Vishneva Stretches—As Far as She Can; City Ballet Up, Down in Perma-Crisis
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The Dance
Why would the world’s foremost classical ballerina choose to turn up in New York leading a small company performing three works newly choreographed on and for her? Idealism? Vanity? Artistic ambition? Chutzpah? Her program was called “Beauty in Motion,” a real misnomer. How about “Vishneva Goes Contempo”? Or “A Long Night at the City Center”?
We know that Diana Vishneva is a phenomenon of strength and style, and she certainly has earned the right to stretch her talents as best she can. But what she proved with this program is that although she’s a nonpareil Odette-Odile and Giselle, she isn’t equally at home in Alexei Ratmansky, Moses Pendleton and Dwight Rhoden.
Most interesting by far was the Ratmansky—a noble but futile effort to choreograph to Schoenberg’s unyielding song cycle Pierrot Lunaire. Its four dancers—Vishneva and three superb men from the Kirov, Igor Kolb, Mikhail Lobukhin and Alexander Sergeev—gave their all in an attempt to vivify this exercise in Expressionist commedia dell’arte, but it doesn’t (because it couldn’t) work. All that white-face, all that angst! Ratmansky shows again how accomplished he is—how fluent and sincere, nothing tricksy—and Vishneva’s supple dancing streams onward without hesitation or doubt: She’s a master. But although she’s generously placed herself at the service of her musical and imaginative choreographer, one can’t help wishing Ratmansky had created for her something less thorny and more grateful.
The Pendleton effort—F.L.O.W. (For Love of Women)—is what you would expect from one of the founders of Pilobolus and the leader of MOMIX: ingenuity piled on ingenuity. In part one we never see the three dancers, only their feet and hands in luminescent blue against black, making recognizable shapes—a face, a heart, birds in flight and nesting. It’s fun, or would have been at half its length. Think updated Alwin Nikolais. Parts two and three were solos for Madame. In part two, she’s prone, acting out her appetites on a tilted mirror, so that everything doubles up horizontally: four legs, four arms, two heads. It’s narcissism squared. Again, it’s clever, and again it quickly wears out its welcome. In part three, she’s inside a huge construction of strings of beads, which she whirls and twirls around and around to marginally amusing effect. Any one of a score of talented dancers could have done it just as well.
The Rhoden, called Three Point Turn, was the worst of it, its movement, according to Rhoden, “meant to represent the machinations of the mind, body, and spirit when falling in love.” In other words, it’s the usual slam-bang, bang-bang gang-bang. It spotlights three couples, the central one Vishneva and Desmond Richardson, whose massive glamour looks more and more studied as the years and decades roll on. Rhoden springs from Alvin Ailey, Richardson springs from Alvin Ailey, but Vishneva and friends spring from Russia. She—unflatteringly costumed and sporting a misguided hairstyle that accomplished the impossible by making her look homely—tried to Get Down. It was a sad mismatch. The poor boys looked like escapees from Spartacus and the girls looked stunned by culture-warp.
When Vishneva stretches to Balanchine neo-classicism in “Rubies,” she’s magnificent. The “Beauty in Motion” program wasn’t stretching, it was sagging.
CITY BALLET ENDED its 14-week winter marathon with the usual bewildering roller-coaster ride of triumphs, disasters and bewilderments. Most of the bewilderments were avoidable—they’re a direct result of the company’s recent policy of theme-organized programming.
It’s because they’ve concocted an “American Songs and Dances” program that we get a parade of songs by Rodgers and Hart (abominably sung, in Peter Martins’ sub-pastiche Thou Swell), immediately followed by another parade of songs in Ives, Songs, that Tudoresque exercise in nostalgia by Jerome Robbins.
It’s because they’ve dreamed up a concept inexplicably called “Passages” that we get two very long and frequently lugubrious works in a row, Ratmansky’s Russian Seasons directly following Mauro Bigonzetti’s Oltremare (Beyond the Sea)—and this at a Saturday matinee presumably in hope of a family audience. (The third Passage was Christopher Wheeldon’s An American in Paris, that comic-strip version of the Gershwin score and Gene Kelly movie, in which Damian Woetzel proves yet again that Dorian Gray has no monopoly on the secret of eternal youth.)
The Bigonzetti is one of two new works this season, and it’s the most impressive of the three ballets he’s done for the company. Spirits sink when its 14 dancers troop on in the semi-dark carrying suitcases: Immigrants, heartbreak ahead. But it gathers together in a series of intense duets, climaxed by the encounter between Maria Kowroski, her natural glamour hidden behind late 19th-century steerage garb, and Tyler Angle. Kowroski has finally claimed the leading-ballerina role her beauty and opulent movement style have promised from the start. In Oltremare, she displays an aggressive power and a charged sensuality that significantly extend her range.
Bigonzetti has coaxed extraordinary results from his dancers, helped by the unsubtle but charged score by his frequent collaborator Bruno Moretti. Andrew Veyette has a thrilling explosive solo; Angle, Tiler Peck, Ana Sophia Scheller, Amar Ramasar, Teresa Reichlen, Sean Suozzi and Jonathan Stafford demonstrate how brilliantly the Soloist level of the company can perform when they’re engaged—and rehearsed.
The season’s other new work, Wheeldon’s Rococo Variations, to Tchaikovsky, is a careful, clever exercise in partnering for two couples: Sterling Hyltin and Giovanni Villalobos, Sara Mearns and Adrian Danchig-Waring. It’s playful, it’s decorative, it’s without inner life—in short, it’s minor. A question: Why, in a ballet so specifically constructed to mirror two pairs of dancers, are the pairs so physically and temperamentally unalike? Mearns—who has now more or less completed her sweep of the entire repertory, though she’s not yet listed as a principal—is slightly solid in build and somewhat stolid in style, and it’s an unofficial law that critics must always refer to her dancing as “creamy.” Hyltin is slim, sparkly—“quicksilver.” Danchig-Waring is blond and extra-tall; Villalobos is short and dark. Or is the contrast the point? I hope so, because if it is, it means the ballet has a point.
Otherwise, all at the State Theater is as it has been, only more so. (Alas, in the case of Nikolaj Hübbe, it’s less so—this beautiful artist has skipped town in order to take over the Royal Danish Ballet, from which he jumped ship 16 years ago.) Most of the senior dancers appear more superannuated by the moment. A performance of that great ballet Serenade was disastrously listless: Darci Kistler appeared wan and tragically underpowered—she even made Yvonne Bourree look semi-respectable.
Mozartiana, on the same program, was equally inadequate. It was never Wendy Whelan’s strongest moment, but this time out she was small-scale and dull—in a Farrell role. Tom Gold, soon to retire, has long since passed his shelf date, and Benjamin Millepied doesn’t have the necessary technical command or partnering strengths. As for the four “Menuet” girls, they seemed to be on automatic pilot.
As for the company’s other senior citizens, bulky Albert Evans made it through Ratmansky’s lovely Russian Seasons, but as the Shirelles had it, my love for him is a thing of the past. And then there’s Nilas Martins …
Meanwhile, the youth brigade is settling into the repertory. Mearns, as I say, is everywhere—creamy in Ives, Songs and creamy in Thou Swell. Robert Fairchild is a definite comer; Georgina Pazcoguin a blast of energy (her Anita in West Side Story Suite steals the show); Veyette always a contender. Tall, blond Teresa Reichlen seemed over-parted in Stars and Stripes—the best thing about the performance I saw was the spirited playing of the orchestra under Paul Mann—but she was very persuasive in Tschaikovsky Piano Concerto No. 2, a.k.a. Ballet Imperial, in fascinating contrast to powerhouse Ashley Bouder. Whereas Bouder is all glorious attack, Reichlen (invariably labeled “willowy”) dealt with the ballet’s formidable challenges lyrically, emphasizing its Swan Lake connections.
City Ballet remains a great company in perpetual artistic crisis. Everyone knows what it needs: more guidance from the top; more rehearsal time; more coaching from former Balanchine luminaries; more rigor in casting and programming. Everyone knows what it has: an endless supply of talented dancers; an endless supply of money. And an eager audience.
Let’s give that audience what it deserves.
Copyright © 2008 The New York Observer. All rights reserved.
