© Charlie McCullers, Atlanta Ballet 'The Great Gatsby' reviews recent Atlanta reviews more Pamela Gaye reviews

Award-winning choreographer Stallings and Company Director McFall combined their talents, placing a language of dreams center stage while telling through dance the tale of lost souls struggling to reconnect. Language as dance, dance as language were enhanced by the lithe movements of Dixon equally seductive as flapper, Long Island socialite, and lover, equally winsome in her performance of swing jazz steps as in classical pas de deux. Enhanced by the restless music of jazz greats John Coltrane, Fats Waller, and Jelly Roll Morton, Gatsby begins and ends with camera montage.

In the opening scene, Welker as Gatsby watches an enlarged black and white photograph of Daisy allowing the audience to visualize the arousal of his imagination. As Tom Buchanan, Daisy’s husband, Clark view with Welker to commands the stage, emerging in a bowler hat to strut amidst scenes of flappers, street musicians, shoeshine boys, and high society matrons. Throughout the production, choreography draws on imaginative scenery and props as dancers primp and project off-balance arabesques and form lingering plastic formations of rejection and desire as backdrop. All are wielded together to herald key elements of Fitzgerald’s story. Alternating are danced sections reflective of afternoon parties enhanced by impeccable corps segments bringing the language of dance to the foreground, all the while enhancing as background, an elliptical quality of loss.
 

In Gatsby, a story is told where ballet links elements of narrative. Bits and pieces of set design that evoke disparate images of mansions on Long Island and beaten-down car shops form unforgettable scenes such as the one where dancer James Pruitt, as George (owner and proprietor of a shop in Waste Land) leaps off-balance diagonally across the stage daring Christian Clark as Tom to out dance him to win back the love of his wife In scenes such as this, drab fantasies of forgotten love fade into those of a speakeasy bar where dancers roll beer barrels across the stage as props.

As the longest running ballet company in the South, the Atlanta Ballet makes yet another dramatic entry with this classic story. Seen were a range of images evoking photographs deftly mingled into montage of shifting breathtaking solos that combined adagio with swing, coupling choreography with props and set design. Innovative uses of setting framed dance and narrative such as the scene where a bass fiddle served as a main backdrop for a typical upscale Long Island party. Certainly Naomi-Jane Dixon is one of Atlanta Ballet’s brightest stars. Her breathtaking solos with Clark and Welker and range of expressive musicality framed scenes of nostalgia and glitter, symbolic of the jazz age. Evoking images of Louisville, Kentucky and the legendary mansions of a fabled Long Island, Gatsby excelled, evocative of decades past.