Alastair Macaulay

NEW YORK — Since the Museum of Modern Art reopened this month, it has devoted its fourth-floor Studio space to a strangely wonderful, interactive installation: David Tudor’s “Rainforest V (variation 1).” Throughout the room hang about 20 mundane objects, including a metal barrel, a wooden box, a lampshade, a reflective disc, a glass jar, a vintage computer’s hard drive and more. Collectively they become a kind of urban jungle, suspended like Calder mobiles with the anti-utilitarian aesthetic of Duchamp readymades.

Then, as you wander around them, you realize: This jungle emits noises, and they alter according to your proximity. You may also notice that every object is fitted with a sound transducer, giving each its own resonance. The box, the can, the jar — they’re all acoustic sources, as if they were seashells. A window in the gallery overlooks 55th Street, but the constantly changing polyphony of “Rainforest” transports you quite elsewhere.

David Tudor (1926-96) was a musical pioneer in many ways: as an admired virtuoso of modernist piano music; as a composer of electronic music; as a creator of sound installations. Among his colleagues were John Cage and choreographer Merce Cunningham — who, in 1968, commissioned Tudor to compose a score for his dance company.

This was Tudor’s first music written for Cunningham’s repertory. But he knew the Cunningham tradition: The choreographer would tell a composer the duration and title of a piece he had in mind. Often, the score would be written independent of the choreography — the music usually had a different title — but in this case, Cunningham’s title inspired Tudor, who at once responded, “Oh, then I’ll put lots of raindrops into it.” In the end, the differences were only a matter of capitalization: Cunningham’s dance was “RainForest,” and Tudor’s score “Rainforest.”

For the next three decades, Cunningham commissioned scores from Tudor, always eliciting imaginative sound dramas. But this first one proved a seedbed for Tudor’s imagination. The scenic design of “RainForest,” after all, featured Andy Warhol’s “Silver Clouds,” whose theatrical interactions with the dancers inspired Tudor: From the 1970s onward, he developed the material of his score for various spatial setups.

One of those iterations, “Rainforest IV” (1973), was devised with musicians who later became known as Composers Inside Electronics. Three of them — John Driscoll, Phil Edelstein and Matt Rogalsky — then realized “Rainforest V,” an installation version that can play by itself.

And so the installation at MoMA is available to see — and hear — at all hours. Throughout the fall, though, the museum is also presenting performances by Composers Inside Electronics of “Forest Speech,” another Tudor score belonging to the “Rainforest” family. For this, the Studio is outfitted with benches and cushions, and its blinds are lowered to darken the space. The roster of musicians will change with each performance (there are six more through Dec. 15); on Sunday, they were Edelstein, Marina Rosenfeld, Stefan Tcherepnin, Spencer Topel and Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste.

The performers were visible at one end of the room, but their sounds came out of the installation’s galaxy of suspended hardware. Here again was the spectrum of isolated chirrups, growls, trills, squeaks, purrs, avian alarm calls. It was hard not to hear the sounds of frogs, cicadas, isolated birds, giant cats and even elephants. (Cunningham said he took the title of his dance from the Pacific Northwest, “from the rainforest of the Olympic Peninsula”; he had also been thinking of central Africa, inspired by anthropologist Colin Turnbull’s book “The Forest People.” Perhaps he was also thinking of the “Rainforest” sculptures by his friend Louise Nevelson?)

The aural collage of Tudor’s musique concrète — squeaks, burbles, rumbles, booms — also evokes more fictional realms, as if a “Star Wars” droid had wandered into the arboreal conclave of Ents in “The Lord of the Rings.” These sounds may seem a sonic illusion, but listen closely and you’ll know they are just electronics using the frequencies of everyday objects. Tudor’s music is multidimensional: fantasy and fact, technology and escapism, poetry and game.

This article originally appeared in

This Rainforest Trills, Burbles and Booms

(Critic’s Notebook)

In a 40-year stage career, mostly with the Royal Ballet, she created roles for a host of eminent choreographers, among them Frederick Ashton, John Cranko, Robert Helpmann, Andrée Howard, Kenneth MacMillan, Léonide Massine and Ninette de Valois. Several of those roles remain in the repertories of American and British companies.

And though she appeared in ballets to music by Chopin, Tchaikovsky and Léo Delibes, Farron also performed to a wide range of new music.

She died on July 3 at 96. The Royal Academy of Dance, where she was the director in the 1980s, confirmed the death but did not say where she died.

The 1930s, ′40s and ′50s were an era when many scores were commissioned for British dance. Farron, often in solo or lead roles, danced in world premieres of at least 14 scores by 12 composers, including Lord Berners (“A Wedding Bouquet”), Benjamin Britten (she was Belle Épine in his three-act “The Prince of the Pagodas”), Hans Werner Henze (Berta in his three-act “Ondine”), and Michael Tippett (a solo in the premiere of his opera “The Midsummer Marriage”).

Farron also became known as an inspiring teacher at both the Royal Academy and the Royal Ballet School, helping to shape the careers of many future ballerinas.

She was born Joyce Margaret Farron-Smith on July 22, 1922, in London, the first of two children of Hugh and Amy (Ellis) Farron-Smith. Her father was a civil servant, her mother a teacher.

After studying all kinds of dance in childhood, she became one of the first two scholarship students to attend the Vic-Wells Ballet School. It was de Valois, the school’s artistic director, who chose the name Julia Farron.

She joined the Vic-Wells Ballet (known now as the Royal Ballet) in 1936 on her 14th birthday. Nine months later, in 1937, she was still the company’s smallest and youngest dancer when she created the role of Pépé the Dog in Ashton’s “A Wedding Bouquet.”

This was danced to a Lord Berners choral score employing words by Gertrude Stein, who took delight in the girl who was cast as the dog.

Farron always remembered that Ashton had remarked afterward, “Now you must grow.” She did, creating roles for him over the next 21 years.

Good-humored, frank, intelligent, imaginative and hardworking, Farron happily absorbed everything she could from de Valois, Ashton, Helpmann (then a star dancer) and the music director Constant Lambert. While she acquired a strong technique, with fast footwork and a vivid upper body, she also became a noteworthy dance actor.

Hers was the ballet generation that performed through the London Blitz, dancing while falling bombs were shaking the West End theaters in which they were performing.

The highlight of her career, Farron later said, came in 1946, when the Sadler’s Wells Ballet (as Vic-Wells was known by then) moved to the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden — a haven after the war’s vicissitudes.

Farron was unafraid to show lewd or vicious aspects of character. Her roles ranged from the Prostitute in Helpmann’s “Miracle in the Gorbals” to the Queen in “The Sleeping Beauty.”

In 1948 she married the South African dancer (and later choreographer) Alfred Rodrigues. She gave birth to their son, Christopher Rodrigues (now chairman of the cultural organization the British Council), in 1949, during the Sadler’s Wells Ballet’s epoch-making debut season at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York.

Farron was thrilled the next year when George Balanchine came to Covent Garden to stage “Ballet Imperial,” a work from 1941. It was she who led the corps onstage at the start of the third movement — a bit of dancing that she later called her favorite in her entire career. (She also danced the same work’s taxing grand ballerina role in 1951.)

Farron created many roles for Ashton, among them the irate goddess Diana in the three-act “Sylvia” and the exuberant, fleet-footed Neapolitan dance in “Swan Lake,” both in 1952 and both still danced today.

Even though she went on to dance lyrically poetic roles throughout the 1950s — one was the Prelude in Mikhail Fokine’s “Les Sylphides” (1909) — she also continued to depict psychologically jagged characters, most notably when she created Belle Épine in the Cranko-Britten collaboration “Prince of the Pagodas” in 1957 and Berta in Ashton-Henze’s “Ondine” in 1958.

Both of these were three-act roles to important new scores. Both characters, too, were antiheroines, and Farron revealed their complexity — dignified yet sensual and given to startling flashes of venomous anger.

She initially retired from the stage in 1961, having been a professional dancer with the same company for 25 years, and having toured with it to the United States and Russia. She quickly trained in dance teaching, joining the Royal Ballet School staff and remaining with it for many years.

Farron helped shape generations of dancers, including the future ballerinas Leanne Benjamin, Bryony Brind, Fiona Chadwick and Alessandra Ferri.

Enthusiasm, thoughtful analysis and humor were part of her teaching style: plasticity of the upper body, spruce footwork and imaginative theatricality were her objectives. On his 80th birthday in 1984, Ashton singled her out as a teacher who knew what he liked in dance and who passed it on to her students.

Kenneth MacMillan brought Farron back to the stage in 1965 as Lady Capulet in his new three-act production of “Romeo and Juliet,” a role she continued to play (also on tour in America) until 1976. Even in casts led by Margot Fonteyn and Rudolf Nureyev or Lynn Seymour and Christopher Gable, Farron made a searing impression, above all in the outrage with which her Lady Capulet lamented the death of her nephew Tybalt.

Farron’s teaching career climaxed with her appointment as director of the Royal Academy of Dance (known then as the Royal Academy of Dancing) in 1983; she held the post until 1989. Based in London, the academy, founded in 1920, establishes standards for dance teaching from Canada to Australia.

In addition to her son, Rodrigues, Farron is survived by two grandchildren and a great-grandson. Alfred Rodrigues died in 2002.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/24/arts/dance/julia-farron-dead.html" id="d0d7c580-5305-35d4-a657-3c30d8041801">The New York Times</a>.

Versatility, attack, imagination, authority: These virtues stamped performances by British dance artist Julia Farron over a remarkably enduring career, beginning in the 1930s when she was a teenager.

Julia Farron, Acclaimed Ballerina From Age 14, Is Dead at 96

Ballet is an art of synthesis. Academic dance, music and visual design unite, sometimes with sublime alchemy. But are these really the most important ingredients for ballet?

A valuable new book, Nadine Meisner’s “Marius Petipa: The Emperor’s Ballet Master” (Oxford University Press), records how many other elements have often seemed more crucial: notably scenario, casting and politics. Petipa (1818-1910), French-born, was the most important shaper of Russian ballet before Serge Diaghilev, who formed his company, the Ballets Russes, in 1909.

Today we single out “The Sleeping Beauty” (1890) from Petipa’s long career: That glorious, abundant collaboration with Tchaikovsky, made in St. Petersburg, remains one of the definitive peaks of ballet classicism. From the 1920s to the ’70s, however, Petipa’s classicism was often hailed as a parent of ballet modernism. “Forward to Petipa!” was a war cry in the ballet experimentalism of the early Soviet era. Twentieth-century aficionados saw his ballets as enshrining pure dance and elevating aspects of humanity to the sublime.

In the 1960s and ’70s, when the West came to know the Elysian Shades scene of Petipa’s “La Bayadère” (1877), his reputation soared: He was the master architect of formal values in ballet. George Balanchine and Frederick Ashton, the dominant Western ballet choreographers of the second half of the 20th century, hailed him as such.

It turns out, however, that Petipa was working along quite different lines. Soon after his arrival in Russia at the age of 29 in 1847, he began making ballets that were peak artistic expressions of the czarist regime: royalist, hierarchical, elitist.

Dynastic succession is a recurring theme in their scenarios. Peasants, when they reach the stage at all, are generally happy, except sometimes in affairs of the heart. Russia is almost never the location. The worlds depicted so intensely by Petipa’s Russian contemporaries — Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Mussorgsky, Rimsky-Korsakov and Repin — might have come from another planet.

Meisner’s book, the first full-length Petipa biography in English, is by far the most detailed and complete survey of his life and work to date. Not all its fascinations are cheering, however. Meisner retells, in all seriousness, many of the stories of Petipa’s ballets, even though their narratives are all too often dismayingly absurd.

And though dance made an important contribution in most Petipa ballets, in several it was far from their raison d’être. “King Candaules” (1868) ends, after its title character has died, with a scene in which his queen is haunted by his ghost until she drops dead; that, Meisner writes, is followed by a tableau in which, amid the other gods in the cloud-filled heavens, Venus-Astarte points “at the corpse of the hubristic queen who had dared to compete with the goddess of beauty.”

Fatuous, yes — and all too characteristic of other Petipa ballets. Such a narrative epitomizes what the Bolsheviks would soon want to sweep away.

Petipa’s story was also entwined with the careers of dancers and their influential supporters. In no country was balletomania as extreme as in Russia. Over 60 years with the Russian ballet, Petipa did marvels for ballerinas from Western Europe and Russia. We learn in Meisner’s book about the “ballerina war” of 1862-65, when the main excitement was caused by Maria Surovshchikova (Petipa’s first wife) and Marfa Muraveva, Russians both, and about the visiting Italians — notably Virginia Zucchi and Pierina Legnani — whose standards transformed Russian ballet at the end of the 19th century.

The super-ambitious Russian prima ballerina Mathilde Kschesinskaya (1872-1971), however, became Petipa’s enemy. Her power was immense: Having been the mistress of Czar Nicholas II in his youth, she became involved with two other grand dukes of the Romanov dynasty. She established a monopoly on a number of the best roles. When a director of the Imperial Theaters fined her for an anachronistic change of costume, she used her influence to have the fine canceled. The director, thus overruled, promptly resigned.

Kschesinskaya’s shenanigans, notorious even when she was at her prime, are a blatant sign of what was corrupt about the Russian ancien régime. It seems appropriate that when Lenin, on his return to Russia in 1917, addressed the revolutionary crowd in St. Petersburg, he used the balcony of the house that had been hers. Declaring his politics to be Russia’s future, he consigned her to its past. Or to the West: She escaped Russia with one of her grand dukes. (The Bolsheviks killed the other one.)

The successful 1917 revolution, however, was preceded by a failed one, in 1905. Hundreds of workers were killed or wounded when police fired on their peaceful protest march on what was called Bloody Sunday. Petipa’s favorite ballerina, Olga Preobrazhenskaya, danced that night. But although noting in his diary the flowers and gifts she received, he then wrote, “It’s too much — here they’re dancing, and in the streets they’re killing.” Then 86, he went with his youngest son to look at the broken shop windows on Nevsky Prospect, the city’s most eminent street.

These are among the many touching details of Petipa’s life that Meisner records. Yet she leaves unmentioned two other signal events of St. Petersburg’s 1904-5 winter. Isadora Duncan, dancing rapturously and with radical simplicity to classical music without any male partner, made her local debut, causing a sensation among artistic progressives. And Diaghilev presented an outstanding exhibition of historical Russian portraits that made both aristocrats and the intelligentsia reconsider Russian history.

Diaghilev gave a visionary summing-up speech as his exhibition closed. “I have become completely convinced that we are living at a terrible time of fracture: We are doomed to die so as to give rise to a new culture that will take from us all that remains of our tired wisdom,” he said. And he spoke of “a new and unknown culture that we are creating but which will clear us away.”

Did Petipa attend Duncan’s dance performances? Did he visit Diaghilev’s exhibition or read the text of his speech? He must have been aware of them. He certainly must have known of the ambitious young Diaghilev, who had caused crises during his brief time on the staff of the Imperial Theaters.

Meisner writes that “the Ballets Russes grew from the soil that Petipa had tended.” Well, yes — Diaghilev’s lead dancers were drawn from Petipa’s company — and no. In 1909, Diaghilev and his colleagues constructed a ballet company that was a vital corrective to what Petipa had been doing. They used music by leading Russian composers Petipa had ignored, notably Borodin and Rimsky-Korsakov; they absorbed multiple aspects of Duncan’s influence.

The three main composers of Petipa’s ballets were Cesare Pugni, Ludwig Minkus and Riccardo Drigo: all Western, all harmless, all decades behind the main current of classical music in their day. Diaghilev consigned them all to history.

In recent decades, however, all three composers have been infiltrating ballet repertory — thanks to Petipa. An abbreviated (but still long) pastiche of his preposterous “The Daughter of Pharaoh” (Pugni) was staged in 2000 by the Bolshoi Ballet, which has toured it to London and New York. Many Western troupes now have productions of the Petipa-Minkus war horses “Don Quixote” and La Bayadère.” The choreographer Alexei Ratmansky, using period notations and other sources, has reconstructed Petipa’s “Harlequinade” (Drigo, 1900); he’s also staged “Don Quixote” and “La Bayadère.” What cause could anyone have to cry “Forward to Petipa” today?

Perhaps every ballet era will reinvent Petipa. Over the last 40 years, the dance world has come to see “La Bayadère” not as a single act of formal dance classicism but as a full-length story ballet, abounding in melodrama, processions and scenic effects. It once seemed laughable that anyone would resurrect “The Daughter of Pharaoh,” whose titular character throws herself in despair into the Nile, which promptly entertains her with a great-rivers-of-the-world ballet; in this century, thousands have seen it in several countries.

Today, we’re also given — often onstage, as in Ratmansky’s reconstructions — new quantities of historical information about Petipa’s dance texts and style. These newer versions of Petipa are often less heroic in scale, less idealist in manner. Are we now seeing Petipa the proto-postmodernist, playing history games that are full of clever detail, meta-narrative, and incidental humor? I think we are. Petipa, changing his shape, seems determined to survive and dominate the ballet scene.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/23/arts/dance/petipa-biography-nadine-meisner.html" id="d851070d-7e75-360a-aa52-ea8a2660bc47">The New York Times</a>.

(Critic's Notebook)

A Long Look Back on a Ballet Maker

Early in the 1960s, an emerging generation of dance rebels — Yvonne Rainer, Trisha Brown, David Gordon, Steve Paxton, Lucinda Childs, Deborah Hay — began to fight off the constraints established by those giants, presenting a new and alternative tradition at Judson Church in New York. (Twyla Tharp, part of that generation, presented some early work at Judson Church, too, but her work developed so differently that she is usually placed outside the category.) What they began to make was later labeled postmodern.

Between these generations came Merce Cunningham (1919-2009), whose centennial is being celebrated this year. Modernism had taken dance where it had not been before, yet Cunningham took it further.He separated dance from musical accompaniment; in an art otherwise shaped solely by the creators’ intentions, he dared to used chance procedures as part of his compositional process; he employed a technical rigor as austere as any other in dance, opening up new possibilities of spinal movement, spatial address and rhythm; and he created startling polarities of slowness and speed. All these created shock waves.

Several American dance critics began to review Cunningham’s work respectfully in the late 1950s and early ’60s, even when it perplexed them, which was most of the time. But John Martin, a longtime dance critic of The New York Times and champion of America’s modern dance tradition since the 1920s, never reviewed it at all — an omission that seemed pointed to many.

Cunningham’s status within modern dance began to change when he and his company taught and performed for four summers, 1958-61, at the American Dance Festival at Connecticut College. Even so, Gordon said in 1958, “Not only was Merce the lowest on the totem pole that summer, he was a joke to the serious modern dance people.” Paxton recalled that Limón, after watching a Cunningham piece, said, “I never saw anything like that before!” His tone, Paxton said, was not kind, but “he was too highfalutin to be more explicit.”

By contrast, the younger generation that would soon become the Judson experimentalists were immediately receptive. And they all took Cunningham’s class. Childs said, simply, of Cunningham, “He changed my life.”

“Modern dance at that time was about emotion,” she said. “You were being asked to be happy or sad. Merce’s teaching and his work was in line with the abstract art of that time. It completely changed the aesthetics and taste of dance.”

The Museum of Modern Art’s recent exhibition, “The Work Is Never Done: Judson Dance Theater,” brought revivals of Judson’s early offerings. Brown died in 2017, but in a series of interviews during the MoMA run, Childs, Hay, Gordon, Paxton and Rainer spoke of how Cunningham, their onetime teacher, opened up revelatory new possibilities in time and space.

Yvonne Rainer

Rainer defined the Judson generation with her “No” manifesto (“No to spectacle, No to virtuosity, No to transformations and magic and make-believe” and no to much more, in 1965) and her seminally anti-sensationalist, anti-phrasing dance “Trio A” (1966).

In an email, she wrote: “Merce always said that we were John’s children” — John being the composer John Cage — “and not his, but of course, since we all studied with Merce, his work inevitably rubbed off in some way, on some of us more than others, especially me, I think.

“Technically, I was using everything I learned in Cunningham and ballet classes, especially Merce’s idea of pitting one part of the body against another, while others were abandoning or temporarily putting aside their training and going in the opposite direction of pedestrian movement,” she said in the email. “So I would say that Merce’s work was at once inspirational, energizing and something to bang your head against.”

David Gordon

Gordon had begun watching Cunningham in New York in the mid-1950s, before others of his Judson generation. He recalled being introduced to Cunningham’s work by the less renowned but also influential choreographer James Waring, for whom he danced, as part of a wide artistic education. He also recalled watching the movie “Sunset Boulevard” and discovering the to-him unknown generation of renowned silent film actors Gloria Swanson, Erich von Stroheim and Buster Keaton. “Well, Merce was like that to me,” he said. “From the beginning, I behaved with Merce as if he were some mysterious traveler from another planet.”

“The thing I was most interested in — and I wouldn’t have been able to talk about philosophically — was that Merce rearranged the focal point of visual presentation,” he added. “I was looking at the way Renaissance art arranged space. But with Merce you could not guess where he intended you to look at it. And it was an adventure.”

Steve Paxton

Paxton recalled his discovery of Cunningham in the late ’50s, at the American Dance Festival: “I took Merce’s classes, and brilliant classes they were — in an enormous gymnasium. There was a feeling of tremendous respect and awe for him and the company.”

Paxton continued: “So I came to New York, and I thought about Cunningham a lot. I finally decided that, first of all, his technical approach and his choreographic approach didn’t have to be the same thing. About six months later, I accepted his choreographic. I was drawn to the company — I did fall for them — and the work. And that’s what pulled me through to finally accepting the chance procedures. They seemed so inhuman, so un-what I thought of as artistic at that time.”

Paxton saw Cunningham’s “Rune” (1959) many times — rehearsals as well as performances — in the summer of its premiere. “By the end,” he said, “I was relishing it rather than being surprised by it.”

He also singled out Cunningham’s “Suite for Five” (1956), in which he danced while with the Cunningham company. “Again, it posed a problem,” Paxton said. “I didn’t know how to give it full value. Not to elaborate in any way, to make it just purely classical. Can I do it? Am I doing it purely enough? I love that kind of puzzle.”

“Since I danced it, I’ve seen it,” he said. “And it’s just the purest thing. Sets of crystals just reflecting off of each other. It gave me a sense of great isolation. You’re in front of people, but you feel as if you’re moving in Antarctica. Just great austerity, great isolation. I just found it an experience of great depth.”

Lucinda Childs

Talking about Cunningham — “I never reacted against Merce’s work” — Childs was marvelously precise. “The Judson Group applied John Cage’s methods,” she said. “We were aware that the chief difference between him and Merce was about vocabulary. They weren’t our only influences: We studied with, and talked to, James Waring and Robert Dunn.”

“I had a scholarship at the Cunningham Studio,” she added. “And for a year I’d be the first there every morning, and would register everyone for class. So I got to know Merce then. The matter of vocabulary came up in an important conversation I had with him.”

“Merce did come to see Judson performances,” she said, “and told me he liked what he saw. But he said to me that the Judson way of dancing and his way of using a technique were at odds. He didn’t think I could be a Judson dancer and a Cunningham dancer. The way he said it was helpful. At that time, I very much wanted to be a Judson dancer.”

Deborah Hay

Deborah Hay recalled her first views of Cunningham and his company in 1961: “I came from a conventional dance background: I’d studied ballet, tap, toe, modern — conventional and wonderful. I had never seen anything like this! And I immediately became a devotee. It just made me so aware of everything I didn’t know. I didn’t even know how to look.”

Like Paxton, Hay danced in the Cunningham company, though only for a few months in its 1964 world tour.“His aesthetic was so compelling to me,” she said. “That clean slate! I was used to the rich, gorgeous texture of more conventional modern dance; and here was this other!”

But it was never in her mind to stay in the company. Hay said that while she admired the “quality of technique” that the great Cunningham dancers Carolyn Brown and Viola Farber had, “I knew I could never reach that level.”

“Really,” she added, “that became the deciding factor for me in my own subsequent choreography: never to use that kind of technical mastery, to explore other aspects of movement.”

Rebelling against the rebel

Inevitably, in the mid-1960s, Cunningham became in turn a figure for some of these rebels to move on from. Improvisation, generally antithetical to Cunningham dance, became appealing to Paxton. Virtuoso technical rigor became what Rainer, Brown, Gordon and Hay needed to avoid to some degree.

Whole areas of music omitted from the Cunningham-Cage experience, from Bach to Fanny Brice, became important to Gordon, Paxton and others. Musical responsiveness, exiled by Cunningham, gradually came in from the cold in their work.

Yet the bold achievements of these postmodern choreographers never made Cunningham’s modernism look conventional, accessible or old-fashioned. To some degree, their work was a move away from the precipice to which he had brought dance — and where his work remains: taxing, challenging, complex.

This article originally appeared in <a id="f00db3db-b05b-3f18-a0da-c9a1903e9311" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/10/arts/dance/merce-cunningham-judson-dance-theater.html">The New York Times</a>.

What Merce Cunningham taught the Judson dance rebels

In modern dance, even more than in most art genres, each generation of practitioners has rebelled against the one before. By 1960, a canon of top-tier American modern dance choreographers was widely acknowledged: Martha Graham, Doris Humphrey, José Limón.

“We’re parting the molecular structure of the air here,” Farrell said as the couple made their slow entrance toward each other in paths. “We’re coming together.”

This was the third and final day of rehearsals; Farrell had already gained the dancers’ trust. As the long, slow, high-drama pas de deux progressed, she drew Mearns’ attention to a repeated raising of the crook of the elbow: “We’re developing a motif here — it doesn’t occur in any other ballet.” After an hour with this couple, Farrell went on to work with Maria Kowroski and Tyler Angle on the same roles.

All this proceeded like straightforward dance business, but the occasion was momentous. Farrell, 73, was an exemplary leading light at City Ballet for decades before her retirement from the stage in 1989. These rehearsals were her first work with the company in 26 years.

Her return caps a new phase of City Ballet history. The company’s first 35 years (1948-1983) were shaped by Balanchine; the next 35 years were shaped by his successor, Peter Martins. Gradually, from the mid-1980s onward, Martins thinned his rehearsal staff of most figures whose Balanchine experience surpassed his own; even when rare ballets were revived that could have profited from their insights, he seldom invited such alumni back to work with the company. Since Martins’ resignation last year, the company has brought back a number of those former stars — Mikhail Baryshnikov, Patricia McBride, Mimi Paul, Edward Villella — to coach roles they either created or performed at length.

What makes Farrell so important? Her place in Balanchine history is central: She inspired him to make some of his most radically modernist works; opened up fresh torrents of romanticism in him; showed how old roles could be transformed. She combined grandeur, musicality, wit, fervor and acumen to phenomenal degrees.

“Diamonds,” one of the signature works Balanchine made for Farrell, displayed the heroic scale of her dancing; although the role has Imperial Russian qualities, she often seemed to be dancing it with unparalleled freedom in infinite space.Set to Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 3, it is usually shown as the closing ballet of the pure-dance trilogy “Jewels.” Jonathan Stafford, City Ballet’s recently appointed artistic director, first reached out to Farrell to coach “Diamonds” before the “Jewels” revival in fall 2018, when he was the company’s interim leader.

The summer timing didn’t work out, but with the company’s coming revival of “Diamonds,” Stafford tried again. “Maria and Sara have been dancing the lead role for years,” he said, “but they were both so keen to work with Suzanne if at all possible.”

After Farrell retired from dancing, she continued to work at City Ballet as a ballet master until 1993, when her contract was abruptly terminated. Since Farrell and Martins had had a renowned partnership as dancers, this caused a scandal. The New Yorker reported in 1993 that Martins was giving little work to Farrell. Just after The New Yorker article was published, she lost her job.

Although exiled from Balanchine’s company, Farrell never quit Balanchine. She established a company of her own, the Suzanne Farrell Ballet (2000-17) in Washington; staged Balanchine ballets from Moscow to London; and taught. Her reputation as a source of Balanchine wisdom never faded; while the roles she originated gained stature as pinnacles of ballet repertory, the reputation of her insights as a teacher and coach kept rising. As she said in a 2017 interview, “Balanchine is my life, my destiny.”

During Martins’ leadership tenure at City Ballet, many dance critics and Balanchine alumni noted that much about the company’s dancing had changed considerably, as had details of its versions of Balanchine choreography. Talk of Farrell’s being invited back began immediately after Martins’ departure.

A factor that helped to swing her return was a letter from Kowroski, the company’s senior principal, in the fall. Now in her 40s, she has been dancing Balanchine-Farrell roles since the 1990s — several for longer than Farrell herself danced them. She wrote to tell Farrell how much it would mean to her, now nearing the end of her own career, to have Farrell’s guidance in “Diamonds” and other historic roles.

The significance of having Farrell back in a City Ballet studio escaped no one there. “I’m learning so much,” Andrew Litton, the company’s music director, told Farrell in front of the dancers and other staff before discussing aspects of tempo and phrasing with her.

In an email a few days later, she said, “It was wonderful to live in the ‘world’ of ‘Diamonds’ for a few days,” in the studio where it “first came into being.”

She showed no nerves; she seemed the calmest person in the room. “I’m here for you,” she stressed to the dancers. She corrected details of floor patterns: Diamonds should keep recurring in terms of diagonals and edges. She also drew their attention to aspects of the music and the options these gave the dancers in how they accentuated them. And she corrected specific steps and configurations.

Although she has called herself a shy person who has had to learn in adult life to use the spoken word, her talk seemed, on this occasion as on others, effortlessly eloquent, moving between wit, poetry, analysis and metaphor. She observed to Mearns: “Mr. B. said, ‘Small things can be beautiful, too. The perfume of lilies of the valley can be beautiful, too.’” To Janzen she called out: “Don’t look like you’re trying to catch the swan! Don’t follow her — let her go. It’s not ‘Swan Lake’ at all.”

“Was that weird?” Kowroski asked about her own account of one passage in the finale. Farrell paused before saying softly, “It was uncommitted.”

When the rehearsal ended, she turned to me and, without skipping a beat, remarked: “We saw ‘The Cher Show’ last night. It was wonderful — have you seen it?”

While still in the studio, Mearns and Kowroski described their reactions to their rehearsals with Farrell during the previous days. For Mearns it had been “unreal”; Kowroski said she had left as if “in a dream.”

“Suzanne is the epitome of how I think Balanchine wanted his ballets danced,” Mearns said in an email a few days later, adding in another note: “Her intelligence and imagination help to free up mine and understand mine better.”

Kowroski, also by email, said that for her, at this stage in her career, working with Farrell felt like a “renaissance.”

“It is one thing to know someone from afar and know their body of work and their career and experience them like an artifact in a museum,” she wrote. “It is another to be in the room and have direct contact with the person. This is not to say I have not been in contact with many, many people directly connected to Balanchine before — but suddenly now I have this new treasure trove.”

Farrell, Mearns said, “really thought about what we’re doing — it’s like it’s ingrained in her.”

She added: “It’s part of her DNA. We’ve been taught to listen to the music just the one way — but she hears other things and gives us the freedom to open up to what we hear.”

Will Farrell be invited to make other contributions to City Ballet? In an email, Stafford said that Farrell’s knowledge of the Balanchine repertory was “of incomparable value” and that, while there were no immediate plans to have her back, he and the associate artistic director, Wendy Whelan, were “both hopeful that there will be many opportunities for Suzanne to return to our studios.”

Over the past 20 years, Farrell has specialized in staging Balanchine ballets for companies learning them from scratch. So what was it like to teach these dancers who arrived with many years’ experience in these roles?

“It has pluses and minuses,” she said. “They’ve got their old way so much in their body that it’s hard for them to adapt. But it’s within their realm. They’ve told me everything I’ve said makes complete sense.”

Kowroski recalled that Farrell began their first rehearsal by asking her how she saw the two dancers in their pas de deux. “I said I imagined them as king and queen,” she said. “But Suzanne said ‘No, there’s room for vulnerability here.’ That’s changed the whole meaning of it for me.”

This article originally appeared in <a id="611b5488-7a76-3eb8-a768-3dd64005f6b1" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/23/arts/dance/suzanne-farrell-new-york-city-ballet.html">The New York Times</a>.

Jewel from the past reflects a mentor's glory

NEW YORK — Suzanne Farrell, the sublime ballerina and creator of many lead roles for the choreographer George Balanchine, was back in the studio where he made many of his masterworks for New York City Ballet. On this mid-April afternoon, she was coaching Sara Mearns and Russell Janzen in Balanchine’s “Diamonds.”

The only men with whom Graham regularly collaborated were designers and composers: above all, composer Louis Horst and sculptor-designer Isamu Noguchi.

She introduced a male dancer, Erick Hawkins, to this troupe in 1937, causing dismay among several of her dancers, colleagues and devotees. But Graham was not to be stopped. Further complications soon arose: Hawkins, 15 years her junior, became her partner, her lover and, eventually, her husband. How is it for a woman with a younger man? What challenges are involved in marriage? How is it for an original female artist in a male-dominated society? These were now among her themes.

She added a second man to the company in 1939, Merce Cunningham. A series of her most remarkable works followed — notably “Deaths and Entrances” (1943), “Appalachian Spring” (1944) and “Cave of the Heart” (1946) — several with the Graham-Hawkins relationship at their center.

In just one exceptional work, “El Penitente” (1940), she worked with all four: Horst, Noguchi, Hawkins, Cunningham. “Penitente,” a 20-minute masterpiece of neo-primitivist dance drama at its most ambiguously layered, returns to the Martha Graham Dance Company’s repertory this year. Newly coached by Marni Thomas Wood (who joined the Graham troupe in 1958), it will be part of the company’s season at the Joyce Theater (April 2-14). Horst composed its sparse, often percussive, score, his last for Graham. Noguchi, without any of the sculptural décor that he often used to define stage space, designed the props.

The three dancers are touring players, arriving with a cart to enact scenes from the Bible; those scenes are filtered through the religious traditions of Native Americans of the Southwest, in which believers expiate sins by mortifying the flesh. You think you know how the Bible’s central stories go? Think again.

Hawkins danced the challenging title role, the penitent who flagellates himself to attain fuller belief and enlightenment. (Mikhail Baryshnikov sometimes performed this part in the late 1980s and early ‘90s.) Graham’s role as Mary combined the Virgin Mother, the Magdalene and the Mater Dolorosa who laments her dead son. In a dance with an apple, she also becomes Eve, tempting Adam with the fruit of the tree. Cunningham, his face mainly covered, played Christ, an often stiff figure whose gestures indicate blessing or rebuke; He was, Wood said in an email, “The avenging Angel, the forgiving Angel, the supporting Angel. (But we never called him God.)” There’s much to unpack here; but “Penitente” moves fast.

“It embodies a kind of innocence not often explored in the Graham rep,” Wood said of “El Penitente.” That innocence lies in its seemingly naïve, antiheroic simplicity of style. Wood learned it in 1964 from Hawkins and from the Graham veteran Pearl Lang, and then received further direction from Graham herself. In January, she taught it to the current company. “It requires investing a degree of naturalness that alternates with the dramatic (which can get ‘over done’ if you don’t watch out),” she said.

How do other Graham-Hawkins roles compare to those in “Penitente”? “In most other dances, their relationship represents a clearly dramatic build that brings a message explored and developed throughout the entire work,” Wood said. “But ‘Penitente’ creates the spark of quickly dared transitions in and out of a different situation every few minutes. Martha did talk about telling the various stories as if you were peeling them off a chapel wall and your audience needed to know the difference between sinners and saints. She and Erick clearly enjoyed going back and forth between both those extremes.”

It’s a tough piece, expressively knotty, marked by the intense and rapid repetition of certain steps (explosive small, rapid jumps in particular, taking off from both feet and landing on one). And its Horst score heightens the tough atmosphere.

Janet Eilber, artistic director of the Graham company since 2005, told me in January that Horst was opposed to strings in modern-dance music. In a recent email, she elaborated: Horst “told Martha that she should develop her ideas for the dance first, and the music should be added later,” as opposed to what choreographers like Isadora Duncan and St. Denis were doing by choosing the score first and drawing inspiration from it. “As part of this idea,” Eilber wrote, “he felt that strings were too emotionally instructive — telling the audience what to feel.”

Yet within a few years Graham would be commissioning scores with plentiful strings: “Appalachian Spring” (1944) is the most celebrated. The advent of Hawkins changed many aspects of Martha Graham dance theater: even its very sound.

This article originally appeared in <a id="838819bf-fe8f-452a-9d1d-abc9438ab07a" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/26/arts/dance/martha-graham-company-el-penitente.html">The New York Times</a>.

The layers of a Martha Graham masterpiece

When choreographer Martha Graham added men to her company, it struck many as a contradiction in terms. Her all-female troupe, founded in 1926, had powerfully demonstrated women’s independence.

<h1>In 1990, choreographer Paul Taylor sent “pseudo death-threats” (his darkly teasing term) — each one a work of art — to five of New York’s foremost dance critics. The one that Deborah Jowitt received was a striking text collage: “Who saw her die? ‘I,’ said the fly, ‘with my little eye, I saw her die.’ Anon.”</h1>

Jowitt, 85, still has it hanging on her wall. She showed it to me recently when I visited the Greenwich Village apartment that she and her husband have lived in since 1969. It hangs alongside vintage posters of 19th-century Romantic ballet, of Twyla Tharp, and of the radical 1970s improvisatory group Grand Union.

Jowitt, who has been reviewing since 1964, has probably vexed fewer choreographers than most other leading critics. She speaks of Taylor tenderly (“a genius”), and with gratitude. As the subject of her first review for The Village Voice (Nov. 9, 1967), he immediately wrote her with advice: She should have more confidence in her own views and not quote a senior critic to prop herself up.

The letter ends: “If you believe I have ‘sold out’ then you must say so. If you think I would trade fine work for ‘success’ you are just plain crazy and I will spank you the next time I see you. All best wishes to you and your typewriter from me and mine, Paul.”

Originally from California, Jowitt came to New York as a dancer and soon became a choreographer too. She has lived through great days for this city’s dance; she helped to create a golden era for its dance criticism.

From 1967 to 2011, she wrote a weekly column for the Voice that won her regard far beyond this city. As a writer she was — and remains — generous in her scrutiny of the new, open-minded in her embrace of any and every dance form, and an exemplar of a descriptive form of writing both searching and evocative. As for right now, “There just are too few people writing about dance these days,” she says.

This month the 14th Street Y honors her with a series of performances (March 21-24) titled a Deborah Jowitt Celebration. A wide range of New York dance artists will perform; a selection of old photographs of Jowitt will be shown.

The apartment is full of memories. She shows me the armchair where Tharp sat during an early-1970s interview, wryly watching Jowitt’s young son as he kept pushing a cup toward the edge of a table. In such a home, it’s natural for Jowitt to speak of her many dance enthusiasms, from the witty audacity of the postmodern experimentalists to the humanity of the 19th-century choreographer August Bournonville.

She's been writing about dance for 55 years, she's not done yet

These are edited excerpts from our wide-ranging discussion.

Q: You still write each week — a dance column for Arts Journal. What keeps you working?

A: Writing about dance is something that I’ve become addicted to. It’s like the wine I like to have with dinner. If I don’t have it, I miss it.

Q: How do you handle evaluating new choreography?

A: I try to feel like I’m open. My job is to see what it is. Obviously whether I’m elated or discouraged comes in — but I try not to deal with that while I’m seeing it — unless I see trouble, like something out of character.

I’m trying to immerse myself. If a thought like “Oh my God, it’s not as good as the piece he made last year” comes into my mind, that’s OK — but put it on one side. What my job is to see what the work is, or seems to be, saying. It’s a process.

Q: You started out wanting to be an actor —

A: That was my idea. It changed because I spent part of a year in London. I studied with Eileen Thorndike [Sybil Thorndike’s sister]: She liked my Juliet! But I didn’t know how to manage a career. I was too tall, or I was American; and my parents didn’t realize how little I knew.

And then a letter came from New York: Would I like to join this modern-dance company, run by Harriette Ann Gray? So I fell into dance because it was a last resort!

Q: Your dance career brought you into contact with some of the framers of American modern dance. Am I right that you danced at Jacob’s Pillow on the same program as “Miss Ruth” — the high-prestige modern-dance pioneer Ruth St. Denis?

A: Yes, in 1959 (I was Demeter in a piece by Pearl Lang) — and Alvin Ailey was on the program too. Before that, I took dance-composition class with Louis Horst [the influential musician, critic and choreographic theorist]. I did what I thought was the assignment, and then I ran around ecstatically in a circle. Louis, who never got up from the piano, just said “What was all that ‘Diana on the misty mountaintops'”? [laughing]

Q: How did writing enter your life?

A: Criticism began for me — while I was dancing and choreographing — with a radio program, “The Critical People,” for WBAI listener-sponsored radio, probably in 1964. Until then, I had only gone to see the dance that I thought I might like; and I didn’t have a lot of money. We had a trick for getting into the City Center and seeing the New York City Ballet without paying. And I really didn’t see that much.

But suddenly my responsibility was to go see something that otherwise I might not have seen. I was just getting an education while I was reviewing.

Q: At The Village Voice, were you encouraged to concentrate on small-scale new works, on big-league ballet, on the whole spread or what?

A: Nobody encouraged me to do anything! But Diane Fisher, who was the arts editor, after my first two pieces, said one thing: “Isn’t dance about movement?” “Yes.” “Well, why don’t you write about that?”

The next piece I wrote, I tried to say what the movement quality was. And Diane said “Fine. Keep going. That’s it.”

Q: And so that descriptive vein came to you early?

A: I think that [dance critic] Marcia Siegel and I, who were best friends, felt the same way. We wanted to bring whatever it was into life in some way. We didn’t want just to sit there and say, “This was bad, this was good.” And eventually a kind of style — a personal style — developed.

Q: The basic difficulty of describing movement remains.

A: Sometimes it’s so hard to describe that I almost give up. The last review I wrote — I can’t believe they did this, but ... A man got down on his knees, with his knees apart, and his feet flexed. And a woman stood on his heels. And he crawled with her, upright, and she was upright on his heels. And, right in the middle of trying to describe this, you think, “Maybe I just won’t bother!”

Q: You prefer to evoke than to evaluate?

A: Yes, but there’s a kind of description I don’t like: “She stepped onto her right leg and raised her left leg 90 degrees to the side. Then she switched her —”

Q: What of the opposite extreme in criticism, the rush to unjustified judgment?

A: I remember there was a really great Kabuki performance in New York. And somebody reviewed it in a sort of tired “I suppose it’s all very well if you like masks and things like that.” Really an ugly review. I didn’t want to be that kind of person or think that way about what I was seeing.

Q: Which choreographers or dance people most stretched your mind?

A: Trisha Brown, for one. Even when she was stumped, she was brilliant. And her mind just worked in different ways that I found so exciting and so admirable. Her mature work seemed just as delectable as her early pieces that I loved, like when she attached a rope to herself and walked down a pillar. Who else would do things like that?

Q: What was the adventure of following the experimental work that began in the 1960s?

A: The experimental people got me thinking about what is dance. When does it stop being dance? Or does it ever stop being dance? I just assumed, if people said it was dance, it was. So I would say that the dance educated me.

This article originally appeared in <a id="fc3a1dfc-625b-4980-aa9f-721eb512be35" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/12/arts/dance/deborah-jowitt-14th-street-y.html">The New York Times</a>.

Jowitt, who has been reviewing since 1964, has probably vexed fewer choreographers than most other leading critics. She speaks of Taylor tenderly (“a genius”), and with gratitude.

<h1>NEW YORK — Those who claim New York to be the world’s dance capital have few grounds better than the dance division of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts: the largest, most eclectic and most enterprising collection of dance materials anywhere. It regularly films dance productions in the city, preserving the present for the future; it aims to have a copy of every dance book ever published; it possesses treasures going back centuries. And its doors are open to the public as well as to specialist researchers.</h1>

For many dance devotees who live elsewhere, a visit to New York has to include time on the third floor of that library, located at Lincoln Center, to view its dance films. Visiting from Britain in the 1970s and ‘80s, I learned much about British dance that was unknown back home. Find a screen, enter the online catalog, click a link, and within a minute or two you can find yourself watching Merce Cunningham and his company performing “Antic Meet” in 1964.

Curious how Balanchine’s “Serenade” looked when it was danced in skirts ending at the knee? Here are clips of the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo’s 1940 and ’44 performances. Want to know how Margot Fonteyn looked in “Sleeping Beauty” when the Sadler’s Wells Ballet toured North America in the 1950s? Here she is, in all three acts.

Today the dance division contains the collections of Mikhail Baryshnikov, Merce Cunningham and Jerome Robbins, among many more. Its full name is the Jerome Robbins Dance Division, and with good reason: The choreographer donated a share of all the royalties of his “Fiddler on the Roof” to it. This year, the dance division celebrates its 75th anniversary.

I’ve been visiting it for 40 years; revelations occur there frequently. I made many more discoveries recently, when Linda Murray, the collection’s curator, gave me a tour of some of its rarer treasures, demonstrating its breadth and depth. Here are just a few selections.

Ballet shoes can be mere items of fan fetishism. The dance division, however, has a number of dance shoes that are historically telling.

Anna Pavlova’s feet were famously arched and tapered, yet her shoes have much less pronounced blocks for the toes than any modern ballerina would employ. She was the most world-renowned ballerina with the most world-renowned feet — but her shoes make us marvel at the strength those slender feet must have had. (One pair is thought to have been made in the 1920s, a decade when she traveled the globe.) They also have a remarkable amount of side stitching. We can only speculate what support this gave her.

The gold shoes worn by Serge Lifar for the premiere of George Balanchine’s “Apollo” (1928) accord with the intensely colorful costume originally given to the title character. (Today’s Apollos wear white or black, with ordinary dance slippers.)

Guglielmo Ebreo: ‘On the Practice or Art of Dancing’

Ballet has its roots in the Italian Renaissance, particularly in the work of the dancing masters of the 15th and 16th centuries who established principles of harmony in dance terms. The library’s copy of one of the earliest and most influential dance manuals, “De Pratica Seu Arte Tripudii” (“On the Practice or Art of Dancing”), is dated 1453: The author is Guglielmo Ebreo (William the Jew — “Ebreo” means Hebrew) from Pesaro; his treatise is seminal, an indication of Renaissance thought governing dance to give it both rules and harmony.

I’ve been reading secondhand about this sourcebook for years: I never expected to see an original copy or to find that it was handwritten. The language is at first impenetrable, but the word “Danza” (dance), at the top of one page, is the beginning that leads the scholar into its teachings.

Nijinsky’s Diary

In 1919, at 30, already legendary dancer-choreographer Vaslav Nijinsky (1889-1950) was found to have schizophrenia; he remained in one institution or another for the rest of his life. During the early days of his illness he wrote a remarkable diary that became celebrated when his wife, Romola, published a bowdlerized version of it in English in 1936. (In 1999, an unexpurgated version, edited by critic Joan Acocella, was published.) The original is now in the library.

Nijinsky’s mind wanders in many directions, but a recurring theme is God, with whom Nijinsky at times identifies. Nijinsky’s drawings show striking firmness of contour and force of color; several suggest, as his wife said he intended, eyes. In the context of his writings, it is easy to imagine them as the eye of God.

Mary Wigman’s American Diary

American dance critic Edwin Denby wrote in 1944 that modernism had reached its most radical extreme in the work of Nijinsky and his German contemporary, dancer-choreographer Mary Wigman (1886-1973). Martha Graham, only a few years younger, was inspired in the 1920s by what she heard of Wigman. When Wigman finally toured the United States in 1930, Graham burst into tears of relief when she found that her own work had not been a mere reproduction of Wigman’s after all.

For many dance devotees who live elsewhere, a visit to New York has to include time on the third floor of that library, located at Lincoln Center, to view its dance films.

Alastair Macaulay

Articles written by the author

This Rainforest Trills, Burbles and Booms

Julia Farron, Acclaimed Ballerina From Age 14, Is Dead at 96

A Long Look Back on a Ballet Maker

What Merce Cunningham taught the Judson dance rebels

Jewel from the past reflects a mentor's glory

The layers of a Martha Graham masterpiece

She's been writing about dance for 55 years, she's not done yet

Pavlova's shoes, Nijinsky's diary, and other dance treasures from the Public Library

Hail, Dance, and Farewell to the Critic's Life

4 New Cavaliers Go Full Throttle in 'The Nutcracker'

Review: E Pluribus 'Nutcracker,' as a British Critic Signs Off

The Ambiguous Sexism of Marius Petipa, Ballet's Towering Master

Spreading Joy With a Mastery of Multiple Styles

Review: The Inspired Poetry of Gandini Juggling

Review: At MoMA, Dances by Steve Paxton, an Original Too Rarely Seen

Review: At MoMA, Dances by Steve Paxton, an Original Too Rarely Seen