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City Ballet Goes Green

2/25/2015

Le Baiser de la Fee, photo by Julieta Cervantes

Symphony in Three Movements, photo by Paul Kolnik

George Balanchine famously said: “there are no new steps, only new combinations.” He neglected to mention that there are quite a lot of old combinations in his choreography too. This does not diminish his genius—he was so prolific that it rather shows how savvy he was at stealing his own steps. Most choreographers are avid recyclers. They borrow from others, and especially themselves. I get very excited when I spot a patch of repurposed material I hadn’t noticed before, and this week I happened upon two more.

Balanchine’s Harlequinade (1965) cycles through our rep only rarely, and it has been absent for over a decade. I was an Alouette when it last ran, and since the birds don’t appear in Act I, I had never seen it before. So I sat in the audience and watched the dress rehearsal. I was surprised to discover a cribbed verbatim sequence in the children’s choreography. The little girls who play the mini-Harlequins attack Columbine’s dopey suitor Léandre with the same choreography that the adult fairies in Balanchine’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1962) employ to attack Puck. Both groups wield sticks, encircle their prey, and go on the offensive with attitude sauté chassé drives. I guess when you have nailed a balletic stick assault you have nowhere else to go with it!

But this isn’t the only bit of recycling going on in Harlequinade. There are the Rouben Ter-Arutunian sets which were originally used for New York City Opera’s production of Cinderella. The plot is

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Me and Hannibal Lecter

2/16/2015

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Right before my first performance of The Goldberg Variations a week and a half ago, Albert Evans reminded me backstage that Goldberg was Hannibal Lecter’s favorite piece of music, and that the sarabande which accompanies my pas de deux plays in the background during the grotesque scene in The Silence of the Lambs in which Dr. Lecter murders and flays two guards before escaping from prison. I laughed and didn’t think much of that particular influence during my performances until the very last show of Goldberg a week later, when out of nowhere one of my wisdom teeth became terribly angry and I could think of nothing but aching flesh. I couldn’t open my mouth, couldn’t swallow. By the time I got to the dentist he didn’t give me much choice—the tooth had to go. Let me tell you, being a ballet dancer is not a fun job when you are post-dental surgery. Since I didn’t want to mask any muscular pain in my legs, I did not take the pain meds. I naively thought I would be fine the next day, but with every deep port de bras and pirouette I tried I tasted the metallic wetness of blood. I was forced to mark everything for a few days. It was not a fun week.

But the ordeal did get me thinking more seriously about Hannibal Lecter and Goldberg—and remember I wasn’t on Vicodin so this line of thought was more lucid than you might expect. I was thinking about how Hannibal Lecter is a symbol of hyper-intellectualism. His effete and discerning tastes are given as proof of his lack of humanity; his extreme rationality is a source of his chilly

Albert Evans and Wendy Whelan in The Goldberg Variations, photo by Paul Kolnik

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The Russians do Chopin

2/8/2015

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Yekaterina Kondaurova and Yevgeny Ivanchenko, photo by Julieta Cervantes

I caught the last performance of the Mariinsky’s run at BAM and it was quite interesting. The company danced three ballets to the music of Frederic Chopin—to piano alone—with choreography by Michel Fokine (revised by Agrippina Vaganova), Benjamin Millepied, and Jerome Robbins. The Mariinsky is a remarkable company: with complete uniformity of line and limb, their bodies and positions are stunningly beautiful. Chopiniana, the 1908 sylph ballet by Fokine, opened the program and had a large corps of women who were possibly the most synced up group I’ve seen besides the Rockettes. (Inexplicably, these women did not get any credit in the program; there was not even a list of their names.) Their stylized torsos and arms were absolutely identical; the patterns they made were perfectly symmetrical. It was a most impressive feat. This synchronicity and attention to detail were among the highlights of the afternoon.

At one point during a principal woman’s solo, I became aware that the corps women, arranged in three florets framing the stage, were slowly, almost imperceptibly, blossoming open as they moved from a standing position to a kneeling one—with one woman in each bunch remaining upright in the middle like a stamen. I wanted to applaud like crazy for them, but not exactly for the

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Goldberg Gladness

2/2/2015

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Me hanging out on the Koch

Prior to last Thursday night, my only contribution to the NYCB winter season had been lounging dauntlessly on a giant paper boulder—through both real and fake snowstorms—on the side of the theater. Important work to be sure (ha), but I was thrilled to rejoin the realm of the performing in Jerome Robbins’s Goldberg Variations last week. Goldberg, from 1971, is a funny ballet. I never recommend it to first-time audience members, but maybe I should. In 101 Stories of the Great Ballets, Balanchine (with Francis Mason) urges those who have never heard Bach’s 1741 masterpiece to lose their Goldberg virginity while watching the ballet. “A hearing of the recording of the work is certainly not essential before seeing the ballet, but…[c]ome to think of it, I would suggest, if the piece is not familiar to you already, that you hear it first as you see the ballet. In this case, both what you see and what you hear will be marvelous” he assures. Goldberg is one of the longest works in our rep, clocking in at 83 minutes. Some people find it interminable; some

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City Ballet Goes Green

Me and Hannibal Lecter

The Russians do Chopin

Goldberg Gladness

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