Real
Time
Live from Lincoln Center
Lincoln Center Celebrates Balanchine 100
Public Broadcasting Corporation
Wednesday, May 5, 2004
by
Nancy Dalva
copyright
© 2004 by Nancy Dalva
published 10 May 2004
If
you saw the all Balanchine New York City Ballet Spring Gala broadcast
on PBS, you already know what a misnomer "Live from Lincoln Center"
is. "Televised" from Lincoln Center is more like it. Real time
broadcasts of ballet are not the real thing, or the real deal. They do
the works performed no credit—they are invariably chopped up and
distorted by the camera, or in the rare case of a stable camera, they
are seen from such a distance that they have all the impact of an ant
farm. The only arguments in their favor involve publicity (building an
audience for dance, and so forth), and community (the shared experience
of a live event). Of course the same argument can be made for any live
telecast, whether a basketball game, the hearings of the Senate Armed
Services Committee, or the live pursuit of O.J. Simpson in a white van.
Still, the broadcast had intrinsic interest, on two counts. The first
was how well suited to the small screen are some of the company's dancers
who can seem see ill-suited to the stage. Here, the television close ups
are invaluable, showing to the viewing world what one only knows from
the very front rows of the New York State Theater (where I happen to like
to sit). The second virtue was the permanent documentation of two performances
by Kyra Nichols. These will be best experienced as an aide memoire to
seeing her, or having seen her, in the theater–the dance equivalent
of pressed flowers. It would be wonderful to have really excellent films
of ballets like Liebeslieder Waltzes, and Vienna Waltzes—just
think of the wonderful film of The Royal Ballet in Ashton's Enigma
Variations—but "Live from Lincoln Center" is better
than nothing.
There are two huge problems with live dance on television. The first is
the framing of the dance. In conventional ballet, the choreographer chooses
where you will look, directing your eye by design. In like manner, a ballerina
will further refine your gaze with her own, directing your eye to her
feet, or her partner, or off into space. Or she will create the illusion
of looking right at you, which is divine in the theater but on camera
looks like Gloria Swanson ready for her close up in Sunset Boulevard.
The second huge problem is a lack of gravity. The television screen is
essentially undifferentiated space, without fixed points–your eye
constructs the conventions of three dimensions. This is why tapping is
especially successful and pleasurable in film. The sounds lets you know
that there really is a floor.
With
the exception of Concerto Barocco, greatly legible because Maria
Kowroski works on a grand scale, and because the camera work achieved,
uniquely in this work, a good combination of being upstairs and being
in the front row and being within the work, the best thing to see on the
"Live from Lincoln Center" telecast was duets. Here the camera
could hold the entire performance in a reasonable equilibrium. You could
see detail and you could see the whole thing at the same time. Thus Duo
Concertante was entirely pleasurable. Peter Boal is a far snazzier
dancer than Yvonne Boree, his partner, but she is so beautiful, and of
such harmonics proportion , and has such a lovely way of leaning her head
to her partner's shoulder that on television she was his ideal mate. In
the theater, when you see her dancing next to other ballerinas doing the
same thing, you don't doubt her beauty, but you can doubt her ease. There
is something herky-jerky about the placement of her arms in space, something
tense that is the enemy of grace. Alone in close up with Boal, none of
this applied. She seemed natural, at ease.
The other dancer to whom the camera is a natural, easy friend is Niles
Martins. He happens to be an excellent camera actor. (One wonders what
his career would have been in a company that performed mostly narrative
ballets, like Tudor's. He might have had a good time.). His large handsome
face is clearly legible, and he is ardent without being silly. (This is
also true in the theater.) Of course it isn't hard to love his partner
in "The Man I Love," Alexandra Ansanelli, though in truth her
love affair is never really with her partner, whoever he is. She has other
loves. The first is dancing.( I've never seen a dancer happier to be dancing,
and it makes you happy in return.) The second is us—meaning the
theater audience; she did not play to the camera. For Ansanelli, the audience
is the partner of choice, and her partner is our stand in. Martins was
perfect in this regard. The fact that you couldn't see his feet at all
times might have been frustrating to some, but it didn't hurt his performance.
His feet are not his strong point, nor is his line.
In that department, where Fred Astaire is the peerless exemplar of making
clear shapes in screen space, the New York City Ballet equivalent turns
out to be Wendy Whelan. In the final rondo from Brahms-Schoenberg,
dancing with Damien Woetzel, she was clarity itself, no matter how far
away the camera. Detail at long distance is one of her specialities. Not
so Damien Woetzel's. His is a performance type—he is an escape-
from- gravity artist—that really demands live viewing. Besides which,
gypsy costumes on men look dopey in close up.
On the other hand, male evening dress looks excellent in close up, in
real life, on the stage, or on the screen. First off, there is none of
the whole vexing convention of having some of the men dance with jackets
and not pants that so plagues the ballet, where the hero often (as in
Swan Lake) appears to have forgotten his trousers. Second, a
good suit does so much for one's line. Thus Jock Soto has never appeared
better than partnering Kyra Nichols in the second half of Liebeslieder
(she did Charles Askegaard the same favor in Vienna Waltzes,
though this was much more apparent in a live performance on Saturday than
on the screen earlier in the week.) It made one sorry not to have seen
them dance together more. Nichol's more frequent partner, Philip Neal,
here danced with Darci Kistler, which is not really a fortunate pairing.
She makes him look callow. On the other hand, Nicolai Hübbe and Jenifer
Ringer—the fair and the dark—were heaven together. Miranda
Weese doesn't seem to need a partner, but Jared Angle obliged nonetheless.
But theirs were not memorable appearances. The televised Liebeslieder
belonged to Nichols and Soto.
The beauty of their duet turned on the phrasing, of the lifts in particular.
Soto can look stressed in lifts, at which he nonetheless excels, but he
lofted Nichols as if she were thistledown, so that the timing and trajectory
in the air were a matter of artistry, not necessity. In fact, the entire
matter of putting the ballerina down at all looked optional. Thus the
Nichols gift for shaping movement became airborne.
There was a lot of what you might call "added value" to the
broadcast, which boasted a glamorous hostess (Sarah Jessica Parker, in
a series of glamourous outfits, and at least three different glamourous
hairdos) the best of which was archival footage of Balanchine himself.
("You don't have to accentuate time to mean time," he said to
Stravinsky.) The worst was probably the musical director and choreographer
Susan Stromam, whose appearance (in a black turtleneck and baseball cap)
as a taped narrator made no sense at all. Then again neither does her
choreography make sense in the NYCB repertory. The company's own Ballet
Master in Chief Peter Martins would have been a much better choice, and
one wonders why he didn't leap to the task. He did appear on stage to
drink some vodka, at which time he did not, mercifully, ask the audience
to "sing "Happy Birthday to George Balanchine." This has
actually occurred in the past, and it is a very weird moment. Who sings
"Happy Birthday" to the dead?
Speaking of which, it often crosses my mind that Balanchine is one of
the world's busiest dead people. For someone who hasn't been beatified,
he leads an active death. Choreographers imagine him in their studios.
His repetiteurs seek his advice. Former dancers speak to him on a regular
basis. Etc. Still, at times he gets to take a break and float somewhere
in the ether at the top of the New York State Theater, during a performance.
Usually that happens when a ballerina is particularly invested in his
choreography, and in imagining the pleasure he would have taken in the
performance ("So beautiful") you imagine him back. So it was
during the "Rosenkavalier" section of Vienna Waltzes,
with Kyra Nichols alone on stage, and then joined by a partner who, though
theatrical alchemy, appears to the viewer's eye as imaginary. Sometimes
when you see this duet you feel the ballerina is dancing with a lost love.
Sometimes you feel the love has been lost to death. It depends to some
extent on the actual man dancing the part.(Adam Lüders, for instance,
used to be extremely believable as a ghost, palely drifting in from the
tomb.)
I've seen Nichols dance the role different ways, but her current version
is unique to her. Not only her partner is imaginary—the whole ballroom
is imaginary. Her white satin dress is imaginary. She is a girl, drifting
around in her room, imagining herself in the arms of a handsome man. Hers
is a dream of dancing, and dancing as dream. Into the partnering she brings
a wealth of nuance, particularly with her swan-like arms. (You can indeed
think of the Merry Widow—who in the full ballet dances the previous
number in glittery black—and the Marshalin as Odile and Odette,
if you want to. They come from Swan Lake as surely as from the
Lehar and the Stauss.) As her moments on the darkened stage brighten into
a bright ballroom full of waltzing couples, Nichols transits from the
dreamy to the real. (This can be very clearly seen in the theater, perhaps
less so on the video.) Her delighted full smile at her partner is very
much in the present tense, and his delight is just as authentic. Nichols
wraps up many of her roles now in these deceptively simple single performances,
calling up such of them as she will—or perhaps she just dances,
and everything is there. This is the very definition of mature artistry.
The videotape of this performance will be as cherished, to her fans, as
is Margot Fonteyn's late career Juliet.
At the conclusion of the live broadcast under the credits—after
Placido Domingo sang "None But the Lonely Heart" a second, taped
time, and Martin Bookspan vamped until you thought he was going to have
to start naming the gross national products and most frequent exports
of small foreign countries— the show's director ran some slow motion
of footage from what we had just seen live. If you stuck with the program
you know that this was truly magical, the slowed arc of the leg, the untethered
floating jump, the sense of flight, of time, or space. And it was eerily
familiar. Hadn't we just seem something like that?
We had. In Liebeslieder, when Soto lifted Nichols, stepped across
the stage with her, and set her down. Great dancers don't need cameras
to pull off their effects. Get hold of the videotape and take a look at
them. Watch the ballerina take all the time in the music, which is, in
Balanchine, the same thing as taking all the time in the world. In real
time.
Photos:
First: The crowd outside State Theater watches the gala inside. Damian
Woetzel and Wendy Wheelan in the Rondo of Brahms-Schoenberg.
"Detail at long distance is one of her specialities."—Nancy
Dalva. Photo: Paul Kolnik
Second: Yvonne
Borree and Peter Boal in Duo Concertant, with Cho-Liang Yin,
Violinist; Cameron Grant, Pianist. Photo: Paul Kolnik
Originally
published:
www.danceviewtimes.com
Volume 2, Number 17
May 10, 2004
Copyright
©2004 by Nancy Dalva
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