Raymonda Variations
Hallelujah Junction
New York City Ballet
New York State Theatre
January 22, 2002

This performance was a "New Combinations Evening" wherein the company pays tribute to Mr. Balanchine’s legacy by presenting new ballets on the anniversary of his birth. As such, we were treated to an unexpected round of Happy Birthday by the orchestra under the baton of Hugo Fiorato. Then came the opening strains of Glazunov’s Raymonda, the first work on the programme.

Back when I used to take class, I had a teacher who one day confronted us and chided "Double pirouettes are no longer enough!" She was right, of course, two was simply not enough. Audiences expect more than just doubles. I sometimes wonder if this is not also true for corps work. I’m not sure simple formations and groupings are enough to satisfy anymore. I felt this as I watched Balanchine’s Raymonda Variations which saw its premiere back in 1961. I felt the group sections lacked content, emotional or otherwise, and context as well. I’ll be the last person to jump on the "let the classics rot, times have changed" bandwagon, but somehow I felt these corps sections were missing something.

I was still pondering the destiny of ballet and corps work when Peter Martins’ Hallelujah Junction hit the stage. Now here was dance that satisfied my modern mentality. While the smaller number of dancers led one to think "ensemble" rather than "corps", there was such flavour and urgency to the group sections that I never felt I had to wait for the soloists in order to see something interesting. Mind you, it wasn’t more exciting than the Raymonda corps work simply because there was more action — it was because these dancers were grappling with a situation (although it was very much an abstract work), these folks were doing and accomplishing something that felt important.

This was a U.S. premiere; originally, the work had been created on the Royal Danish Ballet and was unveiled in Copenhagen in March of 2001. Principals Gitte Lindstrøm and Andrew Bowman guested in this evening’s performance, dancing the roles they created in the work’s first incarnation.

The curtain goes up on a mostly-darkened stage (moody lighting by Mark Stanley.) In the murkiness upstage, at an unnaturally high level, we see the illuminated sheet music and disembodied heads and hands of the pianists who will perform John Adams’ duo-piano work. During the curtain call one can make out the platforms on which they’re perched, but initially, the musicians seem to float, ghostlike, over the proceedings.

This John Adams piece is divinely bizarre. The dialogue between the two pianists is best described as interlocking and while one is sometimes lulled with what, in a traditional sense, seems to be a musically-correct presentation of the phrases, those phrases then suddenly overlap, collide, and clash in ways that could sound like mistakes but for the fact that there is something appropriate and inherently right-sounding about them.

Martins’ choreography seems to spring from the same fevered mind. Dancers clothed in all-black or all-white bolt around and dance, very hard, to the audience. There is a danger that this ballet could have been one of those works that careens along at a breakneck pace and never relents, but Martins provides an interesting solution to this: he finds nuance and gradations of fever-pitch dancing. Arms and legs sometimes explode outward in a violent, spoke-like fashion, other times flail, as in the crazed balancés, but there is a variety in this blazing tempo that makes it engaging and not wearing.

One sympathises with the dancers in the first movement; how hard it must be to count that music, but all that work paid off when the first movement came to an unexpected but very definite end— and so did the dancers. Very striking.

The entire work was not at top speed: this second movement that followed was a more measured duet for the two guests from Denmark. Lindstrøm and Bowman moved smoothly from one unusual lift to another. For me, Martins’ greatest surprise in this movement was the promenades which circled around a fixed point, like they’re supposed to, but then would somehow mysteriously skate across the stage, still turning, and take up alignment on some other point on the floor. It was like a magic trick, very mysterious and beautiful.

The last movement picked up the pace again. There were several speeding duets by pairs of dancers other than the principal couple. One marvelled at how the flinging hands of the men could land with such timing and accuracy on the waists of their partners, just in time for a lift before resuming their arcing.

Throughout the ballet, Benjamin Millepied dashed, lept and spun as the third of the three featured performers. He was tasked with some daredevil pirouettes that finished with a leg that sliced around, like Bruce Lee’s nunchakus, into a deep lunge.

My only complaint about the work was the brevity, though I suppose Mr. Adams’ music is as long as it is. Nevertheless, I would have enjoyed seeing the adagio partnering ideas explored further and maybe some more of the unusual, high-speed work done by the ensemble.

Photographs by Paul Kolnik