There’s a widespread belief that companies must do new work for the sake of their dancers and their audiences. I’m not fully convinced. Take the Royal Ballet, for instance. They’ve just announced their plans for next season, 2006-7, and there are to be four creations. How many people who want classical ballets by RB-trained, NY-based Christopher Wheeldon and by company member Alastair Marriott will look forward equally to work by modernist Wayne McGregor, or vice versa? And do we need a new “Seven Deadly Sins” by Will Tuckett? Whereas there are only two Ashton ballets all season: “Rhapsody” and “Symphonic Variations” —respectively three and six performances! The biggest single improvement in dance standards at Covent Garden lately came in the season when the company was stimulated with lots of Ashton revivals; and audiences too enjoy heritage works or other revivals (which will be new to many of them anyway). read more
Tero Saarinen has kivekset (that's Finnish for hutzpah—in a manner of speaking.) Fortunately, he also has talent and the smarts to choose gifted collaborators. Already recognized internationally as a powerful performer (although I'm afraid he's allowed himself to be described in the program as "one of the most brilliant dancers of his generation"), Saarinen brings to New York a tasting platter of his own choreography. Trained initially as a ballet dancer with the Finnish National Ballet, then traveling to Japan to study martial arts and Butoh, Saarinen abandons balletic elegance in a fury of bent elbows, wide spread fingers and intentionally awkward jumps and landings. The vocabulary is fresh, if not expansive, and is greatly enhanced by the inventiveness of Finnish lighting designer, Mikki Kunttu. In fact, using churning skyscapes, dramatic shadow play, and even strobe lighting, Kunttu lifts Saarinen's dances out of a certain intellectual despair and makes them art. read more
Having seen William Forsythe’s “Artifact” in Frankfurt several years ago, I must confess to a degree of discomfort at the idea of an “Artifact Suite.” The 1984 four act piece had explored the possibilities of languages—ballet’s and verbal, life’s and the theater’s—and what and how they communicate. The original “Artifact” had bombarded its audiences with contradictory impulses, leaving one exhausted, puzzled and—in my case—thoroughly exhilarated by the sheer audacity of its sweep. In the current version, the discussion about semantics is largely absent. Gone also are the three actors—a garrulously aggressive queen figure, a dry academician with a megaphone and the silent Beckett-like character, the object of their attention, who lived half in and half out of the earth. The latter, however, seems to have been transmogrified into a “Single Female Figure” (Elana Altman). While the loss of most of “Artifact’s” admittedly somewhat arcane intellectual properties may be regrettable, Forsythe gained a practical show piece that is guaranteed to wow audiences for years to come. Anarchy is out, but there is something to be said for order. read more