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Saturday afternoon’s performance prompted me to jot down: “Does performing every style under the sun serve the audience, let along the dancers?” With Kirk Peterson’s pallid, pleasant opener Eyes that Gently Touch, the show felt like a first-rate dance recital. With two more dances, Nocturne and Flower Festival in Genzano, it was like being at a ballet competition winners’ showcase. With the restaging of Anthony Tudor’s Lilac Garden, I felt at times like I was at a Dance History conference. But with the last dance, Eureka! I witnessed not a training group troupe, but the incarnation of a bonafide ballet company. The dancers came alive in Adam Hougland’s Vanish.

Hougland isn’t very far in age from the dancers, which may be one reason why they approached his kinetic, daring choreography to Peter Vasks String Quartet No. 4 as though it had emotional relevancy to their lives. One of the standouts was Katherine Williams, the company’s newest member. While in Lilac Garden she looked like a wan child, under Hougland’s tutelage Williams transformed into an athletically-daring, young woman on the verge of becoming a performing diva, her legs swooping in counterpart to Vasks’ plaintive violin chords that descended in fifths like a dive-bombing song bird. Vanish begins with a vision and a blackout. In this split second, ten dancers in brown briefs and bare chests appear like cubist entanglements—all arms and legs in a smoke-filled dead of night. The five sets of couples are seen again and immediately the women begin pushing their classical training into off-kilter, sky-high extensions and internal leg rotations.
 

Devon Teuscher, Yannick Bittencourt and Christine Shevchenko in Lilac Garden
© Gene Schiavone

But the women aren’t the only ones who get to jack knife their legs with the sharpness of a Venus flytrap clamping down on food. In a pas de deux for two men, Jose Sebastian is lifted and swung by another male dancer in the same manner. Sebastian’s limber moves confirmed what is now a growing standard in dance: men’s legs extensions and long lines are equally as attenuated and expressive as women’s. What’s notable in Vanish is that Hougland gives his male classical dancer the opportunity to be highlighted in ways that were, until recently, female territory.

Hougland also gives the Studio Company dancers movement that brought to mind impending surgeries. At one point, his female dancers stood in second position parallel and dropped to their knees as though their shins had been hacked off. At another moment, the men jumped into an assemblé and, as their working leg closed, their chest and necks opened to the sky. Some of the dancers landed in this spine-crushing position, instead of straightening their spine to cushion the impact. This jumping like lemmings was beautiful but yikes!

Hougland’s exploration of risk also continued on a thematic level: Female dancers entered the stage in a backward bourree as though teetering on blind faith. One dancer was lifted plank-like to the ceiling over the shoulders of her partner. Like a violinist’s bowing, she violently flickered her leg against her ankle as if the music heard was coming from her long-limbed pulsations. She also resembled a nocturnal insect in heat. This ecstatic vision was repeated again and again. I couldn’t get enough of it.

Rumor has it that the mother ship, American Ballet Theater, will be losing some of its dancers at the end of its upcoming season. If so, certain Studio Company members may be moving to the big stage soon. Christine Shevchenko, who in 2003 was the youngest dancer to win the Princess Grace Award, should be promoted. Her smile extends into her limbs and warmly out to greet us in our seats. When she reached toward her partner in Peterson’s Eyes and in Tudor’s masterpiece, it was with her face and spirit as well as her arms. She loves to dance and she dances with a loving attention to every moment on stage. Paris Opera Ballet trained dancer Yannick Bittencourt is also a shoe in. In Lilac he performed the role of The Lover with an astoundingly genuine yearning.

Joseph Gorak, who won the gold medal at the 2005 Youth American Grand Prix Finals, has something different: A monster technique. In Peterson’s Nocturne, which isn’t so much a dance but a showcase piece for a classical wunderkind, his concentration, poise and technical mastery never faltered in grace or elegance of line. Gorak, like his 11 ballet beautiful comrades, have great careers ahead of them. Next year a new configuration of dancers will hold forth. Hopefully Artistic Director Peterson will match Studio Company 2008 with more choreographers like Hougland, who brought out the dancers' passions as well as deftly paraded their beautiful legs and feet.