Seeing Things: January 2007 Archives

This article originally appeared in the Summer 2006 issue (Vol. 15, No. 2) of Dance Now.

Dance fans are forever complaining about dancing stars who refuse to recognise when the time has come to call it quits and retire from the stage. Two of the last century's ballet divinities, Rudolf Nureyev and Margot Fonteyn, continued not merely for years but for decades past their prime, first adjusting their repertoire to diminishing physical capability, eventually creating a performance out of charisma alone. Among the incomparable artists still with us, Darci Kistler--the last New York City Ballet ballerina identified by Balanchine--has for some time been treading down the perilous path traced by Fonteyn, albeit with a gentler persistence. During the Nineties, switching from ballet to more physically lenient modern and postmodern choreography through his White Oak Dance Project, Mikhail Baryshnikov appeared to be evading retirement as Nureyev did, though in a supremely tasteful way.

Viewers new to the game will watch the severely compromised performances of a protracted sunset and, in extreme cases of benign blindness, will not even notice that they're underpowered. Inexperienced viewers tend to respond with almost unerring instinct to the truly terrific, while ignoring, untroubled, the less than wonderful. To the neophyte observer susceptible to dancing, everything about it is odd and fascinating.

The spectators who suffer from the decline of a once-transcendent dancer are the ones who witnessed and rejoiced in her glorious prime. Instead of merely lamenting the passing and ravages of time, they now feel angry, betrayed. They feel the performer is desecrating their memories of her artistry when it was sublime. They feel that she, having once so significantly enhanced their lives, has no right to do this, that she should know better, and so forth. In their petulant righteousness, they forget that the artist they once revered is only human, subject to human folly based on exigent human need.

This article originally appeared in the Culture section of Bloomberg News on January 18, 2007.

Jan. 18 (Bloomberg) -- From every one of the 140 seats in the black-box theater at the Mark Morris Dance Center in Brooklyn, you're close enough to see the performers' muscles flexing, hear their footfalls, and feel in your own body the vibrations of the live music to which they move. While the Mark Morris Dance Group is at home in opera houses worldwide -- including the Broooklyn Academy of Music just across the street -- the choreographer chose this intimate space for the two-week run of a repertory program that opened last night.

The new item on the bill, a quintet with Morris himself at the center, is a disappointment. Called ``Italian Concerto,'' after the Bach score to which it's set, the piece is dominated by cryptic gestures, first performed discretely then expanded into more flowing dance phrases.

The swiftly paced opening and closing movements seem merely a frame for the slow middle section that's Morris's solo. At 50, Morris has grown jowly and thick in the middle, but he's still a powerful, rhythmically astute dancer. Here, though, you wonder what his gestures might mean: the forward-thrusting hands with their splayed fingers, the repeated double tap of a flat palm on the chest, in the territory of the heart. The dance could be seen as a portrait of an aging creator -- a Prospero or a Merce Cunningham.

Love Rules

The program's standouts were two dances offering very different takes on the theme of love. ``The Argument,'' created in 1999, couldn't be more contemporary: It dwells on lovers' incompatibility.

Three male-female couples dance successive duets to Schumann's ``Funf Stucke im Volkston'' for cello and piano. The relationship of the first pair is fueled by rage. The thoughtful second couple is never going to mate easily; both partners are too serious and too easily discouraged. The man and woman of the third duo veer between anger they keep in check, which isolates them from each other, and conciliatory impulses that lack sufficient force to prevail. Ruefully, we recognize them all. We've lived most of the roles ourselves.

Morris's 1989 ``Love Song Waltzes,'' a sequel to his 1982 ``New Love Song Waltzes'' -- the two co-opt the pair of Brahms scores Balanchine chose for his ravishing ``Liebeslieder Walzer'' -- locates love in the community rather than in the hearts of a special pair set apart from workaday society.

Morris deploys a dozen dancers as an ensemble, in small interrelating clusters, and occasionally as couples (same-sex and hetero). The twosomes are usually replicated and thus purged of exclusivity.

Shifting Social Arrangements

All the social arrangements are shifting ones. The emotions, lavish in their range, are fleeting too, as if the people in the dance lived in a climate famous for its changeable weather. And every feeling, from tender empathy to the more vehement passions (one being a fierce if futile resistance to love), belongs to the group as a whole. Given these conditions, the dance looks wonderfully fluid, but its structure is tight as a drum.

Throughout the evening, the dancers laid claim to the highest praise for their technical aplomb, their musicality, and their sheer human authenticity.

In case dance observers were worrying about Morris's working lately on too small a scale, word came yesterday that his next project is a full-evening ``Romeo and Juliet.'' It will have its premiere at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, in the 2008 SummerScape Festival.

Rome, Juliet Redux

One would think that the ballet world had already given us enough of these lovers, but Morris can safely say something that has always been true of his work, ``The music made me.'' His production will be made in response to the discovery in Russia of documents on Prokofiev's original score and scenario, suppressed in the Stalinist era because they failed to conform to the dictates of Socialist Realism. Since Morris is inclined to follow no dictates but his own and those of the music he's chosen to work with, he should be just the man for this job.

The Mark Morris Dance Group continues at the Mark Morris Dance Center, 3 Lafayette Ave., Brooklyn, through Jan. 27. Information: +1-212-352-3101 or http://www.mmdg.org.

© 2007 Bloomberg L.P. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission.

This article originally appeared in the Culture section of Bloomberg News on January 15, 2007.

Jan. 15 (Bloomberg) -- ``I love everything about the theater,'' Yoshiko Chuma says at a midday rehearsal of ``A Page Out of Order: M,'' which begins a five-day run tomorrow at Dance Theater Workshop in Chelsea. Known for her maverick imagination and crazy-quilt multimedia work, the Japanese-born Chuma has been a fixture on New York's downtown scene for over a quarter- century.

``But it's a very expensive hobby,'' Chuma adds wryly. No doubt: The new piece was created episode by episode over a period of five years in venues as disparate as Macedonia (hence the ``M'' of the title), Albania, Japan and the U.S.

With her company, the School of Hard Knocks, Chuma has made pieces for venues ranging from the Paris Opera to the Halloween parade in Greenwich Village, not to mention the private living rooms of patrons.

Chuma's earlier work brimmed with absurdist gaiety. Lately it has grown graver and darker. ``Page,'' while typically cryptic and inventive, offers intimations of the hardships of dislocation and conflict. The action, much of it abstract, is by turns violent, contemplative, agonized and quietly cooperative. Still, reflecting Chuma's temperament, its seriousness is leavened with considerable charm.

Ralph Lee Installations

The key element in ``Page'' is Ralph Lee's installation of four 7-foot metal cube frames. Fluently maneuvered and inhabited by a six-dancer ensemble, they reconfigure and animate the space even more vividly than the choreography that goes on in, around and through them.

Often white panels are attached to the sides of the cubes to serve as screens for film projections of nature, architecture and local inhabitants drawn from disparate parts of the globe. Meanwhile, onstage musicians produce a lively cacophony while a narrator-singer provides a few vocal clues to what's going on -- in Japanese.

The overall effect is one of magically and disconcertingly shifting boundaries. The social and political issues are, at most, a subtext. Chuma herself is against interpretation.

``Some people come to my performances looking for meaning and use up all their energy trying to find it,'' she says. ``I wish my audience would not have expectations or preconceptions. They limit the imagination. What I do is ambiguous. I don't have a statement. If I had a statement, I'd be a writer.''

Yoshiko Chuma and the School of Hard Knocks will be performing at Dance Theater Workshop, 219 W. 19th St., Jan. 16-20. Information: +1-212-924-0077.

© 2007 Bloomberg L.P. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission.

This article originally appeared in the Culture section of Bloomberg News on January 4, 2007.

Jan. 4 (Bloomberg) -- Nikolaj Hubbe was not merely the most poetic player in last night's return of ``The Sleeping Beauty'' at the New York State Theater. He was, of all the Prince Desires I've seen, the most convincing. He made the situation of a young prince yearning for love completely believable, something that could really happen to a guy in the street or in a forest, now or long, long ago.

A fairy shows him a vision of a princess who's been asleep for 100 years, but only in fugitive glimpses. With the power of his imagination, Hubbe makes us see what he's thinking: This girl is perfection, but is she real? And, if she is, will I be able to make her mine? Doubt and incredulous joy fluctuate in his every move. He's not thinking of happily ever after yet. He's thinking of right now.

There were other pleasures to be had on opening night of the New York City Ballet's two-week run of Peter Martins's 1991 version of the Petipa-Tchaikovsky ballet of 1890: Wendy Whelan's unlikely yet touchingly wise rendering of Aurora, a role utterly mismatched to her considerable gifts; Jennie Somogyi's musical and beautifully sculpted dancing as the Lilac Fairy; Teresa Reichlen's lush, witty Diamond in the Wedding Scene; as well as the spunk and meticulous grace of the many children from the School of American Ballet.

Mime Allergy

Overall, though, the New York City Ballet, bred in Balanchine's neo-classical style, doesn't inspire confidence when it tries to move in the 19th-century classical tradition. Most of the dancers look brittle, hemmed in, as if speaking an unfamiliar language. Still, that's not the main problem. The main problem lies with the production itself.

Martins assumes, with good reason, that his audience enjoys the old-fashioned pleasures of a good story and lavish scenic effects. Yet he's also convinced, again rightly, that such viewers are primarily interested in movement -- the more athletically extraordinary, the better. Further, that they're allergic to mime, not overly concerned about psychological depth and indifferent to the ballet's moral lessons. And that they have extremely short attention spans.

Martins has proved he's right, of course, by selling lots of tickets. Let other companies -- notably the Kirov in 1999 and the Royal Ballet last year -- produce lavish, historically based, even beguiling productions. Neither speaks directly to the here and now. By contrast, Martins's ``Beauty'' is unabashedly contemporary. Beginning with its reduction from nearly four hours to two and a half, it is ruthlessly efficient. It's brisk and to the point, devoid of metaphor and subtlety.

Prince Nikolaj

If it's soul you're looking for, you must look elsewhere. Unless, that is, you catch Hubbe in the several alternating casts and keep your eyes focused exclusively on the Prince.

New York City Ballet is at the New York State Theater, Lincoln Center through Feb. 25; ``The Sleeping Beauty'' will be performed through Jan. 14. Information: +1-212-721-6500 or http://www.nycballet.org.

© 2007 Bloomberg L.P. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission.