New Ballet Choreographers.

New Ballet Choreographers Miller Theatre at Columbia University, September 13-16, 2006

Ballet is meant for a big stage, big drama, big music. But the Miller Theatre is now producing intimate ballets with live music in collaboration with Works & Process at the Guggenheim. The series commissioned premieres by three budding choreographers: Brian Reeder, Tom Gold, and Edwaard Liang.

Reeder, known for his humorous pieces, contributed a somber, Tudoresque work for seven dancers. Them opened with a lone figure, Joseph Gorak, pacing in silhouette upstage while three couples bonded in a tight circle. Jefferson Friedman's original music provided occasional bursts of strident energy. As each couple danced separately, Gorak tried to join them. Despite nice trio work, the group patterns were unremarkable and the phrasing flat. The literal finger-pointing motif ("They are not letting me in!") didn't help. Part of the problem was that the cast, drawn from American Ballet Theatre's Studio Company, was too young to project emotional depth.

Gold's Masada, to music by John Zorn performed by the Masada String Trio, was fun and light and studded with an Eastern head-wagging move. Four young women, two in bright pink tunics and two in yellow, smiled aplenty. Scan Suozzi lay on the floor as though all of this were his dream. But he didn't enter the dream until New York City Ballet's Ashley Bouder blew in, and you could see why. Bouder has acquired a new sheen of glamour--and an uncanny facial resemblance to Madonna. Her femme fatale gave the piece focus.

Liang showed two beguiling duets, both with nicely slippery musicality. In Softly as I speak, for NYCB principals Maria Kowroski and Albert Evans, one of the many lifts had Evans flinging Kowroski in one direction and then back again like a boomerang--a wild version of a similar lift in "Emeralds" from Balanchine's Jewels. But the duet had more of a Tharpian ranginess and invention than a Balanchinian symmetry. During one of the low notes in Philip Glass' beautiful String Quartet No. 5 (played by the Chiara String Quartet), Kowroski placed her palm on Evans' heart, propelling him into a restless solo.

Liang made the sensuous Fur Alina, to Arvo Part's spare piano music, for NYCB's Wendy Whelan and Craig Hall. Out of stillness came a sudden lift that spiraled and melted. When Whelan moved her head through Hall's hands, you could almost hear her purring.

In both these duets (and in last year's Distant Cries), the man emerges from darkness and the couple enters a mysterious, intimate place. It would be nice to see Liang expand his range of moods and branch out into group works. He is a natural.