AMERICAN BALLET THEATRE
If these two choreographers were just formalists, we wouldn’t care so much about them. But both work from a personal vision that gives their dances an emotional charge. Ballet Imperial is informed not only by Balanchine’s nostalgia for a particular time and place–Saint Petersburg in the era of Petipa–but also by a general longing for a safe and ordered world. This dance rests firmly on its solid 19th-century score, Tchaikovsky’s Second Piano Concerto, even as it exploits the music’s occasional sparse, anxious, and modern-sounding piano solos.
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The choreography emphasizes symmetry, particularly symmetrical repetition. The female corps of 16 breaks up into lines of 4; one line performs a phrase in unison, which the next line repeats, and so on until all four lines have completed it. Then the innermost dancers in each line move in unison to the center and back out; that phrase is repeated by the next dancers in each line until the fourth and outermost have completed it. Geometric patterns rule: squares, circles, diamonds, parallel lines set diagonally or straight, star shapes. And there are no ends left untied. At the beginning of the second movement the female soloist in white leaves the stage and the male soloist, flanked by two lines of five women, flings first one line behind him and then the other in a slow-motion crack-the-whip pattern. The woman in white reappears at the rear of the stage and advances to the man through a living corridor, five women on each side, to embrace him. At the end of this movement the sequence is reversed: she embraces him and departs through the same corridor; he gathers his two lines once again and cracks the whip. This moment of reverse deja vu is oddly elegiac.
“Brief” is the word for this dance, which speeds by in ten quick sections; the whole thing is only 20 minutes long. (Tharp disdains doing anything “important,” though she has plenty to say.) It’s easy to distinguish the first five sections, but the last five seem intentionally fudged: they go by in a blur, especially on a first viewing. Tartan patterns come to mind, the way different colors in a plaid both remain distinct and blend together–at the beginning of Brief Fling, we see the colors distinct and separate; by the end they’ve been melded.
Other aggressions pop up in Brief Fling: part of what distinguishes the factions is how roughly or gently the men handle the women. The blue man usually partners his lady with the deference typical of traditional ballet. But the green faction, which includes only one woman, shows no respect whatever for the delicacy of its representative female. She spends much of her time in the air being unceremoniously tossed and flung; she’s held aloft blatantly by her butt; and at one point she’s seated comfortably on a man’s shoulders, her crotch pressed firmly into the back of his neck. This woman is at least as cocksure as the men; when she tumbles down their extended arms to the floor, her legs click open and shut with the dangerous action of a Swiss army knife. (Kathleen Moore is unsurpassably authoritative in this role; a miracle of simultaneous concentration and ease, she holds us in the palm of her hand for the short, sinuous space of her solo in “Suite.” She even manages to make a nonchalant slap to her thighs mean business.)
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Marty Sohl.
