Inimitable Tudor
New York Theatre Ballet
Antony Tudor's Jardin aux Lilas, Judgment of Paris, and and Little Improvisations
Suite from José Limón's Mazurka Florence Gould Hall, New York City
Feb. 15, 2008
Members of the New York Theatre Ballet in Antony Tudor's Jardin aux Lilas. Photo by Richard Termine.
To honor the 100th anniversary of Antony Tudor’s birth the New York Theatre Ballet presented two of the choreographer’s major works, Jardin aux Lilas (Lilac Garden) and Judgment of Paris, as well as Little Improvisations, merely a bagatelle, but still echt, inimitable Tudor. All three dances were staged by Sallie Wilson, to my mind the only person able to infuse Tudor’s emotionally searing choreography with the inseparable subtleties of gesture and feeling it had when Tudor was with us to coach it himself.
Tudor set his 1936 Jardin aux Lilas at a farewell party in an Edwardian garden shadowed and scented by budding lilacs and haunted by Ernest Chausson’s poignant Poème. Caroline, a young woman who might be springtime itself, waits to be claimed by The Man She Must Marry, a stiff, middle-aged, clearly monied gentleman.
Among the guests is An Episode In His Past (the impassioned former mistress of the bridegroom) and Her [that is, Caroline’s] Lover, an ardent youth who can’t yet resign himself to the approaching marriage of convenience. The ballet suggests his life will be forever darkened by this early sorrow and Caroline’s probably wounded beyond repair.
The choreography reveals the inevitable vagaries of the human heart through impassioned rushes through the space (as if it were an invisible maze constructed by Fate), furtive meetings, whispered secrets, brief touches, gestures of unfulfilled yearning, and cruel ones of possession. At a celebrated point, all the members of the cast freeze in postures indicating their relationships, as if paralyzed by the intensity of the emotions they’re feeling, while the music surges on. At the end of this passage, Caroline is the first to move out of the dream-state, tentatively, stretching a fumbling hand ahead of her, like Bournonville's Sylphide, suddenly blind before her death.
For me, the most heart-rending performance of the ballet came not on opening night—when every move and impulse seemed correct but still tentative, crying out for further performance to make it bolder and more fluent—but at a studio rehearsal of the work conducted by Sallie Wilson that I had the privilege of attending.
Wilson, who formed a close relationship with Tudor when she was a dancer (a unique and memorable one) at American Ballet Theatre, now stages and coaches his choreography for the NYTB. At 65 and in fragile health, she still works with relentless persistence and patience to teach her young cast that Tudor isn’t Tudor unless gesture and emotion are fused. "Every move must mean something!" is one of her typical cries. She also insists on freshness. "Each moment must be new every time you do it! Brand new, every time." And she can tell in an instant when those instructions have not been fulfilled.
Sallie Wilson rehearsing with Elena Zahlmann and Kyle Coffman of the New York Theatre Ballet for Antony Tudor's Jardin aux Lilas. Photo by Briana Blasko.
An uninitiated observer might think Wilson is micromanaging the material, but, under her instruction, though in fits and starts, poetry begins to stream through the dancers; walking, for instance, segues into dancing as unobtrusively as still water beginning to flow.
My favorite moment in the rehearsal came when the first evening star appears in the sky. It’s an imaginary one, located way out and up over the heads of the audience. "There’s a star up there," Wilson reminds the dancers, who are dutifully pointing to the up and out location, then bowing their heads and pulling their folded hands to their breasts as if in prayer. "You’re not just glancing at the sky and pointing a finger; you have to mean something," she goes on. "You’re wishing on a star." A pause, then she offers this afterthought: "You have to believe in fairy tales."
When Tudor set out to make an amusing ballet, as he did with the 1938 Judgment of Paris, true to his mindset (and with musical reinforcement from Kurt Weill), he instinctively relied on sarcasm. The ballet’s title sardonically refers to the legend of Paris in Greek mythology. There, the youth is forced to evaluate the charms of three rival goddesses, awarding a golden apple to the winner. Tudor’s take on the matter? In a seedy Parisian café of yesteryear, three frowzy aging women of ill-repute compete for the attention of a gentleman past his heyday whose progressive inebriation renders him incapable of rising to the occasion.
The solos of the fallen ladies who have so little left to sell were wonderfully rendered, the comic and tragic elements in them so well meshed, your heart felt as if it were sliding from one end to the other of a perpetually teetering seesaw. As Minerva, the company’s artistic director, Diana Byer, in her quiet combination of despair and determination to see life through to its bitter end, made me think of the typically desperate heroine in the novels of Jean Rhys.
In the 1953 Little Improvisations, accompanied onstage by pianist Noriko Suzuki playing Robert Schumann’s Kinderzenen (Scenes From Childhood), Rie Ogura and Mitchell Kilby played a pair indeed not much past their childhood—romping, teasing, and flirting a little, as if love were still a game.
Exercising the quick inventiveness of the young, this girl and boy employ the simplest of props. With a short backless bench and a length of white cloth, they effect mercurially changing "pretends" (a queen and her cavalier, a classical Roman hero, sweethearts sheltering from an April shower, a teenager dreaming of motherhood) and moods (a gamut ranging from fond to sulky).
The antics, which end in tender togetherness, are charming; the miracle of Tudor’s choreography is that he manages to keep the proceedings fun but not cute, and blessedly unsentimental.
If the Tudor works weren’t riches enough, the program included a piece by José Limón, whose 100th birthday it is as well. Limón famously liked his emotions big and his ballets (too) long. For this occasion, though, Sarah Stackhouse, a distinguished veteran of his troupe, chose to mount a suite from his 1958 Chopin-scored Mazurkas that was just right in many ways, one of them being its modesty.
Intending to honor the heroic spirit of the Polish people, Limon revealed their inner qualities of optimism and fortitude, their innate gift for bonding and, not least, their capacity for joy.
A pair of ensemble passages frames the piece, proposing that its seven participants have simply gathered to do the folk dancing—smoothly transformed into modern dance—integral to their community. Between these poles are fresh, touching solos and duets that evoke specific characters and relationships.
In a long solo, Terence Duncan recalls a young man who works the land, in whom unquenchable hope prevails (just) over the backbreaking labor and vulnerability to disaster that color a life like his. The figure is surely a cousin to the Husbandman in Martha Graham’s Appalachian Spring. Rie Ogura’s solo portrays the budding springtime of a young girl not yet fully aware of what it means to be a woman, but impelled by hopeful dreams.
The duets evoke a young couple’s first encounter with romance—all innocence and ecstatic discovery—and mature, fulfilled love, characterized by a confident wildness and weight.
Ferdy Tumakaka was eloquent at the onstage piano. Stackhouse made the dancing look expressive and entirely natural, like an enlargement of the dancers’ breath or a song delivered spontaneously. The overall effect of her sensitive and intelligent work makes you think of what modern dance must have looked like before it succumbed to the demands of show biz.
