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Ballet NY

"Concerto", "In Twilight", "Duet from The Other", "The Edge"
Ballet NY
The Ailey Citigroup Theater
New York, NY
November 19, 2011

by Mary Cargill
copyright © 2011 by Mary Cargill

Ballet NY, the newish name for the Judith Fugate/Medhi Bahiri company formerly known as Dance Galaxy, gave a brief New York season in the Ailey Theater. The company looked very good--engaged, well-rehearsed, and open-hearted.  The main draw was a selection from the rarely seen "The Other", Agnes de Mille's final ballet, but the other three works, by director Medhi Bahiri, showed off the dancers very well.  The program opened with "Concerto", to music by Bach.  The work was definitely influenced by Balanchine's majestic "Concerto Barocco"--many steps and poses were familiar.  It by no means rivaled that most perfect work, and the adagio movement for three couples was too fussy to capture the piercing simplicity of the music, but Bahiri used the ballet vocabulary well, with lots of little steps and quick transitions. 

A New "Romeo and Juliet" in Toronto

“Romeo and Juliet”
National Ballet of Canada
Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts
Toronto, Canada
Nov. 16, 2011

by Denise Sum
copyright 2011 by Denise Sum

The National Ballet of Canada opened their 60th anniversary season with the world premiere of a new “Romeo and Juliet” by Alexei Ratmansky. The decision to commission a new version was somewhat of a gamble. The company has been performing John Cranko’s interpretation to adoring audiences since 1964. The Cranko version is a signature piece for the NBoC and has played an important role in its history.  However, Ratmansky is a big name choreographer and one hopes that this new production will bring renewed international attention to the NBoC.

 

Flagged

"Canyon"
John Jasperse
BAM Harvey Theater
Brooklyn, NY
November 16, 2011

By Martha Sherman
Copyright © 2011 by Martha Sherman

The premiere at BAM of John Jasperse’s latest work, “Canyon,” is an homage to wonder. An artist whose work is subtle and implicit has used the grand, crumbling 19th Century Harvey Theater, a richly textured score by Hahn Rowe, and the collaboration of his five dancers to build a compelling dense work. That it somehow started with an idea of the Grand Canyon is both believable and irrelevant. Jasperse’s work has always been mysterious, hard to pin down. This work continued in that inscrutable tradition – the audience’s role was not to understand, but to watch and enter.

ABT at City Center - Program 2

"Seven Sonatas," "Duets," "Known by Heart ('Junk') Duet," "Black Tuesday"
American Ballet Theatre
New York City Center
New York, New York
November 8, 2011

By Michael Popkin
Copyright 2011 by Michael Popkin 

For its second New York program last week, American Ballet Theatre tackled four works in divergent styles ranging from Ratmansky to Cunningham and managed to dance them all with sensitivity.  The revival of Merce Cunningham's "Duets," not danced at ABT since 1990, was a feature, but the other ballets on the program were just as strong and the level of performance was high.  The company has a rich repertory of smaller works like these that it can't afford to dance at the Met, and it was a treat to see them so well performed in the intimate setting of the remodeled City Center.

Light as a Feather

"Angels of Swedenborg"
Ping Chong and the Great Jones Repertory
Ellen Stewart Theater at LaMama
New York, NY
November 10, 2011

By Martha Sherman
Copyright © 2011 by Martha Sherman

LaMama’s 50th anniversary season opened in a flurry of wings - and 600 pounds of feathers. Ping Chong’s revival of the 1985 production “Angels of Swedenborg” has been updated to include references to iPods and flat screens, but Emanuel Swedenborg’s underlying exploration of angels above and below resonates in any era. To the entering audience, a downstage electronic ticker shared a repeating loop of news from Swedenborg, an 18th Century scientist and mystic, “The Lord has graciously opened the sight of my spirit. He has raised me into heaven and lowered me into hell, and has shown me visually what each is like.” Ping Chong’s visually rich dance theater used Swedenborg’s images to honor LaMama’s own guiding spirit. He turned the space named for her -- the Ellen Stewart Theater -- into a shimmering, billowing swirl of white, as angels danced among us.

Ananiashvili Returns

"Charms of Mannerism," "Bizet Variations," "Swan," "Dreams about Japan"
Nina Ananiashvili and State Ballet of Georgia
Avery Fisher Hall
New York, NY
November 5, 2011

By Carol Pardo
Copyright ©2011 by Carol Pardo

You can come home again; at least Nina Ananiashvili can come back to New York whenever she wants. Beloved as a principal dancer at American Ballet Theatre, from which she retired in 2009, she was no less beloved this time out, as the marquee name and director of the State Ballet of Georgia. New Yorkers are almost as hungry for the works of Alexei Ratmansky, resident choreographer at A.B.T. and in demand everywhere else. The company, represented by ten of its leading dancers, and its director had the sense to give ‘em what they want: Nina three times in one night and three chamber works by Ratmansky, made for her, that you won’t see anywhere else.

Style in the Lab

"Entity"
Wayne McGregor/Random Dance
Novellus Theater, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts
San Francisco, CA
November 11, 2011

By Rita Felciano
Copyright @ Rita Felciano, 2011

Wayne McGregor's "Entity" surprised with an integrity and finesse that neither "Chroma" nor "Eden/Eden", his two works in San Francisco Ballet's repertoire, could muster.  Here, watching McGregor's thought processes and intelligence in action, seeing the choreographic process unfold, expand and curl in on itself to physicalize concepts about the intricacy of the human body, was a cool --  in every sense of the word -- and cerebral but also thrilling experience. "Entity's" high degree of stylization and transparent structure, combined with a tsunami of invention, demanded and received my complete attention.

Characters in Search

"Stay"
Theater of the First Amendment Company
Lansburgh Theatre
Washington, DC 
11 / 11 /  2011

by George Jackson
copyright 2011 by George Jackson

Eleven people are placed on an island in this new dance play. Perhaps they are stranded. Some, though, seem to be there by choice. We watch them interact and indulge themselves for 90 intermissionless minutes, speaking Heather McDonald's text and dancing Susan Shields' steps. At the end, they sight a ship offshore. Does it take them away from themselves and each other? Despite the signs cast by Gregory Cane's sky projections and many reminders of theater past (Theophile Gautier's "Giselle" scenario, Richard Wagner's Gesamtkunstwerk notions, Luigi Pirandello's "6 Characters in Search of an Author" and Samuel Beckett's "Waiting for Godot" among them), we'll never know. Were there more structured action in the writing and choreography, we might even care. Too much of the time, though, these people seem to be just treading water.

Fall for Dance - Program 4

Fall for Dance Festival
"Agwa," "Weight x 3," "The Return of Ulysses," "Pa Cuba me voy"
Compagnie Käfig, Tao Dance Theater, The Royal Ballet of Flanders, Lizt Alfonso Dance Cuba
New York City Center
New York, New York
November 3, 2011

By Michael Popkin
Copyright 2011 By Michael Popkin

Popular dance from around the world opened and closed Fall for Dance's fourth program.  CCN de Créteil et du Val-de-Marne/Compagnie Käfig led off with its hip-hop inspired "Agwa" before Lizt Alfonso Dance Cuba's "Pa Cuba me voy" closed the evening with virtually a Las Vegas floor show in Latin style.  The large casts of both works, moving in blocks on stage to strong musical and visual rhythms, reaffirmed the gut power of theatrical dance in such popular styles.  The middle half of the program was more eclectic, a study in constrasts that struck different chords.

Down to Earth

Wooden
Laura Peterson Choreography
HERE Arts Center, New York
November 9, 2011
by Tom Phillips
Copyright 2011 by Tom Phillips

Laura Peterson is as much an installation artist as a dancer/choreographer, and “Wooden’ is her biggest project to date – a dance set in a large indoor space, half of it covered by a live lawn and the other half a hard floor with limbs of dried-out driftwood suspended from the ceiling. The dance takes place in two parts, with the dancers changing over from the lawn to the floor, and the audience going the other way.

It’s her biggest project, but in another way her smallest. Petersen’s interest is not so much in human interaction but in the play of forces that underlie it. She seems to find her subjects through a microscope, one that has grown steadily more powerful over the years. In her first major production “Security” her company became bug-like creatures who crawled around after each other in instinctive fits and starts. In “I Love Dan Flavin” her dancers moved stiffly, falling and rising like the ones and zeros of computer code. Now in “Wooden” she and her three fellow dancers move like sub-atomic particles, circling and bumping, clumping and separating, rolling and tumbling. She plays with all the number combinations possible in a group of four – sometimes separating out one dancer for what looks like an improvised solo piece – a structure that reminds us of the role of chance at every level of existence. It also reminds us of how much we have in common with sub-atomic particles, and celestial bodies that move according to laws, but have their own quirks and quarks, and odd ways of dancing around each other.