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Mining the Past: A New Giselle, a Restaged Robert Wilson Ballet, and Charles Reinhart

Monday, January 17th, 2011

by Rachel Straus

Finding clues to a lost dance resembles detective work. If you’re the Sherlock Holmes type, dance reconstructions can become obsessively fascinating. On January 9 and 10, the Guggenheim Museum’s popular Works + Process series hosted Pacific Northwest Ballet—Giselle Revisited.

Under the artistic directorship of former New York City Ballet principal Peter Boal, PNB is undertaking a 170-year reconstruction of the French ballet. At the Guggenheim, Boal—alongside dance scholars Doug Fullington and Marian Smith—offered the sold-out crowd a Giselle history-mystery lesson, some mesmerizing mime, and bits of glorious dancing performed by Carrie Imler, Carla Körbes, James Moore, and Seth Orza.

PNB is reconstructing the ballet from a rare 1860s score once used by the ballet’s composer Adolphe Adam. The score includes note-for-note annotations of the mime and dancing. When Giselle scholar Smith got her hands on this score, recently purchased by a Cologne archive, she bent Boal’s ear. His patrons partially funded the reconstruction. PNB’s new-old Giselle will premiere this June in Seattle: Pacific Northwest Ballet Giselle Performances

The best part of the January 10 lecture-demonstration was when the dancers mimed the passages while Smith read descriptions of their action from the score. Given greater understanding of how the narrative details coincide with the musical passages, the dancers mimed with a purpose usually reserved for the ballet’s pure dancing scenes. When James Moore (Hilarion) expressed his concern that Carla Körbes (Giselle) had fallen for a two-faced cad (Loys/Albrecht), his body and face transformed. Moore’s miming is unaffected and intense. In these gestural moments, he stole the show.

What was less convincing was Doug Fullington’s part of the presentation, where he discussed this reconstruction’s use of Stepanov notation. Unlike music scores, notations rarely give the full scope of the choreography. Nicholas Sergeyev, who recorded Russian Imperial Ballet dances from the late 19th and early 20th century, used Stepanov notation. When Sergeyev fled Russia after the 1917 Revolution, he took his Stepanov notation scores (including Giselle) with him.  The Royal Ballet, previously called Sadler’s Wells, became the recipient of Sergeyev’s knowledge.

But here’s the rub. There is much documentation (from RB founder Dame Ninette de Valois and others) about how Sergeyev’s notation and memory possessed major holes.

In light of this information, it was odd that Fullington presented the Stepanov score as something relatively concrete. Boal was more candid. He told the audience that due to the gaps in their reconstruction, they were looking at Giselle productions by the Paris Opera Ballet and others for inspiration.

The evening ended with Act II’s grand pas de deux, a major artistic and technical endeavor for any ballerina. If this Works + Process in any indication, Carla Körbes is going to rise to the occasion in the female lead. From every pore of Körbes’s dancing body radiated the desire to make this Giselle matter.

**

Another unearthing from Terpsichore’s past came care of the Martha Graham Dance Company. The 85-year-old troupe is reviving Robert Wilson’s 1995 Snow on the Mesa. The commissioned work—made fours years after Graham’s death and in homage of her life and art—will open the company’s New York season (March 15-20) at the Rose Theater. New York Times dance critic Anna Kisselgoff described Snow on the Mesa as “a must see, with the marvelous Graham company projecting drama to the hilt.” (New York Times 1995 review)

On January 11, two sections of Mesa were performed for an invited group at the company’s cramped Upper East Side headquarters. Wilson, whose only attempt at modern dance making is Mesa, references some of Graham’s enduring interests: developing imperiously sexual female characters, costuming her men in loin cloths, and using set designs (particularly Noguchi’s) as landscapes to depict the subconscious and the forbidden.

Mesa appears to be a lovingly rendered homage. It doesn’t, however, white wash Graham’s leviathan personality, which dominated the stage through her choreography for her heroines (whose roles she initially performed). When dancer Xiaochuan Xie (as Graham) sauntered across a set of low white benches, they became a catwalk, a fitting platform to taunt her male consort, Ben Schultz (as Erick Hawkins).

At the Rose Theater in March, the company will offer four different programs, seven Graham works and a world premiere by Bulareyaung Pagarlava. In the last decade, the troupe underwent a trial by fire (see New York Times coverage of legal battle). In this decade the Martha Graham Company will hopefully be able to focus on their repertory treasure and future.

**

Last week included a third spectacle devoted to looking back. On January 14 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, several hundred sat in celebration of the American Dance Festival director Charles Reinhart. Reinhart’s children largely organized his 80th birthday event, which also served as a goodbye ceremony. Reinhart will retire from his 41-year-old post soon. His second-in-command Jodee Nimerichter will take over the reigns of the summer festival, located at Duke University in North Carolina.

Because Reinhart is a dance man, the assumption was that dance performance would be the main event at his celebration.

Though there were performances by Pilobolus, Eiko & Koma, Shen Wei, and Paul Taylor Dance Company, dance was only part of the proceedings. A film about Reinhart, made by his daughter Ariane, started the evening. It was quaint. It was a home movie. In picture after picture, natty Reinhart is captured posing for the camera, with a bravura associated with the modern dance choreographers he championed.

Following the movie, Master of Ceremonies Mark Dendy took center stage. A choreographer known to play the bad boy, Dendy was dressed as Martha Graham (in a gold lame gown). While the movie presented Reinhart as something of a dance prince, Dendy’s snarky remark— “Charles has influenced all the artists of the world”—created a hushed stillness in the theater.

The evening ricocheted between the intimate (Reinhart’s friends and family spoke) and the professional (companies performed, Anna Kisselgoff lectured). Reinhart’s kids are clearly not veteran presenters. Perhaps they should have left the show’s programming up to dad.


 

 

 

 

 


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Men at Work: Adam Barruch, Philippe Saire, and Wally Cardona

Monday, January 10th, 2011

by Rachel Straus

Sometimes it helps to be overtly theatrical. Take Adam Barruch. At Dance Theater Workshop (January 5 and 6), the choreographer-performer opened the Emerging Artists showcase as though he were hit by lightening. Barruch’s ferociously physical attack belies his boyish, slight-of-hip appearance. Under a pool of light, he slammed his fist like a meat cleaver into a table, channeling the voice of Mrs. Lovett (Angela Lansbury) in the 1979 Broadway hit “Sweeney Todd.” Barruch’s 2008 solo, named after Stephen Sondheim’s tune “The Worst Pies in London,” was the highlight of the evening. His whirling dervish arms, maniacal facial expressions, and dead-stop gestures drilled down to the essence of Sondheim’s hunger-leading-to-violence lyrics. While Lansbury blurts out words like squirting blood, Barruch’s fast-firing synapses camped a famous tune with the finesse of an old-time Broadway hand.

Barruch’s “Worst Pies” signals that he is a chef to watch. In contrast, the two other choreographers, on the Gotham Arts Exchange presented program, demonstrated how difficult it is to concoct imaginative movement and collaborate effectively with music. With respect to their emerging choreographer status, it’s best not to dwell on their shortcomings.

Gillis in “Chalice.” Photo: Virginia Rollison

Barruch’s second offering of the evening—to Bach’s aria “Erbarme Dich” from “St Matthew Passion, BWV 244″—possessed a jewel-like focus. Called “Chalice,” the solo physicalizes the lyrics of Bach’s aria, regarding betrayal and its subsequent feelings of guilt. In a blood-red dress, veteran performer Margie Gillis reaches and recoils from an alcohol-filled chalice. Her unbound, hip-length hair weeps over the drink—her undoing. Like Martha Graham’s solo “Lamentation” (1930), “Chalice” never feels saccharin. Like a painting, it captures a moment in time. It’s consistently intense. But the third piece by Barruch failed to harness the previous solos’ succinctness. In the world premiere of “Wane,” narrative elements surfaced and dissolved; seven dancers came and went in lush, spiraling phrases; black cargo pants and aggressive partnering hinted at a warring world.

**

Warring (or wrestling) was the featured movement motif in Cie. Philippe Saire’s “Lonesome Cowboy,” which held its U.S. premiere at the Joyce Theater (Jan 6-9). In the Swiss-Algerian choreographer’s universe, comprised of five men in a gravel pit, aggression became the departure point for displaying how the male species becomes defined by their life’s station (whether it’s in the military, on Wall Street, or on a stoop guzzling beer in a kilt sans underwear).

This narrow self-definition renders these guys—surprise, surprise—lost, dazed, and confused. At the end of the 80-minute production to Christopher Bollondi’s alternatively heavy hitting and soporific sound score, the five performers took a bow like they didn’t know what hit them.

Their antics during the performance reminded me of the blockbuster film “Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure” (1989), where two time-traveling teenagers survive Napoleon and Genghis Khan’s violence because they are ignorant, daring dudes. In “Lonesome Cowboy,” the men nail each other’s faces to the floor with their heels, suck face, and drag each other around to no lasting positive or negative effect. They are pawns in Saire’s clichéd psychodrama, divorced from any movement material that would identify them as individuals.

**

“A Slow Week in the Dance Studio with Strangers” would be my suggestion as the working title for Wally Cardona’s latest dance, presented January 8 at the Baryshnikov Arts Center. Titled “Intervention #4: Robert Sember,” the hour-long piece was “Slow” because the performers (Cardona, Sember, and Francis A. Stansky) moved about as I do in my apartment: They sat, stood, and lied prone. The work involved a “Week” because on Monday, January 3, the sound artist and social activist Robert Sember met the choreographer Wally Cardona; by Saturday they had to create something for the ever-critical New York crowd. Cardona and Sember’s experience occurred in a “Dance Studio,” in this case room 6A of the BAC. And, yes, the artists were initially “Strangers” to each other. Like my working title, the overall piece felt strung together.

If creating a dance for consumption in five days sounds like a doleful plan, you’re correct. Nonetheless, my hopes for “Intervention” ran high for four reasons: One, in tough economic times it’s best to be honest with your audiences. If there is only enough money to make a work in a week, why not advertise it as just that? Two, Cardona’s “Intervention” concept—an artist intervenes and catapults him in new directions—is an intriguing idea. Three, Cardona is on the fourth of seven “Intervention” series; he may be getting the hang of this format. Four, the couple seated to my left really liked “Intervention #3: Karina Lyons,” which premiered in December at the Joyce Soho. In that work, the intervener was a sommelier and wine consultant who lubricated the audience with wine while Cardona, a fascinatingly quirky mover, danced.

Sound artist Sember, however, is no Merlot wine. He is tall and serious; he’s not particularly nimble. Did he create a pall over Cardona’s creativity? Only Cardona can say.

Cardona is prone to exploring multiple layers of meaning. With Sember at his side, Cardona created a concept that read better on paper than on stage. At the 40-minute mark, I believe I got its gist: How do three people interpret the same verbal directions?

“Intervention #4” began with Cardona, standing stock still in square space, flanked by the audience seated around him. Cardona walked purposefully, closed his eyes, and covered his ears. A timer rang; he left. Then Sember entered. He accomplished similar movements, but this time a voiceover (via overhead speakers) directed his actions, as though a mild-mannered choreographer was in his head. Later, a duet with Sember and Stansky unfolded where two voices directed their tasks: “turn your head to the left,” “sit on your left side.” The work’s climax came when all three men took the same verbal cues from the same voice. Each performer interpreted the same words—“twist,” “reach,” “fall”—in different ways.

“Intervention #4” called to mind Roland Barthes’s S/Z (1970). The French semiotician argued that a text has no fixed meaning. There are only interpretations. This is a founding principle of post-modern dance. If it sounds doleful, you are correct.

 

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Dance History in the Age of Marketing

Tuesday, January 4th, 2011

By Rachel Straus

Humanity has passed through the age of reason, innocence, anxiety, imperialism, paradox, and turbulence (according to Alan Greenspan). Now we are in the age of marketing. For confirmation look no further than Goldman Sachs’ $450M to Facebook.

Not wanting to be left behind, I market the following ten articles. I wrote them over the past year, they are published by Dance Teacher magazine, and cover major dance figures from 1890 to 2009.

1.  Russian Ballet Icon Vaslav Nijinsky (1890-1950)

2. West Side Story Choreographer Peter Gennaro( 1919-2000)

3. Martha Graham Principal Dancer and Choreographer Pearl Lang (1921-2009)

4. Movement Therapy Founder Marian Chace (1896-1970)

5. Dance Composition Teacher Bessie Schönberg (1906-1997)

6. Precision Dance Pioneer Gussie Nell Davis (1906-1993)

7. Neo-Realist Choreographer Maurice Béjart (1927-2007)

8. Radio City Rockettes Creator Russell Markert (1899-1990)

9. Hollywood Musical Dance Arranger Robert Alton (1906-1957)

10. African-American choreographer Talley Beatty (1918-1995): Coming in February!



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Bringing in the New Year: January 2011 Dance

Monday, December 27th, 2010

By Rachel Straus

Today I’m inaugurating a monthly series dedicated to listing, and briefly describing, upcoming New York dance events. Here are eight suggestions for the best, the newest, and/or the most intriguing dance performances happening across the city in January:

JAN 8 2011

 Baryshnikov Arts Center

Wally Cardona 
Intervention #4

Each Intervention is a five-day collaboration between dancer/choreographer Wally Cardona and an expert in a field other than dance.

 

JAN 9, 10

Guggenheim Museum

Works & Process: Pacific Northwest Ballet—Giselle Revisited

“Pacific Northwest Ballet dancers will perform excerpts from Peter Boal’s new staging of Giselle prior to its June 2011 premiere at McCaw Hall in Seattle. The ballet features reconstructed choreography by dance scholar Doug Fullington and Giselle scholar Marian Smith based on Stepanov notation circa 1903 and French sources from the 1840s. PNB will be the first American company in modern times to use the Stepanov notations from the Harvard Theatre Collection for a ballet production. Artistic Director Peter Boal will discuss the production with Fullington and Smith. PNB dancers Carrie Imler, Carla Körbes, James Moore, and Seth Orza will perform.” (taken verbatim from Guggenheim website)

 

JAN 10 2011

Baryshnikov Arts Center (in collaboration with The Cunningham Dance Foundation)

BAC Flicks: Mondays with Merce Ocean (1994), 
N.Y. Premiere

Ocean, the last film Charles Atlas made with Merce Cunningham, is set 150 feet below and on the floor of Minnesota’s Rainbow Granite Quarry. The choreography is Cunningham’s. The performers, his company, which will disband on December 31, 2011. The St. Cloud Symphony Orchestra is filmed performing an orchestral score by Andrew Culver (inspired by John Cage) and an electronic score by David Tudor.

 

JAN 18 -22

Dance Theater Workshop

Sidra Bell Dance New York and Gallim Dance

Sidra Bell Dance New York presents POOL, a surrealist and futuristic work inspired by the recollection of near drowning.

Gallim Dance, led by choreographer Andrea Miller, present For Glenn Gould, a new work inspired by two recordings Glenn Gould made of Bach’s Goldberg Variations, the first in 1964 and the second in 1981 a few weeks before his death.

 

JAN 19

Symphony Space

Royal Ballet Broadcast of Giselle

In this delayed time, high-def satellite broadcast from the Royal Ballet in London, you can enter the virtual age of “live” theater.

Choreography: After Marius Petipa, music: Adolph Adam, featuring: Marianela Nuñez and Rupert Pennefather.

 

JAN 20, 21, 23, 28

David H. Koch Theater, Lincoln Center

New York City Ballet

Alexei Ratmansky’s Concerto DSCH (2008) to Dmitri Shostakovich’s Concerto No. 2 in F Major, Op. 102 (1957) is fantastic.

 

JAN 25 — FEB 1 2011

Baryshnikov Arts Center (in collaboration with Dance Films Association’s 39th Dance on Camera Festival)

Billy Cowie Retrospective

Award-winning Scottish video artist/composer Cowie presents his four-screen installation Men in the Wall. 3D glasses provide viewers with an altered view of four men whose lives are as private as they are different.

 

JAN 28, JAN 30

David H. Koch Theater, Lincoln Center

New York City Ballet

A world premiere by Broadway choreographer Susan Stroman to Duke Ellington’s music [title unknown]. It will become the companion piece to her 1999 Ellington-inspired work Blossom Got Kissed. This work could be a dud, but you’ll be the first to know, if you go.

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Christmas with Mark Morris and Alvin Ailey

Tuesday, December 21st, 2010

By Rachel Straus

Nostalgia is the main event in most Nutcrackers.  But in the original 1892 “Nutcracker” by Marius Petipa and Lev Ivanov, the subject—nostalgia for one’s lost childhood—did little for the pre-Freudian audience. The libretto came from the 1816 novella by E. T. A. Hoffman. In it a girl’s favorite Christmas toy (the Nutcracker) comes alive, defeats an evil Mouse King in battle, and whisks her away to a magical kingdom of toys. This plot wasn’t received enthusiastically by Russian audiences (primarily composed of the Tsar’s retinue), who were interested in getting their ballerina divertissements on. And so the child-centric ballet faded from the repertoire.

In the mid 20th century more popular “Nutcracker” productions developed, with the understanding that parents were sending their middle class daughters to ballet class. “Wouldn’t it be nice to see Lauren in a ‘Nutcracker,’ dear?” The rest is history. Most of these “Nutcracker” ballets were made in America, during a time when culture still meant Europe. These versions referenced Victoriana or German volk and its concomitant bourgeois charms. In Act I everyone behaves beautifully. Consequently, the social interactions between the party guests and the perfectly dressed children have always looked stilted. We live in a culture which championed Doctor Spock. That is why Mark Morris’s 1991 version—called “The Hard Nut”—is a brilliant piece of theater. It traffics in social behaviors that we now refer to as the “me” generation. They are as familiar to us as the Big Mac is to many of our mouths.

On December 19 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, “The Hard Nut” had its last performance of the season. After 19 years in repertoire, it has never looked better. It is pitch perfect in its nostalgic waxing for—and satirizing of—suburbia, the sexual revolution, the Twist and the Hustle. (The Victorian waltz is nowhere to be found.) American nostalgia, Morris brilliantly shows, has little to do with Europe or Russia. Our collective past is memorialized through bell-bottoms, big hair, and the Oprah-esque acknowledgement that all families have “issues”. In the “Hard Nut,” memories of Christmas past include fake trees, the Yule log (blazing on TV), getting useless gifts, drinking spiked eggnog, and warding off lecherous maneuvers of drunken family friends. It also includes a nod to America’s role in slavery through the character of the black Nurse/Maid. Kraig Patterson plays this role brilliantly. Auntie Maim in black pointe shoes? Check.   

Using a truncated version of Tchaikovsky’s score (performed by the 48-member MMDG Music Ensemble under Robert Cole’s baton), the Morris Christmas ballet is a wonder for its visualization of the music. In the beginning of the Act II, the male-female ensemble leaps into the air as the cymbals crash. They are Snow. They sport headgear designed by Martin Pakledinaz that renders them into Dairy Queen soft serve cones. Every one is in a tutu. It’s hard to tell gender. From their hands they throw flakes of powder. As their leaping increases, the snow sprays resemble fireworks bursting in air. It’s delightful.

No prima ballerinas are in “Hard Nut.” The star of the show is the costumes and the set design by cartoonist Charles Burns. In the magic kingdom of Act II, Burns created four gigantic portals, each one slighter smaller than the next, to frame the dance action on stage. The effect is a bit like Hitchcock’s “Vertigo,” especially when a huge bulls eye is lowered on the backdrop and it begins to spin. While Pakledinaz’s costumes are over the top (the Mouse King is Elvis; the Arabian dancers are covered from head to toe according the principles of hijab), Burns’ set is pared down and in black and white. When the giant Christmas tree appears, it moves into the space like a docking Art Deco style ocean liner. Act I may look like 1960s suburbia, but Act II definitely references 1920s glamour, a time in American culture where everything sped up, including the dances.

What is most miraculous about Morris’s “Hard Nut” is how loving it feels. While the choreographer’s recent “Romeo and Juliet” (2007) fell flat (perhaps because Morris’s stayed true to the plot and choreographed male-female dances), in “Hard Nut” he completely dispenses with dancing along gender lines. John Heginbotham dances the role of Mrs. Stahlbaum/the Queen across from Mark Morris who plays “her” husband. The first major pas de deux of the evening happens between two men: William Smith III (Drosselmeyer) and Heginbotham. In the finale, the heterosexual pas de deux between David Levanthal (Nutcracker) and Lauren Grant (Marie) also departs from convention. Other dancers lift them. Not once does Levanthal pick Grant up: ballet;s symbolic act for courtly love. Instead their love for each other is displayed in the last moments in the most obvious way: They kiss and kiss and kiss. Levanthal and Grant are married. From my vantage point, they appeared very happily married.

**

On December 18 at City Center, the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater held their 21st performance of their annual New York season. The program featured “Love Stories” (2004), “Suite Otis,” (1972), and “Revelations” (1960). The matinee performance began with a historical film in celebration of Ailey’s masterwork, now in its 50th year in repertoire. The show was striking for two reasons. One, the newest crop of company dancers was featured. They include Daniel Harder, Demetia Hopkins, Megan Jakel, Yannick Lebrun, Michael Francis McBride, Samuel Lee Roberts, and Jermaine Terry. All of these dancers joined the company in the past two years. They are technically brilliant. I look forward to seeing them develop in their roles.

The other striking aspect of the show involved watching Vernard J. Gilmore in “Suite Otis” and “Revelations.” Gilmore joined the company in 1997. This year he has come into his own as an expressive, confident, charming, athletic, musical mover. In “Otis,” choreographed by George W. Faison, Gilmore embodied the alternatively loving-fighting suitor with a credibility that made me forget I was watching theater. There is no greater pleasure than seeing a dancer slowly transform from being proficient to being masterful. Gilmore has made the leap in his 13-year tenure with the company. What a lovely gift for the audience.

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“Black Swan”: A Beastly Ballet Film and Martha Hill: Modern Dance Wrestler

Tuesday, December 7th, 2010

By Rachel Straus

How many ballet clichés can one film hold? Answer: Enough to make you puke. And that is what Natalie Portman spends a fair amount of time doing in “Black Swan,” the pulp ballet movie directed by Darren Aronofsky, which opened December 3. Portman, who plays Nina Sayers, a corps member of a ballet company, isn’t just a bulimic. Like her historic predecessor Victoria Page in the film “Red Shoes” (1948), La Danse makes her bonkers. Ballet, as the old cliché goes, demands a ballerina’s complete subjugation of pleasure. And so the normal desires of a young woman—a love life, some independence and autonomy—are as remote to Nina as a good meal.

In “Black Swan” the protagonist is pain, not this rising dancer Nina. The foil is satire: Nina lives in a pink room among stuffed animals and a tinkling ballerina music box. Whether in the studio or at home she is everyone’s punching bag. Is she an artist? No way. She’s a tool. And when she uses a primitive one to kill herself, she says with a smile “I felt it.” Meaning that she finally understands the dual demands required of the ballerina performing the lead in the late 19th century ballet “Swan Lake:” The White Swan is the virgin and sacrificial lamb; the Black Swan is the whore and murderer (according to Aronofsky). Nina dies with a smile on her face knowing she was both. Now that’s morbidly pathetic.  

Why does Nina dance? Where as Victoria Page (played by Royal Ballet principal Moira Shearer) answers this question in “Red Shoes” with the poise of a peacock—telling her future boss that it’s as necessary as living—no one bothers to ask Nina why she’s willing to endure the mental and physical demands of a highly disciplined life. This lack of character development strikes at the heart of Aronofsky’s problematic ballet flick. The director possesses zero admiration for anyone striving to be an athlete and an artist before they reach their 30th birthday. There is no convincing footage demonstrating how dancers fall in love with the possibility of becoming art. Bone-thin Portman, who is on screen 99 percent of the time, isn’t a dancer. How could she demonstrate the joy and power of dancing? The fact that American Ballet Theatre soloist Sarah Lane is her dancing double doesn’t help. Lane is shot from the calf down or at distance that makes her look like a specter.

Aronofsky got one thing right: Dancers experience pain (subsuming themselves to the aesthetic and physical demands of their art form). But in “Black Swan,” pain is the trope to drive home Aronofsky’s plot in which Nina transforms into a swan—scales and all. Nina’s transformation is gory and sadistic. She mutilates (until she loses finger nails, cracks her bones, and plunges glass into her belly). She is sexually exploited and victimized (in hopes of becoming a more sensual dancer). All the while she goes mad (seeing things and imagining others).

Aronofsky recently told the media that he was surprised that the ballet world didn’t roll out the red carpet, when he announced that he would be making a dance film that would take “Swan Lake” and turn it into a gore fest where female dancers are featured as sex-starved or sex-crazed victims of male power. Perhaps those who were asked to be Aronofsky’s consultants caught his previous film, “The Wrestler” (2008).  In it an aging pro wrestler (Mickey Rourke) is addicted to being pumped, popping pills, and being applauded for getting pulverized. At the end of “Black Swan,” Nina dances “Swan Lake,” whipping her standing leg in perfect circles while her working leg rises up and down on pointe (fuettes). The crowd roars as though she’s Hulk Hogan at a Las Vegas World Wrestling Championship.

Following in the tradition of slasher movies and exploitation films, “Black Swan” is particularly American because it thumbs its nose at high art and its earnest, eccentric, obsessive purveyors. With this in mind, critics reviewed “Black Swan” favorably. Vincent Cassel as the sadistic ballet company chief, Barbara Hershey as the “Mommy Dearest” mother, and Winona Ryler as the aging, raging Ballerina are appropriately monstrous and consequently entertaining. But why New York City Ballet principal dancer and choreographer Benjamin Millepied signed on to play The Prince continues to pain me. My guess is that his decision has something to do with money and a lot to do with Natalie Portman, who is now his girlfriend.

***

Another film that involves dance, but will not get the kind of publicity as the Portman vehicle is Greg Vander Veer’s. At Symphony Space on December 6 in conjunction with Martha Hill Dance Fund, Vander Veer screened an excerpt of his work-in-progress documentary on the dance pioneer Martha Hill (1900-1995).

Hill’s impact on modern dance education in America was equal to Serge Diaghilev’s impact on ballet performance in Europe, writes Janet Mansfield Soares (Wesleyan University Press, 2009). The former Martha Graham dancer created dance departments at New York University, Bennington College, and The Juilliard School. She helped foster dozens of others around the world. She organized the first summer seasons of what is now the American Dance Festival.

In her recent biography of Hill, Soares unearths and reveals Hill’s gargantuan mission to make the nascent modern dance movement as viable as the 400-hundred-year-old ballet tradition. The focus of Vander Veer’s documentary excerpt and Soares’s book is Hill’s battle to bring modern dance (in combination with ballet training) to Lincoln Center, where The Juilliard School was in the process of creating a state-of-the-art, performing arts headquarters.

The problem for Hill and her dance department was the New York City Ballet. Under the executive leadership of Lincoln Kirstein (whose connection to power was that of an oligarch), City Ballet demanded the dance portion of the Juilliard building for its School of American Ballet. At the panel, former Juilliard dance student Risa Steinberg talked about the debacle. Steinberg, now the Associate Director of the Juilliard Dance Division, described how she and fellow students stood outside the State Theater and asked people to sign a petition to keep her school alive. “The voices of all these other people became as loud as Balanchine’s money,” said Steinberg. In the end, the dance division prevailed. But the story is much larger than City Ballet versus Juilliard’s dance department. It’s about the ongoing battle between ballet and modern dance for money, theaters, and audiences. The details are ugly. The personalities are colossal. I hope this film by Greg Vander Veer and his young associates gets made.

 

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Radio City Christmas Spectacular is Spectacular

Tuesday, November 23rd, 2010

By Rachel Straus

In 1932 BBC Television held it first broadcast, the Polaroid camera came into being, and Russell Markert made Radio City Music Hall a popular destination. The choreographer’s bevy of high-kicking girls—soon to be called the Rockettes—became the Art Deco house’s main event. If it weren’t for the ladies with the legs, I wonder whether the vaudevillian enterprise would have lasted. From its kick start Radio City ran rife with financial troubles. Then there was the deepening Depression. Then Hollywood movies made the seven show a day format as moribund as the Polaroid. But the Rockettes persevered, at least at Christmas time. On November 5th I went to the 78th season of the Radio City Christmas Spectacular with one question in mind: What is the show’s staying power?

Here’s my bullet-point answer:

• Continuity is powerful, especially in a culture where we wipe the slate clean every election. The favorite number in the Christmas Spectacular is Markert’s 1933 The Parade of the Wooden Soldiers. Three-dozen ramrod straight dancers, costumed in high-plume hat toy-soldier costumes, undergo military precise kaleidoscopic arrangements across the stage’s airplane hanger space. While the show began this year with a 3-D film of Santa on his sleigh, careening like Spider Man through Manhattan’s spires, it’s this old-fashioned nod to what all kids do—arrange toys and then knock them over—that makes the finale so childishly satisfying. In the last moments the dancers stack themselves against each other like Dominos and one-by-one fall backward like the Leaning Tower of Pisa, until they are all flattened against the floor like deflated balloons.

• Sex sells. In Let Christmas Shine, the Rockettes appear in silver lame mini-dresses on multiple levels, recalling Busby Berkeley’s Ziegfeld Follies. Their legs, arms, and breastbones are bare. They start kicking. The fellow seated next to me smiled ear to ear.

• Kitsch is as American as apple pie. Where else can you get Santa, Jesus, and Tchaikovsky in one sitting? Santa, played by Charles Edward Hall, is as bloated and jolly as expected. Dancing pigs and a teenager performing in pointe shoes are featured in the Tchaikovsky Nutcracker number, brashly played by the Radio City Music Hall Orchestra. Meanwhile, the nativity scene resounds as a multicultural faux pas. On cue, the nations of the world (and one live camel) bow low to the Savior of Christianity. W would approve.

• The production is seamlessly executed and the special effects are state of the art. In the 1940s, Radio City’s shows boasted miraculously appearing elevators, turning stages and huge set pieces, which amplified the Rockettes’ unison tapping, kicking and posing. Today, the organization employs Batman + Robin Productions to create LED content. In the number New York at Christmas, LED images are projected on the windows of a Gray Line double-decker bus, which spins across the stage. Seated inside are the Rockettes, preening and then peeling away parts of their costumes like runway models.  

The show is up until December 30. If you want to see good choreography, don’t go. If you want a whiff of old-time vaudeville with a wallop of techno-glitz, nothing compares to the Christmas Spectacular whose calling card remains the high-kicking Rockettes.

 

 

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As Pure as it Gets: Pepe Torres Flamenco

Tuesday, November 16th, 2010

By Rachel Straus

“This is 200 percent authentic flamenco,” whispered a Seville-born audience member during Homenaje, the one-night show created by Spanish dancer Pepe Torres, presented by the World Music Institute, and held at NYU’s Skirball Center on November 13. I think I knew what she meant. My first introduction to flamenco involved watching a troika of heavily made-up woman in ruffled organza skirts. They haughtily arched their backs and flourished serpentine-shaped arms. Then they pulverized the floor with their feet while looking mad as hell. Torres did nothing of the sort. With his ensemble of six male musicians, Torres was a marvel for what he is not: A sexed-up dancer, a drama king. His crystalline percussive footwork and lack of histrionics were awesome for what he laid bare: A passion for rhythm and performing with others.

After a 20-minute delay, Homenaje began in silence with Torres seated next to his flamenco shoes. Then the 33-year-old dancer from Seville began playing the guitar while looking at the audience, his face mesmerizing for its wide-eyed, tragic-comic dimensions (The muscles around his eyebrows slope down, those around his mouth curl up). It was fitting that Torres’s homage or Homenaje to his ancestors began with embracing an instrument. Music drives Torres’s artistic vision. His family is known for their gypsy guitar tradition, which is semi-improvisational, heavy-fingered, and passed from one generation to the next. While Torres’s grandfather Joselero de Moron introduced him to zapateado (flamenco’s rapid-fire footwork), his great uncle, the legendary Andalusian gypsy guitarist Diego del Gastor, initiated him into the rigors of playing and dancing in an ensemble.

Torres may have been the only dancer on Skirball’s stage, but Homenaje wasn’t a vehicle for his star power, primarily because the two-hour show for “¡Flamenco Festival Gitano!” felt unadorned and collaborative. Torres ended all four of his solos by walking off stage, as though his previous virtuoso dancing was merely a stopover between buying milk and a conversing with friends seated behind him, who happened to be playing guitars, singing, and hand clapping. The low production values of Homenaje added to its casual quality. The lighting was bare bones. The only props were a table and the wood chairs that the men sat on. The ensemble dressed in black (Torres appeared once in a gray suit). If it weren’t for the musician’s face mikes (which they occasionally manipulated with irritation), the men could have been in a backroom café.

But their song wasn’t easy on the heart. In laments, which ricocheted between piercing cries and minor key ululations, one male singer at a time reached an emotional fever pitch. Then like a wound mysteriously cauterized, the individual songs of Luis Moneo, Dávid Sanchez, Juan José Mador, Jr. abruptly ended. When Torres appeared, he breathed contrast into the proceedings. The percussive intensity of his footwork along side the fast fingerings of guitarists Eugenio and Paco Iglesias became an antidote to the long, heavy tones of the men’s cante (song). These spontaneous-seeming expressions of fervid intensity and then eternal sorrow are what make people mad for flamenco.

Homenaje ended with an extended encore by singer, guitarist, and elder statesman Juan del Gastor. Like a wine with an impressive pedigree, Gastor knows he’s special (the Playbill stated he is “heir to the guitar playing of his uncle Diego del Gastor”). Nonetheless, Gastor was the least compelling performer of the evening. He strutted like an old peacock and sported a violet-colored silk cravat. He didn’t bother with the microphone. While Gastor sang and danced (for what I feared might be a long time), Torres sat at the table and looked on admiringly. Unafraid of relinquishing the spotlight, Torres showed how flamenco is bound by honoring one’s predecessors. Yet Torres’s ability to dance percussive complexity and shirk the temptations of modern stagecraft is why many see him as person first, a performer second. It’s why Torres is considered authentic to the flamenco tradition.

 

 

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Cedar Lake Contemporary Ballet

Tuesday, November 9th, 2010

By Rachel Straus

On Oct. 28, Cedar Lake Contemporary Ballet, which finished up its 12-day New York season over the weekend, offered a program by three choreographers whose treatment of dancers’ bodies was harsh. In Hubbub, by 27-year-old Alexander Ekman, 15 company members stripped to their underwear and stood in a line at the lip of the stage. They drew war paint on their faces. They pounced up on small, high tables resembling pedestals, exhibiting themselves like specimens. Striking flexed muscular poses, they displayed their hard-edged bodies, cut as body builders’. Then they slammed their limbs under, over, and around their platforms with military precision, like so many unbreakable machines. I’m afraid it was supposed to be a satire, but it didn’t read that way. It looked like an ideologically driven cult going through some kind of ritual.

Ekman earned his dancing chops with Nederlands Dans Theater, whose chief choreographer at the time, Jiří Kylián, created lush, lyrical, reflective works for his dancers. In Hubbub, the dancers resemble punching bags. Toward the end (taped music by Xavier Cugat and Chopin), they even sounded like punching bags, exhaling fiercely. But the group gasp had the effect of piercing the ballet’s harsh tenor. Dancers dropped their heroic personas and muttered to each other, as though they had lost the thread of their thoughts. A duet ensued in which Harumi Terayama and Oscar Ramos performed a series of unrelated movements, which were simultaneously discussed by the two on a recorded voice over. “Take me downstage, Oscar,” said Terayama. “Ooh, I like this part,” she continued.

The commentary was pretty meaningless; consequently Terayama, who is not an empty-headed individual, came across as a dancer who doesn’t think beyond the steps. And Ekman reinforced the typical stereotype: that those who dance are vapid. Then he abruptly changed course. With Chopin’s Nocturnes, Op. 9-2. #2 in E flat, Ekman decided to demonstrate how the dancers are just like you and me. In more recorded voice overs, we learned that one of them has a crush on the other; one calls his mother every night. Unfortunately, Ekman’s last-ditch effort to humanize the dancers felt discordant, out of tune with the rest of the work’s steroid-induced mood.

Also on the program were Jo Strømgren’s Sunday, Again (2008), a company standby about a badminton match in which the players are cold and cruel to each other, and Jacopo Godani’s Unit in Reaction (2009). The latter played with the idea of mechanized force (think Power Rangers) and entanglement (think Scylla, the Greek sea monster). Godani alternated between the two movement qualities to create a composite vision of six prowling Jeckl and Hyde dancers (one minute they’re languid, they next they lash their limbs like vampires hungry for blood). Dressed in unisex, dark, mesh wrestler suits and lit in near darkness (both care of Godani), the brooding, bass-driven, metallic music (by Ulrich Müller and Siegfried Rössert of “48Nord”) further heightened the apocalyptic mood.

What was life giving was the dancers. They gave flight to choreographers’ ideas. They embodied diverse movement styles. They approached all of the material passionately. It would be nice to see them portrayed as caring. Watching them as defensive line backers, mean badminton partners, and humorlous denizens of the dead gets—all in one sitting—was hard on the eyes.

In choosing the next round of  dances, Cedar Lake’s artistic director might heed Shakespeare’s words, “Farewell, fair cruelty.” The bard knew how to leaven cruelty with a little love and tenderness.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Dance Happenings in NYC

Wednesday, October 27th, 2010

By Rachel Straus

• On October 18 the New York Dance and Performance Awards (otherwise known as the Bessies) reprised their ceremony, following a two-year hiatus. Among the 2009 award winners was Kyle Abraham for his full-length work The Radio Show. Musical America featured Abraham in June 2010 as the “New Artist of the Month:”

http://www.musicalamerica.com/news/newsstory.cfm?archived=0&storyID=22933&categoryID=2

 

• If you are in New York City later this week and want to see the painterly choreography of Chinese dance artist Mr. Wei and his ten-year-old group Shen Wei Dance Company, you can do so for free. The company will be performing excerpts from RE-(III) all around Manhattan. Here is the schedule:

Thursday, October 28:

10am, 12pm & 9pm Duffy Square in Times Square

11am 42nd Street Subway

3pm Around Grand Central Station

7pm Union Square

Friday, October 29:

11am Columbia University

12:30pm Wall Street

2:30pm Battery Park

4:30pm The Metropolitan Museum

7:30 DUMBO

For more information go to:

http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=106720379394156&ref=mf

 

• Today I’m writing about the late, great choreographer Talley Beatty (c. 1918-1995). The story will be published in the February 2011 issue of Dance Teacher magazine. Beatty’s Tres Cantos (1975) will be revived by Ballet Hispanico and presented at the Joyce Theater  (November 30-December 12). To get a sense of Beatty’s beauty check out Maya Deren’s 1945 A Study in Choreography for Camera:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BTX2LKDXn3o.

To understand his artistic impact on the Civil Rights era, check out his masterwork Mourner’s Bench, as performed by Jerome Stigler of the Dayton Contemporary Dance Company:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zKxytimwUT4

 

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