Archives for June 2006

Clad in tartan, the clan, which appears in the first and longest of the ballet’s three segments, marches in formation, then charges and whirls, commandeering the stage. Ballet aficionados and casual observers alike generally agree that this three-and-a-half-minute dance, given the clan name of “MacDonald of Sleat,” is the most thrilling moment in “Union Jack.” The ballet, an hourlong extravaganza created as a bicentennial event, is currently being performed in the company’s winter season at the New York State Theater.

Since its inception, “Union Jack,” has enjoyed great popularity as an outsize, exuberant showpiece. But “Scottish and Canadian Guards Regiments,” the full name of that first segment, is something considerably more: singular, ingenious choreography.

This section is based on what is known as the Scottish tattoo — the presentation of clans in full regalia, parading in intricate formation. Here, almost surreptitiously, Balanchine expands parade-ground marching into dancing, without forfeiting either the powerful geometric patterning or the aura of ancient ritual.

Seven detachments of 10 dancers each are introduced one by one in a strict, solemn march, each group identified by its own tartan. Once assembled, they interweave swiftly and precisely, like threads shuttled through a loom.

The mood lightens as each regiment dances individually. Two male clans perform together, with frisky steps, as if in a friendly Highland fling competition. Members of a male clan and a female clan pair off graciously, inspired by country dancing. Three women’s groups perform alone, one delicately lyrical, another — Ms. Sylve’s clan — forceful, the last subtly seductive. All 70 dancers meet and interweave once more, then depart in a stately recessional as the lights dim, leaving the last figures in silhouette.

“When Balanchine began choreographing the clans’ marches,” Ms. von Aroldingen recalls, “he used a diagram he had drawn with little circles, colored differently for each group. He had figured out — for 70 people– exactly how many musical beats were needed to get from one place on the stage to another. The rest of the choreography just poured out of him so fast it was unbelievable. He gave off this tremendous energy.”

Part 2, an intimately scaled intermezzo, evokes the Edwardian music hall, where sentimentality and dopey humor went hand in hand. It depicts a husband-and-wife team playing a Pearly King and Queen, the mock-royalty of London’s legendary costermongers, or Cockney street peddlers. Laced with broad pantomime, the dance applies wit and charm to tawdry entertainers who have more resilience than talent. This section is essentially a pas de deux, but at its close two high-stepping little daughters arrive in a cart drawn by a live donkey whose training proves, at times, less effective than that of the girls.

Part 3 brings back all the regiment leaders from Part 1, but in an entirely new guise. This section, “Royal Navy,” is a rollicking suite of dances that would be entirely at home in a Broadway show. Sailor-suited trios, solos and chorus lines — both male and female — deliver countless variations on the traditional sailor’s hornpipe.

These antics are mixed with exuberant pantomiming — hauling rope, reconnoitering through a spyglass, flirting on the fly. Amidst all this jolly-tar stuff, classical ballet steps, executed by long-stemmed showgirls in fetchingly abbreviated naval togs, make a surprisingly easy fit. The whole business is executed with unquenchable glee, as if by sophomores on spring break. The high spirits calm only for the finale, in which the whole cast stands in formation, tiny bright flags in hand, to semaphore “God Save the Queen” to the strains of “Rule, Britannia,” as the Union Jack, the flag of the United Kingdom, descends behind them.

“Union Jack” was clearly the project of Lincoln Kirstein, the man who, recognizing Balanchine’s genius, lured him to the United States in 1933 and fostered his career for the next half-century. The quirky pretext for the ballet was to make a Bicentennial offering to the kingdom from which America had wrested its independence. Kirstein was a self-confessed Anglophile, a condition related to his love of tradition, with its panoply, hierarchy and ritual. In a widely quoted program note, he presented his argument for the ballet in his inimitable prose style: “In the tepid euphoria of quasi-official celebration, dimmed by an exhausted peace and clownish public scandal” — a reference to Watergate — “it has been deemed fitting to recall roots.” In the course of the ballet’s making, its tone shifted, so the homage became alternately serious and tongue in cheek.

But why did Balanchine agree to the project? Exactly a half-century earlier, taking his cue from Victorian pantomimes, he had choreographed “The Triumph of Neptune” for Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. In it, apparently, he danced a hornpipe that brought down the house. Diaghilev’s death in 1929 left him searching for other employment, and Balanchine spent a few years enjoying London’s elegance, as well as its earthier music halls. By his own account, the kilted marching bands he saw at the Edinburgh Festival in 1952 inspired his Romantic Highlands ballet, “Scotch Symphony.” Perhaps the most compelling motivation of all, however, was the fact that an extravaganza promised healthy ticket sales.

The score for “Union Jack” was provided by Hershy Kay, who had done similar work for “Western Symphony,” Balanchine’s 1954 “cowboy ballet,” and “Stars and Stripes” (1958), inspired by Sousa marches. For the tribute to the Brits, Kay selected Scottish ballads, English folk songs, Edwardian music-hall ditties and sailor’s hornpipes, elaborating upon them in his orchestration.

Rouben Ter-Arutunian, another seasoned contributor to Balanchine’s enterprises, designed the backdrops and costumes. The regiments marched before an architectural fantasy: a “London Bridge” as it might appear in a picture book for children. The Royal Navy got a similarly playful drop, depicting jaunty ships on saucy waves. The Pearly King and Queen section was framed by a red-and-gold toy theater.

Ter-Arutunian dressed the Pearlies and the sailors in stylized versions of the types they meant to evoke. The regalia for the seven clans, however — the kilts in authentic tartans, with full accouterments — were not the trompe l’oeil work of a costume shop, but were executed by Toronto-based military tailors with a long tradition of producing the real thing. The prescribed uniforms were modified only slightly, mostly for greater lightness and mobility.

“As you put on your costume,” Ms. von Aroldingen says, “it gave you a feeling of aristocratic elegance and respect for order. It helped you acknowledge being part of a tribe and loving the place you belonged to. I know it’s not possible in this life,” she adds, “but I wish I could put on that costume and do that dance just one more time. Nowadays, when I see it performed, it has such an impact on me that everything — every part of me — is there, except my body.”

In the studio, Ms. von Aroldingen winds down her session with Ms. Sylve by showing her the complete “MacDonald of Sleat” section on videotape. Ms. Sylve scrutinizes the shifting-grid formations of the ensemble and the escalating demands on its leader as the dance progresses. So far she has learned a third of it. The dance finishes with the whole group spinning in place like individual cyclones, halting abruptly, then adding one more brief onslaught of turns for emphasis.

Ms. Sylve surveys the action and nods. “It’s hard,” Ms. von Aroldingen acknowledges, “but once you’ve got it …”

Ms. Sylve finishes her sentence: “… it gives you so much joy.”

Copyright © 2006 by The New York Times Co. Reprinted with permission.

Jan. 25 (Bloomberg) — Trailing its mooring ropes across a dark stage framed in black velour drapes, a Paris Opera-style crystal chandelier lies crashed on the floor. Ten dancers, costumed with necrophiliac glamour, pace, embrace and fall to the opening measures of the Adagio Sostenuto from Beethoven’s “Hammerklavier” piano sonata.

Christopher Wheeldon, resident choreographer of the New York City Ballet, has set the scene for “Klavier,” his latest work for the company. With the help of his designer, Jean-Marc Puissant, he is about to tell us that deep feeling is wedded to gloom.

Wheeldon, still a wunderkind at 32, is widely thought to be the fellow who’s going to rescue classical choreography from its present doldrums.

Trained by the Royal Ballet and formed further at the New York City Ballet, he has been exposed to a variety of masters — Frederick Ashton and Kenneth MacMillan in the U.K., George Balanchine and Jerome Robbins in the U.S. He has absorbed useful lessons from them all about craft, musicality and theatrical effect.

These skills have been evident in the dozen ballets he has created for the New York City Ballet, the Royal Ballet, the San Francisco Ballet and other ranking troupes eager to have his work. They are evident again in “Klavier.”

Couples and Trios

Wheeldon divides his cast into two duet couples — Wendy Whelan and Sebastien Marcovici, Miranda Weese and Albert Evans — and two subordinate trios. Deftly manipulating the arrivals, retreats and interminglings of these little groups, he seems to partition the space differently and dramatically every few seconds. But to what purpose?

The two pairs manage to convey a message through the kind of movement they do. Singly and then together, the couples amplify a statement made at the opening, embracing and then collapsing to the ground. The female figures often look like so much malleable clay in their escorts’ arms.

Now the men maneuver the women’s bodies athwart theirs, in postures that are stunning and strange. When the women stretch their legs in taut splits, their partners skid them across the floor at a vicious speed. And the falls register ambiguously. Are the figures descending into sleep, sex or death?

Not Persuasive

Each duo seems to share a deeply felt passion, and it’s clearly a tragic one. Unfortunately, the message remains a one- liner; it doesn’t evolve. So while the dancing is handsome to look at, it’s not emotionally persuasive.

The trios tell us nothing. Most often, one simply duplicates the maneuvers of the other. (They came into existence while the ballet was being choreographed, when Wheeldon watched the understudy trio working alongside the three dancers he’d originally chosen.)

Wheeldon winds up matters logically. He’s too astute a craftsman to flub a finale. The full cast reassembles to repeat the pacing of the opening segment. There the dancers mysteriously kept their backs to the audience, shrouding their secrets.

Now they turn to face the spectators boldly, head-on, as if to indicate that something revelatory has been accomplished. But it’s hard to know what.

The most noteworthy thing about “Klavier” is its motley casting, ranging from newcomers and chronically underused members of the company to dancers at their peak and older ones who retain a powerful stage presence.

The result looks as if Wheeldon chose his dancers not simply for technical efficiency but because they fascinated him as people. And since they have that in common, the group coheres.

© 2006 Bloomberg L.P. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission.

WITH a new dance-theater production, “Aristophanes in Birdonia,” on view beginning this week at Danspace Project, the veteran postmodernist David Gordon confirms a recent shift in his subject matter. Once best known for constructions that brooded wittily on the personal relationships of couples, multi-generational families and small dance troupes like his own Pick Up Performance Company, Mr. Gordon finds the wider realm of social politics inescapable these days. “I think,” he said, choosing his words carefully, “that there are a great many powerful decisions being made in America about which I have no say.”

Paradoxically, he discovered most of the issues now troubling him set forth in “The Birds,” a masterpiece of Classical Greek comedy produced in 414 B.C. Corruption in government, appetite for war, rampant litigation, moralizing charlatans, conflict among interest groups, greed, scheming and unjust taxes – Aristophanes had recorded them all, as well as the impulse to create a utopian escape hatch. “The attempt to organize a world in which you would not be a victim,” Mr. Gordon said. “I was interested in that.”

As he did in his “Dancing Henry Five” (2004), for which Shakespeare is credited as his co-author, Mr. Gordon appropriated the themes, ideas and tone of a classic. The script he created for “Birdonia” centers on his specialty, wordplay to the point of absurdity, delivered by dancers capable of keeping the talk going as they execute the choreography. In action they look like pedestrians in extraordinarily good shape who have a latent memory of ballet classes. The production uses some incidental music, but the rhythm of the movement Mr. Gordon has devised is most closely allied to the rhythms of the words.