Paris Opera Ballet

A Ballet Romance

July 18, 2012 by Tobi Tobias

Paris Opera Ballet / David H. Koch Theater, Lincoln Center, NYC / June 11-22, 2012

Say that, as a dance fan, you happen to have a young child in your life who’s showing a burgeoning interest in—perhaps even an instinctive love for—dancing. If you take her or him to the ballet to see one of the venerable 19th-century classics, you want to be sure it’s a production that’s faithful to its tradition—not savagely cut, skewed, or “reimagined” beyond recognition. The very young, with their acute receptivity, deserve the very best.

The Paris Opera Ballet’s Aurélie Dupont in the title role of Giselle, with the corps de ballet as wilis

Photo: Stephanie Berger

I’ve had the pleasure and responsibility of fostering such a dance-avid child’s interest in ballet for a dozen years. (She’s 15 now—a scholar, a musician, and a runner.) We’ve had the luck of living in New York City, host to American Ballet Theatre, the New York City Ballet, and a plethora of ranking visiting troupes. As time went by, though, there was a diminishing number of satisfactory productions to be seen of touchstone works such as The Sleeping Beauty and Swan Lake.

Happily, the current visit of the Paris Opera Ballet has brought us the most beautiful and satisfying staging of Giselle that I’ve ever witnessed—and I, too, fell in love with ballet very young (without the help of a fairy godmother). Created for the company in 1841, this is a Giselle that sets the ballet where it belongs—in a pastoral community glowing with sunshine and good will until a dallying prince invades it (his excuse, he claims, is love), then in a dank graveyard populated by vengeful ghosts who can be vanquished only by a devotion existing beyond death (even then it’s a damned close call).

Dupont as Giselle, Mathieu Ganio as Albrecht, and the corps de ballet

Photo: Stephanie Berger

Unusually, this production of Giselle is not entirely dependent on the ballerina playing the title role. Indeed, the work of the corps de ballet, 26 women, moving as one, creating one breathtaking sculptural image after another, is of equal—perhaps greater—importance. The interlacing lines of wilis (maidens who’ve died when their sweetheart betrayed them) crossing the stage in traveling arabesques made me gasp along with the neophyte viewers, though I’d seen the passage again and again. The stunning effect of the corps is no doubt due to the strict principles governing the dancers’ selection, their scrupulous training from childhood through adolescence (with many aspirants falling by the wayside) and, somehow, to their apparent communal dedication to animating the choreography at the highest level possible. It’s a zeal that never flags but is, instead, renewed night after night. I find all of this eerie and marvelous and feel privileged to witness it.

The costumes for the production, after those designed by the celebrated Alexandre Benois in 1924, are ravishing. The lower classes are modestly dressed. Then a procession of the aristocracy (to which the unreliable prince belongs), on its way to the hunt, brings rich color and magnificent detailing—in more or less medieval style—into the picture. The palette includes bright red, crimson, mulberry, violet, peach, cream, and deepest blue, the last offset with ermine trim. The complementary headgear is appropriately outré. Every last one of this 1% looks haughtily stunning.

In the second act, however, the wilis’ nearly surreal white costumes make the gorgeous worldly outfits we saw on the aristocracy look like mere gaudy outer skins of the earthly upper class. The wilis are clad in the uniform of their mystical if horrific rites. The ghostly women, veiled when we first see them, wear neat bodices above long tutus that flair out in quivering concentric circles when the women turn, as if creating a gently whirling cloud around their legs. From the back of their bodices sprout tiny translucent white wings. Where are they going to fly, I wondered, if they’re essentially dead and buried? No matter; once the second act is launched, susceptible observers will have entirely suspended their disbelief. They’ll see nothing but a stream of miracles.

Even the lighting of this Giselle is magical, most obviously in the slow coming of dawn, which robs the wilis of their power, saves the now-repentant prince’s life, and sends Giselle back to the sorrowful and lonely peace of her grave. It’s a peach-tinged light, a glow really, that increases as subtly as sleep finally arrives to an fretful insomniac.

As I write, I’ve seen three of the POB’s Giselles (and am signed up to see two more). By far the most gratifying was the first of them, Aurélie Dupont (whom I couldn’t resist visiting twice). The others were Clairemarie Osta and Isabelle Ciaravola.

Dupont is not the first ballerina you’d identify with Giselle. She has a devastating personal beauty (not necessary for the role, maybe even distracting) and an authoritative presence, no doubt encouraged by her years as an étoile–the A+ dancers of the company, according to its hierarchical system. Yet, as POB’s aesthetic dictates, she doesn’t “sell herself” but rather underplays and, in doing so, entices the viewer to join in the work of her imagination.

Dupont (center) as Giselle

Photo: Stephanie Berger

In the first act of the ballet, her work is initially impressive only in the fluency and correctness of her dancing. But she’s a master of calibration and when she arrives at the Mad Scene she takes fire. First she looks like a child betrayed, then sketches the history she’s recalling of Albrecht’s (as the two-timing prince is called) courtship of her—making each feeble, jagged gesture a stab to the spectator’s heart, then leaping wildly here and there, as if to escape her sorrow.

Her second act was beyond terrific, her personal glamour sacrificed to create an image that was all air and pathos. She danced and acted as if those two elements might, quite naturally, be tethered to each other. At the moment of her appearance at the command of Myrtha, queen of the wilis, whirling as if seized by some untamable force of nature, she seemed to be a dead soul. Then, gradually, she achieved a piercing half-life through her memory of a love that refused to acknowledge death. She reacted to the now penitent and sorrowing Albrecht as if she didn’t actually see him and couldn’t really touch or be touched by him, yet somehow, deep within her senses, recalled an attachment to him that she would never abandon.

Dupont and Ganio as Giselle and Albrecht

Photo: Stephanie Berger

In all this, she displayed two gifts essential to a ballerina: She makes you look at her (indeed refuses to let you look away) and she makes you believe in her.

Clairemarie Osta is a marvelous dancer—fresh, fleet, and buoyant. She’s no stranger to virtuoso feats where they’re appropriate. For one thing, she does the diagonal of hops on pointe traveling backwards—without in the least seeming to show off. Her Mad Scene has personal touches that are entirely apt. Overall she plays it as if she had slept while the prince-playing-peasant courted her and she responded with shy joy, and has now awakened to a nightmare. And yet Osta’s never entirely convincing as Giselle because she’s just not the type. She doesn’t come across as a fragile, vulnerable young woman to whom tragic things happen. She has the delicious personality of a soubrette; a born Lise in La Fille mal gardée.

Isabelle Ciaravola didn’t endear herself to me in L’Arlésienne and my lack of enthusiasm continued upon seeing her Giselle. Like her fellow étoiles she is amazingly capable. Still, the rank of étoile is supposed to be given for a charisma, a luminescence that is beyond technique. Instead I find Ciaravola dry, angular, even occasionally grotesque, as if she were activated by an unreliable puppet master maneuvering the strings. I’d prefer not to be so negative—especially about a dancer I’d never seen before now—but I understand, just from intermission talk, that she has many admirers, so if I can’t see what’s terrific about her, no matter. That’s the beauty inherent in having a diversity of dancers to interpret a role. The Parisians fielded four in New York and, with three of these close to retirement, no doubt have other candidates back home.

None of the Albrechts I saw seemed just right for the role, one too young and brash paired with a mature ballerina; another too mature to negotiate the technical challenges, though theatrically wise; a third who, with everything going for him, remained indifferent to the story the ballet means to tell. The men’s partnering, though, particularly in the second act, never faltered.

Marie-Agnès Gillot as Myrtha, Queen of the Wilis, in Giselle

Photo: Stephanie Berger

As Myrtha, I much preferred Marie-Agnès Gillot, who alone had the force the role demands and a rare range of emotion. Gillot is one of the most versatile and impressive dancers in the august French company, and her presence permeates the entire second act—until Giselle’s literally undying love for Albrecht defeats her. Emilie Cozette, the first-cast Myrtha, was sweet, small, and tender. What had Casting been thinking of?

Apart from the excellence of the dancing, the company’s style in mime is ideal. Even when it’s in the traditional code vocabulary (for example, tracing a circle around the face means “beautiful”), it’s very underplayed—conversational, as it were. The POB dancers behave as if dancing were their poetry, mime their prose, and the two were intimately related. Think of the relationship between aria and recitative in opera.

The corps de ballet as wilis

Photo: Stephanie Berger

A minor but telling detail (one of many, the Parisians being well-nigh obsessive about detail): Just as in the lithographs of Romantic Age ballerinas, the wilis carry their heads inclined slightly forward, drawing attention to the back of the neck (la nuque, in French)—a part of the body that, according to Japanese culture, is considered particularly beautiful and erotic. Evidently, the Japanese are right.

Led by the Belgian conductor Koen Kessels, the orchestra of the New York City Opera delivered Adolphe Adam’s score sensitively and vibrantly. Ballet music is rarely so well treated in New York. It was a pleasure to hear what’s possible, given care and financial support.

Made in France

July 15, 2012 by Tobi Tobias

Paris Opera Ballet / David H. Koch Theater, Lincoln Center, NYC / July 11-22, 2012

The Paris Opera Ballet, playing at the David H. Koch through July 22, gets the prize for vintage achievement. Formed in 1669, it has the distinction of being the world’s oldest classical ballet troupe. The academy that produces most of its dancers dates from 1713. Naturally, this legendary institution, absent from New York for 16 years, had to re-introduce itself.

The Paris Opera Ballet’s Aurélie Dupont (center, held aloft) with fellow artists of the company in Serge Lifar’s Suite en Blanc

Photo: Stephanie Berger

The first of the three ballets it performed on its opening night in New York declared that exquisite technique rules the company’s aesthetic. Serge Lifar’s Suite en Blanc, set to Édouard Lalo’s score for Namouna, is essentially a compendium of steps, steps immaculately executed by the dancers—almost all trained at the company’s school from early childhood—so that they seem to be the definitive, textbook, version of that step. The goal is, quite simply, perfection. Onlookers will find this sublime, curious, or off-putting, according to their taste. As for its being a ballet about ballet, it’s a distant cousin of Harald Lander’s Études, often performed by American Ballet Theatre, but neither gaudy nor wild. Suite en Blanc is completely confined within the parameters of good taste.

Some, almost random, particulars:

The women’s feet—in their spanking clean, neatly tied pink satin pointe shoes—seem to caress the stage floor and, incredibly, make no sound on the landings from jumps and leaps or on gentle pitter-pattering runs.

The women’s arms are graceful and ornamental, tracing filigreed patterns on the air. The head, neck, and shoulders harmonize scrupulously to produce an effect called épaulement, something Balanchine ignored, because it interfered with the speed he wanted and, perhaps, because it looked old-fashioned.

There are women who can balance forever on one foot—en pointe, of course—turning themselves into an unwavering middle-weight piece of sculpture, apparently through sheer will or perhaps a code of honor.

Everyone in the company, it seems, can turn like mad, some even like gyroscopes. Among the men the finishes—always the telling part of a turn—are sometimes uneven.

The men bend their knees slightly and shoot their bodies directly up into the air, beating their feet together, clearly and firmly, then landing neatly. Missteps, even on a first performance in an unfamiliar theater, are few and clearly destined for eradication.

The men are not only adept partners, but also infinitely polite and respectful cavaliers as well. And they manage to pull off impressive athletic feats without looking like cavemen. True this unremitting chivalry and control may exasperate the New York spectator. We’re simply not used to it.

Throughout, there’s not much variation in the weight of a step. Even in the air, the dancers don’t create the illusion of being ethereal—or, on the ground, impressively forceful. What they’re aiming for, I guess, is sublimity.

Aurélie Dupont and Benjamin Pech in Suite en Blanc

Photo: Stephanie Berger

The high point of Suite en Blanc is a duet in which I saw Aurélie Dupont, a ravishing dancer nearing the company’s compulsory retirement age of 42, sveltely partnered one evening by Benjamin Pech and the next by Mathieu Ganio. Dupont is undeniably a beauty—in both face and figure, a superb dancer with the lush quality of a Suzanne Farrell or a Sara Mearns, and a role model of calm, confident serenity. She exemplifies the rank of étoile (star)—which the company awards to those artists who have a luminous quality that draws viewers’ attention like a magnet and makes them rejoice in what they see. There’s a marvelous moment in the duet where the man walks forward holding her body above the floor and she “walks” too—on air. And another in which she lifts her arms over her head and intertwines her fingers as if to indicate at once the crown of a regent and the halo of an angel. If I had known about her earlier, I would have traveled to Paris more often.

Isabelle Ciaravola and Jérémie Bélingard in Roland Petit’s L’Arlésienne

Photo: Stephanie Berger

It took me a second viewing to figure out the tale Roland Petit’s 1974 L’Arlésienne was trying to tell and even then the story felt wrong-headed. The title itself, The Woman from Arles, appropriated from the Bizet score to which it’s set, is a red herring because the central figure of the ballet is a young man. He and the woman his fellow villagers—a 16-member corps—assume he will marry and settle down with, can’t make their relationship work because the youth has visions—visions of a love that’s utterly beyond earthly reach. Think of La Sylphide, in which James, slated to marry the charming, down-to-earth Effie, feels trapped in the ordinariness of his bride-to-be and the domestic life their community expects them to lead together, and so dreams of a love that’s literally unearthly. You know how that one ends.

The woman, played paper-doll style (is this how Our Hero thinks of her?) by Isabelle Ciaravola and more humanly and sweetly by Nolwenn Daniel, approaches her intended again and again—this is a tediously long ballet—and the two do try to connect, to no avail. He grows more and more possessed by his visions and allergic to her overtures and at last jumps out of a suddenly and conveniently appearing window to his death.

Jérémie Bélingard in Petit’s L’Arlésienne

Photo: Stephanie Berger

The dancers I preferred in the leading roles were Jérémie Bélingard in the opening night cast—his acting was so convincing I almost believed in the goings on–and Nolwenn Daniel (who played a sweetheart any man would be proud to win) in the second performance.

Bolero: You know that Ravel music. And it’s still just as long as you remember. It belabors a simple melody, assuming that repetition, hand in hand with escalating volume and augmenting instrumentation, will hypnotize the hearer. The composer, it’s said, told a friend that he found the little phrase itself “insistent.” Apparently Bronislava Nijinska thought so too and was the first to choreograph the score, in 1928.

Nicolas Le Riche in the central role of Maurice Béjart’s Bolero

Photo: Stephanie Berger

The Paris Opera Ballet does Maurice Béjart’s 1961 version. It’s an audience pleaser, god knows; I find it unbearable. The choreography features a man or a woman (I saw Nicolas Le Riche on opening night, Marie-Agnès Gillot the following evening), discreetly wearing as little as possible under the circumstances, standing on a red oval table to pulsate, gyrate, and gesticulate nonstop with increasing fervor. He (or she) is bordered on all three sides of the stage by a row of dancers who become drawn into the rite until, at the finish, they close in and lunge at the figure on the table, suggesting a synchronized orgasm.

Nicolas Le Riche and the male ensemble in Bolero

Photo: Stephanie Berger

My guest for the opening night program, with which Bolero concluded—with a bang, you might say–condemned the piece, which she was seeing for the first time, as incredibly vulgar. I was bored by the trite choreography, but deeply impressed by the sensuous power and selfless dedication to the enterprise of the two dancers I saw in the leading role. It was definitely a case in which maturity counted. The audience as a whole went crazy for it. Standing ovation and all that. Yelps of delight.

The POB’s mixed repertory program will be followed by Giselle, created for the company in 1841. I can’t wait.

What’s New?

May 12, 2012 by Tobi Tobias

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

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

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

Photo: Paul Kolnik

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

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

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

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

Tiler Peck and Tyler Angle in Benjamin Millepied’s Two Hearts

Photo: Paul Kolnik

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

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

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

Sara Mearns and Jonathan Stafford in the second movement of Balanchine’s Symphony in C

Photo: Paul Kolnik

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

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

Lèse-majesté

February 27, 2012 by Tobi Tobias

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.”

_DSC5270ip — 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.

_DSC4610ip — 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?

_DSC5233ip — 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.

_DSC5016ip — 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.

kings-9858ip — 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.