Dance Review: Dance in Various Forms

American Ballet Theater

David Koch Theater, Lincoln Center, Manhattan

October 20, 2018

Humans

Directed by Yaron Lifschitz

Circa Contemporary Circus, Brisbane AUS

Brooklyn Academy  of Music

October 4, 2018

I saw two very different but entertaining dance evenings in October. The grand American Ballet Theater is known for its full length romantic ballets (like Swan Lake) on the huge stage of the Metropolitan Opera. But in the fall they do an annual series of collections of shorter works in the more viewer-friendly confines of the Koch Theater, normally the purview of the New York City Ballet. This year they intruded on the normal NYCB turf of George Balanchine, performing a wonderful version of his Symphonie Concertante (1945), set to the wonderful concerto for violin and viola by Mozart. The dance oozed classicism, with typical Balanchine tutu-ed ballerinas arrayed in geometrical forms, perfectly shifting to changes in the music. The two instrumental voices (well-played by orchestra members Gora Schmidt and Shmuel Katz) were echoed on stage by two ballerinas (Stella Abrera, Gilliam Murphy), partnered at times by the statuesque Alexandre Hammoudi. Balanchine plays with every combination of two and three you can imagine. The buoyant first movement involved multiple solo and duo interactions between the women, sometimes explicitly reflecting the ornaments and passages of the string players. The striking second movement was largely danced by the two women each with one hand always in contact with Mr. Hammoudi, often required contortionist moves that needed to look like ballet, not Cirque du Soleil (see below). 

The final movement featured intricate solo and ensemble work with much interaction with the superb women of the ABT corps de ballet. This was a typically bracing and superb partnering of music and dance by Mr. Balanchine. Ms. Abrera was particularly stylish with her crisp classical lines.

Next up was a new ballet Garden Blue by young choeographer Jessica Lang (the ABT is featuring female choreographers this season). Set to an abbreviated version of the Dvorak E minor “Dumky” Trio, it featured paired man-woman couples, each in a brightly monocolored unitard (all orange vs. all purple, etc.) flitting about abstract huge wooden flowers and leaves. There were intermittent interjections by a solo woman dancer in a white/green contrasting costume (Christine Shevchenko, who needed to have more fun)—was she a grasshopper?. I liked the set and the colors better than the dance, which never really created its own style or really interfaced with the music, although Dvorak is always a good choice if you want to portray sunny colorful garden music. The trio in the pit did not project as well as it might have on stage, but that would have disrupted the flowers and bees.

The night’s final piece was Fancy Free (1944), featuring Jerome Robbins’ choreographed WW2 sailors on leave picking up two girls (or at least trying to) in NYC. It’s sort of a prelude to the later, more fleshed-out ballet from the musical On the Town (1960). Both Robbins ballets feature jazzy scores, leaping sailors, and macho bravado (best communicated here by Arron Scott, terrifically extrovert New York-y). Unlike On the Town, none of the guys succeeds in “getting” one of the two girls (outstanding work here by the brassy and flirty Luciana Peris and Isabella Boylston, the latter a long way from her usually cool Giselles and Swans) and there is less innuendo of gay attraction here than in the later work (it is 1944 after all). It featured a dance-off with the winners to get the girls (didn’t work, alas) and lots of opportunity for the women to reject the oversexed guys. It was fun seeing this work in the city of its inspiration, and seeing the collaboration of two of the four men (the other two were lyricist Stephen Sondheim and writer Arthur Laurents) who, allegedly after a double date, came up with West Side Story, set just two blocks away from the theater.

On the face of it, the vastly entertaining Humans by the Australian Circa Circus Ensemble is far from ballet. Most of the audience, I think, came to Brooklyn to see a Cirque du Soleil acrobatics show, with similar death-defying lifts, pyramids, and contortions. They got that, but there is a more refined choreographic spirit at play here, and the hour-long performance came across as an intriguing mix of modern dance, acrobatics, rhythmic gymnastics (albeit without real synchrony) and, yes, circus showmanship. The six men and three women paired in almost every combination and sense of the word. They nicely mixed showy circus-gasping type lifts with introverted solo dances, sexual writhing on the stage, and humor. I enjoyed a bit where one performer’s inability to lick his elbow (a frustrated acrobat indeed) turned into a sort of group orgy where each tried to lick his or another’s elbow in highly individual ways. Exhibitionism was never far from the surface, and the sexuality was more earthy than the costumed eroticism of Cirque du Soleil. Here, women were dragged around the stage by their hair; men grinded against one another. 

The dancers entered the stage in drab millennial street clothes, some coming from the audience before the show started, and stripped one at a time as we watched, leaving their street clothes on the stage, leaving themselves in flesh-colored shorts or clingy leotards. The show title Humans ended up being very apt; despite their super-human feats, this performance was by real people with varied bodies, untrimmed facial and body hair untrimmed, and genuine Australian exhibitionism.