In a Star-Studded Festival, Only One Center of Gravity
<First published online in the New York Times on October 6, 2007>
New York is blessed in that one first-rate flamenco troupe, Noche Flamenca, keeps returning each year. Since starting as chief dance critic here in April, I have encountered many dance companies, and many more individual dancers, for the first time. Of these there has been none I have been so glad to discover as Noche Flamenca and, above all, its lead dancer, Soledad Barrio.
I can think of no current ballet dancer in the world as marvelous as she. Outside ballet, my first comparison would be with the very different Madhavi Mudgal, a celebrated exponent of the Odissi style of India, though virtually unknown in New York. These dancers are never farther than a few yards from their musicians and yet turn stage space into something sublime.
As a rule, Noche Flamenca is fastidious about appearing here in small downtown theaters where the close quarters allow the music and dance to work ideally together upon the audience. So it is quite a coup for the City Center, in Midtown, that at its Fall for Dance festival on Thursday the company gave the premiere of its new “Martinete y Solea” there.
Singer, guitarists, clappers were all — startlingly — amplified. So was the floor on which first Juan Ogalla and Antonio Rodriguez danced together (the Martinete) and then Ms. Barrio danced alone (the Solea). The altered sound world changed the whole drama of the dance; the aural balance wasn’t quite right, since Ms. Barrio’s heels could seldom be heard when all the musicians were clapping and strumming together.
But how fascinating to see her nonetheless triumph in a theater this large. She is a mistress of stillness and slowness: she has only to extend a straight arm and walk slowly forward across the stage, and it becomes an existential drama. Out of these passages of pressure-cooker restraint come her great explosions of woodpecker footwork, the astounding bodily arcs that she holds and in which she unexpectedly revolves upon herself, suddenly focusing on a point of floor as if it were a snake she was defying, or standing stretched like a human bow for archery.
You had to laugh at the nerve with which Fall for Dance placed this right after Trisha Brown’s shuffling Bob Dylan “Spanish Dance” (1973). In that part-comic, part-luscious dance, the feet do far less than the swaying pelvis and the slowly, gorgeously lifting arms, and one shuffling woman bumps into another and nudges her into motion until five of them are bumping along like interlocking trolleys.
The evening’s first three items were altogether less interesting. Karole Armitage’s “Ligeti Essays,” new this year, had devices that obviously referred to Balanchine’s more overt modernism in “The Four Temperaments,” “Agon” (especially) and “Symphony in Three Movements.” But the choreography became less a serious exercise in style, more a collage of stylistic effects. Not dissimilar beneath the skin, Kyle Abraham’s solo “Inventing Pookie Jenkins” (2006) was a watch-me display of upper-body archness.
Most dispiriting is Christopher Wheeldon’s pas de deux for Wendy Whelan and Craig Hall, “After the Rain,” to Arvo Pärt music. The way Mr. Wheeldon connects a range of choreographic images in a single legato flow is a clue to why so much has been made of him. But this dance also exposes how dismayingly passive his presentation of women often is. Perhaps only with a strong-looking dancer like Ms. Whelan can it be tolerable to watch a woman repeatedly swoon, drape herself on her partner’s neck or back, ecstatically abase herself at his feet, and let him lift her like the sail to his mast or the prow to his ship.
Is Mr. Wheeldon (a genuine talent) taking ballet forward or backward? Here, the latter.
@New York Times. 2007