DTH Aims High

New Bach. Photo: Rachel Neville

Here's the thing about being a Ballet company. There is a standard canon that must be mastered, a kind of core curriculum that you must pass in order to be awarded a metaphorical degree, which allows you to go on and do whatever the heck you want. Said canon includes a list of difficult steps, such as the fouetté (for women) and the double tour en l'air (men), in addition to including some classic standards in your repertory. You can embrace that canon—as have most major ballet companies in New York, including Dance Theatre of Harlem—or ignore it. Choosing it means not only that you're serious about being a part of the continuum of classical ballet, but that you're accepting failure as an option, but admitting that you have a ways to go. And, of course, mastery means just that. The company performed at the Rose Theater last week in its second return season.

DTH, by that standard, has some work to do. Electing to perform Petipa's Pas de Dix, sections of Raymonda's final act from 1898, indicates that the company (reconstituted last year under Virginia Johnson's artistic direction) has high goals and is serious about pursuing them. Keeping that in mind makes it somewhat easier to watch the young troupe attempt these difficult moves and at times fall short. Ballet can be a cruel art—while it can't ultimately be held to a binding standard, such as timed speed or first across the line—it can be graded and compared to ideals of perfection. That said, there were many lovely performances, including by the two leads: the serene, precise Ashley Murphy and Da'von Daone, with his explosive jumping ability.

DTH's second season in its rebirth provides many reasons for optimism. Two of the works I saw last year were reprised: Swan Lake Act III pas de deux, and Return (1999), choreographed by Robert Garland. This year, Nayara Lopes, magnetic, with a supremely flexible lower body, performed the Black Swan with Samuel Wilson, once again confident and strong, with sailing grand jétés, and the ability to finish a double tour in arabesque. Return, again featuring Daone, remains a terrific show closer, with its crowd-pleasing R&B score and combination of ballet, jazz, and instantaneous switching from effete ballet to goofy club idioms.

New Bach was choreographed by Garland in 2001, and with its proximity style-wise to Return, it might have been better served being separated on the program by another dance. It, too, blended classical ballet with jazz-inflected moves. The women walk on pointe, sinking into their hips; it resembles the strange way supermodels slink down a runway. Pamela Allen-Cummings designed the elegant rhinestone trimmed navy costumes. Lindsey Croop, leggy and suave, led the cast, which looked at ease and happy to be performing such a witty and fun dance. But don't let this light-hearted dance overshadow the fact that DTH is serious about tackling the classical idiom.

Company note: Michaela DePrince, so memorable in last year's run, left DTH to join the Dutch National Ballet's second company. While her personal story of survival is riveting, and her astounding ballon and flexibility are missed, it gives DTH's other accomplished dancers more of a chance to shine, and shine they did. Here's hoping she returns to New York at some point, on tour or with another company, so we can see her artistic progression.

Music—a cool stream of water amid hermetic dioramas

The Hilliard Ensemble, showing versatility as movers. Photo: Mario Del Curto

In I went to the house but did not enter, Heiner Goebbel's music-theater work in the White Light Festival, originally produced by Théâtre Vidy de Lausanne, the four singers of the Hilliard Ensemble appear trapped—nearly static figures frozen in three hermetically sealed diorama-like settings. In the first act, to a faint dripping sound, the members of the renowned Hilliard Ensemble—David James, Rogers Covey-Crump, Steven Harrold and Gordon Jones—are dressed in trench coats. They pack up the furnishings of a stuffy parlor, dismantling the curtains and vacuuming the rug before rolling it up, in advance of singing Goebbel's musical setting of TS Eliot's The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. They then do it all in reverse, replacing the furnishings at a glacial pace. The vocal section evokes liturgical songs—repeating tones in close intervals, with one line shifting a half-step. It's glorious sound amid mundanity, tedium, and the implications of a life-changing event, whether it be simply changing locations or the possibility of death—or the reverse. 

The changes of the elaborate sets in the Rose Theater proved to be the most action-packed sequences, performed by the stagehands in near darkness with the curtain raised. The second setting is the front of a house, complete with clay tiled roof, gutters, a dumpster out back, and venetian or vertical blinds that open to reveal the house's occupants in three apartments, plus a workshop hidden behind a garage door. The men alternate sung lines by Maurice Blanchot about life and death as birds chirp and airplanes and police sirens pass by. A stark, leafless tree's shadow is cast on the house. Again, the banal is elevated to the universal through song.

Before the next set change, the singers gather around a bicycle like spies exchanging information and sing a lovely song setting of Kafka text, with the refrain of "I don't know" in close, shaded harmonies, ending with a big verbal wink: "It's a wonder we don't burst into song." Touché.

The third set seems to be one corner of a rose-wallpapered hotel room, complete with an oversized bed, a thermostat, and a cheap tv. Beckett is the source for the text, phrases like pretzel nuggets popped into one's mouth—salty, crunchy, nearly meaningless. The men wander in the room; one turns on the thermostat, which hums. They gaze out the tall windows which let sharp light into the dark room. They set up a slide projector and screen, showing nostalgic images of family vacations. The final image gives hope: instead of a still image, it is a film of a stream which burbles and glitters—like music, a source of life amid the stasis of a man-made world.

A Star (Merkens) Shadowing a Star

There is only one Mark Morris, for better or worse. Even though he hasn't figured out how to subdivide or clone himself, he managed to wear several hats during the Mostly Mozart run of his Dido and Aeneas at the Rose Theater (through tonight). First and foremost, he is choreographer of this gem of a production, one that remains an outstanding work in his oeuvre after 23 years. Second, he is the conductor, in the orchestra pit having a jolly old time, right across from the powerhouse mezzo-soprano Stephanie Blythe (her voice raises the roof), and other crack singers. Third, and somewhat vexing, if unavoidable, his ghost lives onstage in the dual roles of Dido and the Sorceress, now danced by Amber Star Merkens.

It's not that Merkens is subpar. She's engrossing, emotionally complex, with a whiff of the tragic. As much as I've admired her in her 11 years with Mark Morris Dance Group, she has remained unknowable, unlike so many of the company's members whose personalities have become as familiar as old slippers. That mystery has been part of her trademark. She is physically commanding, with sure, clean lines, but more likely than not bearing a placid facial expression evocative of the Mona Lisa. She communicates primarily with the rest of her body, reserving for herself whatever psychological underpinnings roil beneath the surface.

Mark Morris is one of those performers whose magnetism is a force of nature. Whatever he's performed in, he'd be the one to draw the eye. He has innate technical skills—notably his sense of balance and centering—to make any dancer jealous. But beyond his technique, his presence has always been undeniable, his sheer force or personality combined with a healthy dose of camp and humor. As Dido/the Sorceress, these traits seemed to multiply exponentially, intoxicating us in the audience along with the delightful Purcell score and the dramatics unfolding onstage via the mimetic, rhythmic movement. It will never be possible to strike the memory of Morris in these roles, alongside Guillermo Resto as Aeneas, nor should it be. It just isn't perfectly fair to the dancers who followed in these roles. (Incidentally, I fondly recall Bradon McDonald's interpretation of the roles; he perhaps came closest to Mark's exuberance, if with even more ferocity.)  

Today's Dido remains engaging in different ways. Domingo Estrada Jr. is a strapping, sweet-natured Aeneas, and Maile Okamura and Rita Donahue are Dido's smart-moving right-hand women. Merkens switches handily between the stricken, midas-nailed Dido and the sinister Sorceress in part by unpinning her hair, which, when draped over her face, looks vaguely like Morris' did back when, but also with her unironic thrill in being evil. She'll never be Mark—no one will—but we take pleasure in her subtlety and with what she chooses to share of her profound gifts.

Mark Morris Dance Group at Mostly Mozart, 8/25/11

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Mark Morris Dance Group at Mostly Mozart with Renard and Socrates.

http://www.thirteen.org/sundayarts/blog/mark-morris-dance-group-at-mostly-mozart/1586/

"Renard." Photo by Stephanie Berger.

Watching Mark Morris Dance Group last week at Rose Theater, an annual highlight of Lincoln Center’s Mostly Mozart Festival, I was suddenly aware of the absence of many of the company’s longtime members who have retired in the last year or so. At any moment, I expected David Leventhal, Julie Worden, Bradon McDonald, June Omura, and Joe Bowie to bound onstage as they had for ages, joining the familiar faces of sophomore and freshman dancers that now cheerily peopled the stage. Of course the company is pretty stable as they go, with constant minor flux, but it does seem to have undergone a wave of generational change recently.

Cunningham and Bokaer: Legacies Touring and Vanishing, 7/21/11

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Cunningham: Merce Fair, and Jonah Bokaer's On Vanishing at the Guggenheim.

http://www.thirteen.org/sundayarts/blog/museums/cunningham-and-bokaer-legacies-touring-and-vanishing/1481/

On Vanishing. Photo by Michael Hart.

The end of an era began two years ago, when Merce Cunningham passed away. After an intense period of (ongoing) mourning by the dance world and the world at large, plans were unveiled by the company for the ominously titled Legacy Tour, which is in its final stages, after which the company will disband. The third-to-last New York phase took place last weekend as part of Lincoln Center Festival. (It will appear in BAM’s Next Wave Festival in December with three programs, and then leading up to New Year’s Eve at the Park Avenue Armory. Then, kaput.) But meanwhile, at the Guggenheim a few days prior to “Merce Fair,” MCDC alumnus Jonah Bokaer was quietly adding to his own oeuvre (and, in a sense, to Merce’s) with a polished, solid work, On Vanishing.

Constructing with Light, 7/13/10

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Saboru Teshigawara at Lincoln Center Festival

http://www.thirteen.org/sundayarts/blog/performance/constructing-with-light/863/

When Saboru Teshigawara was last in the Lincoln Center Festival with Bones in Pages (2006), the set was a huge part of the performance. A wall of wooden cubbies, thick books with their pages fanned out, shards of glass. It seemed that the theatrical setting was every bit as important as the three performers. (Four, if you count the raven.) So it came as a surprise to see that Miroku (which ran last week as part of Lincoln Center Festival) employed no set, and also that it was a solo for Teshigawara. It wasn’t a question of whether this respected performance artist would take command of the theater with such minimalist elements, but how?

The elaborate lighting was key. Designed by the choreographer (who also did the varied sound with Neil Griffiths and Kei Miyata), it ranged from a dangling, manipulated bare bulb to make shadow puppets, to straightforward spot and focused lights, to creating architectural constructs with myriad projected rectangles of blue. In one version, it appeared to be a wall made of huge blocks of ice. Other versions, with horizontal sections partly lit, hinted at the arctic sky, or being deep underwater. Still other iterations had the state-of-the-art light grids flash vertical segments sequentially, very quickly.

Despite vying for attention with the lighting for much of the hour, Teshigawara’s precise movement held the eye. It largely avoids describing anything specific, and is unconnected to classical or familiar vocabularies. At times, he withdrew into his body, and at others, he opened up, releasing all his stored energy. And yet each mode — jittery, lyrical, heroic, feral — seems to allude to some archetypal emotional or physical state of being. Evoking psychologically and materially universal states of being in the Time Warner mall — now that’s magical.

Image: Saboru Teshigawa in Miroku. Photo by Stephanie Berger.

Mark Morris—Keys to the Family Car, 8/21/09

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Mark Morris Dance Group at Mostly Mozart, Rose Theater.

http://www.thirteen.org/sundayarts/blog/ballet/mark-morris%E2%80%94keys-to-the-family-car/745/

When you first got your driver’s license, did you take your parents’ car out? Perhaps tentatively at first, and then with more confidence each time? And yet, it was always your parents’ car, and always would be, but you got used to it, and maybe they got used to the idea of you in it. Well Mark Morris has had the proverbial keys to the parents’ car—Lincoln Center—for several years now. Even so, given his puckish nature, he’ll always seem like the teenager in the Buick Roadmaster. And that’s not a bad thing.

Lincoln Center, where Mark Morris Dance Group has performed regularly in recent years—with more frequency than even BAM, near his headquarters—dominates Manhattan’s culturescape in the genres of classical ballet, music and opera. Morris is no neophyte, with his company nearly 30 (!) years old. His modern style is straightforward, rhythmically attentive, often joyous. And yet he structures his dances with the great care of a classicist, from the full-length works to the shorter ones. It’s earthbound and exalted all at once.