Late Style
Post #5, 20 April 2022: Artie Shaw, Pina Bausch, Natalia Sats, Burl Ives, Merce Cunningham
Artie Shaw. Jazz Musician, Composer, Band Leader. Artie Shaw was in his mid-seventies when he arrived in Ottawa leading a youthful jazz orchestra. Benny Goodman’s great rival had forsaken the clarinet long ago in the waning of the big band era, but he led the ensemble briskly through two fast-paced swing sets. I knew something of this maverick star of the 1930s and 1940s—briefly the husband of Ava Gardner, jazz visionary, author, target of McCarthyism—so it was delightful to chat backstage: a tall man of firm opinion and a direct manner of expression. At the top of the show the musicians struck up his theme-song ‘Nightmare’ with its creepy three-note chromatic rise-and-fall. Just then a bat fluttered out of the ceiling to dart here and there over the audience. Indeed, these creatures did stray in very occasionally through the National Arts Centre’s ventilation ducts, yet everyone agreed this little fellow had appeared uncannily on cue. (January 2009, Ottawa.)
Pina Bausch. Choreographer. Pina Bausch entered my backstage office, mild, bemused, attentive, asking to use the phone. She perched on the edge of the desk while I dialled in the government’s overseas phone code to Germany. During these Ottawa residencies of the Tanztheater Wuppertal I would become immersed in their agonistic aesthetic that was at once compelling and yet beyond my ken.
Hanging up from her low-key conversation, she lingered for a few minutes to chat, scanning the titles of my university library books lining the shelves. She mentioned Kontacthov’s coin-operated children’s rocking horse, a miniature white stallion on a battered red and green base. It was undulating beneath the adult female dancer rather too urgently. Electricians earnestly adjusted the transformer. (11 July 2008, Ottawa.)
...Not long into the film Pina—surely itself a masterpiece of ‘late style’—completed by Wim Wenders despite Bausch’s sudden passing just before the shoot, she explains that dance picks up where language reaches the point of inexpressibility. Having in a sense ‘lived with’ three of the four pieces Wenders draws from, Le sacre du printemps, Café Muller, Kontacthof and Vollmond, I can attest to her choreography’s propensity to brush up against the ineffable, while staying grounded in the German situation.
In fact, German cultural exports populated the NAC’s calendar in the 1980s almost as precursors to unification. I hunched alone in the dark for fifteen straight hours pre-screening Fassbinder’s Berlin Alexanderplatz; fascinated but gutted by its harshness. Once, standing behind the railing at the back of the darkened hall beside Reinhild Hoffmann, Director of the Tanztheater Bremen, she smiled at me while half the audience filed out midway through her provocative Callas. They had taken offense to half-naked male dancers encircling the diva, loudly cracking their bull-whips on the stage floor. Although disconcerting in the moment, Hoffmann’s undisguised delight at scandalizing Ottawa was substantiated by the subsequent doubling of our dance subscriptions. (4 February 2012, Ottawa.)
Natalia Sats, Theatre Director. The receptionist stationed in the National Arts Centre’s main foyer seems nonplussed forwarding me an incoming call; it’s from the Russian Embassy, it’s 1986. A heavily-accented male voice announces the imminent visit of a Soviet Theatre luminary. I’m to drop what I’m doing and await her limousine.
I don’t rebuff his directive. Surely, this is a fortuitous opportunity? I’m thinking of my essay of two years ago on “Soviet Theatre and Socialist Realism.” Struggling to recall its subject matter I position myself inside the entrance of our bunker-beside-the-Rideau, a lone sentry scanning for the Russians.
He’s first out of the car, a man-without-qualities of medium height in a grey coat striding towards me even as an imposing woman in white fur and matching hat heaves herself free of the black embassy sedan.
“Natalia Sats, from Moscow,” he nods towards the tall figure beside him. “You showink her theatre.”
With that, Madame Sats, an octogenarian of erect bearing, herself a furred human fortress, leads us into Hamilton Southam’s Cold War bastion of high culture. Removing neither coat nor hat, she advances rapidly through its labyrinthine hexagons, from Opera House to Theatre to Studio, through the carpentry, properties, costume workshops and rehearsal halls. Occasionally the embassy man translates.
“She’s not impressed,” he whispers.
Sats? Sats? Suddenly I do remember mentioning her in my Soviet Theatre essay, but the detail eludes me. Everything is moving swiftly. Standing in the pass door next to the opera stage, nearing the end of our tour, she fixes me directly with perfect French.
“You don’t have a children’s theatre?”
I describe the NAC’s youth programs but it’s clear she’s lost interest. We make our way back up to the foyer and she disappears into the limousine without further exchange. It is only as their car descends the ramp running along the canal that I remember, and lament what I could have asked her: “tell me about the Meyerholds?”
I recall that Sats had taken over Moscow’s children’s theatre after the avantgarde director Joseph Meyerhold was arrested and executed; his wife Zinaida Reich was stabbed to death in their apartment. That was during Stalin’s purges. Had Sats not replaced Reich at the children’s theatre and then ruled for decades?
Revisiting my essay, I read:
The youth theatre, or the “Tiuz” in the terminology of the Twelfth Party Congress of 1923 was to be used for “the mass propagation of ideas in the struggle for Communism…. Under… Natalia Sats, the “Tiuz” became an important part of Soviet education.
Alas, I’d encountered an arch-villain of Cold War theatre history and said absolutely nothing. (Ottawa, December 1986.)
...It turns out that Natalia Sats’s story was not at all as I’d understood it. For one thing, she’d had her own run-ins with Soviet authority, though not at first. Aided by her composer father’s connection to Tolstoy, she’d vaulted to the national stage at fifteen, precocious pioneer of Soviet youth theatre. Her affair with doomed General Tukhachevsky placed her under suspicion, and by the time of Meyerhold’s arrest in 1939 she was imprisoned. No, she hadn’t displaced Zinaida Reich—leading actress of Meyerhold’s own company—who’d never devoted herself to children’s theatre.
Yet, though Reich was murdered for satirizing Stalin’s tastes in drama, Sats was rehabilitated, eventually receiving the Lenin Prize. Collaborating with Prokofiev on Peter and the Wolf, she’d led the Moscow Musical Theatre for Children well into her eighties. (That Soviet Brutalist building, named after her, is not so dissimilar to the NAC.)
Knowing more, perhaps I’d have cited her play that I’d seen as a child.
“Boys like me are not afraid of wolves,” says Peter, stoutly.
Might the grand dame have smiled at me just once, knowing that her “tiuz” had reached far-away Canada? (Edinburgh, April 2019.)
Burl Ives. Singer, Actor: The Little White Duck played repeatedly in my early childhood on the mono hi-fi that Dad built from a Radio Shack kit. Ives’s reedy voice will forever be distinctive. He arrived with his wife Dorothy for a solo concert in the Opera house. At first protective, soon she was exchanging cordially with us. Burl sat beside her, hands folded on his tummy. He was by then elderly, rotund, suffering shortness of breath. Once onstage he mesmerized the rapt audience scattered in the half-empty house. I didn’t know then how he had been bullied by McCarthy’s HUAC committee in the 1950s. Capitulating to save his career meant forever alienating close associates Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger. One sensed melancholy in the tremulous melisma that underscored his renditions of the old folk ballads. (January 2009, Ottawa.)
Merce Cunningham. Choreographer, Dancer. The Merce Cunningham Dance Company came up to Ottawa from New York. Already elderly for a dancer, Merce nonetheless remained active for many further years, even if his performance had less left in the legs and concentrated its expression in the arms and torso. It was an enjoyable residency with an energetic company of dancers. Always congenial, he still encourages me daily in semaphore, his face multiplied on TV screens, from the framed poster he once dedicated to me in a youthful cursive hand. (January 2009, Ottawa.)