Reflections on Mortality
JACOBS, LAURA A.
On Dance REFLECTIONS ON MORTALITY BY LAURA A. JACOBS Choreographer Jerome Robbins' position at the New York City Ballet (NYCB) has been described as that of "a prince with his own...
...One wonders what the company's upcoming American Music Festival portends, considering that most of the 20 works commissioned for it are from contemporary choreographers who stand outside classical ballet...
...Robbins sardonically lifts their steps from the toy soldiers' battle in The Nutcracker, giving us to understand how a vivid fantasy can become horribly real...
...In the more romantic, languorous songs the choreography remains all too handsomely inside conventional boundaries of meter and meaning...
...True, Robbins has responded to a simple song with simplicity, but it is simplicity of an entirely literal sort that misses the transition Ives makes within "The See'r" from the concrete to the abstract...
...A large wooden grid, like an unpapered Oriental panel, is frequently positioned scrim-like in front of the stage...
...As self-designated chronicler of seachanges at the City Ballet, perhaps Robbins is just doing his job...
...Technology in its many forms is central to his vision-not as a means for embellishing expression, as in the work of Laurie Anderson, but as structure...
...for Suzanne Farrell in 1985, for instance, it was clear that her retirement was approaching...
...The See'r," a song about time's spiral (it ends with the repeated phrase "going by"), elicits a banal succession of leaps and turns in a circle...
...A severely arthritic hip was not only limiting her range and her strength in turn-out-one of Farrell's glories-it was causing her daily agony...
...In tribute to Duell, Robbins choreographed Quiet City in the spring of 1986...
...This pocket story-ballet has a morbid beauty that seduces in the manner of La Valse...
...But at least it allows a seeming glimpse of starry sky above its second story...
...The libretto is worthy of Edgar Allan Poe: Poet goes to masked ball...
...Several early songs depicting the frolics of three little girls have a flickering, butterfly-wing delicacy and charm...
...The Sleepwalker, for example, evades men airily, as a sylphid would...
...On Dance REFLECTIONS ON MORTALITY BY LAURA A. JACOBS Choreographer Jerome Robbins' position at the New York City Ballet (NYCB) has been described as that of "a prince with his own territory within the company...
...There's something aching in her face, something urgent in her step...
...A gnomish old man acts as a kind of Drosselmeyer to the historical evocations that Chong's 10-member Fiji Company puts before us...
...Balanchine's death in 1983, Suzanne Farrell's retirement, Duell's tragic suicide, the many deaths from AIDS of young men in the arts in New York-all these thoughts prick our consciousness when watching Ives, Songs...
...inwardly, though, it expresses the composer's awareness of his own mortality...
...Chong is here taking a break from his subtler explorations to remind us that all is vanity...
...The NYCB is changing, perhaps inevitably...
...When she enters from under the arch, we feel it as a rush of air from the crypt...
...Through it we see a heretic's suicide, a Northern Renaissance painting, and encapsulations of the conquest of the Aztec empire, World War I and the rise of Hitler's Germany...
...By extension, In Memory Of...
...It makes you think that Balanchine must have read Freud...
...flirts with host's mistress...
...The graveyard chill of the steps, the absinthe-edge on the music and Saland's pale green dress together conjure up the same eerie sentiment as Byron's "glow-worm in the grass...
...Television sets flank the stage, each surrounded by incense and candles, as if to say that God is in the pixels...
...The work was set to Berg's Violin Concerto, whose program ostensibly concerns the death of the young Manon Gropius...
...is killed by host for his liberties, and then spirited away by said sleepwalker, to amazement of all...
...Robbins' choreography is most effective when following an overtly narrative line-the musical-theater mode...
...He putters around a table cluttered with odd objects, and reacts in various languages to what happens on stage...
...Indeed, there is an unmistakably supernatural tone to this duet...
...it's an acerbic tour de force...
...An NYCB ending not much lamented is that of the loudly decried backdrop to the redesigned and recostumed La Sonnambula-it developed a tear down the middle last summer and had to be replaced...
...The personal kingdom of George Balanchine, once guarded by him and by Robbins, its prince, is lowering its drawbridge...
...Saland, physically pliant, seems entranced by some outer force...
...At one point, for instance, after the women sing "The White Cuffs of Dover," the men file on stage and then begin to move, slowly, like chess pieces (the floor is a checkerboard...
...The Festival, a bold and controversial innovation on the part of company artistic director Peter Martins, reportedly was opposed by Robbins...
...This January's MarayaActs of Nature in Geological Time took on the history of civilization, presenting it as a series of cataclysmic imperatives: natural, biological and social...
...Robert La Fosse-fresh from American Ballet Theater-danced the lead role, virtually composed of excerpts from the angel's dances in In Memory Of...
...Joseph Duell was Farrell's escort, the one who gave her over to death...
...This is avant-garde dancing à la Twyla Tharp or Anna Teresa de Keersmaeker, but it is also a stunning evocation of totalitarian ideologies...
...sees boys turning into soldiers and hastening eagerly to their graves...
...her body is along for the psychological ride...
...In Balanchine's hands, however, this image is handled more powerfully and suggestively than it is in La Sylphide...
...Robbins' ballet came complete with a figure of death and a flood of empyrean light from the wings that illuminated the way to the end of the tunnel...
...Despite its scope, Maraya is not major Chong-it has a pedantic strain and at times suffers from vagueness...
...Kistler completes these phrases not with an elegant finish but with a vertiginous lurch...
...Each time an era ends, a red neon tube sweeps sideways across the stage like the vertical pointer on a radio...
...We may not have seen so voluptuous a sexual tableau as the PoetSleepwalker pas de deux since Picasso's drawings of sleeping women with Minotaurs looming over them...
...the two realms fought for man's soul...
...Ives, Songs is a masterly contemplation of time's passage, in a league with Antony Tudor's The Leaves Are Fading...
...The ballet ends with "Elégie...
...could be read as an elegy on the passing of a great ballerina...
...Only "from the 'Incantation'" (Byron's verse), a duet danced by Stephanie Saland and Jeppe Mydtskov, breaks into originality...
...The ball is infected with something of Poe's "supreme madness," and the plot moves along smartly, driven by passionate responses to violent secrets...
...But when Ives' music turns the comer, growing both elusive and wise, Robbins fails to follow...
...This strikes precisely the right note for Ives' music, which is about stoic exteriors, in contrast to Berg's ever-deepening interiors...
...The breath of purifying night air is a relief from the corruption being depicted on stage...
...In the pas de deux the Poet tests the Sleepwalker's acquiescence by propelling her in a series of swirling trajectories...
...Mydtskov is stern, angular and controlling...
...A lone nondancing gentleman wanders through the ensemble-these are his visions...
...The grids and graphs and electronic symbols that order modern life are Chong's poetic point of departure...
...Yet if his stages, built around mundane office objects and mechanical bits, can seem cold and antiromantic, Chong's narratives almost always have mystical or philosophical textures...
...dances with mysterious sleepwalker...
...Where Angels was hopeful and expansive, Maraya is pessimistic and nononsense...
...Soon all are consumed in a dance of intricately syncopated marching, tracing out cross-and-reverse patterns with interpolated leaps and low-laying Samurai poses...
...Multimedia artist Ping Chong has never shunned the part of our world that is metallic, bureaucratic, inanimate...
...But these faults are excusable...
...Last year at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Chong's Angels of Swedenborg pitted a lushly anthropomorphized netherworld against a computer-age landscape...
...Baritone Timothy Nolen sings the 18 songs Robbins has choreographed, accompanied by Gordon Boelzner on the piano...
...Such a reverie may seem premature for Robbins, still very much in his prime, yet his mood has been tinged with loss and gloom for several seasons now...
...Kistler's Sleepwalker is a portrait of innocence overwhelmed...
...The work takes a long, sad look back...
...Chong tells his story of wiped-out civilizations in '80s shorthand...
...He Is There...
...Kistler's long, honey-blond hair, which has become a kinetic part of her dancing, here drapes down her back like drowned Ophelia's-it could line her coffin...
...Even though all seems well at NYCB, a sense of ending is in the air...
...Later, standing over the dead Poet, a physical wave of horrified desire bends her round in a motion that recalls the aged Siren's breastbeating in The Prodigal Son...
...The first thing we see when the curtain goes up is David Mitchell's fine backdrop, a shadowy, weathered wash of rust and verdigris-the colors of the copper trim on New England homes...
...He lets the wind have the last word...
...Farrell played herself...
...La Sonnambula was choreographed by Balanchine in 1946 to Vittorio Rieti's orchestration of themes from Vincenzo Bellini's opera of the same name...
...Robbins' new ballet, Ives, Songs, shows the prince pressing flowers from his fields and gardens into a leatherbound book...
...A year later this talented dancer, one of NYCB's finest principals, took his own life...
...After a bland beginning as the Sleepwalker last winter, Darci Kistler has found her way, frighteningly...
...Romantic conceits are toyed with throughout...
...When hechoreographed In Memory Of...
...Beginning with "The Children's Hour," the scene changes from youth to adulthood to wistful old age...
...Ives, Songs, for all its sombemess and its studied, preoccupied temperament, could slide onto the shelf devoted to Americana like Our Town and Spoon River Anthology...
...The new one, though not so cold as its predecessor, is still unsatisfactory, too townish and bourgeois...
Vol. 71 • March 1988 • No. 4
