DanceMetros

Cracking the Nutcrackers

Russian expat George Balanchine choreographed The Nutcracker for New York City Ballet in 1954. Balanchine danced several roles in the ballet at the Maryinsky Theater created by Lev Ivanov’s 1892. He streamlined the story with a mix of neoclassic balletics and pantomime dance for American audiences. The Balanchine artistic trust only permits certain companies permission to dance Balanchine’s Nutcracker and there are plenty of other interpretations that re-imagining the story, some sticking closer to the ballet’s Russian origins.

When The Moscow Ballet’s ‘Great Russian Nutcracker’ swung into Philly for two nights at the Annenberg Center in Philly just nights after the Pennsylvania Ballet’s Balanchine production opened, I thought it would be interesting to compare the choreographic templates, lineage and impact on contemporary audiences.

PB principal Alexander Peters leads the Candy Canes

PB Principals Ian Hussey & Amy Aldridge as Sugar Plum & her Cavalier

PB Corp de Ballet in Snowflake scene

MoscowBallet Arabian Variation Sergey Chumakov & Elena Pretrachenko

MB’s Harlequin scene

Pennsylvania Ballet’s production of George Balanchine’s The Nutcracker

Academy of Music, Dec. 9-31

Pennsylvania Ballet Artistic Director Angel Corella continues to sharpen the company’s production of George Balanchine’s Nutcracker and since the Balanchine trust keeps tight reins on the few companies that are licensed to perform Mr. B’s, PAB’s attention to the smallest details make all of the difference, dusting off ACT I of ballet, which is can drag on if not fueled with enough performance energy.

Child dancers Claire Smith and Rowan Duffy as siblings Marie and Fritz, Both young dancers have natural stage presence and are strong dancer-actors, a key element in focusing the opening scenes. And this energy extends to all of the children at the Holiday party, which can often look like seasonal pageantry.

Corella is making sure that both the children and adult dancers are defining characters in their pedestrian and gestural movement.

PAB’s new dance master Charles Askgard portrays Herr Drosselmeir, and is a study of detailed pantomime dance. Even Balanchine’s lumbering mouse battle moves swiftly along.

The Act I solos commence when Drosselmeir animates the Harlequin dolls in their cute pointe patterns, but Balanchine saves the fireworks for the toy soldier solo, a precision dance, with precision flatfooted jumps and limb moving in sharp opposite angles- In this performance danced by Peter Weil with haunted eyes executing the drill steps.

After the faux mouse battle, Marie and the Nutcracker Prince are transported to the snowy forest where Snowflakes perform vintage Balanchine choreography full of geometric configurations and requiring tight esprit de corps. At this performance the corps’ ensemble had the pulse but veered off with some blurry unison pacing and scrambled transitions.

Amy Aldridge as the Sugar Plum Fairy among the little angel gliding over the floor to open Act two and Aldridge who has danced this role many times and this performance can be counted as among her most radiant performances.

In the Act II divertissment Lillian DiPiazza smolders as Coffee in the Arabian Dance and Jermel Johnson slices through the air with saber leg splits for Tea. Alexander Peters and his battalion of Candy Canes getting through those hoops with jaunty flair. Making the most of their flash tarantella in the Spanish Dance are newcomers Sterling Baca and Nayara Lopes.

But it was Dayesi Torriente dancing the lead in Marzapan Shepardess that stood out. This is a deceptively simple looking mid-tempo choreography, is actually very tricky and easily scuttled. Balanchine’s counterpoint patterning can loose technical clarity and merely look pretty. In this performance Torriente commanded with thrilling artistry and her Shepardesses- Adrianna deSvastich, Jacqueline Callahan, Yuka Iseda and Ana Calderan, were completely in sync.

The corp de ballet looked sharper than in the Snowflake scene, with precision and attack in Dewdrop Flowers dance. Principal Mayara Pineiro set the highest mark with her fiery lead solo. Pineiro can just hang on point arabesque and her transition steps flawless entrances and exits to diamond centered turns, airy jetes and luminous pointe work.

The finale pas de deux is all Balanchine fireworks and tests the mettle of even the most technically proficient dancers. Aldridge not missing a moment to thrill with her solid technical prowess from every angle. Aldridge and principal dancer Ian Hussey as her Cavalier with palpable chemistry throughout highlighted by their consistent fluency Balanchine’s difficult lift sequences. Hussey’s solos highlighted with centered turns and solid tours en l’air.

It can’t be understated how vibrant conductor Beatrice Jona Affron’s tempos, detailing and orchestral thrust of Tchaikovsky score are key. In Act I, among the outstanding soloists are Luigi Mazzocchi’s violin solo just engulfing the Academy and harpist Mindy Cutcher floating gorgeously crystal strings first as the first snowflake piques on the floor.

Moscow Ballet’s Great Russian Nutcracker

Annenberg Center, Philadelphia

Dec. 12-13

The Moscow Ballet version of the Nutcracker is a more classic Russian version, without doubt and is a choreographic update by the directors after Imperial Ballet period versions by Russian choreographic masters Vaganova, Marius Petipa and Lev Ivanov.

At the Moscow Ballet’s Great Russian Nutcracker, you pick up right away that the story is much different, with Uncle Drosselmeyer, in a wonderfully danseur lead character part performed by Maksim Bernadskyl. Uncle is Christmas Eve magician who conjures the young girl Masha’s Nutcracker dream escorts us through the whole ballet.

Drosselmeyer Anastasiya Terada is hypnotic in her mechanical moves in a multi-colored ribbon tutu ‘Kissy Doll’ and Konstantin Vinovoy’s Harlequin (the prototype for Balanchine’s Soldier) equally spellbinding. Not transcribed by Balanchine are the Moor Dolls.

Where Balanchine leans heavily on just pantomime and gestural acting to carry Act I, here there is much more dancing including a waltz for the adults, and an officer saber dance.

The Nutcracker Doll & Prince is danced by Mykhailo Syniavskyl throughout (Balanchine turned it into a mostly pantomime role for a young male dancer).

The mice battle is a much more interesting scene, than Balanchine’s limp and comedic version. Here Sergyl Merzlyakov is not a fat cartoon rat, but a scary Rat King in red and black dyed tights stylishly sinister headpiece. The fight choreography has Merzlyakov slicing through the air or in thrilling sword dances with Nutcracker Prince.

Elena Petrichenko and Sergey Chumakov were flash dancing ‘Moor Dolls’ in the first act, but they emerge as virtuoso dance – acrobats to open Act 2 as the Dove of Peace, each with a majestic wing and they cleave together in a series of lifts that keep moving to various symbolic and sculpted positions. Later, the couple appears in an even more dramatic tableau in the Arabian Dance (a lengthier transcription of the Arabian music from Tchaikovsky’s score.)

Balanchine made this a solo dance and one of the highlights of his version for a smoldering solo for a principal ballerina. This has an equally entrancing quality and these two make the most of it.

Balanchine was skimpy on his version of The Spanish Dance even though he has four couples animated in a stylized tarantella, with fancier footwork for the leads pair. Moscow Ballet’s duet for Boris Yastrub and Olga Aru is more interesting in its variation; this couple has wonderful presence and flair in this dance, though their technique flagged.

Moscow Ballet’s ‘Chinese Variation’ (Tea) is much more developed than Balanchine’s flash dance version with glittering repeated phrases. MB’s is much more a character dance, however un-pc with ‘Orientalism.’ Juliya Verian and (stealing the show again) Sergyl Merziyakov’s playful patterns transition steps to technically dazzling double tempo grand pirouette and razor sharp aerial splits.

The reverse is true in The Snowflake ensemble dance at the end of Act I, Moscow’s Snowflakes are exemplar of Russian ballet decorousness, whereas in Balanchine’s turns the heat way up for the Snowflake scene to cap off Act I.

Moscow Ballet’s ‘Russian Variation’ is an expanded Czardas dance with Anton Romashkevych and Anna Bogatyr in traditional Ukrainian dress exuberant in high stepping patterns. Romashkevych in robust barrel rolls and Cossack plies, around Bogatyr, who is twirling like a top. Balanchine turned this into the Candy Canes hoop dance, which is just as effective as a scene, but doesn’t have this folkloric flavor.

Mykhilo Syniavskyi and Veronika Hordina have great chemistry and refinement in the central pas deux that define their characters and unfolds in dramatic finales for both acts.

So Moscow Ballet’s Great Russian Nutcracker has a lot to offer in contrast to Balanchine’s distillation of Russian aesthetics. Even with techniques among this large cast erratic, particularly in the corp de ballet scenes, it should be noted that dance schools and companies in Russia have gone through drastic reduction of state sponsorship over the last 20 years and that is a classic Russian story for another cold winter’s dance night.

DanceMetros

Jessica Lang Dance triumphal at Dance Celebration

Lang’s architecture in ‘Lines Cubed’

Choreographer Jessica Lang grew up in Doylestown PA, and got her start as a dancer-choreographer in Philadelphia. For the last 16 years, she has choreographed more than 80 works for companies all over the world, and has received many awards, including the 2013 Bessie. Lang started Jessica Lang Dance in 2011 and this month, brought them to Philly for their first appearance Dance Celebration at the Annenberg Center.

The troupe’s appearance proved a highlight in an altogether electric season programmed by Dance Celebration artistic director Randy Swartz, which has featured mainly international companies.

At the opening of a four performance run March 19, Lang was introduced by Swartz and she told the audience how appreciative she was for the reception to her company that it indeed, felt like a homecoming for her. Her troupe of ten dancers showcased Lang’s expansive artistic dance template and her salient stage composition with a sampler of six works; you get the sense that this is just a preview of a very prolific choreographic master.

‘Lines Cubed’ builds out of dancers as architectural body studies set to an industrial score by John Metcalf and Thomas Metcalfe, which engulfs the action like a soundtrack to a thriller. The dancers seem to recalibrate their positions with the repeated sound of a piano wires being hammered.

The dancers are grouped in red, yellow, blue or black outfits signal disparate choreographic moods. The ensemble locks in squared or sharply angled shapes get more dizzying and in the process, Lang delineates clean balletic lines -classic, progressive and deconstructed- evolving in her striking stage visual of morphing accordion piping, like a geometric schematic.

The end section strikes as ponderous in the arc of the long form piece. But, the ideas and attack of these dancers with this material makes it a stunner.  

‘Mendelssohn/Incomplete’ for six dancers, indeed does look like a middle draft of a larger work. It is set to the Tranquillo movement, performed by Gould Piano Trio of Mendelssohn’s Concerto No. 1 inspiring lyrical expressionism by Lang, but is also curiously choreographically spare. The couples chasse and petit jumps are pretty, but don’t go anywhere. Lang starts to mix it up with some group configurations, but only briefly.

In contrast, ‘Among the Stars’ with music by Ryuichi Sakamoto is a riveting duet danced by Laura Mead and Clifton Brown. Mead in a drop-dead structured raw silk dress with a train that unspools as she piques across the stage, while Brown holds the other end. It becomes an allegory for their relationship as they leap over its borders, gather it around them or release it in the air, their story punctuated by Lang’s unique lift patterns and releases that flow naturally, danced with precision and subtlety.

Fabric also figures in ‘The Calling’ a solo scored to the ariatic elegies of Trio Mediaeval. Kana Kimora is dressed in a form fitting off white gown that fans out on a wide circle. At points she seemed both free and trapped in it, or disintegrating (she seems to sink into the floor at one point) or in gorgeous sculptural torso-scapes that suddenly become pained. 

‘White: a dance on film’ by Lang and director of photography Shinichi Maruyama has the ensemble projected on screen and moving sometimes in slow motion on turns and jumps showing Lang’s and the dancers polish, but they are just as wily in funny gestures the speeded up section is hilarious Buster Keaton meets modern ballet

‘I.N.K’ at first seemed connected to the dance on film, as a dancer dressed in black togs is suddenly crouched before the blank screen as huge splash of ink starts to be projected on across it. The liquidly soundtrack cues other dancers to enter the scene, some in a scuttling crouch march, others moving with slithery and rippling bodies. The piece just pulses with abstract movement, of the phrasing looking like reverse dance combinations and again Lang creating sculptural shapes in motion. A male-female duet breaks out downstage that seems to be floating an intense relationship, but ultimately, this is decidedly cryptic mis-en-scene.

Lang seems to have some false ending and like Cubed Line, the arc of the piece seems less in focus than the back half. Still, Lang’s edginess and whimsy, side by side, goes a long way in building its own dynamic dance-scape.

The audience’s lusty applause for the conviction and esprit of these dancers sent the clear message that they hope to see them back on this stage again soon.

DanceMetros

‘Risky Business’ quintessential Philadanco

Perelman Theater, Philadelphia
Dec.11

Philadanco has had a very tough year financially and for their fall series at the Kimmel Center titled Risky Business by artistic director Joan Myers Brown, might have more than one meaning. Brown was definitely referring to a program packed with risky, athletic moves. The legendary Brown, has piloted the company for 45 years and her school for 55. Winner of every arts accolade along the way, Danco does Philadelphia proud on tour all over the world, but the city doesn’t return that love with financial support.

But, despite these hardships, Danco opened its 45th home season with a theatrically thrilling, choreographically exciting program of five works. Pulse by Daniel Ezralow, has dancers sliding across the stage with precarious velocity, dressing in bluish iridescent dance togs and socks hydro foiling in and out of dramatic pools of light. The deceptively simple work is Ezralow‘s visual representation of spacey electronica music by David Lang, that builds to a sonic matrix as the dancers pulse together in floaty ensemble configurations and just as fast in breakaway solos. Jah’Meek D. Williams is suddenly the center, in mach speed spins and later Victor Lewis, Jr. locks into a plie with a spellbinding hand dance like he was trying to capture atoms.

‘White Dragon’ choreographed by Elisa Monte for six dancers has a modern-primitive feel, with the dancers are costume in colorful skimpy outfits that could be part of a cultural rite, moving in agitated angular patterns. The music, by Glen Branca gets more 80s clubby and the ensemble sections are more fluid in the back half of the piece with ramped up athleticism and double-tempo phrases. A central duet entrances with sculptural and acrobatic intensity, danced with stunning precision by Rosita Adamo and Joe Gonzalez.

Ray Mercer‘s ‘Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner’ features a 5 foot standing table that dance on and dive off of, and otherwise use as a relationship cliff. Mercer’s dynamic movement ideas beautifully anchored to couples’ figuring it all out. Like Pulse, this full ensemble piece, shows more refinement every time out and is much more than its dazzling dance effects. Elyse Browning in a scorching solo on top and underneath the table. Roxanne Lyst, always with gorgeous athleticism, is in fearless flight vaulting in breathtaking lateral splits. In one of the sizzling duets, the towering Adrian Moorefield and Janine Beckles have such steeled litheness and intimacy in their partnering.

‘Ghettoscape with Ladder’ is classic by Talley Beatty, set to Natalie Cole’s rendition of Good Morning Heartache. Four men carry in an eight foot ladder and on it is former former Danco and Ailey star Deborah Manning St. Charles (who now teaches at Danco). She reprises her role from 15 years ago, dancing Beatty’s precarious precision with as much theatrical power and balletic grace than ever.

The premiere piece ‘Latched’ by Christopher Huggins, set to Sohn, a pulsing Brit electronica band. Huggins has the dancers in black tops and tights, it is choreographically it is Huggins at his most witty and mysterious. The theme of couples coming together only to be pulled apart, it is a simple physical play on the push-pull of relationships. Huggins’ flowing choreography also technically demanding with low to the ground lift combinations, for instance, that displays Danco’s dazzling athleticism and Huggins’ vivid musicality.

‘Risky Business’ has such artistic depth and technical magic that, in fact, they are more relevant than ever. Brown is about to take embark on a six week European tour with their smash production ‘James Brown: Get on the Good Foot‘ that premiered last year at the Apollo in New York, was given a dicey reception by critics, but played to sold-out houses in New York and L.A. Danco dances on without fail.

DanceMetros

Parsons Dance’s jazzy return to Philly

Miguel Quinones about to take permanent flight in the transcendent Parsons’ dance CAUGHT (photo B. Docktor)

The Dance Celebration series at the Annenberg Center is presenting one of the most diverse and stellar line-ups of companies for their 2014-15 season. The dance series has been struggling to maintain funding in its commitment to present all styles of dance from around the world. They kicked off with Britain’s BalletBoyz, Israel’s Kibbutz Contemporary Dance, Spain’s Soledad Barrio & Noche Flamenca, all attracting enthusiastic audiences, but still not enough to fill Annenberg’s spacious Zellerbach Theater.

The first week in December, the popular New York based troupe Parsons’ Dance returns with a mixed program of old and new repertoire.. Choreographer David Parsons is not only known for his athletic, sensual and diverse choreographies, but showing vastly different content each time out. His current tour is highlighted by his newest piece Whirlaway and dance-works by out choreographer Trey McIntyre and former Parsons dancer-choreographer Natalie Lomonte.

Whirlaway is scored to a song-cycle by jazz composer Allen Toussaint’s and had its premiere in New Orleans last spring in a sold out performance in a 2500 seat theater. “Everybody’s jaw dropped that we sold out,” Parsons said in a phone interview last week from the company’s studios in New York.

“Allen Toussaint is one of the most legendary singer-composers in the US. He played ‘Whirlaway’ live onstage behind us with a 12-piece band,” Parsons said. The choreographer collaborated directly with Toussaint “we sat around the studio and came up with the tracks for it and he was so great to work with. This is a fantastic piece closer for this Philly program. The music is more jazz-funk and it brings audiences together at the end. You feel like you are in New Orleans celebrating dance and beautiful bodies and music.

As he has done with other song suites, notably ’In the End’ scored to tracks from the Dave Matthews Band, Parsons often choreographs to popular music, usually with a cohesive narrative line. “There is always a thread that I like to communicate. I hate when people sit in a dance concert and have a question mark as to what it’s about. I like to bring something that has to do with their lives. “

Jazz scoring to contemporary dance is a rarity, but it is a standard method that Parsons is always experimenting with. His 2001 piece ’Kind of Blue’ set to Miles Davis’ ’So What’ (also on the Philly program) he describes as “improv based, there are segments where the dancers can go off, I don’t care. You know I like to have fun and I like them to have fun,” he assures. the dancers don’t have to stick to every choreographed move,” Parsons explains. “when we have time off on tour for instance, I get bored. So I would do these jazz improvs.”

Also in Philly, in sharp contrast, the troupe will dance Parsons’ ‘Bachiana’ (1993) scored to J.S.Bach’s Orchestral Suite no. 1, as you would expect is ” very balletic, Air on a G String section is the anchoring duet,“ Parsons describes, “it was first done on a French company and we‘ve danced it all over the world. . Now many other companies have danced it too.”

In addition to choreographing an average of two new pieces a year, David Parsons nurtures other dancer-choreographers with his creative support through Generation NOW Commission. On the current tour, he will be presenting former Parsons dancer-choreographer Natalie Lomonte’s preview of work in development. Lomonte teaches dance at Fordham University and also performs, most recently she dance captain and in the cast of “Spider-Man: Turn Off The Dark.” Parsons said that he likes to “stay inside the family as much as we can. New choreographers need a place to show their work. Natalie knows the company and understands the physicality of our dancers.”

At every performance in Philly audiences have come to expect a performance of Parsons most dazzling signature piece ‘Caught‘ a solo work he created in 1982 that never looses its mystique or theatrical punch. Scored to trippy electronica music by Robert Fripp it is a tour de dance force that has been performed by both male and female members of the company. One of its amazing elements is the dancer’s breathtaking synchronization with a strobe light that gives the illusion of the dancer suspended in mid-air.

After Philly, the troupe is performing in Utah, then at the Joyce Theater in New York (Jan.21-Feb.1) before they embark on a six-week European tour.

Parsons Dance Dec. 4-6 at the Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts 3680 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA | http://www.annenbergcenter.org | 215.898.3900
http://www.parsonsdance.org

DanceMetros

Philadanco
Blood, Sweat and Dance
Perelman Theater

Philadanco played to sold-out houses in the Perelman Theater in Philly for their spring concert series in the Easter weekend. Danco is coming off a high profile year with the premiere at the Apollo Theater of Get on the Good Foot, dancing to music by the Godfather of Soul, James Brown. Even though artistic director Joan Myers Brown commented after their return from their LA, and other stops touring Good Foot, received some bad notices, but audiences were coming in droves. Last fall in Philly, Danco’s powerhouse programming included a retrospective of works by Christopher Huggins proved a hot dance ticket and they are following on their home turf with Blood, Sweat and Dance, which showed Danco’s wide – ranging choreographic template,

The concert opens BAMM by Seattle-based choreographer Donald Byrd where he runs Spectrum, but is a prolific choreographer for companies all over the globe. BAMM with Mio Morales’ metronomic electronic score propels Danco dancers (in spacey purple unitards) initially like emotionless dancebots, but when they start switching out partners, scenarios unfold. The male-female duets get acrobatic with perilously angled body geometry; then becomes a dizzying communal dance of individuality. Dancers cluster and move rhythmically in a traditional African communal skip step. Roxanne Lyst is at the center of the action in a series of solos that end in an intimate duet on the floor. Bryd’s choreography had a ponderous feel in the front half, and as danced in this performance, seemed even more tentative, but once the duet work starts, it gels with ensemble esprit.

Gene Hill Sagan’s Suite en Bleu, scored to Bach, sweep in and out of balletic-jazz aesthetic in silky chasses and fluid lift patterns. The ensemble was a bit erratic during some of the transitional phrasing in the middle and this performance had a rote quality that makes it look dated. Danco has danced in with more energy in the past, but among the standouts this night Adryan Moorefield’s huge fully extended and airy jetes (he is a very tall, muscled dancer) and Courtney Robinson, Rosita Adamo and Janine Beckles‘s razor precision and ensemble esprit.

Ulysses Dove created more than 26 contemporary ballets before his death at age 49 in 1995 and now his brother Alfred L. Dove, keeps his legacy alive. Dove was in Philadelphia for the Danco’s company premiere of Bad Blood. The opening has Dwayne Cook, Jr. is alone on a bench and does an arresting solo to executing hypnotic body sculpting, the other dancers appear, Dove has the dancers in mach speed spins variations on their heels, arms tights to their bodies.

Bad Blood suggest a scenario where the women characters seemed submissive to the male characters. It is set to songs of troubled love by Laurie Anderson and Peter Gabriel, essay three male-female couples in turmoil. At several points, the women hurl themselves at the men, (vaulting on their waists and necks). At one point, a dancer is hauled across the stage the strap on her belt. Whatever the macho scenario, the performance level and stage pictures are so dynamic, it is easy to ignore, with Danco‘s athletic artistry in full gear.

Rennie Harris’ Philadelphia Experiment just grabs you by the throat and doesn’t let got. It is a modern dance masterpiece and Philadanco refines it every time out. Backdrop projections of historical documents and of the streets of Philadelphia show poverty and blight and there is voiceover narration about the bombing of MOVE members. Dancers moving forward, slumped over and with movement that symbolizes historical oppression and loss, time passing and racial pride surviving an onslaught of injustices.

The mood shifts, the bass-line music takes over and the dancers just explode with matrix slo-mo dives, intricate group patterning and fluid fusion of hip-hop, street and club moves that keep evolving. At the center is Tommie Waheed-Evans’ mesmerizing solo that expresses liberated and angry truth. Harris has two faux endings, each time bringing the lights up on another reprise, driving home the work’s visceral and poetic power.

Booksbooksbooks

Balanchine and the Lost Muse: Revolution and the Making of a Choreographer
Elizabeth Kendall
Oxford University Press

Dance scholar Elizabeth Kendall pulls the curtain back on the early life and influences of choreographer George Balanchine, the principal architect of modern ballet aesthetic, in Balanchine and the Lost Muse: Revolution & The Making of a Choreographer.

The “lost muse” was ballerina Lidia Ivanova, a gifted and innovative dancer in her own right. She was Balanchine’s first partner in his student days at what were the remnants of the St. Petersburg Imperial Ballet Academy. The school survived, somehow, after the fall of tsarist Russia, in the capital renamed Petrograd, torn apart by war, famine and disease. The young dancers thrived artistically in a harrowing environment.

Balanchine was dumped at the school in 1913 at age nine as his family split up and fled desperate conditions in southern Russia. Balanchine showed much musical talent: he studied piano, doubled as a dance rehearsal pianist, and eventually emerged in productions as a strong caractère dancer.

In the intervening years, the ballet schools and accommodations were halted at various points. On Theater Street, site of the vaunted Mariinsky Theatre, Imperial Theater School, and Petrograd Ballet School, dorms and studios had no heat and food was scarce. Yet the school was a haven for talented students. Kendall rescues this history and the main players in a pivotal artistic time that unfolded in the midst of the Lenin’s 1917 Bolshevik revolution.

Even though Russian ballet had operated under the patronage of the Imperial court, aristocratic patrons and military, after the revolution the doors were flung open and all Russian people were permitted access for the first time. And they embraced the ballet’s artistry lustily, with primal nationalistic pride.

In the years after the revolution, dance artists who had been scattered around Europe, such as Mikhail Fokine and Marius Petipa who were with Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, returned thanks to their love of Russian dance. The ballet, like everything else, was being restructured under the Soviet system.

Meanwhile, there was an artistic revolution within the ballet world and liberation among the dancers and choreographers. They not only wanted to preserve Russian classicism but to reflect the revolution and explore free dance. Isadora Duncan had influenced a generation of Russian dancers when she taught and performed in Russia in 1905-06 and teachers at the school were embracing Duncan theories of free dance (even within pristine classicism) by such influential ballet stars as Olga Preobrazhenskaya, ballet star and Ivanova’s teacher. Balanchine and the other boys were under the laudatory instruction of danseur noble and gifted instructor Samuil Andrianov, who later Balanchine assessed “Made our generation.”

The through line of Balanchine’s relationship with Lidia Ivanova as his choreographic muse is a more sketchy arc in the book, but Kendall gives credible examples of how the specter of Ivanova may have guided Balanchine’s aesthetic, particularly for roles that directly evokes the Russian classicism of his childhood.

Kendall details Ivanova’s technique and beauty onstage which made her very popular with audiences. She was known for her huge jumps and is credited for a creating a fully extended jeté for ballerinas. Her natural athleticism set the standard for Balanchine’s choreographic template for women later. Ivanova was also invested in the bold innovations advancing Russian theater and was challenging the dance theater to adopt similar experimentation. Meanwhile, Balanchine was getting work as a pianist and dancer while also emerging as an important choreographer. In the meantime, he had a series of affairs with women and in 1924 married, Tamara Geva, the first of his many marriages and official muses.

Ivanova was 16 when she was planning to go on tour, a ruse actually to defect in the west with several dancers including Balanchine, but she was killed in a boating incident the night before they were to leave. Kendall dissects the different theories about the dancer’s death, but ultimately, it remains a mystery shrouded in conspiracy theories. Otherwise, Kendall has rescued the almost bio-history of these dance artists with nothing less than heroic scope.

Music&Dance

NYE~ Lets face the music & dance

Guest maestros usually front the Philadelphia Orchestra’s holiday concert series but Yannick Nézet-Séguin, in the middle of his first season of chief conductor of the Fab Phils, was in Verizon Hall on New Year’s Eve to conduct the exit music for one tattered year.

(P:PeteChecchia)

Nézet-Séguin mixed the Viennese waltz play list up and chose the theme of orchestral dance music from around the world. He opened with the full Suite from Richard Strauss’ Der Rosenkavalier which contains some very famous waltz passages that are most often extracted. The less familiar lead in to those dizzying waltz section had hints of being under-rehearsed with the orchestra creaky in some of the more complex transitions and atypical for Nézet-Séguin, erratic in the overall pacing. Just when it started to get brittle though, those swirling symphonics bounced everything into proportion and framed a glittering orchestral drama.

In contrast, Nézet-Séguin had no trouble, from start to finish, essaying Haydn Symphony no. 45 (Farewell) with its famous humorous ‘farewell’ from the musicians. Terrific, muscled mis-en-scenes in the allegro movement and Nézet-Séguin brought out the inner baroque chambers of the piece magnificently. Also gorgeous sonority in the cellos during the third movement minuet.

This conductor is game for fun and for such standard fare as Johann Strauss’ Blue Danube brought on Michele Camaya, Jaime Verzain, Todd Burnsed and Ron Todorowski, four dancers from the New York based Mark Stuart troupe. They did a switching partner waltz comedy that played to the literalness of the music. Later, the dancers were back for the Manuel de Falla’s Ritual Fire Dance from El Amor Brujo and Stuart choreographed what could be viewed as an update of Nijinsky’s ballet The Rite of Spring, except that the sacrifice, danced by Michele Camaya, is no balletic victim. She let Burnsed and Todorowski fling her around in erotic lift patterns that kept evolving, but she ended up knocking them away when Stuart appears and they glide into a smoldering tango. No virgin sacrifice at the dance altar here. Dance in front of full orchestra, carries risks, they can easily devolve into Lawrence Welk-y style spectacale, but Stuart’s choreography was full of whimsy and wit.

The musical globe trotting also provided the highlights of the evening with Brahms’ Hungarian Dance and especially Shostakovitch’s Waltz from Suite for Variety Orchestra. The Prussian-Slavic percussive drive of this was just completely translucent, a fiery diamond orchestral sound from this orchestra. Then, Eric Satie’s reflective, cathartic masterpiece Gymnopedie No. 3, in the arrangement by Debussy, the Phil’s hypnotic strings, just lushness bathing the hall and the harp line by the inestimable harp of Elizabeth Hainen, providing golden musical moments. Nézet-Séguin finished with a Leonard Bernstein’s Mambo, always an audience favorite and the usual NYE fare Auld Lang Syne.

Stage

An excerpt from my DanceJournal article about physical theater & dance elements prominent in two LiveArtsFest plays~

At the Suzanne Roberts Theatre, Thaddeus Phillips’ Red-Eye To Havre de Grace’ uses every inch of the Roberts stage to create the last days of Edgar Allen Poe while he is on tour performing The Raven along the northeastern corridor of Baltimore, Philadelphia and New York. Phillips describes the show as images “of Poe on trains in 1849 is wonderfully mysterious, and this musical follows Poe’s final journey, which had many crazy details, many rife with metaphor. “

As Poe, Ean Sheeny, reflects the author’s drug and alcohol use and Phillips has him in constant motion at times as animated as a silent film actor. He is reminiscent of silent film stars in many highly stylized moments of macabre physical comedy. But Sheeny is masterful in micro-acting moves as well, that build the harrowing psychological and surreal world of Poe. Sheeny gives a tour de force physical and vocal performance.

Phillips’ devises a constantly mutating set design with the set changes by the actors worked into the narrative to keep everything off kilter. The sense of unsettling travel and interior menace builds as Poe becomes more and more desperately escaping mental and emotional walls closing in. On Poe’s arrival at a Hotel in Philadelphia Poe is taken through the building’s corridors as they constructed and maneuvered in real time by the actors.

 

The play is laces together Poe’s biography and literature, dramatizing his poems ‘Beneath the Floorboards,‘ Tincture of Opium,‘ ‘Die Together,‘ ’Annabel Lee,’ among others.  The poems are scored to original music by David Wilhelm and sung by bass baritone Jeremy Wilhelm. There are also disquieting musical interludes on the prepared pianos that underscore many of Phillips’ pure movement passages of Poe traveling in and out of reality.

The stylized movement in the play is by choreographer Sophie Bortolussi, who portrays Poe’s consumptive wife Virginia, who appears and vanishes, in several sleights of body all over the stage. She comes out of crawl spaces, walks blindly backward off tables, scales down sheets from a suspended sick bed. Bortolussi is the macabre and a floaty spectral, covering Poe when he is passed out on a bender, or a threatening presence, trying to pull him down an imagined void. The show’s most stunning sequence is Bortolussi’s stilt tango in the show’s denouement as grotesquely beautiful and disturbing as anything in Poe‘s imagination.

Red-Eye To Havre de Grace photos from Philadelphia Live Arts web site. No credit provided.

DanceMetros pt. deux

Known for its explosive physicality, eye-popping aeriels in a mix of Capoeira and Afro-Brazilian dance, the New York based troupe DanceBrazil made their first appearance in Philly as part of the Annenberg Center’s ‘Out of this World’ dance series last week. Actually they just made it, arriving late on the first day of their run because their passports were being held up by the Brazilian government, after performances there.

Randy Swartz, artistic director of Dance Celebration, announced at the Saturday matinee performance that DB just made their performance on Thursday night after the hold up, but that one dancer was still in Brazil. Meanwhile, the company not only performed well, the next morning kept their dates for the student outreach capoeira performances and workshops.

At the Sat matinee performance, the troupe opened with the 35 minute rhythm expose called “Batuke” which refers to the street music that is made from make-shift instruments at Carnivale. The work has an formal score by Daniel Santos, that revolves around a single – stringed instrument called berimbau. A trio of women in ribbony skirts over move in oscillating torso patterns, then break out in liberated dance.

The men followed, in the regimental, but no a no less dancey, rainstick jousting exhibition. The unison footwork is hypnotic, but the precision of the stick wielding thrills. The men and women are finally together in modern garb, ripped ribbed dance togs, mixes more idioms of free dance- from ensemble pulses ala Ailey to gyroscopic salsa moves, for instance, is playful, if less potent, but tons of fun.

DB premiered ’Imfazwe’ an expose of the fight expressionism and the dance aesthetic that form the template for Capoeira has the feel of a company classic on its first outing. Twelve dancers form the physical dialogue in the Capoeria roda to summon and sanctify the energy field. Vieira uses unison work sparingly it seems, perhaps he wants the dancers connected to the moment. All of the fight sequences are showing singular artistry and technique are highlighted with low to the ground butoh slo lurches, hair-trigger body jousting and those mach-speed gladiatorial kicks, are spellbinding