London Troupe and New York Visitors: Ripples in and Out of Sync
<First published online in the New York Times on March 24, 2008>
LONDON. Which matters more in dance: energy or synchronicity? In its two-week season at the London Coliseum, which ended on Sunday, New York City Ballet closed its all-Balanchine program with “Symphony in C.” In a famous episode in its finale, while four ballerinas center stage do complex pirouettes, dozens of dancers lined at the sides and back do the most basic step in the Balanchine lexicon: tendu (a pointing of a foot that involves the transfer of weight from both feet to one and charges the working leg with energy from hip to toe). I first saw this ballet in New York in 1979, danced by City Ballet, and I can still remember the shock of that moment.
At first the shock seemed to be about imperfect timing. All those dancers were doing tendu - but not together! While some feet were fully pointed, others were still pointing, others withdrawing. To this British eye that failure in sheer drill seemed outrageous. Soon, however, those Balanchine tendus delivered a more valuable jolt to my nervous system: those legs and feet gleamed, even in so basic and academic a step, with an energy that seemed visceral.
Meanwhile in 1979 and the years that followed, the Royal Ballet itself had begun to show the opposite of City Ballet: synchronicity without energy. Though its corps de ballet - one of the glories of world dance until 1978 - remained in sync most of the time, its dancers ceased to exemplify the most beautiful features of fully centered control that had so often been a marvel in works like “Swan Lake” and “La Bayadère.” Even in its arm movements, the company became milder, more superficial.
So it was odd at first to hear British balletomanes complaining this month at the London Coliseum that New York City Ballet’s dancers don’t all move as one. Actually City Ballet has better unison - and, alas, less energy - than in Balanchine’s day. Later the complaint about drill became annoying in another way. For in some of its own central ballets the Royal Ballet is no better.
In one passage of the Vision Scene in “The Sleeping Beauty” (which I saw last Monday at Covent Garden), for example, 16 nymphs stand by the wings, each holding on one leg a first arabesque (a basic demonstration of outstretched line). In 2006, when the current production of “The Sleeping Beauty” was new, several of the women couldn’t sustain this balance at any of the six performances I saw; it seemed reasonable to hope that by 2008 this feature would have been improved, but no.
When the six fairy godmothers in the Prologue, one after another in a row, do pirouettes into attitude, they used to form a perfect horizontal tableau. (As someone once pointed out, those raised legs looked like a row of handlebars.) Now the pirouettes aren’t crisp, and each one has a different line in attitude.
The best feature of today’s Royal Ballet - as its recent quadruple bill of ballets by Frederick Ashton, Balanchine, Jerome Robbins and Christopher Wheeldon demonstrated - is that it is a haven for individual dancers of talent. The range of striking principal and soloist dancers is wide. At least two principal dancers, Alina Cojocaru and Marianela Nuñez, keep growing so evidently that I regret not seeing their every performance.
And it’s remarkable to see how all the principal dancers (most deriving from the Americas and Continental Europe) now exemplify complex features of old British ballet style (the intense use of the torso, the invisible use of the “unbroken” wrist, the attention to long phrasing and unflamboyant line). Sarah Lamb, an American whom I saw here last week in Robbins’s “Afternoon of a Faun” and as Princess Florine in “The Sleeping Beauty,” has become an exceptional exponent of these Royal virtues.
By contrast, look at City Ballet’s lineup of ballerinas in “Symphony in C.” (The first cast in London had Abi Stafford, Sara Mearns, Megan Fairchild and Tiler Peck, each leading one of the ballet’s four movements.) You realize that few things about the company today are more distressing than its relative shortage of highly individual stylists. These women do not lack technique. But Ms. Stafford’s callow dancing has none of the depth, the chiaroscuro, the grandeur that her choreography requires, and both Ms. Fairchild and Ms. Peck - very different dancers in other roles - tend here to show the same lightweight perkiness.
Touring can be the making of a company. People recently have recalled how Balanchine changed his teaching before City Ballet’s first tour to London, in 1950; he was raising the company’s standards to a new high. This March I was gratified that Fayçal Karoui’s conducting often injected adrenaline into the company (there was a real difference between these performances of “Serenade” and those seen in New York in February) but sad that London was seeing the company at its best only in Alexei Ratmansky’s “Russian Seasons.”
Watching City Ballet this month in London I realize that even now nothing about it is more controversial than its Balanchine ballets and how it dances them. Frightful wrists, ghastly tutus, imperfect drill, too little facial charm - these old British complaints and others were heard again. And at the same time those same ballets kept subtly undermining those same audiences. Who could resist this choreography?
My favorite moment? During a matinee of “Agon,” as Teresa Reichlen in her castanet solo kept fluently on top of two rhythms at the same time and the two men onstage mimed clapping, a child in the audience began clapping along too, in time. It just felt so right.
@New York Times, 2008