Rabbit and Rogue
American Ballet Theater
The Metropolitan Opera House
New York, New York
June 4, 2008
All American Fare (Interplay, Ives Songs and I'm Old Fashioned)
Definitive Chopin (Dances at a Gathering, Other Dances and The Concert)
New York City Ballet
New York State Theater
New York, New York
June 1 and 4, 2008
By Michael Popkin
copyright 2008 Michael Popkin
Towards the end of ABT's new Rabbit and Rogue last week, my mind, shocked and awed by nearly forty minutes of non-stop sensory overload, tried to make sense of it all: the smoky black theatrical space punctuated by descending and horizontal cones of spot light; the music, a pulsing wall of sound louder than that in any movie theater (is it possible for live music to sound more recorded?); the masses of dancers emerging from and vanishing into a gloomy upstage area, all dressed (and often undressed) in a variety of sexy Norma Kamali costumes; Sascha Radetsky and Marcelo Gomes performing nearly a Three Stooges routine in the midst of it all; Sarah Lane in a silver bikini (not bad); Jose Manuel Carreno, stripped to the waist and dressed below in a cross between silver harem and capri pants, performing classical lifts and promenades with Maria Riccetto.
Several possibilities occured to me. Maybe this is Tharp's visualization of someone's subconscious, I thought, a group of whacky Jungian archetypes, the Moe, Larry and Curley within, who knows, maybe even her own Moe, Larry and Curley ? Or then again, I thought, maybe it's Tharp's idea of a crazy Olympus, where a couple of practical jokers like Loge in Wagner, or Eshu in the Yoruba pantheon, are stuck in a Bacchanal carried on by the corps de ballet? Finally, though, I settled on a third alternative, one much more likely: probably it means nothing at all. Having to make a big ballet on ABT for the Metropolitan Opera House, Tharp just didn't bother to edit her composition in any way. Composer, designer and choreographer all followed their conceptions to excess; Jorma Elo's method of structuring (or not structuring) ballets for ABT had become contagious, but on the vastly larger scale of the Met stage.
* * * *
Meanwhile at City Ballet, the Robbins' Celebration entered its final phase. With the first performance of the Chopin program Wednesday night (Dances at a Gathering, Other Dances and The Concert) twenty-five of the thirty-three Robbins' ballets scheduled for this spring had been danced, and I found myself wondering whether this total immersion in his work had been justified and, more, why it was even necessary in the first place?
It's not after all the centennial of Robbins' birth; he would only have been ninety years old right now, no older than many an aged but living artist. Nor has more than a decade passed since his death; it's not a length of time you'd expect to bring him into a new perspective. I can't help speculating that the Robbins' Foundation is awash in money generated by the choreographer's residuals; that because it's a foundation some of the money even has to be spent; that City Ballet's business plan involves theme programming and festivals as a way of marketing its "brand;" and that the Robbins Celebration lies irresistibly at the intersection of these two impulses.
Not that this would be a bad thing if the results justified the effort. But Robbins is perhaps not a choreographer who can support nearly an entire season of evening length programs like these. You can enjoy Opus 19/The Dreamer on a mixed bill with some Balanchine or Martins; but dance it on the same program with his Andantino (which it resembles); and then add the repetitive, long winded Piano Pieces at the end of the evening, and I can guarantee you won't be in the best mood to watch Brandenburg and Opus jazz a few night's later. The ballets start to run together. Then also imagine you've sat through Watermill the previous week.
This "running together" of Robbins' works isn't just a matter either of how some of his more similar ballets look when danced in close proximity to each other; the different elements within the individual works can also appear to run together when they're not well performed, and this is particularly true when the ballet in question is nothing but a series of musical variations in the first place. That was the case with Dances at a Gathering last week. The cast (Jonathan and Abi Stafford, Amar Ramasar, and Rachel Rutherford among them) wasn't able to make the ballet project and as a result, the long series of alternating variations - one lyrical, the next agitated, the next lyrical, the next agitated - became monotonous and undifferentiated.
An even better example, though, is the way The Goldberg Variations looked last winter (the ballet will be danced by nearly the same cast later this spring). The series of thirty variations runs for an hour and twenty minutes; and as Bach tends to sound "like Bach" to the uneducated ear much of the time, there isn't in the first place a great deal of natural dilineation between the different parts of the musical score. Despite this, however, it got a great performance here several years ago when Janie Taylor and Ashley Bouder were the ballerinas in Part I, and Miranda Weese, Maria Kowroski, and Wendy Whelan in Part II. Every single variation was riveting, individual and memorable; the personalities and remarkable individual presence of each of these dancers insured it. (The opening night cast in 1971, by the way, included Gelsey Kirkland, Karin von Aroldingen, Peter Martins, Patricia McBride and Helgi Tomasson among others). Last winter, though, when the ballet was cast with many of the same dancers as was Dances at a Gathering last week, the variations were hard to tell apart; your memory flagged; nothing was individual and the parts ran together. Like Dances, Goldberg is a ballet that requires stars.
The company showed us just the opposite though - how vivid, memorable and exciting Robbins can be when performed at his best - in several brilliantly detailed performances of Interplay this season, culminating with one on Sunday, June 1st. Tiler Peck and Robert Fairchild, and Daniel Ulbricht and Ana Sophia Scheller were the two principal couples; while Ashley Laracey, Stephanie Zungre (the performance of her career in a technically demanding role), Sean Suozzi and Troy Schumacher rounded out the cast. Young, appealing, athletic, exuberant, physically impressive - the dancing spared nothing, it was some of the best NYCB has to offer these days. Yet the pyrotechnics were always in the service of Robbins' expression, and a ballet about youth, strength, informality and pure dancing got the best performance it has here in a decade. That afternoon, the Robbins Celebration was worth it. No question about it.
Photos: Top - ABT ensemble in Rabbit and Rogue, copyright Rosalie O'Connor
Bottom - Tiler Peck and Robert Fairchild in Interplay, copyright Paul Kolnik
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