Balanchine

Enterprises that Require New Clothes

September 27, 2013 by Tobi Tobias

New York City Ballet / David H. Koch Theater, Lincoln Center, NYC / September 17 – October 13, 2013

On September 19, with considerable fanfare in the media, the New York City Ballet gave its Fall gala. The orchestra was raised on a platform, liberated from the pit that is its usual home, to let the spectators ogle the musicians. The downstairs portion of the audience, many of them clearly one-percenters, was outfitted in expensive-date-night costume. Plenty to look at without a dancer yet in sight. Then the musicians charged the air with excitement, an enthusiastic rendering of John Adams’ Short Ride in a Fast Machine urging them on. Finally the dancing took over—the three major pieces on the program having their world premiere. Each was first introduced by a video that expanded upon Martins’ notion of allowing high-end designer fashion to play an important role in City Ballet’s proceedings and, by this means, to increase the company’s audience.

Up first was Justin Peck’s Capricious Maneuvers, set to music by Lucas Foss. The costuming is by Prabal Gurung (who, a program note wanted us to know, has clothed both Michelle Obama and the Duchess of Cambridge). The five dancers who share the stage space looked fresh and lively in a stern but striking palette of black, white, and red. There’s an onstage piano, around which the dancers gather when not in action–a move that is already a cliché.

New York City Ballet in Justin Peck’s Capricious Maneuvers

Photo: Paul Kolnik

When they were fully animated, the performers looked like a cheery group of youngsters, a population typical of the disarmingly ingenuous types beloved by Jerome Robbins in his earlier and lighter ballets. If Peck had been given an explicit assignment, it seemed to be the job of creating an inviting curtain raiser. Capricious Maneuvers fills that order well enough, but it hardly filled the role of striking the viewer as something he or she didn’t already know.

If Peck’s contribution was charged with gaiety, Benjamin Millepied, named as the boss-to-be of the Paris Opera Ballet, initiated a heavy mood of doom that paralyzed the spirit. Its title? Neverwhere. Its music? By Nico Muhly, a frequent Millepied collaborator. Its costumes? By Iris Van Herpen, who is prominent (and attractively modest) in the introductory videotape.

Sterling Hyltin and Tyler Angle in Benjamin Millepied’s Neverwhere

Photo: Paul Kolnik

Costume-wise, the big deal in this piece is the outré foot-gear. The six dancers in the ballet, three of each gender, wear practice garb in a fabric that looks like patent leather (but is light-years away, I can assure you, from kiddies’ Mary Janes). The women sport knee-high boots of a similar fabric. These ladies are also assigned short-skirted tutus that capture the light and have the appearance of dark (and, surely, evil) stars.

By the way, it’s just the women who wear the boots. The men are made to look barefoot in soft, flesh-colored ballet slippers. Surely there’s some amateur psychology lurking here, but I can’t bear to think of it, it’s so obviously faux-sophisticated. Or perhaps the foot-gear budget had gone way over its limit. The choreography is of negligible interest. And I suspect that the costuming is sheer eye candy—licorice perhaps.

It’s hard to know what the choreography may be trying to tell us—if anything. It seems to consist of brief, unrelated situations that have no affect at all. Here and there it simply yields one pretty position after another. Lots of the dancing takes place against a huge pyramid, which, as time goes by (oh so slowly), gets bathed in various colors of light. At one point a woman keeps testing the grip a man has on her—until he simply carries her away as if she were an unwieldy package he was destined to drop off at his next stop. At another point we see a duet disappearing, each of its dancers retreating to his or her corner, so to speak. But the choreography is largely devoid of instances of simple human connection. Who knows? Maybe the Parisians, who use aloofness as their default manner, will think it’s le dernier cri.

Tiler Peck and Robert Fairchild in Angelin Preljocaj’s Spectral Evidence

Photo: Paul Kolnik

Last of the new works was Spectral Evidence by Angelin Preljocaj, set to music by John Cage and costumed by Olivier Theyskens. If you worked hard at making the choreography “mean” something, you might have decided it was a gloss on the witchcraft hysteria that riddled Salem at the close of the seventeenth century. Theyskens offered muted clues: the men tightly clad in uniform forbidding black suits, while the women were wrapped in flowing pearly white, ornamented with red streaks that looked much like rivulets of blood. I couldn’t help wondering why Preljocaj chose to ignore the teachings Balanchine set forth again and again a good while ago, confidently demonstrating, through the example of his own ballets, the differences among the nature of literal narrative, suggestions of narrative, and absence of narrative, all of which he handled with aplomb.

At any rate, Spectral Evidence remained uncertain—and ineffectual—whether considered as a near-abstract ballet or one that referenced a specific historical event in America’s culture. Its confusion and its refusal to make any point decisively only added to the sense of hopelessness that grew more leaden until the audience was revived with a bit of Balanchine’s upbeat Western Symphony, then mercifully allowed to go home. I hope the watchers in the dark this evening remember the authority and elegance of the company’s dancers, despite the choreography they had no choice but to illuminate as best they could.

Balanchine’s Western Symphony, performed in October, 2010

Photo: Paul Kolnik

As for the decision to overemphasize the importance of “what the dancers wore,” I feel this is a good moment to point out it was at Balanchine’s wish that in the house program the credits for each ballet the company danced at a given performance were listed with the creator of the music first; the choreographer’s name came second. The new ballets unveiled at the gala program—in deed if not in word—put its money on the clothes. We should remember, too, that for some of the most significant Balanchine ballets—The Four Temperaments being one example—the costumes found their final form by being “reduced” to the simplest of practice clothes.

A Cheated Flight

September 21, 2013 by Tobi Tobias

New York City Ballet / David H. Koch Theater, Lincoln Center, NYC / September 17 – October 13, 2013

The New York City Ballet opened its fall season at the David H. Koch Theater with a week of Swan Lakes—broken only by a trio of new works for the gala on September 19. The version was Peter Martins’s, which, typically, illustrates the choreographer’s adamant conviction that “less is more.” Needless to say, the stubbornly “clean” edition is likely to make a newbie viewer wonder what, indeed, this legendary piece is about. In its more generous renderings, Swan Lake has a great deal to say about the human experience: the power of love; the unmitigated threat of evil; and the tenacity of the heart. Tschaikovsky’s score is saying it all along.

To give credit its due, the dancing was well-nigh impeccable, every step sharply executed, from principals through corps members. A video work tape of the piece would provide an admirable device from which to learn the bare-bones aspect of the choreography. The phrasing was often musical, too. Still, the absence of “soul”—the quality that makes the steps sing, or tear at the viewer’s heart—is woefully neglected. Balanchine often forbade his dancers to indulge in “acting”—that is, acting that is superficial, and thus fake. Peter Martins squelches even genuine feeling itself. And entire passages of his choreography demonstrate how, in his version of Lake, emotion and mood are disastrously—you might say heinously—neglected. (Forget about, for instance, the traditional “my mother’s tears formed this lake” mime in Odette’s explanation of her plight to Prince Siegfried. It’s gone. Disappearance, such as the now customary one of Benno, Siegfried’s best friend, has been extended to blood relatives.

Despite the fact that so much was missing, the house was not merely packed but eager to express its enthusiasm, if one could judge by the applause (with which today’s audience has become a naively used addiction.) Balanchine, in his occasional jokester mood, was known to comment wryly, “Call any ballet Swan Lake and people will come.”

Only the presence of Sara Mearns, whose style has a profound visceral quality, made good sense of the double role of the pure Odette (a young woman captured and turned into a swan by an evil sorcerer, then forced to join a bevy of young women with the same terrible fate, as well as her evil opposite, Odile, the sorcerer’s daughter, who seduces Siegfried so that he’s tricked into taking the Bad Girl for the Good Girl).

Not since Suzanne Farrell has the City Ballet harbored the enormous imaginative resources of a dancer like Mearns, who played the double role on opening night. This is not to say that the two dancers are anything alike. (Every member of the highest grade of ballerinas is, obviously, sui generis.) Farrell was first and foremost an angel, a dancer whose very persona indicated qualities of the unworldly—indeed, the sublime. Mearns is a dancer whose feet (and instincts) are rooted in an imaginary earth. Again and again, in any of her performances, she reminds you that she is not a “ballerina” but a “dancer,“ in the way that Soledad Barrio and other greats of Terpsichore’s many-faceted realm are more than practitioners of a particular codified form of dancing.

Mearns’s dancing has an animal quality, revealed most fully through her strong, pliable spine and eloquent arms and hands. Whenever she dances—even in an abstract ballet—it tells a “story,” if not a narrative one. If there’s a dance equivalent to “reading the phone book,” that’s what I’d be willing to observe Mearns doing. Whenever I see her perform, I feel I’m looking at a marvel.

At the close of the NYCB performance, the littlest observers were carried to one of the theater’s exits, asleep, in the arms of their dads. It was way past their bedtime of course. But if some of these toddlers and kindergartners are eventually going to constitute a new generation of classical-dance fans—or even become professional dancers themselves, I hope they will eventually see versions of Swan Lake that do justice to the great ballet’s makers and its composer.

I recall, fondly, a little girl who wasn’t even walking yet, but sat on her living room floor spontaneously devising her own choreography (largely from the waist up) to the Swan Lake music playing on her family’s radio. She had not been told much of the story, but Tschaikovsky offered her enough to ignite her imagination.

Youth in Bloom

June 6, 2013 by Tobi Tobias

To call the School of American Ballet “selective” is an amusing understatement. It’s the training ground in the U.S. for potential professional classical dancers (who must, of course, begin on the path as children) and the alma mater of a majority of the performers in the New York City Ballet.

School of American Ballet Workshop Performances: Jordan Miller and Alejandro Ocasio in George Balanchine’s Divertimento No. 15

Photo: Paul Kolnik

The academy draws students who show basic potential for the trade to which they aspire in anatomy, musicality, focus, and quickness to respond to instruction. The younger children—whose size clearly differentiates them from the company members—often get to perform roles in ballets that require them. Balanchine wanted SAB’s pupils to have the kind of valuable stage experience he had had himself, as a boy at the school of the Mariinsky (now Kirov) Ballet. The sad but inevitable dark side of SAB is that year after year, in the course of the academy’s curriculum, the less-than-wonderful and the less-than-committed to ballet’s singularly challenging requirements are weeded out and more capable others, who began their dance life elsewhere, take their places.

Annually, as May segues into June, SAB shows the best of its senior students in three performances over two days, with shifting casts in the principal roles; the remarkable teenagers (as they have become) work wonders; and the public ogles, astonished. The event is called a Workshop, which is yet another understatement. I saw both matinee and evening performances on June 1.

SAB Workshop Performances: The cast of Balanchine’s Le Tombeau de Couperin (with Alessandra D’Alessandro facing front)

Photo: Paul Kolnik

The repertoire for this year’s Workshop comprised three Balanchine ballets—the exquisite Divertimento No. 15 (to Mozart), staged by Suki Schorer, which makes you feel you’ve died and gone to heaven; the inventive and elegant group work Le Tombeau de Couperin (to Ravel), staged by Rosemary Dunleavy and Arch Higgins, which starts out as a model of purity and ends with a hoe-down; and the Walpurgisnacht Ballet from Gounod’s Faust, staged by Susan Pilarre—a showpiece in which a bevy of lovely young women, their hair unbound, let ‘er rip.

As usual, the stagers had been dancers with the company though not necessarily at the principal level since performing in a ballet and passing the choreography on to the rising generation require somewhat different gifts. There were plenty of excellent dancers in action, but for me no single performers who were clearly destined for glory. Instead, let me name the soloists in both the matinee and evening presentations of Divert, as the dancers nickname it, the most important and challenging work on the program: Daniela Aldrich, Laine Habony, Jordan Miller, Clara Ruf-Maldonado, Mimi Staker, Patrick Frenette, Zachary Guthier, and Alejandro Ocasio.

SAB Workshop Performances: Clara Miller, Lorris Eichinger, and ensemble in Balanchine’s Walpurgisnacht Ballet from Gounod’s Faust

Photo: Paul Kolnik

The stagings of all three ballets on display were well-nigh immaculate because Workshop enjoys an extended rehearsal period, which the parent company forgoes in favor of a huge rep. (Its next season is using as its slogan “33 Ballets in 3 Weeks.”) The miracle is that the Workshop productions do not lose their youthful freshness because of the lengthy preparation period with its detailed coaching. Instead, they give you a glimpse, hearteningly promising to repeat a similar event every year, of the very fortunate mating of grueling work, hope, and incandescent desire.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

Untitled

October 22, 2012 by Tobi Tobias

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.

Making It New

October 6, 2012 by Tobi Tobias

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?