Over and over, Sokolow builds these impeded efforts. The people could get together if only they did something simpler, more direct. When they're alone, they frantically shake their hands, clutch their faces, throw their heads back. A woman stands center stage. One man, then another and another, strides past her. Each time, she jerks her head away as if she'd been slapped. They haven't even seen her.
Dreams is said to be about the concentration camps, and it's full of nightmares. Things you can't finish doing, like the woman who crawls over the shoulders of men, peering into an endless escape road. Or the man running in place, faster, faster, his head arching up then pitching forward, till he's doubled over but still running. Or another man, drumming a rhythm on a stool as if he were trying to remember a song, a face, and trying harder and harder, till he's running and pounding the rhythm into the back wall. He stops, yells once. His yell becomes a cry. Then he opens his mouth. No sound comes out.
The thing about Sokolow's people is that they're alone. Their sexual longings are private, their schemes for relief are inhibited. Even when others are present, they don't connect. Maybe it's not even possible to imagine this kind of repression in an era when teenage girls text snapshots of their naked bodies to their boyfriends and people confess to rape and murder on TV. But even if you don't empathize with the pathology of these lost souls, the starkness of what they do is piercing.
Related:
Photos: Boston Ballet presents Black & White (2010), The meaning of 'THE', Boston Ballet’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, More 
- Photos: Boston Ballet presents Black & White (2010)
Boston Ballet's reprise of Jiří Kylián’s Black & White
- The meaning of 'THE'
William Forsythe's 1991 ballet The Second Detail begins with 13 dancers in ice-blue leotards and tights, facing away from the audience.
- Boston Ballet’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream
George Balanchine didn’t create a slew of full-length ballets, but it’s easy to see why a setting of Shakespeare’s ever-popular A Midsummer Night’s Dream is one of them — and not just because, back home in St. Petersburg, when he was eight, he played a bug in a theater production of the Bard’s moonbeam-muddled comedy.
- Boston Ballet's 'Bella Figura'
"Bella figura" in Italian is more than a phrase — it's a philosophy. It makes life beautiful. "Bella Figura" as the title of Boston Ballet's latest program is an invitation to find beauty in three disparate choreographic styles — one of them incorporating topless women (as well as men).
- High stepping
The heavy-hitter repertory shows this season come from ALVIN AILEY and GEORGE BALANCHINE . But why not welcome spring by taking a chance on fresh experiences as well?
- Reality riffs
When Jerome Robbins's New York Export: Opus Jazz boogied onto the scene in 1958 then took Europe by storm. Created for Ballets: U.S.A., a company of ballet, modern, and jazz dancers that Robbins had put together for a government-sponsored cultural exchange tour, Opus Jazz was a kind of spinoff from the 1957 hit musical West Side Story , which Robbins directed and choreographed.
- Here’s looking at you
Set in the usual small village — this one in the Carpathian Mountains of Eastern Europe — Coppélia might look like just another pleasant 19th-century ballet about a boy, a girl, and another girl. But appearances can be deceiving — and that’s theme of this work, whose title character is a life-size mechanical doll.
- Review: La Danse: Le Ballet de L'Opéra de Paris
Frederick Wiseman's documentary is a love letter to Paris, to the Palais Garnier opera house (the Bastille gets a cameo), and the Paris Opera Ballet.
- 2009: The year in dance
You could say there were two tremendous forces that propelled dance into the world of modern culture: the Ballets Russes of Serge Diaghilev and the choreography of Merce Cunningham.
- Is it magic yet?
When you've seen every Boston Ballet Nutcracker for the past 20-odd years, and reviewed most of them, it can get a little hard to locate the magic. Then again, when you survey other Nutcracker s around the world you appreciate that there's no place like home, and not many that are as good.
- From Mozart to milonga
We Bostonians may swathe ourselves in sweaters and lock our doors against the blustery weather, but once the music begins, dance performances can help us shake off the shivers — and often transport us to more temperate climes.
- Less
Topics:
Dance
, Dance, Boston Ballet, Ballet, More
, Dance, Boston Ballet, Ballet, Jorma Elo, Arts, Opera House, The Opera House, Less
