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Letting down Mr B.

Giannandrea Poesio

Wednesday, 26th March 2008

New York City Ballet
London Coliseum

Despite the hype with which it was heralded, and an undeniably interesting programme of delectable choreographic offerings, the New York City Ballet season at the London Coliseum has not lived up to expectations. Last week I expressed my reservations about the second programme on offer, the one celebrating the artistic genius of Jerome Robbins; I now find myself in the unenviable position of expressing similar and even more serious reservations about the other two programmes I saw, the Essential Balanchine, and Four Voices: Wheeldon, Martins, Bigonzetti and Ratmansky, which is dedicated to four new dance-makers.

Keeping up with tradition and with a historically well-established reputation is not an easy task for any dance company that has grown and thrived thanks to the enlightened vision of a great master. Once the artistic leadership ends, all sorts of problems arise in terms of preservation, repertoire, style, school and artistic approaches. Regardless of what is claimed by dance academics — who have little or no practical knowledge of the actual art form — ballet, like any theatre art, cannot easily be frozen in time; a well-established repertoire requires constant attentive and careful revision to remain theatrically viable and vibrantly immediate for subsequent generations of viewers. However, just as there is little point in trying to reproduce with fussy exactness what was successful and popular 20 years or more ago, specific artistic parameters must be carefully considered every time a work from the past is revived. Personally, I do not think that the Essential Balanchine programme took such parameters into account. Serenade, arguably one of Balanchine’s signature masterworks, looked fairly choppy and hurried, and seemed to be danced in a drearily mechanical way. So did the final item on the programme, the ever scintillating Symphony in C, in which none of the many choreographic subtleties of this ballet seemed to have been approached with the necessary finesse. It is as if Balanchine’s unique idealisation of the Russian Imperial Ballet, so clearly referenced in this work, had been grossly overlooked to focus more on spectacle. Luckily, this was not the case with another monolith of the Balanchinian repertoire, Agon, even though only Wendy Wheelan’s performance went beyond what came across as a merely competent execution. What I found particularly worrying, beyond the general untidiness of the dancing I commented upon last week, was the overall sense of stylistic disunity among the interpreters. I know far too well that it is utterly unfair to make comparisons with the beautiful old days when Mr B., as Balanchine was known, kept his vigilant, tyrannical eye on everything; yet I would have expected the corps de ballet to look less of a technically mismatched array of differently shaped and sized bodies. Pity, for in both Serenade and Symphony in C there were occasional glimpses of how the work could look like if danced more cogently and consistently. Indeed, it must be said that, apart from the technical and interpretative flaws mentioned above, both ballets were tackled with a gusto and a speed that no Balanchine performance seen these days on this side of the ocean seems to possess.

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