Archives for 2007

This article originally appeared in the Culture section of Bloomberg News on April 5, 2007.

April 5 (Bloomberg) — The three dancers in “Becky, Jodi and John” are simply playing themselves.

Becky is Becky Hilton; Jodi is Jodi Melnick. Both women have been important figures in groundbreaking dance — Hilton, an earth-mother type, chiefly with Stephen Petronio and Lucy Guerin; Melnick, swift, sweet and smart, with Twyla Tharp and now Trisha Brown. John is John Jasperse, creator of this piece and just about as celebrated as downtown choreographers get.

Each of them is 43 years old, and while they’ve been good buddies for some two decades, they’ve had no major stints of dancing together before this. Jasperse says they’ve hooked up now at New York’s Dance Theater Workshop to share the often devastating experience of growing old in the land of the young.

Then how come this piece is so sanguine and audience- friendly? Its subject is one few dancers can face with equanimity — the inevitable early end of a performing career based on youthful athletic prowess. What’s more, Jasperse has made his reputation with work not given to sentiment. His usual product is brainy, dead set against easy beauty, familiar with the prevailing weather in the lands of gloom and doom.

Then again, “Becky, Jodi and John” isn’t so much about dancing after all. It’s mainly about friendship that’s long, deep and likely to last forever. This is evident in the serenity with which the three dancers move, often watching each other as one might contemplate a landscape, and in the way their bodies seem to know no embarrassment in the others’ presence.

Foot Fetish?

In one illuminating scene, John enters bare-armed and bare- legged, carrying a stack of boxes that conceals his equally naked chest and pelvis. He lets the boxes thud to the floor. Jodi moves in, standing as close as she can without touching him, and stares, long and calmly, at his now public parts. Then they move into a duet of taking turns half collapsing, as if fainting, each repeatedly rescuing the other with a deftly timed supporting arm before she or he hits the floor.

The piece has its share of typical Jasperse tactics, especially movement in which every body part — hand, foot, the back of a leg — is revealed as unique, grotesque and wonderful. (How often, outside Japan, does one encounter lovemaking in which the foot plays a major role?)

Nudity, of course, is one of this choreographer’s basic tools. He has spiced this dance in particular with action from props, some of it witty, some silly, all of it adding to an ambience of personal charm. Hahn Rowe’s strange and lively score, commissioned for the occasion and played onstage by the composer, adds aptly to the mix.

“Becky, Jodi and John” is too flimsy to become a highlight of Jasperse’s resume. As a bagatelle, though, it provides a fair measure of enchantment.

The John Jasperse Company continues at Dance Theater Workshop, 219 W. 19th St. in New York, through Apr. 7. Information: +1-212-924-0077 or http://www.dtw.org.

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

This article originally appeared in the Culture section of Bloomberg News on March 15, 2007.

March 15 (Bloomberg) — It’s nearly impossible to describe the work of Zvi Gotheiner — an Israeli choreographer based in New York for two decades — without resorting to the word “lush.” “Earthy” and “robust” leap to mind as well. “Gertrud,” given its world premiere last night at the Ailey Citigroup Theater by Gotheiner’s 12-member company, ZviDance, has a goodly share of those qualities, and yet it misses its mark.

The piece is a tribute to Gotheiner’s early mentor, Gertrud Kraus, a dancer, choreographer and visual artist who emigrated to what is now Israel from her native Vienna in the run-up to World War II. History remembers her primarily as a teacher and a key figure in the growth of modern dance in her adopted country. Period photographs reveal an impassioned lyricism in her dancing that must have made her an indelible presence.

Oddly enough, Gotheiner is unable to bring Kraus to life, either as an artist or as a human being. He has his dancers quote copiously from her wit and wisdom as they emulate her idiosyncratic methods in the studio. But the tone of these passages is so dry that Kraus comes off as little more than a beloved eccentric. When dancing is allowed to wrest attention away from the words, it looks like exercises in Gotheiner’s style without any reference to what Kraus herself might have created.

Mutual Pleasure

The most moving segment is almost incidental: a brief, quiet duet for two women sharing an invisible cigarette and, by delicate implication, another mutual pleasure. The final scene — in which the dying Kraus leans on her acolytes and views the sole existing footage of her own dancing — is an unexpected and perhaps desperate resort to melodrama.

“Gertrud” features projections that include Kraus’s sketches of stick-figure dancers and abstract designs suggesting motion — a hieroglyphics of dance. The music for the piece, by Scott Killian, is neither here nor there. Among the quoted Kraus utterances is this useful one-liner: “Never walk around barefoot to Romantic music.”

Gotheiner’s own signature, torn-from-the-earth effect operates magnificently in his 2006 “Les Noces,” set to the Stravinsky score. The 10 participants indulge in a cleverly crafted rush of escalating passions — stamping, leaping, gesticulating, falling and shuddering. For the longest time, though, the choreography refuses to account for the specific characters Stravinsky had in mind in his celebrated evocation of the rituals surrounding an arranged marriage among Russian peasants.

Bride and Groom

When it does, different dancers rotate in the roles of the innocent bride and groom (same-sex matings duly honored) and the parents and friends who urge them on. The steps of the story, from the preparation of the bride and groom to the wedding night, are also left vague. So that while the physical action is thrilling, you’re never sure what it’s in service of.

The lure of Stravinsky’s vigorous, colorful score is unfortunately irresistible. Bronislava Nijinska, the first to choreograph the music (in 1923), got it absolutely right; Jerome Robbins admitted that his version, in 1965, fell short of her level. Today’s dance-makers refuse to recognize this evidence and persist in creating their own interpretations. I’ve seen three just this season. Could new dances to the score be outlawed for a while? If the state can legislate against trans fat, why not this contribution to our artistic life?

ZviDance is at the Ailey Citigroup Theater, 405 W. 55th St. at Ninth Avenue, through March 18. Information: +1-212-415-5500; http://www.92Y.org/HarknessFestival.

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

This article originally appeared in the Culture section of Bloomberg News on March 5, 2007.

March 5 (Bloomberg) — Intense and wiry, Paul Taylor’s senior dancer, Lisa Viola, emerges from a circling ensemble dressed in white Sunday-best practice clothes for a solo of strange stymied gestures. She flings herself into backbends as if turning herself inside out, staggers forward on her knees in a stuttering rhythm, clasps her hands in prayer and wrings them like a person deranged by grief.

Taylor, whose company is performing at the New York’s City Center, typically creates two new works a year, one gloomy and one upbeat. “Lines of Loss,” combines the dark with another of the choreographer’s perennial fixations — the grotesque.

The dance is constructed as a suite, its nine episodes set to plaintive music by a half-dozen composers whose careers span seven centuries. The 14th-century’s Guillaume de Machaut is the earliest among them; the modernists are represented by John Cage, Alfred Schnittke and Arvo Part. Astonishingly, the common tone of the pieces makes them cohere. They form an almost seamless whole.

The choreography describes twin afflictions of profound physical incapacity and psychological devastation over the loss of one’s beloved, the death of friendship, alienation from others, alienation from oneself. Several of the portraits are searing.

In one, Michael Trusnovec stands alone on stage as if he were the last person alive in a geography devoid of landmarks. He makes disconnected moves — scratching at his body, lying down and bicycling his legs, waving his hand before his eyes, as if to confirm the terrible fact that he can’t see or that the only thing to be seen is emptiness.

Pretzeled Twins

The central duet, for Viola and Trusnovec, has them dancing with their arms intertwined, like pretzeled, conjoined twins. Even when they separate briefly, as if for a breath of air, they seem doomed to an unspecified hell on earth.

Choreographically, the passage is a tour de force, at once horrible and beautiful. Finally they get some space between them, only to look more lost than ever. They walk off in opposite directions and, startlingly, turn to blow each other a kiss.

The piece begins and ends with a procession. Its eleven dancers enter single-file in silhouette against a backdrop of rough, thin black lines streaked horizontally over a white ground. In the final passage, ten of the dancers reappear in brilliant red cloaks and lie down in a snaking line that looks like a river of blood. The handsome designs are by Santo Loquasto; the evocative lighting, by the incomparable Jennifer Tipton.

Cop Out

That ending is a cop-out, though. The choreography, so ingeniously observed in places, quits before it has made a definitive point. Viola alone escapes the fate of the red- shrouded figures and walks quietly away. For some time, she’s been one of Taylor’s most favored dancers. Has he now cast her as angel, exempt from life’s toll?

Tomorrow the company will give New York its first look at Taylor’s new “Troilus and Cressida (reduced),” unveiled last April under the auspices of his alma mater Syracuse University. Reports from its touring venues suggest that the piece is one of the low-down comic works with which Taylor has continually peppered his repertoire. Here, tricked out in outlandish costumes, the dancers apply their athletic deftness and grace to the art of blundering in the fields of love and war.

The plot, such as it is, can be traced backward from Taylor through Shakespeare and Chaucer to Homer’s “Iliad.” The idea of clowning around to Ponchielli’s “Dance of the Hours,” of course, takes its cue from Walt Disney.

The Paul Taylor Dance Company is at City Center, W. 55th St. between Sixth and Seventh avenues, through March 18. Information: +1-212-581-1212; http://www.nycitycenter.org.

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

This article originally appeared in the Culture section of Bloomberg News on March 1, 2007.

March 1 (Bloomberg) — A woman with a blunt peasant’s face steps out from a raggedy, 13-dancer line-up. “This is `Composition Number 1,’ in which my son was arrested,” she announces before leaving the stage. Then all hell breaks loose.

The remaining dozen dancers enact a street melee seemingly initiated by a horrible onslaught from above. In a silence broken only by the grunts, gasps and stifled cries that accompany bodies fleeing, grappling and thudding to the floor, they display the results of a senseless conflict in which there are no heroes or enemies, only victims.

The message comes from William Forsythe. His newly formed Forsythe Company is performing “Three Atmospheric Studies,” an antiwar dance-theater piece prompted by events in the Middle East. It’s a far cry indeed from the “drastic classicism” that made Forsythe famous. The choreographer — American-born, though based in Germany for the past three decades — declares it “an act of citizenship.”

Politics and dance usually make uneasy bedfellows. But from Kurt Jooss’s “The Green Table” (created in Germany in 1932 and still arresting) to Paul Taylor’s 2005 “Banquet of Vultures,” choreographers have at times responded with vehement eloquence to what Goya so aptly termed and depicted, the disasters of war.

Forsythe both personalizes and objectifies these calamities. The plight of the mother, who slowly comes to realize that her son has been killed and is viewed by the authorities masterminding the combat simply as “collateral damage,” piercingly illustrates the fact that even a single death of this kind is one too many.

Menacing

Still, the scene I’ve described is an ingenious example of formal deconstruction. Its violent chaos is fragmented into brief start-and-stop segments that are refracted as if by a kaleidoscope.

“Composition No. 2” is all talking, no dancing. Against a background of ominous bass notes, a man (Amancio Gonzalez) who seems at first pedantic, then quietly manipulative and menacing, translates into Arabic the mother’s account of the experience in which her son vanished. Much is garbled in the translation; much is lost. As her plainspoken memory of the simple truth is destroyed, the mother — vividly played by Jone San Martin — becomes increasingly hysterical and grotesque.

Placed between the two conducting this fatal interview, an impassive art-professor type (David Kern) lectures on the similarities of composition between a Crucifixion painted by Lucas Cranach the Elder in the early 16th century and a 2005 Reuters photo of a bombed building, with people racing away as fires rage. (Both images, Forsythe’s inspiration for the piece, appear in the program.)

War Victims

“Composition No. 3” reprises the violent street scene and the lecture of the art professor, who now sorts through the fallout of cataclysm: “Here’s a ring — with a finger still in it.”

A blonde pixie of a dancer (Dana Caspersen), her Texas- accented voice electronically deepened, represents an amalgam of recent and current American leaders. Addressing the almost inert mother at a photo op, she says, “You have to understand that this not personal” and “Apart from the general state of emergency here, there’s no cause for alarm.”

In its indictment of government-sanctioned destruction and murder and manipulation of the truth, “Three Atmospheric Studies” is sophomoric at times, but I like Forsythe as an angry man. His subject matter wins out over his earlier, overly intellectual sophistication. Here he seems engaged enough with his cause to allow awkwardness in his art. In the end, incomplete control may actually enrich it.

The Forsythe Company performs at the BAM Opera House, 30 Lafayette Ave., Brooklyn, through March 3. Information: +1-718- 636-4100 or 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 February 9, 2007.

Feb. 9 (Bloomberg) — At the edge of the sea, a middle-aged man, taut with repression, watches a group of boys carelessly tossing a beach ball. He singles out a blond youth, godlike among them. They dance an ingeniously constructed duet full of deep shifting feelings, made furtive by the incursions of the carefree adolescent gang.

This is the most affecting scene in John Neumeier’s “Death in Venice,” based on Thomas Mann’s 1912 novella and set to chunks of Wagner and Bach. For his version — created in 2003 and being danced by the Hamburg Ballet at the Brooklyn Academy of Music — Neumeier has transformed Mann’s protagonist, Aschenbach, a venerated aging writer, into a renowned choreographer.

Weary of the ascetic life he felt his career required and doubting the authenticity of his writing, Aschenbach embarks on a beach vacation to discover Dionysian pleasures. In Venice, where everything solid is transmuted into its fugitive watery reflection, he conceives an illicit passion for a ravishing 14- year-old boy and dies, an object of ridicule, his obsessive desire unconsummated.

Neumeier’s choreographer has the advantage of his workplace, a ballet studio rife with gorgeous, self-aware bodies. He hankers after a sympathetic, sandy-haired fellow who, teamed with his dark sidekick, sometimes taunts the older man.

Pangs of Creation

Many minutes of rehearsal go by, however, without offering a hint of narrative. It’s all dry, classroom-classical stuff. We learn only that the temperamental choreographer is suffering the pangs of creation (hand to bowed head). He storms out of the studio, succumbs to reverie and fantasizes a pair of tough male lovers who morph into gondoliers floating their prey along the canals.

Once the scene switches to Venice, the ballet perks up, fueled by erotic visions both delectable and violent and glimpses of an elegant society at leisure, unaware of an encroaching epidemic of cholera. The fair boy and the dark one from the studio (now clearly Mann’s Tadzio and Jaschu) are reincarnated here, humiliating the choreographer with the energy and arrogance of youth, but no more than he degrades himself, trying vainly to appear young.

Finally, though we don’t see how or why, Tadzio becomes interested in Aschenbach. Still, the youth eludes an actual embrace with his pursuer until the final scene, back in the rehearsal room, where the physical climax occurs and the choreographer dies.

Boys on the Beach

Despite commendable performances from Lloyd Riggins, Edvin Revazov and Thiago Bordin as Aschenbach, Tadzio and Jaschu, respectively, the ballet is scuttled by Neumeier’s insistence on accounting for every strand in Mann’s deftly woven tissue.

Aschenbach’s dignifying his longings with parallels from ancient Greece is well handled by having the boys on the beach launch into fragments of Greek folk dancing, but elsewhere Neumeier is obtusely literal. He compounds that fault by adding some Freudian musings of his own invention. Like much of his work, “Death in Venice” is long on ideas but short on dancing that’s meaningful in and of itself.

The Hamburg Ballet continues at BAM, 30 Lafayette Ave., Brooklyn, through Feb. 10. Information: +1-718-636-4100 or http://www.BAM.org.

Karole Armitage

By her own declaration, Karole Armitage has been out to revolutionize classical dancing. She earned the moniker “punk ballerina” in New York in the 1980s, avidly and successfully sought fame abroad, then returned here to stay in 2004. Over time, her work, still willfully inscrutable, has grown tamer.

Armitage Gone! Dance opened Feb. 6 at the Joyce Theater in Chelsea with the world premiere of “Ligeti Essays.” A succession of 23 small dances to works by the late composer, it aims for haiku-like concision and delicacy of perception. But it’s almost impossible to follow after the first handful of vignettes. Armitage, as is her fatal habit, strings one movement after another without taking any responsibility for their physical logic or emotional coherence.

The proceedings, far too dependent on extravagant leg extensions, were redeemed by three terrific dancers: William Isaac, a gentle fellow with a magisterial build; Theresa Ruth Howard, a vivid presence who is very much her own woman; and Frances Chiaverini, whose blend of power and fluidity evokes memories of Mark Morris’s Tina Fehland and Balanchine’s Suzanne Farrell.

The program was fleshed out with “Pig,” a bagatelle involving a porcine inflatable (by Jeff Koons) and a very pregnant sylph, and the Bartok section, reworked, of Armitage’s 2004 “Time is the echo of an axe within a wood.” Think calm, alternating with raging disorder — predictably and at great length.

Many people find Armitage’s work brainy, iconoclastic, even beautiful. For my part, I can only quote my companion who tried and failed to appreciate another much-touted artist: “There is a secret here to which I am not privy.”

Armitage Gone! Dance is at the Joyce Theater, 175 Eighth Ave., at 19th Street, through Feb. 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 the Culture section of Bloomberg News on February 5, 2007.

Feb. 5 (Bloomberg) — Seven devout young men from a long-ago shtetl dance, arms linked, creating an impenetrable wall with their black-clad bodies. Their movement is both angular and sinuous, mirroring Leonard Bernstein’s score, which couples modern dissonance with undulating ethnic references. Suddenly the figures break free, making cryptic, emphatic gestures with their hands, each body now a separate locus of mystery and danger.

This is the opening passage of Jerome Robbins’s “Dybbuk,” revived in its original form by the New York City Ballet. Set in an Orthodox Jewish community in Eastern Europe, this account of possession, exorcism and love beyond the grave — based on S. Ansky’s “The Dybbuk,” a staple of Yiddish theater — premiered in 1974.

Back then the ballet received a lukewarm reception, and Robbins himself was dissatisfied with it. Several revisions that made the piece more abstract were no better. The return to the original, reconstructed by Jean-Pierre Frohlich and Elyse Borne, who danced in the first production, proves that this ballet needs as much story as it can get. Even so, the choreography is no more than a series of vignettes — as vivid and incomplete as stained-glass church windows that illustrate the high points of dramatic Biblical tales.

Body Snatcher

In Ansky’s 1914 drama, Chanon, an impoverished religious scholar, and Leah have been promised to each other by their fathers before they were born. But when Leah is ready to marry, her father chooses a richer husband for her. To reclaim his promised bride, Chanon explores the treacherous mystical world of the cabala and dies as a result. His spirit — the dybbuk — invades Leah’s body; the community exorcises it, at the price of Leah’s life. Destined for each other, the lovers are united after death.

Without connection to these characters and events, the ballet would be indecipherable. There’s plenty to praise in Robbins’s stark, strange male solos and the male septet that opens the piece, asserting the implacable power of the community’s obsessions, along with their opposite, a dulcet folksy number for Leah and her girlfriends.

Most striking is the long duet in which Chanon, now a dybbuk, possesses his beloved’s body, first violently, countering her resistance, then with her utter compliance. Robbins makes it clear that this is, in a sense, their wedding night. The fact that much of the choreography has a cabala-on- Broadway sheen just reconfirms where Robbins’s immense talent was most at home.

Turbulent Emotions

The entire cast performed with devotion, Benjamin Millepied working extra-hard to blend technical strength with the turbulent emotions besetting Chanon. Jenifer Ringer, all reticent lyricism, made an exquisitely pure, delicate Leah. “Dybbuk” is in no way a major ballet, but it has given her one of the best roles she’s ever had.

The New York City Ballet is at the New York State Theater, Lincoln Center, through Feb. 25. 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 the Summer 2006 issue (Vol. 15, No. 2) of Dance Now.

Dance fans are forever complaining about dancing stars who refuse to recognise when the time has come to call it quits and retire from the stage. Two of the last century’s ballet divinities, Rudolf Nureyev and Margot Fonteyn, continued not merely for years but for decades past their prime, first adjusting their repertoire to diminishing physical capability, eventually creating a performance out of charisma alone. Among the incomparable artists still with us, Darci Kistler–the last New York City Ballet ballerina identified by Balanchine–has for some time been treading down the perilous path traced by Fonteyn, albeit with a gentler persistence. During the Nineties, switching from ballet to more physically lenient modern and postmodern choreography through his White Oak Dance Project, Mikhail Baryshnikov appeared to be evading retirement as Nureyev did, though in a supremely tasteful way.

Viewers new to the game will watch the severely compromised performances of a protracted sunset and, in extreme cases of benign blindness, will not even notice that they’re underpowered. Inexperienced viewers tend to respond with almost unerring instinct to the truly terrific, while ignoring, untroubled, the less than wonderful. To the neophyte observer susceptible to dancing, everything about it is odd and fascinating.

The spectators who suffer from the decline of a once-transcendent dancer are the ones who witnessed and rejoiced in her glorious prime. Instead of merely lamenting the passing and ravages of time, they now feel angry, betrayed. They feel the performer is desecrating their memories of her artistry when it was sublime. They feel that she, having once so significantly enhanced their lives, has no right to do this, that she should know better, and so forth. In their petulant righteousness, they forget that the artist they once revered is only human, subject to human folly based on exigent human need.

[Read more…] about Enough

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

Jan. 18 (Bloomberg) — From every one of the 140 seats in the black-box theater at the Mark Morris Dance Center in Brooklyn, you’re close enough to see the performers’ muscles flexing, hear their footfalls, and feel in your own body the vibrations of the live music to which they move. While the Mark Morris Dance Group is at home in opera houses worldwide — including the Broooklyn Academy of Music just across the street — the choreographer chose this intimate space for the two-week run of a repertory program that opened last night.

The new item on the bill, a quintet with Morris himself at the center, is a disappointment. Called “Italian Concerto,” after the Bach score to which it’s set, the piece is dominated by cryptic gestures, first performed discretely then expanded into more flowing dance phrases.

The swiftly paced opening and closing movements seem merely a frame for the slow middle section that’s Morris’s solo. At 50, Morris has grown jowly and thick in the middle, but he’s still a powerful, rhythmically astute dancer. Here, though, you wonder what his gestures might mean: the forward-thrusting hands with their splayed fingers, the repeated double tap of a flat palm on the chest, in the territory of the heart. The dance could be seen as a portrait of an aging creator — a Prospero or a Merce Cunningham.

Love Rules

The program’s standouts were two dances offering very different takes on the theme of love. “The Argument,” created in 1999, couldn’t be more contemporary: It dwells on lovers’ incompatibility.

Three male-female couples dance successive duets to Schumann’s “Funf Stucke im Volkston” for cello and piano. The relationship of the first pair is fueled by rage. The thoughtful second couple is never going to mate easily; both partners are too serious and too easily discouraged. The man and woman of the third duo veer between anger they keep in check, which isolates them from each other, and conciliatory impulses that lack sufficient force to prevail. Ruefully, we recognize them all. We’ve lived most of the roles ourselves.

Morris’s 1989 “Love Song Waltzes,” a sequel to his 1982 “New Love Song Waltzes” — the two co-opt the pair of Brahms scores Balanchine chose for his ravishing “Liebeslieder Walzer” — locates love in the community rather than in the hearts of a special pair set apart from workaday society.

Morris deploys a dozen dancers as an ensemble, in small interrelating clusters, and occasionally as couples (same-sex and hetero). The twosomes are usually replicated and thus purged of exclusivity.

Shifting Social Arrangements

All the social arrangements are shifting ones. The emotions, lavish in their range, are fleeting too, as if the people in the dance lived in a climate famous for its changeable weather. And every feeling, from tender empathy to the more vehement passions (one being a fierce if futile resistance to love), belongs to the group as a whole. Given these conditions, the dance looks wonderfully fluid, but its structure is tight as a drum.

Throughout the evening, the dancers laid claim to the highest praise for their technical aplomb, their musicality, and their sheer human authenticity.

In case dance observers were worrying about Morris’s working lately on too small a scale, word came yesterday that his next project is a full-evening “Romeo and Juliet.” It will have its premiere at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, in the 2008 SummerScape Festival.

Rome, Juliet Redux

One would think that the ballet world had already given us enough of these lovers, but Morris can safely say something that has always been true of his work, “The music made me.” His production will be made in response to the discovery in Russia of documents on Prokofiev’s original score and scenario, suppressed in the Stalinist era because they failed to conform to the dictates of Socialist Realism. Since Morris is inclined to follow no dictates but his own and those of the music he’s chosen to work with, he should be just the man for this job.

The Mark Morris Dance Group continues at the Mark Morris Dance Center, 3 Lafayette Ave., Brooklyn, through Jan. 27. Information: +1-212-352-3101 or http://www.mmdg.org.

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

This article originally appeared in the Culture section of Bloomberg News on January 15, 2007.

Jan. 15 (Bloomberg) — “I love everything about the theater,” Yoshiko Chuma says at a midday rehearsal of “A Page Out of Order: M,” which begins a five-day run tomorrow at Dance Theater Workshop in Chelsea. Known for her maverick imagination and crazy-quilt multimedia work, the Japanese-born Chuma has been a fixture on New York’s downtown scene for over a quarter- century.

“But it’s a very expensive hobby,” Chuma adds wryly. No doubt: The new piece was created episode by episode over a period of five years in venues as disparate as Macedonia (hence the “M” of the title), Albania, Japan and the U.S.

With her company, the School of Hard Knocks, Chuma has made pieces for venues ranging from the Paris Opera to the Halloween parade in Greenwich Village, not to mention the private living rooms of patrons.

Chuma’s earlier work brimmed with absurdist gaiety. Lately it has grown graver and darker. “Page,” while typically cryptic and inventive, offers intimations of the hardships of dislocation and conflict. The action, much of it abstract, is by turns violent, contemplative, agonized and quietly cooperative. Still, reflecting Chuma’s temperament, its seriousness is leavened with considerable charm.

Ralph Lee Installations

The key element in “Page” is Ralph Lee’s installation of four 7-foot metal cube frames. Fluently maneuvered and inhabited by a six-dancer ensemble, they reconfigure and animate the space even more vividly than the choreography that goes on in, around and through them.

Often white panels are attached to the sides of the cubes to serve as screens for film projections of nature, architecture and local inhabitants drawn from disparate parts of the globe. Meanwhile, onstage musicians produce a lively cacophony while a narrator-singer provides a few vocal clues to what’s going on — in Japanese.

The overall effect is one of magically and disconcertingly shifting boundaries. The social and political issues are, at most, a subtext. Chuma herself is against interpretation.

“Some people come to my performances looking for meaning and use up all their energy trying to find it,” she says. “I wish my audience would not have expectations or preconceptions. They limit the imagination. What I do is ambiguous. I don’t have a statement. If I had a statement, I’d be a writer.”

Yoshiko Chuma and the School of Hard Knocks will be performing at Dance Theater Workshop, 219 W. 19th St., Jan. 16-20. Information: +1-212-924-0077.

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

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

Jan. 4 (Bloomberg) — Nikolaj Hubbe was not merely the most poetic player in last night’s return of “The Sleeping Beauty” at the New York State Theater. He was, of all the Prince Desires I’ve seen, the most convincing. He made the situation of a young prince yearning for love completely believable, something that could really happen to a guy in the street or in a forest, now or long, long ago.

A fairy shows him a vision of a princess who’s been asleep for 100 years, but only in fugitive glimpses. With the power of his imagination, Hubbe makes us see what he’s thinking: This girl is perfection, but is she real? And, if she is, will I be able to make her mine? Doubt and incredulous joy fluctuate in his every move. He’s not thinking of happily ever after yet. He’s thinking of right now.

There were other pleasures to be had on opening night of the New York City Ballet’s two-week run of Peter Martins’s 1991 version of the Petipa-Tchaikovsky ballet of 1890: Wendy Whelan’s unlikely yet touchingly wise rendering of Aurora, a role utterly mismatched to her considerable gifts; Jennie Somogyi’s musical and beautifully sculpted dancing as the Lilac Fairy; Teresa Reichlen’s lush, witty Diamond in the Wedding Scene; as well as the spunk and meticulous grace of the many children from the School of American Ballet.

Mime Allergy

Overall, though, the New York City Ballet, bred in Balanchine’s neo-classical style, doesn’t inspire confidence when it tries to move in the 19th-century classical tradition. Most of the dancers look brittle, hemmed in, as if speaking an unfamiliar language. Still, that’s not the main problem. The main problem lies with the production itself.

Martins assumes, with good reason, that his audience enjoys the old-fashioned pleasures of a good story and lavish scenic effects. Yet he’s also convinced, again rightly, that such viewers are primarily interested in movement — the more athletically extraordinary, the better. Further, that they’re allergic to mime, not overly concerned about psychological depth and indifferent to the ballet’s moral lessons. And that they have extremely short attention spans.

Martins has proved he’s right, of course, by selling lots of tickets. Let other companies — notably the Kirov in 1999 and the Royal Ballet last year — produce lavish, historically based, even beguiling productions. Neither speaks directly to the here and now. By contrast, Martins’s “Beauty” is unabashedly contemporary. Beginning with its reduction from nearly four hours to two and a half, it is ruthlessly efficient. It’s brisk and to the point, devoid of metaphor and subtlety.

Prince Nikolaj

If it’s soul you’re looking for, you must look elsewhere. Unless, that is, you catch Hubbe in the several alternating casts and keep your eyes focused exclusively on the Prince.

New York City Ballet is at the New York State Theater, Lincoln Center through Feb. 25; “The Sleeping Beauty” will be performed through Jan. 14. Information: +1-212-721-6500 or http://www.nycballet.org.

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