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Reviews

Dancing as Fast as They Can—
The New York City Ballet's Spring 1997 Season

by Mary Cargill

The New York City Ballet performed in the State Theatre as usual from January through July, excluding the December Nutcrackers and a break in March. The first half was repertory as usual, which means about thirty ballets, including a new ballet by Jerome Robbins and a guest, Isabel Guérin from the Paris Opera Ballet. New Yorkers (and New York critics) tend to forget that such concentrated variety is not the norm, and can take the superhuman effort to cast, rehearse, and present this many ballets for granted. Of course, when sitting through an inadequately rehearsed or strangely cast ballet, it is small comfort to think that there will be a different ballet the next night. Presumably to save rehearsal time and to accommodate the subscription audience, ballets are given in bunches, creating a breathless "If it’s Tuesday, it must be Agon" feeling. And often first performances had a dress rehearsal feel, with the corps eyeing each other carefully at times, and collisions not unknown.

There were many new faces in the corps this year, and far fewer experienced ones, which could explain the often over careful dancing. Many of them danced with a slight "Hi grandma, look at me" grin, with too many arms flailing and shoulders hunched. Their general lack of stage presence was painfully obvious when one corps girl watched the last act of Coppelia with her arms folded, as if she felt ballet was all about movement and not about theater, so that if she weren’t moving she wasn’t part of the ballet. But the end of the Spring season, this gauchness had by and large disappeared, though at times the corps could still look as if it was in a ballet roller derby.

Gauchness and untheatricality are not in Isabel Guérin’s vocabulary. Unfortunately, her performance in her only classical role, Swan Lake, was a disappointment. She was cold and distant, as if she were trying so hard to be a super-cool Balanchine ballerina that she couldn’t let any of the emotion in the choreography come through. It was beautifully danced, if a little slow and unmusical, but it was all phrasing and no feeling.

Her performance in Robbins’ The Concert, however, as the enraptured young girl in the fluffy hat, was chic, witty, and delightfully underplayed. Guérin seems to have a real affinity for Robbins; she was also very funny as the girl in green in Dances at a Gathering, and gave her solo a gracious individuality. She was not funny at all as the Siren in The Prodigal Son. Though she does not have extraordinarily long or elegant legs, she was able to use her upper body with a cold and deliberate hypnotic effect, rather like a mechanical cobra.

Her appearances were particularly welcome in the Winter season when City Ballet was thinner than usual at the ballerina level. Kyra Nichols was still on maternity leave, Darci Kistler was back but seemed to cancel as much as she danced, and Judith Fugate retired after the Nutcrackers. A somewhat neglected and underrated dancer, Fugate, with her small, precise dancing added an extra dimension to City Ballet. Watching her was like looking gold filigree--delicate, intricate, and beautifully detailed. In certain ballets, especially in the French-scented ones like La Source, and most gloriously in The Sleeping Beauty, she brought a beauty and charm, which will be hard to replace.

Merrill Ashley, too, was barely visible, but did dance her scheduled Ballo della Reginas. The audience, sensing perhaps that this was its last opportunity to see a Balanchine ballet danced by its creator, watched with its heart more that its eyes, and who could blame it.

City Ballet audiences may not have many more chances to see an original Balanchine, but they can still see a great choreographer’s work maintained by its creator. Many of the memorable performances were given in Robbins’ ballets, and in Fancy Free, the audience got to see a great ballet carefully cast and coached. Robert La Fosse was perfect as the shyer soldier, his solo almost pathetically eager to please. The ballet was full of delightful nuances. I especially enjoyed Tom Gold nervously swaggering into the bar and boldly downing his beer--obviously his first legal drink. Damian Woetzel, as the more extroverted braggart, had a field day and was at last able to integrate his virtuosity into his character. The girls, Samantha Allen and Pascal van Kipnis, were equally good. In an early performance, Samantha Allen’s oddly becoming Forties bouffant hairdo started coming down, and she sat at the table fussing and worrying, a charming unexpected bit of realism. Unfortunately, she pulled it back into a ballerina bun for the other performances, but only a cast with a genuine understanding of character and style could turn an accident into a piece of the action.

The only premiere in the Winter season was a new Robbins ballet, Brandenburg, set to pieces of four of the Brandenburg Concerti. It was not top drawer Robbins, but rather bits and pieces from lots of drawers, especially the one for cutesy juveniles. The craft was there, memorably in a mysterious don’t touch, can’t really see you pas de deux for Nikolaj Hübbe and Lourdes Lopez, but it was still craft without content. At forty minutes it was far too long--it was quite a wait for the inevitable cartwheels. The short peasanty skirts did not go with the formal music, but then neither did most of the choreography.

Winter also saw the New York debut of Schoenberg/Wuorin Variations by Richard Tanner, which premiered in Saratoga Springs in 1996. It is yet another spiky leotard ballet, with lots of flexed feet and pseudo-angst. It was most memorable for the extraordinarily unflattering costumes, mustard yellow for the girls and dull green for the boys, with colored belts that chopped the bodies in half. The choreography wasn’t at all musical--it seemed only to exist side by side with the notes. When the music got louder, it just meant there were more people on stage, doing the same few awkward steps at terrific speed. Unlike its Balanchine models, it never became an extension or a visual representation of the music.

Bad choreography, unfortunately, turned up again in Peter Martins’ Schubertiad. Revived for the 200th anniversary of Schubert’s birth, this had not been seen since its premier in 1984. With elaborate sets and costumes, it has a surface attraction. But it is clear that the old joke "Good choreographers borrow, great ones steal" is true. Balanchine stole wholeheartedly from Petipa--ideas about structure and form, the idealization of the ballerina, and chunks of steps. He stole all this, added his own response to music and his genius, and make them his own. Martins has borrowed many ideas from Balanchine for Schubertiad (which could be called Schubert-liebestänze Walzer), but no real characters develop. Margaret Tracey dances plaintively, then becomes happy; couples seem to have emotional problems, then the next moment they dance with someone else, as if nothing mattered. In the middle (when novice viewers think the ballet is over), the lights go down and the scene switches to an outdoor garden. The men take off their jackets and the women most of their skirts, but the choreography does not change. There is no sense, as in Liebeslieder Walzer or Davidsbundlertänze, of getting a richer, more private view of the couples. At the end of the day, Martins must give back all that he has borrowed, and ends up with nothing.

Another less ambitious Martins was also seen in the Winter season, The Tchaikovsky Pas de Quatre, a classical divertissement for the full-length Swan Lake he recently produced for the Royal Danish Ballet. It served as a filler, a fourth ballet to complete a short evening, and normally wouldn’t deserve much attention, but it was so staggeringly bad it was hard to ignore. It uses selections from Swan Lake not usually heard; Sir Frederick Ashton also used much of this music for his own Swan Lake Pas de Quatre, one of the most beautiful and inventive of his works, and possibly any choreography would suffer by comparison. But even so, Martins’ choreography was finicky or almost completely unimaginative; when the music gets faster the dancers just spin, with no variety or interest. He gave the dancers lots of turns from a slightly bent knee, making them look squat and awkward. The centerpiece is a pas de deux to a wistful, romantic melody, Tchaikovsky at his most lush. The partnering is so complex and geometric, the dancers can barely look at each other, much less generate any emotion. The performers, Benjamin Millepied, Miranda Weese, Samantha Allen, and Jennie Somogyi, did their best, but this ballet is utterly heartless, which I suppose is something of an achievement, considering it is danced to Tchaikovsky.

Of course, being the home of Balanchine, all was not grim on the choreographic front. One of the most enjoyable offerings was Who Cares?, an excursion into Gershwin’s fairy tale New York, where men are sophisticated and women can kick. The corps in the first performance, as was so often the case, was a little rocky, but by the last one, it was glorious. I especially enjoyed Aura Dixon, a tall, luxurious corps dancer, kicking joyfully in "Lady Be Good". Miranda Weese in "My One and Only" was in her element, with sharp, precise, and gracious turns. This was one of her first major roles as a young corps dancer, and as a young principal she is even better. Monique Meunier also danced this part. She has a very different style than the elegant, precise Weese, but her long-legged, flowing approach also worked very well, even if it smudged the details a bit around the edges.

The main role in this and several other ballets were shared by Margaret Tracey and Nicol Hlinka. Hlinka danced with extraordinary confidence and grace throughout the Winter; it was really her season. She has always been a musical dancer, sometimes to my mind almost self-indulgently so; she can stretch the music, exaggerating or distorting the steps, as if she were trying somehow to make an impression. This was not the case this year, and her timing was delicious. In her solo "Fascinating Rhythm", the music really seemed to be coming from her arms. Her insouciant flick of the wrist, right on the downbeat, was so perfectly timed that many in the audience laughed in surprise--it was like seeing the choreography for the first time. She was greatly helped by Philip Neal’s strong and gracious partnering. For once, the complicated lifts in "The Man I Love" seemed easy and unforced. Her Sylph in Scotch Symphony was by turns elegant, mysterious, and playful, and by going deeper than the steps connected the ballet, quite properly, to all the balletic sylphs that preceded it.

The "let them watch steps" championship goes to Margaret Tracey, who approaches her roles like the Breck Shampoo girl--bright, glossy, and never changing. She was very enjoyable in Tarantella, and, I understand (I did not see her) charming in Coppelia. Her debut in Scotch Symphony, though, might as well have been Coppelia. The elusive, mysterious, and magical Sylph was danced as a perky soubrette. Even Nikolaj Hübbe, defeated by the speedy, complicated turns Balanchine devised for André Eglevsky, seemed dazed. Tracey also made her debut in The Firebird, where again, she seemed totally lost. The Firebird has many facets--commanding, mysterious, and powerful. But she is never a simpering coquette pretending to be a vamp.

Wendy Whelan also made a debut in La Sonambula, a role in which she would seem equally miscast. She has become grotesquely thin, and seeing her in leotard ballets is a bit like watching an animated paper clip, but the long, flowing costume hid her emaciated body and overdeveloped rib cage. Appropriately in this Schubert anniversary season, her Sleepwalker emphasized the wilder, darker, death-obsessed side of Romanticism, which was a welcome contrast to the pieces of cotton candy recently floating through the role. Looking like she had just come from a chat with the Erlkönig, she blew in from the other side of the grave, her burning blank eyes in a desperately pale face instinctively looking for someone to keep her company. It was clear that she wasn’t taking the poet for a pleasant little rendezvous--she wanted company in the grave. Hübbe matched her intensity. Even sitting at the back of the stage flirting with the Coquette, his presence blazed through the action upstage.

Whelan was less satisfactory in the pas de deux in Agon, a role that should suit her better than the Sleepwalker. She hurled herself on stage, jerked her leg around Jock Soto’s neck and stared at the audience until they started to applaud. Then she flung herself through the rest of the steps with no elegance or grace. This hip approach to Agon has been a City Ballet staple for a number of years. Even Alexander Ritter, usually so elegant and clean, danced the Sarabande as if it were another version of Phlegmatic, all loose arms and funny shapes. This made the Pacific Northwest Ballet’s cool and elegant version performed here last year such a revelation. Agon was based choreographically and musically on French court dances, so a more formal approach seems more appropriate as well as more interesting. Agon seems to be a lost ballet at City Ballet nowadays.

Casting and style were also questionable in Vienna Walzes, one of Balanchine’s deceptively simple ballets where the atmosphere is more important than the steps. The dance episodes, "Voices of Spring" and the "Explosions Polka" were the best. "Tales from the Vienna Woods", with either Helene Alexopolis or Diana White and Jock Soto, has become a high school prom, all frisky kicks and giggles. Simply because the dancers are able to get their legs above their heads exposing their frilly drawers is no reason to think it appropriate at a nineteenth-century ball. It lacked the combination of elegance and desperation; after all if a girl couldn’t get a partner, it could very well mean a lifetime sentence of poverty and spinsterhood.

The "Gold and Silver Waltz" had Lourdes Lopez as the woman with the most smashing hat, and she was stunning, walking in like Marlene Dietrich, where she met the very handsome but young and ill-at-ease Peter Hansen. So instead of two experienced people meeting on equal terms, we saw an older woman and a gawky youth on his first trip to the demimonde. She looked like she could eat him for breakfast.

Darci Kistler repeated her performance in the "Rosenkavalier" section, where a woman wanders through a ballroom by herself, mysteriously conjuring up memories of a former partner, who fades in and out of sight. Suzanne Farrell and later Stephanie Saland (on whom, in Farrell’s absence, Balanchine worked out the choreography) were each able, through a tilt of the head or a wave of an arm, to convey years of bittersweet memories. Kistler, with her sunny good nature and clear, uncomplicated style (which made her such a notable Aurora), could only suggest an innocent young girl, alone at her first ball. At one time she literally flapped her arms in time to the music, like a twelve-year old pretending to dance Swan Lake. In the Spring season, Kyra Nichols danced the part, giving it back some seriousness and weight.

What has not been lost is glorious male dancing; there is a seemingly inexhaustible source of corps boys able to dance anything, and a glorious variety of principals. Robert La Fosse, who is winding down his dancing, is developing into an intelligent and subtle mime. His Dr. Coppélius was played as a harmless, methodical eccentric. La Fosse avoided the temptation to make the character darker--no misunderstood genius he--and thus kept the ballet, which should be sunny and lighthearted, in balance.

He was much darker in Robbins’ melancholy Ives Songs. An older man, wandering through the past dominates the memory ballet. Previously, La Fosse played him as a gnarled, shuffling old man, but this year he was middle-aged, with many years of loneliness ahead of him. Adam Lüders in his unforgettable performance also took this approach, which I think is more interesting. La Fosse does not have Lüder’s height or haunted face, but his performance was nonetheless deeply moving.

Male dancing was also on display in Apollo. It is a reviewer’s job to write about what he sees, not about what he wanted to see or thought he should see. Second-guessing casting is not part of the job description. But at times it is inevitable, and to give Apollo to Nilas Martins, a dancer whose inadequacies have been well-chronicled in this magazine and elsewhere, can only seem to an outsider to be perverse.

Igor Zelensky got the majority of the Apollos. This Kirov-trained dancer has some wonderful gifts. He is tall, fluid, with a soft and elegant jump. But he has never really seemed to be part of NYCB, and in fact, left after the Spring season. His Apollo is forceful, a bit raw at the beginning, and gaining in power, but this Apollo really looks as if he will grow up to be Mars.

Hübbe is another import, but he has become much more integrated into City Ballet. When he first arrived, he had some difficulty with his turns, and seemingly as compensation, forced other parts of his dancing. But his turns have improved (the problems with Scotch Symphony were not typical), and he is a more relaxed, confident dancer. His Apollo was especially memorable for the controlled power of his upper body, urging the muses on, pulling them back, testing his strength.

Peter Boal was finally given the role in the Spring season. There has long been discussion over the nature of the Apollo--is it a demi-caractére part or a purely classical role. The general consensus seems to be on the side of the demis, and an Apollo with a less than classical body but a noble soul makes a wonderful contrast; Hübbe and Jose Carreño of ABT prove that. But it is also wonderful to see the choreography performed by a classicist like Peter Boal, a dancer of such beauty that he, like Anthony Dowell, can make an arabesque seem like a moral statement.

The Sleeping Beauty, given in the spring after a three-year rest, also seems to have lost its way, or at least lost its ballerinas. Margaret Tracey was the first cast, and she gave a pleasant performance, floating politely on top of the music, never disturbing its depths. Her hit-or-miss arabesque, which tends to end up in no man’s land between her hip and her shoulders, destroys the brief eternal moment of perfect beauty that a classic 90 degree arabesque gives and is so essential for Aurora.

Yvonne Bouree made her debut in The Sleeping Beauty. She is a small dancer, who moves on a small scale, so would not seem a born Aurora. By the standards of the previous Auroras City Ballet has offered, she was not outstanding, but if lightly sketched, the performance was still true to life. Bouree was charming in the first act; she seemed genuinely delighted with her roses, with her partners, and with her chance to shine. It may have been nerves, which caused her occasionally to tighten her face and stick her chin out, but she got through the balances with few problems. (I understand that the second performance, which I did not see, was less successful.) Her vision scene was light and delicate; she really did seem like a bit of mist drifting through the forest. The final act was less successful, since she couldn’t capture the superhuman grandeur of the role. She was charming, but much more like Sugar Plum than Aurora.

The most successful Aurora I saw (I missed Wendy Whelan and Miranda Weese) was Nicol Hlinka, who danced with real presence and musical authority. When I had seen her in the role previously, she seemed at times to be forcing her effects, stretching the phrases somewhat willfully, as if trying to draw attention to her own talent rather than letting the dancing flow. There was none of this mannerism this time, and she gave an elegant, technically assured, and nuanced performance. To my eye, though, her slightly short and stocky build means that the absolute classic perfection of the immortal Auroras is not there.

Absolute classical perfection was fortunately on view when Peter Boal danced the Prince. From his first entrance, bored but always polite, to the final coda when he did some thrilling turns into a perfect arabesque, he was magical. Hübbe did not attempt those turns, but brought his own convincing presence to the role. Always the perfect cavalier, he seemed to be aware of his ballerina even when she wasn’t on stage, and made the ballet a really love story, not just an excuse for some dancing.