In addition to showing us wonders we'd never even dreamed of, Merce Cunningham (1919-2009), that inscrutable genius of modern dance, taught us a tough, valuable lesson: Dance is not forever. Its very evanescence increases its intensity at the moment of performance. It may register profoundly with the spectator but it inevitably disappears. Cunningham knew this and he made his plans.

Members of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company

Photo: Julieta Cervantes

According to the reports circulated after his death in 2009 (which are now, unsettlingly, being re-examined), the choreographer had decided that, once he was gone, the Merce Cunningham Dance Company would dissolve. The repertory that Cunningham had created for it was to be made available to other qualified companies, with a former Cunningham dancer sent to stage and coach it. The recipient company would also be given information in text and visual form to help make the production as "authentic" as possible. (This process has already been tried out with American Ballet Theatre's performances of Cunningham's Duets, staged by Patricia Lent, during its week-long season at City Center in November.)

Further, MCDC would begin a "long goodbye" by touring the world for two years. This is now all but accomplished. The penultimate performances of repertory--Roaratorio, Second Hand, BIPED, Pond Way, RainForest, and Split Sides--just took place at BAM. A week of shows in Paris follows. Still to come are six Events (Cunningham's familiar kaleidoscopic arrangements of excerpts from his dances) to be held in New York's Park Avenue Armory, December 29-31. Foreseeably the company's most ardent fans will be spending New Year's Eve cheering and weeping as they witness the end of something immensely important and the beginning of something unknown.

Meanwhile, some comments on the performances at BAM, where the spectators in the packed house focused laser-beam attention on a community of glorious dancers nurtured by a grand master. Come New Year's Day, most of them will be unemployed.

Roaratorio: Desjardins, Riener, Weber, Crossman

Photo: Julieta Cervantes

The first of the programs given at BAM was devoted solely to Cunningham's hour-long Roaratorio, created in 1983. It was a perfect choice because of its ebullience, its sheer joy in the fertile--even crazy--mix of the casual happenings that constitute everyday, ordinary life. The full title of the John Cage score that plays in tandem with the choreography gives a "local habitation and a name" to the culture the dance evokes: "Roaratorio, An Irish Circus on Finnegans Wake." The reference, of course, is to James Joyce's unconventional epic novel, set in Dublin.

The Irish strain crops up continually in Cunningham's dance, most obviously in the airy, precise footwork that relates to Irelands' traditional step dancing and in the casual embraces of folk dancing, such as the Irish jig. The costumes, however, tell a different story. They're sleek, bright-hued rehearsal outfits, with three different colors allotted to each body. The performers add to and subtract from this get-up in the wings, which have been bared so we can see ostensibly off-stage activity simultaneously with the onstage performance. When they're officially onstage, a few dancers at a time spell themselves by perching on high stools, where they look like mid-20th century teens at the soda shop, eyeing their peers.

Throughout this long dance there isn't a moment when the steps and the incessantly shifting stage patterns aren't interesting. They may suggest this or that kind of situation to you or make you feel this or that, but these effects (or even their possibility) aren't essential. What counts is that the 14 moving bodies of the piece and their relationships to one another and to the space they're in seize your attention and refuse to let it go. Meanwhile, Cage is supplying the sounds of urban street life: infants wailing, dogs barking, chatter in various languages, the rumble of traffic, laughter. The entire affair is brimming with life.

A musical note: As is Cunningham's standard practice, Cage's score for Roaratorio was created independently of the choreography. The relationship of what we see and what we hear in a Cunningham production is that the two elements, created separately, share a chunk of time. In the case of Roaratorio, however, the music was not commissioned by Cunningham, as is usually this choreographer's practice, but created in 1979; Cunningham adopted it for his production. And, certainly, the two elements seem to be fused, not by the dancers' setting their moves to the score step for note, but in what looks like a celebration of the same matter in two different but miraculously compatible languages.

It's hard to resist reading a story--a terribly old-fashioned one--into the 1970 Second Hand. I didn't resist, just happily gave in to temptation. I took the piece to be about an aging artist who, having achieved marvelous things in his prime, is now looking at the person he has become and the role he has played in his relation to the rising generation. Admittedly, the theme I imagined is hopelessly corny, yet Cunningham's choreography is all subtle understatement.

Second Hand: (far left) Robert Swinston

Photo: Stephanie Berger

Second Hand opens with a remarkably long solo for Robert Swinston, in pale practice clothes. Swinston is, quite visibly, the company's senior member and has become a key figure in its administration. Here he's performing the role Cunningham choreographed for himself. He remains center stage, all but rooted in place, trying out minuscule moves that displace a part of his body just a few inches. In the solitude of the huge blank stage space, he seems to be examining the enormous differences such small distinctions make. Intermittently he tries out challenging balances that suspend him calmly between earth and air, that space being a dancer's true environment.

The light that falls on him brightens; a woman in rose enters, all springtime buoyancy. Swinston watches her from far upstage, as if not to disturb her lovely aura, and finally she comes to him. May and December, they run side by side, faster and faster, their path an oval loop, until she suddenly breaks away, leaving him alone.

Now a bevy of dancers floods the stage. Swinston keeps to the background, observing them intently. He might be their creator or director. Eventually he integrates himself, partially, into their dance. Finally he rests on the ground, half reclining, like an ancient Greek statue, admiring the moving figures and their ravishing arrested poses. Gradually--as if inevitably--the dancers pace off into the wings, leaving slowly, one by one. Alone once again, Swinston, the "Merce" figure, stands center stage, feet planted well apart, legs and chest stretched taut, arms lifted high. It's a pose of heroic triumph, but somehow without ego.

John Cage's score for this piece, which the composer archly called Cheap Imitation, came into being when he was refused permission to use Satie's Socrate for Cunningham's choreography. Inventively Cage kept the structure of the Satie, while altering its pitches through chance procedures.

BIPED

Photo: Stephanie Berger

The dance I enjoyed least on the BAM programs was BIPED (1999). Its title is the name of the motion-capture system that Cunningham used to choreograph once his own range of movement had been severely diminished by arthritis. Mind you, there was nothing to suggest the mechanical in the way the dancers moved, as one might have expected. What I found so off-putting was Cunningham's insistence on calling the wrong kind of attention to the tool that served him so well. He used it as decor, projecting BIPED's drawn moving images, as well as unrelated drivel that might have come from a Colorforms kit, onto a front scrim that remained obdurately in place throughout the piece. The scrim itself mildly obscured the live dancers behind it, diminishing their physicality and making them look far away.

Perhaps because these factors milked life from the dance, BIPED ran the risk of other Cunningham pieces that seem too repetitive and/or too long--it let your attention flag. Aaron Copp's lighting, which bronzes the dancers' flesh, is fine, and Suzanne Gallo's costumes are superb--variously cut unitards in fabric that lends its panoply of jewel tones a metallic glaze. I love the moment in which the dancers add gauzy grayish jackets to their outfits, making you think of brightly-hued butterflies setting time in retrograde by creeping back into chrysalis form.

The music was by Gavin Bryars.

Pond Way

Photo: Stephanie Berger

Like several important choreographers of the Pacific Northwest (Trisha Brown and Mark Morris come first to mind), Cunningham was acutely tuned to the workings of nature. His 1998 Pond Way, which opened the third and final repertory program at BAM, finds him turning toward the gentle and lyrical. Thirteen dancers clad in a white version of Arabian Nights garb move softly and lightly, their "landscape" an infinitely pleasing backdrop by Roy Lichtenstein that suggests rippling water through an ordering of black dots against a pale ground. Tucked, almost invisibly, into a corner, there's a rough sketch of one end of the crudest fishing boat imaginable (complete, however, with fisherman).

Gradually the dancers, whose footfalls make no sound, persuade the viewer that they're a flock of creatures--insects, fish, or birds seem most likely--whose little society retains its own communal life, all the while being embedded among a host of other groups sharing the same territory.

As it runs its course Pond Way offers many an opportunity to observe tactics that Cunningham invented or co-opted for his choreography. For one example: Five women do a particular phrase in unison, but each displays herself to the viewer at a different angle so that the phrase looks different on each, while remaining, strictly speaking, the same. For another: A group of dancers working together suddenly divides its function into two complementary parts. Some of the dancers, still moving busily but now rooted in place, become a maze; the remaining dancers become Theseus-clones, threading their way through it.

Finally a group exits, one dancer after another, performing a striking version of classical ballet's grand jeté (the leap adds a minute but brilliant flash of motion when it reaches its height). When the last leaper goes, the dance is over, as a school of fish or flock of birds vanishes if something disturbs the element in which it swims or flies. That finish seems abrupt if you love this dance, because you wish (expect, even) that it could go on forever as do the processes of nature.

Brian Eno's score for Pond Way is peaceful yet haunting. It suggests the cries of animals, howling winds muted by being distant, gongs echoing through endless corridors.

RainForest: (standing) Brandon Collwes and Silas Riener; (prone) Krista Nelson

Photo: Stephanie Berger

The 1968 RainForest offered a diametrically opposite view of nature--a tooth, claw, and sex version. Andy Warhol's stunning decor is, in a way, a distraction from what's going on among the proto-humans onstage. It consists of a flock of gleaming Mylar pillows, inflated to the bursting point. Some hang from above on all but invisible threads. Others loll on the stage floor (at times, spookily, just inches from it), moving lazily or in instant retreat as the cast of six makes arbitrary contact with them. The dancers wear skin-toned, roughed-up body stockings; Warhol had wanted them nude.

An initial couple seems to represent lovers-in-innocence until the twosome is disturbed by a violent man whom the woman takes quite a shine to. After that intrusion one figure replaces another in La Ronde fashion and the sexual activity becomes a sensuous account of unquenchable lust, trailing brutality in its wake. Memorable images include a pairing in which a man drags himself painfully across the floor on his belly with a spent woman laid out on top of him; they seem to be made of one flesh. Another is the appearance of a woman who's an iconic Lilith, her thick dark hair whipping around her face like a curtain of evil. She's swift, avid, and utterly reckless.

The animal cries that emanate from David Tudor's score reinforce the feral behavior of the people. The soundscape also includes birdsong, whistles, drumming, and other forms of percussion.

Obviously, this stunning piece is open to many another interpretation. No matter what one's reading of it is, it remains a forceful argument against the notion that all Cunningham's works are the same.

Split Sides: Silas Riener

Photo: Stephanie Berger

As a preface to Split Sides, the final work in the BAM series--presumably the last New York would see of Cunningham's repertory as performed by his own company--David Vaughan, the troupe's archivist, presided over a passel of VIPs' casting of a die. The results would determine the order of the two versions that had been created for each of the elements in the production--choreography, music (one score from Radiohead, the other from Sigur Rós), costumes, decor, lighting. Making this invitation-to-chance a public stunt instead of a privately used creative tool struck me as a lapse of taste uncommon on Planet Merce.

From its premiere in 2003, I thought Split Sides a lamentable effort to make Cunningham appear "with it," when this choreographer had been Mr. With It himself from the start of his career. Only Vaughan could have made the public die-casting palatable. Not only a distinguished dance writer but also a dapper veteran performer, Vaughan was witty and utterly compelling. I'm not going to comment further on Split Sides; what I wrote about it just after its premiere is what I still think. Except that, this time, Silas Riener aced a solo--reworked for his particular gifts--that had the audience gasping in amazement.

Amazingly, when the curtain fell on the company for what was ostensibly the last time it would be performing the Cunningham repertory in New York, its home town, nothing special happened. Was this an example of elegant stoicism? The curtain calls were pretty much the same as they had been throughout the four-day run. The dancers stood shoulder to shoulder in a single horizontal line and bowed. None of them was singled out as being more important than the others. A good part of the audience stood to applaud enthusiastically. There was perhaps one extra call this time, maybe two. No flowers were presented onstage or thrown from the audience. One dancer kept gesturing toward the musicians in the pit. Then the curtain fell for good and that was it. At least for now.

The performers for the BAM engagement were: Brandon Collwes, Dylan Crossman, Emma Desjardins, Jennifer Goggans, John Hinrichs, Daniel Madoff, Rashaun Mitchell, Marcie Munnerlyn, Krista Nelson, Silas Riener, Jamie Scott, Robert Swinston, Melissa Toogood, and Andrea Weber. They are remarkable in themselves and even more so as a collective.

© 2011 Tobi Tobias

The oddest thing about Martha Clarke and Alfred Uhry's Angel Reapers is that it has no plot. This despite the fact that Uhry is a widely respected American playwright, as his Pulitzer, Oscar, and Tony awards attest. Clarke herself, a founding member of the tremendously popular Pilobolus, is widely known for haunting dance-theater pieces, in which her vivid imagination and penchant for the perverse reveal the world's underside. A MacArthur Fellowship (the "genius grant") tops her long list of awards. How could she not have noticed that the 75-minute work she and Uhry had concocted about that unique American religious sect, the Shakers, desperately needed the architecture and propulsion of a story? As matters stand, Angel Reapers plays like a documentary, though it's not at all clear how much of its content is fact and how much fiction. What's worse, it doesn't seem to have any point.

The Dark Is Light Enough: A scene from Martha Clarke and Alfred Uhry's Angel Reapers

Photo: Rob Strong

Two things commonly known about the Shakers: One: They were committed to the rule of celibacy. Two: Along with spoken testimony to their rigorous principles (at its most ecstatic, speaking in tongues) and confession of their infringements, their rites included movement: stepping, stomping, and shaking that mounted in intensity in order to exorcise their sins. The violence of this "dancing" was like that of spiritual possession, its climax occasionally ending in a faint. (A third fact generally known about the Shakers is that they constructed home furnishings breathtaking in their purity of form, but let that pass, since Clarke and Uhry didn't find it pertinent.)

Here's what the creators of Angel Reapers did give us. A cast of six women and five men who can, to varying degrees, dance, sing, and move eloquently. The movement element is well covered by having the best dancers doing the challenging parts such as falling heavily to the floor and writhing vigorously in the throes of religious, or plain human, passion. The a cappella singing of authentic Shaker work songs and hymns sounds quite natural and blessedly avoids theatricality. It goes without saying that "Tis a Gift to Be Simple" is represented; Aaron Copland eked out a whole ballet for Martha Graham--Appalachian Spring--from it. The spoken word doesn't fare so well; the performers with insufficient training in diction and projection are not convincing. Strangely enough, none of the people on stage seems fully "real"-- either as a character identified in the program (Sister Susannah Farrington, an abused wife; Brother Moses, a runaway slave) or as a fully confident performing artist, so it's hard to empathize with them. We're not drawn into their world; we just watch them from afar.

Angel Unaware? Asli Bulbul in Angel Reapers

Photo: Rob Strong

We first see the full cast at its communal worship, making clear what dictates they've vowed to obey. Gradually we learn how each member became part of the community. (This material has more than a hint of AA meetings behind it.) Eventually we come to various members' breaking the sect's stringent rules, for the most part the one about chastity. The issue is, of course, the tension between the Shakers' will--which could prevail only in a community giving itself over to group hysteria--and human reality. Inevitably a man and a woman touch--merely touch--and the whole house of cards collapses. Intercourse has its day, heterosexual first, then, Clarke being an equal-opportunity artist, same-sex (a gorgeous duet, featuring lifts that are also embraces, represents a pair of men coupling). Last, a radiantly pregnant woman and her partner leave the fold. Mother Ann Lee, historically the woman who brought the sect to America, gets worried. Very worried. And, ambivalent. An uncompromising leader, she only wanted to teach her chosen people how to live in order to be sure of Heaven when they died. Now she's beginning to feel some very human sympathy for the transgressors.

The end of the piece remains an enigma to me. Left alone, the despairing Mother Ann has a flesh-and-bone vision of four men who are buck naked, though never in full-frontal view of the audience. (Granted, this modesty may have something to do with local laws.) One member of the quartet, William, who is Ann's brother, points out, "My soul is an angel. My body is a man. 
They are at war--man and angel. The angel is pure. The man is strong. I fight him. 
I never win. 
Why is it so hard?" When he leaves, Ann is alone again, sitting in one of the sect's unforgiving straight-backed chairs. We see her in profile, as if in effigy, and hear her singing, faintly but clearly, as if to sustain her own faith, while the light fades to dark.

Go to see this venture if you like, but keep in mind the fact that Doris Humphrey, a key choreographer of mid-20th-century modern dance, did the subject shorter and better. The Dance Division of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, at Lincoln Center, will show you The Shakers, made by Humphrey in 1931, on film--for free.

The performers in Angel Reapers are Sophie Bortolussi, Asli Bulbul, Patrick Corbin, Lindsey Dietz Marchant, Birgit Huppuch, Gabrielle Malone, Peter Musante, Luke Murphy, Andrew Robinson, Whitney V. Hunter, and Isadora Wolfe.

© 2011 Tobi Tobias

God Is in the Details: George Balanchine, creator of the New York City Ballet's The Nutcracker, coaching the smallest of the toy soldiers at a dress rehearsal

Courtesy of the New York City Ballet archives

With its premiere in 1954, George Balanchine's version of The Nutcracker, choreographed for the New York City Ballet and set, of course, to Tchaikovsky's eloquent score, inaugurated a craze for the Christmastide ballet that promises never to abate. This season City Ballet itself is adding to its annual "Nuts" season (running through December 31) with a live telecast of the ballet on December 13, which will be on view in more than 500 movie theaters cross-country. On December 14, PBS's Live From Lincoln Center will present the ballet.

All this broadening of the audience for the production is surely admirable. Comparatively few people have easy geographic access to the live version that fills the David H. Koch Theater at Lincoln Center; even fewer have easy financial access to it. Privileged though I am, being a New York-based dance critic, I dare to say that live is best and, moreover, that the Balanchine Nutcracker remains more splendid than all the subsequent renditions I've seen.

I attended this year's opening night performance on November 25. Overall it was lavishly rewarding. Knowing the production so long and so well--and having written about it so often--I gave myself the freedom to report this time simply on the elements that particularly caught my fancy.

Getting to Know You: Fiona Brennan as Marie, clutching her precious nutcracker as she learns how it works

Photo: Paul Kolnik

The Nutcracker boasts a horde of characters, most of them unforgettable. Not all of them are human. The first creature we encounter is a pink-gowned angel with sweeping wings--oversized ones that appeared intermittently in Balanchine's ballets down the decades, indicating this choreographer's belief in the power of otherworldly forces. Hovering over the snowy roofs of a modest town and stretching her arms out to a shooting star, the angel dominates the front cloth we gaze at as the orchestra plays the ballet's overture.

Next we meet a family that lives in the town, the prepubescent Marie, the elder child of Dr. and Frau Stahlbaum, and her irrepressible kid brother, who are celebrating Christmas Eve according to the customs of Germany's upper middle class in the late 19th century. Given the casting I saw, it was Marie, the child heroine of the tale, who interested me most. Played by Fiona Brennan, Marie is innocent, unselfconscious, and open to what the world has to offer her. So far, it would seem, the world has not let her down.

Brennan is plain-looking (in the way that Mary of The Secret Garden is plain) and miraculously unaffected. As the events of the ballet's first act spin out, evolving from the domestic to the hallucinatory and the ecstatic, she looks as if she's participating in real-life happenings, real feelings. Her Marie is a child without guile who experiences everything--even the visionary turns the plot takes--as if it were true.

Let Joy Be Unconfined: Sara Mearns as the Sugarplum Fairy

Photo: Paul Kolnik

Sara Mearns was the evening's Sugarplum Fairy, a fact that would make any balletomane or newbie to dancing feel blessed. (Mearns is a dancer whose magnificence is evident at first sight, because of the grace and visceral power of her lush body.) We see her first in Act II, appearing amongst a group of angel-children who've been skimming over the stage in geometrical patterns. Once she appears in their midst they make a wide circle around her, like acolytes uniting with their leader. When Marie and the Nutcracker Prince arrive on the scene, she asks them, genuinely wanting to know, "How did you come to be here?" She seems fascinated by the boy's detailed mime account of the events that drew them to her kingdom--one of the ballet's tours de force--and deeply grateful for the explanation. In both these passages she behaves like an ideal mother, understanding aunt, or gifted schoolteacher of the young--exuding love and concern for the child or children in her midst.

Towards the end of the ballet, in the grand pas de deux with a cavalier who appears from nowhere--with no narrative identity, but simply to support the ballerina in the duet's tricky partnering--Mearns continued to defy any impulse a viewer still might have to read her as flat, two dimensional. Alone or with a partner, she invariably works in three dimensions, a moving sculpture with a very human heart.

Admittedly, she didn't treat Jonathan Stafford--on duty for the occasion--as an emotional foil. How could she? She'd never met him. Suzanne Farrell, another remarkable Sugarplum, handled the problem of the undocumented cavalier just by being grander and more mysterious than her partner, who is needed but not recognized. Mearns, for whom remoteness is not a familiar mood, couldn't relate to her escort the way she had to the flock of small angels, but was simply magnificent on her own, as if he were invisible (which he was, almost), nailing her every move in the pas de deux, and triumphing in her solos.

Nature's Charms: Tiler Peck as Dewdrop in the garden of the waltzing Flowers

Photo: Paul Kolnik

Second only to the Sugarplum Fairy role in The Nutcracker is the brief but dazzling part of Dewdrop, leaping and whirling her way, all clarity and speed, through the mazes formed by a bevy of lyrically waltzing Flowers. I saw Tiler Peck, whose performance was a technical marvel, as it is in any role she tackles. Peck was already an astonishing dancer--and a remarkably beautiful woman--when she joined City Ballet and she matured swiftly on the job, becoming more subtle and sculptural without losing a jot of her panache. I can't think of any woman now in the company who could equal her as Dewdrop. And yet, much as Peck is almost all you might wish in the part, she still lacks the driving fervor that Heather Watts and Karin von Aroldingen, with much less claim to the title of "ballerina," projected years back--a kind of ecstatic madness, driven by some sort of life force.

There's also an invisible being present--a soul that suffuses this production: Balanchine's, especially Georgi Balanchivadze's. As a young student in the renowned dance academy of St. Petersburg's Mariinsky Ballet (Pavlova's school, Nijinsky's, Nureyev's, Baryshnikov's), Balanchine played the Nutcracker Prince. Decades later, creating his own production for the New York City Ballet, he co-opted from the Russian version the mime monologue with which the young Prince explains to the Sugarplum Fairy the dramatic events that led to his arrival with Marie in the Land of Sweets. During his lifetime, as one Prince succeeded another, Balanchine personally coached any boy new to the role. (Two casts alternate in the children's roles, and the youngsters must abandon parts for which they've outgrown the costumes.) Now that Balanchine is gone, the children's ballet mistress, Garielle Whittle, often tells her charges in rehearsal, "Mr. Balanchine used to say . . ."

Each time you see Balanchine's Nutcracker, certain passages in it seize your attention, not just for their choreographic deftness--with Balanchine you've learned to take this for granted--but for their emotional resonance. Think of the moment in the Party Scene, for instance, when the fathers dance with their little daughters, becoming the girls' first cavaliers as they're introduced to the pleasures and strictures of social life. I could name many more, as could all frequent viewers, but will cite just one: Who with any heart could resist the sight of the two children, Marie and her Prince, hand in hand, backs turned towards the audience, walking trustfully toward a faraway star in a darkening snow-covered forest?

When the final curtain fell on these wonders and the audience stumbled out of the theater into reality, I felt--once again, but even more intensely--that The Nutcracker, as conceived by Balanchine, is among the most refreshing and civilized of entertainments.

© 2011 Tobi Tobias

This season's gala-event costumes for women of a certain income emphasize cascading ruffles in weak-willed pastels or glowing jewel tones. The men continue to sport black-tie mufti with almost no rakish variation on the theme. Expense is evident, as is the eternal question of hoi polloi concerning the gowns with obviously crushable skirts, How does she sit down in it?

Despite the War: American Ballet Theatre's Luciana Paris in Paul Taylor's Company B

Photo: Gene Schiavone

This fashion report comes from the opening night of American Ballet Theatre's week-long fall season at the handsomely renovated City Center--now gorgeous and comfortable beyond belief. The repertory for the week eschewed the company's multi-act classics (Swan Lake, now in warped form, Giselle, et al.) and wannabe classics (Neumeier's Lady of the Camellias, Kudelka's Cinderella) that ABT offers in its long spring seasons at the Metropolitan Opera House. Each program in the City Center run purveyed three or four ballets that owe more to modern dance (Paul Taylor's), postmodern dance (Merce Cunningham's, Twyla Tharp's), and ballet being catapulted into the future (Alexei Ratmansky's), than to the strict conventions of classical ballet.

Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: Kristi Boone in Twyla Tharp's In the Upper Room

Photo: Rosalie O'Connor

The high point of the opening night show was, incontestably, Twyla Tharp's In The Upper Room. Created in 1986 for Tharp's own company and set on ABT in 1988 the ballet is a powerhouse; it starts at the top of the scale energy-wise and escalates from there. Philip Glass's driving score is a full partner in the dancers' trip to Paradise, assuming that's what the "upper room" indicates.

Upper Room divides its cast into two different sects: those shod in sneakers (affectionately called the Stompers) and those who favor classical dance footgear, which means pointe shoes for the ladies. The two camps eventually merge, as they have in the course of Tharp's career.

Tharp's relentless choreography displays dozens of terrific things you can do when you mate academic dancing with Tharp's personal style, a brew of both classical and modern dance, jazz, pedestrian gesture, and myriad other fascinating ways of moving that she fixed on in her childhood from an eclectic set of lessons and since then through her magpie instinct. Boxing, just for starters.

Upper Room is perfect proof of the fact that Tharp is a demon of patterning. You can feel her brain ticking away as one design succeeds another. Her choreography offers a kaleidoscope of moving bodies arranged in space, each image utterly clear and then gone, giving way to the next, just seconds after you've taken in the preceding one.

The overall pace of the dance seems furious, the action mounting in fervor. The speed makes obvious the risks the dancers are often taking--seemingly without fear but, rather, savoring the reward of attempting the near-impossible and achieving it. It's quite possible that in this piece Tharp is telling us this is one of the main factors that make a dancer dance.

Costumes and lighting are not relegated to supporting roles in this production; they're striking essentials. Norma Kamali designed a wardrobe of prison-striped black and white pajama-like outfits, accented by a blinding red. (The women's gleaming red pointe shoes (worn over red socks) is a terrific latter-day sequel to the demonic footgear Moira Shearer wore in the best dance film ever made.) As the dance progresses, the cast gradually sheds the coveralls to reveal more and more carmine underneath.

The lighting designed by Jennifer Tipton astonished the audience when Upper Room was first performed. She filled the upstage area with a drifting fog from which the dancers emerged--as if by magic--and into which they disappeared. At the City Center performances, which Tipton did not supervise, the entire stage was suffused with smoke that never moved and functioned as a pale gray scrim that never lifted, thus diminishing some of the action.

Starry Night: Herman Cornejo and Paris in Tharp's Sinatra Suite

Photo: Rosalie O'Connor

Herman Cornejo's return to performing after a long recuperation from injury was reason enough to be happy and excited by the evening's performance of Tharp's Sinatra Suite. Cornejo is a unique dancer--an extraordinary technician who, refusing to be typed by his scrappy-kid-brother looks, has extended his abilities to danseur noble roles, modern dance roles, you name it. At his best he's an artist who infuses everything he does with life.

Cornejo wasn't at his best in this duet on opening night, He was having obvious trouble with the lifts, and his partner, Luciana Paris, was of no help to him, apparently having problems of her own. He also tended to separate elements in the dancing that should be fused. He called undue attention to feats demanding classical ballet prowess because he executed them so immaculately, meanwhile failing to articulate the jazzy, gymnastic, and casual elements that are essential to Tharp's signature style.

He was encouragingly better in the closing number, a solo to "One for My Baby (and One More for the Road)." There, the lyrics conjure up a guy who has been through it all telling his sad story to the bartender in a seedy dive about to close for the night. Here, too, Cornejo danced with too much emphasis on the classical bits and too much self-conscious acting, but also with hints that he was beginning to set matters right. The important thing is that he's back on stage. He's not just one of ABT's great stars; he's indispensable.

Sinatra Suite got its ideal cast at a later performance when Paloma Herrera and Marcelo Gomes took the leading roles--they're both innately sexy dancers and have reciprocally crackerjack timing. The richness they brought to the succession of songs that runs from dewy-eyed romance to the inevitable break-up went so far as to hint toward the end that it's the woman, not the man, claiming "I did it my way." Being a generous performer as well as a singular one, Gomes let Herrera go for it.

As for the choreography, not only is it inventive, it's also vibrantly expressive about the shifting moods of love. (In the Upper Room has only one mood: driving on Ecstasy.) To my mind, though, the ballet was even better in its original incarnation, the 1982 Nine Sinatra Songs--more thrilling, more sensuous, occasionally even amusing (remember the bumbling young sweethearts of "Somethin' Stupid"?). Using more songs, that piece involved several couples and was originally danced by the singular members of Tharp's own company, back in simpler times, when the choreographer had her own company.

Five in a Row: A line-up of ABT's male dancers in Demis Volpi's Private Light

Photo: Rosalie O'Connor

The big curiosity of the evening was the premiere of Private Light by Demis Volpi, who is a mere 25 years old. The Argentinean-born dancer-choreographer trained in his homeland, then in Canada, and finally came under the wing of the Stuttgart Ballet, joining the company in 2004. He began to choreograph in 2006 and has enjoyed the support of Stuttgart's Noverre Society, which has aided several emerging choreographers who went on to international fame. He has since gathered much attention and much praise, but I can't join in the applause.

Generous apologists for Volpi are bound to say: He is a beginner and he will learn. But anyone examining the careers of the western world's choreographic geniuses (Balanchine, Graham, Ashton, and Tudor leap to mind) will see that they refined their craft over the years--choosing, according to their own inclinations, whose inventions to imitate, steal from, or build upon--but that their artistry and unique imagination were unmistakably in them from the beginning.

Clearly, Volpi has learned the set rules of his trade. For example: Select a movement theme, state it early on, then thread it throughout the piece, giving it a few exact repeats but even more variations. The trouble with Volpi is that he hasn't absorbed such rules organically; they remain merely intellectual propositions that never become visceral or vivid--or make any obvious point.

In Private Light Volpi fixates on the idea of the line-up, the kind in
which the police present a prospective witness for the prosecution with a handful of people (among them the suspected criminal) who resemble one another. They stand under bright light, their bodies evenly spaced in a horizontal line. The Volpi version uses five male-female couples and insists, throughout the piece, on the rule of five, a tactic that makes the ballet feel increasingly tedious and contrived.

A major feature of the piece is The Endless Kiss--heavy mouth-to-mouth smooching. Its repetition is neither interesting nor (as I assume the choreographer meant it to be) funny. Another big deal has one of the men (Joseph Gorak) neatly executing excerpts from a ballet barre without a barre to support him, as a little horde of his colleagues are periodically revealed to be watching him. The solo is a feat, to be sure, but a dry one, and the point of it remains murky.

The central segment of Private Light is a duet for Simone Messmer (who creates a different persona for every one of her ABT roles) and Cory Stearns. Messmer first appears alone, doing one capricious thing after another, like a girlchild who's been brought up under the free-to-be system. When her partner arrives--signaling the beginning of her adulthood--her shenanigans become grotesque enough for the spectator to wonder if she's being abused. She keeps collapsing, a victim in his arms. Am I just imaging this or is Europe's contemporary ballet more tolerant of nasty behavior towards women than we are in America?

The most agreeable element of Private Light was its accompaniment--selections ranging from folk-style music to classical pieces by Albéniz and Villa-Lobos, enticingly played at the edge of the stage by guitarist Christian Smith.

Ménage à Trois: Alexei Agoudine, Xiomara Reyes, and Grant DeLong in The Garden of Villandry, co-choreographed by Martha Clarke, Robby Barnett, and Felix Blaska

Photo: Gene Schiavone

Villandry, as the program might usefully have mentioned, is one of the16th-century châteaux on the Loire (small castles, such as fairy tales depict), best known for its elaborate formal gardens. The site, painstakingly refurbished and scrupulously tended, is open to tourists whose reaction, in their myriad tongues, is invariably "lovely" or "amazing."

With the musicians in an upstage corner, a trio in Edwardian dress dances the subtle--and mercurial--relationships among two gentlemen and the lady they both desire. The dancers on this occasion were the perennially lovely Julie Kent; Roman Zhurbin, a sturdily built and quietly resourceful character dancer; and Julio Bragado-Young, who looks like a stock character--the pale, undernourished young tutor of yore who has a few wealthy children under his care and a head full of impossible dreams.

The dancing is a detailed study of the myriad ways in which three bodies can join and intertwine and (very rarely, never creating too much distance between them) separate. Hands touch and withdraw. Gentle kisses, mostly a brush of the lips on a cheek, are given and accepted. Secrets are whispered behind a cupped hand held to the sharer's ear. The lady lets her head fall on one suitor's shoulder and then, playing fair, on the other's. She is swung into the air by both, her long white skirt flying with her--a shroud of chastity, perhaps. She rejoices in the admiration her courtiers give her and sweetly, always tactfully, returns the pleasure.

Imagine, if you're a member of the so-called gentler sex, the most romantic and refined of your female friends actually admitting she wanted to live such a life. "Oh," you might well scoff, "it's like a perfume ad." But then who are you to judge? You don't wear perfume.

As the ballet went on, I expected some crisis to the situation that had been so artfully and meticulously presented, some climactic scene, some horror, perhaps, or at least some melodrama. (Throughout a long and fruitful career, Clarke has regularly revealed her penchant for eerie, alarming scenarios.) Even when I decided that the participants in the trio probably don't crave a solution to their problem, that they no doubt find it exquisitely romantic, I still remained ignorant of the tone the piece was taking toward the whole business. One contextualizing clue: the ballet begins and closes with the three dancers staring reproachfully at the audience as if we lookers-on were voyeurs.

Ménages à Deux: Paloma Herrera and Eric Tamm in Merce Cunningham's Duets

Photo: Gene Schiavone

ABT's acquisition of Merce Cunningham's 1980 Duets, one of the late choreographer's most accessible works, may be a forecast of how that repertory will fare when the Cunningham company disbands at the end of this year, as part of Cunningham's plans for his works' life after his own death. His dances will be released to other qualified troupes, with a former Cunningham performer appointed to set and coach the work.

I can't imagine Cunningham's dances being in better hands than those of Patricia Lent, who transmitted Duets to a pair of ABT casts. In a particularly rewarding Works & Process program at the Guggenheim Museum in October, Lent worked with Isabella Boylston and Craig Salstein, making sparse, concise corrections and suggestions in the most even voice imaginable, never inflecting the information with her personality. She might have been a latter-day guru. Everything she said made good sound sense.

In performance the plainspoken yet mysterious choreography suggested a realm of dancing almost alien to ABT's nonetheless eclectic repertory. It was only natural that many of classical ballet's conventions, deliberately abandoned by Cunningham, automatically surfaced: dancing to the audience; dancing that ended in freeze-frame images; dancing that emphasized the brilliance of a certain step or phrase. But most of the performers seemed to respect the unfamiliar horizons and want to explore them, which is a good sign.

Fighting Depression: A scene from ABT's production of Paul Taylor's Black Tuesday

Photo: Gene Schiavone

Paul Taylor's dances have been well absorbed by ABT's dancers, as was evident in the week's performances of the 1991 Company B and Black Tuesday, created in 2001. In a method Taylor has worked out for himself, both pieces were first done by classical companies and then quickly absorbed back into the Taylor company's repertoire, where they seemed to find their most genuine interpretations. Still, Taylor has long claimed that he has no problem with having his choreography performed with a classical accent. Moreover, ABT's version of the pieces I've named have, a decade or two after they were choreographed, taken on an ebullient life. The reason? Increasing familiarity with the Taylor way of moving and the ability of the upcoming generation of classical dancers to excel in a wide range of styles.

Ballet Blanc: Reyes and Cornejo in Alexei Ratmansky's Seven Sonatas

Photo: Rosalie O'Connor

Alexei Ratmansky's 2009 Seven Sonatas, set to seven of Scarlatti's Keyboard Sonatas (played onstage by Barbara Bilach), is a delectable choreographic feast. I thought it marvelous when I first saw it, but it's even more gratifying now, having grown richer through repeated performance--and through my own better appreciation of it after repeated viewings.

As usual, Ratmansky is rigorous here, offering a cornucopia of invention without leaving the context in which he's working. And as usual his choreography is packed with evidence that he has learned from the masters he honors. He even pays them overt homage; I spotted brief quotes from Fokine, Bournonville, and Balanchine, among others. And of course there are little jokes--amusements, rather--along the way, which seem to reveal the sheer pleasure that dance gives him.

Three couples constitute the cast of Seven Sonatas, so it might be called a chamber ballet. It might also be termed a ballet blanc because it's costumed in white--for the men as well as the women, actually--and because it refers to the Romantic vein of purity and fleet, weightless execution. It also seems to be plotless, but Ratmansky is an irrepressible creator of subtexts. At one of the two performances of the piece that I saw in ABT's crammed week at City Center, I was convinced that the ballet was revising the story of Bournonville's La Sylphide: Young man captures the otherworldly sylphide and--guess what?--they proceed to live a charmed life, full of laughter. Ratmansky danced and choreographed for the Royal Danish Ballet for several years, so he must know the Bournonville version by heart.

ABT's week at City Center was a terrific stylistic challenge to its dancers, a showcase for performers exiled to lesser roles in the blockbuster multi-act works that prevail in the company's long spring season at the Met, and a way to attract an audience that isn't mired in old conventions. Is it possible that the company's two profiles can be reconciled? If that seems impractical, how about two weeks at City Center next year?

© 2011 Tobi Tobias

Duŝan Týnek Dance Theatre

Photo: Julieta Cervantes

Seeing the Dušan Týnek Dance Theatre, recently at Tribeca PAC, in the second of the two programs it offered, made me wonder why the standing of its marvelous choreographer hasn't graduated from "promising" to top-of-the-line. If he were working for a big institutionalized company like ABT or New York City Ballet, he might blow contenders like Brian Reeder and even Benjamin Millepied off the map.

Czechoslovakian-born, Týnek emigrated to train and dance in New York. His mentors include Aileen Pasloff, Merce Cunningham, and Lucinda Childs. He formed his own company, Dušan Týnek Dance Theatre, in 2002. From my first sight of his work, I was hooked on what he was doing.

"Ambitious beyond its power to deliver, the piece is filled with vision, charm, and wit," I wrote about his Pilot's Dream, and "preserves uncorrupted the poetic fantasies of childhood." This was in the Village Voice, back in 2003. The following year, again in the Voice, I called his Pink Tree, a duet for women, "astutely constructed and beautifully danced" and noted Týnek's "skill at implying feelings through movement."

Since then, many a dance writer has noted his gifts: imagination and originality, first of all; then, a seemingly inborn command of structure; an uncanny ability to make movement express emotion and atmosphere; and a dance vocabulary that bonds classical and modern techniques in a way that seems natural, not studied or just plain awkward.

Duŝan Týnek's Portals

Photo: Julieta Cervantes

The cast for Portals was: Alexandra Berger, Ann Chiaverini, John Eirich. Emily Gayeski, Elisa Osborne, Samuel Swanton, Satoshi Takao, and Nicholas Wagner.

Two dances on the three-work program, Portals and Widow's Walk, were new this season. Both demonstrate Týnek's steadily increasing sophistication. Portals, was the most powerful piece I've seen from him yet. All eight of the company's dancers are dressed in Karen Young's boldly cut leather-look costumes, which bring to mind warriors of ancient Greece or Rome. Both men and women move with gutsy force--and considerable sensuousness--before and behind Mary L. Hamrick's pale translucent drop cloth. The drop is patterned with jagged gashes indicating cracks (from age or from assault), and punctuated with a huge cutout in the shape of an upside-down U. Hence the portals of the title.

Týnek's choreography conjures up a tight community (one passage is even influenced by central European folk dancing), with a lust for life, equally feisty in war and mating, actually not separating the two. The full-blooded thrashing action alternates with contemplative moments in which the participants seem to reflect on who they are and, as Yeats put it, what is past, or passing, or to come.

Týnek's Portals

Photo: Julieta Cervantes

A master of understanding the relationship of dancers to the space in which they move, Týnek makes the most of the different planes of action created by the drop cloth, activating each of them at the same time, but in contrasting ways. For instance, a brief intense duet--a couple making a significant personal connection--occurs in front of this scrim while, behind it, figures in silhouette pace back and forth in a horizontal line, a restless, anonymous parade. Adding yet another vibrant element to the piece, the music, by the post-modern composer Aleksandra Vrebalov, was played live and onstage by the equally daring string quartet ETHEL.

Widow's Walk refers to the porch-in-the-air that once surrounded many a coastal New England home. Up high, so it provided a view of the waters from which fishermen drew their living, it was cantilevered against the building and reached all around it. The fishermen's anxious wives paced it, watching for their husbands to return, fearing that, as often happened, they might be seized by the turbulent waves.

Týnek's Widow's Walk

Photo: Julieta Cervantes

We meet the wives, then the men. The couples, four of them, rejoice in their mates, but once the men leave, the women revert to their apprehensive stalking. We see the men again, stepping straight towards us, making spasmodic gestures that indicate hard physical labor. Then the women return, now in white tunics and white bathing caps; they have become the sea itself--unpredictable waves with their ironically beautiful lacy edging of foam. Gentle at first, the waves escalate to sheer rapaciousness, as they devour and destroy their prey. The men put up a vigorous fight, but there's no victory to be had over the mindless forces of nature. The piece ends with the four human couples whipping through the space as if their rage at death will never end. When the men vanish for good they take with them even the comfort that pacing the widow's walk brought to their wives. What the women feared has come to pass, leaving nothingness.

Widow's Walk, set to music by Mary Rowell and Phil Kline, was also accompanied, live, by ETHEL.

Týnek's Transparent Walls

Photo: Julieta Cervantes

The evening's opener, Transparent Walls, set to a score by Vrebalov, a Týnek favorite, presents a dove-like couple who are all in all to each other against a crowd of six who swirl around them, threatening chaos or mayhem. It's Us vs. Them until the entire environment grows menacing and the lovers, too, are trapped in its lurking perils--perhaps simply in the dire straits of being alive. Although the dancers worked with their typical fervor, this piece didn't match the complexity and impact of the two works that followed. Nevertheless it made a useful curtain raiser, immediately assuring the audience, through the freshness of the choreography, that it was not going to be mired in the conventional.

Týnek's flaws? Nothing Bessie Schonberg, the late advisor to the realm of contemporary dance, couldn't have corrected in a minute: Sameness will dull your audience's perception, so . . . Don't use all eight of your dancers for three pieces in a row. Don't use dusky lighting for three dances in a row. And, while we're talking about dusk, don't encourage your costume designers to confine their palettes to muted grays and browns.

Apart from pointing out that many of Týnek's dances could benefit from further development, I won't attempt to guess what suggestions Bessie might have made about the choreography. She was a keen-sighted observer and a benign supporter; she could make anything better without undermining its creator.

Duŝan Týnek's Dance Theatre in rehearsal

Photo: Julieta Cervantes

Still, I believe Týnek's frustratingly slow progress toward wider recognition is not due to artistic shortcoming but, rather, to practical factors. Emerging choreographers of the classical-ballet persuasion seem to have a good many opportunities to make and show their work, especially if they are attached to an important company. Contributing to the repertory of a junior company and creating a dance for a company's New Choreographers Evening are just two of the options. Contemporary dance troupes don't have the money to back such programs and many of them (like Paul Taylor's) are devoted entirely to the work of their founder. At the same time, ironically enough, the big ballet companies are absorbing the work of the best contemporary choreographers (Taylor, Tharp, Cunningham) because today there are few strictly-ballet choreographers as good as these. Now there's no way Týnek can change the situation on his own (though I devoutly hope he's doing whatever he can). It's up to the organizing contingent in the dance world--the folks who brought Fall for Dance into being, for example--to figure out the solution. Preferably soon.

© 2011 Tobi Tobias

Shadowplay: Jonathan Burrows (l.) and Matteo Fargion (r.) in their Both Sitting Duet

Photo: Herman Sirgeloos

When the presumably odd couple Jonathan Burrows (dancer and choreographer) and Matteo Fargion (musician and composer) played The Kitchen back in 2004 in their Both Sitting Duet I titled my review (lots of description, some analysis, intimations of enchantment) "Less Is More." Seven years later, they're back in New York for three performances at Danspace Project, for which they may have been thinking that less was not quite enough. Opening night was essentially a double-header: their first success here was preceded by Cheap Lecture and The Cow Piece, two works, made in 2009, that New York hadn't seen yet.

Before I get to the more recent pieces, I'm reproducing my 2004 report for ArtsJournal because it sums up what I saw--and still see--in Both Sitting Duet.

IS LESS MORE?

© 2004 Tobi Tobias

Two's Company: Burrows (l.) and Fargion (r.)

Photo: Alastair Muir

Now, what about Cheap Lecture and The Cow Piece? Both are dazzling, and they belong together. The first makes its point largely through words; the second, through absurdist deeds. Both ramp up Burrows' and Fargion's particular gift--articulation and offbeat timing in spoken language and body percussion--to such a virtuosic degree that a first-time onlooker's head starts to reel. I, for one, felt I was taking in only part of what was actually going on. I'd jump at the chance to see both pieces again, right now. Best of all, soundly rooted in the couple's earlier work, they move it along to more complex developments, refining and advancing their unconventional aesthetic.

Cheap Lecture is a loving mockery of sessions purporting to convey information--even wisdom--by a pair of professorial types. You've sat before them, puzzled or benumbed, in college or the halls of adult education. (Granted, this pair is dressed like handymen, but that costume is just these artists' trademark.) Each fellow, standing, speaks into his own standing mike, but the two thread their utterances into their partner's as if to represent a single person. Silences, little and large, make for the duo's off-beat timing, and their use of repetition owes much to Gertrude Stein. Each guy holds a sheaf of paper that is supposedly the script of his talk. Page by page, he drops it onto the floor when he finishes making one of his pointed/pointless points. Behind the speakers is a large screen onto which are projected the key words and phrases of their rant; these might be the notes taken by a dutiful listener, pathetically intent upon enlightenment. Be assured, though, that the B&F tone is neither bitter nor supercilious. Life is absurd, they're telling us, and we're all in it together.

Information Please: Fargion (l.) and Burrows (r.) in their Cheap Lecture

Photo: Herman Sorgeloos

The Cow Piece uses the same setting--but to another purpose. Burrows and Fargion stand behind a pair of laboratory-style tables, each of which has become home to a mini-herd of a half-dozen three-inch plaster or plastic cows. On an undercoat of white, half of them are spotted black; half, sienna. The men are their irresponsible shepherds, given to the intermittent playing of invitations to peasant-style dancing--on a harmonica, a mandolin, and (my erudite guest informs me) a miniature harmonium.

The men arrange and rearrange their cows obsessively and count them again and again like uncertain, if loving, parents. Farjeon even names his--Italian names, like Bella and Lavinia, that refer to his ancestry. As the pace of these doings and the energy put into them accelerate, the men--like very young children whose playing has gotten out of hand--escalate into gleeful cruelty to their cattle, knocking them down and, clever devils, hanging them on minuscule ropes made of string. Throughout the piece, the narrative is, accompanied by all the iterations, gestures, and skewed timing typical of the makers' style. The crazy antics and even wilder joy are horrifying and amusing at the same time.

Something I continue to find amazing about Burrows and Fargion's work is that many of its viewers think at first that they've stumbled upon little-known-talent--you know, just by accident. No such chance. The duo has performed its repertoire internationally, consistently intriguing its audience, and has been officially commended with honors such as a New York Dance and Performance Award (a "Bessie") and high-end commissions (for Burrows) from the likes of William Forsythe's Ballet Frankfurt and Sylvie Guillem. At first glance, the pieces don't seem to have any hidden ambitions but rather to be like something you yourself (or, more likely, a clever child) could fashion with one of those kits of 1001 click-together parts. The simplicity of means in Burrows and Fargion's work and the sheer fun that pervades it seduce you into loving it. All the while it's inexorably revealing its genius.

© 2011 Tobi Tobias

Scattershot: Frances Chiaverini in Bacchae, created by Luca Veggetti for Morphoses

Photo: Kyle Froman

As its title indicates, Veggetti's Bacchae claims to be based on the violent and profound Greek drama of the same name that was among the last works of Euripides, the towering fifth-century BCE playwright. (My colleague Deborah Jowitt offers a splendid survey of this background in her Dance Beat review for ArtsJournal.) If, however, you went to see Morphoses hoping to encounter in Veggetti's version the ancient classic's basic story--with its philosophical ramifications and theatrical punch--you were on a fool's errand.

Though he deigns to summarize Euripides' plot in a brusque just-the-facts-ma'am paragraph in the house program, Veggetti refuses to stoop so low as to represent any of the events in the play or identify any of the characters on the stage. Instead he offers highfalutin' pretentiousness in the form of sleek movement in a reduced vocabulary and posturing made to look runway-stylish.

The key ingredients in the choreography are bold gestures of the arms, strangely curved in at the wrist; borrowings from an advanced level of yoga (a practice surely Greek to the Greeks); and, worse of all, endlessly reiterated skids across the floor, as if the dancers were on kids' scooters, an effect made possible by their feet being sheathed in socks. The move has no decipherable context to give it meaning; the socks look absurd.

Throughout, apparently to create atmosphere--of dread? of great doings?--voices from nowhere intone words and phrases that, when they're not too blurry, still don't tell us much. There are also tactics , seemingly heavy with metaphor, that fail to give us the key to their lock. For instance, we first meet the flautist Erin Lesser, in a long stint of trying to animate an instrument taller that she is. Much time and breath are wasted on this absurdist passage, which includes assuming the overgrown flute is a percussion instrument. When Lesser appears later, she gets to play a real flute. What's the point of this?

Bacchae is also crammed with smart-alecky tricks that fizzle and arch devices that are simply ludicrous. A little wooden puppet--a strung-up version of those small jointed wooden figures that help visual artists get anatomy-in-action right--appears early in the piece and never returns to clarify its purpose. Veggetti might usefully have a look at Crystal Pite's Dark Matter to see how richly such an avatar can be used. And then there was the much-repeated effect of having the dancers enter the stage by crawling--awkwardly, too--underneath the yards of black fabric that curtained the three walls of the stage. I could go on; the list is substantial.

Footsteps: Chiaverini in Veggetti's Bacchae for Morphoses

Photo: Kyle Froman

In both its incarnations Morphoses has been, of necessity, a pick-up troupe. Its 11 current dancers form a modern ballet group deserving nothing but praise; to a one they're handsome, proficient, mature, and distinctly individual. Three dancers play the central roles in Bacchae. Frances Chiaverini has an extended solo that functions as a prologue, her long, strong, impressively flexible body stretching on the floor as if she were simply a dancer warming up. In the course of the show she's regularly the central--magisterial--figure of a segment, even when she's hovering on the dusky sidelines, watching it.

Gabrielle Lamb of the gleaming copper hair is paler and smaller. Although she's clearly strong, especially in held poses, she has a fragile, vulnerable air. She appears to be condemned by fate, projecting courage through passive endurance. Adrian Danchig-Waring (borrowed from the New York City Ballet) has the face and bearing of a long-ago Mediterranean potentate. You could imagine his head on an old Roman coin. Full-figure he appears at once entirely self-possessed yet gnawed by inner turmoil. Imagine how eloquent such dancers could be in worthy choreography!

Lopez's long-range plan envisions the troupe's appointing a different "resident artistic director" every year. This person (the Swedish choreographer Pontus Lidberg's name has been mentioned for 2012) will create or be the catalyst for a forward-looking work, alert to the possibilities of multi-media, which are already embraced in the dance world. The question remains, Will there be a next year?

© 2011 Tobi Tobias

Last night I saw the first program, which presented the Mark Morris Dance Group, Lil Buck, the Trisha Brown Dance Company, and the Joffrey Ballet. The evening opened with Morris's 2003 All Fours, set to Bartók's String Quartet No. 4, played live. Admirably, Morris insists on this condition and is willing--and, thanks to his success, able--to pay for it. Essentially abstract, the dance appears to pit two communities against each other, then bring them to an uneasy reconciliation. The groups are identified by the color of their costumes; there are eight "blacks," four "whites."

Profiled: Members of the Mark Morris Dance Group in Morris's All Fours

Photo: Ken Friedman

The black crowd might be a gang possessed by evil, brain-washed into it perhaps, and ready to disseminate it, or so I assumed from the mechanical, staccato quality of their actions. The white contingent may remember what love is, but obviously harbors a deadly secret (indicated by their cautionary gesture of raising their fingers to their lips). It comes as no surprise that Morris never reveals what the secret might be; doing so would ruin the work's power. Paul Taylor operates with the same splendid motto: Never explain.

The rapprochement of the two contingents isn't rendered as clearly as their earlier opposition, which is presented as turf warfare. Once the two gangs tentatively start occupying the same space, it's hard to tell what might have brought them together. But then compromise is never as clearly dramatic as contention.

The choreography is full of astute references to other legendary modern dance choreographers. From Martha Graham Morris co-opts the pleading or praying gestures of folks in trouble; from Paul Taylor, the lumbering gait of the grotesques in 3 Epitaphs; from Doris Humphrey, the most gorgeous of the falls to the floor that she invented: from vertical to splayed-out supine on a single count.

The audience for All Fours may also find literary associations in the piece, whether Morris himself intended them or not. Eerily and wonderfully two of the black men function as clones, but not quite. The pair made me think of Tweedledum and Tweedledee in Alice's Wonderland as well as Dupont and Dupond (pronounced the same way in French, in English translation called Thomson and Thompson), the hapless detectives in the Tintin comics.

Typically Morris accumulates a series of gestures--some of them suggesting an attitude or an emotion, some perhaps arbitrary--and repeats them in deftly varied ways throughout a tightly structured dance. In All Fours it's thrashing arms, a hand cupped to the ear, fists with a single finger raised straight up, a woman standing on the thighs of a man who obligingly bends his knees to create her perch. You notice the ways in which Morris deploys this material and you think, Here's a guy who knows what he's doing.

My only problem with the Fall for Dance performance of All Fours is that the cast didn't seem to be working with the lusty commitment Morris fans have come to count on. Why I can't imagine.

The most fun and the greatest surprise of the evening was Lil Buck's The Swan, a solo, partially improvised, set to the Saint-Saëns music to which Michel Fokine choreographed for Anna Pavlova. Lil Buck (aka Charles Riley) wasn't wearing pointe shoes, though his limber gyrations in sneakers often whisked him onto pointe and demi-pointe. What he does is a form of urban street dancing called Memphis Jookin' and he's a born star.

Articulate Ankles: Lil Buck, both dancer and choreographer for The Swan

Photo: Erin Baiano

Accompanied by an onstage cellist (Joshua Roman) and a harpist (Riza Hequibal Printup) who, beautifully lighted, suggest a corner of Heaven, Buck (the "Lil" seems to be an honorific in his trade) makes a calm entrance. Then, energy coursing through him, he delivers arm gestures that suggest, simultaneously, both the rippling wings of a swan (at least as imagined by Fokine, and Ivanov before him) and the water that is the bird's element. His whole body is preternaturally fluid. He has the most articulate ankles imaginable and the mobility of a contortionist in every joint. Buck's Swan meets its death as the dancer slowly ties his body into a knot from which there is no escape.

There's more to Buck's performance than a lithe body, physical eccentricity abetted by grace, and a charismatic stage presence. He seems to identify with the swan in its plight, giving the creature the same kind of dignity and pathos that I once saw Galina Ulanova achieve in the Fokine version.

Right after the performance I went to YouTube, that gallery of innumerable uncurated images, to see and learn more. I saw that while the vocabulary of Memphis Jookin' is small, the joyous defiance with which its inadequately privileged practitioners break the rules of Establishment Dancin' is immense.

The most sublime contribution to the program was Trisha Brown's Rogues, new work, set to music by Alvin Curran, that looks like part of something larger, still to be created. As it stands, it's an exquisite duet performed by Neal Beasley and Lee Serle, one a head taller than the other. In gray jerseys and skinny jeans--typical Brown workaday garb--they do much of their dancing in unison or at least in canon. This tactic, of course, reveals the differences between things that might be carelessly considered the same.

As the dance progresses, Brown subtly and slyly persuades you not only to notice the differences between the two men but also to rejoice in them. Just to begin with, the shorter fellow is stockier, the taller one lankier, and these disparate builds affect the way they move and the very texture of their movement, even when they're synchronized.

The men performed very faithfully in Brown's style--fluid yet full of unexpected angles, understated and unaffected, yet with unwavering focus. They did remarkably well, as far as anyone can replicate a uniquely personal style. As yet, no one has fully succeeded. Onstage Brown was a marvel, tossing off sneakily complex moves as if she were sauntering down the road and performing feats of concentration as if she were part of a desultory conversation. Her remarkable physical sensitivity, her intellectual acuity, and her wry sense of humor make imitators look lazy. The "next" Trisha Brown would have to be an original, just as she herself is.

The Joffrey Ballet, which way back when was resident at City Center, flew in from its Chicago home to represent classical dancing. To me, Edwaard Liang's Woven Dreams, set to music by Maurice Ravel, Michael Galasso, Benjamin Britten, and Henryk Gorecki, seemed essentially unwatchable. Svelte muscular bodies in sleek costumes rendered a slew of balletic conventions that lacked a coherent structure and afforded no clues as to musical inflection and emotional subtext. The dancers--hardworking if still needing a jot more technical polish--seemed to be, literally, just going through the motions.

The piece begins with a group emerging from an enormous, heavy web (designed by Jeff Bauer, who also provided the ice blue Vegas-goes-minimalist costumes). Oh so predictably, the web rises to serve as a ceiling and, many moons later, descends to hover over the performers' heads, signaling the end of the ballet's meaningless maneuvers.

Many of us in New York miss the Joffrey but Woven Dreams made me recall how many indifferent-to-godawful ballets the company has always had in its repertory. When Robert Joffrey was alive (he died in 1988), he fostered a rep in which easy-looking ballets, mostly by the facile Gerald Arpino, were programmed side by side with neglected but fascinating one-acters of the past by the likes of Kurt Jooss and Léonide Massine as well as more current masters like Ashton and Balanchine. At the same time, Joffrey commissioned work from gifted choreographers on the cutting edge, notably Twyla Tharp and Laura Dean. He remains a hard man to replace.

I should say here that a slot on a Fall for Dance program doesn't let you fairly size up a company. It was never meant to. Fall for Dance offers pleasure and stimulation. Intrigued viewers must take it from there on their own.

© 2011 Tobi Tobias

Light--silent and impalpable--is almost essential to theatrical dance. Jennifer Tipton has been its master for over four decades, creating atmospheric marvels for drama and opera as well. In 1994 she dared to ask herself, What if light were not just a significant accompanying element but a star player in the show? The answer became Necessary Weather, in which she collaborated with two distinguished postmodern dancers, Dana Reitz and Sara Rudner, for an hour-long piece presented at the Kitchen. In a quiet way it became legendary and was finally revived last year at the Baryshnikov Art Center. This year it has been incorporated into Lincoln Center's White Light Festival.

Sara Rudner (l.) and Dana Reitz (r.) in their and lighting artist Jennifer Tipton's Necessary Weather

Photo: Stephanie Berger

Note: All photos show the present production.

I skipped last year's revival because I couldn't imagine anything as beautiful and moving as the original production. Finally, last night, I succumbed and showed up at BAC's sleek Jerome Robbins Theater--and now regret the move. Why? Because 17 years later, everything has changed considerably: I've aged; so have the dancers. All three of us are surely aware of what the Beatles considered old in their charming song "When I'm Sixty-Four." What's more, the culture has shifted enormously. Innocence, wonder, and vision have lost yet another chunk of the popularity they enjoyed in the Sixties.

Here's what I said about Necessary Weather in New York magazine back in '94:

Downtown at the Kitchen, a distinguished trio comprising the dancer-choreographers Dana Reitz and Sara Rudner and the lighting designer Jennifer Tipton presented a haunting hour-long work called Necessary Weather. An evocation of subtle atmospheres, the piece was an equal collaboration of the three (early in her theatrical life, Tipton was a serious dance student). Still, their specialties were evident: Rudner's and Reitz's sharp, delicate articulation and sensuous fluency; Tipton's ability to make illumination create a world of wonders.

At one point, the two figures skirted the perimeter of a large disk of light, cautious but intrigued, like members of a tribe approaching the sacred arena of their ritual. Then Rudner moved into the bright space and suddenly, shedding its ominous aura and acquiring gaiety, it changed into a circus ring. There she seemed to enter a private world of release and delight, though Reitz was duplicating her moves in the near-darkness just an arm's length away. For me, passages like this recalled childhood episodes in which my mood was profoundly affected--and my imagination activated--by the light conditions at different times of day and night, in different seasons and weather. As this singular work proves, theatrical artifice can be the means of recapturing primal experience.

Here are a few of the thoughts I had about the current production:

Rudner (l.) and Reitz (r.) illuminated by Tipton in Necessary Weather

Photo: Stephanie Berger

Sara Rudner, surely the silkiest dancer of her generation, was for many years, as a colleague of mine recently called her, Twyla Tharp's muse. Miraculously, she's retained a good bit of her earlier fluency, but now you see some of the effort involved, especially when she moves from the softness and calm that pervade Necessary Weather into a spate of the crazily swift, complex dancing she did for Tharp.

Tipton's encyclopedia of light effects constitute a telling tour de force on their own. They really do demonstrate how lighting evokes mood in the theater, just as it does in nature. Even more amazing is the fact that she works almost exclusively with black and white (light and dark) and all the many grays in between. Technicolor effects don't enter the picture. A little peach, a little gold--that's all you really notice. Meanwhile, the shifting intensity of brightness and dusk leaves you breathless and conjures up memories of events in your own life that occurred under just such states of illumination.

The choreography itself is not very interesting. Its vocabulary isn't large, and too much attention is given to the arms (wafting airily) and hands (overactive, as if they were trying to defect from the arms to which they're attached). The torso has little to say. The legs and feet are vastly under-challenged. Both Rudner and Reitz pace the floor sensitively (they've perfected the cat's-paw tread and the rhythms of walking), but anything in the hop, skip, jump department has been avoided.

Tipton is acutely aware of how light falls on dancers, not just in terms of how it makes the audience see them and interpret their action, but what it "tells" the dancers themselves. Professional dancers learn from performance how to accept its embrace or hide from it--or in it. From Paul Taylor in the modern wing and Irina Kolpakova on classical ballet's turf, I've heard detailed, impassioned advice to dancers about being aware of how the light strikes the cheekbone.

Rudner (l.), Reitz (r.), and Tipton's collaboration, as seen in Necessary Weather

Photo: Stephanie Berger

Rudner and Reitz wear the all-white costumes I recall from the original Necessary Weather: sheer, loose tunic-length shirts over a torso-hugging singlet and easygoing trousers. Their feet are bare. In one segment of the dance Tipton's lighting turns them into pale, barely visible wraiths, moving around restively, like the ghosts that frighten your four-year-old at night, just after you've fallen asleep. As I write this, I realize that the piece hasn't completely lost its enchantment for me. And I hope that others may have the experience the choreographer Christopher Caines described to me today: "I was the rehearsal-process light-board operator for the original production of Necessary Weather, a life-changing experience. I have never had the same eyes since."

© 2011 Tobi Tobias

I've always shared George Balanchine's idea that a dance should speak for itself. William Forsythe certainly doesn't. At BAM last night The Forsythe Company, based in Germany, opened a four-day run of his enigmatically titled work I don't believe in outer space, created in 2008. Vigorously applauded by a largely pre-middle age audience, it would have remained as impenetrable to me as its title, had I not read the reviews and previews from its earlier showings in London.

Here's the story I pieced together: The choreographer's 60th birthday made him conscious of his own mortality. He decided to make a piece to explore the almost unfathomable idea of leaving the world, of simply being absent from everything he knew. (By odd coincidence I had that experience once as a child and naturally have never forgotten it. The notion of non-existence can be terrifying.)

The Forsythe Company in William Forsythe's I don't believe in outer space

Photo: Julieta Cervantes

In conjunction with considering his own past and his future prospects, Forsythe explored the idea that the domain he'd be leaving had no meaningful structure or even concrete reality. Things fell apart, came together haphazardly, fell apart again, came together again, and then, maybe, exploded. Everything that happened, happened "as if by chance." Yet, somehow, life was very much worth living. All of this was accompanied by the notion that at times the goings-on could be amusing.

I don't believe in outer space uses 17 dancers; live sound and recorded sound (to which the dancers often lip synch); music by Thom Willems; a plainspoken set with dimly lit upstage portals for appearances and disappearances; and, strewn helter-skelter on the stage floor, numerous rough-hewn balls made from the black gaffer tape the backstage crew uses to install flooring and then discards after the show. The balls look like miniature meteorites, fallen from--well, outer space.

The star of the show is Dana Caspersen (Forsythe's wife). She plays a witchy figure who survives any disaster because of the unquenchable force of her rage. She's fueled by fury, like creatures of primal evil in the Brothers Grimm. Once you recover from the shock of her presence as this character--the hands like vicious claws, the squatting walk, the loud, grating voice--you're lured into a shamed admiration of her daring tactics and their success. Caspersen also plays this demon's alter-ego, a Little Goody Two-Shoes housewife, who doesn't stand a chance.

Once the major ideas of the piece are presented, Outer Space continues as a series of vignettes. They flow into one another in a manner so subtle that their order seems random--as strings of events so often do in what we think of as real life.

The Forsythe Company in Forsythe's I don't believe in outer space

Photo: Julieta Cervantes

In a scene that Alice might have witnessed in Wonderland, two guys play ping-pong. Of course there's no table, no net, and, what's more, no ball. But they man their racquets in tandem with the exact sound of the celluloid ball striking an invisible surface. Of course, life being what it is, this absurd match becomes a fatal competition. Even when one of the men captures his partner's racquet, the two manage to go on "playing."

At intervals we see a handsomely built male couple--doing what exactly? Making love standing up (more or less) or fighting, in close. The viewer is left to choose which or to settle for the obvious--both. The pair is passionately locked in combat.

Now and then, a petite, fleet woman with a mop of curly dark hair, flashes through the space wearing something red. She's like a spark of fire briefly animating the prevailing darkness.

As time goes by, events get increasing violent and/or surreal. Finally Yasutake Shimaji introduces some welcome calm into the raucous proceedings. A Japanese-born man, slender and supple, he has a long, haunting, less-is-more solo in which he's all self-containment and quiet grace.

Suddenly, unexpectedly, matters turn almost sentimental as the narration becomes a long, loving citation of all the things in life you relinquish when you disappear. It may bring tears to your eyes ("no more years, calendars, planning"). You may think it's sappy ("no more running with your brothers on a railroad track"). I thought the most telling entries on Forsythe's list were the ones connected to dancing: "no more speed, direction, going, different ways of going"; "no more trees, Fall/fall, things that fall." And then, the most searing loss of all: "No more touching."

The 17 dancers who make all this happen are a fabulous bunch. They deserve accolades for power, precision, flexibility, and individual presence. I'm certain that, if I saw them more often, I'd grow fond of the personas they project, just as I did with the performers in Pina Bausch's early works. Meanwhile, it's thrilling to see that nearly all of Forsythe's dancers have their muscles on high alert and that they seem devoted to their boss's vision. The sight of the full cast simply running cross-stage at top speed can convince you that it's the journey, not the arrival, that matters.

© 2011 Tobi Tobias

City Center renovated, view from house left

Photo: © Aislinn Weidele / Ennead Architects

Last night's celebration of the renovation and restoration of the New York City Center assured the theater's aficionados of dance, music, and drama that they would still be spared having to "walk a mile for a camel." Before it became an arts center "for the people" (meaning affordable), the building, called the Mecca Temple, was a center for the Ancient Arabic Order of the Nobles of the Mystic Shrine. It was not a house of worship, however, but instead a highfalutin clubhouse for a fraternity of Freemasons aiming to do good through charitable works and to enjoy each other's company. Its rituals involved exotic costumes and props. Its decor was based on the concepts of "Arabia" captured in the Moorish Revival style. Hence the camels on the site's walls.

Subsequently obliterated by a thick coat of All-Purpose White, the camels--once taking their riders on prosaic journeys--are now re-imagined as the mounts for more ecstatic pilgrimages in a pair of dreamy pastel-hued murals at either end of the lobby on the mezzanine level.

City Center, Grand Tier lobby, with the new version of the camels

Photo: © Aislinn Weidele / Ennead Architects

At first glance a visitor will notice that the City Center has been made visually more handsome--and striking--all the while wholeheartedly, and with tactful subtlety, respecting its old look, which was admittedly hokey. While architectural changes have been executed for urgent practical reasons, much of this refurbishing has been accomplished by a massive paint job. From the ceiling of the outer lobby through the auditorium itself, the patterning and palette of Moorish decor has been used as an inspiration. Repeated geometric designs are now larger and bolder, while the palette of burgundy and a deep blue just tinged with green has been intensified. Both modifications contribute to the illusion of stained-glass windows set alight by the sun. Touches of gold have been added, while the proscenium has been darkened with slate gray, creating a frame of mystery around what happens on stage. Inside the auditorium, seating and carpeting echo the prescribed palette.

The only misstep is a clumsy and unfathomable video installation in the inner lobby, perhaps an attempt to add the visual arts to the house's offerings. I'd say everything else was a success, intelligence and taste having been used to avoid innumerable pitfalls. Admittedly, I'm one of the no doubt few people who reveled in the City Center's shabbiness. I still remember the day that Robert Joffrey, trying to escape doing the interview he had promised me, took me on a long tour of the dusty, gloomy backstage realm and suddenly halted to say, in wonder, "Can you imagine all the things these walls have witnessed?" Yes, I could: Balanchine and his New York City Ballet, just to begin with.

But progress is unstoppable. The house has been made more comfortable for performers (improved backstage accommodations and a top-notch sprung stage floor) and for spectators (a lighted and heated marquee, improved sight lines, seating with more leg room and more booty room, expanded restroom facilities, and a second elevator).

The new look was designed by Ennead Architects, took more than half a decade to execute, and will end up costing a reported $57 million. Since the City of New York was absorbing nearly half that amount, it seemed only reasonable that Mayor Bloomberg should get to open the gala evening by conducting the orchestra of the house's Encores! series in the "Star-Spangled Banner." This being the national anthem, the audience--packed with splendidly attired 1%-ers--had to stand up (correct) and applaud (incorrect, but common practice). Still, though he added a brief, amusing speech, the Mayor should probably not quit his day job.

City Center renovated, view from house left, with front of stage

Photo: © Aislinn Weidele / Ennead Architects

The stream of top-notch entertainment that followed, introduced by commentators often as starry as the artists, was adeptly put together by the Broadway choreographer Kathleen Marshall. Each item was terrifically done, so I'll just report them in order of appearance. Here goes:

Robert Battle, Judith Jamison's successor as artistic director of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, introduced an excerpt from Ailey's Pas de Duke. Linda Celeste Sims and Matthew Rushing danced it with the kind of musical acuity, sexiness, and sheer know-how that only veteran performers can achieve.

Alex Bernstein, Leonard's son, speaking for the City Center's classical-music scene, gave us the violinist Joshua Bell, a one-time child prodigy who has actually fulfilled his early promise, combining an energetic attack with a honeyed tone. Then came the mezzo-soprano Denyce Graves singing "Mon coeur s'ouvre à ta voix" from Samson et Dalila, convincing her hearers that great emotions are within ordinary people's reach.

An admirably self-effacing Sara Jessica Parker pointed out, correctly, that the City Center was best known for its dance attractions. As evidence, if any was needed, Wendy Whelan and Ask la Cour of the New York City Ballet (long housed at City Center), performed the celebrated duet from Christopher Wheeldon's After the Rain. Whelan was all fragility and flexibility; la Cour made a reverent Prince of Tenderness.

Keeping things in the family, the actor Matthew Broderick (Parker's spouse) spoke for musical theater, introducing three dynamic singers--Donna Murphy ("I Happen to Like New York"); Brian Stokes Mitchell ("It Ain't Necessarily So); and Patti LuPone ("Everything's Coming Up Roses").

Brian Williams, TV newscaster extraordinaire, extolled the City Center's ever-growing outreach program and interviewed two young students aiming for careers in the arts (Tessa Horn and Makaela Martinez) who had benefited significantly from professional artists' visits to their schools. He survived the danger all actors fear--being upstaged by children--but just barely, so all three came up roses.

For a finale, a chorus of singers who have appeared in the house's Encores! programs, sang "Take Care of This House." The orchestra, which had done yeoman's duty throughout the program, playing onstage, came in for its well-earned share of the applause.

When the City Center is looking for its next project, it might usefully try fulfilling the job of a "people's theater," which it once was. For the first performance I saw there, I sat in a front and center orchestra seat for $1.25, which my modest adolescent's allowance covered several times over. I remember this because I was seeing the New York City Ballet for the first time and, while I had succumbed to a few childish crushes, it was the first time I really fell in love.

© 2011 Tobi Tobias

The Suzanne Farrell Ballet, named for the transcendent dancer who was George Balanchine's last muse, celebrates its 10th anniversary this year. Ironically, after a decade of generously favorable response to the group's work, some observers are questioning the wisdom of the enterprise's very existence.

Sarah Kaufman, the Washington Post's Pulitzer Prize-winning dance critic, sums up the situation clearly in her review of the troupe's showing at Kennedy Center in DC (the Farrell Ballet's official home), which directly preceded the present New York run. The Center's support for what became the Farrell Ballet had been urged by James Wolfensohn when he was chairman of the Center's board. Like so many of us, he had been inspired by the ballerina's incomparable dancing.

Thanks to Farrell's unique experience with Balanchine and her own vision and skill, the company she evolved over the past decade has consistently offered passages of sensitive, selfless, profoundly musical dancing. Nevertheless, it remains essentially a small pick-up group that can work only sporadically with Farrell. Inevitably, few if any of its dancers have been of the highest professional caliber. Under these circumstances, which are dictated by well-intentioned yet insufficient funding--and the absence of a Lincoln Kirstein clone to guide its growth--the organization can't hope to develop even as far as an aspiring regional ballet. "The questions now are," Kaufman concludes, "Could Farrell's talents be better used? And could [Kennedy Center's] money be better spent?"

Once it was clear that the New York City Ballet, under Peter Martins, didn't care to have Farrell around in her ideal role--coaching the dancers in the Balanchine repertory--I once hoped another sort of plan might work. What if three companies ripe for and worthy of what she can offer--Miami City Ballet, just for example--each agreed to hire her for a residency of three months per year, during which time she would coach and teach company class, imparting her deep understanding of Balanchine's principles? This was a pipe dream, my colleagues insisted; logistics alone would make it impossible and the present state of the economy would make it unlikely.

So dance fans are left with what Farrell can do with the resources she has. What I saw on the opening night of her company's New York run was disheartening. The ballets performed were Haieff Divertimento (1944), which Farrell had reconstructed; the pas de deux from Diamonds (1967), in which she originated the ballerina role and hasn't been equaled yet; Meditation (1963), the first ballet Balanchine created for her; and the justly renowned Agon (1957).

As a curtain raiser--a meet-and-greet affair, introducing the dancers to the audience--the light-weight Haieff Divertimento would have been just fine if only Farrell's dancers had the ability to toss it off with ease technically and the principals had invested in it dramatically.

The work for the four-couple corps and a central, unpartnered man is dotted with spiffy little bows from one dancer to another and from the dancers to the audience. You see immediately that this is the work of Balanchine because of the swift, crisp footwork, the inventiveness in the use of formal classical steps, and the liveliness and logic of the stage patterning. All of this reminded me of the perkier sections of the more substantial, and equally arch Danses Concertantes (1944; revised 1972).

And then, at the heart of the piece, we get the Romantic Balanchine. The man who lacked a partner meets the one destiny has chosen for him. He yearns to possess this sylph or muse who, as women of her ilk do, keeps floating away from him. The best that can be said for the Farrell crew's execution of the choreography is that Kirk Henning was promising as the main guy and everyone tried really hard to bring it off. The problem here--and throughout the program--is that effort is just what you don't want to see in a performance.

The pas de deux from Diamonds, the concluding section of the three-part Jewels, revealed most clearly what Farrell has been able to accomplish with her dancers and why the deck is stacked against her. Balanchine created the ballerina role on her and her dancing persona. Her grandeur, her lushness, her daring, and her potent dance imagination are incorporated into its design.

As in every ballet Farrell has mounted on her company, her coaching has clearly been superb and miraculously without ego. But she is working with people (here Violeta Angelova, partnered by Momchil Mladenov) who are dancing the coaching, phrase by phrase, step by step, as if they had a microchip containing Farrell's wise, detailed, and objective instructions embedded in their bodies. The dancers operate as if they understand these instructions and respect them but they can't follow them--or, when they do--can't make them cohere. The results include missteps, disjointedness, and a woeful absence of confidence and spontaneity.

Agon was all too obviously beyond the technical abilities of Farrell's dancers, and yet its timing was, in every detail, as deliberately strange and adept in its relationship to Stravinsky's spare, compelling score as it had been at the ballet's premiere. I remember being one of the astonished witnesses of that first night, merely a teenager but able to recognize that Agon was what the City Ballet was "about."

The ballerina role in the climactic pas de deux was created on Diana Adams (partnered by Arthur Mitchell). Farrell later inherited the part and now has assigned it to Elisabeth Holowchuk, who performed leading roles in three of the four ballets on the Joyce program. Holowchuk is an accurate dancer but, lacking both inherent drama and sensuousness, she simply doesn't register as a theatrical personality.

The most relaxed dancing on the Joyce program came with Meditation, made for Farrell when she was still in her teens. It's a duet that's a man's (Everyman's? The choreographer's?) naked confession of love for the dream woman he can never fully possess. It registers as a powerful rush of emotion (the Tchaikovsky score helps a lot), leaving little memory of specific steps and or stage patterning. Performing it, Holowchuk managed to entertain the possibility of expressiveness while Michael Cook was convincing through his authenticity and mercifully unpoetic. Any guy could find himself in this situation, he suggested. And this is certainly true--if only because unanswered love can be as emotionally gratifying as love fulfilled.

Shoring up the sporadic performances of her troupe, Farrell has contrived projects that are supposedly do-gooders for the dance community. Borrowing dancers from other companies to fill out the ranks of her necessarily small troupe is claimed to enlarge the visiting dancers' opportunities. Does importing more proficient dancers than she has to lead a production fall into the same category? Or is it evidence that the Farrell Ballet is not in a position to produce stars from its own ranks?

Another undertaking, reviving Balanchine works previously thought to be lost, presumably rescues them from oblivion. But Balanchine, an undeniably productive and resourceful choreographer, himself allowed these works to disappear. Often he recycled the best inventions in them when he made a new ballet. In viewing Farrell's reconstitution of the "lost" works, Balanchine fans with long memories can enjoy the parlor game of seeing where some phrases or effects showed up in subsequent ballets--reworked, refined, and elaborated in their new context.

Farrell's projects, especially when given formal names like the Artistic Partner program and the Balanchine Preservation Initiative, may engender respect for her company and elicit significant funding. But they are, in the end, essentially social work and scholarly endeavor, not art.

Farrell's dancing was an immense gift to the world. People who never had the chance to see it "live" fall in love with it via video alone. Once a ballerina who couldn't be surpassed, Farrell subsequently demonstrated her extraordinary ability as a teacher and coach of Balanchine's style and repertory. Surely she's earned the opportunity to function at a level that corresponds to her gifts.

© 2011 Tobi Tobias

Much touted in advance, New York City Ballet's just-premiered $800,000 Ocean's Kingdom is a once-in-a-lifetime (please, god) collaboration by Paul McCartney (first a Beatle, now a knight) and Peter Martins (first a superb dancer, now a company director, a choreographer, and a Danish knight to boot).

Pas de Deux No. 1: Paul McCartney and Peter Martins, creators of Ocean's Kingdom for New York City Ballet

Photo: Paul Kolnik

On the side of Good in the new ballet is an undersea population devoted to peace and love, featuring Princess Honorata (Sara Mearns). Representing the Bad--aggression, abduction, violence, and threatening hair-do's--are the invading terrestrials, among whom the only nice guy is Prince Stone (Robert Fairchild). He falls in instant, Romeo & Juliet-style love with the Princess, and of course she, requiring a shade more persuasion, with him. But his nasty elder brother, King Terra (who plagued these characters with their names?) wants this trophy naiad for himself.

Pas de Deux No. 2: Sara Mearns and Robert Fairchild, heroine and hero of Ocean's Kingdom

Photo: Paul Kolnik

When the ballet winds down its 55-minute reign, it ends happily, without for one moment having earned the right to call itself a fairytale, its dramatic and emotional range being picayune. Real fairy tales--a powerful literary genre--take good and evil seriously and enact them with force. Observe any kid in their thrall.

When it comes to classical-music credits on his résumé, McCartney's been there and done that for nearly a decade. Nevertheless, his score for Ocean runs the gamut from movie music to faux-Broadway. The fashion designer Stella McCartney, daughter to Sir Paul, did the costumes, which range from limply imagined blue tunics for the ladies from the sea to gaudy tattooed cat suits for "The Baddies," as the composer deftly nicknamed them. The scenery, for which the program blames Perry Silvey, is weightless, almost non-existent, consisting of unconvincing projections. Does the feeble decor reflect City Ballet's making a last-ditch gesture toward keeping expenses down just in case the ballet fails to prove immortal?

The pre-curtain efforts of the City Ballet's chief music man Fayçal Karoui and his orchestra to make a case for the score were well brought off but unconvincing. The little teaching session served to fill in time because, I'm told, McCartney refused to have any other ballet share the gala opening-night program, (not even Balanchine's Union Jack, which was originally scheduled).

"Baddies": Amar Ramasar (in black tights) heading up the gang of villains in Ocean's Kingdom

Photo: Paul Kolnik

The choreography is instantly forgettable. Even the magnificent Sara Mearns offers merely a stymied sampling of the gifts that make her one of the most riveting dancers of our time. Instead of using her full-bodied emotional power, for example, she just acts with her face, now sweetly in love (Sara Mearns? Sweetly?), now vapidly sorrowful. Her suitor, Robert Fairchild, looks benumbed by the choreographic vacuity and seems to be doing nothing beyond what he's been told to do. This is hardly the dancer--ardent, witty, alive to every event--who last year originated the hero role in the City Ballet's far-better venture into the waves, Alexei Ratmansky's Namouna.

The couple have the requisite love duets in which Mearns fleetingly recalled her fluent, sensuous, and imaginative self--and one duet that briefly suggests apache dance. Yet not a single phrase that Martins choreographed for the pair is likely to be remembered once the curtain falls.

Dark Angel: Georgina Pazcoguin (r.) in Ocean's Kingdom

Photo: Paul Kolnik

The only distinguished dancing in the show came from the veteran corps dancer Georgina Pazcoguin, in the role of Scala, a handmaiden of Honorata who, for reasons negligently kept secret, first betrays her mistress and the lady's suitor, then saves their lives, sacrificing her own on their behalf.

Pazcoguin stood out among the more than 45 dancers trapped in Ocean by following her usual method of building a full persona for her character. In her starkly cut black gown she looked like a Graham dancer from days of yore, the confidante who tries to warn the heroine that the situation is dire. Needless to say, this approach didn't fit in stylistically with anything else going on, but, for me, it was the only meaningful action on stage. Pazcoguin should have been made a soloist long ago.

For some reason, there's a grand party--to pep things up with some acrobatic, exotic, and comic dancing, perhaps--but its raison d'être, plot-wise, is obscure. It features Daniel Ulbricht, the company's expert in the acrobatic mode. He shines far more, however, when he's used as a regular dancer, not a freak, or when the antics of a jester are part of the character he's dancing.

Would I recommend this product to a friend, as the Internet so often inquires? Rhetorical question. No need for a reply.

© 2011 Tobi Tobias

August Bournonville (1805-1879)--dancer and choreographer, instructor and artistic director--gave the Royal Danish Ballet a repertory and a dancing style that have made it, and kept it, a world-class phenomenon. As his voluminous memoir, Mit Teaterliv (My Theatre Life), reveals, several of his ballets that are alive in the repertory today were inspired by his personal experience. Konservatoriet (The Conservatory), created in 1849, is one of them.

Charles Andersen (in flight) and Jean-Lucien Massot (r.) as the ballet master in the Royal Danish Ballet's production of August Bournonville's Konservatoriet

Photo: Costin Radu

Bournonville was trained for a career in ballet from childhood--at Copenhagen's Royal Theatre, where his father, Antoine, was ballet master (that is, artistic director). In the 1820s, to put the finishing touch on his skills, he traveled to Paris, then the dance capital of the world. There he studied with the celebrated Auguste Vestris, who came to be known as le dieu de la danse (god of the dance). Eventually, through his talent and diligence, the young Bournonville progressed to performing with the Paris Opera Ballet, even partnering the most celebrated ballerina of the Romantic age, Marie Taglioni.

Diana Cuni in flight in Konservatoriet

Photo: Costin Radu

After distinguishing himself abroad, Bournonville returned to Denmark to rescue the Royal Danish Ballet from an arid period and to rejuvenate it. But through a long career as ballet master in Copenhagen, he never forgot his experience in Paris. Some two decades after his return home, just after he retired from performing, he immortalized in Konservatoriet his memory of the classroom of those early days. Music--both borrowed and composed--by Holger Simon Paulli evoked the scene, as did the women's filmy white tutus, emblems of Romantic-era dancing.

The setting of Konservatoriet is one common to ballet studios everywhere--an uncluttered space. In today's renditions, the scenic design omits even the ornate pictures on the walls in the original version. Now only a single decorative element signals the grandeur of Parisian ballet--a crystal chandelier, albeit one that's swathed in gauzy fabric to keep off the dust during the day, when the theater's routine work takes place.

(L. to r.) Charles Andersen, Gregory Dean, and Alexander Staeger, with pupils of the Royal Danish Ballet's school behind them, in Konservatoriet

Photo: Costin Radu

The studio is peopled by a ballet master who directs the daily class and dances as well; a bevy of freshly minted adult dancers, two of the women obviously favorites--by virtue of their talent and charm; a handful of children who are being trained for the stage by taking class alongside their role models; and a violinist to accompany them all in their exertions.

The choreography Bournonville devised for these characters has an architecture that is impeccably ordered, varied, and balanced. Viewers may absorb this great virtue only subliminally because of the vitality and beauty of what is right before their eyes: the duets and trios, the solos that sometimes hint at a particular personal quality, and the small groups that sweep across the floor one after the other, as if they were impelled by the dancers' camaraderie. And of course the children have their little moment in the sun. Audiences are invariably enchanted by the immature bodies' precocious technical aplomb.

Children of the Royal Danish Ballet's school with Nicolai Hansen as the ballet master in Konservatoriet

Photo: Costin Radu

Bournonville's deftness in turning the commonplace practices of the classroom into theatrically fascinating material is everywhere apparent. Example: The ballet master summons first one of his protégées (demonstrating that he wants her to begin with the backbend phrase of a sequence he has no doubt taught her), then the other. The two proceed to execute the same bit of choreography, but with the second woman a phrase behind the first. So, when a leg is extended hip-high by one and then the other, both women turning in place, the pair creates the hypnotic effect of a pair of windshield wipers gone out of synch. As if by magic--you can't catch how it's done--they end by working in unison.

Thomas Lund, flanked by Gitte Lindstrøm (l.) and Gudrun Bojesen (r.) in Konservatoriet

Photo: Martin Mydtskov Rønne

At the heart of the work is a dance for three--the ballet master and the two "special" young women, who fleetingly hint both at sweet sisterhood and competitive rivalry. Its various solos, duets, and trios are connected so naturally they look joined by happenstance--or, more likely, inevitability.

One of the many marvels in the ballet school scene is its opening. It's no accident that Konservatoriet begins and ends with the same basic step--a grand plié--that a dancer does, many times over, every day of his or her dancing life. It makes for stretch and suppleness and, done without support as it is here, is a challenging test of balance. The curtain rises on a view of the performers neatly aligned in rows, facing the audience. In unison, they take one step forward, then--legs and feet "turned out" so that their kneecaps face opposite sides of the stage--bend their knees and smoothly, torso erect, head exquisitely poised, lower their bodies towards the floor. And, still without a tremor, rise again.

The ballet finishes with the same action, this time adding a single flourish--the sudden flaring of one leg into a curved position behind the body while the opposite arm is raised in a complementary arc. The pose recalls statues by the Renaissance sculptor Giovanni da Bologna that inspired the use in ballet of this sublimely balanced position. The figure represents Mercury, messenger of the gods.

Susanne Grinder (l.) and Kizzy Matiakis (r.) as the prize young women of their class in Konservatoriet

Photo: Costin Radu

Konservatoriet is danced in the unique style that Bournonville developed for his dancers. To this day there has been no classical dance company in the world that can equal the Royal Danish Ballet in its specialties.

Notice, for instance, the way these dancers look when they travel horizontally through the air. Their leaps don't take the swift, straight path of an arrow or bullet; rather, they're buoyant, like feathers blown by an April breeze.

Notice, too, the quick, crisp footwork. On the women it looks positively filigreed. Wherever possible, jumps are festooned with beats of one foot against the other, executed immaculately and at hummingbird speed. Viewers keeping close watch will marvel at the fact that, on the landings, just for a split second, the turned-out feet snap shut--right heel against left toes, left heel against right toes--as uncompromisingly predatory as a shark's jaws, the exactitude and energy of that action helping the dancer rebound into the air.

Above the waist the head, neck, and shoulders continuously shift position, gently, to complement the formidable work of the legs and feet. The torso is pliant but calm; the arms, often held low and still.

Bournonville's choreography requires dancers who, within even a brief passage, can alternate slow and fast movement, perform difficult steps with equal panache to both right and left, and spring into any direction at all without the slightest hint beforehand of which way that will be.

Dancers often say that Bournonville style demands a killer technique, especially because the performer must behave as if everything were perfectly easy. What's more, the choreography must be offered to the audience with a friendly, modest demeanor in which there's not a single thing that's fake. And whatever group is on the stage at a given time, all its members must present themselves as part of a heartfelt community. To dance according to Bournonville's values is to create a metaphor for civilized conduct.

The Konservatoriet we know today was not, at first, a stand-alone ballet. As its original title indicated, it was longer--Konservatoriet, eller Et Avis Frieri (The Conservatory, or A Proposal of Marriage Through the Newspaper). A lightweight but appealing plot, bubbling with gaiety and requiring eloquent mime, was wrapped around the ballet class scene.

Monsieur Dufour, a late-middle-aged, bumbling yet self-congratulatory administrator of the leading ballet academy in Paris, has half-promised to marry his faithful housekeeper. Nevertheless hoping for a more glamorous match, he places an advertisement in a newspaper personals column. Seeing this, the academy's students inveigle him into an evening at a restaurant with an outdoor space for dancing, a peaceable view of nature, and a huge and varied clientele. There, amidst much fun his expense, Dufour learns to accept reality.

The very young Kirsten Ralov as the aspiring child, Fanny, flanked by Else Højgaard (l.) and Margot Lander (r.) as the budding ballerinas who befriend her

Photo: Huset Mydtskov, 1933

Meanwhile little Fanny, the daughter of impoverished street musicians, longs to get the serious dance training her native talent deserves but is turned down by Dufour because she can't pay for lessons. The academy's two budding ballerinas "adopt" her cause and see to it that her future is assured.

By the mid-1930s, the time of the full-length Konservatoriet had come and gone; in 1941 the ballet class segment began to be performed independently. In 1995 the complete version was revived by a trio of seasoned Bournonville experts that included Kirsten Ralov--a Royal Ballet stalwart as dancer, instructor, and administrator--who had danced the role of Fanny as a child. While the revival had its charm--and, certainly, historical interest--it didn't appeal to today's audience. However, the classroom scene continues to thrive, describing with affection what ballet was like in early-nineteenth-century Paris.

Konservatoriet offers far more than nostalgia, though. It indicates how Bournonville absorbed the crystalline precision of the French style of dancing and quietly adapted it to the humane values of Danish culture. Even so, he was not merely adept. It was his unique genius--inborn, rare, impossible to explain but easy to recognize--that allowed him to create this gleaming ballet about classical ballet, which reveals the very foundations of the art.

Tobi Tobias writes a weekly column on dance, SEEING THINGS, for ArtsJournal (www.artsjournal.com/tobias). For her work on Bournonville and the Royal Danish Ballet, she was honored with a Danish knighthood.

© 2011 Tobi Tobias