by Leigh Witchel
Aging for a dancer isn’t just a slide into decrepitude. There’s a level of experience, in stagecraft and life, that older dancers don’t have to fake, an understanding from having been around similar to the way Elaine Stritch said she wouldn’t touch I’m Still Here until she was 80. There’s also a long sweet spot where emotional acuity and nuance rises faster than technique declines. And the performances those dancers give can rip you apart.
The Joffrey Ballet of Chicago’s well-composed Studies in Blue program was a triple bill of highly emotional works, and all of them gave a showcase for the company’s most experienced dancers to move us.
Hummingbird, made in 2014 for San Francisco Ballet, is one of Liam Scarlett’s most affecting works. The design, by John Macfarlane, got the first gasp: a backcloth of steel blue with black drips like dirty rainfall, hung to curl back. It met a ramp painted similarly. The drop lifted just a bit and Xavier Núñez on Saturday evening or Alberto Velazquez at Sunday matinee literally slid down the ramp through the low gap.
Gayeon Jung challenged Núñez on the low note, pushing him as a taunt. On Sunday, Amanda Assucena made it more into an aggressive greeting as she shoved Velazquez: Hey You. Assucena was a minx, enjoying Velazquez’ need, amused at being tossed by him with her leg flying up to her hand. Six more couples joined the main couple from the ramp.
Hummingbird has a young choreographer’s weakness: too many good ideas. The spatial brilliance of John Macfarlane’s design vied for center stage with Scarlett’s examination of relationships, at times in the first movement feeling as if it was forced to alternate for our attention: Ramp, relationship, ramp, relationship.
But then a woman in a utilitarian white dress appeared, her back to us. She looked at the first woman. The first woman gave her a look of recognition that may have had nothing to do with knowing her and everything with knowing her situation. The first woman turned and pushed her partner off.
The middle movement of Philip Glass’ Tirol Concerto is long, at least 16 minutes. It’s a massive ask for the dancers, but Scarlett paid them back with interest. The pas de deux is one of the best, if not the best, he ever made.
On Saturday night, Jeraldine Mendoza walked forward alone, then moved with effort to the corner. She was pulled back to the center where she met Stefano Goncalves. They embraced, as he tried to comfort her as he wrapped himself around her.
Goncalves and Mendoza did very good work. But at the Sunday matinee Dylan Gutierrez and Victoria Jaiani were as close to heaven-sent casting as it was going to get. It helped that they each are about five years older than their counterparts. In her late thirties, Jaiani is the perfect age for the duet. Like Lorena Feijoo, who originated the part as well as Yuan Yuan Tan in San Francisco, experience helps when you’re asked to express emotional pain.
The pas de deux is ridiculously taxing, and the woman’s skirt often wound up covering the man’s head. Jaiani and Gutierrez knew exactly when it might happen and how – and which of them – should quickly disentangle him to make it as unnoticeable as possible.
Gutierrez was a next-level partner, so skilled and strong he could restore some agency to Jaiani. He did only as much as was needed, and concealed almost all of it. It always looked as if she were initiating the action. There was no yanking; he was literally an Invisible Means of Support.
Glass’ adagio is way too long to be danced as a duet, at least the duet that Scarlett envisioned. Women and men appeared to give the main couple a moment out of the spotlight, including two men who partnered one another similarly to the main couple. The woman went to them briefly to be lifted and returned. Scarlett often used that echoing device. It served as a reminder that this was everyone’s story; the folks who are center stage, and the ones who aren’t.
The second movement is where the dance integrated fully, including the design. A stunning visual moment happened when the ramp was again revealed. As the corps swirled in front, the man waited at the apex of the diagonal, like a classical statue at the height of a landscape. Scarlett used a similar heroic reveal in a ballet he made the same year for English National Ballet, No Man’s Land.
The complexity of the emotions the main couple was feeling remained unstated. Both in 2014 and here you sensed it, but it never felt like something from inside, rather an unfathomable hurt visited upon them, something as horrific and out of their control as a miscarriage.
The female ensemble lay down on the ramp in slumber, as if their dreams could not be disturbed by the couple’s pain. The last part of the duet seemed constructed to deliberately exhaust the couple; looking at it again, the transition point where Scarlett started laying it on thick came into view. Lifting, flailing, the woman was falling into the man; he was pulling her. Both Gutierrez and Goncalvo were hauling, flipping and tossing nonstop. The emotion was the exertion; the exertion was the emotion. But it got the couple to exactly where Scarlett wanted them, exhausted, panting, their hands on their knees.
Jaiani made it look real; Gutierrez flipped and caught her, and she staggered away, gasping, to steady herself. The one surprise: where everyone else really collapsed there, Gutierrez put his hands on his knees because he was supposed to. His stamina seemed inexhaustible.
The woman tried to leave with the other women, but the man stopped her and carried her back to center. She took her hand away, but held him, yet still left him to exit. When Gutierrez followed Jaiani off, he gave an involuntary gasp that let you know he was just as emotionally spent. Both of them gave career-defining performances.
No one wants to end feeling the way they would after that pas de deux, and given that Scarlett made a third movement, neither did he. But that transition to a finale was never easy and Scarlett tried to do it the method likely to be the hardest: trying to reinforce the concerto structure with a recapitulation.
Joining Valeria Chaykina and Blake Kessler on Saturday night and Anais Bueno and Edson Barbosa on Sunday, the first movement couple returned for a jarringly chipper dance, with the ensemble jogging furiously mimicking an ostinato. But not the second couple. Structurally, to do what it looked as if Scarlett was trying for, you would need the second couple. Emotionally, that was impossible, but as it was it was a letdown. It may have worked better given the swinging moods of the Glass to just work with the movements discretely and have each couple stay in its own movement.
The women slid their hands provocatively down the men’s chests before the ballet ended in silhouette. It was a reminder of Scarlett’s choreographic explorations into sexuality. He never got that to work, his next work for SFB, Fearful Symmetries, was Kenneth MacMillan for the age of the Tinder hookup. With a Chance of Rain for American Ballet Theatre went off the rails and his full-length Frankenstein for The Royal Ballet had a prurient rape scene. But Hummingbird, even with flaws in the structure, burns with a humane passion.
Yonder Blue was commissioned by the company in 2019 from Andrew McNicol, a British choreographer associated with English National Ballet. As the name suggests, the atmosphere suggested a blue paradise. It had the clean, minimalist look of recent British modernism, with pale costumes and fabric flats creating an enclosed space: Wayne McGregor meets Jasper Conran.
The score by Peter Gregson sounded like winsome electronics to begin. One of the nagging problems with the entire performance wasn’t in the performances, but the amplification of the Civic Opera House. It may depend on where you sat, but close to the front on the side the heavy bass reverberations and the side speakers made a live orchestra sound recorded.
The work is large and well-crafted with a deft division of unison and counterpoint. McNicol began with big, neat partnering, moving into swirly-swoopy moves but the backbone was classical. Curls of smoke drifted up into the heavens as the curtain rose, while couples raced on and off at the opening. The section ended with the women, their arms held horizontal, braced by the men in arabesque. Like its music, there was satisfaction Yonder Blue offered cheaply to the viewer, but the work moved past that as it gained volume.
The big duet, for Goncalves and Mendoza on Saturday and Velazquez and Jaiani on Sunday, was handsome. He hoisted her overhead, swooped her down cantilevered and they embraced as he put his head against hers passionately. It’s related to the kind of partnering you saw even back when The Joffrey actually did Robert Joffrey or Gerald Arpino’s works – the man as crane and woman-as-cargo. It takes a strong partner and a light woman, and she is forced by the choreography to let him do a lot of the work. There wasn’t much room for her to initiate movement or have agency.
McNicol may have even realized this because he switched things up. The woman left and the man slotted into a trio with two other men. Again well crafted, what was even more interesting is it avoided both the dynamic of the couple and the idea of one person toting and the other being carried. The men were doing many of the same partnered moves, arabesques, lifts, and cartwheels, but everyone was switching off. It was interesting, unexpected, and probably tiring as hell for the guy who didn’t get a breather.
McNicol was focusing on transitions. One man from the pas de trois stayed to join another woman for a pas de deux, pressing her up and swinging her round as everyone else assembled. But the other two men didn’t just run or walk off, they danced off. Every section blurred into the next. The main couple finished a duet by him slowly passing her laterally across the stage as the cyclorama dropped before they walked off – awkwardly because they had to buttonhook to the back where there was an opening – but the man came right back in to join a male quartet briefly. Yonder Blue was one heck of a workout for the lead man. Velazquez and Jaiani made the awkward exit work better. They were simpatico; he took her hand and made the walk purposeful.
Age helped again here. Both Jaiani and Mendoza emoted up a storm, and Goncalves seemed most alive when he was suffering, suffering, suffering. But a few years more life made it easier to buy what Jaiani was selling. It didn’t hurt that she was also very good at what she does. Her sadness looked earned, whether it was or not. As with Gutierrez, Velazquez was able to partner her so there was a sense of her making choices, not being cargo. But since that happened with both of them, it’s also that Jaiani has found a way to take control of being partnered. And that takes experience.
As curtain fell, the women lay down and the men and the couple walked back into a smoky glow. Yonder Blue was a lovely piece that managed to stay right on the line between manufactured and genuine emotion, between being satisfying and going down too easy. You could see influences of other British choreographers and the aesthetic in McNicol, McGregor, David Dawson, and Scarlett.
The work needed a cast that could add the astringency it required, and the Velazquez and Jaiani had the edge. Goncalves behaved passionately and both he and Mendoza moved beautifully. In five years they’ll be amazing.
The premise of Stina Quagebeur’s Hungry Ghosts, the opioid crisis, could easily have also sent the ballet off the rails, either into Go Ask Alice or Just Say No. But it didn’t, Quagebeur’s sharp observations and a major performance by Bueno kept it on track.
Quagebeur’s dance career was at English National Ballet, she’s likely best known on this side of the Atlantic for creating the role of Myrtha in Akram Khan’s Giselle. This work was a commission and a world premiere.
The work was set in a dark, hazy environment designed by Jack Mehler. The corps moved past Bueno and Hyuma Kiyosawa (the pair led both performances), jogging and thrashing. The situation was clear from get-go: she was standing there, but not really there. Bueno kept reaching for the people behind the panels functioning as a translucent scrim; Kiyosawa tried to hang on to her and beg her to stay.
The two danced an “in happier days” duet, playfully knocking into one another. But even then, there were hints of problems in Bueno’s far away gaze. She managed to depict a complex character. You could see both her playfulness and her stubbornness, but also her need for more than him, even her confusion at what that was. It worked that Kiyosawa’s acting was simpler and more direct. It hinted at a mismatch. At the end of the duet, Kiyosawa continued off as if he didn’t notice she was gone.
Behind the scrim figures swirled in the shadows, and a curtain panel lifted for her to join them. You wouldn’t think of doing a ballet to this, but Quagebeur has made more than a cautionary tale, she’s made a dance, modern in look but retro in intent, like The Rake’s Progress if it were sympathetic to the Rake.
The work is built around steps and movement as much as drama. Bueno walked on to the shoulders of the men behind the scrim to tumble off before repeating: a literal high. She danced with the group, a tight little petit allegro where she tried to run and escape the group, but with a mind divided and ever-changeable, she dove back into them as they moved woozily around into themselves.
To a strident rumble, the group backed out and Kiyosawa returned to Bueno as she rocked, dazed, echoing the others rocking behind the curtain. He grabbed her and begged her to stop when she reached away, then walked away from her. She tried to leave, then she tried to stop him and finally released him. In the contradictory impulses of desperate affection, neither of them wanted the other to stay or leave.
She returned to the group that threw itself into a bacchanal of motion both gentle and violent. Lights flashed like explosive sparks. When he returned again to stare at her, she was far away. To playground noises mixed into the orchestral score by Jeremy Birchall, he hugged her, she kept falling into him and shrugging him off, her attention on the others.
Finally, she threw off his hand and again tried to stop him, but when he tried for a last time to reach her she recoiled. He tried to hold her as she shivered but she broke free, but taking his arm off, and with a last glance walked to the others behind the curtain.
A ballet this intent on a message could easily boomerang. But while Quagebeur was passionate about her message and you barely noticed steps, the piece was full of them and Hungry Ghosts was more dance than melodrama.
On top of that, there was Bueno’s complex performance. In her mid-thirties, she didn’t portray a Little Girl Lost. She was a troubled woman, but one paradoxically in control of her life as it crumbled. Her power and the contradiction was that she had agency. You didn’t feel pity for her as much as a kind of awe, wishing for all the world she’d make different choices, but the character was a rarity in ballet: the woman who has full ownership of her destiny. She was the anti-Giselle.
The bit of complexity Hungry Ghosts could have explored adding, especially as the heroine was strong and sympathetic, was some understanding of the dangerous seduction of substance abuse. Why it will never be as simple as Just Saying No might be the most important message for those thinking of saying yes.
As much as the dancers have been praised, so should the choreographers. And the company’s curation. It mounted three good works, all less than a decade old, that worked well together. That’s an accomplishment in itself.
*
Still.
Still.
In the middle of Hummingbird, along with the unknowable loss the couple is reeling from, there’s the dull ache of another awful void.
I didn’t know Liam well, but I knew him. I liked him. I had interviewed him, and I remember being impressed by the amount of learning the man, at that time young, had somehow managed to pack into a career that didn’t give him much time for intellectual curiosity.
When I last saw his production of Swan Lake at The Royal Ballet, Scarlett’s bio in the program stopped at 2019. As if through the alchemy of propriety, he were still somewhere out there, working.
He’s not. Liam’s gone, having taken his own life three years ago after a hideous scandal. There’s not going to be anything more.
What remains was in front of us. It’s not time for Hummingbird to be shelved as tainted, or fade away. It has flaws that Scarlett might have fixed on a major restaging. Or maybe not. Liam’s gone. We’ll never know. Because of the structure, Hummingbird requires a great cast and a lot of work to make it whole. But for the central duet alone it deserves preservation.
Still.
One place we can try to find solace is in performance. Like art, it’s a form of memory. Perhaps one of the most important of all.
copyright © 2024 by Leigh Witchel
Studies in Blue
Yonder Blue, Hungry Ghosts, Hummingbird – The Joffrey Ballet of Chicago
Civic Opera House, Chicago, IL
February 24-5, 2024
Cover: Victoria Jaiani and Dylan Gutierrez in Hummingbird. Photo © Cheryl Mann.
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