On Dance
JACOBS, LAURA
On Dance BAD DAYS FOR BALLERINAS BY LAURA JACOBS The current fashion in the ballet world is naysaying. The mood is one of gloom. This isn't such an abnormal state of affairs, really. From...
...She has found a way to sift weight back into weightlessness through the molten shifts of her shoulder line and the decisive push of her epaulement, not to mention the mossy articulation of her feet...
...Actually, she took off on the last weekend of the winter season, when she danced a lush, transcendent Titamain Midsummer Night's Dream...
...Granted, her Act I was negligible, a little glib and goofy...
...She was a streak of blond enthusiasm and delight, spider-thin and starbent...
...From religion and politics to etiquette and art, the "good old days" have always been a hovering rebuke...
...Self-negating roles, regardless of how big, serve no one but the choreographer interested in negation...
...but her Act II was sheer transubstantiation...
...Today choreographers have trouble putting together a simple, ardent pas de deux, let alone full ballets that glorify a woman...
...We love ourselves too much to love others, she seems to be saying...
...While this past spring's season was not a great one for ballerina-watching, there were some bright spots...
...She enunciated every step, fully turned out, pulling her passés high even if it slowed her down or threw her off: She's building a stairway to paradise...
...They also were choreographers who could make ballets about romantic love without blackening them with irony...
...Over at NYCB, Merrill Ashley seemed to enjoy a second wind...
...Jennifer Tipton's death-bed lighting accentuates Yeager's consumptive, bent-kneed bourrées...
...Indeed, Balanchine and Ashton, each in his own style, took up where the Troubadour poets left off: Balanchine composing moon-vaulting sonnets for his dark ladies, Ashton painting perfect red roses for his teacup ballerinas...
...The same performance saw Julie Kent make her debut as Caroline, and it was agift...
...William Forsythe's slash-and-burn ballets are only becoming more literal as the years go by...
...In Swan Lake her Odette was technically perfect to the point of eccentricity...
...her performances are essays on what she would do if she danced them...
...But for all its messinese and aggression, Brief Fling is affecting: It is trying to get in touch with its own soul, with the soul of ballet, although all it can hear is the rush of bad blood and a far-off echo of innocence...
...Still, these changes do not bode well for the ballerina—the raison d'être of ballet...
...She has been reduced to mannerism and decorative strategies...
...Her legs, undeniably beautiful, were static in the manner of a '30s studio still...
...It is true that the exceptional dancer can invent herself despite such roles by finding challenges in the classic repertoire, much as the phenomenal Tina LeBlanc has done at the Joffrey...
...Maria Calegari, also coming back after an absence, was the true star of NYCB's spring season...
...Having lost the nerve that had made her fascinating in the first place, she compensated with a stolid placement reminiscent of Ballet Russe dancers...
...Admittedly, Kent has a distance to go: She is not always able to project her sensations...
...On the surface this series of Sinatraized duets, capped by a grand finale, is an ode to city nights and strange interludes...
...No one can deny that women are not objectified and idealized the way they used to be...
...Forsythe, at the Frankfurt Ballet, does not have a ballerina to his name...
...Yet there can be no doubt that death has greatly impoverished the scene over the last decade...
...In the 1980s ballet lost George Balanchine, Sir Frederick Ashton, and Antony Tudor—all choreographers of genius whose sensibilities revised and extended our understanding of what this art form is capable of expressing...
...There was no Swan Lake more complex than hers to be seen all year—none more heartfelt, trembling, troubled, and exciting...
...Nevertheless, the rest must be carefully nurtured with dances they feel they can confide in...
...Fans seem to expect it to groove forever on the court of Versailles...
...But her inability to deploy steps kinetically, to shape and sustain a phrase, remains a problem...
...This porcelain dancer, so refined yet so alive in her mind, eschewed the silent-movie histrionics of Leslie Browne and restored Jardin aux Lilas to freshness and innocence...
...15 she beamed her musical responses while the heavy machinery lurched and idled...
...Oddly, though, the signature song is "My Way"—not exactly the essence of romance...
...the performance was sea-shell delicate, her momentums curling and cresting...
...This curious work begins sweetly with traditional Scottish tattoos and folk melodies, then curdles into skin-head cynicism: Brigadoon meets Push Comes to Shove...
...In pieces like Balanchine's Walpurgisnacht Ballet and Divertimento No...
...At the ABT Amanda McKerro w maintained her inexorable celestial ascent, giving a crack performance as Aurora in The Sleeping Beauty that was more bold and open than two years ago...
...Alessandra Fern's Giselle continued to astound...
...so somnolent was she that the ballet seemed to be reflected in her downcast eye...
...It accompanies one of the duets and is reprised for the finale...
...but romantic love—as well as love of classical technique—burned steadily at the core of his work...
...The songs have a nightclub joi de vivre that gets the audience moony...
...The central couple, technical whiz-kid Julio Bocca and perky but overtrained Cheryl Yeager, are flanked by a band of thugs and corps girls in Tartan shifts...
...Tharp's latest premiere at ABT, Brief Fling, makes a sharper point, as the title suggests...
...Peter Martins at the New York City Ballet (NYCB) can churn out workmanlike approximations—Beethoven Romance, for instance, or Songs of the A uvergne—but his heart is not in it...
...Were Tharp to paraphrase Fling, she might declare "O Highland Rose, thou art sick...
...Then she injured herself...
...Susan Jaffe, who has softened up and developed some nuance, has not overcome her difficulty communicating character, but occasionally the weakness proves a strength...
...She has found a way to relax into her old supertechnical roles without attempting her former snap and speed...
...He is more vividly engaged in the big, cold, antiromantic pieces: Echo, The Waltz Project, and his latest, Fearful Symmetries...
...Tudor added angst to the mix, and heightened the ratio of Freudian drama...
...All dancers attempt to empty Giselle of weight—Wilis are, after all, bodiless...
...Shifts in the focus of ballet—fairly represented by Brief Fling—inevitably reflect shifts in the culture at large...
...Her integrity read like passion...
...After long absence, Kistler came back to the stage changed—heavier and a bit spooked, I think...
...This spring Calegari returned to trickier roles, with no dissembling or calculation...
...There is a story here...
...Her Giselle radiated will...
...The leggy Margaret Tracey bounced from role to role with her high-flying fearlessness and ebullience, picking up where Ashley left off...
...and ballet—a discipline born of monarchy, endowed by aristocracy, and proudly wearing its good-old-days esthetic on its chiffon sleeve—takes change harder than most...
...Critics fixed on her...
...Her turn-out was effortful, though her upper body was effusive...
...Ferri has gone a strange step further...
...Nor can anyone blame our younger choreographers for letting a little fresh air into the hothouse...
...As a teen she had the kind of ecstatic energy you might imagine gathering before the big bang...
...But her deft portrayal of a woman on the eve of a loveless marriage—the beckoning fingers as she stretced her hand to her true love—was heartbreaking and right...
...Tharp may be using the ballad to make a statement about her approach to dance, or this may be her was of slipping a large cliché about the '80s "me" decade into a stack of smaller romantic clichés (one per song): lovers in innocence, in experience, in silliness, in extremis...
...If today's classical choreographers can't or won't "adore" a dancer—won't examine, develop and re-imagine her in new creations, and innovativen cast her in old ones—we will end up with far fewer ballerinas than we need...
...One might expect something better from Twyla Tharp's Nine Sinatra Songs, recently absorbed into the repertory of the American Ballet Theater (ABT), where it fits the dancers like an Adrian gown fit Garbo...
...As for Darci Kistler, this was the season in which the high hopes for her tipped into hysteria...
...Today Kistler is deemed a star by those who need her to be one...
...And Mark Morris, as brilliant as his work in ballet has been, shuns gender differentiation altogether...
...Whatever, the effect is to mock the myth in the music...
...Even in trash like Gershwin Concerto Calegari was thirstily all there, her pointy shoulders a map of hauteur, her moments of mirth suggesting the killer Odile she could someday be...
...we get an egalitarian community of dancers or a playful, platonic pairing— all without a trace of adult love...
...Her SwanLake was forced and hollow, her Theme and Variations at once anxious and niggardly...
...Kistler was the last ballerina Balanchine hand-picked before he died...
...That was the case in Jardin aux Lilas, where her tight-lipped passion intensified the mistress—a role rendered stiffly by the one-note Martine van Hamel...
Vol. 73 • July 1990 • No. 9
