Anila Mazhari-Landry and Spencer Theberge as The Bride and Husbandman in Martha Graham's Appalachian Spring. Photo by Rosalie O’Connor.
This spring, the Juilliard Dance Division celebrated its distinguished history with a program of three enduring works by choreographers associated with the academy: Antony Tudor and José Limón, both born exactly a century ago, and Martha Graham (born in 1894), who has always seemed eternal. Each piece concerns itself with what the New Yorker’s art critic, Peter Schjeldahl, recently termed "plausible human interests and desires." Call this virtue passé at your peril.
With her 1944 Appalachian Spring, Graham created a paean to American pioneer life that—like Laura Ingalls Wilder’s evergreen "Little House" series—is astutely free from sentimentality. The choreographer herself originally danced the Bride, giddy with the frivolity of youth. Interestingly, this is the only character in the work who evolves emotionally. As the piece unwinds, she comes into her mature kingdom—of marriage and childbirth in the wilderness—without entirely sacrificing the gaiety that makes her her own (slightly and covertly rebellious) woman.
The Bride’s partner, the Husbandman, is undemonstrative by contrast. Though he is quietly tender to his mate, one remembers him most as stalwart and hopeful, his vision soberly fixed on the faraway horizon. The Revivalist, a doomsday preacher fueled with rage, is tempered by a quartet of fluttery female acolytes and balanced by the Pioneering Woman, an Earth Mother figure who offers comfort and serenity. These eight people so effectively represent the whole world to one another that the spectator is inexorably drawn into it, as if by a magnet.
Aaron Copeland’s score for the dance was created at Graham’s request and originally titled Ballet for Martha. It makes much of the Shaker song ‘Tis the Gift to Be Simple, which, once heard, refuses to leave your mind for weeks on end; it won the 1945 Pulitzer Prize for Music.
The dance is sheltered in one of the world’s perfect sets, which takes its inspiration from the unerring simplicity of Shaker furniture. Its designer was the Japanese-American sculptor Isamu Noguchi, Graham’s most significant collaborator apart from her mentor, Louis Horst.
The Juilliard production was mounted by Terese Capucilli, once an indelible Graham performer (often regarded as Graham’s protégée), later co-artistic director of the Graham company, and now a member of the Juilliard faculty. Meticulously thought out and rehearsed, the staging exuded the keen intelligence and loving care that are typical, too, of the School of American Ballet’s annual performances in the same theater. Capucilli made her dancers scrupulous about the varying textures and timing of the choreography and—best and rarest yet--got all four principals to create the illusion, both dancing and in repose, that their characters were actually thinking.
On occasions like this, a reviewer often enjoys spotting a star-in-the making. Such guesses are a little self-indulgent and pointless besides, since time alone will tell. Still, if the reader insists, I would single out Anila Mazhari-Landry, who danced the Bride--for the spring of her jump, her ebullient spirit, and the ability to shape and project her character’s unique temperament. But they were all wonderful: the boyish, self-contained Spencer Theberge, refusing to flaunt his handsome technique, as the Husbandman; Evan Teitelbaum as the Revivalist, lending the gestures that are threats of hellfire a coiled, writhing quality that suggests the snake in Eden; and Carolyn Rossett as the Pioneering Woman, an oasis of assurance and calm. Nevertheless, it is Capucilli, who elicited these performances, whom I think of as the heartbeat of the event.
Antony Tudor’s 1937 Dark Elegies is set to Gustav Mahler’s poignant Kindertotenlieder (Songs on the Death of Children). The composer used as his lyrics poems by Friedrich Rückert, who wrote them upon the sudden death of both his own young children. Tudor never specifically identifies the tragedy his ballet represents. It simply depicts a community on a rocky sea-washed coast in the throes of the greatest grief imaginable and then, eventually, moving their ravaged souls toward resignation.
Juilliard Dance Division in Antony Tudor’s Dark Elegies. Photo by Rosalie O’Connor.
From Donald Mahler’s pallid staging, which looks pretty rather than viscerally charged, the first-time viewer (one was my guest at the performance) would never guess the agony of the characters’ feelings. In this production, the melancholy figures onstage seem emotionally thin and undifferentiated. Dark Elegies is a magnificent ballet and deserves better handling—indeed demands it if it is to have an ongoing life.
Like so many young dancers, the Juilliard students assigned to carry this ballet neglect the power of stillness, those microscopic pauses that give a step or phrase weight and feeling. Their failure, which a coach like Capucilli could have remedied to a considerable extent, is at least counterbalanced by the youthful artists’ freshness.
I certainly admired the flexibility and flow of Mary Ellen Beaudreau as the woman in the first duet who keeps laying herself out horizontally, a repeated posture that should tell the viewer her situation makes her seek nothing but death. Aaron Loux, a slight figure with a pinched face and coppery hair, the soloist in the third section, is also a fascinating dancer, if not one born for the role he’s playing. But these two, like their fellow performers, can’t invest their parts with significant feeling—the kind that Tudor intended to wrench your heart—without a director who has the know-how, the ardent desire, and the patience to coax it from them.
The onstage singer was the baritone Kelly Markgraf, a student at the Juilliard Opera Center. Clifton Taylor provided semi-abstract backcloth designs to replace the traditional realistic drops by Nadia Benois in which one is used to seeing the ballet.
José Limón choreographed his 1956 There Is a Time to a score commissioned from Norman Dello Joio, Meditations on Ecclesiastes. (The music won the Pulitzer Prize in 1957.) The source referred to is the celebrated Old Testament passage (Ecclesiastes 3) that encourages a balanced view—and acceptance—of the nature of life: "To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven: / A time to be born, and a time to die... A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance"—and so on. The subject matter is a perfect fit for Limón’s humanistic bent.
The choreography isn’t on a par with the Tudor and Graham pieces. lt lacks their power and striking originality. Instead, it tends to be well behaved—primarily lyrical and buoyed by breath, with intermittent angularity and percussiveness dutifully inserted for contrast. Still, it has its inventive moments—sometimes in just a single gesture or phrase, but exactly the right one, sometimes in a complete segment.
"A time to laugh," perfectly rendered by the bubbling Chanel DaSilva in an interpretation that rivals even the unforgettable one of Nina Watt, is a capsule of irrepressible joy. "A time to keep silence, and a time to speak," danced by Sarah Murphy and Brett Perry—with no music for "silence" and body percussion and answering rhythmic beats offstage for "speech"—is clever and, in the case of the Mary Wigmanesque "silence" (Murphy’s role), haunting.
Christopher Vo (seen in "A time to be born, and a time to die") deserves special mention for his dancing. He’s small and perfectly proportioned, fluid as all get-out, and able to be precise and expressive simultaneously—a uncommon gift. Dance writers often fall into the trap of designating extraordinary emerging artists as "dancers to watch in the future." Vo and the other performers I’ve named in this piece, along with many of their colleagues, are dancers to watch right now.
With this production, Risa Steinberg, once a star in Limón's company, proved herself a star again—in transferring the very ethos of the Limón technique and mindset to the rising generation.
