Quiet Eroticism

Martha Clarke’s ‘Vienna: Lusthaus (revisited)’ is a visual meditation on decadence, combining dance, music and drama. The production begins a national tour at McCarter Theatre in Princeton Jan. 18-19.

By: Matt Smith

"Above,
Above, from left: Elzbieta Czyzewska, Julia Wilkins, Jimena Paz, Paola Styron, Denis O’Hare, Vivienne Benesch and Erica Berg in the New York Theatre Workshop production of Vienna: Lusthaus (revisited) last spring. Below: Mr. O’Hare and Paola Styron.
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   When it comes to her work, choreographer-director Martha Clarke can’t keep from tinkering — often months or sometimes years after the fact.
   Take Vienna: Lusthaus, for example. Ms. Clarke revived her Obie-winning 1986 theater-dance creation in New York last spring and is taking it on a four-city tour that kicks off at McCarter Theatre in Princeton Jan. 18-19.
   "It’s one of my favorites," she says, "and I can’t leave them alone. It’s like somebody in their own living room, perpetually changing a painting."
   The revisited version of her impressionistic dreamscape of dance, music and drama, set in a decadent, pre-World War I Vienna, features 30 or so loosely connected scenes. But, says Ms. Clarke in a phone interview from her New York apartment a week and a half prior to the first performance, that could change before opening night.
   "About a third to 40 percent of the show is new material," she says. "It’s re-tailored, slightly changing its intention. And right now it’s 34 vignettes, but by the end of the week it could be 31 or 35. But it’s pretty much intact, and seems to be working."
   Vienna: Lusthaus (revisited) has a cast of 16 — seven dancers, four actors and a five-musician roving chamber ensemble — interwoven to create a progressively dark, foreboding Vienna.
   "It goes from light-hearted to darker, spring to winter," Ms. Clarke says. "The challenge was how to put these disparate pieces together. You have pretty, waltzing Vienna and the birth of the Nazis.
   "At the end of the piece there’s a great drum roll, and it feels like the impending chaos," she adds. "When it’s over — if it’s worked for you — there’s a kind of darkness. You don’t come out laughing — unless you’re perverse."
   Vienna: Lusthaus was actually intended as a meditation on John Hersey’s book Hiroshima, but Ms. Clarke and composer Richard Peaslee didn’t feel comfortable tackling the horror of that 20th-century tragedy.
   "We sat down one beautiful autumn afternoon (to talk about it), but neither of us felt worthy and were afraid of trivializing the book and the source," she says, "and I said to Dick — he was visiting me in the country — ‘Why don’t I waltz into the country library and see what I can find.’ I pulled out a book about Vienna.
   "Now I had been to Venice the summer before and had seen the works of (Austrian) painter Egon Schiele, which are very expressionist and have this perverse eroticism.
   "I tend to read a lot, look at a lot," she notes, "then forget about it and go make the piece."

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Robert Israel’s elegant period costumes add to the show’s beauty, as do the partially clothed or naked actors and dancers behind a scrim on the stage.


   Ms. Clarke and Mr. Peaslee enlisted writer Charles L. Mee to add the text, which appropriates the language of Sigmund Freud, among others. The work premiered in New York at St. Clement’s Church in the spring of 1986, then played at the New York Shakespeare Festival and Kennedy Center. "I knew that we had something very beautiful," she says.
   Robert Israel’s elegant period costumes add to the show’s beauty, as do the partially clothed or naked actors and dancers behind a scrim on the stage. However, Ms. Clarke says, while the show has an erotic quality, it is not a highly sexual piece.
   "It is a quiet eroticism," she says. "There is nudity, but it is not sensationalized whatsoever. Most performers are comfortable with that kind of nudity. It’s not a titillating eroticism — it is actually quite detached, the same detachment of an artist’s model."
   Ms. Clarke would know, having been an artist’s model in her dancing days. One of the original members of Pilobolus, the dance-theater acrobatic troupe, the 58-year-old Baltimore native also is known for her Obie-winning The Garden of Earthly Delights, based on the painting of 15th-century surrealist Hieronymus Bosch, and for her work with the Joffrey Ballet and American Ballet Theatre, among many others.
   While Ms. Clarke sees some parallels between turn-of-the-20th-century Vienna and the world at the turn of the 21st century, she is reluctant to go too far or get too academic in her comparison.
   "I ain’t no historian," she jokes. "We were grounded in terms of history — (Crown Prince) Rudolf, Mayerling, the politics, the old empire about to crumble — that’s all there. The truth is, I was a dancer. I know movement and music. It’s a marriage of elements that gives you a feeling rather than a literal statement.
   "I’m a kind of craftsman, a cobbler. If I’m making statements about our time, it is more instinctive rather than intellectual. I suppose what I put there is my view, but I never know what I’m doing or why I’m doing it. I’m not didactic or pedantic — I’m a child playing with finger paints."
Vienna: Lusthaus (revisited) plays at McCarter Theatre, 91 University Place, Princeton, Jan. 18, 8 p.m., and Jan. 19, 2 p.m. Tickets cost $30-$40. Note: contains nudity and adult subject matter. For information, call (609) 258-2787. On the Web: www.mccarter.org