by Leigh Witchel
All three works on the triple bill Fall for Dance fielded for its last program had great dancing: virtuoso displays by dancers at the top of their games. One of the pieces also was a great dance.
Russia’s loss has been the Netherlands’ gain. In a move of conscience after the invasion of Ukraine, Olga Smirnova left the Bolshoi Ballet to resettle in Amsterdam and work with the Dutch National Ballet. Along with Jakob Feyferlik, and in tandem with Maia Makhateli and Constantine Allen, the quartet performed Hans van Manen’s “Variations for Two Couples”: Two short women with exquisite feet and no joints partnered by two giraffes.
Van Manen’s double duet was set on an elegant, spare stage, designed by Keso Dekker with discreet light tubes on the floor and a thin crescent behind the dancing. It was the kind of Lycra twist ’n stretch fiesta that was big when van Manen was big, about 40 years ago. But you couldn’t carp about how beautifully it was danced.
Each couple got its own pas de deux to start. Allen took Makhateli round and side to side in a duet that was linear and extreme. Mostly you would have stared at her prodigious feet. To use the slang of my dance generation, they went beyond croissants to bananas. Makhateli is Georgian, but resettled in the US with her family. (Her older brother, David, danced with the Royal Ballet). She began her career with Colorado Ballet, then Birmingham Royal Ballet, before joining Dutch National in 2007.
Feyferlik and Smirnova paired made for a very blond pas de deux, with the path of the partnering twisting and turning into itself, but again Feyferlik was mostly schlepping her about in jetés. The music (unrelated selections for each dance) by Einojuhani Rautavaraa had a quick little trill as a motif, every time it happened, Van Manen set a head waggle.
The next selection, by Stevan Kovacs Tickmayer, brightened for a more technical duet for Allen and Makhateli. He turned and turned, then Makhateli echoed, but in the same way, Van Manen echoed the music as a soundtrack rather than trying to find something more.
Smirnova and Feyferlik joined them onstage but each stayed in their couples for a tango to Astor Piazzolla, however ballet tangos tend not to be convincing either as ballet or tango. The work ended by the men sliding the women offstage. Perhaps the most amazing and lovely thing about this facile duet was that van Manen, who is now 90, was in the audience and came onstage to take a bow. But “Variations for Two Couples,” made a decade ago, felt as if he didn’t buy the conventions either of the music, or of ballet, even though he was more than willing to make use of them.
Martha Graham Dance Company’s performance of Hofesh Schecter’s “CAVE” made more sense in the context of the populism-for-populism’s-sake brief of Fall for Dance. I hated it slightly less than when it was originally done last spring.
There was plenty of full-tilt, top-drawer dancing, both from the Graham dancers and Daniil Simkin, whose Studio Simkin company helped to commission the work. But that was all it was, and like other work of Schecter’s, it oversold. Was it Pauline Kael who said that watching the Indiana Jones movies was akin to the sensation of having your bones ground to a fine powder? Of course, “CAVE” felt a ton better to the dancers, allowing them to let ‘er rip and be fabulous. They all looked as if they were blissed-out on Ecstasy. But if I had wanted to see a rave, I would have attended a rave.
For all the maddeningly eclectic curation of Fall for Dance, it brings companies we might not get to see otherwise, including Nrityagram Dance Ensemble, now on its third visit to the festival. This time, they brought “Poornāratī,” which was a change from the last two: it was a collaboration with the Chitrasena Dance Company, and there were men in the cast.
Four women from Nrityagram shared the stage with two men and two women from Chitrasena, and each worked in their home style, Odissi or Kandyan. The sinuous Odissi style is more familiar here because of Nrityagram among others. Kandyan is a Sinhalese form that also suffered a similar eclipse under British colonialism, but it was traditionally male. After its revival, women entered the ranks.
Five musicians were placed at the side on stage right, where they usually are in Nrtiyagram’s performances. Instead of dancing, the company’s Artistic Director, Surupa Sen, led the musicians and composed and arranged the syllabification (bols) that led and responded to the movement.
The piece began in darkness and smoke, with the two groups working in counterpoint. “Poornāratī,” echoed the complicated verbal gymnastics of the bols that propelled the dance. When a man’s voice joined Sen’s, the dance also took on a second push and got more layered. The Nrityagram women took positions in the center in plié; the Chitrasena quartet guarded the perimeter going into a deeper grand plié.
The Nrityagram women rotated in a warrior pose; the Chitrasena dancers took to the air; jumping sideways to and from the center. This was nritta; abstracted dance. The idea of Indian dance as being more than story telling or religious instruction, but needing no more justification than nritta itself, is something Sen is unapologetic about.
For the first section Nrityagram mostly stayed center stage, but suddenly the Chitrasena men burst across the stage, then the women. The entire cast formed a deep V as the group slowly pulled with imaginary rope the dancer at the point forward to end the section. A short coda finished the work, with the Chitrasena dancers taking the spotlight using handbells as a prop, they circled the stage with barrel turns, gathering everyone into a procession off.
As with other Nrityagram performances here, the group has been adept at making Indian dance easy to watch for Western audiences not only unfamiliar with the form, but used to different conventions for approaching dance. There is also the double pleasure of virtuoso dancing and virtuoso musicianship. But Nrityagram never rests on virtuosity alone – the house isn’t just brightly painted, it’s solidly built.
copyright ©2022 by Leigh Witchel
Fall for Dance Program 5 – Nrityagram Dance Ensemble, Dutch National Ballet, Martha Graham Dance Company
New York City Center, New York, NY
October 1, 2022
Cover: Nrityagram Dance Ensemble and Chitrasena Dance Company in “Poornāratī.” Photo credit © Ravi Shankar.
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