Arthur Mitchell

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.

DTH II / Joyce Theater, NYC / February 7, 9, and 11 matinee and evening, 2012

Virginia Johnson action shotrr — Virginia Johnson, Artistic Director of Dance Theatre of Harlem
Photo: Martine Basagni

Dance Theatre of Harlem, with its mission of countering classical ballet’s unspoken policy of no-blacks-need-apply, was founded in 1969. Its leaders were Arthur Mitchell (a charismatic African-American principal with the almost exclusively white New York City Ballet) and Karel Shook (a white former dancer and star teacher, known for welcoming black dancers to his classes). From its legendary New York debut at the Guggenheim Museum in 1971, the company was always popular with its audiences—not merely for the social justice it represented, but because its performers displayed an individuality and human warmth even in those early years when their technique needed further development.

In the 35 years of the company’s existence, much was achieved, while much remained to be accomplished. Toward the end of that time, seemingly insolvable problems arose. The first of them concerned personnel, at the very top. Mitchell, who had been a father figure to the dancers, had trouble coping with their inevitable self-determination as adults. Severe financial troubles set in as well, with downturn of the national economy. Finally the company had to “go on hiatus,“ as it was hopefully phrased.

Still, the doors of its excellent school remained open. Then in 2009 Virginia Johnson—a founding dancer of the original troupe and, essentially, its prima ballerina—accepted the challenge of bringing the full company back to life. Meanwhile a small touring group of the school’s senior students had emerged as the Dance Theatre of Harlem Ensemble, overseen by Keith Saunders, another former DTH star. This group, 16 in number and now called DTH II, made its New York debut with four performances at the Joyce Theater, February 7, 9, and 11 matinee and evening.

Click here for a preview glimpse of Dance Theatre of Harlem II at the Joyce Theater.

The program’s curtain raiser, David Fernandez’ Six Piano Pieces (Harlem Style) introduced eight instantly likeable dancers in Vernon Rose’s cheeky costumes. But these handsome figures weren’t just strutting their street style; they were offering glimpses, often just in a single step, of how “cool” can be matched with pure classical beauty.

At the same time you got to see that the members of this troupe do not necessarily conform to the “ideal” anatomy—slender, long-limbed, exquisitely proportioned––currently dictated by companies who draw from huge talent pools. It was also obvious that the technical level needs amping up. On the other hand, the young dancers display a beautiful and cohesive company style—something absent from many of the loftiest groups we see.

Moritz Moszkowski composed the score; Melody Fader was its energetic pianist.

Despite the triteness of its genre—the struggle for self-realization—Christopher Huggins’ In the Mirror of Her Mind, was the stand-out dance on the program, largely because of its performers. Aptly set to a Henryk Górecki score, the piece is a semi-abstract affair in which the protagonist (Ashley Murphy, striking in her crimson dress) is set on the path of realizing her true nature thanks to three quasi-mythic male mentors (DaVon Doane, Samuel Wilson, and Anthony Savoy, grave and dignified in Natasha Guruleva’s plainspoken costumes).

Huggins enriches his work with half-hidden implications. For example, since the piece opens with the seeker recumbent, raised up by the men who then dance with her, Huggins implies that she may have been dreaming these wise men and thus may be her own guide. Huggins also gives the dancers lots of opportunities to display their best skills. Their ability to do partnered work calmly, almost flawlessly, and seemingly effortlessly is proved over and again. After seeing too many clutch-and-slip lifts concocted by MacMillan and Neumeier—I was delighted by the woman’s making a complex pretzel shape of her body and hurtling herself at her advisor of the moment so that she attached to his chest and pelvis without the least bit of fuss.

Most gratifying is the fact that Murphy, a lovely lyrical dancer, seems moreover to be a vessel of drama, expressive by nature. By the time the ballet concludes and she stretches her arms into an airy infinity, you want to lay the entire Antony Tudor repertory at her feet.

From its beginnings, DTH has had a close association with Balanchine’s ballets, which serve, in themselves, as powerful training devices. The connection was marked on this program by the presentation of the master’s now rarely performed Glinka Pas de Trois, created more than half a century ago for three crackerjack technicians in the City Ballet: André Eglevsky, Patricia Wilde, and Melissa Hayden. DaVon Doane, Ashley Murphy, and Flavia Garcia didn’t come up to their standards (at the time of the ballet’s creation, none of the other City Ballet men could match Eglevsky) and the DTH II women were uncomfortably mismatched in height and embonpoint. Nevertheless the production said wonderful things about the Harlem company’s signature style. The dancers are beautifully placed (in other words, they exhibit a harmonious posture in motion); their musical phrasing is very good, though not yet imaginative; and—most important— nothing they do is forced. Ever.

The second half of the program began with Gabrielle Lamb’s nicely crafted film showing how the dancers—and Johnson herself—found their identities at DTH. The proceedings then moved on to (and got mired in) Donald Byrd’s Contested Space. It is far too long, self-indulgently so, and Amon Tobin’s murderous static-infused score makes it all the more intolerable. The general idea of both music and choreography is that the world is a threatening place (so yesterday, as themes go) with a climate that squelches even the hope of congenial relationships. Interestingly, the dancers’ sanguine approach to both their work and their audience keeps them from being as harsh as the choreographer imagines them to be in this piece. What Johnson, Saunders, et al. have drawn from these young artists and bred in them is, as we hear in Lamb’s film, the model of “a gifted artist who seems descended from the gods.”

What next? Nothing less than the return of the main company—DTH I, so to speak—an outcome that has its parallels in The Sleeping Beauty. As befits our straitened times, the company will begin modestly, with 18 dancers (when it shut down, the company held 44). The roster will include members of DTH II as well as others culled from auditions that began in January. It should be mentioned that DTH now conceives of itself as “multiracial, multicultural, multinational group” with, Johnson cautions, at least 50% of its members black. The plan is to have the newly formed company begin rehearsals in August, tour the results beginning in September, then open in New York by April 2013.

As in the past, the repertory will encompass classical and neoclassical (think Balanchine) masterworks and contemporary pieces, including commissions. As during Mitchell’s tenure, African-American choreographers will be given special attention. Laveen Naidu, who now plays executive director of DTH to Johnson’s artistic director, heads the fund-raising side of operations. His success is critical to the dream of releasing classical dance from its gated-community status.