By Susan Reiter

Now in its 40th year, Dance on Camera is at a new level of maturity. The annual event at the Walter Reade Theater that once fit into a three-day weekend has expanded to fill five days, Jan. 27–31, and within its brief duration has its own opening night, centerpiece and closing night films.

This year’s festival also takes advantage of the recently opened Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center (across 65th Street from the Walter Reade), which will host free screenings of short films as well as conversations and panel discussions with filmmakers on Saturday and Sunday. Many of the regular screenings will also include appearances by directors and participants.

With 14 programs packed into its five days, the festival includes films exploring a wide variety of dance styles, artists and institutions. For New Yorkers, the opening night documentary, Joffrey: Mavericks of American Dance, is an expansive reminder of the rich and often turbulent history of what was once a mainstay of the local dance scene before the company relocated to Chicago.

The film’s opening strikes a jarring note: While proclaiming the Joffrey’s record of innovation and originality, it starts off with scenes of Lar Lubovitch’s Othello in rehearsal. A ponderous ballet already performed by ABT and San Francisco Ballet at the time, this is hardly the type of work that made the Joffrey’s reputation.

But once the 90-minute film gets going, the performances—and voices—of many talented and personable Joffrey dancers and the company’s never-a-dull-moment history makes for riveting viewing.

Coming of age during the 1960s, the Joffrey also had its finger on the pulse of the times as the counterculture emerged and the Vietnam War dominated the news. The documentary rightly gives significant attention to Joffrey’s choices of Kurt Jooss’ The Green Table and Léonide Massine’s Parade in 1973—painstakingly detailed revivals that made these seminal works live for a new generation.

Another American dance institution with an even longer history—Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival—is the subject of Never Stand Still. The Ron Honsa documentary’s choppy approach takes some getting used to as it interweaves the history of this influential festival and school—giving due attention to Ted Shawn and his male dancers of the 1930s—with what amount to substantial mini-documentaries on such worthy and fascinating subjects as Mark Morris, Paul Taylor, Suzanne Farrell, Shantala Shivalingappa and Gideon Obarzanek, who speak not only about Jacob’s Pillow but about their own artistic and esthetic philosophies.

An intriguing festival documentary is The Space in Back of You, about the influential but relatively unsung Japanese dancer and choreographer Suzushi Hanayagi. She became part of New York’s earliest postmodern dance scene and made significant contributions to several of Robert Wilson’s elaborate productions.

For fans of ballet competitions and their inherent drama, there is First Position, focusing on a particularly interesting and varied selection of contestants at a recent Youth America Grand Prix. Still Moving: Pilobolus at 40 is fun as it chronicles the launch of that distinctive collaborative troupe, offering a glimpse of its founders as shaggy-haired Dartmouth jocks and a touching tribute to the late co-founder Jonathan Wolken.

And for the closing night, there is the truly special—and long-awaited—Check Your Body at the Door, which profiles the New York City club dance scene of the 1990s. It offers a full and vibrant portrait of a number of important dancers, displaying their amazing physical skills in both club and stark studio settings.

Dance on Camera 2012
Jan. 27–31, Walter Reade Theater, 165 W. 65th St. (betw. Broadway & Amsterdam), and Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center, 144 W. 65th St., www.filmlinc.com; $12.

By Susan Reiter

Following a brief winter hibernation after its five-week Nutcracker onslaught, New York City Ballet returns to its primary business Tuesday, Jan. 17, when it opens its six-week winter repertory season. While the company’s repertory has been opened up to an increasing variety of choreographers in recent decades, the vast archive of George Balanchine’s exceptional ballets remains its mainstay.

Sara Mearns and Chase Finlay in Christopher Wheeldon's Polyphonia

The season’s first week culminates with a day celebrating Balanchine’s Jan. 22 birthday (happy 108th, George!). Its centerpiece is the 3 p.m. performance of two of the master’s most expansive and appealing works.

Who Cares, a 1970 ballet set to a delectable array of Gershwin songs, celebrates the brash energy and romance of New York and alludes to Balanchine’s brief heyday as a major Broadway choreographer.

The second half of the birthday program offers Union Jack, Balanchine’s majestic—and sometimes cheeky—1976 tribute to all thing British. With its cast of 72 arrayed in kilt-clad regiments choreographed with thrilling precision and dramatic vigor, it is unlike anything else in the repertory. The military-style discipline gives way to an all-too-human music hall couple whose urge to entertain is sometimes greater than their actual finesse. The large cast then return in sailor suits to dance the go-for-broke Royal Navy section, which mocks every possible cliché and is a rambunctious delight.

When NYCB’s autumn season began in mid-September, considerable advance hype was focused on Ocean’s Kingdom, a new Martins ballet set to a score (and based on a concept) by Paul McCartney, which became a hot ticket. If you couldn’t get in and the largely negative reviews haven’t scared you off, there will be five more performances beginning Jan. 19.

This season’s major premiere sounds a lot more promising. Christopher Wheeldon, while no longer the company’s resident choreographer, remains a regular contributor to the repertory and continues to be one of the ballet world’s most significant and in-demand choreographers.

During a Monday event that is part of City Center’s intimate Studio 5 series, Wheeldon offered a brief advance look at a trio from the ballet that showed him working with refined musicality and fluency.

The new work will be part of an all-Wheeldon program (Jan. 28 and Feb. 4) that includes his 2001 Polyphonia and the company’s premiere of DGV (Danse à Grand Vitesse), which he created for the Royal Ballet in 2006. Polyphonia has been in exceptionally fine shape as danced by its current casts last fall, and this brilliant, intricate work for four couples has already staked its claim as a classic of 21st-century ballet.

DGV, set to a score by Michael Nyman, is a surging, propulsive work for a cast of 26, which had its New York premiere when Corella Ballet Castilla y Leon performed it at City Center two years ago.

On Monday, Wheeldon remarked that he had created the still-untitled premiere provide the ideal contrast with the two earlier works on the program. “I wanted to make something gentler, more romantic and classical to balance out the Ligeti and the driving, athletic world of DGV,” he said. He also noted that he was still toying with the program order, contemplating having the new ballet open the program. Arrive late on Jan. 28 at your own risk!

New York City Ballet: Jan. 17–Feb. 26, David H. Koch Theater, 20 Lincoln Center (63rd St. & Columbus Ave.), www.nycballet.com; $29+.

By Sharon Elizabeth Samuel

The dance pieces are as iconic as the woman who created them.

The Martha Graham Dance Company will celebrate its 85th anniversary with seven performances at Lincoln Center, March 15–20, featuring classic Graham works, along with companion pieces by contemporary choreographers.

Opening night of the anniversary season, March 15, will kick off with a black-tie gala. The show will feature Robert Wilson’s Snow on the Mesa, a tribute to the journey of Martha Graham, who died four years before its 1995 premiere. It will be paired with Graham’s Maple Leaf Rag, her last complete ballet. With costumes by Donna Karan and a Louis Horst score, the dance is a parody of the art of choreography and a favorite of Graham audiences.

Another Martha Graham classic, Deaths and Entrances (1943), will be revived on the second night of the season after being out of the repertory for six years. The dance illustrates the story of the Brontë sisters, exploring Victorian romance, psychological repression and childhood memories. It was so influential in its time that it caused Graham’s contemporaries to hail her as both “the dance world’s Picasso and its Freud.”

Dancers perform excerpts from Snow on the Mesa and Death and Entrances in preparation for the 85th season of Martha Graham’s Dance Company, March 15–20 at Lincoln Center. Photo by Andrew Schwartz

“Deaths and Entrances was one of the first ballets in which Martha made visible a woman’s thoughts and memories,” said Janet Eilber, artistic director and former dancer with the company. “Men pass through on the stage, and the audience realizes that the men are not literally there in her presence, but she’s remembering them. In 1943, this was revolutionary.”

“These are the kinds of things that crossed over from dance into film and theater,” said LaRue Allen, executive director of the company, “The whole idea of the flashback is very Martha Graham. It’s one story, but the story is happening to contemporary people, and also to people who lived over a hundred years ago. It stretches the audience to see that.”

Taiwanese choreographer Bulareyaung “Bula” Pagarlava was invited to create a companion piece to Deaths and Entrances. The task of “reinventing” a Graham masterpiece may seem monumental to a young choreographer, but Pagarlava has already taken on the challenge once before, with his 2009 variation of Graham’s Lamentation. His process has less to do with recycling Graham’s techniques, and more to do with understanding the emotion of her work.

“Her work was about basic human experiences, so when I’m working on a piece, I love to talk with the dancers,” Pagarlava said. “They all have different stories, and I use those stories to create a new experience.”

When he first saw the Graham technique as a high school student in Taiwan, Pagarlava was more bewildered than impressed with the Graham movements of contraction and release. Yet he went on to see 19 performances in three weeks, becoming more taken with the Graham technique with each show.

“At 12 years old I wanted to be a dancer,” said Pagarlava, who grew up disadvantaged as a native of the aboriginal Paiwan tribe. “My family was poor, living in the mountains, and we didn’t have that much information. My sister brought me to the theater to see a performance, and when I saw the dancers, I told her, ‘I want to be that.’”

After formally studying dance, Pagarlava began experimenting with choreography. He would improve on performances that he considered “bad,” delighting instructors and gaining a reputation as a gifted artist. He created several dances as a resident of the Baryshnikov Arts Center, one of which caught the eye of Janet Eilber.

Eilber herself has deep personal ties to Martha Graham. As a former principal dancer, she worked very closely with Graham.

“Martha was very active at that time, doing a new ballet every year,” said Eilber. “I got to learn a lot by being in the studio with her every day—a lot about art, about the stage and also about how to conduct your life in an integrated way. With Martha, your art and your life were very much one.”

After joining the company in 1972, Eilber danced many of Graham’s greatest roles, was directed by Graham and had roles created for her by Graham.

In her latest role as artistic director, Eilber has engaged modern audiences through media and creative partnerships.

“Martha Graham is about the ‘new,’ and revolting against the old,” she said. “We realized that there are classic pieces we don’t want to revolt against, but we still wanted people to connect with them. So we asked ourselves, ‘What’s the dance equivalent of a museum audio tour?’ The answer: spoken instruction, media, educational programs with museums and bringing in people like Bula, who can use classic works as a springboard for creativity.”

Such partnerships go beyond choreography and into costumes and sets. On March 17, “The Noguchi/Graham Connection” will highlight the decades-long collaboration between Martha Graham and Japanese sculptor Isamu Noguchi. It includes Embattled Garden, a Latin-infused comedy of the Garden of Eden; Cave of the Heart, Graham’s retelling of the tragedy of Medea; and Appalachian Spring, the story of a young couple in the post-war era. The show makes use of the organic, abstract forms of Noguchi’s sets and Graham’s choreography. It is also an official event of Carnegie Hall’s Japan/NYC Festival.

The Saturday, March 19 matinee will feature multimedia montage Dance is a Weapon, which premiered in 2010. The politically charged performance is a compilation of six dances from the 1920s and 1930s, punctuated with narration and text. It opens with a solo by Isadora Duncan, as well as three other solos highlighting homelessness, the “machine” of commerce, and economic displacement. The montage will include Graham’s 1935 work Panorama, performed by 33 high school students. The final dance of the program will be Appalachian Spring, which was originally heralded by critics as “shining and joyous” and “a testimony to the simple fitness of the human spirit.”

Eilber and LaRue Allen have also set out to restructure the umbrella organization of Martha Graham. When they took on their administrative roles, they inherited the two-pronged Martha Graham Center, which encompassed the Dance Company and the Martha Graham School of Contemporary Dance. In the past five years, they have created a third division, Martha Graham Resources, which archives more than 2,000 films and videos that chronicle over 80 years of programs. They have also developed a licensing system for Graham’s numerous ballets.

Graham composed 181 pieces during her career, which earned her the Medal of Freedom, the United States’ highest civilian honor, as well as the Local One Centennial Award for dance, which is given out only once every 100 years.

She was undoubtedly a pioneer of modern dance, but the question of what sets her apart from more “traditional” dancers is a complicated one. For principal dancer Miki Orihara, it was the naturalism and adherence to the automatic movements of the human body that attracted her to the Graham technique.

“It’s not like ballet,” said Orihara. “What we would do in class was different from what we would do on stage. But once we were on stage, the techniques we learned in class would blossom.”

The Martha Graham Dance Company’s 85th season will feature five programs, some of which will be presented more than once throughout the week. Performances will take place at the Rose Theater, Frederick P. Rose Hall, Broadway at 60th Street. For more information, visit marthagraham.org.

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To read the sidebar From Flying Ace to Dance King, please go to http://ourtownny.com/2011/03/02/from-flying-ace-to-dance-king/ .

By Sharon Elizabeth Samuel

For 20-year-old Stuart Hodes, the prospect of dancing for a living seemed laughable. He had just finished three years of service as a pilot in WWII, an experience he remembers as “a war that nobody doubted was good.”

Although he wanted to become a journalist, he became discouraged by the fact that, as he recalls, “you could throw a stone in Times Square and it would land on a reporter.”

So Stuart went into public relations, unsure of his future but bolstered by the savings that his mother had set aside for him while he was in the military.

“I suddenly had $14,000, which was a lot of money back then. A subway ride cost five cents,” he said.

The PR job led to a chance encounter with an actor who worked for Martha Graham, causing Stuart to look up the Graham practice studio in the phone book. When he saw two performers rehearsing in the theater, he wondered if he could become good enough to join them.

Photo by Andrew Schwartz

“I realized how like flying dancing was,” said the former pilot. “Dancing won’t answer the question that philosophers and poets try to answer, which is why things happen the way they do. Instead, dancing abolishes the whys—it just celebrates the moment, celebrates the fact that a dance is happening right here and now.”

Despite the fact that he was 21 and never received any training in dance, Stuart began taking lessons that September. By December, he was asked to join the company.

“I was the right size, and they just needed more male dancers,” he insisted. “Basically, I could walk across the room without falling down.”

Even after five years of touring the world, dancing in the ensemble and choreographing some works of his own, Hodes was hesitant to call himself a professional dancer.

“Dancing wasn’t something you did for a living, especially if you were a man,” he said.

Although he supplemented his work for the company with Broadway gigs and private dance instruction, the financial pressure of a growing family eventually caused him to leave the company in 1958. Yet he continued his friendship with Graham until her death in 1991, and still sings her praises.

“Martha Graham was an adventure,” he said. “Dancing with her was like walking on the dark side of the moon. You never knew what you were going to see. She invented things and places that had never been conceived before.”

Graham’s achievements were the product of her extraordinary talent, but she was also motivated to exert herself physically and mentally to the point of exhaustion. “She was merciless to herself,” said Hodes. “She never asked you to do anything she wouldn’t do herself.”

Her limitless energy and creativity often boiled over into heated arguments with her dancers.

“She was a genius, and she believed in her own genius, but she was very insecure about people. You had to prove your loyalty to her. She had a temper, and when she was angry with you, she set out to absolutely nail you. But I had a temper, too. And however difficult Martha was to live with, you forgave her when she was onstage.”

In one of Graham’s more memorable confrontations with young Stuart Hodes, she protested that his pants were too baggy. She declared that from that point on, “your pants should be so tight that people in the topmost balcony could count your buttocks!”

For Hodes and contemporary dance theorists, the task of defining the Graham technique is a complicated one.

“Dance writers can bore you to death about what makes modern dance modern,” said Hodes. The best description may actually be a comparison to earlier forms of dance.

“Ballet is ethereal, looking heavenward. With ballet, everyone wants to be an angel en pointe. But in modern dance, you’re earth-bound, human. Martha made it noble to be human—to suffer, to love, to be small and to not be considered ‘pretty.’”

Hodes, a Manhattan resident, enjoys the proximity of his two daughters, who reside in New York. He and his wife Liz have set up a makeshift theater in their apartment, often filming themselves performing scenes from plays and musicals. Stuart is also working on his memoirs.

As they move from dancing and choreographing to acting, writing, traveling and music teaching, the couple adheres to his affirmation that “creating anything is an adventure.”

By Joel Lobenthal

Director Darren Aronofsky may be bold and indie, but in his latest film Black Swan, which has been heaped with critical praise, he opportunistically and rather heartlessly recycles one cliché after another about ballet and ballet dancers. Overall, it seems Hollywood may be in worse trouble, artistically, than ballet itself at the moment.
Aronofsky is equally reliant on received tropes—visual, audio, narrative—from the psycho-horror, identity-fissure playbook. Like virtually every ballet movie, Black Swan constructs parallel narratives between the storylines the dancers move to and what goes on in their private lives. Here, Swan Lake’s magisterial dual role Odette/Odile turns into fodder for psycho chicks clawing at each other like the gargoyles Hawn and Streep played in Death Becomes Her.

It’s wrong to say that one movie speaks for an entire culture, but since not only Hollywood, but most of the commercial mass media now pay so little attention to professional dance, I don’t think it’s rash to assume that the film reflects an industry-wide condescension, if not outright contempt for ballet. What’s most insidious is the way that the filmmaker presents us with the trappings of real-life ballet (yes, it is nice to see featured some actual professionals), and therefore the film may deceive many in the general public into thinking that this is what it’s actually like. Because Aronofsky’s film presents a particular ballet world that is sick doesn’t necessarily mean he’s proposing a sweeping statement about all ballet worlds. But ballet has become so excluded from the mainstream media conversation that the distorted part will tend to stand in for the whole.

Most glaringly, balletic beauty is just not present in the film. The performance segments aren’t particularly well danced or well filmed. Rather, what is on exhibit is every kind of abusive and unprofessional behavior. No doubt, these things do go on in ballet, but Aronofsky seems to have no interest in acknowledging any degree of craft or artistic depth by anyone working in the field. Yes, ballet is a cruel and ruthlessly competitive field, but it deserves to be taken seriously.

Seeing the film, I could only reflect on my own experience of ballet’s backstage world.  During the 1980s, I watched many rehearsals at American Ballet Theatre, principally because I was friends with coach Elena Tchernichova. The painstaking, serious-minded pursuit of perfection that went on in her rehearsals gave me another view altogether of balletic process than what Aronofsky presents. I thought of this when I talked with former-ABT dancer Jennet Zerbe just about the time I watched Black Swan. Zerbe now teaches at the Alberta Ballet school in Calgary. I told her about the way that many of the most memorable performances I’ve seen were not done by the top-ranked people. Zerbe is a case in point: She was in ABT’s corps when I witnessed her and Hilary Ryan, another corps dancer, debut in the same solo from Paquita at Sunday matinee and evening performances given by ABT in December 1984 at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C.

Each young woman—they were both around 20—was very tall and striking. Each, in her own way, performed with the refined and poetic style wherein celebration of the self goes hand in hand with celebration of something bigger, and elegance becomes a metaphor for graciousness of spirit. Either of the dancers could have become a ballerina; neither did, for a variety of reasons. While Ryan was given virtually no other solos to dance, over the half-decade following Paquita, Zerbe performed a number of other solo roles before injury forced her to stop dancing well before she was 30. I haven’t seen or spoken to Ryan since she left ABT at the end of the 1980s, but since running into Zerbe again several years ago.

Casting policies back in the 1980s were no less problematic than they often are today.  But on that Sunday, Ryan and Zerbe did give me a demonstration of ballet’s full expressive possibilities—something that Black Swan does not do for a single moment.

Morales, who lives in the East 70s, admits that her life has been uncanny for its lucky turns and fortuitous meetings, including her first encounter with the magnetic Flamenco dancer Maria Alba. Both Greco and Alba molded the young Morales and invited her to dance with their companies, which included dates at New York’s Town Hall, Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, Jacob’s Pillow and tours in the United States and overseas. Although she concedes that Greco was the fiery kingpin of Flamenco, it is Alba whom she considers her real mentor.

Liliana Morales started dancing at the age of 5 and was performing small roles in New York opera companies by age 8.

“She was my idol,” Morales said. “She was a great artistic dancer. She had the feeling that is Flamenco.”

A native New Yorker, Morales started dancing at the age of 5. By the time she was 8, she was performing small roles in New York opera companies. Not surprisingly, her first role was in Carmen with the Amato Opera Company.

In August 1969, Morales headed to Madrid, where she began studying with Jose Granero, a ballet dancer from the Jose Greco Dance Company. Her studies were cut short by her mother’s death, which brought her back to New York, but when Morales returned in 1971, she quickly plugged herself into Spanish dance culture. For the next five years, she built a reputation in Madrid’s famous tablaos, including Café De Chinitas, Torres Bermejas, Los Cabales and other celebrated Flamenco venues.

Reflecting on favorite career performances, Morales points to the opening night party for the 1992 Broadway revival of Man of La Mancha. Raul Julia, who starred in the show, was so taken by Morales’s zesty and nuanced dancing that he later invited her to perform at his 50th birthday party.

Since 2000, Morales has been teaming up with diva Natalia Brillante (also an Upper East Sider) as the Spanish dancing duo “Gitana.” Looking forward to their next gig at San Martin restaurant on July 22, Morales says that people of all nationalities can enjoy Flamenco and classical Spanish dance. Just ask Catherine Lenihan, president of the Women’s National Republican Club, which hosted Gitana in June. A dance enthusiast, Lenihan said that she glimpsed in Morales’s solos the great tradition of Spanish dance: the arm sweeps, the hand curlicues, the castanets and the foot stomps.

“She’s danced all over the world,” Lenihan said. “And when I watch her dance, she makes me think of Jose Greco.”
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An Evening of Flamenco and Classical Spanish Dance
July 22, at 7:30 p.m. and 9 p.m.
San Martin Restaurant, 143 E. 49 St.
212-832-0888