Dance - Year in review

Performances that moved us

by Jeffrey Gantz and Marcia B. Siegel

1. Spring break. What with Miss Saigon's helicopter occupying the Wang Center stage throughout January and February, Boston Ballet had to sit out most of the winter, but the company more than compensated with its three spring repertory programs. "Body Electric" sandwiched company principal Laszlo Berdo's world premiere, Four Hands, between two hits from past seasons, Lila York's Celts (March 1996) and Twyla Tharp's Waterbaby Bagatelles. "Ode to Joy" gave us another world premiere, Lila York's ambitious Ode to Joy (set to the last movement of Beethoven's Ninth), along with Balanchine's jazzy, angular Capriccio for Piano and Orchestra (a/k/a Rubies) and resident choreographer Daniel Pelzig's Tchaikovsky piece Cantabile. And "An American in Paris" offered more Balanchine, the sumptuous Symphony in C, and Bruce Marks's Lark Ascending, but the centerpiece was the world premiere of Pelzig's An American in Paris, a glitzy 45-minute tribute to love, loss, George Gershwin, and the City of Lights.

2. Twyla! Tharp didn't invent rhythm dance, of course, but her The Fugue, choreographed before most of the tap dogs were born, is nevertheless the original model for their success. In The Fugue and many of the jazz and pop pieces that followed, she unleashed a primal energy that art dance had kept in check. The Tharp! company's visit to the Shubert also brought us Heroes, which like In the Upper Room has a score by Philip Glass but is far less driven, far more lush and even romantic, and Sweet Fields, which, set to Shaker hymn tunes and the vigorous praise songs of William Billings and other early American composers, centers on the spiritual life of a more innocent time.

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3. Mark! Whatever happens in a Mark Morris dance happens in the music, and his musical taste is sophisticated. At the Emerson Majestic, he gave us Canonic 3/4 Studies, which was not just a clever spoof of ballet conventions but a rebuttal, an aesthetically valid counterproposal as well as a parody. Medium, a new work set to John Harbison's tribute to Franz Schubert, "November 19, 1828," started out in Morris's most didactic mode, but along the way the dancers began to share one another's vocabularies, and their partnerships began to shift along with their gender roles. And Lou Harrison's Grand Duo for Violin and Piano alternated between moods of somber mysticism and crazed exuberance. There was more than one moment when the choreographer's phenomenal craftsmanship climbed over into more fulfilling ground.

4. What time does the next swan boat leave? Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake remains the ultimate ballet as it bourrées along the narrow footpath between day and night, land and water, man and woman, woman and swan, love and lust, life and afterlife. And the excellence of Boston Ballet's production seeps out of the sets, the costumes; it exudes from the pores of the dancers, and from the company's music director, Jonathan McPhee. This go-round was highlighted by company principal Kyra Strasberg's first Odette/Odile, all classic position, charismatic presence, and male-melting Southern-belle charm, and by the pairing of real-life couple Larissa Ponomarenko and Viktor Plotnikov, which was like watching Waterford crystal dance. But it's hard to pick out highlights -- you wouldn't have an easy time finding a Swan Lake this good in New York.

5. Mischa! White Oak was started in 1990 to back up the great ballet star Mikhail Baryshnikov, who wanted to ease off the rigors of his native craft but not stop dancing entirely. The central attraction of the company's May appearance at the Shubert was Baryshnikov's solo in Christopher Janney/Sara Rudner piece HeartBeat:mb, where the dancer is hooked up to an electronic monitor that plays his heartbeat through a sound system for all to hear. Even when Baryshnikov danced with the company, in Neil Greenberg's Tchaikovsky Dance, showing a gentlemanly, paternal desire to blend in with the company, you could see he knows that when he's on stage the audience doesn't see anyone else.

6. Jerome Robbins. He was the last surviving member of the triptych -- with George Balanchine and Lincoln Kirstein -- who reared one of the most important cultural institutions our country has ever seen, New York City Ballet. And on Broadway, his parallel universe, Robbins's signature on such shows as West Side Story, The King and I, and Fiddler on the Roof raised the standard of dancing in musical theater. He was, as New York Times dance critic Anna Kisselgoff wrote, "the first major American-born classical choreographer." With the passing of Jerome Robbins, there is indeed a palpable closing of a particularly brilliant time and space in classical dance.

7. Walking on air. Postmodern juggler Michael Moschen, who opened this fall's Dance Umbrella season at the Emerson Majestic, is a wizard, a clown, a dancer, and an animator of Euclidean science. Other jugglers toss objects around. Moschen assumes objects have a life of their own and trains them to be beautiful. One of his most endearing exploits involves a small silver baton and a hoop about 18 inches across. As he steps carefully across the stage, he points the stick at the twirling hoop, or strokes the circle's edge; and the hoop obeys the stick, stopping, reversing direction, floating up and down in front of his body. At the beginning of his show, the audience screamed at his feats. Fifteen minutes in, it was holding its breath.

8. Old-fashioned girl. Boston Ballet's Giselle isn't the flashy type -- the pyrotechnics it provided this fall were emotional rather than physical. And along with the usual mature artistry from the likes of Patrick Armand, Kyra Strasberg, Larissa Ponomarenko, Viktor Plotnikov, Pollyana Ribeiro, and Jennifer Gelfand (a list that's by no means exhaustive), we got to see the exciting potential of young dancers like Tara and Zachary Hench and April and Simon Ball. May their tribe increase.

9. Polishing up the Nutcracker. For all that it has a hugely successful Nutcracker, Boston Ballet keeps trying to come up with something new to keep audiences coming back. This year, artistic associate Daniel Pelzig revamped the first act, taking out the parlor scene and giving Grandpa (now obviously entering his second childhood) and Grandma (the ever-amazing Tony Collins) more to do, allowing the children to be a bit more grown-up (the first cast's Clara, Marie Ceranowicz, took full advantage), and getting the Snow Queen and King on earlier than before, so that they have an entire pas de deux to the most erotic music Tchaikovsky ever wrote. For act two, artistic director Anna-Marie Holmes (not Pelzig, as we reported in our review) revamped the "Waltz of the Flowers," whose Dew Drop now has four Cavaliers to go with her 12 Flowers. Not every change seemed for the best, but credit the company with trying to improve when it could easily rest on its laurels.

10. Before there was Riverdance. Trinity Irish Dance Company isn't exactly Irish: its members are from Chicago, from Mark Howard's Trinity Academy of Irish Dance. They're not even all Irish-American: the troupe that landed at the Emerson Majestic this month included dancers named Kowalski and Prokopij. But Irish is as Irish does -- as was made plain by the flabbergasting footwork of Natalie "I Can't Believe She's Not Irish" Sliwinski. One look at what Howard calls Trinity's "progressive Irish dance," with its angular, athletic arm movements and geometric patterns, and it's clear he had a major part in making Riverdance possible. This was a treasurable look at where stepdancing was before Riverdance and where it may go in the future.