Miami City Ballet
Sunday 4 October 2009
Auditorium Theatre, Chicago
Center Orchestra, Row P
Symphony in Three Movements
Nothing quite compares with the shock and joy of seeing a new favorite for the first time.
That said, the second look was pretty shocking and aweful as well. The dancers in all four pieces were more alert and energetic than the night before. The jumping in Valse Fantaisie and the level of energy in In the Upper Room ceased to look as labored as the night before. Catoya and Sarabia shed their reminders of Things Other Than Swans. This was an on-message performance throughout.
Stravinsky’s Symphony in Three Movements, as the program tells me, was a musical attempt to capture the maestro’s impressions of the Second World War. There are the odd moments of crashing chaos sandwiching the deadly quiet in which one sits in dread over what happens next.
Mr Villella and Ms Mauro at the Fireside Chat talked about the ‘generic’ (or perhaps simply general) images of war choreographed into the piece: that of the Home Front, the helicopter arms, etc. In the last review, I described the choreography using organic images (the sentient hedge, orbiting bodies), but in truth I also had no idea how to organize the anachronistic but highly persistent images of the Great War, courtesy of my fantastical love of Blackadder Goes Fourth.
The pale gleaming women of the Home Front reminded me of particularly sinister and organic barbed wire (its spikes the arms and baroque hands of the Balanchine-trained corp). Tricia Albertson’s jumping contest with Alex Wong became more competitive in the matinee: she challenged him head-on in both ability and athleticism. It wasn’t the lighter one-upmanship of the night before but a grimmer competition whose purpose is unknown.
The rhythmic trot, the precision formations strip the corp members of their respective genders – they are anonymous bodies, trying to trap and engage and out-maneuver each other’s units. This time the imagery of the Rubies women seemed more integrated into the action of the corp, pulsing into focus and then just as quickly disappeared, like reflections from popped foam bubbles. The cognitive dissonance is less when one prepares for it, but it is still disconcerting. Are they brief reminders of civilization amidst the chaos? Or perhaps is it an allusion to the spirit of woman as, or at, war?
Someone once said that conflicts were in reality short and brutish things, most of the other time in war was spent in boredom, in anticipation and also in dread. As I watched the second movement, I kept thinking about life in the trenches, of bodies sitting still, contorting to climb over obstacles and other bodies. It is a moment of reflection in the stolen calm, in which life resumes in all its oddity. Kronenberg and Guerra in this performance was not as languorous (nor the observer as delirious) as the night before, the newly observed sharpness in their movements better accentuated the contrasts in the choreography.
Once again I short-change the third movement in my inability to call up a unifying image of its proceedings (an excellent excuse to see it yet again). Perhaps the most I can say is that if the first had directed my attention to the personalities of dancers or blocks of dancers, then the third forced me to look at the movements of the dancers in relation to each other. It was as if I were forced to view war from above like one would view a Busby Berkeley musical, where suddenly one could extract purpose and logic and even beauty from its purportedly senseless components.
The tragedy of war lies in its costs, regardless of the identity of the victor. Perhaps it was an accident of the close reading, but the image that I took away from the finale were the men, prone like corpses, staring out into nothing as the women erected trees of graveyard crosses behind them.
Valse Fantaisie 1953
“The three ballerinas, wearing headdresses reminiscent of Glinka's Russia, moved together in a perpetuum mobile, attended by the male dancer.” – From the Balanchine Foundation catalogue entry for the second Valse Fantaisie
I am rather ambivalent about the ‘modern’ costuming that every Balanchine ballet seems to have these days. On the one hand, I think it would have lent grandeur and a more overt sense of story (or at least structure) to the choreography; but on the other, the national costumes would have overwhelmed the choreography with notions of character.
The increased energy level improved the performance of this piece perhaps most of all. The night performance had dancers looking as if they were straining to jump and was very distracting. That had disappeared by the matinee and the dancers looked happy and free as they bounded all over the stage.
There is a clear structure to Valse fantaisie that at once evoked that of the grand pas de deux from Paquita (ensemble, male solo, female solo, female solo, pas de trois, etc) but also transcends it. The waltz rhythm is relentless, an ever-present pulse that sustains the action even as dancers stop, reset, find each other to dance in another configuration.
Perhaps the strongest impression that the piece made (besides the excellent dancing by all, including the late substitution for Jeanette Delgado, Sara Esty) were the number of Les Sylphides references that Mr Balanchine seemed to have snuck in. There were the sequence of one footed hops to pointe from the Mazurka and even the undulation of the arms.
Valse fantaisie does not resemble Sylphides harmonically but there was the same choreographic integration of the corp and the soloist when the four dancers reunite for the finale. Instead of maintaining the distinction of rank, Mr Balanchine integrates the soloists into the corp (but then again, what kind of corp do four lead dancers make?), allowing them to emerge and melt back seamlessly into a moving tapestry.
As Jack noted, there were indeed some problems in the lighting, as the lighting began to dim even before the dancing was over! It wasn’t the most climactic of endings, but overall, still a lovely performance.
Black Swan pas de deux
The small glitches in mannerisms had disappeared by the matinee performance. Sarabia, prince that he was, ditched the Theme and Variations quote. Catoya dropped the odd Don Quixote/generic Spanish epaulement that she did at the end of her fouettés. The partnering seemed rougher than Saturday night, though the trick-y moments (which I am still not so fond of) - particularly the ending partner spin in which he takes his hands off - no longer looked as if Catoya was about to fall over while doing the rumba.
Sarabia is, as I say again, elegant, but really the Black Swan pas de deux doesn’t give him much to do. In addition, I could not keep my eyes off of Catoya, who seemed to have drunk a million cups of seductive evil coffee before the matinee. While the amused detachment still remained, this time she casted her web more widely out to us, fascinating an admittedly primed audience with little more than presence. I particularly appreciated her balances that went on forever. I felt as if I were granted a glimpse into the essence of Odile, that of a potent distillation of intent and technique aimed at Siegfried with the sole purpose of getting him to say YES. It was particularly startling when, during one particularly balance, she suddenly turned her head to look at us, as if commanding us to devote the proper amount of attention and awe to her if we weren’t already, and believe me, we were!
Poor Siegfried didn’t stand a chance, and quite frankly, I didn’t feel sorry for him.
I’ll leave off In the Upper Room as I have very little to add. I seemed to have lost track of Deanna Seay in the matinee performance. I don’t know how it happened, especially as I quite enjoyed her dancing as a stomper the night before. The smoke did not work as well as the night before, differing highly in quantity in quantity as well as location as the performance went on. The performers in the afternoon also seemed to have more trouble with the scenery – two or three got a bit tangled in the black fabric strips, but these are minor quibbles. Everyone danced their heads off (once again, Jeanette Delgado the stomping demon!) and the energy levels complemented the music (and the still convincing climax) much better. Jack noted that the two stompers at the end seemed to have jumped twice as high as they did the previous night, and they did!
Applause was not as sustained nor as loud as the previous night. There was a lot of it but not as much as the company deserved. For their next performances in a clime near me, I think I should invest in an amplifier, or perhaps an unobnoxious company of claquers to do what the city could not.
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