NYCB Vol. 17 No. 11 - Antique Epigraphs

Written by Anna Kisselgoff, New York Times, 1984:

"What could any choreographer nowadays do with imagery of Ancient Greece that would not look like a cliché? Jerome Robbins supplied the answer at the State Theater with beauty and subtlety Thursday night in the world premiere of his "Antique Epigraphs" for the New York City Ballet.

"Rarefied in tone but immediate in resonance, ‘Antique Epigraphs’ is, above all, a work rich in associations. Some of these pertaining to the music’s subtext, should be considered openly.

"The score is by Debussy — the flute solo, 'Syrinx,' preceded by 'Six Epigraphes Antiques,' compositions conceived as a setting for a collection of prose poems titled 'Les Chansons de Bilitis.' Since these poems purported to be autobiographical and by a member of Sappho's circle of Lesbian lovers and poets in Ancient Greece, the fact that Mr. Robbins's cast consists exclusively of women (there are eight) is not entirely irrelevant. To suggest otherwise would be all too coy. The point to make, however, is that Antique Epigrapes is a very chaste ballet. Its nature, in fact, is to be other than what it first appears.

"It is not, for instance, really about Ancient Greece despite its pictorial references - recurrent flashes of friezes and archaic stances. Nor is it meant , on suspects, to evoke the Greece of Mr. Robbins’s imagination. Rather, the ballet embodies a filtering of several levels of sensibility — a choreographer musing on the music of a composer inspired by a poet's view of antiquity. It is here that the ballet is true to its sources.

"One of the great jokes in literary history is the fact that "Les Chansons de Bilitis," supposedly discovered in a manuscript in a Greek tomb, were actually written just before the turn of the century by the French writer Pierre Louÿs, a sort of Clifford Irving of his time. The unmasking was achieved with Germanic precision by Prof. Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorf in 1896.

"Nonetheless, Debussy was moved enough by the pastoral genre of some of the poems, whatever their authorship, to write this music. It is, then, a 20th-century view of Greece that the music translates. The occasional Prental melodies in the’Epigraphs’ fascinatingly confuse—as did Louys- Orientalism with Hellenism.

"Mr. Robbins has heard all these echos with uncanny instinct and brilliant shrewdness. And when the ‘Epigraphs’ come to an end and he adds the ‘Syrinx’ solo  for unaccompanied flute, the result is a stroke of genius. Syrinx was the nymph pursued by Pan. She was ‘saved’ when her fellow nymphs rendered her immobile and turned her into a reed.

"What could be more apt than to create a final section to this ballet that is almost entirely a study in stillness! Repeatedly Mr. Robbins’s sisterhood falls into positions and remains stationary.

"Interestingly, Mr. Robbins used the same two pieces of Debussy music in 1952, for an allegorical and very different ballet called “Ballade.” Now he has placed ‘Syrinx’ at the end rather than the beginning and changed the order of two of the ‘Epigraphs.’

"The cast, in Florence Klotz’s high-waisted filmy gowns of various colors and revealed against Jennifer Tipton’s azure lighting, is first seen in single file, but in profile.

"The predominant dance idiom is that of classical ballet, but it is deliberately restricted. Like Nijinsky’s choreography for ‘Afternoon of a Faun’ (also set to Debussy gloss on a French poem about Greece), Mr. Robbins startles us, later, by including a solitary jump amid the tranquility.

"There is also a leitmotif of walking with simple gestures, with regrouping patterns. Stephanie Saland has the first solo—evoking a sorceress of intensity. Mr. Robbins injects a moment of sitting positions on the floor from Martha Graham’s vocabulary that he has not dared to use before in such Neo-Classical works.

"Maria Calegari, tenderly attended by Jerri Kumery and Helene Alexopoulos, introduces a note of Sapphic lyricism. Motifs of Orientalism—the Westerner’s view of the East—is felt in a torso-rotating quintet led by Simone Schumacher and including Victoria Hall, Florence Fitzgerald and the Miss Alexopolous and Miss Kumery. Kyra Nichol’s solo—with the jump—is partly a study in archaic profile, with her body snapping into brief freezes.

"Friezes are what come to the fore in the final section when the women link arms and around one another’s waists as the flute begins. Mr. Robbins’s febrile imagination leads them into a variety of chain formations—animate vase painting of poetic value. Robert Irving conducted the music with Andrew Lola sensitively heard in the flute solo."