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Lincoln Center Festival 2004: Ashton Celebration / Metropolitan Opera House, NYC / July 6-17, 2004

The second night of the Ashton Celebration featured two dances, both Birmingham Royal Ballet productions, in which the choreographer operated in his free-flowing “barefoot” vein, presumably with Isadora Duncan as his muse. The legendary primogenitor of modern dance was surely past her prime when the 17-year-old Ashton witnessed a handful of her performances in London, but she nevertheless made a tremendous and lasting impression on him—through her musicality, her sense of plastique, her voluptuous weighted quality, her resonance in stillness, and the sheer charismatic force of her conviction.

Ashton’s Five Brahms Waltzes in the Manner of Isadora Duncan started out as a little nothing, a pièce d’occasion. From his recollections of Duncan, enlarged by the evocative action drawings artists had made of her—not attempting to replicate Duncan’s own simple choreography but freely extrapolating from it—Ashton set a single waltz on the superb dancer-actress Lynn Seymour for a gala in 1975. It was recognized as a gem and, the following year, he expanded the material into a suite, which entered the repertory of the Royal Ballet.

Seymour was extraordinary in the role. Even photographs, which inevitably diminish the vitality of the dancing they record, show that. One, by Peggy Leder, seizes the moment in which the Isadora figure rushes straight forward toward the audience, arms outstretched, rose petals cascading from her hands, head flung back to expose a strong, sensuous throat, the advance of the body led by a magisterial foot that confidently acknowledges gravity’s claim.

The BRB’s staging was danced by Molly Smolen, who had the immense good fortune to have Seymour coach her in the role. The result was glorious. Smolen moves with exorbitant energy, capturing the lion-hearted quality we associate with Duncan. What’s more, she makes the movement look impetuous; for a moment you think she might be inventing it on the spot. I suspect this quality characterized Duncan’s performances, which may well have encompassed a certain measure of improvisation. Running about the stage in a curving path, trailing behind her a huge swath of fabric that echoes the glowing peach hue of her Grecian tunic, Smolen seems to have turned herself into all things that ripple with life: wind, waves, flames. At times, she’s Dionysian, the incarnation of primal sexual instincts. Elsewhere, in repose, she seems to find the still center in which a single person can imagine herself to be the heart of the universe.

Unlike Duncan, and unlike Seymour, who danced with generously fleshed bodies, Smolen has an upper body that appears as slender as a stripling’s, and her arms retain some of the charming angularity and awkwardness of adolescence. Astutely, she uses this deviation from the generic Isadora image to her advantage. She lets the gaucheness set off the prevailing voluptuousness of the material and, with it, suggests something of the stubborn, single-minded rebelliousness, usually confined to impulse-driven youth, that characterized Duncan’s personality and actions, onstage and off, throughout her life.

Much credit for the pleasure and excitement Smolen generates in this Ashtonian gem is due to Seymour—for serving as mentor to an interpretation so valid for the ballet yet so unlike her own.

Dante Sonata, rescued from oblivion on the initiative of the BRB’s director, David Bintley, was choreographed in 1940, as Britain waited for the bombs of World War II to obliterate the happier life it once knew. A somber mood due to the recent death of his mother augmented Ashton’s response to, as he put it, “the whole stupidity and devastation of war.” (On another occasion, he used the word futility.) So the ballet’s juxtaposition of the Children of Light and the Children of Darkness is no good-guys-vs.-bad affair, but rather a lose-lose situation, in which, though the Dark figures are patently the aggressors, both tribes are ravaged and all but destroyed. Although the work is, admittedly, something of a period piece—with lots of Massine-derived, Robert Helpmann-style expressionism in it—it is piercingly relevant today. It should be required viewing, for instance, for anyone participating in the upcoming national conventions of our major political parties, alternating in repertory, perhaps, with Kurt Jooss’s The Green Table.

The ballet is based on the Inferno and Purgatorio sections of Dante’s Divine Comedy and set to music by Lizst that refers to the Dante via a poem by Victor Hugo. The choreography, like the costumes and backdrop by Ashton’s beloved collaborator Sophie Fedorovitch, are influenced by celebrated illustrators of Dante: William Blake, Gustav Doré, and John Flaxman. The female Children of Light are visions of innocence in unadorned translucent white gowns; their male partners, princes of purity, complement them in snowy chemises with blouson sleeves and immaculate danseur noble tights. The Children of Darkness favor black webbing and grimaces that transform their faces into ferocious (or is it agonized?) masks. The choreography owes most, however, to Isadora Duncan, not simply because most of the dancers are barefoot and the women’s long hair is unbound, but also—and primarily—for its emotion-invoking plasticity and its tidal surges of movement.

“What one mostly remembers from Dante Sonata,” David Vaughan writes in Frederick Ashton and His Ballets, “are its images of shame and suffering, turmoil and torment.” I can’t put it better and would merely add to it notice of the effective patterns Ashton designed for the warring groups—now starkly geometrical, as in Martha Graham’s 1931 Primitive Mysteries; now linked and braided as in Bronislava Nijinska’s 1923 Les Noces. Beyond that, I recall particularly the sheer pictorial beauty of the several ways in which the participants shield their faces, depicting grief, and the odd yet very apt things occasionally done by a single figure suddenly sprung from the ensemble—a woman, for example, nearly berserk with anguish, thrashing the air with her arms as she runs, as if beating frenetically on a giant invisible drum. This aspect of the choreography eerily prefigures certain traits in Mark Morris.

As I’ve indicated, Dante Sonata works as a polemic piece as well as on a purely aesthetic plane. Concerning the latter, the most intriguing aspect of the ballet may be its intensely pictorial nature. It ends, for example, with the simultaneous crucifixion of the male leaders of the Darkness and Light clans, but the shock and horror of the action is muted by the fact that the scene makes you think, first and foremost, of paintings of the subject you’ve viewed in the medieval and Renaissance sections of the world’s great museums.

Photo credit: Bill Cooper: Molly Smolen in the Birmingham Royal Ballet’s production of Frederick Ashton’s Five Brahms Waltzes in the Manner of Isadora Duncan

© 2004 Tobi Tobias

Lincoln Center Festival 2004: Ashton Celebration / Metropolitan Opera House, NYC / July 6-17, 2004

Oh, to be in England this year, the 100th anniversary of Frederick Ashton’s birth, to follow the many productions of the ballets with which the choreographer fashioned the shape and tone of British classical dancing! New York-based dance aficionados, at least, can console themselves to a certain extent with the Lincoln Center Festival’s Ashton Celebration—two weeks of repertory being offered by four companies: the Royal Ballet (Ashton’s own home base), the Birmingham Royal Ballet, the Joffrey Ballet of Chicago, and K- Ballet Company from Japan.

Ashton is, among other things (lyric poet, devotee of classicism, master of theatrical fantasy—and comedy besides, and consummate musician), the choreographer for people who revere the novels of E.M. Forster. Both artists specialize in delicate mood and the tender sentiment, continually embodying in their work what Forster, in his Howard’s End, termed “the voiceless language of sympathy.” “The affections are more reticent than the passions,’’ Forster wrote in the same passage, “and their expression more subtle.” Against all odds—ballets with literal content gravitate naturally to the more easily demonstrated subjects of ardent love and tragic death—Ashton’s 1968 Enigma Variations (My Friends Pictured Within) treats the idea of friendship so profoundly and poignantly, it might make even a misanthrope weep in empathy.

The ballet is set to the Edward Elgar score from which it takes its name, a suite of musical character studies of individuals in the composer’s circle. Ashton places the action in Worcester in 1898, the locale and time of the score’s composition, in the house and adjacent garden where Elgar is surrounded by his near and dear: his care-filled constant wife; a man who is his heart’s comrade; several endearingly eccentric friends (whose very absurdity invites affection); several ladies whose relationship to Elgar, though intentionally kept enigmatic, suggests the many faces of love (a flirtatious child-woman, a serene mature one offering a sensuousness that needn’t ignite, an ephemeral muse), and an assorted flurry of neighbors and functionaries.

The Elgar we meet is often abstracted (an artist being essentially alone, no matter how dense and lively the population in his immediate vicinity). What’s more, he’s melancholy, at moments despairing; having arrived at early middle age, he has not yet achieved the recognition his talent deserves. The single “event” that occurs in the ballet is the delivery of a telegram announcing that the celebrated conductor Hans Richter has agreed to conduct the first performance of Enigma Variations—the score that was, finally, to make Elgar’s name. (Granted, some of this information relies on a program note, but it is gloriously carried through on the stage.)

The ballet alternates between solo dances that set forth the temperament of the individual characters and duets, trios, and small groups that reveal the relationships among them. The amusing and the touching alternate in a scrupulous calibration typical of Ashton, while classical steps and naturalistic gesture are seamlessly wedded to create a unique form of theater, one investigated elsewhere only by Ashton’s contemporary Antony Tudor.

Two passages in the ballet quietly proceed to leave you shattered. One is a duet for Elgar and his devoted wife. She seems to be saying—no, not saying, she’s too discreet for that, just feeling—I wish I could be more to you. I wish I could be everything to you; you are my life’s work. I wish I could give you what you want. But of course she can’t, because what her husband wants is the desire of an artist—to have his efforts (that is, his deepest communication of who and what he is) reach the public they might move. Though the composer’s wife may serve as his support and comfort, it is not in her power to make that happen. It’s impossible to imagine this concept being choreographed until you see Ashton do it perfectly.

A second piercing segment, called the “Nimrod” variation (for the nickname of Elgar’s closest friend), begins as a meditative “conversational” duet for the two men and expands into a luminous trio that includes Elgar’s wife. All the movement—simple, deliberate, and serene—conveys the idea that the three are bonded by shared experiences and ideals, and that this bond enables them to face life’s difficulties and disappointments with equanimity and hope. The passage also provides a psychological frisson in juxtaposing a pair of presumably closed intimate alliances—a marriage and a same-sex best friendship—and proposing that the three participants involved can establish another, parallel, form of intimacy.

While these and similar portions of Enigma Variations are Chekhovian, the solos for the ballet’s oddballs (all of them, tellingly, men) are Dickensian, brilliantly calculated exaggerations of acutely observed traits. Embedded in them are challenges to the performer’s virtuoso capabilities, and this contributes greatly to their wit. In turn, these vivacious set pieces are counterbalanced by the overall elegiac quality of the ballet, typified by one character’s thoughtfully and sympathetically observing others, unseen. At the very opening of the piece, Elgar’s wife stands on the landing of a staircase in the house, looking down at her husband with loving concern. Later, when two young people in the still-ingenuous stage of love enjoy an extended duet, Elgar, screened by the mist at the back of the garden, gazes at them as if in a reverie. One can easily imagine him recalling an earlier time in his life when romance was fresh and promised to satisfy all his yearnings. Such is Ashton’s suggestive power.

Enigma Variations, danced by the Birmingham Royal Ballet (which had its origins as a “second” company to The Royal Ballet, and now rivals it in many ways), was far and away the finest production on the opening night of the Ashton Celebration. (More about the other entries as the week progresses.) The dancers of this company, which has been making a point of cherishing the Ashton repertory—not given its full due in the UK, just as the Balanchine repertory is not fully honored in the States—have the Ashton take on classical ballet technique in their bones and blood. The unerring placement, the exquisite contraposto of the torso and arms, the fleetness and precision of the footwork—all this ravishing technical stuff has been bred into them. They don’t have to work at or worry about it at the moment of performance, when they need to be concerned with other matters, such as imagination and expression. It is simply a given. And it’s one of the most gratifying givens I’ve come across in a very long time.

Enigma Variations will be performed only once more in the current engagement, on July 9, along with The Two Pigeons. Tonight, July 7, the BRB will dance Ashton’s Five Brahms Waltzes in the Manner of Isadora Duncan and Dante Sonata, which the company had the resourcefulness to retrieve from near-oblivion. On the 10th, it will offer Dante Sonata and The Two Pigeons. Tickets to the Ashton Celebration are available. While the best seats would ravage the budget of most dance fans, they’re still cheaper than a trip abroad, and there are some good views from the higher regions of the house. And then there’s always standing room, which has a true-lover-of-art cachet of its own.

Note: David Vaughan, in his indispensable book Frederick Ashton and His Ballets (Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1977), points out the passage from Howard’s End.

Photo credit: Stephanie Berger/Lincoln Center Festival: Joseph Cipolla and Silvia Jimenez in Frederick Ashton’s Enigma Variations.

© 2004 Tobi Tobias

New York City Ballet: Boris Eifman’s Musagète, world premiere June 18, 2004

For reasons too discouraging to explore, the New York City Ballet commissioned a work from Boris Eifman for its year-long Balanchine centennial celebration, now winding down. And Eifman came up with Musagète (Leader of the Muses), a 50-minute extravaganza that–despite its appalling notions of choreography, biography, and their possible relationship–claims to be a homage to the master. This is an event that could only have occurred over Balanchine’s dead body. The Eifman Ballet of St. Petersburg is much acclaimed in its home town (the city that bred Balanchine) and it has certainly been a hit in its City Center appearances of the last half dozen years, relished by an audience packed with Russian émigrés. But Eifman operates from an aesthetic that’s the antithesis of Balanchine’s–long on lurid melodrama and gimcrack sentiments, short on musicality, structure, steps, and classical decorum. Following are my notes. (It’s o.k. if you want to stop reading now. Really.)

The musical selections that make up the score–substantial excerpts from Bach, a snippet of Georgian choral singing, and an infusion of Tchaikovsky to wind things up–begin with the Bach Paul Taylor used for the dark-night-of-the-family’s-soul section of Esplanade. Eifman gives us a lone man (Robert Tewsley), in generic black trousers and white t-shirt, sitting on a chair, head bowed, in what looks like a prison. We’re talking major depression here. Or worse. Eventually this troubled protagonist (let’s call him Mr. b, after the Big B he represents) points his finger skyward. Maybe this means something–but what? Emerging a little from his gloom, he stands to execute the tendu demonstration famous from the Cartier-Bresson photo that the NYCB adapted for its centennial logo. Retrieved verticality launches him into an anguish-in-the-throes-of-creation solo in which he’s half on, half off his chair, which conveniently turns out to have wheels. (Never mind that Balanchine was known to keep his personal griefs private and his behavior in the studio briskly professional and productive.) An attendant appears and tries to calm him. Hey, wait a minute. Is this Stygian cavern not a prison but an asylum? Has Eifman confused Balanchine with Nijinsky gone mad?

Next, an opaque black backdrop rises just enough to reveal a line-up of pairs of feet in pointe shoes working away in frisky, nimble unison. The drop then rises to reveal, full figure, the owners of the feet, inexplicably clad in performance-ready white tutus to perform their daily exercises at the barre. The idea is based on an actual formative event in Balanchine’s youth. Still a pupil at the renowned Maryinsky academy, he broke school rules to peer into a studio where the company’s ballerinas were practicing and was fascinated–riveted–by the sight of their footwork. Eifman’s treatment of the event, however, is lifted from Harald Lander’s eternally popular middle-brow entertainment Études, a debasement true to his taste.

One by one the young ladies advance into the center space to be corrected and manipulated (yup, here come the sexual overtones) by Mr. b. He shows them what he wants them to do, choreography-wise, enjoying little flirtations on the side. This already misguided section culminates with Mr. b choreographing the opening gestures of Serenade–the raised arm with the hand shielding the face from the light, the feet snapping from parallel position into a turned-out first.

Back to the blackness and the chair, but now Mr. b enjoys the company of a single “special” woman (Wendy Whelan) sheathed in a black practice outfit enlivened by sparkling paillettes on the bodice and on a matching snood. Mr. b veers between sculpting her–seeing what contortionist grotesqueries her body is capable of–and making love to her. This is Eifman’s “advanced” notion of the adagio pas de deux.

At the performance, I was trying to figure out which of Balanchine’s early muses/private-life partners Whelan might represent. Tamara Geva? Alexandra Danilova? Vera Zorina? They were all glamour girls. Subsequently I caught up with a New York Times piece by Sylviane Gold that reports Whelan’s saying she understood herself to be the incarnation of Balanchine’s cat Mourka. The celebrated feline was photographed by Martha Swope as the choreographer put her through motions that looked very much like spectacular dancing. Go know.

Anyway, a fellow in black practice clothes (chic, like Whelan’s) strides purposefully by and, uh-oh, Ms. Muse seems to like him better than she likes Mr. b. The new pair disport themselves acrobatically, their duet briefly enlarging into a pas de trois, but Mr. b quickly drops out of this impossible affair and despairs, while Mr. X carries off the muse. (Have we somehow skipped ahead to the rupture between Balanchine and his most compelling égérie, Suzanne Farrell, upon her marriage to a NYCB dancer? Surely few men would be so despairing over the loss of a cat, no matter how lithe and obliging a dancer it was.)

A whole flock of girls in black studio togs kindly arrives to comfort Mr. b. One even covers his eyes à la Serenade‘s Dark Angel. (Aficionados in the audience are registering the quotes from the masterworks almost audibly, and Eifman obligingly selects only obvious ones. Have I mentioned Agon?) Then, mercifully, the lights come up full and Mr. b goes back to his proper business of choreographing, moving from the women to a gaggle of men, then meshing the two ensembles. Suddenly, from their midst, Mr. b grabs one of the anonymous boys and matches him with one of the anonymous girls. (“Notice me! Notice me!” was the eternal cry from Balanchine’s acolytes, and the choreographer was swift to spot potential and groom it.) But now, abruptly, with a rough push and pull, Mr. b changes one boy for another. This chance of a lifetime that fizzles happens too fast for its implications to be explored, as is perhaps for the best. Mr. b retreats to the back of the stage and stands impassive, arms folded, as if, having pressed the “On” button, he could let the choreography evolve on its own. From the frenetic look of the proceedings, he’s pressed “Fast Forward.”

Lo and behold! a girl in a rosy girlish dress runs in and (here comes Serenade again) falls down. Mr. b gives her the balletic equivalent of the kiss of life–the God-touching-his-finger-to-Adam gesture that Balanchine co-opted from Michelangelo for Apollo. (What can we learn from this? That the quality of borrowings depends not on the material borrowed but on the sensibility and craft of the borrower.) The girl is Alexandra Ansanelli at her most kittenish (no, not like Mourka, Mourka was classical in repose and a hoyden in motion). The pretty-in-pink girl and Mr. b fall in love, enjoy a mutual accord blissfully free from anguish, until . . .

The happy couple finds itself rushing through a matrix of women looking mid-century modern dance-ish in long, severely cut black skirts. Has Martha Graham been invited to create a work for Balanchine’s company? (This did happen once, the result being the now discarded first half of Episodes, but that experiment was Lincoln Kirstein’s bright idea; Balanchine had no use for modern dance.) Or is this one of those Russian premonitions of doom? Suddenly Mr. b is back in his peripatetic chair, despairing, his watchful attendant ever-solicitous. (Eifman seems to find the idea of solitary incarceration piquant and insanity theatrically picturesque. I haven’t the least objection to morbidity on stage, but I prefer mine unDisneyfied.)

Ansanelli returns, playful as ever, to engage Mr. b in a duet that’s part contortion, part making out, when–bam!–Fate strikes her down, robbing her not merely of an inherent grace that ballet training has honed to perfection, but of her very mobility. She collapses in grotesque postures. Tanaquil LeClercq, felled by polio. A death figure out of Ingmar Bergman’s Seventh Seal drags her out of Mr. b’s sight and life on a long swath of inky cloth. (Never mind that Balanchine remained married to LeClercq for a good long time after her illness struck and that she lived, gaming coping with her disabilities, for many years after they parted. Never mind that she was in no way an Ansanelli type–either physically or in stage persona. LeClercq was all long-legged rakish elegance, the epitome of intelligence and wit, with an uncanny capacity for poetic suggestion. The well-nigh criminal tastelessness of Eifman’s depiction of her tragedy would have driven me out of the theater had I not been sitting in the middle of a long row–and obliged, as a journalist, to see the performance through.)

So . . . where were we? Mr. b, as is his right, succumbs once again to grief. A phalanx of men arrives to energize him, followed in short order by a matching female contingent; the choreographer’s raw material, as is its right, is urging him to get back to work. No sooner has he complied than, among them, he notices the magnificently long-legged, sensuously supple Maria Kowroski and seizes her for his own. Suzanne Farrell, of course. The company simply fades away, leaving Maria/Suzanne and Mr. b alone in the dark with a ballet barre just long enough for two. He discovers her enormous physical and emotional resources and the rest is history. The barre (itself inclined to motion, like its cousin, the chair) bears witness to shenanigans no barre should have to endure. At their conclusion, Mr. b lies spent. The lady vanishes. Though tasteless (as Eifman’s work is chronically), this business is not as vile as the polio episode. Nevertheless, as balletic orgasms go, it doesn’t hold a candle to the climax of L’Après-midi d’un Faune.

A fog blows in. Mr. b indulges in a little modern dance floor work to some religious-sounding choral music (Georgian, in reference to Balanchine’s ancestry). Mr. b, it appears, has entered an altered state. From above, a pastel rainbow of light beams plays on the swirling mist. Gaze cast to the heavens, Mr. b splays his body along the tipped barre that, moments before, served as a bed for ostensible voluptuous pleasure. (It looks no more comfortable than Noguchi’s precarious bed for Oedipus and Jocasta in Graham’s Night Journey, but let that pass.) Now it’s a death bed, and its occupant is experiencing visions.

Balanchine treated his own death choreographically at least twice–depicting the last moments of the visionary Don Quixote in the ballet of the same name (sometimes performing the role himself), where the bed actually elevates its expiring tenant, and in the profoundly moving pageant-like setting of Tchaikovsky’s Pathétique. Both treatments depend on the highly colored imagery and impulse to ecstasy that one might expect from an adherent of the Russian Orthodox faith. Yet even viewers who found the material over the top could see that it poured from a font of simple, indeed naked, sincerity, and that, like everything else Balanchine did, it was exquisitely balanced in a larger context. Eifman’s Mr. b, I’m afraid, expires in tawdry-thrills mode. But the show’s not over until the finale.

Dazzling lights. Chandeliers. A mass of women in snowy zircon-studded tutus, fetching little tiaras, and partners to match, madly churning out what might be a faultily translated, phoned-in version of the finale of Symphony in C–or is it Theme and Variations? Or Ballet Imperial? Amid the hectic traffic, hierarchy prevails, as it must in classical ballet. Whelan and Ansanelli, partnered, respectively, by Nilas Martins and Benjamin Millepied, are relegated to soloist status in favor of Kowroski, who, as the channeled image of Farrell, must reign supreme. Squired by Stephen Hanna (Mr. X, see above), she egregiously exaggerates whatever she has in common with Farrell, who, in real life, is no longer welcome at the New York City Ballet in any role, but whose dancing remains indelible. Raked over though one’s sensibility may be, exhausted as one’s eyes are at this point in Eifman’s travesty, one should not miss the second quote from Études that turns all the dancers into silhouettes.

Then, melodramatic flashes of light, and the late Mr. b, now in evening clothes (no doubt de rigueur in Paradise), moves among his dancers. They all bow to something unseen, then cheerily carry on their work like the pros they are. By now, though, they look like automata.

Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Photo: Paul Kolnik: Alexandra Ansanelli and Robert Tewsley in Boris Eifman’s Musagète

© 2004 Tobi Tobias

Stephan Koplowitz: The Grand Step Project / various locales, NYC / June 15-28, with multiple performances on each date; for specific locations, dates, times, and travel directions, go to: http://www.dancinginthestreets.org/season/grand_step.html

Dancing in the Streets, which springs choreography from the prison of conventional theaters, celebrated its 20th anniversary by commissioning the site-specific specialist Stephan Koplowitz to tackle half a dozen celebrated New York City staircases. The result was The Grand Step Project, which I visited at the location most familiar (and dear) to me, the broad steps fronting the imposing Beaux-Arts façade of the New York Public Library at Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street–the Lion Library as it’s affectionately known, being guarded by the magisterially leonine marbles, Patience and Chastity. Overlooking Fifth and thus offering a fine view of the passing parade of life in midtown, these steps are often inhabited–at least in decent weather–by construction workers and office workers (chatting desultorily as they consume their brown bag or take-out lunches), students, lovers, tourists, and folks whose feet or spunk have simply given out en route.

The steps comprise a pair of long and wide, wide, wide flights separated by a generous flat plaza. The performance Koplowitz designed–15 minutes of choral music (on this occasion from the New York Choral Society, rendering feisty spirituals) followed by 15 minutes of dancing–gamely used the flat expanse for an empty zone between action and audience and confined the dancers to the upper flight, which is broken only by a single meager ledge.

The beginning of the dance was spectacular. Dozens of young people in summery street clothes spilled from behind the library entrance’s massive pillars, stretched out on the stairs as if lying in their beds or floating on a lake, and proceeded to roll down the steps until the whole staircase looked as if it had turned to roiling flesh.

The thing about a staircase, though, is that, once you’ve gone down, there’s no place to go but up, and so the dancers stood and did so, which was something of an anti-climax. Apart from a repeat of the lava-pouring-down-the-mountainside roll (compelling even the second time around), the balance of the dance consisted largely of the figures’ grouping and regrouping in formal clusters and making semaphoring sorts of gestures with their arms. Some contrast to this material was duly provided by the ensemble’s forming a human frame for a few soloists and occasionally coupling up for a little jiving, even a lindy-style lift or two, though there wasn’t much space on the stairs for letting go.

Given the circumstances–the staircase venue, the outdoor location (which invariably diminishes dramatic impact)–the massed-choir tactics were destined to work best. They would work even better, I think, if the arm gestures with which they’re embroidered had more full-bodied power behind them. As they’re performed now, the hieratic motions are made with limbs that look too fragile and fingers that seem too delicate to create sufficient impact. The same moves would register more eloquently if sprung from the gut, with visible energy and weight.

All in all, though, the performance was both ambitious and appealing. This sort of undertaking is a major organizational challenge, yet it was presented as the kind of thing that might just happen serendipitously in a big, crazy town where art counts and imagination flourishes. I–and, apparently, the crowd that gathered and stayed–found it compelling enough to overcome the distraction of the day’s weather (temperature in the nineties, humidity that made your palms stick together when you tried to applaud). Most important, its premises proved to have staying power.

The show over, I fled around the corner to the subway for a nice cool local train to the Upper West Side. As I went down the MTA staircase, it suddenly came alive for me. The steps here are slate gray, scored into a diamond pattern. Because of their composition, millions of displaced stars seem to twinkle from the dark matrix, defying the blobs of used chewing gum, the smoldering cigarette butts, and god knows what else New Yorkers cast away and crush with their relentless traveling feet. I was conscious of myself going down the steps, that utterly pedestrian function taking on the fascination of art. I reacted to the appearance of a lone climber-up (with her sienna skin and her flamboyant red dress, she took on the grandeur of a diva making an entrance in a gorgeously melodramatic opera). I registered the decreasing distance between us–until we passed each other and, as if by some infallible magic, the space between us began to stretch out again.

I thought about other steps, among them the infinite number I had climbed the day before with a patient but weary granddaughter in tow, when the escalator at the elevated 125th Street station on the Broadway line froze into staircase mode. “Climbing and climbing to reach the subway in the sky,” I said to encourage the four-year-old with the wondering gentian-blue eyes and the corn-silk hair curling into tendrils from the heat. Pale and slender, her bare legs labored to carry out the necessary task. “We’re climbing all this way up to catch the train, and the first thing it will do is take us underground. Isn’t that odd?” I asked the silent child, who allowed me a flicker of a smile and persisted in her arduous ascent–Heidi takes Manhattan.

I assume that creating a heightened awareness of the environment and ourselves as performers in it, is more or less Koplowitz’s intention.

© 2004 Tobi Tobias

SCHOOL OF AMERICAN BALLET 40TH ANNUAL WORKSHOP PERFORMANCES

Juilliard Theater, Lincoln Center, NYC / June 5 & 7, 2004

Persisting in its unwieldy low-key name (see above), Workshop infallibly provides a bright spot in the dance-world calendar. A yearly showcase of the august academy’s students, the event consists of matinee and evening performances on a Saturday and a gala evening the following Monday (same program, with varied casting at the top). And then it’s gone forever—apart from the archival videotapes made since 1980 by Virginia Brooks, which can be viewed with permission from the Balanchine Trust. A look through those archives reveals a quarter century’s worth of nascent stars, to say nothing of dancers who would become distinguished soloists and stalwart members of the ensemble—at the New York City Ballet (the school’s parent company) and with other troupes cross-country and abroad.

As just about everyone in Workshop’s audience is aware, it was George Balanchine who, with Lincoln Kirstein, brought SAB into being—even before they established the forerunners of the NYCB. Legend has it that Balanchine insisted, “But first a school.” In honor of the 100th anniversary of the choreographer’s birth, this year’s program was dedicated solely to works from his hand: Serenade, the first ballet he created in America; the Ballabile des Enfants from Harlequinade (which gives stage experience, an essential component of dance training, to pupils still some years away from their teens); Le Tombeau de Couperin (a tribute to the “anonymous” dancers of the ensemble); and excerpts from the Hail, Britannia! extravaganza Union Jack. At the conclusion of the last piece, where a stageful of dancers usually performs a tour de force of synchronization, spelling out “God save the Queen,” each one armed with a pair of perky twin-triangled semaphore flags, the message instead read: G-E-O-R-G-E B-A-L-A-N-C-H-I-N-E. And instead of the British flag being flown in behind the smiling signalers, down came the Cartier-Bresson photo of “Mr. B,” every SAB student’s godfather, demonstrating the correct placement of the foot in tendu, a basic that classical dancers repeat daily, striving to step a millimeter closer to perfection, from their first class to their retirement.

Potential-star spotting is part and parcel of Workshop. For me, two young women, polar opposites in type, stood out this year: Tiler Peck and Kaitlyn Gilliland. Peck, a 15-year-old from California, is a diminutive bundle of athletic energy, with a projection that’s absolutely electric. In Serenade, she’s so eager to exercise her technical brilliance that she prevents the atmosphere of the piece from accumulating around her. As a rollicking sailor in Union Jack, though, she’s perfect. With her exuberance and assurance, her evident joy in being who she is and doing what she’s doing, she could carry a Broadway show on her own.

Gilliland, just turned 17, comes from Minnesota and from a distinguished matrilineage. Her grandmother, the late dancer and choreographer Loyce Houlton, founded Minnesota Dance Theater, blending the purity and lyricism of classical ballet with the deep texture of modern dance. Her mother, Lisa Houlton, who now runs that company, was herself a lovely dancer schooled in both modes. Gilliland, however, might be a changeling child. She seems to belong entirely to the ballet domain, indeed to a particularly rarefied part of it. Exceptionally tall, exceptionally slender, her small head poised like a jewel on her long neck, her spine as flexible as a young willow, she’s an ethereal, otherworldly creature. As the “Dark Angel” in Serenade, she seems to exist in a dream that is half the creation of Balanchine and Tchaikovsky, half her own fantasy. Even heading up the leg-flaunting chorus of Wrens in Union Jack, She manages to remain a little shy, luminous in her innocence. She will remind veteran observers of Allegra Kent.

I also liked Rachel Piskin’s dulcet lyricism in Serenade. Piskin, who is 16, isn’t as striking a type as Peck and Gilliland; she’s more the norm—but it’s a lovely norm that she embodies, and she seems almost guaranteed a rewarding career.

As for the men, their very number is noteworthy. Could it be that America has finally matured enough culturally to allow its young men to dedicate themselves to classical dancing? In the Harlequinade children’s divertissement, some of the “boy” roles that, of necessity, have long been played by girls en travestie, are now gender-correct in their casting, and it does make a difference. Elsewhere the guys representing the Advanced Men’s class displayed considerable native talent and well-honed skill. If I couldn’t identify with any certainty a future danseur noble among them, I was infinitely touched by one young man in Le Tombeau de Couperin. Perhaps the least proficient in skills of his seven comrades in the piece, all repeating and refracting the same steps, he possesses infinite adolescent grace. He’s still only half way to a grown man’s body, with its expanded chest and steady confidence in its bearing and gestures. He’s at that stage when, the moment a fellow has acquired some command of his rapidly lengthening body, he finds he’s grown another inch—in his sleep, surely—and things have once again fallen apart, with any single move likely to prove unreliable. Raymond Radiguet (Le Diable au corps) and Alain-Fournier (Le Grand Meaulnes) have written eloquently about young men in this phase of their development. Perhaps never again in their lives will they be so vulnerable and so beautiful. The perilous beauty of adolescence is evident everywhere at Workshop, all the more vivid because of the young performers’ unswerving dedication to the standards of mature professional artistry.

Note: Radiguet’s Le Diable au corps (1923) is available in English translation as Devil in the Flesh. In 1946 it was made into a film named for the book, directed by Claude Autant-Lara and starring Gérard Philipe and Micheline Presle. Alain-Fournier’s Le Grand Meaulnes (1913) is available in one English translation under its original French title and in another as The Wanderer. A key incident in the book served as the premise for Andrée Howard’s La Fête Étrange, choreographed in 1940 for the London Ballet.

Photo credit: Paul Kolnik: Kaitlyn Gilliland (standing) and Rachel Piskin in George Balanchine’s Serenade

Serenade choreography by George Balanchine © The George Balanchine Trust

© 2004 Tobi Tobias

Mark Morris Dance Group / BAM Howard Gilman Opera House, Brooklyn, NY / June 8-12, 2004

The problem with the two new-to-New-York dances Mark Morris paired for his company’s recent run at BAM lies mainly in their juxtaposition. Violet Cavern (being given its world premiere) and All Fours (in its first local performances) are both dry, brainy, essentially abstract works in which structure dominates. Both bring you to your knees in admiration of Morris’s craftsmanship; neither provides much meaningful emotional experience or a lush good time. Neither comes as a surprise or holds any of the surprises—small astonishments at what can be done with a simple step or the placement of bodies in space—that Morris (Mr. Wit, Mr. Invention) is usually so deft at supplying.

All Fours, set to Bartók’s String Quartet No. 4, provides an almost diagrammatic response to the score’s five movements. In the first and final sections, eight dancers in severe black tailoring dominate, moving, often in unison, with the fierce, dedicated energy of a group whose force lies in its very anonymity. It is a mass, with no leaders, no individual temperaments. The three movements at the center feature two pairs of figures in white or light gray ramshackle exercise togs. First we have a pair of men (Craig Biesecker and Bradon McDonald), then the same men plus a pair of women (Marjorie Folkman and Julie Worden), last the two women alone. Though they project no decided personalities, we see them intimately—because of their small number? because of their vulnerable look in their pale clothes? because, while the dark figures moved with an almost compulsive ferocity, their actions seem more passive?

The spectator’s mind inevitably makes stories, if only fugitive ones, out of non-narrative dances—partly from hints planted by the choreographer, partly from a need to “interpret” so as to “understand.” Granted, this is a failure on the spectator’s part, this desire to know, to define, to pin down in ways more appropriate to literature than to dancing, yet it goes on all the time. In this case, I saw the “dark” ensemble and the “light” individuals as the public and private aspects, respectively, of the same group. And I saw the group as a cult, in thrall to a demonic possession, like the societies created by Paul Taylor in Speaking in Tongues and The Word. Out in the lobby at intermission I met colleagues and dance fans who had other stories entirely.

Here’s what led me to my interpretation: The dark figures’ unison aspect; the abrupt, angular, driven nature of their actions; the seemingly compulsive repetition of their gestures, some of them without emotional freight, like a hand thrust forward with the thumb up in hitchhiking mode, others laden with significance such as arms flung heavenward, hands clasped, toward a cast-back head, in the manner of passionately prayerful congregants in a Pentecostal church. (Martha Graham made much of this last in her choreography for the Preacher and his acolytes in Appalachian Spring.) Further: The light figures’ brain-washed demeanor, or at least their look of being subject to influences beyond their control or even full comprehension; their being carried away at intervals like helpless puppets by members of the dark tribe; their repeatedly facing each other and putting a hand to their partner’s lips, the signal serving as a reminder that some terrible secret must not be revealed. (The fact that both the dark and the light groups use many of the key gestures in the piece made me understand them as part of the same community.) And then: Nicole Pearce’s lighting, which keeps the stage ominously dark only to have it flare suddenly, at unpredictable intervals, into hellfire red or a bleak dawn. Others, looking at All Fours, may interpret this evidence differently or, still more likely, see or remember different evidence.

Morris, a choreographer as serious about music as Balanchine was, doesn’t usually work with commissioned scores (which may turn out to be duds), but he made an exception with Violet Cavern. It’s accompanied by about three-quarters of an hour’s worth of partially improvisatory music from The Bad Plus and was played by the group (Ethan Iverson, piano; Reid Anderson, bass; David King, percussion) at the BAM showings. Iverson served as musical director for the Mark Morris Dance Group from 1998 to 2002, which may explain some of Morris’s trust, and The Bad Plus has swiftly made a name for itself in the contemporary music world for its smooth combination of jazz with other forms—rock, pop, heavy metal. I am not knowledgeable in this area, but to me the score seemed insufficiently complex, repetitive, and far too long. Not surprisingly, I felt the same way about the choreography.

The activity is placed in a floating world. The curtained panels that conventionally form the wings at either side of the stage (the place into which dancers ordinarily vanish from view) have been removed. The official dancing ground is delineated by shiny flooring. When the dancers leave it, they quit “dancing” and just walk or run through the remaining indeterminate space, reconstituted as pedestrians, ordinary folk. In modest black box theaters, which have no wings, this state of affairs always prevails, and it has become a popular ploy even on opera house stages. Still, it provides some fascinating sights and a useful prod to re-think what “dancing” means. If you ask me, it’s whatever the choreographer puts in front of your eyes.

Stephen Hendee, the set designer, has been less fortunate with his decoration of the central space. He’s created a crowd of small translucent rectangles crisscrossed with spiderwebbing that hang over the dancers’ heads like clouds that have gotten stuck in an aerial traffic jam. For variety’s sake, colored light is projected onto them at intervals. You guessed it; violet’s first.

Actually the violet cavern idea suits the first half of the piece, which evokes down-and-outers—denizens, perhaps, of today’s or yesteryear’s clubs—who’ve succumbed to drugs, hopelessness, and unfeeling states in which they can see a companion disintegrating, stare at him or her, and drift off or away. There may also be a reference here to the demoralized state of the populace induced by the events of September 11 and their never-ending repercussions.

Ever the master of formal devices, Morris doesn’t slack off here. Many a design or phrase is repeated in exquisitely calibrated variations. The suggestion of life’s being merely a passing parade comes from the pervasive use of bodies facing front while traveling horizontally cross-stage, and in the use of motifs that at their first occurrence look like dramatic events and then, with repetition, prove to be something that can occur again and again, to anyone and everyone. Only one image is striking, but it is unforgettable: Two bodies lie supine, parallel to each other, pushing themselves along the floor, legs bent, with the soles of their feet, progressing with some difficulty, head first. Each extends an arm to a standing figure who grasps it and walks slowly along facing the sliding bodies as if they were dogs and s/he their walker. The connection with photos from Abu Ghraib may be coincidental, but it gives the image a horrifying resonance.

I found the dark sections of Violet Cavern, which account for at least two-thirds of the piece, monotonous. Inventories of the incapacitated, depicting the apathy of the damned, they’re unrelieved by sufficient choreographic or musical inspiration. But it’s the last segment I really object to. In it, the mood inexplicably lightens and, before you know it, everyone is launched into hallelujah activities—leaps with a ravenous appetite, arms flung skyward, dervish whirling at high speed, and so on. This ecstasy without evident cause, which gave me grave reservations about V, the Schumann piece that was Morris’s big 2001 hit, surfaces again and has the audience, excitement built to fever pitch, cheering. In L’Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato, widely considered Morris’s finest work, the exultation of the finale is clearly earned; in V, I would have to agree with Morris if he claimed “The music made me”; here, in Violet Cavern, the resurrection of joy seems arbitrary. On opening night I gauged the audience’s response to the piece as a “maybe”; two nights later the crowd was on its feet, pelting the stage with accolades.

Much was made in the press about Morris’s use of live music in these performances. Much, indeed, should be made in these economically stricken times when dancing has been forced to pretend it is expendable. The truth is that live music is nearly as essential to theatrical dancing as live bodies.

Photo credit: Stephanie Berger: Michelle Yard, Craig Biesecker, Julie Worden, and Amber Darragh in Mark Morris’s Violet Cavern

© 2004 Tobi Tobias

New York City Ballet / New York State Theater, NYC / April 27 – June 27, 2004

American Ballet Theatre / Metropolitan Opera House, NYC / May 10 – July 3, 2004

NEW YORK CITY BALLET: A PAIR OF NEW WORKS FROM PETER MARTINS

I. EROS PIANO

The subtler and more engaging of the two new works by the New York City Ballet’s artistic director, Peter Martins, the trio Eros Piano is set to John Adams’s delicate and complex music of the same name. A flood of luminous color greets the eye as the piece opens. Mark Stanley has suffused the vast bare stage with a glowing turquoise light that suggests an underwater universe. First one woman (Ashley Laracey) picks her way on pointe along a lateral path so far upstage she reads as a shadow, a figure there and yet (do I wake or dream?) not there. Just as she vanishes from view, Nikolaj Hübbe, a substantial figure bathed in a golden glow, traces a parallel path downstage. Then he’s gone and a second fragile figure (Alexandra Ansanelli) appears, she too traveling laterally, so that we seem to be witnessing a panorama-in-time, with the women figments of our imagination and of the man’s as well. To add to the illusion, Holly Hynes has dressed the women in aquamarine unitards, one a paler shade, the other more intense. Hübbe is sheathed in a blue-green tint so faint it looks like ice.

Eventually the three get together, the man first with one woman, then, after she drifts away from him, the other, and finally—this has a wonderful theatrical-shock effect—with both. As a fellow might expect, partnering mermaids, the women’s bodies behave as if they’re infinitely malleable. These circumstances give Martins a perfect opportunity to explore one of his prime areas of curiosity and expertise, convoluted partnering. If he has used it with excessive ingenuity elsewhere, in this instance it is appropriate and lovely. Hübbe manipulates the acquiescent women into all sorts of baroque shapes, wrapped around him like clinging seaweed or poised on the ground as if resting for a moment on the floor of the sea until a passing wave escorts them back to the surface.

Hübbe and Martins both being Danish-born, trained in the school of the Royal Danish Ballet and principals in its company before leaving home for Balanchineland, I couldn’t help thinking, as I watched Eros Piano, of Bournonville’s Napoli, widely considered Denmark’s “national ballet.” In the Blue Grotto scene that constitutes most of its second act, the appealingly plebian hero, Gennaro, enters the dangerous enchanted underwater realm in the hope of rescuing his beloved fiancée, Teresina, lost to the waters when their little boat capsized in a storm. Alas, the demon running the place is busy transforming her into a naiad. Initiated into the sisterhood of water nymphs that he holds in thrall, Teresina will be doomed to lure splendid young men away from real life and its responsibilities into a realm of ceaseless but monotonous pleasure. The key connection between Napoli’s Blue Grotto passage and the situation Martins sets up in Eros Piano is the fact that Gennaro can’t recognize Teresa in her replica-naiad state—she might be any one of those alluring girls gliding around him—nor she (in her mesmerized state) him.

Nineteenth- and 21st-century ballet being obedient to different rules, Napoli ends happily, with Gennaro and his Teresina, having triumphed over seductive evil, reunited in sunlit terra firma reality, whereas Hübbe is finally abandoned by both women—true to their nature (or to the nature of postmodern relationships), they just float away. As the curtain cuts him off from our sympathy, he stands alone, bereft of companionship or enlightenment as to his plight.

Even apart from its chamber-scale cast, Eros Piano is a small piece, unpretentious in its ambitions, focused on filigreed detail. It might be still more absorbing in a theater of more modest proportions. I would like to see it again. Meanwhile I wonder what connection, if any, exists between this piece and Martins’s Chichester Psalms, with which it’s paired on the current season’s programs. Does it lie in a coupling of opposites—Eros and Agape, profane and sacred love?

II. CHICHESTER PSALMS

Leonard Bernstein’s Chichester Psalms—an arrangement, for orchestra, chorus, and boy soprano, of familiar passages from the Old Testament—can be understood as urging, in appreciation of life, the wisdom and reconciliation that will quell factional strife and bring about a holy state of peace. Perhaps Martins decided to stage this score because of the turmoil rife in the world today. Both casts for his setting, named for the music, are led by a fair-complexioned woman and a dark-skinned man. (Carla Körbes and Amar Ramasar did the first performance; Dena Abergal and Henry Seth have also been cast.) The pair act as guides in the cause of calming internecine warfare through a realization that people are more alike than they are different. Ramasar, a gentle, deeply expressive dancer, is the very image of compassion.

The ballet’s opening image, a formal tableau of mixed chorus and dancers ranged in a wide tiered arc, announces the solemnity of the piece. The performers’ black and white costumes (by Catherine Barinas) refer to choir robes and ancient Middle Eastern dress. The female dancers’ white gowns lean toward the Grecian mode, which makes their pointe shoes look incongruous (and suggests that the ballet vocabulary is not the perfect language for the task at hand). The male dancers’ costumes, picturesque swirls of black, owe something to Martha Graham (whose own vocabulary is usefully raided to add a bit of force and expression to the proceedings).

Apart from the two principals, the dancers move in chorus. The most dramatic section has the men paired off in combat, with the women, midway, running lyrically through their midst to quiet the conflict—agents of succor, advocates of harmony. The principals, who seem to be loving partners with regal dignity, simply lead their tribe toward its quiet epiphany.

Overall, the choreography is more like an illustration of principles than an enactment of them. It is also curiously deficient in force and invention. Modern dance choreographers and ballet choreographers with modernist leanings have done more effective work in the choral mode. To name a few: Doris Humphrey, in the architecturally driven New Dance; Martha Graham, in Primitive Mysteries, where the ensemble, with its inexorable tread, becomes the chief character; Bronislava Nijinska, in Les Noces, which vigorously embodies the force of community evident in Stravinsky’s score. Martins’s effort, essentially pallid and banal—the ensemble linking hands to promenade in a snaking chain, and so on—allows your attention to wander to the disagreeable question of whether or not Bernstein’s music wants, or even really permits, a visual complement. I suspect that it doesn’t.

The score, conducted by Andrea Quinn, was persuasively sung by the Juilliard Choral Union (directed by Judith Clurman) and the thirteen-year-old James Danner, who duly produced some of those unearthly tones that reinforce the beliefs of the faithful and give religious skeptics second thoughts.

AMERICAN BALLET THEATRE: GILLIAN MURPHY

Gillian Murphy, who dazzled this past week in Ballet Imperial, is a ballerina in every fiber of her being. Her own dancing is bold, confident, and magisterial; what’s more, she looks as if she’s the animating force behind the whole ensemble. Self-contained, immune to flourishes of ego, she simply takes charge of everything that’s happening on stage, making the entire ballet cohere.

By a slight re-angling of her body in partnered adagio, she shifts from one potent image to another. Here she’s a princess in a tragedy of love, the next moment a bird poised for flight—an icon of freedom. She’s too singular and formidable a physical personality to qualify as a natural actress—she’ll have to approach drama-dependent roles obliquely, as she did with Hagar in Tudor’s Pillar of Fire. Perhaps her innate ability to create telling images—physical metaphors, as it were—will prove sufficiently theatrical in itself.

Tall and large-boned, with a striking face (often compared to Bette Davis’s) and phenomenally adept technique, she seems, sui generis, powerful and regal. The next time company and choreographer find themselves casting about for a subject as they set out to spend zillions concocting a latter-day multi-act, lavishly decorated story ballet—these items may not advance the cause of dance but they often sell tickets—they’d do well to think of Murphy as Queen Elizabeth I (also an imperious redhead) or Catherine the Great.

Photo credit: Marty Sohl: Gillian Murphy and Carlos Molina in the American Ballet Theatre production of George Balanchine’s Ballet Imperial

© 2004 Tobi Tobias

American Ballet Theatre / Metropolitan Opera House, NYC / May 10 – July 3, 2004
New York City Ballet / New York State Theater, NYC / April 27 – June 27, 2004
Dance Theatre of Harlem

AMERICAN BALLET THEATRE

When it comes to George Balanchine’s 100th birthday, the New York City Ballet is, by rights, the chief celebrant, but it is hardly alone. The homage has been national, international, and well-nigh relentless. This past week, NYCB’s nearest neighbor, American Ballet Theatre, joined in officially with its all-Balanchine program: Theme and Variations, Tchaikovsky Pas de Deux, Mozartiana, and Ballet Imperial. The program constituted a cornucopia of choreography, staged with vigor on several different sets of principals, as if ABT wanted to ensure that the largest possible number of its leading dancers shared in the experience, which was surely an instructive one.

The performance I chose—for its overall casting—was given before an audience packed with connoisseurs and offered many beauties and many thrills. For me, its highlights were the production of Theme and Variations and Veronika Part’s dancing in Mozartiana.

Theme, set to the final movement of Tchaikovsky’s Suite No. 3 for Orchestra, was commissioned from Balanchine by ABT in 1947, to showcase the spectacular classical technique of Alicia Alonso and Igor Youskevitch. It remains a challenge even today, with its exacting and inventive choreographic mini-essays on basic elements of the danse d’école (the extension of the foot in tendu, the jump, the turn, the partnered adagio). Understandably, it is most often danced with a concentration on the impeccable execution of its myriad feats, so that, witnessing a successful performance of it, you feel exhilarated but not necessarily moved.

In the current production, marvelously staged by Kirk Peterson, Ashley Tuttle’s presence in the ballerina role changed the emphasis. While Tuttle’s a strong technician, she makes herself memorable through her musicality. Nowhere did she sacrifice precision, but her message was clear: the essential unit of dancing is the phrase, not the step. This understanding provided an alchemy that turned motion into emotion, revitalizing the choreography.

Tuttle’s partner, Angel Corella, was equally admirable, matching her phrasing-first approach and exchanging his familiar heroic-bravura style for luminous decorum. The solo in which he alternates double air turns with double pirouettes was impeccably done, not a bit circusy, yet not textbook-dry either. He offered dancing as close to perfect as we’re likely to get in this life, yet charged with tremendous energy held just in check.

I don’t think it was just the Bengal-rose hue of the principals’ costumes—a throwback to Aurora’s tutu for the Rose Adagio in The Sleeping Beauty—that suggested the Theme couple might be Princess Aurora and Prince Désiré on, say, their tenth wedding anniversary. The cue was embodied in dancing that suggested a still youthful pair, still loving, still trusting in visions, now settled into a fruitful reign over a peaceable kingdom.

The demi-soloists and the small ensemble echoed the behavior of the principals at every moment—in clarity, strength, vivacity, and, above all, musical impulse, making the performance as a whole remarkably alive and human.

The role created on Suzanne Farrell in Mozartiana gave the 26-year-old Veronika Part the best opportunity she’s had to reveal her gifts since she joined ABT nearly two years ago. The infinitely soft and sculptural movement of her upper body, enhanced by her Kirov training, makes for a ravishing port de bras. Her cushioned footfalls have an unusual and satisfying weight. She registers not as “girl” or “spirit,” but as “woman.” Beyond that, her lushness in motion is so innately expressive, you imagine it would be fascinating simply to watch her going through her ritual of daily exercises at the barre.

In the rising generation of ballerinas, Part is the most physically like Farrell—she has a similar opulent physique and her movement has the same voluptuous texture—but Farrell is a hard act to follow, as is Nina Ananiashvili, who, originally coached by Farrell in a Bolshoi Ballet production, now dances the role at ABT, where Mozartiana has been staged by Maria Calegari.

It’s still early days for Part in this strange, beautiful ballet, which demands so much of both body and soul. In the opening Preghiera (Prayer) section she didn’t seem so much steeped in devout communion as acting—unaffectedly, but still acting—a state of holiness, while Farrell so nakedly invested the choreography with her entire being, she made Balanchine’s inventions appear to be a reflection of her own guileless, ardent heart.

Ananiashvili has been able to grasp something of Farrell’s intentions in her performance, whereas Part, at this juncture, can show us only a vastly gifted young dancer operating on some tentative instincts. In this role, she seems only half-realized as a dancer, barely realized as an artist, yet clearly possessing tremendous potential—and this is what’s so touching in the experience of watching her just now. Someone should tell her not to smile.

NEW YORK CITY BALLET: IVESIANA

I wish I understood better why Balanchine’s Ivesiana made such a piercing impression on me when I first saw it with its original cast and why every subsequent encounter with it—I got to see it twice last week—has confirmed its power. Is it Balanchine’s acute response to the music? His piercing imagery? His ability to set up scenes that clamor for lurid melodrama and responding waves of kitsch sentiment and then play them out with tranquil objectivity?

Created in 1954, the ballet is set to four small, unrelated pieces for orchestra by Charles Ives—eerie, idiosyncratic music that is both spare and complex. Often it seems to be a kind of ambient sound going on inside your head as you try to live in a contemporary urban America that harbors faint, fragmented echoes of its past. The ballet’s four sections are named for their music.

Central Park in the Dark: The light has almost failed in a space without boundaries. A large cluster of female figures—hair unbound, shrouded in unitards as dark and dull as mud—moves out from a faraway corner to fill the area, with the humdrum gait and pace of pedestrians in a train station. The bodies then bend over head first, kneel, and sway back and forth, crouching at intervals in fetal position. A pale bare-legged girl in a plain white sundress, “victim” written all over her, enters and picks her way through their midst as they begin to resemble tombstones or, raggedly waving their raised arms, trees in a forest rife with dangers. The girl, arms outstretched before her, fingers like antennae trying to palpate anything they might encounter, seems to be blind.

A man enters, clad like the anonymous figures. The girl goes to him immediately and, at his touch, swoons in relief or fear. Logic would have it that this lone male is the girl’s potential attacker, yet sometimes he seems as lost and terrified as she. They wander through the not-quite-human matrix as if through a tangled wood, jumping over the low obstacles formed by the bodies’ pairing up to link arms. Slowly, inconspicuously, the figures arrange themselves into a mound. Then, as the music rises to a crescendo of muted cacophony, the man flings the girl’s body onto this half-animal, half-vegetable hillock and flees. The body lies there, inert, for some terrible moments in which nothing happens. Finally the girl rises, only to return to her sightless wandering. The ensemble recedes, reassembling in its opening position way back in the space, as if the same story were about to unfold again, and the fragile girl, isolated in the middle of nowhere, walks tentatively out of our view.

The Unanswered Question: Another dark space. Light falls on only two people. The first is a woman in a white leotard, limbs and feet bare, long hair streaming over her shoulders, face expressionless. The other is a near-naked man whose existence lies in reaching out for her eternally. The woman is an icon. She’s borne by four men swathed in black who are non-entities apart from their function. They hold her high above their shoulders, in standing or seated position, so that she resembles the statue of a saint paraded before a worshipping crowd. They swoop her downward towards her yearning pursuer, sometimes sweeping her over his recumbent body. They pass her along among themselves in a horizontal circle, as if she were a belt binding them. They wheel her backwards and bring her up head first, as if she were emerging from deep waters. Not once do they allow her feet to touch the floor.

The theme is central to Balanchine. The yearning man is the artist-lover. The woman is his muse, by definition—indeed, of necessity—unattainable. The idea is commonplace; the marvel is the way in which Balanchine has found a series of images operating in time to convey it.

In the Inn: A man and woman meet casually at a club, enjoy a sophisticated danced flirtation—they’re worldly wise, attractive and mutually attracted—then go their separate ways with insouciance. No strings, no regrets, just that gorgeous interlude in which they charm and challenge each other and we get to watch, relishing their savoir-faire. There is no indication whatsoever of how this section relates to the darkness that prevails in the rest of the ballet. You’re left to figure that out for yourself—if you need to.

In the Night: The landscape of the first section has now become the sole action. Once again, in the gloom, the anonymous figures trudge cross-stage on their knees—until the inexorably failing light makes them invisible. Matthew Arnold’s “We are here as on a darkling plain” verses would seem to apply but for the fact that what Balanchine gives us here is not a cri de coeur like “Dover Beach,” with a proposed escape route (“Love, let us be true to one another”), but a simple, uninflected statement of fact that proves to be ineradicable.

No one mentions Ivesiana when lists of Balanchine’s masterpieces are being drawn up, but it is one nevertheless. And, half a century from the date of its making, it remains as new as tomorrow.

DANCE THEATRE OF HARLEM

An element in the New York City Ballet’s Balanchine 100 centennial celebration has been the appearance of guest artists from companies with close ties to the master. Most recently it was the turn of Dance Theatre of Harlem’s Tai Jimenez and Duncan Cooper, who dispensed their troupe’s signature warmth and graciousness in the Liberty Belle pas de deux from Stars and Stripes. Ironically, their visit coincided with the dismaying news, made public by an article in the New York Times, that DTH was in danger of folding.

While the extraordinary DTH school continues to function, the 35-year-old company, 44 dancers strong, is now operating with only a skeleton staff, there being no money on hand to pay salaries, while the board of directors has been swiftly bailing out. DTH will fulfill its upcoming engagement at Kennedy Center, June 8-13, but its future is uncertain unless sufficient funding is found to meet a $2.5 million deficit and cover the costs of ongoing production. Blame for the current fiscal shambles and the company’s lack of a sound infrastructure is being concentrated on Arthur Mitchell, the company’s founder-director, who is accused of “inept management,” according to the Times report.

Inept management? Mitchell, the NYCB’s first African-American principal dancer, conceived DTH to correct the virulent concept that blacks can’t do classical dancing, curtailed his own performing career to bring the company (and the school necessary to it) into being, and miraculously held these enterprises together for three and a half decades, leading the troupe to successive moments of glory and repeatedly getting it to rebound from near-death situations endemic to arts institutions. You call that inept management? I call it heroic achievement, and I think it should be acknowledged with admiration and gratitude—at the same time as the current grievous problems are being addressed.

Apparently, the company is now in the process of hiring an executive director, who will take care of practical matters while Mitchell, who has agreed to the arrangement, concentrates on the artistic side of the company’s affairs. This solution, simple and logical as it is in theory, may be difficult to carry out in practice, for two reasons. First, it assumes, wrongly, that there is no overlap between administrative decisions and artistic decisions. When it comes to repertory, then, will Mitchell be allowed to select or commission dances solely on their aesthetic merit? Or will he, like every other ballet director functioning today, have to give equal or greater weight in his decisions to what sells? (Ironically, Mitchell has always emphasized—purist critics would say overemphasized—ballet’s obligation to “entertain” its audience.) Second, it assumes that Mitchell will actually be able to relinquish authority on ostensibly administrative matters. From what I’ve seen, supreme authority has been essential to his achievement with DTH. Without it, and his overwhelmingly charismatic exercise of it, the company would never have existed.

In order to operate under conditions of shared authority, Mitchell will have to reshape an essential part of his personality, an element that has lain at the heart of his success. I hope he will have the courage and fortitude for this latest challenge, as he has had for so many previous ones, because his mission—making black performers an integral part of the classical-dance world—has not yet been fully accomplished. The executive director, when s/he comes on board, will need empathy for the struggle with himself that Mitchell will be undergoing and a constant awareness of the fact that even the most expert administrator could not have made Dance Theatre of Harlem happen.

© 2004 Tobi Tobias

American Ballet Theatre / Metropolitan Opera House, NYC / May 10 – July 3, 2004

I know Raymonda—Petipa, Glazounov, 1898—is a hokey ballet. Still the dance world can’t leave it alone, its strictly classical variations, pas de deux, and small-group-of-soloists configurations being dazzling—incomparable, actually, and a veritable lexicon of the danse d’école—its score so full of pleasant, atmospheric tunes supplemented by vivacious invitations to earthy romps in heeled boots.

And so American Ballet Theatre, convinced (perhaps rightly, since it must reach way beyond hard-core dance aficionados in order to fill the Metropolitan Opera House)—convinced, as I say, that its audience craves multi-act story ballets, elaborately dressed, with scenery to match, has come up with a new production. It has been choreographed by Anna-Marie Holmes after Marius Petipa and “conceived and directed,” as the house program carefully notes, by
by Holmes and ABT’s artistic director, Kevin McKenzie. (Beware of enterprises crediting their conception.) Ormsby Wilkins adapted the Glazounov score and conducted his result on opening night. Zack Brown created the scenery and costumes. The production was undertaken in partnership with the National Ballet of Finland, which gave it its world premiere in Helsinki a year ago. (If those responsible for the staging noticed that it was deficient in any way, they’ve had plenty of time in which to improve it.)

This is a “full-length” Raymonda, though curtailed so that audience and stagehands can get home at a reasonable hour. It’s decently danced, although, overall, it sacrifices vigor and fervor on the altar of correctness. Under Wilkins’s baton, the beguiling music failed to provide the dynamic support dancing requires; let’s assume, however, that this strange flaccidity can be given a shot in the arm. The scenic investiture, if you will, caroms off multiple ill-sorted inspirations, including but not limited to: Les très riches heures du Duc de Berry; the fashion and art à la japonaise popular ca. 1920; Rouben Ter-Arutunian’s designs—trees that float upward so their roots become chandeliers—for Balanchine’s Vienna Waltzes; Islamic minarets; and Las Vegas floor shows. The little girls who study ballet and come to matinees may well find it delectable. But how any choreographer, conceiver, or director could have put on The Raymonda Show without the spine of plot and some depth of characterization is utterly beyond me.

The plot is a mess in this version. Granted, the plot of Raymonda has been a mess from the get-go, but presumably it was more capable of suspending disbelief in Petipa’s time, when ballet libretti often preferred rampant fantasy to logic. In ABT’s Raymonda, plot is almost gone, leaving confusion in its wake.

This is what the audience needs to know: It’s the Middle Ages and we’re in Provence, which is feeling close political ties to Hungary. (Already you have misgivings.) The exquisite heiress Raymonda, under the guardianship of an aunt, the Countess Sybelle (the spelling of the names in this tale is variable; I’m using ABT’s here), is slated to marry Jean de Brienne—suitably aristocratic, to say nothing of white, Christian, and a paragon of chivalric behavior. But, uh-oh, here comes trouble, in the form of the Saracen Abderakhman, a knight in his own domain, granted, but in appearance a person of color, an infidel, and the kind of guy (like everyone from his world, Petipa’s audience might have agreed) who, taking a fancy to a young lady, feels lust rather than love and, finding persuasion (gifts of glittering jewelry, a show of gaudy regional dances from his private nightclub) ineffective, segues without any problem to attempted abduction and rape.

So you’ve got drama (if only melodrama) and conflict—eventually de Brienne disposes of the Saracen in a duel so that he and his fiancée can live happily ever after. But here’s the key thing: the conflict lies not in sword versus scimitar but within Raymonda’s consciousness. She must choose between Jean de Brienne’s chaste love, which even her virginal self suspects may prove a bit dull, and the seductiveness of Abderakhman, who represents the sensual life. She meditates on this forbidden love in a dream scene; what could be more Freudian?

ABT, however, partly through its mistaken desire to keep things zipping along, has not only left the story and its underlying theme unclear, it has also conceived and directed the heroine as a blank and Abderakhman as a ludicrously exotic idiot who represents neither serious sexual appeal nor serious threat. You sit there muttering pitiably to yourself (or to the young woman sitting next to you, who has kindly plied you with much-needed cough drops), What is going on?

Well, what’s going on are these incredible passages of abstract classical dancing that surface with merciful regularity from the miasma of the muddled plot and unrealized characterizations. Endlessly inventive, they have an infallible dance logic and architectural logic as well. Beyond their beauty—and their unexpected ability to suggest aspects of temperament—they possess an intellectual dimension that makes them the very antithesis of eye candy. Balanchine and Ashton, inarguably the supreme classical choreographers of the twentieth century, rightly took Petipa’s work as a manual of instruction.

It would be an understatement to call the classical-dance excursions for the principals and soloists in Raymonda challenging, and ABT’s opening night cast acquitted itself very well, if with too much visible caution. (The cumulative result resembled a graduation performance at a world-class ballet academy.) Coached to be modulated and fluent—the incarnation of grace—as well as precise in the trickiest feats, the dancing just now looks trapped in this instruction. Take, by way of example, the performances of Raymonda’s two girlfriends: Michele Wiles’s fresh-faced American-girl daring and prowess (so like Merrill Ashley’s) have been stifled; her boldness, her leggy angularity, her frank presentation of herself as an athlete immune to balletic affectations have been softened, as if these qualilties were inappropriate to the occasion when, in fact, they define her stage persona and give it a unique appeal. And Veronika Part, late of the Kirov and thus to the manor born, seemed too calculated, though she provided the loveliest, most evocative dancing to be seen on opening night. (It should be noted that Anna-Marie Holmes, because of her own affiliations with Kirov tradition, locates the manor in Russia.)

Maxim Beloserkovsky, as Jean de Brienne, wasn’t quite up to all the technical requirements of his role, though at his best—cleaving the air in long leaps—he was very handsome. To my mind he’s a lyrical dancer, forced by life and ABT to masquerade as a virtuoso. Marcelo Gomes, a gorgeous young dancer who tends to be passive in his more outré assignments, needs to quiz Holmes or McKenzie closely on who, exactly, he is in the role of Abderakhman and what this character represents. Malleability in dancers is useful to a point; beyond that point it’s a defect. Dancers slated for the history books tend to absorb instruction and then go on to claim their roles, taking possession of them in order to infuse them with vitality and individual life.

As the ballet’s eponymous heroine, Irina Dvorovenko was entirely vacant. She has her fans—and many of them were present on opening night, cheering her on—but I am not one of them. She has a showgirl’s body and a very pretty face. Though she lacks musicality, her technical proficiency is not to be dismissed. But to my mind none of this takes the place of the kind of artistry that—selfless and fueled by an ardent imagination—ferries the spectator into worlds that are strange, potent, unforgettable.

In terms of interpretation, the current production will improve with further performance and alternative casts. Nina Ananiashvili, for example, made a sublime Raymonda, dancing in excerpts from the ballet at ABT’s opening night gala. And perhaps Martine van Hamel, as radiant in the walking role of the Countess Sybelle as she once was as the ballet’s heroine, will find a way to convey to the rising generation of Raymondas, as she did to her audience when the part was hers, the fact that sensuality can be one of a nobly born maiden’s virtues, indeed an important part of her dowry.

In its time, Raymonda has had many incarnations, both in program-length and “excerpts from” form. Balanchine went back to it repeatedly. Back in 1946, he mounted a two-act version for the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo in collaboration with Alexandra Danilova; it was part of their rich, redolent Maryinsky heritage. Danilova danced Raymonda. How I wish I had been there! (The cast, recorded in entry no. 233 in Choreography by George Balanchine: A Catologue of Works, illuminates a critical moment in dance history.) Subsequently Balanchine thought of more efficient ways to use his Raymonda legacy. In 1955 he pared the material down to Pas de Dix, a brisk, brilliant affair that showcased the variations from the ballet’s last act, the “after Petipa” part of the choreography credit presumably best read as more “after” than “Petipa.” In 1978, he then expanded his take on the source material to concoct Cortège Hongrois, providing Melissa Hayden with an adequately lavish vehicle in which to make her farewell at the New York City Ballet. This version included some of the zesty Hungarian folk dances that, in the original, aptly set off the purely classical stuff. In between (1961), he choreographed Raymonda Variations (originally called Valse et Variations), which co-opts parts of Glazounov’s score but does without Petipa’s direct input. (The New York City Ballet is dancing it this season.)

ABT’s ventures into Raymonda territory include: a full-lengther staged by Rudolf Nureyev in 1975, starring Cynthia Gregory and Nureyev, with Erik Bruhn as Abderakhman; divertissements staged by Mikhail Baryshnikov in 1980, with van Hamel as Raymonda; the Grand Pas Classique staged by Baryshnikov in 1987 and dressed in the fur-trimmed tutus we saw when ABT unveiled bits of the current production last season, with van Hamel again as Raymonda (and, the very next year, Kevin McKenzie as Jean de Brienne); and the third act staged by Fernando Bujones in 1991. They’ll get it right yet.

Note: This column is confined to a single item because I spent the week under house arrest ordained by New York’s latest virus. Like some dance critics, it’s a mean one.

Photo credit: Marty Sohl: Marcelo Gomes as Abderakhman and Irina Dvorovenko as Raymonda in American Ballet Theatre’s Raymonda

© 2004 Tobi Tobias

American Ballet Theatre / Metropolitan Opera House, NYC / May 10 – July 3, 2004

New York City Ballet / New York State Theater, NYC / April 27 – June 29, 2004

AMERICAN BALLET THEATRE: GALA

American Ballet Theatre’s opening night gala was a model of good taste. The company’s well-heeled supporters, definitely part of the show as they milled about the lobby and curving staircases of the Metropolitan Opera House, were exquisitely dressed. Immaculately groomed men in the black and white uniform their role requires provided a complementary background for their gaudier ladies. The women’s ensembles—a preponderance of them cut Botticelli-style from delicate fabrics in springtime hues—constituted a delectable fashion parade (and were duly ogled as such by the more pedestrian crowd peering over the balcony rails). The onstage entertainment was equally graceful, the many entries on evening’s program scrupulously chosen and balanced. Amidst all this refinement, I must admit, I almost missed the raw vulgarity—on both sides of the footlights—of the Bad Old Days: the garish gowns-from-hell, the acrobatic variations on the theme of the 32 fouettés.

If the program was, as my date remarked, “all arias, no recitative,” the smorgasbord (to shift metaphors) approach was appropriate to the occasion—providing a taste of things, no deep immersion—and consciously reflected ABT’s sense of its present identity.

Represented first and foremost was the idea of ABT as a custodian of what can loosely be called “the heritage”—classics from the nineteenth century and latter-day works explicitly declaring their adherence to that tradition. The performance opened with the first movement of George Balanchine’s Ballet Imperial, and it’s significant that ABT’s production of the piece harks back to the old version, which evoked the glories of tsarist Russia in its costumes and décor, though the New York City Ballet has itself moved on to a streamlined scenic investiture and has renamed the ballet after its music, Tschaikovsky Piano Concerto No. 2. Representing the actual nineteenth-century part of the heritage category were the extended unison adagio for the female ensemble from the Kingdom of the Shades scene of La Bayadère and chunks of both classical and “Hungarian” passages from the company’s new production of Raymonda, which is about to have its official American premiere.

All three excerpts, and they were substantial ones, were performed with great care, reflecting admirable commitment and hard work from the dancers and their coaches. For the most part, though, the material didn’t quite take wing. The company seems caught between the deliberate Russian style with its sculptural and soulful beauties, and American style, with its speed, sharpness, and verve. Despite its good intentions—and, indeed, its frequent beauties—the dancing seemed deficient in breath, musicality, and, above all, spontaneity. Only the Bolshoi-bred Nina Ananiashvili, in Raymonda, looked fully at ease with her assignment, confidently opting for Russian sublimity as if the alternatives were irrelevant to her identity as a ballerina.

Two pièces d’occasion proved engaging enough to be repeated on other occasions. Carmen Fantasy featured the onstage performance of the violin virtuosa Sarah Chang, gowned in red sequins, playing Pablo de Sarasate’s score with fiendish precision and wild feeling. Kirk Peterson’s choreography is a distillation of the Carmen theme—an elixir of tawdry glamour, bad blood between the lovers, voyeurs and provocateurs in the form of cigarette girls, and so on. Miraculously Peterson keeps his material from lapsing into Backstreet Spanish clichés; instead, he makes the dancing swift, vivacious, technically and atmospherically out for blood—and astonishingly contemporary.

To honor that seemingly ageless man of the ballet theater, the soon to turn 90 Frederic Franklin—still a force in coaching and in retrieving worthy old ballets from limbo, as well as a sometime performer—ABT’s artistic director Kevin McKenzie devised the punning A Sweet for Freddie. The affectionate bagatelle invokes Franklin’s long identification with Coppélia, which ABT will present later in the season. (Once upon a time, Franklin played Franz to Alexandra Danilova’s memorable Swanilda for the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo; in later years he moved on to a finely etched portrayal of Dr. Coppélius and to stage the ballet as well.)

McKenzie generously gives the debonair Franklin two Swanildas to waltz with (Amanda McKerrow and Ashley Tuttle, the most gentle-tempered of ABT’s ballerinas), and then provides two more, each eventually furnished with a slightly dumb, slightly loutish Franz. From time to time the multiple Swanildas lapse into Coppélia’s mechanical-doll state and have to be rescued from such restrictions on their mobility and élan through a bit of Freddie’s trenchant yet graceful mime. At the end, Franklin gets to leave with all four beauties on his arm, their swains registering bafflement as to how the dude brought it off.

The indelible moment of the piece comes right up top, where Franklin, dapper in evening dress, enters and strolls briskly down the diagonal of the Met’s enormous stage with the fluency of a well-exercised fellow one quarter his age. He doesn’t look like he’s dancing, and he’s immune to the affectations of performing. He simply looks like he’s walking—on a clear day in mild weather, certain as any instinctively sanguine man can be that the future is about to offer him unexpected delights.

In the program’s gimmick department—an element absolutely essential to galas—we got David Parson’s Caught, which uses strobe lighting to freeze-frame its solo performer (here Angel Corella) in a swift succession of suspended-in-air positions, and Christian’s Spuck’s Le Grand Pas de Deux, a spoof of the genre dependent on junior high school humor, emphatically performed by Irina Dvorovenko and Maxim Beloserkovsky.

True to its mission, the evening showcased the company’s extraordinary constellation of stars—among them, in addition to those noted above, Alessandra Ferri and Julio Bocca, gorgeously lascivious in the bedroom pas de deux from Kenneth Macmillan’s Manon; Gillian Murphy and Ethan Stiefel, mistaking the tone of Balanchine’s Tarantella, but dazzling nevertheless; and Jose Manuel Carreño as both take-your-breath-away technician and the guy everyone wants to go home with, in his solo from the bravura Diana and Acteon pas de deux. It also managed, with the Kingdom of the Shades passage, to pay due homage to its ensemble, from which the next generation of stars will spring.

NEW YORK CITY BALLET: CHRISTOPHER WHEELDON’S SHAMBARDS

“Is this a word we’re supposed to know?” a fellow was asking in the intermission that followed Shambards, Christopher Wheeldon’s latest work for the New York City Ballet. Well, no, and the audience would have benefited from the elucidation that was available in the press kit but not in the house program. The ballet’s score was commissioned from the Scottish composer James MacMillan, who titled its middle section “Shambards” after an epithet in an Edwin Muir poem that mourns the destruction of the national ethos, calling Robert Burns and Sir Walter Scott “sham bards of a sham nation.”

Wheeldon’s ballet, which is semi-abstract, seems only vaguely related to this issue. It prioritizes patterning, with an ensemble that moves in intricate sharply-etched configurations. The corps work is infused with references to tightly controlled shape—in the parades of Scottish bagpipers, Highland dancing, and the intricate formalities of Celtic design. All this essentially decorative business is carried out cleverly and meticulously in the ballet’s three movements. The result, though, feels too neat, too clean, too self-conscious. Its lack of organic impulse leaves it devoid of sweep and surprise.

Punctiliously positioned against the corps work are some baffling exercises for the soloists. In the opening section, called “The Beginning,” Carla Körbes and Ask la Cour seem to be merely central figures in the handsome shifting patterns that inexorably take possession of the stage. I read this couple as primogenitors of the race, who emerge from the tribe and are, perhaps, ritually sacrificed at its hands.

“The Middle” focuses on a couple (Miranda Weese and Jock Soto) with more contemporary romantic tsuris. We see disagreement, along with hints that it’s rooted in chronic, low-lying anger. We see sorrow, and then rapprochement; shards of a waltz tune surface in the music. Suddenly the man flings his partner to the floor, drags her around by one arm, then holds her limp body in front of him, as if bearing a corpse. Observers more concerned with the evolution of academic ballet technique than the plight of battered women will explain that Wheeldon is experimenting productively here with the traditional adagio form, “advancing” it so that the lady is free to relinquish her right to verticality for a horizontal position on the ground, her gentleman friend lending a hand as he looms above her.

“The End” adds two diminutive pairs of virtuosi (Ashley Bouder and Daniel Ulbricht; Megan Fairchild and Joaquin de Luz) to the ensemble for some immaculately structured dancing in kaleidoscopic patterns. This material escalates from folkish exuberance to the edge of danger, at which point Weese and Soto return to re-enact their catastrophic encounter. Now, instead of presenting her body straight on to the spectators with the air of a horrified penitent, he drags it sullenly into the wings. The ensemble, which had arranged itself like an allée of trees to frame the terrible scene, simply melts away in the descending darkness, as if it had been destroyed by what it witnessed. If you work hard, you can make the onstage scenario fit the Muir.

Holly Hynes has created stunningly simple costumes for Shambards in a palette of browns, grays, russet, claret, and ebony. A set of skirts that look like kilts with some bounce to them is nothing less than ingenious. Mark Stanley has worked complementary wonders with the lighting, rendering the stage dense with brooding and threat.

The very best thing about Shambards is that it provides a featured role for Körbes, a nascent ballerina worthy of far more significant assignments than she’s currently getting. Indeed, she’s the only one of the company’s young women on the rise who would be perfect in both female roles in the NYCB’s most rewarding excursion to the Highlands, Balanchine’s Scotch Symphony.

HERE ON A VISIT:

I. NYCB: LORNA FEIJÓO & GONZALO GARCIA

Guest dancers from companies with a “Balanchine connection”—through their artistic directors, past or present, and their repertory—are adding spice to the NYCB’s already eventful season. To date, the most gratifying visitors have been Lorna Feijóo (currently with Boston Ballet) and Gonzalo Garcia (from San Francisco Ballet). Although neither of them seems destined by training to be an exemplar of the Balanchine style, they revivified the exhilarating Ballo della Regina.

Feijóo, a product of Havana’s National Ballet School and a former principal with Ballet Nacional de Cuba, displays the virtues of that tradition—killer technique coupled with fervent feeling. Think Alicia Alonso. To my mind (I saw her work with the Cuban company), Feijóo is essentially a Romantic dancer, and she didn’t, indeed, embody the qualities of fresh-air fleetness and crispness on which the Ballo role, originated by Merrill Ashley, was built. Yet her performance—full of exuberance grace, eager to please yet not show-offy—was both delightful and persuasive.

Gonzalo Garcia, who is only 24, trained in his birthplace, Spain, before emigrating to San Francisco. Along the way, he seems to have won prizes at every ballet-competition in sight: youngest to take the gold at the Prix de Lausanne, and so on. In Ballo, he looked like a boy dancing not for the gold but for the hell of it, out of sheer animal spirits. Arms loose and free, he seemed to gambol, now over the earth, like Pan, and just as easily, like Ariel, in the air. He brought off the virtuoso feats the choreography requires without emphasizing them, incorporating them instead into the coursing flow of the movement.

Beyond their command of the formidable technique Ballo demands, both dancers displayed an ardent involvement with the feelings that lie latent in the choreography as well as an intense communication with each other. (Risky as it is to generalize, passion, too often absent from classical dancers who are American- born and –bred, seems to be the birthright of those whose mother tongue is Spanish. It must be something in the culture.) Wrongful though kidnapping may be, I’ll bet New York balletomanes have been speculating on the possibility of Feijóo’s and, especially, Garcia’s remaining with the hosts of their recent brief encounter.

II. ABT: ROBERTA MARQUEZ

Remarkable dancers from Elsewhere have long been a staple of the star-conscious American Ballet Theatre. The Kirov’s Natalia Makarova was just one such acquisition, and it was in her staging of La Bayadère that the Brazilian-born and –trained Roberta Marquez has been introduced to stateside fans, first in DC, now in New York.

The 26-year-old Marquez is a principal with the Municipal Theatre Ballet in Rio de Janiero and a guest artist with England’s Royal Ballet. She’s is an extremely petite woman, small and delicate enough to make her partner, the concisely built Ethan Stiefel, look bulking and towering—way macho. If she is not a great artist, she is clearly a star. The earmarks? Impressive technique with the daring to match, sensational projection, and, I suspect, the kind of confidence and desire usually reserved for people performing acts that are going to result in military medals or canonization.

She may be small, but she dances huge. In Bayadère, from the moment her veil is lifted to reveal her piquant face and a body that is tremulous even in stillness, she’s eager to reveal Nikiya’s single-minded passion for a lover whose heroism is nowhere up to hers, the hurt-child pathos proper to the situation, and (half-hidden, of course) the character’s yen for immolation. (Nikiya’s finest hour, Bayadère watchers know, comes after her death).

As the living and loving, rivaled and wronged Nikiya, Marquez is persuasive in her earnestness, admirable in her commitment to the melodrama of the story. Once Nikiya is a ghost, Marquez duly makes her as remote and disembodied as a spirit should be, all the while attempting to convey the tenderness and longing Nikiya still feels for her sorry lover. Somewhere along the way, though, Marquez loses her grip on her viewers’ rapt fascination and belief—because her conspicuous physical prowess and her apt characterization lack the support of that indefinable yet immediately recognizable element we call “soul.”

In many ways the model for Marquez is, in her own generation, Alina Cojocaru, and, before that, Gelsey Kirkland. Marquez is similar to them physically, arguably their near-equal technically, but she lacks their incandescent spirit. Perhaps it is lying dormant in her and will surface with time. I hope so, but I’m not counting on it, since the quality is one that, in ordinary life as well as artistic life, is usually evident by adolescence. Such a blessing is impossible to conceal.

Photo credit: Paul Kolnik: Carla Körbes and Ask la Cour, in Christopher Wheeldon’s Shambards

© 2004 Tobi Tobias