The Many Lives of a Dancer, Explored Upon the Stage
<First published online in the New York Times on June 6, 2007>
Over the weekend, it was possible at Lincoln Center to see all the generations of a School of American Ballet dancer’s life onstage. On Saturday afternoon, the curtain rose at the New York State Theater to reveal, at the start of Balanchine’s “Mozartiana,” Kyra Nichols, in her farewell season with New York City Ballet, framed by four tiny girls from the school, who danced the opening Preghiera with her. Ms. Nichols’s way of including the children in her dance of prayer while gently opening herself to the light, to the stage space and to the music made this a sublime image.
At the same time, across Lincoln Center at the Peter Jay Sharp Theater at Juilliard, many more dancers from the School of American Ballet were giving the first of three annual workshop performances. In these, they performed two ballets by Balanchine, one ballet and one pas de deux by Peter Martins (who is both ballet master in chief at City Ballet and artistic director at the school), and another ballet by Sean Lavery, another well-remembered former City Ballet principal (one of Ms. Nichols’s bygone partners) who teaches at the school.
A notable inclusion was the balcony pas de deux from Mr. Martins’s recent “Romeo and Juliet” as danced by Callie Bachman and Russell Janzen. Ms. Bachman had been Mr. Martins’s original choice for Juliet and, before an injury, was the dancer for whom he made much of the role. The brochure for Monday night’s benefit performance included an extended interview between Ms. Nichols and a student, Cameron Dieck, compellingly exchanging talk about teachers, choreographers, repertory and professionalism.
This year’s workshop performances are in tribute to Lincoln Kirstein, the school’s founding director, born 100 years ago. They also honor the lifelong commitment of Nancy Lassalle, a school alumna who graduated not to stage stardom but to passionate and generous work, long term (as director, patron and in other capacities), on behalf of the school and the company. The centerpiece was Balanchine’s “Four Temperaments,” staged by Suki Schorer in an account that, with its qualities of jazziness and attack, made the masterpiece seem as cutting-edge as it surely was when new in 1946.
The title of Mr. Lavery’s ballet, “Twinkliana” (1989), is less twee than it sounds but just as sweet. Set to Mozart’s piano variations on the tune usually known as “Twinkle, twinkle, little star,” its theme-and-variations structure makes it look, endearingly, like a child’s-eye view of a Balanchine pure-dance essay in academic style. The mixture of glee and serious focus in the seven child performers, ages 11 to 13, was delicious.
By contrast, Mr. Martins’s all-male “Gentilhommes” (1987), choreographed to Handel, seldom breaks through from exacting classroom study into sheer dance; even when one male pas de trois features a series of nonacademic arm gestures, the tone always remains academically formal. It broke though into dance impetus best in a bright solo danced here by Matthew Renko, 19, and it is he whom I would also single out from the performance of “The Four T’s” as imaginatively caught up in the world onstage (without any “acting”) as he was lucid.
Mr. Janzen, the 17-year-old Romeo in the balcony pas de deux, is already a partner of rare accomplishment. Audiences tend to respond to big, high lifts, and this pas de deux has plenty; but very often the hardest are the low ones, when the man, using extreme control in his forearms, has to keep his dancer just above floor level as if floating on air. Mr. Janzen, helping Ms. Bachman skim across the stage in lifted hops on point, is already the master of these. She responded shiningly, as if he had already done her work for her.
The program concluded with the 1958 “Gounod Symphony.” As the two principals — roles that in the 1980s still proved stylistic challenges to such experienced stars as Mr. Lavery and Merrill Ashley — Sara Adams, 17, and Zachary Catazaro Clark, 18, (first cast) and Kristen Segin, 17, and Joshua Thew, 19, (second cast) showed a few rough edges but, more important, real danciness. Ms. Adams showed particular brio in the long, amazingly brisk pas de deux.
I suspect we will not look back on 2007 as a vintage year for the School of American Ballet. But where the average level is as high as shown in this “Gounod” corps, there is no doubting that Kirstein’s school is in powerful shape. And in the finale of “The Four T’s,” Ms. Segin delivered a phrase of supported pirouettes, reversals and sudden-death pivots with a speed and a fluency that will surely be found amid no other ballet school in the world, and in few professional dancers.
@New York Times, 2007