Word: dybbuks
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Gossip has always had a terrible reputation. A sin against charity, they said, quoting St. Paul. The odd, vivid term sometimes used for it was backbiting. The word suggested a sudden, predatory leap from behind-as if gossip's hairy maniacal dybbuk landed on the back of the victim's neck and sank its teeth into the spine, killing with vicious little calumnies: venoms and buzzes...
...Free (1944) and later joined forces on Broadway's evergreen West Side Story, were collaborating on a new work for the first time in nearly 17 years. In the season of The Exorcist, their theme had a certain built-in appeal: the ancient Jewish folk myth of the dybbuk, a wandering spirit of a dead person that invades and inhabits the body of a living man or woman. So what could go wrong...
...answer, alas, is quite a lot. Dybbuk, which was given its world premiere at Lincoln Center last week by the New York City Ballet, is a wan and murky evocation of the Hasidic legend that is all but drowned in a sea of pretentious metaphysical subfusc. The dybbuk story, a ghetto version of Romeo and Juliet given classic shape in Shloime Ansky's 1916 Yiddish play, involves the star-crossed lovers named Channon and Leah. Once their fathers had taken a vow that some day their children should wed. By the time boy meets girl, the vow has been...
...Their Dybbuk is a sequence of abstract, related dance episodes that imply but do not explicitly contain a narrative structure. All this would be fine had not the collaborators approached their task with such owlish solemnity. Sequences of the ballet are described in the program notes as if they were stages of a sacred liturgy rather than parts of an evening's entertainment. For instance, a rather ordinary set of variations for male dancers is summed up as "The Quest for Secret Powers." In this case, rite does not make might...
Composer Bernstein contends that there is a mystical relationship between the occult numerology of the kabbalah and his 50-minute score. In fact, the Dybbuk music is a bland, pseudo-modern pastiche-a murmuring of Mahler here, a shriek of Stravinsky there, stray leitmotifs of Hasidic melody to suggest ethnicity. Robbins' choreography matches the music, sometimes cliché for cliché. When the orchestra explodes in a burst of Yiddish song, dancers sway sinuously, as if at a ghetto wedding. There are great yaps of brass at Big Moments of high stress; on stage, the performers thrust splayed hands...