BALLROOM UNDER THE SKY
Midsummer Night Swing: First there’s a 45-minute lesson, then, as the sun slowly goes down over the plaza, two hours of unfettered outdoor dancing to the vivacious sounds of the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra. “Make yourself sassy,” the instructor calls, as a marvelously motley crowd rehearses the basics of the lindy hop. “There’s a difference between wonderbread and groovin’.” Bodies hunker into lowdown mode. Feet swivel in and out without impeding the jaunty backstep, step, step, backstep, kick, kick.
The dancing crowd is a cross-section of the city’s citizenry. Ethnically and socially, it’s all over the map. The seven ages of humankind are well accounted for and looking good: a toddler swung in a dancing dad’s embrace; little girls luminous with their fantasies; scruffy, uncertain adolescent boys destined to mature into heroes; exotically gorgeous twentysomethings; happily bourgeois middle-aged twosomes; elders refusing to let the years quell their response to rhythm.
“Time to get close.” Swirls and twirls get added on, partners dipping under each others’ arms. “Hug her in, guys, then set her free–but not so free you can’t summon her back with a little tug on her hand.” The teaching done, the orchestra moves into full gear. Now the seasoned veterans of many another ballroom let their imaginations soar, inventing personal variations of elements like the dip, in which the gal swoops from vertical to diagonal in one swift move, her guy ensuring that she’s safely suspended halfway between heaven and earth. Beginners, both the shy and the eager, stolidly trace the lindy’s primary maneuvers with their feet, while, above the waist, their bodies begin to curve and twine. The dance floor throbs with the double beat of steps and music. Just about everyone in sight looks guilelessly happy.
Surely this dancing is a metaphor for a good life: an endless stream of giving and taking; grace in spontaneity; instinctively anticipating a partner’s footfalls and handholds and responding to them in kind, now and then embellishing the basics with snazzy flourishes; maintaining the beat, no matter what; adorning the action with a smile.
CLASS
A dozen taut-muscled dancers sit poised for action on the floor of a clean, well-lighted space. At a nearly imperceptible signal from their instructor and an eruption of sound from a piano in the corner, they launch into their daily ritual of exercises. Their movement, invented by Martha Graham, is rooted in the principles of contraction and release. It emanates from the body’s gut; this is no arms and legs affair. It requires–beyond strength and endurance–intense inner focus, deep concentration.
As the series progresses, the torso emerges, projecting ardently into space–head, neck, and breast opening to an imaginary sky. Only then do the limbs enter the picture, stretching high and wide from the core of the body. Next the chest and pelvis begin to swivel, giving the figure a lush sculptural dimension. Now the whole body coils in on itself, then lashes out horizontally like a venomous snake striking its victim. Now it falls back, still heroic in its energy and self-possession, but felled, it would seem, by some malevolent god.
Many of the exercises are like cataclysmic geological events. Drama is inherent in them, but it is never applied to them falsely. To an observer, the dancers begin to look like people in extremis (both physically and emotionally), beasts of prey, Eumenides. When they question their instructor briefly, it’s startling to hear words emanating from them. They seem to be operating in a realm beyond speech. When they stop, suspended, at the end of a sequence, the ferocious action of the preceding moments remains vibrant in their perfect stillness.
The studio is climate controlled now, but in the old days, when the dancers rose from these floor exercises, they stood in pools of their own sweat, laughing a little sometimes, as they still do, at their own daring and folly.
HOOPS
All around town, guys–guys who really know how–are playing pick-up basketball. They’re in gyms and, better yet, on the asphalt of outdoor public playgrounds where they’re one of the greatest free shows on earth, the common man’s alternative to the NBA.
The regular players, topnotch amateurs, are tall, tall, tall. At first glance, they seem to be all rangy arms and legs. Next you notice the hulking shoulders and the power embedded in them. And then the faces–masks of cool. Athletic grace often means not letting it show that you’re trying.
At any given moment, the guy with the ball in hand acquires instant foes. They block his path in a wide-legged squat that shifts unnervingly from side to side, like a moving wall, or thrust their arms up vertically just inches from his face. The object of this hostile attention swivels and swerves, dodges and feints, then seizes an opening and sends the ball off to a confederate who has a tiny window of opportunity, spacewise and timewise, to aim for a goal, before he himself is surrounded.
Dribbling, passing, shooting for the basket, these men hold the ball lightly in their articulate, long-fingered hands, so lightly it can spin in their grasp, as if were a girl with whom they were touch-dancing. Eyes, a player’s swiftest organ, track the ball, the basket, the members of the opposing team, the members of his own, continually adjusting, in position and tactics, to the perpetuum mobile of the circumstances.
Again and again, the whole crew of them runs the length of the court–swift, angular, elegant. Goal in sight, the man they’re after–to hinder or assist–sees his chance. He freezes for an instant, then jumps as he shoots, putting stability at risk to lend the ball extra height, extra loft, as it sails toward the hoop, then sinks below the metal rim, sweetly caressed by the little fringe of netting.
NERIAD
In the exotically tiled pool of the YMCA, just steps away from Lincoln Center, where she danced so memorably with the New York City Ballet, Allegra Kent moves exquisitely through the water exercises she invented back in the seventies. She still has the lithe body of an aquatic creature, and it glides silkily through its pale aquamarine sea on a preliminary warm-up course, propelled by a powerful, even arm stroke. She’s sheathed in a black velour leotard that, wet, resembles a seal’s skin. As she coasts beneath the water’s surface, a hand or foot emerges quietly, curved like a fine-edged fin to slice through the liquid element without roiling it.
Vertical now, using the rounded rim of the pool as a ballet barre, she slips arms and legs into vermilion floaties calibrated to provide the right measure of buoyancy–and thus resistance–when she directs a limb downward. An uncanny sequence of stretches follows, all balletically shaped but, eerily slowed down and smoothed out by the water, transmuted into the stuff of fantasy. Throughout, the signature qualities of Kent’s dancing in the domain of earth and air manifest themselves: the infallible harmony and proportion in the body’s shifting shapes, the lyrical flow of the movement, the tremulous presence. She climaxes the session with a string of languid, perfectly sculpted cartwheels. When she rights herself again, the poise of her head alone suggests that balance, a key element of dancing, has nothing to do with stillness. As Kent embodies it, it is a ceaseless stream of minute–essentially invisible–adjustments to the whirling of the world in space, the shifting climate of time and place, and, not least, the vagaries of the balancer’s heart.
ICE
A small flock of them appears, in signature posture–the chest, open with abandon, amplified by wide-flung arms curved just a shade to temper the look. It reads two ways: This space is mine or Here is my heart.
Surging forward, they defy speed limits. In multiple turns, their swiveling image blurs before your amazed eyes. But they know slowness and stillness too. One woman moves like poured cream; she hardly seems to have separate feet. Another, held aloft by her male partner (at once suitor and servant), resembles a serene marble statue turned to flesh, his arms her pedestal.
Arabesques and attitudes recur like mantras, the shapes struck with a passion for clarity and intuitive confidence in the beauty of these harmonious formal designs. Even so, animation prevails. A charging run shoots up, without warning preparation, into a high-and-wide jeté. The legs crisscross deftly, feet hitting their mark with the delicate precision of mountain goats’ hoofs. The body changes direction as if traveling backward, streaming or skittering, were no less natural than locomotion in face-forward mode.
Duet work in this domain–as in so many performance (and pedestrian) venues–depends on the partners’ mutual understanding. Based on rhythm, balance, a taste for risk, and immense trust, this uncanny wordless accord seems to grow increasingly instinctive the longer the pair works in tandem. Lifts are spectacular here. One cavalier swings his lady out horizontal, so that she lies on the air just inches from the ground, linked to him only at wrist and ankle. They whirl together as if their connection were not athletic but ecstatic.
The space is empty now, the figures having moved into a life beyond our view. All that’s left to see is the once smooth, pristinely white floor that has been savaged by the gleaming blades of their high laced skates.
PHYS ED
A bevy of girls, maybe two dozen of them, just entering adolescence, are being aired on Central Park’s bridle path, no doubt a hop, skip, and jump from their elite private school. (The uniform says it all; their privileged circle is the last bastion of dowdy skirts reaching to knee-level on bare legs devoid of sensual content.) From the reservoir jogging path, I watch them through a frame of cherry blossoms. It is the most ravishing of spring days. They are marshaled by a gym mistress who demonstrates a peculiar traveling step: a skip with the legs rigidly thrust forward, knees stiff. It looks like an emboité performed by raw military cadets. In groups of six, the girls launch into it. Five out of the six are awkward and some of them can’t do it at all. Two of the utterly incapable laugh: Who cares? One stops, starts, and stops again, visibly close to tears. I can’t do this. It’s the dance of life, and I’ll never be able to do it. And I don’t know why. What sort of culture breeds natural fluency out of its children? What fortunate conjunction of the stars allows one girl–plump, stocky, radiant face lifted to the absurdly blue sunlit sky–to transform this odd locomotion on a dusty uneven track into the gait of an unfettered mythic steed?
RARE BIRD
You’re surprised to find her in the New York City Ballet. Carla Körbes, already singled out for solo roles, is not the archetypal Balanchine dancer–built like an arrow and moving as sharply and swiftly, shedding contrapposto as if it were unnecessary baggage. She seems to belong to another time and place, where the first requirement of a ballerina was personal resonance.
Of medium height, Körbes gives a diminutive impression because she’s not long-limbed and because there’s some flesh on her as well as plenty of visible muscle in the thighs. Her strong feet have a beautiful bowstring arch. Her face is heart-shaped. You take one look at her and think “Delicious.” Built like a soubrette, still she’s never cute. Her long neck gives her eloquence; her temperament and training, it would seem, make her opt infallibly for elegance. At once aloof and warmhearted in manner, she has the aplomb of a princess born and bred to graciousness. In the smallest move, she projects tremendously, becomes larger than life. In flight, she’s utterly imposing, commanding space on a grand scale.
She’s musical, too, and she’s a quick study. When the Balanchine Foundation videotapes Violette Verdy coaching the role she created so memorably in the “Emeralds” section of Jewels, Körbes (ably supported by James Fayette) learns the pas de deux from scratch. Within minutes of having been instructed in the steps and partnering, she’s dancing as if the choreography belonged to her, releasing herself into the yearning, evocative phrases of the Fauré score so that the music seems to surround her like an invisible veil of perfume. Towards the end of the session, Verdy says to Körbes, “I don’t see dancers like you too often. How old are you?” “Twenty-two,” Körbes tells her. Verdy: “When it happens, it’s going to be magnificent.”
REHEARSAL
Rhythm lies at the heart of Mark Morris’s dances. This is apparent when we see them on stage; it’s doubly apparent in rehearsal. Polishing a vintage repertory work, as he’s doing today with the 1984 Gloria, Morris focuses instinctively on restoring the rhythmic keenness of his original choreography–a response to the intricate heartbeat set in motion by Vivaldi with his Gloria in D.
Score in hand, Morris sits on a rolling swivel chair, out of which he’s getting a lot of mileage, singing the music loud over the already well amplified tape and dictating the multi-rhythms by means of hand claps, foot taps, and vocal exhortations. With repeated performance (or a period of non-performance) and inevitable changes of cast, choreography tends to get flattened out into simple steady-pulse regularity and thus to lose both vitality and nuance. Morris snaps his fingers to bind the dancers to exactitude in the myriad rhythmic subtleties he has devised, to keep them from being lulled into the musical slackness that the lushness of the score’s voices and instruments might induce.
The dancers–despite their celebrated physical and temperamental individuality–are all willing responsiveness in these circumstances. For the purpose of making Gloria come alive again, they are offering themselves as human musical instruments. Morris is their conductor. Not for nothing is the focal point of his work outfit a t-shirt emblazoned in caution yellow with the words TOP DOG. That score in his hand is not an affectation. It’s a basic working tool–and a talisman.
VIDEO
On the video monitor, captured in Paul Taylor’s Esplanade a quarter-century ago, Carolyn Adams runs like a child. She seems weightless, skimming the floor flat-footed, “roller-skate skinny” legs and arms innocent of dance devices like turnout or sculpture-conscious port de bras. She travels forward, then–with the suddenness of an umbrella blown inside out by the wind–reverses direction to sail backwards. Now and then, as if taken by whim, she skitters sideways, legs scissoring. At unpredictable intervals, through some uncanny sleight of foot, her run bubbles up into a turn in place without breaking the locomotive flow for a nanosecond. She runs in straight lines and curling arcs, disappears and returns, halts once or twice as if to deliver a taunting “You can’t catch me!”, then unexpectedly bends her knees deeply, arches her torso over them like a bowstring, and hurls herself across an improbable distance into the cradle of a waiting man’s arms.
From that moment seized by the camera, Adams’s life has evolved in real time. Since she retired from the stage in 1982, she has taught steadily at Juilliard while continuing to create ingenious programs that preserve cultural treasures ranging from Harlem’s historic architecture to the choreography of the masters. At home, she and her husband nurture two children adopted from an Azerbaijan orphanage. And yet you can watch her running Esplanade‘s exhilarating run over and over again, go away about your own pedestrian business, then return to the screen and confirm that the dancing has not lost an iota of its gaiety and breath. The image may be flat, devoid of many nuances offered by live performance, but it is forever.
© 2005 Tobi Tobias