High voltage

"Body Electric" throws a powerful current

by Jeffrey Gantz

"BODY ELECTRIC,"Waterbaby Bagatelles, by Twyla Tharp. Four Hands, by Laszlo Berdo. Celts, by Lila York. Presented by Boston Ballet, at the Wang Center, through March 15.

After an unusually long winter hibernation (enforced by the presence of Miss Saigon's helicopter on the Wang Center stage throughout January and February), Boston Ballet awakes to three programs over the next six weeks. "Body Electric" reprises two hits from past seasons, Lila York's Celts (March 1996) and Twyla Tharp's Waterbaby Bagatelles (April 1994 and March 1995), sandwiching a world premiere, Four Hands, from company principal Laszlo Berdo. It makes a tasty breakfast snack before the more substantial meals ahead, which will culminate next month with ballet's grand banquet, Swan Lake.

I confess that this third serving of Waterbaby Bagatelles hit my taste buds like watercress -- peppery but without much substance. Maybe it's the taped music (which Tharp prefers to live), a potpourri of Webern, Kronos Quartet, Bang on a Can, and Astor Piazzolla that concludes with the apotheosis of John Adams's On the Dominant Divide. This enables Tharp to keep the movement under tight control, but the piece pulses rather than breathes, and the Boston Ballet dancers, at least, never look as uninhibited as when they're interacting with an orchestra.

It's still fun to watch. The title may or may not allude to Charles Kingsley's 1863 children's classic The Water-Babies. Various groups ebb and flow: a foundation group of ladies in '20s-style skirted bathing tunics and matching aqua caps, accompanied by a Pan-like creature in goat shorts; three couples in blue compression shorts and black overskirts/shorts; a buff-clad Iron John group doing manly things in the woods. There's a slow, Parisian-boîte apache pas de deux; a tango where the girls face off against the boys à la West Side Story; and an eye-popping sequence where the waterbabies writhe and wriggle seductively on the floor (poses straight out of Arthur Rackham's Rheingold illustrations) while Pan and the men play Siegfried, trotting out their best moves before carrying the waterbabies off. Meanwhile five rows of horizontal tube lights move up and down, as if all this were taking place in an aquarium.

The main movement motif is circular, a coiling of tension that has no place to go: the men huff and puff, the waterbabies shimmy anemone-like. Part VI (the Rheingold sequence) begins the release, with the men cutting loose to the ladies' obvious appreciation. But in the concluding Part VII, John Adams's music (built on arpeggiated chords borrowed from Beethoven's G-major and Emperor piano concertos) resolves easily and without much preparation, and the choreography follows suit, with one of the blue-black ladies (Jennifer Gelfand in the three performances I saw last weekend) changing into white and joining Pan in celebration. Behind them, as the curtain falls, the waterbabies get tossed along a line of men, like mermaids who've been captured by mortals. If there's more substance to this piece, it's not easily grasped. But then, water never is.

Laszlo Berdo's Four Hands, set to five of the eight pieces from Rachmaninov's Opus 5 and 17 Suites for Two Pianos, is deceptively unpretentious. The curtain rises on a sober tableau of six couples, in black unitards with gray tops, against a black drop; it could be an elegant nightclub -- or a rehearsal studio in mourning. The choreography has a class look to it, everybody moving together or women against men, sometimes breaking into couples. At one point the ladies favor the tiny, temporizing step you'd see in Slavic folkdance. The ladies' toe shoes are white; the music ("Pâques," from Opus 5) reproduces the church bells of an Orthodox Easter.

The drop rises to reveal the two pianos facing each other in the rear right corner of the stage, shrouded in darkness -- another rehearsal-studio reference? Crossed-angel-wing spotlights find a couple writhing and wrapping themselves about each other, to the mournful, descending figures of Opus 5's "Les larmes" ("Tears"). At one point she stands on pointe and does a deep backbend as he holds her about the waist -- distance and desire. One by one more couples enter, the men carrying the women upside down and spread-eagled. The pas de deux couple are left alone at the end: she curls up in his arms before he leads her off.

The bells turn to snowflakes in the green-lit part three (to Opus 17's "Valse" -- "Waltz"), for a whirling blizzard of a soloist who seems to be finding herself, both technically and emotionally. There's a second pas de deux: whereas the first one was physically about weight and emotionally about dependence, this one is more ballet-like, with the lady taking brief solo flights while the man looks on in approval. The backbend gesture is repeated, but this time the lady straightens up and embraces her partner. Then she runs off and he follows. The music -- "Romance," from Opus 17 -- is as lyrical and uplifting (Rachmaninov showing the influence of Schumann and Brahms) as "Les larmes" was gloomy and clotted. The final section, to the Opus 17 "Tarantelle" (which anticipates the end of the C-minor piano concerto's first movement), offers solos from both the lady and the man. Later the women are hoisted aloft with their heads thrown back, looking like the Christ of Dalí's Crucifixion.

Like Rachmaninov's Suites, Four Hands doesn't seem very interesting or very deep at first, but there's more going on than initially meets the ear or eye. I hope the company will bring it back soon.

As for Lila York's Celts, I predicted upon its debut, in March of 1996, that it would be back in two years. It's a magisterial translation of Irish stepdancing into ballet, but it looked better before the real thing (i.e., Riverdance, but not Lord of the Dance) came to town last year, and it keeps threatening to turn into Finian's Rainbow or a depiction of a Celtic tarot pack. What saves it is the quality of the steps -- both as choreographed and as performed. I'm glad to see that York has jettisoned the section titles ("Reel," "Galway Bay," etc.), which were too generic to be of any help; the piece stands fine on its own. And there's no faulting the music, which kicks off with a double jig from the Chieftains before throwing in a pipe lament from The Secret of Roan Inish, the Ry Cooder/Chieftains "Dunmore Lassies," and the Çaracena from Bill Whelan's The Seville Suite. Actually, I wish York had stuck to the Chieftains throughout; the version of "The Fox Hunt" she uses (from Celtic Thunder/New York Hard Days) pales next to that on The Chieftains 2 or The Chieftains Live.

Celts opens in a vertical column of mist and dancers stepping brightly in Tunji Dada's green-earth costumes (whose snazzy details barely make it to the first row); there's what looks to be the tribal goddess and her high king, a group of bare-chested mini-kilted males pumping themselves up to go to war, plus a leprechaun-like figure (again the quality of the choreography and the performances, by Robert Wallace and Carlos Santos, redeem the stereotype), and a pair in red. In part two, to Roan Inish's "Selkie Song," the king swings the goddess around in a kind of mating dance and she curls her legs open, as if giving birth; the gesture is repeated in part four, to an audience of moonlit maidens, but then the goddess runs off while the king remains, worn-out, mortal. The finale explodes to the bagpipe rock of the Brittany's Dan Ar Braz. It's held together by a repeated concluding gesture: a man with fist upraised, his back to us. (The hidden Ireland?) This is a dessert piece, Irish trifle, and last weekend's audiences wolfed it down with abandon.

"Body Electric" is really an ensemble program, and the company does itself proud, but there are some especially shining moments from the usual suspects: Patrick Armand's leering Pan look and ethereal entrechats; Robert Wallace's sheer footspeed as the "leprechaun" (Carlos Saura not far behind in a darker interpretation); Larissa Ponomarenko slinky and sinuous in the apache of Waterbaby Bagatelles, and the entire Part VI group; Pollyana Ribeiro and Armand in the second Four Hands duet, so affecting. Most of all Jennifer Gelfand, immaculate through all three pieces and focused, expressive, as I've never seen her before. The company will be back next week with "Ode to Joy" (March 19 through 29): a Lila York world premiere, Ode to Joy; Balanchine's Capriccio for Piano and Orchestra; and resident choreographer Daniel Pelzig's Cantabile, which debuted in February 1994, during the company's Tchaikovsky centennial.