Tag: Alastair Macaulay

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SLSG’s Dance Highlights of 2010

Instead of trying to remember which were my favorite performances of the year, I’m just going back through my blog archives from January of this year and linking to the most memorable posts. More fun that way! A lot happened in a year…

January

Pacific Northwest Ballet made their debut at the Joyce; it was my first time seeing them live.

The Post‘s Page 6 announced that you know who and you know who are dating, and the ridiculous homewrecker attacks began.

Baryshnikov and Annie Liebovitz starred in a very cool Louis Vuitton ad.

February

I totally fell for New York City Ballet’s Sleeping Beauty.

…and Mark Sanchez 🙂

I found myself quoted in Colin Jarman’s book, Dancing With the Quotes.

I also fell for Sara Mearns’s Odette in Peter Martins’s Swan Lake.

On a personal note, my former judge, the esteemed Honorable Sylvia Pressler, passed away.

The Kings of Dance came to town.

Morphoses shocked the ballet world by announcing that Christopher Wheeldon was leaving the company.

March

My friend’s organization, Art for Change, held a benefit for Haiti after the earthquake.

Rasta Thomas’s Bad Boys of Dance announced that Danny Tidwell and SYTYCD’s Jacob Karr were joining the company.

Corella Ballet Castilla y Leon finally made their NYC debut!

I found myself actually getting press for liking Kate Gosselin – or for not hating Kate Gosselin rather – on Dancing With the Stars.

I fell for Keigwin + Company’s Runaway.

I was delighted to receive an email from NYCB ballerina Yvonne Borree’s aunt regarding of all things, my novel.

April

I had my first experience as a dance writer panelist! Thank you, Marc, from TenduTV!

Tiler Peck appeared on Dancing With the Stars in a Travis Wall routine, which everyone was so excited about. But it ended up amounting to not a whole lot…

Roberto Bolle danced a naked Giselle, in Italy of course.

May

New York City Ballet opened their spring season with premieres of Millepied’s Why Am I Not Where You Are and Ratmansky’s Namouna, both of which I liked, though Ratmansky’s had to grow a bit on me.

Baryshnikov returned to the stage.

I greatly enjoyed ABT’s new production, Lady of the Camellias, though most critics panned it.

June

ABT celebrated Alicia Alonso’s 90th birthday with three all-star Latin American casts (plus Natalia Osipova) dancing in Don Quixote.

Yvonne Borree gave her farewell performance at NYCB.

Bill T. Jones won a Tony for best choreographer for Fela!

Philip Neal gave his farewell performance at NYCB.

Natalia Osipova was mugged right outside of Lincoln Center.

Two of the greatest ballerinas in Europe – Osipova, and Alina Cojocaru – gave back to back Sleeping Beauty performances at ABT.

Albert Evans gave his farewell performance at NYCB.

Tap great Savion Glover made headlines by voicing his annoyance with Alastair Macaulay’s NY Times criticism of him – onstage, during a show.

Conductor Maurice Kaplow gave his farewell performance with NYCB.

Darci Kistler officially ended the era of the Balanchine-trained dancer with her farewell performance with NYCB.

July

Carlos Acosta announced his retirement from ballet and his foray into modern dance.

Alex Wong, probably the second greatest contestant ever on SYTYCD was injured and unable to finish the show.

My friend, Taylor Gordon, was profiled as a freelance ballet dancer in a New York Times article 🙂

Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater’s beloved Denise Jefferson passed away.

Nilas Martins retired from NYCB oddly sans fanfare, sans criticism, sans a performance.

August

I interviewed tWitch about his role in the movie Step It Up. Fun fun interview!

I had a blast covering Ailey Camp.

I nearly fell over when Wendy Perron, esteemed E-I-C of Dance Magazine recommended Swallow on Twitter!

September

NYCB began their excellent “See the Music” series.

October

I loved Ashley Bouder’s Serenade.

Emerging Pictures’s awesomely exciting Ballet in Cinema series began with the Bolshoi’s Flames of Paris.

This cool new Lincoln Center-area street art sprouted up.

One of my favorite posts of the year, though it received no comments, was about Anne Fortier’s novel, Juliet. I jokingly daydreamed about it being made into a film, and which of my favorite ballet stars might take the lead.

November

ABT made an historic visit to Cuba and oh how I wished I could have gone with them.

I think I was the only person in the entire dance world to sympathize with Bristol Palin on Dancing With the Stars.

I had a blast covering New York So You Think You Can Dance auditions.

All of a sudden Black Swan was everywhere.

Nearly fell over again upon hearing Riccardo Cocchi and Yulia Zagoruychenko took the world Latin ballroom title – making them the first U.S. couple ever to do so.

December

My take on SugarPlumpGate.

Black Swan finally premiered which I didn’t love but was happy to have ballet brought back into the spotlight.

I was in awe of Alvin Ailey’s 50-dancer Revelations, staged in honor of the 50th anniversary of that dance. I also loved several other dances in their City Center season – Ailey’s Cry, Ronald K. Brown’s Dancing Spirit, and Geoffrey Holder’s The Prodigal Prince – just to name a few.

Robert Wilson / Roberto Bolle’s Perchance to Dream exhibit in Chelsea was a lot o’ frightening fun.

ABT’s new Nutcracker premiered, which I really enjoyed, almost as much as the Bolshoi’s.

Portman and Millepied revealed they are now engaged and expecting.

I had great fun, despite the crazy snowstorm, going down to Wall Street and covering Judith Jamison’s ringing of the closing bell at the NYSE.

Pretty busy year.

Happy New Year, everyone!

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Jenifer Ringer Talks About Her Weight on the Today Show

If you guys haven’t seen this yet, Jenifer Ringer was on the Today Show talking about Sir Alastair’s criticism of her weight, her past eating disorder, and the struggle to be thin for ballerinas in general. I hadn’t known, but Natalie Portman lost 20 pounds for Black Swan!

Poor Jared Angle! He hasn’t gotten anything out of this – and he supposedly sampled half the damn Sweet Realm!

Oh also, it’s interesting to look at the comments in the Huffington Post post; quite different from those on Jennifer Edwards’ earlier post in which many commenters supported Macaulay.

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The Royal Ballet’s Nutcracker

 

Yesterday I was invited to a pre-screening of a filmed version of the Royal Ballet’s Nutcracker, which will be shown later this month at cinemas in New York and around the country by Emerging Pictures’ Ballet in Cinema series. Check their website for local schedules.

The Royal Ballet version was very good, albeit different from what I’m used to (which, as a New Yorker, is basically Balanchine’s). The Royal’s was directed and choreographed by Peter Wright (after Ivanov), the orchestra conducted by Koen Kessels, and was originally shown at the Royal Opera House in Convent Garden in December 2009.

The biggest difference between this and Balanchine’s is that Clara and the Nutcracker Prince dance all throughout the second half, the Land of the Sweets (here called the Sugar Garden). They participate in the Arabian dance, the Russian dance, the Chinese dance, and the flower dances. The dancer who dances Clara (unfortunately, I don’t have a full cast list and didn’t get her name from the quickly scrolling credits at the end of the film, so I don’t know her name) was older – not a child – and she was a really beautiful dancer. Very fluid, light, willowy, with an innocence in her movement. Very child-like (in a good way, because it was called for here). At first I didn’t like that they danced throughout because I thought at points it almost looked like they were making fun of the various styles of dance. But then I realized, no they weren’t doing that at all; they were playing and having fun, like children would, and like audiences composed heavily of children would want to see them do, and would want to do themselves. The Nutcracker Prince’s name I do have – Steven McRae, and he was very good.

The Sugar Plum Fairy and the Prince were danced brilliantly by Miyako Yoshida and McRae. The ending pas de deux was a traditional one and it was danced just about the best I’ve ever seen it. Yoshida in particular was really stunning. She’s a small dancer but has a lot of power – particularly in her developes –  her leg just seems to shoot up there! Her assisted pirouettes and her fouettes done in a diagonal line were also stunning. She’s a fast, spirited dancer with great clarity in her lines, which were never over-extended and which she always finished with zest. But even with all the demanding athletics of that pas, she didn’t turn into an Olympic performance; she remained sweet and princess-like. It was really magical. It’s a performance I could have watched over and over again.

Drosselmeyer, the magician, really blew me away too. He is a main character here – he doesn’t just appear at the beginning to present the toys and give Clara her nutcracker doll; he acts as a guide all throughout the second half, bringing Clara and her prince on a tour through the Sugar Garden, presenting the various national dances to them. He’s clearly in charge of Clara’s dream, although at the end, there’s a little twist on that. You’ll have to see the production to find out what it is 🙂 And Drosselmeyer was portrayed very well by Gary Avis. It’s not a dance role, but requires a big stage presence and Avis really came through on that. He received lots of applause at the end and took all the curtain calls with all the main dancers.

The only thing I have to say – and this is not at all bad – but did Macaulay ever review dance in the U.K.? He was a theater critic for most of his career there, right? Because if he ever reviewed the Royal, I’d think he would have had to remark on the weight of some of the dancers. Some of them made Jenifer Ringer look like a twig. Not that they danced badly because of it. I think for a while I’m always going to be thinking “hey, she’s bigger than Jenifer Ringer, she’s bigger, she’s way bigger”…

Anyway, if anyone reading this is in the U.K. and / or has seen this production, I’d love to hear your thoughts!

Photo taken from the Ballet in Cinema website.

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Does a Ballerina’s Weight Affect the Quality of a Performance?

 

So, if you haven’t heard, the New York dance world is all up in arms over NY Times chief dance critic Alastair Macaulay’s review of New York City Ballet’s Nutcracker. The full review, which is here, I think is generally pretty good. But then he begins his concluding paragraph with this:

“This didn’t feel, however, like an opening night. Jenifer Ringer, as the Sugar Plum Fairy, looked as if she’d eaten one sugar plum too many; and Jared Angle, as the Cavalier, seems to have been sampling half the Sweet realm. They’re among the few City Ballet principals that dance like adults, but without adult depth or complexity.” (Ringer and Angle are pictured above, in that production. Photo by Paul Kolnik.)

Angry reactions have abounded: here are a couple on Huffington Post. In the second piece, Jennifer Edwards, quoting critic Eva Yaa Asantewaa (a friend of mine), notes that Ringer has had an eating disorder in the past and argues that this sentence was disrespectful, reckless, and irrelevant. Edwards also quotes an earlier reflection of Macaulay’s on his role as dance critic:

“My job is to be a professional aesthete with serious criteria; and I share my perceptions and my values with the reader as best I can.”

Edwards concludes by posing two questions:

“1. Do you read the Times dance reviews? Has this changed over time?

2. Do you feel reviews of this nature are of use to venues, arts organizations, audience members, aspiring young dancers, and artists?”

I wrote a little comment on HuffPo but thought I’d elaborate a bit here because I think it’s an interesting, and complicated, issue.

I definitely don’t think a dancer’s weight affects the quality of a performance unless the dancer really can’t dance. I’ve seen Ringer dance pretty recently and she is a tiny thing with no weight problem whatsoever. I didn’t see this performance but I’ve always thought she was technically a very good dancer with a lot of charisma, particularly in roles like the one Melissa Barak recently gave her where she can act as well as dance. And I think Jared Angle is one of the best male partners – if not THE best – City Ballet has.  I think Macaulay just wanted to be snarky – that’s part of his critic’s voice. I think he thinks he’s being funny. Maybe snark and sarcasm in critical reviews are partly a British thing? I see a lot of it though in reviews these days.

I think Macaulay knows a lot about dance history and I get the most out of his reviews when he focuses on that – on the history of a production, how this compares to others’ or past productions, the history of the performers, the artists, etc. I generally like his Nutcracker review, most of which focuses on Balanchine’s unique take on Tchaikovsky. The serious parts of it are very illuminating and show why this production is important and thus why a reader of his review might want to go see it. So the snarky part about Ringer’s weight seems really out of place. I actually re-read the sentence and that directly following it a few times, thinking maybe he meant that Ringer and Angle were dizzy, dancing with childish abandon when they usually dance like adults. But, no, I think he has to mean that they were both plumper than usual – the same as everyone else’s interpretation.

In response to Edwards’s question 1 above: I do remember former chief critic John Rockwell making references to dancers’ bodies, albeit not with the same snarky voice. In particular I remember him likening Marcelo Gomes’s legs to “tree trunks,” which offended some dance-goers. But it also seemed that he really loved Gomes and he’d lauded his dancing in the same review. So then it didn’t seem like he was making a value judgment, just a description.

It is tricky, because it’s hard not to talk about bodies since they’re kind of inherent in this art form. I offended readers (mainly on Facebook) once in my review of Burn the Floor on Broadway by saying that the tiny Broadway stage looked way too crowded during the ensemble numbers with all of those dancers and the band sharing it. I said it looked particularly crowded when Maks Chmerkovskiy and Karina Smirnoff were the leads, as opposed to Pasha Kovalev and Anya Garnis, since the former two – Maks in particular – were so large. I didn’t at all mean it as a criticism of him, but of the staging (and I suggested they take the band off of the stage, like in Tharp’s Movin’ Out). And, everyone who’s read my blog for any length of time knows that I often prefer larger dancers (Veronika Part, Marcelo, Roberto Bolle, Vaidotas Skimelis – come on!) But I was still attacked and even told if I didn’t remove it, those people would never read my blog again.

Also, sometimes a partnership just doesn’t work right when one dancer is too large for the other. Sometimes certain movement, certain styles look better on one dancer because of that dancer’s physique. I think those are valid criteria for judging the quality of a performance. But it can still get out of control – as in So You Think You Can Dance when the judges just start talking about the dancers’ bodies. How many times did they have to remark on Josh Allen’s butt? I always felt embarrassed for the whole show whenever that happened but everyone else seemed to think it was funny. But of course New York Times is not a corny TV show.

What is the purpose of a newspaper review anyway? To let your audience know from your educated perspective what is good and bad about a performance, and whether or not they should spend their money and go see it. I don’t really like Edwards’s second question because I don’t think the purpose of a review is to be of use to venues, artists, aspiring dancers, and arts organizations. The critic’s duty is to his readership – a general audience of potential dance-goers trying to decide whether to spend their money on a certain show. The critic has to be honest about what she thinks did and didn’t work in the show and why. And I also think for the presumably well-educated NY Times audience it’s nice when the critic goes into the history of a production, of a dance, the way Macaulay often does. But the critic can’t be protecting the artist from hurt and also serving his readership of potential dance-goers. Otherwise, he’s going to end up lying to someone.

Which gets back to the issue of whether a dancer’s weight gain or loss is a serious criterion in judging the quality of a performance. I think it’s ridiculous that someone would think it is, but what do you guys think? Why are we, as a culture, so hung up on weight anyway? People are always criticizing certain dancers for being too thin as well…

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PURO DESEO, PNB AT THE GUGGENHEIM, BALANCHINE LEOTARDS AND ROBBINS & ASTAIRE

 

Photo of Luciana Achugar’s Puro Deseo, from NYTimes, taken by Chad Batka.

You guys, I am really sorry but there are several things I’ve seen lately that I don’t have time to write about. So, I’m linking to other writers’ reviews. The first is Luciana Achugar’s exploration of the occult, Puro Deseo, which premiered recently at the Kitchen. I generally agree with NYTimes’ Gia Kourlas that Achugar needs to go a bit deeper with this piece, but this is a strong start, and parts of the performance I found very compelling, such as when, toward the beginning, Achugar is wearing a large black cape and moving back and forth in a diagonal pattern across the stage, and every time she backs up, toward a light projector, she casts an ominous shadow that eventually eats up the entire theater. Very cool lighting effect that achieved the result she was aiming for. At points her partner, Michael Mahalchick, would contort his body in ways that were both creepy and unsettling but also ultimately human. At times her movement would mirror his, and at times she’d react off of him, sometimes writhing on the ground seemingly in erotic pleasure. This is what I thought needed to be developed a little further – the connection between eroticism and the occult, but regardless, ever since Tere O’Connor’s Nothing Festival a couple of years ago, Achugar has become one of my favorite experimental artists and I always love seeing her new work.

Second, is Pacific Northwest Ballet’s Works & Process event at the Guggenheim over the weekend. I loved seeing James Moore and Carla Korbes again, and especially Seth Orza. Moore’s performance of a beginning excerpt of Balanchine’s Prodigal Son, and Korbes and  Orza dancing an excerpt from Balanchine’s Apollo were, to me the highlights of the evening. But here is Oberon with far more detail on the evening than I can provide right now.

Also, last week I saw two NYCB programs – one comprised of some of Balanchine’s most famous leotard ballets (Symphony in Three Movements is always a favorite of mine, especially in contrast with Concerto Barocco), and an evening of Robbins during which I was blown away, once again, by Gonzalo Garcia as the poetic figure in his Opus 19 / The Dreamer. And, call me a goof (because everyone else seems to hate it), but I always love to see Robbins’ I’m Old Fashioned, with the dancers performing a balletic interpretation of Fred Astaire and Rita Hayworth as a movie excerpt of the latter two dancing plays on a screen erected at the back of the stage.  Anyway, here is Macaulay on the Balanchine program and Roslyn Sulcas on the Robbins.

Review coming soon of Wayne McGregor’s new Outlier, although I said some of what I have to say already on Twitter. I’m actually really enjoying tweeting about performances. I find Twitter a useful device for paring down sentences to the essentials. Of particular use to verbose people like me anyway 🙂

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THE STATE OF CRITICISM, PART ONE

I’m sure I’ll have much more to say on this over time, so I labeled the post Part One.

Here are a couple of write-ups from The Dance Enthusiast on the panel discussion on dance criticism two weeks ago that I took part in.

I was going to wait for the video to go up online so I could embed that or link to it but it hasn’t gone up yet. I usually take notes at such things, but since I was on the panel didn’t — and I feel lost doing a write-up without my notes.

Anyway, these two write-ups are good. We talked about how there are virtually no paying jobs for dance writers now, in the internet age, how there’s only one full-time dance critic in the country (no one was allowed to speak his name — but it’s Alastair Macaulay of the NY Times of course), and the situation is only getting more dire as newspapers let go more and more of their arts critics and close down entire arts sections.

Robert Johnson, esteemed longtime dance critic, currently at the New Jersey Star Ledger but he’s written and / or edited for practically every dance publication in existence (Dance Magazine, Pointe, etc.) was on the panel as well, and he was probably the person most knowledgeable about dance history and the history of writing about dance of anyone in the room. He’s a very nice man as well and I was glad to finally meet him. As Jowers points out in her write-up, when Marc Kirshner of TenduTV (the moderator) asked how newspapers got into this situation, Johnson pointed to an intriguing-looking book by Dolores Hayden and said it likely has a great deal to do with the suburbanization of American culture. Newspapers are local and most of them serve their urban communities, and with people leaving those urban centers and spreading out, there’s just not as much interest in what goes on in the cities anymore — like dance and classical music performances, art openings, etc.

That definitely resonated with me since many of my readers here found my blog through my writing on the dance TV shows and aren’t located anywhere near New York. I’ve tried to write about the local dance performances I see in a way that makes those people interested in seeing a performance,

Continue reading “THE STATE OF CRITICISM, PART ONE”

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KINGS OF THE DANCE SHOWS HOW DANCER-RICH BUT CHOREOGRAPHY-IMPOVERISHED BALLET IS IN THE BALANCHINE-INUNDATED U.S.

 

Photo of Desmond Richardson by Andrea Mohin, taken from NYTimes.

So, “Kings of the Dance” made the New York stop of its international tour this weekend at City Center. I was there Friday night. The last time this show toured here several years ago (it is produced by Russian dance promoter Sergei Danilian) there were only four male dancers — Angel Corella, Ethan Stiefel (both of American Ballet Theater), Johan Kobborg of the Royal Ballet in England, and Nikolay Tsiskaridze of the Bolshoi. This year, there were many more dancers and Tsiskaridze was the only one who returned (and, funny, but I totally didn’t recognize him). The others were: David Hallberg, Marcelo Gomes and Jose Manuel Carreno from ABT, Joaquin De Luz from NYCB, Guillaume Cote from Canada, Denis Matvienko from Ukraine, and Desmond Richardson from NY-based Complexions Contemporary Ballet (So You Think You Can Dance fans may recognize his photo above, since he has guest performed on the show a couple times).

What I liked about this program the last time it toured here was that there were fewer dancers, and that way you kind of “got to know” them better, by seeing them each perform several different pieces. Here, you basically only saw many dancers once, and a few twice. If you weren’t familiar with them (as my two friends who came with me weren’t), you could easily get them confused. They played a short movie at the beginning where each dancer (besides Desmond Richardson; I think he may have been a late addition to the American tour) talked a bit and you saw them dance. Jose’s cute Cuban accent seems to have gotten more pronounced 🙂 — I think he did it on purpose, knowing how many female fans would be in the audience! David’s voice somehow sounded a bit deeper than it does in person. Matvienko (who, for ballroom dancers, looks A LOT like former US champ Andrei Gavriline) and Tsiskaridze spoke in Russian and their words were translated.

What I loved about this program though was that there were so many solos that exposed us to so many different choreographers whose work I’d never seen (and some of whom I’d never even heard of) before. Every company in this country is obsessed with Balanchine, so it’s a wonderful wonderful change when we actually get a taste of something else. But more on that in a moment.

As with every Danilian production, there were lots and lots of Russians in the audience, and I think Desmond Richardson and Joaquin De Luz in particular grew a new fan base. Poor Joaquin — well, maybe: after the performance and during intermission I kept hearing, “That little guy was great!”, “That little guy was just incredible,” “Where can I see that little guy dance?” So, Joaquin is the great “little guy” whom everyone is seeking out now. And everyone went wild after Richardson’s solo, Lament, choreographed of course by Dwight Rhoden, an absolute master at presenting his friend’s spellbinding combination of gracefulness and masculinity. My friends were floored, along with the rest of the audience judging by the exclamations.

After the movie, they opened with Christopher Wheeldon’s For 4, for four dancers, which is a carry-over from the last performance. On the night I went it was performed by Matvienko, Carreno, De Luz, and Cote (but the cast varied each night). It’s an adagio lyrical piece, as with the vast majority of Wheeldon’s work, and I wished there would have been some more allegro parts with bravura solos. But that’s just not Wheeldon’s thing.

Then, after intermission, we saw a solo performed by each man, ending with a drop dead gorgeous duet danced by Cote and Gomes choreographed by French choreographer Roland Petit, from his Proust ou les Intermittances du Coeur. The men were dressed in skin-toned unitards, which almost made them look naked, and the duet to me seemed to be about a man obsessed with his reflection, or another side of himself, as each’s movement was mainly a reaction to the other’s. But at some points there was some really beautiful partnering, some really beautiful lifts and it seemed like a man dancing with his soul. Breathtaking!

Anyway, other highlights of the solo section were: a really beautiful solo for Marcelo choreographed by Adam Hougland, called Small Steps, which was like lyrical iron-pumping — a series of beautiful poses showing off his musculature interspersed with flowing lyrical movement; a beautiful, lyrical piece danced by David Hallberg from Frederick Ashton’s Dance of the Blessed Spirits; a fast, fun, more virtuosity-heavy solo by David Fernandez for Joaquin De Luz called Five Variations on a Theme; Jose Carreno dancing a gorgeous adagio to Ave Maria — a modern version — by Igal Perry (which I’d seen before and fell in love with it all over again); and Rhoden’s Lament for Richardson, which, like Marcelo’s solo, reminded me of lyrical iron-pumping (which I mean in a good way of course) highlighting as it did that seemingly incongruous combination of male elegance and virility.

The only ones that didn’t really work for me well were Boris Eifman’s Fallen Angel danced by Tsiskaridze, which I think just didn’t have enough context, and Vestris by Leonid Jakobson danced by Matvienko, which was by turns a comical and bravura piece first danced by Baryshnikov in 1969. I thought Matvienko was a lovely dancer with really beautiful lines who could really deliver on the jumps and especially turns, but I just think it needed to be better acted because there were some places where it almost seemed like he made a mistake, and then you realized it wasn’t a mistake by the dancer; it was supposed to be the character who humorously screwed up. I heard Baryshnikov was excellent and I wish I could see a video of that.

Then, we saw Spanish choreographer Nacho Duato’s Remanso, which I’d never seen live before, but saw in a video performed by ABT. It involves a wall with three dancers interacting with each other around it, climbing over it, looking around it. It’s sweet, flirtatious in places, and loving and romantic. The night I saw it it was danced by Gomes, Cote, and Hallberg, though this cast alternated each night as well.

The program ended with a bravura “Grand Finale” with each dancer coming out and doing jumps and turns, and all the big fancy “male things” of classical ballet.

But the thing I kept thinking throughout was, wow, that’s really cool choreography, who’s that choreographer? Oh,  I’ve never heard of him, or, oh I’ve heard of him, how cool that I finally got to see something by him! I mean: Roland Petit, Igal Perry, David Fernandez, Adam Hougland, Nacho Duato, Leonid Jakobson. We NEVER get to see choreography by these people here. Petit is a major choreographer. As is Duato (we really see his choreography only when his own company tours here, infrequently), ditto for Eifman, and the others I’ve never even heard of. Why don’t we see more variety here? Why don’t we see more Mats Ek and Pina Bausch and John Cranko? Why do we have to drown in Balanchine over and over and over again? Why do dance companies think that we want to see Balanchine? Why do they think Americans are into this man? As far as I’m concerned, his only truly great work is Jewels. The rest, okay, his footwork is more intricate and there are certain subtle little embellishments in the variations, but really, what was so great about his ballets in their entirety? What was so great that we have to be so completely inundated with him here in the US? I mean, it makes sense that NYCB does his work because they were founded by him but every other major company in the US is likewise obsessed – San Francisco Ballet, Miami City, Boston, Pennsylvania, even the Kirov and POB when they tour here they think we want more of this crap. And whenever ABT doesn’t do classical, there seems to be an overload of Balanchine. Does anyone consider that maybe, just maybe, we might get bored? That he doesn’t speak to younger generations of Americans AT ALL? Did someone tell POB and Kirov that Americans only understand Balanchine so you have to do Balanchine when you come here? I think ballet is dying in this country because of every artistic director’s completely inscrutable obsession with this boring boring man.

Anyway, I greatly thank Mr. Danilian for allowing Americans to see something else for a change.

For a completely different perspective, see Macaulay’s review.

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PACIFIC NORTHWEST BALLET MAKES ITS JOYCE DEBUT (and Marco Goecke Steals the Show IMO)

 

Tuesday night, the Pacific Northwest Ballet opened its 5-day run at the Joyce. This was my first time seeing this company, and it has a reputation as one of the most prestigious in the U.S. Helmed by Peter Boal, a former dancer with New York City Ballet, the company is already familiar to many NYCB fans, but not yet to me.

I really wish they could have brought the whole company and danced at City Center, a more suitable stage for ballet. The Joyce is small and known for modern dance and so they could only bring a small portion of the company. And, the small stage limited their choice of choreography and prevented the dancers from dancing full-out. So I felt it lacked a certain balletic grandeur, although I still greatly enjoyed the evening.

For one thing, I was thrilled to finally be able to see Brazilian ballerina Carla Korbes dance, after being introduced to her on the Winger. She had a part in just about every ballet and she did not disappoint — she has great charisma and dances with great dramatic intention.

I was also happy to be able to see Seth Orza again 😀 (Everyone who’s read this blog for a while knows how downright devastated I was when he left NYCB…) He’s so sharp and precise, and so strong — I think he definitely needs to be promoted to principal (he’s now a soloist, as he was when he left NYCB).

So, there were four pieces on the program: Opus 111 by Twyla Tharp, Fur Alina by Edwaard Liang, Mopey by Marco Goecke (my favorite, and pictured above, James Moore dancing), and 3 Movements by Benjamin Millepied.

I’ll start with my favorite — Mopey, by Goecke, danced very intensely by Moore.

 

I’d always been curious about this young German choreographer ever since this little exchange (the “Evan M.” being Evan McKie, a principal with Stuttgart Ballet).

Anyway, Mopey is hard to describe — basically just a solo for a man who by turns twists and contorts his body into awkward shapes, bounces up and down, makes muscle-man poses, waves his arms about gracefully, appears to be possessed and struggling to control his limbs — his fingers bent and curved down somewhat grotesquely, almost monster-like. It was short but really engrossing.   Here’s a YouTube clip of a dancer from Stuttgart dancing an excerpt from the piece. Unlike in the clip, which is danced only to one piece of music, Moore danced first to silence, then to Bach, then to pop punk by The Cramps.

I also liked Millepied’s 3 Movements, pictured below (dancers are James Moore and Lucien Postlewaite).

 

All photos by Angela Sterling, by the way.

It was abstract but I thought I detected a bit of a men versus women showdown (I think this is a recurring theme of his — at least in his recent works). It was set to rather unsettling Steve Reich music and filled with original movement, the way the groups of men and women would go at each other at times, almost like they were from separate clans. But the costumes were contemporary: almost casual work attire for the men and little flirty dresses for the women. Costumes were designed by Millepied’s girlfriend, Isabella Boylston, corps dancer at ABT.

I also liked Fur Alina by Liang. It was a man woman pas de deux danced by Carla Korbes and Karel Cruz and it seemed to be the somber story of two lovers slowly deciding to part. It was set to Arvo Part (who it seems, understandably, is becoming the most used composer for contemporary ballet these days — at least for these despairing pas de deux).

Oddly, the Tharp was my least favorite (below: dancers in front are Korbes and Batkhurel Bold).

 

I’ve never seen Opus 111 before and this one (set to Brahms) didn’t seem to have any of Tharp’s signature comical character roles or her theme of ballet versus other kind of dance (fill in the blank: American social —  like in Deuce Coupe, Scottish folk, hip hoppy aerobics —  like in Upper Room) or her crazy, almost death-defying lifts. It was pretty and lyrical and the dancers lightly flew around the stage, at times coupling off. But sweet as it was, it just seemed to lack something. Might have been the small stage though and they just couldn’t dance it full-out?… Sir Alastair saw something more in it though.

I hope the company comes to NY again — to City Center.

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FRANCIS MASON, DANCE WRITER, DIES AT 88

I’m so sad to hear of this. I didn’t really know Mr. Mason, but over the last couple of years, he’s been seated next to me at many dance performances. I knew who he was because so many critics would stop by our row and greet him. He was the most lively man. I remember sitting next to him last year when then new ABT wunderkind Daniil Simkin danced Flames of Paris with Sarah Lane, and after Simkin completed an astounding series of barrel turns, Mr. Mason whistled, raised his eyebrows and shook his head, letting out a little laugh. I remember thinking, okay if this man, who’s apparently been around a while and seen a lot, is impressed by this guy, Simkin is officially impressive.

I also remember seeing Mr. Mason not long ago at a Cedar Lake installation performance. A young woman slid off our bench and began stretching and several of us kind of looked at each other, obviously wondering whether she was a dancer and part of the performance but too shy to ask. Mr. Mason took one look at her, and got up and called out to her, “Are you part of the performance?” (She wasn’t, she laughed.)

I feel like I just saw him and he looked perfectly healthy, although with elderly people I guess you never know — it can be any little thing that causes death. I’m actually shocked he was 88; I thought he was in his early 70s — probably because he was so active and sprightly.

And active he was, as you can see from the obituaries. I was just recently introduced to the excellent critical journal he edited, Ballet Review, one of the many things he did.

It’s just so sad thinking that you just saw the person and, now, that’s going to be the last time you ever saw them. I thought the same with Clive Barnes.

Here is James Wolcott’s obituary, and here Alastair Macaulay’s.

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BALLROOM VIDEO FROM VAIL IS UP

The Vail International Dance Festival website has finally posted a video of the festival’s ballroom night, Ballroom’s Best. I’d been waiting for this. There are interviews with the spectacular International exhibition champions Hanna Karttunen and Victor DaSilva (from South Africa; you might remember DaSilva from that TV show Superstars of Dance) and the sweet American Smooth champs J.T. Thomas and Tomas Mielnicki. For those of you who follow ballroom, there’s a bit of footage of American Rhythm champs Jose DeCamps and Joanna Zacharewicz in there too.

Sir Alastair did not so much like this show when he saw it.

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MARTHA WAINWRIGHT, MORPHOSES, AND MARCELO IN THE PARK

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Philip was really sweet and sent me some pictures taken by his friend, Kokyat, of the Morphoses / Martha Wainwright performance Saturday night in Central Park. Above are my three favorites from ABT and NYCB respectively: Marcelo Gomes, Gonzalo Garcia and Tiler Peck (seated). They’re dancing Christopher Wheeldon’s Fool’s Paradise.

It was a fun night. For people unfamiliar with Martha Wainwright’s music, she’s kind of a folksy, bluesy, country mix. So, the dances, mostly choreographed by Wheeldon, a couple by Edwaard Liang, complemented that with lots of wavy-armed, lyrical, softly jazzy, almost social-dance-like movement, with ruffly dresses for the women and open t-shirts, casual vests and buttoned Oxfords with ties for the men.

Here’s a photo by Andrea Mohin of the NYTimes, of Bleeding All Over You, chor by Liang and set to Wainwright’s song. Teresa Reichlen is in the middle, surrounded by Jason Fowler and Adrian Danchig-Waring of NYCB. See Mohin’s slide-show here.

 

 

Here’s another favorite of mine by Mohin from the NYTimes slide show, of Gonzalo Garcia and Tiler Peck in Love is a Stranger (set to Wainwright’s re-interpretation of the Annie Lennox hit). This was one of my favorite dances of the evening because, well I love both these two, and it kind of reminded me of when they danced Other Dances together at NYCB this season.

 

And my other favorite from that slide show, of Rory Hohenstein dancing a solo in Far Away, the first piece of the night.

I don’t know if it was Craig Salstein and the wine or the promise of seeing Marcelo in the second act or what, but everyone seemed to have an extra glow or something; everyone seemed to dance so much better than I’ve ever seen them before — particularly Hohenstein. He was really fluid, really beautiful in this dance.

See more photos in the Times slide show here. And read the accompanying review by Sir Alastair in which he gets just a bit caught up in the spelling of the word “Whither.” I don’t see that anyone has blogged about the review, but it’s certainly making its way around via email because of that paragraph. It’s like the critics are becoming part of the performance…

Anyway, Marcelo danced in the last two ballets — Wheeldon’s well-regarded Fool’s Paradise, and Tears of St. Lawrence (a new collaboration between Wheeldon and Liang). Paradise was set to recorded music by Jody Talbot (the only non-Wainwright music of the night) and Tears to Wainwright’s song of the same name.

Marcelo danced the opening pas de deux in Paradise with Tiler Peck and I feel like I saw things anew and like I was more connected to and moved by some of the twisted, unique, two-body shapes just by seeing a dancer I connect with in the part — his covering her ears, his bowing down to her in arabesque… No one could make the arabesques Marcelo was making, and there were several parts where he and another male dancer — at the beginning Gonzalo — would frame the women with those arabesques and Marcelo’s raised leg was always significantly higher. I always love Gonzalo, and it could just have been my seeing him next to Marcelo, but he didn’t seem as stretched-out Saturday night. His extensions weren’t as heavenly as they usually are. Actually, there was nothing in any of the ballets that really brought out the qualities that make Gonzalo Gonzalo. No Mercurial Manoeuvers, no Hallelujah Junction, no MNS Oberon, no Other Dances, no Concerto DSCH where he could fly all over stage and charm you to death. He doesn’t excel as well at the slower, pretzel-shape pas de deux-heavy dances. Well, it’s not that he doesn’t excel, it’s just that his personality doesn’t have the chance to shine. I want Wheeldon to choreograph something high-flying for him and put it in the Morphoses program 🙂

Back to Paradise: I have to say, upset as I was over not being able to see the dancers up close, I was able to see the patterns better from sitting back in the sky box. Wheeldon and Liang both came back there and stood beside us to get a view of the overall, so I guess Susan and I ended up in the kind of ideal Balanchinian viewing area. From there I really could better appreciate the patterns and the look of the whole.

For all the “whither wather” goofiness, one of Macaulay’s lines in the afore-linked-to review really resonated with me: “I like the control with which Mr. Wheeldon keeps making you pay attention, but I can’t get interested in these dances as thought or drama.” I think that’s what prevents me from getting entirely into a Wheeldon ballet (at least his ballets for Morphoses; some of his ballets for NYCB have been far more dramatic or expressionistic); I feel like I need to come away from a work of art with something other than just a beautiful image. I need more in order to keep thinking about the piece over and over again, which is the effect I want a work of art to have on me.

But I’ll keep trying with Wheeldon — I’m sure if I liked Mercurial Manoevers and the After the Rain pdd, other dances of his will eventually grow on me. Especially if he uses my favorite dancers more often 🙂

Here are some more Kokyat photos of Fool’s Paradise:

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And here are some of Tears of St. Lawrence:

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Cast taking a bow, with Wainwright and Wheeldon in center. Look how cute they are 🙂

As I said earlier, there was a lot of music and it almost felt like a music concert with some dance thrown in, but, like others have mentioned, I’m glad the program exposed Wainwright fans to dance. Toward the end, Wheeldon came up onstage and introduced the dancers the way Wainwright introduced her band. He called his dancers “his band” and jokingly noted this wasn’t often done in the dance world. At one point, he remarked to Wainwright that he thought she might dance some and she responded, “Oh … no … oh, I don’t know… I could lie down and let people do things to me?” Everyone laughed. “Maybe it could be you,” she tacked on. “Ah, I don’t think it would be me,” he said after a long pause. He seemed a bit embarrassed. It was cute.

Anyway, thank you again to Philip for letting me use some of Kokyat’s photos. Definitely visit Philip’s blog where he has several posts filled with more gorgeous photos. The photos begin with this post (keep clicking on previous posts titled “Starry Night” to see more).