New York City Ballet.
New York State Theater November 22, 1994-February 26, 1995Since Balanchine's death, New York City Ballet director Peter Martins has been quietly weaving a web of his own. It reveals him to be a man of patience, as well as vision and craftsmanship.
His guiding mode is balance - balance in the choice of repertoire matched by balance in the training and preparation of his dancers. The NYCB dancers were formerly known for their brilliant legs and often haphazard arms. Now the outline that each individual makes in space has become complete and indelible. The company's characteristic speed is coupled with clarity.
The bulwark of the winter repertoire was, of course, the Balanchine ballets. Them were twenty-four. With the exception of two all - Jerome Robbins evenings, every program contained the richness of at least one Balanchine offering.
Robbins, whose works looked particularly well cast and rehearsed, was represented by fifteen. Martins modestly included only six of his own in the regular repertoire, plus two pieces d'occasion on the opening-night gala. There were also some holdovers from last year's Diamond Project choreography. Because programming and dancing were so intelligently mated, one did not feel cheated by the scarcity of top-quality premieres.
Only Robbins's 2 & 3 Part Inventions had full choreographic stature. The ballet was first made last spring for students of the School of American Ballet. With their youth in mind, Robbins etched a hint of playfulness into the twelve J.S. Bach counterpoint studies that he explored. This time, danced by more experienced artists (Wendy Whelan, Jenifer Ringer, Ethan Stiefel, Alexander Ritter, Samantha Allen, Miranda Weese, Christopher Wheeldon, and James Fayette), there was more stress on formal discipline tempered by a pleasing overlay of courtly manners.
Robbins likes to peruse simple devices like walking and to find in them a new poetic dimension. When he did this in Glass Pieces, the walking had the directness of blank verse, while in 2 & 3 Part Inventions it has the stately flow of rhymed verse.
He also likes to offer challenges to specific dancers. Here he lured Stiefel away from his elfin approach to elevation and made him more aware of the ground as a dance dimension. And Ringer was given a calm and spacious solo, which she performed most sensitively.
Choreographer Kevin O'Day seemed to be influenced by the cyclonic pacing of some of Martins's ballets. In his premiere, Huoah (exhale when you say it), seven dancers, initially in lozenges of overhead light, snatched at each other in ambivalent male/female relationships. Further driven by Graham Fitkin's prickly score, they embarked upon a relentlessly paced dance journey that lacked a clear sense of purpose. Whelan, Ringer, Ritter, Peter Boal, Jock Soto, Stacey Calvert, and Nikolaj Hubbe were the vastly challenged participants.
A choreographer once commented, "If you haven't got a name for your dance, you probably don't have a dance." The title of Richard Tanner's Operetta Affezionata (loosely translated, "Affectionate Bagatelle") finally surfaced on the day of the premiere. Set to Weber's sunny Concerto for Clarinet and Orchestra No. 1 in F Minor, Op. 73, it didn't venture far beyond the blandness of a Watteau painting reproduced on a candy box.
Opening night included the New York premiere of Damian Woetzel's Glazounov Pas de Deux. Discreet understatement was its tone. Kyra Nichols and Igor Zelensky reflected this tastefully.
In Martins's Untitled there was no inevitability between music (an excerpt from Charles Wuorinen's The Mission of Virgil) and choreography. The pas de deux did offer an opportunity for sophisticated partnering to Margaret Tracey and Boal.
Martins's X-Ray, to the third movement of John Adams's Violin Concerto, had a churning vivacity. Soto, one of the company's most versatile performers, served as catalyst between two agitato couples (Darci Kistler and Hubbe, Whelan and Nilas Martins). This brio essay would benefit from further development.
Soto's most challenging partnering assignment took place during the January 15 farewell for Heather Watts. As she assumed center stage to be pelted with flowers and laden with bouquets, he knew instinctively when to be at her side and when to leave her alone in sentimental splendor. It was a charming finale to their long relationship.
In style, NYCB is truly a twentieth-century force. Its dance shapes do not grow out of mime, as in the nineteenth century, nor do these shapes merely provide lively interludes between pillars of mime. It's flow and momentum that count. And while for the most part closely wedded to music, the dancing is not exclusively an extension of music. It has an inner drive of its own.
When this drive comes through clearly, as in Balanchine's Monumentum Pro Gesualdo and Movements for Piano and Orchestra, the dance becomes an almost magical presence. Even when it doesn't quite work, as in Martins's Symphonic Dances, one cannot help being caught up in the choreographer's intent.
To reassess how NYCB relates dance and mime, I attended performances of two essentially nineteenth-century ballets, The Nutcracker and Swan Lake. (Nutcracker also provided the opportunity to see guest artists Margaret Illmann and Paloma Herrera as Sugar Plum and Dewdrop, respectively. Their brief appearances proved somewhat inconclusive.)
The mime in Nutcracker was often inspired. Robert LaFosse as Herr Drosselmeier almost took flight as he flourished his cape, and William Otto's Mother Ginger preened and sashayed with the charm of a court lady. And yet these flavorful interludes never inhibited the sparkling dance momentum. Even the children, so deftly rehearsed by Garielle Whittle, were aware of the balance between the literal and the lyrical.
The word "lake" in its title gives special poignancy to the way in which Balanchine's Swan Lake is currently performed. The arrivals and departures of the corps had a tidal pulse, and Kistler as Odette did not merely enter into that action; she flowed through it. When she parted from Siegfried, her arms rippled delicately, as though the lake again beckoned. As Siegfried, Zelensky simply relied on his finely ingrained training. His habitual solemnity was also used to advantage.
Robbins's The Cage, powerfully performed by Whelan as the Novice and Diana White as the Queen, has always been recognized as a contemporary meditation on the second act of Giselle. This time I realized that his Afternoon of a Faun is a commentary on the second act of Swan Lake. As Kistler paused in the doorway to a dance studio, and as Soto watched her, mesmerized, the effect was as moving as the entrance of the Swan Queen. And as they shyly came together, suspended beyond time, one knew that a force would separate them as it does Odette and Siegfried.
Browsing through a season as varied as this, I often felt like the proverbial tourist stopping at bookstalls along the Seine. Only in NYCB there was nothing musty to be found.
One evening I attended Balanchine's Four Temperaments with a friend who had never seen it. Hard to believe, the ballet is almost fifty years old. Although I could clearly remember an early cast led by Todd Bolender and Tanaquil Le Clercq, this time the ballet, led by White, Albert Evans, and the serene Lourdes Lopez, had even more variety of texture. In addition to its vigor, it seemed touched by a spiritual dimension.
This quality sifts through Balanchine's ballets more than one realizes. As the dancers flexed their wrists and extended their arms, one forward and the other to the back, they seemed to be simultaneously accepting and warding off the unknown.
There aren't too many specifically dramatic roles for the NYCB dancers. Their artistic growth comes more from the exploration of their own personalities from season to season.
Among the principal dancers, Whelan might be called a "Nike for the nineties," Her alert, spunky manner is beginning to expand into grandeur. Helene Alexopoulos courses through space as though she were discovering it for the first time. Woetzel is probably the company's most consistently virtuosic male technician. But there is a hint of hunger in his performing, as though he wishes to demand more of himself, perhaps technically, perhaps artistically.
There was heartening advancement among the soloists. Stiefel, who was promoted to principal during the season, is now beginning to give serious attention to the niceties of partnering. Michael Byars is developing a flair for dramatic roles. His Pierrot in Harlequinade was one of the ballet's most appealing portrayals. Of the company's impressive cadre of male principals, I found Hubbe particularly gracious in his demeanor toward his partners.
Merrill Ashley did not perform often. I saw her only in Ballo della Regina and The Four Seasons. How much the less-experienced dancers, both male and female, could learn from her impeccable stage deportment and from her quiet radiance!
The NYCB dancers seem to be unusually intelligent, and they have the reflexes of hummingbirds. These traits would appear dry if they produced only the speed and clarity that are the company's watchwords. But because his own background is unusually rich and secure, Peter Martins has been able to lead his dancers along a path similar to his own. It is an incredible company.
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| Title Annotation: | New York State Theater, New York, New York |
|---|---|
| Author: | Hering, Doris |
| Publication: | Dance Magazine |
| Date: | Jun 1, 1995 |
| Words: | 1511 |
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