Adding Some Sizzle at A.B.T.

By Martha Duffy

Twyla Tharp's new ballet highlights a strong season

When the curtain goes up on Once Upon a Time, Twyla Tharp's new dance for American Ballet Theater, Mikhail Baryshnikov is alone onstage. He is elegantly dressed in pleated, '30s-style trousers, the kind that Cary Grant or Katharine Hepburn used to wear in the movies. This attractive, provocative first glance recalls Tharp's triumphant Push Comes to Shove (1976); that ballet began with Baryshnikov's sidling out in a vaguely Slavic tunic and a sassy bowler hat. No doubt about it, Tharp understands this Russian-American firebird better than any other choreographer. She sees the virtuoso and the man in exile, and above all she understands the star power.

So here comes Misha, 1983 edition, a busy man indeed. Into his private space--a space he defines with whipping spins, sudden leaps followed by trancelike stillness--comes a very young woman in red (Deirdre Carberry) to be partnered through soupy Glazounov waltz tunes. That is no easy job, since this muse is coltish and blithely selfabsorbed. Three more young women (Elaine Kudo, Nancy Raffa, Amanda McKerrow), wearing costumes that suggest old-fashioned pinafores, glide in and out. At the end, his red-geranium partner's having vanished, Baryshnikov is hypnotized by the retreating figure of McKerrow.

Once Upon a Time is Tharp's most romantic piece. She sees what choreographers usually see in Baryshnikov: a performer who extends the boundaries of male virtuosity, in that sense the most modern of ballet dancers. But in the clarity and fastidious detail of his technique, as well as his warmth and amplitude, Baryshnikov evokes nostalgia--for the perfumed legends of Nijinsky and the Diaghilev troupe that first ignited the passion for ballet in the West. It is no small feat to capture this double image in a twelve-minute work, but Tharp has done it.

On a mundane level this Misha seems a bit tired, with his loosened tie and distracted air. It does not take much imagination to see this overworked chap as the head of a big dance company, which of course happens to be Baryshnikov's situation as artistic director of A.B.T. Develop the dancers, search out inspiring choreography, get out there and sell tickets with your own bag of tricks: that is a day's work for him.

This is the third year of his tenure at A.B.T, which is currently playing an ambitious eleven-week season at New York City's Metropolitan Opera House. His initial goal was to create a strong, youthful corps de ballet and to lessen A.B.T.'s chronic reliance on international stars. The corps now is an impeccably disciplined instrument, but the members are so fresh in their almost votive commitment that their precision never suggests a drill team. At the start of his first season, Baryshnikov also picked out a few youthful dancers and virtually pushed them out onstage in important roles. His choices--among them, Susan Jaffe, 21, Cheryl Yeager, 25, Robert La Fosse, 23, Peter Fonseca, 25--are strong ones, but it takes years to develop a finished principal dancer. Of the familiar stars, Fernando Bujones, 28, Cynthia Gregory, 36, and Martine van Hamel, 37, are in glistening form and, with Baryshnikov, often carry the show.

The company's strengths are evident in the season's most ambitious new production, George Balanchine's Symphonie Concertante (1947). This work has not been performed for 30 years, and survived only because it happened to have been transcribed in Labanotation (a system of symbols for preserving choreography). Symphonie Concertante is a reclaimed treasure. Set to Mozart's Sinfonia Concertante in E-flat for violin, viola and orchestra, it casts two ballerinas as the solo instruments, the brilliant Gregory as the violin, the mellower Van Hamel as the viola and surrounds them with a corps tracing patterns and recombining in gentle, eloquent classical phrases. Designer Theoni V. Aldredge has fashioned what must be the most beautiful tutus in years, and when the ballet fills the stage it becomes a superplum paradise. Symphonie Concertante is the kind of sturdy piece that ballet troupes survive on and that Balanchine provided as effortlessly as a man sowing a garden row.

The company also has a fine new staging of Bournonville's La Sylphide by Erik Bruhn, who once danced the role of James eloquently and who is now artistic director of the National Ballet of Canada. As James, Bujones uses his particular aggressive variation on the Bournonville style effectively, and he is nicely complemented by Marianna Tcherkassky's sweet, limpid, almost blurred Sylph. The gorgeous sets by Desmond Heeley are drenchingly romantic, but Bruhn (wisely keeps sentiment in check onstage. A revival of Jerome Robbins' fierce, street-hip New York Export: Op. Jazz has corps kids of the '80s snapping their fingers just like gang squads of the West Side Story era. This ballet shows its age (1958) only in the costumes: the sweatshirts are plain, without any emblazonment.

With the exception of Once Upon a Time, A.B.T.'s newly commissioned ballets offer sober evidence that it may take even more patience to build a repertory than to school a major dancer. The company, led by Gregory and Cynthia Harvey, dance the socks off Interludes, a bland effort set to Brahms' Serenade in A Major, Opus 16 by San Francisco Choreographer John McFall, 36. Lynne Taylor-Corbett, whose Great Galloping Gottschalk was a hit last year, has a moody new piece, Estuary; once again the performances, by Van Hamel and Patrick Bissell, burnish a dull concept. Van Hamel, a dancer of wit and grace, has an even murkier assignment in Jiri Kylian's Torso, a grim, roughhouse pas de deux with Clark Tippet.

The death of Balanchine in April underscored the present scarcity of talented choreographers, a problem that every large company must deal with. Baryshnikov tries to be philosophical. "One has lived with this a long time," he observes. "If one looks around the country, there are very few names--Merce Cunningham, Paul Taylor, Jerry Robbins, Twyla Tharp, Eliot Feld. It must have been wonderful to be here in the '40s when Balanchine, Antony Tudor and Agnes de Mille were making ballets for A.B.T. I wish I could choreograph like Balanchine, but I can't, so I am patient and I try out new talent. If I find a choreographer strong enough to take over this wonderful company, I would make it his or hers, in terms of artistic direction." Such an event is not at hand, however. Instead, what Baryshnikov said in his onstage eulogy of Mr. B. seems to apply more closely: "He looks out for us and for all companies." For the next few years, one hopes that he does not blink.

--By Martha Duffy This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.