American Ballet Theatre
American Ballet Theatre gave a sterling performance of German choreographer Kurt Jooss’ 1932 masterpiece, The Green Table, which received its much anticipated company première at City Center in October. The work, staged by Jooss’ daughter Anna Markard, would be welcome in the repertoire at any time, but as U.S. casualties mount in Iraq, it takes on topical force.
The Green Table opens with ten grotesquely masked diplomats in white tie and tails. They bob and bow, pace and posture to a lilting, tango rhythm that underscores their unctuous civility. But aggression is never far from the surface. The men shake their fists and lunge belligerently at one another across a green baize conference table. The scene ends when ten pistols emerge from ten trouser pockets: Shots ring out; the war is on.
Jooss came of age at the close of World War I, the bloodiest conflict Europe had known. It left him with a deeply cynical view of war and made him skeptical of man’s ability to keep the peace: The Green Table ends exactly as it began, with those hypocritical statesmen and their deadly pistols.
The choreographer subtitled his ballet “A Dance of Death in Eight Scenes,” and Death, the ballet’s central character, opens the second section. Costumed in thigh-skimming black shorts attached to the torso by a rib cage–like web of straps, Death has a fierce, weighty movement style.
Soloist David Hallberg imbued the role with menace and virility. He engraved each step with icy clarity. When he exited in a slow, stiff walk, his legs sliced across the space with a violence that reverberated through his long thighs. He lingered over the movements, making them disconcertingly sensual. When the tall dancer marched in place behind three hapless soldiers, his arms jerking in the air, he evoked an evil puppeteer or a diabolic conductor marking the beat of Fritz Cohen’s Weimar-inflected piano score.
Confident recruits, a stricken mother, tearful sweethearts—all succumb to this Grim Reaper, whose face is hideously made up in a German Expressionist manner. In a brothel, Death also forces himself on the Young Girl, danced with throat-catching desperation by Jennifer Alexander. There was a grisly tenderness to the way Hallberg bent over his prone victim for a lingering kiss that skimmed the full length of her lifeless figure.
Jooss considered the close alliance of movement, music, costumes and lighting essential to the impact of his dance-dramas. He approached dancemaking with the questioning spirit of the early moderns, and in The Green Table the result was a ballet of unusually concentrated narrative power.
The work is also a small jewel of close-knit ensemble dancing. Hallberg had the star part, but the 15 other members of the cast anchored the ballet with a moving dramatic intensity of their own. The première was a high point in a strong ABT season that also included revivals of Antony Tudor’s Dark Elegies and George Balanchine’s Apollo.
Nicole Dekle Collins is a freelance arts writer who specializes in dance.
