 |
| Kaleigh Schock and Damien Johnson rehearse "Mingus Dances" in the studio © SKepecs 2018 |
by Susan Kepecs
The headlines, on any given day, reveal an
unprecedented wave of women standing up to male entitlement. The uprising you
see on TV is centered on politics and pop entertainment. In the more rareified world of ballet, the
making-art part – choreography – has been (mostly) the province of men. Marius
Petipa. Michel Fokine. Anthony Tudor. George Balanchine. Jerome Robbins. Alonzo King. Justin Peck. Alexei Ratmansky.
Christopher Wheeldon. And that’s just a few. Two years ago, playing off this
fact, The New York Times ran an
article called “Breaking the Glass Slipper: Where are the Female Choreographers?" This
is partly hyperbole, since women do choreograph
ballets[1]
and have throughout history, but still, change is in the air. New York City Ballet is showing works by
several emerging female choreographers this season. Dallas’s Avant Chamber Ballet, the home
company for Madison Ballet alum Madelyn Boyce and current Madison Ballet
soloist Shea Johnson, has run a Women’s Choeography Project for the last three
years. And Madison Ballet spotlights
women choreographers in its second repertory show of the 2017-18 season, She, Feb. 2-3 at the Bartell.
“It’s a show I’ve wanted to do for
years,” says artistic director W. Earle Smith.
“I’m really excited about it.
This show will go down as one I’ll be forever glad that I did. I think it’s an important show; we need to
support women choreographers and give them opportunities to show their
work. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed watching
the show develop – these women are very diverse, and each brings a different
voice to her work. The result is really
compelling.”
Former Madison Ballet board
president Betty Custer, who’s also chair of the Overture Foundation board and a
community leader in many other ways, introduces the performance. “She’s going to speak to why it’s important
to support women in leadership roles in the performing arts,” Smith says. “There’s no better person to do this. Her introduction is an important aspect of
the show.”
On the bill are works by four female dancemakers working
today. One is Nikki Hefko, whose performance career spans classical,
neoclassical, and contemporary repertory with Dance Theatre of Harlem, with
which she danced for for a number of years, and Madison Ballet, during the company’s
first few professional seasons (she was Madison Ballet’s Peter Pan in
2008). Hefko is now the artistic director of the New Orleans School of
Ballet and also of her own company, Nikki Hefko & Dancers.
Also contributing a piece to the She
program is Chicago / New York choreographer Jacqueline Stewart, who frequently
sets her quirky, quasi-balletic contemporary works on Madison Ballet.
New to the company is Katherine Kramer, whose background is tap – she studied
with ace hoofers Brenda Bufalino and “heelology” virtuoso Ralph Brown. This is
the first time she’s set her work on a professional ballet company.
Windy City choreographer Stephanie
Martínez, who danced with River North Dance Chicago and the now-defunct but once
wonderful company Luna Negra, sets one of her works on Madison Ballet for the
first time. “Non è Normale” originally
was commissioned by Joffrey Ballet Chicago in 2015.
Finally,
for historical context, there’s Bronislava Nijinska’s Stravinsky-scored,
peasant wedding-themed Les Noces[2]. The work was created for the Paris-based,
avant-garde, early twentieth century Ballets Russes (for which Balanchine also
choreographed in the 1920s), and it premiered in that city in 1923. But Nijinska had only left Kiev two years
earlier, and Les Noces – like her
brother Nijinsky’s Rite of Spring,
which premiered a decade earlier (and caused a riot with its startling
modernism) – reflects the anticapitalist, anti-patriarchy exuberance of
Bolshevik art.
“The Stravinsky / Balanchine
relationship makes this piece a natural for us,” Smith says. He’s restaged
Nijinska’s work for this program.
I watched an early runthrough of the program last week; the
dances weren’t done in the order in which they appear on the playbill, but this
is how I saw them. Martínez’ “Non è
Normale” is contemporary but balletic. Its timing is stretchy and varied, its
flow gratifyingly constant. It’s mostly set to a contemporary Italian classical
score, but a playful jitterbug to the title track danced by Madison Ballet’s
best jitterbuggers, Kelanie Murphy and Jackson Warring, breaks the piece in the
middle and adds unexpected angles that deepen the experience of watching the
work unfold.
Kramer’s contribution, “Bow” (the
title refers to boats, not reverence), is modern dance, with lots of
undulations. It counterbalances the rest
of the show – there’s not much here that’s balletic, though the women
are on pointe.
Stewart’s piece, “Gait N Heel,”
featuring three women on pointe and five in (very) high heels, plus three men,
is likely to provoke feminist controversy. I’ll reserve judgement till I see it
onstage, but Smith loves it. “I have to tell you,” he says, “it’s one of her
best pieces. The dynamics between the women on pointe and the others in heels
is very true to form in terms of her style and voice.”
Hefko’s two-movement “Mingus
Dances” is neoclassical bebop – how great is that? It starts with a stunning adagio pas by Kaleigh Schock and Damien Johnson, powerful dancers making their debut as
Madison Ballet soloists in this piece. The pas is followed by a fast ensemble foxtrot
that’s loaded with Harlem style.
For Les Noces, which is set on the whole
company and which I saw last, only the fourth movement (the wedding feast) had
been sketched out. The counts are astounding. “Two phrases of six, then six
fives and four sixes,” Smith said, clapping out these shifts. There are lots of
small jumps and stomps in sixth position that feel utterly tribal, an echo from
Rite of Spring.
“One two three, one two three, one
two three four five six seven eight nine,” Smith counted, as the group marched
forward, then back, then to the side. It
was hard, the dancers didn’t know it yet, and everyone was laughing. “We’ve got
plenty of time,” Smith said through his own giggles, kicking the hilarity up a
few notches.
Les Noces isn’t the program finale,
but it should be. By the time we see it onstage it’ll probably be
wonderful.
[1]
Women were (and still are) pioneers in the modern dance movement (think Isadora
Duncan, Martha Graham, Ruth St. Denis, just for starters), but they’ve have
also made their mark in ballet choreography. Agrippina Vaganova, best known for
standardizing Petipa’s ballet vocabulary, created her own versions of Swan Lake
and Esmeralda for the Kirov in the 1930s.
Between the 1920s and the 1940s, Bronislava Nijinska, sister of Vaslav
Nijinsky, choreographed some 80 ballets for Ballets Russes, Paris Opera Ballet, the Polish Ballet, and other companies. American dancemaker Twyla
Tharp, whose choreographic career began in the realm of 1960s postmodernism but
runs the gamut, has created ballets for ABT, NYCB, Paris Opera Ballet, the
Royal Ballet and the Joffrey, among other companies. Jessica Lang set her contemporary ballets on companies across the
world for two decades before starting her own outfit in 2014; Jessica Lang Dance
performs at the Wisconsin Union Theater in March. But – this is the point – by
comparison to the number of male choreographers working in the ballet idiom,
the number of women creating ballets is miniscule.
[2] Les
noces is French for “the wedding,” or “the nuptuals.”
No comments:
Post a Comment