Alastair Macaulay: When New York dance gets its music all wrong

Our critic in residence Alatair Macaulay has spent the week in New York: – Adagio Hammerklavier and Beloved Renegade

I.

Nothing in dance is more vital or more ineffable than how dance and music meet each other. The adjective “musical” is regularly applied to choreography that others find “unmusical”. Still the stakes are seldom as high as Hans van Manen makes them in his “Adagio Hammerklavier” (1973) – yes, to the third movement (adagio sostenuto) of Beethoven’s awe-inspiring Hammerklavier keyboard sonata no 29 opus 106.

Not only is this slow movement sublime, but van Manen requires a much slower tempo than is often employed (think Christoph von Eschenbach). He casts three male-female couples, sometimes in unison in close formation, sometimes in successive duets. It takes strongly stylish dancers to fill this slow tempo; but when the Royal Ballet (briefly) acquired “Adagio Hammerklavier” in autumn 1976, it cast the six roles from strength (Natalia Makarova and David Wall were in the leads); and at present Dutch National Ballet is also casting from strength, with Olga Smirnova and Jacopo Tissi leading.

The Dutch National brought ten works to New York City Center for the four performances of November 20-22; four of the works were by van Manen. Now in his nineties, van Manen certainly likes a challenge. In 1971, he had made “Grosse Fuge”, to Beethoven’s Great Fugue op.133, often and reasonably considered the composer’s most complex work. Whether shockingly or excitingly – maybe both – van Manen matched Beethoven’s most astounding dissonances with hauntingly quasi-sexual imagery of male-female behaviour, rhythmically and rigorously shaped to the music. (The late Clement Crisp referred to it in the “Financial Times” as the “cloaca maxima of choreography”.) In his “Four Schumann Pieces” (1975), set to Schumann string quartets, he followed two successive male-female duets with one male-male one. Such gender-neutrality would raise no eyebrows today, but in 1975, though the dancers’ stage manners were very cool, such same-sex coupling was unusual in the extreme.

Although the 1976 Royal cast included Monica Mason, Jennifer Penney, Mark Silver, and Wayne Eagling, all at their most luminous, the production was scarred by Makarova’s choosing to impose some bizarre divergences of line. Today’s Dutch National cast, offers the opposite spectacle: two outstanding dance luminaries painstakingly subordinating their own styles to that of the choreography. It’s a remarkably spare, lean experience. Van Manen’s musical phrasing diverges from Beethoven’s without being irksome, and occasionally with absorbing attention to Beethoven’s harmonic tension. In the final duet, Tissi holds Smirnova off-balance in an rising arabesque shape, her arms and raised leg maintaining one convex arc while he raises her: at one point their faces and eyes come close enough to be near to a kiss, a moment of subdued drama that slowly passes, more question than suggestion.

Purity can be a boring word, but Smirnova does not bore. She has the inner quiet and stylistic rigour that compel attention. Now in her early thirties, she was already a ballet legend the moment she graduated from the Vaganova institute of St Petersburg. She chose not to join that city’s Maryinsky Ballet but instead accepted a contract with the Bolshoi Ballet of Moscow, which she joined at soloist level, never dancing at corps level. During her illustrious career then, she had begun to dance there with the younger Jacopo Tissi, an Italian star of La Scala Ballet, when Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine. For a number of artists, this invasion was a trauma. Smirnova later remarked that a Russia that made such invasions was not a Russia in which she wished to remain. She and Tissi left; they joined Dutch National Ballet, where they remains.

Ted Brandsen, artistic director of Dutch National since 2003, has steadily raised the profile of this company. The Russian-Ukrainian-American choreographer Alexei Ratmansky, the former director of the Bolshoi Ballet, became (while remaining artist in residence to New York City Ballet) Associate Artist to Dutch National a year ago. Another of the company’s staff is another Russian whose place in history is unforgotten: Larissa Lezhnina, remembered as one of the first Kirov/Maryinsky ballerinas to dance a leading Balanchine role when the St Petersburg company began to dance ballets by the great Russo-American classical master.

“Adagio Hammerklavier” proved the most substantial work brought to New York by the Dutch. The company brought two other van Manen creations: his “5 Tangos” has dull chic, his “Frank Bridge Variations” falls obviously short of the young Benjamin Britten’s thrillingly diverse score. Brandsen’s own “The Chairman Dances”, to the well-known John Adams score, is a harmless vehicle for twenty dancers. (Its men wear full-length tulle skirts almost identical to its women’s). “Two and Only”, a more amorous gay duet choreographed by Wubkje Kuindersma to sentimental country music, would be forgettable were it not same-sex. I wish that Ratmansky’s “Trio Kagel” were forgettable: it’s a divertissement pas de trois that works much too hard to amuse.

Jerome Robbins’s extended pas de deux “Other Dances” (Chopin) was danced with riveting refinement by Smirnova and Tissi. Although Smirnova also briefly showed a sly twinkle in Jiří Kylián’s “Wings of Wax” (1997), this is a pretentious affair to music by four composers (from Bach to Glass) that makes the Dutch repertory feel less honest-to-goodness than its other works.

II.

The word “pretentious” returns to mind about the choreography of Lauren Lovette (pictured). She has now been resident choreographer to the Paul Taylor dance company for three years : why? Choreographers usually at least show two basic reasons for creating dances. One, they show us why they’ve chosen this piece of music. Two, they show us what they like about these dancers. Lovette, however, seems at a loss; every Lovette work is the vaguest work performed by the Taylor troupe.

Fortunately – the three-week Taylor season at the horridly named David H. Koch Theater – ended on November 22 – there are dozens of Taylor’s own works to be revived. And at present they’re being well revived, even though few of today’s dancers worked with Taylor, and none at great length. One particular glory is “Beloved Renegade” (2008), a perfect example of Taylor’s weird originality. Who else would choose Poulenc’s “Gloria” (1959) as a setting for a work about the American poet Walt Whitman (1819-1892), looking back at the end of his life? Somehow Taylor arranges Whitman’s visions (which include an angel/muse) and memories (which include memories of the dead and dying in the American Civil War) to Poulenc’s religious score as if the conjunction were inevitable.

When it was young, it was said that Taylor saw “Beloved Renegade” as autobiographical, conducting rehearsals with great emotion. This season’s revival, the first with a new generation of dancers, is wonderfully fresh; it’s easy for us to watch it with no less emotion. Taylor’s drama is a changing kaleidoscope, at every point responding to pulses, harmonies, and melodies in Poulenc’s score, with changing avenues, diagonals and other stage geometries. Though Taylor’s earlier work does not include angel figures, we can at once see how this female angel is both his muse and his death. The male protagonist is principally an observer – a seer – but also a poet. These are his visions, his creations. “Beloved Renegade” remains the last masterpiece of Taylor’s long career. As always since its 2008 world premiere, I find myself brushing away tears in its final scenes.