BALLET VOICE

96.  Executive Aggressions:  an Editorial and a Review

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         The death of the Bolshoi Ballet’s long-lived Yuri Grigorovich (1927-2025) reminds one that in some parts of the world, authoritarians can be toppled only to return and prosper.  Some balletomanes remember when leading dancers of that company revolted at Grigorovich’s leadership, how he absented himself from Moscow to establish a regional company of his own, only to return to his former base and become so valued that Vladimir Putin expressed a desire to have him run both the Bolshoi and the Maryinsky Ballet in St. Petersburg.  We read in current newspaper reports that Stalin is to be officially rehabilitated in Russia:  a benevolent, smiling statue of the mass murderer has just been unveiled in a subway station in the capital.

         Balletomanes who admired the extraordinary products of Russian dance schooling would endure much to glimpse such performance artistry, rather like some of us watch old Betty Grable films to see her partnered by the extraordinary Hermes Pan.  But who can forget or forgive the physical and mental pain of sitting through Grigorovich’s full-length ballets – the touring Spartacus, Ivan the Terrible, The Golden Age, The Stone Flower, Romeo and Juliet – despite their sometime brilliant executants?  Newspaper reports and obits have made do with generalized estimates of his lifetime accomplishment.  The word “significant”, prominent in the New York Times obituary, covers a lot of territory; respect for the newly dead can often be stretched only so far.  Here was a servant of a tyrannical State who used his political power and artistic control to oppress within his domain, embedded like a nested Russian doll nearly identical to the larger one in which it is housed.  How many young careers in choreography were crushed beneath the departed’s heel?  The ballet Spartacus celebrates brutality even as it drapes attempted revolt in bathos.

         I emphasize dancemaking rather than performance here because one of the results of Grigorovich’s decades-long influence was his failure to strengthen the received Russian tradition in classical choreography.  For some of us, his approach cheapened the art, simplified its rhetoric, diminished its stylistic detail and the received concept of choreographic form.  Many examples of a coarsening of the classical language presented themselves to ballet audiences during the twentieth century.  Evenings at the Bolshoi Ballet under Grigorovich were especially headache-provoking.  On the level of serious dance invention, his works proved overblown in concept, brutal in attack, ungrateful and illogical in their dance design, with an athleticized anger playing roundabout their scrum.  There were Western repercussions.  Certain choreographers were strongly influenced by this strain of bombast to create kitsch of their own.  I am thinking of the examples of Glen Tetley, John Cranko, and Kenneth MacMillan.  Before Grigorovich’s example and influence, ballet critics turned silent when not cagily mealy-mouthed.

         Across the generations it is true that ballet lovers have sometimes looked back and found a prior age’s refined dance language to have been traduced by subsequent masters.  In the nineteenth century the ballerina Ekaterina Vazem judged Petipa’s dance vocabulary to be less nuanced than the earlier French school of Joseph Mazilier, Jules Perrot, and Arthur Saint-Léon.  In the early twentieth century, there were those, like the Russian-French critic André Levinson, who encountered the ballets of Michel Fokine and the young George Balanchine and found their dance detail inferior to Petipa’s and Ivanov’s.  Balanchine was aware of such distinctions.  In tandem with Lew Christensen, New York City Ballet’s Mr. B attempted to conserve petit batterie into the second half of the twentieth century.  The result was the creation of Square Dance and the final version of Mozartiana.  Balanchine also encouraged reviving Bournonville’s French-derived filigree in a Stanley Williams’ divertissement for New York City Ballet.

         In the late 1950s, the Bolshoi ballerina Galina Ulanova commented on the disappearance of petit allegro from Russian classroom technique and from its stages.  When watching a Balanchine class in New York with temps lié passages, she noted, “We have lost all of this.”  The Bolshoi had especially come to emphasize grand batterie and thus allowed part of the useful past to slip away in new work.  Grigorovich did little to restore such beauties, even as he excised much mime from the full-length story ballets which he revived.  To achieve his poster-board art, he scoured a movement language.  Soviet revisionism became an artistic scourge.

         Some of us would argue that Petipa and Balanchine placed a new emphasis on invention in the classical dance phrase and on the movement architecture of their ballets.  Perhaps some of the old French filigree did indeed suffer, although there are passages in the ballets of Frederick Ashton where such details continued to be honored.  (See his recently revived Foyer de Danse.)  Ashton was particularly expert at evoking the upper-body plastique of the French style – its épaulement – as well as its feminine pointework.

         Here in the U.S., company directors currently do not seem aware that commissions for new ballets can allow the deep past to be respected.  If American Ballet Theatre persists in its emphasis on new full-length works based on Great Literary and Dramatic Classics, the company may find itself consigned to a side gallery in George Lucas’ L.A. Museum of Narrative Art.  ABT’s current policy is an example of how a theatrical form can be weaponized against itself toward a triumph of the ersatz.  What is the difference in terms of effective dance detail between a Spartacus, a Royal Ballet Woolf Works, and ABT’s recent Crime and Punishment?

         And how many of the commissioned choreographies now to be encountered at New York City Ballet enrich our idea of traditional ballet values or connect our present with the Balanchine achievements in basic craft and subject matter?  The announced list of upcoming novelties for the 2025-26 year does not reassure.  Past examples of Balanchine pastiche from neophytes have usually proved dilute.  Attempts at a contemporary “edge” have failed to persuade over four decades of indiscriminate raids upon Euro, postmodern and street-dance modes.  A Fashion Gala turns out to be more ready-made than bespoke. The movement vocabularies in NYCB premieres can be as impoverished as Grigorovich’s.

         NYCB’s insistent advertisement of a new choreographic “brand” – its ambition to be in the creative vanguard, whatever that might be -- has become as unconvincing as the labored attempt to force a marriage between modern dance clichés and the academic style of the graduates of the School of American Ballet.  The promiscuous mix does not make for any real extension within the form.  Balanchine analyzed movement through his knowledge of his own developed dance idiom, and he used compositional method toward musical dance phrasing and steadying architectonic span.  His fantasie was sustained.  What is missing today at the company in new work is an equivalent dance idiolect and the basics of craft.  Raw intuition is not enough.  The expensive efforts of former Artistic Director and choreographer Peter Martins to distract attention from such absence by bringing in dozens of choreographers from around the world to make token “ballets” have resulted in a diminishment – rather than the expansion -- of an art.  And the current management of New York City Ballet appears to have no plans to change that situation.  For them, flash will do.

         ABT has forgotten its Tudor tradition.  Britain’s Royal Ballet and its school have largely failed to live up to its Ashton challenges.  A lucky ticket buyer at the Koch Theater may forage future evenings featuring George Balanchine’s surviving repertory, but the odds are growing slim given programming packed with the usual infantile novelties.  Evenings at NYCB can be enervating despite the Balanchine motherlode.  I am reminded of Katherine Anne Porter’s comment on judicial failures in the case of the condemned Sacco and Vanzetti, how there can be an abuse of power when the law is something to be “inflicted – not enforced”.

         Last month, the Paris Opera Ballet presented Manuel Legris’ latest version of the Léo Delibes ballet Sylvia (inspired by the Lycette Darsonval-Léo Staats restoration at the POB from 1979) with a declared emphasis on le style français.  Rumor has it that the Legris dance materials are more than pastiche – they attempt a personal idiom in dialogue with the company’s received tradition.  Perhaps New York City Ballet could bring Legris over for a commission – the POB successfully joining past to present where NYCB fails?  Balletomanes remember that it was a proposed new production of Sylvia that magnetized the talent around Diaghilev to form the original Ballets Russes and thus to usher in what we think of as the serious art of ballet in the twentieth century.

         The list of talented ballerinas at NYCB -- Emilie Gerrity, Emily Kikta, Isabella LaFreniere, Sara Mearns, Miriam Miller, Mira Nadon, Tiler Peck, Unity Phelan – constitutes in itself a want-ad for a serious, adult choreographer, one who can use a received academic language to make vital new ballets.  Ready artists deserve substantive new roles in fully achieved vehicles.  (Several of them are also in need of tall, classically trained partners.)  Ballet Voice can identify one local dancemaker who combines developed personal taste and the American neo-classical tradition and who could offer fresh challenges to these dancers.  What we do not need is more ensemble choreography from favored novices and indulged hacks who see themselves as the company’s star “creatives”. 

         In Russia, a modern dream of social renovation subjugated a people and its arts.  The current Washington, D.C. political administration’s substitution of slogans for policy finds a parallel here in Manhattan as a mania for “innovation” and ad-campaign rhetoric replace the cultivation of conceptual artistry at the ballet.  As at Grigorovich’s Bolshoi, today’s dance audience must, therefore, look past choreographic fatuity to find performative values rather than compositional ones.

         You can see current managerial confusion in the 1990s New Puritanism of NYCB’s promotional materials, its published ads and streaming videos:  those “costumes” that mimic a Leigh Bowery tat; those genteel animated bugs and botanicals which replace the dancers in Midsummer streamers.  When we turn to our true native artists -- NYCB’s best dancers -- we witness guardianship of the inheritance.  In a recent magazine interview, one of the company’s principal ballerinas has described the new works she is given to lead with one word:  “bad”.  She would know.  For the present and quite possibly the foreseeable future, management may content itself with encouraging extraordinary executants in iterations of the repertory treasures.  It’s a great deal.  But it’s only a beginning.

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         Of today’s extraordinary executants, Mearns scored a major triumph in the Suzanne Farrell role in Vienna Waltzes, “Der Rosenkavalier.”  I’d long feared this ballet, a sensation of the 1977 season, had overstayed its welcome, seeming on many occasions an overblown but empty pastiche or, at best, a relic of a company that had been.  This season, we rediscovered this work, not as a series of genre studies or a crash course in the evolution of a social dance form, but as a large-scale example of lyric theater, one that manages to have an architectonic coherence though comprised of five discrete ballets, each imbued with its own rich fantasy.  

         In fact, the ballerina role in the final movement is of a woman immersed in fantasy.  Entering alone from the downstage right corner after many couples have already crossed the stage, the ballerina begins a waltz as if dancing with the ghost of a partner.  Though eventually joined by the same man four times before her final, lone exit, the degree to which the woman acknowledges this man is ambiguous and varies from ballerina to ballerina.  So deeply was Mearns consumed by her reverie, one hardly remembers she was partnered at all.  In her handling of the role, the entire solo could be this woman’s dream.  I confess that in a flash of Surrealistic reflection, I wondered if she was ever actually there. That is, was Balanchine’s intent all along to show us the dream and not the dreamer?  And is the partner absented so often because we’re being asked to experience her dream, and not his?  The power of Mearns’ performance begs these questions.

         Emily Gerrity’s contribution to Vienna Waltzes was also fascinating. Veering between delicacy and rapture in the opening “Tales of the Vienna Woods,” Gerrity suggests a broad rhythmic counterpart to the waltz step’s thrust and suspension; or, thought of conversely, she revives the drama in the waltz step itself by making its implications the basis of her overall interpretation. The stone creates the ringlets that expand across the lake.  Her partner, Peter Walker, was touchingly attentive and dignified throughout.  Bookended by such stellar performances, the entire cast rose to the occasion.  Megan Fairchild and Joseph Gordon glided through the sylvan glade of the “Voices of Spring” waltz with an intoxicating esprit; Sara Adams and Harrison Coll found the wit within the bawdiness of the “Explosion Polka”; and Mira Nadon’s sculpted silhouette and laser-like gaze gave a surprising dimension -- a decisive, modern woman’s edge -- to her Merry Widow.

         Mearns was cast in another great Farrell role this season, the ballerina in Chaconne (1976).  The unabashedly romantic opening pas de deux — spirits in the ether — comes naturally to her, and she and her frequent partner, Tyler Angle, delivered.  However, the opening is very short, and the rest of the ballet, set in an earthly if idealized court, presents the ballerina with terms that are far more challenging to today’s Mearns.  Because the earthly pas de deux is filled with rococo curves and sharply banked directional changes, the shapes must be etched to read.  Mearns’ tracery oozes and the whole blurs.

         Isabella LaFreniere, however, had a stunning success in the role.  Because LaFreniere can make the ballet’s shapes immediately legible, she not only brings out, but seems to revel in, the wit of the rapidly contrasting images; huge circles of the leg out of dainty point tendu, a hieroglyphic strut on the heels of an en face plié on pointe, a powerfully accented balançoire — rhythmically precise yet surprising — from a graciously arcing arabesque.  After the Theme and Variations, LaFreniere seemed to lose the precise play of relative values that had made her performance to that point so riveting, but there is no doubt that with additional opportunities and, perhaps, individual coaching (calling Ms. Farrell), LaFreniere will make a complete triumph of this great role.

         While LaFreniere’s performance holds out the hope for a fully vivified Chaconne, the viability of Ballo della Regina, another work from the same period (1978), seems less assured.  Made to showcase the unique skills and attributes of Merrill Ashley, Ballo is one of the high watermarks of Balanchine’s allegro repertory, with a use of pointework that looks not back to the delicate French school but forward to the forthright American.  Interestingly, though both Tiler Peck and Megan Fairchild meet the technical demands of the work, this ballet refuses to soar.  Given Tiler Peck’s allegro brilliance (one can only imagine what Balanchine would have created for her!) it seems as though Ballo would be an ideal fit, and yet something is missing.  The late Arlene Croce’s pithy description of Ashley’s performance comes to mind -- “she flies like cut glass.”  Peck doesn’t here make the shape of a jump crystalize in a flash, so the stab of surprise, essential to this role, is awol.  Fairchild, meanwhile, simply doesn’t have Ashley’s scale.  A great part of the ballet’s joy came from seeing a woman as tall as Ashley moving with such speed and clarity.  But it was more than simply joy; joy can be manufactured in a variety of ways.  Speed married to scale was the astonishment of this ballet, and of its ballerina.  Unlike Chaconne and Vienna Waltzes, Ballo may depend too much on its originator to ever be convincingly reborn.

         This brings us to the fascinating case of Apollo, Balanchine’s oldest extant work and a ballet that has had more lives than any other in the City Ballet repertory.  Created in 1928, the penultimate year of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, Balanchine’s first Apollo was Serge Lifar.  Though not a classically refined dancer, Lifar was a great beauty as well as the impresario’s lover.  Cannily, Balanchine devised a role for him that capitalized on his sensuality, his mystique, and his sense of theater.  As Balanchine famously noted, this was not an Apollo Belvedere; his Apollo was, instead, “a wild half-human youth who acquires nobility through art.”  For the interpreter of this role, each moment is a progression.  Nothing is more deadly to the work than an Apollo possessed of classical refinement from the start.

         On YouTube, there’s a wonderful video of Anthony Dowell coaching the Royal principal dancer William Bracewell in Frederick Ashton’s Daphnis and Chloe, another Greek fantasia by a twentieth century master.  What’s fascinating is that Dowell’s regular corrections involve making the performance less classical.  At one point, Dowell jokes, “Demi [pointe] didn’t exist in those days”, when he instructs Bracewall not to be so high up on his arches.  Elsewhere, he tells Bracewell to “Throw the arm away so it’s a joyful thing, so it’s not so academic”, and later he says of a transitional step, “it’s gorgeously placed.  Relax, as if you’re in the sand at the beach.  More languorous.”  Finally, Dowell quips, “It’s very hard to take the classical out of someone.”

         I bring this up because it parallels the state of Apollo at City Ballet these days.   Chun Wai Chan gave a spirited performance, but much of it was generic. The role requires misdirections of classical impulses; landings that sink into the floor; a leg swept across the other with a dangerous force, not an elegant resolution; frappés that suggest kicking up the topsoil.  In Apollo’s second variation, Balanchine quotes Nijinsky’s Faun frequently and, like Nijinsky’s creature, Balanchine’s Apollo folds the energy in as often as he projects it out.  His torso twists against his lower body not with sculpted equipoise but with tension creating, like the Faun, a sensuality but, also (unlike the Faun), implications of strength not yet understood or refined.  Fauns were part of a Dionysian, not an Apollonian, entourage; and yet wild Dionysus in faunish guise is the engine beneath Balanchine’s Apollo – that is, until the Apotheosis and his earned ascent to Olympus.  The glory of this work is that we witness the diamond chiseled from the rough.  Chan’s fantasy of the role isn’t yet complete.  We need more sand on the beach.

         The grit of balletic inspiration is a necessity for both performers and choreographers.  Chan’s hygienic account may be the result of being asked to dance too many new ballets bereft of real fantasy and supporting detail.  He is not alone.  Here is this company’s persistent executive dilemma.

     

M.P.

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