Archives for 2006

This article originally appeared in the Culture section of Bloomberg News on October 24, 2005.

Oct. 24 (Bloomberg) — Lovers of classical dance complain, rightly, about the dearth of compelling new choreography. American Ballet Theatre just gave them reason to hope.

Last Thursday, on the second night of its three-week season at New York’s City Center, the company offered the world premiere of “Kaleidoscope,” an astonishingly confident and inventive neoclassical work by a little-known choreographer, 26-year-old Canadian Peter Quanz.

Set to Camille Saint-Saens’s delectable Piano Concerto No. 5, the piece doesn’t flag once in its 27 minutes. It presents two couples who might live in different worlds –on neighboring country estates, say, given Holly Hynes’s pretty pastoral costumes. We meet the two pairs and get to know them sequentially. We see them together only at the ballet’s close.

The matrixes in which the couples operate are created by a corps de ballet of a dozen women and a half-dozen men. Quanz maneuvers this ensemble in swiftly shifting patterns that are invariably well-balanced though — contrary to traditional practice — asymmetrical. He keeps you eager to see what will happen next, as if you were following a thrilling plot. At the same time he delivers the very essence of classical dancing — harmony that continually reinvents itself.

Witty Surprises

As each leading pair plays against segments of the ensemble, it suggests a courtship that’s headed for ecstasy, yet prone to moments of misunderstanding. The two men, Ethan Stiefel and Maxim Beloserkovsky, are fair and fine-boned, with a delicate air about them. Their ladies, Gillian Murphy and Veronika Part, are generously proportioned women with a commanding presence. So the men appear to be sensitive souls, poets perhaps, amazed and delighted by their good fortune in being accepted as cavaliers to goddesses.

“Kaleidoscope” contains two witty surprises. The first is a passage in which the corps de ballet gets to dance without any intrusion from the principals, becoming, just for a moment — and deservedly — the whole show. The other is the finale, where the two main couples appear together for the first time, backed by the full corps, and the stage picture suddenly becomes symmetrical. It’s as if the two pastoral estates had merged and transformed themselves into the magnificent hierarchical court in which ballet was invented.

Dance of Death

Kurt Jooss’s antiwar ballet “The Green Table” may date to 1932, yet has lost no relevance. Constructed as a series of vignettes that have the vividness of great poster art, it shows corrupt world leaders instigating war while the people suffer. An all-devouring Death (David Hallberg, in the first cast) lays claim to his prey: valiant soldiers who believe in their cause, an impassioned war widow exacting revenge, a young girl forced into prostitution, a frail grandmother, even a profiteer. Each dies differently; all join finally in the macabre chain known from medieval times as the dance of death. Most of the performers need to add more weight and calm to their interpretations, but Marian Butler, as the old woman finally embracing death, is already perfect.

`Apollo’

The best that can be said of the company’s production of George Balanchine’s “Apollo” is that it includes the birth scene (and the original ascent to the heavens) that the choreographer ruthlessly sheered off his 1928 masterpiece late in his career. Otherwise ABT’s present rendition undermines both the sublimity of the ballet and its daring originality.

The orchestra, under Charles Barker, gives a lackadaisical account of Stravinsky’s score. Similarly, Richard Tanner’s staging ignored the dynamics of choreography in which angularity and abruptness brilliantly punctuate both allegro and lyrical dancing. I don’t know who instructed the muses to smile as if gently peddling their charms, but someone should tell them to stop.

© 2005 Bloomberg L.P. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission.

This article originally appeared in the Culture section of Bloomberg News on October 20, 2005.

Oct. 20 (Bloomberg) — Jerome Robbins’s exquisite 10-minute duet “Afternoon of a Faun” and a revival of Agnes de Mille’s exuberant 1942 “Rodeo” opened American Ballet Theatre’s three-week season last night, offering an auspicious start to the company’s fall run in New York.

“We’ll just be dancing ourselves silly and having a wonderful time,” artistic director Kevin McKenzie promised the opening-night audience at Manhattan’s City Center.

“Afternoon of a Faun” was first created in 1953 for the New York City Ballet. Referring back to Nijinsky’s famous choreography to the evocative Debussy score, it describes an encounter between a young man and woman in a ballet studio, where the possibility of romance vies with the dancers’ natural narcissism.

Jean-Pierre Frohlich, who staged the ballet for its ABT premiere, has given his dancers, Ethan Stiefel and Julie Kent, plenty of space in which to discover their own version of the characters.

Setting the mood from the outset, Stiefel captured the languor and self-involvement of the young man perfectly. Throughout, he performed with a spontaneity Robbins would have loved. Kent, though she has the right delicacy and elegance for the girl, seemed rather too knowing about how she wanted to look.

The piece has one of the most beautiful sets ever designed for a dance — a bare, luminous room created by Jean Rosenthal from panels of sheer white silk. It was appropriate that, on this occasion, the set design and the choreography returned to the stage of the City Center, for which they were first made.

Dancing Cowgirl

Agnes de Mille’s “Rodeo,” set to Aaron Copland’s echt- Americana score, marked the choreographer’s centenary. Corny, sentimental, and un-PC as it is, “Rodeo” is still disarming in its account of a cowgirl who wants to join the riding, roping guys and is tamed into loving one of them instead. The choreography’s daring intrusion of American vernacular movement into the rarefied classical vocabulary still feels fresh.

Faithfully staged by Paul Sutherland, with Cowgirl coaching from Christine Sarry (an unforgettable interpreter of the role), the production has the air of over-careful rehearsing. Further performances will relax and enrich it, making it look weathered by prairie sun and dust. Already the relationships among the characters are precise and tender. And Erica Cornejo makes a perfect Cowgirl, her mix of feistiness and yearning just right, her energy well-nigh incandescent.

`Gong,’ `Petipa’

Among the evening’s other offerings, Mark Morris’s “Gong” was by far the most substantial. Set to a gamelan-inflected score by Colin McPhee, it borrows gestures from Indonesian dance. Fifteen dancers move in the intricate, arresting patterns that are the choreographer’s trademark. A pair of eerie discontinuous duets performed in silence intensifies an atmosphere where the awkward becomes beautiful.

The familiar pas de deux from Marius Petipa’s “Paquita” filled the classical-bravura slot, danced by the Russian-trained Maxim Beloserkovsky and Irina Dvorovenko, a husband-and-wife team that’s mismatched dance-wise, her diva style overwhelming his poetic quality.

Three excerpts from Kirk Peterson’s “The Howling Cat” formed the lightest — and most heartily applauded — item on the program. This compendium of balleticized Spanish-dance cliches was valiantly performed by Paloma Herrera, Jose Manuel Carreno (who had convinced himself that it was amusing), and a trio of auxiliary men following Jesus Pastor’s example of switchblade swiftness.

Tempting Choices

ABT’s season is as crammed with temptations to various tastes as a deluxe assortment of chocolates. Four classics will return to the repertory: Antony Tudor’s psychological study of grief, “Dark Elegies,” George Balanchine’s “Apollo” (with the birth scene that the choreographer ruthlessly cut from the New York City Ballet production), Kurt Jooss’s ever-relevant antiwar ballet, “The Green Table,” and Twyla Tharp’s apocalyptic “In the Upper Room.” The world premiere of Peter Quanz’s “Kaleidoscope” will provide the novelty both dancers and audiences crave.

© 2005 Bloomberg L.P. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission.

This article originally appeared in the Arts & Leisure section of the New York Times on October 16, 2005.

THE first vision to greet viewers at the Oct. 19 opening of American Ballet Theater’s three-week season at the City Center will be what the program calls ”a room with a mirror.” It is Jean Rosenthal’s ethereal evocation of a ballet studio, created from diaphanous white silk, for Jerome Robbins’s ”Afternoon of a Faun,” a 10-minute boy-meets-girl duet with the evanescent, shimmering quality of a soap bubble. Ingeniously made and perennially popular, the 52-year-old work has just been staged for the company by the veteran Robbins expert Jean-Pierre Frohlich.

Like the set, the action of the ballet is simplicity itself. A young man, nude to the waist, in workaday black tights, dozes on the studio floor, then awakens, stretches indolently, rises and tries out a few steps. All the while, he examines his reflection, as dancers constantly do, in an imaginary mirror — actually, the invisible wall that separates the audience from the stage. A girl in a practice tunic, long hair unbound, enters, intent on her own reflection. At first startled to see another person, the two begin to relate through a tentative pas de deux and the tentative stirrings of romance, always retreating to the familiar safety of looking at their images rather than at each other. Finally, the boy brushes a kiss on the girl’s cheek. Wide-eyed, holding her hand to the place his lips touched, she backs away from him, out of the room. He returns to sleep, as if her presence and his desire had merely been a dream.

“Afternoon of a Faun” is set to Debussy’s impressionistic score, ”Prélude à l’Après-midi d’un Faune” (1892-94), a response to Mallarmé’s celebrated poem of 1876 describing an indolent faun on a languorous summer day encountering a bevy of nymphs who arouse his sexual longing. When the dancer Vaslav Nijinsky choreographed his first ballet to this score in 1912, it was nothing less than revolutionary. Rejecting the conventions of classical dancing, the performers moved two-dimensionally, their heads in profile, bodies facing front, like the figures in an archaic frieze, their movements angular and rigid. A severely restricted vocabulary was offset by potent rhythmic and sculptural effects, which are implicit in the luminous photographs taken of the ballet by Baron Adolf de Meyer.

Nijinsky’s iconoclastic choreography went almost unnoticed, however, in the scandal over the ballet. Having essentially been propositioned, the head nymph flees, leaving behind her long, gauzy scarf, which the faun appropriates and uses to consummate his desire. The ballet concludes with him recumbent in his resting place, arching his body in orgasm.

Robbins knew this famous precedent, of course, but dared to try his own version of the material for the New York City Ballet. Fascinated throughout his career by the qualities of youth, he took his immediate inspiration from two serendipitous sightings involving young dancers. He was struck, first, by the ”animalistic” quality of a teenager (Edward Villella) stretching at the barre. On another occasion, he was watching Louis Johnson and a student rehearsing the adagio from ”Swan Lake” — itself about an unexpected encounter, burgeoning love and thwarted longing. Robbins noticed that the dancers were so absorbed in their mirror images, through which they could correct their technique, that they seemed to ignore the erotic implications of their physical contact.

Co-opting Mallarmé’s theme and Debussy’s atmosphere, Robbins also echoed specific gestures of Nijinsky’s. Yet he made striking inventions of his own. Among the ballet’s memorable moments is the boy’s ”stroking” the girl’s loose, rippling hair, outlining the luxuriant length of it while reverently keeping an inch of air between it and his caressing hand. Nonetheless, she seems to feel his touch and springs away from him into a formal ballet pose that transforms her from a young woman susceptible to love into a classical statue no more malleable than marble.

Another landmark in the ballet is an ingenious and beautiful lift. The young man makes a circle of his arms and cradles the girl’s head between his palms. Then he widens the circle and lowers it to her waist while she slips through this hoop, reaching upward, and he cantilevers her body so that she seems to float horizontally, as if swimming in space. The mechanics are so well concealed, it looks like a miracle.

The most remarkable aspect of Robbins’s ”Faun,” however, is the air of utter simplicity and naturalness with which the choreographer insisted it be danced. As Mr. Frohlich, who has appeared in the title role, noted: ”This ballet is about real human beings. Sure, there are classical steps in it, but Jerry wanted it to be performed as if you weren’t performing, just being there in the moment. He wanted everything to look casual. This quality is very hard for classically trained dancers to get, and some of them have trouble with it in the beginning. They’re walking on their toes like princes and princesses. I say, ‘Strip it.’ You have to be sensitive. You have to be honest. You have to trust the choreography and do it for what it is.”

The original dancers of ”Afternoon of a Faun” — still, perhaps, uneclipsed — were Francisco Moncion and Tanaquil LeClercq, to whom Robbins subsequently dedicated the ballet. On opening night at American Ballet Theater, it will be danced by Ethan Stiefel and Julie Kent, who is celebrating 20 years with the company. Subsequent performances will showcase other teams of stars and stars-in-the-making, recreating ”Faun’s” potent mood and its astute mix of artifice and ordinariness.

Copyright © 2005 by The New York Times Co. Reprinted with permission.

This article originally appeared in the Arts & Leisure section of the New York Times on July 31, 2005.

Montclair, N.J.

SUSAN MARSHALL is putting the finishing touches on her new work, five brief dances sheltering under the umbrella title “Cloudless,” to have its premiere this week at Jacob’s Pillow. At least the rehearsal schedule called for finishing touches. It sometimes looks as if she is reinventing the dances from scratch, like a God with second thoughts.

We’re at the Alexander Kasser Theater, an intimate state-of-the-art house on the Montclair State University campus. Its executive director, Jedediah Wheeler, one of the commissioners of Ms. Marshall’s current work – the others are Jacob’s Pillow and Dance Theater Workshop, the venerable showcase for ground-breaking dance in Manhattan – has offered the choreographer theater time. This means she can move her work in progress out of the studio and develop it, with full production values, in a performance space, something she could not afford to do on her own. Mr. Wheeler, it would seem, agrees with the MacArthur Foundation, which made Ms. Marshall a fellow in 2000, that the people we regard as geniuses should not starve to death.

She has also received a Guggenheim fellowship; testimonials from the likes of Philip Glass, with whom she has collaborated; and positive reviews galore. The Chicago Tribune, for example, called her work “as profound as the art of dance can get.”

Still, she can’t pay the rent. Her Web site, susanmarshallandcompany.org, says so up top and straight out. The plea for funds essential to her company’s projected 20th-anniversary season at Dance Theater Workshop next spring tells prospective supporters exactly what their contribution will buy, while it reveals the high cost of making dances: $100 pays for a single day’s use of a studio; $1,000 puts a half-dozen dancers into the studio for a day; $10,000 commissions a new (short) dance. Poetic richness coupled with economic poverty – this is the state of dance in America. Ms. Marshall seems to take the situation in her stride: “I look at it,” she said in a tone that precludes further discussion, “as a challenge to be embraced.”

The financial straits, which clearly dictate working “smaller, tighter, faster,” as Ms. Marshall puts it, support her present artistic impulses. “At midcareer,” she said, “I began wondering what ideas and structures were central to my work. Looking backward and pushing deeper seemed to be the best way to go forward.”

She started with two early winners that are modest in means, stunning in effect. “Arms,” from 1984, is a stationary duet in which the dancers stand side by side, faces impassive, as their upper limbs, flailing, reaching, striking and twining, speak for the whole body and the soul as well. The 1979 “Kiss,” which will appear on the Pillow program, has its two performers suspended in rope harnesses as they swirl deliriously into each other’s embrace, then pull back into a more isolated association, over and over again. Both pieces seem to predict and sum up Ms. Marshall’s later work, in which pedestrian gestures, distilled to near abstraction, symbolize human desire and its inevitable partner, human conflict.

“Cloudless” is true to the small and tight stipulation Ms. Marshall has dictated to herself. The pieces for the Pillow are for one to five people; their duration is roughly 4½ to 6 minutes. For the Dance Theater Workshop engagement next March, where an expanded version of “Cloudless” will constitute the entire program, Ms. Marshall will double the number of pieces and let some run as long as 11 minutes. Throughout Ms. Marshall’s career, both tiny, terse creations for a nearly bare stage and big works with lavish production values have conveyed the same message: We are always of two minds about what we want. Defining, then articulating, our own state of mind is tough enough, but understanding that of others is well-nigh impossible. Inevitably, Ms. Marshall’s work tends to be dark.

Reluctantly, she agreed: “If you’re working with complexity and you’re working with the body, some of those overtones and undertones are going to be dark. I like to think, though, that they’re always counterbalanced by upward movement – and tenderness.”

Untrammeled joy, a rare quality in Ms. Marshall’s spectrum, actually prevails in the “Cloudless” solo for Petra van Noort. In perpetual motion, eyes gazing skyward, hands whirling and fluttering like a flock of butterflies, the dancer embodies a child’s ecstasy in merely being alive. When, toward the end, the dance slows down, it suggests that the ardent child has matured into a woman who keeps her early intimations of delight unextinguished inside.

Today’s rehearsal, with Ms. Marshall still adjusting the Pillow pieces – sometimes substantially – and grappling with early drafts of the Dance Theater Workshop material as well, offers a panoramic view of the choreographer’s idiosyncratic working method. Unlike Mark Morris and Twyla Tharp, Ms. Marshall does not follow the conventional route of choosing musical accompaniment at the outset, then inventing movement with her own body and transferring it to the dancers largely by physical demonstration. The sound score for “Cloudless” is being created in tandem with the choreography by Jane Shaw, and Ms. Marshall draws the movement out of her dancers, beginning with long sessions in directed improvisation. Throughout the process, she operates almost entirely via words.

“All the actual movement in my work is generated by the dancers,” Ms. Marshall explained. “I start by setting them in motion with instructions about space, timing and the nature of the activity. I give them physical goals – the more abstract, the better. The dramatic or psychological subtexts evolve as the dance develops, through our group discussions about where the work wants to go. I like to create through the back door, you see, because that’s where the discoveries – and the surprises – are.”

If Ms. Marshall’s style of choreographing is meditative and communal, her method of accomplishing a day’s work in the theater is a marvel of efficiency. Ms. Marshall runs the dances that are almost performance-ready, still allowing for “enormous changes at the last minute,” all the while engaging her performers in the process. Primary work on new pieces is deftly sandwiched into the schedule. The fairly raw material is allowed to be fitful and awkward.

Whenever there’s a moment’s break in the activity, Ms. Marshall addresses the sound, light and props, along with mini-conferences about where a dance is going and what it means. Not once does she project the frantic urgency that her packed agenda and impending deadlines might well provoke. Ms. Marshall seems particularly concerned about the transitions from one dance to the next. “Because it’s in the moments between events that some of the most meaningful and magical things happen,” she said. “You’ve put your energy into making what you think are the meaty, central parts of your dance. As is only natural, things haven’t turned out as you expected. Each part has taken on a life of its own. And now you have to connect them.”

Copyright © 2005 by The New York Times Co. Reprinted with permission.

This will be my last word in SEEING THINGS, at least for now. Two new ventures have opened up for me, and I can’t afford to turn them down. I’ve become the New York-based dance critic for Bloomberg News, and I’ve begun contributing regularly to the Arts & Leisure section of the New York Times. That’s about all the dance writing I can manage and still pay attention to my “other life”—writing for children.

I will miss many things about writing for ArtsJournal. One of the most important is the association with its founder and editor, Doug McLennan, whose inventiveness, apparent to AJ’s ever-growing readership, is equaled by the generosity I’ve known in working with him.

SEEING THINGS will continue to be available to readers. To access it, use this link: www.artsjournal.com/tobias. A link to SEEING THINGS will also appear on the ArtsJournal home page (www.artsjournal.com), in the right hand column, under “AJBlog Heaven.” I suspect this is the only Paradise I’ll ever attain, apart from those moments of bliss I experience while watching glorious dancers performing a splendid dance.

Fra Angelico: The Last Judgment: Paradise, ca. 1435-40; Staatliche Museen, Berlin, Germany; Photo: Jörg P. Anders

© 2005 Tobi Tobias