91. Sanctuaries: NYCB’s “Bourrée Fantasque”, Sondheim’s “Merrily”, “La Chimera” and “Snow Country”, reviewed by Pippa Hammet
Our Ebersdorf Tower must defend its proposed company The Ballet not only from politicized aesthetics but against progressive science as well. Our dear Louise was approached last week by her sometime cat-wrangler Albertine – now world traveler and assistant to Valery Wonkoff at his New Jersey clinic – to propose the conscription of my employer’s prize collection of felines for scientific experimentation: namely, for mass cloning! You can imagine how our Lulu immediately reacted – No! Twenty-one times No! At which point, Albertine turned to me and meowed, “Then perhaps Pippa’s Murr can go beneath the knife!” I almost fainted at the idea of my beloved pet giving up a tissue sample in the name of advanced genetic engineering. No! Never! Murr is the one and only!
But then crafty Albertine proposed the near and far advantages. One, Louise’s current generation of precious pets would have ready duplicates, spares against aging, distemper, abduction, or various diseases. (Post-Covid, disease is much on my boss’s mind.) Two, the great Wonkoff proposes to supply our coming company with a future cloned corps de ballet, guaranteeing a matchlessly unified dance ensemble beyond any balletomane’s dreams. Albertine was also quick to remind Louise that Wonkoff has a special relationship with the French all-female ballet company, Le Swing, to which he promises to provide genetically enriched Denisovan ballerinas in coming seasons. So, it is Mapp-versus-Lucia time: Madame Beach’s Parisian ensemble against Louise’s proposed New York chamber company, each vying for a scientifically achieved balletic nirvana.
And in the middle of this international contest: my sweet Murr! I took my beloved tomcat aside, stroked and calmed him: “Not my Murr! No, not my Murr!” Rather reminiscent of the Great Cham’s consoling words when his furry one was threatened centuries ago in dear old London Town.
But our choreographer Sandy has risen to the challenge. To distract Louise in her confusion, he is devising a new pas de deux for Cheryl and Master Raro: a Cat Burglar ballet, very Roland Petit. Here is the conception. Instead of a jewel thief à la Cary Grant, Sandy’s ballet will have our Master’s Fantomas lurking to steal a sleek prize-winning ballerina puss, danced of course by Cheryl. Sandy has allegorized the situation that Louise finds herself in, thanks to Wonkoff’s shocking proposal. How can she refuse his innovative offer? Talk about artistic appropriation! The pas de deux can take the place of Albertine’s Catalytics on our opening night program. And Murr and I can take comfort seeing our dilemma turned into dance fantasy right before our eyes.
Now, that is The Ballet! A true sanctuary for the art.
As a reward, I took Sandy to see a program at New York City Ballet. I am happy to report that Balanchine’s Bourrée Fantasque looks much more Parisian-chic this season. The lead ballerinas were smart and stylish. Emily Kikta managed a rich elasticity in her phrasing, and her comic persona was very tongue-in-cheek. She glows on stage. Her partner, TJ Takahashi, is a theatrical wit. Balanchine’s big third-movement finale always works, but Alexa Maxwell charmingly held the eye throughout the length of Emmanuel Chabrier’s brilliant “Fête Polonaise”. In the second movement – led by Emilie Gerrity and Gilbert Bolden III – the ballet becomes haunting. Sandy says that Balanchine evokes Degas, high fashion models, Surrealist mannequins, and ladies of the night: all that a Dream Paris can offer the ballet’s Poet. Gerrity, as usual, was musically precise, ready for any shift in musical tempi. I am convinced that this ballet was not only another of Balanchine’s essays in the French style but also his showman’s reply to the post-World War II popularity of Roland Petit’s splashy entertainments.
And the work is another product of Balanchine’s love of Chabrier, a further footnote to Cotillion. Sandy and I were disappointed by the NYCB orchestra’s lack of tight ensemble, Gallic transparency, and rhythmic snap. I can only blame music director Andrew Litton, who is no friend to dancers when it comes to tempi. He’s into temporal extremes. (Maybe that’s how he stays awake on the podium.) The Balanchine repertory is a blessed retreat from the banality of the many new, “advanced” works presented by NYCB’s current management. That rep’s core musical component needs more attention than Litton seems prepared to give it.
I went by myself to see a performance of the recent Broadway production of Merrily We Roll Along, having been warned by my employer that the director, Maria Friedman, would doubtless be guilty of many dubious decisions on the way to a desired box-office hit. (She directed a London version years ago that Louise found deeply misguided.) And it is true that the three leads were not able to suggest the tight bond that is called for in the text. The production uses the “approved” version of Merrily’s playscript: “The Hills of Tomorrow” is nowhere to be found. It will probably take some years before a strong director will be able to overcome Sondheim’s strictures in this matter and in addition forge a tight trio from lead performers. Friedman has encouraged her cast to investigate individual “motivations” rather than the characters’ interpersonal ties, individual psychology rather than group history. (Our Louise, alas, was proved right once again.) In the meantime, I did enjoy the wonderful new musical arrangements by Jonathan Tunick, revising his original orchestrations for a smaller, amplified band. Tunick has managed to emphasize anew the way Sondheim’s musical ideas are presented in full elaboration at the beginning of the show and eventually reveal their architectonic sources in the closing scenes. This is one of the ways the score achieves its unity of effect. And I suspect this compositional strength permitted Sondheim a rhythmic variety and density that he denied himself in other projects.
I am always interested in seeing Merrily for its vivid songs and lyrics, but especially now that we know that it may be about Sondheim’s relationship with Mary Rodgers, how they might have married at one point. I always thought the musical dealt with the threat of “selling out” professionally, something the composer-lyricist observed as his coevals were steadily seduced over the years into television work and Madison Avenue. Thanks to Rodgers’ posthumous memoir Shy, we now know Merrily’s narrative may have evoked an even more personal theme for Sondheim.
Louise claims that the best production of Merrily she has encountered was the Michael Grandage version at London’s Donmar Warehouse in 2000. I’m willing to believe her, especially after enduring the heavy, effortful show now in its closing weeks at the Hudson Theater. (It has been given obligatory Tony Awards, and a video record will be made of the production.) To recover from the experience, I’ve been reading the theatrical memoirs of Michael Blakemore, the Australian-born stage director, who died recently. They are titled Stage Blood and Arguments with England. Blakemore had evocative writing skills in addition to stage expertise. Reading about his life in the theater – early inspired by the touring version of Olivier’s Richard III and eventually working alongside Olivier at the National Theater -- is an immersive experience. His depiction of the battle royale over the rise of Peter Hall as the National’s director is fascinating. You close the books wishing that we had a Blakemore now working in the U.S.
Master Raro and I went to see the new Alice Rohrwacher film at Lincoln Center. La Chimera is about tomb raiders in Italy, men who steal Etruscan artifacts from beneath its soil and sell them to dealers with no sense of their value beyond cash. Josh O’Conner plays Arthur, a British-born robber who has the magical ability to sense where the buried treasures lie. He has mysteriously lost the love of his life, a beautiful woman named Beniamina, and the film becomes Arthur’s Orphic search for her. Isabella Rossellini plays Flora, an aging music teacher who is certain that her daughter is merely missing rather than dead. Flora is surrounded by a tribe of women, who attempt to distract Arthur from his depression, offering him sanctuary, while the local band of tomb raiders roughly exploits his divining skills. La Chimera features the mythopoeic side of Rohrwacher’s art. Her magic realism is prismatic and always lightly achieved.
What you remember from one of this director’s films will be unique individuals and strong group dynamics. In La Chimera, Rohrwacher achieves a vision of ancient Italian carnival out of Bakhtin, whether in the women’s communal skills or the permanent holiday which the robbers maintain. There is a clamorous street fair that reminds one of Rossellini’s The Little Flowers of Saint Francis in its natural exuberance and unforced primitivism. The movie sends chills up the spine at certain moments, like the miracles in Rohrwacher’s Happy As Lazzaro. La Chimera is not to be missed.
Cheryl has prompted me to read Yasunari Kawabata’s novel Snow Country, and we have been discussing it continuously. Cheryl takes the work to be a portrait of a provincial geisha’s hopeless “friendship” with a married man who visits her once each year at that nipponese version of erotic sanctuary: a hot springs resort. The spa lies in the snow-covered hills of north-western Japan. He is a drifter, avoiding commitments in life, and the young woman is trapped in the demanding routine of her work. There are suggestions that she hopes he will rescue her, set her up in Tokyo as his mistress, find her to be more than just a “good girl” or “good woman”. At the end of the novel (and a total of three annual visits to sustain their relation), there is no evidence that the affair can continue. The evocation of the woman’s poignant querulousness and the man’s emotional vacuum is thorough: a detailed portrait of mutual exploitation. If the analysis of the lovers’ situation were any longer, it would be unbearable for the reader. The novel’s short length is perfect.
The man is a professional dance writer. I think Kawabata intends his novel as an allegory about the superficiality of response to the art of dance to be found in the work of supposed journalistic experts. Shimamura has educated himself in Japanese dance forms but has become bored with them and turns to the Western ballet as his new area of study. But he never goes to see ballet performances and contents himself with reading French texts (Paul Valéry, and possibly André Levinson) and collecting program booklets and posters from the Diaghilev era. As Kawabata puts it, “Nothing could be more comfortable than writing about the ballet from books.” The superficiality of his affair with Komako is paralleled with this lack of real engagement with serious dance artistry or reportage: “…hardly knowing it, he was treating the woman exactly as he was treating the western dance.” The disconnect leads to cynicism, for Shimamura “pampered himself with the somewhat whimsical pleasure of sneering at himself through his work . . .” He is a confirmed dilettante. We have all known such failed writers. We have read them.
The novel reminds this reader of certain films by Michelangelo Antonioni. The lazy, complacent immersion of the two Japanese lovers in their amatory rituals is reminiscent of the way Antonioni shows moderns falling into one another’s arms out of fear of innovation and failure of imagination. When Shimamura refers to his lover as “clean”, he probably means his superficial fantasy of her has now been perfected. Eros is a strict god for the Japanese storyteller and the Italian filmmaker. By the end of Kawabata’s narrative, the universe renders its judgment on his couple. Komako must face a dangerous act of heroism, but Shimamura’s fate is near cosmic in its desolation.
Discovering such varieties of self-deception in Snow Country, you can’t help but draw parallels with types of writing on the art of dance found in our U.S. journals. Most reports on our ballet would indicate that the spectacle is required to be little more than an elaborate distraction. The reviews and critiques have little to do with where the art comes from, where it now resides, or where it might be going. Contemporary dance reports are about as serious as a “comfortable” love affair. Kawabata allows the reader to make the connections. For him, the ballet and love are serious matters. His novel’s issues speak to us as though no time has passed. It was written in the late 1930s, and a final, slightly expanded version was published in 1947.
Here in 2024 we have the New York Times arts coverage for our amazement. I am always fascinated at how the dance writers of the Times manage to avoid any discussion of choreographic method in their reviews and seasonal wrap-ups. Individual dancers may be analyzed in performance detail – especially if they improvise -- but never the craft of real dance-makers. Does the Times think that ballets just appear among us magically? It is as though the form itself is anathema to the Times, an activity so arcane it is not to be addressed in detail. The paper makes do with bland interviews to substitute for analysis.
My favorite recent Times interview appeared in the June 6 issue where the great pianist Mitsuko Uchida was interviewed by Javier C. Hernández, and the questions were so banal that Uchida advised the journalist to go back to school to “study music full time.” The suggestion is beyond embarrassing. It is a comment on how far below the acceptable the standards of arts reporting in the Times have fallen.
And then there was the May 16 interview by Elizabeth A. Harris of the reporter Zoe Schlanger upon the publication of her The Light Eaters, a new volume on the “intelligence” of various members of the plant kingdom. What is this discussion doing in the Arts section of the newspaper? Schlanger’s project has no evident pretentions to belles-lettres. The language used in the interview is at best impressionistic in its ambitions toward pop scientific proof. The colloquy reads like two highly suggestible amateurs boosting their potted greeneries. Are Harris and Schlanger the satiric creations of an errant AI program? Does their appearance among us at this time open up a new beleaguered subject for the paper: minority botanicals? It is to howl.
When it comes to the arts, the Times is no sanctuary. Its editors have replaced text with full-page photos of personalities. Puffy profiles run riot. It’s journalistic slash-and-burn.
P.H.
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