On Dance
GUREWITSCH, M. ANATOLE
On Dance BALANCHINE'S EXTRAORDINARY PEOPLE BY M. ANATOLE GUREWITSCH "I teT is my firm belief that human society is divided into three distinct castes: Russian dancers, dancers, and very...
...And today, long after Diaghilev's splendid creatures have departed, if I were called on to determine the new vanguard of that exalted caste, without a moment's hesitation I would choose George Ba-lanchine's New York City Ballet...
...A more seasoned and knowing escort, he may not erupt like a firecracker, but, oh, he knows the moves, and the lady does not have to trick him into serving her pleasure...
...Balanchine's first disquisition on Ashley's wizardry in allegro, features aqueous poses and gestures too, but they are frolicsome and sunny like the play of Graces in an Arcadian pool...
...Several seasons ago, Balanchine revived the ballet with her fleet, clean footwork in mind, but an injury kept her out of the initial round of performances...
...When Mikhail Baryshnikov joined the city Ballet for what turned out to be a very brief stay, Balanchine handed him a bouquet of Villella's roles, among them Rubies, and Baryshnikov's thrilling fireworks set thepiece newly ablaze...
...That quality lends an almost hallucinatory clarity to the neoclassical masterworks she has excelled in (Divertimento No...
...in time, she may come to master the as yet unconquered stretches of the first pas de deux...
...Rubies (performed to Stravinsky's Capriccio for piano and orchestra), the central panel of the three-part ./ewefe, was originally seen in 1967 starring Patricia McBride and Edward Villella...
...Until last season, she alone had performed it...
...His own dancers learn to penetrate this truth, and in doing so they become extraordinary indeed...
...Thus begins Bal-letomania (originally subtitled with perfect aptness, The Story of an Obsession) by Arnold Haskell, the recently deceased enthusiast best remembered as the slavishly adoring camp follower of Di-aghilev's Ballets Russes...
...Like his narrative ballets, however, they are to the fullest degree works for the theater...
...But how sudden are the reversals of fortune...
...All the greater, therefore, was the impact of her triumph in the second pas de deux...
...While other casts have been seen to generally favorable effect in the ballet, without Ashley and Cook the transformation from sparkling geometry to poetry does not occur...
...The term is very broad, though, for there are more sides to Balanchine's imagination than can be embodied in one type of performer, let alone in a single person...
...Replacements left a hole where a gem ought to be...
...It is interesting to note that in reviving Square Dance, Balanchine interpolated a new solo for the male lead...
...In the first of two sublime pas de deux for the principal couple, the ballerina wears her hair loose, and as her cavalier carries her across stage the swimming movements of her arms evoke the passage over the river of forgetfulness into the Elysian Fields (the music is from Gluck's Orphee...
...the surprise is that the ballet's mood proves so accommodating to his faunlike, prelap-sarian artlessness...
...The little Faure ballet, Bal-lede, unveiled last year, hinted at her range of feeling...
...On Dance BALANCHINE'S EXTRAORDINARY PEOPLE BY M. ANATOLE GUREWITSCH "I teT is my firm belief that human society is divided into three distinct castes: Russian dancers, dancers, and very ordinary people...
...His Midsummer Night's Dream, returning this month, is as memorable for its dances as for its evocation of Shakespeare...
...It has often been remarked, for example, that a plush legato is simply not within her register...
...Chaconne's associations are more numinous, and Ashley's studied parting of the waves and nodding of the head did not approach the wellspring of the image...
...Many viewers who prize her blithe efficiency also mistakenly assume that profundity and romance are beyond her...
...Cook's and Andersen's dissimilar successes in this piece reveal how Balanchine's finest dancers can discover themselves in roles from the existing repertoire...
...To be sure, the miraculous heightening only occurs when Ashley is squired by Bart Cook, whose gallantry and pride in his lady's radiance propel her to transports almost too intimate and intense to behold...
...In a sense, it may be said that he discovers their dances in them much the same way that Michaelangelo discovered the David in a block of marble...
...If not, she still has Square Dance...
...Balanchine has composed splendidly and often for Farrell, but none of his inspirations for her is more glorious than this lead role...
...The enormousness of Balanchine's range is the essence of his genius for making performers realize themselves...
...Collectively they are often known as Balanchine's proteges, and indeed, most of them grew upunder his tutelage at the School of American Ballet...
...His innocence lends the torrid love game a new kick, and spurs McBride, the sleek siren, to an unprecedented pitch of calculating allure...
...In no way did she mimic her illustrious predecessor...
...As Andersen skips through it, Rubies assumes an especially heartless, wicked tinge...
...Take for starters, Merrill Ashley and some of her codancers...
...Here, Ashley disappointed...
...In her sudden ascent, Ashley's imperturbable technical prowess was greeted with amazement, but her poetic potential was hardly guessed at and to this day is still not widely recognized...
...With his departure to take up the artistic directorship of American Ballet Theatre, it looked like McBride would once again have to pull her escort through the ballet on her shiny coat-tails...
...His "abstract" creations concentrate, as none before his did, on the expressivity of dancing??unencumbered by the kinds of events that program annotators stitch into little synopses and performers telegraph to the audience by mime and emoting...
...c ^^^^ook's name may not be the first that comes to mind when one thinks of virtuosity in the City Ballet's male contingent, yet he holds his own even in some of Balanchine's most explosive inventions...
...15, Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto No...
...Villella's dancing days are done, and his formidable role in Rubies (not to mention in other ballets) for many seasons proved more or less intractable...
...3, Allegro Brillante...
...It is a paradox of Ashley's speedy precision that for all the logic and coherence of her phrases, she allows one to see a dance broken, as it were, into flickering instants of neat stillness that cascade by at a breathtaking pace...
...Her role was passed on to Kay Mazzo, who put across something of the ballet's buoyancy despite an imperfect and labored execution of the steps that spread a rather diffuse glow...
...When Ashley moved in, the mist parted to reveal sharp, glittering patterns and Square Dance leaped into focus...
...McBride continues to perform her part with undiminished vivacity...
...That it could be given to anyone else seemed inconceivable...
...The Corelli sarabande neatly illustrates a facet of Balanchine's interplay with his dancers :hiscustomin composing of setting them challenges that will lay open ever more of their gifts...
...No one would doubt that Andersen's aerial nimbleness in the most fiendish variations would do justice to the intricacy of Rubies...
...With Cook, McBride tones down her act considerably...
...Part of his genius resides in his ability to select and invent repertoires that suit vastly different dancers, to fashion MERRILL ASHLEY his charges into profounder, more expressive, more individual practitioners of their art...
...One of them is the company's newest recruit from Denmark, the mercurial lb Andersen...
...Ballo delta Regina...
...Perhaps Ashley will be given further opportunity to explore Chaconne...
...Balanchine gave her the dense, filigreed textures she revels in, but in addition scattered a delicate perfume of sentiment that she conveyed sweetly...
...The marvels of dance theater will never bedazzle me to the point of such lordly indifference to the fascinations of all else, I hope, but I know what he was getting at...
...Never has Rubies looked so companionable, yet its keen-honed erotic edge is unblunted...
...When Cook is absent the long line of the sarabande, pierced by brisk flourishes and unfolding in a stately, meditative procession, seems emptily portentous...
...Today, ascant year later, the City Ballet has two smashing leads for Rubies...
...He is the man who gave America its first full-length Nutcracker, to which no other production, domestic or imported, can compare for atmosphere, enchantment, choreographic sophistication, and storytelling transparency...
...She paced herself differently, striking different accents and peaks??an imaginative recreation of the highest order...
...No less exhilarating today than when she first danced it, the piece now benefits as well from new and moving layers of feeling...
...Balanchine's steps, so perfect a vehicle for FarrelPs haughty majesty, proved as fine a setting for Ashley's graciousness...
...2, the "Theme and Variations" movement of Tchaikovsky Suite No...
...SquareDance is as profoundly his as it is hers...
...the second is, of all people, Bart Cook...
...Set to a Corelli sarabande, it is stylistically one with the original adagio for the two principals, but the inspiration for its contours lies in Cook's distinctive qualities as a dancer: the accuracy and easy courtliness of his carriage, the sculptural plasticity of his phrasing, his unaffected gravity, the harmony of his proportions, the pliancy of his supremely expressive back...
...Then, without prior fanfare (the City Ballet makes no fuss over casting), on an evening when Farrell was in resplendent form as Terpsichore in A polio and Lucile in Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, Ashley appeared in Farrell's role...
...if Farrell was indisposed, Chaconne was canceled...
...The two of them together irradiate the stage around them with shared joy and admiration, and give the whirling entrees of the finale their note of incandescent rapture...
...The most startling advances in Ashley's development have taken place in her recent performances of Balanchine's Vivaldi ballet, Square Dance, and in her performance of Suzanne Farrell's part in Chaconne...
Vol. 64 • January 1981 • No. 2
