Tulsa Ballet
“Elite Syncopations,” “Por Vos Muero,” and “This Is Your Life”
Tulsa Ballet
On paper, the program for Tulsa Ballet’s return to New York after an
absence of more than two decades must have seemed an ideal showcase for
the company’s versatility and seriousness of purpose. There were ballets
by noted chorographers—one to display the dancers’ classical technique,
another their fluency in the idiom of contemporary European
dance—topped off with the New York premiere of a recent commission.
There was variety in the music, décor, and costumes. There was even a
latent theme: social dance refracted through the prism of ballet.
Alas,
the whole was less than the sum of the parts. The problem wasn’t the
dancers; they’re talented, committed, and engaging and it’s easy to see
why they’ve garnered the kind of community support that makes both
touring and new commissions possible. The problem lay in the dances:
they all promised more than they delivered.
The
program opened with Kenneth MacMillan’s 1974 “Elite Syncopations,” a
suite of solos, duets, and ensemble pieces set to orchestrated piano
rags by Scott Joplin and his contemporaries. It’s the kind of ballet
that tempts marketing departments to plaster “rollicking” and
“light-hearted” all over the subscription brochure. MacMillan tarts up
his classical vocabulary with knowing winks, wagging derrières, and
music-hall jokes: the “Calliope Rag” might be a variation for The Fairy
of Shimmy. And in case we’ve missed any of the nudge-nudge-wink-wink
naughtiness, Ian Spurling’s famous Peter-Max-on-a-bender-costumes
helpfully direct our attention to the ballerinas’ points of anatomical
interest with strategically placed stars, bullseyes, and arrows. There’s
nothing wrong with celebrating the erotic charge at the heart of social
dance with a bracing shot of the vernacular. But a puerile snicker
informs “Elite Syncopations” cartoon cheer: it isn’t “Dances at a
Honky-Tonk” or “Storyville Waltzes”—it’s Benny Hill in pointe shoes.
To
their credit, the Tulsa dancers didn’t just vamp to the jokes. Karina
Gonzalez and Alfonso Martin—justifiably the company’s stars—invested
their “Bethena Waltz” duet with both the tenderness in Joplin’s music
and the elegance in MacMillan’s steps. Gonzalez and Kate Oderkirk
dispatched their solos (“Stop Time Rag” and “Calliope Rag,”
respectively) with the self-assured élan of women to reckoned with, not
leered at.
The company used the Orchestra of the Royal Ballet’s
recording of the score, which sounded flat and charmless over the
Joyce’s sound system and seemed as close to unsyncopated as it was
possible to be and still be ragtime. They‘ve performed the work with a
live band in the past (see the accompanying photos). The dancers might
have been better served had they dispensed with the recording and simply
put a pianist on stage.
The company looked its best—energized,
expansive, and musical—in Nacho Duato’s “Por Vos Muero” (For You I Die),
a pretty essay in broody House-of-Kylian atmospherics set to 15th and
16th century Spanish dance music and voiced-over extracts from the poems
of Garcilaso de la Vega. The ballet was easy to watch: Duato swept us
along on a steady current of one lengthy and sinuous phrase after
another. He rarely varied their rhythm and texture, however. Decorated
though they may have been with a sprinkling of the usual contemporary
dance ornaments—head rolls, flexed feet, angled limbs, contractions—as
well as with references to Renaissance court dance, they were really
just the same phrase over and over again: step–jump–turn–lunge–sink
down–rise up–repeat.
Duato took care to vary the stage picture and its mood with changes in
music, lighting, props, and ensemble—and it might have worked had the
apparatus not been freighted with a portentousness all out of scale with
the proceedings. Every prop, every shadow, every ray of light seemed
intended to Mean Something—about love and its object, presumably—but
there wasn’t really enough going on to attach a meaning to. Rather than
deepening the impact of the dancing, the effects put quotation marks
around it. Still, Serena Chu’s radiant musicality throughout the
evening—but especially during “Por Vos Muero”—deserves a special
mention.
Young Soon Hue’s newly commissioned ballet was also a
suite of dances—tangos in this case. Unfortunately she elected to frame
them with irritating device that emulated edgy wit but was mostly
witless: we were the studio audience for an episode of the 50’s TV show
“This Is Your Life” watching seven hapless and painfully stereotyped
characters deliver monologues that told us more than we really needed to
know. Then they danced about it. Why this device? It might have worked
as a barbed send-up of reality TV and the tell-all/see-all culture that
feeds it—in which case Jerry Springer or Judge Judy would have been
better models. But there seemed to be no more to it than the need to set
up the backstories that we should have gotten from the dances and to
give the costume designer something retro to work with.
The
choreography was in the Xtreme Broadway mode—think “Tango Argentino”
filtered through William Forsythe—but wasn’t totally without craft. An
amusing group dance for the men seemed to rely on the disconnect between
what they were wearing—shirts, ties, sheer black tulle crinolines,
socks with garters—and their affect, which was all tribal fierceness,
but I suspect it would have been fun to watch even if they’d been in
practice clothes.
copyright © 2009 by Kathleen O’Connell
Top: Wang Yi in “Elite Syncopations”
Photo by Christopher Jean-Richard
Middle: Karina Gonzalez and Alfonso Martin in “Elite Syncopations”
Photo by Christopher Jean-Richard
Bottom: Ricardo Graziano, Serena Chu, and Ma Cong in “Por Vos Muero”
Photo by Ralph Cole
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Dance with me my lover
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