On Dance
DUNNING, JENNIFER
On Dance AN AMERICAN SEASON BY JENNIFER DUNNING It has been neither the best nor the worst of seasons for the American Ballet Theatre, which concluded its summer engagement at the New York State...
...Structurally the work resembles Push Comes to Shove, Tharp's recent hit for the company, but lacks its piquancy...
...At the end, gallant frontier couples dance to delicate folk tunes while a child of the '30s watches...
...indeed, the honors of the evening went to the dancers, not the choreographers...
...It was fitting that during the festivities honoring her between the ballets, she was greeted with a message from President and Mrs...
...In place of her usual tart choreographic comments on the accompanying music and the manners of traditional dance, or her insight into the unique qualities of her dancers, we got Tharp and Baryshnikov being jes' folks in an admitted bit of ephemera...
...Texas Fourth is also something of a family piece for de Mille...
...It is as if a Norman Rockwell and a Richard Estes had been crossed to produce a look into history...
...The second premiere that night was Frederick Ashton's Five Brahms Waltzes in the Manner of Isadora Duncan...
...One remembers that de Mille herself, a self-confessed young ugly-duckling, took the part at Rodeo's premiere...
...The head, with its frizz of white hair and fierce old blue eyes, was cast down in an uncharacteristic attitude of listening, bobbing up only to nod affirmation when the Mayor referred to her new Texas Fourth as "another hit...
...Still, Once More, Frank seemed to be merely once more without feeling...
...Van Hamel, a gold-medal winner at the prestigious Varna (Bulgaria) ballet competitions, is now in her sixth year with the American Ballet Theater...
...Rebecca Wright danced the lead role well enough, but was too pertly pretty for the Cowgirl...
...It takes place in Baird, Texas, her husband's birthplace, and is dedicated to the memory of Roma Foy, his grandmother...
...The work is typical de Mille, incorporating ballet, folk and even Broadway-style numbers...
...But by far the most indigenous performance of the season was an evening of Agnes de Mille...
...No special stress was placed on the Bicentennial...
...first staged in 1938, to the premiere of Le Sacre du Printemps, Glen Tetley's elegant, frenetic outpouring of movement...
...It may have too many axes and rocking chairs and flutter-handed gossiping neighbors to bear repeated viewing in a short span of time...
...Mayor Beame bestowed upon her New York City's Handel Medallion for artistic a-chievement...
...Its success was due most of all to the ballerina's generous manner, an easy amplitude of line and gesture that brought the lengen-dary Duncan to mind...
...Designer Oliver Smith's spacious Western horizon and movable, bleached small-town building frames give a feeling of open air, and de Mille's use of the stage is intriguing...
...One of her preoccupations has been the odd man out, for instance, the focus of both Fall River Legend and Rodeo, the two vintage ballets?948 and 1942, respectively—that made up the rest of the evening...
...The most striking aspect of Texas Fourth is its hard-edged appearance...
...Four nights later the American Ballet Theater presented its seasonal gala benefit...
...De Mille has not completely recovered from the near-fatal stroke she suffered last year...
...But the idiom has less to do with America than with de Mille's own sensibilities...
...Contrary to the actual verdict, de Mille suggests that Lizzie Borden was guilty of murdering her father and stepmother...
...The premiere that was to give the affair its eclat —Twyla Tharp's Once More, Frank, set to three Sinatra songs?was disappointing, although golden children Tharp and Mikhail Baryshnikov were amusingly beguiled lovers...
...One provocative match-up came in Robert Kliavin and Galina Samtsova's oddly demure, fairy-tale version of an old warhorse...
...Fall River Legend—set to Morton Gould's score and conducted by the composer at this performance?is the most literal of narrative ballets...
...The use of guests does spice each season and encourage a certain healthy competition—although several of this summer's imports were only mediocre dancers...
...British critic and dance historian Arnold Haskell once called de Mille "the first real idomatic American dancer...
...The solo, created for Lynn Seymour of England's Royal Ballet, bore the working title "Homage to Isadora...
...Again, the score was conducted by its composer, Aaron Copland...
...But it would be a great pity to allow the policy to restrict the growth of performers like van Hamel...
...On Dance AN AMERICAN SEASON BY JENNIFER DUNNING It has been neither the best nor the worst of seasons for the American Ballet Theatre, which concluded its summer engagement at the New York State Theater on August 7. Earlier this year at the Metropolitan Opera House, the company had staggered through the birth throes of producing its own full-length version of The Sleeping Beauty, that sine qua non of classical ballet...
...Yet she stood throughout these encomiums—a tiny, rounded figure in an evening dress, one hand clinging unobtrusively to the podium, the other moving restlessly against her side...
...The Ballet Theater seems to view galas as arenas to test suitable partners for its tall ballerinas, and Peter Breuer acquitted himself well in the highly charged atmosphere...
...She has become something of a cause celebre among balletomanes as a victim of the company's guest star policy, which effectively limits the number of times regular dancers appear...
...Other performances rose to the occasion, too...
...In her optimism, sentimentality and crackling humor de Mille is thoroughly home-grained and, since she began to choreograph in 1929, she has been the dance's spokesman for the plain values and concerns of a buried American past...
...Mar-tine van Hamel, his partner, made up for what he lacked in elegance...
...nonetheless, it is a compelling exploration of the psyche of a woman so oppressed that she is driven to kill...
...The dance for girl and maternal ghost, for example, is reminiscent of the dream duet for Lizzie Borden and her dead mother in de Mille's Fall River Legend...
...The pas de deux was scheduled for one performance only...
...Oddly enough, Tharp's split-second, fractured choreography appears to engage Baryshnikov more than any American ballet he has done since his defection two years ago...
...None seem out of place, because this is not a recreation of the past but a glossily popular, as well as nostalgic and highly personal, backward glance...
...Although its first performance was given by her Heritage Dance Theater three years ago, the ballet seemed tailor-made for the Bicentennial...
...Perhaps she was the inspiration for the motherly figure who winds through the dance's final section, an elegy to a bygone era...
...And the Russian's beautiful efficiency affords special clarity to Tharp's method of breaking down movement and putting it back together again in new and surprising ways...
...Their presence in the American Ballet Theater, after all, adds to its undeniable luster and its rank as one of the world's major companies...
...In her book on the making of that ballet, de Mille, who is also a talented writer, reveals that the segment was choreographed after the death of her own mother...
...A German who has appeared with a number of European companies...
...The Black Swan Pas de Deux by Royal Ballet star Anthony Dowell and Natalia Makarov was dazzling in its stylized passion, and William Carter performed a contemporary flamenco farucca, choreographed by Manolo Vargas, with absorbing intensity...
...The works offered ranged from Eugene Loring's atmospheric Billy the Kid...
...It is as if we were watching Independence Day parades march through time...
...Easily the most interesting ballerina in the company, she is an exhilarating dancer who moves naturally and with great intelligence, clarity and musicality...
...Sallie Wilson continues to give a coruscating performance as Lizzie, all taut anguish one moment and hesitant gaiety the next...
...Now it simply presented a solid repertory solidly (albeit at times stolidly) danced...
...Ford...
...Yet it might be considered a tribute to Seymour as well...
...As de Mille observed in her acceptance speech, Texas Fourth is about "all those lovely, old-fashioned virtues...
...Breuer is an appealingly eager, lanky dancer, despite a rather ragged attack...
...Le Corsaire Pas de Deux...
...They embrace the girl as she wanders in their midst, then leave her to her contemporaries...
...Dressed in soft harem pants and a tiara and sporting a waist-long braid, she looked and danced like a Russian princess...
...In Rodeo, among de Mille's earliest dances and one that influenced her ground-breaking achievement in the musical Oklahoma, an unappealing little cowgirl exchanges her blue jeans for a party dress to catch a man...
...Typically, however, she still walks with a forthright cowboy step and a pair of boots are visible beneath her skirt...
...She takes the lines of cowboys and flirting girls that wind through Rodeo to new, abstract levels in this ballet, creating a continuous, streamlined processional of familiar patriotic celebrants...
...Set to a score of traditional songs and music by Harvey Schmidt, composer of The Fantasticks, it is a blitz of cowboys, 1936 teenagers, baton twirlers, and red-white-and-blue pompons...
...There are other touching moments in Texas Fourth when an atavistic hunger for the intimacies of long ago comes through...
...Nevertheless, with four Thursdays devoted to native choreographers, the six-week run had a particularly American flavor and gave proof of the vitality and variety of this country's contribution to contemporary ballet...
Vol. 59 • August 1976 • No. 17
