New Ballets from Millipied & Co.
Benjamin Millepied & Company
Joyce Theater
New York, NY
March 14, 2006
by Susan Reiter
copyright 2006 by Susan Reiter
While he has been quite busy as a choreographer in recent years, and last spring offered a New York City program of his own work, this time around Benjamin Millepied added a third hat for this program of four world premieres at the Joyce. In addition to choreographing one work and performing in two, the 28-year-old NYCB principal served as impresario, offering opportunities to three other choreographers. Two (Andonis Foniadakis and Luca Veggetti) are Europeans whose work the French-born Millepied has encountered and admired; the third (Aszure Barton) is a Canadian whose work had been presented in smaller New York spaces but who was receiving a major boost in her visibility on this occasion.
This quite serious, rather lengthy program had a very European flavor, opening and closing with dark works featuring shadowy lighting. Millepied’s own “Closer,” a beautifully calibrated duet he performed with ABT principal Gillian Murphy, came across as the most “American” work of the evening. Its strong Robbins influence was evident in the natural, somewhat meditative way Millepied launched into his fluid, springy solo, after an opening moment when both dancers were on stage but Murphy immediately exited. As he bounded along in lovely sync with the rippling arpeggios of Philip Glass’ ”Mad Rush” (excellently performed by pianist Pedja Muzijevic), Millepied evoked the fluid pleasures of riding along on ocean waves, and the watery atmosphere was also emphasized by the cool ultra-pale blue of the costumes and lighting. When the score turned turbulent, his circling of the stage grew more intense, punctuated by dives and rolls to the floor.
Murphy, in soft slippers, camisole and loose pants, had her turn to ride Glass’s crests and eddies, and while she was not as at ease with the spontaneous, this-is-just-happening tone of the movement, one could see her furthering the lessons she learned from performing Twyla Tharp’s “In the Upper Room”—downplaying her sharp, sublimely accurate technique and letting her body dig down into the phrases. The two joined forces for expansive, swooping lifts as Glass’s churning music again switched to a more agitated mode, then settled into companionable sweetness as they sat facing one another, legs overlapping and bodies golfing and rolling over one another. She maintained a reserve and slighly rigidity, on contrast to his plush, luxuriant phrasing, and both captured the thread of melancholy in Glass’s music, their encounters suggesting that all is tentative and fleeting.
When the curtain rose on the opening work, Veggetti’s “Silence Text: A Ritual in the Art of the Dancer,” one immediately felt one was back in that increasingly vast territory known as Forsythe Land. Sleek, sheer black costumes, moody lighting that obscures the dancers’ faces, toe shoes wielded like weapons—much of what Veggetti offered had a familiar flavor, yet in its spare seriousness and intensely focused presentation, “Silence Text” had moments of searing power. Tyler Angle, Ellen Bar, Teresa Reichlen and Alina Dronova of NYCB, along with former NYCB and ABT dancer Alexander Ritter alternately sliced through space like sleek demons or lurked in shadowy corners, as though ready to pounce. Bar was most often left on her own, and managed to create a fascinating ominous presence through her extended moments of stillness.
Paolo Aralla’s “music and sound design” included hushed whisperings and harsh, abrupt bursts of industrial-strength sounds that were initiated by dancers’ coming close to, or in contact with, several microphones suspended above the stage. Some of the noises produced, including one that sounded like a guillotine, were loud enough to set the teeth on edge. At the same time, those microphones held hidden light fixtures that made the dancers glow warmly while standing under them—providing rare moments of something suggestive of warmth amid the otherwise chilly gloom.
Fionadakis’ “Phrases, Now” offered more muscular, juicy dancing, especially for the powerful, wild-haired Ula Sickle, a Warsaw-based dancer/choreographer whose credits include working with Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker. She was at the center of a quartet of NYCB men— Millepied, Angle, Craig Hall and Sean Suozzi. They wore glittery black tops that matched her oversized dark glittery shirt and her legs were bare. Sickle had the stage to herself at the start, as she lashed out with flinging legs, swiveled her body far off center, and crumpled to the floor. As Julien Tarride’s electronic score crackled and pulsed through foghorn bleats and ominous rumblings, dancers came and went, filing the stage with loose, urgent, flinging movements. Partnering was harsh and full of twisting manipulations. Notable mainly for its glossy, stylish veneer and the dancers’ no-holds-barred attack, “Phrases, Now” kept its encounters intriguing; Fionadakis has an appetite for space but his preference for spurts and bursts of movement left tone wishing for more sustained action to shape the work more persuasively.
Weighing down and extending the program as part of its middle portion, Barton’s “ (perhaps ironically titled) “Short-Lived” left this first-time viewer of her choreography wondering what all the fuss has been about. The four dancers—Charissa Barton, William Briscoe and Ariel Freedman from her own troupe, plus Ritter—moved with slippery sensuality and springy resilience through phrases that incorporated the sharp unfoldings and flickings of the legs of tango dancers. This was in accordance with the unusual and exciting music, by the Cracow Klezmer Band— a presumably Eastern European ensemble, yet one whose music reverberates strongly with the flavor of the tango, and prominently featured what sounded like a bandoneon. Men partnered woman, men partnered men, but nothing was developed or persuasive. Ritter—in a sleek maroon top while Briscoe was bare-chested—often passed through as something of an outsider, yet the dramatic tension of that was not fully mined. Wary encounters and moody lighting effects offered moments of implied drama, and Freedman’s juicy dancing was a pleasure to observe, but Barton’s choreography lost its momentum well before the dance reached its conclusion.
Volume 4, No. 11
March 20, 2006
copyright
©2006 Susan Reiter
www.danceviewtimes.com
|
|