"Like Fly in Glass of Milk": A Lost Dance Returns

Abstract

Reviewed by: "Like Fly in Glass of Milk": A Lost Dance Returns Jay Rogoff (bio) In the days before the COVID-19 crisis turned dancers worldwide into wallflowers and dance fans into socially distanced video streamers, February 29th offered an auspicious occasion to catch up with the New York City Ballet at Lincoln Center—the last for months, it turned out, because the pandemic forced cancellation of the company's spring season. The day's two programs offered a mini-survey of the company's choreographic history, with two works by company co-founder George Balanchine, two by [End Page 457] longtime NYCB choreographer and ballet master Jerome Robbins, and two by current resident choreographer Justin Peck. The most striking and novel spectacle of these Leap-year Day performances, it turned out, involved hardly any leaping at all. Rather than the vertical adventures that distinguish so much of the company's choreography, the newly restored male solo from Balanchine's 1959 ballet Episodes involves the elements of water and earth far more than the air. Balanchine intended Episodes as a balletic tribute to the Viennese champion of atonality, Anton Webern, and planned it to showcase the composer's entire, sparse output of orchestral music, much of which follows 12-tone strategies and sounds simultaneously spare and compressed. Through the 1950s, Balanchine's modernist "black-and-white" ballets, including such masterpieces as The Four Temperaments and Agon, had demonstrated how thrillingly a stripped-down aesthetic could make room for explorations of feeling that resonated with the vibrations of human emotion and the anxiety of the postwar world. Webern's equally strippeddown, anti-melodic music provided a grounding for dances that, 60 years later, look even more experimental than Balanchine's previous black-and-white efforts, demanding viewers' laser-like attention. The sleek costuming that Balanchine had introduced with costumer Barbara Karinska in 1951—white T-shirts, black tights, and white socks for men; black leotards, pink tights, and thin black belts for women—turned "practice clothes" into a uniform and, by removing the dancers' personality, made them universal expressions of humanity. The original version of Episodes involved an experiment, a joint choreographic venture for Balanchine and Martha Graham, the foremost creative force in modern dance. It wasn't a true collaboration. Graham used some of Webern's early tonal music for the ballet's first part, a costume dance-drama concerning the power struggle between Mary, Queen of Scots (danced by Graham) and Elizabeth I (performed by NYCB dancer Sallie Wilson). One key sequence paired the two queens in a mimed tennis match. Balanchine choreographed all the atonal sections, one of them a challenging eight-minute solo for Paul Taylor, then a Graham dancer, as well as a choreographer with his own company, founded in 1954. Balanchine then concluded the work with Webern's orchestration of Bach's Ricercata in Six Voices from A Musical Offering. Taylor had difficulty grasping the solo's central purpose, and when he sought help, Balanchine, who in speech as well as choreography had a genius for distilling feelings into striking images, confided, "Is like fly in glass of milk, yes?" The complete Episodes lasted two seasons. By 1960, scheduling difficulties ended the two-company arrangement, so NYCB danced the Balanchine sections as Episodes II. Graham revived the Mary-Elizabeth ballet for her company in 1979, apparently with significant changes, since she could not recall the choreography perfectly after 20 years. The male solo dropped out in 1961, after Taylor declined Balanchine's invitation to join NYCB, and this shortened ballet became, for the rest of Balanchine's life [End Page 458] (he died in 1983), the canonical Episodes, danced to four of its initial seven Webern works. In 1986, Taylor taught the solo, set to Webern's Variations, Opus 30, to NYCB dancer Peter Frame, who performed it in Episodes through 1989. He left the company the next year, and the solo disappeared again until 2014, when Frame taught it to several members of Miami City Ballet. One of those dancers, Jovani Furlan, joined NYCB in 2019. For the current revival of Episodes, Furlan taught the solo, fittingly enough, to longtime Paul Taylor Company...