[Performance photos, including from the world premiere dances, will replace those below upon receipt.]
American Ballet Theatre
David H. Koch Theater
Lincoln Center
New York, New York
October 16, 2024
Program – “Contemporary Choreographers”: La Boutique (Bond world premiere), Mercurial Son (Abraham world premiere), Etudes
Jerry Hochman
American Ballet Theatre opened its Fall 2024 Koch Theater season last week with two world premiere dances, and one classic. The world premieres were of mixed quality; the classic was … a classic.
One of the two particularly unusual aspects of the evening was how low-key it was. [I’ll address the second later.] At the appropriate time, the lights dimmed, the conductor entered the pit, and La Boutique began. No introductory welcoming remarks on the occasion; no Susan Jaffe, ABT’s Artistic Director, in sight. Maybe her appearance was being saved, to be added in between pieces. Nope. Nothing. It was opening night, and it just happened; a night like any other night.
I suspect that Jaffe made some remarks at a private reception following the performance, and may have watched backstage during it. But her non-appearance was something of a let-down.
The first dance on the program, however, was not.
La Boutique is interesting-looking, enjoyable to watch, and possibly the finest (and certainly the longest) piece choreographed by Gemma Bond that I’ve seen. Generally, it hearkens back to Petipa, but electrifies Petipa style and pace for impatient contemporary eyes. In the process, however, it displays a different, and somewhat strange, ambiance.
The dance’s score is is an adaptation and/ or rearrangement of the score for the ballet La Boutique Fantasque, and is often attributed to renowned Italian-born French opera composer Gioachino Rossini. But I’ve found nothing (after admittedly not an exhaustive review) that indicates that Rossini composed anything titled “La Boutique Fantasque” in any form. Rather, a Rossini composition – actually multiple compositions – created in a different context and with different titles, and approximately 60 years after its creation, was “discovered” by renowned Italian composer Ottorino Respighi, who orchestrated it, and this orchestration became the score for the ballet .A little elaboration (aka diversion) is appropriate.
For most of the last 40 years of his life (he died in 1868), and while only in his 30s, Rossini unexpectedly retired from composing operas (e.g., Barber of Seville, Cinderella, William Tell), or most anything else, and left Paris in the early 1830s for his native Italy (Bologna), and composed little if any music. After returning to Paris in or about 1855 (no reason, apparently; maybe he just got bored), he became renowned all over again for his musical salons, for which he wrote roughly 150 vocal, chamber and solo piano pieces, some of which he collectively titled “Péchés de vieillesse” (“Sins of old age”).
Slow forward to the early 19th Century. Respighi (who, among a host of other works, composed “Ancient Airs and Dances,” which Agnes de Mille’s used as the accompaniment for her Three Virgins and a Devil), apparently pitched the score of some of Rossini’s “Péchés de vieillesse,” which Respighi would orchestrate, to Serge Diaghilev for a ballet. One thing led to another, and Respighi’s orchestration of certain of Rossini’s sins became the score for Léonide Massine’s La Boutique Fantasque (“The Magic Toy Shop”), which premiered with the Ballet Russes in London in 1919 (or 1918, depending on the source).
Massine’s ballet tells the story of a toy-maker/ shopkeeper who creates “dancing dolls” (dolls that “perform” dances automatically, and then stop), including a male and female pair of can-can dancers who are in love. Long story not quite short enough, rather than face separation as a consequence of being purchased by different buyers, the can-can dancers and the other dolls come to life and plot to hide the can-can dancers from their purchasers. After the dolls succeed in forcing the purchasers away, the dancing dolls and the shopkeeper celebrate the reuniting of the can-can dancers. [Think a mashup of the Disney/Pixar’s film “Toy Story” and Coppélia, and maybe a little generic Nutcracker.]
ABT has had The Magic Toy Shop in its repertory archives, but hasn’t performed it in decades. It premiered in 1943 (in a high school in Nebraska), and the dancers for that premiere performance included many ballet icons, early in their careers. NYCB’s repertoire does not include La Boutique Fantasque (it includes Bourree Fantasque, which sounds similar but isn’t the same thing). Lest one think that The Magic Toy Shop escaped Balanchine’s attention, fear not. The Balanchine Foundation web site references a piece titled Legetǿjsbutiken (La Boutique Fantasque) that Balanchine created to Respighi’s orchestrated score for the Royal Danish Ballet in 1930.
For her ballet, Bond here has now added another layer of adaptation: a rearranged version of the Respighi score that Respighi himself had repurposed from the Rossini original that had nothing to do with toys or dolls. She collaborated with Ormsby Wilkins, ABT’s Music Director, and Principal Conductor Charles Barker to “rearrange” Respighi’s score.
La Boutique has more in common with Massine’s creation than only being adapted from the same score. There aren’t any dancing wooden dolls, but there’s a lot of built-in fun as the 26 ABT dancers percolate on and off stage at a rapid (though not feverish) pace, with corps dancers constantly entering and exiting and occasionally forming stage patterns.
The dance does slow occasionally, and in these spaces Bond inserts solos and duets that complement the classical Petipa style that’s the take-off point for the ballet in general. Devon Teuscher and Aran Bell, the lead pair, seemed to have the lengthiest duet, but like the rest of the dance, it was nice to watch, but not more. I liked much more the far briefer duet for SunMi Park and Cory Stearns, which amplified their relationship without adding extraneous or contrasting details. As for Skylar Brandt and Carlos Gonzalez, frankly I don’t remember much at all of them as a pair. [Gonzales seemed to fade away while partnering.] I do, however, recall Brandt.
I’ll explain. For all its energy, La Boutique has a somewhat dark edge as a consequence of the lead dancers’ costumes (stage and costume design by Jean-Marc Puissant). One doesn’t often find black as a significant color on Petipa tutus, but there it was here, blanketing each tutu – and carried over on a less dominating scale as softly diagonal lines down the ballerinas’ bodices. Strange. For a ballet as upbeat as La Boutique, the dark edge to the costumes is somewhat baffling.
Also baffling is the apparent intent to carry the black color reference beyond costumes. When I first saw Teuscher in this piece, her hair looked darker than I recalled from prior outings. I noticed the same black hair color on Brandt, where it was more apparent – so much so that at first I didn’t recognize her. I’ve watched Brandt dance for years, and the dancer I saw here didn’t quite look like Brandt – this dancer had what appeared to be jet black hair. It was only when this ballerina was featured and displayed the qualities of execution that I’ve come to recognize as hers – including the proportions in her arabesques en pointe – that I realized it was Brandt.
Skylar Brandt, here with Herman Cornejo
in “The Specter of the Rose”
Photo by Julieta Cervantes
What to make of this? I don’t know. And I’m not sure I’m right about the darkened hair – it might have just been the way the lighting hit. Or it might have been intended to provide the ballet with an Art Deco look (which it does). But it’s worth following up the next time I have the opportunity to visit the toy store. The featured cast also included Fanqi Li and Andrew Robare, and Ingrid Thoms and Joseph Markey. Li and Robare made a more lasting impression.
La Boutique was a great opener for the season’s opening night. And unless the use of “black” has a significance that I don’t yet comprehend, there’s no “meaning” to what Bond has created. But that doesn’t matter in the least. Her piece is highly entertaining even without tickling one’s cortex, and is another feather in Bond’s choreographic cap.
Kyle Abraham’s new dance is a different matter.
Everything about Mercurial Son seems wrong – particularly the music. The dance is choreographed to a variety of pieces composed by Grischa Lichtenberger, a German electronic and experimental music producer, visual and installation artist, living in Berlin, who, per Apple Music’s description (written by Paul Simpson) “constructs harsh, jagged sound sculptures that are often sourced from field recordings, turning everyday environmental sounds into sharpened digital fragments and rearranging them with pinpoint precision….[his] aggressive audio creations are twisted into mutated rhythms that are informed by techno and electro, even if they’re too abstract and scattered to dance to.” Based on the “music” accompanying Mercurial Son, that description is accurate – but it doesn’t stop choreographers from trying. I understand that Ohad Naharin created a dance to Lichtenberger’s music (Last Work, for Batsheva Dance Company), although from excerpts of the dance that I’ve seen the score there is more mellow than grating. Now comes Abraham who attempts the same thing, to a score that no one could describe as mellow.
The “songs” Lichtenberger creates often have number/letter titles (like “001_0415_07_re1214_11_ns_ss_as_Ms-vc,” one of the ‘songs” that Abraham uses here. There appears to be no intent on Lichtenberger’s part to have his sounds convey a meaning, though it certainly creates an ambiance.
To me, the sound/ noise in Mercurial Son, most often, is like dueling garbage can lids or the sound of repetitive car crashes. It gives new meaning to “heavy metal.” There are points in the dancer when there’s a brief period of silence, or at least silence by comparison, but they’re few and far between.
The dance that Abraham has choreographed to this sound stew is certainly not Petipa, but I have no idea what to call it beyond idiosyncratic. Dancers emerge from the wings and walk across the stage, then suddenly explode as if hit by … a garbage can lid. It’s too negative, and too irrelevant to anything in particular to qualify as a display of anomie. Maybe darkest European expressionism run amok and vaguely transplanted to a vaguely urban setting.
Cassandra Trenary and James Whiteside,
here in Arthur Pita’s “The Tenant”
Photo by Ian Douglas
At best, the movement looks forced and unpleasant – with one exception. Even though her role doesn’t appear to be the most significant, Cassandra Trenary steals whatever is there to steal. She’s a compelling presence here – from the power of her stage persona combined with the power of the choreography for her role – abetted by her unique (for the dance) costume. She stands, or moves, in stark contrast to Catherine Hurlin, whose costume is a softly-colored leotard and complementary-colored skirt. The other women in the dance wear mostly black costumes that are remindful of Hollywood sado-masochistic productions or comic takes on them; the two men are dressed in monochrome-colored loose-fitting pajama-like thrift-shop rejects. The movement quality, overall, appeared classical ballet from the waist down, and elsewhere on the dancers’ bodies as an abundance of what I’ve often described before as “slinky”, with rippling arms, torsos that have a life of their own, and darting heads.
But this is Abraham, and, although it takes awhile, I’ve ultimately found in many of his pieces what I thought was an explanation for what seemed impossible to explain, a purpose to what initially appeared to make no sense. The Runaway, a runaway hit for NYCB a few years ago, is a case in point. And as Mercurial Son gradually rattled toward its end, the tone changed – much as it had in The Runaway. The craziness, the unpredictability, the neurotic movement emphasis, yield to a slow, quiet pace, to which the audience sees Markey’s character slowly walk upstage, his back to the audience, toward or away from something.
New York City Ballet Principal Dancer Taylor Stanley
in Kyle Abraham’s “The Runaway”
Photo by Paul Kolnik
Moreover, there’s the dance’s title. I don’t believe that Abraham concocted the title for no reason. Logically, Markey’s character is the Mercurial Son, just as Taylor Stanley was the Runaway. But I have no insight as to the significance of that here, other than, perhaps the obvious…pondering choices made and changed and maybe, ultimately regretted. And perhaps this is clarified in his interactions (if any) with Trenary or Hurlin’s character. I don’t recall seeing that, but I wasn’t looking for it either. And maybe there’s an intended kinship between Mercurial Son and Prodigal Son (maybe with Trenary’s character as a surrogate Siren). There I go, overthinking again.
I can’t say that all this is reflected in the piece. But given the epiphany I had while viewing The Runaway, if and when Mercurial Son returns, I’ll give it another shot before drawing a conclusion. And maybe bring with me a set of earplugs.
Of the dancers in the piece, besides Hurlin, Trenary, and Markey, there were (in alphabetical order, as in the program) Sierra Armstrong, Gonzalez, Robare, and Thoms. Thoms and Armstrong played what appeared to be enablers with welcome precision, and Robare stood out. But Hurlin is wasted here – or appears to be unless her character is in the piece for a particular purpose that I didn’t decipher on first view.
Hurlin was decidedly not wasted in Etudes, the evening’s final piece; she was its star, and no overthinking is necessary to assess this Harald Lander piece. I reviewed Etudes after ABT revived it a year ago, and have nothing more to add to what I wrote then. It’s all good, and somehow exciting as well.
Catherine Hurlin in a prior performance
of Harald Lander’s “Etudes”
Photo by Emma Zordan
Here, Hurlin’s partners were Isaac Hernandez and Jake Roxander. Overall, the huge cast looked just a bit ragged, but that’s to be expected on opening night, and had no impact on the performance. Hernandez, newly returned to ABT as a guest artist (my understanding is that that’s temporary) looked a bit rusty, but nothing that affected the overall quality of his performance – and in particular his secure partnering. Roxander was Mr. Excitement throughout, until his last series of consecutive double tours. But the audience didn’t seem to mind at all – when Roxander appeared for his curtain call, the house rocked.
At the outset of this review, I stated that there was a second unusual aspect to this Opening Night program. The program. Here it was a magazine-sized publication of En Face magazine devoted exclusively to this ABT Fall 2024 season. But there was no casting; that was provided by a paper insert. [I’ve ascertained that this same magazine was distributed at other performances last week, and may be throughout the season.] Does this make any sense? I suppose it’s less expensive than Playbill, but it’s both inconvenient to carry, a waste of paper, and doesn’t qualify as a performance souvenir. Hopefully this experiment will soon end.
Also soon ending is ABT’s three-week Koch Theater season. The company is in residence through November 3
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