Mozart

Youth in Bloom

June 6, 2013 by Tobi Tobias

To call the School of American Ballet “selective” is an amusing understatement. It’s the training ground in the U.S. for potential professional classical dancers (who must, of course, begin on the path as children) and the alma mater of a majority of the performers in the New York City Ballet.

School of American Ballet Workshop Performances: Jordan Miller and Alejandro Ocasio in George Balanchine’s Divertimento No. 15

Photo: Paul Kolnik

The academy draws students who show basic potential for the trade to which they aspire in anatomy, musicality, focus, and quickness to respond to instruction. The younger children—whose size clearly differentiates them from the company members—often get to perform roles in ballets that require them. Balanchine wanted SAB’s pupils to have the kind of valuable stage experience he had had himself, as a boy at the school of the Mariinsky (now Kirov) Ballet. The sad but inevitable dark side of SAB is that year after year, in the course of the academy’s curriculum, the less-than-wonderful and the less-than-committed to ballet’s singularly challenging requirements are weeded out and more capable others, who began their dance life elsewhere, take their places.

Annually, as May segues into June, SAB shows the best of its senior students in three performances over two days, with shifting casts in the principal roles; the remarkable teenagers (as they have become) work wonders; and the public ogles, astonished. The event is called a Workshop, which is yet another understatement. I saw both matinee and evening performances on June 1.

SAB Workshop Performances: The cast of Balanchine’s Le Tombeau de Couperin (with Alessandra D’Alessandro facing front)

Photo: Paul Kolnik

The repertoire for this year’s Workshop comprised three Balanchine ballets—the exquisite Divertimento No. 15 (to Mozart), staged by Suki Schorer, which makes you feel you’ve died and gone to heaven; the inventive and elegant group work Le Tombeau de Couperin (to Ravel), staged by Rosemary Dunleavy and Arch Higgins, which starts out as a model of purity and ends with a hoe-down; and the Walpurgisnacht Ballet from Gounod’s Faust, staged by Susan Pilarre—a showpiece in which a bevy of lovely young women, their hair unbound, let ‘er rip.

As usual, the stagers had been dancers with the company though not necessarily at the principal level since performing in a ballet and passing the choreography on to the rising generation require somewhat different gifts. There were plenty of excellent dancers in action, but for me no single performers who were clearly destined for glory. Instead, let me name the soloists in both the matinee and evening presentations of Divert, as the dancers nickname it, the most important and challenging work on the program: Daniela Aldrich, Laine Habony, Jordan Miller, Clara Ruf-Maldonado, Mimi Staker, Patrick Frenette, Zachary Guthier, and Alejandro Ocasio.

SAB Workshop Performances: Clara Miller, Lorris Eichinger, and ensemble in Balanchine’s Walpurgisnacht Ballet from Gounod’s Faust

Photo: Paul Kolnik

The stagings of all three ballets on display were well-nigh immaculate because Workshop enjoys an extended rehearsal period, which the parent company forgoes in favor of a huge rep. (Its next season is using as its slogan “33 Ballets in 3 Weeks.”) The miracle is that the Workshop productions do not lose their youthful freshness because of the lengthy preparation period with its detailed coaching. Instead, they give you a glimpse, hearteningly promising to repeat a similar event every year, of the very fortunate mating of grueling work, hope, and incandescent desire.

On Balanchine’s “Ivesiana”

May 3, 2013 by Tobi Tobias

“I don’t have to tell you that Mr. B is with Mozart and Tschaikovsky and Stravinsky,” Lincoln Kirstein announced to the New York City Ballet audience, exactly 30 years before the company’s April 30 opening night this season. The program, which inaugurated City Ballet’s three-week American Music Festival attracted a good house and fervid audience enthusiasm for two big pieces easy on both eye and spirit: Who Cares? to Gershwin songs (their lyrics unsung, but engraved in popular memory; Tiler Peck at her familiar finest) and Stars and Stripes (Hershy Kay, after Sousa, the master of marching), plus one tiny one—the amuse-bouche Tarantella.

Janie Taylor and Anthony Huxley in George Balanchine’s Ivesiana

Photo: Paul Kolnik

The piece awarded only a tepid reception was the one I went to see—the 1954 Ivesiana, named for its composer, Charles Ives. It seizes the imagination and always in different ways; its message is up to the interpretation of the viewer. The message, however, is never heartening.

The piece opens and closes with a largish group in unremarkable practice clothes of dull hues, people locomoting on their knees, the rest of their body erect but subdued, their destination undefined and unexplained—perhaps a useful image for sociologists. Human assets such as will and imagination—even intention—seem to have died in them long ago. They are, of course, incapable of mourning what they’ve lost. They’re indifferent, emotionally hollow.

Balanchine’s first stroke is right on the mark: the curtain rises on a full blackout. Then, slowly, a little light comes up; witnessing this is like the beginning of arousal from deep anesthesia. Viewers see a knotty cluster of people on their knees that slowly fans out as if merely to create a breathing space. Still the claim of that larger space registers as a warning and a threat.

Ashley Laracey and members of the ensemble in Ivesiana

Photo: Paul Kolnik

A young woman in a white tunic, hair unbound (Ashley Laracey), wanders through the still-dense forest of kneeling bodies. Her hands palpate the air directly before her, as if she were not simply lost but blind as well. Worse yet, she’s joined by a man in a grey unitard—anonymity personified–and together they make their way through the crowd. So far the narrative might have been coveted by some contemporary equivalent of the Brothers Grimm.

Ashley Laracey, Zachary Catazaro, and members of the ensemble in Ivesiana

Photo: Paul Kolnik

Throughout, the stage remains ominously dark. The girl appears to be running away from the man. Inevitably, he captures her and then leaves her inert body with a group of the anonymous people, as if for dead. The nameless crowd clusters behind the body—fulfilling its mission, as it were—and disappears into the velvety, fatal dark as, presumably maimed and sightless, the girl is once again let loose and tries to find her way. The section described above is called “Central Park in the Dark” and, having lived half a block away from the site, I can attest to the fact that the narrative has many factual roots.

The second section, “The Unanswered Question,” originally featured the incomparable Allegra Kent whose extreme plasticity, coupled with a supercharged poetic imagination, made her role unforgettable. Now Janie Taylor, partnered by Anthony Huxley, takes the leading role, but creatures like Kent are never replaceable. Four men in black (they’re hardly visible) manipulate the woman so that her partner can almost reach out and touch her but never does, clearly never will; she remains forever just beyond his reach. The supporters hold her aloft, erect, like a revered icon, and then, in a thrilling, danger-laden single swoop, she drops backwards. In a few seconds her supporters have her standing in the air once again.

A third section, called “In the Inn,” finds a man and woman (the dangerously good-looking Amar Ramasar, who overacts, and the lush Sara Mearns) enjoying the simple pleasure of a mix of social dances. In the viewer’s imagination, however, the horrors implied in what went before the joy make the halcyon images seems ironic or at least unworthy of trust.

The closing section, “In the Night,” gives us the full cast once again, walking unremittingly on its knees in the near dark to one side or the other of the stage, some exiting into the wings, some still “caught” mid-stage as the curtain falls. Unlike Who Cares? and Stars and Stripes, Ivesiana makes no effort to “entertain” its audience; it is there to make us recall our worst nightmares (asleep or awake) and to marvel at the fact that the most profound ideas and feelings can be expressed (often best expressed) without a single word.

The entire program was extraordinarily well danced.

Wunderkinder

June 7, 2012 by Tobi Tobias

The School of American Ballet’s Workshop Performances / Peter Jay Sharp Theater, Lincoln Center, NYC / June 2 matinee and evening; June 5, 2012

School of American Ballet’s Workshop Performances: Austin Bachman in Peter Martins’ Les Petits Riens

Photo: Paul Kolnik

Students at the School of American Ballet and the in-group that cares about it call it, simply, The School, as if it had no equals. So far it doesn’t, at least in the States. It’s the training academy of the New York City Ballet, which skims off the cream—according to its particular needs and taste, of course—and releases the others to companies across the United States and sometimes around the world. Every spring it presents three of what it calls Workshop Performances (same program, alternating casts in the principal roles) so those interested can get a good look at the teen-age pre-professionals, for many of whom the very next step is to find a job.

Silas Farley in George Balanchine’s Cortège Hongrois

Photo: Paul Kolnik

As usual, once a spectator recovers from the shock of seeing these painstakingly trained and lavishly accomplished late adolescents, he or she will recognize—or at least sense—the particular qualities of an SAB “product.” At SAB, some of them shepherded from childhood as well as through adolescence, the students learn what the celebrated 18th-century dance artist Jean-Georges Noverre itemized as the basics of dancing: to bend, to stretch, to rise, to leap, to dart, to glide, to turn. They learn to perform infinite elaborations of these basics with exactitude, profound musicality, grace, style, and assurance—all effort concealed. (George Balanchine, who established the school even before forming his first company, understood dancing as the work of angels, anonymous and transcendent.)

This year’s Workshop offered two challenging ballets, Balanchine’s Cortège Hongrois and Les Petits Riens (Little Nothings) by Peter Martins, who heads the school as well as the parent company. I saw two performances—the matinee and evening shows on July 2.

Cortège Hongrois was created for the New York City Ballet in 1973 to honor the veteran ballerina Melissa Hayden on the occasion of her retirement. Juxtaposing the classical- and character-dance veins, it was the choreographer’s most extended take on Marius Petipa’s 1898 Raymonda, set to a Glazounov score that, once heard, has you humming its high points for weeks, often against your will. Petipa’s ballet was an imaginary account of a highborn young woman in the Middle Ages—lovely, proud, and emotionally susceptible—who can’t decide which of her two suitors to favor: the pure Christian knight (good guy) or the sexy Saracen (bad guy).

Silas Farley and members of the character- and classical-dance ensembles in Balanchine’s Cortège Hongrois

Photo: Paul Kolnik

Balanchine had already dealt with the material better, notably in his brisk, all-classical Pas de Dix. Cortège, however, was a vehicle eminently suited for Workshop because it provided roles to three dozen dancers in the two contrasting styles. And, defying all expectations of tedium, the ballet was ignited by the young dancers’ verve. Responsibility for staging the piece was split between Suki Schorer (classical) and Susan Pilarre (character); both, former dancers with City Ballet, are stalwarts in the development of SAB’s advanced students.

The classical segments of the ballet were performed by students working far beyond their years (no one in the whole program yet qualified as a twentysomething). The technical requirements were very well mastered; the aplomb was continuously amazing.

Claire von Enck and Austin Bachman as the leading classical-dance pair in Balanchine’s Cortège Hongrois

Photo: Paul Kolnik

Balanchine chose to keep his Cortège choreography abstract, avoiding any reference to narrative and character. Still, both the women I saw in the leading role gave her interpretation a subtext, which presumably taught the many little girls in the audience how a princess-type—especially one with “issues”—should behave. Claire von Enck and Austin Bachman, who led the evening’s cast, topped the matinee pair (Mikayla Lambert and the wonderful Silas Farley) but when I’d only seen the matinee cast, I didn’t think anything was missing.

As for Bachman, I’ve been watching him and marveling since he arrived at SAB as a boy. He’s blessedly capable all round: jumps, leaps, turns—the whole vocabulary. Clear in every step, he’s soft and airy as well. His skill as a partner is still minimal, but that’s probably due to inexperience. He has the most beautiful and elastic feet, which shoot him into the air and, even more important, enable neat, cushioned landings. He has the face of a shy country boy unaware of his charm, and the good manners that prevent him from over-estimating his importance. If he continues to be diligent and lucky, he’s likely to go down in the history books.

Elinor Hitt, leading the character-dance segment in Balanchine’s Cortège Hongrois

Photo: Paul Kolnik

Although dancers usually prefer to play royalty than peasantry, the character work in this production of Cortège glowed with vehemence and joy. The booted dancers in their preposterously fringed costumes looked as if they were participating in a lusty ritual they believed in wholeheartedly. Dancing the female lead in the character dances at the matinee, Elinor Hitt, a rail-thin blonde who doesn’t look as if she grew up in America, was a standout. (The house program insists that her home town is Arlington, Virginia.)

Peter Martins’ Les Petits Riens (Little Nothings) uses its title ironically. Named for its score (Mozart’s only music intended for ballet) and given its premiere by City Ballet in 1987, it’s a pretty big deal, which SAB’s young cast brought off deftly. Though a chamber work in scale (four couples), it poses a slew of technical challenges as Martins, typically, explores how far he can take the academic vocabulary—along with his specific gift for men’s work and special fascination with partnering—without flouting tradition entirely. The verdict proves to be “pretty damned far.” That doesn’t mean, though, that the spectator is having a good time, let alone undergoing a transformative experience. For those small miracles you have to go to Balanchine.

The full cast of Martins’ Les Petits Riens

Photo: Paul Kolnik

The craft Martins displays is refreshing—until the craftiness becomes annoying or, simply, a bore. The fact that, as in several Martins works, there is no main couple, adds to the loss of affect; ballet is, by its very nature, a hierarchical world. Worse, Martins seems not to have been in the studio back when Mr. B. declared for the umpteenth time, “Put a man and a girl on the stage and there is already a story.” For all his invention and his understanding of what a male dancer might accomplish, Martins appears to lack the human-interest gene.

The ambitious Workshop program had a curtain raiser, Sean Lavery’s 1990 Twinkliana, set to Mozart’s Twelve Variations on Ah! vous dirai-je, maman (the tune to which Americans sing the “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star” lullaby). The ballet is both an entertainment and a lesson, illustrating the various stages of a dancing youngster’s development. Its revival just now is a bow to Lavery’s long, varied, and significant service to City Ballet and its school. Of course I remember him best as a classical dancer, in particular in Balanchine’s Tschaikovsky Concerto No. 2 (formerly Ballet Imperial). I can still envision him at a particular moment in that work, when he deploys two strings of women, one from each hand, and maneuvers both chains of pliable beauties so that they curl softly this way and that at his ever-gentle yet compelling demand. I’ve always thought of this passage as “Balanchine’s Dream.”