Just minutes into Karol Armitage’s The Predators’ Ball: Hucksters of the Soul—her new multi-media theater piece presented at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in October—I couldn’t stop thinking of that strange, hothouse creature of the 1940s and 1950s, the dream ballet. These twenty-minute “ballets,” the expression of a character’s dream or fantasy, pinpointed the show’s inner conflict, poeticized it. They worked within the Broadway musical as the show’s high-art cadenza, a wordless tour de force. And they reflected the Freudian analysis that was de rigueur with the literary set, not to mention neurotic Broadway types, in mid-twentieth-century America. Couched late in the show, surrealistically staged and often sophomorically symbolic, dream ballets were little landscapes of the subconscious: an epiphany inside a pirouette. Recreated in the movie versions of Broadway shows, the ballets were opened up, filmed on vast sound stages—ninety parts sky to ten parts people—as if to stress the unrealness of the dream, its atmosphere of gravity without weight. It is on film, in fact, in movies like Oklahoma!, Carousel, An American in Paris, and Singin’ in the Rain, that most of us saw our first dream ballet. It had become a deep pocket in a celluloid strip.

I was thinking of the dream ballet because so much of what now passes for storytelling on the stage is not actual narrative but the twenty-minute dream ballet expanded to fill a two- to three-hour time slot. BAM’s Next Wave Festival specializes in this species of theater—indeed, has been actively breeding it for fourteen years. The big bang, of course, was Einstein on the Beach. The big flop, Endangered Species (the title referring less to the animals forced into postmodern posturing than to the theater as we once knew it.)

In its progressive programming, BAM has actively sought and supported works of performance art or Tanztheater or dreamscape or “opera” (quotation marks part of the word)—pieces unmoored from genre, defying categorization. The spacey, irradiated picturings of Robert Wilson’s stage, the circle of hairy Hell that is an evening with Pina Bausch, the aggressive abstracts of Anna Teresa de Keersmaeker, Martha Clarke’s morphing narratives—it’s a theater of dreamy, free, often too free, association. Even the operas, usually composed by Philip Glass (Einstein on the Beach, the recent Cocteau trilogy) or John Adams (Nixon in China, The Death of Klinghoffer), their loop music scores gliding like a tracking shot without end, spin forth as film from a reel. At BAM, it’s as if the film form of the dream ballet had been airmailed back to the east coast stage, complete with imploded horizon line and a sproketed sense of the void. Weightless gravity was alive and well in New York City.

“I wanted to make a kind of post-MTV production where image and a cinematic style could tell a story with all this kind of dance and movement around it.” That’s Karol Armitage talking about The Predators’ Ball, her post-MTV dreamscape evocation of the rise and fall of leveraged buyout king Michael Milken.

Armitage is a BAM baby. Though her early choreography was presented in New York’s downtown spaces where, doing a post-structuralist turn as Suzanne Farrell, she found her super-sophisticated following, Armitage’s later and worst work premiered at BAM. It was the Eighties, and she was flush with a Guggenheim, a famous fiancé (David Salle, who also had a Guggenheim —how’s that for matching grants?), a commission from Baryshnikov at American Ballet Theatre, hip clothes and a punk hairdo (or punk clothes and a hip hairdo), and— talk about having it all—friendship with the Material Girl herself, Madonna. And she tried to put it all on the stage. As early as The Mollino Room for ABT you could see that the Salle presence in her work had a deadening effect—the sourball backdrops he did for her dances were pure pose and attitude, no movement, no volume. But Salle was cultural capital, and he remained a big influence in her two-act work that premiered at BAM in 1987, The Elizabethan Phrasing of Albert Ayler.

Pointe shoes in film dream ballets, especially when they were in Technicolors other than pink, always smacked of exotic, self-conscious artiness (after all, in the context of the film, they’d come out of nowhere). And that’s how Karol Armitage has always worn her pointes—as if the camera were running. Elizabethan Phrasing was really more of a home movie than a ballet, a séance in the living room, object lessons floating by: here’s our jazz pics, our Fifties furnishings, our flea market/art market classicism, our cultural cachet (or was it cachepots?). In these pages, Jed Perl remarked on the acquisitive nature of the Armitage/Salle sensibility. [1] No wonder they’re attracted to Milken.

The one thing Armitage couldn’t do, and it became more apparent with every premiere, was “extend classicism”—everybody’s misguided mission in post-Balanchine ballet. Souping it up with SoHo symbolism, girding up in black leather, cracking a whip while doing the dévelopés of one of Balanchine’s bachantes, Armitage didn’t look bad (rather, she looked baaaaad, man). Still it was always the Karol Armitage Show, not classical expression evolved but a commentary on where that expression was forced to go kicking. If Suzanne Farrell dancing Balanchine was a story within a story (woman as dream ballet!), Armitage dancing Armitage was lipstick on the mirror—kisses to the congnescenti, and exit lines.

The funny thing about The Predators’ Ball is that it doesn’t even look like Karol Armitage, but like BAM. When young Michael Milken scribbles mathematical formulas on a blackboard, I found myself thinking of Einstein on the Beach. Next came Nixon in China: there’s that keening kind of not-quite-aria-not-quite-recetitive singing, and in the role of Milken, Thomas Jay Ryan looks and sounds compellingly like Nixon. The video screen that was rolled on stage from time to time worked its own déjà vu: Bill T. Jones’s Still/Here was still here. In that post-MTV dance-document, video screens were a shortcut to simile (pick an image, any image) and also a weird opiate: put a screen, no matter how small, onstage and people will strain to watch the screen instead of the live performers.

As for Armitage’s choreography, it has finally succumbed to the Nineties norm, what might be called post-perspective classicism. This is ballet that uses classical steps but without any deep feeling for the interior space of the stage, its invisible but formidable tiers and meta-dimensions. The result is an incessant chorus-line look, rows of synchronized movement with punched up dynamics, or simple kicks and leaps in canon. The only way to get crescendo out of such flat composition is either to throw more dancers on the stage or to fake the effect with speed and stretch, a kind of dancing in extremis. William Forsythe and Peter Martins are the main practitioners of PPC, and Armitage has joined the club. When she introduces a lone girl who bourrées and balances in a white unitard—Idealism! Hope!—it’s so out of context it’s corny. Extending classicism may no longer be Karol’s concern, but when did she go tone deaf?

I notice that I haven’t described the show yet. Score: a mix of fashion show music (i.e., Eurodisco) and poignant symphonic by Georges Delerue. Lighting: Palladium dark, dank, with neon highlights—Wall Street awake at 4:00 A.M. Costumes: predominantly suits and suspenders (great looking in full-corps scenes). Narrative strategy No. 1: scenes built on symbols, such as the section about Milken’s X-shaped conference table (dancers made X signs with their arms and legs), or the almost-exciting sequence of Ron Perelman’s hostile takeover of Revlon, symbolized by supermodels (the scene accumulates well, but has no physical momentum behind the confrontation—it “tells” rather than “shows”). Narrative strategy No. 2: name that echo. Who’s the guy in the silver suit? (Thyades, a Caliban-type sprite); what are those weird chairs with telephones? (Quotrons designed as if by Kandinsky); who does that insinuating voice-over sound like? (HAL, the computer from 2001: A Space Odyssey).

Reviewers noted that although the show didn’t add up to much, it was always lively. Is keeping the audience distracted the same as drawing it in? Considering how fast the show moved, it was surprising how soon into each scene one’s attention flagged—Armitage’s quick cutting wasn’t always MTV-quick enough. The actual ballroom scene, which came near the end of the show and might have been a glittering and meticulous coup de théâtre, was a sloppy letdown. Costumed in high court French decadence, it predictably devolved into a tacky orgy.

At the end of a long voice-over in which HAL details the genius of young Michael Milken, he finally says: “If you could get inside the head of a genius what would you find? You would find nothing at all--because you don’t speak the language.” This is a good summation of The Predators’ Ball. Inside its lightboard of flashes, gimmicks, impressions, suggestions, projections, and tableaux, there is finally “nothing at all.” That nothing is not what’s missing from Milken, it’s about Armitage: she doesn’t have the language. In the days when she was trying to speak “in ballet,” at least she knew she was working with syntax, diction, psychosexual history. There was the potential for sustained expression. Using MTV as a model for narrative technique, however, is just a quick and dirty grab at her subject.

But then, maybe Armitage doesn’t care about Milken as much as she says she does, and she set out to make junk theater, the performance version of junk bonds. Or maybe she hadn’t noticed that Robert Wilson’s best works have momentous scores to help them cohere, that Pina Bausch brings a spectacular focus to her weary intellectual striptease. The only zing of concentration in The Predators’ Ball came from a black rapper who appeared in the piece. The collected energy he brought to the stage was like a wake-up call—he had a language. A narrow, low-ceilinged language, yes, but in this setting its simple authority and dexterity were greater than all the angles Armitage played. Post-atomic, post-video, post-CD-ROM-and- Internet, post-text, post … next? At BAM the post-narrative world is more weightless than ever.

Notes
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See “From September to December,” by Jed Perl, in The New Criterion (February 1988). Go back to the text.