National Dance Company: an important night

The energy and effort of the entire staff of the National Dance Company (CND) in offering, with passion (and some inconsistencies) the best of itself, is appreciated. And that being in the middle of a schismatic climate that is even disturbing. It was not a perfect night (in ballet, talking about perfection is as chimerical as it is stupid: one thing is the always essential desire for corrective improvement and another is the objective of the ideal show) but it was sought - and that was in the collective will - to get out of the theater with some hope, that the good taste that these three choreographies left on an important night was that the ensemble had emerged from previous dark and unproductive stages, that the years of Joaquín de Luz were beginning to reap some seasonal fruit, and that , facing the immediate future, a line of work was modeled where a prismatic and careful task was contemplated. In ballet, rushing only leads to slipping and miracles simply do not exist. If there really is a pedagogy of pain in ballet, scholastic use has been made of it here; Its assumption goes from routine procedure to moral purpose.

Miscellaneous (or combined) programs are difficult to create that are balanced and give the public an overview of choral forms, whether thematic or stylistic; They may not be a single, vertical line, but rather the braiding of several. In this aspect, Joaquín de Luz has shown to do very well, knowing the repertoire - although in his case with a certain and logical leaning towards the North American School where he matured his personality and criteria - and balancing it. The program that we see these days is the last that the Madrid native will make at the head of the CND, after the abrupt and until today publicly unjustified decision, very authoritarian in the "

ancien regime

" style, not to renew his contract as artistic director, with an established three-year work permit that, when denied, limits their work and project fulfillment. Nobody sensible and who loves ballet can put themselves in profile with this panorama and perspectives.

The CND had straightened out and improved significantly, with many technical and artistic evidence; It was neither a leading company nor was it looking for any other shine than to fulfill its role and tasks. Now a multitude of cruel unknowns are opening up. Speculation takes the place of analysis and that is always bad for everyone. The specter of burying Spanish academic ballet forever and converting the old production unit into a contemporary laboratory is today on the lips of many and is becoming a sword of Damocles over the artists, those who last night boldly demonstrated what they want to do about the scene: it was danced with enthusiasm and verve.

We see the final product of a ballet and most of the time we don't even ask ourselves how it got to that end, where many times the accident, the circumstantial mechanics and even the weather, have played a decisive role.

The young man and death

does not escape this and is more than documented and written with different versions of the events that occurred on the stage of the Champs-Elysées Theater in post-war times where there is nothing trivial, from the controversial yellow color from the dancer's first costume to the nocturnal and urban landscape (roofs of Paris) that is seen only as a background in the final minutes of the work [in Madrid there have been no curtains but only some of the basic corporeal elements of the set; is a synthesized option that is supported].

To begin with, let's recap on the fact that the ballet was created based on jazz percussion sequences suggested by Petit himself (whose first role at the age of 19 in 1943 had been Carmelo in

El

amor brujo

in Serge Lifar's version for the Paris Opera) and only very shortly before the premiere was resorted to the orchestral arrangement of the music of Bach's

Passacaglia in C minor

[BWV 582] that Respighi had made in 1901 as a school exercise when he was only 21 years old (Stokowski and Ormandy also made their symphonic versions of the same Bachian original).

There was much discussion in that testing ground with a librettist Jean Cocteau inspired by a real case (the suicide of a young painter friend of his); More than improvisation, let's talk about an intense process. Bach-Respighi suggest here a tense accompanying background, but without too much synchronic fabric (it is the influence of cinema). The coexistence of still surreal traces with the manifest discordance of existentialist thought, locks the fantastic action in the naturalistic environment of the degraded mansard, that lair for the protagonist's vital anguish that ends up being a sepulchral bed: love-lover and death-liberation in a same figure. In an interview with this newspaper when the premiere of

Puss in Boots

(Le chat botté, Paris, 1985) Petit said that this predilection for scenes with the dead perhaps came from his internalization of the plot of

El amor brujo

, experienced five years before. from

Le jeune homme…

(and a year before, in 1945, he had made

Guernica

with designs by Picasso, another ballet of death and destruction emerging from the intimate to the social).

This ballet is today a living and still influential modern classic that all dancers of merit aspire to embroider. The couple at the Parisian premiere were almost dating at the time: Nathalie Philippart (an all-rounder whose best classic role was

La Sylphide

) and Jean Babilée, a brave young bourgeois man who already dreamed of leather jackets, motorcycles and racing cars). They devastated. There was scandal over the explicit friction (which was repeated in New York in 1952 when the piece entered the repertoire of the American Ballet Theatre). The Cuban Yanier Gómez and the American Yaman Kelemet premiered on the Channel; It was the night of their debut and they were greatly applauded. Both deployed technical reading efficiently and fought with those dramatic profiles that are already highly consecrated and even mythologized today.

The evening began with Peck's choreography, an exultant work where there is much more substance than the inveterate catchphrase of “American speed”; the plastic derives from the refined gray metropolitan luxury (so

upper class

), capable of creating its own elective distance. Reflexive articulation? It's a posibility. Dynamics at the service of geometry or vice versa? Well too. Ballet, as a genre and in general, lacks its own aesthetic analysis apparatus, but we must strive to go beyond the descriptive. Crafts like Peck's need that seriousness of inquiry.

The program closed with the other premiere, Bigonzetti's work that is always received with enthusiasm by the public. Like other choreographies by the Italian, it moves fluidly from effect to sensationalism; It has a quarter of an hour left and the texture is intense, but flattened by the soundtrack. The dancers through ensembles, solos, pas de deux and other variations, made it more bearable within their limits. There is a certain group jocularity, but at the same time, the pantomimes cite human outbursts and dramas that pulse in the perfume of music with ancestral roots. The audience that filled the theater was receptive and applauded everyone long and warmly.

National Dance Company

Heatscape

: Justin Peck / B. Martinu;

Le jeunne homme et la mort

: Roland Petit / JS Bach – O. Respighi /

Cantata

: Mauro Bigonzetti / Assurd and others. Artistic director: Joaquín de Luz. Red Room. Canal Theaters. Until April 21. 

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