demicontretemps

Weighing in on the Ringer thing....

2010-12-14T03:02:00.005-05:00

Jenifer Ringer recently appeared on The Today Show and made some unsurprisingly diplomatic comments about Alastair Macaulay's now-infamous review of her opening-night Nutcracker (with Jared Angle). It was mentioned in The NY Times' arts blog section, and has generated the usual run of reader comments. Perhaps because I couldn't sleep, I tossed in my own two cents' worth. In case it doesn't make the cut, I'm pasting it here for posterity, after cleaning up some ugly sentences:

Regarding that opening-night Nutcracker, both Ringer and Angle appeared slightly above their best weight. It did affect their line, but not, in my own opinion, enough to merit mention in a review. They've both been heavier and lighter, and I had no doubts that after a few performances they'd fine. It was, after all, the first night of the season, and the day after Thanksgiving -- more than enough reason to cut any dancer some slack. At the end of City Ballet's fall season, Ringer looked about as fit as I'd ever seen her, and, not coincidentally, dancing at her strongest, and reminding us she's got fine technique and a more-than-respectable jump. I'd have liked to see Ringer start Nutcracker season as she'd finished fall, but she has a long record of getting better and better as a season progresses, and I had no doubts that after a very few performances she'd be exactly where she wanted to be. Also, for me, the charm and charisma of Ringer's Sugar Plum were of far greater interest.

She wasn't, however, pushing herself hard technically, and she slightly changed the choreography of her Sugar Plum solo, replacing the two trickiest pirouettes with much easier turns. She's not the only CIty Ballet ballerina to finesse that part of the solo, and back in the day Balanchine himself would often tweak his steps to favor individual dancers' strengths and weaknesses, so I didn't consider Ringer's modifications to be of great detriment to her role, but they were there, and they're the sort of thing one notices. I've seen Ringer nail those turns in the past, and I'm sure she will again in the future. Both technically and physically she wasn't in her finest shape, but she wasn't far off, either.

Angle is City Ballet's finest partner since Jock Soto retired, and it was a treat for me to see how quietly and calmly he supported Ringer through the Nutcracker's very long and very tricky adagio. He was also fine and drama-free in his own short solos, and, for me, any slight deviations from his best line I noticed were hardly worth noting, or mentioning afterwards. I've seen Angle perform since then, and he's back to his best form, as I was quite sure he would be.

In ballet, it's not irrelevant to make note of a dancer's weight. As much as you might like to, you ultimately can't separate the dancer from the dance. It also was not incorrect of Macaulay to note that Ringer and Angle were above their best weights: they were.

I don't think that Ringer's history of weight and body-image issues make it somehow less appropriate to note her weight. She's a professional, and she's been consistently at, or near, the pinnacle of her profession for the decade or so that's passed since she rejoined City Ballet; she long ago slew, or at least tamed, those demons. Also, dancers are used to harsh criticisms. As one professional not distant from this fracas told me recently, "we're much harder on ourselves."

But just because an observation is both relevant and correct doesn't mean that it's appropriate or, more importantly, useful, and just because you can say something doesn't mean you should.

After a few paragraphs of heartfelt and, to my eye, illuminating, comments on Balanchine's choreography, Macaulay didn't leave himself space to say more than a few sentences about the performance at hand. As he wasn't exactly thrilled with the performance, perhaps it's just as well.

For me, the two real questions about Macaulay's remarks are ones of value and tone. Of all the observations he might have made about the performances of Ringer and Angle, was their weight of such aesthetic importance as to make the cut and merit inclusion in the very few words he gave to, not Ringer and Angle, but his New York Times readers? Was it really THE most important image for his readers to keep in their minds' eye about the pair's performance, against which all others should be filtered out?

Clearly Macaulay thought it was, or he would've mentioned something else. But what would Macaulay's choices tell a Times reader who'd attended that performance and then turned to the review for further enlightenment? (Of course, Macaulay mentioned more than the dancers' weights; he also criticized their style, saying they "dance like adults, but without adult depth or complexity." I'd perhaps understand this better if he'd mentioned a way in which they actually do "dance like adults," rather than [or in addition to] two ways they don't. He clearly has a very high opinion of the Times' readers' power of deduction; alas, my own isn't up to the task.)

As for tone, snark has had an honored place in criticism since the days we called it sarcasm. But, really, how much wit does it take to make fun of someone's weight? Macaulay certainly has plenty of cohorts in this endeavor, especially in the dance world, but does he really want to stand among them? More importantly, does the Times?

YouTube Ballet Video of the Day No. 2. Black Swan Trailer

2010-09-09T18:19:00.004-04:00

Here we are, with YouTube Ballet Video of the Day, only a week or so after the first one. Way to go, Eric!

I'm a bit late to the party here, as this has been out for a few weeks, but it's hard not to come back to it, like watching a train wreck in slow motion, again and again and again....

Maybe I'll live to see a ballet movie that's not, on at least some levels, ridiculous, but this ain't it. For anyone who hasn't heard, Black Swan is Darren Aronofsky's latest, starring Natalie Portman as a star ballerina in a big-deal ballet company in New York City, and Mila Kunis as her scary young rival. As you'll see here, Kunis takes her fan-girl infatuation with Portman to whacky extremes, stalking Portman to her apartment where, apparently, they engage in some hot girl-on-girl making out, and maybe more. In the backstage scenes, there's some mirror-smashing and chewing of the cinderblock scenery backstage at Suny Purchase's dance theater (standing in for something grander, I'm sure).

We're also treated to a ballet master who apparently wants Portman's fouettes to be sexier, and feels her up while rehearsing her in an adagio (is this the White Swan or Black Swan?). Now, I've seen some over-the-top demeanor in Swan Lake -- Michele Wiles in a particularly slutty White Swan (yes, White Swan), or Irina Dvorovenko in just about everything -- but usually the ballerinas figure it out on their own. I'd like to think a real-world AD wouldn't turn a rehearsal into a smarmy public grope-fest, but, nothing surprises me anymore. No AD has ever used his dancers as a harem before, right?

The scene with Portman's Ballet Mother from Hell snipping her daughter's nails and fingertips (Joan Toumanova Crawford?) is delicious. It's a cliche, and I'd call it happily over-the-top except I recall a certain real-world ballerina complaining in her autobiography of having her nose clipped by her mother (with a surgeon, at least, and not backstage!) Aronofsky's previous film, The Wrestler, was a lovingly rendered cliche (with the benefit of having Marisa Tomei).

Oh, and the shot cutting from the broken jewelry-box ballerina to a real ballerina's working foot wasn't exactly subtle, but it's clear that for all its attention to detail, Black Swan's using received ideas of ballet as the backdrop for a pycho-sexual thriller that may or may not be entertaining enough to make up for the unreality of its backstage world (and on-stage makeup!). Will it transcend itself into genius like The Red Shoes? I doubt it, but I'm hoping it'll at least be a rip-roaring guilty pleasure.

NYCB Fall Season Schedule on the Web!

2010-09-09T15:42:00.003-04:00

As an attempt to actually plan my future, I've entered some upcoming NYC dance events in iCal. Among these are the performances of New York City Ballet's inaugural (or reanimated) Fall Season. As an added bonus, I'll be entering casting information as it becomes available.

I tried embedding the calendar in this entry, but it gets too squished when sized to fit this column. So, scroll down to the bottom of this page to witness it in all its glory.

Or, you can click here to see it in all its Apple-formatted glory.

For the more geekily inclined, you can use the following URL to subscribe to it in iCal, Gcal, or what have you. (The name of the calendar may require some cleaning up after you import it into Gcal.)

webcal://ical.me.com/erictaub/NYCB.ics

As I flesh out my modern and ballet calendars, I'll be putting them up here as well. I'm always open to suggestions about what companies and venues to add. Right now, I'm concentrating on the biggies: the major ballet companies, City Center, DTW, the Joyce, along with whatever else strikes my fancy. For the time being (and probably forever), I'll be sticking to performances in New York, that is, ones I might at least be remotely able to actually see.

YouTube Ballet Video of the Day No. 1, Cynthia Gregory's Aurora

2010-08-29T15:06:00.007-04:00

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As a bit of self-discipline, I'm starting a new feature: YouTube Ballet Video of the Day. Why? It's pretty obvious; I want to get in the habit of churning something out every day, regardless of the siren call of Internet procrastination. So, here we go, YTBVOTD #1.

I'd pondered for awhile what video to do first (Soloviev? Bouder?), but then I remembered my own most-popular upload, Cynthia Gregory's Rose Adagio in ABT's wonderful and, alas, lost Oliver Messell production. I'd never seen Gregory's Aurora live, although I did catch other ABT Auroras ranging from the sublime (Natalia Makarova) to the, um, not-so-sublime (Yoko Moroshita). I must have missed this Live from Lincoln Center broadcast in 1979, too. I remember the first time I saw it was years and years later, on a blurry videocassette lent me by a friend (it's how we shared videos in the days before YouTube). I had no idea of the cast (I'd been away from ballet for awhile at the time), and when Gregory erupted onstage for the Rose Adagio, I thought, "Wow, that's Cynthia Gregory." Then I thought, "Wow, she's good!" Then it was, "Holy crap, that's the best Aurora I ever saw!"
I expected her rock-solid technique and steely balances, but I was blown away by the sophistication of her portrayal. Perhaps it's my imagination, but her shoes seem much softer than what I'm used to today. I'm always conscious of her foot rolling through her arch when coming on or off pointe, a beautiful display of nuance and control. Indeed, her footwork throughout is magnificent, especially in those first little jetes from side to side with which she bursts into her birthday party. They're tiny, sweet and precise; she could've made them bigger and higher (as she could've made her developpe here higher), but she wisely forsakes amplitude for sparkle: her feet are dewdrops on her blooming rose. Indeed, her dynamic range is a revelation: she could "nail" everything (and in her sleep, most likely), but saves her technical artillery for her two stupendous balances, and, especially, that moment around 2:57 when she stretches s-l-o-w-l-y from attitude to arabesque, and then just as slowly down to fifth. I've never seen a ballerina flaunt her control so brilliantly, and yet so subtle. I screamed when I first saw it, and it's still scream-worthy today.

I could expound on other facets of this remarkable performance, like her marvelously soft arms, the decorously low position of her foot in her pirouettes and her perfectly tuned portrayal--sweet, but never cloying. I could, but I have to finish this sooner or later. I'll leave it to the commenters on YouTube to expound on Gregory's many virtues. In many ways, seeing her performance today is a real schooling: an old-fashioned modesty of deportment combined with technique that's still awe-inspiring thirty years later. Her deportment may not have seemed "old-fashioned" at the time, but from this vantage, you can see what we've lost and gained in the intervening years. Gregory reminds us that we may not have made the wisest of bargains.

I'd like to thank the YouTube commenter who pointed out that in the midst of this stellar performance, Gregory has the presence of mind to kick away a wayward flower that had fallen in the middle of the stage. She does it so calmly that I'd seen the video scores of times and never noticed it.

More Giselle

2010-07-22T14:25:00.008-04:00

As one of the Ballet Bag Ladies (sorry, I couldn't resist) pointed out, the biggest dichotomy/chiasmus/whatever in Giselle is the role dance plays. D'oh! Talk about ignoring the blindingly obvious! Giselle is the girl who dances; it's how she defines herself, and how everyone in the village defines her. Although ultimately Albrecht's responsible for her death (him being a cad and all), dancing's the immediate cause of her demise.
Unless it's one of those productions where she stabs herself with Albrecht's sword. That would explain why Giselle's not buried in the churchyard -- and why Hilarion, the eternal loser, has to make a cross for her grave, which would otherwise be unmarked? I gather suicides don't get to be buried in churchyards, but are dumped unceremoniously behind some trees out back in the woods somewhere. Except, if she does stab herself, all of the first act's mimed hoo-ha about her weak heart doesn't make much sense, or, rather, no longer serves a dramatic purpose. Maybe instead of tapping her heart, Berthe could tap her head: "If you dance too hard, dear, your brain will overheat, and you know what that means!" Giselle is perhaps not the sharpest pencil in the village's box and it wouldn't affect the plot much to have her be -- literally -- touched in the head. Or perhaps dancing one's self to death is considered a form of suicide, which would explain why Giselle's grave is out in the woods, where, apparently, all the Wilis' are too. Or maybe it's just the wallflowers' corner. But I digress.)

So, while I've already mentioned that in the first act, Albrecht kills Giselle (however indirectly), and in the second act she saves him, I never mentioned that in each act it's dancing that's the vehicle and agent for these key story elements. Dancing kills Giselle (and Hilarion, but, really, who gives a crap about him?), and she uses it to save Albrecht by preventing the Wilis from using it to kill him. Whew. Talk about a self-referential work of art!

Why Avatar is a ballet

2010-07-22T01:34:00.004-04:00

I know, Avatar was a long time ago. Well, Giselle was even longer ago, so cut me some slack.

I loved Avatar. Yes, I know the plot is hackneyed, predictable, and even somewhat somewhat embarrassingly Orientalist (or would be, if there were an Orient on Pandora). Even if you hadn't read about the movie, you could predict the plot after the first ten minutes. So what? I suppose Cameron could've made an Ingmar-Bergman-in-outer-space flick, and the three people who saw it might've loved it, or, probably, they'd say the arty plot ruined what should've been good, simple, entertainment, and what kind of a snob was Cameron, anyway?

Getting back to the movie he actually made, I couldn't help but notice a certain snobbish condescension in many of the opinions I read that slammed Avatar. "Oh, yes, the -- sniff -- special effects were ok, but the plot was so predictable, and I'm all about the plot." These are usually the same people who go on and on about what a great movie The Hurt Locker was, and how it's some sort of triumph of artistry over crass commercialism that it beat Avatar for the Oscar, blah, blah, blah. While parts of The Hurt Locker are dramatically compelling, much of its depictions of military operations are ludicrous, at least according to most of the comments I've read about it that have been made by real soldiers. And the plot -- a soldier gets addicted to the thrill of combat and can't stand civilian life -- well, we've never seen that before, now have we?

When you get right down to basics, there aren't that many plots in the world, and most of them are hackneyed and stupid -- cliches, even. So what? There's a reason cliches have become cliches -- they are useful, and they're useful because they have a kernel of truth. If not, nobody would bother repeating them even once. I think those "all-about-the-plot" people should ask themselves who they think they're really kidding.

I'm rather fond of ballet and opera. Most (not all!) ballets and operas have stupid plots; often they're really stupid. What makes most ballets and operas great isn't the story, but how it's told. It's not hard to imagine Mr. Plot Snob saying of Swan Lake, "Well, all that toe stuff was ok, but the plot was stupid, and I'm all about the plot." Or of Il Trovatore, "They've got good voices, I'll grant you that, but ..." You might say that anyone going to a ballet or opera expecting a brilliant plot is missing the entire point of going to the ballet and opera. In most ballets, the story (if there is one, and let's not go there today) is the vehicle for the dancing, and not the other way around. It's the same for opera (and as I'm an opera noobie, I'll just stick to ballet from here on). You don't go to the movies for a story; the story brings you the movie.

To repeat: it's not the story; it's how you tell the story that counts.

I've mentioned from time to time that when I was a kid, I was fond of superhero comic books. Among other things, they were about people in tights defying gravity. I'll never forget the first time I saw Baryshnikov do those amazing traveling brise voles in Giselle. Here was a guy in tights, defying gravity! And to music! He was a comic-book hero come to life, using, by virtue of his years of training, nothing but his own muscles and sinews (and costumes and lighting, etc., but let's not get into that now). It's from these grueling years of obsessively hard work that we see sylphs and wilis take flight, maidens transform into swans, puppets come to pathetic life, or a floating rose awaken a young girl's dreaming sensuality.

Ballet is one big special effect. It's also many other things, of course, but it's a trick, a technique, for making the unreal real, for bringing magic to life, for astonishing us.

Avatar is the same. It astonishes us. Well, it astonishes me. The people who complain that the plot is just an excuse for the special effects are entirely right, yet entirely mistaken. It's not deplorable; it's wonderful.

I was fortunate enough to see Avatar in an IMAX theater, with the huge, hemispherical screen. The 3D effects were amazing -- I felt entirely pulled in to Cameron's wild, crazy and wonderful world. Floating mountains with waterfalls spouting into the void? A ten-foot-tall cat-girl who rides her personal flying dragon? The insane variety of glowing, floating, creeping and crawling life? I was entirely entranced.

It was entirely appropriate that the "hero" was a human discovering the world of Pandora. That eager but not-too-bright Marine is a stand-in for us. His discoveries are ours, and he's our vehicle for entering the magical unknown. He's not that different from that ballet archetype, the man surrounded in amazement by the supernatural manifested through toe-dancing women: James among the sylphs, Siegfried and the swan-maidens, Prince Florimund and the Vision Scene's dryads, Solor and the Shades of Bayaderes Past, and so on.

I doubt Cameron studied ballet, I mean, studied about ballet. He owes more to Kipling than Gautier, but it doesn't matter. He's showing us the impossible made real, using as best he could the tools at his command, just as centuries earlier ballet masters did the same. You could argue that his conflation of the unknown with the exotic is as demeaning to his own fictional creations as any number of nineteenth-century ballets' evocations of exotic climes and peoples. I'd say, "so what?" Let's learn from it what we can, and move on. Shall we pillory Bournonville for Napoli's happily cliched Italians, or for the cruel exploitation of trolls in A Folk Tale? Or dance Gautier to death for his unsympathetic portrayal of betrayed dead women as vicious harpies bent on destroying every man in their path (like they have to be dead to do that)?

One thing I've learned from my time as a self-appointed occasional dance critic is to be very wary of watching the dance in one's head instead of the one that's before one's eyes. It's easy to see Avatar in the context of everything we think it should or shouldn't be (and that list grows longer as movie plays on), yet miss the wonder of what it actually does, which is, in my humble opinion, pretty damn fantastic.

Ever notice how each act of Giselle mirrors the other?

2010-07-20T21:11:00.005-04:00

This is probably old hat to many (or even both) of my readers, but I've always been struck by the many similarities between Act I and Act II of Giselle, how they're slightly altered, mirror versions of each other. In other art forms, Act II would be the Bizarro version of Act I, or everyone in Act II would sport silly goatees. (And wouldn't we love to see a Superman or Star Trek penned by Gautier: "Quelle est cette chose appelée l'amour?" Green-skinned wilis?)

I'm not going to dig into Gautier's original libretto, that has Albrecht and Bathilde reunited as the sun rises. It gets too complicated, and it's almost never done this way anymore. Can you imagine Bathilde's thoughts at again finding Albrecht off in the middle of nowhere with some sketchy explanation? In Act I it was, "I thought it would be fun to dress as a peasant and go hunting, yeah, hunting, that's it." It didn't take long for Bathilde to discover what a crock that explanation was, and it sure makes a heck of a lot more sense than his second-act story: "Well, there was this woman. Um, lots of women, actually. And the woman, well, she was that one from the village, you know, the crazy milkmaid chick I wanted to schtup? No, the milkmaid. But it's OK, because she was dead. Actually, they were all dead, so I couldn't have been cheating on you with any of them. Or if I did, it doesn't count. In fact, they were mean and tried to kill me. Thank God crazy dead chick still thought she loved me -- I have no idea why. Ouch! Anyway, I had to get busy with her, or I would've died. What a bummer that would've been, right before our marriage. I had no choice, really. Ouch!"

Anyway, I'm not going to go there; it's too complicated. Let's stick with the "standard" story the way it's usually performed these days. There are lots of ways the acts are alike, yet different:

At the beginning of each act, Hilarion, demonstrates how handy he is with his ... hands. In Act I, he hangs some dead birds off of Giselle's cottage. In Act II, he whips up the cross for Giselle's grave with nothing more than some sticks and a length of string. Making cross is a lot more practical than festooning her grave with dead flowers, like Albrecht does. For that matter, think of the fine mess Albrecht would be in if Hilarion hadn't cobbled together that cross. But does anyone thank Hilarion? Of course not. He's the ballet's designated loser.

In Act I, after Albrecht appears, Wilfred very wisely advises him to get the hell out of Dodge. Albrecht ignores him. In Act II, after Albrecht appears, Wilfred very wisely advises him -- well, you see where this is going, don't you?

In Act I, flowers help Albecht and Giselle get together. Same in Act II. In each act, Giselle starts dancing on her own, and then entices Albrecht to join her. They even dance to the same mazurka (I think it's a mazurka). Come to think of it, in each act, before she dances, she directs Albrecht to a spot safely outside of the action -- in Act I, it's the bench, and Act II, her cross -- and tells him "stay." Albrecht being Albrecht, he doesn't.

The greatest relation between the acts is a sort of dramatic chiasmus: Albrecht kills Giselle, Giselle saves Albrecht. It's not just a dramatic reversal, but one that's manifest in the choreography. Act I ends with Giselle dead at Albrecht's feet; Act II almost ends with Albrecht dead at Giselle's feet. Of course, where Albrecht brought about Giselle's death, Giselle's actions allow Albrecht to live; when Giselle falls, she doesn't get up; when Albrecht does, Giselle helps him to rise, because that's the kind of girl she is. Even dead, she's a better person than Albrecht. Go figure.

So, is Myrtha the Bizarro-world, or goateed, Bathilde? Certainly if a boulder fell on Bathilde's head right after Act I, her ghost would be fighting Myrtha for the chance to off Albrecht. (Oh, no, what if someone made a Giselle that was really about Bathilde? Like, if Giselle slips and stabs Bathilde with that stupid sword, so Bathilde's the ghost in Act II? That could be exquisite.) So Myrtha could be a refraction of Bathilde. But she could also be Berthe, who's not without some authority in Act I regarding her daughter.

It seems pretty clear to me that all these similarities between the acts are deliberate. There are too many of them to overlook. So, in a very real sense, each act of Giselle tells the same story, but with different endings. Why the semi-hidden parallels? What better way to highlight the differences between Albrecht, and Albrecht's world of the first act, and Giselle, and her world of the second act, than to show us so much that's the same, but different? Dare I say that they're two sides of the same coin? I guess I just did.

Also, once you notice Gautier's device (if it is indeed his), it's pretty cool. A lot of ballet is about coolness; things that impress you on a non-literal level. The dramatic devices that bind the acts are clever, but not the stuff of genius. What makes them so impressive is how well they've been implemented, and, bound into the warp and woof of the ballet, they're implemented pretty well. Well enough, I think, that you sense them even if you don't explicitly recognize them, and, well, it's creepy. Deliciously so. It can give you a chill down your spine, or should. It's not just Giselle that's transformed in the second act; it's the whole world. And if it could happen to the world, it could happen to you (and one day it will). And what is ballet about if not the transfiguration of our world?

On that cheery note I'm hitting the sack.

Cat Revives Rare Balanchine Ballet!

2010-05-10T18:29:00.000-04:00

The New Improved Figure in the Carpet. According to Tabitha.

ABT's Met Schedule Online!

2010-05-10T16:22:00.002-04:00

Yes, it's already online in that clunky one-month-at-a-time window at abt.org. I couldn't take it anymore, so I copied it into my iCal, and published it. So, here it is:
You can view my calendar at:

http://ical.me.com/erictaub/ABT%20New%20York

You can subscribe to my calendar at:

webcal://ical.me.com/erictaub/ABT%20New%20York.ics

Enjoy.

Ratmansky's got a fever, and the prescription is ... MORE DIVERTISSEMENT!

2010-05-04T07:31:00.003-04:00

Yes, dear readers, I finally have another review up on Ballet.co, and only a few days after the actual performance, City Ballet's opening night gala.

The Ratmansky could've been subtitled "Too many divertissements in search of a story."
Some salient quotes:

(At least when the Danes do a tedious undersea grotto scene they're considerate enough to surround it with two intermissions and a restaurant.)

Isn't it nice of City Ballet to give Ratmansky the wherewithal to create the Bolshoi's next big hit?

Then there was the new Millepied, which was even weirder.

Sigh.

All pictures, copyright Paul Kolnik.

All Balanchine, All Divine

2010-02-19T09:34:00.003-05:00

Latest ballet.co review, of City Ballet's All Balanchine program.

It's hard to imagine two more divine ballets sharing a bill than Liebeslieder Walzer and Tschaikovsky Piano Concerto No. 2.

Jennie Somogyi and Justin Peck

"There are places in Liebeslieder where the sense of nostalgia, especially in this couple, can become overwhelming, and I'm not ashamed to admit the tears started welling up and didn't stop for the rest of this extraordinary ballet."

Ashley Bouder and Jonathan Stafford

"Embodying as she does the the diamondiferous manner of an old-school ballerina, Bouder takes 'ballet-russing' to a level of artistry far beyond its original, somewhat derisive, usage. In other words, she's right at home in PC No 2's ballerina-worshiping paradigm (remember, it was born as Ballet Imperial)."

Amazingly enough, I actually got this written in a more-or-less timely manner, and with only a modicum of embarrassing typos.

Read the entire thing on ballet.co .

An Open Letter to Michael Popkin

2010-02-18T04:17:00.002-05:00

Danceview Times blogger Michael Popkin recently posted a reprise of City Ballet's way with the classics, to which I've taken some objection:

Dear Michael,

You're a terrific writer, a good friend, and at peril of your never again buying me a drink, I do have to take issue with a few of the things you wrote in your recent blog post about City Ballet's current winter season. You're not the only critic I've read decrying City Ballet's decision to program long runs of five full-length (I'd rather say "evening-length," but hardly anyone else does) ballets. This is more than City Ballet's ever done in a single season; no more than one or two full-lengths has been the norm. With so many evenings devoted to these biggies this season, there's been a drastic reduction in the number of evenings devoted to City Ballet's traditional programs of three one-act ballets. You're not the only writer to imply that this new look is the mess of pottage for which City Ballet's traded its heritage, and a sign of the End of Days, when the repertory of every ballet company in the world will be reduced to cookies pressed from the same few cutters, or, as you put it, "the same dozen ballets being programmed by every single company."

These statements are fine examples of the "thin-entering-wedge" argument, an assumption that a current trend must continue, and can have only one possible outcome. City Ballet's programmed a lot of full-length ballets this season. Does that mean that EVERY company in the world is doing (or has done) the same? Or most, or even many? A lot? Just which companies, besides NYCB, are we talking about here, anyway? Some nameless companies that might be putting on Balanchine's Coppelia? Well, why wouldn't they? It's a gorgeous ballet. I think it's a mistake to assume that if a company puts on a full-length ballet, it has a choice between that and a mixed bill. Given the state of the economy, and that full-lengths tend to be more popular than mixed bills, it's more likely to be a choice between a full-length ballet or no ballet at all. Or no company at all.

Letting the rest of the world fend for itself, and returning to City Ballet, I can't see how this season's five full-length ballets represent some sort of wholesale abandonment of the Balanchine heritage. Don't forget, in addition to Swan Lake, Sleeping Beauty and Romeo + Juliet, they're doing Balanchine's A Midsummer Night's Dream and Jewels.

Getting back to the "thin entering wedge," it's fallacious to look at this season and assume that from now on, EVERY season will have a preponderance of full-length ballets. The Spring season has a grand total of zero full-length ballets. It does, however, have twenty-two ballets by Balanchine, seven by Robbins, four by Martins, two by Wheeldon and one each by The Usual Suspects: Barak, Bigonzetti, Miroshnichenko, McGregor, Millepied and Ratmansky. Of these, seven are premieres. Is there another company in the world that can offer such an embarrassment of riches (granted, some are more former than latter)? It's quite likely that over the years the number of Balanchine and Robbins ballets performed each year has declined slightly. That's unfortunate, but inevitable. Unless the company entirely stops creating new ballets, some new works will enter the "permanent" repertory (some might even deserve it), and these will either crowd out "lesser" works of the masters, or, more likely, keep them "offline" longer than the A-list ballets.

Of course this isn't ideal. What's ideal would be for Balanchine and Robbins never to have died, and for me to remain forever thirty, rich, and less incompetent in the ballet studio. It ain't gonna happen. Given this sad state of affairs, Peter Martins has done tolerably well at preserving the repertory. He hasn't done as well as we all would've liked, and he's hardly been above reproach, but I'd give his curatorship a solid B-plus. Sometimes "it could've been worse" isn't such a bad legacy. While stylistically the Balanchine ballets (and their dancers) aren't what they were, or what we might ideally wish them to be, they're still pretty damn good, and the company's been dancing them sensationally. Who Cares? was a revelation, as was Midsummer. I can't remember a season in recent decades when I've so often left the theater as thrilled and babbling with enthusiasm as I have this winter. The days when the Balanchine repertory looked shabby and underrehearsed are gone, gone, gone (let's hope that trend will continue in the spring). Did the few Balanchine ballets look so great this season in spite of, or because of, the full-lengthers?

Anyway, I don't think you can say that City Ballet's "neglecting," "rejecting," or "retreating from" Balanchine's paradigm, on the basis of one season, especially given what's on deck for the spring. Also, about that paradigm, just because Balanchine was good at making virtues of necessity doesn't mean that was what he'd do if he had his druthers. The spare "practice clothes" look of his black-and-white ballets didn't come about because he up one day and said, "let's not use costumes!" For much of City Ballet's early years, there wasn't much money for costumes, so Balanchine, to borrow a phrase, made it work. If it weren't for budget shortfalls, would we have ever seen this severe, black-and-white world?

Similarly, Balanchine never "rejected" full-length ballets; necessity rejected them for him. At City Center he had neither the money nor the resources to do full-length ballets (with the exception of the Nutcracker, but that's different). Balanchine wasn't above pandering to the masses to build an audience at City Center, but he did it with one-act works like Stars and Stripes and Western Symphony. Morton Baum's implied that Balanchine considered these crowd pleasers to be distractions from what he really wanted to create (or at least Baum considered them such), yet he made them anyway, and they turned out okay. When Balanchine panders, we get masterpieces; when Martins panders, we, sigh, don't. But both get people into the theater.

Balanchine wasn't opposed to full-length ballets. Once he had the resources of the New York State Theater, he made A Midsummer Night's Dream and proved a genius at storytelling, and, with a new muse, his Don Quixote, which seems like about five full-length ballets in one. True, he had no interest in a full-length Swan Lake or Romeo and Juliet, but he famously wanted to do a Sleeping Beauty, but only in a theater with a turntable, so he could properly stage the long-lost Panorama. Clearly, full-length ballets were not Balanchine's primary interest, but wasn't trying to consign them to the dustbin of history, either.

Perhaps you're right in saying that "every other company does these ballets and most do them better," but not in New York. City Ballet's regular "competition" is American Ballet Theatre. ABT does Kenneth MacMillan's Romeo and Juliet, which is far, far better than Martins' Romeo + Juliet. McKenzie's and Martins' Swan Lakes are both dreadful in their own ways, so I'd rank that as a tie. McKenzie's truly awful Sleeping Beauty makes Martins' lovely one look even better. So it's a tie: City Ballet, 1.5; ABT, 1.5. And if most other companies do these ballets better than City Ballet, why were there so many full and near-full houses?

Your citation of "doing what they want," they being dancers and audiences, apparently, as an argument against doing these full-length ballets reminds me of an unintentionally droll scene in Frederick Wiseman's recent documentary about the Paris Opera Ballet, La Danse, in which Brigitte Lefevre chides and cajoles her ballet masters and mistresses to encourage their dancers to take modern classes. Lefevre suggests that if they do, they might dislike performing in modern works less. She also observes that the POB's evenings of these modern works aren't very popular with audiences, either. Perhaps French irony is drier than I can tell, but Lefevre seems entirely bereft of any in her promotion of works that dancers hate performing and audiences hate watching. I suppose in Lefevre's Bizarro world, art is like castor oil: it tastes awful going down, but it's good for you and you'll swallow it and you'll like it, or else.

So, in Lefevre's Paris, the show must go on even though nobody wants to dance in or watch it; in Popkin's New York, the show should not go on, even though people DO want to dance and watch it. I'm stretching a point here, but for crying out loud, while popularity shouldn't be the only criteria for performing something, it shouldn't be a reason NOT to. I'm sure you didn't mean for this, or your jab at "infantile" audiences, to sound so condescending and snobbish; at least I hope you didn't.

Let's face it. Much of the problem is that of this season's three "classics," Peter Martins' Swan Lake sucks, and his Romeo + Juliet sucks even more. I am in the camp that thinks his Sleeping Beauty is wonderful, however. Martins' creepy R+J makes MacMillan's look like a work of staggering genius, although at ABT, Kevin McKenzie's Swan Lake tied Martins' in the race to the bottom: they're both dreadful. If Martins' full-lengths were better, we probably wouldn't be having this argument. Let's not forget, though, that Balanchine's contribution to the full-length set, Midsummer and Jewels, is quite wonderful. I don't hear anyone railing against them!

Those arguments you dismiss so out-of-hand are actually quite compelling, and in dismissing them, you seem to confirm their validity, or, somehow, use their validity as a reason to discredit them. Given the state of the economy, and the fact that City Ballet's chewing though its once-massive endowment at a frightening pace (yes, we both know where a lot of it goes, but that's another story), that the classics sell well is a huge plus. City Ballet needs to sell tickets, and it needs to make money. Actually, it's kind of brilliant marketing to generate such a buzz about full-length ballets by clustering them together, leveraging existing, and expensive, assets without the expense and risk of a new full-length production. Circuses? Yeah, you'd never catch Balanchine working for the circus ... nevermind. Giving the audience what it wants (casting popular dancers in famous roles) is a bad thing? Giving the dancers what they want (a chance to do those roles) is a bad thing? Bringing a new audience to the ballet is a bad thing?

Dear God! I remember back in 98 (I feel so old), City Ballet was celebrating the 50th anniversary of its founding in 1948. As I looked at the silver-haired audience, I had the depressing realization that most of them could've been at that first performance, and where was the audience of the future? It looked like City Ballet didn't have much time to find, or manufacture, one.

Although there were a lot of kiddies at the full-lengthers, I wouldn't call the new audiences "infantile," unless you consider everyone under forty to be such (given the noisy chatter, bag-tearing, munching and texting I saw, you might be right), it wasn't so. I was thrilled to see not just kiddies, but college-aged kids and even prime-of-lifers at these shows who'd clearly never been to the ballet before. Of course they're stupit. They applaud and even laugh and cheer in all the wrong places, and they reward truly stupendous performances with mild applause. (Two curtain calls for La Bouder's Aurora? Shame!)

Yep, they're newbies. Can't even tell a soubresaut from a sisonne, I'll bet. They don't even know what they're looking at, and I'm awfully glad they're there. Some of them will stick around, see other works, and perhaps start working their way through the repertory, learning and seeing, as Balanchine's repertory can teach them to see. People have to start somewhere. I know I did.

Finally, if City Ballet does full-length ballets, or even just the "classics," poorly, that's not a reason not to do them, it's a reason to do them better.

I won't go into your description of Bouder (you're entitled to your opinion), but you might consider that by now the "cheerleader-from-Carlisle" thing might filter more than illuminate her for you.

Now I need a nap.

Dances upon which a moratorium should be declared

2009-12-31T05:22:00.000-05:00

Although Christmas has come and gone, it's never too late to Scrooge, so here's my list of Things that Should be Given a Long Rest, in no particular order:

Tango Ballets: By these I don't mean dances by real tango companies reframed, tastefully or otherwise, as a theatrical experience but when ballet choreographers essay something in the key of tango, it's always the same damn dance, with one cliché after another. Chairs on either side of the stage, segregating the sexes, who proceed to glare smolderingly at each other for the entire piece. Two guys doing that "no-we're-not-gay-really-this-is-muy-macho" dance. Outre conjunctions of hips, thighs and crotches. Fishnets and toe shoes. It's both ironic and brilliant that Paul Taylor uses almost no recognizable tango steps in his wonderful Piazzolla Caldera, the most successful tango "ballet" I've seen. But you choreographic non-geniuses (you know who you are), give it up already. A tango ballet may seem like a good idea at the time, but trust me, it isn't. But if you must indulge, how about some girl-on-girl tango? That tango Stefania Saltarelli dances with Dominique Sanda in The Conformist is one of the most erotic movie moments ever.

Chairs: No more dances with chairs. Except thrones. Whenever the curtain rises on a dancer-chair duo, my heart sinks. Soon we'll see him twisting and tangling his limbs about the defenseless inanimate object, punctuated by some pointedly wacky cantileverings. Oh, dear God. Haven't choreographers seen this done a million times before? I admire the gusto with which they reinvent this particular wheel (or caster), but this act was probably old before the discovery of fire. I knew for sure I would want my wrists during Boris Eifman's not-quite-awful-enough Musagete when I found poor Robert Tewsley (as Balanchine -- can you imagine a more thankless role?) having some special moments with a chair. (I lie. By then I already wanted to cut my wrists.) When I am King, chairs will be made for sitting, and sitting only.

Carmina Burana: Please, please, please. Carmina Burana seems like it should be a natural for ballet -- all that pulse-pounding, thrusting metronomy, those hopefully naughty lyrics teasingly clothed in Latin, the ever-bubbling pot of sex! sex! sex! How could it fail? Alas, let me count the ways: about as many as there are Carmina Burana ballets. They always suck. They always present leeringly erotic clinches that are neither as original or daring as the choreographer would have us think. It's time to take the Carmena Burana ballet out behind the barn and shoot it. It may not put Carmena Burana entirely out of its misery, but it'll sure brighten up my day.

The Cage: Every time I see The Cage, I feel dirty. I think it's safe to say that Jerome Robbins had Issues with Women -- beneath even Fancy Free's happy-go-lucky surface beats a misogynist's heart. When the sailors confront the girl with the red handbag, it looks as much the prelude to a rape as it does playful flirting. And let's not forget the girl who (maybe) gets tossed off the roof in New York Export Opus Jazz. For all Robbins' brilliant stagecraft, The Cage is an ugly, ugly ballet. You'd think so much sex and violence might at least be fun, but it's not. It's oceans of ikky, Those awful wigs. The necrophiliac sex (if Bad Luck Guy No. 2 isn't entirely dead by the time the Novice screws him, he's pretty damn close). The awful wigs. And BLG No. 2 gets knocked down for the count when a few of those fright-wigged Amazon-insects lift the Novice up in a spreadeagle, and ram her crotch right into his face! Yikes. Attack of the Killer Vagina! Paging Dr. Freud! I used to think it was enough to see The Cage once a decade, but my next viewing will be half-past never. It's ugly, nasty and mean, verging on downright evil. Nuke it and pave it.

Old ballets set in modern dress: I cringe at the thought of the Met's new Carmen that I'm going to see New Year's Eve. Give me Olga Borodina and castanets, please. The Royal Danish Ballet's modernization of Napoli just scares me. I do not want to see Giselle become a toothsome morsel of a Congressional intern, or James a gay Hollywood actor marrying Effie as a beard. (He's actually in love with Gurn and, oh please, shoot me before I finish this thought). These ballets are windows into the sensibility of past generations -- they're already relevant to our modern condition, if we but look. Swaddling them in anachronistic clothes is a lazy assertion of a ballet's lasting values. They obscure what they're meant (I imagine) to illuminate.

I'm even happy to see the painted cat....

2009-12-06T13:42:00.030-05:00

Ah, it's Nutcracker time and all's well with the world, mostly.

Read all about it on ballet.co .

I may go to hell for having some fun at Sara Mearns' expense with the splattering drop of dew line, but I couldn't help it. Drosselmeyer made me do it.

Robert LaFosse and a very spunky Marie.

Those dancing bumblebees, Megan Fairchild and Joaquin de Luz.

All photos copyright Paul Kolnik

La Danse, madame, c'est une question morale.

2009-11-19T00:37:00.002-05:00

Or not. Frederick Wiseman's transportive documentary, La Danse: The Paris Opera Ballet, didn't tell me anything new about French ballet qua ballet. To sum up: superb, brilliant, beautifully schooled dancers; adagios vaster than the Russians' and more slow; style so correct and dry as to make the Mariinsky look like circus clowns; Nureyev choreography that makes my calves ache just to watch it; and, finally, terminally, really, really dreadful contemporary ballet. There are few phrases that can turn my bowels to water as quickly as "an evening of contemporary ballet." The mere thought of attending such an evening at the POB makes me wish instead that I might sleep with the fishes Wiseman so marvelously shows us swimming in the dark streams that run far beneath the Opera.

I suppose it was inevitable that Wiseman's camera lingered more lovingly and lengthily on monstrosities like Angelin Preljocaj's scenery-chewing paintball massacre of a Medea (worse than Yuri Possokhov's, and I didn't think that was possible) or the screaming mimis of some nightmare perpetrated by Mats Ek, of which I won't look up the name as it might lead me to remember the damn thing. Compared to these, work by Wayne McGregor seemed like Balanchine's, and by Pina Bausch, Robbins. That's not to say that those latter two were anything to write home about, except as a warning.

I'm not going to go into Wiseman's brilliant unmoving-fly-on-the-wall cinematic style. There are plenty of movie critics who can do that better than me. Wiseman's camera seldom pans or zooms; it presents you with whatever panorama you'd face were you indeed that fly. Only gradually do you sense his invisible, guiding hand, as in his brief meditations on black members of the Opera's massive support staff that sooner-or-later prompt the epiphany that the only blacks in this film are wielding mops, trowels or cash registers. There are a few Asians among the lily-white POB dancers, but no blacks (that Wiseman sees, at any rate).

The many glimpses of dancers without their performance faces were fascinating, as in a ballerina (who I should've recognized but didn't) half-marking, alone, the steps of a role she's learning. Her intense concentration on the unseeable -- the ideal dance in her head -- seemed as much a prayer as a rehearsal. No wonder Balanchine said his celebrated, enigmatic aphorism ("La Danse, madame...").

I enjoyed the bits of Paquita we saw (who was that guy with the orbital sissones in the pas de trois? I remember him from the video), but the grand adagio was slow, slow, slow. So slow Makarova would've been looking at her watch and tapping her foot. Speaking of religion, the lead ballerina unleashed some truly biblical fouettes -- singles and doubles centered upstage, then moving deliberately downstage with single after single. Whew!

The corps, the leads in the Paquita excerpt were perfection, but so perfect, so dry, that I felt I couldn't breathe watching, or that I suddenly needed a LOT of moisturizer on my face. I'm not used to thinking of the Kirov as a wild and crazy lot, but in my memory of their wonderful Paquitas at City Center last year they seemed that way, compared with the academicians of the POB. Hell, I found myself longing for Balanchine's messy, brilliant Amazons of the Seventies.

Oh how I wish Wiseman had seen fit to show us less of that execrable Medea and more of poor, nearly forgotten Graduation Ball. I haven't seen that for decades, and it would've been a treat.

There were aluminum buckets all over everywhere in that Medea; the soulful ballerina who played the lead killed Jason's children by dousing them with red paint, er, blood from a couple of buckets. Oh how I wanted someone make like Jimmy Durante in It's a Mad, Mad, Mad (etc.) World, and expire while kicking one of those stupid buckets. But, no, I guess that would've been ridiculous.

There were some amazing shots of the corps rehearsing Nureyev's staging of the death-defying Russian snowflakes from his Nutcracker, and a bit of Nureyev's own brutally hard and brutally unmusical work. I admire what he did for the POB, but he was a dreadful choreographer.

Getting back to the "contemporary" stuff. There was an interesting meeting between Brigette Lefevre (who is the epitome of the old saying, "Diplomacy is the art of telling someone to go to hell in such a manner that he'll look forward to the trip") and some lead dancers (or teachers?). She talks about how younger dancers don't like to dance the contemporary works, and that she wants them to start taking a modern class once a week, so they'll know the technique and not hate it so much (I'm paraphrasing). She also mentions that when the POB puts on "contemporary" programs, the attendance is very bad.

So, if nobody wants to dance it, and nobody wants to see it, why are you doing it?

Maybe the answer isn't scolding the dancers into taking more "modern" classes (do they have a special bucket-tossing day?), but in doing dances that don't suck?

Anyway, go see La Danse. But sit on the aisle so you can duck out when the red paint starts flying....

Sometimes I feel like slapping Wheeldon and saying, "You can do better than this!" but then I think, can he?

2009-11-18T22:22:00.002-05:00

Wendy Whelan and Andrew Crawford in Rhapsody Fantasie, photo by Erin Baiano

Here's my considerably belated look, on ballet.co.uk, at Program B of Morphoses/The Wheeldon Company at City Center. I suppose I'm being hard on him, but he's so gifted, I still hope for more. One day I'll be able to stop writing about the precocious child and start about the era-defining, accomplished artist.

What NOT to say to a dancer

2009-11-03T20:55:00.006-05:00

So this woman posted on Twitter something like "After the performance I saw dancers X and Y and they kind of agreed when commiserated with them about Terrible Ballet." I slapped Chatty Twitter Lady's wrist (via tweets); she may have thought she was being chummy, but all she accomplished was to put X and Y in a difficult position while stroking her own ego.

Let's suppose that Chatty Twitter Lady was right, and Terrible Ballet is a piece of crap. Let's also suppose that Dancers X and Y were painfully aware of its crappiness. It was still inappropriate for her to disparage Terrible Ballet to X and Y, or even insinuate (nudge-nudge, wink-wink) that it's a piece of crap. In fact, it's wrong to criticize any aspect of a company to a dancer's face (except, perhaps, musicians).

Repeat after me: When you meet a dancer, the only correct thing to say is "you looked terrific." If you must mention a piece said dancer has just performed, you can add "and that ballet was terrific, too." You may expound on these themes, but do not criticize anything.

Why? It's simple, when you think about it, but many people, like Chatty Twitter Lady, don't. Ballet companies are not democracies; they're dictatorships, benign or otherwise, ruled by the artistic director, who can make or break a dancer's career on a whim. It's in a dancer's best interest to do nothing to bring himself to the attention of the career-breaking whim. High among those nothings is to be caught bad-mouthing the director's choreography. Murder might be higher on the list, or getting the director's son arrested for possession of one's own cocaine (wait, scratch that last one). It's not just saying bad things that could be fatal, but even being around someone who's saying them, giving them tacit approval with one's presence.

If the director had read Chatty Twitter Lady's account of her conversation with X and Y, they could find themselves admiring from the wings their former repertory, danced by others. It was bad enough for CTW to ensnare X and Y with her opinion; it was unforgivable to recount the conversation on the Internet.

By criticizing a ballet in front of one of its dancers, you're putting him in a situation where nothing he can say would be right, even saying nothing, even if he agrees with you. The best the dancer can do is attempt some serious damage control, or just pretend he didn't hear. So, don't criticize anything. Don't put the dancer in the position of having to defend a work he might not even like himself. For you it's making conversation; for him, it's breaking his career. So don't do it.

Behind this public mask, dancers are wicked critics. I've heard dancers rip into others' performances with language I'd be embarrassed to use, or casually confirming that they, too, think Terrible Ballet is crap. If dancers speak like that around you, it means they trust you not to repeat what they're saying to the wrong ears. So don't rush off to your friends saying "Guess what so-and-so just said?" or, worse, tweet it.

What it comes down to, often, is ego. By voicing your opinions in front of a dancer, you're trying, really, to establish a connection, a meeting of the minds that's more about feeling good later than aesthetic discourse. At some point, you might actually be able to have that discourse with said dancer, but until you're trusted, all you're really doing is waving your hand and saying "look at me!"

On the other hand, I don't think there's a dancer born who wouldn't enjoy being told he (or she) is terrific. So do it. Even if you don't mean it, do it anyway. It's a hard enough way to make a living.

I'm going to hell for this, but...

2009-10-07T17:40:00.005-04:00

So a friend asked emailed me, wanting to know if it was worth missing his poetry class to see V*r*n*k* P*rt dance The Dying Swan tonight.

I observed my fingers typing out this reply: "Not even if Anna Pavlova herself returned from the grave to dance it on my lap."

Suddenly I know what I'll be for Halloween....

New Chamber Ballet, September 11, 2009

2009-09-24T10:32:00.013-04:00

Romantic Pieces, Dreams, All the Rage, Moments, Echoes
City Center Studio 4

With dancing designed to be seen practically in your lap, Miro Magloire's New Chamber Ballet lives up to its name, with a style and choreography suited this small studio at the back of City Center. He's developed an ensemble of strong dancers over the years, and they dance with an exquisite precision that would be lost entirely in a concert hall. They don't project, but turn their focus inward, as if using ballet technique to tend a Zen garden. When a dancer swings her leg in a ronde de jambe across the stage, the curve might've been made by a protractor, and I've never seen the "ballerina walk" rendered with such near-obsessive detail: the foot turned out and pressed forward, toes touching first and then the heel, turning out the foot even more, and so on. It becomes almost hypnotic.

Magloire's choreographic style builds on this impassive purity; his dances are all about nuance and clarity, with purpose expressed especially in the smallest gestures: if a dancer flexes her elbow x degrees instead of x + 1, its for a reason, and not the vagaries of performance. As with the works of Merce Cunningham, Magloire's dancers are impassive vessels for his choreography; no stage smiles here, indeed, no smiles at all. This is serious business.

His program note for Romantic Pieces has the odd observation that he's avoided working to romantic music, such as Dvorak's Four Romantic Pieces for Violin and Piano, because it seems, everyone else uses it, and I suppose music whose qualities "spark the choreographic imagination" is just too easy. Magloire's sober romanticism eschews the obvious; there are no dramatic rushes or anything to indicate a dancer might be overcome with emotion. At one point a dancer holds her hands before her face as if crying, but the gesture's more stylized than evocative. Despite its dryness, I enjoyed Romantic Pieces. Magloire shapes his dances to Dvorak with "painterly" integrity and variety that's nonetheless pure ballet. He doesn't get carried away by the Dvorak, but occasionally reflects it with a dancer's big, swoopy curve into an elongee fourth, held for a bit before she steps through and is on her way. I liked the solos for Elizabeth Brown, Emery LeCrone and Andrea Spiridonakos, especially LeCrone's flashing double pirouettes, but Magloire's invention faded when using the three dancers together, verging on dry, classroom progressions across the studio. It speaks to Magloire's integrity that he uses musicians, not recordings. Erik Carlson's violin and Melody Fader's piano were superb; the choreography could've used some of their dramatic juice.

Dreams has no music other than what Brown, LeCrone and Madeline Deavenport make themselves. In severe black tights, they twine themselves about the floor, whispering not-quite-intelligible words to the air and fluttering their hands like confetti. The contours of this dream are severe and formal, delivered with a measured pace, and the trio's arms echoed and reinforced each other. While often engrossing, Dreams overslept. A long final section in which the dancers evoked a trio of somnolent, yet clucking, chickens might well have been cut.

Despite a grandiose program note and a too-clever beginning, Constantine Baecher's All the Rage, became more interesting as it went along. Set to Martin Stauning's Stasis IX-X as played by Carlson and Fader, the piece saw Brown, Daevenport and Lauren Toole pacing slowly, on pointe, along the studio's perimeter. With a dissonant flourish of the music, one dancer would stop pacing and dance a jagged solo, then she'd resume pacing and another would take over. This gets old in a hurry, and Baecher eventually broke away from this formula, with musical bursts crashing through the dancers' formality. All the Rage became wilder as it progressed, or, in this cerebral evening, what passed for wildness.

In Magloire's Moments, Lauren Toole deftly reflected the arpeggios of Salvatore Sciarrino's Caprices No. 2 and 6, played by Carlson while standing mid-studio. The piece ended with a charming touch when Toole reached out and muted the violin's strings. I'd noticed Magloire's passive musicality here and in Romantic Pieces; he's content to follow the music rather than lead it although he's a fine voice in his composers' chorus. Perhaps to mix up this musicality, in Echoes he has his ensemble of five dancers moving only in the interstices between Webern's Four Pieces for Piano and Violin (op 7). Alas, while Carlson and Fader played beautifully and the dancers stood quietly, I kept seeing Balanchine's Episodes in my mind, as nature and imagination abhor a vacuum. By the time the dancers joined the musicians for the final piece, I'd filed Echoes under "better in thought than in deed."

Although the choreography's occasionally too brainy for its own good, it's honest and rewards scrutiny. I liked New Chamber Ballet's intensity tremendously, and I'm looking forward to seeing them again.

Originally published on ballet.co.uk.

At least they spelled my name right

2009-09-13T10:14:00.009-04:00

I really need to set up a Google Reader feed for my name and "ballet." I'm always surprised when people mention my reviews, and usually find out about it well after the fact, if ever. I had no idea Woolcott quoted chapter and verse of my mostly-rave about Veronika Part's Nikiya ("She's a Ginger who thinks she's Mary Ann") until months afterwards. So I just last night discovered a "justanotherdancer" deploring my not-very-complimentary review of Darci Kistler's underwhelming Titania on a dance blog. Perhaps referring to her adagio with Bottom as a "duet between a donkey and a dead horse walking" was a bit pointed, but not undeserved. She was an embarrassment, and I said so. Would I be doing my readers a favor if I said otherwise? I feel badly for Kistler that injuries kept her offstage for too many years of her once-stellar career, but that's no reason to inflict the "Darci Death-Watch" on a paying audience.

While I don't agree with "justadancer's" opinion of my review, I do wish I were in his shoes, as he "has not seen her dance for a very long time," and the last time he saw her, "she inspired [him] greatly." I wish that my last memories of Kistler were as lovely as his, and I sincerely hope he won't have them dashed to shreds by actually seeing her now.

As "justadancer" suggests, Kistler was indeed having a bad day; she's always having bad days. If her Titania was atypical, I'd have said so, and gone lighter on her. But it wasn't a fluke; it was par for the course, and has been for years. In the ten years or so I've been watching her (not counting a few when she was a teen-age marvel), her performances have devolved from eccentric to depressing to "I'm ready for my closeup now." Over the years I've poked fun at her, but there are only so many circumlocutions one can use for discreetly informing one's audience that a dancer was bad. I've often decided the kindest thing was simply to not write up some of her performances.

In fact, I've respected her enough to refrain from describing in print her unprofessional stage deportment, in which she appears to be under the impression that when she can't see the audience, the audience can't see her. This emperor's wife may not have no clothes, but she comes close with her unfortunate manner of adjusting her leotard. City Ballet's emperor either knows and doesn't care, or he avoids his wife's performances and nobody has the courage to tell him (or Kistler).

Kistler's peculiarities are the sort of thing a kid in the corps would be fired for, and kids in the corps have been fired as a result of her death-grip on the limelight. Thanks to the bad economy and frightening budget projections, City Ballet fired eleven corps dancers this year. How many of their careers might've been saved if Kistler hadn't been pulling down a principal dancer's salary? She probably doesn't make as much as eleven corps dancers combined, but it's certainly more than a couple. True, some of the dancers let go were deadwood and others near retirement, but their places could've been taken by younger dancers who'll find themselves facing a bleak job market. All this for a dancer who shouldn't be onstage?

There was a disrespectful person at that Midsummer performance, but it wasn't me, and it's nothing but sanctimonious claptrap to demand one should lie about a terrible performance.

If ballet stars were comic book heros, who would draw them?

2009-07-21T17:08:00.004-04:00

I recently decided to treat the twitterverse to my aphorism about how I like ballet because, like comic books, it's about people in tights defying gravity, but with music. Then I also remembered a favorite Ballet Talk thread from years ago matching ballet dancers with ice-cream flavors. I think Dvorovenko was a hot fudge sundae with two cherries on top, but I could be mistaken. Poor Yvonne Borree was creme brulee, cracked.

Then I remembered dear Irina's recent Giselle where I kept flashing on a vision of her as a manga or anime heroine -- the Sailor Moon of the ballet world -- and the idea popped into my mind the important question that would strike any comic-book fan worth his sald contemplating ballet stars as comic-book heroes and heroines: which artist would draw whom?

Blissfully ignorant as I am of any comic-book artist who's started drawing in the past three decades, my list will be as properly classic and backwards-looking as ballet itself. Feel free to join in, you folks out there in demicontretemps land.

In no particular order:

Irina Dvorovenko Neal Adams

Ashley Bouder Jack Kirby

Andrew Veyette Gene Colan

Veronika Part Frank Frazetta or maybe Coop (cheating, but...)

Janie Taylor Jim Steranko

Vladimir Malakhov Vargas (ok, I'm cheating, so sue me)

Gennady Saveliev Don Martin (cheating again, but I had to, and sorry, Gennady)

Julio Bocca Barry Smith

Roberto Bolle John Buscema

Diana Vishneva Joe Kubert (a dark horse, I know)

Of course, there are more great dancers to go around than there are great pencillers, at least that I can remember, so I have to repeat myself a bit. Delving into history:

Nureyev Smith

Baryshnikov Kirby

Makarova Steranko

Kirkland Steve Ditko

Ok, I've done my I'm-going-to-hell-for-this anti-mitzvah for the day. Will anyone out there get it?

Veronika Part, Corey Stearns in La Sylphide

2009-06-21T21:53:00.003-04:00

Airs, La Sylphide

American Ballet Theatre

June 17, 2009

Metropolitan Opera House

New York City

New York

I'm happy to say Veronika Part jumped just fine in her debut in La Sylphide. She jumped fine, acted fine, did everything more than fine, actually. If she didn't float with quite the ballon of the retiring Ananiashvili (or, I imagine, the pyrotechnic Osipova, whose Sylphide I unfortunately missed), she was more than capable of getting both feet off the ground (far off the ground) at will, and was more than a match for the rigors of Bournonville's puzzle-box footwork.

Part's dancing was a delight, strong, clear and generous, but what struck me the most was the clarity of her acting, in which mood after mood fly across the Sylph's demeanor as quickly as her feet fly though Bournonville's tricky batterie. It's the tragedy of La Sylphide that, however much James and the Sylph might love each other, and however bravely they reach outside their own worlds towards each other, they fundamentally misunderstand each other, and can't transcend their own natures enough to make their "mixed" relationship work. It's their differences, and their longing for the different, that kill them; Madge, and her poisoned scarf, is simply the vehicle for the doom already sealed the moment James follows the Sylph into the woods.

Part, and Cory Stearns, also debuting as James, made the most of the differences that doom the pair. Part's Sylph is sweet and chaste: she entices Stearns' James with her tears, vivacity, words of love and promise of a magical life in the woods. Stearns' James is brash and full of himself; he's intrigued by the Sylph's supernatural aspects, but also lusts for her as a woman, and, despite being fey, Part's Sylph is a beautiful woman, and eminently lust-worthy. She's fatally unaware of how James perceives her, just as James can't comprehend her nature, or the nature of her love.

From the ballet's beginning, the Sylph famously eludes James' attempts to hold her, and his growing frustration makes him easy prey for Madge's offer of the poison scarf; he wants so badly to possess the Sylph he's not going to look anywhere near this gift-horse's mouth. It's a sad failure to communicate: the Sylph offers James a birds' nest, springwater, flowers, and he wants ... her. Although we don't know what might happen should James actually touch the Sylph (I suspect that, absent magic, it might be truly impossible), it seems his efforts would eventually end in tragic failure even without Madge's evil assistance.

It's too simple, though, to look at La Sylphide as just a tale of two foolish lovers (neither James nor the Sylph are the sharpest pencils in their respective boxes), of carnality's oil being unable to mix with spirituality's water. However lustfully James might grab for the Sylph, it's not simply her beauty that draws him. When the Sylph calles her sisters to dance for James, Bournonville has him wander among them in amazement. He's found a magical, faerie world, and the aerial brilliance of the solos he trades with the Sylph can be seen as his efforts to ascend to her world, as her own solos can be seen as similarly reaching out to him.

However much James and the Sylph eventually fail, there's a nobillity in their efforts to find each other, as shown in the second act's beautiful ballet blanc. James fails, as does the Sylph, but it's not for want of trying. For Bournonville, the message of La Sylphide was that one should stay where one belongs (as with his A Folk Tale), yet that's not the reason its imagery of moonlit glades and supernatural love has resonated so throughout the ages. Perhaps Bournonville appreciated that he was merely making the fatal more attractive, or perhaps he enjoyed that ambiguity.

Who hasn't felt the longing for something grander, more mysterious and beautiful in their lives? If you woke up to find a Sylph professing her love, would you follow? Is she that different from Rilke's statue of Apollo, admonishing you to change your life?

Getting back to Part, Stearns and ABT, the dichotomy between the Sylph's spirituality and James' carnal appreciation of her was never more marked, yet drawn with enough ambiguity that you could appreciate the ballet's greater depths. As for the dancing, Stearns was brilliant, with a big, easy jump that belied the difficulty of Bournonville's enchainements. If his batterie wasn't quite as clear as David Hallberg's the night before, well, whose is? Stearns' James fits perfectly in the tradition of Nikolaj Hubbe's great James, a careless, free-spirited, narcissistic romantic who loves not wisely but too well. Part's Sylph, for her ethereal beauty, is much the same. The joy of watching Part is how grandly she paints her character. She fills the cavernous Met with the Sylph's bouyant personality. When she mimes to James that she's not going to cry anymore, but to dance for him, it's like the sun's come out from behind a cloud, and at her death, you can feel James' dismay at the darkness rushing in.

Martine van Hamel's Madge was all the meaner for her fussy punctiliousness. She delighted in her evil, but painted it delicately, almost tenderly turning the heartbroken James to witness the Sylph's ascent to, well, wherever Sylphs go, before happily killing him. Craig Salstein's Gurn verged on slapstick, bumbling effusively everywhere except his first-act solo, after which he and Stearns shared a friendly, if out-of-character, bow.

This cast of Paul Taylor's Airs was a bit more in tune to Taylor's off-kilter aesthetic than the previous night's, with Kristi Boone striking a fine balance between muscular and spiritual as the "priestess" character.

Airs and La Sylphide, June 16, 2009

2009-06-21T21:46:00.004-04:00

Airs, La Sylphide

American Ballet Theatre

June 16, 2009

Metropolitan Opera House

New York City

New York

Ad-libbing like a true ballerina, Nina Ananiashvili took a sticky moment in La Sylphide Tuesday night and turned it into a little triumph. In the first act, after the reel, James holds high the wedding ring he's about to present to Effie and the Sylph playfully steals it and puts it on her own finger. Ananiashvili plucked the ring from David Hallberg's hand, but dropped it. Ooops. Instantly taking in the situation, she rose on pointe, turned to Hallberg and with a flourish of her wrist, pointed to the ring and mimed that he should be a good boy and bring her the little bauble. Then she stepped back and posed herself in delicate anticipation as Hallberg retrieved the ring, looked at it as if pondering what to do next, and then, with a flourish, dropped to his knee and offered it up to Ananiashvili. She happily accepted, mimed the equivalent of "let's blow this popsicle stand," and they were off to the races out the door.

As a friend said, it's the first time James actually proposed to the Sylph and, while it goes a bit against the actual choreography here, in which James is appalled and tries vainly, and momentarily, to get the ring back, the end result is the same: James casts his lot with the Sylph and turns his back on hearth and home. It wouldn't have done for the Sylph to bend down and pick up the ring, or for James, unbidden, to give it to her; instead, they instantly came up with a perfect adlib to get the Sylph the ring without breaking character. I imagine that this wasn't the first time in the history of La Sylphide that someone dropped the ring, although I wonder if it was ever handled more professionally.

As she's done throughout her farewell season at ABT, Ananiashvili showed that being a ballerina really has nothing to do with dancing. Of course you have to dance well enough, but it's more about creating self-referential glamor and theatrical authority. In recent years, she's looked like exactly hereself: a middle-aged mommy whose day job is being the Greatest Ballerina in the World, or, at least, to convince you that she is. A ballerina would never dig in the dirt for a dropped ring when there's a strapping lad nearby to be commanded to do it for her.

Although she's gotten a bit creaky, with an unfortunate tightness in her upper back, she's got a surprising amount of technique left, and retains her magician's knack for directing your eye towards what whe wants you to see, and away from what she doesn't. In true Bolshoi style she was always indifferent to fussy niceties, saving her focus and energies for the choreographic high notes, which she invariably nailed and, as, moreover, she made sure you knew she nailed them. This isn't damning her with faint praise: she's a great actress with a keen dramatic sense and stage smarts, and I've been more than happy, over the years, to sit back and let her take over the driver's seat (as if she'd have had it any other way).

I expected that her mime with Hallberg, and her dramatic conception, would be spot on, but I was thrilled by her ballon, how she floated over the stage in her jumps, both great and small. She can still manage big, straight-ahead jetes as well as any woman (her leaps across the front of the stage during the first-act reel were mesmerizing), but even when her jumps have become shrunken indeed, she still shapes them to convey a sense of weightless floating: the jump she makes in your mind's eye is more important than the one she makes onstage, and far more lasting.

I saw a perfect little example of her way with phrasing in the first of the solos the Sylph trades with James in Act II. She'd do a sissonne or two forwards towards Hallberg in the downstage right corner, stepping into a little releve with her front leg lifting into a pretty attitude. Ananiahsvili's sissonnes were vanishingly small, but she phrased the degage so beautifully, stretching out the presentation of her foot as if it were the greatest present in the world, arching her upper body ever so slightly over her leg to add to the emphasis, that the slightness of her preceding leap hardly mattered. You saw a light-footed lead-in to the soft and seemingly weightless rise of her foot. This is, alas, the only time I'll have seen Ananiashvili's Sylph, but I'll bet that in earlier years, with a more consistently robust jump, she phrased those steps differently. I think she quite deliberately chose to downplay the jump and draw our eyes instead to the beautiful rise of her foot. I admire stage intelligence like that, and it's part of what makes her a great artist. As always, she was a great actress, and her Sylph's death was made more tragic by her hint that a she was killed as much by her broken heart at James' betrayal as Madge's poison.

As you might imagine, Hallberg's dancing as James was Fourth-of-July fireworks a few weeks early, with the great height of his leaps only adding to the super-charged clarity of his beats and the dizzyingly generous, even courageous generosity of his bravura phrasing. In one or two places Hallberg's brio almost got the better of him, but, like Damian Woetzel, he's developed a knack for turning lead into gold. If he finds himself a bit off the music, or off-balance, at the end of a phrase, he calmly motors on to the next thing as if he'd just pulled a rabbit out of his hat.

Hallberg's acting is more conservative. He seems almost dutifully enthralled by Ananiashvili's Sylph more than crazily, recklessly in love with her, and it seems almost out of character when he tries to grab her in the second act. I suppose he's letting his feet do his acting for him in his brilliant second-act solos, and with bravura gifts like his, why not? I wish I'd gotten more of a sense from him of James' amazement at the magical world unfolding around him in the second act, though.

Overall, ABT's production was delightful if occasionally rough around the edges, as I wouldn't have minded some more punch in the too-stately first-act reel (or more focus from the tired horns). If the second-act corps of Sylphs weren't a perfect picture of lithograph-era mystery, they weren't far short, and were as happy in their allegros as mysterious in their holding-hands adagio. Carlos Lopez was a broad and sullen Gurn, and Nancy Raffa's Madge was also broadly drawn and unsubtle, like Margaret Hamilton in mid-melt, although her mime was undeniably clear.

It seems every decade or so Paul Taylor's lovely Airs pops up in ABT's repertory. It's pointless to expect ballet dancers to move with the same odd combination of awkwardness and grace as Taylor's dancers, but it seems that last time around ABT's dancers got it better. In the leading, invocational role, Simone Messmer was reserved and pure where more intensity and focus might've worked better. Although parts of Taylor's style translate easily to ballet-trained dancers, others don't, and this cast, especially the men, looked decidedly uncomfortable with Taylor's many decidedly non-vertical, off-balance moments. Overall it was a pleasant, if fuzzy performance. Kelley Boyd and Joseph Phillips were boiserous but perhaps too perky in the cute fourth-movement duet (Airs is set entirely to bits and pieces of Handel), while Luciana Paris and Roddey Doble seemed a bit nonplussed in the teeterring cantilevers of the twice-performed (fast, then slow) sixth and seventh-movement duet. Oddly enough, Leeann Underwood, the least-featured woman, made the most lasting impression on me of Taylor's style, wit and power.

Messmer's Myrtha and the Max-and-Irina Show

2009-06-21T20:36:00.006-04:00

Giselle

June 10m, June 10e, 2009

American Ballet Theatre

Metropolitan Opera House

New York City

In addition to Osipova's heralded debut, I caught two other Giselles out of ABT's week-long run.

Wednesday afternoon, it was Maria Riccetto with David Hallberg. Riccetto's a capable soloist, but it was courageously optimistic to cast her as Giselle. In Act I, she's sweetly earnest, in fact, she's earnest throughout, as if she's delivering a student's graduation exercise more than a breathing, dramatic performance. She's got a strong enough technique to make it easily through the act, although it's hard to see what David Hallberg's Albrecht sees in her other than an eagerness to please. I'm usually not at all fond of Riccetto's wispy, weightless arms, but they added to her air of ghostly insubstantiality in Act II. She managed tolerably well in her adagios with Hallberg, apart from an occasional almost-stumble on pointe, but her soubresauts and leaps were nondescript. It was an honest performance, but nothing that would inspire me to see her again. Hallberg danced brilliantly, and posed with aristocratic grace befitting Albrecht's station and his own peerless line. His stage persona doesn't burn with the ardor that a Corella, perhaps, might use to coax from a reticent partner a brighter performance than Riccetto's. After his jaw-dropping entrechat sixes in Act II, I entirely forgave any shortcomings in his acting, past, present and future.

My main interest in the performance came from Simone Messmer's debut as Myrtha. A corps dancer long known for her distinctive musicality and dramatic acuity, Messmer was regal and distant as she staked her claim to the Met's stage, with even her prettiest adagio poses a statement of ownership. Messmer flew through her allegro with ease, and commanded her willis with appropriate hauteur. Isabella Boylston and Hee Seo were graceful and pretty as Moyna and Zulma, but someone might've told them, especially the overly sweet Seo, that Myrtha's assistants are not actually nice former people. Jared Matthews lived and died passionately as Hilarion. In the peasant pas de deux, Yuriko Kajiya showed off her high attitudes in her big, open sissonnes, and has softened a bit the edges of her presentational, nearly mechanical facility. Carlos Lopez has had better afternoons, dancing with almost pugnacious energy, but too-often coarsening his finishes with unfortunate, small adjustments.

Wednesday night was my first look this season at the Max-and-Irina show, and it really was quite a show, with Irina Dvorovenko and Maxim Beloserkovsky so carefully plotting each instant of their characters onstage existence that you can hear the nonstop chatter of their inner monologues - whether you want to or not. From the instant she bounds out of her cottage door, Dvorovenko's Giselle is a sharply drawn assemblage of shy but impetuous glances, batted eyelashes, tellingly inflected posture in which every inclination of her torso, shoulders, head conveys a brightly polished bit of meaning. There's not an ounce of spontaneity to her performance, or Beloserkovsky's, or even an attempt to create the illusion of spontaneity. You might find such ill-disguised calculation and artifice off-putting, except that they do it very, very well. I stopped caring that I didn't believe for an instant that there was any real emotional bond between this Giselle and Albrecht. I gave up on looking for dramatic impact beneath the dancers' polished surfaces, and enjoyed their wealth of details, felicitous or otherwise. I sat back and enjoyed the ride, and what a ride it was!

Right now, Dvorovenko and Beloserkovsky are dancing better than I can recall, and smarter. She no longer tries for technical feats she can't reliably manage, so if she doesn't go for a big balance quite so often, she's sure to nail them when she does. She's more than strong enough to bring fireworks to each act. Beloserkovsky danced cleanly, brilliantly and with confident authority. Dvorovenko's studied and mannered, and happily prone to unforgettable moments of questionable taste; her Giselle isn't only the village girl who loves to dance, but she's the one who never goes from Point A to Point B without inserting a pretty little pique balance in arabesque, whether or not you or I might think it's really appropriate. I began her performance thinking of her as a sort of Saturday-morning animated-cartoon Giselle, but as the iron will behind her artifice asserted itself, I thought of as a graphic-novel, manga Giselle, with panels detailing in glorious close-up detail her every mighty blink or moue. (Yes, Jack Kirby would've drawn a fine Dvorovenko Giselle, but I digress.) I became totally enthralled by Dvorovenko's ferocious attention to detail, appropriate or otherwise, it hardly mattered. All this would be moot if she didn't dance brilliantly, but she does, and delivers her every little gesture with the same intensity she brings to her second-act soubresauts or deep, deep penchees. If she could refine her facial expressions by pumping iron with her eyebrows, I could see her doing it. Hell, if she could shoot laser beams out of her forehead, I could see her doing that, too, and I'd probably like it.

In both acts, Dvorovenko's interpretation is resoundingly conventional, except for the intriguing if perhaps unintended suggestion that she's the village's ruling Heather: she commands her fellow peasant girls to fetch the grapes, for instance, and it seems they hop to it right smartly. In the second act, I was struck by the almost ostentatious perfection of her well-practiced adagios with Beloserkovsky. When he promenades her in a deep, almost six-o'clock penchee, not only is her upper body practically brushing her supporting leg, but she holds her arms over inverted head in a picture-perfect fifth. The line's lovely, a bit show-offish, and the pair invite, almost demand that you admire their near-perfection. Most other Giselles are content, or, perhaps, astute enough to allow their arms to float somewhere about their heads in an ectoplasmic flutter. (The not-at-all spontaneous Osipova certainly did.) While once I might've been put off by what I would consider an aesthetically unfortunate exhibitionism, I just sat back and admired. Yes, indeed, that's a beautiful penchee, with such pretty arms! Is this what it feels like to sit through an entire Celine Dion concert? At the ballet's very end, Dvorovenko doesn't simply stand on her grave and bend over to give Beloserkovsky her farewell lilies, but braces herself against the cross and dives into yet another six-oclock penchee as she quite easily lowers her face to his level. I used to deplore this as a tasteless stunt, and joke that obviously Albrecht had forgotten his wristwatch and she was telling him the time. By the end of Wednesday night's performance, I'd have been disappointed if she'd left the penchee out. It was the perfect final note. Perhaps loving this Giselle is a guilty pleasure, but I had no regrets in the morning. I still don't. However one might feel about exactly where this pair have chosen to place their artistic target, they score a perfect bullseye, and of the three Giselles I saw this season (also Riccetto's and Osipova's), theirs was by far the most successful.

There were other dancers onstage. Gennady Saveliev was a taciturn but tragic Hilarion, and Veronika Part a towering snow-queen of a Myrtha. Isabella Boylston and Mikhail Ilyin danced a crackerjack peasant pas, although Ilyin seems in the line of short, demi-caractere tricksters of whom Kevin McKenzie seems to have an overabundance.

A Couple of Midsummer Night's Dreams

2009-06-21T19:31:00.009-04:00

A Midsummer Night's Dream

June 19 and 20, 2009

New York City Ballet

David H. Koch Theater

New York City

Another day, another magical sylvan glade. But while at the Metropolitan Opera House, ABT's sylphs have been gamboling in the moonlight, across the Lincoln Center Plaza at the David H. Koch Theater it's been Titania, Oberon and their faerie-land retinues in Balanchine's A Midsummer Night's Dream, a little marvel of compact storytelling and dazzling imagery.

Friday night saw a last-minute debut by Gonzalo Garcia as Oberon, replacing the always-brilliant Joaquin de Luz. In this most frighteningly challenging of Balanchine's roles, Garcia was about as comfortable as I've seen him since he joined City Ballet. He's often looked as if his focus has been directed somewhere out beyond the footlights, and this dreamy demeanor added an otherworldly sheen to his king of the fairies. In the famous scherzo, he glowed with delight at his minions of bugs and butterflies as brightly as his golden jacket, as if he'd found the happy place that had eluded him for so much of his adventure in the Balanchine repertory. His was a fine debut: his feet flashed brightly and propulsively through Oberon's dizzying batterie (especially those floating-in-air sissonnes battus), and he seemed truly both king of the fairies, and of the stage. He was a bit conservative in places, and not quite entirely committed to the Scherzo's aerial magic, but at his next performance Saturday afternoon he'd already relaxed and expanded quite happily into the role. It's not just Garcia's dancing that shone; he acted with a dramatic presence and weight that made me think he might be happiest in story-telling dances.

It's been awhile since Darci Kistler debuted as Titania, and she's a fine fairy queen: girlish, impetuous, and imperious. Fine, that is, when she's acting. Dancing, it's another story. She relied heavily on her cavalier, Charles Askegard, to carry her through their adagio, but there was only so much the veteran Askegard, who's made a career out of partnering problematic NYCB ballerinas, could accomplish without actually dancing her steps for her. Even Askegard's best efforts at turning Kistler's tiny jumps into breathtaking flights eventually came up short. I have never seen a veteran ballerina work more assiduously to destroy her audience's positive memories of her career than Kistler who really should have retired at least five years ago. Here, her charm couldn't offset her inability to do more than sketch Titania's solos or her odd deportment when she seems to think nobody's watching her. So limited as she's become, she so stressed the slapstick humor of Titania's duet with the enchanted Bottom that she cheapened and obscured Balanchine's subtler text on the ennobling nature of even the most ridiculous-seeming love. It was a duet between a donkey and a dead horse walking.

Daniel Ulbricht brought his personal trampoline along with his portrayal of Puck. It's hard to fault his huge leaps with gloriously soft landings, or his easy, playful rapport with the audience, but I'll try. Puck's a supremely comic role, but he's subservient to Oberon. Ulbricht steals the stage so easily and relentlessly that I wouldn't have blamed Garcia for turning him into a newt, if only Oberon's magic were real. Puck isn't the hero of the ballet, and Ulbricht skews its focus and meaning. He's a brilliant, brilliant dancer, but Peter Martins is doing nobody any long-term favors by refusing to teach Ulbricht of the value, or even the existence, of modulation. I'd sentence Ulbricht to a year of dancing nothing but Tudor, and assuming both Tudor and Ulbricht survive the experience, we'd all be better off.

Especially tasty in this cast were the star-crossed lovers, that is Rebecca Krohn's Helena, Amar Ramasar's Demetrius, Jennie Somogyi's Hermia and Jonathan Stafford's Lysander. They're all high-powered dancers, and they put more verve than usual into Balanchine's ingeniously drawn love-hate duets. Krohn hurled herself with passion at Ramasar, ensnarling him as he braced against one desperate penchee after another, and then she fought off Stafford's advances to an exhausted standstill. Somogyi, once the "go-to" principal for technically killer roles, has remade herself into a strong and versatile dancer of character and grander-than-usual dramatic force. Hermia's "my-world-is-crumbling" solo was frightening in its intensity. Leading her discordant hounds, Teresa Reichlen's Hippolyta hardly needed a bow - the flights of her long legs in straight-ahead, flying-carpet jetes were arrows aplenty. As Bottom, Henry Seth again proved a master of necessarily deadpan humor in wielding his donkey head in his duet with Kistler's dotty, love-struck Titania, but he might consider that a little wiggling of his character's eponymous anatomy can go a very long way indeed. Erica Periera was an indefatigable perpetual-motion machine of a lead Butterfly. Jenifer Ringer, like Somogyi recently returned from maternity leave, bounced happily through Balanchine's second-act wedding divertissement, and, with the equally frolicsome Philip Neal, gave full measure to the romantic grandeur of the "hold-your-breath-until-it's-finished" adagio, perhaps Balanchine's finest. I couldn't help noticing that both Neal and Garcia gave little treatises on the manly art of turning without spotting, and I'd be remiss if I didn't mention the bouncing ball that was Faycal Karoui behind the podium, whose leaps seemed second only to Ulbricht's. While the dancers have long grown accustomed to Karoui's occasionally ever-accelerating tempi, Oberon's cape, in the opening scene, was a bit more obstinate, although Garcia whipped it into shape, overcoming a hurdle second only, it seems, to the Scherzo.

Saturday afternoon, Reichlen took over Titania, having made her debut last Thursday. Technically, she eats up the role, but her Titania's an odd complement to Kistler's. Reichlen's tall - 5'10, I think - and looms over the shorter Garcia (this matinee was to have been his official debut) in MND's finest "Mutt-and-Jeff" tradition of short Oberons and tall Titanias (taken, one hopes, to its ultimate extreme when Maria Kowroski's cast with Joaquin de Luz). When Garcia shook his upraised finger (not that one!) at Reichlen in anger at Titania's having denied Oberon the prized changeling child, it looked as if he were considering poking it up her nose. Reichlen's a regal Titania, but a bit cool and formal, partly, I think, from her own temperament (for all her amazing physique and legginess, she's never warmed to the occasional sexpot roles in which she's been cast, like Union Jack's WRENS or Arabian), and partly from her comparative newness to the role. Dancing solo, Reichlen showed all the detail and attack so absent with Kistler: she rocketed upwards in Titania's impetuous "kicking-up-my-heels" leaps, where Kistler did well to get both feet off the ground at the same time, and the generous billowing of Reichlen's line was indeed magical. However, her cavalier, Justin Peck, seemed a bit overmatched for Reichlen's largess, and she seemed to deliberately hold back in her supported moments so as not, perhaps, to overpower him; exactly where Kistler danced her freest. In her duet with Seth's ubiquitous Bottom, Reichlen blossomed, dancing large with love-struck abandon.

Perhaps with help from Maurice Kaplow's measured conducting, Gonzalo Garcia was even better in the Scherzo, and attacked throughout, even where he'd held back the night before. His unconventional Oberon's grown on me. He's regal and kingly at all the right moments, but he seems as much enchanted and thrilled by the stage magic about him as any stage-struck child in the audience. I've never been more reminded of the happy-go-lucky guy who bounded sloppily, but with great gusto, through Ballo de la Regina as a guest here five years ago, except that his Oberon was far from sloppy. Garcia's done more than his share of wandering in the artistic wilderness since he joined NYCB. I hope his Oberon's a sign he's found his way home. As the lovers, Dena Abergel acted out Helena's sufferings more strongly with her face than body, while Sterling Hyltin's Hermia danced powerfully but was often light on dramatic context. Both Ask La Cour's Demetrius and Robert Fairchild's Lysander were comic gems. Fairchild in particular brought extra life to Lysander's dopey flower-gathering and drew his dagger to chase Demetrius with magnificent petulance worthy of a silent-movie bad guy. Both men attacked their dry-ice-befogged swordfighting with wonderfully over-the-top enthusiasm, and Fairchild might well have set a record for most double-takes ever by a Lysander.

Troy Schumacher substituted for Sean Suozzi as Puck, in what might well have been a debut. Short and a bit slight, with a flashy technique that's long stood out in the corps de ballet, Schumacher didn't quite match Ulbricht's bravura, but played Puck with a simple-minded sweetness that fit far better into the ensemble than Ulbricht's "look-at-me" embellishments. Savannah Lowery was the sort of tough-minded Hippolyta you wouldn't want to run into in a dark alley, and despite her rough edges she tossed off several impeccable fouettes. In the Divertissement, Janie Taylor and Tyler Angle had a debut I'll long remember. Taylor turns her roles to gold, and her intensity gave Balanchine's evocation of love as the center of the world a piercing spirituality. Angle complements her well, attentive and himself strikingly graceful, but always aware that he's the setting for Taylor's jewel.

Alas, thanks to the slumping economy, City Ballet's cut its Saratoga season to only two weeks, and won't be bringing Midsummer to the outdoor, midsummer loveliness of the Performing Arts Center, where real fireflies can compete with the onstage ones. Having finished this review, and this week of woodland spirits, I feel oddly bereft. Perhaps I can run to Lincoln Center to catch one last matinee.

Osipova's Giselle

2009-06-16T05:00:00.008-04:00

Giselle

American Ballet Theatre

June 13, 2009

The Metropolitan Opera House

Perhaps it was unfair--to somebody--that my first look at the lauded Natalia Osipova Saturday night came after I'd just been reduced to blubbering ruin that afternoon by City Ballet's enthralling Liebeslieder Walzer. Perhaps I'd become so attuned to the subtle genius of Balanchine's masterpiece, and the understated sublimity of its grand ballerinas that I couldn't recalibrate myself to properly appreciate Osipova's feats of bravura. Or, rather, I appreciated them just fine; it's when she wasn't rewriting physics that she left me cold. Osipova's short, whip-strong, and reed-thin, but she's a reed of steel. She's got the most astonishing ballon I've seen in a woman, and she eats up Giselle's technical challenges like a tasty dessert. But although she was fearless when dancing, her characterization was aggressively conventional. She's not a bad actress, and she had no cringeworthy moments (would I could say the same about her partner, David Hallberg), but she diverged not an iota from Generic Russian Giselle 101. She didn't hold back physically; she mimes emphatically and with great clarity, making fine use of her beautiful Russian port de bras, but her Giselle was depressingly short on subtlety, nuance and telling detail--the very qualities that had abounded in the afternoon Liebeslieder. She has a pretty, petite face with soulful Eastern European eyebrows, but her smiles of joy and grimaces of anguish are much alike, dutiful twists of the emotional dial. She's happy when Giselle's supposed to be happy, sad when she's sad, and dies when she dies. In the second act, she gave no sense of the girl Giselle used to be fighting with the ghost she'd become, or the profound nobility of her love and forgiveness. She did what she had to do to get to the good stuff, very professionally indeed, but she seemed far more spiritually engaged in her aerial adventures. All that acting seemed the price she, and I, had to pay for her soubresauts; it's a good thing they were to die for.

What disappointed me so about Osipova was that she seemed either not to know that there's so much more to be done with the role, or not to care. For the Bolshoi's star ballerina, neither is forgivable. I remembered Nina Ananiashvili's terrifying mad scene from last year (I regret that I missed her final Giselles this season), where, beneath her insanity, you could see Giselle's anger and fear as she realizes she's going to die and her dreams are over. Or how Makarova would play with her phenomenal balances to show you the exact instants when she'd first make her ghostly self visible to Albrecht. Or how Kirkland did ... everything. Even Julie Kent would shame me for not better appreciating her with second acts of dramatic sophistication and power. In the end, I can't blame Liebeslieder for my want of engagement with Osipova; she's got a ways to go. I'm sorry, Natalia, but if you want to be a prima ballerina, you've got to run with the big dogs or stay on the porch.

I will say this for her; her technical acumen is astonishing. In the first act, she played masterfully with the "look, no hands" hoping diagonal at the end of the "Spessitseva" solo, and, more impressively, earlier in the same solo, she twice delivered beautiful, paired double pirouettes before sinking to her knee. Most ballerinas, even the famous ones, bail on the doubles; I can't remember time I saw one who didn't (certainly not my other two Giselles of the week). She's got ankle-to-the-ear extensions, but she wisely avoided hitting us over the head with her flexibility. Indeed, I wouldn't have minded if she'd lingered more in the deep penchee in Giselle's brutally hard second-act adagio solo. And her jumps are truly, "all that." Her soubresauts soared, and she repeatedly gave the impression of a puff of down on the wind. For Giselle's climactic backwards-hopping changements and entrechat quatres, she had Ormsby Wilkins slow the tempo way, way down so she could take her own sweet time about floating back to earth after each stupendous ascent. It's showboating, but of the highest artistry, and the Met audience went wild (alas, many of them were primed to cheer every time the great Russian ballerina pointed her toes). The first time I saw this particular trick was five or so years ago, with Irina Dvorovenko. This year, she wisely ceded the high-and-slow road to Osipova, opting instead to wow the audience with low-and-fast batterie. But more of Irina the Great later. The only woman I've seen with a jump that measures up to Osipova is Ashley Bouder, and her jump's entirely different: she doesn't float, she just goes up and stays up.

When Osipova's Giselle was called from the grave by Myrtha in Act II, her outside turns in attitude were staggeringly fast, and her big sisonnes and assemblés shot from a canon. For all the fireworks, I didn't get the slightest hint that her crazy turns might've been a continuation of the anguish of her mad scene, fresh in her newly-awakend ghostly memory. It's like she was the new kid on the block trying her best to impress the mean girls up the street.

I suppose my final score on Osipova would be "jump ten, acting seven," and I'd love to see more of her bravura.

It might've seemed like a great idea to team Osipova with David Hallberg, as they share the same strengths: Hallberg, too, has a phenomenal jump, nonpareil technical purity and feet most ballerinas would kill for. (Back to the death similes, I see; well, it IS Giselle.) Alas, Osipova's weaknesses, too, are Hallberg's. He's a less-convincing actor, and while Osipova's "go-to move" is furiously knitting her Slavic eyebrows, Hallberg has never met an intense emotion that couldn't be portrayed with bulging eyes. Unlike Osipova, Hallberg seems to be aware that his acting can leave something to be desired, and he'll use his magnificent line as often as possible to convey emotion. At Giselle's curtain, after she's gone back into the grave and he's strewn his lilies where he may, he lunges forward deeply on one knee reaching towards her grave in dismay, and our final image is of his extremities, stretched out in beautiful despair. He manages the not-inconsiderable feat of working his line constantly (of course he's the hero--look at his feet!), without ever seeming ostentatious or fussy (I wish I could say the same for Malakhov).

As Osipova acts, however energetically, by rote, and Hallberg tends to retreat behind the battlements of his physique and technique, it's not surprising that they synergistically destroy whatever chemistry they might've had together, at least when acting. But when neither has a foot on the ground, it's a different story; they're a pair of dancing anti-Antaeuses. I was a little puzzled that they deliberately underplayed the circling grand jetés with which he chases her in the first act. Most jumpers are all too happy to show off what they've got here. (I'll never forget, years ago, Peter Schaufuss chasing the sun and moon as much as Makarova; he made his point, to the audience and to her.) Hallberg and Osipova quite deliberately underplayed these jetés down to glissades at first, making each jump marginally larger. Did they want to tease us by saving the really big jumps for Act II, or were they planning on finishing the circle with a really huge jump that didn't quite work out? I felt I'd been scolded for wanting dessert before supper.

Oddly enough, I don't find myself saying of Osipova that her jump offsets her acting, but I do say that about Hallberg. Perhaps if the ballet were called Albrecht I'd feel differently. Regardless, I forgave Hallberg everything when, in the second act, he eschewed the traveling brisé volées introduced by Baryshnikov thirty-some years ago. Instead, he went resolutely old-school, marched downstage center, and flashed his feet through twenty-two or so of the most gorgeous entrechat sixes I've seen in my life: those legs, those long, curved calves, those prehensile arched soles almost kissing each other. Hallberg's in rare company: I recall Erik Bruhn, Fernando Bujones (magnificent) and perhaps Nureyev. Hallberg's are up there with the old films of Soloveyev.

So, while I enjoyed bits and pieces of this Giselle very much, overall it left me cold: a lot of work to do for some world-class soubresauts and entrechats.

As for the rest, for the second time this week I watched Veronika Part's Myrtha with increasing dread. Part is a superb, tremendous ballerina, but she has limitations, and she has to be cast correctly. She doesn't have a great jump; she never did, at least at ABT. She's gorgeous and statuesque in Myrtha's long adagio, but the stage gets as big as the Sahara when she graduates to Myrtha's allegro. In those Romantic-style jetés, with the back leg flipping up into attitude, she throws her front leg forward and leaps high vertically, but she's got no loft. The instant her back leg hits that attitude, boom!, her front leg's touching down, and then you realize she's hardly covered any ground at all. The beats in her assemblés battus got sketchier and sketchier until they were the merest flicker of her ankles (she was one of the ABT ballerinas who came to grief in Balanchine's Symphonie Concertante, with its extended entrechat sixes).

Despite its famous allegro solos, a dancer without a strong jump can be a fine Myrtha; after the Wilis' divertissement ends, all she has to do is stand in the corner miming "You! Here! Die!" Part does this supremely well. But La Sylphide? I hope I'm wrong, but I foresee an epic train wreck. Or perhaps Part was hoarding her jumps, although I don't think it works that way. Martine van Hamel, Kevin McKenzie's longtime partner, was a big, strong and sensuous Myrtha, one of the greatest in recent memory; she was also a well-received Sylphide. I've wondered if she and McKenzie see a bit of herself in Part, and are casting her as "another Van Hamel." Van Hamel, however, had a good jump; Part doesn't. I really hope I'm wrong about this.

Jared Williams sulked, spun and died mightily as Hilarion. Hee Seo and Blaine Hoven danced a sweet, if occasionally fuzzy, Peasant Pas de Deux. Hee Seo twice finished her very prettily danced solos with pirouettes into a deep fourth position, but each time had to adjust her front foot after she stopped. Anywhere else in her solos, it's a minor slip, not worth noticing, but there, it was painfully apparent. Twice. Hoven has a big jump and danced very cleanly, but didn't quite nail his final turn to the knee in his big solo. Carlos Lopez was a very earnest Wilfred, the squire whose good advice Albrecht ignores at the beginning of each act -- one symmetry among many between the two acts. Melanie Hamrick and Leann Underwood were soft, pretty and strong. I liked Underwood's big renverses as Zulma, but someone should tell these girls that Wilis are not Sylphs. (I miss Daria Pavlenko's smoldering, pissed-off Zulma from Hell.)

After a week of Giselles, ABT's orchestra sounded depressingly ragged, especially the overworked horns. There was even a horn flub when Hilarion blew on Albrecht's horn to summon back the hunting party.

I fear for poor Lowenskjold this week

Hallberg, Hoven, Lopez, Matthews, Osipova, Seo

On The Dnieper, Prodigal Son, Desir

2009-06-09T01:37:00.009-04:00

American Ballet Theater Prokofiev Celebration

Prodigal Son, Desir, On the Dnieper

June, 2009

Metropolitan Opera House

New York City

New York

I'm glad I waited until I saw On the Dnieper, ABT's new Ratmansky, twice before writing about it. After my first viewing, I would've said it was nice, but "too dancey," that Prokofiev's admittedly slight story gets lost in the peripatetic crowd. The outlines are there, and enough mimed interactions between the characters to convey the plot, but put the ballet in practice clothes at most times you'd be hard-pressed to know that there's actually a story. Even beautifully clothed, Dnieper carried little emotional impact, and putting it on the same program with the emotional sledgehammer of Balanchine's masterpiece, Prodigal Son, seemed unfortunate and unfair. I admired Dnieper more than I enjoyed it. This was after its premiere.

After a second viewing, with a less-stellar but more-cohesive cast, I began to appreciate the depth and subtlety with which Ratmansky's woven his storytelling into the warp and woof of his peripatetic choreography. This Dnieper runs deep and wide, and I regret now that I only saw it twice. Although he doesn't entirely eschew traditional "now-we-mime, now-we-dance" storytelling, for the most part he combines, quite brilliantly, a characters' outward behavior with their inner monologue. Ratmansky's not the first choreographer to use this method, but he's one of the most successful. I came to appreciate Ratmansky's restraint; he shows a lot, but he's sparing with the artistic highlighter. Rather than wallop us with the dramatic stomach-punches of Prodigal Son, he presents us with surprising richness, like James Joyce, and invites us to observe and discover.

Ratmansky follows the libretto conceived by Prokofiev and Serge Lifar for the ballet's original premiere in 1932, and it's a story both slight and familiar. A soldier, Sergei, returns to his home by the banks of the Dnieper. He's betrothed to Natalia, but finds himself falling in love with Olga, who's inconveniently betrothed to a nameless fiance. Olga falls for Sergei, who picks a fight with the fiance. Noble Natalia sees Sergei and Olga are truly in love, gives them her blessing as they run away together, and is left alone at the ballet's end to contemplate that virtue is its own reward.

Visually, the ballet's stunning. The curtain rises on Simon Pastukh's set of flowering cherry trees, cherry petals fall throughout the ballet, it seems, and magically carpet the stage. Sergei dances a long "I'm happy to be home" solo, at times skipping with joy, regarding his surroundings in glad recognition, or simply stopping to soak in the ambiance or kneeling to run some good Ukrainian dirt through his fingers. Marcelo Gomes, ABT's reigning dancer/actor par excellence, is a natural choice for Sergei, and he brings a wealth of inflection to Sergei's every motion; too much, perhaps. On the ballet's opening night, he verged on "Hamlet in the Cherry Orchard." I found myself preferring Gennady Saveliev's simpler, clearer Sergei. Saveliev's a beautifully pure and understated dancer, despite his penchant for tossing in the occasional five-forty. Last year his Bluebird was a thing of beauty, but ABT's audience, schooled to equate flash with artistry, rewarded him by sitting resolutely on their hands. Sergei could've been made for the third-cast Saveliev, and it's his most impressive role; he dances like an angel and acts neither too much nor too little.

In the two ballets that Ratmansky made for New York City Ballet, Russian Seasons and Concerto DSCH, he creates a powerful sense of community among his dancers, with the corps sometimes coequal to the leads, observing and commenting on them, or off in the corners living their own lives. In Dnieper, the inhabitants of Sergei's nameless village aren't dancing scenery, but an integral part of the story. This community's as much a character as any of the leads, as the villagers arrange and rearrange the scenery onstage (apparently on the Dnieper one is fond of picket fences), and they often retire to the sidelines to observe the action when other choreographers might've whisked them offstage. Ratmansky presents the life of the village as dance, and when Sergei arrives he's shown happily integrating himself into that dance as much as reconnecting with his lover and mother. He joins the village men in a dance that seems them holding him aloft and swinging him about, part hazing, part welcome to the returning hero.

Much of the ballet's first half is about those reconnections. Sergei finds the overjoyed Natalia, meets the dissatisfied and flirtateous Olga, her fiance and, most wonderfully, Olga's parents, danced by Martine van Hamel and Victor Barbee. I'm grateful to any choreographer who brings the great Van Hamel onstage, however peripherally. Ratmansky could have used younger dancers, but wisely chose these veterans; again, he's showing us a community. As Sergei's mother, ABT's ballet mistress, Georgina Parkinson, has a reunion with her son that was both touching and beautifully realized, with both Gomes and Saveliev. She's carried onstage, literally walking with her feet off the ground, by two stalwart peasant lads, and followed by the massed ensemble of the village's girls. Sergei embraces her and holds her upright as she comes near to swooning; he sinks to his knees at her feet, and, for an instant, braces one arm and, tilted almost sideways, starts to "walk" and pivot around his arm. You've seen this a million times in break dancing, and I thought, "oh no, Ratmansky's showing us he's trendy." But it was just an elegant and telling way for Sergei to rise to his feet and lift up his mother from behind. It wasn't jarring, superfluous or self-conscious; it was the right move at the right time.

Perhaps it's overstating the obvious, but you can't be a great choreographer without being great at putting steps together, and Ratmansky's great at putting steps together. Every step, every movement is a choice, and he chooses with great discernment and sophistication, and he's clever enough to extend the traditional ballet without hitting you on the head with his cleverness or collapsing into self-indulgence. As I've tried to imply in Dnieper, many of his steps do double-duty to tell the story. When Olga first gets up close to Sergei, he briefly lifts her, then she falls backwards into the arms of two fortunately nearby boys, who immediately pop her back upright and the ballet's intricacies continue without skipping a beat. The first time I saw this, with Paloma Herrera's Olga, it barely registered. It was one movement among many on that crowded stage to that beat of Prokofiev's. Later, with Simone Messmer's Olga, I suddenly realized, "She just met Sergei and swooned!" Usually in ballets, when one character becomes lovestruck at the sight of another, it's projected to the stars. There's nothing wrong with such emphases, but my eyes weren't ready to pick out the details of the many, many such little epiphanies Ratmansky's strewn about. In his various duets and solos for the leads, Ratmansky is more conventional about wedding emotion and movement, but I think one could write a treatise on how movement motifs echo among his characters. As Olga falls in love with Sergei, her solos start echoing some of his signature movements from his first solo: trembling little plies in an ever-deeping fourth position, a dreamy rise to releve, back leg sweeping into sweetly pure, low-held attitude. She's a dreamer, too, it seems. When the two dance together, they share more such echoes; they're literally growing together.

Dnieper's first section ends with general commotion as it's become clear that there's something brewing between Sergei and Olga. As the would-be lovers rush offstage, the ballet's most overtly emotional moment comes as Van Hamel and Parkinson trade evil hand gestures and eviler glares. The moment's a gift, and the pair put their decades of experience into each instant.

After a blackout and pause, it's nighttime among the cherry trees, as a huge moon shines among the stars on the Met's backdrop. Olga's in her white pre-wedding dress, and with her fiance, she accepts toasts, flower petals and cheers from the villagers, but soon things fall awry.

Sergei and Natalia both dancing little soliliquoys of despair, as the villagers form a long aisle between them, down which Olga and her fiance march after their betrothal. Knowing that Olga doesn't love him, the fiance accepts congratulations from the village girls, and dances an explosive, bitter solo. He runs off, and Olga dances one of anguish and despair. Ratmansky's imagery here becomes stunning, with Olga teetering from side to side, her indecision made manifest big, swooping pas de chats, or droopy steps into arabesques from side to side, her body held up as much by the swinging of her free leg as her melting backbone, and resolve, it seems. She reaches to her mother for strenght, then collapses. Here as elsewhere, Ratmansky deliberately refuses to milk the scene for easy emotional impact; Olga's dancing an intricate, difficult solo (all Olga's parts are deceptive; brutal technical challenges so undersold they're easy to miss).

Sergei and the fiance fight, but again, the community participates, as the village men line up, at times literally, behind one or the other, and take on the battle as their own. It's not just a scuffle between rivals; it's literally tearing the town apart. At times, the villagers pull Sergei and the fiance apart, as if to keep them from killing each other. The fiance runs off, but the fallen Sergei is kicked and pummeled by the fiance's faction. Natalia helps Sergei to his feet, and, recognizing the love between him and Olga, she blesses them as they bow before her, and sinks to the stage as they run off. Again, the first time I saw this ballet, the denouement seemed dry, choreography painted by numbers. On my second viewing, I appreciated Ratmansky's subtlety more, and found more meaning in the solos, particularly the soon-to-be-jilted fiance's tour de force, and anguished ones by both Olga and Natalia. Partly, I think, because the second viewing's cast was better, but also because my eyes had grown better acclimated to Ratmansky's subtle palette.

The first cast, as I've mentioned, had Gomes as Sergei and Herrera as Olga, with Veronika Part as Natalia and David Hallberg as the fiance. While Gomes imbued Sergei's movements with great emotional import, I think, in this case, less might've been more, as it would've let the emotional colors of Ratmansky's movements better shine through. Herrera tried mightily as Olga, but although she's a powerful dancer, and sweet and pretty, she's Gomes unfortunate complement: emotional depth seems entirely beyond her. With Messmer, Olga became an entirely different role. Veronika Part was a magnificent Natalia. She's good at being a self-sacrificing lover (as in her Nikiya), she's just plain gorgeous, and dances, if you'll pardon the cliche, with a heart as big as all of Russia. No offense to Herrera, but it's impossible to believe any man in his right mind would abandon Part's Natalia for her Olga. As the fiance, David Hallberg looked increasingly sulky and sullen, much like his Siegfried, showing he acts best, perhaps, with his marvelous feet.

Regarding the second cast I saw, I don't think you could find a better dancer for Sergei than Saveliev. There were moments when he appeared a bit underrehearsed, or perhaps Sergei's years on the front left him a bit out of step with his fellow townsmen. It mattered little to me compared with his lyrical style and understated yet clear acting. Simone Messmer's Olga was a dramatic tour de force, with all the fire and clarity that Herrera lacked. Messmer drew for us not only the shapes of Ratmansky's intricate steps, but their emotional freight. Maria Riccetto's Natalia was a beautifully realized portrait of a sweet girl one would believably dump for Messmer's passionate Olga. Eric Tamm also danced with fire and brilliance as the jilted fiance, and danced his second-scene solo as if chased by demons.

I suppose it speaks well for ABT's depth, or Ratmansky's perspicacity, that a third cast of soloists and corps dancers could outshine a first cast of vaunted principals. It is, however, food for thought, and I'd be very surprised if Messmer remained in the corps much longer. (I'd say the same for Tamm, but ABT's corps is bursting with gifted men of longer tenure.) As for On the Dnieper, go see it. At least twice.

As for the rest of the Prokofiev program, I saw a rough-around-the-edges Prodigal Son, with Herman Cornejo tearing up his family's Biblical suburb with brilliant aerial flights offset a bit by fist-poundings that verged on a two-year-old's tantrum. He did portray the Prodigal's creeping descent into despair convincingly, although his final knee-walk back to his father (adorned with a depressingly unconvincing fake beard) was depressingly light-weight compared with the many superb Prodigals of recent memory from New York City Ballet. Michele Wile's Siren was a brassy working girl from the trailer park next door, who clearly loved her work, but no part of it more than the many opportunities it gave her to caress her own inner thighs. She doesn't give the Siren's reaching-over-her-head arm gesture with much evil, triumphant oomph, but, overall, she weilded her sexuality as a happy scimitar to cut down the too-willing Cornejo. Their "let's make a pretzel" erotic duet could've used a bit more rehearsal, as she didn't slide down the seated Cornejo's shins from her perch on his raised knees so much as she just stepped off of them. I'm hoping with practice ABT will again get the hang of Prodigal as it did five years ago, but I doubt it will stay in the repertory long enough to matter.

If it might have been unfair to put On the Dnieper on the same bill with Prodigal Son, the same can't be said for James Kudelka's painful Desir, which is like the ugly girlfriend some pretty girls keep close at hand. Desir makes anything else on its bill look brilliant. In depicting couples dancing in the moonlight, he labors so mightily to avoid romantic cliches, or, worse, echoes of Jerome Robbins thunderous word on the subject, In the Night, that, despite Desir's romantic trappings (and name), he's made a non-romantic non-ballet. Kudelka reminds me of the old aphorism that if you try to make a product idiot-proof, the world will make a better idiot. In avoiding the obvious stupidities, Kudelka replaces them with stupider ones. The male ensemble seems far more interested in dancing with each other than with the women. When they're done dancing, they turn and walk offstage like non-dancers. This was cool in 1970. The women hold up the fronts of their skirts and dance little "they-might-be-jigs." He's the least musically astute choreographer I've seen, and the morning he made Desir he must've swallowed an extra helping of anti-musical pills. In Desir, the sexes are mostly interested in each other as fulcrums and levers and counterweights. If they notice each other it's for mechanical advantage or narcissistic self-reflection. The most passionate moments come in a swoopy, lift-entensive exercise in which the man's in love, but with only his partner's toe-shoed foot. And only her right one. By the time Kudelka deigns to show us a conventionally romantic duet, the curtain's about to fall, my bullshit detector's long since started ringing, and, at least in spirit, I've left the building. Fool me once, James...

Mark Morris' Romeo & Juliet, on Motifs of William Shakespeare

2009-06-05T20:44:00.007-04:00

Mark Morris' Romeo & Juliet, on Motifs of William Shakespeare

The Mark Morris Dance Group

May 15, 2009

The Rose Theater

Before I actually sat through it, Mark Morris' Romeo & Juliet, on Motifs of William Shakespeare, sounded just crazy enough to work. Morris' story would hearken back to Prokofiev's original 1936 vision for his famous ballet score: that the star-crossed lovers would not die, but escape Verona into some sort of celestial apotheosis, while the empty crypt inspires the Capulets and Montagues to kiss and make nice. Moreover, Morris would incorporate the latest musicological research to restore Prokofiev's score to the happy, pristine state in which it existed before Leonid Lavrovsky demanded change after change (including the "unhappy" ending) before the ballet's 1940 premiere with the Bolshoi (and Ulanova). Adding to the challenge, Morris would present the piece in small, intimate theaters, and eschew the usual crowds of Veronese townfolk, sticking instead to the smaller numbers of his own dance company.

I began suspecting the jig might be up when I read that the score, as reconstituted by the musicologist, Simon Morrison, restored twenty minutes of music which had been cut, and, while squirming with ennui for most of Morris' ensuing three-hour behemoth, I had ample time to consider that for all Prokofiev's bitching, Lavrovsky knew what he was doing. Do we really need ANOTHER divertissement after the endless Mandolin Dance before someone finally decides to take Juliet's pulse? One of the smartest things MacMillan did in his staging was to move the Mandolin Dance to the first act; it just slows down an already ponderous third act.

And, for all Morris' ingenuity, having Juliet wake up before Romeo can kill himself, so the lovers can run off to never land, just doesn't work. Instead of the great, familiar tragedy towards which the story's inexorably moving, it ends with a great big "oopsie!" Morris has the prissy Paris make a big deal of having his servants collect his wedding presents for Juliet before storming off in a huff, and Lords C and M seal their new relationship with a big buss, lip-to-lip, when it seems they'd more likely be looking to make a martyr out of Friar Laurence. I'm not saying there couldn't be a miraculous retelling of this story in which the lovers revolt against the tyranny of our expectations; it's just that this ain't it.

Trapped within Morris' three-hour behemoth is a pretty good forty-five-minute dance suite yearning to breathe free, but for every one of Morris' clever, even brilliant, strokes, there are hours, it seems, of repetitive, slow, pedestrian exposition. Indeed, endless exposition poisons Morris' work far more effectively than any potion. I found myself grumbling to Juliet, "goddamnit, if you're not going to take the poison already, I'm going to go up there and take it myself!" As with MacMillan's Mayerling, I felt it dreadfully unfair that characters onstage were provided with the means of their own deliverance, while the poor audience must live through the ballet's every moment, from curtain to welcome curtain. As Morris' lovely Juliet, Maile Okamura, flitted hither and yon in graphic fits of indecision, I thought of how brilliant MacMillan seems in comparison, and how respectful of Prokofiev, by having Juliet make up her mind while simply sitting on her bed as that magnificent music roils and crashes around her.

This R&J looks promising at the start, thanks to Allen Moyer's little jewel-box of a set, and Martin Pakledinaz’s authentic-looking Renaissance costumes. The two houses confront each other with rudely boisterous gestures that would probably get you knifed in present-day Verona, and the opening melee seems the work of more than Morris' handful of dancers. I particularly liked the various "party" dances at the Capulets; although in most productions the Capulets reek of menace, Morris' portrays their dances as formalized, though barely constrained, violence. The men strut about like peacocks, and often seem about to stop dancing and beat the crap out of each other. In their dances with women, the men grip them about the waist with one hand poised high overhead as if frozen in mid-blow; the women hold a hand above their faces as if to ward off the strike. It makes me hope there are some serous battered-woman shelters in Verona; clearly they're needed.

I've always enjoyed Morris' dancers, movers and shakers with vigor, wit and personality, and they give this piece their all, but even inspired dancing can't overcome Morris' vast stretches of tedium. (I'm thinking his artistic inspiration was "the check cleared.") The "crowd" scenes which begin the second act are interminable, with the Montagues and Capulets forced to endure endless, it seems, follow-the-leader processions led by the prince of Verona and his staff-thumping herald. While casting women as both Mercutio and Tybalt adds layers of sexual ambiguity more dreary than intriguing to their endless codpiece-slapping antics, I wonder if Morris made the choice more from necessity than artistry. It really doesn't work, partly because of their threadbare choreography--Morris' Mercutio prance about so shamelessly and repetitively, codpiece or no, I half-expected Tinkerbelle to come flying in from a wing. Moreover, the more emphatically these slight, lithe women tried to present themselves as manly braggarts, the worse it worked, and the thrusting of their hips and jaws made them into spitting images of Lucille Ball's famous phony stuntman, "Iron Man Carmichael," with daggers and codpieces instead of fake mustaches and chewing tobacco. Ball's impersonation was brilliant satire; Morris' use of travesti just weakens two key characters.

After the lovers sweet balcony-less balcony scene, and their eye-popping near-nude bedroom one, they, like everyone else, get sucked into the relentless maw of following Prokofiev's pacing. It seems literally to take Juliet an hour to quarrel with her parents, go to Friar Laurence, bring the poison home, and eventually, take it. And then, as I've mentioned, there's even more dancing than usual before someone realized that Juliet's stillness isn't simply because she's as bored to death as I am. While I admire Morris' respect for Prokofiev, and the score, played by the Orchestra of St. Lukes, sounded particularly heavenly, Morris bit off far more than even his genius could chew. Morris has a gift for bringing text to life, but when he's not following a text, he flails about badly here. In the lovers' first delicate contact (Noah Vinson was a sweet if not particularly ardent Romeo), you could practically hear "palm to palm is palmer's kiss," and Morris echoes the motif in the lovers' apotheosis, but to show us Romeo and Juliet in love forever, he doesn't have to SHOW us them in love forever.

Okamura, Vincent

Boris Eifman's Eugene Onegin

2009-06-01T15:55:00.007-04:00

Eugene Onegin

Eifman Ballet of St. Petersberg

May 29, 2009

City Center

New York City New York

Despite everything, I'm rather fond of Boris Eifman. Thanks to him, I'm immortalized in Reading Dance, Robert Gottlieb's massive compendium of dance writing, with a quote of this pithy, but apparently compelling, description from a ballet.co review: "kitsch masquerading as profundity." Kitsch masquerading as profundity can be great fun, and I've admired Eifman not because he's awful, but because he's unabashedly, zestfully, copiously so. My big disappointment with Musagéte, the deservedly short-lived "tribute" to Balanchine he made for New York City Ballet was that it wasn't awful enough. Facile, puerile, tasteless, wrong-headed and shallow (Alexandra Ansanelli as a paralyzed-before-your-eyes Tanaquil Le Clercq? Wendy Whalen as Mourka, the Dancing Cat?), but sadly sober, coming from the man who'd created such world-class, worse-than-Béjart kitsch like his Tchaikovsky, with its homoerotic duets between the composer and his mad, gay doppelganger and its gay orgy on the Queen of Spades' green felt card table (to the happy refrains of Capriccio Italien). Eifman lacks not for theatrical vision; it's just that he seldom uses it to look beyond the end of his nose.

Forgetting Eifman's propensity for wordiness, I arrived at City Center for The Eifman Ballet of St. Petersburg's Eugene Onegin with little spare time to do more than glance over his eight-page "Choreographer's Note" about the ballet. Alas, it didn't begin as memorably as his note for Tchaikovsky ("The great composer lies dying..."), and consisted mostly of translated excerpts from Pushkin's poem, chopped and arranged to provide "descriptions" of the various scenes of Eifman's episodic production. Eifman's set his story in the recent past, starting with the failed counterrevolution of 1991, making a half-hearted correlation, perhaps, between Tatyana's rise from rural simplicity to urban sophistication and Russia's transition from post-Soviet near-poverty to its current gilded age of petrodollars and oligarchy.

Eifman's set his Onegin to familiar bits of Tchaikovsky (but only the Waltz from his opera Eugene Onegin) interspersed with some truly dreadful metal-guitar rock by Alexander Sitkovetsky. Zinovy Margolin's set looks like a suspension-bridge squashed upstage, while Olga Schaishmelaschvili's and Pyotr Okunev's costumes quite sumptuously evoke everything from a zombie version of Hair to fin-de (last) siecle petrodollar designer trash. Circular things abound upstage: a projection of the moon, a round shining orb in which we see, briefly, TV images of late-century public turmoil, a ballet performance in slow-motion, and blurry scenes that I couldn't quite make out. Often a big, circular ring, spotted with near-blinding lights, would descend from the ceiling, serve as an enigmatic doorway for some of the characters, then ascend again. The first time I saw this I said to myself, "Oh, aliens! Please, let there be aliens.!" But, alas, Eifman failed me.

Near the ballet's beginning, we see Onegin (Oleg Gabushev), Lensky (Dmitry Fisher) and the Colonel (Sergei Volobuev) toasting each other with drunken enthusiasm. (It's what I've always imagined an Eifman brain-storming session to be, actually.) The Colonel slinks off, blinded, it seems, in the early-Nineties chaos, while Onegin and Lensky dance a contorted, twisty-pully duet that suggests that, at some level, they're more than "just friends." At one point one of them (I think Lensky) lies on his back while face-to-face, directly on top of him, the other does a handstand pressing his feet rather erectly towards the ceiling. In the lexicon of Eifman's near-copulatory male-female duets, this is shorthand for "someone's about to get plowed," and while Onegin and Lensky don't actually do it before our eyes, between the friends' smoldering stares and chest-slapping "roughhousing," they might as well have.

We meet Tatyana (Maria Abashova) and Olga (Natalia Povoroznyuk) in the country slapping at mosquitoes among the very pretty country girls of Eifman's corps. We know Tatyana and Olga are the stars because neither hides her hair beneath a scarf, and Olga's the slutty bad girl because her hair's in a sassy ponytail, while Tatyana (who likes to read) is in chaste pigtails. Onegin and Lensky saunter in off the bridge, and while Tatyana's taken with Onegin, Olga's taken by Lensky, and I was reminded how very taken Eifman is with crotches--crotches exposed in any number of novel and acrobatic ways, crotches rubbed against just about any part of another (or one's own) anatomy, crotches as the target of Eifman's signature (and perhaps patented) Flying Face Plant. In this, a man takes a huge flying leap face-forward across the stage, catching himself with his hands so he dives to graceful halt with his face ever so delicately kissing the happily available crotch of his supine lover. Eifman connoisseurs will remember the ardent face-plant bestowed upon the not-quite-Spessitseva heroine of Red Giselle by her Cheka-agent lover; here Lensky tries it out on Olga not long after they meet, and, as a bonus, Onegin plies the second-act Ghost of Lensky with a variant, in which Lensky's standing, and puts Onegin's head in such a tight thigh-lock that you might expect them to be pried apart with crowbars. At one of the innumerable entr'actes set in grim discos, Tatyana tries to escape the fricative crush by standing on a banquette; alas, she stands with her legs spread a bit wide, which means it's only a matter of time before a man sticks his head between her legs and carries her off lasciviously on his shoulders.

Tatyana also ends her letter-writing scene with some memorable crotch-talk. Spread on the floor, she mimes writing while an offstage voice narrates what I assume are the words of her letter. As she writes, she gets increasingly dreamy and twists and turns herself about. Her writhings end with the letter pinned between her legs so that she must delicately extricate it from her crotch before she seals it with a kiss. (She doesn't overtly rub the letter on her crotch; that would be gross.) It's hard to imagine how Onegin can decline a letter touched by such labial generosity, but, of course, he does. (For all Abashova's leggy lasciviousness, she's still a virgin compared with Anna Netrebko and her bedpost-humping aria with the Kirov opera a few years ago.)

Compared with Tchaikovsky's opera, Eifman's letter-writing scene is mercifully brief. Even briefer are Lensky's last moments. Onegin flirts with the "open-24-hours" Olga who's wearing a magnificently slutty red dress. Lensky takes exception, there's some manly pushing and shoving going on, then, Onegin knifes him. Poor guy didn't even get to pretend to have a farewell aria. In Eifman's scheme of things, while Lensky's clearly angry that Onegin's flirting with Olga, it's ambiguous of just whom he's really jealous. It seemed odd that Eifman would dispatch Lensky so quickly, but his design became clear in the second act, when Onegin has the afore-mentioned passionate duet with Lensky's bare-chested, hirsute ghost. Obviously, sexy-dead-gay Lensky is more worthy of stage time than alive-sulking-doomed Lensky.

After Lensky's death, Eifman flirts with greatness, but ultimately wimps out: On a bare, dark stage, Onegin mopes about and gnashes his teeth as helicopters and sirens lurk about on the soundtrack. Adding to the "police-drama" feel is a chalk outline of Lensky's body close by the righthand wings. Onegin approaches the outline with fulsome, contortionistic regret, then takes the huge cloak he's conveniently wearing and drapes it over the outline, as if tucking the dead Lensky into bed. Onegin lingers over the outline, and for an instant I thought Eifman was going to treat us to a love duet between Onegin and Lensky's outline, a depiction of gay necrophiliac love that would beat out David Bintley's unforgettable pas de deux between Edward II and the bag holding his lover's severed head. It would've been epic. Instead, Onegin rushes off in a snit. We do also get to see the very pretty, sultry and leggy Tatyana console the very pretty, sultry and leggy Olga, but, again, Eifman teases.

Along with the aforementioned necrophiliac encounter between Lensky and Onegin, Eifman devotes much of his second act to Tatyana's transformation from a sweet naive country girl to a full-blown nouveau-riche bitch. She's been picked up--literally--by the Colonel at a disco (see above for a description of his technique). To an overly long rendition of the Waltz from Tchaikovsky's opera, we see Tatyana primped, coiffed and polished while Eifman's spirited ensemble prances about in expensively vulgar black tie suits and evening dresses. After the transformation, she's buried in makeup and rhinestones, happily filling out a flimsy, trashy one-shouldered cocktail dress. All that's left is for her to tear up Onegin's letter, and for Onegin to die in a knife fight with the Colonel. The ballet ends with a figure dressed like Onegin, but not him, emoting to the heavens as he releases torn-up scraps of paper that fly up from his hands in the breeze from a hidden fan. More paper scraps fall down from above, and the curtain drops. Was this Pushkin? Did I care?

In his program notes, Eifman writes about how he likes to use the "classics" as a starting-off point for examining the Russian soul. Although sometimes the results can be endearingly wacky (for all its silliness, I enjoyed his recent The Seagull), more often he trashes his literary inspiration in service of tales that, despite their theatrical fecundity, depict little more than received wisdom, or, worse, reduce their characters to cutouts, however grandly Eifman wields his scissors. At the end, this Onegin has little to say about the Russian soul other than that the men are drunken, jealous, stupid (and dubiously closeted) louts, while the women are beautiful, sexually rapacious (or repressed sexual rapacious wannabees) and a little scary. Taken on its own merits, Eifman's raging eroticism is kind of fun; there are worse ways to spend one's evening than watching gorgeous, scantily-clad people getting it on to the strains of Tchaikovsky. Book him in one of those crazy nightclubs in Brighton Beach where the tables come pre-stocked with bottles of vodka, and I'm there.

NYCB: Allegro Brillante, Opus 19/The Dreamer, Swan Lake

2009-05-29T19:04:00.004-04:00

Allegro Brillante, Opus 19/The Dreamer, Swan Lake

May 28, 2009

New York City Ballet

David Koch Theater

New York City

New York

I try to avoid NYCB/ABT comparisons, as they're very different companies, but this spring they're asking for it by doing the same ballet, on the same night, even, so let's get on with it: City Ballet's Allegro Brillante blows ABT's away. ABT actually does a very fine job with Balanchine's tribute to American speed and Russian glamor, especially so considering they must sprint over the Metropolitan Opera House's huge stage, but City Ballet's is just better--clearer, cleaner, more musical and, last night, blessed with the stupendous debut of Tiler Peck. ABT's stars, Gillian Murphy and Paloma Herrera, ate up Allegro's killer ballerina role, but Peck's performance was more brilliant, yet also more delicate and finely shaded. Perhaps it should go without saying that Balanchine's home team dances his works better than any other, but recent years have shown us this isn't always the case.

I'll grant that ABT's dancers must dance larger and more forcefully in expanding Allegro over the Met's vastness, and so City Ballet's dancers have more leeway in both time and space with which to play, but that alone doesn't account for the differences in shading and presentation. City Ballet's dancers flew through Allegro in a breathless cascade, but they also took time to show us the choreography. For Peck and Amar Ramasar, also making a debut, and the four corps couples, the ballet's technical challenges weren't just hurdles to be overcome, but elements in the grander scheme of Balanchine's design. I've often faulted City Ballet for breaking Balanchine's overarching legato phrases into series of semi-disjointed diagonals, but this Allegro was a single uninterrupted stroke of Balanchine's pen, in motion even as the curtain rose on the circling couples and never resting until the final end-stop, when the ballerina's carried into the wings in that dramatic, two-armed overhead lift, and, as if pulled by the wake of her passage, each corps girls makes as if, perhaps, to follow her, but instead steps into a sudden arabesque, frozen, finally, in their partners' arms as Tchaikovsky's last chord's struck and the curtain falls. Balanchine knew drama.

I don't have the time or words to catalog Peck's excellencies. Technically she was rock-solid, especially in overcoming the ballet's greatest ballerina-hurdle, the two sets of twin, unsupported pirouettes, downstage center, from a deep, deep preparation in fourth. Each time she calmly dispateched a double, and then, even more calmly, a triple. As Balanchine mercilessly leaves no time at all between turns, if you make the slightest error in the first turn, you're screwed, as you either botch the second, or must make painfully visible adjustments--there's no hiding. Elsewhere, Ramasar swung her effortlessly through the repeated two-handed pivots, so clearly that you could see not only the tricks, but how they fit into Balanchine's larger scheme. Perhaps my favorite moment came when Peck escorted Ramasar to the wings as if saying, "You can take a break now. Us girls are going to have some fun." And fun they do have, in leaps both grand and intimate, before clearing off to let Ramasar and the men do their share of gamboling.

What struck me the most about Peck was what she didn't do. Where Murphy was an awesome combination of Wonder Woman and Supergirl, and Herrera played dazzling three-card monte with her feet, Peck just .. danced. Between her bravura punctuations, Peck showed us the calm at the center of this particular storm, encouraging us to stop and smell the choreographic flowers along with her. As for Ramasar, after years of ofsetting his slight technique with his winning smile, he's matured into a graceful partner with some convincing bravura of his own.

It's not often a debut brings the house down, or the audience seems to cheer as one when the curtain hits the stage. Peck deserved every yell, as did Ramasar and high-flying ensemble: Faye Arthurs, Lauren King, Rebecca Krohn and Ashley Laracey, and Adrain Danchig-Waring, Craig Hall, Austin Laurent and Christian Tworyanski. The men, particularly, had winged ankles. As usual, the pianist Nancy McDill had wings on her fingers.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: Wendy Whelan dances Robbins' Opus 19/The Dreamer better than Patricia McBride ever did. As the mystery woman conjured, perhaps, by the eponymous dreamer of Prokofiev's Violin Concerto No. 1, McBride was beautiful but an ornamental echo of Baryshnikov or Tomasson. Whelan, the Queen of the Adagios, isn't so pretty, but is a far stronger presence, emphasiing Robbins' intriguing ambiguity about this woman's nature. Is she the man's fantasy? His alter-ego? His soul? Robbins hints but never explains, and the ballet's final pose, with each resting their head in the other's hands in sleep, is one of Robbins' most arresting. The fluid way Robbins has his ensemble of six men and six women both augment and offset the leads is brilliantly understated, and prefigures the independent-minded corps in the works of Alexei Ratmansky.

Honestly, until I saw Whelan dance this ballet with the incomparable and greatly missed Peter Boal, I never appreciated what a magnificent ballet Robbins made. Boal was a very cerebral dreamer, and Whelan a sublime dream. In one of his best roles with City Ballet, Gonzalo Garcia's far more restive, tossing and turning where Boal elegantly revolved. It's one of Garcia's best roles here, resting deliberately or fortutiously on the slight uneasiness he still displays from time to time since he arrived at City Ballet. With Garcia, Whelan's more physical herself, stamping her feet and pushing and pulling Garcia about with whiffs of mania. And, oh, isn't Whelan dancing gorgeously this season? Freed of carrying the repertory on her shoulders, she's blossomed after years of looking the tired trouper. As in her luminous Chaconne from earlier this season, she was exquisite, and a dynamo, stepping up into a split-second double pirouette with her working foot flexed and parrallel with such lightning attack and lack of preparation it took my breath away. (She does that a lot.) Perhaps the less the Newspaper of Record takes from her dancing, the more she gives to the rest of us.

Arturo Delmoni was quite lovely playing the violin solo.

Maria Kowroski was an Odette who perhaps should've flown south last winter season, and I was hoping she'd be a bit more engaged in Balanchine's sweet one-act Swan Lake last night. She was and she wasn't, and I wonder if the fault last season was how I watched her. There's no romantic chemistry at all between her and Philip Neal's very proper Siegfried, and my binoculars showed her face set in a frozen sigh, if such a thing is possible. I suppose it was fitting that she was dancing in Alain Vaes' haunting ice-cave of a set. Before their pas de deux, but after her wing-flapping first encounter with Neal (no mime here), as the pair wait upstage behind a screen of dancing cygnettes, she recoils delicately at his arm on her waist as if he hadn't just been handling her far more intimately, and gazes down her nose at him, as if to say, "I beg you pardon, we haven't been properly introduced."

But when I put down the binoculars, it was another story, as her supremely flexible back, high-arching arabesques and attitudes with her foot almost wrapping around Neal's head told a different, and far more eloquent, story, with all the drama and grandeur her face lacked. Having grown up with it, I cherish this Swan Lake, with its oft-parodied parade of swans on the upstage conveyor belt, and the liberties Balanchine takes with Ivanov, and how he extends Ivanov's vision. I love how Balanchine makes the corps of cygnettes much more intimately involved in the action with Odette and Siegfried, echoing and enhancing their movements, or marshalling themselves in an elaborate fugue where Ivanov had them simply advance, or stand there. And there are the two wonderful dances Balanchine created, the Pas de Neuf and Valse Bluette. But for all Balanchine's inventions, this production also looks charmingly back to his days at the Mariinsky. He arranges his swans in elaborate friezes which could've come out of an old painted photograph of Imperial Russian ballet, and then there are the hunters. It really makes little sense for Siegfried, after he meets Odette for the second time, with her cowering swan maidens, to broadly mime "I won't shoot," when he clearly should be breaking up the massacre his fellow hunters are about to wreak on the swans. So I'm happy to see the hunters, and the logic, back onstage. And what better way for the hunters and cygnettes to reconcile than to have each hunter pose with two swans as Odette and Siegfried dance? A moment before the swans were almost dead meat, now they're posing in symetrical b-plus poses draped on each hunters shoulders. Ridiculous, pretty, and lovingly old-school. I love how Odette dives into a deep penchee to give Siegfried a farewell hug posed downstage center, in an exact quote from Ballet Imperial, and how nothing says "something big's about to happen" like twenty-nine swan-maidens bourreing madly to Tchaikovky's most thunderous crescendos, just before Von Rothbart spoils the party once and for all.

If Kowoski was more Ballerina Imperial than Odette, she was still luscious, and longtime corps veteran Dena Abergel was both sweet and wonderfully secure leading the Pas de Neuf, with its trick solo attitude turns and poses, just as Ellen Bar led the lilting Valse Bluette. Neal was a princely and proper Siegfried, and Henry Seth wielded Von Rothbart's wings and chicken-head with aplomb.

It's gratifying to see a nearly full orchestra for a weeknight program at City Ballet, when ABT's right around the corner. Perhaps it was a fluke of scheduling, or perhaps the word's getting out about just how well City Ballet dances these ever-popular ballets. Maybe we'll survive this recession after all.

Originally posted on ballet.co.uk

Another ABT Balanchine/Tchaikovsky Spectacular, May 20, 2009

2009-05-29T19:02:00.003-04:00

Allegro Brillante, Tchaikovsky Pas de Deux, Mozartiana, Theme and Variations
May 20, 2009
American Ballet Theatre
Metropolitan Opera House
New York City

ABT's been playing mix-and-match games with its stars throughout this weeklong bout of its Balanchine/Tchaikovsky Spectaculars. For better or worse, I'm seeing only two, with last Wednesday night's being the second. So, without further ado:

In Allegro Brillante, Paloma Herrera was paired with the up-and-coming Cory Stearns. Her Tuesday-night genius in Tchaikovsky Pas de Deux notwithstanding, I've always been wary of Herrera in Balanchine, or rather Herrera's musicality. Or lack thereof. She's always been a bit of a lost sheep in the Mozartean meadows of ABT's own Symphonie Concertante, and she's the only dancer I've seen capable of sleep-walking through Theme and Variations. However, this night she came to dance, and beautifully played Balanchine's melodies against Tchaikovsky's own. She ate up the ballerina challenges: her delicate, flashing footwork wasn't a surprise, but her confident rubato was, and a welcome one. Much of Allegro's about the nuanced relationship between the ballerina and her partner, as in the odd moments when she must chaine away from him to particularly dramatic piano cadenzas, then fly back to where she's left him, by the stage-left wing. She's not a fledgling leaving, then running back to the security of her nest, as each of the ballerina's little voyages is a demonstration of her puissance, as are her brutal unsupported triple pirouttes, so evokative of the ballerina's famously hard opening solo from Ballet Imperial. Herrera ate up every challenge, not with the irresistable force Gillian Murphy'd used the night before, but with an unexpectedly sweet reserve. Her footwork was a marvel, and her presentation seemed to flicker between that of the seasoned, experienced pro she's been for years, and the fresh young student who burst on the world scene straight from the School of American Ballet.

This was my first look at Stearns in a leading role. He might've been excused for taking it easy on himself, as that afternoon he'd filled in for the injured Herman Cornejo in Theme and Variations, but he danced full-out and courageously. With his thick, light-brown hair and slightly dark complexion, he looks a bit like a taller, slighter, younger Jose Manuel Carreno, and while he's doens't quite have Carreno's polish or bravura, he's quite happily at home with Balanchine's musical flights, and partnered Herrera brilliantly through the trickiest adagio bits, effortlessly pivoting Herrara into one deep penchee after another, holding her delicately by her wrists. Clearly Stearns is a rising star, and I expect to be seeing much more of him this season.

Tchaikovsky Pas de Deux paired last night's Theme couple, Michele Wiles and David Hallberg. They couldn't have been more different than last night's Herrera and Gomes, but still, what a treat. After years in which Wiles would push herself hard into an inevitable stumble (a microscopic one, but there nontheless), Wiles has mellowed into simply enjoying herself onstage, which she does quite well, playfully showing off for both the audience and Hallberg, who easily gathered her up into the adagio's lovely, tricky final lift, with her legs curved far above horizontal and her smiling face inches from the stage. I suppose I should just make a keyboard macro for writing about the long-legged Hallberg and the almost prehensile arch of feet, and how I'd happily just watch him practice his batterie. In bravura roles, Hallberg can still surprise with treats, like his awe-inspiring sisonnes to the side with developpes that send his foot shooting up like a bottle rocket, or his flying-carpet jetes. Such gorgeous legs and feet, stretched out in perfect opposition so high above the stage--Hallberg's a blond, isn't he? Sometimes my eyes have a hard time making it above his knees.

It's saddening to see how much of her once nonpareil technique Nina Ananiashvili has lost. Where she once floated through jumps with Bolshoi-derived nonchalence, she lunges, sketches and, where necessary, fakes us out. One of the smartest dancers I've ever seen, Ananiashvili's a master of direction and misdirection. If a jump's no longer pretty, she'll direct our eyes elsewhere--to her grand and tragic carriage, her soulful demeanor, her peerless musicality, her magician's hands. I'm going to miss her art, and her artifice. Angel Corella partnered her ably, as always, although some of quick pivots near the end of their long adagio could've been a bit smoother. Corella's quickness belied his newly chunky form spotlighted by his merciless white tights.

In Theme and Variations, Gillian Murphy's like a sports car with a lot under the hood, and curves to match. She subdues her technical hurdles with ease that speaks of great power in reserve (she likes to accelerate where other dancers coast), and her physique speaks of strength and health. She's a ballerina on a pedestal, but the pedestal's in a sports club. She's still properly regal and even haughty, but her athleticism gives her persona a refreshing modernity. She could hardly help but glow in the worshipful arms and gaze of Marcelo Gomes, who treats ballerinas like little miracles. Tall, dark and powerfully built, Gomes overcame the multiple double-tour/pirouette solo with as much grit as grace.

There was a time when it seemed odd to think of ABT performing so much Balanchine in a season, but, judging from the audience at the Met, Balanchine and Tchaikovsky still do well at the boxoffice, and ABT has shown it can deliver the goods more than respectably.

Originally posted on ballet.co.uk

ABT's Tchaikovsky/Balanchine Spectacular, May 19, 2009

2009-05-29T18:58:00.003-04:00

American Ballet Theatre
Allegro Brillante | Tchaikovsky pas de Deux | Mozartiana | Theme and Variations
New York City, Metropolitan Opera House
May 19, 2009

I spent a lot of time thinking about feet at American Ballet Theatre's Balanchine/Tchaikovsky program at the Met last night. Oh, and also about Balanchine and Tchaikovsky. It's nice to see ABT back, and back doing real choreography to real music (they'll make up for it next week with Le Corsaire).

First up were Allegro Brillante, and then Tchaikovsky Pas de Deux. Oddly enough, ABT still spells the composer's name "Tchaikovsky," rather than City Ballet's fussier, if perhaps more correct, "Tschaikovsky." Set to what would have been T(s)chaikovsky's Third Piano Concerto, Allegro looks very much like Ballet Imperial/Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto No. 2's baby sister. Lots of charging about, melodramatic chaine turns, and a ballerina-worshipping role that's not much short of Ballet Imperial's among Balanchine's "Tchaikovsky gut-busters." When ABT staged Ballet Imperial a few years ago, Gillian Murphy just ate up the technical difficulties, letting out of her demure shell a fierce and fearless, take-no-prisoners prima ballerina. I'd rather missed that gal, and was happy to see echoes of her as Murphy charged ahead. After all, it's supposed to be allegro. And brilliant. It was a treat seeing Murphy hop-scotching her way through Balanchine's tounge-twister footwork, or snapping smartly into a triple pirouette to be seamlessly collected by Ethan Stiefel, himself a bounder of great verve and brio, and quite oblivious to his reputation as an iffy partner. I particularly liked the way he scooped up the not-insubstantial Murphy into a big shoulder-sit.

However invigorating a curtain-raiser Allegro might be (and City Ballet thinks so, too, as Wednesday night both ABT and NYCB will begin their respective programs with it), it was not quite all joy in Tchaikovskyville. As much as I love Murphy's fleetness and the bottomless well of power she can dip into in a split second (and her fierce auburn hair), she was a bit unfortunate at her extremeties. I imagine her big smiles were meant to convey something of her ecstasy at mastering Balanchine's killer bout of ballerina-worship (or more likely to suck in enough air to match the ballet's killer pace), but at times I found myself thinking, "Who put the pebble in her toeshoes?" And about those toeshoes and feet: I've read up on Gaynor-Mindens, the controversial synthetic shoes of which Murphy was an early poster-girl, and supposedly they're available in varying degrees of stiffness. They don't have to be rock hard, as Murphy's appear to be. She seems hardly to roll through demi-pointe, but just blasts from flat foot to full pointe; it's like her feet are shiny pink on-off switches. Perhaps the stiffness of her Gaynors are also the cause of her never-quite-arched-enough feet. They're clearly a sturdy platform for Murphy's power, but they're not very pretty.

Overall, though, it was a winning show. David LaMarch kept ABT's orchestra blasting away at a brisker pace than was once ABT's norm for Balanchine, and the dancers--Murphy, Stiefel, and four couples--easily ate up the vastness of the Met's stage, so much deeper than the State Theater's. Indeed, the corps dancers were among ABT's strongest: Melanie Hamrick, Simone Messmer, Luciana Paris and Hee Seo, and Grant DeLong, Alexandre Hammoudi, Joseph Phillips and Eric Tamm.

Allegro ends with the danseur carrying off his ballerina in a high, dramatic lift, with one leg pointed to the heavens and her back practically draped over his shoulders, to the downstage right corner (where Balanchine was wont to observe his ballets). This is exactly how Tchaikovsky pas de Deux ends as well, and I thank ABT for making that association indelible in my mind. Tchai Pas is a famously fun bit of killer fluff, its iron armature happily disguised in flirty froufrou. As given by those two canny pros, Paloma Herrera and Marcelo Gomes, it was a little bravura masterpiece. I think Herrera's at her best when she can come to the theater, whip off a pas de deux, and head home before her attention wanders. I've often bemoaned how Balanchine's works cruelly uncover her iffy musicality, but not this night: her formidable technique was entirely at the service of her wit, and she dazzled.

As I've mentioned from time to time, Herrera's got the most beautiful feet in the business, and she uses them to devastating effect. All the delicacies I missed so in Murphy's footwork, Herrera displayed with dizzying abandon. Flexing, straightening, rolling through her toes, and ever-so-slightly over-arching as they bore her weight on pointe, Herrera's feet were as alive and breathing as Murphy's, encased in their Gaynors, weren't. When Herrera held a balance on pointe in fourth, it was as if she were presenting us with the crown jewels. Tchai Pas has a lot of tricky pointework that must look light, carefree and flirtateous; Herrera gave Balanchine's steps the ride of their lives. In one of her solos she does a simple releve on pointe while swinging her other leg into an attitude to the front, followed by a releve where the leg straightens to a high battement forward. Herrera turned this into a little symphony: her working foot, rolling into a prettily arched releve, was perfectly complemented by the curve of her sweetly presented working foot. These curves played against the rock-solid verticality of her balance, like a string pulling her upwards, and the soft, rising lilt of her arms. It was the kiss of spring becoming summer. Gomes, by far the most interesting and versatile of ABT's male principals, was a bounding and turning ham sandwich, but his charcuterie was all for Herrera's delectation; he loves dancing for us, but even more, this night, for her.

Veronika Part also has gorgeous feet, at the ends of sculpturally recurved legs. Everything about Part's gorgeous; she's an oasis of lush. I remember when she'd dance Mozartiana five with ABT five or so years ago, not long after she joined the company, her performances were heartbreaking. She'd start out in the Preghiera showing a soul as big as Russia, but back then she seemed always to be dancing in pain, and the ballet's technical intricacies would eventually overwhelm her. For all her shortcomings, she had a great Mozartiana in her that would eventually fight its way out, I hoped. Well, Part has whipped herself into shape, become one of ABT's most interesting women (and, finally, a principal dancer), and that great Mozartiana has fought its way out, and taken off for Rio, as it wasn't at the Met last night. Part was indeed beautiful, but sadly presentational. A few days ago I'd heard some critic friends going on about Part's penchant for overacting. I felt badly hearing it, as I haven't seen Part overact; instead she's shown a charming, Mariinskyish reserve. And last night it wasn't so much that Part overacted as she slipped into the unfortunate Russian habit of finding familiar, if inappropriate, analogs for Balanchine's roles in the traditional repertory.

Such a mind-set has brought us the spectacle of three soubrettish Muses vying for Apollo's favors, and last night, Part's very Lilac Fairyish Preghiera. Part was lovely, strong and confident, lacking only a wand and a purple spotlight. But when one prays, one is not usually also the figure of authority, or so I've been told. Later, while the variations she traded with Maxim Beloserkovsky are supposed to be happy (after all, this is Balanchine's vision of heaven where, of course, one dances to Tchaikovsky), Part's sauciness was a bit unsettling. Black dress, saucy, flirty? She was doing Mercedes. Usually I try not to be so prescriptive about what Mozartiana "should" be, as I've found that ballerinas can paint this role with the surprising colors of their own essence, and I've seen it danced beautifully by dancers as disparate as Farrell, Nichols, Ananiashvili and even Miranda Weese. Part wasn't looking within herself, but was taking the easy, familiar way out; only by Julie Kent's have I been more disappointed by a Mozartiana.

That's not to say she didn't contribute a lot of beautiful dancing: she did. I remember a tiny little balance in arabesque like a gasp of surprise, or how she sank into a deep, elongated plie in fourth with her arms held high over her head, melting to the side in a stunning cambre. I suppose that made her grins and moues all the more disappointing. Indeed, before Part's return for the variations, I'd been admiring the clean and sober dancing of the four corps girls in the minuet. They'd lost the Regional Ballet Smile which plagued ABT's earlier Mozartianas; but, alas, Part found it.

Beloserkovsky's long legs looked fine indeed in his filigree solos, if perhaps a bit rushed in places, and he partnered Part well in adagios from which, it seemed, some of the trickier bits might've gotten too softened. Carlos Lopez pranced merrily in the Gigue; I suppose it's flogging a dead horse to observe that this shouldn't be a short-guy happy dance (Ulbricht at City Ballet is a worse offender). In this incarnation, Rouben Ter-Arutunian's funereal black costumes have acquired an unfortunate whiff of the crypt for the big and little girls, as faded, criss-cross gold trim on the bodices hints both at skeletal ribs and cloth that's been buried far too long in the dirt. Surely in Balanchine's heaven there are drycleaners?

Balanchine was famously fond of vulgarity, so perhaps he would've loved Michele Wiles. Actually, last night, in Theme and Variations, I loved her. She's toned down the more outre bits of her onstage persona (imagine, a night at the ballet where the cheesy smile was NOT Wiles'), and she is making smarter choices about when to try for the big balance/turn/trick, and when to let the moment slide gracefully past. She doesn't do the Russian Ballerina Princess thing in Theme; she's more of a leggy, healthy All-American cheerleader-in-a-tiara, and next to the even leggier David Hallberg, she looked like a million blonde dollars (Hallberg looks like a millio n blond kroner). She was a spinning demon in her tricky first solo with the ever-changing spots, bounding through ABT's Alonso pas de chats rather than NYCB's Kirkland gargouillades, but such are the joys of tradition. As always, Hallberg's own legs and feet seemed among the wonders of the world, and I particularly liked his tidiness in second solo, bringing his feet together cleanly in fifth between the rondes de jambes en l'air sautes, rather than the sloppy failli that's so popular now. Oh, and his double-tour/pirouttes were also great fun, as well as that one enormous sissonne in the final polonaise. While Wiles once would've been outrageously flirty in the long adagio, last night she was simply happy. Despite my occasional gripes about the evening, so was I.

Originally posted on ballet.co.uk

2009-05-21T10:38:00.001-04:00

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2009-05-21T09:27:00.001-04:00

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2009-05-16T11:57:00.001-04:00

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2009-05-10T09:28:00.001-04:00

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Tiler Peck, Best Coppelia Ever

2009-05-04T08:07:00.006-04:00

Originally posted on ballet.co.uk.

Coppelia

April 30, 2009

New York City Ballet

David H. Koch Theater

New York City

New York

I'm expecting a bolt of lightning to strike me dead for betraying the memory of Patricia McBride, but I'll say it anyway: Tiler Peck is the greatest Swanilda I've seen. Last Thursday night she improved upon the performance that had impressed me so last winter. She's pretty, a canny actress, and she wields her formidable technique like a scalpel. Of course this "girl with the enamel eyes" should have that attribute adorned with eyelashes so thick you could use them to semaphore, and also, the only appropriate way for her to peer through a waist-high keyhole is to lock her legs, bend over at the waist and present the audience with her charmingly pert derriere. It's not that Peck's very, very pretty, and a great actress (she is), or that she's got formidable technical chops (she does), but how thoroughly she deploys each quality in service of the other.

In the first act, the opening mime, in which she sets the mise en scene for us audience members who can follow such things, was crystal-clear, with bemusement ("he's in love with her?"), exasperation ("How dare you ignore me!"), and carefree resignation ("Whatever. I'm gonna dance now.") following each other in happy progression. How can a dancer not look adorable banging her fists in anger against an invisible wall while bourreeing furiously?

Among the prettiness of Rouben Ter-Arutunian's designs, Delibes' ravishing score and the happy hubbub of Mazurka, Czardas, sundry friends and pink-tutued cherubs from SAB, I kept on noticing Peck's remarkable lightness on her feet. After she (adorably) investigates the commotion from Dr. Coppelius' workshop (through the aforementioned waist-high keyhole), she rushes back to the villagers at center stage to report on what she's seen, her excitement bubbling up into a sweet little, tippy-toe pas couru run. A glittering pas couru is an important arrow in every ballerina's quiver, but I've never before seen a dancer float so weightlessly, as if Peck were being carried aloft for an instant by the crest of her own soaring emotions. I barely noticed that her toes were touching the stage, let alone carrying her weight.

In Swanilda's third-act solos, between the technically hard bits, there's lots of surprisingly simple pointework: slow-motion chassés on pointe, dégagés into pas de bourrees. In other words, noodling around on pointe to Delibes' plucky melodies. For Megan Fairchild, City Ballet's ranking Swanilda, these patches can seem vast and dry as the Sahara. She's not especially musical or witty, and wanders in the wilderness when she must draw on these qualities more than her quiet yet formidable technique. That's not to say Fairchild's a bad actress--she's a fine Swanilda--but when it comes to expressing character and personality through her dancing, rather than layered atop it, she needs some work.

Not Peck. Again, her light-footedness was remarkable: her feet played teasingly with each other as much as with the music (Peck knows just how much rubato she can get away with at any moment, and chooses those moments, um, impeccably). Her dancing reminded me that the step's called a chassé because the back foot chases the front, and her bourrees became a witty dialog between left and right. Surmounting all was her supremely confident carriage and radiant smile. Swanilda should look pleased with herself by the third act; she's won all of her battles. In her "hard bits," Peck was brilliant: attitude turns changing from front to back with a saucy fillip through rétiré, rock solid multiple pirouettes of all descriptions, and, always, her delicate, precise and witty footwork. (Her traveling brisé volées in the first act were a particular treat.) Her second act, when she impersonates the living doll, Coppelia, was a triumph of biting characterization and bravura character-dancing.

Peck's Franz was Andrew Veyette. He plays the handsome, dim bumpkin to perfection--blissfully unaware that his infatuation with the doll Coppelia is ruining his chances with Swanilda, or that if you want to get the girl you probably shouldn't pin a living butterfly to your chest before her eyes because it makes a pretty button. His charm helped efface his occasional technical lapses, as he has not an ounce of épaulement and had trouble in the fiendish third-act solo originally from Balanchine's Sylvia Pas de Deux. He's not the first man to strain at those repeated double tours into second. But if his shoulders look as if they'd been injected with cement, at least it's lightweight epoxy--his bounding leaps fit perfectly with Franz's carefree nature. He made a fitting complement for Peck's polish, and handled her easily, for the most part, in their third-act adagio, although the setup for her downstage-right balances had more wobbly supporting hands than I like to see (actually, I've never seen these done better than by Benjamin Millepied and the dear departed Alexandra Ansanelli).

Adam Hendrickson, a bravura soloist when not in character roles, was a wistful Dr. Coppelius, more dreamer than would-be evil magician. Coppelia's friends were all prettily danced and acted. Ana Sophia Scheller led the pink-clad children in the glorious third-act waltz. Dena Abergel was a breath of fresh air as Prayer (too modest, perhaps, to trouble the almighty with a wish for a secure penchée for her solo's end), and Ashley Laracey a vibrant red Spinner. Andrews Sill kept the orchestra rolling merrily along, especially in the ever-lively first-act Mazurka and Czardas.

NYCB Opening Night Spring Season, April 28, 2009

2009-05-01T18:52:00.006-04:00

Among the recent commotion about Peter Martins' decision to release eleven corps dancers at the end the summer as opposed to trimming the deadwood in the principal ranks, it's too easy to overlook the simple fact that the company's been dancing superbly well lately. True, its new choreography has been dreary, and its principals can fall short of their illustrious predecessors, but two pillars of the company's foundation--the Balanchine repertory and the corps de ballet--are rock solid.

Martins' squeaky-clean, sharp-edged flavor of Balanchine isn't to everyone's taste, and often it's not to mine, but recent seasons by the Suzanne Farrell and Miami City Ballets have shown that Balanchine's works are strikingly amenable to multiple dialects, and perhaps it's possible to appreciate the virtues of Martins' well-oiled machine as well as the Seventies-styled musicality and lyricism of Farrell's Balanchine, or the raw, Sixties energy of Miami's Eddie Villella. While City Ballet's Balanchine can still be short on nuance, it's not for want of rehearsal. After a distressingly flat first night, Winter Season's Balanchine ballets sparkled. I don't think I've ever seen these ballets danced with such technical clarity, drill-corps precision and such straightforward, damn-the-torpedoes power, not even under Balanchine himself. Martins' instrument, the corps de ballet, is a dynamo; while a far cry from Balanchine's glamorous, mysterious Amazons, Martins' shorter, tidier girls are stronger and cleaner, and his boys are stunningly strong and adept (if you'd seen them in Stars and Stripes last winter, you might still be telling your friends of it, as I do mine).

You can see this power most plainly in Concerto Barocco, which opened the Spring Season's first program last Tuesday night. Once again its coveted eight corps roles are filled with the company's most senior dancers, rather than inexperienced and underrehearsed girls. For decades City Ballet's corps dancers have aspired to dance in Barocco. In finest Balanchinean style, the corps dancers interact with the leading couple very much like a third soloist, with steps that are dynamic, challenging and of a spiritual intensity. I'd cringe in recent years at the game, clueless kids Martins would toss onstage, but no longer. Tuesday's corps was divine: Marika Anderson, Faye Arthurs, Saskia Beskow, Alina Dronova, Lauren King, Ashley Laracey, Gretchen Smith and Stephanie Zungre. If they didn't have quite the Olympian simultaneity of last season's stunning Baroccos, they weren't far off. Watching their measures, grave and alacritous, under Fayçal Karoui's unflagging baton, was an unalloyed pleasure. (I've loved how forceful Barocco's become at City Ballet; it's easy to spot the moment of Edwin Denby's famous "deliberate and powerful plunge into a wound," as well as feel once again something of the power that inspired such unforgettable imagery.)

After seeing too many contestants at the recent Youth America Grand Prix stop dead at the apex of a balance in arabesque or attitude, I savored how much of Barocco's about slipping delicately through the vertical, rather than clinging desperately to it. In the first movement, there are signature repeated piqué attitudes from side to side. As each dancer rises on toe she rolls, ever so delicately, through her balance, then steps and repeats this to the other side. This arc--up, over, down--has the rise and fall of a living breath, growing and fading organically, rolling marvelously along with the inventions of Bach's melodies. There's also the beautiful passage where the principal women mirror each other as they turn towards, then away from each other, in demicontretemps stepping into arabesque, with a little demi plié that carries their momentum through past what's usually an end-stop of a pose; the extra breath of that little plié, the phrase that doesn't die when it might, complements, evokes and echoes the recurving lines of Bach's phrases, or countless Baroque painters.

I could go on for days about Barocco, but I'll just add that Tuesday night Wendy Whelan was in her finest, most lyrical form as the principal ballerina, a role she draws with the authority of a Rubens. Ellen Bar was both delicate and magisterial in her debut dancing the "second violin." A surprisingly sleeker and slimmer Albert Evans was Whelan's attentive and imperturbable partner. Perhaps the calls in the press for thinning City Ballet's expensive principals inspired the seldom-used Evans to whip himself into shape; perhaps he'll find his way back to his former promise.

Next in this all-Balanchine treat of an evening came Ana Sophia Scheller and Gonzalo Garcia in that little killer bon-bon, Tschaikovsky pas de Deux. Sheller pairs well with Garcia. She's short enough for him to handle easily, and her unforced bubbly sweetness draws him out of his frozen-smiled, stiff persona. Scheller's among the crop of young City Ballet girls who have blossomed in Ashley Bouder's long absences this year; last night she seemed the happiest ballerina on earth, and danced that way. Garcia handled her with gentlemanly aplomb. Although Balanchine was known to change the male part of Tschai Pas to suit its dancer of the moment, Garcia's solo and coda looked distressingly unfamiliar: he even left out the big renversés sautés in the coda. His brilliance was casually charming but veering towards the cavalier: he's still allergic to keeping his leg horizontal in his otherwise flashy pirouettes a la seconde.

For me, the three highlights of Winter season were performances by women: Ashley Bouder's phenomenal debut in Theme and Variations, Sara Mearns' in Slaughter on Tenth Avenue, and Janie Taylor's return to La Valse after far too long an absence. Tuesday night, Taylor and Sebastien Marcovici reprised the doomed debutante and her hapless beau. La Valse is deliciously creepy; never more so than with Taylor, City Ballet's poster girl for fey. Attenuated and pale, she seems only partly of this earth; when she first appears at the last of Ravel's Valses Nobles et Sentimentales which open the ballet before La Valse proper, she slowly lunges forward, reaching so far forward towards something indefinable she's practically horizontal, before yanking herself backwards and upright, staring at each hand in turn, as if in surprise that they, and she, were still here. When she meets the poetically stoic Marcovici, their mimed "dialog" hints at that of Odette and Siegfried, turned on its head. Marcovici, resplendent in black tights, tails and white gloves (if ever there were a "glove" ballet, it's La Valse) elegantly spreads his arms as if asking "who are you, what are you doing here?" Unlike Odette, Marcovici's inamorata in white spreads her hands in an elegant shrug, then sketches a waltz step, as if to sigh "Me? I'm bored. But maybe I'll go dance." Or that might be what they're saying; a beauty of La Valse is its ambiguity. Does the girl really want to die? Is she in love with her partner? Does she care about anything?

What thrills me with Taylor is how she can be frighteningly moving and contradictory; on the surface, her La Valse girl affects a world-weary boredom. But she's anything but numb; beneath her shell she's dying of emotional hunger, and her desperation to connect at first drives her into her beau's arms, and then is used by Death (along with her vanity) to ensnare her. (Should Taylor ever dance Giselle, she'd break your heart in the second act by showing you both the ghost and the girl trapped inside.) With Taylor, La Valse isn't simply a tale of a good girl done wrong by that dastardly Mr. Death, or of a jaded thrillseeker's comeuppance. Taylor elevates La Valse to great tragedy, particularly so this night, as she and Marcovici connected emotionally as the girl and her beau seldom do; she looked genuinely happy with him, and perhaps he might've been her salvation.

I was mesmerized by Taylor's last waltz with Philip Neal's death figure. At first she seemed entirely enthralled, staring in his eyes, her face a mask. As Ravel's macabre waltz throbbed faster and faster, she grew wilder and more fearful. Did she throw her black corsage at Marcovici's feet as a last act of defiance, or a final submission to her fate? Even though I knew it was coming, her death still shocked. Taylor's La Valse is one of the finest things I've seen on the stage; do go buy tickets. Oh, the other dancers were superb, too.

The evening closed with the mammoth Symphony in Three Movements. Here, the sixteen young corps girls in white, who form the celebrated diagonal which begins and ends the first movement perfectly complemented Barocco's eight veterans in white, wheeling through their big formations with near-military precision (and, oh! those flying ponytails!). As the lead ballerina role requires athleticism, strong technique and unambiguity more than sophisticated musicality, it's a perfect role for Abi Stafford--perhaps the finest in her repertory. Stafford certainly looked to be having a grand time slicing through the gyring girls in white; I know I did watching her. Her straightforward presentation worked surprisingly well in the long, oddly Asian-looking central duet. She was partnered beautifully by Jared Angle; a self-effacing cavalier in a ballet which needs personality more than perfection. As the lead couple, Daniel Ulbricht easily out-jumped Stirling Hyltin, while big, strong Savannah Lowery shone brightly next to Adrian Danchig-Waring's elegance.

2009-04-28T18:16:00.001-04:00

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2009-04-18T17:32:00.001-04:00

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2009-04-18T15:33:00.001-04:00

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Alexander is fading

2009-04-14T17:23:00.000-04:00

It looks like poor Alexander is coming down the home stretch.

I'd somehow hoped that I could keep him going indefinitely with steroids and phenobarbital, but of course that was just wishing for the moon. Over the past few weeks he's gotten thinner and thinner, although he eats constantly. His coat, which was once a magnificent orange, has gotten rough and disheveled. Lately he's returned with a vengeance to his pacing about the apartment. He paces around the livingroom, stopping briefly to drink water, if he finds himself in the vicinity of the water dish, or take a bite or two of food, if he comes upon a bowl. His attention span is getting shorter and shorter, except when he's doing something obsessive, like his pacing, or his endless licking of the carpet. This behavior started long before his first seizure. Perhaps it's a clue to what's killing him; perhaps not. I'll certainly berate myself for not having investigated this possibility sooner. I've got quite a list of mistakes and errors I've made in the course of Alexander's illness, and one more won't make the burden any more insupportable.

The other obsessive thing Alexander does is, in a way, the most upsetting for me. When he's up and about, he follows my footsteps around like he's homing in on a beacon. Maybe some of the synapses left firing in his brain associate footsteps with food, or maybe, since he's blind, he's reverting to helpless-kitten behavior, and trying to get close to his "mommy" for sustenance. He does this so manically that, no matter how careful I try to be, I'll often stumble over him, as he likes to come up on me from behind and curl around in front of my feet before I even know he's there.

After I've fed him, he usually sleeps for a long time, and I'm happy because at least he looks peaceful. I think a lot of it must be the phenobarbital, which probably knocks him out a bit. It also makes him hungry almost all the time, according to his vet. I joke that he's the feline equivalent of Christina in "Christina's World," as he spends much of this time flopped on the carpet in a similar pose. But Christina sees the world she can't inhabit in other than her imagination; Alexander's still ambulatory and could be in his world, but it's almost entirely gone. He can't see, he's lost the sensation in parts of his body (when I scratch him behind his ears, I have to make sure I use the right one because he doesn't react when I scratch behind his left). Perhaps he follows me because it's the only sensory stimulus he has, and he's trying to find what he'll never regain.

I got up just now and the cats, Alexander along with Sophie and Masha, all decided it was dinnertime. Sucker that I am, I gave in and set out some catfood remnants for them. Alexander used to attack each bowl ravenously, whether another cat was there or not. Now he finds a bowl, takes a bite or two, then wanders away. I've put Masha away in the bedroom, so I'm going to leave some food out as long as Alexander's interested in eating. Right now he's doing a little Grand Tour of the living room. He'll take a few bites of food, wander over to the TV, stop to lick the rug, circle back to the water dish and have a drink, then back to the food dish. Again and again. He still grooms himself, which I've always considered a good sign. But I also look at Alexander the broken shards of a cat I loved: it's as if Alexander's gone, and all that's left are his habits and instincts. Alexander has left the building.

Tonight I'm going to carry him into bed with me. It wasn't that long ago that he'd occasionally surprise me by jumping on the bed when I called him, or to complain about the lateness of breakfast. I don't think he'll jump anymore, but he does hear me call him, still. When I cuddle him, he's tense and wants to go, but as I scratch behind his ears and under his chin, he slowly relaxes, and I feel the tautness leave his muscles. Sometimes he purrs like a kitten, but he always goes to sleep next to me (until a noise or a dream wakes him, and he's off to wherever he goes when he's pacing the apartment).

Yes, I know. Soon I'll be holding him for a deeper sleep. I don't want to think about it. It's a kindness for them, but hell on us.

the first pussywillow

2009-03-03T17:05:00.001-05:00

Princess Masha and her pussywillow paws

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2009-03-01T22:21:00.001-05:00

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2009-02-28T16:18:00.001-05:00

the bedroom
so much roomier

another angle

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2009-02-27T07:11:00.001-05:00

Posted via Pixelpipe.

omg

2009-02-25T20:52:00.000-05:00

Mearns in Slaughter. Omg

Be careful what you twitter.

2009-02-20T03:42:00.001-05:00

So I was all excited when I found out that this Russian ballerina from San Francisco Ballet had started following me on Twitter. Wow. I must be hot stuff. Then I looked at the tweets of the thousand-odd folks she was following (well, a few of them) and realized she must have some sort of Twitter-bot that automatically starts following folks who've used the word "ballet" in a tweet, as I'd just done. Bummer. And here I was thinking I was special.

Off to City Ballet tonight

2009-02-20T03:30:00.003-05:00

Barocco and La Bouder in Theme. And Oltremare.

Uploaded - 2\18\09

2009-02-20T03:30:00.001-05:00

It's been awhile

2009-02-20T03:30:00.000-05:00

I've been thinking about what to do with this blog, and I'm going to try to turn it into a ballet-only one. If I decided to waste my time with an online journal thingie, I'll let you know. Maybe.

Mobile Blogging from here.

Poor, blind Alexander

2008-08-24T00:27:00.003-04:00

After a calm week or so, it began to look as if Alexander had hit a calm stretch, he had three seizures in a day. I held him through his thrashing, paralysis and wailing, and when he recovered from his last one, it soon became clear that he'd lost the vision in his right eye -- he'd lost it in the left many months ago. So the poor guy is blind. It was heart-rending to watch him struggle to accept and adjust to what had happened to him. I've taken to picking him up and carrying him to the bed with me, and holding him and scratching him behind his ears. He now adores being touched even more than before; he seems almost desperate to make some connection to the outside world.

Or seemed. Animals are very adaptable, and he's adjusted to his new condition with gratifying quickness. He knows his way around the apartment perfectly well, and he has his whiskers and perhaps he'll be ok..

Alexander is hanging in there....

2008-08-11T14:26:00.002-04:00

Perhaps you'll see him on his webcam.

It's a sunny day...

2008-07-31T11:00:00.001-04:00

And I'm heading out. Finally.

I'm worried about Alexander.....

2008-07-30T19:05:00.001-04:00

Alexander has been hanging in there amazingly well, all things considered. There was awhile this summer it seemed like he was almost his old self, although a bit subdued. He hadn't had a seizure for a week or so, and I was beginning to think maybe he doesn't have a brain tumor after all. I men, the poor guy had his first seizure in October, and now it's July. If this is kitty brain cancer, it's moving pretty damn slow. I mean, he doesn't have a big brain, even for a cat; how much can something grow in there?

Over the past few days, he's had several really severe seizures. They're heartbreaking to see. He looks confused, then starts turning to his right, with his head twisted over his right shoulder, tighter and tighter, and I can see he's got an alarmed look on his face. Then he starts shaking and twisting uncontrollably, stretched out sideways on the floor, and sometimes flopping about so violently he knocks over the water dish. If he's really wild I try to hold him. After a wrenching minute or two, he stops convulsing, but the worst is about to start. He lies stretched out, unable to move at all, and, perhaps, unable to see, either. (I'm pretty sure he's blind in one eye now.)

Then, still paralyzed, he emits a horrifying wail, and repeats it a few times. I try to hold him gently and talk to him softly. I've learned if I make any sudden noises, or touch him abruptly, he abruptly twitches and shakes, as if I'd startled him. I think it's his fried nervous system, unable to cope with any stimulus.

Eventually, he relaxes, and pulls himself up on his wobbly feet. One front leg limps a bit, but that soon fades.

He's still a sweetie, although there doesn't seem to be much left of the Alexander personality I loved. Sophie has stopped curling up with him, and keeps to herself, or comes to me to be petted (rarely). Alexander and Sophie were such constant companions -- I have scores of pictures of them huddled together like lovers -- it tears me up to see them sundered this way. I'm not sure how much Alexander cared for Sophie. I think he tolerated her more than anything else, and I hope he doesn't feel the loss. The cats are probably beyong caring, but it saddens me.

After a seizure, Alexander shows the alarming behavior he had back in February, pacing restlessly and ceaselessly about the apartment. He doesn't get stuck behind furniture, though, and he eventually lies down on a rug or the floor and sleeps. Often I'll find him in the bathroom, napping on one of the cotton mats I have covering the floor there, or the heart-shaped hook rug in the middle of the living room (when Masha isn't hogging it).

I am afraid that maybe the end is near, but not yet. Alexander still grooms himself, and he's still a big, handsome orange fellow. If anything, he's gained weight and looks filled out and not at all skeletal. I've found that when a cat stops grooming, it's pretty much given up. Alexander might be Alzheimer's Cat, but he still keeps himself clean and uses the litter, and he still enjoys his food. He follows me everywhere when he's hungry, and, because he's not really aware of stuff in his blind spots, he usually ends up tripping me. Sometimes I feel like he's obsessed with getting underfoot, and I yell at him, but I always feel badly afterwards.

He still loves milk, as much as he did when I first got him years ago, and thought he was fascinated with how I made tea, until I realized it was the milk he was after.

As long as he can take care of himself, and enjoys being petted (he loves affection more than ever, I think), and enjoys eating, I'll do whatever I can to keep him going. He must be on his fourteenth or fifteenth life now. It's been nine months since his terrifying first seizure, and five months since I was on the verge of putting him down in February. He can't realize it, but I feel happy that I could give him these extra months of being a cat, even if he's often a bit zoned out. I know he'd rather stick around nagging me for food and drinking milk as long as possible. Of course, the last, hardest gift we must give our pets is deciding it's time for their last suffering to end. I've been there dozens of times with the cats I've rescued and adopted, and it never gets easier. Every time I hear his awful wails at the end of his seizures I torment myself with the thought I've kept him in pain too long, but then he's up and about and being his usual pill of a self.

I remember what he used to be, though, the magnificent mouser who'd always position himself so he could Keep an Eye on Things, where he had the best view of every corner of the apartment. Back when mice were a problem in this building he was a demon to them, and I felt privileged to have him. I still do, and hope I can make his last months as comfortable as he's made these past years so happy for me.

It's too darn hot...

2008-06-07T14:39:00.001-04:00

I'm so glad I don't have a ballet to go to this afternoon. Or anything. I'm huddling by the a/c...

Kirov's Balanchine Program

2008-04-20T13:32:00.004-04:00

Originally posted on Ballet.co.

Serenade, Rubies, Ballet Imperial
April 19, 2008
The Kirov Ballet
City Center Theater
New York City
New York

Coming on the last weekend of the Kirov's long and fascinating season at City Center, the all-Balanchine program was, for me, a long-anticipated dessert, and, apparently, not just for me, as it seemed le toute New York was in the audience, or at least New York's ballet component, with New York City Ballet and American Ballet Theatre much in evidence.

I remember the first time I'd seen the Kirov perform an all-Balanchine program, at the Met in 1999 (not long after it entered the Kirov repertory in 1998), I'd been deeply disappointed. Musically, stylistially and dramatically, they just didn't seem to get Serenade, and the vaunted corps seemed comfortable only when it could translate Balanchine's ever-shifting formations into something more familiar -- bevies of swans, sylphs or wilis, perhaps -- but hardly the alacritous, mysterious ladies in blue for which I'd hoped. (It didn't help that the Kirov seemed oddly cramped in fitting Serenade on the Met's massive stage. I'll never forget Maya Dumchenko slamming head-on into another soloist in the Elegie; was there not enough room?) While, in 2002, the company did a bang-up job with Emeralds and Diamonds in Jewels, Rubies, except for the wonderfully jazzy Diana Vishneva, was more problematic; Russians can dance the heck out of a mazurka or czardas, but they do jazziness like the apocryphal cow on ice.

I'm going to miss the Kirov's magnificent orchestra. Conducted here by Mikhail Agrest, those piercing, descending notes of Tchaikovsky's "Serenade for Strings" never sounded richer, or more poignant. After the curtain rose on the ensemble pose, I had some trepidation. Would Serenade become a dry demonstration of the Kirov dancer's excellent port de bras, the steps done to empty perfection? Well, no. The opening moments, with every dancer curving her arm from that familiar outstretching, overhead pose to the sadder, introspective curl across her face, had a resigned poignancy, and any worries I might've had about the dancers "getting it" were blown away as soon as they all flew into breathless motion. The skirts of Karinska's dresses billowed as beautifully as ever, and the dancers' uniformity of style and almost-ostentatious correctness of placement only reinforced and multiplied the power of each grouping, formation and phrase. They don't move with quite the freedom and unbounded energy evident, even now, in City Ballet's dancing, but they have certainly learned how to dance on top of the beat, and with power and commitment pulsing beneath their hypnotic correctness. Unlike in 1999, the dancers' energy wasn't shackled, but beautifully channeled; beneath the lovely curves of their arms and backs, these dancers practically thrummed with power.

Most unshackled of all was Alina Somova's Waltz Girl. After being turned off by her gauche and vulgar reduction of her first Bayadere into little more than an excuse to show off her extensions and other technical tricks, I found myself completely overwhelmed by her performances in the season's second week; she was just plain brilliant in her second Bayadere, and in Etudes. I don't often speak for Balanchine, but I feel safe in saying he'd have loved Somova's coltish energy, her artless, almost instinctual technical brilliance (where did all that affectation vanish to?), and, perhaps most of all, her sheer hunger and voracity in movement. She dances like a starving woman at a buffet -- a bit like the young Darci Kistler -- and if she's sometimes coarse and vulgar (qualities which stand out like a sore thumb against the Kirov's usual propriety), well, Balanchine was famously fond of the occasional vulgarity, and would sometimes exhort his dancers to be more vulgar. He didn't have much use for shrinking violets. I don't know whether Balanchine would've forgiven Somova her peroxide-blonde hair, her rings and those trailer-trash nail extensions, but I did.

I found particularly entrancing her waltz with Danila Korsuntsev -- I loved the energy of her legs, swinging freely into sharply angled arabesques as he swung her around, those big skirts billowing and following her like a third dancer. Somova's extensions are so naturally high, it seems her natural shape is a diamond or chevron. However actute and extreme her line might seem, for her it's quite natural: it's her world, and welcome to it. At the end of the Russian dance, when the corps reassembles for the restatement of the opening theme, Somova's echoing of that opening hand gesture, while held in Korsuntsev's arms, really took my breath away. You might not like her feet or arms, but there's no disputing that she has ferocious turnout, and the grand progression of her developpé echoed and augmented her arm as it reached skyward before folding back on her averted face. In the Elegie, Somova rather plunged herself into the implied drama, especially as Alexander Sergeev flipped her almost-supine body before lowering her to the stage; perhaps it was a bit naive how Somova echoed Tchaikovsky's chords with her outflung arms, but left no doubt she was feeling the music, and the moment. (Saturday night, Kondaurova made a point of carefully holding arms in a perfect fifth above her head, even as she was spun and lowered; I adore her, but she's not a "swept-away-by-the-music" kind of girl.)

The lovely Ekaterina Osmolkina couldn't be more different than Somova; in her delicacy, refinement and understated perfection, Osmolkina's the embodiment of the Kirov/Mariinsky tradition: everything that Somova's not. Osmolkina's fabulous lightness and ballon, and her casually brilliant pirouettes, let her breeze through the Russian Girl's grande and petite allegros. I might've liked more sharpness in her attack, but that's not Osmolkina's style; even in a warhorse like Diana and Acteon she'd never sell her prowess, just present it as part of a bouquet we're free to admire, or not, should we be so lacking in discernment. She invites us to notice; but never insists. As Russian girls go, this one was old-school Mariinsky indeed. It's hard to praise enough Ekatarina Kondaurova's Dark Angel figure (and wasn't it sweet that the program listed these traditional names for the women's roles?). A tall, powerfully built redhead, she moves with a sculptural strength that comes most strongly through the wingspan of her long arms and beautiful shoulders. (Not that her legs aren't also beautiful tools; it's that Kondaurava's language emerges most strongly from her stunning upper body.) There were some tense moments at her appearance in the Elegie, as the otherwise-graceful Sergeev, while kneeling at her feet and turning her leg through those magisterial promenades in arabesque, got so entangled in her skirts that he looked about to strangle himelf, and, worse, push Kondaurova off her leg. Fortunately, she managed to keep her balance, saving him from what might've been an messy, onstage fate (or perhaps she'd wanted to kill him herself after the curtain). Later, when Sergeev stood above Somova's body, holding her upraised arm against his chest, he struck a beautiful contrapposto pose which might've been sculpted by Michaelangelo. Entirely unexpected, his pose was probably less the result of coaching for this than of decades of training which make the body naturally seek such classical harmony. Standing thus might seem ostentatious in an American-trained dancer; in a Kirov dancer it was just right, and inevitably so.

As staged by Francia Russell and Karin von Aroldingen, via the Balanchine Trust, this Serenade leaves the dancers' hair up in the Elegie, rather than having their unpinned tresses flow freely, as Balanchine implemented in the early Seventies. I'm neutral on the issue of which is better. I like the clarity of the "hair-up" version, but I also appreciate the Romantic sensuality Balanchine found in clouds of free-flying hair. Perhaps, after having the girls in the mysterious opening of Suite No. 3 let their hair down, he decided he liked the effect so much he'd use it in Serenade, too. Regardless; I found the Kirov's Elegie to be quite moving, although, as with the Russian girl, I missed a bit more attack as the girls would hurl themselves at Sergeev.

Overall, though, my reaction to this Serenade was much the same as to the Kirov's opening-night Raymonda: "Wow."

To a chorus of sighs and moans, it was announced that Diana Vishneva would be replaced by Olesia Novikova in Rubies. It was a very sweet and charming ballet the Kirov presented, but hardly the Rubies I know. Endearing and perky, Novikova looked playfully athletic and adolescent, while Andrian Fadeev was clean and powerful in both his leaps and partnering of Novikova in the ever-cantilevered pas de deux. Kondaurova, in the big-girl role, fairly loomed over the ballet like a commanding goddess. She was quite wonderful -- Lilac Fairy and Myrtha all wrapped in one. (She did push a bit too hard in the last of her big, unsupported penchées, but easily turned her falling out of it into a "I-meant-to-do-that" run into the wings.) The ensemble danced with wonderful clarity -- the men in their big, booming sissones and leaps chasing Fadeev about in his playful, airborne solo, and the women in clear, shiny vermillion ranks. I saw none of the lack of ease in the jazzier bits which depressed me so back in 2002; it's not because the dancers were better at it, but that they coped with the jazziness by, well, ignoring it. I suppose the Kirov training leaves little room for the little syncopations, off-balance and off-kilter thrustings of hips, torso, erotically pointed feet and general juiciness, or, dare I say it again, vulgarity with which Balanchine originally imbued Rubies. Or maybe Russians just can't do jazz. Or maybe nobody told these girls that when they stand there with one foot flat and the other pointed like a hooker beneath a streetlight, it's supposed to look sexy? Whatever. This is perhaps the most virginal, sexless Rubies I've ever seen. Indeed, the Kirov's recast it as a through-the-looking-glass version of, say, Sleeping Beauty's vision scene, or the second act of Giselle, both of which feature a more-or-less romantically involved couple interacting at the behest of a commanding, regal woman. This was at its clearest at the ballet's conclusion, where Novikova and Fadeev hurled themselves to their knees before the towering arms of the standing Kondaurova. It was athletic, exciting, high-energy and a miracle of order created out of high-speed chaos; it was rousing fun, but it wasn't Rubies.

I suppose I've just praised the Kirov for finding its own way with Serenade, and criticized them for doing the same with Rubies, but I never was much for being consistent.

Finally came Ballet Imperial. Staged for the Kirov by Colleen Neary, it's pretty much indistinguishable now from Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto No. 2 as performed by New York City Ballet. Whatever bits of mime which might've made it "Imperial" seem long-gone, as are real tutus, Imperial or otherwise. I was a little surprised to see the Kirov's costumes listed in the program as "after Karinska," and "executed by Tatiana Noginova." I'll avoid the obvious puns for which these credits are begging and simply observe that these designs are multiples of fail, and look nothing like anything ever fashioned by the House of Karinska. The rhinestone-trimmed bodices aren't particularly pretty, and they attach to long, shapeless skirts which are neither the real, old-fashioned tutus for which Ballet-Imperial traditionalists long, nor are they airy and flowing like the long dresses which Karinska created when the ballet became Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto No. 2. They're sort of indeterminate nothings, which still didn't prevent Noginova from dusting off her airbrush to create a particularly nasty two-tone blue job for the soloist. Spray painted highlights? Karinska wouldn't have been caught dead.

Overall, behind the playing of the delightful, grandmotherly pianist whose name I never quite got at the various announcements (she was omitted from the program for some reason), the conducting was, well, leisurely. I'd expected as much, but, still, when Igor Kolb was leisurely pulling his skeins of corps women hither and yon in the largo movement, it verged on continental drift. Not that any of this mattered when the divine Viktoria Tereshkina was onstage, or, rather, in command of the stage. Tereshkina's been one of the hits of this Kirov season, and her rendition of the ballerina's brutally difficult first solo was typical: she flashed that firm, toothy smile, and with no fuss or commotion, and just a hint of pride, she nailed, well, everything. I don't think I've ever seen those wicked pirouettes on demi-pointe stopped so cleanly in tendu: even the greatest dancers will show you, however slightly and unintentionally, that they're braking themselves by dragging that tenduing toe into the stage. Tereshkina just -- stopped. Her pose in tendu seemed natural, perfect, inevitable yet entirely voluntary: an artistic choice, not a mechanical necessity. Elsewhere, Tereshkina fired off glittering arrow after arrow from her artistic quiver: brilliant, aggressive leaps; authoritative pointe-work; and, of course, her dazzling multiple fouettés (as always, single-single-double). In her adagios with Kolb, she affected just the right touch of drama, swooping and swooning in his arms with a hint of abandon while ceding nothing of her absolute control: as a ballerina, she's wonderfully canny and strong as diamonds.

For his part, Kolb kept his recent dramatic excesses in check, proving a strong, sensitive and unabashedly Romantic cavalier to Tereshkina, dancing with an amplitude and softness which did much to atone for his recent wacky demeanor in Chopiniana and Spectre. As the leaping, aerial soloist, Ekaterina Osmolkina was again in her element, leading about the equally high-flying Vladimir Shkylarov and Maxim Zyuzin with weightless ease, before joining them in a series of breathtakingly perfect inside pirouettes, doubles after perfect doubles. Again, as with her Russian Girl, I might've wanted more attack in places, but it's not her style, or, in general, the Kirov's. As always Yana Selina was a strong, competent demi, joined by the beautiful and understated Svetlana Ivanova.

For all its leisurely tempi, this Ballet Imperial was a grand, unfolding scroll of ever varying mood, introspective and slightly brooding in its adagios and lambent and brilliant its allegros, but never hinting of less than perfect control. A famous paean to the grandeur of the classical ballerina, Ballet Imperial could not have found a better interpreter than Tereshkina, and the tremendous Kirov ensemble.

Kirov Program 1

2008-04-07T11:50:00.002-04:00

Lopatkina and Korsuntsev in Raymonda

This was originally posted on ballet.co.uk.

Raymonda, Paquita, La Bayadere

April 1, 2, 3

The Kirov Ballet

City Center

New York City

New York

I hadn't seen the Kirov for six years, and I waited with both eagerness and anxiety for their program to begin at City Center Tuesday night. How would they look, I wondered? I didn't wonder long, as the curtain rose on their abbreviated version of Act III ofRaymonda. There was the familiar Vladimir Ponomarev, in all his hammy glory as Rene de Brienne, waving diverse ensembles of dancers about like a royal traffic cop, with only a momentary pause to swipe a dainty, smoothing thumb across his mustaches. Some things never change.

To the marvelous strains of Glazunov's third-act processional, Ponomarev presided over a défilé of character dancers, Raymonda's friends, and finally Raymonda herself, in the person of Uliana Lopatkina, attended by Danila Korsuntsev's Jean de Brienne. As she descended the steps of the Kirov's cardboard castle, she might as well have been Athena descending from Olympus; in her shining white tutu she was that glorious. Her entrance was only the culmination of a thrill which started for me with the entrance of the first dancers, the ones who'd dance the mazurka. I don't think there are dancers on the face of the earth who can walk as beautifully as Russians. Seeing again such proudly raised chests, calmly upright carriage, faces angled as one at such perfect, haughty angles, well, I was in heaven. Each element of every step was hypnotically perfect, none more so than the presentation of the foot: leg brushing straight forward from the hip, turned out to present curve of the foot in its shining white boot, ball of the foot touching the stage first in a relaxed demi-pointe, then the weight comes down on the heel, turning the foot out ever-so-slightly more -- a little bit of poetry repeated countlessly, as entrancing as the arabesques penchés, later that evening, of the Shades in La Bayadere.I've tried to describe a few parts of this Russian walk, yet it's how these dancers, with their years of training, sublime each into an organic, understated whole. We see the glitter of a diamond before we study its facets, and with the Kirov men and women, I was dazzled by the simplicity they made of that ever-so-complicated walk.

It was a treat, one among that evening's multitude, both grand and subtle, that I felt like it must have been my birthday, or Halloween, or Christmas. That I could observe these riches at close hand in the cozy walls of City Center, rather than in the Met's cavern, only made each more special, as if I was sharing in a secret. So through that brief défilémy excitement only grew, with the entrance of the czardas dancers, then Raymonda's classical friends in their tutus and tights, all echoing that glorious walk and filling the stage with perfection. Lopatkina's entrance was indeed glorious, but appearing last, she seemed the living embodiment of all that exquisite training. I was as awestruck as I've ever been at the theater, and they hadn't even started dancing.

The stage emptied, and on came the Mazurka dancers, resplendent in white kid boots, jackets strapped like capes down their backs, the leads in piebald black and white. Over the years, I've seen many mazurkas on ballet stages, but nothing like this joyful tribute to flirtation. All those bits usually seem quaint -- the many ways one might rise on half-toe and click together one's heels, the striking of that signature pose, one hand behind one's head, the other on one's hip; the little runs forward or backward with bent knees and tiny, tiny steps, and, of course, still more smoothing of one's mustaches -- fit together and make sense, just as with that magnificent walk. I couldn't begin to tell the provenance of this particular dance -- the program credits Konstantin Sergeyev "after" Petipa, with help from Lopukhov, Gusev, Tiuntina, and Konishev -- but it's wonderful, showy, and just pure distilled joy. Leading the ensemble were Ksenia Dubrovina and Konstantin Zverev, and I can't say enough good things about each. Tall, lithe and long-legged, Zverev stalked Dobrovina, his not-unwilling prey, loping with bent-kneed, low-slung skipping mazurka step which devoured the stage. Yes, there was a little bit of drama in this happy dance. After teasingly putting him off while she danced a sinuously slow bar or two, Dubrovna happily gave in, and they didn't simply strike pretty poses together; Zverev would pull her into his arms as if he were capturing a rare prize.

While the Mazurka's a Polish import, the Czardas is pure Hungarian, starting slowly and ending in a passionate rush. As the ensembles couples paced slowly in, the men looking particularly noble in their knee-lenght drooping sleeves, I thrilled to their slow, high-kicking step, one leg out at waist height with the other leg slightly bent, with that little sinking of the hips adding drama and a contrary downward accent to the rising leg. Again, I've never seen it performed so naturally. After that slow procession, the lead couple, Alisa Sokolova and Andrey Yakovlev, made an equally slow and grand entrance, with each kick of their legs seeming to drive the orchestra, rather than the other way around. A dark beauty, Sokolova was stunning in her black-and-gold checkered dress, and made grand soliloquies of her high-stepping paces, and even the little bob and weave of the head, which can all-too-easily look affected or comical. As the czardas grew faster and faster, Sokolova's mien changed from noble sorrow to a infectious, almost wild energy, clapping her hands with glee, even. Certainly those side-to-side tilting and swinging steps she'd trade with Yakovlev, like pas de bourree on steroids, hopping into little sideways cabrioles, never seemed as natural and communicative -- very, very happy feet.

I didn't want these character dancers to end. In New York, one can see tolerable ballet even in the absence of the Kirov or Bolshoi, but never such brilliant character dancing; I wanted to soak it up as long as I could. But of course the character dance didn't end with the czardas; Raymonda's a Hungarian princess, and the opening character dances just brought out how thoroughly these character elements are built into the classical choreography; they seem to be even more present in the Kirov versions, or perhaps just performed better. (Did I really see Lopatkina hint at clapping her heels together while in a parallel releve on pointe, or, later, Tereshkina fold her arms and give triumphant bob of her head after her magisterial series of releve retires?)

The treats continued with the bounding entrances of Raymonda and her friends paired up in big, booming chasses and arabesques saute. I remember four couples at a time downstage in a row, doing simultaneous releve-retire steps, and then entrechat sixes which left me transfixed. Not only were all eight dancers perfectly turned out, soles of their feet facing each other and showing off beautiful arches with quick clean beats, but all jumped simultaneously, to exactly the same height -- you could draw a string connecting the toes of all four girls in the front row at the height of their jumps, and the line would be perfectly horizontal. Yes, I was impressed, as I was with the four men, with the sequential double tours firing off in a perfect transition from left to right.

In the grand pas, I've never seen such perfect unity among the eight couples behind Raymonda and De Brienne. I'm used to the timing of the women's leaps to those shoulder-sits and poses on their partner's chests being ever-so-slightly off, the angles of the women's legs in attitude having slight differences, but not here. I was drinking in the elegance of Lopatkina's line, but also thrilled at how strongly each of the couples behind her and Korsuntsev echoed her jumps and poses. When done sort-of together, those leaps to the chest look impressive and difficult; when done together as one, they pack a tremendous visual wallop. As for Lopatkina, her poses in attitude look my breath away; in a company of beautifully presented legs, hers were the most beautiful, and she displayed them as if they were the Hungarian crown jewels.

Yana Selina, a personal favorite, danced the variation with the clarity and control I remember from 2002, finishing by springing up into a perfect, tight sous-sous and snapping her arms into that Hungarian pose. Then it was time for Lopatkina's big solo. I've tossed the word perfection around a lot in this review, and I'll do it some more: Lopatkina was perfect. With her height and grand, long limbs, she had the regal bearing of a princess, and danced with such complete control it seemed there wasn't any part of her physique which wasn't bent perfectly to her indomitable will. Like the other Kirov dancers, she doesn't begin Raymonda's solo with an audible handclap, but regally, slowly turns her arms towards each other and delicately lets her hands drift closely past each other. Clearly, as a princess, she doesn't need to be so vulgar as to make a sound; her attentive subjects should observe her hands, and realize that, audible or not, a clap has happened, and behave accordingly.

Technically, the beginning of Raymonda's solo is little more than bourreing and posing, but from them, Lopatkina built wonders. I won't soon forget the dreamy way she'd rise on pointe then describe a huge arc over the stage, bourreing in a semicircle while sweeping her arm through an even wider arc, as if to proclaim her ownership of all she could survey. I loved how she used her port de bras to add expansiveness to this arc -- rising on pointe, then bending delicately forwards and reaching her arm in front of her (the opposite direction from where she's about to bourree), then straightening her back while delicately swinging her arm from her front to her side, as she bourrees backwards on that curving path, as if gliding over a frictionless surface. It was just as spellbinding when she repeats it in the opposite direction; she's so tall and powerful that she can encompass vast tracts with a swing of her arm or leg. I loved her slow diagonals across the stage, picking her way on pointe as her arms worked through variations of the Hungarian Princess theme, at her hips or cocked behind an ear. She started her solo at a slow crawl worthy of Makarova. I didn't mind; I wanted it to go on forever.

Her Raymonda was strong, commanding and regal, and awe-inspiring in the Vaganova-style curving and recurving of her back, torso, neck and arms. (So much contrapposto!) She was far from the ice-princess I remember dancing the second movement ofSymphony in C years ago, although still a bit aloof in her royalty. I loved how clearly her solo reflected the czardas I'd just seen, as with her series of long runs backwards on pointe, knees bent and arms slowly widening, and this was where I might've spotted clicking her heels together while on pointe. In the ballet's coda, she marched downstage center and seemed to hold her balance in retire forever, before plunging her foot to the stage, giving the conductor his cue for her commanding, ever-faster releve-retires backwards. Lopatkina continued her casual perfection in the allegro finale, and Korsuntsev, tall, dark and dashing, showed elegant power in his brief solos. After the curtain fell on yet another gorgeous pose from Lopatkina, I had regain my composure for a moment before drifting into the lobby to share my babbled enthusiasm with an equally gushing colleague.

Lopatkina's Raymonda was a tough act to follow, and the ballerinas for the succeeding warhorses, excerpts from Paquita and the Shades scene from La Bayadere followed her at an ever-increasing distance. The greatly abridged Paquita started wonderfully, with twin files of eight girls skipping in with great brio and gorgeous epaulement to the opening mazurka. Although two pairs of demis, followed (one of them being the indefatigable Selina), this production omitted the demis' solos, as well as the pas de trois, getting straight to the big-girls' action. The most familiar Kirov ballerina to New York audiences, Diana Vishneva was greeted with wild applause at her rousing entrance, looking in complete command of her big jumps and smiling broadly. If Lopatkina was ice, I thought, here comes the fire. I'd hoped for an equally strong but contrasting performance from Vishneva, but after the happy rush of entrance, she looked increasingly strained and, in this company, vulgar. I'd already noticed how good the Kirov dancers were at smoothing over little imperfections (like a double pirouette which turns out to be a single-and-a-half), but Vishneva pushed so hard in her subsequent solos that every little bobble became a glaring error. Usually able to snap off pique pirouettes with ease, Vishneva would get in trouble squeezing in a more turns than she could easily manage, and saving herself only with hasty adjustments to off-balance finishes. She'd always bounce back, and if you'd blinked, you'd have missed her jamming her flat foot into the stage to catch herself, but in this company, these tweaks were glaringly unfortunate. As if to compensate, Vishneva began what an older generation might've called "Ballet-Russing," embellishing her poses with little flicks of the wrists which seemed to say, "yes, you may applaud now." After Lopatkina's lack of affectation, Vishneva's flourishes just looked vulgar. She did pull out some grand moments, like a stabbing pique into a deep attitude balance right at the stage's edge before turning and hurling herself into the arms of Andrian Fadeev, but by the time she got to her "harp" solo, even her beautiful arms, curling and uncurling above her head in that long, slow diagonal, looked uncomfortably rococo. She blasted out some fast fouettés, but with an unpretty harshness.

Of this staging's variations, the first was danced by the infamous Alina Somova, kicking her ever-flexible right leg with great abandon, flinging it skyward in some behind-the-ears battements, hurling it ahead of her in a jeté to the side, and, most unfortunately, swinging it all over the place in some wobbly Italian fouettés. That she's now a peroxide blonde seems inarguably appropriate. Ekatrina Kondaurova couldn't have been more different; a tall, powerful redhead, Kondaurova seemed a study in calm detachment, when effortlessly turning a balance in second to a deep penchee, or in her dreamy, final diagonal of soutenu turns and pique pirouettes. A bubbly little firecracker, Valeria Martynyuk bounded through the petite allegro and quick little jetés of the "Amor" variation, and Ekaterina Osmolkina delicate and sweet in the celeste solo, finishing with a beautiful double pirouette to the knee. Victoria Tereshkina flew thrillingly through the big jumping solo, with its opening diagonal of grand jetés leading into a phenomenal combination of pirouettes in arabesque and attitude, and a sizzling tour of the stage with pique turns, pirouttes and particularly aerial jeté coupés. In his solos, Fadeev was clean and dashing. Despite Vishenva's excesses, it was not hard to love the ballet's conclusion, with its hordes of leaping and flying ballerinas, all to Minkus' best oompahs.

It might've seemed a good idea to round out this program's trio of Petipa classics with the Kingdom of the Shades scene from La Bayadere, or at least until they tried to fit that famous entrance of twenty-four shades into City Center's too-small stage. Rather than stepping down a ramp, each Shade emerged abruptly from behind a curtain upstage center, struck a pretty, arms-raised pose, and then stepped off into her first penchée. To keep from running out of stage, each Shade also took only two measured paces between arabesques. By the last Shade, there was an awful lot of big, white tutu filling the stage: if for some reason it started to rain onstage, you could've crawled from wing to wing without feeling a drop. Nontheless, the corps was stunning in its measured unity. It was almost hypnotic to watch them, after they'd squared their ranks, all sink slowly into a deep demi-plie, then rise, as one, into tight sous-sous, and then just stand unmoving, on the tips of their toeshoes, for a breath-holding moment. Breathtaking, too, was the gorgeous arch to their backs in every penchée: somehow, their back legs would rise higher and higher, but their heads never drooped towards the stage; instead, their amazing backs would arch ever-deeper.

While the three soloists, Olesia Novikova, Nadezhda Gonchar and Ekaterina Kondaurova again were lovely, Alina Somova, partnered bravely by Leonid Sarafanov, was not. While Somova's got undeniable physical gifts: that high extension, a great leap and, sometimes, great strength in her turns, her dancing seems entirely uninformed by any sense of proportion, phrasing, or even, particularly sad for La Bayadere, any sense of why her character's there, or indeed of even who Nikiya's supposed to be. With her overly-blonde hair, somewhat self-satisfied smirk, Somova seemed to approach her pas de deux with Sarafanov as little more than dead time between opportunities to show off her extensions and leaps. This dead girl only came alive when stretching her legs to the ceiling; sadly, this reanimation never reached her arms, which, while hitting all the required positions, looked always flat and lifeless. Freed of dramatic meaning, Samova's relentless employment of her gifts was also unfettered by taste or restraint. Her every extension seemed designed to reach the ceiling and every penchée to six o'clock. Her grand jetés were particularly alarming, with her front leg rising far above horizontal, with her pointed foot looking like the figurehead of a Viking warship. She's not without strength and athletic bravery -- in her arabesque turns while holding the scarf, she turned both right and left, pulling into big double pirouettes at the end of each phrase (even if her turn to the left finished a bit sloppily). Would that her face might've said something more than "look at me!" when Sarafanov lifted her to that grand fish pose on his shoulder.

I admired all the demis, although Novikova didn't quite nail the final pose of her variation, the first one. Gonchar proved to be a pretty jumper, and Kondaurova paced the growing force of the third solo, from languorous developpes to her final, sparkling diagonal run on tip-toe. Bravely or foolishly, she made use of every inch of City Center's stage, and then some, finishing that last diagonal with a leap into arabesque, sinking through to her knee well beyond the stage's left wing, where a slip would've sent her smacking into a huge amplifier, or tumbling into the orchestra pit. Sarafanov gamely partnered the big and wild Samova, looking to be a bit late catching her after an unsupported turn, but otherwise managing her with at least the appearance of ease. He was thrilling in his solos, managing six double-assemblés (usually men do five; I once saw Nureyev do seven). Somova was quite zippy in her final diagonal of chaines, before the final happy-ending pose.

I wasn't hugely disappointed that Paquita and La Bayadere didn't match the perfection ofRaymonda; how could they? I was just happy to see what could well be the world's greatest company, and at such close range, too.

April 2

Perhaps the opening-night adrenaline had worn off, or perhaps the dancers were feeling the effect of an opening-night party, but Raymonda didn't quite have the edge of the night before. The character dances were as lovely, but the classical dances for Raymonda's friends, and the solo for the four men feel ever so slightly short of the previous night's standard, with the occasional little correction, or moments when dancers weren't quite in sync. It was still great fun, but just a bit short of perfection. Olesia Novikova is a pretty dancer, slightly petite, and with shining black hair and a face which prompted a friend to call her a combination of Audrey Hepburn and Yvonne Borree. She's strong and clean, but not really a princess, or at least not this princess. She looked more like Raymonda's kid sister. Fadeev was an impeccable partner, but a little off-peak in his solo.

Tereshkina led Paquita with a vengeance. She was everything Vishneva wasn't, dazzlingly powerful and perfectly clean where Vishneva was sloppy. Her fouettés were fast and didn't budge an inch, as she spiced up her single turns with a few flashing, hands-on-hips doubles. Yevgeny Ivanchenko was also clean and impressive, but not quite in Tereshkina's league. There was an odd bit of juggling in the solos, which were cast the same as April 1, except that Vishneva was supposed to be the last soloist, but didn't dance. So the solo dancers were the same as before, but Tereshkina did the jumping solo, and, in Vishneva's absence, nobody danced the harp solo. Yevgeny Ivanchenko showed some flair in his solos, overturning a few pirouettes from enthusiam, perhaps.

With Korsuntsev, Lopatkina was exquisite in La Bayadere. I loved watching her grand expansiveness, but sometimes she was too expansive for the City Center stage; I wonder if she'd rehearsed Nikiya on this stage before. She'd make little corrections to keep herself from drifting too close to the wings, which so she looked not quite as perfect as the previous night. She was a cold spectral Nikiya, and Korsuntsev a brilliant Solor. He didn't do double assemblés, but a flashy combination of jeté coupes and big, booming leaps with his legs swinging through a double-split corkscrew leap of his own. The two looked well together, and Lopatkina was like a floating goddess while perched on his shoulders. Unlike opening night, there were some unfortunate wobbles among the corps; sometimes even dead girls are only human.

April 3

As in Paquita, Tereshkina was a terrific Raymonda. More compact and not quite as Olympian as Lopatkina, she nonetheless was every inch a commanding princess. I've quickly come to admire her clarity, precision and strength, as well as Korsuntsev's long line and unforced, understated virtuosity. Paquita paired Somova, her blonde locks liberally enhanced with golden glitter, with the dashing, baby-faced Anton Korsakov. Somova didn't quite butcher the choreography, but seemed tremendously pleased with herself at every high-kick or extreme extension. She's got talent, but her stage instincts, shallow and self-aggrandizing, are dazzlingly vulgar against a backdrop of so many beautifully refined dancers. Imagine Vishneva without her savvy, or Dvorovenko stripped of artifice; Somova's got no outlet for her ambitions other than cranking up her volume. In the parade of variations, she chose the diagonal jumping one which Tereshkina had done so well the previous nights. Rather than simply wait offstage for the variation's introduction to end before leaping onstage from the upstage right wing, Somova ran onstage from the downstage corner at the introduction's first notes, smiled at the audience and spread her arms as if to remind us that she was indeed the star of this show, and then ran to the upstage corner in time to start her diagonal jetés. It seemed an odd display of ego, and as tasteless as her big leaps, with her front and back legs pulled far above horizontal, for that unfortunate dropped-crotch look. She then tossed off some amazing pirouettes in arabesque and attitude, without spotting at all. Would that her sensibility matche her talents. Her fouettés were just a mess, with her working leg flopping all over as she drifted lazily towards the right-hand wings, then slowly back to center.

The variations were much the same as previous nights, except I think (the program notes and insert weren't worth the paper they were printed on) Gonchar danced the Italian fouetté solo that Somova'd done the first two nights, Somova, as mentioned, did the diagonal jeté one, and Tereshkina quite beautifully floated through the harp solo, the one Vishneva apparently declined to do while Tereshkina led Wednesday night's Paquita. I liked Korsakov's line in his solos, although he seemed bland in places.

Atoning a bit for her Paquita, Vishneva was wonderfully dramatic in La Bayadere, making it crystal clear that Nikiya's repeated pose, pointing upwards, was to remind Solor of their oath before the sacred fire, and her own devotion to that holiness, making the Shades scene into a story of Solor's redemption and forgiveness. While Vishneva was still less restrained than her Kirov colleagues (leaving Somova alone for the moment), here she emoted just enough to shape her story, without overwhelming the role with her own personality. I could've done without quite so many bows after her pas de deux and solo, though. Ivanchenko was a good foil, passionate and spectacular. I'd grown fond of the trio of Novikova, Gonchar and Kondaurova, especially the way the latter always finished her solo using that last inch between the speakers and orchestra pit. The first night it seemed an errant miscalculation; by the third it was clear she'd judged her space to the millimeter.

For these first three nights, Mikhail Sinkevich worked wonders with the small orchestra in City Center's pit, although peculiar amplification would sometimes oddly warp the balance between instruments. I was a little dismayed to notice many empty orchestra seats, and to see that many others had been filled through the half-price ticket booth in Times Square. There was a time when the Kirov would sell out its rare New York visits; were high ticket prices ($110 for orchestra) keeping audiences away, or is this just another sign of the coming End of the World for the classical performing arts? I don't know, but I'd encourage any New Yorkers reading this to hurry to City Center; one doesn't get to see the greatest company in the world here all that often.

Alexander hanging in there...

2008-03-10T13:53:00.001-04:00

In February, Alexander Bolshoi started having seizures again, more and more frequently, and then began behaving more and more bizarrely. I took him to his vet, who suggested giving him phenobarbital as an anticonvulsant. Not long after I gave him his first pill, he seemed to become very weak, collapsing while trying to walk, and often unable to see. When he could move, he'd pace ceaselessly around the apartment, bumping into furniture with his whiskers and then going off in another direction. He hardly seemed to know where he was or what he was doing.

One morning I couldn't find him when I woke up, and after turning the apartment upside down, found he'd gotten himself stuck between a hot-water pipe and the wall. It could not have been pleasant. I took him into the vet, convinced I'd probably have to put him to sleep that day. He perked up a bit while the vet examined him, but when she put him on the floor, he began his obsessive pacing again, one time getting himself stuck facing a corner because he couldn't see, or understand, how to get out of it. It was terribly upsetting.

The vet said that even though he didn't look so bad, clearly his mental processes were impaired, and hinted I might want to consider putting him down ("humanely euthanizing" him). I just couldn't. She asked me if I wanted to try a different anticonvulsant and I said, "Well, you're the doctor, what do you think?" She said she'd consult with the veterinary neurologist who'd seen him back in October. She later called me and said the other vet had suggested giving him steroids, to relieve whatever swelling/inflammation might be going on in his brain. So I started him on one pill of prednisone, twice a day. I wasn't expecting much.

It had an immediate positive effect. Alexander became more alert, and aware of his surroundings. As the days went by, he became very much his former self. He'd jump up on the furniture, and return to his charming former habit of driving me crazy at 5 am when he decided it was breakfast time (yes, I'm ashamed to say I yelled at him to leave me alone, just like old times). A couple of days ago I saw him stretch out at full length on a footstool, with his head and front paws dangling off the edge, sleeping. Sophie jumped up next to him, started licking him all over, then stretched out and fell asleep next to him. For a moment, everything was all right, and the cats were the picture of contentment.

I don't know how long this will last, of course, and I know Alexander's days are numbered. This is just a palliative, and doesn't address whatever is causing his weight loss, and his seizures. This morning I noticed what looked like the return of some of his former odd behavior. He would occasionally hiss at nothing, and look at me for no particular reason and meow. I gave him a little snack and made sure his pill was in it. I don't know what else I can do. He's always hungry, and a bit of a pig. If nothing else, I'll give him some more food soon. He's walking all over the apartment, like he's looking for food, or more likely it's a sign of his pacing behavior coming back. He's lying down now on a shirt I'd tossed on the floor. Ah well, Mr. Bolshoi. I'll let you rest.

Whenever I adopt a cat, I always look for the adult or senior ones nobody wants. Nobody wanted Alexander and Sophie, and they were in their cages for months before I took them in. They're both a little odd, but they've proven to be wonderful cats. Alexander's a big, sweet, handsome fellow, and he'd make sure there was nothing in the apartment that didn't belong there (especially mice).

The big drawback with adopting older cats is you just don't have as much time together. I got Alexander and Sophie almost exactly four years ago, and it looks like I'll have little more than four years with Alexander Bolshoi. It's not enough time; it never is. I think he's been happy here, though, or as happy as a cat can be.

One day I'll make a list of all the cats I've had and lost over the years, if I can bear it. It never gets easier. Sometimes I can act like it doesn't hurt, but it always does.

It's really true that deciding when the end has arrived is the last kindness we can do for our pets. I know that time isn't far off for Alexander; I am tremendously thankful for the extra days and weeks this medicine has given him, and me.

So City Ballet's about to visit London

2008-03-09T08:58:00.002-04:00

And Alistair Macaulay had some good and bad things to say about it. I posted this on ballet.co's forums. I thought I'd just stick it here as well:

In the NY Times, Alistair Macaulay has a few kind things to say about the current state of City Ballet.

Here are some random, sleep-deprived thoughts.

Yes, there is a lot of deadwood in the principal ranks, and he names the correct names. Yes, the corps is, in many ways, tidier, tinier, better-behaved but possibly less interesting than thirty years ago. I miss the wild Amazons you can see in videos from that era. They couldn't line up in a row if their lives depended on it, but Balanchine didn't care, and neither did I. Or, rather, Balanchine encouraged them not to line up in neat rows.

Yet, I have a problem with scolding ballerinas in, say, Mozartiana, because they don't dance like Suzanne Farrell. Nobody could dance like Suzanne Farrell. Nobody can. Suzanne Farrell doesn't want her dancers to dance like Suzanne Farrell. Today's Mozartiana principals aren't as risky and off-balance as Farrell was? True, but nobody else ever was; it was Farrell's unique genius to tumble out of true and yet not be.

Although I'd agree that Mozartiana has lost many subtleties of phrasing over the years, it still hasn't kept many ballerinas from turning in wonderful, and wonderfully different, performances. Nina Ananiashvili and Kyra Nichols are about as different a pair of dancers as you could imagine; yet I've adored each in Mozartiana. Neither one recalls in the slightest Farrell. I've always been struck at how ballerinas seem to find something within themselves to express with Mozartiana, and I can only recall one dancer truly oblivious to the ballet's artistry (sorry, Julie).

If I said to them, "sorry, you all suck because you don't dance like Suzanne Farrell," well, my "Pure Balanchine League" card would remain unsullied, and I'd have the satisfaction of looking down my nose at some of the greatest dancers on the planet, but to what end? Would you want to see Nina Ananiashvili trying to be Suzanne Farrell? Could you even imagine it? (I'm trying not to.)

I am in sympathy with much of what Macaulay's saying, yet, I'm also reminded that the ideal is the enemy of the good.

Macaulay does note that even today the company can do a terrific job with Balanchine when it wants to. (He's right, it's a shame they're not bringing PC No. 2 a/k/a Ballet Imperial with La Bouder and Teresa Reichlen.) And he does note that there are some terrific younger dancers working their way through the ranks. While clearly some veterans have outstayed their welcomes (and, it appears, their interest in actually dancing), I can't fault Martins for developing the crop of youngsters you'll get a glimpse of in a few days.

I can't get over the feeling, though, that he's really criticizing the Mozartiana ballerinas of today for not being Farrell, and the City Ballet of today for not being the City Ballet of 1979. I have an uncomfortable image of Macaulay as Defender of the Faith, refulgent in the glow of red-hot pincers and redolent of boiling pitch.

City Ballet could be better. What it can't ever be is the company it was in 1979. In advocating for the former, Macaulay skirts perilously close to demanding the latter.

(Then he says that Teresa Reichlen is the greatest Siren he's ever seen. And perhaps she is, but did he never see Monique Meunier?)

Princess Masha

2008-01-16T09:39:00.000-05:00

While picking her up from her (expensive) teeth-cleaning, the girl who brought her out in her carrier said she looked like a Chartreux. I'd been wondering the same thing for awhile, and said, "Well, I've been wondering that, but who knows?" She said, "have you ever seen a Chartreux? She looks just like one. And her fur feels just like their fur." I'll take her word for it. I wonder what a rare Chartreux was doing wandering around in the Bronx? It's a good thing Masha has such an adorable face.

Whenever I read about Chartreux, it sure sounds like a description of Masha:

Body like a "potato on toothpicks?" Check.

"Chirps" rather than meows? Check.

Fascinated by television? Double-plus-check.

Follows master around like a dog? Check.

Blue fur? Check.

"A dense undercoat gives it resistance and a feeling of sheep's wool." Check indeed.

A rare treasure? Oh, yes. She tells me so every day.

Caught up, FINALLY.

2008-01-16T09:24:00.001-05:00

Well, I have no backlog of reviews in the hopper. It's about time. Sure, I was up until two or three AM and I have an ungodly headache, and the apartment's exploded again. Well, we suffer for our art.

In case anyone's reading this, here's:

Dance for Joy

Jewels

and, down in ballet.co's "What's Happening" board, these proto-reviews:

Sara Mearns' debut in Diamonds

Four by four, with La Bouder romping through Ballo

and Morgan/Suozzi in Romeo + Juliet, which, oddly, I didn't hate this time.

Sometimes it occurs to me that just maybe Peter Martins might be better at running NYCB than I'd be.

Maybe.

Y'know, maybe this will work after all...

2007-12-11T14:19:00.000-05:00

Once I actually put my nose to the grindstone, I do pretty well. I need to remember that.

Caught up, finally.

2007-11-22T22:16:00.001-05:00

Finally got the City Ballet review posted.

It was a fun gala, and it was nice to see Balanchine better-represented, what with the Garland Dance and Western.

I don't think I'll ever forgive the costume shop for messing up the cut of the remade tutus for Western. Obviously it had to be done -- I remember two performances when the first-act ballerina's tutu began to self-destruct onstage -- but the much of the glory of those costumes came from the beautiful and subtle way Karinska cut them on the bias, so they'd be higher on the hips and a bit lower in front and especially in back, where they managed to magically suggest a bustle. Now there's so much tutu on the sides that you see women playing with them, bunching them up to show off the admittedly pretty bows on their panties, etc. I love the enthusiastic display of a comely thigh as much as the next guy, but not at this cost! They look like a decent regional-ballet version, not the Real Thing.

I suppose one day I'll stop crying in my beer and get over it. Maybe.

Interestingly, if you look at the film of LeClercq and d'Amboise and the company from back then, the skirts were much longer in back. I wonder if they were remade shorter, or simply trimmed as time went by?

While I always love a chance to see La Bouder do her thing, I thought the new Martins piece was just gruesome. On the way out a friend suggested that this orgasm in petite allegro was just Martins' idea of what the gala-attending crowd want to see, and his heart is really in his more severe pieces? "Like?" I asked, but she had to catch her bus.

I do think Martins is at his best when he's making steps -- he's never been better than in Fearful Symmetries or Dust, but lately his interest in densely packed choreography has devolved into cheap thrills, and difficulty for its own sake. Perhaps if he had a better sense of the overall shape of an enchainement, or lots of them tied together. There's more to a string of steps than the lead-in to some mind-numbing tour de force at the end. Just put them all in motley and be done with it.

For penance, I wish I could make Martins sit through Suzanne Farrell's heartbreakingly beautiful staging of La Source. The Delibes score isn't hugely different than the Glinka, but the choreography flows in heady arcs and curls, and with Farrell you can see the conversation Balanchine was having with Delibes. I don't expect that level of artistry from Martins, but it'd be nice if he weren't so depressingly satisfied with tricks.

I'd love to see Bouder do her demi role in La Source again; I'd love it more than ever after the gala. I'd also love to see her work with Farrell. I've been impressed with how Bouder grows and changes from season to season; she's constantly re-evaluating and reinterpreting her roles, and growing as an artist in the process. Her last Emeralds was breathtakingly better than her first, and tremendously different.

The problem is that Bouder has become City Ballet's star attraction more-or-less on her own. She's accomplished great things, but she's incarnated herself as an updated, rock'n'roll version of a Ballets Russes roadshow glam queen. She knows how to knock you dead, and turn her particularly hard-edged glamor on like from a spigot, and, well, it's wonderful, except that she has done more, and can do more, but if she does, it won't be thanks to any artistic guidance she might be getting at City Ballet. Lately, Martins most noteworthy accomplishments with ballerinas come from letting great ones slip through his fingers.

With Kyra Nichols gone, Bouder's the most musical dancer at City Ballet. It's part of the formula of her greatness, and I have little patience for people who see only her technical prowess. Given the wonderful, old-school Balanchinian musicality of Farrell's La Source (so wonderful I was teary-eyed by the end), what miracles might she draw from Bouder? I know Bouder learned La Source from Violette Verdy herself, but still. It's sad that we'll never know.

I seem to have delivered a Bouder rant. And now it's time to try to get some sleep.

ABT review FINALLY up....

2007-11-18T16:24:00.001-05:00

OK, so it's way too long. At least it's posted. It's really nothing more than a glorified first draft, and there are typos, but what the hell.

Pennsylvania Ballet Review's up

2007-11-16T14:08:00.001-05:00

Finally!

God knows why I have to put myself through such utter hell to get stuff written, but here it is.

I missed Riolama Lorenzo, but Julie Diana was really lovely in Serenade.

Alexander

2007-11-11T19:34:00.001-05:00

By popular demand, well, OK, my mother asked me, here's a photo of Alexander from a few minutes ago, when I disturbed him from his regal slumber in the fancy Domain chair. How nice that he's a Marmalade Tabby with Green Eyes, as he goes with just about every bit of decor I have.

He's a silly creature, but I love him.

Good Grief!

2007-11-11T18:58:00.000-05:00

I've been watching reruns of that American Masters' series on Charles Schulz and getting a bit sentimental. Of course I was Charlie Brown growing up, and Halloween in Saratoga always seemed right out of Peanuts. Perhaps I should've learned better from Charlie Brown about that little red-haired girl.

I must admit I didn't read Peanuts much after I went away to college, so I missed out on what some have called the strip's dilution and over-reliance on Snoopy. I realize now just how much poetry there was in Schulz' depiction of a world filled with failure and disappointment. I remember reading about Charlie Brown's "failure face" and wondering if I had one. I still do; wonder, that is. I suppose I'll know when I'm dead.

It's baaaack!

2007-11-11T18:41:00.001-05:00

Holy cow. Finally, Project Runway is back!

Time for me to break down and re-enslave myself to Time Warner. Given how much they rob me for RoadRunner, it probably won't make me all that much poorer.

Or I could just get the files via the magic of Bittorrent the next day. Hmmm. I was never very good at waiting.

Shitty First Drafts

2007-11-07T20:43:00.001-05:00

If I ever get a tattoo, which is vanishingly unlikely, it's going to say Shitty First Drafts.

I think it's time to reread Anne Lamott's priceless book.

"Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life" (Anne Lamott)

Mr. Alexander Bolshoi

2007-11-07T20:33:00.001-05:00

An update on Alexander. He's doing much, much better. Astonishingly better. If someone had told me when I first brought Alexander back from the hospital that he'd be something like 95% of his old self, I wouldn't have believed it. The poor cat had certainly managed to fry his brain pretty thoroughly. When I took him home, I thought it was to die in peace. He seemed alert, but couldn't do much more than sleep under his Mission chair in the corner, and keep an eye on things, as he always would. He'd drag himself out occasionally, but could barely seem to control his movements. I remember once coming home and seeing him sitting up staring at me, and I was just thrilled.

Gradually, he started perking up, and could move around the apartment with an odd, flat-footed walk. I thought that was pretty much it, but then his appetite came back full-force, and one morning he jumped on the bed to pester me for his breakfast. So once again he's bugging me for breakfast, lunch and dinner (canned food is better for them than dry, but they tend to wolf it down and demand seconds and thirds).

It's been my experience that once a cat is really ill, he's pretty much on his way out. Sometimes, though, they, and we, get a reprieve. I hope to pay more attention to Mr. Bolshoi, who's pretty self-sufficient emotionally, as long as he's got Sofie. So, now he bugs the hell out of me, and, and I couldn't be happier.

Sofie has gone back to being her own aloof self. Now that she's got Alexander to cuddle with, she couldn't care less about me, mostly. Cats.

So what've I been up to?

2007-11-07T20:16:00.001-05:00

There's been this ABT season to write about. And I am, kinda sorta. At least I'm good at procrastinating. And at least I'm working, which is not at all a bad thing, and it should continue for the next few months.

I think this is the therapist I'd like to have.

moar funny pictures

Only a fool would write, if not for money...

2007-10-29T21:02:00.000-04:00

Well, I'm wrestling away with my little writeup of ABT's first week. I hate writing first paragraphs; I should just start somewhere in the middle and let the ends take care of themselves. Maybe one day I will. I'm suddenly noticing that not only does this season not have a third week, it doesn't have the warhorse pas de deuxs, or some of the stars who would've danced them. Perhaps money's a bit tight at ABT right now? Or perhaps Kevin's decided he's built an audience which no longer needs to be bribed into partaking of nutritious Choreography without the evil sugary enticement of a fizzy pas de deux or two.

Hmm. This is better than what I HAD been writing. Just goes to show you, it's always something.

Back to the salt mines.

(Oh, money's good, but free tickets aren't bad, either.)

Back from ABT...

2007-10-26T23:33:00.001-04:00

So this was my first look at ABT this season. Ballo was odd -- made for the big stage of the State Theater, strangely cramped at City Center. The corps was pretty and safe, in fact, those were the words I'd use to describe the entire performance. Hallberg was tall and gorgeous, despite making some odd faces. No artistic director can do very wrong if he gives Hallberg a lot of jumps -- not with those legs! Murphy, who has moments of pure greatness, was strong yet strangely untriumphant. She danced, for the most part, within herself. If ever there's a ballet which calls for fire and brio, it's this one. I'd say it would look terrific at the Met this spring, but sadly they won't be bringing it.

The Leaves are Fading was lovely, and the company is much more comfortable with Tudor (it'd better be). Although I don't think I need any occasion to note that Xiomara Reyes isn't Gelsey Kirkland, Reyes was quite sweet and charming, with Saveliev. She's learned to tone down her saccharine; or perhaps I've learned to tolerate it better. She made a nice contrast to the handsome and stolid Saveliev. I can't remember when I last saw the complete ballet; it was great to have it back.

As for Millepied's premiere, well, he reminds me of that famous comment of Mickey Spillane's, when asked what was going to happen next in a story: "I don't know, the typewriter broke." I used to consider Millepied to be Wheeldon manque, but as a critic friend pointed out, he's more like Martins manque. This is the kind of stuff Martins' choreography trains one to do. And Liang is Millepied manque, which is really kind, well, sad.

Ecto

2007-10-25T14:51:00.001-04:00

So I've been playing with Ecto for posting. It's extremely cool, especially this alph of 3.0. I wonder if Leopard will break it....

Wheeldon: the Motion Picture

2007-10-25T14:28:00.001-04:00

Well, not really, but I expect to see it next. I've been wrestling with just how snarky to be about Wheeldon's season, or rather the performance I caught last Sunday, the "B-side" program. The program was bookended by old and new Wheeldon pieces, with a middle section of four short works by other newish choreographers. Each of these were introduced by short projected video clips, for some odd reason. I wasn't terribly impressed by these four (although they were well danced by Wheeldon's allstar pick-up ensemble), and wondered if Wheeldon had deliberately picked these bits to make his own work look good. Worse, for the most part the video clips -- ballet for the YouTube generation -- were more interesting than the dances they introduced, which probably was not anyone's intention.

Speaking of which, there's a LOT of fun ballet on YouTube. I'm going to write a more about this, once I put the nail in the Wheeldon review's coffin.

Oh, and ABT started this week. I somehow managed to miss the gala. Don't speak to me about it.

Alexander Bolshoi

2007-10-25T14:18:00.001-04:00

As some of you might know, earlier this month Alexander Bolshoi had a sudden and frightening cerebral incident. He had a few unsettling seizures, and spent a very expensive night at the shiny NYC Veterinary Specialists hospital on West 55th St. (At least it was close, and next door to my favorite neighborhood liquor store). I really thought this was the end for poor Alexander, and, as I couldn't afford an MRI and/or brain surgery for the guy, I thought I was taking him home to die. Instead, he seems to have bounced back quite wonderfully. He has recovered most of his mobility and, what's better, his appetite. He even is back to his old ways of nagging me for breakfast and pretending he's starving. He's always loved milk, and these days I'm letting him have as much as he wants. So, right now he's hanging out under his Mission chair in the corner, resting his head on his favorite catnip pillow, and keeping an eye on things, as he's done since he came here. He's a big, sweet orange marshmallow, and I'm glad he'll be around for a bit longer. I am afraid that whatever caused his seizures will return, but until then I will make him as happy as I can, for as long as I can.

demicontretemps

Weighing in on the Ringer thing....

YouTube Ballet Video of the Day No. 2. Black Swan Trailer

NYCB Fall Season Schedule on the Web!

YouTube Ballet Video of the Day No. 1, Cynthia Gregory's Aurora

More Giselle

Why Avatar is a ballet

Ever notice how each act of Giselle mirrors the other?

Cat Revives Rare Balanchine Ballet!

ABT's Met Schedule Online!

Ratmansky's got a fever, and the prescription is ... MORE DIVERTISSEMENT!

All Balanchine, All Divine

An Open Letter to Michael Popkin

Dances upon which a moratorium should be declared

I'm even happy to see the painted cat....

La Danse, madame, c'est une question morale.

Sometimes I feel like slapping Wheeldon and saying, "You can do better than this!" but then I think, can he?

What NOT to say to a dancer

I'm going to hell for this, but...

New Chamber Ballet, September 11, 2009

At least they spelled my name right

If ballet stars were comic book heros, who would draw them?

Veronika Part, Corey Stearns in La Sylphide

Airs and La Sylphide, June 16, 2009

Messmer's Myrtha and the Max-and-Irina Show

A Couple of Midsummer Night's Dreams

Osipova's Giselle

On The Dnieper, Prodigal Son, Desir

Mark Morris' Romeo & Juliet, on Motifs of William Shakespeare

Boris Eifman's Eugene Onegin

NYCB: Allegro Brillante, Opus 19/The Dreamer, Swan Lake

Another ABT Balanchine/Tchaikovsky Spectacular, May 20, 2009

ABT's Tchaikovsky/Balanchine Spectacular, May 19, 2009

Posted via Pixelpipe.

Posted via Pixelpipe.

Posted via Pixelpipe.

Posted via Pixelpipe.

Tiler Peck, Best Coppelia Ever

NYCB Opening Night Spring Season, April 28, 2009

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Posted via Pixelpipe.

Posted via Pixelpipe.

Alexander is fading

the first pussywillow

Princess Masha and her pussywillow paws

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Posted via Pixelpipe.

the bedroomso much roomier

the bedroom

another angle

another angle

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Posted via Pixelpipe.

omg

Be careful what you twitter.

Off to City Ballet tonight

Uploaded - 2\18\09

It's been awhile

Poor, blind Alexander

Alexander is hanging in there....

It's a sunny day...

I'm worried about Alexander.....

It's too darn hot...

Kirov's Balanchine Program

Kirov Program 1

Alexander hanging in there...

So City Ballet's about to visit London

Princess Masha

Caught up, FINALLY.

Y'know, maybe this will work after all...

Caught up, finally.

ABT review FINALLY up....

Pennsylvania Ballet Review's up

Alexander

Good Grief!

It's baaaack!

Shitty First Drafts

Mr. Alexander Bolshoi

So what've I been up to?

Only a fool would write, if not for money...

the bedroom
so much roomier