falling for the New York City Ballet
September 28. 2010
Going to the ballet is better than ever, in the newly renovated, more spacious feeling David H. Koch Theater. They exchanged many seats for an aisle, comfortable chairs, and great sightlines. The new subway entrance is opened….and the new plaza fountain invites. Also, City Ballet’s brief new fall season is the ideal cut-off for lingering summer doldrums.
The dancers are front and center this season, in lobby photos and of course, on stage.
To explain his 1972 reworking of his 1944 Danses Concertantes, Balanchine famously said “…the ballets I work on necessarily have a great deal to do with the here and now."
On September 28, 2010, city ballet dancers made Danses look au courant. With showy costumes, scenery, and Stravinsky music, it is a jubilant opener, as danced by the limber, airy Sterling Hyltin (pictured.) Amar Ramasar stepped in for an injured Gonzalo Garcia, admirably.
The dance's four sets of trios in rich gem-like colors recall Balanchine's perennial Jewels. Aside from the eye-opening Hyltin, Troy Schumacher delights with his high jumps. The third trio makes crystalline formations with the women jockey for longest leg extension. The final, in red (Ashley Laracey, Faye Arthurs, and Daniel Applebaum) is a more complex, jazzy choreography. Their upper torsos shift with a contemporary twist. Each trio is more enthralling than the last. Balanchine is still the champion at building a denouement.
Tschaikovsky Pas de Deux
Balanchine's Tschaikovsky Pas de Deux followed, to the composer’s eight-minute bravura addition to Swan Lake Act III. Tschaikovsky dashed it off for Anna Sobeshchanskaya, a Bolshoi prima ballerina dancing Odile in 1877.
Ashley Bouder was dream-like with her Swan Lake motif off-kilter turns and backward hops. She circles the big stage with but a few spread-legged leaps. She is light as a feather, (as seen and not heard from Row O.) Her partner Andrew Veyette was sure, and slightly cocky. Then he gives it up in his awesome final solo and his catch— Bouder fishtails through the air into his arms, stage left, and then stage right. They end in a triumphant lift. The crowd roared and gave them three or four curtain calls. The eight-minutes was art.
Barber Violin Concerto
Peter Martins's 1988 Barber Violin Concerto blends a barefoot modern dance couple with a classical ballet couple, to Samuel Barber’s Concerto for Violin and Orchestra, Op. 14 (1941.) Four dancers demonstrated that this ballet is a Martins keeper.
Jared Angle puffs out his chest and leaps like a Martha Graham dancer. As Barber progresses, the princely Charles Askegard must manage an Amazonian, modern Megan Fairchild in the fast scherzo section. He inevitably uses modern push 'n pull. Classical Sara Mearns adjusts to the bare-chested Angle by contracting her torso and spreading her arms in a horizontal gull-like line. In a theatrical moment, she unpins her French bun and lets her locks fall. Finally, there is a seamless fusion of styles as each woman exits, levitated in the floating, modern lift that Fairchild introduced, above her modern man. It is transcendent.
Estancia
In Estancia, the stylish Tyler Angle is a City Boy who tumbles into a whole new setting, the Argentinean Pampas. The press notes say the region is an "apparently circular and unchanging universe." Decades ago, after visiting Buenos Aires, Lincoln Kirstein commissioned Estancia Op.8 by Alberto Ginastera. But Balanchine never used it.
Christopher Wheeldon took up the evocative score and made the new, spirited Estancia (ranch.) As an openly gay choreographer who boldly led a fledgling ballet company across the Atlantic and the US, his choice of subject feels personal.
Angle is immediately taken with Tiler Peck, the Country Girl, especially when she tames Wild Horses (four female dancers dressed in brown with fringed hoods and whisk tails in their hands!) Angle tries his luck with a Wild Horse too. The lead couple’s romantic duet under the stars helps break the eery hum-drum.
A quartet of male Ranch Workers takes front rank, but the moment passes before we can process it, if there is something to process. When the women fly around their men with skirts fluttering and legs spread at us, even brevity doesn't help.
Then, the last country dance recalls old-fashioned ballet pageantry. In the already surprising end, Angle rises triumphantly, center stage, on his tamed Wild Horse (Andrew Veyette). If you blink, you will miss the finale of this epic ballet.
However, when baritone Thomas Meglioranza sings onstage in a woven poncho, he holds us rapt. The gorgeous, painted scenery is Santiago Calatrava’s design, and it was deservedly the centerpiece of the spring City Ballet season. The movement, in Mark Stanley's lighting and Carlos Campos's plain costumes, lacks such lusciousness.
Estancia has its obvious derivations, for example in the wonderful Agnes DeMille. Despite its flaws, it showcases Wheeldon's melding of modern musical theater, classical structure, and romantic expression. That is unique and exciting.
