by Leigh Witchel
Melissa Barak played her cards carefully at her company’s Joyce Theater debut. Where Ashley Bouder, after a few New York seasons, seemed to refine her quest to brand her company as different, Barak, who was a corps dances at New York City Ballet, seemed to want to introduce herself with a company based reassuringly on established models.
In another sign that she was anticipating whatever hand she got dealt, the company performed the whole program, including two new works, at home in Los Angeles a week before the New York debut. Smart move, it’s tough enough to make a New York debut, and there were no signs of new ballet jitters.
The first work, Barak’s new “Cypher,” was taut and well-constructed. A sextet for four women and two men in in bright turquoise leotards and unitards, it opened in silence before seguing into Molly Joyce’s score, which recalled Cage’s prepared piano music.
The dancing, to strings as well as piano, was in sections separated by blackouts. It opened with Lauren Fadeley at center, but the sides of the stage were alive as well, with dancers slipping in and vanishing at the wings. Barak is a skilled and facile crafter; she’s fluent in the full range of ballet’s vocabulary: turns, jumps, and partnering. She uses ballet vocabulary idiomatically; tendues and port de bras moved seamlessly into strides on pointe, and her seamless transitions from section to section may be her strongest skill.
Her work is contemporary in the literal sense – of its time. But she’s doing ballet, not a contemporary ballet hybrid, the dancers’ placement is the same plumb-line spine you’d see at NYCB. If Barak’s technical ease and facility at spinning out enchaînements recalled anyone, it was Christopher Wheeldon. She was creating music visualization that was right in-brand for her alma mater, but doing it with skill.
The central movement of “Cypher” defied expectations with a double solo for two women instead of the usual male-female pas de deux. A man punctuated their dancing by crossing on the diagonal. The dancing swelled to a quartet and dropped into a male solo. A women’s trio segued into a pas de deux. The man swung the woman round him like a planet round his orbit; yet they exited apart. The group reformed for a finale and closed by holding hands. Barak was strong at both the structure of a ballet as well as its individual phrases; she can polish beads, but also deftly string a necklace. Still – and very NYCB – “Cypher” was held together by craft more than meaning.
Barak has avoided a one-choreographer company. Former San Francisco Ballet Principal, now Ballet Master at The Joffrey Ballet, Nicolas Blanc contributed “Desert Transport,” with music – a mélange of piano and tribal chants – by Mason Bates. In front of a cyclorama the color of a fiery sunset, a woman in copper stood with her back to us. Three more women entered to form a quartet; their sisterhood telegraphed by the way they touched one another on the shoulders. The lead woman scanned the horizon, pointing her finger up and outwards.
Like crossing the desert, the journey was long. The music changed; the women raced off at each corner, and were hauled back on laboriously and upside down by the men. The attempt to tell a story was hindered rather than helped by ballet steps.
“Desert Transport” kept going as long as the music did; it seemed as if there were at least three endings. The sky brightened and the women headed back, reformed into a group, made shapes and pointed. The main woman remained in the front, pointing, as the others crossed the back in silhouette. And the rambling, long-winded work finally ended with her pointing some more.
Barak’s ace in the hole was “E/SPACE,” an ambitious work created last year using multi-media. It began with a retro-futuristic light show by Refik Anadol, starting with a projected rectangle: a portal to another dimension or the monolith from “2001: A Space Odyssey?”
Barak’s quick stitchery embroidered the interstellar graphics: a male solo moved into speedy partnering. Outer space was both busy and exciting as a quintet morphed to a double duo to a female duo. On the scrim, thousands of light points arced and swirled like a celestial cyclone.
A trio grew to a quintet into another duet, all at top speed. The dancers entered and exited, spending time onstage doing quick jumps, turns and port de bras with only limited adagio. A galactic cloud assembled on the scrim to disappear and the swirling conglomeration of stars coalesced into a dancing couple.
The dancers onstage were breathless from the nonstop enchaînements. Entering one by one, the finale morphed to unison. One woman was raised high before once again the portal was projected on the scrim. It receded, and then like the reveal in “The Wizard of Oz,” the scrim abruptly dropped and was yanked off showing the reality of the bare stage.
“E/SPACE” was exciting, inventive and ambitious, and it added needed variety to the evening, but this must have been the year of the multimedia space ballet, because in New York we’ve seen two already: Troy Schumacher’s “Translation” and Rashaun Mitchell and Silas Reiner’s “Tesseract.” Barak’s was made right around the same time, and performed first, but it arrived here last, so what should have been “2001” ended up feeling more like “Space: 1999.”
Barak is trying for something more traditional with her group than Bouder is: a chamber ballet company with her at the head. Both women are commissioning female composers as well as using other choreographers, but Barak isn’t making gender a selling point, acting as if her competence and skills are all that’s necessary.
Unfortunately competence and skills have never been enough, especially not for chamber ballet. In some ways Barak and Bouder are opposite sides of the same coin: Bouder is going to have to move beyond her mission statement and work on the form. Barak’s going to have to go past the form and find her mission.
copyright © 2018 by Leigh Witchel
“Cypher,” “Desert Transport,” “E/SPACE” – Barak Ballet
Ballet Festival
The Joyce Theater, New York, NY
July 6, 2018
Cover: Julia Erickson and Thomas Brown in “E/SPACE.” Photo © Dave Friedman
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