Complicated Heroines, Puzzling Partnering
<First published online in the New York Times on April 26, 2008>
SAN FRANCISCO. By what criteria do we judge new works of art? Of the three seen in Program C of San Francisco Ballet’s New Works Festival on Thursday night, two - Margaret Jenkins’s “Thread” and Val Caniparoli’s “Ibsen’s House” - gave hostages to fortune by announcing what they had in mind. And so, if you knew a thing or two about their subject matter, it was easier to explain their shortcomings than their strengths. Since, by contrast, Jorma Elo’s “Double Evil” left any specific intention unsaid, it seemed to succeed the most readily on its own terms. Yet I like it the least. Why? I object to those terms.
Mr. Elo, resident choreographer at Boston Ballet, has also made dances for New York City Ballet and American Ballet Theater. “Double Evil” is the third world premiere of his that I’ve seen in the last six months, each in a different city. Still, his vocabulary is extraordinarily limited (staggeringly so when it comes to point work or lower-body detail) and his range of ideas no less.
He likes to spend the first half or two-thirds of a work showing his mixed feelings about the traditions of ballet, and he makes a laborious shtick out of treating ballerinas in an anti-ballerina way. “Double Evil” has (as did “In on Blue,” his last piece for Boston Ballet) women in tutus who spend much of the time on flat foot, legs turned in, bending their upper bodies and looking at sea. It opens with a duet in which the male dancer, without courtesy or formality, gets down on the floor and then propels the woman around by kicking up at one of her legs.
After carrying on in this “Aw, shucks, what is this ballet game anyway?” manner, Mr. Elo - of course - cashes in with a crude assortment of ballet clichés for wow effect, having his dancers do lots of the same few jumps and turns and rushes. As throughout this festival, the San Francisco dancers were exemplary in fulfilling his demands; I wish for their sake this were not so. Though they and Mr. Elo won the biggest ovation of Program C and perhaps of the festival, I have never seen them made to look more coarse. His point is not line or musicality, but blunt force. The music alternated between Philip Glass (whom Mr. Elo used in his “C. to C.” for American Ballet Theater last October) and Vladimir Martinov; Holly Hynes dressed the dancers in blue (the same blue worn in “In on Blue” in March).
By contrast, Mr. Caniparoli’s “Ibsen’s House” tells us which five Ibsen heroines he’s bringing together and which five male Ibsen characters he has them dancing with. This works best if you have never seen, or at least admired, any of the Ibsen plays in question. All five women wore stiff and seemingly corseted calf-length dresses that might be made of bombazine; the men wore frock coats in charcoal gray. You can’t miss that this is a ballet about the repression of women in Victorian times, that the men are both repressed and repressive, and that nobody is ever happy.
Mr. Caniparoli tries to sum up each woman with one or two characteristic gestures; if Nora from “A Doll’s House” had smoothed her hair or pressed her hands to her skirt any more, you’d have thought it would be her husband, Torvald, who’d walk out of the marriage, not she.
But I still became confused as to which character was which. I stupidly assumed that the third woman, Mrs. Alving in “Ghosts,” was dancing with Pastor Manders, when I should have guessed (those giveaway high extensions from under the frock coat) that he was her scarcely repressed son, Oswald.
Likewise, I assumed that Ellida Wangel (my favorite Ibsen heroine, from “Lady From the Sea,” identifiable here by her flowing hair) was dancing with her husband and not (my fault again) the Stranger; and with Hedda Gabler showing quite some interest in her male partner, I assumed (wrong again!) that he was not her husband, George Tesman, but her ex-lover Ejlert Lövborg. Perhaps it was for the best that I am not well acquainted with “Rosmersholm,” though it was hard to tell what kind of angst this Rebecca West was having with this John Rosmer.
Meanwhile, Roy Bogas, Roy Malan, Craig Reiss, Paul Ehrlich and David Kadarauch sit and play Dvorak’s Piano Quintet in A, no matter what, looking just like the musicians who went on playing while the Titanic sank. Mr. Caniparoli is actually a much more skilled dancemaker than Mr. Elo: it’s too bad that he isn’t much of an Ibsenist.
Ms. Jenkins, long a local modern-dance choreographer, tells us that the thread of her title is that of the myth of Ariadne, Theseus, “the labyrinth at Knossos and the dark secret at its heart.” Nobody would be so old-fashioned as to complain that no thread is to be seen in “Thread,” but what’s the “dark secret”? No minotaur figure is to be seen here. The many windings of the labyrinth’s path go, we’re told, “through the domains of Eros and Psyche, history and our moment.”
The dances, like an abstraction of Armistead Maupin’s “Tales of the City,” suggest that men and women start alone, then discover feeling, partnering, community and possibly group sex.
Though the choreographic structure is too meandering to sustain serious interest in “Thread” as any kind of developing expression (the mind goes in and out of it), the work’s real pleasure - the greatest to be had in Program C - in its barefoot, physically expansive sensitivity. The 13 dancers, led by Pauli Magierek and Damian Smith, have a touching blend of urgency, self-discovery and glow.
@New York Times, 2008