Michael Popkin

Paul Taylor in New York Considered

Paul Taylor Dance Company
New York City Center
New York, New York
March 4 and 5, 2011

Copyright 2011 by Michael Popkin

Amy Young and former Taylor dance Orion Duckstein in Taylor's Arden Court, photo by Paul B. Goode, courtesy of Paul Taylor Dance Company

Paul Taylor comes to New York every February or March it seems, directly after NYCB's winter season, and astonishes us with the quality of his company and strength of its repertory.  That dance needs to succeed on the stage to realize its dramatic potential - that when it's successful theater it's more than just dance, is good to be reminded of.  I'd completely forgotten this in fact during three performances of Peter Martins' Mirage the week before I saw Taylor; but from the very first minute of the very first piece, in the very first Taylor show I saw (Speaking in Tongues was the work - and it was the final weekend of Taylor's two weeks at City Center), I realized in an instant what had been missing.  Beautifully lit, and costumed and decorated, by Jennifer Tipton and Santo Loquasto respectively, the work made me think and experience visually and intellectually; told me something about dance, myself, and American culture; and finally sent me out of the theater refreshed.  Thank you once again Paul Taylor.  At more than eighty years old, he is the acknowledged master of his craft.

Speaking in Tongues was made in 1988 and clearly shows Taylor's formal roots in Martha Graham's dramaturgy.  But, as it evokes the south of Taylor's youth (and particularly the hypocrisy, sexual repression, and lust for power underneath the sunny exterior of the white, evangelical, southern church), it couldn't be further from the idealistic nationalism of Graham's Appalachian Spring.  It runs for about an hour and, as in Appalachian Spring, there's a preacher - but here he's savagely repressed, dominating his congregation, and first abuses, then rejects a young girl whom the program calls an unwanted daughter, punishing her in fact for provoking his own uncontrolled desire.  (In Appalachian Spring the preacher may originally I believe have been Merce Cunningham's role - and if I'm right about that, what Taylor may subversively mean in his characterization of that persona here is anybody's guess). The other leading characters are the preacher's wife; a dancer who plays the preacher in his youth and whom we see sexually abuse the unwanted daughter; the girl herself as both a young woman and a grown-up (like the preacher she's played by two dancers, one for each stage of her life); and the daughter's adult husband.  There's also a party girl, an odd man out and some townsfolk or parishioners.

The action takes place in a barn-like hall with moveable chairs and biblical verses written on the walls like slogans from the Book of Daniel that run into each other in chalk. The music starts with a send up of the saccharine values of Christian rock as the congregation dances an optimistic 1960's dance in a round pattern, a modern analogue of the sort of Copeland folk tune that Graham utilized: healthy and happy boys and girls determined to be innocent. The atmosphere rapidly becomes pressurized, however, as a Richard Nixon-like voice in transistor radio static intrudes and we are transported to the anxiety laden world of the cold war.  In a series of scenes the action then presents:  the preacher's lust for and abuse of the unwanted girl; his wife's determined admiration for him and willful inability to see what is going on; the girl's initial attempts to experience joy (she had a chance before the incident) and then sad deterioration into a despair only arrested by an impossible effort of will; then her deeply wounded effort constructively to love her husband as an adult; and finally the complete inability of the community to resolve any of this because it can't even acknowledge that it has happened.  Even grief remains below the surface at the conclusion when the music and dance once again resolve into cotton candy platitudes of Christian rock that have now acquired morally obscene overtones on account of what they conceal.

The score by Matthew Patton is glued together from the rock and roll pieces mentioned, as well as droning tectonics, bits of pure percussion and snatches of traditional melody, all interrupted by the transistor radio passages mentioned above.  Taylor's choreography for its part is extraordinarily adept in how he pushes the action forward (on the analogy of ballet pas d'action) but at the same time characterizes the protagonists' emotions.  In the leading roles Michael Trusnovec as the preacher; James Samson as his younger self; Laura Halzack as the preacher's wife; and especially the duo of Jamie Rae Walker as the young unwanted girl, and Annmaria Mazzini as the girl grown up and in torment, were brilliant.  Taylor has an amazing company right now and the dancers are carefully schooled in his very individual expressive vocabulary.

Paul Taylor Dance Company in Also Playing: left to right Francisco Graciano, Parisa Kobdeh, and Jeffrey Smith, photo by Paul B. Goode courtesy of Paul Taylor Dance Company.

As with his use of Christian rock here, Taylor is a master - when utilizing American pop music and social dance from this and bygone eras (which he frequently does to very strong effect) - at creating dances that are on the one hand compelling on their face and perfectly suited to the gist of their music, but at the same time undermine, parody and comment on their genres by introducing crucial measures of social and historical irony.  A good example is Company B, where dances like "Rum and Coca Cola" are unforgettably expressive in their own right, but where the work as a whole stands the sentimental optimism of the Andrews Sisters music and the era it stands for on its head. Even in an outright vaudeville and parody like Also Playing - a send up of classical dance also performed at City Center last month - Taylor merely accomplishes in broad brush what he more pointedly does elsewhere. Dramatic irony is his medium and the very air he breathes.

The shows I saw on March 4 and 5 also included Taylor's acknowledged masterpieces Arden Court and Esplanade, as well as one of the New York season premieres, Three Dubious Memories.  Consistent with what I've just said about Taylor's dramatic method, Arden uses a Baroque score by William Boyce to combine infectious dance appeal with updated historical comment. The palate of free dance sequences - exuberant diagonals of dancers impelled by the thrust of the music - perfectly expresses Boyce's sensibilities: we do really feel like we are in Arden forest on Midsummer's eve.  The historic irony, however, this time positive, the arresting thing; and what leavens the work is how you can't help wondering what Boyce would have made of seeing such a proudly gay and powerfully beautiful succession of men, bare chested and in dappled leotards, erupting across the stage to his music.  It's utterly compelling, aesthetically bold and contemporary, and transcends its type. The synergy between the highly contemporary and inventive realization and the traditional music drives the meaning of this classic - elements that are present but to a lesser degree in Esplanade, which uses some of the same music as Balanchine's Concerto Barocco. 

Robert Kleindorst and Eran Bugge in Esplanade, photo by Paul B. Goode courtesy of Paul Taylor Dance Company

The new work that followed, Three Dubious Memories, was a moody surrealist narrative that presented three competing versions of a love triangle (violent at times) from the point of view of each of the participants - a woman in red and two men (in blue and green), with the central event remembered from the self righteous point of view of each dancer in succession as the aggressor. Thus, in the first section, the man in blue took the girl away from the man in green (the couple were tenderly embracing until then); in the second the men's roles were reversed; while in the third the woman kicked both of their asses.  (Taylor's humor is often unsubtle). Intermixed with these sequences were a series of entrances by a mysterious corps of eight dancers in grey who suggested shades of the dead but whom the program styled the Choristers and Choirmaster, or in other words a chorus and its leader as in Greek drama. Their status as shades was reinforced by the fact that their concluding dance was called a Threnody - which the woman in the seat next to me, after checking her blackberry, obligingly reported is an elegiac poem or ode for the dead.

Like Speaking in Tongues, the piece had a highly innovative contemporary score that largely contributed to its effect, a work called Five Enigmas by Peter Elyakim Taussig that evoked the surreal, dreamy, metaphysical world of memory.  Like nearly everything else on the programs, its success as theater - returning to my original premise - underscored Taylor's current status as the supreme man of the stage in contemporary dance.  As dramatist, director, institution founder, and pater familias of his company and dancers, he is without a peer in the dance world today.  And as the still recent death of his near contemporary and competitor Merce Cunningham continues to remind us, get Taylor's theater while you can.  We are incredibly lucky to have him and will not soon see his like again.

Paul Taylor Dance Company will perform in San Francisco at the Novellus Theater in the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts from March 30 to April 3, 2011 with a gala Dance with the Dancers event programmed for April 2, 2011. For more information check out:  Dance with the Dancers

 

Nearly Perfect - Ashley Bouder and Taylor Stanley in Square Dance at NYCB

Square Dance
New York City Ballet
The David H. Koch Theater
Lincoln Center
New York, NY
February 24, 2011

Copyright 2011 by Michael Popkin

 Ashley Bouder and Taylor Stanley in Balanchine's Square Dance at City Ballet, photo by Paul Kolnik courtesy of New York City Ballet

Square Dance at NYCB on Thursday night was perfectly cast and received a near perfect performance. Ashley Bouder and Taylor Stanley were the dancers and it was debut for both. In a beautifully inflected and sensitive performance, they and the strong ensemble got the spirit and feel of the work just right, as well as the physical execution:  all American, all new world with the freshness and spontaneity of American folk dance; and yet all classical, with a Corelli/Vivaldi score and a dance lexicon accompanying it founded on the purest elements of academic classicism; and all done with both modern day facility and classical dance technique.  They made the eighteenth century modern and colloquial:  the tradition was alive; what more can we ask?

Bouder is the best in this role at NYCB since Merrill Ashley, who of course is the gold standard for this particular ballet par excellence since Balanchine expressly re-choreographed it for her in 1976.  But as in all things at the theater (you hope) the rule, sooner or later, is "The Queen is dead; Long live the Queen" (though we've waited nearly fifteen years for this particular succession).  And I don't claim this mantle for Bouder only on my own authority: half a dozen people at the theater had the same thing to say about the performance, spontaneously and quite independently of each other, the moment the curtain went down; it was a rare case of consensus. Of course Bouder was born to dance the role, as the cliche goes (the only wonder is that they waited so long to give it to her) so well suited is she to the part by type and talent; but she seized the occasion for her best performance in that theater in a couple of years.  Her expression was quietly radiant; she danced with a sense of joy; everything was done easily; and her shy and evident pride were totally natural.  Above all it was a totally innocent performance and that is Bouder at her best. (It's funny, but I can't really think of a more honest dancer than Bouder; even when she oversells it's from the heart, but there was no overselling here last night). 

One should mention that it was a wonderfully musical performance in the rubato of her phrasing and in where she stopped and found stillness in the score; but above all in the succession of pure and beautiful lines she developed.  And then there were those jumps - two big circles of sautes de Basques - the first accomplished with amazing elevation and ease; the second with a courtly elegance and spring to her step. I also can't forget some flying pas de chats off the stage into the wings.  The pointe work for its part was sparkling, brilliant and perfectly schooled. And it was here that  her visible sense of pride added a final flourish:  "See this; I give it to you; to all of you; it is my gift."

Bouder and Stanley in Square Dance, photo by Paul Kolnik, again courtesy of NYCB

That the pas de deux were as moving as they were (and Bouder here carried her arabesques better through her back, and got more feeling out of them, then she did in Swan Lake last week) was of course also due to Stanley's strong partnering. (Precociously strong - I can't remember such a young man, except perhaps for Robert Fairchild, recently coming to this element of his dancing more naturally).  What a debut for him; about twenty years old and in his first full year at NYCB, it was not only his first time out in this role, but his first in any principal role.Tallish, he has exotic looks with an Hispanic overtone and long, stretched lines.  His waist is high, so that the legs appear longer than the torso. To long arms and expressive hands, he adds a beautifully flexible back and has thankfully also stayed out of the weight room to this point (please, please keep out of it) so that the body remains quite lyrical.  

As a mover, interpretive dancer, and performer respectively, he has a soft pliee; expressive, sweeping lines; and is gifted in how he relates to and interprets music.  Naturally a principal dancer, from the very first moment (when he stood in a circle of men) you knew who the star was, no mistake about it.  A particularly beautiful turn in high attitude rear, on demi-pointe, sticks in my mind twenty-four hours after seeing it, and perhaps the image will stick there forever. The solo with the deep backbends was superb; and if he ran out of gas a little towards the end (but not very evidently) who could blame him - at twenty years old and in his first performance "in the big room," you can't really quibble at that.

Bouder and Stanley will dance Square Dance one final time this season, Saturday night February 26 at 8:00 p.m.

Mid-Winter at New York City Ballet

New York City Ballet
The David H. Koch Theater
Lincoln Center
NewYork, New York 
January 18 - February 19, 2011

By Michael Popkin, copyright 2011 Michael Popkin

 Wendy Whelan and Tyler Angle in Ratmansky's Concerto DSCH, photo by Paul Kolnik courtesy of New York City Ballet

Until Sara Mearns blew the roof off the David H. Koch Theater in Swan Lake this week, you had to pick and choose to find the high spots in City Ballet's winter season.  Alexei Ratmansky's Concerto DSCH was consistently brilliant; but on most evenings, one looked either to a good cast of a ballet that was otherwise indifferently danced; or even just to a single dancer in a single ballet for interest (Janie Taylor in Divertimento No. 15, for example).  Prodigal Son danced by Joaquin De Luz, Maria Kowroski and Ask la Cour was one of the high points.

Apart from the perennial appeal of the Dance in America video of Baryshnikov in this ballet, which benefits from close ups of Baryshnikov's iconic performance, Prodigal is not a ballet one sees well performed all that often; the temptation is to treat it as a museum piece, its appeal predicated more on its Roualt decor, Diaghilev Ballet Russe pedigree, and artistic prestige as an example of mid-1920's German expressionism than upon any virtues it has as moving contemporary theater.  Most generally you see the dancers overact in their attempts to realize Biblical myth.  De Luz and Kowroski, however, found just the right balance, dancing the ballet cleanly in so far as it must be danced but deftly making their characters human instead of treating them as grand stylized types.

In this connection, Kowroski's performance of the Siren was the more unusual.  The male lead in the ballet almost always tries to make the Prodigal psychologically real, but it's not often done with the woman.  Helene Alexopolous, NYCB's last great Siren until her retirement in 2002 played the part as inhuman and cold, seducing her victim (and the audience) like a cobra hypnotizing its prey before striking; and certainly that approach does not offend the choreographic text.  But seeing Kowroski play her character nearly as a method actress would, I came to realize how much potential for character acting there is in the role, and more particularly how consistent this is with Balanchine's blocking.

Maria Kowroski and Joaquin De Luz in Prodigal Son, photo by Paul Kolnik courtesy of New York City Ballet

Kowroski's key moment in this direction was when she stood downstage alone as her goons were stripping away the Prodigal's clothes leaving him nearly naked (actually with a suggestion I think of Christ being spoiled before the crucifixion) except for a loincloth.  Here - just before the Siren crosses upstage to rip a necklace from his neck (the last thing he possesses, she'd earlier been fondling it) - the blocking gives her the entire front of the stage, making her as (or even more) individually visible than the ensemble action that proceeds behind her, and she made the most of it dramatically: her facial expressions and posture were a soliloquy of lust and emotional trouble, her character a kind of greedy whore nearly trembling with desire balanced by hesitation as she waited her moment to strike.  

*                                        *                                        *                                        *

There's no denying all the same that the winter's programming has been disappointing, above all because of the disproportionate amount of the repertory taken up by a series of crushingly meaningless works, of which Wayne McGregor's Outlier, Peter Martins' Mirage (both left over from last spring) and Benjamin Millepied's Plainspoken (carried over from the fall), as well as Martins' Hallelujah Junction (revived this weekend) are prime examples; while Martins' extremely long winded The Magic Flute (also left over from the fall), if not meaningless, is at best a very middling and undistinguished example of its genre.  And let's not forget, Robbins' N.Y. Export - Opus Jazz, a deadly humorless treatment of Elvis Presley-era Hollywood dance (badly in need of an Elvis impersonator) that remains in repertory season after season, year after year, apparently due to the largesse and bad taste of the Robbins' Trust.  Taken together as a mathematical proportion of the season's entire running time, these and works like them had a cumulatively depressing effect.  Surely a prime function of art is to heighten, or at least to stimulate human experience; and a show at New York City Ballet shouldn't be a waste of one's time from this point of view, a waste of one's attention and life - but all too often that's what it was this winter.  The programming didn't give you a reason to be there; often nothing even much warranted critical reaction - you couldn't really even hate these ballets, professional as they were, only wish that they would end.

Tiler Peck, Sara Mearns and Amar Ramasar in Susan Stroman's For the Love of Duke, photo by Paul Kolnik courtesy of New York City Ballet

The season's new ballet, Susan Stroman's For the Love of Duke, was a further example. The score was a series of Duke Ellington numbers played onstage by the David Berger Jazz Orchestra and the ballet had two sections that really had nothing to do with each other. The first, Frankie and Johnny ... and Rose, employed Amar Ramasar, Tiler Peck and Sara Mearns as a vaudeville trio engaging in slapstick comedy. It was slickly put together but the humor was forced, the ballet steps rudimentary (Stroman does not speak ballet as a native language and any Dancing with the Stars or Las Vegas production number choreographer could have done the ballet sequences as such - what they probably wouldn't have accomplished as deftly was Stroman's show biz blending of comic vignettes into them); and worst of all was the fact that the ballet made no attempt seriously to engage with Ellington's music, the only thing that could have pulled the two halves of Stroman's program together.  Instead, Ellington's ballads were treated as  background cocktail music useful for their hint of a plot (Johnny flirting with Frankie then Rose!) but for little else.

Onto this short work, Stroman then pasted the revival of a ballet she made for the company in 1999 called Blossom Got Kissed and that starred a young Maria Kowroski at that time.  Kowroski has always been a gifted comedienne (something she in fact credits Stroman for discovering and highlighting in this work); but when in the current revival her role as the ingenue who wants to dance, but can't learn how (until she gets kissed by the leading man) devolved upon Savannah Lowery, the ballet fell flat.  Lowery as a dancer is endearing but muscular and often clumsy; and unfortunately here, watching her comic attempts to learn how to dance, you weren't sure it was entirely an act; and likewise, when she finally did get kissed, she still didn't dance at the other women's level.

Robert Fairchild and Savannah Lowery in Blossom Got Kissed, photo by Paul Kolnik courtesy of New York City Ballet

*                                        *                                        *                                        *

City Ballet has never been younger than right now, a fact that was most prominent and appealing this winter.  With a group of the most experienced women in the corps (Faye Arthurs, Maya Collins, Stephanie Zungre and Kaitlyn Gilliland) missing the entire season to date, a number of dancers still nearly (if not) in their teens have been prominently cast and stepped up to very good effect.  The two most recent SAB classes have been stunners; and among the younger women, Sarah Villwock (a middle size blond woman with a lovely musical attack) and Ashley Isaacs (who danced Zungre's role in Export Jazz) have particularly distinguished themselves.  Even more striking is Lauren Lovette who, in the revival of Christopher Wheeldon's Polyphonia, danced with startlingly mature interpretive weight in the solo originally made on Alexandra Ansanelli. Lovette is dark, mid sized to petite, with fine features and very good proportions - long arms and legs, a long neck and smallish head.  She has plumb lines, beautiful pointes, and a remarkable instinctive ability to hit a perfectly formed and finished position in a split second, without readjustment, and to hold it plumb, just so, and pregnant with drama.  As a performer she also seems on first viewing to have the killer instincts you need to succeed; and not since Sara Mearns burst upon the scene in her initial 2006 Swan Lakes has a woman made this impressive a debut with the company.  (Why does she make me think of Miranda Weese?) Meanwhile among the younger men, Taylor Stanley (from the same most recent SAB class) is likewise being immediately pushed into solo and even principal roles (he debuts in Square Dance next week), while Anthony Huxley (very free in his dancing) continues to develop nicely, and the blond Chase Finlay, with matinee idol looks, musicality and facility to burn, was given the male lead in Divertimento No. 15 as well as a starring role opposite Lovette in Polyphonia, and has shown flashes of brilliance, but also some nerves (who wouldn't), and finally that he needs to work on bringing his partnering up to scratch.

  Lauren Lovette and Chase Finlay in Wheeldon's Polyphonia, photo by Paul Kolnik courtesy of New York City Ballet

The revival of Polyphonia was a great success.  Not only does it hold up well on its own account when danced by multiple casts, but also (with the benefit of hindsight) now looks like one of the most influential choreographies of the contemporary era, so much has its style and structure been imitated by Jorma Elo, Douglas Lee, and Wayne McGregor among others.  Interestingly, while when it first appeared Polyphonia looked like a fairly radical departure from, or at least development beyond classicism, it now (after this decade of imitations and in comparison with them) appears to be more of an innovative but restrained affirmation of classical dance values.  Its minimalist aesthetic and structure (eight dancers in leotards, a series of very simple pas, and above all a great deal of silence and stillness mixed in to the steps, all strung upon a very spare piece of music) along with its strict but innovative use of the lexicon of the danse d'ecole are, I think, responsible for this impression. The difference between Polyphonia and its progeny is that, for all his inventiveness with the classical vocabulary, Wheeldon always remains balletic in sensibility in this piece.  Which makes the highly emotive duet he later made for Wendy Whelan in his After the Rain (which also continued in repertory this winter) all the more striking for the creativity he displays therein when breaking free from strict ballet aesthetics in that pas de deux only freely to harmonize that pas with classicism within the totality of the composition.

A concluding word about Whelan who, dancing into her forties, continues to be the single dancer whose personal imprint most characterizes City Ballet, so that your attitude towards NYCB night-in, night-out, will largely be conditioned by your experience of her dancing.  She has had a remarkable season (yet again) and been responsible (yet again) for some of the season's strongest moments, her repertory including (off the top of my head and based on what I saw):  Walpurgisnacht  Ballet; Mozartiana; Glass Pieces; After the Rain; Polyphonia (her original role); and Concerto DSCH - a ballet that continues to look better every time its danced and in which Ratmansky displays Whelan's femininity and paradoxical softness (because she is so powerful and commanding a woman) to the greatest effect.  That Whelan is simultaneously muse to both Ratmansky and Wheeldon - the two most prominent names in contemporary ballet - tells you pretty much what you need to know about her at this moment of her career.

 

 

 

The Bright Stream at the Kennedy Center

The Bright Stream
American Ballet Center
The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts
Washington, D.C.
January 21 and 22, 2011

Copyright 2011 by Michael Popkin

Marcelo Gomes as Zina's Husband in The Bright Stream, photo by Rosalie O'Connor, courtesy of American Ballet Theater

Working with Alexei Ratmansky on an extended basis is transforming American Ballet Theater in several ways.  The company looks fresh and spontaneous as a whole dancing his ballets:  nothing about a performance seems stale or merely rote.  Then there's also the dancers as individuals; and Friday night in the premiere of The Bright Stream at the Kennedy Center principal dancers Gillian Murphy, Paloma Herrera, David Hallberg and Marcelo Gomes each were brilliant and looked renewed, dancing bigger, more expressively and - in the cases of Murphy and Gomes in particular - with a style that had more grandeur, articulation and amplitude than I recall from either of them before, despite many wonderful performances on both of their parts.

In Act One, Murphy and Herrera were completely charming as the ballerina who visits a communal farm in the Soviet Union circa 1935 (Murphy) and the old friend from ballet school she finds there (Herrera), and their initial duet of jumped turns had an elevation, grace, and above all a sense of ease and relaxation in the air that was lovely.  One noticed that Murphy (who was suited by her city woman dress here, as well as her travesty costume in Act Two) seemed more pulled up through her chest and shoulders than previously, more rounded outward from her breastbone, and as a result achieved an expansiveness that was new for her.  When she arrived at ABT about fifteen years ago, she was an all-American woman, nearly Balanchine in the way she held herself:  a turner with great facility, but a dancer more from the waist down then in her upper body, which she held rather relaxed and slack. Fifteen years of dancing primarily a Petipa based repertory changes a dancer significantly but the adaptation of this placement to Petipa has always been her challenge. Not having seen her in about the year that Ratmansky has been working with her most closely, she seemed very different to me this weekend and more rounded. In a role originally choreographed on the Bolshoi's Maria Alexandrova, the grandeur and amplitude of Murphy's dancing in her upper body left nothing to be desired, and when she raised her arms on high in arabesque at the end of her repeated diagonals in Act One, she seemed to embrace not just the audience and the theater, but the entire universe beyond:  a Ballerina indeed.

Gillian Murphy as the Ballerina in The Bright Stream, photo by Rosalie O'Connor, courtesy of American Ballet Theater

For his part Gomes - a powerful man who has always looked slightly long in the back and blocky in his upper body - benefited from a similar development in his placement.  Pulling himself up and stretching his line across his chest suited him immensely.  He had a verticality and elevation that appeared Bolshoi inspired.  Not only did this balance his lines by giving him more of a core center but, in a larger sense, the scale of his movement seemed finally to match what has always been his obvious strength.  The force of his dancing was in visual accord with its scope.

The Bright Stream, at once a pastoral and a comedy of manners, lies at the intersection of two stage traditions.  The basic elements of its plot and character types, abstracted from the time and place of their Soviet-era realization, stretch back to ballets and operas such as Le Marriage de Figaro, The King's Volunteers on Amager, and even Coppelia; but also to classical French stage comedies such as Corneille's Le Menteur, and Moliere's L'Ecole des Femmes.   A lecherous or overreaching husband, suitor or boyfriend (or some combination of the above) has to be taught a lesson and get their comeuppance, and this  is accomplished by incidents of cross dressing, practical joking and disguise, particularly among the women. (In The Bright Stream the hijinks extend to the secondary characters and also involve ballet in drag).  In the end, the offending male learns his lesson after making love to his own wife in disguise; there is an unmasking as the offended wife reveals herself; and all is forgiven but a hint of a dark undertone may persist.  The particular originality of The Bright Stream is the realization of these dramatic precedents in context of 1930's Soviet theater (whose typology the ballet also not so subtly mocks and undermines - little wonder that the work landed its librettist in the gulag) with national and character dances adapted accordingly.

It's also the ballet - from 2003 - where Ratmansky first revealed his mature choreographic voice:  above all in the extended and extraordinarily beautiful pas de deux in Act Two danced Friday night by Gomes and Herrera.  Shostakovich's score here (otherwise somewhat plodding and forced but always serviceable throughout) has its one truly lyrical moment:  an extended violin solo, with a clear melody, that eventually morphs into a mini violin concerto as elements of the orchestra join in as accompaniment. The action to this love music is poignant because Gomes' character - the husband who is trying to seduce his wife's friend - thinks he is dancing the duet with the ballerina, but is actually dancing with his wife (Herrera) in disguise.  On this ironic and dark matrix (worthy of a comedy by Shakespeare) Ratmansky sets a dance at once deeply lyrical and emotionally complex, and that also reveals what is most individual about his style of composition:  the tendency to have his men and women dance in tandem, side by side, at such moments, close to each other, joining for a step or two, then separating again but always to dance within the same physical space and in marked relation to each other, with lifts and dual poses briefly completing the harmony within the flow.  A bit of tandem glissade, for example, with both dancers joining hands and executing small beats to the side; and then the man falls just behind, executes a small lift of the woman from the waist, moving her forward a step or two before putting her down; and the phrase will then end as he rejoins her at the side and she executes a deep backbend to the floor, draped over his supporting arm while he holds his other arm outstretched.  The moment lasts but a second, however, hardly pauses; and as the music proceeds the dancers are on their way to the next such sequence, the violin melody rising and falling continuously.

Having watched Robert Fairchild and Wendy Whelan in Ratmansky's brilliant concluding pas for them in last year's Namouna at NYCB, and then revisited this work at the Kennedy Center this weekend, it's clear that The Bright Stream is a seminal work for Ratmansky, perhaps the most seminal of all.  Much of what we see thereafter in his opus is present here:  the broad comedy; the essential humanism; the incorporation of vernacular physical movement with ballet steps; the fascination with the dance and symbolic vocabulary of Soviet era Russia.  But certainly no pas de deux that he has subsequently made surpasses this one for its sheer beauty and originality, nor have I ever seen Herrera or Gomes better.

 

New Wine in New Bottles - The New York Choreographic Institute's 10th Anniversary and Ballet Preljocaj at BAM

Tenth Anniversary Program
New York Choreographic Institute
Miller Theater at Columbia University
New York, New York
November 5, 2010

Empty Moves (parts I & II)
Ballet Preljocaj
Brooklyn Academy of Music
2010 Next Wave Festival
Brooklyn, New York
October 29, 2010

 Copyright 2010 by Michael Popkin

  Justin Peck's Tales of a Chinese Zodiac at the New York Choreographic Institute, photo by Paul Kolnik 

Two very different shows over the past month – Ballet Preljocaj at BAM’s Next Wave Festival and the New York Choreographic Institute’s Tenth Anniversary program at the Miller Theater – highlighted how music determines choreography - particularly rhythm.  That rhythm is the heart of dance is one of those obvious things that you wouldn’t think still need to be said.  (And as an aside I also wonder whether, if rhythm is the heart of dance, melody isn’t its soul?)  But having watched a great deal of recent theater dance, there’s no point that needs making more than this.  Whether because of a conscious decision or not – and as a cultural phenomenon it’s probably unconscious – much contemporary choreography is rhythmically weak; and when that’s not the case, pulsing and monotonous at the other extreme.  It’s a result I’d say of reliance upon contemporary classical music, which either tends either to be highly colored but rhythmically impoverished (though oh so involved); or at the other end of the spectrum (the John Adams/Philip Glass school) pulsing and rather unvaried internally.  In particular, composers and choreographers today ignore using actual popular dance scores or patterns as raw material – something that was extremely common one or two generations earlier.  The idea seems to be that what is artistic has to be very heady, intellectual and cool, something you also see in the Chelsea galleries right now.

The Choreographic Institute’s Miller Theater program involved coupling Juilliard composers with young choreographers and seeing what happened.  It’s a wonderful idea and the institute, a creature of New York City Ballet which has operated out of the public eye for the past ten years save for this first ever anniversary show, has made this its official modus operandi.  The seven new dances for the evening were thus made to five new musical compositions created for the occasion by composers working with the institute's young choreographers (with one other dance, by NYCB corps member Justin Peck to recorded music); and the result was virtually a demonstration of the way that contemporary “art” scores create an airy dance atmosphere, and serve as a basis for highly imaginative visual tableaux, but generate visceral dance excitement only when they are also characterized by strongly marked rhythm. 

The best offerings were Justin Peck’s Tales of a Chinese Zodiac where the ensemble of SAB students had strong musical lines to work with (the score was a recording of sections of Sufjan Steven’s Run Rabbit Run) and the resulting dance was strongly theatrical as Peck deployed his corps de ballet of SAB students, albeit on a cramped stage, inventively.  Marco Goecke’s dance, entitled For Sascha, to composer Mathew Fuerst’s String Quartet, also had music with a clearly demarked rhythmic structure, here derived from rap music pulses and internal cadences, and the dance that resulted – for City Ballet’s Marika Anderson, Gretchen Smith, Daniel Applebaum and Sean Suozzi – was visually inspired by hip-hop as well as moves that occasionally reminded me of Michael Jackson’s Thriller.  It made me wish in particular to see more of Smith, whose speed and articulation, coupled with her infectious pleasure in what she was doing, were remarkable. 

 
Sara Mearns in Christopher Wheeldon's Sara Solo photo by Paul Kolnik

The three ballets to one score that concluded the evening – by choreographers Larry Keigwin, Christopher Wheeldon and Alexei Ratmansky respectively, all to composer Daniel Ott’s Inflorescence – were a fascinating demonstration of the different ways the three choreographers adapted to the syncopation and line of a subtle score.  Wheeldon’s solo for Sara Mearns succeeded by virtue of being a solo.  He made the interaction between the rhythm and melody within the music unified by varying the steps of a single dancer (and how compelling a performer Mearns is!) and because it all played out in the one continuous flowing line of her movement, he depicted the music beautifully.  What was rhythmically involved became intelligibly visible because of the unity of flow. 

 
Ashley Bouder, Davis Protas, Ana Sophia Scheller and Christian Tworzyanski in Alexei Ratmansky's Untitled photo by Paul Kolnik

Ratmansky, in his Untitled ballet, accomplished the same thing by ingeniously linking his four dancers as much as possible into a single figure of two, three or four bodies; linked that is either literally in lifts and poses, or visually by occupying the same stage space in marked relation to each other.  I should also mention that Bouder and Scheller are in the best physical shape of their careers.  Earlier in the evening, Darius Barnes was also very successful with a dance called Mandala to Kyle Blaha’s music, with Eric Pereira being particularly compelling among the performers seen in the intimate up-close venue of the Miller.

 
Ana Sophia Scheller and David Prottas in Ratmansky's Untitled

I left the theater all the same wondering why composers and choreographers don’t pay more attention to established dance forms instead of trying to make contemporary tone poems that can somehow be danced to; and in particular why choreographers don't make more dances that move to traditional rhythms.  Established dance music – historic and national dances like tarantellas, mazurkas, chaconnes, and waltzes; or Latin and contemporary dances and everything in between – is the richest fund for material that shows how human beings actually move to music when they don't think too hard about it.  This is what people do and have done to music rhythms, so why wouldn’t a composer or choreographer want to start with this at least some of the time? There’s plenty to do making the old forms contemporary, taking them apart and seeing what the contemporary spin on them is, without having to invent things out of whole cloth.  New wine in old bottles isn't such a bad idea some of the time. Some of Stravinsky’s finest dance music, for just one example, was based upon his re-construction (in his unmistakably personal manner) of renaissance madrigals or baroque figures.  It’s also no coincidence that the most successful ballets in last spring’s Architecture of Dance festival at NYCB were precisely those by Wheeldon and Ratmansky that utilized historically viable material with character dance elements. Balanchine also did a good deal of this "contemporizing" of character or social dance forms. 

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Ballet Preljocaj in Empty Moves at BAM photo by Julieta Cervantes

Preljocaj’s Empty Moves at BAM was the most radical demonstration of all in showing how dance can exist to rhythm and in fact nothing (or little) else.  Without music, and lasting about an hour, four very attractive dancers dressed in casual shorts and tops move (basically in two couples but sometimes as a foursome or in solos) to the nonsensical sounds of John Cage’s Empty Words.  Recorded by Cage during a performance at the Teatro Lirico in Milan, in 1977, this is nothing but Cage slowly pronouncing lines from Thoreau in the simplest cadences imaginable.  Breaking the words into syllables rather than intelligible speech and then drawling these out very slowly, Cage's reading achieves something of the effect of a musician striking an antique harp; lines like “I lived alone” - from beginning of Walden - are rendered in a sing-song voice as:   “Eye-eee  (pause for two seconds) leee-veh-ed (spoken as three distinct syllables and then pause for two more seconds) ah-low-own (three more syllables, pause again)” and so forth.  (This example by the way was chosen by me from Thoreau at random and I don’t mean to suggest that the audience ever knows exactly what the Thoreau text is – or at least I didn’t).   Not surprisingly, during the recording the Italian audience begins to heckle and applaud and, as this reaction becomes progressively stronger and louder, it eventually forms a counterpoint to Cage’s nearly hypnotic performance.

Against this Preljocaj sets his attractive dancers – Fabrizio Clemente, Gaelle Chappaz, Julien Thibault and Yurie Tsugawa - in simple repetitive motions that stick to the rhythm of the sounds.  As the speech is in syllables, so the steps are broken down to their most basic components. A phrase with a “one, two, three” count that ends in a pause is rendered “jump a quarter turn in the air, jump another quarter turn, then another quarter,” then stop.  The barefooted dancers sometimes take off and land in closed fifth positions; but always keep their torsos loose and casual.  Nothing is done that is ever really unattractive.  Even in lifts the bodies remain relaxed and sympathetic. 

 
Ballet Preljocaj in Empty Moves at BAM photo by Julieta Cervantes

The trouble with it was that it went nowhere.  With the simple repetitions, and the primacy of sound over sense, there could be (and was) no development; there was so to speak nowhere to go.  I’m glad I saw it all the same.  Solemn, sometimes playful; it demanded little attention and gave an aesthetic pleasure in the theater that was different nearly in kind from what one expects.  Casual, relaxed, and attractive, it concentrated on the dancers coming to rest at the end of each sequential motion and, from the point of view of Ballet, the template was steps such as balancée and ballonnée that go one way, and then the other, and then stop.  The sound of the dancers’ feet hitting the floor at the end of each phrase reinforced the sound of Cage’s voice.  Everyone was fairly polite.  Was their passion in this group?  Not really.  Did they love or hate each other:  Who could tell?  They weren’t characters, but rather dancers with the same identify on stage as off.  They displayed their bodies, moved to the rhythm and enjoyed themselves; were aware of you in the audience and that was part of their enjoyment. The movement was always harmonious and attractive and though not much was said, the evening was a pleasant one.  It was like standing in a cool wind in early fall, exactly like the night outside.

Photos of the New York Choreographic Institute courtesy of New York City Ballet
Photos of Ballet Preljocaj courtesy of the Brooklyn Academy of Music

Swan Lake Reimagined as Popular Theater

Matthew Bourne’s Swan Lake
New York City Center
New York, New York
October 27, 2010

Copyright 2010 by Michael Popkin

 
Matthew Bourne’s Swan Lake walks a fine line between successful dance and popular entertainment.  Put together with Broadway pizzazz and skill, it has enough dance interest – spread over the narrative scenes in Act One and the Swan dances in Acts Three and Four – to carry the evening as a whole and climaxes in Act Four with a fitting coup de theatre.  It’s true that Bourne’s re-imagining of the plot as the story of a closet case gay prince who goes insane after falling in love with a male swan coarsens the texture and theme of the work; in particular, the conflict between erotic and romantic love that drives the original is lost in a version where the prince neither vows to save the Swan nor breaks the vow by lusting after the Swan’s double.  But all the same, the role of the Swan is a strong one, and got a performance from Richard Winsor the night I saw it that made me glad I saw the show.

 
Winsor – a young dancer of middle height with both ballet and dramatic training – has a quality that producers yearn for:  the star power to carry an evening at the theater nearly by himself.  In this production we don’t really care emotionally about the fate of the Swan anyway – he’s more a force of nature than a character in fact - nevertheless it’s the strength of his dancing (and that of his cohort of swan companions) that carries the evening as a whole, a strength that is completely male.   The strongest element of Bourne’s production is the way he embodies the swans, not as ballet Trocadero figures – traditional female swans in drag - but as entirely masculine individuals:  aggressive, muscular, and even frightening (with the lead Swan much given to grabbing the back of the prince’s neck and pushing him around).  There’s no dramatic conflict in the Swan; he has only to appear and awaken the prince’s latent homo-erotic character, and then to come on to the prince's mother (the Queen) to drive the play to its denouement.  Winsor’s personal beauty, compelling presence, and tightly wrapped, attitude laden and muscular dance technique were more than adequate for this task.  

 
That there is very little lyricism in this play is a fault for those who, like me, love the original and miss the pathos in the great love duets in both of Ivanov's white acts.  The soaring climaxes in the score, however, as well as the melodramatic action at the conclusion of both of those acts allows Bourne to slip around this roadblock from the sentimental point of view; and it also has to be remembered that most of the audience is not comparing what they see with the Petipa - Ivanov original.   Bourne's consistent lack of narrative clarity in the second half of the ballet is a more serious flaw.  The ball scene ends when the prince pulls a pistol after his mother (the Queen) has interacted sexually with the Swan/Stranger; the Stranger grabs the gun and shots ring out; but it all happens too fast; you can’t really tell what happens.  Likewise in the bedroom scene that ends the ballet, the death of the Swan at the hands of his swan cohort (determined to keep him apart from the prince?) and the possible apotheosis of the lovers in a mirror over the bed is less than clear – again we never completely know what has actually happened, much less why it has happened.  That this doesn’t really matter to the audience tells you that the success of this work does not depend on details of this sort, but on another order of experience in the theater entirely.

Matthew Bourne's Swan Lake is in its final weekend at New York City Center
Photos of Richard Winsor as the Swan/Stranger in Matthew Bourne's Swan Lake copyright Bill Cooper, courtesy of Matthew Bourne's New Adventures Production

September in New York - Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch at BAM and Batsheva Dance Company at the Joyce

Vollmond (Full Moon)
Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch
Brooklyn Academy of Music
Brooklyn, New Yok
September 29, 2010

 

Project 5
Batsheva Dance Company
Joyce Theater
New York, NY
September 26, 2010

 

Copyright 2010 by Michael Popkin

Fall in New York - in dance and everything else - gets into gear only after the Jewish Holidays and the end of September 2010 kicked things off with a bang.  At one moment New York City Ballet was playing Lincoln Center; Fall for Dance at City Center; and downtown, Batsheva Dance Company was at the Joyce at the same time that in Brooklyn (further downtown, extreme or existential downtown) Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch opened on the main stage at BAM.  The last two shows are well worth a note.

Pina Bausch 

 

In Bausch's Vollmond (translates Full Moon) an eight foot square boulder straight out of Isamu Noguchi sat a the front of the stage and water was everywhere.  The dancers wallowed in and crawled through a small river that ran across the stage (and under the rock)and scooped up, and tossed the water at Saturnalian moments; and meanwhile drenching rains fell periodically with a sense of epiphany.  Both the sound of the rain and the way it caught the light were beautiful.  Punctuating the water park effects were dance solos, small soliloquies by the dancers or vignettes.  Dramatically - and given the look and costumes of the dancers - it was as if Fassbinder movie had been hit by a monsoon.

At her best, Bausch uses an overarching stage conception to impart allegorical meaning to her action on stage. In her 1991 work Palermo, Palermo, for example - made soon after the fall of the Berlin wall and the reunification of Germany - dancers picking their way through a concrete block wall that had tumbled toward the audience could not help evoking both the rubble of post-war Germany in 1945 and the nation's existential crisis of that contemporary moment.  It superimposed these images, so to speak.  Vollmond's meaning was more diffuse, humorous, private and obscure; lighter and more playful.  Made towards the end of Bausch's life and her first work performed here since her unexpected death last year, its humor and exuberance resonated more as an enigmatic moment of Zen imagery - one of those nearly nonsensical statements that Zen poses as serious - than as Wagnerian theater.  Given the stock use of the image of the moon reflected in water in Zen poetry, I even wondered whether Vollmond may not have intended this association? 

Batsheva's Project 5

  

Ohud Naharin - the alter ego of Batsheva - kept things short at his Joyce show.  With a running time of just over and hour and four internal parts that were alternately very bad and very good (in that order), the brevity of each part amounted nearly to a hit and run guerilla tactic for artistic self preservation. The bad parts couldn't sink the whole while the stronger parts left a good impression.  Is there some kind of Aristotelian stage law at work here?   I suppose it depends on the relative strength, properties and offensiveness of the competing parts.

Here the deadweight elements were two cultural commentary pieces set to declamatory verse or slogans.  In the first, five dancers arranged themselves in dynamic group poses while a voice in English recited things like:  "Ignore all possibilities, the damnation of Faust . . ." etc.  As things went along the group periodically changed its pose while the monologue repeated, but each time another phrase or thought was added.  At time mildly funny, it ended with "Wipe your ass real good because it's impolite to let people know you've been to the bathroom."  (My paraphase).  The intellectual content was lightweight; the use of the material pointless; and if you are going to allude to Goethe, please make it better than this.  In the other deadweight section, three women stood fetchingly behind 1930's radio era microphones and ranted in Hebrew.  Both of the pieces reminded me of the facile conceptual art you often see in Chelsea art galleries, where quotations from various texts make little point but the act of quoting passes for profound.

The strong elements of the show were a Bolero for two dancers (to Ravel's familiar score) in the middle of the program and a symbolist vignette called "Black Milk" that ended it.  In the Bolero two women (alternating casts, one all male, the other female, danced the ten day run and I saw the women) began in relaxed contr'aposto posed against each other, one swinging her arm limply to the melody, the other swaying her body to the orchestral rhythm.  As the melody repeated, and orchestral forces were added with each repeat, the two dancers rearranged their positioning vis-a-vis each other every time the score rolled over.  The women were visually interesting, their changing poses consistently inventive, and the overall effect was brilliant.  Ratmansky's Bolero (danced here last year) attempted something similar but, because his dance was extremely repetitive, ended up exposing visually the score's monotony - something always implicit in the composition but unrealized by the hearer because of the music's joy.  Naharin succeeded much better with this music: his blocking and choreography were non-repetitive and very free, and setting the dancers to cross the stage on a diagonal made each addition of orchestral force an act of progression.

Taking a completely different stylistic tack, "Black Milk" at the close of the show deployed four women in a brief surrealist drama.  Dressed virginally in white, with bare arms and shoulders, they solemnly formed a line on their knees downstage, as if for a ritual, but then in a startling moment slowly smeared themselves with grey mud from a bucket that they passed down their line.  One had a sense of purity being defiled and for me the intellectual associations were of original sin, the dirt of incarnation, the wages of experience, etc.  As in any good symbolic work, the image was both visceral and strongly evocative; and it was here above all that I wish I had seen the all male cast because, by eliminating the associations of virginal purity and femininity, they must surely have provoked a very different set of thoughts.

Photographs:  of Vollmond by Julieta Cervantes courtesy of Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch; of
Project 5 by Gadi Dagon courtesy of Batsheva Dance Company.

 

 

Classics at City Ballet

Swan Lake and Sleeping Beauty
New York City Ballet
David H. Koch Theater
New York, New York
January 27 - February 14, 2010

By Michael Popkin (copyright 2010 Michael Popkin)

With Swan Lake following Sleeping Beauty at New York City Ballet these past three weeks (both in the company's streamlined Peter Martins' versions) the two great Tschaikovsky ballets have made an interesting contrast.  Swan Lake on the one hand is a quintessentially romantic ballet; as in Giselle or La Sylphide, the hero - yearning for love - enters a forest glade in the moonlight, pursues a supernatural heroine and is either destroyed or at least ends the ballet bereft and alone. Sleeping Beauty on the other hand is classical ballet par excellence:  the prince gets the girl; malign forces are overcome, order is established in the realms, and all ends in a suite of sparkling dances.  The striking thing about the two works, however - and the essence of their contrast - is the way each of them actually contains within itself a mini-version of the other. The Vision scene in Beauty is essentially a little Swan Lake in miniature:  the prince meets his vision of Aurora in the moonlight in very much the same way that Siegfried will later meet Odette in the othe work; it's the happy ending and wedding at the end that makes the difference. The middle act of Swan Lake on the other hand (concluding with the Black Swan pas de deux) gives us exactly the kind of divertissement of classical and national dances as does the wedding that Beauty ends with - except that in Swan Lake the celebration and betrothal go terribly wrong.  The two ballets are in a way distorted images of each other turned inside out.

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Despite this contrast, the current winter season at City Ballet, subtitled "Classics," poses the question of whether and why the company should be programming these works in such concentration.  Along with Martins' Romeo + Juliet, half of the eight week season has been taken up with them and the effect, as I see it, is to emphasize a negative trend towards reducing the ballet repertory at the major American companies to a few standard and familiar works.  Virgil Thomson, writing about the repertory of so called "classical" music in the 1960's, used to make the point (in my paraphrase) that "classical music" had become in his time the same fifty works played over and over again by every symphony orchestra in the country, if not the world.  If anything, ballet is in even worse shape in this connection:  with The Nutcracker, Swan Lake, Beauty, Giselle, increasingly Coppelia (in the Balanchine version - which, rumour has it, is being acquired by a couple of American companies at the moment) and five or six others, we are talking about the same dozen ballets being programmed by every single company.

And NYCB in particular posseses a priceless repertory of its own, and one that completely breaks this mold; so why neglect it to program in this way?  Balanchine's idea of a ballet company was precisely one that rejected this paradigm and I thus can't view with indifference a season that represents a total retreat from, if not surrender of, this point.  The contrary arguments are that the "classics" sell tickets (but so does the circus); that the audience loves to see favorite dancers tackle the iconic roles in these ballets (and so why not give them what they want); that performing these ballets develops the dancers (and so why not give them too what they want); and finally that they are good vehicles to introduce a young (in this case a very young, even infantile) audience to the art form.  These points are not in the case of NYCB persuasive to me.  Every other company does these ballets and most do them better.  The clinching argument is that these are not works, in the last analysis, that City Ballet even does particularly well.

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Ensconced in a newly renovated theater, the company has indeed sold tickets, though not until last week's Swan Lake in palpably greater quantity than in prior Winter seasons.  Meanwhile the company seems to be struggling to adjust to the technical aspects of its renovated house.  The expanded and relocated orchestra pit (it has been moved forward) has in particular proved a problem to adjust to,  with the dancers at times looking like they either have trouble hearing the music on the stage, or seeing the conductor, particularly when variations start in the far upstage corners.  The sound of the music in the auditorium - noticably more sonorous at some moments - has been inconsistent at others and one noticed last week that the stands of French horns had been moved, for the first time in memory, to an opposite side of the orchestra than that of the other brass.

The development of the company's young ballerinas in the blockbuster roles of the Tschaikovsky ballets has also provided mixed results.  The strongest debut was that of young Tiler Peck in Beauty, where the ingenuous radiance of her person and effortless strength and grace of her dancing justified repeated visits to the theater; at the opposite end of the spectrum, Sterling Hyltin's Aurora (which she repeated from three years ago) represented a setback for a dancer who until that point had been having an absolute breakout star season by any standard; the major role made on her by Alexey Miroschnichenko in The Lady With The Little Dog having provided her with a vehicle that displayed every one of her many brilliant qualities:  a technique of steel combined with a touching openess and indeed vulnerability of personality on the stage; a slight Russian scent to her training that persists to this day and that Miroshnichenko emphasized by choreographing on her in nearly a Kirov style; and an extraordinary ability to pose and achieve finished positions in the air during lifts.

Ashley Bouder, as both Aurora and as Odette/Odile, reprised triumphant performances in these roles from prior seasons; but especially in Swan Lake it has to be noted that she is physically miscast. Bouder has a long back and not much extension; her proportions do not look particularly good in a classical tutu - and in particular the tutu and headdress in Swan Lake do not suit her.  She also has built into her smile and expression the irrepressible persona of the good old, American girl next door from Carlisle Pennsylvania - of the lead cheerleader from Carlisle high school so to speak.  Properly used, this Self is the source of her greatest strength as a dancer - her prodigious musicality, integrity and honesty in interpretation.  If she must act, she can do both tragic and heroic well and her Vision scene in Beauty, ballasted by her seemingly innate emotional understanding of tragedy, was lovely.  But in Swan Lake the jarring effect just of seeing her first entrance in the costume took time to overcome; overcome it she did, however, in a performance that was a tour de force both of her physical command of the ballet vocabulary and of musical interpretation; but it was a performance that needed to be prodigious in those qualities to compensate for its very existence.

Young Kathryn Morgan's debut in Beauty was pleasing and promising, but no more than that; she has all the talent in the world but is raw and unfinished at this point, needing in particular to sharpen her attack (and to be more centered) in turns.  She is so immensely gifted, all the same, that one readily agrees with the decision to cast her here. She needs above all to dance right now and has the strength and presence for such roles.

One ballerina who is not miscast in Swan Lake on the other hand is Maria Kowroski; she has danced Odette-Odile for more than a decade now both here and as a guest at the Kirov; and apart from Peck's Aurora, Kowroski's performance of Swan Lake, her second time out, at the matinee on February 13th, was the highlight of the winter season to this point.  Looking beautiful in the costume, she made superb use of her eyes, extended her technique successfully beyond her usual mastery of adagio to the grand allegro portions of the score, and delivered a performance (indeed keyed the entire company to a performance) that was satisfying as both drama and dance.

Photo by Paul Kolnik, Courtesy of NYCB:  top, Ashley Bouder in The Vision scene of Peter Martins' Sleeping Beauty; bottom Maria Kowroski and Charles Askegaard in Act II of Peter Martins' Swan Lake.

CLASS STRUGGLE ON BROADWAY

Ratmansky's On the Dnieper
American Ballet Theater
Metropolitan Opera House
New York, New York
June 1 - 6, 2009

Copyright 2009 by Michael Popkin

When ABT announced last year that it was adding Alexei Ratmansky to its masthead as resident choreographer (styled "artist in residence" in the current Playbill), many wondered what kind of fit this would be.  Ratmansky is known for serious artistry, while ABT makes its living presenting standard ballet hits in a circus-like atmosphere that features dancers over artistic content.  The premiere of Ratmansky's On the Dnieper last week answered the question in a most positive way:  the ballet is brilliant, the equal of any new work presented in New York in a decade.

Like Ratmansky's 2003 The Bright Stream (a Bolshoi production that toured here that or the following summer), On the Dnieper is a contemporary reworking of a Soviet-era ballet.  In The Bright Stream the plot was "love on a collective farm," but with a kind of late eighteenth century pastoral thematic touch - as in a ballet like Jean Dauberval's La Fille Mal Gardee, love triangles get sorted out and all ends happily.  On the Dnieper is a darker tale:  a young soldier named Sergei returns home, falls in love with the betrothed of another man, forsakes his own fiancee, and causes discord in the village.

The ballet's theme in a general sense thus turns on the tense relationship between individual happiness and desire on the one hand and the habits and culture of village peasant life on the other. The group - represented by the corps de ballet and the soloists who play the villagers and the friends and parents of the protagonists - is always present in this ballet, looking on as the love triangles unfold and taking part in the action by turns.

What must be understood, though, is how Ratmansky dramatizes this in the specific terms of Russian history and its communist era ideology and conflicts.  Sergei is not just a generic Russian soldier returning home after a war, but represents The New Soviet Man returning to a peasant village whose traditional social structure is intact; as such, he is far too sexy for the other village boys to compete with or for the village girls to resist.  He is also, socially speaking, the grain of social leaven that cannot help but work in the loaf.  In his opening scene solo, Sergei is happy and rhapsodic at his return, turning in attitude on high demi-pointe, his arms upraised, embracing the landscape and finally falling on his back on the earth of Mother Russia.  At first, the village boys admire him and he tries to fit into their phalanx in a labored, squatting group dance in which they lift him repeatedly above their heads.  But as time goes on and it becomes clear that the village beauty Olga, betrothed to a local peasant lout (danced in the two casts I saw by David Hallberg and Alexander Hammoudi) prefers Sergei to her fiancee, they turn on him and in the end beat him savagely.  The inevitable class struggle is underway; things cannot remain the same and it is only when Sergei and Olga leave the village behind them (perhaps even as a social stage and structure) that a new future becomes possible.

All this is staged and lit in the most beautiful fashion imaginable.  The designs by Simon Pastukh utilize a small group of Kabuki-like cherry trees and a number of picket fences of various heights, which are rearranged periodically by the corps to create scenes which evoke, successively, a village street, a square, an alley or (when the fences are placed on a diagonal to divide the stage) the edge of the village and the fields beyond.  The lighting, by Brad Fields, makes the blossoming spring a virtual reality; particularly the second half of the ballet where the tragedy and transcendent denouement (as Sergei's fiancee renounces him in favor of Olga and the couple leaves the village) take place in theatrical moonlight.  In forty-five years of watching both opera and ballet at the Met, I have never seen its sometimes awkwardly deep stage used more effectively. 

Meanwhile, amongst ABT's fans and critics, another kind of class struggle was going on.  Though ABT at a stroke regained its artistic credibility with the addition of Ratmansky, the reception of the ballet in the auditorium was tepid and the audience clearly didn't know what to make of it; watching the rush to the doors and hearing the lukewarm applause at the curtain, I had the impression they would have much preferred another chance to to see a bare-chested Ali turning multiple pirouettes.

More curious is the case of the critics, who have generally complained of the work's "thematic emptiness" but who should have known better. The ballet is anything but empty of theme.  Had it been brought here and danced by the Bolshoi, Ratmansky's Soviet era themes would have been recognized and appreciated.  Danced by ABT, the critical audience apparently couldn't absorb and contextualize it.  The great irony of this small masterpiece is that it was produced here in New York by an American company.

Copyright 2009 Michael Popkin
Photographs by Rosalie O'Connor, Courtesy of American Ballet Theater

Slaughter on 10th Avenue, and Some Notes on New Choreography at City Ballet

Lifecasting, January 22, 2009
A Simple Symphony, February 17, 2009
Slaughter on Tenth Avenue, February 27, 2009
The David H. Koch Theater
Lincoln Center
New York, New York

Who would have thought that Sara Mearns and Robert Fairchild in Slaughter on Tenth Avenue would be the high point of the end of the season at NYCB?  Originally choreographed by Balanchine for the 1936 Broadway show On Your Toes, and rechoreographed and restaged by him in 1968 with Suzanne Farrell and Arthur Mitchell in the leading roles, the ballet has generally been regarded as slight, nor have I ever looked at a casting list before and thought this was something I had to see.  But live and learn, go to the theater with an open mind and you never know what may happen; and this past week Mearns in particular blew the figurative roof off of the old New York State Theater with a raw, beautiful, and amazingly exhibitionistic performance that made the ballet appear in an entirely different light.  A perfect pastiche of a roaring-twenties gangster melodrama (actually it's a play within a play, but we will limit outselves to the barest scenario), Slaughter has plum roles for a strip tease girl (Mearns) and her hoofer boyfriend (Fairchild) whose love conquers all, while they foil the plots of a villainous gangster to murder them both (actually she gets shot, but comes back to life to dance at the end), and of a jealous fellow dancer who has hired a hit man to shoot the hoofer at the climactic moment of the play within the play.  There's a Richard Rogers score and plenty of infectious dancing, including a romantic pas de deux in dance hall style for the leading couple, with the stipper high kicking into huge extensions as her partner supports her on a diagonal across the stage; a tap dance for the hoofer with numerous repeats to keep things going until the police can capture the hit man; and a final jazz dance in quadruple meter (with a big stress on every fourth beat) for the entire cast, but especially for the stripper, who criss-crosses the stage shaking a tail feather with the best of them.  Sounds camp; but animated by the magnetic star quality of Mearns, who has never looked better in a costume, it came to life not only as a captivating physical exhibition, but even an amazingly correct display of academic dance.  No woman dancing today carries her arabesque from her arms, through her back, and into her working leg better than she does; or has a deeper, more perfectly cambered back bend; or more personal beauty either, for that matter - the perfect qualities for the role, along with a total abandon of one's self that no one would have predicted from her.  Not even the publicity folks at NYCB who don't have a photo of her in the role, in which she was second cast, an afterthought evidently for the last week of the season.  This is one to see, though, next time we have the chance in the spring.

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City Ballet is a company built around new choreography.  The idea was implicit in the original George Balanchine/Lincoln Kirstein conception and the effort to carry on the tradition, with sometimes more, but often less success, is a continuing theme in the post-Balanchine era.  Besides regular festivals of new works (institutionalized recently as The Diamond Project, though it's unclear what will become of this in the current era of strained finances), every season includes a few new pieces. This winter there were two new offerings, each in its way emblematic of two distinct strands in contemporary ballet.  Lifecasting, a ballet by British born choreographer Douglas Lee, currently a principal dancer with the Stuttgart Ballet, set to music by Ryoki Ikeda and Steve Reich, premiered on January 22d and appeared to be a ballet of the Wheeldonesque, push-me, pull-you variety.  With the dancers dressed in sleek gold spandex leotards, the stage, surmounted by an industrial lighting battery, looked like the bridge of the Starship Enterprise of Star Trek fame; the music was haunting and for the most part meditative; the tall women were often stretched and posed, in contrasting and complex groups by their partners.  The atmosphere was theatrical, the lighting dim, and in this vein the ballet was rather successful, particularly in the riveting role it created for Ashley Bouder who, beautifully costumed and coiffed to set off her gamine figure (she alone of all the women was dressed in blue rather than gold and had her hair dressed in bangs), made a memorably calm entrance to the side of the rest of the writhing motion after rising from a sunken channel at the rear of the stage.  (A Star Trek Athena rising from the soil of her Athens).  Withal, though, the weakness of the ballet, one might say the weakness of the genre, was the absence of rhythmically intelligible dance.  You could in fact define this genre of contemporary choreography as body movement theater in contradistinction to dance in the common sense of the word.

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Former City Ballet dancer Melissa Barak's new ballet, A Simple Symphony, set to the Benjamin Britten score, debuted on February 17th and was of a more traditional variety.  It was as if Barak were making the point on this program entitled 21st Century Movement that the tradition was still alive. The women wore cream colored romantic tutus, with the palest yellow stripes, of Barak's own design; the men were dressed in grey vests and tights, with flowing blouson collars somewhat in the manner of the first act of Giselle; the cast was divided into a corps de ballet of six women, two pairs of soloists, and a principal couple (Mearns and Jared Angle); and the musical structure of the symphony was similarly observed.  An opening movement introduced us to each contingent in the hierarchy: corps, soloists and principals.  To a Scotch inflected second movement of plucked and strummed strings, Barak set a memorable dance for the corps and then another for the soloists.  The center of the ballet was then a traditional pas de deux, before all concluded with an ensemble dance.  The strength of the work is the way the choreography coheres to the music and amalgamates itself with it organically; I can still see the second movement dances of the corps and the soloists to the plucked strings, and hear the accompanying music, in my minds' eye and ear, and that's something that rarely happens with a contemporary ballet.  The weakness of the work is the generic nature of the central pas de deux, which appeared formulaic:  there was much promenading of Mearns in arabesque by Angle, ending in swoons over his arm, but nothing happened emotionally.  Edwin Denby once likened Balanchine's pas de deux to "whispered conversations in the night," thereby indicating how important emotional values, or some kind of resonant content of meaning, was to their success.  By all accounts a calm personality on the surface, Balanchine was surely a passionate individual and each of his great pas de deux bears the stamp of a human drama.  Barak, schooled in the Balanchine style, left an emotional vacuum at the center of her pas de deux.  Although it is the best new work in a traditional style I have seen at NYCB in nearly a decade, a larger measure of heart and soul were needed to make it complete.

Copyright 2009 by Michael Popkin.
Photos by Paul Kolnik, courtesy of New York City Ballet.  Top: Lifecasting ensemble with Ashley Bouder; Bottom:  Sara Mearns and Jared Angle in A Simple Symphony.