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On Balanchine’s “Ivesiana”

May 3, 2013 by Tobi Tobias

“I don’t have to tell you that Mr. B is with Mozart and Tschaikovsky and Stravinsky,” Lincoln Kirstein announced to the New York City Ballet audience, exactly 30 years before the company’s April 30 opening night this season. The program, which inaugurated City Ballet’s three-week American Music Festival attracted a good house and fervid audience enthusiasm for two big pieces easy on both eye and spirit: Who Cares? to Gershwin songs (their lyrics unsung, but engraved in popular memory; Tiler Peck at her familiar finest) and Stars and Stripes (Hershy Kay, after Sousa, the master of marching), plus one tiny one—the amuse-bouche Tarantella.

Janie Taylor and Anthony Huxley in George Balanchine’s Ivesiana

Photo: Paul Kolnik

The piece awarded only a tepid reception was the one I went to see—the 1954 Ivesiana, named for its composer, Charles Ives. It seizes the imagination and always in different ways; its message is up to the interpretation of the viewer. The message, however, is never heartening.

The piece opens and closes with a largish group in unremarkable practice clothes of dull hues, people locomoting on their knees, the rest of their body erect but subdued, their destination undefined and unexplained—perhaps a useful image for sociologists. Human assets such as will and imagination—even intention—seem to have died in them long ago. They are, of course, incapable of mourning what they’ve lost. They’re indifferent, emotionally hollow.

Balanchine’s first stroke is right on the mark: the curtain rises on a full blackout. Then, slowly, a little light comes up; witnessing this is like the beginning of arousal from deep anesthesia. Viewers see a knotty cluster of people on their knees that slowly fans out as if merely to create a breathing space. Still the claim of that larger space registers as a warning and a threat.

Ashley Laracey and members of the ensemble in Ivesiana

Photo: Paul Kolnik

A young woman in a white tunic, hair unbound (Ashley Laracey), wanders through the still-dense forest of kneeling bodies. Her hands palpate the air directly before her, as if she were not simply lost but blind as well. Worse yet, she’s joined by a man in a grey unitard—anonymity personified–and together they make their way through the crowd. So far the narrative might have been coveted by some contemporary equivalent of the Brothers Grimm.

Ashley Laracey, Zachary Catazaro, and members of the ensemble in Ivesiana

Photo: Paul Kolnik

Throughout, the stage remains ominously dark. The girl appears to be running away from the man. Inevitably, he captures her and then leaves her inert body with a group of the anonymous people, as if for dead. The nameless crowd clusters behind the body—fulfilling its mission, as it were—and disappears into the velvety, fatal dark as, presumably maimed and sightless, the girl is once again let loose and tries to find her way. The section described above is called “Central Park in the Dark” and, having lived half a block away from the site, I can attest to the fact that the narrative has many factual roots.

The second section, “The Unanswered Question,” originally featured the incomparable Allegra Kent whose extreme plasticity, coupled with a supercharged poetic imagination, made her role unforgettable. Now Janie Taylor, partnered by Anthony Huxley, takes the leading role, but creatures like Kent are never replaceable. Four men in black (they’re hardly visible) manipulate the woman so that her partner can almost reach out and touch her but never does, clearly never will; she remains forever just beyond his reach. The supporters hold her aloft, erect, like a revered icon, and then, in a thrilling, danger-laden single swoop, she drops backwards. In a few seconds her supporters have her standing in the air once again.

A third section, called “In the Inn,” finds a man and woman (the dangerously good-looking Amar Ramasar, who overacts, and the lush Sara Mearns) enjoying the simple pleasure of a mix of social dances. In the viewer’s imagination, however, the horrors implied in what went before the joy make the halcyon images seems ironic or at least unworthy of trust.

The closing section, “In the Night,” gives us the full cast once again, walking unremittingly on its knees in the near dark to one side or the other of the stage, some exiting into the wings, some still “caught” mid-stage as the curtain falls. Unlike Who Cares? and Stars and Stripes, Ivesiana makes no effort to “entertain” its audience; it is there to make us recall our worst nightmares (asleep or awake) and to marvel at the fact that the most profound ideas and feelings can be expressed (often best expressed) without a single word.

The entire program was extraordinarily well danced.

Onward

April 11, 2013 by Tobi Tobias

Wendy Whelan knows how to make her “sunset years,” so to speak, work well as a much-admired principal dancer—a veteran of over a quarter-century with the New York City Ballet. With this company, astute technique has become an essential—indeed the foremost—of a star dancer’s attributes, competing only with musicality, which is not Whelan’s primary forte. And, at the age of 47, some of this ballerina’s technical prowess, which was distinctive as she displayed it, is naturally failing her. Anatomy is remorseless.

Of late, presumably conforming to the company’s wishes, Whelan performs fewer roles. One of the ploys that sustains her reputation, showing off the kind of movement in which she is now most poignant, is to dance slowly, with precise delicacy. She takes on roles in which legato becomes almost a fetish. A beautiful fetish, I would add, though I wouldn’t want to watch a daily dose of it unless I was also getting to see its opposite—to say nothing of its middle ground—in the course of a program.

It would seem that a goodly number of the School of American Ballet nymphets, from whom Whelan’s successor will eventually emerge, admire, even revere her. For many, she is their role model. See, for example, her account of the duet in Christopher Wheeldon’s After the Rain—it’s become almost an iconic piece for her. Its subject, incidentally, is a quiet but heart-wrenching farewell. Jock Soto, who originated the role of the man in the duet, was about to retire from the company, a great loss to all concerned.

Tall, rail thin (her body sometimes looks alarmingly undernourished in roles not requiring tights, which smooth out many a revelation), with the profile of a crown princess, Whelan manages to appear imposing and vulnerable at the same time. The critic John Rockwell has aptly referred to her “sinewy lightness.” Her arms often fall into a hieratic angularity—as if insisting on an important part of her birthright. Typically, every move she makes, she makes her own as well as the choreographer’s.

Most interesting as a career move in Whelan’s current life is her expanding the way she can still be seen as a dancer who looks very special. Characteristic of the arrangements she has worked out is her upcoming show, Restless Creature, which will have its official premiere at Jacob’s Pillow’s Ted Shawn Theater, August 14-18. For this she has commissioned four ballets by four newish choreographers—works presumably tailored to the assets she still has available, which, so far, are many. The choreographers invited to merge their imaginations with hers are Kyle Abraham, Josh Beamish, Brian Brooks, and Alejandro Cerrudo.

In some ways I wish she wouldn’t pursue this activity. In the end, it’s always a sad and losing battle. For other reasons, I hope she will. If ever there were a dancer out to make the most of herself—and expend enormous valor of body and soul in doing so, it is Whelan. May I confess that I would prefer a gentler goodbye? Something like Kyra Nichols’s last few seasons, which made “less is more” piercingly meaningful? No, probably not. The two dancers harbored very disparate souls. At any event the choice is hardly up to me.

Note: On April 14 and 15 at 7:30, the Works & Process series at the Guggenheim Museum will be devoted to Whelan and her Restless Creature. Ella Baff will moderate a discussion with Whelan and the quartet of choreographers she has commissioned for the piece.

Photo: David Michalek

Life Lessons

April 5, 2013 by Tobi Tobias

Mark Morris Dance Group / James and Martha Duffy Performance Space, Mark Morris Dance Center, Brooklyn, NY / April 3-14, 2013

Jenn and Spencer, being given its world premiere on the opening night of the Mark Morris Dance Group’s run at the company’s studio/theater in Brooklyn, refers to two of the company’s splendid dancers, Jenn Weddel and Spencer Ramirez. The duet named for and performed by them illustrates the magic a pair of dancers may be capable of and an extraordinary exploration of the duet form.

Mark Morris Dance Group’s Jenn Weddel and Spencer Ramirez in Morris’s new Jenn and Spencer

Photo: Stephanie Berger

If you’re seduced by clothes, of course (and I am), the first thing you notice is Weddel’s ravishing floor-length gown, executed in faintly glistening burnt sienna. Ramirez’s costume rightly makes no attempt to compete but complements it simply with a pale shirt and slate gray semi-gloss trousers. (The costumes were designed by Stephanie Sleeper.) Almost immediately, however, your attention is directed to Morris’s ingenious choreography.

The two dancers seem driven to couple yet appear resistant to the project, as if it might ruin their plans for their singular selves. So initially they behave like inevitable antagonists, Jenn, for example, devoting herself to a long, busy solo. Spencer responds by creeping under the skirt of her handsome gown and manipulating her body. Still, her attitude consistently remains independent, in no way cooperative and certainly not submissive.

Next she turns her back on him, as if prepared to stride away, but he’s not willing to give up—and perhaps he knows her innermost desire too. He does a busy rapid solo while she looks on. And then he disappears. She goes on dancing; he reappears as if to reconcile; and then, arm in arm, they survey their perhaps limited terrain of togetherness. Suddenly she does a backwards fall, straight down, and he supports her at the very last moment. Their duet concludes with their starting anew with an angry section that escalates to an abrupt end because that’s all there is to say. I found the piece true, moving, and admirably devoid of sentiment.

Mikhail Baryshnikov (center, in a checked shirt), with members of the MMDG, in Morris’s The Wooden Tree

Photo: Tim Summers

Mikhail Baryshnikov, who has been buddies in the dance field with Mark Morris for ages—both dazzling in their respective talents, accomplishments, and gift for collaboration—appeared with the Mark Morris Dance Group to star in Morris’s newish A Wooden Tree. With music and words by Ivor Cutler—“I Love You But I Don’t Know What I Mean,” “I Got No Common Sense,” for instance—the piece could be thought of as a failed instruction manual on love emanating from a Scottish venue that has not yet conferred much sophistication on its populace. It poses familiar, unresolved questions like “Why don’t a woman love a woman?” (And the same for other gender pairings.) All-purpose answer: “Because it’s trouble all the time.” It turns out that hetero coupling has the very same unfortunate result.

In explicating this problem Baryshnikov makes phrases of Morris-style pantomime sharper than ever—amazing clarity has always been part of his dancing—and jives around the space as if he had a whisky bottle in his pocket and nary a care in the world except, alas, for ever-recurring problems of the heart. This fellow, unfortunately typical of the human race, and he and his (let’s call her his lover until she’s not any more) sit and stare at each other as the piece goes on: “What do we talk of when we meet? Nothing at all. We have a beautiful cosmos.” “Cosmos” is twisted with irony.

Laurel Lynch (foreground) with her MMDG colleagues in Morris’s new Crosswalk

Photo: Stephanie Berger

The world premiere of Crosswalk was given a suitably lively performance on opening night, with Todd Palmer on clarinet and Colin Fowler on piano playing Carl Maria von Weber’s Grand Duo Concertant. It reminded me of unabashedly upbeat works that the New York City Ballet often used as definitive “send ‘em home happy” pieces.

True to its title, Crosswalk contains lots of parading—in simple formations, most often on a horizontal path, which is, after all, how a spectator sees a parade. My favorite bits involved what I thought were references to Balanchine’s Apollo–for instance, the moment, in which a man “drives“ a trio of women as if they were an lively matched brace of fillies. Clarity of vision pervades the piece and that alone is a plus. But do I yearn to see it again? Yes, because one’s first look at a Morris work—like one of Alexei Ratmansky’s or, indeed, Balanchine’s—never yields everything there is to see and think about. No, because Morris has repeatedly shown himself capable of far more subtlety and innovation. Elizabeth Kurtzman’s costumes for the women in variations on a theme of orange should have been stopped when the first bolt of fabric appeared in the workroom.

MMDG dancers in Morris’s The Office

Photo: Stephanie Berger

Included in the program was The Office (from 1994) in which Dvořák’s Bagatelles for two violins, cello, and harmonium accompanies a story that is banal on the surface but, Morris being Morris, ominous in its implications. A handful of young job-seekers are summoned, one by one, by–a minor company official, I guess she is—presumably to an interview that will decide their immediate nine-to-five fate. The tone hints—just hints, mind you—that the summons may result in a fate even worse than a file clerk’s dreary servitude. Morris tends to be timely only obliquely or with a universal application that leaves the actual specifics of his concern vague, but the very subject of The Office is nevertheless perfect in the light of today’s unemployment woes.

The original costumes for the piece were curated by June Omura, a long-time dancer with Morris, from clothes she found in thrift shops. Pina Bausch started out dressing her dancers in this way too and, to my mind (partially educated by this infinitely evocative second-hand source) the switch to blatantly gorgeous, expensive costumes lessened the richness of her work.

Folk Tales

March 10, 2013 by Tobi Tobias

Paul Taylor Dance Company / David H. Koch Theater, Lincoln Center, NYC / March 5 – 24, 2013

Paul Taylor, having boxed in the stage of Lincoln Center’s David H. Koch Theater so it won’t look outlandishly large for a modern-dance group—it was built, first and foremost, for the New York City Ballet—has added two new works to the repertory of his company, which is in residence through March 24. As usual when Taylor comes on stage at the end of the program to take a slightly abashed bow—he has never forgotten the boy he once was—his gala clothes seem to fit his swimmer’s body with a slight awkwardness and absurdity. In the era in which he was still dancing, he took his curtain calls in a ratty blue terrycloth bathrobe—a more Taylorish outfit, if you will. The present set-up was bound to look “faux” to old-time fans.

Still, Taylor has reigned for over half a century as one of the supreme choreographic talents of our era—think Aureole (1962); think Last Look (1985); think all the astonishing wonders before, after, and in between that bear witness to both the joys and horrors of the examined life and its extension into the imagination. I hesitate to be negative about a gift and an output that’s well-nigh unequaled in modern dance, even if this season’s newbies don’t figure among Taylor’s best achievements.

Dancers: Sean Mahoney and Amy Young Photo: Tom Caravaglia

The better by far of the two novelties is Perpetual Dawn, set to an easily forgettable score from Johann David Heinichen’s “Dresden Concerti.” The dance is a pretty thing mired in the greyish-pink sweetness of Santo Loquasto’s set, but not even the celebrated Jennifer Tipton’s lighting can lend it the necessary contrasts that might infuse the dance with vitality.

Loquasto’s set, as the ballet’s title suggests, is firmly committed to a palette of pink that is, granted, carefully not intolerably cloying, and a mousey gray-brown that makes you think of real velvet and its seductive texture. Trouble is, it’s just all too nice. One doesn’t—or shouldn’t—go to the theater for “nice.” “Nice” is for Hallmark cards. With these tones, the set vaguely delineates a peaceable outdoor landscape early in what promises to be a lovely day. Has Taylor conveniently forgotten that, more often than not, “pretty” is not a compliment in the art world? Loquasto’s complementary costumes, in the decoratively-inclined country-folk vein, are just what you’d expect and a telling example of why girls now often prefer jeans.

Expressing their pleasure in their surroundings with much pairing off, the 11 dancers of the piece couple up a lot, loyal as pigeons, it would seem, but the choreography is a clear set-up for the odd-man-out situation. In this case the character usually lacking a partner is played by a self-confident woman, Michelle Fleet, whose stardom has grown slowly and evenly during her years with the company, strewing much admiration along the way. I may be hypersensitive in bringing this up, but I was distracted by the fact that the character who was shunned—and understandably acting displeased with her situation—is the only black performer in the company.

The dancers display sheer joy in their dwelling place, but when the time of day slides into eventide, with its thoughtful or dreamy melancholy, the dance is finally given the contrast and variety it deserves (and needs).

Towards the end of the piece, Taylor’s lovers become especially playful with each other—a guy shepherds a gal through a slow cartwheel and the pair makes the move seem sexy, not circusy; it’s then that you finally feel you’ve had a meaningful peek at this choreographer’s multifaceted intelligence.

Dancers: Francisco Graciano, Robert Kleinendorst, and Sean Mahoney Photo: Tom Caravaglia

The second new work, To Make Crops Grow, starts out with some gourds and suchlike in the form of harvest items, and moves on to a version of a familiar myth, perhaps best known from Shirley Jackson’s short story The Lottery, which I recall from a classroom reading assignment in Middle School (back then, Junior High). Maybe Taylor read it there too, though I believe his formal education was sketchy. (Just as well.)

The gist of the mythic tale it is that a human member of a small, tight-knit community is sacrificed to make the group’s harvest fruitful; the victim is chosen by lottery with the common consent of all involved. Taylor’s version has some of the ominousness appropriate to such a venture, but, as far as I could see, no new take on a situation you’d assume was just up his alley. At one point there’s a loving duet for a pair who, it seemed to me, were worth their weight in gourds, and then some.

Most of the characters (some of them presented as youngsters, others as elders—that is, as part of a family)—seem to be into farming, though there’s at least one pair wearing more citified clothes. Customers at a roadside stand? At any rate—my grip on the goings- on got more and more slippery as the dance progressed. The farming folks are visited by some sort of cockamamie magician who, with doubtfully intentioned assistance (and, thanks to Loquasto, a complicated hat), indicates he’ll work wonders for the community’s harvest. Each person choses a folded slip of paper that (as these ‘lottery” tales go) indicates, when opened, whether its recipient will be chosen to be sacrificed so that the gourds et al. may be plentiful, delicious, even, ironically, life-giving—or spared .

Onstage, the whole business seemed rather tame and unclear, though the the situation called for excitement, fear, and hysteria in both individuals and small crowd clusters, and, in the end, a climactic attack. Perhaps a major choreographer should employ a knowledgeable dance watcher to whisper into his ear on the rare occasion it’s necessary, “No, dear, not this one.”

Meanwhile Taylor has published a new book of essays on dance, Facts and Fancies (Delphinium Books, $11.48 through Amazon). It’s nowhere near as important as his earlier memoir, Private Domain, and the degree of irony present in each of its pieces is exhaustingly varied. It does reprint from Private Domain Taylor’s wonderful essay on the making of Aureole, his first hit, which the choreographer finds less wonderful than do most of his public.

Ballet’s Sweetheart

February 17, 2013 by Tobi Tobias

Pacific Northwest Ballet / City Center, NYC / February 13-16, 2013

The Pacific Northwest Ballet, whose home is in Seattle, has just made a rare visit to New York. It offered two programs, one an acid-test rep of three top-of-the-line Balanchine classics; the other, Jean-Christophe Maillot’s take on Romeo and Juliet, to that Prokofiev score ballet fans hear far too often. Evolved by Francia Russell and her husband, Kent Stowell, in the course of the 1970s, the company is one of several groups whose roots lie in Balanchine territory. Peter Boal, a celebrated New York City Ballet alum known for the purity and exactitude of his dancing and his insightful teaching has been PNB’S Artistic Director since 2005. The company brought its own conductor, the highly regarded Emil de Cou, as well as its own orchestra.

Pacific Northwest Ballet’s stars Carla Körbes and Seth Orza

Photo: Angela Sterling

It turned out, for once, that the promotion department had it right. They put all their chips on the company’s singular ballerina, Carla Körbes, who, as chance would have it, danced Terpsichore to Peter Boal’s Apollo in her native Brazil at the age of 14. And danced it here on opening night, proving to New Yorkers that she’s not only what the publicists claimed she was, but far more. For the record, it was in Balanchine’s last (and thus official) version of the piece that she performed—no birth, no stairway to the stars. I must say I still miss those passages.

Pacific Northwest Ballet dancing George Balanchine’s Apollo, Carla Körbes and Seth Orza in foreground

Photo: Lindsay Thomas

Körbes has the delicious face and body of a charmer in a Fragonard painting, not a single ballerina mannerism (go see for yourself if you can’t believe me; I could barely believe it), lovely technique—strong and correct, effortless in appearance—and a playful quality that seems a part of her personal temperament. On opening night, she danced Terpsichore again, this time with Seth Orza; Peter Boal staged the production.

A PNB trio in Balanchine’s Agon (l. to r., Kylee Kitchens, Jonathan Porretta, and Elizabeth Murphy

Photo: Lindsay Thomas

The two leading dancers—just like the other two muses represented in the ballet—made clear and specific some of the details that other companies skim over. Granted, PNB leaves nothing unconsidered, occasionally to a fault, yet it never once falls into the trap of the mechanical. The dancers move as if this glimpse of teaching the youthful Apollo to be a god (for example, balancing the prone Terpsichore on the nape of his neck) is utterly confident and secure—an attribute I’ve never witnessed before, despite decades of watching Apollo. This sort of marvel makes you think of the ballet as a miraculous event, coalescing perfectly at unpredictable intervals. The truth is that Körbes regularly dances within this dimension.

It should be mentioned that Körbes’ engagement, earlier in her career, with City Ballet simply did not work out, despite her rare gifts. Now in her early thirties, she is no “baby ballerina”—but she has come into her own. One can only be grateful.

Among the men of PNB, I most admired Seth Orza, a former City Ballet soloist who danced with welcome confidence in his presence. Jonathan Porretta, too, performed with a fine spirit. And there’s a wonderful loose-jointed young man with reddish hair called Andrew Bartee who looks as if he’s made for great things. A majority of the men, though, lacked sufficient authority and energy—that “Here I am! Look at me!” quality—the absence of which can be more defeating than any lack of technical acumen.

Balanchine’s Concerto Barocco, danced by members of the Pacific Northwest Ballet

Photo: Lindsay Thomas

My PNB enthusiasm wilted drastically with the performance of the two Balanchine masterworks staged by Francia Russell: Concerto Barocco and Agon. These renditions were at best “nice.” Only very occasionally did the dancers look as if they recognized shifts in the music’s rhythm, tone, instrumentation, et al. as factors to be embodied or debated with. The music was treated almost as an element of decoration, rather than as the heartbeat of the choreography. And nowhere did the dancers activate the space through which they moved. (Where is Mary Wigman when we need her?) The most inexplicable example of the Russell approach is to give us the celebrated pas de deux in Agon utterly devoid of its sexual element. What did she think these people were doing?

PNB would never have come into being without Russell’s decades of dedicated labor. I admire her for that and sometimes regret that I’ve vowed as a critic to tell the truth as I see it. Dissenters should remember that mine is just one person’s opinion.

PNB’s dancers in Jean-Christophe Maillot’s Roméo et Juliette with Karel Cruz (center) as Friar Laurence and (l. to r.) Jerome Tisserand and Andrew Bartee as his acolytes

Photo: Angela Sterling

For the second of its two programs, the company walloped us with its three-hour (one intermission), hyperactive Roméo et Juliette, by Jean-Christophe Maillot—for which Olympic-grade stamina is required of the dancers as well as considerable patience and book-learning from the audience. Even certified English majors (count me among them) will have some problems figuring out who’s who and what’s happening to her/him. As for why this or that is occurring, I believe we’re meant to feel it’s just fate; or the anything-goes environment; or the lack of parental authority (Juliette has no dad to lay down the law in this version of the story); or raging hormones. Apparently Friar Laurence—albeit slightly inept but traditionally a source of comfort in ballets well-rooted in Shakespeare’s play—has a much inflated and mixed (read “confused,” “up to no good”) agenda and cannot be trusted. To put it mildly. Are we to think he’s a worker of black magic? Is he insane? Is he an instrument of fate? Of bad karma? Surely the viewer deserves more concrete explications of M. Maillot’s imaginings

What other information can I offer? The male dancers knocked themselves out portraying a hearty crew of boys being boys. Romeo (Seth Orza) was sweet, though hardly irresistible, and determined to possess his latest beloved (remember Rosaline, his girlfriend of yesterday?), but hardly a Justin Bieber heartthrob. Juliet’s Nurse (Rachel Foster) and our heroine’s wayward mom (Laura Gilbreath) lacked a truly concerned commitment to the girl who was presumably their responsibility. Körbes, the first-cast Juliette, looked exhausted, both physically and emotionally, long before the tale had played itself out. The women of the corps were graceful and, thanks to the designer Jérôme Kaplan, attractive in their wafting dresses. (Juliette even rates cloth-of-gold at one point.)

PNB’S Carla Körbes and Seth Orza on their wedding night in the title roles of Maillot’s Roméo et Juliette

Photo: Angela Sterling

The “upscale” program notes are in love with adolescence, and the choreography offers a detailed dissertation on learning to love (for example, the evolution of the kiss). Nevertheless the dancers’ rough and tumble existence, including the lovemaking, is crammed with knockabout playfulness. Other elements, many of them critical to plot cohesion, are blithely ignored.

Perhaps there should be an Inquisition to examine new ballets for their believability flaws. Maillot’s R&J has no class structure or explicitly clear definition of clans—Capulet versus Montague. None whatsoever. Yet this is the element that, in Shakespeare’s telling, sets up the tale’s basic situation. Juliette, a young woman supposedly from an important and moneyed family, would never consider the teenage street kids, if, indeed, that’s what they are, to be her social equals. And even a choreographer as contemporary as Jerome Robbins, whose work suggests that adolescence was his favorite among the stages of life, had to have his volatile teens ultimately answerable to their society. Aside from Peter Pan, few imaginary personages manage to stay permanently young and unfettered.

The ballet’s set, by Ernest Pignon-Ernest, is essentially abstract and all white, including the floor cloth. It looks more sterile than an operating room. On the other—and more significant—hand, the orchestral accompaniment, led by Emil de Cou, was considerably finer than our big local troupes enjoy.

I salute the PNB dancers and the viewers who remained patient and enthusiastic throughout the show and can only hope they will read or reread Shakespeare’s text, if just to set their minds straight about what was going on in Verona.

Youth’s Sweet Dream

February 4, 2013 by Tobi Tobias

New York City Ballet: Justin Peck’s new work, Paz de la Jolla / David H. Koch Theater, Lincoln Center, NYC / January 31, February 2, 6, and 8, 2013

Justin Peck, choreographer of Paz de la Jolla for New York City Ballet

Photo: Paul Kolnik

Justin Peck, a 25-year-old member of New York City Ballet’s corps de ballet, seems to have lots of useful ideas and moods in his unstoppably busy brain. His latest work for the company is Paz de la Jolla (the peacefulness of La Jolla) and set to a similarly evocative score along the same lines by Bohuslav Martinů.

The choreography is typical of Peck’s prescience about the useful “rules” of choreography—and those that are not. He is so informed that you feel he’s equipped to make a reasonably commendable ballet in his sleep and that if the results didn’t satisfy him, he could tweak his material until they did.

Beach Boys in Peck’s Paz de la Jolla

Photo: Paul Kolnik

For Paz de la Jolla Peck wisely follows the trite but still instructive admonition to writers at the starting gate of their careers: “Write what you know.” In a good many ways, Paz de la Jolla epitomizes the sensuous pleasure native to southern California culture, in which he grew up. From his description, it was a wonder he ever left—but he wanted to dance and he believed that that would happen most effectively in New York, which, for him, it did.

Sterling Hyltin and Amar Ramasar, as the lovers in Paz de la Jolla

Photo: Paul Kolnik

The warmth of the Californian climate (Peck often lets you see it in the way the dancers move) matched by Martinů’s evocative music arouse the happily susceptible body and soul. Peck sets off the benign effect by slight additions from the underside of joy, and the effect was accidentally enlarged by the first several performances’ taking place in New York during a period of freezing snow, icy streets to navigate, and bouts of high winds that are all too prevalent in our local winter weather. Getting to the theater without incident was an adventure in itself.

Perhaps Peck’s development as a choreographer will one day follow the writer Grace Paley’s instruction: “Write about what you don’t know about what you know.”

The ballet opens with lots of swift brilliant movement, laced with authentic-looking split-second choices about what happens next.

Hyperactive arms and legs, like the long, thin limbs of gangly teenagers, shoot this way and that. It’s clear from the get-go that Tiler Peck (no relation to the choreographer) is the tomboy in the bunch; Sterling Hyltin, the sweetheart; Amar Ramasar, the eternal boyfriend. The ground is the sandy beach; the 15-member corps de ballet, costumed in blue, is the ocean—as dangerous as it is beautiful. The subsequent goings on are melodramatic in a predictable seaside vein, as if Peck were saying “Well, it’s always like this, isn’t it?”.

There’s a lovely—and refreshingly original—moment during the obligatory lovers’ pas de deux when Ramasar moves away from Hyltin for a moment, as if captivated by his own dream, but then returns—as most reliable tales, other than Hans Christian Andersen’s, would insist—to focus on her.

Now and then the water figures have an ominous air. They dally with Hyltin while her boyfriend dozes, then lure her into their midst; when they vanish, she lies on the shore alone, as if dead. The problem here, as well as with the ballet as a whole, is that, with everything happening at top speed, you’re not always sure what’s going on. The choreographer insists upon a happy ending, though; you can’t blame him, he’s still young and Martinů has given him no “death music.”

Hyltin, Ramasar, and Tiler Peck, as the principals in Paz de la Jolla

Photo: Paul Kolnik

The casting for La Jolla is happily conventional: Hyltin is the young woman whose evident, indeed sole, job in life is to be beloved. She calmly accepts her duties without conflict or protest; they are her fate. Tiler Peck is surefooted and delightful as an emissary of exuberance and delight, while Amar Ramasar is, as almost always, the guy immediately recognizable as “the prince.” At first glance you might think the three were sent over from Central Casting, but they’re far better—the very models of their respective roles.

Peck, as the woman who needs no support, in Paz de la Jolla

Photo: Paul Kolnik

All 18 in the cast look terrific in the beach clothes designed for them by Reid Bartelme and Harriet Jung, as well they might, since their training makes them so eye-worthy.

As its its right, the ballet is confined to the halcyon side of life in La Jolla, indirectly to its climate and to its lovely long meandering shoreline. For such reasons the place has, in real life, become a paradise for the greatly privileged. (Wikipedia tells us that Mitt Romney has a vacation house there.) Let that pass, but not this: anti-Semitism had a long reign in La Jolla. Still the ballet itself is strong and consistent enough to ignore the darker aspects of the location’s history—from the truly offensive to just plain human failings. Nevertheless, what Peck might most usefully direct his attention to next, is to find ways in which to make his dancers look like real (though imaginary) people. For examples of this he might pay acute attention to Alexei Ratmansky, who delights in the human race.

Bliss!

January 28, 2013 by Tobi Tobias

New York City Ballet / David H. Koch Theater, Lincoln Center, NYC / January 15 – February 24, 2013

The New York City Ballet’s two-week festival (January 15-27, 2013) of Balanchine’s choreography to music by Tschaikovsky came with a guarantee: no duds, no Eurotrash or other Terpsichorean fads, no feeble imitations of the greats. How wonderful it was to head for Lincoln Center night after night, knowing one was about to encounter dance that was sublime, to music by an ideal partner.

George Balanchine (1904 – 1983)

Photo: Tanaquil LeClercq

The ballets presented were: Allegro Brillante, Diamonds (from Jewels), Divertimento from “Le Baiser de la Fée,” Mozartiana, Serenade, Balanchine’s one-act version of Swan Lake, Tschaikovsky Pas de Deux, Tschaikovsky Suite No. 3, Tschaikovsky Piano Concerto No. 2 (once known as Ballet Imperial), and Tschaikovsky Suite No. 3.

Serenade, the first ballet Balanchine made in America, and the one he told Karin von Aroldingen (a dancer in the company who had become a close friend), was the one that might outlast him, proved its claim on immortality once again. Its invention, its pervasive beauty, its hidden story (slightly different, it seems, for every viewer, but universally poignant) worked their familiar magic. The cast I saw was headed by Ashley Bouder, Megan LeCrone, Sara Mearns (making her debut as the principal woman), Jared Angle, and Adrian Danchig-Waring. They and the rest of the participating dancers seemed to have absorbed the choreography through their skin.

I loved Balanchine’s Divertimento from “Le Baiser de la Fée” from the moment I first saw it. He gives it only a touch of plot (from the Hans Christian Andersen tale The Ice Maiden), but it’s enough to knock you flat. The choreographer, who had a mystic streak of his own, portrays the fate that haunts an artist whose talent proceeds from a fairy’s kiss—a blessing, yes, but one that dooms him to destruction. Tschaikovsky, who had a fatal instinct for tragedy, was very much at home with this theme.

The ballet is dense with haunting moves and portrays the implacable separation of a loving couple who seemed, at first, destined for a happy ending. (Does the woman represent one of the “ordinary” joys of life that an artist may have to forego or, perhaps, life itself?)

If you’re old enough and lucky enough, you’ll have seen the originators of the leading roles: Helgi Tomasson—for whom Balanchine here created one of his greatest male solos, full of sweeping, windblown movement—and Patricia McBride, whom I think of as an artistic ancestor of the wonderful Tiler Peck.

Allegro Brillante looked as if it had been made with Peck in mind. She is more than swift, strong, and accurate; she’s musical as well. So her speed and dazzle were tempered—or, let’s say, complemented—by a seemingly intuitive sense of phrasing. Her performance in this ballet is enhanced by her ability to take physical challenges as occasions for pleasurable play. She was partnered by Amar Ramasar, a very attractive fellow, whom the viewer is meant to find persuasive, but hardly a virtuoso.

The Tschaikovsky Pas de Deux was assigned to Megan Fairchild, who can be counted on to nail every step in the classical vocabulary but who but doesn’t manage to tell her audience anything in the process. If Balanchine had been around to give the crew his much repeated admonition “Don’t think, dear; just dance,” Fairchild could be said to take that advice too seriously. She was partnered by Joaquin De Luz, a small high-flyer.

Diamonds, the least compelling segment of the tripartite Jewels, gave us Sara Mearns, back from a long hiatus due to injury, dancing an eloquent duet with Ask la Cour—trained by the Danes (as Peter Martins was), who has suddenly come into his own as an artist.

Balanchine’s one-act Swan Lake shows the master at work at a useful project. “If you want to sell tickets,” he reportedly declared, “make a ballet and call it Swan Lake.” He had keen theatrical know-how and understood that, to fill the house, the company could not live on his “leotard ballets” alone, though they remade classical dancing forever. His abbreviated version of Swan Lake—especially in the work for the corps, placated the popular audience, assuring it that beauty in its simpler forms has its own virtues.

Pyotr Ilych Tchaikovsky (1840 – 1893)

Imposing and evocative at the same time, Tschaikovsky Piano Concerto No. 2 might be said to have marked the coronation of Teresa Reichlen as a ballerina, no longer merely the strawberry blonde with the endless legs and the firm technique. I wrote about this ballet in my previous piece, Tschaikovsky, A Balanchine Muse, and, having seen it again, am still marveling. Once titled Ballet Imperial, with décor and costumes to match, it has divested its storybook trappings to become regal in the abstract.

Tschaikovsky Suite No. 3 goes on for three movements with rather too much pink in the women’s flowing costumes, the women’s unbound hair treated as a fetish, and a pervasive mood of romance. In the fourth and final movement, to a musical theme and variations, it becomes a far sterner and challenging ballet, with Ashley Bouder and Jonathan Stafford leading the proceedings. I found myself semi-susceptible to the piece when I was younger; now those first three movements seem almost jejune.

The sole dissonant note in the two weeks was the rerun of a pièce d’occasion by Peter Martins the occasion of which had passed: Bal de Couture proved to be little more than a catwalk affair to display fancy-dancey costumes by the fashion designer Valentino, whom the company had already made too much of last season. These costumes fail to conform to the needs of the dancing body, making it look slightly misshapen; their palette is simplistic—red, black, and white; and they boast qualities that may be appropriate to high-end social life, but only impede the needs of complex, high-velocity movement. The Tschaikovsky music from the opera Eugene Onegin was not sympathetically served.

I know that Chanel once provided costumes for Apollo and I’ve actually witnessed Christian Lacroix’s raucous wardrobe for ABT’s Gaîté Parisienne. In general, though, I feel that the best resource for dance costumes is—to shift metaphors—cobblers who stick to their last. I can’t fathom any artistic reason for following, in dance, the interests of the rich (and those craving the indulgences of same) in catwalk clothes. For one thing, it’s likely to make the audience suspicious of even worthy attempts to couple dance with glad rags.

NOTE: In my previous SEEING THINGS piece—Tschaikovsky, a Balanchine Muse—I wrote about Balanchine’s Serenade, Mozartiana, and Tschaikovsky Piano Concerto No. 2.

Tschaikovsky, a Balanchine Muse

January 18, 2013 by Tobi Tobias

New York City Ballet / David H. Koch Theater, Lincoln Center, NYC / January 15 – February 24, 2013

The New York City Ballet opened its six-week Winter Season at Lincoln Center’s David H. Koch Theater with George Balanchine’s Serenade, created in 1935 and set to Tschaikovsky’s Serenade for Strings. It was the first ballet the choreographer made in America. (In the two weeks immediately following, the company’s repertory is devoted—with a single exception, a new work by Peter Martins—to this extensive and often felicitous pairing of composer and choreographer.

The New York City Ballet’s Sara Mearns, airborne amongst her sisters, in George Balanchine’s Serenade

Photo: Paul Kolnik

I saw my first Serenade back when the New York City Ballet was still performing at the New York City Center. “The people’s theater,” the then-dingy auditorium was called—meaning that even my schoolgirl allowance could cover the price of a ticket. Back then, as I recall, each season opened with Serenade. The ballet was already an icon—ravishingly beautiful, poignant in ways dependent on how you interpreted it, enormously inventive, and a statement of intent—a model of what a Balanchine ballet could be.

Regular members of the audience would then notice changes Balanchine had made in the choreography since the last season and boo them softly under their breath. How dared he? we were asking—and then remembering, with some embarrassment, that Balanchine, its maker, not his already ardent audience, owned it. But for those of us faithful watchers, it was as if a living being had been ruthlessly altered; season after season, it took us a while to get used to the “latest” Serenade.

The second-night performance of Serenade in the current season featured Sara Mearns—much missed last season because of an injury—who was making her debut in the ballet. Her talent is so prodigious, she’ll unquestionably be wonderful in the role; she’s already unforgettable. Like Suzanne Farrell, she imprints herself indelibly on the viewer’s perception. But, to my eyes, she still seems to be figuring out what the ballet is “about.” I’m eager to see further performances that will reveal her development of who and what she can be in the role.

Sterling Hyltin and Chase Finlay, making their debuts in the central roles of Mozartiana

Photo: Paul Kolnik

The program moved on to an engaging rendition of Mozartiana led by Sterling Hyltln, Chase Finlay, and Anthony Huxley. Every season reveals Hyltin’s progress in the combination of delicacy and strength that makes us think of porcelain. Is it unreasonable to wish that she might develop a hint of a tragic dimension as well? Finlay is still a so-so partner, whose gradual improvement deserves to be coddled because he’s such a gifted and engaging dancer. He has a reasonably gracious partnering manner, but he’s still somewhat deficient in the coordination part of the job.

Anthony Huxley, one of the City Ballet’s several young men fulfilling their early promise, performing the Gigue in Balanchine’s Mozartiana

Photo: Paul Kolnik

Huxley offered the best account I’ve seen of the jester role, as I think of it, in a long time; he just needs to “throw it away” more so that you realize his character comes from the noble art of clowning. The whole ballet was meticulously danced as if, indeed, it had been meticulously rehearsed—not always the case at City Ballet, which frequently sacrifices polished renditions to presenting a large repertory. Balanchine himself had mixed emotions about “correctness.”

Teresa Reichlenand and Tyler Angle, icons of royalty, in Tschaikovsky Piano Concerto No. 2, formerly known as Ballet Imperial

Photo: Paul Kolnik

Tschaikovsky Piano Concerto No. 2, which closed the program, was presented, rightly, as a compelling, large-scale event that, alone, would prove the company’s right to top-drawer status in the classical ballet world. Actually, it presents a world in itself—so convincingly varied yet cohesive, it arouses complete belief. The company happily managed this effect with grace and musicality as well as grandeur. Teresa Reichlen, who danced the critical female role, still needs more experience in roles requiring ballerina authority—just now she’s wonderful but somewhat too reticent. Her modesty is refreshing, though; it’s a virtue our culture honors all too rarely. In fashioning the choreography, Balanchine seems to have used everything he learned from Petipa and then doubled it in terms of invention, complexity, and sheer crowd control. The piece got more and more thrilling as it went on, all the while inviting—no, urging—its viewers to watch more keenly than ever.

On Soledad Barrio

January 1, 2013 by Tobi Tobias

Soledad Barrio, one of the greatest dancers of our time, in any genre—hers is flamenco—is giving class. The venue is a modest studio over a ground-floor church on West 86th Street. The dancing arena must boast a very resilient floor in addition to its three chandeliers, the only hint of “décor” in sight.

Soledad Barrio, onstage

Instead of one of the long, gaudy ruffled gowns Barrio wears for her existence onstage—which has ignited the imagination of admirers worldwide—she wears a black t-shirt and black trousers flared at the ankles. Her hips are swaddled in a white scarf strewn with bold black ovals that conjure up the notion of paw-prints. Her feet are shod in the classic gear of women practicing her trade—black round-toe pumps with sturdy Cuban heels that have an alternative identity as weapons, now striking or slashing at the floor or delivering urgent whispered messages to it. Her dark hair is yanked back in a braid that becomes more and more wispy as the lesson proceeds. She wears no makeup, not a speck.

Tirelessly, she demonstrates, full-out, over and over again, what she wants from her eight pupils—a motley crew of varying degrees of experience. The quality they have most clearly in common is an unspoken yet evident belief—you can see it in their worshipful gaze—that her knowledge of flamenco is unsurpassed.

Although she may laugh and joke occasionally with her students, she’s subtly merciless when it comes to clarity and correctness. She believes, passionately, that exactitude is essential; clearly she’s a model of that herself. I’d never realized how important it was in her theatrical performances.

When she demonstrates the phrases she’s asking her pupils to reproduce, she seems to be dancing full out, but if you’ve seen her onstage you know that here she’s just marking. In performance Barrio invariably goes far beyond what one pre-conceived as the limit.

Her English is good enough to convey the basics, and, teaching in New York, she naturally uses the local lingo. Needless to say, however, there are enchanting linguistic gaps. To be sure, her regular students understand her better than I could because she’s familiar to them. Like many a dance teacher, she’s a very funny mimic, but her physical imitations of her students’ flawed execution are inevitably far from kind. Not one of the women looks like even a possible Barrio protégée. Why, I wonder, does Barrio lack the caliber of students she deserves?

I adored the few minutes in which she demonstrated “spotting”—the same sort of “trick” ballet dancers use to avert dizziness when executing multiple pirouettes and the cousins thereof. It was enough to make a small child believe the lady was a witch.

I was thrilled by the sight and sound of her the feet hitting the floor faster and faster, a bedazzling form of percussion.

As the pupils are executing a complicated sequence, she says mildly—perhaps a little ironically—“Feel the floor.” Explaining a move that swirls back on itself, she proposes this: “In the last moment, to say yes, you say no.” This is the only instruction she gives in this session that is not solely technical.

Her demonstrations of many a long chain of movements often make you think of eating—of devouring, actually. At other moments she holds her head, jutting into space, like that of a lethal snake injecting its poison into a victim. But she never refers to “meaning” in her instructions, only to movement—the element, as Martha Graham so often reminded us, that never lies.

She stretches an arm out to the side and undulates it, as if whipping up a generous bowl of cream or egg whites, first to a froth, then to firm mountain peaks. Still, there’s no addition of drama.

On a 12-count phrase, she tries to get her students to do nothing on one of the counts. Doing nothing proves to be difficult, a challenge. This is a common problem among dancers, especially the younger ones, no matter what their genre. Only mature, gifted, or “born” dancers have stillness in full command.

Barrio, offstage

Photo: Gabriela Goldin Garcia

In a class that lasts a good deal longer than the 90 minutes scheduled for it, Barrio never once mentions, or even refers to obliquely, the emotional, psychological, or theatrical aspects of her work—the areas that make her world-famous. I suspect she chooses not to. Perhaps she feels that these elements belong to her alone. Perhaps she’s willing to share her technique but not her artistry, which, for all I know, she considers her identity. Most likely, she’s learned, no doubt the hard way, that some things cannot be taught.

Barrio will be appearing in New York with her company, Noche Flamenca, at Joe’s Pub, January 3-8 (two shows daily except on closing night).

Diaghilev Smiles

December 21, 2012 by Tobi Tobias

Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo / Joyce Theater, NYC / December 18, 2012 – January 5, 2013

The trouble with the Trocks—Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo, the men-only troupe that parodies classical ballet—is that their dancing gets better and better. None of the dancers is qualified for a place in the higher echelons of the profession, but their technique continues to advance. Placement, the backbone of ballet, is given reverent attention, although the performers clearly need to have had more rigorous training when they were adolescents. The knees are sublimely taut. The pointe work, rarely the domain of men, has made amazing (and unlikely) progress. Here and there elevation is becoming—well, genuinely elevated. The phrasing is more musical, so that the dancing looks more like dancing rather than clowning around. And the company’s feeling for the essential absurdity of classical dancing is subtly and lovingly delivered.

A fatal moulting

Photo: Gene Schiavone

On opening night the company offered two takes on the iconic Swan Lake. The first derived from Act II of the original—the encounter of Prince Siegfried with Odette, a lovely maiden captured by a malevolent sorcerer and turned into a swan to reign as queen over a bevy of his victims, and then the virtuoso pas de deux in which the dangerously innocent young hero, yearning for pure, perfect love, mistakes the sorcerer’s wicked daughter, Odile, for his true soul mate.

The “Black Swan” pas de deux—an Olympic-style seduction of the innocent hero by Odile pretending to be Odette—offered a stunning account of the fouettés and several other showy challenges that gave the public considerable amusement and joy.

Every person in the company has a stage name, of course. Roberto Forleo, who plays Odette marvelously, is called Marina Plezegetovstageskya. Given the Trocks’ increasing sophistication, the humor is too broad. The dancer, however, quickly became one of my favorites in the group; she has the most ravishing line. The quartet of “little swans,” dancing, arms linked, in (well, almost) perfect unison, deserved medals for combining the frisky with the neat.

I should mention that, in addition to the traditional costume involving many white feathers, the Trocks’ Odette wears elbow-length white gloves—and somehow this additional accouterment seems perfectly natural.

Go for Barocco, choreographed by Peter Anastos in 1974, is the Trocks’ Balanchine send-up. Although it dutifully gives you your fill of daisy chains, which Balanchine overused a bit, it’s nowhere near clever enough, not compared to what Balanchine himself could have created, probably in under 15 minutes, had he been asked to see what teetered on the edge of the absurd in his own work.

Laurencia, in its unTrocked version, is a ballet based on a seventeenth-century melodramatic play by Lope de Vega that was inspired by a real-life historical event. The ballet was created in 1939 by Vakhtang Chabukiani—a formidable male virtuoso who defined the “heroic” style. No one ever kicked sand in this fellow’s face! The eponymous heroine of the piece is the feistiest girl you’d ever want to meet. No droit de seigneur customs prevail for her. There are still companies playing the piece straight, the Mikhailovsky, for one.

I must say that I had trouble understanding how the Trocks could successfully parody the ballet for an audience unfamiliar with the original, but these stylistically agile gentlemen, masters of broad, erotic humor, managed the job with their usual aplomb and contagious delight. Bringing faux-Iberian flair to a compact rendition of an afternoon in the village square (charmingly designed by Robert Gouge), the dancers combined bravura moves with similarly overwrought passions. Among the antics were a series of fouettés (whipping turns ideally coming in batches of 32, but, hey, who’s counting?) that had a spectacular finish and a batch of bourrées (tiny steps on pointe that travel sideways) that made every inch of the doer’s body quiver.

Since the original ballet was about conventional romance, many of the men in the Trocks’ version are playing men, a situation that induces some tantalizing confusion in the viewer’s gender-spotting. This may well lead, I dare to believe, to some useful enlightenment on the subject. Who would have thought that the Trocks were educational?