Triple Double
New Dances/New Music
Peter Jay Sharp Theater
The Juilliard School
New York, NY
February 25, 2005
By Tom Phillips
copyright 2006 by Tom Phillips
For its 100th birthday, the Juilliard School commissioned a triple double—three new dances, set to three new pieces of music. The all-premiere program was a showcase for the school’s energetic and committed modern dancers, and just as much for its world-class orchestra and the brilliant acoustics of its Peter Jay Sharp Theater. As for the new works themselves, two out of three weren’t bad.
Jerome Begin’s score for “Confines” is a panoramic pastiche. It opens with an indeterminate sliding whine from the violins, punctuated by pops of percussion and brass. Throughout the piece, the sections give the illusion of working independently, with the fun coming in the unexpected interactions between them, e.g. a passage for woodwinds and a wood block, and a long section of where the orchestra plays background to some melodic tinkling bells. This illusion of chance is echoed in the ensemble choreography by Alan Hineline, with dancers running repetitive patterns that pass through each other’s lines. Most of the movement is quirky and impersonal in the style of Merce Cunningham, except one sharply-etched physical duet, danced on Saturday by Annie Schreffler and Nolan McGahan, who looked like they had something to do with each other. It all comes together in a cacaphonous finale, with the orchestra blasting one staccato chord after another like a Beethoven symphony that can’t stop, and everyone on stage in lines except for one wild-card guy who whirls around in a mock frenzy. Some of the ensemble movement was ragged, but this piece had non-stop energy, and enough wit to sustain itself.
Christopher Rouse’s “Friandises” was a joint commission from Juilliard and the New York City Ballet, and served as the score for two choreographers—Peter Martins for NYCB and Adam Hoagland for the Juilliard dancers. (I saw both this week, Martin’s “Friandises” at the NY State Theater on Thursday, and Hoagland’s more ambitiously titled “Watershed” on Saturday at Juilliard.) The music is brassy, astringent and jazzy, with brilliant flourishes for percussion, including one crescendo cymbal riff that seemed to fly up and ricochet off the ceiling of the Juilliard space. Both choreographers treated it as a showpiece for male dancers—Martins with pyrotechnic crossings led by the Olympian leaper Daniel Ulbricht, Hoagland with Grahamesque kicks and falls, and one spectacular all-male lift, where several men catapult a mate feet first in a plunging arc above their heads. Martins had the edge in fireworks, given the technical level of City Ballet’s young male corps. But Hoagland made up for it in the slow section, a Sarabande for shimmering strings. Martins, impersonal as usual, staged a multiple pas de deux, with several couples going through essentially the same moves. Hoagland’s version was an intimate give and take for two, starting and ending in a diagonal ribbon of light across the stage. Dominic Santia and Navarra Novy-Williams were a riveting pair as they pulled back and forth from each other— especially in one repeated clinch where she flung herself against him, belly to belly, then let her head and limbs float away on the air as he hugged her waist. She managed to be solid in the core and soft in the extremities—a complex combination that drew us into the mysteries of the relationship.
The finale of the program was by far the most elaborate piece. “Senbazuru” means a thousand cranes, a Japanese omen of peace and hope. The music by Pete Wyer seemed like one crescendo after another, but nothing could top the spectacle put on by choreographer Jessica Lang. Besides the thousand paper cranes, which descended from above, it featured three balconies, four singers, a long red fabric, many animated dancers, and a fog machine. At the center of it all was a shirtless victim, danced by Jonathan Alsbery. The sopranos were two kind ladies singing about love, journeys, horizons, and love, and they were evidently trying to save the victim from his fate, which had him repeatedly arching against the floor in agony. They didn’t succeed, and neither did the piece, weighted down with a surfeit of symbols and a dearth of plot. It wasn’t any of the performers’ fault, though. Alsbery put on a major-league exhibition of whirling, thrashing and suffering. And the singers were terrific, especially Daisy Press, the high soprano, and two men singing a wordless backup score featuring the interesting consonant DZ. The singers’ microphones seemed like an insult to their operatic powers, but that was just another symbol of the excess that doomed this drama.
Photo of Adam Hougland's Watershed, set to the music of Christopher Rouse (Friandises) by Rosalie O'Connor.
Volume 4, No. 8
February 27, 2006
copyright
©2006 Tom Phillips
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