The Rewards of ‘Goldberg Variations’

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The New York Sun

Jerome Robbins’s “The Goldberg Variations” is well over an hour long, and time doesn’t fly while you watch it. But while it is repetitive and overworked, it is also very rewarding. Sunday afternoon, it appeared on the final program of New York City Ballet’s Robbins celebration.

“Goldberg” dates from 1971, at the peak of the period in Robbins’s choreographic career when he seemed to be in the throes of an edifice complex. At that time, it almost seemed as though if a work of his wasn’t going to turn out in epic dimension, it didn’t seem to him worth turning out at all. It’s not surprising that he chose to use not only the entirety of Bach’s Goldberg piano cycle, but also included most of the musical repeats for good measure.

Not only does time not fly here, but Robbins comes up short when he tries to hurry it along. It’s the more rapid sections that tend to sag, as they trick Robbins into utilizing too many steps to match the torrent of notes, while his breakdown of different speeds of slowness is sometimes hypnotically watchable. “Goldberg” contains some of Robbins’s most imaginative transmutations of Balanchine’s neoclassical vocabulary, as well as some relatively atypical attempts at music visualization.

The costumes by Joe Eula establish a definitive visual and theatrical concept that is integral to the ballet. “Goldberg” opens with Kaitlyn Gilliland and Jason Fowler dancing Bach’s Theme, wearing heeled shoes.They perform bows and mirror movements that telegraph social and court dance of the Baroque period. The two return at the end of the ballet dressed in natty versions of dancers’ practice clothes.

In “Goldberg,” sexuality is as mutable as the multiple identities the dancers’ costumes confer on them. Here, the message is “It’s all good,” and it’s a message that has a particular relevance to the ballet’s time and place. New York at that time was one of the capitals of the sexual revolution, and also of the women’s and gay right movements that emerged during the 1960s.

Maturation occurs over the span of the ballet, too. In the first half, the dancers are characteristic Robbins juveniles; in the second half, the women at least are taller, and both men and women seem meant to embody adults. And the second part of the ballet certainly contains the crowning choreographic content of the work. Partnered by Stephen Hanna, Sara Mearns dances a duet that relates to the one she danced earlier this season in Robbins’s “In the Night,” which he made the year before “Goldberg.” She seems emotionally needy, almost to the point of instability. Mr. Hanna finds his own voice in the ballet in a solo that registers as Robbins’s answer to Balanchine’s “Phlegmatic” variation from 1946’s “The Four Temperaments.” As had Balanchine, Robbins mines the iconography of commedia and other lexicons of posture and pose suitable to the dejected, lovelorn, or similarly enervated harlequin, hero, or jester.

Rachel Rutherford and Jared Angle have a duet in which they seem to be making up novel partnering amusements as they go along. Ms. Rutherford’s beautiful legs and commanding arabesque make her always seem like a dancer of importance, but she can sometimes be wan. On Sunday, she gave one of her liveliest and best performances.

Wendy Whelan and Gonzalo Garcia dance two duets. In the first, they are light-hearted, making mocking fencing passes at each other. In their second encounter, she is somewhat remote and preoccupied, certainly independent and probably the most self-actualized persona in the ballet. Even more so than earlier in the season, when they danced Robbins’s “Opus 19” together, it’s apparent that Ms. Whelan is a good partner for Mr. Garcia. Opposite her, he seems less callow than he sometimes does with other ballerinas.

Sunday afternoon, “Goldberg” was followed by 1984’s “Brahms/Handel,” as much of a Robbins attempt at “Goldberg” as reaching for the moon. Choreographic collaboration is rather rare, but Robbins had in years past worked together with Balanchine, who died in 1983. Since Twyla Tharp often seemed in those years to be positioning herself as the new Balanchine, it was perhaps inevitable that she would be lining up to work with Robbins.

“Brahms/Handel” is a skillfully modular and disjunctive work. A schematic division of labor seems to be happening: Robbins’s team is dressed in blue, Ms. Tharp’s in green, and some sort of Sherwood Forest community is suggested. There’s a patent attempt to homogenize the whole thing by making it look obvious that he or she had edited the other’s sections and sent his or her own spin across the aisle, as it were. And sometimes members from the opposite teams mix it up together, and you’re not able to tag the choreography step by step. It’s performed to an orchestral bloviation of Brahms’s piano work inspired by Handel.

I appreciated “Brahms/Handel” more on Sunday than I had when it was first performed. But Robbins’s neoclassical style seems to exist alongside Ms. Tharp’s take-apart of ballet with the felicity of chalk and cheese. The fact that it was done at all seems to be the most important point to be made by the ballet.


The New York Sun

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