Haglund's Heel

New York City BalletClear and convincing evidence

The April issue of The New Criterion includes Laura Jacobs' Season of the Witch, a fascinating, in-depth review of Angelin Preljocaj's Spectral Evidence performed by New York City Ballet. You may recall that Preljocaj found his inspiration for the dance in the mass hysteria and religious extremism that led to the Salem Witch Trials during which innocent women were accused of being witches and were dealt brutal sentences by the men who feared them.

Contrary to the metro area's male newspaper critics who gave it the brush-off (five males dissed it with similar rhetoric while the lone independent-thinking female critic, Apollinaire Scherr, found significant artistic merit in it and worthy of four stars), Jacobs found it dazzling:

Spectral Evidence, Angelin Preljocaj’s new dance for the New York City Ballet, is as strange and beautiful as its title. It’s the kind of title Martha Graham often put on her work—a title like a hardwood floor in Emily Dickinson’s house. And it’s the kind of subject Graham was attracted to—a legend or event knotted with violence and desire. Spectral Evidence is about the seventeenth-century Salem witch trials, a shameful yet fascinating piece of America’s past. Preljocaj sees the story through a prism, a Swarovski crystal. Working a refined synthesis of ballet history, modern dance, and postmodern tropes, he slides content into dazzling form.

Jacobs explores the role that hysteria has played over the centuries in dance from Giselle to Swan Lake to Fall River Legend to La Valse to Dybbuk and concludes that "Spectral Evidence looks right at home at NYCB."

You can read Jacobs' review in its entirety here.

More of Preljocaj's work will be on display soon when he brings his own company to Lincoln Center in April to perform his dark interpretation of Snow White with costumes by Jean Paul Gaultier.

 

Radetsky will hang up his cleats

Somehow it's fitting that Sascha Radetsky will bow out in the same season as Derek Jeter. They both joined the big leagues in the same year - 1995. And if fans nicknamed Jeter Mr. November because of his heroics during the post season, Radetsky could have been called the same. He sometimes carried the fall season for ABT with his brilliance in works by Tharp, Welch, De Mille, Fokine and an unforgettable performance in Tudor's The Leaves Are Fading opposite his wife, Stella Abrera. That's not to say he was less valuable in the spring, only that he was often more visible as one of the team's power hitters and clutch players in the fall season.

Lots of people are excited about Radetsky's future after ABT. His upcoming starring role in the TV series Flesh and Bone and more of his thoughtful writing are both things we will look forward to in the near term. Jeter hasn't given us a clue what he'll do.

It'll be tough to lose them both, though.

 

Oh, dear – not the retirement we were hoping for

Sascha Radetsky announced today via Twitter that his July 3rd performance in Coppelia opposite Xiomara Reyes will be his final performance with ABT. Very sad to hear this, but everyone knows that bigger and better things are on his horizon and that it's time to get moving full steam ahead toward them.

 

observations 3/27

Lucinda Dunn, Australian Ballet principal and wife of Associate Artistic Director and former ABT principal Danilo Radojevic, is set to retire from the stage in April after 23 years with the company.

Australian press has just reported today that Radojevic has also decided to leave his longtime job at Aussie Ballet.

Wonder if any of this has popped up on the radar of the Royal New Zealand Ballet which is hunting for a new artistic director to replace Ethan Stiefel who is finally coming home to New York. Radojevic at RNZB would be pretty perfect. Come to think of it, Radojevic running ABT would be pretty good, too.

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The State Primorsky Opera and Ballet Theater, born in the Fall of 2013 in Vladivostok, Russia, and for whom American Joseph Phillips is a Principal Dancer, has been invited to perform at the Bolshoi Theater.

The company will take its acclaimed production of "Fourteen" to Moscow this year. The multi-disciplinary work choreographed by Primorsky's Ballet Director, Aidar Akhmetov, is set to Shostokovich's Symphony No. 14 and poems by F. Garcia Lorca, G. Apollinaire, W. Küchelbecker and R. Maria Rilke. It stars Inna Ginkevich (Death) and Artem Yachmennikov (Poet), both formerly of the Stanislavsky Theatre, and Joseph Phillips as the soldier.

The dates of the Primorsky performances at the Bolshoi will be announced in a joint statement by the two theaters soon.

Wow, Phillips' work in Vladivostok sure beats carrying the spear for Kevin McKenzie.

 

Cinema notes

The captured cinema presentation of the Bolshoi Ballet's March 30th performance of Marco Spada, featuring David Hallberg, Evgenia Obraztsova, Olga Smirnova and Semyon Chudin, will be shown in NYC at the Village East Cinema on Saturday, April 12th at noon with a repeat on Tuesday, April 15th at 7pm. Immediately before the showing on Saturday, Joan Acocella and David Vaughan will offer some introductory information about the production.

The hats are to die for:

Photo: Alexander Mudrats

Many cinemas in the U.S. will receive the transmission live on March 30 or delayed on April 1st. Here is a link to the complete U.S. listing with dates for first and second screenings.

The venue at Village East Cinema in NYC is equal to or better than the Big Cinemas Manhattan on East 59th Street where we used to see these cinema-casts. One has the sense of actually sitting in a theater similar to City Center as opposed to a movie house. The house staff is very polite. The concession stand person even apologized to Haglund for having to charge $4 for a small bottle of water.

The last presentation at Village East Cinema was the Bolshoi's Lost Illusions which turned out to be quite a spectacular event. Haglund found this work of Alexei Ratmansky's to be some of his best and most enjoyable to date. However, the music was so unappealing (except for a few piano solos) that this balletomane will never sit through it again. Ever.

During an intermission, the brilliant-should-get-an-Oscar-for-something-or-other Katerina Novikova asked the composer, Leonid Desyatnikov, if writing for ballet was any different than writing for anything else, e.g., for film score or concert orchestra. Desyantnikov replied it was not with the exception of creating a regular rhythm. That may be a clue as to why his music did not help this ballet along.

Less than optimal choices of music have made appreciating Ratmansky's work difficult several times. The musical selections for On the Dnieper, The Tempest, Shostakovich Trilogy, and even Seven Sonatas, have been successful when played on the concert stage but less so when supporting the visual structure and dramatic/emotional peaks and valleys of a ballet. Some of these musical choices have dragged down the ballets considerably.

But let's get back to cinema ballet – The Royal Ballet's presentation of The Sleeping Beauty seen recently at AMC's Empire Cinema on 42nd Street was a royal treat. The production, which uses the 1946 designs by Oliver Messel, wasn't quite as imaginative as the one which Anthony Dowell supervised years ago. The costumes and scenery were beautiful but seemed like creations that could pop up in any number of big ballets. Dowell's, on the other hand, created splendor with a tad of gothic influence including a huge staircase from which Aurora descended. The staircase is now gone. Aurora simply appears from the back of a crowded stage. It felt very unspecial. When it's your own 16th birthday party, you really should make a splashy entrance.

Sarah Lamb was a beautiful Aurora with long, eloquent limbs and the serenity of a Grace Kelly. The cinema-cast cameras had us sitting on the stage most of the time; so, we saw every adjustment and imperfection that would have flown by unnoticed if we had been sitting in the house. But she was quite the beauty with a sense of modesty that made her elegance all the more attractive. Those who have declared the Royal Ballet style dead and buried should take another look at Sarah Lamb, who, by the way, hails from Boston. No mannerisms, no excesses, no pointy elbows, lovely slight curves in the wrists and hands that made the balletic line sing, body high/arms low, beautiful use of head positions, no compromises in the hips, no winging of anything – Sarah Lamb is a clear example of the Royal Ballet's careful attention to detail and company style.

Steven McCrae as Prince Floribund was attentive and conveyed his difficulty dealing with his at-the-crossroads-of-my-life decision. His jumps were grand, his form was identifiably English, but his performance didn't rise to the overall level of his partner's. Haglund kept wondering what Thiago Soares would have looked like opposite Sarah Lamb.  Maybe that's because, these days, Thiago and Marianela hang out with Haglund at the bus stop each morning in Hell's Kitchen:

observations 3/22

Haglund wishes that he would observe some chatter somewhere about grateful choreographers banding together to create a Piece d'Occasion for Wendy Whelan's retirement during NYCB's fall season which she announced recently to The Atlantic. It only seems right.

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Reminder: The Guggenheim's Works and Process event with choreography by Emery LeCrone as danced by Tyler Angle, Teresa Reichlen, Stella Abrera, Alexandre Hammoudi, and others will be livestreamed Sunday evening at 7:30 at this link:

http://www.guggenheim.org/video/bach-interpreted-new-choreography-by-emery-lecrone

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How to spot the ballet dancer at the golf driving range: S/he sets up with the right hip back and out of alignment, mishits the ball, and then whispers, "Sorry." Oh, yes, it's true.

 

ABT – Washington DC casting alert

The cream has risen to the top for the second night of Les Sylphides in Washington DC next month. According to the Kennedy Center website, the Four-Star cast for Wednesday, April 16th is now:

Veronika Part
Joseph Gorak
Stella Abrera
Sarah Lane Melanie Hamrick (just edited on KC site and now appears on ABT site)

Seeing as Joe is not really tall enough to partner Veronika, it would seem that Stella just may get to do the PdD. She was exquisite in 2005 when dancing the role opposite Marcelo Gomes, and we can expect that she will be even better now. Back then,Tobi Tobias wrote that she "looked windswept, miraculously so" and "Here she took wing, soared, was thrilling. She was weightless and buoyant as gossamer, yet impelled by surging energy. I haven’t seen anything like it in Les Sylphides since the days of Lupe Serrano and Sallie Wilson."

The first evening's casting is:
Hee Seo
Cory Stearns
Stella Abrera
Sarah Lane

 

RB cinema presentation of Sleeping Beauty

On Thursday, March 20, the Royal Ballet's performance of Sleeping Beauty filmed the prior evening will be shown in cinemas across the U.S. Sarah Lamb as Princess Aurora, Steven McRae as Prince Florimund, and Laura McCulloch as the Lilac Fairy will lead the cast in this production which is based on Petipa's original work with additional choreography by Anthony Dowell, Frederick Ashton, and Christopher Wheeldon.

According to the Royal Ballet's website:

• Frederick Ashton choreographed Aurora and Florimund's Act II Variations and Florestan and his Sisters in Act III (after Marius Petipa).

• Anthony Dowell choreographed Carabosse and the rats in the Prologue and the Polonaise and Mazurka in Act III (with Christopher Carr).

• Christopher Wheeldon choreographed the Act I Garland Dance

For more information about the dates and times of the presentation, go to this link and plug in your zip code. Some countries are receiving the transmission live on March 19th.

Here's the cast program for the evening's performance.

 

observations - 3/18

It looks like Phil Jackson won't be coming to ABT's front office or to coach - not at this time. Knicks fans have reason to live: Troubled club now in Phil Jackson’s hands 

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Kristina Shapran will dance the lead role in Giselle at the 2pm matinee on Wednesday, November 12 when the Mikhailovsky pulls into the Koch Theater this fall. Tickets are on sale now.

What has the new artistic advisor to the general director been up to? Maybe Altynai Asylmuratova will make the trip with the company, fall in love with New York, and want to stay.

Speaking of Giselle, when Baryshnikov was running ABT, he took Gelsey Kirkland and himself to Minneapolis to dance Giselle. Next month, the city not only isn't getting ABT's A-team, it's not getting the B-team or even the T-team. Not very thoughtful of amurika's national ballet company.

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The 2014 Jerome Robbins Award will be presented to the Paris Opera Ballet on June 19, 2014 at Palais Garnier in Paris. Outgoing director, Brigitte Lefèvre, will accept the award on behalf of the company. From Ms. Lefèvre's written acceptance addressed to the Robbins Foundation:

As I am about to leave the company I served with passion for over twenty years, I receive this award with a particular emotion. I cannot help but express my gratitude to Jerome Robbins. I had the pleasure of hosting him in the 1990s when he came with four of his ballets which brought the number of his ballets to fourteen that have entered the rep since 1974. The Paris Opera Ballet owes so much to Jerome Robbins. Through regular visits with his "second family" as he liked to say, several generations of performers have experienced first‐hand the diversity of his work.

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Wendy Whelan indicated in a recent interview for an article in The Atlantic that she will officially retire from NYCB during this coming fall season.

Today, Whelan is making small progress with her injuries; she has starting doing light exercises. However, she intended to be back on stage this month for her freelance dance project, Restless Creature, but had to postpone the tour due to delays in her recovery from hip surgery.

She still plans to appear in the NYCB’s spring season—but in City Ballet’s fall season, she told me, she was bidding goodbye to ballet. She will retire.

“I’m gonna go,” she said. “Because I’m hoping that that will take the pain away.”

 

 

Paul Taylor Dance Company @ Lincoln Center60th Anniversary Gala – 3/13

Remember in the old days when you would arrive at a fine restaurant and the hostess would usher you past the dessert cart on your way to the table just to get you salivating? Keeping your hands down at your side was so difficult because the trigger finger was ready to swipe a path through the dense icing that beckoned from around the base of the chocolate cake.

Thursday night at the Paul Taylor Dance Company's Spring Gala, up the steps to the ring levels we trudged, past the long table of silver dessert compotes with their little goodies all identically arranged and awaiting transfer to the gala tables on the promenade level. Oh look, are there a few delicious little cakes missing from that compote at the end of the table by the stair railing?

By the end of the evening’s performance, no one really had room left for dessert anyway.

What a terrific, uplifting evening of dance during which we enjoyed 3+ masterworks by the master of American modern dance: Paul Taylor’s Cloven Kingdom, Sunset, Piazzolla Caldera, and an excerpt from Airs. The excerpt, treated something like a piece d’occasion, was performed beautifully by Tiler Peck and Robert Fairchild of New York City Ballet.

Every time Haglund sees Cloven Kingdom in which the men in black and white tuxedos gloriously prance around to snare drum cadences with their “hoof-hands” proudly held out in front of them, he’s reminded of those New Year’s Day Rose Parade telecasts from the 1950s and '60s when the Calizona equestrian drill team strutted down Colorado Boulevard with the Appaloosas high-stepping and side-stepping to the crowd’s applause. Their spotted rumps were always so curious looking.

Cloven Kingdom is Taylor’s witty, brilliant comparison of formal and primitive aspects of society – the civil versus the uncivil, the good and the evil animal in every one of us. The men in tuxedos sometimes precision-dance cooperatively and sometimes climb on one another’s backs like uncivilized animals tend to do. The women engage in more formal dances while wearing long dresses with mirrored headgear that bounces the reflection of the stage lights all over the audience in the darkened theater rings. It all serves to create a strange but attractive society that some might think could be just another neighborhood below 14th Street. On Thursday night the Taylor dancers were hysterical in their seriousness and exceptional in making it all look like an ordinary day in the lives of their creatures.

The New York Times loved Cloven Kingdom (1976), calling it “wickedly sophisticated.” The Times loved Piazzolla Caldera (1997), calling it “genius” and “a brilliant essay” on the tango. The Times loved Sunset (1983), calling it “beautiful” and a “masterpiece.” But those were better Times – times when the Times critics actually had practical dance knowledge and didn’t carry the burden of a whiney one-note agenda to stop men from dancing with women. Yes, those were better Times. But this little animal will not stoop to any uncivil discourse about anyone’s sketchy qualifications for evaluating dance in today’s Times - not at this time.

Sunset is the masterful manipulation of music and movement that we have enjoyed from Taylor’s work over six decades. Edward Elgar’s Serenade for Strings and the heartfelt mourning in his Elegy for Strings grab the gut and won’t allow us to to feel the happiness that the actors on stage portray because we know their futures long before they live them. The soldiers who are on leave flirt and dance with the pretty young girls. There is such hope and expectation of happy lives ahead. But the joy in their steps can’t be felt because Elgar’s Elegy is the “distant roll of thunder at a picnic” that Auden described. At the end of the day, as the soldiers leave to return to war, a hat falls from a soldier’s head to the ground. The fallen hat is retrieved by one of the young girls who clutches it as hope for the future when the soldier returns and as a keepsake in the event he doesn’t. No matter what the war, this scene plays out over and over again.

Piazzolla Caldera erupts into smoldering, steamy hot, tango-inspired movement that takes your breath away. There’s some funny business as when two inebriated men dance a tango of compadróns in which they fight and wrestle with one another, but mostly the dance conjures up the flavor of the old style tango movement that was born in the brothels of Argentina as opposed to the slick and glamorous portrayal we often see today in dance competitions. The highlight of Thursday night's dance was the PdD for Michelle Fleet and Michael Trusnovec. So sizzling hot in terms of technique and sexual inferences that it became necessary to loosen the collar while watching it.

Paul Taylor choreographed the masterpiece Piazzolla Caldera when he was nearly 67 years old. He made Sunset when he was 53 and Cloven Kingdom when he was 46. His Emmy Award winning Speaking in Tongues and Brandenburgs, both unfortunately omitted from this season, were made when he was 58. He made the disturbing but compelling war-related piece, Banquet of Vultures, when he was 75 years old. Every year, Taylor has made two new works. Some years, particularly in the first decade or two, he may have made more during the year, but unlike today’s much younger choreographers, he did not race from place to place, from commission to commission, from idea to idea, trying to leverage his economic value at the expense of his artistry. He made two new works each year.

Taylor’s body of work is filled with important, craft-saturated dances that likely will endure until the end of dance. Now, thankfully, Taylor’s own idea of creating a repository and incubator for American modern dance will ensure that, as well as ensure the preservation and continued presentation of works by America’s modern dance legends such as Merce Cunningham. There will be no childish lawsuits over who owns the choreography created by Taylor when he is gone. There will not be a planned lingering death of his company. No, Paul Taylor is choreographing estate planning and future revenue streams for the benefit of the past, present, and future of American modern dance. If the choreography is as good as Cloven Kingdom, Sunset, and Piazzolla Caldera, we will be eternally grateful. Hopefully, this campaign will yield the newest permanent resident organization at Lincoln Center. Just tell us where we should send our checks.

The Gala evening was filled with so many outstanding performances. But Michelle Fleet and Michael Trusnovec in their PdD from Piazzolla Caldera take the cake and the H.H. Pump Bump Award, a stiletto of pure ecstasy from Christian Louboutin.