April Notebook: Graham, Gibney, Varone

Canto Ostinato, with Zack Sommer, Tiare Keeno, Lounes Landri. Photo: Julieta Cervantes

Seeing Gibney Company and Martha Graham Dance Company on consecutive nights in New York recently provided a snapshot of modern dance. Think of it as a big tree—with its unshakably strong trunk in the form of Graham and Lucinda Childs, plus new branches, works by younger choreographers.

The highlight was Lucinda Childs’ Canto Ostinato at the Joyce Theater, danced by the Gibney Company, which recently landed Childs as a resident choreographer for five years. Childs has worked continuously since the 1960s in opera, theater, and dance. Early on, she created conceptual pieces with the Judson Movement, and ran a company, which was disbanded in 2019. So the recent occasional Childs dance in repertory, or unique remountings, have been most welcome.

Canto Ostinato is a précis of Childs’ mesmerizing style, based on crisp body geometries and repeating diagonal phrases danced by four to music by Simeon Ten Holt. Her dances have a pared-down look, from the neat costumes by Dominique Drillot (who also designed the set and film—vertical light bars that crossed the upstage scrim), to the ethereal lighting by Tsubasa Kamei, and the result feels like the perfect amount of each element combined. I could watch this on repeat for a very long time.

The context for the dance felt a bit jarring, comprising works by Medhi Walerski (with a Euro-neoclassical feel), Jawole Willa Jo Zollar (passionate and turbulent), and Mthuthuzeli November (exuberant). The sum total certainly showed Gibney Company’s stylistic flexibility and range, so key to a repertory company. But I look forward to seeing much more of Childs’ concert dance done by the multi-talented Gibney dancers. Kudos to Gina Gibney for this invaluable recognition of one of the undersung choreographers of our time.

Chronicle. Photo: M. Sherwood

At City Center, Martha Graham Dance Company’s performances were pieces in a larger mosaic of the troupe’s 100th year celebration. As with many single choreographer companies whose founders have passed, this has evolved by necessity into what is essentially a repertory company based on Graham’s rep. Her contributions to the program were Diversion of Joy and Chronicle, two of her more broadly popular dances, at least for today’s audiences. Even after seeing these works many times over the years, Graham’s maximally expressive, muscular, yet elegant vocabulary still feels absolutely fresh. It represents what the human body and spirit can achieve with determination and training. The dancers’ bodies are so strong and have undergone such extreme training that they seem like weapons themselves. And yet the sculptural shapes formed by the recombining of head, arms, torso, and legs still feel at once fresh and fundamental. Both Graham’s and Childs’ oeuvre have been marked by a certain refinement and classicism which helps to elucidate their crisp styles. How providential that we will continue to see their work regularly for the foreseeable future.

Sandwiched between these works were Jamar Roberts' premiere of To the Brink and Back, set on the estimable Lloyd Knight. Live drums supplied a simmering tension sustained as he paced restlessly between archetypal poses. It was followed by En Masse, a premiere by Hope Boykin (both she and Roberts are alumni of Ailey), to Leonard Bernstein's music. This suite included some new musical passages, but it was so eclectic and at moments dated-sounding that it distracted from Boykin's movement, which contrasts with the technical formality of Graham's vocabulary.

Diversion of Angels. Photo: M. Sherwood

Another veteran of contemporary dance, Doug Varone, popped up with his troupe at the venerable Hudson Hall, in Hudson. Fresh off of pulling out of a scheduled Kennedy Center run, Varone received a warm embrace from the audience. The smart program, hosted by Varone and performed without fancy lights or costumes, led off with a run-through of Lux, one of his best-known ensemble works. He then recruited audience members to help in choreographing something new—he scattered the eight across the stage, and directed his dancers, one-by-one, to move toward and interact in different ways with the volunteers. This group then left the stage, and the dancers performed the framework without them. In yet another section, a pair performed a duet to a Handel aria, and then the same movement (with a coda) to Janis Joplin; the result felt markedly different and showed how music affects context. In the first half, viewers were given glimpses into the various choices that go into choreographing, and no doubt ways to better comprehend the experience of watching contemporary dance—which can often be opaque. 

Doug Varone at work. Photo: David McIntyre

The company then performed a preview of No Matter What the End, set to the Radiohead album In Rainbows, that had been scheduled to premiere soon at the Kennedy Center and which will be presented at the Joyce in May. Varone noted that he rarely uses pop music in part because it is so loaded, which was the case for In Rainbows with many of us who were very familiar with it. It’ll be interesting to see it complete with costumes and lighting, and bearing an invisible badge of honor as a symbol of resistance.

Miami City Ballet Flourishes

Hannah Fischer, Cameron Catazaro, and Adrienne Carter in
Diversion of Angels. Photo: Christopher Duggan

Miami City Ballet closed out Jacob’s Pillow’s 2022 summer festival with a flourish. The selection of repertory performed—by Martha Graham, Margarita Armas, Jerome Robbins, and George Balanchine—showed artistic and technical versatility under the direction of Lourdes Lopez, an alum of New York City Ballet. It was also proof that MCB has established itself as one of the most accomplished ballet companies now working.

The company danced Graham’s vivacious Diversion of Angels, with its trio of couples in white, red, and yellow, plus a chorus of five. The style demands some solid technique shared by ballet, most notably the ability to balance at length, canted on one leg with the other extended high to the side, and explosive leaps and jumps that expand in the air as if turbo-boosted. MCB handled these feats with ease, raising their legs ever higher, and leaping ferociously high. The Graham company’s bodies are drilled in her vocabulary continuously, sometimes to the point of exaggeration—contractions can read as gut punches, and breaths visibly chuff in and out. MCB’s rendition is softer and more fluid, befitting a more lyrical work like Diversion.

Renan Cerdeiro in Geta. Photo: Danica Paulos

Renan Cerdeiro danced Geta, a world premiere by Armas and an ode to the late Geta Constaninescu, a teacher at the MCB School. Dressed in a long white tunic, and set to “Ne Me Quitte Pas” sung by Nina Simone, the solo clicked through dramatic poses, bursts of energy, diagonal oppositions of the limbs, heart clasps, and ended with an arm sweeping to the side, a staple of end-of-class “reverences,” often a thank-you to the teacher and pianist. The devotion and passion elicited by Geta were palpable.

Interestingly, whether by chance or purpose, a similar sweeping arm move opened Robbins’ Antique Epigraphs (1984), a dance for eight toe-shoe clad women to Debussy. Each wore a different pale-hued chiffon sheath, lending a columnar, caryatid feel to dance at moments. Formal experiments, canons, and the occasional stasis dotted this work, on the more classical and lyrical side of the Robbins spectrum, even if it lacked his essential wit and snazz.

Miami City Ballet in Serenade. Photo: Danica Paulos.

Seeing it just before the milestone of Balanchine’s Serenade, to Tchaikovsky, raised some questions about the programming. There are similarities, even if Mr. B’s icon of ballet was created a half-century earlier. The ankle-grazing chiffon skirts, the formations of (mostly female) bodies shifting through geometries, and pleasing, gentle scores that accompany both, underscored the shared DNA. And of course, it’s tough for a dance to lead in to Serenade, one of the most beloved and seminal plotless classical ballets, a rich enough source to spawn a recently published fascinating book, Serenade: A Balanchine Story, by Toni Bentley. It’s part memoir, part analysis of the ballet, which remains among the most influential in modern ballet. And no doubt it must have influenced Robbins, whether overtly or subconsciously, when he created Antique Epigraphs, as it has countless other dances. It need not have preceded Serenade directly on the bill, unless the intention was to underscore the similarities.

One other nit to pick—the Ted Shawn Theater stage at the Pillow is slightly too small to accommodate the atmosphere and space required by Serenade. I usually see it performed by New York City Ballet at NYC’S Koch Theater, where it appears as if immersed in water, or in the clouds—just far enough away to remain dreamlike. At the Pillow, the dancers are much closer, so they read as human, rather than ethereal or archetypal. In the iconic opening scene, when the corps stands evenly spaced across the stage, there is not enough space between them and the proscenium, making it feel cramped. 

But who could argue with seeing a world-class company perform one of modern ballet’s greatest works, to close out a robust summer festival at the Pillow? A late summer treat, indeed.