It takes hours daily of blind instinctive moving and fumbling to find the revealing gesture, and the process goes on for weeks before I am ready to start composing… . This is the kernel, the nucleus of the dance. All the design develops from this.
—Agnes de Mille,
Dance to the Piper

To be a dancer in America in the Thirties and Forties—the decades when Martha Graham was moving earth with her flexed foot, Eugene Loring was playing Cowboys and Indians to Copland, Antony Tudor was pulling G-force expressionism from a classicism in stays, Jerome Robbins was coining character with a jukebox genius for vernacular, and George Balanchine was taking dictation from God (lightning speed, cat-paw quiet) and a footnote from Fred Astaire (that swingy, selfless style)—to dance was a vocation. No one has written better about the calling than Agnes de Mille, herself a groundbreaking choreographer in those landmark years. De Mille’s books are gems of eyewitness reporting and insight, and especially radiant are the discussions she had with Graham, a best friend and very much the big sister. Their conversations were always about the search, the struggle, the don’t compromise, the divine, even if it was sometimes what Graham called “divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching …” Onward, Choreographic Soldiers.

“Quickening” was another Graham word, as in “a vitality, a life-force, an energy, a quickening.” It too has a religious connotation, the moment, according to Aquinas, when a soul is divinely infused. Remembering the breakthrough influence that Igor Stravinsky’s Apollon Musagète had on him, Balanchine, in the 1940s, wrote, “I began to see how I could clarify, by limiting, by reducing what seemed to be multiple possibilities to the one which is inevitable.” Call it what you will—“the revealing gesture” or “the one which is inevitable”—all the design develops from this. When Antony Tudor was making his 1942 masterpiece Pillar of Fire, “Hagar’s gestures,” de Mille reports, “were chosen with prayer and fasting.” Trial by fire, gesture forged in fire, Promethean fire, art. Hagar’s very first movement—which is the ballet’s as well—opens her to the audience like nasty gossip. She is sitting alone on the front steps of a house and slowly her right hand, flat and tense as a blade, lifts from her lap toward her temple in a slow-motion scythe-like arc, nine to twelve, and smooths her already smooth hair. She is wound tight, marking time, sick with its passing, nearly hopeless, and this slow seminal motion, the climbing flat of her hand, will grow into larger moves, will inflame in a series of bodily arcs and plunges, reaches and retreats, a tug of war between abandon and regret. And it all begins in the flat of a hand.

And then there’s de Mille. One of the things I love about her work, especially her work on Broadway, is the way she found a heartfelt, almost reverential, stylized in-between: a plastique that took a slightly off, but simple, move or pose or gesture and graced it—poeticized it—with the pulled-up, still-point energy of classical dance. No wonder she was such a perfect fit with Rodgers and Hammerstein; they too worked reverence, songs like steeples, into their musicals. De Mille was a great synthesizer. She learned from Graham and Tudor, revered their achievements, and partook—too much some say, though I don’t—of what they created. De Mille’s work has its own gravity, a weighted lightness, a low plumb that’s not as heavy, pitching, as Graham’s, and a plastique as taut as Tudor’s, but shadowless, as if the sun is always straight above. She’s like milkweed; the pods are rough, brown, but the stem runs with whiteness, and the seeds fly. Look at Oklahoma!, Carousel, Brigadoon—not just at the dream ballets—and you get blown away. Movement unfurls in fluttering bolts, and then it’s cut for an ecstatic moment, a pose frozen like an action shot in a Forties fashion magazine. Example: Laurey’s leap onto Curly’s shoulder, like a doe on a cloud. You just gaze at how wonderful it is.

Is such stylization dated today? In 2001 at City Center, American Ballet Theatre’s best effort was de Mille’s Rodeo. Like a barn-raising, sprung with air, the ballet just stands up before you. And because the characters are so true, their gestures like strikes of a silver hammer, the story can tell itself through rhythm, grouping, and folk dance forms—no words necessary. It didn’t hurt that in Joaquin De Luz, now a soloist at New York City Ballet, the company had an irresistible Champion Roper.

Last October at City Center, ABT revived Tudor’s Pillar of Fire, a more difficult ballet all around, with Julie Kent, Gillian Murphy, and Amanda McKerrow having their first attempts at Hagar (the company goes at it again this spring at the Met). Even if Kent hadn’t been almost five months pregnant—coyly, annoyingly, she kept tucking a hand under her queasy-making belly bump—she would have been miscast. Her Hagar was a spinster Juliet, stiff and moony and, as always with Kent in recent years, pretty at the expense of everything else. Murphy danced with more muscle, but in a cowering way, as if Hagar were a victim, the subject of abuse. She’s not, she’s a soul on fire, a battlefield in her breast, desperate for love but in a moment of defeat willing to take just sex. McKerrow’s performance was smarter, more linear and coherent, but not deep or big enough, not enough in her eyes. Pillar of Fire is not just a story of small-town ingrown judgment and sublimation, it is also about the making of an artist (it made the first Hagar, Nora Kaye). You must lose yourself to transcend yourself. The music, after all, is Schoenberg’s “Transfigured Night.” Pillar of Fire is transfigured storytelling, even without a Hagar that burns bright: the shorthand is sharp, the narrative flow sure, cursive, one minute telescoped close in, the next swept off in the distance; we seem to move through a real town in real time, then suddenly the ballet is out-of-body, an erotic dream, innocence and experience dancing together, as if the town itself were dreaming of what happens at its edges in the dark. Oh, for such storytelling today. It wasn’t until I saw Susan Stroman’s new work for New York City Ballet that I realized how much I miss the revealing gesture, the stylized soul quickening onstage.

The Stroman ballet is the first of four works commissioned as part of NYCB’s centennial celebration—the hundredth anniversary of George Balanchine’s birth in 1904. It’s been eleven years since the last big celebration: in 1993, NYCB honored the tenth anniversary of Balanchine’s death by performing, in chronological order, seventy-three of his 425 ballets. If that undertaking was sublime in scope, this one is on the skimpy side. I don’t mind that. Balanchine, who liked to build festivals around composers (Stravinsky, Ravel, Tchaikovsky), probably would have waved away his 100th with a Who Cares? flourish—a vodka toast and on to 101. But what would he think if he got this for a present: a full-length ballet by a Broadway choreographer?

Not a pièce d’occasion. Not a thirty-minute movement sonnet, a pure-dance project that the deep-pocket producers on 42nd Street would never get. No, Martins has given Stroman the whole stage for an entire program. Not even Jerome Robbins, the most brilliant Broadway choreographer of the last sixty years, and a resident choreographer at NYCB for many of those years, got the whole enchilada at the State Theater. Balanchine worked at full-length, but infrequently: The Nutcracker, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Don Quixote, Jewels, Coppélia. Peter Martins has added to that: his attractive if rather cramped Sleeping Beauty of 1991, his homely and stylistically inappropriate Swan Lake of 1999 (if you have Mr. B’s take on the classic, you don’t need Mr. M’s). And now this, an outside effort called Double Feature, the title a reference to the silent movie format of Stroman’s show. I can’t bring myself to call it a ballet.

The rationale behind this commission, its connection to the centennial, is a glib byte. Peter Martins in Playbill: “In the thirties Balanchine was ‘Mr. Broadway,’ as was Jerome Robbins later on. Today, Susan is definitely ‘Ms. Broadway,’ so it seemed perfect to have her here this year to honor Mr. B’s legacy as a Broadway pioneer.” Never mind that the presence in rep of Balanchine’s “Slaughter on Tenth Avenue,” his ballet from the 1936 musical On Your Toes, is enough for many of us (we all love “Slaughter,” we do, it’s lots of fun, but oh I think I’ll skip out on it tonight). Never mind that you can get your Broadway Balanchine in better places, like The Four Temperaments (those slow-motion kick lines), Western Symphony, Stars and Stripes, Who Cares?, the third act of Union Jack (there’s a lot of Shubert Alley in those third-movement curtain closers), not to mention “Rubies,” a whole Broadway show in tiaras and red velvet—think Lola on the town with The Hot Box Girls. Susan Stroman is currently the most award-winning choreographer on Broadway—five Tonys for starters—and that makes her a gold-plated prize in these days of risk-averse arts marketing. A couple questions, though. Is Martins simply ignoring the fact that Stroman is also the most overrated choreography on Broadway? Or is he innocent of all that?

The great claim for Stroman is that she’s a storyteller who tells the story “in dance.” What I’ve seen of her work proves the opposite. Take away the sets, the spoken words, the projected titles, the heavy-handed visual and musical cues—take away the Broadway show around the dances—and there isn’t much to differentiate her choreography in Contact from her choreography in The Music Man from her choreography in Oklahoma! from her choreography in Double Feature. Stroman travels light. She goes from project to project with two little bags: one holds her scant vocabulary of steps, the other her small number of tricks. You can get them all in Contact, the strange musical Stroman developed with Lincoln Center Theater, a show that wowed dum-dum theater critics and left dance critics cold. It has three acts/scenarios (perhaps they’re supposed to be dream ballets), but the one where you see Stroman’s vocabulary go all the way from A to B is the middle number “Did You Move?”

Described as “fantasies of a downtrodden housewife in 1950s Queens,” it begins with a couple sitting down for dinner in an Italian restaurant. The husband is a brute, the wife is a ditz, but a lonely ditz, browbeaten. Increasingly furious because he can’t get a roll, the husband leaves the table from time to time to get more food or to look for a roll, always admonishing his wife, “Don’t talk, don’t smile, don’t fuckin’ move.” Every time he leaves the stage, his wife dances about the room—a fantasy of course—trying to make contact (the title!) with other people. Is this description getting tedious? Imagine sitting through it, especially as the word “fuck” gets thrown around louder and louder, for laughs no less.

Stroman’s little bag of steps includes the following: a popped-up développé à la seconde (a high kick), various jetés, skips, chassés (a kind of sliding gallop), pas de chat, pas de bourrée, and a textbook arabesque. These steps are linked together in combinations you might find in any adult beginner class at any ballet school in the country—over-emphatic, herky-jerky, the teacher keeping things big and bouncy for students not yet ready for nuance, the refinements begun at the intermediate level: finding, feeling, the psychological difference between en dedans and en dehors (inward and outward, darkness and light), learning the subtle shading of épaulement (that cameo intimacy of bust and head), climbing into the high altitudes of adagio—lift, hold, breathe, reach—those invisible mountain passes touched with eternity and pain. But getting back to Contact, why is this woman even doing ballet? A housewife in 1950s Queens would be wearing a girdle, her deportment in the real-life moments would have a bit of ballroom formality, stillness. Shouldn’t her dream dancing have something of that Fifties formality? Gene Kelly romancing Leslie Caron? The silk of Cyd Charisse? Why is she hearing frantic classical music and not Rosemary Clooney, Frank Sinatra, Nat King Cole, those fireside classics? When she’s felt up by a waiter under the table, it’s a disconnect: is this the wife’s fantasy of romance or Stroman’s idea of humor? “Did You Move?” is a coarse and sophomoric piece of theater, and bad dance.

The third act of Contact—the “Girl in Yellow” section—is also coarse, and almost unbearably endless, but choreographically it’s an improvement. Stroman is held within the bounds of swing dancing, line dancing, and must invent within a narrow, sometimes quite furrowed, range. This helps, because it forces upon her the act, in Balanchine’s words, of “limiting … reducing what seemed to be multiple possibilities.” Well, it’s something. Still, the two main characters, potential lovers, are the broadest of clichés, he the isolated workaholic, she the cool beauty. They never quicken into something we can care about because they haven’t one revealing gesture between them.

Here’s an experiment you can do at home. Rent both the 1955 film of Oklahoma! (Shirley Jones and Gordon MacRae; choreography by de Mille) and the 1999 revival, just released (Josefina Gabrielle and Hugh Jackman, choreography by Stroman). About fifteen minutes in you’ll find the ensemble number “Everything’s up to Date in Kansas City.” Look at the differences. De Mille has blond Gene Nelson as Will Parker, the character just back from winning a rodeo in K.C. She’s got him in cowboy boots, tight pants, and a black hat—already he’s stylized, heightened like a flamenco dancer, slim as a spike. Yet how does the number begin? With Nelson in a catcher’s squat, off to the side by a wood crate. So it begins quietly, Nelson planted low, then rising on stovepipe legs, walkin’ that cowboy walk, singin’ about what he’s seen (Gas buggies! Burleycue!), then back down into that sexy squat, pants taut across his thighs, as if the dance is warming up and taking its time. You feel that—acres of time and everyone quiet in the sun, watching Will. He does a two-step in a circle, exaggerating it, but his second pass, a ragtime tap, that’s more his style, a riding style from the hip down, quiet through the leg, giddyup in the heel. He keeps circling, his tapping clipped as grass, each pass more complicated, but always returning home to that crate on the side. Even when the other cowboys join in and de Mille brings the dance to a boil, double-time and breakaways—two girls, an old woman, and all these rough men—it’s friendly, orderly, always within the hub, the homemade decorum and dishtowel snap, of that communal circle. Will Parker, our hayseed Apollo with the beautiful thighs, is the kernel of the dance.

Stroman, in her version, takes Will Parker out of boots, puts him in brown flats so long they almost look like clown shoes. She has him demonstrating bawdy dance-hall moves, among them her favorite funny step, the recurring Stroman Squat: second-position plié on tip-toe, done fast and goosey (it’s totally wrong for a cowboy, even a chorus-boy cowboy). Stroman stages “Kansas City” as a loud rowdy number, a free-for-all. There’s no communal center, no developing design, no feeling of land, or love for Will (this one’s so charmless he’s almost a clod), just one stunt after another—rope tricks, back flips, split jumps, wham bam thank you ma’am. Stroman doesn’t grow a dance, she Stromanizes the stage, empties her bags of bombast on the music. When it’s over you’re flattened.

Double Feature is prefab theater, smooth on the surface, no foundation down below. It consists of two acts—a melodrama called “The Blue Necklace” and a comic romp called “Makin’ Whoopee!”—which tell their stories through the conventions of silent movies, i.e. projected dialogue, lots of props, and the implied lyrics of the popular songs that make up both scores. Ballets aren’t supposed to need so many words, or any words at all—the whole point is that they communicate what words cannot. But Stroman the storyteller needs words, and thus the inter-title projections are lengthy and continual. You spend as much time reading as watching, and this is a cheat. Why grow a dance from the flat of your hand when you can have thoughts thrown on a screen above your head? Adding to the conceptual confusion (for me anyway), when the movie-theater scrim lifts on “The Blue Necklace,” we see a kick-line of chorus girls on pointe at “Valentine’s Variety Theatre.” So it’s a ballet that’s a silent movie about a vaudeville dancer who becomes a movie star. “They’re chorines,” a friend said wonderingly, “but they’re in tutus?” The whole dimensional question is wonky-making, and Stroman might have played with it (as Paul Taylor did in his film noir treatment of Le Sacre du printemps), finding a focus by trying to answer the question. But she doesn’t. As usual, she just empties her two bags—steps and schtick—in the little bit of stage in front of the sets. It’s all foreground, but then again, Stroman’s work is all foreground.

“The Blue Necklace” is a weepy that turns into a Cinderella story: an aspiring actress (or is she a dancer?) leaves her illegitimate baby girl and a blue necklace on a church step, the child’s adopted by a man whose wife is the archetypal wicked stepmother, the actress becomes a star and wants to find her daughter, who grows up, goes to an orphans’ ball sponsored by the actress mother, proves her DNA by dancing well, and blah-blah-blah happy ending. The score is Irving Berlin hits arranged by Glen Kelly, nicely done but way too long. Doug Besterman’s orchestrations are accomplished, yet from the very first notes you hear a pushy, almost presumptuous tonal appropriation of Hershy Kay’s Who Cares? Riding coattails, nostalgia by numbers, whatever. It’s too much and too easy. Robin Wagner’s scenery is precise, the source of the show’s sleek feel.

As for Stroman, her work with a classical vocabulary is not worthy of this stage. She keeps the dancers moving, keeps going and going, trying to coin a phrase, find a flow, a momentum, a meaning. I think that’s why every solo and duet goes on too long, with louder repeats: she knows the steps aren’t moving the story. At the orphans’ ball, watching the belaboring of Berlin’s “The Best Things Happen While You’re Dancing,” all I could think of was the 1954 film White Christmas. Rent it and see what Robert Alton, a real Broadway choreographer, did with Danny Kaye, Vera-Ellen, a dock outside a dinner club, and that song. Talk about phrase and flow. Stroman does well with “Mandy,” using it to introduce the matinée idol danced by Damian Woetzel. The dance is light, rhythmically acute, made with skips, and it suggests a personality, a man who skips through life and is quick to shine. It’s a narrowing-in that opens out.

Stroman makes a lot of references to older ballets, shows, choreographers. You could call her (and some do) Ms. Pastiche. Why hasn’t she learned what goes into the crafting of these classics? Watching her Stromanize “Marian the Librarian” in the revival of The Music Man, I felt like yelling, “Grab a dictionary and look under S for stylized, subconscious, subtext, or symbol.” In the famous essay quoted earlier, Balanchine writes that he came “to understand how gestures, like tones in music and shades in painting, have certain family relations. As groups they impose their own laws.” In “The Blue Necklace,” Stroman should have shown us the “family relation” between mother and daughter, not from the outside with subtitles and cues, but from the inside, kinetically, with something they share like a genetic code—the inevitable step, a revealing gesture.

Indeed, one of Stroman’s most dependable tricks is kinetic. It’s not so much a one-two effect as a twofer, a split second in which two things happen at once. Contact: husband drops his plate on the table/wife whips a napkin off her head; Oklahoma!: trunk glides in out of nowhere/Will Parker lands on it just as it stops. These twofers are percussive punctuation, like exclamation marks, and good for making nothing happening seem like something happening; in short, good for Stromanizing. Sometimes, though, the exclamation speaks. In “The Blue Necklace,” the adopted daughter dances around the living room she’s supposed to be cleaning, and every time the mean mother bursts in/the daughter falls to the floor pretending to scrub. It’s a funny bit, explosive in the right way, and oddly touching, because we begin to see character shown not told.

“Makin’ Whoopee!,” using the songs of Walter Donaldson, is based on Seven Chances, a Buster Keaton movie about a young man who will inherit millions if he can marry by 7:00 that night. I can just hear Stroman selling it to Martins, something like “the chase scenes, all those girls in bridal gowns, it’s the Wilis in Giselle.” If only this piece had been half as long as it is, a two-reeler, so that Stroman could have concentrated her slim resources on the slim story. Alexandra Ansanelli and Tom Gold are wonderfully cast, a little wedding-cake couple, and Gold especially has a triumph as the unblinking Buster Keaton, a yearning romantic trapped in the black cloud of his dark suit, his body always a beat behind his heart. But again, Stroman pads it out. The pas de deux in the park, where the Keaton character proposes to various females, are tiresome. The dances for Gold and his two business partners, a real Broadway trio, should be wittier, more inventive, with more of those twofers. They never quite click in. And why does Stroman have Gold, who’s clearly worked hard to get the Keaton plastique, suddenly toodling around like Chaplin’s Little Tramp? (“’Cause she always throws in the kitchen sink,” said a theater queen I know.) The climactic chase is a coup de théâtre. The stage is clear and a mass of brides-to-be pound after Gold in long thick diagonals. It’s always fun to watch people run, really run, onstage. Some of the brides are guys in drag, and when one of them falls down under a strobe effect it gets a huge laugh. A little dog, a Boston Terrier, gets an even bigger laugh. Leaving the theater I thought, wouldn’t it be great to have a Boston Terrier?

In recent years I’ve chanced to ask friends in the theater why Stroman is so dominant on Broadway when the work is so undistinguished. I always get the same answer. To wit: She’s easy to work with, a team player, she doesn’t storm the director with demands, she’s nice. Suddenly the baseball hat makes sense—the black baseball hat, one of the boys, that is Stroman’s signature accessory. In other words, she’s not a Beelzebub like Robbins, purgatory on two legs (but his shows are shot with heat and light). She’s not a pain in the ass like de Mille, famous for her tantrums, those Biblical floods of tears (but the dances are icons of American history). And she’s not a Graham, who broke rule after rule in her quest never to lie, the first rule broken, according to de Mille, “that of being a good egg—one of the gang.”

Dance is not a gang or a team. It is a vocation. You must lose yourself to transcend yourself. Susan Stroman, Ms. Broadway, has five Tonys and counting. What she doesn’t have is a moment of truth.

Laura Jacobs is the dance critic for The New Criterion and author, most recently, of Women About Town (Viking).

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