{"id":5911,"date":"2018-06-28T13:38:49","date_gmt":"2018-06-28T17:38:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/?p=5911"},"modified":"2018-07-01T18:54:37","modified_gmt":"2018-07-01T22:54:37","slug":"a-gala-and-denmark-in-the-berkshires","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/2018\/06\/a-gala-and-denmark-in-the-berkshires\/","title":{"rendered":"A Gala and Denmark in the Berkshires"},"content":{"rendered":"

Members of the Royal Danish Ballet Come to Jacob’s Pillow, as it celebrates its 86th anniversary.<\/p>\n

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Amy Hollinshead and Alberto Garcia perform one of Janis Claxton’s Pop-Up Duets (Fragments of Love)<\/em> at the Jacob’s Pillow Gala. Photo: Christopher Duggan<\/p><\/div>\n

Art, time, and money can squirm and slip around one another in unexpected ways. This year\u2019s Gala at Jacob\u2019s Pillow in the Berkshires made some people open their pockets on the spot and made others wish they could. The mood was jovial, and the weather responded with sunshine (perhaps the gods were penitent about the rain that made last year\u2019s 85th anniversary a damp, slightly muddy one). You could mosey around the premises, taking in the sensational array of historic dance movie posters in Blake\u2019s Barn and drinking in essence of June and whatever else you craved while inspecting the new Perles Family Studio.<\/p>\n

In various spots, you might also have come upon an arresting duet by members of the Edinburgh-based Janis Claxton Dance. I only watched two variants, but they raised interesting thoughts. Of the four dancers (Joanne Pirrie, Albert Garcia, Amy Hollinshead, and Valerio Di Giovanni), a man and a woman might pair up on a lawn, and later, in another spot, the two men would take it on. The duet itself keeps the partners close together and is full of the intense glances and shifting rhythms that suggest a relationship being tested. The power dynamic between the male-female one I saw seemed more full of small equivocations than the one performed by the two men, although both were equally demanding.<\/p>\n

This year, Jacob\u2019s Pillow director Pamela Tatge and her staff and board made a wise decision in relation to time and attention span. No auctioneer trying to elicit bids while the guests (most of whom were already supporters) ate the fine meal served in the enormous tent, where silent-auction items were laid out amid the dining tables. Instead, in the middle of the preceding performance in the Ted Shawn Theater, Coulter Rule began by auctioning off, from the stage, three of the most alluring and pricey items, gradually winding down to call for smaller and smaller donations, while a large group of Jacob\u2019s Pillow students wearing red t-shirts saying \u201cFace the Future\u201d raised a brigade of arms to point out audience members ready to contribute. In terms of time, that strategy got a lot done pretty fast.<\/p>\n

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Three Jacob’s Pillow students in Annabelle Lopez Ochoa’s Scarlet Circles<\/em>. Photo: Christopher Duggan<\/p><\/div>\n

By that time, we\u2019d seen the twenty-two students in the Pillow\u2019s Ballet Program Scarlet Circles<\/em> (to music mostly drawn from Bach concertos), which Annabelle Lopez Ochoa had created for them in only four days (the audience gasped when Tatge announced that), and the piece turned out to be a seamless and very fine one\u2014bringing dancers on and offstage in various combinations that gave each one moments in the limelight. We had applauded a tribute to the Ballet Program\u2019s director Anna-Marie Holmes and her music director, Ramona Pansegrau and a tribute to the gala\u2019s honorary chair, Carmen de Lavallade, who looked beautiful and spoke wonderfully, after Amanda Smith, with beguiling vivacity, performed Come Sunday<\/em>, a piece that de Lavallade\u2019s late husband Geoffrey Holder had made for his wife in 1955. We had applauded choreographer Faye Driscoll as she accepted the annual Jacob\u2019s Pillow Dance Award, which will doubtless lighten her financial burden.<\/p>\n

All that was left between the auction and dinner was a \u201cpreview selection\u201d from Ephrat Asherie\u2019s Odeon<\/em>, which was to premiere there June 27. Asherie and her colleagues\u2014 Manon Bai, Valerie \u201cMs. Vee\u201d Ho, Linda Madueme, and Matthew \u201cMegawatt\u201d West)\u2014 showed how creative you can get working from a tap base. Not just feet making magic with the floor, but arms gesturing as people feint with each other. These people also flip through the air and dance while grounded.<\/p>\n

Were we getting hungry? Sure. But hadn\u2019t we just been fed in other ways? Yes.<\/p>\n

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Ida Praetorius and Andreas Kaas of the Royal Danish Ballet in August Bournonville’s The Kermesse in Bruges.<\/em> Photo Christopher Duggan<\/p><\/div>\n

Jacob\u2019s Pillow\u2019s 86th<\/sup> summer season began the following week with performances by members of the Royal Danish Ballet (seven principal dancers, two soloists, and two from the corps de ballet). In a program designed by the company\u2019s artistic director, Nikolaj H\u00fcbbe, the passage of time, art, and memories slipped around one another in complex ways. For one thing, consider the hundred-year-plus span of the ballets shown: excerpts from works by August Bournonville (1805-1879) that preserve the Romantic Ballet style he learned at the Paris Opera and developed in Copenhagen; a pas de deux from Giselle <\/em>(1841); the two major pas de deux from Swan Lake<\/em> (1895), and a pas de deux by Harald Lander, who headed the RDB from 1932 through 1951.<\/p>\n

The company\u2019s history in the United States began when Ted Shawn brought a group of RDB dancers to Jacob\u2019s Pillow in 1955 (for which he was knighted by the king of Denmark two years later), and in due time the whole company performed in the U.S. Inevitably, my own history plays a role. Like many dance critics and historians, I traveled to Copenhagen for three celebrations of Bournonville\u2019s ballets in 1979, 1992, and 2005.<\/p>\n

The Jacob\u2019s Pillow program opened and closed the same way as the RDB performance at Manhattan\u2019s Joyce Theater in 2015. The evening began with the final celebratory Pas de Sept from Bournonville\u2019s A Folk Tale <\/em>(1854) and ended with everyone onstage for Act III of Napoli. <\/em>The two ballets share themes. Happiness restored. Hero safe. The woman he loves brought back from an alien magical kingdom\u2014A Folk Tale<\/em>\u2019s Hilda from the trolls\u2019 cave and Napoli<\/em>\u2019s Teresina from a kingdom under the sea. And what do Bournonville\u2019s people do when they\u2019re happy, and a wedding is finally taking place? They dance. (They don\u2019t dance unhappiness\u2014no despairing developp\u00e9s<\/em>; the drama develops in other ways).<\/p>\n

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The celebratory last scene in Bournonville’s Napoli.<\/em> L to R: Kizzy Matiakis, Marcin Kupi\u00f1ski, Andreas Kaas, Holly Jean Dorger, Amy Watson, Jonathan Chmelensky, Ida Praetorius, J\u00f3n Axel Fransson, Meirambek Nazargozhayev, Emma Riis-Kofoed. Photo: Christopher Duggan<\/p><\/div>\n

The dancers in A Folk Tale<\/em> excerpt don\u2019t wear their usual costumes; instead, the women are garbed identically in full-skirted dresses in the same muted red as the men\u2019s attire. People in this supposed village square become appreciative onlookers when their friends are dancing to Niels Gade\u2019s festive score; the three men (Jonathan Chmelensky, J\u00f3n Axel Fransson, and Meirambec Nazargozhayev) clap hands as they leap by their partners (Kizzy Matiakis, Ida Praetorius, Emma Riis-Kofoed, and Amy Watson).<\/p>\n

In Bournonville\u2019s day, pointe shoes weren\u2019t the hardened objects they later became; a dancer could briefly alight on tiptoe and amaze her audience. That may be why the women dancers charm us with buoyant steps that cause their feet to knit the air and make the floor look more resilient than it is. The men are no less nimble, and both they and the women launch their leaps and let them fly. Often their arms are curved and joined overhead in that en couronne<\/em> shape that frames their faces, and they tend to hold them low and curved when they jump, which makes you focus on their beating feet. One of Bournonville\u2019s most beguiling steps is a leap in which the performer opens his\/her arms as if this were a generous offering to all the watchers. For the sake of modesty, female dancers contemporary with Bournonville didn\u2019t lift their legs very high (although these dancers do). Partners often dance companionably side by side, and no acrobatic lifts occur.<\/p>\n

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L to R: Ida Praetorius, Marcin Kupi\u00f1ski, and Kizzy Matiakis in August Bournonville’s Napoli<\/em>. Photo Christopher Duggan<\/p><\/div>\n

The Pas de Six and Tarantella from Napoli<\/em> not only celebrate a wedding; they reflect Bournonville\u2019s love of 19th<\/sup>-century Naples, which he explored while temporarily banished from the company and the country by the king (a long story). The dancers (all those mentioned plus Holly Jean Dorger, Andreas Kaas, J\u2019aime Crandall, and Marcin Kupi\u00f1ski) wear ballet\u2019s idea of fisher folks\u2019 Sunday- best attire and try to make up for the missing set and the crowd of extras who usually watch from a bridge. The mood is exuberant (although at the Pillow, there didn\u2019t seem to be enough tambourines in the tarantella), and the variations express that in various ways. Crandall performed the solo whose steps, along with the music by Edvard Helstead and H.S. Pauli, periodically arrest her on one toe for a suspended breath of a moment. Praetorius played the maiden gifted at speedy jumping. Pairs danced together. Trios celebrated. If you\u2019d ever seen Napoli <\/em>in its entirety, you would have known instantly that Watson and Chmelensky represented Teresina and her beloved fisherman Gennaro. And when you rescue your girlfriend from the king of the sea and his minions by venturing into a tidal cave with a crucifix, you\u2019d better be given a splendid party by your friends.<\/p>\n

The\u00a0 pas de deux from the first act of Bournonville\u2019s The Kermesse in Bruges <\/em>displays a similar joyous mood. Praetorious and Kaas performed the duet beautifully. They focus, of course, on us as spectators plus the invisible ones on stage, but mostly on each other. They are sharing some lovely, energetic dancing as a way of discovering love. Again no villagers watching, no mother to grant her daughter permission to dance. But the dance itself is a charming conversation: \u201cplease dance for me!\u201d \u201cOf course.\u201d And each shows the other his or her favorite airborne steps and nimble beats. Praetorius watches her own busy feet at one point, as if to assure herself that they were doing their job.<\/p>\n

If you\u2019d like to see an earlier performance of the duet by Praetorius with Alban Lendorf and a happy crowd, click here:<\/p>\n