Some Achieve Greatness
JACOBS, LAURA
On Dance SOME ACHIEVE GREATNESS BY LAURA JACOBS Just as the rookie's fate in the major leagues fascinates baseball fanatics, the young dancer's rise through the ranks is an exciting part of the...
...Iin place of Boal and Merlo, two newcomers round out the male side of Rienstins season: Ethan Stiefel and Arch Higgins...
...His leading foot, a silver arrow, tips up and up, allowing him an extra aerodynamic moment of ascent as the earth dips down in its continuing curve...
...Having pushed technical exactitude to a point beyond ambition (which may explain the moral dimension that enlarges her work), she is defined as much by what is not there?stress, fear, "pretty" mannerisms, star airs—as by what is...
...Julio Bocca at American Ballet Theater, while perhaps more feline than female, has a similar refinement...
...When Stiefel is on stage we do not simply see a dancer in love with his work, we witness a passion that sets its own standard...
...Stiefel's chameleon quality may stem from the way his technique mixes masculine and feminine excellences...
...Karz, still in the corps, is the more engaging dancer...
...Alas, neither has yet come into consistent focus...
...Of the young men in the original line-up of Riens—Peter Boal, Richard Marsden, Jeffrey Edwards and Carlo Merlo (who has since left the company)—Marsden and Edwards remain this season...
...At the New York City Ballet, women have maintained their delicacy even as they danced with the power of men...
...He is the embodiment of scent, memory?the desire that is the basis of all dance...
...Stiefel steals the show...
...When Tracey is expected to work technically against her own inclinations, she loses her thread...
...Both made big impressions in Riens...
...When he doesn't connect, we get a dancer in a daze, toes unpointed...
...Les Petits Riens came back into the repertory this winter, on the coattails of the Mozart bicentennial celebrations...
...Who will get sidetracked, quit or settle...
...classical shapes are tossed off like jazzy thunderbolts...
...Why does one dancer make hay of a single break, while another stays stuck after half a dozen...
...She performs with snap and intelligence yet lacks depth, so it is difficult to see what path might take her to the top...
...Nichols has, to be sure, danced more glitteringly in the past, but never with the magisterial prowess she has been exhibiting this season...
...Not unlike a graduation recital, the ballet maintains a level of difficulty disproportionate to the pleasure it gives...
...Boal has everything he needs to be major—except, perhaps, the need itself...
...But in the ballet it is all seen through a fairy-tale mist, and can begin to take on the character of a long-running bedtime tale...
...I first saw Stiefel dance the title character of the Steadfast Tin Soldier...
...He makes his way through the repertory looking large and broadchested in one role (Tchaikovsky Pas de Deux), fine-boned and diminutive in another (Symphony in C...
...Which brings us to Steifel's leap...
...Tracey brought strength to her Riens role and LeBlanc brought happiness (that counts for something these days...
...An imaginary teacher might be standing in the wings...
...Stiefel may be the only dancer today who could effectively perform the show-stopper Le Spectre de la Rose, choreographed for Nijinsky in 1911 by Michel Fokine...
...Perhaps that is why Nichols is so amazing in Balanchine's Mozartiana, one of his last masterpieces...
...Take Kyra Nichols, today's reigning ballerina at the New York City Ballet (NYCB...
...Technically Borree is erratic, but when she's "on" she gives charged, deftly sculpted readings...
...Two of those original petits —Margaret Tracey and Wendy Whelan —are now principal dancers...
...Indeed, they embody two important types in the Balanchine repertory: the sexy, dewy, gifted beauty, and the prize whippet, all nerve and muscle...
...Nichols didn't blaze to early glory...
...Until she strengthens up her extension a laseconde and stops mistaking a power move for a primp in the mirror, she will never dance a work like La Source well...
...Boal, who facially resembles Edwards, is now a principal—and one, moreover, who can command the stage in an open, exciting way...
...here he's a squeaky-voiced adolescent (Interplay), there he's ahood ornament by Erte (Blue Bird in Beauty...
...We never get the whole Zippora...
...On Dance SOME ACHIEVE GREATNESS BY LAURA JACOBS Just as the rookie's fate in the major leagues fascinates baseball fanatics, the young dancer's rise through the ranks is an exciting part of the balletomane game...
...Marsden has not graduated to, or earned, larger roles...
...The critical difference is that it isn't integral to his technique...
...Edwards, a small-boned man with romantic handsomeness, has taken some leads, but has so far not secured a higher status for himself...
...In fact, Les Petits Riens is a graduation of sorts...
...The dark-haired Borree is the critic's darling of the moment, although her precise qualities are difficult to gauge...
...Costumed in a tunic of rose petals, the dancer jetes into the room of a young woman who, just returned from her first ball, has drifted into dream...
...This slim strawberry-blond is in the corps, but every time he gets a new role the gallery is jammed...
...These are the same mysteries of luck and character we confront in our work and family lives...
...And his landings are a shock...
...The current cast also includes Kathleen Tracey (sister of Margaret), Sherri LeBlanc (sister of the incomparable Tina over at the Joffrey) and Yvonne Borree—all three of whom had earlier distinguished themselves as Fairies in Beauty...
...Ballet dancers, of course, face this challenge on a regular basis, but rarely have I seen it met so dramatically...
...Nevertheless, she moved steadily, unhurriedly upward by dint of sheer integrity, self-knowledge and her Russian-princess radiance...
...Nichols aside, the most interesting recent dancing at New York City Ballet has been done by the younger company members...
...Whelan reminded one more of the sinuous athletic model who doesn't win with her looks so much as her grit...
...a performance of such machine-tooled technical containment and swooping emotional exuberance that I was stunned...
...Whose early promise will pan out...
...The leg behind has the reach of an unfanned peacock's tail, the linear sweep of Hirschfeld's pen...
...Both shot upward quickly, taking on big roles even before their promotions...
...The pudgy, coquettish Cass, now a soloist, has proved herself to be a compelling mid-level dancer...
...Company artistic director Peter Martins choreographed this Mozart suite of duets and solos in 1987 as a show case for eight promising corps members...
...That image, however, plays oddly against the robust correctness of his dancing...
...He has all the strong moves in the male dancer's arsenal—swift, multiple pirouettes, clean double tours, rapturous elevation...
...It is like no one else's...
...In this season's production of Riens Karz holds onto her role—a sign, perhaps, that Martins still sees her as a hopeful in the starting gate...
...George Balanchine himself somehow overlooked her...
...Descending into the princely lunges—one leg bent, the other stretched behind—that punctuate many of the phrases in Valse Fantasie, Steifel plies down almost to the ground...
...Tracey came off as a dancer of Apollonian purity and ingenue eagerness...
...In that case we might have to dub Stiefel, in the lexicon of Robert Bly and his men's movement, "Iron Ethan...
...it is, as it were, some "little nothings" for the nobodies who might eventually be somebodies...
...Perhaps we are about to watch a man claim equal opportunity...
...The question keeps balletomanes in suspense...
...An essay on leaping and landing, this is a role even Nureyev couldn't animate...
...But her fragility works against her, diminishing her power to project...
...He hasn't yet put a stamp on his repertory...
...In roles that couch virility in the syntax of beauty, Stiefel is untouchable...
...The steps are fussy and overwrought, too consciously decorative, and the filagree on the solos is out of sync with Mozart's easier breathing...
...When he connects with a role, as he has dancing Oberon in A Midsummer Night's Dream, the result is electrifying...
...As for Whelan, one fears that she won't find a way to transcend the tone of aching competence that hobbles her in glamour roles like Diamonds and Symphony in C's second movement...
...The Spectre shows the woman what is in her heart: him...
...He has a brooding, "esthetic" air about him—he might be the artist in a lace jabot, dreaming in his garret...
...Nichols, with her peculiar gravity, chooses a narrower footpath, and evokes the earthly, Masonic Mozart—she is Pamina poised between right and wrong...
...Even when she does land a big role, she dances as though she doesn't want to jostle herself...
...His Valse Fantasie with Margaret Tracey, one of Balanchine's most tender, twilit duets, was a once-in-a-lifetime match of youthful caprice and bounding aplomb—the two resembled child lovers egging each other on...
...She is said to be a favorite of Farrell's...
...In the third movement of Symphony in C he flew across the stage like a dark knight jumping awesome obstacles, and left a brilliant streak in the ballet...
...Though he, too, is smallish, his proportions give him an appearance of largeness and importance...
...He also has the finesse of a female—a precision of footwork and an eloquence in port de bras...
...She has a kittenish appeal, with pink cheeks on which you'd like to draw whiskers (she danced a superb White Cat in Beauty...
...Sometimes the story turns triumphant...
...Strong and deliberate, her dancing is like the piano voice in a Mozart concerto: touching lightly on its argument, crystalline in tone, distinguished by o'er-passing complexity, more deeply sensible than the orchestra...
...Suzanne Farrell made the lead role (created forherin 1981) into a joyful requiem, a virtuoso romp in the hills of heaven...
...As the stoical toy soldier who offers his heart to a paper doll, he gaveme...
...it is merely an added layer of performance...
...This reed-slim woman is gifted with an exquisite line and, for one so slight, an arabesque of immense scale...
...How far will Stiefel go in realigning the art of male classical dancing...
...Stiefel never ceases to surprise...
...Tracey was delicious as Aurora in the NYCB's production of The Sleeping Beauty last spring, but she falters in roles—La Source, Rubies?that require more from her than natural affinity...
...Kelly Cass and Zippora Karz were also in that first lineup for Riens...
Vol. 75 • January 1992 • No. 1
