Poetry:
Hazo, Samuel
DANCE STARS & THEIR STRIPES THE AMERICAN MUSICAL FESTIVAL To celebrate its fortieth anniversary, the New York City Ballet recently mounted an American Music Festival (April 26 and May 15). The...
...He had used two of the pieces from "Three Places in New England" with equal success twenty-three years earlier in his "From Sea to Shining Sea...
...There certainly were challenges...
...Costume and scenic shops were taxed to their capacity...
...Sixteen choreographers presented premiers of their work in this spring's festival...
...Andersen's "Baroque Variations" involved a couple in an intricate set of variations nestled amidst trio interludes...
...One need go no further for the event's justification than a comment of the Festival's organizer, Peter Martins: "It's challenges that help keep us in shape...
...One of the most successful of these was Martins's "The Waltz Project," originally commissioned in the bicentennial year...
...Several of the other pieces, departing substantially from the company's "black and blue" tradition of a bare stage, blue-lit cyclorama, and black curtains, were lushly invested with scenic apparatus and props...
...To what degree it will draw attention to American music in general remains to be seen...
...Dean's "Space" was notable for its use of a large corps, while Lubovitch's "Rhapsody in Blue" effectively caught the drive of the familiar Gershwin score...
...Two of the pieces, those by Eugene Tanner and the late Joseph Duell, had previously been performed but were new to the company's repertory...
...On the closing evening, a suite of songs performed by Ray Charles and a group supported by the New York City Ballet orchestra provided an energetic and exuberant finale for both dancers and musicians...
...La Fosse's "Woodland Sketches" was delicately nuanced, an exploration of light-hearted flirtation and romance that created a small-scale but charming piece for four couples...
...Finally, a series of eleven posters was commissioned from abstract, "pop," and figurative American painters such as Helen Frakenthaler, Roy Lichtenstein, and Susan Rothenberg...
...But the real success of the festival lay in the demonstration of new aspects of the company's own technical brilliance and sturdy flexibility...
...Their music was selected by four different choreographers for visual realization...
...Martins, who had been a champion ballroom dancer in his native Denmark, clearly understands and enjoys working with the intricacies of social dancing...
...Feld's surreal "The Unanswered Question" inventively combined props and movement to evoke the atmosphere of Ives's discordant music...
...They had been devoted to the music of a single composer...
...Participating guest artists included violinist Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg, cellist Fred Sherry, and soprano Joan Morris...
...The dancers of the company had to learn twenty-three new ballets and the musicians had to prepare an enormous volume of unfamiliar music...
...None had previously mounted ballets for the company and the results were mixed...
...Forsythe's "Behind the China Dogs," a gloss on the classic vocabulary, was resolutely obscure...
...Overall, the festival produced a handful of ballets that will enter the regular repertory and perhaps one score, Wuorinen's, that will have an independent concert life...
...Dean and Lubovitch worked with members of the company, combining their own styles of modern dance movement with the company's classic styling...
...For an acknowledged piece d'occasion, "Sophisticated Lady," Martins appeared himself to partner stylishly in an extended social dance duet with Suzanne Farrell...
...Mahdaviani's "The Newcomers" and Verdy's "Set of Seven'' were notable for their fresh presentation of individual dancers' talents...
...Five new scores were commissioned by NYCB from contemporary composers (Charles Wuorinen, Ellen Taaffe Zwi-lich, Leslie Stuck, Michael Torke, and Paul Schwartz), and scores by forty-three other composers were played, including those of popular songwriters (Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, and Richard Rodgers), jazz musicians (Duke Ellington and Ray Charles), and classic contemporaries (John Cage, Lukas Foss, Samuel Barber, and Leonard Bernstein...
...For each festival, the late George Balanchine had created new works and had encouraged the choreographic aspirations of company members...
...The Festival consisted of twenty-three ballets set to American music...
...Cook's "Into the Hopper" (Edward Hopper) wove a surreal story out of characters from well-known paintings emerging from their frames when the museum was closed...
...There was, of course, precedent in the four major festivals the company had mounted between 1972 and 1982...
...Stravinsky, then Ravel, followed by Tchaikovsky, and Stravinsky again...
...DON McDONAGH...
...The dozen selections he chose from out of the original twenty-five ranged from the romantic to the eccentric...
...These differed in concept...
...It certainly demonstrated the popularity of Ives and Gershwin...
...Laura Dean, Eliot Feld, William Forsythe, Lar Lubovitch, and Paul Taylor-all directors and chief choreographers for their own companies-were invited to participate in the Festival...
...Among the company members invited to contribute ballets to the festival were Ib Andersen, Bart Cook, Robert La Fosse, Miriam Mahdaviani, and Violette Verdy...
...Rehearsal logistics were an organizational triumph...
...It showed considerable skill and musical sensitivity...
...Large numbers of new ballets were created, a handful of which became part of the standard repertory...
...The imagery and integrated film sequences were novel, but the plot was slight and little movement invention was shown...
...Taylor's dark "Danbury Mix," named after the composer's hometown, caught the astringency and naive jolliness of the Ives music he selected...
Vol. 115 • July 1988 • No. 13
