© Paul Kolnik 'Evenfall' reviews 'The Red Violin' reviews NYCB 'Herman Schmerman' reviews 'Herman Schmerman' reviews Weese in reviews Woetzel in reviews recent NYCB reviews more Eric Taub reviews Discuss this review (Open for at least 6 months)

Part of the fun of the Gala is the chance it gives us mere mortals to rub shoulders at intermission with, it seems, every ballet dancer in New York and, more importantly, observe what they're wearing, and with whom they're chatting (or not). So I had the privilege of congratulating David Hallberg on his recent promotion to Principal with American Ballet Theatre. Sporting a freshly broken wrist (courtesy of her floor-pounding role in "The Unanswered Question"), the stunning Georgina Pazcoguin decorated her cast with some fetching black lace, once again proving that there's no stopping a girl who knows how to accessorize. Ashley Bouder showed a chic new understated look, the only glitz the rhinestone-studded ankle strap on the Manolos gracing those valuable feet!

Ah well, back to reality.

The theme of this gala was a celebration of City Ballet's ongoing Diamond Project, committed to creating new ballets. Each of the program's works were commissioned by The Diamond Project. There were new ballets by City Ballet's Artistic Director, Peter Martins (The Red Violin) and Choreographer in Residence, Christopher Wheeldon (Evenfall), as well as a reprise of the pas de deux from William Forsythe's Herman Schmerman, created for the Diamond Project in 1992.

Slowly but surely, I'm beginning to realize that Wheeldon's recent "pure-dance" ballets often have a subtext which is anything but pure. While Balanchine's movement-metaphors tended to be sublime and subtle (in how many of his adagios do we see a ballerina on the verge of bourreing or floating off into the empyrean, only to be delicately brought back to earth by her worshipful but all-too-mortal cavalier?), Wheeldon's can be disarmingly, and sometimes distressingly, literal so literal that my sensibilities, attuned, as they've been, to a more-delicate aesthetic, simply miss what, in retrospect, seems painfully obvious. Either that or I'm just thick-headed.

The first time I saw Wheeldon's unfortunate Shambards, I noticed the depressingly literal jiggery-pokery of the Highland-dance themes Wheeldon tossed about with abandon, without quite catching that in his duet with Miranda Weese, Jock Soto kind of, well, killed her. Ooops. And it wasn't until I read Nancy Dalva's review of Wheeldon's After the Rain that I understood that a rather odd, repeated movement motif in the ballet's abstract, elegiac first section, where each woman would drop into a deep penché while swinging her free leg in a sort of perpendicular grande ronde de jambe, was supposed to represent the spinning hands of a clock. So that bit was all about the passage of time! Who knew? Not, apparently, me.

So it was with some trepidation that I watched the unfolding of Evenfall, Wheeldon's new ballet for this sixth incarnation of City Ballet's Diamond Project, at the company's Spring Gala last Wednesday. What vital clue would I miss? Just how far over my head would Wheeldon's salvoes of meaning fly? Indeed, when the curtain rose on Evanfall, there was that familiar feeling of being, ever so subtly, set up: Wheeldon's ensemble, comprising six men and a dozen women, appear in Holly Hynes' beautiful, updated takes on traditional, classical ballet garb. The women's costumes have delicate, exquisitely pleated tutus, but no tiaras; the men's jackets are elegant, but sleeveless. All are dressed in shades of light gray, echoed by Mark Stanley's masterful lighting, which suffuses the stage in a shimmering, gray pearlescence. Was Wheeldon about to present a pretty plotless work in the Balanchinean vein, like Peter Quanz' recent Kaleidoscope for ABT?
 

Not to worry. While there's a great deal in Evenfall which looks comfortably classical, Wheeldon quickly establishes he's moving far from the familiar world of classical probity. For one thing, he's chosen an intense, turgid and roiling score, Barók's Piano Concerto No. 3, a far cry from Tchaikovsky's romantic majesty. For another, even as he deftly marshals and deploys his ensembles, he throws in motifs that are anything but classical. It wouldn't be a Wheeldon ballet without the women at some point making like ostriches in some deliberately gauche posture with their heads to the stage and their derričres skywards, and here he doesn't disappoint.

In one oft-repeated pose, the women face us then tip over forward from the waist, like Coppelia dolls whose springs have run down, hands brushing the stage in a pretty, if inverted, port de bras. Oh, and they tuck one leg up behind them like wading storks. This position, to which Wheeldon returns again and again, isn't without a geometric interest, as it allows us to admire the perfect circles of Hynes' tutus. Wheeldon peppers Evenfall with such jarring poses (while also throwing in an occasional arm-fluttering nod to Swan Lake, or the traditional balletic mime for "let's dance").

I couldn't pin any particular import on these oddities (he often has his dancers sitting or stretching on the floor in decidedly un-classical positions), other than that they're perhaps Wheeldon's way of saying "This is not your father's tutu-n-tiara ballet." In other words, he's not giving us, as Quanz did, a pallid pastiche, but a vision and vocabulary that's more authentically Wheeldon's own. He is also making damn sure we don't forget this for an instant, as once again he dips into his seemingly bottomless well of self-indulgent cleverness. He's so fluent, so capable, he can almost get away with saying to us, "I will make them stick their butts up in the air, and you will like it!" I would like it, too, if I could come up with any artistic context, any meaning, whether kinetic or textual, for Wheeldon to employ these dislocations, other than the indisputable fact that he can.

Where Wheeldon's not being deliberately obscure, there's a kind of soulful sweep to Evenfall. This was Bartók's final work, intended as a birthday present for his wife, although he died before it could be completed, as Wheeldon points out in a program note. The shimmering effect of Stanley's lighting and Hynes' costumes add to the nostalgic air of fading light and memories. The ballet's led by Miranda Weese, with her piquant feet and tough-as-nails demeanor, and Damian Woetzel, City Ballet's ageless virtuoso with a danseur's stride that's as pugnacious as it's elegant. With this couple, Wheeldon again plays with our expectations, and layers onto what's often conventionally pretty adagio work hints of a darker side to their relationship than we're used to seeing in such an ostensibly "pure-dance" work. Yes, it's the "dark subtext" rearing its ugly head again.

Wheeldon makes it very clear that Woetzel is anything but a Balanchinean cavalier. Repeatedly, Woetzel ducks out of his clinches with Weese, like he's longing for his freedom, but is too polite or co-dependant to simply walk away from her (at least not right away). In places, Wheeldon playfully adapts balletic conventions for separating lovers. In one section, six corps girls form a ever-spinning wall to keep Weese and Woetzel apart (more of Wheeldon's "look-at-me" brilliance). Another time, Wheeldon has Woetzel break away from Weese, cradling his head in his arms (an oft-repeated motif), as Weese dances off into the wings, looking for all the world as if they're playing a game of hide-and-seek, and he's counting to one hundred. Indeed, when Woetzel rises, he immediately begins searching for Weese among the women in the corps, in the time-honored tradition of the hero who can't tell one girl in a tutu from another.
 

If Evenfall is "about" anything, it's about Woetzel's many ungallant leave-takings from Weese. The concerto's adagio movement ends with Weese entirely alone on the darkening stage, and the ballet's finale ends with a puzzling surprise. Weese and Woetzel lead the ensemble in an allegro grouping which looks for all the world as if it's going to end conventionally, with the couple in some happy pose. Instead, everyone charges towards a downstage corner, stopping at the last second, except for Woetzel, who flies into the wings, leaving Weese to fend for herself as the curtain falls. Huh? At least he didn't kill her.

Assuming Wheeldon wasn't reworking Le Spectre de la Rose, what's going on here? I can only think of two depressing possibilities. Either Wheeldon has been watching too many Woody Allen movies, and thought it would be interesting to remake Ballet Imperial as if the lead couple were in the midst of a divorce, or Woetzel is supposed to represent Bartók, and Weese his wife, Ditta, because Bartók died before finishing the concerto, and so, well, you get the idea. It's hard to contemplate the latter without thinking of the heartbreaking departure of Robert Schumann from Clara at the end of Balanchine's Robert Schumann's Davidsbündlertanze. By comparison, Woetzel looks to have run off to hail a cab on Columbus Avenue.

Would that I could've done so during the premiere of Peter Martins' own Diamond Project ballet, The Red Violin. As you might gather from the title, this ballet is set to John Corigliano's "Concerto for Violin and Orchestra (The Red Violin)," based on his score for the celebrated, eponymous movie. Martins has used this forty-minute piece to support a work for two lead couples: Jennie Somogyi, Sebastién Marcovici, and Sara Mearns, Amar Ramaser and two subsidiary ones: Sterling Hyltin, Andrew Veyette and Tiler Peck, Sean Suozzi. I could go on about the meaning of Carole Divet's costumes uniform, dark tops and tights for the men, brightly colored dresses for the women or the organizational schemes Martins uses there's an almost algebraic logic to who dances with whom, when but all this would belie the true nature of The Red Violin which is that it's a crashing bore. The Red Violin movie covered over four centuries of history; in its forty minutes, the Red Violin ballet seems to last no more than half so long.
 

Corigliano's concerto, with its endless, endless faux-cadenzas (rendered with sweet conviction by Kurt Nikkanen) and repetitive, bombastic explosions, might be great accompaniment for a film, but danceable, it's not. Or, at least, there's little resonance between the concerto and Martins' dry, puzzle-box choreography. While in Balanchine's works, extended violin sections usually were reserved for the most extreme revelations about his ballerinas (think of Theme and Variations), and ultimately, himself, Martins reveals nothing. There's some dry invention which seems more novelty for its own sake (especially convoluted lifts), but the more inventive Martins becomes, the less he has to say. While the dancers all realize Martins' aridities with power and conviction (Somogyi, in red, was particularly sculptural), I couldn't even call this the dance equivalent of Duse reciting the phone book. At least the listings in a phone book have some intrinsic meaning, and use.

Compared with the Wheeldon and Martins works, the Forsythe seems a work of great invention and wit, and neoclassical integrity. It didn't hurt matters that both Wendy Whelan and Albert Evans negotiated Forsythe's intricacies with throw-away virtuosity and sly, deadpan humor.