| From: THE NEW YORK TIMES, September 14, 2000 Dance Review by Anna Kisselgoff
Varied Styles, but Always True to
Balanchine
WASHINGTON, Sept. 13 — Even by ballet powwow standards the two-week
Balanchine Celebration that shot off to a dazzling start on Tuesday night at the John F.
Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts here is unusual and ingenious.
Six companies have been invited to perform George Balanchine's ballets, ranging from the
1929 "Prodigal Son," which he created for Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, to the
1981 "Mozartiana," which he choreographed for his own
company, the New York City Ballet, two years before he died.
It isn't the what but the who and the how that are attracting enormous interest here. The
ballets are familiar in this selective overview, but six companies are
bound to dance them differently. The trick is to make it all still look like Balanchine:
that is, allow for nuances but avoid mannerism and emoting, and also have the technique
that Balanchine demanded for movement to speak
on its own terms.
It was a surprise, perhaps, to see a Balanchine tribute lead off with the Bolshoi Ballet.
Balanchine's plotless ballets were long anathema in Russia, where Soviet aesthetics
favored opera house narrative works. Times have changed, and Nina Ananiashvili led
"Mozartiana" with eye-opening grandeur, dancing in big Bolshoi style without
betraying the Balanchine pure-dance aesthetic.
Miami City Ballet was its ebullient and energetic self in "Rubies" and
"Stars and Stripes." Edward Villella, the Miami's director; Suzanne Farrell, now
heading the Suzanne Farrell Ballet, an expanded version of her touring unit; and Helgi
Tomasson, director of San Francisco Ballet, are the former Balanchine stars represented at
the celebration.
Nonetheless the revelation of the festival may well be a company slightly outside the
fold, the Joffrey Ballet of Chicago, reborn under Gerald Arpino since it moved from New
York in 1995. As far as pure dancing went, the company's wonderful performance of the 1957
version of "Square Dance" was a model of capturing Balanchine's singular blend
of playfulness and virtuosity. Tracy Julias was the cast's outstanding young ballerina, a
classical dancer by any standard.
For those who may not have noticed, the New York City Ballet is absent for reasons too
absurd to bear much discussion. The company has not performed at the Kennedy Center in 13
years: its orchestra contract requires it to use City Ballet musicians on tour, but the
Kennedy Center must use its own orchestra.
Nevertheless Charles and Stephanie Reinhart, artistic directors for dance at the Kennedy
Center, invited City Ballet, even thinking that one of the orchestras could be paid not to
play. When this proved financially impossible, they conceived of this brilliant overview
as part of the Kennedy Center's millennium programming. The celebration would demonstrate
Balanchine's influence outside his own company.
The idea was to concentrate on troupes that emphasized his works. Dance Theater of Harlem
and Pacific Northwest Ballet in Seattle chose not to participate, objecting to shared
programs or how they were scheduled.
Yet as this first program showed, there is no sense of competition. Rather
there is a sense that one company enhances another, and all confirm
Balanchine's faith in the classical ballet vocabulary as an enduring dance idiom. Ms.
Farrell's group joins the Joffrey and the Miami on Friday. Next week will feature the San
Francisco Ballet and the Pennsylvania Ballet.
Obviously the Bolshoi is in a different category. In catching up with Balanchine it
suggests also how standardized the international repertory is becoming. The same ballets
are everywhere but if danced as well as here, well worth the effort.
There is a touch of Molière in this
"Mozartiana," and Ms. Ananiashvili offered a sweet image of a pious
burgher's wife at prayer. The children who flanked her were American (Julia Cobble, Paige
Kline, Mercedes Tully and Elizabeth Wisenberg). Their adult counterparts were four sleek
Bolshoi maidens. And the bouncy Gigue acquired a novel maturity in Dmitri Belogolovtsev's
dynamic performance.
The ballet remains a disjointed suite of set pieces. Its heart, an unconventionally
structured duet, showed off Ms. Ananiashvili fully stretched in her torso with a
passionate air, and Sergei Filin, remarkably precise in a cascade of sparkling and minute
footwork.
Alexander Sotnikov, a fine Bolshoi conductor, was in the pit, where the Kennedy Center
orchestra, needless to say, was also present. Each company brought its own conductor, a
relevant tribute to Balanchine's special concern with music.
Arnie Ross, the Joffrey's violin soloist, led the string ensemble, which was made to
resemble a group of fiddlers at a hoedown in "Square Dance."
Balanchine used the conceit of a barn dance with a caller. The music, however, is by
Vivaldi and Corelli and links ballet's roots to folk dance and Baroque forms. In 1976
Balanchine discarded the caller and the band.
The 1957 version, however, remained a hit at the Joffrey, and it was a joy to hear John
Oldfield, the new caller, match his doggerel to the dancing, which is always classical and
fiendishly difficult despite the red neckerchiefs on the men and the country-dance
patterns.
Ms. Julias, as taut as a thoroughbred, projects every stretched toe and leg with alarming
brilliance. When she wiggles her legs in the air (a gargouillade), you see the step as
others rarely perform it. Her partner, Willy Shives, is a highly interesting dancer and
gave the ballet's interpolated solo a human warmth.
The Miami City Ballet has been seen on tour in recent years, and the Stravinsky
"Rubies," an excerpt from "Jewels," has settled in nicely from the
company's previous pushy performances. Now the dancing is lively and polished, as Eric
Quilleré and Jennifer Kronenberg demonstrated in the duet and as Sally Ann Isaacks
demonstrated likewise with the corps.
Akira Endo conducted "Rubies" and "Stars and Stripes," in which the
company was better, taking more care to shape the movement. There is superb detail in this
staging of Balanchine's tribute to Sousa's marches. The men rock subtly from side to side
as they march with their partners. Paige Fullerton, Ms. Isaacks and the exuberantly
talented Luis Serrano led up to the pas de deux danced by an assured Iliana Lopez and a
reticent Franklin Gamero.
In the end it is not so much that each company approaches Balanchine
differently as that each company is different from the others. One sees little of the
daring common to New York City Ballet's dancing of Balanchine. The Bolshoi is a world-
class company, like the City Ballet, and it has the technique and power that not all other
companies have. Yet getting into the spirit of Balanchine is just as important, and there
was plenty of that to go around.
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