Seeking System

NYCB: The Nutcracker, Romeo and Juliet, and Jewels

I've seen the NYCB thrice since the last post, and have been, in short, underwhelmed, surprised, and abstracted.

The Nutcracker, with Yvonne Boree as the Sugar Plum Fairy, on a late December Saturday night, in a full-priced seat in the Orchestra, was over-storied, under-choreographed, and dull. 

Romeo and Juliet, with Sterling Hyltin and Robert Fairchild as the lovers, on an early January Wednesday, in a student seat from the third ring, was believably dramatic, expressively danced, and unsappily romantic (and Daniel Ulbricht as Mercutio was the bright spot of the night).

Balanchine's Jewels, on a mid-January Saturday night, from the fourth ring sides, with Ashley Bouder dancing in Rubies, Abi Stafford dancing in Emeralds, and Maria Kowroski dancing in Diamonds, was unclear about itself, despite the technical chops of these dancers, from beginning to end.  Balanchine-lovers love Jewels, and I'm not a Balanchine-lover yet, but even Ashley Bouder projected so much showmanship at this performance that the relationships between dancers and their partners seemed meaningless.  This was the first explicitly non-story ballet to come from Balanchine, but even a subtraction of narrative implicates moving bodies in space into a relationship with one another, and this connectivity was wholly missing from tonight's performance.  A most chilly, lonely night.

I still look to the rest of the winter repertory with pleasure - because I discovered the twenty dollar fourth ring sides seats?  Because I still get a thrill out of ballet formation?  Because A.M. was right, that the orchestra has never been better?  Because it's winter? because it's fun to deconstruct intended meaning out of these pieces?  Because the photographs lining the walls at the New York State Theatre are grainy and haunting? 

ABT - Takeaway

Two more notes from four nights at ABT

1.  Systems
The median ABT female dance body is significantly healthier (less protruding bone!  more boob!) than the median in the other companies I've seen this season.  While it seems gauche to discuss each dancer's body specifically (more on why I think it seems gauche some time later, sparked by the other AM, who recently noted, in the middle of a compliment about her dancing in the NYCB's winter repertory, that he "didn't enjoy the physicality" of Wendy Whelan), I can't help but say that I was amazed at the bodies I saw - particularly the curves of ABT's dramatic ingenue Gillian Murphy and the legs of its crown princess, Julie Kent. 

2.  Gillian Murphy and Walt Whitman
Gillian Murphy seems to do a better story ballet (Fall River Legend) than she does abstract ballet (the Benjamin Millepied-choreographed, Nico Mahly-composed From Here On Out). There is something uniquely narrative about the way she carries her awareness -- she also can do a facial expression while dancing that is appropriately dramatic and expressed - I find many dancers trying to do this and coming off either overdone or distracted.  This is why I found her a little too watchable in the abstract pieces - she somehow brings a narrative to them where maybe there shouldn't be.  She really brings the American to American Ballet theater - there is something healthy and wholesome and earnest about her, and I wonder if this must be part of the reason she graces so many ABT poster covers (not that to be called American means that one must be healthy and earnest -- it's more that she is like what we want America to be, an idealization that plays up the fact that comparatively we live a newly habited, and for ballet's sake newly sophisticated, place).  Even with all of this, Murphy can't carry a largely undanced story ballet like Fall River Legend, Agnes de Mille's adaptation of the Lizzie Borden story, on her goodness alone. 

A Third Eye - George Platt Lynes

George Platt Lynes is more famous for his male erotica photographs than his ballet photographs.  But I found a copy of his book Ballet over the summer at the NYU Library, and nobody has stopped me from renewing it. 

This book is so rare that I hope Twelvetrees Press won't mind that I direct you to an excerpt from its introduction:

Ballet is the subject of these photographs, yet it is often only incidental to their structure and purpose.  George Lynes studied in Paris with Man Ray and admired Jean Cocteau and Gertrude Stein.  It was under these influences that he opened his photography studio in New York City during 1932; surrealism, neo-romanticism and other European visual movements remained with him.

When Lincoln Kirstein and George Balanchine invited George Lynes to photograph their ballets, they understood he would bring something else to their vision:  a third eye.  The shadows of these images are filled with Lynes' mentors: Cocteau, Joseph Cornell and Pavel Tchelitchew among them; but the light, Lynes has made his own.  These photographs are airless and brittle, they float before us bearing the magnificence of their maker's obsession and their subject's otherworldliness.  They are selected herein for their visual interest. No history is implied, or document recorded, other than the tracing of one man's passions.
Jack Woody, 1985

I also can't find any images from the book online - the image I've subbed is a Paul Cadmus photograph of Lynes and Monroe Wheeler.  and

To add my one nightcap thought:  there is a photograph toward the front of this book of Sono Osato, taken in 1937.  Osato wears a full-length, light-refracting black dress, princess and fitted to the hip with a full train, and it is so startlingly contemporary that I saw some semblance of it yesterday in the black-longsequinned fringe dresses in the window at Prada.

ABT, Saturday night, First Dance: Clear

I carried my copy of Alastair Macauley's ABT recap with me to City Center on Saturday night with the intention of looking it over in my seat before the show began, figuring out which parts of it I had to try and agree or disagree with, but it was too electric in the lobby and in the grandstands to get in any good alone time with the Arts section.  For $27, I was seated in the left rear mezzanine, a chilly region so far north of the stage that the dancers are rendered before you as tinily as they look on the cover of your program.  Saturday night was my first premiere, and with it came its donors in all of their uptown splendor:  bejeweled and upper-easty and cocktail-dressed (and fighting gravity).  It didn't feel like old New York (whatever that is), but it did feel energetic and tipsy, and somehow that audience pulse transferred straight through to the dancing (or maybe all along it was the dancers projecting their energy into us). 

Off the bat was Clear, a stunt-punctuated, high velocity, man-based ballet from the Aussie choreographer Stanton Welch (a repertory encore for ABT set to two Bach violin concertos).  It reminded me of watching figure skating on television and waiting to gasp when a skater landed a triple axel - a ballet full of air and revolutions.  Not such a bad ballet to watch from the rear mez, where form and formation end up becoming what you notice because you can't see the minutiae - these men are dime-turning and weaving in and out of each other with communicative, back-of-the-house-reaching precision.  The costumes were simple nude longtrunks (think of a longer extension of the trunk from Cezanne's The Bather on show on the 5th Floor at MOMA), and the backdrop was nude, and what was clear was not any costuming or lighting or sonic gimmick, but lucid, full frontal expression, as if the title's reference is: strip away decorative elements and you have pure movement.  The Paul Taylor men seem to have gone to the same school for jumping as these ABT dancers (no names because to me in the rear mez, the were a collective) - but these men would have been at the top of that class. 

My one problem with this piece was the female dancer, who, dressed in a beige crop top with bell bottomy tights, flitted in and out of the picture in fits and starts.  You think she's gone for good and then, like the old Energizer bunny commercials, she dances back in out of context.  I was surprised at myself for being ruffled by her, but realized she made me realize that the hes were hes - in other words, she introduced a narrative relationship by presenting herself as the other (her choreography is different!  her body is different!).  It's the way you might notice a beautiful woman when she walks into a room full of men - you start to think of their relation to her, what they all want to do with her, and tension ensues.  Before she entered, they were charged up ions, springfooted and abstract, and after she entered, they were men.  To add insult, her costume was a bit Mamma Mia (not the Met's, but Broadway's - with apologies to Michael Kors). 

More on the other two ballets (and Sunday night's program too) tomorrow!

Turnips!

I either forgot that they were partly purple, or I never knew. 

"When knowledge accumulates ceaselessly but at random, it increases the desire for system."
- Raymond Aron

A few things to love about the James Sewell Ballet

1.  There's only one blonde-bunned dancer in the group - Emily Tyra, ballet's Erica Christensen.  The other dancers are specific and rangey and darkheaded.  She, too, is specific and rangey, but her all-American-ness stands out, as if she was chosen to be part emblem of the American ballerina, and part statement on behalf of the troupe - we are all different, they seem to say, and each of us was chosen for a reason .  I contrast her to Sterling Hyltin, a principal at NYCB who replaced Ashley Bouder in Wheeldon's Saturday afternoon show - a beauty, easy on the eyes, but not commanding herself - not commanding her partner - and not, so far, commanding you. (I do have hope for her - she looks deeply felt in the NYCB winter bulletin).  But it was satisfying to watch the Sewell dancers - by the end, each of them had revealed something dramatic, something dark, something odd, about themselves.   

2.  In a primordial, monster-inspired ballet called Schoenberg Serenade, I was amused by the elements of play: seven company members - an odd, uneven corps - a bug with six legs and a head.  Arms and legs angling and creeping like spiders.  The company stacking one on top of the other to form various entymological puppets, then deconstructing back into dancers before your eyes.  A Sewell choice:  dancers Caroline Fermin and Justin leaf wear their wild hair down.  It  speaks the same language as the rest of the choreographical wildness.  Same goes for the mesh tank that reveals Nicholas Lincoln's tattoos!

3.  In an 11-part ballet called Opera Moves, Sewell presents ballet's answer to the variety show - Tyra reveals that she's at least a double threat with an operatic croon of Lonely House.  The other AM is irked that these operas aren't properly cited, but as an opera virgin, I was just happy to be hearing some.  The costumes radiate with warmth and graphic wizardry:  pink and peach lycra, red velvet.  Embellishments call to mind gladiators and the chandelier and buck point graphic artist (name!  name!  can't remember his name.  He's in the lobby, the coat closet line, at the Moma).  Sally Rouse is the most versatile dramatic ballerina I've seen - she can do romance, she can do friendship, she can even do funny - a tough one for ballerinas, who often seem too perfectly graceful and aligned to perform feats of physical humor.  But Rouse isn't misaligned, she's just small and dense and concentrated and emblazoned - a pistol, as my dad would say.   Or a firecracker.   

At the end of a weekend full of Wheeldon and Sewell, Sewell shows me more sculpture, more play, more movement, and cooler men (Chris Hannon is ballet's Christopher Moltisanti). I'm excited to give Wheeldon another chance.  Alastair MacAuley threw little darts at each of these companies, and he amuses me, but I suspect that he's grumpy - he's also sage enough to have earned the right to use his weapons. I'm not, and I'm excited to hunt and gather my own opinions, and bring them back here to the system.   

jsballet.org - James Sewell Ballet's website

http://www.barefootpenny.blogspot.com/ - into the mind of a Sewell dancer!  (the regal, stoic, Icelandic looking one: ballet's Bjork!)

"and everyone and I stopped breathing"

I'm a dropout of Phil Levine's poetry class, but I still love him (you can love something that doesn't love you!), and I missed the chance to hear him read tonight on behalf of a caffeine low, so I came home and looked him up and found this - a Frank O'Hara poem:

http://www.wnyc.org/news/articles/18356

 

And this, a reading from 2005: 
http://www.blackbird.vcu.edu/v3n2/features/levine_p_031605/levine_p.htm

So here's to this new personal magazine, and to ballet and New York and Phil Levine and all the things you quit and October and everything in it.