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There and here
ABT’s Romeo, NYCB’s Balanchine, Boston Ballet’s press clippings
BY JEFFREY GANTZ

NEW YORK — Boston Ballet isn’t the only company with dancers who were taking their final bows this spring — at American Ballet Theatre a week ago Saturday, Julio Bocca made what he’d announced would be his final appearance in Romeo and Juliet. The audience demanded — and got — at least a half-dozen curtain calls, a fitting acknowledgment not just of Bocca’s performance but of the 17 years this Argentine has given the company since he joined, as a principal, in 1986.

The ABT Romeo is the Kenneth MacMillan, and it was edifying to see this so soon after Boston Ballet’s production of the Rudi van Dantzig version. Nicholas Georgiadis’s set and Thomas Skelton’s lighting create a chiaroscuro of umbers and siennas; it’s eye-catching in a way that Toer van Schayk’s dungeon set for Van Dantzig isn’t, but with its shallow loggias and its portcullis over the Capulet doorway, it seems just as closed off, as opposed to the essay in Renaissance perspective that Alain Vaës provided for the Choo San Goh version that Boston Ballet premiered in 1984. Van Dantzig develops the socialist strain in Leonid Lavrovsky’s 1940 St. Petersburg version; MacMillan suppresses it. MacMillan’s market dances and fight scenes look more programmed and predictable than Van Dantzig’s; his trio of harlots (which Saturday included former Boston Ballet corps member Sasha Dmochowski) have less personality. Neither choreographer creates many memorable moments for the balcony and aubade pas de deux; MacMillan’s more extended tomb scene is kinder to the lovers, though the dispatch with which Romeo runs Paris through is a blot on his character, and Choo San Goh made the scene work better by following Shakespeare and bringing on Friar Laurence. Yet what’s most remarkable about these versions (and Daniel Pelzig’s for Boston Ballet in 1997) is how similar they all are. Arlene Croce attributed this situation to the literal nature of Prokofiev’s scenario and score; it’s hard to argue.

Courting Rosaline, Bocca’s Romeo exhibited such Old World grace and panache, it seemed impossible she could refuse him; courting Juliet, on the other hand, he looked like an aging James Bond, authoritative but not spontaneous. His Juliet was Alexandra Ferri, so kinetically kaleidoscopic in the 1984 Royal Ballet production that was available for a time on video, but here less fetching. It’s hard to be the same coltish teenager you were 19 years ago — then again, it’s hard to bring maturity to your Juliet when the script has you and your nurse playing keep-away with your teddy bear. Ferri’s best move of the night came when Bocca brought her out for a curtain call and she ducked away and back inside, leaving him alone with the applause.

OVER AT THE NEW YORK STATE THEATER, I caught two typical " Balanchine and friends " programs from New York City Ballet: Square Dance and Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto No. 2 on either side of Christopher d’Amboise’s Circle of Fifths Saturday afternoon, Concerto Barocco and Vienna Waltzes bookending Richard Tanner’s Sonatas and Interludes and Jerome Robbins’s In the Night Sunday afternoon. Invidious metaphors (three Leahs for four Rachels?) come easy at NYCB these days, but personal preference aside, what stood out was how idealistic Balanchine’s work looks in comparison with everyone else’s. The anemone-like movements of Circle of Fifths (set to the Philip Glass Violin Concerto) conjured Elisa Monte’s Treading; it’s all about bodies in motion. Wendy Whelan, as the woman sought by Peter Boal and Albert Evans, seemed all arms and legs and no center; Boal, on the other hand, was all center, his movements big, easy, graceful. Glass’s music is less a traditional concerto than his usual modulating form with violin obbligato; similarly, it was hard to detect anything sonata-like in John Cage’s music for Sonatas and Interludes, which as danced by Jock Soto and Maria Kowroski looked like gymnastic exercises, with lots of arabesques penchées for Kowroski but not much development in the pair’s relationship. Set to four Chopin Nocturnes, In the Night verges on decorative. Only the third couple, James Fayette and Jennifer Ringer (dancing to Opus 55 No. 2), got much to work with, a duet of distance and desire to which they brought both passion and humor.

Balanchine’s work is all about souls whose corporeal manifestations are in motion. If the motion isn’t grounded, the result can seem lightweight, even fluffy, and that was the case Saturday with Square Dance, where Mr. B slyly traces American country hoofing back through its British folk ancestors to its Renaissance roots (visible in both the Dance of the Knights and the market dances of anyone’s Romeo and Juliet). Concerto Barocco, on the other hand, expresses the geometry of the gods, and yet its genius lies in the way it embraces human imperfection. It has, of course, better music: Bach’s sublime Double Violin Concerto as opposed to Square Dance’s Corelli and Vivaldi. Whelan looked better here, anchored when she danced with James Fayette or the other " violin, " Pascale van Kipnis.

Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto No. 2 started out life as Ballet Imperial, a court/military ball with a St. Petersburg backdrop, but in 1973 Balanchine decided the reference to tsarist Russia was outmoded, so he changed the title, simplified the costumes, and scrapped the set in favor of NYCB’s standard Maryinsky/Balanchine blue cyclorama. The catch is that nothing could be more outmoded — or imperial — than Tchaikovsky’s clunky but affecting concerto. Saturday afternoon, Susan Walters’s melting performance gave Miranda Weese, Philip Neal, and Ashley Bouder room to throw their emotional weight around, but they looked as deracinated as the set, and in the slow movement, which glosses Swan Lake, Neal made an awkward business of the lady chains. (Devon Carney did this better in the Boston Ballet stagings of 1993 and 1994, and he and Alexandra Koltún were, if not better dancers than Neal and Weese, more imperial and had more appropriate costumes.) Vienna Waltzes, on the other hand, revels in its set, which takes us from the Vienna woods (lovers’ meetings; forest deities in spring; a circus polka) to Maxim’s (Balanchine’s witty salute to Franz Lehár’s Lustige Witwe) and then the ballroom of our dreams (where the lead lady is dreaming of Mr. B), the mirrored glimpses it affords growing until by the end the number of dancers on stage is doubled. Even in the current generic production (writing in the New Criterion last September, Laura Jacobs remarked on seeing a NYCB VW " in which the dancers were having trouble waltzing, let alone waltzing as one " ), it glitters, but one can hardly imagine it without its set. Is Imperial Vienna less dated than Imperial Russia?

BACK HOME IN BOSTON, meanwhile, the ballet season may be over, but Boston Ballet continues to make headlines. Over the past month, Geoff Edgers in the Globe has written about the " retirement " of popular principal Jennifer Gelfand; Theodore Bale in the Herald has reported on the dismissal of ballet mistress Eva Evdokimova; Christine Temin in the Globe has described one of the company’s Romeo and Juliet pairings, Sabi Varga and Sarah Lamb, as having " the potential to become that great rarity: a couple who spark each other on stage, in the Nureyev and Fonteyn mode " ; and Geoff Edgers, again in the Globe, has devoted a long article to the new artistic director called " The Turning Point: His first season over, Mikko Nissinen has made it clear that he’s in charge at Boston Ballet. " The company got more media attention than it wanted in 2001 when incoming artistic director Maina Gielgud quit before taking up her post, and before that in 1997 when anorectic corps member Heidi Guenther died of heart failure. But it’s been a long time since Boston’s daily newspapers have devoted this much space to the dancers and what they do on stage.

With media attention come, of course, media clichés. To read the Globe these days, you might think that Nissinen and new executive director Valerie Wilder had rescued Boston Ballet from artistic and financial ruin. It’s true that, buoyed by the world’s most financially successful Nutcracker, the company had overextended itself, and that when Nutcracker attendance began to decline, Wilder trimmed the performance schedule and laid off some staff. (Evdokimova, it was announced, is not being brought back next year because her position is being terminated.) It’s also true that toward the end of Bruce Marks’s 11-year tenure as artistic director (1985-’96) and during the directorship of his successor, Anna-Marie Holmes (1996–2001), the company had mixed success with the likes of Bournonville’s Abdallah, Dace Dindonis’s Carmen, the Petipa/Sergeyev Corsaire/Pirate, Lila York’s Ode to Joy, Daniel Pelzig’s An American in Paris, Christopher Wheeldon’s Firebird and The Four Seasons, Ben Stevenson’s Dracula and Cleopatra, and Michael Pink’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame.

All the same, under Marks, Boston Ballet became one of the best companies in America. The dancers he brought in — Fernando Bujones, Jennifer Gelfand, Paul Thrussell, Patrick Armand, Trinidad Sevillano, Larissa Ponomarenko, Rob Wallace, for starters — illuminated the company’s performances of Giselle, Don Quixote, Swan Lake, and Sleeping Beauty as well as newer works like the Choo San Goh Romeo and Juliet and John Cranko’s Onegin and The Taming of the Shrew. In the 1990 and 1992 " glasnost " productions of Swan Lake, for which Bolshoi and Kirov stars Nina Ananiashvili, Alexei Fadeyechev, Tatiana Terekhova, Konstantin Zaklinsky, and Yulya Makhalina were brought in, Boston Ballet held its own. The company’s Nutcracker became not only the world’s most popular version, but one of the world’s best (doubters can check the video evidence). Marks also brought on music director Jonathan McPhee, whose interpretations regularly put the recorded competition to shame (he didn’t do badly in his year as interim artistic director, either). Under Holmes the company standard remained high, and offsetting the unfortunate Dracula there was some stellar Balanchine plus Kenneth MacMillan’s Winter Dreams.

These accomplishments more often than not got short shrift in the Globe and the Herald. In her article last month, Christine Temin writes of having taken a " highly knowledgeable New York balletomane friend of mine, herself a former ballerina, to see Lamb and Varga. She was greatly impressed by the level of the entire company. She was also surprised. The word about Boston Ballet under Nissinen isn’t out. " There was no need for the anonymous lady to be surprised — the word about Boston Ballet under Marks could have been out some years ago, if the Globe had bothered. To judge by Jack Anderson, Clive Barnes, and Anna Kisselgoff (notably in her 1997 review of Le Corsaire), the New York dance critics knew the score.

Temin is right to credit Nissinen with making good choices for 2002-2003: John Onegin, Frederick Ashton’s La Fille Mal Gardée, the van Dantzig Romeo. And you can argue that the company danced better than ever this season. But I don’t know why she’s so eager to compliment Nissinen for bringing in coaches: Twyla Tharp was here in 1993 for Waterbaby Bagatelles, Paul Taylor in 1995 for Company B, Reid Anderson for Onegin in 1997, Mark Morris for Maelstrom in 1998, etc. And the Balanchine Trust always sends someone to oversee productions of Mr. B’s work, so no surprise that Ballo della Regina brought us Merrill Ashley, for whom the work was created.

As for the mass exodus of company members, Temin rationalizes that " Nissinen, like any artistic director, must have the freedom to work with the dancers who most interest him, " and Edgers quotes him as saying of the departing dancers, " They’re all wonderful artists, but when there’s a new regime coming and you have been playing quarterback, sometimes it’s hard to be told to play linebacker. " It will come as news to many — perhaps most — long-time Boston Ballet observers that Paul Thrussell, Jennifer Gelfand, Simon Ball, April Ball, Tara Hench, Karla Kovatch, Ilya Kozadayev, and the rest are merely linebacker material. They’re outstanding dancers, they’ve been a credit to the company, and they’ll be a credit to other companies. I hope that the dancers who do interest Nissinen will be their equal.

Issue Date: June 13 - 19, 2003
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