by Leigh Witchel
For the first time, American Ballet Theatre opened Incubator, its choreographic workshop, for public performance. Even with an audience, these were five brief works in the early stages of their development with minimal production. Mostly, it showed what young choreographers are being influenced by.
Tyler Maloney’s “Embers in the Sky” started with low electronic music by Teodor Wolgers and Hector Plimmer, which gave the work its title. Tristan Brosnan and Michael de la Nuez, dressed nearly identically in gray turtlenecks and shorts, walked to center, but one lingered behind to look at us nervously: cliché number one in an evening filled with clichés.
The men burst into double cabrioles and other complicated steps, and lifted one another in Russian pas de chats. It’s weird to say this, but male partnering is so routinely trotted out now that it’s starting to get dull. Only one sudden lift sparked a feeling, when one man grabbed the other by the waist and froze him as he traveled straight up. It had certainly been done before, but it came at the right moment. The duet began to gain density with a large circle as the men raced round, lifting one another. They moved towards us switching places and the brief work was over.
It was easy to tell this was Maloney’s work, without even consulting the program. He is a talented pyrotechnician, and it made sense he’d use virtuoso steps, just as Liszt or Paganini would put instrumental fireworks into their works. Maloney used more vocabulary than ideas; and “Embers in the Sky” felt like a performer’s creation of work he’d like to perform.
ABT soloist Luciana Paris also made a work that was easy to tell was hers. The native of Buenos Aires offered “Then and Now,” described as a “brief study of the evolution of tango.”
The work began, as tango in fact did, with men dancing with one another. Jacob Clerico and Duncan McIlwaine partnered one another wearing suits but no shirts. Remy Young gathered their jackets almost immediately and took them away. You could hear the ghost of Bessie Schönberg sigh at choreography that introduced a prop and then ignored it.
The music, by Juan Pablo, sounded at first like the soundtrack to a telenovela, as written by Astor Piazzolla’s third cousin. Young did pawing footwork, and the work become an uncomfortable duo for three. Sometimes Young danced, sometimes she watched the two men.
Clerico went to the back of the stage, retrieved his jacket and put it back on as Young and McIlwaine danced, then did a brief fast solo before McIlwaine joined him, as they eyed one another suspiciously. A fast finale led to a sudden ending. “Then and Now” felt underdeveloped, not quite a history or a survey, not exactly a situation. Everyone was confronting one another but the setup was too brief to have a sense of who these people were and why the atmosphere was so predatory.
Mark Caserta’s “bad weather” was a trio to two industrial or sampled scores, one by Lisa Lerkenfeldt and the other by Eiko Ishibashi. The dance began with Aleisha Walker draped like a sack over a Joseph Markey’s shoulder, while Fangqi Li contorted in front. Both women were off pointe. The movement style was contemporary ballet, with straight legs, but a curved spine. “bad weather” used the stage well and had a good build and phrasing that emphasized continuity rather than positions.
But emotion came cheap. Caserta opted too often for someone’s head in someone else’s hands and angrily chopping arms. To a drumroll like the opening of “Cabaret,” Markey took Walker towards the back while Li crouched down and loudly wept.
And though the phrasing was full, Caserta favored floor work over vocabulary or steps, and the long movement phrases started to get flabby because they didn’t contain anything distinct. After several minutes of watching free phrasing, everything felt like just another movement, with the dancers tumbling and rolling, panting from the exertion by the blackout. “bad weather” seemed more rewarding to perform than watch.
Eva Alt’s “Glass and Guitar” was more old-school, and unsurprisingly, set to music by Philip Glass. The work began as a duet for Anabel Katsnelson and Melvin Lawovi. She entered in parallel bourrées, then did chaîné turns with arms overhead as Lawovi supported her. If Alt was looking to do something different, it seemed to be within the relationship of men to women in traditional pas de deux: what she does and what he does, what she initiates and when she relies on him. One thing that was quite familiar though, a motif of pointing upwards at something the dancers could see but we couldn’t.
Leah Baylin joined in at end of movement; all three fluttered their fingers, and swayed as they touched themselves down their bodies as if they were instruments. Lawovi is a tall, elegant dancer as well as a good partner. Baylin stood at the front before meeting him, but their meeting wasn’t a betrayal of Katsnelson. It was nice in this workshop to see something without angst, which in its own way is as much of a trope as blissed-out happy-happy ballet.
The brief second movement was a danse générale of walks, poses and arabesques. While Lawovi did a solo of reaches and contractions, the women sat on the ground posing decoratively. To end, the trio returned to their swaying motif.
The final work was Roderick George’s “When the Curtain’s Down” to music by Slowdanger. Proving that anything once inventive can quickly become cliché, this work also began with a woman atop a man, this time Kanon Kimura straddling Elwince Magbitang’s shoulders while Yoon Jung Seo was in front. The recording intoned in a strange voice “You speak and I hear violins. It’s magic.” Yes, and also cliché.
Magbitang frequently lifted Kimura, as she was smaller, both women rotated their arms at the back of the stage while Magbitang slowly crawled to center and lay there curled.
“When the Curtain’s Down” had the least links to ballet. The dancers were in socks, and like Caserta’s work, there wasn’t much vocabulary. But George asked one of the women to bourrée across the stage in socks. If you want a woman to do a pointe step, why not put her on pointe? Render unto Caesar . . .
The trio slid to a crouch, then did tight movement as the score rumbled. It ended abruptly as Magbitang dropped Kimura as the lights went out.
All the dancers in the evening, company or apprentice dancers at ABT, were very fine. The issue with most of these works, and opting for public performance of them, was that we were looking at them before the dances had decided what they wanted to be. It was hard to imagine any of these pieces as a finished work for performance. These were scratch pads; short, only in rudimentary development. Clichés also may be obvious to an audience but they’re an important first step in creating your own work: copying others to develop your skills. But as performance, none of the pieces showed any of the choreographers at their best. Even the introductory remarks seemed inadequately prepared.
There was also the sense, and it was outgoing director Kevin McKenzie’s credo, that the watchword, even for this workshop, was versatility, versatility, versatility. Fine, but what ABT lacks is a point of view, and even here we were looking at an assortment of trends. What kind of dancers will this choreography develop? It feels as if it could be those who will adapt to everything and excel in nothing.
copyright © 2023 by Leigh Witchel
ABT Incubator – American Ballet Theatre
Schimmel Center at Pace University, New York, NY
January 13, 2023
Cover: Yoon Jung Seo, Elwince Magbitang, and Kanon Kimura in “When the Curtain’s Down.” Photo credit © Kyle Froman.
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