9. Going Viral: A Review of New York City Ballet by Cheryl S.
So much can happen so quickly! Especially if you have an assistant like my Sandy. I was telling him my ideas for a new ballet based on Louis Althusser’s concept of critical ideology, and I was using my fingers on the table at Starbucks to represent the dancers and their movement, when Sandy said, “Let’s video this!” So that’s what we did. He shot my manual choreography in extreme close-up, posted it on YouTube as “Digits Ballet” to music by Charles Gounod, and it immediately went viral. In two days we had eight million viewers, almost as many as the new Kitty Lovvies video. Sandy says we should really do a sequel and ask Rita Moreno and Nancy Pelosi to appear as manual guest artists. He claims our video is my Cochran Revue breakthrough piece, and I must maximally exploit the internet with dance videos from now on because digital is the future in all of the arts. He’s probably correct because I’ve been getting job offers left and right.
I heard from a geneticist, Dr. Vassily Wonkov, who emailed from Yakutsk, Siberia. The Wonkov Ballet Company needs a full-length work on global warming. Wonkov says he has some very interesting dancers (he called them “Denisovans” – could he mean Denishawns?) who need a narrative ballet connected with a scientific project involving the genetic engineering of plants. The aim is increased release of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere to return Siberia to the warm climate it had millions of years ago. Wonkov writes that the magnetic North Pole is moving again and headed straight for Yakutsk, and something must be done asap before it arrives. He wants a Skype session with me (and Sandy) to discuss the particulars. Sandy has heard that Siberians are highly educable and dexterous (his words were “hale and hot”), but it’s a long way to go for just one gig. Sandy feels that the perfect dance maker for the project would be Wayne McGregor (especially if they would give him a permanent or long-term, residency) and that if it is cold in Yakutsk, maybe the short-term solution would be space heaters, just like here in New York. Anyway, we’re in touch with the scientific institute there which feeds dancers into the Wonkov Ballet (!), so we’ll see what happens.
Then I got a telephone call from Beijing (!!), where a French lady (Madame Beach) is asking to meet with me on her way back to Paris and her new ballet company, Le Swing. She says I have beautiful hands in the video, and the French ballerinas need to work on their port de bras and manual skills. She thinks there is so much you can do with les doights. I could make a ballet and inspire the Parisian Swingers in those areas. She also says that there may even be a New York version of the company in the works. This is very exciting. She asked me if I had ever read Adrienne Rich. (I haven’t but now I definitely will!) I really feel like I am exploring new artistic territory as an AFBC (American Female Ballet Choreographer).
And right here in New York City, there is a former ballet producer, Louise Ebersdorf, who telephoned and wants to talk to me about choreographing for a dancer she sponsors – an international ballerina-type from France. Ms. Ebersdorf says she has always loved the art of ballet, and she asked if I knew the works of Henry James or Ivy Compton-Burnett. She has a staff that reads those authors to her, and she invited me to a reading. (Sounds like she is on up in age.) Her husband, Mr. Ebersdorf, is stationed in Odessa, Texas and is so involved with fracking that the couple haven’t seen each other (or spoken!) for many years. Ms. Ebersdorf seemed a little vague about scheduling, but I’m certainly willing to talk about a project. She asked me if I liked cats. (Some people have allergies, as we know.) With all this potential activity on the job front, I am so glad I have Sandy for help with world-wide correspondence, not to mention as my dance captain and teaching assistant. He’s a gem.
We’ve been to the opening weeks of the New York City Ballet winter season, and it has been so helpful to me as a young choreographer. As I mentioned, I wanted a ballet dealing with Althusser’s reformulation of the received Marxian concept of ideology. According to Althusser, ideology has to be revised regularly to accommodate new aspects of reality (this is what my “Digits Ballet” implies with matrix wipes in the editing), and that means we would have to indicate not only what the old and new realities would be in the dancing, but also the ideological re-fashioning that dramatizes the change. (Spoiler warning: on our video, the right hand is the old reality and the left hand is the new.) The plan for my ballet was to make the dance itself the “new reality”, but that means setting up an “old” versus a “new” style in terms of dance spectacle and showing the moment of crucial transition. (Sandy and I have had long discussions about how to make this happen formally. We are highly self-critical when we argue, and our debate is very healthy.) Putting ideas on stage without words is difficult.
I was reminded of this when I saw Justin Peck’s new ballet Principia. It appears to be about the breaking of modern icons and its aftermath in our contemporary iconoclastic world. Goodness knows we live in an environment in which mighty leaders and institutions have been revealed to have feet of clay. The inevitable question is: where is the critical reevaluation of our beliefs that must follow in response? That is what is largely missing in our society today; is there an answer to that query in the new ballet?
Several times during Principia we see corps de ballet members forming vertical spires around the stage. The orchestra simultaneously strikes a chord that sounds like crystal resounding from a blow, while a single dancer approaches and taps the top of the individual construct with a hand (!). Immediately the spire shatters to reveal a lone dancer standing within it, stripped of authority, so to speak. I take these tableaux to indicate the moments when the old ideological certainties deconstruct before a new reality and we await a new set of values to take their place. I can certainly see the production of new values when Tiler Peck dances in this ballet; she is a fount of movement discriminations. (And I also admire Harrison Coll for the fantasy in his dancing.) But Principia didn’t add up for me as an ensemble work. Its movement textures do not build on the theatrical idea.
The statement J. Peck is making is obviously an official one, almost a manifesto from a company’s resident choreographer, so in addition to the difficulty of melding ideology and art, the ballet aims at summation and perhaps the suggestion of a potential program to redress loss, turning idea into action. Having gone viral now myself, I know the heavy sense of responsibility that J. Peck must have faced. That is why I was happy to see the great Balanchine’s Serenade earlier in the season, a ballet which – if it has a practical, programmatic aim -- limits its subject to known romantic themes and poetic foreshadowing. I would be more convinced with J. Peck’s portrait of the necessity for -- and consequences of -- iconoclasm if he made more of a contrast between the Befores and Afters of those crystalline smashups. And if the score by Sufjan Stevens did so as well in musical terms. Without that contrast, nothing goes viral on the NYCB stage; it’s just super-slick S.O.P. The new work ends with the entire cast confronting its audience by lining up downstage for a stare-down, very American Modern Dance. Then the curtain descends. As Sandy put it, “Echo Boomers sometimes return a hollow boom.”
But Balanchine’s Serenade! In Jeff Buckley’s words, it is just So Real! From the moment the female corps de ballet shields its eyes from the intense stage moonlight with its hands (!) and then withdraws them and lowers the collective gaze in a kind of love-sick anguish, you can identify (or at least I can). What are these women going to do (action!) about heartbreak? There are three of them. There is the Waltz Girl who will learn what to do with her future. There is the Dark Angel (who Alexandra Danilova claimed represents the present wife). And there is the Russian Ballerina, who is a creature out of the past, a kind of Other Woman who invades the ballet to state her claims upon the man who once betrayed her. And in the end, the Waltz Girl decides to be a ballerina and enter a professional alternative to dependence on a male love object in her life. (I can so sympathize now that I am a choreographer. And a female.)
There is a kind of three-part dialectical structure in Serenade: present, past, leading to a future. The opening movement (the Sonatina) shows the stage world the Waltz Girl will enter and learn from. For example, the Dark Angel has a section where she seems to be taken away by a chariot formed by some of the other ballerinas. So here is an image of today’s deep longing for change. The Russian ballerina dominates the third movement (the Tema Russo), and we eventually find out in the final movement (the Elegy) that she made a mistake in the past that now she regrets, because the man we meet there will never be hers alone. She’s a brilliant back street woman. (We saw Tiler Peck in the role – an image of justified female vengeance. So real. So today.) And in that final movement, the Waltz Girl makes her decision and commits to a life in the arts as a ballerina. There you have it: the present longing for change, the past error that led to such need, and the apotheosis that synthesizes a future. Very Hegelian.
The great Althusser discovered toward the end of his life that you can use your hands in ways that you come to regret, tragically. We (Sandy and I) have to be very careful now. We want to be hands-on. Digital mastery may point the way to our future.
C.S.
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