Wal-Mart Heiress Funds First-Rate Dancers in Trendy Ballets

This article originally appeared in the Culture section of Bloomberg News on January 15, 2008.

Cedar Lake dancers Acacia Schachte, Oscar Ramos, back, and Jon Bond perform on Dec. 21, 2007. Photographer: Paul B. Goode/GRW Advertising via Bloomberg News

Jan. 15 (Bloomberg) -- Four men and five women are dressed unisex-style, eyes heavily outlined in black, all in stiff, strapless, brief-skirted dresses decorated to suggest spring burgeoning. They shudder, run rampant, scuttle about as if sensing what's coming -- sex, presumably -- and finding it menacing.

``People in Trouble'' could serve as an umbrella title for Cedar Lake Contemporary Ballet's show. (The New York City-based company is performing at its own theater in West Chelsea through Jan. 19.) Yet these nine figures who populate the program's most striking piece, ``Rite,'' are pre-human and their initial impact isn't sustained past the mid-point of the work.

Though the score, the four-hand piano version of Stravinsky's ``Sacre du Printemps,'' calls for a Chosen One, a sacrificial maiden, Belgian choreographer Stijn Celis's dance inexplicably finishes tamely, with the woman who began it isolated, unpartnered, a wallflower at the prom.

Canadian Crystal Pite contributed a quieter, more sensitive work, ``Ten Duets on a Theme of Rescue.'' Cleverly, it couples five dancers in shifting situations that range from hostile attraction to pitiful dependence. It's a thin piece that needs expanding and beefing up, but its subtle yet easily decipherable emotion is welcome.

`Symptoms of Development'

Jacopo Godani's ``Symptoms of Development'' is one of those dances so popular today it might have been mass-produced. The Italian choreographer's movement looks fueled by unremitting rage; the pointed one-liners about the evolution of human biology, consciousness and the like are pretentious. The dancers seem to inhabit a glamorous hell, where writhing and whiplash motion is the order of the day and the relief, or at least contrast, of serenity is nonexistent.

While Cedar Lake's ballets aren't memorable, the dancers are terrific: strong, swift and uncannily flexible. I especially admired Ebony Williams, stunning in looks and motion; Acacia Schacte, the queen of fluidity; and Nickemil Concepcion, built like an oak tree yet a vessel of interior drama.

This is not the first dance troupe to owe its existence to a rich woman's fancy. Rebekah Harkness, founder of the Harkness Ballet (1964-74), got there first, with her killer combination of lavishness and vanity. But the largesse of Wal-Mart heiress Nancy Walton Laurie is unique in America today, where most dancers still live hand to mouth. Her Cedar Lake offers its performers salaries they can live on -- with all kinds of benefits ranging from health insurance to studios and a theater to dance in.

Rocky Beginning

Founded five years ago, it had a rocky beginning with many complaints about petty disciplinary actions (like fines for lateness), which seem to have been resolved under the current artistic director Benoit-Swan Pouffer. Running the company like a corporation, a style that makes artistic types uneasy, is an idea that still prevails.

The greatest problem, however, remains the repertory. The company has intended from the first to exist, rootless, on the choreographic cutting edge, but it has yet to commission or acquire an edgy ballet that convinces the audience it has seen the future and approved of it. Cedar Lake's only real hit to date has been the retrospective ``Decadance,'' by Ohad Naharin, artistic director of the Batsheva Dance Company, based in the choreographer's native Israel.

Comprising excerpts drawn from over two decades of Naharin's work, ``Decadance'' was given a one-night-only reprise in Cedar Lake's current run. It, too, contains much frenetic action, but the theatrically astute Naharin offsets the turbulence with passages of calm, mystery and absurd humor. The overall effect is robust and life-affirming, as if the choreographer finds the human animal weird but worth his enduring interest and empathy.

At 547 W. 26th St., between 10th and 11th avenues, through Jan. 19. Information: +1-212-868-4444; http://www.cedarlakedance.com.

© 2008 Bloomberg L.P. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission.