Category: Ballet

Photo: Fabrice Calmels and Victoria Jaiani of The Joffrey Ballet in Edwaard Liang’s WOVEN DREAMS.

Thursday October 27, 2011 – At the superbly renovated New York City Center, the annual Fall for Dance festival opened tonight with four companies participating:

PROGRAM I
Mark Morris Dance Group, All Fours, Mark Morris
Lil Buck, The Swan, Lil Buck
Trisha Brown Dance Company, Rogues, Trisha Brown
The Joffrey Ballet, Woven Dreams, choreographed by Edwaard Liang

The main reason I went tonight was to see the Edwaard Liang piece (photo at the top) and I enjoyed every second of his WOVEN DREAMS – and so, it seems, did the rest of the crowd who quietly “ooooohed” and “aaaaahed” throughout the ballet and then lavished the Joffrey dancers with sustained applause at the end. If Edwaard had taken a curtain call, that would have been the crowning touch. But he’s too modest. We did see him during intermission and he looks – if possible – handsomer and more fit than ever. I’d give anything to see him dancing again. But the life of a choreographer certainly seems to agree with him, and we need his choreography.

But to start at the beginning of the evening, as the musicians took their seats to play the Bartok quartet #4 for Mark Morris’s ALL FOURS, I thought maybe this was a piece that would revive my admiration for the choreographer. Back in the 1980s we trekked several times to see Mark Morris at the Pillow and always loved what he was was doing; but over the years it seems to me that he’s run out of creative steam. ALL FOURS, from 2003, avoids the cliche Morris moves – fanny wiggles, pelvic thrusts, waving arms – for the most part. Much of the piece is given over to structured walking about; there’s a good duet for two guys and a nice quartet. The dancers all did well, but as the work passed by it seemed that the same motifs kept cropping up; in the end the waving arms made their appearance. The piece was politely received, but the musicians were vigorously saluted at the end: Jesse Mills and George Valtchev (violins), Jessica Troy )viola) and Wolfram Koessel (cello).

In the solo THE SWAN, Lil Buck (above) performed his unique fusion choreography to Camille Saint-Saens’ classic Dying Swan: imagine morphing Michael Jackson and Maya Plisestskaya. At first there was some laughter as the street-clad dancer moved in a pool of light, but this quickly turned to admiring sighs and bursts of applause as Lil Buck rose onto the ‘pointes’ of his sneakers. With cellist Joshua Roman and harpist Rita Hequibal Printup rendering the familiar Saint-Saens melody onstage, a few feet away from the dancer, the piece made a cohesive statement of music and movement. True to Isadora Duncan’s ‘rule’ that no dance work should exceed five minutes in duration, it seemed to me that Lil Buck really had something to say. A few toffs turned their noses up but the overwhelming response was whooping enthusiasm.

Trisha Brown’s Rogues features two men – one tall, one short – dancing mostly in sync to a whimsical score by Alvin Curran. From a frenzy of buzzing insects, the music switches to piano, then some sort of electronic pipe, and then harmonica. The two dancers, Neal Beasley and Lee Serle, were genial and moved smoothly thru the choreography of this pleasant duet.

After a pause while the huge basket-weave drapery for the Liang piece was hung, the large contingent of Joffrey dancers took the stage for WOVEN DREAMS.

Looking at the Playbill, my first thought that Edwaard was using too many different composers but then: the soudtrack of a dream is never predictable. Thus he was able to develop this six-movement ballet using music of Ravel, Galasso, Britten and Gorecki. Throughout the piece, Edwaard’s musicality and sense of structure – the keys to success of a large-scale work – were ever evident as was his daring sense of pushing the dancers to extremes of technique and partnering. As the work unfolded, the Joffrey dancers delivered everything Edwaard asked of them with a combination of energy and artistry that seemed perfectly aligned to both the music and the choreography.

Central to the ballet is a radiant two-part adagio danced by Victoria Jaiani and Fabrice Calmels (photo at the top of this article). As sometimes happens in dreams, this duet is interrupted by an unrelated passage (more about that shortly) but then the couple seem to pick up where they’d left off.

A choreographer could not ask for two more beautiful and expressive dancers than Ms. Jaiani and Mr. Calmels; the latter’s magnificent physique, long powerful arms and splendid line served as a tower of strength for his radiant partner. Together they moved thru the flowing style of Edwaard’s adagio, making the seemingly impossible partnering motifs look seamlessly grand. The underlying feeling of physical risk keeps the viewer entranced while the dancers’ sense of lyricism sustained the dreamlike atmosphere.

Between the two pas de deux segments, Edwaard interjects what seemed to me the most brillliant scherzo: a quintet of men suddenly appear before a lime-green background to dance a remarkable pas de cinq to the pizzicato movement from Benjamin Britten’s SIMPLE SYMPHONY. Here Edwaard finds a contemporary accent to the classic ballet vocabulary which male dancers have ‘spoken’ for decades. With its choreographic freshness and touches of subtle wit, this quintet lasted just long enough to leave us craving more. The Joffrey men gave their dancing an extra splash of darkish vibrancy.

In the larger-scale passages of the outer movements, all 20+ of the Joffrey dancers showed an intrinsic vitality and a willingness to follow Edwaard’s lead into exploring new combinations and patterns. The cumulative effect of the ballet and the way the floating woven tapestry was brought into play seemed to vastly please the packed house and there was enthusiastic applause at the end; I think if Edwaard had  appeared onstage he would have been greeted as a rockstar. Which he is, in my book. 

Above: Kokyat’s photo of the facade of the newly-renovated New York City Center.

On with the Festival! And thank you, Helene Davis.