Letting down Mr B.
Giannandrea Poesio
New York City Ballet London Coliseum
Despite the hype with which it was heralded, and an undeniably interesting programme of delectable choreographic offerings, the New York City Ballet season at the London Coliseum has not lived up to expectations. Last week I expressed my reservations about the second programme on offer, the one celebrating the artistic genius of Jerome Robbins; I now find myself in the unenviable position of expressing similar and even more serious reservations about the other two programmes I saw, the Essential Balanchine, and Four Voices: Wheeldon, Martins, Bigonzetti and Ratmansky, which is dedicated to four new dance-makers.
Keeping up with tradition and with a historically well-established reputation is not an easy task for any dance company that has grown and thrived thanks to the enlightened vision of a great master. Once the artistic leadership ends, all sorts of problems arise in terms of preservation, repertoire, style, school and artistic approaches. Regardless of what is claimed by dance academics — who have little or no practical knowledge of the actual art form — ballet, like any theatre art, cannot easily be frozen in time; a wellestablished repertoire requires constant attentive and careful revision to remain theatrically viable and vibrantly immediate for subsequent generations of viewers. However, just as there is little point in trying to reproduce with fussy exactness what was successful and popular 20 years or more ago, specific artistic parameters must be carefully considered every time a work from the past is revived. Personally, I do not think that the Essential Balanchine programme took such parameters into account. Serenade, arguably one of Balanchine’s signature masterworks, looked fairly choppy and hurried, and seemed to be danced in a drearily mechanical way. So did the final item on the programme, the ever scintillating Symphony in C, in which none of the many choreographic subtleties of this ballet seemed to have been approached with the necessary finesse. It is as if Balanchine’s unique idealisation of the Russian Imperial Ballet, so clearly referenced in this work, had been grossly overlooked to focus more on spectacle. Luckily, this was not the case with another monolith of the Balanchinian repertoire, Agon, even though only Wendy Wheelan’s performance went beyond what came across as a merely competent execution. What I found particularly worrying, beyond the general untidiness of the dancing I commented upon last week, was the overall sense of stylistic disunity among the interpreters. I know far too well that it is utterly unfair to make comparisons with the beautiful old days when Mr B., as Balanchine was known, kept his vigilant, tyrannical eye on everything; yet I would have expected the corps de ballet to look less of a technically mismatched array of differently shaped and sized bodies. Pity, for in both Serenade and Symphony in C there were occasional glimpses of how the work could look like if danced more cogently and consistently. Indeed, it must be said that, apart from the technical and interpretative flaws mentioned above, both ballets were tackled with a gusto and a speed that no Balanchine performance seen these days on this side of the ocean seems to possess.
Keeping up with tradition also means being able to maintain and perpetuate the distinctive and often unique choreographic trends and standards the company has long been associated with. Which was, in theory, the aim of the Four Voices: Wheeldon, Martins, Bigonzetti and Ratmansky programme presented last Tuesday. Unfortunately, none of the four items presented stood out for being inventive and ground-breaking, two qualities that constantly informed the works of both George Balanchine and Jerome Robbins. Christopher Wheeldon’s Carousel, set to Rodgers’s music, had very little of the choreographic ingeniousness I praised in Electric Counterpoint and often slips into trite predictability punctuated by extremely naive ideas, as in the ‘human’ reconstruction of the merry-go-round. Similarly, Zakouski, by the company’s director Peter Martins, is merely a pretty party piece, the steps of which can easily be guessed in advance, as two diehard ballet-goers sitting next to me showed. I have also seen better creations by the Italian Mauro Bigonzetti than In Vento. The title plays on the assonance of the Italian for ‘in the wind’ (‘in vento’) and the first person singular of the verb to invent (‘invento’). Despite some refined visual games, and some effectively theatrical ideas, the creation drags on for what seems an eternity and, regardless of the title, shows little novelty or invention. The same could be said of Russian Seasons by Alexei Ratmansky, who seems to have gone for yet another adaptation of the overused formula of creating a series of dance numbers to adapted folk songs — something that has been around now for more than 30 years. Indeed, it would have been much better to have stuck to the old repertoire, as the new one leaves little hope for the future.
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