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The directions for Terry Riley’s groundbreaking 1964 composition “In C” are quite simple. The one-page note consists of 53 short musical motifs that the musicians play in sequence. But there is a constant shift of alignment and displacement as each musician chooses how many times to repeat each figure before moving on to the next. This, combined with the relentless, metronomic tick-tock of a C note, creates a tension between staying in place and moving forward. It’s the sound of collective decision making, the cohesive kind, the beehive that’s louder than rowdy town hall meetings.
Translating all this into dance, as German choreographer Sasha Waltz does, is quite simple. For “In C,” which Sasha Waltz & Guests brought to the Brooklyn Academy of Music on Thursday, Waltz designed 53 dance phrases to match each of Riley’s motifs and gave similar discretion to 14 of his dancers. For nearly an hour, the Bang on a Can All-Stars deftly play Riley’s composition on one side of the stage, while the dancers do the equivalent all over.
The added dimension is not just visual. It is spatial in the varying distribution of bodies, sometimes draped on wings, with dancers dancing between musicians. The individual and collective play of the music is reproduced, as the dancers constantly change their allegiance, briefly moving into synchronicity with each other in groupings ranging from couples to the entire ensemble. You can see decisions come true. In a group repeating a sentence together, a dancer freezes; when the others return to the freezing point, it rejoins them. But the overall look is a whirlpool of action painting.
It is also on the cheerful side of serenity. Olaf Danilsen’s lighting illuminates the stage and floor in sherbet or sherbet tones. These changing colors are stronger than the slight harmonic movement in Riley’s note, but they don’t push the production out of the key of C.
Dance phrases also hover in a slightly loose zone. There’s a bit of contrasting jolting or swaying to register the metronome pulse, but a sentence pattern is dominant, flexing elastically in the middle, and closing in a clipped fashion, like when a fist is reached to pull down the cord of a train whistle. There’s enough variety – ground work, minimal physical contact – but little on its own stands out. The action is absorbent and easy to set all at once.
At its best, dance spatializes a suspension or texture of time. At every moment, repeating a sentence, some dancers show where we are, while those who are the first to adopt the next sentence give an idea of the future. The memory here overlaps, but only of short duration. The sequence of repetitive sentences moves in one direction, and very few of these sentences are remembered.
A spectator’s memory of course encompasses more than just this dance. I thought of Trisha Brown. In an adaptation by the Candoco Dance Company, “Set and Reset” was recently performed on the Brooklyn Academy stage.. With its relaxed flow and abrupt sequencing, Waltz’s “In C” is clearly influenced by “Set and Reset”, as the ping in Laurie Anderson’s note for that dance comes off the pulse of Riley’s “In C”. But to remember “Set and Reset” is to remember how individual and group play can be so much more exciting with slack and rigor.
In a recent interview, Waltz explained the practical ways in which “In C” is a pandemic-appropriate dance. Originally, dancers could learn the phrases individually, and now, if someone tests positive, a performance doesn’t have to be cancelled.
But there is also something about dance in its structure and tone that fits the last stages of pandemic life among the lucky ones: the way it changes as the C note continues to ring, the feeling that time is pushing forward even if it stays still, there is a need for cheerful colors. For better and for worse, it’s the dance of the moment.
Sasha Waltz and Guests
Saturday at the Brooklyn Academy of Music; bam.org.
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