Bound for New Life, Set to Music of the Old World
<First published online in the New York Times on January 25, 2008>
After the world premiere of “Oltremare” at the New York State Theater on Wednesday night, the New York City Ballet dancers were joined onstage first by the choreographer, Mauro Bigonzetti, and next by the composer of its commissioned score, Bruno Moretti. Seeing the two men together, with their similar clothes and spectacles, several people in the audience asked, “Are they brothers?”
No, but the two Italians have frequently worked together. (At City Ballet alone, this is Mr. Bigonzetti’s third ballet to a Moretti score.) And it is Mr. Moretti’s music, composed for just 21 musicians and featuring a fisarmonica (an Italian version of the accordion), that turns “Oltremare” into a theater piece both effective and evocative. Even if a program note didn’t confirm this, it would be easy to assume that Mr. Bigonzetti’s ballet is about immigrants (very possibly Italians) to the New World.
Their suitcases tell us they are traveling; the action tells us, after a prologue where they cross the stage in single file with the suitcases, that they are aboard a ship. And their costumes, by Mr. Bigonzetti and Marc Happel, tell us that this certainly isn’t “Now, Voyager”: these folks are working class. “Oltremare” means “beyond the sea.”
The ballet, without anything amounting to much of a narrative, is a dramatic study whose dances are largely in expressionist mode, moving from one pose of gestural weight to another in staccato, fragmented sequence. The two leading couples (Maria Kowroski with Tyler Angle, Tiler Peck with Amar Ramasar) are shown to be in stalemates of conflicted but intense emotions.
The physical style is scarcely original, but Mr. Moretti’s score makes it particular, atmospheric, unusual. The main pas de deux for Ms. Kowroski and Mr. Angle - the most spectacular event of the ballet, charged by alternating depictions of personal anguish and sexual tension (she plants a foot on his chest and, later, his groin) - is scored for just three double basses, playing slow, long notes without any resolution. Elsewhere the fisarmonica speaks of the Old World. The music moves between known harmonies and unfamiliar dissonance.
The dancers’ sustained focus and intensity of commitment are a credit to Mr. Bigonzetti. Each of the dances probably amounts, both dramatically and choreographically, to a not-quite-convincing array of known effects, but that isn’t entirely how you feel as you watch: you find that you know where these characters are, in their lives and in their hearts.
Certainly I want to hear it again, and to see again in particular the marvelous performances of Ms. Kowroski (who shows aspects of urgency, need and darkness that I have not seen in her before), Mr. Angle and Ms. Peck. Mr. Angle here as in “Fancy Free” and other current repertory has an occasional quality of vulnerable open-heartedness beneath his great elegance of bearing and personal beauty, which help make him one of the company’s most watchable artists. He is also an excellent partner, courteous and attentive.
“Oltremare” is the centerpiece of a new City Ballet quadruple bill, “Passages.” All its works are by living choreographers; none of its scores date further than 1903 (Sibelius in “Valse Triste”). Other companies tend, when presenting world premieres amid mixed bills, to reassure audiences by making classics or pre-1900 music part of the fare. This program, however, embodies what has made City Ballet singular throughout its history: a commitment to modernity and innovation.
The safest items come first: Christopher Wheeldon’s “American in Paris” (2005, to Gershwin’s score of that name) and Peter Martins’s “Valse Triste” (the Sibelius score of that name sandwiched between two parts of the same composer’s “Scene With Cranes”). Nothing about either is very novel, but “An American in Paris” beautifully designed by Adrianne Lobel with Cubist drop curtains and ravishing two-tone costumes is appealingly exuberant: a well-made mixture of classical and character styles of dance. On Wednesday night it was led by the ardent Damian Woetzel in the title role, Ms. Peck vivid as his eager new bien-aimée, and Sara Mearns delicious as a very Parisienne mistress of revels.
“Valse Triste” (1985), by contrast, is a mere sketch. In the role created for Patricia McBride, Darci Kistler seems to be a solitary figure in black, lyrically longing for death, who is visited by a spectral man in white (Jared Angle) who may just be death’s messenger. The Sibelius waltz is itself so darkly eloquent that it does more work than choreographer or heroine. Ms. Kistler, dimly elegant, exerts very little energy here, so that the tap of her point shoes across the stage acquires disproportionate force.
The evening closes with its most bewildering and most marvelous item, Alexei Ratmansky’s “Russian Seasons.” Created in 2006 to fascinating new music by Leonid Desyatnikov, this work employs both ballet classicism and Slavic folk-dance idiom, with an enigmatic tension between the two genres. After seeing it for the first time, I hardly know what to make of it except to say that each of its dances operates as a strange, compelling multilayered dramatic poem, and that the poems add up to a plotless drama I am impatient to see again.
@New York Times, 2008