Tobi Tobias on Dance et al.
Mark Morris Dance Group in the Mostly Mozart Festival 2009 / Rose Theater, Lincoln Center, NYC / August 19-22, 2009
Mark Morris Dance Group in
Empire Garden.
Photo: Gene Schiavone
Mark Morris, who shares top honors (with Paul Taylor) as America’s greatest living choreographer, is at mid-career, but maybe no longer at the top of his game.
The full article appeared in Voice of Dance (http://www.voiceofdance.org) on August 25, 2009. To read it, click here.
Have you noticed that ballets that are inarguably choreographic disasters often improve after a few performances? This happens, I think, once the piece has been danced before a public audience and the performers have finally admitted to themselves that “there’s no there there.” Then they take the hapless creation into their own hands, recognizing that it’s up to them to do what they can to rescue it.
It’s not that they change the choreography noticeably, though they may intensify the phrasing and the shifts in emphasis between light and shade. It’s more, rather, that they learn to “sell” the piece to the public by believing in it, much in the way a parent or other committed guide bolsters an ill-endowed or wayward child.
They give it extra and more intently focused physical energy, more psychic communication between dancer and dancer or among groups of them. They animate areas of the stage that before looked empty or dead with its lifeless figures standing lackadaisically where the choreographer has placed them, without awakening their consciousness, as if waiting for a bus. They attempt to discover what the choreographer intended this particular ballet to be “about” and make it their own vision. Not for a moment now are they content, as they appeared to be at the ballet’s premiere, to be satisfied with simply going through the motions.
The feeble ballet may have the grace to vanish permanently from the repertory at the end of the season or after one last try in the following season, but meanwhile you’ve got to admire the dancers for their resourcefulness and generosity of spirit in the face of fiasco.
© 2009 Tobi Tobias
This article originally appeared in the Culture section of Bloomberg News on July 27, 2009.
July 27 (Bloomberg) — Merce Cunningham, the American choreographer revered for his continual reinvention of dancing, has died. He was 90.
He died in his sleep last night in his Manhattan apartment, according to Leah Sandals, a spokeswoman for the Merce Cunningham Foundation.
A compelling dancer himself, Cunningham created a body of work that questioned the traditional premises of dancing, providing unique answers that were both baffling and beautiful.
“What interests me is movement,” Cunningham said in a 2005 interview with Bloomberg News. “Not movement that necessarily refers to something else, but is just what it is. Like when you see somebody or an animal move, you don’t have to know what it’s doing.”
Some aficionados found Cunningham’s work inscrutable. Others found it absorbing and wholly original in the worlds of modern and classical dance. Watching it could be like taking a quiet walk alone, open to the fluctuating qualities of landscape and weather. To some admirers, it was the only game in town.
Cunningham never made things easy for his audience. His dances shunned narrative and character. They were simply about dynamic human bodies moving in space. Occasionally the work assaulted the spectator. The 1964 “Winterbranch,” with its Sisyphean movement, its darkened stage from which lights shone full blast into the viewers’ eyes and its abrasive La Monte Young score had people exiting the theater in droves.
Placing the Music
Steadfastly, Cunningham kept dance, music, and decor separate entities, co-existing in time and place. He would inform the composer of the required duration and that was that. The dancers in a new work usually first heard the score that would accompany them at the dress rehearsal of the piece.
In creating a dance, Cunningham sometimes turned to the “I Ching,” the Chinese system based on rolling dice. Injecting an element of chance into his work, he said, expanded his choreographic choices that might otherwise be limited by habit. Zen philosophy, with its emphasis on the present moment, and a keen sensitivity to nature also informed his work.
Mercier Philip Cunningham was born on April 16, 1919, in Centralia, Washington, the middle son of three born to Clifford Cunningham, a lawyer, and his wife, Mayme.
While his two brothers followed their father into legal careers, Cunningham found his path through a neighbor, Maude Barrett, a retired vaudeville performer. Cunningham took classes at Barrett’s local dance school, starting with tap. With Barrett’s daughter as his partner, he performed at auditoriums and fairgrounds.
Meeting Martha Graham
After high school he attended George Washington University in Washington, D.C., then returned home after his first year. In 1937 he enrolled at the Cornish School in Seattle (now Cornish College of the Arts), which prepared students for the concert stage. He planned to be an actor but kept studying dance, including a class on Martha Graham’s work, taught by a former member of her company.
It was during his second stint of summer classes at Mills College in Oakland that he met Graham, who invited him to join her company in New York.
A marvelous dancer, agile and fluent, yet with a commanding intensity, Cunningham danced with the Martha Graham Dance Company from 1939 to 1945. His roles ranged from March in the Emily Dickinson piece, “Letter to the World,” its feather- light jumps seemingly impelled by gusts of spring wind, and the damnation-and-hellfire Revivalist in “Appalachian Spring.”
New Vision
He began choreographing — solos, mostly — in the 1940s and formed his own company in 1953, at the legendary Black Mountain College.
Unlike Graham, who invented her own rooted-to-the-earth, gut-sprung vocabulary, Cunningham borrowed mostly from his mentor’s opposite — classical ballet, which emphasizes balanced, harmonious proportions, elegant verticality and the illusion of ease. He gave the style wry new twists.
Cunningham set his early works to familiar music, particularly that of Erik Satie, but the choreographer’s most significant musical collaborator was the avant-gardist John Cage, who was also his life partner for half a century. Cage died in 1992.
Along with David Tudor, another early participant in Cunningham’s enterprise, Cage came to favor music that was created at the performance, played on electronic instruments. Cunningham also worked with outstanding visual artists whose forward-looking sensibilities overlapped his own, among them Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Mark Lancaster, Frank Stella and Andy Warhol.
Painted Birds
“I don’t try to tell them what to do,” Cunningham told Bloomberg TV about working with other artists. “I much prefer that they use their way of thinking and imagine, so that something would be added to this joint working that no one of the three of us — the dance, the music and the decor — could predict.”
Cunningham created a large body of drawings on his own, mostly of birds and animals. Every morning, he got up and made one. The Margarete Roeder Gallery in New York City, where the works appeared over the years, has a Cunningham exhibition on view through July 31.
Athletic and Magisterial
High points of Cunningham’s seven decades of dance-making include “Summerspace” (1958), with its dancers streaming past Rauschenberg’s pointillist backdrop in leotards that match it; the exuberantly athletic “How to Pass, Kick, Fall and Run” (1965); “RainForest” (1968), where the dancers move like jungle creatures among Warhol’s silvery helium-lofted pillows; “Sounddance” (1975), which seems to launch its performers into a violent intergalactic world; “Points in Space” (1986-1987), which takes its title from Einstein’s declaration that there are no fixed points in space; and “Ocean” (1994), a magisterial piece that has its dancers framed by concentric rings — the spectators and, behind them, the musicians.
He described “Ocean” this way in a November 2008 interview with Bloomberg’s Muse TV: “It’s like being in a bath of sound, because it comes from every source around you. In doing it, you find out something else about dance, something that you never thought of before. I always look forward to seeing what that will be.”
Besides repertory works, Cunningham created one-time-only 90-minute “Events.” These were collages — of old dances, excerpts from his repertory and new material — in which several unrelated passages often occurred in the performance space at once, with clusters of dancers taking different points as front, accompanied by a sound score devised for the occasion.
Chance and Change
The productions underlined Cunningham’s faith in chance and change. They had a practical purpose, too, allowing his work to be seen in sites other than theaters. Events, untitled except for number (#1 was in 1964), occurred in venues ranging from the ruins of Persepolis in Iran to Cunningham’s own studio in Greenwich Village, where a wall of windows, revealing the cityscape, often as the sunlight gradually faded, became the dancers’ backdrop.
Today Cunningham’s work is considered the great link between the so-called Mid-Century Moderns (from Graham and her contemporaries to Paul Taylor) and the postmodern choreographers who emerged in the 1970s such as Twyla Tharp, rebelling against traditional theatrical conventions.
Though his company had perpetual financial strains, Cunningham was showered with awards during his long career. Among the most prestigious were New York City’s Handel Medallion, the Kennedy Center Honors, a MacArthur Fellowship, the Golden Lion of the Venice Biennale and the rank of Officier of the French Legion d’Honneur.
Attracted Talent
Cunningham attracted dancers of extraordinary capability for his company. Chief among them was Carolyn Brown, whose intelligent book about her two decades with the troupe, beginning with its inception, “Chance and Circumstances: Twenty Years with Cage and Cunningham,” was published in 2007.
Even in his last years on stage, while crippled by arthritis, Cunningham riveted an audience’s attention. In his 1999 one-time-only duet “Occasion Piece,” although severely restricted mobility, he managed to upstage Mikhail Baryshnikov.
In middle age Cunningham already looked older than his years and eventually came to resemble a cross between magician and guru. He was deeply intelligent, a loner at heart though always friendly in his behavior, witty, perceptive and forever devoted to “making it new.”
During a time in my life when I was feeling sad and isolated, and my own immediate circle–splendid, stimulating, and supportive people though it contained–was not offering me a certain kind of sensibility I craved, I had the maverick idea of augmenting my circle of friends with people I did not know but who were writers like me, so in some way kindred souls.
These writers might have lived in times and places very different from my New York contemporary situation, but all such were permissible, the whole affair taking place in my imagination. There were some writers, of course, whom I never thought to annex, though theirs was work of genius–the ancient Greek playwrights, Shakespeare, Proust (whose epic I actually disliked), Dostoevsky. They were irrevocably distanced from me by the grandeur of their work. But what about Sappho, Marivaux, Mme. de Sévigné, Trollope, perhaps, in his Barchester vein; Willa Cather, and, surely, Turgenev and Chekhov. Those I seriously entertained.
Jane Austen, whose work I idolize, remained a borderline case when it came to “friendship.” I couldn’t bond with her through her masterwork, Pride and Prejudice–perfection discourages personal intimacy–but I could get close, perhaps, through Emma, whose heroine is rich in commonplace human flaws, and certainly through Persuasion, which promises that one’s heart’s desire may not be fulfilled in the bloom of one’s youth, but belatedly, in maturity.
Actually, the idea of appropriating writers as friends took definite form when I glanced at the pile of Babar books stacked on our dining room buffet–a couple of well-worn ones from my own childhood that I had read to my two children, others bought just for them, and then, when my offspring aged out of pachyderms in clothes, still others that I bought for myself on successive trips to Paris, allowing myself just one each time, to draw out the pleasure of acquisition. Besides writing about dance, I am a children’s book writer and delight in having magical books for the young close to hand. I am currently reading these gorgeous large-format Babar albums–sight-translating the text from the French–to my two local grandchildren. Jean de Brunhoff (the author/illustrator of these wonders), I thought, he is my friend. And then I began to add other writers for children to my list. The category–of innocence, openness, and a belief that anything can happen–speaks to my soul.
Some of these writers I read as a child, some for the first time only once I had my own children to read the stories to. You will have your own list. You may even still have the books. My distinguished friend and dance-writing colleague David Vaughan once told me that the mark of a truly cultivated adult is his interleaving on his bookshelves the books he read and loved as a youngster with books he acquired later that were written with adults in mind.
I can’t resist providing a list of the writers and the books of theirs that made me think we might be soul mates.
First, some of the blessed ones who write for the very young:
Margaret Wise Brown: Goodnight Moon and The Runaway Bunny, of course. But don’t forget The Dead Bird. At kindergarten age, our children begged to have my husband or me read it to them because it invariably made us (just the adults, mind you) cry. One of our grandchildren, hearing the story for the first time when a kindergartner, commented gravely, “Yes, that is exactly how it is with death.” And don’t forget Little Fur Family. It fits into the palm of your hand and a two-year-old will understand it intuitively. It depicts the perfect love in which parents can immerse their child, giving him the courage to explore the “wild wood” beyond the cozy safety of his home, to which, of course, he can always return.
Arnold Lobel: If you’ve had anything to do with a child, you know about the “Frog and Toad” books–absurd and amusing adventures with their own pitch-perfect childhood logic, amounting to a mini-saga of friendship that endures despite (or because of) the quirks that might make the amphibians incompatible. Now try Uncle Elephant. A little elephant’s parents, out for a sail, encounter a storm and are presumed drowned. Old Uncle Elephant, wrinkled and rheumatic, arrives to take over the child’s care. Rescued, the parents return. Uncle Elephant quietly mourns the days he spent with his nephew: “They all passed too fast.”
Else Holmelund Minarik: The quintet of Little Bear books, ingeniously illustrated with Victorian-style crosshatched drawings by Maurice Sendak, who would blossom as both writer and illustrator in his own Where the Wild Things Are and In the Night Kitchen. Minarik’s series is acute to the importance of a child’s fancies, expeditions, friendships, and overly ambitious projects, in which parents, and grandparents too, are essential for understanding, support, gentle supervision and–it goes without saying–unconditional love. The beauty of Minarik’s texts–as is true with so many memorable children’s writers from the mid-twentieth century on–is that none of these generic concepts are preached outright; they are in the books’ very nature, the climate of feeling in which events transpire, the code of behavior that prevails.
Elementary schoolers through middle-aged children will naturally want more complicated fare–longer and denser texts, harder words, more complex concepts–though the younger among them may not yet have outgrown animal protagonists.
A. A. Milne: Winnie-the-Pooh and its companion volume, The House at Pooh Corner: Some folks, especially in our hardened times, find the books’ charm off-putting. To these naysayers, the imaginary personalities and adventures of the stuffed animals that their little-boy companion creates and joins seem–well, twee. The author’s son, on whom the boy, Christopher Robin, was based, recalls in his memoirs that the books blighted a good part of his schooldays and adult life.
But three generations of my family have loved them and we’re not planning to stop. We even discuss which character each of us most resembles, one claiming to be the donkey, Eeyore, always looking on the dark side of life; another, the übermom Kanga, ministering a tad too protectively to her easily excited toddler, Roo; yet another, Tigger, whose bravado far exceeds his knowledge and skill. Myself, I favor Pooh, the “bear of very little brain,” who nevertheless is a born poet (of a sort). On the birthing of his works, he comments, “It isn’t Easy . . . because Poetry and Hums aren’t things which you get, they’re things which get you. And all you can do is to go where they can find you,” advice I have frequently passed on to my student writers.
The most poignant scene in The House at Pooh Corner is Christopher Robin’s farewell to Pooh as he is about to start school–in other words, a reluctant premonition of the end of carefree childhood that the boy, not entirely clear on the matter himself, announces to his beloved bear as “I’m not going to do Nothing any more.” My daughter read the passage aloud to the audience at her graduation from Hunter College High School. One auditioned for this “Inspirational Reading” gig by choosing a text and delivering it to a jury of one’s classmates. She was awarded the privilege for her selection and her heartfelt yet unsentimental recital. On Commencement Day there was hardly a dry eye in the house.
I beg you to ignore the Disneyfication of the Pooh books. Instead, take your kids and grandkids to see the play-battered original toys featured in them, prominently ensconced in a glass case that the New York Public Library has transferred from the Donnell Library Center to the Children’s Circulating Room at the Humanities and Social Sciences Library.
E. B. White: Charlotte’s Web and Stuart Little. One can barely choose between the two–and why should one have to? Still, I, my daughter, and her elder daughter (the fourth generation–my mom being the first–of our family’s obsessive readers), give precedence to Charlotte’s Web. My son-in-law demurs. “I don’t know about girls,” he says, “but for boys it’s Stuart Little all the way.” Within a perfectly ordinary surround, both stories treat the bizarre–a spider who can spin out words with her web, a feisty mouse as the child of a human family–with matter-of-fact calm, as if it, too, were perfectly ordinary. Both are written in an English so plain and clear, it serves as a beacon to neophyte and seasoned writers alike.
Laura Ingalls Wilder: The Little House series, to which my daughter introduced me when she was in grade school and which became a perennial re-read for us both. These nine books constitute the saga of an American pioneer family–fraught with danger, poverty, hard work endured wordlessly, the simplest homemade pleasures, and an often unspoken yet constantly evident loving mutual commitment despite the vivid differences in the characters’ temperaments. The story is rendered through the eyes of a young girl (the author), who grows to adulthood in the course of the series.
The writing’s immaculate matter-of-factness–you can learn to build a log cabin from this text!–often mysteriously accumulates to deliver a terrific emotional punch, as at the very end of the first book, Little House in the Big Woods. When young Laura questions Pa about Auld Lang Syne, the tune he’d just played on his fiddle for the family gathered close to the hearth on one of those “long winter evenings of firelight and music,” he explains that the words mean “the days of a long time ago.”
But Laura “thought to herself, ‘This is now.’ She was glad that the cosy house, and Pa and Ma and the firelight and the music, were now. They could not be forgotten, she thought, because now is now. It can never be a long time ago.”
The immortal Lewis Carroll double-feature, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass. It was my mother, really, who was obsessed by Alice, and she read it aloud to me over and over again. I found it fascinating, somewhat frightening, and, as I grew up, crammed with hidden messages–about puberty, about chess, about the way daylight reality slips so easily into nightmare, even madness, and, mercifully, about how a slip of a girl can be equipped to confront life’s mysteries if she possesses curiosity and courage.
C. S. Lewis: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. My enthusiasm for this well-nigh perfect book–perfect as a fantasy adventure, perfect psychologically–didn’t extend to Lewis’s Narnia series as a whole. As my then pre-teen daughter said when she got terminally discouraged halfway through, “It was getting too religious.” But a passage in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, describing the attempt to test the mettle of the eldest of the four child heroes and heroines and redeem the one among them who isn’t instinctively good (or timid or righteous), made me, a pacifist, see the physical thrill–and sometimes nobility–of combat unto the death as few pieces of writing have done:
Peter did not feel very brave; indeed he felt he was going to be sick. But that made no difference to what he had to do. He rushed straight up to the monster and aimed a slash of his sword at its side. That stroke never reached the Wolf. Quick as lightning it turned round, its eyes flaming, and its mouth wide open in a howl of anger. If it had not been so angry that it simply had to howl it would have got him by the throat at once. As it was–though all this happened too quickly for Peter to think at all–he had just time to duck down and plunge his sword, as hard as he could, between the brute’s forelegs into its heart. Then came a horrible, confused moment like something in a nightmare. He was tugging and pulling and the Wolf seemed neither alive nor dead, and its bared teeth knocked against his forehead, and everything was blood and heat and hair. A moment later he found that the monster lay dead and he had drawn his sword out of it and was straightening his back and rubbing the sweat off his face and out of his eyes. He felt tired all over.
Louisa May Alcott: If you didn’t cry over Beth’s death in Little Women, forget Alcott; she is not for you. If you did, and certainly if, like me, you re-read the book annually for decades, be sure not to miss its sequels, Little Men and Jo’s Boys. Nothing can touch Little Women, in which the Alcott family biography is transmuted into novelistic drama and perception. Still the sequels have wonderful moments and continue the story of three of the four Victorian sisters who became so real in the first book, we’re avid to know what happened to them afterward.
Kenneth Grahame: The Wind in the Willows. Set in a luminous natural landscape dominated by a river and woods, animal characters, each true to his breed–most prominently, Rat, Mole, and Toad–still display a glorious assortment of human feelings and foibles. The earnestness of these figures, and all the minor ones, too, in being wholly themselves is one of the paramount joys the book provides.
The irrepressible, irresponsible, wholly self-involved Toad’s mercurial interests and his escalating vehicular ambitions are ingeniously balanced by the contemplative wisdom of Rat and the almost febrile sensitivity to nature of Mole. Together these two evoke the virtues of a calm, simple life, taking things–and appreciating them–as they are; respectful of the fact that nature, enlarged by imagination, can be terrifying as well as beautiful; responsible and effective when real danger arises; and always their brothers’ keepers.
P. L. Travers: The Mary Poppins books. The first three are by far the best, and they are divine. On a Spring Break trip to California to visit a college classmate in her parents’ home, I was assigned a then-uninhabited children’s bedroom furnished with commodious bookcases sheltering the grown-and-gone children’s early reading. There, I stayed up til dawn, night after night, in a private orgy of re-reading Mary Poppins. I remember nothing else about that trip, not even, I confess, the name of my undergraduate friend. Mary Poppins, however, subsequently became my model for grandmotherhood: Hold the kids up to strict standards of behavior and take them on magical adventures. To this day, I crave a carpet bag and a parrot-headed umbrella.
Frances Hodgson Burnett: The Secret Garden and A Little Princess. It’s tough to choose between them. Most of us come down on the side of The Secret Garden, but my novelist friend insists that A Little Princess has had a deep influence on her life. She explains, “Even when the heroine, Sara Crewe, is reduced [in the book, she loses her fortune] and is no longer a princess on the outside, she refuses to let her own sense of her identity falter. I am still a princess on the inside, she thinks. If you behave that way,” my friend continues, “it gets you through troubled times. Then maybe the people around you will finally see your worth.” She adds with typical ironic reservation, “Maybe not.” (This essay is for that friend, Lynne Sharon Schwartz, who has never let me down.)
J. R. R. Tolkein: The Hobbit. I can’t claim to be a fan–and certainly not a friend–of Tolkien, who has had almost every kid I’ve known in his thrall, but I have finally succeeded in reading The Hobbit through to the end, after several tries. In the adventure/fantasy category it’s clearly one of the Great Books but, alas, this is not my genre.
Admittedly, the encounter of the story’s unlikely hero–or at least central character–the hobbit, Bilbo Baggins, with the eerie Gollum is something I would kill to have written. Just for starters, try this: “Deep down here by the dark water lived old Gollum, a small slimy creature. I don’t know where he came from, nor who or what he was. He was Gollum–as dark as darkness, except for two big round pale eyes in his thin face.” Having no companion to talk to but the occasional about-to-be-devoured victim, Gollum talks to himself, in a chilling whisper and cracked syntax, calling himself “my preciousss.”
Apart from this haunting creature, which resurrects childhood nightmares for me, what fascinates me most about the book is the fact that, just when you think the story is winding down to a conventional triumph of the good, Tolkien offers a startling change of tone. Bilbo, who generally prefers homely comfort devoid of disturbing incident, lets his recessive gene for risk and excitement induce him to join a danger-fraught expedition to conquer a terrifying, evil-doing dragon. Once this feat has been accomplished, human nature–in this case represented largely by dwarf, goblin, troll, and elf nature–being what it is, politics and greed rear their familiar heads, until you think Tolkien is talking either about today or the whole, more often than not dismal, story of the human race. Entertainment shifts to philosophy, without entirely losing the attributes we expect when we’re merely being regaled.
Natalie Babbitt: Tuck Everlasting. You might call this a Bildungsroman but for its disarming lack of self-conscious significance. A ten-year-old suffocatingly protected girlchild, naturally yearning for independence, adventure, and “the chance to do something that would make some kind of difference in the world” is initiated into life on a broader scale. The means contains elements of fantasy that are entirely believable because of the matter-of-fact way in which her tale is told.
Through an accidental encounter with the Tuck family, Winnie Forster discovers the secret of the hidden spring from which the Tucks, decades ago, had accidentally drunk and become immortal. She also meets sheer evil in the form of a sly operator–the man in the yellow suit–who wants to possess this secret Fountain of Life solely for pecuniary reasons. The Tucks consist of paterfamilias Angus Tuck; his wife, Mae; their elder son, Miles, whose wife and children had abandoned him once they decided that never aging is a sure sign of witchcraft, and his kid brother, the 17-year-old Jesse, who still thinks immortality can be a joyous adventure and who begs Winnie to wait until she is 17 too and then drink from the spring so that they can enjoy life together forever.
As the dramatic plot unfolds–leavened with near-palpable description of weather and place–our slip-of-a-girl heroine slowly but surely comes to understand the horrors as well as the privileges of a life that goes on without end, and, in the process, demonstrates extraordinary courage and loyalty to the family she has come to love. In the end, after the full life suggested by the inscription on her gravestone, it’s clear that she chose life’s final blessing: death.
The truth about all these books–and at least a dozen favorites I haven’t mentioned as well as the ones that primarily engage boys–is that, if you’re susceptible to them, they make you feel as if they were written for you alone. Which is why, almost by definition, you consider the author your friend.
POSTSCRIPT: On finishing this essay, I felt so remiss in underappreciating books especially enjoyed by boys, I wrote to a number of male friends (and people connected to them) asking about their favorites, from childhood through adolescence. I received a slew of replies. Here they are, with the writers’ permission and the slightest bit of editing.
CHRISTOPHER CAINES (dancer, choreographer, writer, editor):
As someone who has worked for eight years in children’s books, I can tell you the boys’ books vs. girls’ books divide is alive and well in every sales and marketing and editorial department in every publisher in this land. The PC police should get real jobs and live in reality!
Most important to me were: “The Chronicles of Narnia” (C. S. Lewis); the series by Sonia Bleeker on Native Americans (maybe not “politically correct” today); and “The Egypt Game” (Zilpha Keatley Snyder).
By the time I was about 11 or 12, I read adult books.
DEBORAH JOWITT (dance writer, teacher, mother and grandmother of boys):
Thinking back to my son’s preferences, I don’t remember any books specifically for boys. Toby liked books that I think many girls would have liked too (not the all-pink variety, though).
BEN KATCHOR (writer/cartoonist):
My favorite reading material as a child was comic books. Spider-Man, Doctor Strange, Tintin. All approved children’s literature found in the library and bookstore was suspect and boring at some deep level.
MARK MORRIS (dancer, choreographer, opera director):
The books that meant the most to me as a boy were: all of the Curious George books (H. A. and Margret Rey), from which I learned to read, and the Laura Ingalls Wilder [Little House] books, which were first read to me in elementary school.
I loved the Pippi Longstocking books (Astrid Lindgren), “Island of the Blue Dolphins” (Scott O’Dell), “Alice in Wonderland” (Lewis Carroll), “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe” (C. S. Lewis), no comic books. I still worship Dr. Seuss.
“Half Magic” (Edward Eager) was a big one. There was a series of them eventually and they were all very good. “A Wrinkle in Time” by Madeleine L’Engle). “Bridge to Terabithia” (Katherine Paterson), which they made into a horrible movie. I also remember loving the Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle series.
I casually asked some boy friends of mine and here are their cut and pasted replies: The Boxcar Children books (Gertrude Chandler Warner and her successors); “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” (Roald Dahl); “The Education of Little Tree” (Forrest Carter); “From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler” (E. L. Konigsburg); “Goodnight Moon” (Margaret Wise Brown); “James and the Giant Peach” (Roald Dahl); “Katy and the Big Snow” (Virginia Lee Burton); “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe” (C. S. Lewis); “Little House on the Prairie” (Laura Ingalls Wilder); “Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel” (Virginia Lee Burton); “Sideways Stories from Wayside School” (Louis Sacher); “Tuck Everlasting” (Natalie Babbitt); “Where the Wild Things Are” (Maurice Sendak); everything by Lloyd Alexander.
GEORGE DORRIS (dance writer) & JACK ANDERSON (poet, dance writer):
Jack and I spent a few minutes after dinner to think of books we enjoyed as boys. It depends a bit on how you define that term, but since you go up to 18, all of these apply, although by 16 I was reading so-called adult books, on the Times’ best-seller list. So here we go, in no particular order, but starting with several younger ones. I’ve put an initial after those only one of us delighted in.
“Freddy the Detective” (Walter Brooks) / J says some of the follow-up books too
The Oz books (L. Frank Baum)
The Hardy Boys series (Franklin W. Dixon et al.) / G
Books by E. Nesbit: “Five Children and It” / J’s favorite; “The Story of the Amulet” /
G’s favorite; “The Railway Children” / G’s sister’s favorite
“The Good Master” and “The Singing Tree” (Kate Seredy)
Albert Payson Terhune’s books about dogs / G
Books by Robert Louis Stevenson: “Treasure Island” / G; “Kidnapped” / J
Historical novels for boys by Edward B. Hungerford / J
“Ivanhoe” and “Quentin Durward” (Walter Scott) / G
“The Last Days of Pompeii” (Edward Bulwer-Lytton) / G
“Quo Vadis” (Henryk Sienkiewicz) / G
“George Washington’s World” (Genevieve Foster) / J liked several other books in the series as well
Books by Richard Halliburton: “The Royal Road to Romance,” “Richard
Halliburton’s Book of Marvels: the Occident,” and “Richard Halliburton’s Second
Book of Marvels: the Orient”
Books by Howard Pyle / J
“Van Loon’s Lives” and “The Arts” (Hendrik Wilhelm van Loon)
Books by Nathaniel Hawthorne: “A Wonder-Book for Girls and Boys” and
“Tanglewood Tales” / J; “The House of Seven Gables” / G
“Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea” (Jules Verne)
“The Count of Monte Cristo” and “The Three Musketeers” (Alexandre Dumas, père) / G
Enough for a start?
DAVID VAUGHAN (dance writer, archivist for the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, performer);
I don’t know if I can be of much help, since for one thing my childhood reading was all done in England. My absolute favorite of course was Kenneth Grahame’s “The Wind in the Willows,” which I used to read about three times a year, as well as another of his books, “The Golden Age.” The Doctor Dolittle books. I suppose the Andrew Lang Fairy Books wouldn’t count. Maybe the Biggles books (W. E. Johns) and “Just William” by Richmal Crompton and all its sequels. And I used to devour The Gem and The Magnet, two weeklies with stories about boys in public schools–see George Orwell’s essay “Boys’ Weeklies.”
NANCY DALVA (book critic for the New York Observer, producer and writer for “Mondays with Merce,” a website series for the Cunningham Dance Foundation):
My boys liked anything to do with dinosaurs, the Boxcar Children series (Gertrude Chandler Warner and her successors), the Redwall series (Brian Jacques), “The Hobbit” (J. R. R. Tolkein), “The Once and Future King” (T. H. White), Star Trek novels, Roald Dahl, and Kurt Vonnegut, the earlier in the list primarily read by the elder son (himself now a writer), and the latter two being favorites of the younger (who had and has a mordant sense of humor and a philosophical bent).
Both read comic books, and Calvin and Hobbes collections (Bill Waterson), though these are not technically books. Neither liked any of the books I loved as a girl, by the way. Well, my younger son, did like the Eloise stories, come to think of it. The mischief factor. When they were very little they liked Margaret Wise Brown–“Goodnight Moon” for Adam and “The Runaway Bunny” for Robert, who also was keen on a book I just loved called “Fritz and the Mess Fairy” (Rosemary Wells). My own favorite book as a little girl was Marie Hall Ets’s “Mr. T. W. Anthony Woo, The Story of a Cat, a Dog, and a Mouse.”
P.S. My father used to read Rudyard Kipling to my brother. I was not as keen as he was.
JOAN HSIAO BROMLEY (former investment banker, former public policy analyst, former Ph.D candidate, currently a teacher of fifth graders and mother of two boys and a girl):
Here are a few quick thoughts. Our sons, Jimmy and Peter, both really enjoyed “Where the Red Fern Grows” (Wilson Rawls) although Jimmy refused to listen to the end, because he guessed where it was headed and “Little House in the Big Woods” (Laura Ingalls Wilder), although neither was crazy enough about for me to read them the whole series. Peter wasn’t crazy about “The Phantom Tollbooth” (Norton Juster) either.
OK, you know my Jimmy well enough for me to divulge what he might keep secret now. There were fully two years, I believe, during which we chased around branch to branch within the Seattle library system for ALL the (old) Nancy Drew mystery stories (various authors; Mildred Wirt Benson wrote 23 of the first 30). He knew exactly where they were kept in each library. I still remember his joy and hope there’d be “new ones” when he spotted a clump of yellow spines. Similarly, he LOVED “Anne of Green Gables” (Lucy Maud Montgomery)–but then didn’t continue with the series, not sure why.
My husband, Jim, remembers that, as a boy, he greatly enjoyed Betty Macdonald’s Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle books; Beverly Cleary’s Ramona books and especially her Henry Huggins series; all of the Hardy Boys series, and “The Phantom Tollbooth.” But our sons really DIDN’T like any of the Mrs. Piggle-Wiggles and think it’s AWFUL that I might have considered naming one of them “Ramona” before we knew they were to be boys. They didn’t make it through even one Hardy Boys mystery, despite receiving many over the years as gifts. Still, lots of the boys I am currently teaching can’t stop reading these things. I do have very fond memories of all three males in our family enjoying much of Roald Dahl’s work together every evening.
ROBERT GRESKOVIC (dance writer, teacher):
I’m afraid I wasn’t much of a reader as a child, nor was my brother, nor any other male relative in my family. I’m not proud of this but ’tis so. So I can’t really help.
My friend Curtis has recently acquired a number of Horatio Alger books as vintage items. I’ll pass this along to him and he may have something real to tell you.
CURTIS ROBERTSON (General Aesthetic):
When I was a kid, my teachers periodically placed orders on our behalf with Scholastic Books, and there was a series of books I liked about a bespectacled boy genius named “Encyclopedia Brown.” Each book had a half-dozen or so mini-mysteries that were all fairly benign. They had nothing to do with murders or anything, but were more along the lines of stolen baseballs and the like. I enjoyed them, because as a fairly precocious kid, I appreciated any celebration of brains I could get my hands on, considering the fact that the real-life kids I knew tended to discount that in favor of sporty skills.
A couple of years ago I came across some old editions of books by the 19th-century writer Horatio Alger. My grandfather had told me about these books when I was young, because they came out about the time he was a kid.
Even today people are probably somewhat familiar with them, since the phrase “it’s like a Horatio Alger story” has long been used to characterize the lives of great men who rose from humble beginnings. The typical hero of Alger’s books is a poor boy whose wastrel father has left him and his mother to fend for themselves, and who has to defend her from abuse and and/or financial ruin.
In one of the handful of these that I have a copy of, the boy has his own small private ferry in which he transports people for a modest sum. One day a rich man from the city boards it with his baby; the baby falls into the water and the boy saves its life. Then the rich man hires him to work at his bank and the boy falls in love with and marries the rich man’s daughter and rises in the bank and lives happily ever after as a direct result of hard work, devotion to his mother, and the courage to dive into the treacherous water to rescue a baby.
Along the way, the local spoiled brat (jealous of our hero’s general ability to make friends and have the girls swoon) frames the boy for a crime, possibly in concert with our hero’s freshly-sprung-from-jail drunken father, and the goldbrick spoiled brat’s action is found out and his family’s entire fortune compromised.
Back to what I read when I was young: Two books by Robert McCloskey about an affable boy called Homer Price, which took place in a tiny rural town. I don’t remember anything about his adventures, except a few weird details, but they stay with me even now.
I also enjoyed reading the Wizard of Oz books. There was a set of hardcover editions of them in the library of one particular classroom of one particular teacher I had in 6th Grade.
In 7th Grade, I read Louisa May Alcott’s “Little Women,” “Little Men,” and “Jo’s Boys,” as well as several Edna Ferber novels, including “So Big,” “Show Boat,” and “Cimarron.” I also read “Cheaper by the Dozen,” written by a couple of the children (Frank Gilbreth, Jr. and Ernestine Gilbreth Carey) of an efficiency expert who decided that it was actually more economical to have more children than to have fewer.
When I was a tiny tot, my mother read Raggedy Ann and Andy books to my sister and me. We enjoyed them immensely, but they weren’t particularly gender-specific.
Other than that? The Doctor Dolittle books (Hugh Lofting), “Charlotte’s Web” (E. B. White), the whole Seuss oeuvre, and, when I was very little, a book about seven blind men who were all shown an elephant, each one touching a different part of it. Therefore each had an entirely different impression of what an elephant was; one thought it was a tree, because he had felt only one of the legs. The one who had felt the side thought the elephant was a wall. It made a great impression on me.
DAVID GORDON (co-director with his son, Ain Gordon, of the Pick Up Performance Company[s]):
Very favorite three children’s books in young Ain’s life: Eugène Ionesco’s “Story Number 1,” “Story Number 2,” and “Story Number 3.”
After that he was into British Goons records. We would hear him laughing in his room.
DAVID GRAY (consultant to non-profit organizations):
Oh boy…yeah, I was a huge fan of Dr. Seuss books, still am! I read them to our two sons. I’m amused to see what catches their eye. For me it’s the design of the spaces, the crazy architecture, and the flamboyant colors. The closest I’ve seen in real life is Venice where the Byzantine mixes with Western styles and the mooring poles for gondolas are each painted in their own crazy-quilt style to indicate who owns the pole–very Seussian. My younger boy just loved the Sneetches and the machines by which Sneetches added and removed belly stars. He would make machine-like noises and trace the path of the Sneetches with his finger as they “raced round and about again.”
Another book that really resonated for me as a child was Robert McCloskey’s “Burt Dow, Deep-Water Man.” I’m not sure what was so appealing–maybe the colors and the care and detail of the old guy taking care of his boat. Then there were the whales and their apparent upset, only to find that they were, in their way, fashion victims (though I don’t think that’s the way I would have worded it at the time!).
We were also fans of the C. S. Lewis Narnia books. We’re way too irreligious to have noticed the Christian philosophy, but we sure liked swords and battles and being King and being transported to alternate worlds.
NICHOLAS STRAUSS-KLEIN (Feldenkrais Practitioner, musician);
My wife Jen’s brother loved Matt Christopher books. I was a huge Richard Scarry fan, and my three-year-old son, Henry, is too!
I’m sure you’ve been pondering Harry Potter and Thomas the Tank Engine stuff.
ED SULTAN (former banker, currently arts volunteer):
I’m pleased to respond to your request for the titles of childhood book favorites of the Sultans (the group reporting includes me; my sons, David and Peter; and David’s sons, Harry and Isaac).
Here’s the list in no particular order: The Alex Rider series (Anthony Horowitz); the On the Run series, the Everest series, and the Island Series (Gordon Korman); “Leon and the Champion Chip” and “Leon and the Spitting Image” (Allen Kurzweil); the Underland Chronicles series (Suzanne Collins); the Childhood of Famous Americans series (various authors); the Olympian series (Rick Riordan); the Humphrey series (Betty G. Birney); “The Enormous Egg” (Oliver Butterworth); the Guardians of Ga’Hoole series (Kathryn Lasky); “Arnie, the Doughnut” (Laurie Keller); “The Black Stallion” (Walter Farley); the Hardy Boys series (Franklin W. Dixon et al.); “Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel” (Virginia Lee Burton); “The Story of Ferdinand” (Munro Leaf); “Harry the Dirty Dog” (Gene Zion); “Where the Wild Things Are” (Maurice Sendak); “The Borrowers” (Mary Norton); the Curious George books (H. A. and Margret Rey); “Island of the Blue Dolphins” (Scott O’Dell); “James and the Giant Peach” (Roald Dahl); the Secrets of Droon series (Tony Abbott); “The Dangerous Book for Boys” (Conn Iggulden and Hal Iggulden); “The Big Book of Boy Stuff” (Bart King and Chris Sabatino); “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer” (Mark Twain); “Treasure Island” and “Kidnapped” (Robert Louis Stevenson); “Tom Brown’s Schooldays” (Thomas Hughes); “The Little Lame Prince” (Dinah Maria Mulock Craik).
ROBERT JOHNSON (dance critic):
Oh, I think I read the usual. Robert Louis Stevenson’s “Treasure Island,” “Kidnapped,” and “The Black Arrow.” Arthur Ransome’s adventure/mystery series, starting with “Swallows and Amazons”; Jack London’s “The Call of the Wild.” Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, maybe Walter Scott’s “Ivanhoe” and “Quentin Durward.” Perhaps “Two Years Before the Mast” (for the nautically inclined). The Hardy Boys??? What a jumble! Oh, and I suppose Kipling’s “Jungle Book” qualifies, too. “Robinson Crusoe” (Daniel Defoe) and “The Swiss Family Robinson” (Johann David Wyss). I was personally most fond of “The Three Musketeers” (Alexandre Dumas, père).
Hope this dog-eared list helps!
THOMAS PHILLIPS (writer and musician):
My personal favorites (not necessarily just for boys): “Winnie the Pooh” (A. A. Milne); “The Odyssey” and “The Iliad” (Homer, in prose translations); “Stuart Little” (E. B. White); “Bambi” (Felix Salten); “The Jungle Book” (Rudyard Kipling); “The Catcher in the Rye” (J. D. Salinger); “My Name is Aram” and “The Human Comedy” (William Saroyan).
When I was young I read mostly sports novels and stories–nothing that’s still popular.
I didn’t read it until I was grown, but I think Willa Cather’s “My Ántonia” is a great frontier story, every chapter an adventure.
Melville isn’t really for kids, but I bet I would have been fascinated by “Bartleby, the Scrivener” and “Benito Cereno.” “Billy Budd” is very dense but has enough adventure and mystery in it to hold a boy’s attention if he’s a fluent reader.
And speaking of adventure, I never read it but my 86-year-old cousin Dick says he and his teenage friends loved “Scaramouche” by Rafael Sabatini–a swashbuckling story of the French revolution.
JEFF WEINSTEIN (cultural critic):
I don’t recall reading really young children’s books. We had no books in the house except for library ones and those from a Doubleday Book Club for children, which I devoured: “The Swiss Family Robinson” (Johann David Wyss), Hawthorne’s “Wonder-Book for Girls and Boys” and “Tanglewood Tales,” anything I could find by Poe (yes, adult), Jules Verne. I saw the Hardy Boys on Walt Disney TV; why bother reading them? I read comics, all kinds. All my real children’s book “reading” was done on TV. (My spouse, John Perreault, says about the same, but radio for him.)
My mother read Shakespeare to me, she claims, as I sat on her lap and watched TV. (I was three, four.) I am not certain of that, because she often stretched the truth.
BEN ACHTENBERG (documentary filmmaker and distributor):
The books I remember most fondly (and still reread from time to time) are the Swallows and Amazons series by Arthur Ransome, written in the 1930s. I believe they’ve been republished in paperback, but I don’t know if anybody reads them. Wikipedia says yes, and that there’s a bit of a tourist industry to visit the sites in the English lake country where most of them take place. We visited the area when our son, Jesse, was maybe 12. We stayed in the summer house inhabited by some of the fictional children–very exciting for me; for Jesse, not so much, though he thought the books were OK.
Interestingly, in the context of your question, the books have very strong and adventurous female, as well as male, characters.
Another recollection for you: When my father was dying–fully competent and rational, but very tired of being sick, he had decided to refuse any further medical treatment–and my brothers and sister and I were sitting with him, he asked us to read him his all-time favorite book: “Treasure Island.”
© 2009 Tobi Tobias
American Ballet Theatre / Metropolitan Opera House, NYC / May 18 – July 11, 2009
Rushing to the Black Sea, the Dnieper passes through Ukraine, where Alexei Ratmansky, the new Artist in Residence at American Ballet Theatre, first danced professionally. Working to the Prokofiev score originally choreographed by Serge Lifar in Paris in 1932, Ratmansky put his singular ingenuity into his own version of On the Dnieper–a 40-minute ballet deriving its title from the music, which is considered his first official work for ABT. (A pièce d’occasion for the gala showcasing Nina Ananiashvili, which opened the company’s May 18 – July 11 season at the Metropolitan Opera House, apparently doesn’t count.)
Like all of Ratmansky’s work that I’ve seen, On the Dnieper reveals the multiple influences on the formation of his aesthetic: training in the Bolshoi Ballet’s academy in Moscow, then, when rejected for admission to the parent company, performing as a principal dancer with the Ukraine National Ballet, the Royal Winnipeg Ballet, and the Royal Danish Ballet, and choreographing for prestigious companies from St. Petersburg’s Kirov Ballet to the New York City Ballet. For some four years he has been the artistic director of the Bolshoi Ballet and one of its most inventive choreographers, at times taking his inspiration from Soviet-era ballets once thought better forgotten and making them utterly new and delightful, as with The Bright Stream. Now he has given up the leadership of the Bolshoi, with its soul-devouring administrative demands, to concentrate on his choreography.
Marcelo Gomes, Veronika Part, and Paloma Herrera in Alexei Ratmansky’s On the Dnieper
Photo: Gene Schiavone
On the Dnieper tells a tale that the Romantics among us will believe in, others not. Sergei (Marcelo Gomes in the first cast, as are the others I name) returns from World War I to his beloved native village, indicated by weathered wooden fences, and the poignant springtime sight of blooming cherry trees just beginning to drop their petals. Though welcomed by his fiancée, Natalia (Veronika Part), he’s distracted by Olga (Paloma Herrera), the community’s vivacious beauty who has already developed a distaste for the fellow to whom she’s engaged (David Hallberg). Parental figures and the young people of the village surround them, witnesses and judges as the plot plays itself out–with much self-recrimination on Sergei’s part, and a selfless renunciation in favor of Olga on Natalia’s part–to an ecstatic happy ending amid a veritable storm of petals, in which love conquers all. Yes, the program note is needed, but Ratmansky comes closer than most dance storytellers to indicating situations and, especially, deep feeling directly through his choreography.
What I like best about this ballet is its mood. Without making a melodramatic fuss, it supports the primacy of feeling, the respect for social behavior (at its moral base and in its formal traditions), and the wrenching conflict between those and the pull of the unexpected, often inexplicable, desires of the heart. It evokes the world as imagined by Tudor and by Chekhov.
Herrera, I’d venture to say, has never danced more eloquently. Finally, no doubt largely because of Ratmansky’s ballet, she’s realized that bravura technique cannot, alone, make a ballerina. In On the Dnieper she’s exploring the realm of fusing her extraordinary physical prowess to a range of emotion. I hope the revelation of this possibility will carry through to the rest of her repertory; it could make her glorious.
Gomes, as always, has a commanding presence and here he lives up to the way he looks. At the same time, he is very affecting in his confusion and regret when he realizes that, for his own happiness, he must betray a sensitive woman he once loved. He needs only a little more detail and nuance, the patina a role acquires with time in the hands of a resourceful interpreter.
Part is just right for the reticent sensitivity of the abandoned, self-sacrificing sweetheart. I was touched by the moment she “gives” Sergei to Olga and they bow to her formally, then rush off, elated, to their future and she falls to the ground, unwitnessed in her anguish. She’s the one character that made me think of her future–never marrying, I fantasized, becoming a nun or a nurse to the incurable, anything that would allow her to give her life to succoring humanity and expunge self-interest from her soul. The fact that Part’s role is about emotions rather than famously difficult steps relaxes her frequently visible mistrust of her technical abilities, freeing her as a creature of the stage.
Hallberg, unfortunately, has a role that doesn’t show him to any particular advantage, though he may, like many a wise dancer, make something better of it as he performs it more.
It was fun to see the seniors associated with the company (teachers, coaches, regisseurs, and the like) in the parental roles and wonderful to see a corps de ballet convincing in its robust dancing and in its walkaround roles as well, as witnesses, abettors, and benevolent spies–roles that make a community cohere.
Kudelka’s 1991 Désir, given its ABT premiere on this season’s Prokofiev program, is a plotless one-acter that uses the only four remarkable passages in the Cinderella score and two other numbers gleaned from the composer’s Waltz Suite (reworked from his opera War and Peace). The dance is a pretty little thing, nothing more, admittedly useful to fill out a mixed-repertory program, but essentially insignificant.
Isabella Boylston and Cory Stearns in James Kudelka’s Désir
Photo: Rosalie O’Conner
Two couples, one of them (Gillian Murphy and Blaine Hoven) opening the piece, the second (Isabella Boylston and Cory Stearns) appearing midway through, demonstrate joyous, fulfilled love, the first pair with an allegro pulse, the second in an adagio mode.
Misty Copeland and Carlos Lopez seem equally content, but they introduce a small ensemble expressing the doubts and tensions that arise between the sexes. Clusters of closely bonded young men and similarly united young women reflect the emotional difficulties of moving beyond a single-gender group. I think. This is not the clearest ballet in the whole world.
The movement is often soft and curving, over a firm ballet base. Nothing you haven’t seen before. The dance would benefit from a wider, more inventive vocabulary.
There is no hint of a subplot behind the activities, several of which are incomprehensible. Why do the men repeatedly stretch out supine and stiff? Is this a premonition of death? What’s the meaning of a repeated frozen arm position in which the women hold their full skirts bunched into a bundle in front of their bellies, like a wedding bouquet or its logical aftermath?
The best elements of the piece are the gorgeous costumes by Marjory Fielding (designed for the National Ballet of Canada production)–and the presence of Isabella Boylston in the first cast. Boylston has an uncanny calm that rivets the viewer’s attention, even when she’s tossed into the air and flipped backward by her partner. She has the face of a Flemish Madonna, a long, suavely proportioned body, and impeccable technique. In repose, she seems sculpted from marble; in motion, she’s like that cool, noble stone magically endowed with fluidity. The fact that she has incredibly beautiful feet is underlined by the duet’s finishing with her partner’s extending his body along the floor to kiss one of them. The gesture is embarrassing, though, at odds with the formal tone of the duet, and entirely unnecessary. However, Boylston, still a corps de ballet dancer, deserves promotion to soloist rank on the performance of this role alone.
As for the costumes, the women’s ankle-length dresses have a subtly composed palette of colors related to fuchsia and fire-truck red. They’re set off by one in muted blue, another in intensely deep violet. The lavish skirts swirling in unison have a ravishing effect. The men wear casual t-shirts in shadowed tones that echo the women’s gowns; they top workaday trousers of burnt sienna. The women are flowers; the men, the earth from which they spring.
One way to sell tickets to the ballet (or to sell anything else, for that matter) is to cause a sensation. In the States, the general public that comes to the ballet loves a sensation (for one thing, it justifies the cost of the tickets) and does its best to exaggerate the dimensions of one with wild cheers and applause during the performance, escalating into feverish standing ovations and bouquets from the spectators pitched onto the stage at the end.
Natalia Osipova in August Bournonville’s La Sylphide
Photo: Marc Haegeman
During ABT’s current season, the Bolshoi Ballet’s Natalia Osipova–whose fleet, airborne technique took my breath away in 2005 in a solo in her company’s Don Quixote–did a stint that I assumed to be a tryout for a larger guest association with ABT in the future, dancing the title role in two Romantic-era ballets, Giselle and La Sylphide.
Sensations, however, have only a tangential connection with artistry. Osipova’s elevation (an issue of hip flexibility and leg power) and fleetness (foot articulation and power) are near miraculous. So much so that they have become phenomena–the feet working like hummingbirds’ wings, for instance–not really the province of dancing anymore. Other parts of her body have been neglected: her face doesn’t create the illusion of beauty that enhances a ballerina; her torso has no fluidity. She has also obviously been over-coached, a fact that destroys the childlike naturalness she had when I first laid eyes on her.
Giselle was the better of her two portrayals, thanks in part to the sympathetic partnering of David Hallberg. Still, with emotions coursing through her one after another at febrile speed, none of them lasted long enough to register and eventually add up to something coherent. And her continual grinning in Act I, as if this were an emblem of joyous, innocent love, should have been squelched at the first rehearsal. Her subsequent Mad Scene was reasonably good, if still immature.
In the second act, Osipova carried everything before her, seeming to fly and whirl at once when initiated into the ghostly tribe of wilis by a wonderfully malevolent Veronika Part. Still, the necessary change in movement texture between the live girl and the dead one who still retains her early passion for her lover, forgives him, and saves his life, was absent. I would guess she understands the difference intellectually, but can’t yet make it happen physically. If, with time, experience, and sound professional advice, she still doesn’t, her sensational effects are likely to deteriorate into mere circus tricks.
Osipova’s La Sylphide was a disappointment. Her particular gifts do little to evoke the enchanting Bournonville style (which the Russians have never mastered and the Danes themselves are losing) in its phrasing, irrepressible ebullience, or charm. Her partner, Herman Cornejo, who seems to be able to adapt to any style he tries, was the hero of that performance.
June 27 saw Nina Ananiashvili’s farewell performance with American Ballet Theatre. She took on the celebrated dual role of Odette-Odile in Swan Lake, the very thought of which can make a ballerina two decades younger than she quake in her pointe shoes. (Ananiashvili is 46.) The performance was extraordinary; I’ve never seen anything like it. Throughout, she demonstrated the exquisite technique that she has honed to perfection over the decades, but here, in the “white acts,” she added little miracles like executing the mime passages, as in her relating her woeful story to Prince Siegfried (Angel Corella)–“my mother’s tears formed this lake”–so fluidly it became the veritable cousin of dancing. Then, with a masterly containment of emotion so profound it was almost unbearable, though devoid of obvious acting, she made the dancing so refined it looked abstract. If classical dance can be transmuted in the equivalent of an Ozu film, this was it.
Nina Ananiashvili in Kevin McKenzie’s Swan Lake, after Marius Petipa and Lev Ivanov
Photo: Nancy Ellison
Instead of the cheap thrill of the full 32 fouettés (which, by the way, neither Margot Fonteyn nor Maya Plisetskaya ever mastered) she did a mere 24 as neatly as could be imagined and wisely quit while she was ahead. As if to make it up to the audience this slight diminishment of bravura, she executed a surprise carnival-style move in which Von Rothbart (Marcello Gomes at his sexiest) threw her high into the air to be caught in the deluded Siegfried’s arms. The three repeated the feat on the curtain-calls, much to the delight of the madding crowd.
In the Black Swan act, Ananiashvili’s rendition was tantalizing enough to contrast with her Odile, and some of her feats, though subtly executed (such as long balances in which she seemed to stretch up and out as on a breath) were remarkable. She made a quiet though compelling seductress, though, admittedly, her Odile doesn’t seem as truly evil as her Odette seems good by nature’s design.
The bows themselves, which seemed to run on hourglass time, rather than that of a stopwatch, constituted a ballet within themselves and were designed with unusual good taste. Even the single explosion of confetti, white and gleaming, looked like a falling star in a fairy tale instead of the familiar torn up paper drifting listlessly through a net. My favorite moments were the cast’s applauding the ballerina, and she, them; Ananiashvili’s personally presenting one white flower to every single corps de ballet swan; ABT’s other ballerinas, in svelte black mufti, coming on to offer the heroine of the hour a long-stemmed blossom, followed by her male partners in the company, and, later, the artistic director himself, Kevin McKenzie, to whom Ananiashvili bowed low as she had to the Russian coach and to the former Kirov prima, Irina Kolpakova; the appearance of the ballerina’s little copper-haired daughter, whose mom promptly enough shooed the child back into the wings after a bow or two; Ananiashvili’s catching in one hand bouquets that the audience hurled at the stage, simply snatching them out of the air. You might say she has a gift for coordination.
Curtain call for Nina Ananiashvili’s farewell performance with ABT.
Photo: Gene Schiavone
Ananiashvili’s final season with ABT has included some of the most demanding roles in the nineteenth-century classical repertory in terms of dancing and acting: In addition to Swan Lake, she did Giselle, La Sylphide, Le Corsaire, and, from the twentieth century, Balanchine’s sublime and eccentric Mozartiana. She flourished in all of them but the Bournonville and there she was simply at the mercy of the wrong-headed Erik Bruhn production staged for ABT a half-century back and what seems to be a standard Russian interpretation that makes the characters look crude. And then there’s the inevitable awkwardness of the Bournonville style for dancers who haven’t been trained in it from the start (ABT’s Herman Cornejo and the American Lloyd Riggins are the only dancers I’ve seen overcome this challenge convincingly).
At the opposite end of the spectrum, a pair of Giselles I saw, differently tempered because danced with two different partners, were luminous. With Marcelo Gomes, Ananiashvili matched the power of his stage presence; with Jose Manuel Carreño, she echoed his more understated, yet emotion-filled approach, effortlessly launching shape after beautiful shape into the air, then letting them dissolve into the flow of the dancing.
Moving through the trajectory of Giselle’s story, Ananiashvili gives us both the shyness and blitheness of an innocent girl utterly in love; the suddenly distorted landscape of a woman literally broken-hearted by that lover’s betrayal; then, beyond the grave, a mature sorrow for his plight, his anguish as well as an enduring devotion that saves his life. As the story unfolds, we come to know a remarkable person who remains nakedly true to herself from beginning to end, one of those rare human beings wrapped in a cloak of tenderness.
Ananiashvili’s Mad Scene–the result, no doubt, of years of thought, experiment, and minor but telling adjustments–is an example of how the wholeness of her performances is now invariably extraordinary, every detail of movement and feeling perfectly accounted for, anything extraneous firmly excised.
In both Giselles, she gave us immaculate dancing that was nevertheless softened and full of grace. Yes, her grands jetés cleave the air, but they seem as downy as rose petals. In her high-speed whirling initiation into the tribe of wilis, her legs swathed in the layers of her tulle skirt, her foot barely grazes the floor as she turns herself into a gossamer cloud caught in whirlpool of wind. Her grace has a spiritual dimension, too, that makes her Giselle real, loveable, and tragic, and it is this quality–of the soul perpetually infusing the body–that make our hearts hers.
Ananiashvili’s many fans may wonder why this much beloved ballerina would withdraw from the big time when her technique was still up to the challenges of such works and her artistic powers were at their height. Reasons for such major decisions depend greatly on instinct–what your heart or gut is telling you. But Ananiashvili is practical enough to placate her audience (and, perhaps, herself) with a handful of practical arguments in favor of bowing out: to support her husband, Grigol Vashadze, Georgia’s Foreign Minister, who is pursuing a burgeoning political career, just as he has helped her in the last two decades of her career; to spend more time with their young daughter, Helene; to further the development of the State Ballet of Georgia, based in her home town of Tbilisi, which she was specifically brought in to head in 2004; and because she knew–and admitted to herself, as so many dancers are unable to–that the body’s abilities inevitably fade with age. Any one of these reasons would be persuasive.
There’s no denying that a significant part of Ananiashvili’s appeal is her sheer physical loveliness. Her face, with its creamy skin, dark hair, and heavily browed, soulful dark eyes, has the cast of a Spanish Madonna. Underneath that look is an instinctive empathy for the characters on stage around her. Her long, exquisitely proportioned body seems destined for classical dancing. Her promise of beauty and the perfect poise of her body–a natural harmony–is evident even in snapshots of her as a child. Complementing these attributes is a melancholy frequently underlying even her most vivacious roles, where her smile is infectious, even teasingly flirtatious, yet her eyes suggest that she knows that everything in life is evanescent.
From her first engagement with an American company (a guest stint with the New York City Ballet in 1988), we’ve seen how smart she is, how open to ideas about dancing that are radically different from the Russian ones in which she was scrupulously bred. She was accompanied in the venture by her celebrated Bolshoi colleague Andris Liepa, who continued to do everything in the Russian way familiar to him, while Ananiashvili tried to absorb Balanchine’s way.
In the course of her sixteen years at ABT, we’ve watched the harmony and flow of her dancing in the lyrical vein become more and more beautiful and natural, like the motion of a nymph–a naiad perhaps. The steely aspect of her personality has served her in good stead–both in her dancing, when virtuoso passages require it, and offstage in shaping her career and leading the State Ballet of Georgia, essentially a pleasant regional company that the government is eager to upgrade. She is also blessed with a sense of humor, which Alexei Ratmansky caught in Waltz Masquerade, the pièce d’occasion he created for her to perform at ABT’S opening night gala. It might have been called “The Diva and Her Devotees.”
Diane Solway, interviewing Ananiashvili in W Magazine, asked the ballerina what she’d be doing after her farewell performance with ABT. The answer: “Crying.” Her tears were not the only ones shed on the occasion.
© 2009 Tobi Tobias
New York City Ballet: George Balanchine’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream / David H. Koch Theater, NYC / June 16 -21, 2009
George Balanchine’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, screening of the 1967 film / Baryshnikov Arts Center, NYC / May 26, 2009
George Balanchine’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, created for the New York City Ballet in 1962–with co-collaborators William Shakespeare (libretto) and Felix Mendelssohn (music)–is a perennial enchantment.
Some observers will dismiss it as too “pink” (a favorite Barbara Karinska color for her costumes), but it covers a wide spectrum of jealousy, greed, questionable uses of power, sexual attraction between woman and ass, foolishness, stupidity, and murderous rage (albeit most of these tempered by their comic aspect) before arriving at its magically happy resolution.
You know the story; you read it at school. If you’ve forgotten it, treat yourself to a refresher course. The delightful text is no further away than your computer (http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/8609). Though Balanchine is remembered as saying he was primarily inspired by the music, he renders the narrative deftly. At the age of eight, apparently, he played one of the tiny creatures of the air that inhabit the story in a St. Petersburg production, and City Ballet alum claim he remembered and would recite excerpts from the text in Russian.
From the company’s week of Midsummer performances this season, at the David H. Koch Theater, I chose the cast that featured Teresa Reichlen as Titania, Queen of the Fairies. Reichlen’s career is still relatively young, but she’s been a winner from the start. It’s not just the impeccable dancing accentuating her very long limbs and perfect line I admire, but her courage as well. She tackles prominent assignments with authority and, it seems, the expectation of pleasure.
As Titania she has decided upon a combination of empathy with her fellow characters–child, adult, and–yes–donkey. She is alert to their needs without ever relinquishing the characteristics of queenliness. For example, she allows the laborer magically transmuted into an ass his yen for dewy grass to nibble on but never loses her faith that–coaxed onto his hind legs–he may make a suitably elegant partner in a pas de deux.
When, after much imperious argument, she finally cedes possession of the changeling child in her retinue to Oberon, her kingly counterpart, it’s simply because he desires it so intensely (even though his methods of acquiring it include attempted kidnapping). Everything about Reichlen’s Titania is warm as well as aristocratic.
Reichlen can’t yet lay claim to the sudden plunges from the vertical that made Suzanne Farrell’s celebrated interpretation so sensuous and exciting, but perhaps that is never to be.
The male stars in this performance, Gonzalo Garcia as Oberon and Troy Schumacher as Puck, were adequate but not memorable. The most striking performance was given by Janie Taylor, beautifully partnered by Tyler Angle, as the couple in the wedding divertissement who embody perfect love. This season has marked Taylor’s return to the repertory after prolonged absences. A fragile, often thrillingly wild dancer, Taylor is one of those performers whose soul seems to dance through her. The audience recognized this in a instant, with hold-your-breath silence and then tempestuous applause. She’s one of a very rare breed and deserves all the cherishing that can be given her.
A bevy of children (pupils of the company-affiliated School of American Ballet), playing the chorus of winged insects or fairies threaded through the piece, made it heartening to see that today–compared to yesteryear when I first saw the ballet–the students have acquired a fleetness and clarity unknown to their predecessors and at an earlier age. (This means that younger, thus smaller, children can be used, offering a more piquant contrast with the adults). Balanchine, of course, had a way with dancing children that has never been equaled in the States. He assigned each level of youngsters steps they could do effectively, with precision and verve, without losing their natural charm.
Transparency note, should one be needed: As a student at the School of American Ballet, my daughter danced for a few seasons in this chorus of airy sprites. She was young enough to need an adult escort to and from the theater, and it was a long, dreary wait between commutes, since the kids figure in the choreography from beginning to end. But the music was piped into the chaperones’ holding pen during the performance, and I’d often find my way (i.e., sneak into) the back of the auditorium just in time to watch the exquisite Act II pas de deux. Danced, appropriately, by a couple that has no role in the story, it is an abstraction of love’s deepest feelings and perfectly beautiful.
Suzanne Farrell as Titania
Courtesy NYCB Archives
A few weeks before the City Ballet finished its spring season with seven performances of Midsummer, the Baryshnikov Arts Center offered a single screening of the 1967 film version of the ballet, directed by Dan Eriksen and the choreographer. Whatever its flaws, and they are considerable, it reveals the qualities that made its leading dancers legendary. The young Suzanne Farrell reveals miracles of supple and impetuous motion as Titania. As Oberon, Edward Villella deploys his mercurial footwork, mating ferocious speed with rock-steady power. He originated the role, and his only subsequent rival since has been Helgi Tomasson, rendering the choreography in the fleet style that made him look airborne. Arthur Mitchell, as Puck (he, too, created his role) is simply not replaceable–a gleaming-skinned figure with a handsome, knowing face, who is clearly a born trickster.
The cast also includes the already dazzling Patricia McBride, Nicholas Magallanes, a soulful Mimi Paul, Jacques d’Amboise, and Allegra Kent. Veteran City Ballet followers will also enjoy singling out, amid the corps, dancers they recall fondly from the company’s mid-twentieth-century blossoming.
In many ways the production is a natural result of the era’s prevailing film conventions, which were then so commonplace as to be unnoticeable. But in no way is it equal to the live performances the City Ballet has given us over the years and what video has accomplished in the last half century to transfer ballet more authentically to the screen.
The worst aspect of the film is its scenery. It’s not merely a case of the patently fake asking us to take it for reality but also a question of its hampering the choreography. The combination undermines the ballet in both its woodland-animated-by-spirits and its aristocratic locales. In the forest, the landscape has the falsity of a plaster and plastic background for a model railroad or a Playmobil rainforest. What’s more, the pseudo-Mother Nature foliage constantly obscures the view and threatens the dancers with vines to trip over, trees and bushes to block their path. One of the basic requirements of Balanchine dancing is clear space.
The second act takes us to Theseus’s court to celebrate three weddings, those of the Duke of Athens himself with the Amazon huntress Hippolyta (an odd couple, perhaps) and the two pairs of plebeian lovers, whose complicated, shifting interrelationships (“What fools these mortals be!”) are finally straightened out–not without some early errors–by Puck at Oberon’s command, using doses of a rare rose pollen. The royal residence and grounds, with their imposing staircase and multi-tiered fountain, look like a Reno rendition of Louis XIV’s palatial concept of house and garden.
At the finale, back in the forest, Titania and Oberon are reconciled; she relinquishes the changeling child in her retinue that Oberon coveted to the point of their quarreling vehemently over it. But they are, pointedly, not included in the marriage rites (perhaps, as king and queen of the fairies they are already “married,”) and they part, moving off in opposite directions, though slightly turned to each other, each gently waving a hand in an amicable temporary farewell. Balanchine liked to explain (perhaps tongue in cheek) that they’re fairy folk, a breed that doesn’t engage in carnal intimacies.
Inevitably, the film makes alterations to the choreography that are disconcerting, at times downright confusing when it comes to keeping the plot straight, especially concerning the quartet of middleclass lovers. At other times, there are effects that are plain silly, such as the “magical” appearances of characters out of thin air.
Balanchine makes magic with his imagination that is far more potent than elementary camera tricks.
The camera does its worthiest work with close-ups. While the ravishing dewy beauty of the sleeping Titania is pure Hollywood, where Balanchine did some time in the 1930s and ’40s, it’s a blessing because you’d never be close enough to see it in the theater.
Now for the really bad news. Just before attending the single public showing of the film at the Baryshnikov Arts Center, I viewed it on my computer, using a screener provided by the celebrated Parisian archival institution, the Cinémathèque Française. It was wonderfully clear. The mechanics of the BAC showing, also using a Cinémathèque print, were simply not of professional caliber. Throughout, the image was migraine-inducing–severely blurred, accompanied by deafening sound. Nobody tried to fix this. Then, at the brief live Q & A that followed the film, the microphones worked only sporadically–an apt coda to the general malfunctioning of the event. Suzanne Farrell, straightforward and charming, and the deft interlocutor, the dance writer Robert Greskovic, coped with the situation like troupers.
© 2009 Tobi Tobias
School of American Ballet Annual Workshop Performances 2009 / Peter Jay Sharp Theater, Lincoln Center, NYC / June 1 (matinee and evening); June 3 (evening)
“But first a school,” Balanchine is said to have replied to Lincoln Kirstein, when the later was urging him to be the lynchpin in forming a ballet company in the States, intuiting that this choreographer–a genius without a job and in poor health to boot–would change the face of the art. The result of that exchange is evident today not only in the prowess of the New York City Ballet, which recruits the majority of its dancers from the advanced divisions of the school, but, tellingly, in the annual three-performance run of the School of American Ballet Workshop at Lincoln Center’s Peter Jay Sharp Theater. This year, Workshop offered an all-Balanchine program to celebrate SAB’s 75th anniversary.
Serenade. Choreography by George Balanchine © The George Balanchine Trust
Photo: Paul Kolnik
The program consisted of Serenade (the first ballet Balanchine created in America); the “Ballabile des Enfants” from Harlequinade (to show off the astonishing acumen of the juniors in the school, mostly in the 9-12 range, though some looked no more than six), and Stars and Stripes (to activate our patriotism? to show the delicious corniness and bravado of American culture, which delighted and amused the choreographer? to give roles to large flocks of young women and men who many not yet shine as incipient stars but collectively form an impressive ensemble? to provide a rousing closer?).
To me, the program seemed skimpy–too short, for one thing and too much a one-choreographer-show when for decades past the students were shown as well in work by Petipa, Ivanov, Fokine, or Bournonville (to say nothing of Jerome Robbins), which added other significant dimensions to their training. A new work was often commissioned for the program, too. Granted, this was sometimes a mixed blessing, but on other occasions the assignment was a challenge and an encouragement for a emerging choreographer–like, for instance, Christopher Wheeldon.
The program as a whole demonstrated the uncanny skill developed by SAB pupils who stay the course. Serenade, staged by Suki Schorer, a former City Ballet principal now celebrated for her Balanchine productions, was impeccably rendered, with the small nuances Schorer notices and remembers giving the faithful reproduction life and warmth. The choreography itself, though you may have seen it a hundred times, invariably looks new, fresh, a miracle of immediacy. In the matinee and evening performances (which offered cast changes) that I saw on May 30, I especially admired Shoshanna Rosenfield, Lauren Lovette, and Adam Chaviz, who still looks like a stripling but already dances with unmistakable poise and grace.
Garielle Whittle, an SAB and City Ballet alum, supervised the charming “Ballabile des Enfants,” representing familiar commedia dell’arte characters. Here, the littlest dancers, particularly, were like tiny faceted jewels, glittering as they moved with uncannily sharp footwork. The “Whispering Dance,” as it’s called, for four boy-girl couples at the mature end of the Children’s Division, made elegant Scaramouches, chicly costumed in jet black with white-plumed headgear. This segment, though, seems to have lost some of the mysterious atmosphere that once enveloped it–that aura of children just becoming aware of the adult world’s secrets. Or did I just imagine it existed years ago? I think not.
Susan Pilarre, who, once upon a time, when she was an SAB pupil, played children’s roles with the City Ballet, staged Stars and Stripes, distinguished for two of its four sections–first for the all-male “Thunder and Gladiator,” in which a regiment parades its feistiness in ever-changing geometrical patterns and jumps festooned with beats. They’re like a bunch of toy soldiers and irresistible even to a confirmed pacifist, who couldn’t possibly imagine any one of them coming home in a body bag.
Angelica Generosa in Stars and Stripes
Choreography by George Balanchine © The George Balanchine Trust
Photo: Paul Kolnik
Equally engaging, in the “Liberty Bel[” duet that caps the ballet, was Angelica Generosa, who is as sweet and sassy as they come, gently funny (as she should be here), with all the appearance of enjoying every minute–in other words, a born soubrette. She learned this role in merely a week, to replace an injured classmate, Ashly Issacs. Meanwhile Isaacs has been honored with one of SAB’s prestigious Mae L. Wein Awards, which predicts a successful future.
Serenade
Choreography by George Balanchine © The George Balanchine Trust
Photo: Paul Kolnik
© 2009 Tobi Tobias
American Ballet Theatre / Metropolitan Opera House, NYC / May 18-July 11, 2009
Nina Ananiashvili in Alexei Ratmansky’s Waltz Masquerade
Photo: Rosalie O’Conner
Always an exceedingly star-conscious company, American Ballet Theatre opened its annual spring season (May 18-July 11, at the Metropolitan Opera House) with a pair that would be hard to beat: Caroline Kennedy and America’s new First Lady, Michelle Obama, two of the gala event’s Honorary Chairmen. Both made carefully prepared, mercifully brief, but urgently timely speeches emphasizing the fact the arts are not merely commercially important to America but absolutely essential to its culture. They said it like they meant it.
The full article appeared in Voice of Dance (http://www.voiceofdance.org) on May 23, 2009. To read it, click here.
Martha Graham Dance Company: Clytemnestra / Skirball Center, New York University, NYC / May 12, 15, and 16, 2009
Genius though she was–as a dancer, as a choreographer, and as the inventor of the only Western dance technique apart from classical ballet capable of training a dancer fully to professional capability–Martha Graham produced more than her share of weak, empty works, some of which even qualify as unintentional self-parody. There’s no question, though, that a cluster of her finest efforts belongs to what is known as her “Greek Cycle.”
Any susceptible dancegoer who has seen Cave of the Heart (1946), sprung from the myth of Medea and Jason; Errand into the Maze (1947), a gloss on the Ariadne and Theseus tale; or Night Journey (1947), which retells the Jocasta and Oedipus tragedy–when these works are rightly performed–knows he is looking at the soul laid bare. (Mentioning Graham’s rendition of these couples’ stories, I put the woman’s name first, because Graham saw human experience from a woman’s point of view–in other words, hers.)
This season, the Graham company, which has long known troubles almost worthy of the Greek myths, and is now led by Janet Eilber, has brought Graham’s recently revived 1958 Clytemnestra to New York. Derived from Aeschylus’s Oresteia and given a flashback-and fragmented treatment of time, the piece was a must-see at its creation, yet has been absent from the repertory since 1994.
Preview announcements for the troupe’s May 12-16 engagement at NYU’s Skirball Center (during which the piece was shown three times) as well as reviews from out of town, repeatedly described the work as the acme of Graham’s Greek-related dances. Why? Because it’s program-length, while the others I mentioned are succinct enough to be performed with two other works? Because its ruthlessness is positively gaudy? Many of the seven deadlies are covered and, Lord knows, the blood does flow, but violence, though it may contribute to grandeur–see The Iliad and The Song of Roland, literature that made me, a pacifist, understand the heroism and glory embedded in war–is not necessarily its equivalent. No, Clytemnestra can’t claim to be among Graham’s greatest Greek ventures; it’s simply a helluva melodrama, filled with extremes of action, but short on depth, texture, and subtlety of emotion.
The company calls its present production a reconstruction. What does that mean? It usually means that the dance in question is recalled and remounted by means of first-hand evidence: memories of the people on whom it was made; dance notation scores; film or video of its premiere or early showings; still photographs; notes penciled into the score as aide-mémoires by the work’s original rehearsal pianist; eye-witness accounts of early performances. Of course you see that these sources are listed in order of diminishing reliability, that they are incomplete and often shaky; and that, as time passed, the choreographer herself may have made changes in the dance.
So what have we got in the case of the present Clytemnestra? Something close to the original, claims Eilber, who had advisors that included company veteran Linda Hodes; a version that runs two and a half hours as it did when the dance was first created, compared, by radical example, to the 90-minute show shortened for a Dance in America telecast in the late 70s; the original costumes designed by Graham and dancer Helen McGehee, in place of the Halston outfits imposed upon the piece at one point; the original score by Halim El-Dabh, rife with voiced exclamations like “A mother’s curse!”; the semi-abstract sculptural set created by Isamu Noguchi, whose innovations for earlier and far greater Graham works (among them Frontier; Seraphic Dialogue, and Cave of the Heart) are legendary, but who, for Clytemnestra, just feebly quoted himself.
The choreography reveals Graham quoting herself, too, with moves that are gorgeous–huge strides, with the heels pounding the floor like muffled blows; slow, fluid back falls that require thighs of iron and a snake-supple spine; hands rigidly cupped or emphatically striking the body. These were radical when Graham invented them years before, but cannot astonish here because she appears to be repeating them merely by rote, without the context that would make them fully expressive.
Expression is, indeed, the main issue here. On opening night in New York, it was obvious that the dancers had been rehearsed within an inch of their lives. Now they need to loosen up and, stylized and formal though the choreography is, allow themselves to look like individual people, each one in the throes of his or her particular passion. A few have already achieved this: Maurizio Nardi as Aegisthus, primarily, and also Blakeley White-McGuire as Cassandra and Lloyd Knight as Paris. Nearly all of the others, technically magnificent, I grant you, are working as if they were aiming for a perfect score on the SATs. The Furies–a small chorus of women in black–move in a unison so precise, they look like the Rockettes.
The big disappointment was Fang-Yi Sheu, for several years thought to come close in power and expression to Graham herself. Her incarnation of Clytemnestra shows that, wonderful as she is, this was never really so–that she lacks the seething passion that gave Graham’s dancing its incontrovertible conviction and edge. As the tempestuous queen, Sheu is simply too weak in the departments of rage and lust, to say nothing of sheer athletic power. (Granted, a serious injury incurred a few years back may be responsible for this last.)
One of Eilber’s “bright ideas” to make the dance accessible to the present-day audience involves small changes in the choreography. These are a mistake, unworthy of Graham’s stern and vivid aesthetic, and should be dispatched to Hades immediately. Another is the addition of supertitles explaining who’s who and what they’re about at the moment. These should be unnecessary if the audience can be persuaded to read the program notes. The titles are tackily executed both physically and content-wise (the silly “Clytemnestra dwells on all that has happened,” for instance) and inevitably suggest dumbing down. What ‘s more they’re interspersed with signage like “Pause. 2 minutes,” which leads you to expect “Restrooms to the left. Canteen to the right.”
But the really grave problem with these ostensibly helpful messages is that they point out all too pertinently the fact that the dance itself doesn’t tell you what you need to know. I’m reminded of a long-ago colleague who, confronting performances of early postmodernism, forbid himself to read any program notes until he was returning home on the subway. Invariably, beneath the rattle and screech of the clattering train, he’d find himself exclaiming sotto voce, “Oh, so that’s what it was about!”
Despite my cavils, I’m very glad Clytemnestra is back in the repertory. When a dance is absent, it is soon forgotten. Present, it’s there for the rising generation to learn and interpret. As for the current cast, I am fairly confident that, with ongoing performances, the dancers will make it their own.
© 2009 Tobi Tobias
Trisha Brown Dance Company / BAM Howard Gilman Opera House, NYC / April 29 – May 2, 2009
Trisha Brown’s L’Amour au théâtre
Photo: Stephanie Berger
Trisha Brown, recently back at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, offered a show that indicates how she’s moved from her beginnings to today, in a career that spans five decades.
One of the most wonderful aspects of her early work was its plainness. If the Shakers had had progeny, they might have been her ancestors. In the 1960s, Brown was a hero of postmodernism, as it came to be called, rejecting traditional concert-dance accoutrements, such as plot, emotion, musical accompaniment, decor, and costumes other than the sort of threads in which you washed the car. Quiet, smart as hell, witty, and determined, she had people walking down the facades of buildings, with the gawkiness of entry-level mountain climbers in reverse; communicating movements to one another from Soho rooftops (as if in a visual game of Telephone); making ordinary, often pointless tasks–like picking up a pile of sticks, one at a time, from a spot on the floor and moving them to a similar nondescript heap just several feet away–somehow thrilling.) Without ever indulging in self-congratulatory fuss about it, she embodied the shock of the new.
The 1968 Planes, the oldest work on the BAM program, looked back to these plainspoken dances, though it augments bare-bones movement with hyperactive film that jazzes up and, indeed, almost overwhelms the main, live action. (It also incorporates some music by Simone Forti, a fellow revolutionary.) This is the deal: a pale rectangular wall stands center stage. Pierced regularly by circles, it offers foot- and handholds to three women in jump suits, who ascend, descend, and travel slowly across it at a serene pace, with no destination indicated. The film starts out as a shaky, handheld camera-style view of urban detail animated by frenetic lighting, moves on to add color, and eventually becomes a travelogue of exotic lands. From time to time a pretty young woman in a pink leotard that nearly matches her skin, magnified way beyond life size compared to the live performers, straddles the space and performs supple back bends. Is she a latter-day Terpsichore?
Gradually embracing the elements that add conventional grandeur to dance, Brown moved toward opera-house acceptance, consistently doing so on her own terms. O złożony / O composite (the second element of the title is the French translation of the Polish first part) was created in 2004 for three étoiles of the Paris Opera Ballet (the French adore Brown). It was these top stars–Aurélie Dupont, Manuel Legris, and Nicolas Le Riche–who performed the piece at BAM in its American premiere. While the choreography is far from being top-notch, it was a pleasure to see how these mature ballet-made bodies absorbed the fluid style of the movement Brown gave them, while she in turn, who never studied classical dance, allowed them occasional steps from the technique they had perfected from childhood.
The best (and key) passage in the dance occurs early on and closes the piece as well. The two men face each other and walk softly with the woman’s body held horizontally between them. Her body hides their supporting hands, so she seems to float. The balance of the dance, although each of the participants is given a little solo, is essentially an exploration of how delicately and intricately a physical ménage à trois can be managed. The territory might have been Ashton’s, and he would have made it more tender and far easier to understand.
Brown’s dance is accompanied by a meditatively melancholy score that Laurie Anderson based on poems by Edna St. Vincent Millay and Czeslaw Milosz and is danced before Vija Celmins’s irresistible backdrop of a nearly black sky thick with stars (that is, étoiles).
The glory of the program was the 1979 Glacial Decoy, one of Brown’s perfect collaborations with the late visual artist Robert Rauschenberg. Against a huge four-panel slide show of black and white Rauschenberg photographs of commonplace things, mostly rural, whose interest and beauty so often goes unnoticed, five women flitter back and forth along a cross-stage path that seems, on both sides, to go on into the wings where the audience can no longer see it. If that’s not a metaphor for life, I don’t know what is.
Rauschenberg costumed the women–angels? fairies? visions?–in filmy white nightgown-like dresses with dropped sleeves that fan out like little parasols, leaving the dancers’ fine-boned shoulders bare. So what you see is a sculptural mass of uninterrupted flesh–head, neck, and shoulders–that proclaims warmth and vitality, while the rest of the body is cocooned in a cool scudding cloud.
There is no sound other than the ambient hum that makes a room come alive and the dancers’ often emphatic footfalls. No other sound is needed.
In the world premiere slot in the program was L’Amour au théâtre (Love in the Theater) set to excerpts from Jean-Philippe Rameau’s Hippolyte et Aricie, based on Racine’s tragic Phèdre. Brown is slated to stage the full opera in France in 2010, and the choreography we saw will be dropped into that production in segments. The opera itself is rife with melodramatic situations, dense with strong human feeling. It’s hard to say how Brown will fare with this vehement work and its violent passions. She has certainly progressed in her investigation of complex human relationships between O złożony and L’Amour au théâtre, and the segments we saw bunched into a whole in the latter will register more sharply when they’re separated. Still, even this latest material leaves Brown needing to invent choreography that makes it clear that erotic love is not a merely a matter of tangling arms and legs, no matter how intricate.
© 2009 Tobi Tobias
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