On Dance
JACOBS, LAURA A.
On Dance PATTERNS FROM THE PAST BY LAURA A. JACOBS Peter Martins' latest work for the New York City Ballet, Songs of theAu-vergne, is not as dense or sharply projected as last year's Poulenc...
...The winds of an era course through it, and they howl imperceptibly throughout the ensuing movements, whipping up to a gypsy finale in the fourth movement, "Rondo alia Zingarese...
...She will have to find a new place to dance...
...You never know what she is thinking...
...Watts can pull it off technically because she's "placed" like a rock, yet such nonchalance robs her dancing of interest and, of course, spontaneity...
...Both are darting, crystalline...
...With the 20th century will come reduction, refraction, space compartmentalization, time dissection...
...In a very real sense, the "tomboy'' in her takes us where the ballerina often won't...
...As in a dija vu, he may also have envisioned the embers of his Imperial Russia...
...Maria Calegari and Kyra Nichols both danced the "Allegro" and were equally sure...
...Martins has made Watts look lovely in Songs, but after a strong start that plays to her natural inclinations he has not extended her sufficiently...
...The ballerina's role in the "Allegro" strikes me as similar to the Dewdrop in Nutcracker's "Waltz of the Flowers...
...Nonetheless, one moment near the end of the production lingers: All the dancers are on stage, the colors are gorgeous, the steps are animated and formal in a slapdash way, and the whole ballet seems suddenly to swell...
...And while she can bend around and into almost any role, she does not always care to get a grip...
...The childrens' relation to the adults remains blurred and their presence symbolic...
...The music sounds as if it were trying to speed itself up...
...whisked up and swirling high, she is a satin ribbon in the breeze...
...But he saves the best for the heroine, Heather Watts...
...The more glamorous of the two, her dancing was innervated and restrained: fire disguised as ice...
...They were sung opening night by Frederica von Stade, and in subsequent performances by Del-Louise Moyer...
...Looking harder, one sees the choreography propelling itself in the same way...
...The dancers sweep from pose to pose, saplings swayed by a rising wind...
...It floats along...
...Whatever the case, her mixture of resilient edges and endless pliancy distinguishes her from everyone else in the company...
...and the movement's compulsive repetitions read like a doomed attempt to get events back on track...
...Songs, though, is stripped of bourgeois comforts and plot...
...both are elemental in their drive, yet have a kind of hothouse charm...
...The parental gesturing is reminiscent of the intimate atmosphere of The Sutcracker, Balan-chine's paean to the security of home...
...Never a popular ballet, Brahms (set to Arnold Schoenberg's orchestrations of the 19th-century composer's First Piano Quartet in G minor, Opus25) has a reputation for hauteur...
...In Tchaikovsky Pas de Deux, she virtually sleepwalks...
...But the Allegro melody is haunting, and Schoenberg has instilled it with an insistent forward pulse that begins to catch...
...Both the elation of young love and the poignancy of ever-loosening innocence are captured in these duets...
...Their pas de deux are curvaceous and buoyant...
...In contrast to their etched and edited outlines, Songs is a water-color—transparent, soft, exuding a sort of built-in nostalgia...
...She and her partner, the handsome Jock Soto, seem to be falling friskily in love...
...The choreography allows her no room for fantasy...
...They lend a touch of naturalism to this "frontier" work (which kept reminding me of an Agnes de Mille Western) and give roundness to its quaint "life goes on" theme...
...A tomboy-ish lilllegirl dressed in blueisoutcast, teased by her contemporaries during their energetic dance...
...As one of four permutations of Clara Schumann (the feisty kittenish one) in Robert Schu-mann'sDavidsbundlertanze, the knowledge that she is a part of something greater both thrills andsobers her...
...The lighting moves between shadowy pink-golds and greys, and the mood is remotely elegiac...
...Blossoming nervously, it casts a different spell altogether...
...The traditional archway motif that occurs throughout the piece reappears most strikingly at the end of the movement: The dancers rush in turn under arches formed by the womens' port de bras...
...Songs calls to mind the other "family" ballets in the repertory...
...Moreover, the last thing one wants from Watts is preciousness, and the ballet brings her in dangerously close to it...
...It is set to 13 folk songs from the Auvergne region of France, orchestrated by Marie-Joseph Canteloube and rendered in the Celtic/ Latin idiom known as langued'oc...
...The shapes and patterns in the "Allegro" summon up the dream world in which 19th-century ballet corps settled themselves...
...It is a maypole dance without the maypole...
...At the same time, she is one of NYCB's most enigmatic performers...
...In A Midsummer Night's Dream "Wedding Pas de Deux," a dance of quiet and concentrated delicacy, Watts is all there, knitting phrase to phrase as if a dropped loop would mean loss of life...
...They move at will amid their corps...
...That is ballet...
...She is an astringent, gutsy dancer, the sort who can't resist a dare...
...Like a barren field that manages to retain the magic of a just-departed traveling carnival, Songs conjures itself up...
...Only Vaes' backdrop reminds us of the potential violence of rustic life...
...Painted on the backdrop is an image of Schloss Schoen-brunn, Vienna's Royal summer palace...
...As always, Martins has fashioned some beguiling dances for the soloists, who include Nichol Hlinka, Lauren Hauser and Leslie Roy...
...On the contrary, he has her become practically starry eyed over the children to no apparent purpose...
...Brahms is not merely one of Balanchine's more fascinating looks back to agilded age...
...Far from being featureless, the Brahms "Allegro" is eerily objective...
...The new set by David Mitchell is statuesque and dusky, an interior on the verge of obsolescence...
...When the principal dancer finally passes through we imagine the crumbling empire that she leaves behind...
...He was referring to the remnants of an era—of the Aus-tro-Hungarian monarchy...
...Where the Dewdrop is brazen in her liberty, though, it is the utter cultivation of the Brahms ballerina that frees her from the rest...
...What she seems to need are roles that permit her imagination to roam...
...Each grouping gathers and then disperses before the image can set...
...Performing strictly classical roles, Watts has a tendency to lay back...
...It was this stubborn, ungiving quality that blazed out of Martins' prismatic Calcium Lite Night...
...n its latest outing the New York City Ballet—following up on theLieb-eslieder Walzer and Gounod Symphony of recent seasons—also gave us its renovation of Balanchine'sBrahms-Schoen-berg Quartet, and an intriguing piece it is...
...Although audiences do not respond to Brahms as they do to the more accessible "big" ballets, its sheer physical grandeur wins them over...
...It is Sunset," mused Balanchine upon viewing Vienna during the company's early '70s tour there...
...The new ballet begins rather curiously...
...Her escape into modernity, however, is an ominous one...
...Colors range from cocoa to rose to silvered ivory, a palette that imbues the original costumes designed by Karinska as well as the background curtains by Mitchell that rearrange themselves for each of the four movements...
...But it is Calegari who holds in my memory...
...Although Songs hits its stride once the adults conic out, the unorthodox beginning, so simple and wide open, establishes the personality of the ballet...
...But Martins' use of children is ultimately intrusive, because their function is superficial...
...Hence the distance that exists between audience and ballet, our inability to "fix" on anything...
...The mood lifts wit h t he second song, when children en-Icr one by one, flouncing to the floor or standing patiently, listening...
...Searching for allusions in a gathering storm, one tends to miss the forest for the trees: The "Allegro" shows us history in flux...
...It is on the same large scale as Vienna Waltzes, Union Jack and Stars and Stripes (which always come last on a program), yet unlike IhemBrahmsis not aballet that humors...
...Watts' blue costume connects her to the lit tic girl in blue we have met...
...Out of the splendor and evacuation of Imperial Vienna, he has created a compelling dance parable: Ballet's expulsion from Eden...
...Against Alain Vaes' landscape of far-off hillocks and mountains, low clouds, and a single large, bare bush— all done in shades going from gray to lavender to peach (as are his costumes)— the mezzo-soprano walks across the stage singing gravely...
...Admittedly, it is hard to see beyond the traditional, somewhat monolithic choreographic arrangements...
...Nonetheless, it remains misunderstood...
...In their group dances and duets the adult dancers sweep on and off like temperate gusts and capricious currents...
...In her, purity and daring become one...
...Perhaps she is an older sister, or the child matured...
...In Concerto Barocco, for instance, she slurs her fifths and drops her arabesques...
...He has heard something flinty in the music and effectively offsets Martins' concentration on Canteloube's creamier rhythms, so that a tone of hardship underlies his pastel layers...
...he hasn't justified them choreographically...
...The women, in long tutus, gather in poses that suggest sculpted fountains, and they move repeatedly in a quadrille pattern, getting nowhere...
...The first movement, "Allegro," even this time around, has been called "featureless" and "vague" by critics who should know better...
...On Dance PATTERNS FROM THE PAST BY LAURA A. JACOBS Peter Martins' latest work for the New York City Ballet, Songs of theAu-vergne, is not as dense or sharply projected as last year's Poulenc Sonata or Eight More...
...But today'sNYCBdancers are restless, no longer secure in that realm...
...When Watts is engaged, we are too...
Vol. 69 • February 1986 • No. 4
