danceview
a quarterly review of dance

Reviews

Balanchine in Florida
Miami City Ballet

by Carol Pardo
copyright © 2001 by Carol Pardo
Winter 2001

After seeing invigorating performances of Rubies, Agon, The Four Temperaments and Stars and Stripes by the Miami City Ballet in Washington in September, I wanted to see more, more of the company and more Balanchine. So, ten days after election day 2000, I found myself in West Palm Beach Florida, not to worry over chads or dimples, but to spend a weekend at the Kravis Center for the Performing Arts watching Balanchine's Divertimento No. 15, Diana and Acteon, Sonatine, Sylvia pas de deux and Serenade. The two programs could hardly be more dissimilar. The first crackled with speed, clarity, sharpness and accessible energy; just sitting in the theater was intoxicating. This second program, showing the same hallmarks of Balanchine style did not seduce as effortlessly. The viewer had to work harder--to be a more willing subject before falling under the spell of the dancing.

Divertimento No. 15 is not an undemanding opener. It asks the dancers, particularly the five women and three men who perform the interlocking solos and pas de deux to soar with Mozart's cantilena line as though taking a breath at the beginning of each movement and releasing it only at the very end requiring the audience to participate with the same intensity. Kenneth Easter managed this is his solo, letting some jumps hover but not rushing while staying on the music thus adding some buoyancy to the filigree of the piece. Otherwise, this production doesn't quite take one's breath away but remains a string of individually set gems. The set also changes the tone of the production. Now generally danced before a cyclorama or originally surrounded by a trellis designed by David Hays, the MCB production is set on the stage of a theater, also designed by David Hays. The setting reinforces the sense of performance making the work as a whole seem more public and less intimate that is has previously.

Next on the program were three pas de deux. The first, Diana and Acteon was made for an appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show by Edward Villella and Patricia McBride in 1969. Since I had never seen the broadcast, the prospect of a "new" work by Balanchine was all but irresistible. It is not top drawer Balanchine—Drigo's score does not seem to have been much of an inspiration—but, like an archeologist, I am grateful for the preservation of any relic of a bygone era. Nor can the dancers escape the shades of the original cast whose phrasing permeates the piece. However, Diana and Acteon did give the audience the opportunity to applaud often and loudly and gave Luis Serrano a chance to show off his high, bold jump. Oddly, in a company known for its adherence to the choreographic text, Serrano danced two very different version of the end of his variation and the coda. The first, bursting with jetés coupés en tournant and barrel turns, looked like something straight out of a 1990's production of La Bayadere or Le Corsaire. In the second version, they were replaced by multiple air turns in passé and a manege of jetés which seemed truer: Balanchine wouldn't have appreciated the glitz of the first version and Villella didn't need it to make an impression on an audience.

In a complete change of tone, Drigo's somewhat brassy score was followed by Sonatine to Ravel's eponymous work for solo piano: the pas de deux as a civilized and witty stroll at twilight—an impression reinforced by the dancers’ indigo costumes. The male lead was taken by the three French principals in the company: Bernard Courtot de Boutellier, Eric Quillere and Arnold Quintane, all of them giving the best performances (each quite different from the other) that I have seen them give. To what extent this is due to an affinity for the music, comfort with the technical demands of the piece, or the presence of Violette Verdy and Jean-Pierre Bonnefoux—the original cast—as coaches I don't know. The women too made the piece their own. Mary Carmen Catoya treated the stroll as a gentle flirtation, Deanna Seay as reverie in which only her partner remained as the world fell away and Jennifer Cronenberg outing for a witty aristocrat. To be able to present three casts that can make a ballet live in three different ways is a credit to the company. I can only hope that Sonatine will rotate in the repertory and be more than a one-season wonder.

This trio of pas de deux ended with the Sylvia pas de deux. Like Diana and Acteon, it is a virtuoso piece; like Sonatine, it reflects the delicacy of its French score. Combining the two creates a pas de deux whose demands on the dancers are hardly evident until performance is over. Take, as an example, the use of fishdives: in most virtuoso pas de deux, the dive is an end in itself, the pose taken on the beat and held. In Sylvia, the dancer passes through the fishdive to end the phrase in a very simple supported arabesque.

The program closed with Serenade, which while not the send 'em home ecstatic closer the audience wished for, served to send everyone home with the virtues of the company in the mind's eye: the sense of common purpose on stage, the spatial clarity of the corps work, clean execution, rhythmic sensitivity and a hunger to be on stage.

The program may indicate the opening of a new aspect of Balanchine to be explored in depth or, it may be a response to current circumstances. In the last year, the company has opened its newly constructed headquarters and markedly increased its indebtedness. As a consequence, the size of the company has shrunk and the use of taped music increased (it was used for both Diana and Acteon and Sylvia here). There have also been changes in the backstage personnel, chief among the disappearance of the position of choreographer in residence and of choreographer Jimmy Gamonet de los Heros and with him thirty ballets which constituted nearly a third of the company's repertory. Sonatine which, requiring only two dances, a solo pianist and a cyclorama is (comparatively) inexpensive to produce, replace a previously announced premiere by Gamonet. We shall see where all this leads and can only hope that the difficulties offstage do not have too great an impact on what happens onstage, and that the quality of what happens onstage serves as a rallying cry to work through these trying times and keep the dancing alive.