AFrom the perspective of the dance world, the best thing about Sofia Coppola’s twenty-four-minute “Spring Gala Film” with the New York City Ballet, which he potentially shows, proves and expresses for the twenty-first century in breathtaking, predominantly black and white images, is what classical music is in motion means. The works, the excerpts of which the director puts together so effortlessly into a narrative of what dancing means and what it means to be carried away by the kinesthetic excitement of watching, date from 1956, 1960, 1969 and 1972.
Embedded in this sequence of a solo, two pas de deux and a group piece, the penultimate choreography represents the latest piece for the company, the world premiere of “Solo” by Justin Peck to the Adagio from Samuel Barber’s string quartet Opus 11, the present of dance. But the decades have not affected the other pieces to music by Chopin, Stravinsky, Brahms and Mozart. They give away their intimacy, accuracy and generosity unchanged, their inviting, communicative, empathic gesture is as indestructible as the conciseness of the aesthetic strategies used.
Coppola’s pictures show how Igor Stravinsky and Balanchine, for example, understood beauty: as a complete dance fulfillment of musical melodies and rhythms, savoring every sixteenth. Their shared aesthetic meant the love of symmetry as an image of cosmic harmony; the humble acceptance of human earthly gravity and loneliness, the union of the arts in athletic tension of all senses, the happy, momentary liberation of the dancers in movements that conceal and at the same time overcome all of this. Dance is, and all classical works of this art speak of it, regardless of whether in pointe shoes or sneakers, the most direct expression of this physical struggle to straighten up, an expression of the longing to gain space, to leave something behind, to fly over the world as well as knowing that landing is inevitable.
The return to the big stage
Sometimes the dancers in Coppola’s pictures seem like concentrated astronauts. Each end of a choreography resembles the return of space travelers to Earth for those involved. The film shows this withdrawn expression on their faces, which seems exhausted, happy and isolated at the same time, as if they had experienced something extraordinary that would be difficult to talk about.
But let’s start at the beginning: the film first tells, and this is written in letters in the opening credits, of the return of the ballet company to its theater after a year of absence. Coppola’s camera only needs two settings to capture all these terribly long months of the pandemic in black and white. In one small room there are transparent plastic bags full of unused pointe shoes, in the next there are the gray heads of the mice from the “Nutcracker” that never made it into the spotlight last winter on a shelf above the tightly hanging tulle skirts. Not least because of this, the American dance world, which is dependent on ticket sales and patronage, is hoping for the audience to return to the theater for the fall season. Every winter, the beloved traditional “nutcracker” performances have to bring in more than half of the annual budget.
– .
