Flights Across Continents, Soft Landings on the Stage
<First published online in the New York Times, September 28, 2007>
All tickets for the 10-performance, six-program mixed-bill Fall for Dance Festival at City Center are $10. It’s perfectly probable that parts of the five later programs will give audiences a bad time, but it’s unlikely that many people will end up feeling their $10 was ill spent.
Five of the programs include United States or world premieres, and each includes a range of dancers, companies and choreographers so generously catholic that very few dancegoers will already have seen all of them. I apologize in advance that I can see only half these programs myself; looking at what’s announced, I see just how many areas of my own dance ignorance each one should fill. Any program that makes a critic feel like a student is worth more than $10.
Program 1, which opened on Wednesday night, was happy in several further respects. It included three established hits: Twyla Tharp’s “Deuce Coupe” (1973) and Paul Taylor’s “Arden Court” (1981), both of which have been seen and loved at City Center in decades past, and Alexei Ratmansky’s striking “Middle Duet” (1998), which New York City Ballet has been dancing since last fall. Two nice twists were that “Middle Duet” (though without the angels and the second couple of Mr. Ratmansky’s more complete version) was performed by two dancers from the Kirov Ballet, for which this work was created, and that the 34-year-old “Deuce Coupe” is now danced (as at a marvelous Joyce Theater matinee last spring) by Juilliard Dance.
The American Mr. Taylor and Ms. Tharp, the Russian Mr. Ratmansky and Program 1’s choreographer stranger, Shantala Shivalingappa of India, all have one striking feature in common: each has an advanced, indeed brilliant, conception of how dance can respond to music. In one crucial respect, Ms. Shivalingappa emerged brightest from this all-hit evening: she alone danced to live music. (Each Fall for Dance program includes one item with live music. Bravo in advance to all concerned.)
In the best Indian tradition, her four musicians sat cross-legged at stage right, and part of the witty charm of her solo dance, “Varnam” (an excerpt from “Gamaka”), was in the play between dance and music, above all in her suspenseful pauses (often balanced on one leg) before suddenly pouncing back into matching the rapid percussion rhythms. Of course, since she carries bells in her fingers and wears jangling anklets, she becomes part of the music. Though her feet are bare, they too are an intricate part of the rhythm, with both ball and heel making their contributions clear. No barefoot American modern dancer has yet matched the percussive skills of Indian dance footwork.
Ms. Shivalingappa, a specialist in the Kuchipudi dance style of South India, was making her New York debut as a choreographer. She has, however, performed with international dance companies, most recently with that of Pina Bausch, and her “Varnam” included brief moments that may have been influenced by Western dance (one sweeping balletlike grand rond de jambe, for example).
Mainly, though, this was a beautiful example of Kuchipudi’s range of moods, now coolly compelling in its alternation of curving sculptural positions, now brightly engaging in its use of the eyes and gestures to the audience, now rapidly precise in its stamping and skipping clusters of footwork. To this Westerner, it most evoked the sublime in the rich arcs made by the arms: few ballet dancers know, as quite a number of Indian dancers do, how to make a simple sweep of the arm both geometrically gorgeous and a gesture including the Milky Way.
The leap from this to “Deuce Coupe” (always danced to taped music) felt like a leap across centuries as well as continents. This is an American classic, conjuring the near-hippie sociology of an early-1970s milieu, deeply sensuous, funny and touched too by the melancholy that lies beneath several of its Beach Boys songs. Even though there are sequences where the young Juilliard dancers just trace movement that can never be too luscious, it’s impossible to miss the excitement with which this work stretches them toward risks and precision at the same time.
The ballerina role, with which Ms. Tharp suggests the pursuit of perfection, is lyrically danced by Mary Ellen Beaudreau, and the other dancers convey the cumulative thrill of stylistic fusion as ballet and popular dance and urban behavior all start to mesh into a utopian whole.
In “Arden Court,” which opened the program, it was good to see the musical immediacy and frankness of manner with which the Paul Taylor dancers enlivened this familiar work. Nonreviewing colleagues drew to my attention ways in which this performance should have been sharper, and if they’re right, then the taped music may be one reason. Yet my impression was the opposite: these dancers at once led me into the rich three-speed and highly three-dimensional contrasts of Mr. Taylor’s dance.
Ekaterina Kondaurova and Islom Baimuradov, the two Kirov dancers who deliver “Middle Duet,” make its dark drama compelling. This duet is a crescendo, a grim and strange dance marathon that suggests Beckett’s “I can’t go on, I’ll go on” before letting its couple collapse into sudden death. The modernist- Baroque-tango music is by Yuri Khanon; the dance emphasis is on the ballerina, pulling away from and returning to her partner with accumulating intensity.
Though this work has been seen in New York only since 2006, Mr. Ratmansky first choreographed it for the Kirov in 1998. These two dancers give it a particular edge of conviction and intensity.
@New York Times, 2007