by Leigh Witchel
American Ballet Theatre presented two new works along with a company standard, but the most interesting questions in the mixed bill were asked sotto voce.
Herman Cornejo and Skylar Brandt had to do an unplanned performance of “Theme and Variations” the prior evening, so they may have been tired, but the tone of the ballet was forced and off. Brandt did the opening tendus making eyes at Cornejo, while Cornejo was stuffy with a puffed chest.
The first variation seemed to be why Brandt was cast – she’s a strong technician and a turner, and whirred through the pirouettes. Her one weakness was the same throughout the ballet: Balanchine peppered the role with turns with what seems like no preparation. You have to use the step before as one. Brandt nearly blew the first of them; anything where she was able to set herself up was fine, but none of those “invisible” preparations were rock solid.
Cornejo did the first variation in “Theme” as if giving his last words before ascending the scaffold. He entered way at the back, as if in some dark vacuum, then took forever to walk forward, killing any movement impulse. He made it through the first variation but after close to two decades in the role, you could see him working hard. Even more than Brandt, he needed to pause and set up every turn.
His second variation was shakier. Again, he started way back as if hiding, doing arabesque with his head and neck thrown back as if he were trying to trick us out of looking at his leg. At the end, he took a precipitously faster tempo for the double tours into pirouettes to get through them, omitted the last tour and revolved to his knee with a flourish. Whew.
After getting through the variations, neither had trouble with the pas de deux. Brandt’s performance was assured and her port de bras looked thought-through and prepared. She knew what she wanted it to look like, and nailed the balances with switching arms at the end. She has the chops, she just needs to figure out the transitions.
Brandt could make this ballet hers; Cornejo has always looked happier when he didn’t have to play the prince. He seems to equate noble with sullen. He brightened at the curtain call when he disappeared to give her a bow alone.
This is ABT’s ballet after all, made on and for it in 1947. Its version is slightly different than the revised version Balanchine staged for his own company, but the corps here was so busy twisting and turning into and out of formations in a slow section with Brandt, that it looked as if it was doing a class combination. “Theme” isn’t a classroom ballet like “Konservatoriet” or “Etudes,” but ABT dances it like one. What’s not academic, how Balanchine handles transitions, or makes combinations travel in all directions, is what makes it interesting. It would be something to watch again if ABT were to figure out how to make it reflect a company style. Whatever ABT decides that is. But if the company has ever had an institutional question, it is what is its identity.
“Single Eye,” by Alonzo King, made its debut in March in Costa Mesa. It features two couples, at this performance Christine Shevchenko and Thomas Forster, along with Calvin Royal III and Devon Teuscher. The designs by Robert Rosenwasser were chic: sets made of crinkled, iridescent fabric and simple costumes: flowing robes, unitards, leotards, briefs in metallics and earth tones. One woman’s tights were augmented by concentric ellipses of mesh that ingeniously gave the effect of panniers.
Like much of King’s work, the choreography was sleek, elegant and cryptic. The dancing began behind the golden fabric scrim, first the ensemble women moving forward and back, squatting laboriously over their shoes to do a duck walk on pointe.
After the women exited to the side, Shevchenko and Forster did a frenzied duet. She leaned on and pushed him, took his hands off her as if she didn’t want him to touch her . . . and then partnered with him some more. It was modern ballet’s stereotypical conflicted couple. The duet ended when the music stopped and he pushed her off.
Royal’s solo, to dissonant chords, had the same meandering quality as Jason Moran’s music. King didn’t choreograph enchaînements, rather collections of steps that didn’t necessarily add up to a phrase. He was joined by Teuscher and the ensemble that pushed through and behind him, veiled by the scrim. At the end she wrote something on the ground with her finger and walked off. Interesting, but it was an isolated effect, not a movement towards something. When Royal returned later, he touched his heart as if he were grief stricken but the moment also felt like decoration, rather than something essential.
King created a dance for two of the men and four women from the ensemble that felt as if the men were being used as soloists, and the women as a corps. One woman, the one with panniers, was singled out.
Jason Moran’s music changed from solo recorded piano to electronic thumping. Most of the score was piano with some treatments; in the Met not using live music felt cheap.
To close, Moran did his best Windham Hill imitation as Royal came out in the semi-darkness, followed by Teuscher, for a closing sentimental duet. There was emotion but it was familiar and undifferentiated: She falls, he hauls. A quiet pose, a blackout and it was done. Up until close to the end when King made a group dance of interweaving lines, very little felt developed beyond entrances and exits. King has said in interviews he’s less interested in in ballet as an institution and more as a physical process, and that’s what was onstage. He seemed most interested in energy and movement and letting that add up to a dance.
The excuse for Jessica Lang’s “ZigZag,” a tribute to Tony Bennett and his songs, is a popular, inoffensive pretense to make something Tony Bennett (and Lady Gaga) fans will enjoy, but is it the material for a good ballet? Yet where you least expected it, there were some good ideas and interesting questions.
“ZigZag” got its debut last fall season and used a jukebox of Bennett songs, including a duet with Lady Gaga. The scenery by Derek McLane that gave the ballet its name is a bold black zigzag, like Charlie Brown’s sweater, across the backdrop. Some of Bennett’s own artwork was also incorporated.
The ballet was fronted by three couples, with an ensemble of eight. The women wore full skirts, brightly colored for the soloists, and black and white polka dots for the corps. The men were less showy; in plain white shirts and pants for the soloists, black for the corps.
The bittersweet mix of Bennett’s easy vocals with his advanced age and decline from Alzheimer’s disease set the mood from the overture, “When I Lost You.”
The choreography for the soloists was ingratiating but negligible: for the men, variations that were either soft shoe or tricks. Lang’s approach to the music was generally to act it out. The corps made skyscraper and building roofs with their arms as they exited in “I Left My Heart in San Francisco.”
Jarod Curley went in for Aran Bell in that number, and he may literally be the next Aran Bell: the tall, thin blond who rockets up the ranks – though several promotions were announced a few days after this performance and he wasn’t among them. In “Fascinatin’ Rhythm,” Luciana Paris, Cassandra Trenary and Blaine Hoven did head rolls and silly walks. Balanchine did a lot more with the same song. Trenary could have done her duet with Joo Won Ahn to “It’s De-Lovely” in her sleep.
The ensemble work was where Lang took risks. She tucked into the ensemble two dancers, Connor Holloway and Abbey Marrison, who both wore tank tops and black pants, doing the same choreography at the outset as the men. Later on, Holloway changed into polka dotted pants: white on black in a reference in reverse to the women’s dresses. In “Spring in Manhattan,” three women and Holloway danced the same steps, then in “Just One of Those Things” Holloway was partnered in finger turns and exited partnered by the men.
In “It Don’t Mean a Thing if it Ain’t Got That Swing” Marrison was used in the ensemble with the men as just another member; she did the same steps. Everyone wore soft slippers, which allowed for parity. Holloway’s position was more complicated: there were “men’s steps” as well as acting as the “woman” when partnered, but the goal seemed to be to avoid the rigid vocabulary typing of ballet. Did this bust the gender typing or reinforce it? Lang did it with a light touch and without fanfare, so you could choose whether to ask the question.
The wistfulness bookended the work, which ended quietly to “How Do You Keep the Music Playing.” Paris partnered Trenary, shadowing her in jumps and supporting her in arabesque penché as Lang moved the idea out of the ensemble. The cast rotated to each corner as the curtain fell.
Lang isn’t trying to eliminate gender-typing – she couldn’t have made the dances she did without knowing what are considered men’s steps and what are women’s, and generally, kept to that. The areas where that was broken down were localized. Still, Lang expanded the possibilities of who does what in ballet; the next step is what it’s been for a bit: creating durable repertory.
She took a different angle towards gender than Justin Peck, who went for a unisex approach in casting “The Times are Racing.” In both cases, it’s interesting thing to note that the first thing to go is the pointe shoe. Pointe work, which was considered the province of women, elevated the ballerina to a cult and the shoe became its own fetish, with tales of balletomanes drinking champagne from it, or boiling it into a broth. That mystical skill became an advantage and a prison for women in ballet. Here, it’s worth noting that even though Marrison got more to do, Holloway was featured. In ballet, the benefits of gender expansion still go mostly one way.
Are the signifiers and conventions of gender a big deal, or a red herring? The real issues in ballet lie within its institutional structure. Balanchine’s dictum that concludes “woman inspires, and man assembles” isn’t just an expression, it’s how our world has been run. Even at the height of balletomania in the 19th century, as Ivor Guest seemed to hone in on again and again in his books on the time, a ballerina’s power was only assured long-term by her lovers and protectors.
So go ahead and expand gender typing, but the challenge for ballet isn’t to let men dance on pointe or women do partnering, but to share power. It isn’t the shoe. It’s the system.
copyright © 2022 by Leigh Witchel
“Swan Lake” – American Ballet Theatre
Metropolitan Opera House, New York, NY
July 9, 2022
Cover: American Ballet Theatre in “ZigZag.” Photo © Marty Sohl.
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