Posts Tagged ‘George Balanchine’

Wanted: Artistic Director of a Ballet Company

Monday, September 21st, 2015

By Rachel Straus

Two mid-size ballet companies in North America are in search of artistic directors. Gradimir Pankov is leaving his post at Les Grands Ballets Canadiens of Montreal after 15 years. John McFall is departing Atlanta Ballet after 20 years. In comparison to the majority of the 140-odd ballet troupes across the North American continent, which have minimal seasons and only a handful of dancers, Les Grands and Atlanta employ between 20 and 30 dancers and commission in-demand choreographers for their seasons and tours. So, what is required to helm a mid-size ballet company? Les Grands recently posted the following criteria for their artistic director search:

  1. “It is important that the AD leads the company by working in the studio, as a teacher, coach, repetiteur, or choreographer.”
  2. “The AD reports directly to the Board and is responsible for the company’s look, repertoire, choreography, programming, and is an artistic leader.”
  3. “[The AD has] a mind to fiscal responsibility, and a vision that includes the community’s desire for entertainment [and] artistic achievement.”
  4. “[The AD should have] a reputation for artistic quality and the contacts and ability to bring the world’s greatest contemporary choreographer’s work to the repertoire of the Company.”

It seems, if one takes the Les Grands advert as more than wishful thinking, the search committee wants the AD to do everything in the studio, know everyone in the ballet world, and have a head for business. Does such a wunderkind currently exist?

Loudes Lopez, a former principal dancer with New York City Ballet, is perhaps the only person who fits the bill. She became the AD of Miami City Ballet in 2012, after serving for five years as the executive director of Morphoses. She kept this company afloat, even after its founder, the choreographer Christopher Wheeldon, jumped ship in 2010. Lopez achieved this feat by inviting guest choreographers to direct separate seasons and by keeping her wary board close. Prior to her work with Wheeldon, Lopez served as the executive director of the George Balanchine Foundation, which is concerned with educational outreach. As a New York City Ballet dancer for approximately 24 years, Lopez developed an intimate understanding of George Balanchine and Jerome Robbins’ repertory, having performed their works while both choreographers were alive. Lopez is a particularly marvelous fit for Miami City Ballet because she was born in Cuba. She is able to fundraise in her native tongue and in a city, known as the gateway to Latin America.

While Lopez appears to be the dream AD, other recent AD hires reveal the more typical profile of a former principal dancer turned ballet master in chief. Take Madrid-born Angel Corella, who danced for American Ballet Theatre. He was hired by Pennsylvania Ballet in 2014. Because of various circumstances, he did not come with impressive executive credentials. After retiring from the stage, Corella returned to his native Spain and attempted to create a ballet company, first in the Castile and León region and then in Barcelona. Corella didn’t have experience fundraising and the Spaniards, especially in the wake of the financial crisis, vacillated about, and then declined to back his ballet company.

Then there is the Cuban-born José Manuel Carreño, another star of American Ballet Theater, who became the AD of Sarasota Ballet in 2011, upon his official retirement from the stage. He is now the head of Silicon Valley Ballet (formerly Ballet San Jose). Like Corella, he came to his first job with scant training in fiscal management, fundraising, or marketing experience.

It will be interesting to see who Les Grands and Atlanta Ballet will hire. In the recent past artistic directors of renowned ballet companies used to be choreographers, such as George Balanchine at New York City Ballet, Frederick Ashton at Royal Ballet and John Cranko at Stuttgart Ballet.  Thus their companies had unique artistic profiles. These days ballet companies are in the odd business of performing the same repertory as their fellow troupes. It makes for a homogenized ballet world. My hope is that Atlanta and Les Grands will hire a choreographer, one who puts a real stamp on the artistic “product” of their company. Perhaps this new AD will also be a woman. That would be doubly groundbreaking.

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Ballet Goes to Broadway, Again

Saturday, October 4th, 2014

By Rachel Straus

The blogosphere is alive with news about the current forays of New York City ballet principal dancers Robert Fairchild, Megan Fairchild, and Tyler Peck into Broadway.

Robert Fairchild will appear in An American in Paris in the role originated by Gene Kelly. The production will premiere in Paris and will come to Broadway in the spring. Former New York City Ballet resident choreographer Christopher Wheeldon will provide the choreography.

Megan Fairchild, Robert’s older sister, recently made her Broadway debut (September 21) in the Broadway revival of On The Town. Originally conceived by Jerome Robbins and based on his 1944 hit ballet Fancy Free, On The Town requires that Fairchild dance, sing and act in her role as Ivy Smith, the small town girl who comes to the big city.

Then there is Tyler Peck, who Robert Fairchild recently married. She will premiere in the new Susan Stroman musical Little Dancer at the Kennedy Center on October 25. The musical is inspired by the relationship between painter Edgar Degas and Marie van Goethem, the poor ballet student who modeled for his sculpture “Little Dancer Aged Fourteen” (1881).

The movement of dancers between The Great White Way and the mirrored precincts of the ballet studio is nothing new. What is of note is the development of the Fairchild-Peck dance family dynasty, which also includes Megan Fairchild’s husband Andrew Veyette, another New York City Ballet principal dancer. Veyette excels in Broadway-style City Ballet works such as NY Export: Opus Jazz, where sharpness and grit rather than classical aplomb are emphasized.

Clearly this dancing foursome, who are mature dancers, are looking beyond their careers at City Ballet and ballet, in general. It wouldn’t be surprising if they started a televised dance program, one that presented their shared interests in ballet, Jazz dance, big business (in the performing arts), and self-marketing.

What is not certain for these intrepid ballet dancers is whether their current or upcoming work on Broadway will launch them into a new performing sphere. Much of that success depends on the ability of the choreographers who are, or will be, directing them.

The other ingredient for success is the development of a different kind of stage personality. Highly successful musical theater performers, whether it be Nathan Lane or Sutton Foster, take the material and make it quirky (or comically) their own.

So, in honor of iconic performers and legendary director-choreographers, here is a little slide-show movie about Jack Cole, George Balanchine, and Jerome Robbins, who worked extensively with ballet-trained dancers, from Gwen Verdon to Vera Zorina to Chita Rivera. Together they made numerous enduring Broadway and Hollywood musical theater dance numbers. All three men developed their choreographic voices by breaking the so-called boundaries between the dance forms. All three woman showed that great dancing technique looks like play instead of performance.

To see the slide show movie, press on this link:

Ballet Goes Broadway, Back Then

 

 

 

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Women as Forces of Nature in Balanchine’s Kammermusik No. 2

Wednesday, April 2nd, 2014

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

By Alexandra Hutt

George Balanchine is famously credited with saying that “ballet is woman.” This idea is boldly apparent in his Kammermusik No. 2, which premiered on New York City Ballet in January 1978, and more recently was performed by the company as part of their 2014 winter season.

Throughout the work, seen January 22, Balanchine demonstrates his knowledge of classical ballet, stemming from his training in Russia as a child. Yet he also takes codified ballet steps and pushes them to their limits, demanding hyper-musicality, and infusing ornate, mannerist detail into both the dancers’ gestures and footwork. Alastair Macaulay of the New York Times described Kammermusik as “classicism dotted with deliberate stylistic perversions.” It is those “stylistic perversions” that exemplify Balanchine’s advancement of ballet, and reveal a more nuanced expression of his statement, “ballet is woman”; in that woman embodies Nature—and she is a force to be reckoned with.

Photo by Paul Kolnick

Photo by Paul Kolnick

Balanchine creates the woman as nature comparison from the beginning of his work. When the curtain rises, the principal women (Rebecca Krohn and Abi Stafford) stand apart form a corps of eight men. When the men begin moving with flexed hands and feet, they look like little spiders. Their movement deepens the intriguing musical counterpoint, ominousness and whimsy that lies at the heart of Hindemith’s score, conducted by Andrew Sills. In the more whimsical moments of Hindemith’s Kammermusik No. 2, the same men become prancing ponies, dancing in canon with a certain earnest and feminine quality. Then, they return to their insect-likeness and weave in and out of one another, as a group of ants might, when following a particularly scrumptious set of crumbs. Is Balanchine making fun of them? At the very least, he does it to elevate the roles of the women.

Photo by Paul Kolnick

Though both the men and women in Kammermusik seem to represent four legged creatures, it becomes clear that the female creatures are of a higher taxonomic order, such as tarantulas, with their the forbiddingly long legs and extensions of them. Like their male counterparts, they skitter across the stage, but because they do so in pointe shows they devour space, while retaining an elegance that the opposite sex does not possess in this movement. Not even the choreography for the principal men (Amar Ramasar and Jared Angle) evoke the languid quality that the tarantula-women embody. The women’s sensual style gives their dancing dimension and depth. It’s a feminine kind of power. In one particular sequence, the women seem to transform into another force of nature—massive waves. With oceanic power they chase their partners off of the stage.

Photo by Paul Kolnick

In Kammermusik, the women rule unapologetically. They encompass aspects of the animal kingdom that can be overlooked, such as the illusive cunning of the tigress, who will kill (or be killed) before giving up her territory. Balanchine shows the audience that when he says that ballet is woman, he isn’t referring to the tragic victims in ballet narratives of the 18th and 19th centuries. In this work, his female dancers represents a strong 20th century vision of women who aren’t afraid of their own strength and power.

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Alexandra Hutt is originally from Denver, Colorado. She studied dance at International Ballet School, and received additional training and mentorship from Robert Sher-Machherndl of Lemon Sponge Cake Contemporary Ballet. She is thrilled to be studying at Juilliard, and looks forward to continuing her education in New York City!

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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.

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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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Lifting Ballerinas

Monday, May 7th, 2012

By Rachel Straus

Have you ever wondered what it would take to partner a female ballet dancer? The May 6 matinee at New York City Ballet was an excellent primer for anyone considering this question. In each of the four works from the All (Jerome) Robbins program, at the former New York State Theater, the male lead rarely left the side of his ballerina.

Robbins’s In G Major was a case in point. In the pas de deux section to Ravel’s eponymous composition, Tyler Angle lifted Maria Kowroski at least 25 times. In the end, Angle walked off the stage with Kowroski in a six-o-clock split, her head almost touching his. To create this pose, Angle benched pressed the tall ballerina above his head. Because of the pleasing geometry of Kowroski’s long line, and the ease of her form, my eye naturally moved to her. But it was Angle underneath who made this vision airborne—and magical. At the last moment, Angle’s arms looked like they were going to fail him. Fortunately, the stage wings were steps away.

Besides Robbins’s The Cage (1951), about a tribe of man-eating insect women who destroy one of their prey (Craig Hall), Robbins’s other ballets on the program showed the influence of Balanchine’s neoclassicism. In the Night (1970), In G Major (1975) and Andantino (1981) are plotless ballets. They feature a relationship, or relationships, between a man and woman, which is expressed through a pas de deux. Balanchine expanded classicism through the partnered duet. His lifts were far more complex than his predecessors Petipa, Fokine, and Massine. They didn’t just go up and down. They traveled. The woman changed poses in mid air. The lifts often began and ended in full-bodied motion. In Robbins’s three ballets, Balanchine-style partnering is evidence. The women sail through the sky like birds (and occasionally like fighter jets). The men below them propel their wings.

Of the male leads from In the Night, to music by Frédéric Chopin as performed by Nancy McDill, Robert Fairchild and Sebastian Marcovici stood out for their convincing portrayals of men in adoration of their women. While Fairchild played the young lover to Sterling Hyltin, Marcovici danced the steadfast companion to Wendy Whelan’s vexed, ambivalent character. Marcovici’s lifts expressed the unswerving nature of his love. While she thrashed and pulled away from, Marcovici carried Whelan aloft through her psychological storm. Their pas de deux was the highlight of the afternoon.

Back in 2007 a documentary about the recently retired New York City Ballet principal dancer Jock Soto was aired. Called Water Flowing Together, it contains a memorable scene in which the virile Soto is crumpled in a corner of a studio. With tears of exhaustion, Soto talks about how his arms ache. He says he doesn’t have the strength to lift another ballerina. Yet Soto wasn’t angry or resentful. He expressed exasperation with his ability to continue to make partnering look effortless, to make lifts symbols of the transcendent power of love.

The men of City Ballet, and male ballet dancers everywhere, may not have to dance on the tips of their toes or to suffer the same degree of competition as female dancers, but their job is no less easy. They literally carry certain ballets. Balanchine said “ballet is woman,” but ballet without men would strip the art form of humanity, and of its fundamental expression of being there for another.

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Crystal Pite’s Futuristic Choreography

Tuesday, February 28th, 2012

By Rachel Straus

Seeing The Matrix in 1999 made my heart sink. It wasn’t Keanu Reeves’s acting that depressed me; it was the advances in live action animation. In the final battle scene, Reeves and Hugo Weaving engage in mortal combat. With millisecond timing, they evade each other’s rocket-force punches by bending their head to their feet (like a slinky) and by levitating into the air (like a twister). How, I thought, can dance compete with this technological display of bodily virtuosity?

Then, ten years later, I saw Crystal Pite’s Dark Matters. Her choreography augured a new movement style, a Matrix-esque sense of physical wonder. On January 24 at Baryshnikov Arts Center (BAC), Pite’s choreography enthralled the audience. At the end of The You Show, made in 2010 with her company Kidd Pivot Frankfurt RM, Pite and her eight dancers received a standing ovation.

Photo by Chris Randle

Pite’s style is not lyrically based (like Isadora Duncan), predicated on the balletic idiom (as with George Balanchine), psychologically motivated (in the case of Martha Graham) or in rebellion against concert tradition (Judson Dance Theatre). Its subject is the futuristic body—that’s faster and more intricate than machines. In the beginning of The You Show, Peter Chu falls backward in slow motion onto the floor; he folds like an accordion. Later Cindy Salgado undulates her prone body off the floor—in a blink of an eye. These moments don’t look like stunt work. They are part of a skein of movement, which occurs in inner-space pitch darkness (thanks to lighting designer Robert Sondergaard). They create a dream-like world, which seems only possible in the imagination.

Because Kidd Pivot is celebrating its tenth anniversary, has been a resident company at Künstlerhaus Mousonturm in Frankfurt since 2010, and is only now giving its New York performance debut, Pite has become something of cause célèbre for New York dance-interested audiences. In describing her style, writers often allude to her seven years dancing in William Forsythe’s Ballet Frankfurt. But it’s reductive to see Pite’s work as merely a derivation of Forsythe’s. While Forsythe’s performers looked loopy and frenetic in recent works presented in New York (Three Atmospheric Studies and I don’t believe in outer space), Pite dancers never look out of control. Rather than resembling epileptic victims, they resemble Marine fighters.

In the program notes, Pite writes how The You Show derives from her “fascination with familiar storylines of love, conflict and loss, and the body’s role in providing the illustrative shapes of those stories.” While some observers might find Pite’s relationship theme as captivating as her movement vocabulary, I did not. The three sets of duets, and one group dance, all ended the same way: the significant other leaves the beloved. These departures began to feel a bit pat. What was not pat was Pite’s definition of a relationship in section two, titled “The Other You.” In the duet, Eric Beauchesne and Jiří Pokorný are the same people. Pokorný pushes his alter ego, Beauchesne, around. He resembles a ventriloquist with his dummy. The duet, to an array of atmospheric and classical music, including Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 14 in C Sharp Minor, seemed to reveal a deeper message: The dancer fights each day with her self. The enemy isn’t the other person; it’s the voice that says, “I want to rest!”

Photo by Michael Slobodian

Pite makes fun of this dancer-as-fighter conceit in the last section of The You Show. There, Jermaine Maurice Spivey dons a red cape and becomes a super hero. Later he fights Tron-style with his mate (Sandra Marín Garcia). Their mechanized armor is composed out of three dancers who weld their bodies to either Spivey or Garcia’s. The result is that Spivey and Garcia’s body mass quadruples to resemble armor-clad gladiators. Audience hooted with laughter, when they recognized that Pite was satirizing her combative style. But after this scene, Pite returned to her ardent tone. Four women danced Pite’s electric-shock gestures and buttery, spiraling, back bending floor-to-standing phrases with total seriousness. Their commitment to pushing their bodies beyond what most dancers deem possible is what made Pite’s The You Show entirely captivating. It’s what makes Pite’s choreography part of the zeitgeist, where conversations about the the blending of man and machine abound.

 

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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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