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Surfeits

Dance Day at The Reach Festival

Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts

Washington, DC

September 21, 2019

 

by George Jackson

copyright 2019 by George Jackson

 

An incredible amount of dance was performed in Kennedy Center’s formal and improvised spaces on Dance Day, September 21. From morning into the night it drew a huge audience. I was part of the crowd in the main building’s corridors and theaters, on the terrace overlooking the Potomac River and on the campus’ extension south with  its three blunt, new masonry blocks – buildings by the architectural firm of Steven Holl. I saw snatches of diverse dance on video screens placed theroughout the area, but attended only two entire performances, each about an hour long.

Conflicts

CONFLICTS

 

“Swan Lake”

American Ballet Theatre

Filene Center, Wolf Trap Park

Vienna, Virginia

July 13, 2019

 

by George Jackson

copyright 2019 by George Jackson

 

Of the characters in “Swan Lake”, Odette and Odile fascinate because they are opposites as well as being similar. Suffering has given Odette her allure. Force is Odile’s magnet. However, Siegfried is just a routine prince. Perhaps he has a domineering mother, yet he both manages the courtiers and mixes with them to some extent. Like all princes who have just come of age, he has longings but doesn’t know for what. Can Siegfried be made to hold our interest? That was one of two challenges for Aran Bell, the last of ABT’s three Siegfrieds at Wolf Trap this summer. His other challenge was the bravura of the prince’s solos. Bell was making his debut in the Siegfried role. 

Craft

“Journey”, “Rondo Ma Non Troppo”,

“Prufrock”, “Extremely Close”, “Songs by Cole”

and music by Chris Rogerson and Zoltan Kodaly

Chamber Dance Project

Harman Hall

Washington, DC

June 22, 2019 evening

 

by George Jackson

copyright 2019 by George Jackson

 

The format chosen by artistic director Diane Coburn Bruning for Chamber Project’s summer program was an alternation of dance and music-only selections. All the pieces but one were short and for the one long number, the last, there was both dancing and just-concertizing. This format functioned well and, likely, will be used again in the future. Coburn as choreographer was represented by two older works and the new “Prufrock”. Her competence is apparent in all three pieces. The opening  “Journey” is a display of female/male partnering in acrobatic neoclassical style. The mechanics of holding, embracing, lifting and levering are explored. Its flow of movement, the phrasing, gains continuity as the piece progresses. Concurrent emotions are implied. Music for Coburn’s  “Journey” was the Adagio from Samuel Barber’s String Quartet, Opus 11 with stately yet also challenging dancing being done by Luz San Miguel and Davit Hovhannisyan. Seeing a well known choreographer credited for this duet wouldn’t have surprised me. I preferred Bruning’s “Journey” to Annabelle Lopez Ochoa’s  “Rondo”, a double duet around, under and on a round café table.

Big Venue, Rather New

“Classically Dope” by Wavelengths Winds et alia;

Copland’s “Billy the Kid” Suite and

“From the New World” i.e., Dvorak’s Symphony #9 by

     The National Symphony Orchestra

The Anthem

Washington, DC

June 5, 2019

 

by George Jackson

copyright 2019 by George Jackson

 

An anthem is a hymn in praise of joy. DC’s huge, fairly new venue for the performing arts – The Anthem – is being called a concert hall. It opened on The Wharf, the city’s renovated Southwest waterfront, in October 2017 and is being used for dance as well as for music. It has a movie house marquee facing the boardwalk and waters. Up a couple of steps under the marquee, there are doors into a low lobby that leads to the concert hall – a vast vault reminiscent of an aircraft hangar. At the hall’s front is a large, raised stage. The main floor is a flat expanse for comfortable folding chairs. At the rear, surrounding the control pit for sound and light, are tiered platforms for additional folding chairs. Two levels of balcony boxes embrace the hangar. All together, the audience can consist of as many as 6 thousand people! Decoration is provided by tiny light bulbs arranged as curtains. The place is kept dimly lit even when  no performance is in progress so that it is difficult to read the printed program or see expressions on surrounding faces. What of sight lines for viewing dance?

The Familiar and the Strange

“Valse Fantaisie”, “Change”,

“Passage”, “Dougla”

Dance Theatre of Harlem

Ballet Across America

Opera House,

The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts

Washington, DC

May 28, 2019

 

by George Jackson

copyright 2019 by George Jackson

 

This time Ballet Across America spanned just the nation’s East Coast, but from New York to Florida. Opening night was all Dance Theatre of Harlem’s. It started with company director Virginia Johnson, chic in a sharply cut suit, stepping in front of the curtains and briefly addressing the audience. Johnson had chosen George Balanchine’s neoclassical “Valse Fantaisie” as opener. It is a little piece – a leading couple plus a female corps of four. Mikhail Glinka’s music hasn’t the sweep of a waltz by Johann Strauss 2, nor the surge of one by Richard Strauss, nor the ravishment of Ravel. Rather, the Glinka score is cute and the choreography makes a neat little exercise of it. Dylan Santos as the danseur and Crystal Serrano as the ballerina were amiable, amidst the quartet in its green gauze. After just a brief pause, “Change” followed and it was quite a change of temperament.

 

Photo: Crystal Serrano, Da' Von Doane, and Lindsey Croop in "Valse Fantasie." Photo by Dave Andrews.

 

Sensibilities

"Exuberant Fanfare”, “At the Seams”, 

“Lissajous” and “Du Vent et des Vages”

Bowen McCauley Dance Company

Terrace Theater

The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts

Washington, DC

May 18, 2019

 

by George Jackson

copyright 2019 by George Jackson

 

The entire program was titled “An Awakening”, and without doubt the evening’s choreographers, Lucy Bowen McCauley and Ilana Goldman, displayed the ferment and sensitivity of nascent feelings. The joyous opener, “Exuberant Fanfare” by Bowen McCauley, was very balletic. Bodies were turned-out and limbs were streamlined or smoothly folded, with steps and stances being linked together propulsively. The piece could have been even more danse d’ecole if its three women, or at least their leader, had worn toe shoes. The  two men stood, partnered and soloed with filigree leg-and-footwork  much as danseurs can in neoclassical ballet. The music, played live by violinist Leonid Sushansky and pianist Carlos Cesar Rodriguez, was Igor Stravinsky having fun recomposing scores from early 18th Century Italy. The shift of mood to the next piece was sharp.

 

Photo: BMDC in "Exuberant Fanfare." Photo by David Moss.

 

Seven Hypotheses

 

Dance Icons’ Thesis Concert

Choreography by Rachael Alexandra,

    Alicia E. Diaz de Leon, Jess Hoversen,

    Naomi Lang, Mariah Lopez Solonick,

    Paul Lytle and Mecca Mayers

Dance Loft on 14

Washington, DC

May 11, 2019

 

by George Jackson

copyright 2019 by George Jackson

 

Music by single composers served the first two dance works on the program. Each of the five following pieces of choreography used several composers, from three to six. Was it any wonder that the first two dances didn’t meander? The opener, Paul Lytle’s “Trilemma”, to a Leonard Bernstein score, was about the joy of dancing and contrasted, compactly, a balletic gal who had considerable training with a pair of rawer, also female, talents. The rawer talents brought Isadora Duncan to mind. It was apparent that Lytle knew the historic dance categories and was having fun exhibiting them. In the next piece, “The Light of Slow Descent”, Jess Hoversen deployed ten dancers. She was, I suspect, being didactic as she showed us how her team can be subdivided. A trio was followed by a quintet, by a solo, and by a quartet, etc. One of the dancers was highlighted teaching others. The choice of Arvo Part music seemed apt. Next came Mecca Mayers’ bafflingly titled “Recovering Undercover Over-Lover” to about a half a dozen compositions and texts including one by The Internet. Familiar and homey seemed the living room couch carried onto center-stage by a couple (female, male). It served them both as a love seat and as an exercise bar. Another woman appeared. There was awareness of the woman by the couple and vice versa. Eventually, seven dancers, two of them men, traipsed and turned, folded and unspanned on stage. Likely, the choreographer was showing us the influence of dancers’ expression of emotions (writhing, relief) on each other. Certainly the mere presence of other people is an influence in life. Nevertheless, Mayers’ dance outlasted its welcome, as did the program’s four further works that followed.

 

Photo: Mecca Mayers’ bafflingly titled “Recovering Undercover Over-Lover”. PHoto by Molly Schlechter.

 

Return

“Tracings”

Dana Tai Soon Burgess Dance Company

Kogod Courtyard

National Portrait Gallery

Washington, DC

May 4, 2019

 

by George Jackson

copyright 2019 by George Jackson

 

This time Dana Tai Soon Burgess didn’t make a new dance but restaged his 2003 work. If memory serves, it emerged with fresh bravura and with a lyric thrust from start to stop. Apparently the current version, with a duration of 43 minutes, is a bit shorter than the original that was shown at Kennedy Center. Aspects of ritual and of a legendary reality distill from the choreography, music and visuals. The story is about people, indentured Korean immigrants to American-dominated pineapple plantations on Pacific islands. Burgess shows the fate and transformations of these migrants from 1903 to now – three generations in 116 years. There is an Ancestress who witnesses and presides over the action. Four other women and five men convey currencies and the passage of time. One of the men (Kelly Moss Southall) seems a leader of the Koreans, perhaps dealing with the absent Americans and safeguarding the Ancestress. One of the women (Christin Arthur) experiences the lives of these immigrants in concentrated form and expresses herself impressively. It is this role and Arthur’s performance of it that give “Tracings” unexpected links to some historic pieces of dance history.

 

Photo: Christin Arthur, Anna Kang Burgess and Kelly Moss Southall. Photo by Jeff Malet.

 

Rarities

“The Legacy of The New Dance Group”

Choreography by Jane Dudley, Sophie Maslow, Anna Sokolow and Talley Beatty

Coolidge Auditorium

The Library of Congress

Washington, DC

April 19, 2019

 

by George Jackson

copyright 2019 by George Jackson

 

Seldom anymore do we get to see live performances of historic modern dance or, as it is called with loving irony, of “old modern”. Once upon a time, it constituted a successful revolution, or at least a fashion. That was from the 1920s into the 1960s, and not only in America. Shown on Friday evening at The Library of Congress were half a dozen works of choreography from the past – one from 1934 and the others from the 1940s. All were solos, five of them danced by women and one by a man. The four original makers of these works had all experienced contact with Martha Graham (1894 – 1991), an exception in the sea of modern dance forgetfulness. The importance of the torso was apparent in all the dances. That central portion of human anatomy was subject to tensions almost constantly as it stretched and arched or coiled or was held ready. This charged torso defined the dancing as acts of willpower and emotion. Supplementary were the dancer’s arms and legs. Often  the arms and hands were very mobile, wrapping and unwrapping themselves around the torso, but they could also remain like oars at rest. The legs and feet moved the body from place to place in space yet seldom called attention to themselves as they do in ballet. What of the head and face?

Of Numbers and Nationality

“Le Corsaire”

The Mariinsky Ballet

Opera House

The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts

Washington, DC

April 11, 2019

 

by George Jackson

copyright 2019 by George Jackson

 

Eighty-one dancers are listed by Russia’s Mariinsky Ballet in its current Kennedy Center program. That does not include the children who supplement in the grand, Act 3 divertissement of “Le Corsaire”. These junior dancers are local, from two ballet schools – the DC Kirov Academy and The Washington School of Ballet. Of the company’s regular dancers, 44 appear to be female and 37 male. The majority, unsurprisingly, likely are Russian but by no means all. At this performance, the title role of the chief pirate Conrad was danced by Xander Parish, whose initial training and performing took place in his native Britain at the Royal Ballet. How did Parish fit in with his current colleagues and compare with Timur Askerov, opening night’s space devouring Conrad, who is a Russian from Baku in Azerbaijan?