danceview
a quarterly review of dance

Reviews

New York Report

by Mary Cargill
copyright © 2001 by Mary Cargill
Winter 2001

The Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater made a brief visit in July to the New York State Theater as part of the Lincoln Center Festival. There were two programs, one all Ailey and another with newer works by Ronald K. Brown and Judith Jameson. There was also live music, a rare treat nowadays, since costs are so high.

The all-Ailey evening opened with a revival of the 1958 Blues Suite, “hymns to the secular region of his soul”, to quote from Ailey’s succinct and vivid program note. With a few exceptions, though I found listening to the music more evocative than the dances accompanying them. Diva Gray’s performance of “The House of the Rising Sun” was much more tragic than the movements of the three women in their scanties which accompanied it. “Sham”, though, with Dudley Williams as a straw-hatted hayseed looking for a girl, matched the music perfectly. Williams, who has been dancing with the company since 1964, has wonderful comic timing and an old-fashioned, effortless distinction; even in his floppy hat he seems to be wearing spats.

Pas de Duke, choreographed in 1976 by Ailey to Duke Ellington, is a champagne-scented bauble for a white-satin woman and a black-satin man (Linda-Denise Evans and Matthew Rushing), with some high kicks and friendly competition that wears its years well.

The two new productions (Grace by Ronald K. Brown from 1999, and the premier of Double Exposure by Judith Jameson), unfortunately, do not seemed destined for as long a life, despite some extraordinarily powerful dancing. Grace is an amalgam of pop religious songs, many with a facile optimism (“Grey skies are just clouds passing by”) and seemed very long.

Double Exposure was striking for its extensive credits, which included a costume designer, a lighting designer, a media concept and creation credit, a creative director, a technical advisor, an art director, a director of visual design and animation, a production coordinator, and a credit for electronic environmental design. The stage pictures, a computer generated light show, were stunning, but totally dominated the choreography.

Revelations, which closed both performances, uses much simpler stage effects—swaths of cloth and a large umbrella is about as high-tech as it gets, but it is infinitely more rewarding. The live singers added an extra richness to that eternally moving work. It does seem that the pas de deux “Fix Me, Jesus” is becoming more of a technical tour de force than a sustained prayer, and I missed Dudley Williams’ fragile strength in “I Wanna Be Ready”, but as always the color, vitality, love, and understanding was extraordinarily moving.

So too, in another way, was the visit by the Ballets Trocadero, who returned to the Joyce Theater in August. There is no better way to celebrate the end of summer than with these wonderfully funny dancers and their over-the-top names; my current favorite is the Artist formerly known as Prince Myshkin. They gave performances of unalloyed delight and, underneath the fun, of a touching seriousness.

What company nowadays can offer a triple bill of Fokine, Balanchine, and Petipa, each danced in a distinct and recognizable style? Les Sylphides was full of ballerinas with appropriately limp and droopy arms and otherworldly expressions, even if one dear was nonchalantly chewing gum. And Ida Nevasayneva, in killer pearls, danced the Pas de Quatre as if she understood exactly who Marie Taglioni was; her grim determination to wrest every ounce of respect owed Taglioni by her companions in its own way honored her memory.

As always, the more the audience knows about ballet, the funnier the jokes were. Anyone would laugh at the opening of Raymonda’s Wedding when the chalky-faced White Lady rode in on a scooter, but she (“sometimes a statue, sometimes a ghost, always an enigma”) was even funnier to those who have seen the full-length production.

And of course it is funny to see over-muscled men wearing tutus, but there are enough gleams of pure Petipa in the variations shapes and style to remind the audience what true classical dancing can be. Underneath the laughs, the Trocaderos have a sincere and honest commitment to classical style and all its beauty. They take it seriously, if not solemnly; other companies could learn from their approach.

One such company, I’m afraid, is the Birmingham Royal Ballet, the newish incarnation of the old Royal Ballet Touring Company, which gave several performances at New York’s City Center in September. The company has a varied and interesting repertoire, including some Ashton revivals, though this visit left the “heritage ballets”, as the director David Bintley has called them, behind, as if these great works are only suited for the blue-rinsed matinee crowd.

The repertoire consisted almost entirely of Bintley’s works. The showcase was his Edward II, touted in the ads for its “power, violence, sex, and sadomasochism”; THIS IS NOT SUITABLE FOR CHILDREN, the ads screamed. Not suitable for American children, apparently, because the ballet had children in it.

It also had extensive, undigested pieces from many other ballets, including Spartacus, The Green Table, Job, Midsummer Night’s Dream, Checkmate, Petrouchka, Manon, and Romeo and Juliet; it even worked in the little Prince from The Nutcracker. The only bits I didn’t recognize were a pas de trois for a man, a woman, and a severed head, and public urination, and I suspect there are good reasons these haven’t been used before.

The triple bill included two more Bintley works The Shakespeare Suite, and Nutcracker Sweeties, and opened with a redesigned version of Balanchine’s Slaughter on Tenth Avenue. The new designs make the piece look more like Berlin in the 1930’s than Broadway in the 1940’s—the poor Striptease Girl in a black fishnet bodystocking was particularly badly served—and gave it a harsh, sour, overly-sophisticated look completely at odds with the humor of the piece. Slaughter should be danced with a wink and not a leer.

Both Bintley pieces were suites of dances set to jazz, making this one of the most unvaried and poorly planned triple bills I have ever seen. Even successful three-act ballets have a different flavor for each act—no one wants a complete meal of deserts. And the interminable intermission chatter by the condescending conductor (“We simply must show these colonials we don’t despise them.”) made the evening even longer. Both Bintley ballets also suffered from a self-conscious cuteness; Kate stomped around in tennis shoes, Richard III wore dark glasses, and in Nutcracker Sweeties, Sugar Rum Cherry was a pale imitation of Rita Hayworth putting the blame on Mame. I’m sure it wasn’t Mame’s fault, but someone should be blamed for the repertoire. Instead of anything substantial, we were offered slightly curdled whipped cream or water from a dank, brackish pool, clogged with debris from other ballets.

Unfortunately, the tepid reviews and poor attendance probably means the company won’t return soon, and New York won’t be able to see its rapturously received Ashton revivals. For despite the slight air of desperation, as the dancers tried too hard to punch home their jokes, the company appears to be extremely talented. Robert Parker, especially, stood out and managed to bring some sincerity to the overactive Hamlet and Ambra Vallo did give some charm to the vulgar, tipsy Titania.

The Birmingham Royal Ballet could have taken programming lessons from Leigh Witchel’s chamber company, Dance As Ever, which performed a varied and interesting program at the Pace Downtown Theater in September. The company (five dancers plus Peter Boal guesting from the New York City Ballet) performed a program that ranged from classical to romantic to comic. The program opened with Quodlibet, a classical exercise with an elegant grace to music by Mozart and Weyse. The choreography was well structured and varied, if a little too long.

The heart of the program was a solo for Peter Boal to songs from A Shropshire Lad composed by George Butterworth. Dressed as a soldier from World War I, Boal danced through the meditative songs as if he himself were a memory. There was no literal portrayal of the words, no pretend cherry tree, no self-conscious acting; the choreography flowed beside the songs in a subtle, moving, and imaginative counterpoint. It was an extraordinarily moving piece, especially the elegiac last song “Is My Team Ploughing”, where the effective lighting (by Jeffrey Salzberg) seemed both to box the dancer in and to elevate him above all human suffering.

The Elevator, which closed the program, was a complete change of pace, a very funny finale which combined elevator music and parodies of classical dancing. Again, it was a bit too long, as if the choreographer wanted to include every joke he could come up with, but the individual jokes were very funny indeed. The shades from La Bayadere made their famous entry through an elevator door and ended up in grass skirts dancing to “Bali Hai”; the wilis from Giselle danced (extremely musically) to “I enjoy being a girl”. The comedy was unforced and the jokes weren’t punched. I especially enjoyed Mary Carpenter and Robert McFarland miscommunicating their mime, she doing Giselle and he the Nutcracker Prince, both performing with a sweet and reasonable earnestness and conviction, which was so much funnier than the self-conscious and almost desperate appeal to the audience by the Birmingham Royal Ballet.

I also saw two other chamber ballets, DanceGalaxy and Julio Bocca and Ballet Argentino. DanceGalaxy is a small classical company run by the former New York City Ballet principal Judith Fugate and her husband Medhi Bahiri. It gave its second New York performance at Marymount Manhattan Theatre in June. The company has an impressive roster of dancers, including, on this visit, Veronica Lynn and Christina Fagundes, who have been dancing with Suzanne Farrell’s company, and Donald Williams of the Dance Theater of Harlem.

Unfortunately, with the exception of Balanchine’s Diamonds pas de deux from Jewels, the choreography only rose to adequate, but fortunately it didn’t sink lower. The opening piece, Daniel Levans’ Cancionnes Amatorias, set to songs by Enrique Granados, was a pleasant, Spanish-inflected classical dance for four couples; it was a stylish exercise and very well danced—Francois Perron and Veronica Lynn were especially elegant. Lynn also danced the Diamonds pas de deux with Nils Bertil Wallen, a gracious and polished dancer formerly with the National Ballet of Canada and the Birmingham Royal Ballet. Lynn’s performance of the famous Farrell role was understated and her air of gentle melancholy suited the choreography well.

The evening closed with a new ballet by Adam Miller called The Flow Bear Waltzes. Since the music was French and the atmosphere surreal, I suppose the title is a joke—Flow Bear, Flaubert. It was a disappointingly bland finale; unlike their closer last year, a lively pop music piece by Ginger Thatcher, this had little real flavor. Despite the accordion music, the choreography lacked a French accent and looked a bit generic; the dancers though were eminently watchable.

So were the dancers from Ballet Argentino. Julio Bocca, when he is not being a superstar with American Ballet Theatre, is the artistic director of this small, young company, which made a brief appearance at City Center in October. The program opened with the Don Quixote pas de deux with Bocca and three young dancers, Luciana Paris as Kitri, and Daria Vadimova and the small, dark, and very sweet Rosana Perez as soloists. Unfortunately, the tutus were of the super-stiff variety and flopped around at unflattering angles whenever the dancers went into an arabesque, but otherwise it was a smooth, if a bit careful, rendition. Paris (with fan) danced the solo very well and her fouettes were crisp and clean. Bocca toned down his usual flamboyance and made no attempt to upstage his Kitri; he was absolutely charming and his turns in the coda were wonderfully controlled.

The rest of the choreography didn’t match this remnant of Petipa, though Adagietto by Oscar Araiz (to Mahler) had very effective atmospheric blue lighting which complemented the dancers’ (Cecilia Figaredo and Christian Allessandria) floating quality; it was like watching a lava lamp in the twilight.

Sinfonia Entrelazada was choreographed by Mauro Bigonzetti to music by Mozart and text by Shakespeare. This was very highfalutin company for the choreographer, who, according to the program note, was inspired by The Two Gentlemen of Verona to create a “mood piece which wants to evoke the deep ambiguity of the sentiment of friendship.” Despite committed performances, Shakespeare is a better playwright than a muse.

The finale was Piazzolla Tango Vivo choreographed by Ana María Stekelman, danced to (very) live music performed by the Fundacion Astor Piazzolla Quintet. It was lively and popular, and provided a stunning solo for a bare-chested Bocca and a table, but the young dancers could not quite connect with the atmosphere of raunchy despair in the music. It had more decoration than substance, but the young company was great fun to watch.