A Ballet Company’s Modern Adventure

Set your VCR. In 90% of PBS markets, the latest “Live From Lincoln Center” was shown last Thursday in prime time. But an overcrowded schedule led KCET to delay airing this three-hour cavalcade of contemporary ballet until 11 p.m. tonight. That’s right: Final curtain calls at nearly 2 a.m. on a weeknight--and no repeat.

Titled “New York City Ballet’s Diamond Project: Ten Years of New Choreography,” the telecast honors an ongoing series that has commissioned 40 works by 23 choreographers. Host Beverly Sills aptly calls the project an “adventure in ballet,” and NYCB director Peter Martins says it has become central to his company remaining “a creative institution.”

Significantly, three of the seven choreographers showcased in this compendium come from the world of modern dance, evident not only in their talent for bringing new energies and vocabularies to the ballet stage, but also in their ability to undermine cliches.

In “Red Angels” (1994, music by Richard Einhorn), for instance, the late Ulysses Dove alternates classical steps and torso undulations, combative partnerships and sudden emotional yieldings--plus supplying a fake-out ending that literally walks away from the standard ballet finale.

A male duet from Angelin Preljocaj’s “La Stravaganza” (1997, music by five composers) also flouts ballet norms, catching you off guard through its structure (unity leading to abrupt isolation) and its forceful, anything-but-classical movement language. The Tharpian opening to the excerpt from Kevin O’Day’s “Viola Alone” (1994, music by Paul Hindemith) similarly provides a contemporary edge, but O’Day quickly falls into the trap of throwing too many steps against the music.

Of the more conventional ballets, Lynne Taylor-Corbett’s “Chiaroscuro” (1994, music by Francesco Geminiani) creates an abstract life-cycle with Jock Soto at its center. The episodes may be too brief and the characters too undeveloped to realize her expressive agenda, but the attempt generates a greater stir than does Christopher Wheeldon’s formulaic “Mercurial Manoeuvres” (2000, music by Dmitri Shostakovich).

At this early stage in his career, Wheeldon proves fresh and original only in small-scale passages--breezy solos for Benjamin Millepied, for example, and sculptural duets for Soto and Jenifer Ringer. But director Kirk Browning can’t find a way to shoot the more problematic ensembles except from far away, so much of the performance looks ineffectual.

Like Wheeldon’s work, the excerpts from Richard Tanner’s music visualization “Ancient Airs and Dances” (1992, music by Ottorino Respighi) seem oddly familiar on a first viewing. But Tanner has the advantage of better camerawork and the presence of the telecast’s major discovery: Janie Taylor.

Here and in Martins’ “Jeu de Cartes” (1992, music by Igor Stravinsky), Taylor triumphs over faceless choreography with technical brilliance and a way of personalizing her steps that make every passage memorable. “Cartes” also features accomplished dancing by Millepied, Damian Woetzel and Nikolaj Hubbe, but it’s Taylor’s game whenever she’s in view.

Martins fields an equally powerhouse cast for excerpts from his stale “Them Twos” (1999, music by Wynton Marsalis), but here it’s the charismatic Hubbe in the sexless “Sex” duet and the ghostlike Darci Kistler in “Loss” who remind you of how great a company New York City Ballet remains under his directorship.

Several times during the evening, Sills speaks of Martins in the same breath as choreographers George Balanchine and Jerome Robbins, and this ridiculous puffery masks his genuine achievements in the era following the deaths of those two masters. Her overstatement is seconded by the air time Martins gets here, not only for his choreography (two of eight pieces), but also for his excessive prominence in the taped intermission features.

The best documentary segment comes at the end of the second intermission, almost as an afterthought. But in explaining how new works evolve and the relationship between a choreographer’s vision and the dancers’ individual strengths and weaknesses, it proves far more revealing and germane than all the Martins promos that precede it.

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“Live From Lincoln Center” airs at 11 tonight on KCET-TV.