I will be working in Copenhagen NOV 17 through NOV 30 and not posting on SEEING THINGS until my return. Meanwhile, please continue to send your Comments on the pieces already posted, especially recent reviews and all of the PERSONAL INDULGENCES essays; I will post your Comments as soon as I can.

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Three years ago, when Christopher Wheeldon left the security of his position as Resident Choreographer at the New York City Ballet to form his own small company, Morphoses, his head was full of extravagant dreams about making classical ballet new for the 21st century. He even fulfilled some of them. But the economic downturn has thwarted his progress. Ballet companies, no matter how modest in scale, cost major money, and donors are feeling poor these days. Which brings us to the nagging question of whether or not Morphoses is really worth saving--at all costs, so to speak.

The full article appeared in Voice of Dance (http://www.voiceofdance.org) on November 4, 2009. To read it, click here.

The ticket line at Greenwich Village's Film Forum November 4-17 for Frederick Wiseman's latest grand-scale documentary, La Danse: Le Ballet de l'Opéra de Paris, will surely contain as many dance fans as film buffs. And I suspect the local dance crowd will enjoy the movie more. It offers extensive, if necessarily fragmented, footage of the Paris Opera Ballet's remarkable skills, and the celebrated French company rarely visits the States. Dedicated movie-goers, especially those familiar with Wiseman's complete body of work, are likely to be disappointed.

Wiseman's earliest films--shot in black and white, which suited his subjects and his style--still remain his most meaningful works. He treated his topics lawyerly (prior to his film career he was a lawyer).

From his first film, the harrowing Titicut Follies (1967), in which he treats Massachusetts' State Prison for the Criminally Insane, he piles up the evidence point by point like a star prosecutor, allowing concrete facts alone, unadorned by appeals to sentiment--or, indeed, any explication whatsoever--to reveal the obvious verdict.

Later in his film career, he was lured by the siren song of color, even later by the fiction that "everything is beautiful at the ballet," which brought him into my own field, dancing. In 1993 he examined American Ballet Theatre; recently, the Paris Opera Ballet. In both films, he coolly inspects the dance company as an institution, but without much point that I can discern.

La Danse finds him applying his familiar tactics: He opens by placing the institution he's scrutinizing in context. We see a stunning series of freeze-frame shots of Paris, moving closer and closer to the opulent Palais Garnier, where the phantom of the opera held sway, at least fictionally, and which the Paris Opera Ballet has long made its home. (Now it has a second home at the Bastille, about which the less said, the better, and Wiseman says nothing.) Throughout the film, these shots of the city and the Palais Garnier's dark, claustrophobic underground corridors are repeated, but not as a respite from intense emotion, while giving emotion a wider and more natural vein, as Ozu used shots of wind-stirred trees and the like, but instead--well, why actually? La Danse has no easily discernable drama or intention. It just goes on "forever" (158 minutes, to be exact), then peters out.

Oddly, Wiseman doesn't dwell on the gaudy magnificence of the Palais Garnier's public spaces--the gilt, the marble, the mirrored halls, the bronze statues, the crystal chandeliers; we eventually catch glimpses of them as the camera follows a cleaner--but throughout Wiseman emphasizes the gloomy corridors and winding passageways of the interior, the flooding in the lower regions where fish have set up housekeeping, as well as the no-better-than-institutional studios and offices.

As soon as Wiseman has oriented us to the particular domain he's chosen to examine--as always, in his films, a world in itself, sealed off from a wider reality--he introduces the people who inhabit these nondescript backstage spaces: the dancers, the element most likely to seize a viewer's attention. We see them taking the daily morning class essential to professionals and then learning or rehearsing or being coached in their roles.

The dancers' bodies are exceedingly svelte, lithe, and strong--capable of marvels. These dancers are the survivors of a rigorous schooling from about age eight and an equally rigorous weeding out of the pupils not up to standard, throughout the decade that it takes to turn a child with the right anatomy and unquenchable desire into a professional dancer. The POB dancers' technical prowess is stupendous, but everyone seems to take it for granted, and we never see how it came about; nothing is shown of the academy in which these "acrobats of god" are trained, though it is a unique institution in itself.

In the company's studios, the ever-present coaches clearly make a dancer's professional life that of an eternal student. They are forever being corrected, in order to attain some Platonic ideal of execution. These elders who supervise the rehearsals, usually once leading dancers themselves, are encyclopedias of information about how things were done in the past and what might be achieved now. Their bodies have thickened, their legs have lost their spring, but their eyes have become piercingly sharp.

As is typical of Wiseman, not one of the dancers or coaches is named. Similarly, the ballets we see excerpts from are not named; their choreographers unidentified, though some of them appear on camera to coach their own work. (Apart from the familiar nineteenth-century classics, the choreography is nothing to write home about.) This information is revealed only in the Shaker-plain closing credits, another Wiseman hallmark.

Wiseman's familiar use of anonymity while revealing both personality and job description is best effected in the scenes involving Brigitte Lefèvre, the Paris Opéra's director of dance--in other words, POB's boss. Her calm yet steely authority and well-calculated empathy for her dancers (she was once one of them herself) emerge gradually but unmistakably from the several scenes in which she's the focal point. You don't know her name or exactly what she does, but you know what she is. Wiseman persuades us to understand Lefèvre solely from how she behaves in a series of different situations in which she deals with dancers, repertory, casting, company policy, and money. This is no mean achievement.

It's also in the scenes involving the administration that we begin to realize the grand scope and complexity of the POB as an institution. Wiseman also covers the scenic department, where thick but deft fingers are pictured adding gleaming paillettes to the tulle or velvet of a costume, the sewing crew working under short white tutus that are suspended from the ceiling like so many chandeliers. The more pedestrian aspects of a life in dance are recorded too, as in a view of the company's cafeteria that, amusingly, offers us freeze-frames of dishes like the ones we accepted, faute de mieux, in college.

The film progresses from work in the studios to rehearsals onstage in an auditorium hauntingly devoid of spectators. All of these activities and the behind-the-scenes work as well--a studio being spackled and painted, the dancers having their make-up applied--are arranged as a collage in time, but the elements are bricks without mortar to make them adhere, to build something. What does Wiseman himself derive from all the material he's presenting to us? What are we to make of it? Damned if I know.

Towards the end of this seemingly endless film without drama, climax, or even resolution, there's a stirring, extended excerpt of a performance, by Delphine Moussin, of Medea murdering her children in Angelin Preljocaj's eponymous ballet. And there's been a very brief shot of the public entering the lobby of the Paris Opéra, with its exquisite curving double staircase, but to the best of my recollection, we never witness a dance being viewed by the public it's meant for. And, sadder yet, we never hear it applauded.

© 2009 Tobi Tobias

Avery Fisher Hall, Lincoln Center's main concert venue, lacks an orchestra pit, wing space, and a floor suitable for dancing. Musicians performing there stay put once onstage, limiting their motion to decorous walks to and from their places. Not for them phenomenal steps requiring a floor that cushions sleights of foot or a safe landing spot for leaping exits at race-car speed. Nevertheless American Ballet Theatre was installed at Avery Fisher for a four-day engagement, October 7-10.

The full article appeared in Voice of Dance (http://www.voiceofdance.org) on October 14, 2009. To read it, click here.

William Forsythe made his name creating ballets with an eye to pushing the art conspicuously forward, as Balanchine had done. Nowadays he makes concoctions that are so hard to appreciate, detractors find them empty, showy, foolish, inexplicable, or all of the above. It's not that I think he should retrace his early steps. Artists must not - cannot, actually--imitate their past. They need to move ahead to find their own future. I just wish I understood and liked Forsythe's recent work better.

Decreation, which Forsythe and his devoted troupe brought to BAM'S Howard Gilman Opera House for an October 7-10 run, is not so much a dance as a dance cum postmodern drama cum installation cum performance art cum . . . well, you get the idea.

Forsythe's idea is that the world is in pretty hopeless shape. While its inhabitants obsess about communication, connection, empathy, and even love, he tells us, their actions invariably disintegrate into the cruel and bizarre. Though he keeps his stage tidier than the colossal-mess-loving Pina Bausch--even the dancers' clothes, shmatas you could clean the garage in, are fastidiously keyed to a subtle sky-and-earth palette--Decreation recalls the themes of her angst-driven earlier works.

The piece opens with a narrator standing behind a translucent box (also used as a projection screen, part of the media mix the choreographer favors), playing the dual role of defense attorney and accused. Her lines, delivered in a voice cracked with rage, alternate so swiftly between the two characters, they're barely intelligible.
The effect is like that of a particularly hostile Punch and Judy show.

In general, the sound is unbearably raucous, with overlapping verbal provocations accompanied by intermittent music played onstage and crackling static. The static may be there to remind us that everything we say nowadays is being recorded as info in the public domain, to be received by unsympathetic listeners. Occasional silences fail to bring relief; they only make one woman's low moaning audible.

As for the movement in the piece, it's usually violent and grotesque (angular, spasmodic, writhing)--and endlessly repetitive. The groupings, though, are so handsomely arranged, it's hard to believe that the anatomical incoherence represents authentic feeling.

Images suggesting sexual abuse abound. One pathetic figure often reappears, clutching one of her breasts with her right hand and her crotch with her left. She is the Eternal Female Victim, until she slips out of a contorted confrontation with two men, leaving them to undo each other.

Ten minutes into the one-hour show, you feel as if you've stumbled into a loony bin, albeit one that boasts high-end design and a façade of braininess. The latter comes across in exchanges like this one: He says, "Everything is beautiful and nothing hurt." But she says (he reports), "Everything hurt, everything that was beautiful." And then there's the persistent variation on this theme: "I might prefer to love another more than I love you. What would you do?" Only the libretto of one of the gayer Mozart operas could make such business viable, and then it would bubble with fun. Here it's rendered with pensive solemnity, reiterated so often you wonder why the guy at the receiving end doesn't counter with "Gimme a break already!"

In the final segment, the huge round table that loomed in the background is stripped of its formal dinner paraphernalia (crystal, china, sumptuous white cloth) and dragged forward, folding chairs placed to rim its periphery. The whole overwrought cast congregates, seated, for one last blast. Of course a distraught woman mounts the table (remember the Béjart Boléro?) and--oh, never mind. We've all been there before.

© 2009 Tobi Tobias

Vermeer's renowned work The Milkmaid, on loan from Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum, is the centerpiece of a special exhibition that runs through November 29. It's joined by the Met's own five Vermeers and other works, sometimes borrowed, related to it through the time, locale, and subject matter of their composition. The juxtaposition teaches a tough, true lesson about every art: competence enhanced by energy differs radically from sheer genius. None of his Netherlandish contemporaries in the seventeenth century holds a candle to Vermeer.

Painted in the late 1650s, The Milkmaid shows a robust young woman who, from her rough clothes with their rolled-up work sleeves, her setting, and her action--standing at a table heaped with various magnificently crusty breads, carefully pouring milk from an unglazed clay jug into a low glazed bowl of the same material--is clearly a domestic servant. The simple room she stands in holds little but the woman, the breads--some roughly torn into pieces for the bread porridge she's probably concocting--and a few culinary objects.

Two elements, however, suggest an additional dimension: a small foot warmer behind her (imagine the heat creeping upwards when it's used) and a sketch of Cupid shooting an arrow from his bow among the Delft tiles set where the chalky wall behind her meets the floor. An art aficionado of the time would easily have recognized these as emblems of erotic love. Today the ordinary viewer may not notice them or think of their meaning, but surely, if he simply looks hard and steadily at the woman herself, he will suspect, from what Vermeer shows him, that she has a secret inner life, which lures him into contemplating what it might be. The very light in the room--coming only faintly from the window to her left, which contains a small broken panel (can it possibly suggest lost virginity?), while she and her work are bathed in a cool glow from an invisible source to her right--gives an uncanny luminousness and mystery to this sturdy woman.

In this, and in nearly all the pictures of his maturity, Vermeer shows himself to be the master of the beauty of silence, composure, and introspection. As in sublime adagio dancing, his pictures create an atmosphere of suspended breath. And as in most long-lasting ballets, a sense of a profound yet unspecified inner life, subtle and elusive, is exuded by Vermeer's solo figures. Even his couples and somewhat larger groups intimate--in addition to their social relationships (lovers or seducers and the women they desire; mistress and maid)--something of each figure's half-hidden self. Like dancing--even when it's abstract--Vermeer's paintings are an instructive and poignant example of expression without words, without even specificity. They are examples of the enigmas that give the greatest art its soul.

The justly celebrated photographer Robert Frank (1924 - ) focuses on the unvarnished truth about ordinary people, a subject explored in the early works of choreographers like Trisha Brown (in her early, bare-boned "task dances") and Mark Morris (in the motley types of his first dancers' bodies and his combining pedestrian moves with codified technique). Compellingly, Frank reveals his have-not subjects as they are, stripped of the appearance or behavior more privileged people use as a mask, attempting to present themselves to the world as they would like to be seen.

The Met's current exhibition of his work, "Looking In: Robert Frank: The Americans" centers on the book of that name published a half- century ago, showing each of its 83 subtly riveting images with a generous addition of related material. The Swiss-born photographer, who emigrated to the States in 1947, drove a used Ford along a route that crossed the country twice in the mid-Fifties, shooting a vernacular America. He greatest sympathy seems to lie with the poor and with African-Americans--people with little power, financial, social, or political, so that their status ranges from the utterly ordinary to one that can't help arousing the viewer's pity. If these pictures are harsh, it's because life is harsh, and often lonely, though the images include gaiety and human bonding as well as pathos.

Rich folks, the ruling classes, are naked in their pretensions in Frank's images. But this photographer doesn't preach, at least not openly; he records. Quoted in the show's wall text, he says: "I am always looking outside, trying to look inside, trying to say something that is true. But maybe nothing is really true. Except what's out there." It's reality he's after. He grabbed it using a casual style that allowed low light, blurry focus, grainy images, and unconventional composition, according to Frank's wishes and situation. This iconoclastic aesthetic had a major influence on photographers who came after him. And surely any dancer-choreographer who attempts to start building a vocabulary and a pattern for dance-making from scratch--Isadora Duncan, Martha Graham in her early career, Laura Dean--flouting traditional rules in pursuit of her or his own vision, is Frank's kindred soul.

If Frank's work is rooted in life's reality, the paintings and drawings of Antoine Watteau, which dominated French art in the first quarter of the 18th century, present (or, more accurately, imagine) life as artifice.

In the Met's current "Watteau, Music, and Theatre," the elegance and poise of the body's poses and the figures' consciously graceful self-presentation (exuding charm tempered by a regretful melancholy); the soft titillation of an erotic subtext; and the evocation of Cythera, the Greek island considered Venus's birthplace, thus an idyllic land of pleasant dreams, are seen in musical and theatrical settings. One can readily think of them rendered in a ballet--The Sleeping Beauty being the most obvious--or compare them to delicate, fragile porcelain figurines.

As a dance writer I can't fail to mention the well-known picture by Nicholas Lancret (a follower of Watteau, though without his emotional power), which is included in the exhibition. It features the celebrated ballerina Marie Camargo in a garlanded skirt whose hemline she raised slightly above prevailing tradition so that the viewer might see her trim ankles in action. Nevertheless it's another work in the show, a Watteau brimming with atmosphere, that continues to seize my imagination and refuses to let it go. Called Mezzetin, (after the commedia dell'arte character), it shows a seated man past his first youth playing a lute in front of what seems to be a theatrical drop curtain hazily depicting a generic leafy park sheltering the obligatory marble statue.

Perhaps this man once trained as a dancer; his exquisitely muscled lower legs are sheathed in silver stockings that emphasize their admirable form. Lavish fabric--of lush texture and an intense rose hue--dominates his costume, from his generous hat and cape to the outsize rosettes on his shoes. By contrast, his hands, fingering his musical instrument, are grotesque--even deformed--reddened and gnarled as if to represent the result of the life-long practice necessary to a musician or dancer who aspires to the rank of artist. The backward tilt of his body, especially his head, and his faraway gaze suggest a haunting nostalgia for beauty that must vanish--in art and in love--and self-indulgence in that gentle, bittersweet melancholy as well. Forget The Sleeping Beauty; think, instead, of Balanchine's Emeralds.
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It's easy enough to call upon Degas to illustrate the connection between the visual arts and dancing, since dance was one of his primary subjects. But in the Met's several rooms of this artist's dance works, part of the museum's permanent collection, we meet with the several aspects of Degas that exist. There are the pictures--in oils, pastel, or charcoal--of the female Paris Opéra dancers in performance; the studies of these dancers in rehearsal (notice their frequent boredom), in class (where they often stray from classical correctness), or at rest (where their exhaustion affects us viscerally); the bronze casts of small wax figures showing some of the oddest postures dancers assume, often while doing no more than examining the sole of their foot; and the drawings, often studies for work yet to be realized, Nearly all of these tell us that, at heart, Degas was not an artist of the pretty--as collections of reproductions on note cards often insist--but, at his truest, exercised the ruthless pair of eyes and deft hand of an anatomist. My favorite image in this last category--it burned itself into my brain long ago, though I can't recall where I saw it--is a charcoal on, I think, blue paper, of an ankle and foot, in a soft ballet slipper. The foot is turned out and seen from behind. It is absolutely accurate, so the position seems very strange, especially as it's unattached to a body that would give it a context. It is a perfect emblem of ballet.

On my Met visit I cottoned most to the over-familiar bronze figure of a child dancer (one Marie van Goethem) who was a student--one of the "little rats"--at the Paris Opéra. Strangely, the nearly life-size figure (first created in wax ca. 1880; cast in 1922) is adorned with some fabric: she wears a ragged-edged dancing skirt of coarse weave ending just above the knee, while the bronze braid that falls down her back is tied with a long-streamered bow of faded pink satin ribbon. Her right leg is thrust forward, as in fourth position, but it's loose-kneed and takes no weight, as if she were "at ease," between the more strenuous efforts of her trade. Her arms are pulled straight behind her back, hands clasped, the pose emphasizing her touching slenderness. The most eloquent part of her is her head, tilted defiantly upward with unquenchable pride.

She made me think of the little girls of the New York City Ballet's academy, the School of American Ballet, each with her pluck, her self-assertion, and her desire to have the world understand she is a member of the elite and that though she may be a mere--oh, let's say--advanced-beginner in her exotic trade, she has at least been selected as worthy of training, and her aspirations are sky high.

© 2009 Tobi Tobias

Mark Morris, who shares top honors (with Paul Taylor) as America's greatest living choreographer, is at mid-career, but maybe no longer at the top of his game.

The full article appeared in Voice of Dance (http://www.voiceofdance.org) on August 25, 2009. To read it, click here.

It's not that they change the choreography noticeably, though they may intensify the phrasing and the shifts in emphasis between light and shade. It's more, rather, that they learn to "sell" the piece to the public by believing in it, much in the way a parent or other committed guide bolsters an ill-endowed or wayward child.

They give it extra and more intently focused physical energy, more psychic communication between dancer and dancer or among groups of them. They animate areas of the stage that before looked empty or dead with its lifeless figures standing lackadaisically where the choreographer has placed them, without awakening their consciousness, as if waiting for a bus. They attempt to discover what the choreographer intended this particular ballet to be "about" and make it their own vision. Not for a moment now are they content, as they appeared to be at the ballet's premiere, to be satisfied with simply going through the motions.

The feeble ballet may have the grace to vanish permanently from the repertory at the end of the season or after one last try in the following season, but meanwhile you've got to admire the dancers for their resourcefulness and generosity of spirit in the face of fiasco.

© 2009 Tobi Tobias

This article originally appeared in the Culture section of Bloomberg News on July 27, 2009.

July 27 (Bloomberg) -- Merce Cunningham, the American choreographer revered for his continual reinvention of dancing, has died. He was 90.

He died in his sleep last night in his Manhattan apartment, according to Leah Sandals, a spokeswoman for the Merce Cunningham Foundation.

A compelling dancer himself, Cunningham created a body of work that questioned the traditional premises of dancing, providing unique answers that were both baffling and beautiful.

"What interests me is movement," Cunningham said in a 2005 interview with Bloomberg News. "Not movement that necessarily refers to something else, but is just what it is. Like when you see somebody or an animal move, you don't have to know what it's doing."

Some aficionados found Cunningham's work inscrutable. Others found it absorbing and wholly original in the worlds of modern and classical dance. Watching it could be like taking a quiet walk alone, open to the fluctuating qualities of landscape and weather. To some admirers, it was the only game in town.

Cunningham never made things easy for his audience. His dances shunned narrative and character. They were simply about dynamic human bodies moving in space. Occasionally the work assaulted the spectator. The 1964 "Winterbranch," with its Sisyphean movement, its darkened stage from which lights shone full blast into the viewers' eyes and its abrasive La Monte Young score had people exiting the theater in droves.

Placing the Music

Steadfastly, Cunningham kept dance, music, and decor separate entities, co-existing in time and place. He would inform the composer of the required duration and that was that. The dancers in a new work usually first heard the score that would accompany them at the dress rehearsal of the piece.

In creating a dance, Cunningham sometimes turned to the "I Ching," the Chinese system based on rolling dice. Injecting an element of chance into his work, he said, expanded his choreographic choices that might otherwise be limited by habit. Zen philosophy, with its emphasis on the present moment, and a keen sensitivity to nature also informed his work.

Mercier Philip Cunningham was born on April 16, 1919, in Centralia, Washington, the middle son of three born to Clifford Cunningham, a lawyer, and his wife, Mayme.

While his two brothers followed their father into legal careers, Cunningham found his path through a neighbor, Maude Barrett, a retired vaudeville performer. Cunningham took classes at Barrett's local dance school, starting with tap. With Barrett's daughter as his partner, he performed at auditoriums and fairgrounds.

Meeting Martha Graham

After high school he attended George Washington University in Washington, D.C., then returned home after his first year. In 1937 he enrolled at the Cornish School in Seattle (now Cornish College of the Arts), which prepared students for the concert stage. He planned to be an actor but kept studying dance, including a class on Martha Graham's work, taught by a former member of her company.

It was during his second stint of summer classes at Mills College in Oakland that he met Graham, who invited him to join her company in New York.

A marvelous dancer, agile and fluent, yet with a commanding intensity, Cunningham danced with the Martha Graham Dance Company from 1939 to 1945. His roles ranged from March in the Emily Dickinson piece, "Letter to the World," its feather- light jumps seemingly impelled by gusts of spring wind, and the damnation-and-hellfire Revivalist in "Appalachian Spring."

New Vision

He began choreographing -- solos, mostly -- in the 1940s and formed his own company in 1953, at the legendary Black Mountain College.

Unlike Graham, who invented her own rooted-to-the-earth, gut-sprung vocabulary, Cunningham borrowed mostly from his mentor's opposite -- classical ballet, which emphasizes balanced, harmonious proportions, elegant verticality and the illusion of ease. He gave the style wry new twists.

Cunningham set his early works to familiar music, particularly that of Erik Satie, but the choreographer's most significant musical collaborator was the avant-gardist John Cage, who was also his life partner for half a century. Cage died in 1992.

Along with David Tudor, another early participant in Cunningham's enterprise, Cage came to favor music that was created at the performance, played on electronic instruments. Cunningham also worked with outstanding visual artists whose forward-looking sensibilities overlapped his own, among them Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Mark Lancaster, Frank Stella and Andy Warhol.

Painted Birds

"I don't try to tell them what to do," Cunningham told Bloomberg TV about working with other artists. "I much prefer that they use their way of thinking and imagine, so that something would be added to this joint working that no one of the three of us -- the dance, the music and the decor -- could predict."

Cunningham created a large body of drawings on his own, mostly of birds and animals. Every morning, he got up and made one. The Margarete Roeder Gallery in New York City, where the works appeared over the years, has a Cunningham exhibition on view through July 31.

Athletic and Magisterial

High points of Cunningham's seven decades of dance-making include "Summerspace" (1958), with its dancers streaming past Rauschenberg's pointillist backdrop in leotards that match it; the exuberantly athletic "How to Pass, Kick, Fall and Run" (1965); "RainForest" (1968), where the dancers move like jungle creatures among Warhol's silvery helium-lofted pillows; "Sounddance" (1975), which seems to launch its performers into a violent intergalactic world; "Points in Space" (1986-1987), which takes its title from Einstein's declaration that there are no fixed points in space; and "Ocean" (1994), a magisterial piece that has its dancers framed by concentric rings -- the spectators and, behind them, the musicians.

He described "Ocean" this way in a November 2008 interview with Bloomberg's Muse TV: "It's like being in a bath of sound, because it comes from every source around you. In doing it, you find out something else about dance, something that you never thought of before. I always look forward to seeing what that will be."

Besides repertory works, Cunningham created one-time-only 90-minute "Events." These were collages -- of old dances, excerpts from his repertory and new material -- in which several unrelated passages often occurred in the performance space at once, with clusters of dancers taking different points as front, accompanied by a sound score devised for the occasion.

Chance and Change

The productions underlined Cunningham's faith in chance and change. They had a practical purpose, too, allowing his work to be seen in sites other than theaters. Events, untitled except for number (#1 was in 1964), occurred in venues ranging from the ruins of Persepolis in Iran to Cunningham's own studio in Greenwich Village, where a wall of windows, revealing the cityscape, often as the sunlight gradually faded, became the dancers' backdrop.

Today Cunningham's work is considered the great link between the so-called Mid-Century Moderns (from Graham and her contemporaries to Paul Taylor) and the postmodern choreographers who emerged in the 1970s such as Twyla Tharp, rebelling against traditional theatrical conventions.

Though his company had perpetual financial strains, Cunningham was showered with awards during his long career. Among the most prestigious were New York City's Handel Medallion, the Kennedy Center Honors, a MacArthur Fellowship, the Golden Lion of the Venice Biennale and the rank of Officier of the French Legion d'Honneur.

Attracted Talent

Cunningham attracted dancers of extraordinary capability for his company. Chief among them was Carolyn Brown, whose intelligent book about her two decades with the troupe, beginning with its inception, "Chance and Circumstances: Twenty Years with Cage and Cunningham," was published in 2007.

Even in his last years on stage, while crippled by arthritis, Cunningham riveted an audience's attention. In his 1999 one-time-only duet "Occasion Piece," although severely restricted mobility, he managed to upstage Mikhail Baryshnikov.

In middle age Cunningham already looked older than his years and eventually came to resemble a cross between magician and guru. He was deeply intelligent, a loner at heart though always friendly in his behavior, witty, perceptive and forever devoted to "making it new."

As celebrated in Russia as the Mississippi is in America, the mighty Dnieper River has accreted to itself a history, an atmosphere, and a mythology that reaches out to several arts--just as Mark Twain's masterwork, Huckleberry Finn, for example, is bound to the Mississippi.

Rushing to the Black Sea, the Dnieper passes through Ukraine, where Alexei Ratmansky, the new Artist in Residence at American Ballet Theatre, first danced professionally. Working to the Prokofiev score originally choreographed by Serge Lifar in Paris in 1932, Ratmansky put his singular ingenuity into his own version of On the Dnieper--a 40-minute ballet deriving its title from the music, which is considered his first official work for ABT. (A pièce d'occasion for the gala showcasing Nina Ananiashvili, which opened the company's May 18 - July 11 season at the Metropolitan Opera House, apparently doesn't count.)

Like all of Ratmansky's work that I've seen, On the Dnieper reveals the multiple influences on the formation of his aesthetic: training in the Bolshoi Ballet's academy in Moscow, then, when rejected for admission to the parent company, performing as a principal dancer with the Ukraine National Ballet, the Royal Winnipeg Ballet, and the Royal Danish Ballet, and choreographing for prestigious companies from St. Petersburg's Kirov Ballet to the New York City Ballet. For some four years he has been the artistic director of the Bolshoi Ballet and one of its most inventive choreographers, at times taking his inspiration from Soviet-era ballets once thought better forgotten and making them utterly new and delightful, as with The Bright Stream. Now he has given up the leadership of the Bolshoi, with its soul-devouring administrative demands, to concentrate on his choreography.

On the Dnieper tells a tale that the Romantics among us will believe in, others not. Sergei (Marcelo Gomes in the first cast, as are the others I name) returns from World War I to his beloved native village, indicated by weathered wooden fences, and the poignant springtime sight of blooming cherry trees just beginning to drop their petals. Though welcomed by his fiancée, Natalia (Veronika Part), he's distracted by Olga (Paloma Herrera), the community's vivacious beauty who has already developed a distaste for the fellow to whom she's engaged (David Hallberg). Parental figures and the young people of the village surround them, witnesses and judges as the plot plays itself out--with much self-recrimination on Sergei's part, and a selfless renunciation in favor of Olga on Natalia's part--to an ecstatic happy ending amid a veritable storm of petals, in which love conquers all. Yes, the program note is needed, but Ratmansky comes closer than most dance storytellers to indicating situations and, especially, deep feeling directly through his choreography.

What I like best about this ballet is its mood. Without making a melodramatic fuss, it supports the primacy of feeling, the respect for social behavior (at its moral base and in its formal traditions), and the wrenching conflict between those and the pull of the unexpected, often inexplicable, desires of the heart. It evokes the world as imagined by Tudor and by Chekhov.

Herrera, I'd venture to say, has never danced more eloquently. Finally, no doubt largely because of Ratmansky's ballet, she's realized that bravura technique cannot, alone, make a ballerina. In On the Dnieper she's exploring the realm of fusing her extraordinary physical prowess to a range of emotion. I hope the revelation of this possibility will carry through to the rest of her repertory; it could make her glorious.

Gomes, as always, has a commanding presence and here he lives up to the way he looks. At the same time, he is very affecting in his confusion and regret when he realizes that, for his own happiness, he must betray a sensitive woman he once loved. He needs only a little more detail and nuance, the patina a role acquires with time in the hands of a resourceful interpreter.

Part is just right for the reticent sensitivity of the abandoned, self-sacrificing sweetheart. I was touched by the moment she "gives" Sergei to Olga and they bow to her formally, then rush off, elated, to their future and she falls to the ground, unwitnessed in her anguish. She's the one character that made me think of her future--never marrying, I fantasized, becoming a nun or a nurse to the incurable, anything that would allow her to give her life to succoring humanity and expunge self-interest from her soul. The fact that Part's role is about emotions rather than famously difficult steps relaxes her frequently visible mistrust of her technical abilities, freeing her as a creature of the stage.

Hallberg, unfortunately, has a role that doesn't show him to any particular advantage, though he may, like many a wise dancer, make something better of it as he performs it more.

It was fun to see the seniors associated with the company (teachers, coaches, regisseurs, and the like) in the parental roles and wonderful to see a corps de ballet convincing in its robust dancing and in its walkaround roles as well, as witnesses, abettors, and benevolent spies--roles that make a community cohere.

For reasons I can't fathom, ABT's artistic director, Kevin McKenzie has returned to the work of the Canadian James Kudelka and Prokofiev's Cinderella score, after adding the choreographer's self-consciously quirky program-length version of the fairy tale to the repertory three years back, without much success.

Kudelka's 1991 Désir, given its ABT premiere on this season's Prokofiev program, is a plotless one-acter that uses the only four remarkable passages in the Cinderella score and two other numbers gleaned from the composer's Waltz Suite (reworked from his opera War and Peace). The dance is a pretty little thing, nothing more, admittedly useful to fill out a mixed-repertory program, but essentially insignificant.

Two couples, one of them (Gillian Murphy and Blaine Hoven) opening the piece, the second (Isabella Boylston and Cory Stearns) appearing midway through, demonstrate joyous, fulfilled love, the first pair with an allegro pulse, the second in an adagio mode.

Misty Copeland and Carlos Lopez seem equally content, but they introduce a small ensemble expressing the doubts and tensions that arise between the sexes. Clusters of closely bonded young men and similarly united young women reflect the emotional difficulties of moving beyond a single-gender group. I think. This is not the clearest ballet in the whole world.

The movement is often soft and curving, over a firm ballet base. Nothing you haven't seen before. The dance would benefit from a wider, more inventive vocabulary.

There is no hint of a subplot behind the activities, several of which are incomprehensible. Why do the men repeatedly stretch out supine and stiff? Is this a premonition of death? What's the meaning of a repeated frozen arm position in which the women hold their full skirts bunched into a bundle in front of their bellies, like a wedding bouquet or its logical aftermath?

The best elements of the piece are the gorgeous costumes by Marjory Fielding (designed for the National Ballet of Canada production)--and the presence of Isabella Boylston in the first cast. Boylston has an uncanny calm that rivets the viewer's attention, even when she's tossed into the air and flipped backward by her partner. She has the face of a Flemish Madonna, a long, suavely proportioned body, and impeccable technique. In repose, she seems sculpted from marble; in motion, she's like that cool, noble stone magically endowed with fluidity. The fact that she has incredibly beautiful feet is underlined by the duet's finishing with her partner's extending his body along the floor to kiss one of them. The gesture is embarrassing, though, at odds with the formal tone of the duet, and entirely unnecessary. However, Boylston, still a corps de ballet dancer, deserves promotion to soloist rank on the performance of this role alone.

As for the costumes, the women's ankle-length dresses have a subtly composed palette of colors related to fuchsia and fire-truck red. They're set off by one in muted blue, another in intensely deep violet. The lavish skirts swirling in unison have a ravishing effect. The men wear casual t-shirts in shadowed tones that echo the women's gowns; they top workaday trousers of burnt sienna. The women are flowers; the men, the earth from which they spring.

One way to sell tickets to the ballet (or to sell anything else, for that matter) is to cause a sensation. In the States, the general public that comes to the ballet loves a sensation (for one thing, it justifies the cost of the tickets) and does its best to exaggerate the dimensions of one with wild cheers and applause during the performance, escalating into feverish standing ovations and bouquets from the spectators pitched onto the stage at the end.

During ABT's current season, the Bolshoi Ballet's Natalia Osipova--whose fleet, airborne technique took my breath away in 2005 in a solo in her company's Don Quixote--did a stint that I assumed to be a tryout for a larger guest association with ABT in the future, dancing the title role in two Romantic-era ballets, Giselle and La Sylphide.

Sensations, however, have only a tangential connection with artistry. Osipova's elevation (an issue of hip flexibility and leg power) and fleetness (foot articulation and power) are near miraculous. So much so that they have become phenomena--the feet working like hummingbirds' wings, for instance--not really the province of dancing anymore. Other parts of her body have been neglected: her face doesn't create the illusion of beauty that enhances a ballerina; her torso has no fluidity. She has also obviously been over-coached, a fact that destroys the childlike naturalness she had when I first laid eyes on her.

Giselle was the better of her two portrayals, thanks in part to the sympathetic partnering of David Hallberg. Still, with emotions coursing through her one after another at febrile speed, none of them lasted long enough to register and eventually add up to something coherent. And her continual grinning in Act I, as if this were an emblem of joyous, innocent love, should have been squelched at the first rehearsal. Her subsequent Mad Scene was reasonably good, if still immature.

In the second act, Osipova carried everything before her, seeming to fly and whirl at once when initiated into the ghostly tribe of wilis by a wonderfully malevolent Veronika Part. Still, the necessary change in movement texture between the live girl and the dead one who still retains her early passion for her lover, forgives him, and saves his life, was absent. I would guess she understands the difference intellectually, but can't yet make it happen physically. If, with time, experience, and sound professional advice, she still doesn't, her sensational effects are likely to deteriorate into mere circus tricks.

Osipova's La Sylphide was a disappointment. Her particular gifts do little to evoke the enchanting Bournonville style (which the Russians have never mastered and the Danes themselves are losing) in its phrasing, irrepressible ebullience, or charm. Her partner, Herman Cornejo, who seems to be able to adapt to any style he tries, was the hero of that performance.

June 27 saw Nina Ananiashvili's farewell performance with American Ballet Theatre. She took on the celebrated dual role of Odette-Odile in Swan Lake, the very thought of which can make a ballerina two decades younger than she quake in her pointe shoes. (Ananiashvili is 46.) The performance was extraordinary; I've never seen anything like it. Throughout, she demonstrated the exquisite technique that she has honed to perfection over the decades, but here, in the "white acts," she added little miracles like executing the mime passages, as in her relating her woeful story to Prince Siegfried (Angel Corella)--"my mother's tears formed this lake"--so fluidly it became the veritable cousin of dancing. Then, with a masterly containment of emotion so profound it was almost unbearable, though devoid of obvious acting, she made the dancing so refined it looked abstract. If classical dance can be transmuted in the equivalent of an Ozu film, this was it.

Instead of the cheap thrill of the full 32 fouettés (which, by the way, neither Margot Fonteyn nor Maya Plisetskaya ever mastered) she did a mere 24 as neatly as could be imagined and wisely quit while she was ahead. As if to make it up to the audience this slight diminishment of bravura, she executed a surprise carnival-style move in which Von Rothbart (Marcello Gomes at his sexiest) threw her high into the air to be caught in the deluded Siegfried's arms. The three repeated the feat on the curtain-calls, much to the delight of the madding crowd.

In the Black Swan act, Ananiashvili's rendition was tantalizing enough to contrast with her Odile, and some of her feats, though subtly executed (such as long balances in which she seemed to stretch up and out as on a breath) were remarkable. She made a quiet though compelling seductress, though, admittedly, her Odile doesn't seem as truly evil as her Odette seems good by nature's design.

The bows themselves, which seemed to run on hourglass time, rather than that of a stopwatch, constituted a ballet within themselves and were designed with unusual good taste. Even the single explosion of confetti, white and gleaming, looked like a falling star in a fairy tale instead of the familiar torn up paper drifting listlessly through a net. My favorite moments were the cast's applauding the ballerina, and she, them; Ananiashvili's personally presenting one white flower to every single corps de ballet swan; ABT's other ballerinas, in svelte black mufti, coming on to offer the heroine of the hour a long-stemmed blossom, followed by her male partners in the company, and, later, the artistic director himself, Kevin McKenzie, to whom Ananiashvili bowed low as she had to the Russian coach and to the former Kirov prima, Irina Kolpakova; the appearance of the ballerina's little copper-haired daughter, whose mom promptly enough shooed the child back into the wings after a bow or two; Ananiashvili's catching in one hand bouquets that the audience hurled at the stage, simply snatching them out of the air. You might say she has a gift for coordination.

At the opposite end of the spectrum, a pair of Giselles I saw, differently tempered because danced with two different partners, were luminous. With Marcelo Gomes, Ananiashvili matched the power of his stage presence; with Jose Manuel Carreño, she echoed his more understated, yet emotion-filled approach, effortlessly launching shape after beautiful shape into the air, then letting them dissolve into the flow of the dancing.

Moving through the trajectory of Giselle's story, Ananiashvili gives us both the shyness and blitheness of an innocent girl utterly in love; the suddenly distorted landscape of a woman literally broken-hearted by that lover's betrayal; then, beyond the grave, a mature sorrow for his plight, his anguish as well as an enduring devotion that saves his life. As the story unfolds, we come to know a remarkable person who remains nakedly true to herself from beginning to end, one of those rare human beings wrapped in a cloak of tenderness.

Ananiashvili's Mad Scene--the result, no doubt, of years of thought, experiment, and minor but telling adjustments--is an example of how the wholeness of her performances is now invariably extraordinary, every detail of movement and feeling perfectly accounted for, anything extraneous firmly excised.

In both Giselles, she gave us immaculate dancing that was nevertheless softened and full of grace. Yes, her grands jetés cleave the air, but they seem as downy as rose petals. In her high-speed whirling initiation into the tribe of wilis, her legs swathed in the layers of her tulle skirt, her foot barely grazes the floor as she turns herself into a gossamer cloud caught in whirlpool of wind. Her grace has a spiritual dimension, too, that makes her Giselle real, loveable, and tragic, and it is this quality--of the soul perpetually infusing the body--that make our hearts hers.

Ananiashvili's many fans may wonder why this much beloved ballerina would withdraw from the big time when her technique was still up to the challenges of such works and her artistic powers were at their height. Reasons for such major decisions depend greatly on instinct--what your heart or gut is telling you. But Ananiashvili is practical enough to placate her audience (and, perhaps, herself) with a handful of practical arguments in favor of bowing out: to support her husband, Grigol Vashadze, Georgia's Foreign Minister, who is pursuing a burgeoning political career, just as he has helped her in the last two decades of her career; to spend more time with their young daughter, Helene; to further the development of the State Ballet of Georgia, based in her home town of Tbilisi, which she was specifically brought in to head in 2004; and because she knew--and admitted to herself, as so many dancers are unable to--that the body's abilities inevitably fade with age. Any one of these reasons would be persuasive.

There's no denying that a significant part of Ananiashvili's appeal is her sheer physical loveliness. Her face, with its creamy skin, dark hair, and heavily browed, soulful dark eyes, has the cast of a Spanish Madonna. Underneath that look is an instinctive empathy for the characters on stage around her. Her long, exquisitely proportioned body seems destined for classical dancing. Her promise of beauty and the perfect poise of her body--a natural harmony--is evident even in snapshots of her as a child. Complementing these attributes is a melancholy frequently underlying even her most vivacious roles, where her smile is infectious, even teasingly flirtatious, yet her eyes suggest that she knows that everything in life is evanescent.

From her first engagement with an American company (a guest stint with the New York City Ballet in 1988), we've seen how smart she is, how open to ideas about dancing that are radically different from the Russian ones in which she was scrupulously bred. She was accompanied in the venture by her celebrated Bolshoi colleague Andris Liepa, who continued to do everything in the Russian way familiar to him, while Ananiashvili tried to absorb Balanchine's way.

In the course of her sixteen years at ABT, we've watched the harmony and flow of her dancing in the lyrical vein become more and more beautiful and natural, like the motion of a nymph--a naiad perhaps. The steely aspect of her personality has served her in good stead--both in her dancing, when virtuoso passages require it, and offstage in shaping her career and leading the State Ballet of Georgia, essentially a pleasant regional company that the government is eager to upgrade. She is also blessed with a sense of humor, which Alexei Ratmansky caught in Waltz Masquerade, the pièce d'occasion he created for her to perform at ABT'S opening night gala. It might have been called "The Diva and Her Devotees."

Diane Solway, interviewing Ananiashvili in W Magazine, asked the ballerina what she'd be doing after her farewell performance with ABT. The answer: "Crying." Her tears were not the only ones shed on the occasion.

© 2009 Tobi Tobias

George Balanchine's A Midsummer Night's Dream, created for the New York City Ballet in 1962--with co-collaborators William Shakespeare (libretto) and Felix Mendelssohn (music)--is a perennial enchantment.

Some observers will dismiss it as too "pink" (a favorite Barbara Karinska color for her costumes), but it covers a wide spectrum of jealousy, greed, questionable uses of power, sexual attraction between woman and ass, foolishness, stupidity, and murderous rage (albeit most of these tempered by their comic aspect) before arriving at its magically happy resolution.

You know the story; you read it at school. If you've forgotten it, treat yourself to a refresher course. The delightful text is no further away than your computer (http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/8609). Though Balanchine is remembered as saying he was primarily inspired by the music, he renders the narrative deftly. At the age of eight, apparently, he played one of the tiny creatures of the air that inhabit the story in a St. Petersburg production, and City Ballet alum claim he remembered and would recite excerpts from the text in Russian.

From the company's week of Midsummer performances this season, at the David H. Koch Theater, I chose the cast that featured Teresa Reichlen as Titania, Queen of the Fairies. Reichlen's career is still relatively young, but she's been a winner from the start. It's not just the impeccable dancing accentuating her very long limbs and perfect line I admire, but her courage as well. She tackles prominent assignments with authority and, it seems, the expectation of pleasure.

As Titania she has decided upon a combination of empathy with her fellow characters--child, adult, and--yes--donkey. She is alert to their needs without ever relinquishing the characteristics of queenliness. For example, she allows the laborer magically transmuted into an ass his yen for dewy grass to nibble on but never loses her faith that--coaxed onto his hind legs--he may make a suitably elegant partner in a pas de deux.

When, after much imperious argument, she finally cedes possession of the changeling child in her retinue to Oberon, her kingly counterpart, it's simply because he desires it so intensely (even though his methods of acquiring it include attempted kidnapping). Everything about Reichlen's Titania is warm as well as aristocratic.

Reichlen can't yet lay claim to the sudden plunges from the vertical that made Suzanne Farrell's celebrated interpretation so sensuous and exciting, but perhaps that is never to be.

The male stars in this performance, Gonzalo Garcia as Oberon and Troy Schumacher as Puck, were adequate but not memorable. The most striking performance was given by Janie Taylor, beautifully partnered by Tyler Angle, as the couple in the wedding divertissement who embody perfect love. This season has marked Taylor's return to the repertory after prolonged absences. A fragile, often thrillingly wild dancer, Taylor is one of those performers whose soul seems to dance through her. The audience recognized this in a instant, with hold-your-breath silence and then tempestuous applause. She's one of a very rare breed and deserves all the cherishing that can be given her.

A bevy of children (pupils of the company-affiliated School of American Ballet), playing the chorus of winged insects or fairies threaded through the piece, made it heartening to see that today--compared to yesteryear when I first saw the ballet--the students have acquired a fleetness and clarity unknown to their predecessors and at an earlier age. (This means that younger, thus smaller, children can be used, offering a more piquant contrast with the adults). Balanchine, of course, had a way with dancing children that has never been equaled in the States. He assigned each level of youngsters steps they could do effectively, with precision and verve, without losing their natural charm.

Transparency note, should one be needed: As a student at the School of American Ballet, my daughter danced for a few seasons in this chorus of airy sprites. She was young enough to need an adult escort to and from the theater, and it was a long, dreary wait between commutes, since the kids figure in the choreography from beginning to end. But the music was piped into the chaperones' holding pen during the performance, and I'd often find my way (i.e., sneak into) the back of the auditorium just in time to watch the exquisite Act II pas de deux. Danced, appropriately, by a couple that has no role in the story, it is an abstraction of love's deepest feelings and perfectly beautiful.

A few weeks before the City Ballet finished its spring season with seven performances of Midsummer, the Baryshnikov Arts Center offered a single screening of the 1967 film version of the ballet, directed by Dan Eriksen and the choreographer. Whatever its flaws, and they are considerable, it reveals the qualities that made its leading dancers legendary. The young Suzanne Farrell reveals miracles of supple and impetuous motion as Titania. As Oberon, Edward Villella deploys his mercurial footwork, mating ferocious speed with rock-steady power. He originated the role, and his only subsequent rival since has been Helgi Tomasson, rendering the choreography in the fleet style that made him look airborne. Arthur Mitchell, as Puck (he, too, created his role) is simply not replaceable--a gleaming-skinned figure with a handsome, knowing face, who is clearly a born trickster.

The cast also includes the already dazzling Patricia McBride, Nicholas Magallanes, a soulful Mimi Paul, Jacques d'Amboise, and Allegra Kent. Veteran City Ballet followers will also enjoy singling out, amid the corps, dancers they recall fondly from the company's mid-twentieth-century blossoming.

In many ways the production is a natural result of the era's prevailing film conventions, which were then so commonplace as to be unnoticeable. But in no way is it equal to the live performances the City Ballet has given us over the years and what video has accomplished in the last half century to transfer ballet more authentically to the screen.

The worst aspect of the film is its scenery. It's not merely a case of the patently fake asking us to take it for reality but also a question of its hampering the choreography. The combination undermines the ballet in both its woodland-animated-by-spirits and its aristocratic locales. In the forest, the landscape has the falsity of a plaster and plastic background for a model railroad or a Playmobil rainforest. What's more, the pseudo-Mother Nature foliage constantly obscures the view and threatens the dancers with vines to trip over, trees and bushes to block their path. One of the basic requirements of Balanchine dancing is clear space.

The second act takes us to Theseus's court to celebrate three weddings, those of the Duke of Athens himself with the Amazon huntress Hippolyta (an odd couple, perhaps) and the two pairs of plebeian lovers, whose complicated, shifting interrelationships ("What fools these mortals be!") are finally straightened out--not without some early errors--by Puck at Oberon's command, using doses of a rare rose pollen. The royal residence and grounds, with their imposing staircase and multi-tiered fountain, look like a Reno rendition of Louis XIV's palatial concept of house and garden.

At the finale, back in the forest, Titania and Oberon are reconciled; she relinquishes the changeling child in her retinue that Oberon coveted to the point of their quarreling vehemently over it. But they are, pointedly, not included in the marriage rites (perhaps, as king and queen of the fairies they are already "married,") and they part, moving off in opposite directions, though slightly turned to each other, each gently waving a hand in an amicable temporary farewell. Balanchine liked to explain (perhaps tongue in cheek) that they're fairy folk, a breed that doesn't engage in carnal intimacies.

Inevitably, the film makes alterations to the choreography that are disconcerting, at times downright confusing when it comes to keeping the plot straight, especially concerning the quartet of middleclass lovers. At other times, there are effects that are plain silly, such as the "magical" appearances of characters out of thin air. Balanchine makes magic with his imagination that is far more potent than elementary camera tricks.

The camera does its worthiest work with close-ups. While the ravishing dewy beauty of the sleeping Titania is pure Hollywood, where Balanchine did some time in the 1930s and '40s, it's a blessing because you'd never be close enough to see it in the theater.

Now for the really bad news. Just before attending the single public showing of the film at the Baryshnikov Arts Center, I viewed it on my computer, using a screener provided by the celebrated Parisian archival institution, the Cinémathèque Française. It was wonderfully clear. The mechanics of the BAC showing, also using a Cinémathèque print, were simply not of professional caliber. Throughout, the image was migraine-inducing--severely blurred, accompanied by deafening sound. Nobody tried to fix this. Then, at the brief live Q & A that followed the film, the microphones worked only sporadically--an apt coda to the general malfunctioning of the event. Suzanne Farrell, straightforward and charming, and the deft interlocutor, the dance writer Robert Greskovic, coped with the situation like troupers.

© 2009 Tobi Tobias

"But first a school," Balanchine is said to have replied to Lincoln Kirstein, when the later was urging him to be the lynchpin in forming a ballet company in the States, intuiting that this choreographer--a genius without a job and in poor health to boot--would change the face of the art. The result of that exchange is evident today not only in the prowess of the New York City Ballet, which recruits the majority of its dancers from the advanced divisions of the school, but, tellingly, in the annual three-performance run of the School of American Ballet Workshop at Lincoln Center's Peter Jay Sharp Theater. This year, Workshop offered an all-Balanchine program to celebrate SAB's 75th anniversary.

The program consisted of Serenade (the first ballet Balanchine created in America); the "Ballabile des Enfants" from Harlequinade (to show off the astonishing acumen of the juniors in the school, mostly in the 9-12 range, though some looked no more than six), and Stars and Stripes (to activate our patriotism? to show the delicious corniness and bravado of American culture, which delighted and amused the choreographer? to give roles to large flocks of young women and men who many not yet shine as incipient stars but collectively form an impressive ensemble? to provide a rousing closer?).

To me, the program seemed skimpy--too short, for one thing and too much a one-choreographer-show when for decades past the students were shown as well in work by Petipa, Ivanov, Fokine, or Bournonville (to say nothing of Jerome Robbins), which added other significant dimensions to their training. A new work was often commissioned for the program, too. Granted, this was sometimes a mixed blessing, but on other occasions the assignment was a challenge and an encouragement for a emerging choreographer--like, for instance, Christopher Wheeldon.

The program as a whole demonstrated the uncanny skill developed by SAB pupils who stay the course. Serenade, staged by Suki Schorer, a former City Ballet principal now celebrated for her Balanchine productions, was impeccably rendered, with the small nuances Schorer notices and remembers giving the faithful reproduction life and warmth. The choreography itself, though you may have seen it a hundred times, invariably looks new, fresh, a miracle of immediacy. In the matinee and evening performances (which offered cast changes) that I saw on May 30, I especially admired Shoshanna Rosenfield, Lauren Lovette, and Adam Chaviz, who still looks like a stripling but already dances with unmistakable poise and grace.

Garielle Whittle, an SAB and City Ballet alum, supervised the charming "Ballabile des Enfants," representing familiar commedia dell'arte characters. Here, the littlest dancers, particularly, were like tiny faceted jewels, glittering as they moved with uncannily sharp footwork. The "Whispering Dance," as it's called, for four boy-girl couples at the mature end of the Children's Division, made elegant Scaramouches, chicly costumed in jet black with white-plumed headgear. This segment, though, seems to have lost some of the mysterious atmosphere that once enveloped it--that aura of children just becoming aware of the adult world's secrets. Or did I just imagine it existed years ago? I think not.

Susan Pilarre, who, once upon a time, when she was an SAB pupil, played children's roles with the City Ballet, staged Stars and Stripes, distinguished for two of its four sections--first for the all-male "Thunder and Gladiator," in which a regiment parades its feistiness in ever-changing geometrical patterns and jumps festooned with beats. They're like a bunch of toy soldiers and irresistible even to a confirmed pacifist, who couldn't possibly imagine any one of them coming home in a body bag.

Equally engaging, in the "Liberty Bel[" duet that caps the ballet, was Angelica Generosa, who is as sweet and sassy as they come, gently funny (as she should be here), with all the appearance of enjoying every minute--in other words, a born soubrette. She learned this role in merely a week, to replace an injured classmate, Ashly Issacs. Meanwhile Isaacs has been honored with one of SAB's prestigious Mae L. Wein Awards, which predicts a successful future.

© 2009 Tobi Tobias

Always an exceedingly star-conscious company, American Ballet Theatre opened its annual spring season (May 18-July 11, at the Metropolitan Opera House) with a pair that would be hard to beat: Caroline Kennedy and America's new First Lady, Michelle Obama, two of the gala event's Honorary Chairmen. Both made carefully prepared, mercifully brief, but urgently timely speeches emphasizing the fact the arts are not merely commercially important to America but absolutely essential to its culture. They said it like they meant it.

The full article appeared in Voice of Dance (http://www.voiceofdance.org) on May 23, 2009. To read it, click here.