As for the great Waltz of the Flowers, Ratmansky has eliminated the Dewdrop—no doubt wisely: Who could compete with Balanchine here? In her place we have four busy bees (in orange and black, with antennae) buzzing among the girls and doing for them what bees do for flowers. At times, the overall effect of the waltz is diminished by these apian pranksters, but this is acceptable fun.
The divertissement as a whole, however, doesn’t lead up to and prepare for the supposedly climactic grand pas de deux; it’s not a culmination. First-cast Gillian Murphy and David Hallberg are the company’s supreme classicists, and they handled the tricky steps flawlessly. As usual, Paloma Herrera was pleasing if surfacey, and Cory Stearns handsome and half-baked.
Most startling were Veronika Part and Marcelo Gomes. As always, he’s grand and generous, sympathetically dealing with her sometimes overwrought effects—the head flung back, the voluptuous smile. (They’ll work out their partnership problems.) Part has outdone herself in this role. For all her large-scale dark beauty, she’s usually phlegmatic, but here she was rapturous, ecstatic-orgasmic! More Anna Karenina than Nutcracker Princess. I don’t know what this has to do with The Nutcracker, but it was gratifying to see her come so vividly alive.
At the very end, Clara is back in bed, clutching her toy nutcracker and drifting off to sleep. Yes, it was all a dream.
This Nutcracker wouldn’t be worth dissecting if it weren’t so intelligent and inventive, and Ratmansky will surely refine it over the years. It doesn’t really challenge Balanchine, but it can stand on its own beside him.
The New York Observer
JANUARY 5, 2011
The Glory of the Young Paul Taylor
THE TREMENDOUS ACHIEVEMENT of the Paul Taylor season that just ended was the revival of his 1966 masterpiece Orbs. It must be his longest work—it’s in two parts, split by an intermission—and it’s been revived only once before, in 1982. This is a magisterial piece, an astounding summing-up by a choreographer barely in his mid-thirties, set to his most daring choice of music: the late Beethoven string quartets. Only a supremely confident young man could have embraced this daunting challenge.
Orbs also provided Taylor with one of his greatest roles. His character is the Sun (in a white unitard, decorated with silver stars), and around him revolve the planets and moons. He presents them—the planets in two male-female couples, the moons four ravishing girls in shimmering Alex Katz costumes—and proceeds to instruct, nurture, discipline, and cherish them.
The four sections of Orbs represent the four seasons, beginning with “Venusian Spring,” in which he demonstrates the ways of sexual love to his celestial brood. (They learn fast.) On to the confrontational “Martian Summer”—set to the formidable Grosse Fuge.
When, after the intermission, we find ourselves down on Earth and among mere humans, it’s at an autumn wedding. Everyone’s in brown. The Sun is now the solemn, yet occasionally sly, minister. The bride and her bridesmaids and her conventionally weeping mother are our old friends the female planets and their moons. We recognize the male planets in the groom, frantic with nerves—obsessively checking his hair, his tie, his fly—and his best man. The wedding takes place, there’s a nutty outdoor feast with an outlandish roasted bird flung about, and there’s much fluttering from the women, with their affectionate homage to and parody of the girls at another wedding, the one in Graham’s Appalachian Spring. (Graham at this period was never far out of Taylor’s mind.)
And then we’re back in the heavens, for the most beautiful and resonant passage in the entire work—“Plutonian Winter.” The orbs are deadened, life has drawn to a halt. Here we’re reminded of the plangent sadness that informs another of Taylor’s finest works, Sunset. The planets, their moons at their feet, are isolated in their separate muted spotlights. (Exceptionally striking in her desolation is the magnificent Amy Young, holding the most beautifully posed and poised balance I’ve ever seen. She’s frozen in her stillness—secure beyond secure.) The now-dimmed Sun presides.
Paul Taylor may be a pessimist, but he’s not a sadist, at least not here. Winter, too, passes, and he brings the Sun and its satellites back to life and harmony in a reaffirming whirlwind of a coda. It’s like the coda to Don Giovanni, when normal existence resumes after the Don’s descent into hell.
The outpouring of invention in Orbs is endless, its felicities countless—no wonder Arlene Croce referred to it as “perhaps the most charming work in the modern dance repertory.” Because the Taylor season was cut from three to two weeks this year—the City Center is again shutting down for repairs, and nothing can be allowed to interfere with the Encores! series—Orbs was presented only twice. Let’s hope we don’t have to wait another thirty years to see it again.
The New York Observer
MARCH 9, 2011
Thirty Years of Peter Martins
PETER MARTINS has been making ballets for thirty-six years now, ever since Calcium Night Light, in 1977. As I remember it, City Ballet’s orchestra was on strike, the company was shut down, and somewhere in Brooklyn Martins previewed this startling duet (to Ives) for Heather Watts and Daniel Duell. Everyone trooped out to see it, everyone was knocked out by it, and soon it was in the company’s repertory. Arlene Croce described its climax as “a staccato, nonstop, seriocomic pas de deux in which limbs become hinges and handles, bodies are clamped together, then slid apart.” She went on to say that “the choreography makes not one superfluous gesture, everything stands out with bright-edged clarity, and the flatly factual tone communicates an instantaneous emotion.” Balanchine liked it enough to insert it into his own Ivesiana, where it didn’t belong, but the compliment to Martins was immense.
Calcium was a fortuitous debut, and Martins’s ballets through the next several years confirmed this happy first impression: Sonate di Scarlatti, Eight Easy Pieces, Lille Suite were less personal statements than serious attempts to master his craft, under the eye and influence of the greatest of all teachers and exemplars. These works were all fluent and pleasing, and they added up to a convincing apprenticeship. When Balanchine chose Martins as his successor, he knew he was getting a hard-working, competent, and eager dance-maker.
In the immediate years after Balanchine’s death, with the entire responsibility for the company on his shoulders, Martins focused more on that responsibility than on his own creative ambitions, but he went on developing new works—eventually, scores of them. Who can remember them all? Who would want to? Far too many seemed to be by the numbers, and the numbers weren’t distinctive. Can we really distinguish one of his ballets set to the music of Michael Torke from the next? They all seemed flashy, trendy, empty. He made works to offer opportunities to his younger dancers; he made works to explore the limits of partnering; he made works for his ballerinas, in particular his wife, Darci Kistler, at first to rejoice in her marvelous talents, later to veil her diminishing powers. He made his versions of the classics. He mounted Festivals, Homages, Projects. He went in for desperate, gimmicky collaborations—with Paul McCartney, the architect Calatrava, the designer Valentino. He raised money.
Now he’s been in charge for thirty years, and the company is securely afloat—his single greatest achievement. And he’s celebrating with a new version of his 1988 American Music Festival, which had been a good idea that unfortunately led to paltry results. He’s also celebrating by putting forward his own work with uncustomary boldness—Martins has always been modest. This past week, however, was notable for two things: an all-Martins evening, and a total absence of Balanchine. In all the years going back to 1948, I can’t remember a week in which not a single Balanchine ballet was performed, apart from those weeklong runs of Martins’s Swan Lakes, Romeos, et cetera. An accident of scheduling? Perhaps.
The focus on Martins’s ballets has been instructive, occasionally gratifying, and ultimately saddening. His Rodgers and Hart pastiche, Thou Swell, shows him at his exploitative worst. (On second thought, the mercifully brief Sophisticated Lady, to Ellington, may be
even worse.) His Fearful Symmetries, to John Adams, is sound and fury signifying nothing—and signifying it for a long time. Barber Violin Concerto is a valiant but unsatisfactory response to that overwrought piece of music (it was more interesting when, originally, the second couple was performed by two Paul Taylor dancers).
But. River of Light, to a dense but powerful score commissioned from Charles Wuorinen and with ravishing lighting by Mark Stanley, has depth and resonance. I can’t remember having seen it before, and would happily see it again. The duet The Infernal Machine, to Christopher Rouse, is a fascination of gnarly partnering (it was good to see Ashley Laracey in a prominent role), and another duet, Purple, to Torke, at least gave us a chance to watch the enigmatic, elusive Janie Taylor.
The oddest Martins event was the return of Calcium Night Light. This piece has never lost its provocative appeal, but it came close the other night, due to suicidal miscasting. Martins is relentlessly pushing Sterling Hyltin, and she’s a lovely dancer. But Calcium isn’t lovely; it’s feisty and abrasive. Her silky smoothness is antithetical to the thorny nature of the piece, just as Robert Fairchild’s wholesomeness is; there are half a dozen women in the company more suitable for the role. Only Peter Martins’s psychiatrist, if he has one, could explain why he would sabotage one of his best ballets this way. Even so, the originality and cheekiness of Calcium could be detected through the weak miscasting. We were right back in 1977—this guy had talent. And by the end of the season, Hyltin had found herself in the role—she’s a fanatical worker, and an intelligent one.
Martins’s talent comes through most powerfully in Hallelujah Junction, a really exciting work made a dozen years ago and set to a really exciting two-piano score by John Adams. (Its title refers to a truck stop near the California-Nevada border.) Two grand pianos, beautifully lit, are raised high above and behind the dance area; we can see the two excellent pianists, Cameron Grant and Susan Walters, preside unobtrusively over the dancing. There’s a couple in white—Hyltin and Gonzalo Garcia—and a man in black, Daniel Ulbricht. There are four couples in black. Hyltin is lithe and sinuous—not as expansive as Kistler, the original, but radiant. Garcia is stalwart and gracious. Ulbricht shows us his formidable technique without showboating. What’s so remarkable about the piece is the excellent structure: The principals, the four couples, come and go in a rapid and inevitable flow, everything exhilarating and natural, everything stimulating, in contrast to the febrile hokeyness of Fearful Symmetries. Hallelujah Junction is Martins’s finest ballet, and why it isn’t in the repertory of more companies is one of the mysteries. But the biggest mystery—the sad mystery—is why, if he could make this good a piece, he hasn’t made more on its level. Like Marlon Brando in On the Waterfront, he coulda been a contender.
The New York Observer
MAY 21, 2013
One Big Bug
DOWN AT THE JOYCE, we’ve just been treated to The Metamorphosis, the much-heralded dance-drama (or something) from England’s Royal Ballet, starring principal dancer Edward Watson. Yes, Gregor Samsa wakes up one morning turned into a giant bug, but not until we’ve seen him going again and again through the dreary motions of his salesman’s job. Is it the deadening routine of bourgeois life that brings on the transformation? Not in Kafka’s great novella, in which the metamorphosis just … happens, in the first line.
This entire elaborate piece, created by Arthur Pita, is a pretext for Watson’s tour-de-force performance. He thrashes, he spasms, he crawls and climbs and clambers. He slides and slips through the brown ooze he’s been secreting. At times, he seems more simian than insectoid, but who’s counting? Watson is terrific, but enough is enough. His family feels the same way, as their initial repulsion/sympathy morphs into irritation. At first, the young sister—in Kafka, an aspiring violinist; here, an aspiring ballet dancer—tries to protect Gregor, but she gets fed up. The sensitive, conflicted mother is helpless. The angry father is alternately belligerent and pathetic. Three men in beards and black hats stomp around. (In the story, they’re lodgers; here, they’re apparently refugees from Fiddler on the Roof.)
We also have a brusque, no-nonsense maid who deals with the bug with neither repulsion nor sympathy. Her job is to clean, and she sweeps, scrubs, and mops, shooing Gregor aside whenever he gets in her way. In Kafka’s tragic denouement, he wastes away in shame and guilt—and his family’s negligence. In the Pita version, the maid solves everybody’s problem by deliberately leaving open the high casement window, and we last see the wretchedly obliging Gregor preparing to defenestrate himself—he knows he’s not wanted. Poor bug!
But what a maid! You just can’t find help like that these days.
The New York Observer
SEPTEMBER 24, 2013
Paul Taylor’s Diamond Jubilee
AT SIX IN THE EVENING on Sunday, March 23, the Koch Theater was filled to the (metaphorical) rafters for an extraordinary event. To celebrate the sixtieth anniversary of the Paul Taylor Dance Company, the great choreographer had decided to add to his three-week season a single performance of his 1965 satiric phantasmagoria From Sea to Shining Sea, a work he described in his memoirs as “old Miss America’s wrinkles, patriotism past its prime.” It has been revived before but not with a cast of thousands, or anyway more than fifty, including a few current dancers, a bunch of recent retirees, and—most precious to the clued-in audience—a group of real old-timers. Senta Driver as “Sweeper”? Roars of welcome. David Parsons (looking great and adorably funny) as the welcoming “Indian Chief” exterminated without a second thought by the Pilgrims? Gales of loving laughter. Eileen Cropley, Renée Kimball Wadleigh, Elizabeth Walton, Sharon Kinney. Everybody’s favorite, Carolyn Adams (one of the “Performers in Bathrobes” and doubling as one of the “Tooth Brushers”).
Here were heroes like Thomas Patrick, Thomas Evert, Andy LeBeau, Andrew Asnes (both “Super Mouse” and “Bossy Chair Remover”), Patrick Corbin (“Iwo Jima” and “Motorcyclist”). Three wonderful women who left the company only recently and are still mourned: Lisa Viola, Annmaria Mazzini, Amy Young. Linda Kent, tapping away. Rachel Berman, looking great, as “Streaker.” And first, last, and eternally, Taylor’s right-hand woman: tall, imposing, enchanting Bettie de Jong—“Big Bertha” herself, anchorwoman in Esplanade, and here, at the very end, poor Miss Liberty, slumped in a chair, dangling her crooked crown.
All the characters are played by a dispirited, exhausted gang of performers, dressed in bathrobes, hand-me-downs, cast-offs. Iconic images flash by—Iwo Jima, Betsy Ross, Al Jolson—all drained of life and significance. It’s mordant, wicked, funny, distressing. It was the time of Vietnam. Taylor makes no direct reference—he’s nonpolitical—but he’s clearly unhappy for his country. In his book Private Domain, he says, “I viewed the U.S.A. backwards, sideways and askance.”
And when the cheers died down and the audience of what seemed like the entire dance world settled in after an intermission, we were knocked out all over again by Esplanade itself, Taylor’s signature work, as fresh and revelatory as it was in 1975. Yes, the old dancers are gone, but the new ones are sensational. Michelle Fleet has perfected her central role as the skittering solo girl, hopping and back-pedaling her way around the stage when not leaping into someone’s arms—and taking for granted that he’ll be there. It must have been inspiring and challenging for her to be dancing this in front of Carolyn Adams, the originator and by coincidence another African American. Fleet had nothing to worry about. Neither did redheaded Heather McGinley, a relative newcomer, in the central de Jong role, but then de Jong is the company’s rehearsal director, so McGinley learned from the source.
By the time Esplanade was into its amazing climax—what Arlene Croce called its “paroxysm of slides and rolls across the floor”—the audience was once again ready to explode with joy. Once more, Croce nailed it: “The dancers, crashing wave upon wave into those slides, have a happy insane spirit that recalls a unique moment in American life—the time we did the school play or were read
y to drown in the swimming meet. The last time most of us were happy in that way.”
Paul Taylor’s Americanness more and more seems to me an essential, if not the essential, thing that sets his work off from that of most other choreographers, which may be why it seems harder for the English and the Europeans to take him to heart—they’re more at home with the abstractions of Cunningham or the mythic realms of Graham. (His heir in this regard is Twyla Tharp, who danced for him until she went off to be her own kind of American.) Dance after dance is situated in our country and its popular culture—from Company B (the Andrews Sisters) to Black Tuesday (the Depression) to the all-American horrors of Big Bertha; from the gangsters of Le Sacre du Printemps (The Rehearsal) to the barbershop quartets of Dream Girls; from Alley Oop and that girl in the polka-dot bikini in Funny Papers to the traumatizing born-again Christianity of Speaking in Tongues to his most recent masterpiece, Beloved Renegade (Walt Whitman and the Civil War) to his two new pieces this season—both minor—American Dreamer (Stephen Foster) and Marathon Cadenzas (dance marathons of the 1930s). And others. He’s American to the core, drenched in our decencies and our corniness (anathema to foreigners), deploring our violence and ugliness, and so both celebrating us and lashing out at our decadence. He knows us well, because he knows himself.
The New York Observer
APRIL 3, 2014
The Mariinsky—a Giant Question Mark
THE RECENT SEASON of the Mariinsky (ex-Kirov) Ballet at BAM inspired a number of questions, to most of which, alas, I don’t have the answers.
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