an blog | AJBlog Central | Contact me | Advertise | Follow me:

Seeing Things

Tobi Tobias on Dance et al.

You are here: Home / Archives for main

main

Glimpses #7: Ashton’s Pastoral

by

Frederick Ashton’s La Fille mal gardée, being shown about town in the Ballet in Cinema series, creates a world of delight.  The beloved 1960 ballet is set in a peaceable countryside, back when wheat was harvested with scythes.  Yet even this bucolic wonderland is threatened—by greed.  A farm owner intends to marry off her delicious daughter to the simpleminded son (pathetically fond of his red umbrella) of a wealthy neighbor.  After many amusing and touching tangles and resolutions, the spunky young woman sees to it that she weds the fresh-faced Mr. Right, who is besotted by her.  The ballet is filled with challenges of classical and character dancing (brilliantly met by the Royal Ballet).  What’s more, it’s replete  with pink satin ribbons that, in the deft hands of the dancers, perform their own choreography, from geometric tricks like cat’s cradle patterns to lyrical transformations into rippling waves.  One merely has to visit Ashton’s vision to repossess joy.

© 2012 Tobi Tobias

Starry Night

by

American Ballet Theatre:  Gala / Metropolitan Opera House, Lincoln Center, NYC / May 14, 2012

The 15 items presented in American Ballet Theatre’s gala opening night program proceeded, one after another, like items on a To Do list.  The individual numbers, most of them familiar (at least half of them overfamiliar), provided many an occasion for multiple fouettés for the ladies, kamikaze feats both old and startlingly new for the gentlemen, and crises of passion for the couples.  The show fulfilled its ostensible purpose of presenting every principal dancer on the roster—and many of the soloists.  As a whole, though, it was exhausting to the eye and the spirit.

Considered individually, of course, almost every entry contained something very fine or at least instructive to notice.  Here’s what I noticed:

American Ballet Theatre dancers in Christopher Wheeldon’s Thirteen Diversions
Photo:  Gene Schiavone

Sections of Christopher Wheeldon’s Thirteen Diversions (music: Britten) opened and closed the program.  Every dancer participating seemed as swift and sleek as a human being could be.  However, the choreography—to my mind, some of Wheeldon’s best—suffered mightily from being broken up.

Strangely excerpted from Le Corsaire (Anna-Marie Holmes, after Petipa and Sergeyev; music: Adam), three Odalisques revealed clear individual temperaments.  Sarah Lane demonstrated the beauty of small things rendered with exactitude; Misty Copeland represented vitality; Isabella Boylston proved, once again, that clarity has a spiritual dimension.

David Hallberg in La Bayadère
Photo:  Rosalie O’Connor

Trailing clouds of glory, David Hallberg showed that his concurrent work as a member of the Bolshoi Ballet is the graduate schooling for his talents.  In the Act II pas de deux from La Bayadère (Makarova, after Petipa; music: Minkus) with Polina Semionova, his dancing was clearly more spacious and forceful, with no loss of subtlety.  Semionova is not the best partner for him, even though she does complement him in height; she’s too much of a strongwoman, while he projects dreams you can understand as if they were your own.

The program returned to Le Corsaire—a ballet  clamoring to be excerpted—but Paloma Herrera and Cory Stearns failed to distinguish themselves in the “Bedroom” pas de deux.  Without doubt, Herrera is technically superb, but her representation of feeling always looks painstakingly learned, not experienced.  As for Stearns, he is perhaps not the guy you’d want to trust to let go of you mid-air.

Veronika Part is invariably fascinating to watch, but even she can’t transform Susan Jaffe’s Blue Pas de Deux (music: Alessandro Marcello) into a silk purse.  Her partner was Thomas Forster, unprepossessing in the role, though not even Marcelo Gomes could have saved the day.

Gala programs frequently harbor a piece for a star in a guise other than the one he’s accustomed us to. The slot was filled this time by the acrobatic virtuoso Daniil Simkin proposing himself as a French low-life who hangs out in seedy cafés.  Ben Van Cauwenbergh’s Les Bourgeois, set to a Jacques Brel song of that name, had Simkin clowning around, to be sure, but only in between executing never-before-seen feats.

Probably the most famous duet in classical ballet, the Act II pas de deux from Swan Lake (here, “after Ivanov”; music: Tchaikovsky) was danced by Irina Dvorovenko and Maxim Beloserkovsky.  The two are poorly mated for double work in the traditional vein because (1) she overwhelms him physically and (2) their stage temperaments clash.  She’s a Russian diva type; he’s essentially a Romantic dancer whose ideal Odette might be Alina Cojocaru.

Polonaise D’Enfants (music: Glazunov), choreographed by Raymond Lukens, a member of ABT’s education and training team, presented a selection of students ranging from grade schoolers through ABT’s junior troupe.  The two littlest boys were irresistible; a medium-sized boy displayed a virtuoso’s ambitions; the young female teens were outranked by their School of American Ballet counterparts.  The members of the junior company, who have not necessarily come up through the ABT school, have already jumped, unscathed, through flaming hoops.

Marcelo Gomes and Diana Vishneva in Kenneth MacMillan’s Romeo and Juliet
Photo:  Rosalie O’Connor

In the Balcony pas de deux from Kenneth MacMillan’s Romeo and Juliet (music: Prokofiev), Diana Vishneva created a motivation for her every move.  I loved the way she walked out onto her balcony and raised her arms to the sheltering night sky and her initially running away from her newly beloved like a moth terrified of being trapped.  Her Romeo, Marcelo Gomes, was nowhere near as febrile as she but so adept as a partner that he seemed an organic part of her own dancing.

It was marvelous to see Herman Cornejo in fine fettle once again after a long recovery from injury and last season’s comeback performances.  His partner, in the Act III pas de deux and coda from Don Quixote (after Petipa and Gorsky; music: Minkus), Xiomara Reyes, has nothing like his artistry, but she’s a spiffy technician.  Fouettés—of which we saw far too many in the course of the evening, each set with its quirky variations—are child’s play to her.

Angel Corella and Alina Cojocaru in MacMillan’s Manon
Photo:  Rosalie O’Connor

In the Act I pas de deux of MacMillan’s Manon (music: Massenet), Alina Cojocaru, sympathetically partnered by Angel Corella, coupled the theme of sexual urgency with that of irresistible youthful sweetness. The dismal fate of these lovers was foreseen only by viewers familiar—as many balletomanes are—with the long, tangled tale.

Gillian Murphy and Vadim Muntagirov made an odd couple in the Act III pas de deux and coda of Swan Lake (after Petipa; music: Tchaikovsky), she playing an Odile only America could have bred (athletic, straightforward evil), while he was an Old World Siegfried (all elegant balletic manners, no rough urgency).  He’s Russian born, trained in Perm and at the Royal Ballet.  They might learn a lot from each other.

Ironically, in the Act I pas de deux from John Cranko’s Onegin (music: Tchaikovsky), Roberto Bolle, who hasn’t yet learned how to act, looked far too young and unsophisticated for the role, while Julie Kent, a veteran ballerina, was utterly convincing as an inexperienced young girl suddenly hurtling from virginal innocence to reckless passion.  Cultivating acting as part of her skill set has lengthened Kent’s career by a decade.

Natalia Osipova in Flames of Paris (after Vainonen)
Photo:  Rosalie O’Connor

Natalia Osipova and Ivan Vasiliev brought the gala performance to a rip-roaring close dancing the Flames of Paris pas de deux (after Vainonen; music: Asafiev)—a party-piece for super-adventurous virtuosi.  She astonished with her ability to levitate.  He was a wild man, eager to risk life and limb—he did even fall once—in order to be swifter, higher, more physically inventive than any danseur or stunt man in the movies.  Fortunately he brought some mocking wit to the undertaking, which diminished its vulgarity.

© 2012 Tobi Tobias

What’s New?

by

New York City Ballet :  Spring Gala, Á La Française / David H. Koch Theater, Lincoln Center, NYC / May 10, 2012

New York City Ballet’s spring gala treated its extravagantly dressed audience to two new ballets—one by Peter Martins, who heads the company, the other by the dancer and choreographer Benjamin Millepied, who recently retired from performing with the company and will be pursuing an ambitious project in Los Angeles.  The evening was called Á La Française (in the French manner) and was duly decked out in French references—in the musical choices and, most pointedly, in the attempt at high-chic costumes.

New York City Ballet’s Claire Kretzschmar and Taylor Stanley in Peter Martins’ Mes Oiseaux
Photo:  Paul Kolnik

Martin’s Mes Oiseaux (literally My Birds, make of this what you will), is set to a score for violin, cello, and piano by Marc-André Dalbavie that’s at once delicate, strong, and complex—like a spider web.  The choreography, for a sole man and three women, can be understood as a Judgment of Paris affair (the mythical version, inflected by Antony Tudor’s ironic take), in which the gentleman must choose the “fairest” among three goddesses.  In a process that’s too neatly organized and too long, Martins shows the fellow trying out each of the ladies, failing to arrive at a decision, and, of course, losing all three.  The flighty trio goes off on its own—perhaps to set up a ménage á trois that has no need of him.  Their identity lies in their togetherness more than it does in their individuality.

The three women’s dancing is immaculate.  Lauren Lovette, Ashly Isaacs, and Claire Kretzschmar (whom I’d laid my bet on as the winner, from the way she rides the air)—looked capable of any challenge Martins set for them, no matter how esoteric.  Everything they do is, presumably at Martins’ instruction, terrifyingly stripped of feeling.

Taylor Stanley, the Paris of this excursion, is not merely wonderful here, but unique in general.  He has a muscular, sinewy quality, which can verge on the feral.  This is rare in classical ballet, which assigns its most gifted men either to the noble prince or the virtuoso category.  Tudor would have found a dramatic dancer in him.  If Stanley were in a company like American Ballet Theatre, someone would already have created a latter-day Streetcar Named Desire to showcase him.  At any rate, if ever there were a deeply three-dimensional dancer, it is he.

The costumes for the piece, by the fashion-world designer Gilles Mendel (supervised by Marc Happel, City Ballet’s director of costumes) clothe the trio of women in archly cut black tunics, each accented with a different sharp color.  Stanley is given a less chichi equivalent, which you barely notice because of the deeply textured nature of his dancing.  When, I wonder, will the dance world accept the fact that fashion designers, primarily intent on an immobile visual effect, are rarely a reliable choice for outfits subject to vigorous physical activity?

Tiler Peck and Tyler Angle in Benjamin Millepied’s Two Hearts
Photo:  Paul Kolnik

If the Martins ballet was disappointing, Millepied’s Two Hearts—set to a score by Nico Muhly, the choreographer’s favorite composer—was completely discouraging.  Two terrific dancers, Tiler Peck and Tyler Angle, waste their time playing a couple that seems to suffer from fear of commitment (a prevalent postmodern malady).  Or is it just a fear of sex?  At any rate, embedded in an ensemble that’s a dozen strong, they seem to be working their way to a gratifying ending when the subject of the ballet shifts somehow into the threat of war, with the oversensitive couple making love before the man goes out to die.

If Millepied’s submerged stories remain chronically vague, his choreography is as inefficient as his hints at narrative.  Any passage in it, no matter how small, seems not only disjunctive but improbable.  It’s all one thing after another, with no relationship among the things.  This inevitably puts musicality out of his reach, though Muhly’s scores are hardly dansant.  The moves Millepied gives his dancers look arbitrary, constructions made for an absurdist human anatomy.

For the record, the costumes were equally hard on the eyes.  Created by the sister designers of Rodarte, Kate & Laura Mulleavy, and “supervised by” Happel,  they’re all uncompromising variations of jet black stripes on harsh white.  When the full cast of 14 assembles and revs up the action, the designs might cause an epileptic seizure; even in repose, they’re jarring.  After the two new ballets had been performed back to back, I was muttering Thoreau’s “Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes.”

Sara Mearns and Jonathan Stafford in the second movement of Balanchine’s Symphony in C
Photo:  Paul Kolnik

Thankfully the final item on the program was a Balanchine masterwork, so coherence, musicality, and natural-looking invention were restored to the evening.  The ballet was Symphony in C, set to the very dance-worthy Bizet score; it has finally been given new costumes. I don’t love the new Happel-designed ones, but at least they banished the folded dinner napkins that used to adorn the women’s tutus.  The ballet, created in 1947 for the Paris Opera Ballet, was originally called Le Palais de Crystal (Crystal Palace) so it’s reasonable that now both the women’s white tutus and the men’s black velour tunics are thickly adorned with Swarovski crystals.  The glitter is fun—somehow elegant and tacky at once, like a child’s fantasy of aristocratic elegance.

The ballet was well danced all through the ranks:  principals, demi-soloists, and corps.  Still the standout was Sara Mearns’ rendition of the second movement.  In its own way, it ranks with the interpretations of Allegra Kent and Suzanne Farrell.  Those two ballerinas, however, aimed for the sublime; Mearns doesn’t.  She’s a specific woman, in our own place and time, fraught with the emotions of a life deeply—perhaps too deeply—experienced.

© 2012 Tobi Tobias

Glimpses #6: Sara Mearns

by

Dancing to the spiky Hindemith score for Balanchine’s Kammermusik No. 2, Sara Mearns—a favorite of connoisseurs as well as New York City Ballet’s general public, is like a coiled spring unfurling and rewinding in bursts of energy tempered by minute doses of calm.  She’s like a wild creature, acquired by auction, probing her new environment.  No one in the piece, not even her striking co-star, Teresa Reichlen, is as alive as she is.  Three times her partner, Amar Ramasar, holds out his hand to her; three times she extends her hand as if to accept his and then retracts the gesture.  Several of her solo bits end with a flamboyant flourish, as if she were saying “now that’s that.”  At several points she seems to propose “You want ugly?  I’ll give you ugly.”  And does.  It leaves you breathless.

© 2012 Tobi Tobias

Glimpses #5: Vuillard

by

 

Edouard Vuillard, Misia and Vallotton at Villeneuve, 1899, oil on cardboard. Collection of William Kelly Simpson.

 

As you can see from the Jewish Museum’s rich retrospective of his pictures, Edouard Vuillard (1868 – 1940) was obsessed by fractured patterns.  Clothing in figured fabric and décor vie for attention with the people represented.   Dresses, wallpaper, exuberant plants refusing to confirm that they’re indoors or out, and secondary human figures appearing as half-visible ghosts charge the viewer’s retinae and create a haunting—even ominous—mood of instability.  In the picture above, the man and woman ignore each other’s presence, while the man’s head becomes part of the painting behind him and the woman’s pet dog, begging for a treat, nearly disappears against the rambunctious checkerboard of her dress.  Vuillard gets his showing at the Jewish Museum because he was befriended by powerful Jewish art enthusiasts in the Paris of his day.  Could there be any connection, I wonder, between his hallucinatory view of the world and the mystical aspects of the Jewish faith?

Edouard Vuillard:  A Painter and His Muses, 1890-1940 / The Jewish Museum, NYC / May 4 – September 23, 2012

© 2012 Tobi Tobias

Tracking Corella

by

Barcelona Ballet / New York City Center / April 17-20, 2012

Ángel Corella, artistic director of the Barcelona Ballet and the company’s star dancer
Photo:  Erin Baiano

For a long and happy time, we thought of Ángel Corella, a much-adored star with American Ballet Theatre, simply as a king of dance.  Now we’re coming to know him as a “native son.”  The classical company he founded in Spain, his birthplace, now called the Barcelona Ballet, owes its existence in large measure to his decision that such a troupe was needed.  Spain, celebrated for bringing dances of the people—flamenco, for one—to high art, has often had a lackadaisical attitude toward classical ballet.

In the course of a decade’s work, Corella exercised his determination to change that situation, all the while maintaining his own celebrated performing career.  Now, with Barcelona Ballet appearing for the second time at City Center, he has made the inevitable decision to leave ABT in order to devote himself fully to his company in Spain.  It was time, or almost time.  He was the main drawing card for the City Center engagement of the troupe, appearing in the program’s full-company, wow-zowie closer in brief, sometimes softened doses of the bravura stuff his fans expect of him and a long solo heavy on melodramatic pantomime.  The ballet, Pálpito (Hunch), by Ángel Rojas and Carlos Rodríguez, was hardly distinguished, but Corella performed with dignity and purity of purpose, along with the innate sweetness for which he is beloved.  He retires officially from ABT on June 28, no doubt among laurel wreaths and tears, dancing Swan Lake with Paloma Herrera.

Corella has made a smart decision, I think, and, like Arthur Mitchell with Dance Theatre of Harlem and Edward Villella of Miami City Ballet (both ironically railroaded out of their tenure after they’d fulfilled their main mission), he has stamped his dancers with his own convictions:  devotion to the job of dancing, accuracy of execution, unity of style as a company.  At this point, Corella’s protégés are quick to define legato and staccato yet shy of revealing the emotions that might go with these modes.  They are neat as can be in their footwork, but without the sharp edge that can make neatness thrilling.  Their jumps and leaps are automatically buoyant—still more as if by fiat than by choice.  Their turns—turns in every form imaginable—are phenomenal and enviably confident; what they might signify is still obscure.  In sum, the Barcelona dancers have a long way to go, but they’re clearly on the right path.

At the moment, every single dancer in the company makes you conclude that Corella is a rigorous and charismatic taskmaster.   Still, his dancers will have to loosen up a bit; become more musical, which should help them be more expressive; assert some independence that will let them own their roles.  And even a pedestrian could tell them never to smile unless the smile were spontaneous.

Center:   Barcelona Ballet’s Aaron Robison partnering Ana Calderón
Photo:  Erin Baiano

Having groomed his dancers for competence, Corella will eventually need to take the next step—the difficult one of breeding (or attracting) a few stars.  Apart from himself, Corella doesn’t have any at this point.  I saw only two dancers of distinction.  The first is Carmen Corella, Angel’s sister and the company’s associate artistic director, a tall ravishing beauty but a strangely placid mover. The other is Aaron Robison—a big guy and obviously muscular (most of the men are small and slight), with an ability to—let’s call it—make his presence felt.  The program had three dances and he was in all of them.  During the first piece, I noticed him.  In the second, I looked for him.  In the last I was sold on him.  I’m told that Suzanne Farrell would say to her pupils, “Make me notice you.”

Barcelona Ballet’s Carmen Corella and Dayron Vera
Photo:  Erin Baiano

Despite the many achievements that still lie before them, Corella’s dancers already hint—through their well-marshaled energy and their intense focus in performance—at their desire to be something beyond correct.  Could that something be wonderful, transformative even?  I hope so, because no amount of purely anatomical or theatrical prowess can make a dancer who lacks that desire interesting to watch.

© 2012 Tobi Tobias

Glimpses #4: Re-inventing Tanny

by

Now that truth and privacy have been banished from our culture, it’s not astonishing (or, apparently, actionable) that Varley O’Connor should have co-opted a chunk of a singular artist’s life and “novelized” it.  Tanaquil LeClercq was not a heroine in a middle-brow tale.  She was a unique, fascinating, and—for those, like me, who saw her dance—unforgettable ballerina who was dealt the worst hand imaginable—paralysis.  She was, for the period O’Connor covers, the muse and wife of the New York City Ballet’s George Balanchine, the supreme choreographer of the twentieth century.  Do we really want to know the couple’s pillow talk?  Or the lady’s with others, plus the gentleman’s own obsessions?  Or witness their slow-motion uncoupling?  O’Connor hasn’t the daring, the flair for fantasy, or the writing chops to bring off a vivid romance novel.  Her attribution of the one she’s written to a pair of revered artists is, to my mind, exploitive.  (The Master’s Muse, Scribner, May 2012)

© 2012 Tobi Tobias

To My Readers

by

Dear Readers,

I want to share with you the honor and pleasure I feel in having been named a finalist in this year’s Pulitzer Prize for criticism.  The citation reads:  “For work appearing on ArtsJournal.com that reveals passion as well as deep historical knowledge of dance, her well-expressed arguments coming from the heart as well as the head.”

This year’s winner is Wesley Morris of The Boston Globe for film criticism; the other finalist is Philip Kennicott of The Washington Post for cultural criticism.

I’m especially pleased about the fact that this is the first time a dance critic has been given the Pulitzer distinction for work created for the Internet–in my case, reviews written for my column, “Seeing Things,” which appears in ArtsJournal.

Readers are an essential part of a writer’s life.  I thank you–friends, colleagues, and hundreds of people I’ve never met–for your contribution to my work.

tt

Glimpses #3: Paris in New York

by

Here in the States we all know Brigitte Lefèvre, head of the Paris Opera Ballet, thanks to Frederick Wiseman’s documentary on the venerable company, La Danse.  She’s a woman who knows how to take charge.  At a press conference hosted by the Cultural Services of the French Embassy, she tells us about the company’s upcoming American tour, which will bring it to New York July 11-22.

Encountering her live, your attention is seized by her exquisitely shaped hands, which move with a ballerina’s grace.  Turns out she was a petit rat at the POB’s academy, entering at 8½, graduating into the company at 16, and soon manifesting a parallel interest in dancing outside the classical vein.

Though she claims not to speak English, she listens keenly to her translator’s English précis of her remarks, and understands something of the audience’s questions.  “What exactly is the French style?” she’s asked. She emphasizes its classical purity, adding, “Il faut le voir pour le comprendre” (You have to see it to understand).  And so we will.

© 2012 Tobi Tobias

Occupy Lincoln Center

by

Paul Taylor Dance Company / David H. Koch Theater, Lincoln Center, NYC /  March 13 – April 1, 2012

What dance company director could resist the opportunity of playing the grand-scale Lincoln Center house formerly known as the New York State Theater, even if his or her usual venue were the now handsomely refurbished City Center?  Not even Paul Taylor, who has firm, if sometimes oddball, principles. The Paul Taylor Dance Company seized the opportunity to perform there for three weeks and the people in charge of such things shrank the space and overlooked the fact the company couldn’t afford live music.

Michael Trusnovec and Laura Halzack in Paul Taylor’s Aureole

Photo: Tom Caravaglia

Black masking reduced the stage space from its New York City Ballet proportions (it was built primarily to serve Balanchine).  It diminishes the height and width of the proscenium and thrusts the wings closer to center stage.  I believe the cyclorama at the back of the stage has been moved forward too.  The job has not been done with any imagination or grace and certainly with no luxury; it cheapens the frame in which the dance is the picture.  Throughout the repertoire, the lighting has been inexplicably dusky, and the canned music sounds tinny.  Some of the choreography looks OK in this venue; more of it doesn’t, though the company will adjust to the space as good dancers typically do.  When it comes to Taylor’s dancers and Taylor’s dances, however, we’re not talking about plain old good.  We’re talking about “frequently glorious” in both departments.

Michelle Fleet in Taylor’s The Uncommitted

Photo: Tom Caravaglia

The repertoire for the season is incredibly rich in the masterworks created by Taylor over a half century.  New to New York was The Uncommitted, set to music by Arvo Pärt, a favorite with choreographers given to exploring the poignancy of human existence.  It describes a world populated by people who are pathologically unable to respond to society’s urgent message—“Only connect.”  At first the eleven dancers move in a vocabulary that is largely a single gesture or, at its most generous, one little dance phrase after another.  They’re not even a community, just unnervingly separated individuals occupying a shared space. Taylor also calls on an old trick of his:  a group of dancers moving in a circle looses one of its members to take a central position, and then replaces him or her with another figure from the circle.  Rarely can you see the switch happening; it seems to occur by magic.  The person caged at the center is also deprived of fluency, managing to execute only a fragment—a shard, really—of dancing.  The sole exception to this paralysis is Michael Trusnovec; everything he does, even standing in repose, looks like dancing.

The isolated movers next join in duets and trios—brief ones, however, as if the participants can’t sustain the contact involved in moving with another person.  This section is beautiful and filled with pathos.  Two pairs switch partners as if it doesn’t matter whom you dance with, whom you mate with, whom you love (if, indeed, you know what love is).  Trusnovec and his partner, Laura Halzack, are granted a long duet but can’t seem to get it together and end, inevitably, by walking away in opposite directions.

Halzack and Trusnovec in The Uncommitted

Photo: Tom Caravaglia

A final section has the crowd of 11 walking aimlessly around and, if they make eye contact, immediately turning away.  A woman adrift in a crowd has no boundaries, no destination, no one even to recognize her presence.   The crowd travels back and forth, cross stage, peeling off one by one and disappearing.  Halzack, the last person left, watches the man she has finally identified as her guy vanishing into uncharted territory and yearningly stretches out one arm in his direction.

Taylor’s treatment of the social alienation theme is a little pat, a little corny, and certainly déjà vu.  The Uncommitted is interesting in its first section as an exercise in unlinked motion.  From the earliest days of his career, Taylor has been fascinated by—and ingenious in exploring—how much you can subtract from conventional theatrical dancing before things fall apart.  But, as a whole, the piece is not compelling in terms of feeling.

Halzack, Michael Novak, and Michael Apuzzo in Taylor’s House of Joy

Photo: Paul B. Goode

A second work, House of Joy (i.e., whorehouse), being given its world premiere, is just nine minutes long and registers as the introduction to a dance that has yet to be (if you’ll excuse the wordplay) fleshed out.  It has a large cast (of 12) garbed by Santo Loquasto in his familiar picturesque vein plus a set, also by Loquasto, in forced perspective, of a street in a run-down part of town.  The players are three procurers who apparently scour the mean streets for randy guys who can pay for satisfaction; four clients—one of them a petite but feisty woman; and a quintet of “Shady Ladies,” one of them male.  One after the other, boy meets girl, so to speak—one of the guys is a fussy geriatric—and then the curtain comes down.  Huh?

Is Taylor’s genius so forbidding that he has no buddy who might have said, “Fill ‘er out, Paul, or let ‘er go”?

I didn’t get to see Gossamer Gallants, a third Taylor effort new to New York.  I understand it’s a goofy gloss on Jerome Robbins’ The Cage.  It will have to keep.  There are, as urbanites complain, only a certain number of hours in a day.  In this heady dance season, aficionados are finding that those are already double-booked.

The original and current casts of Aureole bowing after the 50th anniversary performance of the dance

I did see the 50th anniversary performance of Taylor’s Aureole, one of the dance world’s loveliest classics, which, coupled with the faux-spring weather of the week, yielded a message about life’s being worth living.  At the curtain call the originators of all the roles—Elizabeth Walton, Dan Wagoner, Sharon Kinney, Renée Kimball, and Taylor—bowed with the performers of the present, giving the audience a visual metaphor for the unbroken link between then and now.

© 2012 Tobi Tobias

an ArtsJournal blog