The hopeful anticipation--you can sense it in the air, along with the pollen.
To babysit yourself until the season starts, take a few riveting minutes to read Laura Jacobs' swan report in the latest New Criterion, which alights upon Black Swan, Sara Mearns' smasheroo Odette/Odile at NYCB, and the enduring majesty of Natalia Makarova:
Balanchine?s Swan Lake comes in and out of NYCB repertory?large, wild, creaturelike?but as of 1999 there has also been a full-length Swan Lake in rep, the work of Peter Martins. This production has abstract backdrops by Per Kirkeby, the most effective being the tangle of blue-black paint drips that looms over the lakeside scenes and suggests a neurological storm. It?s a decor that wouldn?t have been out of place in Aronofsky?s Black Swan. Indeed, when the Martins production was performed this past February at NYCB, all the Swan Lakes were sold out and Black Swan fever was heating up the house. Or was it Oscar fever? No matter. Joyless as it is, Aronofsky?s Oscar-winning film has put ballet front and center in the cultural conversation. And while the Martins production remains thin and flat, rushing the tempi radically, and the nycb corps often does look more like cranes than swans, the company has a bona fide Odette in Sara Mearns.
Mearns joined NYCB in 2004 and her rise has been as steady as the tide coming in. She danced a premature Swan Lake (the Martins) in 2006, when injuries among the principals left the role open to underlings. I didn?t see her in the part but balletomanes were buzzing?she?d handled herself with aplomb. Mearns has long legs and long, strong feet, but she doesn?t have a typical City Ballet bee body. She?s wide in the shoulders, wide in the ribcage, even wide in the face, with a square Grace Kelly jawline and high wide cheekbones. In contrast she has a tiny waist. But then there?s the overdeveloped leg muscles. So she?s a constellation of extremes that add up to lush, plush power.
In 2007, when Mearns danced the role of Lilac Fairy in The Sleeping Beauty, it all came together. Unusual among women at NYCB, where epaulement is on the skimpy side, she used the broad set of her shoulders and ribs to find amplitude, a serene space around torso, head, and neck. This wreath of space?a feeling of sovereignty?is necessary to ballerina roles and to Lilac Fairy in particular, though today it?s less common, perhaps because so much contemporary choreography doesn?t require it and actually doesn?t want it. Mearns?s dancing had a fullness we?re not used to seeing at NYCB, where linear sweep is the rule, and it set her apart.
She wasn?t, however, without challenges. As Sugar Plum in The Nutcracker, it was discernible that Mearns?s turnout, the way the thigh rotates open at the hip, was not quite ?easy.? Moving the leg en l?air, through � la seconde and back into arabesque, there was something awkward, a bit of a hitch. And yet her concentrated attack, her continuing reach, was impressive. It was intelligence at work?you could see it?but it?s hard to say whether it was the body leading the brain or the brain?the will!?pushing through the technical kink. This is one of the mysteries of ballet dancing as an art and why prescriptions of ?more books, more sex? are irrelevant. The iridescence of a dance performance happens almost ecologically, within the fertile mix of training, hunger, heat, rehearsal, muscle, mettle, and music. Out of this emerges the flash of the dragonfly, the refraction of the marsh, the metaphysics of the swan.
Mearns just kept besting the problems. In Jewels, in 2008, when she debuted as the lead in ?Diamonds,? her authority was complete. Her turnout in the role?s revolved and shifting extensions was smooth, and she counterpointed those whorling arabesques and ebullient spirals with a chilly stillness in sous-sus (?under-over??a position on pointe in which the legs and feet catch together so tightly only the front leg is visible). An unmelting icecap, Mearns seemed to expand the role?s height and horizons. Precocious, she understood ?Diamonds? better than many seasoned dancers before her, including Kyra Nichols, who couldn?t help pulling the role in around herself like a fur collar, selling it a little, melting it.
Go read the rest, with my blessing.
Source: http://www.vanityfair.com/online/wolcott/2011/04/spring-ballet-season-will-soon.html
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