Tobi Tobias

Trisha Brown Dance Company / Baryshnikov Arts Center, NYC / April 7 -11, 2010

Trisha Brown, celebrating the 40th anniversary of her company at the Baryshnikov Arts Center, is a certified original and quite likely a genius. More often than not, her choreography has been conceptual –from the early iconoclastic task dances executed in silence to lush operatic productions. This trait makes her very popular with European audiences, who dote on ideas, and with American viewers of an intellectual bent. Not that her work has ever seemed arid or calculating; as much as it’s governed by structure, it is tempered by Brown’s wry wit.

As her career evolved, Brown enriched her dances through collaborations with visual artists (notably Robert Rauschenberg) for stunning costumes and environments and through music that ranged from jazz to the classics. Not least, she has always been uncannily alert to the sensuousness of flesh in motion.

She was a gorgeous dancer herself, one who gave new depth of meaning to the word fluidity. She executed the deceptively casual movement she designed as if her body were a silk scarf being drawn through a keyhole. Yet, paused even for a nano-second, she had a firm rooted look and a sense of center so profound, it could never go awry. What’s more, she convinced you that what she was doing was practical, logical–quite simple, really. Even at their best, her marvelous dancers couldn’t outdo her, though they worked sensitively and diligently in her mode, the veterans duly passing the word along to the rising generation.

Brown’s face was remarkable too: as craggy as that of an early New England settler steadfastly enduring the physical and emotional hardships inherent in claiming a new world or perhaps that of a pioneer, dauntlessly pushing the American horizon westward. (Actually, Brown was a native of the Pacific Northwest, which has produced a remarkable number of dance innovators, among them Merce Cunningham, Robert Joffrey, Mark Morris.)

Perhaps the most extraordinary aspect of Brown’s body, however, was her back, which she bared and turned to the audience in the 1994 If you couldn’t see me. (Throughout this10-minute solo, the dancer faces upstage.) The spine and its attendant muscles riveted our attention. The title of the piece is evidence of Brown’s ever-amused and amusing irony. Actually, she couldn’t see us. We could see “her” as we gazed at that eloquent back; we just couldn’t see her face. This dance was (and remains), subtly, as radical a challenge to the accepted conventions of dancing as Brown’s blatantly idiosyncratic early work that had her company signaling on rooftops or walking on walls.

Brown is 73 now and no longer performs If you couldn’t see me–or indeed any of her dances–for the public. The loss is immense, though inevitable. At BAC, the solo was done at alternating performances by Leah Morrison and Dai Jian. I saw both.

Morrison, a lovely looking young woman, recalls Brown in her long limbs, cushioned joints, and velvety way of insinuating her movement into space, though she lacks Brown’s complementary staunch quality. Wearing the simple white costume Rauschenberg designed for Brown–the leotard-style top deeply scooped to leave the back naked, the calf-length skirt slit at both sides to free the legs–Morrison makes aspects of the choreography scrupulously clear: the occasional angular moves of the arms, for instance, that offset the impression of unfettered flow. Throughout the piece, her plainspoken rendition, free of attitude and adornment, is a blessing. But, when it comes to the essential, her back isn’t compelling.

The ability to project through the back while deprived of the drama of the face is a rare gift. Apparently Morrison wasn’t born with it; I don’t know if it can be learned. The other element that Morrison lacks can be acquired. Brown was in her late fifties when she choreographed If you couldn’t see me; her back had the topography of a seasoned athlete’s–vertebrae, muscles, and tendons distinct to the naked eye. That gnarled-tree effect, suggesting the wisdom of visceral experience, was an enthralling sight.

It’s only fair to note here that Morrison won a 2008 Bessie award for her performance of this role, so my reservations about her rendition may make me a dissenting party of one.

Jian is new to the role and still has a long way to go. He’s an undeniably adept dancer and a typical Brown acolyte in his softness and fluency. His dancing adds a fascinating element to the choreography because, since he was born and trained in China, Asian dance influences his way of moving–just slightly, like the merest trace of a “foreign” accent. At one fleeting moment he looked like a statue of an Eastern god, poised in the shelter of his temple.

Like Morrison’s, Jian’s back is relatively inexpressive, but in his case the radical concept of a dancer’s offering the audience the back rather than the face is undermined by the fact that, though Jian wears the split skirt, his entire torso is left nude. Think of it this way: In traditional Japanese costume, the erotic effect of exposing the nape of a woman’s neck depends on the elaborate swathing of the rest of the body. To bare shoulder or bosom as well would kill the original intention.
The 1994 If you couldn’t see me was the first solo dance Brown had made in 15 years. In 1995, she converted it into a duet called You can see us, which she performed first with Bill T. Jones, then, a year later, with the ballet superstar Mikhail Baryshnikov, as a pièce d’occasion. I saw the latter casting. The two moved side by side, she facing upstage, as was her wont, he down, as was his. Unlike the original solo, which engenders piercing observations and haunting questions in its viewers, the duet was no more than a curiosity.

Created in 1980, Opal Loop/Cloud Installation #72505 remains one of the most beautiful dances I’ve ever seen. The BAC audience seemed to be seduced by it too.

A black curtain veiling the farthermost area of the stage pulls apart to reveal the quartet that comprises the full cast. The four stand quietly, in profile, enveloped in a fog. Released by the opening of the curtain, the mist pours out to fill the entire stage and drift tentatively towards the spectators. In the course of fifteen minutes, as the mist swirls, assuming ever-changing shapes and degrees of density, the performers, too, move out into the space, becoming clearly visible, nearly invisible, and all the shadings in between.

The moving figures do what Trisha Brown’s people usually do, which sometimes looks like dancing, at other moments like skeins of the pedestrian gestures made by ordinary people getting on with their lives while absorbed in some sort of inner mediation. The danciest passage puts a male-female pair at the center of an imaginary diagonal line, partnering and not quite partnering, while the remaining man and the remaining woman position themselves at either end of that unseen line, each going through the movements the duet has assigned to his or her gender.
The mist, which moves gently, like a colony of scudding clouds changing shape in a gentle breeze, has been created by Fujiko Nakaya and is, rightly, referred to as sculpture. The crucial quality of this art, though–which, the house program instructs us, is intended to evoke the climate of Brown’s Pacific Northwest birthplace–is that it’s evanescent. Even more so than dancing, but in the same way. Its poignant beauty is intensified by the fact that it doesn’t last.

Opal Loop has no sound accompaniment beyond the hiss of the water being transmuted into clouds, the dancers’ padded footfalls, and, occasionally, their breathing because, for all the languorous mood it evokes–the feeling of swaying in a hammock, perhaps, as a summer day fades from sunset to twilight–the movement can be swift and demanding.

Opal Loop leaves its viewers with many potent afterimages–and afterthoughts as well. It encourages you to treasure the ordinary and shows you how the casual becomes important, even monumental.

© 2010 Tobi Tobias

Come Fly Away / Marquis Theatre, NYC / New York premiere March 25, 2010

Given Twyla Tharp’s incisive intelligence and no-holds-barred manner, you’d never expect her to fall for the sentimental, beguiling songs of Frank Sinatra, but she has, over and over again. Come Fly Away, which opened at the Marquis Theatre March 25 after three weeks of previews, is the latest result. Considering Tharp’s investment in the show–the talent, the time, the cultivation of backers (the cost of such entertainments is astronomical), the grueling effort to get it to Broadway–I wanted it to be wonderful. It isn’t.

For one thing, it’s hard to know what the show’s “about.” Its website, which seems to be pitching the production as a kind of Valentine’s Day stimulus, reveals only that “Fifteen of the world’s best dancers tell the story of four couples falling in and out of love at a swinging nightclub on a star-lit evening.” Journalists covering the musical’s premiere in Atlanta last fall (when it was called Come Fly With Me) or writing previews for its New York opening did a lot of explaining about each figure in the eightsome and the vagaries of their love lives as Tharp describes these things in interviews. From this evidence, you’d assume the show has solid characters and a clear plot. But if you just walk into the Marquis and simply watch what’s going on onstage, you’ll be hard put to figure out what’s going on narrative-wise, let alone who’s who.

Of course, you know where you are, from James Youmans’s gaudy set, which suggests an Art Deco drinks-and-dancing nightspot–on steroids. Spacious enough for dancing on an intimate scale, it also provides an upstage platform for a 19-piece band (conducted by Russ Kassoff), a well-stocked bar to the right, a sprinkling of small tables and chairs, and a backdrop that assures us the night is full of stars. Katherine Roth’s costumes are simple and timeless, all swirl and sheen. This elegance is punctuated, when the going gets hot, with vulgarity that is, alas, overdone and, worse still, unimaginative.

About that band: While it’s live, it accompanies the actual Sinatra’s caressing voice, scooped out of the crooner’s recordings. (The digitized Sinatra is relieved from time to time by the live and lovely vocalist Hilary Gardner.) But maybe we shouldn’t be so picky concerning this curious arrangement. After all, Sinatra’s family and estate have given their blessing to the entire project.

The oddity of Come Fly‘s means of capturing Sinatra turns out to be the least of the show’s difficulties. The brazen gaudiness of the whole affair is another, but that’s show biz. The central flaw is that the audience is left to intuit a story or stories from hints in a continuum of some of the busiest dancing it has ever seen. If the show does have a plot (or even a point beyond the observation that love’s tough), it’s not all that clear.

We meet each of the four main couples in their relationships of the moment, but they soon split–through temperamental differences, quarrels, misunderstandings, or the cruel desire to try out an alternative lover. As if someone had yelled, “Change partners and dance!” the eight “characters,” most of whom are given no more depth than paper dolls, are shuffled like a deck of cards. About half of them seem to get together again as the show moves toward its finale, but by that time–exhausted by the volatile coupling, the incursions of a feisty ensemble, and the merciless visual cacophony–I, for one, had lost track.

Back in the Sixties, when Tharp began choreographing, she worked in the world of concert dance–eschewing even theaters at the start; one terrific piece was performed in Central Park, in a field of grass. Abstract or semi-abstract choreography were the prevailing modes. Tharp didn’t need to worry about narrative chops. And hers have since proved to be conspicuously weaker than her dazzling invention in the realm of movement.

Tharp being Tharp, though, once she fixed on the Great White Way as her goal, was bent on effecting radical changes in the Broadway musical’s conventions, dispensing with spoken narrative and allowing dance and song to be the sole conveyors of events and emotions. Her 2002 Movin’ Out, set to Billy Joel’s music–a tremendous hit, running for three years and garnering a Tony award–was created along these lines. Next up, in 2006, was The Times They Are A-Changin’, to Bob Dylan songs. It was a colossal flop.

Now we have Come Fly Away, the fourth of Tharp’s rendezvous with Sinatra. Its predecessors?

Once More Frank (1976), a duet created for an American Ballet Theatre gala, in which Tharp juxtaposed her own maverick style–a delicious mix of ballet, jazz, modern, boxing, pedestrian moves, et al.–with Mikhail Baryshnikov’s pure classicism.

Nine Sinatra Songs (1982), created for the company Tharp maintained at the time, remains her best effort in tandem with Ol’ Blue Eyes. It’s simply a string of duets for different pairs rendered in suite form. The nature of each of the relationships portrayed–sublime, troubled, violent, romantic, ebullient, sweetly bumbling–is crystal clear and entirely satisfying, not least because it leaves the impression of real people, real situations, and real feelings. Generalized and idealized as it is, the viewer comes away from it thinking, Yes, that’s what love is like.

Some of the material in this piece resurfaces in Come Fly Away, rethought and reworked. True, it fits our era that the apache dance, which originally (and traditionally) gave us woman-as-victim, now shows us a woman who gives as good as she gets. Overall though, the older versions, more modestly presented, were quite possibly perfect.

Sinatra Suite (1984), made for ABT, is a condensed and modified spin-off of Nine Sinatra Songs, now showing a single couple in various phases of a romantic relationship. Although it’s an attractive (and easily portable) piece, in the end less is less.

The element of Come Fly Away that can hardly fail to delight most spectators is its superb dancing. John Selya, a Tharp veteran (as are several in the cast), lends the show a texture it otherwise lacks in a ruminative solo set to “The September of My Years.” Other standouts are the sensuous Holley Farmer, on the rebound from the Merce Cunningham Dance Company; Matthew Stockwell Dibble, the personification of classical ballet’s sublime harmony, who is also eloquent (and funny!) as a guy who’s totally stoned; and Karine Plantadit, from Ailey and The Lion King, who seizes the stage by overdoing everything a lascivious tigress is meant to do.

Just about every dancer in this show–ensemble members as well as featured players–is a marvel of technical brilliance, charged energy, charismatic projection, and wildcat daring. After a while, you wish they’d tone it down a bit. More and more, as her career progresses, Tharp tends to favor an unremitting pull-out-all-stops mode. Granted, she works wonders with it but, operating in this way, she neglects the very element that make tempestuous passages effective: movement that’s calm, quiet, contemplative. Call it adagio–allegro’s best friend.

© 2010 Tobi Tobias

Limón Dance Company / Baryshnikov Arts Center, NYC / February 9 -10, 2010

Sokolow Theatre/Dance Ensemble: Anna Sokolow Birthday Tribute / 92nd Street Y, NYC / February 14, 2010

Limón Dance Company / 92nd Street Y, NYC / March 5-7, 2010

Can dance history exist without dancing? How can we make the choreography we treasure survive? Much of the history of the art exists in words written about dancing. Even at its most evocative or detailed, such evidence preserves dance at several removes. With passing time, the ways of recollecting what is, ironically, the wordless art, expanded beyond text, drawings, and notation to still photography, and then to recorded motion via film and video. Yet none of these methods, invaluable though they are, comes anywhere close to recreating live performance, with its visceral thrill.

                      

Recently, showings by the Limón Dance Company and the Sokolow Theatre/Dance Ensemble demonstrated the efforts being made to keep dances by José Limón and Anna Sokolow in the working repertory, although seven decades have passed since the earliest of these pieces was created. The job would be uphill work at any time, because the ticket-buying public has the final word about which dances live or die and the general viewer has scant interest in past glories. Just now the task is even tougher, today’s dismal economy being ruthlessly unkind to the arts.

Limón and Sokolow had much in common. Close in age, both were prominent in the generation of choreographers that followed the era of the radical innovators–Martha Graham and Doris Humphrey at their fore–who essentially defined American modern dance as a distinct, dynamic genre. Sokolow was a member of Graham’s early company; Limón was Humphrey’s protégé. Limón was Mexican-born, and the vivid culture of his birthplace infiltrates many of his works as a melodramatic, even surrealistic element; Sokolow was fascinated by Mexico and spent a significant amount of time there, touring and teaching. Both were dead serious and both explored the human psyche, often its dark side. (I’ve been told that Sokolow’s preoccupation with gloom earned her the sardonic nickname of “Little Mary Sunshine.”) Both choreographers were very much of their time; the work of both, I believe, deserves a life beyond it.

The Limón company, led by Carla Maxwell, a former star dancer with the group, is in the stronger position by far, boasting an unbroken existence since Limón’s death. With the choreographer’s works augmented by others carefully chosen or commissioned to be compatible with Limón’s humanistic values, it can still present itself as an established group offering pleasure and food for thought to the general public. Still, it has gone through precarious periods, and may indeed be in one now, with only short, intermittent engagements in New York.

Appearing at the Baryshnikov Arts Center (BAC) February 9 and 10, the Limón troupe offered two dances that have long been considered masterpieces. Limón’s 1956 There Is a Time, is set to Norman Dello Joio’s Meditations on Ecclesiastes, commissioned for the dance and winner of a Pulitzer Prize. The full cast represents a community that, hands linked, keeps re-forming in a moving circle, a thematic statement that frames and formalizes solos, duets, and small groups. These vignettes illustrate the consoling Biblical passage that acknowledges the vastness of human experience (birth and death; planting and harvesting; love and war) and counsels “To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven.”

Superbly danced–as it was only sporadically here–it’s a lovely piece, if just a season or two too long, as are many of Limón’s efforts. “Cut it in half and fix the rest,” Humphrey often told emerging choreographers, but Limón chronically failed to follow this sound, if severe, advice.

At this showing, I particularly liked Logan Kruger’s appearances as a woman who is comfort itself and Kathryn Alter in the dark roles. The male soloists were fully adequate to their assignments but none of them made me feel I’d remember them forever–as I do Nina Watt in “A time to laugh . . . a time to dance.” Watt was so utterly the image of a wildly giggling child, the epitome of buoyant, irrepressible delight, that the role might as well have been retired when she retired. Overall, the current Limón dancers are undeniably experts in softness, sensitivity, fluency, and accuracy of detail. What they need most just now is a walloping dose of impetuousness; they are too pleasant and too neat.

The other item on the BAC program was Anna Sokolow’s Rooms, generally considered her masterpiece (to the neglect, perhaps, of the rest of her repertoire). Rooms is a superb work, as pertinent on the subject of urban loneliness and isolation as it was at its making in 1955. Simply by assigning each dancer a stark wooden chair as his or her home base, the choreographer leads us to imagine a low-end rooming house in which individuals with drastically limited human intercourse drown in their despair or dream heart-breakingly impossible dreams.

All the segments of the piece were thoughtfully danced, but Kristen Foote and Daniel Fetecua Soto emerged as its stars. “Escape” gave us Foote, soft, powerful, and sexy as hell in an orangey-pink dress, revving up for a romantic encounter. After a mimed toilette in which she luxuriated in her own beauty, she leaned from her chair to caress an invisible beau in an empty chair she’d placed opposite hers. As convincing as her anticipation of sensual pleasure–and, simply, connection–were the moments when her confidence evaporated, perhaps as she remembered bitter, even humiliating, past experiences. Then grief broke through–until she forced herself, once again, to imagine that this time . . .

In “Panic,” Fetecua Soto, tense and bare-chested, sat in his chair like a criminal awaiting execution. Four other seated figures surrounded him yet ignored his very existence. They stared ahead as if frozen, then, one by one, abandoned the scene. Fetecua Soto’s character grew more and more twitchy, shielded his face with his palms as he whipped his head back and forth, and finally, seemingly pushed over the edge of sanity by his plight, abandoned himself to nothingness.

The haunting jazz score, created for Rooms by Kenyon Hopkins, was played live by the Manhattan School of Music Jazz Ensemble, conducted by Justin DiCioccio. As is always the case when live music serves as choreography’s partner, it made all the difference.

Early in March the Limón company played the 92nd Street Y–a haven for major and minor moderns back in the day–with a program of works by Limón and dance makers who were his contemporaries: Sokolow, Daniel Nagrin, and Donald McKayle. The dancing was much feistier than in the earlier performance, I’m glad to report. Unfortunately though, the format of offering fragments to represent work by the fellow toilers in the field felt “educational” rather than theatrical. The highlight of the program was Limón’s 1947 La Malinche, reconstructed and directed by Sarah Stackhouse, a former Limón star.

The shape and nature of La Malinche is startlingly close to Graham’s 1940 El Penitente, with a troupe of three that arrives to present a primitive morality play in a village square, then, having imbued the roles with personal passion, moves on, presumably to give the same performance in the next town. The faux-naif dance style is also very close to the one Graham used for her piece. Did Limón borrow too freely? Or, perhaps, did Graham? There’s evidence that Limón had begun developing the dance that became La Malinche as early as the mid-1930s, and that his 1939 Danzas Mexicanas was a concrete result of the way his imagination had been working. In either case, it’s useful to think of Graham’s frequent comment: “I only steal from the best.”

The story told in Limón’s piece, which is set to a serviceable score by Norman Lloyd, is one that the choreographer remembered seeing enacted in his childhood: A Mexican-Indian woman (La Malinche) is lured into abetting the European conqueror of her land (El Conquistador–that is, Cortez), who reduces the local inhabitants to slavery. Having betrayed her people–represented by a native man who is her rightful partner (El Indio)–she repents after her death, returning as a ghostly presence to support him in the revolution against oppression.

The plot may sound corny today, but the astute simplicity of the choreography makes it convincing. The dancing, by Alter, Fetecua Soto (as the good guy), and Dante Puleio (the bad guy) hit all the right notes of dictatorial complacency, succoring womanhood, and rebellious fervor without fuss or exaggeration.

Meanwhile, the Sokolow troupe gave a single performance on February 14 at the 92nd Street Y to honor the 100th anniversary of the choreographer’s birth. The group represents a heroic effort by Jim May, once a dancer with Sokolow, to show us her greatest gift: the ability to fuse the rules governing a “well-made” dance (clarity, classically balanced structure, and so on) with invention and emotional authenticity.

The program comprised numerous small works and excerpts from larger ones. It included two latter-day versions of the 1945 female solo Kaddish (set to Ravel), which refers to the Holocaust by evoking the Jewish prayer for the dead; Ballade (Scriabin), a fresh-as-springtime quartet that represented Sokolow in her lyrical vein; and excerpts of earthier pieces such as Kurt Weill; Frida (an evocation of Frida Kahlo, the doom-eager and doom-plagued Mexican painter); and Murals, recently resurrected by May.

The problem with finding a sizable, steady audience today for work like Sokolow’s lies in the pieces’ seeming too small in scale and impact. (The histrionic behavior of Limón’s outsize heroes, as they contend with the vagaries of fate or their own flaws, has a distinctly popular appeal.) Sokolow’s work is quieter and more subtle. It’s best seen in an intimate space, where the close-up view reveals the fine-tuned detail of both motion and emotion. For today’s public, given what it has been schooled to appreciate, Sokolow’s dances are not large and “loud” enough.

It’s unfortunate, too, that the dancers May can commandeer just don’t look fully professional, lacking the confidence and projection typical of seasoned performers. At best, a couple of the men seem promising. Most of the women lack the highly toned bodies of dancers who perform regularly. Yes, the group has clearly responded to May’s coaching and can be admired for its sincerity of purpose. But May’s quest is in a race with time, the great obliterator.

Photo credits: Limón: unidentified; Sokolow: Lionel Fredman; There Is a Time: David Levy; Rooms: Meems; La Malinche: Julie Lemberger

© 2010 Tobi Tobias

Paul Taylor Dance Company / City Center, NYC / February 24 – March 14, 2010

Paul Taylor’s Also Playing–one of the pair of new dances featured in his company’s February 24 – March 14 season at City Center–is “dedicated to all Vaudevillians, especially those who went on no matter what.” The man knows what he’s talking about. In 1974, Taylor, himself a unique and fabulous dancer, collapsed on stage from chronic illness and exhaustion, ending his performing career. A year later, however, he created Esplanade, a work of sheer perfection that has become his signature piece. This through-dark-to-light scenario, with its insistence on persevering no matter what, is an emblem of Taylor’s artistic career and the story of his company as well. Despite the grueling work demanded of them and the chronic specter of inadequate funding, both choreographer and company have managed to survive–and triumph.

Also Playing is a mixture of Taylor’s love for old time entertainment and gentle fun at its expense. It’s set to a medley of excerpts from Donizettii’s Dom Sébastien and L’assedio di Calais. (You know these ebullient, catchy tunes, believe me.) Santo Loquasto has created a ornate black-and-white proscenium for the occasion and Jennifer Tipton has lighted its “curtain” in scarlet, a witty economy. Said curtain rises on the first of 15 short “acts,” each of which is a take on the generic fodder for yesteryear’s vaudeville revues.

The opener is a girlish quintet, all tutued up, who have apparently reached the advanced-beginner stage of their ballet training. They’re cavaliered (I use the word advisedly) by a pair of dangerously underqualified men who are clearly happier in the following soft-shoe routine.

Next comes a tap number lead by a guy gotten up as a dancing horse with a tail and mane subjected to frequent perms. Then there’s an old-fashioned waltz–for a soldier sporting exaggerated epaulets and a lady in an extravagantly beruffled skirt. Balanchine has presented their Platonic version on several occasions.

Have I mentioned that, throughout all the show’s numbers, we can glimpse the “artistes” behind the scenes, so to speak, making quick crossovers from one side of the stage to the other for their next entrance and frenetically quick changes for their next role? We’re allowed to see this through the translucent backdrop and a murky upstage corner representing the wings of the limelighted performance space. Call it the layered look, if you will, and think of the scene as choreographed by an inordinately deft traffic cop. Think again and discover that Taylor is commenting not only on the vaudevillians’ life in the theater but also on that of his company.

The show goes on with a strip teaser (Eran Bugge), swishing her rump at her audience and a dying swan, pointe shoes and all (Julie Tice), accompanied by three mourners in inky veils and black corsets. Laughably inept, their efforts are nevertheless touchingly sweet and earnest. The fast-paced bill continues with an apache duet in which the woman (Michelle Fleet) gives as good as she gets (and in high heels too); a gypsy trio with Parisa Khobdeh at its heart; a garland dance with many a dropped petal; an Egyptian duet in which the two players move in the profiled stance Taylor used so spectacularly in his Sacre du Printemps (The Rehearsal); a female bullfighter (Annmaria Mazzini) taunting three cowardly bulls with her gloriously sleazy red satin cape; and, by way of a finale, a parade of people in white practice clothes (Onward, dancers!) led by an exhilarated woman (the vivacious Fleet) waving an American flag.

A stagehand, Robert Kleinendorst, has been present throughout, wielding his broom to sweep away the fallout (you’d be surprised) from each act and hoofing a little on the sidelines as he watches. Towards the end of the show, he gets his big chance–with a captivating solo in which he and his sweeping tool, a kind of fifth limb, dance full-out with utter aplomb.

Brief Encounters, the other Taylor work new this season, may be a first for the choreographer. As haunting as a fragrance, it’s suffused with romantic atmosphere and keen–often touching–observations about sexual propositions, yet it’s laced with Taylor’s brand of crass jokery. Rarely, if ever, has Taylor combined these two familiar modes of his in a single piece. The two still make awkward bedfellows but, with ongoing performance and perhaps some second thoughts, they–like man and wife in an arranged marriage–may mesh. As for me, I loved the dance at first sight.

Set to Debussy’s Le Coin des Enfants (Children’s Corner), Brief Encounters is performed in front of a dark, bronze-tinted curtain by Santo Loquasto, which depicts successive arches over a corridor leading to an unknown destination. The 11 dancers are clad (barely) by Loquasto in the briefest (hence the pun of the title) of black bikini bottoms and, where called for, bras. Still, their primary “costume” is the glow of their exposed, tautly muscled flesh under James F. Ingalls’s inspired lighting.

Despite the title of the music, Taylor’s piece is definitely PG but, like the celebrated film from which the dance co-opts its name, its erotic content remains prelapsarian. At first the dancers circle, stealing looks at each other as possible sexual partners. But even the occasional touch–tender palm to dancer-taut buttock–has no sequel; the group vanishes as quickly as a fleeting memory. (All the encounters in this piece are, as the title promises, tantalizingly brief and the more suggestive for it.)

Next we see a melancholy man (the wonderful James Samson, consummately full-bodied but eternally innocent) who hasn’t yet defined what he desires, though he wants something passionately and is frustrated by not finding it. He might be The Sleeping Beauty‘s Prince Désiré, before the Lilac Fairy sets him up with Aurora.

One by one, a number of women, each gorgeous in a different way, approach him but then retreat. Finally he’s surrounded by a quartet of men, who eye him intently; they too withdraw, seemingly because of his failure to respond. Here Taylor is describing–with the choreographic equivalent of perfect pitch–the misery of the young person who is unsure of himself as a potential lover, unsure even of his sexual identity.

Two trios–two men with a single woman, two women with a sole man–dance simultaneously until one person drops out of each group, leaving a male pair and a female pair. This initiates the most recent step in Taylor’s slow progress toward allowing himself to depict same-sex couples onstage, celebrating the love (and lust) that can now finally speak its name. Later in the piece, the choreographer throws reticence to the winds and links two men in a series of handsome acrobatic postures, making them look like copulating gods.

Amy Young dances narcissistically with a hand mirror, adoring her own image, even when a suitor arrives to partner her. When he, very sensibly, draws back, she’s disappointed by her reflection and hurls her looking glass away.

Next we ogle a five-woman harem, which . . . well, what do you imagine those multiple wives did when there was only one sultan available to satisfy their hunger? The women run off in a line and a line of eager men follows them, leaving the coolly beautiful Michael Trusnovec–Taylor’s muse–behind. A discontent beauty played by Julie Tice joins him, but another man intrudes to threaten Trusnovec with a gleaming dagger, in the mode of would-be exotic silent films.

And so it goes, with the theme of thwarted love depicted in terms that range from profound appeals to your empathy to absurd slapstick. Brief Encounters is a bagatelle, to be sure, but it reminds you of the times, not restricted to your adolescence, when you couldn’t make love work.

© 2010 Tobi Tobias

Mark Morris Dance Group / BAM Howard Gilman Opera House, Brooklyn, NY / February 23-27, 2010

Imagine a dance so cool, calm, and exquisite, it seems unreal–a vision from some empyrean realm.

The music, deliberately free from dramatic emphasis, is Eric Satie’s 1918 three-part Socrate, in the version for piano and voice, here with Colin Fowler at the keyboard and the tenor Jean-Paul Fouchécourt singing–almost as if he were speaking dispassionately–the text derived from Plato’s dialogues. The dance, a perfect echo of the score’s subtlety and purity, is Mark Morris’s Socrates, given its world premiere in the Mark Morris Dance Group’s performances at the BAM Howard Gillman Opera House March 23-27.

Morris had engaged with this music before, in 1983, using its final section which recounts, with uncanny restraint, the death of the philosopher. (Socrates, found guilty and imprisoned by his government for promulgating ideas that threatened the status quo, is sentenced to drink a fatal poison. He complies with an uncanny fortitude, as if he were simply taking the next step in his life.) Nearly three decades ago, Morris made a somber, slow-motion piece for six men that I’ve never forgotten, though I saw it only on a grainy black-and-white videotape. The new piece, to the full score, reminds me of the older one, as if it had gone through a very long gestation to emerge as the work of a mature artist whose skills and imagination are at their height.

Not unexpectedly, Morris’s choreography for that last section of the score, “The Death of Socrates,” is the most fulfilling part of the new work; it’s bound to make even the most restrained viewer weep. Here, as the fleet dancers cross the stage laterally again and again, you sense the flow of human experience (individual and communal at once) and see how mimed gestures–often bluntly literal ones–surge through the matrix of abstract dance. From the early days of his career, Morris has been deft at marrying prose and poetry, gestures that tell a story and dance for dance’s sake.

With a masterly hand, Morris conveys the belief that what happens to one, happens to everyone: Socrates is “played” by one dancer and then another and another. Elsewhere, small groups, often quartets and quintets, illustrate a single event. At the end, the entire ensemble of 15 dies Socrates’ death–one body after another succumbs without struggle to the numbing hemlock, each with the same sequence of brief phrases, multiplying the effect of the tremendous moment through merciless repetition, the way traumatic events may echo remorselessly in our minds.

The opening section, “Portrait of Socrates,” immediately establishes the ancient-Greece setting through Martin Pakledinaz’s lovely costumes–variations on a theme of the Greek chiton, echoing in pastel hues the palette Jacques-Louis David used for his celebrated picture, The Death of Socrates, and with a single male figure positioned in an upstage corner against a column of light, semi-reclining as we’ve learned to imagine the disciples who listened to the great Athenian philosopher’s arguments. The most striking element in the dancing is done in duet form and suggests folk style, with the couples linked by a knotted rope held by each pair. A diminutive, frail-looking woman weaves her way through the scene alone; her lack of a partner and the addition of an unobtrusive train to her costume suggests she represents Socrates’ wife, Xanthippe, anticipating her bereavement.

The middle section, On the banks of the Ilissus, illustrates, with just a touch of irony, Socrates’ method of gentle but persistent questioning to enable another person to get his mind around a particular way of thinking. It is also a pastoral idyll, in which small groups of dancers moving lyrically through the space evoke the landscape the singer describes: a river fed by cool tributary streams, welcome shade trees, fragrant blossoms, chirping crickets, and carpets of grass inviting cushioned repose.

And then we come to the calm, plainspoken account of Socrates’ death, which rips your heart out.

The revival of Morris’s 1990 Behemoth, the sole ballet by the most musical–indeed, music-driven–of choreographers that is accompanied only by silence, was met with breath-held silence by the audience–except for the few who turned their backs on the stage and stalked out, in good old modern-dance tradition. Considered in retrospect, it suffered from being on the same program with Socrates because both dances are strictly objective, the dancers deliberately shorn of individual personality, and both emphasize the kind of clear, shifting, intricate patterning that is a Morris specialty. Otherwise, as far as I’m concerned, Behemoth is terrific; it’s been one of my favorite Morris dances since I first saw it.

The scene is a denuded stage. With its towering empty space above and its raw edges left in murky darkness, it might be a metaphor for a prison. Separated by blackouts, the segments of the 40-minute dance are uneven in length, as if to catch the viewer unawares or dislocate his sense of time–a device almost as powerful as the pervading silence.

When the dancers move–at first still rooted to their “assigned” spots–they continue to be held in thrall by a severely limited vocabulary of steps and postures, and even these actions are interspersed with foreboding moments of stillness. From time to time they shudder, wriggle their fingers in the air so that their hands look like spiders in their death throes, or sound a single clap with hands drawn prayerfully to their breasts. The noise is, of course, startling. The claps might be urgent signals–but of what? To whom? The ambiguity is in itself menacing.

Most often the bodies move in unison, sometimes all at once, more often in small groups. Occasionally one dancer is singled out. But before you can mark him or her as the leader of the assembled figures, he/she’s replaced by another. And then another. What’s more, even the bodies moving alone appear to be part of an unholy system.

There is some partnering, but it has nothing to do with love or even lust. There is plenty of falling, the bodies delivered to the floor like rag dolls hurled by an angry child. There are ghosts, dimly visible figures that hover in the wings as if to go on stage, but then retreat. Throughout, Morris is ingenious in configuring his pared-down material so that it rivets the spectator’s eyes and keeps the mind clicking away simultaneously.

Until this revival, I’d thought Behemoth had a 1984 scenario, its figures the victims of a totalitarian system controlling and curtailing their every move. This time, I thought, What if they’re not the victims of a behemoth, but the behemoth itself? “Something enormous in size or power,” says my dictionary.

I can’t say much about Morris’s 2007 Looky, which completed the program, because I just didn’t “get it.” It was the program’s single blithe note, and welcome as such, but I found it confused in both structure and purpose and nowhere near as funny as the choreographer and his dancers meant it to be.

The general idea of the piece, rakishly costumed in black-and-white borrowings from the company’s other works, is to show the postures and pursuits of museum- and gallery-goers. (Paul Taylor has easily–and poignantly–trumped Morris at this sort of game several times over.) Morris settles for puerile slapstick in his finale, having Looky‘s oglers morph into art works themselves, wreaking revenge on an innocent spectator. But in between the crowd (18 strong) succumbs to entertainment. Since the openings of art exhibitions routinely include a glass of whatever, Looky pushes the custom further and segues into two scenes that mix performance with observation and meld in memory as a raucous party: dancing in modes that range from sylphidian ballet to ragtime, drink, recreational drugs, arguing and laughing, mildly licentious behavior, flying folding chairs. And yes, Virginia, Looky is a piano ballet. The instrument in question, duly onstage, is a Disklavier–a digitally fueled player piano–programmed with rambunctious tunes in devilish rhythms by Kyle Gann. That music is the freshest part of the undertaking.

© 2010 Tobi Tobias

New York City Ballet / David H. Koch Theater, Lincoln Center, NYC / November 24, 2009 – February 28, 2010

This story has a back story. Let me whisk you through it.

Some two years before the New York City Ballet danced the January 21st world premiere of Alexey Miroshnichenko’s The Lady with the Little Dog, negotiations had broken down between Peter Martins, who directs the company, and Alexei Ratmansky, then head of the Bolshoi Ballet in his native Russia. They’d been discussing the possibility of Ratmansky’s becoming the City Ballet’s Resident Choreographer. (The job had been created a decade ago for Christopher Wheeldon, who, having formed his own small, ambitious company in 2007, subsequently wanted to give it his full attention.) Shortly after Ratmansky’s negotiations with City Ballet collapsed, he was snapped up by American Ballet Theatre.

Ratmansky was obviously a catch–he and Wheeldon are widely considered to be by far the most gifted choreographers in classical dance today–and balletomanes entertained the foolish hope that he would prove to be “another Balanchine.” Of course he wasn’t, but observers were consoled by his abundant gifts: a dance vocabulary that is inventive yet firmly rooted in traditional classical technique; the wit and human warmth of his creations; his respect for (and delight in) the past and his ability to make it new.

When City Ballet announced that this season would see a new ballet commissioned from another Russian, Alexey Miroshnichenko, hopes were more modest, but still unrealistic–that Miroshnichenko would at least prove to be “another Ratmansky.” No such luck.

The Lady with the Little Dog is, at best, a sweet Valentine of a ballet–pretty and charming, but without much significance. It was inspired by Chekhov’s poignant, similarly titled story in which a man and a woman, each leaving a disappointing spouse behind, visit a seaside resort, ripe, for different reasons, for a passing affair. He’s an aging playboy; she’s a delicate young thing who craves more from life than a marriage that starves her imagination. Instead they find a fierce attachment (call it love) they can’t escape.

Miroshnichenko adopts the names Chekhov used for his main characters, Anna Sergeevna and Dmitri Dmitrievitch, but keeps the proceedings semi-abstract. Sterling Hyltin as Anna has the youth and delicate beauty of the young woman’s Chekhovian ancestor, but Andrew Veyette, as Dmitri, is merely a generic attractive young man, as caring and tender as a romantic heroine might wish and a swell dancer to boot.

Boy meets girl when Anna is out walking her fluffy little dog. They are attended by a male octet in short-sleeved gray unitards. The house program calls them Angels, but their movements are often those of adorable puppies. The cuteness factor is not as unbearable as you’d think, but it–and the central part these fellows play in guiding the couple’s encounters, even to simulated nudity and intercourse–is enough to remove the ballet decisively from the Chekhovian realm of small truths that, accumulating quietly and inexorably, end by piercing the heart.

The most disheartening part of Miroshnichenko’s effort, though, is its lack of interest and invention sheerly as dance. To be sure there are two big pas de deux–obvious choreographic challenges–but the results are invariably banal. In the falling-in-love duet Veyette lifts and turns Hyltin so that her legs swirl out into space, in the familiar way of ice-dancing couples, This “floating on air” is a metaphor for love’s ecstasy, but it has become a cliché and Miroshnichenko’s bag of tricks is far too full of them.

The score, by the Russian composer Rodion Shchedrin (the husband of the celebrated ballerina Maya Plisetskaya, to whom the ballet is dedicated), couldn’t suit the piece better, being as delicate and sweet as a meringue and equally devoid of substance. Philipp Dontsov’s scenery is spare, essentially a gauzy front cloth that lifts up and a backdrop that stays put, both broken by pale rectangles, as if to indicate modernity. For variety’s sake, the upstage drop is subjected to mood lighting by the City Ballet’s Mark Stanley. One can justly accuse Stanley of making most ballets too dim, but he is not often given to the trite ploy of using rhubarb red to indicate erotic passion.

To my mind, the only worthy aspect of The Lady with the Little Dog is its serving as a vehicle for Hyltin, extending her beyond her crisp technique to create a character who is well-nigh irresistible. As I knew you’d want to know, the pale, fleecy scrap of a live lap dog that she walks at the ballet’s opening is the dancer’s very own, and the vibes between them are indeed delectable.

Peter Martins’s latest ballet, Naïve and Sentimental Music, to the John Adams score from which it takes its name, had its premiere on November 24, 2009, for the gala opening of the City Ballet’s season. And it was likely that the choreographer had the grand gesture in mind when he cast nearly all of the company’s principal dancers in it. Of the cast’s 26 performers, only one, Adrian Danchig-Waring, was still “just” a soloist, but he’s clearly headed for the top category and entirely deserving of it.

Unhappily, the grand gesture did little to make Martins’s ballet memorable. Yes, it was impeccably performed, yet the choreography adamantly refused to reveal the individual distinctiveness that had made each member of this top-of-the-crop group worthy of the ranking. For Martins, it seemed, the strong, clear technique that almost all of them displayed was sufficient in itself. Is he immune to the love that can be inspired by the particular dancing temperament of an individual artist?

For the record: The piece comprises three sections. The first is the most highly populated, with seven couples elaborating, in different groupings, on Yvonne Borree’s opening statement of unfurling a leg now to the front, now to the back. The simple movement develops into many a speedy challenge until the stage looks charged with activity. The women–in beautiful tunics by Liliana Casabal that range through a spectrum of blues and greens–are as light and sharp-edged as a Kleenex; the men, naturally beefier, put more obvious energy into their steps. All of them perform as if “exactitude” were their mantra. But the point of their activity is either invisible or, more likely, non-existent.

The second section is devoted to adagio dancing, with its cast of three couples in pure white taking turns at being in the spotlight while the two remaining pairs do complementary slow duets at a distance in a meditative twilight. It is, as might have been expected, the women who stand out: the luscious Sara Means; Maria Kowroski, the diva of pulled-taffy dancing; and the about-to-retire Darci Kistler, who happens to be the choreographer’s wife.

As was also to be expected, the movement is abstract. And then suddenly in the final duet–for Kistler, with Stephen Hanna–the couple is interrupted by a black-clad man who steals Kistler away from her partner and proceeds to conduct her through a rendezvous with death reminiscent of, yet nowhere as powerful as, the macabre and sensuous one in Balanchine’s La Valse. Next, unfathomably, the man in black is replaced (not thwarted, simply replaced) by Hanna, and the dance returns to the ineffable rites of a gated (think heavenly) community. Are we to understand, from that brief narrative intrusion, that Kistler is undergoing a near-death experience (perhaps her retirement)? The problem here is that Martins has failed to make his intentions clear.

The third movement, also for three couples, the women costumed in gorgeous shades of red, has the kind of ferocity you’d expect if someone had yelled “Fire!” in a crowd. In response to the music, the movement now blazes, though it is always tamped down a little by Martins’s insistence on a seamless flow in the action.

To close the piece, the entire cast assembles for a geometrically ordered finale that has absolutely no dance fervor in it. I saw the ballet twice, and each time, as the curtain came down, I felt I hadn’t witnessed anything significant–or even simply entertaining.

After their respective premieres, the Martins and Miroshnichenko ballets appeared on the same program for the City Ballet’s annual New Combinations evening, which is meant to honor Balanchine’s birthday. Surely, in his lifetime, Mr. B knew one should be wary of choreographers bringing gifts.

© 2010 Tobi Tobias

Noche Flamenca / Lucille Lortel Theatre, NYC / December 24, 2009 – January 16, 2010

What better way to spend New Year’s Eve than watching Noche Flamenca?

The Lucille Lortel Theatre, intimate in size, is dark and gloomy, the seats for the onlookers sheathed in a deep red velvet that hints at half-hidden passions. It’s not as atmospherically decrepit as the East Village’s Theater 80, where the troupe usually gives its extended summer seasons, but it will do.

Besides the change of venue, there’s been a change in billing: The name of the company’s diva, Soledad Barrio, one of the most thrilling dancers in the world, now towers over the name of the company. With good reason.

Barrio is simply more intent than even the most acute dancers. Onstage, she becomes a person who takes everything seriously and personally, beginning with the assumption that life is tragic.

In a solo that climaxed the program, Barrio appeared as a contender with deep, dark forces. Fabulously costumed for the encounter, she wore a black ankle-length dress with long lace sleeves and a lace back that wove a spidery pattern over her flesh. Its artfully layered skirt, glimmering with streaks of jet beading, promised to do its own dancing if provoked by the slightest movement of her hips.

After her entrance, though, Barrio stood perfectly still for a very long time with her back to the public–a feat with which few dancers can command their audience’s attention. Her spine was arched, her head placed to present a stern profile. Then, a swift turn, and she faced her watchers directly, her gaze defying its communal gaze at her. She raised one arm, paused, then the other, paused, and finally added a baroque flourish of her fingers. Behind her, singers and instrumentalists waited, as if they were comrades–soul mates, perhaps–with whom she would undertake a perilous journey.

Head swiveling, she stomped halfway across the stage, and a rose that had ornamented her hair dropped to the dingy floor. She saw it fall, gazed at it, as if to acknowledge and pity its fate, and left it where it lay. It was a live rose, I believe, and its loss an accident.

Lifting her skirt to reveal her pale, powerful legs, she used them like pistons, whipping herself into a frenzy of high-voltage footwork. Halting abruptly, she covered her face with both hands for a moment, as if shielding her eyes from an unbearable sight, then emerged from that screen even more fully possessed by her dancing. Her actions no longer seemed to be a performance but rather the work of some primal force of nature being given free rein as we, her observers, ceased to exist for her.

She passed her forearms across her face, then, driving her heels into the floor, raised her arms high over her head, twisting her hands and fingers, transforming them into exotic flowers. She stopped, looked down once more at the maimed rose, then calmly joined the little single-file line formed by the musicians walking offstage, as if to their next pilgrimage.

In the production I saw at the Lortel, Barrio was the only female dancer in the little troupe. Well, what woman could hold a candle to her? In modern dance, Isadora Duncan and Martha Graham. In ballet, maybe Nora Kaye, in her Tudor roles. Certainly no one we can go and see today has Barrio’s transformative power.

The men of the current troupe naturally serve as foils to its star, yet they are extremely accomplished and shown to good advantage. Antonio Jiménez offers an intriguing combination of sturdy legs, scintillating footwork, and delicate gestures of the hands. In his solo, he often hugged his arms tight to his chest, his hands clutching the flaps of his open jacket, like an infant holding on for dear life to its security blanket. And, while he danced, he’d frequently close his eyes, as if to keep his fierce energy within his control. Yet when his solo wound down, he just walked off, matter-of-factly, like an ordinary pedestrian, toward a red light that gleamed in the wings, a fiery sun.

Juan Orgalla opened his solo with a fusillade of footwork. It seemed as if a single step of his boot could kill. His spectators might well have thought, “If he has a heart, you’d never know it; he’s all about power and command, about a way of being masculine that’s native to flamenco and the culture it stems from.” Many a woman has been (and perhaps still is) delighted to submit to the type Orgalla conjures up. A feisty female would laugh him away; a timid innocent would be terrified by the mere idea of being alone in a room with him. Still, when Orgalla segued into a long passage of gentler, more subtle footwork, it became clear that he’s not merely a mirror of dominating masculinity but, rather, a canny virtuoso.

Martin Santangelo, the company’s founder and director (and, incidentally, Barrio’s husband), choreographed the program’s two group pieces–Alba (about a band of American heroes in the Spanish Civil War) and Refugiados (inspired by the writings of refugee children in dire circumstances). In the latter, Santangelo’s manipulation of dancers, singers, and instrumentalists in the space is a small architectural tour de force. Still, there’s no denying the fact that flamenco, when it’s truest to its nature, prefers the solo or, at most, duet form. It is non-narrative and shorn even of a particular theme other than the one that lies at its heart–life’s proud face-off with death. Flamenco is also essentially improvised and so resists the services of a choreographer. I understood that the solos I watched as the clock inexorably ticked its way toward midnight might look very different in 2010. ¡Feliz Año Nuevo!

© 2010 Tobi Tobias

Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater / City Center, NYC / December 2, 2009 – January 3, 2010

Beginning with the opening night gala, I visited the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater (“The Ailey,” to its friends) many times during its month-long City Center season, which celebrated Judith Jamison’s 20-year tenure as artistic director. Jamison will become “artistic director emerita” at the end of this year. Her successor has not yet been named, but it will be hard to find her equal–first as a star dancer, then as a leader with unassailable authority, a sharp eye for talent, a tough work ethic, and irresistible charisma.

Opening night felt relatively subdued compared to the high-voltage atmosphere generated by such occasions in recent years. Its first half was devoted to generic speeches, excerpts from Jamison’s own so-so choreography, and a pièce d’occasion made in her honor by Robert Battle.

Battle’s offering, a male duet titled Anew, may have been about succession. If so, too subtly so. Its only striking element was the poised control, cloaking ferocious energy, of Jamar Roberts and Clifton Brown as they prowled through their space like big cats in the wild. Traditionally, this has been a skill of just about every member of the company, male and female, black and white. Jamison has brought it to a full flowering, as she has the leaps that shoot across uncanny stretches of space; and the sky-high leg extensions from a daringly tilted body. Performance after performance, Jamison’s dancers claim the right to be called acrobats of God.

Excitement quickened in the second half of the program, thanks to a knock-out performance of Ailey’s own signature piece, the 1960 Revelations. One of its highlights was Amos J. Machanic, Jr.’s exquisite and original rendering of “I Wanna Be Ready,” that gut-cruncher of a solo in which the sheer physical challenge (made, of course, to look effortless, even delicate) comes across as a humble, poignant cry of faith. More thrilling yet was the familiar, though never twice the same, sight of Linda Celeste Sims and Glenn Allen Sims performing the “Fix Me, Jesus” duet, which they’ve evolved to the point of incandescence. She lets herself fall from a succession of precarious positions, trusting he’ll there to save her from self-destruction, and he is, but these and many another feat–of coordination, of balance–have become as refined as a silkworm’s threads.

Overall, the company’s technique seems to be suddenly stronger and clearer than I’ve ever seen it. Often when this occurs in a dance troupe, the technical “improvement” is accompanied by the sacrifice of the dancers’ individuality, the texture of their movement, and that invisible but essential quality of soul. (Today’s New York City Ballet is a significant example.) The Ailey, on the other hand, seems to have increased its physical exactitude in order to make the choreographers’ (and dancers’) visions more piercing.

Repertory remains the Ailey’s perennial problem. This was clear from the Best of 20 Years anthology, which presented excerpts from pieces Jamison commissioned, revived (Alvin Ailey’s included), or acquired during her two decades as artistic director. The deficiency surfaced again in two of the three works given their premieres this season. If you can look behind the stunning performances the dancers invariably give it, the choreography offered by the Ailey is, with few exceptions, thin in invention, and stymied by prefabricated emotional agendas.

Jamison’s own Among Us (Private Spaces: Public Places), to music by Eric Lewis, shows us the fantasies of people at an (art) exhibition, the art naïf pictures being by Jamison. Granted, the encounters do include the traditional museum pick-up, but half of them remained inexplicable to me, even on a second viewing. The imaginary shenanigans are encouraged by a genie, played by Clifton Brown, a dancer so beautiful and gifted he can even get away with a tall blue feather waving from the top of his skull.

The movement vocabulary draws from ballet, jazz, Horton via Ailey, and middle-eastern genres; despite this generous pluralism, the choreography falls flat. The most compelling dancing in the show comes from Linda Celeste Sims, all filigreed whirling in a ravishing flamingo-hued dress with a lushly flared skirt, and Hope Boykin, somberly expressive, in a deep purple business suit with an ingeniously pleated vent in its skirt that allows and draws the eye to her full-bodied movement. As I’ve indicated, the costumes, by Paul Tazewell, are marvelous, but clothes alone don’t make a viable dance.

Uptown, by Matthew Rushing, one of the company’s senior and most revered dancers, attempts to chronicle the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s, in which a confluence of African-Americans made achievements in the arts (Langston Hughes, Josephine Baker) and social concerns (W.E.B Du Bois) that would influence generations to come. Both the street life and partying life of the period were memorably sassy too. Perhaps inevitably, the subject required as much talking as dancing–so the piece has a narrator (the hyper-fueled Abdur-Rahim Jackson at the performance I saw), who both speaks and moves, and recordings of the greats. Not unexpectedly, the choreography often falls prey to the impossible task of miming what is spoken. Overall, the result is more like an educational documentary film than a real live dance. By next season it might be playing to kids in middle school.

Nevertheless, Uptown contains occasional passages–the “Weary Blues” section, for instance–that suggest Rushing has some flair for choreography. So I hope he’ll be given another chance–perhaps in a workshop situation, to lessen the pressures of a big, important, and expensive production–to create a work that isn’t so dependent on library research.

By far the best of the new works was Ronald K. Brown’s Dancing Spirit, its title taken from Jamison’s 1993 memoir, its score assembled from jazz, rock, and fusion music of then and now. Brown has created works for many companies in addition to the Ailey and maintains a troupe of his own, Evidence. Despite Brown’s slew of commitments, Jamison’s successor would be a fool not to co-opt him for the position of Choreographer in Residence at the Ailey. The move would benefit all concerned.

Dancing Spirit opens with the entrance of a peaceable man in white, who establishes an area of calm in a teardrop spotlight. A woman follows him, then another man, and so on. The slow procession has a ritualistic air–Brown’s dances are often spiritual–and you breathe deeper as it continues.

Then a punchier rhythm invites additional dancers into the stage space. Arms are quietly raised to the heavens, then strike out forcefully on the diagonal. The group’s movement suavely incorporates elements from the dances of the African diaspora and American modern dance; there’s a touch of jazz here, a hint of ballet there. Torsos ripple, hips sway, inviting the viewer imagine her- or himself part of this community, which depicts the realm of the spirit while giving the Earth its due.

Even so, the loveliest and most remarkable quality of the choreography is Brown’s confidence (that of a born architect) with the groupings and patterns the bodies make in space. A penultimate section is all throbbing percussion, but just when you think this climax will escalate until it sets fire to the theater, the dancers arrange themselves gently into a horizontal line downstage, standing still and self-possessed.

NOTE: The above article, commissioned by Voice of Dance, comes to you so late because VOD has held it without posting it since its timely submission on December 24. Not only has VOD failed to post the piece, it has also failed to pay me for it and for my previous article on its site, “Morphoses Falters,” a review of Morphoses/The Wheeldon Company, which it did post. Such is the lot of the free-lance dance writer.

© 2010 Tobi Tobias

Pacific Northwest Ballet / Joyce Theater, NYC / January 5-10, 2010

Pacific Northwest Ballet, based in Seattle, is making its first New York appearance in 13 years with a program of four ballets, three of them new to our town. The more substantial of them are Twyla Tharp’s Opus 111 and Benjamin Millepied’s 3 Movements. Astonishingly, not a one is by George Balanchine, whose works have long been the most significant part of the troupe’s astutely chosen repertory.

Founded in 1972, PNB was subsequently led for nearly three decades by the husband-and-wife team Kent Stowell and Francia Russell (he got top billing, but she’s the most famous); earlier, both made their performing careers with the New York City Ballet. Russell took charge of PNB’S ever-growing Balanchine acquisitions. Her productions, known to East Coast ballet fans largely by hearsay, were praised for their accurate rendering of the choreography. I saw a couple of them and found them rather dry and dull–the work of a devoted accountant.

Peter Boal, celebrated for the purity of his dancing as a principal with the City Ballet, took over from Stowell and Russell in 2005. You’d think he’d be the first to include Balanchine in an engagement taking place on Balanchine’s “home turf”–if only to show the competition how well, how distinctively his company dances the master’s creations. Just last year, Miami City Ballet, directed by another important NYCB alumnus, Edward Villella, did just this–thrillingly.

Perhaps Boal was more interested in showing the Tharp and the Millepied works because he commissioned them for the company–both in 2008.

Tharp’s Opus111, named for the Brahms string quintet to which it’s set, is easily the best dance on the program. With its cast of twelve, it shows off the soft grace of the PNB dancers and rarely hints at the punitive physical extremes that have been typical of Tharp’s major works for years now and the way-cool slouchiness that so disgruntled old-school observers of her early masterworks. Yes, the choreography abounds in Tharp’s daredevil lifts and maverick twists of the classical ballet vocabulary, but these elements have been gentled–either by Tharp herself or by the way the PNB dancers perform them–and no longer come across as brash challenges to officialdom.

The main characteristic of Opus111, though, is a complex braininess that has been typical of Tharp from Day One. You can hardly parse it on a first viewing, though you can sense that it underpins the ballet’s structure. Here, the choreographer revels in mirror-imaging of all sorts and related complementary juxtapositions, as demonstrated in the lyrical second movement, where the dancing of the main couple is suavely accompanied by, or set off against, the movement of two auxiliary trios and, if I remember rightly, another pair. Tharp operates so smoothly here, she made me think of the secondary groups as the principals’ landscape.

The women in the piece wear soft slippers rather than pointe shoes, ballet’s traditional way of indicating that they are people of the earth, not members of the aristocracy. And folk motifs, which occur briefly and subtly throughout the piece (echoing qualities in the music), emerge full-force in the finale, where every foot is robustly flexed–as classical ballet imagines peasant-dance style–and with the performers arranged downstage in two parallel lines that stretch from one side of the proscenium arch to the other, presenting themselves guilelessly–fresh-faced, forthright, and smiling.

Opus 111 isn’t likely to be considered a landmark in Tharp’s career, but for me it saved the evening.

I don’t know what to make of Benjamin Millepied–a City Ballet principal–as a choreographer. Ambitious and diligent, he “improves” doggedly, learning how to bring off one basic task of choreography after another. But he hasn’t yet made me want to see one of his dances a second time. Au contraire.

Of late he’s been teaching himself to manipulate large numbers of dancers effectively. Earlier, I saw another of his exercises in this vein that resulted in a frantic, blurry mess, like rush hour at Times Square. But 3 Movements, set to Steve Reich’s relentless Three Movements for Orchestra and featured as the second “big number” on the Joyce program, was as clear as could be; indeed it looked as if most of it had been designed on graph paper. Like all the Millepied’s works I’ve seen, this one seems hollow in the sense of having no interior life, no imaginative vision, no notion of what makes a ballet unforgettable. The answer lies beyond the realm of efficiency.

The Joyce program is completed by a pair of smaller pieces, no doubt audience pleasers though hardly distinguished works of art. Edwaard Liang’s Für Aline, a duet created in 2006, is set to a radically sparse score–single notes separated by silence, constituting a fragment of melody that haunts the memory–by the Estonian composer Arvo Pärt, a favorite among dance makers with a melancholy bent.

Liang gives us a young man apparently unable to relinquish his obsessive memory of the woman he loved, who has died. For him, she exists in the present–as exquisite and delicate as ever, moving with a “being beauteous” quality. Unfortunately, Liang depends on bits and pieces he’s (and we’ve) seen and liked in other, better, choreographers’ work, without giving them a meaningful new context and seems devoid of invention when left to the his own devices. What’s more, the mood of his piece is woefully sappy. Still I did appreciate the moment in which the lost beloved suggests that she–though presumably now dwelling in the Elysian Fields–misses her partner as much as he misses her.

Marco Goecke’s 2004 male solo, Mopey, is set to music by C.P.E. Bach, then the theatrical ploy of no sound at all, then to raucous sound from The Cramps. It describes an alienated youth who suffers, violently and picturesquely, from (a) drug addiction; (b) spasmodic hyperactivity caused by Attention Deficit Disorder; (c) an unspecified form of psychosis. Choose one or all of the above. Because of its length, perhaps, and its physical challenges (sheer endurance being just one them), it’s made to impress but not, unfortunately, to express anything beneath the surface.

Given the dubious worth of these two pieces, Boal surely would have done better to replace them with–if not a Balanchine contribution–at least one of the several works of Jerome Robbins that he has acquired for PNB in the course of his tenure.

As for PNB’s dancers, they make a very good ensemble, but even the best among them, charged with leading roles, lack the ability to thrill your eyes and heart, to “own” the stage as real stars do. This capacity may come with time, but then a lot of time has already passed.

What really broke my heart was the sight of Carla Körbes, justly adored by the New York audience when she was with City Ballet, although she never received the roles her ballerina-qualities seemed to deserve. Now a principal with PNB and dancing leads in three of the opening-night ballets at the Joyce, she looked hampered both by embonpoint and, far more telling, a failure of desire.

© 2010 Tobi Tobias