This article by Jeffrey Charles Palmer was published by Australian classical and new music magazine CutCommon on 12 March 2020. To see the article in full, click here.
Elly Toyoda, Lisa Moore and Ashley Bathgate, photographed by Charles Roussel
American realist painter Edward Hopper (1882 – 1967) was a master of capturing the distinct mood of ordinary nights in New York City – perhaps more so than any other known artist. It was on such an ordinary, misty New York Tuesday night that I made my way to the DiMenna Center for Classical Music in Manhattan’s Hell’s Kitchen to see Tales of Hopper, a new theatre-dance work inspired by Hopper’s paintings, presented by Cherylyn Lavagnino Dance.
I’ve been a fan of Edward Hopper for most of my life, even visiting his childhood home-turned-museum just up the Hudson River in Nyack, New York on several occasions. Since moving to New York City 10 years ago, I cannot count the number of times I’ve turned a Greenwich Village corner, noticed the perfection of the pink and orange light bathing a red brick townhouse or the forest green casing of a mid-century diner, and felt as if I’ve just walked into one of his paintings. Hopper’s work oozes the very life of New York City, and so brilliantly captures the moods of its inhabitants in a subtle gesture or glance.
For this reason, I was quite eager to see how Cherylyn Lavagnino had breathed new life into his work through the movement of her dancers.
As the lights went down and the audience fell silent, Lavagnino herself took the stage to thunderous applause. She explained that this work pushed her dancers into the realm of acting more than ever, as she cast them as figures plucked from eight of Hopper’s paintings. The transparent set pieces would reference Hopper’s environments in each of the vignettes, with Martin Bresnick’s original composition for piano, cello, and violin supporting the dancers in bringing the characters’ emotional undercurrents to the surface.
We began with a short Prologue; during which the entire company gave glimpses of the eight vignettes we would be seeing that evening. The first was inspired by Morning Sun from 1952, depicting a young woman perched on her bed, bathed in sunlight, gazing wistfully out her apartment window. Dancer Sharon Milanese began the sequence in the exact same pose, lit perfectly by lighting designer Frank DenDanto III. Her slow, waking movements were perfectly aligned with the Bresnick’s sunny yet melancholy composition, capturing that feeling of not wanting to get out of bed and face the day. The mood changed suddenly, though, with the dancer moving at a much more fitful way, seemingly fighting with herself as to whether she face the inevitable, perhaps undesirable, challenges of the day before her or not. This was the first example of Lavagnino’s drawing on the subtext of the paintings and weaving her own vision of the inner life of their subjects.
We then moved through some of Hopper’s other well-known works, including People in the Sun (1960), featuring cat-like sunbathers constantly moving their chairs to better catch the light, the hints of an illicit workplace affair in Office at Night (1940), and the playful interpretation of Gas (1940), in which dancer Justin Faircloth portrayed a bored petrol station worker waiting to wash his patron’s cars and pump their petrol.
The real tour-de-force performance came during NY Movie (1939), during which dancer Kristen Foote played a lonely usherette in a 1930s movie house who slips into fantasy as she watches the film, standing at the back of the cinema. Bresnick’s lush, cinematic score — played brilliantly by pianist Lisa Moore, violinist Elly Toyoda, and cellist Ashley Bathgate — swept over the audience as we watched the usherette begin to dance with her imaginary leading man who eventually emerged from the shadows, as danced by Malcom Miles Young. The two engage in a beautifully choreographed sequence before he slips back into the shadows on the other side of the transparent screen, and then into her imagination.
The final three vignettes, inspired by Hopper’s Sunlight in a Cafeteria (1958), Nighthawks (1942), and Automat (1927) — three of his most famous works — were linked together as a sort of trilogy. In the Cafeteria sequence, we see the classic story of boy (Justin Faircloth) meets girl (Claire Westby), as the girl coquettishly drops a glove to be retrieved by the boy. In Nighthawks, we are introduced to whom we would interpret as the boy’s existing girlfriend (Corinne Hart) in the iconic setting of Hopper’s all-night diner. The three dancers performed an expertly choreographed love triangle sequence, resulting in the girl we met in the cafeteria being left alone. In Automat, we see her reflecting quietly on all that has transpired over a cup of coffee, before the music swells and all the dancers return to the stage for a final tableau.
After a brief interval, the company came back onstage to perform two of their repertory works. The first was an excerpt from Triptych (2012), featuring the entire company drawing upon themes of the religious ecstasy of the Baroque period, set to Francois Couperin’s transcendent Troisième leçon de Ténèbres à deux voix, followed by Veiled (2016), a work for the women members of the company which explores the enactment of physical and internal grace in the face of oppression, set to a solo violin score by Bresnick. Both pieces were expertly danced, and provided a fascinating look into the breadth of Cherylyn Lavagnino Dance’s repertoire, but felt a bit disjointed coming right after Tales of Hopper; very different in mood and style.
It takes a lot of courage to present something new inspired by work as iconic as that of Edward Hopper. Lavagnino, Bresnick, and the wonderful dancers and musicians not only did that successfully, but in a way that will add a deeper level of awareness the next time I gaze upon a Hopper painting.