CONTRASTS REIGN AT CANADIAN
BALLET
Where Robbins Meets Elo, Beethoven Meets
Monteverdi
By Paul Hertelendy
artssf.com, the independent observer of San Francisco Bay Area music
and dance
Week of June 16-23, 2010
Vol. 12, No. 113
TORONTO---The
National Ballet of Canada is not built around stars, but rather around
a
fine-honed ensemble, clearly speaking of a quality and depth that many
others could envy.
Karen Kain's resident company performs with great consistency and
versatility
in the inviting modern home at the Four Seasons Centre.
The season
finale June 13 featured an evening of modern ballet capped by the
world premiere "Pur ti miro" of the mercurial Finnish choreographer
Jorma Elo, inspired by the Roman Emperor Nero and Poppea. Elo, who is
on the
staff of the Boston Ballet, is all about movement. He is a prolific
choreographer with a flashy, eye-catching style built around speed,
which he
attributes to his early involvement in hockey. San Francisco Ballet
audiences
have encountered him in 2008 via his equally fast-paced “Double Evil.”
The
recurrent concern is that Elo, for all his kinesthetic originality, is often more centered on sheer volume of work
rather than making lasting impact.
His "Pur ti
miro" itself was an unorthodox musical linkage of
full-orchestra Beethoven with a delicate love duet sung in the finale
of
Monteverdi's four-century-old opera "The Coronation of Poppea." A lot
of Elo's fast-flying modern touches abound here---the runs in place,
twirls,
the waist bends, the arm thrusts, and the rapid-darting hands that
barely avoid
bumping the partners. Elo likes quotations. He quotes a touch out of
Robbins'
"The Dreamer" with couples standing and the man swivel-swinging the
partner around. And then there is the Rothbart (Swan Lake)
pose of a man with arms out-spread, like eagles' wings.
Astonishment
comes in the middle with an ardent adagio pas de deux to the
Monteverdi finale which is left to sink in, given an epilogue of the
solo man
dancing to silence. Revert to Beethoven for the rousing Nero-Poppea
finale,
full of sweeping arms, and odd mid-air flips of the women who somehow
always
land back on their feet.
Jerome
Robbins' story ballet "Opus 19: The Dreamer" (1979)
fortunately popped up right after. The male dreamer selects one partner
out of
the corps de ballet and enters into an ethereal pas de deux to the
Prokofiev
Violin Concerto No. 1. They separate; but in the finale, she appears
out of
nowhere within the corps, emerging as his consort in a delicate,
effective
conclusion.
The couple was
played by Guillaume Côté and Xiao Nan Yu, who capped it by
signing autographs in the lobby at the ensuing intermission for dozens
of
devoted fans---a nice personal touch that other companies should
emulate in
these difficult times for the arts, assuming that it does not conflict
with some
arcane union regulation.
Most of the
audience appeared drawn to the Four Seasons Centre for the finale
work, the "West Side Story Suite," featuring Robbins' Broadway
persona, not his modern-ballet one. Sneakers, no toe shoes. The
excerpts from
the musical present a lot of razzle-dazzle combat dance, and much less
of the
Tony-Maria love story. Unlike the musical and the Shakespeare original,
this
Romeo-Juliet has a happy ending, for Maria, Tony, the Sharks, the
Jets---all
hands dancing in unprecedented harmony.
The ensemble
was blessed with an adept, versatile orchestra, ranging from
Broadway brass to a period archlute for the Monteverdi, all under David
Briskin's baton.
National Ballet of Canada,
June 4-13 at the Four Seasons Centre. An element of Toronto's
annual Luminato festival of arts and culture. For info, go online.
©Paul Hertelendy 2010
#
Paul Hertelendy has been
covering
the dance and modern-music scene in the San Francisco Bay Area with
relish
-- and a certain amount of salsa -- for years.
These critiques appearing weekly (or sometimes semi-weekly, but never
weakly)
will focus on dance and new musical creativity in performance, with
forays
into books (by authors of the region), theater and recordings by local
artists as well.
#
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