Dance: Christopher Wheeldon's Estancia at the New York City Ballet (with Danses Concertantes and Brahms-Schoenberg Quartet)

Tuesday, June 1st was the second showing of Estancia, one of seven new ballets commissioned this season by the New York City Ballet under the "Architecture of Dance" rubric, for which Santiago Calatrava has created the sets. I expected something modern, kinetic, and minimal. I've seen Wheeldon's work before, and while he is too much of a traditionalist for my tastes, for the antiquarian NYCB, he's a young Turk, more interested in static shapes than traveling jumps. Estancia is the first time I've seen him revert to one of ballet's most cloying traditions: plot. Though it can't be much longer than 20 minutes, this ballet proposes a love story in the Argentine Pampas, between a city boy and a country girl, the latter rejecting the advances of the former until he proves his manhood by conquering one of the region's wild horses.

Strictly choreographically, Estancia offers a few stunning passages. The five dancers in the roles of wild horses embody that particular equine breath, the trembling chest, pawing feet, and tossed head of the wild creature that first refuses to be conquered, until its spirit is broken, and its feet fall into a measured trot once the bridle is fitted. In partnering horse-dancers with people-dancers, Wheeldon creates exceptionally fresh and captivating pas-de-deux, impressionistic sequences of shapes describing not only the physical interaction of the human and equine body, but the exchange of power between the two. This break from the standard pas-de-deux, in which the male dancer supports the female as she turns innumerable circles around herself, is very welcome.

That said, the piece is not so modern as we might have hoped. I would have happily watched 20 minutes, 40 minutes, an hour of plotless human-equine interactions, but this wouldn't satisfy the typical NYCB audience. But, because this is a piece set in the country, the jeweled and feathered pomp native to the theater would not suffice either. Wheeldon takes recourse, oddly, to the free-wheeling sun-and-dust palette of Rodgers & Hammerstein. Estancia has the feeling of a ballet sequence in a Broadway show staged in the 1950s, Carousel or Oklahoma!; Estancia! would in fact be a title more fitting in tone.

As for Calatrava, what is his contribution? Not the kinetic, architectural sculpture I had expected, but a watercolor-esque painted backdrop of swaying grasses and a few stark palms. The show is beautifully lit, and as the action occurs over a 24 hour period, the backdrop does glow beautifully with the first pink light of dawn, when the city boy and country girl wake up to find themselves lovers, and discovered.

I can forgive Estancia for not meeting my expectations, for it interested me nevertheless, but cannot forgive NYCB for sandwiching the piece between two antiquated Balanchine pieces, the first a parade of harlequin-like trios who present us with their "charming" escapades as if we were royals and they our court entertainers, and the last an example of that airless jeweled and feathered nonsense, an interminable series of emotionless drawing room postures better suited to a fancy-dress photo shoot than the stage of art or entertainment. What is the point of commissioning new works, bringing together contemporary artists, if you are going to then subject your audience to offensively outmoded selections both before and after, poisoning both any anticipation and any lingering sweetness from the piece that is new? Fie.

Dance: Morphoses, Choreography & Design at the Guggenheim's Works & Process

So far as New York is concerned, Christopher Wheeldon is ballet’s golden child, the choreographer anointed by Diaghilev’s ghost to save his ancient religion of pointe and pomp from shoeless oblivion. Wheeldon still sets dances to Stravinsky, still commissions extravagant costumes, and still believes that no show is complete without a romantic pas-de-deux. Compared to the general NYCB standard, Wheeldon’s choreography is rather fresh, though I could do without his preservation of the trappings.

Those trappings were actually the focus of Sunday’s Works and Process program, featuring Wheeldon along with designers Isabel and Ruben Toledo, who collaborated on his ballet Commedia (a suite of riffs off Diaghilev’s Pulcinella, a ballet inspired by the characters of the even older Commedia dell’arte tradition), creating harlequin-like costumes (white unitards painted with black diamonds, colorful capes and masks, long black gloves and short tulle skirts) and an enormous painted backdrop of stylized faces that peer down at the dancers, scaled by the painting to the size of puppets.

This vision, too, is rather refreshing for ballet—traditionally as scene-stilted as opera, where the performers are dwarfed by parapets and fake trees and all other varieties of distracting nonsense. With Commedia, Wheeldon managed to include just enough trappings to satisfy the old guard, while keeping the stage clear enough for more modern minimalists. It was a small disappointment to find that this was motivated more by his limited budget and need to travel, rather than by a brave refusal to buy into a tired tradition.

Also on the topic of disappointment, I admit that I’m not a fan of Toledo’s costumes—I don’t like the hard geometry of the diamonds in black and white against the soft fantasy of the frothy tulle skirts in cantaloupe and mint green. I don’t like the red cape against the lime cape, or the red mask set against the lavender one. The designer’s intention was to create a kind of mayhem, an unintentioned chaos of color, but in the quiet, elegant theatre at the Guggenheim, that kind of visual noise is unwelcome.

Stravinsky, too, is always unwelcome to my ears, but when the music was off, and Wheeldon was demonstrating a kind of mock mini-rehearsal, working with a pair of dancers from NYCB on a short pas-de-deux, I bought at last into the choreographer’s magic—as a dancer, at least. In denim pants and button-down shirt (and striped socks once he did away with his boots in frustration), Wheeldon’s half-movements were more saturated with elegance than the dancers, performing fully and in flexible attire. The mere toss of Wheeldon’s hand, the implied line of his extended torso divulges a radiating grace that made the other dancers suddenly appear amateurish, unstudied, like teenagers at a high school talent show. If he’s going to single-handedly save the genre, he had better teach his dancers to move the way he does.

Dance: Fall For Dance Festival

Now in its fifth year, the Fall For Dance Festival, featuring ten nights of six programs of four to five companies each for the absurdly low price of $10 per ticket, is popular enough that obtaining those tickets is infuriatingly difficult. I've had increasingly worse seats each year (this was my third; read about my second here), and wish that City Center would beef up their server for the flood of frenzied internet purchasers logging in at 10:59 the day that tickets go on sale; because of their poor system, the September 19th show, featuring Merce Cunningham, sold out before I could log in. And so, I bought tickets for each other program, and herein follows a discussion of what I saw.

I knew nothing about Shen Wei walking into the show, but was thrilled to see the company perform a highly structured modern piece called Map, set to a gorgeous Steve Reich soundtrack. The choreography was rigorously musical, a meditation on the workings of hips and shoulders (I sometimes wonder whether this kind of choreography appeals to anyone other than dancers themselves—without narrative or prettiness to grasp onto, unless one has a vested interest in studying what the body itself knows, this kind of work could appear impenetrable). With a threatening, almost cancerous tone, as the dancers' gray bodies broke into clusters, the piece fell apart at the end, as the dancers walked around with their arms flailing. The Fall For Dance Festival has a somewhat regular structure for each show, generally opening with a big modern piece. BeijingDance/LDTX is another company I knew nothing about, but their piece, The Cold Dagger, was equivalent to Map; set to a beautifully ugly composition by Henryk Górecki, with a large group of dancers dressed in black and white floor-length gowns (men and women both wore full skirts), the bodies recalled chess pieces in a violent struggle between groupthink and isolation. Again, to a dancer, the piece was dramatic, stunning, rich in physicality and, more than Map, socio-politically meaningful, but perhaps still elusive, masked, or even truculent to the uninitiated. I think that [bjm_danse] Les Ballets Jazz de Montreal's Les Chambres des Jacques, with its cobbled soundtrack ranging from Vivaldi to the Cracow Klezmer Band and its fresh-faced dancers clad in white, flouncing peasant shifts with colored bodices was much more accessible, while the choreography was equally if not more interesting for the audience and challenging for the dancers (more the men than the women, who seemed to be showcased less). The staging, utilizing square spotlights to highlight different groups of dancers at different times, added to the visual appeal, but ultimately, the piece was perhaps too light, too musical, too fun, too empty. Here I am in danger of insinuating that dark is deeper than bright, but I will come back to that thought in a bit.

The FFD program has space enough for smaller companies to do smaller pieces; there are a number of solos, duets, and trios sprinkled in that give perhaps lesser-known dancers quite a hefty audience. Sheron Wray (whom I perhaps not unfairly mistook for Camille Brown, who performed in last year's festival) danced Harmonica Breakdown; like Brown's piece last year, the music was so good that it upstaged the dancing (which was fine, but a bit repetitive). Kate Weare Company showed The Light Has Not the Arms to Carry Us, an amalgam of a solo and a duet that didn't fit together at all—while the solo was very gut-based (think Martha Graham), the duet was cooler, more cerebral (think Merce). Both Kate (in the duet) and the female soloist danced beautifully (if Kate was a bit more rigid), though Kate's male partner seemed rather too lunkish to carry off her choreography; ultimately, there was little to bind these pieces, and little for the audience to hold onto for later.

Fang-Yi Sheu's Single Room, a disturbingly too-erotic piece, showcased Sheu's acrobatic flexibility, balance, and control (think Circque de Soleil) Sheu is a beautiful dancer with particularly gorgeous feet, but the porno-sax music and the masturbatory writhing against the table (an obvious structural metaphor for a bed) made the piece seem rather cheap. Contrast Sheu's cool and effortless gymnasticism, though, with something deeper: Talia Paz in Love. With the spindly, erotic elegance of a long-legged spider, Paz completely hypnotized the audience so that we barely noticed how repetitive (and frankly, uninteresting) the choreography (and music) were. It didn't matter, though; I would pay money just to watch Paz walk down the street. Her body is perfectly refined; she seems to have control over every last nerve ending, surging with a lush je ne sais qua even to the surface of her skin. Here is a woman who defines visceral dancing: she is everything I want in a dancer. Little surprise that she comes from Batsheva Dance Company.

Two crowd pleasing male duets came from Richard Siegal/The Bakery with The New 45 and The Lombard Twins with Lombard Play Piazzolla—The Dance Concert, but as far as I'm concerned, neither lived up to their promise. With liquid, animation-like whimsy (as in, I've only ever seen cartoons able to move this way), Ayman Harper and Mario Zambrano started strong; the music was a jazz suite and their groove was unstoppable. . . until they (or should I say their choreographer) ran out of steam; here was a piece that needed a strong editor to cut out all dead space in between the maddeningly fantastic dancing. The Twins, by contrast, were over choreographed, and desperately needed a shot of the funk that powered the Bakery dancers. Perhaps never has such physically virtuosic dancing left me so cold. These guys are completely ripped and have complete control over every micro-movement, but they are soulless automatons. Even their choreography had soul, but these so-called hip-hop/street-inspired dancers could not get down (as Robin Dunn always says during her hip-hop classes, the funk is in the floor—you've gotta get down low to be funky). And, on the topic of not being able to get down, Keigwin + Company performed a very disappointing rendition of (my least favorite of the Elements series) Fire, in which a very non-funky Julian Barnett replaced the very funky Samuel Roberts in Walk it Out, turning what, with Roberts, seems a modern embrace of hip-hop into a modern critique of hip-hop—how surreal to see that happen.

Each FFD program includes a traditional dance of national heritage, and I will admit that these are not usually my favorite. The all-male hula group The Gentlemen of Hälau Nä Kamalei performed an indolent piece called Kahikilani, which tells a surfer's love story (involving much more chanting than dancing) without any of the vigorous jumping and squatting I expect from Polynesian dancing. The Pichet Klunchun Dance Company performed Chui Chai, another storytelling piece, in which five females, weighed down by ornate and heavy gold costumes showcased the painstakingly slow traditional dance of Thailand, mannered, imperial, and decorative. This dance, which relies on hand gestures and flickering eyes to tell the story, is ill-chosen for the City Center space, where no one but the front section of the orchestra and perhaps the first rows of the dress circle are close enough to note these subtle details. For the rest of the audience, the piece only became momentarily dynamic with the introduction of a male dancer, in lightweight black pants and tee shirt, who was actually free to move, and who moved with the beautiful, loose freedom of a modern dancer (his choreography, oddly, echoed the movements of the Shen Wei dancers). While theoretically the juxtaposition of the traditional and non-traditional dancing seems interesting, I felt only an anti-imperial insistence, certainly not the actual intention of the piece. (More on this later as well.) Similarly, the traditional Indian dancing of Madhavi Mudgal in Odissi: PRAVAHA was too gestural and mannered to be at all captivating (when I see dance, I want to see whole bodies moving!) Mudgal enlisted the younger Arushi Mudgal to dance alongside her for the piece's second half, and she was definitely more fun to watch—her movements sharper, deeper, executed with more bounce and zest—but ultimately, this kind of movement is not athletic enough, doesn't engage with space enough, and again, insists on storytelling (this time perhaps less narrative, but still an "invocation," an offering, to Shiva (the Indian Lord of Dance), rather than a self-centered (and I mean that in a positive way, a centering-in on the self, on one's own body) exploration or expression). Had she not brought along a group of excellent live musicians, I would have had nothing on which to focus, except for the sensual insinuations of young Arushi's green hips.

I will stop here to discuss Garth Fagan Dance's From Before, even though this modern, New York-based company does not fit the traditional heritage dance category. This is because From Before is a contemporary study of traditional African and Caribbean dance, a piece that looks to be what Merce Cunningham might distill after studying traditional African movements. I will admit that my skin bristled when reading about this piece (the program's notes read, "extracting the essence. . . discarding ritual trappings, allowing the movement to speak for itself); the phrase "ritual trappings" is rather strong, potentially offensive. But as soon as the (all black) cast came onstage, in their neon colored, liquid chrome bodysuits, in the deep squats and tilted angles of Horton and Dunham techniques, with rolling and pulsing pelvises and ribs, their bodies what God intended when God made bodies (if God made bodies): in a Godly image. Though the choreography lagged here and there during short pauses and breaks, this was the best FFD performance of the year, with the most stunning dancers and the most physically-captivating choreography. Other "traditional" companies should make a study of this kind of distillation; Garth Fagan succeeds at what Pichet Klunchun seems to have been pushing toward: making traditional movement relevant.

One thing that keeps traditional dance irrelevant is its adherence to ancient, backward class and gender relations; I already intimated the erotic servitude of women implied in Mudgal's piece, and railed against the imperialism celebrated by Pichet Klunchun, whose dancers are so weighted down by gold threads and crowns that its no wonder they can only move their hands and eyes, and so slowly at that. But ballet is another traditional dance that always infuriates me, both in its inequality (highlighting two principal dancers, while the rest of the company functions as movable scenery) and its hyper-traditional treatment of gender. The two pas de deux I saw this year, one from the Houston Ballet and choreographer George Balanchine (Tchaikovsky Pas de Deux) and one from the Oregon Ballet Theatre and choreographer Christopher Wheeldon (Rush), were equally tedious in their reconstitution of the heteronormative man-spins-woman, man-lifts-woman, man-supports-woman-while-woman-lifts-leg pas de deux formula. Wheeldon has failed to impress me before, but between these two pieces, his was the more interesting, if only because his dancers wore more contemporary black and blood-red unitards than the flouncy, BeDazzled costumes of the Houstonians. Wheeldon's choreography, in fact, could have been interesting if his dancers performed it more staccato; they seemed to be more interested in being pretty than vamping it up and creating real drama.

But even more offensive than the pas de deux was another Balanchine piece, Pithoprakta, performed by The Suzanne Farrell Ballet. Pithoprakta is a kind of modern ballet, debuted in 1968 and set to Iannis Xenakis' eponymous music from 1955. Now. For reasons I've just established, I like to see ballet being broken more than anything else. Think, in 1968, what Balanchine must have been feeling, watching someone like Merce Cunningham dancing to the music of John Cage. Pithoprakta is his response: a lewd caricature of what his backward, pea brain thought Cunningham et al. were doing. But this flat-footed parody of modern dance fails to please fans on either side of the modern-ballet divide: it's awkward, ugly, snarky, and still manages to get mired in ballet's worst tendencies (the showcasing of principal dancers, the stiff, inorganic torsos, the preening, emotionally vacuous prima ballerinas who can barely crack a fake smile). What a travesty. Balanchine's inside-jokey choreography, which attempts to satirize modern's interest in full-body contact and spatial play, only serves to show how little ballet people understand modern dance, and the choice of Xenakis' grating score discloses that the man little understood the potential for beauty in modern music as well.

Dare I continue to rail against ballet and discuss the unintentional farce that was the National Ballet of Canada's Soldiers' Mass? This all-male piece, premiered in 1980 in the Netherlands is, particularly in these times when our country actually is at war, conceptually embarrassing: a theatrical, naive paean to a kind of heroism that doesn't exist, never existed, outside, perhaps, of literature and film, the only places where war can be noble, honorable, lofty, and fought for ideals. Everything about this piece—the choreography, the staging, the costumes, the healthy, corn-fed bodies of the dancers—is a fantasy, Dickensian in its elevation of suffering, of sorrow, to a meaningful end. Contrast this delusion with Hofesh Shechter Company's Uprising, another all-male (modern) dance that discloses, in its raw, primal physicality, the reality of war: the darkness, the turpitude, the sickness. War is violence, and violence is perversion. Shechter is an Israeli who danced with the Israeli Batsheva; while I cannot praise Batsheva and Artistic Director Ohad Naharin's GAGA method highly enough, and while the palpability of Shechter's message is an effect of his GAGA training, I must also express my certainty that Shechter's cold-eyes look at war, at fighting, comes from being an Israeli. It is difficult to watch this piece and not think of checkpoints, of questioning, of bullying. It is impossible not to think of America's own flirtation with secret torture and abuse of prisoners. It is impossible not to think of renegade terror cliques: small groups of terrified young men with nothing to live for but the hope of tremendous suicide, taking out as many "enemies" as possible. And in the tussling, random grouping, and escalated slapping Shechter here displays, we see illustrated with perfect clarity how war happens: by confusion, by ignorance, by rage, by snap judgments, by the escalation of the thump-passed, and it's gritty, and it's scary, and it gets you in your belly, where it sinks you down (while the Canadians are aiming for your heart, to pull you up). This is where I come back, as promised, to my implication that dark is deeper than bright. Perhaps I've decided that it is.

Dance: Fall For Dance Festival

Unfortunately for all of you non-existent readers out there, I occasionally procrastinate. Fortunately for all of you, though, I rarely write about time-sensitive items. The Fall For Dance Festival ran the last few days of September and the first few of October, so it's clearly too late for you this year, but even if I had been live blogging the event, it would have been too late for you; with tickets that cost a mere $10 per night (with first-come, first-served seating) for a performance showcasing five companies and/or choreographers a night, the event generally sells out the day tickets become available, and the good seats are gone within minutes, literally. There are a lot of dancers in New York, and a lot of connoisseurs as well; it's not uncommon for someone to buy a ticket to each night's show, as I did.

Being a bit spacey about dates and times now that I no longer live by my outlook calendar, I missed the first night. That didn't put me off to such a bad start, though, as I missed merely the Paul Taylor Dance Company (I've see them before and their extreme white glee tends to rub me the wrong way), the Kirov Ballet (likely performing something very classical, which, while I can appreciate the necessary skill, I rarely find emotionally spellbinding or intellectually challenging, the two key criteria by which I judge any art, and particularly performances), Shantala Shivalingappa performing her own choreography with live musicians (I was sorry to miss this, as I know nothing about her) and a Twyla Tharp piece performed by Julliard Dance (I have secured free tickets to two of their shows in December, so no big heartbreak there).

The best part of missing the first night, though, was that my first Fall For Dance experience this season was Compagnie Kafïg, the opener for the second night. I curse the fact that I had the worst seat of any night for this show (the second to last row of the rear mezzanine!) Nevertheless, and although I could barely see, I was floored by their performance. From France, the company integrates break dancing (which intensely recalled capoeira) with "modern" dance—that is, they have class—and maintain all the artistic freedom key to their art while eliminating the rag-tag element. They were spell-binding, innovative, and heart-breaking (I know I will never be able to do what they do); they are brilliant and must not be missed should you ever have the chance to see them perform. By the way, they are also funny, and they have great sets and costumes. They were so good that they made the rest of the night—the rest of the festival even—pale in comparison, although the Ballet Hispanico also performed that evening with an excerpt from a piece called Club Havana set to beautiful music that made good use of cigarettes as props.

Rather than proceed with a night-by-night, play-by-play description, I will summarize the performances as best and worst; most and least interesting. What stood out—what dropped my jaw and broke my heart—were the following: Johan Kobborg performing Tim Rushton's Afternoon of a Faun to Debussy; Kobborg's is the epitome of what a dancer's body can be—indeed what God, if there were one, had in mind when he created the human body. Koburg embodied the sometimes shy and sometimes splendorous character of a young fawn as he dipped in and out of various spotlights struck onto a completely dark stage. Keigwin + Company, always young, innovative, and interesting, I find, made up for their fascinating but overcrowded piece from last year with a set of duets called Love Songs, performed by three pairs of young dancers who were as sprightly and saucy as they were technically proficient, something lacking in many other modern dance companies. Also (and as usual), the costumes were different and interesting, and the music was absolutely brilliant (particularly with the inclusion of Nina Simone's Ne Me Quitte Pas, arguably one of the most heart-rending recordings ever by a female vocalist. Kyle Abraham/Abraham.In.Motion performed Inventing Pookie Jenkins, a solo in which he—a lithe, statuesque, caramel-colored black man with a shaven head—wore a floor-length white crinoline and no shirt, and aped glorious movements, integrating classical modern with hip hop for both laughs and gasps from the audience (I tend to laugh less than gasp at performances, but his street thug swagger did push me toward a bit of a chuckle). Break the Eyes, choreographed by Jorma Elo and performed by the Boston Ballet, and which I've already written about here, also stood out.

Pieces that bored, annoyed, frustrated, and infuriated me were as follows: The 5th Wheel, from Carmen deLavallade with live music from Jane Ira Bloom, featured a disturbing and ugly dancer (deLavallade herself) in an ugly red stretch velveteen ensemble (think Juicy Couture for the stage) as she haplessly flitted around the stage on a cheap black office chair (with wheels; get it?) and "interacted" with Bloom, a soprano saxophonist, who oughtn't have been subjugated to this distraction from her lovely music. Equally disturbing and dreadful was Memory from Mats Ek, a "pas de deux" (of the non-balletic sort) in which Ek and Ana Laguna also haplessly flitted around the stage, this time on a minimal set representing a studio apartment's interior. The third and final hapless flitter was Damian Woetzel of the New York City Ballet, performing A Suite of Dances set to a live cellist's voluptuous renditions of Bach's Solo Cello Suites. Again, the musician was not behooved by the dancer, and Woetzel's scrawny, ambling, clowning movement, and his hideous velveteen jester-like costume, so sickened me that I did my utmost to keep my eyes trained on Wendy Sutter, the lissome cellist. It is true that I, like much of my generation, am prejudiced against the elderly. If this seems like a non sequitur, I think it's important that I explain that deLavallade, Ek, and Laguna, and Woetzel are all Old (at least, old for dancers, as in, definitely over 50 years of age (if not 60), with the exception of Woetzel who might be in his 40s). I think it's important to realize that dancers need full range of motion in order to express movement (I don't doubt this statement calls for dissenters, but I will stand by it), and aged, creaky bodies, however beautiful they may have once been, are no longer fit for the stage. It sounds cruel, but dance is not like acting, or writing, or playing music, in which wisdom enriches your craft. To see compromised bodies hobbling across the stage may be poignant for some (elderly?!) audiences (which is likely why these two pieces were so well received by the audience), but for a dancer, it is shameless and disgusting.

Some pieces promised more than they delivered. I had big hopes for Buckets and Tap Shoes, MSP to NYC, a world premiere performance by tap dancing and drumming brothers Andy and Rick Ausland, but their performance was only somewhat engaging and innovative; I saw better tap dancing and noise making at Bring in 'Da Noise, Bring in 'Da Funk. Doug Varone and Dancers did a piece called Lux set to Philip Glass (a very popular musical choice this year, by the way, used also, and to equal small effect, by the Royal Ballet of Flanders in Cornered), but the piece was too long and lacked drama. The Urban Bush Women, whom I usually quite like, performed their signature piece, Batty Moves, which had some highlights but generally seemed dated and culturally melodramatic, and lagged at times; additionally, their costumes were both unflattering and uninteresting. Still, they are a talented, beautiful, and dynamic group of women. Armitage Gone! Dance did a piece called Ligeti Essays, and I only remember loving the music; I have no recollection of the dance, so it must not have moved me. Morphoses/The Wheeldon Company (discussed more here) performed a pas de deux called After the Rain that wasn't very enthralling or memorable, though I remember quite liking the music (by Arvo Pärt) as well.

The greatest disappointment was the Trisha Brown Dance Company, with something called Spanish Dance (which was neither Spanish nor dancing), to Bob Dylan's Early Morning Rain (I love Dylan, but I really prefer the Peter, Paul, and Mary recording of the old classic); the piece involved a number of female dancers, dressed white pajama-like outfits (tanks and loose pants), their hair down, spread in a line across the front edge of the stage (the curtain was never drawn). Train-like, the last dancer slowly chugged forward until she collided with the second-to-last dancer; then the two of them slowly chugged forward until they collided with the third-to-last dancer; then the three of them slowly chugged forward, and so forth, until all six or seven of them had chugged off the stage, their bodies pressed against each other. To call it tedious would be an understatement, and to call it rude and dismissive would be the same.

I had hoped for more from Srishti—Nina Rajarani Dance Creations, which with Quick! gave us a heavy-handed multi-media commentary on the role of the contemporary Indian man in the urban and corporate U.S.; the dancers (and live musicians) were skilled, but in their American-tailored suits, surrounded by video projection screens, a board room table, and other distracting accoutrements, they didn't have the "room" (I don't mean physical room) to actually dance; they felt like puppets. Equally skilled but somehow annoying was Treading from Elisa Monte Dance, a duet performed by the painfully thin Tiffany Rhea and the hulking Matthew Fisher. With her dandelion-fluff frame and unbound waist-length blond hair, Rhea's physical pairing with the black and meaty Fisher read like the heavy-handed scenes from The Loss of Sexual Innocence, and the sexual overtones of the choreography deepened the "ick" factor. Camille Brown of Camille A. Brown and Dancers rounded out the disappointments with an agitated performance called The Evolution Of a Secured Feminine, in which she wore a monstrosity of a costume (something of a pinstriped pantsuit, but with certain pieces, like one arm, missing). Her music was great—classics from Ella Fitzgerald, Betty Carter, and Nancy Wilson—but the performance (which the audience seemed to find rather dynamic) I found to be quite static, her personal style of movement being short on variation.

The one company I've not yet addressed—Via Katlehong Dance—is from South Africa, and, if they hadn't been the final performers of festival (and the last mention in my blog entry!) I mightn't have been so exhausted that I couldn't appreciate their dynamism. In tap shoes, big boots, and curious costumes, they were, after Compagnie Kafïg, probably the most interesting performers, though not quite as spell-binding, and not quite as jaw-dropping. Still, they were shockingly high-energy, and appeared to be having more fun than any of the other performers during the festival. They deserved a show of their own.

Dance: Morphoses/The Wheeldon Company at Guggenheim's Works and Process

This post is three weeks overdue, and for that I am very sorry; it has become a monkey on my back and I am now dropping it off at daycare.

I don't know what drove the procrastination; I wasn't so very busy, and I didn't absolutely loathe the performance—in fact, I found it rather interesting (the format of the program, that is). Christopher Wheeldon is a bit priggish, but what else can be expected for a male dancer of ballet who at such a young age is so sought after as a choreographer. The Boston Ballet's Jorma Elo is just as priggish, and so are the twelve year olds who take ballet at the studio where I do capoeira. It's just something about ballet, I think, and so I take it in stride.

What Wheeldon did so well, though, was give his audience some real-time insight into how he works. After introducing his company with the performance of a short bit of the piece Mesmerics, which I had already seen at the Fall For Dance Festival (blog entry coming soon, I promise! I'm so sorry!) and a video of his dancers working on a performance in Vail, he had dancers come to the stage and recreate a rehearsal session. Two dancers took the stage and ran the opening portion of a pas de duex (to the accompaniment of a live pianist and mezzo soprano) while he stood on stage and watched; after a bit he stopped them, and gave feedback and corrections. As a dancer myself, but one who has never seriously rehearsed choreography for a performance (high school foot- and basketball halftime shows don't count), I loved seeing how he calculated his intention and shifted his dancers—mere tools, it seemed—to better express his own art rather than their own. That is, he not only helped them through a few areas that seemed sticky or troublesome due to weight shift and partner work, but (and he did this again in running a piece of a solo from his Elsinore with dancer Anastasia Yatsenko) but he told them to withhold full extension here and there, to make certain gestures more abrupt and others lighter, as if he were holding a piece of charcoal, drawing a line, and smudging it with his fingertips to his own liking. I had always imagined that the dancer brings her own interpretation to a piece, and though that is of course to an extent true, it is now clear that, particularly in ballet, she expresses less herself as much as her choreographer or director.

The company closed with a pas de deux from William Forsythe's Slingerland, of which I have absolutely no recollection. I'm not, in general, a fan of the pas de deux, so I'm not surprised that three weeks later it has completely slipped my mind in a way that the rehearsal sessions did not. If anything, let it serve as a notice to readers to try, when crafting a performance, to work outside of the box, if you care to be remembered.