64. Dance Details: Lifar, Forsythe, and Teicher, by Pippa Hammet
Where is Madame Beach when you need her? I have been watching dance on the Internet this last week, and I could have used Liane’s pointers on how to react to the works on display, primarily the Royal Swedish Ballet’s production of Serge Lifar’s Suite en blanc and a new William Forsythe dance, The Barre Project. Our Parisian advisor is in deep Siberia, where the Snow Creatures roam. She is sadly landlocked-down like so much of the world under the pandemic. I checked with our Cheryl, but even she has had no luck obtaining an email response from L.B. Travel is out (no trans-Siberian express, I gather), and I’m sure dear Liane must be miserable since she likes to move about globally, wheeling and dealing for new ballet talent. (Liane – Ballet’s Big Foot -- is now convinced, I hear, that she herself discovered Cheryl and Sandy as young, talented choreographers. You should hear our covetous Louise on that topic!) If there is one thing La Beach knows, it is the Big Picture in world ballet. So easy to become parochial here in New York, what with so little touring by international ballet companies. (This was true even before the pandemic shutdown.) Communing with Liane, if only by email, is always an educational experience.
The Royal Swedish Ballet’s production of Lifar’s Suite en blanc has been made available for streaming, and I must confess it disappointed me. Under the current direction of Nicolas Le Riche, the Swedish dancers demonstrate a level of classroom skill – POB, circa 1943 -- but little more. (There is always the possibility that I am insensitive to a native Swedish inflection in the video performance.) Made by Lifar during the Occupation of Paris by the Nazi army, Suite could be said to describe a proud level of technical accomplishment, subsequently freeze-dried for future productions. Perhaps it is one of those ballets which memorialized an advance in skill never thereafter surpassed, even by its originating ensemble. The ballet was made for such famed ballerinas as Yvette Chauviré, Lycette Darsonval, Micheline Bardin, Marianne Ivanoff, and Paulette Dynalix. Possibly each of those women brought a personal charm and fragrance to the premiere. But I have my doubts. One problem is that there is no one central ballerina role. This is essentially an ensemble work, and although hierarchy is suggested (there is even an elevated platform at stage rear to clarify company rank and file), Lifar has aimed at a parade of étoiles rather than the celebration of a single muse. If there was to be a star of this ballet, it was the choreographer above all. Its ensemble accomplishment gives off a glow of self-satisfaction and more than a touch of received complacency. Sounds like Lifar, non?
Lifar described the style of his ballet as “neo-classical”, but we all know how loose that category can be. Not only did he rely on its association with a local academic tradition, but with the French dramatic school of Racine, Corneille, et al. Here is a ballet that advertises its ability to maintain the Big Picture in historical and political terms. And here is a vision of the art that is reassuringly mild, almost bland, in its modernist ambition and Art Deco chic. A suffocating good taste reigns throughout. Sublimity has been almost militarily conscripted and tamed. No liquid skies, no azure halcyons. Everything is in its place.
Mark Franko has written recently about the evidence for Lifar’s collaboration with occupying forces even before this ballet’s premiere. The times in which we now live might allow certain balletomanes to claim that Suite is an example of a fascist aesthetic, along the lines described by Susan Sontag in her notes on “Fascinating Fascism”. I am suspicious of applying loaded ideological language to aesthetic forms like ballets. Certainly, Lifar’s ballet is a riot of virtue-signaling for the French school. Lifar does not really possess a developed classical idiom of his own. His is a pastiche decorum. The dance rhythms he allies to Lalo’s unassertive score feel predictable and four-square. Even the titles of the various pas (La Cigarette, Serenade, La Flûte) do not resonate against what we see the ballerinas trace in their pas. I will admit that Lifar’s ballet does hold the attention better than Alexi Ratmansky’s music hall response to the Lalo music for New York City Ballet.
In general practice of our beloved art, it is the lead ballerina’s refinement of dance detail against her ensemble’s broader choreographic idiom that permits her simultaneously to elevate her dance gesture and to throw reciprocally the corps de ballet’s material into relief as an approximation of her high eloquence. Even as she is separated by achieved technical and artistic eminence, the lead ballerina is revealed to be part of the same school as the ensemble, her variant an extension of the common, achieved idiom. She transfigures her corps de ballet, and it claims her as its rightful leader. Thus, in a good ballet, we are watching a stylistic dynamic in transparent “political” action, and we are granted a glimpse of fresh formal achievement. The authentic ballet relates the choreographer’s dance thought both to an inherited past and to the present strengths of his ensemble. All of these matters are rendered legible and felt beyond any ideological aims. In ballet art, a term like “fascist” would be too blunt a category to describe an aesthetic vision of formal cooperation and shared agreement achieved only through dance spectacle. It is all in the details and their design. I have always assumed that Frederick Ashton’s Scènes de ballet takes this concept of the art as one of its primary subjects.
Suite en blanc does not arrange itself around a central performer. Its star is, indeed, Lifar. He is its operative Max Weberian charismatic leader, and Franko has suggested that Lifar wished to use the German reception of his ballet as a chief recommendation for the position of trans-European ballet führer, following an assumed Axis victory. But the work’s absence of choreographic detail for the leads reduces large patches of the ballet to kitsch. The work reaches for a conventional classicizing frame without achieving significant content. Its sense of ballet history and style might be said to be skewed to the right.
Throughout Lifar’s ballet, the ballerina’s somatic presentation is flatly en face. Even in a diagonal passage, she’s not contoured. And the danseurs are demi-caractère in their loping returns to place. When the standard for principal performer is frozen in pedagogy (rather than extended through choreographic invention), the lead dancer becomes a false idol. The incense burned at her pretty feet is cheapened through rank academicism. Suite en blanc’s Northern cousin becomes Harold Lander’s Études, not Bournonville’s Konservatoriet. The recent ballet Acht Kinderszenen by Matthew Brookoff comes closer to the Danish masterpiece.
If Suite en blanc is not describable as “fascist”, I can see how some viewers could identify “gay” or “homosexual” touches in its staging. “La Flûte” has the entire male corps decorating the stage with a reference to Petipa-style display: a bevy of male beauties arranged in a supine semicircle behind the ballerina. And Lifar tops that impropriety by having the men rise and stand in a “handmaid” position right out of French music hall. (So Ratmansky, that.) If only we were watching a ballet by Léo Staats. Now there was a French choreographer!
And that brings us to The Barre Project (Blake Works II), William Forsythe’s latest video presentation, which streamed twice on the Internet last week. Forsythe has always virtue-signaled a postmodern process in his work and, specifically, a deconstructionist stance toward traditional ballet. Since our Madame Beach was a disciple of Jacques Derrida, perhaps she would have some insights into the latest example of Forsythe’s “ballet ballet” style. My problem is that this choreographer’s innovations, however philosophically inspired, go unfelt by the audience in the performance. When Forsythe’s Dresden ensemble, The Forsythe Company, closed in 2015, some of us hoped that he would move on to a new style of composition, related to some tradition of ballet beyond the punchy, flashdance mode of last century. It appears from the evidence of Barre that nothing has changed in Ballet Ballet Forsythe.
We still get those punctuated battements that make his women look locked and loaded. Even this version of legato movement has a drive that looks ominous. I’m sure that in Forsythe’s eyes the “dance” is pure movement invention, without overt expressive intent or residue, but unfortunately some of us come to ballet ballet with a knowledge of what has taken place on its past stages, and Forsythe’s researches do not efface those memories. That inherited context must be weak indeed in his own memory and thought.
My chief problem with the Forsythe version of our art is that it obscures the very things that bring us pleasure and insight via the tradition: the individual movement qualities of the ballerina or danseur, under the influence of a choreographic idea that stretches those unique, developed strengths. Forsythe’s attempt at novelty replaces those effects with ideations. His material substitutes a range of response from his immediate performers with the “extreme” dynamics and stretched positions that only claim an intellectual justification. Any observable movement details are Forsythe’s, rather than the evident dancers’. The dance personae are willed, applied from without rather than released from within. The ballerina’s contribution is mere cushion for the choreographer’s masterstroke. Any accent she may achieve is a fugitive one.
The best examples of Forsythe performance I have seen have usually come from young dancers who sneak something of the contemporary dance club onto his ballet ballet stage. In the present video example, both Tiler Peck and Lex Ishimoto (from “So You Think You Can Dance”) manage to suggest a demi-caractère ingredient that reeks of after-hours at the Basement, rather than anything having to do with French theory. Perhaps this is the guilty pleasure that Forsythe himself takes in his work: finding a vernacular space for the individual dancer to introduce her or his sly comment, despite all the shackles and buttresses he can impose. Otherwise, Forsythe’s works are basically technical displays within a narrow margin of classroom achievement. We’re at a lecture-demo, yet again. And perhaps Forsythe hopes for future work at various ballet companies around the globe.
There is also the dire effect of Forsythe’s musical choices, which tend toward synthesized bombast, rather like the unrelenting Czerny score for Lander’s Études. The aural-visual effect is one of engulfment, as the heavy beat reduces the dancers to video tick-tock figures lost in black-box space. There is a kind of theatrical perversity in this, Forsythe’s movement gestures serving a monolithic pathos. It adds evidence to one of my theories: that Forsythe is not really a dance mind but, instead, a creature of the theater who sees the art of dance as incidental décor. It is too bad he has to use living dancers to achieve his vision. They inevitably contradict his intentions through detailed physical reflex. As Juvenal suggested, Opposuit natura! Even Nature objects.
There is a difference between deriving theory from a successful work of art and the direct attempt to turn theory itself into a work of art. In his love of the arts, Derrida knew the difference. Without dance detail, Forsythe only manages to produce yet another version of the intense inane.
How reassuring to leave the tendentious and the pretentious for actual dancing. So gratifying to turn from works which evidence the high anxiety of a job application to a variety of dance artistry which creates the effect of effortless invention and casual elegance. The dancer-choreographer Caleb Teicher recently presented his troupe, Caleb Teicher and Company, at the Guggenheim with a new work to Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue. I myself missed that performance because of a schedule conflict for my first vaccine shot, but Teicher is currently all over the Internet. His company shows evidence of an awareness of tap dance, jazz idioms, social dance (especially the Lindy), and the American musical theater tradition. The Teicher ensemble creates a fresh shimmer of rhythmic information that suggests an aborning choreographic voice.
Teicher is already known to many in the New York audience as a tap dancer. He has appeared over the last decade as a member of the Michelle Dorrance and Camille A. Brown companies. His choreography has responded to scores from Bach to American swing band, and this range is clearly the result of Teicher’s own musical-dance skills and sensitivities. His tap sound is rhythmically precise and tonally modulated. There is a facility in his performances toward translating dance fantasy into percussive patterns that are both fleet and interwoven. He knows how to build a dance. There is a wonderful bounce and flyaway suspension in his own legwork that allow his silhouette to shift radically from moment to moment for poetic suggestion. Here is a soloist in the Astaire tradition of rhythmic extension of tap design into plastic elaborations for the whole body. The dancer pays passing tribute to traditional rhythm tap, but he decorates his stage with theatrical and dance hall styles. His moves are eloquent.
It is this dancer’s facility with stylistic boundaries and allusions that strikes the viewer immediately. Take his boy-girl duet to “I Love You So Much”. We are in the world of American musical comedy, specifically the material for dance leads that includes references to ballroom partnering. Teicher mixes tap skills with comic-operetta moves that refer far back to Victor Herbert and weddings of painted dolls. The dance would be pastiche were it not for its deadpan humor. Somehow it never becomes “camp”. Its details are true and seem blithely produced.
In his unaccompanied "Singapore Lindy Revolution" solo, Teicher provides an expanded glossary of tap rhythmic formulae in which his command of regularly shifting tempi is virtuoso. We hear and see the choreographic thought that goes into apparent improvisation: the various sections of the dance grow out of one another toward new versions of aural density. The dance is also a study in physical balance maintained despite the speed and compass of the dancer’s footwork. It ends with a satisying shave-and-a-haircut punctuation from the audience.
In his “Almost Like Being in Love” big band solo, Teicher creates a version of the tap-dance-against-itself number that Astaire turned classic with his “I Won’t Dance” in Roberta. In Teicher’s version, the operative word in Lerner’s lyrics is “almost”. Teicher’s dance wittily equivocates, the male infatuate’s discovery of possible emotion, at first forcefully considered and then casually dismissed. The dance metaphor persists and grows in the viewer’s memory.
I can also recommend various examples of this dancer’s brilliance at Lindy Hop jams, liberally represented in videos on the Internet. Some of my readers may have an interest in the social form. In addition, Teicher’s skill and exuberance on display there make clear one source of his choreographic vocabulary and a performance standard for dance detail which he imports for his more formal dance designs. It is the absence of such a standard of relative measurement for achieved particulars that I have noted in the work of Lifar and Forsythe.
Teicher’s project for an inclusive popular dance idiom would honor all of his stylistic resources. He possesses an apparent openness to formal possibilities as well. Teicher has the entire American pop music tradition to aid him, lucky man. He also has his vivid theatrical imagination to support his discoveries. Various native producers are always planning a big tap revue aimed toward Broadway. Once the pandemic allows the Great White Way to reopen, Teicher would be the obvious talent to spearhead such a never-ending dream. One question: where is the vernacular composer who can write fresh new music to inspire new tap today? Teicher would be the one to reward such a find.
P.H.
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