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Guys by Dolls

When Alban Lendorf (b. 1989) was four, he became attentive to the piano. As he explained in an interview with Pointe magazine, when his lessons advanced to the learning of a Chopin waltz, his piano teacher suggested he take dance classes to help open up the music. From the school of The Royal Danish Ballet to the company, his career rocketed forward; by the time he turned twenty-one, he was a principal dancer, still playing the piano and testing a latent gift for acting.

Daniil Simkin in “Jack” by Drew Jacoby. Photograph by Mariam Medvedeva

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With the blessing of Nikolaj Hübbe, then the RDB’s artistic director, Lendorf set out to see more of the world’s ballet. He landed at American Ballet Theatre for several years where he found patron Lillian Kraemer and where, even among a strong complement of male virtuosi, he held the eye for his exacting musicality (shaping phrases with the authority of such earlier pianist-ballet luminaries as Maria Tallchief and Violette Verdy); for his distinctive openness in movement, as if somehow he managed to maintain the integrity of a plumb line while turning out his entire body from the heart; and for his theatrical projection of a certain quality—one might call it reasonable kindness—characteristic of some Danish male stars. It was a joy to watch him on stage. 

And then, at the age of 29, his knee betrayed him and he announced his retirement from dance. He took up acting in earnest, did a movie or two, a musical. And he returned to the Danish Ballet as a teacher. However, Kraemer, his ABT patron, did not give up on him. 

Her loyalty has been rewarded. By the miracle of modern medicine, the knee was resurrected into service and, in his late thirties, Lendorf is returning to some version of ballet. This coming February he is scheduled to perform, with Caroline Baldwin, in Romania’s Balanchine Legacy International Gala. Their assignment is the pas de deux for Apollo and Terpsichore, excerpted from George Balanchine’s “Apollo” under the aegis of the Balanchine Trust and the attention of Hübbe, himself an admired exponent of the title role during his own curiosity years with the New York City Ballet. 

Daniil Simkin, Alban Lendorf, Osiel Gouneo, Jeffrey Cirio, Daniel Domenech in “Jack” by Drew Jacoby. Photograph by Mariam Medvedeva

Before that, however, New York will get to see Lendorf amid four of his illustrious male colleagues at the Joyce Theater in a commissioned project called “Sons of Echo,” underwritten by the Joyce and a group of dedicated donors, Kraemer among them. Below is what I know about it from an hour-long phone call with its conceiver and entrepreneurial director, Daniil Simkin, former principal dancer with ABT and the Berlin Ballet, whom I reached in Baku, Azerbaijan, where he was momentarily resting after having performed as a guest star (“the dancing still pays the bills”) in seven “Nutcracker” performances over six days.

“Sons of Echo” is a suite of four ballets for five dancers in various combinations, each ballet by a different choreographer, with 60 to 90 seconds of poetry declaimed between the dance sections. The running time will be about an hour and 40 minutes, including one intermission and, at the beginning, a condensed ballet class—“male technique in an abstract yet playful way”—conducted by Tomas Karlborg of Staatsballett Berlin to give the audience the conventional jumps and pirouettes that Simkin believes most people attend ballet performances expecting from male dancers. (His point suggests that the movement vocabulary of the performances per se may be different.) All of the dancers identify theatrically as men; all of the choreographers identify as women. Said Simkin: “All of the women represent Echo, the female creator of life, a mother, creator of the sons.” He added: “The female contains a filter to see male collectivity on stage.”

Jeffrey Cirio and Siphe November in rehearsal. Photograph by Mariam Medvedeva

This maternal-Creator identity of Echo seems to be brand-new for her with Simkin’s project. In Ovid’s Metamorphoses she is a lovelorn nymph; in the Medieval story-poems, where the Echo-and-Narcissus tale of unrequited love and its punishments was adjusted to serve the requirements of chivalry, Echo is mortal—a princess or a noblewoman. (Simkin didn’t probe for me the poetic tradition of Echo and Narcissus in any specific way; however, I suppose it can be argued that motherhood is a condition in which one’s being is repeated, and to make Echo a mother is a way of converting into power and agency the isolating punishment of pure verbal repetition that is the traditional Echo’s unique penalty.) Simkin did emphasize his commitment to collaboration, his eagerness to take ideas from all directions. He also emphasized his admiration for each of the dancers and his delight to participate (he’s dancing in two of the four ballets) with artists of such a high standard.

The dancers will be, in addition to Simkin and Lendorf: Jeffrey Cirio (of the Boston Ballet), Osiel Gonneo (Bayerisches Staatsballett), and Siphesihle November (National Ballet of Canada). There will be, Simkin said, “two creations and two reimagined works.” The choreographers are Lucinda Childs (who has carved out a suite of duets and trios from a larger work she created for Introdans, in Arnhem, The Netherlands), Drew Jacoby (the restaging of a work requiring “different skill sets” from its cast, which she made for the Royal Ballet of Flanders to a “Gagaistic” score), Tiler Peck (New York City Ballet—new work), and Anne Plamondon (independent choreographer—a new duet).

As for the poetry between dances: The cast and the choreographers were asked to fill out questionnaires, from whose answers the Berlin-based poet and visual artist Monty Richthofen took lines and composed, in English, found verse about each participant. The poems will be spoken by “an abstract female voice in darkness.” No daughters of Echo on this go-round, but Simkin said that he’s already hearing from other interested female choreographers about possible future editions of this tribute to sight and sound.

Mindy Aloff

Mindy Aloff's writings on the arts, dance a specialty, have appeared in The New Yorker, the New York Times, and many other periodicals and anthologies in the US and abroad. Her most recent books are Why Dance Matters (Yale) and Dance in America: A Reader's Anthology (Library of America).

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