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Innovation

"Watershed", "Being and Nothingness (Part 1)", "Unearth", "...black night's bright day..."
The National Ballet of Canada
Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts
November 22, 2013

By Denise Sum
Copyright © by Denise Sum 2013

Karen Kain's commitment to promoting and creating opportunities for Canadian choreographers is one of her greatest strengths as an artistic director. She first presented an "Innovation" mixed program featuring works from up and coming Canadian dance makers in 2009. This year, she has done it again with a mixed program featuring 3 world premieres, alongside a new solo piece by Guillaume Côté. As with any new works, the results were variable. However, the important thing is that programs like this give choreographers an invaluable opportunity to experiment and hone their craft, while providing NBoC dancers with the excitement and inspiration that comes from having original works created on them.

Samplings

DancEthos in Concert
with guests Vladimir Angelov & darlingdance
American University’s Greenberg Theater
Washington, DC
November 16, 2013
 
by George Jackson
copyright 2013 by George Jackson
 
One difference between this and most other dance performances surfaced almost right away. Several of the regular performers haven’t the sleek body type that’s become standard. Their build is sturdy, even corpulent. Or diminutive. These dancers aren’t cast differently than the stereotypes. Another difference made itself felt  only after seeing several of the 9 items on the bill. The company seems to prefer showing examples, sketches rather than choreography completed to the last detail. Real endings, satisfying conclusions tend to be absent. The cast just stops doing whatever it has been doing or suddenly sits down facing the footlights with bodies and faces proclaiming “That’s it!”.  Still, there’s nothing pugnacious in the DancEthos approach. Company director Tiffany Haughn and colleagues make the audience and guest artists feel welcome to their little revolutions.

Sumptuous Site

“Homage”
Dana Tai Soon Burgess Dance Company
Kogod Courtyard
The National Portrait Gallery^
Washington, DC
November 16, 2013 at 1:30 PM
 
by George Jackson
copyright 2013 by George Jackson
 
It's not that the choreography calls attention in any obvious way to a ceiling suspended high above the dancers. Rather the opposite happens, for there are passages in Burgess' premiere with bodies sinking to the ground or clinging to the floor while other figures bend down toward them. However, the net of glass and steel that had been cast over the museum's courtyard to form an undulant roof floating four stories overhead is like a magnet and magnifier. It gives objects, actions, perceptions - everything existing and happening below - an uplift and makes them appear larger than life. "Homage" takes place in an expanding universe. It is Burgess' most spacious work. First things first, though, for those who read printed programs prior to seeing performances: this piece germinated as a collage of the dance artists included in the Portrait Gallery's current exhibition*, "Dancing the Dream".  American all, by birth or choice, they are diverse and different. Yet "Homage" doesn't impress itself as bits and pieces. There is flow, continuity, coherence - perhaps because Burgess sees even the most distinctive of dancers as part of one history.  

Project Danceway

"Freefall", "Kaitlyncaitlin", "Talk Radio"
Trainor Dance
Theater of the Riverside Church
New York, NY
November 14, 2013

by Mary Cargill
copyright © 2013 by Mary Cargill

Caitlin Trainor, a dance professor at Barnard College, has a small modern dance company, which had its Fall season at the intimate Riverside Church theater.  Among the novelties were costumes by Christian Soriano, familiar to Project Runway fans as a designer of fabulous, flamboyant evening gowns.  These costumes showed that he is aware of bodies in motion, and they were modest, interesting, and quite flattering to the dancers.  The choreography, too, was low-key, improvisational, and equally flattering.

Marriage of Convenience

“Spectral Evidence,” “Soirée Musicale,” “Namouna, A Grand Divertissement”
New York City Ballet
David H. Koch Theater
New York, New York
October 10, 2013

By Michael Popkin
Copyright 2013 © by Michael Popkin

New York City Ballet’s “Contemporary Choreographers” program was a marriage of ballet convenience.  “Opposites attract” is another old saying; and the final Thursday night program of NYCB’s fall season proved both saws right.  The styles, themes and genres of dance in the triple bill had little in common; but convenience is convenient as long it lasts.

James Kudelka's "Swan Lake" in Toronto

"Swan Lake"
The National Ballet of Canada
Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts
Toronto, Canada
November 9, 2013

By Denise Sum
Copyright © by Denise Sum 2013

"Swan Lake" is a touchstone for any major classical ballet company and the National Ballet of Canada chose to open its 2013-2014 season with this perennial favourite. It is a pity, then, that the company lacks an interesting or coherent version. James Kudelka's vision of "Swan Lake" is overwhelmingly dark and morbid, but without nuance or context. Here, Odette is not a woman under a spell, but literally a swan. Siegfried is rather ineffectual, and Rothbart is a constant but banal presence. The gloomy tone is set during the prologue, where Rothbart (in the form of a winged figure or dark angel of sorts) is seen looking over the kingdom "to assume his place amid a broken and unsuspecting world" as the program notes tell us.

Joyous Balanchine

“Mozartiana”, “Episodes,” “Romeo and Juliet”

The Suzanne Farrell Ballet

Eisenhower Theater

The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts

Washington, DC

November 6, 7, 9 (evening), 10 (matinee), 2013
 


by Alexandra Tomalonis
copyright 2013 by Alexandra Tomalonis

The Suzanne Farrell Ballet gave Washington a more satisfying week of ballet than it has in the recent past. Even when imperfections of casting or preparation were visible, the overriding impetus of dancing the music – Balanchine’s Golden Rule – made the ballets live. It was a happy week (and sold out at the performances I attended).

Resistance Is Futile

"KYLIAN + PITE"
"Petite Mort," "Sechs Taenze," "Forgotten Land," "Emergence"
Pacific Northwest Ballet
McCaw Hall
Seattle, Washington
Saturday, November 9 (matinee and evening)

by Helene Kaplan
copyright ©2013 Helene Kaplan

Peter Boal has said that he's chosen to develop Pacific Northwest Ballet's rep by selecting multiple pieces by a smaller number of choreographers. During his tenure as Artistic Director, he has acquired works by Twyla Tharp, Mark Morris, Christopher Wheeldon, and Jiri Kylian that have been performed by other ballet companies, first integrating them into mixed rep programs, and then, after further acquisitions or commissions, featuring them in dedicated or close-to-dedicated programs.  Coming right off PNB's second all-Tharp program is "KYLIAN + PITE," which features revivals of "Petite Mort" and "Sechs Taenze" and the new-to-PNB "Forgotten Land." Interestingly, Boal did not choose to pair the Kylian works with another work in PNB's rep, Nacho Duato's "Jardi Tancat," where Kylian's influence on Duato, who joined Kylian's Netherlands Dance Theatre in 1981, is so clearly seen in the gestures, vocabulary, and momentum of "Forgotten Land" made that same year. Instead, the last work in the program is Crystal Pite's "Emergence," originally choreographed for National Ballet of Canada in 2009, which shows the influence of the other important post-Balanchine choreographer, William Forsythe, for whom Pite danced, especially in Pite's use of flank and group movement.

Dances and Dramaturges

"Bach Partita," "Gong," "The Tempest"
American Ballet Theatre
David H. Koch Theater
New York, NY
November 3, 2013

By Carol Pardo
Copyright ©2013 by Carol Pardo

Alexei Ratmansky’s "The Tempest" is billed as both "a fragmented narrative as well as a meditation on some themes of Shakespeare’s play," a tale to tell and a theme to explore. The Bard has a proven track record as a ballet librettist ("Romeo and Juliet" everyone?). The power of intertwined themes of the play, vengeance, forgiveness and the power of your love has been proven at every performance of Petipa’s "Sleeping Beauty" since 1890.

But unlike "Romeo and Juliet" or "Sleeping Beauty", "The Tempest" is not hard wired in our DNA. Tybalt or the sleeping princess need no introduction; the same cannot be said of Antonio or Sebastian. Ratmansky is stuck trying to tell a less familiar story while simultaneously extracting its perfume. It’s a tough balancing act that doesn’t come off. The result is a "Cliff Notes" in costume, all but leached of poetry.

His "Swan Lake" It's Not

Matthew Bourne’s “Sleeping Beauty”
A New Adventures Production
Opera House
The Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts
Washington, DC
November 12, 2013
 
by George Jackson
copyright 2013 by George Jackson
 
Britain’s Matthew Bourne likes to caper with iconic plots, characters and musical compositions. He was unknown in America when, towards the end of the last century, the Kennedy Center made a low key announcement that it would preview a new “Swan Lake” movie at its then American Film Institute Theater late one night. Ballet being very much “in” at the time, and despite the lack of casting information, the line of fans waiting to get in was long. Once the movie started rolling it was obvious that the ballet by Bourne wasn’t a traditional “after Petipa and Ivanov” version. The royals at the center of the action had been updated to seem like the House of Windsor and the enchanted swans who intrude on their reign had been transgendered. It was the swans as male that, in particular, caused a stir. They had the predatory beauty, the dangerous allure of the actual birds. Arms arched like wings, backs stooped to crane forward. This corps of men seemed ready to attack, about to cast its spell in flight formation. That singular, initial image of the swans persisted in the audience’s memory. It was as powerful as the traditional vision of the Swan Queen, hovering, pulled-up on pointe with arms undulating fearfully, pleadingly, or reaching for freedom. Although the indelible idea of the Swan Queen may have originated with choreographer Julius Reisinger in 1877, it was Petipa and Ivanov who in the 1890s knew how to develop and vary it, distribute it from principal to soloists and female corps, to turn it into true choreography. Bourne wasn’t as skilled. There’s even a question whether the notion of male dancers as swans was his or Roland Petit’s. What made Bourne’s “Swan Lake” beside the male flock image were the clever parallels he postulated between legend and real life. Bourne’s “Sleeping Beauty” lacks any such interplay.