Martha Clarke's Garden of Earthly Delights

My daughter Gillian and her girlfriend Kim gave my wife and I a pair of tickets to see Martha Clarke’s Garden of Earthly Delights. We went early and went to eat at Caffe Reggio around the corner on Mac Dougal St. We had soup, salad and espresso and soaked in the exquisite atmosphere: heavily carved dark wood,dimly lit old portrait paintings... We left to wander around the West Village: Carmine, Bedford, Cornelia Streets then went to the Minetta Lane Theater.
The lobby was peppered with prints of Bosch’s triptych Garden of Earthly Delights, so the ground was prepared for the journey into the world you were entering.
We had seats in the balcony , a great view to see the reflections of the dancers but the seats are so cramped. The access is so limited that people in the middle of rows have to stand up and let others pass so much so that one man started losing his patience and tried to refuse letting some young men pass, his response was “ Come on, it’s the theater!”. We cracked up!
The show begins with musicians dressed as monks casually coming on stage to make very atmospheric wind and drum noises. Around the stage there are stumps and branches (barren of leaves) sporadically placed among other props; like debris. The dancers come out walking on all fours in nude body stockings, like reptilian creatures, very primal.The progression of their movement is to the discovery of sex. The music is at turns nature driven, melodic, classical, increasingly discordant. The relationships between the dancers progress through the sexual ,becoming increasingly violent. The dancers at one point put on medieval peasant clothing. They create an image of log rolling by the women standing on the hips of prone men. As the men roll, their reflections in the floor imply a watery surface; indelible. Pairs of dancers sequentially begin slow motion leaping across the space, this evolves into the dancers putting on harnesses and flying. Daringly they flip , spin and swing; multiple dancers in the air; out over the audience, they’re assisted by the other dancers onstage , At one point a dancer on stage extends a 5’ long stick to the eye of a suspended dancer. Smoke fills the space from the top down, the climax of the action (in my opinion as this is just a fleeting impression of actual experience) comes when a male figure ascends, spinning, is dropped and raised several times and while at the apex of the rise , lights out, disappears in the dark and smoke.
On leaving, my wife Francie said “The moral of the story is it’s all fun and games until someone loses an eye. I said I saw it as creation myth as opposed to Bosch’s painting, which I always saw as man’s descent into Hell.
When coming down from the balcony I was moved when I saw some old show posters, the first was from Angry Housewives, Francie had painted the scenery for it back in the 80’s when the theater was first built, the second was a poster for Jeffrey that my sister Donna assisted on the sound design for in the early 90’s; ah! nostalgia.
For me it was interesting that a show inspired by a painting had no painted elements, as it was done as a black box with props and it was fun to see the mechanics of the flying system.