Seeing Things: July 2006 Archives

This article originally appeared in the Culture section of Bloomberg News on July 27, 2006.

July 27 (Bloomberg) -- If there's such a thing as a postmodern pastoral, Mark Morris has created it. His three-act ballet ``Sylvia,'' choreographed for the San Francisco Ballet in 2004, received its New York premiere last night as the centerpiece of the California troupe's week-long slot in the Lincoln Center Festival.

The work's many beauties and self-contradictions threaten to baffle and promise to enchant its audience. Set to Delibes' deliquescent score, with ingenious decor by Allen Moyer and witty faux-Greek costumes by Martin Pakledinaz, it is pretty and raunchy, charming and funny at the same time.

Morris gives inventive twists to the classical-dance vocabulary and classical-dance conventions. He also displays a teasing reverence for dance history.

His ``Sylvia'' harks way back to the time when dances were populated by characters from Greek mythology. It also recalls and reimagines devices from 19th-century touchstones like the mystical Kingdom of the Shades scene from ``La Bayadere,'' with its evocative use of veils, and ``Le Corsaire,'' with its just slightly vulgar, harem-trousered odalisques.

The ballet's libretto derives from ``Aminta,'' a celebrated pastoral play in verse, written by Torquato Tasso in 1573. In capsule form: Sylvia, a devotee of Diana, goddess of the hunt and chastity, scorns the advances of her shepherd suitor, Aminta. Orion, a wicked hunter, abducts her, carrying her away to his rocky cave. A shape-changing Eros intervenes repeatedly to straighten things out and deliver a happy ending.

Morris's Characters

In addition to his dance innovations, Morris gives the characters his personal imprint. Aminta is a lovely, if utterly passive, fellow, an adorable dreamer who's useless when it comes to rescuing a sweetheart in trouble.

Sylvia, a proto-feminist, is feisty enough for them both. She deflects her would-be rapist and his comically bestial slaves by getting them drunk on wine from grapes juiced by her own pretty feet and instructing them in Greek folk dancing.

Eros is conceived as a very fey character with a quicksilver technique. Danced and acted perfectly by Jaime Garcia Castilla, the figure gives the proceedings an up-to-date ironic edge.

The loveliest extended passage in the piece is its opening. Here, galumphing satyrs, frolicking dryads and fleet-footed naiads get together in a sylvan glen, finally snuggling down in erotic menages a trois.

The most striking short items are a pair of solos for Aminta, one pining, one triumphant. They were danced to perfection by the proficient and utterly disarming Gonzalo Garcia.

Two Sylvias

I didn't much care for Yuan Yuan Tan as Sylvia. Granted, her acting is sincere and technique highly developed. Still, she looks as attenuated and artificial as a body in a Mannerist painting. Elizabeth Miner plays the role tonight; a videotape of her performance indicates that she's a natural for it.

Morris's ``Sylvia'' doesn't seriously rival Frederick Ashton's version, created in 1952 for the Royal Ballet and recently added to the repertory of American Ballet Theatre. But it offers more fun and food for thought than most dances I've seen this year.

The San Francisco Ballet, America's first professional classical-dance company (founded in 1933), grew from being a regional troupe into one that is nationally recognized.

It's not yet a world-class institution like the ABT, the New York City Ballet and the big guns in London, Paris, St. Petersburg and Moscow. But under Helgi Tomasson, who became SFB's artistic director in 1985, that's what it's aiming for.

The company's opening night program on Tuesday understandably showcased as many ranking dancers as possible in a dizzying cross-section of its varied repertory.

Traditional Technique

It was clear that the dancers' technique has a firm classical base -- no surprise to those who remember the purity of Tomasson's own dancing as a principal with the New York City Ballet.

If too many of the performers seemed short and stocky, their evident talent and unaffected manner compensated for the dearth of prince and princess bodies. The choreography paid its respects to classics of the past two centuries, and the hot dance-makers of several recent decades were fully represented.

Excerpts from Tomasson's own ballets confirmed a gift, evident from his very first work, that may have been sacrificed to his career as a ballet master.

However, Mark Morris's claim, in interviews, that the San Francisco Ballet is the best classical company in North America seems to me exaggerated.

The San Francisco Ballet performs at the New York State Theater, Lincoln Center, through July 30. Information: http://www.lincolncenter.org . Tickets: (1)(212) 721-6500.

© 2006 Bloomberg L.P. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission.

This article originally appeared in the Culture section of Bloomberg News on July 21, 2006.

July 21 (Bloomberg) -- Saburo Teshigawara, who performs his ``Bones in Pages'' at the Rose Theater through Saturday as part of the Lincoln Center Festival, is billed as choreographer, dancer, designer and collaborating composer.

You might also call the visitor from Japan a standup philosopher. This 55-minute solo means something, though the something remains enigmatic.

The installation invites decoding. It includes a wide, high wall of books with fanned-out pages, a large collection of derelict shoes, a table piled with jagged glass shards and a live crow.

`Sculpting Air'

Teshigawara's dancing alternates movement that's infinitely delicate and slow -- almost to the point of stasis -- with swift, spasmodically violent activity. In interviews, the artist talks about ``sculpting air.''

The production is essentially a one-man show. Now and then Teshigawara is abetted by two women, whom the irreverent may associate with old-time magician's assistants. Viewers more susceptible to Teshigawara's aesthetic will be conjured into thinking deep thoughts.

© 2006 Bloomberg L.P. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission.

This article originally appeared in the Culture section of Bloomberg News on July 13, 2006.

July 13 (Bloomberg) -- Auburn-haired, with a porcelain complexion, a willowy grace and a wistful air, Julie Kent has magically retained the appeal of a young romantic heroine.

The dancer, who turns 37 this week, will celebrate her 20th anniversary with American Ballet Theatre tomorrow, starring in Kenneth MacMillan's ``Romeo and Juliet.''

It's safe to say that among ABT's roster of amazing women -- formidable technicians, high-voltage dramatic dancers, divas and soubrettes -- Kent is the most loved. Born and raised in Maryland, she trained at the Academy of the Maryland Youth Ballet, under the celebrated Hortensia Fonseca, eventually making side trips to the School of American Ballet in New York.

Mikhail Baryshnikov, ABT's director at the time, chose her at an audition to join the company as an apprentice when she was 16. And there she loyally remained, rising from corps de ballet to soloist in 1990, then to principal dancer in 1993.

It didn't hurt that she was cast opposite her charismatic boss in the 1987 Herbert Ross film ``Dancers.''

``Luckily, I didn't have to do much dancing,'' Kent recalled last week in an interview backstage at the Met. ``It was just playing a young girl who was infatuated with Mikhail Baryshnikov. It didn't take a lot of acting, that situation.''

Since then, Kent has danced classical and contemporary roles. She's an expert at transformations. In the dual role of Odette-Odile in ``Swan Lake,'' she's the incarnation of unsullied love, then all erotically charged malice.

In the title role of ``Giselle'' and as Nikiya in ``La Bayadere,'' she's equally convincing as a humble girl in love and an impalpable, still loving wraith.

Fraught souls are not beyond her, and she lends radiance to abstract works. Cast to type as the girl next door, she's irresistible.

Not Enough Balanchine

Her only regret? Not having danced more Balanchine, as she would have if she'd joined the New York City Ballet instead of ABT. ``When I watch those marvelous works,'' she says, ``I can imagine how it would feel to dance them. But I know I'm not going to, and I try to be happy simply that they exist for the world to see.''

As she matured, Kent became increasingly persuasive in dramatic roles. She credits two people for helping her make a character and a story convincing.

Her husband, Victor Barbee, a dramatic dancer with ABT before he became the company's associate artistic director, taught her how to explore a role deeply and connect the events in the narrative. ABT Ballet Master Georgina Parkinson worked with her to make all that preparation visible onstage.

Dance Partners

Kent is equally grateful to the exceptional partners ABT has given her. ``One of my first partners, Robert Hill, taught me about physical abandon. You need to know what that feels like in order to achieve it with another partner.

``Today? Angel Corella -- his energy is contagious and everything about him is fun. Jose Carreno is silken-smooth and elegant.

``Marcelo Gomes is exceptionally tall and strong, which makes me feel more feminine. He's also quite a bit younger and less experienced than I am. That can make me feel I'm looking after him.''

A classical dancer nearing the age of 40 can expect some deterioration in her technique. Kent agrees that eventually a dancer must learn ``how to say more with less.'' But, she emphasizes, ``I was never a brilliant technician, and it's not in my nature to show off my technique just for itself. I use technique in order to express something.''

She plans to dance ``for a few more years,'' while ultimately basing her decisions on her family life. She and Barbee, parents of 2-year-old William, hope to have a second child.

Kent, who relishes motherhood, believes that ``as children grow older, they need you in a much more complicated way.''

Insulation

Looking back on her career, Kent observes, ``Being a dancer gave me something I've craved all my life -- the chance to create on the stage -- in those magical moments under the lights and in the darkness behind the lights, backstage.

``It also gave me the cocoon world the dance community offers. The surroundings that insulate you and give you an identity. I became Julie Kent.''

If she hadn't become a dancer, what would she have been? ``A writer,'' Kent imagines. ``I like to express myself, you see. Just not by talking.''

American Ballet Theatre performs at New York's Metropolitan Opera House, Lincoln Center, through July 15. Information: (1)(212) 477-3030 or http://www.abt.org . Tickets: (1)(212) 362-6000.

© 2006 Bloomberg L.P. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission.

This article originally appeared in the Culture section of Bloomberg News on July 13, 2006.

July 13 (Bloomberg) -- Last time I saw Elizabeth Streb, years ago, she had her dancers throwing themselves at walls. One of them was slightly injured at that performance, and I never went back.

It seemed to me that, unlike high-caliber circus aerialists, acrobats or virtuoso classical dancers, Streb's crew was deliberately courting a bad outcome.

Now that Streb is big time -- winning high-end awards, part of the prestigious Lincoln Center Festival -- she bills herself as an Action Architect and only secondarily as a choreographer. Fair enough; her current show, ``Streb vs. Gravity,'' at the LaGuardia Drama Theater this weekend, has very little to do with dancing.

Her current performers are able athletes, if rarely elegant ones. They don't so much throw caution to the winds as rely on deft timing. Still, that disturbing whiff of sadomasochism remains.

When they hurl themselves through the air, their grace is rugged at best. Their flight ends, purposely, in a thud. The chunky, heavily muscled bodies hit padded mats with a sound that conjures up the destruction of flesh and bone.

They balance on scarily tipping equipment that resembles instruments of torture. For a grand finale, complete with glaring light beamed into the spectators' eyes, they use a giant turning Ferris wheel as a treadmill, splay their bodies on its spokes and pitch themselves off the structure to crouch at its base. It's not clear here if the wheel is the performers' plaything, or they are its prey.

Psychedelic Swirls

The whole entertainment, if you can call it that, is decked out to impress. Streb's aesthetic, explored in the house program with fancy words about the human body's face-off with gravity, is also flashed on the backdrop in catchy short takes, along with psychedelic swirls of color.

Relentless contemporary music occasionally gives way to snatches of classical bits mangled by the sound system.

Streb gives interviews in which she claims, no doubt sincerely, an intellectual underpinning for her work in physics, mathematics and philosophy.

Give me the circus artists or the ballet virtuosi any day. They put their fine-honed mastery at risk in the service of ecstasy -- for themselves, I imagine, as well as their viewers. This act requires no justification whatsoever.

Streb Extreme Action performs at the LaGuardia Drama Theater, Amsterdam Avenue and 65th Street, July 14 and 15. Tickets: (1)(212) 721-6500. Information: (1)(212) 875-5766 or http://www.lincolncenter.org .

Chunky Move

The poet Marianne Moore called dancing ``that most exposed form of self expression.'' In his ``I Want to Dance Better at Parties,'' Gideon Obarzanek, artistic director of the vigorous and likable Australian troupe Chunky Move, takes Moore at her word.

Five real-life guys, participants in Obarzanek's research for a documentary on men and social dancing, are introduced on videotape. Their attitudes, ranging from traumatic stasis to robust enthusiasm, thread through the work.

The men's stories are endearing. The widower left to raise two young kids finally ventures back into social contacts via the ballroom. The spunky fellow devoted to communal Greek dance meets his lover in one of those proud, macho chain-dances, then loses him after a decade of devotion.

The Chunksters, as a Down Under journalist termed them, theatricalize the spoken messages with mime and vivid, live dancing: tap, folk, Latin, you name it.

Then trouble sets in. In each of the five ``cases'' as even an amateur psychologist would label them, the professional dancers segue into passages of abstract movement.

Inner Workings

This material is clearly meant to deepen the tales by revealing the inner workings of the men's minds and hearts. Here, though, the choreography is limited largely to the flailing arms and claw-like hands of children imitating monsters, heavy breathing and gratuitous, kamikaze-like deeds.

The single exception is an odd and beautiful duet for two recumbent women. It reiterates profoundly the loss and grief so movingly proposed by Adam Wheeler, in the role of the chain dancer.

Of course the whole affair points out how the gift for dancing is cousin to a successful erotic life. But we knew that already.

In its 11-year existence, Chunky Move has toured worldwide to considerable acclaim. Last year, on only its second visit to New York (with ``Tense Dave,'' the production jointly contrived by Obarzanek, Lucy Guerin and Michael Kantor), the group copped a Bessie (New York Dance and Performance Award)

``I Want to Dance Better at Parties'' isn't up to that level, yet it shows why Chunky Move is so welcome. It does its stuff -- both the humane and the obsessive, macabre stuff -- with such oomph and good cheer.

Chunky Move performs at the Joyce Theater, 175 Eighth Ave., at 19th Street, through July 15. Information: (1)(212) 242-0800; http://www.joyce.org .

© 2006 Bloomberg L.P. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission.

This article originally appeared in the Culture section of Bloomberg News on July 14, 2006.

July 14 (Bloomberg) --The Israeli dancer-choreographer Emanuel Gat brings his small troupe to the Lincoln Center Festival in a pair of works set to dangerously challenging scores.

``Winter Voyage'' uses three songs from Schubert's bleak, poignant ``Die Winterreise.'' Two big guys wearing long tunics engage in close encounters of a hostile-bonding kind. Look- alikes, they might be dual aspects of the same soul.

Their movement is fierce, fluid and maybe a little too gorgeous to be emotionally convincing.

In ``The Rite of Spring'' Gat gives Stravinsky's over- familiar score a new look. He transfers the theme of primitive ritual sacrifice, originally choreographed by Vaslav Nijinsky, to a salsa dance floor.

Two men and three women work themselves up to a syncopated frenzy. When they form couples, constantly changing partners, there's always an odd woman out.

The Chosen One is finally designated, brutalized, stripped and left alone to die. Civilization, Gat suggests, has done little to tame our basic instincts.

Emanuel Gat Dance is at LaGuardia Concert Hall, Amsterdam Avenue at 65th Street, today and tomorrow. See http://www.lincolncenter.org .

© 2006 Bloomberg L.P. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission.

The Royal Ballet: The Sleeping Beauty / Kennedy Center Opera House, Washington DC / June 24, 2006

Life being a busy affair, the only performance of the Royal Ballet's new/old Sleeping Beauty at Kennedy Center that I could get to was the Saturday matinee, June 24. Daytime performances don't turn up the best known stars, but this occasion proved to be serendipitous. The 25-year-old Sarah Lamb, made a principal dancer less than a month ago, played Aurora, and her performance consoled me for my disappointment in the production.

Like the other major companies in the classical dance world, the Royal has streamlined, distorted, and generally tarted up its contemporary renditions of the 19th-century classics. Its previous two productions of Beauty within a dozen years failed on this account. To celebrate the company's 75th anniversary, however, its artistic director, Monica Mason, chose to return to the Royal's first Beauty, mounted in 1939, then given embellished--and definitive--form in 1946. This is the version with which the Royals conquered America in 1949. For decades, it served as the company's signature and lodestone.

The choreographic text of the ballet, set to Tchaikovsky's ravishing score, was created by Marius Petipa in 1890 for the company known today as the Kirov Ballet, resident at the Maryinsky Theater in St. Petersburg. It was conveyed to the young British troupe by the former Maryinsky regisseur Nicholas Sergeyev--who had fled the Russian revolution "with his tin trunks full of notation books"--and godmothered by the troupe's founder, Ninette de Valois. The present resurrection, staged by Monica Mason and Royal Ballet veteran Christopher Newton, adheres to much of the 1946 precedent (not ignoring additions and emendations by Frederick Ashton, Anthony Dowell, and Christopher Wheeldon, and not without some inexplicably foolish calculations). It uses the 1946 Oliver Messel designs, realized and augmented by Peter Farmer.

Taken all in all, the result is a welcome return to decorum, to an exquisitely civilized world in which good and evil as well as human aspirations and foibles are set forth in scrupulous proportion, fantasy ever-present but never out of control. Why, then, is the effect of the production slightly fusty? This impression is largely, though not entirely, due to the passage of time; if sad, it is inevitable. Something else, however, is pulling down the present staging. I suspect it has to do with the way the company as a whole dances.

In the fairies' variations and in the work of the ensemble in the Vision Scene, for example, you see the virtues of the English school of dancing: the harmonious line with its finely modeled port de bras, the soft attack, the precise, delicate footwork. But these features have become tiny and tame, devoid of the surging energy needed to give the spectator a visceral experience instead of one that's merely pictorial. Absent too is the flow that can make a sequence of meticulously rendered steps musical.

Though Lamb has absorbed the Royal Ballet's style--including its serene elegance of deportment--she isn't a product of that company's academy. Her British parents are U.S. residents, and she grew up in Boston, training at the Boston Ballet School. She joined the Boston Ballet in 1998; by 2003 she was not simply the company's youngest principal but arguably its most promising.

Central to Lamb's development in Boston was the teacher and coach Tatiana Legat, of whom Lamb has said, "My artistry as it stands has all blossomed from her." After the Boston Ballet dismissed Legat--giving budgetary concerns as the reason--Lamb decided to extend her horizons. In 2004 she was snapped up by the Royal Ballet, where she proved herself in in a series of leading roles in major nineteenth- and twentieth-century classics. Early in June, following her debut as Aurora in London, she was made a principal dancer.

A blonde with a heart-shaped face, Lamb is very pleasant to look at--and beautifully proportioned. Her dancing has a lovely reticence; she grows on you slowly, drawing you into her imaginary world. She seems to have considerable intelligence and some flair for acting. You notice her firm technique only belatedly.

Granted, the performance I saw began tentatively; her Rose Adagio was marked by fear and trembling. She gained confidence as she progressed, although--perhaps restricted by a desire for correctness--she didn't fully convey the mounting elation of the sixteen-year-old at her birthday party, the heedless joy that leads to her seizing the weapon meant to destroy her. I liked Lamb best in the Vision Scene, where she was convincingly impalpable (and my standard in this matter is Margot Fonteyn), as disembodied as smoke, yet all longing and burgeoning love.

I hope Lamb won't be intimidated by her conversion to English style. She's close enough already and now needs to concentrate on enlarging what she does, giving it more projection and, most important, spontaneity. A ballerina, and she shows promise of becoming one, should never look like a schoolgirl who has learned her lessons perfectly.

Photo credit: Bill Cooper: Sarah Lamb in The Royal Ballet's production of The Sleeping Beauty

© 2006 Tobi Tobias