Kennedy Center Opera House, Washington D.C.

June 10-15, 2008

Ballet Across America, a six-day festival hosted by the Kennedy Center in June, brought together nine ballet companies for a series of performances on the stage of the Kennedy Center Opera House. It was a celebration of American ballet from coast to coast; the Eastern part of the country represented by Boston Ballet, Pennsylvania Ballet and Washington Ballet; America’s heartland by the Kansas City Ballet, The Joffrey Ballet and Houston Ballet; and West coast companies included the Pacific Northwest Ballet, Ballet West, and Oregon Ballet Theater. Each troupe presented a dance in one of the three mixed repertory programs.

This festival, remarkable in its scope and importance, gave a wonderful opportunity for audiences to see a wide variety of companies and choreographic styles and a great chance for the dancers to perform on one of the world’s prestigious ballet stages. The eclectic choreographic repertory of the festival ranged from masterpieces by George Balanchine, Jerome Robbins and Antony Tudor to the works of contemporary choreographers such as Twyla Tharp, Christopher Wheeldon, and Jorma Elo.

Even though there were no world-class troupes or big-star names in the casts, the overall result was enormously satisfying. The performances, featuring many talented and dedicated dancers, brought audiences plenty of memorable moments and surprising revelations. This was a vivid snapshot of the state of American regional ballet today, demonstrating its vibrant spirit and diversity of style.

Ballet West (the company from Salt Lake City was founded in 1963 and originally called the Utah Civic Ballet) opened the first triple bill program of Ballet Across America with George Balanchine’s timeless Serenade - a very appropriate choice for the inaugural dance of the festival: Serenade is universally considered a touchstone of the country’s national ballet. With this work, created in 1934 for students of the School of American Ballet, Balanchine launched his choreographic career in the United States, making his first steps in establishing American ballet as an art form.

Serenade was a beautiful showpiece for the Ballet West’s ballerinas. The opening night cast led by Christiana Bennett, Kate Crews, and Katherine Lawrence danced gracefully and sincerely, highlighting the poetic movements with a special touch of delicacy and nuance.

From the famous opening scene – the 17 ballerinas arranged in formal diagonals, their hands decisively raised forward as if proclaiming their independence and maturity; and then proceeding with simple classroom steps, demonstrating lovely poses of heads and arms, phrasing each steps with clarity and meaning – the dancers unfolded the dreamy radiance of the Balanchine choreography, allowing the audience to discover the ballet’s most fascinating mysteries.

Ballet West has a corps de ballet to admire. The ballerinas are tall, long-limbed, and attractively proportioned. Recapturing the very essence of Balanchine ballets, they brought a special feminine aesthetic to the dance, which made this Serenade so touchingly genuine and natural.

Although Balanchine insisted on the plotless nature of Serenade, many of the ballet’s images have a symbolic meaning. In the final scene, Elegy, the ballerina is slowly raised and carried as if on a pedestal by three men, her head and arms thrown back, reaching to the light. This moving sculpture leaves the audience with a sense of inevitability and loss; and her floating image creates an atmosphere of infinite poignancy that no longer appears nameless and abstract.

The Opera House orchestra conducted by Terence Kern gave a splendid rendition of the enchanting Tchaikovsky score.

The nocturnal tone of Serenade was stylishly elaborated in the second dance of the program – Jerome Robbins’s In the Night (1970), performed by the Pennsylvania Ballet. This company, founded in 1963 by a Balanchine protégé, Barbara Weisberger, is based in Philadelphia.

In the Night is quintessential Robbins, a beautiful study in motion of a romantic relationship. It’s a perfect marriage of piano music and dance movements adorned with a touch of theatricality. Gliding gracefully onstage to crystalline sounds of Chopin’s poetic nocturnes, three couples explore the stages of emotional feelings: innocent and young; wise and mature; and fervent and untamed.

On opening night, the best dancing came from Riolama Lorenzo and James Ihde in the second pas de deux – a glamorous, stately duet of two lovers who found endless happiness and contentment in each others arms. By contrast, the opening duet of Martha Chamberlain and Zachary Hench looked somewhat flat and unassuming, the dancers paying too much attention to the steps rather than the characterization. It was a technically clean performance, but the sense of exuberance and excitement of the young love, which their duet was meant to translate, was missing. In the third duet, performed by Amy Aldridge and Francis Veyette, the couple’s passion came out rather overheated and unnaturally agitated, also diminishing the emotional impact of the piece.

The stellar ensemble of Houston Ballet – America’s fourth largest ballet company – concluded the evening with the intrepid Velocity (2003), a tour de force created by Stanton Welch as a sequel to his earlier work Divergence.

The pace of this piece is conveyed by its title. Danced to a selection of vibrant minimalistic compositions of American composer Michael Torke, Velocity sets the cast in perpetual motion with an exhilarating speed. Here, the choreographer makes the classical ballet steps look not only ultra modern but also highly athletic.

Welch, the 38-year-old Australian choreographer who became artistic director of Houston Ballet in 2003, compares Velocity with “a butterfly mating ritual, in which only the strongest that can fly highest will mate.” His rigorous choreography pushes the dancers to the limits and commands the true virtuosic performers.

An oversized replica of the abstract painting of Dutch artist Piet Mondvian depicting patterns of gray and brown blocks decorated the stage. The black-and-white palette of the dancewear – white short tutus for the women and black costumes with transparent sleeveless tops for the men – gave the dance a special sense of formality and focus. The effective lighting designs by Francis Croese – geometrical patterns of squares, circles, triangles of various colors and sizes projected on the floor – were deftly incorporated in the choreography, adding an extra bonus to the dance’s visual appeal.

Edit: Changed Subject so this thread can handle all 3 bills. BM

Kennedy Center Opera House, Washington D.C.

The second program of the Ballet Across America festival featured Seattle’s Pacific Northwest Ballet, Kansas City Ballet, and D.C.’s own Washington Ballet.

Pacific Northwest Ballet, founded in 1972 and currently one of the largest and highly recognized ballet troupes in the country, opened the triple bill with the somber Jardì Tancat (1983), a dance of heartrending narrative and emotional power created by the renowned Spanish choreographer Nacho Duato.

Inspired by the real-life events commemorated in Spanish folk songs recorded by Maria del Mar Bonet, Jardì Tancat (“Closed Garden” in Catalan) depicts a community of peasants facing severe drought, struggling to survive. The dance deals with themes of death and suffering. With deep sensitivity and humanism, through emotive and symbolic images, the choreographer portrays the people in their extreme poverty, their hardship and their attitude towards life.

As the curtain opens, we see the dancers kneeling down on the floor, their faces buried in their hands in an expression of grief. The stylized stage design – a circle of poles representing dry carcasses of trees – suggests a landscape burned by the merciless sun.

The dance begins in silence, and it takes a few minutes before the soundtrack starts. What we see on stage is a communal prayer which shortly breaks into a vignette of spiritual monologues, duets and ensembles. Dressed in the simple peasant closes, the dancers move about the stage with the earthy, spacious movements, their turns crouching and arms sweeping. At times, they stand motionless, numb with bitterness and despair, facing away from the audience as if hiding their tears. In one memorable scene, mirroring the outcries of the songs, their silhouettes resemble birds with broken wings. They dance barefoot to underscore the simplicity of their lives and endurance of their souls.

The six-member ensemble (Ariana Lallone, Casey Herd, Noelani Pantastico, Jordan Pacitti, Carrie Imler, and Kiyon Gaines) did justice to the work, soulfully expressing the dance’s heartfelt emotions through their evocative choreographic pallet. The cast genuinely communicated the work’s powerful themes: It was a dramatically strong, compelling performance.

There was a different kind of human suffering – a feeling of loneliness and rejection – in Todd Bolender's The Still Point , a poetic short dance which the Kansas City Ballet brought for its Kennedy Center debut.

The Still Point was choreographed as a modern dance and premiered in the summer of 1955 at the Jacob’s Pillow Festival. One year later, Bolender made its balletic version for the New York City Ballet with the original cast led by Melissa Hayden and Jacques d'Amboise.

Accompanied by the first three movements of Debussy’s String Quartet in G Minor, The Still Point is a modern fairy tale and a meditation on human experience. It has the inescapable charm of an old Hollywood romantic movie, naïve and sentimental, with a predictable, happy end.

The main heroine is a young single woman. Rejected and cruelly treated by her friends, she feels vulnerable and isolated, longing for support and understanding. When, in a moment of despair, she seems to lose her courage, a handsome young man comes to her rescue, offering her comfort and love.

The dance unfolds in a sensitive, unpretentious manner. The elegant and unforced balletic movements, finely reflecting the compelling Debussy music, grab and hold our attention, more than compensating for the superficial plot.

The graceful Kimberly Cowen gave a wonderfully articulated and utterly convincing performance as the heroine. Dancing with a simple, expressive flow of gestures, she was able to reveal the inner world of her character and ultimately connect with the audience. The romantic hero, the poised Juan Pablo Trujillo, was sympathetic and confident. Their final duet, the most poignant scene of the dance, proved an affectionate study on trust and kindness. The quartet of the dancers portraying the friends – Catherine Russell, Matthew Donnell, Chelsea Wilcox and Logan Pachciarz – was fine enough to rehabilitate their mean-spirited characters.

After intermission the curtain went up to reveal a spinning disco-ball scattering sparkling lights on the floor; and seven impressively dressed couples – the dancers of the Washington Ballet – took center stage in a glamorous ballroom dance showcase – Twyla Tharp’s Nine Sinatra Songs.

There are many delights in this popular and entertaining modern dance classic, which the choreographer created almost 25 years ago for her then-existing Twyla Tharp Dance Company. The dances, a fascinating sequence of intimate duets, dazzle in the details, featuring mesmerizing scenic designs by Jennifer Tipton; gorgeous ball gowns for the ballerinas and sharp tuxedoes for the men by fashion guru Oscar de la Renta; and of course, the heartrendering Sinatra songs as the soundtrack.

There was no dull moment in the Washington Ballet’s Sinatra Songs. Culminating the program, the beautiful and vibrant cast clearly had a blast.

The exuberant Jade Payette and Runqioa Du combined elegance and charm, dancing to the tender farewell “Softly as I Leave You.” In “Strangers in the Night”, Laura Urgelles was all glamour and poise, effectively partnered by Alvaro Palau. The audience’s favorite, Erin Mahoney-Du and Luis R. Torres as the tipsy lovers who wanted to appear sober, smartly paired playfulness with a slapstick comedy in “One for My Baby (And One More for the Road)”. Morgann Rose and Jonathan Jordan, two formidable dancers, brought out the breezy-and-fun nature of their duet in the quick and amusing “Forget Domani.”

I couldn’t help but admire the performance of Sona Kharatian in “All the Way”. She is a subtle dancer; has a great technique and wonderfully smooth lines. She responds to music in a very natural, uninhibited way, which makes her dancing effective and genuine. Her duet with Chip Coleman in “All the Way” was something to behold.

Lallone, Herd, Pantastico, Pacitti, Imler, Gaines, Cowen, Trujillo, Payette, Du, Urgelles, Palau, Mahoney-Du, Jordan, Kharatian

Kennedy Center Opera House, Washington D.C.

Troupes from the East (Boston), Midwest (Chicago) and West (Oregon) filled the bill for
the final program of the Kennedy Center’s Ballet Across America festival.

Boston Ballet opened with Brake the Eyes - the new work of the company’s resident choreographer Jorma Elo. Besides the odd title (a play on “break the ice”), there were many peculiar things about this dance. It had a feel of a multimedia modern art installation that incorporates live dancing. The recorded electronic soundtrack, a rumbling and growling cacophony, was the synthesized arrangement of Mozart sonatas produced by Elo’s choreographic assistant, Nancy Euverink. She also designed the dance’s additional sound effects, including an agitated voice-over in Russian – a mélange of meaningless, disconnected phrases interrupted by lingering pauses, mixed with the sounds of heavy breathing.

Performed by an ensemble of ten, Brake the Eyes moves at a vigorous pace. The choreography, as in the most of the Elo works, is based on recurrent motifs of rubber-body movements, flat-footed feet, broken lines, awkwardly tilted poses, jerking steps, and abrupt gestures.

Clad in a white tutu, the Kirov-trained Larissa Ponomarenko was the ballet’s centerpiece. Lithe and supple, she handled Elo’s steps with aplomb. Nevertheless, I felt disappointed watching her impersonal “broken-doll” routine, accompanied by warped Amadeus mixed with her recorded voice, which sounded as if she was entangled in disturbing thoughts or was having a nightmare:

Head’s spinning... Red... Black... What a light! ...Hearing better...This side is absolutely dark... This side is absolutely dark... Dark...Oh God! How many people... I know everything... I know what’s important... I know everything...A few turns... Lunch break... Phone calls... Drowning...Why here?... Doctor said...White – Two. Yellow – Three. Red – Four. Black – Seven... Shadows... Head’s spinning...*

It all looked pretentious and incoherent.

The dance offered some eye-catching, inventive moments; however, there was no strong sense of purpose or meaning in the movements; and for all its overwhelming speed and sound, the overall result felt confusing and empty.

Antony Tudor’s Lilac Garden (also known under the French title Jardin aux Lilas) offered welcome counterbalance in ballet aesthetic to the previous work. Brilliantly performed by Chicago’s Joffrey Ballet, it was emotional highlight of the evening.

The performance of this masterpiece during the festival had special significance – this year marks the 100th anniversary of the choreographer’s birth. (The Joffrey Ballet mounted a more substantial homage to the choreographer with its “Antony Tudor Centennial” program that included his three most prominent works: Dark Elegies, Lilac Garden and Offenbach in the Underworld, at Chicago’s Auditorium Theater in February.)

“The movement is the meaning” was Tudor’s credo, and he followed this principle throughout his career, creating highly compelling, physical dances with prime focus on expressive and emotionally genuine movements.

At the heart of Lilac Garden, which Tudor made for London’s Ballet Rambert in 1936, is a psychological drama - a story about secrets and lies, concealed and suppressed feelings, but above all, a poignant farewell to love. In the best tradition of Stanislavsky’s dramatic theater, the choreographer brilliantly reveals the emotional condition of the main characters, vividly capturing their personalities and feelings: excitement and disappointment, anticipation and frustration, enchantment and disillusion.

The events take place at the engagement party of Caroline, a young aristocratic but impoverished woman who is about to tie the knot with a middle-aged, affluent man she doesn’t love. (Here, the groom doesn’t have the name; he is simply called “The Man She Must Marry.”) This marriage will offer Caroline financial security and social status, but she must relinquish her relationship with a young cadet, “Her Lover”. The young man sincerely loves her and is devastated by inevitability of losing her for good. There is another heartbroken soul entangled in the web of romantic relationships: the mistress of the husband-to-be. Relentlessly pursuing him and longing for his attention, she is obviously in love with him; but we doubt that he shares her feelings, for she is just “An Episode in His Past.”

The dance was sumptuously outfitted in an Edwardian-style by Desmond Heely. The somber atmosphere was further illuminated in the ballet’s music — the melancholic Poeme by Ernest Chausson, soulfully played during the performance by the Opera House Orchestra.

The Joffrey dancers rose to the occasion: It was perhaps the most visually and emotionally gratifying performance of the festival.

Dressed in a beautiful white gown, the elegant Emily Patterson as Caroline captured the audience’s imagination, giving a stirring portrait of the main heroine, and the whole story ultimately became a reflection on Caroline’s personal tragedy. In transitory moments of the dance, through flickering gestures, hidden glances and secretly outstretched arms, with great sensitivity and beautiful phrasing, she was able to express the pain of Caroline’s tormented soul. In one of the dance’s lingering moments, she gazed skyward, her eyes filled with sorrow, brokenhearted and lost in the world of her own — an image of striking poignancy and beauty. Ultimately, she was the ballet’s brightest star.

Thomas Nicholas was her fervent lover. The dignified Patrick Simoniello as “The Man She Must Marry” was appropriately self-assured and remote. Victoria Jaiani gave a sensual, yet slightly agitated portrait of the disconsolate “An Episode in His Past.”

The Oregon Ballet Theater concluded the program with Christopher Wheeldon’s RUSH©. It was the debut performance of this relatively young troupe at the Kennedy Center and I am pleased to say that it was a success.

Wheeldon, one of the most prominent contemporary choreographers in the dance world, made RUSH© for the Edinburgh International Festival in 2003. The work was premiered by the San Francisco Ballet to critical acclaim.

Choreographed to the lush and wonderfully tuneful Sinfonietta La Jolla by Bohuslav Martinu, RUSH©, as the title suggests, displays plenty of energetic, speedy footwork. The dance is intelligently conceived and elaborately constructed: Wheeldon, with admirable mastery, incorporated melodic contrasts of the three-part Sinfonietta into the dance’s movements. The artful lighting design by Mark Stanley and the dancewear —attractive costumes in solid bright colors by Jon Morrell —contributed to the overall effect.

The ensemble of 16 intrepid Oregon Ballet dancers looked exceptionally good in RUSH©, moving with ease and assurance through the Wheeldon’s highly challenging choreographic patterns. The imagery onstage was a fascinating display of action, color and light.

The slow, sensual pas de deux of the second movement was perhaps the most beautiful and captivating moment of the dance. The black backdrop is lit by changing colors: from dark to light and from red to blue. The musical tone is elegiac and tranquil. The atmosphere is of serenity. The central couple, danced by Alison Roper and Artur Sultanov, created a beautifully graceful partnership, dancing with understated expressiveness and total clarity.

*My translation from Russian.

Ponomarenko, Patterson, Nicholas, Simoniello, Jaiani, Roper, Sultanov