TEXANS WOULD BENEFIT FROM GUIDING LIGHT.

TEXANS WOULD BENEFIT
FROM GUIDING LIGHT

FORT WORTH DALLAS BALLET
THE JOYCE THEATER
NEW YORK, NEW YORK
JUNE 3, 2001

Fort Worth and Dallas both are lively cities, boasting first-class art museums and strong musical organizations. Their ballet image, however, has been slow to develop a consistent outline.

Currently, their shared company (at best, a shaky concept) does not have an artistic director. They have Bruce Marks as artistic advisor, Bruce Simpson as ballet master in chief, and Anna Donovan as ballet mistress. (According to company manager Mary Lynn Sloan, the ballet does not expect to appoint a new artistic director before the end of 2001.)

The exact weight of these titles is not clear, which makes it an odd time for a company to venture forth from its home. Yet it's obvious that the Fort Worth Dallas organization is gutsy, and in some ways its brief season at the Joyce Theater was successful. The company brought Kevin O'Day's Principia, Stanton Welch's Fingerprints, and Peter Anastos's Yes, Virginia, Another Piano Ballet.

Fingerprints presented the company at its most distinctive. The ballet is one of those group-sponsored productions that one sees with increasing frequency in opera and ballet. In addition to being in the repertoires of Fort Worth and Dallas, it is shared by the Cincinnati, Tulsa, and Washington Ballets.

Welch, best known for his work with the Australian Ballet, used taped African music played by the Kronos Quartet. The fourteen dancers were clad by Kandis Cook in culottes that moved like the surface of water or the flickering of trees. The dance designs had the same fluency. The participants seemed to be constantly meeting and parting, not of their own will, but under some larger force. It was as though Welch had created each phrase and then stepped aside to allow its true momentum to take over.

O'Day's approach to the classical vocabulary is athletic to the point of roughness. His Principia, danced to an insistent score by Steve Martland, began the program aggressively, as though the participants had been told to fling open a door and confront the audience. The dancers had more charm than the choreography.

Why is it that one can relish the humor of Jerome Robbins's The Concert time and again, while Anastos's Yes, Virginia did not have the same strongly comic effect? Although both are danced to Chopin piano pieces, Robbins's kinetic jokes never lose their sensitivity to the music, while in this instance Anastos allowed the jokes to take over. But then, humor is so fragile that its effect is the first to go when the artistic direction of a company is in transition.