Alastair Macaulay

NEW YORK — Since the Museum of Modern Art reopened this month, it has devoted its fourth-floor Studio space to a strangely wonderful, interactive installation: David Tudor’s “Rainforest V (variation 1).” Throughout the room hang about 20 mundane objects, including a metal barrel, a wooden box, a lampshade, a reflective disc, a glass jar, a vintage computer’s hard drive and more. Collectively they become a kind of urban jungle, suspended like Calder mobiles with the anti-utilitarian aesthetic of Duchamp readymades.

Then, as you wander around them, you realize: This jungle emits noises, and they alter according to your proximity. You may also notice that every object is fitted with a sound transducer, giving each its own resonance. The box, the can, the jar — they’re all acoustic sources, as if they were seashells. A window in the gallery overlooks 55th Street, but the constantly changing polyphony of “Rainforest” transports you quite elsewhere.

David Tudor (1926-96) was a musical pioneer in many ways: as an admired virtuoso of modernist piano music; as a composer of electronic music; as a creator of sound installations. Among his colleagues were John Cage and choreographer Merce Cunningham — who, in 1968, commissioned Tudor to compose a score for his dance company.

This was Tudor’s first music written for Cunningham’s repertory. But he knew the Cunningham tradition: The choreographer would tell a composer the duration and title of a piece he had in mind. Often, the score would be written independent of the choreography — the music usually had a different title — but in this case, Cunningham’s title inspired Tudor, who at once responded, “Oh, then I’ll put lots of raindrops into it.” In the end, the differences were only a matter of capitalization: Cunningham’s dance was “RainForest,” and Tudor’s score “Rainforest.”

For the next three decades, Cunningham commissioned scores from Tudor, always eliciting imaginative sound dramas. But this first one proved a seedbed for Tudor’s imagination. The scenic design of “RainForest,” after all, featured Andy Warhol’s “Silver Clouds,” whose theatrical interactions with the dancers inspired Tudor: From the 1970s onward, he developed the material of his score for various spatial setups.

One of those iterations, “Rainforest IV” (1973), was devised with musicians who later became known as Composers Inside Electronics. Three of them — John Driscoll, Phil Edelstein and Matt Rogalsky — then realized “Rainforest V,” an installation version that can play by itself.

And so the installation at MoMA is available to see — and hear — at all hours. Throughout the fall, though, the museum is also presenting performances by Composers Inside Electronics of “Forest Speech,” another Tudor score belonging to the “Rainforest” family. For this, the Studio is outfitted with benches and cushions, and its blinds are lowered to darken the space. The roster of musicians will change with each performance (there are six more through Dec. 15); on Sunday, they were Edelstein, Marina Rosenfeld, Stefan Tcherepnin, Spencer Topel and Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste.

The performers were visible at one end of the room, but their sounds came out of the installation’s galaxy of suspended hardware. Here again was the spectrum of isolated chirrups, growls, trills, squeaks, purrs, avian alarm calls. It was hard not to hear the sounds of frogs, cicadas, isolated birds, giant cats and even elephants. (Cunningham said he took the title of his dance from the Pacific Northwest, “from the rainforest of the Olympic Peninsula”; he had also been thinking of central Africa, inspired by anthropologist Colin Turnbull’s book “The Forest People.” Perhaps he was also thinking of the “Rainforest” sculptures by his friend Louise Nevelson?)

The aural collage of Tudor’s musique concrète — squeaks, burbles, rumbles, booms — also evokes more fictional realms, as if a “Star Wars” droid had wandered into the arboreal conclave of Ents in “The Lord of the Rings.” These sounds may seem a sonic illusion, but listen closely and you’ll know they are just electronics using the frequencies of everyday objects. Tudor’s music is multidimensional: fantasy and fact, technology and escapism, poetry and game.

This article originally appeared in

This Rainforest Trills, Burbles and Booms

(Critic’s Notebook)

In a 40-year stage career, mostly with the Royal Ballet, she created roles for a host of eminent choreographers, among them Frederick Ashton, John Cranko, Robert Helpmann, Andrée Howard, Kenneth MacMillan, Léonide Massine and Ninette de Valois. Several of those roles remain in the repertories of American and British companies.

And though she appeared in ballets to music by Chopin, Tchaikovsky and Léo Delibes, Farron also performed to a wide range of new music.

She died on July 3 at 96. The Royal Academy of Dance, where she was the director in the 1980s, confirmed the death but did not say where she died.

The 1930s, ′40s and ′50s were an era when many scores were commissioned for British dance. Farron, often in solo or lead roles, danced in world premieres of at least 14 scores by 12 composers, including Lord Berners (“A Wedding Bouquet”), Benjamin Britten (she was Belle Épine in his three-act “The Prince of the Pagodas”), Hans Werner Henze (Berta in his three-act “Ondine”), and Michael Tippett (a solo in the premiere of his opera “The Midsummer Marriage”).

Farron also became known as an inspiring teacher at both the Royal Academy and the Royal Ballet School, helping to shape the careers of many future ballerinas.

She was born Joyce Margaret Farron-Smith on July 22, 1922, in London, the first of two children of Hugh and Amy (Ellis) Farron-Smith. Her father was a civil servant, her mother a teacher.

After studying all kinds of dance in childhood, she became one of the first two scholarship students to attend the Vic-Wells Ballet School. It was de Valois, the school’s artistic director, who chose the name Julia Farron.

She joined the Vic-Wells Ballet (known now as the Royal Ballet) in 1936 on her 14th birthday. Nine months later, in 1937, she was still the company’s smallest and youngest dancer when she created the role of Pépé the Dog in Ashton’s “A Wedding Bouquet.”

This was danced to a Lord Berners choral score employing words by Gertrude Stein, who took delight in the girl who was cast as the dog.

Farron always remembered that Ashton had remarked afterward, “Now you must grow.” She did, creating roles for him over the next 21 years.

Good-humored, frank, intelligent, imaginative and hardworking, Farron happily absorbed everything she could from de Valois, Ashton, Helpmann (then a star dancer) and the music director Constant Lambert. While she acquired a strong technique, with fast footwork and a vivid upper body, she also became a noteworthy dance actor.

Hers was the ballet generation that performed through the London Blitz, dancing while falling bombs were shaking the West End theaters in which they were performing.

The highlight of her career, Farron later said, came in 1946, when the Sadler’s Wells Ballet (as Vic-Wells was known by then) moved to the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden — a haven after the war’s vicissitudes.

Farron was unafraid to show lewd or vicious aspects of character. Her roles ranged from the Prostitute in Helpmann’s “Miracle in the Gorbals” to the Queen in “The Sleeping Beauty.”

In 1948 she married the South African dancer (and later choreographer) Alfred Rodrigues. She gave birth to their son, Christopher Rodrigues (now chairman of the cultural organization the British Council), in 1949, during the Sadler’s Wells Ballet’s epoch-making debut season at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York.

Farron was thrilled the next year when George Balanchine came to Covent Garden to stage “Ballet Imperial,” a work from 1941. It was she who led the corps onstage at the start of the third movement — a bit of dancing that she later called her favorite in her entire career. (She also danced the same work’s taxing grand ballerina role in 1951.)

Farron created many roles for Ashton, among them the irate goddess Diana in the three-act “Sylvia” and the exuberant, fleet-footed Neapolitan dance in “Swan Lake,” both in 1952 and both still danced today.

Even though she went on to dance lyrically poetic roles throughout the 1950s — one was the Prelude in Mikhail Fokine’s “Les Sylphides” (1909) — she also continued to depict psychologically jagged characters, most notably when she created Belle Épine in the Cranko-Britten collaboration “Prince of the Pagodas” in 1957 and Berta in Ashton-Henze’s “Ondine” in 1958.

Both of these were three-act roles to important new scores. Both characters, too, were antiheroines, and Farron revealed their complexity — dignified yet sensual and given to startling flashes of venomous anger.

She initially retired from the stage in 1961, having been a professional dancer with the same company for 25 years, and having toured with it to the United States and Russia. She quickly trained in dance teaching, joining the Royal Ballet School staff and remaining with it for many years.

Farron helped shape generations of dancers, including the future ballerinas Leanne Benjamin, Bryony Brind, Fiona Chadwick and Alessandra Ferri.

Enthusiasm, thoughtful analysis and humor were part of her teaching style: plasticity of the upper body, spruce footwork and imaginative theatricality were her objectives. On his 80th birthday in 1984, Ashton singled her out as a teacher who knew what he liked in dance and who passed it on to her students.

Kenneth MacMillan brought Farron back to the stage in 1965 as Lady Capulet in his new three-act production of “Romeo and Juliet,” a role she continued to play (also on tour in America) until 1976. Even in casts led by Margot Fonteyn and Rudolf Nureyev or Lynn Seymour and Christopher Gable, Farron made a searing impression, above all in the outrage with which her Lady Capulet lamented the death of her nephew Tybalt.

Farron’s teaching career climaxed with her appointment as director of the Royal Academy of Dance (known then as the Royal Academy of Dancing) in 1983; she held the post until 1989. Based in London, the academy, founded in 1920, establishes standards for dance teaching from Canada to Australia.

In addition to her son, Rodrigues, Farron is survived by two grandchildren and a great-grandson. Alfred Rodrigues died in 2002.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/24/arts/dance/julia-farron-dead.html" id="d0d7c580-5305-35d4-a657-3c30d8041801">The New York Times</a>.

Versatility, attack, imagination, authority: These virtues stamped performances by British dance artist Julia Farron over a remarkably enduring career, beginning in the 1930s when she was a teenager.

Julia Farron, Acclaimed Ballerina From Age 14, Is Dead at 96

Ballet is an art of synthesis. Academic dance, music and visual design unite, sometimes with sublime alchemy. But are these really the most important ingredients for ballet?

A valuable new book, Nadine Meisner’s “Marius Petipa: The Emperor’s Ballet Master” (Oxford University Press), records how many other elements have often seemed more crucial: notably scenario, casting and politics. Petipa (1818-1910), French-born, was the most important shaper of Russian ballet before Serge Diaghilev, who formed his company, the Ballets Russes, in 1909.

Today we single out “The Sleeping Beauty” (1890) from Petipa’s long career: That glorious, abundant collaboration with Tchaikovsky, made in St. Petersburg, remains one of the definitive peaks of ballet classicism. From the 1920s to the ’70s, however, Petipa’s classicism was often hailed as a parent of ballet modernism. “Forward to Petipa!” was a war cry in the ballet experimentalism of the early Soviet era. Twentieth-century aficionados saw his ballets as enshrining pure dance and elevating aspects of humanity to the sublime.

In the 1960s and ’70s, when the West came to know the Elysian Shades scene of Petipa’s “La Bayadère” (1877), his reputation soared: He was the master architect of formal values in ballet. George Balanchine and Frederick Ashton, the dominant Western ballet choreographers of the second half of the 20th century, hailed him as such.

It turns out, however, that Petipa was working along quite different lines. Soon after his arrival in Russia at the age of 29 in 1847, he began making ballets that were peak artistic expressions of the czarist regime: royalist, hierarchical, elitist.

Dynastic succession is a recurring theme in their scenarios. Peasants, when they reach the stage at all, are generally happy, except sometimes in affairs of the heart. Russia is almost never the location. The worlds depicted so intensely by Petipa’s Russian contemporaries — Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Mussorgsky, Rimsky-Korsakov and Repin — might have come from another planet.

Meisner’s book, the first full-length Petipa biography in English, is by far the most detailed and complete survey of his life and work to date. Not all its fascinations are cheering, however. Meisner retells, in all seriousness, many of the stories of Petipa’s ballets, even though their narratives are all too often dismayingly absurd.

And though dance made an important contribution in most Petipa ballets, in several it was far from their raison d’être. “King Candaules” (1868) ends, after its title character has died, with a scene in which his queen is haunted by his ghost until she drops dead; that, Meisner writes, is followed by a tableau in which, amid the other gods in the cloud-filled heavens, Venus-Astarte points “at the corpse of the hubristic queen who had dared to compete with the goddess of beauty.”

Fatuous, yes — and all too characteristic of other Petipa ballets. Such a narrative epitomizes what the Bolsheviks would soon want to sweep away.

Petipa’s story was also entwined with the careers of dancers and their influential supporters. In no country was balletomania as extreme as in Russia. Over 60 years with the Russian ballet, Petipa did marvels for ballerinas from Western Europe and Russia. We learn in Meisner’s book about the “ballerina war” of 1862-65, when the main excitement was caused by Maria Surovshchikova (Petipa’s first wife) and Marfa Muraveva, Russians both, and about the visiting Italians — notably Virginia Zucchi and Pierina Legnani — whose standards transformed Russian ballet at the end of the 19th century.

The super-ambitious Russian prima ballerina Mathilde Kschesinskaya (1872-1971), however, became Petipa’s enemy. Her power was immense: Having been the mistress of Czar Nicholas II in his youth, she became involved with two other grand dukes of the Romanov dynasty. She established a monopoly on a number of the best roles. When a director of the Imperial Theaters fined her for an anachronistic change of costume, she used her influence to have the fine canceled. The director, thus overruled, promptly resigned.

Kschesinskaya’s shenanigans, notorious even when she was at her prime, are a blatant sign of what was corrupt about the Russian ancien régime. It seems appropriate that when Lenin, on his return to Russia in 1917, addressed the revolutionary crowd in St. Petersburg, he used the balcony of the house that had been hers. Declaring his politics to be Russia’s future, he consigned her to its past. Or to the West: She escaped Russia with one of her grand dukes. (The Bolsheviks killed the other one.)

The successful 1917 revolution, however, was preceded by a failed one, in 1905. Hundreds of workers were killed or wounded when police fired on their peaceful protest march on what was called Bloody Sunday. Petipa’s favorite ballerina, Olga Preobrazhenskaya, danced that night. But although noting in his diary the flowers and gifts she received, he then wrote, “It’s too much — here they’re dancing, and in the streets they’re killing.” Then 86, he went with his youngest son to look at the broken shop windows on Nevsky Prospect, the city’s most eminent street.

These are among the many touching details of Petipa’s life that Meisner records. Yet she leaves unmentioned two other signal events of St. Petersburg’s 1904-5 winter. Isadora Duncan, dancing rapturously and with radical simplicity to classical music without any male partner, made her local debut, causing a sensation among artistic progressives. And Diaghilev presented an outstanding exhibition of historical Russian portraits that made both aristocrats and the intelligentsia reconsider Russian history.

Diaghilev gave a visionary summing-up speech as his exhibition closed. “I have become completely convinced that we are living at a terrible time of fracture: We are doomed to die so as to give rise to a new culture that will take from us all that remains of our tired wisdom,” he said. And he spoke of “a new and unknown culture that we are creating but which will clear us away.”

Did Petipa attend Duncan’s dance performances? Did he visit Diaghilev’s exhibition or read the text of his speech? He must have been aware of them. He certainly must have known of the ambitious young Diaghilev, who had caused crises during his brief time on the staff of the Imperial Theaters.

Meisner writes that “the Ballets Russes grew from the soil that Petipa had tended.” Well, yes — Diaghilev’s lead dancers were drawn from Petipa’s company — and no. In 1909, Diaghilev and his colleagues constructed a ballet company that was a vital corrective to what Petipa had been doing. They used music by leading Russian composers Petipa had ignored, notably Borodin and Rimsky-Korsakov; they absorbed multiple aspects of Duncan’s influence.

The three main composers of Petipa’s ballets were Cesare Pugni, Ludwig Minkus and Riccardo Drigo: all Western, all harmless, all decades behind the main current of classical music in their day. Diaghilev consigned them all to history.

In recent decades, however, all three composers have been infiltrating ballet repertory — thanks to Petipa. An abbreviated (but still long) pastiche of his preposterous “The Daughter of Pharaoh” (Pugni) was staged in 2000 by the Bolshoi Ballet, which has toured it to London and New York. Many Western troupes now have productions of the Petipa-Minkus war horses “Don Quixote” and La Bayadère.” The choreographer Alexei Ratmansky, using period notations and other sources, has reconstructed Petipa’s “Harlequinade” (Drigo, 1900); he’s also staged “Don Quixote” and “La Bayadère.” What cause could anyone have to cry “Forward to Petipa” today?

Perhaps every ballet era will reinvent Petipa. Over the last 40 years, the dance world has come to see “La Bayadère” not as a single act of formal dance classicism but as a full-length story ballet, abounding in melodrama, processions and scenic effects. It once seemed laughable that anyone would resurrect “The Daughter of Pharaoh,” whose titular character throws herself in despair into the Nile, which promptly entertains her with a great-rivers-of-the-world ballet; in this century, thousands have seen it in several countries.

Today, we’re also given — often onstage, as in Ratmansky’s reconstructions — new quantities of historical information about Petipa’s dance texts and style. These newer versions of Petipa are often less heroic in scale, less idealist in manner. Are we now seeing Petipa the proto-postmodernist, playing history games that are full of clever detail, meta-narrative, and incidental humor? I think we are. Petipa, changing his shape, seems determined to survive and dominate the ballet scene.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/23/arts/dance/petipa-biography-nadine-meisner.html" id="d851070d-7e75-360a-aa52-ea8a2660bc47">The New York Times</a>.

(Critic's Notebook)

A Long Look Back on a Ballet Maker

Dance is about change. The body keeps altering its shape while we watch it move. Many of the dances that were current yesterday will not do tomorrow.

“Today people don’t dance, they jump; in my day, we danced,” an old man tells his granddaughter in an 18th-century French gazette. She replies, “In your day, they didn’t dance, they walked; today is the true age of the dance.”

Dance is dead; long live dance. How has it changed since 2007 — let alone since 1978? I cite those two dates because, with this piece, I end my time as chief dance critic of The New York Times, a job I began in 2007. But I’ve been a dance critic for 40 years now. It’s also 40 years since I first visited New York from Britain, where I’d discovered dance and other performing arts, not as a practitioner but as a wallflower: a fan who wrote letters. The letters led to criticism; criticism led me to New York.

In 2007, I had no idea how much good dance I was going to see. My generation — this can scarcely be overstated — had been in cumulative mourning since the mid-1980s. We could not help lamenting the great choreographers whose premieres we had once attended: George Balanchine (1904-83), Antony Tudor (1908-1987), Frederick Ashton (1904-88), Martha Graham (1894-1991), Kenneth MacMillan (1929-92), Jerome Robbins (1918-98).

There have been breakthroughs and positive changes in the dance climate this century. They’ve made me happy; I’ll mention a few later. Yet, Cassandra-like, I foresee ills ahead. Have we now entered a lesser era for New York theatrical dance, and perhaps for theatrical dance worldwide?

From the 1920s to 2009, New York was invaluable among the dance capitals of the world. Not only did a remarkable number of great choreographers make new dances here, but they also taught. Their classrooms were laboratories that kept reinventing the genre, opening minds as well as bodies. I name four in particular: Graham, Balanchine, Tudor and Merce Cunningham.

With the death of Cunningham in 2009, that kind of teaching creator may have died, too — not just in New York but across the world. Perhaps I underrate the teaching of Zvi Gotheiner and Mark Morris in this city, or Ohad Naharin in Tel Aviv and Richard Alston in London. Perhaps there are others I’m overlooking.

New York will surely remain a hub of dance activity for years to come, thanks to the wealth of talent here today. “We’re always living in someone’s Golden Age, it turns out,” A.E. Housman says in Tom Stoppard’s play “The Invention of Love.” But if I’m right that the great teacher-choreographers are a species of the past, then we’ve now entered a Silver Age, in which theatrical dance is a less radically creative art than before. Where once choreographers forged their dance language, now they tweak within lexicons they have inherited from others.

“Who knows dancing who only dancing knows?” I learned that motto from critic Arlene Croce; I often invoke it. Just now, too much dance — and not just ballet — is too immersed in old music, in old costuming, in old habits. Too many choreographers adhere to the practices of bygone centuries — in choices of music, partnering, gender presentations, body language and stage sociology.

Certain changes are devoutly to be wished. Over these 12 years, I should have spoken more often and more forcefully about two that have begun happening for women in ballet, if too slowly for comfort: women as choreographers and African-American women dancing lead ballerina roles. Here, American Ballet Theater has recently taken the lead: Misty Copeland has become the company’s greatest audience magnet, while its Women’s Move-ment is commissioning female-choreographed premieres. Still, too much rests on Copeland’s shoulders (New York needs a choice of black ballerinas, not one black prima alone!), while certain female choreographers have suddenly been deluged with commissions. Let’s hope the next 10 years see more pervasive reform.

While attending to ballet — always the thorniest of dance arts, as controversial as it is prestigious — I draw attention to two very unalike trends: one heartening, one dismaying. The first is the increasing penetration of George Balanchine’s choreography into national and international repertory. For those of us who remember how radical he often was in his lifetime (even in this city and far more often elsewhere), and how difficult many of his ballets were when young, this vindication is deeply satisfying; moving, too. Balanchine achieved a high water mark for the art. That dozens of one-act Balanchine ballets, like “Divertimento No. 15” and “Symphony in Three Movements,” are now regularly danced from Phoenix to Miami, from Vienna to Vancouver, is a victory of superlative modernism.

Against that, however, please observe the ghastly and ever-increasing popularity of such formulaic 19th-century ballets as “Le Corsaire” and “Don Quixote.” These war horses — trashily circusy, composed to minor-league music — abound in clichés. When I discovered dance in the 1970s, they were the specialties of Soviet companies alone: They exemplified the tosh that Diaghilev had banished to the past, and which all sophisticated Western companies rightly chose to avoid. Today, however, they’re frequently danced in New York (alas, here too Ballet Theater leads the way), London and many other cities. They demean ballet.

Yet every year of my tenure brought new marvels, many by younger choreographers. Justin Peck hadn’t even begun to choreograph in 2007; Pam Tanowitz had, but I hadn’t heard of her; Liz Gerring was likewise unknown to me until once, during a quiet week in 2010, I chose to check out her latest at the Baryshnikov Arts Center. True, Alexei Ratmansky was already a name that was spoken; but whatever we meant by it has had to be serially revised and expanded.

Peck, the resident choreographer to New York City Ballet since 2014, keeps experimenting with ballet’s raw materials, often to 21st-century music. The lyrical, timeless, spacious all-male quintet of “Rodeo” (2015) and the way that men are partnered by women in “The Decalogue” (2017) are just two examples. Others have come in Peck’s several recent essays in ballet without pointwork, thus eliminating the genre’s most obviously sexist ingredient. (Men don’t go on point; must women?) And the fluency with which ballet phrases pour forth in his “Pulcinella Variations” (2017) suggests he may be the truest master of ballet classicism this century.

Tanowitz is a crossover artist; her finest work occupies the borderline between modern dance and barefoot ballet. By taking liberally from the traditions of both ballet and Cunningham, she enriches both. Her “Four Quartets,” which had its world premiere this summer, was, to my mind, the most sublime dance-theater creation this century: a dance for the soul — a changing stage world in which dance, music and the words of T.S. Eliot’s poems coexisted to profound effect.

Gerring’s dances have often changed my breathing, as I especially recall from “Lichtung/Clearing” (2010) and “Horizon” (2015). She, too, uses Cunningham’s vocabulary — but she amalgamates it with movements from sport and pedestrian movement. Where does dance start and basic movement stop in her work? She makes that quandary intoxicating: Her uses of structure (with reiterations and literally retrograde movements), space and rhythm keep changing my answers.

As for Ratmansky, nobody in recent decades has done more to make (and transform) dance history. In 2008, he resigned from the artistic directorate of the Bolshoi Ballet in Moscow; New York has had no greater coup than his move to the city, where he has been artist in residence at Ballet Theater since 2009. He’s made history again as the first front-rank choreographer to make a serious study of period dance notation and reassemble the 19th-century St. Petersburg ballets of Marius Petipa. More valuable yet have been his new ballets (several for City Ballet): I single out “Concerto DSCH” (City Ballet, 2008) and “Serenade After Plato’s Symposium” (Ballet Theater, 2016) from a genre-expanding list.

I moved to New York for this job in search of adventure; I’m still coming to terms with how complex that adventure has been. If I had these 12 years again, I’d spend more time exploring forms of hip-hop around America; I’m thrilled that at least I investigated both Memphis jookin and Detroit jit on their home terrain. I still laugh recalling the day in 2014 when I spent 8 1/2 hours nonstop watching jookin in Memphis; I was probably the oldest and staidest person present but by no means the unhappiest. And no, in 2007 I had no notion how often I’d be turning up at New York’s tango clubs around midnight as a spectator. (I owe that to the prodigious Gabriel Missé, whom I first saw in 2008, the dancer I’m perhaps proudest of having helped to put on the map.)

Older masters — Cunningham, Paul Taylor (1930-2018), Trisha Brown (1936-2017), Twyla Tharp, Mark Morris — were not idle in these years. Cunningham made two wonderfully forward-looking pieces, “XOVER” (2007), with its long and astounding central duet; and “Nearly Ninety” (2009), premiered just three months before his death, a cornucopia of Haydn-like inventiveness and vision.

After 40 years as a critic, I hope now to spend more evenings away from performances. But I do so because I want now to take a more complete stock of what I’ve seen and learned in these decades. There are many histories to be written. The art has changed. Thanks to this job, so have I.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/28/arts/dance/alastair-macaulay-dance-farewell.html" id="17792d5f-f02e-3d84-aa27-1d19d06da3a5">The New York Times</a>.

Hail, Dance, and Farewell to the Critic's Life

NEW YORK — Early in Act II of “George Balanchine’s The Nutcracker,” the Sugar Plum Fairy summons the populace of the Realm of Sweets to join her in welcoming the Little Prince and his new friend Marie, who has saved him from the Mouse King. Oddly, one person who doesn’t join her for this gathering is her own Cavalier. He makes his appearance much later in the act, when she — now wearing a high tutu in a new color — takes the stage for the spectacular Sugar Plum pas de deux, with him at her side.

So who is this man? Her rented escort, her cultural attaché, her camp follower, her prime minister? Whoever he may be, this unexplained use of a supportive male functionary is one of the greatest yet most characteristic oddities of Balanchine ballet theater. (There are similar male consorts in “Concerto Barocco” and “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”) She’s a ballerina; ballerinas need support; ask no further. And soon we see, at least, that he embodies chivalry: He’s there to serve her, and then to cast some sparkle of his own.

This December, an unusually diverse group of four City Ballet men have made their debuts as this Cavalier: Preston Chamblee, Daniel Applebaum, Sebastian Villarini-Velez and Daniel Ulbricht. However anonymous, the role is a taxing one. No sooner has the Cavalier entered then he embarks with Sugar Plum upon an extensive, grand, thrilling adagio that can be seen as a nonstop obstacle course for him: a series of different high-exposure partnering exercises. Then, without leaving the stage, he has to change gear immediately into top-speed virtuosity, with full-throttle sequences of jumps and turns.

The four debutantes are very unalike. Chamblee is a tall, hunky corps dancer; Ulbricht, a principal for 11 years, is a short, stalwart, experienced virtuoso who has tended to be pigeonholed into comic mascot and jester roles. Applebaum (willowy, elegant) and Villarini-Velez (a high-energy and valorous athlete) were promoted in October to soloist rank.

All four were remarkably well prepared; while making their ballerinas shine, they came through all the partnering hurdles without mishap. Ulbricht, whose usual persona — cutely assertive — is familiar to City Ballet audiences, seldom gets to do any partnering. After many seasons of dancing Puck in the Balanchine “Midsummer,” he showed a new side of himself — valiant, authoritative — when he was given the chance to play Oberon in 2015. His support in “The Nutcracker” helped Erica Pereira’s Sugar Plum become more decisively adult than ever before.

Chamblee, with his strong physique, beautifully effaced himself behind the tall, long-limbed, febrile Claire Kretzschmar. Applebaum partnered the brightly precise Lauren King with a remarkably light touch. Villarini-Velez, a sternly intense action man, served the marvelously jubilant Sara Adams as if nothing in the world could be of greater urgency.

In 2015, Peter Martins, then the company’s ballet master in chief, said of the Sugar Plum-Cavalier pas de deux: “There are 13 places that are very precarious, that can conceivably go very wrong to the visible eye of the layperson, not just us. So whenever I watch it, I’m like: 10 more to go, seven to go, four to go, OK, only two left.”

The most notorious of these places is a twice-performed sequence in which the Cavalier stands aside while the Sugar Plum executes unsupported pirouettes into a powerful arabesque gesture. That gesture (she throws one hand high) will take her way off balance if he doesn’t catch her in time. It was remarkable to see how well all these four intervened, some coolly solving the task with just one steady hand.

Three of these casts brought a happy development: The restoration of a moment, late in the adagio, that has been smudged away by most other dancers this century. The Sugar Plum, after taking multiple pirouettes in her partner’s arms, suddenly arches back toward us, her arms opening as she bends. For years, most Sugar Plums have performed this backbend while being whooshed around in a rapid promenade by the Cavalier. (Chamblee, partnering Kretzschmar, still does this version.)

Balanchine, however, insisted on a momentary full stop before that whoosh, and most of these casts showed you why, with the ballerina flourishing her arms and hands in that backbend, catching an instant of glory in the music. It’s just a flash, but it happens twice in quick succession, and it can count, powerfully. Its return is a good deed to be applauded.

Roles like the Cavalier are rapid marathons. It’s tough if the men who learn them have to wait a year for a second chance to perform them, as often happened in the past. City Ballet has been run for over a year now by an interim artistic team: Craig Hall, Rebecca Krohn, Justin Peck, Jonathan Stafford. I admire their decision to give two performances each to the three younger men, so that they can gather immediate experience in this tricky role.

And while these casts had atypical, and welcome, diversity, there’s nothing new in having racially diverse casting of the Cavalier at City Ballet. In 1957, shortly after the Little Rock school integration crisis, Balanchine cast the African-American dancer Arthur Mitchell as a Cavalier, telling him, “This is my greeting to Governor Faubus.” (Orval Faubus, of Arkansas, had mobilized National Guard troops to prevent black students from attending Central High School in Little Rock.)

In general, the City Ballet “Nutcracker” is showing more faces of color — in the opening party, amid the Snowflakes, and in the Realm of Sweets. Good. But I remember the Royal Ballet in London importing a guest Sugar Plum couple — from Dance Theater of Harlem — around 1990. Shouldn’t City Ballet audiences in 2018 be used to seeing black Sugar Plum Fairies and Dewdrops?

“George Balanchine’s The Nutcracker”

Through Sunday at the David H. Koch Theater, Lincoln Center, Manhattan; nycballet.com.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/24/arts/dance/new-york-city-ballet-nutcracker-cavaliers.html" id="9fa8273f-cbcd-3ea8-a31f-7ed9a8930be4">The New York Times</a>.

4 New Cavaliers Go Full Throttle in 'The Nutcracker'

On Sunday, as my last task as the chief dance critic of The New York Times, I chose to take the ferry to Staten Island to see the Vicky Simegiatos Dance Company perform the ballet at the St. George Theater. This was at least my 35th U.S. production in 12 years; both the theater and the production justified the trip.

The St. George is a marvel too little known outside Staten Island. The 2,800-seat theater, built in 1929, was intended as a home for vaudeville and cinema to vie with those across the water on Broadway. After coming close to demolition at the start of this century, it has been lovingly restored. The foyers and balconies are fabulously ornate. Auditorium, front-of-house areas and even restrooms are spectacular.

The Simegiatos company, founded in the early 1980s and based in Brooklyn, is something of a family industry. It’s a matriarchal organization: Vicky, president, artistic director and main “Nutcracker” choreographer, is assisted by her daughters, Matina (first vice president, ballet mistress and co-choreographer of “The Nutcracker”) and Despina (second vice president). Matina and her husband, Voytek Sporek, play Frau and Dr. Silberhaus, the parents — often named Stalhbaum in other productions — of Clara and Franz.

On paper, this all might sound parochial. Onstage, the levels of technique and theatrical projection are remarkably high, and there are dozens of adorable and well-drilled children. At one point in the Battle of Mice and Toy Soldiers, 12 truly tiny child-mice crawled on all fours, very precisely, across the stage, unable to hide their complete delight at contributing to the show. (This will remain one of my favorite “Nutcracker” memories.)

Act 2 started with 12 equally tiny angels — some of them the same performers from the mouse scene — now upright but no less blissful, through whom six larger cherubs danced in bigger steps. These children were already good professionals: Later in Act 2, when two child Gumdrops lost their headdresses (one also lost a shoe), they handled the situation adeptly, kicking or throwing the items out of view as quickly as possible.

Child performer Alisa Zakovics was an exceptional Clara: a lovably innocent character with astonishingly proficient dancing.

Like so many “Nutcracker” productions, the Simegiatos version is performed for just one weekend, but surely is the result of months of industrious rehearsal. It has charming scenery and good costumes, but its Tchaikovsky music is taped, with long pauses between numbers. I found myself going along with all its directorial decisions but two: Patricia Casola, a woman in male attire, made a schoolmasterly Herr Drosselmeyer without fantasy, while the prolonged silence before the Waltz of the Flowers gave cause for alarm.

The staging, among other virtues, showcases the company’s many admirable young adult dancers. The guest Sugar Plum couple, Teresa Reichlen and Ask la Cour from New York City Ballet, were in excellent form, dancing the pas de deux, choreographed by George Balanchine. Though Reichlen and la Cour epitomized the high standards to which all dancers aspire, the Simegiatos dancers were not seriously outshone. Beautiful arms (firmly sculptural) and strong pointwork were widespread. Three impressive young ballerina technicians took the roles of Spanish Chocolate, Arabian Coffee and Dewdrop.

Few “Nutcrackers” tell the same story or even use quite the same score. (For connoisseurs, this is part of the fun: Which music will we hear next?) I enjoyed the overture being used to show us the magician Drosselmeyer at work on his four dolls. As it concluded, when he sprinkled silver dust, they came to life and danced offstage.

So, yes, another good U.S. “Nutcracker.” I come from the land where Richard Buckle once wrote, “Well, we are one more ‘Nutcracker’ nearer death.” What is it about “The Nutcracker” that suits the United States? The ballet’s love of hospitality, its innocence, travel adventure and transformations, its positive, outgoing energy and its cornucopia of stylistic diversity are all right for this country (which Tchaikovsky visited, enjoying immense success, between composing the two acts).

I have seen, but without pleasure, Realms of Sweets that are fenced or walled enclosures. The décor for the Colorado Ballet production, if memory serves, is the opposite: a spreading landscape, with islands and meadows and mountains all made of confectionery, as endearing as sweet. Just now it’s particularly good to see a Realm of Sweets that admits characters from many nations. On the way back from Staten Island, the Statue of Liberty seemed a perfect part of a “Nutcracker” day. Like the Sugar Plum Fairy, she welcomes strangers and embraces diversity.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/24/arts/dance/review-nutcracker-tchaikovsky-staten-island.html" id="cc909a04-59e0-32c3-a936-96670631053b">The New York Times</a>.

NEW YORK — Researchers have found that over half the world’s “Nutcracker” productions take place in the United States. What matters, though, is that a high proportion of U.S. “Nutcrackers” are good. I’ve seen many European versions of the ballet — British and Russian included — and remember the early onset of “Nutcracker” fatigue. Here, however, I’ve found myself hungry to keep seeking more productions and to revisit the best ones. Nutcrackering became for me — a British dance critic working ...

Review: E Pluribus 'Nutcracker,' as a British Critic Signs Off

Welcome to ballet. This grandiloquent action, an archetypal example of ballet classicism, is a crucial transaction within supported adagio, that singularly momentous idiom: With the man’s assistance, a female dancer blooms all the more fully.

What does it say to us? Logically, viewers should attend above all to that joining of hands. Here’s a formal ritual of courtship, in which the woman accepts the man, at least provisionally, as a suitor. Far more powerful, though, is how, now on point, she becomes a multidimensional work of ideal geometry, sculpturally firm and theatrically radiant. No longer entirely human, she’s now also — in line, shape and projection — transcendent.

Such images abound in the work of Franco-Russian choreographer Marius Petipa (1818-1910): You can see them in the dances he made for “Don Quixote,” “La Bayadère,” “The Sleeping Beauty,” “Swan Lake” and “Raymonda.” They confront us with a problematic but beautiful central issue of ballet: its highly ambiguous sexism.

This year, his bicentennial, has brought Petipa conferences (at Harvard University, in Madrid, Moscow, Paris, St. Petersburg); new productions of his ballets in Europe and the United States; and important Petipa revivals around the world. Attention is certainly due. More is being learned about the man, his career and his creations, so central to ballet repertory today. Still, their central feature — the radical dualism he constructs between the sexes — tends to be taken for granted.

The woman goes on point; the man does the partnering. The positions may not be reversed. What’s going on here? Is he serving her or controlling her? He subordinates himself to making her all the more spectacular, but which one is in charge? We can say that such behavior glorifies women — or that it falsifies them. I’m among the thousands who are disarmed by it; I’m also well aware that it’s far from the behavior I encounter anywhere today.

Petipa was the chief architect of the classic ballets I’ve named. In addition, most versions of “Giselle,” “Paquita,” “Coppélia” and “Le Corsaire” contain extensive and crucial contributions by him. And, although he was too ill to make most of the original 1892 “Nutcracker,” he planned its score and scenario in detail with its composer, Tchaikovsky. It’s fair to say his work remains more widely and often performed than that of any other choreographer.

George Balanchine and Frederick Ashton, the two greatest masters of ballet classicism in the 20th century, both acknowledged the vastness of their debt to him. Today’s most in-demand ballet choreographer, Alexei Ratmansky, has now devoted a large portion of his time to reviving Petipa choreography from period sources.

Who are the women in these ballets? The destiny of Aurora in “The Sleeping Beauty” is controlled by others. The Sugarplum Fairy in “The Nutcracker” is just the hostess with the mostest in the Realm of Sweets. Glorious, sparkling, full of dance variety, the heartbeats of every scene in which they appear, they’re figureheads whose inner lives remain unknown. Sure, some heroines — Nikiya in “Bayadère,” Odette in “Swan Lake” — love and trust, are betrayed and suffer.

But all these women, although doing far more of their ballets’ dancing, lead lives shaped by their men. Such was the late-19th century world that Petipa knew, in which few women shaped history or were allowed to create important art of their own.

Still, we shouldn’t assume all 19th-century ballet was like his. The works of Danish choreographer August Bournonville (1805-79) show men and women dancing together as equals. They sometimes even show women partnering men.

Bournonville was part of a Scandinavian tradition that connects to Hans Christian Andersen’s stories and Ibsen’s plays. Petipa, a Frenchman working in Imperial Russia, made no links with Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Mussorgsky, Chekhov. Yet it was he who created enduring classics, central to ballet tradition as Bournonville’s are not. Petipa’s ballets show the powers of his powerless women.

Petipa’s command of space and time is that of a master architect. Whether he’s handling women en masse or alone, he maps the stage with their geometries. He’s also a jeweler, presenting dancers’ bodies this way and that, as if holding gems up to the light, showing us how they refract it in different directions. And he surrounds his queen-bee heroines with retinues. The dances for the female corps de ballet often count for far more than any for the leading men.

It’s reasonable to say that Tchaikovsky’s ballet scores — “The Sleeping Beauty,” “Swan Lake,” “The Nutcracker” — surpass Petipa’s choreography. But that misses the point. Although Tchaikovsky’s music is marvelously evocative, it’s Petipa’s stage drama that shows us what’s at stake: a society in which men honor women, support women, frame women. He makes that seem the cornerstone not only of ballet but of psychology and civilization, too.

He shows us supported adagio as something that transports a hero when he envisions it (“Don Quixote,” “La Bayadère,” “The Sleeping Beauty”); something a heroine dreams about (“Raymonda”) as her shining hope; something children are shown as a peak of wonderland (“The Nutcracker”); something that happens in both courts (“Swan Lake”) and villages (“Coppélia”). Upon the foundation of this male-female negotiation, Petipa constructs the rest of almost every act — the central suite of classical dances with their solo variations, and coda, the other ensembles in various styles, the mime scenes, and more.

In life, Petipa’s view of the sexes was more complex. Many female dancers in Russia were high-class courtesans, feted by generous admirers, whose gifts of jewels then adorned their costumes like trophies. At the St. Petersburg premiere of “Swan Lake,” in 1895, Petipa’s daughter Marie (1856-1930) was only a supporting dancer, yet she wore jewels estimated at tens of thousands of rubles. Like prima ballerinas, she could wield influence beyond her father’s.

The first full-length biography of the choreographer, “Marius Petipa: The Emperor’s Ballet Master,” by Nadine Meisner is to be published in June (Oxford University Press). The most disturbing of its revelations is the formal complaint written in 1867 by Petipa’s wife, Maria Surovshchikova (1836-82), soon after she left him. She had been his muse, dancing the lead role (often with him as her stage partner) in ballets from 1855 to ’66.

In this document, she said that during 10 years of married life, her husband assaulted her every week, “leaving consequences for my already weak health.” According to her account, these often took place before their children and servants; Maria left him after an incident in which he began to throttle her and spit at her. It seems that he was maddened by jealousy; her many admirers were more than he could bear. (The case was settled out of court. Thereafter, they led separate lives.)

Though we have only her word for that complaint — and though Petipa’s ballets can’t readily be said to abuse or demean women — his temper was known to be atrocious. Will we ever understand him?

For most of his life, the famous Petipa was not this one, anyway. His brother Lucien (1815-98), three years his senior, had been one of the foremost dancers in the 1840s and the male star of the original “Giselle” (1841). Lucien went on to become a choreographer of renown, working on staging the premieres of ballet music by Verdi, Wagner and others, while Marius, working in Russia, was making ballets to far less remarkable music from Pugni and Minkus.

Having moved to Russia in 1847, Marius Petipa became the country’s senior ballet master by 1870. The Russian authorities, giving him resources beyond those of other nations, expected him to fill the stage with spectacle, bravura display and vast numbers of dancers. This probably turned him into an artist different from the one he would like to have been. In 1875, when Bournonville visited Russia, Petipa admitted to him that the showy irrelevances that cluttered his ballets were to satisfy the public and those in power, but against his own artistic instincts.

Yet Petipa was one of history’s great survivors; he outlived all the Western ballet masters of his youth and middle age. Far more of his choreography survives, too. Thanks in large part to his legacy, ballet became internationally known as a Russian art. The lineage of Russian ballet luminaries — Pavlova, Nijinsky, Balanchine, Nureyev, Makarova, Baryshnikov — is one descended from Petipa.

While many of his Russian artist contemporaries (Dostoyevsky, Repin, Mussorgsky, Tolstoy, Borodin, Rimsky-Korsakov) were pursuing a cult of Russian subject matter for Russian people, Petipa kept looking to the West, pursuing art for art’s sake. This made him something of a kindred spirit to his later composer colleagues Tchaikovsky and Glazunov; and, in due course, a precursor of the modernism of Stravinsky and Balanchine. Many of his narrative works anticipate the plotless ballets of today. The story slows or stops; the dance flowers; a Romantically classical vision of womanhood is at the center of the frame.

Feminist Germaine Greer once argued that Shakespeare, in his comedy “The Taming of the Shrew,” gave to its tamed heroine Kate a final speech that’s “the greatest defense of Christian monogamy ever written.” We may claim the same for the heroines of Petipa’s wordless ballets. They live only for marriage and (even beyond their mate’s adultery and the grave) true love; yet they rule space, time, music and drama like monarchs. They’re the objects and the justification of Romantic chivalry at its most precariously sublime.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/21/arts/dance/marius-petipa-bicentennial.html" id="9c83ba84-8e28-3da3-ae9b-6ee62520731d">The New York Times</a>.

The Ambiguous Sexism of Marius Petipa, Ballet's Towering Master

The cavalier expansively offers his hand in a descending arc through the air. As the ballerina places her hand in his, she steps onto point and extends one leg behind her.

NEW YORK — This theater, for this city. New York City Center Theater celebrated its 75th anniversary last week. That milestone neatly coincided with the annual five-week Christmas season of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, the theater’s first resident modern dance company, itself celebrating an anniversary this year: its 60th.

Now as ever, the Ailey company is facing in multiple directions: reviving home repertory, acquiring works from elsewhere, commissioning new pieces. On Dec. 7, it presented the U.S. premiere of “Kairos” (2014), by British choreographer Wayne McGregor; and Wednesday it presented a new “Timeless Ailey” retrospective (which is to tour 21 U.S. cities), with excerpts from 14 works that Ailey made from 1958 to ’88.

For City Center’s anniversary Tuesday, the company showed a triple bill of works by great U.S. choreographers: Ailey’s own classic “Revelations” was preceded by Paul Taylor’s “Piazzolla Caldera” (1997) and Twyla Tharp’s “The Golden Section” (1983).

The Taylor “Caldera” — first acquired by the Ailey company in 2015 — is always a big hit, but I confess to having an allergy to it. I don’t enjoy its sexed-up treatment of tango, with women flaunting their underwear and dancers of both sexes steamily stroking their thighs. Tuesday, though, I was struck by Taylor’s sheer brilliance in construction. He usually combined men and women in uneven numbers, in continual suspense, and his mastery of changing geometries was another way in which he kept surprising you.

He was, like most of his generation, reluctant to present same-sex couples; but here he does, as if acknowledging the claim that tango began as a same-sex genre in the brothels of Buenos Aires, Argentina. And he departs from tango vocabulary on occasion: There’s a thunderous sequence in which the dancers — in two concentric circles, one moving clockwise, the other counterclockwise — do fabulously weighted but fast jumps. Some of the Ailey dancers could probably dance this as guests with the Taylor troupe: They have the combination of rich texture and speed.

“The Golden Section” was originally the finale of Tharp’s full-length creation “The Catherine Wheel” (1980), to a superb commissioned score by David Byrne. The earlier sections of that work — filmed for TV in 1982 — were an astonishingly dark narrative in which a nuclear family showed all the frustrated, negative, often hostile energies of an implosive society, a feminist demonstration of everything that’s misdirected about modern American life. When “The Golden Section” arrived, it came simply as an alternative world, a sustained, explosive outpouring of human energies flowing in entirely positive ways.

The dancers of “The Golden Section” are heroic but not unreal. Their vocabulary, a truly Tharpian synthesis, includes disco routines and jogging as well as the jumps and turns of ballet and shimmies. I love its frequent use of peripheral space, with dancers jumping or being thrown in and out of the wings as if this stage realm were just an interrupted view of something far larger. And there are marvelous moments of sheer calm emptiness, with the stage unoccupied in between the dance torrents.

Gender is and isn’t an issue: There are male sections, female sections, but also passages when women support men, exuberantly. The Byrne score, taped, is as wonderful as the choreography: Its overlapping dance rhythms and occasional use of celestial high notes are part of the same multilevel view of human potential.

The “Timeless Ailey” program shows just how many different kinds of dance Ailey could make, and how well.

Even though “Night Creature” (1974, to Duke Ellington) is an old friend, it always takes me by surprise when it introduces Cuban hip motion — a joy, since the Ailey dancers are masters in the powerfully lateral use of the pelvis, now moving in figures-of-eight, now in snakier undulations. The sheer lyrical bliss of “The Lark Ascending” (1972, to Vaughan Williams) is another unlooked-for feat. As you’d hope, the Ailey dancers look wholly at home in every part.

The more I hear Max Richter’s music and his rearrangements of music by other people, the more all of it sounds to me like Muzak. McGregor’s “Kairos” is set to some of Richter’s version of Vivaldi’s “The Four Seasons”; I wonder why.

McGregor is one of the world’s most in-demand choreographers. His vocabulary combines ballet, modern and various aspects of modern social dance in a clever fusion; his structures, like those of “The Catherine Wheel,” suggest a positively alternative society. In very few cases, this succeeds. But I seldom find McGregor uses music to good effect. “Kairos,” made for Ballett Zürich (with a greater proportion of strict ballet vocabulary than most of his works), is blessedly free of his fondness for head-jutting movements and beyond-180-degree hyperextension. Nonetheless, it’s relentlessly large-scale: Small steps are delivered like emphatic statements, while most moves are high and big.

All three of these Ailey programs ended with “Revelations.” This is always popular; the dancers know how to put everything across. Akua Nona Parker, perfectly partnered by Michael Jackson Jr., brings a vulnerable purity to “Fix Me, Jesus.” But most of the cast look as if they’ve been performing it too often to the same taped music. Clifton Brown, a strong technician, dances “I Wanna Be Ready” with a knowing overlay of artfulness; Vernard J. Gilmore, one of the company’s most appealing performers, occasionally lip-syncs in the “Rocka My Soul” finale. Even so, Ailey’s mastery of multiple styles — “Revelations” is not one kind of dance theater but several — keeps this classic alive.

Event Information:

The Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater

Through Dec. 30 at New York City Center, Manhattan; 212-581-1212, nycitycenter.org.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/13/arts/dance/alvin-ailey-dance-theater-timeless-ailey.html" id="3b105d36-bcec-3106-ae39-2da7ebf2aa86">The New York Times</a>.

Spreading Joy With a Mastery of Multiple Styles

MONTCLAIR, N.J. — Even though Gandini Juggling owes much to many other artists, this British group’s work feels like a whole new genre. Here, juggling becomes flights of inspired poetry, musical choreography with strong dance elements, crazy-comedy surrealism, breathtakingly dexterous virtuosity, darkly absurdist drama. Gandini opens windows in the mind.

I discovered this troupe in 2016, when it played a vital part in Phelim McDermott’s spellbinding English National Opera production of Philip Glass’ “Akhnaten,” which is coming to the Metropolitan Opera next year. Why didn’t I know of Gandini before?

Gandini Juggling was founded in 1992 by Sean Gandini and Kati Ylä-Hokkala “to filter juggling through a dance aesthetic.” With “Smashed” (2010), an enchanting — and dumbfounding — hourlong production, the troupe makes its U.S. debut, in the Peak Performances series at Montclair State University.

Gandini, the troupe’s director, and Ylä-Hokkala, the assistant director, are among the nine “Smashed” performers (seven men, two women). Gandini has said that the death of Pina Bausch, in 2009, inspired this show; and yes, Bauschian elements proliferate here from first to last. Yet the larger mindset in this show, with its love of rhythmic subtlety and geometric intricacy, is entirely un-Bauschian. The Gandini directors are also said to be fans of Merce Cunningham and Trisha Brown; I hope we get to see Gandini works inspired by those two.

In “Smashed,” the stage is lined by neat rows of apples. The nine performers, elegantly attired, jauntily saunter through these lines in single file, perfectly synchronized — and wittily musical — as they juggle, three apples each, to the Little Jack Little song “I’ve Always Wanted to Waltz in Berlin.” This let-us-entertain-you way of smiling at the audience is Bauschian; so is the stage environment, which will eventually be wrecked. Gender, as in Bausch, is an issue: Men often take comic advantage of women, trying to impose themselves or steal credit.

Yet the patterns, games and rhythms in “Smashed” are astoundingly original and detailed. Even though the stage order eventually comes unstuck — crockery and apples are smashed, performers are drenched by tea, chairs are knocked over — “Smashed,” like the “Akhnaten” production, has created a beautiful image of civilization, brilliant if precarious. (Teapots are among the objects juggled, in astounding arcs.) The mathematical wit and musical timing here remind me less of the choreographers I’ve mentioned than of George Balanchine.

The music includes popular 20th-century songs — by Al Bowlly, the Ink Spots, Tammy Wynette and others — as well as Bach, Mozart, Vivaldi. Always it forms a rich counterpoint to the stage action, which is often metrically fast when the accompaniment feels slow. The physical response to a tragic aria by Vivaldi is especially imaginative: The dark frustration in the music seems to fuel the tense mayhem onstage. Especially when “Smashed” shows you how the center cannot hold, it demonstrates how much skill, idealism and harmony still achieve.

Through Sunday at the Alexander Kasser Theater, Montclair State University; peakperfs.org.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/14/arts/dance/gandini-juggling-review.html" id="39d2f35b-be59-364c-a743-7d53754545f8">The New York Times</a>.

(Critic’s Pick)

Review: The Inspired Poetry of Gandini Juggling

In the 1970s, when Paxton was a founder member of the improvisational group Grand Union, he developed contact improvisation, which became an international genre. Paxton’s contact improv showed the drama that could emerge from the ways one person’s weight could be taken by others in continually changing negotiations. In the 1980s, he began solo improvisations to Glenn Gould’s recording of Bach’s “Goldberg” Variations, moving to classical music in often unorthodox ways, and with disarming freshness.

In 2010, he danced the world premiere of his solo “The Beast” in a program shared with the still-phenomenal Mikhail Baryshnikov. Paxton’s uncompromising and unpretty toughness, his stark objectivity about showing basic qualities and facts of movement in new lights, were fully as momentous as — and more haunting than — anything Baryshnikov showed that evening.

Yet Paxton has spent much of his career far from the madding crowd; a great many dancegoers have never seen his work. We’re fortunate that the choreographer Stephen Petronio, who was his student in the early 1980s, has, with several first-rate dancers, reconstructed a 45-minute program of Paxton choreography from the years 1964-92 for the Museum of Modern Art’s exhibition “Judson Dance Theater: The Work Is Never Done.” Paxton is one of his field’s great originals; Petronio and his dancers do him honor in this program.

These dances evolve like studies in suspense. Non sequiturs and unforeseen twists abound. They cleanse the palate, inventively taking us into the detail both of basic movement and of aspects of non-virtuoso dance technique. In view of Paxton’s reputation for intensity and seriousness, it’s surprising to find how often they’re playful and witty.

On Sunday, I was struck by a single gamboling jump taken by Ernesto Breton, throwing one forearm in the air, then the other, while skipping from foot to foot. And by the way two men in a duet propped each other up while both leaning off-balance in straight lines — like the mainstays of a steep roof — then, while keeping this position, started to turn and turn. And by how Bria Bacon, lying on her back, sternly propelled herself along the floor by using her heels as hooks that pulled the rest of her body toward them.

These images come from “Jag Vill Gärna Telefonera (I Would Like to Make a Telephone Call),” a 1964 dance that Paxton originally performed with Rauschenberg and which Paxton taught to Petronio, who has made this new arrangement of it. I love its spirit as much as its facts; and the objective clarity with which these dancers perform it is exciting.

Just as riveting are the two suites of dances from the Paxton “Goldberg Variations.” Variations 16-24 are performed by Megan Wright and by Nicholas Sciscione. The effects made by these two dancers are interestingly unalike. They both begin by walking around the space to music, while rubbing white makeup, like a mask, onto their faces: a perfect touch of theatrical alienation.

Sciscione, shirtless, makes a knockout impression in the solo in which he seems to be dancing almost entirely with the muscles in his back. This is actually a full-bodied dance involving head, legs and arms, but what’s startling is how much detail Sciscione (who danced this work in a 2017 program at the Joyce Theater) brings into play between shoulders and hips, all metrically responding to the keyboard. Wright, wearing a white undershirt, can’t show us the same interplay of musculature, yet we’re soon aware how much texture her torso is bringing to this number, how juicily it ripples and tilts.

Other variations here are danced with higher energy: Bach’s music is answered by jumps, gestures, turns and other motion. The style is informal and sometimes fascinatingly awkward, as if a musical impulse in one part of the body directed other parts of the body to move helplessly. The head often has a life of its own, bending up and down and side to side in circles. These movements come in long rhythmic skeins that meet Bach’s music with strangely satisfying phraseology.

Through Dec. 15 at the Museum of Modern Art, Manhattan; moma.org.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/10/arts/dance/review-steve-paxton-dance-moma.html" id="05a73dcf-dcbd-3201-a662-bd1f51daf8f3">The New York Times</a>.

NEW YORK — For more than 50 years, some spark of divine fire has kept touching dancer-choreographer Steve Paxton. In the 1960s, he performed with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company and Judson Dance Theater. He created roles in epoch-making dances in both; his collaborations with artist Robert Rauschenberg were among the bold experiments of the decade.

Review: At MoMA, Dances by Steve Paxton, an Original Too Rarely Seen

In the 1970s, when Paxton was a founder of the improvisational group Grand Union, he developed contact improvisation, which became an international genre. Paxton’s contact improv showed the drama that could emerge from the ways one person’s weight could be taken by others in continually changing negotiations. In the 1980s, he began solo improvisations to Glenn Gould’s recording of Bach’s “Goldberg” Variations, moving to classical music in often unorthodox ways, and with disarming freshness.

Early in the 1960s, an emerging generation of dance rebels — Yvonne Rainer, Trisha Brown, David Gordon, Steve Paxton, Lucinda Childs, Deborah Hay — began to fight off the constraints established by those giants, presenting a new and alternative tradition at Judson Church in New York. (Twyla Tharp, part of that generation, presented some early work at Judson Church, too, but her work developed so differently that she is usually placed outside the category.) What they began to make was later labeled postmodern.

Between these generations came Merce Cunningham (1919-2009), whose centennial is being celebrated this year. Modernism had taken dance where it had not been before, yet Cunningham took it further.He separated dance from musical accompaniment; in an art otherwise shaped solely by the creators’ intentions, he dared to used chance procedures as part of his compositional process; he employed a technical rigor as austere as any other in dance, opening up new possibilities of spinal movement, spatial address and rhythm; and he created startling polarities of slowness and speed. All these created shock waves.

Several American dance critics began to review Cunningham’s work respectfully in the late 1950s and early ’60s, even when it perplexed them, which was most of the time. But John Martin, a longtime dance critic of The New York Times and champion of America’s modern dance tradition since the 1920s, never reviewed it at all — an omission that seemed pointed to many.

Cunningham’s status within modern dance began to change when he and his company taught and performed for four summers, 1958-61, at the American Dance Festival at Connecticut College. Even so, Gordon said in 1958, “Not only was Merce the lowest on the totem pole that summer, he was a joke to the serious modern dance people.” Paxton recalled that Limón, after watching a Cunningham piece, said, “I never saw anything like that before!” His tone, Paxton said, was not kind, but “he was too highfalutin to be more explicit.”

By contrast, the younger generation that would soon become the Judson experimentalists were immediately receptive. And they all took Cunningham’s class. Childs said, simply, of Cunningham, “He changed my life.”

“Modern dance at that time was about emotion,” she said. “You were being asked to be happy or sad. Merce’s teaching and his work was in line with the abstract art of that time. It completely changed the aesthetics and taste of dance.”

The Museum of Modern Art’s recent exhibition, “The Work Is Never Done: Judson Dance Theater,” brought revivals of Judson’s early offerings. Brown died in 2017, but in a series of interviews during the MoMA run, Childs, Hay, Gordon, Paxton and Rainer spoke of how Cunningham, their onetime teacher, opened up revelatory new possibilities in time and space.

Yvonne Rainer

Rainer defined the Judson generation with her “No” manifesto (“No to spectacle, No to virtuosity, No to transformations and magic and make-believe” and no to much more, in 1965) and her seminally anti-sensationalist, anti-phrasing dance “Trio A” (1966).

In an email, she wrote: “Merce always said that we were John’s children” — John being the composer John Cage — “and not his, but of course, since we all studied with Merce, his work inevitably rubbed off in some way, on some of us more than others, especially me, I think.

“Technically, I was using everything I learned in Cunningham and ballet classes, especially Merce’s idea of pitting one part of the body against another, while others were abandoning or temporarily putting aside their training and going in the opposite direction of pedestrian movement,” she said in the email. “So I would say that Merce’s work was at once inspirational, energizing and something to bang your head against.”

David Gordon

Gordon had begun watching Cunningham in New York in the mid-1950s, before others of his Judson generation. He recalled being introduced to Cunningham’s work by the less renowned but also influential choreographer James Waring, for whom he danced, as part of a wide artistic education. He also recalled watching the movie “Sunset Boulevard” and discovering the to-him unknown generation of renowned silent film actors Gloria Swanson, Erich von Stroheim and Buster Keaton. “Well, Merce was like that to me,” he said. “From the beginning, I behaved with Merce as if he were some mysterious traveler from another planet.”

“The thing I was most interested in — and I wouldn’t have been able to talk about philosophically — was that Merce rearranged the focal point of visual presentation,” he added. “I was looking at the way Renaissance art arranged space. But with Merce you could not guess where he intended you to look at it. And it was an adventure.”

In modern dance, even more than in most art genres, each generation of practitioners has rebelled against the one before. By 1960, a canon of top-tier American modern dance choreographers was widely acknowledged: Martha Graham, Doris Humphrey, José Limón.

Alastair Macaulay

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