A Festival of Opportunities

By Martha Duffy

The opening night of New York City Ballet's 40th anniversary last week made for a fine old beano. For one thing, it inaugurated the company's ambitious American Music Festival, three weeks of patriotic programming involving 21 new ballets, five specially commissioned scores, with a total of 41 U.S. composers featured. For another, the evening had a real family feeling that bound the company and its intensely loyal following. Both Suzanne Farrell and Patricia McBride, the troupe's senior ballerinas, appeared in special numbers, and both danced with a radiance and glamour that brought the audience to its feet.

Onstage, City Ballet justified both the sentiment and the celebration. Jerome Robbins' brilliant Glass Pieces seemed as sleek as it did at its premiere five years ago. McBride swept through George Balanchine's The Man I Love looking half her 45 years. Company Director Peter Martins came out of retirement to honor his ideal partner, Suzanne Farrell, 42, who had a new plastic hip, performing with her in his version of Sophisticated Lady, set to the Duke Ellington song. The finale, danced like fireworks by Kyra Nichols, came from Balanchine's ebullient Stars and Stripes. It was just like old times, and everyone wanted to savor the nostalgia.

Festivals, while usually messy and exhausting, galvanize a troupe's creative forces and enhance its public image (not to mention its fund raising) by presenting several new works or perhaps some rarities. N.Y.C.B. excels in this wily art. In the past two decades, the late Balanchine conjured up two substantial homages to Stravinsky (1972, 1982) and one each to Ravel (1975) and Tchaikovsky (1981).

Now, after five years of guiding the company, Martins has cast himself in the festival spotlight. In choreographing eight new ballets in a brief time, he is taking on his old mentor's role by nourishing his troupe. But Mr. B. was drawn by artistic curiosity to explore the dance possibilities in a single composer. In choosing an eclectic approach, Martins has struck out on his own.

He is quick to point out that, as a Dane, he brings a European view to his work. "To me America is the most eclectic country in the world," he says. He carried his quest for variety into his choice of outside choreographers: two of them -- Paul Taylor and Lar Lubovitch -- are modernists who shun pointe work. Although she has choreographed some ballet, Laura Dean is a modernist -- or post-modernist. Martins' decision is controversial; N.Y.C.B. dancers can dance decently barefoot, but why not display them in what they do best? There are some much noted omissions from the roster, including such innovators as Twyla Tharp and Mark Morris, who have put the vocabulary of classical dance to new uses, not always successfully but with purpose and bite. The festival also misses the participation of Martins' co-director Jerome Robbins, a master American choreographer. Robbins bowed out because he is hard at work on a major Broadway production -- a retrospective of highlights from his many musicals -- for next fall.

After the first performances, there was no clear verdict on the wisdom of Martins' strategies, but the early premieres were disappointing. Lubovitch's seemed an almost total miscalculation. He picked George Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue, a familiar piece that has resisted choreography over the years (Balanchine himself tried it and gave up). Lubovitch handled it in his customary bubble-airy style, with too many empty flourishes. Nor did the relentlessly blue costumes do anything to freshen things. Peter Frame and especially the beautiful Lourdes Lopez pranced through the large, washy movements with verve, but Rhapsody seems like a work that Lubovitch might take home to his own company.

Five, by former N.Y.C.B. Principal Dancer Jean-Pierre Bonnefoux, at least produced a strong score, a craggy, dissonant piece by Charles Wuorinen that managed to overwhelm the conventional, agreeable steps. Five works well enough as fill-in festival fare but seems too insubstantial to stay in the repertory.

The oddest new work so far is Tanzspiel, the first serious Martins premiere, set to a moody score by Ellen Taaffe Zwilich. At least no one can accuse the choreographer of mindless flag-waving in his choice of theme. The ballet was suggested by a recent, highly publicized New York City criminal case, in which a young man named Robert Chambers killed his partner during a violent sexual engagement in Central Park. Here the odious dance to death is enacted almost ritualistically, with Lindsay Fischer, a new principal, playing the killer with the utmost blank dissociation.

Poor Kyra Nichols! One of the company's true virtuosos, she is cast by Martins as a sort of erotic nag, importuning her lover and inviting rage. (Three years ago, Martins gave her a similar role in Poulenc Sonata.) The ballet may quietly signal the end of an era. Balanchine thought that "ballet is woman," and he glorified women. In the parts he creates for Nichols, as well as Heather Watts, Martins makes it plain that he has far more complicated reactions.

There is much more to come: major entries by Taylor, Dean, William Forsythe and Eliot Feld. Martins has only begun to reveal what he has on his mind. The festival also opens up opportunities for company members: Ib Anderson, Bart Cook, Robert LaFosse and Miriam Mahdaviani will all try their choreographic hand. Once again, the family is served; the hope is that the future lies somewhere among its members.

With reporting by Nancy Newman/New York