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Seeing Things

Tobi Tobias on Dance et al.

Ailey News

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Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater / City Center, NYC / November 28 – December 30, 2012

I went to an Ailey matinee and the space was filled with children, onstage and off.  The dance-trained kids were inserted into Revelations where the choreography had no need of them, yet they seemed beautifully schooled, spines marvelously erect yet flexible, without a glimmer of ersatz showbiz in them, and, like the New York City Ballet’s wunderkinder, utterly at home being ogled by a huge audience—from classmates and loved ones to hordes of strangers.  Whatever the Ailey’s school is doing to produce this effect, other schools might usefully take note.  Yes, even classical ballet schools.

Dancers of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, led by Jacqueline Green, in Kyle Abraham’s new Another Night
Photo:  Paul Kolnik

I was at the theater especially to see to see Another Night, by the youngish, much-feted choreographer Kyle Abraham.  It’s set to Art Blakey and The Jazz Messengers’ rendition of Dizzy Gillespie’s “A Night in Tunisia.”  (Hence, I assume, the title of the dance.)  But here Abraham’s often-daring subject matter and tone were oddly defanged, perhaps relegated to less Big Deal venues.  The choreographer is also frequently noted for freely combining different dance genres, but that is done so regularly nowadays, we hardly notice.  At any rate, I was underwhelmed by this piece, which seemed to fit right in with much of the earlier Ailey repertory.

Of course there were lovely passages in the dance.  Not for a moment would you doubt either Abraham’s skill or imagination.  He translates the dancers’ extraordinary physical strength into sailing through the air—often in complex contortions—and landing with delicacy and confidence.   And he takes the humanity these dancers display the moment their feet hit the floor and their upper bodies reach into space and makes it something every pedestrian can share.

The dancing itself was no less terrific than we’ve learned to expect from the Ailey, with each of the performing artists making his or her work unique—as if only this body, this individual way of executing a step or phrase, this indication of intent made an essential contribution to the effect of the whole.

This dichotomy in quality between mediocre choreography and stellar performance is a situation that has long plagued the company, but as the repertory continues to expand—not simply in number, but in genre–the tide may turn.  Meanwhile the Ailey keeps putting on shows that keep a world-wide audience watching.

 

 

On December 9, Renee Robinson, a member of the Ailey company for 31 years, celebrated that amazingly long tenure with the troupe, surrounded by the splendid and loving efforts of colleagues who had danced beside her at various stages of her career.

Renee Robinson, veteran of 31 years with the Ailey company, in the founder’s classic Revelations
Photo:  Andrew Eccles

For this retirement-from-the-company’s-stage event (she hasn’t announced her plans for the future yet) Robinson herself took on key roles in the 1974 Night Creature (set to music by Duke Ellington) and in Revelations (created, in 1961, to traditional songs of the black community).  In Night Creature the lady she plays is sexy as all get-out (yet, typically of Robinson, not raunchy) and convinced that she’ll emerge a star.  Robinson herself says she had to travel a long road to stardom, but I think the essentials were already there by the time she studied at the Jones-Haywood School of Ballet, the only classical dance academy in her home town of Washington, DC, that accepted black dancers.  (Interestingly, she has transferred from classical to modern dance smoothly.  That alone is quite a feat.)

In the “Wading in the Water” section of Revelations, Robinson uses her umbrella—with its generous white fabric—almost as a fifth limb, a mark of herself as a beauty created by wisdom and experience.  In the irresistible finale of the piece, “Rocka My Soul in the Bosom of Abraham,” as its community gathers for what promises to be ebullient worship, she demonstrated the joyful sassiness—greeting her girlfriends with the camaraderie that, I suspect, has saved many a troubled soul and keeping the menfolk from taking “friendship” too far.

Highlights of Robinson’s fellow dancers’ efforts included Matthew Rushing, an unusually romantic dancer in the male contingent—one of the few who looks as if could never go to war—performing “A Song for You” with loving—and specific—devotion.  Linda Celeste Sims, another longtime company favorite, danced an excerpt from Alvin Ailey’s famous 1971 solo Cry—an abstract, yet viscerally touching account of a black woman’s experience, surviving a life without privileges.  The piece was done on this occasion with two additional women echoing the main figure.  (The Ailey has never yet admitted to itself that “more” is often “too much.”)

The mood of the program and its reception was rejoicing—celebrating a long life in a merciless art that, at its best, provides ecstasy—for both performers and their witnesses. Not a tear was shed, at least not onstage.

Renee Robinson
Photo:  Andrew Eccles

© 2012 Tobi Tobias

Glimpses #12: Tabula Rasa

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My four grandchildren having aged out of childhood, I invited a dear friend’s marvelous granddaughter—let’s call her Sarah—to my annual viewing of Balanchine’s Nutcracker, as rendered, 58 years after its creation, by the first company to dance it, the New York City Ballet.  There’s little more wonderful than being an old hand at something and sharing it with a person for whom it’s entirely new—and enticing.  Sarah is one of those marvelous creatures on whom, as they say, nothing is lost.

Sarah’s mother had kindly briefed this bright and beautiful six-year old, who was handed over to me fully in command of the story and not a bit puzzled by the fact that the performers didn’t speak.  It’s true, of course, that Tiler Peck, as Dewdrop, is an icon of eloquence, and I’m glad that my young guest saw at least one artist of Peck’s extraordinary caliber.  The entire performance was the best rehearsed I’ve seen in decades of watching City Ballet’s “Nuts.”  There’s a great deal to be said for that sort of “pedestrian” accomplishment.

© 2012 Tobi Tobias

Going Strong

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Lar Lubovitch Dance Company / Florence Gould Hall, NYC / November 14-18, 2012

I hadn’t written about—or, for that matter, even seen—Lar Lubovitch’s choreography for a good many years.  Attempting to remedy that, I trekked over to the East Side—in Manhattan, hardly the hotbed of dancing—to Florence Gould Hall, where his popular troupe was opening a five-day run.  To my shame, I discovered that since I’d last seen his work, Lubovitch had been expanding his range way beyond the insistent fluid grace and communal rapport—“join hands and dance” stuff—that was always so lovely, and quickly so boring.

Attila Joey Csiki in Lar Lubovitch’s new Transparent Things
Photo:  Steven Schreiber

Transparent Things, aptly set to Debussy’s String Quartet in G Minor and being given its world premiere, was the most ambitious work on the program.  The music was played onstage, vividly, by the Bryant Park Quartet:  Anna Elashvili and Ben Russell (violins), Nathan Schram (viola), and Tomoko Fujita (cello).  Lubovitch’s choreography is motivated by Picasso’s 1905 Family of Saltimbanques, which shows a half dozen impoverished street entertainers, two of them children, one an adolescent, one clearly the grandfatherly leader of the ragged troupe. The mood is all pathos and grace.  Apart from the youngsters, the plight, the resignation, and the determination to persevere say much about the dancers of today, the majority of whom earn their keep through piecemeal work often having nothing to do with the art they refuse to abandon.

Picasso gives us melancholy grace expressed through pathos and the itinerant performers’ determination to follow their trade.  Lubovitch doesn’t reflect that mood, though.  His characters are considerably more feisty, except for the man in the Harlequin jacket (Attila Joey Csiki) who’s at the center of the piece.  He’s the spiritual hero, if you will, of the group, in whom all of the others’ artistic yearnings are invested; I found that observation telling—in several ways.

Of course the choreography contains frequent use of a familiar Lubovitch motif:  the players forming chains, separating for a moment, and then, with the insistence of magnets, relinking.  But Lubovitch’s expanded vocabulary energizes the piece so that you feel, having watched it, that you’ve been somewhere instead of just surrendering with a sigh to the choreographer’s dream.

The six dancers were Clifton Brown, Csiki, Reed Luplau, Brian McGinnis, Laura Rutledge, and Katarzyna Sharpetowska.  Reid Bartelme, formerly a Lubovitch dancer, created the costumes; the lighting was by Jack Mehler.

The program opened with Lubovitch’s 2007 Little Rhapsodies, a wry and charming title for a male trio that went nowhere, really, but was pleasant enough and occasionally witty.  The guys (Csiki, Luplau, and McGinnis) acquitted themselves well to its Schumann score, with frisky feet (lots of ballet classes behind this, I imagine) and a general friendly playfulness tempered by passages suggesting sorrow, effort, aspiration, and disappointment.  Its flaw, for me, was that it went on and on, without seeming to get anywhere.  Even an abstract dance, or (as this is) one that’s semi-abstract, needs a climax and a resolution.  True, there are exceptions to this rule, as Merce Cunningham proved again and again, but he had the privilege of genius.

Katarzyna Skarpetowska and Brian McGinnis in Lubovitch’s Crisis Variations
Photo:  Paula Lobo

Back to back with Little Rhapsodies, came the dark, fraught Crisis Variations, created last year and set to music by Yevgeniy Sharlat that is based on Franz Liszt’s Transcendental Etudes and ideal for the occasion.  Seeing it currently, in the wake of the Hurricane Sandy disaster, it seemed eerily of the moment.  Yet when do we not face the end of the world?

Seven dancers mill around the stage space, a lonely crowd, so to speak, except for a duo presumably supported to some degree by the participants’ intimate relationship.  But no, they’re all trying to jump out of their skin in their nameless suffering and horror.  Lubovitch tracks them remorselessly if somewhat too pictorially.  He’s especially adept at depicting a cluster of five, each person moving according to his individual script, yet part of a group statement.  The overall impression is that of violent conflict, of the Nazis’ extermination of the Jews, indeed of the endless succession of wars humanity seems to birth.  Lubovitch evokes humanity as a whole through presenting individuals who have reached the far end of experience, the only successor of which is death.  Nevertheless, Kurt Jooss (in The Green Table) and Paul Taylor (in Last Look) have already covered the ground, fueled by a panoply of gifts with which Lubovitch can’t compete.

© 2012 Tobi Tobias

Valda

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Valda Setterfield
Photo:  Andrew Eccles

“At what point in the day does Valda become ‘Valda?’” asked my dance writing colleague as we shared a cab to the theater for a program we were both slated to review.  “Is it,” she continued, “when she puts on her aquamarine earrings?”  We were coming from a party enhanced by many guests from the dance world.  The fabulous blue-green earrings were sternly rectangular and amazingly large.  You looked at them and they lured your imagination to deep-sea depths promising all sorts of watery magic.

The British-born Setterfield, the dancer and actor wearing them, was—indeed, still is—famous for her clothes and the unique yet understated grace with which she combined the elements of her costume.  It was said that her husband, David Gordon—who has, as he puts it, “made work” that lies between movement theater and spoken theater—dressed her.  If so, it was still apparent that she had a mind—and sensitive taste and imagination—of her own.  It was obvious in her very posture and gait.  I remember a time when one would walk the length of the promenade of the New York State Theater during an intermission of, say, the New York City Ballet and back again, keeping a keen eye alert to the whispered pronouncement “Valda’s here!”

It was also said that the couple found many of the garments in Setterfield’s wardrobe—the unique, the exotic, the invariably beautiful– at flea markets.  Legend has it that once the couple went their separate paths of investigation at such a market in Paris and Gordon called over to Setterfield, “Valda, I’ve found a Fortuny!”  And Setterfield, answered, “Oh, David, I already have half a dozen.”  I have no doubt that she did.

I and many another “Valda” fan will attend a performance simply because she’s in it.  She is invariably the epitome of understatement and composure—virtues rarely on display today and thus all the more instructive and encouraging.

Setterfield is about to appear in Gordon’s The Matter/2012, at Danspace October 25-27, with two shows (7:00 and 9:00) each day.

© 2012 Tobi Tobias

Untitled

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American Ballet Theatre / City Center, NYC / October 16-20, 2012

American Ballet Theatre, financially afflicted like many a dance company in these stringent days, gave a Fall “season” consisting of just one “week”—October 16-20.  Did the brevity of the run ensure the excellence of the repertory?   Presented at the City Center, it consisted of seven ballets or stand-alone excerpts, none of which was filler or “novelty.”   Most were safe (and worthy) favorites—Agnes de Mille’s Rodeo, for instance; Antony Tudor’s The Leaves Are Fading; Twyla Tharp’s In the Upper Room.  The most thrilling item by far was the first of three new ballets that Alexei Ratmansky plans to set to Shostakovich scores.  To this choreographer—Russian-born and trained, once head of the Bolshoi Ballet—Shostakovich is the composer who holds the place that Tchaikovsky did with Petipa, Stravinsky with Balanchine. The new piece is called, austerely, Symphony #9.

ABT’s Polina Semionova and Marcelo Gomes in Alexei Ratmansky’s Symphony #9, named for its Shostakovich score
Photo:  Gene Schiavone

But what else might it have been called?  It portrays both the literal and the abstract without a second’s pause between modes.  Is that a platoon or a corps de ballet going through its maneuvers?  It’s both.  Simultaneously.  And yet the mingle coheres.  As Balanchine’s did (and continues to do), Ratmansky’s work trains his viewers’ eyes to see more swiftly and keenly.

The dance, in intimate communication with the music, evokes the inevitable death toll of war juxtaposed with the ecstasy of victory.  Ratmansky, well endowed with the ability to perceive myriad attitudes to a situation in close range, revels in such ironic possibilities even to the extent of showing a latent vein of humor in them.  Is s/he really dead? you wonder when a body collapses, or is s/he just playing dead?  Why are the bodies often stricken in stop-motion mode?   And what role do these strange views of the action play in the ballet’s overall treatment of events and emotions?  As usual, the moment you’ve seen a Ratmansky ballet for the first time, you want to see it a second time to have questions like these answered as well as having the opportunity to revel in the choreography’s command of structure and its sheer theatrical power.

Semionova and Gomes in Symphony #9
Photo:  Gene Schiavone

Unlike some of Ratmansky’s earlier works, even the most rewarding (Namouna, for instance), Symphony #9 was tight as a drum at its premiere on October 18.  The dancers’ vitality and precision were at a peak I haven’t seen at ABT in ages.

It’s no surprise that the challenging choreography does much for its leading dancers.  Marcelo Gomes looks more than ever like the Big Man on Campus, only one whose personality includes a devilish sense of humor.  Polina Semionova discards her usual type-casting as the girl who can do every damn step perfectly and becomes a real (and way sexy) woman. Simone Messmer, hair cropped short like that of the feisty heroines of yesteryear’s books for girls (think Jo March, after she sheds her tresses), proves herself, once again, to be an original.  Craig Salstein is the boy who dares—part Rookie of the Year, part class clown—with a serious under layer that should free him forever from roles that conceive of him as “the hero’s best friend.”  Ratmansky takes all these talents in hand and makes them more wonderful than they or we could ever have imagined on our own.

Herman Cornejo in Symphony #9
Photo:  Gene Schiavone

And I haven’t yet mentioned Herman Cornejo, who, so very rightly, is assigned no partner.  He emerges, gradually, as the pivot of Symphony #9 or, if you will, its soul.  The audience’s reaction to the solo with which he closed the ballet made me think of an ardor that, almost literally, wanted to devour him.  The ballet’s curtain line is his stream of tours à la seconde (the body whirling as if without end, one taut leg extended parallel with the floor) mapping out an earthly geometry.  To think that many a viewer once believed he wasn’t tall enough or conventionally handsome enough or whatever enough to be a danseur noble—in other words, fit to play a prince!  Cornejo is the model of a post-modern danseur noble—technically breathtaking yet never show-offy, and infinitely thoughtful.   I’ve never heard him speak a word.  I’ve never needed to.

Needless to say I went back to see the second cast—which proved to be nowhere near as effective as the first, though things may improve to a certain extent with further rehearsal and further performance.  In the Gomes role, Roberto Bolle, who can’t act, tried to, ineffectually, while in the Semionova role, Veronika Part, who can, did so, puzzlingly, with soap-operatic exaggeration.  Jared Matthews, assigned the Cornejo part, was as valiant as a good dancer can be when faced with a challenge to which he’s neither equal nor suited.

Symphony #9 ensemble
Photo:  Gene Schiavone

Symphony #9’s glamorous black and white costumes, by Keso Dekker, feature the slashing contrast of shades.  The menswear is hugged by a belt of giant rhinestones; the hems of the women’s striated skirts brush the ladies’ knees as if murmuring to the wearers about what’s going on. The graduated darks and lights of Jennifer Tipton’s illumination provide many an apt mood clue, though the feelings charted by the choreography would be evident even on Times Square in relentlessly dazzling sunlight or in dusk shading ominously toward a complete black-out.

© 2012 Tobi Tobias

Making It New

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New York City Ballet:  Premiere of Justin Peck’s Year of the Rabbit / David H. Koch Theater. NYC / October 5, 2012

Old-time followers of the New York City Ballet used to yearn for “another Balanchine”; today’s fans are more realistic.  They count themselves lucky to discover “another Christopher Wheeldon”—an astute practitioner of the classical craft even if he doesn’t regularly fire the imagination.  At 25, Justin Peck, a member of City Ballet’s corps, stands out in the crowd of aspirants to that status and has already achieved far more.  Proof:  his Year of the Rabbit, set to a score by Sufjan Stevens, which entered the company’s repertory on October 5, and is slated for three subsequent performances this season.  Can it be just wishful thinking that I found it thrilling?

Justin Peck’s Year of the Rabbit for the New York City Ballet—full cast
Photo:  Paul Kolnik

In a September Works & Process program—part of the marvelous annual show-and-tell season at the Guggenheim Museum—Peck had delineated his own “process” in detail and at length until I, for one, wondered how dancing as I knew it could result from such a complex and mechanical system.   They do say that Petipa worked out his choreography on a chess board, but Balanchine, equipped with his profound musical understanding, pretty much just walked into the studio and worked directly on the dancers.  À chacon sa méthode.  Peck’s method provided a skeleton for a brilliantly ordered dance for three couples:  Ashley Bouder and Joaquin De Luz, Teresa Reichlen and Robert Fairchild, Janie Taylor and Craig Hall (the last pair rather more equal than the other two), and a corps that almost proved Peck’s desire—stated at the W&P event—to make corps and principals equal partners.

Ashley Bouder and male quintet in Year of the Rabbit
Photo:  Paul Kolnik

Peck’s choreography for the three featured couples and a 12-member corps pushed City Ballet’s dancers beyond the extraordinary physical prowess we’ve already seen from them.  The challenges of the choreography displayed their strength, speed, and daring, coupled with its opposite—control, which makes immaculate precision possible.  Peck played ceaselessly with the idea of the individual in contrast to the group, not with the entities as rivals for the available space or the viewer’s attention but as partners in creating his singular world of youth at play and, inevitably, in love.  Jerome Robbins’ Interplay, which now seems corny (and was always arch), might still be usefully thought of as Year of the Rabbit’s godfather.

Joaquin De Luz and trio in Year of the Rabbit
Photo:  Paul Kolnik

Most “emerging” choreographers fold references to their elders and betters into the new work they’re making.  Like the best of them, Peck slips this sort of material into his own matrix with wit and understanding as well as admiration. Needless to say Balanchine is always there—as in the moment when the dancers are seen half in and half out of the wings the way they are in Symphony in Three Movements, but Peck has them lying supine, visible only from waist to crown. I enjoyed most the takes on Bronislava Nijinska—because they’re ingenious and beautiful of course, but particularly because they seize upon a school of classical dancing that is not part of the Balanchine legacy.   (Peck is a product of the School of American Ballet, from which he moved directly into City Ballet.)

Craig Hall and Janie Taylor in Year of the Rabbit
Photo:  Paul Kolnik

Rabbit is structured within an inch of its life.  The stage pattern, shifting like a kaleidoscope running on High, is always balanced—which would, of course, be wearisome if it weren’t arranged in such refreshing ways and rearranged every few seconds.   The qualities of romance and its best friends, melancholy and yearning, make their appearance in several passages that are not as original or imaginative as the presto sections.  They are workmanlike to be sure, occasionally touching, but I hope, one of these days, to applaud the moment in which Peck invites legato out on a date.

Throughout the ballet, Peck’s authority is evident.  As is his earnestness of purpose.  Both qualities will help him push forward.  In time, if we’re lucky, he’ll allow the unplanned to expand what he’s doing.

Earlier this season, though unable to write at the time, I marveled at City Ballet’s rendition of Balanchine’s choreography in three programs devoted solely to the master’s work.  I wondered then, as I have on several other special occasions, why the company allows lackluster performances when it can render the work with the empathy and brilliance it deserves.

A special evening was also devoted to honoring the fashion designer Valentino whose “costumes” can give a society woman marvelous éclat, but who doesn’t get—and why should he?—the very basics of ballet costuming.  Valentino gave his “dancing girls” tutus in peculiar and unflattering shapes worn over white panties that might have come from today’s equivalent of Woolworth’s.  The women’s legs were sheathed in tights in the dreadful pancake-makeup tint that, in bygone times, was supposed to represent Caucasian flesh.  (To my knowledge City Ballet includes no African-American women.)  The leg line—classical ballet’s hieroglyphic—was set afire at its tip by the inevitable red pointe shoes, red being the designer’s signature color.  The effect traduces the Moira Shearer film that got it just right.

Anyone will tell you that these gala evenings are not meant for the critics but rather for the company’s donors, as one of several means of inducing them to keep up their much-needed, much-appreciated financial support.  But what could we learn from the Valentino evening—that wealthy patrons of the company, communally, have tawdry taste?

© 2012 Tobi Tobias

Preview from Seattle

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Works & Process:  Pacific Northwest Ballet / Guggenheim Museum, NYC / September 9 & 10, 2012

The dance programs in the Guggenheim Museum’s Works & Process series, each a 90-minute presentation that shunts between dancing and talking, are viewed, live, two or three times, in the museum’s tiny theater, and telecast simultaneously from sea to shining sea.  Most often, these lecture-dems serve as preludes to a run in New York; in harsher words the company that’s featured is shilling for its upcoming shows.  The tough practicality of this arrangement is softened by the charm of the programs’ rehearsal-room immediacy—the dancers wear practice clothes and their music comes from a single piano.   The audience, of course, adores going “behind the scenes.”

Pacific Northwest Ballet’s Carla Körbes, dancing Balanchine
Photo:  Angela Sterling

September 9 and 10 featured the Seattle-based Pacific Northwest Ballet, and all the talking was done by its artistic director, Peter Boal, formerly a principal dancer with the New York City Ballet and a model of pure classicism with a prominent penchant for exactitude. He had a clear theme, which was the way in which, over the years, George Balanchine—essentially City Ballet’s raison d’être—made changes in his works.  These different readings of the master’s choreography were illustrated by the dancers’ executing excerpts from Apollo (created in 1928), The Four Temperaments (1946), Agon (1957), and Tchaikovsky Pas de Deux (1960).  Thanks to Boal’s predecessor, Francia Russell, Balanchine’s ballets have been central to PNB’s repertory since Boal was a mere (but, even then, marvelous) child at the School of American Ballet.

It required keen and experienced eyes to “get” everything Boal wanted the spectators to see.  What was memorable about the occasion was not the detailed analysis, though, but the brilliance and daring of the dancers.

The Guggenheim’s small theater has a stage of Lilliputian dimensions.  This cruelly confined space was not only hampering but dangerous as well.  Every time a woman was lifted high over her partner’s head, her skull ran the risk of smashing into the overhead lights.  A series of swiftly whirling turns seemed to court disaster yet, miraculously, never came to grief.  The dancers performed with elated zest—boldly and bravely, adamantly refusing to be discouraged by boundaries.

Körbes, dancing Balanchine
Photo:  Angela Sterling

The six dancers involved were indeed good, if nowhere near as stellar as the artists New Yorkers see regularly at City Ballet and American Ballet Theatre.  But neither are they what used to be called (damning with a label) “regional”—good enough for second-level troupes but not for the big time.  PNB’s men are especially distinguished by an air of having thought long and carefully about their roles.  Still, Carla Körbes was unquestionably the most important among the performers.  She’s a born ballerina, world-class, who has an unfortunately shaky career behind her.  Just now, with PNB, she seems, finally, to have come into her own, fusing superb technique with potent personality and an accompanying delight.  Ironically, she was first discovered by Boal in her native Brazil, at the age of 14.

PNB will perform at the New York City Center February 13-16, 2013, offering an all-Balanchine program alternating with Jean-Christophe Maillot’s Roméo et Juliette.

© 2012 Tobi Tobias

Glimpses #11: Jean Renoir

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I have too many things to do; in New York—my home town, thank the fates—the situation is self-perpetuating if, as so often occurs, your interest lies in the arts.  Yesterday I allowed myself to fit in—in broad daylight!—not just one but two movies, being shown back to back in our town’s inexhaustible revival house Film Forum.  Both were created by Jean Renoir (my second favorite, after Ozu), the guy who doesn’t kid himself about human nature yet is one of the most humane movie makers who ever lived.  First up was La Règle du jeu (The Rules of the Game), the poignant absurdity of its characters’ behavior summed up in the line “The trouble is that everyone has his reasons.”  Then Grand Illusion, a piercingly ironic film about war (laced with rather more sentiment than we tolerate today).  It has the grace to stand ineluctably for freedom and the wisdom to leave the outcome ambiguous.

© 2012 Tobi Tobias

Baryshnikov’s Choice

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In Paris / Gerald W. Lynch Theater, NYC / August 1-5, 2012

In Paris:  It’s the quietest production imaginable, built—by Dmitry Krymov—through words (in Russian, French, and English), grainy black and white projected images (most often of words), haunting song, and a flying rig.   It dramatizes a short story by the Russian writer Ivan Bunin.  It sold out for five days in New York, at the intimate Gerald W. Lynch Theater, and is about to embark on an extended tour.

It tells the story of an aging exiled White Russian army general living a piercingly lonely existence in the City of Light.  In a low-end restaurant he meets a young woman—his waitress—in similar circumstances of displacement.  Of course  they fall in love, but nothing can blot out their loneliness.  Given their situation, they’re condemned to melancholy.  The tale is fragile in its impact; perhaps only Chekhov could have empowered it.

Mikhail Baryshnikov, who plays the leading role, undertook the production simply because he wanted to.  Lord knows he’s earned the privilege through his breathtaking performances as a classical dancer, first in Russia, then in America, which offered him not just personal freedom but a wide repertory; his exploration of modern and postmodern dance; and his creation of the Baryshnikov Arts Center in Hell’s Kitchen to foster the growth of the arts.  He owes the world nothing more and deserves the opportunity to do as he pleases.

Playing opposite him, the Russian actress Anna Sinyakina is subtle, attractive, and utterly believable.  Together, the pair illustrated how people can be all but destroyed by the loss of home (in all its meanings) and the society that once surrounded them like a second skin.

Alexei Ratmansky provided the choreography.  There isn’t much dancing in the show, and at 63, Baryshnikov is no longer even as fleet of foot as he was for years after he relinquished the role of classical ballet’s reigning prince.   He is still, however, a compelling presence and a model of intelligence and taste.

© 2012 Tobi Tobias

Glimpses #10: “Bayadère,” the movie

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Just when I thought I needed to go to France to see the Paris Opera Ballet in a worthy repertory beyond Giselle, the invaluable Emerging Pictures screened the company’s production of La Bayadère, in Rudolf Nureyev’s final version of the 1877 ballet by Marius Petipa.  (New Yorkers are more familiar with the Natalia Makarova treatment presented by American Ballet Theatre.)  The dancing, led by Aurélie Dupont, Josua Hoffalt, and Ludmila Pagliero—and a female corps de ballet that constitutes a star in itself—illustrated a notion of classical perfection in the Kingdom of the Shades scene and delicious local-color hokum rooted in a melodramatic vision of India.

Dupont blends her mime and her dancing so subtly, you can’t tell where one leaves off and the other begins.  Hoffalt brings no personality to his strangely weak-willed role of warrior hero, but his every step could illustrate a manual of technique.  Franca Squaciapino’s costumes, subtle and sophisticated in their palette and patterns, provide yet another ravishing attraction.

© 2012 Tobi Tobias

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