54. Public Service Announcement: New Dance Videos, reviewed by Pippa Hammet
Master Raro and I have been watching current dance videos on the Internet, including the recent New Works Festival from New York City Ballet. We have done so when Master could take time from his work on the Ebersdorf Tower’s 33rd Floor, which is being converted into a small theater for in-house performances prior to full-scale post-pandemic seasons at the large Louise Theater on the West Side. May the nights of public premieres by our new company, The Ballet, arrive soon! In the meantime, perhaps we will see a private showing of Sandy’s new work for Cheryl, Visions, in the refurbished Tower space. As you may have read (Blog 53), Master Raro is currently concerned that classical ballet style is being reduced by the major companies to what he refers to as Black Box scale, and this trend is suggested in the videos that NYCB is currently commissioning and making available while New York’s big theaters are closed. Master says that our 33rd Floor space in the Tower must not become another downtown Black Box (in fact, it will be painted in silver and gray tones, according to dear Louise). Master Raro also says that perhaps the 33rd floor can eventually be rented out to New York City Ballet and to American Ballet Theatre for the presentation of their new works, which do not often achieve or require opera house projection these days. That way, Master muses, Koch Theater and the Metropolitan Opera House might even become available to our company. Just think – Louise Ebersdorf’s The Ballet in a season at Lincoln Center! And the ostensible major companies then renting time at Ebersdorf Tower’s converted performance space to display their usual minatory novelties.
In their Balanchine repertory programs, the NYCB dancers have had an opportunity to use their classical training in material that continues a balletic tradition (Petipa, Bournonville, Ashton, Balanchine). But examine more recent works at that company, and you encounter a range of dance styles that might very well be more at home in a Black Box in Soho. The first American ballet that Balanchine made here in New York City, Serenade, is a good example of the use of a large corps de ballet designed for opera house scale and reception. As I read it, Serenade deals with erotic susceptibility. A community of women uses one of its own (the Waltz Girl) to lure a lone male into romantic toils. Heartbreak is the eventual result for the heroine when she is abandoned by him. In the ballet’s final “Elegy”, the Girl encounters another worldly male love object, with whom all the women are in love. And he wants all of them. The Girl thus recognizes him as her male counterpart, for she, like many of us, has experienced repeated infatuation and loss in her amatory career. Again, heartbreak! It’s rather like a von Stroheim movie because the heroine must finally realize that she has been betrayed not only by her newest lover and by competitive sisters but by a self-indulged erotic vulnerability within. She has betrayed herself. But the Girl ultimately finds art (in other words, the ballet) and discovers there a shared solace and artistic transfiguration.
The theme of Balanchine’s Serenade is a universal one and requires the big stage of a ballet company to communicate its intensely ironic import. The classical training of the dancers in rhythmic detailing and group designs for the corps make its theme legible to the top of the house. The ballet could never be performed adequately in a Black Box. As you can see, Serenade will always fascinate audiences because of its treatment of a rite of sexual epiphany in Romantic terms. That concept necessitates a large forum for its transmission, not a downtown converted commercial space that, repainted and fitted out with some folding chairs, constitutes the typical Black Box venue. Serenade is site-specific: a large, proscenium stage is its rightful home.
Master Raro is convinced that a kind of confusion of stylistic realms is at work at today’s Lincoln Center. On the one hand, the NYCB administration’s idea of allowing downtown choreographers exposure uptown could serve a Koch audience deeply uneducated in local modern and postmodern dance but all too ready to regard such imported efforts as diverting exotica. (It is true there might be something facile and deer-parky about the cultural politics of such a cross-cultural ploy. Perhaps it’s a little too self-congratulatory and virtue-signaling of current management?) And, in addition, Master Raro finds the general inability of the downtown dance makers to render their work legible to viewers in the Koch Fourth Ring through classical detailing could be interpreted as a form of reverse-elitism. After all, such imported experts may see themselves as outlier missionaries, bringing contemporary enlightenment to the ancien régime. (I’ve been reading the new Phil Klay novel, Missionaries, about the many troubles of South American Colombia, brought about partly by U.S. military involvement in the country’s drug wars. Interventions are tricky.) Master fears that what might be experienced of such dance imports will be readable primarily by those audience members in the Koch Orchestra and lower rings who can indeed afford expensive tickets close to the action. (The peanut gallery will just have to do without, I suppose.) What a high price to pay in order to inform NYCB dancers and audiences about alternative theatrical dance styles! A company could cut its own throat through such invitational outreach to Black Box dance makers.
It was generous of New York City Ballet to commission five new presentations during the pandemic for digital transmission on the Internet, but each of the resultant New Work Festival videos was only about six minutes long and avoided opera house scale in movement detail and group design. (Some of the publicity for the series nevertheless insisted that the creations would constitute “ballets”.) Each work was conceived in a style that was “personal” in its sentiments rather than universal. Each one showed no sense of the kind of large-scale focus that the classical ballet tradition has fostered both rhythmically in its particulars and in its ensemble contouring. The excuse could be that filming outdoors and on-site was a safety-conscious, practical response to the reality of the pandemic. But there is no reason to think that, when eventually given the Koch main stage, the four invited choreographers (plus the one in-house contributor) will suddenly become proscenium-conscious in a presentational sense. (There are currently repertory works by the Paul Taylor company that sometimes reveal a problem in legibility on the Koch stage.) Some of the invited choreographers may claim their advanced works are “anti-presentational” according to a Judson Church manifest. If so, what are they doing in a house where the proscenium dictates active presentation and where a Fashion Gala emphasizes eye-candy? As her acceptance speech indicated this last Saturday evening, Vice-President Elect Kamala Harris knows more about presentationalism than all five of the New Work choreographers combined. They should check out the website WhatKamalaWore.com for some pointers. This may mean we will see some Converse ballets. Perhaps Harris can become official sponsor of a ballet company, like certain members of the Royal Family in England.
It is not difficult to predict that the New Work choreographers’ non-directionality and movement inventions will undoubtedly be offered under the rubric of “avant-garde”, whatever that can mean these days. After all, many of us have been seeing such novelty-driven formulas for more than one decade. There will be little recognition of a classical aesthetic, craft, or impulse when the premieres arrive. The calm with which Balanchine regards his subject in Serenade will be missing, along with the compositional technique available from ballet’s presentational methods. What the new videos showed last week were the many ways the classical tradition can be consciously or unconsciously ignored in the name of “advanced” art. Here is what the current management of the company condones and encourages in “new” work.
Sidra Bell’s “pixallation in a wave (Without Wires)” was an example of the type of dance produced regularly from today’s university dance departments. (Bell was an Adjunct Professor at Barnard College and is now a lecturer at the University of the Arts. She has had an independent dance company of her own for two decades.) “pixallation”’s musical score was by Bell’s father, although there was little noticeable relation between the dance movement and the paternal contribution. There is a strong sense of the over-calculated about this choreographer’s dance style, which is “academic” in the sense of being an evident product of the dance theory courses that characterize higher education’s grip on the art. (That is, dance regarded generally from many angles except the aesthetic, a category which is now considered politically suspect because “elitist”.) Bell’s appended interview with Wendy Whelan (the Assistant Artistic Advisor of NYCB) featured language used in many dance departments, including progressive clichés and “compassionate” ideological jargon. In other words, Bell can “talk” a dance, while the actual invented movement for her performers remains opaque when it is not thin in idiomatic texture. Dance theory from the universities tends to evolve at some discreet distance from the collaborative place where traditional dances have always been made. The Bell video used four NYCB dancers photographed in various locations around Lincoln Center. This approach is termed “site-specific” because something of evident landscape and architecture may be found reflected in the dancers’ material. On the evidence here of one’s senses, we must take Bell’s word.
A few years ago, I am informed that there was a conference of American university dance department personnel at Lincoln Center, with a public discussion between them and representatives of New York City Ballet. Reportedly, the dialogue became heated at one point on the subject of current and future choreographic practice, and there was a general consensus that no common meeting ground could be found between higher education’s theoreticians and local ballet’s practical producers for paying audiences. Following the encounter, one NYCB official rendered a verdict upon further colloquy: “Never again!” But with the appearance of Sidra Bell’s academic dance at the Koch Theater’s next fashion gala, the impregnable walls will have been breached by American academia. (Perhaps the British choreographer Wayne McGregor’s 2010 Outlier was a precedent. He holds degrees from several universities and is resident choreographer at the Royal Ballet. The accurately titled Outlier persists in the NYCB repertory.)
Andrea Miller’s “New Song” plunged her dancers into the Plaza’s reflecting pool. As Miller put it when interviewed, the choreographer wanted her four dancers to “become one with the water”. Obviously, what we were witnessing was a form of “therapy” for performers denied by the pandemic their opportunity to perform at the Koch during a regular season of ballet. Miller is a product of dance studies at Juilliard. The choreographer is being offered an opportunity to show her work before a large, nearby ballet audience, so the arrangement was not only therapeutic but potentially win-win all round? (A secular form of baptism? But into what faith?)
Jamar Roberts’ “Water Rite” was also unable to resist that reflecting pool since he also ultimately consigned a soloist, Victor Abreu, to its depths. Roberts hails from Alvin Ailey’s dance company. It was no surprise that the new work’s movement idiom resembled old-style modern dance. Since Abreu’s legs were submerged in the pool’s liquid element, Roberts’ movement material used a great deal of upper body signaling. In this “Rite” there was a bit more conventional relation between the dance and the musical score (by Ambrose Akinmusire). Roberts insisted in his interview with Jonathan Stafford (NYCB’s Artistic Director) that somehow dance on video is more “real” than live dance in a theater. Is this not a good example of modern media reification? If so, the medium indeed becomes the message, leaving dance and dancer far behind.
The other fan of video and film dance turned out to be homeboy Justin Peck, whose “Thank You, New York” was revealed to be a public service announcement on behalf of all of us who have survived the pandemic (so far) thanks to the many people of our great city who have been on the front lines from Day One. I am afraid that this was the literal, heartfelt take-away from Peck’s produced “ballet”. The choreographer, who is also NYCB’s Resident Choreographer and Artistic Advisor, is sincere to a fault. Peck’s digital artistry (he was his own video director as well as choreographer) was not really tested by the conventional pop choreography on display. Perhaps inspired by his recent work on the forthcoming film version of West Side Story, Peck indicated his chief current mentor by referring to Spielberg as “Steven”. Peck’s future is clearly Broadway and commercial filmmaking. His 2017 Pulcinella Variations indicated that he is not at home in classically-based choreography or music.
As you can see, the New Work Festival gave us academicism, therapy, modern dance, and videography in place of ballet. Does anyone at NYCB actually preview the work of those who are commissioned? Does no one advise the recipients that City Ballet is first and foremost a ballet company with certain standards? Or will the company ultimately have to change its name to New York City Scandals?
The fifth Festival work was by Pam Tanowitz (and Russell Janzen, co-choreographer and dance soloist). You may be pleased to hear that “Solo for Russell: Sites 1-5” was not as unwatchable as Tanowitz’s recent Bartok piece at NYCB. This choreographer appears to see individual dancers as exotic fashion models. Janzen was posed as though for a Vogue shoot against the Delacorte bandshell, both in tights and in colorful drapery which floated in the New York breeze. The windblown effect was the most eloquent movement in the video. Otherwise, the dancer was treated as a fetish object. (Was this intended as a critique of the art form in general?) Tanowitz can appear naive when it comes to the classical construction of ballet movement, but this simulation of faux-ingenuousness fails. In an interview, Tamowitz cannily stressed that she regards herself as a “modern dance” choreographer and that what she attempts is the evocation of “atmosphere”.
This clears up a number of questions that some of us have pondered over several years about how to classify Tanowitz's works. Their weak distillation of Cunningham and Trisha Brown and their general lack of cumulative effect take them into areas of experimental theater rather than into concert dance. She is definitely not comfortable on a ballet stage. Once again, did no one at NYCB look into her stylistic predilections before commissioning her? Surely the selection process is not so helplessly beholden to dance modes beyond the ballet? In Tanowitz, you have a theater mind in constant search for a movement language. She does not settle upon one potential mode and develop it. She exploits what idiom or style excites her immediate curiosity and then, when the moment has passed, moves on. (She is today’s Queen of Style.) A provisional palette is the result of her explorations, not a finished canvas. When interviewed, Tanowitz parrots current cant about the necessity for “agency”, but she never leaves the impression that she has taken serious responsibility for her own artistic aims. Those await eventual discovery somewhere down the road? Thus, to theory, therapeutics, reification, and technology, you could add Tanowitz’s cult of personality and inherited style among the Festival’s methods of avoiding the ballet tradition. She specializes at best in a weak-tea pastiche.
Over the weekend that ended the Festival, having traversed five nights of not-so-New Works, Master and I watched a streamed version of Four Quartets, with staging by, yes, Pam Tanowitz. Having been rejected for participation by NYCB’s Choreographic Institute five times over the years, she is currently honored on the “media”. She has become known with a vengeance. There are any number of famous lines of poetry to be discovered in T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, but I have to confess to a limited tolerance for his late-career religious mode. As Kurt Vonnegut once put it, at a certain point in his not-so-abundant oeuvre, this revered versifier began sounding like the Archbishop of Canterbury. The weight of the world and the next one, too, for good measure? Likewise, there are some handsome sculptural moments in Pam Tanowitz’s contribution to the 2018 theater version. But much of her plastique can resemble one of those adagio movements in a Ratmansky ballet about commune residents clinging to one another without mercy. There’s a likewise Hallmark Card visual sensibility on tap here. At any moment you expect a sparkly snow shower to rain down during an Eliotic change of season. Actually, there doesn’t seem to be much connection with the Eliot poem in Tanowitz’s tableaux. A recitation of his The Waste Land could accompany her spectacle with equal effect. Perhaps better. At one point I thought I caught an allusion in a pas de deux to Fokine’s Le Spectre de la rose. (In his text, Eliot refers to the virtuoso Nijinsky in that ballet.) But no such luck. Eliot is into agonic self-help. Tanowitz helps herself to his earworm apothegms.
The positive critical response to the theatricalized Four Quartets is a good example of what Master and I call “category slippage”. The production really isn’t a dance work, although there are some very fine young dancers employed. The combination of poetry, music, movement, lighting, costumes and scenic design is offered as something like a variant of Music Theater. I’m referring to works like Stravinsky’s Renard or Martha Clarke’s Garden of Earthly Delights. Or a number of effusions by Anne Bogart or Peter Sellars. Like Clarke, Tamowitz rifles through canonic styles and Great Works. She gives herself (and her audience) a guided tour of cultural rites and ruins, while commiserating with everyone over the need to appreciate the Significance Of It All. Tanowitz’s palid Quartets is the result of invoking a Cunninghamesque dance style without its dynamic rigors. Or pushing the release technique of Trisha Brown toward short-breathed inanition.
The literary and social critic who was the more interesting version of T. S. Eliot claimed that enduring work must have intense moments and a subsurface patterning that recognizes artistic inheritance. Here is the quote: “[T]he highest imagination will combine the maximum intensity of immediacy with the maximum implication of pattern.” Tanowitz can deliver an isolated stroke that pierces, but large shaping seems beyond her. Perhaps because larger dance gesture is implied in the immediate detail. The result is that Tanowitz’s movement qualities do not complicate themselves so as to become self-productive from within. Her performers do not look challenged by the aborning idiom of an individual work or from an ongoing repertory language. They look dedicated to suggesting shifts in “atmosphere”. They are generally reduced to scenic properties. Tanowitz may appear humble before her “experimental” artistic process, but as Eliot pointed out, there is a right and a wrong kind of humility. Living art does not stop short of evident challenge.
Back to that Festival week. Commissions for such projects appear to go to recognized veterans of the dance scene. There is no reason to think that NYCB management is scouring the Gotham landscape nightly for truly young and undiscovered choreographic talent with classical skills and taste. (That is, you would think, the job.) Prior recognition in the wide dance field may be the main or only requirement. And that field contains a variety of styles, all of which appear to be of equal interest to the company’s advisors. As a result, selective curation among unidiomatic models could lead to what Henry James called a “deterioration” of an inherited artistic language. Eliot was conscious on his own critical watch of guarding against a “degeneration” in tribal discourse. Something like that stylistic and formal failure now looms at New York City Ballet in the absence of a consequential and redefined classicism. The company may need a more focused selection process for future commissions. This has been a Public Service Announcement.
P.H.
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