86. Retrievals: New York City Ballet’s Spring Season and James Purdy biography, reviewed by Sandy
News from Paris! Albertine has returned with a sobering report on her efforts to stage her Catalytics for the all-female ballet company, Le Swing, and with an assignment from that ensemble toward a new ballet in which she may star. The felines (females all) flown in from Rome’s Palatine proved to be impossible to domesticate, let alone train -- many cat-fights and tetanus shots. Finally, in a coup de grâce, the Parisian animal rights cadre marched in. It seems there had been a kerfuffle at the Moulin Rouge over a snake number (a huge on-stage aquarium, a nude live Mermaid, and many terrestrial serpents almost drowned) which threatened to close the cabaret. Le Swing decided it did not wish to affront French sensitivities with a furry animal act. Louise Ebersdorf, our mighty patroness here, is concerned that New York’s A.S.P.C.A. might not prove friendly to A&P’s opus and might cancel Catalytics on this side of the Atlantic. She will protect her collection of prize kitties from such an undignified fate. Paco is inconsolable about the Parisian debacle, but at least his wife is back home, downstairs in Ebersdorf Tower’s very own cat-cave.
Albertine, scarred but indomitable, claims she has saved the situation and retrieved our native honor. (Big Lulu blanched at that one!) She has arrived with a new ballet concept that has the Le Swing entrepreneur’s (Madame Beach’s) enthusiastic imprimatur: a ballet version of the 1953 American B-movie, Cat-Women of the Moon. Albertine and Beach worked out the many particulars in Paris, and now the object is to clear rights here in the U.S. for the film’s choreographic component, its original 3-D set designs, and its unforgettable musical score by Elmer Bernstein, composed during his definitive Robot Monster period. Albertine has also offered to help cast the ballet.
Albertine has explained the importance of Cat-Women in the choreographic thought of the great George Balanchine, who was obviously inspired by its sci-fi conceits and its music-hall derivations. Balanchine loved cats and B-movies. He regularly encountered the latter on 42nd Street at its many grindhouses in 1940s and 1950s Manhattan, at exactly the time when French filmmakers were also inspired by such works at the Cinémathèque. (Think noir; think Breathless.) Not only did the showman-choreographer borrow feline motifs from Cat-Women, but the computer displays on board the film’s spaceship obviously found their way into Agon, his masterpiece with Igor Stravinsky. (According to Robert Craft, the great composer would be known to catch films at the L.A. Cinerama Dome. Both masters were cinéastes.)
I myself caught Cat-Women via streaming last night and have reported my own insights to Louise, who is dubious about the need for a stage version – except, of course, for its feline component, which could prove useful for the opening program of our proposed company, The Ballet. The film’s period style is low-budget primitive-futurist, especially in its music-hall bevy of Hollywood Cover Girls who represent the svelte sisterhood in black leotards and tights, a pride of vampiric Musidoras dedicated to invading and conquering the Earth. Director Arthur Hilton was better known as an A-movie film editor than as a director of exploitation movies. (He had an extensive later career directing television dramas.) The choreography by Bette Arlen is more primitive than futuristic, very Beverly Hills. However, the set designs of William Glasgow – especially his moon-cave with Greek temple decor -- are charming. Albertine has been commissioned to have them copied in Paris. And E. Bernstein’s music is classic Hollywood and perfect for a ballet once some contemporary Georges Auric arranges and augments the score for the stage scenario.
Albertine’s reward for her many stateside efforts? If not choreographer for the ballet (Le Swing’s own Isabella Belladonna claims first right), then perhaps the lead ballerina role of the powerful Queen of the Cat-Women. Albertine is searching for a guest American dancer for the role of the spaced-out Female Astronaut who falls into the Women’s lunar lair. In the movie she is played by the unforgettable Marie Windsor, who claimed that this was the only film in her career which she wished to forget. I’ve already suggested our Cheryl as today’s ballerina-equivalent. Cheryl and I are big fans of Windsor. My girl would be a knockout in the crucial trance pas de deux. Albertine merely smiled at the hint-hint.
Our prodigal cat-wrangler claims that during her Parisian jaunt she became close to Liane Beach’s Russian colleague, the famous geneticist Valery Wonkoff. The Professor was impressed with Albertine’s demonstrated expertise with feral mollies. Something will doubtless come of that association as well. Albertine says she will be making trips to Bayonne, New Jersey, to oversee plans for a stateside Wonkoff fertility clinic. She has requested leave-time from our Louise, who was not amused.
Here in Gotham City, Master Raro and I attended the spring season of that local monument, New York City Ballet. If there was little new on display of choreographic interest, the company’s parade of dancers through its iconic repertory had its fascinations. Certain ballerinas were missing in action through injury, Covid, or personal pique. (The absence of worthwhile new vehicles must be a continuing frustration for performing artists in their prime.) Master noticed various derelictions in addition to the ongoing series of early retirements and planned parenthoods. There are the dancers who have gratefully joined the company’s administration or migrated to its battery of ballet mistresses and masters, if not the teaching staff at the School of American Ballet. There are the ballerinas who have decided to become choreographers. There are the moonlighters (those who find rewarding work with ensembles beyond the parent organization). And certain company stalwarts have, of course, become dedicated utility performers – substitutes allowed on stage only when certain lead dancers are unavailable (see above).
There may be a kind of professional forgetfulness in operation here, ballerinas failing to remember their first duty as protectors of a tradition which only exists in the unique performance. (They may be like those vulnerable Taylor Swift fans who fight their way into a favored arena and the following day reportedly experience a form of total amnesia, unable to remember any details of the shattering experience: an army of Swiftian zombies.) Master hears that coaching at NYCB remains under tight control: only a few vetted authorities are allowed near the dancers. The NYCB corps de ballet appears strong at the moment, individually errant or highly secured though the company’s principals may be. (At season’s end there were only nine lead ballerinas on the roster; the male list contained twelve danseurs.) Master and I agree that today’s City Ballet corps is like the N.Y. Philharmonic’s distinguished woodwind section, which we found so eloquent and patient in the recent Mahler Ninth Symphony under Dudamel’s baton.
It was heartening this season to find Isabella LaFreniere cast both in the allegro role of Concerto Barocco and in the demanding lead of Raymonda Variations. Obviously, management sees this ballerina as capable of handling both the modern Balanchine idiom and a Petipa-derived role. The concept of emploi (casting according to balletic type) breaks down before a LaFreniere. There were partnering problems in Raymonda (young Chun Wai Chan is not the right build or height for her), but LaFreniere indicated a sensitivity to the ballet’s style that carried her through its many challenges. And in Concerto Barocco she brought off the grands jetés sequence down the diagonal with aplomb.
In the other Raymonda cast, Tiler Peck was lucky to have Joseph Gordon as her partner. Both Peck and Gordon gave distinguished accountings of their roles in the ballet, both in style and in musical response. Roles like this one can prevent Peck from being typecast as the company’s go-to virtuoso lead for all of the new ensemble ballets, works which are almost pointedly anti-classical and utterly ungrateful for such a fully developed ballerina. Peck requires real challenges of style and form rather than endless novel assignments in the NYCB grindhouse. Peck was the stop-time virtuoso we know well in Balanchine’s Donizetti Variations, a ballet made for her precision and wit. We regularly watch this ballerina state a rhythmic phrase and then sum it up in the fleet Balanchine plastique: clarified time values become evanescent spatial forms. Tiler Peck plays in four dimensions.
Master Raro and I were fascinated with Unity Phelan and Emilie Gerrity in the Balanchine modern repertory. I almost did not recognize Phelan in her recent Concerto Barocco, where her ballerina partner was Ashley Laracey. Phelan can shapeshift -- transform her silhouette -- here toward a lower center of gravity for the first and third movements. Suddenly, in the middle adagio there was the Phelan we know in her combination of ready reflex and stretched line. She called upon these attributes with complete control throughout her Agon pas de deux. Phelan arranges a meeting between what the mind imagines and what the senses can grasp.
Gerrity was extraordinary in Kammermusik No. 2 opposite Mira Nadon. (Here was a cast which made the old ballet look reborn.) Gerrity had the Colleen Neary role, which was equal to Nadon’s leadership in the Karin von Aroldingen material. Kammermusik became the space-age work Balanchine claimed it to be (“This is my Star Wars ballet!”). We were able to see Gerrity’s musical “reply” in the canonic repetitions, and Nadon’s untiring attack rang true. Balanchine modern repertory is in healthy shape with Phelan and Gerrity. We have been seeing them both nurtured in ballets that are more traditional in their demands: Phelan in the one-act Swan Lake and Gerrity in Emeralds and Walpurgisnacht. Perhaps it is now Nadon’s turn to show how versatile she can become. (She was early given the multiple tests of Movements for Piano and Orchestra.) The three women should be allowed full range in the Balanchine repertory.
Emily Kikta was paired with Miriam Miller for an alternative soloist-level cast for Kammermusik. Kikta was sleekly nuanced in the Neary part, and Miller was so tigerish in the von Aroldingen role she almost tore the fabric of the work to shreds. Both women deserve a contemporary choreographer dedicated to developing their very real talents.
We were able to catch Christina Clark in the lead in the Haieff Divertimento. She is close to equaling Phelan in the movement continuity of the battements développés. That is saying a great deal. And Alexa Maxwell was wholly in command in the new Wheeldon ballet, which I found very confusing if it is intended as a latter-day gloss on Tudor’s Pillar of Fire, with which it shares a famous Schoenberg score.
If the women of the company are in sore need of a serious classical choreographer, so the men must also feel the lack. In addition to Joseph Gordon, Master and I admired Roman Meija in the first solo in Fancy Free (the Harold Lang part). Anthony Huxley was expert and moving in Square Dance. And in the first pas de trois of Agon, Sebastian Villarini-Velez gave his solo the nuanced continuity and lightness of release that has been missing for many seasons. He is a stylist of the first order.
NYCB does not seem to have any current interest in a stylistic or formal lineage from its Balanchine choreographic tradition. At this rate, its essential Tree of Jacob will bear no fruit or blossom.
I have been reading a new biography of James Purdy (James Purdy: Life of a Contrarian Writer by Michael Snyder, Oxford University Press, 2022) as well as his novel Malcolm, written in 1959. Purdy interests me because of his use of a camp Firbankian humor combined with a narrative fantasy both Kafkaesque and Biblical. What holds this reader is his language, which is fine-tuned toward a dark poetry unlike any other American fiction writer that I know. (The closest comparison would be with Nathanael West.) Purdy was prolific and wrote in a number of registers, including fabulist chronicles of his ancestors toward the end of his life. Malcolm is a comic life of a male innocent. It is often very funny, especially in the several tirades of a Madame Girard, comic set-pieces that are sustained in their rhetorical intensity. I suppose Purdy is fated to be seen as a coterie writer, beloved by literary specialists but ignored by the general public. (I must be becoming a specialist.) Some of the violence and the camp filigree turn heavy-handed, but the prose can be spine-tingling. Both Dame Edith Sitwell and Marianne Moore were sensitive to Purdy’s command of American vernacular.
Here is an example from Malcolm in which the lonely protagonist endures an empty house on a fall afternoon: “It will go on being autumn, go on being cool, but slowly, slowly everything will begin to fall, piece by piece, the walls will slip down ever so little, the strange pictures will warp, the mythological animals will move their eyes slightly for the last time as they fade into indistinction, the strings of the bass will loosen and fall, the piano keys wrinkle and disappear into the wood of the instrument, and the beautiful alto sax shrivel into foil.” Purdy’s dialogue can be unforgettable. There is a jazz pianist who says that his art is what sustains him. People? “I just kind of tend to let them go, if you don’t mind me saying so.”
Purdy had many troubles with publishers, who would come and go, including his brilliant editor Robert Giroux, an awed disciple. Today, many of Purdy’s works are out of print, but there is a valuable complete collection of the short stories, introduced by John Waters. (I must get my hands on it. I wonder if there is a darkling ballet in there somewhere?) The new Snyder biography is not written with style or grace, but it represents an heroic job of research on a stubbornly reclusive subject. I was held by the story of a literary artist fighting to get into print and stay alive in Brooklyn on a tiny income from his publications. It appears to be the common fate of gifted American writers to starve. Purdy kept on writing despite general neglect and died in his nineties. His prose sings.
If – as we may be learning from Congressional hearings -- alien technology can be silently retrieved and studied in secret, why can’t NYCB retro-engineer from the ballets of Mr. B? And revive certain of his classics now missing from the producible ranks of the canon? Why should certain Balanchine classics become “classified”? Why the very loud silence on this issue? The recent news stories about higher-dimensional visitations to our 4-D world could make a Cat-Women ballet all the more up-to-date and nostalgic: potentially a winning combination in a work of art. The Exploitation Ballet might become the accepted -- however unconscious -- model just as horror and superhero films are now the preferred genre in motion pictures. (Some youngsters know no other.) Over in England, the indefatigable Wayne McGregor appears to have exhausted his verbal skills when naming a new dance (Untitled, 2023) at the Royal Ballet. He, too, stands mute.
As Louise says, we must honor the true inheritance and simultaneously redefine it. There is the high challenge.
S.
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