He’s more or less chosen the cream of the crop, but so do other choreographers who don’t manage to reveal them so effectively and generously. The music, except for a short opening section, is Thomas Adès’ thorny but powerful Concerto for Violin; the modest costumes are riffs on dancers’ practice clothes. In this piece, we see another side of the brilliant Robert Fairchild-intense, jagged, full-out. And we see a new Maria Kowroski, her glorious body and legs sheathed in violet, her immense extension and flexibility thrillingly exploited in tremendous lifts and manipulations. At bottom, McGregor hasn’t much to tell us beyond the fact that he’s intelligent, responsible and very capable-qualities that weren’t on display in Genus, a Euro-trashy piece featured in Frederick Wiseman’s overhyped documentary, La Danse, about the Paris Opera Ballet. But that may be the point: McGregor reflects the values of whatever company he’s working for.
That is not the case with the third of the new ballets, Benjamin Millepied’s Why am I not where you are. (Don’t ask me why only the first word is capitalized, or for that matter what it means.) Millepied’s ballets-and I’ve seen more than half a dozen of them-all reflect one thing only: his considerable craftsmanship put to the service of concept rather than content. This one is the first to enjoy, if that’s the word, a Calatrava construct: a huge double arch through which the dancers emerge and retreat-and are dwarfed by.
Here’s the idea: A young guy (the electric Sean Suozzi) is all in white, surrounded by a gang in parti-colored costumes. Two of the gang, Sara Mearns and Kathryn Morgan, are on his case. Mearns is the bad cop, Morgan is the good cop-clearly his Intended. During the course of this long work, bits of costume are added to Suozzi’s white look until-yes!-this loner is just like everyone else, conforming. Meanwhile, Morgan’s costume is suddenly stripped from her, and now she’s all in white. You see, they’ve missed each other along the way. End of concept.
The most interesting thing about this exercise is how it reflects and imitates Balanchine’s La Valse. The music, by Thierry Escaich, echoes the doom-laden Ravel score of La Valse. The costumes, by Marc Happel, suggest the great Karinska’s costumes for La Valse, the tulle skirts a shortened version of her famous “New Look” look of 1951, but with flamboyant bodices that would have made her shudder (and that do no favors to the two ballerinas). The action hopes to achieve the heightening menace of the Balanchine masterpiece, but it has no emotional resonance; it’s the usual Millepied artful emptiness. But it’s all fast and furious, and you can watch it-once.
NATURALLY, WITH ALL the effort being expended on the new works, the Balanchine repertory is, on the whole, being neglected, first and foremost by the casting. New choreographers inevitably choose to work with the most talented and freshest dancers, so Sterling Hyltin, Tiler Peck, Sara Mearns, Ashley Bouder, Robert Fairchild, Craig Hall and Amar Ramasar are populating their new works. Balanchine is mostly being danced by the second team, and they’re obviously being given very little rehearsal time. Last season saw the disgrace of the corps in Cortège Hongrois (it didn’t improve this time around).
This season we had, for instance, a Symphony in Three Movements in which the corps and the principals managed to convert one of Balanchine’s most explosive and exciting ballets into a yawn. This was the first time in my almost 40 years of seeing this work that when the curtain went up on that astonishing long diagonal of girls in white leotards, the audience didn’t applaud. Not its fault: There was absolutely no tension in the lineup. The women were just there, listless and uninvolved, and things didn’t improve.
Worst, perhaps, was The Four Temperaments, one of Balanchine’s greatest and most revolutionary works. The three “themes” that announce the ballet’s vocabulary were proficiently performed by dancers who seemed to have no idea of what they were announcing. “Melancholic,” as performed by Sébastien Marcovici, was more bewildered than melancholy; Abi Stafford’s “Sanguinic” was stolid (and she had some atypical technical problems as well); Ask la Cour’s “Phlegmatic” was merely vapid; and worst of all was Ellen Bar, made a soloist some years back for reasons no one could discern at the time, more or less on the shelf since then and this season shoved into unfortunate prominence as the second ballerina in Concerto Barocco. As “Choleric,” she was less a fury than a malcontent. In the general blandness, there weren’t four temperaments; there were no temperaments. Sic transit. On with the new.
rgottlieb@observer.com
