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This article originally appeared in the Culture section of Bloomberg News on October 28, 2005.

Oct. 28 (Bloomberg) — American Ballet Theatre, at the halfway mark of its three-week City Center season, has added two worthy revivals to its already rich active repertory.

Anthony Tudor’s “Dark Elegies” and Twyla Tharp’s “In the Upper Room” were well paired, evoking the polar opposites of death and irrepressible life.

Created for London’s Ballet Rambert in 1937, “Dark Elegies” first crossed the Atlantic for ABT’s inaugural season in 1940. Tudor became such a significant figure in the company that, decades later, Mikhail Baryshnikov called him “our conscience.”

The dance depicts a small, close-knit community in the aftermath of the unthinkable — the loss of all its children. Set to Gustav Mahler’s “Kindertotenlieder,” a song cycle with lyrics taken from poems written by Friedrich Ruckert upon the death of his own offspring, it envisions the passage from searing grief to resigned acceptance.

World events continually make the ballet’s theme relevant. And while the atmosphere of the piece is admittedly gloomy, its effect is cathartic. Tudor, an undeniable but unprolific genius of dance that’s rooted in psychology, may have fewer than a half-dozen masterworks to his credit; this is surely one of them.

The stark choreography — in which every move counts — incorporates classical ballet and a rougher-hewn style at once archaic and modern, as well as elements of folk dance. Donald Mahler’s staging, faithful and clear, reveals the beautiful bare bones of the choreography. And it has an admirable stillness and gravity.

At this early stage, though, the dancing lacks texture. It needs greater weight and it needs to look as if it’s generated by deep feeling barely under control. Coaching would help, but in the end, emotional affect is the responsibility of the dancers. Adrienne Schulte and Jesus Pastor are already on the right track.

`Upper Room’

When ABT acquired “In the Upper Room” in 1988, observers guessed that Tharp’s title referred to heaven. If so, it was surely a dancers’ paradise of demonic perpetual motion.

Set to driving apocalyptic music commissioned from Philip Glass, shrouded in fog-machine clouds pierced with surreal light (a Jennifer Tipton tour de force), and rakishly costumed by Norma Kamali in zebra stripes offset by screaming crimson, the 39-minute piece assumes that operating at full throttle in a crazed range of movement languages is the route to ecstasy.

Sure enough, it brought the audience to its feet, clapping and yelling in delight. Still, there are a few of us who suspect that, as with Tharp’s Broadway hit “Movin’ Out,” the excitement this choreographer generates has its roots in rage. I found the ballet, with its steel-trap-mind structure, stunning but exhausting.

Vastly Improved `Apollo’

Ballet in repertory offers blessed second chances. ABT vastly improved its revival of “Apollo,” George Balanchine’s earliest masterwork, for its second performance, with a new cast.

The lighting of the opening sequence has been corrected. Where the mother of the god-to-be writhes in her birth pangs — with lashing unbound hair and pelvic contractions worthy of Martha Graham — it is now evocatively dim instead of interrogation-room garish. And the three muses’ inappropriately flirtatious smiles have been largely suppressed.

Most important, Ethan Stiefel tackles the title role with the fierce energy and imagination it deserves. Stiefel’s early claim to fame lay in his technique — its purity and its pyrotechnical skill. Recently he has made enormous strides as a thinking, feeling artist.

Wild Child

His rendition of Apollo as a bawling infant is grotesque and truly observed. Playing with the muses, he’s a wild child, spurred by his mounting excitement. Coming of age, he’s youth incarnate, elated by the discovery of his growing power, then grave in his assumption of divinity.

Parts of Stiefel’s interpretation were way overdone, but intention-wise, they were right on target. This is often the promise of great things.

© 2005 Bloomberg L.P. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission.

This article originally appeared in the Culture section of Bloomberg News on October 24, 2005.

Oct. 24 (Bloomberg) — Lovers of classical dance complain, rightly, about the dearth of compelling new choreography. American Ballet Theatre just gave them reason to hope.

Last Thursday, on the second night of its three-week season at New York’s City Center, the company offered the world premiere of “Kaleidoscope,” an astonishingly confident and inventive neoclassical work by a little-known choreographer, 26-year-old Canadian Peter Quanz.

Set to Camille Saint-Saens’s delectable Piano Concerto No. 5, the piece doesn’t flag once in its 27 minutes. It presents two couples who might live in different worlds –on neighboring country estates, say, given Holly Hynes’s pretty pastoral costumes. We meet the two pairs and get to know them sequentially. We see them together only at the ballet’s close.

The matrixes in which the couples operate are created by a corps de ballet of a dozen women and a half-dozen men. Quanz maneuvers this ensemble in swiftly shifting patterns that are invariably well-balanced though — contrary to traditional practice — asymmetrical. He keeps you eager to see what will happen next, as if you were following a thrilling plot. At the same time he delivers the very essence of classical dancing — harmony that continually reinvents itself.

Witty Surprises

As each leading pair plays against segments of the ensemble, it suggests a courtship that’s headed for ecstasy, yet prone to moments of misunderstanding. The two men, Ethan Stiefel and Maxim Beloserkovsky, are fair and fine-boned, with a delicate air about them. Their ladies, Gillian Murphy and Veronika Part, are generously proportioned women with a commanding presence. So the men appear to be sensitive souls, poets perhaps, amazed and delighted by their good fortune in being accepted as cavaliers to goddesses.

“Kaleidoscope” contains two witty surprises. The first is a passage in which the corps de ballet gets to dance without any intrusion from the principals, becoming, just for a moment — and deservedly — the whole show. The other is the finale, where the two main couples appear together for the first time, backed by the full corps, and the stage picture suddenly becomes symmetrical. It’s as if the two pastoral estates had merged and transformed themselves into the magnificent hierarchical court in which ballet was invented.

Dance of Death

Kurt Jooss’s antiwar ballet “The Green Table” may date to 1932, yet has lost no relevance. Constructed as a series of vignettes that have the vividness of great poster art, it shows corrupt world leaders instigating war while the people suffer. An all-devouring Death (David Hallberg, in the first cast) lays claim to his prey: valiant soldiers who believe in their cause, an impassioned war widow exacting revenge, a young girl forced into prostitution, a frail grandmother, even a profiteer. Each dies differently; all join finally in the macabre chain known from medieval times as the dance of death. Most of the performers need to add more weight and calm to their interpretations, but Marian Butler, as the old woman finally embracing death, is already perfect.

`Apollo’

The best that can be said of the company’s production of George Balanchine’s “Apollo” is that it includes the birth scene (and the original ascent to the heavens) that the choreographer ruthlessly sheered off his 1928 masterpiece late in his career. Otherwise ABT’s present rendition undermines both the sublimity of the ballet and its daring originality.

The orchestra, under Charles Barker, gives a lackadaisical account of Stravinsky’s score. Similarly, Richard Tanner’s staging ignored the dynamics of choreography in which angularity and abruptness brilliantly punctuate both allegro and lyrical dancing. I don’t know who instructed the muses to smile as if gently peddling their charms, but someone should tell them to stop.

© 2005 Bloomberg L.P. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission.

This article originally appeared in the Culture section of Bloomberg News on October 20, 2005.

Oct. 20 (Bloomberg) — Jerome Robbins’s exquisite 10-minute duet “Afternoon of a Faun” and a revival of Agnes de Mille’s exuberant 1942 “Rodeo” opened American Ballet Theatre’s three-week season last night, offering an auspicious start to the company’s fall run in New York.

“We’ll just be dancing ourselves silly and having a wonderful time,” artistic director Kevin McKenzie promised the opening-night audience at Manhattan’s City Center.

“Afternoon of a Faun” was first created in 1953 for the New York City Ballet. Referring back to Nijinsky’s famous choreography to the evocative Debussy score, it describes an encounter between a young man and woman in a ballet studio, where the possibility of romance vies with the dancers’ natural narcissism.

Jean-Pierre Frohlich, who staged the ballet for its ABT premiere, has given his dancers, Ethan Stiefel and Julie Kent, plenty of space in which to discover their own version of the characters.

Setting the mood from the outset, Stiefel captured the languor and self-involvement of the young man perfectly. Throughout, he performed with a spontaneity Robbins would have loved. Kent, though she has the right delicacy and elegance for the girl, seemed rather too knowing about how she wanted to look.

The piece has one of the most beautiful sets ever designed for a dance — a bare, luminous room created by Jean Rosenthal from panels of sheer white silk. It was appropriate that, on this occasion, the set design and the choreography returned to the stage of the City Center, for which they were first made.

Dancing Cowgirl

Agnes de Mille’s “Rodeo,” set to Aaron Copland’s echt- Americana score, marked the choreographer’s centenary. Corny, sentimental, and un-PC as it is, “Rodeo” is still disarming in its account of a cowgirl who wants to join the riding, roping guys and is tamed into loving one of them instead. The choreography’s daring intrusion of American vernacular movement into the rarefied classical vocabulary still feels fresh.

Faithfully staged by Paul Sutherland, with Cowgirl coaching from Christine Sarry (an unforgettable interpreter of the role), the production has the air of over-careful rehearsing. Further performances will relax and enrich it, making it look weathered by prairie sun and dust. Already the relationships among the characters are precise and tender. And Erica Cornejo makes a perfect Cowgirl, her mix of feistiness and yearning just right, her energy well-nigh incandescent.

`Gong,’ `Petipa’

Among the evening’s other offerings, Mark Morris’s “Gong” was by far the most substantial. Set to a gamelan-inflected score by Colin McPhee, it borrows gestures from Indonesian dance. Fifteen dancers move in the intricate, arresting patterns that are the choreographer’s trademark. A pair of eerie discontinuous duets performed in silence intensifies an atmosphere where the awkward becomes beautiful.

The familiar pas de deux from Marius Petipa’s “Paquita” filled the classical-bravura slot, danced by the Russian-trained Maxim Beloserkovsky and Irina Dvorovenko, a husband-and-wife team that’s mismatched dance-wise, her diva style overwhelming his poetic quality.

Three excerpts from Kirk Peterson’s “The Howling Cat” formed the lightest — and most heartily applauded — item on the program. This compendium of balleticized Spanish-dance cliches was valiantly performed by Paloma Herrera, Jose Manuel Carreno (who had convinced himself that it was amusing), and a trio of auxiliary men following Jesus Pastor’s example of switchblade swiftness.

Tempting Choices

ABT’s season is as crammed with temptations to various tastes as a deluxe assortment of chocolates. Four classics will return to the repertory: Antony Tudor’s psychological study of grief, “Dark Elegies,” George Balanchine’s “Apollo” (with the birth scene that the choreographer ruthlessly cut from the New York City Ballet production), Kurt Jooss’s ever-relevant antiwar ballet, “The Green Table,” and Twyla Tharp’s apocalyptic “In the Upper Room.” The world premiere of Peter Quanz’s “Kaleidoscope” will provide the novelty both dancers and audiences crave.

© 2005 Bloomberg L.P. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission.

This article originally appeared in the Arts & Leisure section of the New York Times on October 16, 2005.

THE first vision to greet viewers at the Oct. 19 opening of American Ballet Theater’s three-week season at the City Center will be what the program calls ”a room with a mirror.” It is Jean Rosenthal’s ethereal evocation of a ballet studio, created from diaphanous white silk, for Jerome Robbins’s ”Afternoon of a Faun,” a 10-minute boy-meets-girl duet with the evanescent, shimmering quality of a soap bubble. Ingeniously made and perennially popular, the 52-year-old work has just been staged for the company by the veteran Robbins expert Jean-Pierre Frohlich.

Like the set, the action of the ballet is simplicity itself. A young man, nude to the waist, in workaday black tights, dozes on the studio floor, then awakens, stretches indolently, rises and tries out a few steps. All the while, he examines his reflection, as dancers constantly do, in an imaginary mirror — actually, the invisible wall that separates the audience from the stage. A girl in a practice tunic, long hair unbound, enters, intent on her own reflection. At first startled to see another person, the two begin to relate through a tentative pas de deux and the tentative stirrings of romance, always retreating to the familiar safety of looking at their images rather than at each other. Finally, the boy brushes a kiss on the girl’s cheek. Wide-eyed, holding her hand to the place his lips touched, she backs away from him, out of the room. He returns to sleep, as if her presence and his desire had merely been a dream.

“Afternoon of a Faun” is set to Debussy’s impressionistic score, ”Prélude à l’Après-midi d’un Faune” (1892-94), a response to Mallarmé’s celebrated poem of 1876 describing an indolent faun on a languorous summer day encountering a bevy of nymphs who arouse his sexual longing. When the dancer Vaslav Nijinsky choreographed his first ballet to this score in 1912, it was nothing less than revolutionary. Rejecting the conventions of classical dancing, the performers moved two-dimensionally, their heads in profile, bodies facing front, like the figures in an archaic frieze, their movements angular and rigid. A severely restricted vocabulary was offset by potent rhythmic and sculptural effects, which are implicit in the luminous photographs taken of the ballet by Baron Adolf de Meyer.

Nijinsky’s iconoclastic choreography went almost unnoticed, however, in the scandal over the ballet. Having essentially been propositioned, the head nymph flees, leaving behind her long, gauzy scarf, which the faun appropriates and uses to consummate his desire. The ballet concludes with him recumbent in his resting place, arching his body in orgasm.

Robbins knew this famous precedent, of course, but dared to try his own version of the material for the New York City Ballet. Fascinated throughout his career by the qualities of youth, he took his immediate inspiration from two serendipitous sightings involving young dancers. He was struck, first, by the ”animalistic” quality of a teenager (Edward Villella) stretching at the barre. On another occasion, he was watching Louis Johnson and a student rehearsing the adagio from ”Swan Lake” — itself about an unexpected encounter, burgeoning love and thwarted longing. Robbins noticed that the dancers were so absorbed in their mirror images, through which they could correct their technique, that they seemed to ignore the erotic implications of their physical contact.

Co-opting Mallarmé’s theme and Debussy’s atmosphere, Robbins also echoed specific gestures of Nijinsky’s. Yet he made striking inventions of his own. Among the ballet’s memorable moments is the boy’s ”stroking” the girl’s loose, rippling hair, outlining the luxuriant length of it while reverently keeping an inch of air between it and his caressing hand. Nonetheless, she seems to feel his touch and springs away from him into a formal ballet pose that transforms her from a young woman susceptible to love into a classical statue no more malleable than marble.

Another landmark in the ballet is an ingenious and beautiful lift. The young man makes a circle of his arms and cradles the girl’s head between his palms. Then he widens the circle and lowers it to her waist while she slips through this hoop, reaching upward, and he cantilevers her body so that she seems to float horizontally, as if swimming in space. The mechanics are so well concealed, it looks like a miracle.

The most remarkable aspect of Robbins’s ”Faun,” however, is the air of utter simplicity and naturalness with which the choreographer insisted it be danced. As Mr. Frohlich, who has appeared in the title role, noted: ”This ballet is about real human beings. Sure, there are classical steps in it, but Jerry wanted it to be performed as if you weren’t performing, just being there in the moment. He wanted everything to look casual. This quality is very hard for classically trained dancers to get, and some of them have trouble with it in the beginning. They’re walking on their toes like princes and princesses. I say, ‘Strip it.’ You have to be sensitive. You have to be honest. You have to trust the choreography and do it for what it is.”

The original dancers of ”Afternoon of a Faun” — still, perhaps, uneclipsed — were Francisco Moncion and Tanaquil LeClercq, to whom Robbins subsequently dedicated the ballet. On opening night at American Ballet Theater, it will be danced by Ethan Stiefel and Julie Kent, who is celebrating 20 years with the company. Subsequent performances will showcase other teams of stars and stars-in-the-making, recreating ”Faun’s” potent mood and its astute mix of artifice and ordinariness.

Copyright © 2005 by The New York Times Co. Reprinted with permission.

This article originally appeared in the Arts & Leisure section of the New York Times on July 31, 2005.

Montclair, N.J.

SUSAN MARSHALL is putting the finishing touches on her new work, five brief dances sheltering under the umbrella title “Cloudless,” to have its premiere this week at Jacob’s Pillow. At least the rehearsal schedule called for finishing touches. It sometimes looks as if she is reinventing the dances from scratch, like a God with second thoughts.

We’re at the Alexander Kasser Theater, an intimate state-of-the-art house on the Montclair State University campus. Its executive director, Jedediah Wheeler, one of the commissioners of Ms. Marshall’s current work – the others are Jacob’s Pillow and Dance Theater Workshop, the venerable showcase for ground-breaking dance in Manhattan – has offered the choreographer theater time. This means she can move her work in progress out of the studio and develop it, with full production values, in a performance space, something she could not afford to do on her own. Mr. Wheeler, it would seem, agrees with the MacArthur Foundation, which made Ms. Marshall a fellow in 2000, that the people we regard as geniuses should not starve to death.

She has also received a Guggenheim fellowship; testimonials from the likes of Philip Glass, with whom she has collaborated; and positive reviews galore. The Chicago Tribune, for example, called her work “as profound as the art of dance can get.”

Still, she can’t pay the rent. Her Web site, susanmarshallandcompany.org, says so up top and straight out. The plea for funds essential to her company’s projected 20th-anniversary season at Dance Theater Workshop next spring tells prospective supporters exactly what their contribution will buy, while it reveals the high cost of making dances: $100 pays for a single day’s use of a studio; $1,000 puts a half-dozen dancers into the studio for a day; $10,000 commissions a new (short) dance. Poetic richness coupled with economic poverty – this is the state of dance in America. Ms. Marshall seems to take the situation in her stride: “I look at it,” she said in a tone that precludes further discussion, “as a challenge to be embraced.”

The financial straits, which clearly dictate working “smaller, tighter, faster,” as Ms. Marshall puts it, support her present artistic impulses. “At midcareer,” she said, “I began wondering what ideas and structures were central to my work. Looking backward and pushing deeper seemed to be the best way to go forward.”

She started with two early winners that are modest in means, stunning in effect. “Arms,” from 1984, is a stationary duet in which the dancers stand side by side, faces impassive, as their upper limbs, flailing, reaching, striking and twining, speak for the whole body and the soul as well. The 1979 “Kiss,” which will appear on the Pillow program, has its two performers suspended in rope harnesses as they swirl deliriously into each other’s embrace, then pull back into a more isolated association, over and over again. Both pieces seem to predict and sum up Ms. Marshall’s later work, in which pedestrian gestures, distilled to near abstraction, symbolize human desire and its inevitable partner, human conflict.

“Cloudless” is true to the small and tight stipulation Ms. Marshall has dictated to herself. The pieces for the Pillow are for one to five people; their duration is roughly 4½ to 6 minutes. For the Dance Theater Workshop engagement next March, where an expanded version of “Cloudless” will constitute the entire program, Ms. Marshall will double the number of pieces and let some run as long as 11 minutes. Throughout Ms. Marshall’s career, both tiny, terse creations for a nearly bare stage and big works with lavish production values have conveyed the same message: We are always of two minds about what we want. Defining, then articulating, our own state of mind is tough enough, but understanding that of others is well-nigh impossible. Inevitably, Ms. Marshall’s work tends to be dark.

Reluctantly, she agreed: “If you’re working with complexity and you’re working with the body, some of those overtones and undertones are going to be dark. I like to think, though, that they’re always counterbalanced by upward movement – and tenderness.”

Untrammeled joy, a rare quality in Ms. Marshall’s spectrum, actually prevails in the “Cloudless” solo for Petra van Noort. In perpetual motion, eyes gazing skyward, hands whirling and fluttering like a flock of butterflies, the dancer embodies a child’s ecstasy in merely being alive. When, toward the end, the dance slows down, it suggests that the ardent child has matured into a woman who keeps her early intimations of delight unextinguished inside.

Today’s rehearsal, with Ms. Marshall still adjusting the Pillow pieces – sometimes substantially – and grappling with early drafts of the Dance Theater Workshop material as well, offers a panoramic view of the choreographer’s idiosyncratic working method. Unlike Mark Morris and Twyla Tharp, Ms. Marshall does not follow the conventional route of choosing musical accompaniment at the outset, then inventing movement with her own body and transferring it to the dancers largely by physical demonstration. The sound score for “Cloudless” is being created in tandem with the choreography by Jane Shaw, and Ms. Marshall draws the movement out of her dancers, beginning with long sessions in directed improvisation. Throughout the process, she operates almost entirely via words.

“All the actual movement in my work is generated by the dancers,” Ms. Marshall explained. “I start by setting them in motion with instructions about space, timing and the nature of the activity. I give them physical goals – the more abstract, the better. The dramatic or psychological subtexts evolve as the dance develops, through our group discussions about where the work wants to go. I like to create through the back door, you see, because that’s where the discoveries – and the surprises – are.”

If Ms. Marshall’s style of choreographing is meditative and communal, her method of accomplishing a day’s work in the theater is a marvel of efficiency. Ms. Marshall runs the dances that are almost performance-ready, still allowing for “enormous changes at the last minute,” all the while engaging her performers in the process. Primary work on new pieces is deftly sandwiched into the schedule. The fairly raw material is allowed to be fitful and awkward.

Whenever there’s a moment’s break in the activity, Ms. Marshall addresses the sound, light and props, along with mini-conferences about where a dance is going and what it means. Not once does she project the frantic urgency that her packed agenda and impending deadlines might well provoke. Ms. Marshall seems particularly concerned about the transitions from one dance to the next. “Because it’s in the moments between events that some of the most meaningful and magical things happen,” she said. “You’ve put your energy into making what you think are the meaty, central parts of your dance. As is only natural, things haven’t turned out as you expected. Each part has taken on a life of its own. And now you have to connect them.”

Copyright © 2005 by The New York Times Co. Reprinted with permission.

This will be my last word in SEEING THINGS, at least for now. Two new ventures have opened up for me, and I can’t afford to turn them down. I’ve become the New York-based dance critic for Bloomberg News, and I’ve begun contributing regularly to the Arts & Leisure section of the New York Times. That’s about all the dance writing I can manage and still pay attention to my “other life”—writing for children.

I will miss many things about writing for ArtsJournal. One of the most important is the association with its founder and editor, Doug McLennan, whose inventiveness, apparent to AJ’s ever-growing readership, is equaled by the generosity I’ve known in working with him.

SEEING THINGS will continue to be available to readers. To access it, use this link: www.artsjournal.com/tobias. A link to SEEING THINGS will also appear on the ArtsJournal home page (www.artsjournal.com), in the right hand column, under “AJBlog Heaven.” I suspect this is the only Paradise I’ll ever attain, apart from those moments of bliss I experience while watching glorious dancers performing a splendid dance.

Fra Angelico: The Last Judgment: Paradise, ca. 1435-40; Staatliche Museen, Berlin, Germany; Photo: Jörg P. Anders

© 2005 Tobi Tobias

David Hallberg, dancing with American Ballet Theatre / City Center, NYC / October 19 – November 6

When I first got addicted to ballet, type casting prevailed. The men naturally selected to play Princes (Swan Lake’s Siegfried, Giselle’s Albrecht) were as tall, handsome, and harmoniously proportioned creatures as a company’s roster could provide, their dancing a marriage of exactitude and flow. Management assigned these latter-day Greek gods Odette-Odiles and Giselles with matching attributes.

Demi-caractère dancers (more earthbound and/or more overtly virtuosic) were creatures of a decidedly different category and duly given other kinds of roles presumably suited to their anatomy and their gifts. Similarly, wiry, feisty young women with craggy faces, proletarian bodies, and technique that exposed rather than concealed ballet’s athletic base got to be the Cowgirl in Rodeo. There the model was the ballet’s choreographer, Agnes de Mille, who first played that leading role, which was, perhaps, a spiritual autobiography. De Mille’s most apt successor in that part may well have been Christine Sarry, an unforgettable dancer of similar physical type and style (though she had the additional attribute of projecting a tenderness that could make you cry). At ABT today, type casting is still evident—and, in many cases, wise. Erica Cornejo, one of the company’s most gratifying dancers, though the antithesis of the Swan Queen type, promises to be an ideal Cowgirl. (She gets her chance to prove her mettle in the revival of the ballet, slated for its first showing on opening night).

Way back when, dramatic dancers (emotionally charged in a Freudian rather than a poetic way—think Nora Kaye, dancing Tudor) made a third distinct category and, though casting occasionally broke these boundaries, often out of sheer necessity, they were for the most part respected. Times have changed, however, and dance-world customs with them, as is evident in David Hallberg’s wildly assorted assignments for American Ballet Theatre’s current season at the City Center. It’s hard to think of roles more disparate than the Poet in Fokine’s Les Sylphides, Death in Kurt Jooss’s The Green Table, and the title role in Jerome Robbins’s Afternoon of a Faun.

Hallberg is a natural for only one of these ballets—Les Sylphides. It was evident from the moment he appeared on the ABT scene in 2001, a beautiful blank, that he was born to play noble roles featuring lyrical dancing and melancholy yearnings. He’s a blond young prince—with a profile worthy of a Roman coin and a long, streamlined, exquisitely proportioned body—who has been schooled in a limpid classical style (to which the Paris Opera contributed as well as ABT). In the Fokine, where he plays the sensitive loner who wanders into a nocturnal glen haunted by gossamer visions, he’s absolutely prototypical.

No so for The Green Table, the ever-relevant antiwar ballet, where he takes the lead role of Death, who claims all participants. This devouring monster, who has a slithering, almost slimy quality to him, is a figure of tremendous authority and menace—like Voldemart, I explained to the kid slated to accompany me to a performance of the work. Death, in the Jooss ballet, is not merely a villain but a suprahuman force, and portraying him effectively calls for huge physical presence coupled with intense psychic energy. If you were type casting the role you’d hand it over without a second thought to Carlos Acosta.

Traditional European-sprung fairy tales, created long before the principles of political correctness affected our consciousness, employ a shorthand in which the hero is fair, the antihero dark. (It helps a prince’s case, too, if he’s conventionally handsome, the underlying idea being that beauty of a certain sort—every society, of course, creates it own singular model—indicates moral worth.) Other traditions have contributed to our instinct to associate dark coloring with sensual power. Thus an ideal male dancer in Robbins’s Afternoon of a Faun was the creator of the role, Francisco Moncion, whose looks bore witness to his Hispanic/Indian ancestry. Hallberg, on visual inspection a Nordic type, is in no way an obvious successor to this tradition. All he clearly has going for him is his remarkable beauty and an aloofness in appearance that will serve him well in conveying the narcissistic aspect of the young man who is so intent upon his reflection in the mirror of the ballet studio where the action is set. Embodying the more important erotic charge of the character will be a challenge to him. If he’s an imaginative artist, as I suspect he may be, the assignment could be revelatory. Needless to say, casting against the grain is educational for both performers and their fans.

David Hallberg will appear in Les Sylphides on October 20 & 30 matinee; in The Green Table on October 21, 25, & November 2; and in Afternoon of a Faun on October 22 matinee & 29 evening.

© 2005 Tobi Tobias

My most recent book for children, WISHES FOR YOU, with pictures by the celebrated Danish illustrator Henri Sorensen, has just been issued by HarperCollins Children’s Books in a paperback edition. It makes a wonderful present for very young children–and for their parents, grandparents, and other well-wishers. The book can be ordered, in either hardcover or paperback, via www.amazon.com or www.barnesandnoble.com. And, yes, it is, in a sense, autobiographical.

Bolshoi Ballet / Metropolitan Opera House, Lincoln Center, NYC / July 18-30, 2005

Of the four program-length productions the Bolshoi Ballet brought to New York, only Don Quixote, discussed in my Tilting At Windmills, sports choreography that you might term traditional—stretches in which you can recognize Marius Petipa’s diamond-brilliant designs.

I suppose you might call Spartacus traditional—the company is faithful to Yuri Grigorovich’s original choreography—but I’m not ready to accord a work made in 1968, and already so conspicuously dated, the honors due to tradition. Spartacus remains what it always was—a shamelessly overblown account of violent underclass revolt against a vicious, immoral master, the long-suffering heroic leader matched with an eternally faithful wife, the bad guy mated with a high-class prostitute—but it no longer fits the company like a glove. The male stars of today’s Bolshoi aren’t built (or trained) gladiator-style, like the dancers who thrilled New York in Spartacus thirty years ago. Slighter and sleeker, they’re lyrical types rather than lion-hearted virtuosi. And neither the men nor the women act in the tear-a-passion-to-tatters style that prevailed in the old days. Highbrow balletomanes have always thought Spartacus tacky, but now even its undeniable power to ignite the enthusiasm of the general audience is diluted.

Two other Bolshoi offerings claimed links to the company’s past, although their choreography was newly concocted. To say that The Bright Stream, choreographed by Fyodor Lopukhov in 1935 to a score commissioned from Shostakovich, is somehow the same as Alexei Ratmansky’s 2002 The Bright Stream, which retains only the music and (more or less) the libretto of the original (concerning high jinks on a collective farm), is rather like calling a play The Tempest because it retains Shakespeare’s plot, even though it dispenses with the Bard’s text.

In his day, Lopukhov (1886-1973) was well respected as a forward-looking choreographer, one who, incidentally, may have influenced Balanchine. What, indeed, happened to his Bright Stream? The powers in charge took against it. Stalin, furious with Shostakovich over the composer’s opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, apparently incited Pravda, the Communist party’s newspaper, to pan it as trivializing its subject. The ballet world was no kinder. Agrippina Vaganova, the celebrated ballet pedagogue, condemned it too, apparently because it failed to conform to her concepts of classical dance. The ballet did not survive in the Soviet repertory, and the affair crippled Lopukhov’s career.

Ratmansky, appointed artistic director of the Bolshoi Ballet in 2004 after a politically stormy period in the company’s life, has been looking to the company’s past for repertory. His policy of incorporation as opposed to rejection works in tandem with the Bolshoi’s project of presenting all three Shostakovich ballets, to mark the composer’s upcoming centennial. Last year he produced his version of Lopukhov’s “industrial” ballet, Bolt, and is now at work updating Grigorovich’s 1982 The Golden Age. While keeping, as I’ve said, Shostakovich’s bright bubbling score and the libretto that Lopukhov and Adrian Piotrovsky crammed with deliciously silly events, Ratmansky has fashioned his own choreography for The Bright Stream.

The piece is that rarity, a comic ballet, depicting the interactions between the locals working on the farm that gives the ballet its title and a group of entertainers sent from urban headquarters to congratulate them on their success with the crops. Boris Messerer’s absurdly wonderful sets and costumes—riotous harvests of fruits and vegetables, colors and patterns—set the tone of the piece: at once exuberant and tongue-in-cheek. The principal characters are a rural pair, Zina, who has abandoned her studies in classical dancing to become the farm’s “morale officer,” and her husband, a fairly witless “agricultural student” with a wandering eye; from town, a Ballerina (who, it turns out, learned her fouetté technique alongside Zina) and her equally nameless Partner; and, from a nearby dacha, an ill-favored, ill-matched couple immune to the decorum that might be thought proper to senior citizens. Against a background of folkish cavorting from various regional types, the principals fall into inappropriate flirtations and resulting assignations with one another, misalliances that render them, by turns, unreasonably hopeful, unhappy, slaphappy, cross-dressed, ridiculous—and, eventually, reconciled amidst communal rejoicing.

The choreography is not particularly inventive in dance terms and some perfectly good ideas (like the shenanigans of the Partner en travesti as a sylphide) are ruined by being indulged far too long. On the whole, though, Ratmansky’s work is able and diverting. The configurations for the ensemble are so smart and eye-catching, they put most Broadway-musical choreography to shame.

The best single thing in the ballet comes early on—the scene in which Zina and the Ballerina recognize each other as long-ago ballet-academy mates and proceed to dance a duet that’s both mirror image and challenge, recalling the steps they learned in each other’s company. The sweetness of their situation and relationship, coupled with the charming absurdity of the conceit that Zina, no doubt some years from her last ballet class, can still hold her own with a professional of the first rank, makes you melt. Although the premise is patently absurd, it invites you to accept it graciously, and this sense of your own generosity contributes to your feeling of well-being as you watch. The idea packs some psychological punch too, exemplifying the fact that women forge relationships through mutual empathy, a sense of shared experience.

The ballet is crammed with so-called character roles, but they’re little more than caricatures, not rendered—I suspect not choreographed or directed—with the subtlety of feeling that makes such parts resonate in the works of, say, the English Ashton and the Danish Bournonville. Ratmansky danced in and choreographed for the Royal Danish Ballet for several years before his present appointment and had every opportunity to understand the importance of such roles, but in his own work he can’t yet make them come alive.

Ratmansky’s checkered career has taken him to other venues too—like Balanchine in his early days, he has been an itinerant artist—and he draws his inspirations indiscriminately. This is not surprising, yet, unlike Balanchine, he doesn’t synthesize his sources. It’s relatively early days, but at this juncture, he seems to be one of those all-purpose choreographers—reasonably able and certainly clever in a variety of dance modes, but without any distinctive vision. Tracking his references in The Bright Stream became merely a pleasant parlor game. Here are my sightings: A thoughtful young woman, escaping from society to stretch out on the ground with a good book—Onegin (Cranko); a woman tricking her unfaithful husband into transferring his affections back to her by disguising herself as the object of his adulterous desire—The King’s Volunteers on Amager (Bournonville); a gauzy-skirted, Romantic-style sylphide—La Sylphide (Bournonville again), Les Sylphides (Fokine), the Trocks, because the role is played en travesti (with the difference that Ratmansky’s Sylphide knows that a man presenting himself as a sylphide is funny and the Trocks know that it isn’t); several men and women shifting gender in a single ballet—Far From Denmark (Bournonville); six look-alike friends of the heroine doing their charming little dance in chorus, like a string of paper dolls—Giselle (Coralli and Perrot); a feisty little miss from school—Graduation Ball (Lichine), The Lesson (Flindt); a dancer riding a bicycle cross-stage—Enigma Variations (Ashton), see also the entrance of the heroine on roller skates in Anastasia (Kenneth MacMillan); a human character disguising himself as an animal (don’t ask).

Whatever reservations one may have, The Bright Stream was the most easily likeable of the Bolshoi season’s four offerings, partly because the dancers seemed genuinely to enjoy being in it.

The Pharaoh’s Daughter harks back even further in time than The Bright Stream. Marius Petipa created the original in 1862, to a thin, sugared, intermittently agitated score by Cesare Pugni, the libretto derived from Gautier’s The Novel of the Mummy. The present version, created in 2000 by Pierre Lacotte, is, by the company’s own transparency-inclined admission, merely pastiche based on scholarship. Needless to say, it is also severely trimmed in scale, extravaganzas supported by tsarist coffers no longer being in the cards.

In its time, the ballet was one of those exotic jobs that commandeered the spectator’s fantasy by improbable journeys to foreign climes. In our present globalized day, a fictive Egypt of pyramids and pharaohs, mummies and Nubian slaves, desert storms arriving on cue and death sentences executed by poisonous snakes—to say nothing of side trips to the underworld—can only be treated with genial irony. Lacotte, alas, can’t summon up the necessary wit and charm to carry off this shift in tone.

Lacotte’s edited version of the story line involves a titled British archaeologist traveling in Egypt. Having succumbed to local hospitality that includes a controlled substance, he is temporarily reincarnated (if the word can be used when the person goes back in time) as the brave but plebian suitor of—you guessed it!—a pharaoh’s daughter, name of Aspicia. Predictably, Dad, who was planning to marry off his gorgeous offspring to a fellow bigwig, disapproves of such a misalliance. Vehemently. Daughter, a hotheaded type like her parent, remains resolutely true to her lover and declares she’d sooner die than . . . . Well, you get the general idea. After many a melodramatic turn of events, all ends happily enough, but then the archaeologist awakens up from his dream and finds he’s in the wrong time frame for the consummation he so devoutly wished. Presumably, he’s got his memories for solace.

Lacotte is a product of the Paris Opera Ballet, and his Pharaoh’s Daughter resembles nothing so much as one of those day-long demonstrations of beautifully executed steps by that estimable company’s school. A collector of rarefied objects might dream of such a display of exquisite discrete items in which every detail is refined; it’s a paean to calm perfection. But theater doesn’t work that way. Theater demands a driving thrust, be it dramatic, rhythmic, or visual. It requires a constant play of light and shade. It thrives on the very human qualities of idiosyncrasy and imperfection. Lacotte’s work here has almost no dance impulse and even less dance invention (either in the enchaînements or the stage patterning, which is stupefyingly routine). Attention is focused on the steps themselves, particularly light, delicate configurations of petit allego, and on presenting them carefully and cleanly—immaculately, if possible. Understandably, this not always possible. The Russians, whose breeding emphasizes other matters, do not manage this sort of thing as well as the French, but, speaking in a foreign tongue, they do a remarkable job. And it must be said that this production gives old steps a new life. Where else, except in the Act I pas de deux of Giselle, do we get to see ballottés these days?

The ballet’s strangest scene takes place under water. Our tempestuous heroine, repulsing the increasingly threatening advances of her arranged-marriage suitor, flings herself into the Nile. There she enters the submerged kingdom of that river’s god (clearly a cousin to Neptune), who rules over a populace we can think of as naiads and tritons. Three river goddesses, from distinct geographical locations (Spanish, African, Russian) get to dance an engaging solo each, with appropriate local color. Then Aspicia gets a legato solo followed by an even slower pas de cinq. Is this a literal reference to “liquid motion”? When she floats down to this realm, she’s handed a naiad dress to change into (“The dressing room’s just behind that big rock, honey.”). Then, having persuaded the trident-wielding ruler to release her back to life on terra firma, she gets to don her street clothes again, whereupon she’s hoisted upward. This sounds—and indeed looks—very much like a crude version of the aqueous scene in the Blue Grotto that constitutes the second act of Bournonville’s Napoli. I can’t imagine that Petipa knew about Napoli, but surely Lacotte does.

In the leading roles at the performances I saw, Svetlana Zakharova (queen of adagio) and Maria Alexandrova were fine, each in her own way. Alexandrova must be particularly praised for having added much-needed phrasing to her material. Their partners in the Ta-Hor role, Nikolai Tsiskaridze and Dmitry Gudanov, respectively, were not entirely adequate, the latter largely because he was too small for his lady, though he’s too reticent for hero roles as well. The soloists were frequently distinguished, making me wish I could have seen them in more roles and more performances. The mimes never ranged beyond stock-character portrayals, but the ensemble, here as in all the other productions, deserved medals for effort.

For the record: Though Lacotte’s Pharaoh’s Daughter can’t hold a candle to Petipa’s in lavishness, it does boast a considerable animal population: a mangy gorilla of the human persuasion, a white cart horse of the equine persuasion, a life-sized (if not entirely lifelike) stuffed lion, and a giant cobra that is presumably a puppet. As is the way of such balletic reptiles (Cf. La Bayadère), this last creature is concealed in a basket of flowers. Surely some metaphor is at work here.

Photos: Damir Yusupov: (1) Maria Alexandrova and Sergei Filin in Alexei Ratmansky’s The Bright Stream; (2) Svetlana Zakharova and Vladimir Neporozhny in Pierre Lacotte’s The Pharaoh’s Daughter

© 2005 Tobi Tobias