E-Mail This Article to a Friend Against interpretation? ‘Falling Angels’ and Boston Ballet 2005–2006 BY JEFFREY GANTZ

"How can we know the dancer from the dance?" is the line that kept coming to mind during the three performances of "Falling Angels" I saw last weekend. The three choreographers on the program, Lucinda Childs, Jirí Kylián, and William Forsythe, don’t favor the kind of movement that calls for interpretation; the focus is on the dance and not the dancer. Boston Ballet’s angels, both male and female, don’t need to fall: their strength is their ability to interpret, to be personal. The odd "Falling Angels" program is fine; too many are a waste of the company’s resources. As John Rockwell observed in the New York Times last Saturday, speaking of Forsythe’s In the middle, somewhat elevated, "It is to the great credit of the Boston Ballet that its dancers responded so confidently; right now, at least, they seem better suited to spiky modernism than to the haunting atmospherics of La Sylphide." Boston Ballet dancers have never had any problem getting down, but as acrobatic as Forsythe’s "spiky modernism" looks, it comes to 21st-century performers more naturally than Bournonville. The ability to perform In the middle, somewhat elevated with confidence will elevate the company only somewhat.

Lucinda Childs’s world premiere, Ten Part Suite, made a modest impression on Rockwell: "But for all its passing blandness, her piece had poise and charm." Set to a suite fashioned from Corelli violin sonatas, it mirrors the Baroque style (and what Rockwell calls Childs’s "once-Minimalist vocabulary") in its use of basic elements like turns and reverse turns and jetés and battements. Whereas Mark Morris in his classical-set pieces tends to give his dancers a floppy, almost funky, affect, as if they were children playing "Follow the Leader" or "Red Light," Childs offers extension, articulation, elegance, and a style of setting of steps to music that falls between Morris’s studied and literal and Balanchine’s idiosyncratic and inspired. Ten Part Suite could certainly appear bland on introduction, but like the music it accompanied (well performed by violinist Jason Horowitz, cellist Ronald Lowry, and Freda Locker at the harpsichord), it improves on further acquaintance. Dancing in the duet roles Saturday afternoon, Adriana Suárez and Reyneris Reyes turned their sarabande into a pavane and their minuet into an aristocratic tango; they looked better matched than Lorna Feijóo and Roman Rykine opening night.

Jirí Kylián’s Sarabande and Falling Angels, rites of passage for men and women, respectively, have everybody shedding social roles and getting back in touch with what it means to be a man or a woman, the men primal-screaming in Iron John mode under a threatening canopy of ball gowns, the women reconnecting with the Mother and getting in touch with their inner robot while dancing out the Eleusinian Mysteries. Kylián’s movement vocabulary is more dynamic than Childs’s, but once you’ve incorporated it into your visual lexicon, he seems more static. Still, the two pieces share an elusive sense of humor; you think you’ve taken it all in and then you haven’t. Dancing in the Saturday-afternoon cast, company principal Pollyana Ribeiro gave Falling Angels softness and sensuality without undermining the piece’s Eurotrash ethos, much like Misa Kuranaga in Ten Part Suite. Kuranaga would seem to be a rising Boston Ballet star; Ribeiro, on the other hand, hasn’t been given much this season, even though she’s that rare dancer who is and isn’t the dance.

The first time the company did In the middle, somewhat elevated, in September 2002, it looked more like a brutal take on West Side Story, the dancers’ basilisk glares and body language all about preserving turf, both gang and personal. This time, the intensity was in the movement rather than the interactions. Former company principal April Ball, who’s now with Les Ballets de Monte Carlo, guested at three performances. In 2002, she was the second girl, opposite Sarah Lamb (now a soloist with the Royal Ballet); this time she was the first, staring down Kathleen Breen Combes with almost no effort and giving Forsythe’s multi-directional thrusts focus and emotional weight while pairing with a loose-limbed but similarly centered Carlos Molina (who was just as commanding in his Sarabande solo). The opening-night trio, Romi Beppu, Yury Yanowsky (another outstanding Sarabande solo), and Karine Seneca, didn’t fling themselves about with the same alacrity, but Adriana Suárez with John Lam and Melanie Atkins with Jared Nelson (the embodiment of Blake’s Glad Day) did, and Atkins and Nelson were just as riveting during their brief fling in Ten Part Suite. Melissa Hough was another highlight throughout the weekend.

THE CENTERPIECE of Boston Ballet’s 2005–2006 season, which was announced last week, is Frederick Ashton’s La Fille Mal Gardée, which the company first performed in February 2003. With its witty jokes (the grand royal entrance of the overture dissolving into birdsong), its feckless comic lover Alain, its Widow Simone in drag, its clogging number, and, not least, its dancing chickens, it was a critical and audience favorite, so no surprise that it’s back so soon. What does seem odd is that’s it getting only a single weekend, March 9 through 12. The two-weekend slot you might have expected it to occupy, March 16 through 26, is going instead to the "Spring Repertory Program," which comprises a world premiere by Mark Morris, William Forsythe’s Herman Schmerman, which he created in 1992 for New York City Ballet’s Diamond Project (the title is a retort from the 1982 Steve Martin film Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid), and Jorma Elo’s Plan to B, which the company premiered in March 2004. Morris’s annual Celebrity Series visit to the Shubert Theatre draws some 5000 people; will a Morris world premiere alongside a 13-year-old Forsythe Boston premiere and an Elo reprise draw 15,000 or so for 10 performances?

The season will open, October 13 through 23, with the company’s third different Cinderella in as many tries. We got Ben Stevenson’s version in 1993 and Michael Corder’s in 1997; now it’s the US premiere of the one National Ballet of Canada artistic director James Kudelka did for his company last year. The welcome constant is Prokofiev’s dark-hued score. The Nutcracker will have its third home in as many years; it’s at the Opera House November 25 through December 30, when we’ll find out whether artistic director Mikko Nissinen will try to scale down the 2003 Wang Theatre production, blow up the 2004 Colonial Theatre version, or come up with something altogether different. The season will close with "An Evening of Russian Ballet" May 4 through 7 and then "Carmen" May 11 through 21. The first of these comprises Bronislava Nijinska’s Les noces (choreographed, to the Stravinsky score, for Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes in 1923), the third act of Aleksandr Glazunov’s Raymonda (a version of which the company did in 1996 under the rubric "Glazounov Classique"), and "other pieces" to be named later. "Carmen" is an odd duck, Balanchine’s Serenade (which the company has done often, and well, most recently in 1999) preceding Jorma Elo’s third world premiere for Boston Ballet, a not-quite-evening-length Carmen set to music from the Georges Bizet opera. The company’s 1997 Carmen, a 35-minute speed-reading by the late Dace Dindonis, was not one of its brightest moments; the idea of a Carmen from Elo, whose previous company works, SHARP side of DARK and Plan to B, are not exactly story ballets, is intriguing, but I wonder why it’s not evening-length (it’s not as if the opera didn’t have enough music) and how it will relate to Serenade.