Week 3: January 20-25

[erpollock]

I attended the All Robbins program Tuesday night. Was blown away by Wendy Whelan's creepy, man-stomping Novice in The Cage. She is utterly plastic, or rubber, or spandex. There is no one like her, and I suspect there will not be again. Although preternaturally thin, she is a force of nature, and I rush to catch her performances now, before the eventual autumn of a ballerina's career sets in. For now, she is an insect grotesque. Rebecca Krohn as the Queen and the ensemble of creepy crawlers were superb. The nervy Stravinsky, led by Music Director Faysal Karoui, stays in my mind and I restrain myself from striking those Kafkaesque poses. As the program notes by Deborah Jowett point out, the scenario resembles Act II of Giselle.

I found the rest of the program not particularly thrilling. Interplay is, well, jazzy and cute. I was glad to see Sterling Hyltin again and Robert Fairchild. These two stood out in a first class ensemble.

Four Bagatelles was to me a pas de deux of puff pastry. Tiler Peck had charm, but Gonzalo Garcia I just haven't warmed to yet.

I'm Old Fashioned - I've always felt this ballet suffered by comparison to the Fred Astaire-Rita Hayworth movie original, up there super-sized on the screen. The last portions, where the principals and corps wear black and closely echo the Astaire-Hayworth dance, was most effective. The rest was negligible. How I wish we saw more of Jennifer Ringer. She is an aristocratic, womanly dancer. And for all the appeal of Hyltin, Megan Fairchild, and Tiler Peck - well, they just aren't aristocratic or womanly yet. And I wish NYCB would give Maria Kowroski's comedic talents more scope. She is a gifted comedienne-dancer, her theatrical instincts are brilliant, and I dearly wish she would be used to more advantage than in this slight ballet.

Sighting: David Hallberg, principal of ABT, in the fourth row center of Orchestra, looking like a prince.

[balanchinette]

I was at the Robbins program last night. Just wanted to note that Janie Taylor was wonderful in the Cage, as was Tess (wow, did she look fantastic in that costume). Janie just exuded "insectoid". It was great. I wish we could see more of her. Craig Hall was good but no Jock Soto in this role. Tiler Peck was also very good in Bagatelles, as was Joaquin in his solos (he appeared to be struggling a bit with the lifts, I think Tiler must be a little bigger than Megan, his usual partner). I like Bagatelles, it's very complex for a Robbins ballet. Finally - it's always a pleasure to see Danny Ulbricht, who was dancing in Interplay. I believe he executed 4 perfect double tours in succession. Awesome.

[Helene]

When she first started dancing with NYCB, I could recognize Wendy Whelan as talented, but I had no idea how much until I saw her debut as Novice in "The Cage", a experience for me. It's really thrilling for me to hear how great she is in the role decades later.

[vipa]

Anyone see Thursday night with Ashley's return and Morgan in FFPdd? I'm going Sun. Mat

[vipa]

I've seen T&V over a dozen times over the years. Today's mat. with Gonzalo Garcia & Abi was the worst! They were not up to the challenges of the ballet, and could not have felt good about doing it. I've seen the ballet before & will see it again. It upsets me that members of the audience with no experience with the ballet, think that they have seen it, but they have not.

I'd love to hear other views of that performance and the rest of the program. I enjoyed a lot of it, but am interested in hearing from you all.

[Kathleen O'Connell]

I've seen T&V over a dozen times over the years. Today's mat. with Gonzalo Garcia & Abi was the worst! They were not up to the challenges of the ballet, and could not have felt good about doing it.

'

Definitely not a happy performance of T&V -- everyone looked as if they were dancing in someone else's shoes to music they'd never heard before. I was actually concerned at one point that one or both of the principals might have sustained an injury and that they were struggling to just get through the thing. They've both danced better, and I'm sure they will again though.

I'll post more about the program tomorrow -- right now my husband and I have a date with Battlestar Gallactica.

[abatt]

I was at Saturday evening's performance. Last season I missed Sara Mearns' debut in the fourth movement of B-S Q. I remember reading on this board how fantastic her performance was. Well, I got to see it for myself. Sara was excellent. What a performance! Also, I think it was the debut of Robby Fairchild in the 2nd movement. He was a very ardent and romantic partner to S. Hyltin. By the way, J. Somogyi was replaced by R. Krohn in Chiararscuro.

[carbro]

I attended the Saturday evening performance, too, abatt.

It was not, for the most part, NYCB at its finest. Chiaroscuro, in which I'd hoped to see Jennie Somogyi (replaced, according to insert "due to illness or injury"), is not a very interesting ballet. It has two or three genuinely engaging moments, strung together with a lot of balletic filler.

Then came Papillons, Martins' treatment of Schumann piano music for two couples, apparently contrasting youth and maturity. Casting Darci Kistler and Sterling Hyltin certainly emphasizes this contrast, especially when the two are dancing the same steps. I don't think an intended effect was the obvious difference in the ballerinas' ease of movement.

Ratmansky's DSCH Concerto came as a welcome eyeful of inventive, witty and musical choreography.

Unfortunately, the first three movements of Brahms-Schoenberg were a letdown. I have my usual so-near-and-yet-so-far frustration when watching Abi Stafford -- the missing X-factor that leaves the eye searching the stage for the ballerina. The Second Movement was a rough sketch of what it can be. I know that Hyltin and Robbie Fairchild are new to their roles, and I expect that after a few more times out, it will come together. I missed the man tossing the ballerina, then catching her in the backbend. Also, in the swoons, the audience should see the arch in the ballerina's back. Fairchild's hands were too high on Hyltin's back, depriving us of that lovely line.

For years, I've read on this site complaints about Yvonne Borree's shaking. I had never seen it before, but on Saturday, from the Fourth Ring and without the help of opera glasses, the shaking of her upper body was clearly visible, especially in her developpes. When dancing alone, she was charming. Millepied's variation was strong and sharp -- a real delight.

Then came Mearns and Ramasar to save the night for me. This was the sexiest Rondo I've seen since Meunier danced the role, and as the program drew to a close, we finally got something to stay awake for. This was a very different Sara from the dewy virgin I'd last seen in Tales of the Vienna Woods. What a joy to see the many sides of her so fully expressed as she works her way through the rep.

[abatt]

Hi Carbro. I agree w. you that Chiararscuro looks less and less substantial w. each viewing. It used to look better when Jock Soto performed the lead. I saw Jennie Somogyi in this ballet last week, and she was much more charismatic and interesting than Krohn. The main reason I attended was to see Concerto DSCH again. Borree gave a better performance on Sat evening than she did the prior week in BSQ. I didn't notice the details you mentioned about the Hyltin-Farichild performance of the second moviement. Thanks for pointing it out. Sara Mearns is quickly becoming one of the most interesting and principals at NYCB.

[ViolinConcerto]

I've seen T&V over a dozen times over the years. Today's mat. with Gonzalo Garcia & Abi was the worst! They were not up to the challenges of the ballet, and could not have felt good about doing it. I've seen the ballet before & will see it again. It upsets me that members of the audience with no experience with the ballet, think that they have seen it, but they have not.

I'd love to hear other views of that performance and the rest of the program. I enjoyed a lot of it, but am interested in hearing from you all.

Sat. night and Sun mat. were the first two performances I've been able to get to. I agree with Carbro on just about everything, including that Mearns and Ramasar were the highlights of BSQ. Maybe of the whole evening!

Sunday had more disappointments than thrills. Already I've seen more than I'd care to of Sebastian Marcovic. He looks like a "thud" come to life. The only word I could think of to describe Abi Stafford in T&V was "wooden." I think that Garcia, in his defense, was thrown in well before he was scheduled to premier in this.

I thought Morgan and Peiffer were just delightful in FFpdd, she has charm, delicacy, a sweetly flirtacious glance and very good eye makeup. They are both precise in their footwork, and bouyant in the Bournonville jumps.

I hate to sound like (and feel like) a sourpuss, especially after being so very ballet-deprived, but "La Stravaganza" is a colassal waste of time, space, money and dancers, and I was really not so fond of the new piece, "Lifecasting." (That, like so many other pieces are just too hard to see with such low lighting, but I've bitched about that in the "Aesthetic Issues" thread.)

[Kathleen O'Connell]

NYCB Sunday 1/25/09

I had forgotten that this program was titled “A Tribute to Nureyev,” and was thus mightily puzzled when the afternoon began with Bell Telephone Hour clips featuring Nureyev dancing the Flower Festival pas de deux with Maria Tallchief and the Le Corsaire pas de deux with Lupe Serrano. Then up went the screen and out ran K. Morgan and A. Peiffer ready to begin … um… Flower Festival in Genzano Pas de Deux. Talk about tough acts to follow! Anyway, they both acquitted themselves more than honorably: Peiffer tossed off some crystal clear, feather light beats; Morgan was as poised, deft, and sweetly lyrical as she always is; and they were both charming. I crossed my fingers and hoped for a revival of Bournonville Divertisments soon.

On to La Stravaganza, which I actually enjoyed more than I did the last time I saw it (2002-ish?). I think I might enjoy it even more if we could dispense with the pretentious Moderns vs Vermeers claptrap, which is either over-obvious or completely pointless – I can’t decide which. Keep the backdrops, re-dress it, and see if it makes either more sense or less sense that way: either would be fine. A ballet shouldn’t have to rely on a costume gimmick to make its points. (This is my gripe about The Cage, although in that case I suspect that the insect mise-en-scene is really there to cushion the impact of the point Robbins is beating us over the head with.)

First things first: all of the dancers were terrific, and Tiler Peck was extra-special terrific. She, Kaitlyn Gilliland, Benjamin Millepied, and Adrian Danchig-Waring looked the most comfortable in this idiom and helped me see things I might otherwise have missed. But honestly, I could single out every one of the dancers for something special, and that’s saying a lot for a ballet that doesn’t present very many opportunities for standout individual achievement. (The dancers spend a lot of time moving in unison, sometimes in groups of six, sometimes four, sometimes Moderns alone, sometimes Vermeers alone, sometimes Moderns and Vermeers together. At the beginning at least, the Moderns move in a more fluid, “classical” contemporary idiom to Vivaldi and the Vermeers move in a more angular, “mechanical” contemporary idiom to Musique concrète – which is supposed to be the thought-provoking, unexpected reversal, I guess. Whatever. At least they actually move.)

I liked the opening and closing tableau: five of the Moderns join hands and form an intertwined chain in constant, rippling motion. At the beginning, Tiler Peck wends her way through this chain; at the end, she emerges from the wings to observe it, having had some kind of exploratory encounter with one of the Vermeers (Millepied). For some reason it made me think of the opening of the Inferno, when Dante finds himself “lost in a dark wood,” and I thought it was touching this time around. There is also an interesting section in which two Modern men dance with two Vermeer men, and which I found to have considerably more emotional resonance than the bit where Modern T. Peck rolls around on the floor with Vermeer Millepied after pawing him for what seems like about five minutes. (“Pawing” is probably not the right word. “Re-awakening him with her touch” or “exploring his Vermeery otherness” or “confirming our human connection across the centuries" or something along those lines is presumably what’s going on. It appears to be a recapitulation of an unfortunate section earlier on in which the Modern women, standing in a line, run their hands all over their stone-cold still Modern Men in the stage right gloom for, like, forever while the Vermeers do their their thing center stage. At this point I was either imagining too much or not enough.)

My takeaway: as clap-trappy as it is, the dancers actually move in some relation to the music and one feels something when they do. Better this than say, River of Light (in which there is no relation between the music and the movement at all) or the infinitely more annoying Oltremare (talk about claptrap!), although if La Stravaganza vanished from the repertory, my life wouldn’t be materially altered for the worse.

After the Rain Pas de Deux. It’s perfect. There’s nothing else to say. Well, OK – one more thing: it’s one of the few works in the NYCB rep in which Sebastian Marcovicci remains genuinely effective. I’ve liked him in several roles (I’ve always admired his use of his hands), but he appears to have bulked up quite a bit over the years and his neck is going to look like a linebacker’s if he keeps on like this. There’s no air under his dancing anymore.

Lifecasting. Brace yourselves for the rant. Choreographer’s Note from the Program: “Drawing on the dancers’ individual movement dynamics, coupled with the scores of Reich and Ikeda, has inspired this work.” Let’s leave aside the fact that this is not even an English sentence – Lee had at his disposal eleven of the most individual and distinctive dancers on the NYCB roster and didn’t manage to make anything of it. “Individual movement dynamics” my you-know-what. Bouder, Kowroski, Hyltin, Gilliland, Pazcougin, R. Fairchild, Ramasar, Hall, Carmena, Danchig-Waring, and Tworzyanski: look, you could put these eleven dancers in a studio with any one of us and a recording of the Barney Song and we could somehow manage to give each of them something individual and telling to do, even if the only words in our ballet vocabulary were chassé, pas de bourrée, and assemblé. Or even if all we could say was “do one of those twirly thingys and then stick your leg up in the air.”

Hyltin, Pazcougin, Carmena, Hall, and Tworzyanski were completely wasted: any five dancers pulled from the corps would have made the same impact. (This was a real shame with respect to Tworyanski since we don’t get many opportunities to see this fine dancer in featured solo work.) Let me stress that this was not the dancers’ fault: it was Lee’s. I can understand the allure of creating a ballet on these dancers – it’s like someone handing you the keys to the Maserati and suggesting that you take it out on the Taconic for a spin -- but if you’re going to use a Hyltin or a Pazcougin or a Carmena, you’ve got to give each of them something to do, not dump them into an anonymous ensemble. And if you’re going to use Kowrowski or Bouder, for heaven’s sake show us something new about them; we already know that Kowrowski can tuck her left foot behind her right ear. Danchig-Waring got one shot at unfolding a slow, gorgeous arabesque and then spent the rest of the ballet coiling and uncoiling his torso while propping up either Gilliland or Kowrowski or both of them. (D-W’s long limbs, baroque line, and phenominally supple thoracic spine are the gifts Lee’s idiom has been asking for – couldn’t he have found some way to really exploit them, along with his fine jump? I started to suspect that the only reason Lee found him interesting was because he was tall enough to partner the tallest women. “Where’s Adrian? Quick – run over there and hold up Kaitlyn.”) R. Fairchild got a couple of solo opportunities, but they were so (seemingly) brief, so embedded in the relentless, undifferentiated hubbub that they were over before they could register. He’d unleash a stunning, perfect turn and then vanish into the mass. Look, when someone can turn like that you make a fuss over it. Letting him do it twice while eight other people are dancing something else is not making a fuss, even if you throw a spotlight on him for a second.

Is the concept of solo variation so old-fashioned that we can’t have them anymore, even though we’re blessed with dancers who can make us really see? Is the concept of two people – two specific, individual people -- dancing together and making theater out of it (you know, a story in Balanchine’s sense of the word) so hopelessly out of sync with our (alleged) hook-up culture that it’s not even worth exploring anymore? I don’t much care for Martins’ choreography, but he at least understands that our brains need variations in rhythm and texture, and, from time to time, something -- no, someone -- to focus on to make sense of things. His couples aren’t often happy ones, but they are at least pairs of individuals.

Over the past year or so, I’ve probably seen too much in the Lifecasting mode, by which I mean six or eight or twelve outstanding dancers trapped in an anonymous ensemble in which they, as unique individuals, hardly matter, distinguishable only by their costumes. (Thank heavens for David Hallberg’s bustier – may we call it a cuirasse? – in Stallings’ Citizen: at least I can remember that he was in it. I promise you, if Bouder hadn’t been the only woman in Lifecasting whose costume was color-blocked with turquoise instead of yellow, you’d have hardly known -- or cared -- that it was her.) I’ve also seen too many ballets in which the dancers don’t move so much as manipulate themselves; in which the women are apparently unable to move at all under their own power and must be shuttled from one end of the stage to another or must have their limbs stretched into configurations they apparently can’t be expected to achieve on their own; in which ballet’s vocabulary is not re-fashioned so much as abandoned in favor of its most extreme effects; in which the only break from a massed group doing too many different things at once is a massed group lying on the floor doing nothing; in which music is reduced to a soundtrack rather than being the engine of the dance, as if we were watching a figure-skating championship. The whole time I was watching Lifecasting I kept wondering what Ratmansky might have done with these same dancers. He used a similar ensemble in Russian Seasons, but managed to suggest that there was a reason he used those dancers in particular (although I take it his choice was at least somewhat dictated by availability - in which case he can clearly make a virtue of necessity): he didn’t just tap into the spark at the heart of Sofiane Sylve, he found it in Abi Stafford, too. (He gave her this ridiculous, wonderful, endless, unsupported balance: everytime she does it all I can think of is “see you in the Rose Adagio, bitches.”)

And speaking of Abi Stafford, let’s move on to Theme & Variations. There is much in Stafford’s dancing to admire (and I genuinely like her), but she doesn’t strike me as a tulle-and-tiara ballerina, at least not yet. She’s what I’d call a naïve dancer – I don’t mean that she’s personally unknowing, of course, but rather that she dances as if ballet had been invented yesterday. She looks fresh, but also unresonant. This quality works very well in some ballets: I thought she was wonderful in Symphony in Three Movements, for instance. She danced as if she found the steps intriguing in and of themselves and didn’t try to impose anything at all on the exotic gestures. She just did it, and it looked as transparent and refreshing as spring water. Ditto in The Chairman Dances and Glass Pieces. (She even looks glamorous in that 80’s aerobics headband; poor Rachel Rutherford looked as if she would just die if one of her friends saw her in it.) She adds a spark to the ensemble without disrupting its dynamics, and she looks unexpectedly good in things that Heather Watts, of all people, looked good in: Watts’ role in Robbins’ Piano Pieces, for instance, or her role in Davidsbündlertänze. (Watts’ interpretation was something along the lines of “Clara is having a teen mood”; Stafford’s is more along the lines of “Clara can play faster than you can – deal with it.”) I bet she’d be very effective in Martins’ Concerto for Two Solo Pianos; Ansanelli looked like a vicitm in that ballet – Watts never looked like a victim ever, and Stafford wouldn’t either. Of course, Watts wasn’t really a tutu ballerina herself – she was a Dewdrop, not a Sugarplum – and that may be the link.

In the world of T&V, however, ballet was most definitely not invented yesterday and “naïve” is not an option. Stafford does all of the steps, but somehow contrives to make it look like a classroom demonstration of all of the steps. It’s as if she has every word in the ballet vocabulary down cold, but hasn’t moved on to making sentences out of them yet (let alone to mastering the rhetoric of the tutu). Part of the problem is her phrasing: like several dancers on NYCB’s current roster, she tends to dance completely inside of the phrase, rather than through it, and, to complicate matters, she’s often ahead of the music (especially in adagio), as if she’s eager to get one combination over and done with so she can show us the next one. Leigh Witchel sometimes refers to “one damn step after another” choreography; Stafford is kind of a “one damn step after another” dancer. You see individual steps but not necessarily a whole dance. Her physique (and her foursquare musicality) may work against her in more lyrical passages: she’s well proportioned, but her limbs aren’t long (compare her arms with Whelan’s, for example) and tend to lever off of her center rather than unfurl from it -- some effects may simply be harder for her to put across than others. But even in allegro she could deploy a bit more rubato (that was Weese's -- and lately M. Fairchild's -- particular gift). She dances with the kind unfussy directness you’d see in an expert horsewoman, say, but she hasn’t figured out how to turn on the glamour when the foxhunt is over and it's time for the ball (fussy indirectness isn’t the answer, of course). She appears to be trying to impose “personality” on her dancing via an unvarying, incessant smile; but the smiling needs to come from the same place the dancing comes from -- it can’t be glued on like veneer. I once watched Stafford execute an entire duet with the same fixed smile on her face from beginning to end: it never varied, no matter what she or her partner happened to be doing; it didn’t suggest that she was transported by joy – it suggested that nothing was going on inside. And I don’t believe that for a minute.

As to the rest of the cast: I think everyone could have used another week of rehearsals or an infusion of enthusiasm or both.

[bart]

NYCB Sunday 1/25/09

Lifecasting. Brace yourselves for the rant. [ ... ] “Individual movement dynamics” my you-know what. Bouder, Kowroski, Hyltin, Gilliland, Pazcougin, R. Fairchild, Ramasar, Hall, Carmena, Danchig-Waring, and Tworzyanski: look, you could put these eleven dancers in a studio with any one of us and a recording of the Barney Song and we could somehow manage to give each of them something individual and telling to do, even if the only words in our ballet vocabulary were chassé, pas de bourrée, and assemblé. Or even if all we could say was “do one of those twirly thingys and then stick your leg up in the air.”

Kathleen, I don't know this particular work or the dance-maker in question, but this is the perfect put down of ALL bad choreography EVERYWHERE -- the one every one of us of us, I suspect, would like to have made at some point in our lives.

[balanchinette]

I've seen T&V over a dozen times over the years. Today's mat. with Gonzalo Garcia & Abi was the worst! They were not up to the challenges of the ballet, and could not have felt good about doing it. I've seen the ballet before & will see it again. It upsets me that members of the audience with no experience with the ballet, think that they have seen it, but they have not.

I'd love to hear other views of that performance and the rest of the program. I enjoyed a lot of it, but am interested in hearing from you all.

Sat. night and Sun mat. were the first two performances I've been able to get to. I agree with Carbro on just about everything, including that Mearns and Ramasar were the highlights of BSQ. Maybe of the whole evening!

Sunday had more disappointments than thrills. Already I've seen more than I'd care to of Sebastian Marcovic. He looks like a "thud" come to life. The only word I could think of to describe Abi Stafford in T&V was "wooden." I think that Garcia, in his defense, was thrown in well before he was scheduled to premier in this.

I thought Morgan and Peiffer were just delightful in FFpdd, she has charm, delicacy, a sweetly flirtacious glance and very good eye makeup. They are both precise in their footwork, and bouyant in the Bournonville jumps.

I hate to sound like (and feel like) a sourpuss, especially after being so very ballet-deprived, but "La Stravaganza" is a colassal waste of time, space, money and dancers, and I was really not so fond of the new piece, "Lifecasting." (That, like so many other pieces are just too hard to see with such low lighting, but I've bitched about that in the "Aesthetic Issues" thread.)

I agree with everything you say about Sunday's dismal program. FFpdd was the best ballet of the afternoon, and that's saying something with T&V on the program. La Stravaganza is the worst thing I've seen NYCB put on -- why bother, it's such a waste of those talented dancers who are cast in it. I actually fell asleep at one point. Where Balanchine's ballets seem to fly by in a blink of an eye, this one dragged on for what seemed like forever. It was a relief when it finally ended. The new Lee ballet was only marginally better, again, what a waste of people like Bouder and Korowski. And I wasn't a fan of the monotonous music.

I, too, am suffering from Marcovici overload. While I think he's a decent solo dancer (although he has no neck these days and seems to be all bulging arms and pecs), he's not a good partner -- he seems awfully tense when partnering and he doesn't do much for the woman dancing with him. It speaks volumes of Wendy's gifts that Wendy was able to look as good as she did in After the Rain. With Jock Soto she was radiant, though.

T&V looked pretty awful. ABT did it better in the fall, and I never thought I'd be one to say that ABT danced a Balanchine ballet better than NYCB. After seeing the wonderful Miami City Ballet corps, the NYCB corps in T&V looked straggly and under-rehearsed. Gonzalo was ok, nothing on Hallberg who did it in the fall at ABT. Abi was stiff and had trouble with the turns. The ballet never came alive, even at the grand finale. I hope that, with more performances this season, T&V will improve. It's a shame that ballets like La Stravaganza seem better rehearsed, and the dancers in that more enthused, than in Balanchine's T&V.

[carbro]

[Morgan] has charm, delicacy, a sweetly flirtacious glance and very good eye makeup. . .

Good makeup, maybe, but beautiful eyes definitely!