A Bit of Baroque on Broadway
It wasn't quite the gardens of Versailles at dusk, but on Wednesday evening, Lincoln Center's Josie Robertson Plaza became a hospitable outdoor setting for the seven dancers of the New York Baroque Dance Company. The audience sat facing the towering apartment buildings of Broadway, and the incongruity of urban density threw the alien Baroque into sharper relief. At the same time, though, the performances were a reminder that the central plaza at Lincoln Center is a descendent of, and a visibly conscious homage to, Baroque piazzas.
The performances and the repertory provided a fascinating visit to the period in which dance began to coalesce into a recognizable antecedentofmodernballettechnique. In 1661, Louis XIV established the Académie Royale de Danse to enable his royal circle to receive tutelages from France's best dance teachers. Since then, however, generations of balletic evolution have tended to obscure the defining characteristics of earlier dance that were so clearly on view Wednesday night. And so a visit to the NYBDC is a kind of chastening trip back to the source.
In the choreography on view at Wednesday night's performance, the extension of the leg and the pointed foot became a major statement made at a leisurely pace. The dancers are lightly turned out, so that their legs evince a decorative silhouette rather than a foreshortened mass. We see the same familiar ballet steps, but in a much more modest execution. The dancers perform a single pirouette in one smooth swivel.
Before there were pointe shoes, there was relevé, and here the dancers of the Baroque group rose simply onto the balls of their feet. Seeing the women as well as the men standing in relevé, the inevitability of pointe as an expression for women seemed less natural.
Wednesday night's program was short, and didn't cover all aspects of the Baroque. The heroic genre and its mythological plotlines weren't represented, and the program concentrated on more intimate and less elevated exchanges and themes.
NYBDC's choreography draws upon choreographic treatises and notation systems that were published during the Baroque period. The three vignettes in the opening "Carnival Love" were taken from Gregorio Lambranzi's "The New and Curious School of Theatrical Dancing," written early in the 18th century, a compendium of commedia dell'arte images, themes, and dances. Terence Duncan's scaramouche moved in a low squat, his haunches as much as his feet seeming to propel his bourrées, before he rose upright and performed a prolonged arabesque. In her "Three-Legged Dance," Patricia Beaman dragged a prosthetic appendage around in ball-and-chain fashion. In the "Plate Dance," Caroline Copeland and Jason Melms displayed table manners that were decidedly uncouth.
"Love in the Salon" was a duet between Catherine Turocy and Seth Williams, originally choreographed by Baroque star Marie Salle. Slapstick, props imaginary and real, and mock conflict were all employed in a metaphorical enactment of love play between the sexes.
Baroque opera featured generous interludes of dance, and Wednesday night's program included two suites of full-company dances (Joy Havens was the seventh dancer on view) to excerpts from Handel's operas "Alcina" and "Ariodante." Here, there was less humor and less incident, and more concentration on intricate patterns of movement, which sometimes incorporated garlands that both echoed and participated in the interweaving strands of dancers. The closing piece, "La Follia," contained a Spanish element in the women's ritualized gestures and fan play, and in some passages of stylized tournament combat. It was all as educational as it was genuinely entertaining.
