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.
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