It started with a dance. For Nature Theater of Oklahoma, that’s not unusual. Pavol Liska, who directs the company with his wife, Kelly Copper, said, “Dance becomes a kind of cell that contains the full DNA of everything.”
In “No President,” set mainly to Tchaikovsky’s “The Nutcracker,” the dance that Liska and Copper made is not performed in its entirety until the very end. It’s a distillation of the movement and gestural material seen throughout the work, its “vocabulary,” Liska said. “You steal from the dance.”
There is no Land of the Sweets or Sugarplum Fairy in “No President,” which has its North American premiere at NYU Skirball on Thursday and runs through Saturday. But the show, subtitled “a story ballet of enlightenment in two immoral acts,” is choreographed — humorously, violently, roughly, tenderly — within an inch of its life. For Nature Theater, a capacious, playful experimental theater company in New York City that is known for its risk and rigor, dance serves a distinct purpose.
“I’m always nervous,” Liska said. “I’m always anxious, and the best way for me to just relax myself into the process is to make a dance. Even if we teach a class, the first thing I say is, ‘OK, let’s make a dance.’”
Copper said, “Dance is like a way of insisting that the heart of the thing will be a kind of pleasure, because it is a pleasure for us to work in dance. It’s the most fun we have.”
In “No President,” Mikey (Ilan Bachrach) and Georgie (Bence Mezei) are part of a security company of former actors hired to guard a valuable theater curtain as well as the mystery of what lies behind it. They’re friends until they both fall in love with their supervisor, who is married to the company’s boss.
A rival security company made up of former ballet dancers invades the scene. The plot includes sexual objectification and cannibalism, demons and a president who “gives everyone a cool nickname,” the narrator says, and is “surrounded exclusively by acquiescent acolytes and fawning sycophants.”
As for the dance itself? It comes to complete, rapturous life when Mikey and Georgie, dressed in romantic knee-length tutus and leopard-print leotards, find their way back to each other in a performance that allows them to, as the script says, “dance back into their common dream.”
A blend of ballet and workout drills — a tour jeté here, an elbow-to-knee crunch there — the dance is silly yet sweet. And though the dancers seem to be executing a series of isolated actions, they make them as sustained as a string of lights on a Christmas tree.
The idea for “No President” came out of an invitation from the Museum of Modern Art to participate in its 2018 exhibition about Judson Dance Theater, the 1960s experimental collective. Liska and Copper wanted to work with MoMA’s security guards — Liska had worked as one at the Metropolitan Museum of Art — and to look closely at the relationship between museums and dance.
They were disappointed, Liska said, “with all the dance and theater that had been co-opted by the gallery spaces and the museums, and how they didn’t know what to do with it. And how it was just really trash.”
It didn’t work out with MoMA, and attempts to partner with other American arts organizations fizzled too. Eventually, Stefanie Carp, who led the Ruhrtriennale festival in Germany at that time, offered to fund it. “It’s so hard to work in New York sometimes,” Copper said. “So we ended up in the middle of Germany.”
But before they left New York, they started working on ideas in their apartment. They were out of shape, they realized, and so were their actors. “Ilan would just sweat so much all over the floor, we had to buy a carpet,” Copper said. “So we started looking at ways we could get into shape. And that’s when that calisthenics came in. So there’s a lot of jogging and there’s a lot of burpees and a lot of push-ups.”
They also spent time watching videos of predatory animal behavior, but their process is more physical than cerebral. “We don’t sit around and talk a lot,” Liska said. “We’re always trying to solve a practical problem.”
Copper said, “So the problems were we were too fat and out of shape to do this.”
There are trained and untrained dancers in the cast, which creates a balance, or a tension, between skill and weakness. During the flight to Germany, Copper said, Bachrach sat next to a woman who asked him why he was traveling there. “He was like, ‘Well, I’m a ballerina.’”
“Good for him,” Copper continued. “He’s a ballerina now. So it’s sometimes about also claiming things that we have no right to claim: Saying we’re choreographers of a ballet.”
When they were thinking about music, their question was “What’s the most cliché story ballet?” “Swan Lake” lost out to “The Nutcracker,” whose score they have reordered. “It was very dramatically fitting music,” Copper said, “and yet the weird part is it’s just Christmas in most people’s heads.”
“No President” — named after a Jack Smith film that’s playing in conjunction at Anthology Film Archives on Saturday — has political undertones. In a plot twist, Mikey is elected president: “His approval rating soars to epoch-making heights,” the narrator says, “despite a few actionable blunders he commits, but these only humanize him, make him more relatable.”
Produced with Ruhrtriennale and the Düsseldorf Schauspielhaus, “No President” premiered in 2018 and was partly a reaction to the 2016 presidential election. Now, six years later, Copper said, “It’s like you’re in the backwash of history.”
“It’s not like we made a show about Trump,” Liska said. “We made a show about this type of behavior in humanity.”
When it comes to choreography, Liska knows that he is no George Balanchine, whose version of “The Nutcracker” for New York City Ballet is a holiday tradition. Liska, a former hockey player from Slovakia, has a feel for structure; it relates, he said, to his position as a center, which required him “to be aware of where everything is without looking.
“I’m thinking two moves ahead. I’m making the play, deciding I’m looking there. I’m passing over there. I’m pretty much staging the choreography the way I would coach a hockey team.”
In determining the movement and direction, Liska places himself onstage. He needs to know what it feels like. The show “is like an extension of my body,” he said. “Even if I don’t see it for five years, it makes me physically ill if a turn is wrong.”
Copper said, “And I’m the same way with the words.”
They can have different ways of working. When Liska immerses himself inside the choreography, Copper is usually watching from the outside, “and that’ll remind me of something and I’ll go do some research” she said.
They don’t want their performers to dance for them; they don’t want to see the contentment that comes from being watched. It’s more about, How well does the audience know a performer by the end? Just about anyone can do a burpee.
“People do that in the gym,” Liska said. “So let’s take that off the table. What else do you have? That’s what I want to see. I’m just putting you in this crisis and trying to bring out the best in you. Wake me up! Wake me up and want me to either do it or make me want to live.”
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