Open Rehearsal: Pontus Lidberg’s “Labyrinth Within”
May 18, 2010

Pontus Lidberg, photo by Lasse Lychnell
Ever wonder how dances are created? Are you curious about the questions artists ask as they create? Joyce SoHo opens its doors for work-in-progress rehearsals with its Artists-in-Residence. Next up is Pontus Lidberg on Monday, May 24th at 2 PM.
Labyrinth Within is Swedish-born choreographer Pontus Lidberg’s new creation for camera. Lindberg has been developing the work over the last three years and it is finally taking shape this spring and summer. The project takes off from the worldwide success of his 2007 dance-film The Rain. The new creation features some of the world’s foremost artists in their fields, including Pulitzer Prize Award-winning composer David Lang, world-renowned cellist Maya Beiser, New York City Ballet principal dancer Wendy Whelan, and the choreographer and director Pontus Lidberg. The cast also includes stellar dancers from the US and Sweden: Gabrielle Lamb and Giovanni Bucchieri. The end result of the project will be a new dance piece created for the camera, as well as a chamber version of the same choreography for stage.
During the open rehearsal, in addition to screened excerpts of The Rain, sections of Labyrinth Within will be shown and rehearsed. A Q&A with the artists will follow the open rehearsal.
Monday, May 24th from 2 to 4 PM at Joyce SoHo: 155 Mercer Street between Houston and Prince. FREE with reservation: call 646.792.8377.
New York City Ballet’s All-Robbins Program
May 10, 2010

Wendy Whelan and Gonzalo Garcia in "Opus 19/The Dreamer", photo by Paul Kolnik
After last week’s all-Balanchine program, New York City Ballet presented three of Jerome Robbins’s ballets on Friday evening. Opus 19/The Dreamer is one of his most breathtaking works – always a pleasure to watch and always something newly discovered. While 2 & 3 Part Inventions and I’m Old Fashioned have some charming moments, there are definitely stronger works in the company’s repertoire that could have been included in the all-Robbins program. Yet, what was most apparent throughout the performance was Robbins’s use of quirky gestures: sometimes they added delicate humor, while elsewhere they looked silly or – at least in 2010 – very dated.
This was the case in I’m Old Fashioned, a 1983 ballet that paid tribute to Fred Astaire. His duet with Rita Hayworth in the 1942 film You Were Never Lovelier was the inspiration for the work, which begins by showing the filmed dance on a large screen. Following a theme-and-variation format, three couples and a corps of eighteen swayed romantically to Morton Gould’s commissioned score, with occasional moments of old-fashioned, exaggerated humor in the duets and solos. Tyler Angle and Jenifer Ringer were divine in their intentionally clumsy duet, while Rebecca Krohn and Adrian Danchig-Waring were wonderfully elegant. Yet, Astaire and Hayworth’s duet was choreographically more interesting than Robbins’s interpretation, and the concluding section – in which the full cast danced in front of the filmed excerpt – was irritatingly sentimental.

New York City Ballet in I’m Old Fashioned, photo by Paul Kolnik
Fortunately, 2 & 3 Part Inventions offered a spare, simple exercise for eight dancers, all of whom made debuts in this performance. Like Balanchine’s Concerto Barocco, this ballet is unfussy and straightforward. Set to Bach’s “Inventions and Sinfonias” for piano (played by Nancy McDill), the piece premiered in 1994 at the School of American Ballet’s annual workshop. On Friday night, the young cast’s clear formations and disciplined movement reflected the uncomplicated music, which ranges from meditative to cheerful. While remaining mostly academic and formal, there were also playful moments, such as when two women clasped hands and pretended to climb up and down a wall. Ashley Laracey filled her solo with lovely lyricism and expression, and Kathryn Morgan, Chase Finlay, and Daniel Applebaum made strong impressions throughout the work.
In Jorge Luis Borges’s short story The Circular Ruins, the narrator reveals the dreams of a man on a quest and at one point says, “In the dream of the man that dreamed, the dreamed one awoke.” This quotation came to mind during Opus 19/The Dreamer, an otherworldly, hauntingly beautiful 1979 work set to Prokofiev’s mysterious “Violin Concerto No. 1 in D Major”. Gonzalo Garcia added a breezy quality to the opening section in which he remained distant from the community of twelve women and men that tiptoed behind him. As he dreamt up an ethereal being, Wendy Whelan mysteriously emerged from the swirl of blue-gray costumes, only to suddenly awake from her own sleep and dance with wild abandon as the dream’s momentum built. Garcia and Whelan were alternately mesmerized by one another and swept into each other’s worlds, seemingly longing for something just out of reach. After the whirlwind of gorgeous movement that suggested a restless dream, the ballet ended with remarkable tranquility as Whelan and Garcia rested their heads in the other’s palms. Borges’s story concludes, “He understood that he also was an illusion, that someone else was dreaming him.” This was true in Robbins’s timeless work, as well, for both seemed to be the dreamers.
Morphoses, Year Three
November 6, 2009
Morphoses in Christopher Wheeldon’s Rhapsody Fantaisie, photo by Erin Baiano
During its third season at City Center last week, Morphoses/The Wheeldon Company offered six ballets over two programs, along with behind-the-scenes videos of the dancers rehearsing at Martha’s Vineyard, live music, and a pre-curtain greeting from Christopher Wheeldon himself. There always seems to be a lot of fuss (both good and bad) over this three-year-old company – the “Ballet=Sexy” motto sparked interest in its first season, high-profile costume designers and dancers got attention in 2008, and this year’s uninspiring videos received criticism for focusing on butterflies and blueberries instead of on the choreographic process – along with speculation about how Wheeldon’s choices shape The Future of Ballet. Once all of the excess is stripped away and the expectations about Wheeldon filling Balanchine’s shoes are set aside, Morphoses appears to be a struggling dance company with flawed programs and inconsistent choreography – not unlike many other contemporary ballet troupes.
Last Friday evening’s program started out strongly with Continuum (2002), part of Wheeldon’s trilogy of works set to music by Gyorgy Ligeti. Featuring four couples, a thornily intriguing piano score, upside down scissoring legs and spidery hands, the work was structurally and choreographically similar to Wheeldon’s 2001 ballet Polyphonia. The geometric partnering was set within a meditative atmosphere that felt otherworldly yet grounded.
Morphoses in Wheeldon’s Continuum, photo by Erin Baiano
Paul Lightfoot and Sol León’s Softly as I Leave You, second on the program, was an insincere, angst-filled portrayal of the end of a relationship. Drew Jacoby and Rubinald Pronk are talented dancers, but this work, which used the unusual pairing of Bach and Arvo Pärt, mainly featured their high extensions and flexible torsos as they struggled in and around a coffin. They deserved better, and so did the audience.
Unfortunately, Wheeldon’s newest work, Rhapsody Fantaisie, was a lackluster close to the program. Set to a lush piano score by Rachmaninoff with a bizarre backdrop of windsocks by Los Carpinteros, six couples in deep red costumes swept through movement that combined ballet vocabulary with folk dance influences and imaginative lifts. But it was all a blur, rushing by so quickly with nothing and nobody catching the eye, except for the radiant Wendy Whelan in a duet with Andrew Crawford. Their pas de deux demonstrated how Wheeldon’s movement is most enlightening when it slows down and allows both the audience and dancers to pause and sink their teeth into his choreographic cornucopia.
Wheeldon recently confessed that he’s uncertain about the future of Morphoses, citing fundraising obstacles and the stress of managing a dance company while also choreographing for it. These are challenges faced by many choreographers who start their own companies, except that Wheeldon was already in the spotlight and gaining plenty of publicity when he founded Morphoses because of his time as a New York City Ballet dancer and resident choreographer. For Wheeldon to abandon Morphoses after such a short amount of time would be cowardly. There are countless other struggling companies – many of which have been around for much longer than three years – that have persisted with fewer resources and smaller budgets than that of Morphoses. The company has been extremely fortunate to have performed at Sadler’s Wells, the Vail International Dance Festival, and City Center over the past three years, and there are plans to tour to several cities internationally in 2010. Performing worldwide is impressive for such a young company, but perhaps Morphoses should focus on smaller, local projects before calling it quits so that Wheeldon can devote his energies to the choreographic process.








