A Mystical Evening

This year’s Biennale Danza Venezia Silver Lion award went to Zurich-based choreographer Trajal Harrell. A house director at the Schauspielhaus Zurich, and the founding director of the Schauspielhaus Zurich Dance Ensemble, he brought the Ensemble to FringeArts Festival for the Philadelphia premiere of his 2022 “The Köln Concert” last month.

Harrell’s prodigious body of work reaches back two decades. I first encountered it with his “Antigone Sr./Twenty Looks or Paris is Burning at the Judson Church (L)” and again with “Caen Amour,” which premiered at Festival Avignon 2016. They headlined the Philadelphia Fringe Festivals in 2014 and 2018, as was “The Köln Concert” this year.

Performance

Trajal Harrell: “The Köln Concert” with Zurich Dance Ensemble

Place

FringeArts, Philadelphia, PA, September 28-29, 2024

Words

Merilyn Jackson

Front: Trajal Harrell. Back: Ondrej Vidlar, Titilayo Adebayo, Nodan Bojas Mair, Songhay Toldon, Maria Ferreira Silva in “The Köln Concert” by Trajal Harrell. Photograph by Reto Schmid

Having seen the earlier eclectic, and even iconoclastic shows as I did, many Harrell fans packed the FringeArts Theater. But I don’t think we were expecting to be gripped to the point of tears, as the post-show talkback led by Brenda Dixon Gottschild revealed so many of us were.

Still, it revolved around voguing, which we’d seen before as queer Black antidote to the Judson Church white aesthetic, and the fashion-contrarian costumes by Harrell and the dancers. But nothing prepared us for how deeply the opening Joni Mitchell songs, and then long sections of Keith Jarrett’s 1975 Köln Concert, would affect us. Asked to make a work where the dancers could socially distance during Covid, Harrell became subsumed with Jarrett’s album. It was completely improvised on a rainy midnight concert at the Köln Opera House on a broken piano, the defects of which Jarrett reluctantly decided to work around. To today, it is the best-selling jazz piano concert album. Harrell and his collaborators brilliantly channeled Jarrett’s lonely interiority and determination to go on.

The Mitchell recording of 1971’s Blue album also became one of the best-selling folk/rock albums of all time. Its nostalgic quality took me back to the day, and Mitchell’s piano underpinnings uncannily heralded the unguarded quality of “The Köln Concert.” Both albums filled the intimate theater with the sense of isolation left by the pandemic. But that isolation gave many of us the space for deep attention—an opportunity to discover new meaning in music, books, films. Answering one question right away: How and why would you pair Mitchell and Jarrett?

Ondrej Vidlar, Maria Ferreira Silva, Nodan Bojas Mair, Songhay Toldon in “The Köln Concert” by Trajal Harrell. Photograph by Reto Schmid

Clocking into the whorl of emotional states we’ve all been experiencing in this decade, the Jarrett concert sounded as deep and relevant as today. The loneliness of the pandemic, the trajectory of global politics as fascist threat to personal freedoms, and climate change, all contribute to our communal anxiety. The musical frisson emoted by Jarrett’s innermost and instinctual playing embraced, contradicted, and even soothed these anxieties allowing us to confront them and heal from the damages we’ve suffered.

Individually, the mature artists who make up the Zurich Dance Ensemble embodied these experiences, mystically creating a spectrum of philosophical dreamscapes. Harrell begins as sentinel, mom, or even school marm, standing downstage left as audience clambered into their seats. He wears black slacks, a white shirt, with a flowered satin dress draped around his neck. Both trans and trance. His eyes roam over each person entering but any sternness suggested is belied by his bare feet and placid stance. Once everyone settles, he gives a nod to the ushers and gets down to business, pulling a ribbon from his pocket and tying it around his waist, the dress turned into apron. Is he going to cook for us? Clean our houses? No. He’s going to take us to places we didn’t know we needed to go.

Pretty soon, Mitchell is singing “My Old Man,” and the line Dancer in the Dark crystallizes what’s at the heart of this work. Harrell spreads his expressive fingers, his hand sliding up his other arm as he writhes in a tortuous, Butoh-inflected opening solo.

With similarly profound vulnerability, each dancer in turn took us to other places of their own. I had the feeling the work was spinning a cocoon around us all, and am unable to think about this dance linearly, so I just jump in where moments come to me.

Thibault Lac, Titilayo Adebajo in “The Köln Concert” by Trajal Harrell. Photograph by Reto Schmid

Thibault Lac, in an oversized, mangy fur coat, and New Kyd, in an orange tee, each sit on one of the eight piano benches lined up, throwing arms and legs upwards. Harrell and the other cast, each perched on their own bench become animated. Luc, et al, reappear in black, draped toga-like around his tall body, imposing but distant, as if lost in thought. Kyd, who is currently basing and working in New York, returns with her hair down to dance in solo trance, flinging her braids in the air, leaving a trace or an aura of resentment or defiance in the air. Ondrej Vidlar, tamping down his outrageous titillation from Antigone Sr just a tad, vamps around, cheekily lifting his dress to show some cheek as he finishes his turn, his chin slightly over his shoulder suggesting “You can kiss my ass.”

Paris-based Perle Palombe slithered before us, her breasts nearly escaping the chasm of her dress, her ever so barely twinkling eyes fixed on the audience, a barely perceptible smile at the corners of her mouth. The sweet-faced Songhay Toldon almost looks shy, but with his hair unleashed, he’s tornadic, powerfully spinning en l’air, leaving us breathless. All the while each dancer sits placidly on the piano benches, arms crossed at the wrists in their laps, shifting slightly as one leaves or another enters, or rises or lowers to dance. Throughout, the dancers step on demi-pointe, as if they are house-dancing in stilettos.

Berlin-based Rob Fordeyn, who is subbing for another that day but has been working with Harrell at least since I first saw him in 2014, makes a slight move with his hand, his eyelids slowly lift, his lips part as he rises to solo. He astonishes, both with his humility and assurance as he weaves through the rest of the cast with an utter sense of dignity. He dipped and swayed among them like a bird lazily skimming between lily pads on the surface of a lake.

Harrell gathers them all in a circle of trust. Walking slowly, they froze in sculptural poses like figures on a Grecian urn. Each breaks out into a little solo downstage before they line up for a deeply devout bow while a peaceful hush descends on the space. Applause is respectful, full of gratitude. Clearly, many of us are tearful as this enigmatic work has touched us to our core.

Jarrett, by the way, was born a little north of Philly in Allentown, PA and now lives across the Delaware River in northern New Jersey, unable to play due to two strokes he had in 2018 from which he’s only partially recovered. This draped an even more poignant shadow over the Harrell concert. I hope Jarrett knows about how this dance takes his playing to yet another dimension.

Lastly, accolades must go to the Philadelphia Fringe Festival founder and main curator, Nick Stuccio. A former principal with the then Pennsylvania Ballet, Stuccio founded the festival in 1996 along with conceptual choreographer, Eric Schoefer. While Schoefer left the festival long ago, Stuccio has traveled the world unfailingly finding dozens, if not hundreds of superb artists like Harrell as well as giving local artists like Nicole Canuso, Megan Bridge and Pig Iron Theater a world stage. Stuccio leaves the festival this year, remaining for a while as Emeritus Artistic Director. But his imprint on the City of Philadelphia and the numerous gifts he’s given to our audiences, can never be overvalued.

Merilyn Jackson

Merilyn Jackson has written on dance for the Philadelphia Inquirer since 1996 and writes on dance, theater, food, travel and Eastern European culture and Latin American fiction for publications including the New York Times, the Warsaw Voice, the Arizona Republic, Phoenix New Times, MIT’s Technology Review, Arizona Highways, Dance Magazine, Pointe and Dance Teacher, and Broad Street Review. She also writes for tanz magazin and Ballet Review. She was awarded an NEA Critics Fellowship in 2005 to Duke University and a Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Fellowship for her novel-in-progress, Solitary Host.

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