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New Ballet Choreographers
Premieres by Tom Gold, Edwaard Liang, Brian Reeder
Miller Theatre at Columbia University
New York, NY
September 13, 2006

by Susan Reiter
copyright ©2006 by Susan Reiter 

Nothing could be more admirable than commissioning an entire program of ballet premieres, with live performances of contemporary music, and in this case the results were above average in level of interest and invention. The enterprising Miller Theatre followed up its thrilling Wheeldon/Ligeti program of last fall with this second venture into serious dance programming. All three choreographers selected to participate have ties to the city’s two major ballet companies — Tom Gold and Edwaard Liang are soloists with New York City Ballet, while Brian Reeder danced with both NYCB and American Ballet Theatre (as well as Frankfurt Ballet) — and were able to create these works on a superb selection of dancers from NYCB and ABT’s Studio Company. Liang and Reeder have been making noteworthy works in recent years, while Gold is a relative choreographic novice.

Until the closing work, Gold’s “Masada,” the evening was a showcase for dimly lit, brooding, introspective choreography. Both halves of the evening opened with a duet by Liang. Getting things started was “Softly as I Speak,” for NYCB principals Maria Kowroski and Albert Evans. It was set to the fifth movement of Philip Glass’ String Quartet No. 5, which was substantial and varied enough to incorporate, in miniature, the traditional pas de deux structure. The music begins at full throttle, fast and propulsive, and the black-clad dancers launched right into complex, often surprising partnering that sustained a tense, even hectic mood. Liang played with the way Kowroski’s long limbs could float away form her center, and had her wrap herself around Evans — always a stalwart, resilient partner — holding onto his waist, her legs defying gravity, or arch into an extravagant backbend and walkover with an eerie tinge to it.
 
When the music shifted to heavily strummed chords, Evans broke free for a muscular, bracing sequence, before  Kowroski  asserted her independence with some intensely jagged phrases — hinging her raised leg  sharply at the knee, dropping into a deep second-position plié on toe. When the music found its way back to its initial feverish propulsion, the linked up more closely again, working their way towards a tender final image: as the music shifted into calmer, melancholy territory, Evans carried her comfortingly as she held on, almost childlike, her long legs extended.
 
“Softly as I Speak” still felt a little rough around the edges at this first performance, with Kowroski looking a bit brittle and tense at times. With a few subsequent performances, it will no doubt come across as more cohesive, but it was already an intriguingly forthright and fluent response to Glass’ sometimes overwhelming music.
 
Liang’s “Für Alina,” which opened the program’s second half, was the real gem of the evening. Wendy Whelan has been the preeminent muse for NYCB choreographers of the past decade, and her mesmerizing, heart-rending performance here makes it clear why. The original works shaped around her have opened up new aspects of her performing persona and encouraged her to explore new possibilities within herself. Here, her presence has the fragility of a sigh, as her every spare movement an evanescent but searing impact.
 
This was — yes, Virginia — another Arvo Pärt ballet, but even if choreographers have been turning to the Estonian choreographer a bit too often, Liang clearly responded to this limpid, ultra-quiet piano score – its gong-like cadences and its silences — on a deeply personal level that justifies his choice of score. (Marilyn Nonken was the sensitive pianist.) Whelan and Craig Hall were motionless and separate at the start, barely visible in the gloomy lighting. She was kneeling downstage left; he stood slightly off center. Several brief blackouts were used to then reveal them repositioned and eventually in close proximity, with Whelan gradually rising for her prayerful, forlorn-looking position to standing.
 
Her fragility was emphasized by her soft, loose, charcoal-colored tunic, which wafted about her innocently. Hall cut a handsome, serious figure in black t-shirt and pants. What unfolded was so delicate and unforced that in retrospect one hardly remembers them moving. The intimacy of the theater, and the muted volume of the piano, allowed their every contact with the floor to resonate audibly. Liang found a way to make the silences palpable through the choreography, and sustained a profound sadness, so that even as these two figures found strength through each other and flowed in and out of some more extreme shapes, their return to the despairing sense of lost hope of the opening felt inevitable.
 
Reeder’s choice of music for “Them,” a work for seven members of ABT Studio Company, veered away form the familiar: he used Jefferson Friedman’s String Quartet No.2 , which offered him a lot of different moods to work with — heavy-breathing movie-soundtrack ominousness, knotty intricacy, and spare wistfulness. The opening image, in silhouette, had Joseph Gorak set apart form the other six, positioned as three close couples wrapped around one another. Early on, it seemed Gorak might represent a teacher of leader to the others, but as the dance developed, he became more the generic outsider, destined to remain apart from their society/club/ community, however much he tried.
 
Despite the potentially dramatic scenario, Reeder sustained a rather dry, impersonal tone, so that the works’ interest lay in its smart, varied manipulations of the classical vocabulary rather than on atmospherics or histrionics. All the women wore the same cropped pink tops over dark tights, and al the men sported the same ochre tank tops over tights, so the implication was that they represented a group force rather than individuals. The choreography emphasized clarity and crispness. In the second movement, Gorak’s solo boundings — smooth pirouettes unspooling neatly — had him trying to break out of his isolation, as one couple after another shared the stage with him, but to no avail. They remained a closed, self-contained unit. At one point, he wrapped himself around an embracing pair, and they moved as a trio, but his position on the periphery was soon re-established. In the brisk final movement, Gorak shared the stage with the men and women separately — at one point, he and the women so clearly evoked a grouping from “Apollo” that it must have been deliberate — as Reeder opened up the stage picture with invigorating energy. The youthful dancers performed with riveting concentration and technical aplomb.
 
The Chiara String Quartet, seated near the lip of the stage, delivered excellent performances of both the Friedman and Glass scores.
 
Gold set his lively, if somewhat unfocused, “Masada” to 4 movements for string trio that are part of John Zorn’s ongoing Masada music project, which began in the mid 1990s and integrates Klezmer sounds with Middle Eastern, jazz and other styles. The Masada String Trio performed the vigorous score expertly.
 
For the first time all evening, the stage was brightly lit, and the backdrop glowed with warm colors. The overly cute women’s costumes — loose blouses over briefs were in tropical shades: lemon yellow, hot pink, gleaming orange. With their bare legs and half-dressed look, the women seemed slightly objectified. But the performances of the four blazing NYCB up-and-comers — Tiler Peck, Georgina Pazcoguin, Sterling Hyltin and Ana Sophia Scheller — who bounded gamely through the brisk, space-devouring choreography was anything but cute. The leader in this exercise in multicultural allusions was Ashley Bouder, a welcome sight (and in excellent form) after her absence from NYCB’s  spring season. Sean Suozzi, rising from a downstage corner (or so it seemed from my slightly obscured perspective) to partner her and add his own feisty, probing presence to the proceedings, was dressed in loose chocolate-brown middle-eastern-looking garb. The women’s frisky footwork was offset with bursts of slinky undulations, and there were plenty of busy coming and goings, bringing the evening to a vigorous, if less than substantive, close.

Photo of Tom Gold by Jens Umbach.

Volume 4, No. 33
September 18, 2006
copyright ©2006 Susan Reiter
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