NYC Ballet digital Spring ended with "21st Century Choreographers," which did make one feel particularly optimistic about the future. The only ballet in this group that I thought showed promise was Gianna Reisen's Composer's Holiday, to the music of Lukas Foss, which at least tried a new approach to ballet. especially with its assertive female corps stepping into unusual piques in unusual formations. Justin Peck's two "sneaker ballets --Easy, to the music of Leonard Bernstein and Times Are Racing, to a score by Dan Deacon -- showed some energy, especially the latter ballet, a pas de deux with Peck and Robert Fairchild, but were mostly derivative of Jerome Robbins. Pam Tanowitz's Bartok Ballet, to Bartok's string quartet #5, was strange and strained, with hands-on-shoulders port de bras and weird hopping on one leg with the other leg in attitude. Alexei Ratmansky, who seems to produce endless pointless ballets is represented by Voices, with a score of piano mixed with, yes, voices by Peter Albinger, with dancers mostly rolling around on the floor and Kyle Abraham's The Runaway excerpt is mostly Taylor Stanley endlessly twitching. Oltemare, choregraphed by Mauro Bigonzetti to music by Bruno Moretti is the closest any of these ballets comes to a narrative and is not the better for it, with hunched shoulders and floppy bodies, possibly representing the difficulties of going "beyond the sea" to find a new home.
Fortunately all of these ballets -- with the exception of Peck's Easy -- were excerpts, none of which made one wish to see them in their entirety. None of them were beautiful -- some were quite ugly-- or engaged one's emotions.
No comments:
Post a Comment