Personal Matters : The New Yorker

Albert Evans’s “Broken Promise,” to a score by Mathew Fuerst, a doctoral student at Juilliard, was the least “finished” of the new works. The piece is what Evans did last year at the New York Choreographic Institute, N.Y.C.B.’s ballet-making workshop, and you can see in it simple beginner’s problems, of the how-do-we-get-from-here-to-there variety. But, like Liang’s piece, it was very interesting for its cross-type casting—in this case, of Ashley Bouder. Bouder is City Ballet’s Miss Can-Do. Every company has one: the young woman who can turn more turns, stop on more dimes, than anyone else. Like others of the type, Bouder often seems too caught up in correctness. Every step is smack on the beat; every move is made with the same force: bang, bang, bang. I don’t mean to sniff at Bouder’s technical expertise. That quality is no longer widespread at N.Y.C.B., and her attention to it is most welcome. But now she needs to go to a new place: phrasing, pacing, nuance—adulthood, as it were. And that is the opportunity that Evans gave her in “Broken Promise,” by putting her in an adagio role, with a big, capable partner, Stephen Hanna. It was quite a surprise to see that eager, muscly little torso of hers accommodate itself to long, sostenuto phrases. Evans tactfully gave her the chance to do some of her regular stuff—front kicks so high that she seemed to smack her face, a flying leap onto Hanna’s chest, where she landed with an audible thud (Hanna should get a bonus)—but the main fact of this piece was that Bouder, in a low-cut leotard, did a dance full of long lifts and arabesques, things she could not have done by herself. That is, she was eroticized and glamorized. At the end, she sat down on the floor with Hanna and cuddled with him companionably, as if to say, “Thanks, I needed you.”

via www.newyorker.com