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Flash Review, 6-8: Music
and Muse
Finally, a Glimmer in the Diamond Project from Christopher d'Amboise
By Alicia Mosier
Copyright 2000 Alicia Mosier
Christopher d'Amboise
has made an odd, wondrous thing. Last night at the State Theater
saw the premiere of his "Triptych," another in the series of Diamond
Project ballets at New York City Ballet, most of which have been
nice enough. This ballet, unlike all the others, is not particularly
nice at all. It is instead (like the Bartok score for strings, percussion,
and celesta it so confidently rides) dense and magnetic and concentrated
-- and the concentration comes directly from the center of the piece,
a center whose name is Wendy Whelan.
There she is at the ballet's
beginning, standing in the front corner, wrapped in light and a
blue unitard, musing. Up goes her leg in a breath shaped like an
arabesque, then down and up and down again. She draws a circle on
the floor around her pointed toe, outstretched in a deep tendu.
She tucks her right leg through the ring of her arms, does a flexed-foot
wiggle, then looks out at the world from between two arms as through
a window. We don't know what it is exactly that she's doing -- I
kept asking, what's in that toe of hers that she's finding so fascinating?
-- but we watch because it is her world, her space, and she is inhabiting
it totally. Watching Wendy here is watching a woman live.
Behind her, meantime,
a crowd of figures murmur in the shadows -- some with arms stretched
up in the shape of urns, others with bodies bent forward with arms
curved like birds' wings, hovering. Whelan is the ruling principal
of this crowd somehow; what she does ripples onto them, and we see
echoes of her movements in the hazy brown and gray behind her. Then,
suddenly, she is on the other side of the stage, and all is motion
-- diagonals everywhere, running, amber waves of grain -- and there
is Albert Evans, magnificent in red, doing some sharp quick Kung
Fu steps, looking at us with his almost Egyptianly beautiful face.
There is some strange, lovely partnering in the corps -- a pendulum
swing, especially, that will come up again, the women lifted up
and swung from left to right, slowly, to the stark, sweet chime
of the celesta. When Whelan and Evans go at it together, with all
those figures still behind them, they are like leaders of a tribe.
They stand shoulder to shoulder, facing opposite directions; they
enclose each other's heads in rounded arms; he makes a circle, she
pokes through; they know each other's boundaries. It's not that
the steps are so amazing -- in fact they're somewhat repetitive
and lightweight; you wouldn't expect them to be interesting -- but
somehow in their perfect musicality, and in the deep strength of
Whelan and Evans, they are given power and buoyancy. I love to see
Whelan working, exhaling fast, looking for the next move; she lets
us in on everything.
And suddenly, what begins
to bubble up through all this concentrated quickness and quiet is
"Serenade." I first noticed it in that lined-up mass of figures,
those long diagonals, and the way the principals appear out of nowhere
from behind. But when at the beginning of the third section Whelan
falls to the floor in the front corner there, and Jock Soto and
the extraordinary, totally present Kristin Sloan (where on earth
did she come from?!) come in from the side with arabesques and motions
of masking, there is "Serenade" all over the place. And it is marvelous.
This dialogue between the women, this curving over each other as
if one is giving the other a secret, these levels and promenades
-- the entire third section is an exquisite reading of Balanchine's
loveliest and most heartbreaking ballet. The celesta predominates
in the music here; d'Amboise lets the three dancers follow it in
bell-like arcs of motion, and the effect is riveting.
"Apollo" is here, too,
among others: Sloan and Whelan are standing side by side, and there's
a moment when you think Soto is going to slice his arm between them
like Apollo does the Muses, but instead he turns his hand just in
time and cradles Sloan's face, turning her around, then Whelan's,
turning her too. Beautiful. D'Amboise said recently in an interview
in "Time Out" that this piece was very specific to NYCB: Balanchine
and Robbins, as part of the contemporary choreographer's heritage,
can now be USED and not just derived from. He was right. This is
like the secret dream life of those ballets.
Though "Triptych" is
far from perfect (the corps has to do some things that don't quite
seem to fit, among other quibbles), at least it has some body to
it, and some strange sort of soul. (Mark Stanley's lighting helps
here, too, washing the stage with color.) The image that will stay
with me is that of Soto holding Whelan aloft in the final movement,
with Sloan going before him, and the three of them moving forward
through the crowd of brown and gray like water lilies floating through
leaves in a pond -- Whelan held aloft, like the prow of a ship,
guiding the whole crowd in these gestures of ringing and enclosing,
carrying them and being carried back to her corner of the universe,
back to the off-center center of the dance. It is d'Amboise's musical
intelligence and love for his roots that lets the ballet move as
it does, and it is Wendy Whelan's genius that makes it live. The
music and the muse: that was the story of Balanchine's ballets,
and d'Amboise has learned at least that much.
With that spirit, dark
and bright as it was, at the heart of last night's program, the
other two pieces seemed curiously 2-D. I was reminded how preternaturally
mature a dancer Wendy Whelan is (and how human are the things she
does with her face) by watching Janie Taylor in Robbins's "2 & 3
Part Inventions" (set to Bach's piano variations, played with happy
simplicity by Nancy McDill). She still looks scared, but the beautiful
lines she makes make me think she really will be as good someday
as everybody hopes. She was working hard last night. Edward Liang's
smile was again a godsend; he kept propelling everybody else, looking
at them as if to say, get a load of how sweet it is to be dancing
together to this full-to-bursting music! Eventually he got Carrie
Lee Riggins, Eva Natanya, and Benjamin Millepied (absolutely biting
in his giddy, minor-key solo) to go along with him. But the problem
of musicality reared its depressing head throughout.
Some better news was
to be found in Balanchine's "Brahms-Schoenberg Quartet." Jennie
Somogyi's port de bras in the Allegro was stunning; she is one of
the few NYCB dancers willing to risk throwing back her head and
swooping her arms when she feels like it -- wonderful! It was high
drama with Michele Gifford in the same movement; with her Merchant/Ivory
cheekbones and her stuck landings, she would make a perfect Myrta.
Jennifer Ringer and James Fayette were the luscious couple who'd
escaped to the balcony for the Intermezzo while all the other guests
were bored in the ballroom. Fayette was marvelously dashing, Ringer
her magical self. In the Andante, Yvonne Borree looked terribly
wound up; the noble Nikolaj Hubbe and the refreshingly self-assured
Riggins carried the day here. As for Maria Kowroski and Charles
Askegard in the all-out blow-out Rondo alla Zingarese, well, they
kept smiling slyly at each other and promising quietly, it seemed,
to eat each other alive. Kowroski, for all her gifts, is still a
bit of a tease; she sometimes depends on audience-ogling when she's
topply in the steps, and it means we never get to know her. (The
audience, however, wanted an unprecedented third curtain call from
her and Askegard. That almost makes up for the man who hissed at
someone who was standing to applaud at the end of "Triptych" and
told him to sit down because he was blocking the view.)
I'd guess Wendy Whelan
is off in a corner somewhere right about now, musing. May all these
young ones go and seek her out.
"Triptych" repeats Saturday
afternoon, on a program with "2 & 3 Part Inventions" and Balanchine's
"Chaconne." For more info, visit the NYCB
web site.
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