A Hard Nut to Crack

If you are looking for the perfect Christmas album, cue up (or queue up) The Nutcracker Suite by Duke Ellington and his Orchestra. This 1960 version arranged by Ellington and Billy Strayhorn adds new energy to old Pete Tchaikovsky’s holiday classic. When Ellington was in the studio, he explained to Columbia Records that “I thought Tchaikovsky to Strayhorn to Ellington might be a pretty good parlay.” Starting this week at The Joyce Theater, and running through January 5, the tap choreographer Michelle Dorrance continues the parlay with the premiere of her own Nutcracker set to Ellington’s recording, an album she says she has been listening to since childhood.

As America’s original dance form—and arguably its most profound—tap is the synthesis of history in movement, the sound of the melting pot of America boiling over. Its syncopated athleticism alone is thrilling. Just watch the Nicholas Brothers in 1943’s Stormy Weather—a routine shot in one take—to witness what Fred Astaire thought was the best dancing ever filmed.

A white jig reforged in the black diaspora, tap connects us to the antebellum South through minstrelsy, vaudeville, and Hollywood. This fraught past has more than once sent tap through cycles of death and revival. Its great practitioners have therefore been its great revivalists bringing the form to new audiences, from Master Juba to Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, Peg Leg Bates to Gregory Hines, and Savion Glover to, now, Michelle Dorrance.

While Glover bears the weight of history in his tap, Dorrance dances over its surface through satire. Her routines are Busby Berkeley channeled through Bugs Bunny. A certain ironic detachment may just be the only way a white woman, dancing with a mostly white company, can reach the soul, or sole, of tap.

For her opening week at the Joyce, Dorrance and her company, Dorrance Dance, paired the new Nutcracker with All Good Things Come to an End. This 2018 work set to the music of Fats Waller tells its own history of tap through vaudeville-like routines—all danced, the show lets us know, by the last four people on earth. After sweeping the theater in radioactive gear made of papier-mâché, the tappers perform a cane dance in “Cain and Abel” and shiver-tap down a river raft in “The Myth of the American Dream.” The dancer Josette Wiggan-Freud’s ingenious platform tap, in which a scarf becomes a noose, fuses the history of Jim Crow and Howard “Sandman” Sims together in one harrowing spectacle.

Dorrance approaches her Nutcracker with ironic remove. She riffs on Balanchine as much as Tchaikovsky. She also makes the most of Ellington’s swinging but short recording. The holiday party is transformed into a hopping Lindy. The “Waltz of the Snowflakes” becomes an evocative and silent sand dance. The Sugar Plum Fairy also becomes the Sugar Rum Cherry (as named in Ellington’s recording). Wiggan-Freud and her sequined Sugar Blossoms update the dance from a saccharine treat to an intoxicating tonic. Her brother and dance partner, Joseph Wiggan, fills out an extraordinary Cavalier. Their toe-tapping pas de deux would make Balanchine proud—ballet’s greatest choreographer, after all, once worked with the Nicholas Brothers on Broadway.

And yet, something here seems rushed, especially in the divertissements. Clara is played by one of the tallest men in the company. While the miscasting gets laughs, the satirical update strips the original ballet of its youthful innocence. If we can’t see the divertissements through the true eyes of childhood, the story arc is lost. The magical dances become mere punchlines, with little need for elaboration.

Michelle Dorrance is onto something with this inspired concept. I just hope she gets to retake the exam with more time on the test. A tap-dance Nutcracker continues the great synthetic potential of the form. Now, just further stretch out Ellington’s thirty-minute Suite and find a Shirley Temple to dance the Clara, and we’ll have a swinging sensation that’s still alcohol-free.

Silver and Gold

On a recent performance of New Work for Goldberg Variations by Pam Tanowitz and Simone Dinnerstein.

For all of our talk of virtuosity, it can be easy to forget the role of the instrument itself in baroque and classical music. This is especially true for the keyboard, which has seen dramatic changes in technology over the centuries. While the astonishing works of J. S. Bach are still standard today, the keyboard instruments of Bach’s time generally are not, unless we are attending a specialized performance of “early music.”

We are now far more accustomed to hearing works for harpsichord performed on a modern piano than the instruments of Bach’s own period. Musicians, however, very well know the difference between the resonating dynamics of today’s concert grand and the gentle, plucking tones of the harpsichord of Bach’s day. The question is how to interpret these distinctions when transposing a famous composition from one instrument to another.

Pianoforte, from “soft” to “loud”—the modern piano has a far greater range than the harpsichord and can quickly overpower Bach’s intimate phrasing. The great twentieth-century performers of Bach—even Glenn Gould in his famous 1955 recording of Bach’s Goldberg Variations—treated the piano like a brighter but still baroque instrument. The playing was fast and even, mechanical and at times maniacal yet ultimately restrained.

When the pianist Simone Dinnerstein went to record her own Goldberg a little more than a decade ago, she opened the well-known doors of Bach’s Wunderkammer to new light and air. She employed the piano’s dynamic range to add new color to Bach’s shimmering silver and gold. Her best-selling interpretation added both breath and breadth to the piece we thought we knew so well.

A few years ago, Dinnerstein reached out to the choreographer Pam Tanowitz to set Goldberg to dance. This would not be the first Goldbergian ballet—Jerome Robbins premiered his own famous version in 1971—but it was the first set to Dinnerstein’s romantic interpretation.

This week through Sunday the two are presenting their shared vision at The Joyce Theater, with Dinnerstein and the dancers of Pam Tanowitz Dance together on stage.Inspired by Merce Cunningham’s modern sense for shape and construction, Tanowitz set about undoing the baroque assumptions of choreographing Bach, which we see even in Robbins, and starting anew with Dinnerstein’s interpretation.

The result places not just the player, but also the piano, at the center of the action, with the dancers spinning around, sitting beside, and at times even crawling under the instrument. Tanowitz’s dance is not merely a visualization of the music. It is the embodiment of the pianist playing the music.

As Dinnerstein begins, the stage starts in darkness. Slowly her dancing fingers glow in spotlight. As the dancers enter the stage, bobbing in unison, they move like the knuckles of the hand, their bare feet patting the floor like fingertips on the keyboard.

A challenge of choreographing a complete Goldberg is to recast and renew its many “variations” for over an hour of performance time. Here Tanowitz manages to be inventive without too much distraction or cleverness. Her dancers work as hard and as long as Dinnerstein’s fingers do. Lindsey Jones must be singled out as an accomplished soloist in one particularly challenging section.

The great team of Reid Bartelme and Harriet Jung should also be thanked for their simple chromatic costumes. As the lighting and visual designer, Davison Scandrett finally does more with light angles than I thought possible. These subtle effects complete the show Without changing the color of light, Scandrett signals the different temperatures of Bach’s variations by varying the light and shadow on the face and body.

Whether it be the overhead summer sun or an oblique light of winter, the music of Bach contains every time and every season. Through this kaleidoscope of sound and movement, Dinnerstein and Tanowitz together give new form to Bach’s astonishing composition and put it out there for us all to see, the piano and pianist front and center.

Mit Schlag

Mit schlag

On Whipped Cream at American Ballet Theatre.

The story is almost too sweet to be savored. In the early 1920s, Richard Strauss wrote an extravagant ballet to mark his sixtieth birthday. Engaging the full resources of the Vienna State Opera, this “billionaire’s ballet,” called Schlagobers or “whipped cream,” was meant to reverse the fortunes of the opera house, where he was the co-director, and offer a sumptuous escape from the austerity measures of post-war Vienna. But faced with such abundance, the hungry audiences of Austro-Hungary did not bite. Another confection famously went on to take its place on the plate as the beloved ballet of the hungry billions.

There are more than a few sweet similarities between Schlagobers and The Nutcracker. Both have Divertissements of dancing chocolates, coffees, and teas. Even though The Nutcracker, with its endless delights beginning with its sublime score, cracked the nut of a ballet for children, it was not performed in the West until some five years after the Vienna premiere of Schlagobers on May 9, 1924.

A scene from Whipped Cream at American Ballet Theatre. Photo: Gene Schiavone.

Yet Tchaikovsky’s creation—made even more famous through Balanchine’s New York City Ballet adaptation—is now Strauss’s inevitable comparison. Performed next door to the home of City Ballet, American Ballet Theatre’s giddy new production of Whipped Cream is both an homage to that Christmastime spectacle and a cream pie to the face of wholesome family entertainment. If NYCB'’s Nutcracker is a ballet for the ages, ABT’s Whipped Cream is a ballet for our current age of punishing extremes.

With choreography by Alexei Ratmansky, Ballet Theatre’s artist-in-residence, and sets and costumes by the painter Mark Ryden, Whipped Cream stays true to the plot of Schlagobers, in which a boy eats too much whipped cream after his First Communion. But this new production, which premiered in 2017 and has returned to Lincoln Center for the second time, slathers on the froth in a sickly coating of contemporary corn syrup.

In many ways the ballet now belongs to its new designer. A West Coast pop artist, Ryden traffics in a popsicle aesthetic that mixes furry fandom, steampunk collage, and Japanese kawaii, or “cute,” culture. In Whipped Cream, he maniacally translates this sticky palette to a ballet of overindulgence. His set design tempts the senses like a Good Humor truck on an express ride to a very bad place. Towering Furby-like creatures abound, ably danced by company members, who should get hazard pay for performing in such giant costumes. Since this is a story ostensibly featuring children, the grown-up dancers are also scaled down by being surrounded by figures with enormous costume heads (one of which nearly tipped off a dancer’s shoulders during the evening performance I attended).

A scene from Whipped Cream at American Ballet Theatre. Photo: Gene Schiavone.

Much of Ryden’s artistic iconography has been translated verbatim to the Ballet Theatre stage, with little loss of strange effect. This is why even an image of Abraham Lincoln, from Ryden’s series The Meat Show, peers out from an upper story window of what is meant to be a Viennese street. Furry yaks and oversized bees make multiple appearances, as do the single all-seeing eye and other quasi-Masonic symbols. But it’s not all children and candies dancing in the sweets shop or up in the creamy clouds. In one scene, the overserved Boy lands in the hospital bed of a drunk doctor with a bevy of sadistic nurses, each of whom injects the Boy with oversized hypodermic needles.

Paired with Ryden’s sugary costumes, Ratmansky’s choreography distinguishes its various dancing treats. An ensemble of “Whipped Cream” dancers twirl into a diaphanous airy mixture. Prince Cocoa (Joseph Gorak, in my evening) comes off as haughty and aristocratic, while Don Zucchero (Arron Scott) plays his role flat-footed and dim. Prince Coffee (Thomas Forster) displays upstanding chivalry, while Princess Tea Flower, danced in my production by the sparkling Devon Teuscher, who took the cake, displays signs of caffeinated energy mixed with occasional weariness. A whimsical trio of liquors, led by Mademoiselle Marianne Chartreuse (Katherine Williams), also deliver plenty of the adult treats, toppling over the tippling nurses as these dancing bottles saunter on to the next party.

This rich serving of Whipped Cream can both satisfy and delight. As the lights went up on the opening scene of a cartoonish priest and oversized carriage driver—not to mention a white horse danced by two performers—my nine-year-old seatmate whispered, “I would never miss this.” For those young balletomanes who have seen it all, the phantasmagoria of Whipped Cream offers something new.

Nevertheless, for all of its family fun, the two of us agreed that the juvenile characters here were the least satisfying aspects of the show. Unlike The Nutcracker, in which real children are transformed into adults onstage and then wake up in Christmas Day apotheosis, “The Boy” of Whipped Cream (Jonathan Klein) is merely adult camp. Here is a character with hairy legs in knickers who merely transforms into something like the golden star of A Chorus Line. A show all about saccharine surfaces would taste even sweeter with some genuine depth of flavor. In this adult fancy, it still wouldn’t hurt to sprinkle in some genuine childhood innocence.