REALITY SPARS WITH ILLUSION IN NCDT `STREETCAR'.

NORTH CAROLINA DANCE THEATRE BLUMENTHAL PERFORMING ARTS CENTER CHARLOTTE, N.C. FEBRUARY 9-11, 2001

As one of the most influential plays of the twentieth century, Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire has been adapted for various media for the past fifty years. Now, in his world premiere of A Streetcar Named Desire, choreographer Mark Diamond joins Valerie Bettis (1952) and Arthur Mitchell (1981) in translating the dramatic work into dance. In this ballet of relationships, Diamond's cast, with Mia Cunningham as Blanche, former NCDT member Shell Bauman as Stanley, Amy Price as Stella, Benjamin Westafer as Mitch, and Servy Gallardo as the "Spirit of Young Husband," articulates the wide-ranging emotional language with conviction and artistry.

In the two-act, seventy-minute ballet, funded in part by the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Dance Project's Doris Duke Fund for Dance, Diamond and his collaborators impressively realized the dualities and ambiguities inherent in the play's juxtaposition of reality and illusion. Complementing the ballet vocabulary with various dance forms, Diamond worked the raw and refined physical interplay against a backdrop of desire, domination, and death. Scenic designer Alun Jones suggested illusions of grandeur with plantation columns, while underscoring the reality of physical desire through the commonness of the kitchen/bedroom setting. David Mills's arrangements of brooding jazz, romantic to atonal classical music, and earthy street sounds spiked the landscape of male/female, reality/fantasy and group/solitude dynamics.

Male reality and group interaction were palpable in the poker game, which was vigorously danced, with inventive use of the dinette set and power-packed solos of male bonding and competition. Female fantasy and solitude framed the poignantly performed "mink and tiara" solo as Blanche repeatedly "presented" herself to an imaginary public. Diamond handled the range and complexity of gender relationships with organic yet unpredictable resolutions to his pas de deux lifts and turns. Bauman and Price accentuated the passionately sensual in the "reconciliation" duet and Cunningham and Westafer showcased the politely refined in their dance at the pavilion. Flashback episodes between Cunningham and Gallardo revealed the love, revulsion, and guilt that underlie Blanche's precarious mental condition.

William Forsythe's In the middle, somewhat elevated inspired razor-sharp performances by the NCDT cast, featuring Traci Gilchrist's extreme off-balance extensions, Lance Hardin's asymmetrical sequences, and Kati Hanlon Mayo's multiple on-a-dime turns. With complex coordinations, flawless partnering, and perfect unison, the dancers displayed technical prowess and gutsy risk-taking in this ballet of shifting opposites, working such polar concepts as on/off balance, extraordinary/pedestrian, at rest/in high gear, delicate/powerful and center/periphery. With its speeding-bullet pace, propelled by the edgy percussive score, the cast pushed the audience's "Wow!" button and earned a well-deserved standing ovation.