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Apollonian ventures
Peter Boal at Concord Academy
BY MARCIA B. SIEGEL


Peter Boal has spent most of his career in New York City Ballet, where he’s admired as the purest of classical dancers, even though NYCB favors neo, modernist, and contemporary styles rather than traditional high classicism. Now 38, Boal is beginning an early transition from the supercharged main stages to teaching and a longer but lower-key performing life. Perhaps taking a cue from Mikhail Baryshnikov, he’s started commissioning solos from ballet colleagues and interesting choreographers working in postmodern modes. The newest Boal enterprise will be a company, to premiere next summer at Jacob’s Pillow — this according to Richard Colton, co-director of Concord Academy Summer Stages, where Boal appeared Thursday night.

All three dances on Thursday’s program had a wonderful calm and security, traits of Boal the dancer that his three choreographers obviously wanted to use. The pieces didn’t present big contrasts or effects, but seeing one fine dancer modulating within a fairly small range turned out to be a rare and rewarding experience.

Boal first appeared as an almost-familiar prince or paragon, in One Body, which was choreographed by his fellow NYCB principal Albert Evans. Wearing silken white tights and a drapy, vaguely Grecian chiton, he swept around the space with expansive arm gestures, airy leaps, and pirouettes that were perfectly centered. Not a bump, not a hitch snagged the smooth flow of his line and direction. He seemed to be modeling his body to show it off to advantage, but not in any pushy, conceited way.

There were moments when I thought Evans was referring us to other ballets Boal has danced. The traveling jumps landing on one knee and sweeping through from George Balanchine’s Divertimento from "Le baiser de la fée," for instance. But the whole piece had its own meditative quality, like the music that accompanied it, John Kennedy’s "One Body," for orchestra and countertenor. The singer’s words were so internalized, they drifted just below the surface of meaning, but that in itself means something.

Wendy Perron’s The Man and the Echo might have been an urban edition of the same sensibility. Boal wore a dark suit, sport shirt, and street shoes. His movements were more angular, asymmetrical, sometimes even broken, and tighter in to the body. His gestures were small, anxious — his fingers curled as if they remembered manipulating some complicated object, his arms circled around the back of his head. In a walking motif, very contemporary, almost jazzy, he sank comfortably into each hip, his upper body following in easy opposition. At times he seemed to be attending to the inner workings of his body, but then his focus would shift, as if he’d heard something outside somewhere.

At intervals, he’d be lying or sitting on the floor; instead of John Lurie’s guitar riffs, we heard children’s voices talking to their daddy. Boal had recorded them, and I read somewhere they were his own children. After these interludes, he seemed increasingly agitated, tilting off center, shifting suddenly, gesturing across his body. He seemed even fearful at one point, but he maintained his calm. The last we saw of him, the light was fading out on his profile, and his arms were in a wide-open stretch — one up and one down.

Selections from Lou Harrison’s spiritual music (the Elegiac Symphony) accompanied Molissa Fenley’s Pola’a. Harrison’s chordal string writing reinvested the classical sensibility in still another tone. The music even reminded me of the Stravinsky/Balanchine Apollo at times, as did certain moments in the dance. Fenley’s Hawaiian title refers to the ocean, and other viewers have seen the dancer’s swirling, reversing eddies of turns, and later his agitated jumps and thrusts, as illustrative of the sea’s motion.

I could see that, and how the characteristic Fenley motif of the dancer’s body rocking from foot to foot with symmetrical bent-up arms could have evoked a small boat bobbing in a breeze. But what impressed me more about the dance was the serene continuum Boal made of his extended and changeable circling patterns, the crystalline clarity of his infrequent moments of stillness, the sense of a force that wasn’t effortful. Through the whole 18 minutes of the work, he seemed not only connected to the floor and the space but energized by it, as he changed directions, reframed his body with his arms, spun on and on.

At last he finished off a series of eccentrically shaped ballet moves with a contradictory pose, his upper body slightly twisted and his arms in an elegant wreath above his head. There was no way of knowing where the current would take him next.

 


Issue Date: July 25 - 31, 2003
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