danceview
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Reviews

New York Report

The Chamber Dance Project, DanceGalaxy, LaScala Ballet, the Universal Ballet of Korea.

by Mary Cargill
copyright © 2001 by Mary Cargill
Autumn 2001

The Chamber Dance Project, directed by the ballet-trained Diane Coborn Bruning, made its New York City debut in June at the Marymount Manhattan Theatre. The small company makes a point of performing to live music whenever possible; the musicians are included in the cast list and the evening included a mini-recital as well as dances. This innovative and honorable respect for music contributed to a very interesting evening.

Three works by Bruning were performed; Piazzolla Songs (yes, Virginia, another tango ballet), Berceuse, and the premiere of Passages. Bruning is an interesting choreographer, ballet-based (the girls were on pointe) but with a slightly modern edge. Fortunately, the modern edge didn’t disintegrate into ultra cool mannerisms, and she created some interesting, jagged, yet flowing shapes. She uses the upper body very well, not to form traditional classical poses, but with a rhythm and flow.

Stanton Welch, the prolific Australian choreographer, premiered Kisses, to Debussy. This was more traditionally balletic which is not necessarily a compliment. There were three very similar melancholy pas de deux, with a lot of portentous hands-over-the-eyes gestures and much actual kissing. Real choreo-graphers can make steps that do the kissing. The ballet ends in a pool of light, with dancers reaching up and then lying down, right out of The Beginner’s Guide to Ballet Clichés.

Four Men in Suits, by Ann Carlson, an excerpt from her 1986 Real People Series, was a complete change of pace, a postmodern exercise for four men in suits (Giff Braun, Victor Quijada, Jeremy Raia, and John Walker) boxed in a square, who repeated various words and phrases, while obliquely acting out trapped commuters dreaming of freedom, and literally smelling the roses at the end. It was clever and witty, but had a real bite.

A new Stanton Welch also appeared on the program of DanceGalaxy, the company run by former NYCB principal Judith Fugate and her husband, Medhi Bahiri. The small touring company was founded, according to Fugate, to provide dancers an opportunity to show audiences in less frequently served areas an assortment of dances, from classical pieces to newly commissioned works. In its previous visits to New York, the company had a varied and interesting repertoire, but the choices for this visit, unfortunately, seemed too similar, all variations on swooping lunges, with little of the more traditional classical shimmer.

The program opened with a revival of Choo San Goh’s Beginnings, a rather formless piece of soft-edged classicism to music by Lennox Berkeley. The two couples did a lot of soulful staring and sequential wafting, which was pleasant enough, but despite fine performances by Belinda Hernandez, Bonnie Pickard, Fabrice Herrault, and François Perron, the work was not very memorable.

The program closed with a repeat of last year’s premier, Adam Miler’s The Flow Bear Waltzes. The work is set to Bal Musette music, and the feelings called forth by the melodic, bittersweet tunes, with their smoky café feeling, were by and large ignored for some generic wafting. It looked like choreography by the yard—it wasn’t French enough to be measured by the metre.

The most publicized item on the program was a pas de deux, Reflections, for Christina Fagundes and Alex Lapshin choreographed by Peter Martins to music by his son, the dancer Nilas Martins. The choreography was in Peter Martins’ “homage to Heather Watts” vein, with quirky, jerky phrases lurching from pose to pose. The steps were obviously complicated and difficult (so much for art being about effect rather than effort) and emotionless; the dancers had trouble even looking at each other. The live music was an interesting, jazzy combination for piano, cello, violin, and saxophone that provided a solid foundation for the mainly derivative choreography.

Stanton Welch’s Orange, to music by Vivaldi—a premiere—is one of a set of ballets he has done based on the emotions evoked by the colors of the chakra. Vivaldi, ballet, and yoga may be a sincere multicultural attempt, but the piece might as well have been called Green, since Welch’s steps and ideas seem infinitely recyclable.

The La Scala Ballet returned to New York in July as part of the Lincoln Festival. The company, which is affiliated with the much more renowned La Scala Opera, has had a mixed history and is between directors. This might explain the repertory it brought to New York, which could have used some firmer artistic guidance. The double bill of Amarcord, choreographed by Luciano Cannito and Roland Petit’s Carmen was not very successful. Both works were based on originals in other media, and both relied on the originals to make their points.

Amarcord was based on the Fellini film about growing up in Fascist Italy. The old canard about no mothers-in-law in ballet is not true (no one has trouble figuring out Desiré’s relation to Aurora’s mother), but portraying an extended family at dinner being interrupted by soldiers who take the father to be interrogated and force him to drink castor oil is a bit daunting for even the most talented choreographer to express in dance terms.

And Mr. Cannito is not a talented choreographer. The steps were generic splits, rolls, and turns; the soldiers could have just as well danced the whores’ choreography. The corps tended to dance in straight rows and wave their arms; it was as if the Italians spend World War II doing calisthenics. In addition, the determination to avoid mimed characterizations and make everything danced had some unintended comic effects. The Fascist leader would slap someone, do a pirouette, frown, do a double tour, shove his elbow in someone’s face, and do an arabesque. The best choreography was a traditional jitterbug, symbolizing the arrival of the American troops; it was full of rhythm, steps, and character. But it was a very long war before the Yanks arrived.

Carmen, Roland Petit’s sizzler, is a much better constructed work; the sets are grimly evocative and the stage pictures very effective, if not equal to the emotional punch of the opera. The mixture of realism (people smoking actual cigarettes) and artifice doesn’t always work, but basically it is a concise, if somewhat underwhelming summation of the Carmen story, with one major gap. The character of Don Jose is not developed, so there is no pull between love and duty, no sense that this is a weak but honorable man destroyed.

Carmen was dance by Viviana Durante, a guest artist. It was a shame the company didn’t have enough confidence in their own dancers, because Durante was no asset. She danced crisply and cleanly, but might have been dancing the Spanish doll variation in Coppèlia for all the passion she generated. There is more to Carmen than wiggling a rear end now and then; there should be smoke in her eyes. Durante’s Carmen didn’t seem to realize the Don Jose was in the room and she only seemed to come alive in the final scene, with its anger and contempt. But a Carmen without a lustful joy is no Carmen.

Nor, I’m afraid, is Giselle without magic a real Giselle. La Scala brought the French dancer Sylvie Guillem’s production, originally done for the National Ballet of Finland. Much was made of Guillem’s rethinking the work; in her words “there is no longer a unity of place, but rather a cinematrographic structure”. This was not the first time the La Scala Ballet has rethought Giselle; in 1843 the company rechoreographed it for another guest star, set it in Bosnia, and revised the story, because it was thought too dull for the Italian audience. I suspect Guillem’s Giselle will go the way of this long forgotten Gisela. Film structure, with its realism and close-ups, does not work on stage, and the result was an ugly, incoherent mess.

The set for the first act was a long beige wall that bisected the stage. At various times the huge structure was ostentatiously and distractingly turned around to reveal basically the same long beige wall. The costumes were drab and unattractive. The girls, including Guillem, wore brown socks and toe shoes, presumably to mimic boots. But this attempt at realism made the pointe work seem artificial and meaningless. Nor did the peasant reality go with the gentle nineteenth century music and much of the hustle-bustle was unnecessary and distracting. Giselle’s village seemed to be overrun by homeless old sots waving wine bottle around. There was much extraneous sexual innuendo. One old man grabbed his crotch during the peasant pas de deux, and one of the noblemen ran off stage with a peasant girl, returning shortly tucking his shirt into his pants.

But despite all of these side dramas, the main story was just sketched. Albrecht, the doe-eyed, slight Massimo Murru, had no defined character; the audience had no idea whether he was a young innocent or practiced seducer, whether he loved Giselle from the beginning, or if not why he was there. Nor was it clear why Guillem’s earthy, spunky, take-charge miss (she snatched the harvest festival garland away from the other girls and crowned herself) would be attracted to this Albrecht, or why she would become unhinged when he seemed to sleepwalk out of her life. Giselle’s mother did some abbreviated mime of the story of the Wilis, but no one in the village seemed to care; while she was vaguely gesturing, one of the peasant girls was tossed around the stage with a tablecloth over her head, to great hilarity. If the story is just a joke, the wile’s Act 2 appearance just becomes decorative.

Decorative is not the most apt word for the Act 2 décor, which took place on a rocky plane with a few flat gray tree trunks on the backdrop. Myrtha and her two cohorts (Moyna and Zulma have been nixed) began by bouréeing carefully around the boulders, which finally floated up to the sky, revealing a large white circle. There was no grave, no cross, no wand for Myrtha, and just a bunch of girls in various styles of 1950’s wedding dresses. (It looked as if the Red Cross had thoughtfully airlifted a copy of Bride’s Magazine to Giselle’s village.) The dresses were too heavy for the choreography, and the different styles destroyed the mysterious symmetry of more traditional Giselles. Yes, the original scenario planned to have the Wilis in various national styles, but this idea was dropped, presumably for sound dramatic reasons. In lieu of Myrtha’s powerful mime, the Wilis gathered in circles and whispered in each other’s ears; the scene conveyed all the terror and mystery of a sorority debating a new member.

The Wilis did do much of the traditional choreography, but Guillem reworked, or rather simplified, Giselle’s solos. She cut the difficult balances and the delicate floating footwork. The trademark Guillem extensions appeared at odd intervals, rather as if Giselle had developed a distracting and unfortunate tic that caused her to toss her log up at inconvenient times.

There was little emotional connection between Albrecht and Giselle in this act, in part because the first act characters were so undeveloped. There was no sense of genuine remorse, repentance, and forgiveness. For all the pseudo-realistic details, the drunken stumbling and the debutante wilis, this Giselle had little real drama; it is a completely wrongheaded production.

The Universal Ballet of Korea appeared at the State Theater in August with a similar program—a classic, La Bayadère, and a recently choreographed ballet, Shim Chung. There was, however, no attempt to rethink Petipa, and La Bayadère was given a traditional staging by the current artistic director, Oleg Vinogradov, formerly of the Kirov. The Universal Ballet is associated with the Rev. Sun Myung Moon, and yes, creepy thoughts of cults cannot help but occur. But based on the performances, the company is very strong and quite engaging.

Shim Chung, based on a well-known Korean folk-tale, was choreographed by the company’s first artistic director, the American Adrienne Dellas, to specially composed music by Kevin Barber Pickard. Successful ballet music is hard to write, but Pickard has succeeded; it was melodic and atmospheric without overpowering the other elements. The sets too, mainly traditional painted flats, were unobtrusively atmospheric. Audiences familiar with the traditional 19th century ballets recognized many of the elements in Shim Chung—a put-upon heroine, a vision scene (under water, this time), the triumph of good, and a final wedding celebration. But these did not seem contrived; they seemed rather to grow out of the original fairy tale. (Companies desperate to contrive modern full-length ballets would do well so study the structure of this work.)

The story revolves around Shim Chung and her father, a poor blind widower. To raise money to restore her father’s sight, Shim Chung sells herself to a passing band of pirates so she can be sacrificed to the Sea Dragon King to endure a safe voyage. The Sea King, moved by her goodness, revives her, and a set of underwater creatures entertains her. His son falls in love with her, but Shim Chung rejects the luxurious life to return to her father. Once back on land she meets the King of Korea, who, like all good fairy tale heroes, is seeking his perfect bride. They fall in love and the King summons all the blind men of the kingdom, who all regain their sight to general rejoicing

Goodness and self-sacrifice are not currently in vogue, and are particularly difficult to make interesting artistically, but Sun-Hee Park was a very appealing, human Shim Chung. Her fear, her grief, her determination, and her final joy shone through her luminous eyes and gentle, committed dancing.

The choreography itself didn’t quite match the rest of the production; it was serviceable rather than inspired and the underwater divertissements cried out for a Petipa. The energetic pirates would have been more interesting had they been more Korean; they looked like they were auditioning for roles in Le Corsaire. The wedding entertainers, dancing more authentic folk dances, were thrilling. The only slightly jarring moment was an acrobatic, MacMillanesque pas de deux for Shim Chung and her prince. Fairy tale heroines don’t run around in skimpy nightgowns, and it was too modern and passionate for the more stylized folk-tale elements of the rest of the ballet. But Dellas avoided the wedding pas de deux cliché and had Shim Chung preside over the general joy in a beautiful, heavily embroidered Korean costume in which she could dominate the stage without any physical effort. It was an elegant final touch to a genuinely entertaining and uplifting evening.

La Bayadère may not be as morally uplifting, but it is certainly entertaining and the company, to its credit, played it straight and didn’t skimp on the choreography. No, they are not the Kirov; there were some wobbles and the mime was not as powerful or individualized as it could have been. The Brahmin, especially, lacked the nobility the character needs. They perform the current Kirov version, with all the exotic dances in the betrothal scene and with the shades scene as the conclusion. Americans are probably more familiar with Makarova’a version for ABT, which cuts many of the betrothal scene dances and concludes with the destruction of the temple, the death of the baddies, and the reunification of Solor and Nikiya in Paradise. Dramatically, I find Makarova’s version superior, but I do enjoy seeing all the dances; the charming Danse Manu with the two little girls and the jug, the Golden Idol with all his strutting attendants, the frantic drum dancers, and the stage-filling parrot girls. These were all danced with a winning combination of charm and energy.

The Nikiya I saw, She-Yun Kim, is a lovely dancer, with a refreshing purity of style; she avoided the annoying little wrist flicks at the end of a phrase and just seemed to relax into those beautiful poses. She had some problems with the technique; the backward chugs at the end of her shades solo were not very steady, but she, like the rest of the company, danced with an appealing sincerity and freshness. If, as yet, all the technical and dramatic nuances if La Bayadère were not mastered, the company at least brought good dancers performing great choreography, not, as so many visiting companies do, good dancers in forgettable works.