1. Maestro magic. For a while there Boston Ballet was rivaling the Red Sox for organizational smarts. First it hired Anna-Marie Holmes to replace outgoing artistic director Bruce Marks. Then it fired Holmes and replaced her with Maina Gielgud (John’s niece). Then Gielgud quit before she even started, claiming the company hadn’t been entirely straightforward as to how much money she would have to achieve its goal of becoming one of the world’s top 10 ballet companies. Meanwhile, CEO Jeffrey Babcock, who had been the cultural director of the 1996 Atlanta Summer Olympics, left to become Dean of the School of the Arts at BU. Fortunately the company honchos righted the ship by naming music director Jonathan McPhee as interim artistic coordinator (overheard at one performance this year: "He’s the best part of the whole ballet"). McPhee put together a credible season for 2001-2002, and in September the company named Mikko Nissinen its new artistic director.
2. Cheer the beloved country. It took a few numbers for the Gumboots troupe to establish its claim to the Colonial stage. But 90 minutes later, the crowd was on its feet screaming and cheering — clapping in a six-beat counter-rhythm it had made up itself, against the eight-beat phrase of the drummer. Gumboot dancing commemorates the indentured workers in the South African gold mines, who found a way to communicate with one another by stomping out rhythms with the rubber boots issued to protect their feet from the filthy waste water on the floor of the tunnels. Now gumboot is a competitive team sport in South Africa, and its message to overcome — not just to survive but to survive with joy — transcends history. It spreads out to other tyrannized people, and even to us.
3. Pillars of the community. National Tap Dance Day at the Museum of Our National Heritage in Lexington, at which Brenda Bufalino received the Tapestry Award, concluded with 20 pairs of feet slamming out the shim-sham. Mikhail Baryshnikov and White Oak Dance Project dreamed up PASTForward, which in its Celebrity Series incarnation put volunteers all over the Shubert Theatre stage. And at Jacob’s Pillow, The Horse’s Mouth, from Tina Croll and James Cunningham, rounded up 20 or 30 local dance professionals for its performance (as it does everywhere it goes); and the latest version of Twyla Tharp’s 1970 extravaganza, The One Hundreds, finished up with 100 persons, each having learned one of the original 100 short phrases, entering and doing them all simultaneously — a finale worthy of Charles Ives.
4. Visiting swans. It didn’t look good for the home team when the Royal Ballet — the kind of company Boston Ballet aspires to be — hit town with the ultimate work in the repertoire, Swan Lake, as if to show the locals how it’s done. And indeed the dark and gritty and disturbing Royal Ballet version, which outgoing artistic director Anthony Dowell first staged in 1987, is on the whole deeper and better than Boston Ballet’s. The choreography of the Royal’s first-act waltz and polonaise was exquisite; the swan corps was a thing of beauty. But though the principals made it look easy, they didn’t outclass their Boston counterpoints. Our Swan might not be quite as sleek, but it is swimming in the same lake.
5. Home-bred beauties. In the wake of the Gielgud fiasco, Boston Ballet did what any company does when it seems that life is all thorns and no roses: it called on Sleeping Beauty. And the trio of Auroras we caught — Larissa Ponomarenko, Pollyana Ribeiro, and Aleksandra Koltún — were all rose and no thorns. The production did prick its finger once or twice — Carabosse needs to be a complex victim/villain, not a drag queen. Still, it’s hard to imagine many American companies with the capacity to do Sleeping Beauty this well.
6. Local heroes. At the Boston Conservatory’s winter concerts, authentic Paul Taylor was on view, reminding us that he was one of the first modern-dance choreographers to go balletic and initiate contemporary dance. His 1978 Airs, to selections from Handel operas and concertos, is indeed airy and bright but also keeps throwing us off-balance. We also got Lar Lubovitch’s 1976 Marimba, a terrific, maybe terminal example of a style that couldn’t really evolve, with 10 dancers creating subtly unfolding patterns in space and time to a live performance of Steve Reich’s Music for Mallet Instruments, Voices and Organ. Diane Arvanites-Noya & Tommy Neblett’s "That Better Is by Evil, Still Made Better" (part of Dance Umbrella’s "Boston Moves 2001," at the Emerson Majestic) had fragments from Shakespeare sonnets spoken from the stage by dancers and from the pit by deaf-signers; and these gorgeous poems, with their dense metaphor, tumbling syntax, and singing meters, became a nonverbal element of the dance, evoking a mysterious melancholy. And Seán Curran’s premiere The Only Way Out Is Through, to music by Leos Janácek, offered some strong, peasantlike movement for the large group of dancers in front of a black-and-white Mark Randall photograph projected on the backdrop, one of those worshipful, artful studies of huge machinery parts that might have been made in the early Soviet era.
7. Closing the Umbrella. Dance Umbrella, which Jeremy Alliger initiated 20 years ago, has been losing support and audiences for years, and this May it finally folded up. The good news is that the FleetBoston Celebrity Series has been filling part of the void, and now World Music’s CrashArts wing is adding to our dance program, scheduling winter visits by Susan Marshall and Company and Momix, among others.
8. Another world. ShadowBang, the fusion puppet show by Evan Ziporyn and I Wayan Wija that came to MIT’s Kresge Little Theater in October, offered us the chance to laugh without irony or guilt for the first time in many weeks. The Balinese shadow play sets opposites alongside each other: good and evil, humans and supernaturals, heroes and villains, lower-class sages and confused nobles. You can’t always tell the good guys from the bad guys, and in battle neither side wins conclusively. It’s the world not as it should be but as it is — in highly fictionalized form.
9. Star-spangled ballet. In the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks, Boston Ballet kicked off the city’s fall artistic season with two American works, Gerald Arpino’s Suite Saint-Saëns, a Balanchine-like fusion of Yankee energy and French éclat, and Bruce Wells’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, whose mossy, rustic set ejected us from our modern urban world. In Dream, Paul Thrussell’s Puck always seemed to be moving in a thousand directions at once, his body threatening to break out into God knows what; and the fairy children, flashing their firefly lights, ushered everyone into a blessed and protective fairy ring.
10. New York, New York. You wouldn’t find anything like Richard Move’s interpretations of Martha Graham in Boston. Wearing a wardrobe of exquisite knockoffs, Move as Martha stages his own reductions of Graham choreography in his "Martha @" series; this year, featuring his version of Phædra, it played to a packed audience at the 1500-seat Town Hall. This year also saw the New York debut of Twyla Tharp Dance, the latest troupe assembled by one of the great choreographers of our time, in her new home base in a Brooklyn church. Tharp’s creative energy continues to be unquenchable. When she knows her dancers, and they know her, the combination of risk and trust boosts the work to new heights.
