DANCE REVIEW: Barak Marshall's MONGER at Jacob's Pillow
Dance
Review by Seth Rogovoy
(BECKET, Mass., July 8, 2010) –
Barak Marshall’s darkly entertaining, hour-long dance-theater piece, MONGER, hones in on the “downstairs” part of the “upstairs/downstairs” dichotomy and never lets go. If anything, it digs even deeper, physically and emotionally, than some of his stated influences, which include Robert Altman’s film, Gosford Park, and Jean Genet’s The Maids. Marshall cloaks his vignettes of those who labor in obscurity downstairs for the abusive, never-seen but omnipresent Mrs. Margaret, in Beckettian clothes, and hell, it turns out, is a job working for Mrs. Margaret, to paraphrase Jean-Paul Sartre.
In Marshall’s hands, and in the hands, arms, legs, faces, and other body parts of his ten Israeli dancers, that hell finds its outlet in scenes of black humor, violent slapstick, vaudevillian comedy, and dancing that combines folk elements, hip-hop, and precise, mechanistic movements that are the basis of Marshall’s unique vocabulary – a vocabulary uniquely suited to Marshall’s exploration of his theme.
Those who toil for Mrs. Margaret – five men and five women – do so in bleak anonymity and with the threat of ultimate violence always over their head. The mere ring of the bell demanding service – a cup of coffee, or many cups of coffee, or other unstated services – or signaling a complaint, over time becomes a harbinger of the grim reaper, symbolically, if not literally, at the hands of fellow servants.
Marshall places the servants in a variety of scenarios danced to an eclectic soundtrack of music ranging from the folk to the Baroque. Powerful contemporary Gypsy music by Taraf de Haidouk spurs the corps on to a fierce, athletic, almost industrial-like dance, symbolizing the harsh toil and conditions under which the servants labor for Mrs. Margaret. Powerful, contemporary, and exciting, the limb extensions and military-style salutes were as much about the limits of movement, rarely fluid and mostly punctuated by staccato-like pauses.
After such a segment, we find two men out of Samuel Beckett sitting next to each other and magically forming a third person – a woman, perhaps an effigy of Mrs. Margaret – between them. Her coy come-ons are rejected as the female dancers pass by behind the men in muted light, spectral presences showing us only their backs, legs and arms, as if they can’t be bothered with such nonsense.
The sounds of contemporary Israeli group Balkan Beat Box that, as the name implies, combine traditional folk music of the Balkans with modern rhythms, effected another ersatz folk dance that incorporated hip-hop and comedy, underlined by the use of vintage English-language radio commercials for Hebrew National cold cuts and Manischewitz matzos.
In another scene, through the clever use of quick-change costumes, the entire story of a working-class woman’s life was told in about two minutes, merely through poses and the application of different dresses and other clothing accessories. It wasn’t a pretty life, and one spent entirely at the beck and call of a master until the only release possible, which was death.
Marshall, who shares costume design duties with Maor Zabar, music design duties with Giori Politi, and who leave sthe lighting design to Jacov Beressy, makes the most use of all of these elements, so that lighting and dress, as well as occasional spoken word vignettes, tell the story as much as movement. At one point, the five women are all seated in a row, outfitted in flouncy black dresses and black headbands with puffy white shoulder sleeves, so that when the lights shone on them, all that you really saw was their faces and arms, which exposed ever-briefly the antics of the upstairs ladies, who are ever so vile that they hit and spit on each other.
Likewise, two men shout at each other in what sounds like an ersatz Gypsy language, and another two men engage in a slapping match right out of the Three Stooges.
This incessant darkness vs. light, comedy vs. tragedy, conformity vs. individuality, made for some heavy going over the course of the hour, as brutality piled upon brutality with some tedium and little relief, until finally the workers seemed on the verge of uniting to overthrow Mrs. Margaret. “We cure you Whore of Babylon!” shouted one man, inspiring the corps to another group dance of folk/hip-hop frenzy. Alas, when it was over, they all returned to their stations, donning themselves in their black coats and awaiting the dimming of their lights. In the end, they were no match for the fear-mongering, war-mongering Mrs. Margaret.
Seth Rogovoy is Berkshire Living’s award-winning critic-at-large and editor-in-chief.
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