36. Apostasy: NYCB and Recent Films reviewed by Louise Ebersdorf
Thinking long-term, I’ve consulted with my on-site psychic, Mme Sesostris, about the inevitable future of what the great George Orwell termed “Oligarchical Collectivism” and its probable impact on the arts. Since the art of ballet may be dependent on such a social-political subvention now and forever, I must consider this future if I am going to resurrect my Ebersdorf Ballet company for the long term. My valued savant tells me that tomorrow may indeed more and more suppress the individual to the needs of the group, except for those few rare leaders invested with the power to originate, delegate, and execute (yours truly being one of the elect, of course). The artist-tyrant is necessary to deliver certain goods, and certainly the art of ballet may illustrate in its training hierarchies and performance elites how prophetic theatrical spectacle can be. It is always best to be prepared.
Here at Ebersdorf Tower we are a tight-knit family, working tirelessly for the arts and their sciences, and we can tolerate no rebellions or signs of disloyalty, no more than the great Trump. In instituting our working policies, we prepare for a tomorrow world where family, clan, and faith come first and last. Certain artworks have already predicted such a State. Take Swan Lake, for example. In the Peter Martins version at New York City Ballet, recently revived, the charmed swan-women are led by Odette, and when a hapless Prince Siegfried arrives to attempt to lure her away from her rightful duties to the collective flock, the corps de ballet asserts itself in Martins’ revised fourth act. Yes, the magus Von Rothbart may be wasted in the end, but the Swan Maidens reclaim Odette as their own, and her faithless, solitary Prince is left bereft and despairing at final curtain. Martins was always aware of the general drift! The crime of Siegfried is nothing less than an attempted apostasy against the feminist claims of the ballet’s feathered sisterhood. No wonder this ballet is so popular. Its home truths are basic and eternal.
And now I myself have an attempted apostasy to deal with. Yesterday, Paco presented me with a proposed contract which, if signed, would turn over my tribe of feline prizewinners to him and his wife-accomplice, Albertine, for use in their performance-art piece, Catalytics, aimed for performance at MoMA in the coming spring or fall! I have personally seen no version of their work-in-progress, although it has been in rehearsal for some time downstairs in my studio-lab. (Master Raro has praised Albertine’s wizardry from the evidence gathered in his surreptitious observation-room viewings over recent weeks, but that is not my point.) Imagine initiating such a project without my direction from its inception! My two captives are attempting what could be termed a coup. The pair wish to become what our brilliant Attorney General Barr has termed “an agent of change”. Fools.
In the meantime, while I consider my options (legal and otherwise), I hied myself to New York City Ballet with my faithful Master to see yet another new ballet by resident choreographer and aesthetic advisor Justin Peck. I was gratified to find that Peck has himself taken the temperature of our now and coming times and created a portrait of an inevitable collectivized future seen in theatrical terms. I assume the title, Rotunda, is a reference to a foretold overarching social and governmental system that awaits most of the earth’s populace. (Spectacle is so perfect for portraying the systemic. Or maybe I project my own hopes and fears here?)
The new ballet’s score by Nico Muhly is a masterpiece of orchestration, almost pointillist in its subtle instrumental details. I took Muhly’s (deliberately?) faint, spineless textures to indicate how insidious the coming change will be to governing Groupthink, and how unconscious most of the world will become to its domination. The absence of any real dance impulse in both the music and Peck’s movement perfectly illustrates the achievement of a sense of peace and contentment in the mute ensemble, just as the rehearsal clothes that Peck’s dancers sport presage a Worker’s Paradise become a universal reality. This ballet does not leave much of a sense memory (not even a single, governing image) in its wake, but that would be inevitable when evoking a voyage to nirvana with a concomitant loss of messy, upstart individuality. With perhaps one exception:
Whenever one of Peck’s dancers begins to show some unique spark that could separate her or him from the group, the ballet’s stylish lead ballerina Sara Mearns revs up, stalks the miscreant, and insures that the rebel toes the line. No errant ways will be allowed by this taskmistress! (Do I have to say that yours truly identified?) Mearns keeps her subjects beneath the lash. Watching her patrol from group to group, now disappearing like a good operative into the masses, then emerging unpredictably to discipline suspect communicants -- what a lesson for us all! I found myself involuntarily taking mental notes, and I never do that at the ballet. (My Pippa does it for me, usually.) Master said he didn’t much care for Mearns’ central solo, and I have no memory of her lengthy pas de deux with Gilbert Bolden III (perfect stage name), but that is usually the mark of a great work, no? The subtle drug has been injected painlessly into the available vein. And what an historical sense J. Peck possesses! I particularly admired those summative plastic groupings that often punctuate an ensemble phrase: so like the symphonic Massine’s tableaux from the 1930s, that earlier period of feckless leftism. Someone, somewhere, remembers. Maybe it’s atavistic?
When, at a penultimate climax of the ballet, Gonzalo Garcia persists yet again in lying fully supine upon the Koch Theater stage, we see the eventual triumph of mass over individual, the objective over the subjective. The End. The only question one might have about Rotunda (I image not so much the famous one beneath D.C.’s Capitol Building but rather the wonderful example over Nappy’s tomb in Gay Paree), is the relation of J. Peck’s dance language to the Balanchine heritage, since his choreographic aesthetic is decidedly demi-caractère in both its technical basis (no varied use of real turnout, for example) and dance impulse (here, it is imposed rather than discovered). Perhaps J.P. is more of a Robbins man. After all, Jerome Robbins had his ideas about the relation of the individual to the group, did he not?
(As a footnote to my NYCB report let me strongly suggest that audiences catch future performances of Unity Phelan in the Balanchine repertory. Master Raro and I are enthusiastic fans after lately seeing her in Haieff Divertimento and the “Concerto” from Episodes. As my Master said: “Major!”)
He and I have also been keeping up with new films, and I’m fascinated to see how they deal with the theme of treasonous betrayal and resultant payback, disloyalty and reprisal, social crime and punishment. Marco Bellocchio’s The Traitor is a biography of Tommaso Buscetto, a Sicilian mafia boss who turned against the mob and informed on its operations and crimes. Buscetto insisted that the truer betrayal had been the crimes of a violent new generation of the Cosa Nostra, whose practices included the kidnapping and murder of two of Buscetto’s sons. His eventual testimony in Italian courts led to the arrest and conviction of three hundred mobsters in the 1980s. Bellocchio is a pastmaster film maker, and his movie is an example of cinematic artistry on so many levels (acting, photography, editing, direction), I must confess myself humbled before its achievement. What truth-tellers those Italians are! It must also be emphasized that this is an extremely violent motion picture, and viewers will be right to be appalled. There is one sequence involving torture through the use of two helicopters aloft that will not be easily forgotten. Again, I took notes. We seem to be in a period in which motion pictures are creating a modern tradition of Revenge Tragedy. (I wonder if Ebersdorf Enterprises has at least two copters in its heliport?)
Another example of the theme of socially inspired reprisal can be found in Uncut Gems, the Safdie brothers’ new movie with Adam Sandler. Sandler plays Howard Ratner, a jeweler in the New York diamond district who likes to gamble for big stakes in the gems market and who makes the mistake of owing his brother-in-law Arno $100,000. Arno, a veteran loan shark, hires a couple of goons to put pressure on Howard, whose personal flaw here is not so much his addiction to gambling as his failure to observe family codes of honor within a New York Jewish community. Retribution follows.
The script for Uncut Gems is by co-directors Josh and Benny Safdie and their frequent collaborator Ronald Bronstein. The film is very anamorphic close-up in its visual style, and usually I rapidly lose interest with such in-your-face pseudo-documentation, but the cinematography here by Darius Khondji manages to hold the eye through sustained visual virtuosity. You have seldom seen such feats of focus-pulling with a constantly mobile camera. (There is a recent technology called Light Ranger 2 that aids the alert cameraman.) The resultant visual brio and the hyper-acting by Adam Sandler turn Uncut Gems into something like a classic Ben Jonson satire for our time. The movie’s art may be rough, but it is also vividly true. I can certainly understand a love of gambling. After all, you can’t work in the performing arts like my associates and I do every day without risking time, money, and passion. But take care not to owe your brother-in-law anything. Luckily, I don’t have one.
Speaking of gambling, Michael Winterbottom’s Greed, a toothless satire of the garment industry’s relation to slave labor in Southeast Asia, ends up making its chance-taking oligarch of the rag trade (the “King of High Street”) rather admirable rather than horrifying. Everyone enjoys a winner’s luxuriating in his success, especially when played by a witty Steve Coogan (as “Sir Richard McCreadie”). Winterbottom never finds a way to dramatize his protagonist’s slightest hesitancy before swindling Eastern labor-masters and slaves for his own profit. Bad-taste ostentation plays on-screen, while facts about economic exploitation are relegated to the end credits. One actor stands out: Jamie Blackley as young Richard on the way up. I want that boy to come and work for me!
And the gentlest of recent films, Emma., comments on inevitable retribution for social trespass. As readers of Jane Austen’s brilliant fiction may recall, her heroine oversteps through social ambitions for her friend Harriet Smith. As Mr. Knightley (played here by Johnny Flynn) points out to our heroine (Anya Taylor-Joy), class makes its claims upon the individual perhaps especially in matrimonial rituals. The tribe always attempts to direct libido into approved channels. If a young rebel goes too far in resistance to that major pressure, general opprobrium is the result, as Emma finds after her Box Hill put-down of Miss Bates. Individual pride goeth before the social fall.
Under the direction of Autumn de Wilde, Emma. has three excellent scenes. One is the Box Hill gathering, complete with the dressing down that Mr. Knightley administers to his young student-friend. (It is here that Taylor-Joy’s Emma becomes Austen’s.) One is the later near-stammering proposal Knightley makes to his beloved at the story’s climax: Austen’s dialogue has never been so moving in a theatrical context, and Flynn makes the scene work. And the entire ball sequence is a triumph, especially the alternation of long shots down the lines of dancers with close-ups of Emma’s ungloved hands. At first you think the film will present Emma as merely a very rich bitch, but later you see that it will show certain vulnerabilities amid the hauteur. It is true that the social level of the characters has been upgraded throughout this treatment. These are indeed very wealthy English men and women, some resident in the Greatest Houses of their ancestral land.
Two performances stand out. Harriet is played by Mia Goth, who makes both her character’s amatory hopes and her despair at dashed ambitions highly affecting. Goth is absolutely transparent before a movie camera. The veteran Miranda Hart plays Miss Bates, and she wrings uncountable shades of fatuousness and pathos from the role. These actresses are in the hands of a sensitive director. I would also point out that Mr. Elton is played by the young Josh O’Connor. If you saw him in God’s Own Country, you will find him transformed here. (Rather in the way Taylor-Joy’s lead character in Egger’s The Witch does not prepare you for the figure she cuts as Emma.) And Rupert Graves is Mr. Weston. Some of us remember Graves as a nubile Freddy Honeychurch in A Room With A View and as the gamekeeper Alec Scudder in Maurice. Both O’Connor and Graves are excellent.
The director of Emma. (it is her first full-length commercial film) comes from the world of rock photography and music videos. She has the assistance of a period movement expert, Alexandra Reynolds, and throughout there are effects of Mamoulian-like blocking for comic effect. Michael Nunn and William Trevitt (the Ballet Boyz) are responsible for the choreography in the ball sequence. Autumn de Wilde is clearly alert to what can be said with stylized movement before a movie camera. We need more films from her. My Cheryl and Sandy must see Emma..
I will have to consider how much publicity the participation of my prizewinning pets at MoMA would be of benefit to my revived Ebersdorf Ballet. And how much loss of control I can tolerate with the encroachment of A&P upon areas of decision-making beyond their ken. Loss of control! Suppose my talented kitties escape into the multi-storied recesses of the new MoMA? We’ll need a cat-wrangler! I can just see the dears invading the expanded building’s air vents and adding their piteous cries to the ambience of the museum’s climate-controlled collections. Will there be proper ventilation and policing to protect my pets from respiratory ailments and an adoring public? So many questions. My family’s work grows apace!
L.E.
__________________
Comments