Man of Many
Cultures: Benjamin Millepied Blends Up Another Piece, This One
for PNB
By Rosie Gaynor
Posted
October 30,
2008
Choreographer/dancer Benjamin Millepied (photo by Arthur Elgort)
I spent the
better part of yesterday afternoon following Benjamin
Millepied’s mille steps online. He’s only 31 years old,
but this French-born dancer/choreographer has 15+ works to his
name already. There are excerpts of some of these works on the
Web; I’ve listed the links below since, well, a picture is worth
mille mots.
So what did I
learn? Ten years ago, Dance magazine named Millepied one
of five male dancers to watch.
And three
years ago, in an excellent profile for The New York Times,
Anna Kisselgoff wrote that he had come into his own as a dancer,
but, “as a choreographer, Mr. Millepied still has to come under
New York's scrutiny.”
It just so
happened that, since then, Millepied has come under New York’s
scrutiny. What an exposed and public place to learn your craft!
His works appeared there at least twice in 2006 and again in
2007, and the reviews have grown increasingly positive. And
although he continues to dance as a principal with New York City
Ballet, during the last three years Millepied has also
choreographed for the Paris Opéra Ballet—twice; choreographed
for Grand Théâtre de Genève—twice; and served as
choreographer-in-residence for the Baryshnikov Arts Center. His
most recent piece elicited the following comment from Roslyn
Sulcas of The New York Times: “[The world he creates
onstage in Triade] has the feel of our time, and in it
ballet seems to be a language that can be spoken today. That’s
no small achievement.”
One of five
male dancers to watch? You’d better look quick: this man is
moving fast. He’s not in a hurry, but when you start counting up
the commissions—more again next year in
New York for NYCB and American Ballet Theatre—he’s hot. “The pieces
I’ve seen of his have shown amazing promise—maybe beyond
promise,” says Pacific Northwest Ballet Artistic Director Peter
Boal, who coached Millepied in various roles several years ago
at NYCB. Boal also cast Millepied in the first piece Boal
himself choreographed. “I’ve always known that he had a great
eye for [movement] and I wanted to grab him before he’s too
expensive.” And grab him he did: Millepied’s new 3 Movements
will be presented at PNB next week.
A nice thing
about Millepied is that he has more than three kinds of
movements. Reviewers have noted the influence of Balanchine,
Robbins, and Forsythe. I’ll buy that. I got a sneak peek of 3
Movements last week before I interviewed him, and I could
see the risky off-balance quality of Balanchine, the urban
everyman of some Robbins, the drive of Forsythe. When Millepied
talks of the information/styles stored in his body, he also adds
folk dance, Cunningham, and Limón as well. I’ll pitch in two
more perceived influences: the fluid continuity of Tharp and the
poetry that is every Frenchman’s birthright because it’s in
their very language.
More
important, however, is what all these influences are
acting upon. Or, said another way, who is choosing to
play with these influences. Millepied is a thinker, a
percussionist in a family of musicians, an accomplished ballet
dancer whose earliest experiences included modern dance, African
dance, and joy. You can see this in his movement. “It’s
definitely my own energy,” says Millepied, “the way I like to
move.”
Ballet was
not this dancer’s original passion, but it is a central one. “I
was a little scared of ballet, because of the discipline,” says
Millepied, who began to dance just about the time he learned to
walk; his mother was a modern dance teacher. “Dance was just
such a source of joy for me. I never wanted to feel like I was
being forced into something. I did it because I loved it.” Even
so, when he was 11 or 12 years old—right around the time the
Baryshnikov films White Nights and Don Quixote
came out, he notes with a laugh—he grew intrigued by ballet.
“That was really where I wanted to go. Seeing that kind of
dancing was amazing.” It was a turning point for him. “I think
when I decided to take ballet classes is when I decided to
become a dancer…. Then, of course, I realized the kind of
discipline that you need to become a great ballet dancer.” He
was in a good place to learn. “I went to the Conservatoire de
Lyon, and I had great teachers. To this day I feel so
fortunate.”
Even as a
child, however, Millepied was drawn to the U.S. It started at
home. “My mother started dancing because of West Side Story,”
he said. “We had a picture of Suzanne Farrell and Peter Martins
in the house. There was always this idea that America was the
place to go.”
Although he holds firm to his French roots (“Je reste français,”
he says in one online interview) Millepied has certainly learned
and thrived in the U.S. “I first saw him when he was 16, at the
School of American Ballet,”
says Peter Boal. “I wasn’t teaching at the time, but I took
class every day and so I saw him…. He’s very talented; we all
noticed him right away.” Boal went on to mention the young
student’s first experiences with Jerome Robbins in a piece
called 2 & 3 Part Inventions. “To work with Jerome
Robbins when you’re 16 is amazing. He had been making all these
dark ballets.” An aside: “I was in a lot of them.” A chuckle:
“Dark, death theme. [Then, here, for SAB] was the brightest,
lightest piece; it was a real charm in Jerome Robbins’ life to
work with these guys.”
Millepied has
continued to cross the
Atlantic Ocean, physically and figuratively, as he has experimented
with styles of choreography. “Triple Duet [in 2002, at
Sadler’s Wells] was really a straightforward choreography to
Bach. At that time, I just went with my instinct,” he said.
“Then I started to work in
Europe a lot.
And the expectation in Europe—especially France—is so much about
your own movement quality and finding your own voice, in the
sense that you’re doing something that nobody else is doing….
It’s changing now, but for a while they went totally into this
really conceptual [mode]. If you were dancing on the stage,
forget it. I was pulled…. So I went into this, forgetting that
what I had been doing in the beginning was really just so much
about the construction of the piece and my background, which is
Balanchine. How to come up with interesting patterns? How to
illustrate the music with great skill? It’s as simple as that.
With great structure, with good steps, using the dancers well.”
Millepied
takes issue with those who think that these are old-fashioned
things to focus on; he notes that in
Europe many journalists are not likely to attend this kind of work.
“For them it’s the past. But there’s no rule. Even though I’m
doing something with skills that have been around for a long
time, I still can present this music with new ideas—ideas that
are mine—ideas of today. And this ballet,” he says of PNB’s 3
Movements, “is a ballet of today.”
This
particular underlying philosophy is rare these days, he says,
but he knows he is not alone. “Not a lot of people are doing it,
but there’s certainly a place for it. It’s kind of exciting.
I’ve been very inspired—I was just in New York, where I saw
three of Chris’s [Wheeldon] ballets. He speaks his language with
so much clarity and discipline. It charged me to set this piece
[at PNB]. And with [Alexei] Ratmansky coming to New York…. He has great skill. They both have great skill.”
One skill
Millepied has used more and more over the past few years is his
ability to read an orchestral score. “When I choreographed
Petrouchka for Geneva, I couldn’t see myself choreographing
that score without knowing it. I had a great meeting with this
guy who is the associate conductor at Philadelphia. I spent
three days just really learning the score. It was unbelievable.
Suddenly you can see in your brain this map of the music.
There’s no secret: that’s why Balanchine was so great. It’s
genius too, but he could read the score better than a conductor.
Once he had that score in his brain, he was able to play with it
and go far, far beyond.” Millepied has revisited some of the
Balanchine and Russian ballets he has danced—this time with an
eye to the score to better understand “the kind of genius of
these people.”
I asked
Millepied to show me the two notebooks I’d seen him carry into
rehearsal. One was the score, by Steve Reich. It is
well-thumbed. “It’s totally disgusting,” he said, “I just write
all over it.” Color, lines, counting, notes… “This score—it’s
very Stravinsky-esque. In order to make this work, you need
great order, great discipline. The architecture of this piece is
phenomenal. It really is. It’s amazing.”
One nice
thing about Millepied’s style is that we’ll probably get to see
some of this architecture. But, he says when I ask, “it’s not
about Mickey Mousing. What I’m doing is adding another variation
on the theme that [the composer] is doing.… I’m adding another
layer.”
Toward the
end of the interview, I asked Millepied what he hopes to achieve
with this piece at PNB. I was still probing for a string of
phrases that would help describe his vision or his style.
Instead, he said so simply: “I hope it’s a good piece. I hope it
will serve the company and that it’s a good piece. That’s all.”
That actually serves as an apt description of an aspect of his
style that you can see in the second Amoveo clip below:
effortless-looking complexity.
After
spending my afternoon looking at some of the online excerpts of
Millepied’s work, I’ve developed a few hopes of my own for this
piece.
I hope the
work for female ensembles doesn’t follow Capriccio, where
their movements appear trite to me. This is an unfair comment;
what gets lost when a live performance is translated to a tiny
YouTube screen? At any rate, better to follow what he does with
the solos and the large-group work toward the end. Hello, art!
I hope the
partner work is like that of Amoveo: the dancers are so
very, very connected. They are connected to the music, their
physical space, their air, each other, the audience. I’m
guessing it will be just like that. Even in Chaconne, one
of Millepied’s early pieces, there is this sense of partnering.
Granted, he’s the only one on the cast list, but throughout the
film he is dancing with his environment—and the camera.
I hope that
PNB’s piece is like Amoveo, where the women are more than
just pretty objects to be hoisted up and moved around. There,
they are somehow part of the lifting, part of the
movement.
I hope that
the dancers can get up from the floor. I have such a bias
against dancers sprawling on the floor, since it always seems
like a chore—or worse, a precious cleverness—to get the dancer
back up. But in the clips I’ve seen of Millepied’s work, he can
make it work. Check out the male solo in Capriccio
(5:15-5:34).
I hope that
the dancers can catch what one review called Millepied’s slouchy
attitude. It is a way of relaxing into certain movements, I
think. This is not the place for sloppiness or for that dreaded
redundant gravity (in the physical sense and the emotional) that
sometimes happens when dancers move more slowly than the music.
(When Millepied dances Fancy Free, he dances the rumba
sailor. I’d like to see that.)
I hope
that I can catch the salsa bits, because I like the story as
Millepied tells it. It goes like this, with hand motions and a
smile: “I went to the Dominican Republic this summer for a week.
I was totally in the non-touristique part. I went out dancing
every night. I was dancing with people who had an older-style
salsa. They were really dressed up. Three generations [living
together] on $100, but they were really dressed up. I learned
all the dances while I was there and I practiced with a lot of
different people. And as each new person came in, we were doing
more and more freestyle. They all dance. They all know how to
dance. They’re amazing. I learned a lot. That week was
great. So there’s a little bit of that in this piece too.”
I hope I
recognize the parts inspired by Carla Körbes. “There’s a rhythm
in the second movement,” says Millepied. “You’ll understand when
you see it why it’s so her. There’s a sense of the elegance she
has. She’s an extraordinary ballerina.”
When I asked
Millepied if there’s one thing he could point to that defines
his current style, he said that his style depends on the score
that he is using. “I have in my body much information, from my
career and my education, that I use in different ways.” But, he
added, there is one common thread: the way he uses the back.
“The back moves in my ballet—and in ways that you don’t see a
lot of people doing in more classical work.” Millepied’s ability
to give articulation to the back, to let it move, comes in part
from the experience of living in Senegal for five years as a
child and in part from his mother’s instruction of African dance
and modern dance. But in the online clips I’ve seen, the
expression of this doesn’t look like the overt contractions I
did in African dance classes years ago. He uses it for ballet
rather than in ballet. There are 16 dancers in 3
Movements. I hope they can all get the cat-joyful-total
stretch of the back that we see in, say, “From Here on Out.”
And last, I
hope we love this new work, because Peter Boal is into building
collections for the company’s repertoire and I really, really
want to see Amoveo come to
Seattle,
too.
Benjamin
Millepied’s
3 Movements
is part of PNB’s New Works rep, which runs November 6
through 16. Also on the program are A Garden by Mark
Morris, M-Pulse by PNB’s energetic Kiyon Gaines, and
One Flat Thing, reproduced by William Forsythe. (Sensitive
ears? Some folks use earplugs for the last piece. Boal suggested
to one woman who complained about the music that she bring her
iPod next time! It’s not a happy tune you can whistle, that’s
for sure, but it’s quite an experience.) Tickets ($25–$155),
special-offer discounts, and short previews can be found at
www.pnb.org.
3 Movements
(2008)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HgpHEfIiqgk
Triade (2008)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WozMPjyltZw
From Here on
Out (2007)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2McDhjOwc3k
Amoveo (2006.
It’s touching; grab a hanky.)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RMEeyffe6R4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DnaYhPa9Wc4
Years Later (2006, Baryshnikov! I’m not sure how the second
clip fits in, but it’s lovely to watch.)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=trzIpFLGWgc
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5WHbJ_gmhHc
Capriccio (2006)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C17oCjq-1gE
Nutcracker
(2005)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=scvQW-0029c
On the Other
Side (2004. Grab a hanky for this one too.)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dqcV0w3HWVE
Chaconne (2003)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OIcERh90MLk
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kk7fUFWGeHw
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