Archives for 2007

Guardian Angel

December 23, 2007 by Tobi Tobias

Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater / Masazumi Chaya 35th Anniversary Celebration / New York City Center, NYC / December 18, 2007

Masazumi Chaya, Associate Artistic Director of Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. Photo by Andrew Eccles.

I recall him vividly as a dancer. He was a powerhouse, but a deeply self-contained one, such as one sees in traditional Asian martial arts. This force never got in the way of lyricism when it was required–or sheer hi-jinks for that matter. He always seemed intent about something, be it the joy or anger or grief expressed by the choreography and music themselves, or possibly something beyond even that–perhaps the ecstasy of being an “acrobat of God.”

The full article appeared in Voice of Dance (http://www.voiceofdance.org) on December 20, 2007. To read it, click here.

Slaves to Books: Personal Indulgences No. 5

December 16, 2007 by Tobi Tobias

Bookwormish-ness runs in our family. Over the generations it has seized the soul of my mother, me, my daughter, and my daughter’s elder daughter, to name just the female victims. For example, whenever I take the subway with my young granddaughters–which is often, and often from one end of Manhattan to the other–I read aloud to them. Nearby passengers listen, smiling. Occasionally one of them says, “I remember that book from when I was a child.”

There is nothing like a book. Nothing. People complain about standing in that endless line at the post office or curse the tedium of their daily train commute from suburb to city and back again. Such frustrating situations can be averted by always (always!) having a book with you. Why wallow in boredom when you can simply transport yourself into another world?

Arthur Mitchell, whose Standard English is meticulous, uses Black English to thrust a point home when the occasion or the audience will benefit from it. Back in the seventies, when he founded Dance Theatre of Harlem, a black classical-dance company–literally taking children off the street to make dancers out of them, as well as teaching them to speak, act, and dress with an elegance that made them royal ambassadors–he’d say, in the accent of his native Harlem, “If I ever catch you in the subway without a book in front of your face . . . .” The sentence was never finished but the implied threat was dire and effective.

I have no idea if young DTH aspirants are still subject to that rule but, when I was teaching dance writing at Barnard College, I used it with my students. I explained to them that their “subway book” had to be one they weren’t required to read but, rather, chose to read, and I offered to buy books for any whose budget couldn’t support the strain. Then, every few sessions of our weekly seminar, I’d require them to whip out their book of the moment and hold it aloft.

I also mentioned regularly that the activities most likely to contribute to one’s becoming a professional writer were, first and foremost, to write a lot and, a close second, to read a lot. To my mind, taking courses in writing counted for nothing compared to learning from the examples of successful practitioners, from the pros who constituted the canon to purveyors of popular junk. Without realizing it at the time, I must have constantly mentioned many books that I loved and that had influenced my work.

The proof: Press tickets, a perk of performance journalists, usually come in pairs, and I regularly shared mine with my students. Occasionally, a dance company performing outside the usual Manhattan precincts would send a bus to collect journalists at Lincoln Center and deliver them to the outlying district in question by curtain time. Journalists were told the appointed hour of the bus’s departure and understood that it would be strictly adhered to. One day I sat in a crowded press bus fuming because my student “date,” who was usually reliable to a fault (scatterbrained conduct was simply not in her rep), had not shown up. Just as the doors of the bus were about to close for the trip, she staggered down the aisle to the empty seat beside me, lugging two outsize, bulging shopping bags emblazoned with the name of a familiar bookstore. “I’m sorry,” she said, close to tears, “I was buying every book you mentioned all semester, and it took longer than I expected.” I expected that, in the course of the next year, she would read them all. She was, as I said, reliable.

Obviously, I consider the acquisition of books a commendable enterprise. It is equally a serious problem. As every obsessive reader knows, books multiply in the night, and you soon find they are taking over your living space to a degree that can be outright dangerous. I remember that Edward Gorey, the inimitable author/artist, having filled his many bookshelves, took to creating tall, rickety, freestanding pillars of subsequently amassed volumes without which, apparently, he could not exist. Once, when I visited my dear friend the novelist Lynne Sharon Schwartz, she had ruthlessly plucked some 150 books from her overladen shelves and set them, spines up for easy identification, in cartons outside her apartment door. In front of them she had placed a boldly lettered sign: “TAKE AS MANY AS YOU WANT.” I’m afraid I did. She offered me some shopping bags with a gleeful smile.

None of the solutions to holding the book invasion at bay are particularly satisfactory, though they may fend off a bibliophile’s anxiety for a while. First of all, one can recognize the fact that book-owning isn’t what it used to be. The books you buy these days, alas, self-destruct at headlong speed–sometimes the spines crack even on the first reading–so amassing a personal library for posterity isn’t even possible. My grandchildren have pored over many of the picture books I originally bought for my children–volumes that are well worn from loving but incessant handling, yet still intact. The new books the grands acquire, however, will surely have collapsed long before their own children arrive on the scene.

As for me, after decades I got tired of using crammed bookshelves as wallpaper. I was never going to read Spinoza or Mickey Spillane–much as I thought I should when I acquired their works–so out they went, along with dozens of other worthy titles that had failed, over time, to seduce me. I felt little guilt about their afterlife. I live in a row house on the Upper West Side; any book put out on my stoop is adopted in ten minutes flat.

At the same time as I deaccessioned, I rediscovered the New York Public Library. Its catalogue is online. In the dead of night, your other chores finally done, you can order any volume in the entire city’s circulating collection to be sent to your local branch. You will be notified by e-mail when it arrives there. Then, all you have to do is stroll over with your library card (surely the ticket to a world of wonders!) and pick it up. If you’re a slow reader, you can renew the book online, more than once if no one else is clamoring for it. The most beautiful thing about the arrangement, though, is that the library makes these books go away–indeed, demands them back, threatening the dilatory with daily, if modest, fines. So now I can, theoretically at least, limit the books I give houseroom to the ones I need and the ones I love. Admittedly, I still have thousands.

I have also become a devotee of the adult version of being read to–audiobooks. While I’m allergic to electronic devices and congenitally incapable of understanding them, my husband, like many another man, is addicted to them. He has helped me acquire the spoken texts (there are several ways to do this without paying a cent, and even more choices if you have funds to spare), get them onto a tiny, portable gizmo that will play them (an iPod or other MP3 player) as I’m moving around, and learn the basic instructions for transferring word to ear–nothing fancy, mind you, like replaying a short section so admirable it begs to be repeated, just the essentials.

Now, when I do my regulation thirty minutes on the gym’s Treadmill to Nowhere or perform routine household tasks–both occasions, for me, of excruciating boredom–I can hear stories. In the last two months, I’ve heard Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons, Natalie Babbitt’s Tuck Everlasting, and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night. (That’s a lot of listening hours, but I have a streak of fitness fanaticism and I do a considerable amount of housework. I even iron, like Balanchine.) True, hearing a book is not really the same as reading the text, just as, between close friends, an e-mail lacks the texture of a letter. But, providing me with a way to elevate my heart rate without going out of my mind, audiobooks are on my short list of admirable contemporary inventions.

And then, just so you know, for books you can read without turning a page (though you do have to stay parked in front of a computer), there’s Project Gutenberg, which provides thousands of works in the public domain. Granted, people who detest reading literature from a screen will hate this. The same folks, however, may be happy to know that pillars of bookdom–the Bible, Shakespeare–are readily accessible on the Internet and yield to keyword searches, a convenience that can’t be claimed by our personally owned (perhaps inherited) bricks-and-mortar copies, though these are laden with other values, sentiment among them.

Valéry-Nicolas Larbaud called his two volumes of literary criticism Ce vice impuni, la lecture (reading, that unpunished vice). Vice only in the secret, all-pervasive delight it can bring, I’d say, along with the haunting fact that the addicted can’t be cured of it. My friend Lynne has, finally, given up smoking, but would never consider giving up books, indeed would never be able to. Nor would I. Nor would my granddaughter Lili, who since she was seven, has marched down the street holding her current book open in front of her face, ignoring her elders’ admonitions about the danger of accident, her very being enraptured by story. Reading may be marred by minor inconveniences, as stated above, along with possible solutions. Still, as I’ve mentioned, there is simply nothing like it. Nothing.

Two’s Company

December 11, 2007 by Tobi Tobias

NOTE: This essay was written some five years ago–intended for posting on The Dance Insider in the “Vignettes” series I was writing there. My editor advised against going public with it, since it made me sound ungrateful toward the companies who issue press seats in pairs and might alienate readers who did not enjoy press-ticket privileges. I took his advice. This week, the twinned postings of my friend and colleague Eva Yaa Asantewaa and my ArtsJournal colleague Apollinaire Scherr persuaded me to offer it belatedly.

Since the rewards of writing dance criticism are largely aesthetic, rarely enough to pay the rent, one of the job’s few perks is especially welcome: free tickets to the performance. Usually the freebies come in pairs–one seat for the critic and one for said critic’s guest. Most critics enjoy the privilege and produce a companion for the show, though legend has it that one reviewer consistently arrived alone. “I need the other seat for my coat,” he’d explain.

Having had access to press pairs for several decades, I feel qualified to report that securing a guest for that second seat is by no means simple. I’m even willing to admit–go on, call me a misanthrope–that sometimes it’s more trouble than it’s worth. Here’s the drill: You decide who would be congenial company (remembering that high-maintenance friends are simply too exhausting when you’re working) and who might enjoy the performance. Then, with a couple of back-ups on your list, you try to reach your first choice.

Understand that I’m writing from New York, where the populace is perpetually unreachable. You phone your prospective guest (let’s call this person your PG) and get his answering machine or you send her an e-mail. And then you wait for his/her response. If she tries phoning you back, you’re invariably out; thus the two of you are launched into the exasperating game of telephone tag. These unproductive maneuvers can go on at absurd length, unless one of you is sensible and bold enough to quit midway. If so, you are still without a date. A “no, thanks” response by e-mail is blessedly definitive–though it requires you to start again with another prospect, as did aborting that game of tag. An e-mailed “yes” simply engenders further e-mails–a dozen of them, easily, as the details of the arrangement are filled in. What time was it again? Which theater did you say? Where, exactly, shall we meet? Dinner before? Drink after? (More about the add-on socializing later.)

Mind you, merely managing to contact your PG doesn’t mean you’ve got a date. Once the two of you are in direct communication, you have a good chance of finding the object of your invitation busy at the time of the performance. As I’ve indicated, I’m based in New York, where the citizens pride themselves on being too busy to breathe. Even if your PG is free in the relevant time slot, she may inform you (if she’s frank as well) that, since she last shared your pair, she has developed a morbid loathing of–you name it: opera houses, black box theaters, traveling to Brooklyn; classical dance; modern dance; experimental dance; narrative, abstract, or dramatic dance; world dance (the stuff we used to call “ethnic”); Broadway musicals; hoofers old and new; butoh; mime; the tango; or works in progress. And so you must start your search all over again, should you have the time to do so. And the patience. And the desire. Often you discover that you have expended your full measure of all three on Round One.

Say, however, that you’ve been lucky enough to have secured yourself a companion for the show. Next you run smack up against a peculiar truth about such outings. You may be attending the performance for work purposes, but your guest is more likely to be doing so for the normal reasons people go to the theater: to be entertained and to socialize. So, having said yes to the show, your PG is now, quite logically, suggesting dinner before or a drink after. Problem is, I’m a dance critic; I can’t afford to dine out more than once in a blue moon. Besides, the restaurants reasonably close to the major theaters have become so crowded and noisy, meaningful conversation–assuming that’s what you’re after–is precluded. For me, post-performance gallivanting is equally hard. Either I have to write overnight or I have to get up early in the morning if I’m going to fit the gym into my crazed schedule. (As it is, when Twyla Tharp frequented our mutual local gym, she was already on her virtuous and athletically toned way out of there by the time I arrived.) One friend commented wryly after a performance, as we headed briskly for our respective neighborhoods, which are separated by the width of Central Park, “Thanks for the chance to see the show. We should get together one of these days.”

[Read more…] about Two’s Company

Thierree’s Magic Tricks Charm at BAM; Alvin Ailey

December 9, 2007 by Tobi Tobias

This article originally appeared in the Culture section of Bloomberg News on December 7, 2007.

Satchie Noro swings from ropes while performing in “Au Revoir Parapluie,” directed by James Thierree, at the BAM Harvey Theater in New York on Dec. 4, 2007. Performances will continue through Dec. 16. Photographer: Julieta Cervantes/BAM via Bloomberg News

Dec. 7 (Bloomberg) — A woman in crimson hangs upside down in a tangle of thick ropes, later soaring through the air in a white nightgown, like Peter Pan’s Wendy. An acrobatically inclined man is defeated by the motion of a skeletal rocking chair. The stage floor gets pried apart to make a lake in an improvised rice field, while the plants become whimsically pliant swords in a mock duel.

James Thierree’s “Au Revoir Parapluie” (Goodbye, Umbrella), at the BAM Harvey Theater through Dec. 16, is a loosely joined performance of skits involving acrobatics, mime, magic tricks, aerial feats, a bit of singing and sundry aspects of dancing. Thierree was supposedly inspired by the Orpheus and Eurydice myth — loss, search, death-defying retrieval — but you’d never know that.

What you do wonder, unless you’re simply content to be charmed by the absurd, is how he’s going to make the whole business cohere. It does so only vaguely and succeeds, instead, through inventive props, the intrepid spirit of its five performers and a vein of pathos that gives the pervasive silliness some gravity.

Creator of the French troupe Compagnie du Hanneton, Thierree plays the hero of the show, a lovable charmer unable to cope with the everyday actions we take for granted — putting on a jacket, sitting in a chair — let alone with securing a lover. Though he lacks the exquisite timing of a world-class comedian, perhaps because he hasn’t yet learned the value of stillness, he’s undeniably a multitalented performer.

Miner’s Helmet

The rangy, bemused Magnus Jakobsson, wearing a miner’s searchlight helmet, provides the magic. His best stunts have no visible props or results; it’s all in the mime. Kaori Ito, a tiny, hyperkinetic woman, dances the role of the hero’s over-eager pet. The luscious Satchie Noro, who does the aerial work, is the hero’s elusive love, while a singer, Maria Sendow, appears in settings involving the seedy red velvet and tacky gold trim of an opera house in picturesque decline.

The decor, especially its huge absurdist props, is a main character in the show. The most prominent items are a giant ladder providing an extended balcony, which gets pushed around on a conglomeration of dubiously reliable wheels — think Claes Oldenburg — and a flies-to-floor hanging of ropes that looks like an old-fashioned wet mop on steroids.

Thierree inherited the right genes for his work. His parents were prominent in advancing the nouveau cirque genre, known best in the U.S. through Cirque du Soleil. His grandfather was Charlie Chaplin; his great-grandfather, Eugene O’Neill (not given to the lighthearted, granted, yet certainly a theatrical innovator). Thierree is already 33, but I have a hunch he’s only beginning to harness his imagination.

At the BAM Harvey Theater, 651 Fulton St., Brooklyn, through Dec. 16. Information: +1-718-636-4100 or http://www.bam.org.

`Phoebe Snow’

The Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, at the New York City Center through Dec. 31, has wisely ranged through its attic and come up with a winner — Talley Beatty’s 1959 “The Road of the Phoebe Snow.” The revival, staged by Masazumi Chaya, the company’s associate artistic director, proves that a work typical of its time can burn bright today.

The dance shows us a 14-strong bevy of young people, who may be have-nots but still retain some romantic hope as well as immense vitality. The group’s taut body language, however, shows that it’s living close to the edge and can just as easily turn vicious.

In an emotionally potent duet danced by Briana Reed and Glenn Allen Sims, the woman is just a callous man’s passing sexual fancy. This passage is immediately succeeded by a luminous pas de deux of unsullied love between Linda Celeste Sims and Clifton Brown.

Trouble Starts

The next thing you know, big trouble starts. Provoked by one malevolent guy, the crowd turns on the radiant pair, perhaps jealous of its brief, unclouded joy. The mob viciously beats the man; the woman is raped and so traumatized she throws herself under a passing train.

The construction of the piece is knife-sharp, as is its message. The passenger train named the Phoebe Snow was a creation of advertising in the early 20th century. The Lackawanna Railroad featured trains fueled by anthracite, a hard coal that left passengers’ clothes unsullied, unlike the soot-producing trains fueled by soft bituminous coal. Ads depicted Phoebe as a privileged pale-skinned young woman elegantly attired in immaculate white. Beatty, who grew up along the trains’ route, tells the gritty truth.

At City Center, 131 W. 55th St., through Dec. 31. Information: +1-212-581-1212 or http://www.alvinailey.org.

Bejart’s Spandex `Firebird’ Gets Demure With Ailey

December 6, 2007 by Tobi Tobias

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

Clifton Brown from the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater rehearses for Maurice Bejart’s “Firebird” in New York on Aug. 21, 2007. Performances of the show will continue at the New York City Center through Dec. 31. Photographer: Eduardo Patino/Alvin Ailey Dance Theater via Bloomberg News

Dec. 4 (Bloomberg) — Seeing the late Maurice Bejart’s “Firebird,” the centerpiece of the gala that opened the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater’s five-week season at the New York City Center on Nov. 28, you’d never guess that the French choreographer was celebrated and reviled for works that were spectacular and scandalous. Unless, of course, you expected to see a ballerina in a red-feathered tutu in the title role rather than Bejart’s choice of a gorgeous young man sheathed in shiny, fetchingly cut vermilion spandex.

Bejart uses a condensed version of the Stravinsky score first (and probably best) choreographed by Mikhail Fokine in 1910, but he devised an entirely new libretto. Rejecting the Russian folk tale usually matched with the music, he presents a group of revolutionaries outfitted in camouflage. They are prodded into action (against a never-specified enemy) by the title character, who seems to preach a gospel of love undercut, where necessary, by violence. When this Firebird dies of exhaustion, another arrives, phoenix-like, to replace him, so that the vision of an ideal world is never extinguished.

Choreographed in 1970, this “Firebird” is, thematically, very much of its time. The piece uses a classical-ballet vocabulary (rather than the jazz-inflected modern dance that is the Ailey’s default mode), and the company’s versatile and personable dancers do well with it. Yet the work is so neatly and conventionally constructed, it looks old-fashioned.

`Saddle Up!’

Other new additions to the company’s repertory will surface in the course of the season. So far, I’ve seen “Saddle Up!” about which the less said, the better. Choreographed by Fredrick Earl Mosley to an engaging composite score involving Edgar Meyer, Mark O’Connor, and Yo-Yo Ma, it’s a puerile take on already hokey Wild West themes. The dancers were as sassy as could be under the dismal circumstances.

Even if its repertory generally leaves much to be desired, the Ailey has some remarkable assets. It has the savviest, most financially productive board of directors of any dance company I know and an artistic director, Judith Jamison, who is unafraid of running a tight ship according to her vision. Jamison also boasts a theatrical presence and timing that have only expanded since her dancing days.

Judith, Judith, Judith

As she emceed the gala, even her costume added to her effect: shaved head, red specs, outsize dangling earrings, a silver necklace as formidable as a breastplate and a floor- sweeping black monk’s robe lined with red, the traditional Ailey accent color, visible when her bold stride made it flap open.

And the dancers themselves are unbeatable. It seems almost arbitrary to single out a few favorites featured in the gala program.
The young Clifton Brown was pure poetry in the title role of “Firebird.” Jamison’s recent restaging of the solo Ailey himself choreographed to Duke Ellington’s “Reflections in D” showcased Matthew Rushing, a 15-year veteran with the troupe. He’s a small, exquisitely proportioned dancer whose bare arms and torso would be a credit to the most rigorous gym and a sweet, gentle face. His technique is formidable; his style, lyrical.

Matthew Rushing from the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater rehearses for “Reflections in D” in New York on Aug. 21, 2007. Performances of the show will continue at the New York City Center through Dec. 31. Photographer: Eduardo Patino/Alvin Ailey Dance Theater via Bloomberg News

In Ailey’s signature piece, “Revelations,” Linda Celeste Sims and her husband, Glenn Allen Sims, give an unsurpassable account of the rapt adagio duet “Fix Me, Jesus.” They displayed an intimate rapport with their subject (an oppressed or imperfect soul seeking help), the spiritual to which it’s choreographed and each other (those phenomenal balances are possible only through deep mutual trust).

Linda and Glenn Sims from the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater rehearse for “Revelations” in New York in this undated handout photo. Performances of the show will continue at the New York City Center through Dec. 31. Photographer: Andrew Eccles/Alvin Ailey Dance Theater via Bloomberg News

Their unwavering focus, which excluded even the smallest extraneous movement, epitomized the observation offered by the evening’s guest of honor, Russell Simmons: “Dance is living prayer.”

At 131 W. 55th St. through Dec. 31. Information: +1-212-581-1212; http://www.alvinailey.org.

Thinking About “The Nutcracker”

December 1, 2007 by Tobi Tobias

New York City Ballet: George Balanchine’s The Nutcracker / New York State Theater, Lincoln Center, NYC / November 23 – December 30, 2007.

Marie and the tree from New York City Ballet’s The Nutcracker by George Balanchine. Photo by Paul Kolnik.

The Nutcracker–in George Balanchine’s version for the New York City Ballet, the most skillful, intuitive, and moving that I’ve ever seen–is an essay in contrasts, both physical and social.

The full article appeared in Voice of Dance (http://www.voiceofdance.org) on November 28, 2007. To read it, click here.

City Ballet’s Annual `Nutcracker’ Defies Gravity

November 29, 2007 by Tobi Tobias

This article originally appeared in the Culture section of Bloomberg News on November 29, 2007.

Robert La Fosse, standing second from the right, as Herr Drosselmeier, performs in the New York City Ballet production “The Nutcracker” in New York in this undated photo. Photographer: Paul Kolnik/NYCB via Bloomberg News

Nov. 29 (Bloomberg) — A bracing tonic for the Scrooges among us is “The Nutcracker,” choreographed to Tchaikovsky’s captivating score by George Balanchine for the New York City Ballet.

In the course of its annual five-week run at the New York State Theater (this year, through Dec. 30), it regularly features the company’s seasoned stars as well as stars-in-the making; alternating casts of some 40 Lilliputian children from the School of American Ballet, impeccably rehearsed by Garielle Whittle; and scenic wonders such as a Christmas tree that grows to a surreal height, lights flickering.

You know the story: At a decorous Christmas Eve party long ago, Godfather Drosselmeier gives Marie, the prepubescent daughter of the house, a magical nutcracker that sets in motion striking transformations and wish fulfillments. These climax in a visit to the Sugar Plum Fairy, who reigns over the Land of Sweets, with Marie escorted by the nutcracker now transmuted into the young prince of her girlish dreams.

The opening night’s Sugar Plum Fairy, Maria Kowroski, mistress of adagio dancing, gave a ravishing account of the ballet’s climactic duet. Her Cavalier, Charles Askegard, was secure enough to toss her into the air for a moment midway through their fish-dive maneuver that is already a tour de force: “Look, Sugar, no hands!”

Maria Kowroski as the Sugar Plum Fairy, rear, and Charles Askegard as her Cavalier, perform in the New York City Ballet production “The Nutcracker” in New York in this undated photo. Photographer: Paul Kolnik/NYCB via Bloomberg News

More surprisingly, Kowroski was radiant and tender at her entrance, reigning over the flock of tiny angels that scoots across the stage in interweaving patterns as if on ball bearings.

Ashley Bouder, as the Dewdrop leaping and whirling her way through a corps of Flowers, was even more astounding than usual in her athletic brilliance. Audiences adore her. I still have reservations about her dancing, which is two-dimensional rather than sculptural, a phenomenon that a camera could render perfectly. Live dancing demands more depth.

Nothing Tragic

I also miss the whiff of tragedy that Heather Watts once brought to this role, as if to reflect the evanescence of a dewdrop’s perfection. But perhaps that is too much to ask these days when bravura technique is valued above subtler qualities.

The generation of nascent ballerinas was represented by Erica Pereira and Rachel Piskin, not long out of their student years at SAB. They seconded the remarkable young virtuoso Daniel Ulbricht in the shamelessly politically incorrect pseudo-Chinese dance, “Tea,” which represents one of the treats displayed in the second act’s “Land of Sweets.”

Among the children in leading roles, Jonathan Alexander stood out for his spontaneous exuberance as the naughty kid brother. The all-important character role of Herr Drosselmeier lies at the other end of the age scale. Playing the enigmatic inventor and magician who makes Marie’s dreams (as well as the nightmares) come true, Robert La Fosse has toned down his earlier over-the-top interpretation. Now he displays just the right blending of strangeness and fantasy.

Through Dec. 30 at the New York State Theater, Lincoln Center. Information: +1-212-870-5570; http://www.nycballet.com.

Family & Friends: Personal Indulgences No. 4

November 18, 2007 by Tobi Tobias

When I was growing up, my mother pointed out to me that, among my aunts, uncles, and myriad cousins (along with any spouses and offspring that had accreted to them), the ones that I liked best invariably had the “worst” personalities, moral characters, and behavioral track records. At least according to the standards of our petit-bourgeois world. This was true, but not entirely true. My absolute all-time favorite family member, my mom’s elder sister, Ann, was a saint–all self-effacing and genuine sweetness and tenderness. I adored her and named my daughter after her. I still cherish her memory and talk about her to my daughter’s daughters, my grands. But I digress.

Once I got considerably older, I noticed how many of my closest friends (a majority of them artistic types like me) were “peculiar,” as my mother would have put it–vulnerable, even fragile creatures, given to unconventional behavior because they recognized norms only grudgingly as they went about their business of making the world continually new. I was happy, at this point, to discover what Morison Cousins, the great designer of Tupperware, said: “People who are the most interesting are often neurotic. The ones with good sense almost lose their allure.”

Tel Aviv’s `Gaga’ Dancers Dance to Eno and Bach

November 16, 2007 by Tobi Tobias

This article originally appeared in the Culture section of Bloomberg News on November 16, 2007.

Nov. 16 (Bloomberg) — Nine casually dressed women move as a unit to Brian Eno’s “Neroli,” which hovers on the edge of silence. Their dance is called “Humus” (Latin for “earth”).

They’re introspective and sensuous, hunkering down to sway torso and pelvis as if they were so many waves in the sea, or recumbent, stretching and folding their legs like languid odalisques.

This is the most congenial section of “Shalosh” (“Three”), choreographed by Ohad Naharin for his Tel Aviv- based Batsheva Dance Company. Created in 2005, the 70-minute triptych is on view at the BAM Howard Gilman Opera House through Saturday.

The Tel Aviv-based Batsheva Dance Company choreographed by Ohad Naharin in this undated photograph released to the media on Friday, Nov. 16, 2007. Source: BAM Howard Gilman Opera House via Bloomberg News.

The introductory segment of the piece, called “Bellus” (“Beauty”), begins with 10 dancers facing the audience with calm interest, as if they were the spectators and the audience the show. The group disperses, leaving Erez Zohar to execute a solo of peculiar moves linked not by mood or meaning but simply by the dancer’s fluidity and physical power. Some of these moves are undeniably beautiful, but as if by accident; others are downright weird.

Eventually, he strides off with the busy officiousness of someone with a lot to do. His material is then given new contexts by other soloists, a couple in the shy bloom of love and the full cast we met at the outset.

The final section of the dance, cagily called “Seus” — which can mean either “this” or “not this” — sets 17 dancers jiving to a raucous mix of pop music. Its most eloquent passages are a duet for Sharon Eyal and Guy Shomroni suggesting that love hurts and another for two guys, Gavriel Spitzer and Matan David. Based on old-time social dances, it is delectably tender and funny.

Dusky Lighting

The piece finishes with a gorgeous one-liner in which the dancers, barely visible in dusky lighting, mill about grotesquely like the tame monsters in Maurice Sendak’s “Where the Wild Things Are.” The accompaniment is a Glenn Gould recording of Bach’s “Goldberg Variations.”

Co-founded by Baroness Batsheva de Rothschild and Martha Graham in 1964, the company has shifted with the times — radically since Naharin took over as artistic director in 1990. Today it features his work primarily and tours worldwide, distinguished for dancing that alternates — often in the space of seconds — delicate, subtle phrases with huge, charged moves and is unafraid of either the ostensibly ugly or silly.

Naharin emphasizes the fact that his company now trains in a method called Gaga. He developed it to rehabilitate himself after being severely incapacitated by a spinal injury. Gaga is part of an increasingly popular trend that has dancers supplementing or even discarding a highly codified technique that they’ve mastered for a less rigid movement language designed to free the body while making it flexible, strong, and self-aware.

Batsheva Dance Company is at the BAM Howard Gilman Opera House, 30 Lafayette Ave., Brooklyn, through Nov. 17. Information: +1-718-636-4100; http://www.bam.org.

Devoid of Spontaneity

Not every heartening start has a happy ending. The Pennsylvania Ballet, at the City Center in a rare visit to our town, was founded in 1963 by Barbara Weisberger, a protegee of George Balanchine. It benefited from a Ford Foundation sponsorship to elevate promising companies from the status of “regional,” with its gloomy implications. The troupe reached its highest luster in the decade from 1973 to 1982 under the direction of Benjamin Harkarvy, when its productions of Balanchine’s works were widely considered worthy alternative readings to the New York City Ballet’s.

Since then, matters seem to have gone downhill. “Serenade,” the Balanchine signature work that opened the five-day engagement, was given a conscientiously prepared showing devoid of both spontaneity and mystery, to say nothing of technical aplomb.

Contrived Escapades

The dancers were far more at ease in the other piece on the program, “Carmina Burana,” to the melodramatic Carl Orff score about lust, spirituality and life’s subjection to the wheel of fortune. A new version by the company’s resident choreographer, Matthew Neenan, offers 55 minutes of contrived escapades, their gaudy, peculiar costuming thwarting any meaning the dance may have aspired to.

The Pennsylvania Ballet is at New York City Center, 131 W. 55th St., between Sixth and Seventh avenues, through Nov. 18. Information: +1-212-581-1212 or http://www.citycenter.org.

(Tobi Tobias is the New York dance critic for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are her own.)

Saarinen’s Shakers Dance, Sing; Garth Fagan’s Peripheral Vision

November 9, 2007 by Tobi Tobias

This article originally appeared in the Culture section of Bloomberg News on November 9, 2007.

Nov. 9 (Bloomberg) — Swathed in black, not an inch of flesh visible but for their faces, hands and an opening at the spine or chest, eight dancers cover the stage with a heavy, awkward gait. Outstretched arms angled, torsos canted forward, they strike the floor with their sturdy shoes, their long inky skirts flapping like the wings of wounded birds.

Tero Saarinen dances with member of his company while performing “Borrowed Light” at the Brooklyn Academy of Music Opera House in the Brooklyn borough of New York, on Nov. 7, 2007. Photographer: Jack Vartoogian/FrontRowPhotos via Bloomberg News

The Finnish choreographer Tero Saarinen’s “Borrowed Light,” which opened Wednesday at the gala celebrating the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s 25th Next Wave Festival, portrays the Shakers, a Protestant sect that arose in the 18th century, seeking spiritual perfection. Believers lived communally, with Spartan simplicity, observing a strict separation of the sexes. Their rituals included a cappella singing of hymns composed by the worshippers and ecstatic dance with trembling and wrenching movements intended to cast out sin — and perhaps the tension of thwarted sexuality.

Eight black-clad singers of the Boston Camerata — an early-music ensemble led by Joel Cohen, who co-opted the Shaker music — move fluidly among Saarinen’s dancers, their voices intensifying the otherworldly element of the piece.

In particular, a solo danced by Carl Knif epitomizes the struggle between the sacred and the profane. Begun in silence, its motifs are outflung limbs, trembling fingers and a torso curving violently forward and back, making the whole body rock and stumble. The choreography, for small single-sex clusters and, of course, the full-cast passages, emphasizes the communal support these isolated people must have given one another despite their inner conflicts and dark nights of the soul.

Perfect Design

Design is a prominent partner in the effect of “Borrowed Light,” and it is perfect. Erika Turunen created the handsome costumes; Mikki Kunttu has the performers moving in a rectangle of glowing illumination in an otherwise dark space bordered by stepped platforms.

The title of the dance comes from the Shaker architectural practice of putting windows in interior rooms, so that daylight could be shared, making the workday longer. “Put your hands to work, and your heart to God” was a Shaker motto. One result of that devoted labor was the austere, graceful furniture that has outlasted the influence of the sect itself.

The dance is striking and intelligently crafted, but its conclusion — a melodramatic collision of the sexes succeeded by a consoling wallow in pathos — makes it unworthy of being compared to its great precedents — Doris Humphrey’s “The Shakers” and Martha Graham’s “Primitive Mysteries,” both created in 1931 and still the last word on plainspoken religious fervor.

Through Nov. 10 at 30 Lafayette Ave., Brooklyn. Information: +1-718-636-4100; http://www.bam.org.

Garth Fagan

“Edge/Joy,” an ingenious new work by Garth Fagan featured in his company’s weeklong run at the Joyce Theater, has a bubbling, playful air and a serious subject: how we see.

The human eye naturally gravitates to the center of the area it’s observing, the place where the important stuff is supposedly happening. Fagan challenges that habit by putting the action at the edges of the stage.

Solo, in pairs or trios, the sassily clad dancers animate borders and corners, leaving the spectators’ usual point of focus a mysterious void. Every entrance and exit is a small surprise, and each dancer seems intent on his or her own agenda. From time to time, the stage fills with the piece’s full dozen dazzling performers, passing each other as if at rush hour or with small units doing disparate things, a la Merce Cunningham.

Look Aside

“Edge” is a dance that refuses to tell you where to look, yet the jigsaw-puzzle choreography magically coheres. The music, by Ricardo Zohn-Muldoon — for inventively combined piano, strings, woodwinds and percussion — cooperates in every way.

The Jamaican-born Fagan’s signature style mixes the elegant lines, razor-sharp execution and phenomenal balances of ballet, the percussive isolations of jazz and the earthiness of modern dance with Afro-Caribbean polyrhythms.

Nicolette Depass, Steve Humphrey, Micha Scott, and Norwood Pennewell perform in the Garth Fagan Dance, “Senku” in Oct. 17, 2006. Photographer: Steven Schreiber/Ellen Jacobs Associates via Bloomberg News

Fusion is a commonplace these days, but Fagan’s style is uniquely his. Too easily, the style itself can become the whole show, though in “Edge/Joy” it’s merely the native language of a choreographer out to tell you that byways can be more rewarding than the highway.

Through Nov. 11 at 175 Eighth Ave. Information: +1-212-242-0800; http://www.joyce.org.