Letter from New York: Dance                      
                                                by Stacey Harwood

In 1947, the great dance critic and poet Edwin Denby wrote “Wartime, here as abroad, made everyone more eager for the civilized and peaceful excitement of ballet.  And in wartime the fact that no word was spoken on the stage was in itself a relief.” 

Roughly twenty years later, when I was not yet a teenager, I had my first introduction to ballet when my parents took my siblings and me to sit in the nosebleed seats in the New York State Theater at Lincoln Center.  This was during the height of the Vietnam war and looking back, I wonder if my parents sought refuge in dance as those a generation before had.

            And this past summer, as the numbers of casualties and injured of the Iraq war continued to climb I recalled Denby’s observation as the crowds poured out of the Metropolitan Opera House, having just seen “Swan Lake” and onto the concourse at Lincoln Center where the annual “Midsummer Night’s Swing” was in full throttle, with swing dancers exuberantly lindy-hopping to the jumpin’ jive of the Nelson Riddle orchestra.  While the move from 19^th century Tchaikovsky to mid-20th jazz is jarring, it is also entirely continuous with dance in New York City, where on any given evening one finds performances in theaters, parks, and parking lots.

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            There were many dance highlights this past year, but few can clear the bar set in April by the Mark Morris Dance Group during its too short April season at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.

            The Morris company makes its home in a spiffy new building near BAM yet the company touches down on its home turf for only a few brief visits a year.  Next time they’re here, Brooklynphobes should set aside their hesitancy and hop the B train to Atlantic Avenue, have a drink in the fashionable second floor lounge, and settle in for a couple of hours of thrilling entertainment. 

Photo: Elizabeth Felicella

The company is young and diverse, physically, ethnically and in educational background.  Their individual credentials suggest that many reached a crossroads during their senior year at, say, Brown, when they chose between pursuing either their PhDs in American Literature, or going for the curtain and joining up with Morris.  Lucky for us they chose the latter. 

            Morris’s program at BAM began with the delightful and funny five-minute “From Old Seville” in which Morris proves that even at 47 years of age he’s still got game.  The sole prop on the dimly lit stage is a bar, where the short sturdy Lauren Grant enjoys a drink.  Enter Morris, looking like Tevye with his belly pressing against his shirt, unruly hair and a goatee.   The physical differences between the two dancers immediately set up the sight gag.  They each knock back a drink, slam the shot glass on the counter, and saunter to center stage where they dance to Manuel Requiebros’s A Esa Mujer while playing castanets.  At a pause in the music, they return to the bar like prizefighters retreating to their corners and knock back another drink.  Once again, they circle each other on the dance floor.  This continues, and with each successive round the dancing becomes more flamboyant. 

Grant dances with white-knuckled concentration while Morris flies about with abandon.  They are utterly serious in their dance and it becomes hilariously clear that they’re engaged in competition more than courtship.  Morris might even be dancing as much for the benefit of the bartender rather than his female would-be partner.  The match ends inconclusively as Morris and Grant each leave the stage alone.

            This amuse bouche is followed by the achingly beautiful “Someone is Coming to See Me Tonight,” set to nine Stephen Foster songs performed live with instruments and vocalists at side-stage.  Stephen Foster (1826-1864) is considered the first composer of the American popular song (“Oh! Susanna”, “Swanee River”, “Beautiful Dreamer”). He died penniless with a scrap of paper in his pocket where he had written “dear friends and gentle hearts,” and the music that inspired Morris seems to be addressing the audience with this salutation. 

The nine dancers are dressed in pared down period costume: the women in paneled dresses of muted color and fabric that drapes and glides with each move, the men in simple tights and shirts.   Using an odd number of dancers always presents an interesting challenge to audience expectations; how will they pair up?  Who will be the odd one out?  And what will happen to him or her? Is there some kind of judgment to be made of the one who remains single?  Here the dancers form brief partnerships, or collect as a group on stage as if engaged in the kind of labor done during Foster’s day.  Their stretching and reaching sometimes toward the sky, others toward each other communicates longing.  From time to time a dancer stops abruptly and leaves the stage, a reminder that life is full of interruptions and departures that leave us bereft but with the imperative to carry on.

The program concludes with the forty-five minute “Rhymes with Silver” on a stage that is a riot of color.  The full range of Morris’s influences is on display as dancers group and regroup in exciting formations that tweak convention.  They waltz and polka.  Morris even tips a top hat to Fred Astaire’s brilliant “Bojangles of Harlem” (Swing Time) in a sequence during which when one dancer leads fourteen others in a waltz.
Photo:Stephanie Berger    

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            Hobbes’ description of the life of man as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short,” could well apply to the life of a ballet dancer.  They begin young, train their developing bodies to perform unnatural feats, must pursue their art with slavish devotion, and must leave when those in other careers are just hitting their stride. Unlike professional athletes, they rarely have millions in the bank. 

This year’s New York City Ballet summer program was marked by the retirement of Peter Boal and Jock Soto, two principle dancers who had spent their entire careers with the NYCB.  Both Boal and Soto were not yet forty. 

            Boal joined NYCB on April 30, 1983, the day its founder George Balanchine died.  He and Soto were among the last to have first-hand memories of the great choreographer.  Over the course of his career he inherited the leads in two of Balanchine’s most enduring ballets, Apollo and Prodigal Son, both made for the Diaghilev Ballet and first performed in Paris in the late 1920s.

            Soto joined two years earlier than Boal.  His debut was all the more striking because of his exotic good looks and charisma.  He doesn’t quite fit the mold of the Balanchine male dancer; he’s relatively short and stocky — a prima ballerina on pointe would tower over him.  Yet over the course of his career he became known as an expert partner, attentive to a ballerina’s needs, and a reliable landing strip for her leaps across the stage.   He also possessed the ability to dance with the verve to match big music and fill up an empty stage where a larger dancer with less radiating energy might seem lost.

During the company’s summer season in Saratoga Springs, NY, Soto could be seen with other dancers lounging poolside at the Victoria Pool, a WPA project with an elegant swimming pool surrounded by a Classic bath house.  The memory of Soto sunning himself against the background of Doric columns brings to mind Auden’s In Praise of Limestone with its “nude young man who lounges / Against a rock displaying his dildo, never doubting / That for all his faults he is loved.”                                                              Jock Soto.  Stravinsky Violin Concerto

Soto became a teen idol to the extent that such a term could be applied to ballet dancer.  The fledgling ballerinas from the local dance programs would gather behind the SPAC amphitheater to watch him warm up and blush with excitement if he seemed to look their way.  When he later made his entrance on stage, their squeals from the back of the orchestra section could be heard throughout the theater, as if it were 1943 at the Paramount with Sinatra as the headline act.  Damian Woetzel remains as a male lead with such rock-star status among ballet groupies.

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            “Swan Lake” may well be the best loved, most frequently performed and oft parodied ballet, including “The Nutcracker Suite”, which gets its greatest exposure during the winter holiday season whereas “Swan Lake” is performed year round. 

 “Swan Lake” has inspired generations of choreographers, from Petipa to Matthew Bourne, whose “Swan Lake” features all male swans and is set in a sinister urban environment.  There is a “Swan Lake”

photo:  Love! Valour! Compassion! (1997)

Barbie doll.  The Icelandic rock singer Bjork topped everyone’s worst-dressed list when she wore a swan-inspired dress to the Academy Awards in 2001.

Last summer the American Ballet Theater performed the ballet for a week straight.  “The New York Times” devoted a good deal of its Arts and Leisure Section to various critics’ fantasies of the ideal cast.  Good seats were hard to come by.  Ballet fans in search of a scalped ticket appear more desperate than those looking for tickets to a Knicks game or Rolling Stones concert.  There will be no replay on the evening news; a good review of a missed performance only makes matters worse as a fan imagines what might have been had he or she only paid closer attention to the subscription brochure that arrived in the mail months earlier. 

             There are two emblematic dance sequences in “Swan Lake”:  “The Dance of the Swans” comes during Act II, when the melancholy Prince Siegfried has escaped from his partying friends to spend time alone in the woods. He happens upon Swan Lake where he meets Odette and her flock.  The four swans, enter from the far right with arms crossed forward and holding hands.  In traditional ballet versions, they travel across the stage in unison — moving diagonally and forward and back — by a series of galloping steps, shallow hops and jumps, and mesmerizing quick toe work.  Their steps are precisely timed to the music.  In the experimental Matthew Bourne version, the dance is played for laughs.  The four swans touch each other only occasionally and the choreography integrates arm and head movements intended to imitate swans rather than suggest them.

At the end of Act III, Siegfried has by now fallen for the evil seductress Odile, the daughter of the Black Swan who has changed her to look like Odette, the white swan.  They engage in an ecstatic Pas de Deux, the climax of which is Odette’s variation. She executes thirty-two consecutive fouette, or turns on point for which one leg acts as the whip that propels the dancer’s body around and around.  Audience members perch on the edge of their seats as the moment approaches and erupt into wild applause when the turns are complete. 

Why thirty-two fouette’s and not thirty, or thirty-three?  This feat was put into the choreography because it was a party piece of Pierina Legnani, first prima ballerina of the Maryinsky ballet; and every ballerina since makes it her objective to match the number.

In the PBS film of the Royal Ballet’s 1982 “Swan Lake” the prima ballerina Natalia Markarova allows herself the slightest smile as she approaches the end of the turns. The only evidence that she might be out of breath is the slight flaring of her nostrils as she takes her bows. 

For all of the lower-body pyrotechnics demanded of the a “Swan Lake” cast, the arm work, or port de bras, required of the ballerinas is extraordinary as it is intended to conjure the graceful flapping of a swan’s feathered wings.  The movement begins in the back, with a subtle flexing of the shoulder blades. The ballerina rolls her shoulders forward while rotating the upper arm to create the illusion of undulating limbs without joints. 

 The swans keep up these movements throughout their dances. Odette, the seductive black swan, uses it from time to time as a way to keep Siegfried attracted to making her vaguely familiar.  Odile’s arms are an extension of her mood; they can express arousal or fear or maternal protectiveness . 

At the close of Act II, when Odile must leave Siegfried, she hovers on point, her back to the audience, wings flapping as if to propel her off stage.  With tiny steps she exits stage right, a swan gliding over the surface of water.

Two of American Ballet Theater’s Odette/Odiles used this action to convey the emotional complexities of their character.  Michele Wiles begins her exit slowly, seemingly torn between wanting to stay with Siegfried and knowing she must leave.  Roughly mid-way through her departure, she picks up speed like a swan taking flight.  When Gillian Murphy’s Odette leaves Siegfried, she does so with startling ‘now she’s here, now she’s gone’ quickness that suggest a raw impulse to survive.  She is a fierce Odette/Odile whereas Michele Wiles is tender and vulnerable.

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            After such evenings of dance, one ideally takes a quiet walk to keep the fleeting images and sweet music from slipping away.  This is nearly impossible to do in New York City, where the first sounds to greet the departing audience might be a swing orchestra, or blaring horns of taxis, or screeching subways, the kind of music that city dwellers grow to love.  At least it isn’t the evening news. 

© Stacey Harwood 2005-2006