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Hail and farewell
Boston Ballet’s departing stars; Pilobolus at the Shubert
BY JEFFREY GANTZ

Rudi van Dantzig’s Romeo and Juliet closed out the Boston Ballet season last weekend, and it also closed out a number of Boston Ballet careers, including those of principals Paul Thrussell, Simon Ball, and April Ball and soloist Tara Hench. Principal Jennifer Gelfand is coming back for Don Quixote next season, but after that she too will be " retired. " Last Wednesday Thrussell and Gelfand were paired in the title roles of Van Dantzig’s ballet (Thrussell had previously danced it with Adriana Suárez, substituting for Yury Yanowsky), and they lit up his dark vision.

Gelfand wastes no time defining her Juliet: the moment she sees Thrussell, this proper young lady closes the curtain of her sedan chair. With her nurse (Brooke Kiser) she’s teasing but also sensuous, her body seeming to crave fulfillment, and she keeps nibbling at the grapes she’s pinched. The appearance of Michael Johnson’s Paris is almost too much for her: she’s affronted when he’s so bold as to kiss her hand, but immediately afterward there’s a hint of a smile.

At the ball she’s delighted to see all her friends, but as soon as Jennifer Glaze’s Lady Capulet puts her hands on her daughter, this Juliet’s shoulders rise and stiffen. Paris also gets this cold shoulder; Juliet keeps ducking away to be with her friends. Yet as soon as Romeo presents himself, she loses all sense of decorum and runs after him, and she radiates joy whenever she’s looking at him. With Romeo off stage, she starts to warm up to Paris; there’s the real sense that she could go either way. When Romeo returns, however, her body starts to tremble, and she’s unhappy with but not discouraged by Tybalt’s opposition. When all the guests have gone in to dinner, she comes back to seek him out, and in his arms she stretches luxuriantly, like a cat.

In the balcony scene, Gelfand hugs her shawl as if it were Romeo. Her pas de deux with Thrussell has more weight — more sexual weight — than Thrussell’s with Suárez; when he holds her out and she swims, she’s moving through a medium that’s heavier than air. There’s no false modesty about her: when he throws himself into her lap, she pulls him down alongside her. And when she retrieves his cloak, there’s no sorrow in their parting: he’s her Romeo, now and always.

Their wedding scene is the most reminiscent of Leonid Lavrovsky’s 1940 staging. They seem in awe of each other; she’s overcome by her bridal bouquet, he has to lean on Friar Laurence afterward to stay upright. In her bedroom the shoulders, now slumping, betray her disavowal of Paris, and she phrases her " pas de deux " with the potion bottle imaginatively, wavering between death and Romeo. In the crypt her slow awakening is noteworthy, as is the way she pulls Romeo’s arm around her head.

In a Globe interview published a week ago Tuesday, Gelfand said, " I’ve been ready, willing, and able to perform all year, but if you’re not being used in a company, there’s no point in being miserable. " Boston Ballet artistic director Mikko Nissinen was cited as replying that he " wasn’t to blame for Gelfand’s limited role. Choreographers or stagers had final say over who danced. " Does the artistic director of a major company like Boston Ballet really wield so little power? Gelfand’s non-appearance this year in Onegin and La Fille Mal Gardée and " All Balanchine " was Boston’s loss. Her technique may not dazzle the way it did when she was a teenager, but her acting and her ability to translate music into movement are second to none in this very fine company. The proof was there on stage for anyone with eyes to see.

Wednesday also saw corps member Raul Salamanca as Mercutio. Looking like the familiar portrait of Christopher Marlowe, he brings some imaginative touches to the role, like the feline swishing with which he follows the Capulet ball guests inside. Of all this Romeo’s Tybalts, he’s the most Mercutio-like, and of all the Mercutios, he’s the most like Tybalt. There’s an almost military punctiliousness about him; the full plié with which his Mercutio teases Tybalt is a thing of grace, whereas Christopher Budzynski’s is all parody. I think he’s a more convincing Tybalt, but this Mercutio is a creditable interpretation from a dancer who’s not even a soloist — yet.

Watching Tara Hench as one of Juliet’s friends dance with Yury Yanowsky’s Tybalt reminded me that she was Juliet back in 1997 when Boston Ballet did Daniel Pelzig’s version. Here this exquisite soloist, so outstanding in Balanchine’s Slaughter on Tenth Avenue and Monumentum/Movements, was restricted to being Tybalt’s dance partner and doing the Mandolin Dance. She and Yanowsky (who made her seem more like Tybalt’s girlfriend) would have been a Romeo and Juliet to remember — yet another opportunity lost. I was also reminded, every time the lights came up on the marketplace, what joyous pieces Rudi van Dantzig created for the corps (the ballet’s best choreography, it puts Kenneth MacMillan to shame), and how joyously this corps danced them. And I kept being intrigued by elements of Toer van Schayk’s set design: the cross from Giotto’s Institution of the Crib at Greccio, the altarpiece reminiscent of Duccio’s Rucellai Madonna, the dark angel towering over Juliet’s bier like an Arnold Böcklin sculpture.

Saturday brought Thrussell’s final performance with the company, as Romeo opposite Gelfand. At his curtain call he disappeared behind the floral tributes, and he was genuinely surprised when his father and his sister turned up on stage, having flown in from London. Thrussell isn’t a showy dancer, but he can be devastatingly funny (remember his " She’s Hot To Go, " from Pelzig’s Nine Lives Lyle Lovett suite?) as well as devastatingly romantic (this Romeo, for starters). His airy, soft landings might put you in mind of Ralph Vaughan Williams’s The Lark Ascending. To this observer’s mind, his lark is still ascending. Boston’s loss is Milwaukee’s gain.

Sunday Simon Ball gave his farewell performance, as Romeo opposite Pollyana Ribeiro. He still seemed a shade self-conscious, more like a Hamlet than a Romeo, but I was touched by how softly he made his presence known to Ribeiro at their wedding, and how they stretched out Lavrovsky’s iconic poses as one. The company paid gracious tribute to the departing dancers at a post-performance soiree, announcing their new destinations as they came up front to be recognized: Simon Ball, Frances Pérez-Ball, and Ilya Kozadayev to Houston (Thrussell will join them in 2004); Hench to Tulsa; Karla Kovatch to Festival Ballet Providence; Andrea Schermoly to the Nederlands Dans Theater; Nicholas Mishoe (who went out with a fine Benvolio) possibly to the Dutch National Ballet; many more. It looked as if the company were throwing away good dancers with both hands. The remarkable thing is how many it still has left.

" IN CHOREOGRAPHY, if you can’t be a genius, you must be ingenious. Pilobolus Dance Theatre, I would have said a year ago, is simply ingenious. Now I’m not so sure that the gift of ingenuity isn’t capable of once in a while surpassing itself, so that we are shaken out of admiration into awe. " That was Arlene Croce writing back in 1977. The Pilobolus I saw Saturday evening at the Shubert, in a visit sponsored by the FleetBoston Celebrity Series and the Wang Center, didn’t look like that company. There was a lot of ingenuity on view; there were few signs of genius.

There was also relatively little of Pilobolus’s trademark human geometry, whereby anywhere from two to six company members square the circle, trisect angles, solve Fermat’s Theorem, and generally go where no mortal bodies have gone before. This kind of movement, abstract yet palpable, used to be its own meaning. Now the company has stories of a sort, and the movement is in danger of becoming illustration.

That was most true of the first of the four works on the program (all of them created since the company’s previous visit, in 2000, and thus Boston premieres). Drawn from the 16th-century mythological novel Pilgrimage to the West, Monkey and the White Bone Demon (2001) tells how Monkey (Ras Mikey C) escorts the Monk (Otis Cook) and his friends Sandy and Pigsy (Mark Fucik and Renée Jaworski) to see the Buddhist Scriptures and how they’re waylaid by the White Bone Demon (Matt Kent), whose disguises fool the Monk but not the Monkey. Eventually the Demon appears on metal stilts in a black outfit out of The Phantom Menace, and the four friends take up seven-foot poles (heretofore the Monkey’s purview) and do battle, winning when they join together. The journey itself has many trademark Pilobolus moments (Jaworski walking up the pole held by Ras Mikey C and then down a Cook/Fucik creature), but instead of creating the story, they’re subservient to it.

Ben’s Admonition (2002) is half the length (15 minutes instead of 30) and twice as intense. As the curtain rises, Ras Mikey C and Matt Kent find themselves hanging upside down, shackled by adjoining leg irons, in the nightmare gloom of a dungeon where the only light filters down from high above. At once they pull themselves up; suddenly each is shackled by a hand rather than a leg. They rise and fall like bellringers as the music peals (the score then morphs into a Satie-meets-Messiaen affair that includes piano, celesta, and flute); they push off each other into a series of swings and round-abouts before falling out, throwing elbows and slow-motion punches (the score quotes " Chopsticks " ). Kent extricates himself and leaves Ras Mikey C swinging alone in the spotlight, but then a second spotlight reveals him shackled to his own gibbet. They swing separately, in parallel; as the light fades, they pull themselves up so that each has both hands about his throat.

The title of this piece, Pilobolus tells us, came from an audience-participation contest at the work’s Philadelphia premiere in May of last year; it’s a reference to Ben Franklin’s warning the Continental Congress that " We must hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately. " Ben’s admonition fits the piece so precisely, I wonder that the company didn’t have it in mind already. There’s more to this two-prisoner story than its title but less than you’d find in, say, Kiss of the Spider Woman.

The other two works, Davenen (2000) and The Brass Ring (2002), both seem stranded between narrative and movement. Davenen, which is set to a score by the Klezmatics, has to do with prayer; its inspirations, Pilobolus tells us, include I.B. Singer’s description of shtetl life in his novel Satan in Goray. It begins with a group animal (all six dancers) spotlit from above before breaking into twos and threes. Most of the 30-minute piece finds couples engaging in dialogues that have more to do with soap opera than with prayer while the other four bow reverently or create Pilobolus creatures: Ras Mikey C and Renée Jaworski, Ras Mikey C and Mark Fucik, Fucik and Jennifer Macavinta. It ends with all six separated, backs to the audience, looking up into the light. The Brass Ring is a lighthearted three-ring circus, with the sextet got up in psychedelic unitards, but I found myself more involved with the music, which begins with Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man, segues into ragtime, and goes on to quote Mozart (Eine kleine Nachtmusik), Reveille, Tchaikovsky (The Nutcracker), and Fauré (Pavane). Apart from a gin-rummy game played on Matt Kent’s outstretched body, there’s nothing as witty in the choreography.

You could draw a parallel between Pilobolus and the Chieftains, who after a couple decades of setting the standard for Irish traditional music crossed over into American folk and blues and whatever else took their fancy, signing up lots of guest artists and winning additional fans and even more Grammys. They’re entitled; perhaps Pilobolus are as well. But there’s something defocused and static about both groups. After the performance let out, I walked across Tremont Street to the Wang Theatre and caught the last 45 minutes of Romeo. I’d watched Gelfand and Thrussell in the title roles already, but they were different, exploring, doing new things. And though I’d seen the production six times, it too was still new.

Issue Date: May 23 - 29, 2003
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