Yes, that was rather stupid of me, Jennifer and very sweet of you to be nice about it. <BR>To ease my conscience, I have purchased the article from the NY Times Archive, to share with my friends:<P><BR>DANCE; Made for Two Women, Remade for Two Men <P>By KATE MATTINGLY <P>IN the hands of the Dutch choreographer Beppie Blankert, everyday events, like waiting, watching, wondering, can become extraordinary. In 1986 she made ''Dubbelspoor'' in collaboration with the composer Louis Andriessen. ''It contains one of the supreme theatrical surprise effects of my experience,'' said Christopher Hunt, the producer of PepsiCo Summerfare in 1987 when ''Dubbelspoor'' was first performed in the United States. ''Beppie certainly isn't someone whose concern is to get the largest numbers in, but rather to do something in exactly the scale that its inner integrity requires.'' <P>''Dubbelspoor's'' technical demands -- removable seating, high ceilings, total darkness -- makes it impossible to present at most theaters. Laurie Uprichard, executive director of Danspace Project, spent more than a year finding a suitable Manhattan space for the piece. <P>On Friday, ''Dubbelspoor'' -- Dutch for ''Double Track'' -- comes to Dance Theater Workshop's garage space for 13 performances as part of a nine-city European and American tour that closes at Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival in Massachusetts in July. Performances at the garage space are presented by Dance Theater Workshop and Danspace Project. <P>During a phone interview from her studio in Amsterdam, Ms. Blankert described ''Dubbelspoor.'' ''It began with the idea of making a piece where the senses were separated so that seeing and hearing would come from different spots,'' she said. ''I constructed it together with Louis Andriessen.'' (In July Mr. Andriessen's opera ''Writing to Vermeer,'' a collaboration with the filmmaker Peter Greenaway, will be presented at the Lincoln Center Festival.) <P>In addition to Ms. Blankert's choreography and Mr. Andriessen's music, ''Dubbelspoor'' incorporates Samuel Beckett's play ''Text for Nothing, No. 7'' and videos by Wilbert Blank and Paul van der Ploeg. Originally performed by Ms. Blankert and Caroline Dokter, ''Dubbelspoor'' now features two men: Christopher Steel and John Taylor. <P>''I thought, 'If I'm going to make this piece again, I want to do something different and not just repeat myself,' '' said the 51-year-old Ms. Blankert. ''And then of course I have the beautiful John Taylor, who I love to work with, and I wanted to make it for him. As a performer, he has qualities very much like my own. I recognize myself in his dancing. His movement is very big and large, and he can even do it better than I can. He is very inspiring for me. I never like dancing in my own work because I am somebody who looks. I look at who is standing in front of me and that is my inspiration. And you can never do that with yourself.'' <P>Born in Indonesia, Ms. Blankert took some classes in dance in New York in the late 70's at the studios of Merce Cunningham and Louis Falco. ''In a sense, I'm autodidactic,'' she said. ''I never did any formal dance training. I became a member of a small Amsterdam-based company called Dansproduktie and worked with them for seven years making one or two shows a year.'' This all-female collective enabled each member to dance and to choreograph. ''My biggest passion at that time was to be a dancer,'' she added. ''At a certain point I felt as if I needed a change -- it wasn't only about getting older -- I had been with such a small company for so many years. I quit and became an independent choreographer.'' <P>Her ''Ives Trilogy'' appeared at Danspace Project at St. Mark's Church in 1992, 1993 and 1997. ''Though there is a consistency in terms of Beppie's interest in music, 'Double Track' is so completely different from the Ives works,'' Ms. Uprichard said. ''The Ives pieces are really what I call 'dancey-dances.' The formality remains in 'Double Track,' but the vocabulary and the means of presenting the essence of the work are very different. In 'Double Track' there are characters based on a text by Samuel Beckett. It's very abstracted, like Beckett is. The fact that they could be two women or two men is very interesting to me; I think that there could be different connotations. I'm really curious to see it with two men.'' Ms. Blankert says she and Mr. Andriessen think this male version is much better. <P>On the staying power of the work, Mr. Hunt said: ''Most pieces, if they are re-staged, are in some ways out of date. I think 'Dubbelspoor' is completely timeless, and it could be revived well into the 21st century and still seem completely of its time. <P>''Beppie is always concerned with private, individual interests, with using art in some way to illustrate 'everyday problems,' which are, after all, the stuff of life.''
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