The Sacramento Ballet.

Mondavi Center for the Performing Arts Davis, California October 24, 2002

Ron Cunningham, celebrating his fifteenth-anniversary season heading The Sacramento Ballet with his wife and co-artistic director, Carinne Binda, has called this "a Shakespeare season." Two of his previous successful forays into Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream and Hamlet, are scheduled for winter and spring 2003, and a newly choreographed production of The Tempest premiered October 24 at the new Mondavi Center for the Performing Arts at the University of California at Davis. It was a clear success with the near-capacity audience in the 1,800-seat Jackson Hall.

Among the greatest Shakespeare plays, The Tempest has to be one of the most daunting for a choreographer. Its characters have histories that are more difficult than most to translate into motion; their motivations are somewhat complicated, and what happens in the play is frequently overlaid with magic. You can explain things somewhat in the printed program, but how do you show them through the dancer's art?

At the end of the play there is an important philosophical point. Prospero, the great magician, with every reason to seek revenge, calls up a storm to wreck the ship carrying the enemies who, twelve years prior, had exiled him to this island with Miranda, his 3-year-old daughter, thus robbing him of his dukedom. Yet the final truth he arrives at is that there is greater profit in forgiveness than in revenge.

Undaunted, Cunningham finds his first advantage in the storm that opens the play by creating a spectacular visual metaphor. To an already populous cast he adds new spirits to execute Prospero's commands, female dancers in glistening and filmy blue chiffon costumes whose whirling becomes the storm. They are a beautiful and exciting sight.

Cunningham's favorite designer, the imaginative Mabel Astarloa-Haley, has given Prospero a craggy perch on a hill, center stage. Constructed by Ken Weeks, this perch is a perfect site for Prospero's magical activities and helps to create the appropriate atmosphere for the airiest of Prospero's spirits, Ariel, excellently danced with sudden moves by Colby Damon. As for Prospero, Jack Hansen dominated the tiny island and its inhabitants, and plotted with a wonderful suggestion of authority.

Cunningham orients us to Prospero's history with a quick bit of pantomime involving Prospero and Miranda as a child (Nicolette Three Moons-Richards), and then jumps to the present, where the 15-year-old Miranda is played by Angelica Burgos. The storytelling goes by pretty fast. Prospero's grand design is to have her fall in love with Ferdinand, prince of Naples. (Of course she does, and of course he reciprocates, in the person of Joo Hwan Cho.) Logically, the romance produces some lovely, well-danced duets, and since Prospero is hovering nearby, they become trios.

Then there is the monster-man Caliban. In a strong performance by Luis Napoles, he becomes savagely interested in Miranda and even more interested in the boozy endeavors of Stephano and Trinculo (Benjamin, Schreivogel and Sunchai Muy). Toward the end, Sarah Hinman, Kirsten Bloom, and Whitney Simler--three of the company's most attractive dancers--appear as goddesses, in one of those masquelike interludes the Elizabethans were fond of.

Cunningham commissioned an original score from Jerome Begin, which proved highly effective as played and sung by UC Davis's contemporary music group, the Empyrean Ensemble, conducted by Kathleen McGuire. The unusual score blended soprano Laura Blanchard's voice, electronics, and synthesizer with acoustic instruments.

Another commissioned world premiere was provided by Dwight Rhoden, a former member of Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater who started his own company, Complexions, with Desmond Richardson (see "The Textures of Complexions," DANCE MAGAZINE, February 2002, page 48), nine years ago. Set to excerpts from Bach and Shostakovich, the twenty-seven-minute HellaSweetPlumRhapsody was an exciting and brilliant success. Rhapsody starts with ten dancers marching in a line across the stage toward two others who seem to be tying each other into knots. THE LINE QUICKLY DISSOLVES INTO MULTIPLE, SIMILARLY CONVOLUTED, AND SPEEDILY INTRICATE PAS DE DEUX, WHICH WERE SUPERBLY CARRIED OUT. The piece is absolutely musical, and the dancers' timing was perfect. The costumes resembled beachwear.

The program ended with George Balanchine's Western Symphony, with the featured dancing done with brisk good cheer by Simler, Hansen, Burgos, Michael Separovich, Bloom, and Richard Marsden.

Veteran California journalist William Glackin of The Sacramento Bee passed away on December 20, 2002. (See May 2003)