Swinging Into Comedy (and Along With Sinatra)
<First published online in the New York Times on November 1, 2007>
Is there another dance in which the peripheries of the stage are more fun than in Twyla Tharp’s “Baker’s Dozen”? In this elegantly comic jazz ballroom fantasy to music by Willie (The Lion) Smith, which joined American Ballet Theater’s repertory on Tuesday night at City Center, people hurtle or shimmy onto the stage and yet are often content to stay a yard or so from the wings, strutting their stuff.
Sometimes they’ve no sooner arrived from one wing than they’re off into the next. One woman comes hopping on with her leg extended behind her in arabesque, but before we see that whole leg, some unseen hand has tugged it, pulling her right back out of sight again. And in the passage everybody remembers best, a man is dancing alone by a wing when suddenly a woman falls out of it, upright, and into his arms. (He tosses her back and carries on.) All the comedy in this dance is blithe.
Tuesday’s program reminded the audience of the American in this ballet company’s name. “Baker’s Dozen” was followed by Ms. Tharp’s “Sinatra Suite”; the program’s centerpiece was Jorma Elo’s “C. to C.” (new last Saturday), which aims to reflect and/or refract the friendship of the composer Philip Glass and the painter Chuck Close; and the finale was the Jerome Robbins-Leonard Bernstein classic “Fancy Free.”
It’s possible to feel that Robbins never did anything better or more perfect than “Fancy Free” (1944) or that Ms. Tharp has never surpassed “Baker’s Dozen” (1979). But whereas “Fancy Free,” a character ballet with a taut narrative and a long performance tradition at Ballet Theater, seems evergreen, the plotless “Baker’s Dozen” is more stylistically elusive. The 12 dancers, dressed in all-white social-dance attire (with heeled shoes), frequently need to send powerful ripples up and down their bodies in a way that does not come naturally to dancers who are not year-round Tharp specialists.
@Is there another dance in which the peripheries of the stage are more fun than in Twyla Tharp’s “Baker’s Dozen”? In this elegantly comic jazz ballroom fantasy to music by Willie (The Lion) Smith, which joined American Ballet Theater’s repertory on Tuesday night at City Center, people hurtle or shimmy onto the stage and yet are often content to stay a yard or so from the wings, strutting their stuff.
Sometimes they’ve no sooner arrived from one wing than they’re off into the next. One woman comes hopping on with her leg extended behind her in arabesque, but before we see that whole leg, some unseen hand has tugged it, pulling her right back out of sight again. And in the passage everybody remembers best, a man is dancing alone by a wing when suddenly a woman falls out of it, upright, and into his arms. (He tosses her back and carries on.) All the comedy in this dance is blithe.
Tuesday’s program reminded the audience of the American in this ballet company’s name. “Baker’s Dozen” was followed by Ms. Tharp’s “Sinatra Suite”; the program’s centerpiece was Jorma Elo’s “C. to C.” (new last Saturday), which aims to reflect and/or refract the friendship of the composer Philip Glass and the painter Chuck Close; and the finale was the Jerome Robbins-Leonard Bernstein classic “Fancy Free.”
It’s possible to feel that Robbins never did anything better or more perfect than “Fancy Free” (1944) or that Ms. Tharp has never surpassed “Baker’s Dozen” (1979). But whereas “Fancy Free,” a character ballet with a taut narrative and a long performance tradition at Ballet Theater, seems evergreen, the plotless “Baker’s Dozen” is more stylistically elusive. The 12 dancers, dressed in all-white social-dance attire (with heeled shoes), frequently need to send powerful ripples up and down their bodies in a way that does not come naturally to dancers who are not year-round Tharp specialists.
@New York Times, 2007