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Moving performances
The year in review
COMPILED BY JEFFREY GANTZ

1. More Giselle, please? Most cities would be happy to see one well-performed version of Giselle in a year, never mind two. But two is what we got, and each provided its own extracurricular excitement. Boston Ballet’s February production saw the return of the company’s one-time director-elect (they parted company before she could take up the position) Maina Gielgud, who brought a traditional version, even restoring some of the assets that have gotten excised from the ballet in the interest of modernizing. Our second Giselle was a last-minute replacement: for its November Celebrity Series appearance, American Ballet Theatre was planning to bring Le Corsaire. Boston Ballet had staged that work in 1997, and when former company director Anna-Marie Holmes was invited to restage it for ABT, it became a hit. The company even took it to Japan this past summer — but after making their way back across the Pacific, the sets and costumes fell victim to a longshoremen’s strike. So ABT had to come up with another story ballet, and Giselle is the one it had available. Meanwhile we got to compare the two companies and see some superb dancing.

2. Wings. The Wang Theatre is haunted by the ghosts of recent failed Boston Ballet productions: Carmen, Dracula, Cleopatra, The Hunchback of Notre Dame. But Stanton Welch’s Madame Butterfly won’t be joining them. Welch found the tragedy (as opposed to the melodrama) in Puccini’s opera, and he transferred it to the dance stage, creating not a vivid monarch so much as a delicate, pale-green luna moth. There were stunning set pieces (one set to Puccini’s " Humming Song " ), and Welch’s detail facilitated differing Butterfly and Pinkerton conceptions. The Globe couldn’t seem to decide whether this ballet took wing or not, but we had no doubts — we hope it flies back this way often.

3. Billy Elliott, move over. Two intriguing dance documentaries came our way this year. Mirra Bank’s Last Dance explains how the 30-year-old dancer-acrobat troupe Pilobolus got together with artist/storyteller extraordinaire Maurice Sendak to make a dance. The deceptively avuncular Sendak turns out to be haunted by a dark vision of the Holocaust, and as the dancers improvise toward a narrative, archival footage from the concentration camps is edited in, as if to insist on reality’s brutal story. We never get to see more than " scenes " from the finished product, but it’s hard to imagine how the dance could be more absorbing than this pitiless glimpse into its history. And Jocelyn Ajami’s Queen of the Gypsies traces the career of flamenco dancer Carmen Amaya, who made movies in Spain and Hollywood, toured under of Sol Hurok, danced at the White House for President Roosevelt, was showered with flowers and mink at Carnegie Hall, and by the time she died — at age 50, in 1963 — had a theater named after her in Buenos Aires and a fountain in Barcelona.

4. Mostly Martha. The highlight of Martha @ the Pillow, the latest in Richard Move’s ongoing variety show celebrating the late diva of modern dance, was Graham student Yvonne Rainer’s 1962 Three Seascapes, as performed by Patricia Hoffbauer. Three Seascapes predates Yvonne Rainer’s more overtly feminist dances and films, and as a " pure dance " piece, it seems to represent the reformist intentions of the Judson Church and postmodern dancers perfectly. It questions the role of music in a dance, displays in nontechnical ways the performer’s refined and controlled physicality, and explores how a dance can manipulate our expectations and our emotions. It was powerful in ways you want dance to be — shocking, physically demanding, formal, sensuous, and evocative. It was also stunning.

5. From Russia with love I. Boris Eifman returned to the Wang Theatre with two more of his trademark psycho-drama ballets, Russian Hamlet: The Son of Catherine the Great and Don Juan & Molière. The first, set to chunks from the symphonic works of Beethoven and Mahler, told the story of Pavel I, whose mother had his father killed and then took the throne. History becomes dream in Eifman’s works: it’s difficult to distinguish fact from fantasy. And the choreography is less like ballet than like Russian ice dancing without the ice or the skates. But Eifman has something audiences like, because they keep coming back to see his productions.

6. From Russia with love II. We had better luck with John Cranko’s Onegin, which Boston Ballet presented for the third time. What’s not to like? It’s based on the great novel-in-verse by Aleksandr Pushkin. Cranko’s choreography is character-driven; there’s little mime and almost no divertissement dancing — everything contributes. The score, cobbled together by Cranko associate Karl-Heinz Stolze from minor Tchaikovsky and Francesca da Rimini, sounds like major Tchaikovsky, and at the Wang Theatre it had the benefit of one of the world’s best Tchaikovsky conductors, Boston Ballet music director Jonathan McPhee. All that’s needed is performers who can act as well as dance — which is exactly what this company has.

7. Monkeyshines at Mobius. The version of John Cage’s Variations V that Mobius Artists Group presented in April didn’t look anything like the original work that was produced in 1965 by Cage, the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, and a host of other facilitators. It felt like the original, though. And at the end Alison Ball rode through both rooms on a plastic kid’s tricycle, a nod to Cunningham’s original and unforgettable exit. Mobius also gave us two weekends of Monkeyhouse, who used their beyond-bizarre costumes and props to make feminist points — Odalisque, for example, spoofed the voyeuristic iconography of the sexy female.

8. They’ve got rhythm. LaVaughn Robinson received the Tapestry 2002 award at Dance Inn’s gala National Tap Dance Day concert at the National Heritage Museum in Lexington this past May. As the honoree of the evening, he danced a couple of numbers with his partner, Germaine Ingram, and shed a calm benevolence over the array of dancers in varying ages and flavors. Tapestry is the kind of show that reveals the true heart of tap: its continuity, adaptability, and audience rapport. Hosted by the bouncy Dianne Walker, Tapestry 2002 incorporated two Irish stepdancers, Boston modern jazz choreographer Adrienne Hawkins, Dance Inn director Thelma Goldberg with her students and protégés, nods to celebrities in the audience, and a tribute to the late Buster Brown presided over by Josh Hilberman. The whole cast reassembled for the traditional wind-up doing the shim sham shimmy. And though the unison chorus line might be a simplistic way to present tap, there’s something satisfying about three or four or 25 pairs of feet chattering away and making a single sound. In November, Josh Hilberman and the Dance Inn ensemble put together another entertaining show at Arlington’s Regent Theatre.

9. Reputable rep. Boston Ballet’s two repertory programs, " American Trilogy " in the spring and " Morris, Forsythe, and a World Premiere " in the fall, had more hits than misses. " Trilogy " brought welcome revivals of George Balanchine’s Slaughter on Tenth Avenue (Tara Hench in particular looked like Audrey Hepburn and wiggled like Marilyn Monroe) and Agnes de Mille’s Rodeo (Jennifer Gelfand was an especially winsome cowgirl); even Christopher Wheeldon’s Corybantic Ecstasies had more to say the second time around. Mark Morris’s Maelstrom seemed more of an eddy, but William Forsythe’s In the Middle, Somewhat Elevated kept audiences on the edge of their seats with its industrial-strength score, and the company gave it the rough justice it wants. And Jorma Elo used selections from Dmitry Sitkovetsky’s affecting string-trio arrangement of the Goldberg Variations to ground and counterpoint choreography that was imaginative and articulated and gave individual company members ample room to express themselves. Boston Ballet also gave us " Raw Dance, " at the BCA’s Cyclorama, in which company members got to try choreographing on their colleagues and we saw the results in an intimate setting; the evening had the feel of a small-scale adventure.

10. Fun City. We’re not saying no dance year would be complete without a visit to you know where, but consider what New York served up in 2002. In the midst of a legal battle over who owns her work, the Martha Graham Company managed to mount five very different works choreographed over five decades. In July, the Kirov Ballet opened the Lincoln Center Festival with Petipa’s final, 1900 version of La Bayadère; that was followed by an idiomatic and idiosyncratic presentation of Balanchine’s Jewels and a downy soft (almost too much so) Swan Lake. The festival continued with the 83-year-old Merce Cunningham and his Dance Company once again asking us to rethink what we go to dance performances for and what kind of satisfactions they promise us. And in October, Twyla Tharp brought to Broadway her Movin’ Out, a dance show with characters she developed from the songs of Billy Joel; it had both critics and audiences groping for a label.

Issue Date: December 26, 2002 - January 2, 2003
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