On Dance
JACOBS, LAURA A.
On Dance PERILS OF A FESTIVAL BY LAURA A. JACOBS This spring's three-week-long American Music Festival (AMF) was the first major undertaking of its kind by the New York City Ballet since...
...The women in Behind the china dogs looked glamorous in black tights and leotards with a decolleté neckline...
...It wasn't simply unity that the AMF lacked, though, it was the depth and momentum that result from performers responding to the same musical sensibility over a prolonged period...
...The AMF was of an entirely different order...
...Jeppe Mydtskov was entangled in a sousaphone throughout...
...Part of the problem was the sheer scale of the proceedings...
...the point being that a lot of the French composer's work was not being regularly played, and it was danceable...
...sounds of dogs, bowling balls and two string quartets congealed into an abrasive mass...
...A Fool for You was accompanied by blues classics sung by Ray Charles...
...The Unanswered Question held together like Calder's circus, all quirks and hinges...
...It might have had some appeal if he had driven straight to his subject: a media-soaked world gone mad...
...The two Russian composers were company godfathers—Stravinsky in life, Tchaikovsky in spirit—and the festivals honoring them were clearly an expression of love...
...Both are atmospheric, with one difference: Whereas Balanchine sees Ives chasing shadows in Central Park, Feld hears him in America's heartland...
...Balanchine's works exist in its repertory, but in a different dimension: They are not wrong, nor are they quite right...
...This would have been a great year for an Ives festival—after all, he's our Stravinsky, not only in his willingness to explore polyrhythm and polytonality but in his rich use of materials from music's past...
...Space concluded, typically, with the dancers all spinning in place...
...Choreographically, the company gained little...
...Who ever imagined a dance by Laura Dean at NYCB...
...Feld turned the stage into a vast, flat landscape and transformed his dancers into strange sights and sounds...
...What used to be a family affair was this time a grab-bag...
...It's disheartening to see a choreographer with Martins' talent caught in this kind of tidepool...
...This was meant to give a sense of accumulation and climax where in reality there is none (Dean has been faking orgasm for years...
...Sexual aggression was toned down to ambivalence in The Waltz Project, a set of snazzy, manipulative duets...
...Robert LaFosse's Woodland Sketches, set to Edward MacDowell's 1896 composition of the same name, was a disciplined reverie for four courting couples...
...Robert Weiss' Archetypes was no doubt even more costly to stage, and a lot of people thought it was the worst piece they had ever seen at NYCB...
...Woven into it are the composer's restlessness and distraction, his magpie glints of tin and gold...
...A more radical departure was that the choreographers were chosen from outside the company, and in many instances from outside ballet itself...
...Once he decided to invite so many choreographers for example, he might have made the festival a one-composer event (did anyone need to see yet another Dean dance set to the music of Steve Reich...
...It's the person dancing the steps— that's what the choreography is...
...The same could easily be true some day of the NYCB...
...There are as many horizontal as vertical extremes, whence the dance's built-in contradiction: Visually it is structured as a collage, yet its dynamic is relentlessly linear...
...It was derivative, and happily so: LaFosse has absorbed much from Balanchine's Liebeslieder, where classical steps ripen into pure emotion...
...the bits and pieces are sensation enough...
...Though Martins didn't lift a finger to craft the dance, Watts and Soto in the title song were glad to lift theirs—they made cuckold signs behind each other's heads...
...Weiss assembled a big avant-garde ballet, marked by ambition and brevity—a likable combination...
...its curves and swells seemed a part of his own superb physique...
...Its scale is immense...
...Unfortunately, Archetypes was all hazy suggestion...
...Charmed, it seems, by his own skepticism about the ideals of ballet—desire as a species of divine anarchy, courtship as a stabilizing metaphor, love as the ultimate formality— Martins tries to make his disenchantment ours...
...I'm not interested in later on," hesaid...
...The audience found all this mindlessly enjoyable, harmlessly chic...
...Laura Dean's Space was the same tired thing she always does for ballet companies: Everyone on stage frantically repeated a handful of movement phrases that remind you of a row of falling dominoes...
...Many of the dances were duds, pure and simple...
...Heather Watts and Jock Soto danced it almost entirely holding hands, like two swallows connected by a thread...
...Cast-iron dogs stood in the rear...
...As the title implies, all the music was by U.S.-born composers, many of them hardly known...
...EliotFeld, in The Unanswered Question, employed the same music that Balanchine did in Ivesiana, a move some took to be prideful...
...Past festivals had revolved around a single composer: Stravinsky (twice), Tchaikovsky and Ravel...
...Ultimately the American Music Festival was troubling...
...PETER Martins' contributions to the festival were at best expedient, at worst marred by cynicism—in many guises...
...One wonders what will happen if a company born and bred to dance Balanchine's incomparable repertory continues to have its technique flattened and distorted by unsympathetic guest choreographers...
...Of the nine ballets he has choreographed, I can't remember one that ennobled anybody or had an ear tuned to classical resonances...
...How long before the dancers stop snapping back to the Balanchine form...
...Should the company lose the character Balanchine cultivated, be it through entropy or a Big Bang, we would be deprived of an original language...
...What is true is that the formal patterns alone, the steps without the style, do not deliver the whole ballet...
...That was not exactly the case with the Ravel Festival...
...Balanchine himself predicted that his company's style would change once he died, and seemed unconcerned about the prospect...
...Bert Cook's Into the Hopper, with William Bolcom as the collaborating composer, found favor with the spectators—they liked the paintings-cometo-life premise...
...Martins would have been wiser to narrow the field or impose some limits...
...The result was such a powerful evocation of Ives in its own right that it would be snobbish to balk at it...
...With Robbins entering a silent demurrer by contributing no new works to the AMF (he premiered his Ives, Songs before it began), it was left to fellow artistic director Peter Martins to orchestrate the event...
...the men were Bowery boys in vests and shorts...
...As for addressing the ever-present question of how to make classical dances in 1988, dogs was mum...
...To which Balanchine responded, "Why not Ravel...
...His chief interest is in deconstructing ballet's classical syntax: pulling steps out of context, stretching formulas, emphasizing routine motions...
...Rhapsody in Blue saw Lar Lubovich trying to mimic choreographically a musical canon, a stratagem that did not do Gershwin justice...
...In fact, the best works at the AMF were set to Ives...
...Black and White(ra.\xuc by Michael Torke) simplified the Stravinsky-Balanchine genre into dullness...
...He also took a curiously self-effacing view of his own contribution...
...All that would be left is Balanchine-in-translation...
...In terms of ticket sales and publicity, the Festival was a smashing success...
...William Forsythe's ballet Behind the china dogs was the surprise hit of the festival—"surprise" because Forsythe tends to be severe and overintellectual, not usually crowd-pleasing traits...
...I also spotted a dancehall harridan and a tinkerbell pedaling a Victorian tricycle...
...Previous festivals featured company insiders exclusively: Balanchine, Jerome Robbins, Peter Martins, John Taras, and whoever else at the State Theater showed interest...
...It was musically and scenically incoherent, however, and looked a bit too expensive to boot...
...Ladders fall from the ether, to which Mydtskov and his sousaphone later ascend (I've never seen the State Theater's flyspace loom so high...
...Phrasing, order, development— forget 'em, Forsythe seemed to be saying...
...Taylor, significantly, brought in his own company to perform Mix (although he did include NYCB's Peter Frame), so it is no addition to the repertory...
...On a stage whose darkness was breached only by a bit of with-it Palladium lighting, the eight dancers worked through muscular, rather heartless encounters, involving lots of legs zipping up behind ears...
...Richard Tanner's dance to John Cage, Sonatas and Interludes, was a glib but engaging study of partnering...
...Balanchine's brilliant, night-seeing Ivesiana was revived, as was Martins' Calcium Light Night, his first and some say best ballet...
...It had everyone wondering, "Why Ravel...
...On Dance PERILS OF A FESTIVAL BY LAURA A. JACOBS This spring's three-week-long American Music Festival (AMF) was the first major undertaking of its kind by the New York City Ballet since the death in April 1983 of George Balanchine, who founded the company 40 years ago...
...Martins gave us oblige without noblesse in Tea-Rose: Patricia McBride was made to look fat in pink and pathetically dependent on the kindness of young men...
...No, Feld's work isn't a dancey affair, but then neither really is Balanchine's...
...With all those different composers, all those choreographers, it was hard for the dancers to get a toehold...
...Jean-Pierre Bonnefoux's Five hardly heard its score, which had been commissioned from the Pulitzer Prize-winning Charles Wuorinen...
...He did so boldly, and casually...
...I suspect Taylor's peculiar blend of integrity and hubris was what made him decide he couldn't/wouldn't choreograph a "ballet" for the NYCB...
...But that statement cannot be taken at face value: Balanchine's oeuvre stands independently of any particular collection of dancers as a vehicle of genius...
...In ranzsjc;'e/(toacommissioned score by Ellen Taffe Zwilich) Kyra Nichols was ostensibly murdered by Lindsay Fischer, and the work was instantly dubbed a Robert Chambers-Jennifer Levin ballet...
...James Sewell was strapped to the circumference of a bass drum that rolls around endlessly, giving thislvesiancarnivalalow, murmuring pulse...
...It is a frightening work that grips you to its heart and then dissolves...
...Look at the American Ballet Theater...
...Valentina Koslov was a fantasy blond who came up through a trapdoor, Damian Woetzel a poet...
...The choreography, the steps— those don't mean a thing," he insisted...
...Expression is all in the modeling, and LaFosse displayed a subtle hand...
...There is mastery in this, and in the way Feld casts Ives as the gent behind the curtain, blowing smoke and booming riddles...
...Paul Taylor's new Danbury Mix made the most complex use of Ives' music—indeed of any music in the festival...
...He may be establishing himself as not-Balanchine, but his personal vision is coming into focus as not-attractive...
...The music was composed by Leslie Stuck on an "emulator...
Vol. 71 • June 1988 • No. 10
