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“Year of the Rabbit”: Justin Peck Makes Ballet Run

Tuesday, February 5th, 2013

By Rachel Straus

Justin Peck’s “Year of the Rabbit” begins with a whirligig virtuoso solo by Ashley Bouder. The principal New York City Ballet dancer performs her multiple turns into off-kilter leaps with playful abandon. The total effect is that of “Road Runner” cartoon: Here comes Bouder. Beep Beep! The company that George Balanchine developed is known for moving speedily. But Justin Peck, a 25-year-old corps dancer who has now made three works for NYCB (this is his second), gets his dancers to move even faster than the company’s founding choreographer. About half way through Peck’s 2012 piece—to Michael P. Atkinson’s orchestration of Sufjan Stevens’ electronica album “Enjoy Your Rabbit” (2001)—one had to wonder what all the hurry was about.

Ashley Bouder and New York City Ballet in Year of the Rabbit. © Paul Kolnik

Peck is the first choreographer who Ballet Master in Chief Peter Martins has supported that grew up firmly in the Internet age. While Christopher Wheeldon (age 39) and Alexei Ratmansky (age 44) surely have the latest gadgets, and Martins’ support, it is Peck’s fastidiously fast choreography that evokes the furrowed brow of our new century.

New York City Ballet in Year of the Rabbit. © Paul Kolnik

Back in the 1980s, it was Twyla Tharp who upped the ante on choreographic tempi. She taught aerobics as part of her company’s training. With “In the Upper Room” (1986), she featured dancers in tennis shoes and tracksuits, jogging up and down as though they were on a Stairmaster to heaven. But while Tharp’s “Upper Room” evokes the timelessness of Zen, via repetition of speedily performed choreographic leitmotifs, Peck’s interest in speed feels like young man’s game–with a smidgeon of ADD.

Robert Fairchild in Year of the Rabbit. © Paul Kolnik

Though speed feels like the subject of “Year of the Rabbit,” it also concerns contemporary ballet and its values. In the center of the work, there is a romantic pas deux for the wonderfully expressive dancers Teresa Reichlen and Robert Fairchild. The pair appears to be questing for each other’s love: they dance in separate fiefdoms of the stage, created by boundaries formed out of dancers from the opposite sex. Yet as soon as Fairchild and Reichlen touch, they go their separate ways. The pas de deux’s erotic potency lies with the pair’s physical separation. Actual intimacy isn’t the point, just as Facebook concerns looking and commenting at friends and loved ones from the safety of one’s digital screen.

Peck’s musicality, in which he corresponds, sidles, and departs from Atkinson’s melodic lines, demonstrates that he is astute. His choreography for the corps is also notable.  He continuously weaves the corps through six soloists’ dancing, thus blurring (and democratizing) the typical separation between leading and supporting dancers. All of this movement takes place place swiftly and efficiently, making “Rabbit” an indicator of our times.

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The Female Balanchine Body

Monday, January 21st, 2013

By Rachel Straus

Last week at The Juilliard School, my dance history students and I were looking at the Slaughter on Tenth Avenue number by Balanchine from the 1939 film “On Your Toes.” Our subject for the day was Balanchine in Hollywood. After watching the back-bending, jazz-inflected, bravura performance of Vera Zorina in “Slaughter,” I asked the students a question: Does a particular image come to mind when you think of a female Balanchine dancer? Surely, I thought Zorina fits the bill: she had legs for days, a short torso, and was slim as a cigarette. To my question, the students answered with similar descriptions about the Balanchine female body. Yet one female student raised her hand and protested:

“What about Sara Mearns? And Ashley Bouder, and Teresa Reichlen?” said Amelia Sturt-Dilley. “They have very different body types, and they are stars!”

Indeed, Amelia was right. Today’s New York City Ballet’s principal dancers don’t come in one shape and size (they rarely did). This fact was driven home during the New York City Ballet triple-bill performance at the former New York State Theater on January 19. Sara Mearns, Ashley Bouder, and Teresa Reichlen graced the stage in an all-Balanchine evening, which is part of the company’s ambitious “Tchaikovsky Celebration.”

Mearns and Bouder performed in Balanchine’s “Serenade” (1935). Bouder’s ability to dance a hair’s breath ahead of the beat, with dynamo power, couldn’t be achieved without her muscular, compact physique. This ballerina picks the notes with her pointes. Her dare devil personality comes to the fore in her petite allegro. If Bouder weren’t a ballerina, she might have made a great racecar driver. Her hairpin turns look effortless.

Mearns, in contrast, is a lyrical dancer. In the second movement of “Serenade,” she slowly lowered her out-stretched hand to her forehead. The gesture resembled an anointment: The ritual transformation of a woman into a dancing muse. When Mearns flourished her arms in a circle, as she came out of a turn, audience members in my vicinity sighed with delight. Mearns’ arm appeared to push the string section to a higher octave with her raised arms. Music made visible, yes. That’s Mearns. She also dances with her whole body. It is a body that is as voluptuous as her dancing. Mearns has breasts and thighs. Isadora Duncan would have trumpeted her physique. Legions of New York City Ballet regulars regularly do so, thus establishing a new paradigm for the female ballet dancing body.

As for Teresa Reichlen, her performance in “Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto No. 2” (1941), was equally inspiring. Reichlen’s height enhances her ability to embody the ballerina assoluta, a role that pays homage to the late 19th century Russian Imperial ballet dancers. Reichlen commanded attention through her virtuoso phrase work and calm demeanor. Her long torso gives her dancing a hyper-attenuated quality. Yet the speed of her footwork puts her in a unique category. Like a great jazz dancer, she can cut sharp and wax lyrical. When she ran from one upper corner of the stage to another, her diagonal crossings suggested a narrative. It looked as she was searching for the entry point into Tchaikovsky’s next movement, whose concerto is renowned for its emotional-shifting grandeur.

**

This three-part bill, which includes “Mozartiana,” will be performed again on February 26 at 2 p.m.

The New York City Ballet Tchaikovsky Celebration runs from January 15-27 and from February 13-24

For more information:

www.nycballet.com

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A Masterwork by Israel Galván

Friday, January 4th, 2013

By Rachel Straus

Israel Galván in "Lo Real"

The most indelible dance production of the year, for this writer, was the world premiere of Lo Real/Le Réel/The Real. Conceived by the flamenco dancer-choreographer Israel Galván, and seen December 22 at Madrid’s prestigious Teatro Real, Lo Real’s subject is the Nazi’s genocide of the Roman and Sinti people (otherwise known as the gypsies). This intermission-less, two hour and ten minute production is nothing but ambitious. But in the hands of the 39-year-old Galván, Lo Real neither traffics in sentimentalism nor graphic violence. Instead the work reads like a metaphysical inquiry, an exploration into the fundamental nature of being in the world.

Consider this scene. Galván hammers an old upright piano apart with his sputtering footwork. In doing so, he destroys the harmonic integrity of the instrument. When he forces the piano apart, we hear its strings shrieking as they stretch. We see Galván in a deep lunge with his muscular arms working to push the battered object to its breaking point. But the piano doesn’t dissemble. Instead its strings, like Galván’s wiry body, produce a shrill, taut dissonance, one that is awe-inspiring in its intensity. At this moment, the image of the persecuted gypsy becomes real: Galván, stripped of his shirt, dances while caught in a barbed wire fence. His angular, contorted gestures and his sharp, hard footwork eviscerate him as they reveal the unique quality of his dancing, which bends the tradition of the Seville school of flamenco beyond recognition.

Photo by Daniel Munoz

The title of Galván’s production is key to understanding the choreographer’s perspective. Lo Real/Le Réel/The Real isn’t some semantic word play favored by choreographers wishing to seem intellectual. It’s a functional title. By inscribing the same word in Spanish, French, and English, Galván alludes to the foremost countries (Spain, France, the U.S and UK) that have consistently embraced Galván’s artistry. The title also pays homage to Jacques Lacan’s theory of The Real, which states how the real is that which is authentic and absolute.

Death, Galván has alluded in interviews, is his Real. And in his production, directed by Pedro G. Romero and Txiki Berraondo, it is treated through a reel of distinct images and scenes. Some are comedic: The Nazi film director Leni Riefenstahl appears as a vamp in a red tuxedo-style corset who straddles an old-fashioned lighting stand, thanks to dancer Isabel Bayón’s frighteningly certain performance. Some of Lo Real’s images are tragic: In the finale of Belén Maya’s solo, she cannot stand. Nonetheless, Maya performs her rhythmic footwork while lurching forward to the lip of the stage on her forearms.

Isabel Bayón and Israel Galván in "Lo Real"

Almost all of the spectacular performers, including singers David Lagos and Tomás de Perrate, guitarists Chicuelo and Caracafé, violinist Eloísa Cantón, drummer Bobote and dancing wife Uchi, emerge from the recesses of the vast stage like specters. Either alone or in pairs, they perform transcendent defiances against the inevitability of death, through their song and dance.

Galván’s Lo Real/Le Réel/The Real will next be performed in Paris, Amsterdam and Ludwigsburg and then will return to Spain via stops in Seville and Granada. Let’s hope it comes to New York soon, before another year ends.

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A Dance Labyrinth by Kyle Abraham

Sunday, November 11th, 2012

By Rachel Straus

The world premiere of Kyle Abraham’s Pavement, seen at the Harlem Stage Gatehouse on November 3, evokes a vision of urban youth careening through a dark world. Abraham begins Pavement by marking a spot with his downcast arm.  Then he lassoes his body, drawing a circle with his outstretched limbs. He moves loose, full force and in searching manner, as if looking for a clear compass. When a white dancer enters, he stops Abraham, lies him face down on the floor, and brings his hands to the base of his spine. Abraham’s arrest is done without emotion. This lack of drama makes the event feel doubly devastating.

Pavement’s racially provocative introduction occurs to the accompaniment of Fred McDowell’s rasp-voiced blues song “What’s the Matter Now.” Its lyrics suggest impending violence, but the brutality in Pavement never occurs on stage. It transpires through sound bites from John Singleton’s 1991 crime drama Boyz n the Hood in which young men lose their lives to gang violence.

The recent violence of Hurricane Sandy robbed Pavement of its intended set design. Yet the square stage’s red outline and the presence of a basketball hoop, whose backboard occasionally projected visions of a housing project, gave the 70-minute work a clear sense of place. Abraham’s casting—four black male dancers (Abraham included), two white male dancers, and one black female performer (the powerful mover Rena Butler)—augured a dance about race. Yet Pavement is far from being a modern-day West Side Story. A tale of black against white never comes to the fore. Like T.S. Eliot’s modernist poem The Wasteland, Abraham creates scenes that don’t necessarily fit together or have clear beginnings and endings. They are snippets of everyday life (Abraham asking for a dollar) and dream evocations, in which his remarkable dancers’ limbs weave in and out of each other to the accompaniment of a red strobe light.

Pavement’s stream of conscious structure is also created through a collage of 12 pieces of music. The recorded selections include a J.C. Bach and Mozart aria (performed by the French tenor Philippe Jaroussky), two ballads by Sam Cooke, and an excerpt from Benjamin Britten’s opera Peter Grimes (about homosexual oppression). Almost all of the musical selections, listed in the playbill by the composers’ names only, carry metaphorical weight. Unfortunately, it requires research to understand the connections Abraham is making between the music and his messages regarding the slipperiness of love, gender and race.

In the program notes, Abraham excerpts a quote from W.E.B Du Bois’ 1903 Souls of Black Folk. Du Bois developed the theory of a black person’s double consciousness. He called it the veil. When Abraham’s dancers do the high five, the gangsta walk, and behave too cool for school, they appear to be acting out today’s veil. When they launch into pure dancing sections, they move beyond coded acts of identity. They become unveiled.

Pavement ends with a pile up of bodies. The dancers, however, don’t look dead; they appear to be sleeping, lulled by the sound of Donny Hathaway singing “Some Day We’ll All Be Free.” Here again Abraham transforms a violent image into one that is doubled or fractured in meaning. This shirking of didacticism makes Pavement more porous than concrete. Here is a dance work that becomes a labyrinth, one that is as puzzling as it is fascinating.

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A Dance That Still Strikes The Heart: Martha Graham’s Chronicle:

Thursday, November 1st, 2012

Note: This review marks the continuation of a series dedicated to showcasing the best student writing from the Dance History class I teach at The Juilliard School.

By Michael Marquez

Martha Graham’s Chronicle speaks against the rise of fascism, but it also reveals a universal message. Everyone should fight for causes. On September 30 at New York City Center, The Martha Graham Dance Company’s performance of Graham’s 1936 masterwork concluded the second program of the Fall for Dance Festival.

Blakeley White-McGuire. Photo by Michele Ballantini

Chronicle opens with a lone figure. Wearing a long, heavy black skirt and sitting on a round-shaped platform, Blakely White-McGuire manipulates yards of her costume. Her skirt becomes a psychological extension of her being. It looks like the psychic weight she carries. It invites fascination. When she unfolds the skirt’s red underside, it is as though she is shedding her own blood. While White-McGuire’s focus is captivating and fearless, her full-bodied gestures show her fight.

In the second section, “Steps in the Street,” nine dancers step, jump and twist as one. On the dark-lit stage, with its black floor and cyclorama, Wallingford Riegger’s music drives the performers into a primordial state. Their impassioned dancing looks like it is being spun from their inner impulses. They dig deep into the ground, rooting them selves to the stage to form archaic and statuary-like shapes.

Photo by Michele Ballantini

The strong and vigorous women fight humanely, instead of devolving into immorally behaving creatures. Unfortunately, too many of the dancers’ transitions lack suppleness. Or, as master Graham teacher Terese Capucilli puts it, their transitions lack “thickness.”

Nonetheless, Chronicle shows how much emotion is inside of us. We should never ignore what we feel. We should never forget that it’s necessary to fight for causes. A vanguard artist of the last century, Graham made essential dances. Chronicle is one of Graham’s works that continues to strike at the human heart.

Michael Marquez is a second year student in the Dance Division. He studies the Graham technique with Terese Capucilli.

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Fall for Dance Festival: Recapping Program 1, 2 and 5

Wednesday, October 17th, 2012

By Rachel Straus

The seventh annual Fall For Dance Festival came to a meaty close on October 13.  Program five at New York’s City Center trafficked in high testosterone, thanks to China’s LPD-Laboratory Dance Project’s No Comment (2002) and Yaron Lifschitz’s Circa (2009), which is also the name of the Australian acrobatic troupe. In both works the body was treated like a battering ram.

Circa by Justin Nicholas Atmosphere Photography

In Circa, the performers used not only their fellow artists’ thighs and shoulders, but also their faces, as launching pads for balancing in midair and jettisoning across the space like Evel Knievel. In No Comment, the men continually fell to the floor, as though blown down by an invisible hammer. As a finale, they stripped to their waists to reveal their glistening muscular torsos. Like fight club winners, they took their bows. But their message—sex objects who pulverize themselves are cool—confounded me.

Visions of aggression and angst trumped visions of cooperation and kindliness in the three FFD programs of 12 dances from 12 international and national-based companies seen on September 28 and 30, and October 13. Perhaps the programming, spearheaded by artistic advisor Stanford Makishi, not only represented his personal preferences, but also reflected the times. The majority of the works were made in the past four years, and only two dated before 2002. This decade hasn’t been an easy ride; the dances reflects that.

The festival’s first program ended with Martha Graham’s Chronicle, which was made in response to rising European fascism before World War II. The first section of Graham’s 1936 work surprisingly echoed the last work in the festival: Deseo Y Conciencia (2011). In Deseo, flamenco choreographer-performer Maria Pagés donned a red costume that transformed into a shroud. Likewise, the gargantuan red underskirt worn by Blakeley White-Mcguire in Chronicle possessed the same import. Both women became symbols of mourning, evoking through their blood-red cloaks a fraught world.

Maria Pages. Photo by David Ruano

Blakeley White-McGuire. Photo by Michele Ballantini

The two most ambitious works, of the 12 viewed, were Pam Tamowitz’s Fortune (2011) and Christopher Wheeldon’s Five Movements, Three Repeats (2012). Both tendered subtlety, nuance and mystery. (Full disclosure: Fortune was choreographed on the Juilliard School dancers and I work at Juilliard.) In Fortune, Tamowitz set 21 dancers, costumed in hot pink and red unitards, against a field of greenish yellow. Here was a happy Mark Rothko painting. Though Tamowitz’s movement vocabulary is clearly inspired by Merce Cunningham’s, she doesn’t ignore the music as was Cunningham’s way. Tamowitz’s sharply sculptural patterning, full of pregnant pauses, reflected Charles Wuorinen’s stop and go Fortune (performed by a quartet Juilliard School musicians). In response to Wuorinen’s abrupt shifts in sounds, which instantly dissolve as though they never happened, Tamowitz evokes mini narratives, some absurd, others resonant of a city life, where pedestrians walk with laser-eye certainty.

Juilliard Dancers in "Fortune." Photo by Rosalie O'Connor

Also of note was Christopher Wheeldon’s Five Movements, Three Repeats, which was made for Fangi-Yi Sheu & Artists. Sheu, a former Graham dancer born and trained in Taiwan, is now based in New York. She is one of the great performers of our time. Her guests were none other than Wheeldon’s former colleagues at New York City Ballet: Tyler Angle, Craig Hall and Wendy Whelan. To a recording of Max Richter’sMEMORYHOUSE and Otis Clyde’s The Bitter Earth/On the Nature of Daylight, Wheeldon didn’t treat Sheu as some modern dance oddity among the City Ballet dancers.

At the beginning of every other section of Five Movements, Three Repeats, Sheu undulated her spine like a fern seeking light. Her pliable torso work was best picked up in Hall’s simultanesously-occurring solo that spiraled into the floor. Later on, Sheu and Hall folded their limbs into each other. Their duet featured a melding of their bodies, and organically blended central aspects of their different technical training (Sheu’s focuses on weight, Hall’s on ethereality).

Ms. Sheu and Mr. Hall. Photo by Erin Baiano

Though Sheu’s legwork is akin to the arrow-like esthetic favored by ballet choreographers, Wheeldon didn’t devolve to his usual histrionics: over-choreographing women’s leg extensions in the pas de deux. Consequently, Sheu did not become a human gumby. Instead, she partnered Hall’s weight as much as Hall partnered her’s. Wheeldon’s venture into making work for a modern-trained dancer is heartily welcome. The task seems to stretch him instead of over-stretching his female collaborators.

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Political Mother: Bring Earplugs and Irony

Saturday, October 13th, 2012

By Rachel Straus

Hofesh Schechter is a slippery soul. In Political Mother, seen October 11 as part of Brooklyn Academy of Music Next Wave Festival, the Israeli-born choreographer cloaks his earnestness in irony. The 80-minute, 2010 work is structured through a series of blackouts in which 12 dancers and seven musicians evoke the demagoguery in politics, and entertainment.

Photo by Juileta Cervantes

The work pivots on three visions: the rock concert, with the rapper raging into his microphone above supplicants of fans. The military-style drummers, who appear in portals like a set of Kodak negatives, and who drive the dancers into waves of hyperkinetic motion. The tribe, who perform Hasidic-like folk dances, but with an intensity that beckons questions about their sanity. Dressed like prisoners, with arms raised in their air as though they are shackled from above, they not so subtly evoke those who lived in concentration camps.

Despite these visions, what stays in the mind about Politcal Mother are the slick production values and the deafening sound of Schechter’s pounding music.

Repetition is used to drive home Schechter’s theme: whether you are in Nazi Germany, present-day Williamsburg, Brooklyn or watching a James Bond movie (Daniel Craig was in the audience), it’s all the same. Humans behave like drones, they suffer like beasts, and one man will always rise to the top in attempts to control others.

Photo by Julieta Cervantes

So where is Mother in all this antic behavior? She is folk dance. In electric-yellow lights, at the dance’s end, we read the following words, “Where there is pressure, there is folk dance.” For Schechter, folk dance appears to be the universal form of protest against oppression. It’s where Schechter’s creativity and carefully cloaked earnestness lies.

In folk dance, Schechter rejects the current state of high art, opera house dance, the codified vocabulary of ballet, which historically in Western Europe was the sanctified form of dance expression. With folk dance, Schechter taps into populism. He can skirt between visions of the rock concert, the neo-nationalist volk of Leni Riefenstahl’s films (that helped consolidate Hitler’s power), and the zealousness of far-right religious fundamentalists. What’s notable is that these adopted visions are cynical ones. But, nonetheless, with folk vocabulary—the stamping rhythms, the democracy of the circle dance, and the erasure of gender (in Schechter’s use of it)—beats the heart of this Israeli’s artistry. Like a true postmodernist, Schechter isn’t able to openly love the folk dance he loves. He’s a choreographer in a cat’s cradle.

Throughout the work, I wondered how Political Mother could possibly end. With the cast going mad, the appearance of a masked gorilla, and two murder attempts by pistol, how could Schechter up the ante? The answer: Cinema technique. Schechter hits the rewind button. In less than five minutes, he gives us snapshots of the dance from end to beginning. Consequently the work opens, and concludes, with a Samurai-like warrior committing hari-kari with a sword that pierces his belly from front to back. Too bad this beginning didn’t get more laughs. Watching one male dancer with dreadlocks grunting and groaning from his self-inflicted wound was not a catharsis. It was a cartoon. Few got it. American audiences are indeed earnest.

Photo by Julieta Cervantes

Nonetheless, neo-folk dance is the wellspring from which many great choreographers (from Leonide Massine to Pina Bausch to Alexi Ratmansky) return for material. It’s a way of bringing concert dance back to the people, back to a human body that isn’t always upright and gloriously assured. In Political Mother, Schechter is on to something. Too bad he isn’t willing to tender his dancing credo with less ironic hyperbole.

In one notable section Schechter interpolates the music of Verdi—and—he leaves the stage empty. Solemnity, he seems to be saying, doesn’t include dance movement. Solemnity is reserved for sound, and in that respect Schechter may end up devoting more of his time to musical composition than to choreography.

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La Sylphide at the Slovak National Theatre

Friday, October 12th, 2012

By Rachel Straus

The Slovak National Theatre Ballet in Bratislava is not a destination point for international balletomanes, but it should be if one wants to see August Bournonville’s La Sylphide up close and personal. In the city’s neo-Renaissance theatre, the 92-year old ballet troupe performs regularly. Being there on October 6 felt like visiting the interior of a Faberge egg.

When La Sylphide‘s supernatural and realistic aspects collide, when the mime sections are as affecting as the dancing, the ballet ceases to be a historical document: i.e. the longest continuously performed Romantic ballet. It becomes a dark morality tale. In it a Scottish bloke abandons his bride at the altar for a hyper-feminine creature. He wishes to possess her; he ends up killing her. Too often the production gets mired in ballerina doll sweetness, but not in this case.

Kvetoslava Štefeková. Photo by Ctibor Bachratý

In Bratislava, the real star of the ballet was not the title character, danced by beautiful Viola Marina. It was Kvetoslava Štefeková, who performed Madge the witch. Unlike the Royal Danish Ballet’s production seen last year in New York, this version gives greater attention to the crucial role of Madge, who sets nearly every turn of the story in motion. (For a plot refresher, click here.)

Štefeková’s Madge is no arthritic hag. She’s an athletic feminist who dislikes wishy-washy men. Before she grabs the poison scarf and gives it to James (Oliver Jehelka) to give to the Sylphide, she twirls across the stage like a tornado. In the ballet’s final moments, she grabs Jehelka by his hair and violently lifts his head so that he witnesses the Sylphide’s funeral cortege. This Madge abhors James’s choice: to leave his bride Effie (Veronika Hollá) for an unearthly woman. This Madge ensures that Effie is not left alone. She literally pushes Gurn (Andrej Kremz) into proposing to the humiliated girl. The fact that Effie accepts Gurn without fuss underscores the condition of early 19thcentury women—and the no-nonsense approach of the Slovak National Ballet Theatre to accurately depict women’s lack of historical power.

While Hollá (Effie) plays the good girl and Mariner performs a Marilyn Monroe-like Sylphide, Štefeková’s Madge comes across as a modern female personality. She projects joy and rage, curiosity and condemnation. As the curtain lowers on a crumpled James (Jehelka), Stefekova raises her fists above her head. Here is a woman in bitter triumph, something rarely seen in the denouement of Romantic ballets or, for that matter, in contemporary works where the classical technique is featured.

The other notable aspect of this La Sylphide, staged by former Bournonville principal dancer Niehls Kehlet, was it’s mis-en-scène—and I don’t mean the set design. I mean the dancers’ relationship to the smallness of the stage. Compared to North American stages, this one is tiny. In this environment, every detail of the dancers’ performance is brought into relief. When Mariner (the Sylphide) bats her eyes at Jahelka (James) for the first time, I could actually see her eyelids and the gently lilt of her fingers underneath her opalescent face.  What was made clear was that this woman is as beautiful as she is practiced at tendering her feminine wiles.

Viola Mariner. Photo by Ctibor Bachratý

The Austrian-born Mariner possesses Taglioni-like arms and the neck of Anna Pavlova. Her arabesque is the best part of her dancing. As she effortlessly lifts one leg behind her, she simultaneously balances and grows beyond the shape. The effect is that of flying. And that’s the point: Sylphs can fly. But apart from Mariner’s soaring arabesque and lovely arms, she dances without enriching H.S. von Lövenskjold’s plaintive music as competently conducted by Martin Leginus. Her body doesn’t sing it as much as keep time with the tempi.

As for the Slovak National Theatre Ballet’s female corps, they were a model of synchronization—a vision of sisterly sylphdom.

Slovak National Theatre website

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Music and Dance Partnerships

Wednesday, September 26th, 2012

By Rachel Straus

At the most recent Guggenheim Museum Works & Process (September 23), I couldn’t help but think of Monte Carlo in 1928. In that city and year, the 24-year-old George Balanchine created his bedrock neo-classical ballet to Stravinsky’s Apollon musagète. For the next four decades, the partnership between the young Russian choreographer and older Russian composer flourished.

At Sunday’s moderated talk and dance exhibition, the subject was a new ballet-music partnership—that of the 25-year-old American choreographer Justin Peck and American indie rocker Sufjan Stevens. Peck is a current New York City Ballet corps member who has been making work since 2009. Stevens has several award winning albums under his belt. Moderator Ellen Bar mentioned that Stevens has a “cult following.” The hope is that his music will bring in a new, young audience to New York City Ballet. On October 3 the Peck-Stevens work, Year of the Rabbit, will premiere at the former New York State Theater.

What’s odd about this new collaboration is that Stevens’s 2001 electronica album Enjoy Your Rabbit is getting a complete classical music makeover. In fact, Rabbit has been through not one but two iterations since its inception. Classical music arranger Michael Atkinson turned it into a string quartet in 2007. For the City Ballet commission, Atkinson and Stevens expanded the quartet into a full orchestral score. Instead of electronic acoustics and club beats, Atkinson inserted clacking sounds for the violin and a fare amount of percussion. Stevens’s original work, heard in excerpted form over the PA system, captures the cosmic sensibility of The Chinese Zodiac, which served as Stevens’s original inspiration. The orchestral version, also heard in excerpted form, sounds less celestial.

When Peck began reading up on Chinese astrology, he confessed to feeling overwhelmed by the enormity of the subject. When asked about the challenges of making Year of the Rabbit, Peck said that it has been easy sailing, partially because NYCB Ballet Master in Chief Peter Martins gave his work priority and the pick of the company’s dancers. Only Alexei Ratmansky might have gotten this treatment at City Ballet. But that is the very point. Ratmansky is gone; he took an Artist in Residence position at American Ballet Theatre in 2007. Choreographer Christopher Wheeldon left City Ballet in 2008 to start his own company. Martins is looking for a new wunderkind. Peck has fluency formulating movement based on academic ballet steps. He is the great new hope.

Four excerpts showcased Peck’s choreographic talent, energy, and ambition. His work is fast, virtuosic and not as angular as Balanchine’s style. But the softer arm work often rides on top of Peck’s hyper-kinetic foot work (and sometimes lyricism gets lost). When City Ballet principal Tiler Peck (no relation) danced an excerpt from “Year of the Ox,” it was the most exciting moment of the evening. Having learned the part 48 hours prior, Peck was filling in for an injured Ashley Bouder. Becoming the Ox, she pawed the ground. Her legs and arms yoked in one direction, and then another. She pushed back with flying limbs that syncopated against the music and responded to the violins’ high notes.

**

Another event that featured music as much as dance was the September 17 Alice Tully Hall performance of the Simón Bolivar National Youth Choir and the José Limón Dance Company. The highlight of the one-night only occasion in celebration of Venezuala’s El Sistema was Missa Brevis. With a score by Zoltan Kodaly, a choir of more than 65 young singers, and a cast of 18 dancers, the 1958 Limón work has never looked better.

In the age of irony, it’s not easy to dance Missa Brevis. The work was inspired by Limón’s trip to Poland, where he witnessed the people’s poverty and dignity under Soviet Union rule. Despite this big subject, Missa Brevis came across Monday night not as an ideological sermon, but as a prayer. In their Lincoln Center debut, the Limón dancers performed Limón’s landmark work without an ounce of sanctimony.

Like a religious icon above the heads of the worshippers, Missa began with Kathyrn Alter raised out and aloft of a mass of men and women. Hovering above the organist, played by Vincent Heitzer, Alter’s face shone like a Madonna. Francisco Ruvalcaba danced Missa‘s Christ figure. Ruvalcaba is the outsider who dances alone and prostates himself on the floor in the sign of the cross. Angels also appear: three men men lift three women; they float through the air; their arms reach upwards; their limbs sing to the heavens.

The groupings of dancers in response to Kodaly’s choric mass created sonic-visual achitecture. Its architectural correlative is the great cathedral, one that possesses a high golden altar and low simple benches. Limón learned from his mentor Doris Humphrey that contrast is key to choreography. Consequently, Missa doesn’t focus solely on darkness and sorrow. Of the 12 sections, almost half of them speak of hope.

Under the artistic direction of Carla Maxwell, the Limón Company is now in its 65th year. The company’s executive director is the Venezuelan-born Gabriela Poler-Buzali. Since her appointment in 2009, Poler-Buzali has been forging alliances with Latin American arts organizations, presenters and choreographers. The company is increasingly touring Latin America. Today Limón is being rediscovered as a Latino artist. The majority of the audience at Alice Tully were there to listen to the Simón Bolivar National Youth Choir. Hopefully, they will seek out the José Limón Dance Company after this first, magnificent introduction.

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Eclipse, A New Work for BAM’S Newest Space

Monday, September 10th, 2012

By Rachel Straus

Jonah Bokaer in "Eclipse." Photo: Stephanie Berger

Choreographer Jonah Bokaer and visual artist Anthony McCall’s world premiere of Eclipse inaugurated the BAM Richard B. Fisher Building with six sold out performances from September 5th through 9th. The hour-long work (seen on the 9th) in the new black box theater was configured so that the audience flanked four sides of the dark, carpeted, stage space. The performance began when Bokaer approached one of the lowest hanging bulbs and knelt to Thomas Edison’s invention. Like the sun god Apollo, Bokaer’s penetrating gaze into the bulb’s opaque surface caused its illumination.

Bokaer’s ability to make this opening moment feel mysterious and important is part of the reason why he has captured the attention of museum curators, visual artists and the international dance set. He has an indelible stage presence and is a beautiful mover, though less and less is he demonstrating the range of his physical virtuosity. Like the 1960s Judson Church Theatre founders, Bokaer is saying no to most of his training, which includes ballet, Martha Graham and the Merce Cunningham techniques. His chosen vocabulary for Eclipse is spare, includes lots of sharp starts and stops, and numerous sculptural poses. All are executed with an intense seriousness.

Because Bokaer’s first encounter with McCall’s slowly illuminating lighting installation was gripping (but became less so the second and third time) and because McCall’s “sonic score” for the four dance scenes was solely comprised of the ceaseless tick-tick of an ancient film projector, Bokaer had a real theatrical problem on his hands: How to proceed. On top of that, McCall’s installation of 120 watt light bulbs and old-time theater sound evoked a nostalgia for a previous technological era. In contrast Bokaer has increasingly embraced new technology as a launchpad for developing choreography. Consequently, the most notable eclipse in Eclipse was this difference between Bokaer and McCall’s apparent interests.

Dancers Tal Adler-Arieli, CC Chang, Sara Procopio and Adam Weinert first appeared in the slightly claustrophobic space like ghostly sleepwalkers. Later they became sculptual set pieces graced by Aaron Copp’s chiaroscuro lighting. By the performance’s end, each excellent dancer had performed a short solo.  But unlike Bokaer’s solo—which possessed the tenseness of a perilous traffic blockage with Bokaer as a topnotch traffic cop (pumping his fists outwards from his chest, slashing his arms and changing directions with knife-like precision)—the solos Bokaer choreographed for each of his four dancers didn’t marry gesture with any clear sense of intent.

What was most impressive during the course of the performance was that none of the dancers collided with McCall’s lightbulbs as they traversed through his confidence course-like installation. Also fascinating was when the dancers performed fast-moving phrases inches from both the audience and the illuminated hanging bulbs. During these moments, the performers eclipsed the light.

Eclipse was structured into four scenes by three blackouts during which time deafening sounds (the rumblings of a train, an overhead helicopter) poured out of the speakers directly above the audience’s heads. This experience eclipsed my desire to have ear drums.

In the final section, the dancers moved for the first and last time in unison. They flattened their bodies to the floor to become two-dimensional figures signaling to a subterranean world. Bokaer soon reappeared and took his orginal kneeling pose beside a low hanging suspended bulb. When the dancers took their bows, I had almost as many questions and images hovering through my head as the number of light bulbs hanging in the space.

But the confounding part of Eclipse was not it sense of impenetrable mystery, but the contents of the playbill. Bokaer’s page-long biography made no mention of the fact that he had danced for Merce Cunningham Dance Company. At 18 years old, Bokaer joined the troupe. Cunningham’s aesthetic is firmly rooted in Bokaer’s works, which are chock full of off-center balances, electronic scores and computer technology. Most of all by performing Cunningham’s dances across the world, in the most highly esteemed theaters from 2000 to 2007, Bokaer came to the attention of avant garde composers, visual artists and critics. When Bokaer began to choreograph, he wasn’t some young choreographer with a BA in Visual & Media Studies. He was Cunningham’s favorite male dancer.

Bokaer’s ommission of Cunningham is nonetheless the sign of a true modernist. This originator must eclipse—must totally obscure—the father figure.

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