Let'sTalk Off-Broadway

Dance -- Keigwin + Company at the Joyce Theater

For their opening night at the Joyce Theater, Keigwin + Company presented four dances.  Natural Selection was the ins and outs of three pairs of dancers in muted colors suggestive of simplicity and nature that didn't add anything to similar modern pas de deux variations, and the dancers sometimes searched for their footing when set down from a lift.  One learned fast to keep ones eyes on Liz Riga, a tall, long legged, extremely flexible and vibrant dancer.

Love Songs, to music by Roy Orbison, Aretha Franklin and Nina Simone, was more varied in terms of partnering and with more traces of street dancing, but tended to repeat its good "bits."  The program notes that Liz Riga "was named one of the top 20 dancers of 2008 by Dance Magazine for her 'over the top raunchy/funny femme fatal' performance of Larry Keigwin's Love Songs."  She's great, but that's an overstatement of the role.

Triptych was a world premier but brought nothing new.  The last, Bolero NYC, had an interesting possibility:  large numbers of people of all sizes, shapes and ages promenading dance-like in an open urban area -- like Washington Square Park, many of the dancers come from NYU's Tisch School of the Arts near there.  Once dancer -- yes, Liz Riga -- leads a dog.  There's a steady-ahead bicyclist.  Everybody wears black and red miscellaneous costumes from "Our Closets."  There are crowd pleasers:  an extremely tall ectomorphic male parading slowly in a tiny red bikini;  an overweight woman in a bright red satin dress wiggling to "Bolero," and in fact, the ballet panders to laughs and sentimentality. A tiny tot of a girl is left too long alone on the stage with an inflated balloon;  and, as if Ravel's "Bolero" wasn't enough, at the end there's a segue to "Celebration." 

The dancing ranged from competent to, in one case, tops -- the women were generally finer dancers than the men -- but all in all the choreography lacked imaginative vigor.

Keigwin + Company dances at the Joyce Theater -- usually a GREAT venue for dance -- in NYC's Chelsea district June 23-27.

                                                                            Yvonne Korshak

Comments welcome ... please scroll down and click on "comment" (absolutely no emails appear with comments)

American Ballet Theatre -- The Balanchine-Tchaikovsky Spectacular

                            ... George Balanchine and Peter Ilyitch Tchaikovsky ...

This was a magnificent evening of joyous music and consummate ballet, seen Friday, May 22.  The four ballets moved like four symphonic movements.

The uncluttered, glowing color behind the dancers is all the setting one wants or needs to enjoy the dazzling use of the human body -- and the ABT's glamorous, sensuous costumes that bring out its beauty.  Think jewels splashed against exotic tie-dyed silk. 

   Here they are:

  Allegro Brillante is like a classical pas de deux but with Balanchine's purity -- beyond narrative -- although eroticism is its own story.  From his first moment on stage, Ethan Stiefel was thrilling and charming, he just has it in him since Gillian Murphy, perfect in technique, seemed emotionally disengaged.  The choreography is interesting in the way it follows the music.  For example, if the music flutters, alternate lines of dancers alternately go up and down, fluttering with it.

  Tchaikovsky Pas de Deux:  Well -- there are those who dwell on a more rarefied plane but -- this above all is what most people come to the ballet for!  A classical pas de deux in the style of Petipa, it's loaded with the narrative of desire, and astonishingly danced by the big, strong Marcelo Gomes -- those leaps! -- and the delicate and poignant Paloma Herrera.  The music was originally written for Act III of Swan Lake, according to the program note, but wasn't used for reasons of history, was lost, and later discovered -- a good reason for Balanchine's choice of classical choreography.

  Mozartina is the andante -- the costumes are black, lacey and 18th Century.  Suspended chandeliers speak ancien regime and the sequence of dance styles, a prayer, a gig, a minuet, a pas de deux, and a finale are like a courtly entertainment.  Ballet students, little girls not yet on pointes, dance in the ensemble.  Principal Dancer Veronika Part was strong and precise but, as in Allegro Brillante, the male Principal Maxim Beloserkovsky had more fire, and his footwork in the air is breathtaking.

  Theme and Variations is a big piece with lots of dancers, just right for a finale.  It was beautifully danced and costumed but the choreography is distracting.  David Hallberg was superb in his solos but overworked in partnering Michele Wiles.  As in Allegro Brillante the choreography  often followed the music only here, the musical "ups" required Hallberg to lift Wiles again and again, to the point where the repetition seemed unimaginative and lacked balletic ease -- at her final leap into his arms he looked shocked, I had a close view from the second row and hoped he could hold on.  He did.  Whew!

An evening of ballets by a single composer and choreographer is a wonderful idea -- a free flowing unity in diversity.  This is a great season for The American Ballet Theatre.  Shortly they will be dancing their All-Prokofiev Celebration, including a world premier, On the Dnieper.  The American Ballet Theatre is performing at the Metropolitan Opera House, Lincoln Center, NYC.

                                                                                                            Yvonne Korshak

Please comment ... just scroll down ... thanks!

                                    

Lets Talk Off-Broadway -- Coppelia, The New York City Ballet, at Lincoln Center, Spring 2009

The great classical ballets are founded on great stories.  Coppelia is true to form, and enriched with comedy, and some of the most heart lifting music ever written for ballet by Leo Delibes -- the "oh here's where that comes from" kind of music! 

The setting is an idyllic central European village during festival time, rendered with a watercolor rich background, sketchy enough to give breath to imagination.  Frantz loves two "women, " Swanilda (swanny word play on Wagner and Swan Lake) who returns his love, and Coppelia, a full-sized animated doll who sits on a high porch in the home of Dr. Coppelius, her inventor-maker, reading a book (upside down as we find out). 

In Act II, Frantz, Swanilda and her friends find their way into Dr. Coppelius' workshop where Swanilda disguises herself as the automaton, the ruse revealing to Frantz (once he wakes up from Coppelius' potion) that Coppelia does not exist -- not as a real woman -- and the lovers are reconciled.  Dr. Coppelius, danced by  Adam Hendrickson, is left holding the limp form of a rag doll. 

Thus, with the lovers united, the story thins after Act II but Act III is so filled with gorgeous dancing, including the ecstatic pas de deux between Frantz and Swanilda, that one hardly notices.

The idyllic setting and implausible persuasiveness of the wind up doll might make Coppelia in outline seem a childish story but it isn't.  All major, and mature, emotions come into play, arrowing upward for Frantz and Swanilda, with Dr. Coppelius a tragic counterpoint.  Flirtation, desire, love, betrayal, jealousy, plans that succeed, plans that go awry, joy and despair:  the issues are fundamental, conveyed with the full depth and breadth of emotion through dance. 

Tiler Peck danced the tour de force role of Swanilda that calls on the ballerina to perform full classical ballet and, in Act II, to dance with the mechanical motions of the pretend wind up doll, and even semi-wind up as the ruse begins to deteriorate.  The victory of the real woman over the "doll" in her lover's affections is a satisfying moment (though we're never really worried about her) -- and a notably feminist theme and outcome for a ballet completed in 1884.  For perspective, Henrik Ibsens' A Doll's House was first performed in 1879.

Andrew Veyette was electrifying as Frantz:  he has the strength and big leaps of the great male dancers with an individualizing loose limbed flexibility.  The program notes call Frantz a "country bumpkin" but it's hard to connect the word "bumpkin" with that kind of dancing -- although it's true, he was taken in by that "doll" -- at first.

A classical ballet like Coppelia compells one to compare the physical characteristics of men and women that fuel the soaring culminations of desire.  Voyeurism, yes!  One contrasts constantly the shape of the female torso with the male, the legs, the arms, the neck, the faces as the dancers perform the full range of movements.  These ballets let us have our cake and eat it, too.  The piper is paid by the discipline of the forms and the years of hard work the dancers have invested in their skill.  These cast a permissive veil over sheer elemental eroticism. 

                                                                                                       Yvonne Korshak

next:  Ten Blocks on the Camino Real by Tennessee Williams, Target Margin Theatre

Comments welcome ... please scroll down.  Thanks!