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Great Works by Master Choreographers Challenge Juilliard Dancers By LAURA CARELESS
I never manage to sleep on airplanes. It was a year ago that I sat in the Starbucks on 61st Street very much regretting that fact, pumping myself with sugar and caffeine in a desperate attempt to stay awake for the Juilliard Dance Division Spring Concert. It would be my only chance to see it before my audition here the following week—but I had been awake for 20 hours already, and my eyelids were unmistakably droopy. Once the performance started, however, there was no question of falling asleep; the Juilliard Theater was filled with more energy than all the frappuccinos in New York City.
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| Members of Compañía Nacional de Danza performing Nacho Duato’s Duende. (Photo by Michael Slobodian) |
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This year's concerts, running from March 24-28, promise to be just as full of great choreography, immaculately rehearsed dancers, and inspiring performances. They differ from the December concerts in that the pieces that will be performed are taken from established repertoire, as opposed to new pieces choreographed specifically for Juilliard dancers. This requires a very different rehearsal process, and Lawrence Rhodes, director of the Dance Division, is keen that students experience both. "It is important for our dancers to be challenged at every level," says Rhodes. "Working in great dances is challenging in its own way, in terms of technique, stamina, and performance quality—the demands are different. You learn so much about understanding your part, how it moves, what it means."For many dance companies nowadays, it is a rare luxury to work with live music. In order to make the most of the Juilliard musicians, Mr. Rhodes' original idea was to build the program around the music of the three great Bs of classical music: Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms. We lost out on the Beethoven to the San Francisco Ballet Company, who will be dancing Hans van Manen's Grosse Fugue in New York in October (and were not enthusiastic about Juilliard performing the same piece here so close to their visit). Instead, contemporary European choreography will be represented by Nacho Duato's Duende, set to music of Debussy. Duato is the current director of the Spanish Compañia Nacional de Danza, and a previous member of Nederlands Dans Theater. The director of N.D.T. is Jirí Kylián, whose choreography was performed and enjoyed here at last year's spring concerts. His work is one of the strongest influences upon Duato's choreographic style.
Duende (the Spanish word for elf or pixie) was choreographed in 1991 to a selection of Debussy's music for harp, flute, and strings. Kim McCarthy, who worked with the choreographer as a dancer in his company, has set his works on companies worldwide. He explained to me that the ethereal quality of the music is captured with the effects of movement, costumes, and lighting combined to describe the "flittering" of the mystical creatures that live in the forest. Significantly, this was Duato's first piece to depart from a more heavily weighted movement vocabulary that evokes Spanish folk dancing, in favor of a "linear, more classical" style. "Nacho is always inspired by the music. He is innately musical; it tells him what to do," says McCarthy. "The dance is so interwoven [with the music]; he never uses counts but will tell you to move on the 'plink'! I once asked him what musicality meant to him, and he said it was the difference between a flute and a drum." So the choreographic response is concerned with texture, nuances in timbre that inform the "finding of shapes, statues, forms … the clear classical line that the body creates."
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| The Paul Taylor Dance Company performing Esplanade: Lisa Viola jumping over Richard Chen See, Silvia Nevjinsky, Takehiro Ueyama, Kristi Egtvedt, James Samson, and Amy Young. (Photo by Lois Greenfield) |
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In contrast, Paul Taylor's Esplanade (1975) is primarily occupied with the pedestrian movements of walking, running, jumping, touching, and—most unforgettably, for both the dancers who learn it and the audiences who experience it—falling. The music is selections from Bach concertos in E Major and D Minor, and the piece is being set on Juilliard dancers by Linda Kent, a permanent faculty member who joined the Paul Taylor Dance Company just after the work was premiered, and remained with the company for 14 years. I talked to her before rehearsal, and she arrived loaded with an abundance of material, including videos, Labanotation scores, and newspaper reviews with significant passages highlighted, to add to her own experience of the piece. "There is a big sense of responsibility," she explains. "People know this work! I can't think with Paul's brain, but I have to pick people who I feel most embody his vision. I use all the materials that I can, to get as close as possible. But things evolve; dance is by nature ephemeral. I find more new things each time."The movement of Esplanade evokes the sense of "a wide-open plaza, space, the feeling that you could run forever. The piece has amazing integrity and a large sense of community." This first piece that Taylor choreographed after he himself stopped dancing embodies the joyful sensation of "physicality in space" (according to Kent), revealing his "love of making something from nothing" and celebrating the youthful spirit of "discovering your individuality." It is, she says, "the perfect piece for Juilliard dancers and the spirit they have. Paul always said that dance is for the eye, that you take the nourishment that satisfies you. If you know the people who were in the original cast, you can see that certain elements may have been gleaned from their personalities, but ultimately, the drama is in the movement. In any Paul Taylor choreography, the dancers can grow so much in it, and with it."
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| Members of the Lar Lubovitch dance company performing A Brahms Symphony. (Photo by Jack Mitchell) |
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Peggy Baker, who is making Friday afternoons go faster than we ever believed possible by guest-teaching our Elements of Performing class, danced with Lar Lubovitch from 1980-88, and is also working with Juilliard dancers to stage his work A Brahms Symphony (1985). As the title suggests, the choreography is "on the same grand, epic scale as the music [the first three movements of Brahms' Third Symphony], dealing with themes of life, love, and death." It has the "same impact visually as aurally," Baker explains—not as a simple visualization of the music, but as an embodiment of the idea of the orchestra, a single impression made up of numerous threads of sound. "The harmony between people, the sense that, by doing things together, something greater can be achieved, is a subtext throughout much of Lar's work, and the dancers represent this vision of humanity and its potential."This is created both through the spatial complexities of the choreography and as a result of the movement vocabulary (the steps themselves). Dancers weave polyphonically in and out of each other's paths in what she describes as "long phrases of lyrical movement that just keep unraveling," emphasizing the presence of the group and also the "kinesthetic scale of the individual." Significantly, A Brahms Symphony was the first time Lubovitch had explored partnering between men and women in his choreography, taking lifts on elliptical paths within circular phrases of movement, so that "the lyricism is never broken and the dance builds up huge momentum. He was interested in a greater range of level, the opportunity to lift the roof!"
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Juilliard Dances Repertory Edition 2004
Juilliard Theater
Wednesday-Sunday, March 24-28
For time and ticket information, please see
the calendar.
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Juilliard's performance marks the first time this piece has been performed by students. The fact that Lubovitch's choreography is in the repertoire of only a handful of dance companies worldwide makes the opportunity to dance and witness it—particularly with live music—a rare privilege.All three of the rehearsal directors that I spoke to impressed upon me the importance for students of studying great work, as it helps us to understand what our art form is about, in a way that raises our expectations and stimulates our imaginations.I asked Lawrence Rhodes how he feels the dancers' everyday training prepares us to meet such challenges in the wide variety of work displayed in this month's performances. "For a long time, the philosophy of the School has been to create 'fusion dancers,' well versed and accomplished in a wide variety of techniques and styles. This is achieved through the benefits of being in New York, and the permanent and guest faculty who teach here. There is a demand for absolute professionalism and discipline from students, and the beauty of this discipline is that it pays off!"Laura Careless is a first-year dance student.
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