apollinaire's The Mammaries of Tiresias; the Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia's performance of the Stravinsky L'Histoire du Soldat; and the Locks Gallery's "The Insolent Eye— Jarry in Art: Thomas Chimes, Rebecca Horn, William Kentridge."

The Festival also gave Philadelphians an 81-foot-high Eiffel Tower, devised by the imaginative theater designer Mimi Lien, with a sound and light show and criss-crossing aerial trains and planes that memorably enlivened that sterile interior space of the Kimmel Center. Would that a small piece of the $10 million had also supported more late-night cabaret successes like the Edith Piaf dramatized songs of The Bearded Ladies in the Wilma Theater lobby; or better projection of JJ Tiziou's 45-foot digital mural of dance photos and videos on the Kimmel's east facing brick wall overlooking Broad Street. Without a screen as backing, the full beauty of Tiziou's dance images projected during Festival evenings is adversely muted.

Puppetry revival

The Festival did score a Stravinsky Pulcinella trifecta though, with three sterling, very different productions borne of that puppet's ancestry. (Indeed, with the puppets directed by Robert Smythe in L'Histoire du Soldat, these works collectively gave this Festival a leitmotif of puppetry revival) The Festival also allowed the Kimmel Center to exhibit a long-awaited cultural synergy among its resident companies, joining the Philadelphia Orchestra with the Pennsylvania Ballet in a new production of Stravinsky's Pulcinella.

The second of the trifecta was an outstandingly original and entertaining Punch, a Miro Dance Theatre commission. In stark contrast to the Ballet's Pulcinella, Miro's was raw and raucous, visceral and vicious. The outstanding Basil Twist Petrushka completed the course. (For my full review, click here.)

Romance and frivolity

The Finish choreographer Jorma Elo and the Pennsylvania Ballet offered a world premiere, Pulcinella Alive. Stravinsky's neo-classical composition incorporated bright, 18th-Century Baroque music Ó la Pergolesi to connote commedia dell'arte romance and frivolity. Elo's contemporary take on the Ballets Russes/ Leonide Massine/ Pablo Picasso 1920 production omits the overt appearances of most characters but retains the story line, especially for the lead Pulcinella (Francis Veyette) and Pimpinella (Martha Chamberlain).

With Picasso unavailable, this production used Mikki Kunttu as the scenic designer, offering a set of laid-back, minimalist columns of varying lights. The video screen projections gave a dry taste of what Picasso had done by showing a few historic yet uncompelling drawings. But a lively short video of the backstage antics of Arantxa Ochoa and Alexander Iziliaev's clowning heads and faces, was perfect.

Chamberlain's farewell

Within the vocabulary of modern ballet, Elo warmly conveyed the buoyancy and playfulness of the original Pulcinella. He humorously enacted the Pulcinella dilemma of handling two women at the same time by perching the two (Carlin Curcio and Amy Aldridge) on each of Veyette's knees as he swung his head to their alternating demands for attention. Dancers pulled invisible strings to draw their partners near, and women supported by men (this is still mainstream ballet, of course), appeared to be swimming or peddling in lieu of the traditional ballet glacial stasis of women aloft.

A glorious highlight was Chamberlain— also the designer of the spare, white costumes— who danced her final performance with the Pennsylvania Ballet. Especially in her partnering with Veyette, Chamberlain's technique was visually strong and dramatically exact, whether in her precision-timed leaps into Pulcinella's arms, or a fluid back-bend to hand-stand to standing movement over Pulcinella's back— a move more out of circus than ballet.

Down with cutesy

In Miro Dance Theatre's power-packed Punch, artistic directors Amanda Miller and Tobin Rothlein stripped all the cutesy, romantic layers off the Pulcinella story by going to its rough and tumble antic roots.

The wily, transgressive, trickster figure of Punch— who could as easily overcome you by feigning stupidity or charm or by knocking you out— stands as a character in almost all world cultures going back perhaps 5,000 years. As the engrossing program notes by Bryn Mawr's Linda Caruso Haviland explained, Punch as a character dates back to the popular rogue Maccus in the Atellan Fables.

Punch challenges us to ask why we are so attracted to such an often malevolent, rebellious figure. Not only do Miller and Rothlein embrace the zany spirit of commedia dell'arte, but also they gain by drawing on the Punch and Judy tradition, injecting gender parity through strong, alluring women who are the physical equals of the male characters.

The four outstanding, main performers (Miller, Dana Dlugosz, Paul Struck and Andre Zachery) danced on a square surface, surrounded by four rows of audience on each side in Kimmel's basement Innovation Studio. It was thrilling to sit in such close proximity to such virtuoso dancers.

Hidden masturbation

They enter as monk-like characters accompanied by choral voices. But these are monks covered by cheap hoodies, each wearing a long skirt. Soon their genuflections reveal skewed mouths wide open, with contorted tongues that are tantamount to an additional, and enlivening, appendage.

The opening passage includes raunchy butt feels and a hoodied huddle of hidden masturbation. In a solo, Struck vocalizes into a microphone using only his breath emanating from lungs, throat and the darker, gaseous depths of the stomach. He transitions into a menacing chicken-like man, as the original music of Zeena Parkins mixes choral voices with percussive drums to connote the strange animal transformations occurring.

Unlike the customary use of video in dance and theater as scenic backdrop, Rothlein has quite inventively used multiple handheld digital picture frames, often showing just the performers' open mouths and gazing eyes, which both multiply the characters on stage and lead to the strangest of duets. Dlugosz achieves sexual union with her handheld video mouth images.

Punched in the stomach

Later in the work, two characters transform into stilted neck creatures, their arms lifted above the head within their hoodies, revealing two video face characters who passionately embrace and leave the stage in entwined ecstasy on the floor.

The hilarious fight scene between Struck and Zachery includes wildly choreographed faux fighting: Struck and Zachery cling upside down to each other, and when Struck is repeatedly punched in the stomach he rises three feet off the ground, as only a versatile dancer might. But each of them also "fights" the video image of his opponent's aggressive stare, a parody of professional boxers' pre-fight confrontation ritual. It all ends with both seated, each feeding the other a hardboiled egg.

In this Punch, the women are the men's sexy, wily and vicious equals. (Haviland's program notes remind us of the history of the Biblical Judith, who seduced and then slew Holoferness.) Whereas in the Ballet's Pulcinella, the two women sitting on Pulcinella's knees give him pokes to demand his attention, here Miller and Dlugosz each straight-leg kick up into Struck's armpits.

Gender parity even extends to the birthing of eggs, although Struck's solo egg pops out of his mouth, while Dlugosz's brood of 18 eggs exits between her legs as she is dragged backwards across the floor.

Ballet's civilizing presence

Yet a delicious presence of ballet also pervades this madhouse. It appears on occasion from each of these stellar dancers. Sometimes it's a kind of civilizing antidote to the manic happenings, but more often it makes its own dramatic contribution as in the triumphalism of Dlugosz's vanquishing of Struck and Zachery, or in Zachery's red-caped off-the-shoulder solo, where he makes clownery out of ballet's excesses.

This Punch was greatly enhanced by the contributions of the music artist Zeena Parkins, who has tracked the entire Stravinsky Pulcinella score and, while referencing it, has entirely refreshed it with a rich use of multi-tracked vocals and a wide range of percussions, strings and even some bird sounds. Instead of Stravinsky's neo-Classical mix of 18th-Century music with early modern, Parkins has created a unique contemporary stew of contrasting acoustic and electronic, string, vocal and percussion, playing both harmonic and dissonant music. The mix of musical modes and instruments sync wonderfully with the dramatic narratives of both attraction and conflict.

James Clotfelter's lighting design and Maggie Baker's costume design add to the success of a work that achieves dramatic impact in a small, studio space, perhaps one of the best theatrical uses of the Kimmel's Innovation Studio that I've seen.

I can only hope that many future audiences will see this memorable Punch beyond this Festival's short run.♦


To read another review of Pulcinella Alive by Jim Rutter, click here.