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All that sex
Boston Ballet lives the fantasies of Mr. B
BY JEFFREY GANTZ

"If there is eroticism in the music and the movement, it will speak for itself; if the dancer chooses to emphasize this aspect, it is the beginning of vulgarity." Writing in her autobiography, Holding On to the Air, Suzanne Farrell is talking about sex and Bugaku, but the effect is to explain why Balanchine is sexy where Chicago is the beginning (and more) of vulgarity. Rob Marshall’s Oscar-winning film adaptation, with its wham-bam MTV editing, is slice-and-dice sex, but even the stage version of the Bob Fosse musical is all noli me tangere angles and centripetal energy, masturbation masquerading as sex. Balanchine comes at sex from the opposite end of the epistemological spectrum, the Platonism of Russian Orthodoxy, where truth and beauty meet in the ikon. Both Chicago and Balanchine draw on Cubism (the ikon, after all, is a Cubist prototype), but Balanchine’s fractionated reality is Logos-centered as Chicago’s is not. It’s the difference between fantasy sex and pseudo sex.

The reverse chronology of Boston Ballet’s current "All Balanchine" program traces the roots of that fantasy, starting with Ballo della Regina (1978) and working back through Monumentum pro Gesualdo (1960) and Movements for Piano and Orchestra (1963) to Prodigal Son (1929). The Eternal Feminine, from Prodigal’s Siren to Ballo’s White Pearl, is eternally present; it’s the male who disappears from the stage, withdrawing into the choreographer. The signature leaps of Apollo and Prodigal (the latter immortalized on the dust jacket of Edward Villella’s autobiography, Prodigal Son) are the alpha and omega of Balanchine’s male ikons. Mr. B’s subsequent ballets tell the story of the Prodigal Son who never returns: the choreographer father is left with his dancer daughters, some of whom he marries. Balanchine the choreographer is an ikon painter, which is why his ballets look so fabulous in photographs. That virtually every moment in his ballets is an ikon, as opposed to a transition, explains why they’re works of genius.

Ballo della Regina codifies the difficulties of re-creating both the genius and the fantasy. The piece is set to the ballet music that Verdi wrote for the original (1867) five-act Paris version of Don Carlos, where it functions as the dream of Princess Eboli: she’s the White Pearl and Don Carlos (who in reality is in love with Queen Elisabeth) is the fisherman who braves the depths of the sea to seek her out. Balanchine conceived Ballo for Merrill Ashley, who with her size and speed could bend straight lines the way mass curves space. On the Balanchine Library videotape performance, she obliterates partner Robert Weiss, a Pearl beyond the wit or understanding of mortal man.

As soon as Simon Ball and Pollyana Ribeiro run out onto the Wang Theatre stage, you know this isn’t going to be Arlene Croce’s Balanchine. Ball has too much presence to disappear the way Weiss does (the way Balanchine intended), and it’s clear that they adore each other: they could be doing the finale of Sleeping Beauty. Ribeiro has the speed and the steps; it’s dizzying to watch her pirouette off stage in the middle of Verdi’s gallop finale. But she doesn’t have the mass to bend light the way Ashley does, to embody Balanchine’s paradoxical intersection of the impossible with the actual. Occupying multiple planes in one time frame, Ashley is a Picasso in the flesh. Ribeiro is "merely" a post-Byzantine Madonna by Giorgione or Raphael.

Sarah Lamb and Yury Yanowsky hew closer to the archetype. Lamb has the size, and she pinpoints the still center between aloof and available, as in the teasing entrance she makes into her White Pearl variation. But she looks more studied than speedy, and the perception (if not the reality) is that Ribeiro is doing more steps. Yanowsky is the Heathcliff to her blonde Catherine; he’s darker, earthier, and more reckless than Ball, with a lower aerial and emotional center of gravity. Doing the D-minor second section, Romi Beppu is the most Janus-like of the four waltz soloists, her pas de chat seeming to go in two directions at once. Melanie Atkins brings straight-legged power to #3; Tara Hench conjures Farrell in #1 and #4. Corps member Shannon Parsley matched their achievement when filling for Hench (injured back) Saturday night. The 12 ladies who form the backdrop are girls’-school innocent; it’s not really Mr. B, but who cares?

Monumentum pro Gesualdo and Movements for Piano and Orchestra are the music/dance corollary to Titian’s Sacred and Profane Love, Monumentum being Stravinsky’s recasting of three madrigals by Renaissance composer Carlo Gesualdo (whose harmonies continue to disturb 400 years later) and Movements his farthest excursion into serialism (Farrell wrote that it made Agon sound "melodic"). Balanchine did Monumentum in 1960 for Diana Adams, and he intended Movements for Adams in 1963, but when two weeks before the premiere she discovered she was pregnant, the role fell to the 17-year-old Farrell. The two works, some eight minutes each, became a set in 1966, usually with the same ballerina.

The visual-arts equivalent to Gesualdo would be Venetian painter Carlo Crivelli: both surmise something rotten at the core of the Renaissance universe. Stravinsky’s Movements has no center; having expounded its 12-tone row with a forthrightness that Balanchine matches in his choreography, it probes, tests, meditates, and the rotation of its internal half-rows is reflected in the way Balanchine rotates his ballerina. Last weekend, Monumentum/Movements’ unifying force was Tara Hench, even though she wasn’t cast to dance both roles in the same performance. (This weekend, Hench, back permitting, is scheduled to dance both Friday evening and Romi Beppu both Saturday and Sunday afternoons.) From the knees up she’s eerily reminiscent of Farrell, the ultimate in idealized sex; but though the feet point, they don’t always stab toward Alpha Centauri. Melanie Atkins in Movements has the what but not the why: spidery and athletic, she embodies the Cubist ethos but not the Word unheard (Stravinsky too was Orthodox). To my eye, Adriana Suárez has neither the extension nor the insinuation that Monumentum requires; however the Phoenix’s Pulitzer-winning classical-music critic, Lloyd Schwartz, who has been watching Balanchine for more than 40 years, was satisfied with her performance.

Jared Redick in Monumentum just about disappears — which you could argue is what Balanchine calls for, though Hench’s animation makes him look a bit stiff. The Movements men seem mismatched, Simon Ball too American for Hench (think not only Farrell but also Audrey Hepburn), Paul Thrussell too European for Atkins (someone should choreograph a Henry James novel for this quartet). Thrussell in particular represents a re-imagining of the Balanchine male: culture, sex, and humility. Like Balanchine, he has an American side: when he pivots and freezes with his hands in a warning position, you know he’s a Jet (surely Mr. B had seen Jerome Robbins’s choreography for West Side Story by the time he made Movements).

It will be instructive to see Thrussell’s Prodigal (he’s scheduled to dance it this Friday) in the wake of the three Boston Ballet gave us last weekend. Yury Yanowsky is the Son as hero; his Prodigal leap is so prodigious, it all but carries him off stage. He seems too big for his family, but as soon as he falls among the goons, his vulnerability is revealed; he’s a Rocky who goes down in the first round and doesn’t get up. His Siren (April Ball) mesmerizes rather than tantalizes him; the contest between hero and goddess is over before it begins. Joel Prouty is the Son as nice Jewish boy, and his youth is underlined by the Jehovah-like performance of Viktor Plotnikov as his Father. All innocence and self-assurance, he’s Harold Lloyd at State U., never quite aware of the threat the Goons pose and brash enough to fondle his Siren (Melanie Atkins) when they’re sitting on the table while his two Friends duke it out. Simon Ball enters cheerful and delighted with the goods his Friends have brought out as his patrimony; as soon as his Father enters, however, bitter (longstanding?) anger takes over. Among the Goons he’s the football hero, but they steal his trophies, and the entrance of his cheerleader-prize Siren (Karla Kovatch) leaves him gaping. Impaled on the pillar, he’s the Prodigal as martyr, Botticelli’s Saint Sebastian.

Balanchine’s story ballets never seem as natural to him as his "interactive" ballets (where a story is hinted at and we complete it). Prodigal has its literal stretches: the fight between the Friends (absent from the Balanchine Library video with Mikhail Baryshnikov and Karin von Aroldingen); the sequence where the Siren wraps her left leg around the Prodigal and he turns her in a slow, laborious circle, and later where she slaps him around. The Prodigal’s final two scenes, "Awakening and Remorse" and "The Return," are all mime; in between comes "The Sharing of the Spoils," for the Siren and the Goons, almost all mime. These sections are carried by Prokofiev’s score. Boston Ballet’s three Prodigals don’t look very different as they crawl toward redemption: Yanowsky and Ball are the most devastated, as they had the farthest to fall.

The Siren as ikon faces front with the right leg turned out on pointe — like Manet’s Olympia, she advertises her sexuality at the same time that she withholds it. Karla Kovatch is the most advertising and withholding of the company’s Sirens, her swiveling pelvis promising Paradise and half-intending to deliver, Mary Magdalene with Jesus, or Rebecca De Mornay and Tom Cruise in Risky Business. She’s sexier than Aroldingen — and she’s not even a soloist. April Ball, the most voluptuous of the company’s ladies, is more inhibited; she and Yanowsky appear to have hypnotized each other. She’s all Siren, however, in the snap with which she delivers the Prodigal’s loot to the Goons in "The Sharing of the Spoils." Melanie Atkins is all arms and legs and not enough weight; she’s also focused on the audience at the expense of her Prodigal. Still, her execution is eye-popping. Farrell was a diamond with a warm glow; Atkins just needs a little more warmth. The Goons have some of Balanchine’s best work here, crossing their hands in front of their faces (this echoes the Father’s gesture in "The Departure") or locking arms and scuttling back-to-back across the stage (Croce wondered whether this was Balanchine’s comment on the homoeroticism of the Diaghilev company). These Goons look and act like Nazi skinheads; they’re a chilling sight.

Boston Ballet’s attention to Balanchine over the past decade has been spotty: Apollo, La Sonnambula, and Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto No. 2 in ’92-’93; Serenade, Mozartiana, and TPC2 again in ’93-’94; Who Cares? in ’94-’95; Capriccio for Piano and Orchestra (a/k/a Rubies) in ’97-’98; Serenade, Divertimento No. 15, and The Four Temperaments in ’98-’99; Theme and Variations in ’00-’01; Slaughter on Tenth Avenue in ’01-’02. Working in a city that prefers story ballets, the company is in a difficult position: even giving a substantial portion of its rep-work space to Mr. B (and next season three of the six rep works will be Balanchine: Duo Concertant, Stars and Stripes, and Mozartiana) is hardly enough to imprint the style on the dancers. All the same, the style of this production is a major improvement on what Boston Ballet was doing 10 years ago. And the Kirov’s softer, slower performance of Jewels last July at Lincoln Center underscored the legitimacy of alternative Balanchine styles. For all that Boston Ballet’s Ballo corps look like little girls compared with the NYCB ladies on the Balanchine Library video, they gallop harder and kick higher. The company also takes pride of place in its music, Jonathan McPhee’s orchestra outdoing James Levine’s Met in the Verdi (the audible bassoon burbling in the D-minor waltz; the majesty and harmonic weight of the Spanish hymn) and matching anyone in the Stravinsky (the brass cadences of the second and third Monumentum madrigals; pianist Freda Locker and all hands in the fiendish Movements) and the Prokofiev (the clarinet concertino in "The Despoiling").

One only hopes the company won’t be too prodigal with its resources. Larissa Ponomarenko is still recovering from a bad back. Jennifer Gelfand, however, is absent without explanation from this program, as she was from La Fille Mal Gardée back in February; she would seem the perfect partner for Joel Prouty. Paul Thrussell remains underused (he would have danced Prodigal this past weekend if not for a bad ankle). Viktor Plotnikov has been a revelation in character roles (his Father here, his "I feel pretty" Widow Simone in Fille), but is that all he can do? Next season, many of the company’s current stars are likely to be leaving home, and unlike the Prodigal, they won’t be coming back.

Issue Date: April 3 - 10, 2003
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