American Ballet Theatre
Designed to be performed by and for members of the French court, ballet is now almost prohibitively expensive to mount–and attend. Thus American Ballet Theatre’s appearance at the Arts Center of the College of DuPage featured a live orchestra but a reduced complement of dancers in three short 20th-century pieces rather than one full-length classic. With tickets at $50 to $55, I don’t think the audience was getting any trickle-down effect, however. The most we could hope for was that ABT was operating in the black rather than the red.
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Which is fine–if you think ballet is worth saving from extinction. One of the works here made me think it dead for sure, and a good thing too: Clark Tippet’s S.P.E.B.S.Q.S.A., a 1988 piece for four men accompanied by a live barbershop quartet. I was intrigued by the idea of this dance because my father once belonged to the Society for the Preservation and Encouragement of Barbershop Quartet Singing in America, and I still have a taste for the ringing chords and dissonant harmonies sliding into resolution that I used to hear drifting up from the kitchen as my dad practiced with his quartet. I was curious to see what a ballet choreographer would do with barbershop’s wide dynamic range and odd phrasing, which can vary in a single song from jolly and quick to agonizingly attenuated.
Tudor’s memories of true, perfect love do not hold here. Kudelka, relying I think on the rigidly defined gender roles of ballet, looks into love’s heart of darkness. Though the first movement is filled with a wild, rocking energy that lifts the dancers and sucks them under like waves at sea, the following three sections deliberately, even ceremonially, expose the destructive forces driving men and women. The second movement opens with a woman (the magnificent Kathleen Moore) surrounded by a half circle of crouching men whose raised arms create a kind of fence around her; when they lift her she remains passive, as stiff and lifeless as a sleepwalker or corpse. There’s the suggestion of rape as she tries to break out of their circle, and the only way she can escape is by hauling herself offstage by their raised arms, navigating a treacherous forest of tangled, phallic trunks and roots. The third movement reverses the situation: a single man (Guillaume Graffin) is surrounded by women. Here female passivity becomes threatening and coercive: the women’s steady regard of the man as they remain upright and almost inanimate seems to push him into activity, an enforced, slow-motion braggadocio. The signature phrase of the final movement is a man holding a woman at the waist and pushing her torso forward, then pulling it up, as if she were a rag doll.
