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New York City Ballet26th January 2005 New York City, New York State Theater by Eric Taub |
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After a long absence from the State Theater stage due to illness, Damian Woetzel, for nearly two decades one of City Ballet's mainstays, returned January 26th, dancing the lead in 'Prodigal Son,' the oldest extant ballet by Balanchine. (True, Woetzel did dance a Cavalier or two during 'Nutcracker,' but that hardly counts.) Although 'Prodigal,' with its morbid Prokofiev score and heavy Roualt designs, isn't necessarily something you'd want to see every day, it's a fascinating look at Balanchine as a young artist, redolent of the last years of the Diaghilev era, and that great impresario's indefatigable pursuit of the new, the chic, the shocking. Balanchine tells the Biblical story of the Prodigal Son in a series of vignettes and tableaux, framed by the Prodigal's frenzied escape from his patriarchal home in a flurry of virtuosity and his heartbreakingly feeble, crawling return. There are many coups du theatre: the Father's sudden appearance, like the Old Testament God Himself; the Father's enfolding in his robes of the penitent prodigal at the ballet's end; the creepy back-to-back scuttling of the Drinking Companions after they've robbed the Prodigal. At the center of the ballet is the Prodigal's encounter with the carnivorous and treacherous Siren, whose sexuality is entirely about subjugation. In another context, the couplings of their duet might be arousing (there's not much doubt what's supposed to be going on when she wraps one leg around his middle as he slowly turns her, or in their final pose, which is so empretzelled they must be pulled apart); here, they're all about power and domination: though sexual, there's nothing sexy going on. Woetzel was fiery in the opening section. His multiple, bent-kneed pirouettes represented perfectly the Prodigal's agitation. One of the greatest (and least heralded, outside of New York) virtuosos of recent years, Woetzel added a brilliant technical nicety to these turns, changing his spot from downstage to upstage left, where James Fayette's bearded and robed Father observed. (I remember in a recent performance of 'Theme and Variations,' Woetzel made the fiendishly difficult second male solo even harder by alternating double and single pirouettes between each double tour. Why? Because, I imagine, he could.) Woetzel also knows when to shade his easy brilliance to show the Prodigal's infatuation with the Siren, and his terror when his drunken revel suddenly turned ugly. In the Prodigal's seemingly interminable crawl across the stage after the Drinking Companion's departure, Woetzel clearly showed us the mimed images of the Prodigal drinking from a stream, or collapsing in despair after reaching out to beg from invisible passers-by. Woetzel's Siren was Maria Kowroski, she of the infinite line and infinitely flexible limbs. Kowroski would seem to have the main qualifications of a great Siren, especially her long, killer legs, and yet, she's not. She hit the Siren's opening solo quite well, especially her entrance, bourréeing in a deep, deep backbend, arms forward, and later pounding her chest and back with a spooky enthusiasm. But Kowroski makes the mistake of many Sirens: after first seeing the Prodigal, she pursues him like a terrier after a rabbit. The best Sirens make it clear that they're not letting themselves get out of the Prodigal's line of sight, but it's so he can see and become infatuated with her. The moment where the Siren grabs the Prodigals hands and places them on her hips should be a jarring change in tone, like a frog snapping up a fly, not one facet of an ongoing flirtation. Elsewhere, as is often the case with Kowroski in dramatic roles, her dancing was technically beyond reproach, but with a certain blankness which didn't translate as the iciness some Sirens affect, but as, well, blankness. Near the end of the duet, when she slowly reached her arm upwards, behind her head and enormous, mitre-ish headpiece, it read as an interesting gesture, not the Siren's somewhat-phallic proclamation of her triumph over the hapless Prodigal. I did, however, admire the evil glee with which she later stabbed her toeshoe into the chest of the collapsed Woetzel. The Drinking Companions who befriend and then rob the Prodigal were all among the generation of strong, exciting young corps dancers Martins has created, as were the Prodigal's betraying servants, Antonia Carmena and, particularly, Kyle Froman. Beneath the Father's robes and makeup, James Fayette was solid tower of strength, especially in the ballet's final gesture of acceptance and forgiveness. After 'Prodigal' came the second performance of Christopher Wheeldon's new 'After the Rain.' I'm covering this in more detail in a separate review, so I'll just mention that for this performance, it seemed that le toute ballet in New York was in the audience. A quick pre-performance glance about the lobby revealed Kevin McKenzie and Martine van Hamel, Angel Corella, the glowing Irina Dvorovenko and Maxim Belotserkovsky, (it seemed ABT had the night off), and others too numerous to mention. Clearly the word had gotten out about the touching tribute to the partnership of Wendy Whelan and Jock Soto, and many of their colleagues had come to pay their respects. If anything, the Whelan/Soto duet which concludes the ballet was more moving than at its premiere. On second viewing, though, 'After the Rain' has even more of the look of a pièce d'occasion, and an unfinished one at that. It's hard to imagine anyone other than Soto and Whelan performing the final duet; could it still be in the repertory after Soto retires this spring? The ballet's two halves, so utterly unlike, make me wonder if perhaps might've had a somewhat longer ballet in mind, but ran out of time for its completion. Certainly the often-beautiful, although unashamedly sentimental, duet could be performed on its own, without the stylistically and thematically unrelated opening movement.
The concluding performance of the 1970 Balanchine/Gershwin 'Who Cares?' seemed to show the effect of so many high-profile dancers in the audience. Miranda Weese negotiated the tricky syncopations of her "Fascinatin' Rhythm" solo with the precision and spunk which were once her trademarks, and turned her duet with Nilas Martins to "The Man I Love" into a study in studied infatuation. I'd been looking forward to Janie Taylor's "Stairway to Heaven," but Maurice Kaplow's too-fast conducting pretty much ruined it. Perhaps realizing her hopeless situation, Taylor appeared to give up in the middle of her brisé volées, and switched into survival mode, shrinking her steps to keep up with Kaplow's erratically accelerating tempi. Fortunately, Kaplow was steadier for the other principals, although the corps sections, especially the finale, were rushed. The star of the ballet, and quite possibly the entire evening, was Alexandra Ansanelli, who in her "turning" solo to "Marnie," rattled off several clean double fouéttes, and then concluded a series of pique pirouettes with an astonishing quadruple which looked like it surprised even her. Nilas Martins partnered all three ably in their duets together, and managed some moments of charm in his solo.
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