EMANUEL GAT DANCE: Stravinsky’s Sacre got turned into casino rueda salsa.
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The weekend’s two screenings of Ballets Russes (invaluable, and now on DVD) were introduced by former Ballet Russe de Monte-Carlo principal Frederick Franklin, at 92 as quick with a quip as he is fast on his feet, and making his first appearance at the Pillow in 42 years. “We were in the covered wagons of ballet,” he explains of the two companies’ American tours. (The other Ballet Russe was the “Original Ballet Russe.”) Actually, everyone is spry of thought. Irina Baronova, the youngest of Balanchine’s babies, remembers, “It was more fun in the factory yard climbing trees and throwing stones at one another,” but she became a dancer anyway. George Zoritch wasn’t impressed with Agnes de Mille: “Anyone who’s not bedridden could be in Rodeo,” he says in a sentence without a mean syllable. What emerges from the archive footage is the individuality and personality the dancers command; there’s nothing like it this side of Suzanne Farrell.
Farrell herself underlined the point at the Pillow last weekend when she said, “You want to be fascinating before you’ve even done anything.” Her Suzanne Farrell Ballet was making its Pillow debut in a Balanchine program (Marcia B. Siegel’s review is here), and in her Pillow Talk she was her usual combination of disarming honesty (“I see many things that if I were still dancing I would steal”) and disarming wit (“Everything [now] is videotaped,” making goo-goo eyes at the Pillow’s video camera). In the Doris Duke Studio Theatre, Israel’s Emanuel Gat Dance — another baby company, formed in 2004 — performed Winter Voyage (to “Der Lindenbaum,” “Wasserflut,” and “Der Leiermann,” from Schubert’s Winterreise, plus silences) and The Rite of Spring (to the Stravinsky score). Gat and Roy Assaf danced Winter Voyage barefoot in shaved heads and sleeveless ankle-length silver-gray tunics slit to the hip over black trousers. The parallel and shadow movement reminded us that Schubert’s masterpiece is fixated on the lover, not the beloved. Is he obsessed with his feelings? Himself? Do we feel an auto-erotic Schubertian current when, at the end, Assaf and Gat return downstage to face us, side by side?
Gat’s Rite of Spring is based in the casino rueda style of salsa, with Assaf and Gat switching off among three women, everybody barefoot and dressed in black, the action centered on a red Oriental carpet. It’s an original conceit, but Stravinsky’s music has more nuance than Gat’s repetitive movement. At the end, after the other four have left, the “Chosen One” binds up her hair and stretches out on the carpet, an offering. At the American Dance Festival in Durham last month, Gat, it’s reported, stripped this Chosen One to the waist. At the Pillow, she was sacrificed fully clothed.
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