Patchy performers can't obscure the genius of George Balanchine
New York City Ballet Coliseum, London WC2
George Balanchine might easily have lost himself in New York when he arrived in 1933. In Europe, his St Petersburg schooling had been heightened by the sophistication of the Ballets Russes: classical artistry, avant-garde attitude. In America, however, the émigré embraced the sass and speed that might have swamped him, forging an art of intense athleticism and refinement. His company, the New York City Ballet, exemplified these qualities, and his abstract works are still the core of its repertory. For its first London showing in 25 years, NYCB inaugurated the venue's Spring Dance season with an all-Balanchine bill. But rather than the sleek beasts of legend, we saw unexpectedly polite dancers pattering tentatively through some of the 20th century's great works.
Serenade (1934), Balanchine's first New York work, sealed his style. Instead of a company of Russian virtuosi, he had a mixed-ability cadre of dance students and cheerleaders. He could, however, demand discipline and marshal basic steps into delirious patterns. Discipline, too, has its dazzle. At times there appear to be hundreds and hundreds of girls, their spirals making one huge, giddying wheel.
The piece glintingly deconstructs the poignancies of Romantic ballet. To gently seraphic Tchaikovsky, the curtain rises on ranks of women. A melancholy blue light bathes their tutus, but their wrists are angled, sharp as steel. Bun-heads demurely lowered, they snap their feet into position: gentleness is retooled into a machine. Moments might recall fey stories of wraiths and seekers such as Giselle or La Sylphide, but these are undermined by fragmentation and sheer speed. Balanchine collages an embrace, a sacrifice, a cry for help, but, untethered to story, they seem almost anarchically random. Lines tauten and then dissolve into foam; dancers peel off in a clockwork flurry; solos emerge in a quixotic blur of tulle.
In Agon (1957), Balanchine and Stravinsky refract the flourishes of French baroque dance through Manhattan's urban smarts. Again, individual gestures are polished under disconcerting scrutiny. The initial sections flirt between insouciant and aggressive: shadow-fencing, deft little flecks, or a foot angled like a sucker-punch. Boys fluttered their ankles at each other, and Teresa Reichlen deployed a haughty shuttle of hip. Yet the dancers were too often ingratiating, even simpering. Yes, agon means contest - but who knew they'd be competing for Miss Congeniality?
At the heart of the piece is a thrilling pas de deux, originally created for Diana Adams and Arthur Mitchell: white woman, black man, with all the frisson that touch could engender in 1950s America. It's less a duet than a face-off, and at the Coliseum Wendy Whelan and Albert Evans tore into its antagonism and shocking intimacy.
The sinewy Whelan isn't charming - a friend says she brings to mind words like "gristle" - but she goes about her work with awesome intent. She lifted an ankle around Evans's neck and twisted it like she meant it. Classical ballet often refines bodies into a state of grace, but Balanchine's work insists on flesh and muscle. Evans clasped Whelan's thigh, gingerly fingered her ankle; she slid over his shoulder, hip rasping against cheek. They arm-wrestled; she won.
These works have the meaty heft of masterpieces, even when patchily performed. In Symphony in C (1947) the chains of pure dance to springy Bizet also faltered. On this showing, NYCB has boy trouble. I've rarely seen so many nervous men - henpecked, frankly.
What NYCB's visit didn't release was a company riding a style that is brilliantly, unforgivingly relentless. In her autobiography, the former Balanchine dancer Barbara Milberg recalls his response to a request for a rehearsal break - muttering a dark Russian proverb about there being plenty of time to rest in the grave. It may be time for NYCB to smarten up and choose life.
Pick of the week
Rambert Dance Company
Theatre Royal, Newcastle-upon-Tyne
Includes premieres from New York's Doug Varone and the company's own Melanie Teall.
Contains Violence
Lyric Theatre, London W6
Rear Window-style surveillance, from Shunt's David Rosenberg.
Carlos Acosta with Guest Artists
Coliseum, London WC2
The charismatic Cuban gathers colleagues from the Royal Ballet.
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