Liquid Motion (Schreier/Nunes Premiers)

[Drew]

Atlanta Ballet's closing program had two world premiers, Brazilian Choreographer Juliano Nunes's Yellow set to Beethoven's Hammerklavier sonata and choreographer in residence Claudia Schreier's Nighthawks set to Wynton Marsalis's 4th Symphony.

Although I have praised/admired Schreier as a neo-classical choreographer, I learned from a recent interview that that is definitely not how she sees herself. She does talk about ballet as central to her development, but prefers to see herself as a choreographer who works in a number of styles. She does though continue to emphasize music as what is most important to her. I love her musical taste and her musicality is evident in Nighthawks as well. It is in many ways a vibrant work. Unfortunately, the contemporary penchant for dim lighting --in this case dim to the point of darkness--on top of mostly dark costumes against a mostly dark backdrop comes close to sinking it. I know I have older eyes: What is very shadowy to me may be only somewhat shadowy to someone younger. But I am convinced there is a real problem with overly dim lighting of ballets. And I also know the kinds of cheering that have greeted far lesser works than Nighthawks and far lesser dancing even on a Sunday afternoon in Atlanta--and what greeted Nighthawks today was considerably less enthusiastic. Despite some terrific qualities, the ballet fell flat this afternoon and I would be inclined to look at the lighting design (Ben Rawson) before anywhere else to figure out why.

One more word about the lighting: you may be thinking, well, the ballet is NIGHThawks--and Schreier herself speaks about young people out dancing in the NIGHT.  But one can light a ballet set at night so that everything can be seen from the audience and it still feels like a night scene  A masterful example would be David Finn's lighting for the Liam Scarlett Swan Lake. The production has its problems, but lighting is not one of them.  (At least when the ballet premiered.) I saw it 3X in 2018 from far away and from closer up and at every angle, the first lake scene had a strong night-time quality: the darkeness seemed all around. But all of the choreography--and even nuances of interpretation by the dancers--was visible.

For the rest? Nighthawks is a sneakers ballet--though it rather charmingly includes a couple who shift into a lyrical pas de deux on pointe--quite effectively, too, and not least because the dancers for once were spotlit.  Mostly, though, the ballet portrays young people emerging in the evening to dance and celebrate their way through the night. The costumes are theatrical "street," and much of the choreography draws on popular dance vernaculars though it also draws on ballet vocabulary and requires ballet technique. You may be thinking that it sounds like Justin Peck and that is the one reference I have to describe it: it's Schreier's "Justin Peck" ballet. But one reservation I have in saying so is that Schreier has worked with Marsalis well before this, and I think she has her own distinctive take on the material.  And since, too, in the earlier Peck work that I have seen, Peck was sometimes channeling Robbins--and other popular vernaculars and theatrical choreographers--the game of influence here is not a simple one.  (On a more general front: I often prefer Schreier's musical choices to Peck's.)

I also feel that, even in this 'sneakers' ballet, Balanchine's Symphony in Three Movements, consciously or unconsciously, remains a point of departure for Schreier I thought her first work for Atlanta Ballet, First Impulse, was clearly riffing on its diagonal of women, and in NIghthawks, in one of the pas de deux, the man stands behind the women and they interact in a series of hand and arm gestures in ways that strongly recall the opening of that ballet's pas de deux.

Anyway, Nighthawks is mostly high octane and could be fun, but the extremely shadowy lighting killed it for me -- and perhaps, too, the length also was a little much. (Another Peckish trait...)  Schreier collaborated with a prominent Atlanta artist Charity Hamidullah on the designs -- along with Abigail Dupree-Polston with whom she often works. However, Hamidullah's design imprint seems to me to have gone for naught. At least given the overall lighting schema, her skyscraper-silhouette background looked somewhat like other cityscape ballets (I kept thinking of Who Cares) which CANNOT have been the intent in bringing her on.

In fact, one larger issue for the ballet is that for Marsalis, who calls his symphony the "Jungle," New York CIty is the inspiration (he has said this). Schreier lives in New York, but as she discusses in interviews wanted her ballet to connect with Atlanta too, and worked with Hamidullah an Atlanta artist known partly for her outdoor murals.  Somehow the ballet is supposed to do both at once: evoke "the city" as in New York and the "city" as in Atlanta. I'm not sure that the mesh worked, or even could work, convincingly.

The program opened with Nunes's Yellow.  I learned about Nunes a couple of years ago through Instagram -- he has worked with dancers and companies all over the world. Nunes did the costume designs for Yellow himself--he dresses the dancers in all yellow tights/shoes, leotards completely exposing their bodies without giving them a faux 'naked' look.  I liked this but Mr. Drew disliked the color itself so you can guess his response to the ballet as a whole.  A simply lit backdrop varied in colors behind the yellow ensemble -- the lighting designer for this was also Ben Rawson. For Yellow I occasionally found the lighting overly busy and/or overly shadowy, but the light/bright colored costumes and drops (including the wings) meant the dancing remained visible and sometimes the shifting backdrop added a nice touch of visual interest that set off the yellow dancers smartly. 

The choreography was very much in an eclectic vein with passages right out of Martha Graham or even gymnastics alongside almost pantomime gestures (though abstracted) and more purely classical movement including one classical interlude where the male dancer did a tour to the knee and reached out his hand to his (on pointe) ballerina. In the video shown before the ballet that serves as program notes Nunes evoked a number of different things -- the sunlight of Brazil, the calming but not soporific quality of the music etc. I'm not sure I felt that what he said cohered and I felt similarly about what I saw. Perhaps with some consistency I felt the presence of images of friendship in which groups or individual supported or carried one another, and Nunes' choreography can weave things together in a very flowing manner, but if I compare "Yellow" with some excerpts of his work I've seen on video, then I'd have to say I doubt it's one of his strongest works. The different bits never meshed--instead of looking eclectic, the ballet just looked a bit of a mish-mash. (Always a risk of eclectic choreography. Schreier seemed much more masterful in integrating elements and influences together.) But though I don't think Yellow was a strong work, and would not care to see it again, any hope it had of making even a temporary impact was killed by the recorded music which blared out the Beethoven just when the ballet needed some intimacy.

About the recording: I recognized the exigencies that make it impossible for the company to have live music at all performances. I even think Atlanta Ballet has negotiated this problem pretty well given what a serious problem it is.  Before Covid hit I remember several matinee mixed bill programs that included ballets that might have had to use recorded music in any case and, even better, commissioned new ballets to chamber music which meant that live music was affordable. So when I saw that Nunes' "Yellow" was set to Beethoven's Hammerklavier sonata, I thought "oh good, at least we will have live music for that." But no--it was a recording of Claudio Arrau. Perhaps that recording is meaningful to Nunes and he preferred using it, but though "Yellow" was not a strong work in my judgement it would have been at least twice as effective and maybe even gotten twice the (very tepid) response it got, had there been a live pianist. The ballet's intimate, gestural qualities in particular would have been able to resonate. Can the company really no longer afford a piano and pianist for these performances? I assume that they can't do anything about the sound system at the Cobb Energy Center, but that's not helping anything either. 

Once again--if you have read this far--thank you...

Edited May 13 by Drew
typo/grammar fixes; precision