80. Too Much: New York City Ballet, “Tar”, “Blonde”, “Decision To Leave”, and “Amsterdam”, reviewed by Master Raro
I suppose that I am becoming a grouch as I grow older, but it does seem to me that today there are too many examples of unwonted excess in the air around our Ebersdorf Tower. New York City is famous for being too generous with its cosmopolitanism, but recent examples of avid merchandizing have left me in high combatant mode, waking up to a day that will again batter the barter button and to an atmosphere of ostentatious urban surveillance that is finally much Too Much. Luckily, our dear boss Louise Ebersdorf has retreated in her plans to enter the political arena, but the hurly-burly of The Season now jostles us in our streets and slips gaudy flyers beneath our doors. Maybe I should ask Pippa to take over my job(s) for a weekend while I find a nice, quiet bed-and-breakfast retreat in the mountains upstate. Or, rather, visit the ballet or take in a movie with a friend or friends, especially now that Covid masks are optional.
Some examples of my newfound sensitivity to Mucho-Muchness. Trump as victim-hero: can’t his supporters see that this man can only handle so much reality on screen or off? Asking him to connect is beating a dead pachyderm. The Democrats are also guilty: Too Much optimism. Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta: too much alt-reality. Ye: the garrulous influencer whose only real ambition is to become a much-feared living meme. Art-destroying climate activists: enough of their adhesive and gustatory C.O.R. (Confusion of Realms).
Among the gentler pursuits of our culture, surely the way current arts and crafts watch over us has become a mite too algorithmic? The assumptions about our standards and tastes may have gone too far? Or not far enough? The Metropolitan Museum’s Fashion Gala has become too safely predictable in its outrages. For American Ballet Theatre to revive Alexi Ratmansky’s Whipped Cream assumes a great deal about public tolerance. For New York City Ballet to take its Fashion Galas into a second decade is reminiscent of what the Brits would call “overegging the pudding”. Anything conceived and directed by Ivo van Hove will rely on his idea of our concept of the hyperbolic. As you can see, the pursuit of what the New York Times calls Arts and Leisure incites a type of Big Brother surveillance, so like those live TV cameras on a typical Chinese street. Like a conscription-happy Uncle Sam, Too Much wants you!
Art is usually a matter of just proportions. I took two of my friends – Cheryl and Sandy – to performances of New York City Ballet’s fall season, and I am happy to report that, as Goldilocks discovered in her fairy tale, we were able to find some performances that were Just Right! I think much was due to the Balanchine ballets themselves, which go a long way toward adjusting their poetic dance ratios toward full audience assimilation. His ballets don’t feel like they are hovering over your shoulder, breathing in your ear, presuming automatic likes.
The young ballerina Unity Phelan had an extraordinary season, appearing in La Sonnambula, Episodes (the Concerto), Divertimento No. 15 (third pas de deux), Vienna Waltzes (the Der Rosenkavalier finale), and the Bizet Symphony in C (second movement). My friends and I caught them all. Readers of this site are well aware of Phelan’s steady rise in the company. She traces her balletic line upon each Balanchine role through a nuanced control of movement qualities, playing with both attack and a graded release of tension. With deft inscription, she reveals a subtle musical intelligence. A choreographer is lucky to work with Phelan because her mind is always quickening toward movement transformation as well as continuity. Such graphic artistry was first evident several seasons ago in her ballerina lead in Balanchine’s Haieff Divertimento. She remade that ballet for our eyes and ears. Those choreographers who have used Phelan at NYCB and elsewhere have so far merely referenced her powers, rather than expanded them. Only in the Balanchine ballets does Phelan exult and grow. The current City Ballet audience has grown with her.
What can happen to a company which does not nurture and redefine its dancers’ artistry in new works? Without freshly transformative roles, ballerinas wither on the vine, indulge parenting, become dance-makers, or retire early. Or they become vocal on social media, criticizing their parent organization from within. We are now seeing examples of such phenomena at NYCB, aided and abetted by philistine press coverage.
Tiler Peck always has something illuminating to say in Tchaikovsky Pas de deux and her Symphony in C (first movement). She is a reason for repeat visits to NYCB. I am always disappointed in the way new company ballets fail to tap Peck’s many highly developed skills. The more seriously problematic example of this phenomenon is Sara Mearns, who has never had a new ballet which addresses her several unique qualities. City Ballet is content to be a company without a contemporary choreographic vision of consequence. NYCB ‘s core audience asks only that new work show fresh content, a command of craft, and a connection with the company’s choreographic lineage. Instead, it gets fashion galas. And whole groups of highly trained dancers arriving on the Koch stage despite the Covid epidemic’s shutdowns.
Here is my list of the women who stood out this season: Ashley Hod, Emily Kitka, Emilie Gerrity, Mira Nadon, Indiana Woodward, Sara Adams, and the young Baily Jones. Among the men, I was happy to see Joseph Gordon, Harrison Ball, and Jovani Furlan across the repertory. At the end of the season Cainan Weber was impressive as the Harlequin in La Sonnambula and in the third movement of Symphony in C. I am waiting for the day when Anthony Huxley will at last be given a ballet worthy of him. To watch Huxley in the Justin Peck solo to Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings (the music which accompanied the body bags in Platoon), now stripped of the Sophia Coppola videography from its earlier streaming version, is to witness another tragedy of fashion.
At the end of the season the company produced a performance of Symphony in C that was one of the best renderings of the ballet in recent years. We got Tiler Peck and Jovani Forlan in the first movement, Unity Phelan and Alec Knight in the second, Bailey Jones and Cainan Weber in the third, and a towering Emily Kikta with Aaron Sanz in the fourth. Cheryl and Sandy and I were made very happy at such a concerted show of performance strengths.
Writing recently on this site about the movie Nope, I mentioned a new totalizing genre of self-protective film-making: the film that tries to include everything, everywhere all at once. It’s the Compleat Movie, so you only have to see one every other year to feel you’ve done your duty by the seventh art. I was pleased with the fleet, focused first half of the new Todd Field film, Tár, with Cate Blanchett as a monstre sacre symphony orchestra conductor brought low by #MeToo charges. There are smart satiric touches throughout the work that put Paolo Sorrentino and Ruben Östlund to shame. Todd made two fine films (In the Bedroom and Little Children) at the beginning of his career and then disappeared for a very long time. Blanchett is a technical wonder, but for my taste the film’s script becomes a little too Michael Haneke in its psycho-social finale. I can understand Field admiring the endless facility of Haneke, but the Euro-imagery here (ticking metronomes, subterranean tunnels) comes too late in the narrative to develop theme. The film becomes freighted with an imported significance.
One of the movie’s critiques of its heroine is her worship of Leonard Bernstein’s televised Young People’s Concerts. I have been reading the “autobiography” of Mary Rodgers entitled Shy (edited by Jesse Green, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2022), and there she describes the committee Bernstein assembled to construct the scripts for those famed television programs. (Rodgers was one member of the group. Lenny felt he needed additional help to penetrate the minds of tots.) Lydia Tár is seen mooning over that panel’s word-craft at an advanced moment of her public shaming. Field’s screenplay can be wickedly funny. I look forward to the director’s next film. Hopefully, we will not have to wait so long.
It is possible for a movie to be too clever – too technically flashy – by more than half. Decision To Leave is directed by the South Korean filmmaker Park Chan-wook, he who gave us Joint Security Area, Old Boy, and The Handmaiden. A visually busy policier in which a detective falls in love with a woman he is investigating for possibly murdering her husband, the new film is even more exhausting to watch than a Wes Anderson movie, so many are the red herrings and fractured clues cascading across the screen. The first two-thirds of the film are seen from the detective’s point of view; the last third from the femme fatale’s. Because the exposition of the “male gaze” is so hysterical, Decision feels schematic. Hitchcock made the formula function more involvingly in Vertigo. If you are an addict for police procedurals, you will have a field day.
Blonde is based on Joyce Carol Oates’ exploitation-exorcism of the Marilyn Monroe legend in a plodding six-hundred-page novel now brought to the screen by Andrew Dominik. My friends and I greatly admire Dominik’s 2007 western The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. Blonde is a very long and very faithful translation of the Oates’ omnium gatherum. Almost every received idea about the famed career of the luscious comedienne is here, touched up by Dominik in sequences that have a von Stroheim monumentality. Certain of the scenes are hard to forget, and the performance of Ana de Armas is truly impressive. The portrait of a Hollywood ménage à trois is convincingly handled (the men help Norman Jean develop the outlines of “Marilyn”), and the glimpses of the Arthur Miller marriage are touching (she helps him interpret a youthful love from his past). I was disappointed in only one area of the movie: its ending. Because the film’s POV is highly subjective, the final medicated collapse of Monroe is heavy-handed. A bit of restraint might have been welcome. Dominik makes clear that Monroe faced aging out of her wonderful “Marilyn” creation, with no real guidance for the future from her colleagues, lovers, or friends. It is unfortunate that this exceptional film has been reviewed as an act of insolence. But, as its director has pointed out in interviews, his movie is an examination of a collective “image”. As such, Blonde is much more interesting than its source novel.
Speaking of bad reviews. David O. Russell’s Amsterdam made many early responders very unhappy in their critiques. First of all, it cost $110 million. Second, it appeared to be a light-hearted treatment of a serious subject: the attempt of a covert fascist cabal to take over the U.S. government. Third, it featured many starry actors in small roles. For example, Taylor Swift appears dramatically, only to be pushed into a New York street where she is quickly dispatched by a vintage automobile. Despite these objections, I enjoyed the film. Russell is, after all, the director who gave us Spanking the Monkey (1994), Three Kings (1999), and American Hustle (2013). The film stars Margot Robbie in a role that makes references to Anna Karina in the late Jean Luc Godard’s Bande à part. Robbie is charming, beautiful, and touching throughout. Perhaps critics were thrown by Russell’s improvisational ensemble acting style. Or perhaps they simply didn’t respond to his combination of whimsy and ferocity. The male actor that grasps what is needed here is Robert De Niro, who plays a retired WW1 general resisting conscription into a moneyed right-wing plot. De Niro knows exactly how to focus his line deliveries. He plays with his part. Bravo! And the film’s art direction evokes its period settings with economy and distilled affection. I can recommend Amsterdam – if you can find it at this late date.
As you can see, each of these four films could be (or has been) accused of some form of Too Muchness. Each has a claim on an important topic under current discussion. Tár brings up #MeToo. Decision To Leave is structured around gender issues. Blonde deals with the hurdles women must face in the public arena and with the issue of abortion. Amsterdam has its comment on neo-fascism. There is in each case the danger of Too Much Meaning, especially in regard to hot topics. I suspect that the problem is that the screenplays of each film were not allowed to complicate themselves and thus the paraphraseable “subject” used to raise production funds still lingers in the air to affront public resistance. Not enough time for full development.
And at the ballet, there is always the problem of not enough rehearsal scheduled for the creation of new works: too little time. I gather that many new ballets at NYCB get only six weeks of preparation. (The repertory is now so overstuffed with Robbins-Martins-Ratmansky-Wheeldon-Peck holdings, they require a big share of the rehearsal schedule in addition to the Balanchine works.) New ballets are not necessarily made by veterans who know how to work quickly. Tyros slow things down. The emphasis on commissions is now often on a contemporary dance idiom that is foreign to the company, far from the academic vocabulary that the dancers command – yet another drain on time and energy. The current requirement for novelty – one style from the Joyce Theater brought uptown, and then another and another – means that the new ballets can show a consistent blur in execution. In addition, the NYCB audience appears slap-happy from such diversity in taste: the fans applaud anything and everything. Certainly the challenge of practical adaptation is there for the dancers, who must take care to avoid injury in the many foreign idioms. And their technique can suffer. For an example of that eventuality, all you have to do is attend an evening of American Ballet Theatre.
Where are the Balanchine revivals that we need at NYCB? Where is Sylvia Pas de deux? Where is Minkus Pas de Trois? A video by a rising dancer on the NYCB site recently claimed that Divertimento No. 15 was the only Mozart work ever choreographed by Balanchine. What about Symphonie Concertante and the Violin Concerto? Did the NYCB management approve that video? Why has Don Quixote not come back now that Farrell is available to coach it? Instead, we get endlessly lame novelties. As my favorite poet-savant Péguy puts it, “To make the revolution also means to put back into place things that are ancient but forgotten.”
The Administration and Board at NYCB should look into alternative possibilities for programming. Certain types of repertory diversification can be Too Much in a company’s attempt to be all things to all people. The first value to be sacrificed will inevitably be the performance values in the classical dance idiom both in old and new productions. From Petipa and Balanchine a choreographer at NYCB has presumably inherited a choreographic method, but none of the current dance-makers practice it on the level of basic craft. Current curatorship at NYCB represents a dead end not only for the future but for now. Too Much expense of time, spirit, and (especially) American dollars is producing Too Little.
Our good colleague and friend Florian has just returned from a sight-seeing tour of the Mediterranean. When he flew back home from Malta, he watched a portion of the new movie Jurassic World Dominion on the aircraft’s video screen. Lo and behold, there in vivid color was Malta’s Valetta town square used as a destructo-set for Steven Spielberg’s reanimated dinosaurs. And guess what? The citizens of Valetta have erected a statue of a Spielberg Velociraptor in their central square in grateful tribute to the millions that were poured into the local economy thanks to on-location shooting. Malta has been used regularly by Hollywood film productions since the 1960s. The battle of Pharsalus in the mammoth 1963 Cleopatra starring Elizabeth Taylor was staged in Malta. As Florian puts it, sixty-some years ago such a commemorative statue might have been a tribute to a beautiful film star. Now, the monument is to an extinct reptile. Undoubtedly, Florian’s own guided excursion was itself part of a Maltese encouragement of tourism through the intertwined cartels of international economics: entertainment, travel, government. We are all entangled in the toils and coils of big Spielberg business wherever we turn. Isn’t there a Spielberg-endowed dance studio at the School of American Ballet?
Too Much.
M.R.
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