BALLET VOICE

97.  The High Council:  Robbins by Peck at the Joyce, Berg’s Jeff Buckley, and Ly-Pierce’s Cherubino, reviewed by Master Raro.

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         Despite her advanced age, there is nothing that pumps our leader, Louise Ebersdorf, toward action like a political coup, the current prompt being the sudden firing of the Kennedy Center officials who schedule dance events for D.C. audiences.  “Usurpation!” our Louise charges, convinced that the future will hold only native folklorico troupes and pole dancers on the capitol’s main stage.  Louise immediately called an unscheduled conference with Pippa and yours truly – a triumvirate that constitutes the High Council here at Ebersdorf Tower.  Louise holds that she herself should rule the capitol’s Center; and, clearly, the developing situation under the current Trump administration perfectly illustrates the fragile condition of the performing arts in today’s U.S. 

     Before our leader got us down to that business, she announced that Albertine and Professor Wonkoff have suddenly applied to the Ebersdorf Foundation for a sizable monetary subvention for their Bayonne, N.J., research center.  You will remember that they are developing a new species of ballerina, the Denisovan Prototype, a biological model which will eventually dominate the art with a stylistic uniformity and technical efficiency heretofore unseen.  Wonkoff wants Louise to be the first adopter of this race of genetically modified specimens, and Albertine rashly pressured our great one for early support of the brand by suggesting that, otherwise, she and Wonkoff might take their product elsewhere.  You can imagine how that went down.  (I’ve never seen our boss circle in her wheelchair with such fury!)  Pippa and I are fairly repelled by the whole idea of chromosomal touch-ups, but who knows?  Such genetic tampering could be one of the Waves of the Future, and the great minds behind The Ballet are moved to consider which one to ride!    

         Louise requested immediate input, so she turned to Pippa and me for hot intel.  I brought up the possibility of investing in the recent international efforts toward producing “humanoid” robots.  The new examples of the technology are intriguing, especially the Chinese variety that sells for a mere $6,000 per unit.  An ensemble made up of such devices would give The Ballet a certain futuristic “edge”, especially over those dance companies that advertise a rigid uniformity in their group dance style.  I will make sure Louise stays up-to-date about this industrial potential for high art.  She currently balks at the handsome Optimus model which costs $20,000 p.u.

         Pippa inevitably brought up the necessity to include “trans” (as in “transexual”) dancers in our coming company.  Although the Republican political party displays an obsession with the subject of gender (read “sex”, anything to do with reproductive organs), it can be argued that new developments in medical procedures and somatic imaging will have an impact, now or later, on the art of dance. Let’s face it, folks:  gender ambivalence has always been one of the magical qualities found in stage and screen performance.  The use of new scientific and philosophical approaches to our favorite artform is vital to the health of the intellect (as well as the body), no matter what dramas current political leaders use to get attention, especially with current events of the most dire sort unfolding by the hour.  Despite all the social and political upheaval of the moment, the arts will go on – somewhere, somehow – and we need to be alert to fresh new approaches wherever they turn up.

         I don’t know if Tiler Peck had any of these issues in mind when she conceived her program honoring Jerome Robbins at the Joyce recently, but her performance of A Suite of Dances, a solo made for Mikhail Baryshnikov and never before performed by a woman, suggested rich new possibilities for this late Robbins bonbon.  For this work, Robbins chose four sections from three cello suites by Bach, some of the most profound music in the Western canon. One of the more unseemly aspects of this ballet when it premiered in 1994 was the spectacle of Baryshnikov, who was by then a 46-year-old man we’d watched in the West for twenty years, disporting himself like an impish lad.  There’s an unfortunate strain in Robbins’ aesthetic that turns men into boys and women into men; and here was Peck, taking on the challenge of gender transposition in a cloyingly boyish work.

         The first movement of the ballet, to the Prelude from Suite no. 1, is, perhaps, the most weighted down with scampish clichés -- skips with swinging arms, quick little bounces in place, “Ta-Dah!” arm gestures after single turns -- and here Peck seemed the least comfortable, dancing it at a knowing remove so it almost became her parody of the ballet’s boyish charms.  The second and third movements, however, allowed her to find a path into the material and actually transform it.  The saccharine endearments Robbins put into the second movement Gigue -- audible stomps and comically fast grapevine steps, for example -- were woven into the rhythm and dynamic of the overall dance.  For this reason and, I suspect, because it is a faster movement, Peck was fully in it with a playfulness arising not from Robbins faux naif theatricalities but from her nuanced musical response.  Suddenly she was collaborating with Robbins and Bach to turn this movement into something surprising and even sly in its rhythmic details. 

         When danced by men, the third movement, a stately Sarabande, always reminds me of Paul Taylor solos:  a poetic figure oscillating between gesture and dance movements, locked in an endless rumination.  Peck brings a feminine plastique and a greater continuity to the solo which makes it feel as though she’s actually working through something.  It was this movement, too, that made me want to see a wide range of women do this dance. 

         The final movement, to the Prelude from Suite no. 6, is the weakest of the four choreographically.  Here Robbins returns to the heavy-handed playfulness of the first movement (perhaps there’s something about preludes that brought out the kid in Jerry).  For more than half of the fourth movement, the dancer travels repeatedly upstage and downstage along the central axis, each traversal offering a different phrase with a different character and rhythmic profile.  Perhaps Robbins was demonstrating his fecund response to the Bach or perhaps he felt the repetitive spatial design would read like formal rigor; Instead, it’s obvious, perverse and more than a bit jejune.  There was little Peck could do with this but go gamely along for the ride.  The victory had already been claimed in the second and third movements, allowing for the possibility that gender-fluid casting may be the way forward for this most open and impressionable work, as well as, perhaps, for other works in the Robbins repertory.

         A more modest but still noteworthy victory was claimed by Emma Von Enck, who was partnered by David Gabriel in Robbins’ Four Bagatelles (1973).  A rarely seen dance to the Beethoven piece of the same name, Bagatelles is one of Robbins’ attempts to show he can make a classical ballet.  (He can’t.)  The opening supported pas de deux replies to the music in a generalized, atmospheric fashion but eschews any attempt to respond to the rhythms within the sustained musical phrases.  Later, as in Gabriel’s variation, when Robbins does respond to the rhythms, it’s too often a step-to-note reply.  It was only Von Enck who, by accenting the pick-up notes or the ends of phrases in her variation, gave a surprising, charming shape to her material and brought the work alive.  Without this, the ballet is just an academic exercise, a rote four-section pas de deux. 

         For the end of this program, Peck chose to present excerpts from Robbins’ Dances at a Gathering (1969).  This ballet is widely considered one of this choreographer’s singular masterworks.  I’ve always found it a collection of choreographic doodles or diffuse sketches — some quite brilliant — that never add up to a coherent statement or formal whole.  A genius of the theater, Robbins could always end a particularly vapid pas de deux with a twist -- a dive into the wings, a woman carried off stage held upside down -- that made the audience think something must have happened to engender such a remarkable grace note.  In a sense, he does the same thing with the whole of this ballet by creating a false allegro ending that clears the stage only to have the dancers walk back on, one by one, until the whole “community” is assembled to watch some mysterious object -- a bird? a storm cloud? their destinies? -- pass across the sky.  Then they do some other preciously performative business and walk off in couples as the lights fade.  Clearly this very long work was about something, one muses, after all that; only it wasn’t. 

         I’d often fantasized that if City Ballet could just excerpt perhaps 25 or 30 minutes of material from the opus, the trimmed work would be able to feign coherence.  Unfortunately, in Tiler Peck’s suite on Dances at a Gathering the cumulative effect is as empty in microcosm as it is at full scale.  Peck’s choices do nothing to mitigate the essential flaws of this ballet, though I’m beginning to wonder if any arrangement of excerpts would make a difference.  In place of coherence, Robbins offers monotony.  In place of development, he gives us atmosphere.  It’s as if the entire ballet is exposition.  Working in the Broadway theater, Robbins had narrative texts which his strokes of directorial brilliance only deepened.  Here, there’s no equivalent of a text, so it’s all gesture in search of content.  None of the characters are in any way changed at the end of the piece or, at the very least, we don’t get to know them well enough as characters to be able to note any changes.  Similarly, there’s no discernible reason from within the ballet as to why at the end the Boy in Green walks off with the Girl in Blue or the Mauve Girl pairs up with the Purple Boy; nor is there any reason that they need to pair up at all.  The couples are arbitrary, and the coupling is just a lazy convention to bring the curtain down, a banal rather than a startling grace note. 

         If we take Robbins at his word that this ballet is simply about the extraordinary dancers who originated these roles gathering to dance -- as opposed to a ballet with characters and a plot -- this still doesn’t address the central weakness of the work:  its monotony.  Robbins leans far too heavily on pseudo-folk gestures and steps like hands on hips, heel-to-toe walks, chugs, heel clicks, and a hand held behind the head with a sharply bent elbow (code for “the Slavic Folk”).  They all signal something but go nowhere.

        Furthermore, he reduces the ballet lexicon in the piece, relying excessively on waltz turns and balancés.  Most egregious of all, he minimizes the pointe work, perhaps fearing this would steer the piece away from the folksy atmosphere he wanted to evoke.  The result is that an entire realm of dance values is practically left off the table, and the vocabulary that remains can’t sustain the length of the ballet.  (I often wonder if Balanchine was laying a trap for Robbins when, after watching an early rehearsal, he encouraged his colleague to “make more”, or did Mr. B simply assume Jerry would edit?)

         Dances at a Gathering forces one to recognize the distinction between mere continuity and actual coherence.  There’s not a moment in this work that’s not of a piece with the rest of the ballet, so it maintains a remarkable continuity for its hour-plus length.  But coherence, at least one that is of any interest in the performing arts, requires the sewing together of seemingly disparate elements into a novel whole.  In Dances at a Gathering, Robbins doesn’t even attempt such a feat. Too frequently he has the women and men dance the same choreography.  There is an argument to be made for the development of the ballet lexicon through reimagined gender roles.  This is why Peck’s performance of A Suite of Dances was particularly noteworthy.  A classical choreographer would imagine re-gendered possibilities from within the idiom, but that’s not what Robbins is doing in Dances at a Gathering, and so his re-gendering is reductive rather than expansive.

         In a duet somewhere in the vast middle of the work, a man and woman stand side by side, both doing a series of échappés and passé relevés, a phrase she’d done earlier as the fellow circled the stage doing waltz turns.  The effect, the first time one sees it, is vaguely comical but nothing more.  On pointe, these steps have dance value because the shoes give a sharper edge to the échappés and a narrower plumb line to the relevés.  Done by a man, it just looks goofy and, pardon the pun, pointless.  Later, a trio for women comprised largely of runs, chugs, lunges, balancés, and aimless walking — so much walking — could just as easily have been done by men and, in fact, men soon join the women and they all do runs, chugs, lunges, balancés and, yes, aimless walking.  A solo for the Girl in Green, made on the great Violette Verdy and done at the Joyce quite admirably by Mira Nadon, doesn’t ever go up on pointe.  Verdy once responded to praise of her own performance by noting that she couldn’t come close to the way Jerry demonstrated it -- more evidence that the ballet might benefit not only from more careful editing but from some gender re-assignments.  After all, Peter Anastos’ Robbins parody, Yes, Virginia, Another Piano Ballet (1976), which he choreographed for the Trocs, makes a delightfully skewed argument for this, and in A Suite of Dances Tiler Peck showed us the virtue of playing it straight.

         Around town recently, we have been treated to two fully realized and utterly magical examples of gender ambivalence in performance.  In Amy Berg’s remarkable documentary on Jeff Buckley, It’s Never Over, the late singer makes a number of unapologetic assertions around the idea of gender fluidity, the most startling being, “I decided to make a woman of music and give myself to her; I decided to make a man of music and give myself to him.”  Elsewhere he notes, “Music, it was my mother and it was my father” and says quite candidly that growing up he wanted to be a chanteuse, in particular Nina Simone, a singer whose magnetism contained a healthy strain of sexual ambivalence. 

         None of these statements, nor the image of Buckley wearing his girlfriend’s dresses around the house (a vignette described but not shown), comes close to the sight and sound of him performing what seem to be rococo improvisations in songs like Lover You Should’ve Come Over and Mojo Pin.  Buckley had an extraordinary four-octave range, and when he loses himself in twists and turns in his upper register while maintaining astounding vocal control, the emotional intensity suggests a transcendence of simplistic dualities.  He meets Janice Joplin in a post-gendered realm.

         The other vocal performance that achieved a magical ambivalence was that of Sun Ly-Pierce as Cherubino in the Met’s recent stream of The Marriage of Figaro.  Mozart’s construction of the travesty role is practically foolproof to begin with, yet Ly-Pierce’s Cherubino, as a happy victim of his own passions, had a deeply moving vulnerability.  The singer catches that mix of uncertainly and earnestness so common and yet so short-lived in adolescent boys whose faces have yet to meet a razor.  The balance of masculine and feminine in this performance was deeply seductive and gave both Susanna’s and the Countess’ fleeting moments of near capitulation to Cherubino a discomfiting danger.  How remarkable that a role created nearly 240 years ago can offer a transgressive charge given the right performer today. 

         One wonders if the Met’s Figaro would inevitably be barred from the Kennedy Center under its current management.  After all, Cherubino is really a female performer pretending to be a boy, and when she nearly kisses those other women . . . .   Oh, the red flags that fly to full staff above those red hats, not to mention the red faces of all those Republican pols who get so worked up by the mere existence of trans people!  When New York City Ballet travels to D.C. next June, the company’s resident choreographer, Alexei Ratmansky, plans to show Solitude, a work purporting to explore grief in the midst of the Russia-Ukraine war.  Given our president’s turbulent, on-again-off-again bromance with the Russian leader, perhaps an anodyne Dances at a Gathering would be a safer bet.  It is certainly consistent with the new Kennedy Center’s remit:  anesthetize the public with the trappings of culture while keeping the whiff of transgression off the stage.  How like maintaining the look of democracy while hollowing it out from within.

         “A hallowed arts institution and a hallowed republic now hollowed?  The Horror!” howled our Louise when I finished my briefing.  “The Horror of it all!”  And then she rotated her chair and wheeled herself into her private office as the electric doors slid shut, barring even Pippa from the inner sanctum.  With that, the High Council concluded.

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M.R.

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