Sanjoy Roy

writing on dance

  • HOME
  • Step by Step Guides
  • Reviews
  • Articles
  • Books
  • Audio
  • Resources
  • Etc
  •  
  • FAQ
  • Me
  • Events
  • Blog
  •  
You are here: Home → Reviews → Tao of Glass
  •  
  •  
By: Sanjoy Roy · Published: The Guardian · Category: Music, Reviews · Place: Manchester · See original at The Guardian

Tao of Glass

Not so much a play as a kind of staged music, Tao of Glass is a sublime, intimate and heart-filling encounter between words, puppetry, drama and music
Phelim McDermott’s Tao of Glass

The gold that joins the fragments is music: Phelim McDermott’s Tao of Glass. Photo: Tristram Kenton

In his youth, the actor and director Phelim McDermott would play the album Glassworks over and over again. “Philip Glass – on repeat!” says the now 55-year-old in his visionary new show Tao of Glass, sounding a little contrite that he might have driven his family mad.

Still, the obsession turned out to be lifelong. Tao of Glass, co-directed with Kirsty Housley and with a score by Glass himself, is – on one level – the story of McDermott’s long-held dream of creating a piece to his music. Aided by three puppeteers and a small band of musicians, he acts out his story not as a narrative, but as a collage of fragments. His initial idea, he tells us, had been to stage Maurice Sendak’s children’s book In the Night Kitchen, about a boy falling into a surreal underworld. But Sendak died before work could begin, and the project came to nothing. Yet what do we have here? A falling puppet boy, a model piano that ingeniously transforms into a toy theatre of kitchen cupboards and utensils, a fantasy flight inside a milk bottle, all to a specially composed score.

It’s just one scene of many that deftly layer story, sensation, make-believe and enigma. Some are funny, some matter-of-fact, some philosophical, and some simply magical: puppets fleetingly formed by tissue paper, a snow of sheet music, McDermott lying comatose beside an unplayed piano as the stage rotates like a turning world.

In one key section, McDermott explains Arny Mindell’s theory of three levels of existence – consensus reality, dreamland, essence – and the piece as a whole, meandering in subject from coffee tables to Lao Tzu to comas, seems to traverse these very layers, while three concentric rings that circle the stage rise and fall above it. In another, he muses on the Japanese art of kintsugi: the mending of broken pottery with seams of gold, to make what is broken more beautiful.

Again, you sense this as both a particular story and a guiding idea. Tao of Glass is itself the beautiful joining of fragmented scenes.

The gold that joins them is music. It’s not only that Glass’s music is the seam running through the scenes, but also that the staging itself is a kind of Glassian music: a fluctuating field of motifs, echoes, transfigurations and returns, layers of mood, texture and tone, gentle intimations of the ineffable and the sublime. Every so often your eyes will fill with tears, for there is only so much that the human heart can hold within it.

Footage of rehearsals from Tao of Glass:

  •  
  •  

Related articles

  • The Clod Ensemble: Under Glass
  • A beautiful though enigmatic installation of living human exhibits

  • Motionhouse: Broken
  • Dance as disaster movie: crashes, bangs – and a bit of whimpering.

  • Ardani 25 Gala
  • Volatile energies, men in emotion, and jilted bridezillas – uncommon fare for a ballet gala

← Previous: Trajal Harrell: Maggie the Cat Next: Shobana Jeyasingh / Surface Tension podcast #3: Site-specific works →
Get an email alert when a new article is published on sanjoyroy.net

You like

  • Stage to page: a guide to dance reviewing and writing 2 December 2015
  • Make it happen: the role of the dance producer 1 September 2014
  • Zero Degrees: nothing is singular 30 September 2005
  • Norwegian National Ballet: Hedda Gabler 1 November 2017
  • Signs and wonders: The Nutcracker 30 March 1995

I like

  • Rambert: Life is a Dream
    24 May 2018
  • Musicals we love: Some Like It Hip Hop
    24 February 2014
  • Do the Gleek
    18 October 2010
  • Sadhana Dance: Under My Skin
    12 December 2013
  • Storyboard P / Story Basquiat
    20 May 2013

Recently published

  • Shobana Jeyasingh Surface Tension podcast #5: Staging Schiele
    25 November 2019
  • Cullberg: Figure a Sea
    1 October 2019
  • Boy Blue: Redd
    29 September 2019
  • Rosie Kay: Fantasia
    27 September 2019
  • Shobana Jeyasingh / Surface Tension podcast #4: Science and science fiction
    20 September 2019

 

  • Home
  • Privacy policy
  • Sitemap
  • Contact

Dance writing: links

  • Guardian dance
  • Springback magazine
  • Performance Monkey
  • Deborah Jowitt
  • dancetabs.com

Random fandom

  • Aretha Franklin
  • Guy Maddin
  • Joni Mitchell
  • Maurice Ravel
  • Slayage
  • The Spirit of the Beehive
  • Whedonesque
 

© Copyright 2013–2018 by Sanjoy Roy · All rights reserved · Site design by Sanjoy Roy

Cancel

  • Home
  • Writing
    ►
    • Step by Step Guides
    • Reviews
    • Articles
    • Books
    • Resources
    • Etc
  • Info
    ►
    • FAQ
    • Me
    • You
    • Events
    • Blog
    • Subscribe
  • Follow
    ►
    • Facebook
    • Twitter