It wasn’t a bad idea to trim Prokofiev’s long score, which was conducted with welcome nuance by the company’s new music director, Fayçal Karoui. Compressing the score certainly helped Martins collapse the action into two acts for additional speed and efficiency, as he did with both Swan Lake and The Sleeping Beauty. But are speed and efficiency what we look for in Romeo and Juliet?
The Martins Romeo + Juliet just doesn’t add up. It’s lacking in passion and tragedy; there’s no sense of period or place; the poetry and color of the play aren’t even suggested. However, the bottom line of all Romeos is the bottom line: Like Swan Lake, it’s a surefire box-office winner. When ABT’s overstuffed, overheated MacMillan version turns up soon at the Met, you’ll be able to compare it to this thin, cool new one. I myself prefer whichever one I’m not seeing at the moment.
The New York Observer
MAY 8, 2007
Can Martha Graham Be Kept Alive?
FOR THOSE OF US WHO CARE about Martha Graham, it’s been a bumpy ride.
I got on board in 1958, the year of Graham’s full-evening dance-drama Clytemnestra, the first work of hers I ever saw. To some Graham purists it was suspect—“a bit Hollywood,” as Arlene Croce put it. To me it was a revelation of what theater could be. And what dancers could be. Graham herself, in the title role (of course), was clearly diminished in strength—she was almost sixty-four. But every gesture was so full, so powerful, so telling that it didn’t matter; all she had to do was lift her arm and it was thrilling. And, just as exciting, every one of the principals had the powerful presence of a star, in no way outshone by the star of stars, Martha herself.
Given the consistent quality of repertory and performance, who could imagine then that the great days were drawing to an end? Nineteen sixty-two saw the last really satisfying new work: Legend of Judith, with Martha as the Old Judith looking back over her life while Linda Hodes as the Young Judith dealt with poor Holofernes. After that, every season showcased an eagerly anticipated new work: The Witch of Endor (David and Saul), Cortege of Eagles (the Trojan Women), A Time of Snow (Abelard and Heloise), Mendicants of Evening (Marian Seldes intoning the poetry of Saint-John Perse while bolts of cloth were flung across the stage). Every one of these pieces was a disappointment—a formulaic imitation of the kind of dance-drama Martha had invented.
By the mid-1970s (and that’s being generous), the whole Graham experience was deflating. The new works were more and more lackadaisical and perfunctory, although the loyalists pretended otherwise, and a new generation of dancers—dedicated, talented, and hardworking though they were—lacked the charisma of their predecessors. Worse, as Martha herself aged and became embittered (and alcoholic), unable to reconcile herself to her enforced retirement from dancing, the famous Graham technique began to erode.
And so we arrived at the substitution of chic for art: the Halston years; the Blackgama ad years (Martha in furs); the Margot-and-Rudy years; the Betty Ford–Woody Allen gala years. And the years (until her death, in 1991) dominated by Martha’s young protégé, Ron Protas, and characterized by the abrupt dismissal—the massacre—of the leading dancers of the golden period who were the logical successors to carry on the great work. Finally, there were the catastrophic legal entanglements that followed Martha’s death, threatening the existence of the company and the repertory.
* * *
IT’S TO THE ETERNAL CREDIT of the band of believers who persevered against the formidable odds that we have today a functioning Graham enterprise—that we’re in the midst of a two-week season at the Joyce that’s attracting an enthusiastic audience. But the inevitable questions arise: What is this audience seeing? Or, more directly, are these performances reasonable facsimiles of what Graham intended and achieved? To a large extent, the unfortunate answer is no. The fact that pleasure can still be taken in certain works is a testament to their inherent merits—their compelling concepts, their immaculate structure, their striking imagery. Others are, at least for now, gone with the wind.
The most distressing example is Embattled Garden, the garden in question being Eden, the characters Adam and Eve, Lilith and the Stranger. This work, like Clytemnestra, was mounted in 1958, when it was obviously intended to be taken as a wry and wicked sex comedy—a jaundiced but sympathetic commentary on what fools these lovers (us) be.
Today it’s an overwrought melodrama of lust and betrayal. I was so confused opening night that the next morning I called Paul Taylor for a reality check (he danced the Stranger for years). “Yeah,” he said, “it was definitely tongue-in-cheekish back then.” There were no tongues in cheeks at the Joyce performances.
Almost as endangered is the rhapsodic Diversion of Angels, a pure-dance work that has inspired audiences since its creation almost sixty years ago. Today’s company approaches it with diminished technique and exaggerated piety. Of the three lead women, the imposing Katherine Crockett was not much more than adequate as the one in white, and Blakeley White-McGuire was a disaster as the one in red, her character’s thrilling rushes across the stage reduced to zero effect, the signature contractions in midflight almost imperceptible. (More perceptible was the signature narcissism of her partner, Maurizio Nardi.) Only the young Atsuko Tonohata, in yellow, projected the simple, happy ardor that brings Diversion to life.
* * *
THERE WERE UNFORTUNATE CIRCUMSTANCES this season. Most serious was the absence of Fang-Yi Sheu, an extraordinarily talented and beautiful dancer who illuminated the repertory these past few years. There’s no one in the current company at her level. Miki Orihara is an elegant, lovely dancer, but her Medea, in Cave of the Heart, doesn’t sear you. (Sheu ripped your heart out.) Two of the five women listed in the program as principals aren’t on view at all, and there’s only one principal male listed, the exemplary Tadej Brdnik. He’s a persuasive Oedipus in Night Journey, the kind of hunky guy Graham liked to cast opposite her. (“Me Martha, you Tarzan.”) The Jocastas of both Crockett and Elizabeth Auclair were subpar, the power of the chorus of seven has been diluted, and with the departure of the company’s senior men, the blind seer Tiresias pounding across the stage with his heavy staff has been reduced to a boy with a pogo stick.
As a result, no doubt, of all these absences, the entire season’s casting looks thin, dominated as it seems to be by Jennifer DePalo, a soloist who is certainly competent but who lacks sufficient inner life to ignite Graham’s highly personal art. In sum: This is a repertory that demands stars being performed by a company that lacks them.
Much is being made of this being the Graham Company’s eightieth anniversary. There’s a series of special events, beginning with a single performance on opening night of Lamentation Variations, an effective tribute by three current choreographers (Aszure Barton, Richard Move, and Larry Keigwin) to Martha’s most famous solo. Saturday afternoon we were amused, charmed, moved, and irritated by a ninety-minute tightly choreographed speakathon called From the Horse’s Mouth, featuring a roster of almost thirty Grahamites, old and young, telling anecdotes about her, doing some modest steps, parading her spectacular costumes. Most welcome were a few famous old-timers: Pearl Lang, Mary Hinkson, Stuart Hodes. Most missed were other famous old-timers who have to go nameless because there were so many of them. A gala is upcoming. In other words, the season has been cleverly orchestrated by the company’s new artistic director, the praiseworthy Janet Eilber.
But what was she doing exhuming Acts of Light, a totally meretricious piece of work from 1981? How shamelessly Graham pieced together bits and pieces of her past, demeaning them in the process! Worst is the endless Part III (“Ritual to the Sun”), with eighteen or so dancers in Halston’s clinging faux-nude body-stockings doing floor exercises and other gymlike things before massing for a faux-ecstatic faux-climax. Some works deserve to die the death, and this one should be buried once and for all with a wooden stake through its heart.
Luckily, two Graham masterpieces will be added to the repertory in the season’s second week: Errand into t
he Maze and Appalachian Spring. Will they serve as an antidote to Acts of Light? Hope springs eternal.…
The New York Observer
SEPTEMBER 18, 2007
Bourne’s Male Swans Are Back at the Lake
I DISLIKED MATTHEW BOURNE’S SWAN LAKE a dozen years ago when it hit Broadway, transfixed the critics, and swept the Tonys. Since then it has played on and on all over the world, and now it’s back (at the City Center) in a new and improved version, which I don’t like much more than the original.
Everyone knows its “shocking” premise: The poor Prince hates the falsities of the Court (the usual adolescent anti-establishment angst); loathes yet lusts for the Queen Mom (there’s a near-rape—not only incest but lèse-majesté); is uncomfortable with sexy girls in general and in particular with a pushy girl in pink; and finds comfort only with his dear little toy bird. He’s a mess—not only gender-confused but species-confused, as we discover when he encounters a dozen or so big he-swans with gleaming bare torsos and rippling muscles and thick white shag from their navels to their shins. One of them is … Him! Odette himself! And they get it on.
But not until we’ve been dragged through some introductory scenes that look like skits from a bad revue, the first of them an interlude in an opera house in which four butterflies, three monsters, and a parody huntsman do a parody dance that comes straight out of British panto. Then the Freudian bit with Mom. Then our boy in “A Seedy Club” that evokes every conceivable nightclub cliché. Then he’s out on the street, roughed up and miserable. And finally, he’s down at the lake, near suicide … when up pops the Swan.
Actually, there are a dozen of them, sexy, scary, and aggressive. (No surprise to me, having read in an English newspaper half a century ago—and never forgotten—not only that “swans have been known to attack Scotties” but that “one blow from a swan’s wing can break a man’s leg.” I’ve kept my distance ever since.) The Prince, though, is enthralled, ecstatic. Is it real? A fantasy? A wet dream?
Following (vaguely) the outline of the original ballet, the next act takes place in a ballroom, where the Queen, now alerted to her son’s … peculiarities?… parades a covey of elegant ladies for him to choose among. And, bang, Odile—the false Odette—barges in (he’s in leather now) and is all over every woman in sight, beginning with the Queen. You could call this scene “The Triumph of Rough Trade.” With that busy pelvis action that’s his specialty, the Swan is pure catnip, and the Prince is in an agony of humiliation and jealousy.
This “black act”—everyone’s in black except the Queen, who’s in red—is the only part of the ballet that has some genuine appeal to it: It’s cleverly staged and it’s energized; there’s a witty dance with the “Princesses,” and the choreography for all the national dances—Spanish, Magyar, et cetera—is original and amusing. The dance vocabulary is still thin here, but it’s more various than that of the bird sections, in which the guys clomp and thump around with stylized swan gestures.
Act IV: The Prince collapses, is taken to the hospital, medicated, and put to bed, where in his tortured dreams he rushes back to the lake (as in the standard version) only to see the real Odette being pecked and thrashed to death (those powerful wings!) by her co-swans—I’m not clear why. In the morning, his mother finds him dead, but don’t worry—there’s an apotheosis, and we see Prince and Swan united forever up in the sky. In other words, it’s the same old story: boy meets bird, boy loses bird, boy gets bird.
That this is all a homosexual retelling of a work we know so well is not a problem—Swan Lake has survived other provocative concepts—but to portray Odette as the aggressor and the Prince as passive is to violate Tchaikovsky’s great score. What’s really disturbing isn’t that the Bourne version is just another iteration of that worn-out trope of a boy waking up to his true sexual identity; it’s that the underlying emotional dynamic is so infantile. It’s not only the toy bird in bed with the Prince, but also that he’s clearly happiest when being picked up and cuddled.
All of which seems to fit smoothly with Bourne’s misogyny: Both of the prominent female figures—the sexually voracious Queen and the sexually voracious bimbo in pink—are presented as threatening. They’re caricatures of women, and so, too, are the predatory ladies in black in the ballroom scene. Only adolescent boys and menacing swans are allowed real sexual feelings.
This Swan Lake is startling and at times effective; it’s also coarse and at times risible. Overall, it’s as infantile as its hero. I hope that’s not why it has enjoyed so huge a success, but I suspect it may be.
The New York Observer
OCTOBER 27, 2010
A New Nutcracker Hits BAM
THE PROBLEM with getting Balanchine’s Nutcracker out of your head while watching other versions isn’t just that it’s so familiar; it’s that it’s so perfect. He knew the Tchaikovsky ballet inside out, of course: As a boy, at the Mariinsky, when the ballet was barely twenty years old, he had been the Mouse King, the Prince, and later the Candy Cane. More important, for him Tchaikovsky was a god—and, he said, The Nutcracker was Tchaikovsky’s masterpiece. What he took from the score, above and beyond everything else, was that it was intended as a celebration of Christmas—a child’s Christmas.
Balanchine also emphasized that the original scenario was based less on the famous tale by E.T.A. Hoffmann than on the lighter French version of the story by Dumas père. “Everything that appears in the second act of Nutcracker is a candy or something tasty,” Balanchine told Solomon Volkov in their book of interviews. “Or a toy … The Sugar Plum Fairy is a piece of candy and the dewdrops are made of sugar. The Buffon is a candy cane. It’s all sugar!” And spectacle. Stravinsky agreed: He once remarked to Balanchine that he particularly liked Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker “because there is no heavy psychology in it, just an entertaining spectacle, understandable without tons of words.”
Balanchine shows us an instant grave connection between his little heroine and the polite boy who in the first act Drosselmeyer brings to the Christmas party. It’s a moving suggestion of how children can be drawn to each other—a touching foreshadowing of sexual attraction. But his children remain children throughout their dream experience, from the nightmare of the battle with the mice to their joyous visit, as Sugar Plum’s guests, to the Kingdom of the Sweets. They have an adventure but they don’t have a story.
There are countless other versions that do center on a story—a story of a girl’s psychological growth from preadolescence to young womanhood, and of the children’s awakening feelings for each other and their eventual adult union. The ultra-talented Alexei Ratmansky, in ABT’s new production which premiered before Christmas at BAM, both sticks to the basics and steps out into a modest story line. Early on, his young Clara and her Nutcracker boy are pointedly shown echoing their adult avatars, the Princess and Prince, who perform a classical duet that does get the principal dancers onstage in Act I but blunts their eventual big pas de deux. We don’t need young Clara imagining her future this explicitly. And it seems gratuitous when at the end of the ballet we’re shown the Prince and the Princess getting married. This is not the kind of happy ending The Nutcracker demands. When Clara goes home to bed, she should have visions of sugarplums dancing in her head, not visions of wedding veils.
Ratmansky gives us the conventional Christmas party, but before we get to it there’s an introductory kitchen scene that all too cutely establishes the mice as major players. Seen once, it’s charming; seen again and again, it suffers the fate that cuteness inevitably brings upon itself. The party scene amusingly deploys the usual naughty Fritz, but the interplay between the boy and the girl children is strangely lifeless. The growth of the Stahlbaums’ tree is also underexploited. It sort of grows, sort of tilts, sort of inches forward, and then is awkwardly replaced by gigantic frail and unconvincing boughs that lumber on from the stage-right wings. Meanwhile, our minds can’t help recalling the magic of Balanchine’s tree. It’s not just nostalgia that makes us miss it now
: A great coup de théâtre has been replaced by a humdrum device.
Even so, Ratmansky delivers many happy effects here. His dances for Drosselmeyer’s puppets are ingenious and appealing. When the boy Nutcracker is felled by Fritz, the four puppets rush back on and stand over him in frozen poses of concern. An immense storybook chair glides onto the stage, from which Clara flings her slipper and conquers the Mouse King. Things aren’t helped by a Drosselmeyer whose characterization lacks focus, but Ratmansky’s Clara—the extraordinarily sensitive half-child, half-adolescent Catherine Hurlin—holds everything together with her believable and blessedly unadorable performance.
And then a dazzling triumph. The Snowflake scene turns into an electrifying pas d’action, Clara and the Boy darting through the snow, sliding and flopping on the ice, being normal, happy kids at play—until the sky darkens, the snowflakes grow threatening, the cold turns to chill, and danger is only averted by the arrival of Drosselmeyer with a sleigh to carry them off to the Kingdom of the Sweets. Here we don’t miss Balanchine’s brilliant abstractions because Ratmansky has come up with such a felicitous substitute. Unlike so many other talented choreographers, he’s completely comfortable with ballet on the largest scale.
In the second act, his other great strength emerges: endless inventive detail, from the flick of a foot to the toss of a head. His take on the obligatory scenes that make up the divertissement is mostly original and entertaining—what a relief, for instance, to take a break from Balanchine’s sinuous Coffee arching her back and clapping her little bells. Instead, bare-chested Arabian Sascha Radetsky tries to cope with his four importunate wives in their harem pants and beads—a witty re-imagining. The Chinese dance is traditional yet all Ratmansky’s own. The three bouncy Russians are the three bouncy Russians we’ve seen in a dozen ballets, but they’re especially invigorated and invigorating. Only the five girls listed as the Nutcracker’s Sisters (an unexplained and unrealized conceit) have nothing of interest to do to the music Balanchine uses for Marzipan.
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