JANINE PARKER

Young and old

JANINE PARKER — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 16:44:25 GMT

Mark Morris at Tanglewood
The presence of company veterans infuses Mark Morris Dance Group with a maturity that both grounded and lifted this presentation to a higher plane.

POETS AND CLOWNS MMDG: offers romance with a nose for the absurd.

Youth, it’s said, is wasted on the young, and that used to be an almost universal truth in the dance world, where dancers could be “retired” by age 26 or so, just when their life — and therefore their art — was beginning to deepen. Now it’s de rigueur for dancers to ripen, as they perform into their upper 30s, 40s, even 50s. Often they can still kick their ears, but who cares, listen to what they’re saying.

Such gravitas enriched the appearance of the Mark Morris Dance Group last week at Tanglewood’s lovely Seiji Ozawa Hall. The program promised a breezy evening of dancers waltzing and viewers sighing to Brahms and Schubert (with a bit of Barber thrown in to keep everyone sharp). Performed one way, it could have been too much waltzing and sighing, too much pretty. Of course, the Morris youngsters have much to offer; the point is that the presence of company veterans infuses MMDG with a maturity that both grounded and lifted this presentation to a higher plane.

Especially telling is the way the company performed the 1989 Love Song Waltzes, which is set to Brahms’s first set of Liebeslieder Walzer. The dancers manage this homage to Romanticism without descending into sentimentality or, worse, winking sarcasm. Morris is known for his humor and his nose for the absurd: where appropriate, he’s the Snarky King, but Love Song Waltzes doesn’t come across like some elaborate joke. The mixture of movement flows from formal (low piqué arabesques, with rounded arms and proudly erect torsos) to silly (the parody of the ballet pirouette preparation, head a-bobbing, arms swinging and changing through positions — shall we turn en dehors or en dedans?) to lush (the gorgeously unapologetic sweep of big, lunging balances and waltz turns). There was an uncanny tautness among the dancers Thursday night.

Whereas that piece strikes a melancholic chord, New Love Song Waltzes, choreographed in 1982, feels like the younger, inexperienced (in mood, not construction) sibling, always picking itself up and dusting itself off with optimism. From Michelle Yard’s opening cartwheels through the sweet conclusion — Yard’s sweeping arms and torso seeming to gather and comfort the community — New Waltzes embodies the world of these crazy kids today, with their friendly but no-strings-attached hook-ups.

Rich menu

JANINE PARKER — Wed, 29 Aug 2007 15:56:50 GMT

And Hubbard Street Dance deliver
Hubbard Street Dance Chicago proved a worthy finale for Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival’s 75th-anniversary season.

LICKETY-SPLIT: A rather sweet portrayal of youth.

Hubbard Street Dance Chicago proved a worthy finale for Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival’s 75th-anniversary season. Directed by Jim Vincent, HSDC is a well-trained and versatile troupe whose dancers are also beautiful performers of works from today’s best global choreographers. Many American modern-dance companies present only the works of their eponymous choreographer; HSDC allowed us to sample from an international menu. Still, five dances on one program would have been too much to digest if not for the quality of the works and the engaging and proficient elegance of the dancers. This program had an excess of visual similarities, mostly in lighting design and costuming.

The program opened with Twyla Tharp’s 1979 classic Baker’s Dozen, still lucky, still fresh. A dancer slithers into a pirouette and then pops out into a cartwheel, and might from there be pulled off stage in a most awkward position — crouched on heels — but with a catbird-seat smile. Some companies adopt a nonchalant mien when performing Tharp dances, and though that complements the shruggish slink and easygoing athleticism of her movement, HSDC’s joie de vivre shows Baker’s Dozen from another angle. The jokes are still there — the exiting and entering shenanigans, the duets complicated into trios (nonplussing the men but tickling the women) — and so are the out-of-nowhere dance sequences, such as the man’s thigh-slapping, finger-snapping, torso-gyrating solo. Baker’s Dozen proved the HSDC dancers to be fluent in several genres. (Their least effective work was in the closer, Nacho Duato’s Gnawa, a disappointment to this huge Duato fan — the quiet central duet aside, it settled too easily.)

It turns out these dancers can convey emotions, too. Susan Marshall’s Kiss is a bleak duet that uses harnesses as a metaphor for emotional imprisonment. As Cheryl Mann and Tobin Del Cuore hang in those harnesses, which are suspended from the rafters, they spin away from each other, then sputter and grasp toward each other. When they do connect, they cling, sometimes one draped over the other, sometimes their lines twining round and round; the inevitable separation is either surreal, with Mann dreamily unwinding away from Del Cuore, her head and upper torso swooning back, or stark, the harnesses cruelly underscoring the futility of a hopeful outcome. Only once does it seem that the two will break free: side by side, they take several huge running strides on an upstage diagonal, push off, and leap, soaring around to face the audience again, legs arced into matching front and back attitudes. The pair’s interpretation is spot on; too much angst and Kiss could become a parody of young lust.

Pillow talking

JANINE PARKER — Wed, 15 Aug 2007 15:22:03 GMT

Ballet du Grand Théâtre de Genève and the Mark Morris Dance Group
Last summer, Los Angeles Times dance critic Lewis Segal suggested that ballet is dying an ugly, boring death.

LOIN: The unceasing sweep is of the tides.

Last summer, Los AngelesTimes dance critic Lewis Segal suggested that ballet is dying an ugly, boring death. As always with this sort of thing, sides were taken, battle lines were drawn, letters and counterpoint articles were written. The take-home, however, shouldn’t be that in these times of iPhones and astro-diapers the tale of a half-swan/half-woman can’t be relevant — if that were true, we’d be throwing La bohème, Hamlet, and Great Expectations out the window as well. And yet, there is a problem with ballet these days: too many companies presenting mediocre dances and dancers.

Which is why the US debut at Jacob’s Pillow of the Swiss company Ballet du Grand Théâtre de Genève was such an unexpected gift. Neither of the two pieces BGTG performed, Japanese choreographer Saburo Teshigawara’s Para-Dice and Belgian choreographer Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui’s Loin, was classical, and I did hear one woman in the parking lot complain that when a company has the word “ballet” in its title, there should be ballet. But symphony orchestras present new compositions alongside centuries-old works, and ballet companies have to do the same.

BGTG comprises a broad range of ethnicities and heights — no cookie-cutter corps de ballet here — and yet this is true ensemble dancing. Para-Dice is a paean to air — its currents in the world as well as the breath inside us — and the eight dancers project this most abstract of concepts. The women’s swooping undulations in their backs seem a soft antithesis to the sharp contractions of Martha Graham. The exploration of air became an exploration of space, and then, perhaps inevitably, of time. Ferried by the now pulsating, now ambient “sound creation” of Willi Bopp, the men cut through space with vigor and purpose, or the dancers lie down one by one. Women walk forward, as if in a trance, then fall into the arms of the men, who fluidly pull them backward. The sequence is repeated again and again, and it looks deliriously addictive, like a dream you don’t want to wake from.

Not quite Nina

JANINE PARKER — Wed, 27 Jun 2007 19:02:14 GMT

Ananiashvili and the State Ballet of Georgia look to find their footing
On hearing the opening notes of the Kronos Quartet composition and seeing the dancers lit in sunny yellow, I feared we were about to be subjected to one of those “up with people” ballets.

SECOND BEFORE THE GROUND: Lasha Khozashvili, Nino Gogua, and the rest of the company
relaxed into Trey McIntyre’s ballet.

In the late 1980s, the Iron Curtain began to part, and Nina Ananiashvili was one of the newly hatched wonders the Bolshoi Ballet was able to show off to the West. Boston audiences first saw her in 1990, as part of Boston Ballet’s “glasnost” Swan Lake; she was paired with the late — and truly great — Boston Ballet principal Fernando Bujones, then 37 and at the height of his artistic maturity. Two years later, she was back to dance Odette/Odile with a familiar partner, Alexei Fadeyechev, and her promise of stardom shone brighter still. Arlene Croce, the venerated — and famously crusty — former New Yorker dance critic, was singing her praises as early as 1987: “Ananiashvili deserved her publicity. . . . Probably, she can do a lot more than she knows.” My own Boston Phoenix review (May 8, 1992) of that second set of performances seems like a time capsule set to be opened for her appearance at Jacob’s Pillow last weekend: “ . . . these young couples are the future now; in 15 years, they will be held in the same aura of awe and respect as Natalia Makarova and Fernando Bujones, or Gelsey Kirkland and Mikhail Baryshnikov.”

The Georgian-born Ananiashvili came to the Pillow with the company she is now directing, the State Ballet of Georgia, after years of performing with companies around the world, notably American Ballet Theatre (where she’s still on the roster) and the Royal Ballet. This is a pattern that other dancers — in particular Soviet-bred dancers — have embraced, but the question remains whether all the globetrotting is a good career move. The lack of regular association with a ballet company can lead to a lack of name recognition: to many balletomanes Ananiashvili is a goddess, and yet the audience at the Pillow’s intimate Ted Shawn Theatre was sparse. And there’s a more troubling issue, one that Croce addressed in 1996, in an essay in which she compared New York City Ballet star Kyra Nichols — who by staying with NYCB “ripened on the vine” — with dancers such as Ananiashvili: “ . . . the disaffiliated ballerina — the dancer who seeks artistic completion by freelancing or by guest-starring all over the world.” Croce’s assessment? “Of the generation of ballerinas born by the end of the sixties, Kyra Nichols is the only one with a completely formed, articulate technique and a distinguished repertory in which to deploy it.”