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.  

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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

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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.

 

 

 

Comments

[Moncler Sverige]

Good stuff as per usual, thanks. I do hope this kind of thing gets more exposure.