An Expense of Sprirt

By John T. Elson

An Expense of Spirit

Imagine dinner at a grand luxe restaurant. The satiny table linen is blindingly white, the chinaware and Baccarat crystal positively glisten, the maitre d' and waiters are impeccably dressed. The diners sit down, admire the pleasing surroundings, and then comes the piece de resistance: a greasy hamburger, accompanied by limp French fries and a fizzy concoction dosed with cyclamates. That, roughly, was what it was like at an eagerly anticipated dance event: the gala opening last week of the revitalized Harkness Ballet at the palatial new Harkness Theater near Manhattan's Lincoln Center.

Both the theater and the company are products of the lavish if uncertain tastes of ballet's reigning Lady Bountiful, Rebekah Harkness, 59. A Standard Oil heiress (courtesy of her late second husband), Mrs. Harkness has had a somewhat tempestuous career as a patron of the arts. Two earlier companies she sponsored broke up in complicated spats involving their artistic directors. Presumably to avoid any recurrence of these aesthetic quarrels, Mrs. Harkness is artistic director as well as proprietor of the present company, most of whose 39 dancers are graduates of her highly regarded school of dance.

To display their talents, she spent $5 million to transform an abandoned movie palace into the first U.S. theater designed specifically for dance. What was once the grubby RKO Colonial is now an intimate, lavishly appointed house with a decor of powder blue (Mrs. Harkness's favorite color), black marble floors, lots of mirrors, chandeliers and easily filchable gold-plated faucets in the rest rooms. The disconcertingly dominant feature of the theater, alas, is a campy, Daliesque mural by Spanish Painter Enrique Senis-Oliver called Homage to Terpsichore, which all but swallows the proscenium. Immortalized in an agonized, thrusting morass of naked dancers is a chastely gowned portrait of Mrs. Harkness, making obeisance to the goddess of dance. The painting almost glows in the dark, which means that the audience can still glimpse undraped breasts and genitals even during a performance.

Lithe Bodies. Considering what the dancers were doing on stage at the premiere, the mural did, at moments, serve as a kind of bas-relief. The youthful (average age: 21) Harkness troupers have splendidly lithe bodies for ballet. They are uniformly well schooled and delight in showing off, even flaunting, their imposing technique. Unfortunately, the choreography they are called upon to perform is of a piece with Senor Senis-Oliver's mural: epicene, self-indulgent and fundamentally empty.

Any ballet with the word ceremony in the title is likely to involve some kind of sexual initiation cum tribal rite. Nor man Walker's Ceremonials -- based on a surprisingly tame and even melodious score by Dissonant Composer Alberto Ginastera--is true to type. It appears to be set in Brazil, or perhaps Inca-era Peru. The curtain rises to disclose a corps of dancers entwined in suggestively statuesque poses. Later, most of the couples writhe languidly on the floor in what might generously be regarded as orgasmic abandon. According to one associate of the company, Ceremonials is jokingly referred to backstage as Raw Sex. Overdone might be a better adjective.

Steamy Tale. Another tumid exercise in staged libidinousness is Sebastian, by the company's resident choreographer, Vincente Nebrada. This is a steamy little tale of a Moorish slave in 17th century Venice who loves a courtesan who loves his owner-prince, and who is eventually skewered to death by the prince's evil sisters in the Venetian equivalent to a voodoo ceremony. As the luckless, lovelorn slave, an expressive young dancer named Christopher Aponte is called upon to perform a sensuous duet with the courtesan's red cloak, leaving the unfortunate impression that he is secretly a cloth fetishist.

Ballet audiences being what they are, bravura showpieces for male dancers normally bring down the house. The audience response to Nebrada's Percussion for Six-Men seemed a trifle restrained, perhaps because this abstract exercise in display of technique called upon the dancers to go about their leaping trickery with more than a touch too much of preening narcissism. A case in point: one soloist performs a legato variation delicately poised on tippytoe. The display might have been aesthetically more attractive had he been a girl, or had the performance taken place at the Continental Baths.

By far the best piece of the evening was Todd Bolender's Souvenirs, a spoof of pre-World War I manners, mores and dress, with a setting that suggested a hotel in a Feydeau comedy. There is a small army of standard farce characters, including a jealous husband, a languid vamp, a preening gigolo. Weighed down with a pound or so of mascara, Manola Asensio was a wonderfully deadpan, sultry vamp, but the farce-- predictable bedroom mix-ups, a boop-a-doop beachside romp--is forced.

Like the Wagnerian theater in Bayreuth that Mad King Ludwig paid for, Mrs. Harkness's monument may prove to be a lasting and useful home for the lively arts. Some of her talented dancers will surely be exposed some day to more challenging choreography. Mean while, one can only sorrow that so much love, money and care was expended to such little result. such little result.

John T. Elsan

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