E-Mail This Article to a Friend Evolution/devolution Boston Ballet’s ‘Falling Angels’; Battleworks at Zero Arrow Theatre BY MARCIA B. SIEGEL
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Boston Ballet’s "Falling Angels" repertory program last weekend summarized the state of the art: where it’s going and where it’s been. Everyone might not agree about which ballets represented which end of the time line, but they all posed healthy challenges to the dancers.

Lucinda Childs is known as a postmodern choreographer, but when she started doing works for her own ensemble of eight or so dancers in the 1970s, her repertory looked more classical than anything being done on the postmodern scene. After the dadaistic effusions of the 1960s, downtown dance in New York settled down to explore the basics, and Childs’s early walking-jogging-sitting-rolling dances morphed into marathons of leaping, turning, and small, rhythmic step interjections. They looked like ballets in some ways, but ballets in a constant state of locomotion.

Childs has done crossover work for theater, opera, and ballet companies, but it was Mikhail Baryshnikov who made a convincing case in my mind for her as a choreographer of ballets. He’d included her in the PASTforward programs of postmodern dance reconstructions for his White Oak Dance Project, and in 2002 at Jacob’s Pillow, he presented her group work Chacony (Benjamin Britten) and a solo, Largo (Arcangelo Corelli).

Both of these were persuasive arguments for the success of postmodern reform, as ballet dancing — or dancing — that wasn’t ornate or pretentious. And the classical scores — as opposed to the purely propulsive minimalism that seemed to drive her former works — made me see Childs, at last, as more musical than didactic. This history was embedded in Ten Part Suite, which is set to movements from Corelli violin sonatas for a principal couple (Lorna Feijóo and Roman Rykine on opening night), two demi-soloist couples, and an ensemble of eight dancers. Dressed in simple, simulated streetwear of pale cream except for the principals in white (costumes by Charles Heightchew), the dancers looked as if surging leaps and lush unfolding legs were the most natural things in the world.

This impression of naturalness is created partly by the uncluttered way Childs projects the vocabulary. She favors expansive, space-covering steps and omits anything fussy. The arms may burst up irrepressibly in concert with leaps and soaring turns, but they often swing loosely by the dancer’s side. This unfamiliar upper-body plainness has the effect of emphasizing the chest and shoulders. The dancers seem active, eager, and open.

As they travel, they sort themselves into precise squares and diagonals, staying the same distance apart from one another even when on the fly, so that you perceive the dance as a group enterprise, not a collection of individuals. These floor patterns never seem to settle into formula. The members of a quartet leave in the middle of a number and are replaced by another quartet, or they’re joined at some point by two or six more dancers. This instability of design keeps replenishing our interest in how the stage looks, and it conveys a sense of inexhaustible energy.

The Baroque dance forms of the music give the choreography a variety of pacing, from the slow sarabande duet of Feijóo and Rykine to livelier gigues and gavottes. From the very beginning, Child’s ballet reminded me of two wonderful company works by George Balanchine, Le Tombeau de Couperin (Ravel) and Square Dance (Vivaldi and Corelli).

We get so few chances to see a dance work that its immediate context always influences how we receive it. Following the Ballet’s revival of La Sylphide, Child’s piece had a feeling of Bournonville romanticism evolved into modern times, the joy of moving big with none of the portents and the artifice. What followed Ten Part Suite on the "Falling Angels" program could have been a vision of ballet’s underside, the neuroses exposed and the flash emphasized. I wonder whether, if Ten Part Suite had ended the program, it would have looked more like the future of ballet, after psychotherapy had cured these excesses.

Jirí Kylián offered a doubleheader of gender angst with Sarabande (to a Bach teaser and assorted sound effects) and Falling Angels (to the first section of Steve Reich’s Drumming). Sarabande is a shock-’em and sock-’em showcase for six barechested men. They make their appearance as a theatrical afterthought. First the audience sees six magnificent 19th-century ball gowns. We scarcely have time to realize that there are no models inside the gowns when the lights black out. When they come on again, the gowns are suspended in the air, and beneath each one is an insect-like spotlit form that eventually turns into a man.

The rest of the dance is a formal tantrum of gestures and body shapes suggesting frustration, anger, bravado, embarrassment, fury, and hysteria. Each move is underlined by the dancers’ breathing and emoting with electronic enhancement, and the floor is miked for maximum effect.

The eight women in Falling Angels, like the six men, are alienated from one another in space but united in a lexicon of angry, aggressive moves. The audience screamed with pleasure after both assaults, but though I felt curiously admiring of the women’s strength and commitment, the men’s characters seemed kind of pathetic.

The only pointe ballet on the program, William Forsythe’s In the middle, somewhat elevated, is almost 20 years old now, but it still looks rebellious and deliberately distorted. The lighting (also by Forsythe) jolts out unpredictably from different angles and altitudes, blamming down harshly onto the dancers or smothering them in shadows. There’s no music allowed, just Thom Willems’s fantastically loud noises — rhythmic explosions, things boiling and scraping and whacking and thundering, while the dancers carry on their job.

Forsythe’s choreographic plan is to make the work look as unchoreographed as possible. Dancers stroll into place and rip into tremendous bouts of turning or wildly improbable lifts. Then they walk away to watch the others or execute some other phenomenal thing off in a corner. It’s as if they were giving a demonstration and had to be "on" only for their own parts.

The movement vocabulary is stressed and stretched, twisted and spun within an inch of its virtuosic life. The dancers, Romi Beppu, Yury Yanowsky, Karine Seneca, Melanie Atkins, Jared Nelson, Heather Myers, Kelley Potter, John Lam, and Adriana Suárez on opening night, looked revved up yet matter-of-fact about it.

Later in the weekend, Robert Battle’s Battleworks dancers looked revved up all the time, no breathers for them. Presented by Crash Arts at Zero Arrow Theatre, Battleworks is a Brooklyn-based company that has its own evolutionary history. You could almost see a direct line from Robert Battle back to David Parsons, with whom he danced and choreographed for seven years, and back to Paul Taylor, with whom Parsons danced for nine years. Along this trail, modern dance as an expressive medium becomes more formalized, more energized, and more entertaining. And, well, more like modern ballet.

Alleluia, which opened the program, was announced by a Baroque trumpet. Before the dancers came in, I saw dashing entrances with high-flung arms. And sure enough, big flashing arms streaked in, but not in the way I’d imagined.

This feast of praise and celebration for seven dancers was set to Handel, Scarlatti, and Bach cantatas. (None of the music was identified in more than a cursory way.) Throughout the dance, even when the movement slowed down, you had the feeling of intense, pressured action. Battle choreographs very close on the music, but his movement sometimes looks like more than the music will hold. The arms make a complete circle on one fast beat. The hands or feet have a series of jitters or taps that would be too small to see except they’re so forceful. Everyone seems to be criss-crossing, changing direction, gesturing and smiling, all at the same time.

All seven short dances on the program worked in this way. Exhilarating, eye-catching, cheerful, or demonic, they got a grip on the audience right away. There were interesting compositional pieces, like Alleluia and Rush Hour, the latter for seven people in dark shirts and pants who appeared to be a robot army on maneuvers.

Battle’s ideas range all over the place; so do his musical sources. He doesn’t seem to probe anything very deeply in creating a menu of attractions for every taste. A male duet, Strange Humors, didn’t seem strange at all except for the Gypsy violins playing against African drumming (music by John Mackey). In a drag duet, Two, the burly Battle in a mini-housedress and ratty red braid confronted Jennifer Mabus, a tiny, muscle-shirted pugilist with big Afro hair.

There was a solo, Takademe, in which Kanji Segawa acted out a chant made on the Indian syllables that spell out drum rhythms, what Sheila Chandra calls "vocal percussion." In Unfold, Segawa lugged around Clare Holland, whose body seemed to have its joints hooked up improperly, while a melodramatic French soprano sang about souvenirs charmants. For a macabre final dance, The Hunt, four women (another cast has four men) worked themselves into a yelling, stamping but highly organized frenzy to some neo-African drumming.