Crowd-Pleasing BalletX: Are bonbons enough?
By Robin J. Miller
Philadelphia’s BalletX landed with a bang at the Royal Theatre in Victoria, BC, on November 18, setting a standard for Dance Victoria’s 26th season of dance presentations that will be hard to top. Or maybe not. It depends on your appetite for sugar.
The small company, led by artistic and executive director Christine Cox, is dedicated to new work — a sensible choice in a city where Philadelphia Ballet has a long and successful history of delivering the classics. In its 17 years, BalletX has commissioned more than 100 pieces from more than 60 choreographers working in a range of dance idioms, including hip hop and ballet, house and contemporary. So far so good, right? On the basis of this one collection of short pieces, however, it may be that the breadth of the company’s commissioning process has resulted in too little attention to the depth of the work it presents.
All of the works shown in Victoria were great crowd-pleasers, including the opening 18-minute bonbon, Increasing, set to the first movement of Franz Schubert’s String Quintet in C Major. A program note from choreographer Matthew Neenan, who both danced at Philadelphia Ballet and co-founded BalletX with Cox, explained that his “only desire with Increasing was to make a dance that sprang entirely from the music” with no narrative attached, which makes it sound contemporary, and yet it wasn’t. Instead, except for a few flexed feet and hands here and there, Increasing embodied the classical ideal of beauty for beauty’s sake: it was joyful, playful, lyrical, and restful in its lack of challenge, and provided an eager audience with the opportunity to watch 10 attractive, well-trained dancers display their technique through lifts, leaps, spins, and arabesques familiar to anyone who has seen a traditional ballet. In short, it was pretty and safe.
The next sweet offering was the three-minute Fancy Me, set to King Floyd’s Groove Me, by choreographer Caili Quan. Danced charmingly by Shawn Cusseaux and Andrea Yorita in Converse high-tops, Fancy Me would fit in perfectly as a happy, innocent duet for young contestants on So You Think You Can Dance. That’s not a put-down — the TV show produced some very good work — but it is an indication of the way the evening was tending. If we had been able to see the planned third piece, It’s Not a Cry by Amy Seiwert to Jeff Buckley’s version of Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah, I suspect the feel-good vibe would have continued. Alas, company member Jonathan Montepara had visa issues and could not enter Canada, so that piece was scrubbed while apprentice Eli Alford was thrown into Montepara’s other two roles, learning only on Tuesday that he would be flying to Canada to perform on Friday. (He was excellent.)
Jamar Roberts, resident choreographer for Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre, choreographed Honey, the next 18-minute work on the revised program, to pieces by jazz composer Don Shirley. A touch less sweet than the first two offerings, the work took three pairs of dancers through various stages of love, from sinuous young passion to the compatibility of mature companionship, where the dancers contentedly mirrored each other’s movements. Honey was danced with commitment and style and had a number of inventive movements and lifts — one in particular, in which stand-out Ashley Simpson, with her incredibly long and expressive arms and legs, slid through her lover’s arms, was stunning. My bet, however, is that it was the last piece of the night, EXALT, choreographed by Jennifer Archibald, that will be most clearly remembered by the audience.
EXALT was the only work that employed creative lighting and inventive costuming, at least for the men, who wore black leather-like skirts that twirled fantastically over their leggings; the women, on pointe for the first time in the evening, wore less interesting black leotards. The 22-minute EXALT threw into relief what had been missing in the show until then: drama, grit, and swagger.
The piece started with dark, tribalistic/meditative music composed by Salim-Sulaiman but soon veered into variations on house with its driving, repetitive four-on-the-floor beat. The men clearly would more than hold their own in a war or a street dance battle, while the women were absolutely fierce high up on their toes. It was another crowd-pleaser, but with considerable intellect and sophistication behind it. Archibald layered breathtakingly fast group movement with slower, more subtle and emotional solos and duets, and somehow managed to make the women of the company the equal of the men in strength and power, even with their feet bound inside their toe shoes.
EXALT was a great close to the evening, adding a spicy, savoury dessert to what had been a meal a little too full of sweets.
