On Dance
JACOBS, LAURA
On Dance WALTZ TIME AT THE NYCB BY LAURA JACOBS INITIAL public reactions to the waltz were shock and disapproval. That is hardly surprising, given that the German verb, walzen, means to...
...In one Saturday matinee performance, when Mozartiana was thrown on in place of another ballet, Nichols found a new momentum that grew stronger and more daring the longer she was on stage...
...In the final two movements, the mood shifts from the sophistication of Franz Lehar's "Gold and Silver Waltz" in TheMerry Widow, to the high doom and Jugenstil of Richard Strauss' fevered waltz from Der Rosenkavalier...
...He divided his ballet into three sections: "Invitation to the Dance," to Karl Maria von Weber's famous composition...
...The waltz, Balanchine appears to say, is a state of mind...
...She embodied the uniqueness of artistic will as she stepped out of her partner's arms to waltz alone...
...Both ascents were followed by a great fall: With the Russian Revolution, ballet lost its cultural benefactor in the Tsar...
...Trilogy started well enough with a cameo of Romanticism, the four-girl pose from Perrot's Pas de Quatre...
...Her "Preghia" reads like the 23rd Psalm...
...In her person, the ballet is more finally tragic: the end of an era, the swan song of an Old World...
...The sweeping movement, the distance covered and the intimacy achieved made waltzing truly intoxicating...
...Still, Trilogy had its moments of distinction whenever the four girls of "Invitation" took thestage...
...In contrast to our own big-time shockers—the Twist, the Jerk, slam dancing—with their inclination to put distance between the sexes, the waltz placed a woman securely in a man's embrace...
...Its basic 1 -2-3 step was shaped by momentum and continuity: Uninterrupted by formal obligations to others, the pattern could go on endlessly, and therein lay its sensuality...
...Maybe it was the element of surprise, or perhaps she was determined to bring to this dance the flowing movement of the waltz that was denied her in Waltz Trilogy...
...A young girl in white plunges her arms into black full-length gloves held before her, and the symbolic consummation seals her fate...
...He shows us a variety of such states in Vienna Waltzes, a work of structural richness belied by simplicity...
...but he leaves La Valse abstract...
...With her in the lead, the dance progressed toward an eternal truth about art...
...Our lone woman is then absorbed into the gathering storm, and the stage brightens in apotheosis, evoking the transcending suicide that ends Swan Lake...
...With her smaller scale and deeper languor, her more tensile backward arches and red-gold beauty, the waltz becomes a dazzling sexual vibration...
...Divided this ballet remained...
...That is hardly surprising, given that the German verb, walzen, means to wallow, welter or roll in the dirt...
...Lit in a soft corona, the stage picture was resonant and musically fitting, yet almost immediately the effect was undermined when a group of tall girls jumped on stage...
...Her execution of the series of painfully slow pas de bourrée is so taut and time suspended, they emerge as the ballerina's rod and staff...
...and "Eugene Onegin," using the Polonaise and Waltz from Tchaikovsky's opera...
...The first three convey the fresh forests and the sometimes coarse delight of Johann Strauss II...
...Farrell retired last year, however, and Maria Calegari has taken the part...
...The waltz was, in its heart, Dionysian...
...The ballet's five movements take as their theme the historical phases of the waltz...
...Kyra Nichols, the principal woman in "Invitation" and "Onegin," was more than LaFosse could handle...
...Vienna Waltzes is replete with subliminal meanings, grand implications and parallels with some of dance's quintessential roles...
...The role was made for Suzanne Farrell...
...For where she had often performed Mozartiana as a series of deep-wrought and emphatic commandments, this time she discovered green pastures and flowered...
...As a result, Ravel's off-kilter, watercolor waltzes, already tinged with black, seemed to lead Hellward...
...Similarly, the waltz evolved along with the 19th century and reached its full flower during the era that prized it most, the fin de siècle...
...Mephisto-Waltz, to Franz Liszt's Faustian miniature...
...By the ballet's end she looked as big as the Chrysler Building, with little people scurrying all around...
...There was little for Maria Calegari to do—or that she could do in her weighty black lace number...
...His schemes were never able to incorporate her sheer size and gravity...
...Likewise, "Eugene Onegin" nodded to the Balanchine of Theme and Variations but never found itself...
...The association is complete when the stage is overtaken by a corps of identically dressed women, their ballgowns rising like whitecaps in the wind...
...Although the work depicts a girl at her first ball, seduced and killed by the rites of society, the atmosphere of madness is the real story...
...Nichols is ineffective in Trilogy for the very reasons she excels in works like Mozartiana and Diamonds...
...At its apogee classical ballet emphasized order, while the waltz attenuated itself like the tendrils on one of Art Nouveau's wandering vines...
...In the waltz Balanchine could hear echoes of his beloved ballet—possibly the most glittering and eminent (some would say decadent) symbol of Imperial Russia at high pitch, balanced happily but precariously between reality and make-believe...
...A large male cast and Broadway steps madethe"Mephisto" segment seem like an homage to Jerome Robbins...
...How could he not be impressed by the waltz...
...Costume Designer Gary Lisz may have felt this...
...Where Farrell brought it to a fragile climax, Calegari suggests a dissolutioninto ecstasy...
...True, she is vertical and stately in Mozartiana, and not particularly suited for the vaudeville swoops and graceful slang that Balanchine pulled out of his back pocket...
...Seeing it again this season with a chubby, chalk-faced Darci Kistler in the lead, her hair so long and tangled it might have been growing in the crypt, one is struck by the ballet's underworld imageryand gloom...
...That his soloist, Kyra Nichols, stood out at all was not due to any choreographic strategy but to the contrast of her matronly toothpastewhite tutu, its bodice stacked with silver...
...The breathless, even panting, music and Balanchine's strange asymmetries, elbows pointed and heads constantly turned, create a tone of lush anxiety...
...Yet she brings a moral imperative to steps that are worthy of such an approach...
...This is a perfect setup for the following Rosenkavalier movement, in which a lone woman, ravishing in a white ballgown, begins an extended soliloquy not unlike Odette's in Act IV of Swan Lake...
...Of all the costumes, only his designs for these four—ivory tutus just touched with yellow, giving them a candlelight glow—were not overblown...
...We could not help reflecting," wrotea 19th-century critic, "how uneasy an English mother would be to see her daughter so familiarly treated, and still more to witness the obliging manner in which the freedom is returned by the females...
...In The Merry Widow act, the principal woman is dressed, of course, in black, and her teasing manner —the coquettish withdrawal of her proffered hand—is a stark echo of Odile, the Black Swan in Swan Lake, Act III...
...Balanchine cues us to corruption with faint allusions to the story of Manon Lescaut...
...None of those qualities were lost on George Balanchine, who at the New York City Ballet (NYCB) paid homage to the form in works of unsurpassed reverence and invention...
...with World War I, the waltz lost its sense of Romantic security...
...The whole work embraces many continuums—simplicity to complexity, innocence to experience, consciousness to subconsciousness, optimism to pessimism—and all are contained in that flooding three-quarter time...
...It closed sexual space...
...In this setting, objects and gestures can become remarkably sinister...
...I? the NYCB's one winter premiere, Waltz Trilogy, Robert LaFosse attempted to key into the company's incomparable waltz tradition...
...The attraction, I think, went even further...
...He let his morbid streak run wild in the 1951 La Valse...
...It allowed Balanchine the full play of his yearnings for romance and dreams of death...
...In all of dance it is second only to classical ballet in its ability to codify a particular time and crystallize a sensibility...
...Unlike the humble, intricate German Ländler that gave birth to it, unlike the sarabands, minuets and mazurkas that were the standard fare of cotillions, the waltz was simple...
...The Russian-bom Balanchine, having experienced the two momentous events, sought to revive the fallen dance styles...
...LaFosse never got the better of his floor patterns...
...LaFosse'ssolos for these young women were lovely and full-throated, especially the passages for Yvonne Borree and Rebecca Metzger...
...The highlights of her performance were occasional references to the widow of Vienna Waltzes...
Vol. 74 • January 1991 • No. 2
