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ABT Bids Farewell to José Manuel Carreño

Tuesday, July 5th, 2011

By Rachel Straus

Most dancers’ careers last a little more than a decade.  José Manuel Carreño’s reached the quarter century mark this year. The Cuban-born and trained principal dancer announced his retirement with American Ballet Theatre in September 2010. On June 30, to a full-capacity audience at the Metropolitan Opera House, Carreño made his farewell performance, dancing Prince Siegfried in Kevin McKenzie’s staging of Swan Lake.

Carreño’s departure from ABT marks the passing of a notable generation of performers. Their task was not easy. They danced at the end of the American dance boom in works by renowned ballet choreographers who had made or were making their last dances. Carreño never worked with George Balanchine, Frederick Ashton, Kenneth MacMillan, Antony Tudor, and Jerome Robbins, though he danced their ballets exquisitely. He modeled himself after Mikhail Baryshnikov, Rudolph Nureyev, and Eric Bruhn (who danced with Carreño’s teacher Alicia Alonso, longtime director of the Ballet Nacional de Cuba). Carreño, however, never attained these male dancers’ beyond-the-ballet-world stardom. “Shit—why didn’t I keep playing baseball?” Carreño recently said to Time Out dance columnist Gia Kourlas. Carreno’s comment was a joke. His calling card has been his unswerving passion for ballet.

In an era marked by critics, choreographers, and dancers looking over their shoulders at a passing golden age, Carreño’s confident, uncomplicated stage presence reassured. He gave himself to his roles and his partners completely. As Prince Siegfried, Carreño demonstrated his gallant charms. They include his virtuoso technique (following four pirouettes, he balanced in near stillness before lowering his working leg to the floor), his panther-like grace (turning in mid air, his legs scissored behind him, then in front), and his winning smile.

Like most farewell performances, Carreño’s was as much about honoring his career as highlighting the careers of dancers who are in their prime. Carreño presented each of these performers to the audience with a graciously extended arm. Up first was Joaquin De Luz (as Benno, the prince’s friend). A New York City Ballet principal, De Luz’s guest artist appearance marked the first time he has danced with ABT since he left the company in 2003. In Act I’s Pas de Trois, De Luz, Sarah Lane and Yuriko Kajiya rode the full-bodied symphonic quality of Tchaikovsky’s music (under the baton of Ormsby Wilkins) with a what-me-worry charisma.

Other dancers in their prime, who performed, were David Hallberg (as the evil sorcerer von Rothbart) and Gillian Murphy. Both wowed. Murphy danced Odile (the black swan) while veteran ballerina Julie Kent performed Odette (the white swan). This splitting of Swan Lake’s lead female role isn’t unknown. It was, however, made through Carreño’s suggestion and casting. The contrast between Murphy and Kent’s performances was the most interesting part of the evening. Kent, who like Carreño has 16 years with ABT, unfolded her limbs as though they were tendrils. Her delicacy is her signature quality. It is also a product of her age. Murphy, in contrast, eats up space. She dances with a juicy, full-bodied, fearless quality. This ballerina is no waif.

But it was David Hallberg’s presence that radiated the strongest, if acting as much as dancing is the Geiger counter test. Appearing in Act III, Hallberg as Von Rothbart bore into his fellow performers eyes’ like kryptonite. He danced with each of the four Princesses, luring them into his orbit like a menacing rake that you just can’t help but like. With the Queen Mother (Susan Jaffe), he led her back to her throne and impudently sat in Prince Siegfried’s throne. Hallberg’s comic chutzpah stood in stark contrast to Carreño’s noblesse oblige, which is all to the good, if one believes that von Rothbart and the Prince are foils to Odile (who is imprisoned into the body of a swan by Rothbart and is further condemned by the Prince’s pledge of love to Odette).

Unlike Hallberg, Carreño’s performance wasn’t that memorable. Perhaps it was because McKenzie’s staging of Swan Lake, after Marius Petipa and Lev Ivanov, isn’t that satisfying. There are too many choreographic and visual elements that don’t gel. One occurs when Carreño and Kent leap to their deaths. They look like flying fish rather lovers sacrificing their mortality to be with each other in the afterlife. Another concerns Zack Brown’s Cecil B. DeMille style backdrop from Act III. It bears resemblance to the technicolor scene in The Ten Commandments when Moses parts the Red Sea. Hollywood’s bombastic sensibility rules in Mckenzie’s version, which Carreño has performed since its 2000 New York premiere.

As flowers rained down onto the stage, Carreño took his final bows. A Moses-like parting of the ways occurred. While his colleagues will continue their ballet performance careers, Carreño will cross over to teaching and coaching. He will help usher in the next generation. No doubt he’ll do it with unswerving dedication.

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Shen Wei at the Metropolitan Museum of Art

Tuesday, June 21st, 2011

By Rachel Straus

Shen Wei makes dances that read like landscape paintings. So it made perfect sense when Shen Wei Dance Arts installed itself for two nights (June 6 and 13) at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Chinese-born choreographer designs costumes and paints backdrops that fuse with his serene movement style. But rather than making a backdrop for three dances (seen June 13), Shen Wei used a space where marble and bronze statues dwell: the Charles Engelhard Court of the American Wing. It’s a theatrical setting bar none. To live and recorded music for a sold-out crowd, Shen Wei’s 17 dancers initially possessed statue-like stillness. And like the statues in the Engelhard Court, the dancers were mostly naked.

The event marked the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s first foray into hosting a site specific performance. Earlier this year Shen Wei toured the museum, looking for the ideal space to present his choreography, which is influenced by Chinese opera (of which he trained for a decade), calligraphy, and modern dance (of which he performed in his native China). The fact that Shen Wei chose the American wing may say something about his chosen affiliations. In 2000, Shen Wei adopted the U.S. as his home and incorporated ideas from Abstract expressionism, particularly the notion that art need not be representational.

At the Engelhard Court’s western end, a floor to ceiling sheet of glass creates the impression that Central Park is part of the space. The glass roof, where the setting sun’s rays passed through, gave Shen Wei’s evening an added sense of natural beauty. At the court’s northern end, the facade of a neo-classical bank (once located on Wall Street) was used as an entranceway for the dancers. When a naked Joan Wadopian exited via the façade’s grand staircase, she trailed a red swath of fabric. This vision reminded me of a scene from Stanley Kubrick’s “Eyes Wide Shut.”

The most compelling work of the evening, which included the aforesaid exit, was Shen Wei’s restaging of “Near the Terrace.” The 2000 work to Arvo Pärt’s famously sacred, minimalist compositions, “fur Alina” and “Spiegel Im Spiegel,” began with the dancers arranged among the statues like statuary. Standing, sitting, and reclining, they did not move for a long time. Because their bodies and faces were coated in white powder, they resembled Butoh practitioners, renowned for their slow, hyper-controlled motions. Shen Wei’s dancers mesmerized, reminding this reviewer of sleepwalkers. Their faces expressed intense focus. They looked like they were performing a mysterious rite. They became statues that had come to life.

Pianist Avner Arad and violinist Aaron Boyd performed Pärt’s solemn music behind two immense wrestlers. The delicacy of their playing stood in stark contrast to the marble figures in the act of pummeling each other.

Whether intentional or not there were other moments of absurdity. At the near end of “Terrace,” a male dancer donned an enormous red crepe hat. When the colorfully clad man marched forward, it was funny—and a welcome change in a dance where seriousness of intent and slowness of walk reigned.

Two new works, “Transition” and “Internal External #1,” incorporated the screeching electronic sounds made by Daniel Burke. In “Transition” Burke’s music offered a sense of what it would be like to be inside a cyclone. Not so nice. Meanwhile Hunter Carter and Wadopian climbed a ramp and lowered themselves into black paint. The dancers emerged like huge birds that had fallen into an oil slick. Then they executed mechanized movements as though they were robots on an assembly line. Modernity can be killing, this dance seemed to say.

In “Internal External #1” 14 dancers’ sharp and smooth, slow and fast, balancing and falling, solo and group movements were juxtaposed. Burke’s repetitive clanging soundscape evoked an industrial hell. But at the end, there was bird chirping. The company, many of who are new, looked like they could have used more rehearsals; they occasionally looked unsure of themselves.

At these times, my eyes wandered across the crowd. The gala guests and special invitees sat on the first level while the rest stood, watching from the second and third-floor galleries above. This wasn’t just a dance lover’s crowd. What did they make of this evening? My hope is that they saw Shen Wei as a landscape choreographer, an artist whose work is wholly fitting for a museum.

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A Lustrous 25th Anniversary Season: Susan Marshall & Company

Tuesday, June 14th, 2011

By Rachel Straus

To understand the power of a good title, look no further than Susan Marshall’s “Adamantine.” In its New York premiere at the Baryshnikov Arts Center (June 9), the work’s six performers were bathed in an adamantine luster. That is, a brilliant non-metallic shade of gray. At times this adamantine became darkly diluvian, like a decrepit subway station. At others it looked heavenly, like the setting against a building’s glass façade—all is golden. Through this chameleon-like landscape, a central paradox of urban living emerged. Extremes states, whether on the streets or in the mind, are the norm.

Ildiko Toth by Rosalie O'Conner

Like this adamantine environment (created by lighting designer Mark Stanley and set designer Jeremy Lydic), Marshall’s choreography has two faces. At first glance it resembles many a downtown dance piece, drawing heavily on pedestrian movement and its ho hum world. But as this work progresses, the performers’ walking, pausing and limb flinging increasingly congeal to form rhythmic, visual sparks. Propulsive patterns coalesce in the mind like Rorschachs.

Marshall also contrasts abstract and romantic ideas. The dancers’ relationship to each other is rarely identifiable; their interactions are quasi abstract. But like romantic figures, the dancers seem to seethe; their bodies appear to imprison them. Joseph Poulson and Petra Van Noort were particularly riveting. Serene sinuousness as well as violent turbulence looks vastly different on each of their bodies.

To leaven the seriousness of “Adamantine,” composer-performer Peter Whitehead intermittently appeared, playing his guitar and singing folksy tunes, which bore traces of Bob Dylan and Pete Seeger’s sound. In contrast, Whitehead’s commissioned electronic score was dark and moody. It sounded like thunder, when the dancer flung them selves to the floor. It hummed like a faraway train skirting on its rails as the cast gazed outwards.

Marshall’s other offering on her 25th anniversary program included “Frame Dances.” Unfortunately, this reviewer missed it.

From June 15-18, Marshall’s two dances will be presented at New Haven’s International Festival of the Arts. Catch this lustrous company there, if you can.

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Scapegoats, Bad Girl Ballerinas, and Breathtaking Performances

Monday, June 6th, 2011

By Rachel Straus

Scapegoats. They come in all shapes and sizes, especially in climates of fear and loathing. On June 1, a Sun News broadcast journalist scape goated the Canadian-based modern dancer Margie Gillis. A recent recipient of Canada’s highest cultural honor (the Governor General’s Performing Arts Award for Lifetime Artistic Achievement), Gillis was accused in Fox News style vitriol of squandering more than $1M of taxpayer dollars for her “interpretive dancing.” Gillis didn’t know the Sun News interview was going to caste her esteemed career as a symbol of superfluous government spending. What became doubly painful was that Gillis, when faced with such an attack, made a big mistake. She explained that the money—allotted to her over several decades for educational, solo, and collaborative projects—allows her to make a sacrifice. If ever there were a poor word choice, Gillis chose the one.

Gillis stayed firm with her statement that she sacrifices, despite the broadcaster’s heckling. She said she contributes to the greater good of her culture, and creates regardless of financial rewards and recognition. She impacts all stripes of people. But she failed to admit that her work is a labor of love more than anything else.

The Sun News broadcaster must have known that it would be easy to skewer Gillis. Her devotion can be compared to a religious calling. She sees herself as a missionary. During the 20-minute interview, the Sun News editors interpolated segments of Gillis dancing in a slow motion film. The footage segment they chose to show focuses on Gillis’s ecstatic looking face, where she resembles a medieval mystic having a hallucination. Needless to say, the film segment needs contextualization, but Sun News offered none. Also shown were photos of a Gillis workshop, which she naively said fosters world peace. These snapshots revealed participants sprawling on a studio floor and cheerfully gathering in bucolic settings. They hammered home Sun News’s argument: Viewers’ tax dollars are going to mystics! To communes! To waste!

Gillis is one of the most expressive solo performers working today. But the film clip diminished her artistry. Though she remained composed while the Sun News talking head mocked her as being elitist and sacrificial, Gillis didn’t defend herself well. I wish the eloquent and intimidating Bill T. Jones had been in this hot seat. He would have ripped the blond telecaster a new one, if she had accused him of misappropriating taxpayers’ dollars. But Gillis is a better target for Canada’s (and America’s) current arts funding controversy. She’s a soft-spoken, polite, white woman. Her dances aren’t politically driven. They aren’t about race. They focus on something much more intangible. The spirit.

The Sun News team didn’t ask Gillis hard questions like, can the human spirit be danced? Is its artistic expression vital? Does it deserve tax dollars? These were the questions buried beneath the vitriol. The fact that Gillis’s work, which investigates and expresses feeling, was trashed is horrific. To see the interview click on: Sun News Broadcast

Another video delivered down the virtual rabbit hole came via New York City Ballet’s press office. Called “Make Your Move,” it serves as advertisement for “Dancer’s Choice,” the last performance of the company’s spring season in which the dancers (as opposed to Ballet Master in Chief Peter Martins) choose the repertory and cast the dancers.

While the program will feature five works by George Balanchine, Christopher Wheeldon and Angelin Preljocaj, the video, made by unnamed dancers, features six City Ballet females. By day the You Tube film shows the women being obedient, pink-tight wearing professionals, taking cues from their male rehearsal coach. By night they transform into vamps, kicking and slinking through the streets of New York with spray paint cans in hand.  With the exception of principal dancer Ashley Bouder, who is in white, the black-leather crew looks like they are ready to hit the Meat Packing district clubs. Defacing public property, they paint their logo—“make your move”—on buildings. Scoundrels!

Does this ballet narrative sound familiar? It reminded me of Darren Aronofsky’s “Black Swan” film, with its fast-editing techniques and good ballet girl/ bad ballet girl done-to-death theme. The video is also false advertising. Those who hope to see Ashley Bouder shaking her groove thing at the June 12 performance (where tickets are discounted at $25 and $50) will be sorely disappointed.

To see the Dancer’s Choice video click on Make Your Move

Last week also featured two fabulous performances. Both were intelligent, inspiring, entertaining. The first was “Misters and Sisters” by The Bang Group at Joe’s Pub on June 2. In this dancing-singing homage to love, the company’s founders David Parker and Jeff Kazin pose as long-time lovers along side Nic Petry and Amber Sloan. The soundtrack is 12 Broadway show tunes and Hollywood musical ballads, written by Rodgers and Hammerstein, Irving Berlin, and Arthur Freed (among others), which speak to heterosexual love.

Because “Misters and Sisters” celebrates homosexuality with a Mister Roger’s glee, it feels as subversive as sing-a-long. Kazin and Parker dress sometimes in drag, other times in suits. The men never aim for the grotesque, as is can be the case with cross-dressing performers. Kazin performs proficiently on pointe. Both tap with flare. They wisely leave the heavy duty partnering and contemporary dancing to their younger friends. They share stories with the audience like seasoned vaudevillians and sing like pros. You can’t help but fall in love with their quirks: Kazin’s rangy energy, Parker’s child-like smile.

In ways that are too pat to be formulaic, their dance vignettes illuminate the songs’ lyrics: “All I Do is Dream of You,” “You Were Meant for Me,” “Tea for Two.” What makes their performance memorable is their comic timing. Resuscitating these songs from late-night TV oblivion, they make them their own. This practice began more than three decades ago, when Parker and Kazin say they were dancing and singing to show tunes in their Boston family homes’ basements, unbeknownst to each other.

The second stupendous performance came from New York City Ballet at the former New York State Theater on June 3. George Balanchine’s full-length 1967 “Jewels” shows how it’s possible for a non-narrative, 80-minute work to be riveting. The conceptual thread connecting the ballet’s three segments is bling, specifically emeralds, rubies and diamonds. But here’s the ingenuity: Each stone represents a period in ballet’s history. In the Emeralds section, to music by Gabriel Fauré, Balanchine celebrates the Paris Opera Ballet, where Romantic ballets bloomed and women’s ethereal dancing became the focus. In the Rubies section, to music by Igor Stravinsky, Balanchine casts his eye on American burlesque, specifically its enticing, leg slicing, extroverted showgirls. In the Diamonds section, to music by Tchaikovsky, the Russian-born choreographer reinterprets the Russian Imperial Ballet tradition, with its phalanx of kaleidoscopically shifting dancers whose aristocratic splendor mirrored the audience composed of the Tsar, his court, and military retinue. Dancers whose performances shone the brightest were Wendy Whelan (in Diamonds), Sara Mearns (in Emeralds), and Megan Fairchild and Joaquin de Luz (performing together in Rubies).

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The Ballet World and the Star System

Tuesday, May 31st, 2011

By Rachel Straus

In 1955 the British dance critic R. J. Austin calculated that American Ballet Theatre, whose roster of choreographers continually changed, would focus on it star dancers to solidify its reputation as a premier ballet company. Austin calculated right. Today ABT is powerful because of its stupendous dancers, whether they’re on the masthead or employed as guest artists for only a season.

On May 21, throngs descended on the Metropolitan Opera House to see David Hallberg dance Basilio, the poor barber, across from guest artist Polina Semionova, dancing the headstrong Kitri, in “Don Quixote.” On May 28, Hallberg played Prince Albrecht to guest artist Alina Cojocaru’s Giselle in the eponymous ballet. What seemed to matter to audiences (and critics) in these full-length ballets, where fifty plus dancers performed, was the performance of these principal dancers. The audiences got their money’s worth. Semionova, Cojocaru and Hallberg are at their peak of their artistry.

Hallberg dances like he is in the act of discovery. He has mastered ballet technique to the point that he plays with steps, rather than merely executing them. His confidence as an actor grows nightly. As Basilio he was all brio, showing unswerving confidence that he could win Kitri, despite all those rich suitors. As Albrecht, Hallberg dances as innocently as Cojocaru’s Giselle, whose heart he breaks and who saves him from The Wilis that are bent on his destruction. When Hallberg sequentially scissors his legs in the air six times, he resembles Christ suspended on the cross. His arms stretch wide, his expression is deathly. Hallberg’s face as much as his legs reveal his passion, his fear that if he stops dancing the Queen of The Wilis will kill him.

But Hallberg’s ability to create meaning isn’t what ticket holders, at least those I spoke to, are discussing. Hallberg’s technique and beautiful leg line are the points that dominate the conversation. Balletomanes are comfortable objectifying dancers and reducing ballets to its dancing stars. The choreography takes a back seat to discussions about virtuosity, and how principal dancers’ performances measure up to other principal dancers’. And that is a problem, if you consider a dance an artwork, in which the movement of every one on stage imbues the work with expressive value.

This complaint about ballet being reduced to stars and their tricks is as old as Jean-Georges Noverre (1727-1810). The French dancer and ballet master argued in “Lettres on Dancing and Ballets” (1760) for creating a ballet whose power lays in the sum of its parts. The ballet master, writes Noverre, has a responsibility to the entire work:

“Without forgetting the principal players in the piece, he should give consideration to the performers as a body; if he concentrate his attention on the premières danseuses and premiers danseurs, the action becomes tedious, the progress of the scenes drawn out, and the execution has no power of attraction.”

Kevin McKenzie’s staging of “Giselle” ocassionally grows tedious. It’s not that the ensemble dancers in the village scene of Act I don’t perform their steps beautifully. It’s that their steps convey little about the village life in which their dancing is supposed to express. The villagers dance much like The Wilis, who are ghosts! In both scenes, the dancers perform ballet steps.

So why didn’t McKenzie create folk dances and take the women off their pointe shoes for the village scene? Because audiences want to see virtuosity, even among the corps dancers, and because ballet dancers want to perform ballet steps so that they can have a shot of performing the roles of Giselle and Albrecht some day. Unfortunately, the plot of “Giselle” gets ground down by this assembly line standardization of choreography, which churns out a few principal dancers who can dazzle with their turns and leaps. This keeps the audiences focused on the sport of dance, which tends to sap the overall quality and meaning of a ballet.

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The Seven Deadly Sins at City Ballet

Tuesday, May 24th, 2011

By Rachel Straus

New York City Ballet’s new staging of  “The Seven Deadly Sins,” which had its premiere at the company’s spring gala on May 11,  puts Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht’s dark, sinister “ballet chanté” of 1933 into a new context: a tinsel-town soundstage, complete with unison hoofers in the grand finale. Choreographer Lynn Taylor-Corbett, whose credits include Broadway’s “Swing,” has essentially created a Cliff Notes version of this irony-laced yarn, dragging  principal dancer Wendy Whelan and guest artist Patti Lapone through seven shallow scenes of human transgression and stripping the work of its brooding soul.

In the original 1933 production, choreographed by George Balanchine for Les Ballets 1933, singer Lotte Lenya and dancer Tilly Losch were presented as Anna I and II, yin yang composites of the same woman. The fact that Lenya and Losch bore a striking resemblance to each other, and were about the same age, probably helped Kurt Weill and Bertold Brecht’s scenario. It concerns the Annas experiencing seven American cities, encountering seven “deadly” sins, and struggling with each other’s opposite personalities.

When Balanchine revived the work in 1958, he cast the 21-year-old Allegra Kent across from the significantly older Lenya. New York Times dance critic John Martin dubbed the production  “a stunning revival of a minor masterpiece.” But not all critics concurred, though the vision of Kent carried aloft on a human-size plate wearing just lingerie lingered in the mind, says dance writer Deborah Jowitt.

Balanchine was never afraid of being naughty. He also wasn’t afraid of “Seven Deadly” dissapearing after its run. No one filmed the performance. This may say more about what Balanchine thought of his “minor masterpiece” than City Ballet’s capacity to film performances in the 1950s. But this point is conjecture.

Now flash forward 60 years. At a City Ballet studio event, Lynn Taylor-Corbett suggests to Peter Martins that she make a reintepreted revival of “Seven Deadly Sins.” With a penchant for commercially-driven projects, Martins agrees to the venture and to Taylor-Corbett’s casting of the matronly-looking Patty Lapone, who sings like a battle ax, and the bone-thin Wendy Whelan, who dances like a steely wraith. The hope was that the project would bring in new audiences (read Broadway ticket holders). At the gala, I did see Matthew Broderick arm and arm with his wife Sarah Jessica Parker.

Unfortunately, on stage Whelan and Lapone never formed a convincing relationship, twin-like, sisterly, or otherwise. Lapone mostly stood on the sidelines, serving as singing narrator. Whelan danced Taylor-Corbett’s forgettable choreography, becoming a pawn rather than a protagonist in the rapidly unfolding events.

The greatest interest in Taylor-Corbett’s ballet was Beowulf Boritt’s sets of seven cities. In Memphis, where the sin is “Pride,” Whelan flitted about in imitation of Isadora Duncan during an audition for a sleeze-style cabaret. The black and red décor said bordello, as did the lighting by Jason Kantrowitz. In San Francisco, where the sin was “Envy,” Boritt’s backdrop of quaint Victorian row houses against a boundless blue sky was enviable. In Baltimore, where the sin was “Greed,” Boritt created a salon, channelling both Phillipe Starck’s overblown modernism and the Belle Epoque’s love of patterns. From two gargantuan black and white striped, tasseled love seats, Anna’s overfed suitors embarked on a mutually fatal duel.

As for Taylor-Corbett’s choreography, it lacked movement invention or good movement imitation. In Boston, where the sin was “Lust,” Whelan and Craig Hall peformed a romantic pas de deux.  Muscular and in a wife beater, Hall looked like Marlon Brando in Elia Kazan’s film version of “Street Car Named Desire.” He lifted Whelan aloft in shapes and transitions that looked exactly like moments in Christopher Wheeldon’s “After the Rain”—which Whelan and Hall perform frequently.

Following the performance, this reviewer read the Brecht text, which was translated into English by W.H. Auden and Chester Kallman. What crystalized from the text, but not from Taylor-Corbett’s production, is that the production hinges on demonstrating the conflict between the Annas: Anna I wants money and power; Anna II wants love and a creative outlet. Also, Anna II allows Anna I to push her around. But only in the last scene of Taylor-Corbett’s work is their conflict delivered without a doubt and Anna II emerges triumphant. As Anna II  (Whelan) collapses in front of her families’ spiffy new home, Anna I (Lapone) walks up the stairs in a mink, looking like a character from “The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills.”

The gala’s second half was devoted to Balanchine’s “Vienna Waltzes,” which premiered at the 1977 City Ballet gala.  If you don’t care for the music of Johann Strauss II, Franz Lehar, or Richard Strauss or for watching a carousel vision of dancers waltzing for 46 minutes, this ballet may not be for you. But despite the work’s repetitiousness, “Waltzes” is visual spendor at its finest;  Karinska’s five sets of costumes, ranging from full-skirted 1860s crinoline ball gowns to sleek white silk Roaring Twenties dresses are a fashionista’s delight.

In the pit, Clotilde Otranto energetically conducted such ditties as the “Explosions-Polka” and excerpts from “Der Rosenkavalier.” Principals Maria Korowski, Jennifer Ringer and Megan Fairchild demonstrated their strikingly differing styles through the same steps. That said all City Ballet dancers waltz with a brilliant elegance.

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A New Apollo: Chase Finlay of New York City Ballet

Monday, May 9th, 2011

By Rachel Straus

There is no better way to anoint a rising City Ballet male star than to award him the title role in Balanchine’s “Apollo.” On May 5 corps dancer Chase Finlay hit the big time, receiving curtain calls and roars of applause. The 21-year-old looked like a young Nordic god (much the way Ballet Master in Chief Peter Martins did when he first appeared as “Apollo” in 1967). With a Martins-style majesty, Finlay subsumed his new role. Seated and gazing at his dancing Muses—Terpsichore (Sterling Hyltin), Polyhymnia (Tiler Peck) and Calliope (Ana Sophia Scheller)—Finlay captivated in stillness as much as in his boldly vigorous movements.

Beyond Finlay’s debut, Thursday’s programming felt celestial. Beginning the night were the Balanchine-Stravinsky masterworks “Monumentum Pro Gesualdo” (1960) and “Movements for Piano and Orchestra” (1963). Though these short ballets were made three years apart, they became side-by-side companion pieces. While “Monumentum” features choreographic lyricism and equilibrium, “Movements” traffics in cubist asymmetries. In the latter work, the building blocks of classical vocabulary (plie, tendu, fifth position) are interrupted in transit. Spiral movements are forced into right angles. Despite a lack of narrative, principals Maria Kowroski and Sébastian Marcovici plied a psychologically complex relationship. Neither intimates nor strangers, they danced like two people in a coolly impassioned debate. With hands flexed, they seemed to end their conversation at an impasse.

Photo: Paul Kolnick

But getting back to Finlay. More should be said about this “Apollo,” which appeared second on the program. In Balanchine’s 1928 ballet, the young god’s moment of benediction comes when his muses perform a unison triple handclap. Then the women open their palms for Apollo to rest his head. When Finlay stood and laid his brow, he looked absolutely relieved, having passed through the work’s most iconic moments. They include the instance when Finlay extends his arms skyward like Michelangelo’s “Vitruvian-Man,” echoing the string instruments’ sonic force. Performing this gesture convincingly requires a Nietzsche-like approach to the self. (“The world itself is the will to power – and nothing else! And you yourself are the will to power – and nothing else!”)

Hopefully, Finlay’s ability to embody youthful absolutism will be confined to the stage. Recently French Vogue featured Finlay half naked in Bruce Webber’s photos. Of equal interest, but of a less salacious sort, is the dancing of principal Sterling Hyltin. Her musical responsiveness and love of moving make her appear triple her size. As Terpsichore, Hyltin was bodily electric.

Another hair-on-arm raising experience were the performances of Balanchine’s “Four Temperaments.” (1946). Seen on May 5 and May 7, the casting was powerfully good. Jennie Somogyi’s dancing in “Sanguinic” possessed a boxer’s controlled strike and the elegance of a leopard in full lope. Gonzalo Garcia’s solo in “Melancholic” was velvety phrased and gravely projected.

With 11 Balanchine works selected for opening week, the choreographer’s triple passion for movement abstraction, minimalist costuming, and modernist music was revealed. Called “Black and White,” the series was not a bit monochromatic. Like a spring awakening, the dancers bloomed with color and energy.

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May Dance in New York City

Monday, May 2nd, 2011

By Rachel Straus

May 1-2

Guggenheim Museum

The popular Works + Process series presents “American Ballet Theatre on to Act II.” Current ABT dancers will perform excerpts from their upcoming Metropolitan Opera House season. ABT alumni will discuss the challenges dancers face in the second act of their careers.  You can watch the event each night at 7:30 via livestream.

May 2

Baryshnikov Arts Center

In the final spring installment of BAC Flicks: Mondays With Merce, two Charles Atlas films of Merce Cunningham’s dances will be projected on widescreen. In “Crises” (1960), elastic cords connect the dancers to each other. Dramatic entanglements ensue. In “Native Green” (1985), John King’s music and William Anastasi’s evoke a scintillating spring. Cunningham scholar Nancy Dalva will speak to former Cunningham dancer Gus Solomons, Jr.

May 3-June 12

The David H. Koch Theater

The opening week of the New York City Ballet’s spring season will showcase 12 of Balanchine’s works, which insiders refer to as “black and white” ballets because the costuming is bare bones. Most often, the women wear black leotards and white tights. The men wear black tights and white t-shirts. The choreography is hardly sparse. Up next will be the May 11 world premiere of Lynne Taylor-Corbett’s “The Seven Deadly Sins,” set to the Kurt Weill score, featuring Patti LuPone and Wendy Whelan as sisters (which will be hard to believe). The final week’s performances are titled “See the Music…” and will highlight NYCB’s musical repertory as performed by its 62-piece orchestra. The June 12 “Dancer’s Choice” performance will feature works handpicked by the company’s dancers. Over the seven-week season, the company will perform 19 works by Jerome Robbins, Susan Stroman, Christopher Wheeldon, NYCB Ballet Master in Chief Peter Martins, and George Balanchine.

May 3

The Apollo Theater

This Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater benefit performance will showcase Camille A. Brown’s 2007 solo “Evolution of a Secured Feminine,” which catapulted this complex, hip, young choreographer into the spotlight.

 

May 10-22

The Joyce Theater

The two-week engagement of Cuba’s Danza Contemporanea de Cuba stands out for its offering of three works: The U.S. premiere of “Casi-Casa,” created by the quirky, inventive Swedish choreographer Mats Ek, set to disco, hip-hop, swing and jazz; the world premiere of “Horizonte” by former Ballet Hispanico dancer Pedro Ruiz; and “Demo-N/Crazy,” made by Sydney Dance Company artistic director Rafael Bonachela, which has been said to wow for its athletic partnering and semi nudity.

May 12-14

Cedar Lake Theater

Cedar Lake Contemporary Ballet will present a new installation created by artistic director Benoit-Swan Pouffer. Part choreographed dance performance and part interactive installation, audience members are invited to move freely through the space where the dancers will be performing.

May 12-15

Dicapo Opera Theatre

Dances Patrelle will present the world premiere of Francis Patrelle’s “Gilbert & Sullivan, The Ballet!” an evening-length work, featuring live music and singers, and inspired by characters drawn from Gilbert and Sullivan’s comic operas.

May 13

Buttenwieser Hall at 92nd St. Y

The “Fridays at Noon” free series will culminate with informal performances by tap and step dancing virtuosos Marshall Davis, Jr., Andrew Nemr, and their guests. Davis, Jr. performed in Savion Glover’s Tony Award winning “Bring in ‘Da Noise Bring in ‘Da Funk.” Nemr has the credentials too, having performed along side the Duke Ellington Orchestra, Jimmy Heath, Les Paul, Harry Connick and the Lionel Hampton Orchestra.

May 16-June 29

Metropolitan Opera House

American Ballet Theatre will hold its annual seven-week season. The big event will be the New York premiere (June 9) of Alexei Ratmansky’s “Bright Stream.” Also of interest will be two world premieres (May 24-26) by Ratmansky and Christopher Wheeldon, a New York premiere by Benjamin Millepied, and a revival of Antony Tudor’s “Shadowplay.” The full-length ballet offerings will be “Giselle,” “Swan Lake,” “Cinderella,” “Coppelia,” “Don Quixote,” “The Sleeping Beauty,” and “Lady of the Camellias.”

May 20

Ailey Citigroup Theater

“Performing the Border” aspires to blend and build on the grammar of two Indian classical dance forms, Bharata Natyam and Odissi.  David Phoenix Singh, who runs Dakshina Company, a Bharata Natyam and modern dance company, and Nandini Sikand, who directs Sakshi Productions, a neo-classical and contemporary Odissi dance company, will collaborate.

 

May 21

Manhattan streets

This year’s New York City Dance Parade will showcase 65 dance genres. The parade will start on 21st street, move down Broadway, pass through Union Square, and take over University Place, Eighth Street and St. Mark’s. The House, Techno and Disco floats will lead the celebrants to Tompkins Square Park and to DanceFest, which will offer stage and site specific dance performances and free dance lessons. This will not be a sedentary experience.

May 23

Judson Memorial Church

This year’s Movement Research Gala will feature Trisha Brown’s “Set and Reset” (1983) as performed by its original cast of dancers, who have become dance makers in their own right.

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Deadly Downtown Shows: John Kelly and Young Jean Lee

Monday, April 25th, 2011

By Rachel Straus

Downtown New York nightlife is as good a destination for surveying America’s fixation with youth culture as there is. But last week, two established performance artists presented works created for downtown venues that focused on a most anti-youthful subject: Death. Young Jean Lee wrote and performed “We’re Gonna Die” at Joe’s Pub. John Kelly brought back to P.S. 122 his “Escape Artist,” which won him the organization’s 2010 Ethyl Eichelberger Award.

The two shows couldn’t have been more different. While Kelly sang alone on stage about his trauma, pain, and brush with death (alongside compelling visuals), Lee and four talented rock musicians sang about mortal issues in which they were not the direct focus. Guess whose show was more interesting?

It wasn’t Kelly’s. But to be fair, Kelly’s navel gazing wasn’t the problem. The former Trockadero Gloxinia Ballet Company dancer sang in a style, recalling a Stephen Sondheim musical circa 1984. Worse yet, Kelly sang off key; perhaps because almost all his vocalizations occurred on the horizontal.

In “Escape Artist,” Kelly lay on an operating-size table, telling the tale of taking a trapeze lesson, falling from a flip, and spending weeks in St. Vincent’s Hospital flat on his back—without pain medication. During this relived torture, Kelly drew occasional fortitude from channelling the life of Caravaggio, who escaped pain through art making, but also died young because of it.

Because this show’s strength rested with projections of Caravaggio’s paintings (in which beauty and violence collide) and with Kelly’s quirky video design (created with Jeff Morey), it’s best to describe the visuals. Behind Kelly, three video screens’ content created a triptych-type feast for the eyes. The projections included Caravaggio’s paintings (i.e. “Judith Beheading Holofernes”), moving montages (such as a filmed visit through a MRI machine), and live video recording (of Kelly’s face as recorded by a camera perched above the operating table). The combined technological effect produced a time traveling sensation. It called to mind Salvador Dali’s “Persistence of Memory,” in which melting clocks make reference to the psyche’s indifference to chronological events.

In “We’re Gonna Die,” Young Jean Lee’s chronologically unfolding family tale moved forward with a structural elegance that felt spontaneous. Alternating between speaking to the audience and singing with the band Future Wife, Lee became a modern-day bard. Her rich, melodic voice exponentially increased as her confessional-style self-ribbing grew. She began “Die” describing her uncle’s isolated self-loathing. She continued with love life experiences that crashed. Lee ended with her father’s death; he stopped breathing hours before being given life-saving medication. All the while, Lee spoke a truth most of us dare not speak: We believe, somehow, we will be exempt from suffering and dying.

In the finale, Lee, three guitarists and a drummer sang, “I’m gonna die some day. Then I’ll be gone and it will be okay”. Most of the Joe’s Pub’s crowd spontaneously joined their refrain. This sounds maudlin, but Lee’s intimate performance style possessed the quality of a lullaby. And the audience rocked in her cradle.

As for the dancing, it came briefly and unceremoniously as an encore. When Benedict Kupstas raised his drumsticks in the air, the cast commenced a casual jig. Arranged into tableaus, thanks to choreographer Faye Driscoll, they resembled holiday picture postcards, which make life look sweeter than it is.

“Gonna Die” will be repeated at Joe’s Pub three more times (April 29-30). It’s a feel-good show, uncannily leading us to consider the inevitable: Death.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Underwear in Underland: Stephen Petronio Dance Company

Monday, April 11th, 2011

By Rachel Straus

Stephen Petronio likes underwear. His steely and mellifluous skeins of movement—via the bare legs and buttocks of talented dancers—can be transporting. In Petronio’s New York premiere of “Underland,” the first ten minutes was beautiful. But as time progressed on April 10 at the Joyce Theater, “Underland” became an aerobic workout for the eyes. The dancers never stopped moving. Then there was the matter of the work’s subject.

Created on and for the Sydney Dance Company in 2003, “Underland” initially seemed to be about Australia. The evening-length piece incorporated music by the Australian rocker Nick Cave. It projected video, created by fellow Down Under filmmaker Mike Daly. Daly and Cave’s work explored human doom and gloom. But Petronio’s channeling of the fashion world, particularly its blank stares of runway models, felt at odds with the collaborators’ ideas. As his 12 performers bounded through space, beating their legs together and then splitting them open with utter ease, they looked detached. Their faces bore no relationship to the ecstasy of their movements—or to Armaggedon.

Photo: Julie Lemberger

Mired in multiple ideas, “Underland”‘s elements never quite coalesced. Petronio’s kinesthetically driving choreography made the dancers appear invincible. Daly’s video—with its projected images of atomic mushroom clouds, raging fires, and towns flattened by a tsunami—featured environmental havoc. Cave’s lyrics delivered a vague malaise. Yet in the section named after Cave’s “Weeping Song,” the dance and music elements cohered. The cast (costumed in Tara Subkoff’s military-style fatigues) marched in geometric patterns. Cave’s song, a march and a lament, supported the choreography. When one and then two performers broke out of their soldier-like lines, their gesturally-driven solos and duets seemed to speak of loss of life.

The audience, however, didn’t react to “Weeping Song” with the same enthusiasm as the section titled “Ship Song.” Named after Cave’s 2001 hit, “Ship” featured four performers who swayed at the lip of the stage, as though on a crowded steamer. Gino Grenek appeared in underwear and a leather trench coat. Amanda Wells and Shila Tirabassi wore late 19th century slip dresses. Their swaying evolved into a languid-style orgy, where they grabbed each other’s breasts, kissed and swooned. But being on a boat (perhaps bound for an Australian penal colony) seemed beside the point. It was the underwear, and what lies beneath it, that made this part of “Underland” clearly understandable.

 

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