Classical Movements and More
JACOBS, LAURA A .
On Dance CLASSICAL MOVEMENTS AND MORE BY LAURA A JACOBS I know noble accents And lucid, inescapable rhythms; But I know, too, That the blackbird is involved In what I know. wallace Stevens...
...For a third choreographic try, that isn't bad...
...Morris works in one of the grayest areas of contemporary dance: in small-stage scale, outside a canonized method, with performers of disparate backgrounds...
...Nichols and Calegari could be the two sides of Olympia...
...In the Fantasie, when she throws her head back in abandon, the line from neck to chin is heartless...
...Schubertiad gets better the more you see it...
...Since he has not found a way to combine the two, his angle on the ballet slides all over the stage...
...Set designer Federico Pallavicini's flora are lush and Rousseauesque, a Spencerian's jardin primitif...
...They seem too symmetrical to really be happening...
...A minor work, it shows Morris handling delicate objects with aplomb...
...The dancers do hear the same music...
...Lopez doesn't just fascinate the men...
...They balance and soften her steely dynamics...
...On the surface this ballet, set to Mozart's Divertimento No...
...They don't make sense in the context of this dance or Liebeslieder, unless you see them as constituting the most abstract midsummer night's dream ever choreographed...
...His dances have neither the outsized proportions of Paul Taylor's nor the brilliant linearity of ballet...
...The dancers, running toward the back wall, leap and fall smack on the floor, arms extended as if they were crosses, or swords...
...There is, nevertheless, facility, musicality and silent struggle here...
...When a woman gets slammed in the stomach she somersaults endlessly backward through the air, borne by a row of dancers...
...O Rangasayee, one of the New York premieres, fits a pink light bulb, so to speak, into Gloria's sharply focused fixtures...
...Wearing a swaddling cloth, he pads the floor in loping diagonals, head wobbling to the Indiana of a sitar's vibrato...
...Gloria ends at an extreme...
...she holds them in thrall...
...He's a medium for spiritual ecstasy, and more...
...Each perspective turns up movement of ingenuity and beauty, especially the more personal approach...
...His red painted palms and heels may be a temple dancer's cosmetic, but in Western art they are stigmata...
...I seem to always remember parts of her, but Schubertiad is the first instance where I've seen Lopez' strength serve her dramatically...
...17 in D. K. 334, values decorum above all else...
...and they do not collar philosophies and wring them dry (a postmodern taste...
...But this is no manicured garden...
...The ballroom that once struck me as a mistake—too big, too desolate— now has its own appropriately haunted character...
...now simple brutishness is a quick fix to seriousness...
...Morris can turn six into the teeming masses, one into the voice of reason...
...I was reminded of George Laura A. Jacobs, a new contributor to these pages, was until recently the dance critic at the Boston Phoenix...
...Tomasson has an ideal coloratura in Kyra Nichols, and at times he gives her steps that riffle and trill with the music (she has a wonderful opening variation...
...A relative newcomer among the NYCB's principals, Lopez has developed an intriguing stage presence...
...Still, both pas have rounded edges and a hushed intensity—as if they were held under one magnifying glass...
...scansion is rich and full-fleshed...
...Pressure mounts from without, and by the time the dancing moves outside the ballroom, frustration and doubt have brought the ballet to full boil: Is there someone for everyone...
...Do we make the right choices...
...Visually, that is extravagant...
...The two weeks of repertory preceding the New York City Ballet's (NYCB) annual month of Nutcracker have been marked by a single premiere, Helgi Tomasson's Menuetto...
...Through stylization, slow-motion and instant-replay effects he turns Saturday afternoon violence into a Barthes mythology, a Saturday morning cartoon...
...They grow naturally...
...His lightning movement nearly rips you out of your seat, and being keyed to the voice, it has the nature of a rhetorical slash...
...The image is more sculptural than pictorial...
...He knows those noble accents and lucid rhythms...
...Any ideas his compositions express evolve figuratively, even anthropomorphically, as in his solo, O Rangasayee...
...Studious attention to detail gives the whole enterprise the vague stuffiness of a Sunday recital at a ballet school...
...A close look, though, reveals Tomasson tinkering with the wheels: The academic in him is experimenting with classical syntax, trying new spatial perspectives, and very consciously seeking to avoid choreographic platitudes...
...It all traces back to his impeccable eye for accent, his ear for rhythm...
...The picture of her in Serenade that sticks is of those pliant landings from jete to arabesque plie, her arms poised in a high fifth remarkable for its expansive, stern perfection...
...In the floating leaps at the middle of the dance Morris arranges his limbs as harmoniously as any Renaissance angel...
...Morris thus colors the classical Indian technique, making it his own dialect...
...It is as if a vision has whipped him off the floor, yet he drowns in its swell...
...Blackout...
...Later, head dropped to one side, hands limp and wrists offered up to the audience—an inversion of the taut floral finger arrangements of Bharata Natya—he recalls the abstracted, suffering Jesus...
...The dancers crawl like penitents, swing like bells, leap like the dolphins of Crete...
...The couples occupying odd corners of the stage are so absorbed in their own steps, so disconnected, they could be in different rooms...
...The blackbird, whatever it may be—nature, mystery, metaphor—is with him...
...The dance chirps prettily away, painstakingly strict and bright, in the manner of Ernst Hoffmann's Olympia...
...Tomasson would be grappling with these problems regardless of the music he used, yet Mozart did not help him...
...Big effects reward meticulous placement...
...It is a curious Adagio...
...wallace Stevens ' eighth way of looking at a blackbird is one way to look at Mark Morris, perhaps the hottest choreographer to hit New York in years...
...its disposition is heavy and confrontational —evocative of humility, shame, Adam and Eve inching out of Eden...
...Full of satiric, floor-bouncing slaps and grisly hammer-locks, this is a decidedly glossy production for Morris that nonetheless does realize its title...
...Indeed, none of the principal dancers (Nichols, Calegari, Otto Neubert, and striking newcomer Alexandre Proia) are sufficiently connected to the 11-member corps...
...There was a time when the contemplation of death or sex was enough to buy artistic legitimacy in dance...
...Herbert's words in "Easter-Wings...
...They eschew Twyla Tharp's inclination toward a coalescing technique (you can see survival of the fittest functioning, stylistically, in her dances...
...Morris has spoken out against these images, and it is not hard for him to point the finger...
...In contrast to the couples of Liebeslieder's second half, who waltz out to the boundaries of imagination, Schubertiad's lovers are bound in the undertow of their sexual energy...
...The moments of invention became nothing other than strivings for effect because they are unrelated to the rest of the ballet...
...they give Lopez sweep and amplitude...
...In dances such as Stravinsky Violin Concerto she actually seems to tap into the composer's high voltage— there is that much spring in the ball of her foot...
...His difficulty is that he has not found a transforming thematic mechanism for Menuetto...
...I care less for his overly clever pieces, such as Championship Wrestling After Roland Barthes...
...I dwell on the prologue because the dance transpires from these tides and shallows, forming antonyms for anxiety and faith...
...With a mop of black ringlets swarming around his pale, schoolboy face, he could be a Rossetti youth—or the Godspell logo...
...Lourdes Lopez, replacing Kyra Nichols, is a wonder-accentuating the shadows in the ballet that in turn reveal the dark lady within her...
...The gently lyrical Divertimento is so securely placed it is aloof...
...The dancers come out in slip-like versions of their satin party dresses...
...He follows a different tack with Maria Calegari in the Andante, finding thecoquette in her, the dancer that blows both hot and cold...
...Martins doesn't take the process of coupling in balletic terms, partnering—less seriously than Balanchine, he simply trusts it less...
...The shapes he makes have weight, temperament and a notable tendency to order...
...Gloria was the program's most wholly satisfying piece, if only because it best displayed Morris' classical side...
...Lopez' steps look spidery because her limbs, especially her arms, are so long...
...In Morris movement is deft yet unleavened...
...Rather than having the leveling effect you might expect, it plunges the dance onto a different plane...
...The opening statement is simple, almost dry: From the back of the stage a man and woman come toward the audience, except he is pulling himself along the floor while she walks stiffly beside him, one hand placed on the opposite hip...
...The parody, however, is aimed less at society than at current choreographers (Tharp, William Forsythe, Jiri Kylian) who have employed violence to achieve an easy expressionistic edge...
...During a pause the ballroom walls pull away, opening on a garden (the piano remains in a pavilion center stage...
...In another dancer those arms might upset the line, become topheavy...
...In Episodes, when she hits that splayed seconde sur les pointes, the image reverberates like a gong...
...Affliction shall advance the flight in me...
...The November concert at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) was not equal to his finest programs...
...Watching this remarkable artist develop is its own reward...
...But it didn't have to be...
...Similarly, where the aristocratic couples in Liebeslieder's cozy salon are prey to their own romantic fantasies, in Schubertiad the romantic fantasy is society's—this is, after all, Vienna's bourgeoisie—and it's obsessive...
...You can look at Concertente as a pure, classical exercise or as a reverie: the artist's longing for perfection (represented, of course, by Mozart's music...
...Valentina Kozlova brings a charming, poignant bewilderment to Calegari's role...
...Under Chenault Spence's limestone lighting she is as starkly majestic as John Singer Sargent's Madame Pierre Gau-treau, and as impenetrable...
...For a while, as in the first movement Allegro, he keeps a cool, commanding distance and everything proceeds squarely, sociably...
...Modeled after his masterpiece Liebeslieder Waltzer, it also involves telling departures...
...No less than the concrete poem, Gloria transcends...
...Set to Vivaldi's Gloria in D, it is light and dark, caught between the paradoxical states of joy and sublimation...
...O Rangasayee bathes in the light Gloria searched for...
...as the cast changes, it grows more mysterious...
...Her black hair shining like a raven's wing, she's la belle dame...
...The group dances following the Fantasie pas de trois are turbulent and perplexing...
...But that is not Tomasson's idea...
...In these attempts he does succeed, also modestly...
...Balanchine could choreograph Mozart, as he did in Symphonie Concertente (now performed by the American Ballet Theatre), not only because he was as intuitive a genius but because he fit Concertente into the composer's thematic realm...
...More to the point, as in the poem it is the offhand, innate tone of Morris' knowledge that impresses...
...Muscled like a whippet, and possessing the same tiny hips, she moves with unusual stealth...
...Menuetto seems a modest effort, and therefore a modest failure...
...He doesn't need to reach for an edge...
...She has become a surgical instrument wrapped in gauze...
...They reach the front of the stage just as the first word is sung—"Gloria"—and in that instant the man flashes up, turns a single off-axis revolution, then falls to the ground...
...Though his dances are various and "modern," they have an equilibrium that is mature beyond his 28 years and looks, well, classical...
...Then, as in the Andante and the fourth movement Adagio, he gets up-close and personal...
...Tomasson is aware of his model—the cortege that heralds in Calegari notes it like an asterisk— and he employs the same duo female voices...
...Peter Martins' Schubertiad, which premiered last season, fits more securely into the Balanchine repertoire...
...He knows how hard an inflection can be pushed before it is stretched into a statement, when innuendo becomes braggadocio...
...Tomasson appears torn between the need to use dancers as compositional objects and the desire to plumb their balletic personalities...
...In her soloist years she has slowly slimmed down to the bone and gained strength diametrically...
Vol. 67 • November 1984 • No. 20
