On Dance
JACOBS, LAURA
On Dance SHADES OF UNCERTAINTY BY LAURA JACOBS Cirque du Soleil, now on tour in the United States, could be spotted from a long way off during its recent visit to the Big Apple. Its blue and...
...Cirque du Soleil is a one ring event...
...There were no commissioned works, nothing new made expressly for ABT...
...Everything in Pillar, including the pastel shifts of the little girls, is touched with gray, as if Tudor's ballet were a sadder but wiser fairy tale, a world that revolved around the moon...
...The flounes and the solo trapeze woman are asexual, and the rotund ringmistress France Labonté, her red hair arranged like twin stalagmites, could be a hybrid creature out of Star Wars...
...A thread of a theme runs throughout the performance—that of the solitary traveler with a single suitcase...
...The lights are kept dim and ominous, and are shined at odd angles to cast gargantuan shadows...
...Indeed, the company as a whole was trying hard...
...Inherent in any new work is a statement about the company it is created for—a redefinition of its dancers, its dynamics, its place in ballet—that prevents stasis...
...by contortionists who bring to mind anorexia and child pornography, rather than acrobats or Alice in Wonderland...
...In previous seasons, she found her perfect Pygmalion in choreographer William Forsythe, dance's answer to Jacques Derrida...
...Sir Kenneth MacMillan's Concerto, a shallow, depleted homage to the neoclassicism of George Balanchine, was a less offensive piece of program filler, but little more...
...Drink to MeOnly with Thine Eyes looked under-rehearsed and received no rhythmic support from Gladys Celeste's muddy piano playing, but one could feel the dancers driving for clarity, the soul of this ballet...
...He is begging for discipline...
...Dancers love this ballet for its emotional richness...
...After these displays, when he emerges from the wings for a second bow to the fourth wall, his gravity is divinely phony...
...For the gain of a well-oiled administration and, one assumes, a balanced budget, ABT is paying with a play-it-safe sensibility and a lowered esthetic horizon (literally, that is—in pieces like Ballet Imperial the dancing actually looked lower, heavier...
...There are no elephants, horses or big cats, and therefore none of the usual aromas—the hay and sawdust and manure—to mix with the popcorn...
...it is also straightforward psychoanalytic expression...
...The "cirque du ballet" nights were joyless as well...
...The distance between innocence and experience, the past and the future, is reduced to the feathery, shadowy gradations of dusk: pearl, powder, ash, stone...
...The various acts are the sights he / she sees along the way...
...her inborn classicism was virtually phosphorescent...
...Hisstyleimbues his boyish hubris with a powerful erotic charge, but it's all about Bocca...
...In addition, a large amount of gaseous mist creates alien atmospheres and distant frontiers...
...Former director Mikhail Baryshnikov banned Kylian from the repertory with good reason: His work is insulting to both dancers and audiences...
...Even the show's title, Une Nouvelle Expérience, reflects a "designer" approach, evoking as it does the small portions and taste contortions of nouvelle cuisine...
...Cirque du ballet" is what a friend has begun calling the celebrity evenings at American Ballet Theater (ABT), although nights of frantic adulation, a longstanding ABT tradition, have lately been few and far between...
...Instead of porkchops in kiwi sauce, though, we get a tightrope walker who grins like Puck in A Midsummer Night's Dream and does a few wobbly backflips...
...Deliberately difficult, it offered few rewards for a clean performance...
...Despite the overall disappointment, American Ballet Theater's spring was not without its moments...
...The old pieces ABT acquired and performed for the first time, meanwhile, were arbitrary and marginal...
...Hermann brought in the Parisian Sylvie Guillem to energize a roster in need of sensation, but no matter what the star-hungry daily newspapers make of her, Guillem will never be a great dancer...
...Russian aerialist Vladimir Kekhaial, the main attraction and an amazing articulation of testosterone, moves with such a feline tread he seems about to metamorphose into a she-beast...
...Arnold Schoenberg's music grows dizzy with hope even as dark encroaches and the devil waits...
...So in ABT's La Bayadère, her Nikiya was more a silver snake of false piety than a modest little temple dancer, an interpretation that verged on blasphemy...
...Kevin McKenzie in the role of Solor was a model of grace and will overcoming age and effort...
...Her Hagar was introverted, caught in a whirlpool that pulled ever down at the hip...
...That is all straightforward circus iconography...
...Deconstructing Guillem, Forsythe had no worries about what to do with her heart—she doesn't have one...
...And Julie Kent brought a Victorian mood, a serene gaslit languor, to her part in Birthday Offering...
...As if to answer the waves of Rene Dupere's synthesized New Age music, cheers well up in a tidal roar...
...Hermann and Smith are more a corporation than an artistic directorship...
...The fantasies of abandon and mastery, elation and exorcism, are what give the big top its might...
...The only animal centerstage is man...
...Cirque du Soleil, however, forgoes the traditional symbolism to make a murkier statement about reality and what may be going on in the psyche...
...they stick their heads into the mouths of lions...
...Tudor's choreography is an unprecedented mix of pinpoint gestures and riverlike flow, a smalltown map of fixed paths and incessant circulations...
...Bocca can galvanize an audience with flashing multiple turns, and the almost feminine technical fineness of his feet and hands makes for some unique grace notes...
...In the dark, with only shafts of light searching the tent, you would swear everyone in the place was foaming at the mouth...
...And that is where it stands figuratively, too, for this is not a conventional circus...
...But then, what can you expect from a circus where man is the only animal...
...Its blue and yellow striped tent made a pretty pavilion that rose high above the trees of Manhattan's Battery Park...
...Isabella Padovani, with her blazing brown eyes and wide filly's forehead, was a galloping, breathless presence who commanded attention in every one of her roles...
...Pillar of Fire benefited from one outstanding performance after another...
...The company completed its first New York season under the co-direction of Jane Hermann and Oliver Smith this past June...
...The talented Julio Bocca, so impressive in his initial seasons with ABT, is succumbing to the worst pitfalls of stardom...
...At best she is a sinuous aerobic athlete whose positions have parallels in classical technique...
...they fall, or nearly fall, from the rafters...
...Dominique Lemieux' costumes, flamboyant creations in jewel colors with reptilian collars and curling coattails, do not differentiate between the sexes...
...More puzzling still is the audience's response...
...Jiri Kylian's Sinfonietta, for example, was yet another installment in his love-of-land-but-not-ladies genre...
...Nevertheless, current management has welcomed him back with a bear hug...
...Normally, under the guise of whimsy and innocence, circuses enact our recurring dreams and nightmares...
...In fact, androgyny is part of the show's physical makeup...
...As for ABT's redesigned Coppèlla, it was naively pretty in its new sets and costumes, but it remained underconceived and bruised by caricatures lacking refinement...
...The show shoves male/female polarities off its map of the world and leaves one in an uneasy place: a terrain peopled by twitching freaks...
...and by the most sadistic, unrelenting clown (David Shiner) I have ever seen, who mocks and abuses the spectators...
...To offer greater approval, the crowd's stamping feet gather into a cosmic drum roll...
...Amanda McKerrow turned in a Nikiya in La Bayadère of white-on-white purity...
...This might appear to be a small omission, but it had a huge consequence...
...Leslie Browne was a Hagar of huge scale, radiating her repressed desire like waves of summer heat, her chin tipped up in pain...
...People fly through the air with the greatest of ease...
...Moreover, ABT amply filled its Antony Tudor works...
...How strange the stirrings and confusions of the subconscious that are brought to the surface here...
...In Kathleen Moore's version, the suffering was more neurotic, modern and better danced...
...rather than salmon flan, there is a foursome of flounes, knobby-kneed gnomes who gambol and fret like munchkins in fast forward...
...While most circuses that come to New York move into huge brick buildings (the one from Moscow, for instance, plays Radio City Music Hall), the Quebec troupe seeks airy spaces well off the beaten path...
...Unfortunately, the most distinguished aspects of its performances at the Metropolitan Opera House were dullness and lack of imagination...
...ABT's beautiful women were slung over the men's shoulders, dragged around by the knees and generally cut out of any upbeat or enlightened phrases in the music...
...Dancing for Guillem is not an art, it is gymnastics without the bars, the beam, the springboard...
...Puffing himself up onstage and rushing his cadenzas, he is in danger of following Fernando Bujones down the path of self-righteousness...
...Sometimes this person appears as a little girl, other times as a grown man...
Vol. 74 • July 1991 • No. 8
