Last year marked the 50th anniversary of the premiere of George Balanchine’s Agon, the work that for many, New Yorker critic Arlene Croce among them, defined modern, urban ballet. I agree with that, although the same choreographer’s Four Temperaments, premiering 11 years earlier in 1946 qualifies as well. These masterpieces of modern art, never mind ballet, look as fresh and new and thought-provoking today as they did all those decades ago, a gold standard for contemporary choreographers that it is really unfair to expect them to meet.
 
So what to do?  We need new ballets in the canon that reflect our own historical moment, as Agon reflected urban America, especially New York, in the '50s and Four Temperaments, as Todd Bolender (who originated the role of Phlegmatic) said, the post-World War II unease. (Balanchine, who had little use for psychoanalysis, would undoubtedly deny this.)
 
As a working critic, I try hard not to have Balanchine in mind when I see new ballets, just as I don’t make invidious comparisons between contemporary painters and Picasso. What I hope to see on stage is a work I can watch repeatedly and always find something I haven’t seen before. So my hopes were high at the end of September when I attended an evening of "New Ballets" at Columbia University’s Miller Theatre, featuring dancers from the New York City Ballet, mostly, accompanied by live contemporary music.

The evening did not start well, with Berlin-based Amanda Miller’s forgettable “Dogwood” to music by Fred Frith, the four dancers disporting themselves on and around and in between chairs that resembled tombstones in a dreary exercise in angst. The dancers did their best, but movement that ranged from the half-hearted to the spastic hardly suited either the training or the talent of Amanda Miller, Rebecca Jefferson, Gino Grenek, and Matthew Prescott.

Even worse was Alison Chase’s “Sweet Alchemy,” to excerpts from John Adams’s "Book of Alleged Dances," a no doubt unwitting self-fulfilling prophecy. For such stellar dancers as Megan Fairchild and Charles Askegard, Chase, one of the creative forces behind Pilobolus, now estranged from that company, created choreography highly reminiscent of their organic way of moving, but it doesn’t work well with classical training, and the humor was missing. Ballet, clearly, is not Chase’s metier. And I certainly don’t want to see it again, or Pilobolus either, if it comes to that.
 
Only the middle piece, “Four/Voice,” by Paris-based Luca Veggetti, showed promise. Set to music by Paolo Aralla, with whom he frequently collaborates, it featured the choreographer’s usual multimedia mix, in this case words from Leonardo da Vinci’s Prophecies projected behind the four dancers. Torqued partnering and patterned movement are hallmarks of the Italian’s work, as are elegance and emotional distance. This piece was the most intriguing on the program, and might bear watching again, if only to discover what it is really about, other than investigative, and inconclusive, choreography.

In conventional terms, "Details of a Couple," which premiered in Portland, Oregon, on November 15th, is by no stretch of the imagination a ballet. However,  Rachel Tess and Stephan Laks, founders of Rumpus Room, a modern ballet company based in Sweden and Portland, are classically trained dancers. Tess performed for two years with Oregon Ballet Theatre before going to Juilliard to earn a BFA; and Laks, while getting his degree in the same school, performed with the Eglevsky Ballet.  Their training shows. Tess uses her long legs like a ballet dancer in a solo that comes toward the end of the piece, which clearly is about themselves, partners in life and work; both have the spinal placement and turnout of classical dancers.

Like Veggetti, Tess and Laks create mixed media work with slide projections and spoken text as well as three dimensional props. The most dramatic of these is a table containing stemware in various sizes and shapes, placed outside the actual performance space. Tess, costumed in a short evening dress, stands at one end of the table and meticulously rearranges the glasses to make a path to the other end. Eventually, she threads her way down that path, by which time Laks is standing, waiting for her, and she falls backwards into his arms. No glass gets broken, and perfect trust is established.

In the performance space, which is quite large, the couple dances together and apart, clearly on a journey. At one point, Tess walks over to a box placed on its side and curls up in it, looking deliberately like an object in a Joseph Cornell box. Laks carries a picture frame over to her, and draws her out of the box: He knows exactly what to do. The piece concludes with apples on the stage, representing perhaps the loss of innocence -– they usually do -- but what makes "Details" both eloquent and interesting is its affirmation of the trust in a relationship and the acknowledgment of the risks, with not a lick of alienation in sight.

These two take risks as artists, too.  I’d like to see them make a piece for dancers in pointe shoes.