“Warehouse Under the Hudson,” “Epistasis”
Satellite Ballet
John Jay College
New York, NY
November 2, 2012
by Leigh Witchel
copyright © 2012 by Leigh Witchel
Producing independent ballet takes nerves of steel. Four days after Sandy flooded New York, Satellite Ballet played John Jay College for a single night. The company had to hope that all the elements of the show, musicians in Oregon, dancers in Detroit, could somehow get here. After two days on a bus, the cast made it; the programs coming from New Jersey didn’t. For the audience that could reach the theater, the short evening showed a venture that was both energized and weighed down by conceptualizing. But the promise outweighed the weaknesses.
Satellite Ballet
John Jay College
New York, NY
November 2, 2012
by Leigh Witchel
copyright © 2012 by Leigh Witchel
Satellite is a collective involving dancers, musicians and artists. The choreographer, Troy Schumacher, and all seven dancers have associations with New York City Ballet; all but one are currently in the corps. The interdisciplinary aspects of the production are the group’s best feature: the projections and artwork are haunting; the live chamber music on strings, piano and guitar is richly sonorous. There’s also a lot of chatter about post-modernism and fractured narratives. You’re supposed to spout theory when you start out; so did Balanchine when he was in his 20s in St. Petersburg.
Two works were performed at John Jay, “Warehouse under the Hudson” and “Epistasis,” which was revised from last year. The program was provided to press afterwards and projected on the back screen during the intermissions, where it served mostly as artwork. It wouldn’t have helped the audience; the brief blurb for “Warehouse under the Hudson” read “A young woman meets a thief who has collected her past. He then offers it back to her in exchange for her future.” Pungent, but little of that was on the stage. The actuality was a series of vignettes. Different soloists and couples danced on a stage stripped bare of all soft goods, with a projection screen looming above them.
Schumacher is young in choreographer years – he began in 2010. But that reads as innocence rather than lack of skills. He choreographs statements, not enchaînements. He used the ballet vocabulary, with emotive accents: people clutched their heads or turned in their legs shyly. He brought out personality in his dancers; Ashley Laracey was touchingly vulnerable with Taylor Stanley and David Prottas was darkly appealing in a duet of angry lifts and leaps with Emily Gerrity. Yet when you saw him leaping avidly you wished that Schumacher would look for more dance as well as narrative structure, and give Prottas and the others a plain old combination or two.
The weakest link was the retention of a narrative that the artists had already stripped away. All the women are The Woman, and all the men are The Thief, but there is no theft. Without the program it’s easy to tell there’s an archetype onstage, but it looks like The Maiden and The Stranger. As a story, “Warehouse” didn’t even make post-modern sense – there wasn’t enough dramatic tension to pull it off. But if you approached it as a danced watercolor rather than a narrative, it was a delicate and even touching work to handsome music.
The revised “Epistasis” is polished and improved choreographically from last year, so maybe “Warehouse” just needs some time and work as well. The older work’s title is a term for the action of one gene upon another. There was some of sense of cause and effect as one dancer’s finish becomes another one’s start in this in this 21st Century version of “Interplay.” More, there are the tenderly naïve interactions of the dancers.
Dancing mostly to piano in this piece, Schumacher’s characters were innocents; he made the dancers seem younger than they are. The piece started with the group crouched and moving in slow motion like Jerome Robbins’ Jets.
Lydia Wellington led the other women and they unbound their hair, tossed away the bobby pins and danced. The choreographer contrasted the soloist against the observing group. Lauren King’s solo reinvented her as a Romantic heroine; she began with her hands cupped to her ear, listening like the Sylph. Prottas kicked and flailed, but then stepped to a high half-toe with delicately angled wrists. A tango for Stanley was the most evocative: he moved his hands aggressively downwards in front of him like a Shaker trying to exorcise demons.
As the piece went on, it moved from solos to duets. Samuel Greenberg arrived from nowhere, an interloper who closed the piece in a paradoxically tender duet with Emily Gerrity.
So far, it’s the process, and the honest effort of the experiment that makes Satellite worth the time. The music and the photos have been lovely. The ballets are interesting. If they’re sometimes light on dancing, they still have a distinct voice that owes a debt to Robbins more than Balanchine. It’s a pleasure to get to see more of Wellington or Gerrity, and King or Laracey in a new light. Though he’s green, Schumacher is willing, like Robbins, to take risks that might not pay off until two or three ballets down the line. If the concepts are pretentious, at this point in ballet, a pretentious idea is better than none. There’s an appeal to honest attempts not covered in an impenetrable coating of ingenuity. He’s in the minority today as a ballet choreographer who isn’t trying to solve every problem by making the trickiest steps in town.
copyright © 2012 by Leigh Witchel
Photos of Satellite Ballet by Lora Robertson
Top: Taylor Stanley in “Warehouse under the Hudson.”
Bottom: Samuel Greenberg