Russian Ballets Clash
by John Percival
copyright 2006 by John Percival
We all know, don’t we, that the London season by the Bolshoi Ballet at Covent Garden Opera House in 1956, a half century ago, introduced Soviet ballet to the west. Well, actually that isn’t true. Ignoring tours by small concert groups, there is the little fact that the Stanislavsky Ballet, also from Moscow, gave a season at the Chatelet Theatre, Paris, earlier that year, with Bourmeister’s Swan Lake and two mixed bills. And a specially composed company of dancers from the Bolshoi and the Kirov had actually arrived in Paris in 1954 under official auspices, only to find their season cancelled on political grounds.
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A Very Serious Matter
"Requiem"
The Royal Danish Ballet
Det Kongelige Teater
Copenhagen, Denmark
March 24, 2006
by Eva Kistrup
copyright 2006 by Eva Kistrup
Whether to call Tim Rushton's full evening creation for the Royal Danish Ballet a success depends on the criteria you use to define "success." If you expect a new ballet that will redefine the company and have a long stay in the repertoire, "Requiem" is not a success. The subject matter (Death and Life), the choice of music (two Polish composers from the last century, Henryk Göbecki and Karol Setmanowski), the need for a full chorus and singers in itself will doom "Requiem" to a short run and a limited future. But more importantly although it is very well choreographed and brilliantly danced, it is not very exciting, and that has a lot to do with ballet's the quasi-religious banal philosophic framework. You cannot disagree that war and death should not happen to nice people. Especially nice people like the Royal Danish Ballet.
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A Morris Quartet
"Cargo," "All Fours," "Candleflowerdance," "Going Away Party"(Program C)
Mark Morris Dance Group
BAM Howard Gilman Opera House
Brooklyn, NY
March 22, 2005
by Susan Reiter
copyright 2006 by Susan Reiter
Leave it to Mark Morris to astound with the depth of musicality to be found in the simple motion of rising and falling. In "Candleflowerdance," one of two New York premieres on the last of the Mark Morris Dance Group's three 25th-anniversary programs, the cast of six performs a sequence of leaning, sinking and rising so fluidly that they seem to be sharing a single breath. As they stand close and give in to the supple, suspended movement, it all comes across as the most logical—perhaps the only possible—response to the music—a languid, meandering section at the end of Stravinsky's Serenade in A (1925).
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Inside Out
"Autopsy"
Choreography by Ashleigh Leite
Joyce Soho
New York City
March 11, 2006
by Nancy Dalva
copyright 2006 by Nancy Dalva
"How to keep the flight of mind yet be exact."
Virginia Woolf
Ashleigh Leite's intense quintet called "Autopsy" marvelously establishes her as a choreographer to be seen, and seen again—for herself in performance, for what she gives her dancers and how she allows them to make themselves seen and known, and for her original mind. Hers is as visceral a dance art as you would expect from a former assistant and rehearsal director of the Stephen Petronio Company, and she is the same gorgeous dish he anatomized—and set loose!—in his "City of Twist." She's silky, she's beautiful, she's hot; yet here's what she is not: superficial, self-conscious, or self-involved. While it's true that her journey in this work is from the interior, she takes a novelist's eye to her material, spinning it out on her company of four, so that you can get to know them severally, and separately.
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