Lincoln
Center Festival
Ashton Celebration
Comedy, Dark and Divine
Rhapsody
K-Ballet Company
Five Brahms Waltzes in Homage to Isadora Duncan
Dante Sonata
Birmingham Royal Ballet
A Wedding Bouquet
The Joffrey Ballet
Metropolitan Opera House
New York, N.Y.
July 7, 2004
by
Mindy Aloff
copyright
© 2004 by Mindy Aloff
published July 9, 2004
“I
do not think that choreographers have necessarily to be ‘engaged’
or ‘committed’ or to write ballets about current social happenings,”
Ashton said in “Ballet Annual 1959” (republished in David
Vaughan’s “Frederick Ashton and His Ballets”). “These
subjects are as likely to date as quickly as yesterday’s newspaper.
Some say, and I think rightly, that if ballet is to be taken seriously,
it must deal with serious matters. I believe simply that a ballet must
be a good work of art; that it must express the choreographer’s
vision of experience as truthfully and beautifully as possible. Insofar
as it does this, it will express his most profound sense of values and
thus be likely to concern itself with matters of more permanent significance
than topical issues. He should deal with that which is spiritual and eternal
rather than that which is material and temporary.” On the other
hand, in 1959 Ashton probably didn’t realize that by 2004 this kind
of talk would be considered quaint. “Truth”? “Beauty”?
“Profound sense of values”? “Spiritual and eternal”?
Lingo like that isn’t going to pack in the 19 to 34s. Indeed, on
Wednesday, the second day of the Ashton Celebration, the Met looked half
empty. One problem may have been that the first night got more or less
glowing reviews. Glowing reviews, alas, don’t sell tickets. Vexation,
affront, disdain: now you’re talking box office! The opening night
ballets also didn’t have any sex one could, so to speak, shake a
stick at. And the costumes! If you’re going to send Mrs. Elgar on
a walk in the woods with two men, at least give her a leather bra. Doesn’t
everyone know that Jaeger and the Elgars must have been into a lot more
than a discussion of Beethoven, for goodness sake? They were “just
friends”?
Wednesday
was more like it: misery, naked legs, several crucifixions, and a bunch
of rapelike activity. The kid’s a genius everywhere you turn. Let’s
begin with Ashton’s serious side. Set in a town in 19th-century
provincial France, the events of “A Wedding Bouquet” sound
like a story by Dreiser or Hardy when one relates them without the action:
a rake (Willy Shives; originally danced by Robert Helpmann), who seems
to have dallied with half the women in town, is getting married to a young,
unworldly girl (Emily Patterson; originally danced by Mary Honer) who
is completely clueless about his past. At the wedding, one of the guests,
Josephine (Britta Lazenga; originally danced by June Brae) drinks herself
into a stupor; another guest, Julia (Maia Wilkins; originally danced by
Margot Fonteyn), hollow-eyed, her hair alarmingly unbound amid the updos
of the other ladies and who may have been the object of attempted (or
achieved) rape—despite the efforts of her devoted dog, Pépé
(Jennifer Goodman; originally danced by Julia Farron), to stave off the
attacker—wanders about alone, distributing her gloom Cassandra-style.
The Bride exchanges her wedding dress for a corseted tutu (under which
one spots a garter on one of her thighs) and engages in a Wedding Night
pas de deux with the Bridegroom, during which she misses every partnering
maneuver and he forces himself to carry through anyway. “Bit-ter-ness!,”
the narrator (Christian Holder) intones. “Bit-ter-ness!” The
chaos of the occasion is barely held together by the maid, Webster (Julianne
Kepley; originally danced by Ninette de Valois), who, secretly believing
herself a Fairy in “The Sleeping Beauty,” keeps extending
her forefinger into the air, even though she must be fantasizing that.
. .well, you have to use your imagination here. Ashton, poor dear, couldn’t
often bring himself to be brutally literal in the ballet. Our time is
so much more advanced.
Now,
for the comedy—“The Divine Comedy,” as it happens. Or
about the first two-fifths of it: “Dante Sonata.” Good title,
but it doesn’t mean what you think it means. Dante isn’t in
it: his name refers to Constant Lambert’s orchestration of Franz
Liszt’s “Fantaisie quasi Sonate” for piano, which looked
back for inspiration to Victor Hugo’s “D’après
une lecture de Dante” (“After reading Dante.”), which
serves the ballet as a score. The ballet was made for audiences who were
a little too preoccupied with bombs falling on them daily to pass the
usual security test of reciting an entire canto by heart in order to get
into the theater. They needed the simplicity of a soccer match, and Ashton
provided it, kind of. The opposing teams are the “Children of Light,”
who wear white costumes, men and women, and the “Children of Darkness,”
whose men wear black briefs and black straps coiled around their chests
and whose women wear black skirts with some white fabric visible underneath.
The teams are not symmetrical. The “Children of Light” are
led by two women and a man, and their corps ranks consist of five women
and four men. The “Children of Darkness” are led by a man
and a woman, and their corps ranks consist of seven women and three men.
The great leveler is that everyone is barefoot, vulnerable.
Many
people on Wednesday night associated that detail with Isadora Duncan,
whom Ashton saw dance in London, in 1921—within a year of the time
that Balanchine saw her in Russia and Hart Crane in his native Ohio. She
was hardly at her best by 1921-22. She had lost three children—two
in a freak automobile accident—and other loves in her life, and
her major patron, and she was aging and looked it. In 1946, Balanchine
told Todd Bolender that the Duncan on stage in 1921 was “a pig.”
(I’ve also seen him quoted as saying “a fat pig, rolling around
on the floor.”) Crane thought she was a sensation, but what did
he know? He was only a poet. Ashton, though, had a little dance experience,
and he “was completely captivated.” As he recounted on a tape
in the New York Public Library (which David Vaughan quotes), he was shocked
by her at first, but then he noticed that she “covered the stage
in a most remarkable way, she had a wonderful way of running, in which
she what I call left herself behind, and you felt the breeze was running
through her hair and everything else. . .She was very serious, and an
immensely strong personality that came right across the footlights and
held the audience and compelled them completely; she was very considerable
I think, as an artist and as a dancer.” There are several indelible
passages of women grieving in “Dante Sonata,” one with Niobe-like
grandeur, one motoring in circles, and those, indeed, seem Duncanesque.,
as do, possibly, some of the battlefield confrontations between the two
corps. (Richard Buckle, one of Balanchine’s biographers, has suggested
that Balanchine also made use of Duncan’s work when he staged the
Venusberg dances at the Met.) The intricate sculptural groupings of “Dante
Sonata,” however, with the dancers positioned at different levels
(on the floor, on their knees, standing)—like the astonishing backdrop
by Ashton’s friend and frequent collaborator, designer Sophie Fedorovitch,
in which a cloud, sensually delineated in white on a black sky, morphs
in one area into a human spine, and in which a group of white, horizontal
lines presented from an angle suggest steps leading upward—show
the inspiration from Ashton’s study of illustrations for Dante’s
“Inferno” of John Flaxman and Gustave Doré. The events
in the ballet are often bleak: the man in a pair of lovers is beaten and
crucified; the military victories of the “Children of Light”
are temporary only; and, at the end, the leaders of both “Children”
are also crucified, with the Child of Light who was the mate of one of
those leaders turning away from his elevated body to gesture ambiguously
toward the crucified leader of the “Children of Darkness.”
Bleak is good; bleak is contemporary; bleak is the wellspring of comedy!
No one knew that better than Dante. Anyway, the energy level and dynamics
of the choreography make the choreography quite exciting. And the ballet.
. .I was going to write “has ambiguities that approach paradox,”
but I’ll just leave it at: really keeps you guessing. Ashton said
that he wasn’t thinking of Hitler’s march into Poland when
he made it, but rather of the futility of war in general. Besides, by
not making it literal, it still looks as fresh as Martha Graham’s
“Heretic” or “Steps in the Street.” The same cannot
be said of the music, unfortunately, which sometimes sounds like a concert
offering and sometimes like accompaniment to a picture by Cecil B. de
Mille.
“Five
Brahms Waltzes in the Manner of Isadora Duncan”: Tips here would
be hopeless. No plot, no subtext, no belt, much less room for the Beltway!
Just the Birmingham’s Molly Smolen dancing as beautifully as someone
who isn’t Lynn Seymour, for whom Ashton made it, could dance to
some little stuff by Brahms, with Kate Shipway tinkling the--. . .I was
going to write “ivories” but I’ll leave it at: keys.
My colleague Tobi Tobias has already scooped the crowd by reporting that
Seymour coached Smolen in the role, so I’m going to throw in the
towel and send you to Tobias’s column (www.artsjournal.com/tobias).
The one thing I’ll add on this is that one of Seymour’s coaching
points must have been that, when the Isadora figure runs in a straight
line from upstage to downstage, she leads with her left shoulder. It makes
her body look more Hellenic that way, and it gives the run an incredible
dynamism.
The evening opened with the K-Ballet’s production of “Rhapsody” this time, and the performances looked even better than the night before, almost fit for the Queen. The décor was beginning to grow on me, with its asymmetries and those little triangle gizmos planted in unexpected places, until Risa Takahashi, the excellent pianist, took her bow.
What a dress! From shoulder to metatarsal, it fit her like a surgical glove. And it was black and white, like a silent movie! Bliss.
Photos
1, 2, 3 and 5 are performance shots by Stephanie Berger.
First: Birmingham Royal Ballet's production of "Dante Sonata."
Second: Joffrey Ballet's Maia Wilkins (as Julia), Emily Patterson
(as the Bride) and Willy Shives (as the Groom) in "A Wedding Bouquet."
Third: Birmingham Royal Ballet in "Dante Sonata."
Fourth: The Birmingham Royal Ballet in "Dante Sonata."
Photo: Bill Cooper.
Fifth: Joffrey Ballet's Molly Smolen in "Five Brahams Waltzes
in the Manner of Isadora Duncan."
Originally
published:
July 9, 2004
www.danceviewtimes.com
Volume 2, Ashton Section
Copyright
©2004 by Mindy Aloff
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