Through the Eyes of a Dancer: Selected Writings

Spoleto Festival (Festival dei 2Mondi)

270 | Spoleto Festival (Festival dei 2Mondi) Teatro Nuovo and Teatro Romano, Spoleto, Italy July 3–6, 2009 Web review, dancemagazine.com Alessandra Ferri, new director of dance at Spoleto’s interdisciplinary Festival of Two Worlds, organized three programs of international significance. One program, Choreography Today, gathered works by three of the hottest ballet choreographers alive: Alexei Ratmansky, Christopher Wheeldon, and Wayne McGregor. Another presented Pina Bausch’s company, Tanztheater Wuppertal, newly stunned by the news of her death five days before, in the joyous Bamboo Blues. The third paid tribute to Jerome Robbins, who had loved Spoleto—both the festival and the ancient town. (As an invited guest of the festival, I moderated a preperformance talk.) The program of Ratmansky to Wheeldon to McGregor, held in the outdoor arena of Teatro Romano, traveled from innocent to sophisticated to jaded. Ratmansky’s Russian Seasons for New York City Ballet gives off the flavor of an old-world village, depicting various incidents, romances, and rituals. Rebecca Krohn seems to have a snitfit, Jenifer Ringer emerges from a group of three men in wonder, and Wendy Whelan stoops to pick flowers. Several dancers take a bow in the middle of the piece. It doesn’t quite add up (maybe if you know the lyrics to the Russian songs by Desyatnikov, it does), and the unflattering color-block dresses don’t help. But the men tear through their sections, giving the piece a thrust, and the moods change in a nicely shifting rhythm. The rarely seen first half of Wheeldon’s sextet After the Rain (also for City Ballet) is more dramatic than I remember. At times the three women bourr ée in parallel as they drag the men along the floor to the ominous sounds of Arvo Pärt. In a brilliant transition from the heavy first half to the elegiac second, Wendy Whelan and Craig Hall, now wearing nearly nude leotards, return to the stage with a big loping circle while the other four exit. They settle into stillness before performing the celebrated duet that is the second half of After the Rain.Whelan, long hair flowing, is glorious in the celestial lifts and tender gestures, like when she slips her fingertips over Hall’s shoulders from behind. On the second night, when they weren’t worried about slipping on a wet stage, Hall made a secure and attentive partner in the Jock Soto role. This duet is a small miracle that always sends me into raptures. From 2007 to 2012 | 271 The hyper-aggressive Erazor, fromWayne McGregor|Random Dance, had the advantage in this big open space of being framed by fluorescent lights on the ground. Driven by adolescent rage, the work had some pretty nasty moments . One person might plant a kiss on another’s face and then shove that person or just walk away. Without the infusion of elegance that the Royal Ballet brings to McGregor’s work (judging from their breathtaking recent Wendy Whelan and Craig Hall in Christopher Wheeldon’s heavenly After the Rain. (© Erin Baiano) 272 | Through the Eyes of a Dancer performance of Chroma at the Kennedy Center), Erazor seemed locked into a kind of mean-spiritedness. I report dutifully that the audience loved it. Bausch’s Bamboo Blues, held in the smaller Teatro Nuovo, overflows with a magical exuberance—at least the first part. Each solo is both sumptuous and urgent; each interchange brims with flirtation and inventiveness. The one dark moment, though, is powerful: A man runs in a circle at top speed with a woman jostling on his back. It’s impossible to tell from her screams whether she is thrilled or terrified. In another daredevil section, a woman dashes over a chair and flings herself at a guy halfway across the stage; he catches her and they topple to the floor. This, like other episodes, happens over and over. There is the sense that they can’t get enough of something— sex, dance, daring the person who is there for you? At the end, when the sixteen dancers joined hands for a bow and walked forward, you could see their mind-set shift to the terrible reality at hand: Pina Bausch was no longer with them. Their faces were suddenly drained of pleasure, and they drew even closer together in their grief during the standing ovations. The Robbins tribute was rained out of the Teatro Romano and got squeezed...