by Leigh Witchel
The Sarasota Ballet usually tours loaded for bear and ready to conquer. The company is no stranger to New York. Prior visits have brought Ashton rarities or luminous revivals, cagily overcast with principal level dancers tucked in the corps.
This year, the company’s visit was more a reaction to circumstance. Ashton’s later and less-seen “Varii Capricci” was originally slated, that will now be staged next January in Sarasota. Instead we saw the more familiar “Monotones” along with Ashton divertissements, and ballets by Christopher Wheeldon and resident choreographer Ricardo Graziano. But other circumstances brought the company a major guest star: former American Ballet Theatre principal Marcelo Gomes.
Artistic Director Iain Webb brought two casts of most ballets, and he’ll often give dancers a role as an investment, so “Monotones” looked closer to how we’d see the ballet in Sarasota rather than the For Export casts New York more often sees.
“Monotones” may be compact but it delivers atmosphere. In two sections choreographed a year apart, Ashton designed the costumes, which in the sidelighting of “Monotones I” sometimes shaded green, other times pale orange. It seemed to take place somewhere both hot and cool – like a desert at night when the temperature has plummeted. “Monotones II,” (which was made first) is lunar white: made four years before the moon landing, it’s the original space ballet.
Both ballets also deliver style. Sparse and slow, they are some of the best ballets to see the borderlines and transitions in Ashton between classroom and stage.
The opening night cast of “Monotones I” got the shapes and exaggerations past classroom poses right; in careful arabesques voyagées all three dancers (Ryoko Sadoshima, Thomas Giugovaz and Samantha Benoit) had their legs at the same height. You could see the link to “La Bayadère,” mounted on the Royal Ballet by Nureyev two years prior. But the choreography felt chopped into discrete bits. It may have been first-night nerves; we saw more pearls than necklace. The Sunday matinee cast (Kate Honea, Nicolas Moreno and Katelyn May) phrased more completely.
In “Monotones II” on opening night, Victoria Hulland rose up from arabesque penchée looking heavenwards and made it into something spiritual. The Sunday cast unfortunately had an off day. Nobody had trouble with the neat terre à terre steps or careful épaulement, but there are only a few turns and they have to be perfect. Missing the finish on them is like a smudge on an all-white cloth; our eyes head right to it.
The Joyce is a small theater, so Webb used the Satie played by Cameron Grant on piano rather than orchestrated. As he often does, Webb gets the best musicians he can find, but the acoustics of the Joyce didn’t help and the Lydian mode of the Gnossienes felt less like church bells in the distance and more like a sunken cathedral.
The other two works brought for both programs were less familiar. Christopher Wheeldon’s “There Where She Loved,” was made for The Royal Ballet in 2000, very early in his career. It had a bipolar alternation between the songs of two very different composers, Frédéric Chopin and Kurt Weill. All the Chopin songs were of the younger-than-springtime ilk, and the Weill all lyin’-cheatin’-stealin’.
Wheeldon has always been facile and deft at construction. In the first Chopin song, “Zyczenie (The Wish)” the woman, squired by three men in loose green shirts, extended her feet up one man’s shoulder to slide over and down into an arabesque – a tricky but smooth transition. Wheeldon’s phrasing felt erratic, though not always in the same way as the music.
In “Surabaya Johnny,” Wheeldon multiplied the betrayed girl by three to illustrate Johnny’s perfidy, but he also banked on a cliché ballet could shelve for a good long while – the woman as beautiful victim. As the first of them, Elizabeth Sykes invested her character with angry strength, but mostly each woman was manipulated by the same brutal but able man, and she was so vulnerable and it was all so lovely.
It didn’t look like misogyny as much as a different stale convention. Once upon a time, gay artists couldn’t talk about gay relationships overtly, so they coded what they wanted to say into a straight relationship. If that’s what the serial infidelity and masochism was here, it felt doubly stale. That may be reading too much into it. It could have just been a young Wheeldon sampling ballet tropes. The Chopin sections had moments lifted from “Dances at a Gathering.” Whatever the interpretation, the two extremes, treacly and miserable, never meshed to form something that felt real.
Resident choreographer Ricardo Graziano’s “Symphony of Sorrows” started with five couples in black in a mass, their backs to us. They walked away from us to the third movement of Henryk Górecki’s popular third symphony. The women were in black short dresses, bare legged. One left, her partner dragged her as her legs continued bicycling. He picked her up, cupping her ears. Another woman spasmed before her music began and finally the cast left in a not-quite never-ending cycle as one woman opted to stop her sorrow.
“Symphony of Sorrows” was like a copy of an old master: a tasteful and skilled replica of a Jiří Kylián ballet. In Sarasota, that’s invaluable; it’s a good work that stayed in budget. But bringing it to New York meant that comparison would inevitably get made.
The weekend’s programs swapped out a bouquet of Ashton divertissements for “Symphony of Sorrows.”
“La Chatte” was a silly catnip-infused bonbon – a kitty in a tutu on a chaise, there was even a remote-controlled mouse – but it was also a great vehicle for Honea’s impeccable comic timing. She knew exactly when to land not just Ashton’s poses and walks, but her own looks and smiles.
Asia Bui, Ivan Duarte and Benoit sailed through the blue pas de trois from Les Patineurs. Sunday matinee was Sadoshima and Graziano’s only shot at the “Méditation from Thaïs” and it was shaky. The problem was likely the same as for “Monotones II.” It was a seven show run, the dancers had heavy workloads and were getting tired, and the duet was grueling.
Webb held out until the very end before the headline attraction: Gomes and Hulland in the final reconciliation from Ashton’s masterwork “The Two Pigeons.”
Gomes retired suddenly from ABT at the end of last year after allegations of sexual misconduct. The dance community has whispered about what the possible circumstances were. Gomes has said nothing, ABT has stated the investigation is closed, and there is nothing factual and confirmed that is worth repeating.
The ballet’s pas de deux happens after a young man strays from his lover to chase a gypsy girl, only to be beaten by her lover and forced to return home, bruised but wiser. It’s difficult not only for the partnering but for the added W.C. Fields misery of sharing the stage with animals: The man has to enter with a pigeon on his shoulder and somehow keep it from flying away.
Gomes and Hulland danced this ballet together last year in Sarasota, so they were on solid ground. It showed off Gomes’ exemplary partnering; he neatly placed Hulland through a hole in the back of a wicker chair as if he were threading a needle.
Probably the only reason Gomes danced this was that he had already done it, but it’s hard to ignore that this first appearance back in New York was in a dance of repentance and forgiveness. His absence has been felt.
It was also hard to ignore that the pigeons behaved perfectly.
copyright © 2018 by Leigh Witchel
“Monotones I & II,” “Symphony of Sorrows,” “There Where She Loved” – July 14, 2018
“There Where She Loved,” “Monotones I & II,” Ashton Divertissements – July 19, 2018
The Sarasota Ballet
The Joyce Theater, New York, NY
Cover: Victoria Hulland and Marcelo Gomes in “The Two Pigeons.” Photo © Gene Schiavone.
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