danceview
a quarterly review of dance

Reviews

New York Report
One Helluva  Town
by Robert Greskovic
Volume 15, No. 3 (Spring)

New York--"New York, New York," the song in On The Town recently reminded us, is a "helluva town." (FYI: This past summer's pilot revival by the New York Shakespeare Festival of the 1944 musical inspired by Jerome Robbins's Fancy Free is still being considered as a full-blown Broadway production, minus the Eliot Feld choreography, which was summarily trounced by the reviewers, even though director George Wolfe's casting of the show struck me as a bigger non-event than Feld's uninspired dances.) But, "helluva" situations in the 1940s and in the 1990s are eras apart.

New York City dancegoing over the past six months has prompted more than one helluva riddle. When once regular but lately scarce Royal Ballet reappeared in NYC under the aegis of Lincoln Center '97, local interest was spotty. To my curious eye, this was due not to the lack of artistic worthiness with regard to productions and dancing, but to the oddly chosen repertory--odd to dancegoers but seemingly predictable to the festival's music-minded administration. (John Rockwell, the event's top man, is a music scholar and former New York Times music critic.) And, while the season's musical aspect was of high artistic quality performance-wise, the musicological stress in the programming proved to be of insufficient interest to the dance public. Showcasing Kenneth MacMillan's last multi-act ballet, Prince of the Pagodas (1989) made more sense on music paper than on the pages of one's dance card. Benjamin Britten's only full-scale ballet score is of some interest to the history of English music and dance, but it is of special interest to balletgoers near and far only if it inspired choreography of notable ballet theater. Apparently, it didn't in 1957, with John Cranko's premiere production of the score, and it doesn't today in MacMillan's quasi-narrative/quasi-abstract three-act production. The all-Ravel program, i.e. another musically defined bill, was of more interest and artistic merit on paper, consisting as it did of Ashton's ensemble swirling La Valse and his delicate, pageantlike Daphnis and Chloe, MacMillan's fashion-plate production La Fin du Jour and novice Christopher Wheeldon's naive trifle, Pavane pour un infante défunte. Whatever else this bill proved artistically, especially in the cases of Pavane and Daphnis, the Metropolitan Opera House's vast stage was hardly the ideal frame for the vague sweetness of Wheeldon's duet or for the subtlety of the Ashton's contemporary/ancient Greek rite. In case of Ashton's masterly Cinderella, there should be reason to commend the season’s presenters, except that the best of all "Cinderella" ballets to be found anywhere in the world today was offered almost as an afterthought, programmed for the most part, as matinee fodder. What an unfortunate circumstance this was in the case of the performance led by Darcey Bussell and Jonathan Cope, which to my way of seeing made the awkward Thursday afternoon slot where it appeared stand out as the hot spot of the ballet year, and definitely one of the top ten of the ballet decade. Who could have imagined, however much one already adored Bussell, that she would be so perfectly blissful an Ashton ballerina in a role such as this? I expected much from Bussell, but I got worlds more. I'll treasure forever the personal touch she alone added: When poised atop her kitchen stool at the hearth, she rose lovingly onto her pointes as she placed a lighted candle in front of her mother's portrait, and then slipped silkily off them, lost in thought. To be sure, this was but a tiny detail in the marvelous sweep and delectable flight Bussell made of portraying Ashton's heroine, and the only ones there to wittness it were the kiddie matinee crowd and the those with instinct enough to take off from work or daily routines to attend an unusual afternoon ballet schedule.

That was in July. In September, with next to no publicity (I learned about it from casual conversation with a friend), Dance Theater of Harlem slipped into Aaron Davis Hall, a college-campus theater rather off the beaten path of Manhattan's dance theater circuit. There, with little fanfare, to taped music, and in front of sparse audiences, the dance world got to see a glorious rare bird, a ballerina of amazing depth and lustre, eighteen-year-old Alicia Graf. My first look at her was in an ideal showcase, as The Siren in Balanchine's Prodigal Son. While the lean and tall, yet voluptuous, young woman passingly resembles Felia Doubrovska, the original Siren, perhaps mixed with a pinch of Alexandra Danilova's looks--she has something the former's willowy verticality, mouth and nose and something of latter's eyes--Graf is already a world unto herself. She has the stretch, the ease and languor of young cheeta, and the innocence and pride of the "chosen maiden" species that arises all too rarely in the ballet world. Even in ensemble parts (Mantsoe's Sasanka, Taras’s Firebird, Holder's Dougla) your eye goes to Graf, never playing the star but ever just "being" the one that she surely is. I missed Graf's performance of the so-called "Russian Dance" of Balanchine's Serenade, but in the often extremely exaggerated posturings of Royston Maldoom's Adagietto #5, the fresh and singular Graf wove golden effects from the strawlike material of the stunt-dominated acrobatic adagio. How inspired, also, of ballet's not always beneficent Terpsichore to give Graf to DTH, and us, during the season that marked the official departure from the stage of the troupe's longtime signature ballerina, Virgina Johnson.

As it turned out, if one left the nowadays unpredictable precincts of New York, one found at Hartford Ballet, in Hartford, Connecticut, another rare ballet bird showcased in Balanchine's Prodigal Son: sixteen-year-old Washington, D. C. area wonderkind Rasta Thomas. What is it about the ballet air of D.C./Maryland-area, Graf hails from those parts as well. What is touching, and admirable, about both Thomas' debut as the Prodigal with HB and Graf's as the Siren at DTH is the honesty and individuality with which both render their "characters."? Neither one now has much gravitas or depth as an actor, but neither fakes nor lards on surface moodiness. Both remain their young and innocent selves, at once hardly containing the joy that comes from their remarkably practiced skill at ballet's art. Thomas is a jumper, with added acrobatic skill, all of which sustains a dancer's aptness for performing Balanchine's Prodigal character. He's also on the small-boned, though beautifully proportioned, side, which also puts him in good stead for the boyish role's particulars. The only anomaly, albeit a most minor one, was the fact that his innocent and winning performer's smile betrayed the presence in his mouth of braces on his teeth, surely that's a first for a debut in the nearly seventy-year history of his Biblical ballet.

On the same program with Thomas as the Prodigal, HB showed a prodigious debutante of its very own, Melissa Wishinski, also sixteen years old and a recent recipient of the Princess Grace Dance Fellowship. She shares something of Thomas' and Graf's freshness, directness and eagerness, and turns like some gyroscope/top. (Controlling his eager pirouettes is something Thomas definitely needs to work on.) Artistic Director, Kirk Peterson showed her off in his somewhat awkwardly named La Danse Neva, a Tchaikovsky pas de deux with clear links to Balanchine's literally named Tchaikovsky Pas de Deux and with proclaimed intentions of paying homage to Russian ballet's "prima ballerina assoluta," Mathilde Kchessinka. However gifted Kchessinska was, or for that matter the virtuoso Cynthia Harvey, for whom Peterson originally devised his pas de deux, neither, I'd venture to guess could pirouette quite so amazingly as the sweet-faced and utterly unmannered Wishinski.

Peterson's ambitious mixed bill framed his company's stagings of Prodigal and Neva with original reworkings of Nijinksy's 1912 L'Après-midi d'un faune and his 1913 Le Sacre du Printemps. Though the former had the gifted Carlos Molina in its lead and the charismatic Thomas led the latter, neither bettered nor even matched the originals that inspired them. Ballet history is filled with brave souls who choose to capitalize on a historical work's name by remaking it in terms of a present, thus giving the source new life and making unnecessary the paying of royalities to often greedy keepers of the famous flame. Peterson earned credit for sallying forth into territory of his own choosing, however, neither result proved especially distinguished. His fauns looked and acted more like Bacchanalian satyrs, and his rite of spring looked, for all of the fire and freshness to Thomas' "Chosen One," as if it had been over-thoughout in planning and under-thought-through during the process of choreographing.

Of the two HB performances I saw, one was very well attended and the other a virtual sell-out at Hartford's gigantic Bushnell auditorium. That was in early November. Meanwhile, back in NYC, at the dance-familiar City Center in early September, Twyla Tharp, putting on two-week season of weeks of works simply billed as Tharp!, all but for one, unknown hereabouts, played to mostly empty houses. Admittedly, since disbanding her own troupe in 1988, Tharp has been something of a non-presence in NYC-proper. But here she was, returned and to my eye, beguilingly refreshed. Her newest group, not quite called an official company, is filled with youthful, dedicated and gifted dancers. All the works but the one locally familiar, the formerly all-female creation called The Fugue, were created by Tharp of late with these dancers in mind. Roy's Joys, the season's world premiere, named for the inspiring music of jazz trumpeter Roy Eldridge, showed them all off handsomely, even if Santo Loquasto's unisex pants and tops tended to dull both their bodies and their dancing. The recently created Sweet Fields, to mostly Shaker hymns, is a luminous and simple creation. It moves like a magically wrought, child's pull-toy, one skillfully made of sun-bleached bones that possess at once an organic plainness and a talismanic power. Heros, a kind of dark and elegantly sinister affair, set to a Philip Glass symphony inspired by the music of David Byrne and Brian Eno, reveals much about the marvels of this current crop of Tharp dancers--the wiry and intense Shawn Mahoney, the high-flying and dynamic Roger Jeffrey, and the daring and athletic Sandra Stanton, to name but three.

The same, august City Center presented, none-too-successfully I'm told, a week-long season of Momix, which found the Moses Pendleton-directed troupe in perfectly fine shape, performing a very mixed bill of longtime, and deservedly popular, Momixfare. Sputnik, the season's premiere made a worthy addition to the troupe's repertory, conjuring as it went a kind of Witches Sabbath replete with images worthy of Francisco Goya's eye, imagination and pen. American Ballet Theatre followed Momix in the theater, to play a now rare two-week season on the more humanly scaled stage, i.e. more intimate than the expansive Met stage where the company has lately, exclusively, played. I gather the season did fairly if not wildly well at the box office, even though neither of the new ballets gave ballet lovers much ballet to look at. Nacho Duato's Remanso (to Granados) was little more than a window-dressing affair for three handsomely supple and physically expert men, handsomely dressed and lighted on a stage set with square section of wall and single red rose as prop. (If there were a bigger and more precious cliché than a single red rose, I'd like to know what it is. And, if Duato's use of the cliché is meant to be ironic, he needs more cynical performers than Vladimir Malakhov, Desmond Richardson and Parrish Maynard, especially the blissfully innocent Malakhov, whose bare legs and arms cut through the choreography's surface effects like a swallow's tail through a descending dusk. Jean-Christophe Maillot's In Volo (to Schubert) made Remanso look rich of content and filled with ballet dancing. Not even the impetuous and innately skilled dancing of Ethan Stiefel or the lush and rapturous performing of Alessandra Ferri, the pas de deux's originators, could make this wanly acrobatic work look like it had more than the twistings and twingings that were on display.

With Lar Lubovitch's inept Othello as the centerpiece of A.B.T.'s previous, big-ballet Met season, and these two non-ballets as the drawing cards for the smaller-ballet City Center season, the prospects for more of the same are off-putting to say the most. Until the public is given some guidance and inspired programming to entice it back reliably to the city's dance events, the scene in the unofficial dance capital of the world is going to be a volatile and unpredictable one, with nothing seeming like a safe bet, not even dancing that shows itself off in a remarkable and original light. All of which strikes me as helluva way to sustain NYC's claim to being a serious dance town, never mind one taking blithely for granted the label of dance capital of the world.