Goethe once wrote this: “Music is liquid architecture; architecture is frozen music.” For Havelock Ellis—one of the writers on the arts that Martha Graham and Doris Humphrey found inspiring early in the twentieth century—dance and architecture were the sources on which the visual arts were built. Watching one of American Ballet Theatre’s Lincoln Center programs, this dance-music-architecture trifecta chased around in my mind.
This was the program that opened with a revival of Twyla Tharp’s The Brahms-Haydn Variations (2000), continued with the world premiere of Jessica Lang’s Her Notes, and ended with ABT’s premiere of Benjamin Millepied’s Daphnis and Chloe (created for the Paris Opera Ballet in 2014).
The architecture analogy is weakest in regard to Tharp’s ballet, as staged for ABT by Susan Jones, maybe because no one stays still for long, and building-block architecture is avoided. Want an analogy? Try in-process popcorn. When, in canon, men hoist leaping women high, the image of kernels hitting a hot skillet is not entirely untoward. To the orchestral version of Johannes Brahms’s Variations on a Theme by Haydn, waves of people rush onto the stage, rush off again; symmetrical formations yield to asymmetrical ones, sometimes in surprising ways. Classicism is both honored and tweaked. Gallant classical-ballet manners prevail, but people may enter unannounced in the middle of someone else’s major moment and start their own little fire of dancing. There are often people in the background working out their relationship to Haydn, while others prefer the limelight. No tutus, of course, elegantly cut outfits by Santo Loquasto in shades of white, cream, and beige.
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