BALLET VOICE
Edited by Michael Porter
Ballet Voice hosts alternative views of the ballet, concert dance and related arts in the tradition of Kenneth Burke's "systematic search for a dialectic of many voices".
In memoriam Peter Porter
93. The Way of a Balletomane: Fancy Free’s 80th, Abraham’s Dear Lord, Campo’s The Unforgiveable, Baker’s Anora and Audiard’s Emilia Pérez, reviewed by Pippa Hammet
It’s still batten-down-the-hatches at Ebersdorf Central. The “drones” overhead and the incoming political administration have our Lulu in deep retreat, at least for the time being. Organizing an initial season of The Ballet is at the bottom of her things-to-do list. At first, Louise seemed eager to welcome the aerial visitors; she even proposed we erect a sign on top of the Tower encouraging an alien take-over! Anything would be better than a Vice-President who attacks “childless cat-ladies” and a returning President whose first reaction to the invasion of UAP-UFOs is to shoot them down. (Mass deportation may not work in this case.) Our in-house leader safe-guards her collection of prize-winning felines and takes to her own safe room. The old homestead resembles more and more a laura or hermitage where dedicated anchorites devote days and nights to niche scholarship: so unlike that collaborative swarming that produces the art of ballet.
That kind of ensemble effort was recently on display in the latest Studio 5 presentation at City Center, where a group of Jerome Robbins acolytes celebrated the eightieth anniversary of the creation of his first ballet, Fancy Free. Three authorities were on hand: Robert La Fosse, Jean-Pierre Frohlich, and Stephanie Saland, along with four dancers from today’s New York City Ballet: Harrison Coll (the John Kriza role), Alexa Maxwell (Janet Reed), K. J. Takahashi (Harold Lang) and Sebastian Villarini-Vélez (Robbins himself).
It seems typical of today’s mole-like burrowing of cultural projects that such a vital colloquium was held before a relatively small audience in Studio 5 (streaming available), especially when Robbins deserves celebrating for his work in musical theater all year long. Where is the theater company dedicated today to full stage revivals of his musicals? (NYCB has many of his ballets in repertory rotation – some would say too many Robbins ballets and celebrations at the company – and Broadway has its endless reruns of Gypsy.) Covid conditions in the arts persist post-Covid. How many seasons will be required to get back to “normal”?
The excellent pianist-accompanist for the studio evening was Elaine Chelton, and La Fosse’s master-of-ceremony agility and Chelton’s skills at supporting the dancers in complex music provided the evening with its spine. I’ve never been a great fan of Leonard Bernstein’s score for Fancy Free. – too heavy in the down-beat for my taste, too “Prokofiev”, as George Abbott put it -- but watching the dancers up close made me realize that the composer’s onslaughts of brass and percussion provided Robbins with a sonic trampoline which forced him to invent his own profiled rhythms in the choreography. What Bernstein may have intended as a challenge to his colleague may have been an inspiration. The result is a wealth of visual-aural syncopation that suggest a nervous, urban atmosphere and a swinging milieu.
Or so it seemed to me while watching Coll, Takahashi and Villarini-Vélez elevate the opening of the ballet. Here was vivid audio-visual crosshatching: the deep rumble and throat-clearings of the score forcing Robbins into varied rhythmic invention, clear and ebullient, for the three men. By the way, has anyone ever pointed out that Robbins may have been influenced toward a trio of sailors by the three raffish tars in Cole Porter’s 1940 musical comedy Panama Hattie for Ethel Merman? (There had been Auric’s and Massine’s 1925 Les Matelots for Diaghilev, but that was probably a very different animal.)
At one point in his critique of the ballet’s pas de deux, Jean-Pierre Frohlich described some of its movement derivations as “social dancing”, and here is the challenge for today’s performers – the absence of new popular jazz music and dance in our 2024 vernacular culture. Robbins had to teach the elements of the Lindy and tap dancing to his later casts, and so do today’s backstage coaches. Frohlich admitted that he had dropped a detail in the duet (the “accidental” touch of male palm and female breast) in the light of the current concern for intimacy policing on stage and in the rehearsal hall. As times change, so do ballets. Frohlich as meticulous ballet master watches over the entire Robbins repertory at today’s NYCB.
Stephanie Saland brought her stylishness and theatricality to the evening. What a teacher and coach she makes for the young! Saland’s advice to Maxwell and Coll made me uncover something I’ve always wondered about in the pas de deux – at what point does the viewer realize that the female Second Passerby is really in control? She ultimately leads in this duet. Could it be the cumulative scale in her movement, the way she adds a larger dimension of blossoming plastique to the joint image made by the couple? The woman gives the ballet a space-covering growth, an effect that Robbins calculated in his choreographic plan. That means the viewer’s realization of the sexual compass of the dance arrives bit by bit in its details; it does not depend on just one stroke. Saland has the kind of mind that views a dance whole, and she was able to communicate this vision to the Studio 5 dancers. Ballerinas have to have a bit of the dance-maker in them in order to collaborate with a Robbins. Saland reveals his (and her) stage glamor to be partially a function of craft.
I admired Alexa Maxwell’s dramatic musicality in the pas de deux, and Harrison Coll’s demonstration of the Hayseed solo was like encountering the music from within. Such NYCB dancers are the most musically alert artists found anywhere.
Fancy Free is an exposure of ensemble vitality for a ballet company. Its achievement is the antithesis of the exclusionary mood of today’s politics and any drift toward anomie in our culture. To go from Studio 5 to concert dance performances around town can be to journey from a valentine to our youth to laments for lost present generations. Kyle Abraham’s Dear Lord, Make Me Beautiful (Park Avenue Armory) is a victim -- albeit a sometime beautiful victim -- of our age. Abraham never allows the viewer a sustained or fully developed vignette throughout the evening and yet, rather than serving as a comment on our fractured and concentration-challenged age, the piece merely reflects it, never resolving material but letting it just peter out as new dancers take the stage while the ones who had begun something that could have had legs just sink to the floor, exit, or become otherwise nonentities. As a result, the piece becomes self-indulgent, offering no objectivity or perspective on itself or the world it purports to reflect. Just before the end, Abraham constructs a relatively extended passage in which a tall, powerful woman seems to beckon the other dancers one by one onto the stage and yet, rather than allowing this to evolve into a final summative statement of disconnect, the space empties and Abraham returns to end the work alone to a greatly diminished effect.
The genius of Fancy Free is that individualized characters exist within the bounds of a clearly drawn milieu. In Beautiful, there is an everywhere/nowhere abstraction of place in which the dancers – all ravishing movers – are unable to stake out individual identities. As a result, the work offers little more than a faint whiff of unmoored lament.
I’ve been reading The Unforgiveable and Other Writings (New York Review Books, 2024), essays by the Italian Cristina Campo, translated from the original Italian by Kathryn Davis. Campo was a twentieth-century champion of liturgical traditions, especially the rites of the Catholic Church with its elaborate aesthetics of religious ceremony. For her, things were fine between 0 A.D. and 1960, when the Latin service was replaced in Catholic observances. Between 1960 and 1977 (when Camo died), chaos and dark night descended over her world. Campo’s beloved father had been a fascist functionary before and during World War Two, and she is thoroughly right-wing in her opinions and tastes, especially artistic ones. She was a defender of literary tradition in its deep roots.
She is an inspiring writer on fairy tales. It you have wondered why narrative ballets generally tend toward the fable and the folk, Campo has many insights into source concepts that explain the connection. In essays such as “A Rose”, “On Fairy Tales”, and “Deer Park” she deals with themes of destiny and the overcoming of stern necessity by fabular heroes and heroines. She is sensitive to the French tradition of literature for children, especially the stories of Madame d’Aulnoy and Madame Leprince de Beaumont.
When she describes “the unforgiveable”, Campo argues for excellence in the most elite artistic forms, in opposition to the general presence of vulgarity in our modern world. Here is an example of her prose: “The passion for perfection comes late. Or better, it is late to manifest itself as a conscious passion. If at first it was spontaneous and if in every life a moment comes when we must face the ‘general horror’ of the world that dies around us and decays, the ineluctable moment will reveal this passion for what it is: the only wild and composed reaction.” At moments, her arguments reminded me of the novels of Ayn Rand or the dance writings of Arlene Croce.
Campo is eloquent in her treatment of church ritual. I will not soon forget the passage in her essay “The Flute and the Carpet” in which she describes the vesting of a bishop in the Eastern Orthodox Church. It reminds me of moments in Balanchine’s ballets where ceremony is foregrounded for its own richly eloquent sake. Another famed artist who claimed he was drawn to the arts through churchly ritual was the actor-director Laurence Olivier.
And Campo is in her element as a modern anchorite when she discusses The Sayings and Deeds of the Desert Fathers and The Way of a Pilgrim. (I have to go back to J. D. Salinger and Franny’s Jesus Prayer.) Dedication takes many forms, and this writer is open to the most ancient as well as the ones revealed in modern literature. I especially admired her essays on Anton Chekhov and Simone Weil. I recommend this book to anyone despairing at the state of our world today.
The director of the film Anora has remarked in interviews about a fairy-tale element in his new movie which is set in a version of 2024’s tawdry, all-too-real Brighton Beach. The problem for me is that such a fantasy component has to obey a logic of its own, an imaginative argument which is consistent no matter how pressured the narrative may be toward social realism. Sean Baker would tell us about a young Russian-American lap-dancer (lap, alas – not tap) who allows the U.S.-resident son of a Russian oligarch to spirit her away on the spur of a sexual frisson to Las Vegas to wed her, despite the inevitable objections of his family. (Mother and father arrive from Moscow via private jet and have the marriage annulled in Nevada, also courtesy of round-trip jaunts in that jet.) The character of Anora is inconsistent throughout the movie. When the girl is basically kidnapped by hired thugs and appears in a courtroom with her absconding and drug-happy spouse, all she would have to do is throw herself upon the mercy of the court to be rescued on the spot. Does she? No. And this is the same naïve youngster who suddenly is savvy about pre-nuptial agreements when the boy’s mother threatens annulment? I couldn’t buy such discrepancies. Baker wants his female character to have it both ways. His mixture of genres fails.
Anora resembles a number of award-winning American movies across recent years weak in verisimilitude. In No Country for Old Men, I was unable to get past the scene where Javier Bardem operates on himself without anesthesia to remove a bullet from its bloody wound. In Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, there was a sequence where a man is pitched out of a window above an urban street and somehow survives. Anora is part of an on-going escape from basic reality in our presumably adult entertainments. As James Agee once pointed out, fight scenes in native films have a level of mayhem that would land you and me in the hospital, if not the morgue.
Baker does have a gift for showing controlled chaos with his acting ensemble: his very violent house-invasion sequence is expertly choreographed and sustained in its realism and outrageousness. American film directors (Keaton, Penn, Kubrick, Peckinpah) have a genius for such scenes of precisely rendered anarchy. Their versions of chaos are calculated and stylized. Here, the verisimilitude of Anora’s thuggery-muggery ultimately undercuts the attempted comic fantasy of the rest of the movie. The laughs are choked out of the film.
The other fairy tale in our theaters at the moment is the French film musical Emilia Pérez, which has an inventive score and some vivid choreography along with an outrageous narrative set-up. You’ve undoubtedly heard that it features a brutal Mexican drug lord who has always longed to be a female and who has the millions of pesos to make the transition. (I can identify thoroughly, thanks to Our Leader’s financial generosity.) The director, Jacques Audiard, has a fluid camera style, using CGI out of the Parisian studio where Leos Carax made Annette a few years ago. Audiard’s flow of cinematic imagery is nonstop and eloquent. (I very much admired the director’s fantasy-western The Sisters Brothers released in 2018.)
In Emilia Pérez the characters and story are derived from conventions out of Mexican telenovelas, but Cheryl tells me that the best examples of that genre manage a stylistic and tonal consistency superior to what Audiard achieves here. (Of course, a television series has the advantage of many hours to develop plot-lines and characters.) I have to agree with her that the film begins to flag in its invention about half-way through, and I was thrown out of the movie when it becomes documentary in its depiction of the “disappeared” of Mexico: the now-female drug lord turns into a philanthropist and gives funds to the families of the missing. I realize that this daring stylistic stroke is supposed to wake one up: it is a deliberate directorial coup. But for me it added to the feeling that the depiction of the fates of the main characters is a hollow one. The director is not as interested in his three main female characters as the viewer. Audiard has many technical skills. I recommend his movie for lovers of film musicals in extremis. Think of it as an antidote to those tweenie-tuners Barbie and Wicked.
I must now once again complain about the state of digital projection standards in our city’s movie theaters. The IFC complex in the Village has a habit of using equipment that is less than optimum for the screening of new films. The imagery of Emilia Pérez was very dark and dim on the afternoon I caught it early in its run. When I walked out onto Sixth Avenue, I had blood-shot eyes. This is no way to see a movie -- literally. Digital projection has to be monitored by management. Otherwise, we will go stone-cold blind. Am I a lone voice crying about this particular cinematic malpractice?
P.H.
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