© Herbert Migdoll Boston 'Brake the Eyes' reviews 'Brake the Eyes' reviews recent Boston Ballet reviews Joffrey 'Lilac Garden' reviews 'Lilac Garden' reviews recent Joffrey Ballet reviews Oregon 'RUSH' reviews 'RUSH' reviews recent Oregon Ballet reviews more Oksana Khadarina reviews Discuss this review (Open for at least 6 months)

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...*
 

Lia Cirio and Sabi Varga in Boston Ballet's Brake the Eyes
© Gene Schiavone

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.
 

Megan Quiroz and David Gombert in Joffrey Ballet's Lilac Garden
© Herbert Migdoll

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 Theatre 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.