Word: ballets
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...ballet based on a spot commercial sounds about as inviting as St. Vitus's Dance. Except if it was choreographed by George Balanchine, a genius who can design, with seemingly equal facility, enduring masterpieces or tremendous trifles. His latest work, which was given its world premiere by the New York City Ballet last week, is 22 minutes of slight but effervescent foolery. The title is the giveaway: PAMTGG (pronounced Pam-te-guh-guh) stands for "Pan Am Makes the Going Great...
Composer Kellaway's arch, nervous score does nothing to hide the banality of the original theme, and Balanchine's ensemble choreography is often surprisingly distracted and cluttered. On the other hand, Jo Mielziner's nighttime airline setting is one of the City Ballet's best, and the fanciful costumes by Irene Sharaff might give Braniff a few good ideas. For all its frivolity, PAMTGG does display, once more, Balanchine's uncanny skill at catching the aesthetic potential in America's mass culture and at fusing pop dance with ballet. Slightly dated in its style...
...ballet begins in darkness. A pianist (Gordon Beelzner) sounds the delicate, unobtrusive theme upon which Bach built his variations. Onstage, as the curtain rises, are a couple (Michael Steele and Renee Estópinal) in period attire: he in black frock coat and breeches, she in a white bell-shaped dress. Their movements together are as much mime as dance: a conversation of courtly gestures, expressed more by arm and hand than by the deceptively easy steps that subtly accent Bach's limpid line...
Almost inevitably, The Goldberg Variations invites comparison with Robbins' Dances at a Gathering, another lengthy "pure" ballet that was set to some piano pieces by Chopin. Robbins himself refuses to play the game. "I am not in a contest with anything," he says, and insists that it was only by chance that his last two major ballets were both inspired by keyboard works. Clearly, though, Dances is in every sense a Romantic work-open, playful, exuberant, instantly approachable. Variations is far more formal and classic, and far more demanding as well...
...first heard her play the Variations," he says, "that it was a journey, a trip, that it took you in a tremendous arc through a whole cycle of life and then, as it were, back to the beginning." The words apply not only to the music, but to the ballet that Robbins created...