Ballet Across America

Ballet Across America
performances by Ballet West, Boston Ballet, Houston Ballet
The Joffrey Ballet, Kansas City Ballet, Oregon Ballet Theatre,
Pacific Northwest Ballet, Pennsylvania Ballet, The Washington Ballet
John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts
Washington, DC
June 10-15, 2008

by Alexandra Tomalonis
copyright 2008 by Alexandra Tomalonis

Eight years ago, the Kennedy Center's Balanchine Celebration presented a variety of American ballet companies dancing Balanchine's ballets in a variety of accents, though all true to the works' spirit and style. There was a wonderful potluck supper feel to the festival -- companies brought whatever they had in repertory that season, and served up a feast. One came away from the week feeling not only that Balanchine was in good hands and feet, but also that the neoclassical ballets he had planted in the American soil had taken root. This week, the Center has been presenting a different kind of festival, again a range of American companies, this time a wide variety of ballets. It's not only a wonderful opportunity to see nine companies in a single week, but to ask the question, what is American ballet in 2008?

For one thing, there are some very, very good dancers out there. I saw no stars this week, but many very committed young people dancing their hearts out. No company had a refined classical style, but, for the most part, the dancers were very strong technically. The women came in all heights and proportions; in most companies, the men looked more like athletes than ballet dancers. Rather than going for elegance and long lines, company directors seemed to fancy sportsmen, character or modern dancers rather than classical ones.

Who are these companies, then? The two who showed the most individuality were Ballet West (in Balanchine's "Serenade") and Kansas City Ballet (in Todd Bolender's "The Still Point"). "Serenade" was recognizably Balanchine -- the dancers fleet, elegant and pulled up. The level of Ballet West's dancing is much higher than it was the last time the company danced in Washington. It is now a VERY tall company, and the dancers' long, lean lines were beautiful; they looked groomed. In "Serenade" (led by Christiane Bennett, Kate Crews, Katherine Lawrence, Michael Bearden and Hua  Zhuang) the dancing was strong and free. If at times the women's arm positions were too uniform, too drilled, everyone was musical, and no one tried to act. This was a subtle and sophisticated performance.

Kansas City Ballet, for its Kennedy Center debut, chose a work dear to it, the late Todd Bolender's "The Still Point." Bolender was the long-time director of KCB, and a good choreographer. There's a Tudoresque feel to "The Still Point," which explores relationships and feelings. The central woman (sensitively danced by Kimberly Cowen, with Juan Pablo Trujillo) is a bit of a misfit, pushed away by her two friends when they meet two young men. The woman then tentatively begins a relationship with a young man of her own. Their pas de deux is a conversation, and the man's part (created for Jacques d'Amboise) was a new type of hero -- a man both masculine and tender. It's not a work often seen -- the Joffrey brought it here many years ago -- and it's a small work, simple and sincere, and all the stronger for its simplicity.

Jerome Robbins' "In the Night," a ballet for three couples set to Chopin piano pieces choreographed a year after his longer Chopin ballet, "Dances at a Gathering," is also about relationships -- here three couples, neither new to love nor to each other, dream and quarrel and come to terms with each other, at least for the moment. The work was a bit bland, and the couples seemed unsophisticated in Pennsylvania Ballet's production, despite excellent dancing by all (Martha Chamberlain with Zachary Hench, Riolama Lorenzo, especially), with James Ihde, and Amy Aldridge with Francis Veyette). The Washington Ballet overreached a bit with Twyla Tharp's "9 Sinatra Songs," which is certainly about relationships and which also needed a more sophisticated rendering. Here the women got the raw end of things, being pulled and pushed and pummeled by the men. Was Tharp always so violent? Some of the dancers weren't quite up to the material, and some oversold the work, turning witty movements into pratfalls or punch lines. Erin Mahoney-Duy (in both One For My Baby and My Way, and Brianne Bland and Jared Nelson (in That's Life) caught the fun of the piece.

Joffrey Ballet danced Antony Tudor's "Lilac Garden" here before, when it was new to them, and the ballet had looked a bit raw; it still does. The revamped decor (by Desmond Heely) doesn't help. The wings are covered, floor to ceiling, with painted lilacs, making the stage look like a room with very odd wallpaper. Tudor was famous for explaining exactly what he wanted and expecting dancers to know the characters inside out, from what they had to breakfast to what they would wear to work next week, but in this staging (credited to Donald Mahler) there's no atmosphere: no sense of class distinctions, nor understanding of the difference between public and private, nor even that the ballet takes place at a party. The dancers seemed so rushed that even the famous freeze had no impact; they just ran on and stopped. I'm glad the Joffrey is doing works like "Lilac," especially in Tudor's year, and hope they keep it in repertory until the dancers are more comfortable with it and it breathes.

Another misfire was Pacific Northwest Ballet's rendition of Nacho Duato's "Jardi Tancat," which had everyone I spoke to asking "Why did they bring that?" PNB blazed onto the Kennedy Center stage years ago with a "Brahms-Schoenberg Quartet" so fine it started people looking at how Balanchine was being danced in New York and finding it wanting. "Jardi Tancat" has six dancers shimmy to Catalonian folk tales expressing some political torment and competing with artfully arranged, though puzzling, pointed stakes. The work has the impact of muzak, doesn't show off the dancers well, and its modern dance vocabulary doesn't use their training. All six dancers (Ariana Lallone, Noelani Pantastico, Carrie Imler, Casey Herd, Jordan Pacitti and Kiyon Gaines) shimmied with the best of them, but this isn't the kind of work that gives an opportunity for dancers to shine.

The remaining three works on the week's programs were all new ones: Stanton Welch's "Velocity" (Houston Ballet); Jorma Elo's "Brake the Eyes (Boston Ballet) and Christopher Wheeldon's "Rush©" (Oregon Ballet Theatre, another company making its Kennedy  Center debut). There's been a trend in the last decade of ballet companies taking a bifurcated approach in marketing materials, pairing a ballerina (always in a tutu, often suggesting a very hungry, aggressive and thoroughly contemporary swan) with a man as naked as the law allows, obviously fresh from the gym. Now, save for the nakedness, this has spread from brochures to the stage.

"Velocity," which looks like a ballet, seems to be trying to please the people they think like "Swan Lake" and the people they think like NASCAR. Women in white swan tutus alternate classical steps with  squats and other way cool moves, and the men, looking like black clad stevedores in a Las Vegas show, get quite a work out, tossing off flashy leaps and turns by the dozen. The score is by Michael Torke, with lots of blaring horns and a thundering pulse, and the dancers do not have a moment's rest. There's no sense of connection between the work's sections (run on, run off, lift the women on a loud chord, jump, turn, jump, turn), the choreographic vocabulary is very simple (no connecting steps, no fleet footwork, just repeating the steps over and over VERY FAST). Having the women wear tutus might suggest an interest in the dancers legs, in their lines, but here they're just a costume. Houston Ballet once had a style -- Ben Stevenson's transposition of 1950s English style to Texas. It was an old-fashioned style, but it suited the dancers, and it was theirs. Now, all they've got is speed.

Elo's "Brake the Eyes" (oh, please), set to fragments of Mozart and electronic sounds, is another frenzied work, and here the women (also in tutus of an acrid chartreuse, at least in the dim lighting) get to be spastic, too. They have a doll-like quality to them, as though something had gone terribly wrong in Dr. Coppelius's workshop when he said "Move." Elo/Coppelius likes to have the women bend over and present their backsides, too. Part of the wit, no doubt. The dancers were amazingly clear and gave the choreography full measure. Elo's sense of structure is stronger than Welch's, but, again, it's all about the speed.

I was pleasantly surprised to see ballet companies commissioning works by ballet choreographers, and I hope this is the reverse of a decades-long trend of commissioning or acquiring modern dance works rather than a fluke, but I wish they'd actually use ballet vocabulary instead of simply tacking other movements to it. Watching works like these is like watching a play by Shakespeare, or O'Neill or Stoppard, that has the actors break into slang or Esperanto at odd moments. My biggest disappointment in these ballets and others like them is that the dancers, even those in featured roles, are not individualized. It's not the fault of the dancers that they don't stand out. They're used interchangeably, like pop-it beads. There's no sense that the choreographers are interested in the dancers as individuals, that this dancer has an amazingly supple back, say, or this one has beautiful lines, or that one is unusually musical. And there's no awareness that ballet is more than a series of tricks, that it has a tradition, a history and a philosophy.

Where is this taking us? As recently as ten years ago, there were two basic paths for American ballet companies wanting to attain national stature: build an institution based on the big classical ballets, or take Balanchine's neoclassical works as core repertory. Both seem to be out of favor at the moment. "Swan Lake" needs a corps and is expensive to produce. Some company directors also say that they know their dancers don't have the stylistic uniformity needed to do first-class performances of the big 19th century ballets that audiences persist in loving. This is a valid position, and Balanchine provided a way to deal with it. I'm not of the view that Balanchine's goal was to reform ballet for the sake of reform. I believe he did what was needed: he took the classical vocabulary and adapted it to the music, the dancers, and the technical and economic situations in which he found himself. It's a thought.

The third contemporary choreographer presented here, Christopher Wheeldon, seems to have learned that lesson. His "Rush©" (an attempt to copyright the very word "Rush," or just something to annoy writers?) is a very pleasant ballet that made the young dancers of Oregon Ballet Theatre, who are not quite up to the technical standard of the other companies, look terrific. Made in 2003 for the San Francisco Ballet, "Rush©" takes three leading and five corps couples and spreads them over the stage like an army. The dancers are dressed in rich sherbet hues (raspberry, strawberry, grape and orange, except for the adagio couple, in black with a touch of raspberry, and the brisk, playful tone reminded me of "Mercurial Maneuvers." Just when the work threatens to turn relentlessly perky, Wheeldon slows it down. He understands that there's no point in showing dancers racing around the stage if you don't provide a contrast. And he lets the dancers look like ballet dancers. These dancers got to show that they have line, that the women wore pointe shoes not just to make them look taller, and that they can listen to the music (by Bronislava Martinu) and let it inform their dancing.

The Kennedy Center's Ballet Across America was a wonderful opportunity to see a lot of different troupes in a short period of time, and I hope the dancers found it intriguing and inspiring to see other companies and other works. Does the week represent ballet in America? Several important companies weren't here, notably San Francisco and Miami City Ballets, both of which do have individual styles and profiles. If the companies had brought different works, they might have presented a different picture -- or not. I hope we have another chance in a year or two to see.

Performances reviewed:
June 10: Ballet West, Pennsylvania Ballet, Houston Ballet
June 12:  Pacific Northwest Ballet, Kansas City Ballet, The Washington Ballet
June 13:  Boston Ballet, The Joffrey Ballet, Oregon Ballet Theatre

Photo, from top:
Boston Ballet in Jorna Elo's "Break the Eyes." Photo by Gene Schiavione.
Kansas City Ballet’s Kimberly Cowen and Juan Pablo Trujillo in "The Still Point." Photo credit:  Carol Pratt.
Oregon Ballet Theatre’s Gavin Larsen and Artur Sultanov in Christopher Wheeldon’s "Rush". Photo: Andy Batt