On Dance
JACOBS, LAURA
On Dance FROM THE USSR TO THE NYCB BY LAURA A. JACOBS Much depends on the length of a skirt. That is a lesson we learn over and over again when watching ethnic dance, where gender...
...Rubies" issexyandmodern, full of cheesecake and Jazz Age echoes...
...You hardly saw their feet...
...Trust has made her heavier in his arms and thrillingly larger than life—peering down into the lake she saw happiness for herself and nearly died of it...
...That is a lesson we learn over and over again when watching ethnic dance, where gender differentiations are as clear-cut as the costumes and dance-lovers have their moments as anthropologists...
...In the opening segment, "Emeralds," done to the music of Gabriel Fauré, they evoke a sense of misted abandon, of enchanted forests and bottomless pools and young women happy in the fragrance of solitude, until night falls...
...through their resounding courtly ideals and lush bridal imagery they re-create a world gone forever...
...With the Moiseyev it is images of battle and male camaraderie that are the foundation of the style...
...Maybe too far...
...Right now, Nichols lights the way at the NYCB...
...When they first appear on a darkened stage camouflaged in stiff, tent-like blankets, they seem to be a drifting landscape dimly perceptible in the night...
...In their beribboned, floor-length shifts and elaborate headpieces, they were serene highnesses treading lightly, doing nothing to jostle the illusion of grace, youth, beauty...
...Gone With The Wind is next on the bill at Radio City Music Hall...
...Lauren Hauser is pretty enough, but she doesn't have the glittering epaulement, or the right spirit...
...Rubies" lacked fire with Heather Watts and Jock Soto as the leads...
...it is all angles, classical ballet akimbo...
...Its athleticism, of course, is an attraction, and so is its accessibility...
...They made one think of The Stepford Wives...
...They take measured heel-to-theground steps to move here or there, but in moments of elation they bolt upward to the sky, skirts hoisted and flapping...
...We know this floating, moving-on-casters step from the Georgians, who have it performed by the women, and for hypnotic unreality it is equal to anything by Robert Wilson...
...While Darci Kistler has been giving radiant, if erratic, performances of "Diamonds," the ballet is currently the domain of Kyra Nichols...
...Injuries among principal NYCB dancers have made it difficult to fill the ballet's very specific roles...
...Jewels, George Balanchine's evening-length plotless ballet of 1967, came back into the repertory of the New York City Ballet (NYCB) last month...
...3 in D Major...
...They circled the stage throwing swords into the floor, making necklaces of thorns...
...Stephanie Saland is out, and thus unable to perform the first lead of "Emeralds," and Kyra Nichols is needed for "Diamonds" (because Merrill Ashley is out, too...
...The pictures are all in the steps...
...Her Raymonda Variations has lifled off into a realm of its own...
...Each manacles a wrist or ankle, and to Stravinsky's ominous strings (the Caprìccio for Piano and Orchestra) her free leg is pulled startlingly high in front of her eyes, or next to her ear, or behind her back, but always along the sheared diagonals—the croisé, écarté, effacé, épaulé—of ballet...
...As an encore, the company performed a Virginia reel, much appreciated by the happy audience...
...To see, for instance, the women of the dance company from Senegal swathed in great cottons that billow at the hips and nip in further down the leg, is to see them living in a horizontally bound, vertically infinite space...
...Then suddenly the ballet was alive again when Melinda Roy and Damien Woetzel took it on, and danced every step like two ail-Americans who couldn't get enough of each other...
...Especially the men, who can coil their torsos and shoot out like cannonballs, but just as often drag their legs in that classic Trepak step as though they were heavy, lazy oars...
...this scherzo is so gruff and wistful that one has the feeling Tchaikovsky composed it with icicles in his beard— and Swan Lake, to which he would turn next, on his mind...
...Once they shed their structures, the men are garbed for war...
...And what was it, after all, but a penché angled off into écart...
...They are in no hurry, however...
...She is almost alone in the task of holding up Balanchine's standards of musicality and technical aplomb...
...In Partisans, a tribute to the mountaineers who fought the Nazis, thecompany is at its zenith...
...Nichols goes much farther than Farrell in sounding out the allusions to Swan Lake...
...These days Jewels is suffering from the same lack of energy that mars other Balanchine ballets, except it just suffers less quietly...
...Aerial tricks and spins were performed with a giddy, unreasonable speed...
...In this country there is great sentimental attachment to the Moiseyev...
...Themen, by contrast, cover the ground in hunter's strides—there doesn't seem to be enough stage for them...
...Moiseyev's Polovtsian Dances was windy and rather flat, and the humor of Sanchakou, a Chinese pantomime, just didn't translate...
...The company has been making tours of America since Sol Hurok first brought it over in 1958, packing houses with people who otherwise wouldn't go to dance...
...The Moiseyev Dance Company, which played Radio City Music Hall for two weeks this January, really is male dominant, Soviet style...
...For Jewels is chock-full of gusting développés and pique steps chiseled to a bevel...
...Where Farrell's performance was one of ever-quickening secrecy, Nichols' "Diamonds" brushes tragedy and grows luminous...
...The Moiseyev dance an intricately syncopated, yet languorously savored phrase...
...Thus we witness a turn of fate, its imperceptibility and huge consequence...
...In freedom of the upper body and security of the legs, in having great strength and yet maintaining extreme delicacy, in sheer confidence, she has no peer...
...Without question she commands "Diamonds, " although she dances it so differently from Suzanne Farrell, the role's originator, that some have trouble accepting her...
...As thecavalier promenades her in this position she, invisibly, turns in his arms so that her body falls back and open (écarté), and her leg is a white arrow, piercing the heavens...
...they gallop down narrow paths and scale heights...
...The Moiseyev doesn't have the exotic quality of the Georgians, who seem hothouse flowers by comparison...
...Jewels can become a real yawn, though, if it is not performed with razor sharpness...
...To be sure, Balanchine enlarged the woman's perimeters of expression and eloquence (and he stripped the skirts off her), yet the idea of woman as source—of light, of love—resonates powerfully in both worlds...
...One of the unexpected benefits of the Georgians' visit was the opportunity it gave us to note the sensibility and iconography that surely imprinted themselves on George Balanchine, also a Georgian and proud of it...
...The men, meanwhile, were dervishes of activity, not just physical but poetic...
...Balanchine wants to show, quite literally, that such edges are what give ballet its dazzle and its depth, and this multichambered sequence, located almost dead in the center of the evening, pumps ruby-red blood through the entire ballet...
...These most violent troubadours could have stepped out of early Tolstoy...
...the women hold the men in thrall—they're the magnetic center of a force field...
...Though male virtuosity dominates among the Georgians, you couldn't quite say that it is a man's company...
...It was precisely choreographic events of this kind that won Balanchine his unique and devoted following...
...The men's eagerness for movement is in perfect sympathy with Moiseyev's gift for the evocative step and surprise staging...
...Nonetheless, her Russian princess looks and the imperiousness of her technique fit her to the role...
...The heart of the ballet may be the sequence in "Rubies" where four men make grabs at the second lead, the tall girl who primps like Marilyn Monroe...
...In fact, this dancer just keeps growing...
...Indeed, there is winter in the music (from the Symphony No...
...Certainly there is no moment like the one that begins with a step into a supported, deep-drinking penché arabesque...
...The Radio City program wasn't all winners...
...With so many principals injured, or working through problems, it is arguable that of the lot, only Nichols is giving complete performances—performances in which the steps are not changed or omitted, and which are not limited by fear or lack of imagination...
...Odette is palpably present in "Diamonds," but here, perhaps, it is a dream of Odette in a better ending: Von Rothbart's spell broken and her liberty restored...
...And it is beloved...
...It is a work that gives us the choreographer in all his guises: romantic, modernist, classicist, heir to Petipa, soulmate of Stravinsky...
...We know it as the raison d'être of classical ballet...
...When the Georgian State Dance Company came to New York's Mark Hellinger Theater last August it was surprising how little the women had to do—and fascinating...
...In these instances we felt the dance reverberate in our own lives, in our own experiences with trust and love...
...In the concluding "Diamonds," the stage is lit for clarity and these same steps cut like ice...
...The lead calls for eloquence in the upper body and a strong, vivid solipsism...
...Part of the problem is the casting...
...The women, wearing boots and skirts to the knee, dance right alongside the men and pull their weight, so to speak, but they are drabber...
...still, the delicacy of their ardor, the tender chivalry they exhibited when touching the women wasn't unfamiliar...
...Often long skirts mean home fires are burning, though home may be many decades in the past...
...A fitting tribute...
...They mugged their way through it...
...In all of Balanchine's choreography there may be no ballet that presents the ballerina in such grandeur, or buttressed by equally magisterial corps work...
...In The Road To Dance, a fivepart work illustrating the exercises of the Moiseyev company, those long diagonals across the stage seem to have been built out of 100 biting steps—the dancers, dressed in black practice clothes, could be little steam engines...
...They wheeled and hopped on the knuckles of their feet, a strange ability (and twist on female pointe-work) that made them look like talon-footed deities or hawks diving in for the kill...
...The sequence demonstrates the four planes of classical dance, and likens them to the cutting of a gemstone...
Vol. 72 • February 1989 • No. 3
