On Dance
JACOBS, LAURA A .
On Dance FROM BALANCHINE TO PETER MARTINS by LAURA A. JACOBS Agon, a New York City Ballet (NYCB) signature piece choreographed in 1957, has never been long out of repertory. Moreover, as the...
...No olher company is capable of such uniform sensitivity to phrasing...
...In her first big steps after the opening port de bras—releves up and out, bold pique lunges into fourth, her arms reaching and her head yearning upward—the movement simultaneously holds her to earth and arches her above it as the music hugs the ground like fog...
...Soon the work gathers force...
...Her legs swing forward, bending her at the waist like a boomerang until the deflected momentum pulls her around to his side...
...In the context of his taut, stalwart structuring, these sequences of poised and pret-zeled bodies are the vanishing points, time past and time future, that the entire ballet turns on...
...There is a lovely spot in the Allegretto when a row of girls dip and whirl akimbo, not together, behind the couple...
...But as Gounod's hothouse flowers the NYCB corps was jazzy in its flamboyance, if pristine too...
...Unfortunately, the rustic countryside scene in Romantic disarray beyond the windows looked distinctly English...
...Nichols expands into higher velocity, but the theme never evaporates...
...The overall effect was, well, Wordsworth on ice...
...George Balan-chine forced his hand here...
...Her luminous performance was flirtatious yet self-effacing, shy...
...the funhouse mirror is replaced by a lorgnette...
...They seem to think so, anyway...
...They just weren't looking...
...The third NYCB offering of the season, Peter Martins' new ballet Pou-lenc Sonata, choreographed to Pou-lenc's Sonata for Two Pianos, received an indecisive response from the press...
...She slid happily between the tightest musical lines and had time to relax in the air, in cabriole: There was a hint of cheesecake in the way she fiddled her hips up there, and on coming down she sent a mermaid's shimmer through her lovely long pointes...
...So we mainly remember the pas de deux, where Balanchine has fit star-shaped pegs into square holes...
...Nichols never travels broadly across the stage...
...She drops her head from one side to the other, and then, reaching with one arm, pulls it back again...
...when she goes faster she usually has a higher, or lighter touch, as if she's skimming her own surface...
...Watts looked a little itchy in her pas de deux, perhaps somewhat bored...
...The trap of tediousness is escaped by avoiding the woods...
...Symmetry brings us through the pas de quatres and trois toward the central pas de deux, then takes us back out again, much as mirror reversal rescues us from the underworld in Jean Cocteau's film Orpheus...
...The result is a marvel of immediacy: Agon grabs you almost the way Alfred Hitchcock does...
...The plashes of movement and linear stretch also call to mind the dynamism of a Jackson Pollock painting, for the dances possess a certain sharpness that is not unlike the directness of Abstract Expressionist art: The end equals the energy required to get there...
...When Alexandre Proia enters the stage hejoins hands with Nichols at arm's length, forming a steeple in the air...
...There is no pictorial shape in Agon and few, if any, allusive gestures—such as the mimicking of Michelangelo's Creation in Balanchine's /I po//o...
...The dancers' tutus, sprays of peach and butter-yellow, evoked French vermeil, but Wagner tinted his stage a cool bottle-blue that wasdeepenedbyRonaldBates' overcast lighting...
...Straight-limbed and sweetly muscled, the ballerina is both expansive and entirely direct...
...La Palais de cristaT s ballerinas similarly were first presented as gems...
...Moreover, as the work's toothy rhythms and bracing counterpoints— plus hints on how to count them—have been steadily passed down from old corps members to new, its essence has re-mainednotonlyintactbutripe...
...she seems magnetized to a limited area by her own fantasy...
...put them in Robin Wagner's conservatory and they would look like the fruits of Promet hean dabbling...
...Strangely out of repertory for 20 years, it received a loving restoration this season that quite lived up to Lincoln Kirstein's description of the original production in a letter to Stravinsky: "like a garden of flowers smothered in butterflies...
...He understands what drives Nichols, and both supports and undermines her...
...Poulenc continues Martins' exploration of the nomenclature of desire, the destiny of couples, begun in Schuber-tiad...
...With him she appears subdued, caught in a dream state, an afterglow...
...Even her leaps take on an intonation of stasis (a grand jete, after all, is an airborne, hyperattenuated fourth...
...Gounod s prettiness recalls the small world (and the old world) of the Paris Opera, for which Balanchine created Symphony in Cin 1947 to Bizet's First Symphony, modeled on Gounod's SymphonyNo...
...the steps belong to ballet's classic cavalier, all sincerity and charm (at one point he does a hopscotch...
...It's a chilly day: Arms pulled in and fingers splayed, the dancers are wind in winter branches...
...There is nothing fuzzy about it, and nothing arbitrary either—if you keep an eye on what is being shown, not told...
...Nichols looks less her usual self dancing alongside Proia, but more erotically satisfied...
...Proia is a magnetic force, too...
...In Poulenc it is a motif for the ballerina's fettered psyche...
...Yet beneath the modernist skin this may be Balanchine's most symmetrical effort—no small claim considering that the discreetly symmetrical moorings marking practically all of his ballets are what give his asymmetries their passion...
...Poulenc forces her to deepen her approach, possibly another reason the performance is so moving...
...All the roads lead the ballerina back to herself...
...Perhaps this explains his use of three dancers instead of two, peripheral as d'Amboise's activity ultimately is...
...Lit in silhouette, they are a shelf of music-box ballerinas come to life—mediating between the principals and the corps...
...Hence the reservoirs in Poulenc Sonata, that sense of backwash amid flooding romance...
...The ballerina's variations have a school-figure primness and repetition: She even has to do pirouettes in both directions...
...While architectural formality reigns, there is interplay between the set's adi-mensionality and the corps' sculptural vitality...
...Here the echo implies Nichols' dual nature: She is the dreamer and she may also be the dream...
...Watching them reminded me that toward the end of Agon the corps dances into a pattern that could be a cathedral with buttresses...
...If at first glance the role is reminiscent of an emotionally torn Antony Tudor heroine, Martins has not taken that direction...
...That triangular fourth position (whose three points are head, foot and foot) is like a piece of genetic code that finds itself outwardly manifested in the ballet's romantic triangle...
...Gravity hangs in the balance...
...Agon" means "The Contest," and its atmosphere does suggest challenge and suspense...
...Coming after Agon, Gounod Symphony read like a serene directive from Balanchine: In his cultivated garden the Agons would not be possible without the Gou-nods...
...Her arm draped over her head suggests interior life: It is a wilted high-fifth, reminiscent of Nijinsky's curled arm in the photo-stills from Michel Fokine's Spectre de la Rose, where the dancer was a young girl's dream...
...The small of her back, smaller and located lower than most dancers', may be the secret to her power...
...he gives us an emotional extract...
...Their final pas de deux contains a series of wonderfully wrought images —Nichols pulling ornamentally down off Proia's arm, or arched away from his body like a distended spinnaker sail...
...The minute he steps on stage with that fine carriage and lean, careful directness, his elegance is menacing— the stuff of a Svengali...
...The composition is extremely tight...
...Whereas the fifth position, with its tight criss-crossed feet, is one of stability, beginnings and endings, the fourth is tricky and amorphous—technically the hips are pinioned, yet also disengaged...
...or that it consists of halves, quarters and eighths...
...Martins locates a more organic expression in his application of ballet's fourth position—one foot planted ahead of the dancer, the other behind, so that the legs bridge space while the body rides above...
...their pas de deux is lightly clipped, almost curt, with those icily academic, cal-iper-stiff sissonnes onto pointe...
...Then he cradles her head on his arm, and she readjusts the arm around her neck to have it frame and collar her, much as she collared herself earlier...
...Maria Calegari, however, was dazzling...
...The role never allows the dancer to take over, and Merrill Ashley didn't try...
...The rhythms simply deflect you away from the fact that we are always near the familiar...
...She and Sean Lavery, her ardent partner, gave their pas de deux a special raptness, as if marking the Henry Jamesian point where social or in this case, balletic, convention becomes conviction...
...She is extremely high-chested, yet it is her spine, curving from neck to coccyx in a long Diana's-bow, that gives her that look of incipient flight...
...Instead, it is studded with poses keyed to the sharp intakes and sudden stops of Stravinsky' s music, lucid non sequiturs that look salutary and heroic even as they are separately sculpted...
...The pas de deux builds out of these deliberate movements, welling around the arranging of space between the two...
...He may represent the proper partner for Nichols...
...In many ways, these moments are the pearl Balanchine once thought of putting into his evening-length Jewels...
...With Poulenc Martins seems to have set himself a test in choreographic discipline, in the sense that his shapes accumulate their meaning through repetition...
...Every time Mel Tomlinson slaps himself flat on the floor, arm up at a right angle to support Heather Watts in a precarious arabesque onpointe, wearestartled...
...Martins is striving as well to take the fullest advantage of his dancers' individual qualities, and he travels miles with Nichols' softness and strength...
...Indeed, this ballet belongs to the corps as much as Agon does...
...Agon's creatures are powerful and hybrid...
...The ballet does have a climax, but it certainly does not indicate a choice: D'Amboise bursts toward Nichols and Proia and the three break, scattershot, into odd directions...
...When Nichols drapes her outstretched arms over d'Amboise's, also outstretched, their wingspan almost doubles—it's the epiphanal moment of a love duet, but it fades at high C. The two are so much alike there is no chemistry...
...The NYCB's latest performances of Agon were consistent, if a bit distracted...
...The end finds Nichols standing where she first emerged, her face buried in her hands...
...A score conjuring up snapping blinds and turning doorknobs is matched by choreography that is all curiosity...
...The quintessential abstract ballet is a Baroque court dance dressed in wolves' clothes: Modern angles stem off classical arches that grew historically from the court patterns...
...She builds her castle in the crook of his arm...
...If Gounod's symmetries are less enigmatic, they are nevertheless enchanting, set out again and again to dissolve like crystals in water...
...His dances are fierce in their high energy, and also not very complex...
...Critics wrote that the ballet lacked heart, that they couldn't see any dramatic continuity...
...Nichols' role in Liebeslieder Walzer, for which she has received lavish praise, thematically pins her more to earth as well...
...An ability to reawaken that energy at every performance is in large part what makes this ballet outstanding—or, to put it another way, "dance-proof...
...Whatever, Martins has achieved a small but significant triumph, an experiment that has grown willfully over the lip of the petri dish into the colder, hungrier mouth of the world...
...Christopher d'Amboise comes to the stage in bounding allegro...
...Gounod Symphony, choreographed by Balanchine right after the landmark Agon, seems quaint in comparison, almost reactionary...
...Once a Byronically seductive Rothbart in the Boston Ballet's production of Swan Lake, he brings the same sort of power to this role...
...1. The'47 dance was initially titled Le Palais de cristal, and Robin Wagner's new set for Gounod— an ornate greenhouse inspired by the 19th century's crystal palaces—underlines the connection...
...The ballerina and her cavalier, though, are placed apart from both...
...One of Agon's greatest strengths is that you can see it repeatedly without noticing that every right has a left, every forward a backward...
...In adagio Nichols has a creamy definition...
...Still, overall Pou-lenc is as beautifully tempered and original as the stopwatch tableaux in Agon...
...A strange species has again turned up on the ancient vine...
...Poulenc begins with Kyra Nichols spotlighted stage back and center, dressed simply in white...
...In the squares, diamonds and v-shapes dominating the stage, the 20 corps girls and the 10 men they shared were flying, or floral, buttresses to Ashley and La-very's tender scholasticism...
...In one instance he releases her into the air only to just as quickly pluck her back...
...They look chastened in their frosty white...
...Against Poulenc's music, which is so choppy, turbulent and gruffly expressive that it could be rolling up from inside a canyon, the opening movement seems quiet...
...The gentle curve under her ribs rhymes lyrically with the quick of her back, so that even dancing dynamically she comes on like a cumu-lous cloud, all palpable luster...
...Pearls were eventually vetoed from Jewels for being "nonreflective" and "too close to flesh color," reasons that perfectly describe the modest luster of the Gounod cameo...
...Indeed, you could see the ballet's nocturnal quality, the starless, private night lighting of the stage, as a sign that it wants to hide itself from nature...
...The work, albeit neither a narrative nor comfortingly Balanchinian, is an interesting step in Martins' ongoing development of an esthetic voice...
...The eeriest, though, has Nichols standing between Proia's arms, her back to him, slowly pressing her face up into his cupped hands, then walking through the mask as if molting her own shadow...
...Because he uses the balletic vocabulary more literally, and thus more nakedly, than he has in the past, the phrases may appear obtuse to some or, in this apparently dramatic context, unfocused...
Vol. 68 • March 1985 • No. 3
