Blossom Time in New York
JACOBS, LAURA A.
On Dance BLOSSOM TIME IN NEW YORK BY LAURA A. JACOBS Dance in New York explodes in the spring. With so much going on— American Ballet Theatre (ABT) at the Met, New York City Ballet (NYCB)...
...With so much going on— American Ballet Theatre (ABT) at the Met, New York City Ballet (NYCB) at theState Theater, Paul Taylor at the City Center, and a host of smaller events around town—deciding on one's schedule can mean unending frustration...
...What I found, against all odds, was a stronger, more intelligent dancer, one who offered evidence of genuine artistic decision-making...
...As Columbine played upon the heartstrings of Pierrot, so Keats' pale knight was held in thrall by La Belle Dame...
...When he's "on" he performs deftly, bringing a dazzling finish to phrases that, especially en l'air, convey power and articulation...
...As the younger sister in Antony Tudor's Pillar of Fire, McKerrow was chillingly callow, an innocent touched by Pan...
...Last year the ABT added two provocative new items to its repertoire: The Mollino Room, Karole Armitage'spopmythological treatment of Mikhail Baryshnikov's life and art...
...Indeed, Look's convulsive leaps and lurching short-circuitry could easily be read as aborted versions of Sinatra's sharpedged ballroom steps...
...Symbiotic partner and potential prey, he is ultimately absorbed...
...But invention is beginning to appear...
...Fresh in the repertoire were Paul Taylor's elegiac Sunset (premiered by his companythree years ago), and Enough Said, a slick and somewhat vulgar battle-of-the-sexes piece by ABT dancer Clark Tippet...
...Past experiences inevitably influence present choices, and there is a temptation to skip certain programs in deference to old favorites...
...The music, by the contemporary French composer Pierre Henry, consists of the growls and groans of a rusty door, counterpointed by every imaginable kind of human breathing...
...The charge of misogyny that has been leveled against it is not very plausible: No anger is expressed, and little ambivalence...
...Musicality was not at issue: Browne somehow worked beneath what we heard, dancing to her own haunted rhythms...
...Browne's elevation (take-off) and ballon (landing) are on the plush side to begin with...
...Browne's Act II was one of repressed hysteria, a Pre-Raphaelite martrydom entirely in keeping with her Act I abandon...
...He always brings excitement to the stage— as much a tribute to his dashing good looks as to the ardor with which he treats a partner...
...The silk train, manipulated to a strict metrical count, is an awesome part of her, hiking up one moment, billowing the next...
...Covert drama marked her Aurora in The Sleeping Beauty...
...when she exaggerates this quality, as she often did, her phrasing suffers...
...Still, she managed to make ominous the moment the peasant Giselle starts to suspect Albrecht's deception...
...At center stage is the woman—the Door—wearing a wig and dressed in a white leotard trimmed like a trapeze artist's...
...After the Door, nothing...
...Peter Martins has brought the piece back anyway, with Maria Calegari and Bart Cook in the lead roles, and I found it one of the most fascinating performances in New York this season— not a major work, to be sure, butarichly symbolic footnote...
...She's the key to his universe, the first and possibly the last frame of reference...
...During one split leap he adjusted himself at the peak, further rotating his working leg through the air and opening—enlarging—the position so luminously that it made me gasp...
...That would have been pompous had she not elaborated it with great concentration...
...In Don Quixote he performed all the difficult steps with panache, including Baryshnikov's double tours with bent knee wiggles...
...The way he extends them into the music—he never cheats the music—demonstrates both lyricism and will...
...But Bocca is special...
...Balanchine once said, "I am a cloud in trousers...
...Bocca doesn't just save himself for the air: His arabesques are something a ballerina could be proud of...
...Her dancing became unmusical, her pirouettes labored...
...As she accepted a rose from each suitor, for instance, she withdrew her foot with a modesty that conjured up all the delicate solemnity of youth...
...I suspect, however, that most of the company's energy—and money—went into its new Sleeping Beauty and its redesigned, recostumed Giselle...
...And one wonders if Balanchine knew the art of Philip Guston, with its giant light bulbs and stymied men: The Sigh constantly makes a pulling motion above him, as if trying to turn on the light and end his nightmare...
...Perhaps a cloud is not so far from a Sigh...
...Balanchine made no bones about presenting her as an unmindful, devouring creature...
...Her Act I was erratic, a hearts-andflowers approach pushed hard...
...Look's menacing mirrors and retro satin dresses give it a dark, spangly quality that reminds me of Twyla Tharp's Nine Sinatra Songs, similarly costumed in '40s gowns and danced under a spinning mirrored nightclub globe...
...Pabst's psychosexual fable Pandora's Box...
...Diminutive and feisty, he appears at first glance to be one more virtuoso who is too short for the big girls...
...So it was with some trepidation that I went to her recent debut in the title role of Giselle...
...This year it seemed no less crafted, but it also struck me as thematically ahead of its time—less a political prediction than a vision of civilization brought low through the loss of its capacity for reflection...
...and David Gordon's beautifully wrought, comic Murder—not quite a ballet but a delightful vehicle for Baryshnikov anyway...
...His dancing is confined to a small strip downstage...
...She listens to a far-off horn, symbolic of his noble caste, and in the lift of her head and set of her mouth we see an uncharacteristic coldness...
...I did not see the NYCB premiere of Variations pour une Porte et un Soupir ("Variations for a Door and a Sigh") in 1974...
...Another parallel is suggested by the Door's wig, a Louise Brooks touch that recalls G.W...
...In his diary that year Lincoln Kirstein wrote: "It's time wasted to lament the brief life of Une Porte et un Soupir...
...Neither work appeared this season, nor did Baryshnikov dance...
...Amanda McKerrow, who also did the Giselle role for the first time this season, delivered a more Romantically correct Act I and a frighteningly lucid Act II...
...Not a bad combination...
...perhaps it doesn't deserve revival...
...One was Leslie Browne, a dancer I hadn't really bothered to see for a few seasons...
...Patrick Bissell worked hard this season, partnering more ballerinas than any other man in the company...
...New to ABT this season was Argentinian dancer Julio Bocca...
...Porte fits ostentatiously into the experimental wing of the Balanchine canon, alongside Episodes and Ivesiana...
...She bathes in it, an octopus in her inkcloud...
...She proceeded subtempo, arranging her limbs with almost opiated languor...
...Immaculate technique and nearly perfect placement give her dancing a strong and incorruptible center...
...She made much of steps others dance right over, reminding us of classicism's quiet power...
...This approach is risky when it comes to dancers and choreographers, though, and even to one's own tastes...
...It will not be revived...
...She moves through the ABT repertoire with intelligence, taste and keen musical intuition, if not yet with wit or might...
...The ABT's season provides an example, too, of the risks involved in basing one's expectations on the past...
...McKerrow is very young and still rather an enigma...
...A case in point...
...Is it straining to discover in Look a mocking of the unabashed nostalgia that informs a huge hit like Sinatra—the same nostalgia that makes affluent Americans "turn off the future as they turn into (with the help of Laura Ashley and Ralph Lauren) Edwardian lords and ladies...
...After starring in the movies The Turning Point and Nijinsky, she adopted an overly theatrical approach to her roles, one minute precious, the next hysterical...
...Yet Bissell, tall and wide through the pelvis, is not very pliant, and his technique is too open in the shoulders, too stiff in the hips...
...The late Balanchine pas de deux was taken by audiences and critics alike as an outrageous joke...
...If anything, we witness terrifying adoration, locating the pas de deux in a theatrical tradition that has changed costume through the centuries but not psychological dynamic...
...The Sigh's dragging, falling, sometimes floating motifs are connected to her as if by an invisible thread...
...This was a season for ABT dancers to grow and reassert themselves, and there were some wonderful surprises...
...In Roland Petit's ballet Le Jeune Homme et la Mort ("Death and the Young Man"), the Poet follows a mysterious woman— Death—into oblivion...
...He also said, "Ballet is woman...
...When Paul Taylor's Last Look premiered two years ago, I thought it a marvelously crafted cliché, yet another portentous equating of appetite with extinction...
...The Door is keyed taut to the music, her movements often stiff-jointed, dolllike, as is she were hinged at the waist and elbows...
...And there was a hint of horror in her Giselle Act II, where she started out soft, something newly hatched, and hardened fast into a rare and irretrievable object...
...A mammoth train of black silk fastened at her waist fills the entire stage with cavernous swags...
...Then suddenly she will loosen into threatening curves, or stalk around on pointe...
...To make something compelling out of so small a movement is the sign of a ballerina...
...The man—the Sigh—wears a smoky unitard...
...Porte is so calculated in its effects that you think it must be saying something...
...In Porte he floods the stage with woman, giving us ballerina as phantasmagoria, as glittering, nagging abstraction...
...Even in his best dancing one misses the shading and nuance afforded by a fluent epaulement and an elastic turnout...
Vol. 70 • June 1987 • No. 8
