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Merce Cunningham Dance Company / Park Avenue Armory, NYC / December 29-31, 2011

A Merce Cunningham Event, as the choreographer described it in a program note, is a performance of about 90 minutes, without intermission, “consist[ing] of complete dances, excerpts of dances from the repertory, and often new sequences for the particular performance and place, with the possibility of several separate activities happening at the same time to allow not so much an evening of dances as the experience of dance.”

In the course of his career, Cunningham presented almost 800 Events in a grand range of sites worldwide. Fittingly, given the mutability expressed in the form, it was with an Event that the Merce Cunningham Dance Company concluded its existence on New Year’s Eve, December 31, 2011, in New York’s Park Avenue Armory, a cavernous space able to accommodate the three large platforms on which the dancers appeared. (Actually, you could parade the troops there, even a horse-mounted brigade.) Five other performances of this Event, constructed by Robert Swinston, the company’s Director of Choreography, preceded this last goodbye.

New music for the Events was contributed by David Behrman, John King, Takehisa Kosugi , and Christian Wolff. Typical of the sound scores played simultaneously with Cunningham’s choreography, these suggested two realms— the future, predominantly, with intermittent excursions into the workings of nature. Lots of annunciatory brass suited the Brobdingnagian space and the solemnity of the occasion.

Daniel Arsham studded the lofty height of the space with “clouds”—irregular clusters of off-white to gray balls with the lightweight look of material subject to the impulses of the wind. Anna Finke created the costumes: silky unitards that fit the dancers like second skins, in a subtle palette of gray, blue, beige, and peach. These body stockings were imprinted—most densely at mid-body—with designs suggesting faraway cultures, several of them clearly urban, or intricate tribal designs.

The most important elements of the performance were, of course, the invisible presence of Merce Cunningham and the very much present (and thrilling) dancing provided by Brandon Collwes, Dylan Crossman, Emma Desjardins, Jennifer Goggans, John Hinrichs, Daniel Madoff, Rashaun Mitchell, Marcie Munnerlyn, Krista Nelson, Silas Riener, Jamie Scott, Robert Swinston, Melissa Toogood, and Andrea Weber.

I chose a seat on a front row bench on one side of the center platform, from which I could get glimpses of what was happening on the other two. Here’s what I saw:

• Leaps springing up from the floor as if it were a trampoline.

• Dancers running, falling, spilling onto the floor again and again, only to repeat the sequence of moves as if exhaustion were not a possibility. They seemed, briefly, to have defeated time and the way time erodes the physical capacity of an ordinary human being.

• The way Cunningham groomed his dancers to shift their weight, and thus their center of gravity, with uncanny speed and daring, through a tilt, a lunge, a fall, or just the move of a single limb or turn of the head.

• The seamless shifts from walking to stalking to running to falling. The seamlessness of spinning turns used to travel through space.

• The intricate beats for the legs and feet that were firm in their clarity, yet had the volatile effect of quicksilver.

• The preternatural equilibrium of long steady balances in which only the toes of one foot made contact with the floor. And, even more extraordinary, the fact that this was treated as no big deal. Indeed, Cunningham’s choreography routinely suppresses evidence of effort. In this it takes an Eastern rather than a Western point of view.

• Partnered work that projected no dramatically conveyed emotion—“Make of it what you will,” Cunningham seemed to be saying—but rather investigated what is possible when one body meets another instead of operating alone. If the viewer wanted to attach a mood or a tale to the material, well that was his or her own affair.

• The absolute trust partners placed in each other at moments of physical risk.

• The articulateness of small things.

• At one point Robert Swinston, the senior performer, arrived with a “prop,” a slatted wooden folding chair. He sat on it, quiet and contemplative, then proceeded to explore the object’s repertoire. With a delicate touch and attentive care, he got it to tip and spin gently on the outer edge of a single leg. This accomplished, he folded the chair and walked away with it tucked under his arm.

• But is this dancing? someone is bound to ask. That’s a very good question, likely to yield many a provocative answer.

• All the movement is certifiably abstract, of course. Nevertheless it is heady with implications that are not merely about the body, time, and space. Cunningham’s choreography with its hints of mood, emotion, and, yes, even story is an invitation to the viewer’s imagination.

• The spectators ogled the proceedings as if transfixed. Because of the three-platform layout, each with its own arrangements for viewing, and the house lights that were never fully extinguished, the lookers-on seemed to be part of the show, if only a motionless one.

The audience for the closing night Armory Event was even larger than that of the opening night, which I also attended. The first five performances of the run were quickly announced to be sold out. This final one was crammed tight with long-time admirers and curious newbies and proved to be enthusiastic in an unusual way. Fully aware of the historical importance of the occasion, the onlookers applauded and cheered the dancers’ entrance, which was entirely understandable. Irrepressible, however, they also clapped and hooted at the end of everything they took to be a separate segment of the action—a solo, a duet, and so forth—instead of treating “the experience of dance” as a continuum.

The curtain calls were many, with the dancers lining all four sides of the central platform and then reforming as a tight hand-in-hand circle again and again.

It was hard to believe that this was the last time.

The Events that linger most clearly in my memory took place in Cunningham’s studio in Westbeth, an industrial building converted to give living and working space to artists a good while before Manhattan’s meat-market district became the locus of fashionable young New York.

Out of respect to the studio’s pristine wooden floor, you took off your shoes at the entrance to the studio, then moved into the performance space where the audience sat on rows of metal folding chairs leading a rickety life on risers or—if enough people came, and they did—foam cushions on the floor.

One magical evening Edwin Denby—among other things, one of the greatest dance critics who ever lived and one of the most beautiful souls I’ve ever known—waved to me and invited me to take the seat he was saving next to him. Once I had edged my way to his side I saw that he’d placed a little pile of magazines under his stockinged feet. He offered me another pile. “Otherwise, he explained, “your feet will get cold.” I believe the magazines were back issues of the New Yorker.

A different musician or musicians were invited to play for each Event. As was Cunningham’s custom with his regular repertory, the music had no formal, pre-ordained connection to the dancing; it simply happened at the same time as the movement. The music itself could be inscrutable; more often than not, though, what the ear heard enriched what the eyes saw, if only in oblique ways. There was certainly no need for décor. What was visible from the studio’s huge windows was sufficient. It was often a glorious—even gaudy—sunset.

The dancers, dressed in unassuming practice clothes, entered the space, faced a variety of points in space (there was no designated “front”), and began to move, performing excerpts from the regular repertory—from several different dances at once, of course.

Some observers, the critics, especially, were eager—even frantic—to know which of Cunningham’s works the various fragments came from. I always thought that was not a very useful or satisfying way to watch an Event. It also created a petty kind of competition on I-know-and-you-don’t lines. As an aide-memoire to the dancers, a sheet noting what would be danced and by whom was posted, usually backstage, a day before each Event, even on the very day. (I wonder if any of these sheets have been saved.)

Occasionally the head and shoulders of the person in front of you partially blocked your view of the dancers. It was in these circumstances that I absorbed what I considered to be a Cunningham principle: The dance was simply what you saw. I stopped twisting my torso and craning my neck, relaxed, and enjoyed the part of the show that was accessible to me at that moment in time and in my position—as well as the dancers’—in space. This attitude was beatifically calming, and that calm made awareness possible.

When I started going to these Events Cunningham was still performing. His mass of curling gray hair surrounded his face like a halo. His eyes were riveting. But it was his whole body, taut and alert to every moment in time, that—despite the compromises it had been forced to make with age—offered a wisdom about dance, and simply about being, that made everything else in the space disappear.

© 2012 Tobi Tobias

Merce Cunningham Dance Company / BAM Howard Gilman Opera House, Brooklyn, NY / December 7-10, 2011

In addition to showing us wonders we’d never even dreamed of, Merce Cunningham (1919-2009), that inscrutable genius of modern dance, taught us a tough, valuable lesson: Dance is not forever. Its very evanescence increases its intensity at the moment of performance. It may register profoundly with the spectator but it inevitably disappears. Cunningham knew this and he made his plans.

Members of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company

Photo: Julieta Cervantes

According to the reports circulated after his death in 2009 (which are now, unsettlingly, being re-examined), the choreographer had decided that, once he was gone, the Merce Cunningham Dance Company would dissolve. The repertory that Cunningham had created for it was to be made available to other qualified companies, with a former Cunningham dancer sent to stage and coach it. The recipient company would also be given information in text and visual form to help make the production as “authentic” as possible. (This process has already been tried out with American Ballet Theatre’s performances of Cunningham’s Duets, staged by Patricia Lent, during its week-long season at the City Center in November.)

Further, MCDC would begin a “long goodbye” by touring the world for two years. This is now all but accomplished. The penultimate performances of repertory–Roaratorio, Second Hand, BIPED, Pond Way, RainForest, and Split Sides–just took place at BAM. A week of shows in Paris follows. Still to come are six Events (Cunningham’s familiar kaleidoscopic arrangements of excerpts from his dances) to be held in New York’s Park Avenue Armory, December 29-31. Foreseeably the company’s most ardent fans will be spending New Year’s Eve cheering and weeping as they witness the end of something immensely important and the beginning of something unknown.

Meanwhile, some comments on the performances at BAM, where the spectators in the packed house focused laser-beam attention on a community of glorious dancers nurtured by a grand master. Come New Year’s Day, most of them will be unemployed.

Roaratorio: Desjardins, Riener, Weber, Crossman

Photo: Julieta Cervantes

The first of the programs given at BAM was devoted solely to Cunningham’s hour-long Roaratorio, created in 1983. It was a perfect choice because of its ebullience, its sheer joy in the fertile–even crazy–mix of the casual happenings that constitute everyday, ordinary life. The full title of the John Cage score that plays in tandem with the choreography gives a “local habitation and a name” to the culture the dance evokes: “Roaratorio, An Irish Circus on Finnegans Wake.” The reference, of course, is to James Joyce’s unconventional epic novel, set in Dublin.

The Irish strain crops up continually in Cunningham’s dance, most obviously in the airy, precise footwork that relates to Ireland’s traditional step dancing and in the casual embraces of folk dancing, such as the Irish jig. The costumes, however, tell a different story. They’re sleek, bright-hued rehearsal outfits, with three different colors allotted to each body. The performers add to and subtract from this get-up in the wings, which have been bared so we can see ostensible off-stage activity simultaneously with the onstage performance. When they’re officially onstage, a few dancers at a time spell themselves by perching on high stools, where they look like mid-20th century teens at the soda shop, eyeing their peers.

Throughout this long dance there isn’t a moment when the steps and the incessantly shifting stage patterns aren’t interesting. They may suggest this or that kind of situation to you or make you feel this or that, but these effects (or even their possibility) aren’t essential. What counts is that the 14 moving bodies of the piece and their relationships to one another and to the space they’re in seize your attention and refuse to let it go. Meanwhile, Cage is supplying the sounds of urban street life: infants wailing, dogs barking, chatter in various languages, the rumble of traffic, laughter. The entire affair is brims with vitality.

A musical note: As is Cunningham’s standard practice, Cage’s score for Roaratorio was created independently of the choreography. The relationship of what we see and what we hear in a Cunningham production is that the two elements, created separately, share a chunk of time. In the case of Roaratorio, however, the music was not commissioned by Cunningham, as is usually this choreographer’s practice, but created in 1979; Cunningham adopted it for his production. And, certainly, the two elements seem to be fused, not by the dancers’ setting their moves to the score step for note, but in what looks like a celebration of the same matter in two different but miraculously compatible languages.

It’s hard to resist reading a story–a terribly old-fashioned one–into the 1970 Second Hand. I didn’t resist, just happily gave in to temptation. I took the piece to be about an aging artist who, having achieved marvelous things in his prime, is now looking at the person he has become and the role he has played in his relation to the rising generation. Admittedly, the theme I imagined is hopelessly corny, yet Cunningham’s choreography is all subtle understatement.

Second Hand: (far left) Robert Swinston

Photo: Stephanie Berger

Second Hand opens with a remarkably long solo for Robert Swinston, in pale practice clothes. Swinston is, quite visibly, the company’s senior member and has become a key figure in its administration. Here he’s performing the role Cunningham choreographed for himself. He remains center stage, all but rooted in place, trying out minuscule moves that displace a part of his body just a few inches. In the solitude of the huge blank stage space, he seems to be examining the enormous differences such small distinctions make. Intermittently he tries out challenging balances that suspend him calmly between earth and air, that space being a dancer’s true environment.

The light that falls on him brightens; a woman in rose enters, all springtime buoyancy. Swinston watches her from far upstage, as if not to disturb her lovely aura, and finally she comes to him. May and December, they run side by side, faster and faster, their path an oval loop, until she suddenly breaks away, leaving him alone.

Now a bevy of dancers floods the stage. Swinston keeps to the background, observing them intently. He might be their creator or director. Eventually he integrates himself, partially, into their dance. Finally he rests on the ground, half reclining, like an ancient Greek statue, admiring the moving figures and their ravishing arrested poses.

Gradually–as if inevitably–the dancers pace off into the wings, leaving slowly, one by one. Alone once again, Swinston, the “Merce” figure, stands center stage, feet planted well apart, legs and chest stretched taut, arms lifted high. It’s a pose of heroic triumph, but somehow without ego.

John Cage’s score for this piece, which the composer archly called Cheap Imitation, came into being when he was refused permission to use Satie’s Socrate for Cunningham’s choreography. Inventively Cage kept the structure of the Satie, while altering its pitches through chance procedures.

BIPED

Photo: Stephanie Berger

The dance I enjoyed least on the BAM programs was BIPED (1999). Its title is the name of the motion-capture system that Cunningham used to choreograph once his own range of movement had been severely diminished by arthritis. Mind you, there was nothing to suggest the mechanical in the way the dancers moved, as one might have expected. What I found so off-putting was Cunningham’s insistence on calling the wrong kind of attention to the tool that served him so well. He used it as decor, projecting BIPED’s drawn moving images, as well as unrelated drivel that might have come from a Colorforms kit, onto a front scrim that remained obdurately in place throughout the piece. The scrim itself mildly obscured the live dancers behind it, diminishing their physicality and making them look far away.

Perhaps because these factors milked life from the dance, BIPED ran the risk of other Cunningham pieces that seem too repetitive and/or too long–it let your attention flag. Aaron Copp’s lighting, which bronzes the dancers’ flesh, is fine, and Suzanne Gallo’s costumes are superb–variously cut unitards in fabric that lends its panoply of jewel tones a metallic glaze. I love the moment in which the dancers add gauzy grayish jackets to their outfits, making you think of brightly-hued butterflies setting time in retrograde by creeping back into chrysalis form.

The music was by Gavin Bryars.

Pond Way

Photo: Stephanie Berger

Like several important choreographers of the Pacific Northwest (Trisha Brown and Mark Morris come first to mind), Cunningham was acutely tuned to the workings of nature. His 1998 Pond Way, which opened the third and final repertory program at BAM, finds him turning toward the gentle and lyrical. Thirteen dancers clad in a white version of Arabian Nights garb move softly and lightly, their “landscape” an infinitely pleasing backdrop by Roy Lichtenstein that suggests rippling water through an ordering of black dots against a pale ground. Tucked, almost invisibly, into a corner, there’s a rough sketch of one end of the crudest fishing boat imaginable (complete, however, with fisherman).

Gradually the dancers, whose footfalls make no sound, persuade the viewer that they’re a flock of creatures–insects, fish, or birds seem most likely–whose little society retains its own communal life, all the while being embedded among a host of other groups sharing the same territory.

As it runs its course Pond Way offers many an opportunity to observe tactics that Cunningham invented or co-opted for his choreography. For one example: Five women do a particular phrase in unison, but each displays herself to the viewer at a different angle so that the phrase looks different on each, while remaining, strictly speaking, the same. For another: A group of dancers working together suddenly divides its function into two complementary parts. Some of the dancers, still moving busily but now rooted in place, become a maze; the remaining dancers become Theseus-clones, threading their way through it.

Finally a group exits, one dancer after another, performing a striking version of classical ballet’s grand jeté (the leap adds a minute but brilliant flash of motion when it reaches its height). When the last leaper goes, the dance is over, as a school of fish or flock of birds vanishes if something disturbs the element in which it swims or flies. That finish seems abrupt if you love this dance, because you wish (expect, even) that it could go on forever as do the processes of nature.

Brian Eno’s score for Pond Way is peaceful yet haunting. It suggests the cries of animals, howling winds muted by being distant, gongs echoing through endless corridors.

RainForest: (standing) Brandon Collwes and Silas Riener; (prone) Krista Nelson

Photo: Stephanie Berger

The 1968 RainForest offered a diametrically opposite view of nature–a tooth, claw, and sex version. Andy Warhol’s stunning decor is, in a way, a distraction from what’s going on among the proto-humans onstage. It consists of a flock of gleaming Mylar pillows, inflated to the bursting point. Some hang from above on all but invisible threads. Others loll on the stage floor (at times, spookily, just inches from it), moving lazily or in instant retreat as the cast of six makes arbitrary contact with them. The dancers wear skin-toned, roughed-up body stockings; Warhol had wanted them nude.

An initial couple seems to represent lovers-in-innocence until the twosome is disturbed by a violent man whom the woman takes quite a shine to. After that intrusion one figure replaces another in La Ronde fashion and the sexual activity becomes a sensuous account of unquenchable lust, trailing brutality in its wake. Memorable images include a pairing in which a man drags himself painfully across the floor on his belly with a spent woman laid out on top of him; they seem to be made of one flesh. Another is the appearance of a woman who’s an iconic Lilith, her thick dark hair whipping around her face like a curtain of evil. She’s swift, avid, and utterly reckless.

The animal cries that emanate from David Tudor’s score reinforce the feral behavior of the people. The soundscape also includes birdsong, whistles, drumming, and other forms of percussion.

Obviously, this stunning piece is open to many another interpretation. No matter what one’s reading of it is, it remains a forceful argument against the notion that all Cunningham’s works are the same.

Split Sides: Silas Riener

Photo: Stephanie Berger

As a preface to Split Sides, the final work in the BAM series–presumably the last New York would see of Cunningham’s repertory as performed by his own company–David Vaughan, the troupe’s archivist, presided over a passel of VIPs’ casting of a die. The results would determine the order of the two versions that had been created for each of the elements in the production–choreography, music (one score from Radiohead, the other from Sigur Rós), costumes, decor, lighting. Making this invitation-to-chance a public stunt instead of a privately used creative tool struck me as a lapse of taste uncommon on Planet Merce.

From its premiere in 2003, I thought Split Sides a lamentable effort to make Cunningham appear “with it,” when this choreographer had been Mr. With It himself from the start of his career. Only Vaughan could have made the public die-casting palatable. Not only a distinguished dance writer but also a dapper veteran performer, Vaughan was witty and utterly compelling. I’m not going to comment further on Split Sides; what I wrote about it just after its premiere is what I still think. Except that, this time, Silas Riener aced a solo–reworked for his particular gifts–that had the audience gasping in amazement.

Astonishingly, when the curtain fell on the company for what was ostensibly the last time it would be performing the Cunningham repertory in New York, its home town, nothing special happened. Was this an example of elegant stoicism? The curtain calls were pretty much the same as they had been throughout the four-day run. The dancers stood shoulder to shoulder in a single horizontal line and bowed. None of them was singled out as being more important than the others. A good part of the audience stood to applaud enthusiastically. There was perhaps one extra call this time, maybe two. No flowers were presented onstage or thrown from the audience. One dancer kept gesturing toward the musicians in the pit. Then the curtain fell for good and that was it. At least for now.

The performers for the BAM engagement were: Brandon Collwes, Dylan Crossman, Emma Desjardins, Jennifer Goggans, John Hinrichs, Daniel Madoff, Rashaun Mitchell, Marcie Munnerlyn, Krista Nelson, Silas Riener, Jamie Scott, Robert Swinston, Melissa Toogood, and Andrea Weber. They are remarkable in themselves and even more so as a collective.

© 2011 Tobi Tobias

Angel Reapers, by Martha Clarke and Alfred Uhry / Joyce Theater, NYC / November 29 – December 11, 2011

The oddest thing about Martha Clarke and Alfred Uhry’s Angel Reapers is that it has no plot. This despite the fact that Uhry is a widely respected American playwright, as his Pulitzer, Oscar, and Tony awards attest. Clarke herself, a founding member of the tremendously popular Pilobolus, is widely known for haunting dance-theater pieces, in which her vivid imagination and penchant for the perverse reveal the world’s underside. A MacArthur Fellowship (the “genius grant”) tops her long list of awards. How could she not have noticed that the 75-minute work she and Uhry had concocted about that unique American religious sect, the Shakers, desperately needed the architecture and propulsion of a story? As matters stand, Angel Reapers plays like a documentary, though it’s not at all clear how much of its content is fact and how much fiction. What’s worse, it doesn’t seem to have any point.

The Dark Is Light Enough: A scene from Martha Clarke and Alfred Uhry’s Angel Reapers

Photo: Rob Strong

Two things commonly known about the Shakers: One: They were committed to the rule of celibacy. Two: Along with spoken testimony to their rigorous principles (at its most ecstatic, speaking in tongues) and confession of their infringements, their rites included movement: stepping, stomping, and shaking that mounted in intensity in order to exorcise their sins. The violence of this “dancing” was like that of spiritual possession, its climax occasionally ending in a faint. (A third fact generally known about the Shakers is that they constructed home furnishings breathtaking in their purity of form, but let that pass, since Clarke and Uhry didn’t find it pertinent.)

Here’s what the creators of Angel Reapers did give us. A cast of six women and five men who can, to varying degrees, dance, sing, and move eloquently. The movement element is well covered by having the best dancers doing the challenging parts such as falling heavily to the floor and writhing vigorously in the throes of religious, or plain human, passion. The a cappella singing of authentic Shaker work songs and hymns sounds quite natural and blessedly avoids theatricality. It goes without saying that “Tis a Gift to Be Simple” is represented; Aaron Copland eked out a whole ballet for Martha Graham–Appalachian Spring–from it. The spoken word doesn’t fare so well; the performers with insufficient training in diction and projection are not convincing. Strangely enough, none of the people on stage seems fully “real”– either as a character identified in the program (Sister Susannah Farrington, an abused wife; Brother Moses, a runaway slave) or as a fully confident performing artist, so it’s hard to empathize with them. We’re not drawn into their world; we just watch them from afar.

Angel Unaware? Asli Bulbul in Angel Reapers

Photo: Rob Strong

We first see the full cast at its communal worship, making clear what dictates they’ve vowed to obey. Gradually we learn how each member became part of the community. (This material has more than a hint of AA meetings behind it.) Eventually we come to various members’ breaking the sect’s stringent rules, for the most part the one about chastity. The issue is, of course, the tension between the Shakers’ will–which could prevail only in a community giving itself over to group hysteria–and human reality. Inevitably a man and a woman touch–merely touch–and the whole house of cards collapses. Intercourse has its day, heterosexual first, then, Clarke being an equal-opportunity artist, same-sex (a gorgeous duet, featuring lifts that are also embraces, represents a pair of men coupling). Last, a radiantly pregnant woman and her partner leave the fold. Mother Ann Lee, historically the woman who brought the sect to America, gets worried. Very worried. And, ambivalent. An uncompromising leader, she only wanted to teach her chosen people how to live in order to be sure of Heaven when they died. Now she’s beginning to feel some very human sympathy for the transgressors.

The end of the piece remains an enigma to me. Left alone, the despairing Mother Ann has a flesh-and-bone vision of four men who are buck naked, though never in full-frontal view of the audience. (Granted, this modesty may have something to do with local laws.) One member of the quartet, William, who is Ann’s brother, points out, “My soul is an angel. My body is a man. 
They are at war–man and angel. The angel is pure. The man is strong. I fight him. 
I never win. 
Why is it so hard?” When he leaves, Ann is alone again, sitting in one of the sect’s unforgiving straight-backed chairs. We see her in profile, as if in effigy, and hear her singing, faintly but clearly, as if to sustain her own faith, while the light fades to dark.

Go to see this venture if you like, but keep in mind the fact that Doris Humphrey, a key choreographer of mid-20th-century modern dance, did the subject shorter and better. The Dance Division of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, at Lincoln Center, will show you The Shakers, made by Humphrey in 1931, on film–for free.

The performers in Angel Reapers are Sophie Bortolussi, Asli Bulbul, Patrick Corbin, Lindsey Dietz Marchant, Birgit Huppuch, Gabrielle Malone, Peter Musante, Luke Murphy, Andrew Robinson, Whitney V. Hunter, and Isadora Wolfe.

© 2011 Tobi Tobias

New York City Ballet: The Nutcracker / David H. Koch Theater, Lincoln Center, NYC / November 25 – December 31, 2010

God Is in the Details: George Balanchine, creator of the New York City Ballet’s The Nutcracker, coaching the smallest of the toy soldiers at a dress rehearsal

Courtesy of the New York City Ballet archives

With its premiere in 1954, George Balanchine’s version of The Nutcracker, choreographed for the New York City Ballet and set, of course, to Tchaikovsky’s eloquent score, inaugurated a craze for the Christmastide ballet that promises never to abate. This season City Ballet itself is adding to its annual “Nuts” season (running through December 31) with a live telecast of the ballet on December 13, which will be on view in more than 500 movie theaters cross-country. On December 14, PBS’s Live From Lincoln Center will present the ballet.

All this broadening of the audience for the production is surely admirable. Comparatively few people have easy geographic access to the live version that fills the David H. Koch Theater at Lincoln Center; even fewer have easy financial access to it. Privileged though I am, being a New York-based dance critic, I dare to say that live is best and, moreover, that the Balanchine Nutcracker remains more splendid than all the subsequent renditions I’ve seen.

I attended this year’s opening night performance on November 25. Overall it was lavishly rewarding. Knowing the production so long and so well–and having written about it so often–I gave myself the freedom to report this time simply on the elements that particularly caught my fancy.

Getting to Know You: Fiona Brennan as Marie, clutching her precious nutcracker as she learns how it works

Photo: Paul Kolnik

The Nutcracker boasts a horde of characters, most of them unforgettable. Not all of them are human. The first creature we encounter is a pink-gowned angel with sweeping wings–oversized ones that appeared intermittently in Balanchine’s ballets down the decades, indicating this choreographer’s belief in the power of otherworldly forces. Hovering over the snowy roofs of a modest town and stretching her arms out to a shooting star, the angel dominates the front cloth we gaze at as the orchestra plays the ballet’s overture.

Next we meet a family that lives in the town, the prepubescent Marie, the elder child of Dr. and Frau Stahlbaum, and her irrepressible kid brother, who are celebrating Christmas Eve according to the customs of Germany’s upper middle class in the late 19th century. Given the casting I saw, it was Marie, the child heroine of the tale, who interested me most. Played by Fiona Brennan, Marie is innocent, unselfconscious, and open to what the world has to offer her. So far, it would seem, the world has not let her down.

Brennan is plain-looking (in the way that Mary of The Secret Garden is plain) and miraculously unaffected. As the events of the ballet’s first act spin out, evolving from the domestic to the hallucinatory and the ecstatic, she looks as if she’s participating in real-life happenings, real feelings. Her Marie is a child without guile who experiences everything–even the visionary turns the plot takes–as if it were true.

Let Joy Be Unconfined: Sara Mearns as the Sugarplum Fairy

Photo: Paul Kolnik

Sara Mearns was the evening’s Sugarplum Fairy, a fact that would make any balletomane or newbie to dancing feel blessed. (Mearns is a dancer whose magnificence is evident at first sight, because of the grace and visceral power of her lush body.) We see her first in Act II, appearing amongst a group of angel-children who’ve been skimming over the stage in geometrical patterns. Once she appears in their midst they make a wide circle around her, like acolytes uniting with their leader. When Marie and the Nutcracker Prince arrive on the scene, she asks them, genuinely wanting to know, “How did you come to be here?” She seems fascinated by the boy’s detailed mime account of the events that drew them to her kingdom–one of the ballet’s tours de force–and deeply grateful for the explanation. In both these passages she behaves like an ideal mother, understanding aunt, or gifted schoolteacher of the young–exuding love and concern for the child or children in her midst.

Towards the end of the ballet, in the grand pas de deux with a cavalier who appears from nowhere–with no narrative identity, but simply to support the ballerina in the duet’s tricky partnering–Mearns continued to defy any impulse a viewer still might have to read her as flat, two dimensional. Alone or with a partner, she invariably works in three dimensions, a moving sculpture with a very human heart.

Admittedly, she didn’t treat Jonathan Stafford–on duty for the occasion–as an emotional foil. How could she? She’d never met him. Suzanne Farrell, another remarkable Sugarplum, handled the problem of the undocumented cavalier just by being grander and more mysterious than her partner, who is needed but not recognized. Mearns, for whom remoteness is not a familiar mood, couldn’t relate to her escort the way she had to the flock of small angels, but was simply magnificent on her own, as if he were invisible (which he was, almost), nailing her every move in the pas de deux, and triumphing in her solos.

Nature’s Charms: Tiler Peck as Dewdrop in the garden of the waltzing Flowers

Photo: Paul Kolnik

Second only to the Sugarplum Fairy role in The Nutcracker is the brief but dazzling part of Dewdrop, leaping and whirling her way, all clarity and speed, through the mazes formed by a bevy of lyrically waltzing Flowers. I saw Tiler Peck, whose performance was a technical marvel, as it is in any role she tackles. Peck was already an astonishing dancer–and a remarkably beautiful woman–when she joined City Ballet and she matured swiftly on the job, becoming more subtle and sculptural without losing a jot of her panache. I can’t think of any woman now in the company who could equal her as Dewdrop. And yet, much as Peck is almost all you might wish in the part, she still lacks the driving fervor that Heather Watts and Karin von Aroldingen, with much less claim to the title of “ballerina,” projected years back–a kind of ecstatic madness, driven by some sort of life force.

There’s also an invisible being present–a soul that suffuses this production: Balanchine’s, especially Georgi Balanchivadze’s. As a young student in the renowned dance academy of St. Petersburg’s Mariinsky Ballet (Pavlova’s school, Nijinsky’s, Nureyev’s, Baryshnikov’s), Balanchine played the Nutcracker Prince. Decades later, creating his own production for the New York City Ballet, he co-opted from the Russian version the mime monologue with which the young Prince explains to the Sugarplum Fairy the dramatic events that led to his arrival with Marie in the Land of Sweets. During his lifetime, as one Prince succeeded another, Balanchine personally coached any boy new to the role. (Two casts alternate in the children’s roles, and the youngsters must abandon parts for which they’ve outgrown the costumes.) Now that Balanchine is gone, the children’s ballet mistress, Garielle Whittle, often tells her charges in rehearsal, “Mr. Balanchine used to say . . .”

Each time you see Balanchine’s Nutcracker, certain passages in it seize your attention, not just for their choreographic deftness–with Balanchine you’ve learned to take this for granted–but for their emotional resonance. Think of the moment in the Party Scene, for instance, when the fathers dance with their little daughters, becoming the girls’ first cavaliers as they’re introduced to the pleasures and strictures of social life. I could name many more, as could all frequent viewers, but will cite just one: Who with any heart could resist the sight of the two children, Marie and her Prince, hand in hand, backs turned towards the audience, walking trustfully toward a faraway star in a darkening snow-covered forest?

When the final curtain fell on these wonders and the audience stumbled out of the theater into reality, I felt–once again, but even more intensely–that The Nutcracker, as conceived by Balanchine, is among the most refreshing and civilized of entertainments.

© 2011 Tobi Tobias

American Ballet Theatre / City Center, NYC / November 8-13, 2011

This season’s gala-event costumes for women of a certain income emphasize cascading ruffles in weak-willed pastels or glowing jewel tones. The men continue to sport black-tie mufti with almost no rakish variation on the theme. Expense is evident, as is the eternal question of hoi polloi concerning the gowns with obviously crushable skirts, How does she sit down in it?

Despite the War: American Ballet Theatre’s Luciana Paris in Paul Taylor’s Company B

Photo: Gene Schiavone

This fashion report comes from the opening night of American Ballet Theatre’s week-long fall season at the handsomely renovated City Center–now gorgeous and comfortable beyond belief. The repertory for the week eschewed the company’s multi-act classics (Swan Lake, now in warped form, Giselle, et al.) and wannabe classics (Neumeier’s Lady of the Camellias, Kudelka’s Cinderella) that ABT offers in its long spring seasons at the Metropolitan Opera House. Each program in the City Center run purveyed three or four ballets that owe more to modern dance (Paul Taylor’s), postmodern dance (Merce Cunningham’s, Twyla Tharp’s), and ballet being catapulted into the future (Alexei Ratmansky’s), than to the strict conventions of classical ballet.

Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: Kristi Boone in Twyla Tharp’s In the Upper Room

Photo: Rosalie O’Connor

The high point of the opening night show was, incontestably, Twyla Tharp’s In The Upper Room. Created in 1986 for Tharp’s own company and set on ABT in 1988 the ballet is a powerhouse; it starts at the top of the scale energy-wise and escalates from there. Philip Glass’s driving score is a full partner in the dancers’ trip to Paradise, assuming that’s what the “upper room” indicates.

Upper Room divides its cast into two different sects: those shod in sneakers (affectionately called the Stompers) and those who favor classical dance footgear, which means pointe shoes for the ladies. The two camps eventually merge, as they have in the course of Tharp’s career.

Tharp’s relentless choreography displays dozens of terrific things you can do when you mate academic dancing with Tharp’s personal style, a brew of both classical and modern dance, jazz, pedestrian gesture, and myriad other fascinating ways of moving that she fixed on in her childhood from an eclectic set of lessons and since then through her magpie instinct. Boxing, just for starters.

Upper Room is perfect proof of the fact that Tharp is a demon of patterning. You can feel her brain ticking away as one design succeeds another. Her choreography offers a kaleidoscope of moving bodies arranged in space, each image utterly clear and then gone, giving way to the next, just seconds after you’ve taken in the preceding one.

The overall pace of the dance seems furious, the action mounting in fervor. The speed makes obvious the risks the dancers are often taking–seemingly without fear but, rather, savoring the reward of attempting the near-impossible and achieving it. It’s quite possible that in this piece Tharp is telling us this is one of the main factors that make a dancer dance.

Costumes and lighting are not relegated to supporting roles in this production; they’re striking essentials. Norma Kamali designed a wardrobe of prison-striped black and white pajama-like outfits, accented by a blinding red. (The women’s gleaming red pointe shoes (worn over red socks) is a terrific latter-day sequel to the demonic footgear Moira Shearer wore in the best dance film ever made.) As the dance progresses, the cast gradually sheds the coveralls to reveal more and more carmine underneath.

The lighting designed by Jennifer Tipton astonished the audience when Upper Room was first performed. She filled the upstage area with a drifting fog from which the dancers emerged–as if by magic–and into which they disappeared. At the City Center performances, which Tipton did not supervise, the entire stage was suffused with smoke that never moved and functioned as a pale gray scrim that never lifted, thus diminishing some of the action.

Starry Night: Herman Cornejo and Paris in Tharp’s Sinatra Suite

Photo: Rosalie O’Connor

Herman Cornejo’s return to performing after a long recuperation from injury was reason enough to be happy and excited by the evening’s performance of Tharp’s Sinatra Suite. Cornejo is a unique dancer–an extraordinary technician who, refusing to be typed by his scrappy-kid-brother looks, has extended his abilities to danseur noble roles, modern dance roles, you name it. At his best he’s an artist who infuses everything he does with life.

Cornejo wasn’t at his best in this duet on opening night, He was having obvious trouble with the lifts, and his partner, Luciana Paris, was of no help to him, apparently having problems of her own. He also tended to separate elements in the dancing that should be fused. He called undue attention to feats demanding classical ballet prowess because he executed them so immaculately, meanwhile failing to articulate the jazzy, gymnastic, and casual elements that are essential to Tharp’s signature style.

He was encouragingly better in the closing number, a solo to “One for My Baby (and One More for the Road).” There, the lyrics conjure up a guy who has been through it all telling his sad story to the bartender in a seedy dive about to close for the night. Here, too, Cornejo danced with too much emphasis on the classical bits and too much self-conscious acting, but also with hints that he was beginning to set matters right. The important thing is that he’s back on stage. He’s not just one of ABT’s great stars; he’s indispensable.

Sinatra Suite got its ideal cast at a later performance when Paloma Herrera and Marcelo Gomes took the leading roles–they’re both innately sexy dancers and have reciprocally crackerjack timing. The richness they brought to the succession of songs that runs from dewy-eyed romance to the inevitable break-up went so far as to hint toward the end that it’s the woman, not the man, claiming “I did it my way.” Being a generous performer as well as a singular one, Gomes let Herrera go for it.

As for the choreography, not only is it inventive, it’s also vibrantly expressive about the shifting moods of love. (In the Upper Room has only one mood: driving on Ecstasy.) To my mind, though, the ballet was even better in its original incarnation, the 1982 Nine Sinatra Songs–more thrilling, more sensuous, occasionally even amusing (remember the bumbling young sweethearts of “Somethin’ Stupid”?). Using more songs, that piece involved several couples and was originally danced by the singular members of Tharp’s own company, back in simpler times, when the choreographer had her own company.

Five in a Row: A line-up of ABT’s male dancers in Demis Volpi’s Private Light

Photo: Rosalie O’Connor

The big curiosity of the evening was the premiere of Private Light by Demis Volpi, who is a mere 25 years old. The Argentinean-born dancer-choreographer trained in his homeland, then in Canada, and finally came under the wing of the Stuttgart Ballet, joining the company in 2004. He began to choreograph in 2006 and has enjoyed the support of Stuttgart’s Noverre Society, which has aided several emerging choreographers who went on to international fame. He has since gathered much attention and much praise, but I can’t join in the applause.

Generous apologists for Volpi are bound to say: He is a beginner and he will learn. But anyone examining the careers of the western world’s choreographic geniuses (Balanchine, Graham, Ashton, and Tudor leap to mind) will see that they refined their craft over the years–choosing, according to their own inclinations, whose inventions to imitate, steal from, or build upon–but that their artistry and unique imagination were unmistakably in them from the beginning.

Clearly, Volpi has learned the set rules of his trade. For example: Select a movement theme, state it early on, then thread it throughout the piece, giving it a few exact repeats but even more variations. The trouble with Volpi is that he hasn’t absorbed such rules organically; they remain merely intellectual propositions that never become visceral or vivid–or make any obvious point.

In Private Light Volpi fixates on the idea of the line-up, the kind in which the police present a prospective witness for the prosecution with a handful of people (among them the suspected criminal) who resemble one another. They stand under bright light, their bodies evenly spaced in a horizontal line. The Volpi version uses five male-female couples and insists, throughout the piece, on the rule of five, a tactic that makes the ballet feel increasingly tedious and contrived.

A major feature of the piece is The Endless Kiss–heavy mouth-to-mouth smooching. Its repetition is neither interesting nor (as I assume the choreographer meant it to be) funny. Another big deal has one of the men (Joseph Gorak) neatly executing excerpts from a ballet barre without a barre to support him, as a little horde of his colleagues are periodically revealed to be watching him. The solo is a feat, to be sure, but a dry one, and the point of it remains murky.

The central segment of Private Light is a duet for Simone Messmer (who creates a different persona for every one of her ABT roles) and Cory Stearns. Messmer first appears alone, doing one capricious thing after another, like a girlchild who’s been brought up under the free-to-be system. When her partner arrives–signaling the beginning of her adulthood–her shenanigans become grotesque enough for the spectator to wonder if she’s being abused. She keeps collapsing, a victim in his arms. Am I just imaging this or is Europe’s contemporary ballet more tolerant of nasty behavior towards women than we are in America?

The most agreeable element of Private Light was its accompaniment–selections ranging from folk-style music to classical pieces by Albéniz and Villa-Lobos, enticingly played at the edge of the stage by guitarist Christian Smith.

Ménage à Trois: Alexei Agoudine, Xiomara Reyes, and Grant DeLong in The Garden of Villandry, co-choreographed by Martha Clarke, Robby Barnett, and Felix Blaska

Photo: Gene Schiavone

Set to Schubert’s beguiling Trio No. 1 in B Flat, The Garden of Villandry, co-choreographed by Martha Clarke, Robby Barnett, and Felix Blaska, had its world premiere with the adventurous Crowsnest group in 1979 and its company premiere with ABT in 1988. It’s one of those bagatelles that lasts a surprisingly long time.

Villandry, as the program might usefully have mentioned, is one of the16th-century châteaux on the Loire (small castles, such as fairy tales depict), best known for its elaborate formal gardens. The site, painstakingly refurbished and scrupulously tended, is open to tourists whose reaction, in their myriad tongues, is invariably “lovely” or “amazing.”

With the musicians in an upstage corner, a trio in Edwardian dress dances the subtle–and mercurial–relationships among two gentlemen and the lady they both desire. The dancers on this occasion were the perennially lovely Julie Kent; Roman Zhurbin, a sturdily built and quietly resourceful character dancer; and Julio Bragado-Young, who looks like a stock character–the pale, undernourished young tutor of yore who has a few wealthy children under his care and a head full of impossible dreams.

The dancing is a detailed study of the myriad ways in which three bodies can join and intertwine and (very rarely, never creating too much distance between them) separate. Hands touch and withdraw. Gentle kisses, mostly a brush of the lips on a cheek, are given and accepted. Secrets are whispered behind a cupped hand held to the sharer’s ear. The lady lets her head fall on one suitor’s shoulder and then, playing fair, on the other’s. She is swung into the air by both, her long white skirt flying with her–a shroud of chastity, perhaps. She rejoices in the admiration her courtiers give her and sweetly, always tactfully, returns the pleasure.

Imagine, if you’re a member of the so-called gentler sex, the most romantic and refined of your female friends actually admitting she wanted to live such a life. “Oh,” you might well scoff, “it’s like a perfume ad.” But then who are you to judge? You don’t wear perfume.

As the ballet went on, I expected some crisis to the situation that had been so artfully and meticulously presented, some climactic scene, some horror, perhaps, or at least some melodrama. (Throughout a long and fruitful career, Clarke has regularly revealed her penchant for eerie, alarming scenarios.) Even when I decided that the participants in the trio probably don’t crave a solution to their problem, that they no doubt find it exquisitely romantic, I still remained ignorant of the tone the piece was taking toward the whole business. One contextualizing clue: the ballet begins and closes with the three dancers staring reproachfully at the audience as if we lookers-on were voyeurs.

Ménages à Deux: Paloma Herrera and Eric Tamm in Merce Cunningham’s Duets

Photo: Gene Schiavone

ABT’s acquisition of Merce Cunningham’s 1980 Duets, one of the late choreographer’s most accessible works, may be a forecast of how that repertory will fare when the Cunningham company disbands at the end of this year, as part of Cunningham’s plans for his works’ life after his own death. His dances will be released to other qualified troupes, with a former Cunningham performer appointed to set and coach the work.

I can’t imagine Cunningham’s dances being in better hands than those of Patricia Lent, who transmitted Duets to a pair of ABT casts. In a particularly rewarding Works & Process program at the Guggenheim Museum in October, Lent worked with Isabella Boylston and Craig Salstein, making sparse, concise corrections and suggestions in the most even voice imaginable, never inflecting the information with her personality. She might have been a latter-day guru. Everything she said made good sound sense.

In performance the plainspoken yet mysterious choreography suggested a realm of dancing almost alien to ABT’s nonetheless eclectic repertory. It was only natural that many of classical ballet’s conventions, deliberately abandoned by Cunningham, automatically surfaced: dancing to the audience; dancing that ended in freeze-frame images; dancing that emphasized the brilliance of a certain step or phrase. But most of the performers seemed to respect the unfamiliar horizons and want to explore them, which is a good sign.

Fighting Depression: A scene from ABT’s production of Paul Taylor’s Black Tuesday

Photo: Gene Schiavone

Paul Taylor’s dances have been well absorbed by ABT’s dancers, as was evident in the week’s performances of the 1991 Company B and Black Tuesday, created in 2001. In a method Taylor has worked out for himself, both pieces were first done by classical companies and then quickly absorbed back into the Taylor company’s repertoire, where they seemed to find their most genuine interpretations. Still, Taylor has long claimed that he has no problem with having his choreography performed with a classical accent. Moreover, ABT’s version of the pieces I’ve named have, a decade or two after they were choreographed, taken on an ebullient life. The reason? Increasing familiarity with the Taylor way of moving and the ability of the upcoming generation of classical dancers to excel in a wide range of styles.

Ballet Blanc: Reyes and Cornejo in Alexei Ratmansky’s Seven Sonatas

Photo: Rosalie O’Connor

Alexei Ratmansky’s 2009 Seven Sonatas, set to seven of Scarlatti’s Keyboard Sonatas (played onstage by Barbara Bilach), is a delectable choreographic feast. I thought it marvelous when I first saw it, but it’s even more gratifying now, having grown richer through repeated performance–and through my own better appreciation of it after repeated viewings.

As usual, Ratmansky is rigorous here, offering a cornucopia of invention without leaving the context in which he’s working. And as usual his choreography is packed with evidence that he has learned from the masters he honors. He even pays them overt homage; I spotted brief quotes from Fokine, Bournonville, and Balanchine, among others. And of course there are little jokes–amusements, rather–along the way, which seem to reveal the sheer pleasure that dance gives him.

Three couples constitute the cast of Seven Sonatas, so it might be called a chamber ballet. It might also be termed a ballet blanc because it’s costumed in white–for the men as well as the women, actually–and because it refers to the Romantic vein of purity and fleet, weightless execution. It also seems to be plotless, but Ratmansky is an irrepressible creator of subtexts. At one of the two performances of the piece that I saw in ABT’s crammed week at City Center, I was convinced that the ballet was revising the story of Bournonville’s La Sylphide: Young man captures the otherworldly sylphide and–guess what?–they proceed to live a charmed life, full of laughter. Ratmansky danced and choreographed for the Royal Danish Ballet for several years, so he must know the Bournonville version by heart.

ABT’s week at City Center was a terrific stylistic challenge to its dancers, a showcase for performers exiled to lesser roles in the blockbuster multi-act works that prevail in the company’s long spring season at the Met, and a way to attract an audience that isn’t mired in old conventions. Is it possible that the company’s two profiles can be reconciled? If that seems impractical, how about two weeks at City Center next year?

© 2011 Tobi Tobias