by Leigh Witchel
The Joyce’s Ballet Festival returned bringing out-of-town guests. Dimensions Dance Theatre of Miami is a young company launched in 2016, after founders Jennifer Carlynn Kronenberg and Carlos Guerra retired from Miami City Ballet. It has a big company look and, befitting its hometown, a Latin accent.
The company brought a mixed repertory: two older works, including one by Joffrey Ballet co-founder Gerald Arpino, as well as two commissioned works.
“Stepping into Blue” by Atlanta Ballet’s Tara Lee, was a short duet to Satie performed by Kronenberg and Guerra (a couple in real life as well as professionally). It looked as if it were custom-tailored and carefully stitched to flatter them, and it did so, but at the expense of making sense out of its own ideas.
The work used unusual props, a bucket and blue paint rollers, but violated a cardinal rule of decent choreography: Use your prop. Not only were the paint rollers without paint (think of the messy but amazing possibilities) but half the time the dancers put the blasted things out of the way and did a standard pas de deux. “Stepping into Blue” never bothered to explain the significance of the paint rollers, or why Guerra and Kronenberg could just drop and pick them up whenever convenient. They might as well have held cheerleader pompoms.
“Esferas” by fellow MCB dancer Ariel Rose was a trio that featured Gabriela Mesa, Fabian Morales and Josue Justiz, set to plangent strings. In front of an electric blue cyclorama, the three mimicked the hands of a clock marking time’s passing. At the end, the two men lay at Mesa’s feet as she stood over them, implacably ticking away.
Septime Webre’s “Juanita y Alicia” was a natural acquisition for a Miami-based company. It’s a large group piece set to traditional Cuban music played live. (It was billed as a New York premiere, but it wasn’t. Webre brought the ballet to The Joyce in 2000 when he ran Washington Ballet). Behind the dancers was a massive blowup painting of a faded black and white family photo from a century ago, the parents and children dressed in white and staring at us frozen in time.
Webre’s vocabulary is a stew, but it’s easy to pick out the ingredients: the legs are largely classical; the torso adds the slouchiness of Twyla Tharp and the attack of the discotheque. Webre has a pop sensibility – when the arms bend at right angles during a turn you think less of Balanchine’s “Rubies” and more of Michael Jackson’s “Thriller.”
The ballet spun out long, involved dance phrases, but was less sensitive to the architecture of music. Webre was always on the beat, but less so on the arc. Sometimes he just started and finished at the same time as the soundtrack.
There were hints at a situation – Justiz, wearing paints in a brightly woven pattern opened the work with a solo. Later, Chloe Freytag stripped from her white undergarments to a flesh-toned unitard to dance with him in a furtive meeting.
The ballet was inspired by stories from Webre’s Cuban mother. More than that, though, “Juanita y Alicia” aimed to entertain. An aerial duet featuring Stephan Fons and Claudia Lezcano careened all over the stage, pausing for demure bows by the couple. They acknowledged us first, and after made the same decorous bow facing away as if we had been rotated backstage to look out at ourselves applauding. Webre’s finale flooded the stage and the band drummed out dance-in-your-seat music that lasted into the curtain calls.
Are ballet’s cultural excursions exploration or tourism? A major revival opened the show, Gerald Arpino’s “Light Rain.” The work, from 1981, looked a decade older from its focus on things that were no longer exotic even back then.
The cast was as undressed as possible in flesh-toned unitards, and Mesa, supported by the men, cranked her leg high or fell into a split, stretching as bonelessly as if she were in a sauna. Mesa is long-limbed and hyperflexible, so every extension had a nightclub feel.
The music, by Douglas Adamz and Russ Gauthier, was in three sections, the first and second sections Asian-influenced. Morales and Mesa sold the central pas de deux with full-on nightclub gloss. He carried her upside down and maneuvered her into a split on his back. Morales grabbed Mesa’s foot from the back and brought it towards her head, a move cribbed from “Agon.”
“Light Rain” ended with a Latin-tinged finale of high-speed entrances and exits, but it was all really Arpino – he preferred commotion to structure. The dancers bopped and shimmied as if they were in a disco, but also slumped as if drugged out at Altamont.
The company doesn’t look like a pick-up group; the level was strong. Much of the company has Latin roots and training; Morales is from Mexico, Mesa from Cuba. Other standouts included Freytag, who went all out in both “Juanita y Alicia” and “”Light Rain,” as well as Kevin Hernandez. Dimension’s roster has types: Hernandez was the short firecracker, Mesa the double-jointed Queen of Stretch. That gave the company a look, but one that threatened to overpower the works. Mesa’s extreme facility made “Light Rain” and “Esferas” look much more similar than they actually were. In both ballets she was carried on and manipulated like some wildly powerful spirit that could destroy cities by lifting her leg over her head, but couldn’t walk on her own.
Both the music and the choreography in “Light Rain” often felt like heavy-handed cultural appropriation. Sections of the score had the same carnival sideshow feel as “The Streets of Cairo.” Still, that’s judging the work with more than a generation’s hindsight. Ballets such as “Bugaku” that once seemed pioneering now seem patronizing. That doesn’t mean the attempt wasn’t made.
Heading towards its fourth decade, it would be nice if “Light Rain” showed fewer signs of age. Like Jerome Robbins, Arpino’s interest in current trends made his work topical, and also easily dated. And like Robbins, he deserves more credit than he got for trying to turn ballet on to what was happening at the time.
copyright © 2018 by Leigh Witchel
“Light Rain,” “Stepping into Blue,” “Esferas,” “Juanita y Alicia” – Dimensions Dance Theatre of Miami
Ballet Festival
The Joyce Theater, New York, NY
June 26, 2018
Cover: Gabriela Mesa and Fabian Morales in “Light Rain”. Photo © Simon Soong.
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