The Heart Leaps Whenever They Do
<First published online in the New York Times on April 13, 2008>
WHEN people ask me what I like most about living in New York, I mention that I can see the Lower Manhattan skyscrapers and Governors Island from my bedroom and the Statue of Liberty from my pillow. But that’s the luck of where I live. Twelve months after moving here from London, I also realize that my mind’s eye has been happily filling up with images of New York dancers.
Some of these individuals are already part of the city’s rich dance history; some are juniors making their ways through the ranks and repertories of New York companies; some are regular visitors from abroad. A few are now forever tied in my memory with specific parts of the city and specific views that belong to Manhattan alone.
SARA RUDNER
Sara Rudner was already a legend when I first visited here in 1979. She was a founding member of Twyla Tharp Dance in the 1960s, performed in Ms. Tharp’s sensational crossover piece “Deuce Coupe” in 1973 and subsequent years, and acquired a serious reputation for her own choreography. She already seemed historic when I first saw her dance in 1980, in Paris, though she was in full possession of her powers. When I finally saw her in “Deuce Coupe” in 1992, in a Tharp season at City Center, I couldn’t believe my luck.
I certainly didn’t expect to see her dance in 2007; she is now in her 60s. When I did, though, her performance felt like the quintessence of a whole tradition of New York dance. It was on a Sunday afternoon in May at the Baryshnikov Arts Center; the windows gave a broad and unobstructed view across the Hudson. Boats passed up the river; helicopters crossed the sky; the air began to glow, the sun to set; and there, in the foreground, was Ms. Rudner dancing.
With her stunning, slablike cheekbones, her wide grin and her mane of dark curls, she was effortlessly sensual in even the simplest movements. I especially recall how rich a part her pelvis played: tilting to maximize a transfer of weight, fully absorbed in a current of motion through the body. So many other body parts contributed: shoulders shifting, insteps rising and falling, knees bending and straightening and the still-handsome head turning. It struck me that she was the embodiment of the title of Sally Banes’s definitive book about New York postmodern dance, “Terpsichore in Sneakers”; I think so still.
Terpsichore was the muse of dance, and many ballerinas since the 18th century have played the role or been hailed as her reincarnation. But the three dancers today who, for me, personify the art are none of them ballerinas: Mikhail Baryshnikov (who has not performed ballet since 1989 but still dances in modern works), Madhavi Mudgal (a specialist in the Indian style of Odissi dance who has not performed in New York) and Ms. Rudner. She would combine a shimmy, a kick, a ripple, a walk into a phrase of movement, and it was naturalness itself.
HERMAN CORNEJO
For many who sat like picnickers in Lincoln Center Plaza in the late evenings of July watching “Slow Dancing” on three 50-foot-high screens spread across the front of the New York State Theater, one dancer’s performance stays in memory like a miracle: that of Herman Cornejo. At the apex of what would become a double air-turn to the knee, he just hovered up there. (The slow-motion playback made this all the more amazing.) As his screen solo ended, people burst into applause.
Of Mr. Cornejo, as with a great actor, you wonder: who is he really? Does he have in life the wit, pathos, ardor, sweetness he can have onstage? You ask because, more than any other dancer before the New York public today, he changes from one role to another. Though the shortest of American Ballet Theater’s male principals, he is the most captivating artist on that company’s roster.
To those of us who thought we saw certain roles danced definitively 20 or 30 years ago, watching their present-day incarnations can often be hard; not so with Mr. Cornejo. In Frederick Ashton’s “Dream” he is simply the best Puck I have seen. With his phenomenal speed and buoyancy he could “put a girdle round about the earth in 40 minutes” and still remain, in Oberon’s words, “my gentle Puck.” As Mercutio in Kenneth MacMillan’s “Romeo and Juliet,” he vividly leads me back into precise details of its musical timing (here pouncing down onto the beat, there leaping up to meet it) and makes me feel aspects of the ballet’s Three Musketeers excitement afresh. In a 20th-century remake of the Three Musketeers idea, Jerome Robbins’s “Fancy Free,” he’s colloquial, American and yet more endearing.
Mr. Cornejo doesn’t particularly resemble Mr. Baryshnikov in temperament or style, apart from the general qualities of being somewhat short and dazzlingly fast, light and fluent. Where the young Mr. Baryshnikov would explode with a volcanic flow of steps, Mr. Cornejo more calmly gives us a bower of steps, blooming like the darling buds of May. But there is enough resemblance between the two to make you wish Ballet Theater would give him all Mr. Baryshnikov’s greatest roles. At the company’s gala in May, his account of the “Romeo” balcony pas de deux was the best since Mr. Baryshnikov’s: the most poetically inflamed.
In addition to Mr. Cornejo “Slow Dancing” showed an enchantingly catholic selection of the city’s dancers: the ballerina Wendy Whelan, the Taiwanese dancer Wu Hsing-Kuo, the drag queen Shasta Cola, the postmodern prima Trisha Brown, each - as filmed by David Michalek - dancing just a short passage. But “Slow Dancing” itself, if you gave it time, became one of the wonders of the New York summer: a sampler of the extraordinary range of dance here (I still haven’t seen several of those performers live), a brilliant marriage of dance and technology and an absorbing study of how different forms of dance can look, enlarged and in frame-by-frame sequence.
SOLEDAD BARRIO
City Center, where I last saw Mr. Cornejo, is also where I last saw Soledad Barrio (in its Fall for Dance season), but I think of him as uptown and her as downtown. Ms. Barrio performs with Noche Flamenca, which often has seasons in the East Village: last summer for two months at Theater 80 on St. Marks Place, more recently and briefly at Joe’s Pub. Though she can triumph in a big theater where her music is amplified, she and her colleagues are best appreciated at close quarters, where she hurls new thunderbolts. Noche Flamenca understands the importance of great lighting. When Ms. Barrio just stretches out her arm before her and follows its path into the dark, the move becomes, with her intensity, a heroic drama.
Of course I remember how her feet drill into the floor - this is flamenco - but even more striking is the way she can stand motionless for an age in a convex shape with her back arched and the planes of her face taking the light. Suddenly she pivots to face the opposite way, her torso now concave and her face fiercely focused on the spot that seemed to have been magnetizing her. And when it comes to encores, she drops the tragic mask and grins.
RASHAUN MITCHELL
The Merce Cunningham Dance Company has a number of outstanding dancers: the intense Holley Farmer; the bold Daniel Squire; the bubbly Jennifer Goggans; the valiant and buoyant Koji Mizuta; the fair, quiet Lisa Boudreau and the dark, inscrutable Emma Desjardins, with their gorgeously curved figures; the lithe Julie Cunningham, with her cropped hair and talonlike feet. If I single out Andrea Weber (tall, blond) more than those others, it’s not just because she too is a physically ravishing specimen; it’s because she brings a kind of sunshine to Cunningham dances I don’t remember ever having seen. She can be coolly objective in manner (that is the company’s general way), but her dancing has its own undisguisable glow, even glee.
My sightings of the company in the past year have been either out of town or at the company’s studio in Greenwich Village, where it has given a series of evenings titled “History Matters,” surveying aspects of Mr. Cunningham’s creativity from the 1940s on. It was in the studio, with its views across the Hudson one way and across Manhattan roofs the other, that I first saw part of the company’s red-hot current revival of Mr. Cunningham’s “Crises” (1960). In this Rashaun Mitchell, the most riveting of all the company’s present dancers, performs the role Mr. Cunningham made for himself.
Mr. Mitchell brings no demons even to the most devilish or conflicted passages, just his own powerful animal drive. In Mr. Cunningham’s latest work, “XOVER” (pronounced “Crossover”), he has a brief duet with Ms. Goggans that makes you want to laugh and gasp at once: laugh at his chug-chug rhythm as he hops in triplets (on one leg, then the other), gasp as he raises an arm in huge, easy, beautiful arcs.
BRADON MCDONALD
Within the Mark Morris Dance Group repertory, there are roles nearly 20 years old that have never been danced better than by their incumbents: David Leventhal as the Lark in “L’Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato,” for example, or Lauren Grant as the heroine of “The Hard Nut.” When some of Mr. Morris’s dogged constructions in “Mozart Dances” give me problems, the dancers - like great Mozart singers - always bring them a spontaneity that wonderfully belies the choreography’s clever fixity. When some of Mr. Morris’s work in “King Arthur,” recently presented by New York City Opera, make these dancers look less able than they are, I’m miserable.
And if there’s one dancer I look forward to most, it’s Bradon McDonald. This bearded redhead is just that fraction more gleaming, more in the moment, than others, and he brings even more juice and immediacy to the music. Mr. Morris’s dances are often ensemble works, with so many good dancers that I don’t seek out Mr. McDonald in particular. But when the dance brings him to the center, my eyes tend to linger on him even while the dance moves him around and away.
DIANA VISHNEVA AND ASHLEY BOUDER
Does New York have any ballerina today with the virtues of these glorious artists above? My mind flies to two: Diana Vishneva (seen with American Ballet Theater, with the Kirov and in her own program, “Beauty in Motion”) and Ashley Bouder (at New York City Ballet). They’re diametrically dissimilar: the doe-eyed Ms. Vishneva is luscious and lustrous while the narrow-eyed Ms. Bouder is sharp-edged, scintillating, sometimes scorching.
Ms. Vishneva is never other than beautiful, but she can apply too much artifice to some roles. (In dramatic roles like the Dying Swan, Zobeide in “Scheherazade” and Odette-Odile in “Swan Lake,” her performances have been marred by a series of surface effects.) Ms. Bouder is usually exciting and often knows how to find the drama, hue and arc of even the most pure-dance roles, but she can be calculating. (I have the feeling that she’s crying out for dramatic roles, like the heroine of Robbins’s “Cage,” whereas I’d like to see her dance with more innocence.)
New York is lucky that it sees both these women perform two of the most challenging lead Balanchine roles, in “Ballet Imperial” (known at City Ballet as “Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto No. 2”) and “Rubies.” But they need choreographic guidance. In “Beauty in Motion” this winter Ms. Vishneva appeared in new pieces by three choreographers, but they added up to a vanity display: “Look how different I can be.” What she, Ms. Bouder and others need is a choreographer who will give them three or more different roles, saying, “Take yourself by surprise.”
Surprises lie ahead for all of us. I have yet to see Ms. Vishneva as Giselle, her most acclaimed role. (She dances it at the Met this June.) And I’m aware of many other dancers I’ve seen, in numerous spaces between Lincoln Center and the Brooklyn Academy of Music, whom I have not mentioned here.
I think of Battery Park and see again DeWitt Fleming Jr., dressed in Pierrot-style baggy white trousers and shirt, tapping away one September night. As his feet executed trill upon trill or struck sparks, you’d see the vibrations passing up the loose fabric of his costume while the breeze blew from across the harbor. Memories like this, like happy ghosts, enrich a whole cityscape.
@New York Times, 2008