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Bon Appétit

Fall For Dance Festival
Mark Morris Dance Group, Lil Buck,Trisha Brown Dance Company, The Joffrey Ballet
New York City Center
New York, NY
October 27, 2011

by Mary Cargill
copyright © 2011 by Mary Cargill

City Center's imaginative, and inexpensive, Fall for Dance, opened its eighth season with a mixture of companies, from the well known Mark Morris to the unique Lil Buck, who offered a hip hop version of The Dying Swan.  Mark Morris' 2003 work "All Fours", to the String Quartet No. 4 of Bela Bartok, played, as is Morris' glorious custom, live, opened the program.  The punny title was not overdone, and the choreography was straightforward, musical, and varied.  It opened with a group of dancers in black against a searing red background, making them look like animated silhouettes.  There was an underlying tension in the work, hints of anxiety and unease, as the dancers either ran or crouched.  The people in black are eventually superseded by two couple in white, who dance in various combinations, most notably a staccato pas de deux for the two girls, who again project an underlying strangeness.  They might have been puppets or automatons.  This seems to be a work of mood, not narrative, a simple response to music, and it had a haunting beauty.

Meta-Morphoses

"Bacchae"
Morphoses
The Joyce Theater
New York, New York
October 26, 2011

By Michael Popkin
Copyright 2011 by Michael Popkin 

Morphoses, which last year endured the loss of its founding artistic director Christopher Wheeldon, reinvented itself by planning to invite a different artistic director each year to produce new work.  Luca Veggetti is the first and his dance drama "Bacchae," inspired by the great Euripides play, premiered this week.

Transplant Thriving

Living Dance Festival / 2011 Dance Festival of India
IDEA - Indian Dance Educators Association
Theater 1, Gunston Arts Center
Arlington, Virginia
October 29, 2011 at 7:30 PM

by George Jackson
copyright 2011 by George Jackson

A sturdy, supple tree's silhouette and nothing else decorates the cover of this festival's printed program. It is an apt symbol of how classical India dance is thriving on the other side of the world from its origins. Each of the weekend's 3 programs was substantially different, a goal which the Washington area's ballet teachers would be hard pressed to match. Aneal Krishnamurthy invited me to the Saturday evening performance which featured the Kathak style and a Nepalese rarity as well as Odissi and ubiquitous Bharatanatyam. I'll indulge my Euroeccentricity by comparing these styles to different forms of traditional ballet.  

Floor

"Haze"
Beijing Dance Theater
Eisenhower Theater
The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts
Washington, DC
October 26, 2011

by George Jackson
copyright 2011 by George Jackson

Most remarkable about the piece of group choreography with which BDT made its USA debut wasn't its social message nor its dance substance but the floor on which the performance took place. It was soft. Steps sank into it just a bit. Falls rebounded with a little bounce. While it looked impersonal, like a large sheet of industrial grey felt, in order to balance on it each cast member (10 men, 5 women) had to be assertive. The help or hindrance this flooring provided gave the slim, young dancers chances to show signs of individuality, which the overt movement did not. "Haze" is group choreography almost to the point of anonymity.

"Diamonds" in D.C.

The Suzanne Farrell Ballet
Eisenhower Theater
John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts
Washington, D.C.
October 12-16, 2011

by Alexandra Tomalonis
copyright 2011 by Alexandra Tomalonis

The Suzanne Farrell Ballet danced to full and happy houses, at least on the two nights I caught the troupe’s most recent Kennedy Center performances (Program A on Friday night, and Program B on Sunday afternoon). Oddly, that was the strongest impression I had of both evenings: the audience adored the performances, judged not just by the sustained applause at the end, but by the hush that descended on the house the minute a dancer appeared on the stage that was sustained until the final curtain fell. That’s the greatest tribute a company can receive, and I hope the dancers could feel it, too.

Neumeier choreographs Stravinsky´s “Apollon musagète” and “Orpheus”

Trying to bolster up up two ballets into a full-length Trilogy
John Neumeier choreographs Stravinsky´s “Apollon musagète” and “Orpheus”
Hamburg Ballet
Baden-Baden Festsouelhaus
Baden-Baden Germany
October 14. 2011
 
by Horst Koegler
copyright 2011 by Horst Koegler
 
When John Neumeier planned his "Orpheus“ two years ago, it was the first time that a ballet was to be specially created for Roberto Bolle, star-dancer based in La Scala di Milano, and a highly respected guest with many companies abroad, among many  others the Paris Opéra, London´s Royal Ballet and American Ballet Theatre. He had been acclaimed in all the prince roles, from  “Giselle” via the Petipas through their contemporary descendents, fathered by Ashton, MacMillan and Nureyev, plus some  of their relatives from bourgeios stock. among them Balanchine, Petit and other representatives of the higher ranks of the international ballet gentry.

Suzanne Farrell Opens at the Joyce

"Haieff Divertimento," "Diamonds Pas de Deux from Jewels," "Meditation," "Agon"
The Suzanne Farrell Ballet
The Joyce Theater
New York, New York
October 19, 2011

By Michael Popkin
Copyright 2011 by Michael Popkin

No Balanchine muse is more renowned than Suzanne Farrell, as great a ballerina as America ever produced.  Athough she retired from the stage in 1989, she's promised to deliver some of her old magic through the company she founded, and her first New York performances in over a decade have generated great anticipation and are selling out this week.  But the magic wasn't there on opening night as her program of all Balanchine works (all to Russian music) proved stiff and lifeless.  "Haieff Divertimento" and "Agon" did the most to justify the evening, "Divertimento" because it's a fine work and seldom seen; and "Agon" as the one piece that truly came alive.  But in the middle of the program, "Diamonds Pas de Deux" and "Meditation" seemed more like objects in a museum than live dance and one left the theater questioning the rationale of Farrell's project as a whole. Is she a uniquely qualified caretaker of Balanchine's work, or coach able to stage her own roles or her master's ballets more effectively than anyone else?  Balanchine - the man, the trademark and the logo - is virtually an industry these days, with lots of competition.  Farrell's program answered neither of these questions satisfactorily.

Tradition

"After Petipa"
Doug Fullington
with Christina Siemens (piano) and Batkhurel Bold, Karel Cruz, Kyle Davis, Rachel Foster, Carrie Imler, Kylee Kitchens, Carla Körbes, William Lin-Yee, Kaori Nakamura, Sarah Ricard Orza, Jonathan Porretta, Lucien Postlewaite, Lesley Raush, Brittany Reid, and Jerome Tisserand of Pacific Northwest Ballet
Phelps Center
Seattle, Washington
20 October 2011

by Helene Kaplan
Copyright © 2011 by Helene Kaplan

Last night in the stage-sized Pacific Northwest Ballet Studio C, Doug Fullington presented "After Petipa", the latest in a series of presentations that feature reconstructions from Stepanov notation of excepts of Petipa's works and compare 19th and early 20th century versions of the classics to current versions and the works of his choreographic descendants. "After Petipa" focused on three pas de deux from "Swan Lake" and "Sleeping Beauty", and while the program was more narrowly focused than previous programs, it was no less illuminating and revelatory. The comparisons illustrated several underlying themes: the simplicity of the reconstructed versions to faster tempos, the remarkably similar floor patterns in many old and new versions, changes and re-arrangements of the music between the premieres and the Petipa revivals, the incorporation of drama into the dance movements to replace original mime in pas d'action, and the distinct transition from the Cecchetti-influenced petite allegro with many connecting steps to grande allegro. 

Escher Enacted

"The Rehearsal"
Cuqui Jerez
The Performing Garage
FIAF Crossing the Line 2011
New York, NY
October 15, 2011

By Martha Sherman
Copyright © 2011 by Martha Sherman

For “The Rehearsal,” Cuqui Jerez mixed relentless repetition with laughter and boredom -- just as rehearsals often do. Presented as part of the FIAF’s Crossing the Line 2011 Festival, Jerez and her four collaborators claimed that their goal was not to connect their disciplines (choreography, performance, video) but to walk a line among them all. “The Rehearsal” was neither dance, nor theater, but Jerez’s idea enacted: “The curtain rises and we see the fiction within the fiction within the fiction within the fiction. The curtain falls.” The artists wandered, chatted, argued, got distracted by irrelevant things, tried things out, did them over. Interrupted by directors (also each of the performers) who coached from theater seats, each scene, was repeated -- including the irrelevant interruptions – multiple times.

The Outsiders

"Charlie Chan and the Mystery of Love", "Becoming American"
Dana Tai Soon Burgess & Company
Dance Place
Washington, DC
October 16, 2011

by George Jackson
copyright 2011 by George Jackson

A small town lad in America's Latino southwest falls in love not with the date he has escorted to a dance but with another lad. An orphan girl from Korea is adopted into an an American home. The lad, when not out dancing, is transfixed by television and fantasizes about the much replayed adventures of detective Charlie Chan, an outsider like himself. The girl can't forget images of her Korean past as shadowy figures haunt her few possessions - a bowl, a box and a piece of baggage. It is such misplaced, displaced people who transfix choreographer Dana Tai Soon Burgess. They haunt his dances, including the two his company performed this past weekend. Despite the kinship of their protagonists, these Burgess works were unalike as dances.