danceview
a quarterly review of dance

Reviews

New York Light and Dark

by Robert Greskovic
(from Volume 15, No. 4)

Ballet recently lost Jerome Robbins and gained a commemorative postage stamp. We lose a giant and gain a speck.. The ballet commemorative was unveiled and officially dedicated on the promenade of the New York State Theater on September 16, by Peter Martins and Patricia M. Gilbert (Retail, Vice President, U.S. Postal Service). I gather, not being a stamp-issue follower, that such "launches" are usual for special stamps, and the New York City Ballet cleverly offered its theater, its dancers and its officials to let the generic ballet stamp help reinforce the specific celebration of the company's fiftieth anniversary. Though all the speakers voiced welcome words of support and admiration for ballet's art, none offered great words of wisdom or insight, and two of them, including an official from New York City Ballet's board of directors mispronounced Lincoln Kirstein's name (which was intoned as "KEER-steen"). But the "launch" took place and "BALLET" now has another national presence.

The stamp's image, which postal officials kept referring to as another example of a "miniature masterpiece of art," is to my dance-admiring eyes slightly striking in silhouette and slightly disappointing in attention to fine detail. The pictured dancer-a young, blond woman costumed in a white, sylphidelike tutu poised on pointe in cambré, effacé (or ouvert) attitude-appears appealing enough on the stamp itself. It does not, however, bear undue scrutiny or blowing up to the bigger scale of posters or post cards, both of which were on display and sale. In effect, the image strikes me as overly generic and mildly provincial looking. Still, it does speak up for and represent the art of ballet in a way that will be clearer and more commonsensical to the public than to pundits who might like to suggest that ballet is dated and no longer timely.

In short then, I am grateful for the presence of a ballet image, however uninspired, and welcome it with all the imperfections ballet ideally disguises. Too often nowadays, dance, the most photogenic of all the performing arts in our visual, image-mad era, gets some graphic play but less and less serious coverage and attention in the media. Recently, in the so-called Dance Capital of the World, The New Yorker magazine had a mini-fall preview section of event listings. Every area of that section had an opening volley of text to toot the various horns-theater, film, art, etc.--but not dance. All it got was set of listings unremarked upon as the other arts were. The same week, The Village Voice dropped the usual dance page from its "back of the book" arts coverag all together. (The fact that the Art, as in visual, plastic-arts, page also got excised from the issue is small consolation.) The reason for the Voice move had something or other to do with advertising. When I first heard the news, I thought this meant too little advertising from the dance community. Then, when I picked up the issue, I noted a full page's worth as well as prominent space given to events like the "equestrian theater" of Zingaro, an event that the New York Times covered by assigning a dance critic. Dance, it seems, too often lately, is a decoration and/or filler for media design all the while it is deemed of little interest column-space wise by would-be in-the-know editors.

Meanwhile, for only the fourth time in its twenty-year-long run, the Kennedy Center Honors list of distinguished American artists finds no place for a dance artist of any kind. The three proposed "Great Performances" dance shows all appear to be already made projects, that some PBS stations will be buying. By this I mean that none of the newest dance shows offered on our nation's non-commercial, culture television come to our homes as original products of the broadcast system that might otherwise produce, prepare and present its own programs. The three shows "in the can" include a Zizi Jeanmaire and Roland Petit documentary, an Alvin Ailey documentary and another on Busby Berkeley. Each subject could prove interesting to the television viewer, but then so could a slew of other dance subjects. It is always darkest before the dawn? Can this uneasy, shapeless state of affairs get darker still? How different are things today from yesteryears when attention was better paid to the art we love and follow?

A recall of isolated moments of the most recent past might help deflect undue attention from the sometime negative aspect of where dance is, or more likely is not: At American Ballet Theatre, isolated performances by Yuri Possokhov (he gave two, I saw one) proved that even in the lamest and least dancer-friendly works, some dancers can transcend all and command a stage, grip an audience and make an indelible impression. As the title figure of Lar Lubovitch's impossibly empty and dancer-ignorant Othello, Possokhov burned with intensity, performed with nuance and made himself a Soviet drambalet figure of grand and glorious proportions. As one insider suggested to me, there was good reason to think that the auteur of this ineffectual showcase might not quite approve of the old fashioned, old world values that Possokhov (a Bolshoi alumnus) brought to play in his masterly performance. All the would-be post-modernist distance was gone from his portrayal, and somehow, working through the moderately hokey shticks of some silent-movie, social realist spectrum, the onetime Bolshoi pup had turned himself into a wild lion of a man-tame and warmly docile when it suited his characterization and lethal and voracious when it was apt. All this was moderately ironic if you considered how much spin of innovation had been put on Lubovitch's methods and aspirations.

To tout a multi-act narrative ballet as forward-looking because it eschewed traditional pantomime, as much of Othello's pre-publicity tried to do, is laughable when you consider that pantomimeless narrative ballet had become a staple and standard of Soviet Ballet from the mid-'30s to the early '90s. The fact that the naive drambalets of Boris Eifman, whose St. Petersburg troupe revisits New York for the second time in as many years this winter, show how deathless these once Soviet Socialist Realist schemes can be is an issue that can be dealt with when the troupe next presents itself here.

Then there was the Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo, selling out the Joyce Theater sometime before its week-long season opened. The one show I was happily squeezed into was attended by a wonderfully mixed audience of balletgoers all ready for a good time, with good old-fashioned standards of ballet up for grabs, celebration and witty examination. The company's now-standard Le Lac des Cygnes (Swan Lake, Act II) remains the only one around that still utilizes the character of Benno. All the act's sacred cows are joked about, and then some, and the intermittently broad tone can be as broad as a barn door. But the approach is perfectly good-natured and the lively up-grading of gags and shticks seems to keep the whole thing fresh for the loving performers. New this season was a very tall and very nicely schooled Lev Radchenko, a former member of the St. Petersburg Male Ballet. The wonderfully deadpan, slender young man performed as the hapless yet elegant Prince Siegfried in Lac (under the name of R. M. "Prince" Myshkin) and as the Fanny Cerrito ballerina-lead of La Vivandière (pas de six) (under the name Svetlana Lofatkina). The St. Léon sextet, restaged especially for this cast by the scrupulous Elena Kunikova, was winning in so many directions at once; it could bring tears to the eyes of anyone susceptible to the beguilements of ballet's fancy footwork, sunny spirit and sweeping scale. With the bean-pole Lofatkina bedecked in a full ballerina-length skirt of white, ribbon-trimmed tulle, and the shrimpy, lone male partner (Manolo Molina under the name of Igor Slowpokin) in his knickered tights and blouse, the dance became a little lyrical showcase in which an urgent and eager male dancer gets himself hopelessly lost amid the overwhelming "perfume" from a quartet-plus-leader of buoyant dancing ladies.

Lincoln Center Out-of-Doors festival opened with a heavily attended performance by the Merce Cunningham Dance Company. In the definitely dance-unfriendly bandshell space, made for music concerts, Cunningham's latest Event came off like an island of sublime, innocent "wildlife" being looked at by a throng of confused and/or distracted onlookers. As individual dancers of the current Cunningham troupe darted through the stagespace of coupled or grouped together in marvelous Cunninghamian configurations, one felt you were catching sight of a lost civilization, oblivious to the greater, ruder outside world. A good part of the performance was made up of sections from Tens With Shoes and Points in Space, making one long to see these dances brought back to the company's repertory complete and in decent surroundings. Unfortunately for New Yorkers, this inadequately surrounded Cunningham performance was all we'd get for the upcoming performance year. Cunningham's company has no local dates scheduled during the next twelve months.

Meanwhile, the new year of choreographic offerings got off to a rather marvelous start, with the presentation by Brooklyn Academy of Music of Zingaro Equestrian Theater in Eclipse. This two-hour, one-ring spectacle follows on the troupe's presentation of Chimère in 1996. The earlier marvel of heavenly interaction of performer and horse had an Indian cant. That single ring arena had an indigo pool at the center and cinnabar and saffron earth in two rings around it. This one is based on the contrasts and beauties of black and white. In effect the plainest black-and-white range is given multiple dimensions and shadings by the superb eye of Bartabas, the company and show's artistic visionary.

A large luminous circle of white earth centers the ring; two different seeming blacks encircle it, as two different surface levels for the horses and riders to perform on. Korean pansori singing by YooJin Chung (Korea's answer to a great blues vocalist) and an ensemble of Korean musicians fill the air with percussion, chiming, and reverberating sound. Korean kimonos and Japanese kabukilike wigs and kimonos become the costume theme, with Japanese paper fans and winglike sleeves as consistent props. At one especially inspired point, Julio Arozarena, dressed and then traditionally, ceremonially undressed, like a Kabuki Onnagata bisects the ring again and again in a dramatic journey. The fact that he is a dark-skinned Cuban and that his Onnagata wig is snow white gives further resonance to Eclipse's black and white motif.

The horses are about as beauteous as any performers ever can be. (They have their own costume designer, and from the obviously sleek look of their coats, sheen of the tails and manes, sometimes artfully plaited and coiffed, they must also have their own hairdressers.) In the presence of these heavenly, beautiful creatures, the show reaches its full range, which might be described as "ballet blanc, noir et brun." The browns of the horse's palette range from tawny golds to shiny chestnuts. Their pace and momentum is something one can only experience by being at the edges of the ring round which the pace, charge and canter. The opening horse "dance" is a dressagelike circuit for a horse that appears, for all its girth, height, and scale, to walking on eggs with the easiest of finesse. The genius behind all this is undoubtedly Bartabas, the rider of at least three different horses in his show. Borrowing from certain Korean sacred dances, one I am familiar with is called "Sung Moo" and involves a dancer in a kimono at once crisp and flowing, manipulating yard-long sleeves with rod extensions reminiscent of those used by Loie Fuller and of the "arm" bones that structure a bird's wing and carry its feathers. As happened with Chimère, the event conjures a whirlpool-like energy, a mesmerizing vortex of horse-riding, acrobatics, and dancelike maneuvers that beguile with their very mechanics and elate with the mysterious images they create. Seeing a horse artfully walk backwards, or climactically rear up on his hind legs, or just tear around in a circle with no rider guiding it and/or telling it when to segue into contact with one of the performers or just to gallop, as if on perfect cue, into a dramatic exit, is to see sights as fanciful as they are plain. After his oldest horse, Zingaro, caps the show by more or less delicately wallowing in snow-white flakes of earth and then sitting up like a pet dog who rules his household, the black-clad performers take their bows, and we see no more horses. But Eclipse has an epilogue of inspired design. After one more blackout, the lights come up and in the middle of the luminous, snowy circle we see four pert geese, strutting and happily flapping their wings. No rhyme, no reason for their presence. They are just there, changing the scale and tone of the entire affair, all the while restating it. Only Bartabas could, in my admiring view of his lush artistic vision, tag on four geese to two hours of a horse and rider display and make a newfound poetic statement. Pas de cheval meets pâté de foie gras and the combination is as charming, and French, as it is enchanting and mysterious.