Showcasing New Ballets and Female Choreographers in Boston
<First published online on March 10, 2008>
BOSTON. Boston Ballet has a repertory that judiciously ranges from 19th-century ballet classics by way of George Balanchine, Frederick Ashton and Antony Tudor to recent works by living choreographers. In its artistic director, Mikko Nissinen, it has a figure remembered as a star dancer for 10 years at the San Francisco Ballet. It also has in Jorma Elo, a resident choreographer in demand elsewhere: he has made dances for American Ballet Theater and New York City Ballet and has a premiere at San Francisco Ballet next month.
And with its Next Generation program - shown last week at the Wang Theater here and consisting of three world premieres, an American premiere and a special-event performance - Boston Ballet becomes one of the few eminent companies to promote choreographic innovation as an end in itself. Most companies tend cautiously to package premieres within programs that also feature old favorites, and it takes courage to schedule a bill that consists of nothing but the new.
Boston Ballet has done this and gone one further: the three ballets here that are not by Mr. Elo are all by female choreographers. Female dancers have long been pre-eminent in ballet and many 18th- and early-19th-century ballerinas became choreographers, including Marie Sallé, Marie Taglioni, Fanny Cerrito and Lucile Grahn. But in the last 150 years virtually no ballerinas, and indeed few women, have made ballets.
This Next Generation program has diversity. Heather Myers’s “Gone Again,” to the “Death and the Maiden” movement from Schubert’s Quartet No. 14, was a not-quite-narrative dance for three male-female couples that suggests developing aspects of the maiden-death, agitation-calm, despair-inevitability conflicts of Schubert’s theme. Helen Pickett’s “Eventide” used music by three minimalists (Michael Nyman, Jan Garbarek, Philip Glass), each treating themes and sounds from Indian music. She made an elaborate pure-dance work for five male-female couples (each with a duet in its own distinct mood, and with several soloists also shown in changing solo, duet, trio, quartet and quintet settings) and a corps de ballet of 10 women.
Sabrina Matthews’s “Ein Von Viel,” first choreographed in 2001 for the Alberta Ballet (which Mr. Nissinen directed from 1998 to 2001, when Ms. Matthews was among its leading dancers), is a sophisticated duet for two men. Its structure, focusing more on two-part theme-and-variations layering than on partnering, reflects aspects of its music, nine of Bach’s “Goldberg” Variations.
Mr. Elo ended the program with “In on Blue,” his quirkily Neo-Classical dance for three women and 10 men to music nuttily alternating between parts of an Ysaÿe violin sonata (played live by Michael Rosenbloom) and the theme of melancholy longing composed for Hitchcock’s “Vertigo” by Bernard Herrmann. The women wore blue tutus, the bare-chested men wore blue trousers, and Mark Stanley’s lighting was a study in blue so intense that at times it made the floor look like clouds at twilight.
The program also had unity. In a singular stroke, surely without precedent, all four choreographers opened the evening by dancing, in Mr. Elo’s “Téssera.” Set to a repeating phrase from Sibelius’s Violin Concerto, it showed the four as confidently individual soloists as well as an ensemble. I might call this a real demonstration of house style. Just as all Balanchine’s colleagues who choreographed for the New York City Ballet’s Stravinsky, Ravel or Tchaikovsky festivals had been Balanchine dancers, so this connects these three women and Mr. Elo in one stage unit. A pity then that “Téssera” seems a collection of modish dance clichés.
My problem at Boston Ballet is with that house style. I have seen too little of Mr. Elo’s work to generalize, but he cites William Forsythe as one of the “master choreographers” with whom he worked closely as a dancer (as does Ms. Pickett, a dancer with Mr. Forsythe’s Ballett Frankfurt for more than 10 years). And all five dances were lighted by Mr. Stanley to appear School of Forsythe, with particular emphasis on lighting from above, behind and the wings rather than from the front. This heavy use of shadow almost always prevents dancers from being theatrically distinct. Yet Mr. Stanley’s work certainly gave Ms. Pickett’s “Eventide” amber tints warmer than any Forsythe piece I have seen, and Ms. Matthews’s “Ein Von Viel” had enough front lighting to make its two men clearly legible.
Nonetheless, a Forsythean tone dominated most of these works. Big lower-body steps are juxtaposed with off-balance emphasis and strong upper-body movement. But the lexicon of steps is seldom large, detailed movement is seldom employed, and the style tends to celebrate forceful attitudinizing rather than line or musicality. Mr. Elo is a master of this style: I find no appeal in it. His anti-ballerina use of ballerinas (often on flat feet in their tutus and bending their upper bodies like mad) seemed a mere effect.
Of the three female choreographers, Ms. Pickett - though too Forsythean for my palate - has the widest command of choreographic structure and looks the most accomplished. There were many incidental pleasures from her “Eventide,” and its look (she designed the costumes with Charles Heightchew and the set with Benjamin Phillips) was impressive. From the first, her contrasts of stage foreground and background were arresting; and there were other striking contrasts of scale, though seldom in her choice of lower-body vocabulary.
But though Ms. Myers’s “Gone Again” and Ms. Matthews’s “Ein Von Viel” are less original works, each had more delicacy and, in the core energy of each dance phrase, more sheer humanity. None of them seemed immature, but each seemed limited rather than released by the genre of dance theater that seems to prevail in the Nissinen-Elo Boston stable.
@New York Times, 2008