the danceview times
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Volume 2, Number 8 February 23, 2004 An online supplement to DanceView magazine
New! updated February 26, 2004 Nijinsky—Lost in the Chaos Nijinsky Clare
Croft Vaslav
Nijinsky is a ballet icon. His ballets and life story have cemented his
place in dance history. But with iconic status sometimes comes a flattening
of character, and John Neumeier’s depiction of the famous dancer
in the evening length Nijinsky has fallen into this trap. Neumeier
devotes most of his two-and-half-hour ballet to placing Nijinsky’s
inner landscape onstage, creating a swirl of impossible-to-digest dance
that presents Nijinsky as a one-dimensional figure, lost in the swirl.
The man who created the first truly modern ballets and passed through
two complicated relationships, first with impresario Serge Diaghilev,
then later his wife Romola, appears the same throughout Neumeier’s
ballet. Though the relationships were, in fact, very different, Neumeier's
depictions are not. The
lack of subtle character development was even more striking after having
seen Norman Allen's "Nijsinky's Last Dance" at the Kennedy Center
this past fall.
Clichés of Madness Nijinsky by
Gia Kourlas After
spending Friday night with John Neumeier’s latest full-evening catastrophe
about Vaslaw Nijinsky (yes, another histrionic attempt to depict the famous
dancer), I can’t help but imagine what went into his “Nijinsky
File.” You know—points of inspiration for visual design and
character development; I’m not referring to historical photographs
or sketches of costumes or musical scores. This version of Nijinsky’s
life falls into the category of trying to make insanity hot (as opposed
to truly sad, which it was, or unintentionally funny, which is more often
the unfortunate case. Apart from actual research—and he does reportedly
have a vast collection of Nijinsky memorabilia—Neumeier seems to
have had two things on his mind before he stepped into the studio with
his dancers: homoerotic Calvin Klein advertisements (those featuring young
men in underwear) and Adam Cooper in Matthew Bourne’s Swan Lake
(that’s his Diaghilev). Letter from New York 23
February 2004. For the past 25 years, Theodora Skipitares has been making award-winning spectacles of puppetry, using techniques from around the world. The several productions of hers that I’ve seen tend to be optically spellbinding and aurally almost unendurable. Her scripts are disorganized and banal, the voices of her actors aren’t very interesting, and the minimalist electronic scores she uses, often for 70 minutes at a stretch, cancel out the delights that come in through the eye. What she really needs, from my perspective, is to present her puppetry in silence, with dialogue streaming electronically somewhere visible. And yet,
when she triumphs, one is knocked out with pleasure. There was one scene
in Skipitares’s new production, Odyssey: The Homecoming,
which I saw at La MaMa e.t.c. yesterday, that was worth the effort to
go. Conjuring Loie Fuller Dance
of the Elements by
Rita Felciano Howling
winds and slashing rains couldn’t keep me from traveling to Stanford
the other evening despite the fact that my little car was telling me in
no uncertain terms that it didn’t belong on a freeway during such
a dark and stormy night. But then how many chances does one get to see
something at least approximating what the mother of modern dance, one
Loie Fuller, of Fullersburg, Ill and Paris, France, might have looked
like?
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A Valiant Beauty The
Sleeping Beauty by
Mindy Aloff The
photograph you see here is of Jenifer Ringer (with Philip Neal), the first-cast
Aurora in the New York City Ballet’s production of The Sleeping
Beauty. The last two weeks of NYCB’s winter season have been
given over to Beauty, and, in that time, the company is fielding
five sets of principals. Several critics from The Dance View Times
will be writing about the other casts next week. This review considers
the first cast I was able to see, with Yvonne Borree as Aurora, Nikolaj
Hübbe as Prince Désiré, Kyra Nicholas as The Fairy
Carabosse, and Maurice Kaplow conducting. Before I begin, I want to give
my frame of reference for critiquing this ballet. New Casts in Jewels Jewels by
Mary Cargill The redesigned Jewels was the not-so-surprise hit of the season, with packed houses and cheering audiences. The earlier designs, with the chintzy parures in the background, were not a great loss, but they at least did not detract from the choreography in the way the news ones, to my mind, do. “Emeralds”
is now a mass of green nothingness, Clearly the designer wanted a nether
world, either a bower or a sea bed, but the dancers, with their green
costumes, fade into the background; even their skin seems to take on a
greenish tinge. Despite the oppressive "Green Mansions" mood,
the second cast, Rachel Rutherford with Robert Tewsley (in a welcome return
from injury), and Pascale van Kipnis with James Fayette, caught the delicate
lyricism of the music. Rutherford, in the Verdy role, danced with a delicate
shading and a gentle urgency; those horns were calling her away to somewhere!
The difficult mime-like movements, where the hands say nothing exactly
and everything allusively, were lovely. I never saw Verdy dance the role,
though, and people who did are always disappointed; and yes, it is inexplicable
that Verdy does not coach her part. Though some of the partnering looked
a bit tentative, Tewesley had a romantic authority and plushness to his
dancing that gleams with an old fashioned
courtesy, so perfect for “Emeralds”. Pushing It Ellipse by
Susan Reiter The
gentle swaying of a glowing oblong red lantern, as it rose slowly through
the darkness up to the flies, was the opening image of Graeme Murphy's
Ellipse. The introductory section, for two women who shared a
mysterious symbiotic connection, was a bravely reflective and somber one.
But as it progressed through its 80 minutes, Ellipse evolved
into a rough-and-tumble agglomeration of teasingly tasteless costumes,
excessive gymnastic exploits, and attempts at humor that veered too close
to silliness. A Powerful Depiction of Poverty and Despair
Les Sublimes by
Lisa Traiger In
1904, when Pablo Picasso painted "Les Saltimbanques," he captured
a world-weary sense of isolation. That evocation has become a hallmark
of the malaise infiltrating contemporary society. Picasso's saltimbanques
are circus people: a tall harlequin, a fat clown in a red suit, a young
girl in a tutu, a bare-chested teenage boy, a younger boy and a seated
woman in an oddly perched hat. (The large canvas hangs in the National
Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.) They're not a family in the traditional
sense, but they're bound together even in their despair, their isolation.
They stare out at us from Picasso's barren no-man's-land landscape telling
of the psychological separation of lives lived on the fringes of society. |
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Copyright
© 2004 by DanceView |
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