Late February and March were chock-a-block with venerated masters of modern dance, from graying to old to dead. The plethora of offerings forced us to think again about what we will be left with in their wake.

Principally, Cunningham did, whose troupe had its fourth to last hometown show. In the oldest dance on offer, Antic Meet, from 1956, the view is even farther back, as the choreographer looks to his scrappy youth. Here's the start of my Financial Times review:

The first of this irreplaceable company's New York appearances in a final, globe-trotting year moves backwards in time.

The Joyce programme ends with 1958's Antic Meet, in which Cunningham reconfigures his beginnings in vaudeville - before he encountered modern dance or even graduated from high school - through the prism of absurdist theatre.

Long-time collaborator Robert Rauschenberg dreamt up the inspired Dada props and costumes for skits loosely based on hoofers, musclemen, tumblers and clowns. Cunningham himself came up with the most famous prop: a café chair strapped to his back that he uses to support a dotty ballerina. She makes a dramatic entrance through a door she has provided for herself.

Marcie Munnerlyn and Rashaun Mitchell. Photo by Yi-Chun Wu.

Antic Meet operates by the clown laws of the universe: if you put one foot in front of the other, you will trip; simple acts grow impossibly tangled; the harder you try, the less there is to show for it; nothing follows from anything. Though the opening-night cast lacked sufficient antic energy, the performance still managed to suggest a new back story for the sudden shifts--in tempo, direction, everything--that distinguish a Cunningham dance.

Fast-forward to 1982, when arthritis riddled the choreographer's hips and feet. Quartet is a quintet, with him as the nearly stationary fifth wheel.....

Quartet. Photo back to front: Robert Swinston, Krista Nelson, Jennifer Goggins, Brandon Collwes. Photo by Stephanie Berger.

For the most desolate Cunningham dance, and the first of the computer dances, click here. 

The Cunningham company is going the way of Balanchine minus the New York City Ballet. It has a trust, which will send out rehearsal coaches (repetiteurs, ballet deliciously calls them) among former company members to interested and able troupes and college departments.

But who will be able?

Cunningham technique is at least as specific in its demands as that of Balanchine--and yet much less widespread. Even with Balanchine, troupes as venerable and reliably excellent as the Mariinsky/Kirov haven't always been able to pull the ballets off.  The emphasis can be just off enough that you cannot make sense of what you're seeing. (To be fair, I've only witnessed one Mariinsky Balanchine to suffer that fate: the ballsy, athletic Rubies.)  

Last month, I witnessed two cases--one positive, the other, not so much--of what the Cunningham rep might have in store. The positive was Trisha Brown company member Neal Beasley doing a solo that only its author, Brown, has performed until now: the gorgeous, fierce whooshing Watermotor. The dance is so identified with Brown --partially because Charles Atlas made a beautiful film of it in 1978, when it was new--that I wondered whether it could be transferred to anyone, not to mention anyone less voluptuous than her (which is pretty much anyone). But Beasley (during a two-week DTW season-- in its intimacy a great venue for Brown) made the solo his own--a more thrashing version that suited his compact frame--and confirmed the choreography's power. 

Mark Morris's Grand Duo,  in a student showcase at Juilliard of "classic works," wasn't so lucky. Though the musicians did justice to the Lou Harrison score in all its jubilant forthrightness, the dancers couldn't muster sufficient ferocity for Morris's primitivist, sneakily obscene stomping dance.

****[restored] If the Cunningham troupe is thoroughly disbanded--without even a pickup troupe among the former company members (and why, why not? Why can't there be a somewhat expanded version of the RUGs, the Repertory Understudy Group? Didn't Cunningham's own ambivalence in the months leading up to his death warrant as much?)--the dances' future is likely to look more like the Juilliard rendition than like Beasley's solo in a language he is in fluent in.

The Juilliard show confirmed something I had just noticed about Morris's own dancers, at the intimate shows at his Brooklyn studio. Here's that review:

Mark Morris fans enthuse about his musicality and clarity of expression, his inspired choice of score, his wit, contemporary sensibility, storytelling genius and diverse lineage, from Isadora Duncan to Balkan folk dance. But at the 150-seat James and Martha Duffy theatre where his company is celebrating its 30th anniversary until March 27, his singular movement style strikes hardest.

At close range, you notice how much force the dancers put into their steps for the sake of precise shape and character. The skilled wielding of so much power focuses on the dancer's will, making him seem as "real" as anyone. The Morris dancer does not disappear into the dance.

The Muir, to Beethoven's settings of Scottish and Irish folk songs, and the slight Festival Dance, to the kind of bland classical score (Hummel, in this case) that reduces Morris the poet to Morris the patternmaker, the women overwhelm their scrawny male partners by sheer meatiness. The long La Sylphide tutus for The Muir and the 1950s poodle skirts for Festival Dance underscore how unlike a sylph or girl next door these women are; the astounding Petrichor - created for the company's eight women - describes what, in a better world, they might be.

The fragrant Petrichor. Photo by Brian Snyder

Petrichor, Morris has tuned in to the swoopiness of the Villa Lobos score (played live and magnificently). Over four distinct movements the dance ebbs and flows but never stops. The choreographic patterns resemble flocks and herds and tides that materialise and grow dense before disintegrating. This elusive structure allows us to sink into sensation. "Petrichor" means the fresh scent of rain, and the dance is fragrant.

Several Paul Taylor dances from the past decade could be called "phantasmagoria" - the name of the second premiere of the New York season. Increasingly, the acclaimed American choreographer has set on stage a tumbled dream of theatre - or its kin, ritual. Some of these dances, such as 2010's Also Playing (reprised this year), are comic and rooted in vaudeville; others, such as the pair of Buñuelian Dream pieces from 2007, are infused with an eerie surreality. But both types - in fact, most of Taylor's vast repertory - feature shifting points of view. Taylor is a master of sleight-of-hand, with tricks in the service of truth.

Phantasmagoria is one of the revue-inspired pieces, though it begins soberly enough. Brueghel peasants, sunk in longtime Taylor collaborator Jennifer Tipton's inky shadows, pound their fists on the ground in protest at a grievously hard life. Soon, though, they have cast off their woes and grown frolicsome. To a score of anonymous Renaissance tootlers that carries on throughout the dance, the lassies squat simian style on their lads' thighs and press cheek to cheek.

Like a zealous and drunk short-order cook reduced to scraps, Taylor serves up a whole hodgepodge menu of stock characters - first as separate dishes, then as stew. Gauzy and flower-bestrewn Isadorables, a strictly up-and-down Irish step dancer (a deadpan and broom-stiff Michelle Fleet), an imperious spying nun with massive wimple (Laura Halzack, whose comic impulses turn out to rival her celebrated lyricism) and, as pièce de resistance, an "East Indian Adam and Eve", as the programme puts it.

A Bowery Bum (Robert Kleinendorst) about to trespass on three Isadorables

For more on how Taylor turns the scrappy into the revelatory--click here.

In the season's first premiere, Three Dubious Memories, it was Taylor's own mentors that hovered over the dances: Antony Tudor (his teacher at Juilliard)--with his portentously universalizing names of characters ("The Man of the Moment" etc)--and Taylor's greatest influence, affectionately satirized, Martha Graham.

Sent in a retrospective direction by Three Dubious Memories, I ended up thinking of another work on the program, the 1976 masterpiece Esplanade, also in terms of influence--in this case the older Balanchine work that shares part of its score. Here's that Financial Times review:

Revisiting a great dance, you may be struck less by its familiarity than by its persistent strangeness. Its many unfolding mysteries can make it seem disorientingly new. For example, on the opening night of the Paul Taylor company's two-week New York season, Esplanade seemed suddenly to be in secret dialogue with another masterpiece to Bach violin concertos.

Though Taylor's beloved 1975 work only shares half its score with Balanchine's 1941 Concerto Barocco, it too arises with seeming inevitability from the music. And its pleasure and revelation, tenderness and melancholy, also reside in basic steps that gain traction as they travel between dancers. Except for a desolate adagio, Esplanade is down to earth and sunny here; Barocco, by contrast, is courtly and cool. But the steps in both move like an electric current - or a lively conversation.

In Barocco, the ballerina leaps into the middle of small accommodating circles of women like a fairy on to a lily pad. In Esplanade, the architecture is more personal - one dancer balancing on the squishy belly of another, her arm stretched along the horizon. Both choreographers reflect Bach's transparency - Taylor not only with clear patterns but with everyday movement as well. Esplanade's flex-footed gallops, runs, slides, hops, and bounding leaps into another's arms speak the language of summer, shining a mirror on our most casually lovely selves.

Three Dubious Memories - the first of the two season premieres - evokes not a work from an alien dance culture but one from Taylor's own past. The choreographer dubiously remembers the mid-century "Greek" psychodramas of his one-time mentor, Martha Graham.

James Samson, chorus leader, before his impassive clan

For Taylor's delightful mangling of Graham, click here.

Meanwhile,  there was the Graham company itself, at the Rose Theater in several distinct programmes including one with her Bronte Sisters phantasmagoria, Deaths and Entrances, which hasn't appeared for almost a decade. I have liked current artistic director Janet Eilber's cleaning away of the histrionics that accrued since Graham's death. It allows me to see better the genius organization the choreographer gave  her later dances, which often move both synchronically--within the terrain of the psyche, where everything happens simultaneously--and diachronically, across time. That's how Deaths and Entrances, with its young girls and several sisters, works, with temporal modes sharing the stage at once.

***[restored] Now Eilber needs to work on the dancers' legs. While the troupe has the gorgeous coil and release essential to Graham, it has lost the capacity to do those killer swan-dives, where the leg swings out into the air like a vast sail as the body plunges down to the floor, all while the dancer is revolving on her metatarsal. Impossible, yes, but somehow people used do it. Barbara Morgan's iconic photographs of the early Graham troupe testify to this fact, as well as to the tree-trunk legs of her acolytes. Legs from another century.

Also last month, at DTW, grand Graham devotee Richard Move (of Martha @ Mother's fame) recreated the choreographer's 1964 interview with dance critic Walter Terry at the 92 Y. It wasn't simply a paint by numbers production, though. Move captures Graham's utter command of her audience and interviewer, her wisdom, and her intense loneliness, stuck in a world where even the most educated and well-meaning, such as Walter Terry (played with his indelible, irrepressible good humour by playwright Lisa Krohn) come off as clueless beside her.

Move doesn't indulge in camp here: he understands that Graham isn't just trying to be bigger than life--this isn't just outsized ambition--she is bigger. A visionary. When Terry asks a question that expects too little of dance or her, she looks at him as if he had just evaporated before her eyes and she was stuck in a mirage-inducing desert by herself. 

***[restored, added to] That refusal to accommodate--not for the sake of being difficult, but because you believe entirely in what is at stake--has nearly vanished from the world. Graham expected that Terry, as well as her audience, could be spoken to without condescension or simplification, and it is exhilarating to watch. Nowadays it is not the audience who is enthralled to genius, but the other way around, with people who should be our heroes having to stoop and smile to accommodate the bozo obliviousness of whoever deigns to give them a bit of media attention.  Only Hollywood stars are exempt.

The one week run at Dance Theater Workshop was sold out and thus too short. I know it is a very tricky business guestimating a show's audience, but DTW tends to underestimate. Juliette Mapp's fantastically dense and smart The Making of Americans (about which I hope to write more in the future) could have been extended for another week as well.

Alright, that's it for now. I still have a pile of other reviews from the past six weeks to organize an idea around--and post--so I may be back before the battle of the ballet seasons begins, in May.

In the meantime, enjoy your Passovers, Easters, and other rituals to survival, resuscitation and bunnies!

Over Christmas, I deflowered a middle-aged friend of his Nutcracker innocence. A typical European, he'd seen Pina Bausch but no Petipa. Though I suspect he found the whole thing childish, he responded gamely (this was to ABT's new Ratmansky version) except to the pas de deux. These moments of slippery idealized romance made him itch. In fact, he decided BAM was infested with bed bugs.

That's not far from my reaction to reviews that separate the dancer from the dance--gushing about a dancer, say, with only passing reference to the ballet that defines her and that she embodies for the night.

The method smacks of nineteenth century balletomania, in which fans treated the choreography as the ballerina's vehicle, not her legs. In reaction, Balanchine insisted that in his company the choreography would be star. He knew that if the ballets were any good, the dancers would be in no danger of being taken for granted. In fact, they would be recognized for their talents as dancers and dancer-actors, not for qualities somewhat at odds with dance, such as "personality." 

I had the luxury of spending some of my 400 words on the dancers: a thrill, as I love NYCB dancers. But I wanted to talk about them in a way that gave both them and the dance their due. My rule for myself was, Write about the dancers in so far as you can say how they are shaping the dance.

Whether or not I did a good job, I wish more critics would follow this rule. It would eliminate the semi-pornographic, wholly dispiriting tone of connoisseurship--ah what a nice wine, a nice pointed foot, a slim ankle--that occasionally still creeps in to "fine arts" reviews. (Reviewers of the popular arts--pop music, movies, theater, etc.--may at times be frivolous, but they would be run out of town if they adopted such a sniffy tone.)

Here is the start of my review of Balanchine's Symphony in Three Movements, with Janie Taylor shaping her role in such a way that made the whole ballet take on new aspects--or at least made me aware of them. (For the whole review, click here).

Balanchine ballets may be timeless but they are also deliciously of their moment, especially the experimental works - where you least expect it. Created for New York City Ballet's 1972 Stravinsky Festival, Symphony in Three Movements (which repeats in the spring) comes late to the modernist party. Balanchine celebrates this with a pop-Modernism, decked out in bubblegum-pink as well as the usual black and white.

Stravinsky includes in his symphony odds and ends accumulated during the war years: a soundtrack for a US newsreel of Hitler's advancing army, a rejected score for the 1943 Hollywood movie The Song of Bernadette. Balanchine responds with his own mainstream mash-up, but circa the late 1950s and beyond, when the automobile and automation were encouraging whole new species of frivolous motion.

A boy and girl (on Saturday Anthony Huxley and Erica Pereira in debuts) compete at jumping high, knees to their chests. The large ponytailed corps lap the stage in concentric circles, crouch prettily as if about to burst into a Broadway number, and form a chorus line to semaphore mysteriously. The three male leads catapult their partners into the air in a balletified form of swing dancing - with Megan LeCrone, pressing against thin air, especially riveting.

For the central pas de deux to Stravinsky's plucky adagio, Balanchine concocts an Orientalist analogue to this sporty excess. A couple engages in ritual intimacy with crooked limbs and hinging wrists.

Janie Taylor, opposite Jared Angle (above; photo by Paul Kolnik), made an intriguing combination of impetuosity and doll-like dumbness, as if she were doing whatever popped into her head-- except the pops came so slowly we could glimpse the void that preceded them.

The whole ballet works by that principle - or would have if Saturday's corps had enjoyed enough rehearsals to risk split-second timing and more recklessness.

Click here for more on Balanchine's ephemeral architecture in Symphony in Three Movements.

Before Polyphonia, which turns 10 this month, Christopher Wheeldon's pieces for the Royal Ballet, whose school he attended, and the New York City Ballet, where he danced, marked him as a major talent. After this modernist leotard ballet, created on eight dancers from NYCB, the young Brit was a sensation.

Polyphonia - which repeats in the spring - descends from the daring, flex-footed, angular Balanchine ballets that in 2001 were looking dangerously faint. Like Agon, The Four Temperaments and Symphony in Three Movements (gloriously paired with the Wheeldon on Wednesday), Polyphonia transplants us to a "forest of symbols that watch a person with their familiar gaze", as Baudelaire, the quintessential modernist, put it. The symbols - in dance, steps - reorganise experience as a dream does.

Tyler Angle about to cantilever Wendy Whelan forward. Photo by Paul Kolnik for NYCB

Polyphonia's steps emphasise the grave balance between people. Tyler Angle carries Wendy Whelan on his back like Aeneas did his ailing father from burning Troy - except her legs are bent sharply over his shoulder like scythes. She straddles his hips like a plough and rotates her body full circle, like the shadow on a sundial. The images are ancient and mythical, rooted in heaven and earth.

Wheeldon uses the floor like the contemporary choreographer he is - the dancers lying and crouching there, and bending over straightened legs like storks. He honours Balanchine without repeating him.

Balanchine could alert you to the beauty and rhythmic juice of music you hadn't paid much attention to. Likewise, Wheeldon organises the anarchic sound of Ligeti into beats and fashions a single organism from the 10 short numbers. At least that is how it is supposed to work. On Wednesday, with several dancers debuting in their roles, the ballet didn't entirely cohere.

Or maybe it simply cohered differently. My memories of the premiere, in 2001, have strongly influenced my take on the current rendition of Polyphonia. Ah, the pull of that first time!

It is tempting to say that Sara Mearns is better than the Odette and Odile that the Peter Martins choreography hands her, but is that ever really the case? As long as a dancer is not inventing her own steps, can she ever be other than choreography embodied and inspirited? These are not rhetorical questions. I'm really asking. 

In any case, Mearns was fantastic--made the ballet worth watching: 

The hit ballet horror movie Black Swan may have galvanised the hordes at Swan Lake (the nearly sold-out run continues until February 26), but telegenic lesbian sex has nothing on ballerina Sara Mearns' two swans, black and white.

Peter Martins' uneven 1996 version of the iconic work does little to set the stage for this momentous turn. The New York City Ballet chief evinces the same impatience with plot as Balanchine, who claimed that Swan Lake's story amounted to "a prince coming out with a feather in his hat". But in supplanting plot with poetry, Balanchine's two-act distillation clarifies and deepens the drama. In contrast, the reams of steps in Martins' four-acter are neither adequate as metaphor nor fulfil the storytelling imperatives of scene-setting and character development - except, thankfully, in the crucial case of Odette the swan queen and her cosmopolitan nemesis double, Odile.

The prince, for example, arrives at his pivotal 21st birthday party with so little fanfare - despite Tchaikovsky's broad hints - that I mistook the jester for the guest of honour. For the ballroom scene, the choreographer has sexed up the national dances to prepare us for Odile's seduction of the prince, but then adds perky innocent numbers that throw us off the scent.

The end-stopped lines of Sara Mearns' Odile; like a strong rhyme, they popped. Photograph by Paul Kolnik for NYCB. 

Only in the scenes with Odette and Odile does the ballet gain a reason for being - one consonant with the Balanchinean values of speed, daring, leggy breadth, and trust in the steps to tell the story.

Mearns, 25, came to the public's attention five years ago in this double role. She was still in the corps and had yet to be singled out for anything. The bone-thin principal dancer's wide frame accentuates the capaciousness of her movement: her valiant cavalier, Jared Angle, had to run to support her in leaps around the stage.

When the huntsman-prince first stumbles into the woods, Mearns is a whirring tumult, eventually quieting to a stateliness that intimates creaturely strength - her leg crooked around the prince to anchor her as she plunges to the floor. As the calculating Odile, she trades vastness for blunt power, kicking her leg overhead as if punting a ball over a goalie. Always she slips in and out of poetry, sometimes dancing as the character and sometimes as the emotional air the character breathes.

At the wittily titled Balanchine birthday celebration "Saturday at the Ballet with George" (click for whole review) I was struck by how indelibly Suzanne Farrell has marked both Walpurgisnacht Ballet and Mozartiana. (I don't mention it in the review, however.) You feel her in the high-stepping dressage and the way the turning and piqueing steps slide past each other, the dancer skipping a stop to continue spinning around herself. An exhilarating and dizzying effect in both ballets, it means something different in each.

This year, Balanchine's birthday fell on a Saturday - an excellent day for a party, as any child knows - and New York City Ballet celebrated its co-founder from morning to night. Artistic director Peter Martins led a demonstration class for advanced students from the feeder school, current company members discussed what Balanchine meant to them, and of course there were the ballets - from The Prodigal Son, which Balanchine created for Diaghilev's Ballets Russes in 1929, to Mozartiana, made two years before the choreographer died, in 1983 at the age of 79.

In a single day we hopped from pop Americana (Stars and Stripes) to constructivist fable (The Prodigal Son) to slippery elegy (Mozartiana) and reverie (Walpurgisnacht Ballet) - each ballet a master of its kind but none reducible to genre, and all immediately identifiable as Balanchine.

After seven works in a single day, you start making new connections: for example, between the angularities in The Prodigal Son that spell moral deformation and those in The Four Temperaments, two decades later, that suggest astringent clarity. Or between the ballerinas in the late works Mozartiana and Walpurgisnacht (respectively, supple and inward-leading Wendy Whelan and silky Maria Kowroski), who glide backwards while facing forwards as if slipping inexorably into the past.

A mechanical and seductive Kowroski reigning over her goons and the prone Prodigal (Joaquin De Luz). Photo by Paul Kolnik for NYCB.

More epiphanies from a bounty of Balanchine.

For reasons good and bad, choreographers Andrea Miller and Sidra Bell are not typical fare at New York's longtime incubator for new performance, Dance Theater Workshop. On the one hand, their work doesn't question performance's frame: not much meta-conciousness going on. On the other, they like movement--revel in it, experiment with it.

There is no reason why the two hands should be opposed--why a choreographer couldn't explore movement and performance's parameters. Cunningham did. Sarah Michelson does in her latest tour de force, Devotion. Still, a few years ago the opposition had grown as pronounced and unquestioned as it was during the Judson years (the '60s and early '70s). In New York, the trend was particularly prevalent among choreographers under 40, for whom steps often served as placeholders for an idea--about repetition or tedium or the oxymoron of performing pedestrian motion--they didn't want us distracted from. So, no intricate detail, none of that visceral thunk through body and mind that a person understands as "beauty."  

Now that it's waning, I can admit how devastated the Inertia Movement (as I dubbed it a while back) made me. Many lazy assumptions fueled it: that the most complete way to challenge an audience is by rejecting what makes dance pleasurable and/or engrossing: steps, spatial configurations, musicality, surprise; that movement itself doesn't generate ideas, it merely fulfills them; that high theatricality (such as Bell's) is best avoided, but if it must appear it should be ironic.

However successful the result, DTW's getting behind these two young women struck me as a necessary corrective--the kind of contrary probe that keeps honest an organization whose "importance," as the esteemed Claudia La Rocco at the mighty New York Times points out, "rests in its support of artists who truly push and pull at the boundaries and hearts of their art form."

La Rocco complains that Bell and Miller "risked nothing." And yet I haven't seen many dances called "putrid," as another outraged critic dubbed Bell's. So yay for DTW!

By the way, I don't think Bell's dance was garbage (though it may have been "putrid"). It was weird and impossible to make total sense of and it did give off a smell of rot, definitely. But this combination of effects is too unusual to equal trash.

Here is some of my review of Andrea Miller and Sidra Bell:

"Downtown dance" - as the experimental scene was christened long before high rents exiled choreographers to the outer boroughs - has always had a theoretical bent. But about seven years ago, the generation coming up decided to question the parameters of dance by not moving at all. Whatever motion survived the purge simply worked in the service of the choreographer's ideas about dance and performance. The movement had little life of its own, little power to shape those ideas.

Carla Peterson, Dance Theater Workshop's artistic director since 2006, must have sensed how askew the situation was, because she began commissioning choreographers - such as Andrea Miller, 28, and Sidra Bell, 31, on this double bill (until Saturday) - who believe movement and ideas feed each other.

Late in his life, Glenn Gould returned to the music that had jumpstarted his career, the Goldberg Variations. "It was a spooky experience," he said of listening back. "I recognised the fingerprints but not the spirit." With the charming and engrossing For Glenn Gould, Miller demonstrates the conversion of spirit into fingerprints - artistic intent into alienable object.

Snipped second paragraph on the Miller work, which would make sense of this photo (by Yi-Chun Wu).

Bell's Pool also explores alienation - or drowns in it, anyway....

Kendra Samson, Jonathan Campbell and Austin Diaz in Bell's Pool. Photo by Yi-Chun Wu for DTW.

....The notion of numbness overwhelming spiky will is intriguing. Bell only needs to conceive the two separately enough that their embroilment stirs us.

For the full Financial Times take on the controversial ladies, click here.

As for Sarah Michelson's Devotion: talk about visceral thunk through body and mind!

I've always been blown away by Michelson's vision, how far she sees and yet how every detail and every moment-- each blasting entrance and exit, brand of tennies, color of T-shirt, style of hair, choice of civilian or dancer, spindly tween or adult--counts toward that insight. But with her last work, Dover Beach, at the Kitchen a couple of years ago, I came out feeling impatient. The vision was so controlled that, though the stage set--half caged and half free--was mesmerizing, with the women in the large cage doing these long slow developes that they held and held like they were in water, the movement mainly allowed little settling and focusing. It didn't afford a chain of associations, a little burst of pleasure, to make possible the onslaught of darkness which is life as Michelson sees it. And so it seemed less true to me, because invariably in life there are little offerings of distraction, of help. With Dover Beach I felt more completely what I had felt in other of her dances: I am not being imprinted because I am not ever given something whose valence I instantly grock, in my body.

Devotion left me a jangle of responses. The dance is very rhythmic, and the rhythms counterpoint the movement so that, say, a dancer doing a three-count pattern to 4/4 music only returns to the start of the measure after 4 rounds (this is just an example--I'm not sure anyone did this.) Plus she's moving in a staccato circle of second position plies around herself: east, south, west; south, west, north; west, north....like that. The overlapping, incongruent patterns cause a kind of mathematical riot in your brain akin to the sublime. And there are these reinforcing or complicating details, like a single arms jutting out or a head bobbing. 

The punishing qualities of the dance achieve a vibrant relationship with these lyrical strokes. It reminded me of what New Yorker critic Peter Schjeldahl once wrote about beauty:

In my experience, an onset of beauty combines extremes of stimulation and relaxation...Beauty is a willing loss of mental control, surrendered to organic process that is momentarily under the direction of an exterior object....Nothing in itself, beauty may be a mental solvent that dissolves something else, melting it into radiance.

Here's a chunk of my Financial Times review on Devotion (I apologize for the weird indenting):

They are a good match. Playwright Richard Maxwell reinvigorates threadbare genres - the Everyman monologue, the boxing Bildungsroman - with hyper-natural dialogue delivered so woodenly that you actually begin to hear "how people articulate themselves and how they don't", as he has put it. Manchester native Sarah Michelson choreographs every eyelash flutter in marathon dances that expose the nature of performance - the public scrutiny, the numbing repetition. Painful analogies between performance on stage and in life unite these acclaimed iconoclasts.

But the analogies in the two-hour Devotion - choreographed by Michelson, with Maxwell writing the anchoring voiceover for beginning and end - are less painful. Devotion (appearing in Minneapolis and on the west coast later this winter) is crowded with benign influences: Jesus and Mary, Adam and Eve, Cunningham, Tharp and Lucinda Childs. Its view is more dappled than dark.

Michelson still devises endurance tests for her heroic performers: for the first half hour, the voluptuously precise Rebecca Warner; for the second, the slight Welsh 14-year-old Non Griffiths surviving aerobic extremity alone and eventually with James Tyson; and finally, the comically committed Jim Fletcher keeping up with Eleanor Hullihan, as vital as a panther.

Maxwell/Jesus and Michelson/Mary, with apostle Rebecca Warner doing their bidding below. Photo by Paula Court.

"Before the Fall," Michelson says in voiceover, "you were happy to share your identity. Now you need to carve out your own niche. You need your space." The carving and measuring are relentless, with dancers' arms pointing like compass arrows, their feet tracing circles across the wide space. There  is so much ground to cover.

And yet Devotion is not merely relentless. Michelson has always had an eye for movement detail, but the results didn't always resonate. Intent on originality, she often kept the moves hermetically sealed. It was their duration and spatial configuration that counted. Now she has outed her influences, and they....

For the effect that explicit allusions have on Michelson, click here.

By the time I was nine, home was my mother, my sister, and I. We bickered in twos, with the third as chorus and tie breaker. Sometimes my sister would cut me off or my mother her with a complaint about "tone"--how she didn't "like it."

It's a dread phrase, "I don't like your tone," because it implies that there isn't anything behind the tone to have excited it--or that there shouldn't be.  

In the arts, "tone" is the frame the artist gives her subject: quiet, ironic, sincere, dismissive, etc. There is no art without it, but it can be more noticeable in works, like those reviewed here, that are inspired by other works--other dances, movies, books--or that are more dependent on genre identification (thriller, camp horror, etc.) for their effects.  

There aren't many of us dance critics, so it was eye-opening to write on something--the Aronofsky flick Black Swan-- reviewed by hundreds. Most of the critics seemed not to notice the punishing wrath that auteur Aronofsky directed at his heroine (the Portman character). The movie evinces no sympathy or even basic respect for her. This isn't typical of a thriller, in which the thrill depends on us identifying with the victim, not feeling sorry for her.

But critics mainly read the movie as a straight up thriller. Or they made elaborate arguments about its being a camp masterpiece. Only a few, such as Dennis Lim at Slate, allowed that it might be mean and silly simultaneously, the one barring it from camp and the other from being scary. "Aronofsky misses one of camp's most essential qualities," Lim writes. "Its tenderness."

Anyway, here's a chunk of my Financial Times review:

The only story that movies ever seem to want to tell about ballet is of women destroying themselves for their art: The Red Shoes, in other words. Still, the directors usually have a genuine affection for ballet. Not Darren Aronofsky. The mastermind behind The Wrestler and Requiem for a Dream may offer all the usual accessories to the tale - vengeful ageing divas intent on thwarting the bright young thing headed to her doom, tyrannical directors, ambitious mothers, vicious colleagues, absurdly high stakes - but he forgets to like ballet.

Nina (Natalie Portman) is a soloist in a New York company whose stage door, at least, resembles that of New York City Ballet. The director (Vincent Cassel) offers her the lead in Swan Lake on one condition: that she loosen up. How else can she hope to embody the good Swan Queen's wicked double, the lascivious Black Swan?

Lose yourself," the bully exhorts. "Live a little." He prescribes a regimen of sex - with himself, if she'd like - and masturbation. She takes on the second assignment the way she does everything - with deadly seriousness - in her bedroom, presided over by her stuffed animals.

She does little without supervision, usually supplied by her overbearing, undermining mother (Barbara Hershey).

Nina never can lose herself - there are too many contradictory demands on her. But she does gain a demonic double. Ramming the stuffed animals down the garbage chute, this maniac arrives at the theatre in an orgasmic fury and wins a standing ovation and the director's ultimate admiration and gratitude for her Black Swan.

It doesn't ever seem worth it.

The blame lies partly with the constrained camerawork, which never reveals what all the struggle is for. To keep from betraying Portman's modest training - she devoted a year to a discipline that demands a decade at minimum - the camera stays above the waist. Body double Sarah Lane of American Ballet Theatre provides the precise footwork. We shuttle north to south and back again, with none of the midrange shots of the whole body and expressive face that light up classic dance movies: Gene Kelly singing in the rain, Astaire and Rogers rollerskating in the Park, Moira Shearer pas-de-deuxing with stray newspapers on the vast stage of The Red Shoes.

Worse, though, is the relentless misery to which Aronofsky subjects his heroine. Portman's face quivers and her eyes brim with tears in almost every scene - even before the balletmaster raises the stakes. When she speaks, her voice barely emerges from her throat, it is so choked with anxiety. Her spine is stiff with fear. In light of her suffering, the thrill leaks out of this thriller. Who cares whether Nina has really sprouted wings or is only going mad? You want the torture to stop.

If Aronofsky had paid some attention to the ballet Nina is destroying herself over, he might have made a less odious film. Sure, there is a good maiden and a sly vixen in Swan Lake, but, like the ballet's dopey prince, Aronofsky gets them mixed up. The virtuous woman has a self to lose; the schemer merely fakes it.

Odile the Black Swan is easy to understand....

For more on the disconnect between the ballet that the movie alludes to in its very title and the movie itself, click here.

Tone--or sensibility, as Susan Sontag would have it--also counts for a lot in Jack Ferver's Rumble Ghost, at PS 122, which is abashed by its own irony, a smart and very contemporary POV:

In this startlingly funny mash-up of group psychotherapy and the real-estate thriller Poltergeist, the focus of the horror shifts disconcertingly. Director and actor Jack Ferver uses the methods of experimental theatre to produce this slippery effect.

Rumble Ghost starts with an invented prequel to the 1982 Spielberg movie, about children with special powers and their clueless parents trapped in a ghost-plagued house. Dad Steven (Christian Coulson) and mom Diane (Ferver) are taking a tour of their soon-to-be home. They envision Carole Anne and Robbie's room here, kids' bathroom there and Grandma in the basement. Then they envision it again - and again in a dankly hilarious loop. The future is always dimly approaching.

After 20 minutes of scene-setting, "Diane" disappears into "Jack", the actor playing her. We are now in the present, where the problems are not ghosts but the usual disillusionments: boyfriend not hot enough, artist residency in Paris not cool enough and Jack abashed at his shocking ingratitude.

Instead of Poltergeist's spiritual medium and paranormal psychologists, we get drama therapy. Chairs are dragged into a circle and the bossy and defensive therapist "director" (Carlye Eckert) corrals four despondent actors - now going by their real names - into taking turns describing their Inner Child. The Inner Child then retaliates by describing his Outer Adult.

Jack Ferver in Inner Child Therapy. Photo by Liz Ligouri.

The childhood memories are puny and fuzzy enough to seem true to life. So are the glib clinical terms by which the performers characterise themselves: they know all the intricacies of the therapists' diagnostic manual, and they do not believe a word. Their issues have yet to be resolved when the stage goes black.

The circle sitters' peevishness towards this New Age-style exorcism is funny, but more bitterly funny still is Ferver and his Generation Y cohorts' devastation at their own chronic irony. Together with Ferver's understated sureness of touch as director and acting good enough that you hardly notice it, the oscillation between insouciance and desolation makes the show.

In the New York Times, my esteemed colleague Claudia La Rocco asked of Philip Saire's Lonesome Cowboy,

Do we really need another gloss on the lewd, enraged jock or the primal male whose aggression is barely disguised by a shirt and tie? Mightn't we move beyond the tired dichotomy of men pushing one another around violently only to end in sexual embraces?

I see what she means. What saved the Joyce show for me was its dispassion, its capacity to observe the moves of homoerotic aggression as if through a telescope from the moon. You may ask, why bother with such socially loaded material if you strip it of its politics, don't offer insight into its origins or reason for being? Good question! It would have been a better dance if it hadn't so obviously signaled the social milieu-- with suits and ties, and kilts--when its method was mainly inductive, investigating the movement for what it could tell us about the men's stances toward one another. I was struck by how constant their contact was and how it mattered less that they achieve alpha status than that get a chance to touch and wrangle.   

Anyway, here's a chunk of my Financial Times review: 

Swiss choreographer Philippe Saire set the tone for Lonesome Cowboy at curtain's rise. In midnight-blue, vaguely military, uniforms, five dancers moved through a series of typically male poses. The men flexed their biceps, raised their arms in surrender, crossed those arms over their chests in tight refusal and pulled their elbows towards their stomachs in crushing defeat. But they did all this at the dreamlike pace of t'ai chi.

Like the step-by-step Muybridge photographs of Greco-Roman wrestling that inspired the dance, Lonesome Cowboy approaches an essentially violent subject with cool dispassion. For men's tendency to threaten, challenge, corral, tease and mangle each other, the choreographer studied the prison gang in Cool Hand Luke and the platoons in Full Metal Jacket, but his tone is less American pistol-packing polemical than Swiss neutral.

Saire offers his dancers' dodging and feinting, their rolling in each other's arms across the floor in a rough horizontal waltz, their scuffing up the stage's black gravel surface in backward lopes, their lifting each other by crotch or nape of neck, without a story. The movement is beautiful. The dancers - all chestnut-haired and of middling height, as if they were brothers - approached the harrowing moves with fearlessness and keen focus. They slid seamlessly between antic violence, erotic tenderness and exhausted collapse. Frozen tableaux emerged from the long bouts of athleticism like sunlight amid a storm.

The transitions from vigour to quiet, which seem inevitable though you don't anticipate them, account for a good deal of the dance's pleasure....

For the whole story of Swiss cowboys, click here.

Part I of Pavel Zustiak's impending trilogy inspired by the Jerzy Kosinski novel The Painted Bird could have easily been too bathetic, too flat, too outraged. You name it. Instead, Zustiak approached the emotional extremity driving the Holocaust tale with tenderness and quiet (as I say below)--uncannily mirroring the novel's own approach. I'm looking forward to the next two parts, this summer and fall.

Author Jerzy Kosinski may have claimed that as a Jewish child in wartime Poland, he suffered the brutalities detailed in The Painted Bird, but the novel makes other claims. A woman is not merely raped, she has a glass bottle thrust and broken inside her; a man is not simply murdered, he is devoured by hundreds of rats. The novel is an allegory. More than Holocaust atrocities, it conjures the terror of anticipating your extermination: glass breaking inside you. The 1965 book is a pitiless document, told with fairytale simplicity, of a child contending with unfathomable horrors by exiling them from his heart to his imagination.

In the first part of a trilogy inspired by the book - the Baryshnikov Arts Center will present the second in June and PS 122 stages the third in September - choreographer Pavel Zustiak brackets the main event: the boy fingering shards of his shattered memory. The hour-long dance begins with two people and ends with a horde lowering themselves on to their stomachs as if their bones were made of china. Do they lie down because they are weary or because they want to join the boy in his nightmares? Bastard, as the dance is called, is filled with mystery.

When he lives out old memories, the painted bird (Jaro Vinarsky) resembles a cat twitching in its sleep: you can only guess what he is working over.

Brilliant Slovak dancer Jaro Vinarsky. Photo by Megan Green.

The moves themselves are nothing special - they suggest listening, saluting, pelting stones, crawling across ice, and confronting enemies on all sides - but Vinarsky brings to each moment a sense of haunted compulsion.....

For praise of the live music and mention of some flaws that ultimately don't upset the mood, click here.

At Noche Flamenca's annual winter show in the Village, Juan Ogalla's matador lunges and peacock stance drove my friend Haggai crazy. He's like John Travolta from his disco days, he said.

Until a few years ago the Noche regular annoyed me, too. Too showy, too fussy, I thought. And then, about three years ago, he stopped annoying me. Suddenly I was impressed, excited.

I assumed he had changed, but maybe it was me. Perhaps I finally saw past the flash--or grew inured to it. And which is it? So many variables contribute to what a person hears and sees--and only some of it has to do with the dance itself.  

"How do they do that wailing?" my friend exclaimed at the opening of Noche Flamenca's New York season. He meant without seeming phony. Authenticity is a pressing concern for a populist art form born out of dire circumstances. The small, acclaimed Spanish troupe satisfies this imperative by artfully shaping the dances to pull them into the present tense.

Director Martin Santangelo has organised the 90 minutes of solos, duets and musical interludes to accentuate the shifts in mood. In her increasingly desperate siguiriya, for example, maestra Soledad Barrio circles the stage with trilling feet only to stop dead centre, raise her hands jaggedly overhead as if crushing a clay pot between them, and freeze. A singer immediately begins to moan, carrying the torch of Barrio's feeling into another idiom.

The transitions between numbers also bleed feeling. In the forthright opener, the three dancers, three singer-percussionists and two guitarists charge toward us in a tight phalanx. As if to intimate that the company is spent, the next number is quiet and ruminative. Under a single spot, guitarist Eugenio Iglesia plucks out a lyrical tune. Likewise, dancer Antonio Jimenez's dark solea por bulerías - imagine the Tin Woodman in the first throes of lovesickness - evolves slowly in the wake of Soledad Barrio and Juan Ogalla's suave, flirtatious alegrías.

Barrio and Ogalla. Photo by Marie Daix.

Over the course of the evening, you become keenly aware of the blooming of new feeling and the softening of old: Barrio collapsing forward as if pulling a shroud over her head when the stage goes black at her solo's end; Ogalla, once all flash and pride, making his arm as luminous as a candle flame, or letting his face go slack and his arms limp so they can absorb the low, fast tremors of his feet.

For more--on Barrio and Ogalla's "I'm Old-Fashioned" number-- click here.

To nail a tone or sensibility is really hard. And sometimes--for example, at the Japan Society's Contemporary Dance Showcase this year--the pleasure is that you can't:

Now that nearly every pocket of the globe has been exposed to view, a foreign experience is harder to come by. In the 14th edition of this annual showcase, Taiwanese, Korean and Japanese choreographers acknowledge our shrunken world, but they also belie it. The four dances cross all sorts of borders while remaining thrillingly untranslatable.

Aptly, the programme's running theme is how to make sense of an influence, a life, a love or a body that lacks intrinsic logic. Ahn Ae-Soon's charming "Bul-ssang" - the title is a play on the Korean words for "pity" and "Buddhist statue" - simply lets randomness reign. The piece begins with its eight dancers cradling gaudy plaster of Paris religious statuettes - a serene Buddha, an imploring Jesus. Soon they are breaking into duets and solos that combine hip-hop popping and locking with Kathak stamping and the tiny, shuffling ladies' steps of traditional Asian dance.

Ahn Ae-soon Dance Company's Hyo Seon Heo and Hyo In Kim in "Bul-ssang." Photo © LG Arts Center

Eventually they send stacks of brightly coloured plastic plates flying - building material, it turns out, for a model Buddhist temple they will meticulously construct. Without pointedness, "Bul-ssang" mixes kitsch and art, reverence and insouciance.....

For the rest of the programme--the antic Condors, Maki Morishita's absurdist domestic drama, and the jellyfish love story from Taiwan-- click here. 

Yes, ridiculous: now that all the nuts are cracked, I get around to posting these.

It was an especially bountiful Nutcracker season here in New York. Besides the glorious perennial, New York City Ballet's Balanchine production, Ratmansky mounted his very own version for ABT and Mark Morris's Hard Nut made a rare (too rare, I say) East Coast appearance.

The Ratmansky excited me so much, I hardly knew where to begin. But I began. Below, a chunk of that review. We are lucky--the ABT production will return to BAM next year, when I hope to get to some thoughts that didn't make it into this first review (like, for example, more about the choreography, which is delectable, and mainly ensemble work: a very deliberate choice, I think).

For Alexei Ratmansky's latest revelation, a deep and vivid Nutcracker, the former Bolshoi director and current American Ballet Theatre resident choreographer has absorbed influences as various as Balanchine and Mark Morris. Yet in spirit, story and choreography this two-hour drama is indelibly his own: at once goofy and wise, theatrical and musical, casually gestural and mindbogglingly virtuosic, entertaining and moving. Despite its setting in the cosily domestic Biedermeier era of 19th-century Germany, it is also thoroughly contemporary.

Like many Nutcrackers, this one offers a child's-eye view of life's wonders and terrors. Like many, it reveals our heroine, Clara, stretching towards young adulthood. But its vision of this blooming is all its own - with the fantastical learning to live in peace with the real, the private with the public, the gleefully childlike with the soberly adult, in an intricate psychological design.

The ballet begins in the messy kitchen of the Stahlbaum house, where secrets are spilled and appetites cooked up. Two sassy maids show off the mincing steps they have gleaned from past parties, just as Clara (a persuasive Catherine Hurlin) will learn from the current one. She and her little brother Fritz are salivating over more immediate and childish pleasures, a tray of freshly baked sweets.

Beneath the worktable, a scene-stealing Little Mouse (delightful Justin Souriau-Levine) gnaws on a massive wedge of cheese in a foreshadowing of the larger, more ravenous vermin to come. The Stahlbaum parents steal a swoony kiss. And after everyone has left for the festivities in the living room, Drosselmeyer (Victor Barbee) enters. His wavy locks signal his Romantic standing in this stalwartly bourgeois milieu; so does his latest creation, the bewitched nutcracker doll, which he will bestow on his favourite godchild along with his invisible gift for fantasy.

The Little Mouse (Justin Souriau-Levine) eying his nemesis. Photo by Rosalie O'Connor for ABT.

Ratmansky sounds the note of romance lightly but consistently: the life-sized dolls with which Drosselmeyer entertains the guests come in male-female pairs, and Clara's girlfriends pant after the imperious wizard as if he were Elvis. So the winter wonderland music that swells in the wake of the battle between the mice and the toy soldiers anticipates not only the coming snow but also Clara's feelings for the boy inside the Nutcracker shell whom she has saved (a sweetly shy Tyler Maloney).

Yet the choreographer does not make the Soviet mistake of having Clara instantly shed her child heart and fall lustily in love, at which point Candyland would only bore her. Rather, she and the boy mix awkward hugs with snowball fights.

The snow grows dangerous. Photo by Erin Baiano.

When their imagined older selves appear, the children waltz alongside them for as long as they can keep up. (On opening night, a buoyant and slippery Gillian Murphy and an impetuous David Hallberg did the honours as mature princess and prince; at the Friday matinee, it was a coltish Paloma Herrera with a somewhat shell-shocked Cory Stearns. [Ed. note, just promoted to principal--and yet he is hardly used to being a soloist!])

The Sugar Plum pas de deux, the apotheosis of this dream romance, sustains a goofy delirium beside a more traditional nobility. Likewise, Ratmansky injects a quartet of begoggled bumblebee men into the unfolding mass of waltzing flowers, models the Russian dancers after the Three Stooges, and has Mother Ginger's tiny charges do a squat and sassy chain-gang dance with waggling heads and slapping feet (it perfectly becomes them).

He has a special gift for idiosyncrasy, which he celebrates with every low-key, handmade moment and every child - the production abounds in them - allowed his or her fervour and force. (British set and costume designer Richard Hudson brilliantly complements this vision with individually detailed costumes in outlandishly gorgeous hues.)

For the coup de theatre of the Ratmansky Nutcracker--the dangerous snow scene, with hapless Siren Flakes--click here.

To all those Brooklyn parents of youngish children, this is a great Nutcracker for kids--and not just because there are a lot of them. As I suggest above, Ratmansky allows his little charges a buoyant ferocity and goofiness that are the vernacular of children. At the one matinee I got to, a Russian mother behind me who had come down from Ithaca was fretting at intermission over whether she had brought her 5-year-old son to the right Nutcracker--should she have done the Balanchine instead? But at the final bows, she reported it was the first Nutcracker (of four) her son had stayed awake for in the second act. Of course, this may only be because he is now a year older...

The chief new pleasure of this year's Hard Nut 
was Morris's debut as the Homer-Simpson-like Dad Stahlbaum: myopically trying to fulfill his duty as head of the clan when he's most definitely its tail. Everyone was fantastic, in fact--that's one thing you can count on in a Morris production. I didn't have the space here to write much about the dancers, unfortunately.

More than most American versions of The Nutcracker, Mark Morris's campy, thoroughly hopeful take is a love story - about how random acts of horniness in a newly liberated yet still ticky-tacky America might inspire a child to something genuine when she grows up (quickly, of course).

Any decent Nutcracker deftly establishes the real-world setting from which its nightmares and dreams will spring. Morris's 20-year-old tale takes place wherever the defanged Nutcrackers that this Nut fondly despises might tinkle: elevators, supermarkets or at the Stahlbaum Christmas party circa 1970. The guests, in pompadours and polyester disco duds, are already washed up. It makes you want to giggle and moan. The partiers bump and grind and perform other mildly naughty moves on one another - Morris, like Balanchine, has one intrigue tumble after another - but, as Tchaikovsky's light music (too light on opening night) intimates, they know to keep themselves in hand.

Mr. Stahlbaum (played for the first time by the inimitable Mark Morris) leads his guests in Xmas carols. Photo by Stephanie Berger for BAM.

Our heroine Marie (a subtly sincere Lauren Grant) knows nothing. In a world of comic-book black and white, blaring Christmas red and green, and lewd innuendo, the girl wears pink and misses all the jokes. But she intuits what all the grown-ups, except the magnetic Drosselmeier, only grope towards.

Click here for how Morris saves the second half of The Nutcracker from the usual extended coda.

Because Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater has tended to extrapolate badly from its founder's aesthetic and ethos, I forget every year what a strong craftsman Ailey was. Even when he was tired, the work had merit. Revelations is always my first reminder of his craft--and, no, he wasn't tired for that--followed this year by Cry, Night Creatures, and the final section of Three Black Kings. In fact, Ailey produced relatively little dreck. (I'd put Memoria on that list and maybe Flowers and most of The River.)

In the three reviews I wrote for the Financial Times on the current season (through January 2), I found myself wanting mainly to write about the Ailey contribution even when there was a premiere on the program.

Here is my review of the best premiere of the season, Christopher Huggins' Anointed. I situate it in terms of the Revelations legacy as I see it:

At Revelations on Friday, the gloriously craggy singer Ella Mitchell belted out the gospels while Judith Jamison in conductor mode coaxed a low, spooky sound from the chorus and students from the Ailey school dashed into the auditorium to mirror the drama onstage.

When the dancers slapped the air with their fans and threw back their heads to "Rocka My Soul", the audience jumped up, ecstatic. Though they always rise for Revelations - it has become part of the ritual - this time the packed house was possessed.

Whether Revelations cracks the fourth wall or not, its mix of blood memory, pilgrim's progress, popular music and populist faith has served as lodestar for the company repertory, though most works isolate a single strand from those that Revelations miraculously entwines.

The five-week City Center engagement includes snapshots of the Harlem Renaissance (Matthew Rushing's Uptown) and spontaneous subway dramas (Camille Brown's Groove to Nobody's Business); glorified dance parties (George Faison's Suite Otis and the team effort Love Stories); works to Ellington and Gillespie, played live by Wynton Marsalis and company; and spiritual journeys, the most recent of which surely contributed to the glowing mood on Friday.

Ailey alumnus Christopher Huggins's Anointed creates its fervour via the swift, seamless partnering, stretched limbs and curving torso, and constant motion of contemporary ballet. The idiom risks soporific sameness and relentless emotionality, and Anointed's Moby soundtrack - like light at the end of the tunnel minus the tunnel - certainly pushes in that direction.

From left, the gorgeous women of Ailey: Rosalyn Deshauteurs, Olivia Bowman-Jackson, Ghrai DeVore, and Demetia Hopkins in Christopher Huggins's Anointed. Photo by Paul Kolnik.

But the choreography is so enlivened by flight - the women gathered into the men's arms like flower buds or suspended overhead like birds- and so awake to human dignity that it escapes a banal end....

Click here for the whole Anointed review.

And here is a review of the season's opening night, with the company premiere of artistic director in waiting (as my esteemed and witty colleague Roslyn Sulcas has put it) Robert Battle's manly Hunt. But again Revelations distracted me, getting me thinking about what could possibly have been so misunderstood about Ailey's aim to justify such awful contributions from his peers and progeny (with the big exception of Ronald K. Brown).

The company is in the mood for self-love. Last season it celebrated artistic director Judith Jamison's 20th anniversary with a premiere dedicated to her "spirit" and a greatest hits compilation of works commissioned during her reign. Now it is throwing a year-long 50th birthday party for the dance to which it owes its reputation: the founding choreographer's Revelations. There will be live accompaniment on several occasions, a version for a cast of 50, and a documentary by Judy Kinberg of Dance in America renown that prefaces each performance.

It is hard to have an experience that has already been memorialised. By the time the curtain rose on the dancers on the glittery opening night, I only wanted to compare them with their screen versions. But I realised why Ailey dancers can reach outspread hands to heaven, while contestants on So You Think You Can Dance cannot. Even Ailey's most overused gestures come with an aura of modernist faith. His belief in the distillation of emotion and story into spare lines imposes a restraint on his choreography - a sensual interiority - that saves it from kitsch.

But this saving grace depends on the dancers' delivery. Too often.....

Here is the whole opening night review, for your delectation.

Finally, with Three Black Kings, revived in full for the first time in three decades, I am fully justified in going on about Ailey.

Three Black Kings has lain dormant almost since Alvin Ailey created it for a massive Duke Ellington celebration that he organised in 1976. The choreographer had made dances to the Duke from the beginning - Blues Suite, Reflections in D and a suite of works Ellington commissioned to accompany My People for the Emancipation Proclamation's centenary in 1963. But when the composer died in 1974, Ailey outdid himself, creating eight pieces to his music in two years.

Saluting the King (Martin Luther, danced by Glenn Allen Sims). Photo by Paul Kolnik.

Three Black Kings is the genius jazzman's last composition, completed by his son Mercer after his death. It is not his best work, nor Ailey's. But both are good enough to justify this belated revival, especially when Wynton Marsalis's Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra is in the house, as it was last week. In fact, the dance dwarfed everything else on Wednesday night: Billy Wilson's Winter in Lisbon, a paean to 1940s nightlife that drowned Marsalis's smoky, then bleating trumpet in a din of razzmatazz moves; Ulysses Dove's Episodes, a portrait of mean-spirited anonymous sex; and artistic director-designate Robert Battle's solo In/Side, its appealingly gawky vulnerability undermined by a repetitive structure.

For the first black king, the Nativity wise man Balthazar, Ellington alternates propulsive conga drum with piercing clarinet. To the drums Ailey sets bare-chested men whirling like dervishes. To the reed, the dancers bow luxuriously before their demigod king (Jamar Roberts, perfectly typecast). But the music's lyrical solos do not merely announce the presence of royalty; they are a clarion call to a new order. Why else would the Magi "traverse afar"? Ailey sticks to Balthazar before he leaves home.

For Solomon, king number two, Ellington focuses not on the sage judge but on the lover of 700 wives and 300 concubines. So Clifton Brown comes out in a loincloth....

For the whole Black Kings review, click here.