ABT Crime and Punishment 10/31 When the ballet requires super titles

— or a heavy lean on another artist's reputation or gimmicky angst & yank choreography of the type that neither William Forsythe nor Jorma Elo could make stick, it’s time to reassess the campaign to force the genre to progress in a certain direction for no reason other than to claim easy attention. As we have chanted before, there is no such direction in art as “moving forward” or “progressing”. Those are marketing tags to make people dissatisfied with what they have so they will buy something new. Art creation simply expands like the universe; it doesn’t move along any progressive line. Music didn’t progress from Mozart to Nico Muhley. Painting didn’t progress from Rembrandt to Gerhard Richter. Architecture didn’t progress from Louis Sullivan to Norman Foster. Art ideas expand and mutate and are born from the imaginations in human brains which haven’t changed all that much since Rembrandt’s time.

 

        ABT, in its misguided effort to look progressive, has suffered yet another failure in Helen Pickett’s Crime and Punishment, a mediocre dance version of Dostoevsky’s epic novel about a character's road to hell that is paved with a trumped-up good intention to commit a crime in order to enrich himself and collaterally help others. Did we even really need to revisit Raskolnikov’s criminality, self-indulgent suffering, conviction, imprisonment, and election to the presidency? Hold on . . . we sense a troubling digression. Let’s all pause to focus on our breathing. Thumbs & index fingers together, palms up, breathe.

 

        Okay. 

 

        Was there anything to admire about Crime and Punishment? Well, yes: the dancers’ commitment and determined effort to sell the angst & yank to the audience. In this particular performance on Thursday, Herman Cornejo quite literally threw himself into Raskolnikov’s steps, rolls, flails, and head-holding. Skylar Brandt portrayed with soulful obligation the beautiful, innocent Sonya who truly loved Raskolnikov but was forced into prostitution. Aran Bell was Razumikhin, Raskolnikov’s friend who didn’t know how to help him. Raskolnikov’s sister, Dunya, (Catherine Hurlin) loved Razumikhin (they kissed passionately - in the dance, not the book) and had to fight off the affections of Svidrigailov, portrayed with skillful theatrical shading by Patrick Frenette. Hurlin and Frenette danced a vigorous Mayerling-like pas de deux that involved a gun. She rejected him and tried to shoot him, but in the end, he decided to shoot himself behind a glass door at the top of a staircase to nowhere. (In Mayerling, the suicide by gun was behind a bedroom screen.) 

 

        The stage was constantly in a buzz of activity — not dancing, but the dizzy swirling in and out of the scenery walls. It has become all the rage for dancers to move the scenery on and off the stage instead of using union stage hands. Ratmansky did it in On the Dnieper, his first ballet for ABT, and then Wheeldon began doing it with his Broadway shows and ballets. There was a lot of obnoxious scenery moving by dancers in ABT’s “Lifted” a few years back, too. This time, however, the audience got to listen to the barking of the stage manager’s instructions from the wings as part of the charm.

 

        The music composed for this dance by Isobel Waller-Bridge was, at its best, unremarkable. Not a minute of it would stand alone on its own merits. Boisterous and dramatically obvious, it was like music running through an old silent movie to predict and warn the viewer of the action ahead. Not a note of it reached the soul of the audience.

 

        Haglund wanted to cry at the end of Crime and Punishment. Cry because of the donors’ money wasted by ABT. Despite all the extraordinary full length works at its disposal, ABT has opted for mediocrity for no reason other than to pander to some audience sub-sector that it thinks it needs. On the horizon, however, it appears that it has the good sense to bring in Wheeldon’s The Winter’s Tale for next year — but possibly too late, because ABT allowed Wheeldon to recycle many of his ideas from The Winter’s Tale for the dud production of Like Water For Chocolate. People will remember. Balletomanes have elephants’ memories.

 

        A dance that depends on super titles flashing across the stage to explain to the audience what is going on despite two magazine-sized pages in the evening’s program full of helpful Cliff-like notes is a dance in trouble. This was one more sign that all of Pickett’s good intentions could not ameliorate the artistic crime.

 

Comments

[Eulalia Johnson]

Haglund, thank you for taking one for the team, for writing this incisive obituary and for exposing the notion of "progress" in Art for the indefensible idea that it is. Mozart wrote, "Nevertheless the passions, whether violent or not, should never be so expressed as to reach the point of causing disgust; and music, even in situations of the greatest horror, should never be painful to the ear but should flatter and charm it, and thereby always remain music." No mature individual is unaware and unaffected by the brutalities of human life. We need Art's glimpses of a perfect reality to uplift and fuel us with the gratitude and resolve we require to keep on keeping on. Who needs to pay for abuse and degradation when the material world dishes those up for free? Would that ABT's top brass pull Renoirs and Canovas out of the vaults instead of commissioning graffiti.

[Haglund]

Thanks, Eulalia, for "Would that ABT's top brass pull Renoirs and Canovas out of the vaults instead of commissioning graffiti."

It has never made sense why ABT won't bring in Mayerling. Lady Deborah MacMillan once said that Kevin McKenzie told her that the ABT audience wouldn't understand it. Sooooo, Texas can understand and love a sophisticated MacMillan masterpiece but New York cannot? Over the years ABT has had extraordinary theatrical talent who could more than do justice to MacMillan's extraordinary ballet and they have an abundance now.

And it has never made sense why ABT couldn't negotiate back the right to dance Clark Tippet's stunningly beautiful Bruch Violin Concerto. Why are people selfishly willing to make Tippet's legacy suffer by denying this work to be performed by the company for whom he made it?

And it has never made sense why ABT failed to seize on the growing enthusiasm for Ratmansky's gorgeous production Of Love And Rage by not presenting it after its premiere year.

Artistic decisions should be better.

[Laura]

Think of the hops on pointe in Balanchine's Concerto Barocco - how perfect they are for the music, how they make you feel when you see them danced. Think of the feeling you get when watching the tree grow in the Nutcracker (cheesy as it is) - and there isn't even any dancing on stage! Think of the feeling you get when Symphony in C ends, and the audience starts applauding before the last step is danced. THIS is why people go to the ballet. Please, new choreographers, stop with all the bells and whistles. Just give us steps that go with the music. I feel like we are forgetting the number one goal of ballet - it's a pleasure. I know it can't be easy coming on the heels of geniuses, but Tiler Peck and Roman Mejia bouncing a red ball around on stage is not progress (I'm looking at you, Justin Peck.)

[Haglund]

Sharply on point, Laura. Thanks.

[angelca]

Give me Petipa or give me......

Macmillan!

[Haglund]

Yep, Angelica.

By the way, the Paris Opera Ballet's Swan Lake starring Sae Eun Park and Paul Marque will be presented via IMAX cinema on November 8 (this Friday at 5pm) at AMC Empire on W42nd St and other theaters around town.

Here's a link:
https://www.fandango.com/swan-lake-2024-237905/movie-overview

YouTube preview:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RzRU_fnYMF4&t=5s

[Zachary]

Hey Haglund, Texas' audiences are very sophisticated!!! I remember being in the theater right after Hurricane Harvey when Mayerling premiered.

Speaking of sophisticated audiences, with two seasons of back to back John Neumeier in Houston (Midsummer Night's Dream and the Little Mermaid) I'm hoping Ms. Kent brings Lady of the Camellias to Texas since we're never getting it back here in NYC.

[Solor]

I think Haglund misses the point of dancers moving scenery around. Having the characters do the job explains to the audience that the walls are an integral part of the story. not just physical barriers. I'm only surprised that the walls didn't appear in the cast list.

[Haglund]

Zachary, I wanted to die for having to cancel the trip to Houston to see the Mayerling premiere in the hurricane aftermath. Lady of the Camellias is overdue for a comeback in a big US company. I'll bet Ms. Kent is working overtime to get it to Houston. I can hear Yuriko coughing already.

[Haglund]

Solor, I definitely missed the whole point of the dancers moving the scenery around. It now seems that the wall handlers could have given those walls-on-wheels some spinning pirouettes. For the walls to be completely uncredited in the cast list was just another crime that needs punishment.

[Annie H.]

I miss Bruch Violin Concerto. At least Angel Corella has the sense to put that gem on stage. And Mayerling isn’t really any more lurid than Manon. Two ideal choices for ABT.

[Haglund]

True what you say, Annie H.