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American Ballet TheatreJune 2008 London, Metropolitan Opera House by Rachel Straus |
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American Ballet Theatre’s third week of its spring season at the Metropolitan Opera House featured a New York premiere by Twyla Tharp. Long anticipated, Rabbit and Rogue, to music by movie and sitcom composer Danny Elfman, demonstrates Tharp’s continuing interest in commercially driven collaborations and her fluency with neo-classical ballet. In geometrically intricate squadrons, Tharp set dancers blazing across the stage, where they pulled out speedy, off-kilter multitudinous steps. But in this made for ABT ballet (one of a half dozen commissions since 1988), Tharp failed to embrace ballet with her eccentricity, wit and inventive approach to the classical vocabulary. In the choreography for her two lead dancers, Tharp made mincemeat of their roles. At the June 4th matinee, Sasha Radetsky danced the Rabbit and the miraculously kinesthetic Marcelo Gomes performed the Rogue. These formidable dancers devolved into cartoon figures as they shadow boxed, shook down their shoulders and hips as though going over multiple speed bumps and as they mugged the audience. During these moments they didn’t dance, making their characters first two dimensional and then unimportant. Unlike Tharp’s In the Upper Room, where her fluid jazz-inflected style and classical ballet steps seductively intermingled, in Rabbit and Rogue, Gomes and Radetsky were cut off from a cohesive dance vocabulary. In their bad boy gesticulations, Tharp seemed to be saying enough of this classical stuff. Like adolescents, Gomes and Radetsky walked on and off the stage with jaunty bluster. They hardly acknowledged the rest of the cast, who zigzagged behind them. Then, as though receiving a jolt of ballet, they barreled into pirouettes and tour jetes, but to little purpose. Previews mentioned that Rabbit and Rogue would resemble a game of one-upmanship between two formidable male virtuosos (the lead cast was Ethan Steifel and Herman Cornejo), but I didn’t see much competition or camaraderie developed. And the rest of the cast's dancing seemed an after thought; part of a different ballet altogether. But Tharp’s unemotional whiplash ballet steps did have a Rogue quality. And like a Rabbit that scuttles into a hole in the ground, Tharp’s lighting designer Brad Fields created shaft-like spotlights that made the dancers appear as though they were somewhere deep underground.  © Rosalie O'Connor
Since her hit Movin’ Out, Tharp appears to have focused more on Broadway and franchising her best dances to ballet companies worldwide. It’s been years since she had a full-time company that helped her to develop work. Not surprisingly this ballet felt particularly pounded out.
Also on the program was Harald Lander’s 1948 Etudes. It shared with Rabbit and Rogue the unfortunate quality of more is definitely not more. The construct—how ballet evolves from its foundational movements (plie, tondue, fondu, developpe) to an art form that moves through space with architectural integrity—became increasingly plodding as Lander moved away from the basics (seen in rows of dancers working at barres) to more complex configurations in the center such as adagio, petit allegro, and pas de deux. For all of Lander’s ballet knowledge, Etudes lacked an essential element: Poetry. The attempt by Irina Dvorovenko, Maxim Beloserkovsky and Gennadi Saveliev to breath life into this mechanical ballet was valiant. At times Dvorovenko transcended with her confidence and attack. Saveliev’s electrified face and limbs in the final movement did lift up the show.
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