New York City Ballet.
NEW YORK STATE THEATER NOVEMBER 21, 1995-FEBRUARY 25, 1996 REVIEWED BY AMANDA SMITHMuch happens in a season as long as New York City Ballet's winter run. This one saw the death of Lincoln Kirstein, the visionary genius who brought to America another genius, George Balanchine. What the two men created together continues, as they intended, without them.
And so this season, as seasons do, saw the premiere of new work. The more successful of the two new pieces was David Parsons's Touch, an acceptable modern dance given a spectacular performance by a cadre of eight superb dancers. Disappointingly, this Paul Taylor alumnus, who directs his own troupe, made no accommodation to the fact that NYCB is a ballet company; his dance is thoroughly modern.
It begins with pairs of dancers wearing jazz shoes flying diagonally across the stage, then pulls them into a group center stage--the first of a series of abrupt transitions. This unremittingly driven dance doesn't expand reasonably or logically. Its themes and motifs--skipping, hands slashing the air--often look intellectually constructed, placed, rather than organically developed. The four men and four women change partners and touch one another's cheeks, but this contact is often aggressive and often rebuffed. Despite Richard Peaslee's lush, sometimes buoyantly jazzy cinematic score, there's not a moment of tenderness or respite; even in the duets, figures watch from the shadows at the back of the stage, like voyeurs. The title is finally ironic; Touch is an essay about people who don't connect.
Among the members of the ensemble, the young Edward Liang is distinctive and incisive, as if he were born to the movement; Albert Evans catches the eye as well. Touch is costumed by William Ivey Long in unflattering black bell-bottoms and tops from which fabric panels fly out behind the dancers like cloth daggers.
For his new Reliquary, an homage to the Balanchine-Stravinsky partnership, Peter Martins has drawn on several Balanchine ballets. But where Balanchine's fantastic diagonal of women in Symphony in Three Movements is a brilliant image, a similar line in Reliquary looks cluttered; later, the stage seems littered with the arms and legs of twelve women. Pas de deux have traditionally been one of Martins's strengths and the duets here--Margaret Tracey with Peter Boal, fast and flying, and Wendy Whelan with Nilas Martins, pensive, reflective--are moderately successful. Martins achieves a cleaner look with five couples onstage than he manages with the corps, but where's the counterpoint?
Charles Wuorinen's score, A Reliquary for Igor Stravinsky, embroidering on unfinished fragments by Stravinsky, is sometimes perky but more often turgid and bombastic. The most inspired and haunting moment in the dance comes near the end, when one of Stravinsky's sketches is projected onto the backdrop and the dancers assemble onstage; Stravinsky's presence is almost palpable. The projection fades and the dancers form the final picture: the men in a circle the women deployed around them, the whole forming the shape of an eye.
Whatever his choreographic problems, Martins's is the devoted hand that steers the complex ship of City Ballet, its vast, profound repertoire, its assemblage of enormously gifted dancers. Among the highlights of the season were Helene Alexopoulos's sparkling singing and dancing as Anita in West Side Story Suite; Robert LaFosse's inspired fussy, funny, and eccentric Dr. Coppelius; Philip Neal's partnering and noble bearing, a source of consistent pleasure; Whelan's flawed but fascinating Swan Lake; Liang and seventeen-year-old Cara Copeland distinguishing them selves in Calcium Light Night; Maria Kowroski's promising debut in Symphony in C.
If the season belonged to a single performer, it was Boal, a dancer in whom the necessary gifts--technique, range, consistency, intelligence, beauty--are wonderfully balanced. His Prodigal Son is a depiction of such psychological clarity and depth that he gives new life to a venerable role. Stepping suddenly into The Four Temperaments during a performance in which Nikolaj Hubbe was injured, the only indication of Boal's necessarily hasty preparation was a slightly rumpled T-shirt, he followed that dance with a superb Opus 19/The Dreamer. I was Boal, too, who danced the final segment at Kirstein's memorial service depicting Orpheus, sending the lyre that represents music and poetry--and the memory of the men who loved and created them--heavenward.
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| Title Annotation: | New York State Theater, New York, New York |
|---|---|
| Author: | Smith, Amanda |
| Publication: | Dance Magazine |
| Date: | May 1, 1996 |
| Words: | 700 |
| Previous Article: | Kazuo Ohno. |
| Next Article: | Washington Ballet. |
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