by Leigh Witchel
Smuin Contemporary Ballet is passing the torch. Company founder Michael Smuin was central to San Francisco’s dance history for decades, running San Francisco Ballet from 1973 to 1985, then creating Smuin Ballet in 1994. He died suddenly in 2007, and since that point the company has been run by Celia Fushille. Amy Seiwert, a choreographer who danced with the company, is taking the reins; Fushille’s last lap was a tour to The Joyce Theater.
The company brought a triple bill, without any work by Smuin on it. It would be hypocritical for me to object to this; I’ve been pretty hard on Smuin’s work, which had a strong sense of theater, but plenty of kitsch. The company has toned down the kitsch, or at least made it current, but hasn’t lost its showmanship.
If anything was closest to Smuin’s style of connecting with an audience, it was the opening piece, Val Caniparoli’s Tutto Eccetto il Lavadino (Everything but the Kitchen Sink). The men and women, all in simple, athletic, gray outfits, danced together, but working by sex. The men contracted and lunged, the women hit arabesques. The driving, calisthenic steps to baroque music felt familiar; a kind of Vivaldercise.
Three men remained for a trio, slouching, slumping and jogging. We’re ballet dancers doing funky movement! The humor tried too hard. Another trio for two men carrying a woman had the same frenzy but with more elegant construction.
The women were on pointe and given more classical vocabulary, but Caniparoli also gave them swinging turns and chicken walks. Before that, seven men acted out the plucking of a harp by individually gasping, dissolving into tears or emoting. It was striking, but the timing didn’t land. Was it supposed to be theatrical or comic? The audience couldn’t figure it out.
The work was a decade old, but you quickly got a sense of how the company looked in 2024, and how well the dancers moved. Cassidy Isaacson, with her cherry red hair, typified their full phrasing; she made bicycling her legs into something both luxurious and witty, then happily swung into risky off-balance turns.
The company’s women were fearless, and a series of duets came close to gelling the work, starting with Maggie Carey lounging as if sleeping in her partner’s arms. Terez Dean Orr leaped on to Ricardo Dyer from offstage. Orr had distinct timing and delivery, and knew how to stretch and sculpt a phrase.
The work got stronger as it went on, but when Caniparoli came back to his opening to make his finale, the cuteness from the opening didn’t slot into place and things didn’t manage to add up. The men were emoting heartily, but it still looked disconnected. The dancers exited and a kitchen sink was rolled to end the piece. Funny, but I’m not sure I’d make difficulty in structuring and editing into a selling point.
Annabelle Lopez Ochoa’s Tupelo Tornado, about Elvis Presley, was made this year. She didn’t make an Elvis’ Greatest Hits jukebox ballet, and we don’t need one. Almost every great pop musician from Joni Mitchell through the Rolling Stones has had to suffer that indignity, and jukebox works get no closer to penetrating an artist’s mystique. Rather, Tupelo Tornado put Presley under a microscope.
Ochoa started the work in front of the curtain, with a follow spot slowly traveling down . . . picking out a tiny Elvis doll. That was her strength in a nutshell; the intelligence to create simple but ingenious effects. It was good to see her at it – many of her commissions for ballet companies have been straight choreography, which isn’t where she stands out. Her best work is dance theater, which takes more time for dancers not trained to it. But here, it came with pitfalls. After a while, the tiny Elvis doll felt like a metaphor for how Ochoa shrunk Presley.
She seemed fascinated with the phenomenon of Elvis, but less with Presley himself, and more America’s embrace of him. For all the boisterous of Tupelo Tornado, it felt clinical. There was as much talking about Presley in the sound score as there were Elvis numbers, such as Suspicious Minds, which opened as the dancers stripped the stage of its flats and back curtains.
Coming on at the opening, the dancers were showing a lot of skin, wearing gray tights or tops and blue gloves. Also occasionally blue shoes, but not suede ones. The main Presley figure, played by Brandon Alexander, had a TV on his head, and lip synced. It was over the top, but so was Presley, but this pushed in a different direction, almost to drag. The theme of identity was carried through when the cast danced in Elvis masks in a pumping unison number, but the references didn’t dig enough into its subject. Sure, it recalled Vegas, but what did it say about Presley?
Isaacson was featured in the big duet to Blue Moon, Barbour got the final word in a slow duet to Presley singing Love Me Tender a cappella, and was cradled like a broken pietà.
Ochoa has been interested in 20th century figures; she did a full evening work on Eva Peron for Ballet Hispanico. In Peron’s case it felt too clinical, as well. There, she could have questioned Peron’s legacy more. Here, it was the opposite, what felt missing was affection.
Ochoa referenced Elvis the cultural appropriator, choosing Big Mama Thornton’s version of Hound Dog instead of Presley’s and spent time on Elvis the Drug Addict. Ochoa tried to be even-handed. The voice-overs of those who knew him talked about how Presley treated all his singers fairly and the same, and Ochoa entertained the possibility that Presley’s love of Gospel music went beyond appropriation to synthesis.
Only at the end of the piece, when talking about his drug addiction, did we hear that Presley was a phenomenon. But that’s where she needed to start. There’s a reason people worshiped Elvis, and still do. You wouldn’t have known that from Tupelo Tornado. If you were looking for Elvis, he had left the building.
In 2017, two years before Seiwert made Renaissance, she brought her own group to The Joyce with a long, ambitious work to Schubert’s Winterreise. Renaissance seemed to develop and distill some of the themes and movement from the earlier work.
Renaissance was set to haunting Slavic choral songs sung by the Kitka Women’s Vocal Ensemble. It made for mysterious work, starting with a quintet of the company’s women working in long phrases with a ferocious movement quality. Seiwert’s palette wasn’t all that different from Caniparoli’s, and some of her choreographic devices were familiar: the corps moving organically like an amoeba or one after another in a chorus line. Still, those familiar tools also felt purposeful. She was using the continuous, never-ending quality to sketch a community.
One woman was laid on the back of four other dancers, and then there was a quartet for three women and a man. The dancers were off pointe, which allowed the women to be more grounded, and also take more initiative as well.
Seiwert’s sleight of hand in creating the connective tissue between the main episodes also felt well-worn, but well-used. Chances were she built the main dances, then fashioned the elaborate transitions based on who needed to enter and exit. Soundly crafted, but it also might have been a nice contrast to have a transition or two where someone simply walked out and the next person just came in.
One very striking effect happened when Tess Lane entered in blue with five men, borne by them in a way we might have seen in Illuminations or The Unanswered Question, but it was fascinating to see how Seiwert and Lane shaded it. The men weren’t suitors or swains, and Lane wasn’t unknowable. She was independent, carried by the wind or spirits. She felt fully in control of her movement, what she did and how it happened, except maybe a flip or two that required a partner to start it.
Lane ended by being carried and pointing, but not pointing a direction to the men, like a woman in a sedan chair. She wasn’t heading in that direction, her pointing was more as an internal state or desire than a command. Her compass was inside, and she walked off by herself. It may have just been because the ballet was in the middle of the triple bill, but the cast danced with better phrasing and a more connected attack, and nobody had to rev up to get there.
It was also an impressive sign for the company that you quickly recognized the individual women in the company, not just by their appearances, but their qualities. Once again, Dyer and Orr danced together, doing unusual partnering and slow, dreamlike extensions. She phrased beautifully, Carey had stunning feet, Isaacson was striking, and Barbour also moved beautifully.
Towards the end, there was an amazing moment where Lane was brought in overhead as if walking in the air fully upside down, then was pressed off. It felt more like extraordinary courage than cargo. The work closed with Orr standing while the other women crouched round her.`
Seiwert took over the company after this tour, and if Renaissance was any indication, it’s in different but good hands. She’s more earnest and less kitschy, but still gets the company’s dancers and movement. She makes work that makes her and them look good.
copyright © 2024 by Leigh Witchel
Tutto Eccetto il Lavadino, Renaissance, Tupelo Tornado – Smuin Contemporary Ballet
The Joyce Theater, New York, NY
July 10, 2024
Cover: Brandon Alexander and Cassidy Isaacson, and Smuin Contemporary Ballet in Tupelo Tornado. Photo © Chris Hardy.
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