On the gleaming dance floor of the Kansas City Ballet s downtown studio, something terrible has happened. A dozen dancers, depicting the villagers of Antony Tudor s 1937 Dark Elegies, are mourning the loss of their children from some unnamed calamity. The rehearsal is fierce, intense.
The dancers expressions strained. On a clangorous, out-of-tune piano, music director Ramona Pansegrau pounds out Gustav Mahler s ghastly Songs on the Death of Children. Something has to break the tension.
Suddenly Paris Wilcox turns too sharply and collides with a crouching dance partner. Now we know why there are so many dead bodies littering the path to your premiere, choreographer Donald Mahler says to Wilcox. Dancers and crew burst into laughter.
The repartee is just what s needed. ( It s not a toothpaste tube; you can t squeeze somebody out of the circle, Mahler says on another occasion. He s no relation to the composer.
) The dancers struggle with Tudor s idiom, not because it s technically showy, but because the raw emotional content touches nerves. Mahler recalled a dancer in another company crying during a rehearsal of a Tudor piece. Tudor moves the dancers and the audience in a deep way, said the septuagenarian former Tudor dancer.
It s like psychoanalysis. Even a simple movement can go terribly wrong if it isn t properly coached, said ballet master James Jordan, who, like Mahler, is a designated stager of Tudor s works for the St. Louis-based Antony Tudor Trust.
At today s rehearsal, for example, one little scissors-hop with arms chopping up and down like a soldier s keeps looking like a vaudeville lick. Mahler, steeped in the choreographer s style, has the job of making it look like Tudor. Dark Elegies receives its local premiere this week on the opening performances of the Ballet s 50th-anniversary season, staged by Mahler and featuring baritone Robert Gibby Brand and the Kansas City Symphony Ballet Orchestra.
The piece is a masterful anomaly in the output of a choreographer who many feel hasn t received his due in American dance. Tudor is an enigma, someone whose work never looks perfect. And he produced few works because he worked very slowly, Mahler said.
His pieces are pure inspiration. He could sit for days and not do anything. The British-born Tudor, whose birth centennial the world celebrates in 2008, was one of the first ballet choreographers to dispense with tutus.
That gave his work a modern-dance feel despite its classical ballet grounding. He began as a dancer with Ballet Rambert in London, choreographing Dark Elegies and Lilac Garden, before arriving in New York in 1940 as resident choreographer with Ballet Theater (later American Ballet Theatre). He choreographed extensively in the United States and later taught at the Metropolitan Opera Ballet School, the Juilliard School and the University of California-Irvine.
Tudor became a foil to Balanchine. But unlike his Russian counterpart he had no company of his own to foster his works. Not until the Tudor Trust was established in 1977 was there a commitment to preserving them.
Tudor died in 1987. Interest in him continues to grow, and works like Dark Elegies are found in the repertoires of many major companies. Still, why would anybody create an elegy to dead children?
News RSS