Balanchine's bodies of work spring to life
George Balanchine's choreography requires that dancers strip themselves bare: Their bodies in all their majesty become the lines and zigzags, the angles and arcs and starbursts that light up the points and counterpoints, the rhythms and accents and changes in key of the music from which Balanchine's dances spring.
Not every dancer can do that. Last night, the Boston Ballet made a heroic attempt in its performance of three of the master choreographer's pieces: the sprightly "Ballo Della Regina" (1978), the disquieting "La Valse" (1951), and the architectonic "The Four Temperaments" (1946). That the company shone in its performance of the first two is reason to celebrate.
"Ballo Della Regina," set to the ballet music from Giuseppe Verdi's opera "Don Carlos," is plotless yet inspired by the tale of a fisherman who searches a grotto for the perfect pearl (here, the principal ballerina). Erica Cornejo as that "pearl" is at once steely and luminescent. Her ability to anticipate the music, whether she's spinning into a hop on pointe or stretching into a taut arabesque that seems to originate in her upper back, makes her a physical manifestation of the score rather than a performer dancing to it. Her cavalier, James Whiteside (the fisherman in the opera ballet) traces filigrees in the air with his rapid beats.
The neo-Romantic "La Valse," a dance in two parts to music by Maurice Ravel, emerges from the other side of the moon. It's a tale of doom and decadence, of paying for past and present sins. The piece is imbued with waltzes, but never of a purely joyous type. Indeed, the music and the dancing conjure up carousels run amok or records warped by heat playing on a turntable. The Boston Ballet hits its stride in the scene where the girl in white (Karine Seneca) is lured by Death (Carlos Molina) to dance till she literally drops. Seneca is drawn to Molina as if by a magnetic force she wants to escape but can't. She flings an arm across her face in a gesture of dismissal, but it does her no good. The dance ends with her held aloft, a flurry of women whirling, as in a spell, around her.
Alas, "The Four Temperaments," Balanchine's groundbreaking neo classical masterpiece, exceeded the reach of the Boston Ballet dancers. Danced to a commissioned score by Paul Hindemith, the piece comprises a three-part theme and four variations, arising from the ancient idea that the body possesses four humors: melancholic, sanguinic, phlegmatic, and choleric. "The Four Temperaments" is starkly abstract despite the symbolism of its characters; it blows apart classical ballet conventions, with its turned-in knees and thrusting pelvises, its splayed legs and pushed-to-the-breaking-point metatarsals. True, Romi Beppu shattered the air in her pas de deux with Mindaugas Bauzys; when she straddles his leg in a split you'd swear you heard something pop. And Kathleen Breen Combes as Choleric exudes a powerful energy. But too many of the dancers couldn't hold Balanchine's edge. They looked diminished beneath the music, shrunken in the stage space. They just could not become the jagged and steely rhythms of the score.
