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In The Megalopolis with Mark Morris’ “The Forest”

Monday, May 23rd, 2016

By Rachel Straus

Mark Morris’ A Forest (seen May 21) premiered at the Mark Morris Dance Center in downtown Brooklyn, now a construction zone where multiple glass skyscrapers dwarf the once prominent, white dance building. As if in response, Morris’s Forest choreography to Haydn’s elegant sonorities, from Piano Trio No. 44 n E Major, is often treated with slight dance responses. For example, when MMDG Music Ensemble pianist Colin Fowler, violinist Georgy Valtchev, and cellist Wolfram Koessel introduced Hayden’s primary theme, and later repeated it, the nine talented dancers became Pavlovians, dutifully repeating the same dance phrase. Part of their dance phrase involved hopping three times in three clumps, and in time with the musicians’ strident triple bowing and fingering. They brought to mind excited kids at a candy store.

Mark Morris Dance Group in A Forest. © Ani Collier.

Mark Morris Dance Group in A Forest. © Ani Collier.

All the Forest dancers wore white unitards with a geometric pattern that looked just like Victorian wallpaper of Acanthus leaves. Maile Okamura’s costumes reinforced the notions that nature is a distant memory, a simulacrum of a simulacrum, and that the dancers’ bodies are in service of the choreographer’s design.

Morris’s newest work, part of  his insouciant genre, makes me wonder what Haydn would make of his cheeky approach. That said, the dancers never mugged the audience. Their serious, straight-forward demeanor, even when they were dancing comically to the music, brought to mind humanistic automatons strictly tethered to the beat. In the final movement, when Koessel plucked his cello, several of the dancers dropped to the floor like felled trees, thus connecting (for me) the cello’s mellow force to the more violent energy of the jackhammer (outside).

Mark Morris Dance Group in A Forest. © Ani Collier.

Mark Morris Dance Group in A Forest. © Ani Collier.

At the final bows, Morris reinforced the perception that the dancers are not free agents. When he entered, and took his place in line, he flicked his hands apart and the dancers ran to the wings. When he was ready for his third bow, he flicked his hands together. Voila! They rejoined him. My companion, a classical music expert, stopped clapping at this point. She was not amused by Morris’ public deprecation of these fine artists.

Unlike Cargo (2005)—where the dancers wear Jockey-like baggy underwear and pretend to be primitives—Foursome (2002) and The (2015) treated the dancers with greater reverence.  Foursome is set to Erik Satie’s Gnossiennes #1, #2 and #3, and was played with delicate sophistication by Fowler. Thanks to Katherine M. Patterson’s costuming, the four male dancers are immediately individualized. Domingo Estrada Jr. (is the urban sophisticate), Noah Vinson (a 1970s dancer), lanky Billy Smith (the cowboy) and Dallas McMurray (junior golfer). Costume eccentricities aside, the dancers performed somberly, reflecting the hushed power of Satie’s first and second songs. Morris gave them walks, which seemed to freeze each time they reached the end of their stride, consequently providing a half photograph, half lived experience. Foursome‘s pleasure includes its emotional arc. It moves from slow and fragmented to fulsome and joyful. The last song was a delight, with the men transforming into proud folk dancers, their chests puffed high, hand pressed to their chests, and feet pounding rhythmically in the floor. Their musicality was infectious.

Mark Morris Dance Group in The. © Mat Hayward.

Mark Morris Dance Group in The. © Mat Hayward.

The, which completed the program, was the only work to feature the full company (16 of the 18 performers). Commissioned last year by the Tanglewood Music Center for the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s 75th anniversary, The reveals Morris’ love for Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 1 in F Major. Pianists Fowler and George Shevtsov performed the version arranged for four hands by Max Reger. Yet the dancers juicy, buoyant attack made it seem as though they were performing with a full orchestra. They even were given permission to smile. The is Morris at his most humane. The dancers are the song, appearing to make the musical phrases sing more energetically. Their collective sensibility presented an ideal, the forging of a community of inspired music and dance artists.

 

 

 

 

 

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90 Years and Counting: The Martha Graham Dance Company

Sunday, April 17th, 2016

By Rachel Straus

The Martha Graham Dance Company’s 90th anniversary season (April 14-18) at New York City Center opened with Graham’s Night Journey (1947) and closed with her Cave of the Heart (1946). In between these masterworks, about Greek tragedy heroines, was a world premiere by the experimentalist Marie Chouinard and the last proscenium work that the venerable Swedish choreographer Mats Ek said that he would ever make. Considering that Chouinard’s Inner Resources reads like an uninspired group of teenage competition dancers trying to look avant-garde and Ek’s Axe was both terrifying and beautiful, it is a tragedy that Ek will not be making more dances for the stage and that Chouinard will.

Axe (2015) was created on Ben Schultz and Peiju Chien-Pott, the most dramatically daring and physically chameleon-esque Graham dancer of her generation. Axe is about a couple in crisis. It was originally made by Eks as a film, featuring his wife and dancing muse Ana Lugana. At City Center, the dance begins with the sound of a heavy object falling, again and again. When the curtain goes up, Schultz wields an ax. He is splitting wood on a tree stump. In the course of the nine-minute ballet, set to a recording of the Albinoni-Giazotto Adagio in G minor, Schultz obsessively chops wood into smaller and smaller pieces—like a woodsman with a compulsive disorder. Because the music has been used in innumerable tragic films, including Gallipoli (1981), we know that this dance is not going to end well. Indeed, Schultz never looks up to notice a haggard Chien-Pott, teetering side to side, like an unsteady piece of brittle wood. She circles around Schultz, but he pays no mind. So Chien-Pott becomes increasingly manic, repeatedly falling to the floor, and extending her legs to all four corners as if trying to dislocate her limbs. Their tragic story, however, has a surprise ending: the petite female dancer fills Schultz’s enormous arms with wood and marches him to the wing. As the curtain falls, Chien-Pott raises the ax—it’s aimed at his head.

Graham (1894-1991) would likely have approved of Axe. It features all of the elements that made her 1940s masterworks radical and potent: a revenging female dancer, a movement vocabulary that sallies between the grotesque and the sublime, a compressed abstracted story, and a large muscular man who is easy on the eyes, and when given a chance, is shown to be a good dancer too.

Since the Graham company’s current mission is to commission choreographers to make works that bear a relationship to Graham’s oeuvre, it is nigh impossible to understand Chouinard’s Inner Resources as bearing any aesthetic relationship to Graham’s. It possesses the quality of an amateur music video, with its half-hearted Vogueing and some clumsy b-boy floor moves. The music by Louis Dufort, who has collaborated with Chouinard since 1996, produces the effect of listening to a DJ club mix that is inside of a food processor. The women upend the heteronormative by sporting big mustaches, but they also strut on the points of their feet like runway models. When they strip off their blue shirts and black pants, they stand inert as if their nudity makes them afraid to move. This last image isn’t exactly a feminist statement. The Graham company’s eight female dancers deserve better than this.

Fortunately, the performance of Cave of the Heart, with Chien-Pott playing the revenging Medea, salvaged the company’s image that night. The Mannes Orchestra, under the baton of David Hayes, supported the dancers in their ability to breathe life into the work’s dramatic personae. Chien-Pott, Abdiel Jackson, Anne O’Donnell and Leslie Andrea Williams’ artistic courage, and inventiveness, made this Graham ballet relevant and worth repeat viewings.

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Celebrating Alwin Nikolais: The Futuristic Choreographer

Wednesday, February 17th, 2016

By Rachel Straus

Which came first, the arcade game Pac-Man or Mechanical Organ by Alwin Nikolais? Both came into being in 1980. With a child-like glee, both present an abstracted technicolor figure, fearsomely navigating every which way. Moreover, after watching the Alwin Nikolais Celebration at The Joyce Theater (Feb. 9), it became clear that the late choreographer (1910-1983) influenced more than the world of dance. In Nikolais’ productions, technology drove his visions. Like a Steve Jobs of the theater, Nikolais was a master mind. He conceived the concept and aesthetic of each work by controlling all the elements: composition of the electronic score, costuming of his dancers, décor creation, and choreography (albeit in collaboration with his zealous performers, who worked with him at the Henry Street Playhouse).

Nikolais wasn’t just a prescient choreographer because of his employment of technology, he was a harbinger of today’s technologically immersed individual. The Connecticut-born former puppeteer, organist and German-based experimental dancer arguably inspired early computer artists to think inside the box. Nikolais’ box was the proscenium space and since it was a square, like the computers of yore, there is much to be said about how he foreshadowed, or recommended, ideas to the next generation of techies.

Alwin Nikolais’ Tensile Involvement: ( L to R) Aaron Wood, Bashaun Williams, Juan Carlos Claudio, Lehua Estrada, and Mary Lynn Graves. Photo: Yi-Chun Wu

Alwin Nikolais’ Tensile Involvement: ( L to R) Aaron Wood, Bashaun Williams, Juan Carlos Claudio, Lehua Estrada, and Mary Lynn Graves. Photo: Yi-Chun Wu

Take for example Nikolais’ masterwork Tensile Involvement (1955). A pre-digital vision is created, thanks to the ten admirable dancers of the Ririe-Woodbury Dance Company—who performed all four works on the program, are dedicated to keeping his choreography alive and are guided by Alberto Del Saz, director of the Nikolais/Louis Foundation. The dancers transformed the stage into a cat’s cradle by running with an enormously long, stretchy dayglow material, which they never allowed to become slack. Look at your computer’s interface when it is on sleep mode for a modern-day example of this effect. Indeed, before the invention of laser beams, light shows and computer-generated images, Nikolais figured out how to rig a lighting plot and and employ unconventional material to generate that which hadn’t yet been discovered by engineers. Instead of clicking and coding, his dancers designed the space with their bodies, and props, to produce a vortex of intersecting lines. Nikolais’ futuristic artwork is at its most dazzling when the dancers frame themselves inside their own sets designs (or interfaces). At this moment, the decor and the dancer merged, and the audience clapped heartily. In the Renaissance, Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man expressed how the proportions of the body are the building blocks for architecture. In Nikolais’ Tensile Involvement, his dancers’ bodies express how we are comprised of particles, beams of light and energy.

The program opened with Crucible (1985), a work in which the dancers appeared and disappeared behind a large mirror. Now this may sound simple, perhaps even childish, but as the work progressed it became visually spectacular. The set resembles a big café bar. Instead of the bar’s surface being zinc, it is a black mirror and it is tilted upwards, so that when the dancers emerge from behind it, we see them and their inverted image. But unlike Narcissus, who never left the pool of water which reflected his gorgeous face, the Ririe-Woodbury dancers do everything but stare at their doppelgängers. With the mirrored set and special lighting effects, the dancers sculpt their limbs to become frogs zebras then frogs, Siamese twins then DNA double helixes. Crucible is just what the dictionary says it means: a place or situation in which different elements interact to produce something new.

Alwin Nikolais’ Gallery Photo: Yi-Chun Wu

Alwin Nikolais’ Gallery Photo: Yi-Chun Wu

Clowns in Alwin Nikolais’ Gallery: Bashaun Mitchell and Juan Carlos Claudio. Photo: Yi-Chun Wu

Clowns in Alwin Nikolais’ Gallery: Bashaun Mitchell and Juan Carlos Claudio. Photo: Yi-Chun Wu

Gallery (1978), the last work on the program, tendered the most sinister visions of the evening. At the finale of the eight-section work, bits of the dancers’ day-glow masks are shot off by an an invisible shooter. Like an ominous shadow that grows bigger and bigger, the work grew less child friendly and more interesting. First there were pink-green pinwheels, later hot-pink clowns violently flapping and finally a group, who stays standing despite being shot at. Gallery reads like a house of horrors and delights. This can also be said of technological innovation and Nikolais’ dances. Both continue to be glowingly relevant.

 

 

 

 

 

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Mark Morris’s Pleasant Ballet for ABT

Monday, November 9th, 2015

By Rachel Straus

Mark Morris’s After You, a new commission from American Ballet Theatre, is textbook pleasant and thus a convenient opener for a company wishing to present a thirty-minute ensemble work. Performed by 12 dancers and set to a composition by Johann Hummel (Septet in C-major, Op.114 “The Military”), the ballet’s title, After You, refers to what is said when two people nearly collide. One person gives permission for the other to take the lead. Thus the ballet, seen October 27 at the former New York State Theater, evokes an abnormally civilized world of dance—especially for Morris, who has been celebrated for making ballets to classical music that dabble in physicalized human faux pas. Nothing of this sort is seen in the three sections—titled Allegro con brio, Adagio and and Menuetto. In Isaac Mizrahi’s unisex style silk pajamas in fuchsia and tangerine orange, the ensemble carries out ballet steps in suspiciously peaceful harmony with each other. Hummel’s music, under the baton of David LaMarche, supported this mood in its grinningly bright orchestration.

 

Arron Scott, Stella Abrera and Calvin Royal III in After You. Photo: Rosalie O'Connor.

Arron Scott, Stella Abrera and Calvin Royal III in After You. Photo: Rosalie O’Connor.

Despite the polished performances of principals Stella Abrera and Gillian Murphy (as well as that of winningly confident corps dancer Calvin Royal III), the ballet as a whole made me think that Morris was making fun of ballet. And he said as much at N.Y.U.’s Center for Ballet and the Arts, the day of the work’s premiere (October 20). “I’ll do anything for money,” Morris joyfully admitted in reference to his commission by ABT to a standing room audience event, which was held to launch Dr. Stephanie Jordan’s Mark Morris: Musician – Choreographer (Dance Books). At N.Y.U., Morris added that while his dancers can do anything, ballet dancers are limited (they have trouble walking like normal people and they dramatically emote, which he despises). Of course, this is not the first time that Morris has made fun of ballet dancers. But I nonetheless had to wonder why ballet companies continue to commission him to choreograph, when in return he flips them the bird. The only answer I have is that Morris delivers the kind of conservative fair that colludes with the current conservative ethos of American Ballet Theatre. Jennifer Homans, who directs N.Y.U.’s Center for Ballet, calls today’s ballet companies “big business.” Perhaps ABT needs to commission works that are risk adverse.

 

From left, Cory Stearns, Veronika Part and Thomas Forster in the company premiere of “Mono-tones I and II.”

From left, Cory Stearns, Veronika Part and Thomas Forster in the company premiere of “Mono-tones I and II.”

Also in the program was ABT’s premiere of Frederick Ashton’s ground-breaking Monotones I and II, created for The Royal Ballet in 1965 and 1966, respectively. Ashton’s ballet is inhabited by three dancers (in each section), who perform only slow, unfolding movement. The work becomes daring for its hushed quality (no “ta da” moments, no multiple pirouettes). Ashton once explained that his ballet was inspired by space travel. Set to Satie’s titular score (originally orchestrated by Debussy), the music of Monotones suggests time lapses through the pregnant pauses that float throughout the score. With matching caps, the dancers appear in sleek unitards (lime color and then white). Originally designed by Ashton, these costumes help render the dancers into heavenly bodies. Their supported adagio work brings to mind the movement of comets drawing the night sky in parabolic splendor. In the second section, Veronika Part dances most of the ballet on pointe, thereby transforming into a white rocket pointing to the sky. Her two partners (Thomas Forster and Cory Stearns) look as though they are preparing her for lift off by burnishing her limbs with theirs. These are not men and women, Ashton suggests, but forces; their technical elegance ensures seamless orbit in zero gravity.

 

The last ballet on the program, Kurt Jooss’s Green Table (1932) can also be said to be radical because it is about war. Despite the United States’ continual of fighting wars since 2001, it seems odd that no ballet companies have chosen to tackle this looming subject. Of course, it’s a risky subject. War does not beget happy endings. This fact is clearly presented in Jooss’s ballet, whose subtitle is a Dance of Death in Eight Scenes. Dancing the character Death, the virile Marcelo Gomes shows that no scythe is needed to kill. The musculature of his legs and arms, further emphasized by a gladiatorial costume that emphasizes the bulk of his quadriceps and pectoral muscles, is weapon enough. The work is not so much a kinesthetic dance experience as a set of stark tableaux. It’s eye-widening to see how much war’s violence can be communicated with so little movement.

 

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Basil Twist Camps History in Sisters Follies

Monday, October 19th, 2015

By Rachel Straus

Basil Twist’s Sister’s Follies: Between Two Worlds, commissioned for the 100th anniversary of the Abrons Playhouse, is a testament to how camp saves performance history from oblivion. Dance and theater works of yore are notoriously difficult to produce. Their re-staging can look hopelessly old fashioned. But in Sisters’ Follies, Twist—a newly minted MacArthur Genius and a third generation puppeteer—casts Joey Arias, the celebrated drag queen chanteuse, and Julie Atlas Muz, the burlesque performance artist, to play the titular sisters: Alice and Irene Lewisohn, who founded the Playhouse in 1915 as a vehicle for their theatrical ambitions. Muz and Arias are stars of satire, but they aren’t real-life divas (like the Lewisohn sister were). Under Twist’s direction, Muz and Arias become the Lewisohn sisters’ ghosts, floating, flipping and dangling from wires—which divas don’t do. Arias and Muz also prance and preen, belt and belittle each other in the jewel-box size theater, made spectacular through the efforts of 11 behind-the-scenes performers, who manipulate large and small puppets in costumes that range from camels to biblical figures. The Lewisohn’s Playhouse becomes Twist’s camp marionette theater.

Joey Arias as Alice Lewisohn. Photo by Hilary Swift

Joey Arias as Alice Lewisohn. Photo by Hilary Swift

Sisters Follies’ homage to the copper heiresses Alice and Irene Lewisohn is, perhaps unintentionally, a meditation about dance versus theater. Alice was the thespian, Irene the terpsichorean. In this satire, they see each other’s chosen art form as the lesser mode of theatrical expression. (It’s nice to see some things never change.) The Jewish sisters resided in New York’s uptown world, yet their Playhouse, on 466 Grand Street, was ground zero of immigrant New York. According to Playhouse scholar John P. Harrington, many of their productions stemmed from the folk tradition of satire. In Sisters Follies, the heart of the show pumps through five satiric cabaret numbers in which Wayne Barker’s mix and match music (a little Dion Warwick, a splash of Rimsky-Korsakov), Arias and Muz’s high-voltage performances, and the puppeteers make merry by spoofing Lewisohn’s successful—and deeply unsuccessful—stage productions, which spanned from 1915-1927.

Twist uses every inch of the tiny Playhouse to evoke the grand vision of the Lewisohn sisters’ theatrical ambitions. Above the proscenium stage, the sculptures of tragedy and comedy (two masked heads) are transformed—through the projection design of Daniel Brodie and Gabriel Aronson—into the faces of the endlessly kibitzing sisters. We learn about how their stage rivalry spurred them to reach new artistic heights. Before this theatrical effect occurs, we see Arias and Muz flying across the stage, like oversize puppets, singing a version of “Sisters” from the 1954 film White Christmas. Irving Berlin’s forgettable lyrics get a remake: Arias and Muz sing, “‘Art is for the masses’ we’re declaring/To this noble purpose she and I sworn/This dream house playhouse was born!”

Julie Atlas Muz as Irene Lewisohn. Photo by Hilary Swift

Julie Atlas Muz as Irene Lewisohn. Photo by Hilary Swift

For the dance writer, the most pleasing number was the “Kairn of Koridwen,” originally performed in 1916, in which Irene starred as a Welsh woman who must choose between love and religion. In a platinum blonde wig and a silver lame gown, Muz (as Irene) demonstrates that she is clearly not from Wales. In Muz’s choreography, she kicks like a Tiller Girl (a precursor of the Rockettes), gestures dramatically à la Isadora Duncan, and then her male object of desire enters on a pogo stick, which immediately calls to mind the famous traveling steps of Tiresias in Martha Graham’s Night Journey. The connection to Graham, who studied at the Playhouse, is furthered by having the chorus, a set of Druids dressed like Darth Vader’s kin (that is if he copulated with an antelope), contract and lunge in unison to a rendition of Charles Griffes atonal music of the day. Muz is so distraught by having to choose between sex and spirituality that she strips down to a G-string. The chorus then lifts her up and, poof, I see Gypsy Rose Lee in all her naked glory. Twist and Muz’s play with historical references is a gas.

Arias’s shining moment occurs in the number “Midnight at the Oasis.” One of the most compelling drag queens working today, Arias also has pipes. When he sings, “I’ll be your belly dancer, prance/And you can be my sheik,” he isn’t just satirizing early 20th century productions like Scheherazade, with its fascination for the “exotic” far east, Arias becomes a pop star in his own right. His vocal range is operatic. His darkly etched eyes and sculpted face bring to mind the disco diva Grace Jones, who like Arias performed with a near violent wish to be seen.

Since Sisters Follies has no narrative or character development, the show grows stale toward the end. Twist tries to keep the momentum by having the sisters’ bickering turn into a full-scale war. They end up throwing a large stick of dynamite at it each other. Finally, it explodes (thanks to a transparent screen that projects a conflagration). Then the unexpected occurs, when Arias and Munoz appear in front of the curtain in their underwear and safety harnesses. Up close their harnesses (for sailing through space) look like S&M gear, which is all too perfect considering the hyper-sexual content of Twist’s production. Breaking the fourth wall, Arias and Muz talk about the joys of playing the Lewisohn sisters because they too were creatures of the theater. Twist’s Sisters Follies is magical performance art. It celebrate the larger than life ambitions of theatrical folk—both today’s and those buried by the passage of time.

 

To purchase tickets for Sisters Follies: Between Two Worlds before it closes on October 31st go to:

http://www.abronsartscenter.org/performances/basil-twist-sisters-follies.html

 

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Lion Hearts: Batsheva’s Young Ensemble

Friday, October 2nd, 2015

By Rachel Straus

The company known as Batsheva-the Young Ensemble made its Joyce Theater debut with the composite work “Decadance”, many of whose sections have been presented in the recent past, in New York and on different companies. Thus, opening night (Sept. 27) was not so much an opportunity to see new work by Israeli choreographer Ohad Naharin, the company’s artistic director, as to look at the work anew as performed by 16 fresh-faced and limbed dancers. In “Decadance”, the performers are the main event, their individuality is the subject, and the audience championed them. When the dancers took their bows at the end of the 85-minute work, they received a standing ovation. The artists who made this audience member especially delighted were the poetically understated Matan Cohen, the intensely serious Korina Fraiman, the confidently loose Chiaki Horita, and the volcanically cool Kyle Scheurich.

Photo by Gadi Dagon

Photo by Gadi Dagon

The Young Ensemble, as its name connotes, is a troupe whose dancers are between the ages of 18 and 24. Their tenure lasts just two short years. During this time they live and breathe the Gaga technique, whose codified vocabulary (which is now articulated in a Gaga dictionary) continues to be constructed by Naharin. Gaga words are packed with images. In the dictionary (made available to me by a Juilliard School dance student), Kada means bones floating inside the flesh. Magma means feeding texture from the hands and feet into the rest of the body. The words, as translated by Naharin into choreographic phrases (and often done in uncanny unison), produce movement and theatrical qualities that read to the viewer as hushed and screaming, reverent and absurd, banal and virtuosic. Gaga offers dance artists a magnetically-attractive experience: the ability to formulate extreme states of expression—both emotional and physical—through metaphoric language that connects the mind and the body.

Judging by other works created by Naharin, it’s clear that the choreographer likes lineups in which the dancers face the audience like bold soldiers, or resigned camp victims, or defiant teenagers. These lineups, which have a photographic stark stillness, are interpolated with frenzied movement, often done by a solo dancer in four counts. In this space of a human breath, one dancer packs in a lifetime of movement. The effect is like watching a six-minute solo in fast-forward speed. Naharin seems to be commenting on the breathless pace of modern life, as well as the inner life, in which emotions and ideas whirl around (especially when we are young), much like the end of a powerful washing machine’s spin cycle.

Naharin’s “Decadance” works as a full-length piece because its sections are organized to provide maximum contrast. For example, in the second section, set to a pulsating Arab folk musical arrangement, the dancers move with a cartoon intensity. In the third section, set to ambient recorded sounds, a mood of longing pervades: the dancers are seen in tableaux, then they lope across the stage like caravans crossing a wide expanse of desert.  “Decadance,” as performed by Batsheva-The Young Ensemble, will be at The Joyce until October 4. Then they will meet audiences in Japan (two cities) and Melbourne, Australia. In these places, they will likely win more hearts.

Photo by Gadi Dagon.

Photo by Gadi Dagon

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Wanted: Artistic Director of a Ballet Company

Monday, September 21st, 2015

By Rachel Straus

Two mid-size ballet companies in North America are in search of artistic directors. Gradimir Pankov is leaving his post at Les Grands Ballets Canadiens of Montreal after 15 years. John McFall is departing Atlanta Ballet after 20 years. In comparison to the majority of the 140-odd ballet troupes across the North American continent, which have minimal seasons and only a handful of dancers, Les Grands and Atlanta employ between 20 and 30 dancers and commission in-demand choreographers for their seasons and tours. So, what is required to helm a mid-size ballet company? Les Grands recently posted the following criteria for their artistic director search:

  1. “It is important that the AD leads the company by working in the studio, as a teacher, coach, repetiteur, or choreographer.”
  2. “The AD reports directly to the Board and is responsible for the company’s look, repertoire, choreography, programming, and is an artistic leader.”
  3. “[The AD has] a mind to fiscal responsibility, and a vision that includes the community’s desire for entertainment [and] artistic achievement.”
  4. “[The AD should have] a reputation for artistic quality and the contacts and ability to bring the world’s greatest contemporary choreographer’s work to the repertoire of the Company.”

It seems, if one takes the Les Grands advert as more than wishful thinking, the search committee wants the AD to do everything in the studio, know everyone in the ballet world, and have a head for business. Does such a wunderkind currently exist?

Loudes Lopez, a former principal dancer with New York City Ballet, is perhaps the only person who fits the bill. She became the AD of Miami City Ballet in 2012, after serving for five years as the executive director of Morphoses. She kept this company afloat, even after its founder, the choreographer Christopher Wheeldon, jumped ship in 2010. Lopez achieved this feat by inviting guest choreographers to direct separate seasons and by keeping her wary board close. Prior to her work with Wheeldon, Lopez served as the executive director of the George Balanchine Foundation, which is concerned with educational outreach. As a New York City Ballet dancer for approximately 24 years, Lopez developed an intimate understanding of George Balanchine and Jerome Robbins’ repertory, having performed their works while both choreographers were alive. Lopez is a particularly marvelous fit for Miami City Ballet because she was born in Cuba. She is able to fundraise in her native tongue and in a city, known as the gateway to Latin America.

While Lopez appears to be the dream AD, other recent AD hires reveal the more typical profile of a former principal dancer turned ballet master in chief. Take Madrid-born Angel Corella, who danced for American Ballet Theatre. He was hired by Pennsylvania Ballet in 2014. Because of various circumstances, he did not come with impressive executive credentials. After retiring from the stage, Corella returned to his native Spain and attempted to create a ballet company, first in the Castile and León region and then in Barcelona. Corella didn’t have experience fundraising and the Spaniards, especially in the wake of the financial crisis, vacillated about, and then declined to back his ballet company.

Then there is the Cuban-born José Manuel Carreño, another star of American Ballet Theater, who became the AD of Sarasota Ballet in 2011, upon his official retirement from the stage. He is now the head of Silicon Valley Ballet (formerly Ballet San Jose). Like Corella, he came to his first job with scant training in fiscal management, fundraising, or marketing experience.

It will be interesting to see who Les Grands and Atlanta Ballet will hire. In the recent past artistic directors of renowned ballet companies used to be choreographers, such as George Balanchine at New York City Ballet, Frederick Ashton at Royal Ballet and John Cranko at Stuttgart Ballet.  Thus their companies had unique artistic profiles. These days ballet companies are in the odd business of performing the same repertory as their fellow troupes. It makes for a homogenized ballet world. My hope is that Atlanta and Les Grands will hire a choreographer, one who puts a real stamp on the artistic “product” of their company. Perhaps this new AD will also be a woman. That would be doubly groundbreaking.

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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.

 

 

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The Solo Dance Act: Nederlands Dance Theater 2

Monday, February 9th, 2015

By Rachel Straus

Perhaps we are returning to the era of dance as a solo act. That’s what I was thinking while watching the 16-member Nederlands Dans Theater 2. In three of the four works presented at the Joyce Theater on February 7, the ensemble dances devolved into a series of solos. This trend occurred for no apparent reason. Insiders know, however, that it’s a lot easier to make solos than group choreography. Thankfully NDT2 has superb dancers, like the dramatic Imre Van Opstal and the inimitable Spencer Dickhaus. So this tendency to load up an evening with solo dance sections isn’t a tragedy. But I nonetheless left Saturday night’s show feeling empty-handed. The ideas in the presented works, made between 2003 and 2013, are light or just insignificant. Some are plain dated, like Sara by Sharon Eyal and Gal Behar, which is about how we are becoming mechanized by our machines.

Imre Van Opstal in Sara. Photo by Rahi Rezvani

Imre Van Opstal in Sara. Photo by Rahi Rezvani

NDT2’s look-at-me-now style choreographies, under the direction of Paul Lightfoot and his artistic partner Sol León, stand in stark contrast to the former NDT2 seen five years ago under the direction of Jiri Kylian. This Czech choreographer was responsible for putting NDT2, composed of dancers under age 27, on the international dance map through his choreographies that combined the communitarian qualities of the folk, the elegance of ballet, and the experimentalism of modern dance. As a result of Kylian’s ensemble dances, one reveled in NDT dancers’ multiple strengths, which included their partnering, solo and group dancing, as well as their ability to become symbolic figures in an architecturally complex landscape, framed and influenced by a well-chosen piece of music.

I New Then by Johan Inger. Photo by Yi-Chun Wu

I New Then by Johan Inger. Photo by Yi-Chun Wu

With the exception of Johan Inger’s I New Then (2012), set to some of Van Morrison’s greatest hits, the two other ballets employing music in the program responded to their scores like background sound. Indeed, the work that used no music was the best of the lot. In Shutters Shut (2003) danced by Dickhaus and Opstal, the choreographers León and Lightfoot developed and set their duet to Getrude Steins’ poem, “If I told him: A completed portrait of Picasso” (1923). In the poem, Stein replicates the fracturing of an image into jagged shapes, seen in Picasso’s cubist paintings, through her repetitious and abrupt prose style. Lightfoot and León, in turn, fracture gender norms: Dickhaus wears red lipstick, his expression is a cross between Betty Boop and Garbo, and he knows how to jut a hip. Meanwhile Opstal moves with the masculine force of Mussolini, and her black eye makeup makes her look like a modernist guerilla fighter. The costumes are clever too: they resemble corset-cum-wrestling skins; the fronts of them are white and the backs are black, thus causing the backside of the dancers to disappear into the black backdrop hanging at the lip of the stage. When Dickhaus and Opstal traverse from stage right to left, the work ends. No more than four minutes, Shutters Shut is a morsel of creativity. What’s more, the dancers need each other to successfully complete the work. Their comic timing and opposing interpretations of the same quirky gestures transform them into freakish twins. Their dancing is marvelous and, for this viewer, it says something more than “look at me.”

 

 

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Justin Peck’s New Graffiti Ballet

Saturday, January 31st, 2015

By Rachel Straus

Justin Peck’s ballets are athletic, spirited, musical.  The 27-year-old choreographer is pushing the technical envelope of today’s dancers. Far from looking stilted in ballet’s three-century-year old language, Peck’s dancers appear unleashed by, and often euphoric in, his ballet-rooted aesthetic. Yet despite Peck’s adherence to tradition, he is nothing but a contemporary choreographer. His combination of steps are so complex that 20 years ago the dancers might not have been able to realize them.

Peck, who has been dancing with New York City Ballet since 2007, was named resident choreographer of the company in 2014. His third first piece for City Ballet was Paz de la Jolla, inspired by and is set to Bohuslav Martinů’s Sinfonietta la Jolla. Peck is returning to the music of Martinů for his first commission from Miami City Ballet, a company founded by the former Balanchine principal Edward Villella and now heralded by former Balanchine ballerina Lourdes Lopez. Yet the inspiration for the work, which will premiere at Palm Beach’s Kravis Center on March 27, appears to be less about Martinů’s Concerto for Piano and Orchestra No. 1 in D Major (1925) and more about the graffiti art found in Wynwood, Miami. That is, if the promo-video for the new ballet, called Heatscape, is an accurate rendering of the spirit of the work.

Justin Peck and Miami City Ballet dancers in Wynwood

Justin Peck and Miami City Ballet dancers in Wynwood

In the first moments of Ezra Hurwit and Peck’s Heatscape video, Peck puts on his ear phones, we hear Martinů’s concerto, and we see the tall, boyish choreographer enter Wynwood Walls graffiti park, created by the late real estate mogul Tony Goldman. What follows is the appearance of Miami City Ballet dancers, sailing through the air like dolphins in front of various graffiti murals.

One wonders whether Peck, who is not a Miamian, knows the story behind Wynwood’s recent and massive gentrification, and if he did know it, whether he would choose this place as the backdrop for his promo video.

The story of Wynwood begins in the 2000s. Looking for a place to invest his money, the real estate mogul Goldman took note of the creativity of area’s graffiti muralists. They were illegally using the sides of Wynwood warehouses to showcase their art. Goldman decided to give them legal wall space for their work. And, so, Wynwood Walls were born. More recently, another real estate mogul named David Edelstein began buying up Wynwood’s warehouse neighborhood. Thanks to Edelstein, the working class area has become a hipster mecca. Edelstein’s approach is as follows: buy large swaths of a poor neighborhood, promote urban artists as the symbol of the neighborhood, rapidly gentrify the area into a playground for nightlife and the bourgeois consumption of art, and then kick out old residents. All of this is described in Camila Álvarez and Natalie Edgar’s Right to Wynwood, which won the Best Documentary Short at the 2014 Miami Film Festival.

With this in mind, Peck’s decision to put ballet and Miami graffiti together is problematic. His joining of the two arts occurs not just in his promo video, but also in the soon-to-be-completed stage version of Heatscape. Shepard Fairey, a former graffiti artist, known for his Barack Obama “Hope” poster, is creating the work’s graffiti-esque set design.

Putting ballet and graffiti together is hardly new. The first graffiti ballet was Twyla Tharp’s Deuce Coupe (1973) for The Joffrey Ballet. Back in the 1970s, when Tharp was making Deuce Coupe, graffiti was still considered anti-social. It illegally altered public spaces. By hiring graffiti artists to spray paint the stage backdrop, while Tharp’s ballet-meets-social dance unfolded, she threw into question the notion of high and low art.

Peck, who is a classically trained ballet dancer, rightfully wants to mix the “high” and the “low”; to blend sanctioned and rebellious art forms together. Unfortunately, graffiti is no longer a rebellious art. The establishment has embraced it. In the case of Wynwood, real estate moguls are using graffiti to gentrify the neighborhood. Consequently, Peck’s Heatscape video promo doesn’t express bohemian culture as much as it reveals the corporatization of culture, marketed to young people in spaces owned by real estate titans. Let’s hope Peck’s actual ballet doesn’t fumble so drastically into contested urban spaces, where art and big business are meeting. Let’s hope Heatscape is just a hot dance.

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