Archives for 2007

This article originally appeared in Voice of Dance (http://www.voiceofdance.org) on September 21, 2007.

Big Dance Theater / Dance Theater Workshop, NYC /
September 19-22, 25-29, 2007

Big Dance Theater’s The Other Here. Photo by Julieta Cervantes.

Here’s the recipe for Big Dance Theater’s The Other Here, just arrived at Dance Theater Workshop after a February premiere at Japan Society and a tour including Jacob’s Pillow. I don’t think the auteurs of this dance-theater group, Annie-B Parson and Paul Lazar, will object to my going public with it, because it operates on eternal human ground. The piece looks like the “pretend” games of vividly imaginative pre-literate children, in which the youngsters dress themselves in a motley assortment of co-opted clothing and fervidly enact, in words and motion, free-form stories that change as easily as weather though their theme holds strong at the center.

These are The Other Here‘s specific ingredients: Two texts: a pair of stories, The Carp and Life at Mr. Tange’s by the celebrated Japanese writer Masubi Ibusi (1898-1993), who absorbed much about mood and human nature from Chekhov, and teaching materials published by American life-insurance purveyors happened upon in a used-book store by the troupe’s dramaturg. Westerners’ reverent but unavoidably skewed appreciation of traditional Japanese customs. Okinawan dance, reimagined by Parson, who comes from an American postmodern culture and accepts that fact blithely. Music ranging from Okinawan café ballads of the 1920s, rendered with just the right degree of sentiment by the impossibly pretty Heather Christian, and a deafening dose of latter-day pop. Gender fluidity, as in the diminutive Jess Barbagallo’s dangerously persuasive insurance broker. (Though she looks like Tom Sawyer, Barbagallo is the most seductive performer in the piece.)

And then there’s the fish. It’s a valuable white carp given by a dying friend to the protagonist, one Mehdi (played by Lazar, who doubles as an insurance salesman losing his grip as he ages). Mehdi reluctantly promises to be responsible for the creature’s fate and immediately, then over years, tries to find it another home. The carp, first shown in a Japanese wooden carrier-bucket, is, through Peter Flaherty’s video magic, transferred to a large pond and then a huge one, growing each time–like a problem one has never fully addressed.

Needless to say, Big Dance Theater’s most significant gift is for making disparate elements cohere in a realm beyond logic.

The atmosphere of the piece is nostalgic, regretful for promises unfulfilled, with pockets of gaiety (such as a bubbling clapping dance). It’s infiltrated by the glib lies of the life-insurance folks, which serve as a metaphor for the dangerous untruths we tell, hear, and swallow every day. At the same time, it points to a co-existent world, one that’s simpler, more honest and tolerant, in which pleasure and goodwill can flourish.

Big Dance Theater’s The Other Here. Photo by Julieta Cervantes.

Other spare special effects are marvels, too, especially the use of a stage-wide panel of colorless translucent strips that form an upstage sky-to-earth curtain. Designed by Takeshi Kata, it blurs the image of people moving on a platform behind it–like a couple sheltering under a parasol–to create images that quietly evoke the prints of old Japan.

The piece serves as a lovely hour of entertainment–not forcefully or even significantly theatrical, but with an ability to send out ripples like a stone lightly skimmed on the surface of a lake or, if you will, a carp suddenly shifting direction in its watery domain. It is inordinately helped by the fact that its six performers–Barbagallo, Christian, Chris Giarmo, Molly Hickok, Lazar, and Jennie MaryTai Liu–are adorable, each in a different way.

The Other Here is crammed with enigmatic one-liners–amusing, profound, or both at once. “The truth of this life lies in its impermanence.” “There is so much magic in what we do.” As I understand it, some of the “pearls” come from the Ibusi stories, some from the insurance hawkers. More often than not, it’s hard to tell which. Now there’s irony for you.

© VoiceofDance.com 2007

This article originally appeared in the Culture section of Bloomberg News on Sept. 17, 2007.

Sept. 17 (Bloomberg) — On film, swathed head to ankles in a tube of stretch jersey, the only bare flesh a face like an ancient mask and work-toughened hands and feet, Martha Graham dances “Lamentation,” her landmark 1930 solo that is the ultimate incarnation of grief.

“Lamentation Variations” was concocted for the opening performance (significantly, on Sept. 11) of the Martha Graham Dance Company’s two-week New York season. It follows the Graham footage with brief, slight pieces by Aszure Barton, Larry Keigwin and Richard Move (the Graham impersonator who used to be persona non grata with the troupe). These afterthoughts, borrowing some of Graham’s gestures and fragments of the work’s mood, are both insignificant and unnecessary.

Now under the direction of Janet Eilber, once a glamorous Graham principal, the company has been heir to chronic waves of disaster and dissolution in its 80-year life. Again, it’s attempting rebirth (one of the legendary choreographer’s favorite words). It’s got three strikes against it.

The company has not yet produced heroic performers equal to those who brought Graham’s great middle-period works to life in the 1930s and ’40s — pieces such as the flawless “Appalachian Spring,” the ecstatic “Diversion of Angels” and the tempestuous “Night Journey” and “Cave of the Heart,” all of which are being performed this season. Graham stars — Pearl Lang, Mary Hinkson, Helen McGehee, Ethel Winter, Yuriko (Kikuchi), Matt Turney and Bertram Ross, among the ones I saw — could tear a passion to tatters both physically and emotionally.

Operatic Scale

Then there’s the cultural dissonance. Apart from Graham devotees, current audiences find even the best works hopelessly outdated, often ridiculous. The dances’ fierce, gut-sprung vocabulary (Graham’s unique invention) and their grand-opera emotive style couldn’t be more contrary to the cool, sleek temper of the times.

And now Eilber, who can give the company no future if it can’t sell tickets, has taken to “contextualizing” (one of her own favorite words) the repertory, promoting works of genius that used to speak perfectly well for themselves. Eilber has a different dance-world celebrity hosting each program, telling the audience what it’s going to see and testifying to its worth.

Of course, there were redeeming moments. Relieving an alarmingly tepid opening night, the dancers playing the Adam- Eve-Lilith-Serpentine Stranger quartet in “Embattled Garden” unfroze a few minutes into the dance and went for broke. They still weren’t wonderful, but they suddenly took a chance on owning their roles instead of working by rote like dutiful schoolchildren.

Vehement Eve

Cast against type to play Eve, Jennifer DePalo, a strong- boned woman with vehemence and concentration to match, was the most vivid of them. She proved her mettle the next night as the chief soloist in “Sketches From `Chronicle,”’ one of the few Graham pieces that regularly elicit cheers from today’s viewers, with its superb, severe architecture and an all-female cast as self-contained as nuns and as ferocious as furies.

On the same program, DePalo also played the Leader of the Chorus, a secondary role in “Night Journey,” with concentrated fervor, putting a barely passable Jocasta and Oedipus in the shade.

I also liked the work of the young Atsuko Tonohata, as effervescent as spring in “Diversion of Angels,” and the veteran Miki Orihara, who seems to understand what’s going on in a dance with every cell in her delicate body.

The third evening, as Medea in “Cave of the Heart,” Orihara approached that transcendent state in which the carefully designed choreography seemed to emanate from her own anatomy and state of mind. Tadej Brdnik, as Jason, used his blunt force effectively, in contrast to the other leading men in the troupe, who count too much on the beauty of their gorgeously honed physiques.

Most everything else I saw was destined to disappoint the old Graham fans and discourage new viewers.

Through Sept. 23 at the Joyce Theater, Eighth Ave. at 19th St. Information: +1-212-242-0800; http://www.joyce.org.

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

This article originally appeared in Voice of Dance (http://www.voiceofdance.org) on August 27, 2007.

Nureyev: The Russian Years / PBS “Great Performances” / August 29, 2007

Rudolph Nureyev. Photo courtesy Thirteen/WNET New York.

Rudolph Nureyev (1938-1993), the Tatar ballet dancer, was a phenomenon before America and the world at large ever heard of him. Now there’s a TV documentary supporting that position. Nureyev: The Russian Years, a joint project of WNET and the BBC, has its American premiere August 29 in the PBS “Great Performances” series. Written and produced by John Bridcut, it chronicles the earliest segment of the dancer’s career through the immediate period following his dramatic defection from the Soviet Union in 1961. And of course it exalts Nureyev as the exotic, feral, passionate performer he was.

True, Nureyev’s saga has been endlessly–sometimes fancifully–documented. This program escapes redundancy because it offers on-camera interviews with the dancer’s colleagues and friends who could not speak freely before the Soviet regime collapsed and footage of Nureyev’s dancing in his youth not accessible in the West until now.

Much of this early footage was shot by Teja Kremke, an East German ballet student who became Nureyev’s lover when they were both young. (Julie Kavanagh, whose exhaustive biography, Nureyev: The Life, will be published by Pantheon next month, tracked it down, and served as consultant to Bridcut’s project.) Kremke’s amateur film, showing the unseasoned Nureyev’s ability to defy gravity and conquer space–with phenomenal strength, coordination, grace, and a very individual musicality–proves that his unique talent and dynamic temperament were evident from the start.

Nureyev grew up in rural surroundings without luxury of any kind, except for, it’s implied, his mother’s love. As a boy, he liked to watch trains, which he found romantic. He was, actually, born on a train, which later seemed prophetic of his adult life–its drama and its shifting landscape.

When he saw his first ballet at the age of 7 in the provincial town of Ufa, it was love at first sight. Ostensibly he declared, “That’s all I’m going to do–dance!” Living “in the sticks” as he did, with no economic resources and a father who insisted that dancing was an unsuitable profession for his son, Nureyev could hardly have fulfilled his near-impossible dream without his innate avidity and persistence.

He did menial work to pay for his childhood lessons in folk dancing, then had some rudimentary ballet training and local performing experience. His aim for the future, though, was nothing less than to attend the ballet academy in St. Petersburg (then Leningrad), whose best students graduated into the legendary Kirov Ballet. It was the alma mater of the likes of Anna Pavlova, Tamara Karsavina, George Balanchine, Alexandra Danilova, Natalia Makarova, and Mikhail Baryshnikov.

He finally succeeded and, in 1955, he fell in love again, with the city of Leningrad and the Kirov Ballet and its academy. He was 17, and thus a late starter at an institution geared to molding children into professionals. Nevertheless, he declared to his far more experienced peers, “I will be the number one dancer in the world.” Modesty was not in his rep–perhaps he couldn’t afford it–but he worked fanatically to develop his skills.

The documentary offers the earliest known film of Nureyev dancing–at 20, at a Moscow student competition in a solo from Le Corsaire. Subsequently included in a film that was shown widely in Russia, it was the start of his fame in his motherland. In his final year at the Kirov’s school, however, the company did not offer him a place, though its competitor, Moscow’s Bolshoi Ballet, invited him to sign on as a soloist. At the last minute, the formidable Kirov ballerina Natalia Dudinskaya, nearing the end of her stage career, said, “Why don’t you stay here and dance with me?” (Today, this May-December coupling seems to prophesy the celebrated partnership Nureyev would form with England’s prima ballerina assoluta, Margot Fonteyn.)

Rudolf Nureyev in Le Corsaire at a student competition in 1958. Photo courtesy of Thirteen/WNET New York.

Once an official member of the Kirov, Nureyev went to live with his former teacher, the celebrated Alexander Pushkin, where he was pampered and probably slept with Pushkin’s wife, violating a primal law of hospitality. At the theater, too, he was thought of as a troublemaker: for his insistence on pursuing a wide cultural horizon where insularity was the rule and seemingly small incidents as well, such as his refusing mid-performance one night to continue in the loose trousers assigned to the male dancers and insisting on the Western fashion of form-fitting tights. He was a rebel in the land of restriction.

The show records his partnership at the Kirov with the ballerina Ninel Kurgapkina, now in her late seventies and the most vivacious figure in the documentary after its hero. Indeed, the circle of Nureyev’s associates interviewed here gives a marvelous impression of the best aspects of the Russian spirit–courage, humor, and an unflagging awareness of life’s richness, even in daunting circumstances.

In 1961, the Kirov decided to exclude Nureyev from its planned tour to Paris because of the rash independence of his personality. But Janine Ringuet, an assistant to the French presenters, having seen him dance, had her superiors insist that he appear in France. This was Nureyev’s opportunity to defect and, despite the obvious dangers, he took it.

The documentary contends that Kremke had planted the idea in Nureyev’s mind that a talent like his must take the whole world as its stage. If so, it surely accorded with Nureyev’s sense of what his gifts deserved. It’s equally true that his defiant temperament and the fact that he was gay made him a natural target for repressive authority, so that his future in Russian seemed precarious.

At any rate, Nureyev danced in Paris, to a tumultuous reception. Then, as the company assembled at Le Bourget airport, Nureyev was informed that (for some trumped up reason) he was not to go on to London, the next leg of the tour, but to return to Russia. The dancer’s reaction: “I am a dead man.” Witnesses disagree about what happened next. The French dancer and choreographer Pierre Lacotte, who had befriended Nureyev in Paris, recounts his version of the event, which culminates in Nureyev’s hurling himself into the arms of the French police, shouting, “I want to be free.” Granted asylum, he hid out for a time in Paris without any means of practicing (the equivalent of a prison sentence for a dancer).

Eventually he joined the Grand Ballet du Marquis de Cuevas, while the KGB, which had long had its eye on him, tried every device possible to retrieve the man they called a traitor. Nureyev managed to evade them and went on to three decades of the glories we are most familiar with: the celebrated partnership with Fonteyn, whom he called his soul mate; the association with the Denmark’s Erik Bruhn, a quintessential danseur noble, ice to Nureyev’s fire; performances worldwide that received unbridled accolades; work as an artistic director and choreographer.

Nevertheless, as the Danes say, Nureyev’s life was not a dance on roses. His close friends in Russia were often held under suspicion and Kremke died at 37 in “unexplained circumstances.” The Soviet government prevented Nureyev from returning to visit his family until his mother was dying, and when, much later, Nureyev finally danced again on the Kirov stage, he was already dying of AIDS.

Rudolph Nureyev. Photo courtesy of Thirteen/WNET New York.

His choreography alone would not have won him a place in the history books. Mostly, he created his own versions of revered nineteenth-century classics, choreographing perverse solos for himself, solos made of phrases that twisted the classical vocabulary against its own grain. Purists found this ploy exasperating, but Nureyev was determined to show off his mastery of the difficult and to make the hero of these traditional pieces that favored the ballerina equally important.

He felt compelled to go on performing long after his technique had conspicuously declined and his abilities were finally scuttled by illness. By his last years on stage, he was dancing solely on his charisma and his legend. Yet the general public was still roaring its approval and adoration. Just as at the beginning, people recognized a hero when they saw one.

Nureyev: The Russian Years is conventionally structured. It’s also disconcertingly patched together, with scenes never recorded–like Nureyev’s first sight of a ballet–“reconstructed” with latter-day participants or showing Nureyev’s appearance in a ballet to accompany voice-over narrative of his life. What’s more, these devices aren’t employed with any great skill or imagination. The unique worth of this venture lies in the archival footage and the interviews with people close to Nureyev who were not free to speak openly of him during the Soviet era. And Nureyev himself, with his wicked intelligence, rebelliousness, and ardor, makes one of the most compelling talking heads in the bioflick genre. Even when he’s not dancing, he’s a star.

© VoiceofDance.com 2007. Reprinted with permission.

This article originally appeared in Voice of Dance (http://www.voiceofdance.org) on August 21, 2007.

Mark Morris Dance Group, Mozart Dances / New York State Theater, Lincoln Center, NYC / August 15-18, 2007

Mark Morris Dance Group in Morris’s Mozart Dances. Photo by Stephanie Berger.

I saw (and wrote about) the world premiere of Mark Morris’s Mozart Dances a year ago at the New York State Theater, when it was presented as part of Lincoln Center’s annual Mostly Mozart Festival. This year the Festival gave it four encore performances, August 15-18, on the same stage, and I felt I was seeing deeper and deeper into its immaculate architecture and enigmatic, stirring emotions.

Defying possible monotony, Morris set all three parts of his dance to piano compositions: “Eleven” to the Piano Concerto No. 11 in F major; “Double” to the Sonata in D Major for Two Pianos; “Twenty-seven” to the Piano Concerto No. 27 in B-flat major. Like Balanchine, who frequently took the names of his ballets from their music, Morris made his own titles as blunt as could be. This is a canny device for refusing to tell the audience what a ballet is “about,” thus relying upon the individual viewer to listen and watch keenly, activating his or her imagination.

As at the dance’s New York performances last summer, Emanuel Ax was the pianist for the concerti, Yoko Nozaki seconded him for the Sonata, and Louis Langrée led the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra. I haven’t heard music played for dancing as sensitively as this since the pianist Garrick Ohlsson collaborated with Annabelle Gamson, a matchless interpreter of Isadora Duncan’s work.

Call Mozart Dances abstract if you will, but its first two segments are extraordinarily rich in subtext. As with Balanchine’s Serenade, there is no “story” of the sort that might neatly be pinned down in a program note. Still, the choreography continually hints at character, situation, even fragments of plot–all to be interpreted “personally.”

“Eleven” opens with a horizontal lineup of seven men who vanish almost before their presence has registered. Their presence simply notifies you that they’ll be back eventually. The rest of the dance belongs to eight women. Lauren Grant, a small woman crowned with blond curls, is the protagonist. She combines a lush sculptural quality with clarity and astounding projection, qualities that have made her one of the Mark Morris Dance Group’s greatest dancers and greatest stars.

Lauren Grant. Photo by Stephanie Berger.

The others, each distinguished in her own right, form a chorus who witness and, to a point, empathize with Grant’s unnamed experiences, passions, and sufferings. The “to a point” reservation is critical because Morris makes it very clear that, when it comes down to it, each of us is alone.

This section introduces the gestures and movement motifs that the entire piece will use again and again, each repetition, at least in the first two parts of the triptych, showing us the move at a new angle or taking on fresh meaning from a new context. Instances that burn themselves into your brain: Grant, at the opening, folding one arm up toward her heart; the other women clustering at the side of the stage, looking skyward as if mildly examining the weather; dancers rooted in place, dynamic in their stillness, their backs toward the audience, arms akimbo, hands overlapping at the vulnerable spot where the head joins the neck; and a sudden fall–this becomes the section’s curtain line–arms and legs splayed and angled as if the body had been thrown from a motorcycle speeding heedlessly over rocky terrain.

Mark Morris Dance Group in Morris’s Mozart Dances. Photo by Stephanie Berger.

“Double” features the eight men we glimpsed in “Eleven.” To me, Joe Bowie, in an inky frock coat modified for dancing and black biker shorts, represents Mozart, teaching the others, common men, whatever can be taught about art. One of them, Noah Vinson–looking innocent and vulnerable with his boyish build and childlike face–seems to be his special protégé.

But then, as the men bond in an exquisitely inventive circle dance, Vinson, both arms angled up to his heart, fists clenched in anguish, tells us he is going to die. As the women did with Grant, the band of brothers does its best to succor and protect him, but falls away when nothing prevails, leaving Vinson pathetically lost in a world devoid of landmarks. Bowie remains constant, though, like a father with a doomed son, no longer instructing but simply being there.

Suddenly, like an astonishing vision, the women appear, wearing limp gauzy skirts that sweep the floor, an acknowledgement that Vinson is beyond the help of his fellow man and needs a circle of angels to escort him from this life to the next. Yet a moment later, cued by a shift in the music, all is well again, the dancing joyful and robust, Vinson’s tragic fate magically rescinded. The dance as a whole captures the spirit of certain Mozart operas and is one of Morris’s finest achievements to date.

In “Twenty-seven,” the third and final segment of Mozart Dances, men and women meet in equal numbers, in bright sunlight, so to speak, suddenly shorn of mystery. They seem to represent the concepts of society as a solid whole and the fleeting formation of couples within it. As is true of Balanchine’s Jewels, comprising “Emeralds,” “Rubies,” and “Diamonds,” the last segment of the trilogy is weaker than the two that preceded it. In the case of the Morris piece, it’s far weaker.

The repetition of all the dance’s basic gestures, which felt so organic before, now seems forced and thus grows tiresome. Brief solos for the individual dancers look obligatory–the fifteen seconds in the sun that is undeniably each one’s due–though a few of them, like the one for Elisa Clark, a plain-faced woman who’s the epitome of grace, are particularly beautiful and/or surprising.

In a later passage, there are some amazing man-woman lifts–a rare device for Morris. Unlike the hoist and triumphant sculptural pose typical of classical ballet, these lifts are all flow. Spilling through the space, they’re counterbalanced by falls into stillness that eloquently suggest, as they have throughout the dance, that this is what we all come to. Even so, the ideas of an entire populace finally assembled, with friendly small clusters within it, don’t contain much specific or profound feeling this time, though they are familiar Morris concerns. Subtext is slender or absent entirely here, while there’s far too much footage of cheerful-natives-frolicking-on-the-village-green. Of course Morris might say, “The music made me.”

Martin Pakledinaz designed the beautiful, witty black and white costumes. James F. Ingalls provided inexplicably routine lighting. The three overbold backdrops of giant paintbrush strokes, the work of Howard Hodgkin, stubbornly refuse any connection to the music or the dancing.

I saw the performance on the 16th, which was televised on PBS’ “Live From Lincoln Center” and seen by millions of viewers — not just the 2700-plus that the State Theater holds — and no doubt recorded for an afterlife by many of them.

It was intriguing to witness, live, an event that, under ordinary circumstances, would be ephemeral. The fact that performance exists, as Marcia B. Siegel puts it, at the vanishing point, is a significant part of its compelling fascination. I realized as I was watching, though, that this performance, in its televised version, would give Mozart Dances a solid place in dance history, though the video is only a reproduction.

What I missed, and the television audience saw, was Sam Waterston as host and a pre-recorded intermission homage to the late Beverly Sills, who regularly filled that role with her inimitable vivacity. I could catch up with the recorded version, but, unless I need it for study purposes, I probably won’t, even though Waterson is my heartthrob.

© VoiceofDance.com 2007. Reprinted with permission.

This article originally appeared in the Culture section of Bloomberg News on July 26, 2007.

July 26 (Bloomberg) — Thoreau was right when he wrote that urban life threatens to do us in. Frederic Flamand, director of the Ballet National de Marseille, tackles this theme in “Metapolis II,” which opened last night at the New York State Theater as part of the Lincoln Center Festival.

A collaboration with Pritzker Prize-winning architect Zaha Hadid, the ballet creates a maelstrom of elements that dehumanize our society: frenetic pace, crowding, an impersonal environment. At the same time, it proposes that moments of empathy and tenderness, even an occasional return to the scale in which man is the measure of all things, are still possible.

The hubbub of modern life is represented by a heady mix of media. Projections of fast-moving, crazily angled cityscapes — jangly street life, cars traveling endlessly through claustrophobic tunnels, buildings imploding — are juxtaposed with dancers interacting with real-time images of themselves.

Hadid contributed three zigzagging aluminum bridges that the performers manipulate into changing configurations, standing, lying, crawling and sliding on them, even popping in and out of circular cutouts in their surfaces. Her futuristic costumes, severe and gaudily playful by turns, reveal the consoling glow of flesh. This helps us think of the dancing figures as real people, at once beautiful and vulnerable, rather than as automatons.

Disembodied Voices

The collaged score involves a violin played live, occasionally plaintively, most often against percussive thrumming and static or disembodied voices that seem to lack a common language.

The choreography is the weakest link in the mix. “Metapolis II” is a makeover of the original “Metapolis,” created in 2000 with a troupe specializing in experimental dance. In transferring the piece to the Ballet National de Marseille, Flamand reworked it for classically trained performers, combining traditional ballet steps with a generic postmodern style. He can’t make a coherent dance phrase, though, so the movement registers as an endless series of gestures.

About three-quarters of the way through the piece, passages we’d recognize as love duets under more auspicious circumstances overtake the disaffected proceedings. Still, even these occasions for intimacy have no subtle moments and no climaxes.

Flamand’s greatest flaw — an odd one for a man who has collaborated with several respected architects — is a gravely deficient command of structure. The choreography for “Metapolis II” is just a restless string of happenings. One brief scene succeeds another, but as a whole the ballet goes nowhere and takes far too long to get there.

Shen Wei

Sheathed in pale gray pajama-like outfits, faces chalked white, the dozen dancers in Shen Wei’s radical version of the Beijing opera “Second Visit to the Empress” look like ghosts. Their ultra-fluid movement, adamantly abstract, is done in groups, as if they’ve been shorn of individual identity.

By contrast, the three leading singers in this political melodrama — translated in terse supertitles at Lincoln Center’s New York State Theater — are costumed in wildly imaginative shapes, textures and color schemes, bathed in golden light and initially enshrined like saints. Their voices pour out from their stillness, powerful and evocative.

The piece, which originated some 300 years ago, became a staple of the Beijing Opera repertory. Shen loved the opera and wanted to give it new life as he pursued his career as a choreographer and visual artist in the U.S.

Adding Dance

In Shen’s version, presented during the final week of the Lincoln Center Festival, the score has been cut and edited to make it palatable to today’s audience. Shen intended to beef up the dynamics by adding dancing to what was originally an excruciatingly static presentation, the three main characters placed in an immobile row and left to get on with their vocalizing.

Shen’s strongest gift is for creating visual imagery, however, not movement. In this production, the 16-member Chinese- instrument orchestra of winds, strings and percussion churns up far more energy and emotion than the dancing wraiths. And the diva, Zhang Jing, bends and sways in antiphonal curving shapes, looking for all the world as if she assiduously took dance class several times a week.

“Metapolis II” will be repeated tonight and tomorrow at the New York State Theater, Lincoln Center. “Second Visit to the Empress” will be repeated July 28 and 29 at the New York State Theater, Lincoln Center. Information: +1-212-721-6500 or http://www.lincolncenter.org.

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

This article originally appeared in the Culture section of Bloomberg News on July 17, 2007.

July 17 (Bloomberg) — Dressed in rakish, mismatched bits of theatrical costume, six feisty dancers evoke a ragtag traveling circus onstage and off. They’re down on their luck yet plucky, lacking the talent to match their big dreams.

This is “B’zyrk,” one of the new-to-New York pieces in the opening-night program of Pilobolus, the company that will be cavorting at the Joyce Theater in Chelsea through Aug. 11.

As is typical of a Pilobolus creation, the collaborative choreography by Jonathan Wolken and six others features gymnastics, feats of balance and timing, horsing around and the merging of bodies into strange shape-shifting organisms. One three-body combination whirls along the floor like tumbleweed.

Wolken and his crew try hard to evoke both the bitter weariness of second-rate performers worn down by endless one- night stands and their vision of themselves as beautiful and strong, altogether worthy of applause and fame. But the results are more trite than unique and genuine, and the physical marvels are too crude to express the poignant atmosphere the choreographers mean to create.

While the music is compiled from five sources, the costumes are from a single hand, that of the ever-ebullient Liz Prince. The performers, like most Piloboli, are endearing, especially Manelich Minniefee and Renee Jaworski.

Memorial Dance

A second piece receiving its local premiere was “Persistence of Memory” by Michael Tracy, with assistance from Minniefee, Annika Sheaff and Edwin Olvera. As performed by Minniefee and Sheaff, it’s a light, sweet duet that was commissioned as a memorial to a woman who died too young. It shows the woman in a variety of moods, as if she were a real personality, not an object of veneration simply because her life was cut short.

As with “B’zyrk,” the feelings the dance attempts to evoke are essentially at odds with the typical Pilobolus vocabulary. Here, though, there are a few moments that gel. Early on, for example, the lithe woman, dressed in pale chiffon with her auburn hair unbound, does a backbend all the way to the floor, and the man crawls into the cave her body has shaped.

Most impressively, the woman is quietly but constantly shown to equal the man in physical strength, bearing his body just as calmly and beautifully as he does hers. I could imagine the dance being done to great acclaim at a feminist rally. Though it’s too simplistic to be worth seeing twice, it’s worth seeing once.

Honed Bodies

Pilobolus is one of the most popular dance troupes around. Its current monthlong engagement at the Joyce has become an annual affair, and the group tours worldwide. The highbrow dance audience turns up its nose at Pilobolus — “You call that dancing?” — but the general public loves it.

Why?

It’s nonthreatening like Cirque du Soleil, and it’s immediately accessible; there are none of the half-hidden meanings of Balanchine’s “Serenade” or Graham’s “Errand Into the Maze.” It can also be funny, though the fun is usually sophomoric.

Pilobolus can be sensuous, too. The dancers’ magnificently honed bodies are sheathed in bright, high-sheen unitards or cannily designed rags that advertise every gorgeous contour — or just left as close to nude as the police permit. And the Kama Sutra-style intertwining of the bodies is something even people who can live without dance will appreciate mightily.

Some of Pilobolus’s early pieces had more ambiguity and sophistication, plus provocative investigations of the grotesque. Perhaps today’s public prefers simply to be entertained.

Pilobolus is at the Joyce Theater, 175 Eighth Ave. (at 19th Street), through Aug. 11. Information: +1-212-242-0800 or http://www.joyce.org.

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

This article originally appeared in Voice of Dance (http://www.voiceofdance.org) on June 28, 2007.

Mikhail Baryshnikov and Hell’s Kitchen Dance / Howard Gilman Performance Space, Baryshnikov Arts Center, NYC /
June 22-24, 2007

Dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov. Photo by Olivier Simola.

Tragically, classical ballet dancers are athletically over the hill in their thirties. That leaves decades of life to be used constructively. Some artists–like the legendary Alicia Alonso, Margot Fonteyn, and Rudolf Nureyev–insisted upon performing until the last gasp, pathetic yet still gripping. (Frayed genius is still genius.) Some take up related work–leading companies, teaching. A few (though usually not the superstars) move on to entirely different professions. The 59-year-old Mikhail Baryshnikov, whose name is as likely to be indelible in the history books as Nijinsky’s, found eloquent ways to dance once ballet’s virtuoso jumps, leaps, and turns were beyond him, notably in the postmodern mode with his White Oak Dance Project (1990-2002).

The year 2005 marked the opening of the long-awaited Baryshnikov Arts Center, way west on 37th Street in Manhattan, to foster the development and collaboration of artists in multiple disciplines. June 22-24, in BAC’s Howard Gilman Performance Space, a black box theater that seats 180 when you pack ’em in real tight, Baryshnikov showed New Yorkers Hell’s Kitchen Dance (named after BAC’s nabe), which has been touring the country. The two commissioned works on the bill, Donna Uchizono’s Leap to Tall and Aszure Barton’s Come In, both created in 2006, encompass the present-day skills of the superstar, dancing with superb, mostly youngish performers.

Today, Baryshnikov is naturally weaker in the departments that middle age erodes: strength, speed, and elasticity. Those who thrilled to him in his physical prime will probably be saddened by what they see today. Yet he remains a phenomenon.

He has retained a certain amount of his legendary physical dexterity. Though muted, it still represents the Platonic ideals of classical dancing. When he’s standing in place, his posture is too taut, almost militaristic, as if defiantly confronting ruin. Once he starts moving, though, his joints look remarkably supple.

His theatrical intensity is undiminished. The only performer I’ve ever seen upstage him was the venerable Merce Cunningham, who, standing in the background, grasping a barre for support part of the time as he sketched a move or two, managed to be even more compelling than Baryshnikov dancing full-out in the foreground.

The killer charisma is intact. But it has evolved from a winning boyishness to the allure of a mature man, face lined by experience, who is piercingly clear-eyed about life and the passage of time. His keen intelligence is more evident than ever.

And then there was the choreography, better than average, certainly, yet nothing you’d rush to see were such a hero not at its center.

Uchizono’s Leap to Tall (what the title might mean escapes me) is a trio for Baryshnikov and two women, Hristoula Harakas and Jodi Melnick, who is wonderful and mature enough to have copped her Bessie award for “sustained achievement in dance” half a dozen years ago.

The design of the dance is tasteful and intelligent, beginning with the two women upstage, delicately edging their way across the space with tiny pivots of the feet, while Baryshnikov lurks quiescent, barely visible in the shadowy foreground. But serviceable craftsmanship alone–largely presenting Baryshnikov in inviolably rigid stances that eventually melt into more fluid action–can’t create a telling theatrical experience. Clocking in at 31 minutes, the piece feels far too long, its stubbornly enigmatic key gestures repeated too often to keep the viewer’s mind curious–or even alert.

The only segments that hit the heart (and are interesting physically, to boot) are the tender and witty takes on male-female partnering. In his heyday, Baryshnikov did his magnificent share of hoisting ballerinas aloft, his strength, impeccable carriage, and ardent chivalry making them look like airborne divinities even when his mouth was full of tutu-tulle. Uchizono’s women occasionally return the favor granted to their back-in-the-day sisters. They act like gentle puppeteers, seeming to propel Baryshnikov through steps that recall his triumphant reign as a classical dancer and cradling him with their arms to lift him just a few inches from the floor, as if he were a much-beloved toddler. His cooperation is at once sweet and ironic.

The music, by Michael Floyd and Iva Bittova, follows upbeat percussion with lulling pop-romance.

Mikhail Baryshnikov and Hell’s Kitchen Dance in Aszure Barton’s Come In. Photo by Nancy J. Parisi.

Aszure Barton’s piece, Come In, takes its name from its Elgar-like score by the contemporary Russian composer Vladimir Martynov. Both music and choreography give nostalgia a good name, and Barton’s work has far more emotional impact than Uchinozo’s.

Against a videotaped landscape panorama evoking Baryshnikov’s Russian origins, a populace in simple black clothes seems to confront the past and acknowledge that (pace Proust) it cannot be recaptured. Baryshnikov being the central figure in the piece, the sentiment can be applied specifically to his performing career and his expatriate status. However, the choreographer and the dancers make it universal–resonant for all of us in one way or another.

Two elements engrave themselves in one’s recollection of the dance: Baryshnikov’s making a simple gesture take on new nuances every time the choreography requires him to repeat it, thus expressing decades of emotion and memory, and the sense of present love for a particular person meshing with abiding love for a place left behind. Perhaps I’m exaggerating the virtues of Barton’s piece, but it’s the sort of thing to which I’m susceptible.

© VoiceofDance.com 2007. Reprinted with permission.

This article originally appeared in Voice of Dance (http://www.voiceofdance.org) on June 25, 2007.

Savion Glover, Invitations to a Dancer / Joyce Theater, NYC / June 19 – July 14, 2007

Savion Glover. Photo by NiNA.

The master tapper Savion Glover may have been cool providing the feet motion-captured for the irresistible dancing penguin Mumble in the movie Happy Feet. But he’s hot in his new live show, Invitations to a Dancer, at the Joyce Theater in New York through July 14.

A big chunk of the program takes place on three raised miked rectangles–each just roomy enough to hold a guy and his dancing. Glover, who’s obviously the main man, is flanked by a pair of sidemen, Marshall L. Davis, Jr., and Maurice Chestnut, who provide a nuanced obbligato to Glover’s star turn. Combined, the sounds their feet make have unquenchable vitality. This is cannily coupled with a hint of threat, like the distant noise of a ferocious storm or an infernal machine revving up to do its secret job. Every so often, though, Glover lightens the mood with sheer gaiety, lifting his knees and freeing his feet to gambol blithely in the air, as if the law of gravity had been briefly suspended.

From time to time, Glover generously cedes the center space to one of the sidemen. Davis uses the opportunity to concoct an impressive solo that is heavy and grave, his feet thudding against the top and sides of his platform as if to announce what we all knew was coming–the end of the world.

Related to this solo is the theme of knocking that prevails throughout the three men’s work together. Knocking at the door, hoping to find a welcoming person behind it? Knocking at the gate of opportunity or, perhaps, Heaven? Despite the obsession lurking in the repeated knocking, Glover’s optimism buoys these ideas, especially when he smiles. Often a sullen performer, or at least one reluctant to acknowledge the presence of his audience, Glover frequently gives way in this show to one of his rarely recognized assets–the angelic smile of a child who hasn’t yet been notified of the world’s troubles.

The biggest miracle of the trio’s work remains its collaboration. Performing alone, a good hoofer can sound like a series of different musical instruments. Three so finely attuned to one another can become a whole jazz band at once. The fact that–apart from the steady outline of a session-much of the work is improvised simply boggles the mind.

The second half of the show contains a long solo by Glover, and watching–better yet, hearing–what he can do is like a little sojourn in Paradise; one is keenly aware of the privilege. Alone on a dusky stage, caught in the narrow glare of a downlight, he performs a few casual feats like keeping his gleaming turquoise tap shoes nearly flat on the floor while making them sound like a bubbling spring that accidentally got itself amplified. Then he gets down to business. Sober-faced now, body bent over, he barely moves from his spot while he focuses on generating a wide spectrum of sound. He seems to be a man who, past a wild youth, is now addressing his life with sobriety. Suddenly, he appears to have aged decades, threatens to collapse to one side, then the other. When the knocking theme recurs, it might be an inexorably ticking clock. Before the mood gets maudlin, though, he straightens up, reclaims youth’s vivacity, and tries out some new inventions.

Understandably, Glover worries about providing sufficient diversity in his productions. Incomparable as his dancing is, two hours of relentless, essentially abstract footwork would exhaust the viewers’ attention–in part because the experience is so intense. Tap, remember, didn’t start out as concert dance, and the formal conventions of the proscenium stage remain slightly alien to it.

So Glover, being, among other things, a savvy showman, experiments with variety. Early in 2005, he made a point of dancing to classical music–a worthy try, and worth pursuing, though the marriage wasn’t fully consummated. Another show, in the Christmas season of the same year, had a religious, praise-God bent.

For the current production, Glover tried introducing non-tapping women into the mix. Accompanied by Glover and his two sidemen, three barefoot femmes move with lush enthusiasm, front and center, in a jazz mode laced with dollops of ballet. Two of them, Lauren Last and Jerica Niehoff, are pulchritudinous beauties with Broadway instincts. The third, Sheila Barker, wiry and graceful–and the only African-American on the distaff side–is far more accomplished and interesting than her sisters. Wonderfully supple in an Indian-inflected, jazz-rooted duet with Glover, she proves to be the only one of the lovelies who can really reflect his rhythms. In another number, Glover challenges a fourth gal, Suzana Stankovic, who is got up as a tiny ballerina-doll off a music box–fluffy white tutu, pointe shoes, and all. Stankovic, who is game and strong, tries to make her antics funny, but since she is, at best, a mediocre classical dancer, the effect is grotesque.

There is no instrumental or vocal accompaniment to this show. Given the spectacular aural variety and ingenuity of the tapping, one hardly noticed.

© VoiceofDance.com 2007. Reprinted with permission.

This article originally appeared in the Culture section of Bloomberg News on June 19, 2007.

June 19 (Bloomberg) — The New York City Ballet’s sublimely cool Kyra Nichols and American Ballet Theater’s tempestuous Alessandra Ferri have little in common except the fact that, to the sorrow of their countless admirers, both ballerinas are retiring this weekend.

Nichols, 48, is leaving the stage after a remarkable 33 years with the City Ballet; Ferri, 44, who may continue to perform elsewhere, has been with ABT for 22 years. Some classical dancers have ruefully called retirement a first death, but the gala evenings honoring these artists at Lincoln Center – -Nichols’s on Friday at the New York State Theater, Ferri’s on Saturday at the Metropolitan Opera House — promise to be memorable celebrations of extraordinary careers.

Born in Milan, Ferri trained at La Scala and joined London’s Royal Ballet in 1980. She quickly became a favorite of the celebrated choreographer Kenneth MacMillan, her fluidity and febrile quality serving his purposes well. After her early stardom in England, she emigrated again, joining ABT as a principal dancer in 1985. A permanent guest artist at La Scala, she has cultivated an adoring following all over Europe. In Japan she’s virtually a cult figure.

Ferri is small and delicately built. She’s very pretty, with large eyes, an expressive, heart-shaped face and perhaps the most exquisitely arched feet in the profession. She’s a lyric dancer essentially, not a pyrotechnician. More important, she’s a dancer-actress, with a range that’s enormously useful in ballets rooted in story and character. She moves her audience as an innocent, a temptress, a passionate lover, a tragic victim or a heroine reduced to a state so abject, death seems a blessing. Everything she does looks utterly heartfelt.

Impetuous Onstage

In the past decade, Ferri arrived at the point in her career when she could permit herself to be completely impetuous onstage. In her recent “Manon,” with her chosen partner, La Scala’s Robert Bolle, she was physically fearless as he adeptly tossed her through the air and flung her about his body like a silk scarf. Matching her physical daring with emotional abandon, she created a woman for whom sexual exploits were not simply ecstatic but like food to the starving.

These qualities promise to make her farewell performance in MacMillan’s “Romeo and Juliet” (partnered again by Bolle) a soul-stirring experience. She’s been dancing the role for over a quarter-century, deepening her interpretation of a character for whom she felt an instant affinity when she first played it in her debut with the Royal Ballet at the age of 17.

Flawless Technician

Nichols was practically born into the City Ballet. Her mother and first teacher, Sally Streets, had danced in the company’s corps de ballet. She grew up in California, eventually studied at the School of American Ballet, and was invited to join the City Ballet in 1974, where she was shortly given important roles and officially made a principal dancer after five years.

Calm and modest in manner, Nichols was first recognized as a flawless technician, a slender long-limbed young woman who could do everything effortlessly. Ego and affectation were absent from her dancing. She put her talent at the service of musicality in ballets by Jerome Robbins, who was the first to recognize her gifts; by George Balanchine, who trusted her with key roles in his repertory; and later by Peter Martins. Often she seemed to become the music itself.

In recent seasons, Nichols withdrew from ballets that were athletically beyond her and reduced her schedule, making every appearance an event of sorts — the most glorious sunset imaginable. She forced nothing, faked nothing, just grew more quiet, more serene and more luminous than ever. The purity that had been evident in her dancing from the first seemed to expand into a moral force.

Three by Balanchine

For her farewell, Nichols will appear in three Balanchine pieces. Appropriately, the opener will be the 1934 “Serenade,” the first ballet the choreographer created in America, in which she has managed to retain her freshness and her refusal to overdramatize the work’s tragic subtext. In “Robert Schumann’s `Davidsbundlertanze”’ (1980), she will again epitomize tender empathy and understated grief in the role thought to represent the composer’s wife, Clara, watching her husband slip away into madness. The “Rosenkavalier” segment from “Vienna Waltzes” is a perfect vehicle for her ability to forgo projecting while drawing the audience into her universe of gentle crystalline perfection.

Nichols will give her farewell performance with the New York City Ballet at the New York State Theater, Lincoln Center, on June 22. Information: +1-212-721-6500 or http://www.nycballet.com.

Ferri will give her final performance with American Ballet Theater at the Metropolitan Opera House, Lincoln Center, on June 23. Information: +1-212-362-6000 or http://www.abt.org.

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