Assorted suites

Boston Ballet's "Young Masters" at the Shubert

by Marcia B. Siegel

"THE YOUNG MASTERS," Nine Lives: Songs of Lyle Lovett, by Daniel Pelzig. Maelstrom, by Mark Morris. Below Down Under, by Laszlo Berdo. Presented by Boston Ballet at the Shubert Theatre through February 28.

Who knows how they program ballet evenings? The first of Boston Ballet's winter outings at the Shubert Theatre offered three pieces of very similar dimensions: plotless ensembles with from 10 to 14 dancers, solos and smaller units shared evenly, and a minimum of mass maneuvering. Each work had its own stylistic pretext, but all were essentially the same contemporary inkblot alternative to the perceived excesses of traditional ballet. No stars took over. No stories or heavy emotions diluted the stream of dancing, even for a second's relief.

The company seemed apprehensive about its Shubert interlude, which comprises a pair of two-week programs before we all troop back across the street to their home base at the Wang Center. With a stage maybe half the size of the Wang's, and half the audience capacity at 1800 seats, the Shubert is a good space for any dance that doesn't aspire to the grandiose dimensions of 19th-century spectacle. Apart from the economic advantages to the company, the Shubert's human scale could do wonders for the dancers, who always look miniaturized and bland to me in the Wang. There's a kind of reciprocity between what a dancer does and what the audience sees and responds to, an instant appreciation-feedback that has nothing to do with pre-programmed standing ovations. In the Wang it evaporates before it covers those acres to the stage, where the dancers might make use of it. But more than once on opening night at the Shubert, I thought I saw a dancer's brain go "Click!" in a moment of unanticipated and galvanizing contact.

Daniel Pelzig's Nine Lives: Songs of Lyle Lovett provided a fine opportunity to test this new relationship. Pelzig contrasted a showcase of classical steps with some characteristic gestures and attitudes matched to the pop moods of Lovett recordings. The five men, in pants and shirts with rolled-up sleeves, swaggered and jived like Western dudes, but the women looked less affected by the music. I think their abbreviated satin mini-dresses in dark colors with matching pointe shoes worked against them. What would these fashion statements be doing in a Dust Bowl bar? But designer Nong Tumsutipong didn't seem to be aiming for any unified idea of place or person here.

Actually, neither was Pelzig. The men consistently splayed off into imaginative movement variations. They dug into the music's varying energies, especially Simon Ball shadowed by Paul Thrussell in the slowly unfolding arabesques, the introspective air turns and pirouettes of "Pontiac"; and Christopher Budzynski grinning and thrusting out his elbows and galloping around in "She's Hot To Go."

Lovett's women, in these lyrics, seem to be easy-going, earthy gals, but Jennifer Glaze looked uncomfortable sinking into one hip and negligently lifting a shoulder in the blues number "All My Love Is Gone." The rest of the women kept their usual reserve and didn't venture far from a proper classical line.

According to the scheme Pelzig adopted for the work, most of the numbers started with a solo dancer who was then joined by a partner or an ensemble -- Glaze's significant other was Yuri Yanowsky. After a standard adagio duet (Larissa Ponomarenko and Simon Ball to "Nobody Knows Me"), Pollyana Ribeiro demurely cooperated when Viktor Plotnikov spun her into his vortex of spins, barrel jumps, fast rolling falls, and mimed visits to a bar for refreshment ("Black and Blue").

The piece wound up with four couples and one rotating extra man doing simultaneous different duets with tricky lifts and holds, led by Thrussell and the sultriest lady, Adriana Suárez. Although the music was a C&W-style waltz ("If You Were To Wake Up"), the choreography seemed to work against its rhythm, or maybe all the couples were dancing to their own.

One thing Mark Morris never does is work against music, and Maelstrom, which Morris gave Boston Ballet after the Lila York piece originally scheduled for this program was withdrawn, is set on Beethoven's Ghost Piano Trio, which got a spirited rendition from Michael Rosenbloom, Ronald Lowry, and Freda Locker. The dance, made for San Francisco Ballet in 1994, shows Morris working with a limited ballet vocabulary and a big, formalist idea about group choreography.

Morris arranged the 14 dancers in constantly evolving patterns, leading the audience on and on with the device of the canon. I've never seen this ordinary compositional tool used with such facility. If I hadn't been so interested in how Morris would reinvent it, I'd have screamed. At one point he acknowledged his own craftsmanship by setting a line-up of dancers in an obvious follow-the-leader game, as if to say, here's the building block of it all. The ballet started right out with two couples (Thrussell and Suárez, Plotnikov and Ribeiro) doing different, canonic movement phrases in counterpoint. Later, small groups appeared, each group in its own canonic sequence.

The overall design of the ballet seemed to be set by the Allegro-Largo-Presto dynamics of Beethoven's structure. After a first section danced against James F. Ingalls's blue sky with harmless clouds, the stage turned dark and the small clusters of dancers gathered into larger, more cohesive groups. Thrussell lay on the floor until Suárez led him off. The group slowly crossed the stage; Thrussell and Suárez ventured in and out several times but never joined the group. They all crossed again in a powerful phalanx, and just before the end, five men toppled over without warning, as the others kept going on inexorably.

Finally, under an ominous red sky, the small units returned in a long but disjointed recapitulation of actions one could recall from earlier. There was nothing literal in this dance, no emoting or expressing you could name. Yet, I thought of ever-present death and of how we don't pay enough attention to the distinctions of our friends.

Below Down Under was the latest effort of Laszlo Berdo, the principal dancer who's being cultivated as an in-house choreographer by Boston Ballet. Berdo used an eclectic score put together by the Englishman Stephen Kent that featured aboriginal didjeridoo and other familiar and exotic instruments. Although the audience was encouraged to think about the dance in relation to the Australian native people, the music was at best some kind of generic ethno-pop, or Aussie-pop. The dance had no shred of authenticity anywhere else.

First we saw only a large piece of cloth pulled up in peaks like a tent colony. Gradually the peaks were raised from the flies to unveil one woman, then four others, decoratively posed in spangled, halter-top leotards and feathered topknots, their skin painted with smears of white. Uh-oh. Was this a desert harem or the hideout of some comic-strip headhunters?

The dance that followed was an uncooked and deeply regressive blend of the primitive and the exotic. The women tried to undulate and look seductive, a task that got even more impossible when they had to don fake grass skirts over their fake warpaint. Men strutted on, leading with their pelvises, wearing feathered loin cloths over their tights, and headbands with plumes stuck in the front. I won't embarrass the dancers by naming them, but the designer, Deborah Newhall, deserves special mention for self-indulgence.

I don't know what Berdo thinks goes on in the Outback, but the dance went from the steamy opening episode ("Red Rock") to couples doing the bunny hop ("Jumping Jaxs"), a duet ("Elements") where the man did some undulating fast turns, a men's dance where each participant solo'd in the center of a semicircle -- all facing the audience ("Barking Dogs"), and yet another duet, worthy of burlesque, where two people did acrobatics lying on a lit-up platform and other couples wandered in, spoon fashion, to watch them ("Voyeur"). The whole thing wound up with a circle dance, meant to be tribal, I suppose.

What was worst about this dance was its lack of self-awareness. It's possible to make fun of the exotic, as the superbly funny and sexy movie of Kismet does. And it's possible to stifle the audience's dismay by taking the pseudo-ritual seriously, as though it were going to change the life of a village. Berdo gave the dancers neither alternative. It was dance as usual, or, according to the company's publicity, "pushing dancers to new performance boundaries." I can only hope they will reconsider their trespasses. Or at least get rid of the feathers and grass skirts.