by Leigh Witchel
New Chamber Ballet’s Secret Place got a new, old ending. The long piece was originally choreographed by company director Miro Magloire in 2022, but in preparing for a tour to Germany, and performing in a castle where Johann Sebastian Bach worked, the venue requested a piece by him. Magloire obliged by tackling one of the composer’s most glorious pieces.
The company consists of a quintet of tall, long-legged women. Secret Place started with Amber Neff slowly walking into the space. The other four women approached Neff one at a time with varying degrees of concern or curiosity.
The group changes only gradually over time. Kayla Schmitt, who had first appeared as an understudy, now is a member. Sarah Thea Craig, who has designed costumes for Magloire for over a decade, dressed the women in the practical but specific aesthetic she often does: the costumes are always based on a leotard top (often wrapped and sleeveless) with a wide skirt or leg – this time one long leg and one short one.
A pianist making his debut with the group, Seth Schultheis, played a calm chord in the atmospheric score by Reiko Fueting, the first part of Five Meditations on Music from Luigi Rossi’s Collection. The women rolled, touching one another’s foreheads as if sharing thoughts.
Secret Place was an apt title, but Magloire’s work often has that intimate quality. Much of the dance happened on the floor. The ground work gave it the feeling of picnicking en plein air. It felt as if we were looking at an old-fashioned image of domesticity, a scene imagined by Manet, Renoir or Ingres. As Arlene Croce said about Emeralds, this was a man imagining the interior of a private, feminine world.
The work escalated softly. Neff cartwheeled over Anabel Alpert and that move got passed through the cast. Schultheis reached into the piano occasionally to strum a glissando on the strings. Rachele Perla supported Megan Foley; the women managed more leverage by lying on their backs on the floor and using the soles of their shoes instead of their hands as the support platform.
Despite the gymnastics, there was a particular quality in the calmness and femininity. Yet these women weren’t picnicking, they were flipping one another. They all sat and clasped hands, swaying into the next movement. First Perla rolled away, then returned.
At a new movement Alpert got up and piquéd around the others as the music chimed into a fugue, then Perla followed and the wonderfully tall Schmitt, and Neff. Each has a unique disposition. Magloire has a look, and a vision, for the company, but it encompasses a range of temperaments that don’t require the women to feel a certain way.
As Foley drifted on the perimeter, the other four supported one another in a head butt to isolated forte chords. The music had a peculiar serenity, like a chorale with notes erased. Suddenly Foley circled in jetés that the space could barely contain.
The quintet moved to the side and violinist Doori Na played a more nervous solo, then channeled a Bach partita. The women whirled and raced but the atmosphere stayed playful.
Even more than some of Magloire’s other works, Secret Place felt like the imagining of a sorority. Alpert was the calm one, Neff the instigator and so on.
If you see a few of Magloire’s work you can start to pick out a composition style. It’s not a firm division, but he seems to have two loose palettes. The first is sculptural: partnering, floor work, gymnastics. The second is academic: pointe work, waltzes, and steps with a French name. Especially here but also elsewhere, academic steps happen on the perimeter of the space and sculptural work happens at the core. It’s a tendency, but he doesn’t hew to this religiously; he had Schmitt stagger back lightly before continuing a path of arabesques around the others.
After light, asleep for piano and violin, the new ending was the skittering Imitazione delle campane by Johann Paul von Westhoff into the great Chaconne from Bach’s Partita No. 2. This was a later addition to the work, but musically it wasn’t a shock, Fueting referenced it in passage: time (copy).
Still, it’s one of the most daunting works in terms of familiarity to a New York dance audience. José Limón, William Forsythe, Kim Brandstrup and Karole Armitage are just a few who have used it, Forsythe as the center of his towering Artifact. Maybe the only Bach piece more intimidating would be the double violin concerto. Both Forsythe and Magloire wrote love letters to the Chaconne, but Forsythe’s was ambivalent. Done to a recording by Nathan Milstein, it was also a confrontation with the music.
You could see Na relishing his opportunity to perform the Chaconne. He took it at a clip and not as a tragedy. The women danced it as a calm ritual; their mood brightened and they ran three against two, with the members in each group shifting. The trio swayed and contracted, while the duo partnered and tumbled. Magloire picked up the pace and there was urgency in repetition, but he also chose not to change significantly how he works.
From the center, Alpert looked at the others who had gone to the side; they circled their arms towards one another. Neff went back and forth in inside piqué turns that fell perilously into the momentum of the spin without worrying about a finish. Then Perla floated in more calmly placed attitudes, and Foley did extensions.
The women rolled into the center, falling into one another, held up by the hip on a shoe, steadying themselves with clasped hands. They all raced across the space, switching spots.
Na got the last word; the women sat at the end to listen to him as he walked slowly into the dancing space on the chords, and they bowed their heads on the final note.
Magloire, whose interpretation was far more modest than Forsythe’s magnum opus, had the wisdom to ignore everything that came before and concentrate on his own relationship with music and Bach. There was no confrontation, it was an assimilation and a salute. It felt like a finale, but also a benediction.
copyright ©2024 by Leigh Witchel
Secret Place – New Chamber Ballet
Mark Morris Dance Center, Brooklyn, NY
April 12, 2024
Cover: Doori Na (playing violin) and New Chamber Ballet in Secret Place. Photo © Steven Pisano.
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