Planet of Cool

Les Ballets de Monte-Carlo

by Marcia B. Siegel

Official dance lore has it that the modern dance lives on through the influence of Martha Graham. But ballet today owes far more to Graham's ideological foe, Merce Cunningham. The typical contemporary dance universe, constructed for us by the visiting Ballets de Monte-Carlo last weekend, is populated by an egalitarian tribe of highly mobile, dispassionate beings. Their ostensible subject may be sex, but their minds and hearts are on dancing. They can use the movement vocabulary of any academy almost indiscriminately, from the jetés of classicism to the squats and reaches of Limón to the violent embraces of Tanztheater. And their choreographers seem interested in these languages for no particular reason other than to signify some situation or atmosphere. It astonishes me that the audience no longer seems to expect anything more.

Les Ballets de Monte-Carlo offered four pieces in this vein. They may have more range; I'm told their Boston repertory was scaled to fit the pocket-size stage at the Copley Theatre. (Boston is probably the only big American city that hasn't built a good theater for dance performance in recent years, despite its perpetual rehabilitation projects.)

The program opened with Na Floresta, by one of Europe's current hot-shot choreographers, Nacho Duato. This big eclecticism relied more on modern-dance weightiness and expansive gesture than anything else, but the movement was set in predictable compositional lumps: a women's dance was followed by a men's dance, then the women singled out one of their group to be the partner in a love duet. There was a quasi-competitive men's duet, a trio where two men lugged a woman around, a woman's solo, and finally a duet sequence that ended with all five couples clustering downstage and gesturing away from the audience, just to be contrary.

The solo woman in these numbers might have been the same dancer, but in the dim lighting of this performance all the women looked identical to me -- sleek and wire-thin, with glossy tight hairdos and inscrutable faces -- and only now, writing down the sequence, do I think some narrative theme might have been intended. A poetic program note asked us to think of the Amazonian rain forest, but it didn't help.

Company choreographer/director Jean-Christophe Maillot contributed a duet (Duo d'Anges) where the tallest, sleekest, wire-thinnest and glossiest woman (Bernice Coppeiters) tangled with one of the good-looking men (Chris Roelandt). They molded to each other's bodies and stretched away for quite a long time until he kissed her. He immediately seemed ashamed and she jittered away. This brought on a quick resolution of sorts: she went into a spasm and fell on her back. He tenderly touched her face and blew a kiss -- into the air. The emotional meaning of this encounter was no more evident than the reason for her pointe shoes.

Maillot is so confident of his ability to design dances that he didn't appear to have a qualm about using Paul Hindemith's Theme and Four Variations, which was commissioned by George Balanchine for what became one of the towering masterpieces of 20th-century choreography, Four Temperaments. I found it impossible not to see and feel Balanchine's work while Maillot's banal creation slid before my eyes.

Ignoring both the loaded subtitles (Melancholic, Sanguinic, Phlegmatic, Choleric) and the compositional architecture of the music, Maillot once again treated us to couples, four of them. During the initial presentation of the musical themes, the men were droopy and the women fierce, implying a reversal of gender roles. As the score proceeded, each couple demonstrated a different shade of incompatibility. By the time Hindemith and Balanchine soared to a magnificent climax, one woman was compulsively throwing herself against a man's outthrust arm, attempting to be caught in an embrace, but instead he gave way and swiveled around, forcing her to charge past him and try again.

Strangely enough, the post-Cunningham choreographer Lucinda Childs made the most extensive use of the ballet vocabulary on this program, in a short piece called Concerto, to harpsichord and string music written for it by Henryk-Mikolaj Górecki. Childs let us appreciate the company's fine technique, without the bother of a pseudo-sexy pretext. The seven dancers traveled in lively linear patterns, with low jumps, chassés, pas de chat, chaîné turns, and other ballet steps, but instead of the traditional ballet dancer's stop-and-go, they propelled themselves continuously through space, making their preparations and arm placements visible only at strategic and satisfying stopping points.