Ballet's Mixed Messages
JACOBS, LAURA
On Dance BALLET'S MIXED MESSAGES BY LAURA JACOBS A AFEW years ago dance critic Clive Barnes, in a critique of his colleagues, wrote that they were a bunch of sexually repressed spinsters and...
...Opening night boasted a star roster, but it was impossible to tell from looking at the stage...
...In The Sleeping Beauty, ostensibly a tale of virginal marriage, the heroine's pricked finger complicates the issue of purity...
...And he is not alone...
...These names alone tell us virtually all we need to know about The Transgressor's fear and loathing...
...Vaslav Nijinsky explored the conflict in more voluptuous terms...
...Forsythe, Twyla Tharp, Glen Tetley, Peter Martins, Karol Armitage, Dove, et al...
...are all guilty to various degrees...
...Only The Transgressor comes off thin...
...The cliches balloon, meanwhile, as each picks up what the others are doing...
...Undertow succeeds because Tudor peered into his own mind and carefully modeled its recesses...
...the four rapists are Satyrisci...
...One rub of her wrist against her hipbone and we realize she's up to a dangerous folly...
...Their dynamics go in one direction: faster, harder, meaner...
...The dichotomy can be seen in the most basic barre exercises, where the open-leg exposure of grand plie, for example, contrasts with the ethereal port de bras...
...All this makes ballet very old-fashioned...
...Dove, however, can take some personal credit for the particular crudity of Serious Pleasures...
...No longer considered offensive, the ballet is a spellbinding evocation of Edwardian England by one who saw its last years (Tudor was born there in 1909...
...Giselle and Romeo and Juliet tell of the ways social equilibrium is disrupted by sexual passion, even as they celebrate it...
...Still, whether naive girls, misguided helpers or tipsy slatterns, the female characters are powerful and stunningly self-possessed...
...Cybele is the boy's mother, and the female he finally murders is Medusa (both are danced by the same woman, a key connection...
...In the process, it provides a complete psycho-sexual history—possibly the most colorful clinical analysis ever put on stage...
...The sisterhood was not happy...
...But instead of lasting bliss, her fate is ambiguous apotheosis...
...Swan Lake offers up a figure of clean soul and corrupt body (she is half bird...
...They were unencumbered by opera-scale renderings of Hagar, the heroine tormented by love and lust (Kathleen Moore and Leslie Browne both danced her introspectively...
...In the double role of Cybele/Medusa, Christine Fagundes is impressive, too...
...On view was the same whipped-up, athletic spins and kicks featured by most contemporary ballets: lycra and latex stretch steps, one size fits all, rather than phrases custom tailored to the dancers...
...Tudor thus acknowledges, in a way no other choreographer has, the body's journey from innocence to experience, vulnerable at every turn...
...Here, McKerrow has taken her portrayal of the vain younger sister in Pillar and pushed her toward the brink...
...One could call Undertow misogynist...
...An intense light glares from behind, silhouetting the dancers as they stand framed in the jambs...
...Undertow brims with succinct characterization, with Tudor's genius for gesture...
...The women ("Demons of Light") are voracious, hair-tossing harpies who cannot keep their legs together, while the men ("Angels of Darkness") are largely gay, with a penchant for sadomasochistic posturing and crucifixion imagery...
...As Medusa, Fagundes is transmuted into a heedless dominatrix, her long whip legs swinging with a crack...
...A fitting outcome, Terpsichore might say...
...Taken together, such qualities constitute generosity—to the dancers, to the audience, to the truth...
...The edge of cold condescension comes from William Forsythe, whose current influence on young choreographers appears to have the sweep of a computer virus...
...Perhaps Anthony Tudor has come closest to dealing plainly with sex and repression in dance...
...Tudor gave each his respect...
...Last year American Ballet Theater (ABT) gave several unerring performances of Pillar of Fire, his 1942 masterpiece...
...Having snipped and spliced themselves into an MTV vacuum tube, today's trendsetters in dance can only up the ante...
...A whole genre of ballets could be titled "Fin de Siecle Sex...
...It is also an eloquent collaboration...
...from the tribal climax of Le Sacre du printemps to the threesome in the polymorphous perverse Jeux...
...But Breinin understands Tudor well...
...In any case, the work seems to imply that we are all whores in doorways...
...For contemporary audiences, it rings Pavlov's bell: We immediately understand that this is intended to be a whooping ballet, loads of fun...
...Her Cybele delivers the first Oedipal rejection with tender distraction...
...Even the sweet-natured Robert LaFosse, in his latest work for the New York City Ballet, I Have My Own Room, hacks through classicism a la Forsythe...
...His Serious Pleasures is closed-circuit choreography, not close observation, without a freeze-frame of honesty...
...IT is hard to say what truth, if any, resides in Serious Pleasures, a new dance by Ulysses Dove that ABT recently premiered...
...The black bridge behind it represents The Transgressor's inevitable path, his heart of darkness...
...Tudor clearly had read Freud...
...Undertow was labeled obscene even by those who thought it brilliant (ballerina Alicia Alonso recalls that some of Tudor's original coaching directions were "too dirty to repeat...
...Has human sexuality—not hype or mores, but the actual drama of touch, response and ardor—changed so much since the days of Giselle, Jeux and Undertow...
...Although ballet's raw stuff is the human body, it most often seeks to transcend that clay through a system of classical celestial movements, to literally reach the sublime by sublimation...
...the missionary is Polyhymnia...
...It is the faulty filament that keeps the work from burning bright...
...The gestures in Serious Pleasures, although no more explicit than those in Undertow, do nothing to enlarge our experience of how people move in desire, or to demonstrate what dance is capable of...
...Jorge Gallardo's sleek decor slashes the stage with two walls opening at a wide angle, each bearing a row of doors (loudly slammed throughout the piece...
...The strength of the choreography is in the details...
...William Schuman's brooding score sends a frightening charge through Undertow's three movements?Prologue: Birth and Infancy," "The City: Adolescence and Manhood," "Epilogue: Guilt...
...The foreground is a clothy reality, mid-stage is a dusk of sorts, and the background is a darker fantasy...
...Despite its changing every minute, William H. Grant III's lighting leaves the dancers indistinguishable for the entire performance...
...There has always been a tug-of-war between ballet's urge to ascend and its notion to go native...
...Dove's choreography has the same effect...
...When choreographers are more connected to A Current Affair than to craft, their work becomes trivial...
...In the role of Ate, a girl who plays with fire and gets burned (she is raped by the Satyrisci), Amanda McKerrow is terrifyingly prescient...
...Robert Ruggieri's music is metallic, thumping, complicit...
...Thus those who especially appreciate its traditional artistic values recoil from the works of today's hip, irreverent choreographers...
...Section II's backdrop, an aerial view of city spires, is partly blocked by a looming bridgehead sculpture of a giant bird, its open beak scissoring the sky...
...Moreover, dance after dance takes as its theme the eternal tango of flesh and spirit...
...his first audience, though, evidently had not...
...The Transgressor certainly is bullied by the women, stunned by their desire, repelled by their passes, and maddened by the way their needs overwhelm his own...
...I suppose he means that it can come at a high price...
...The result is Dove, who is disingenuous without even realizing it...
...Each character that appears in Pillar—indeed, in any Tudor ballet—is situated somewhere on this continuum...
...They may well be magnifying themes now at large in society, such as violence against women and the open war between the sexes, but relevant themes don't automatically add up to art...
...The dance focuses on sex in the 1990s, which "is serious business," Dove maintains...
...Undertow's other characters are given Greek names to emphasize their universality...
...On Dance BALLET'S MIXED MESSAGES BY LAURA JACOBS A AFEW years ago dance critic Clive Barnes, in a critique of his colleagues, wrote that they were a bunch of sexually repressed spinsters and sour-pusses...
...he tells the whole of the story, unsavory as it is, with invention, stagecraft and wit...
...Dove, rather than come to intimate terms with his own vision, has chosen to play it cool...
...Subtitled "The Merciless Battle Between Spirit and Flesh," it tempts one to shout "uncle" after about two minutes...
...This bleak image, if only in spirit, is present throughout the choreographer's work...
...Tudor divides his space into light and shadow, totem and taboo...
...Or maybe they were simply not ready to see such graphic sexual references in an opera house...
...Every reach or connection between characters implies choice and consequence...
...That, too, is the true subject of his most infamous ballet, Undertow, brought to the Metropolitan Opera House this season by ABT after a 12-year absence from the repertory...
...During the solos, the performers are spotlit directly from above, like insects under a microscope...
...In the ABT production, Raymond Breinin's masterly scenery and costumes suggest an ashy sunset, awash in industrial din and dinge...
...The heart rebels...
...Their pas de deux are merely fast, hot and hostile couplings...
...The light catches just their brows, cheekbones and chins, masking them in ghoulish shadow and lending the proceeding an air of Auschwitz...
...As ambitious today as at its 1945 premiere, Undertow depicts the life cycle of a murderer...
...The prostitute is Voluptia...
...As a result, it was easier to note the amazing stage symmetries that give rise to the ballet's high-wire tension...
...His work could be charted as a long hide and seek with orgasm, from the Faun's onanism in the forest to Petrushka's "little death" at the fair...
...Johann Renval dances the role with muscle, wringing all the motivation he can from the steps, but the part is seriously underchoreographed...
...Nijinsky was blunt about his subject matter, and went insane at an early age...
...Ballet abounds with these mixed messages about society's courting and condemning the body...
...But Barnes had a point, however nastily focused: For many devotees, the attraction to the art is escapist...
Vol. 75 • June 1992 • No. 8
