Ballet Adds Human Splendor to Wonders of Vail

August 8, 2010 Ballet Adds Human Splendor to Wonders of Vail By ALASTAIR MACAULAY VAIL, Colo. — The setting of the Gerald R. Ford Amphitheater here is spectacular. Audiences can see the evergreens and ski slopes that cover the Rocky Mountains. And on Friday night, while taking our seats beforehand, we could watch star dancers practicing their steps on the uncurtained open-air stage. At work in front of us were dancers born in Japan, Russia, Spain and the United States who perform with the Royal Danish Ballet, the Royal Ballet, New York City Ballet, American Ballet Theater and Boston Ballet — a miniature United Nations of ballet. The occasion was the first of two International Evenings of Dance, but this scene is also characteristic of the two-and-a-half-week Vail International Dance Festival, whose last performance was Sunday and whose director is Damian Woetzel, former principal of New York City Ballet. The Vail stage has already seen Savion Glover, Pacific Northwest Ballet, the Paul Taylor Dance Company, and Beijing Dance/LDTX, while the New York dancer-choreographer Larry Keigwin has been artist in residence. What made the International Evenings feel yet more like the United Nations this year was their wealth of new partnerships and collaborations. On Friday, Carla Körbes (Brazilian, Pacific Northwest Ballet) danced Balanchine’s “Agon” pas de deux with Eric Underwood (American, Royal Ballet). Ms. Körbes’s line has a luscious elegance that lights up this choreography, and Mr. Underwood partnered her with an exciting innocence, making their incendiary meeting seem his first such adult encounter. Misa Kuranaga (Japanese, Boston Ballet) danced the “Don Quixote” pas de deux on Friday and the “Giselle” pas de deux on Saturday with Herman Cornejo (Argentine, American Ballet Theater). With her exceptional technical command and stylistic grace, she is the best partner I have yet seen for this great but short male star, who partnered her with real delicacy. The program’s only two blips — notably a problem with the taped music at Saturday’s performance — affected Mr. Cornejo, but he rose to the occasion and won ovations each time. He also danced Natalie Weir’s “Within You Without You,” a series of spectacular, intense and fairly meaningless solos (to George Harrison music) interrupted by visits from Ms. Körbes, who seems to bring him solace from these possibly existentialist phases. Most dancers who appeared here in multiple roles evidently relished each change of persona, but none more admirably than Mr. Cornejo: an ardently heroic noble in “Giselle,” a braggadocio Spaniard in “Don Quixote,” a bare-chested and troubled modern man in “Within You.” Both the Friday and Saturday programs included performances of two premieres. The new “Fandango” solo by Alexei Ratmansky (Russian, Ballet Theater) was danced by Wendy Whelan (American, City Ballet) to live music by Boccherini. Mr. Ratmansky links the dancer to the seven musicians, who are onstage. At times Ms. Whelan strolls around them, explodes like the embodiment of the music’s spirit, leads two of the musicians (still playing) across the stage, and shakes a tambourine at a player who keeps taking it back. Mainly she dances. Mr. Ratmansky brings out Ms. Whelan’s most striking rhythmic brilliance. Though “Fandango” is not a watertight choreographic structure, and though occasionally he asks for too many big wheelings and arcs of the her arms, the incisiveness with which she suddenly plunges into parts of the music is terrific. She does so with academic ballet footwork, but so matched to Spanish rhythms and sonorities in the music that it feels like a folk performance. The other premiere, Mr. Keigwin’s “Rock Steady,” is a cartload of clichés for three guys and a gal, set in showbiz-jive style to Aretha Franklin songs. The guys are Spanish, American and Cambodian (Joaquin De Luz and Robert Fairchild from New York City Ballet, and Sokvannara Sar, currently freelancing); the gal is Tiler Peck (American, City Ballet). Shortly after Ms. Peck’s first entrance and exit the three guys behave like dogs trying to break their leashes in excitement. Ms. Peck, upside down in Mr. Fairchild’s arms in a pas de deux, splits her legs wide apart in front of his face, apparently so as to give him a good view of her inner thighs and groin. The upside-down split lift was a device that had anyway occurred earlier in the evening. Though most dance companies owe Chopin plenty, few have commemorated his bicentenary. Mr. Woetzel, however, had the bright idea of reviving two of Robbins’s least-known Chopin arrangements. One of them, “Suite of Chopin Dances,” was originally set for Mikhail Baryshnikov and Peter Martins: a series of male solos and duets from Robbins’s “Dances at a Gathering” and “Other Dances,” here performed by Mr. De Luz and Daniil Simkin (Russian, Ballet Theater). But the other, “Three Chopin Dances,” ends with a very charming duet created specially by Robbins for a White House performance during the Carter administration and that hadn’t been revived until Saturday night. The male role includes Baryshnikov neo-assemblages of academic steps including multiple pirouettes that go stylishly off balance and an entrechat-sept (a beaten jump landing on one leg) that, as it arrived, turned into something else. Mr. De Luz showed the choreography with commanding charm and compellingly musical phrasing. The danger of such gala-type events is that they become collections of showy party pieces. Mr. Woetzel knows not to give us more than one set of 32 fouetté turns per evening, but I wish he could also program only one item per evening in which the ballerina does horizontal 180-degree splits above her partner’s head. Sarah Lamb (American, Royal Ballet) and Mr. Underwood delivered these in two pas de deux by different choreographers — from Wayne McGregor’s “Limen” (Friday) and Christopher Wheeldon’s “Tryst” (Saturday) — each showcasing identical acrobatic hyperextensions and lifts. Ms. Lamb, a dancer I have loved in several roles, also delivered the most sharply efficient “Dying Swan” I have ever seen, as if death was a slight inconvenience that this swan had to fit, neatly and politely, into her crowded agenda. The “Sinner Man” male trio from Alvin Ailey’s “Revelations” (danced by the Americans Clifton Brown, Jamar Roberts and Matthew Rushing of the Ailey company) brings down the house, of course, but it’s depressing how it shows the supposedly spiritual drive of Ailey’s choreography as just another occasion for audience-directed display. The same three dancers delivered Hans van Manen’s “Solo”: each solo is a rapid and silly string of whimsically cute effects larded onto Bach music. The stage’s sylvan setting was perfect for two Bournonville pas de deux, danced by the Danish Hilary Guswiler and Alban Lendorf (both of Royal Danish Ballet). Ms. Guswiler is sweetly charming from the ankle up, but Mr. Lendorf, though more shy in manners, is a model of style and prowess, easily delivering immaculate double air turns to both right and left. The party-piece context showed all the more clearly the way Bournonville avoids clichés. In the “Flower Festival at Genzano” pas de deux, the man does his double air turns not as punch lines but at the very start of his solo, then he moves straight into small footwork whose scale is all the more remarkable after such an opening salvo. Carts help dancegoers reach the amphitheater, but not for the world would I miss the marvel of walking all the way from the center of Vail. The path — with a wonderful bare minimum of lighting — runs beside a large and rushing stream, the noise of the waters a particular thrill in the later evening. During Friday’s performance the sky had become cloudless, and on my way home I kept looking up through the pine trees to see perhaps a thousand stars, all astonishingly large and seemingly near. .

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