National.

Houston Sprinkles Pixie Dust
Houston Ballet
Wortham Theater Center
Houston, Texas
March 14-24, 2002
Reviewed by Clive Barnes

The Houston Ballet has, under the long-term artistic direction of Ben Stevenson, led the way for American ballet companies in the creation of new full-evening classical ballets. Indeed it has more than led the way; it has practically created a trend. All of these ballets have had three things in common--a title abounding in name recognition, such as Dracula or Cleopatra, plus a dance-viable subject and, last but not least, choreography by Stevenson himself. Now, with Stevenson on the brink of retiring as artistic director--the Houston board has moved into determined search mode--he entrusted the company's latest full-evening extravaganza, Peter Pan, to Houston Ballet's choreographic associate and former dancer, Trey McIntyre.

Peter Pan--in the original J.M. Barrie manifestation rather than the Disney transmogrification--is a fascinating story, an archetypal childhood fantasy. Yet like the best of childhood fantasies or fairy stories it embodies some symbol of instinctively recognizable adult truth, whether it's the awakening of womanhood in The Sleeping Beauty, the eternal hopes and dreams realized in Cinderella, or the quest for youth, and fear of death, found in Peter Pan.

Consequently, I was happy to accept an invitation by the Houston Ballet to see this new piece, with music, as English as Worcester Cathedral, taken from Elgar, and I fully intended to see both casts. But my plan was unceremoniously put aside by an airline snafu, and it was only after six or seven hours of tiresome waiting at La Guardia that I finally arrived in time to see only the final Saturday evening performance. This was virtually the same as the first cast on March 14, but my apologies nevertheless to the missed matinee group.

McIntyre, who has been associated with the Houston company for all of his professional life, is a widely performed young choreographer of considerable promise; still, a major undertaking such as this Peter Pan could well have proved daunting. But he has tackled it with invention, a sure dramatic instinct, and a very special sensibility. He had to make slight changes in the story--for example, he decided that dogs were not a good choreographic prospect, so the canine nanny Nana is out--and the audience is no longer required to express its famous belief in fairies to save the ailing Tinkerbell. The ending is also slightly changed, but by and large this is Peter Pan as Barrie envisaged, even to the extent--not followed in either the play or the subsequent musicals--of having a male Peter.

At times McIntyre shows his inexperience in too much repetitive dance padding, but his choreographic use of the requisite flying (yes, as is the custom, it's Flying by Foy) is unusually poetic, his characterization of Captain Hook is masterly (as is his cheeky, boisterous Peter Pan), and in some of the duets he shows the command of an emerging master. And the production as a whole is charming--Niel DePonte has done a nice job of arranging the scattered bits of Elgar (who would have guessed that so much of Falstaff would have ended up as Peter Pan?), and the scenery by Thomas Boyd, the costumes by Jeanne Button, and the lighting by Christina Giannelli contrive to make Never-Never Land perfectly viable. And Jerry Lynch has provided a properly uncuddly but grimly riotous crocodile.

The Houston troupe--many of its members from the company's own school, and nearly all of them long-term residents--is a superb ensemble, in acting as well as dancing. Mauricio Canete's sprightly and mercurial Peter was a delight, the graceful and gracious Sara Webb made a nicely wistful Wendy, and all the rest inhabited Barrie's half-world with a winning sense of fantasy. But the performance that grabbed the attention was unquestionably Timothy O'Keefe's grandiose Captain Hook. With a wonderful costume--including a curling tricorne hat and a hooked hand to die for--and magnificent makeup, all black goatee and eyebrows, O'Keefe danced well, handling his one-handed partnering with panache and generally dominating the proceedings.

This Peter Pan, for all its many virtues, is no definitive work and seems unlikely to be destined as any kind of a repertoire standard outside of the Houston Ballet. Yet, with its choreographic confidence and narrative skills, it certainly represents a major step in McIntyre's career.

What Dreams May Come
Ohio Ballet and Dayton Ballet
State Theatre at Playhouse
Square Center
Cleveland, Ohio
April 5-6, 2002
Reviewed by Steve Sucato

To speak, or not to speak? After all, what is Shakespeare's Hamlet without hearing its eloquent verses?

At its core, Hamlet is a most powerful and compelling story, with or Without verse, one that choreographer Stephen Mills distilled into a brilliant modern ballet. Mills's original 2000 production for Ballet Austin was restaged and presented as a joint production in Cleveland by the Ohio and Dayton Ballets. Set to music by minimalist composer Philip Glass, with otherworldly sets and lighting by Mills, Jeffrey Main, and Tony Tucci, Hamlet's stage alternated between monochrome scenes of darkness and light.

The two-act ballet was told in retrospective, opening toward the end of Shakespeare's story with Hamlet near death. Arisen from his funeral bier, Hamlet--danced by Damien Highfield--began recounting his tragic story, beginning with his return home from school and the news of his father's death.

A visit from the ghost of his father, dreamlike visions of family treachery, and a celebration heralding the marriage of Hamlet's mother, Gertrude (Anna Kirker), to his uncle Claudius (Sasha Janes) set into motion a series of events that would lead to Hamlet's inevitable downfall.

The corps moved through chic choreography that had them leaping into the air and landing with arms folded in half and positioned at ear level, with their elbows pointing forward. The scene exemplified Mills's generally bold choreography for Hamlet, a blend of several dance styles.

Other notable sections in the ballet's first act included a sharply defined pas de deux between Hamlet and his love interest, Ophelia (Emily Gotschall), and a powerful solo by Janes as a guilt-ridden and frightened Claudius. The first act ended with Ophelia slipping into madness after her father's accidental death at the hands of her beloved Hamlet. Traversing through wildly amorous, childlike, and crazed behavior, Gotschall was radiant and thoroughly convincing as the mad Ophelia, whipping her long blonde hair in front of her face and tossing herself about the stage. The scene culminated in Gotschall skittering her way through a long trough of real water at the foot of the stage until it appeared that she had been pulled under--flecks of colored foil floated down from above, making it clear to the audience that Ophelia had drowned.

In the second act, Hamlet immersed himself in fraught retrospection over Ophelia's death. As in earlier scenes in the ballet, Mills employed a physical manifestation of Hamlet's soliloquies, with three dancers costumed to look like Hamlet expressing his torment through dance.

Assaulted at Ophelia's funeral by her brother, Laertes (Justin Michael Koertgen), Hamlet retreated to his mother's arms--the stunning choreography revealed Hamlet's clouded and incestuous feelings for her. Kirker turned in a ravishing, expressive performance as Gertrude.

The ballet's final scenes included a splendidly executed sword duel between Hamlet and Laertes (in which Highfield and Koertgen emptied their physical reserves fiercely combating one another), and the dramatic deaths of Gertrude, Laertes, Claudius, and the melancholy Hamlet.

Skillfully danced and breathtaking to behold, this production of Hamlet was an unqualified triumph. The combined cast was indistinguishable in style, and their collaboration raised both companies to a higher level of performance.

In the Mix
Dance Salad
Cullen Theater, Wortham Center
Houston, Texas
March 28-30, 2002
Reviewed by Marene Gustin

For ten years Nancy Henderek has been putting together a little show called Dance Salad. For the last seven of those years she's done it in Houston, not exactly a mecca for contemporary dance. This year, despite fund-raising and logistical problems posed by September 11, she put together a program with the best national and international dance--ballet and modern, to almost full houses, even on a shoestring budget--presenting groups that had never shared an American stage before.

Among the highlights was an appearance by the Chinese company Guangdong, whose director, the incomparable Xing Liang, had stunned Houston audiences two years earlier with his Asian Dance Salad performance. Xing sent two of his pieces: 180 degrees and The Night of a Dancer. The former began in silence as four women in white silk slips moved so fluidly about the stage you hardly noticed when the plaintive strains of a Bach piece, played live by Yo-Yo Ma, began. The women used oversized folding fans to hide, then reveal, their faces in a moving work for and about women. The Night of a Dancer had Wang Tao writhing on his sleeping mat to Igor Stravinsky's Rite of Spring. In a somnambulistic state, Tao began to sleep-dance. His jerks become patterns, his movements barre practices. It was clever and charming and a lovely showcase for Wang's lithe body and expressive humor.

The company brought five pieces in all, including Sang Jijia's Heart, Shape, Substance/Comrades, a duet for Wang and Zhao Liang. Set to music by John Adams, this was an athletic yet emotional dance for two men that may be about worker angst or love relations; either way, it was powerful and touching.

Meredith Monk supplied an eerie score with shrieks for Yunna Long's Do You Be, based on a Chinese legend of a lost ghost. Zhao Liang, dancing the wrenching solo, provided an adequate substitute for the missing co-director, who usually dances it; he has similar suppleness and strength.

Guangdong combines an Asian sense of tradition and history with American modern movements to create unique work. Wu Bing designed wonderful costumes, from semi-traditional to fanciful, while the lighting was minimal, sets almost nonexistent, and most of the music American. The exception was Long's Linglei/Unusual. Done to a Chinese synthesized score, this highly formal ensemble work closed two of the three nights of Dance Salad. Drawn from Chinese folklore of animals, the piece combines a corps of shiny creatures--a flock, a school, a herd?--in fast-moving patterns with a slow-motion couple in white dresses. Breathtaking in its visuals, moving in its steps, it was a perfect finale.

But there was much more than just Guangdong, although an evening with just them might have been enough. There were more ensemble pieces this time. Besides the Guangdong works, Alonzo King's LINES Ballet of San Francisco fielded two company works: Tarab and The Heart's Natural Inclination. Both featured King's beautiful, strong dancers (Chiharu Shibata worthy of individual note) in inventive, balletic choreography.

The Goteborg Ballet of Gothenburg, Sweden, also brought a larger work. Jacopo Godani's Digital Secrets set four dancers to the pounding rhythm of the digital age, including Rei Watanabe who, on two consecutive evenings, morphed into a pre-teen Juliet in the balcony scene from Martino Muller's excellent update of Romeo and Juliet. In her version of baby-doll jammies, Watanabe invoked the blush of a first kiss with Mattias Suneson. The duet was so gorgeous and so simple, it's a pity the completed ballet hasn't been seen here. Goteborg also offered a humorous William Forsythe pas in Herman Schmerman.

Rambert Dance Company's Paul Liburd did honor to both his company and choreographer, Christopher Bruce, with his highly controlled performance in Hurricane, a moving solo to Bob Dylan's ballad of the same title. In this U.S. premiere, Liburd played a boxer brought down by racism in a piece that reminded us why Bruce is such a major force in contemporary dance.

The Norwegian National Ballet brought a beautiful and sensual pas from Jean Grand-Maitre's Exilium, danced exquisitely by Ingrid Lorentzen and Ole-Willy Falkhaugen, and Jiri Kylian's pas from Heart's Labyrinth.

Henderek juxtaposed the serious and dark Kylian and Guangdong works with lighter treats such as Roxanne Butterfly's Rhythm Is Our Voice (which pitted tap against Bernice Brooks's drums and Sue Terry's wailing sax), and Rebecca Stenn's darting imitation of a lizard. Stenn, easily recognizable as a former Pilobolus and MOMIX dancer, gave a more-than-credible performance in her Iguana, which also used Brooks and Jay Weissman on bass.

The local team, Houston Ballet, contributed Uncommon Valour, a dramatic wartime trio by Timothy O' Keefe.

Robert Battle, in a dance that almost wasn't, used two members of Battleworks in his Strange Humors. The male duet of drunk or vodoun-possessed dancers undulating to John Mackey's music was vivid, visceral, and strangely funny. The five-minute work received the loudest ovation.

This year's event also included master classes and community projects along with the three nights of dance. Henderek claims the event has a "life of its own," and isn't sure how it will evolve. But if this year is any indication, it could wind up as the premier contemporary dance festival between the East and West Coasts.

How High Can You Fly?

Sky Dancers Dance Mission Theater San Francisco, California March 22-April 7, 2002 Reviewed by Ann Murphy

The aerial dance festival "Sky Dancers" began in a narrow alleyway outside the theater. As the show got under way, the night air smelled of hamburgers, coffee, and falafel, and the crowd stood three deep in the slim space. Neighbors craned their necks out bay windows, cars rolled to a stop, and passersby halted to see the mysterious bodies of Amelia Rudolph's troupe vaulting from fire escape to brick wall and back again.

Thirty years ago choreographers like Trisha Brown and Twyla Tharp asked their dancers to slip down the face of buildings, march through parking lots, or make signs to one another on rooftops in Manhattan. In that spirit "Sky Dancers" brought together performers who ranged from straight-up trapeze artists to haunting dance ensembles in harnesses and soloists on swings, curated by the indomitable Krissy Keefer of Dance Brigade.

During the 1960s, when new modern dance was diametrically opposed not only to ballet but to traditional modern dance, Tharp, Brown, and their colleagues mixed aspects of street drama with new minimalist ideas about dance. Artists tore open the walls of even the wide-open loft space, seeking freedom from the rigid boundaries of the proscenium, and said, "Here, dance can be anywhere you look; choreography is wherever movement is."

The current spate of aerialists aren't after that same emancipation, but they seek new kinds of freedom all the same. Bay Area aerialists increasingly seem to be young feminists, less interested in asserting dance's ubiquity than in freeing themselves from its illusion of effortless feminine flight. These women--and the festival was an all-women event--often have imposing biceps, bellies as tight as washboards, and legs sculpted like the legs of mountain climbers, which some of them are.

Like most festivals, the programming was uneven. Keefer mixed serious circus fare, wildly campy acts, conceptual art, and schmaltzy, if beautiful, aerial spinning. But she showed us the range of styles and entertained and provoked us by asking questions like "Is circus art a kind of dance?" Those of us who have watched sky dancing take hold in the Bay Area as a genre of dance got to see how far it, as a form, has come.

Thanks in particular to the work by Rudolph, Joanna Haigood, Jo Kreiter, and Terry Sendgraff, aerial dance has furthered the dialogue between dance and conceptual art that Brown and Tharp initiated. Each of these older choreographers has had an abiding relationship to modern dance, and each remains rooted in the aesthetic concepts of the art form. The apparatus-dependent works of Haigood and Kreiter in particular took stringent stylistic care not only to transcend the sheer athleticism involved, but to make the apparatus an object under our scrutiny. Meanwhile, Rudolph's harnesses and ropes created illusions of planes and space and she played with the ideas of mountaineer and dancer until they were inseparable.

IN EDGE, AN EXCERPT FROM A LARGER work, Rudolph treated the building's exterior like an upturned floor, on which they leaped and performed duets. Haigood, by contrast, transformed her meditative spinning and butoh-slow extension of the hand, made toward a suspended rock, into a meditation on the potency of small acts exquisitely executed. Kreiter and her troupe of crack dancers lent feminism a brooding air of hardship, frustration, and small joys as they rebounded off the interior wall or twisted on an umbrella-shaped apparatus. Despite their awful dull-red loungewear and bland New Age music, Terry Sendgraff's dancers unfolded and evolved like simple organisms.

The younger performers presented sometimes smart, sometimes cheesy acts full of irony about performance, and an often delicious blending of entertainment and circus-based skill. Ena Starling's An Act of Exotica on the Vine created a woman-as-vamp rope act that blended carnival sideshow creepiness with art-school savvy. Amanda Starr's Warm Day aimed for something similar with a nerd-into-sex-bomb routine, in which she suspended herself by her feet with circus ribbon. She undercut her own humor, though, by constantly being a half-beat ahead of the music. Lauren Steiner's Be The Cake and Eat it, Too ended the program two out of three weekends with four tutu-clad ballerinas in harnesses performing a bulimia ballet on high. They stuffed in the cake, spat it out, performed effortless entrechat six, and rolled head over heels--weightless--as not even the most sylphlike ballerina will ever be.