Ballet for Smarties

“Genius,” The Washington Ballet
Sidney Harman Hall
Washington, DC
February 2, 2008, matinee

by Lisa Traiger
copyright 2008 by Lisa Traiger

After a fortnight of bayaderes, lilac fairies, opium dreams and moody princes lost in forests, Washington has left the 19th century far behind to bourree and jete into the 21st. Ballet for smart people, or “Genius,” last week’s aptly titled winter program by The Washington Ballet, hit the nail squarely on the head with a triple bill of contemporary choreographers: Mark Morris, Twyla Tharp and Christopher Wheeldon. In the well-appointed Sidney Harmon Hall, the latest addition to the dance-theater landscape in the Washington, DC region, a part of the downtown Shakespeare Theatre complex, the company looked splendid. With its fine proscenium arch and expansive swath of 775 seats, the theater is exactly right for a chamber-sized ballet company like the Washington Ballet. It showed off the dancers far better than the company’s recent digs at the Eisenhower and a piece calling for intimacy, like the Wheeldon, was far better served with a closer-in perspective than it had been in prior seasons at the Kennedy Center’s boxy Eisenhower Theater.

Laura Urgelles and Runquiao Du in "There Where She Loved." Photo by Steve Vaccariello, courtesy The Washington Ballet

The dancing at Saturday afternoon’s program verged not merely on the good, but the world class. Although, I missed the return of beloved ballerina Michelle Jimenez, who decamped for the Dutch National Ballet at this past season’s close, the Washington Ballet showed it has plenty of terrific dancers in the running for Jimenez’s vacated slot. There was Laura Urgelles in an aching waltz at the opening of “There Where She Loved”; Brianne Bland in a balmy but muted Chopin “Spring” from the same work; and Elizabeth Gaither accompanied by Runquiao Du to the heady make-up/break-up of “Je ne t’aime pas,” in the same piece.

Mark Morris’s “Drink to Me Only With Thine Eyes” fosters his trademark wit in the very grammar used to structure and build the work. Originally commissioned two decades ago for ABT (during Baryshnikov’s era), the ballet is awash in a carefree sense of play. The way the dancers weave and skitter through interchanging pairings, small groups, circles and lines mirrors Virgil Thomson’s score, a baker’s dozen etudes by the American iconoclastic modernist. It hums and pitter patters along like a series of long-lost folk tunes set slightly awry. The simplicity and familiarity of these deceptively complex piano musings position the music and dance on equal ground in a way that few contemporary choreographers have an ear to do. Accompanist Glenn Sales fingered through the pristine, airy and moody works off to the side rather than center stage, where Morris originally placed the piano for ABT. Alas, as lovely as the Harman stage is, it was not ample enough to place a grand amid the skipping and easy fluctuations of dancers, which alters the intent of the work, which is foremost about the music and how ballet lexicon can be subdivided and repositioned within the musical settings.

Clad in Santo Loquasto’s creamy white jersey cardigans and skirts for the women and loose slacks and tops for the men, the dozen dance like rambunctious children let loose on a school playground for recess. But this is a Robbins-like idealized society a la “Dances at a Gathering,” with no rough-housing allowed. Instead, for the women there are flurries of petit batterie succinctly dashed off like a game of jacks or hopscotch. The men relish a passel of easy-going leaps and later carry the women in the work’s iconic pose, one leg bent and placed in passé at the ankle, the arms crossed overhead in an elliptical fifth. It’s a simple memorable theme that repeats throughout. But the women are not merely lifted; Morris has them hoisted, floating like kites, bodies horizontal. Later their partners turn them like tops back and then in retrograde, a bow to Thomson’s own heady compositional intrigue. There they spin slightly off kilter and then unwind themselves and bounce or bourree to a next encounter. While the ballet was choreographed en pointe, Morris’s modern dance antecedents remain clearly rooted even in his deconstructed balletic iconography. This proved most challenging for the company because Morris demands equal attention to earth-centered connectivity from his dancers as it requires airy, fluttery pointe work. While the Washington Ballet’s company soars in the airborne parts without a hitch, the choreography challenges them to drop their centers of gravity and feel weightedness as well as uplift. Once they forge connections with this modern sensibility, the work will become a richer experience.

Wheeldon’s “There Where She Loved” is a small piece, its seven interludes set to alternating songs by Chopin and Weill. It’s an unusual choice and when the company first acquired and danced the work in 2005, the piece seemed, with its divergent musical styles and discordant relationships, an odd fit, not entirely wrong, but just not completely suited to the company’s strength. This season the work has been shot full with a refined sense of maturity and intimacy. Wheeldon’s shifting perspective lends a cinema-like quality and each of the tightly constructed duets, solos and small groupings is rendered in Bergmanesque close-up, emotionally full, laden with what roils a heart in the midst of a love affair or its ensuing breakup. That the dancers in Holly Hynes moody purples and deep greens have so ably captured Wheeldon’s small but not insignificant gestures -- the tilt of a chin, the clasp of a wrist, the brush of a shoulder -- to tell these wordless stories of love and struggle, loss and redemption, imparts a closeness that at times borders on voyeuristic. Soprano Kate Vetter Can and mezzo soprano Shelley Waite provided the light and dark chords, joined again by Sales on piano, that build “There Where She Loved” into a poignant study in contrasts.

Returning to Tharp’s “Nine Sinatra Songs,” the company simply gets better, relishing the cheeky pop-culture sensibility and the American grandeur that Sinatra endowed his songs. Nobody sings “My Way” like Sinatra. He owns it and his brash, confident, all-knowing way transfers to the dancers, too, who imbue the piece with that spirit of confidence and reckless abandon. Gaither and Du, Urgelles and Alvaro Palau, Erin Mahoney-Du and Luis Torres attack the intricate and unforgivably hard choreography with its soars and dips, speed bumps and crashes, airborne catches and tosses. Urgelles swoons for Palau in “Strangers in the Night” while Gaither and Du are a sigh in motion in “Softly as I Leave You.” The tricky, sticky “One for My Baby (And One More for the Road)” proves a breeze even with its bruising turn-the-other-cheek gamesmanship; (recent mom) Mahoney-Du partnered by Torres was all gawky grace and drunken giggles. Company sprite Maki Onuki joined by Zachary Hackstock found the high-school goofiness in “Somethin’ Stupid.” Only Brianne Bland and Jared Nelson Saturday afternoon lack the combustible edge to bring off “That’s Life.” With its disco ball glitter, easy-on-the-ears music, sleek and frothy Oscar de la Renta gowns, heels and tuxedos, “Nine Sinatra Songs” closes any program with the fizz and bubble of a split of champagne, classy, a little sweet, very dear, irresistible.

Artistic Webre has done well in cutting through many choreographic trifles to curate a program with three substantial and winning ballets. The “Genius” moniker suited the company’s contemporary sensibility and evolving physicality. But most important is the palpable sense of intellectual rigor asserted by these three works, each a very different challenge to mind, body and spirit, and all welcome on this troupe.

Brianne Bland and Jonathan Jordan in "Drink to Me Only with Thine Eyes." Photo by Stephen Baranovics courtesy The Washington Ballet.

February 5, 2008
© 2008 Lisa Traiger