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The School Comes First: “Scenes de Ballet, ” “Tala Gaisma.” and “Union Jack” The great ballet companies are great institutions, each with a unique history and tradition, and each also with a great academy attached. “But first a school” George Balanchine is reported to have said when Lincoln Kirstein proposed bringing him to America. And on Friday night at the New York State Theater, the School of American Ballet—New York City Ballet’s academy—literally did come first on a program that commenced with the revival of Christopher Wheeldon’s “Scenes de Ballet” and ended with a performance of George Balanchine’s “Union Jack.” The middle work on the program was Peter Martins' 2005 ballet “Tala Gaisma.” The music for “Scenes de Ballet” is an eighteen minute score by Igor Stavinsky composed of eleven brief dance elements which merge into each other in a fluid manner. The music is relatively melodic for Stravinsky and the themes flow into each other with a quality of reverie. Wheeldon’s ballet to this score was created in 1999 and was one of his first major works. Though performed by City Ballet in May of that year, it was also presented at the School of American Ballet’s annual workshop that June and is a sort of institutional display, a visual ode to the School and its students. The ballet employs 62 student dancers, extending in age from the junior classes to those about to graduate. It is a “mirror ballet” in which one side of the stage depicts a dance studio and the other side the studio’s mirror image. Two groups of dancers are thus deployed whose steps and poses reflect each other. The illusion of this choreographic device is promoted by Ian Falconer’s set design, which divides the stage in two by a diagonal ballet barre. Stage right is the “real” studio. Stage left is the reflection. For stage left, Falconer has created painted drops in which we see the reflection of three vertical windows looking out on a cityscape of onion domes, suggesting that the action takes place in a time and milieu vaguely reminiscent of Imperial Russia. Reflecting the fluid structure in Stravinsky’s music, Wheeldon has created a flowing set of entrances and exits for his large cast of students so that the stage fills and empties of dancers and dance elements nearly continuously. There are few distinct dances as such. Instead there are brief snatches of dance, stage pictures flowing quickly into one another. As the work proceeds, scene follows scene. Groups of girls in three distinct pink costumes, dressed according to their ages, and of boys in practice clothes, white tee shirts and black tights (with shorts for the youngest boys) quickly enter and exit, executing quick choreographic passages themselves or acting as a corps de ballet framing others who do so. The only distinct structural element of the work, or moment which constitutes a distinct "dance" of its own within this flow is a chaste and classical pas de deux for one of the older girls and a boy, which is "imagined" by one of the young girls when she is briefly left alone on the stage and gazes into the "mirror" to watch the older couple on the other side of the barre. Although this continuous flow of images could have been visually confusing, Wheeldon brings it about quite naturally. The fluidity of his stage images matches that of the music. The continuous deployments onto the stage are managed flawlessly. The student performers look beautiful from first to last. Their eager excitement at finding themselves on the big stage at Lincoln Center is palpable, but restrained by the idiom of classical dance. The ballet is also perfectly cast in that the dancers on either side of the mirror match each other in size, coloration, placement and style. The grand pas de deux was well performed by Kathryn Morgan and Jerome Tisserand on Friday evening, two appealing young dancers with impeccable training who also succeeded very well in conveying the romantic lyricism of their choreography. It is most interesting to compare “Scenes de Ballet” with Wheeldon's more recent work. In its pastel colors, its modesty, restraint and lack of emotionalism—and particularly in the cool, straightforward and textbook way he employs the dance vocabulary here—“Scenes de Ballet” is the most classical of Wheeldon’s works. Since “Scenes,” Wheeldon has made a series of works which have at times been increasingly more dimly lighted, red and black in décor, emotionally melodramatic and more distorting in their treatment of the classical steps: “Mercurial Maneouvres,” for example, or “Polyphonia,,” “Shambards,” or his recent “Klavier.” In relation to all this, “Scenes de Ballet” is a point of departure for Wheeldon and one wishes, revisiting it, that the style had remained a point of reference for him or at least a point of occasional return. Balanchine’s “Union Jack” concluded Friday night’s program and provided the perfect institutional counterpoint to Wheeldon’s ballet,” as “Union Jack” (employing a cast of more than 70 dancers from the parent company) is as much a “Grand Defile” and display piece for the New York City Ballet as a whole as “Scenes de Ballet” is a display piece for the school. Particularly rich and rewarding here was Kyra Nichols unexpectedly lovely performance, along with Nilas Martins, as the Pearly Queen in the comic middle section of the ballet, a set piece in which two heavily costumed figures engage in a bit of slapstick comedy ostensibly from the British music hall, ending in the entrance two similarly attired “Pearly Children” with a pony cart. Nichols' gift to us Friday night was to show us that the “Pearly King and Queen” not only has the structure of a classical Petipa grand pas de deux (entrance for each of the principal dancers; ensemble dance for the two; a variation for each and then a coda and recapitulation, in this case with a pony)—but that it also consists of perfectly classical choreography underneath the vernacular idiom of the music hall forms. On an evening that began with a display piece by the school, the rock solid way Nichols stayed over her leg in her big supported develope; the perfect arch of her supporting foot at the base; the mesmerizing ease of the development of the leg and the final and distinct motion of turn out—how she displayed the foot and working leg at the end so as to stand there, perfectly still, yet opened up to us with lines which extended to the end of the universe . . . this was a burst of light upon what ballet training and the aesthetic of classical dance are all about. The perfect display to point the end of a perfect lesson. In Martins’ “Tala Gaisma” this week Sebastien Marcovici has taken over the principal male role intended for Jock Soto last Spring. Marcovici is sometimes not the most classical of dancers in how he presents himself. His strongly developed shoulders and upper body can be hunched and tense, his hips occasionally turned in. Nevertheless, he brings an element of rather “louche” male sexuality to this role which works well and which begins to make a kind of crude but effective emotional sense of “Tala Gaisma.” His three muses were (as at the ballet’s premiere) Sofiane Sylve, Darci Kistler and Miranda Weese. In particular, Sylve, a dancer of plastic physicality and sensual weight who holds the stage merely by standing before the audience in a contr’apposto pose, perfectly matched Marcovici’s approach. Volume 4, No. 7
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