— 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.