On Dance
JACOBS, LAURA A.
On Dance LETDOWN AT LINCOLN CENTER BY LAURA A. JACOBS Oa balmy summer night Lincoln Center is a charmed place. Crowds gather, chatting excitedly, then disperse into the theaters. The odd...
...And why in heaven's name those loony soap bubbles cascading down at the end of the dance...
...To this basic gray Kyliân adds a modernist gravity, and an array of psychological gestures for relevance...
...He treats it as some sort of universal language, convenient but too dull to explore...
...Their silky arms and backs and powerful heels lend a refined force to Kyliân's waves of inchoate feeling...
...Buckets of money had to have been spent on this production, and they were simply wasted...
...It is also puzzling: Why Mozart...
...What bothered me about the Bolshoi I will take up in my next column...
...The series begins as farce of some wit...
...Jiri Kyliân, the Czech artistic director of the Netherlands Dance Theater, is not only wrongheaded, his vision seems infected with misogyny...
...All ends happily when Cinderella signs a star's contract at the movie studio and her love duet with the matinee idol is filmed for posterity...
...Whatever the answers, the scene is an absurdity that reveals more of Nureyev than of Cinderella...
...Ideas can't develop because step-phrases are so narrowly imagined...
...A symbol of the performing arts' communal nature, its constancy is soothing, a cleansing rite...
...No matter...
...Setting the ballet in Hollywood instantly enlarges the contrast between Cinderella's innocence and society's corrupting influence...
...The mechanics of the story do not get damaged in the transplanting, though Nureyev is forced to explain plot transactions that are not in the domain of dance—some of them, anyway: We never do find out why, at one point, the movie producer stumbles hurt into Cinderella's sad bungalow...
...His women are constantly getting pushed to the floor, dragged through the air and manipulated into distraught cat's cradles...
...Dancers come on stage powdered, bewigged and arrayed in various states of 18th-century undress—muslin corsets, skirts, culottes, etc...
...or possibly the shadow of Freud confronts him at every turn...
...What Nureyev really needs, has always needed, is an editor...
...One wonders whether they ever balk at what he asks them to do...
...Neither structure helps shape a dance space...
...Neither possibility could excuse lapses in taste masquerading as the bald observations of an enfant terrible...
...Nureyev's Cinderella, discovering happiness in a Hollywood career and a love affair, is catapulted into hyperreality...
...The New York Times, that engineof cultural commerce, churned out delighted advance copy like an arm of the Met's PR department...
...The matinee idol and his minions sport riding breeches, a cute idea that ought to have been vetoed immediately for distorting the body line...
...It's like a descent into the void—and I can't help thinking that's where this Cinderella ends up...
...Kyliân's dynamics can be sharp and edgy on the surface, as in his choreography for Igor Stravinsky's Svadebka ("The Wedding"), yet they read as amorphous, lumpy...
...The men rely on the women, it appears, for dread intimacy as well as sport...
...they move with an amplitude that leaves no doubt we are watching adults at work...
...His version of the fairy tale is set in 1930s Hollywood...
...For the dance-lover, though, the season has been a letdown...
...Shame, pain and fleeting love are all his dancers can wrest from the world...
...Kyliân tries to paint Guernica...
...Is she merely amusing herself, or expressing her dreams...
...In Act I when Cinderella is left alone she dresses in her father's clothes and spats, and performs a Charlie Chaplin routine, followed by a Fred Astaire number with a hat rack...
...There is, however, a shift in the story's moral...
...I think Kyliân meant them to be seen as victims of 20th-century atrocities, crowding at the borders of consciousness...
...The Punch-and-Judy pratfalls and skirt-grabbing have a distinctly Tharpian flavor, its lack of attention to musical detail notwithstanding...
...Steps fall into a familiar "flow" that renders them all, from arabesque to jeté, a muddy approximation...
...Moving in slow motion, these dancers doff clothes or kneel to earthen tasks...
...And wouldn't one of these allusions be enough...
...But one moment does stick: Cinderella descends a wide art nouveau staircase stepping on the backs of tuxedoed men, as yellow camera flashes explode in the dusky light around her...
...I found it hard to care about this heroine or her prince, despite the fine performances by Isabelle Guérin and Patrick Dupond...
...a Degas pastel would have been more appropriate...
...For all the wrongheadedness Nureyev displays in Cinderella, it can at least be said that his choreography is harmless...
...The Netherlands' dancers are crafty and luscious...
...Unfortunately, it soon turns out that this frolicsome affair is merely one part of a stiff allegory...
...Irrespective of what's happening inside, the fountain, incandescent in the growing darkness, maintains its own rhythms of crescendo and decrescendo...
...That may be due to a lack of rhythmic complexity: Kyliân harnesses his dancers to the music's most obvious beats, and can't see a phrase until it is past him...
...At the conclusion of the first Mozart dance, and in the interludes between the remaining dances, a second set of figures encroaches from the stage's edge, accompanied by a bilious electronic growl from the orchestra pit...
...While Nureyev obviously did not have the self-effacing Guérin in mind when he choreographed the part of Cinderella—the rond dejambesbased solos are more suited to the swirling decorative line of company member Sylvie Guillem—she manages to instill a melancholy beauty into the steps...
...They swoon, romp and goose one another in bawdy counterpoint to Mozart's exquisitely mannered though playful melodies...
...While latecomers hurry across the plaza, others remain settled on the edge of the circular fountain in the center, as though the energy and expectation around them were the featured event of the evening...
...The women are decked out mostly in chiffon, balletic enough yet unbecoming—and hardly reminiscent of the A and H lines of '30s fashion...
...Although long program notes attest to the conceptual grounds of his work, the dances themselves are full of outlandish touches that imply everything and say nothing...
...The sets loom large and are either overly literal, as with the studio facade flanked by a gigantic Betty Grable cutout, or painfully symbolic, as in the case of the monstrous time machine, sealer of all our fates, that sits static in the background...
...Act II is set in a studio where different pieces are being filmed—a farcical costume drama, the Keystone Kops, King Kong eating nati ve girls (the huge stuffed ape hung from wires particularly enchanted the audience...
...Nureyev, it seems, meant his Cinderella to be at once a uniquely American vision of success and an homageto Hollywood...
...There was a week of the Paris Opera Ballet's glitzy production of Cinderella, a week of the groundstomping Netherlands Dance Theater and three weeks of the Bolshoi Ballet— with ticket prices skyrocketing...
...Perhaps Kyliân has been unduly influenced by the success of Pina Bausch, Germany's doyenne of fear and loathing...
...I hedge here because it is hard to tell exactly what he is up to from his dance construction...
...Cinderella, a three-hour-plus ballet conceived and choreographed by Rudolf Nureyev for the Paris Opera Ballet, was so bulging with extraneous ideas and confused designs that it became an entertainment of fearful wondering: "What won't he do next...
...Costumes by Hanae Mori, which should have been good, are awful...
...Some critics saw them as peasants who toil while the aristocracy parties...
...This summer, especially, scheduling at the Met has been something on the order of Barnum and Bailey...
...Too bad it can't wash away all the hype that surrounds dance...
...The odd ticket is passionately sought from any of a few regulars who seem to make their living this way...
...The worst we saw from him was Six Dances to the music of Mozart...
...The original Cinderella finds fulfillment in a good marriage and completion within society...
...This rather heavy-handed point is gratuitous at best...
...With his handsome face and concentrated presence, Dupond commands attention even as he bends classicism to his own interests...
...A more serious problem is his misuse of classical ballet...
...The ballet inside this mess might still have emerged if Sergei Prokofiev's problematic score had been trimmed, instead of used in its entirety...
...Why these particular eras yoked together...
...Cinderella's stepsisters have been turned into aspiring starlets, the stepmother is a pushy stage mom, the fairy godmother is a movie producer with magical powers, and the prince is a matinee idol...
...An idea first grasped in childhood and warmed in our souls gets confused, grows cold...
Vol. 70 • July 1987 • No. 10
