Archives for 2011

American Ballet Theatre: Jose Manuel Carreño’s farewell performance / Metropolitan Opera House, Lincoln Center, NYC / June 30, 2011

Jose Manuel Carreño bowing to the audience at the close of his farewell performance with American Ballet Theatre

Photo: Rosalie O’Connor

Is any dancer among us today as much loved as Jose Manuel Carreño? The ardor was apparent at American Ballet Theatre’s June 30th performance of Swan Lake at the Metropolitan Opera House. The occasion was the company’s official farewell to the 38-year-old star playing Prince Siegfried who has been one the pillars of its fame. Yet the evening seemed not so much a regretful goodbye on the part of the dancer and his audience as a celebration of Carreño’s artistry and the personality that informs it.

A brief bio is in order. Born and trained in Cuba, Carreño joined the National Ballet of Cuba headed by the legendary taskmistress Alicia Alonso. After winning a couple of major international competitions, he moved on–to the English National Ballet in 1990, then to the Royal Ballet in 1993. Gradually he realized that, despite all he learned from these opportunities, he and England were ill-matched–the people too buttoned up, the weather too gray–and joined ABT, where he has danced to continuous acclaim since 1995.

Since then, I’ve seen dozens of his performances and can report this about them: The moment Carreño appeared onstage, you sensed his warmth, his erotic appeal, his unquenchable joy in dancing, his generosity, and his impeccable manners. Just a few minutes into the proceedings, his remarkable physical prowess had you gasping. The showiest aspect of it comprised astonishing feats made to look like a form of exuberant self-expression, not, as occurs too often, the material of a second-rate circus. Carreño’s technique was clear and correct yet still sensuous, innately musical (rhythm ran through him), and wedded to harmony of line. Longtime fans have been talking, too, about how, even as the bravura capability that first got him noticed inevitably began to fade, it didn’t matter much for a while, and, when it did, he decided to take leave of the company that had been his home in his physical heyday.

 

Carreño in the role his fans most identified with him: Basilio in Don Quixote

Photo: Rosalie O’Connor

Carreño performing the title role in George Balanchine’s Apollo for ABT

Photo: Marty Sohl

From left: Carreño, Ethan Stiefel, and Angel Corella in Jerome Robbins’s Fancy Free

Photo: MIRA

Carreño has been wonderful in both classical and contemporary roles. He’s played just about all the danseur noble roles in the international repertory, from Albrecht to Apollo, and was equally comfortable in the more slangy styles of Jerome Robbins and Twyla Tharp. If classical ballet, 19th-century style, didn’t convince a viewer that Carreño was terrific–and a heartthrob, to boot–this resistance would likely be overcome by his performance in Robbins’s 1944 Fancy Free, which charts the adventures of three sailors on leave in New York. He played the part Robbins created for himself, the guy who does the sexy rhumba with the chair.

As many a grateful ballerina has attested, Carreño has also been the ultimate cavalier, infallibly gracious to his partner, whoever she might be. It’s as if “Woman” were a generic character in his stage life, eliciting from him an instinctive response of deference and devotion, to say nothing of astute partnering.

Despite the fact that farewell performances often require the audience to take on faith the best achievements of the honoree, Carreño’s was thrilling in and of itself.

He was surrounded by friends. Two of his most frequent partners split the leading female role between them, as has occasionally been done in the past, to tailor the technical challenges to each ballerina’s specific gifts. Julie Kent was the epitome of poignant regret and fragility as Odette (the white swan); Gillian Murphy, a voluptuous, witchy daredevil as Odile (black). Susan Jaffe, a third ballerina with a long history as Carreño’s partner, came out of retirement to play the Queen Mother. Cast as Benno, Joachim de Luz–a close pal from earlier ABT days, who’s now with City Ballet–added sparkle to the Act I pas de trois. Melanie Hamrick, Carreño’s fiancée (as was recently announced in the New York Times) was featured in the Spanish Dance and as one of the two swans who do the weighty mirror-image adagio passage that underlines the swans’ communal sorrow. In truth, though, it seemed that the entire company was working as a united force to make the performance as splendid as Carreño deserved.

Carreño himself danced the way, perhaps, he dreams of dancing; everything worked, his gifts and his current abilities coalescing. He nailed each of his solos. The virtuosic demands were well considered, ably met, and finished with neat, cushioned landings, while Siegfried’s melancholy solo when he feels alone and loveless in a crowd of his paired-off friends, was handsomely sculpted and beautifully acted. Performances like this come only rarely in a dancer’s life, and usually at a poorly-attended matinee on a rainy Sunday. Here, with some 4,000 pairs of eyes fixed on him alone, there were many passages that must have made the spectators wonder why the guy was retiring at all.

Carreño and dancers of ABT in Le Corsaire

Photo: Gene Schiavone

True, his leaps these days are not what they once were. They’re softer in attack and lower at their peak. Still, now as well as back then, for a dancer who always seemed so much more of-the-earth than most danseurs nobles, he appears very light in the air–not ethereal, but simple very light, as if gravity had reduced its claim and the air itself made him buoyant.

Turns are Carreño’s specialty and his continue to be unsurpassed in their finesse. Throughout his ABT career, as I recall, he was in the forefront of inventing variations on multiple pirouettes–as with the working foot poised at the knee of the standing leg and then, with a barber-pole effect, stealing down the standing leg to hug the ankle. Lately, while still swiveling smoothly, he can make the working foot sneak upward again. He can also diminish the speed of a multiple pirouette so that it starts out ferociously energetic and finishes in a contemplative calm. Such inventions, adopted by his peers and the rising generation of standout men, enliven and enrich the ballet vocabulary though they occur so naturally, we hardly notice them.

Time has only enlarged Carreño’s adroit partnering skills. In terms of physical support, he’s keenly sensitive to what his ballerina needs, how much, and when. At the same time he builds an emotional rapport between her character and the way she’s playing it and his. Everything he does is governed by a self-effacement that seems to be central to his temperament. Though his stardom is indisputable, he tempers it with humility.

Carreño in his farewell performance with ABT, dancing Prince Siegfried in Swan Lake with Julie Kent as Odette

Photo: Rosalie O’Connor

In his response to Kent’s Odette, he gauged his presence and held back in intensity. He was never not there, but he never overwhelmed her. The music for their lakeside pas de deux was taken at so slow a pace–presumably requested–that it provided a gossamer surround for the ballerina’s fragility. Carreño performed as if the character Kent had devised for herself were the most important element in the ballet–as if, indeed, he’d forgotten to whom the evening was dedicated.

Carreño in his farewell performance with ABT, dancing Prince Siegfried in Swan Lake with Gillian Murphy as Odile

Photo: Rosalie O’Connor

With Murphy, he matched both her physical challenges (which were spectacular, such as triple fouettés enlivening the obligatory 32 singles) and the nearly excessive excitement with which she played the temptress. In their pas de deux he even smiled for a few seconds like someone having an indecently good time; then let some doubt that Odile was his beloved Odette shade his face; next quietly and sweetly surrendered himself to Odile as her prey. Given the mounting incendiary quality of their match, the firebomb explosion when the villains’ duplicity was revealed seemed a crude afterthought.

Some of the wonders Carreño worked were very small and subtle, yet they registered large as moments charged with meaning–and magic. An example: At one point Siegfried is searching, futilely, for Odette among the lamentation of swans; then she enters the stage from behind him and he seems to feel her presence at the nape of his neck. Carreño’s expression of Odette’s effect on him–simply through her being near him, before he turns his head to see her–is an effect I’ve witnessed only in classical Japanese theater. I’ve seen it attempted in Giselle of course, but never convincingly.

From Carreño’s farewell performance with ABT: Carreño (center, with bouquet); to his left, David Hallberg; to his right, Kevin McKenzie, ABT’s artistic director

Photo: Rosalie O’Connor

Then, the bows, always the final act of such an occasion. As the curtain fell on Swan Lake the spectators in the packed theater rose as one, applauding and shouting their acclaim. First the full cast, much of it in white feathers, bowed. Then the dancers of the solo parts, and then the principals: David Hallberg who’d been spectacular as the licentious von Rothbart (a dancing role in the current ABT production), then Carreño and his two ballerinas.

As the sequence was repeated, Carreño kept the pair of ballerinas by his side as long as he could before he allowed himself to take a solo bow. Needless to say, it elicited roars from the house. Murphy and Kent had retreated to the sides of the stage and, with the rest of the cast, were applauding Carreño who, turning his back toward the audience, knelt and bowed his head in homage to the company.

While all this was going on, red and white flowers were hurled from the heights of the auditorium and flung over the orchestra pit. No sooner had a more formal presentation of tributes concluded than a parade of Carreño’s colleagues marched onstage from the wings, one by one, to deliver embraces along with their own floral offerings–so many that the bouquets and laurel wreaths had to be laid to rest on the floor, where the petals and leaves, gently crushed, formed a mound of tribute.

After another round of bows for the principals in front of the Met’s iconic golden curtain–mind you, the applause went on steadily for some 15 minutes–Carreño, by now weeping between smiles, took his last bow, one arm around each of his lovely, raven-haired teenaged daughters. No confetti. No helium balloons. They’d have been a frivolous distraction at an event that anatomized devotion.

ABT’s Jose Manuel Carreño in the company’s production of Le Corsaire

Photo: MIRA

Carreño’s future in dance is assured. He talks about the possibility of guest appearances with ABT and beyond. He’d love to perform on Broadway or in film. He is also already celebrated as a teacher, working with the boys at the School of American Ballet (New York City Ballet’s academy) and giving company class at ABT. This summer he’ll offer a comprehensive summer program for the young, the Carreño Dance Festival, in Sarasota, Florida. Perhaps he’ll have more time for some favorite diversions: playing tennis, exercising his salsa chops in the clubs. We won’t see as much of him, but we’ll never forget him.

© 2011 Tobi Tobias

Royal Danish Ballet / David H. Koch Theater, Lincoln Center, NYC / June 14 – 19, 2011

On the final leg of its ambitious coast to coast American tour, the Royal Danish Ballet played New York–the city least likely to let the troupe’s legendary charm dissuade fans from seeing its problems. A central one is repertory. As Nikolaj Hübbe, the company’s artistic director–and an energetic publicity machine–are telling the world at every turn, the RDB hopes to redefine itself by combining cutting-edge contemporary work with its custodianship of August Bournonville’s ballets, performed with regard to the unique style forged by the great 19th-century choreographer. The program offered on the first two nights of the six-performance engagement was not entirely convincing.

Down with Classicism! The Royal Danish Ballet’s Alba Nadal and Tim Matiakis in Jorma Elo’s Lost on Slow

Photo: Per Morten Abrahamsen

If Jorma Elo’s Lost on Slow, made for the Danes in 2008, is any indication of the RDB’s eye for achievement at the cutting-edge, we’re in bad trouble. Elo’s response to the ill-assorted passages of Vivaldi he’s co-opted for accompaniment is simply his familiar spastic perversion of classical dance givens–order, harmony, flow, and, as appropriate, beauty.

Three pairs of dancers, looking too far gone for relationship counseling, delivered this material (including a Munch-like silent scream from a lady being lifted by her cavalier) with determined precision. This made them look so frozen and mechanical that, gargoylish though they appeared, they probably couldn’t pass the entry exam for Scandinavia’s celebrated School for Trolls, which requires some capacity for feeling.

What, I wondered, is the obligatory mid-section pas de deux meant to convey? Crippled emotion? The impossibility of human communication? These are hardly up-to-date themes. Granted, the Vivaldi occasionally lures Elo into crafting a fluent phrase or two, but overall the choreography spurns connections. It’s just one weird gesture after another.

I feel obliged to report that on both evenings that I saw Lost on Slow, the audience applauded the piece with all its might.

Given the agenda Hübbe is proposing for his company, the inclusion of The Lesson, based on a one-act Ionesco play and choreographed by Flemming Flindt in 1963, may have seemed an odd choice, particularly as the curtain-raiser on opening night and the number of performances it was given. The intelligentsia loathes it; the general public finds much to enjoy in the melodramatic horror story of a psychotic middle-aged ballet master giving a macabre private lesson to a dance-entranced nymphet, apparently just one in a long series of victims. To be sure, this ballet is not high art, but it’s a handy vehicle for a company famous for dancers who can act.

Lady Killer: Thomas Lund in Flemming Flindt’s The Lesson

Photo: Martin Mydtskov Rønne

Plot-wise and mood-wise, it outdoes Black Swan at every turn. The setting (wonderfully designed by Bernard Daydé) is a picturesque old ballet studio with a profusion of mirrors, where a rigid female accompanist prepares for the pupil’s arrival. The girl is infatuated with dancing and pretty good too, as it turns out, at incidental bits of sexual provocation. Needless to say, much is made of the gleaming pink pointe shoes that are the symbol of her trade.

From the moment the ballet master enters the room, it’s clear from his twitching, face-averting, obsessive behavior that he’s certifiable. Putting the pupil through her paces, which are increasingly demanding and increasingly bizarre, he couples furtive sexual advances with escalating violence. To make a long story short: Reader, he strangles her. The pianist, his abettor and perhaps an early victim who managed to escape alive, helps him dispose of the body just as the next student is impatiently ringing the studio’s doorbell.

The Lesson fielded no fewer than three men for the role of the ballet master–Johan Kobborg, Mads Blangstrup, and Thomas Lund–and each was remarkable, offering an interpretation that was very much his own. My favorite was Lund, who was the most realistic in his madness and thus the most terrifying. The ballet master’s curdled psyche evident throughout his body, Lund could convince even a veteran viewer of the work that the monstrous events were really happening, to real people, possibly even right now.

As the student, the striking Alexandra Lo Sardo gave a vivid–perhaps too vivid–portrayal of the girl in the traditional vein (of a young woman whose very personality invites trouble). Ida Praetorius, a petite, fair-haired apprentice with the company, still all legs and wide eyes, offered a more innocent, even childlike, take on the character, which I found moving.

Gudrun Bojesun, alternating with Mette Bødtcher, enriched the character of the pianist by adding a surging flow to the robotic moves the choreography assigned her and a dramatic subtext that enhanced the sense of a mysterious and ghastly relationship with the serial killer.

The best thing that can be said about Georges Delerue’s made-to-order score is that it does its job.

When it comes to the Bournonville heritage–the Royal Danes are its custodian, just as the New York City Ballet is of the Balanchine legacy–the company is still unable to find the right way to use it.

The most significant evidence of the Danes’ current attitude to Bournonville was unveiled at the Kennedy Center in DC, prior to the New York City engagement. The performances in the capital were devoted solely to Hübbe’s drastically “new” versions of Napoli and A Folk Tale, two of the three most significant Bournonville ballets extant. Several critics were very tolerant of them; I wasn’t and will explain why, in detail, in a separate piece, to come.

Remembrance of Things Past: Gudrun Bojesen reincarnates Bournonville’s Sylphide

Photo: Martin Mydtskov Rønne

In the Apple, Bournonville was represented by La Sylphide, the ever-mounting dance excitement that concludes Napoli (which never fails to thrill,) and Bournonville Variations. This last is a new concoction–thought up, arranged, and staged by Hübbe and Lund, the company’s Bournonville expert as both dancer and instructor. It’s made up of excerpts, parceled out among nine men, from the so-called Bournonville Classes. These are six set classes–one for each day of the work week–that were put together by Hans Beck, a successor to the great man, mostly from consultations with dancers who had worked under Bournonville. Believe it or not, these classes, in which each exercise was accompanied by a popular tune, were used for decades as the training system for the company and the students being schooled for it.

Originally the classes were transmitted via the monkey-see, monkey- do system from one generation of dancers to the next. In 1979, the classes–and their accompanying music–were scrupulously researched, then published as texts through the efforts of Kirsten Ralov, RDB ballerina, teacher, and stager. A quarter-century later, the classes were recorded as DVDs. Although the videos are duly supported by a pair of books, it’s the availability of the moving images that makes the material, once a kind of professional secret, accessible to just about anyone. Even you, even I, can try out the classes alone at home in our spare time (though I would hardly recommend it).

For the RDB’s dancers and students, the unavoidable boredom of doing, say, Tuesday Class every single Tuesday from as early as the age of six until their retirement in mid-life, was alleviated, at least in the adult echelons, by the men’s creating naughty ditties that they sang sotto voce as they executed the amazingly convoluted chains of steps. “If you can dance Bournonville, you can dance anything,” it is said.

A real Bournonville class performed by professional or pre-professional dancers is, like a Martha Graham class performed by adepts, a thing of beauty and awe for the spectator. For their Bournonville Variations Lund and Hübbe got it all wrong from the moment they thought of theatricalizing the material. What might have worked would have been a demonstration, plain and simple, of a single full class (minus the Bournonville barre, which seems absurd–and even dangerous–to today’s dancers), performed in the starkest of practice clothes, with women admitted to the club. (The set classes offer piquant alternatives according to gender for certain enchaînements.) But no, the perpetrators had to make it macho–something only guys could do, to reinforce the idea that the Danes produce these incredible male dancers (which they do). They also felt they had to make it look like a ballet (which it doesn’t). It has no structure, no narrative or even subtext, no point whatsoever.

Bournonville Mashup: Alban Lendorf and Alexander Stæger in Bournonville Variations, idea, arrangement and staging by Thomas Lund and Nikolaj Hübbe

Photo: Costin Radu

Perhaps to conceal the fact that their smattering of excerpts doesn’t cohere, Lund and Hübbe gussied it up with glittery black costumes (blame Annette Nørgaard) in the wannabe provocative sex-and-death vein (are the faux-leather pleated skirts that the guys wear at one point a reference to the kilts of La Sylphide?) and raw lighting in garish colors (blame Anders Poll) that Jennifer Tipton would surely condemn as dumb and vulgar past forgiveness. Martin Åkerwall’s music, claimed to be based on the original accompaniment to the exercises, is unrecognizable as such.

Two of the nine dancers stood out: Alban Lendorf, a forceful presence, who stands out in everything he does, and, especially, Lund himself, who has the timing, the ballon, and the calm and tenderness needed for the lyrical phrases in the material as well as the ability to make the more devilish challenges look like an impulsive expression of joy. The others ranged from pretty damn good to not really up to it, the latter revealing the sad fact that Bournonville dancing is no longer the company’s top priority.

The Danes in Italy: Susanne Grinder and Ulrik Birkkjær in the tarantella from Act III of Bournonville’s Napoli

Photo: Costin Radu

More justice was done to Bournonville by an excerpt that concluded the third act of Napoli, which was relatively protected from Hübbe’s changes to the full ballet. (The most flagrant of renovators may turn shy when it comes to meddling with national treasures.) Yes, a bland interpolated solo for the hero and heroine dampened the ever-heightening vivacity for a few minutes. And it was foolhardy to use the newfangled ending in which the lovers ride off after their wedding reception on a glossy white motorcycle instead of the original’s peasant car crammed with bouquets from the pair’s friends, two little boys lustily waving Italian flags on top, and Mama (who said there were no mothers-in-law in ballet?) accompanying them. Nevertheless, what was left was enough to make even the most cynical of spectators admit that life was worth living.

First there’s a pas de six that opens with a lyrical passage for four women and two men. They manage to partner off in a series of patterns that is always logical, never contrived. Meanwhile the mood of their dancing conveys the fondness the participants have for one another and, indeed, for every other dweller in their village, all of whom seem to know each other by name as well as predilections. Then this band encounters a seventh, the man who gets to do the first of seven solos, launching fireworks of an understated prowess that define the Danish dancing spirit.
There are seven solos in all–each as inventive as it is demanding, each spilling forth fascinating and incredibly deft combinations of steps and posture: soaring leaps with one leg curved behind as in the famous statue of Mercury, arms outstretched as if to embrace the onlookers; buoyant jumps in place that are studded with beats, the arms now lowered and quiet; gentle side-to-side shifts suggesting reeds blown by a breeze this way and that; and witty reversals of direction that, no matter how often you see them, always register as a surprise.

It’s Easy When You Know How: Alexander Stæger, members of the Royal Danish Ballet, and students in the company’s school in Act III of Bournonville’s Napoli

Photo: Costin Radu

Everything is executed, of course, as if it were child’s play. The solos are interspersed with the dancing of a linked trio of young women who seem to rank between the soloists and the happy crowd of neighbors cheering them on. (Tambourines play a big role here.) The community is jubilant because the lovers’ story, a fraught one, has miraculously ended in joy, and the audience in the theater finds the mood contagious. The excitement intensifies with an exuberant tarantella and finishes with a communal dance invoking the gods of fertility, as is only appropriate to the occasion.

All the while, on a bridge in the background, there’s a bevy of children clapping in time to the music’s changing meters, gleefully raining confetti down on their elders, and, I’m told, memorizing the solos so that they can perform them when their day comes. Towards the end, some ten of these children–here, the Danish ones, the others being borrowed locals–descend from their perch to skip neatly in pairs through the ranks of their elders. Few onlookers can remain unmoved.

The New York engagement ended with four performances of La Sylphide, the sole Bournonville ballet with a long history in the international repertoire. I went to the last one for sentiment’s sake, because it was the last, and to another that I chose for its casting: Gudrun Bojesen in the title role and Sorella Englund as the witch, Madge, an interpretation that I’ve never seen equaled in the years I’ve been looking at dance.

Bojesen, the RDB’s finest example of classical dancing in the Bournonville style, is, quite simply, the most exquisite Sylphide I’ve ever seen. Enchanting in the contemporary context–as an enticing but impossible vision–she also evokes yesteryear’s Sylphides, whom we know from etchings and photographs dating all the way back to the 1830s, when the choreographer created his version of the ballet, co-opted from the French one and presumably “translated” somewhat to reflect Danish values.

A Danish Ideal: Gudrun Bojesen in the title role of Bournonville’s La Sylphide

Photo: : Martin Mydtskov Rønne

The first thing you notice about Bojesen is her radiance, coupled with the fact that the glow seems to be inextinguishable and to come from within. Yes, such a quality is intangible, but it counts nonetheless; I’d go so far as to argue that no ballerina can be considered significant without it.

Of course technical accomplishment can be discussed more concretely. Take, for example, the extraordinary softness of Bojesen’s footwork. She wears the lightest and most pliant of pointe shoes, which allow her enormous flexibility. And when she moves, even descending from air to earth in a leap or jump, not a single footfall can be heard. This achievement is essentially nonexistent today; in Bojesen’s case, it furthers the illusion that the Sylphide is wrapped in an aura of silence, apart from music.

Bojesen duplicates the virtues of her footwork in the suppleness of her entire body as she moves through space, thistledown style. What’s more, her mimed gestures are woven into her dancing so that the barrier between poetry and prose miraculously dissolves. She plays the Sylphide, rightly, as amoral, a creature of nature, driven by her own desires, and utterly poignant in her death, which results from her loving a mortal man.

Poor James, this creature he’s dreamt of–perhaps created in his imagination–lures him away from a humdrum if safe existence. He’s slated to marry and find contentment with the life laid out for him by family and friends. But how can he resist the Sylphide’s allure? It’s a call to freedom from constraint, to an existence in which nothing is preordained, a call to bliss.

Over the years I’ve seen Englund play Madge several times; on each occasion, she had imagined the character anew. In her single New York appearance in the role she seemed to be a faded beauty with piercing eyes who had fallen on hard times or, like the Sylphide, an otherworldly creature, the sort whose presence we may sense through fleeting glimpses or simply by intuition. Perhaps, Englund may be suggesting, she is a sylphide who has fallen from grace.

Englund makes the witch’s motives complex (as they might be in novels and real life, but rarely are in ballet). Madge craves revenge on James who so feared her presence, warming her frail, chilled body at his fireside, that he threw her out of his house; at the same time she lusts to have him for herself. Once she has duped James into destroying the Sylphide, capturing her with a poisoned scarf, and he lies swooning (perhaps dying) at the her feet, she forces him to look up and see his unseizable beloved being floated into the heavens. But no sooner does Madge gloat over her victory than she’s dismayed by what she’s lost through her jealousy and then, finally–the curtain line is hers–triumphant in her power. Englund conveys all this with an energy and focus remarkable in both their physical and psychological dimensions. Susceptible viewers, and I’m one, are duly shaken.

Ulrik Birkkjær offered a decent James, admirable for the correctness of his dancing, but he was no equal to the two transcendent women in the cast or to my memory of Nikolaj Hübbe’s playing James to Englund’s witch some years ago. That was a blazing encounter of two supremely gifted artists exploring the primal subjects of love, wrath, and power. The possibility of witnessing performances like that, rare though they are, is what keeps me going to the theater.

© 2011 Tobi Tobias

and, from the archives:
On the premiere of Nikolaj Hübbe’s production of La Sylphide: The Danes at Home, Seeing Things, September 26, 2003
On the Bournonville Classes: Total Immersion: The Bournonville Festival, No. 8, Seeing Things, June 11, 2005

School of American Ballet: 2011 Workshop Performances / Peter Jay Sharp Theater, Lincoln Center, NYC / June 4 and 7, 2011

As classical dance fans know, the annual Workshop Performances of the School of American Ballet–New York City Ballet’s renowned academy–display the accomplishments of its budding teen-age dancers, some of whom will be the next decade’s stars, others who will make a corps de ballet ever more deserving of its name–“the body of the ballet.”

This year’s performances–I saw two of the three showings, the matinee and evening performances on June 4–can be considered a landmark event. The two casts of nine men (average age 17 ½) alternating in Peter Martins’s 1987 Les Gentilhommes proved irrefutably that, after decades of working toward the social acceptance of boys who choose to dance, America, with SAB in the lead, can produce a male contingent of classical dancers of the highest caliber.

Amazing Grace: School of American Ballet’s Harrison Ball in Peter Martins’s Les Gentilhommes

Photo: Paul Kolnik

Set to felicitous music by Handel, Les Gentilhommes demonstrates the refinement a young man can achieve through rigorous schooling in strength, exactitude, selflessness, and unforced grace of manner. The ballet’s cast of nine is dressed in loosely pleated white shirts, ruffle-trimmed at the wrist and neck, and unforgiving white tights. They might have stepped out of Castiglioni’s Book of the Courtier, which describes the attributes a young man of the Renaissance needed to cultivate in order to shine in courtly society.

The breathtaking adagio in place with which the ballet opens consists solely of changes in posture and gesture, so the viewer can see the harmony of each dancer’s form from shifting points, as if she or he were slowly walking around a piece of sculpture.

Then one of the nine, placed at the center of the group, acts as its leader, proposing a brief sequence of steps that is then reiterated by the others–in flawless unison. This consonance is never mechanical or show-offy (like the sensational Rockettes’). Rather, buoyed by music and breath, it looks perfectly–albeit ideally–human.

The piece progresses with three sequential trios, each emphasizing a specific aspect of classical-ballet virtuosity. Finally the nine dancers assemble again, now in a diagonal line, and take up their call-and-response activity, first in brisk tempo, then quieting into the legato pace of the opening. Gradually the stage darkens and they perform a révérence (the traditional formal bow of ballet students to their classroom teacher, with which they will eventually recognize and thank their audience).

The deference of the bows and the falling darkness seem to be reminders that a dancer’s job is to serve his demanding art with humility, discipline, and devotion. Such a commitment eats up his youth and, because the body falters long before the desire to dance is quenched, lasts only halfway through his maturity. The reward is satisfaction in doing what one was destined to do–and, just possibly, glory.

Ad Astra Per Aspera: Young men from SAB–Joseph Gordon, center–in Martins’s Les Gentilhommes

Photo: Paul Kolnik

Seeing Gentilhommes again at the evening performance, I noticed many lovely details:

● Proof that the angle of the wrist and the placement of the fingers can matter tremendously. (Once you learn this from dancing, you can look for it beyond dancing. In sculpture, in acting, in everyday life.)

● A movement traveling down a diagonal side-by-side line-up of the dancers almost faster than you could see each one execute it.

● Grands battements in which the leg is not forced or hauled upward but flung high softly and easily, even buoyantly.

● Each man’s composed stillness when he’s finished a phrase and is “just” standing in place.

● The reaching into the air with a single arm, the eyes following and extending that reach, and then, only then, the body soaring straight upward, almost invisibly thrust off the ground by the legs and feet.

● The beauty of the beats, tiny and unemphatic, added to a jump without the least effort, simply to make the jump glitter. (It’s what the stars do to a nighttime sky.)

● Last, but most amazing, the men’s perfectly turned-out fifth position: feet locked tightly together, right heel to left toes, right toes to left heel, forming a base so secure, a rocket could be launched from it. Peter Boal, one of the most impeccable principal dancers City Ballet ever harbored, a member of the original cast of Gentilhommes, now artistic director of Pacific Northwest Ballet, confessed one day with rueful humor to the SAB boys he was teaching, “I feel as if I’ve spent my life getting in and out of fifth position.”

High Fidelity: SAB’s gentlemen in fifth position

Photo: Paul Kolnik

Albert Evans and Arch Higgins, both former dancers with City Ballet, did the superb staging. Their production looked as if Stanley Williams–Evans’s teacher, Higgins’s teacher, Boal’s teacher, Martins’s teacher–had coached it himself. At the premiere of Les Gentilhommes in 1987, Martins dedicated the ballet to Williams with the words Skol, Stanley!, as if raising a glass to the justly renowned (and loved) classical dance pedagogue, a man with a persistent vision of exquisite simplicity.

George Balanchine said that his Allegro Brillante, which opened this year’s Workshop program, “contains everything I knew about the classical ballet–in thirteen minutes.” And it’s an exigent 13 minutes for the leading couple–here Angelica Generosa partnered by Harrison Ball at the matinee and Joseph Gordon at the evening performance–as well as for the four necessarily highly accomplished couples who make up the ensemble. (At Workshop the ensemble was terrific and justly earned its own ovation.)

Co-stars: The ensemble of Balanchine’s Allegro Brillante

Photo: Paul Kolnik

Balanchine’s choreography to the single completed movement of Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 3 in E-flat major is exhilarating, often speed-driven and simultaneously insistent upon having its every image register with acute clarity. An abstract ballet, Allegro has no subtext whatsoever; it’s about the sheer thrill of the academic vocabulary–and Balanchine’s startling but eminently logical extensions of it–responding to the surging music.

As just one example, take the way the dancers’ arms and legs keep thrusting sharply into diagonal positions one way and another, then quickly reverse, often taking the whole body in a new direction. Again and again, the dancer looks like a weather vane in a lashing tempest. Then take another–perhaps the ballerina’s series of turns on pointe escalating into a string of every related turn in the book. Take yet another and you find your heartbeat has been accelerating all along the way.

Sparklers: Angelica Generosa and Joseph Gordon in Balanchine’s Allegro Brillante

Photo: Paul Kolnik

My one problem with all this is that I simply couldn’t take to Generosa, prodigy though she may be. Unlike most gifted pre-professionals, she’s already a finished product, secure in everything she does (and tops with a pretty smile). She looks as if she’s absorbed every bit of coaching she’s been given and does to perfection everything she’s been told to do. As a result, she has become an encyclopedia of scrupulously rendered feats. Now, if it’s not already too late, she needs to become a dancer.

Admittedly, the leading woman of this ballet has got to be a virtuosa–the role was created for Maria Tallchief–but a 17-year-old virtuosa who doesn’t seem to realize that there’s a world beyond physical prowess kind of dampens your day.

The piece was staged by Suki Schorer, formerly a principal dancer with City Ballet, an instructor at SAB for four decades, and a longtime provider of distinguished Balanchine productions for Workshop. She must have realized that, given the senior SAB students at her disposal this season, Allegro couldn’t have been staged effectively without Generosa, who danced all three performances.

Girl Crazy: Peter Walker, escorting Lindsay Turkel, one of his three dates, in Balanchine’s Who Cares?

Photo: Paul Kolnik

Balanchine’s Who Cares?, set to an irresistible slew of Gershwin songs, encourages belief in the choreographer’s assertion that “ballet is woman.” Susan Pilarre–like Schorer, an expert stager of Balanchine’s ballets–mounted the piece for Workshop with remarkable insight, but it was clear that she didn’t have enough women to fill the ballet’s requirements–or her own. Each of the female soloists, at the very least, must have excellent technique and, most significant, her unique “perfume”–if the ballet is to evoke the many moods of romance proposed by the songs and the choreography. Each should have the power to make you fall in love with love. But as past Workshops have demonstrated, there are vintage years in dancers as well as in wines, and this year’s crop had few women of that special quality.

Man About Town: Walker in Who Cares?

Photo: Paul Kolnik

It was left to the leading man to carry the show. He has a duet with each of the three main women, followed by a solo of his own. Peter Walker was fast and fleet in the role, always attentive to the lady in his arms–indeed he had no eyes for anyone but the one of the three he was dancing with at the moment. (This alone was bound to make viewers a little suspicious. Had Walker decided he was playing a trickster?) He went on to perform his solo with the casual ease of Jacques d’Amboise, who originated the part, but added to that a hint of cunning and danger. It suited the portrait of a young man about town who seems sweet and sincere enough but perhaps is not quite the gentleman he’s billed as being–or that Walker had appeared to be, not an hour before, in Les Gentilhommes.

A male quintet, to Bidin’ My Time, offered viewers another look at performers who’d caught their eye earlier in the program. I was particularly happy to see Austin Bachman, whose promise and progress I’ve followed for a couple of years. He still looks boyish and is more than ever a model of classical correctness–presented softly, as are his modesty and charm.

I was delighted, too, to notice Silas Farley–tall, willowy, and gentle–for the first time. He’s the sort of dancer who makes you imagine the ballets that might suit him, even though, so far, you’ve only seen him in one or two.

Follow the Leader: Jock Soto as the Ringmaster parading 48 girls from SAB in Jerome Robbins’s Circus Polka

Photo: Paul Kolnik

The school’s Children’s Division, represented by Circus Polka, looked better than ever this year. Every time I see this three-minute showpiece, devised in 1972 by Jerome Robbins for 48 girls–ranging from tiny enough to be (wrongly) dismissed as “cute” to just pubescent middle schoolers–the pony tails are longer and bouncier; the uniformly slender legs, molded by ballet training, more lithe and disciplined; the footwork more finely articulated; the stage presence more confident and joyous.

There’s an anecdote attached to the piece that’s recalled whenever the ballet is performed. Back in 1941 the Ringling Brothers, Barnum & Bailey Circus invited Balanchine to choreograph a routine for some 50 elephants and the pretty girls who rode them. Accepting the challenge, Balanchine asked Stravinsky (who, along with Tchaikovsky, was a source of unending inspiration for him) to compose a brief score–a polka perhaps–for the occasion. After being assured that the elephants were “very young,” the composer complied and, in 1942, the show went on. The score bore this dedication: “For a Young Elephant.” Three decades later, for City Ballet’s Stravinsky Festival, Robbins co-opted the music for three tiers of SAB girls and an adult Ringmaster who put them through their paces.

Spelling Bee: For the curtain line of Robbins’s Circus Polka, the young dancers form the initials of Igor Stravinsky, who composed the ballet’s score

Photo: Paul Kolnik

This year’s Ringmaster was Jock Soto, a former City Ballet principal dancer, now a member of SAB’s faculty. The piece was staged by Garielle Whittle, a longtime member of the faculty as well as children’s ballet master for the company. The Ringmaster wields a mean whip (which of course never touches a child). Unarmed, Whittle prepares youngsters to combine exorbitant energy and technical precision with springtime freshness and grace.

© 2011 Tobi Tobias

American Ballet Theatre: Ratmansky, Wheeldon, Millepied, and Tudor / Metropolitan Opera House, Lincoln Center, NYC / May 24-26, 2011

The lone mixed-repertory program in American Ballet Theatre’s eight-week spring season at the Metropolitan Opera House attempted to lure today’s audience, addicted to multi-act story ballets, to a more varied–and riskier–scenario. It offered new pieces by the two most gratifying classical choreographers in our midst (Alexei Ratmansky and Christopher Wheeldon), another by the fellow most avid to join their ranks (Benjamin Millepied), and the revival of a work by a past master (Antony Tudor), though not of one of his masterworks.

Antony Tudor (1908 – 1987)

Photo: Elizabeth Sawyer

In Dumbarton, set to Stravinsky’s neo-classical Concerto in E-flat (Dumbarton Oaks), Ratmansky devotes himself to one of his specialties–making an ensemble fascinating in itself. The choreography offers a perpetuum mobile opportunity to ten dancers, who are also seen, at intervals, as separate couples. (Imagine a video camera zooming in on a particular pair in a community to reveal more and more about them.) The full-group patterns look like quick-shifting kaleidoscope images that have been released from their customary geometric boundaries. Ratmansky’s flair guarantees that the unleashed, unexpected patterns never once lose their coherence.

Nearly four decades before Ratmansky created his piece, Jerome Robbins used the music for his Dumbarton Oaks, choreographed for the New York City Ballet’s 1972 Stravinsky Festival. Seasoned viewers remember that ballet, if at all, as a feeble effort, having something to do with recreational tennis, with the costumes vaguely reflecting the dapper Twenties. Now the score–like so many things in life–has been given another chance. This dance-historical footnote would be irrelevant if there weren’t hints of Robbins’s predilections in Ratmansky’s ballet–not in the steps and style, but rather in its evocation of an appealing past time and place. In the Ratmansky the idyll is simpler and sweeter than contemporary urban life. Richard Hudson’s costumes–with their all-cotton look–suggest ordinary folk living good lives far from big cities. Without the least bit of sentimentality or fakery, everyone in this imagined realm looks young and beautiful.

And Then Suddenly, Without Warning: The full cast of Dumbarton, choreographed by American Ballet Theatre’s Artist in Residence, Alexei Ratmansky

Photo: Rosalie O’Connor

The tone of the choreography is largely playful, though when the music slows and grows quiet, Ratmansky lets the atmosphere of the dance become more meditative. Then, with almost no warning, one woman collapses in her partner’s arms, falls to the floor, and is borne off, body supine and rigid, as if in a funeral procession. It made me remember being a fourth-grader returning to class from spring vacation and having the teacher announce to the room of 28 children and one empty seat fused to a cleared desk, that Charlie–stickball champ, ramshackle scholar, the kid with the irresistible grin–had died. Charlie? Die? How could this happen? He was only ten years old! Life’s natural order had been hideously disturbed.

The music returns to an upbeat mode and Ratmansky, always prone to let joy have the victory over gloom, has the stricken woman return unharmed, unaffected by what has occurred a few moments earlier. It’s the spectator who remembers.

Set to Benjamin Britten’s Diversions for Piano and Orchestra, Wheeldon’s sleek, handsome Thirteen Diversions shows the choreographer taking a step his audience has been hoping to see for quite a while. Like most of his work, the piece is exquisitely organized and inventive when it comes to steps, all the while adhering to classical principles and, for the most part, the classical vocabulary. But now, at long last, in a ballet that ambitiously has four principal couples sharing time and space with an ensemble of 16 (in itself no mean feat), Wheeldon has been able to access some emotion that actually looks genuine. It makes all the difference.

Typically, he reaches for design that is over-impressive. Brad Fields, credited with the lighting, has also created the décor: projections on the backcloth of huge fields of saturated color sliced by streaks of white light. The hues change with each of the thirteen passages. The eye is bombarded. I imagine that Jennifer Tipton, who has proved incontrovertibly that subtle lighting is the most persuasive, would be appalled.

Bob Crowley’s costumes, too, are over the top. The principals wear white; the ensemble black. The theme is dinner-jacket tops for both genders (the men’s have a 19th-century look, while the women’s are feminized). Below, the men wear danseur noble white tights; the ladies sport knee-length fluffy skirts. The predominant fabric appears to be a lush, infinitely pliable satin, easily the most sensuous of materials. And have I mentioned the ballerinas’ hair-dos? Very chi-chi. Must have cost a fortune.

Deep Song: Marcelo Gomes and Isabella Boylston in Christopher Wheeldon’s Thirteen Diversions

Photo: Rosalie O’Connor

Given the high style of all this eye candy, the dancers’ demeanor is formal–until, in duets for two of the couples, myriad and mysterious forms of love surge to the surface. The emotions are not acted, though; they reside in the choreography. And the dancers, blessedly, make them happen, without distorting them with personal comment. Gillian Murphy and David Hallberg seem to enjoy an early-summer romance, the sort of thing where to abandon oneself to love is no big deal, but only natural, given the circumstances. Late in the ballet Wheeldon explores the other end of the amorous spectrum, giving the wonderful Isabella Boylston and Marcelo Gomes a gorgeous duet that is fraught with passion. It describes a bonding so deep and complicated that it hurts as often as it succors. In this pair of duets Wheeldon accesses a humanity he previously chose to ignore or needed to grow into. No artist is complete without it.

Troika, the Russian word for a carriage drawn by three horses, is used informally to refer to the passage in Balanchine’s Apollo in which the exuberant young god gathers his three muses and drives them along at a brisk pace. It is also the name of Millepied’s latest ballet, which is, in my opinion, the best work he has produced so far. Granted, this is not much of an endorsement, but it’s a sign that, having spent a number of years learning his trade with uninspiring results, Millepied is now capable of constructing a ballet that is workmanlike instead of awkward, hollow, and/or baffling.

Troika, set to Bach cello music, gives us three guys of different heights–small, medium, and large, so to speak–although, strangely, nothing much is made of this in the choreography. Channeling Jerome Robbins in his Interplay mode, Millepied makes them best buddies, regular guys who are, you know, just hanging out, fooling around. Since the performers are not street kids but talents subjected to the long, arduous years of classical-dance training, it’s hard to suspend your disbelief in the premise.

Boys Will Be Boys: Sascha Radetsky, Alexandre Hammoudi, and Daniil Simkin in Benjamin Millepied’s Troika

Photo: Mikhail Logvinov

The fooling around is, inevitably, full of feats. They’re acrobatic, jokey, show-offy, competitive without rancor–in other words, boyish–and no doubt intended to impress and charm the audience at the same time. Toward the end of the ballet, when even disarmed spectators may well have had enough and the “boys” are drenched in sweat, the tallest fellow leads a slow meditative section (a typical Robbins tactic for offsetting hijinks) in which we can assume the three are brooding over their inner feelings and perhaps their friendship too.

The dancers were swell. I preferred the first cast–Daniil Simkin (short), Sascha Radetsky (average), Alexandre Hammoudi (tall)–yet couldn’t help feeling that these men were wasting their talents with a project short on authenticity. The cellist, Jonathan Spitz, who played onstage, was swell too.

What can I say about ABT’s revival of Tudor’s 1967 Shadowplay? The choreographer’s small but utterly unique oeuvre, by turns tragic, tender, and acerbic, saw deep into the human soul, fusing gesture with feeling. When Mikhail Baryshnikov headed ABT, he called Tudor the company’s “conscience.” Tudor’s ballets–among them Jardin aux Lilas (Lilac Garden), Dark Elegies, Pillar of Fire, and The Leaves Are Fading–have long been considered the company’s legacy. But time has indeed gone by. Nowadays even the masterworks I’ve named fail to attract the general public, whose taste has been blunted by the large, the gaudy, and the next new thing.

It’s possible that Shadowplay doesn’t stand a chance. It has been considered a “difficult” piece from the moment of its creation–hard to understand and as much posture and gesture as full-fledged dancing. It’s a mythical affair, reflecting Tudor’s growing commitment to Buddhist thought and practice. It describes, all too vaguely, a young man’s journey toward enlightenment as he encounters the denizens haunting his jungle home. The eerie music is Charles Koechlin’s and relates to Rudyard Kipling’s Jungle Book, which also informed Tudor’s choreography.

The hero, called Boy with Matted Hair, is a human stripling, innocent and vulnerable, curious, too, but firm of purpose. He stays close to his meditation spot at the foot of an immensely gnarled tree with spidery branches as various forces arrive to tempt and torment him. There’s a tribe of Arboreals, monkeys low on the spiritual totem pole; then the Aerials, six women in balletic versions of Cambodian dress; the Terrestrial, a gorgeous hunk of a man costumed like a Hindu god, who dominates the Boy sexually and belatedly receives his comeuppance; and the Celestials, two male bearers carrying a seductive woman high above the earth. She turns out to be a real harpy, hardly a desirable erotic companion. Presumably by force of will, the Boy overcomes these distractions to achieve Nirvana.

In the intermission a woman seated behind me, who had evidently seen me scribbling notes in the dark, asked me if I could explain the ballet we’d just watched. Before I could think, I blurted out, “No.” For the sake of civility I quickly made amends, but I suspect my initial response was closer to the truth.

You can tell the ballet is considered “important” by the artists who’ve danced the leading role. Anthony Dowell, perhaps the most pure and touching male dancer in history, originated it. Baryshnikov took it on in ABT’s 1975 revival. Herman Cornejo, who has an uncanny ability to grasp and then produce the style of any role he covers, was slated to portray the Boy in the current production but was waylaid by injury; Craig Salstein turned in a sensitive performance in his place–all tender-footed gait and unsullied soul–while Daniil Simkin appeared in the alternate cast.

Below, a glimpse of Anthony Dowell and Derek Rencher in the original production of Shadowplay by the Royal Ballet:

I hope the ballet remains in ABT’s repertory long enough to give Cornejo his chance in it and to give me another chance to see what the music critic Andrew Porter saw in it: “If the ‘content’ of Shadowplay could be . . . verbalized,” he wrote, “there would be no need for the ballet. Words can be only a crude pointer to the kind of work it is, a work in which Tudor, as ever, communicates in a clear, eloquent imagery, with great delicacy of nuance, what can be really experienced but hardly translated into any other medium.”

© 2011 Tobi Tobias

American Ballet Theatre: Opening Night Gala / Metropolitan Opera House, Lincoln Center, NYC / May 16, 2011

Gala! Of course there were little speeches before the curtain–from Rachel Moore, American Ballet Theatre’s Executive Director, resplendent in an origami-influenced emerald gown; Kevin McKenzie, the company’s Artistic Director; and Carolyn Kennedy, whose girlish awkwardness has become part of her charm, following her mother’s example of supporting the arts. Then a tasting menu of familiar love-story pas de deux for ABT’s principal dancers and a pair of obligatory yet very well-deserved nods to the company’s corps de ballet.

The ensemble assembled for a pair of all too brief excerpts that book-ended the program. These were drawn from the big-deal item of ABT’s spring season at the Met, Alexei Ratmansky’s The Bright Stream, to the score Shostakovich composed for a Soviet-era production. Ratmansky, who has just signed on for an extra decade as ABT’s Artist in Residence, used the lively music but created new choreography to it in 2003–for the Bolshoi Ballet, during his tenure as head of that company. Two years later, the Russians presented the production in New York–to much delight.

Regrettably, the excerpts shown at the gala were so tiny (and the participants so many), that this preview did a disservice to the rollicking program-length work, which is set, as was the original version, on a collective farm. (In other words, not near a castle, a rural cottage, or a haunted lake.) First-time viewers must have been hard put to figure out from the excerpts what was going on. But I wouldn’t for the world have missed the sight of Susan Jones–a diminutive woman of a certain age subject to embonpoint, former ABT dancer now an indispensable ballet mistress–turning incisive cartwheels in a billowing red dress.

Top Marks: Gillian Murphy in Balanchine’s Tchaikovsky Pas de Deux

Photo: Jack Vartoogian

The most ravishing dancing of the evening was done by Gillian Murphy and David Hallberg, performing Balanchine’s Tchaikovsky Pas de Deux. Consummate professionals, consummate classicists, and strong, clear technicians, the two gave a deliberate, almost solemn, rendition of choreography that was flawless in its polish.

This is obviously quite different from the tone Balanchine intended in 1960 when he made the piece for New York City Ballet. Back then it looked like a bagatelle tossed off by genius. Violette Verdy and Conrad Ludlow, the originators of their roles, danced it with great élan, as a playful romp full of verve and spontaneity. The piece was clearly made for Verdy’s effervescence, her wit, and her unparalleled musicality. It was full of surprises, like the moment Verdy took off from one side of the stage and hurled herself, horizontally it seemed, over the huge gap that separated her from Ludlow, on the other side–and landed in his arms in fish-dive position. You’d hear the spectators gasp and laugh in delight, even before they thought to applaud.

But I liked the Murphy/Hallberg reading too, for its flowing, creamy dancing, for the way Murphy, in the slow-motion ending of the adagio, seemed to rise upward into Hallberg’s embrace to arrive at a fish-dive position (the precursor of the one at the ballet’s finish); and for the solos: Hallberg, always flawlessly placed, being gentle and buoyant; Murphy deft and animated in her allegro work; Hallberg riding the air in long leaps, then Murphy explicating Balanchine’s disquisition on piqué turns and punctuating the coda with effervescent flying pas de chat. It’s rare to find dancing you can call perfect.

Being Beauteous: Veronika Part and Marcelo Gomes in the grand pas de deux from Ratmansky’s The Nutcracker

Photo: Geme Schiavone

Veronika Part has enraptured ABT fans in the way Sara Mearns has City Ballet’s audience–through the irresistible appeal of a way of moving so luxuriant she reveals the very essence of dance. Not just academic classical ballet, which is simply her artistic language, but dance itself.

With the adept and empathic Marcelo Gomes as her partner, Part performed the grand pas the deux from the Nutcracker that Alexei Ratmansky created for ABT last year. Through a few of the missteps and hesitations she’s prone to, she made it evident that she wasn’t likely ever to achieve the cool perfection that Murphy and Hallberg had just demonstrated–and that it doesn’t matter.

In this performance Part was at her most tender, like a child on Christmas morning, awakening to joy, or an adolescent awakening to romantic love. Individual steps and phrases flowed into each other like speech transmuted into song. Remarkable lifts were executed not bravura-style, but as part of the pair’s characterizations. In the ballet, Part’s role embodies the child heroine’s idyllic dream of what she might become and experience as a young woman. Dancing this role, Part makes you believe that the dream–absurdly simple, sweet, and innocent–might actually come true, even if you’ve already grown up.

¡Sí Cuba!: Jose Manuel Carreño (second from right) and friends in Georges Garcia’s Majisimo

Photo: Gene Schiavone

An all-star, no-star octet of Hispanic dancers, seven of them born and trained in Cuba, danced Majisimo, choreographed by Georges Garcia in 1965 for Alicia Alonso’s Ballet Nacional de Cuba. Set to music from Massenet’s Le Cid, the piece is structurally naive, but it made its point: American dance has been conspicuously enriched by Cuban artists, who typically mate technical acumen with human warmth. The cast: From ABT, Jose Manuel Carreño, Paloma Herrera, and Xiomara Reyes; from San Francisco Ballet, Lorena Feijóo and Joan Boada; from Boston Ballet, Lorna Feijóo and Nelson Madrigal; and Reyneris Reyes from Miami City Ballet.

Carreño, surely the best beloved of ABT’s dancers, could be the poster boy for the appealing “Cuban style.” Here, apart from a brief solo moment, rather than performing as a star, he played a modest–and endearing–role as a member of a congenial team. He will appear in his more familiar guise–prince of the proceedings–at his farewell performance on July 30. He’ll be Prince Siegfried in Swan Lake, partnering not one, but two of his fortunate ballerinas, Julie Kent and Gillian Murphy, as Odette and Odile respectively. Be there, prepared to cheer and weep.

Sweet Sixteen: Alina Cojocaru in the Rose Adagio from The Sleeping Beauty

Photo: Gene Schiavone

Wearing incredibly soft pointe shoes, properly shy and girlish, the petite Alina Cojocaru, a guest from the Royal Ballet, performed the Rose Adagio from The Sleeping Beauty, abetted by four local princely cavaliers. Ripped out of the context that would identify her as the 16-year-old Aurora, heiress-apparent to a fairy-tale throne, being introduced to the quartet of regal suitors from which she’s expected to choose a mate, this celebrated pas de cinq made a mere gymnastic thrill of its climax. The four balances in unsupported attitude that Margot Fonteyn famously prolonged when the Royal Ballet made its American debut at the old Met started a tradition. Here’s Dame Margot upholding her own tradition.

Cojocaru handled the technical challenge credibly, though not incredibly. (Her forte is not technical dazzle but, rather, lyricism, musicality, and sensibility.) Still, she managed to hold one balance long enough to suggest a soap bubble suspended in the air and finished with a flourish, thrusting her free leg straight behind her with such a rush of energy, it seemed to blaze like the tail of a comet. She made all the doings musical and even snuck in some subtle acting–revealing a growing emotional confidence in her relationship to the suitors, even a flicker of flirtation, despite the fact that Aurora is even more of an innocent than the Juliet who hasn’t yet set eyes on Romeo.

Dangerous Liaisons: Diana Vishneva and Marcelo Gomes in MacMillan’s Manon

Photo: MIRA

In contrast to Aurora, the Manon of Kenneth MacMillan’s eponymous ballet has no virginal impulses whatsoever. Au contraire. Diana Vishneva, a principal with the Mariinsky Ballet and ABT as well, and the marvelous Gomes gave a potent rendering of what you might call a first-lust pas de deux. They made every one of the choreographer’s impossible lifts, meant to be equivalents of physical passion, look credible, even beautiful. (When they don’t come off, as happens with lesser dancers, all you can see is the shame and danger the exploits impose on the performer–the slipping, the groping, the fear, if you will, of falling.) At the gala, all went well.

I wish I believed more in Vishneva’s characterizations. Although they’re unquestionably multifaceted and intelligent, they seem to be constructed, not charged with actual feeling. They’re so logically conceived and so well performed, physically and theatrically, surely it would be easier to surrender to them, to accept the beauties of what this fine dancer can do without dwelling too much on what will never be. I’m just not there yet.

There was more, much more: The Act II (“White Swan”) pas de deux from Swan Lake, danced by the promising Alexandre Hammoudi and the ever-more-capable yet still soulless Paloma Herrera; Jessica Lang’s ridiculous Splendid Isolation III, in which Irina Dvorovenko and Maxim Beloserkovsky were upstaged by yards of cloth; the Act III (“Black Swan”) pas de deux from Lake, in which Michele Wiles, whose career has unfolded as a journey from no drama to melodrama, was partnered by Cory Stearns, who was coping as well as he could; and the Act II duet from John Neumeier’s Lady of the Camellias, in which Julie Kent played an appealingly wan Marguerite to Stearns’s Armand. Perhaps the “small plates” scheme, so popular with diners-out, is no longer the best model for a ballet gala.

Pre-professional students from ABT’s Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis School looked quite accomplished–I’d recommend only greater sharpness of attack–in Raymond Lukens’s Karelia March, set to music by Sibelius. The most gifted, persevering, and luckiest among them will go on to ABT II and then to the parent company. Their path is challenging and its results uncertain. Put this list of their names in the bottom of a desk drawer and look at it five years from now: Kimberly Buesser, Amanda De Oliveira, Ellie Greenhouse, Gabrielle Johnson, Seika Paradeis, Brianna Steinfeldt, Alison Stroming, Cassandra Trenary, Paulina Waski, Fernando Duarte, Beau Fisher, Max Isaacson, Shu Kinouchi, Lucius Kirst, Alex Kramer, Connor Redpath.

© 2011 Tobi Tobias

New York City Ballet / David H. Koch Theater, Lincoln Center, NYC / May 3 – June 12, 2011

The Women in White: Members of the New York City Ballet corps de ballet in George Balanchine’s Symphony in Three Movements

Photo: Paul Kolnik

New York City Ballet opened its spring season with a week and a day of programs devoted solely to the abstract Balanchine ballets that form the core of the master’s repertoire and aesthetic. Balanchine worshippers, often discouraged by the works acquired since the master’s death, flocked to the performances, breathing sighs of gratitude.

The irony of this mini-festival was that Balanchine himself would never have offered such homogeneous programs. An accomplished chef, the choreographer liked to take his metaphors from the culinary art. He’d point out that a satisfying evening of ballets would provide contrasting elements, just as a good dinner furnished varied courses: aperitif, main dish, and dessert.

Even so, I saw all the ballets on offer, some of them twice. I didn’t mind the programming at all. Granted, being a dance critic, I’m in the trade, so to speak. And from the moment I saw Balanchine’s ballets, danced by City Ballet–at my second dance performance ever, early in my teens–I felt that this choreography was my heart’s home.

What made me think that “Balanchine: Black & White,” the May 3-8 mini-festival of the choreographer’s “leotard ballets”–as they’re called because their costuming is only a subtle step away from practice clothes–would bring the productions back to what they once were? Only a viewer’s nostalgia and longing, I assumed–nothing rational.

After all, aficionados have been carping for close to three decades about changes in the original choreography that have crept in–probably from sheer carelessness. The preservation of the ballets as Balanchine left them has often seemed lax, precious rehearsal time being given to one new work after another that’s unworthy of it. As for intentional changes, the general opinion is that Balanchine himself had the right to retool his work and often did (Think of the many versions of Serenade a long-time fan has seen! Think of the ruthless cropping of Apollo!), but that the cut-off for second thoughts should be 1983. I agree almost wholeheartedly.

As for the style in which the Balanchine ballets have been performed for some time, for the most part, they’ve been danced as the rest of the repertoire is now danced: coolly, sleekly, sometimes dazzlingly, but without fervor and without subtext. City Ballet’s dancing is definitely sharper, more physically thrilling than it was in the old days; veteran observers complain that it’s all surface. This, I suspect, is a reflection of today’s culture; if so, there’s nothing much to be done about that. Yes, coaching from dancers who were shaped by Balanchine himself could offer a corrective. I’ve seen Violette Verdy, Suki Schorer, and Merrill Ashley work marvels with their skill. But under Peter Martins’s long reign as Ballet Master in Chief, this practice has not been much encouraged.

Balancing Act: Teresa Reichlen, partnered by Amar Ramasar and Craig Hall in Balanchine’s Agon

Photo: Paul Kolnik

Nevertheless, after a rather lackluster first night–protracted and stormy contract negotiations had been settled only that morning–the “Black & White” project produced a little miracle: Balanchine revivified. The dancers and their ballet masters seemed to have looked closely at the choreography that is their heritage–and their responsibility–and decided it was worth heightened attention and heightened effort. The ballets seem to have been carefully examined and scrupulously rehearsed. Not a single one coasted along on the principle of business as usual. Several of them positively gleamed with the artists’ discovery of the choreography’s richness and wisdom.

The audience noticed. Judging from its fervent applause for choreography of such absolute purity that it is customarily given a polite but tepid response (Monumentum pro Gesualdo, for instance), the public was suddenly charged with enthusiasm. It had discovered that Balanchine’s most subtle, complex, and rigorous ballets were like nothing else on earth. Which is true enough.

The lesson the City Ballet’s administration might do well to take from one of the grandest weeks of dancing that I, for one, have ever witnessed, is that Balanchine’s day isn’t “over” or his work impossible to restore to its original glory. The ballets simply require focused and continuing attention. Providing this is an issue of time and money, which the company needs to budget in proportions somewhat different from the ones that have prevailed for too long. Less, I’d urge, for those gimcrack festivals of new work that yield almost nothing worth keeping; less for choreographers borrowed from Broadway who, after all, fail to entertain; less for choreographers who are “all the rage.” More for Mr. B.

Social Perfection: Maria Kowroski and Charles Askegard, center, in Balanchine’s Monumentum pro Gesualdo

Photo: Paul Kolnik

“Balanchine: Black & White” presented a dozen ballets. They were: Apollo (1928; music: Stravinsky); Concerto Barocco (1941; Bach); The Four Temperaments (1946; Hindemith); Agon (1957; Stravinsky); Square Dance (1957; Corelli and Vivaldi); Episodes (1959; Webern); Monumentum pro Gesualdo (1960; Stravinsky); Movements for Piano and Orchestra (1963: Stravinsky); Duo Concertant (1972; Stravinsky); Stravinsky Violin Concerto (1972); Symphony in Three Movements (1972; Stravinsky); Le Tombeau de Couperin (1975; Ravel).

The works that made the most overwhelming impact on me were Episodes and Symphony in Three Movements. Episodes, whose Webern score fractures the world, coolly and mercilessly anatomizes it, and then, at the very last moment, makes it cohere again, opened the second night of “Balanchine: Black & White” and struck me dumb. I had admired Balanchine’s response to–dare I say extension of?–the music since the ballet’s premiere, for a starkness and strangeness that described the universe as it really was, once you quit resisting the truth.

From the start, it seemed to me one of the most forward-looking ballets I’d ever seen (or would be likely to see). I was fascinated by its spare and seemingly arbitrary movement, by the fact that stillness (in the music and in the motion) was a major player in the proceedings, and by Balanchine’s fearless answer to the question What if you removed all the rules, or, if you will, the conventions of choreography? I was even delighted by the fact that, at the end of a musical segment, the dancers simply stopped, then walked–almost like pedestrians–to the spot where they would take up again when the music resumed.

Last week, still remembering the pleasures provided by the original cast–the pioneers of Episodes, as I think of those dancers–I saw the perfect polished version of the ballet, meticulous in every respect. The time in which it is set still seems to be the future, while the principles guiding the choreography are in no way estranged from classicism.
For almost four decades, Symphony in Three Movements has represented the thrill and terror of exorbitant energy as well as the strangely inverted results that occur when that force is played out. Just now, it could serve as a parable of our time, in which individuals, communities, and whole societies disintegrate, besieged by an overload of information and the simultaneous failure of authentic communication–or, simply, succumbing to the all too human impulse toward conflict and violence.
The ballet’s tribe of formidably svelte, long-legged women in skin-tight white leotards, posed in a diagonal line from one corner of the stage to another is one of the most compelling opening images ballet has to offer. Balanchine gives you just a few seconds to take it in, and then has these women, whose type he has essentially invented, prance into motion with irrepressible energy, ponytails flying and whipping. When that line reforms at the close of the first movement and creates the optical illusion of a current (of a surging river? of electricity?) swirling along its path as, fluidly, one after one, the women turn to shift the direction in which they’re facing-well, you know you’re not in Kansas anymore.

In between those two moments Balanchine shows us the rest of the world: five women in black, perturbers of calm, often in a coiled-to-spring position, abetted by male partners, and three leading women whose leotards (and hair ornaments!) are in three just slightly, and deliberately disconcerting, incompatible shades of red. They are also accompanied by partners and may represent humanity.

In the third movement the full cast is deployed on an invisible grid, sometimes becoming the grid itself, by means of line-ups and arms stiffly outstretched to the side. The dancers might be soldiers or prisoners; either or both, it’s up to you and your own fancy (as is, needless to say, everything in my own “interpretation” of this ballet). The women in white, stationed on the border line between the stage and the wings, move into and out of concealment gesturing with their arms in a code no one can crack. (Whom you can see and when you can see her depends on where you sit. This is not simply a given observation of art you look at, but a useful lesson in life.)

Finally the male contingent moves forward and, laid out as if on graph paper, stretches full length on the floor in push-up position, heads toward the audience, poised for action, like patriots futilely declaring, like so many that went before them, “We’re ready.” Ready for what? Annihilation?

The middle section of the ballet is an eerie duet for one of the three leading ladies and her partner (I saw Janie Taylor and Jared Angle) in the roles originated by Sara Leland and Bart Cook.) You might think that, as is customary in classical-ballet duets, they’ve come together in privacy to explore–or make–love. In the world Balanchine has envisioned with this piece, there’s no such thing as love; it’s been blotted out by circumstances. Their exchange is one of bodies reduced to stylized movement colored by, perhaps, Balinese (that is, “foreign”) dancing, and it ends with the partners significantly leaving the stage in opposite directions, rather than any hint of bonding.

One of the best things about Symphony in Three Movements, I hasten to add, is the tremendous impression it makes even on those who join with Balanchine’s own (at least public) stance against interpretation.

Young God: Chase Finlay in Balanchine’s Apollo

Photo: Paul Kolnik

As for the dancers seen in principal roles in the course of the “Black & White” project, two men in the rising generation stood out particularly. First among them was Chase Finlay, who joined the corps de ballet in 2009. With his thick blond hair and expressive mouth, he can look like a pouting Cupid and is surely a candidate ripe to rival Justin Bieber as a darling of the screaming tweens. Fortunately he has better things to do, given his prodigious technique and his ability to possess the stage with the aplomb of a seasoned star.

Entrusted with the lead in Apollo, Finlay renewed the vitality of this pivotal ballet, Balanchine’s first masterwork. Clearly he was using everything he had been told or read about the role, and his boss, Peter Martins, had been one of its most memorable interpreters. Still, Finlay made it spontaneous and his own. Perhaps he identified with his character: a very young man learning the job of being a Greek god.

At moments in Apollo, Finlay recalled the young Baryshnikov, not merely in looks, but so on top of the challenges in the choreography, he could lend an impish touch to the playful passages with his troika of muses. In Duo Concertant, he was remarkable again, impersonating an ordinary fellow, one your daughter might be dating (assuming they were both into classical music). Here he partnered Megan Fairchild, who, though technically adept, falls all too easily into the trap of cloying sweetness. Finlay’s presence brought fresh air to the ballet (which has an admittedly hokey premise) and to his ballerina.

A Princely Meditation: Anthony Huxley in Balanchine’s Square Dance

Photo: Paul Kolnik

Nowhere near as sophisticated in stage presence as Finlay, Anthony Huxley, a corps member since 2007, is nearly his equal in promise for the future. Dancing the male lead in Square Dance, the opening ballet in the “Black & White” series, he was a wonder–from his compact, beautifully proportioned body to his flawless coordination. He seems to be airborne by nature, not through effort or training. He’s not so much a high-flyer, though, as forever buoyant.

He has dark, close-cropped hair and a somber, innocent face, like that of a thoughtful child. There’s nothing in the least pushy about him, no Mr. Bravura here, just dancing that’s at once a plain, quiet statement and irrefutable proof that classicism still counts. He makes every one of the old steps look newly minted.

In the celebrated male solo that Balanchine made belatedly–to fill the plea of the cast’s women for a breather after the extra-frisky section they called “Chase the Rabbit,” Huxley already vies with the finest of his predecessors, Bart Cook and Peter Boal. From the moment he appears on the otherwise empty stage, he’s surrounded by an air of mystery, aloneness, and singularity. He might be the prince of a lost kingdom. As he proceeds through a chain of small phrases, made more of posture and gesture than the heat and flow of ordinary dancing, he evokes a mood of remembering and longing for a state he once inhabited, but which has disappeared, leaving him only dignity and resignation.

Caught: Maria Kowroski (airborne) in Balanchine’s Monumentum pro Gesualdo (alternating in the role with Teresa Reichlen)

Photo: Paul Kolnik

Among the women, the most evocative performances were given by principals whom I’ve admired for some time now. Teresa Reichlen, the long-legged epitome of poise, was exquisite in Monumentum, her pale face grave, her movement sublimely calm and clear, her hands making filigreed gestures. She made me think of a medieval princess–perhaps the one in the breathtaking, enigmatic Dame à la Licorne tapestries at the Cluny museum in Paris–performing a rite she had embraced as her duty. Even when she was thrown from the arms of one pair of men, left for a nanosecond to float unsupported in space, then caught by a second pair, she maintained an unperturbed arabesque.

She was equally amazing in the Choleric section of The Four Temperaments, a fiery figure who looked dangerous to touch but one that kept the world steady on its axis. Even a small mishap revealed her phenomenal equanimity. In the introduction to the second pas de trois of Agon, she balanced on pointe on one foot, looking directly out at the audience–and somehow failed to connect with her supporting partners’ hands. Slowly and serenely, she tilted sideways, like Pisa’s tower, without a tremor, until she was rescued. A few minutes later she was performing the intricately timed solo to castanets as of she’d never been anything but safe.

Reichlen has so perfected the qualities that constitute her profile, it might be time for City Ballet to try casting her against type–say, in roles that require warmth and voluptuousness. There may be more to her than meets the eye.

Sara Mearns has been whipping through the City Ballet’s repertory at a pace her admirers can barely keep up with. I’d never imagined the company would think of her for Concerto Barocco, but there she was, lending her luscious fluency to just the right degree as a foil for Maria Kowroski, the queen of adagio dancing, who naturally got to do the central duet with the sole man in the ballet.

Mearns’s role in the final section of Episodes was a triumph. After all the ingenious, unsettling dislocations Balanchine created to the stark atonal Webern music used for the bulk of the ballet, here he matched the composer’s tribute to Bach–an arrangement of the Ricercata in Six Voices from A Musical Offering–with choreography that, still spare, restores the idea of harmony. Mearns was a natural for the part.

Two other key women on the roster, Maria Kowroski and Wendy Whelan, were to be praised more for the intelligence with which they conceived their roles than for sheer theatrical impact. Kowroski, luminous early in her career, now fails to engage fully with what she’s doing; many of her effects are beautiful–in Monumentum she was crystal clear and at the same time tender as a rose petal–but still remote. Her performance in Stravinsky Violin Concerto, partnered by Amar Ramasar, earned a second curtain call, I felt, because she had understood the nature of the choreography and how she could dance it most effectively, not because she appeared to be experiencing the moods and events it implied.

Though Whelan still looks as if she’s made of spun steel, her technique has, unavoidably, been ebbing in recent years; her projection of acute sensitivity, increasing. While she’s been unequalled among her peers for her interpretation of roles conceived in the land of regret and pain, her natural range has always been limited. She has worked admirably to extend it, and frequently succeeded to a point, but she still lacks the confident joy and the claim to conventional beauty that are hallmarks of the traditional classical ballerina. But then the New York City Ballet is hardly a traditional classical ballet company.

Thanks to George Balanchine, the company is the chief custodian of a huge percentage of the most remarkable ballets created in the 20th century. As the “Black & White” festival proved by giving such pure and energized productions of the abstract works, Balanchine’s ballets cannot be condescendingly dismissed as monuments of the past, relegated to the history books, thought of as relics for a museum. They remain signposts pointing to the future of the art.

© 2011 Tobi Tobias

New York City Ballet: The Seven Deadly Sins / David H. Koch Theater, Lincoln Center, NYC / March 11, 12, 13 14, & 15, 2011

Working Girls: Patty LuPone, Wendy Whelan, and company men in Lynne Taylor-Corbett’s The Seven Deadly Sins

Photo: Paul Kolnik

New York City Ballet’s spring season gala on May 11 focused on the company’s new production, The Seven Deadly Sins, choreographed by Lynne Taylor-Corbett, credit-wise a practiced hand at dance-theater. It looks pretty much born yesterday, but the Kurt Weill – Bertolt Brecht cabaret-style melding of music, dance, and spectacle has a history both with George Balanchine and the company.

Balanchine produced his first version of the piece in Paris for Les Ballets 1933 in that year. It was far from universally acclaimed, but the choreographer never forgot it. In 1958 he made a revised version for the 21-year-old Allegra Kent, a flexible creature of fantasy who had captured his imagination. Kent danced the lithe Anna 2, a naive idealist. Lotte Lenya, Weill’s wife, famous for a rough-edged voice that resonated tough experience, sang Anna 1, the cynical tyrant. Plot-wise, the two are treated as sisters, but are designed to represent the morally conflicting halves of a single person.

Back home in Louisiana, their righteous, poverty-stricken family–mom, pop, and two brothers, all sung by men–send the young women across America, the land of opportunity, with the mission of earning enough money to buy them a proper house to replace their poor people’s shack on the banks of the Mississippi.

Sweet Love Remembered: Whelan and Craig Hall

Photo: Paul Kolnik

The project takes a Biblical seven years and visits to seven metropolises, during which the white-souled Anna repeatedly fails as a dancer (indeed, an artist of any kind) and is forced to eke out the required funds as a prostitute. Miraculously, she retains her guilelessness, though the degradation finally kills her.

I saw the 1958 production while I was still at school. I remember Kent and Lenya distinctly, no doubt because each was unforgettable in her own way. I don’t recall many specifics about the production, but I can still feel–or is it taste?–its atmosphere: decadent, sordid, sinister, yet unable to penetrate Anna 2’s natural purity.

Taylor-Corbett’s take on the material is a strangely tame revue. It has no atmosphere and no affecting drama. Even the melodrama falls flat. Dire and ironic situations are acted out–say, Anna 2’s submitting to sex with a rich john, while the true love she’s found waits for her in the bed of a look-alike hotel room next door–yet nothing ever really seems to happen to anyone. This is not sound theatrical policy and certainly not good for a production that requires a heavy sardonic tone.

Sisters Under the Skin: LuPone and Whelan

Photo: Paul Kolnik

Patti LuPone, a Broadway-type singer with a dynamo voice, and Wendy Whelan, City Ballet’s senior ballerina, carried out their assignments well, Whelan working in her airy lyrical mode to reflect her character’s unimpeachable innocence. However, neither was magical. Nothing they did was likely to arouse the audience’s empathy. Similarly Beowulf Boritt’s sets and Judanna Lynn’s costumes, attractive on their own terms, failed to evoke the sleazy and mordant tone of the culture they needed to describe.

I could register other complaints, such as the distracting fact that it’s often hard to connect the sin named in the program with the representation it’s given on stage and that Anna 2’s physical modesty is overdone to the point of monotony. Still, none of this would matter if the show had only taken fire instead of remaining dutifully workmanlike. Instead it’s like a coloring book in which the crayon has been forbidden to venture outside the lines.

© 2011 Tobi Tobias

Paris Opera Ballet School / Palais Garnier, Paris / April 7, 9, 11, & 12, 2011

The spectacularly ornate Palais Garnier opera house, home to the Paris Opera Ballet, can be daunting to a visitor, given its grand staircase, paired pillars of marble in exotic colors, elaborate gilded carvings, and profusion of crystal chandeliers. Nevertheless it’s a perfectly suitable showcase for the children, adolescents, and very young adults being trained in the company’s celebrated academy. Their accomplishment is equal to the effusively regal setting while their unaffected manner is an antidote to it.

Linked: Students of the Paris Opera Ballet School in John Taras’s Designs for Six

Photo: David Elofer

While I was spending part of April in Paris, I saw two performances that the students gave at the Opéra, as it’s called: two different casts in Pierre Lacotte’s back-to-the-original version of Coppélia, prefaced by John Taras’s Designs for Six.

Taras, who died in April of 2004, some two weeks short of his 85th birthday, made a substantial contribution to the classical dance world, as dancer, choreographer, and ballet master for key companies on both sides of the Atlantic. As I recall him, from a slight acquaintance during his many years with the New York City Ballet, Taras was a very nice man, a gentleman and–more telling–a gentle man, modest and soft-spoken. That personal quality infuses the ballet for which he’s best known, Designs for Six, the Paris Opera Ballet’s title for the work he created in 1948 for the Metropolitan Ballet as Designs With Strings, and subsequently called Design for Strings. The music, accessible and agreeable, is the second movement of Tchaikovsky’s Trio for piano, violin, and cello in A minor.

It’s a simple, well-made ballet, which takes its inspiration from Balanchine. It lacks the rigor and invention of the master, to be sure; still it is lovely to look at, intelligent, and exquisitely understated. What’s more, it makes a fine vehicle for young dancers on the threshold of their professional careers because it benefits from the fresh, innocent quality of their youth while displaying the technical accomplishment to which they’ve devoted the better part of their childhood and early adolescence.

I had seen the ballet several times over the years in several different places–where and when I can’t recall–but never until I saw it performed by the advanced students of the Paris Opera Ballet School this spring, did I understand what force it could gain from a young crew of talented, impeccably trained dancers. This was immediately apparent from the striking illustration of classical placement in the opening tableau–a statement about exactitude tempered by grace.

That first image has the sextet–four women and two men–posed together in silhouette against a blue-sky cyclorama. Very slowly, as if at the pace of a sunrise, the light increases to illuminate the flesh tones of the dancers’ skin against the jet black of their simple costumes and to filter through the net of the women’s short tutus.

Variations on a Theme: Students of the Paris Opera Ballet School in Designs for Six

Photo: David Elofer

Once the figures begin to dance, they give the overall impression of spooling out an uninterrupted chain of pure beauty. At the same time it’s clear that Taras intends to demonstrate the myriad ways in which six bodies can be deployed. In keeping with his temperament, he’s content to do this unobtrusively, and so avoids the self-congratulation that Jerome Robbins, who excelled at cleverness, put into such a task.

Memorable among the inventive small segments is a women’s duet performed now with crossed arms and linked hands, now with unison dancing alternating with mirror-image movement. There’s also a zippy trio for women, complemented by another pas de trois for the fourth woman and the two men. One passage includes lots of daisy-chaining, though the tactic is admittedly somewhat stymied because it can’t travel much with so few participants. (This is probably the only awkward passage in the piece.) Towards the end of the ballet, the full cast revels in some Spanish-dance flourishes with good humored panache.

The centerpiece of the ballet is a pas de deux of grave beauty that makes its young man and woman look like an emblem of commitment. It’s a subtle reminder that teen-age passions can run very deep and thus deserve to be taken seriously–indeed, honored.

Introduced with this duet is a delicately proposed subtext that gives the ballet its particular charm and its ability to move the audience. The six figures, it suggests, constitute a group of friends firmly bonded by their dedication to an all-consuming enterprise–let’s call it training for the classical ballet stage–that isolates them from the ordinary world. Their entire universe, apart from mastering their art, consists of one another. Then love intrudes and, as it so often does, catastrophically threatens friendship. Once it’s introduced with the pas de deux, this idea tinges the rest of the ballet.

The “veil” is so sheer, however, as to be invisible to some viewers, who see Designs for Six simply as a graceful piece without a theatrical bone in its body. In truth, its good manners so consistently govern the show that when, at the end, the dancers return to the silhouetted tableau in which we first met them, they might be assumed to have had no transformative experience at all. They can be read simply as the willing prisoners of beauty.

Throughout the performances I saw, all the young dancers had an air of striving for something beyond what they had already mastered.

When you watch a bevy of good dancers you’re unfamiliar with, though, there’s almost always one that seizes your eyes, and often your heart as well. For me on this occasion it was a young man named Mathieu Contat, dancing the main duet in one of the performances I saw of Designs for Six and, on my second viewing of the student program, playing Franz in Coppélia. He’s a youth with a body admirably proportioned for eventual danseur noble roles, excellent technique that is still in the process of gaining an adult strength and force, and an irresistible boyish charisma.

In the intermission, a woman of a certain age who exuded Parisian chic, whom I’d asked if she knew the young man’s name, introduced me to Contat, who had appeared in the front of the house in ordinary youth garb (jeans, etc.), offering an offstage version of his onstage charm (self-confident yet respectful of his audience, happy in being where he is and doing what he does). After we chatted briefly, I asked if I could know how old he was. “Seventeen,” he admitted, with some apparent doubt as to whether that was too old or not old enough.

The more ambitious item on the program–in sheer number of dancers and variety of dancing styles–was a looking-backward version of Arthur Saint-Léon’s 1870 Coppélia. At its heart lies its Delibes score, which seems to dictate dancing as it swings from effervescence to romantic sweetness, folk dance, and the practical–sometimes nearly farcical–dramatic needs of the moment. It nearly choreographs itself. Invariably, it inserts itself into the listener’s head and–for good or ill–remains there for days.

Pierre Lacotte, who has made a specialty of reviving 19th-century ballets by going back to the originals as far as is practicable, set his new-old version of the ballet on POB’s students a decade ago and it has usefully remained in the school’s repertory, allowing children and tweens to mingle with the young adults playing the principal roles. It certainly has its delights, despite its occasional unevenness of tone and its failure to hold a candle to the Russo-American Danilova-Balanchine version of 1974, which knows just when (in the third act) to abandon history for the confident originality of genius.

Les Petits Rats: Young students of the Paris Opera Ballet School in Pierre Lacotte’s version of Coppélia

Photo: David Elofer

Lacotte’s production remains unquestionably good for the school, and not merely because it offers an alternative to the parent company’s most recent version of Coppélia–a reportedly hapless and gruesome take on the ballet by Patrice Bart. (Bart’s excuse was making the ballet more like E.T.A. Hoffmann’s The Sandman, a dark-magic tale on which Saint-Léon’s Coppélia was loosely based.)

Lacotte’s Coppélia shows the students the point of significant aspects of their training. Throughout their years of meticulous classical dance instruction, they are also taught acting, mime, and folk dancing–to encourage their imagination and enable them able to give creditable performances in these genres onstage. This history-driven Coppélia also helps the developing dancers realize that the parent company honors its backstory, that the repertory of the past is linked to today’s innovations, and that the dancers of today and tomorrow have an authentic connection to their predecessors.

As a result, when a bevy of dancers surges over the stage in red boots and thick-heeled character shoes, you feel the weight with which the feet strike the floor, the powerful spring in the knees, the feisty carriage of the upper body, and the animal exuberance of bodies responding to lusty rhythms. What you don’t see, mercifully, is ballet dancers so bored by playing a corps of peasants that they do so half-heartedly, without zest or conviction.

The acting and the mime taught in the school results in the creation of distinct, believable personalities onstage. From the moment we first see her, the ballet’s heroine, Swanilda, displays her spirited temperament. In a vivacious mime monologue she has us understand that while she’s truly in love with her boyfriend, Franz, she can’t understand–and doesn’t intend to put up with–the young fellow’s attraction to that pretty girl sitting so placidly in her strange neighbor’s window.

Put to the Test: Paris Opera Ballet students Marie Varlet and Germain Louvet as Swanilda and Franz in Coppélia

Photo: David Elofer

Swanilda’s straying beau is something of a dolt, though one with considerable appeal if very few brains. During the stalk of wheat test–if you can hear the seeds rustle, your lover is true–with their whole rural community watching, he hasn’t the sense even to pretend he hears the happy message.

No matter, Swanilda is clever enough for both of them and feisty enough to let nothing stand in the way of her getting what she wants. She may be a girl who’s reduced to tears by her sweetheart’s skewering, then trampling on the butterfly she was blithely chasing, but she’s willing to trick him when his foolish heart strays to the dolly in the window. What’s more–much more–she’s ruthlessly cruel to the doll’s creator, Dr. Coppélius, pretending she is his cherished automaton come to life and then disabusing him of his dream.

I saw Marie Varlet and Alizée Sicre as Swanilda; the latter is the more febrile and ambitious, perhaps for stardom. Both Germain Louvet and Mathieu Contat played Franz, combining an appropriately youthful lack of sophistication with technical élan.

Idée Fixe: Paris Opera Ballet student Natan Bouzy as Dr. Coppélius in Coppélia

Photo: David Elofer

Most notable of all is the student rendering of Dr. Coppélius, because those trusted with the role are evidently allowed considerable leeway in honing their own interpretations. Natan Bouzy gave the role a sound traditional interpretation, playing Coppélius as a gimpy old man obsessed by an idea any normal villager–and indeed anyone in the audience–would dismiss as nutty. His signature image is the greedy hands with which he tries to seize Franz’s life spirit to implant it in Coppélia.

Julien Guillemard offered an unusually creative interpretation. His Coppélius was not even old, but simply an outsider intent upon his improbable vision. Despite the community’s scorning him as a reclusive, half mad fellow, he seemed truly to believe that, through the arcane instructions in his gigantic book of spells, he could bring his beautiful automaton to life, give her not merely the human breath that would transform her motion from staccato to lyric but also a heart that could awaken to love.

Guillemard’s portrayal has not yet accumulated the fascinating detail that distinguished the two most original and effective men I’ve seen in the role–Niels Bjørn Larsen of the Royal Danish Ballet and Shaun O’Brien of the New York City Ballet. But they had been evolving their characterizations for decades–to the point of being able to improvise on any part of them in performance. Meanwhile Guillemard was utterly convinced of, and convincing in, the persona he has worked out so far.

All’s Well That Ends Well: Swanilda (Marie Varlet) and Franz (Germain Louvet) get married

Photo: David Elofer

There was so much to like in this program and it made such an optimistic prediction for the future that, after seeing it, the only thing I wanted was to see it again. And I did.

POSTSCRIPT:
People agreeing with the conventional assessment of the relative value of pictures and words may want to watch a six-minute excerpt on YouTube from the current three-act production of Coppélia that is pretty much what I saw, except for the mature Lacotte’s appropriating the role of Dr. Coppélius for himself. The Swanilda is Charline Giezeendanner; Franz is Mathieu Ganio. To view it, click here.

YouTube also harbors a two-act version of Coppélia performed by the POB students in 2001 and credited to Claude Bessy, then the director of the school, and Pierre Lacotte, after the version of Albert Aveline. A shade over one hour long, it shows a bit of the Palais Garnier, outside and in, some sweet backstage footage, and the full performance. To see it, click here.

© 2011 Tobi Tobias

Hello!
I’ll be in Paris for the first half of April–seeing things. Posting will resume later in the month. Meanwhile, your Comments on my recent reviews and any of the Personal Indulgences essays–listed on the first page of Seeing Things–are very welcome.
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Mark Morris Dance Group / James and Martha Duffy Performance Space, Mark Morris Dance Center, Brooklyn, NY / March 17-27, 2011


There Is Nothing Like a Dame: Amber Star Merkens (c.) and women of the Mark Morris Dance Group in Morris’s Petrichor
Photo: Brian Snyder

Where does Mark Morris make his artistic home in New York? At the David H. Koch Theater? It has showcased L’Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato, often cited as his masterpiece, no fewer than four times and housed the premiere and a return run of his Mozart Dances. At the Brooklyn Academy of Music? It has been inviting him back since 1984, before his name became a household word. Actually, his key home may lie in the building cater-corner to BAM, the Mark Morris Dance Center, which he built for his work and his company’s, and for significant auxiliary activities, one being a school that offers classes in myriad kinds of dance (an echo of his own training) to both children and adults.

A key element of the Center is the James and Martha Duffy Performance Space, a large studio that, when filled with sleek utilitarian chairs on risers, becomes a theater. It’s a perfect venue for dances that are best seen close-to, in an intimate space. It’s here that the Mark Morris Dance Group just presented a program of three dances new to New York: Festival Dance (in its world premiere), Petrichor, and The Muir.

By audience acclamation, Festival Dance was the program’s huge hit. A few of my colleagues pointed out that, while exhilarating to them as well as to the general audience, the piece was not in a class with Morris masterworks like L’Allegro and Dido and Aeneas. I agree with them, and have engaged in that bell-curve style of criticism often enough. But this dance, so deftly made and so thrilling–joy personified–made me reconsider. On occasion it might be better to avoid diminishing wonderful dances by rating them against the ones, sometimes by the selfsame dance maker, that will make it into the history books.

Despite the tumult and despair currently plaguing the world, Festival Dance insists that delight and exuberance still exist. It’s set to Johann Nepomuk Hummel’s Piano Trio No. 5 in E Major; the other two instruments are cello and violin. (Between the ages of eight and ten, Hummel took his piano lessons from Mozart, free of charge, room and board included.)

Love Me Forever: Rita Donahue and Aaron Loux in Morris’s Festival Dance
Photo: Richard Termine

The dance is populated by a dozen people chosen from Morris’s crew, both veterans and newbies. We meet them as couples, beginning with the honeyed Rita Donohue and Aaron Loux. These two, who are apparently very much in love (he especially) are capable of playing in a childlike way, always on the verge of laughter. Their relationship remains light; they might be teenagers.

As more dancers join in and several other couples come to the fore, Michelle Yard and Domingo Estrada reveal a love that’s deeper, richer, more serious. It is both grave and sensuous. This coupling suggests that both artists, striking on their own, have found a partner who makes their individual qualities more resonant.

Next the dance demonstrates how two lines of five–one all-male, one all-female to begin with–can interweave, reshuffle, and regroup in unexpected ways. This sounds like a dry cerebral exercise that might be thought up by an idiot savant. Thanks to Morris’s uncanny skill in fusing form with feeling, it’s anything but. The configurations say something, several things, and one of them is that where you are in the matrix of life can change–by accident or fate–at any minute.

Crossing Paths: Maile Okamura and Spencer Ramirez in Festival Dance
Photo: Richard Termine

Finally the dance grows more and more wild. Like Balanchine, Morris revels in exorbitant energy, kept under control–just–by the shapes he gives it. The piece closes with the youthful embrace that served as its opening statement. Why? That’s left to the spectator to ruminate on.
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, “petrichor” is “a pleasant, distinctive smell frequently accompanying the first rain after a long period of warm, dry weather in certain regions.” To me the word would make a fine name (and recipe) for a perfume. (MMDG’s marketing department might work wonders with this.)

“Where All the Women Are Strong”: The women of the Mark Morris Dance Group in Petrichor
Photo: Brian Snyder

Calling a new work Petrichor simply because the word appealed to his fancy, Morris created a deliquescent dance for the eight seasoned women in his troupe. The choreography is beautifully in thrall to his chosen music–Heitor Villa-Lobos’s String Quartet No. 2, Op. 56. The score reflects the qualities of Debussy and Ravel, and Morris accordingly sends his octet of nymphs rushing and interweaving through their secret haunt, which is actually empty space.

Needless to say, this choreographer’s nymphs-in Elizabeth Kurtzman’s red, pink, tangerine, or gray tunics overlaying pearly bike shorts–are quite contemporary. When the women move with allegro fervor, their brief loose tunics whip crosswise or fly up and the skin-tight, gleaming shorts emphasize the power of their buttocks. When the nymphs are becalmed, one can study the marvelous workings of their bare legs and feet. Overall, though, the most memorable impression the piece gives is one of fluidity–of a lake, let’s say, rippled by wind.

Certain specific moves and gestures in the piece reinforce its connection to mythic times. The repeated thrumming of the feet on the floor suggests primal ritual, and the recurrent cupping of the hands against an ear remind us of Romantic ballet’s references to idylls of the past in its supernatural sylphs and wilis.

Petrichor is remarkable for the enormous variety Morris can derive from conventional choreographic tropes: the line-up or circle–and their breaking down into smaller groups that repeat the pattern; dancing in unison; dancing in canon; crisscrossing and meshing lines; movement traveling down a line; lines that peel off; pairs working as mirror images. Morris makes these familiar ploys interesting all over again–and inventively complex, without ever blurring.

Toward the end of the piece, the women make birds’ wings out of their arms as they run, as if to warn us that they–like dance itself–will disappear. Then the whole group keeps retreating from view and returning, retreating and returning, until you wonder if you’re seeing them at all or, perhaps, dreaming them.

Belle of the Block: Laurel Lynch (r.) with suitors Dallas McMurray (c.) and Noah Vinson (l.) in Morris’s The Muir
Photo: Richard Termine

While The Muir was the weakest item on the program, it could be the prize example of a lesser choreographer’s work. The sheer intelligence of its stagecraft makes it worthwhile. And its score, Beethoven’s setting of Scottish and Irish songs–romantic (in several modes), nostalgically linked with nature, high-spirited, or plaintive–does more than half the work of expressing Morris’s dual motif of love and death. The title of the dance refers to the Highlanders–sons and fathers, lovers and those beloved–who were slaughtered at Drumossie Muir, making a last stand against the English in the 1746 Battle of Culloden. Robbed of their lives, they left their womenfolk to mourn.

Although the structure of the piece is episodic, The Muir adds up to a firm personal conviction that Morris often states in his choreography: Life is richest and most meaningful when people bond in small colonies–call them clans, if you will. The dance also shows–once again, to be sure–Morris’s understanding of love as a tremendously variegated experience. The lyrics of the songs, well articulated by Irene Snyder, John Matthew Myers, and Jorell Williams, speak of desire, flirtation, and rivalry; of passion fulfilled, passion rejected, and passion spent; and of course, of love conquered by death.

As he often does, Morris incorporates a number of mimed gestures that are repeated at intervals. One has the dancer emphatically touching his heart and then the center of his back. Its meaning is unusually opaque. I translated it bluntly as “The moment you love, you’re sure to be stabbed in the back.”

Although the six dancers of the piece gave it their all, when I set sail for my desert island, there’s just one vignette from The Muir that I’m taking with me. It’s choreographed to the song about the irresistible Sally; you know the refrain: “She is the darling of my heart and she lives in our alley.”

Laurel Lynch, who hit her artistic stride, blazingly, this season, makes an unforgettable Sally. Dressed in a Romantic-era tutu tinted rosy red, she runs through imaginary narrow backstreet passages, casting glances of teasing gaiety behind her, but far too busy to stop. You adore her on the instant–for her vitality, her wit, and, not least, because she seems to leave a perfume in her wake. One local admirer, played as a sweet, devoted, but unprepossessing fellow by Dallas McMurray, is also enraptured. The poor lad sees his small claim to this vision’s attention dwindle even further when he discovers he has a rival, who may even have gotten there first.

According to Morris’s usual policy, the music for the entire program was played live by a fine chamber group of instrumentalists and singers tucked into in a corner inches from the stage. On one of the two nights I saw the show, I could read the score over the shoulder of one of the violinists. From that position I could also see into the wings and admire the dancers’ composure when they were officially out of sight and the alertness that suffused them as they were about to step onto the stage. I’ve seen many kinds of dancing in all sorts of venues. This experience felt strangely like being at home.

© 2011 Tobi Tobias