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Even after my daughter, a School of American Ballet student, outgrew (literally–the costumes have to fit) a string of kiddie roles in Balanchine’s Nutcracker–Angel, Soldier, Polichinelle, Candy Cane–I still made many a trip to Lincoln Center for New York City Ballet’s annual offering of the holiday production. As a dance critic, I’ve found the ballet infinitely engaging and worth considering from myriad angles. This season I’ve gone twice, both times to focus on the company dancer who fascinates me most these days: Sara Mearns, who is appearing in two roles–Dewdrop and the Sugarplum Fairy.

The two characters are distinctly different in kind. The Sugarplum Fairy has been played most touchingly by Balanchine’s ballerinas as tender, even motherly, to her “children.” When we see her first, at the beginning of Act II, she marshals a bevy of diminutive Angels (the youngest and most petite of SAB’s little girls), grave and often visibly nervous as they stream diagonally across the stage in intersecting lines, their tiny feet invisible underneath their gleaming white hoop skirts, their progress as smooth as poured cream. Soon afterward she’s a child-sensitive host to the young Nutcracker Prince and the friend of his heart, Marie–a pair of courageous and exquisitely mannered children whom she has the grace to treat as if they were grown-ups.

Dewdrop is not really human at all, but abstract, or perhaps metaphoric. Brilliant as a faceted diamond, she tears through space and her network of Flowers–a virtuosa amidst the flurry of pink petals suggested by the corps women’s costumes. The greatest Dewdrops I’ve seen were Heather Watts and Karin von Aroldingen, because somehow–only Terpsichore knows how–they gave the role a streak of the tragic. Their interpretation implied that a dewdrop, its shimmering life limited to a mere hour or two, was very much like dancing: dazzling, evocative, wondrous to be sure, but utterly ephemeral.

Mearns’s Dewdrop was probably less rich and less relaxed than it promises to be a few years from now; she still has the air of a stranger to the role or, more accurately, an explorer or an investigator of it. Nevertheless it made me notice an aspect of her dancing I’d so far ignored.

Justly beloved by audiences at large, Mearns is the opposite of the so-called “Balanchine type”: elongated, super-slender, and precise, every step hitting its mark. Mearns is generously proportioned, like Titian’s luxurious nudes, and she extends her body into space with a matching generosity, even though doing so regularly challenges the vertical posture so important to ballet. As Dewdrop, she did all this with her upper body, and produced her familiar sensuous results, not once, it should be noted, allowing her natural amplitude to distort the music’s timing. Her City Ballet predecessors in this kind of dancing have been rare, though memorable–Jillana, Stephanie Saland, and Balanchine’s most potent muse, Suzanne Farrell.

Meanwhile, Mearns’s legs and feet were telling a very different story. Her turns and swift footwork were airy, light, sharp–and plumb-line vertical. She was able to produce this quality at high pressure too. As her dance amidst her attendant Flowers progressed, she sped along the path they repeatedly opened to her with growing authority, excitement, and daring. The contrast between the two modes–lush and crystalline–was a show in itself. Born a natural dancer, Mearns has become a thinking one as well. This bodes well for her future.

As interpreted by Mearns, the Sugarplum Fairy is a benevolent monarch, putting both the inhabitants of her realm and unexpected visitors (or were the children actually destined to come?) on a comfortable footing with her. We see her first early in Act II, bending slightly forward from the waist to greet the tiny gliding Angels (thereby emphasizing their delicious minuteness), waving them into motion with her wand, then finding a place in their dance, making them the framework for her very existence.

In her solo, to the otherworldly music of the celesta, Mearns traced the filigreed patterns of the choreography with delicate footwork, letting that ethereal quality permeate her body until she seemed to be made entirely of spun sugar.

Next she introduced the groups who would perform the divertissement dances–not as if they were subordinates or, worse, slaves trotted out to provide “entertainment,” but as beloved and distinct social enclaves within her realm. Several of the groups represent a foreign, often exotic, clime: China (Tea), for example, Arabia (Coffee), Spain (sweetened chocolate). Obviously Sugarplum is pro-active when it comes to immigration.

When the little Prince arrived with Marie, Mearns’s Sugarplum reacted with surprise, wonder, and concern as the boy related–in a mimed monologue Balanchine performed as a Maryinsky pupil in Russia–the sequence of events that led the youngsters to the “Land of Sweets.” When the account was complete, Mearns sighed with relief and rejoicing, sweeping her arms upward and drawing a long breath that filled her torso.

Cut to the grand pas de deux, where Mearns looked as if she were dancing in a cloud of her own perfume, letting her Cavalier be anonymous as, of course, Balanchine designed him to be. He’s there simply to support the woman–in balances, in multiple pirouettes, into the air–so that she can display the full range of her allure.

Remember, Balanchine’s the choreographer who declared “ballet is woman” and frequently said that his function as a choreographer was to serve her.

Mearns made everything in this duet soft, secure, easy–as if were occurring in the dream of a woman focusing on the sensations of her own being. Towards the finish line of this remarkable variation on the theme of lovers’ meeting, Mearns circled the stage in a wide chain of turns until she called to mind a race car speeding up to a wild and dangerous–potentially fatal–pace. This was typical of Mearns’s raw, caution-to-the-winds magnificence, which was one of the first things we knew about her.

Now we know more.

The New York City Ballet will be performing George Balanchine’s The Nutcracker at the David H. Koch Theater, Lincoln Center, NYC, through January 2, 2011.

© 2010 Tobi Tobias

Black Swan / Opened December 3, 2010

Surely The Red Shoes, created by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, is the most beloved ballet film of all time. My innocent eyes and heart were ravished by it shortly after its premiere in 1948. Shot in fabulous color–it glowed like a handful of precious jewels–the movie was built on a melodramatic exaggeration of a myth still popular at the time. The idea (which had a modicum of truth in it), was that being a ballerina was a full-time job and a half, leaving no room whatsoever for love or its frequent partner, domesticity. Woe betide the gifted young dancer, then, who found herself caught in the conflict between artistic glory and romantic satisfaction.

I’ll never forget the final shot of the movie’s anguished heroine, Moira Shearer–a great beauty of a ballerina, her porcelain skin and aquiline profile framed in a cloud of delicately curling red hair–just after she’d flung herself into the path of a moving train. I can still see her svelte stilled legs in their pale ballet tights and the gleaming red pointe shoes–all bloodied.

Some two decades later, as if performing a ritual, I took my nine-year-old daughter and two of her schoolmates to the film and, in the fullness of time, one of my daughter’s daughters, at the same age. Similarly seduced mothers had been doing so since The Red Shoes first opened, and, if it fired the imaginations of their fledgling daughters, as it reliably did, enrolled the girls in ballet school. (Not until Billy Elliot did boy aspirants get an equal opportunity.)

Times have changed. The ostensible ballet movie of the moment is Darren Aronofsky’s extravagantly promoted Black Swan which, a week before its December 3 opening, had finally gotten around to describing itself, accurately, as “a psycho-sexual thriller.” Eerily, it has a lot in common with The Red Shoes. It’s pitch perfect in embodying passé Romantic myths about (1) classical ballet, (2) madness, and (3) sex (formerly known as love). Nevertheless, mothers with any sense in them will lock up their daughters rather than regale them with this show.

Here’s the “official trailer”–a don’t-miss–of Black Swan:

The tale this flick tells: Nina (Natalie Portman, with the help of choreographer Benjamin Millepied; intensive re-training in classical dance which she studied in an earlier life; and a double, American Ballet Theatre’s Sarah Lane, for the tricky bits) is a lovely young dancer–all radiant innocence and vulnerability–on her way to stardom in a world-class ballet company based in New York. She comes equipped with a few problems, though.

Problem 1: The company’s director (Vincent Cassel), obsessively controlling (like the Red Shoes’s Lermontov) and erotically rapacious, is mounting a new production of Swan Lake. Nina’s a natural for half of the dual leading role that would be her break-through–the pure, lyrical Odette, queen of a bevy of swans who are actually maidens entrapped by an evil sorcerer. However she can’t manage to embody the evil Odile (the black swan) who, impersonating Odette, seduces the prince who has vowed to rescue the pure object of his affections. “Your dancing is still frigid,” “I never see you lose yourself,” the director complains to his protégée–and of course suggests sex as the perfect cure-all.

Problem 2: Nina’s mental health is shaky at best. So as the plot tangles, she’s more and more subject to hallucinations, each of them so ambiguous at first that the viewer, as well as Nina, confuses them with actuality.

In real life, Nina has to deal with the cruelty of the young replacing the old, as is common–and inevitable–in the performing arts. The director gives Nina the lead in Lake (as insiders call it) and publicly fires the company’s aging prima, who attempts suicide. Then, as Nina becomes increasingly unhinged by the strain of making good in the role, she finds herself threatened by Lily (Mila Kunis), a hardier and earthier type than our ingénue, whom the director imports–from California, where else?–to take over as Odette-Odile if necessary.

Lily’s resulting gaudy nightmares about her situation involve (semi-graphic) masturbation, group sex, and lesbian sex, with the assumption that they’re still no-nos. And murder (Nina offs Lily), which is still generally frowned upon. (The huge New York audience for the preview I attended found much to laugh at.) After imagining a fucking session with Lily–talk about sleeping with the enemy!–Nina tells her rival about it as if it had actually happened. “Was I good?” Lily asks. This is the only intentionally funny line in the show.

If matters weren’t gothic enough without it, blood is a key element in Black Swan. Early in the film Nina develops a rash on her back that she scratches until it bleeds, introducing the theme of self-harm, specifically cutting, a behavior observed in people with “issues.” Nina takes the sanguine vein all the way. Soon she’s oozing blood from her fingertips. Finally she inserts a mean knife into her vagina and–after a triumphant debut in Lake–expires with blood soaking through her white, thickly feathered tutu between her breasts and at her belly. “I was perfect,” she whispers of her performance as she lies dying, “I was perfect.” So much for amateur psychology mated with cheap thrills. And an inordinate desire to cop an Oscar.

It’s probably overkill, or too late, but I should mention Nina’s Problem 3. Though surely old enough for her own digs, she lives with her mom. Who is a ballet mom, over-protecting, indeed smothering, the daughter for whom she’s sacrificed her own dancing career. I wouldn’t even bother mentioning this–the caricature is without compassion and old hat besides–except for the fact that Barbara Hershey, who plays the role, is by far the most accomplished actor in the film. Her portrayal of the self-sacrificing yet fatally needy woman is honest, deep, and extremely subtle. You can almost believe that this momma took her kid to see The Red Shoes with the best intentions in the world.

For the sake of completeness, see the trailer for The Red Shoes:

© 2010 Tobi Tobias

Note: The photos of the young Prince reproduced here are from George Balanchine’s celebrated version of The Nutcracker, inspired by the Russian production of his youth. Balanchine himself played the role as a student in the St. Petersburg academy that trained dancers for the celebrated company we now know as the Kirov or Maryinsky Ballet. Each photo shows the Prince in the mime monologue with which he tells the Sugar Plum Fairy about his earlier battle with the Mouse King and his retinue. Balanchine himself often coached the School of American Ballet student assigned the role.

November’s rolling along toward December and the Winter Solstice, it’s already twilight by four o’clock, and the news of the world is not good. In these dark times (both literal and figurative), people–at least those who still have jobs and roofs over their heads–are inclined to indulge in frenzied bouts of shopping and preparations for gastronomic bravura as they anticipate “the holidays.”

Mercifully, the hectic tempo of the season is soothed now and then by seasonally appropriate thoughts–even deeds–of good will to all men (and women, of course) and by visions of an alternate world offered by theatrical performance. Here’s where The Nutcracker comes in, being a ballet that depicts Christmas in both its domestic and magical guise and lets us see it through childhood’s unfettered imagination.

Many a version of this venerable ballet exists, varying the era and the locale or culture of the original (Victorian period; upper-middle-class) or, more radically, changing the very concept of the work. The original Nutcracker ballet, created in Russia in 1892 by Marius Petipa and Lev Ivanov, was based on E.T.A. Hoffmann’s intriguing tale The Nutcracker and the Mouse King (1816). Its music, commissioned from Tchaikovsky, is one of the Western world’s most evocative scores.

Beginning with George Balanchine’s definitive version of The Nutcracker, choreographed for the New York City Ballet in 1954, the work has gradually become–at least in the States–an annual destination for holiday-minded viewers and a cash cow that saves the company producing it from financial ruin. People who couldn’t care less about ballet enjoy The Nutcracker; susceptible children are inspired by seeing it to clamor for dance lessons; and experts in the field never tire of mining outstanding productions of it for new sources of delight and new meanings. The most faithful Nutcracker viewer I’ve known, the late Edward Gorey, a notable author-artist with a pronounced penchant for classical dancing, told me that he attended every performance, year after year, of the City Ballet’s production, which typically runs for eight or nine performances a week, for five weeks.

In a four-part series under the umbrella title “Winter Solstice,” I’ll be writing about three of the many Nutcracker productions here in New York, one by one. There are several other local versions worth viewing–and I’ve seen some of them in previous years–but the ones I’ve chosen for this venture seem to me the ones likely to reach the widest audience. They are:

The Nutcracker / Choreographer: George Balanchine (1954) / New York City Ballet / David H. Koch Theater, Lincoln Center / November 26, 2010 – January 2, 2011

The Hard Nut / Choreographer: Mark Morris (1991) / Mark Morris Dance Group / BAM Howard Gilman Opera House / December 10 – 19

The Nutcracker / Choreographer: Alexei Ratmansky (world premiere) / American Ballet Theatre / BAM Howard Gilman Opera House / December 22, 2010 – January 2, 2011

Meanwhile, I offer below some of my earlier thoughts about the Balanchine Nutcracker.

THREE ARTICLES ON BALANCHINE’S NUTCRACKER:

The essay below was first posted on Voice of Dance, November 26, 2008.

Thoughts on Balanchine’s Nutcracker

New York City Ballet: George Balanchine’s The Nutcracker
New York State Theater, NYC
November 28, 2008 – January 3, 2009

 

 

 

Yes, we–believers and doubters alike–take our children, grandchildren, and godchildren to see the New York City Ballet dance George Balanchine’s version of The Nutcracker, created in 1954 and an annual Christmastide event ever since. Many youngsters also dance in it, if they’re being trained at the School of American Ballet, the company’s rigorous academy. But this ballet is in no way mere kiddie fare. It offers the adult much food for thought–and reverie.

After Tchaikovsky’s celestial overture–during which we gaze at a front drop showing an angel spreading starlight over the snow-covered roofs of a gemütlich German town some 200 years ago–we get our first glimpse of a pair of children gazing with unquenchable curiosity at a world from which, for one good reason or other, they have been excluded. Marie and her rambunctious kid brother peer through the keyhole into the drawing room where their parents are putting the finishing touches on the massive candlelit Christmas tree and arranging the presents destined for the children and their young cousins and friends who are about to arrive. The firmly shut door means “Children, you may not look–yet.”

The ensuing party is a lively one, tamed by the grace of formal social dancing in which three generations join and the examples of civilized adult manners, along with friendly admonitions to over-boisterous youngsters. It harbors areas of mystery, too. They center on the presence of the elderly, eccentric Godfather Drosselmeier (accompanied by a solemn handsome nephew just a few years older than Marie and the rough-and-tumble boys at the festivities).

Drosselmeier seems capable of magical feats far more complex than the scarf tricks with which he first entertains the children. An ingenious inventor of mechanical toys, he has fashioned adult-size wind-up dolls and, especially for Marie, whose fancy it captures immediately, a foot-high working nutcracker in soldier’s garb. But then her overexcited, jealous little brother seizes it and dashes it to the floor so that its jaws, with their prominent teeth, can no longer crack nuts to deliver their sweet kernels.

When the party ends, as all parties must, and the guests have departed, Marie reappears in the deserted drawing room in her angelic nightclothes. She has left her bed to succor her beloved Nutcracker. The young girl–a tiny, fragile figure in the large, silent room–peers through its French windows at the wintry midnight townscape, but it is too dark to make anything out. It’s a lonely moment, and she comforts herself by curling up on the sofa, cradling her broken treasure.

 

Now vivid clues to more frightening, perhaps evil, aspects of life are introduced into Marie’s home–in which she is used to being cosseted with love, creature comforts, and safety–seemingly because the prepubescent girl is getting old enough to come face to face with a few threatening adult realities. Under the cover of night, Godfather Drosselmeier returns, mends the Nutcracker for the child he clearly adores, displays its face beside his own as if to point out a resemblance–and conjures up an army of mice.

More and more, as the decades have slipped by, the rodents–the king with seven heads, each crowned, his rodent family and friends, and a bevy of rodent offspring (a grotesque parallel to the human guests at the Christmas Eve party?)–have made the ensuing scene of the battle with the mice more comic than scary, a pity, I think; the balance was more effective when it went the opposite way.

Marie awakens to witness startling transformations. The Christmas tree grows to gargantuan size. The toy soldiers, neatly arranged in a case in the drawing room grow to her own height and come to life to battle the mice. The bed that Drosselmeier’s nephew earlier offered Marie for her broken Nutcracker magically scoots away as if of its own volition to be replaced by a life-size bed, and the Nutcracker, now grown as well, charges into battle to protect the terrified Marie. The changes of size and awakening to new powers hint at the physical and emotional processes of puberty, during which a child can seem to grow in body and soul overnight.

It is through the mice’s invasion, though, that Marie’s mettle is tested. The valiant Nutcracker is responsible for the necessary swordplay, but when it looks as if he may be defeated, Marie has the courage and the presence of mind to distract the Mouse King by throwing her slipper at him, so the prince can get the upper hand, slaughter the royal rodent, and hold aloft one of its seven golden crowns. (The boy will give Marie full credit for her bravery in recounting the event to the Sugar Plum Fairy in Act II–in a pantomime solo Balanchine himself performed as a ballet student at Russia’s renowned Maryinsky Theatre.)

Meanwhile, again as if by magic, the Nutcracker is stripped in the blink of an eye of his soldier outfit to reveal the elegant costume of a storybook princeling. With immaculate chivalry, he presents the tiny, gleaming crown to Marie and leads her out into the landscape she only peered at through the window earlier, it being imperceptible to her while she was a child sheltered in her own home. The scene they traverse is a forest swept by falling snow, with (human) snowflakes whirling through it, as if wafted by the wind. This is the realm of unmarred nature in which events once conjured up only by the imagination are now really about to take place.

At the Christmas party, we also witness Marie’s early lessons in love, first when she cuddles her Nutcracker while her little cousins and girlfriends rock the dolls they’ve received as presents, then when she solemnly shakes the hand of Drosselmeier’s nephew, to thank him for bringing her the miniature bed in which her injured Nutcracker can repose. Lastly, once the other guests have left for home, the boy escorted away by his uncle, the girl led off to bed in the opposite direction by her mother on a darkening stage, each of the youngsters extends a yearning arm toward the other, as if to promise that the bond beginning to form between them will not be broken.

In Act II, when Marie and the Nutcracker Prince find themselves in the Kingdom of Sweets ruled over by the Sugar Plum Fairy, we’ve entered the domain of imagination given free rein. In one way it’s an homage to the ingenuous childish dream of possessing the full spectrum of deliciousness. In another, it contains a moral: the youngsters are being rewarded for mature, adroit behavior in their encounter with the marauding mice. Balanchine, as he said on another occasion, is having his cake and eating it.

Sweets from all corners of the universe are presented to the regally enthroned children and dance for them–candy canes, marzipan shepherdesses, hot chocolate–each according to its kind. Eventually, though, it’s time for Marie and her young prince to return to ordinary life, albeit in a magical sleigh pulled by reindeer that fly through the air. Imagination has been given its due and the youngsters have had their vision of pleasure which will no doubt sustain them throughout their lives, but there may be some relief, too, in returning to the familiarity of the commonplace.

Balanchine teaches many a lesson in The Nutcracker but doesn’t press any of them upon the spectator. They are simply there to be ferreted out or absorbed unconsciously, and all the more intriguing for that. For example, the choreographer uses children of different ages (giving each group dance material within its capabilities, which is then brilliantly executed), fully professional adult dancers of varying ranks, company apprentices in walk-ons, and a few senior artists in character roles. In this way, Balanchine shows how a dancer usually begins as an absurdly young child and then (if the will and the body hold fast and luck blesses the enterprise) progresses, stage by hard-worn stage, in his exacting trade.

Balanchine’s Nutcracker is also a treatise on the nature of reality and illusion–and a child’s uncanny ability to live in both worlds, moving fluidly between them. In the more rigidly compartmentalized adult world, this is a gift most often retained by artists.

© VoiceofDance.com 2008

The following piece was first posted on SEEING THINGS, November 27, 2003

A “Nutcracker” Anecdote

New York City Ballet: The Nutcracker / New York State Theater, Lincoln Center, NYC / November 28, 2003 – January 4, 2004

The Nutcracker, in George Balanchine’s (for me) definitive version, danced by the New York City Ballet, opens November 28 at the New York State Theater for a run of six weeks. I know it well, not just as a dance critic but also as a one-time ballet mother whose School of American Ballet-attending child was for several years a member of the show’s huge cast of kids.

In this latter guise–conveyer of child to endless rehearsals–I, along with the other moms, dads, and nannies, occasionally got to watch a stage run-through. I remember in particular a dress rehearsal supervised by Mr. B himself. Decades later, it still provides me with a clue to the great man’s sensibility. On this occasion, matters had worked around to the point where Marie, the ballet’s juvenile heroine, terrified by the attack of the predatory mice, flees to a white-ruffled bed, stands on it for a moment, all innocence and vulnerability in her little white nightdress, then tumbles backward in a faint.

Her fall looked fine, albeit a little smudged, to me, but Balanchine wasn’t satisfied. He asked that she repeat it and was no happier with the result. He went up to her and, with typical gentle courtesy, worked directly with her–quietly and intimately, as if the two of them were alone on the stage–explaining and showing what he wanted. Then he stood back as she tried again. It was still not right in Balanchine’s eyes. Turning from her so that she didn’t see his little twitch of impatience and exasperation, he addressed the children’s ballet master and the other assistants in attendance: “Somebody teach her how to faint.”

How to bow, how to faint, how to waltz. Over years of mere glimpses of Balanchine at work and many an interview with his dancers, I came to understand that these skills were as important to the choreographer as a breathtaking mastery of the classical dance vocabulary he did so much to advance. I think it disturbed him at the core when dancers (even child dancers, because they represented his art’s future) couldn’t execute convincingly the moves that any citizen of civilization can perform almost instinctively. Balanchine, as his work reveals, gloried in the high artifice of ballet, but he never divorced his art from human nature.

Photo credit: Paul Kolnik: George Balanchine’s Nutcracker

© 2003 Tobi Tobias

The following review was first posted in the Culture section of Bloomberg News, November 29, 2007.

City Ballet’s Annual ‘Nutcracker’ Defies Gravity

 

 

Nov. 29 (Bloomberg) — A bracing tonic for the Scrooges among us is “The Nutcracker,” choreographed to Tchaikovsky’s captivating score by George Balanchine for the New York City Ballet.

In the course of its annual five-week run at the New York State Theater (this year, through Dec. 30), it regularly features the company’s seasoned stars as well as stars-in-the making; alternating casts of some 40 Lilliputian children from the School of American Ballet, impeccably rehearsed by Garielle Whittle; and scenic wonders such as a Christmas tree that grows to a surreal height, lights flickering.

You know the story: At a decorous Christmas Eve party long ago, Godfather Drosselmeier gives Marie, the prepubescent daughter of the house, a magical nutcracker that sets in motion striking transformations and wish fulfillments. These climax in a visit to the Sugar Plum Fairy, who reigns over the Land of Sweets, with Marie escorted by the nutcracker now transmuted into the young prince of her girlish dreams.

The opening night’s Sugar Plum Fairy, Maria Kowroski, mistress of adagio dancing, gave a ravishing account of the ballet’s climactic duet. Her Cavalier, Charles Askegard, was secure enough to toss her into the air for a moment midway through their fish-dive maneuver that is already a tour de force: “Look, Sugar, no hands!”

 

 

More surprisingly, Kowroski was radiant and tender at her entrance, reigning over the flock of tiny angels that scoots across the stage in interweaving patterns as if on ball bearings.

Ashley Bouder, as the Dewdrop leaping and whirling her way through a corps of Flowers, was even more astounding than usual in her athletic brilliance. Audiences adore her. I still have reservations about her dancing, which is two-dimensional rather than sculptural, a phenomenon that a camera could render perfectly. Live dancing demands more depth.

I also miss the whiff of tragedy that Heather Watts once brought to this role, as if to reflect the evanescence of a dewdrop’s perfection. But perhaps that is too much to ask these days when bravura technique is valued above subtler qualities.

The generation of nascent ballerinas was represented by Erica Pereira and Rachel Piskin, not long out of their student years at SAB. They seconded the remarkable young virtuoso Daniel Ulbricht in the shamelessly politically incorrect pseudo-Chinese dance, “Tea,” which represents one of the treats displayed in the second act’s “Land of Sweets.”

Among the children in leading roles, Jonathan Alexander stood out for his spontaneous exuberance as the naughty kid brother. The all-important character role of Herr Drosselmeier lies at the other end of the age scale. Playing the enigmatic inventor and magician who makes Marie’s dreams (as well as the nightmares) come true, Robert La Fosse has toned down his earlier over-the-top interpretation. Now he displays just the right blending of strangeness and fantasy.

Through Dec. 30 at the New York State Theater, Lincoln Center. Information: +1-212-870-5570; http://www.nycballet.com.

© 2007 Bloomberg L.P. All rights reserved.

Sasha Waltz & Guests: Gezeiten / BAM Howard Gilman Opera House / November 3-6, 2010

Three doors, phantasmagorically mismatched, open onto an empty room. The paint on its walls has peeled away in jagged fragments to reveal two previous colors. This derelict space could provide shelter only to the desperate. One of the doors has a thick brick frame that juts into the room. It’s easily imagined as the entrance to a crematorium; instantly you think Holocaust. It turns out that Sasha Waltz, who choreographed this dance-theater piece–Gezeiten (Tides), at BAM’s Howard Gilman Opera House, November 3-6–has been thinking about a more inclusive range of crises and catastrophes: 9/11, Katrina, earthquakes, tsunamis, genocide–all the disasters, natural and man-made, that the human flesh and spirit are heirs to.

Gezeiten is divided into three sections. The first is the most recognizable as dancing. Its mood is set by a man and woman who enter first, one body tightly behind the other, like sardines in a can. The pair paces the room cautiously, staring straight ahead, as the blind might. Other couples join them, replicating the first couple’s posture and gait, but soon the whole group flares out into bold motion, limbs partitioning the air, one partner propelling or cantilevering the other, exiting and reentering, then beginning to run–away from what? toward what? They toss each other’s bodies into the air with increasing vehemence. In between these wildly accelerating moves they return to order in a series of long line-ups. Rooted to the floor, they rise and sink in simple patterns. Pattern itself segues into the mechanical, then obsessive repetition of a single gesture. All the dancers flee but one, who remains in a slowly failing light, mindlessly reiterating the group’s last move.
Some of this material is accompanied by silence, some by fragments of Bach’s music for the cello, played by a man in a downstage corner, as if to remind us that bodies still able to respond to rhythm and melody by dancing retain some aspect of their humanity. Then the ambient sounds of war and destruction take over.

The second section is more literal, like silent film or naturalistic pantomime. The doors are now shut. Furniture has appeared–tables, chairs with screaming-red plastic upholstery as if from a cheap mid-20th century luncheonette, and a worn-out bed with an iron bedstead. The dancers–settlers in this closed camp–battle amongst themselves, then stack the furniture and climb onto its precarious safety. One guy becomes self-elected bully-in-chief, urging the mob to join in the abuse of his scapegoat, even after the helpless man has fallen. The agitated crowd gabbles in a cacophony of languages (the cast actually comes from many different lands). Another man starts tearing up the floorboards, eventually erecting four tombstone-like crosses on the site. A small woman hunched over a black pail–containing what?–sobs unremittingly. A woman in a white clinician’s coat tries to comfort her (in vain of course).

The group quiets down, eats, drinks, forms a docile chorus to sing a little folk song sotto voce, then turns against its own members once again. Suddenly they’re besieged from outside–air-raid style sounds, smoke, darkness, fire–by a force against which their shelter proves inadequate. The fire shoots up in a single spiral, orange and yellow flames greedily rushing upward, apparently stealing all the available air. The fugitives collapse and vanish–except for the woman who grieved over the contents of the black bucket (the remains of her child, I guessed morbidly). As if finally accepting the inevitable, she puts herself to sleep on the worn-out mattress of the iron bed.

The third and last section of Gezeiten is a succession of surreal events that the spectator must interpret as s/he chooses. With the doors open again, “stuff” keeps on happening, in vignette after vignette. It’s well-nigh impossible to know what any of the events signify or how they relate to one another. The most solid item in this theater of the absurd has the floor boards mysteriously rising up at crazed angles and crashing down again, accompanied by hacking sounds, then darkness again, with quick-shifting beams of light ferreting out figures hunting god knows what, fleeing, or–justifiably, to be sure–going berserk.

It’s in this final section that you see why some dance observers believe Waltz has been influenced by the late Pina Bausch. The stage is full of Bauschian enigmas, Bauschian violence, even a sumptuous Bauschian evening dress or two (though not, as in Bausch’s earlier works, from the thrift shops, but more along designer lines, as in the later ones.) There are, moreover, Bauschian rivulets of water, spilling portentously and ludicrously from unlikely orifices. Lacking, alas, is the sense one had with Bausch (before she tamed her aesthetic) of a choreographer throwing caution to the winds as well as the wry Bauschian sense of humor.

Most significant, however, is the fact that all the strange visions Waltz conjures up lack theatrical power. One reason for this is that too many things are occurring at once, but the material itself just isn’t charged. I won’t bother you with details on the finale, dominated by some giant worms who had apparently inherited the earth; it was simply too silly.

I was interested in Gezeiten almost all of the time I was watching it–though nearly two hours of attention to work like this without any intermission is asking a lot of many viewers. Yet the more I thought about the piece afterward, the more I found it wanting. Most peculiar, I think, is the fact that the piece is not expressive. Events just happen, but the dancers–otherwise very deft and precise–project very little, if any, emotion about their plight. Sorrow, joy, rage, fear, and panic seem to have been excised from their vocabulary. Obviously they were carrying out the instructions they’d been given (perhaps along the lines of Balanchine’s “Don’t act dear; just do.”) But the Waltz who states in interviews that she’s charting the broad spectrum of people’s reactions to dire situations and who claims, moreover, that she’s illustrating the idea that reconstruction always follows destruction–that Sasha Waltz reads more eloquently than what is actually accomplished on her stage. Of course in Europe–Waltz is German and based in Berlin–program notes are considered an integral part of the show.

© 2010 Tobi Tobias

Kidd Pivot Frankfurt RM: Crystal Pite’s Dark Matters / Alexander Kasser Theater, Montclair State University, Montclair, New Jersey / October 21-24, 2010

Name Crystal Pite and most of the dance enthusiasts I know still say “Who?” Maybe it’s just America that doesn’t know her. Yet. Pite’s had a solid career as a dancer–in her native Canada and beyond, notably with William Forsythe, in Germany. Turned choreographer, she’s created pieces for companies of some rank, among them Nederlands Dans Theater, Ballett Frankfurt, and Les Ballets Jazz de Montréal. She now has her own troupe–Kidd Pivot Frankfurt RM.

I first saw Pite’s work in New York when Cedar Lake Contemporary Ballet performed her Ten Duets on a Theme of Rescue. Amidst a familiar crop of would-be chic, portentous, hollow works (beautifully danced, mind you), it made its mark. Abstract with an emotional subtext, it was meaningful as I watched, and proved to linger in my memory. So off I went to New Jersey to see Pite’s program-length Dark Matters, part of the Peak Performances series at the Alexander Kasser Theater, on the campus of Montclair State University. NIMBY, you might say.

Dark Matters (the latter word can be taken as noun, verb, or both) has two parts, separated by an intermission. The first half is bound to charm everyone. Performed by itself, it would be perfect for the New Victory Theater, which deals in productions for children that won’t drive the sophisticated adults escorting them to thoughts of infanticide due to the boredom or revulsion that crude or stupid “kiddie” shows arouse in them.

Our first glimpse at the rise of the curtain is, indeed, darkness. Then scanning beams of light–as if from a detective’s flashlight or searchlights from the roof of a prison, thwarting escapes–pick out segments of a poky pre-modern study where an Inventor (let’s call him) works, obsessively intent on his latest project. The scene is simply rendered by Jay Gower Taylor, yet it’s redolent of Dickens, or maybe Edgar Allen Poe, or then again E.T.A. Hoffmann, whose tale The Sandman inspired the libretto for the ballet Coppélia.

With a steadier if still dusky light we see that the Inventor is fashioning a mannequin with articulated joints–a cousin to the ones artists use for anatomical drawings. A quartet of puppeteers appears–or were they always there, in the shadows?–to manipulate the finished figure with miraculous exactitude. As in traditional Japanese theater, these facilitators are completely shrouded in black; even their faces are veiled. They huddle together, wielding long wands with strings that attach to the delicately built miniature man. Self-obliterating, they nearly convince the viewer that the Inventor is teaching the mannequin to walk, each stage of that difficult, glorious process exquisitely defined.

But many an inventor has seen his creation get out of hand and turn on him in close-to-human guise, lacking nothing but a soul. Literature loves the theme: Think of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Think of Frankenstein. Think of Hoffmann’s Automata as well as The Sandman. As soon as it can walk fluidly, the Inventor’s mannequin begins to display feelings–first hurt, then annoyance, then rage against its creator. Its attacks grow increasingly violent until they wreck the room and then the man himself. Both are left lying inert–motionless, unconscious–in exactly the same position on the workroom floor.

To this old theme, usually filed under the rubric of (entertaining) horror, Pite adds the dimension of humor. She makes the whole process of science usurping God’s role as creator-in-chief funny–funny in the best way, which involves magic, irony, and a definite vein of the tragic.

The second half of Dark Matters is ostensibly an abstract version of the first half. And indeed certain moves in Part One are repeated in Part Two, like dutiful reminders of the preceding narrative. Overall, though, the movement is hit-the-mark precise and extraordinarily powerful, the energy emanating surprisingly from shifting zones of the body. You wouldn’t want to get in its way.

Solos seem to make statements, though you’d be hard put to name their various topics. Group passages, which owe a lot to contact improvisation, emphasize twining and cantilevering. But, sad to say, despite the dancers’ whiplash power, most of this half is not as engaging as what came before. It goes on too long, too, making us all the more aware of our disappointment. This section is redeemed in a way–and the whole piece unified–by a final, contrastingly tender, passage in which the slight, graceful man who played the Inventor gently solaces and supports a woman almost stripped to the skin, helps her flex her knees and ankles and–yes–walk. Together they manage a slow, quiet duet of mutual aid and mutual commitment, which is, perhaps, as close as post-modernism can get to love.

In interviews and in a personal statement from Pite tucked into the press kit, the ultra-brainy choreographer talks about scientists’ concept of “dark matter.” It’s a force, they claim, that makes up a goodly portion of the universe. However, they can only infer its existence and nature; as yet they have no absolute proof. According to Pite, the doubt that haunts this theory parallels a dance-maker’s (i.e., her own) “not knowing” about her creations, which causes her to work in a state of agony, and so forth. She even quotes the playwright John Patrick Shanley in her program notes: “Doubt requires more courage than conviction does, and more energy; because conviction is a resting place and doubt is . . . a passionate exercise.” We don’t need to know all this; Pite’s piece speaks for itself–and positively about her future.

The audience for Pite’s opening night by no means filled the house, but it was certainly enthusiastic. More than half of the viewers were young people whom I took to be Montclair State students. This largely local crowd made me wonder how much of the NYC audience Montclair could attract on a regular basis. The Brooklyn Academy of Music finally persuaded Manhattanites that they could cross the river for art’s sake, but BAM was accessible by public transportation within the MetroCard zone. For NYC dwellers, who are often car-less, Montclair is still a stretch–as much mental as geographical.

The Kasser Theater is accessible by charter bus from the Port Authority Bus Terminal on weekends and by a NJ Transit line from Penn Station on weekdays. The travel cost is rock bottom as are tickets to the shows. Still, why bother, when Manhattan (with some help from BAM) is still the dance capital of (at least) America? I’ll tell you why: For several seasons now, Jedediah Wheeler, executive director of the Kasser’s arts and cultural programming, has exercised his sense of what’s unique and worthy to choose forward-looking choreography that honestly deserves that description.
Granted, if you’re a New York dweller, the Kasser is not a mere twenty minutes away from your hearth. But surely you can count the travel time as a little vacation from the hubbub of urban life and chat with your seat mate, do those deep-breathing exercises meant to relieve your stress, read, or simply dream. When you arrive, inhale slowly; the air is amazingly fresh.

© 2010 Tobi Tobias

Matthew Bourne’s Swan Lake / New York City Center / October 13 – November 7, 2010

Once upon a time, as Matthew Bourne tells us, there was a crown prince, a supersensitive fellow with an emotionally frozen mother (see Freud). Naturally, he gets himself entrapped by a tiara-coveting floozy (see the tabloids’ take on royalty), all the while fumbling at and fretting over the arid court duties he despises.

His instincts for romance, sex, true love, freedom from constraint, even rendezvous with danger–every young man’s birthright, wouldn’t you agree?–lead him down an unusual path. Moonlit, it takes him to the water’s edge, where he encounters the flock of swans he has often dreamed of. (At home in bed, his sleepy-toy is a plush swan.) The leader of the flock, called simply The Swan, and indeed all of the others are male–with shorn heads and bare chests chalked white, faces scored by an inky streak suggesting a beak, nether parts concealed to the knees with thickets of white feathers. Moving with heavily muscled grace–now blunt, now sensuous–they convey a terrifying power.

I can’t wait any longer to say that the current version of Matthew Bourne’s Swan Lake, at City Center through November 7, is the most gratifying re-invention of the Petipa-Ivanov Swan Lake, I’ve ever had the good luck to see. The production, a significant reworking of the piece since its first New York run in 1998 (it premiered in London in 1995), gives it far more meaningful dance–in terms of steps, gesture, and deeply visceral execution–and this is exactly what it needed.

Set to a recording of Tchaikovsky’s evocative score (essentially uncut) for the original ballet, Bourne’s Lake operates in three different arenas–often simultaneously. The simplest is an account of royal life, which turns palace into prison, encourages covert misbehavior (Her Majesty’s daily agenda is a mix of opening exhibitions, christening sea liners, and secret trysts), and suppresses basic human instincts so that they must be converted into over-the-top dreams. The second is an account of the life of the id, which can be thwarted but, blessedly, never fully quelled. Last but far from least is the spinning of a complex and subtle relationship of the Bourne version to the traditional Swan Lake. The latter is, of course, the emblem of classical dance, with its tragic tale of the poignant Odette, transformed into a swan by a wicked, perhaps lascivious, magician; her evil alter ego, Odile (a single ballerina usually portrays the stories of both O’s); and Prince Siegfried, who is fatally distracted by the glittering bad girl into mistaking her for the good one.

This multilayered arrangement is ambitious and, to be frank, it doesn’t always cohere. Nevertheless, as with Alexei Ratmansky’s wonderful Namouna, you forgive the little lurches because the material is so fertile and engaging and its treatment so f

The top stars of Bourne’s Lake on the night I saw it (the taxing main roles are double-cast) were Simon Williams as The Prince and Jonathan Ollivier in the dual role of The Swan (Odette) and The Stranger (Odile). Williams, persuasive because of his boyish looks and earnest attitude–like those of the young Baryshnikov–is a very good dancer and a resourceful actor (when he despairs, as he often does, it’s hard to resist giving him instant empathy.)

Ollivier is a remarkable dancer–long and lean, with a space-slicing leap that conjures up an image of a sword doing its worst. In his Odette guise, he’s a mournful outsider seeking a love he yearns for but has never known. In his Odile incarnation (wearing provocative black leather trousers) he is raw, ruthless, and commanding. Crashing a dressed-to-kill party at the castle, he makes aggressive sexual overtures to every femme in sight, doing double duty with The Queen (Nina Goldman, cool even at her most randy) and turns the presentation of the princesses auditioning for the role of Consort to the Heir Apparent into a satisfyingly wild orgy.

The high point of the dancing is the love pas de deux for The Prince and The Swan. The duet has a vein of antagonism–often a part of lovemaking–but inevitably the two succumb to the white heat of their mutual attraction. The movement vocabulary is, first and foremost, very creaturely, full of well-observed swan mannerisms and extensions of them. The Swan nuzzles The Prince with the sweetness of an adolescent newly aware of physical love. The Prince lifts The Swan so that the bird appears to take flight in all its wide-winged magnificence and the image becomes a metaphor for the notion that both partners are soaring high–on the joy of finding, against all odds, the perfect mate.

The ensemble extends the idea of the wild, free animal driven by primal instincts with movement that’s bold and weighty, sinewy and sensuous, insinuating a danger that’s implicitly evil.

The Prince achieves ecstatic release in his mating with The Swan at the price of his life (and The Swan’s life too). True to their breed, the swans in this covey are vicious when the objects of their attachment are threatened. (Once, in Central Park, I fled from a male swan that decided I was getting too close to his cygnets.) The swans turn on their leader and his lover and destroy them. But Bourne allows his Swan and Prince the apotheosis tradition calls for. Through a skylight in the Prince’s bedroom the pair can be glimpsed together–at last and forever. I didn’t weep when I saw this last night, but now, remembering it and writing about it, I feel, welling up, the tears it has earned.

Admittedly I’m a Janey-come-lately to admirers of this show. I managed to resist it–vigorously–at its New York premiere a dozen years back, though it subsequently copped three Tony Awards. The production has been touring worldwide ever since, applauded by a great range of spectators, from balletomanes to folks cheerfully unaware of–or perhaps immune to–the pleasures of classical dancing. Meanwhile Bourne has created other works for his company, New Adventures, several of them with similarly oblique takes on landmark works of art. I hope that next time round, I’m quicker to catch on.

© 2010 Tobi Tobias

By Martha Ullman West, guest contributor

A recent National Endowment for the Arts survey shows that per capita attendance at the ballet in Oregon is fourth in the nation; in Washington State it is even higher. Could this be because we have decent-to-excellent ballet in a part of the country better known for the bounty of its rivers, the height of its trees, and the beauty of its scenery?

Lord knows, ballet attendance in the United States as a whole is woefully small (at best four percent of the population, surveys show), and the three major companies in this region–Seattle’s Pacific Northwest Ballet, Portland’s Oregon Ballet Theatre, and the Eugene Ballet Company–are in a constant struggle for financial survival. Nevertheless, they are managing to produce pretty much the same array of story ballets as the big guns in New York and San Francisco, including, not surprisingly, The Nutcracker, in three different versions. OBT is the only west coast company performing Balanchine’s; PNB does Kent Stowell’s, with Maurice Sendak’s sets and costumes; EBC performs artistic director Toni Pimble’s pirate-themed rendition.
This season, the Seattle and Eugene companies will present Cinderella; PNB will perform Balanchine’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream; and OBT opened on October 9 with its first evening length Sleeping Beauty, staged, after Petipa, by artistic director Christopher Stowell. With a company of 32 dancers and apprentices, the challenge is the ensemble dances, not the principal roles or divertissements, although many roles will be double and triple cast. Three company ballerinas are capable of a fine, nuanced Aurora: Alison Roper, Yuka Iino, and Kathi Martuza, and I look forward to seeing them partnered by principals Artur Sultanov, Chauncey Parsons, and such upcoming soloists as Brennan Boyer.

When Stowell took over OBT’s directorship in the fall of 2003, following the departure of founding artistic director James Canfield, the last thing I expected was a traditional, program-length Beauty seven years later, or for that matter, in June 2006, a complete Swan Lake. Canfield, well trained in the classical tradition by Mary Day, had mounted Beauty’s Act III early in his tenure, which began in 1989, and his own Nutcracker, in a gorgeous Campbell Baird production, emphasized 19th-century classicism. The repertory did contain several Balanchine ballets, a decent version of Giselle thanks to then ballet master Mark Goldweber, and, while he was still alive, the neo-classical ballets of associate artistic director Dennis Spaight. Canfield commissioned work from Donald Byrd, Bebe Miller, and Karole Armitage, and, to his credit, from Portland’s modern-dance choreographers.

However, in part for financial reasons, the emphasis at the end of Canfield’s tenure was on his own work, which had increasingly moved away from traditional and neo-classical ballet. Let it be said that Canfield, who had a short but stellar performing career with the Joffrey Ballet and continued to dance for nearly a decade with OBT, is an extremely good teacher, and insisted on strong classical technique at all times; he just stopped using it in his choreography.

Stowell, the son of Francia Russell and Kent Stowell, PNB’s founding artistic directors, trained by his parents and the School of American Ballet, enjoyed a lengthy dancing career (16 years) with the San Francisco Ballet, performing in a wide array of choreographic styles, from Balanchine’s to Mark Morris’s. The minute he hit town in July of 2003, he drew on his contacts with choreographers in whose work he had performed, not to mention the Balanchine Trust. His first season, which happened to be Balanchine’s centennial, included his Rubies; The Nutcracker, alas in a dreary second-hand production; Serenade, already in the rep; and Duo Concertant. The opening program told Portland precisely where he came from, adding to the curtain-raising Rubies a Helgi Tomasson pas de deux, his father’s Duo Fantasy, and Paul Taylor’s Company B.

The rest of the season was a clear indication of where Stowell was headed. February concerts included the premiere of a new Firebird by Yuri Possokhov in a charming production with children from OBT’s school cast as monsters, and the premiere of Stowell’s own Adin, a modest work to Shostakovich. In the concluding concerts, Christopher Wheeldon’s There Where She Loved received its American premiere, programmed with Julia Adam’s new Il Nodo, danced to medieval music, and, to my joy, Ashton’s Façade, staged by Alexander Grant. It was, after all, Ashton’s centennial as well as Balanchine’s.

In subsequent years, Stowell added works by Jerome Robbins, James Kudelka, Trey McIntyre, Twyla Tharp (the “Junk” duet from Known by Heart, not, thankfully, yet another Sinatra Suite), and Wheeldon’s Rush. He also commissioned two ballets from Nicolo Fonte. Bolero, which premiered on a French program in 2008 and was seen again at the conclusion of last season, could well become a signature piece for the company. While it is marked by the style du jour–relentless high-energy dancing–Fonte, unlike Jorma Elo and Stanton Welch, among others, understands that just as comedy underscores tragedy, stillness and breath highlight speed. For me, last season’s best program was February’s pairing of The Four Temperaments with Stowell’s one-act A Midsummer Night’s Dream, a delicious, sophisticated take on Mendelssohn’s music. Stowell’s choreography in general is marked, as was his dancing, by intense musicality, intelligence, and wit.

A hundred miles south of Portland, the Eugene Ballet is directed by Toni Pimble, one of the very few women now heading a ballet company. She and Riley Grannan, who is the managing director, founded the company in 1978, using their state retirement money from their years of dancing in German opera ballet companies. Grannan grew up outside Eugene; Pimble is British and received her training at the Elmhurst School. Like most artistic directors, she brings her experience as a dancer to the job, and her sensibility remains quite British, particularly as expressed in her Cinderella and Romeo and Juliet. Over the years, however, she has learned about her new country by making some very interesting ballets based on Native American culture–Children of the Raven and The Skinwalkers, the latter inspired by the paintings of the Native American artist Helen Hardin. For Skinwalkers, she invented a movement vocabulary that completely avoids stereotype and is appropriate to Pueblo dancing without trying to replicate it.

Pimble is a versatile choreographer, who created a well-received neo-classical ballet, Two’s Company, for the New York City Ballet’s first Diamond Project in 1992. She has also made work on the Atlanta Ballet, Nevada Dance Theatre, and, most recently, Kansas City Ballet. A feminist–and why wouldn’t she be?–Pimble has made two ballets that are highly political: Columba Aspexit, only five minutes long, which premiered on a program of work by women choreographers to music by women composers in 1992, and in 1997 the stunning Still Falls the Rain, an abstract indictment of fundamentalist religion, based on a Taliban incident in Afghanistan, created long before 9/11 took us to war there.

While there are only four concert seasons a year in Eugene, the company tours extensively throughout the region, and with more than The Nutcracker, taking its 21 dancers, who are an international bunch–Grannan spends a lot of time filling out immigration forms–to communities as small as Florence, on the south Oregon coast. The upcoming season starts with Cinderella on October 16 and the traditional family-oriented February show contains Pimble’s Alice in Wonderland, which has a smashing corps de ballet of flamingos, coupled with a new piece by Jessica Lang. The season ends with Maurico Wainrot’s Anne Frank and a new piece by company member Gilmer Duran.

PNB did not open its 2010-2011 season with a story ballet, though Peter Boal, who took over from founding artistic directors Francia Russell and Kent Stowell in 2005, following his retirement as a principal dancer with the New York City Ballet, is ending it with the company’s first Giselle. Boal, like Janet Reed (who founded PNB’s School in 1974), Russell, and both Stowells could be categorized as part of the Kirstein-Balanchine diaspora, and he has, to be sure, both maintained and added to the company’s extensive Balanchine repertory, but in his five-year tenure he seems to be shifting the paradigm.

This season, the only Balanchine programmed is A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and, judging from the opening program as well as an all-Tharp evening scheduled for early November and a Contemporary evening in the spring that includes a world premiere by Marco Goecke, one can justifiably speculate that this neo-classically trained dancer is de-emphasizing what one might call the mother tongue. Under the umbrella title of Director’s Choice, he opens with two ballets by Jírí Kylían, Petite Mort and Sechs Tanze (a company premiere); Jerome Robbins’s Glass Pieces, another PNB premiere; and a longtime PNB standard, Nacho Duato’s Jardi Tancat. Only Glass Pieces reflects his own past with NYCB, which, to his credit, he has used to add quite a bit of Robbins’s work to PNB’s rep. The Duato, which he seems to trot out whenever the company goes on tour, a pleasant enough piece that shows the dancers can perform ersatz Graham, he owes to Stowell and Russell, who also added a great deal of contemporary work to the rep, particularly in the company’s 25th anniversary season.

Boal is determinedly not himself a choreographer; what he wants to do is bring work to the Seattle audience that it hasn’t seen before, and to challenge PNB’s fine-tuned, classically trained dancers to perform in new ways. Perhaps his most successful attempt at that was when he presented Jean Christophe Maillot’s Romeo and Juliet a couple of years ago, giving Louise Nadeau an extraordinary role as a seductive Lady Capulet and Olivier Wevers a highly sinister one as Friar Laurence. Commissioning Twyla Tharp to make two new pieces on the company was something of a coup as well. PNB remains a major company under his direction, and he and his regional colleagues are providing audiences with plenty to see. That may have something to do with comparatively high attendance at the ballet. And it certainly makes me happy.

© 2010 Martha Ullman West

Martha Ullman West grew up in New York and is now based in Portland. She has been writing about dance for Dance Magazine, Ballet Review, The Chronicle of Higher Education Review and many other publications since 1980. At present she is under contract with University Press of Florida for a book titled Making Ballet American: Todd Bolender and Janet Reed.

Counter Space: Design and the Modern Kitchen / Museum of Modern Art, NYC / September 15, 2010 – March 14, 2011

Fall for Dance / City Center, NYC / September 28 – October 9, 2010
Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch / BAM Howard Gilman Opera House, Brooklyn, NY / September 29 – October 9, 2010

Trisha Brown Dance Company / Whitney Museum of American Art, NYC / September 30 – October 3, 2010

Every now and then I steal time from dance, my regular beat, to indulge another passion: old things–vintage fashion, vintage films, vintage photography, and, yes, even vintage housewares. So of course I scurried over to the Museum of Modern Art to ogle Counter Space: Design and the Modern Kitchen. It’s at once a charming and sociopolitically resonant exhibition–the latter because, if you wanted to study the role assigned to Woman, where, until the last half-century, would you have been likeliest to find her?

The centerpiece of the show is a real room–the “Frankfurt Kitchen,” designed for public housing in 1926-27 by Margrette Schütte-Lihotzky. Not an inch of space is wasted here; austere form follows practical function without once succumbing to the adornment or idiosyncrasy that would indicate human life. Nearly all the storage space is painstakingly compartmentalized, its contents hidden but ready to hand. Peering into this room, you imagine you could stand at its center with at least one foot fused to the floor and prepare a multi-course dinner (for agoraphobics it would be paradise).

Seconding this a-place-for-everything-and-everything-in-its-place example is a late 1960s mini-kitchen cannily devised as a series of hinged rectangles. Unfurled, it reveals dedicated storage spaces; closed, it becomes a pair of hygienic-white boxes. Both kitchens pay homage to the gods of ever-increasing efficiency and, ostensibly, progress.

Second in importance only to the kitchens themselves are the handsome tools of the culinary trade, lined up in capacious vitrines. Lots of these objects will be recognizable to the comfortably-off as part of their own batterie de cuisine or that of their mother or grandmother. Most of them, sleek as Brancusi sculpture, are clearly striving to be works of art–sometimes, as I know from personal experience, at the expense of functionality.

Much as I admired the damned good design of all these things, I was gradually depressed by the pervasive sterility. When the person with whom I share a kitchen cooks, the room ends up looking like Berlin after World War II. Where, I wondered (granted, inappropriately), is the mess often associated with action–and thus with life itself? Should we cling to the Bauhaus tenet of “less is more” when chaotic abundance offers so much vitality? Ironically, chaotic abundance abounded, one way or another, in the dance events I saw in the two weeks that followed my MOMA fling.
Fall for Dance, in its seventh season at New York City Center, intentionally offers everything but the kitchen sink. It’s designed to attract newcomers to Terpsichore’s Wonderland, enticing them with $10 tickets to any of the 2100 seats in the house and then giving them four items on each program that are as disparate as dance can get, so the spectator is pretty sure of finding at least one item to fire his imagination. This season–completely sold out a week before the series started–comprises five programs, each being performed twice.

Opening night began boldly with Merce Cunningham’s complex, abstract Xover (pronounced “crossover”), perhaps the least accessible and most sophisticated work in the whole run. Danced before a backdrop by Robert Rauschenberg and accompanied by two John Cage scores (performed simultaneously), the movement is one of Cunningham’s most exquisite exercises in purity.

Minimally dressed in white practice clothes, 14 ultra-svelte dancers execute non-narrative, (ostensibly) non-expressive movement that reveals dance pared down to its essence–razor-sharp lines, lyrical curves, delicately shifting balances, and human ardor seeking ecstasy. Its centerpiece is a 7 ½ -minute duet (an eternity in dance time) for a male-female couple in which each partner calmly, delicately, and inventively responds to or supports the other’s smallest shift in position or location in space. Like Frederick Ashton’s Monotones, it’s a vision of Heaven.

Cunningham’s company, nearing the midpoint of a two-year world tour following the choreographer’s death, after which it will disband–all this according to the late master’s instruction–danced, the way all dancers should, as if this performance were their last: fully committed, aware that every living thing dies, and rejoicing in the moment.

This was a tough act to follow. Miami City Ballet, which stunned the New York audience with its vitality on its last visit, couldn’t throw caution to the winds as the virtuoso feats and rakish rhythms of Twyla Tharp’s The Golden Section demand. This is a company that has already given thrilling accounts of Tharp’s In the Upper Room and the daring Rubies section of Balanchine’s Jewels. A puzzlement, as Yul Brynner liked to say when he was the King of Siam.

The seasoned Odissi dancer Mudhavi Mudgal and her four young acolytes breathtakingly turned rouged wrist, palm, and fingers into luscious blooming flowers, but Mudgal’s choreography, dependent upon the most banal conventions of Western dance structure, stymied any possibility of transcendence.

The rocket rise to recognition of Gallim Dance utterly escapes me. I Can See Myself in Your Pupil, choreographed (I use the word generously) by the troupe’s founder-successor, Andrea Miller, manages to be both unattractive and uninteresting. It mashes together street dance bled of its freshness, gymnastics, acrobatics, and a pervasive yet unexplained hostility between the sexes. (The girls win.) It has no notion of relating to the space it inhabits, the crudest response to music, and an incredible lack of intelligence. No doubt unintentionally, it tells us something about the current state of our culture.

The late Pina Bausch, of Tanztheater Wuppertal fame, was, of course, the diva of mess. In her most potent works–before she betrayed her stern personal aesthetic and opted for pretty–she’d clutter her stage with enormous amounts of litter: earth, water, trodden blossoms, the debris created from a wall of concrete blocks that, just after the curtain went up, fell and shattered before the spectators’ eyes. Bausch would have her dancers go about their weird business obliviously treading on such material until it seemed to be a form of post-modern compost.

Subsequently she turned to more dulcet fare–younger, more technically accomplished dancers, as compared to the unique personalities of her earlier companies, and emotional relationships less cruel and fraught than her horrific vaudevilles of what it’s like to be human. Never once, though, did she forget to employ her wry humor. Often the laughter it evoked came from confrontation with the absurd, sometimes from the sight of grown-ups bent upon resurrecting their inner child.

Bausch created Vollmond (Full Moon) three years before her death in 2009. (This was the troupe’s first New York appearance without her at its helm.) Vollmond is recognizably Bauschian in its sensuous indulgence in mess. The dancers wallow in water that seems to rain from above and bubble from below as well, pouring over the stage floor towards the audience. Two hours later, the performers are wildly flinging large buckets of water against the huge boulder that serves as the only scenery, with the rock shooting the water right back–as an arc of shattered diamonds. The piece also conforms to Bausch’s customary vignette-by-vignette sequencing, never establishing a firm architectural structure for what’s going on. Like the early works, Vollmond is studded with ludicrous behavior and hostile acts, but here these elements are nowhere near so corrosive as they were in the choreographer’s heyday. This is Bausch re-imagined by the Walt Disney Studios.

While the strategies of Vollmond seem tired and thin, the work’s lack of impact is most evident in the current crew of dancers. Despite their gifts, they are mere shadows of the personas on (and with) whom Bausch originally built her church. The proof? You only have to see the performance of Dominique Mercy, who, with Robert Sturm, is now running the company and trying to discern its proper future. The lone member of the old guard still on stage, Mercy is the real thing, as is evident in his two brief appearances as a ghostly figure who doesn’t seem to belong with the others and so, quite logically, and without fuss, disappears, and in an extended contemplative solo as a guy whose quiet, profound melancholy comes from finding himself of two minds. (I imagined this dilemma: Let the company die a natural death? Turn it into a traveling Bausch museum? Join forces with an aesthetically comparable group–what about Sasha Waltz’s?–so as to have new work to invigorate the old?) For me, Mercy’s presence onstage retrieved the whole evening.

Trisha Brown, a founding star of postmodern dancing and choreography, began her 50-year career by rejecting everything but the kitchen sink when it came to the conventions of theatrical dance–movement married to music, the proscenium stage, costumes, sets, narrative, emotion–and then, without selling out, reclaiming these elements gradually in the course of her development into an internationally appreciated artist. Her recent showcase at the Whitney Museum, in a room cleared for dancers and the spectators who moved freely around them, centered on her Equipment Pieces, notably Walking on the Wall (1971) and Man Walking Down the Side of a Building (1970).

In Walking on the Wall eight dancers approach the tall ladders propped against two immaculate white walls that join at a right angle. Men and women both wear long-sleeved t-shirts and trousers that emphasize the fainter gray of their shadows. In turn, each one climbs to a height he or she will “own” and adjusts the harness that envelops the torso and is connected by cables to a track at the top of the wall. One by one, they hunker over their knees, lean out from the ladder, and step into space, placing their bare feet flat on the vertical surface, then standing straight-spined and straight-legged, and then–walking.

They walk forward and backward, stepping with grace and exquisite care over each others’ cables when they meet. If, occasionally, one of their number needs an assist, a colleague’s hand is extended and accepted, tenderly, then swiftly relinquished. Except for the sound of the cables in the tracks–like that of metal window blinds being opened or closed–the room is utterly silent and entirely calm. Now and then a female dancer who is ebullient in her earth-bound mode substitutes some gently buoyant overcurves for the serene walking pace. For the watcher, gnawing thoughts of danger and risk gradually dissolve as the dancers float across the space, a tribe of worthies for whom the Universal Law of Gravitation has been suspended.

In Man Walking Down the Side of a Building, the man I saw was Stephen Petronio. (Elizabeth Streb, shown in the photo above, alternated in the role.) The locale was the East 75th Street façade of the Whitney. The technique of the feat was similar to that used in the wall walking, but the effect was far more terrifying. Why? Because it was outdoors, with heavy rains and wind threatening. Because the “arena” was made of stone (with vicious edges). Because, with just one person executing the act–a singular hero, if you will–that figure seemed more destined to suffer a terrible fate. And because, dammit, we knew him.

Apart from pedestrians (and drivers!) who were stopped dead in their (metaphorical) tracks by the sight, the spectators were largely people well acquainted with the dance world. For them, this wasn’t just some anonymous stunt man, a professional plying his accustomed trade, who might, sadly, fall to his death, as sometimes happens at the circus. This was Stephen Petronio, an alumnus of Brown’s company, now a celebrated choreographer in his own right. He was a real person, for god’s sake, as vulnerable as you and me.

© 2010 Tobi Tobias

Dear Reader,
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