The Rite… it LEFT Something to be Desired

            See what I did there? Since Rite sounds like the direction right, and left is the opposite… never mind.On March 17, 2015 I saw The Rite performed by SITI Company with Bill T. Jones Dance Company. It was quite the experience… just not the Rite one for me.

I am hilarious.

Anyway, I’ll start with the good. The dance is spectacular, with the ability of the dancers obviously pushed to their limits. The amount of sweat falling off of the dancers faces could have filled an Olympic swimming pool. I guess I won’t limit it to the dancing, all of the movement was incredibly well done. There was one bit where a person was walking on chairs being placed in front of her, when the people holding the chairs lifted them off the ground. As if this wasn’t enough, they turned the chairs sideways, so the person walking on them was walking on a horizontal plane being supported by two people holding her. That is just one example of the extraordinary movement to be found in this piece. As well, the dialog is well said, with good timing as well as good lines. Some lines delve into the nature of humanity, asking the audience why we perceive time as only moving in one direction. It is a very thought provoking experience, and in that aspect it would gain enough of my saliva to run its plumbing for weeks. However, for me there is one major downside.

There is little or no plot. There is nothing to hold the whole thing together, giving the lines little to no reason to be there. The people are just dancing, the actors are just speaking. There are hints to what it may be about, mostly coming from one character. As soon as this character appeared, she broke the fourth wall. Throughout the play she asked the dancers and actors questions of if they knew about the audience, if they wanted to change anything about their current state. These sections hint that the play may be a commentary on acting and theatre, showing the humanity and realization that comes with acting in a play. However, those sections are diluted with a plot that feels crowbarred in. Throughout the play, there is a solder character. He has the first monologue in the play, and some events in the play are catered to him. However, he is never explained, he is just there and has lines. He has problems sure, and it is interesting. I just never understood what he was doing for the play. If they justified his existence somewhere it would have made sense and I would have been completely fine with it. However, even the play addresses the confusion over what its about. The lady that broke the fourth wall had an entire section where she tried to explain what the play was about. Eventually she settled on “It’s about sex. A primal human instinct to be satisfied.” However I think the play had very little to do with that.

I guess the deciding factor of this is whether you like a plot in a play. If you want to see dancing there is certainly a lot of that and it is amazing. However there is no plot.  Think of it like this: My opinion is in a play, the plot is glue to hold all of the movement and dialog up. You can have the finest materials to build a house, perfectly sanded and painted wood, but it won’t stay up if there is no cement to keep it together. So as a play it’s a not that great. If it had been labeled as a dancing experience with dialog instead of a play then I would be much better towards it.

Rating: Sony getting hacked again and again. It’s a good company and they do a lot of hard work, they just get criticized for having bad marketing and PR.

Great as a Dance Performance, Confusing as a Play by Ryan LaPointe

On Tuesday, March 17, we saw A Rite, performed at the '62 Center for Theatre and Dance, located on Williams College campus in Williamstown, Massachusetts.  A Rite is the product of seamless collaboration between Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company and SITI Company.  It is an exploration of Igor Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring, which was incredibly controversial in its time, causing a riot in the audience on opening night.

Because A Rite was performed by a combination of a theatre company and a dance company, I was initially unsure where it would fall on the spectrum between a theatre performance and a dance performance.  I discovered that it leaned heavily towards a dance performance.  While there were several monologues and a couple of dialogues throughout the piece, the main focus was on the dance numbers.

I was impressed and entertained by the many dance numbers, but the story being conveyed by the dances was completely lost on me.  At one point in the performance, I recognized that the red-haired girl was being sacrificed, but I was only able to gather this because I had prior knowledge that someone was supposed to be sacrificed.  That was the only point during the performance when I had any idea what was going on in the story being told.

There were some numbers in the performance when music was produced solely with vocal noises made by the dancers.  To be clear, they were not singing; the variety of noises they made would not sound melodious per se.  However, combining these noises and adding a rhythm resulted in very interesting and good music.

During the few dialogues that the show contained, the cast sat on chairs downstage in a row facing the audience.  In these dialogues, they would often break the fourth wall—and sometimes mock the audience—with phrases like, “It's hard to listen.  Listening is hard,” “You don't care about the audience,” and, “Well, this is my job, and I need a paycheck.”  I found these dialogues to be the most humorous part of the performance.

All considered, I would recommend this performance of A Rite, albeit I was completely unable to follow the plot of the show.  I highly enjoyed the excellent dances, and I was amused by the often comedic monologues and dialogues throughout the show.  The content of the performance is more than capable of standing on its own, without an understanding of plot or deeper meaning.

What? By: Emily Pisacreta

           I’m going to be completely honest, I watched the entire 80 minutes of A Rite, and I still have no idea what happened. But, if I’m being completely honest, I was okay with that. When the Bill T. Jones/ Arnie Zane Dance Company and SITI Company took the stage at Williams College on March 17^th, 2015, I knew I was in for a night of theater that I have never experienced before. The two groups came together to examine the music, dance and consequential riot that ensued after Igor Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring was first performed in Paris in 1913.

Now, I could try to describe the plot to you, but I truly have no idea what the plot was. In simplest terms, the dancers danced to the music originally from Rite of Spring, with added elements of the actors giving monologues as different characters loosely related to Rite of Spring. Ellen Lauren, for example, was an actress from SITI Company, she portrayed a character almost like a professor; donned in a blue polka dot dress, she was there to help us understand the music and the riot. Her monologues, which occurred in between periods of dancing, explained the construction of the music, and the audience reactions in a very high pitched, piercing voice. Meanwhile, Steven Duff Webber wore a suit, and with a powerful presence reminded us of the passage of time. His monologue really got to me, to the point where I was thinking about it two days later, trying to really understand it. He taught us that, if you are moving, and someone is standing still, the two of you will have perceptions of “now” that are slightly different. He did this to put into perspective how this event that happened 100 years ago is still important to us today, as time is not moving in one direction, it is all around us. In these moments, the actors really showed every characteristic of their roles, which is what make their acting so strong and engaging. I was interested in the monologues and the characters presented, although half the time I had no idea what they were even talking about, and what it had to do with the piece I was watching. I just liked listening to the stories, and watching these actors, who were so committed to everything they were doing. I was especially amazed at how into the dancing the actors got. Of course professional dancers did the bulk of the dancing, but the actors were right there with them, moving and sweating profusely. Whether it was dancing or acting, the actors dove into everything they were doing and really did an amazing job portraying their characters.

The set was effortlessly beautiful as well. It was a simple black stage with only white lights to illuminate it. The curtain in the background moved every once in a while to change the mood of the scene. For example, in the last scene, a soldier-like character portrayed by Will Bond ran back and forth behind a curtain that was cut into strips that hung across the upstage area. It made the scene more mysterious and a little bit darker than it already was, if that is possible. It added to the desperation I felt while watching him run back and forth. The only props used in the entire performance were stools that the performers sat on, danced with, and threw around, and a piano that was rolled onto the stage to be played and sat on. The set was simple and, for a piece like this, it needed to be. The dancing and acting on stage was extremely complex and difficult to understand. If there had been a bunch of props or complicated technical elements, we would have been even more confused than we already were. With the simple set, the focus was on the performance and trying to understand the piece.

Finally, the dancing. I absolutely loved the dancing. What I loved about the dancing was that I could tell that all of the dancers on stage were miraculously well trained. They went into splits and did double pirouettes when the choreography called for it, but these dancers knew that that they were not there to show us how amazingly technical they were. The choreography was very primitive, with lots of second positions, flexed feet, jumps and moves that were not supposed to be pretty. So many times dancers get caught in trying to make their work look good, but the dancers in this piece knew that this was not what this piece was about. This piece was about riots and sacrifice and instincts, and nothing about that is pretty. My absolute favorite piece of dance was a sequence of lifts that the company repeated a few times. There were some lifts that involved the whole group, where someone would be dragged across the stage. Others where two people would engage in more traditional girl and guy lifts that you might see in a more traditional dance setting. Each and every lift and move in the sequence was seamless, while still being hard-hitting, primitive and exciting to watch. For me, the dancing was absolutely the highlight of the show. And, again being completely honest, I went home and watched far too many YouTube videos of the Bill T. Jones/ Arine Zane Dance Company’s performances. I would go back and watch A Rite again just to watch the choreography, which was so new and out of the box, that I could watch it a million times and find something new that I loved each time .

This piece. I could never describe it as anything but really, really weird. But sometimes weird, out there, incomprehensible work is the most fun to watch. While I did not come out of the piece with any idea of what the plot was, I came out curious and was still thinking about the piece the next morning. This piece was definitely hard at times when things got really weird and all I could do was try and figure out what the heck they were doing. But overall, I still want to go back and watch it over and over until I can understand every little nuance and every intention behind it. This piece is definitely difficult at some points, so if you looking for a fun, easy night of theater or do not like being confused, this is not the piece for you. But if you are looking for a piece that you will be thinking about for the next six months, and still never totally understand, then A Rite is the piece for you.