by Leigh Witchel
Dance Theatre of Harlem closed out City Center’s Dance Festival with a program of three recent works, all of which ask the question that DTH has been evolving through since its founding – what is the repertory of an American Black ballet company? What goes in it, what’s the right mix?
“Higher Ground” premiered at the beginning of the year in Detroit, confronted the question head on. The challenge asked a lot from Resident Choreographer Robert Garland. The work, described by Garland: “The ballet “Higher Ground” represents a Sankofa-esque reflection on our current times.” Sankofa is a word of Ghanian origin about the importance of learning from the past. Garland chose a practical, easy-to-rehearse format, a jukebox of recorded hit tunes by Stevie Wonder. Jukebox ballets can often be inchoate because of the ease of cutting-and-pasting, but Garland stayed on topic.
Garland gave his six dancers a flowing opening to “Look Around,” then one woman crawled backwards from a line, picked up by the men. Another couple repeated, and so on. In “You Haven’t Done Nothin,” he added his voice and frustration to the pile. Each dancer affected angry, naturalistic responses: shrugging, pointing, raising a fist, but Garland treated those movements as both gestures and choreography. The angry shrug became a motif as he worked to incorporate cultural language into dance design.
Garland’s work has always been temperamentally restrained, and he’s a company man. His ballets tend to be good for the dancers; they maintain and extend the company’s technique. When you’ve spent your adult life building up an institution, it doesn’t make you prone to burning things down.
But then he choreographed`“Village Ghetto Land,” where his exasperation mixed with Wonder’s irony. After another line of dancers gesturing, Amanda Smith did a clean, tight pointe solo. Garland’s sarcasm was restrained, but it was sarcasm all the same. It wasn’t until the third verse that Smith started to break down, but Garland also gave her Giselle’s hops on pointe: a distant reference to her breakdown? Everyone returned and took selfies around her.
In the last, eponymous, movement, Garland did what a classical ballet maker would do: the conflict was wiped clean and the cast danced a big finale in a perfect-ish world.
It’s never easy to have a foot in two worlds, but Garland owns both his places in ballet and Black America. He responds to current events but stops short of rage. Still, it wouldn’t be a bad thing to see him break a few eggs.
Claudia Schreier’s “Passage” premiered before the pandemic in Virginia, with an original score by Jessie Montgomery, played live. To high strings, the ballet opened in haze (so much haze) with a striking image: three trios of two men each holding a woman cocked high overhead. Yet instead of digging into it, the women were brought down and Schreier created five more striking images in the first two minutes: a male duet, a sextet, then couples. Rather than feeling like deploying themes, that felt unfocused.
Schreier’s complicated partnering challenged both the dancers and herself. The lifts were demanding, and sometimes awkward and unflattering to the company. Still, the dancers didn’t look overwhelmed, more overloaded.
If she started by making sculptures, as she moved into the piece she made fast, simple corps work: “Passage” started to look like a ballet. That’s often the last frontier for an intellectual choreographer. The work plunged into a complex male duet for Anthony Santos and Derek Brockington, and they again look overloaded. The lights turned yellow, the music sped up and the cast raced into entries and exits.
Santos and Brockington continued with their duet: Santos collapsed at the front, and headed towards Brockington. The others swirled round, Santos ran off; Brockington took a woman as his partner, and later on so did Santos. All the men lifted him, and finally he raced into a lift with Brockington as the stage went black.
There’s a lot going on here, and particularly if Schreier was trying to hint at any sort of meaning. My guess after cold viewing was that the ballet referred to the perils of the closet. After reading her notes (and taking the title into account), it was made for the 400th anniversary of the landing of African slaves in Virginia and was an abstracted portrayal of human fortitude. If Schreier wants that association to be anything more than a program note, she has work to do.
Why would anyone want “Balamouk” to be longer than it was? Made in 2018 and inflated with more sections the following year, Annabelle Lopez Ochoa almost gave us a reason. The original part is still grating, so are some of the new sections, but believe it or not, the final section was so insane, it managed to make things work.
Beginning with Middle Eastern music, the work is “exotic,” but not in a good way. The dancers made tight movements and perfumed gestures all in a clump. There was plenty of showing off; Dylan Santos was phenomenal, another man spun too many turns to count.
There were many touchstones from other countries, music from finger cymbals, music that sounded vaguely Hungarian. At some point the question became, “Why is this indiscriminate borrowing OK?”
It’s about this point that the klezmer music began (The Klezmatics performed live). The piece swung into a crazy bouncing finale as the band sung in Yiddish. If you have a good sense of humor (or you’re a New York Jew) that nutty juxtaposition piled on top of the rest somehow made up for everything else. When it was first made, and for most of the extended version of “Balamouk,” it sure seems like cultural appropriation. But once it picked up its courage, as well as its craziness, and went from watered-down Orientalism to boldly ripping off klezmer music, it was a wicked send up of cultural appropriation.
copyright ©2022 by Leigh Witchel
“Higher Ground,” “Passage,” “Balamouk” – Dance Theatre of Harlem
New York City Center, New York, NY
April 10, 2022
Cover: Dance Theatre of Harlem in “Balamouk.” Photo credit © Christopher Duggan.
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