Photo taken from the Prix de Lausanne website.

Last weekend I went to another fabulous Guggenheim Works & Process event, this one in celebration of Frederic Franklin, the 95-year-old formerly of Ballets Russes who’s worked with American Ballet Theater for many years now performing non-dance character roles and setting ballets on the company and its studio company, ABT II. I’ve written about him here.

ABT, ABT II, and some of the Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis School students performed some ballets Franklin has staged for them. My favorite was the Hungarian Czardas section from Petipa’s Raymonda, performed by ABT II, with Irlan Silva and Meaghan Hinkis as the lead couple. So much fun — and really made me want to see the whole ballet. I’ve since gotten my hands on a couple videos — more on them later.  But for now I just want to say how wonderful I thought Silva was — how much he stands out, how much strength and discipline and precision he has, along with that ever elusive star necessity, Presence. Even doing basic heel toe steps, he just brings it to another level.

Here are a couple of videos of him at the 2008 Prix de Lausanne, where he danced for his native Brazil and placed very well. The first is of his contemporary solo, a little-seen work by Nijinsky, and the second is his classical variation, from Le Corsaire.

And here is a video I found of that Czardas, danced by others.

Also performed, by others, were the classical Raymonda variations and the Sleeping Beauty Bluebird Pas de Deux. And, ABT dancers were David Hallberg and Xiomara Reyes dancing the Giselle Act II Pas de Deux. Which was far too short! But of course one must never miss the opportunity to see David Hallberg dance up close Among other things, he knows how to make the most of a pose, to take the lines — particularly the leg lines — to their fullest and most sublime.

Photo of Hallberg dancing with Gillian Murphy, taken from here.

Here’s a Sarah Crompton interview with Christopher Wheedon in the London Telegraph. Morphoses is about to open their fall season there, debuting a new ballet by Wheeldon and one by Australian choreographer Tim Harbour. At the end of the month, New York audiences will get to see those premieres.

In the article, Wheeldon talks about trying to increase ballet’s appeal to new audiences. He surmises it may be certain ballet aesthetics, such as the toe shoes, that are a turn-off, that may make ballet inaccessible. I strongly disagree though. I think people are generally awed by the toe shoes and by the beauty and immense athleticism of the art form. They’re all the more awe-inspiring when you see them up close, a thought I had recently in the Guggenheim’s tiny theater watching ABT, their studio company, and the students at ABT’s Kennedy-Onassis School of Ballet perform in a Works & Process event there.

I really think people in general are drawn to stories. That’s what I hear anyway from other dance-goers, or would-be dance-goers (who patronize theater and opera but shy away from dance). I think abstract ballets can definitely be intriguing but I think if your repertoire consists of only the kind of story-less ballets Balanchine made it’s going to suffer. I’ll be very excited to see the Alice in Wonderland that Wheeldon’s doing for the Royal.

Daniil Simkin and cast in Benjamin Millepied’s Everything Doesn’t Happen at Once in Gene Schiavone photo, courtesy of ABT; all photos by Gene Schiavone (except for Arron Scott headshot below and bottom picture).

Just to let people know, as the photos shows above, the guy who was flinging himself into the group lifts in the first cast of the Millepied was Daniil Simkin; in the second cast it was Arron Scott (below). The program notes only gave a special mention to the two dancers doing the pas de deux and a lot of people were asking who the main soloist was.

Anyway, here are a few more reviews:

Here is James Wolcott on opening night gala (and our fab Shun Lee dinner afterward ), here is Apollinaire Scherr’s FT review; and here are more of Apollinaire’s thoughts on her blog, Foot in Mouth. I’m surprised there aren’t more reviews — this was a pretty big season, with three world premieres — but that’s all I can find at the moment. (Update: Robert Greskovic’s WSJ review just went up; thanks to Meg for letting me know.)

Re the Wolcott write-up: I forgot to mention the models — Iman and Veronica Webb, who, instead of A.D. Kevin McKenzie, thanked the gala sponsors and introduced the program — screwing up Benjamin Millepied’s name. It wouldn’t have been such a big deal if they wouldn’t have been so giggly over it. It seemed like they were reading their notes for the first time and were really unprepared. I really don’t know how to pronounce his name either — I’ve always said the last two syllables to rhyme with plie (without the “l”) but have been told that’s wrong. But damn did ABT get a lot of press for signing them on. Just Google “ABT Fall 2009 Season” and it’s all about Iman.

(Gillian Murphy, Cory Stearns and Eric Tamm in Aszure Barton’s One of Three)

Anyway, I saw four of the six programs, saw the Ratmansky and the Millepied ballets four times and the Barton three, and they each grew on me the more I saw them. The Saturday matinee was my last performance and I found it by far the best. I felt like the dancers were finally comfortable with the new dances, knew what they were all about, and really made them meaningful. I described the ballets here.

Oh and regarding SanderO’s comment on that earlier post: yes, I do need to see the story in the dance. The dancer and choreographer won’t pull me in at all if they don’t each tell me some sort of story. That doesn’t mean the ballet has to be a traditional full-length dramatic novel or something with a clearly defined beginning, middle, and end, inciting incident, rising action with crises 1,2, and 3, climax and resolution, etc etc. but there needs to be some kind of story; there needs to be some intention in the abstraction. A lot of critics use the word “evocative” — a dance needs to be evocative of something, and I just mean the same thing. If there isn’t something meaningful going on, there’s no reason for me to see it. I can appreciate the neat geometric patterns and pretty images, but that’s not enough to make me go.

Anyway, I saw more in Millepied’s Everything Doesn’t Happen at Once on further viewings. At first I thought it was kind of everything but the kitchen sink the way Apollinaire kind of describes, but after several viewings I saw more of an evolutionary, battle of the sexes theme throughout, which becomes a more literal battle by the end. The piece starts with the stage looking swimming-pool like with the dancers making broad strokes with their arms. The stage gets over-crowded and eventually someone in charge — looking rather conductor-like, kind of throws his arms up and dismisses everyone.

Then, there’s a pas de trois (two men one woman), which becomes a double pas de trois (same), which turns into the central pas de deux (man-woman). Throughout there seems to be struggle going on — in the pas de trois the men kind of manipulate the woman around, until she’s practically on her side. In the central pas de deux is in places tender, in places more angsty as if the girl is trying to get away from the guy or fight him in some way, and he is struggling to hang onto her.

By the end, the scene has evolved into a kind of battlefield with marching music and the ballerinas doing those Balanchinian marches en pointe. Except they’re more unsettling than cutesy, like in Balanchine. This is the part where Daniil / Arron gets tossed into the crowd, throws himself with wild abandon at the groups of men, who catch him mid-split, then gets caught up with a bunch of grabbing girls.

Interestingly, the audience laughed when this role was danced by Simkin — I think because he is small and a bit long-haired and it kind of looked like he was afraid he’d be taken for one of them and was trying like hell to assert his masculinity. (I think it would have worked better had the girls been chasing him and then he flings himself into the groups of guys rather than the other way around, but not a big deal).

But no one laughed when it was Arron. It looked far more serious with him in the role — it looked like he was practically getting raped by that rabid group of girls.

Also I noticed with Arron that after the rabid group of girls leaves him alone, he kind of internalized the tauning; there was now an invisible fist punching him all about. It really looked like he was getting beaten up by that thing. But the fist was invisible so it was like he’d been driven mad. It was very unsettling, and I think, with the music and the rest of the action, this feeling is more of what Millepied was going for — not all the high air flips, crazy long spins, and windmill jumps that Simkin is known for and did here. Simkin’s character made the end of the ballet more playful than battle-like.

There’s also a short section where there’s all this marching music and there’s more centerstage chaos with all 24 dancers out there at once and suddenly a group of dancers standing at one corner break into partners and go waltzing through the crowd. But it’s really short-lived, like even courtship is a battle.

I don’t know — that’s what I saw on further inspection. But I could be making it all up. It’s kind of fun with abstract ballets (the ones that have a lot going on in them anyway) to make up your own story. I mean, the way dances get made anyway, as I learned at a Guggenheim event last night featuring ABT’s efforts to adapt ballets to different stages (including this small one in AF Hall, meant for concerts), is that things get changed depending on space, depending on the logistics of the stage, depending on dancers. Whoever knows if the end product is what the choreographer originally had in mind anyway.

I don’t think Millepied’s was a perfect ballet — I found a lot of the bird-like patterns from his recent NYCB ballet, Quasi Una Fantasia, to be out of place here – he didn’t need all that; he should have focused more on the battle — but I found his the darkest, the most thematically clear and the most absorbing.

Stella Abrera and Gennadi Saveliev in Alexei Ratmansky’s Seven Sonatas.

The Ratmansky grew on me, as did the Barton. On the last day, Michele Wiles danced the main female character (in the long white ballgown) in the Barton and I loved her. She gave the character a real story. When she comes out onstage she is all bitchy and glamorous, but Michele it’s really an act; she is seeking attention from the main man (in that cast Blaine Hoven) while trying to maintain her haughty demeanor so as not to be shown up by him if he dismisses her. At one point, she extends her arm out to him, as if he’s supposed to kiss it but he turns and runs offstage. She crumbles. It’s heartbreaking.

I also really loved Craig Salstein, Jared Matthews and Daniil Simkin in Barton’s second cast (Matthews and Simkin alternated parts opposite Salstein). They danced a section in the second part and all three made it clear (Salstein most so) that they were in a little competition for the girl’s attention. The girl (Luciana Paris), meanwhile, was just dancing on her own, in her own world, paying them no mind at all. It was hilarious.

But back to Michele Wiles for a minute: a wonderful ABT patron gave me her ticket for a company class, which she couldn’t attend, and Michele seemed so sweet — smiling out and waving at people during the class and even during warm-up.

Also, can some choreographer please please please create a little solo or some kind of dance just for Gillian Murphy! Please! During that company class, during the center floor work when the dancers divided into groups and did turns in a diagonal down the center, Gillian blew everyone completely away. She was like a tornado. But a technically perfect tornado! Everyone in my section literally began to laugh and shake their heads in amazement. She needs something to showcase her technical brilliance and athletic prowess. C’mon ABT!

Each of the dancers brought their own special thing to the Ratmansky. Christine Shevchenko (an up and coming corps member) was gorgeous with the role created by Julie Kent (danced opposite David Hallberg). She was more lyrical than Julie, with flowing, expressive arms that resembled Natalia Makarova in Other Dances. Julie’s arms were more staccato. Hee Seo, who completely blew me away as well, did a combination of the two — by turns feathery and lyrical, and modern and staccato. Alexandre Hammoudi and Jared Matthews both danced David’s original part and they were very different than David. Both connected with their ballerinas much more — when they were left alone onstage they clearly looked about for her, wondering where she was, then accepting they were alone and falling into their solo.

David Hallberg. I can never get enough David Hallberg. He didn’t look around for his ballerina when she left him, but when she returned to the stage, he danced well with her. But when she was offstage, she was out of sight, out of mind with him — he was too busy making Ratmansky’s movement wholly his own. He seems to be a rapidly maturing artist, playing with the music, playing with rhythm, giving some things more emphasis than others. When I first saw him dance this role I thought his “character’s” movement was more modern than classical, but I think that was just because of the way he did one section where he keeps pushing out with his hands, like he’s stopping the air, or stopping something from getting too close. He slowed down that movement a lot, really emphasizing the arms, and then did some ensuing footwork at the speed of light, whereas the others did everything in equal measures -so it didn’t have the same look.

Jared Matthews and Maria Riccetto in Some Assembly Required, photo by Rosalie O’Connor.

ABT also put on Clark Tippet’s Some Assembly Required from 1989, a male-female pas de deux evoking a lovers’ quarral replete with difficult-looking angst-filled lifts, struggling pushes and pulls, then more tender making up. It went on a bit too long; some middle parts that were repetitive could have been taken out, but the cast I saw — Jared Matthews and Maria Riccetto did very well with it. Jared is dancing and dramatizing better than ever before, imo.

And the company also did Robbins’ Other Dances, another male-female pas de deux (this one pretty famous) that was choreographed on Baryshnikov and Makarova. I saw both casts — Marcelo Gomes and Veronika Part, and David Hallberg and Gillian Murphy. I liked both — although I think I honestly prefer Tiler Peck and Gonzalo Garcia’s at NYCB. Gonzalo has a smaller body, more like Baryshnikov’s, and I think some of the gestures — like the placing the hand behind the head, kind of primping, looked sweetest on him. Ditto for Tiler. David is dancing very aggressively these days. He’s making the absolute most of every movement — it can be stunning at times, and at times it seems a bit overdone, which it seemed to me a tad here.

I also think that joke on the Kirov dancers getting dizzy and losing their footing because they don’t spot-turn doesn’t come across as such to new audiences. When Marcelo and Gonzalo did it, many in the audience honestly thought the dancers screwed up for real, not on purpose. David really didn’t do the joke because he’s a cheat I’m kidding — he did, but he spun, stopped, got dizzy, shook himself out of it, and started the next phrase all in the blink of an eye, so you didn’t even notice he “got lost.”

Gillian was good but it didn’t seem to be a dance that showcased her talents to their fullest. I’ll say it again — I really think she is the most athletic and technically one of the best female dancers in the world and she desperately needs more roles that prove that!

Over the weekend I saw the second of the two experimental performances sponsored by the Guggenheim in celebration of the museum’s current Kandinsky exhibit. (The first was the Isabella Rossellini reading / light show I wrote about earlier). This one, which took place at Columbia University’s Miller Theater, sought to honor the ideals of the early 20th Century Kandinsky-led Blue Rider movement, which advocated the bringing together of visual, music, and literary artists to produce art that would engage all of the senses.

So, this production, The Blue Rider in Performance, combined poetry/opera libretti, music, dance, and paintings and other visuals. During the first half of the program, soprano Susan Narucki sang libretti by various composers including Arnold Schoenberg, Thomas de Hartmann, Arthur Lourie, and Anton Webern, while Sarah Rothenberg (who also conceived and directed the show), played piano.

Both women were brilliant. I also loved the images projected onto the back wall during the singing and piano playing. Sometimes a vibrant full-blown painting by Kandinsky would appear, at other times the wall would go blank and a black line would slowly begin wending its way across that wall — a painting in progress. At other times, there would be no painting, but instead a kind of light show of shadow play of what was happening onstage. The lights would catch Rothenberg as she played. She’d sometimes appear rather ghostlike, sometimes macabre, sometimes threatening, as she’d hunch over her piano, creating a rather wicked shadow, while swaying her body rather violently about as her hands flew back and forth across the keys, producing an equally violent-sounding melody.

I didn’t know that much about Kandinsky, and so, after these performances did some research. Art  historians and critics have used his painting, The Blue Rider (above), to show how he used color. Kandinsky was considered the father of abstract art. He wasn’t as interested in painting figures realistically as he was evoking an emotional response in the viewer through color and shadow – -blue being the color of spirituality to him. In the image above, your eye is drawn to the movement of the rider. But the movement is depicted through a series of colors– the blue of his jacket is lighter than that cast on the ground by his shadow — rather than specific details. Is he carrying a child in his arms or not? It’s not really clear. But you get the sense that the rider is moving very fast toward something; you feel an urgency.

I felt that as well with the way they used the lights to shadow Ms. Rothenberg as she played piano. You couldn’t see details in her movement, which was illuminated in large shadows on the back wall, but she was moving across that keyboard madly, her movements blending into one another. She looked like a mad scientist at times. The sometimes chaotic melody, along with these shadows, combined to create this feeling of frenzy, or of being haunted by something.

(photo by Julieta Cervantes, taken from the NY Times)

In the second half of the program, the piano was removed and the Brentano String Quartet took the stage and played Schoenberg’s String Quartet No. 2 in F-sharp minor, Op. 10 (Arnold Schoenberg was a member of the Blue Rider Group as well). During the first part of this second half, four dancers from Armitage Gone! Dance performed choreography by former “punk ballerina” Karole Armitage. Opera Chic informs that Schoenberg wrote this piece during a rather trauma-filled period in his life, when his wife left him for another man – an artist Schoenberg had hired to teach him to paint — then returned home, upon which the artist committed suicide and destroyed all of his artwork.

The four dancers — two male, two female — in broad strokes portrayed this story, the two women initially beginning as companions, then fighting, breaking into couples with the two men. The couples would mirror each other — one would struggle, performing tension-filled lifts and supported stretches, while the other would be more at peace with one another. Then it would change. At one point, one of the couples was engaged in this really sadly beautiful statue-like embrace where the woman leaned toward the man, putting her weight into his chest, seemingly needing him, while he, considerably taller than she, rested one elbow atop her shoulder, and held his hand to his forehead, as if his mind was full of turmoil, trying to decide what to do about her. It was such a mesmerizing pose, especially with the way they held it for a considerable time, I almost couldn’t take my eyes off of them to watch the other couple dance.

During the second half, the dancers exited and the soprano returned. So there wasn’t a whole lot of dance. But, despite that, I really enjoyed these two experimental performances the Guggenheim put on. More please!

The Kandinsky exhibit continues through mid-January.

Top image taken from the Miller Theater site; the second, of Kandinsky’s Blue Rider, from here.

I had a crazy day. This afternoon I went to the Guggenheim to see this new ScentOpera – an opera told entirely through music and smell (each seat had a little microphone that blew the scents into your face) — which I’ll write about soon. Suffice it to say it was very interesting and I think Nico Muhly has found his niche: composing for smell — because, unlike with dance, his music most definitely did not overpower these whiffs at all, at least not as created by perfumier Christophe Laudamiel. I nearly passed out from “Funky Green Impostor.”

Anyway, more about that soon.

Tonight was the premiere of ABT’s new resident artist Alexei Ratmansky’s first ballet for the company — a night for which many have been waiting ever so eagerly. For those not up on the ballet-world gossip: Mr. Ratmansky (from the Ukraine, and former artistic director of the Bolshoi) initially was rumored to be contemplating taking the resident choreographer position at NYCB. Then he didn’t and everyone was depressed because Christopher Wheeldon was leaving to start his own company and everyone really liked Ratmansky and wanted to see more of his work stateside. Then, next thing everyone hears is that he’s accepted the same from ABT, making everyone happy but confused — NYCB is known for being more daring and contemporary in its repertoire; ABT sticks more to the traditional classical story ballets. Ratmansky,who was leaving the Bolshoi because he wanted more of a challenge (the Bolshoi’s rep is akin to ABT’s), seemed a better fit for NYCB.

Anyway, I was expecting tonight something along the lines of Concerto DSCH or something he’s done for NYCB (which is all that I’ve seen by him): a contemporary Balanchine-esque ballet without a linear narrative but with a discernible theme and with original, clever, thought-provoking choreography. Instead, On the Dnieper (the Dnieper is a river in the Ukraine), set to Prokofiev’s music of the same name, is a story ballet that I found to be about three parts Tudor, one part Robbins (with some of the fight scenes).

It’s the story of Sergei (danced by Marcelo Gomes), a young soldier who returns home, after war, to his fiance Natalia (Veronika Part), only to realize he no longer loves her but is attracted to Olga (Paloma Herrera), a flighty, flirtatious local girl who is betrothed to another man (David Hallberg). After a brief encounter, Olga falls for Sergei and begins to doubt her love for her fiance. One evening at a party, Olga dances with her fiance and Sergei becomes jealous and challenges the fiance to a fight. Sergei is felled, and Natalia rescues him — picks him up, cleans him off. But soon Olga is back. Natalia, after trying desperately and unsuccessfully to win Sergei back, heartbroken, does what she knows she must for the man she loves — helps him escape with Olga.

It reminded me of Antony Tudor because there’s a lot of drama — albeit without all the heavy psychology — a lot of hurt, wounded tragic characters with broken dreams, unrequited love, painful sadness that just reverberates through the whole auditorium. And the characters each seem to have a way of moving unique to them: Marcelo’s Sergei jumps back and forth a lot with lots of beats of the feet — as if he can’t decide whom to choose, what to do, as if he’s torn.

David Hallberg’s fiance is rather borderline psychopathic, highly impassioned (to make an understatement) but almost frighteningly controlling of Paloma’s Olga. After the way David had described his character on the Winger, I was expecting a reprisal of his “friend” in Tudor’s Pillar of Fire or his R&J Paris – -vulnerable and hurt but proud and trying to bear his pain noblely in a way that made me want Juliet to leave Romeo for him. That’s not what we got at all! Our first viewing of him is slicing madly through the air at Paloma and her friends as if to say, stop everything, I’m here. Besides the jumps and aggressive arms, he has a lot of crazy fast footwork throughout. At one point, when his jealousy is getting the better of him, he starts shuffling his feet so fast, he actually looks down at them, stunned, like he really can’t control them. A way out-of-control Fred Astaire.

Paloma is all about the fickle, flirtatious girlish jumps. And Veronika is more adagio, and she keeps extending her arms both to one side, then laying her head on that shoulder as if an expression of her loyalty and devotion to Sergei. Later, when she realizes he’s drawn to another woman, this movement looks more like a prayer that he’ll return to her. Veronika is heartbreaking and she’s the emotional centerpiece to the ballet. You really want to cry for her at the end.

I think it’s a good ballet — a little slow in places, but generally compelling and with meaningful movement that echos the characters’ desires and actions. It just surprised me that it wasn’t what I’m used to from him. I think after seeing so much NYCB, I’m becoming so enamored of Balanchine and non-narrative contemporary rep of the kind he’s done on that company. I hope that not all of the work he’ll do for ABT will be story ballets. I hope he will do some Concerto  DSCH and Russian Seasons and Dreams of Japan-like ballets for ABT as well. ABT’s dancers are so brilliant; it’s fascinating watching what they can do with those kinds of movement-heavy, dramatically open-ended kinds of dances.

Also on the program — which I’ll write more about after seeing the other casts — were Balanchine’s Prodigal Son (danced tonight by Herman Cornejo, replacing Ethan Stiefel, who’s still out with an injury), and James Kudelka’s Desir. Desir is about several different relationships — mostly couples — about sexual angst, romance, fighting, etc. I liked parts of it but not all (I’ll write more about it after more viewings), but what really floored me was a beautifully romantic pas de deux with sweeping lift after sweeping lift performed by Cory Stearns and Isabella Boylston. I’ve never really seen Isabella before and Cory I have but not much, and he’s definitely never stood out as much as he did tonight. Those lifts looked hard and he didn’t tire one bit. He was the ideal strong male partner, showing her off, making her look beautiful, giving her such gorgeous height, sweeping her up through the air, without being the least bit show-off-y himself. He was all about her and they both shone. They were breathtaking. And I’m definitely not the only one who thought so. The audience went wild with applause when they took their bows. They got even more applause than Gillian Murphy and Blaine Hoven! (who were excellent as the angst-ridden couple who eventually gets it together in the end). I’m glad Kevin McKenzie gives young dancers these kinds of chances to stand out.

More soon on the rest of the ballets, and hopefully some pictures as well.

(Photos above: top, Janie Taylor and Jared Angle in Quasi Una Fantasia, bottom, Abi Stafford and Craig Hall in Toccata. Both by Paul Kolnik, courtesy of NYCB)

Last night I went to New York City Ballet’s Spring season gala. I always love galas but they’re especially exciting when they showcase world premiere dances. In this case, there were two such premieres, along with the world premiere of a new piece of music set to one of the ballets.

First things first: I missed most of the red carpet events, unfortunately, since the program began early (so as to make time for the after-show dinner, which I am far too poor to attend). And shame on me for mismanaging time like that — that Waiting For Godot experience from two years ago was too much fun. I did get there just in time to see the paparazzi flashing away at (Sex & the City author) Candace Bushnell and (NYCB principal) Charles Askegard. Sweet Charles soon stepped aside to let his wife bask in the glory all on her own. She looked radiant. I was jealous.

Continue reading ‘TWO WORLD PREMIERES — QUASI UNA FANTASIA AND TOCCATA — AT NEW YORK CITY BALLET GALA’

(photo of Commedia by Erin Baiano)

(photo by John Ross, of Commedia)

Last weekend’s Works and Process event at the Guggenheim focused on Christopher Wheeldon’s recent ballet, Commedia, and the costume and set designers, Isabel Toledo and Ruben Toledo, respectively.

Isabel Toledo is of course best known for this dress:

(photographer unknown, image taken from Huffington Post) — Michelle Obama’s inauguration dress. Interestingly, we learned at the event that she found out Obama was wearing the dress just as Wheeldon’s Morphoses was premiering the ballet at the Sydney Dance Festival in Australia. (she was with the company there; we saw some footage of that, shot by Wheeldon on his point and shoot).

Commedia, which I’ve wrote about briefly here, is a sweet ballet in the style of Italian Commedia dell’arte and involves a set of traveling performers. Wheeldon made it in honor of the centenary this year of Ballets Russes (you may have seen the excellent documentary on that company that showed here a couple of years ago and is now on DVD); Commedia will be performed again when Morphoses returns this fall to Sadler’s Wells in London and then NY City Center. Commedia is set to a score by Stravinsky, which Michel Fokine had used for his ballet, Pulcinella, which Ballets Russes performed.

The Toledos designed the costumes and stage sets, and it was really interesting hearing the three talk about their collaboration. Isabel was very personable, very chatty, and though she’s Cuban-born, her accent sounded perfectly American. She talked about how much more difficult it was than she expected to design costumes for a dance

Continue reading ‘ISABEL TOLEDO AND CHRISTOPHER WHEELDON AT GUGGENHEIM’

(photo of Xiomara Reyes, taken from ABT website).

Sunday evening I attended another Works & Process event at the Guggenheim. These programs are so fantastic — they’re designed to kind of make the average person an insider, to give you a behind-the-scenes view of how art or cultural programming is created. Anyway, this one was on female choreographers and American Ballet Theater. Unbenownst to me (and most I think), ABT in conjunction with Altria has set up the Women’s Choreography Project, whose mission is to encourage more young women to venture into choreography — an excellent aim given that there are so startlingly and inscrutably few female choreographers, at least in ballet.

The women participants whose work we saw were: Gemma Bond, Misty Copeland, Nicole Graniero, Elizabeth Mertz, and Xiomara Reyes — all ABT ballerinas, and all, except Xiomara and Misty, members of the corps de ballet. (Xiomara is a principal and Misty a soloist.) It’s not a given or a demand of course that these ballerinas will necessarily become choreographers, but the program, led by Stephen Pier, exists for them to explore their talents, ultimately decide whether choreography is for them. It will be interesting to see, if programs like these proliferate, if it leads to more women dancemakers.

Anyway, it was really interesting watching Pier work with the women, but, to be honest, a bit confusing. At the beginning, Pier defined choreography for the audience as the movement of bodies through time and space. “That’s all,” he said. Then, he had Gemma Bond demonstrate a phrase she’d been working on.  She walked to the middle of the stage, smiling bashfully, and did a short, abstract lyrical segment. Then, Pier told her to focus on the back wall, to look at the shape of three windows, the lights coming through them, their geometry, and some writing on the wall underneath them (which I think was something like a dedication to whoever funded the auditorium, in small letters).

Bond used her hand to shield her eyes from the stage lights, and squinted up toward the windows. We all turned around, followed her gaze to the back of the room. She then laughed, shrugged her shoulders, and gamely re-performed the phrase. “It’s the same thing,” said the woman next to me. But I didn’t think it was. I thought she used the stage a little more; the pattern was now more horizontal than vertical, which went along with the three, horizontally aligned windows. She did exactly what was asked of her, I thought. Then Pier asked her, “well, what are you going to do with that red light coming out from the middle window?” She looked back at the windows, focused for a moment on the middle one, then, seemingly concentrating hard, repeated the phrase again. This time it was the same horizontal pattern as before, but now she stepped forward in the middle, kind of punctuating the movement with a little dot, making both vertical and horizontal use of the stage. “Now, that’s different,” said the lady next to me.  I agreed, but thought this difference was far more subtle than the last.

It was really interesting, but I think we were all intrigued because we knew exactly what was going on, what the choreographer was using to guide her. If we didn’t, I think it would just have been three slightly different patterns with no real meaning.

Pier then gave the women a pair of opposites to work with: fast and slow, light and dark, sharp and soft. All chose sharp and soft, except for renegade Misty, who chose freedom and constraint — which wasn’t one of Pier’s categories! (At one point, he asked each what they found hardest about the project and Misty said it was keeping within the rules. I love her!) Anyway, I looked deeply at the dances, trying hard to concentrate, to see the contrasts, but couldn’t always find them.

But as I was watching this, I was thinking of what I’d seen earlier in the day — the rehearsal footage of Alvin Ailey choreographing on his dancer Donna Wood Sanders, which I wrote about here. How he told her, you’re a prisoner, you can’t escape, you’re struggling, trying, let me see that. And this dance, Masekela Langage, about a group of people living under systematized racial oppression, was obviously very close to his heart.

I realize Pier was only giving these women exercises, that he wasn’t saying this was all there was to choreography. At least I hope that’s what he meant. He had said choreography was only about the movement of bodies through time and space. Is that all? I couldn’t help but get the feeling that Ailey’s world was so different from that of a lot of contemporary ballet, where it’s all about geometric patterns, interesting shapes, use of space, use of different rhythms, and not so much about creating something from the heart. I mean, literary writers and artists have to create because they have something to tell the world, something they find deeply meaningful. Although this was obviously only a glimpse into their process, I didn’t get the sense that these women were being encouraged to explore their visions of the world and learn to make movement that emanates from that place. It makes me wonder how most contemporary choreographers work — if they’re just thinking of light and shadow and abstract oppositions and geometry; if they’re not concerned with trying to tell us something.

Anyway, I have to say Xiomara (photo up top) completely blew me away with her work. She danced a lyrical balletic piece, but it had a kind of hippy-ness to it, a kind of swaying Gyspy-like, Latin feel. She danced with so much emotion. Her facial expressions almost reminded me of a flamenco dancer’s. I’ve never seen her dance like that before. I feel like perhaps she’s someone who’s better at dancing her own work than classical ballet. And perhaps she’d be good at creating work for other contemporary ballet dancers like her. Maybe she’ll be our next female ballet choreographer?

They also showed pieces by women who’ve choreographed for ABT: Lauri Stallings (whose Citizen I wrote about here) and Aszure Barton, whose work I’d never seen before and really loved. ABT II (the studio company, comprised of teenaged dancers) performed her Barbara, a sweet ballet that didn’t really have one single linear narrative, but had a lot of little subplots involving cutely intriguing characters.

On an endnote, Irlan Silva (above, from the studio company) — whoa! Methinks he is going to be in the main company soon…

(photo by Rachel Papo from NYTimes)

I guess the Brokeback Mountain opera (to be made by composer Charles Wuorinen) is on hold for the moment (hopefully, it’ll still happen eventually). But mainly over curiosity over the Brokeback-composer-to-be, I went to the Guggenheim recently for a Works & Process event celebrating Wuorinen’s 70th birthday.

The first part of the program consisted of Sean Curran Dance Company dancing to Wuorinen’s The Mission of Virgil, a deeply tense, dramatic piece for two pianos that took as its inspiration Dante’s Inferno. The dancers appropriately thrashed about in frenzy, crawled around the floor looking animalistic and like creatures from a netherworld, and stomped in unison evoking Satanic wrath — all with immense expressiveness and very good precision of form.

But of course I’ve seen dance performed to classical or modern music before. I was most interested in the second part of the program — Ashberyana — in which Wuorinin had set to operatic music (baritone with four stringed instruments, a piano and trombone) four John Ashbery poems from the poet’s book Wakefulness.

I don’t know that much about music (yet; am learning through Tchaikovsky!) but from what I’ve heard thus far (John Adams, Wuorinen), modern opera music is so harsh, so severe, to me, and it all seems so low-keyed and monotone. With Adams’s Doctor Atomic, that made sense given the intellectually dense, emotionally heavy nature of the story, but the set of poems Wuorinen chose of Ashbery’s seemed not so much so, but instead, by turns humorous, playful with words and logic, dreamy, surreal, rhythmic. And yet it seemed the intensity of the music — violins sounding like slashes of a knife, the cello a blow to the head, and the baritone’s voice so virile, powerful, menacing, almost as if he were threatening with each word — didn’t ideally mesh with the poems.

I don’t know… judge for yourself if you like: go here to read at least one of the poems in the piece (“Dear Sir or Madam”) — scroll down; and go here to hear the poems set to music and song.

I wonder if a Brokeback opera will / would sound similarly furious and damning.

“don’t worry; we’re not in bikinis!”

Originally uploaded by swan lake samba girl via mobile.

T-Mobile

Delic appetizers @ upper east-side Brazilian restaurant Buzina Pop. Chi chi atmosphere that is also very comfy. Excellent music, of course! Slightly weird service though.

Update: I’d stopped here on my way to the Guggenheim for another Works & Process, this one on composer Charles Wuorinen. It’s his 70th birthday; he’s the composer commissioned to make the upcoming opera version of Brokeback Mountain. Anyway, choreographer Sean Curran’s modern dance troupe was performing to one of Wuorinen’s pieces. Curran’s dancers and his choreography are excellent; Wuorinen’s music interesting — very severe and unsetting… more soon…

(photo of Tudor’s Pillar of Fire from Artsjournal)

Last night I went to one of the best Works & Process events at the Guggenheim that I’ve been to in a long time. (By the way, I spent practically all weekend, despite a severe cold turned into sinusitis turned into a migraine episode, at City Center watching Morphoses, and despite said sickness had a pretty good time — promise to write all about that very soon!) Anyway, this Works & Process event, about American Ballet Theater’s upcoming City Center season honoring choreographer Antony Tudor, was so excellent because:

1) three of my favorite dancers (excepting Marcelo that is — he never does Guggenheim sadly) were onstage working their magic only feet away from me. This included Jose Carreno (headshot above), Julie Kent and Veronika Part, the first and third of whom I’ve never seen at Guggenheim. And it was the best dancing I’ve seen there. Usually, with the space being so intimate, the stage so close and the dancers in workout clothes rather than actual costumes, everything just seems scratchy, like you notice all the little foibles the distance of the stage at the Met or City Center prevents you from seeing. But with these three: looked just like it does in the big opera house, completely smooth and polished and dramatic and intense and perfectly in character and just miraculous movement altogether.

Veronika I must say almost made me cry with her Leaves are Fading character, and she and her partner, Alexandre Hammoudi, only performed a short excerpt from the 4th pas de deux of that ballet. She’s probably ABT’s most dramatic ballerina; her mission is always to make you feel exactly what her character is feeling, to bring you to that same place and make you a part of that world. To do so she puts everything she has into a role and the results are always so rich. There are other wonderful actress dancers in ABT, but there’s just no one on her exact level.

And the second reason I loved last night’s program was that I found it really informative. I didn’t know much about Tudor and I learned a great deal. Kevin McKenzie (ABT’s artistic director) spoke, and he talked about him not so much as a director trying to sell people on his company’s upcoming season but more as a former student reminiscing on how wonderful it was to be taught and coached by a genius.

(photo of Tudor by Kenn Duncan from ABT website)

Tudor created character-driven story ballets, and he gave his characters great psychological depth, as expressed, of course through movement. He’d develop a character through the walk, the way hands are held, through specific repeated gestures, spending hours and hours going over these things with his dancers, McKenzie said. Which is why I titled this post as I did. I’m just getting so tired of all these abstract story-less ballets with movement that doesn’t seem to have any meaning (at least not literal) or where the point is to make beautiful music visible. If I want to bask in the beauty of music, frankly, I’d rather go to a symphony and close my eyes and drink it all in. Movement should be more; it should be something beyond music. I like dances that are more like plays with movement substituting for words. I want characters with real lives and issues and emotions and depth, that I can latch onto and feel for. I want to get caught up in their stories, and cry for them; I want their predicaments to make me think about the state of things.

We saw some little film excerpts of Tudor speaking. “Dance must change to stay alive. Life is change,” he said. He wanted to modernize ballet, which is interesting because Christopher Wheeldon (Morphoses man who I’ll get to soon) says the same. But Tudor’s way of doing so (and most of his ballets were created from the 1930s through 70s; he died in 1987) was to make it more people-oriented, enable viewers to see the characters onstage as real people with genuine emotions, allow them to identify with those characters.

We saw excerpts of several of his ballets: his sweet Little Improvisations, a duet between a boy and girl; Judgment of Paris, a rather funny re-telling of three goddesses vying for the attention of one god but re-set in a bar with prostitute / ‘dancers’ subbing for the goddesses and a drunk patron for Paris; Pillar of Fire, a tragic portrait of three sisters, their relationships with each other, and their men; and The Leaves Are Fading, a sadly beautiful story of the life of one relationship.

(photo of Leaves are Fading by Rosalie O’Connor; Tudor profile by Cecil Beaton)

Anyway, I’m now very excited for ABT’s Tudor season, upcoming at City Center at the end of October. Even if some of the ballets are a bit dated now (which we’ll have to determine when we see them), they’ll still be a welcome break from all the abstract shapes and movements that are supposed to evoke something … or not, and sometimes do, sometimes don’t, and sometimes do but I don’t care… I feel that the way to modernize ballet again today is to give us more, new, updated stories, but more on that later.

Sorry if this post is a bit loopy and rambling … I’m still suffering the after-effects of a week of Sudafed intake (and am kind of realizing the reason they put the drug behind the counter :S)

(all photos by Richard Termine)

So, last night I went to the Guggenheim primarily to see this Works & Process combination dance / fashion program, “A Two Part Affair — Ballet and Modern Meet Uptown.” I was really looking forward to it because, unlike the other W & P programs, which are more of a preview of an upcoming show, this was a performance only to be shown at the museum. Two choreographers — one, Pam Tanowitz, from the Modern world; the other, Brian Reeder, from Ballet — collaborated to form a kind of hybrid dance form.

Also exciting was that Jillian Lewis, from Project Runway, did the costumes. She, along with Tanowitz and Reeder, spoke about the production on a panel moderated by dance writer Robert Greskovic (who is actually a pretty funny guy — who knew! — cracking jokes right and left, making fun of himself for being so out of it as to not know who Lewis was I probably shouldn’t admit it but neither did I :S — I just don’t watch enough TV…)

Anyway, the program, as its name implied, consisted of two parts: the first danced to Renaissance music; the second to modern composers like Charles Wuorinen (creator of the upcoming operatic version of Brokeback Mountain), Philip Glass, and Lou Harrison. This second part, I far preferred to the first, though to be honest, I thought most of it was pretty eh… pretty, but just nothing that really blew me away, either costume- or choreography-wise.

I feel like we’re currently in the midst of a rather unfortunate period of Minimalism. Choreography consisted mainly of ballerinas tip-toe-ing around, taking very small steps, men and the sole female Modern dancer doing these small side-sweeping steps, sometimes with flexed feet, sometimes pointed. Once in a while there’d be a leg slightly raised and a very small waist-high lift, but overall there was nothing spectacular, nothing the least bit dramatic about the movement. I think choreographers still need to tell a kind of story with the movement, even if it’s not a full narrative but of the Balanchine (“whenever a man and woman are onstage together, there’s a story) variety. I just didn’t see that here — dancers kind of partnered at random with one another, broke into a short solo, but there didn’t seem to be anything to it that you could hook onto.
And the costumes — well, here are some more pictures so you can see for yourselves:

(again, all photos by Richard Termine)

So, as you can see, all of the men’s costumes consisted of pink or blue diaphanous t-shirts and tights with cut-outs that were also see-through in places. The female dancers all wore leotards with exterior underwire bra; the two ballerinas sassy little striped tutus and the Modern woman a lacey thing that wrapped around her neckline feather boa-like. But the tutus and boa were worn only in the first, Renaissance section; they were taken off for the modern.

I mean, Lewis was likely going for sexy– she said she wanted to focus on the body, highlight the human form — but to me, I guess that’s just been done before. Plus, she used such light colors and mundane-looking fabrics, the costumes just kind of almost weren’t even there. And, even including tutus and boa, they just didn’t seem to fit at all in the context of the Renaissance. I then remembered seeing David Hallberg dance earlier at the Guggenheim in a fabulous Christian Lacroix. He left out the delicious candy-apple velvet jacket, but here are some pics he took of himself in the tights. I mean, hello — THIS is what we need to spice up Ballet, I say! I say away with minimalism; bring back Lacroix!

Anyway, I really did appreciate the concept of this program; I think collaborations can be very fruitful and lead to innovation and creativity. Back to the dancing for a moment, I really just think the choreographers needed some more time. There was one point during the second, modern, part where Roman Zhurbin (center, in the bottom picture) held his arms out and each ballerina grabbed on. He lifted, walked slowly around stage carrying the two of them. To me, it was beautifully reminiscent of Balanchine’s Apollo. At center stage was one of the male modern dancers in a kind of Martha Graham-esque pose, body bent over forward, foot flexed back, seeming to carry a non-existent world atop his arched-over shoulders. So, also Apollo-like, yet fundamentally Modern in form. It was like a double-sided Apollo. I feel like they should have gotten rid of everything else, used this stunning moment as a starting point.

I think the rest of it was kind of too hybrid. They didn’t use the Ballet dancers to show the beauty and poetry of the dance form; ballerinas were going on pointe and Zhurbin would point instead of flex his foot at times, but that doesn’t really mean anything. It just looked like a very watered-down form of Ballet. And then both Zhurbin and the female ballet dancers had these very muscular bodies — particularly Zhurbin (aka Ballet god! — never noticed that before; ABT is really under-using him…), and the Modern dancers were more thin, almost a bit scrawny in comparison. But of course there’s a reason for that — Ballet requires great use of the legs, the thigh muscles for those huge jumps and the calves for pointe work. And the upper body is so developed for spectacular overhead lifting. If you don’t show some of that difference in the movement, I think the bodies end up looking a little weirdly unbalanced…

One final thing: writer Claudia La Rocco didn’t see the program, unfortunately, but here’s an interesting discussion she and her commenters started about Ballet’s current kind of identity crisis and how costuming fits into that.

I’m behind on my blogging. Last Sunday, I braved the freezing cold (I HATE NY when temps drop down to the teens and single digits; all I can think of is death) and ventured up to the Guggenheim for another Works & Process event. This one, entitled “Ballet in Sneakers,” was about the making of a new film of Jerome Robbins’ 1958 jazz ballet, “NY Export: Opus Jazz.” Two New York City Ballet dancers — Ellen Bar and Sean Suozzi — are the impetus behind the project. The filming is still currently underway and, in fact, is not very far along unfortunately. I was hoping they would have more clips to show other than that which I saw earlier at NYCity Ballet (which I blogged about here), but so far the duet I wrote about in that post is the only one that has been filmed. The (very young!) filmmakers — director Henry Joost, along with Jody Lee Lipes and Ariel Schulman, were there to discuss a bit of the logistics of filming that piece and the locations in which they’re thinking of shooting other parts: a tobacco warehouse under the Brooklyn Bridge, a hidden area in Staten Island under the Verrazano Bridge, and they’re looking for a low rooftop surrounded by high rises. Joost gamely asked the audience to let him know if they knew of such a place. Basically, they are seeking to film one of each of the five parts of the dance in each of the five burroughs, which I thought was sweet, and fitting since Robbins was a quintessential New Yorker who loved this city, and made his ballet in honor of it. I’ll be interested to see the finished product.

I do wonder how long it’s going to be, though, since the ballet itself is not as long as a full-length feature film, and whether it’s going to show in regular cinemas, art house theaters, the New York State Theater, PBS, go direct to DVD, etc. I really wish the Works & Process organizers would allow some time for an audience Q&A. They do have a cocktail social afterward, but it’s often difficult to track down the speakers, and Sunday night it was impossible since the lobby is currently being used for the filming of another movie (don’t know which, but I heard Clive Owen was spotted in the museum earlier that day) and so was unavailable to us.

Speaking of movies, “How She Move,” of which they showed a trailer during “Dance War” on Monday night, looks kind of good. Well, the dancing at least looks decent… It opens here tomorrow night.

And speaking of “Dance War” — really, I’m sorry this post is so all over the place! — I wasn’t tremendously impressed with Monday night’s first team dance-off. I liked Team Carrie Ann’s last performance the best, mainly because they did what I said I’d most prefer in my last post on the show: put the divas up front and center and have the men as backup dancers. The women can really sing (at least four of them can), and though I’m not sure I’m tremendously impressed with anyone’s dancing, at least the choreographers seem to be entrusting the men with somewhat more interesting moves than the women. I didn’t much care for Carrie Ann’s first team performance, though — the hip hop with all the posturing. I thought it was interesting at first, and very initially reminded me of Camille A. Brown’s “Groove to Nobody’s Business,” but it got old fast and went nowhere. I couldn’t much appreciate Bruno’s first piece, with all the pimpish sex kitten crap. He basically said he wants “sexy women and strong men,” so that is apparently where it’s at for him. And I honestly can’t remember his second piece…

First, I just copied this from the Winger website. I’m sure Kristin won’t mind (By the way, in the top pic on the post that I just linked to, Danny Tidwell (trying to be incognito in hat) and the girl who I think is Jamie from SYTYCD are in the forefront.) This picture (that I copied here) is the Cedar Lake Ballet pre-party blogger get-together I have been going on about for some time now. From left to right: Counter Critic Ryan Kelly, Ariel, Philip / Oberon, goofus me, David!!!!! (who doesn’t look that terrified at all to be standing next to me, right?!), Taylor Gordon, Evan, Doug Fox, and of course, the mother of all dance bloggers, Kristin Sloan

Second, last night was another Works & Process event at the Guggenheim. This one was in celebration of Frederic Franklin, a delightfully sweet 93-year-old man who’s enjoyed a wonderously long career in dance. He started out in a tap dance ensemble in Paris in 1931, performing with the likes of Josephine Baker, was quickly snatched up by the Markova-Dolin Ballet in England, and eventually ended up with the famous Ballet Russes. After retiring from dancing, he joined ABT both performing non-dance roles in the big story ballets and helping to re-stage classics. In between an interview with Mr. Franklin by moderator Wes Chapman, they showed film clips of him dancing and speaking about his life (which I figured out afterward, while talking with Barbara, a reader of this blog and the Winger, were likely culled from the great documentary Les Ballet Russes), and excerpts of ballets that Mr. Franklin has staged. Two excerpts were from Coppelia, one performed by very good young dancers from ABT II (ABT’s studio company), the other by students at the Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis School (ABT’s ballet school). The program only listed the students’ names in alphabetical order, but I was blown away by the ballerina who performed the lead in that excerpt. I can’t give her proper credit because I don’t know which name belongs to her; but Barbara and I agreed that she was brilliant.

And two of the other excerpts — a pas de deux from Leonide Massine’s “Gaite Parisienne” and one from Balanchine’s “Mozartiana” — were performed by ABT principals Julie Kent and Mr. Beautiful (center, in pic above, as well). Julie, as always, was lovely and she really is such a beautiful ballerina, so light and feathery, she just floats around the floor. But Marcelo is the consummate partner for her. Marcelo is the consummate partner period. Oh, I haven’t seen Marcelo in months now and I miss him … But David just steals every smidgeon of attention whenever he is onstage, wherever he is actually — passing by a damn window… On a stage, he becomes the stage. And it’s not in any way his fault; he doesn’t try to do it at all. He really tries very very hard to highlight the ballerina; he showers all of his attention onto her, whether he’s partnering her or standing off to the side simply watching her, as he did last night in “Mozartiana.” How do I know this? Because the entire time Julie was dancing, I was looking at him. I’m too tired to try to look it up right now, but I just read an article where the writer was saying that Baryshnikov was a great dancer and brought new steps into to the canon and all, but that’s not even the half of what he meant for Ballet; he could stand completely still on a stage and you couldn’t stop looking at him. That’s exactly how I feel about David. It goes without saying he’s a sublime dancer, but that’s not even the half of it; not even ten percent.

In “Mozartiana” Julie and David wore workout clothes — typical for Works & Process, but in the “Gaite Parisienne” pdd, oh my oh my, costumes! Gorgeous, fascinating, jaw-droppingly breathtaking Christian Lacroix costumes. Normally, I’m not that into designer clothes, but Lacroix is on a whole different level; the man is so clearly an artist to me. If only more ballet companies would hire him to re-design all the classics… David’s costume consisted of this bright celebration-red velvet tux, gorgeously loud varicolored striped tights, and black shoes. Julie’s was less colorful — simple beige and black — but stylistically stunning in a sweetly sexy little girl / china doll kind of way, suiting Julie to a tee. And the choreography — I haven’t even checked to see if ABT is doing this during their spring season (a quick internet search reveals they last put it on all the way back in 1988?), but it was the most sweetly sexy waltz-ballet I have ever seen. I really want to see the whole.

Anyway, it was a fun people-watching night. Sir Alastair was there wearing this very interesting red Mexican-y pancho-esque jacket and a gold scarf tossed spiffily around his neck. I saw him talking to Wendy Perron, EIC of Dance Magazine, at one point. And it was nice seeing Barbara again at the cocktail thingy afterward Always a fun night at the Guggenheim. The only negative, the museum was apparently remodeling or something and they had half the lobby roped off; very hard to negotiate the large crowd without spilling your wine!

(photo by Mark Sadan, copied from Ballet Co)

Early last week I saw Shen Wei Dance Arts give a Works & Process presentation at the Guggenheim. This was my first time seeing this company, although I briefly saw Mr. Shen in David Michalek’s Slow Dancing Films. (I think “Mr. Shen” is right, by the way: first name follows the last in Chinese?…) I know this company has performed at many festivals around the world, and is a favorite of the Lincoln Center Festival, and after seeing their New York premiere of “Behind Resonance,” I know why.

The piece began with a group of dancers wearing unadorned but gorgeous floor-length, gray velvet garments (strapless dresses for the women, skirts for the men) walking majestically across the stage, finding a spot then standing perfectly still, and making a pose. After a few seconds, they would move, walk to another place on the stage, or sometimes in the audience, and do the same, stop in pose. In a sense it was like a fashion show, but I don’t mean that in a bad way. They weren’t making runway poses; rather they were making various shapes with the beautiful fabric. One female dancer leaned up against a side wall, her hands pressed hard against it, and her legs about two foot-lengths apart so that the fabric made a kind of triangular shape, like a large cone. Another would lean over a rail aligning the ramp leading from audience to stage and wrap one leg around it, the fabric stretching over and creating a kind of fan shape.

After several minutes, the dancers began taking various upside-down positions when they stopped. One man sat in the middle of the stage, then rolled back on his elbows and lifted his entire body up, where he held it, his legs spread apart so that the fabric now made an upside down triangle. A woman did a hand-stand against a back wall. It was interesting because, as the dancers walked the material trailed flowingly behind them, like a bridegown. I would have thought as they lifted their legs into the air, the gowns would have fallen straight down, but they didn’t; they stayed put at the dancers’ outspread ankles. The lights were dimmed into a kind of bluish haze and it was so visually mesmerizing.

After a few minutes of this, the dancers now began to pair, men lifting women, both making the triangular shapes now — the men upright with their legs spread about two foot-lengths apart, the women in the air. Not all lifts were the same of course, or that would be monotonous; one man would be holding a dancer in a horizontal overhead position, another would be held upside down, another upright in a back T position behind the man, etc. And not all dancers stopped in pose at once; they each had their own timing. So, as one was posed, another would be in the midst of a lift or finding a position.

Finally, after a few minutes of this, the lights dimmed more, and, as some dancers were still performing the lifts, the curtain widened to reveal two women, now wearing only flesh-toned shorts, rolling together very very slowly on the floor. As they rolled toward the audience, their bodies would become entangled with the other so much so that they began to resemble one, two-torsoed, contorted body. It began to look like a two-headed mermaid crawling on the ocean floor. Then the opposite curtain widened to reveal another female dancer on the other side of the stage, this one alone, rolling very slowly as well, but going backward instead of forward. Her body would slowly bend back, first from the hips, then the waist, then the collarbone, then the chin. When she rolled back at the collarbone, she looked completely headless for a time. Both the ‘two-torsoed creature’ on the opposite side of the stage and this woman looked simultaneously grotesque and beatific. The whole thing was simply enchanting. The music, which I hardly remember since I was so stunned by the visuals, was by David Lang, and was simple with an air of mystery, consisting of a bland background hum spiked with some bells every now and then. And these were only some excerpts from the piece; I’d so love to see the whole.

Though Shen Wei is from China, his troupe is multicultural, as it seems is their repertoire. At times in the beginning of this piece, the dancers would look almost like Tibetan monks, the way they walked in such a determined, straight-forward manner to their chosen destination for a pose, where, even when leaning their bodies in a pained-looking manner against a wall, their faces remained impassive, ascetic. At other times, they kind of resembled elegant Western models.

Mr. Shen recently traveled back to China and throughout Asia, to Tibet and Cambodia. He’s currently making a larger work called simply “Re” as in re-birth, re-newal, re-envision, re-visit, re-work — fill in the blank basically, about these travels. He showed us some slides of pictures he took there. I was most mesmerized by photos of trees in Western China. These enormous trees would somehow grow not from the ground, but atop a building. So, he had these pictures of a gigantic tree centered right on top of a mosque or a house, its roots snaking down the sides of the building. They were eerily breathtaking, just like “Behind Resonance.” I’ll be very interested to see what all Shen Wei does with these images, how he translates them into dance. The project is set to premiere in 2009. In the meantime, according to Danciti, the company will be performing Monday night at Cedar Lake, with many others, as part of the Dancers Responding to Aids benefit, if anyone is going to that. (I can’t afford to!)

A little birdie at the Guggenheim last night told me that none other than David Hallberg is scheduled to perform ABT’s upcoming Works & Process event there in January!!! Julie Kent is slated to dance as well

I am behind on my reviewing, but am working hard on my Alvin Ailey post (it’s really difficult to write about something you love; you keep feeling like you’re not doing it justice…) and, after that, Shen Wei Dance Arts at Guggenheim, which I saw last night. In the meantime, here’s a funny, but informative Winger post about NYCB’s Justin Peck getting made up to dance the role of Mother Ginger in their Nutcracker. Growing up, “the fat lady with all the kids under her skirt” was always my favorite part of that ballet, so I really enjoyed this.

I’m still in a state of sugar shock. Like when you’re having a little meal of chocolate truffles (as some of us are occasionally wont to do ); the first couple make your blood race in a good way and you’re hyper-aware and -active, but then you have one too many and hyper-activity turns to jitters and your brain starts racing ahead of you and you have no coherent thoughts whatsoever? Anyway, too much going on last night! It was the world premiere of two new ballets: “Close To Chuck,” a collaboration between choreographer Jorma Elo, composer Philip Glass and artist Chuck Close (whose self-portrait is pictured above) in tribute to Close’s body of work. It was also the not premiere but second performance of a new ballet by NYCBallet dancer Benjamin Millepied called “From Here On Out,” set to new music by 20-something composer Nico Muhly, whom I talked about here.

These premieres are so much fun to be a part of, they’re such an event extraordinare. Practically everyone in the ballet world turns out. I’m so thankful to Apollinaire for inviting me since they were nearly sold out. We sat in front of Tobi Tobias — so fun putting a face to writing. I was hoping we’d see some other familiar dance writer names, but they must have been sitting on the other side of the theater. On our side were also NYCB ballerina Maria Kowroski and Tyler Angle, and some people who I recognized but couldn’t put names to, including a Paul Taylor dancer.

Okay, first things first: the evening began with another performance of choreographer Stanton Welch’s “Clear” again starring Jose Carreno, which I wrote about in my last post. Last time I saw him it was his debut in the role and I wrote that he concentrated more on the steps than the drama; this time I felt differently. I felt that he gave it much more emotion, was probably just getting the steps down the first time. I was also sitting on the right side of the theater instead of the left this time so I might have had a better view of his face. He danced it gorgeously, perfectly, emotionally, everything. I LOVE that ballet. The more I see it the more it evokes different things for me. Last night, it kind of reminded me of a more abstract version of Death in Venice, where the men, resplendent in pants that are skin-colored but have a bit of golden quality to their sheen, no shirts, have their arms and legs outstretched looking up to the heavens, as if they are both in worship and the objects of someone else’s worship (like the viewer’s). At other points, others of the men act silly and playful, covering their eyes with their hands, much like Tadzio (the older man’s muse and unrequited love interest in “Venice”), at times kind of bouncing around jovially zigzagging their heads. It goes from beautiful and poetic to cute and playful and back again, with the final pas de deux between the lead man and the ballerina ending in a beatific embrace, his head on her shoulder and her head pointed to the sky, her arm reaching upward. People have said they think the ballerina was superfluous, that Welch must have felt he needed to put her in because it was ballet. I thought about it and, though I think that ending scene is gorgeous, she was hardly in the ballet and she didn’t really seem to belong. Why not simply replace her with one of the other men, like one of the young sun-god, playfully flirty Tadzio-types, like the one danced by cute Jared Matthews? I know the ballerina on pointe has classically been the element bringing forth the poetic, but Welch’s whole point is that men in and of themelves can be so. Maybe he was afraid of it looking “gay,” or something, but, please, ballet audiences are more sophisticated than that.

Anyway, the fun thing about sitting on the right side of the theater is that it’s near the curtain, so when they pull it back and the dancers come out front for their curtain call, they’re right in front of you. Completely beyond surreal being that close to Jose. I love him so! You just want to reach out and touch… don’t worry I would never Oh, and then at the end of intermission, before the new “Close to Chuck” began, I spotted him in the back of the orchestra section, watching. I had to force myself to turn back to the front to see the ballet. Even standing there in a plain black t-shirt, the man just melts me.

(picture from Village Voice, of Angel Corella and Julie Kent in the leads, Herman Cornejo walking in background; I cc’d picture of Jose Carreno from ABT’s website in my last post, so won’t repeat it here).

Second on was the “Close to Chuck.” A disclaimer: I always get more out of a piece the more I go see it — I see all kinds of things I missed on first glance — so these are only my initial afterimages after viewing it only once. I have to say the costumes (by Ralph Rucci) and backdrop (various stages of a painting of Mr. Close’s Self Portrait pictured up top of this post) were so stunning, my focus was largely there. In future performances, I’ll pay more attention to the actual dancing The audience was abuzz. As the curtain lifted to reveal several people — Marcelo front and center, Herman to his left in back (this after Jose, both on stage and in audience is where my “truffles” were starting to go into overload…) — all covered neck to foot in shiny black, the bottom portion of the costume a long wide skirt for both men and women, the audience gasped in unison. As a curtain against the back wall lifted to reveal a sparsely filled-in black and white rudimentary etching of the portrait, a single person walked around stage, whipping off each dancer’s vest. The men were now shirtless, the women wearing black mesh leotards with a large black cross down the front and back. Everyone wore handless black gloves that started at the wrist, ended at the elbow. The costumes were very reminiscient to me of those used in Nacho Duato’s “Castrati” which I recently blogged about. They were very medieval, religious, but in a retro vogue way, not authentic like in the Duato. The long skirts for the men made Marcelo and Herman — two of the dance world’s most manly dancers– all the more striking, and ironically more rather than less virile, especially with the gloves which looked similar to the leather arm gear in Castrati.

Marcelo walked over to Julie Kent, dancing the lead ballerina here, examined various parts of her body — or perhaps measured her — his movements very rigid and staccato, almost unsettlingly so. After a short pas de deux, everyone left the stage, and the back curtain lowered back down over the painting. The dancers then re-emerged now without the skirts. The women wore simply the leotards, the men these biker-ish looking pants, all black but a darker more textured inky black lining the inner leg, a lighter, more diaphonous black lining the outer leg. A thick piece of elastic hugged the waist, and in front there was a long horizontal rectangular cut-out between the waist and pelvis which I found sexy and suggestive, albeit rather odd. The women were on pointe and then men wore either black ballet slippers or possibly jazz shoes — I couldn’t really tell, but it looked like there was a very small heel. The back curtain drew up again to reveal another black and white version of the portrait, but this one more filled-in than the previous. The work was being created.

Movement — both partnering and solo — was intentionally stiff, rigid, and awkward, but with hints of fluidity, very much like that I described in Elo’s just-premiered piece “Brake the Eyes.” In fact at one point, Marcelo performed the same exact movement pattern as the ballerina in “Brake” as his body was seemingly divided into two, the left half held stiff and bent, the right arm making flowing, wavy watery movements, as if half of his body was struggling to break free from the other. In “Brake,” I interpreted this to be half classical ballet, half puppet and thought of it as some kind of statement on the world of classical ballet. With Marcelo performing the same movement (and it looked very different on Marcelo’s huge body as compared to the petit ballerina’s), I thought of it more as the artist trying to break free of constraints or, in Close’s case, the limitations of his own body.

I don’t know a huge amount about Close, but I do know he was a promising youngish artist when struck with an aneurysm, which rendered his arms and legs nearly useless. He then developed a new kind of painting method, by which he would photograph his subject, then employ others to put various computerized graphs over the photo, over which he would, using an arm brace, paint in the little graphic squares, making a colorful complex portrait that was almost industrial-looking if viewed from up close, but poetic if viewed from afar. I felt like Marcelo symbolized the artist / subject (since Close was both) and both his personal struggles and his work process; a lot of the movement evoked the artistic struggle to create.

The dancers again left the stage, the curtain fell and rose again, this time revealing a colored, fully-painted portrait, very majestic.

Marcelo was the perfect body for Elo to create this piece on. With his large bone-structure, every awkward movement he made, a hip jutting out due to intentionally uneven weight distribution, a shoulder asymmetrically hung down, made the awkwardness of his body contortions all the more obvious. At one point, he almost looked like Billy Crudup’s Elephant Man that played on Broadway several years ago (Crudup, by the way, wore no makeup or prosthetics in that play; rather the way he moved his own normal body in such a distorted, awkward manner illustrted both the burden he bore from the disfigurement and how beautiful he was underneath it all). In the final segment of the ballet, the dancing becomes more mellifluous. The work is created, beauty triumphs. I’ll be seeing this ballet again at least one more time before the season ends, so I will likely, well definitely, get more out of it, and will report back when I do.

Oh, almost forgot: the curtain call was fantastic. Not only was Elo there (the choreographer usually takes a bow at the premiere), but Mr. Close came out onstage too! He was wheeled out in the most artful wheelchair. Instead of the regular four wheels on the floor, this one had its wheels stacked, two top two bottom, so it was like he was riding a permanent wheelie, making his height far above everyone else’s. Marcelo ran over and gave him a hug, as he’d done seconds earlier with Elo. Marcelo is happiness

The third ballet of the evening was the other new one, Millepied’s abstract “From Here On Out,” with original music by Nico Muhly. I’m sure that I’ll get more out of this ballet upon my second and possibly third viewing of it this season as well, but my initial thoughts are that the music far outshone the choreography. Muhly is a genius, make no doubt about it. After I’d seen Muhly speak about the project at the Guggenheim, I’d joked that I was excited to “hear” the ballet. Well, that’s exactly why you should go. I don’t know much about music but there were so many different kinds of instruments, I think a xylophone even, mixed with computerized sound to miraculous effect. And the way the percussion or horns would build into a crescendo then subside, then build again when you’re not expecting it, like a wonderful surprise. The music was enchanting, there was so much going on, it’s just a feast for the ears. I just felt that the genius of the choreography didn’t match that of the music. Which is not at all to say it wasn’t still interesting, it just didn’t take my breath away.

It may partly be that the choreography just didn’t start out strong enough. It opens with several dancers, all wearing purple unitards bearing various cut-outs — one on the side of the waist, another on the opposite hip, for the men over one breast — all standing in a huddle, simply shifting weight one foot to the other. There’s some partnering, then ensemble work, and eventually a pas de deux between a man and a woman takes place. For the most part this duet doesn’t do much for me save for a few longing stretches and holds. (Go here to see one of my favorite shapes from that duet performed by Marcelo and Paloma Herrera.) From there, the ballet builds up a bit then ends on a stronger note: several women get whisked up and carried off into the wings. It’s a rather lovely end. I just wish it had the same momentum throughout. But as I said, I’ll be seeing it some more this week, so will report back on what further viewings yield.

Until then, I just discovered that Muhly actually has a blog! Go here to read a cute post about his freaking out at the last minute over a note. Go here for a Times article about a couple of things ahead in the coming week for ABT (a revival of a piece by Antony Tudor and Tharp Tharp Tharp!), and go here for the rest of the season schedule and tix. Only one week left

Another happy night for me at American Ballet Theater [a.k.a Danny Tidwell's Old Company -- sorry, I'll only do that for this City Center season, I promise ] But that goes without saying; ABT is always a blast.

Tonight was the debut of a long-favorite dancer of mine, the legendary Jose Carreno, in “Clear,” Stanton Welch’s beautiful male-centered ballet which I’ve been chirping about incessantly here, here, and here. That first “here” links to my post chattering on about the excerpt of this ballet that I saw performed two nights ago with Herman Cornejo in the lead. Well, interestingly, Jose gave it a completely different tone here. Where Herman was more grounded and virile (‘man-god’ I called him), Jose was lighter and more ethereal, like Angel Corella, on whom the ballet was originally created. (Angel has skipped out on performing with ABT this season, I assume because he’s working on getting his own new company underway in Spain. Fun fun!). I know how much Jose admires Angel because, when I once sat in the front orchestra far to the side, I could see into the wings where Jose was watching Angel perform Sinatra Suite — so cute! — so I figure he’s watched Angel a lot and had his movement in mind. Also, abstract though the ballet is, Herman gave it a bit more of a story, with his more angsty interaction with his ballerina, at times seeming haughtily to refuse her, then taking notice of her, succumbing, and ultimately becoming, blissfully, one with her. Jose kind of kept it at the same level, being ‘nice’ to his ballerina throughout, and concentrating more on the watery fluidity of the movement. Jose excels at turns, and he was breathtaking in the ballet’s repeated sequence of continuous spins for the lead man, where he spots in one direction and fouettes himself around several times, then turns a quarter and spots in that direction and fouettes around, then the next quarter, and so on, into a full circle. Herman’s forte is his sky-high jumps. So, Herman’s “Clear” was more virtuostic, dramatic; Jose’s more poetic. Just fun to see how two genius interpretive artists, through their different strengths, make a ballet their own.

And can I just sound like a schoolgirl for a moment and get something out of my system: Jose is so damn gorgeous!!!!! The girls behind me were giggling all through the beginning movement. It was hard not to join them. But Sir Alastair was sitting right in front of me, so I had to behave like an adult…

And all the up & coming young dancers like Jared Matthews were so cute; I was sitting up close tonight so could see faces well. He and the others kind of had these looks like “oh my god, I can’t believe I am sharing the stage with this legend…” Adorable

Just one more thing regarding “Clear” and then I’ll shut up about it: Blaine Hoven!!!!! I made a trip to the ladies room during intermission and a woman in line whom I didn’t know turned around to me. “You know who I am really liking?” she blurted out to me as if we were the best of friends, as she looked down at her Playbill and scanned the cast list. Her finger stopped at Blaine’s name and just as she looked back up at me, I nodded and we simultaneously said “Blaine Hoven.” The man is starting conversations amongst complete strangers in the ladies room line! He needs to develop his artistry more, and perhaps hone his partnering skills, but as a soloist, his technique, his lines, and the ease with which he takes on the modern movement vocabulary: extraordinary.

(image of Julie and Marcelo taken from City Center website; top headshot of Jose from ABT site)

Second on tonight’s program was Lar Lubovitch’s beautiful, but somewhat eery, crepuscular dreamscape, “Meadow,” danced by my favorite partnership, Marcelo Gomes and Julie Kent. This is a ballet that makes me yearn to know more about dance and the way choreographers create meaning. The whole thing unfolds behind a scrim, so from the start it has that feeling about it that it’s not quite real; it takes place in the land of the imaginary. It begins with an ensemble of both women and men, the women wearing nude-colored tops, the men shirtless, and both in flowing, blue skirts (more like skorts for the men) bearing abstract, cloud-like shapes. They flitter around the stage almost like night-time fireflies, or night-nymphs, some throwing their arms up as they run, a couple at a time doing a lift and carry. The music is a melodic Franz Schubert. But intriguingly, at various points a sole instrument — an untuned violin here, a bass there — will strike out discordantly over the mellifluous music. It sounds like an orchestra warming up, one instrument at a time, but why in the midst of already-playing music? Then, the sound completely shuts off while the dancers are still in the midst of a sequence, before slowly scattering off into the wings. This musical disruption, to me, gives the piece a disconcerting, eery feel, like something is awry, but what?

After the ensemble disappears, Marcelo and Julie, standing in the background and in the midst of an impossible-looking overhead lift, slowly come to view under an increasingly bright light shining down from above. They wear skin-tight unitards, Julie’s completely skin-toned like the tops of the night-nymphs, Marcelo’s the same blue with cloud shapes as the skirts / skorts of the ensemble. They complete a series of slow, high, dangerous-looking lifts that have that same, slow-motion dreamy feel. The ensemble returns, another pas de deux happens, and eventually Julie and Marcelo interact with the night creatures, Julie getting lost among them, and lifted away by one of their men-folk, Marcelo reaching out in vain behind her. It’s rather sad. The piece ends with the ensemble gone again and a final pas de deux beginning in the same crazy-high overhead lift as in the first duet. This time, though, Julie is lifted (by stage wires apparently emanating from the ceiling), all the way up to the heavens, Marcelo standing on the ground, reaching up, looking very alone. The audience oooohed and aaaahed over the trick with the wires, but I was left feeling unsettled; it was beautiful but discomfitting. And I still am not sure about the soundscape at the beginning. The dancers didn’t react to it at all; their movement corresponded to the underlying mellifluous Schubert. Maybe it was supposed to evoke the consciousness trying to wake the subconscious before it goes too far and there’s no turning back?…

Last was Balanchine’s pretty, poetic, female-centric “Ballo Della Regina,” which I also just blogged about as being performed opening night. This one starred Michele Wiles and Maxim Beloserkovsky. As I mentioned earlier, I was nearly knocked out of my seat and catapulted up to the chandeliers by David’s opening-night performance. So I was expecting to be a bit let down tonight, which I most definitely was not. Max was great, perfect really, for what I imagine Balanchine to have wanted. David took over the stage, but Max blended in more; he was just a happy-as-can-be man amongst the butterflies. Of course that’s not to say there was anything wrong with David’s performance. Never! David is what makes you want to spend the money and go to the ballet in the first place. You just really don’t want to see anyone else onstage when he is around; you just want him.

Michele was the one who really blew me away tonight. She not only danced the female lead here perfectly, she gave it so much life, so much sparkle, she set the stage on fire tonight. Of course Kristi Boone and others in the ensemble helped. The women’s bright smiles brought a real humor to some of Balanchine’s more original, subversive-at-the-time steps: the high-leg-lifted marching on pointe, sometimes with bent knee resembling a playful tip-toe-ing across the stage, the cute little square-dancish jumps, the jazzy can-can-esque kicks. I noticed the ABT dancers wear wide grins while the NYCBallet dancers (who perform Balanchine much more frequently) are generally more subdued (excepting Ashley Bouder). I don’t know which is officially better, or if one even can be said to be, but to me the lively facial expressions bring out the charming fun of Balanchine.

(image above, of Lord Hallberg and Gillian Murphy, copied from NYTimes website; here is Sir Alastair’s review of opening night)

Anyway, off to bed for me now, I’m tired… Tomorrow night at ABT is the premiere of a new ballet by NYCB’s Benjamin Millipied, and Saturday night another, the new one, a Jorma Elo / Chuck Close / Philip Glass collab. And tonight’s program will repeat later in the week. Go here for info.

So, the first round of Morphoses reviews are flowing in. Thank you Tobi Tobias for saying what I was trying so very hard to say way too late at night (there are plusses and minuses to writing immediately after a performance: on one hand the “afterimages” in Arlene Croce speak are the most vivid and fresh that they’ll ever be, but on the other sometimes your brain needs to chew things over a bit). Particularly resonant with me was Tobias’s paragraph about Wheeldon not engaging the emotions of his audience, or even perhaps himself. And thank you, Ms. Tobias for giving me one brief glimpse into the value of “Slingerland.”

One thing Tobias mentions that struck me: she says that she doesn’t know if Wheeldon’s desire to give the dancers too much free reign in the dances’ creations is a good thing. I’ve now heard several choreographers (Jorma Elo, Wheeldon, and most recently Nacho Duato — promise I’ll get to that review today!) say that the way they work is that they have some vague notion of what they want when they go into the studio, they choose the music, they have a general idea in mind, then they let the dancers go and figure it all out, discover the movement and how best to convey that idea. Helen Pickett even said at a Works & Process event that she lets her dancers improvise right on stage, during the actual performance. So what is the choreographer then? The music selector, the originator of the basic idea? I’ve heard theater and film people laugh when someone asks if they’d thought of a co-director. No way, they all say, there’s got to be one person and one person alone behind the helm of a project or everything just gets all confused and there’s no “voice” to the work and meaning is lost. I wonder if that’s partly what’s happening to me, I can’t always make sense of things in dance because there are too many interpretations going on at once on that stage and there’s no single voice or authority (ie: that of an older person with life experience and well-developed artistry) in control?

Anyway, I so would have liked to have gone to the Morphoses open rehearsal yesterday, but unfortunately couldn’t take off work. Kristin went and wrote a bit about it — apparently it was a rehearsal of Mesmerics, one of the pieces on Program 2, wherein Wheeldon corrected and instructed dancers on the movement, but it doesn’t seem that he talked about his process. There was an audience give and take but Kristin didn’t write anything about. I always like to hear what audiences have to say about something, what others get and don’t get and what they want to understand and know from an artist. Oh well, maybe next time I can go. Damn work interfering with my blogging life!! Also, maybe Works & Process can institute a little audience Q & A into their programs in the future?

Here’s Sir Alastair’s review. He echoes others, saying that the most notable thing about the company thus far was the fame of the dancers (true), but also adds that in his opinion, Wheeldon doesn’t take seriously enough his female dancers, makes them too passive. It’s an interesting take and something I hadn’t thought of.

Joel Lobenthal in The Sun gives a very fair, balanced review saying Wheeldon may not be the “great white hope” of ballet but is nevertheless a young, very talented choreographer “still in the process of finding himself.”

Apollinaire’s Newsday review is also fair and balanced (as always with her), and I love this paragraph in particular: “The sculptural twining of limbs yields imagistic sparks, but they don’t light a fire this time. Wheeldon seems to have gotten carried away by his own dexterous invention.” So, my “meaningless weird abstract shape after meaningless weird abstract shape” gibberish expressed much more eloquently She also gives me more to understand regarding Forsythe.

By the way, speaking of my phrasing, James Wolcott linked to my write-up (so wonderfully nice of him!!), calling it “a trembling ordeal of terror worthy of the Simpsons’ Halloween special” as I found myself “buried under a paper mache rock slide of ‘meaningless weird abstract shapes,’ and live[d] to tell the tale.” Hehehehe, I couldn’t stop laughing. I guess it did sound like a nutty Simpsons-esque Halloween cartoon! Good, imaginative writers can make things sound so nice… (Off the topic of Wheeldon but on the topic of Wolcott, he has an entertaining, socio-cultural history of the Twist in the November Vanity Fair.)

And here is Philip, who said what I thought he would, focusing on all of the great dancers involved in the program (although he is also a big opera lover and talked about the beauty of the music a bit too).

Here’s a Washington Times review.

Here’s what Ballet Talk balletomanes had to say.

And, in case I left something out, here is a fuller list of reviews, including those from London, where Morphoses premiered in September.

And anyone who has been reading my blog for the past couple of weeks knows it pains me to say that. But unfortunately tonight was one of the most mind-numbing, boring nights I’ve ever had at the ballet. And I was looking so forward to it! Maybe too much…

First of all, when I referred earlier to Christopher Wheeldon as a genius, I meant the Christopher Wheeldon who’s choreographed some of my favorite ballets for NYCB, like “Scenes de Ballet” his first, “An American in Paris,” “Carousel,” “Klavier,” “Evenfall.” What happened to him? Not that I like everything syrupy sweet — definitely not — but those ballets had meaning you could latch onto, a storyline even if slight, SOMETHING. Tonight was like an extended Rorschach test, and even those can be more fun assuming you’re with someone who’s oversexed and keeps seeing genitalia in everything. Tonight was completely meaningless weird abstract shape after completely meaningless weird abstract shape after completely meaningless weird abstract shape. I’m not stupid, can you please engage my mind, Mr. Wheeldon? One abstract piece fine, but a whole night of them is insulting; I have better things to do. I probably shouldn’t say it that way: I mean that I just get tired of visuals all the time; can a dance-maker alternate the visual with the intellectual? I just don’t know what I’m supposed to be getting out of all this abstraction and it gets so frustrating when that’s all there is.

Second, regarding my earlier pronouncement of Wheeldon a genius: I think either I need to stop going to the Guggenheim Works & Process things or else I need ONLY to go to those, because everything looks so different on that small stage and in that intimate setting. All of these ballets tonight were not only abstract but when they weren’t pas de deux they utilized very few dancers, and I think either these dancers didn’t know how to dramatize or project or emote, or else the stage was just too vast and the audience too far away to really see any subtlety, to make any sense of anything. Either Wheeldon needs to make larger-scale works for a larger stage or keep these smaller scale ones and put them in a more intimate setting.

Okay, first on the program was “There Where She Loved,” a piece which I’d just raved about after seeing it at the Guggenheim. Unfortunately, the only part of it that was really compelling was the part that they staged at Works & Process. The whole is about 20 times longer and it’s so long and drawn out, it really loses its steam; it’s just completely boring. And by the time we get to the good part which I’d seen earlier (and was waiting and waiting and waiting for), I was so on the verge of falling asleep I almost missed it. To be sure, there was one earlier sweet little pas de deux evoking young love danced by Sterling Hyltin and Gonzalo Garcia whose charm is likely due to its prettiness (lots of “awwwwws” in the audience), but it only lasted a couple of minutes.

Second was “Tryst Pas De Deux” which was danced by just-retired Royal Ballet legend Darcey Bussell, and Jonathan Cope. All I could see in this ballet was: two people come out onstage, regard each other, walk toward each other with purpose (making me momentarily intrigued), but then simply begin doing lifts, making a series of abstract shapes with their connected bodies. Then it was over.

Then came William Forsythe’s “Slingerland.” From what I’ve seen of his work, Forsythe is a choreographer who really respects the intellect of his audiences; he’s a very smart man and he really gives you something to chew over with his dances. And everytime I’ve seen anyone other than his own company perform his work: it’s a no-go. I wish if others were going to put on something of his, they’d work directly with him, let him coach the dancers. He has something very specific in mind and if the dancers or the person who staged the piece isn’t in on it, the audience certainly isn’t going to be. The way this came out here, it was now Wendy Whelan and Edwaard Liang who walked out onstage, regarded each other, then proceeded to make weird meaningless abstract shape after weird meaningless abstract shape with their bodies.

Next was “Prokofiev Pas De Deux.” What can I say: more abstract shape after abstract shape, although these shapes were more traditionally balletic than awkward, and the female lead was danced by Tina Pereira, who is one of the few exceptions to what I said above in terms of dancers not really knowing how to emote, dramatize or project. Other exceptions to that are: Sterling Hyltin, Gonzalo Garcia, Ashley Bouder (for sure!), Michael Nunn, and sometimes Wendy Whelan and Maria Kowroski depending on the piece. Unfortunately, for anyone who wasn’t there tonight, you’re not going to get to see the affecting Ms. Pereira because she’s being replaced by Alina Cojocaru for the remainder of this program.

Next was “Dance of the Hours.” Okay, I’ve never seen this one, but, according to the Playbill, it is taken from La Gioconda, Act III from 1876. The audience found this funny, and I easily got the idea that it was a riff, a joke on something, but I didn’t know what. Because of the way the magnetic Ashley Bouder dramatized it, I laughed along with everyone else, but the problem I feel is that if Wheeldon wants to draw new audiences to ballet through his work, he has to make sure everyone gets the joke. The humorous riff is a lot funnier if you have a sense of what is being “riffed” of course. And the program doesn’t tell us.

Then last was “Fools’ Paradise,” another Rorschach test, this one involving several dancers instead of just two. At one point Maria Kowroski came alive, she had a series of abstract, awkward shapes, but she had a real intention to them, her body was making a shape for a reason, and believe me the entire audience in my section leaned forward almost simultaneously. Dancers: please understand, we can tell when you think, when you’re not just doing a series of steps by rote. Unfortunately, within 15 seconds she’d disappeared into the wings.

In the New York magazine article, which I linked to in my last post, the writer frames the piece by showing Wheeldon’s venture from the perspective of a very young girl who happens in on a rehearsal, presumably the kind of new viewer Wheeldon wants to attract. The little girl likes sports, not ballet, which she knows nothing about. Wheeldon invites her in, lets her watch. At the end of the first performance, he asks her if she likes ballet now. She says no. He asks her if she likes ballet dancers, she smiles and nods yes. He says, “well then you like ballet.” But is that true? I think that’s a big part of what goes on in the ballet world right now. People are connecting to their favorite dancers. Do NYCB fans really love Balanchine and all that his ballets stand for, or are they connecting with their favorite dancers? Would I like “Clear” and “In the Upper Room” and “Sinatra Suite” as much if they weren’t danced by Marcelo Gomes and David Hallberg and all of the ABT faces and bodies and personalities that I’ve come to know and love over the past few years? I don’t really know; I’ve never seen those ballets performed by anyone else. Maybe part of the reason I wasn’t so enthralled with tonight’s program is that Wheeldon has used many dancers with whom I’m not familiar; I’m positive Philip is going to have a completely different take when he sees the program tomorrow night, and I’ll bet you he focuses mainly on his favorite dancers and not on Wheeldon’s work. Is this a good thing though? I want to get something from the choreography; I want the choreography to speak to me, the same way Forsythe’s choreography does, not just the dancer. Otherwise, I’ll only ever want to see ABT. And, how will new fans be made, who don’t already love these dancers, who don’t already have favorites? In my opinion, there’s far too much, almost absurdist, abstraction in contemporary ballet, that speaks to no one. On Friday afternoon, at his open rehearsal, Wheeldon really should spend a good deal of his time explaining to young newcomers exactly how they are supposed to read these ballets, exactly what they are supposed to get out of them. Because I’m almost positive that, with this program, no new fans will be made.

Anyway, I feel badly disliking my evening as much as I did, since I had such high hopes. As I said at the beginning of this post, maybe I had been looking too forward to this, with all the hype. So, the good thing is, if you’re reading this and haven’t yet seen Morphoses and are going to, now you’ll have this nasty review in your mind and can think how off the mark that crazy blogger was, how it’s not at all as bad as she said it was, she was just nuts. So there, I just made your enjoyment of it that much better

I had such a great dance-watching night last night! First I went to yet another of the Guggenheim’s Works & Process events, this time to hear choreographer / artistic director Christopher Wheeldon talk about his new company, Morphoses, which, I know, I just can’t shut up about and am likely driving everyone crazy with! (But at least I’m not the only one! Also, Philip has an interview up with Morphoses choreographer Edwaard Liang, who was supposed to dance last night but unfortunately did not.)

I just think Wheeldon is such a genius, at least in terms of his choreography. His head may be a bit in the clouds as an artistic director regarding what the company may be capable of in terms of all the visual artists / musicians, etc. etc. ETC. he wants to collaborate with (especially in light of last week’s huge news about corporate giant Altria’s pulling the plug on crucially-needed dance funding in NYC), and executive director Lourdes Lopez told a funny story about his extremely last-minute, day-of-performance, without-a-care-in-the-world wish that she locate a violinist in rural Colorado to play live. But one thing is for sure: as a creator of dances he is brilliant; he is a contemporary Kenneth MacMillan, I do believe.

So, we saw a solo excerpt from “Elsinore,” an abstract, mesmerizing feast for the eyes (which I usually don’t say about either abstract ballets OR solos) danced by Russian ballerina Anastasia Yatsenko. And that was preceded by this absolutely beautiful bittersweet pas de deux called “There Where She Loved,” which tells the story of a woman trying in vain to make herself believe she doesn’t love her cheating husband, and which contained some of the most inventive, gorgeous partnering I think I’ve ever seen. It was danced by NYCB ballerina Maria Kowroski and Ballet Boyz danseur Michael Nunn. It seriously nearly made me cry, a sentiment expressed as well by a woman I met afterward waiting in line for the bus.

They also showed a short documentary-style film about the troupe’s world premiere in Vail, Colorado this summer which was really cute. An excited Tyler Angle exclaimed that you don’t even realize how hard you’re working because of all the excitement of being part of something fun and new. Wendy Whelan sweetly remarked that it was clear Wheeldon had taken pains to assemble a group of dancers who got along so well together, which was a part of the joy and success of working with him. There was no studio in Vail so they brought barres out onstage and took class there. (I always love watching professional dancers take class; I once watched an instructional tape of Fernando Bujones doing the same and it was so unbelievably thrilling just watching a master execute beyond perfection everything you try so hard to do.) Illustrating his charmingly goofy sense of humor, Wheeldon, raising a cup of coffee to the camera man, said, “Okay, I’m ready to run a company now, I’ve had my morning coffee.”

Wheeldon told us his artistic vision and reasons for starting the new company were twofold: to take ballet in new directions by creating fresh programming that would both draw new audiences and re-invigorate current ones; and to give dancers as fulfilling a career possible by allowing them to broaden their training in new dance styles and to share in the creative process by collaborating on the pieces. He believes the old way of running a company top down doesn’t work anymore: dancers are intelligent, they juggle college courses now with their full-time dancing, they don’t need to be lorded over and their minds can and should be used in the artistic process. You can always tell when a dancer had a part in creating a role, he said.

Wheeldon is such a little cutie — a genuinely wonderful, warm, happy guy with a very cheery outlook. I can’t wait to see their first full program, on tomorrow night!

Then, I came home and watched Dancing With the Stars. I was very happy to see Jonathan Roberts convince his celebrity student Marie Osmond to take a ballet class in order to get down some dance fundamentals, such as finding her center. “I don’t know what a core is!” she screamed, like a typical beginning adult. How much can I relate to that, and to her complete inability to do those grand jetes!!! Too funny I loved to see her trying though, and realizing how very hard it is.

But more: ahhh, how much do I love watching all those amateur men try the tour jetes in Paso!!!! This is by far my favorite Paso Doble step for the men, of course being the bravura-loving balletomane that I am It’s really the one ballet step that is used in a Latin dance and it’s so gorgeous of course when executed properly, balletically, as Slavik Kryklyyvy, my favorite, does! Looks very Don Quixote. I’d always get very annoyed at competitions when there wasn’t at least one big huge tour jete in each Paso routine. But those amateur men last night! They were so cute trying to get it right! The boxer guy dancing with Karina Smirnoff jumped quite high, but kicked his feet together then lifted both legs in back instead of only one; I thought he was going to come down right on his knees. Fortunately he fixed it mid air and did what looked like a spiffy Jive bent-knee jump instead, but with a bull-fighter Paso attitude. But it was cute! And another guy just jumped forward with the one foot and turned around in the air and came down on the other, but without gaining any height or even trying to bring his legs together, so looked very squat! Still, definitely better than I can do and I found it all a thrilling blast to watch. I think Karina and the other pros should send their students to Vladimir (I don’t know how to link to that specific step in ABT’s dictionary, but go here, scroll down to jete entrelace and watch Vladimir Malakhov execute the perfect balletic tour jete). Actually wouldn’t it be awesome to have a ballet dancer come on the show and teach!!!

And how cute is that Helio! I love him so much I am already worrying myself sick over him getting injured in a car accident. Be careful, Helio! Judge Carrie Ann said, “Watching you makes me happy to be alive, Helio.” Exactly. That’s precisely the way I feel about Marcelo. It’s a Brazilian male dancer thing, quite obviously. Brazilian male dancers make you happy to be alive

Speaking of which… it’s just one week now!!!

Tonight I went to another Works & Process event at the Guggenheim museum, this one focusing on the upcoming season of my favorite ballet company in the world, American Ballet Theater We were treated to brief excerpts of four of the works they’ll be putting on, including, most excitingly, a brand new ballet choreographed for ABT by New York City Ballet principal dancer Benjamin Millepied called “From Here On Out.” I was hoping Millepied would be there to talk about his work, but he wasn’t; instead the composer commissioned to create the score — prodigy / wunderkind / kid genius Nico Muhly, and ABT’s orchestra conductor Ormsby Wilkins were there. Muhly really cracked me up. He’s 26 years old, recently graduated with his MFA from Juilliard (Columbia undergrad), and is already a highly sought after composer — I mean this is an orchestral work for the largest dance company in the country! He was so cute, so excited about this piece. Since I don’t know much about music, most of what he said was like overhearing a conversation in another language: the piece is a pasacaglia with a baseline melody with repetitions, the variations and entrances of which can be disguised, like a trick, which can be very provocative, etc. etc. He described the musical repetitions with variations as being like several NY city blocks, all of which span the exact same distance but which vary in terms of their flavor depending on neighborhood, which I thought was a nice little analogy. Wilkins, the conductor, told us the music to this piece was so amazing, so compelling, we should make several trips to the ballet this season to see each and every one of its performances. That way, he exclaimed excitedly, we could actually watch the ballet the first time, then the second, third and fourth sit back and listen to the sheer genius of the music! Or, if we preferred, each time we saw it, we could keep one eye on the stage, and both ears on the music!

“Yes!” Muhly shouted, grabbing the air. Since he was so young, he explained further, he was really nervous that this would be the end! Every work his last! “I mean, this may be the last ballet I ever do; I had to put everything I had into it, everything!” he said gesticulating wildly and nearly smacking moderator Wes Chapman right in the face. Anyway, we saw a very brief excerpt of the dancing, and it did look very lovely, with lots of wave-like movements, very watery, flowing, and some beautiful partnering. I can’t wait to see, oh, I mean HEAR it in full!!!

They also had some excerpts from “The Leaves Are Fading” created for ABT in 1975 by Antony Tudor, a ballet comprised of several pas de deux telling the story of a male / female relationship, at various stages. I’ve never seen this one before and I’ll be interested to see what it looks like on the big stage in costume and in full. From the excerpts I saw, it looks pretty, but without a lot of originality in the partnering — a lot of the lifts I’ve seen before and then again and again and again. I guess it is from 1975. Whenever I see a romantic pas de deux, I can’t help but compare it to something by MacMillan, and he always far outshines whatever else I’m watching. To me, he was just the master of the passionate, poetic pas de deux and I fear I’ll never feel so moved by anyone else’s work again. He was so original; no lifts, no movements were repeated, and nothing was something learned in a basic partnering class — everything was completely unique — every shape, every passionate or frenzied embrace an original form. Anyway, the nice thing about this portion of the talk was that they had two of the original dancers from the first ever production discuss what it was like to work with Tudor; they also showed some slides of that 1975 performance. The dancers — John Gardner and Amanda McKerrow — said Tudor wanted them to strive for pureness and simplicity, told them not to “put anything on top of the movement,” to keep it “simple and clean.” I interpreted this as meaning no acting, no passion, no intensity, which is likely one reason it didn’t do much for me. I like passion and drama; I like pieces that mean something and that allow a dancer to make choices that give us an in on that meaning. We’ll see how Marcelo and Julie do with it…

Then there was an excerpt from Agnes de Mille’s “Fall River Legend,” about the tragedy of Lizzie Borden. And last, but the antithesis of least, was an excerpt from Australian choreographer Stanton Welch’s “Clear.” I have to say after Fall For Dance I was getting a bit disillusioned by ballet, thinking it, in comparison to all of the other amazing dance I saw, the form most lacking in relevancy, meaning, urgency and ability to make one think (more on that later). But “Clear” reminded me of what is so compelling about just watching something abstract that is beautiful, even if you can’t decipher the meaning. “Clear” is a male-centric ballet, with only one ballerina who’s only onstage for small portions of the ballet. And the men dance so beautifully. You just get so lost in the sublime movement. I guess you don’t normally think of men as delicate and beautiful — you think of them as virile and daring and strong, carrying a ballerina high above their heads all over stage then doing a bunch of injury-defying twisty leaps, but you don’t often see a group of men dancing together and just looking so beatific. So perhaps there is actually a gender element, a challenging of convention that I’m finding provocative in this piece. But regardless, I can’t wait to see it in full at City Center. I can just watch it again and again and again and get so lost in its beauty.

One last thing: afterward, during the reception I met Barbara, who comments frequently on my blog and on The Winger! I’m so glad she came up and introduced herself to me, along with her daughter. It was really fun chatting over wine and little finger foods about such things as how we felt about seeing David Hallberg perform for the first time: Blown Away! She’d gone to see another dancer who was out sick and reliable David took over. She hadn’t known who he was but was immediately was so taken by him that she came right home and Googled him and found our blogs And now she’s more hooked on ballet than ever! Yay! We also agreed that Blaine Hoven, who performed in two excerpts tonight, is amazing and is soon going to be promoted. I especially love how he moves his upper body; the way he’ll scoop his shoulders forward and you can see the wave ripple all the way down to his hips. Most ballet dancers with their classical training are so straight in their upper bodies that contemporary moves like that are all but impossible. Blaine definitely has something special. Anyway, it was so great meeting and hanging out with you guys, Barbara! Thanks so much for introducing yourself to me!

Last night I went to my first Works & Process discussion of the Fall season to investigate the Boston Ballet, who will soon be performing as part of the Fall For Dance Festival at City Center. These Works & Process events held by the Guggenheim Museum, by the way, are really a good value. For only $25 you can see, in a very intimate setting, prestigious dance companies perform new pieces from their upcoming reps, and hear the artistic directors and/or choreographers talk about the works.

Last night’s program featured speakers Mikko Nissinen, Boston Ballet’s artistic director, and choreographers Helen Pickett and Jorma Elo. Elo is the main reason I wanted to attend, as I have loved both of the two very modern ballets I’ve thus far seen of his: “Slice to Sharp” performed by New York City Ballet; and “Glow Stop” by my favorite American Ballet Theater This makes me a bad person, as dance critics just lurve to hate Elo I guess many find him vapid and aerobic. But I think his ballets are fast, fun, sharp and bedazzling, and they both showcase the dancers’ athletic abilities with their numerous mid-air turns, high jumps, and fast precise footwork, and take dancers out of their comfort zone (as this favorite of mine once put it) which, in a weirdly extended way, does the same to us.

Anyway, tonight’s piece of his, an excerpt from “Break the Eyes” was the best thing I’ve seen by him yet. The music alternated between a section consisting of heavy, disconcerting, foreboding sounds (at first sounded almost like something out of “Jaws”), and was accompanied by the voice of a young woman breathing frantically and speaking urgently in Finnish, and a section of sweetly mellifluous Mozart piano music. A solitary ballerina danced to the foreboding soundscape, her movements at the start sharp, jerky, and frazzled, which became less so as the ballet went on. The Mozart pieces were danced by a small ensemble whose dance vocabulary — pretty partnering, lifts, quick-paced but mellifluous allegro steps — mirrored the flowing music, the solitary ballerina’s angular, harried, awkward movements a stark contrast to theirs. As the piece developed, the music was at times played together, the frantic Finnish woman’s voice crying out over, disrupting the Mozart. The ensemble and solitary ballerina seemed to struggle with and react against each other, eventually helping to define each other. The dance was intriguing: though I didn’t “get” everything the first time around, as I never do with abstract ballets, there was a real development there, a kind of story, and I felt Elo was trying to say something, making me curious to see it again. I’ll get that chance with Fall For Dance, as Elo’s is the piece the company will perform.

Boston Ballet, as Nissinen explained, seeks to perform a blend of contemporary and classical ballet. Ballet, he said, is “not just a church or museum, but must pave the way for the future.” I like that, and it’s true. There’s nothing more beautiful and romantic and fairytalish than classical ballet, but for the art to stay alive, there must be new along with old. (What if the only plays performed on all of Broadway were by Shakespeare? Going to theater would be a historical enterprise, like visiting a museum.) In this vein, the company also presented a Swan Lake pas de deux — you realize just how beautiful classical ballet is, what genius possessed Ivanov, and how iconic Tchaikovsky is when you see something like this juxtaposed with the modern — along with an excerpt from the first professional work by new choreographer Helen Pickett. Interestingly, Pickett said her process was to choreograph a dancer’s solo, then allow the five or so others sharing the stage to improvise their own moves, taking cues from the soloist’s movement “reading” her vocabulary and reacting to it. She said it was empowering to the dancer, which I can see. Still think I’d be very nervous making up my own movement right on the spot before an audience though!

Anyway, if you wish to see the Elo piece at Fall For Dance, go here; for Guggenheim’s W&P schedule, go here.

Last night I went to see a discussion and demonstration of ABT’s SLEEPING BEAUTY at the Guggenheim as part of the museum’s Works & Process series (in which the producers talk about the making of a new ballet and have a few dancers demonstrate some of the choreography). I’d attended their talk on OTHELLO a couple months ago and learned a lot about the history of that ballet and choreographer Lar Lubovitch’s intentions, and got to see some amazing dancing (David Hallberg ) from very close.

Well, I didn’t feel this one went quite as smoothly.

Kevin McKenzie, ABT artistic director and choreographer of this new production, was out sick, so Wes Chapman moderated a discussion between famed former ballerina Gelsey Kirkland who is helping to put this production together by coaching the dancers, and her husband Michael Chernov.

First, five ballerinas — Maria Riccetto, Kristi Boone, Yuriko Kajiya, Zhong-Jing Fang, and Adrienne Schulte — performed the Fairies Variations. After each danced, Kirkland would come onstage and ‘coach them’ right in front of us! I don’t know if it was intended to be this way — if they were trying to show what a hard life a dancer leads or trying to showcase Kirkland as a strict but brilliant former ballerina and current teacher or what, but I’m sorry, I thought it was just not a good idea. She came across as really quite mean to the dancers. She started with Riccetto, telling her she was supposed to, as she’d told her before, show the audience “the child” ie: Sleeping Beauty, which she was supposed to be carrying in her arms. She had Riccetto do it over a few times, and, at the end of the third, Kirkland turned to the audience and asked us if we “saw the child.” Of course everyone wanted to please Kirkland, and of course we couldn’t see any child because there were no props, as it was a work in progress hello, so everyone said “oh no.” Riccetto looked so embarrassed. I felt just horrible for her.

Then, poor Kristi Boone, who I really like, came out and performed her solo. It seemed like everyone was so scared of Kirkland, like they were trying very hard but were just so shaky. At the end of Boone’s variation, Kirkland told her her movement was so lacking in fluidity she kept looking like she was simply ‘reaching for a bowl of cereal’ when she stretched upward, then kind of scolded her, saying, “I told you how to do this yesterday, we talked about it yesterday. I know it’s hard, but do it again.” And she made her repeat it a couple of times for us.

After she finished with Boone, poor Kajiya, who has the sweetest most innocent-looking face, came out and did her solo looking like she was going to faint from the pressure the entire time. Kirkland was hard on her too, but I don’t even remember what she said; I just couldn’t listen; I couldn’t even look anymore. I just remember she told Kajiya to do something over, and Kajiya tried, but the pianist played the wrong part, so Kajiya performed the part he played, then was told by Kirkland she’d done the wrong part, which she seemed to know but was too sweet to correct the pianist. Nightmare!

After Kaijya fled to safety, Chapman asked the audience, “are you all finding this helpful?” And I couldn’t help it but I shouted out “No,” and shook my head dramatically. I’m sure they didn’t hear my soft voice in the sea of “yesses” and couldn’t see my head shaking, but somehow someone knew it had to be toned down because Kirkland was much better after that. Fang escaped without a single correction, and Schulte only had to do her “trouble spot” over once.

Then they talked a bit about the costumes and set designs. At a few points, Kirkland and Chernov disagreed over whether a particular costume was still in the works or whether they’d changed the design, and then whether they’d completely changed it or slightly altered it. And then there was a bit of disagreement on whether to call the cavaliers (the men) “knights” or “elves,” — Chapman, who seemed like he was trying very hard to keep things running smoothly, nicely asked for audience input, and we all shouted out, almost in unison, “Knights!” I have to say, it was Kirkland’s suggestion to change “elves” to “knights” so she was definitely on the pulse on that one.

After the discussion, Irina Dvorovenko, the only principal who danced this evening, came out and performed the beautiful Rose Adagio (in which Beauty is courted by four gorgeous guys, and which involves extremely difficult balances and partnering). Her suitors were Blaine Hoven (who looked like he had a bit of a cold), Jared Matthews, Patrick Ogle, and Isaac Stappas (who is, hello, really quite good-looking — did I know that???). Anyway, annoyingly, Kirkland was again hard on Dvorovenko, but let all the guys escape without a single word of criticism. I realize Kirkland is a former ballerina, and so is helping to coach the women, but it’s just a pet peeve of mine for someone to be hard on only one group of people.

Anyway, poor Irina, another favorite of mine… To her credit, Kirkland tried to be kind, telling the audience Irina was a great ballerina and it was a true pleasure to work with her, and that there were only a few minor things … then began ripping her. What she wanted Irina to keep doing over was basically an acting job. She said it was very hard for a dancer to keep from playing to the audience, and to maintain “a fourth wall,” then asked her several times to re-perform a look of “wonderment” upon seeing … something … presents maybe? That’s the thing: I don’t think the audience really understood what was even going on between Kirkland and the dancers, what exactly the dancers were supposed to be doing that they weren’t. But poor Irina: the Guggenheim is obviously ridiculously small compared to the Met Opera House, and here she’s standing in front of maybe a hundred people, the closest all of five feet away from her face, having to do this huge, over-the-top acting job of making a face of “wonderment” and pretending to project out into the Family Circle hundreds of feet away at the Met … it was so embarrassing for her. I really felt all of the dancers’ embarrassment.

Then, another discussion ensued, followed by, finally!, newly-promoted Craig Salstein dancing an all too short Bluebird Adagio with pretty (and, by this time, courageous) Riccetto.

I mean, all in all it was an interesting night. I think it drove home to audiences how hard dancers — at least the women — work when being coached by someone with Kirkland’s stature and personality, and how hard the life of a ballerina can be in that regard. At least that was made clear to me. And I have to say, to me at least, it was upetting. Like I said, if they did hear me shout out “No,” I didn’t mean to be rude, but I was just very bothered. Maybe others didn’t care. But, for me, and for many I think, the dancers ARE the company; we see them more than anyone else and we relate to them more than anyone or anything else in ABT, and we don’t like to see our favorites get picked on! (Plus, the gentleman next to me was snoozing, and my “no” did wake him up, at least momentarily, so I feel like my actions weren’t all bad )

The night also made clear how difficult it must be to put something together when people are disagreeing about how things should be. It seems like a pretty ballet, and hopefully it’ll get there by the time it premieres. Chapman, in impressing the importance of this production to us, said, “ABT without a Sleeping Beauty: it’s like we’re not America’s National Ballet Company anymore…” I personally don’t know if that’s true — is it really that fundamental of a ballet? — but, in any event, it should be interesting to see how it all comes together. I’ll be excited to see Marcelo and all my other favorites perform it anyway

Last night I went to panel discussion at the Guggenheim Museum as part of its “Works and Process” series, in which artists discuss their current “work in progress” with the public. Last night’s talk was entitled “The Shakespeare Festival” and focused on the American Ballet Theater’s upcoming Met season, which will include several “Shakespeare ballets” — most notably their newest production, choreographer Lar Lubovitch’s rendition of “Othello.” This was my first time attending one of these talks and it was really interesting, albeit short. The space, downstairs in the museum’s basement, was very intimate, seating only about a couple hundred, in contrast to the enormous opera houses and theaters the company performs in. The discussion, by Lubovitch, Kevin McKenzie (ABT’s artistic director), and moderator Wes Chapman, was interspersed with performances of pieces of the ballet by the ABT dancers, of course! Our cast was: Stella Abrera as Emilia, Jared Matthews as Cassio, Sascha Radetsky as Iago, Xiomara Reyes as Desdemona, Sarawanee Tanatanit as Bianca, and some guy I’ve never heard of before named David Hallberg?? — as Othello.

When he walked onstage, Wes Chapman (gosh, I keep wanting to call him Wes Craven…) said he first wished to introduce the dancers “since most of you are probably confused by all those names in the Playbills and it would be nice to put a face to a name for once.” He said this totally seriously. And only about two people in the audience (including me) laughed. Are ‘normal’ ABT patrons really this weird, or is it me — am I the weirdo?

Anyway, David!!!!!!!!!! Unbelievably for me, I arrived a little late (cross-town buses on the weekend are evil), and it was general seating so I couldn’t get my usual spot — practically onstage. But even though I was about six rows back, everyone was so CLOSE compared to when they regularly perform. And David looked SO skinny — I couldn’t believe it. He was also wearing all black dancewear (a slimming color we all know — oh also, the dancers weren’t in costume; they wore their normal working clothes), so could have been that — but he just looked so small.

I can’t wait to see the whole production — choreography looks so beautiful, even though it’s a pretty bloody story. I think Lubovitch is so brilliant — I haven’t seen a lot of his work, but from what I have, he is definitely becoming a favorite of mine (and he uses the great one a lot in his work, so clearly he knows what he’s doing…). Seriously, it was the first time I’ve seen him speak and he sounded really erudite and perspicacious. He said he was trying to create a “ballet in pictures” and was not so concerned with a linear narrative (as was the playwright who, he noted, didn’t actually originate the story; rather an Italian man whose name I can’t remember now is credited with that, though it was really originally an orally handed-down folk tale) as with making something that was humanly relatable and emotionally true to the classic story. As someone who’s fundamentally verbally oriented, I have a keen interest in how the poetry of language is translated into the poetry of dance, so I was very intrigued. But, as I said, unfortunately, the discussion was far too short.

But the dancing was brilliant. David is a baby genius. And I can’t wait to see the whole thing. Although, I have to say, it was really amazing just being able to watch them up close in their rehearsal clothes, without all the elaborate stage sets and costumes and props in a huge house. In a weird way all the pomp and circumstance of the theater kind of distances you from what you’re essentially there to see — the dancing…

Anyway, the Guggenheim has several other dance events as part of this series. Go here to have a look.