Archives for 2007

This article originally appeared in the Culture section of Bloomberg News on June 11, 2007.

June 11 (Bloomberg) — To the sound of birdsong, Wendy Whelan transforms herself from ballerina to magical avian creature. In a sienna-streaked tunic suggesting feathers, she accents the familiar curved-arm movements of classical dance with quick, sharp angles. Her head flicks this way and that, as if noticing the pleasures and dangers of the natural world. Her feet, on pointe, delicately pick their way across the ground.

After this inventive, beguiling solo, it’s pretty much downhill for Christopher Wheeldon’s “The Nightingale and the Rose,” created for the New York City Ballet and given its world premiere at Lincoln Center on Friday.

The biggest problem is narrative. The half-abstract proceedings on stage are unfathomable if you haven’t read the 1891 Oscar Wilde story — a blend of bathos and worldly cynicism that inspired Wheeldon — or the program insert in which the choreographer sets forth his own modification of the tale.

The story concerns an artist (the nightingale, pouring out its soulful song) who sacrifices her life to produce a perfect red rose for a young man (Tyler Angle) in love with a demanding and ungrateful minx (Sara Mearns, in a filmy gown, with “Alice in Wonderland” hair).

The neighborhood offers an abundance of yellow and white roses (the female corps de ballet), but the tree that usually yields red ones has been through a tough winter that prevents its flowering unless certain terms are met. It requires the nightingale to sing through the moonlit night, pressing her breast to one of its thorns until it pierces her heart.

Nourishing Blood

The nightingale’s blood nourishes the production of a rose and stains it to perfection. The young man duly presents the flower, which the petulant object of his affections finds unacceptable. The swain, far from being broken-hearted, shrugs as if to say “That’s life.” He leaves the beautiful rose where the girl flung it and goes on his way, ignoring the lifeless body of the self-sacrificing bird.

Wheeldon fails to make the story intelligible, calls the young man The Student (while ignoring Wilde’s point about the fellow’s dependence on dry, dusty books rather than the sublime and lasting passions of art) and delivers the kind of entertainment clueless adults concoct for children.

After Whelan’s opening solo, the only worthy choreography is for the ensemble of men led by Seth Orza and Craig Hall, who form the fatal tree. Sheathed in earthy brown highlighted here and there with the scarlet of freshly spilled blood, they’ve been assigned a weighty, gnarled dance vocabulary to create a perch, a nest and, inevitably, a trap for the bird.

The score was commissioned from the company’s resident composer, Bright Sheng, who also conducted. The music is colorful and lively, and clearly is influenced by Sheng’s Chinese background. But it lacks the rhythms and melodies that serve as an invitation to the dance.

One-Eyed Moon

Martin Pakledinaz designed the imaginative costumes. James Buckhouse is credited with animation, including a one-eyed moon that spills a couple of tears over the sad events.

Wheeldon — widely considered classical ballet’s savior in our current choreography-poor era — has done far better work than “The Nightingale and the Rose.” Bred by the Royal Ballet in his native England, he came to the City Ballet as a dancer and quickly proved his mettle as a choreographer.

Next year he’ll relinquish his base as the company’s resident choreographer, a position created for him, to strike out on his own with a small troupe he calls, awkwardly, Morphoses/The Wheeldon Company. Slated to perform at the City Center Oct. 19-21, it aims to change the face of classical ballet in both its artistic and organizational aspects.

Wheeldon’s choreography is in great demand from conventional big-time companies, so presumably his free-lance work will help pay the bills.

“The Nightingale and the Rose” will be performed again on June 16, 17 and 20 at the New York State Theater, Lincoln Center, Broadway at 65th St. Information: +1-212-721-6500 or http://www.nycballet.com.

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

This article originally appeared in Voice of Dance (http://www.voiceofdance.org) on June 5, 2007.

School of American Ballet’s 2007 Workshop Performances / Peter Jay Sharp Theater, Lincoln Center, NYC / June 2 & 4, 2007

School of American Ballet in George Balanchine’s The Four Temperaments with Raina Gilliland (foreground). Photo by Paul Kolnik.

As the entire classical dance world surely knows, the School of American Ballet’s annual Workshop Performances show the public the high-powered training that provides carefully selected young candidates to the New York City Ballet as well as companies worldwide. This year’s three performances–I saw the two on June 2, matinee and evening, with many alternations in both major and minor roles–were dedicated to Lincoln Kirstein. The occasion was the 100th anniversary of the birth of man who brought George Balanchine to America, co-founded the now-illustrious academy with him, and masterminded the companies that evolved into the New York City Ballet.

To open the program, SAB faculty member Sean Lavery revived his brief, unpretentious, and endearing suite, Twinkliana, for the school’s younger children. The silly title (a riff, of course, on Balanchine’s Mozartiana) comes from the fact that it’s set to Mozart’s Variations on “Ah, vous dirais-je, maman,” to which English speakers sing “Twinkle, twinkle, little star.”

A half dozen lithe little girls and a boy who’s something of a prodigy display the extraordinary technical capabilities of their generation, most effectively in mini-solos. The choreography is no more than capable; the wonder of its performance is the way Lavery has the youngsters dance–gently and joyously, buoyed by the music. Even the backdrop contributes to the lovely tone of the dance, a still-dark sky brushed with a faint scattering of stars.

Peter Martins’s 1987 Les Gentilhommes, for nine men dancing to Handel concerti, provided a showcase for the academy’s late-adolescent male contingent, which goes from strength to strength. The ballet seems to reach back from the 18th-century era of its music to the Renaissance cavaliers who were deft fencers, equestrians, and poets alike. All this, and the flawless manners of the gentlemen, is conveyed in the purest classical style, as befits a ballet dedicated to Stanley Williams, the celebrated SAB teacher from Denmark who bred dancers to his impeccable standards.

School of American Ballet in Peter Martins’ Les Gentilhommes led by Matthew Renko (center). Photo by Paul Kolnik.

A late addition to the program was the balcony scene from Martins’s new Romeo + Juliet, featuring Callie Bachman. When Martins created the work for the NYCB, he shaped the heroine’s role on the sixteen-year-old, intending her to dance the premiere of the piece. An injury kept her from doing so; performing this excerpt from it now that she’s healed was her consolation prize. I’m glad that Bachman got the moment in the sun that she deserves, but I don’t see in her what the publicity hoopla surrounding her performance wants me to see. She is a sweet young thing (straight out of a Boucher painting) with terrific technical prowess. Yet, being a little too conscious of her own abilities and charms, she’s not very convincing as a girl swept away by a first passion. Her partner was Russell Janzen, who gave the job his best effort.

Balanchine was represented on the program by The Four Temperaments, a landmark work, and Gounod Symphony, a candy box affair with intermittent flashes of genius. The ballets were staged by veteran custodians of the master’s repertoire, Suki Schorer and Susan Pilarre, respectively. As often happens, these women, given their own talent, a generous rehearsal period, and the eagerness of their young protégés, shaped productions that had more force and personality than the NYCB’s own versions.

Created in 1946, The Four Temperaments still looks amazingly new and its impact is stunning. In Schorer’s superb staging, full-blooded and propelled by rhythmic vitality, the piece was the program’s heart and anchor. Why Schorer doesn’t extend her gifts to the main company and why the Workshop programs that feature her skills aren’t toured are just two of the mysteries of the dancing life.

Gounod Symphony, by contrast, is pretty and fluffy and pink. Very pink, thanks to Karinska’s tutus, where layers of rosy and yellow tulle create a sunrise glow. The ballet hasn’t a moment of darkness or doubt. Balanchine amuses himself creating dozens of ways in which lines of dancers can interweave, then challenges the main couple of this pastoral matrix with inventions of highly sophisticated urbanity. Pilarre has coached her pupils to handle these features with aplomb. She might have added just a whiff of perfume.

Among this year’s raft of gifted dancers displaying almost uncanny technical acumen, Raina Gilliland and Samuel Greenberg were distinguished for a stage maturity way beyond their years. Tall, elegantly built, and beautiful–like her elder sister, Kaitlyn, already notable in the NYCB corps–the 17-year-old Raina led the Choleric section of The Four Temperaments with goddess-like power. Both Gillilands are third-generation members of a distinguished dance family. The late Loyce Houlton, founder of the Minnesota Dance Theater, was their grandmother; their mother, Lise Houlton, was a soloist with American Ballet Theatre.

Greenberg, 18, hasn’t (yet) achieved leading-man status but was outstanding in the eight-member ensemble of Les Gentilhommes and the first theme of The Four Temperaments. He already projects an adult dignity and depth of feeling that recalls the unforgettable Francisco Moncion, a charter member of the NYCB.

Best of all, perhaps, was the feeling of camaraderie in the program’s ensemble dancing. In Les Gentilhommes and Gounod Symphony especially, all the corps members seemed to delight in belonging to the same team and this made the ballets radiant.

© VoiceofDance.com 2007. Reprinted with permission.

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

June 4 (Bloomberg) — Veronika Part’s lush, emotionally eloquent dancing as Aurora in the Vision Scene was the sole unarguably wonderful element in American Ballet Theater’s new version of “The Sleeping Beauty” that had its world premiere Friday at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York.

The Kirov-trained ballerina’s work in the arduous first act had been admirably strong and clear. But here — seemingly impalpable, yet making it clear that she is longing for the Prince as much as he is for her — Part worked the real ballerina magic of transforming steps into atmosphere and feeling. If only choreographer Kevin McKenzie’s full production had come anywhere near that feat!

Set to Tchaikovsky’s enchantment-invoking score, “The Sleeping Beauty” has challenged choreographers since Marius Petipa first staged the ballet in St. Petersburg in 1890. Peter Martins’s 1991 version for the New York City Ballet, revived this year, is typical of the speed-it-up and minimize-the-mime jobs that are common today.

Counting one-act versions, this is ABT’s sixth go at the story and its third full-length production. It was created by a triumvirate: the company’s artistic director, McKenzie, who has already concocted unsatisfactory versions of the two other great Tchaikovsky ballets, “Swan Lake” and “The Nutcracker,” abetted by the incomparable, if troubled prima ballerina Gelsey Kirkland and her husband, Michael Chernov.

Homage to Petipa

Aside from Part’s glorious performance in the Vision Scene, the production was continually in conflict with itself. It seemed, on one hand, to want desperately to sell tickets to an uncultivated audience — and its kids. On the other it paid homage to the idea that “The Sleeping Beauty” is the lodestone of classical ballet, earnestly recreating chunks of it that have become legend.

The minuses are many. Though the production kept most of the segments that people lovingly recall from more traditional versions — among them, the fairy solos in the Prologue and most of Aurora’s dances at her coming-of-age party, including the Rose Adagio — even these highlights were interfered with unnecessarily and illogically. Every bit of the newfangled business — like the Prince’s solo of longing for perfect love – – was indifferently choreographed.

The narrative, exquisitely simple, has been crammed with extraneous, sometimes ludicrous, notions. The Lilac Fairy and her retinue intrude on passages to which Petipa never invited them. Whole scenes, here severely curtailed, have lost all their meaning — notably the Hunting Scene, meant to reveal the Prince’s society and why he leaves it to seek his heart’s desire.

Unsightly

The decor is unspeakable. Aiming for country-cottage prettiness, Tony Walton’s scenery is sometimes saccharine, sometimes vulgar, sometimes both at once. Willa Kim’s costumes are for the most part gaudy and overwrought. A few insipid ones only make matters worse with their mistaken concept of gentility.

The dancing was generally fine throughout, showing what must have been fastidious coaching on Kirkland’s part. Michelle Wiles, an amazing, no-nonsense technician, took on a softer grace than usual as the Lilac Fairy and tried hard to make her movement say something. Overall, the dancing suffered from rather too much exactitude, but it is sure to relax and bloom with further performance.

The most mesmerizing of the soloists was Herman Cornejo as the Bluebird; one could almost sense the powerful, beating wings as he soared. The most disappointing was Martine van Hamel as Carabosse, the wicked fairy responsible for Aurora’s century- long sleep. An unforgettable Lilac Fairy at the height of her career, van Hamel was herself cursed here with new choreography that made her look like a bourgeois harpy in a costume from hell.

“The Sleeping Beauty” runs through June 9 at the Metropolitan Opera House, Broadway at 65th Street. Information: +1-212-362-6000 or http://www.abt.org.

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

This article originally appeared in the Culture section of Bloomberg News on May 18, 2007.

May 18 (Bloomberg) — The entire backdrop of the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Harvey Theater fills with a black-and-white video close-up of a pair of fleshy moving lips as voices chant nonsense syllables to an eerie accompaniment. Onstage are a dozen gleaming office chairs, set in neat rows. Soon the space is invaded by dancers running, grappling and scuttling on all fours as if at war with each other and at the same time determined to form a community, to communicate.

Doug Varone, whose company is celebrating its 20th anniversary, has plenty of experience fusing his choreography with theater. With the New York premiere of “Dense Terrain” Wednesday night (his oddly belated debut at BAM), he revealed a masterly ability to blend dance, music, video and set design with an idea about the human predicament: the daunting challenge of not merely speaking, but of making oneself understood.

In the course of the piece, the onscreen actor (Anthony Cochrane), who seems, by turns, to be a madman, an obsessive professor or God, is seen scribbling gibberish all over the walls and floor of his otherwise barren habitat. Later the writing spills onto huge, roughly plastered panels that the dancers keep moving to reconfigure their space, perhaps to make sense of their world.

Eager, Obedient

Eventually Cochrane appears in the flesh and attempts to teach the dancers his vocabulary, along with cryptic — but oddly eloquent — accompanying hand gestures. The students, seated in the primly arranged chairs, are eager and obedient in repeating their lesson by rote. But the moment they’re left to their own devices, the material and its ostensible meaning disintegrate. Their inability to connect through either language or gesture seems suddenly tragic.

“Dense Terrain” opens and closes with a solo by Eddie Taketa, who blends extraordinary speed with a deep visceral quality — a rare gift. Much of the choreography belongs to the ensemble, but Varone is an astute dance architect: He makes sure there are two stunning duets at the heart of the work.

In the first of them, John Beasant III and Ryan Corriston get into a violent fight when the professor’s lesson fails them. Even a sudden kiss leaves them frustrated. Their physical rage escalates, climaxing in a sexual union partly diverted to the video screen, as if the men were dreaming it.

The savage duet is offset by a beautiful, ingenious adagio for Daniel Charon and Natalie Desch, the company’s most seductive dancers. The passage keeps them recumbent on the floor, simply shifting the forms of an endless embrace. Their tangle of legs and palms reaching around to cradle heads suggests that connection may be possible after all — even if only just briefly.

Too Complex?

“Dense Terrain” may well be too complex to be fully absorbed in a single viewing (a flaw, if it is one, preferable to that in many pieces on view nowadays that are considerably less than the sums of their parts).

Varone, credited with concept, direction and choreography of “Dense Terrain,” duly thanks his dancers for their input. The art-rock and movie composer Nathan Larson created the score. Allen Moyer designed the set; Blue Land Media, the video; Jane Cox, the lighting. Liz Prince provided costumes deliberately dull-toned and unremarkable to make the performers look like Everyman and Everywoman. If ever there was a symbiotic team, this is it.

Doug Varone and Dancers is at BAM’s Harvey Theater, 651 Fulton St., Brooklyn, through May 20. Information: +1-718-636-4100; http://www.bam.org.

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

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

May 4 (Bloomberg) — Mark Morris may not have been an obvious choice to stage and choreograph the Metropolitan Opera’s new production of Gluck’s 1762 “Orfeo ed Euridice,” which had its premiere Wednesday night at Lincoln Center. The Met has been slow to acknowledge postmodern choreographers. (George Balanchine was the last to try that double role — in 1953, with “The Rake’s Progress” — and the results weren’t happy.) For Morris, whose passion for vocal music may even outweigh his love of dancing, the results are strange and beautiful, which is to say typically Morris.

The stage picture, devised by artists previously associated with this choreographer, is strikingly bold, as the Met’s proportions demand. Set designer Allen Moyer has constructed a pair of three-tiered shallow arcs that seat the 100-strong chorus, leave a spacious dancing ground in front of them and separate or abut as the action requires.

Isaac Mizrahi has dressed the chorus in what looks like an exotic selection from every opera in the Met repertory. The dancers — the entire Mark Morris Dance Group plus a few from the Met Opera — were assigned contemporary casual clothes, as if to underline the fact that love, sorrow and unexpected joy exist in the here and now, not merely in the realm of ancient myth.

Simple Dancing

This is not Morris’s first encounter with “Orfeo ed Euridice.” An earlier production, with a different design team, was seen in 1996 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.

The choreography itself is kept very simple, from huge arm gestures in the beginning that echo and amplify Orfeo’s yearning lament to the final rejoicing — a cheeky mix of ballet, folk and sock-hop antics — when Euridice is firmly fixed once again in the world of the living and her husband’s arms. The most noteworthy passage is a triple duet studded with postures of uncanny grace. It’s meant to convey to Orfeo that Euridice will be returned to him through the force of love, and it makes that proposition convincing.

David Daniels, the countertenor playing Orfeo, sings with the deeply human quality Morris particularly values. Maija Kovalevska was technically impressive as Euridice, if not emotionally persuasive. Heidi Grant Murphy made a cheerful, unpretentious Amor, as if rescuing troubled lovers from catastrophe were all in a day’s work.

Morris’s free-wheeling spirit does occasionally get out of hand. Amor, sheathed in a flying harness, is lowered from the skyscraping top of the stage, singing gamely all the while. Orfeo totes a guitar (though he never seems to play it) to substitute for the mythological character’s lute. Euridice, who is indeed gorgeous, is gotten up like a trophy wife in a gown sprouting ostrich feathers. “Orfeo ed Euridice” is a work of myriad fluctuating moods — that’s an essential part of its poignancy — but it’s hard to imagine it being jokey.

Still, the simplicity and naturalness of Gluck’s score, revolutionary in its time, remains profoundly touching today, and James Levine conducted with his customary vitality.

This season’s performances of “Orfeo” are dedicated to the late Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, who was to have sung the role of Orfeo.

Further performances are scheduled for May 5, 9 and 12 at the Metropolitan Opera, Lincoln Center. Information: +1-212-362- 6000; http://www.metopera.org.

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

This article originally appeared in the Culture section of Bloomberg News on May 3, 2007.

May 3 (Bloomberg) — There’s nothing like having the right people on your side. Wednesday’s sold-out premiere of Peter Martins’s “Romeo + Juliet” for the New York City Ballet had Bill Clinton in the seat once reserved for Lincoln Kirstein at the New York State Theater. One can only hope the former president didn’t come expecting a glimpse of George Balanchine’s ideas about the future of classical dance.

The world probably doesn’t need another ballet set to the Prokofiev score. Kenneth MacMillan’s 1965 version (which will be danced by American Ballet Theater across the plaza at the Metropolitan Opera House June 18 through 23) has long served as the definitive one. But City Ballet needs its own “Romeo” because, with its melodramatic narrative, interesting, troubled characters and lavish costumes and scenery, it’s the kind of spectacle that sells tickets.

Martins believes these full-length story-telling classics need updating for today’s audience, as he has shown in his versions of “Swan Lake” and “The Sleeping Beauty.” This means, primarily, zipping along at a contemporary urban pace. His “Romeo + Juliet” sheds everything he deems unnecessary, including the mime that can give story ballets texture and the quiet or extended moments that provide atmosphere, psychological depth and balance for the hectic passages.

Snazzy Swordplay

Martins’s choreography is vigorous and serviceable but not very interesting. The exception is the lovers’ duets: While impressive by virtue of their sheer daring, they are more acrobatic than romantic or erotic. Even more disappointing is the fact that Martins provides no particularly memorable scenes. It’s pretty much business as usual — love at first sight with dire consequences. The snazziest aspect of the show is the painstakingly staged swordplay.

The weakest link is the set by the celebrated Danish painter Per Kirkeby, who also designed Martins’s “Swan Lake.” Both the backdrops and the front cloth are essentially abstract paintings that do little to define where the action is taking place. A unit set, stolidly rooted center stage, opens and closes as necessary to become bedroom, ballroom, balcony, crypt. It is unconvincing in its every guise.

Part of Martins’s master plan was to make the cast as young as possible. Of the four Juliets alternating in this week’s performances, two are relative newcomers to the company, one merely an apprentice. This guarantees a certain freshness, but if the policy spreads throughout the repertory, it will have promising talents aging out in their mid-20s.

High-Flying Sprite

The first cast’s principals, however, were undeniably wonderful. The 21-year-old soloist Sterling Hyltin is a fair- haired, high-flying sprite; her Juliet a joyous child who only grows braver and truer as her innocence is destroyed. Romeo is a breakthrough role for Robert Fairchild, just 19, who combines pure classicism with a soft, almost plush quality.

On the whole, the dancers were superb, even where viewers might occasionally question their assignments. One wonders, for instance, why Romeo’s pals Mercutio (Daniel Ulbricht) and Benvolio (Antonio Carmena) are played as genial thugs, since their dazzling virtuoso dancing renders them heroic. Was Martins channeling Jerome Robbins’s “West Side Story”? One wonders, too, why the vivid Georgina Pazcoguin has been encouraged to play the Nurse as a caricature.

As Tybalt, Joaquin De Luz exudes a menacing quality that, being tightly controlled, makes him the more threatening. Nikolaj Hubbe, in his two brief scenes as Friar Laurence, is reality itself. He’s the most persuasive actor in the show.

Elders of the company — Darci Kistler, Jock Soto and Albert Evans among them — add weight to the proceedings, while Martins’s mandolin dance for a quintet of boy students shows off the rising generation’s impeccable technique with considerable wit.

“Romeo + Juliet” will be performed through May 13 at the New York State Theater at Lincoln Center. Information: +1-212-721-6500; http://www.nycballet.com.

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

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

April 26 (Bloomberg) — What grand gesture can you make to honor the centenary of an icon’s birth? The New York City Ballet is dedicating its spring season, which opened last night at the New York State Theater, to Lincoln Kirstein, co-founder, with George Balanchine, of the company and its prestigious academy, the School of American Ballet.

All this week, the programs will be devoted to 10 Balanchine works that define the choreographer’s world-shaking development of classical ballet in the 20th century. They serve as indelible evidence of Kirstein’s achievement in luring the choreographer to America and doggedly furthering his career for the decades it can take to make the public appreciate genius.

The ballets are, in order of their creation, “Apollo,” “Concerto Barocco,” “The Four Temperaments,” “Symphony in C,” “Square Dance,” “Agon,” “Episodes,” “Symphony in Three Movements,” “Duo Concertant” and “Pavane.” All but the last of them — which simply provides a role suited to Kyra Nichols, the last ballerina Balanchine developed — seem to sum up the classical-dance legacy Balanchine absorbed from the past and catapulted into the future.

The sentiment of the occasion is fitting. The pressing question is: How are these works being danced now? There has been plenty of complaint in the past two decades about the NYCB’s custodianship of the Balanchine canon. The company’s performances have frequently been criticized as slipshod.

On opening night, “The Four Temperaments” and “Agon,” two of the choreographer’s most forward-looking masterworks, looked scrupulously rehearsed, clear and sharp-edged. Apart from some seasoned soloists, though, the dancers often seemed to be speaking a diligently learned foreign language, not their mother tongue. They looked far more at ease in the more conventionally classical “Symphony in C,” giving that extraordinary showpiece the unquenchable verve and soulful center it demands.

Subtle Dynamics

The rich, subtle dynamics that characterized NYCB performances when Balanchine himself supervised them were too often absent from the evening’s program, as they have been for some time. But a handful of extraordinary talents often made the stage vibrant.

Maria Kowroski, sympathetically partnered by Philip Neal, gave a sublime account of the celebrated adagio movement in “Symphony in C.” Sean Suozzi brought surging energy and implicit drama to the Melancholic section of “The Four Temperaments.” In “Agon,” Teresa Reichlen deployed her elongated, eerily supple body with enormous intelligence and composure, while Wendy Whelan and Albert Evans were eloquent in the central duet, with its deeply strange erotic beauty.

`Pavane’

Oddly, “Pavane,” a bagatelle compared to the heftier works on the program, got the most memorable performance. Set to a sinuous Ravel score, this solo for a woman in a diaphanous white dress was danced by Nichols, who will retire at the end of the season after 33 years with the company.

Her movements emanated from a strolling walk laced with simple gestures in which she manipulated a swath of gauzy fabric so that it became a veil, a cloud, a banner — perhaps an infant that has died. With her musicality and devotion invested in this simple though exquisitely calibrated piece, Nichols brought her lyrical, understated dancing close to perfection.

Even with less than ideal performances, Balanchine’s choreography triumphs. In a single evening, it can make much of the dancing one has seen all year irrelevant.

Kirstein Show

Lincoln Kirstein (1907-1996) was a bear of a man with a steel-trap mind, an instinctive feeling for what was next in the arts and the indomitable will and courage needed to bring it into being. While he possessed a general’s gift for strategy, he also had a visionary streak that allowed him to accomplish the seemingly impossible. Though giving Balanchine the opportunity to flourish was undoubtedly Kirstein’s greatest achievement, from the time he was a Harvard undergraduate, he made significant contributions to the advancement of literature and the visual arts as well.

His formidable presence is captured in an exhibition mounted throughout the State Theater’s public spaces. Edward Bigelow, its curator, describes it as a mosaic. Ticket holders strolling past the disparate elements in the half-hour before curtain time or in the intermissions will see that they cohere.

An aerial view of Lincoln Center, informal shots of Kirstein and Balanchine, the two with Peter Martins, who leads the company today, and Kirstein surrounded by a flock of SAB children underline the fact that he built an institution strong enough to outlast its founders.

Even more stirring than the photos demonstrating concrete achievement — shots of seven decades’ worth of ballets that depended on his efforts — are the portraits of Kirstein as a child and youth. The 4-year-old seated on his pony, sturdy body taut, gaze piercing, presages the man he would become. The shyly affectionate boy in a family portrait taken a few years later, and George Platt Lynes’s poetic portrayal of him as a young man, complete the picture.

The New York City Ballet is at the New York State Theater, Lincoln Center, through June 24. Information: +1-212-721-6500; http://www.nycballet.com.

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

This article originally appeared in the Culture section of Bloomberg News on April 20, 2007.

April 20 (Bloomberg) — The Eifman Ballet of St. Petersburg, Russia, is recognizable at a glance.

The dancers are as flexible as rubber bands and emotionally stretched to the snapping point; the stage patterns are exercises in simple geometry; the lifts acrobatic; the gestures extravagant.

There’s nothing soft or subtle in the choreography of Boris Eifman, 60, yet it can be crudely effective. It looks like animated poster art.

The repertory for the troupe’s season at the City Center, in New York, features “The Seagull,” which had its premiere in St. Petersburg in January. Eifman, who has already co-opted Tolstoy’s “Anna Karenina” and Dostoevski’s “Brothers Karamazov,” has now turned to Chekhov.

He has pared the chief characters to four and turned Chekhov’s subtle, penetrating tragicomedy into a semi-abstract psychodrama. All desire and anguish, it operates, remorselessly, at fever pitch, with music by Rachmaninoff and Scriabin.

Rather than sticking with Chekhov’s world of words (writers and actresses) Eifman has shifted the action to the dance stage. His protagonists are a celebrated ballerina past her prime (Nina Zmievets), her rising-star rival (Maria Abashova) and a pair of male choreographers who represent stultifying tradition (Yuri Smekalov) and the cutting edge (Dmitry Fisher). When not occupied with professional competition and generational conflict, the four tangle themselves, soap-operatically, in personal passions.

Ballet About Me

Eifman, whose self-importance is robust, has declared that the ballet is autobiographical, with him as both the established master and the renegade. But his choreography for “The Seagull” represents both modes with nothing more than cliches.

Many passages are just peculiar. To indicate male-male confrontation, one guy literally walks up the other’s body. For lovemaking, a man manipulates a woman’s body as if he aimed to turn her inside out. A gratuitous insert of hip-hop dance just confirms that classically trained dancers haven’t got the moxie for these moves.

The most truthful — and unflamboyant — scene in the ballet has the reigning choreographer confronted in a dimly lit studio by his assembled dancers. They form a living wall facing him, stony-faced, then stalk him in a circle, as if demanding to be brought to life in new and wonderful ways.

Other choreographers have described the terror of that situation in words. Eifman managed to realize it choreographically. It’s the one autobiographical element in the piece that inspires belief.

Pink Floyd

The company is celebrating its 30th anniversary this year, and its first night at the City Center was a tasting menu of excerpts from key Eifman works. It included the soft-porn duet “Double Voice,” to rock music by Pink Floyd, with which Eifman defied the repressive Soviet authorities in 1977. To American dance fans, bred in a more permissive climate, the piece would have seemed behind the times in its day; 30 years after the fact, its naivete is truly embarrassing.

The program opened with the world premiere of the first item in the troupe’s repertory created by a choreographer other than Eifman: “Cassandra,” by the 28-year-old, Moscow-based Nikita Dmitrievsky.

The young choreographer is a chip off the old block. Using a Gustav Holst score like movie music, Dmitrievsky provides characters and narrative taken from mythology and history in their heroic modes (the doomed Greek prophetess, the fall of Troy), stage patterning that might have been plotted on graph paper, and a dance vocabulary of semaphored gestures meant to express extreme states of grief and rage. Somehow, though, the piece is not as over the top as Eifman’s usual product (nor anywhere near as powerful as Martha Graham’s 1958 “Clytemnestra”). It’s actually too tame.

The Eifman Ballet of St. Petersburg continues at the New York City Center, West 55th Street, between Sixth and Seventh avenues, through April 29. Information: +1-212-581-1212 or http://www.nycitycenter.org.

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

Three-quarters of a year ago, struck by an image, I wrote about a dancer whose history was essentially unknown. Here is the image–

Weegee
Ballerina Marina Franca in her peacock costume, April 18, 1941
Gelatin silver print
© Weegee / International Center of Photography

–and here is the essay. A brief passage in it now seems prophetic: “Contemplating this lady in her outlandish white costume–all shimmer and froth–we wonder: Who is she? How did she arrive at this time and place? This peculiar destiny? What does her “performance” consist of? Is she, perhaps, a reluctant collaborator in her work?”

A couple of seasons after the essay appeared, I received an e-mail from Marc Salz, a Philadelphia-based painter in his late fifties, who identified himself as the dancer’s son. Since then, through the instantly informative yet strangely remote means of e-mail, he has filled in Marina Franca’s story. He also provided me with my first sight of Al Hirschfeld’s dashing image of her. Featuring the same outré peacock costume that caught Weegee’s eye, it recorded Franca’s appearance in the stage show at New York’s most extravagant picture palace, Radio City Music Hall.

© AL HIRSCHFELD. Reproduced by arrangement with Hirschfeld’s exclusive representative, THE MARGO FEIDEN GALLERIES LTD., NEW YORK. WWW.ALHIRSCHFELD.COM

Marina Franca, Salz relates, was known as Marina Lord at the time of the Radio City gig. Her real name was Wilhelmina Roothooft. She was born in Amsterdam in 1917. In her mid-teens, she decamped for Paris to train for a career in classical dance with the great Russian émigrés who had themselves relocated there. She studied first–in 1932–with Alexander Volinine, then made her debut in 1934 at the academy run by Lubov Egorova. In the late thirties, she studied with Olga Preobrajenska, where Léonide Massine discovered her and introduced her to the Ballet Russe.

The outbreak of World War II abruptly ended Franca’s 1938-1939 stint with the Ballet Russe. Salz explains the situation this way: “My mother was separated from her family (her mother and her younger brother, Edmond, in Holland, and her elder brother, Jan, who was in hiding in France). Her father had died earlier, when she was thirteen. She had been sending her mother money for support, she told me, but was otherwise cut off from communication with her family by the Nazi Occupation.

“She left for America, where her career choices were based on her own survival, of course, but also upon her concern for her family abroad. At first she tried her luck in Hollywood, but that didn’t work out for her as it did for another Ballet Russe dancer, Marc Platt. I have a number of publicity photos of her from that time; she even did an ad for ballet slippers.

“I think her post-Ballet Russe career must have been humiliating to her,” Salz continues. “Her training and talent were of a far higher caliber than the things she had to do to survive. The peacock costume, for instance. She couldn’t have done much dancing in it. It had a motor in the back that activated the peacock’s ‘display.’ It was almost a burlesque contraption. I think the Weegee photo captures her nervous unease at her situation.

“At the time of the peacock costume, my mother’s ballet career was clearly in trouble. I think she assumed that the choreographer of the moment, George Balanchine, would not care for her figure and style. First of all, he would probably think she was too zaftig. And then his connection with Stravinsky made his choreography more angular and formal–almost the opposite of the old-fashioned Russian School in which my mother was trained and the lighter French style of the Ballet Russe.

“She then met Sam Salz, a well known art dealer, who was 22 years her senior. They married in 1942. Sol Hurok, the ballet impresario, was the matchmaker. They lived first at a hotel on Park Avenue, where my father had his headquarters, selling Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings. When they bought their own house on East 76th Street, it became the new center for my father’s art dealing. Meanwhile, they had produced two sons–me, and my brother André, who is a year younger.

“My mother disliked my father’s insistence that his gallery and his domestic life occupy the same space. The “customers,” who included Rockefellers and Mellons, came in the evening as well as the daytime. We were all told to be very quiet while they considered the pictures my father was selling. After they left, my mother would yell “The coast is clear!” and we could come out of our rooms and relax.

“The pressure of always putting on a show for those people really got to my mother. She was a person who hated snobbism and had that direct Dutch character of always stating her opinion. Her personality was in a way like Dutch weather. The clouds in Holland sometimes block out the sun, sometimes let it shine through. Different moods for different times, and you had to be prepared for both. My parents divorced in 1970.

“I never saw my mother dance, and, as the years went by, she talked less and less of her dance career because it belonged to a world that existed in the distant past. It was nice to go to the ballet with her, though, because she would occasionally comment on the dancers’ moves. ‘Oh, that was off!’ ‘Oh, that’s good!’ It was like being at a basketball game. Balanchine became simply one of the men who came to our house to play bridge and gin rummy with my father, along with the pianist Vladimir Horowitz and the cellist Gregor Piatagorsky.”

After being captured by two very disparate popular artists–Weegee and Hirschfeld–in the forties, Franca sat for a pair of portraits by the Dutch Fauvist painter Kees van Dongen. Salz believes that his father commissioned the pictures in Deauville in the mid-fifties. The stronger of the paintings–Portrait of Marina Salz–seizes the vivid energy intimated in the meager but telling accounts we have of Franca. Serendipitously, the public will be able to view this image May 4-8 at Sotheby’s (1334 York Avenue at 72nd Street, New York City), where it will be offered in an auction of Impressionist and Modern Art on May 9.

Salz prefers not to dwell in print on the last phase of Franca’s life, which was dark, plagued by deteriorating health and spirits. For publication, he reports simply, “During the seventies, my mother had a ninety-acre country estate in Bedford, Pennsylvania, which she helped create with her new partner, who was Russian. Together they named the place Swan Lake. My mother died there peacefully in 1999.”

Franca’s son has proffered his information in the hope that his mother will be remembered. By strange coincidence, this addendum is being posted on the 90th anniversary of her birth. Far be it from me, then, to deprive Salz or Marina Franca herself of the Heaven-bent apotheosis that ballets of the past deliver so generously.

© 2007 Tobi Tobias