No Boundaries

“C to C (Close to Chuck),” a dance portrait of a musical portrait of Chuck Close that will make its world premiere on October 27 during American Ballet Theatre’s fall season at City Center, began as a series of happy accidents. The first occurred as pianist Bruce Levingston stood in a foyer at Rockefeller University, taking in one of painter Chuck Close’s many portraits of composer Philip Glass. The timing was fortunate: Mr. Levingston was about to play Schumann’s Kreisleriana, which is inspired by a character in an E.T.A. Hoffman novel. “It got me thinking about musical portraits,” Mr. Levingston said. “I thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be cool, if Glass did a portrait of Close?'”Cool — and not unrealistic. Mr. Glass — the wild-haired, maverick composer known as one of classical music’s fathers of American minimalism — and Mr. Close — the painter known for his take on photographs via gigantic, pixelated portraits — have a bond certainly unique among artists. The two met in the mid-1960s through sculptor Richard Serra; a few years later, they joined in a dream group of artist’s assistants, including Spalding Gray and Steve Reich, helping Mr. Serra with his hulking works.“Everything we did seemed to have a tremendous amount of overlap,” Mr. Close said of the group of fledgling artists. “Phil and I were really hell-bent to purge our work of every other artist — to try to find something personal and idiosyncratic, not tradition-bound. I didn’t want anyone standing in front of my paintings thinking of another painter. And I just think Phil was the most inventive and innovative composer of my adult life.”Mr. Levingston ran into both men at an arts benefit, approached them cold, and found both game to create a musical portrait. “His whole countenance changed,” Mr. Levingston said of Mr. Glass’s response to the idea for the piece. The composer turned the piece around in just six months. And then, another happy accident: Mr. Glass had written two versions of the piece, and his assistant sent Mr. Levingston the “wrong” score. Mr. Glass then gave Mr. Levingston the intended piece, but the pianist, it turned out, loved both, and the final work, divided in two parts — much like Mr. Close’s artistic life, which is partitioned by the spinal aneurysm that changed his painting style — resulted.Mr. Levingston performed the piece at Carnegie Hall in 2005. And a year later, he met Finnish choreographer Jorma Elo, who had just created a new dance, “Glow/Stop,” to Mr. Glass’s music. At a dinner, Messrs. Levingston and Elo discovered they shared an interested in ice hockey, but it wasn’t long before they began to discuss the possibility of setting dance to Mr. Glass’s portrait of Mr. Close for ABT. “Philip’s music, it’s very hard to describe,” Mr. Elo said. “The structure of it, in a way, gives space for dance — it’s more architectural. And of course, the drive, the pulse, is easy to build around, too. There are no huge colors giving a sense of, ‘Oh, now we’re in a forest, now a storm is building up … ‘ For me, it makes it easier.” Mr. Elo then met with Mr. Close, whose work he’d never encountered in his native Finland, at the artist’s studio. “It was fantastic, to just sort of jump into his brain in a way,” Mr. Elo said. “It was all around me, what he’s worked on. He’s extremely passionate about detail, how you build on detail, how things that look certain ways are actually not that at all.” And Mr. Elo was struck most of all by the lack of what Mr. Close strives most to avoid in his work, what Mr. Close calls “virtuosomanship.” “Chuck paints famous people,” Mr. Elo explained. “But if you really look, his paintings have nothing to do with them; it’s the world that is inside their pixels.”For Mr. Close, the opportunity to work with a choreographer was a reminder of his days as a young artist in the city. “I spent a lot of time in artists’ lofts with dancers dancing, watching choreographers’ work,” Mr. Close recalled. He sees in Mr. Elo’s choreography what he liked best about his contemporaries Trisha Brown, Yvonne Rainer, and Twyla Tharp. “They liked ordinary movement,” he said. “And that’s very similar to what I was doing in my painting.”Mr. Elo’s choreography is wholly reflective of Mr. Glass’s music, ominous one moment, beautifully shimmering the next, aptly capturing the deeper meaning of the color changes in Mr. Close’s work. Mr. Close becomes animated when describing it. “The first half I see as much more minimal, reductive, with huge limitations, more like his early stuff, which parallels my early painting. And the second half is this kind of explosion, go for broke, just a riot of color.” The dance is contemplative, detached, with partners never quite touching in the slower movements, but bursting with Mr. Elo’s trademark athletic energy and vivacity in Mr. Glass’s brighter moments.Ultimately, Mr. Close sees the work as a convergence of talent reminiscent of a time when artists were free to move out of their own studios and into one anothers’ spaces. “To get a good choreographer and composer and visual artist together,” he mused. “It’s like old home week!”

No Boundaries

No Boundaries

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