New Ballet at the Miller Theater
Disappointingly, no one determined the future of ballet in the “New Ballet” program that Columbia University’s Miller Theater presented, in September, in New York. Impresarios George Steel and Mary Cronson commissioned choreographers to work with new music: Amanda Miller with Fred Frith, Luca Veggetti with Paolo Aralla, and Alison Chase with John Adams. Each dancemaker has an intimate sense of musicality and a very individual style; and their premières proffered totally different possibilities. Veggetti deserves our continuing faith.
Miller’s poetic Dogwood is structured around fanciful cardboard chairs and a quartet: Miller and Rebecca Jefferson—who dances in Miller’s Cologne-based company pretty ugly tanz köln—Matthew Prescott and Gino Grenek. They dance with wind-milling arms and large contorted walks. They arrange the chairs and sit on them, and they sit on one another’s laps. The dancers’ twisting, giant steps are far from classical, yet their movement activates the spare set. Frith’s music, performed onstage, is a whiny downward scale, its mood depressing and unbalanced. In response, the dancers cluster, surrounded by the chairs. Looking up and opening their arms above, they iterate the furniture’s outwardly scrolling design. Though Dogwood resists our concept of beauty, it creates another, wider notion of it.
Veggetti’s Four/Voice features balletic torsion, beautifully executed by Frances Chiaverini, Robert Fairchild, Daniel Ulbricht and Rachel Piskin on pointe. Words from Leonardo da Vinci’s Prophecies, flashing on the black cyclorama, interfere with and then disappear behind the moving bodies. Piskin and Ulbricht’s duet is an intentional struggle. Their intertwining arms and legs construct tightly choreographed moving tableaux. Chiaverini “rests” in demi-plié. Piskin balances center stage with one arm up, while Chiaverini and Fairchild tangle, moving around her. The taller Chiaverini stretches curving arms and rod-straight extended legs, accentuating her length. Her contracted spine is highlighted in a backless, boy-cut leotard. Each dancer in a different costume performs individually prescribed movement motifs, but together they complete Four/Voice’s musicality on the spot, as Cunningham dancers do. After a blackout in the middle, Michael Nicolas, also onstage, plays Aralla’s heartbreaking cello solo.
MOMIX co-founder Alison Chase, now working on her own, has six New York City Ballet dancers dialogue with larger-than-life projected images of themselves. The game cast pairs in interlocking formations, acrobatic lifts and loving, devoted partnerships. The women’s pointe shoes are outlined in red, like the feet of classical South Indian dancers. Unusual overhead lifts look like a forced fusion. Though lightweight and with little obvious complexity, Sweet Alchemy, to Adams’s “John’s Book of Alleged Dances,” is a candy heart, a nice try.
These choreographers offered refreshing, new takes on musicality. But only Veggetti exploits and sustains the classical vocabulary.
Lori Ortiz is a New York–based freelancer writing for PAJ, DANCE, Attitude and Gay City News.
