danceview
a quarterly review of dance

Reviews

ABT at the Met—
A few new ballets, but the news is the dancers

by Lynn Garafola
copyright © 2001 by Lynn Garafola
Autumn 2001

The best thing about ABT these days is how Kevin McKenzie is bringing along the company’s gifted young dancers. Gillian Murphy’s extraordinary debut in Swan Lake—she is a ballerina in all but title now—and her newly cemented partnership with Marcelo Gomes testify to McKenzie’s success in identifying future principals and understanding what they need to develop. Murphy, who received her training at the North Carolina School of the Arts, commands a prodigious technique. She is a distinctly American phenomenon, with the scissor legs, articulate pointework, and fleetness one associates with dancers reared in the Balanchine tradition. At the same time she has the strengths that come from training with a more traditional emphasis—placement, line, port de bras, épaulement, even a huge Plisetskaya leap. She can turn on a dime. As an Odalisque in Le Corsaire, she did three and even four turns—with time to spare. This season, as Odile, she did triple and double attitude turns and a deep renversé so slow it seemed to halt the flow of time; then she whipped into the fouettés with a triple, followed by singles and doubles. Her dynamics are thrilling; what power in her leg as it lifts forward, circles into second, moves around to arabesque, then sweeps up into a penchée. And this was only her debut.

Murphy does not dance with “soul,” nor does she “act.” She finds her way into a role through the music. As Odette she was the music, following it, yielding to it, fleeing it, plumbing its depths. The dancing said it all, freshly, spontaneously, in the here and now. But also impersonally. This is not an Odette to warm the heart or tug at the emotions. As Siegfried, the Brazilian-trained Marcelo Gomes is fire to her ice. He is dark where she is fair, ardent where she is cold, a romantic hero come to win his lady. He has the proportions of a ballet prince, as well as the demeanor. One is struck by his utter ease in classical movement, as though this were a language he speaks not only fluently but also naturally. He is blessed with line, flexibility, and elevation, expressive, unmannered arms, a light effortless jump, and wonderful turns; even in the most bravura passages he never sacrifices elegance. Finally, he is a marvelous partner, who gives Murphy a womanliness that other partners (including Angel Corella, unsuccessfully paired with her in Don Quixote) seem unable to elicit. Their Theme and Variations together was charged with eroticism, yet so pure, so technically accomplished, and musical that one experienced the ballet as something abstract, a thrilling distillation of Petipa and The Sleeping Beauty. Technically Gomes may not yet be quite at her level, but their partnership is that rarity, a meeting of true artistic minds.

Another exciting partnership this season was the pairing of Julie Kent and José Manuel Carreño. Their Giselle was one of the best I have seen in years, freshly imagined and emotionally compelling, yet faithful to the spirit and form of this most traditional work. Both are magnificent dancers. They are also marvelous actors, who can infuse the most classical gesture with the throb of human life. In the first act they have completely rethought the narrative episodes, breaking them down, fleshing them out, emphasizing the dramatic logic, clarifying the details. The surprise encounter of the lovers at the start of the ballet is played almost in slow motion. Dancers, of course, are always touching. But I have never seen the touching that is part and parcel of these scenes take on so strong an emotional coloring, express so clearly the desire experienced by the protagonists. Not a step is changed in the choreography. What is new is the dramatic specificity, the focus, the detail. In her solo Giselle looks at Albrecht, gestures to him, as if she were dancing for him alone. Yet they remain fully a part of the ballet’s community, protagonists of a collective drama revitalized by their presence. The contrast between the lovers and Hilarion, as played by Ethan Brown as a rube disdained, lurking as an outsider on the periphery of village life, could not be greater. It’s hard to feel much sympathy for him, or the fate awaiting him in the ballet’s intensely romantic second act, a last night of love before the separation of eternity. As ideal mates in this distilled poem of love, Kent and Carreño were superb. Both are great classical stylists, with beautiful line and open, expressive port de bras; both are musical and immensely generous collaborators. There are times when a single impulse seems to propel them through the air, when a single mind seems to be shaping a step or magnifying the scale and dynamics of a phrase. Nothing is overstated or done solely for effect. The idea of classicism—clarity, proportion, harmony—is always uppermost, and even when executing the most bravura passages they stay in character. One leaves the theatre elated and purged, released from a genuine cathartic experience.

The success of a Swan Lake and Giselle depends on more than its principals. In Swan Lake the Act I pas de trois, beautifully coached by Kurt Petersen, has become a showcase for dancers headed for the top. Once a haven for Russians, ABT is now a magnet for Latins. They come from all over the Spanish-speaking world, and with their strong classical training and easy relationship with the audience, they have largely overshadowed the Russians. The strongest trio this season featured Erica and Hermán Cornejo, a brother-sister pair from Argentina, and Xiomara Reyes, a Cuban-trained soloist who joined ABT after dancing in Europe. Seldom have I seen a threesome better matched. Each has a marvelous jump (although Hermán’s elevation—he seems to jumps as high as he is tall—is phenomenal), clean footwork, strong turns, flexibility, and an engaging personality. The Cornejos were twinned again as the gypsy couple in Don Quixote, where Hermán gave free rein to his fantasy in the air, and his sister danced with exuberance. Soloist Anna Liceica, who began her training in Rumania and completed it at the School of American Ballet, also danced the pas de trois, and with her big jump and strong turns (all her piqués were doubles) made a fine partner for Joaquín De Luz, an elegant stylist from Spain; the weak link in the trio was Anne Milewski, who lacks the strength for the increas–ingly demanding roles she is receiving. Liceica looked very much in command in the peasant pas de deux in Giselle, where she was partnered by Marcelo Gomes; her variation was beautifully calibrated, with pirouettes that slowed to a perfect ending, although her extensions occasionally sacrificed beauty of line to height.

A product of Washington’s Kirov Academy, Michelle Wiles is an anomaly—an American who dances more like a Russian than ABT’s own Russians. Tall, blond, and long-limbed, she has the strengths and weaknesses of traditional Russian training. The pluses include her open, expansive port de bras, majestic balances, and slow, serene adagio. On the minus side, she has little speed; her footwork needs greater clarity, and she is not particularly musical. Although she was cast this season in contemporary works as well as in Balanchine’s Theme and Variations (which did not show her to advantage), most of her growing repertory is in nineteenth-century classics—Moyna in Giselle, a solo Shade in La Bayadère, the Dryad Queen in Don Quixote, Diamond in The Sleeping Beauty, one of the “big” Swans in Swan Lake—roles that she filled out, imparting an Imperial, if studied grandeur to their choreography. While grandly scaled, her Myrta was less successful. Stiff rather than imperious and curiously remote from the Wili sisterhood that surrounds her, Wiles has yet to find her way into the role, the most dramatically challenging of her career.

Upholding the honor of Russia on ABT’s increasingly Latin-dominated roster are Irina Dvorovenko and her husband and excellent partner, Maxim Belotserkovsky. They are now big stars, with endorsements and a Dance Magazine cover to their credit, and their every appearance brings out New York’s Russian-speaking community, which applauds them wildly. Both hail from Kiev, where they received their training and made their professional debut. Of the two Dvorovenko is the most intriguing, a brilliant virtuoso dancer, with the sky high extensions of the current crop of Russian ballerinas, coupled with speed, strength, and (for a Russian) unusually articulate pointework. There is nothing she cannot do. She turns like a top, jumps like a gazelle, is equally at home in adagio and allegro, and sets the stage a-sizzle with personality. Yet whatever note she strikes—spectral, seductive, petulant—her acting is one-dimensional. In the first act of Giselle who could fail to admire her huge jumps, the extraordinary elevation of her ballottés? But who could admire the smug look on her face after she sat down, the way she fiddled with tempi and ignored everyone on stage except her husband, who happened to be Albrecht? And what is one to make of the kewpie doll-vamp of her mad scene? In Act II everything—poetry, style, drama—was sacrificed to technical effects: freakishly high extensions, excessively slow tempi, excessively fast tempi, split jetés, overhead lifts, all of which elicited deafening applause.

Dvorovenko is ambitious, hard-working, and smart. She is here in America to stay, and unlike some Russians she has partly remade herself. Last year, for instance, she acquitted herself admirably in the revival of Twyla Tharp’s Push Comes to Shove, where she almost seemed to mock her own ballerina mannerisms. In ABT’s new production of John Cranko’s Eugene Onegin (of which more later) there were moments when she seemed to lose herself in the role of Tatania, to plunge deeply into her character, to approach it freshly and with imaginative engagement—even to downplay the technical fireworks. It could well be that Tatania was the first emotionally demanding role she had to do on her own, without the coaches, without the hallowed interpretation of generations before her. Still, it was in Don Quixote, that old Russian chestnut, that Dvoro–venko scored her biggest triumph this season. From her first entrance, she lit up the stage, a real spitfire, full of fun and totally alive. She jumped higher and moved faster than ever, and used her fan with a playfulness that recalled Makarova, although without the latter’s wit. Dvorovenko never sits on her heels; she carries her weight forward like Balanchine’s proverbial boxer, ready to take off—the secret of the speed and dynamic attack that sets her dancing apart from that of most Russians. Alas, in this and virtually every other ballet she danced this season, she could not resist the hard sell. She makes no distinction between artistry and bravura, revels in tricks, and sees nothing wrong with exploiting them shamelessly.

How different is the company’s senior Russian ballerina, Nina Ananiashvili. In The Merry Widow she gave the wealthy Pontevedrian widow Hanna Glawari—a role she shared with Dvorovenko—heart as well as glamour, sadness as well as beauty, longing as well as abandon. She has a face made for tragedy, expressive arms, and beautiful hands. Everything about her is refined. As Aurora in the Wedding act of The Sleeping Beauty (performed on an all-Tchaikovsky mixed bill), she was gracious and regal, with the long, singing line that was once a touchstone of Russian lyrical style. Her hand gestures in the second variation were as light as gossamer with all the charm of a traditional Russian dance—no one today performs them quite like that. And what nobility she brought to the first arabesque that ends the ballet. Here was a true Russian artist.

Another senior ballerina in whom the idea of service runs deep is Amanda McKerrow. From her earliest performances she was something of an anomaly, a ballerina who was artless, even plain, with no tricks or hard sell. She was affecting as Cinderella, above all in the opening solo in Act III, where her small frame and utter lack of pretension fit the ballet’s character like a glove. With Vladimir Malakhov out for much of the season because of injury, her Prince was Ethan Stiefel, a less than ideal match, given his youthful exuberance and generally wooden acting. (When Malakhov did return, it was to partner Susan Jaffe in one of the most mismatched Nutcracker pas de deux I have ever seen; his leg was often higher than hers.) Stiefel’s boyish élan served him well in Tchaikovsky Pas de Deux, invigorating McKerrow, giving a happy innocence to his spectacular technical feats in the variations. Stiefel also partnered her in Swan Lake, where his immaculate technique shone in the variations, although, here again, he seemed emotionally constrained, uncomfortable in the role of ballet prince that Malakhov, for instance, inhabits so easily. McKerrow, by contrast, glowed with a deep contentment. Seldom has her Odette seemed so unworldly or her Odile so ravishing; seldom has her technique seemed so pure.

Cuban-trained Xiomara Reyes, who joined ABT this year as a soloist after dancing with the Royal Ballet of Flanders, is a happy addition to the company’s roster. Petite and vivacious, with a light, airy jump, she has the gift of naturalness on stage and a talent for characterization that recalls Alessandra Ferri. In the role of Valencienne, the second female lead in The Merry Widow, Reyes was delicious, a flirt with a heart of gold who loves her aging husband almost as much as she adores her handsome lover. She brings little touches to the part, like patting her hair when the perfectly coiffed Hanna appears or jumping up to dance at the ball, and she is alive to everything that goes on around her. She really looks at her partner and responds to him. Best of all she puts her heart into the drama. There is a moment in Act III when her husband, Baron Mirko Zeta, played by that consummate actor Victor Barbee, now one of the company’s ballet masters, finally realizes how things stand with his wife and Camille de Rosillon, the French attaché who is her lover. Other casts turn the scene into a farce. But Barbee and Reyes give it genuine pathos, and in the end the three go off together in a quiet, unexpected act of love. In John Cranko’s Onegin, new to the repertory this season, she was a splendid Olga—frivolous, but also girlish, a sprite who dances for joy. Reyes is an exceptionally musical dancer, with the speed and pristine footwork of today’s best Cuban dancers. She can pull out all the technical stops, and does so without the grand russki manner. Her Lensky was Angel Corella. Technically, she was fully his equal, while both physically and emotionally she complemented him (far better than Ashley Tuttle, with whom he is frequently paired): their pas de deux was a poem of young love. Might a Giselle or a La Sylphide be in the offing?

Born in Uruguay and trained at the North Carolina School of the Arts, Maria Riccetto is another dancer who seems headed for the top. Tall and rangy, with the Balanchine-inflected technique of an American dancer and the sunny personality of a Latin, she was a solo Shade in La Bayadère, a friend in Giselle, a Flower Girl in Don Quixote, the White Cat and Silver in The Sleeping Beauty, the Italian Princess in Swan Lake. Her big chance came in Onegin with the role of Olga, the ballet’s second female lead. Although technically she met its challenges, artistically she was too young for the role; compared to Malakhov’s Lensky, burning with romantic ardor, she looked like a kid. Still, I admire McKenzie’s willingness to gamble on young talent. He has good instincts, and often his bets pay off, if not immediately then in the long term. Sascha Radetsky (who is American despite the name and a real heart throb in the movie Center Stage) is another corps dancer adding solo and demi-soloist parts to his repertory, with good reason: a fine classicist, with a buoyant jump, a natural feeling for gesture, and a relaxed stage presence, he gets better every time you see him. This season he was a Toreador and a Gypsy in Don Quixote, one of the Neapolitan leads in Swan Lake and one of its two Rothbarts. He also danced Blue Bird, doing full justice to its flying jumps and beats, and partnering Elena Shelkanova, his less than ideal Princess Florine, with gallantry. Other casting gambles that worked included Joaquín De Luz as the Jester in Cinderella and lead Pontevedrian dancer in The Merry Widow, roles that displayed not only his extraordinary bravura (as the Jester he did six pirouettes that stopped dead in passé relevé, then he came down) but also his gift for infusing steps with character. Finally, a word about Jerry Douglas, an African-American newcomer to the corps who was a last-minute replacement as the Jester in Cinderella; with his classical proportions and princely demeanor he is a talent to watch.

McKenzie can bring dancers along, but he can also let them get out of hand. He has done nothing to discipline Dvorovenko; one suspects that so long as she sells tickets and receives critical accolades, her antics will be tolerated if not actually encouraged. Certainly, in the case of Paloma Herrera, the baby wonder of some years back, the policy backfired. Although her Cinderella and the Rose Adagio she danced on the Tchaikovsky program were technically competent, they lacked the sparkle of her early performances; for whatever reason she seems to have lost her way. Probably the most egregious failure of artistic discipline this season occurred in Cinderella. Julio Bocca, whose career as a premier danseur is coming to an end, gave a truly hilarious performance as the simpering Stepsister, batting her baby browns, primping, flying, falling, fussing over her petticoats. But it was all interminable, the slapstick, the shenanigans, the sadism (which is in the plot, not an invention of the performers), the business that becomes busier with every performance, intruding ever more intrusively on the narrative.

McKenzie’s strengths lie in the studio. However, as artistic director, he also has a large say in repertory, although I wonder how much of the decision-making really lies with the ABT board. Certainly, the decision to all but proscribe mixed bills (one of which was an all-Tchaikovsky program) from the Met season was a marketing strategy, one that seems to have paid off, at least in terms of box office. But where was one to find the “product,” the multi-act narratives that the ABT audience is apparently dying to see? Nineteenth-century ballets are few, but those with strong male roles are fewer. Yet this, apparently, is the litmus test that traditional ballets must pass. Hence, the reworking of traditional ballets along the lines of Le Corsaire, in which has numerous male roles (some converted from mime roles) with virtually interchangeable bravura variations. This was the model for McKenzie’s tasteless reworking of Swan Lake, in which the female choreography was left pretty much intact, while male roles were either added (like the hyper-active Jester) or beefed up (like Rothbart, a seducer in black leather). (When the ballet premiered, there was even a variation for Siegfried in Act II; this was soon cut.) The “new ballet” that begin with Fokine in the early 1900s explicitly rejected the multi-act formula. Virtually all new ballets created during the first half of the twentieth century were one-act works, although they sometimes co-existed in a repertory that included versions of the older full-length “classics.” It was only in England, home of the West’s re-invented classical tradition (Beth Genné’s article about this in a recent issues of Dance Research is fascinating), that the creation of new full-length ballets was actively encouraged. (The Soviets, for quite different reasons, encouraged them as well.) These narratives, which might be called “neo-traditional,” had all the trappings of their nineteenth-century predecessors—stories, pas de deux, big ensemble numbers, at least one ballerina heroine, along with much-enhanced roles for men. They also had lots of stuff—costumes, sets, props—and big production values. Having exhausted the stock of Kenneth MacMillan ballets and eschewed Frederick Ashton’s longer works, ABT has turned to their British successors. It would be hard to say which is worse—Ronald Hynd’s The Merry Widow or Ben Stevenson’s Cinderella. With its Prokofiev score, the latter is certainly more pretentious. But like The Merry Widow it is a narrative that collapses under the weight of its own inconsequence. Scenes go on interminably, with endless repeats, and drawn-out mime scenes (not that traditional mime is used). The settings (Cinderella’s are by David Walker, The Merry Widow’s by Desmond Heeley) are totally without imagination, and the costumes are vulgar. Cinderella’s, which come from the Houston Ballet, included the kind of tutus with sparkles that five-year-old girls drool over.

John Cranko comes out of this British tradition as well. However, his Onegin, which entered the ABT repertory this season, is in a completely different category. Indeed, it is a happy acquisition for the company. The original designs by Jürgen Rose have been duplicated, and they are beautiful, full of atmosphere, evoking the period and the people of Pushkin’s Romantic-era poem like a genre painting. Cranko choreographed the ballet in 1965 for the Stuttgart Ballet, and it quickly became a favorite on the company’s U.S. tours. Then, the tours stopped, and the ballet vanished, until a couple of years ago, when the Stuttgart returned with it to New York. Seen again after so many years, Onegin seemed a throwback to a time when spectacle had yet to become synonymous with stuff and artistic unity was something to which collaborators still aspired. There are wonderful ensemble dances, waltzes, khovorods, and a peasant number in which couple after couple leaps across the stage, exits, then returns en masse, crossing to the other side—a thrilling escalation of effects. The narrative is always clear; we know what happens, when, and why—without recourse to mime or interminable “business.” The characters too are always clear—Tatiana, the ballet’s impetuous heroine; her flighty sister, Olga; Olga’s fiancé Lensky; his brooding friend, Onegin, with whom Tatiana’s falls in love; Prince Gremin, the elderly relation she marries. There are spectacular pas de deux, above all for Tatiana and Onegin, full of complex partnering, dangerous tosses, and the kind of gymnastic lifts that wowed the West in the 1950s on the first Bolshoi tours. And there is a magnificent role for a ballerina. Julie Kent was all fire-and-ice as Tatiana, flush with passion for Onegin in Act I, crushed by his rejection in Act II, glowing with voluptuous maturity in Act III. She plays the last scene brilliantly—the agony, ecstasy, and consciousness of choice, the final, wrenching separation from Onegin. Who would suspect that she had such depths of banked passion in her? Her Onegin was Robert Hill, who has the hewn face and gravitas of a young Abraham Lincoln. But the heroic gesture comes hard to him, and the romantic role does not sit easily. Still he was a fine complement to Kent and handled the difficult partnering effortlessly. By contrast, the second-cast Onegin, Giuseppe Picone, seemed even colder and more self-absorbed than his character, which he played as a diabolic Svengali. His fumbles in the pas de deux with Dvorovenko, his Tatania, were all too evident. Although a fine addition to the repertory, the production needs to “season.” At times the pace seems a little sluggish, and the stage business needs to be fine-tuned, as though we are seeing a dress rehearsal rather than the finished ballet. A special mention should be made of Georgina Parkinson’s detailed acting and authority as Madame Larina, Tatiana’s mother.

Since the ABT management appears to view mixed bills as box-office death, the “contemporary” program was given right at the beginning of the season, when houses tend to be thin. On the bill was Twyla Tharp’s The Brahms-Haydn Variations (choreographed for the company a year ago), and two new works, Paul Taylor’s Black Tuesday (which premiered at Washington’s Kennedy Center), and Gong, by Mark Morris. Unlike most people I liked Black Tuesday. Set to songs from the Depression and with splendid lighting by Jennifer Tipton evoking life in the streets under the old New York “Els,” the work has a sobriety—a darkness—more attuned to modern dance than the usual hoopla of an ABT season. This was not a showstopping piece, although it did showcase dancers like Stella Abrera, Elena Cornejo, and Adrienne Schulte, a member of the corps who is just beginning to receive small roles. In “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” which brought the ballet to an end, Ethan Stiefel gave a fine performance, as though being a Depression-era hobo gave him permission to enjoy the swivels and leaps and spins he does so effortlessly. Gong was another fine work, a ballet that is unapologically balletic, yet unmistakably by Mark Morris. The music, by Colin McPhee, has its roots in Java, long a source of inspiration for the choreographer, but confined here to prayer poses and the like, and the looming forms projected on the cyc like huge shadow puppets. Seen from above, the work looks even better than from the orchestra. The opening is stunning, a pale purple circle containing the line of dancing figures set on a deep purple floor. The circle motif is reiterated in Isaac Mizrahi’s fabulous pancake tutus, which add their own lush tones—lime green, aqua, purple, mahogany, wine. And from above (where I sat one night because I couldn’t get a press ticket) one can really savor the freedom with which he uses space, the way he keeps it alive and full of visual interest, whether the dancers are circling in a manège or spinning offstage as a group, chaining à la Balanchine, or performing a slow, slow adagio against a backdrop of shadows. Like a number of Morris works, Gong has a meditative center.

Last and certainly least among the new works was The Pied Piper. This was the brainchild of Louis G. Spisto, the company’s former Executive Director, who spoke about its gestation in a Works & Process program at the Guggenheim Museum. Indeed, it was Spisto who brought John Corigliano’s score to the ABT board, the answer, so he claimed, to its prayer for a story ballet for kids. What could be better than the Pied Piper? Spisto may have aspirations of imitating Diaghilev, but he hasn’t a clue of what appeals to kids. This Pied Piper was totally untheatrical, with an incoherent scenario cobbled together by Mark Adamo and choreographer David Parsons, and a stage so dark that one kept expecting the lights to come up. (They didn’t.) There were rats galore, human-size and mechanical puppets by Michael Curry that scurried everywhere. There were animations by Michaela Zabranska that turned the town of Hamelin into a dead ringer for the expressionist Flanders imagined by Robert Edmond Jones for Nijinsky’s 1917 Tyl Eulenspiegel; more striking was the opening, with its flickering stars and psychedelic sunrise. Parsons is a modern-dance choreographer much in demand by ballet companies. Unfortunately, he has only a passing knowledge of virtuoso technique and ballet character work. For the Piper, danced by Angel Corella, he choreographed spins and more spins, leaps and more leaps, an aerobic workout but not much else. He did no better with the ensemble dances, which an old pro like Freddy Franklin could have staged in an afternoon. And despite the masked faces of the townspeople and the stylized costumes by Ann Hould-Ward, no evidence of stylization could be discerned in the choreography. This was an expensive production, and a great deal of money was spent on promoting it. The fact that the ballet was a dud probably did more to end Spisto’s career at ABT than his expense account and alleged mistreatment of company employees. The lesson to be drawn from this fiasco can be summed up as follows: God spare us from Diaghilevs who know nothing about dance.