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Mindy Aloff on Dance Sight Unseen (The New Republic, November 6, 1999)
One of the most difficult things in the world is to tell a story through dance, an art that lacks both the past and future tenses, and that is incapable of rendering more than a handful of relationships without the support of program notes. And yet these limitations do not seem to have impeded anyone. In the past year alone, choreographers have attempted to make ballets out of Christopher Marlowe's Edward II and Henry James's The Turn of the Screw, among other unlikely literary subjects. Still, no borrowed authority is going
to change the course of Even when the theatrical frame and situation are very particular and complex--as in, say, Frederick Ashton's Enigma Variations, which shows a day in the domestic life of Edward Elgar (the coup de theatre is the composer's receipt of a telegram!)--the actual danced passages are restricted to a few emotions and to legible actions. One need not have read a biography of Elgar to understand how Ashton's figuration of his world feels. The characters may wear the clothing of another age and comport themselves with the manners of the past, but there is nothing opaque about their identities. This is who they are; or rather, this is what they do. When we are able to inhabit these characters, it is precisely because they lack interior lives. In the verbal theater, it is possible for a character to say one thing while clearly wanting to say, or suppressing, something else. In dancing, an entire art form of interior life made manifest, what cannot be shown to the public simply does not exist. Indeed, there is so much about the world and the human condition for which dancing as such cannot account that a hybrid theatrical form, called dance-theater, had to be developed in order to accommodate the needs of choreographers to engage the material. It is rather stunning, then, to find choreographers working in nearly all genres returning, with various degrees of trepidation, to the themes of classical beauty and romantic love; to find them once again respecting the boundaries between dance and drama rather than trying to transgress them. Pina Bausch's Danzon, a work of dance-theater that she recently brought to the Brooklyn Academy of Music, is concerned with passages of pure dancing for its own sake. Although it includes her customary images of sexual humiliation--Jan Minarik infantilized in a diaper, Jack Benny-like double takes during moments of sensual congress between partners--it also offers something very unusual for a Bausch work: a clear stage floor, on which individual dancers perform distinctive solos and on which, at one point, the entire cast, in ballroom clothes, runs and falls backward in a large, swiping gesture of movement sumptuously pursued for the pure, childlike joy of doing it. A barefoot solo for the dancer Cristiana Morganti, tightly knitted from small steps that evoke the actual ballroom dance called danzon, features a motion in which the foot is used like a paintbrush, curled and twined over on itself, and it is one of the most insinuating moments of pure dancing that I have ever seen in a Bausch production. Danzon, as a whole, is a curiously synthetic piece, a kind of mosaic of images and techniques from elsewhere in her repertory that are strung in a loose sequence. Its tone is reflective, rueful in places. Set beneath a large bridge construction on which are projected slides and films of forests and fish and other aspects of the natural world, the meetings and the partings of friends and lovers are sketchily introduced and wiped away, as if all the pleasure and the pain were coming to us through a sieve of retrospection. Bausch's own solo, a dance for arms performed on the spot for nearly its entirety, evidences a weariness and a vulnerability that one does not associate with her, and its repeated soft salutes to something high and far away have an alarming, valedictory quality. In the same week, Meredith Monk, another leading figure in the realm of dance-theater, gave the premiere of her new minimalist spectacle, Magic Frequencies: a science-fiction opera at the Joyce Theater, and she, too, fastidiously observed the distinction between theatrical events and dancing for its own sake. Monk is a more self-consciously disciplined craftsman than Bausch. Every element that she places on stage serves either a symbolic function or a narrative function, and, unlike Bausch, she rarely repeats details of staging exactly--choosing, instead, to play with them in terms of scale (particularly delighting in their miniaturization) or of mood. In her new work--where the death
of a man in his bed, attended by his Is it a coincidence, then, that Giselle
is enjoying a resurgence of At American Ballet Theatre's season last spring, I attended a matinee, with Vladimir Malakhov and Amanda McKerrow in the leading roles, which was so infused with dance and dramatic detail that my companion, who has been watching Giselle for over a half century, pronounced it the most loving performance of the ballet that she had ever witnessed. There were certainly things that I had never seen before in any Giselle, such as the moment when Albrecht, about to betray the village girl by acknowledging his aristocratic fiancee Bathilde, steals one last heartrending look at the innocent whose happiness he is about to cut down forever; and the dancing in the second act was rich with stylistic delicacy and poetic effects that arose directly from subtle dynamic changes in the articulation of the classical vocabulary. It felt as if Malakhov had been coached by Rudolf Nureyev and McKerrow by Gelsey Kirkland. The tragedy has rarely made a dancegoer quite so happy. Still, if happiness, and all that goes with it--social equilibrium, personal composure, moderated joy--are what you seek in dance fantasies, Romanticism is hardly the place to search for it. Happiness on the dance stage is a classical matter, and it has been so scarce in works of the past twenty years that it practically has to be reinvented. At the Boston Ballet this fall, Christopher Wheeldon has made an effort to do that in a new staging of Stravinsky's Firebird, using the longest version of the score, from 1910. Its cinematic techniques--with instantaneous cuts from scene to scene--and its dungeon-like setting of Kastchei's kingdom of monsters align it more closely at times with The Wizard of Oz than with Fokine's, Balanchine's, or Taras's stagings. The Firebird herself belongs to the movies, too: androgynous and severely costumed in a scintillating unitard, she is more imperial than mystically transforming, and the classicism that she represents is not the cold beauty of an untouchable exoticism but simply cold. Wheeldon, instead, has invested his considerable gifts at formal invention in the human princess and her attendants, who are set in motion with intricate Thracian configurations and the first use of multilevel groupings that I have seen on the ballet stage in many years. The awkward problem for Wheeldon's Firebird is that the human characters are more interesting than the fantasy: the Firebird's presence seems more ceremonial than necessary. Even so, Wheeldon's concentric inventions for the human court, absorbing and lustrous, consistently pleasure the eye, and the pas de deux for Ivan and his princess, with its orbiting low lifts and rapturous geometry, bring to contemporary ballet an element of charm and steady optimism that no other choreographer of his generation seems able or willing to provide. Wheeldon is still in his early twenties. He is having to learn some very large lessons about choreography and stage direction in a very intense limelight of public and critical scrutiny. This Firebird shows him to be a fast study and an independent intelligence, while also exposing his inclination--it informed also his earlier ballets in New York--to diffuse an audience's focus by shying away from clear priorities. A Firebird in which the most alluring figure is the princess weakens the story and blunts the impact of Stravinsky's score. The Firebird is a monstre sacre; she mates with music, and although she represents a beneficent force in the universe, she has no direct issue. Wheeldon makes her into a kind of super-athlete, but she is more than that: she is ballet as theater itself. The choreographer has glimpsed the creature, though he has yet to prove that he can seize her. And the choreographer's struggle is itself a kind of romance.
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