In search of repertory

Balanchine and more in Hartford

by Marcia B. Siegel

While Boston Ballet was finishing up its "Balanchine!" programs at the Wang Center, another Balanchine work was being presented by Hartford Ballet down at Bushnell Auditorium. Getting to see Serenade, Divertimento No. 15, The Four Temperaments, and Rubies all in one week is a rare treat. But rarity is exactly the problem. An occasional crack at a master choreographer doesn't allow dancers to push past the terrifying challenge into a more assured interpretation. For the audience, Balanchine becomes just another novelty, one that lacks the obvious, audience-friendly tricks in more modern pieces.

One of the many singular aspects of dance as a performing art is that its repertory, whether old or new, doesn't "exist" in the way a play or an opera does. Productions of old works are often called reconstructions, meaning that before they can be learned, rehearsed, and staged, they have to be re-created. Sometimes there's a film or a written score from a past production that gives a pretty complete account of the choreography, but revivals often follow a scenario embedded in the memory of a dancer. And no ordinary dancer, but one with a comprehensive grasp of all the steps done by the whole cast, not just the part she may have danced herself. Victoria Simon, who staged the Boston and Hartford revivals, is one of the most trusted Balanchine repetiteurs, yet the Hartford and Boston recons differed, mainly in the matter of style.

One of the distinctions of Balanchine ballet is the stylistic imprint his dancers acquired. Some people call it American, some call it contemporary, but Balanchine dancing has a jazzy ease, a sharp attack, a musical assurance. Balanchine dancing, of course, doesn't "exist" either, except as a composite of wonderful things seen, remembered, and newly animated. The dancers may be doing the hardest step combinations in the world, but they can take minor liberties with the beat, lengthen or quicken the phrase, so that the performance radiates a joy that has nothing to do with smiling all the time.

Sometimes, individual moments of expression like this can illuminate a whole sequence. Serenade (1935), the first ballet Balanchine choreographed in America, revisits the sighs and vapors of the Romantic ballet. Without a literal plot, Balanchine suggests the temporal and the supernatural worlds where courage and betrayal, love and death, coexisted on the Romantic stage. The totemic 19th-century ballet, Giselle, comes to mind in Serenade at the odd beginning of the last movement, where a ballerina lies on the floor and is solemnly approached by a man with another woman clinging to his back and covering his eyes.

But much earlier, implanted in the formal choreography, another woman falls in the same position. One night Pollyana Ribeiro anticipated that fall with a slight intake of breath, then got up with a dismissive glance. It was like the moment early in Giselle when she has a slight fainting spell while dancing, then recovers and shrugs it off. Her weakness will be fatal, and tragic. Ribeiro's fall brought all of that back and imposed the spirit of Giselle onto Serenade from that moment on.

It goes without saying that Balanchine dancers have to be technical virtuosos, even the corps de ballet. His total output constitutes probably the most exacting use of the classical ballet vocabulary that has ever been made, and I think it's for this reason that it needs to be performed. Balanchine isn't just another different-looking item in a repertory but an extreme test of what dancers can do. A Balanchine ballet may also be pretty, fast, spiky, sexy, or spectacular, but so are other ballets. It's the steps -- their complexity, visual design, and resonance -- that make these ballets so rich.

The steps can be simplified, and we in the audience might not consciously notice if the dancers do four foot beats instead of six, throw their leg in the air instead of placing it, or make a straight leg gesture instead of a circular one. But the dance won't look extraordinary. Of the Boston dancers, Ribeiro, Jennifer Gelfand, Adriana Suárez, and Aleksandra Koltun seemed consistently in command of the vocabulary and able to make those idiomatic decisions that brought it alive.

The others got through it with varying degrees of suavity. One bland performance of Divertimento made me understand why audiences sometimes consider Balanchine just so much boring technique. You could say Balanchine is nothing but steps, but those steps are like a story, full of events and reflections. Dancers don't always trust their own ability to make steps into narrative. In The Four Temperaments (1946) some of the opening-night cast, including up-and-coming American Ballet Theatre star Giuseppe Picone, mistook the musical titles for acting indications. I think for Balanchine the connection was so remote it was almost subliminal. In any case, Picone in the Melancholic variation and Gianni Di Marco in the Phlegmatic couldn't let the kinky classicism tell their story but dramatized what was already distorted.

Incidentally, the company made the peculiar decision to list Kurt Seligmann as the designer of The Four Temperaments without explaining that his designs are gone. Balanchine started stripping off the excessive decorations as soon as he saw these elaborate affairs, and by 1951 Four T's was down to the practice clothes in which it's danced now.

Balanchine's late Stravinsky ballets push the idea of distortion to the zenith. Instead of a pure upright vertical body line, the dancers often tilt off-center. Their gestures may be broken up or angular or rotated outward with extra torque. The Hartford dancers really got into the extremity of Rubies, pushing their pelvises forward and crooking up their elbows, and doing the picky footwork as if it were some arcane form of tap dancing. The audience was underwhelmed.

But after Kathryn Posin's men-women-and-selves ballet Stepping Stones, they cheered a lot. Posin's piece, created in 1993 for the Milwaukee Ballet, is one solution to the problem of repertory and also shows how choreographers can keep working when it's too expensive to have their own companies. Posin, a modern dancer, has been freelancing for a while. She uses pointe work, but only in a simple way. Balanchine is the most convincing argument that ballet is more than standing on the pointes and doing various acrobatic feats with a partner. Well, maybe the audience does want the acrobatics and fake love scenes right now instead of the intricacies of high-style classicism.

Stepping Stones has six women in short tunics and pointe shoes, six barefoot women in body suits, six men in trunks, and six graduated platforms with funny tilted bits of railings on the upstage side. The tunic women do something like barre exercises on the platforms. The other women loll on the floor a lot. The men hurl macho moves around and finally hurl the women around. One man and one woman separate from the others and help each other step from one platform to the next. These are placed far enough apart that the dancers have to stretch and twist each other to reach them. Aside from the opportunity to look at their bodies working so hard, I could see no reason why they weren't allowed to step on the floor. In a final section all 18 dancers were stretching and lolling without taking advantage of the unifying structure of Joan Tower's piano-and-percussion score, so the stage looked like a bucket of pick-up sticks.

The program told about this work's "exploring the relationships of women, their strengths and weaknesses, and their ability to reach out to each other for support and affirmation," but with a little wit the piece could have been a takeoff on the competitiveness and sexual deprivation of dance companies. Seriousness and high moral tone were amply provided in the Hartford's last piece, Acts of Light, by Martha Graham. This late work, the most extended and to me the least engaging of several classroom ballets Graham made, has a lush orchestral score by Carl Nielsen. (All the music on this program was taped and played too loud, as if excessive volume would make us feel there was a live orchestra. It actually makes the music sound more artificial.)

At the end of her life, Graham seemed to me to have reverted to the exotic sensualities of her earliest teachers, Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn, against which she initially had rebelled. Acts of Light is a kind of bare-bones recapitulation of earlier Graham duets and rituals, ending with an extended demonstration of Graham technique for a large ensemble.

There are more typical and theatrical Graham dances, and the Graham administration is now allowing them to be performed by outside companies. The Hartford Ballet, now under the co-directorship of Peggy Lyman, has done one of the few other lyrical Graham dances, Diversion of Angels, this year, but both these works fit into today's taste for bland, beautiful, nondramatic dancing. If a company has the resources to do repertory at all, what better way to extend both the dancers' and the audience's concept of what dance can be? I doubt it's that much easier to produce dances that soothe us by reinforcing what's familiar.