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Gloriously on His Own
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20375 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
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3 / 1992 |
2,231 Words |
| Author
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Camille Hardy
Camille Hardy is a New York-based critic who publishes and
broadcasts on the arts internationally. |
The New York City Ballet (NYCB) opened its ninety-fifth New York season on November 19 with a gala celebration and a preview of A Musical Offering, choreographed by Peter martins, the company's ballet-master-in-chief and former principal dancer. The ballet, given its official world premiere two evenings later is subtle and sophisticated. Resting as it does on the musical structures of Johann Sebastian Bach's score of the same name, A Musical Offering is something of a benchmark in Martins directorial approach to the company, which he guided in tandem with Jerome Robbins after founder George Balanchine's death in 1983 and has led along since Robbins retirement in 1990.
Clearly Balanchine's Neoclassical aesthetic is nurtured and maintained with the addition of some wiry and abstract imagery along with a level of dancing and ensemble report that is simply unmatched anywhere else in the world. Peeling back the layers A Musical Offering reavels some of the facets that have shaped Martins and the NYCB into the rich partnership that is now so gloriously on display.
Riding a groundswell of international success as one of ballet's princeliest stars, Martins decided in 1978 that he had to choreograph. Calcium Light Night, his choreographic debut, was created for Daniel Duell with Heather Watts and was perceptively described by Anna Kisselgoff in the New York Times."It is a youngish man's work a set of movement studies in which the hero symbolically seems to be trying things out". Already present were such Martins hallmarks as his reverence for dancing for its own sake as well as his deftness at extending classical shapes into spiky abstractions that form a tension against ye do not break, the integrity of ballet's purest idiom.
Somewhat embarrassed by the amount of press attention devoted to "a first ballet", Martins confessed in 1978 that faced with a tiny tape recorder an empty studio and the deadline for delivering a piece, he gloomily realized. I didn't know anything about choreography what to do what not to do". At the time he felt teaching to be important as a process for learning to analyze movement and had reservations about devoting his life to making ballets, even if it were decided that he had the necessary talent. In a candid New York Times interview with Jennifer Dunning, the 32 year old danseur stated, "My prime time as a human being will be when I am in my forties, when I am the most clever, most handsome, the best human being. Not the nicest, but the most disciplined. Then I will live and have something to say, "Today at forty five, Martins" A Musical Offering seems to sum up his earlier prophecy about
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