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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

Chunky Move: Mortal Engine / BAM Howard Gilman Opera House / December 9-12, 2009

Chunky Move, founded in 1995 and still led by Gideon Obarzanek, comes to us from Down Under, or Oz, as some people call Australia.

The troupe’s name indicates its original purpose–to invent dance productions that contrast with the rarefied artifice and elegance of ballet. (Originally trained in that classical genre, Obarzanek, who masterminds the group’s works, is decidedly in recovery.)

Of the Chunky Move programs I’ve seen in New York, my favorite is Tense Dave (a collaboration by Obarzanek, Lucy Guerin, and Michael Kantor), awarded a Bessie in 2008.

Especially after seeing Mortal Engine, I’m mystified by the fact that the items in Chunky Move’s repertory are so dissimilar, so different in subject, style, and tone to one another. This may be (at least in part) the result of collaborative creation. Often the makers of the movement, the set (in Tense Dave, for instance, the “stage” consists of a huge compartmentalized turntable), as well as the light, sound, costumes, and electronic gimmickry have near-equal prominence. I’d bet, too, that the performers have a lot to say about what goes on; though silent, they look articulate.

Mortal Engine is a giant step away from Tense Dave; it doesn’t even call itself a dance. According to the press release, it’s a “multimedia performance work using movement- and sound-responsive visual projections to portray an ever-shifting, shimmering world that defies the limitations of the body. A web of lasers and video projections react to the dancers’ every movement, creating a layer of virtual choreography superimposed over its physical manifestation.” Fancy talk, but you get the idea. Needless to say Mortal Engine has no definitively fixed form; it’s new every night.

So what actually goes on in the one-hour (and too long at that) intermissionless piece? On a huge tilted floor, raked toward the audience, a remarkably supple, mostly recumbent woman in a sheer-topped gray leotard curls and splays her body as if it were well-nigh boneless. After a long passage of this bravura elasticity, she’s approached by five crawling bodies bathed in inky shadows that appear to menace, even swallow, her. A section of the tilted floor is then engineered to a near-vertical position and she stands alone before it, illuminated by light so bright your eyes cringe as you watch. Next, the light fragments into a phalanx of splinters that surround her. The whole business reminded me of Joan of Arc’s trial and burning at the stake. Wondering why I had to find a familiar narrative for stage action that its creators surely conceived as abstract, I realized that what I was being offered was simply insufficient. The media were multiple, as promised, but the result was thin–and trite to boot.

In another “scene” a man and woman move as if they’re making love, at first calmly, with a voluptuous laziness, but then in a confusion of thrashing arms and legs. Apparently, not even love can save the day.

And so it goes. Shadows are always present, in one way or another, threatening vulnerable victims. Often these “ghosts” leave their image for a while, even after the figures casting them have shifted position. Later, broken down into confetti-size particles, the dark matter seems to be an element the bodies exude, infecting the world around them, or one that has inexplicably materialized from nowhere to entrap the bodies present.

The frequent alternative to these versions of dark is blinding light–sometimes as whole-body haloes or pictographs of death by electric shock, at others as patterns that trap the bodies in an inescapable maze. Sections are given over to the light alone, which forms swiftly morphing linear patterns. All the while, the sound hums, growls, throbs, buzzes, or emits static–as if it were intent upon drowning out reasonable discourse or the music of the spheres.

Finally, the show moves into a very Ayn Rand apocalyptic mood. A fog spills over the bodies onstage and invades the auditorium, accompanied by a faint smell of incense (or is it hot cinnamon toast?). A triangle of green light divided into beams and topped with a glaring spotlight (a postmodern Christmas tree sporting its star?) follows the path of the fog. After this business is given extended play, a lone figure goes stumbling towards the intense green light atop the triangle, as if to its perilous destiny. Then, in an abruptly conjured peach-tinted glow, two figures embrace. Oi vey!

It’s possible that Chunky Move’s productions fall into one of two opposed categories: Down Home or Outer Spacey. Tense Dave belongs to the first group, showing the messy drama of a confused or obsessed human being awkwardly making his way through life. Mortal Engine–cool, objective, and galactic–reminds me of nothing so much as Alwin Nikolais’s dances. Nikolais operated in the pre-electronic theater days of the mid-twentieth century, but all the concepts are the same as Mortal Engine‘s, in particular the treatment of the human body as just one of many equally fascinating elements in the universe, such as mercurial effects of sound and light. Granted, the result is occasionally magical, but it hardly provides emotional satisfaction.

© 2009 Tobi Tobias

By Christopher Caines, guest contributor

Imagine that Sol Hurok had telephoned the director of a slightly down-at-heel, raggle-taggle, time-traveling vaudeville troupe one day and said, “Parker! Listen: I need a Christmas show! A Nutcracker! Pronto! My Russians canceled. I can get you a couple weeks of one-nights. If you deliver, maybe we can make it an annual thing. Can you do it?”

Parker looks around the studio. The troupe has a ragbag assortment of old props–some beat-up top hats and tails, a red feather boa, a fan, silk flowers, sunglasses, a flashlight, a tiny fake Christmas tree for holidays on the road, a stack of maple-leaf-red knit watch caps left over from a winter tour to Ontario, plus bubble wrap to pack it all up in. There’s a Chinese takeout container from somebody’s lunch. Tap shoes? Got ’em. Plus a trunk full of battered toe-dancing shoes the dancers found, left behind on a railway platform by one of the Ballet(s) Russe(s) on a whistle-stop tour that Parker’s group crossed paths with in Des Moines or somewhere. Luckily the troupe does have the right music: a stack of 78s including a set of this Tchaikovsky fellow’s Nutcracker Suite–though a few of the disks are scratched, broken, or missing. But luckily the stack includes some novelty arrangements of the same music that might fill the gaps. Best of all, the troupe has a bunch of terrific dancers: many shapes and sizes–not like a corps de ballet–but all strong movers, smart, ace rhythm, big heart. Maybe a few old friends might be enticed out of the stables as guest artistes, and maybe Parker can get some kids from somewhere–Christmas show, gotta have kids. The Nutcracker . . . it’s about this wooden doll, right . . . ? “Sure,” Parker says to Hurok. “We can do it.” And so, in my fantasy at least, David Parker and the Bang Group’s Nut/Cracked was born.
In fact, Parker’s wryly affectionate take (and double-take) on the holiday ballet classic was not commissioned by Hurok, but by an Italian producer in Genoa in 2003. The piece was next presented in an abridged form at Dance Theater Workshop in January 2004, and returned for a box-office-record-setting two-week run at DTW the following December. Since then the Bang Group has performed the work (in many versions, with casts of varying sizes, on stages ranging from the tiny to the large) around New York City and the country for seven seasons–adhering to the spirit, if not the letter, of the laws of vaudeville. Nut/Cracked has racked up more than 150 gigs, which is remarkable for a non-ballet company’s Christmas dance show, and the work returns to DTW for three matinees starting December 13. The piece often includes guest dancers, and this year, I will be one of them, lending a hand (or a hoof) to an old friend and colleague by appearing in a couple of sections.

I readily agreed when David asked me to dance in Nut/Cracked because I had laughed so hard watching it in 2004. Not only that, but I grew up in a small Canadian city that had no Nutcracker–in my youth, North America still had such cities–and I neither saw nor danced in a production of the ballet as a child, unlike legions of my fellow dancers (including, over the years, many members of my own company). I’ve always felt a bit deprived by my Nutcracker-less childhood. That ballet, of course, opens the magic doorway into dreaming of dancing, and dancing, or a least dance-going, for countless millions. But not for me. At long last, I’ll get to dance in a Nutcracker.

Sort of. For while Nut/Cracked is not a Not-Cracker–that is, it is not an anti-Nutcracker–it is nonetheless not The Nutcracker. Although all the music for the show comes from or is adapted from Tchaikovsky’s score, Nut/Cracked sets aside entirely the ballet’s story and characters: no Marie/Clara/Masha, no Fritz, no Herr Drosselmeier, no Mouse King, no Dewdrop or Sugarplum Fairy or Snow Queen–no Nutcracker, even. Still, they all hover, like ghosts, in the work’s shadows. For Nut/Cracked is a palimpsest: knowledgeable viewers will see through the nut’s cracks to the traditional ballet, and to ballet conventions and mannerisms that are being sent up in some of the numbers. Yet the piece does not rely for its comedy on an audience that knows The Nutcracker at first hand and will get all the to-the-trade jokes. Nut/Cracked‘s humor ranges from the insinuating through the subtle to the very broad, often all at the same time; you can enjoy it no matter what you know about ballet or any other kind of dance, and the work is both good fun for those who adore Christmas, oddly satisfying to those who hate the season, and a tonic for people like me who simultaneously love and dread it.

Parker is not at all the slightly naïve entertainer I have depicted in my fantasy genesis story of his work, but a highly self-aware artist; moreover, his take on the tale is, in Schiller’s terms, a sentimental rather than a naïve work–though in our modern sense of the word, it is not sentimental in the least. Indeed, Nut/Cracked is sly, occasionally arch, and packed with knowing allusions not only to traditional stagings of the score but to other ballets as well–not to mention revivals, quotations, paraphrases, and fond parodies of, among other things, modern and “postmodern” dance, breakdancing, clogging, soft-shoe (in bare feet), Saturday Night Fever-style disco, and the all but lost art of toe tap. The work revels in its mongrel vocabulary, its hybrid vigor, its inclusive taste. The dancing overflows with jokes (many of the in- and/or running varieties), slapstick, gags, pratfalls, visual puns–and a bisl of shtikele too: the silk bouquets in the “Waltz of the Flowers” induce an allergy outbreak among the cast; the skating rink where the “Waltz of the Snowflakes” is set has some treacherous patches the Zamboni must have missed. The traditional Nutcracker is also a comedy: a dramatic entertainment that ends, at least symbolically, in a marriage (as opposed to one that ends in death, which would make it a tragedy). Yet Parker’s Nut/Cracked represents a different order of comedy entirely.

In order to prepare properly for my roles, I thought it might be wise to revisit the “real” Nutcracker. Luckily, I live in New York City, and thus can go straight to the top: Mr. B. And so I found myself in the newly renovated David H. Koch Theater at Lincoln Center on opening night, the Friday of Thanksgiving weekend, at New York City Ballet’s George Balanchine’s The Nutcracker^TM, as the company currently bills its annual holiday spectacular, a ballet I had not seen for several years. Premiered in 1954, Balanchine’s Nutcracker is not the country’s oldest full-length version (the San Francisco Ballet holds that honor, with a production originating in 1944), but it is acknowledged by many critics and balletomanes to be the greatest, not to mention the direct source or inspiration for countless other productions. Balanchine’s is likely also the closest in spirit and in detail of dance and mime to the original, premiered in 1892, with a scenario devised by Ivan Vsevolozhsky, director of Russia’s Imperial Theaters, and his ballet master, Marius Petipa, for the Maryinsky Theater in Saint Petersburg, but choreographed by Petipa’s assistant, Lev Ivanov, when the master fell ill.

Viewing The Nutcracker again I was struck above all by its moral seriousness, lightly borne. The choreography, and NYCB’s mise-en-scène in most ways, constitute an exquisitely crafted entertainment; it’s easy to see why families who can afford it make the ballet an annual holiday tradition. Yet the sense that the ballet offers more than entertainment is present from the overture, not only in the way that the music vaults across the whole range of emotion in the score, but in Rouben Ter-Arutunian’s frontcloth, which shows an angel reaching with both hands toward a star. It is worth remembering that this Christmas star, which reappears above the towering pine forest in the last measures of the climax of act 1, the “Waltz of the Snowflakes,” to guide the child heroine and hero into the visionary realm of act 2, glisters not over Toys”R”Us: it shines over the Savior’s manger bed in Bethlehem. And although all of Balanchine’s work persuades me that the Virgin Mother of God meant much more to him than the Father or the Son ever could, nonetheless The Nutcracker remembers at some level that Christmas is not only a holiday, but a holy day. We should never forget that Balanchine was a man of faith, and not faith in music alone, but a professing member of the Orthodox Church. How else to explain the Russian child angels, each bearing an unadorned miniature Christmas tree, who glide about the stage on tiptoe in patterns of immaculate symmetry with their stiff conical skirts swaying like church bells, to welcome Marie and her little prince to the Land of Sweets?

Balanchine’s Nutcracker, like the original Maryinsky version, is a ballet for and about children, and also a work designed to give children of all ages seriously training for the profession roles to perform. Yet the vital purpose of childhood, in Balanchine’s world, is to grow up, to learn to be an adult. In act 1, we see the children who are invited to the Christmas party at the Stahlbaums’ cozy bourgeois home–gemütlich and gutbürgerlich both–as they are schooled in adult ways, above all, by dancing. At first, parents and children dance their quadrille-like figures together, with the adults guiding their offspring through the steps and patterns and showing them the appropriate manners: how to approach a partner, how to bow, how to offer a hand, how to accept one. Thus instructed, the children are soon able to dance unattended at stage left while their parents dance opposite. The children’s realm is a miniature parallel replica of the adults’. Eventually, the two groups evolve from unison to counterpoint, as the children dance their own independent figures without guidance. Metaphorically–or more precisely, metonymically–the parents have begun to impart an entire aesthetic and moral education. (The theme is underlined in the mime action too, as Marie’s scene-stealing naughty younger brother, Fritz, is repeatedly scolded for his misbehavior.) Later, when corsages are distributed to the males of the assembled company, the little boys gravely offer them to their partners, just as their fathers do. As Arlene Croce wrote in 1974, Balanchine’s act 1 is “taken for granted because it’s so simple and ‘has no dancing.’ It contains the heart of his genius.”

In act 2, Marie and Drosselmeier’s nephew, restored to himself after being transformed into the Nutcracker Prince (the nutcracker doll brought to life to do battle with the Mouse King and his army), do not dance, but sit enthroned high above upstage center to watch the divertissements Balanchine has devised, which include young dancers drawn from many levels of the School of American Ballet. Symbolically, act 2 is a wedding celebration; we remember the crucial bit of mime in the party scene in which Drosselmeier (as least as portrayed by Robert LaFosse, whom I saw in the role) reveals to the audience that he is plotting the union of Marie and his nephew, and the way the two little dancers walk up the aisle through the evergreen cathedral at the close of the snow scene. But Marie is only eight years old. Though she wears a tiny bridal veil throughout act 2, she is celebrating, not her marriage to her gallant young friend, but the future promise of it–Marie is playing house on a very grand scale. Dancing functions in The Nutcracker just as the ballet itself functions within the repertory of a company that maintains a school–like City Ballet, and like the Maryinsky: as a realm of necessary experience, yes, but above all as a realm of noble aspiration. Below them on the stage, Marie and her prince behold dancers of all ages, from the tiny Polichinelles (darling French clowns) who emerge from under Mother Ginger’s skirts, through the adolescent corps of Candy Canes, to Dewdrop (one of the work’s two ballerina roles) and her Flowers. The long path that leads from early lessons to apprenticeship to mature artistry is laid out, step by step, in a series of images of dancerly accomplishment. Yet Balanchine also vouchsafes to Marie secrets of adult life that no child could ever consciously understand, which she can only keep and ponder in her heart, as the Gospel of Luke tells us Mary meditated upon the events of Christmas night. “The annual Nutcracker has become a liturgical event,” Croce wrote in 1969, “one whose deepest significance we celebrate in our hearts and try to keep our children from knowing.”

In Balanchine’s theatrical universe, to become a dancer–and, especially, a ballerina–is the noblest of all human destinies. It demands great sacrifice; in a certain way, it may even demand the sacrifice of childhood itself. Moreover, all children must at some point leave childhood behind, and while they may know or guess what that mysterious leave-taking will look like, they cannot know how it will feel. In the music for the Sugarplum Fairy’s grand pas de deux with her Cavalier–and only here, in the entire ballet–Tchaikovsky allows adult passion to brim, overflow, and cascade as from a dammed lake of tears. The plangent melody, at first ruminating, then soaring, is deeply shaded by tragic knowledge of indefinable loss. As the melodic motif contracts, rising urgently in pitch and volume, striving to cadence, then crests and wanes, we recognize too the tremor of erotic knowledge. “Listening, we see, we touch,” Croce wrote in 1986, “until we hardly know whether it is the tympani we hear or the hammering of our own hearts.” Tellingly, perhaps, this is the only segment of the score of those that Parker sets that his comedic purposes forbid him to approach on its own terms (whereas he otherwise highlights rhythmical details of the score’s music-box-like textures that strictly balletic treatments sometimes blur), and for which he must resort to Nut/Cracked‘s sole truly sardonic, even caustic ironies. Only classicism at its purest may reach for the star Tchaikovsky hangs high before us.

When I write that Nut/Cracked represents a different order of comedy from Balanchine’s Nutcracker, and that it is a work of Schillerian sentiment, I mean that the two works are suffused with different kinds of self-awareness. The Nutcracker is self-enclosed within the visionary realm of classicism. Gleaming through Balanchine’s ballet are reflections and refractions not only from the Petipa-Ivanov original, in which Balanchine himself danced as a child, but from the other great Tchaikovsky-Petipa ballets, Swan Lake and The Sleeping Beauty, as well as Sylvia and Coppélia, whose scores by Léo Délibes Tchaikovsky revered. Indeed, the whole history of ballet as a theatrical art form and a spiritual endeavor shines through the fabric of Balanchine’s choreography, above all in “Snow,” “Flowers,” and Sugarplum’s pas de deux. There is something of Dr. Coppélius in Drosselmeier, with his giant mechanical dolls, for example, and of Swan Lake‘s Von Rothbart too. Sugarplum’s adagio echoes Sleeping Beauty‘s “Rose” adagio. Balanchine’s Nutcracker is a duplicate in its structure of his Midsummer Night’s Dream (which ballet-goers may see at NYCB immediately after The Nutcracker closes in January–a nice programming touch): a densely plotted first act that leads to an all-divertissement second act in ritual celebration of marriage; The Nutcracker‘s act 2 likewise echoes the wedding dances that close The Sleeping Beauty and Sylvia. I could go on. The cultural background of The Nutcracker is ballet itself.
The background of Nut/Cracked, however, is in part the reception of ballet in the United States and the role that The Nutcracker has played in that story over the course of the last century. (Americans’ first exposure to any part of the ballet was in a production entitled Snowflakes starring Anna Pavlova in New York in 1915: the habit of devising spectacles including excerpts from The Nutcracker originates from within ballet, not outside it.) The pop/jazz treatments of Tchaikovsky to which Parker sets the first half of his evening (corresponding structurally, but not thematically, to Balanchine’s act 1 before the “Snow” scene) offered him a side door into Tchaikovsky’s imposing score via the fiercely syncopated percussive vocabulary that is this tap dance-based choreographer’s native dialect. The records also roughly chart the naturalization of the immigrant European aristocratic dance form in the United States, as they range from charming, daffy kitsch (smooth choral arrangements with cute lyrics by Fred Waring and the Pennsylvanians), to playful but serious jazz recompositions by Raymond Scott, Glenn Miller, and Duke Ellington, who address Tchaikovsky more or less as an equal, as a fellow composer.

The cultural background of Nut/Cracked is equally the American (and worldwide) Christmas Industry, which of course includes the country’s 300-plus current productions of The Nutcracker–and for New Yorkers and our holiday tourists, includes Balanchine’s masterpiece. In this sense Parker’s work has what I can only call a meta-theatrical dimension. Nut/Cracked acknowledges the annual consumer frenzy of Christmas, complete with pandemic bad faith, commodity fetishism, stress, envy, greed, disappointment, shopping and wanting and getting and not getting and returning and “re-gifting”; gruesome Xmas Muzak that starts in October; compulsory contributions to the economy and equally compulsory fun; pious, prefabricated sentiment; the ritual sterile debate about the season’s “commercialism”; the obscenity of year-round Christmas stores; and such traditions, more honored in the breach than in the observance, as getting blasted at the annual office party and making a pass at a co-worker.

Beyond its craft–the flowing ensembles, the meticulous development of gestural motifs, the intricate percussive counterpoint, the close attention to the music’s structural changes–the best thing about Nut/Cracked is its good spirit: a lot of “Let’s put on a show!”–but something more, too. For all its wisecracking, Nut/Cracked reveres ballet, which remains within the work an ideal realm of aspiration–perhaps more glimpsed than seen. Classicism is cracked, but not broken. The dancers are forever crashing nimbly to the floor as the choreography, turning on a dime from some cherished Cecchetticism secretly embedded in a buoyant petit allegro enchaînement to a waltz-clog or the Charleston or the Funky Chicken, pulls the flying carpet out from under the dance. More than anything else, Nut/Cracked makes fun of itself, and in so doing allows us to find humor in the predicaments we put ourselves through every year at Christmastime.

Christopher Caines is artistic director of the Christopher Caines Dance Company. He is currently at work reviving ARIAS, the evening-length work with which he founded his ensemble in 2000, for spring 2010 performances.

David Parker and the Bang Group perform Nut/Cracked at Dance Theater Workshop, December 13, 19, & 20 at 2 p.m. New York City Ballet presents George Balanchine’s The Nutcracker at the David H. Koch Theater at Lincoln Center through January 3.

© 2009 Christopher Caines

Dear Readers,
I will be working in Copenhagen NOV 17 through NOV 30 and not posting on SEEING THINGS until my return. Meanwhile, please continue to send your Comments on the pieces already posted, especially recent reviews and all of the PERSONAL INDULGENCES essays; I will post your Comments as soon as I can.
tt

Morphoses/The Wheeldon Company / City Center, New York City / October 29 – November 1, 2009

Three years ago, when Christopher Wheeldon left the security of his position as Resident Choreographer at the New York City Ballet to form his own small company, Morphoses, his head was full of extravagant dreams about making classical ballet new for the 21st century. He even fulfilled some of them. But the economic downturn has thwarted his progress. Ballet companies, no matter how modest in scale, cost major money, and donors are feeling poor these days. Which brings us to the nagging question of whether or not Morphoses is really worth saving–at all costs, so to speak.
The full article appeared in Voice of Dance (http://www.voiceofdance.org) on November 4, 2009. To read it, click here.

Frederick Wiseman’s La Danse: Le Ballet de l’Opéra de Paris / Film Forum, NYC / November 4-17, 2009

The ticket line at Greenwich Village’s Film Forum November 4-17 for Frederick Wiseman’s latest grand-scale documentary, La Danse: Le Ballet de l’Opéra de Paris, will surely contain as many dance fans as film buffs. And I suspect the local dance crowd will enjoy the movie more. It offers extensive, if necessarily fragmented, footage of the Paris Opera Ballet’s remarkable skills, and the celebrated French company rarely visits the States. Dedicated movie-goers, especially those familiar with Wiseman’s complete body of work, are likely to be disappointed.

Wiseman’s earliest films–shot in black and white, which suited his subjects and his style–still remain his most meaningful works. He treated his topics lawyerly (prior to his film career he was a lawyer).

From his first film, the harrowing Titicut Follies (1967), in which he treats Massachusetts’ State Prison for the Criminally Insane, he piles up the evidence point by point like a star prosecutor, allowing concrete facts alone, unadorned by appeals to sentiment–or, indeed, any explication whatsoever–to reveal the obvious verdict.

Later in his film career, he was lured by the siren song of color, even later by the fiction that “everything is beautiful at the ballet,” which brought him into my own field, dancing. In 1993 he examined American Ballet Theatre; recently, the Paris Opera Ballet. In both films, he coolly inspects the dance company as an institution, but without much point that I can discern.

La Danse finds him applying his familiar tactics: He opens by placing the institution he’s scrutinizing in context. We see a stunning series of freeze-frame shots of Paris, moving closer and closer to the opulent Palais Garnier, where the phantom of the opera held sway, at least fictionally, and which the Paris Opera Ballet has long made its home. (Now it has a second home at the Bastille, about which the less said, the better, and Wiseman says nothing.) Throughout the film, these shots of the city and the Palais Garnier’s dark, claustrophobic underground corridors are repeated, but not as a respite from intense emotion, while giving emotion a wider and more natural vein, as Ozu used shots of wind-stirred trees and the like, but instead–well, why actually? La Danse has no easily discernable drama or intention. It just goes on “forever” (158 minutes, to be exact), then peters out.

Oddly, Wiseman doesn’t dwell on the gaudy magnificence of the Palais Garnier’s public spaces–the gilt, the marble, the mirrored halls, the bronze statues, the crystal chandeliers; we eventually catch glimpses of them as the camera follows a cleaner–but throughout Wiseman emphasizes the gloomy corridors and winding passageways of the interior, the flooding in the lower regions where fish have set up housekeeping, as well as the no-better-than-institutional studios and offices.

As soon as Wiseman has oriented us to the particular domain he’s chosen to examine–as always, in his films, a world in itself, sealed off from a wider reality–he introduces the people who inhabit these nondescript backstage spaces: the dancers, the element most likely to seize a viewer’s attention. We see them taking the daily morning class essential to professionals and then learning or rehearsing or being coached in their roles.

The dancers’ bodies are exceedingly svelte, lithe, and strong–capable of marvels. These dancers are the survivors of a rigorous schooling from about age eight and an equally rigorous weeding out of the pupils not up to standard, throughout the decade that it takes to turn a child with the right anatomy and unquenchable desire into a professional dancer. The POB dancers’ technical prowess is stupendous, but everyone seems to take it for granted, and we never see how it came about; nothing is shown of the academy in which these “acrobats of god” are trained, though it is a unique institution in itself.

In the company’s studios, the ever-present coaches clearly make a dancer’s professional life that of an eternal student. They are forever being corrected, in order to attain some Platonic ideal of execution. These elders who supervise the rehearsals, usually once leading dancers themselves, are encyclopedias of information about how things were done in the past and what might be achieved now. Their bodies have thickened, their legs have lost their spring, but their eyes have become piercingly sharp.

As is typical of Wiseman, not one of the dancers or coaches is named. Similarly, the ballets we see excerpts from are not named; their choreographers unidentified, though some of them appear on camera to coach their own work. (Apart from the familiar nineteenth-century classics, the choreography is nothing to write home about.) This information is revealed only in the Shaker-plain closing credits, another Wiseman hallmark.

Wiseman’s familiar use of anonymity while revealing both personality and job description is best effected in the scenes involving Brigitte Lefèvre, the Paris Opéra’s director of dance–in other words, POB’s boss. Her calm yet steely authority and well-calculated empathy for her dancers (she was once one of them herself) emerge gradually but unmistakably from the several scenes in which she’s the focal point. You don’t know her name or exactly what she does, but you know what she is.

Wiseman persuades us to understand Lefèvre solely from how she behaves in a series of different situations in which she deals with dancers, repertory, casting, company policy, and money. This is no mean achievement.

It’s also in the scenes involving the administration that we begin to realize the grand scope and complexity of the POB as an institution. Wiseman also covers the scenic department, where thick but deft fingers are pictured adding gleaming paillettes to the tulle or velvet of a costume, the sewing crew working under short white tutus that are suspended from the ceiling like so many chandeliers. The more pedestrian aspects of a life in dance are recorded too, as in a view of the company’s cafeteria that, amusingly, offers us freeze-frames of dishes like the ones we accepted, faute de mieux, in college.

The film progresses from work in the studios to rehearsals onstage in an auditorium hauntingly devoid of spectators. All of these activities and the behind-the-scenes work as well–a studio being spackled and painted, the dancers having their make-up applied–are arranged as a collage in time, but the elements are bricks without mortar to make them adhere, to build something. What does Wiseman himself derive from all the material he’s presenting to us? What are we to make of it?

Damned if I know.

Towards the end of this seemingly endless film without drama, climax, or even resolution, there’s a stirring, extended excerpt of a performance, by Delphine Moussin, of Medea murdering her children in Angelin Preljocaj’s eponymous ballet. And there’s been a very brief shot of the public entering the lobby of the Paris Opéra, with its exquisite curving double staircase, but to the best of my recollection, we never witness a dance being viewed by the public it’s meant for. And, sadder yet, we never hear it applauded.

© 2009 Tobi Tobias

American Ballet Theatre / Avery Fisher Hall, Lincoln Center, New York City / October 7-10, 2009

Avery Fisher Hall, Lincoln Center’s main concert venue, lacks an orchestra pit, wing space, and a floor suitable for dancing. Musicians performing there stay put once onstage, limiting their motion to decorous walks to and from their places. Not for them phenomenal steps requiring a floor that cushions sleights of foot or a safe landing spot for leaping exits at race-car speed. Nevertheless American Ballet Theatre was installed at Avery Fisher for a four-day engagement, October 7-10.

The full article appeared in Voice of Dance (http://www.voiceofdance.org) on October 14, 2009. To read it, click here.

The Forsythe Company / BAM Howard Gilman Opera House / Brooklyn, NY / October 7-10, 2009

William Forsythe made his name creating ballets with an eye to pushing the art conspicuously forward, as Balanchine had done. Nowadays he makes concoctions that are so hard to appreciate, detractors find them empty, showy, foolish, inexplicable, or all of the above. It’s not that I think he should retrace his early steps.

Artists must not – cannot, actually–imitate their past. They need to move ahead to find their own future. I just wish I understood and liked Forsythe’s recent work better.

Decreation, which Forsythe and his devoted troupe brought to BAM’S Howard Gilman Opera House for an October 7-10 run, is not so much a dance as a dance cum postmodern drama cum installation cum performance art cum . . . well, you get the idea.

Forsythe’s idea is that the world is in pretty hopeless shape. While its inhabitants obsess about communication, connection, empathy, and even love, he tells us, their actions invariably disintegrate into the cruel and bizarre. Though he keeps his stage tidier than the colossal-mess-loving Pina Bausch–even the dancers’ clothes, shmatas you could clean the garage in, are fastidiously keyed to a subtle sky-and-earth palette–Decreation recalls the themes of her angst-driven earlier works.

The piece opens with a narrator standing behind a translucent box (also used as a projection screen, part of the media mix the choreographer favors), playing the dual role of defense attorney and accused. Her lines, delivered in a voice cracked with rage, alternate so swiftly between the two characters, they’re barely intelligible.

The effect is like that of a particularly hostile Punch and Judy show.

In general, the sound is unbearably raucous, with overlapping verbal provocations accompanied by intermittent music played onstage and crackling static. The static may be there to remind us that everything we say nowadays is being recorded as info in the public domain, to be received by unsympathetic listeners. Occasional silences fail to bring relief; they only make one woman’s low moaning audible.

As for the movement in the piece, it’s usually violent and grotesque (angular, spasmodic, writhing)–and endlessly repetitive. The groupings, though, are so handsomely arranged, it’s hard to believe that the anatomical incoherence represents authentic feeling.

Images suggesting sexual abuse abound. One pathetic figure often reappears, clutching one of her breasts with her right hand and her crotch with her left. She is the Eternal Female Victim, until she slips out of a contorted confrontation with two men, leaving them to undo each other.

Ten minutes into the one-hour show, you feel as if you’ve stumbled into a loony bin, albeit one that boasts high-end design and a façade of braininess. The latter comes across in exchanges like this one: He says, “Everything is beautiful and nothing hurt.” But she says (he reports), “Everything hurt, everything that was beautiful.”

And then there’s the persistent variation on this theme: “I might prefer to love another more than I love you. What would you do?” Only the libretto of one of the gayer Mozart operas could make such business viable, and then it would bubble with fun. Here it’s rendered with pensive solemnity, reiterated so often you wonder why the guy at the receiving end doesn’t counter with “Gimme a break already!”

In the final segment, the huge round table that loomed in the background is stripped of its formal dinner paraphernalia (crystal, china, sumptuous white cloth) and dragged forward, folding chairs placed to rim its periphery. The whole overwrought cast congregates, seated, for one last blast. Of course a distraught woman mounts the table (remember the Béjart Boléro?) and–oh, never mind. We’ve all been there before.

© 2009 Tobi Tobias