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Pirate Treasure

"Le Corsaire"
Boston Ballet
Boston Opera House
Boston, Massachusetts
October 29, 2016, matinee

by Mary Cargill 
copyright © 2016 by Mary Cargill

"Le Corsaire" originally set sail in Paris in 1856 and moved to Russia with Marius Petipa in 1858, where it went through several revisions. The last Petipa version was done in 1899 and it has added a lot of cargo since then.  Unlike "The Sleeping Beauty" the swashbuckling tale, tangentially related to Byron's poem, has no definitive version and its melodramatic plot is basically a plank to support some great (and not so great) choreography. The Boston Ballet presented Anna-Marie Holmes' version based on the 1992 Bolshoi production in 1997, and was the first American company to dance the full-length "Corsaire". (This is essentially the version that American Ballet Theatre dances.)

Boston Ballet in the Jardin Animé from "Le Corsaire".  Photo © Liza Voll.

Assurance

New Works! 
The Washington Ballet Organization & Guests
theArc Theater
Washington, DC
October 29, 2016 at 2 PM

by George Jackson
© 2016 by George Jackson

The modernist notion that every dancer and each dance student should be a choreographer too is still unusual in ballet. Given the risk of commissioning new work even from esteemed choreographers, the Washington Ballet presented eight new pieces by, mostly, professionals best known for skills other than making dances. Three of the choreographers are dancers in the Washington Ballet’s principal company and five are diverse former dancers who have turned to teaching. Performing the premiers were the dozen members of Washington Ballet’s second or Studio Company, seventeen members of its Trainees Program and eight of its Professional Trainees Program, the nine juniors and eight seniors of Washington Ballet @ theArc’s Performance Ensemble, and seventeen classmates from Howard University’s Dance Arts Program. In charge of this showcase was Victor Barbee, associate director of Washington Ballet’s still new artistic regime.  Perhaps two of the eight new works will have a significant after life – not a bad ratio. 

The Joys of Motherhood

Sara Juli
“Tense Vagina: an actual diagnosis”
The Chocolate Factory
Queens, NY
October 21, 2016

by Leigh Witchel
copyright © 2016 by Leigh Witchel

Sara Juli’s “Tense Vagina: an actual diagnosis,” was indeed a laughing matter. The deadpan one-woman-show chronicled her battle with vaginismus, or tense vagina, where the vaginal muscles tighten and spasm. Juli narrated us through this voyage with the insanely patient logic of a mother, and we experienced that full on because for over an hour she was The Mom and we were her surrogate children.

Sara Juli in “Tense Vagina: an actual diagnosis.” Photo by Brian Rogers.

Portraying Persistence and Change

“Margin”

Dana Tai Soon Burgess Dance Company

Kogod Courtyard

Smithsonian Institution’s National Portrait Gallery / American Art Museum

Washington, DC

October 28, 2016

 

by George Jackson

© 2016 by George Jackson

 

Police terminology is often applied to the art of portraiture – capturing truths that are elusive in life and arresting transient moments. That is the traditional view, but not the only one any more. Wander through the National Portrait Gallery’s current exhibit “The Outwin 2016: American Portraiture Today” and you will see images that hide a subject’s personality by presenting the individual’s features as a mask. Of course, that too is a sort of truth. Other portraits, even some executed in conventional media such as paint and canvas or pencil and paper, change as you approach them or transform the longer you look. Dance is adept at marking all sorts of alterations, at displaying the innumerable types of impermanence afflicting people, and it manages this along a time line. Burgess, whose latest choreography is based on the Portrait Gallery’s exhibit, seems aware of the options and chose to pursue some of them. “Margin” contains probing portraiture  but also, quite pointedly, uses bodies to be the picture’s frame. 

 

 

Being In the Seat: A Personal Journal

“A 24 Decade History of Popular Music”
Taylor Mac
St. Ann’s Warehouse
Brooklyn, NY
October 8-9, 2016

by Martha Sherman
copyright © 2016 by Martha Sherman

After listening to Taylor Mac sing for 24 hours straight, maybe there was a reason why the tune that ran through my head for an hour after I stumbled out of St. Ann’s Warehouse was the early 1920’s hit, “After the Ball is Over.” I don’t even like that song. There were over 240 songs that the performance artist and gay icon sang in his 24-hour marathon, covering 24 decades of American music since the country’s founding. But at least one song had to bubble up; you can’t keep that many tunes in your mind at one time.

 

Photo: Taylor Mac in “A 24 Decade History of Popular Music.” © Martha Sherman

 

Symposium and Variations

American Ballet Theatre
“Serenade after Plato’s Symposium,” “Symphonic Variations,” “The Brahms-Haydn Variations”
David H. Koch Theater
New York, NY
October 19, 2016

by Leigh Witchel
copyright © 2016 by Leigh Witchel

Is Alexei Ratmansky’s “Serenade after Plato’s Symposium” the anti-Emeralds? Arlene Croce posited that “Emeralds” was Balanchine’s imagining of what women were like in private without men. Ratmansky’s “Serenade,” a dramatization of Bernstein’s symphony, opened American Ballet Theatre's falls season at Lincoln Center, and presented a view of men as layered as Balanchine’s women in “Emeralds,” and sometimes as contrived.

Daniil Simkin and Blaine Hoven in “Serenade after Plato’s Symposium.” Photo by Rosalie O’Connor.

The Nice and the Nasty

“Cinderella”

San Francisco Ballet

Opera House

The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts

Washington, DC

October 26, 2016

 

by George Jackson

© 2016 by George Jackson

 

Scads of cinders but scarce a diamond in Christopher Wheeldon’s version of “Cinderella”. In this retelling of the folk fairy tale, the world is as nasty but not as well made as in Alexei Ratmansky’s staging (2002 for the Maryinsky). The story was re-raked for Wheeldon by Craig Lucas, and originally presented by Dutch National Ballet in 2012. San Francisco Ballet acquired it a year later. It turns out that Lucas’s libretto complicates rather than enhances the story’s moral. Wheeldon tackled staging the dances with what seems haste, as if he couldn’t wait to be finished – especially Act 1 is replete with signs of  his impatience. The best choreography is contained in Act 2. The final Act 3’s dances have unfulfilled promise. Audience response at Kennedy Center was maximum for the production’s spectacle, special effects such as a gigantic tree’s swarming foliage, the raising and lowering of a constellation of chandeliers, and panoramas of cloud drift. In the title role, opening night’s Maria Kochetkova showed, for the first time in my experience, a grown up woman’s warmth and wisdom. 

 

Maria Kochetkova and dancers of the San Francisco Ballet in Christopher Wheeldon's "Cinderella."

 

Space and Time as Spacetime

“a continuity of discontinuity” “Figure at Sea”
Cullberg Ballet
Zellerbach Hall, Berkeley
October 22, 2016

by Rita Felciano
copyright © Rita Felciano 2016

When on the evening of Cullberg Ballet’s first performance after more than a decade, I learned that Deborah Hay’s “Figure at Sea” would be preceded by a 45-minute lecture, "a continuity of discontinuity", by the choreographer, my heart sank. It just seemed a low point of a presenter’s trust in an audience’s ability to come to terms with unfamiliar material. I am glad to say that I was wrong. Never did I think that Hay could communicate with a large audience, such as Zellerbach's 2,500 seat auditorium. Her concepts of continuity and discontinuity — and the opposite -- may have been fairly abstract, yet her explanations on how the concepts influenced her dance-making were crystal clear. Her manner of presentation -- informal, with a sense of humor and direct addresses to the listeners -- made this less a lecture than a perspective into the evolution of this artist’s thought processes going back to the 1960's. Could “Figure at Sea” stand on its own? Absolutely, because it is a superb realization of dancerly essence: movement in space and time.

Cullberg Ballet in "Figure at Sea. photo credit: © Urban Jörén

Comrades

"Monotones I and II", "Serenade after Plato's Symposium", "Prodigal Son"
American Ballet Theatre
David H. Koch Theater
New York, NY
October 26, 2016

by Mary Cargill 
copyright © 2016 by Mary Cargill

American Ballet Theatre's now traditional Fall season is a treat for its audience, which gets to see interesting one-act ballets, full of fine dancing from the corps and soloists (as well as the principals), with few tutus in sight. The October 26 program stood out for its varied and interesting choreography and its well-rehearsed, dynamic dancing in works by Sir Frederick Ashton, Alexei Ratmansky and George Balanchine -- a wonderful line up.

 ABT in "Serenade after Plato's Symposium" Photo © Rosalie O'Connor.

Krishna's Heels

 

 

DC’s 13th Annual Fall Festival of South Asian Arts  

Dakshina Dance Company & Guests

Atlas Performing Arts Center

Washington, DC

October 22, 2016

 

by George Jackson
© 2016 by George Jackson 

 

Just before departing to perform overseas, Dakshina – Daniel Phoenix Singh’s small company that explores both Indiadance and modern-dance – organized a weekend of performances by diverse groups and individual artists trained in South Asian traditions. Of the two Saturday events I caught, one was a free studio demonstration by small squads of young women who clarified technical aspects such as anatomic turn-out and different types of body stances. The demonstration’s final example, by the elegantly refined Vyjayanthi Vadrevu, featured runs on stretched heels. The other presentation was a theatrical solo of a sort not uncommon in India that, due to its length, comes to seem like an act of self sacrifice. This particular dance, by Indira Kadambi, lasted just 70 minutes.   

 

Photo: Indira Kadambi.