{"id":269,"date":"2011-10-25T13:52:32","date_gmt":"2011-10-25T17:52:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/?p=269"},"modified":"2011-10-26T17:16:20","modified_gmt":"2011-10-26T21:16:20","slug":"two-companies-east-from-houston-north-from-d-c","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/2011\/10\/two-companies-east-from-houston-north-from-d-c\/","title":{"rendered":"Two Companies: East from Houston, North from D.C."},"content":{"rendered":"
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Houston Ballet (Melissa Hough, front) in Jorma Elo's One\/end\/One. Photo: Amitava Sarkar<\/p><\/div>\n

In successive October weeks, two ballet companies with very dissimilar identities and agendas appeared at the Joyce Theater. The Houston Ballet is composed of over 50 dancers. It also boasts a handsome, beyond-spacious new building in its hometown (price: a surprisingly modest $46,600,00) that\u2019s connected by a bridge to the Wortham Theater Center, where the company and the Houston Grand Opera perform. Artistic director Stanton Welch balances the repertory (and, no doubt, the budget) by presenting both full-length ballets (such as his 2009 Marie<\/em> and Kenneth MacMillan\u2019s Manon<\/em>) and shorter, edgier works.<\/p>\n

The Suzanne Farrell Ballet was founded ten years ago as an outgrowth of the summer intensive ballet classes given at the Kennedy Center by Farrell\u2014George Balanchine\u2019s last, and perhaps greatest muse. The company has annual seasons in D.C., and it tours. It has remained, at least in part, a pick-up group, with regular members augmented by guest artists; Farrell isn\u2019t very interested in new works; the company is a vital element in her mission to stage and coach Balanchine ballets\u2014mainly those that were part of her repertory when she was a dazzling, musically sensitive young dancer\u2014as well as remounting ones that haven\u2019t been seen in years for her own and other institutions as part of her group’s Balanchine Preservation Initiative.<\/p>\n

Because the Joyce\u2019s medium-sized stage and lack of a pit militates against extravaganzas, or even ballets with large casts, the Houston Ballet arrived with three works\u2014none of them requiring more than eight dancers\u2014and double-cast two of them. The Joyce Foundation had awarded the company its first Rudolf Nureyev Prize for New Dance \u2014a $25,000 grant to a ballet company wishing to commission a small-cast work; in other words, a work enabling said company to show its chops in a non-opera-house setting\u2014say, at the Joyce. And the winner is. . .Jorma Elo! Elo\u2019s One\/end\/One<\/em> formed the centerpiece of the Houston Ballet\u2019s Joyce program, bookended by Jir\u00ed Kyli\u00e1n\u2019s 1989 Falling Angels<\/em> and Christopher Bruce\u2019s 2006 Hush<\/em>.<\/p>\n

The Houston company has skilled dancers\u2014strong, well-trained, up for anything. And anything is what Elo demands. His ballets (what company doesn\u2019t have an Elo these days?) embellish the classical vocabulary with little jolts and quirks that audiences find fascinating\u2014electric, somehow. One\/end\/One<\/em> pits four couples against Mozart\u2019s Violin Concerto No. 4 in D major (heard in a recording by the Netherlands Chamber Orchestra). The women wear handsome, gold-trimmed black tutus by Holly Hynes (their elegance somewhat sabotaged by the acreage of black panties they reveal); the men are costumed to match.<\/p>\n

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Karina Gonzalez and Connor Walsh in One\/end\/One. Photo: Amitava Sarkar<\/p><\/div>\n

Elo\u2019s choreography for One\/end\/One<\/em> is meticulously on the music, but it doesn\u2019t breathe with it. The dancers often resemble dolls, walking stiffly, cocking their heads. Sometimes they undulate while performing pointework. Picture a snake in a tutu. For dancers, doing Elo\u2019s choreography must be like multi-tasking; head here, shoulder there, twitch this, roll that. This sprightly little ballet is rife with oddities. For instance, here\u2019s a maneuver in the duet that\u2019s excellently performed by Karina Gonzalez and Connor Walsh: Gonzalez strikes an arabesque; Walsh embraces her lifted leg as if it were a football he plans to run with, and turns her into position; then he releases his grip and with one hand traces several little circles in the air around her ankle. He also ends a sequence of supported cartwheels by burying his face in her net skirt. After that, he takes a short nap.<\/p>\n

Perhaps coincidentally, all three ballets on Houston\u2019s Joyce program involve a lot of quirky angularity and staccato moves. Falling Angels<\/em>, created by Kyli\u00e1n for Netherlands Dance Theater (with which Elo performed in the 1990s), is set to Steve Reich\u2019s Drumming<\/em>. Kyli\u00e1n embraces Reich\u2019s spartan power, creating a clever analogue to that compelling musical exercise, which starts out simple and accumulates complexity as instruments join and rhythmic patterns layer over one another, displacing accents. Finally, dancers and percussionists (heard on tape) work their way back to simplicity.<\/p>\n

The eight women wear black leotards, white socks, and white jazz shoes. Each begins in her own rectangle of light. Despite occasional flirty glances or defiant stares at the audience, the women work their trim little butts off. The choreography allows individuals or pairs to emerge or swim against the current, but always within the confines of the pattern.<\/p>\n

Bruce\u2019s Hush<\/em>, choreographed for the Houston Ballet in 2006, makes a different use of abruptness. A family of buskers, or maybe circus performers, enters in a procession; father, mother, and kids. Wearing Marian Bruce\u2019s attractively ragtag clothes, they jerk along, pausing occasionally like wind-up toys with iffy circuitry. But they\u2019re camping here for the night, and Bruce\u2019s musical choices\u2014as varied as a Vivaldi adagio, the Bach-Gounod \u201cAve Maria,\u201d Rimsky-Korsakov\u2019s \u201cFlight of the Bumblebee,\u201d and a hoedown\u2014suggest life as a series of numbers. On the other hand, all the selections are performed by Bobby McFerrin and Yo-Yo Ma, which gives them a bubbly, sometimes poignant charm. Hearing the tunes in the context of Bruce\u2019s work, you can almost imagine the mechanical organ of a distant merry-go-round.<\/p>\n

Hush<\/em> is a modest little work, gratifyingly unaffected, and it shows off the dancers\u2019 dramatic abilities as well as their technical skills. The mother (Kelly Myernick) checks on the sleeping children and does an abstracted version of housework. The elder brother (Rhodes Elliott) performs some very nice jumps, and his sibling (Ilya Kozadayev) picks up the steps. Even Dad (James Kotesky) joins in. He also dances fondly with the littlest girl (Melody Mennite), who has just bested her brothers by catching the flying insect they\u2019re chasing, putting it in her mouth, spitting it out, and stamping on it. A sister (Jessica Collado) forms a trio with the boys. You see the parents\u2019 affection for one another. In the end, crickets chirp, and the family members gather up their stuff and trudge on down the road.<\/p>\n

The polished program at the Joyce wisely introduced the company to New York in the form of an amuse-bouche<\/em>. It did its job: whetting our appetites for more glimpses of these dancers.<\/p>\n

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The Suzanne Farrell Ballet's Elisabeth Holowchuk and Kirk Henning in Balanchine's Haieff Divertimento. Photo: Carol Pratt<\/p><\/div>\n

What ballet-lover doesn\u2019t want to cheer Suzanne Farrell on? Her coaching of performers in the Balanchine repertory focuses on musicality and nuances within the overall shape of the choreography. Her company can make you discern details in Balanchine\u2019s ballets that dancers in other companies\u2014even those in the New York City Ballet\u2014often glide past. The revelations she provides balance the problems her group faces. The dancers who performed during her company\u2019s Joyce season are all very good, and some much better than that. They understand what Farrell is after, but they\u2019re not uniformly brilliant, and that is disappointing. At times, you can almost feel her guiding hand still on them; I\u2019m reminded of certain Russian dancers who perform as if they were hearing in their heads their coach\u2019s dictates about each step.<\/p>\n

The novelty of the Joyce program was Balanchine\u2019s 1947 ballet, Haieff Divertimento<\/em>, re-mounted by Todd Bolender for the Kansas City Ballet in 1985 and last seen here in a 1993 New York City Ballet reconstruction. Four couples and a lone man are onstage when the curtain opens and a trumpet call sounds in Alexei Haieff\u2019s music. They look like a gathering of blue jays, thanks to Holly Hynes\u2019s very attractive costumes (tunics for the women over long-sleeved leotards). Bluebirds, however, are not as good at symmetry or as polite as these partners, who bow to each other at every opportunity. The choreographic texture, interestingly, isn\u2019t as dense as it is in many of Balanchine\u2019s works\u2014by which I mean that there appear to be fewer steps per musical phrase. The ballet\u2019s opening section has the look of a very sleek, finely-wrought primer of classical moves. The single man in paler blue (Kurt Henning) behaves like a host, but also evokes the hero of many 19th-century ballets; \u201cwhere is the one for me?\u201d his gaze and gestures seem to say. Or \u201cshe was here just a minute ago. . . .\u201d<\/p>\n

The second section brings him the girl of his dreams (Elisabeth Holowchuk), who falls into his arms without hesitation. Their duet has a number of unusual moves. When the woman steps into an arabesque, confronting her partner and holding onto him, she paws the air with her lifted leg in an unusual, very beguiling way. Or, face to face, the two thrust straight arms past each other\u2019s shoulders and alternately spread and close their fingers, somewhat the way the hero of Balanchine\u2019s Apollo<\/em> does.<\/p>\n

The ballerina has a quiet solo (identified as \u201cLullabye\u201d in the original production), as if she were out walking in a stylish but dreamy fashion, gazing around and up at the sky, perhaps dejected. At the end of the ballet, she leaves. However, this isn\u2019t a sad work; there are smart, individual jumping passages for the four secondary men and solos for the women they brought to the party.<\/p>\n

At this point, the dancing by the Suzanne Farrell Ballet seems brittle in places and not entirely in tune with Haieff\u2019s effusive music. Nancy Reynolds\u2019 Repertory in Review<\/em> makes it clear that in 1947, both critics and the original dancers found the ballet light-hearted and charming, full of wit. Of course. The glamorous Mary Ellen Moylan was the ballerina and Francisco Moncion partnered her. The cast included Bolender and the young Tanaquil Le Clercq. Farrell\u2019s dancers treat Haieff Divertimento<\/em> with care and respect, as if afraid they might break it.<\/p>\n

When Balanchine made Meditation<\/em> in 1963 for Farrell and Jacques d’Amboise, she had been in the NYCB only two years, and the choreographer was crazy about her. A poet\u2019s muse alludes to daffodils and sunrises (whatever turns her on) and issues orders: \u201cGet to work. Write!\u201d A choreographer\u2019s muse offers her body as material. And the impact of this tall, slightly gangly, very musical teenager must have been overwhelming for Balanchine. When Holowchk enters and comes up behind the hero (Michael Cook) kneeling in despair, his hands over his eyes, she doesn\u2019t just embrace him lightly; she wraps her arms around his head. He may be dreaming her, but she\u2019s not an elusive sylph, she\u2019s all his. For the moment. Holowchuk becomes bolder in this\u2014extravagant, glamorous\u2014and Cook is effectively ardent.<\/p>\n

By 1967, Farrell was fully fledged. In making her the ballerina\u2014again partnered by d\u2019Amboise\u2014in Diamonds<\/em>, the finale of his Jewels<\/em>, he installed her as a princess in the Russia of his youth, as well as the kind of magical female who inhabits such worlds as Tchaikovsky\u2019s Swan Lake<\/em>. In this excerpted pas de deux, the man (Cook again) looks at the woman (Violeta Angelova) as if he were saying over and over under his breath, \u201cOh, you marvelous creature!\u201d while she sometimes gazes offstage as if into another domain.<\/p>\n

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Andrew Shore Kaminski, Violeta Angelova, and Ian Grosh in Balanchine's Agon. Photo: Paul Kolnick<\/p><\/div>\n

It\u2019s always painful to see a Balanchine ballet danced to taped music, especially when the volume level is too high, as it often is at the Joyce. And Agon<\/em>, with its bristling Stravinsky score, may have a small cast, but it needs a lot of air around it. Again, Farrell\u2019s dancers perform this great 1957 ballet with understanding and commitment, but not all of them with the spiky finesse it requires. Holowchuck and Momchil Mladenov danced very well together in the uncanny pas de deux that once featured Farrell (this time, the muse gets tested to the extent of her flexibility). Angelova in the second pas de trois looked strangely meek and underpowered the night I saw the company.<\/p>\n

As I said before, admirers of Balanchine owe Farrell much. And perhaps it\u2019s too unrealistic to hope that, in addition to staging his ballets for companies around the world, she can find whatever it takes in the way of time and money to maintain her own group at the highest professional level.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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