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Tobi Tobias on Dance et al.

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Ivan Vasiliev

Starry Night

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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

Lèse-majesté

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Kings of the Dance:  Opus 3 / New York City Center / February 24-26, 2012

For the third time, Ardani Artists, an outfit specializing in the spectacular, brought us Kings of the Dance, a series of star turns contradicting Balanchine’s famous pronouncement that “ballet is woman.”

Their majesties
Photo: Gene Schiavone

This time the kings were—in alphabetical order, of course—Guillaume Côté (National Ballet of Canada), Marcelo Gomes (American Ballet Theatre), David Hallberg (ABT and Bolshoi Ballet), Denis Matvienko (Mariinsky Ballet), and Ivan Vasiliev (Mikhailovsky Ballet).  Each in his way worthy of a crown.

The roster included no dancers from the New York City Ballet—or, for that matter, from the Paris Opera Ballet—though these are two of the world’s most aristocratic troupes.   Are their dancers forbidden to undertake such assignments because the gig isn’t high-minded enough?  For all their circusy atmosphere, the two previous kingly productions managed to include some high-quality material—Frederick Ashton’s soul-stirring Dance of the Blessed Spirits, for example—that rescued the show from hopeless vulgarity.  Still I guess you could say the very premise of Kings is anti-art in its notion that ballet can be fairly represented by tours de force deprived of meaningful context and casting limited to a single gender.

Ivan Vasiliev
Photo: Gene Schiavone

Regardless of its high-achieving dancers, Kings III is done in by its rep.  The participating choreographers are, as a group, enough to make the heart sink:  Mauro Bigonzetti, Edward Clug, Patrick de Bana, Jorma Elo, Marco Goecke, and Marcelo Gomes (the last renowned as a dancer but little known as a dance-maker).  All of the ballets are new, apparently made for the  Kings’ tour that, ending in New York, had visited venues as disparate as St. Petersburg and Orange County.

Strangely enough, most of these new pieces seem related, as if the choreographers had been handed a list of required moves at the studio door.  The opening work, Bigonzetti’s Jazzy Five, has a sequence of angular, interleaving moves for the arms and hands that was maddeningly reiterated throughout the piece, which usurped the entire first half of the program.  It then cropped up, like an insidious virus, throughout the rest of the evening.  Even before I saw it infect a second body, I wanted to taser it.  Jazzy Five presents its quintet of lavishly gifted men, experienced in their art, as a brotherhood of goofy adolescents clowning around in the locker room or at a sock hop.  The material insults these dancers; worse yet, they can’t bring it off.  BTW:  None of the Kings is convincing in the jazz mode.  These guys are experts in classical dancing.  Did the Ardani folks not notice that?  Is it not enough?

Denis Matvienko
Photo: Gene Schiavone

Post-intermission, the program offered a protracted solo for each dancer.  Each of the men trained in the Russian tradition was touching in his devotion to the mood in which his character wallowed, even though, to an American viewer, he might have seemed melodramatic.  In Clug’s Guilty, Matvienko appeared to be not so much haunted by his misdeed (think Dostoyevsky) as already tried, convicted, and imprisoned by ruthless powers-that-be—a scenario associated with Russia from tsarist times to right now.

Vasiliev was even more vivid in de Bana’s (titled as if by Graham) Labyrinth of Solitude.  His evocation of chronic melancholia was completely persuasive. Unfortunately this achievement was undercut by the flaw plaguing the entire program:  the dancer’s own best steps were inserted into the choreography like lardons into a roast.  Vasiliev’s specialties are airborne and fantastic; they don’t do much to convey clinical depression.

David Hallberg, with his immaculate dancing, lithe figure, and personal beauty, was criminally ill-served by Nacho Duato’s Kaburias.  His costume, drastically flared and fringed ankle-length black culottes that he had to manipulate—flinging the fabric over his head, grasping a swath of it with his mouth—made him look inept and foolish.  I guess that the choreographer hoped to kindle some sort of gutsy passion via this material, but Hallberg, a strikingly pale blond who is an icon of purity, just isn’t a likely conduit for earthly concerns.

Guillaume Côté
Photo: Gene Schiavone

Côté, who combines precise technique with an unexpected flowing quality, gave as good a rendition as was possible of Goecke’s Tue under absurdly limited circumstances.  The piece consisted mainly of vibrations of the hands with a throbbing obbligato from the head.  Goecke treated these body parts as if they were the chief sources of power and beauty in neo-classical dancing, as they are, arguably, in Indian dance.  The curtain line of the piece had Côté executing a classical port de bras.  Inevitably, once he hit this formal stance (en couronne, ironically), he sent it into reverberation mode.

The absurdist play-on-words title of the solo assigned to Marcelo Gomes, Still of King, itself announced that the choreographer was the inexplicably popular Jorma Elo.  It’s Elo who regularly claims his viewers’ attention by murdering language in that meaningless, pompous way.  Then he moves on to offing la danse.  He takes it as his mission to deconstruct the classical ballet vocabulary then walk away, leaving the jagged shards on the floor, but not before adding some lethal moves to the mess to give it the correctly bleak postmodern mood.  Lately, he’s resorted to classical music as a foil; here he appropriates parts of a Haydn symphony.  But the abettor aiding him most is Gomes himself.

Marcelo Gomes
Photo: Nikolay Krusser

Yes, the dancer starts out doing Elo’s familiar stutter-stop business, but, given his fleshy, muscular presence and his sexy good looks, there’s no way he’s going to look jittery or victimized doing the spastic routine.  He remains fully in command of the situation despite the gyrations; he looks almost coherent, even relaxed.  Best of all, he has a sense of humor.  Where Elo’s choreographic ideas are patently ridiculous, Gomes makes them mildly funny, even fun, companionably sharing the joke with the audience.  This was the only item on the Kings program that I’d be willing to see again.

KO’d, with an overwrought classical-style score by Côté and busy, busy choreography for all five of the Kings by Gomes, provided a finale of sorts.  In theory this recognition of multiple talents in a single artist can only be seen as positive.  Meanwhile, though, Gomes probably shouldn’t quit his day job.

Good buddies
Photo: Gene Schiavone

© 2012 Tobi Tobias

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