10 Years of the NY Choreographic Institute
November 15, 2010
Justin Peck's "Tales of a Chinese Zodiac", photo by Paul Kolnik
To celebrate its 10th anniversary, the New York Choreographic Institute presented three performances at Miller Theater last weekend that featured works by emerging and established choreographers. The Institute, which promotes the development of choreographers by providing dancers and other resources to make their creative work possible, was initiated in 1992 by New York City Ballet’s ballet master in chief Peter Martins. Thus, the performances featured NYCB’s own dancers and students from the School of American Ballet (SAB), the company’s official school.
By far the most impressive piece on the program was Tales of a Chinese Zodiac, choreographed by NYCB dancer Justin Peck. In his introduction to the work, Peck explained that he wanted to emphasize the undertones of the music by Sufjan Stevens and highlight its “youthful buoyancy”. Featuring thirteen students from SAB, Peck’s piece accomplished both of these goals – and much more. The work was architecturally rich, with changing spatial groupings and dancing that moved seamlessly from the floor to overhead lifts and jumps. There were moments of playfulness, but these didn’t detract from the overall sophistication of the work as shown by the dancers’ clarity and precision. It’s clear that Peck has an extensive dance vocabulary, which he knows how to apply to groups and individuals, along with a clear vision and a keen ability to capture a musical score through movement. I look forward to seeing more from this emerging choreographer.
Ashley Bouder, David Prottas, Ana Sophia Scheller, and Christian Tworzyanski in Alexei Ratmansky's "Untitled", photo by Paul Kolnik
In an interesting exercise, three choreographers – Larry Keigwin, Christopher Wheeldon, and Alexei Ratmansky – each presented an interpretation of An Inflorescence, a short musical score by Daniel Ott. Wheeldon’s solo for Sara Mearns had a breezy quality to it, while Keigwin’s interpretation – for four NYCB dancers – showed quick, whirling patterns of movement. Ratmansky’s piece, for another quartet of NYCB dancers, felt more frenetic and edgy.
Darius Barnes’s Mandala, danced by eight young NYCB dancers with music by Kyle Blaha, had an undercurrent of gloom. The dancers moved cautiously to Blaha’s delicate score, which was pleasant enough but never shined through in this lukewarm piece. Even darker was choreographer Marco Goecke’s For Sascha, featuring a string quartet by Mathew Fuerst and four NYCB dancers. Under dim lighting, spastic arm and hand gestures reflected the string music. With their backs to the audience for the majority of the work, the dancers’ limbs seemed to take on a life of their own.
Jessica Lang’s Droplet, performed by NYCB’s Wendy Whelan and Craig Hall, showed a slow accumulation of movements and gestures that built throughout the work. The dancers offered their lyricism to the choreography, which meshed well with the ethereal score. The piece itself looked like a work in progress – eager to expand into something more – but it was danced with such purity that I barely noticed. Referring to Wendy Whelan, the woman sitting behind me remarked, “She’s exquisite.”
Overall, it was a highly enjoyable evening of dance, and Peck’s work in particular suggests that a fresh, young crop of ballet choreographers are on the rise.
Columbia Ballet Collaborative at Miller
April 11, 2010
Dancers in Emery LeCrone’s Five Songs for Piano, photo by Matthew Murphy
In 2007, a group of former professional dancers studying at Columbia University were frustrated by the lack of ballet opportunities on campus. They took matters into their own hands and founded the Columbia Ballet Collaborative (CBC). Each semester the student-run, student-directed group offers free weekly classes to the Columbia community and rehearses for an end-of-semester performance, which was initially held in a studio at Barnard College or City Center. Last year the group made the leap to Columbia’s Miller Theater, where they once again presented their spring performances on Friday and Saturday night. The company has demonstrated technical and artistic growth each semester, and this weekend’s program – featuring six works by as many choreographers – was the most well-rounded to date.
Victoria North in Five Songs for Piano, photo by Matthew Murphy
The pieces were predominantly somber in mood, with brighter moments emerging here and there, but they were so choreographically diverse that it was hardly a depressing evening of dance. Five Songs for Piano, a premiere by CBC’s Resident Choreographer Emery LeCrone, was structurally marvelous as the five women – all excellent – moved through gestures and striking images that indicated an internal struggle. In solos or duets set to a melancholic quintet of piano works by Mendelssohn, the dancers broke free from a horizontal line across the back of the stage. Rapidly switching their legs from turned out to parallel, abruptly slamming their palms and extended arms to the floor, and moving between angular movement and more graceful, balletic lines evoked inner turmoil, while sophisticated costumes and eerie lighting contributed to the fragile ambience. LeCrone might still be considered an emerging choreographer, but superb work like this suggests that she has already emerged, and she’s here to stay.
Craig Hall in Monique Meunier’s Solid Ground, photo by Matthew Murphy
Monique Meunier’s Solid Ground featured a classical rock score and fast-paced movement for five women and one man, Craig Hall of New York City Ballet. Although the work included complex lifts and a continuous morphing of formations, it tended to look formulaic or trite. And unfortunately, it lost momentum as it dragged on for slightly too long. Excursions, a new piece by Claudia Schreier set to a slow piano score by Samuel Barber that evoked summer haze, consisted of three women in a series of duets with guest artist Don Friedewald. The dancers seemed slightly strained by the challenging partnering, but their commitment to the ballet was impressive.
The darkest work on the program – in terms of both mood and lighting – was John-Mark Owen’s Ah, Mio Cor, set to Handel’s score. The five dancers were poorly lit and the unflattering costumes included tuxedo pants and frilly green tops with a high neckline. Owen’s lackluster choreography did not reflect the emotion heard in the music’s opera singing, but Navarasa, created by Lauren Birnbaum, displayed movement that was as varied and nuanced as the global sounds heard in the score by Osso and Sufjan Stevens. Individual dancers stood out among the group of nine, but this work primarily examined the changing collective emotions of a community.
Dancers in Lauren Birnbaum’s Navarasa, photo by Matthew Murphy
Enjoy Your Rabbit, a lovely duet created by Justin Peck for himself and Teresa Reichlen (both are dancers with New York City Ballet who study at Columbia and Barnard, respectively), also featured music by Osso and Sufjan Stevens. The first half was full of heartache and longing, with seemingly endless extensions suddenly broken by sharper, edgier movement. The intricate partnering eased into more lively jumps and brighter individual sections for Reichlen as the piece progressed. Peck’s choreography had wonderful breadth and musicality, and both dancers exhibited remarkable fluidity. This brief duet deserves to be expanded upon, perhaps at CBC’s performances next fall.
Teresa Reichlen and Justin Peck in Enjoy Your Rabbit, photos by Matthew Murphy
The Ballets Russes in Music and Dance
April 29, 2009
Michael J. Novak in Vaslav Nijinsky’s Afternoon of a Faun, photo by Costas
Last Saturday, the Harriman Institute of Columbia University and Barnard College’s Dance Department and Music Program joined forces to present “Celebrating the Ballets Russes in Music and Dance” at Miller Theatre. This event marked the centenary of the first Paris performances of Serge Diaghilev’s legendary Ballets Russes. Upon introducing the performance, Catharine Theimer Nepomnyashchy, director of the Harriman Institute, admitted that this was “a rather complicated collaboration”, one that undoubtedly involved months of planning. Fortunately, the audience was treated to a sophisticated evening of music and dance – all performed by current students at Columbia, Barnard, and the Manhattan School of Music.
The program opened with Maurice Ravel’s Tzigane for Violin and Piano. Diaghilev never commissioned a work to this dramatic 1924 piece, but he commissioned Ravel’s Daphnis and Chloe in 1912, choreographed by Michel Fokine. Pavel Gintov’s piano playing and Elissa Cassini’s violin performance were utterly captivating. They both infused each note with the passion and gusto that can be heard in the richly colored music.
Vaslav Nijinsky’s 1912 Afternoon of a Faun is one of the landmark works of the Ballets Russes. Set to music by Claude Debussy and staged by Tina Curran based on a reconstruction by Ann Hutchinson Guest and Claudia Jeschke, the short ballet is a work of adolescent sexual awakening. Moving mainly in profile, a faun carefully maneuvers his way around several fleeting nymphs. He briefly connects with one of them, and the piece ends with a masturbatory gesture that caused a scandal at its Paris premiere in 1912. Michael J. Novak breathed life into Nijinsky’s somewhat two-dimensional choreography. His performance conveyed the depth of the ballet’s nuances – a hand gesture or a tilt of the head – with intention and sensitivity to timing. The chief nymph, Marygrace Patterson, and six accompanying nymphs were delicate and precise in their ensemble work.
Dancers in Afternoon of a Faun, photo by Costas
In 1923, the Ballets Russes premiered Igor Stravinsky’s choral masterpiece Les Noces (The Wedding), with choreography by Bronislava Nijinska. The stage at Miller Theatre was just large enough to hold the four pianists, tympani, principal singers, and full chorus that this musical work requires. The ensemble was capably led by Gail Archer, director of the music program at Barnard and conductor of the Barnard-Columbia Chorus. Les Noces is a painful telling of a Russian peasant wedding that feels – and sounds – more like a funeral. The opening female soloist expresses the bride’s fear of departing from her mother at such a young age, while the chorus echoes her emotions and mourns for the bride and her family. The soloists’ voices were occasionally overwhelmed by the severity and intensity of the music – particularly the excellent percussion – and in spite of singing in English, the lyrics were not always clear. But the music alone was more than satisfying. Les Noces is infrequently performed because of its musical requirements, so listening to a powerful, well-rehearsed performance was a treat.
Catharine Theimer Nepomnyashchy and Lynn Garafola, a Barnard dance professor and historian who produced the program, should be proud of this successful evening, which certainly would not have been possible without the time and effort that the students, coaches, and coordinators devoted to the performance.
The celebration of the Ballets Russes continues this summer. Beginning in June, the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts will present “Diaghilev’s Theater of Marvels: The Ballets Russes and its Aftermath”, an exhibit that celebrates and explores the ballet company’s impact on the dance world.
Zoe Scofield and Juniper Shuey at DTW
February 14, 2009
Christiana Axelsen and Zoe Scofield, photo by Juniper Shuey
On Thursday evening, the devil you know is better than the devil you don’t made its NYC premiere at Dance Theater Workshop. This seventy-minute collaboration between Seattle-based choreographer Zoe Scofield and her husband, visual and video designer Juniper Shuey, premiered at the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art in 2007. the devil you know is simultaneously refined and raging, guided not by a narrative, but rather by an accumulation of emotions. Hidden beneath the wildly explosive movement and ghostly stares is a vulnerability that runs its course throughout this stunning piece.
The opening projection of rapidly falling snow creates a pressured atmosphere – one in which the audience is weighed down while feeling as if they are rising above it. The pressure mounts as Morgan Henderson’s crackling electronic score grows louder and a corps of dancers, students from Barnard College, twitches and trembles. What starts as a delicate image of snow becomes frighteningly chilling, setting the stage for the types of transformations throughout the work. Scofield draws upon her solid training in ballet to show rigorous technique, clear lines, formations, and patterns. But the balletic foundation is often distorted. Torsos curl, hips jut out, and arms are more spidery than swan-like. Grace is counterbalanced by ferocity. The satisfying rawness of the devil you know is not only apparent in the movement, but also in the embodied emotions emanating from the dancers’ cells. Scofield, in particular, is possessed by a force that overwhelms her soul, causing her to wildly convulse and gasp without warning. Yet, she succeeds at breaking down the theater’s fourth wall by sucking the audience into her emotional state with the subtlest of glances.
Photo by Ken Aaron
Emotional depth is also visible among the dancers’ interactions. In a duet for a woman and the only man in the piece, the dancers violently grab at each other’s necks, but in the end, she supports his neck with the top of her foot as he slowly rolls across the floor in silence. Another couple imitates this mesmerizing image. It is one of the tenderest moments in the work.
Charcoal-colored confetti falls throughout the last third of the piece, creating a murkier setting than at the piece’s opening. After another round of vicious stomping and leaping to a repetitive, rhythmic score that combines percussion and electronics, the pace mellows and the dancers return to their starting positions, with squares of yellow light cast from above. The rich emotional history embedded and revealed in Scofield’s movement comes full circle, but along the journey, the dancers reach a heightened consciousness of their surroundings and selves.
the devil you know is better than the devil you don’t continues this evening at DTW. Tickets can be ordered online, at the box office, or by calling 212.924.0077.
Read an interview with Juniper Shuey at DTW’s blog, and learn more about Scofield and Shuey at their website.
The Columbia Ballet Collaborative
December 28, 2008
Kimi Nikaidoh, a former dancer and current student at Columbia, leads a rehearsal of the Columbia Ballet Collaborative in Streng Studio at Barnard College, photo by Andrea Mohin
In the fall of 2007, several former professional dancers studying at Columbia University founded the Columbia Ballet Collaborative, a group that provides performing opportunities to ballet dancers on campus and choreographic opportunities to individuals in and outside of the college community. I attended their first informal showing in December 2007, held in one of Barnard College’s dance studios, and their second showing the following spring, and was impressed by the group’s professionalism, artistry, and organization. Since the majority of performance opportunities for Barnard and Columbia students are based in modern dance, CBC is a much-needed addition to campus. Fortunately, the Collaborative is expanding and will be performing at Miller Theatre in April 2009. Gia Kourlas followed the success of the group and spoke with some of the founders in a recent NY Times article. You can also watch a short Times video about the company.
