Love stories

Boston Ballet and Boston Conservatory offer stylish valentines

by Marcia B. Siegel

Last weekend's performances by Boston Ballet and the Boston Conservatory's Dance Theater offered audiences and dancers the chance to sample contemporary dance reinventing itself six different ways in contemplation of essentially the same subjects. It was love that made these dances go round -- love and style.

Maybe it's a stretch to talk about love as a subject of Bruce Wells's synoptic Glazunov Variations (Boston Conservatory), but in setting several solo variations and a pas de deux from Raymonda, Wells was summarizing an elaborate ballet occasion without bothering about any story. There's a reason why the plot twists and complications of the 19th-century ballets so often culminate in weddings. This ritual not only celebrates the virtuosity and harmony between two high-ranking dancers, but it symbolizes the survival of the monarchy through a propitious marriage.

George Balanchine understood that the dance spectacle would hold up on its own, without any narrative trappings, and by the 1940s he was creating plotless but totally classical expositions of the dancers' art at its most demanding, Symphony in C and Ballet Imperial, for instance. Balanchine choreographed the wonderful Raymonda music at least four times, only once using the story of the original ballet. He never ran out of inspiration, either. Pas de Dix (1955), Raymonda Variations (1961), and Cortège Hongrois (1973) look altogether different from each other.

Bruce Wells's Glazunov Variations is a sort of pocket version, with six female soloists and a principal couple. In true Balanchine fashion, all eight dancers get a chance in the spotlight, and the pas de deux and ensemble sections call for teamwork, so the dancers have to excel both as corps de ballet and as stars. Wells's choreography was a lot for the dancers to conquer, but their hard-working performance seemed drained of joy or musicality.

Ronald Feldman conducted a large and spirited orchestra from the Conservatory's music division. Elaine Bauer, former Boston Ballet ballerina and now on the faculty at the Conservatory, directed the production and designed the costumes.

In a way, Mark Godden's Another Year, premiered at the Shubert Theatre in the Boston Ballet's "Without Words" series (continuing through February 20), is the antithesis of the Wells-after-Balanchine modern ballet aesthetic. The spectacle here is anguish, desire, and the kind of expensive but cheap theatricality most 20th-century ballet reformers tried to eradicate. The curtain goes up on 14 people in party clothes, with champagne glasses in their hands. Suddenly the glasses fly up in the air and the guests drop to the floor, leaving the bride and groom all exposed in the center in a harsh white light.

With a superfluous and cynical pretext -- marriages fall apart from the time they're sealed -- the ballet is a string of duets for a maladjusted couple surrounded by friends who are no help to them. The bride and groom (Adriana Suárez and Paul Thrussell) don't get along. We don't know why, or why they married in the first place. She discreetly seduces Yuri Yanowsky. Many tense, decorative love scenes and a prolonged trio of indecisiveness later, she and Thrussell are reunited. Again we don't know why.

Layer by layer, the dancers strip off their garish costumes (designed by Carmen Alie and Denis Lavoie). I guess this is meant to effect some psychological revelation that isn't evident in the dance. At first the women's voluminous, calf-length ball gowns cast shadows over their legs. Their toe shoes are beige anyway, so if there is any important footwork, it doesn't draw the audience's attention.

I have to say that the score, Henryk Górecki's Lerchenmusik for clarinet, cello, and piano, made me extremely anxious with its excruciating repetition of two-note piano cadenzas and screechy dissonances. Maybe it was supposed to. Nacho Duato's Without Words, which opens the Ballet's program, treats the perennial ballet love metaphor with more restraint. Duets, trios, and larger groups dance in different combinations and intensities to six of Franz Schubert's small pieces transcribed for piano and cello. (Boston Ballet uses small musical ensembles or tapes in the Shubert Theatre, where the orchestra pit is limited.)

Dressed in flesh-colored bodywear and soft shoes, the eight dancers use a balletic movement vocabulary that's been expanded to incorporate aspects of modern dance. As they twine around each other, swing and circle their partners, press into the floor, and lean into the air, the dancers look flexible and almost relaxed. There were beautiful surprises -- like Pollyana Ribeiro curving her upper back over a man on the floor, Lyn Tally's flexing and arching foot -- that came from Duato's and the dancers' intelligent use of plastique.

Company B, Paul Taylor's Andrews Sisters piece, offered another challenge to the Boston Ballet dancers. This 1991 work was made for Houston Ballet and is in the repertory of Taylor's own modern-dance company. Boston acquired it five years ago. Taylor excels at making entertaining dances with little sharp needles of apprehension or nastiness in them, and Company B is no exception. While the dancers are jitterbugging or polka-ing happily around to the famous trio's 1940s swing, slow silhouettes march and stumble across the distance to remind us of the war that was going on overseas.

The dancers threw themselves into Taylor's full-bodied movement, although they didn't have the hang of the smooth gradations between fast and slow, ripply and jerky, weighted and airy that are characteristic of Taylor's movement style. Maybe it doesn't matter when the audience is so ready to have a good time, as it was after Duato's and Godden's dark ballets. I just think Taylor's choreography isn't improved by the unrelenting hard sell some of the dancers gave it.

Colin Connor, whose What the Waitress Saw had its premiere on the Boston Conservatory program, is another modern dancer, from Juilliard and the José Limón tradition. He now freelances, making works for both modern and ballet companies. What the Waitress Saw is a modern dance with an idea; something to do with the way times change but families remain the same. A mom, dad, and kid in 1960-ish street clothes dance their connections and differences in a lunchroom. The counter girl takes off her uniform for filmy undies. Characters freeze into time-stopped poses while other characters take over the action. A pack of urchins invades the place, but they don't carry out a stick-up; they just dance, eventually falling into two trios who mirror the family.

Connor seems to be trying to create overlapping periods of time, using some Dadaistic devices -- on-stage spotlights manned by people who later dance with the urchins, big useless objects deliberately placed in the middle of the dancing space -- in hopes of re-routing our search for continuity and logic.

Connor's dance, set to Aaron Copland's Clarinet Concerto, with Peter L. Cokkinias as soloist, made up one part of a little Copland fest. The program ended with Appalachian Spring, played in the original small-ensemble orchestration of its premiere in 1944. Productions of this landmark modern-dance work are scarce outside the Martha Graham company. It's apparently never before been performed by an all-student cast, so it's a great coup for the Conservatory's dance division. Several teachers and coaches from the Conservatory and the Graham Foundation in New York lovingly set it on the students.

Appalachian Spring has been in the Graham repertory pretty consistently, and I've seen the company do it, live and on film, many times. What the Boston Conservatory dancers achieved was to reveal its innocence. They don't have the technical veneer, or the sense of calculation, exuded by the professional company. But in their interpretation you could see that this is a dance about expectation, about rarin'-to-go young people on the American frontier, and about those who send them on their way. It looked like a dance about the future. It didn't look like any old stage romance, which it often does. In Friday night's performance, the Bride, Alison Cook, was luminous, transported, and she carried the others along with her.

Martha Graham designed her own costumes -- and redesigned and redesigned them. For this production somebody has kept the ruffly silk Bride's dress of recent vintage, but it's done in a sandy brown color instead of lavender, and the other costumes stress the earth tones. Even the Revivalist's perky followers are in blue that looks as if it's been washed many times. Isamu Noguchi's wood-frame set, the bones of a farmhouse going up, looked almost cozy on the Conservatory's small stage. All of this gave the dance a homespun, intimate quality, quite unlike the reverently curated diorama that depicts Martha Graham's work in other productions.