Posts Tagged ‘John Martin’

All in the Family: Paul Taylor’s American Modern Dance Company

Sunday, April 19th, 2015

By Rachel Straus

The dance company founded by Paul Taylor in 1954 returned for their annual season (March 10-29) to the former New York State Theater, but it returned under a different name: Paul Taylor’s American Modern Dance Company. This is significant. New to the company’s title are the words American and Modern. Taylor, now 84 years old and considered the surviving grand master of American modern dance, appears to be concerned about the health of his chosen genre. With his company’s new title comes a new mission: to present works by other choreographers, whether living or departed, who are part of the American modern dance family tree.

Principal advertising image for Paul Taylor's American Modern Dance Company

Principal advertising image for Paul Taylor’s American Modern Dance Company

Now comes the first problem. What is American modern dance? John Martin, the first and longtime dance critic (1927-1962) of the New York Times, described American modern dance as a genre developed from the movement style of a choreographer, who creates a training technique in service of that style, whose body of work is broadly in defiance of 19th century academic ballet traditions (aka romantic stories, pointe shoes, prettiness), and whose subjects are contemporary (be they social, political, or cultural).

Now comes the second problem. Today, performers who identify themselves as modern dancers take ballet class. Today, choreographers who identify their work within the modern dance tradition don’t feel compelled to create a training technique, and they make commissioned work for ballet companies. Lastly, the social commentary implicit in dance theater is less in fashion in the U.S.A today than it has ever been.

That said Taylor fits snugly into John Martin’s definition. He disdains ballet. He has a training technique. His muscular style is inimitable, especially with its signature arms. (They are redolent of the 1937 Rockefeller Center statue of the god Atlas holding the earth aloft his shoulders.) Taylor works alternate between light-hearted and darkly eerie visions of American behavior.

With all of this said, it make sense that Taylor and his advisory team chose Doris Humphrey’s Passacaglia (1938, set to J.S. Bach) and Shen Wei’s Rite of Spring (2003, set to the four-hand Stravinsky recording) to launch his company’s new initiative of showing important 20th century modern dance works. Both Humphrey and Shen’s works fit Mr. Martin’s definition of modern dance, more or less.

Shen Wei Dance Arts in Mr. Shen's Rite of Spring

Shen Wei Dance Arts in Mr. Shen’s Rite of Spring

Shen’s Rite of Spring, as performed by 16 members of his company, is individualistic firstly because it makes no reference to the classic ballet version: Nijinsky’s Rite of Spring (1913)—in which a maiden is danced to death. Notably Taylor’s Rite of Spring (1980) doesn’t have a sacrificial dance scene either. It includes gangsters and a stolen baby, and is very much in the tradition of film noir (which he grew up on). Shen’s version brings to mind the Cultural Revolution, which he was born into, and which made mass conformity, both of the arts and its people, an ideology. As if expressing this matter, Shen’s set design is composed of horizontal and vertical intersecting lines of chalk, made on the stage floor, that form cells. They appear to imprison the dancers. Behaving alternatively as robots and then madmen and women, who violently throttle themselves to the floor, the dancers in Shen’s world enact oppression and violence. Yet they never emote. The impersonality of their action is what makes the work so dramatic.

Kristen Foote and Durell R. Comedy with other members of the Limón Dance Company.

Kristen Foote and Durell R. Comedy with other members of the Limón Dance Company.

Humphrey’s Passacaglia—set to J.S. Bach, played live by organist Kent Tritle, and performed by the José Limón Dance Company—presents the group as an interlocking organism, where there may be a hierarchy, as delineated by the set design of different level blocks, but it is one that seems democratically elected. Humphrey stated that her favorite composer was J.S. Bach. Taylor has choreographed 17 works to the composer. His most popular Bach work Esplanade (1975) is performed every season and clearly is a celebration of the group. While Humphrey’s group is noble and utterly well behaved, Taylor’s group is composed of young people, who frolic, fall in love, fear, loath, and hurt. Taylor’s sociology is more expansive than Humphrey’s, but he seems to show in his choice of this work that he feels indebted to Humphrey. Unlike Taylor’s other mentor Graham, who famously said “the center of the stage is wherever I am,” Humphrey’s group dances show again and again the individual in the group. This is an inclusive vision. Taylor’s American Modern Dance Company is trying to do a similar thing with its programming of modern dances by other choreographers. No doubt a family that sticks together has a better chance of survival.

 

 

The Seven Deadly Sins at City Ballet

Tuesday, May 24th, 2011

By Rachel Straus

New York City Ballet’s new staging of  “The Seven Deadly Sins,” which had its premiere at the company’s spring gala on May 11,  puts Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht’s dark, sinister “ballet chanté” of 1933 into a new context: a tinsel-town soundstage, complete with unison hoofers in the grand finale. Choreographer Lynn Taylor-Corbett, whose credits include Broadway’s “Swing,” has essentially created a Cliff Notes version of this irony-laced yarn, dragging  principal dancer Wendy Whelan and guest artist Patti Lapone through seven shallow scenes of human transgression and stripping the work of its brooding soul.

In the original 1933 production, choreographed by George Balanchine for Les Ballets 1933, singer Lotte Lenya and dancer Tilly Losch were presented as Anna I and II, yin yang composites of the same woman. The fact that Lenya and Losch bore a striking resemblance to each other, and were about the same age, probably helped Kurt Weill and Bertold Brecht’s scenario. It concerns the Annas experiencing seven American cities, encountering seven “deadly” sins, and struggling with each other’s opposite personalities.

When Balanchine revived the work in 1958, he cast the 21-year-old Allegra Kent across from the significantly older Lenya. New York Times dance critic John Martin dubbed the production  “a stunning revival of a minor masterpiece.” But not all critics concurred, though the vision of Kent carried aloft on a human-size plate wearing just lingerie lingered in the mind, says dance writer Deborah Jowitt.

Balanchine was never afraid of being naughty. He also wasn’t afraid of “Seven Deadly” dissapearing after its run. No one filmed the performance. This may say more about what Balanchine thought of his “minor masterpiece” than City Ballet’s capacity to film performances in the 1950s. But this point is conjecture.

Now flash forward 60 years. At a City Ballet studio event, Lynn Taylor-Corbett suggests to Peter Martins that she make a reintepreted revival of “Seven Deadly Sins.” With a penchant for commercially-driven projects, Martins agrees to the venture and to Taylor-Corbett’s casting of the matronly-looking Patty Lapone, who sings like a battle ax, and the bone-thin Wendy Whelan, who dances like a steely wraith. The hope was that the project would bring in new audiences (read Broadway ticket holders). At the gala, I did see Matthew Broderick arm and arm with his wife Sarah Jessica Parker.

Unfortunately, on stage Whelan and Lapone never formed a convincing relationship, twin-like, sisterly, or otherwise. Lapone mostly stood on the sidelines, serving as singing narrator. Whelan danced Taylor-Corbett’s forgettable choreography, becoming a pawn rather than a protagonist in the rapidly unfolding events.

The greatest interest in Taylor-Corbett’s ballet was Beowulf Boritt’s sets of seven cities. In Memphis, where the sin is “Pride,” Whelan flitted about in imitation of Isadora Duncan during an audition for a sleeze-style cabaret. The black and red décor said bordello, as did the lighting by Jason Kantrowitz. In San Francisco, where the sin was “Envy,” Boritt’s backdrop of quaint Victorian row houses against a boundless blue sky was enviable. In Baltimore, where the sin was “Greed,” Boritt created a salon, channelling both Phillipe Starck’s overblown modernism and the Belle Epoque’s love of patterns. From two gargantuan black and white striped, tasseled love seats, Anna’s overfed suitors embarked on a mutually fatal duel.

As for Taylor-Corbett’s choreography, it lacked movement invention or good movement imitation. In Boston, where the sin was “Lust,” Whelan and Craig Hall peformed a romantic pas de deux.  Muscular and in a wife beater, Hall looked like Marlon Brando in Elia Kazan’s film version of “Street Car Named Desire.” He lifted Whelan aloft in shapes and transitions that looked exactly like moments in Christopher Wheeldon’s “After the Rain”—which Whelan and Hall perform frequently.

Following the performance, this reviewer read the Brecht text, which was translated into English by W.H. Auden and Chester Kallman. What crystalized from the text, but not from Taylor-Corbett’s production, is that the production hinges on demonstrating the conflict between the Annas: Anna I wants money and power; Anna II wants love and a creative outlet. Also, Anna II allows Anna I to push her around. But only in the last scene of Taylor-Corbett’s work is their conflict delivered without a doubt and Anna II emerges triumphant. As Anna II  (Whelan) collapses in front of her families’ spiffy new home, Anna I (Lapone) walks up the stairs in a mink, looking like a character from “The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills.”

The gala’s second half was devoted to Balanchine’s “Vienna Waltzes,” which premiered at the 1977 City Ballet gala.  If you don’t care for the music of Johann Strauss II, Franz Lehar, or Richard Strauss or for watching a carousel vision of dancers waltzing for 46 minutes, this ballet may not be for you. But despite the work’s repetitiousness, “Waltzes” is visual spendor at its finest;  Karinska’s five sets of costumes, ranging from full-skirted 1860s crinoline ball gowns to sleek white silk Roaring Twenties dresses are a fashionista’s delight.

In the pit, Clotilde Otranto energetically conducted such ditties as the “Explosions-Polka” and excerpts from “Der Rosenkavalier.” Principals Maria Korowski, Jennifer Ringer and Megan Fairchild demonstrated their strikingly differing styles through the same steps. That said all City Ballet dancers waltz with a brilliant elegance.