“After the Rain,” “Luce Nascosta,” “Who Cares?”
New York City Ballet
David H. Koch Theater
New York, NY
June 10, 2010
by Kathleen O’Connell
copyright © 2010 by Kathleen O’Connell
“Luce Nascosta (Unseen Light), Mauro Bigonzetti’s fourth work for New York City Ballet, looks dramatic but isn’t drama. A lot goes on—furiously, and for a long time, too—but nothing ever happens. Lit by Mark Stanley in striking chiaroscuro, nine couples dressed in black engage in the kind of fraught, convoluted partnering that’s “dramatic” in the sense of looking like mortal peril, but is in reality only a simulation of drama. We see emblems—of what? dysfunction? cruelty? torment?—but not the arc of a human encounter. It’s all sound and fury, signifying nothing more than a reflexive, moody angst that’s the lazy sentimentality de nos jours.
The work begins with Tiler Peck and Gonzalo Garcia in a pool of light performing a tense, pulsating duet to silence, the rest of the cast fanned out behind them in a shadowed semi-circle. After far too long, the orchestra begins to play—we hear dark, sinister horns—and the other dancers start to move towards the light. Backed by Bruno Moretti’s wildly episodic score—by turns bombastic, jocular, ominous, and tender—they make their turbulent way through an interlocking series of solos, duets, quartets, sextets, and larger ensembles that fill the stage with non-stop motion, but go nowhere. All the while, Salvatore Calatrava’s beautiful golden discs—glowing like the moons of Jupiter—make their stately transit across a pitch–black sky and back again, serenely indifferent to the hollow turmoil below.
Like many choreographers working in the contemporary dance idiom, Bigonzetti de-emphasizes footwork in favor of a hyper-mobile spine, elaborate arms, and sweeping extensions. The focus is on a rhythmic flow of eye–catching shapes rather than on a shaped phrase of defined steps. Thus the dancers in “Luce Nascosta” more often than not seem to move in space rather than through it. They’ll spin in place, for instance—often with a limb jutting out at a thrillingly off–kilter angle—rather than traverse the stage in a barrage of turns. Couples move as if welded together: duets aren’t about relationships; they’re about a conjoined existence. (In some Bigonzetti ballets, “Festa Barroca,” for example, the conjoined may move in a fluid sympathy of gentle beauty. Not so in “Luce Nascosta” or 2008’s “Oltremare.”)
Bigonzetti’s stylistic and technical departures from classical ballet aren’t an issue. But he’s taken eighteen of the company’s most individual dancers—all of whom throw themselves into his work with fearless conviction—and made them indistinguishable. In an interview printed in the program, Bigonzetti states that his new ballet is “about the dancers and my experience of working with them. My inspiration was their character, personality, and humanity. … My job ... was to go inside and pull out something different from them, to show their sensibilities.” Lovely sentiment; a shame that he does no such thing. Bigonzetti’s moves are inventive, but his vocabulary—and its expressive potential—is limited. Everyone is given the same angsty maneuvers to play out in the same vehement way.
As if to drive the point home, Marc Happel has dressed them all in exactly the same costumes—tight, long sleeved black crop tops and short skirts with tiers of flouncy ruffles for the women (think Carman Miranda) and flowing black pants and bare chests for the men. Thank goodness for Ashley Bouder’s chic bob and bangs—at least we could pick one individual out from the crowd.
Bigonzetti seems similarly indifferent to the variety in Moretti’s cinematic score. The choreography occasionally aligns with its moods but just as often ignores them. He wittily launches the women into a hip thrusting, ruffle shaking line dance during an episode that sounds like the Hollywood version of fiesta music. But a later section of exquisite tenderness prompts the same overwrought duets that the propulsive bombast does.
There are passages of astonishing, viscerally charged beauty. One sets Tyler Angle spinning with rippling arms in a beautiful release of coiled energy; it’s the most striking solo in the work and among the most tough–minded dancing Angle’s done to date. But “Luce Nascosta” is also studded with unfortunate gestures that look absurd. The dancers are frequently asked to splay their fingers to such an extreme that their hands resemble nothing so much as the snouts of star-nosed moles. Couples shove each other around then fling their heads back in melodramatic paroxysms of despair. In a signature Bigonzetti move, the women jam an upraised foot against their partners’ chests, as if they planned to give them a mighty shove to kingdom come.
“Luce Nascosta” was bracketed by two luminous duets bound up in the drama of real couples: “Speigel im Spiegel” from Wheeldon’s “After the Rain,” danced by Wendy Whelan and Craig Hall and “The Man I Love,” from Balanchine’s “Who Cares?” danced by Tiler Peck and Robert Fairchild.
Hall dances “Speigel im Spiegel” with less magisterial serenity than its originator, Jock Soto, who seemed to be of the same order of mysterious being as the otherworldly Whelan. Hall is more human—and more gravely tender—both when he bears her aloft towards heaven and when he slips beneath her fragile backbend bridge to release them both into sweet repose.
The performance also featured Kaitlyn Gilliland’s debut in the first half of “After the Rain,” partnered by Adrian Danchig–Waring and opposite Teresa Reichlen and Amar Ramasar. Gilliland and Reichlen—both tall, willowy blondes—looked spectacular together. Although they resemble each other in size and coloring, they are very different dancers, the one blessed with the ability to spin a phrase out into eternity, the other with a diamantine attack.
Peck and Fairchild danced “The Man I Love” with captivating rapport and imagination. Both were utterly at ease with its Broadway inflections and worked them with a naturalness that has eluded other interpreters. Their musicality and emotional engagement with the material were in such perfect sync that when Fairchild burst across the stage ahead of Peck’s lightening chainés to catch her opening into arabesque it seemed as if nothing could top its heady thrill. And then they did it again. Perfectly.
copyright © 2010 by Kathleen O’Connell
Photos by Paul Kolnik
Top: Adrian Danchig-Waring and Teresa Reichlen “Luce Nascosta”
Middle: New York City Ballet in “Luce Nascosta”
Middle: Ashley Bouder and Jonathan Stafford in “Luce Nascosta”
Bottom: Kaitlin Gilliland and Adrian Danchig-Waring in “After the Rain”
