Review Voyager a Dance Among the Planets Kennedy Center
What's more invigorating than one boundary-pushing ballet visitor? Three!
Wednesday's audience at the Kennedy Heart'south Ballet Across America series was treated to a varied and impressive, though uneven, evening with Nashville Ballet, Jeremy McQueen'due south Black Iris Project, and Complexions Gimmicky Ballet.
Curated by American Ballet Theatre'due south Misty Copeland, the program began with a lovely short flick, Now More than Ever, directed by dancer-turned-filmmaker Ezra Hurwitz and featuring Stella Abrera, Isabella Boylston, Marcelo Gomes, Calvin Majestic 3, and James Whiteside. It was a visual appetizer, placing the dancers in and around the Kennedy Heart, on terraces, in hallways, and moving well-nigh the peripheries of the empty Opera House before eventually finding their way to the stage. Accompanied past an effervescent electronic score by Aaron Roche, information technology suggested a supernatural summoning to Washington of dancers throughout the land — apt for the occasion of this ambitious series, which will likewise feature a program selected by New York City Ballet's Justin Peck. At once elegant and blusterous, the movie made for a mannerly welcome.
Nashville Ballet followed with artistic manager Paul Vasterling's Concerto, danced to a superb 3-movement work for piano and orchestra by Ben Folds — yes, that Ben Folds, who in addition to being an indie-rock star and multi-instrumentalist has a serious and appealing classical vocabulary. Pianist Joel Ayau performed the sweetness, sly, jazzy concerto with the Opera House Orchestra conducted by Nathan Fifield, Ayau on stage with the dancers.
Vasterling's staging is simple and graceful. His costume colour schemes and Scott Leathers' lighting mirror the three movements' shifts in mood. In the first, the spritely soloist Judson Veach leaps in and out of duos and trios, the corps swirling about him, until a ring of women happily and amusingly surrounds him. The movement's palette is black and white and the music has a retro aureola echoing Gershwin, with sections reminiscent of Ravel'due south Concerto for the Left Hand. The sensibility is that of a summer evening on the boondocks with young friends and cliques interacting and flirting.
The lithe Kayla Rowser is featured in the more mysterious pastel-hued second movement. And the sunny and powerful Mollie Sansone shines in the third, with subtle calorie-free projections on the backdrop behind her and Ayau at ane point standing at the piano as he plays a rhythmic clumped-chord design with his right hand while muting the strings with his left. The dancers' ensemble work frayed a tad toward the very finish. And the piano downstage correct blocked some audition members' view of the mid- and back-stage corps. But it'due south a tradeoff — probably a worthwhile i — because Ayau's operation is itself a worthy spectacle.
The Blackness Iris Project's Madiba, choreographed by McQueen, is a stirring story ballet almost Nelson Mandela to a score by Carman Moore. Information technology stars the astonishing Andile Ndlovu as Mandela, Daphne Thousand. Lee every bit Winnie Mandela, and Alex Aquilino as Mandela'south prison guard.
Moore's music, again conducted past Fifield, passes varied heartbeat-similar rhythm patterns and colliding melodic fragments from instrument to musical instrument, with mallet percussion motifs stirred into the propulsive mix.
Mandela, established in the opening scene as a proud Xhosa clan member (Madiba was his tribal name) is too preoccupied with books and romance to pay much mind to the oppression around him. When he awakens to it and becomes politically active, he's arrested and thrown in prison. In that location he establishes a grudging cooperative relationship with his guard, who allows him pen and newspaper. And when Mandela is freed, he rallies his nation.
If this summing up of an extraordinary life sounds woefully accelerated and pat, so too is the ballet, which feels similar a work in progress. What we see looks like a fast-motion preview of what could, and perhaps should, exist a total-evening project four or v times larger in scope. At this calibration, the proportions are off, the fascinating prison house sequences cut short and the upbeat catastrophe premature and unpersuasive. The man, afterward all, spent 27 years behind confined!
There are so many wonderful facets hither for McQueen to expand on: the street-life dances; the strange love-detest symbiosis pas de deux of prisoner and guard; the innovative officer duos moving in fascist angularities, i hoisting another like a slice of arms; a deepening of the Xhosa heritage chemical element.
A longer version could elaborate further on the immature Mandela's running and boxing; the evolution of his thoughts, dreams, and horrors while shut away at Robben Island; his complicated (to say the least) marriage to Winnie. It could build on the wonderful and whimsical natural elements embodied here by Christina Spigner'south and Amanda Smith'south delightful blue cranes.
If McQueen does amplify the work, he might consider too whether his depictions of South Africans' clashes with the military are too balletically "pretty," though their meaning is clear. Making them more realistically raucous and ugly, in contrast to the romance and the nature elements, would widen the already impressive dramatic range he's established. In add-on to Moore, McQueen has the correct collaborators here, with Alan C. Edwards's lighting and fog particularly effective in establishing the forbidding prison house, and Montana Levi Blanco'southward costumes speedily conveying place and circumstance (I also dearest the cranes' tutu feather tails).
In short, Mandela's life is a brilliant discipline for a ballet and McQueen is approaching information technology in a visionary way. But he could accept it much farther, and I hope he will. Yeah, I know — like shooting fish in a barrel for some critic to suggest a months' long, maybe years' long, expansion of a projection that's probably already run McQueen ragged. It would, still, exist time and effort exceptionally well spent.
The evening's third human action was Complexions' Star Dust, choreographer Dwight Rhoden's David Bowie-inspired odyssey. The typical critical knock on Complexions is that despite its explicit and accomplished emphasis on dancer diverseness, its choreographic diversity is nil, with pieces tending toward superficial razzmatazz. That take mostly feels stick-in-the-muddish to me — every bit if gorgeous, splendidly trained, and scrupulously rehearsed bodies bounding joyously about were a scourge of, and threat to, civilization.
Still, I get it, and Star Grit is a helpful case study.
In Michael Korsch's ravishing tapestry of acme- and back-lights, flattered past Christine Darch's psychedelically rouged and purpled shimmering cut-away costumes, the company is cute, sensuous, and — that iii-letter quality that dare not speak its name on the serious ballet stage — fun. Just the voyage through nine Bowie songs doesn't nearly live up to its potential. "Lazarus," featuring Terk Lewis Waters, is absorbingly spectral. "Space Oddity," with Addison Ector and company slowly strutting, unisex, en pointe, is imaginative. But many of the other numbers have a sameness to them, rows of taut boogying bodies sliding in from stage right and stage left like players in a customized glam-stone foosball game. The semi-regular lip-syncing, moreover, has got to get. Information technology instantly reduces the ambiance to that of a tacky nightclub human action.
Again, there's nothing tragic about what amounts to an incredibly intricate trip the light fantastic party. Merely with troupe members this good, information technology'south a waste product, and a somewhat mystifying one given the Bowie theme. Who more than than Bowie begs for an innovative narrative arc and a set at least a bit more ingenious than a sparkly cabaret curtain? It's like a Stagecraft 101 assignment. Option your personae: Ziggy, Thin White Duke, and/or Swiss Recluse. Pick your set themes: Space, Mars, Spiders, and/or Androgynous Swingtown. Use your backstory about the lad from Brixton. Circle dorsum to the end story as he musically anticipates his death and ushers himself into the Melancholy Stardom Beyond. So many possibilities unexplored.
Rhoden and Complexions co-artistic director Desmond Richardson have done the difficult part: assembling an incredible group of dancers and finding an accessible semi-pop niche for themselves. All good. It's time for them to take information technology to the next creative level, proving the fuddy-duddies wrong while maintaining their wowed crowds.
Ballet Across America continues at The Kennedy Center thru Sunday, April 23, 2017. Details and tickets.
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Source: https://dctheatrescene.com/2017/04/21/misty-copelands-curated-ballet-across-america-kennedy-center-review/
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