Ballet Ullate 10/02/96

Ballet Ullate performed Jaleos and El Amor Brujo by Victor Ullate tonight at City Center. It was perhaps the most joyfully tasteless evening of dance I have seen in quite a long time.

I mean tasteless in many different ways. The kitsch value of the performance was enormous; the Spaniards seem to have no conception of camp, and dance with total equanimity in Elvis-gone-berserk costumes and sets that look like they were used to wrap frozen foods. Because they put so much precision into their training (both men and women are excellently trained, and very pulled up in the thighs and well placed over their hips) there is a very high quality level to the kitsch, and one feels as if one has died and gone to Las Vegas during the performance, perhaps to Live at the Valencia Room in the Fabulous Sahara Resort, where paella will eternally be "pie-el-la"

Then there is the more literal definition of tasteless; that is, lacking in discrimination. Like paella or a salad bar buffet (and Las Vegas is truly the land of buffets in the city lacking taste and discrimination, where one can get a partitioned tray and happily wash your pickled herring bits down with canned corn and chocolate pudding), Victor Ullate's choreography is chopped bits thrown together with no conception of showing a design in space over time. It's just one step after another. Discrimination implies editing, one selects what not to show, and what is thematically related, or what to compare and contrast. Here, things occurred because a bar of music ended, and Mr. Ullate had evidently run out of ideas and has a very short attention span.

In Jaleos, towards the end of the work the women push the men. Why? Why ask why? It has nothing to do with any movement motif that occurred before it or with any emotional motif either. It happens because it's sexy, and because Mr. Ullate had four more minutes to go, and hadn't used this trick. The men then do double tours to an à la seconde. The women then get on the floor and split their legs wide open to give us a pussy shot. The whole thing proceeds with this sort of grinding lunacy. And I've only described about 5 seconds of the ballet.

The experience is actually more fun if you're not in the mood for intelligence or choreography, because the dancing is exceedingly accomplished. Like the choreography, it is all done indiscriminately though, without any modulation from a constant fortissimo. It's like listening to someone shout for an entire evening. The whole thing reminds one of William Forsythe with a lobotomy crossed with some sort of sub-Bejart strain of virus. Mr. Ullate's career as a dancer was spent with Bejart, and he has inherited his style of salad bar choreography.

El Amor Brujo is rough going indeed, because it is totally incomprehensible. I would attempt to summarize the story, if I had the slightest idea what it was. Something about men dressing in gypsy drag, and bats, maybe. Your guess is as good as mine. The deFalla score was numbingly extended over an hour longer than its actual duration with sounds of the sea and castanets. When the entire cast appeared for some sort of apotheosis by doffing their costumes and reappearing in Fashions by Gap, I lost all composure and started to double over in laughter at the mania of it all.

Throughout it all the Spaniards lavished the sort of technique on it as if they were performing the most cogent and forceful work. Or maybe they can find a connecting thread in the tapas that were flung at us this evening.

LAW

©1997 Leigh Witchel. All rights reserved.