Savvy dance fans in New York City keep their eyes peeled for companies visiting from around the country. These troupes--they used to be called regional companies--often bring repertory rarities that otherwise wouldn't be seen in the world's dance capital.
North Carolina Dance Theater (NCDT) is one of those companies that lovers of good dancing watch for. Last fall, the medium-sized (seventeen dancers) troupe, which some critics have called the very model of a contemporary repertory company, returned to New York for a week's engagement at the Joyce Theater. Surprisingly, the nine ballets it presented there, all New York premieres, were bland offerings compared with the repertoire it had brought on earlier visits. In 1986, for example, the company presented Elisa Monte's ferocious White Dragon and Helgi Tomasson's Giuliani: Variations on a Theme--a fleet, formal work originally choreographed for the school of American Ballet--on the same evening.
Odd Planning
It was something of a shock, then, to find so many works at the Joyce by middling choreographers such as Vicente Nebrada and Mauricio Wainrot, and an entire program by the company's artistic director, Salvatore Aiello, who is known as a serviceable, not distinguished, dancemaker. Repertory is important in this city. Although the personable dancers of NCDT have always made a good impression, New Yorkers, accustomed as they are to watching some of the world's finest dancers, have, in effect, seen their like before. Even with the draw of Mel A. Tomlinson, a veteran of the Dance Theatre of Harlem and New York City Ballet who has returned to his native North Carolina and joined NCDT, the New York season seemed oddly planned.
When asked to comment, Aiello is refreshingly candid about why this was the case: "We went through an enormous financial crisis last year," he says. "That financial crisis led to me having to keep producing [ballets], because there was no one else to do it. So I whipped out a few ballets."
So he did. And so North Carolina Dance Theater was seen at something of a disadvantage during its season at the Joyce. Although the repertory seemed designed to show off the technical versatility that audiences have such an appetite for, a certain sameness in several of the works became apparent. It was disheartening to learn from Aiello that the selections for the Joyce season are representative of the works that the company will be presenting all the way from Florence, Alabama, to Moses Lake, Washington, during its current cross-country tour.
For a company that promotes the concept of "theater" in its very name and that has always been willing to risk the new and therefore possibly controversial, NCDT seems, during this season, to be promoting a comparatively tame repertoire. Semi-abstract works set to "important" music--ballets such as Nebrada's La Mer (danced to Debussy's work of the same name), Susan McKee-McCullough's Renderings (Prokofiev's Piano Concerto No. 1 in the D-flat Major), even Aiello's own Notturno (Schubert's Nocturne in E-flat)--don't do the dancers any harm, but they don't go very far in challenging the artists, either. This season's repertoire is an artistic decision to play it safe.
Does it matter? No doubt this repertoire will
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