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A Poignant Beginning

"Images," "Offenbach Overtures,"Beloved Renegade"
Paul Taylor Dance Company
New York City Center
New York, NY
February 25, 2009 

by Lisa Rinehart
copyright 2009 by Lisa Rinehart

The Paul Taylor Dance Company's opening night program at City Center is a diorama of the mountains and valleys in Taylor's long and prolific career. "Images," a gloriously formal work from 1977, is mature Taylor; all swooping arms and bounding jumps constrained by unabashedly decorative poses. Fast forward twenty years to "Offenbach Overtures" and we have a search for inspiration in silliness -- not a comfortable fit for Taylor. Finally, the New York premier of "Beloved Renegade" walks us along the shimmering line between life's sweet engagements and the lure of eternal rest. It is elegiac Taylor at his most honest and introspective, and a telling premier for the winter season.

Near East: How Far?

"The Smala B.B."
Cie2k_far Contemporary Dance Company & Creation of All Kinds
Arabesque Festival - Arts of the Arab World
Terrace Theater
The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts 
Washington, DC
February 24, 2009

by George Jackson
copyright 2009 by George Jackson 

Four young men are on stage and a fifth is seated on a platform to the side. They look like they might be from the Near East - skin color, hair, and thin ankles that show despite the long trousers being worn. The space looks lived in, not just because the men are on stage and already active when the audience enters but due to items that are scattered about - a stepladder of molded yellow plastic, a red carry-box, a pair of gymnastics rings, exercise mats and a few other things that could be found all over the world. Because there aren't many items, the place has an empty, even barren, feeling. Still, there's something that suggests the Near East. This living or lounging space wouldn't look as vacuous if it were in the West. While the scattered objects might be used anywhere for some light fun, it turns out that in this context they cast shadows too - shadows that haunt like ghosts.

Standard Text, Two Stories

"Swan Lake"
American Ballet Theatre
Opera House
The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts
Washington, DC
February 20 and 22, 2009

by George Jackson
copyright 2009 by George Jackson

Two generations of ballet goers have grown up with Kevin McKenzie's ABT production as their standard "Swan Lake". Compared to the many deviant versions concocted over the years, this production's story - although retold - has been neither updated or remotivated. Despite cuts in the score, nowhere does the mood of a scene mangle the music. Nor are new choreography (McKenzie's from 2000) and old (after Petipa and Ivanov, ca. 1894/5) like the proverbial apples and oranges that won't add up. One should be grateful for such virtues of omission! In the first (Friday, Feb. 20) and last (Sunday, Feb. 22) of the ballet's four* Washington performances, the dancers cast as the romantic hero and his nemesis switched roles. Marcelo Gomes was Friday's Prince Siegfried and Saturday's evil magician Von Rothbart; David Hallberg was magician first, then prince two days later. Veronika Part on Friday and Michele Wiles on Sunday in the dual role of true and false Swan Queen are both tall, impressively long- limbed women. Yet they are dissimilar in other physical respects, as well as technically and temperamentally. Watching became a different experience on these two occasions, not withstanding the context of the same "Swan Lake" text.  

Questions, Questions, Questions

San Francisco Ballet
Program III
“Swan Lake”
War Memorial House
San Francisco, CA
February 21, 2009

by Rita Felciano
copyright © Rita Felciano 2009

In Helgi Tomasson’s new “Swan Lake” von Rothbart (an irresistible Damian Smith) seems inspired by contemporary Goths as well as Dracula. The Queen Mother (a pinched Anita Paciotti) exhales ancien régime and looks like a mix of Marie Antoinette and the stepmother in Disney’s Snow White. Given those force lines, the fact that this “Swan Lake” did not become a comic book version testifies to Tomasson’s taste and willingness—and perhaps timidity-- to push at the edges of tradition without leaping beyond them. What he and first-time ballet designer Jonathan Fensom have come with is a stark anti-romantic take that blurs the line between black and white, good and evil. This new “Swan Lake” is too fragmented and conceptually compromised to convince completely, but it is grounded in the basic conundrum that underlies all “Swan Lakes”. Odette/Odile—why can’t Siegfried tell the difference?

Drama Wanted

"Allegro Brillante," "Flames of Paris pas de deux," "Pillar of Fire," "Brief Fling"
American Ballet Theatre
Opera House
John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts
February 17, 2009

by Alexandra Tomalonis
copyright 2009 by Alexandra Tomalonis

2008 is Antony Tudor's Bicentennial year, and while several companies have scheduled performances of Tudor balets, there's no major retrospective of his work, no chance to put it in context, to be dazzled by the variety of the ballets, to, perhaps, see some of the ballets long out of repertory that could be brought back. If any company could have been expected to host such a celebration, it would have been American Ballet Theatre, the company for whom Tudor made so many fine ballets, and which basked for so long in his reputation. Alas, there's no Festival, nothing like the celebrations for Ashton or Balanchine of 2004, but ABT did include a Tudor work on its opening program: "Pillar of Fire."

Forever

Laura Peterson Choreography
"Forever"
Performed by Christopher Hutchings, Kate Martel, Stephanie Miracle, Laura Peterson
Dance New Amsterdam, New York
February 19, 2009

by Tom Phillips
Copyright 2009 by Tom Phillips

“Modern Dance is Modern Art.” That’s what Laura Peterson tells her dance students, and it’s a teaching she follows rigorously in her company’s new work, “Forever.” This is dance strictly as a visual object, the elements being four dancers in four colors, moving on a white oval floor, among four faux Grecian columns and a mirrored rear wall. The set is vaguely reminiscent of the modernist paintings of Dali or de Chirico, but the dancing itself is even more abstract. Always a minimalist, Peterson makes art by strictly limiting her choices. In "Forever" there’s no emoting, no acting or miming, not even any touching. It’s just snippets of movement, driven by sound. Sometimes together and sometimes apart, the four run around in circles, march, jump, crawl, point, wiggle, spin and fall, roll, twiddle their fingers, bourree on their toes, cave in their chests, sprawl on the floor etc. and end up as they started, running around in circles. What’s going on? Turn the page.

A Simple Symphony

21st Century Movement
"Slice to Sharp," "Hallelujah Junction," "A Simple Symphony," "Mercurial Manoeuvres"
New York City Ballet
David H. Koch Theater, New York
February 17, 2009

by Tom Phillips
Copyright 2009 by Tom Phillips
Melissa Barak’s first piece of choreography for New York City Ballet was a forgettable apprentice work when she was a NYCB corps dancer back in 2001. But a still photograph from her “Telemann Overture Suite in E-Minor” in the current Playbill shows what she was aiming at: dancers arrayed in the classical architecture of one of George Balanchine’s symphonic ballets. Now she’s back with a less forgettable work, aiming for the same ideal. “A Simple Symphony” still has the feel of an apprentice piece: it’s short (16 minutes) and set to a neo-classic piece by Benjamin Britten written in his youth for a school orchestra. But it has the formal serenity of a symphony, and something more: an unabashedly pretty look, and fulsome romance in the central pas de deux. The pretty look is supplied by Barak’s own costume design – pouffy skirts and satin bodices in silvery pink and blue. The romance comes from the patented perfume of the company’s most romantic ballerina ever, Sara Mearns.

Washington Ballet's "La Sylphide"

"La Sylphide"/"Celts"
The Washington Ballet
Eisenhower Theater
John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts
Washington, D.C.
February 12, 2009

by Alexandra Tomalonis
copyright 2009 by Alexandra Tomalonis

The Sylph has proved to be one of the most durable of Romantic ballet heroines, as well as the most elusive. Who would have predicted in 1836, the year August Bournonville choreographed his version of the ballet that had rocked Paris four years earlier, that "La Sylphide" would be flying in  Washington in 2009, and that the Washington Ballet, a company that has specialized in contemporary choreography, would capture so much of the ballet's atmosphere? One thing that probably linked last Thursday's opening night with the first performance in Copenhagen so long ago was the audience's reaction to its first sight of the sylphs in the second act: it gasped. All of those beautiful women dancing together in the moonlight bewitched audiences then and still bewitches them today.

An Adult Air

Dancevert
Dance Place
Washington, DC
February 13, 2009

by George Jackson
copyright 2009 by George Jackson

Dancevert, making its Washington debut, is the couple Tom Evert and Susana Weingarten in solos and duets of their own making. He's best known as a former Paul Taylor dancer and she's from a ballet, modern dance and theater background in Mexico. Cleveland was their base prior to arriving in the DC area. As choreographers, individually and jointly, they like to look back to models from the past but do so with an eye for expressing sexuality. 

Swans and Strippers

“Swan Lake,” “The Steadfast Tin Soldier,” “Romeo and Juliet,” “Slaughter On Tenth Avenue”
New York City Ballet
David H. Koch Theater
New York, NY
February 13, 2009

by Leigh Witchel
copyright © 2009 by Leigh Witchel

Balanchine’s one act production of Swan Lake hasn’t been seen at New York City Ballet for a while; Peter Martins’ full length version incorporated large elements of the Balanchine into its second act, and the Martins setting is what has been in repertory.  This earlier production attracted notice for its sets and black swan costumes, following an idea it was said that Balanchine had but never acted upon.  Alain Vaes’ set is an icy blue grotto; “Napoli” moved to the arctic.

Wendy Whelan was a swan with long, bony lines and a very human intensity.  She reproduced the requisite bird moves and as with other classical roles, got as close to a classical line as she could and filled out the rest with a sense of the situation and predicament.  In the coda, she went for footwork over the drama with small, detailed entrechats passés, but not in the finale.  As the corps looped infinitely around her, she almost touched Siegfried before she left him forever.  She rose through her back from agony, past tragedy to destiny.