Molly McQuade
Contemporaries
''Contemporary Quartet''
New York City Ballet
New York State Theater
February 21, 2007
Reviewed by Molly McQuade, March 13, 2007
During the New York City Ballet's recent presentation, in the company's
winter season, of six new evenings of old dances organized by theme, one
program, confidently dubbed ''Contemporary Quartet,'' caught my eye with
its nod toward the historic. (The other program titles were more straightforward,
such as ''Essential Balanchine.'') To me, the word ''contemporary'' seems
the most arresting in the current NYCB lexicon. For what was almost future
and will soon be past must tickle the eyelash and, with it, the brain.
True, christening this program may have been a go-getting publicist's
idea, intended to sell tickets, nothing more. But never mind. For everything
means something, doesn't it, in the end? Even just a single adjective.
What does this one mean, for the dancers or for us?
The adjective ''contemporary'' was chosen, and the word ''future'' was
not. So this program wasn't up to the folly of prophesying, at least not
explicitly. Yet the four choreographers offered by the program were selected
from a broad field nowadays of strivers and their striving. What does
the choice tell us, and how do the four ballets and their makers speak
to us, as well as to and for the company itself?
To define something, first look at what it isn't. The ''contemporary''
program isn't: Mark Morris, Twyla Tharp, or Paul Taylor, all of them ''contemporary''
avatars of the dance whose work has often been performed by classical
companies to good effect. The ''contemporary'' program also isn't: New
Yorkers exclusively, although there's a New York bent. The ''contemporary''
program isn't: bare feet (all the women dance en pointe). But it isn't
beholden to the full-blown tutu, either; only one cast of the four wears
that. The ''contemporary'' program isn't really about ''contemporary''
music, since a single dance relies on it. Brahms, Vivaldi, and Rodgers
and Hammerstein go to work for the other three. The ''contemporary'' program
isn't: deceased choreographers, however honorable. (Eliot Feld is the
program's elder statesman, Peter Martins almost that, and Jorma Elo and
Christopher Wheeldon are the younger generation.) Perhaps most self-evidently,
the program isn't Jerome Robbins or George Balanchine, who are well represented
on the other five thematic programs of the season. Although NYCB's repertory
was of course formed by Balanchine first and Robbins sort of, these two
are ''now'' considered classics who, I guess, speak less pointedly to
the contemporary moment in particular than they do to a kind of eternal
present. (There was no ''eternity'' program, incidentally, so called;
maybe wait till later?)
Even within this ''contemporary'' program, the meaning of the word ''contemporary''
shifts about conspicuously. Perhaps that's part of the point: City Ballet
will and does harbor the winds of change. Some winds are newer than others.
Three of the four ballets were first performed within the last five years
and two of those within the last twelve months. Only Eliot Feld's ''Intermezzo
No. 1'' had its premiere in a non-''contemporary'' past--to be precise,
on June 29th, 1969. To my eye, the dances by Wheeldon, Elo, and Martins
have more in common than not, although compiling a descriptive summary
of their likenesses would be bound to challenge anyone. Interestingly,
Feld's ballet comes across to me as a true forebear of the others; as
somewhat less ''contemporary'' than they are; and, coincidentally, as
the most lasting, original, and accomplished of the four. Feld's is distinctly
different in its style of imaginative musical dynamism. For the sake of
his disagreements with the others, as well as for the sake of his always
arguable influence, let's start defining what could be meant by ''contemporary''
with him and his.
At first glance, ''Intermezzo No. 1'' looks far more traditionally balletic
than the dances of Martins or Elo, or even Wheeldon. Why does it? Well,
because of its generally good manners and seemingly romantic silhouettes:
the men are all dressed, more or less, like moody, neatnik heroes of the
woods (read: Swan Prince) and the ladies do all look very much like ladies,
and unlike most modern ones. By contrast, Elo's dance salutes the ballerina
as a knobby, fascinating neon clothespin, all naked hurtling brawn. Feld's
richly evanescent, long bouffant skirts puff out rather as they would
have in the nineteenth century, if not literally akin to it. The hair
is all budded up in a bun at the back. A pair of wee recessive gauzy wings
for each of the three women would not be out of place with their sylphidish
idyllic selfhood. And, at first hearing, the Brahms piano music does invite
them to tiptoe and waltz.
But the dancing does respond with elegiac wit and loyalty to the romanticism
of the Brahms, Feld also reconstrues what he hears, listening to it during
another--''contemporary''--era. For example, when the music seems to swoon,
the dancing really doesn't mimic it. When the piano aspires to an ideal
of royally disembodying ether, Feld reminds us instead of the uses of
gravity. In that sense, he's anti-romantic, even while observing every
stitch of the inherited romantic cerement.
It's the partnering of his three assembled couples that reveals, most
subtly, Feld's attention to the tensions at hand in romanticism when it's
later re-seen. Embodied in the lifts, especially, is a modern sense of
inherent ambivalence that belongs more truly to the recent present than
to a nineteenth-century past. For each time a woman rises at, or in, the
hands of her partner, the rhythm and the visual emphasis fall on her return
from air--or else, in an unexpected, signature pause, come to rest
upon a suspended, lowering moment. The moment looks suspended, even as
she's being lowered, due partly to the helpless erotic reaction (a reflex)
of her bouffant skirt to the plummet: ''heavily,'' it lifts, even as she
sinks and sits. As she sinks and sits in her partner's grasp, it takes
off, with an indefinite voluptuous velocity. At this moment, Feld's eye
seems to calculate the sigh of redress: the dancers strive, breathe, they
dance up, ethereally--but in a way, it's all for nothing, as the
skirts tell us in their reflex. For in the end, like the skirts, even
romantics--romantics especially--must entreat the earth, and
roost mainly from their own fundaments.
Feld's musicality is never literal or prescriptive in the ballet. Again
subtly, he plays with the music. He won't let it play him. In that respect,
too, he resists the pro-forma, upper-echelon yearning of romanticism,
its snobbish struggle to surge and transcend. Evidently, he views dancers
differently from the romantics: as people, and as people who are subject
to change. Although a goal to ''characterize'' may sound crudely literary,
and far more so than Feld's apparent motives, still his dancers do not
forget themselves in the steps, or even in the music. Instead, they locate
themselves in those, and they remain themselves--not any other people.
Not archetypes, either.
The realism of the approach does not speak in a purely romantic tone of
voice. It speaks of what is actual, not only of what is immanent. (Immanency:
that true sylph of romantics.) By giving us what's actual together with
what's immanent and striving, you could say Feld betrays romanticism,
except that in their incessant embraces and their affirmations, the dancers
do keep swooning into clarity of emergent form. They want what they don't
have, more than they want to hold on to what they've gotten, and more
than they want to just keep on swooning. So, to get what they most want,
they might be willing to leave their bodies behind. While striving to
leave, they find form. ''Art is the place where selfishness and selflessness
meet,'' once wrote someone.
To give that essential modern conflict, however summarily I have paraphrased
it, a place on the stage is not the main goal of every ''contemporary''
choreographer. Yet, other conflicts can follow from it, as ''contemporary''
postscripts. The nervous, primary pummel of Jorma Elo's ''Slice to Sharp,''
for instance, on the program with Feld, does not allow us the option of
Feld's nuanced total conflict. Instead, our eyes blink at a continuously
sprightly throb, in Elo, of hearty violence, as his four rushing couples,
alone even when in tandem, commit, commit, commit--cardiac, rhythmic.
The body is all they have, not as a symbol, nor as a metaphor. Those are
things they don't want; there's no time for anything like that. These
kids, unlike romantics, wouldn't ever choose to effervesce. The dance
is nonstop, like Cunningham's, but mightily accelerated. The bravura here
of NYCB dancers Maria Kowroski, Joaquin de Luz, and Edwaard Liang can
make ruthlessness, on the brink of anarchy, nervy and fun, even if the
body alone--an abstraction, no less--is not enough, in the end,
to keep us completely happy as ''contemporaries'' of them.
Martins' ''Friandises'' fits nicely into the cardiac Elo aesthetic, or
vice versa: both choreographers seem to be abstract expressionists of
sinew who aren't hoping that their dancers will merge with one another
ambivalently (as Feld's do), or marry an Intention, or marry Love, or
marry Music, even. Instead, as if sent by catapult to New York, the twenty
dancers in ''Friandises'' throb with a heated, bitten, virtual vitality,
in a place apart. I never found them cold, although Martins has been faulted
sometimes for seeming to discard the human like a chaff. What is chilly
in Martins suggests to me its exact opposite, even while sometimes seeming
to excise that.
Christopher Wheeldon's ''Carousel (A Dance)'' is far less furious in any
discarding of the chaff. In fact, it reminds me of Martha Graham without
the crisis and the rictus--on a nice summer day in some safely mythical
American village (one that probably doesn't exist anymore). The idyll
of his ballet is set and drawn by Wheeldon's precise and yet relaxed use
of line, whether in a single body alone or in an embodied ensemble of
two baker's dozen.
The idyllic aspect of Wheeldon's ''Carousel'' also claims conspicuous
ancestors: not just the apple-cheeked, maritime New England of Rodgers
and Hammerstein, or the Western carnival of Agnes de Mille, but also the
backstory of the dancing American male, circa 1956, when the movie version
of the musical was released. After all, Jacques d'Amboise led the merry-go-round
pas de deux in the film. As if rewriting that particular masculine prerogative,
Wheeldon in his own ballet chooses the life of the village instead, in
a communal vision. The summer serenity of his ''Carousel,'' calm especially
in comparison with the varied agons of the film, emerges from a stable
circle, and from circular motion. The merry-go-round is chiefly metaphorical,
and a visual abstraction. Like any circle, it can contain, and it will
continue.
Maybe that's why plot matters little in Wheeldon, though a great deal
in the movie, where large and small events cue bouts of physical action,
reaction, reverie and, of course, dancing. The minor action becomes major
quickly in the film, as when the harridan who owns the carney threatens
to knock the lithe young heroine ''on your little pink bustle,'' and thus
throws her into the arms, more or less, of Billy Bigelow, the raffish
barker. Circles of plot revolve and eddy in the film, like unmanned carousels.
The lovers' duet is all about ''going in circles,'' until heads spin;
dizzy Billy dies after falling headlong on his knife. The circle of village
kinship then receives his widow. It's no coincidence that when Billy descends
to earth from the afterlife for a visit, he finds his daughter caught
in the tightening clasp of provincial taboos. Weeping, she is seen spinning
atop a beached wheel, possibly from a shipwreck.
In 1956, such qualms and shocks were resolved easily enough in a loud
song about hope. (Yours, mine, everyone's--aren't they all the same?)
Wheeldon may have taken that balmy closing moment from the film as the
occasion for revisiting ''Carousel,'' although his rendition rules out
righteous moral fantasy and prefers to build a merry-go-round, a la Balanchine,
with just bodies, not props or horse-and-rider impersonations. Perhaps
Wheeldon wasn't trying to encapsulate the entire musical in one little
waltz, granted. But the gracefulness of his conception gives back to American
summer a new and slender renown--that of nostalgia, well edited. Yet I
also missed a sense of ''modern'' struggle in Wheeldon's ''contemporary''
idyll. Where might it be found?
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