Between Horror & Humor: Eight Questions for Jack Ferver about the New York Premiere of ‘Two Alike’

Posted on May 16, 2012 by

Jack Ferver. Photograph by Kevin Tachman

Downtown dancer/choreographer Jack Ferver and visual artist Marc Swanson debuted their collaborative work Two Alike at the Contemporary Arts Museum of Houston in 2011. The performance, both dark and comic, explores the effects of abuse on queer youth. The piece — a solo danced by Ferver within Swanson’s unsettling sculpture of mirrors and black wood — has its New York premiere from May 17 to 19 at The Kitchen. I spoke with Ferver by phone about the origins of the work, his often surprising use of humor, and why the “It Gets Better” campaign doesn’t apply to adults.

How did your collaboration with Swanson come about?
Marc and I met in 2008 when he saw a piece I did called MEAT. After he saw another work of mine, Death is Certain, we really talked. I visited his studio, fell in love with his work, and said we should collaborate. We began talking about ourselves as artists and how we came to be artists, and it went back to our childhoods.

And how did you both arrive at Two Alike?
Originally, we thought the piece was going to be about how we grew up in small towns and moved to a city. I grew up next to the woods, and I would play in them, and Marc also grew up near some woods. I thought there would be a trajectory of traveling through the woods to the high-rises of the city, but then I began working on the solo, spending all of this time alone in a room. Deeper things came up, about where my art comes from, where my sense of play comes from. My sense of play comes from an incredibly lonely childhood.

You mentioned to me in December that Two Alike is different from your other works. What makes it unique?
The construction of it is different from my other works. It’s a solo. I’m not outside of it at any point, getting to watch it, and I don’t have a sparring partner. I’m my own sparring partner in this work. Memories or fantasies are my sparring partner. Working with Marc also has pushed me to make work in a more formal way.

Your work often pairs serious subjects — isolation, insecurity, even suicide — with humor. What compels you to take that approach?
Part of it is just who I am as a person and an artist: I have a sense of humor. I’ve always been analyzing people and life. Life is terribly sad, terribly tragic, but it’s also really funny. When people laugh while watching my work, it can be because they find it shocking or relatable. I make work so people don’t feel as lonely as I have felt. And with all of my works, I think, people laugh at the narcissism that they themselves are inflicted with.

What did you use from your childhood in making this piece?
I tried to pull from all of it, but I’m not just dealing with my childhood, and I’m not just dealing with what is it to be bullied and victimized as a child for being gay. When I premiered this piece in Houston, people came up to me afterwards and told me about how the work had touched or helped them. Some of them were gay, and some were not. I don’t think it’s just gay people who can have lonely and terrified childhoods.

The publicity materials for Two Alike say that you use repetition frequently in the piece. What purpose does it serve?
I had my first dance class when I was 6. It was all repetition: I repeated something over and over, looking to make it perfect. Repetition can be a metaphor for how people who have had pain in the past keep trying to get a different result. People do that in their adult lives as well. They keep seeking the job, the partner, the financial status, to try to resolve the crushing experiences from an earlier time.

Did all the recent headlines about bullying prompt you to make Two Alike, or influence the work in any way?
This issue was on my mind prior to the headlines. I didn’t intend for this piece to come out when bullying was such a hot topic. I grew up really tortured. There were many points in my childhood when suicide seemed like an option, and I feel very blessed that I somehow got through that. But it’s very boring for someone to make a work just about himself, so in all of my work I try to take the “micro” of my own experience and expand it to the “macro.” My personal story really isn’t that interesting. What’s interesting is what’s going on everywhere.

What do you think of the “It Gets Better” campaign?
It’s great for children, but I don’t think hope is good for adults. I never have hope in my work. I feel it’s a very corrosive thing. People can get sleepy and lazy in hope. “Oh, it’ll get better. Things will all work out.” Really? From where I stand, there’s a ton of work that still needs to happen about how destructive xenophobia is — and I want it to end. As adults, we’re all responsible for it ending.

Posted in Contemporary Dance | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Contrasting but Complementary Styles: New York City Ballet Shows Differences Between Robbins & Balanchine

Posted on May 14, 2012 by

Teresa Reichlen and Jared Angle in “Kammermusik No. 2.” Photograph by Paul Kolnik

New York City Ballet’s greatest strengths are the size and richness of its repertory, and for that it has George Balanchine and Jerome Robbins, its two founding choreographers, to thank. For years, the two men worked side by side in the same office at City Ballet’s home theater and they deeply respected each other’s work, but their approaches to ballet are unmistakably distinct. Balanchine was most famous for his abstract, plotless ballets performed with minimal sets and simple costumes (even though he also produced a few important narrative works). Robbins, who earned greater fame by directing and choreographing a number of iconic Broadway musicals, is best known for his theatricality. Balanchine often presents his dancers as people, while Robbins fashions them into characters.

To explore these and other differences, New York City Ballet presented one of its free on-stage demonstrations on Saturday, May 5. These demonstration events, full of anecdotes about bygone eras, are always a thrill for the company’s biggest fans, and this one was no different. Peter Martins, New York City Ballet’s ballet master in chief, was joined by former City Ballet dancer Kyra Nichols, one of the company’s most beloved ballerinas, for an hour of discussion and excerpts performed by company dancers. And there were ample opportunities to see what made Robbins and Balanchine unique artists in the first two weeks of the company’s spring season, particularly at that Saturday’s all-Robbins matinee and all-Balanchine evening performance.

The most valuable point that Martins and Nichols made was about these choreographers’ use of music. Without saying it outright, Nichols suggested that Balanchine responded directly to a score when laying out a ballet, while Robbins started with his emotional response to the music.

Maria Kowroski and Tyler Angle in “In G Major.” Photograph by Paul Kolnik

After watching Robbins’ ballet In G Major, however, I wondered whether Robbins also sometimes forced a score on a predetermined theatrical scenario. The 1975 ballet’s score is Ravel’s jazzy, Gershwin-inflected Concerto in G Major, which lends itself easily to the atmosphere Robbins attempts to create: a sunny holiday on the French Riviera. What it doesn’t always lend itself to is choreography. Rhythms overlap, change abruptly, or fall apart entirely, and during these passages Robbins seems almost confused. Dancers soldier through the steps, but such transitions can be disorienting. He succeeds brilliantly in the third movement, when a series of trios burst into canon, but most of the ballet feels too beholden to the music or too apart from it.

Ravel’s score slows — and becomes far more adaptable to dance — in the second movement, which Robbins uses to create a poignant pas de deux. The tenderness and the sad, romantic strains of the music perfectly complement the duet, which finds the ballerina alternately pulling away from her partner and surrendering to him completely. (At the Saturday matinee, Maria Kowroski danced the female lead. In the first movement, she passed through a half-dozen partners aloofly, as if she doesn’t notice them, making the fragility she showed in her duet with Tyler Angle all the more heartbreaking.)

In The Cage, an early Robbins ballet about a tribe of insect-like women who ritualistically kill men who wander into their realm, the music can be similarly problematic. The ballet is entertaining enough, and the Saturday matinee performance proved that it could be an excellent vehicle for Teresa Reichlen, whose cool style and long legs make her a perfect fit for the role of the merciless queen. Yet there’s a noticeable discrepancy between the score, Stravinsky’s Concerto in D for String Orchestra, and Robbins’ dramatically charged plot. There are ominous chords in the Stravinsky, but Robbins exaggerates any horror to be found in them. (There is also ample evidence in Robert Garis’ illuminating 1995 book Following Balanchine that Stravinsky objected to the score being used in this context.)

Balanchine, on the other hand, approached his scores almost scientifically, which also Nichols pointed out in her comments during the demonstration. All of Balanchine’s ballets are highly musical creations, but none makes me personally see the music more than his Concerto Barocco, which he created in just a few weeks for American Ballet Caravan’s 1941 tour of South America, and which we saw later in the day that Saturday. The ballet’s steps, particularly in the first and third movements, are tied heavily to its score, Bach’s Concerto in D Minor for Two Violins, but this doesn’t prevent Balanchine from injecting it with his own touches of imagination, as several recent performances by New York City Ballet showed. A friend intelligently remarked on how well Balanchine uses space in Barocco. Familiar steps for the corps de ballet recur in different patterns (squares, crosses, diagonal lines), and the direction these formations face changes constantly.

Interestingly, the company programmed these performances of Barocco with Kammermusik No. 2, a late Balanchine work set to Hindemith’s score of the same name. The two ballets share a number of similarities: Both use canon heavily and have a corps of eight and two ballerinas. (Kammermusik, however, adds two partners for the women.) Yet it’s far easier to notice why this work is unique. The corps in Kammermusik is composed entirely of men — a highly irregular choice on Balanchine’s part — and many of its steps are far from classical. The women’s spins are wild; feet, when kicked, are often unpointed.

Kammermusik responds its score intelligently and its angular steps have a coherent formal logic, but I don’t find it particularly enjoyable to watch. One senses that witnessing Teresa Reichlen and Sara Mearns perform the ballet with a strong corps, as they did on the opening night of New York City Ballet’s spring season, is to see the work clearly, but in many ways Kammermusik resembles a machine: perpetual, relentless, something less than human. Nevertheless, the company deserves praise for reviving this controversial work. It shows a different side of Balanchine’s musicality, and his willingness to experiment with his own standards.

Another fascinating point that Martins and Nichols made about the Balanchine and Robbins styles concerned differences in partnering. In Robbins’ dances, the woman generally depends heavily on her partner. “With Mr. B’s ballets,” Martins said, “the woman does the work and the boy comes in to stop her.”

Examples of Balanchine’s approach abound in his Tschaikovsky Pas De Deux, a demanding, eight-minute duet made in 1960 on Violette Verdy and Conrad Ludlow. Nearly all of the impressive steps in the opening adagio fall to the woman; her cavalier holds her to protect her from the effects of gravity. During the on-stage demonstration, Gonzalo Garcia and Ana Sophia Scheller performed a passage that has the cavalier support his partner mid-way through a series of pirouettes. Martins gently scolded Garcia, repeating, “Don’t touch,” as he reached for Scheller too early. It made one realize how risky this style of partnering can be. At the evening performance following the demonstration, Garcia seemed nervous about letting Scheller spin alone for so long, and reverted slightly to his old ways.

Wendy Whelan and Sebastien Markovici in “In the Night.” Photograph by Paul Kolnik

Then compare the Balanchine partnering of Tschaikovsky Pas de Deux to the Robbins partnering of in In the Night, which opened the matinee on Saturday. The work opens with three pas de deux, all varied in character. In the first pas de deux at the excellently danced Saturday matinee performance, Robert Fairchild held Sterling Hyltin’s arms while she shifted her weight to the side and balanced on point. The second duet found Andrew Veyette holding Maria Kowroski (replacing Sara Mearns) upside-down. The women’s dependence on their partners here is clearly romantically charged.

In the Night contains another memorable moment that one can’t fathom finding in the Balanchine oeuvre: In the third duet, a tumultuous game of cat-and-mouse between Wendy Whelan and Sebastien Markovici, Whelan gently touched her partner’s body and fell at his feet in complete submission, perhaps to apologize for her earlier ambivalence. It brought to light another critical difference. Robbins presented women — and men — as vulnerable and humanized. To Balanchine, who famously put ballerinas on a pedestal in his ballets, woman was much more. She was powerful, independent, transcendent.

Posted in Ballet, New York City Ballet, George Balanchine, Lincoln Center | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Dispatch from Florida: Sarasota Ballet Dances Works by George Balanchine, Twyla Tharp & Dominic Walsh

Posted on May 3, 2012 by

Sarasota Ballet in “Serenade.” Photograph by Frank Atura

Vacationing in Florida has long been a tradition in my family. As a child, I went every year to my grandmother’s home in Bradenton Beach, a lazy island town on the Gulf Coast, and my parents recently began spending their winters in the same area. This year, I made an addition to the usual itinerary of poolside lounging and seafood dinners: a visit to the nearby Sarasota Ballet. (My mother accompanied me on what was her first ballet performance.)

Sarasota Ballet is a promising small company led by Iain Webb, a former dancer with London’s Royal Ballet who took the reins in Sarasota in 2007. The company has earned renown for its productions of Frederick Ashton’s choreography, a staple of the repertory that Webb danced in London. I regrettably was not able to see any Ashton during my stay, but I did catch a triple-bill (titled “My Way”) of works by George Balanchine, Dominic Walsh, and Twyla Tharp. The variety on the program was encouraging. I was even more impressed to learn that all three works were company premieres.

These are not all easy ballets to perform: The program opener, George Balanchine’s Serenade, is a cornerstone of American ballet that requires a cast of 28, the vast majority of them women. There were other hurdles in Sarasota — a relatively small stage at the Sarasota Opera House, a tape of the Tchaikovsky score — and a few noticeable missteps in the dancing. Because Serenade is in so many ways a communal dance, a certain level of uniformity is required to unlock its magic, and this cast often disagreed on the timing of steps and the nuances of posture.

The dynamic choreography never bores, though, and what this cast lacked in polish it made up for in energy. Sara Sardelli stood out as female lead in the “Waltz,” giving a highly musical performance. I hope the company continues to perform Serenade, and the rest of the audience that night might agree. There was an unusual stillness in the theater throughout the performance. No cough drops were unwrapped, and not a whisper could be heard. (It made me wonder whether some of the noisier New York City Ballet audiences take Balanchine for granted. )

Sarasota Ballet in “Bello.” Photograph by Frank Atura

The company next tackled more contemporary fare: Houston-based choreographer Dominic Walsh’s Bello. The 20-minute work, made in 2005, depicts a man contemplating his life, through remembrances of the women who have shaped him. The protagonist, played by a countertenor (in this performance, Gerrod Pagenkopf), sits behind a desk and sings five Handel arias. Pairs of dancers — memories of relationships long gone — come and go on a stage filled with fog.

The juxtaposition of movement and music was jarring. Walsh’s choreography, full of gyrating bodies and melodramatic gestures, looked thin alongside Handel’s music and Pagenkopf’s sweet voice. And for a dance that claimed to be about self-examination, Bello could be bafflingly salacious: Each of the four men emerged in progressively less clothing, and they often struck poses that showed off their physiques — their rear ends in particular — to tasteless effect. (My mother, bless her, tried to remain positive on this point: “At least their bodies looked nice.”)

Fortunately, the well-chosen finale, Twyla Tharp’s 1982 popular Nine Sinatra Songs, gave company members ample opportunities to shine. Before this performance, I had seen only the consolidated version of the piece, 1984’s Sinatra Suite, a staple in American Ballet Theatre’s repertory. Sarasota Ballet’s strong performance made me wonder why the full work — far superior to the suite — isn’t seen in New York more often.

Sarasota Ballet in “Nine Sinatra Songs.” Photograph by Frank Atura

Nine Sinatra Songs is mostly a series of ballroom-style duets set to the recordings of Frank Sinatra, and this cast brought rich characterization to each. Fumbling with his hands and spinning his partner one too many times to “Forget Domani,” Alex Harrison looked like a nervous teenager taking Anais Blake on a first date. Danielle Brown and Ricki Bertoni found a delicate balance between violence and affection in their duet to “That’s Life.”

Only twice, both times in passages set to “My Way,” is more than one couple on stage, and these pairings — once utterly unique — suddenly become anonymous: a series of dates happening concurrently at a New York City nightclub. Yet it’s these group scenes that are the most triumphant, moving, and memorable.

This rendition of Nine Sinatra Songs was made even more satisfying by my mother’s reaction to it. My mother loves to dance socially, but she initially had doubts about whether “going to the ballet” would be for her. Nine Sinatra Songs, and its charismatic interpreters at Sarasota Ballet, won her over. She was talking about it for days.

Posted in Ballet, George Balanchine, Outside New York | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Down South with Diana Adams: The Second Installment of the Ballet Cook Book Dinner Series

Posted on May 2, 2012 by

Chicken in buttermilk spoonbread, just how Diana Adams liked it

In March, New York City Ballet soloist Antonio Carmena and I kicked off a series of dinners based on Tanaquil Le Clercq’s Ballet Cook Book with a menu of Russian recipes by George Balanchine, whose ballets marked the beginning of my love affair with dance. For the second dinner, held the evening of April 21 at the Brooklyn home of Susan LaRosa, we decided to start at the beginning of the alphabetically arranged book by preparing the favorite dishes of legendary ballerina Diana Adams.

Diana Adams and Arthur Miller in "Agon."

Adams is best known as one of Balanchine’s great muses: She originated roles in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1962) and Episodes (1959), and most famously danced the female lead in the premiere of Agon (1957). But Adams had a wealth of experience before joining the ranks of New York City Ballet in 1940, including jobs in musical theater (she was in the original cast of Oklahoma!) and six years dancing with American Ballet Theatre. One of the best vignettes in the cookbook chapter humorously recounts her first encounter with Balanchine, while auditioning for Dream with Music on Broadway, several years before joining City Ballet:

“There was this man who wanted to become my agent. He sent me to audition for a part in the show but before I went he told me, ‘Listen, kid, don’t accept anything less than the second lead.’ After the audition was over, Mr. Balanchine came up to me and said, ‘I’ll take you.’ And although I didn’t care what part I danced, I dutifully went into my little speech about not accepting anything less than the second lead. Mr. Balanchine looked at me straight in the eye and said, ‘In this show there is only one dancing lead.’”

“And that disposed of Diana,” adds Le Clercq.

The recipes Adams chose to share — obviously rooted in her Tennessee upbringing — aren’t what you would expect from a ballerina. Most are high in calories and heavy in sugar, and remarkably few of the entries feature fruits or vegetables. Those of us at the table found it difficult to believe that the svelte Adams ate these dishes often. Her dishes all also looked very similar: Only after serving the meal — which consisted of hush puppies, shrimp bisque, chicken in buttermilk spoonbread, yam pudding, and pecan pie — did we notice that all of the food’s coloring fell somewhere between yellow and brown.

Antonio mans the stove top.

The day began early, with best friend Jeff Gageby and I arriving at Susan’s home shortly after 4 p.m. Antonio was already there. Being mostly inept in culinary matters, Jeff and I focused on preparation — peeling shrimp, grating yams, juicing lemons to make minted vodka lemonade — while Antonio and Susan managed the skilled work. By starting earlier than we had for the last dinner, we assumed the meal would be served on time at 8 p.m., but it was well after 9 when we finally sat to dine. At this dinner, we were joined by Catherine Cremona and Art Priromprintr (both balletomanes I had met through Twitter), as well as my good friend Nithan Narendra, who has seen relatively little ballet but has excellent taste.

We began the meal with Diana’s shrimp bisque, which in addition to several pounds of shrimp called for salt pork, white potatoes, white wine, cream, butter, and sherry. Despite the rich ingredients, the bisque was much lighter than expected. Its helpings were generous and the flavors were excellent, but take our advice: Add a few liberal dashes of salt before diving in. (Click here to download the recipe for shrimp bisque.)

Yam pudding: It tasted better than it looked

The entrée, “chicken in buttermilk spoonbread,” was a twist on fried chicken, a Southern staple, but unusually, this recipe called for the chicken to be fried and then baked in a cornmeal mixture. (Standing upright in the casserole dish, the chicken looked as though it were trying to escape the spoonbread, as Susan accurately pointed out.) We served it with hush puppies, a classic Southern dish of fried cornmeal, which Diana’s mother, a Northerner, altered to suit her own taste by substituting scallions for onions. (“Not Southern,” she used to say, “but better.”) They were tasty but at our meal were comically flat in shape. The reason was simple: Antonio — and most of the guests — had never eaten them and hadn’t a clue what they looked like. (Click here to download the recipes for chicken in buttermilk spoonbread and hush puppies.)

Undoubtedly the most curious dish on the menu — also served with the chicken — was “yam pudding,” a baked concoction of sugar, molasses, butter, cinnamon, milk, and grated yams. When the pudding emerged from the oven as a strange-looking mess of brown and orange, we were all reluctant to sample it. It turned out to be delicious, but given the high sugar content, one small scoop was more than enough. Antonio, the lone dissenter, found it too sweet for his palette. (Click here to download the recipe for yam pudding.)

Pecan pie

The best part of the meal, everyone agreed, was the dessert: a pecan pie. Although Diana’s chapter contains three dessert recipes, the pie is described as her childhood favorite. “I used to devour my portion with a delight close to anguish,” she notes in the book. And no wonder: It had an excellent texture and wasn’t overly sweet, as many pecan pies are. Susan, an accomplished baker, went so far as to say the recipe was better than her own. She attributed this to the corn syrup, which is rarely used nowadays in making pies. We improved on the recipe slightly by adding vanilla ice cream. (Click here to download the recipe for pecan pie.)

The meal was ultimately satisfying, but I wasn’t alone in feeling five pounds heavier when I left Susan’s home to trek toward the subway. Tread carefully with this rich menu. Limit your portions, and have a salad for lunch. Or, when going back for second helpings, imagine you’re a leading ballerina ask yourself what Balanchine would have to say.

Watch a video of the dinner preparation condensed to four minutes:

Check back soon for details about the next Ballet Cook Book dinner. Space is limited, but if you are interested in attending, write to ryan@bodiesneverlie.com and tell us why you would like to be our guest.

Posted in Ballet, George Balanchine, New York City Ballet | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 3 Comments

A Whirlwind Tour of Odissi: Sujata Mohapatra Opens Erasing Borders: DanceFest India-2012

Posted on April 23, 2012 by

Sujata Mohapatra performs at the Erasing Borders Festival. Photograph courtesy of Imaginoor Photography

The Erasing Borders Festival, with the variety of Indian dance styles on display, and its mixture of ensemble and solo performances, might offer New York’s best introduction to Indian dance. Presented by the Indo-American Arts Council, the festival typically takes place in late August, but this year the council joined with Trinayan Dance Theatre to produce a spring series as well.

Due to travel plans, I could attend only one performance at this iteration: the opening night, held at The Club at La MaMa, which featured Sujata Mohapatra, one of India’s leading Odissi artists. (Odissi is one of eight classical forms of Indian dance.) Mohapatra’s appearance came just weeks after another group of Odissi dancers — the Nrityagram Dance Company — performed at the Joyce Theater. Mohapatra is a gripping solo artist, and she too demonstrated this ancient art form’s exciting possibilities.

She established her presence immediately in the mangalacharan, a blessing that traditionally opens an Odissi performance and salutes the earth, the guru, and the audience. After squatting repeatedly, her palms full of flower petals, Mohapatra moved through a series of sculptural poses marked with bent limbs and striking balances. Arms moved fluidly while feet moved staccato, and to an entirely different beat. Her musicality was clear as she played with and against the rhythms of the score.  She showed great physical strength as well: When she stomped, one could feel the resulting vibrations through the floor.

Mohapatra was at her most radiant and mesmerizing in Pallavi, the second work on the program. This piece — a nritta, or pure dance composition — was more clearly about the music, with Mohapatra playing a game of call-and-response with Padmasri Raghunath Panigrahi’s rollicking score. Although this was only my second Odissi performance, a number of the movements in Pallavi — the arching the arms while using one hand to clasp the pinky of the other — stood out as unique within the form.

Just as impressive were Mohapatra’s talents as an actress, which she showed in abundance by dancing an excerpt of the epic poem the Ramayana. In this narrative piece, she portrayed no fewer than seven characters, some human and others animal. (Mohapatra explained, before the piece began, that dancing this number of roles was highly unusual. She learned all seven by chance, as a substitute for other dancers in rehearsal, and later convinced her guru to let her to combine them all in one performance.)

Prashant Shah performs at the Erasing Borders Festival. Photograph courtesy of Imaginoor Photography

She performed each role commandingly and distinctively. As the dance opened, she was Rama, the archer, stringing a bow and stalking cautiously through the woods, her legs in a wide masculine stance. Moments later, she became Sita and might have been gathering fruit from a tree, her eyes moving seductively from side to side. Then she transformed again, into a deer, batting her eyelashes and springing about the stage. My understanding of the mythology was weak, but I could follow what was unfolding. The changes in lighting, which signaled character shifts, were a great help.

Mohapatra was followed on opening night by Prashant Shah, a performer versed in Kathak, a form of dance from northern India. His solo, Pravaah (meaning “flow”), was defined by sharp contrasts. Dramatic leaps, high-speed spins, and percussive footwork frequently gave way to moments of complete stillness. Shah also invited audience members to partake in the dialogue between movement and music by encouraging them to count rhythms out loud.

Participation was tepid. By that time, most spectators seemed exhausted, and the odd ordering of the program could have been to blame. Before his solo began, Shah acknowledged the great honor of performing after Mohapatra, a superior performer and one of the great masters of any form of Indian dance. For all his charm and enthusiasm, Shah might have fared better as the opening act to Mohapatra’s tour de force.

Posted in Indian Dance | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Three Works Made Young: The Students of The Juilliard School Dance Limón, Duato & Naharin

Posted on April 16, 2012 by

Juilliard students in Ohad Naharin's "Secus." Photograph by Rosalie O’Connor

For dance fans, March is the most overwhelming month of the New York City cultural calendar. This March brought performances from local American ensembles such as Paul Taylor Dance Company, Mark Morris Dance Group, Martha Graham Dance Company, as well as engagements from foreign companies including Nrityagram Dance Ensemble and Batsheva Dance Company — on top of premieres from choreographers Sarah Michelson, Pam Tanowitz, and Stephen Petronio. It’s practically impossible to see everything that looks interesting.

Fitting in student performances, therefore, might not be a priority for dancegoers already faced with a glut of options. But it would be foolish to miss the annual concert given by the students of The Juilliard School.

These young dancers proved again this year that they could hold their own in a season saturated by professionals. At this year’s iteration of Juilliard Dances Repertory, held at the school’s intimate Peter Jay Sharp Theater, they performed short works by José Limón, Nacho Duato, and Ohad Naharin. (The variety on display at these performances is always remarkable. Last year, many of the same students danced works by Bronislava Nijinska, Eliot Feld, and Mark Morris.)

Juilliard students in José Limón's "Waldstein Sonata." Photo by Rosalie O’Connor

The program opened with a dance meaningful to the school: José Limón’s Waldstein Sonata, set to the eponymous piano music by Beethoven. Limón, a member of the Juilliard dance faculty starting in 1953, left Waldstein Sonata unfinished when he died in 1972; the piece was arranged for performance in 1975 by Daniel Lewis (a Juilliard graduate-turned-faculty member).

The work is worth saving, and the freshness of the students’ dancing at the performance I saw gave it a timeless feel. There are casual purple and blue costumes, onstage piano accompaniment (by Yuxi Qin), stirring musicality in the choreography, punctuated by brief moments of same-sex partnering: these elements all made one wonder whether Waldstein Sonata was created by Mark Morris, another modern dance maker who has been drawn to Beethoven’s music. Limón’s steps and geometries are simple but charming: The arms are raised with bent elbows or held horizontally in front of the torso, and the dancers return repeatedly to a square formation.

Gnawa, a 2005 piece by Nacho Duato set to a score that incorporates Spanish and North African sounds, was the program’s middle work. The women wear elegant black dresses, the men only pants. The dance is tribal, and one can easily imagine it as moonlit ritual. The dancers do their best with Duato’s choreography, but they can’t break through the piece’s off-putting theatricality.

Juilliard students in Nacho Duato's "Gnawa." Photo by Nan Melville

The piece might be best appreciated for its solos. Kristina Bentz moved easily between feminine grace and animal ferocity. Alexander Anderson required only a brief solo to make a lasting impression with his enthusiasm and technique.

Closing the program was Secus (2005), a work by Israeli choreographer Ohad Naharin, a Juilliard alumnus. The title, according to publicity materials, translates as both “this” and “not this,” and the choreography too possesses a strange formal tension. Dancers join in duets, trios, and quartets that dissolve as quickly as they form, keeping the eye constantly engaged.

Secus also succeeds because its many surprises — some humorous, others jarring — keep one in a constant state of suspense. As the piece begins, what sounds like remixed burlesque music plays. The dancers, defying the music, stare straight ahead blankly, their arms at their sides. Later, the cast breaks into three lines, with dancers performing brief solos once they reach the front. Sometimes they dance; at other times, they might lower their pants. Their faces, meanwhile, reveal no trace of emotion.

While this piece was exciting to me, I’m ambivalent about what little other I’ve seen of Naharin’s work. His Three to Max, performed by Hubbard Street Dance Chicago at last year’s Fall for Dance festival, struck me as fresh and utterly unique, but when Batsheva Dance Company (the ensemble Naharin directs) brought Hora to BAM last month, I found the choreography was joyless and suffocating. Naharin is a hard sell. It’s a testament to the Juilliard dancers’ talents that they can perform his work with complete conviction — and make this skeptic a believer.

Posted in Contemporary Dance, Juilliard, Lincoln Center, Modern Dance | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Mark Morris Versus the Music: A Choral Fantasy and Four Saints in Three Acts at BAM

Posted on April 3, 2012 by

Mark Morris Dance Group in "A Choral Fantasy." Photograph by Julieta Cervantes

Note: This review appeared in the April 2012 issue of The Brooklyn Rail. Click here to read the issue’s other dance features.

Setting dance to Beethoven has historically raised a few eyebrows in the dance world. George Balanchine, a great lover of music, went so far as to describe Beethoven’s heavy-sounding music as “unchoreographable” and never once during his prolific career used the composer’s work. Most choreographers seem to have heeded his warning. In 1966, Paul Taylor turned to Beethoven’s late quartets for Orbs, by most accounts a masterpiece, but enjoying even this can be an uphill climb.

So it came as a pleasant shock to watch Mark Morris Dance Group tackle Beethoven and make it seem easily danceable in Morris’s new work A Choral Fantasy, which premiered at BAM in early March. Even more remarkable is that “Fantasy in C minor for Piano, Chorus, and Orchestra,”a meditation on the unity of the arts, is as intimidating as any in the Beethoven catalogue. (Many music historians view the work as a precursor to the “Ode to Joy” in his later Symphony No. 9.)

Many Morris works are defined by dualism, and in A Choral Fantasy one finds tension between individual expression and conformity. Inventive movement abounds, but the dancers—dressed tellingly in tight, military-style costumes by Isaac Mizrahi—repeatedly return to rank-and-file marching that depersonalizes them.

Morris also demonstrates his skill at expressing various musical constructs—canon, call-and-response, and accumulation—through movement. In the most brilliant passage, Amber Star Merkens dances alone at center stage. Her solo summons William Smith III and Dallas McMurray, who engage in a playful game of slapping and clapping. Other groups—each larger than the last—emerge one by one at separate corners of the stage as the others freeze, until all four quadrants of the stage are occupied. Then each explodes into action simultaneously, performing unique steps. It’s a feast for the eye.

Earlier in the program, however, Morris didn’t fare so well with a different musical challenge: Virgil Thomson and Gertrude Stein’s 1934 opera Four Saints in Three Acts. Morris’s commitment to vocal music is admirable, but this dance setting (from 2000) never quite matches the score’s witty heights. It was all too easy to focus on the orchestra pit instead of the stage.

Mark Morris Dance Group in "Four Saints in Three Acts." Photograph by Julieta Cervantes

In Saints, Morris draws heavily—too heavily—on folk dancing influences. Performers enter, exit, and dance in chains that quickly become predictable, whereas Stein’s libretto constantly surprises. Wearing Elizabeth Kurtzman’s charming costumes, the dancers frolic with an almost angelic lightness, but this too becomes tiresomely saccharine.

Saints doesn’t add up to much but it nevertheless has its moments. A scene set to Saint Ignatius’s famous aria about “pigeons on the grass” finds six men strutting and flapping their arms, recalling the ornithological studies in Morris’s L’Allegro, il Penseroso, ed il Moderato.

One should acknowledge, however, that perhaps Saints might have been more satisfying on another night: the flow of the performance was disrupted when dancer Michelle Yard, dancing the principal role of Saint Teresa of Ávila, suffered a calf injury and was forced to withdraw, necessitating a brief pause and a cast change. Until then, Yard had been the evening’s standout performer, transcending the repetitive choreography to make every step new, fresh, and free.

Posted in BAM, Brooklyn Rail, Mark Morris, Modern Dance | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment