All Kylián: Female Role in “Tar and Feathers”
by Holly Moniz
A petite woman stands behind an iceberg of
bubble wrap knock-kneed and hunched over as she stares down the audience with
her arms hanging limply by her sides, a lion’s roar erupting from her gaping
mouth. Another woman stands with each of her feet atop a man’s back, wearing
them like shoes as they crawl in front of a piano resting on ten-foot-tall
stilts. A third woman, for however brief the moment lasts, lifts her male
partner an inch off the floor as though she is about to perform a deadlift with
a barbell while pianist Tomoko Mukaiyama improvises live.
Choreographer Jiří
Kylián’s
piece “Tar and Feathers,” the second of three contemporary ballet pieces the
Boston Ballet danced during the All Kylián performance at the Boston Opera
House, defies the expectations of stereotypical gender roles in a traditional dance
performance. Originally choreographed and performed in 2006, the piece
highlights female strength and aggression in a cast of six consisting of three women
and three men.
The dance opens with the image of the first above-mentioned
dancer standing and growling, a moment evoking such ferocity that the audience
seemed to collectively retract in their seats as they first heard the loud and
gruesome roar on opening night. Quickly thereafter, two women begin to partner
with one man. At one point as the three
dance together, the man seems to hang weightlessly on the two women as the
women support one another, their limbs appearing tangled together.
In this pose, the man relies entirely on the strength of the
female dancers to support his weight, contrary to most partnering in other
dance performances. It seems that in every other traditional ballet, a woman
relies on the man to lift her to create space and length as she leaps because
women’s anatomy and musculature prevents them from jumping as high and suspending
as long as men. However, this single pose destroys the notion that a female
dancer cannot be as strong as her male partner, as the two women’s muscles in
their arms, backs, and necks appear to nearly bulge out of their skin.
As the piece continues on, another
pair of dancers takes the stage and begins a pas de deux. In the middle of
their partnering, the man reaches to lift the woman into a straddle split, but as
her feet leave the ground, she abruptly resists maintaining the beautiful pose,
bending her legs, loosening the tension in her pointed feet, opening her mouth
wider than I believed humanly possible as the lion’s roar is once again played.
The number of these displays of aggression and animalistic imagery increase as
the dance marches onward.
At the beginning of the end of the piece, though, the aggression
and tension seems to reach its breaking point. During the final minute or two,
dancer Kathleen Breen Combes performs a stunning solo in which she has appeared
to lose her mind, her body cutting and jutting through the wide empty space
around her. Meanwhile the remaining dancers run out in a group standing on the
right side of the stage, wearing identical bubble wrap tutus, black wigs, and
masks with bright red lips, and dance in unison to Kylián’s voice reciting Samuel
Beckett’s poem “What is the Word.”
The message of this visual on stage is clear: Kylián mocks
the dance world’s past representation of the weak ballerina submissively
following the steps of a dance all together. His soloist, Ms. Combes in this
performance, instead represents the real female dancer, a strong animal and a
powerhouse filled with the need to express herself through movement.
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