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Random reflections on… Boston Ballet programme 1

Some totally partial thoughts on programme 1 of Boston Ballet’s London season. Featuring music, architecture and poetics


Never mind the background – Boston Ballet’s 50th anniversary, first visit to London in 30 years, etc (try this review for more details) – let’s get to the programme. Boston Ballet brought two programmes for their London season. Two ballets by George BalanchineSerenade (1934) and Symphony in Three Movements (1972) – bookended Programme 1, forming a pincer movement that left me with a single thought: Balanchine is awesome (say it with an American accent).

Serenade is very well known, Symphony in Three Movements isn’t but really should be – because it’s awesome – and both are great examples of why Balanchine is brilliant. Number one: composition. This, it seems to me, is the rarest of choreographic gifts. I think of composition as the constructon, repetition, variation and development of actions and phrases. The placement, organisation and direction of dancers on stage. The framework that holds the piece together and the foundation on which it stands. It’s like the music and the architecture of dance. Number two: poetics. By which I mean the way that all that framing, phrasing and bolting together gives rise to meanings. Or, to be more poetic, opens the windows of our imaginations.

Back to the programme. Serenade begins in this world and ends in the next. This world is ballet dancers on a stage, all lined up and proper. They are dutiful and beauteous at the same time, both executing the work’s formal harmonies and embodying its lyricism. It’s all music and architecture. Then half way through, the piece begin to well with poetry. There are images of blindness, of time passing by, of death. And it’s all done with the music and architecture of movement. Blindness: a woman holds her hand over a man’s eyes. Time passing by: pairs of women flow in straight lines across the stage; at the centre, the man gives one of them a little lift as she passes, as if catching a moment. Death: the cathedral-like construction of the final passage, the dancers processing behind one woman, lifting her up so that more than seeing her leave the stage, we sense a departure from this world and an ascension into another.

Boston Ballet in Balanchine's Symphony in Three Movements.
Boston Ballet in Balanchine’s Symphony in Three Movements. © The George Balanchine Trust.
Photo: Gene Schiavone

 

Symphony in Three Movements, to Stravinsky’s brassy score, has a totally different mood. It’s big and bouncy and brash. There are hurdling jumps and zooming leaps. There are jazzy syncopations, and thumpy downbeats. It’s Balanchine via Broadway. Also, via baseball. Because never mind chorus lines – this corps de ballet are more like cheerleaders, with bright white leotards and peppy ponytails. You can all but picture the shake of pompoms and the twirl of batons as they trot around in formation, backing up the teams of guys and dolls in front. There’s a more poetic central duet of strange angles and tilts that makes the couple seem to be scanning horizons and panoramas, but overall this was more a group than a character work, a fizzy formation piece. I thought of Mondrian’s famous Boogie Woogie paintings, with their offbeats and accents, their coloured, blocky traffic, gridded and dynamic as an American city.

Piet Mondrian Broadway Boogie Woogie (1943)
Piet Mondrian: Broadway Boogie Woogie (1943).

Outflanked – and frankly outclassed – by the Balanchine works were Ghislaine Thesmar’s staging of Nijinsky’s 1912 Afternoon of a Faun, and Jorma Elo’s Plan to B (2004, music by Heinrich von Biber). Faun was taken at a fair speed, so I never quite sensed the languorousness that gives rise to those horny faun fantasies. And I don’t remember seeing such distracting costumes before – the medusa-tresses of the nymphs, as solid as stone, and the seashell thingummy that clung to the Faun’s groin (cockles, eh?). It’s hard to carry off the arch, ultra-stylised eroticism of this piece, and this staging didn’t do it for me.

The crowd-wower was undoubtedly Elo’s Plan to B, with its phenomenal feats of balance, speed, flexibility and dexterity, all dynamically skewed to one side of the stage as a glassy pane tilts over the other side like a blank screen. The music is busybusybusy, the dancers look amazing, superhuman, and the drive is terrific, but you know what? It was like a shot, a high that’s over as soon as it’s over. I got a kick, but I wouldn’t necessarily go back for more. Whereas those Balanchines…

Next: random reflections on Boston Ballet programme 2
(clue: love–love–hate)

Note: This is not a review. I’m trying out a different format, more partial and more freeform but less rounded and less representative. Basically, more bloggy. To see how it pans out.

Go to: Random relections on… Boston Ballet programme 2