\nweeks–and I knew if I didn’t write about them soon (all of them), I’d forget
\nwhat I was thinking. So this roundup is altogether too long. In order not to
\nfall into a stupor, perhaps you should read it in installments. The photos
\nserve to separate the parts.<\/i><\/font><\/p>\n
<\/font><\/font> About Last <\/span><\/i><\/font> <\/font><\/font> <\/span> Speaking There Here’s a one-minute <\/i><\/span><\/p>\n <\/font> <\/i><\/font><\/span>![\"concerto](\"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/foot\/concerto%20dsch.jpg\")
<\/a><\/font><\/span><\/div>\n
<\/span><\/font><\/p>\n
\nAlexei Ratmansky’s “Concerto DSCH,” my friend Elaine exclaimed,
\n“It’s so real!<\/i>“<\/font>
\nOf course, it’s not real, it’s ballet. But Ratmansky’s eye for what people do
\ntogether–become voyeurs, perpetrators, flirts, attention-hoggers, rivals,
\naccidental lovers–is so wise and funny that he seems to have lifted scene
\nafter scene from life and translated it more perfectly than possible with
\ntranslation into ballet. It’s like when Marge and Homer Simpson become
\npilgrims–exactly as they’ve always been except now they’re on the Mayflower<\/i>.
\nAt one point late in the ballet–the score is Shostakovich’s urbanely witty,
\nthen brooding, then buoyant Piano Concerto No. 2 in F major–a horde of dancers
\nbursts onto the stage with little flat-footed hops, and everyone laughs, not
\nonly because the boing<\/i> in the step is funny but because, performed en
\nmasse<\/i>, it answers the drama that the dancers have just intruded on. You
\nfeel glee –and relief–to find aspects of humanity so instantly recognizable,
\nno matter the language they’re spoken in.
\nIt’s tempting to compare Ratmansky to all the other choreographers I admire,
\nnot because he’s derivative–not at all–but because he ratifies ballet’s
\nhistory by extending it. The choreographer whom he most reminds me of, though,
\nis Jerome Robbins. (I swear, I had this thought before the Robbins festival at
\nNew York City Ballet began. Specifically, it was Ratmansky’s “Bizet
\nVariations,” with its shades of the three rival sailors in “Fancy
\nFree,” that clinched the connection for me. That was during the BAM run
\nthis winter of Nina Ananiashvili’s State Ballet of Georgia, which commissioned
\nthe ballet.)
\nRatmansky also makes a real place of the stage. He also is preoccupied with the
\npsychology of the group and of the individual in the group; he also understands
\nthe corps not as a corps proper but as a bunch of people, whose relation to one
\nanother is constantly in flux. He also recognizes the punctuating power of
\nexits and entrances (like the last word in a sentence or in a line of poetry).
\nMost of all, he succeeds where Robbins desperately wanted to, but only
\nsometimes did: he develops a language that jettisons conventional signs (for
\nRobbins, the “cool” finger-snapping, the maidenly curtsying, the
\nfolksy jigs) for what those signs originally conveyed, before they became
\ncommonplace. Too often, Robbins got stuck in the middle, retaining the gestures
\nwhile lifting them from their social context, so they quickly devolved into
\nshtick. Ratmansky saves himself by inventing his own gestures. (He loves
\ninventing steps as only perhaps Balanchine did, and he’s got a keen sense of
\ntheir evocative oomph.) Because the moves are never exactly what you’d see in
\nthe world, they offer it with wit and insight.
\nOn the same program– it’s called Here and Now–is “Rococo
\nVariations,” Christopher Wheeldon’s last ballet as the company’s resident
\nchoreographer. I dismissed it at its premiere this winter as even more
\nfrou-frou than its Tchaikovsky score, but now, on a third viewing, it seems to
\nhave deepened, grown full of mood. Of course I want to think Wheeldon went to
\nwork on it, fixing the transitions so that it now feels of a piece, but
\nprobably I’m the one who’s changed.
\nIt’s embarrassing to be so inconsistent. If I love a piece at first sight, I
\nrarely love it less on a second go, but the other way around happens too
\noften–especially, for some reason, with Wheeldon and Mark Morris.
\nIt took two visits before I could stand Morris’s “Sylvia” and
\n“Mozart Dances.” Five for “V.” (Believe me, I would have
\ngiven up by then if the dance hadn’t appeared on mixed bills.) Two for
\nWheeldon’s “American in Paris.” But I’m not sliding from admiration
\nto adoration here, I’m leaping from impatient dislike to swoony love–a vast
\ndistance.
\nMaybe it’s a musical thing. Both Wheeldon and Morris respond in detail to their
\nscores, and when their interpretations depart radically from my own dreamy
\nvisualizations, I spend the first visit or two simply adjusting–reading the
\nwords but not grasping the sentences. I’m glad to have the luxury (the free
\ntickets!) to come again.
<\/i><\/font><\/p>\n
\nchance for “Rococo Variations” and “Concerto DSCH” this
\nseason: Thursday, 8 pm, State Theater, Lincoln Center. Orchestra, 3rd<\/sup>
\nand 4th<\/sup> ring seats still available. Nycballet.com. (The program
\nconsists of four ballets; the ones in the middle are bad, in my humble opinion.
\nYou could take a break for dinner and come back for the Ratmansky.) <\/i><\/font><\/a><\/font><\/span><\/p>\n
\nof being quickly dismissed–and of music revisited–British choreographer
\nMichael Clark didn’t get many reviews for his two programs to Stravinsky
\nscores, presented last week at the Rose Theater as part of Lincoln Center’s
\nGreat Performers series. So it’s nice that the trusty old Times sent a reviewer
\nto both programs–except they sent the same reviewer, Claudia La Rocco, and she
\ndidn’t like either show! (Once it was clear that Clark irritated her, it was
\nnuts to subject her–and us–to a second drubbing. The Times should have sent
\nsomeone else.)
\nWhere La Rocco saw meagerness, sterility, and stale, ’80s outrageousness, I
\nfound a lot to be intrigued by. (I only saw the second program, which featured
\n“Mmm…” to Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring” and “I
\nDo”–pictured above–to “Les Noces.”) But that’s neither here
\nnor there: we’re entitled to our different views. I do take issue, though, with
\nthe bind La Rocco puts an artist in who wants to respond to dance history or
\neven just the music of dance history.
\nShe concludes her review of “I Do” and “Mmm…” with, \n
\nare neat touches throughout the two works. But Mr. Clark is going up against
\nhistory here, and neat doesn’t quite do the trick.
\nIf Clark had followed the usual plot line of the ballets, the result would
\nlikely be derivative, if not hokey (see: Robbins’ “Les Noces”).
\nInstead, he acknowledges the scores’ canonical status by assuming we know the
\nstory and allowing himself to take a more oblique approach, and he’s accused of
\nskirting the issue (“neat touches”). What, then, is<\/i> there for
\nhim to do? This music cries out, as it always has, to be danced to, and we
\ncritics should be careful not to muffle that cry.
\nFor what it’s worth, “Mmm…” and “I Do” seemed to me<\/i>
\nmainly modest and serious (albeit with kinky embroidery), intent on approaching
\nthe music in both highly conceptual and highly kinetic and spatial terms (these
\nlast two deliciously bound): a difficult approach, which does indeed make
\nsuccess unlikely, but a worthwhile one for its being so unusual.
\nWhile the conventional response to the rhythmic bombast of “Rite” and
\n“Noces” is to meet it beat for beat with percussive steps, Clark
\ntranslates rhythm into an angularity of the body. The dancers move in flat,
\nCunninghamesque tilts with right-angled arms. The pieces’ necessary texture
\ncomes by way of flurries of steps, turns that go against sense, torsos softly
\nabandoning their clear lines to gyre and implode, entrances and exits that
\nmaterialize unexpectedly (half the time through rotating mirrored panels at the
\nback, which open onto a cement back wall and spotlights beaming directly into
\nour eyes. Ingeniously creepy.).
\nThe penchant for the planar is very British contemporary-dance– Richard Alston
\nand Russell Maliphant have it, too–and Americans tend to find it a bit bland.
\nOur strict angles–our<\/i> Cunningham–is Cunningham, who is more explosive,
\nmore suddenly still, whose palette is both larger and more detailed. But the
\nlove that the Brits have for the most basic of Cunningham shapes–as if it were
\na miracle to flatten the body into an X or a Y, how much juice even in
\nthat!–is touching and contagious.
\nI found the attention the Clark pieces invited was very like that of Cunningham
\ndances, which have no narrative or dramatic arc, either. You get absorbed in
\nthe details and are not waiting for anything in particular. But with Clark,
\nanyway, the devastatingly dramatic just may occur. “I Do” ends with
\nthe dancers in a tangle on the floor under sickly yellow light, as if they had
\nbeen downed by poison gas and curled their limbs in to die. (Ah, the spectacle
\nof forever after!) The bride, bedecked in what looks like a tea cozy cum dildo,
\nstands above the wreckage. Trauma and drama presented as incident may be at
\nodds with Stravinsky’s “Rite” and “Noces”–all about
\nanticipation, both of them–but so much the better.<\/font><\/p>\n
\nclip <\/a>from “Mmm…” No more Michael Clark for Americans this
\nyear, but the company will be touring the Stravinsky fare to Luxembourg,
\nMarseille, Suffolk, and Belfast this summer and fall. Click here <\/a>for itinerary.<\/i><\/font>