Festival Ballet Providence.

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Festival Ballet Providence

VMA Arts & Cultural Center, Providence, RI

February 8-10, 2008

Viktor Plotnikov's Coma (2007) begins with a stunning image of four dancers lying on slabs that are swinging close to the ground. It's a hospital with a difference. Banks of lights suddenly glare at us and go dark. Music by Arvo Part is played on tape (rather too loudly). In this context, the dancing seems to play out fantasies about death.

There are more beautiful images, like people lying on the floor in a row with both arms waving like grass in a field. Later, still on the ground, each of four men takes the woman's face in his hands, turns her head toward the audience, and places his head above hers, ear touching ear. A dark angel of death threads through them, twisting and scooping her arms. In these moments, sacrifice, tenderness, and despair collide.

The highpoint is a deeply poignant duet in the second section. Leticia Guerrero, a powerful, simpatico dancer, gets a tap on the shoulder from the dark woman--now a doctor?--and she goes in to see her loved one (Alexander Akulov) lying on the slab. She falls into a slumber. In her dreams he gets up and dances with her one more time. Draping, dragging, pulling on each other's clothing, they long for each other and long for life.

Each shape they make tugs at your heart anew. After he returns to his swinging slab, Guerrero now taps the doctor on the shoulder (a sign to pull the plug?). The doctor/angel passes her hand over Akulov's eyes, and his stiff reclining body goes limp. Guerrero, sitting upstage with her back to us, beats her arms against her body like a hummingbird. She is perhaps his soul taking wing from his body.

That would have been a powerful ending, but Coma continued. This time, the music reflected the lighter side of Arvo Part. Were all the coma patients now in heaven?

Also on the program were fine renditions of Tudor's Leaves Are Fading and de Mille's Rodeo. The Festival Ballet dancers performed the sustained phrasing of Leaves with delicacy and sensitivity. Jennifer Ricci was particularly warm and yielding to her partner. Some of the difficult lifts were not totally smoothly managed. But each set of partners focused fully on each other, giving the ballet a tenderness that it doesn't always have. In Rodeo, Guerrero was the tough-but-pining Cowgirl, and Akulov was dashing as The Head Wrangler who goes off with a daintier girl.

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For a company of only 19 dancers (and 3 apprentices), it was impressive to see the scope and depth of their artistry.