Snowbound at City Ballet

THE NEW CRITERION

Snowbound at City Ballet

On Kyle Abraham’s When We Fell, performed by New York City Ballet.

Video killed the ballet star. At least that’s the impression we got watching the many attempts over the past year at translating the ballet stage to the computer screen. Iced out of the David H. Koch Theater, last fall New York City Ballet tried to turn up the heat for the final week of its digital fall season with five video premieres. To its credit, the pre-recorded programs gratefully brought ballet out onto the streets. Coming home from the office one evening, I happened to see one of the works in production, with the principal dancer Taylor Stanley moving fluidly, then spastically, as if suddenly possessed, as he stood up from a bench in Riverside Park.

The joy of seeing live dance—even just a few seconds of it set to recorded music—seemed far removed from the treacly, overedited final product that ensued. Created by Justin Peck, with Jody Lee Lipes as the director of photography, that sneaker ballet became just another Nike ad, in this case set to Chris Thile’s earworm of a tune called “Thank You, New York.” Really, no thanks. Another reason to pack up and move to Texas.

Despite the talent of their choreographers and dancers, the other four works fared little better. The problem was the overly redolent filmmaking by Ezra Hurwitz and cinematography by Jon Chema. In Andrea Miller’s “new song,” set to music by the executed Chilean singer Víctor Jara, the perfume was at its fullest, and was in fact quite evocative. But ballet does not need quick cuts, smokey closeups, and lens flares. Just let dancers dance.

With its new spring initiative, City Ballet has learned from the mistakes of last fall. The mandate to let dancers dance is what makes choreographer Kyle Abraham’s latest video premiere, called When We Fell, so compelling. Developed with eight City Ballet dancers during a three week residency—“COVID-compliant,” we are assured—at the Kaatsbaan Cultural Park in Tivoli, New York, the ballet offers a haunting return to form. Co-directed by Abraham and the cinematographer Ryan Marie Helfant, When We Fell captures the performers in 16-millimeter black-and-white film as they move across the Koch Theater stage and, even more affectingly, Philip Johnson’s mezzanine. Now the cameras are static, often fitted with a fisheye lens, so that the point of view resembles surveillance footage switching intermittently among feeds. In the otherwise empty theater—empty of all of us for far too long—the work feels like “night at the ballet,” or day at the ballet, with the ghosts of dance filling the shadows.

But of course, the Koch theater has not been entirely vacant this past year. Those colossal marble statues, enlarged by Lincoln Kirstein from tiny figurines by Elie Nadelman, have kept watch over the hall. With bodysuit costumes by Marc Happel, in When We Fell the dancers arrive as marble halfway made flesh. In her pantomime poses, the soloist Claire Kretzschmar enters the scene as a Nadelman sculpture herself, at times come to life, at others returning to the cold stone of the space.

Captured at various angles, this ballet, which remains available for streaming through Thursday, makes the most of the rigid geometries of the mezzanine’s architecture. The dancers move like chess pieces across the gridded marble floor. They watch one another. Then they freeze in position, as when the corps dancer India Bradley pauses in penché. Taylor Stanley is most adroit at incorporating Abraham’s liquid breakdancing flow with the Balanchine technique—two dance traditions that are not so far removed as one might imagine. Done right, the hip-hop dancing looks like ballet in reverse, with movement made strange, popping and melting down. The opening music of “Piece for Four Pianos,” by Morton Feldman, adds to the odd emptiness as it seemingly reverberates through the vacant theater.

We should not expect such ballet, at moments like this, to resolve into the Nutcracker Suite. And indeed, as Abraham’s sixteen-minute work continues, it shifts from the mezzanine to the Koch Theater stage, with dancers now overanimated by the cacophony of Jason Moran’s “All Hammers and Chains,” which sounds as advertised. As the performers dance past one another, an abundance of cabriole leaps and fouetté turns by the apprentice KJ Takahashi resolves into a pas de deux. Now the lighting designer Dan Scully shines a backlight on the principals Lauren Lovette and Taylor Stanley and it seems as if we observe them from offstage. Nico Muhly supplies the music, titled “Falling Berceuse,” for this elegiac coda. Finally the camera zooms out to reveal dapples of light that turn out to be the faceted lamps of the Koch auditorium, so well known, but here become strange. Created during a snowy residency in upstate New York, When We Fell captures that eerie, snowbound feeling of a year in frozen isolation.

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.