Following on from yesterday evening’s adventures, let me offer a little advice, in reverse order of importance:

1. Eat something if you’re going to drink anything.

2. See if there are any tickets left for Yvonne Rainer’s RoS Indexical/Spiraling Down. Do it now. Right here.

Now let me explain why.

With RoS Indexical, Rainer uses one of the pivotal moments of recent dance history to fashion an often exhilarating work, capable of provoking both thought and laughter. How she manages this is perhaps most succinctly expressed in the title -  an indexical being an expression whose content varies from context to context. In this case, that expression is an event that has passed into dance lore – the 1913 Paris premiere of Rite of Spring.

RoS opens with four dancers seating themselves at a card table, putting on headphones and, in attempting to sing Stravinsky’s overture, replicating somewhat the effect the dissonance of Stravinsky’s music had almost a century ago. Yet what was (reputedly) for that audience an annoyance, was for those watching last night, a source of interest and even amusement.

Right from the outset, then, mutability of meaning (and thus, reception) is embraced. Throughout, the dancers’ ebullient performance is accompanied – and counterpointed – by the sound score of the BBC’s Riot at the Rite. At one point, the dancers ‘step off-stage’ and behind a large sofa, drinking water, talking and resting. At another, the stage is invaded by spectators planted in the audience, outraged at this ‘travesty’ of a now revered classic. And I’ve gotta say, I loved the touch of two indignant protestors dressed in Roerich’s original costume design…

Rainer’s second work, Spiraling Down, I found to have quite a different tone: Ravel’s Bolero, and a story about running (or a runner) spoken from a lectern by the dancers, or in Rainer’s own recorded voice, constituting the score. The movement of the performers reflected this athletic theme, but it’s movement infused with a giddy, frivolous energy that complements the intricate patterns of motion…and towards the end, it assumes an almost hypnagogic character with arm-whirling hunters in pursuit of prey, spiraling off stage and back again.

Now, before I go any further, I have to go right back to the start of the evening and the show Sunstruck. In a darkened Smock Alley, with nothing more than a circle of chairs, a single light source and two male dancers (Trevor Patrick and Nick Sommerville) dressed in black, Sunstruck created an amazing sense of utterly abstract space, and of cyclical motion within that space. And as the revolution of their bodies conjured with the relativity of distance – now infinitely far, now intimately close – the unhurried rise and fall of light, body and voice wore away the substance of all of it, of all existence. All emptied out, picked clean, worn bare and evoking in this spectator what he imagines is the sensation of happening upon the sun-bleached scattered purity of bones in a desert.

That emptying out of substance sort of brings me in a roundabout way back to RoS Indexical. As one of the founders of  Judson Dance Theater and Grand Union, Rainer was a part of a generation which, in its rejection of the constraints of modern dance and ballet, seems almost a recursion of the avant-garde of the early 20th century. That still earlier generation didn’t just test limits. They tore them down, overleapt them, inverted and subverted them. And because people (as a society, or as a class within a society) held a firm, at times absolutist conviction about the inviolability of an art form’s canon, code, standard or form…well, to see it violated couldn’t help but incite a firestorm of reaction.

What’s peculiar to me is how each iteration of this impulse seems fated to be weaker and less impactful than that which preceded it. I suppose it’s simply a testament to the success of all such movements (like the Dada movement) that it’s hard to imagine any audience being thrown into convulsions of outrage by anything.

And I guess that’s a good thing.

That said, I have to admit that sometimes – not often, but sometimes – I’d love just once to see an audience that cared enough to storm a stage. Unrehearsed.

Which in turn brings me back to my first bit of advice – why you need to eat something if you plan to drink anything…