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Director's Choice: News, Casting, Reviews


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I totally agree, I also love her singing. The dancers look perfectly at ease with Duato's movements. I have on tape a documentary that was on a cable channel(many years ago) about Duato and his performing and choreographing for NDT. Included were the rehearsals for Jardi Tancat and at the end, a complete performance of this piece.

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Thanks to a Heads Up (:flowers:)

Casting is up for Week 2 -- there's another cast for Jardi Tancat, and Laura Gilbreath and Karel Cruz perform the "Facades" pas de deux in the last performance.

Thursday, 30 Sep 7:30pm

Petite Mort

Carrie Imler

Kiyon Gaines

Chalnessa Eames

Benjamin Griffiths

Kylee Kitchens

Josh Spell

Rachel Foster

Lucien Postlewaite

Laura Gilbreath

Olivier Wevers

Carla Körbes

Jeffrey Stanton

Sechs Tänze (Six Dances)

Margaret Mullin

Sarah Ricard Orza

Abby Relic

Brittany Reid

Barry Kerollis

Jerome Tisserand

Kiyon Gaines

Ezra Thomson

Jardi Tancat

Lindsi Dec

Karel Cruz

Maria Chapman

Jonathan Porretta

Kylee Kitchens

James Moore

Glass Pieces

Rubric

Lindsi Dec

Seth Orza

Lesley Rausch

Lucien Postlewaite

Chalnessa Eames

Jerome Tisserand

Facades

Carla Korbes

Batkhurel Bold

Friday, 1 Oct, 7:30pm

Petite Mort

Carrie Imler

Kiyon Gaines

Chalnessa Eames

Benjamin Griffiths

Kylee Kitchens

Josh Spell

Rachel Foster

Lucien Postlewaite

Laura Gilbreath

Olivier Wevers

Carla Körbes

Jeffrey Stanton

Sechs Tänze (Six Dances)

Margaret Mullin

Sarah Ricard Orza

Abby Relic

Brittany Reid

Barry Kerollis

Jerome Tisserand

Kiyon Gaines

Ezra Thomson

Jardi Tancat

Carla Körbes

Seth Orza

Lesley Rausch

Lucien Postlewaite

Chalnessa Eames

Kiyon Gaines

Glass Pieces

Rubric

Rachel Foster

Benjamin Griffiths

Sarah Ricard Orza

James Moore

Margaret Mullin

Kiyon Gaines

Facades

Maria Chapman

Jeffrey Stanton

Saturday, 2 Oct, 7:30pm

Petite Mort

Sarah Ricard Orza

Seth Orza

Carli Samuelson

James Moore

Maria Chapman

William Lin-Yee

Margaret Mullin

Jonathan Porretta

Ariana Lallone

Batkhurel Bold

Lindsi Dec

Karel Cruz

Sechs Tanze

Carrie Imler

Chalnessa Eames

Rachel Foster

Kylee Kitchens

Benjamin Griffiths

Josh Spell

William Lin-Yee

Andrew Bartee

Jardi Tancat

Ariana Lallone

Jeffrey Stanton

Rachel Foster

Batkhurel Bold

Carrie Imler

Olivier Wevers

Glass Pieces

Rubric

Lindsi Dec

Seth Orza

Lesley Rausch

Lucien Postlewaite

Chalnessa Eames

Jerome Tisserand

Facades

Carla Korbes

Batkhurel Bold

Sunday, 3 Oct, 1pm

Petite Mort

Sarah Ricard Orza

Seth Orza

Carli Samuelson

James Moore

Lesley Rausch

Jerome Tisserand

Margaret Mullin

Jonathan Porretta

Ariana Lallone

Batkhurel Bold

Lindsi Dec

Karel Cruz

Sechs Tanze

Carrie Imler

Chalnessa Eames

Rachel Foster

Kylee Kitchens

Benjamin Griffiths

Josh Spell

William Lin-Yee

Andrew Bartee

Jardi Tancat

Lindsi Dec

Karel Cruz

Maria Chapman

Jonathan Porretta

Kylee Kitchens

James Moore

Glass Pieces

Rubric

Rachel Foster

Benjamin Griffiths

Sarah Ricard Orza

James Moore

Margaret Mullin

Kiyon Gaines

Facades

Laura Gilbreath

Karel Cruz
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At the last minute I decided to go to the dress rehearsal last night. I often avoid them because I miss the flat-out dancing and energy of a "real" performance. But last night it was well worth my time to see Carla in the lead role in "Glass Pieces".....she is a knock out in that powerful role. And what a ballet!! I am a big Robbins fan anyway (he's genius in my book), and on top of that I've always loved ballets with minimialist music. My regular subscription night is tonight.....I can't wait to see Carla do it again.

(I am always amazed by Carla when I see her in a dress rehearsal. I swear she never "de-tunes" her dancing just because it isn't a real performance. She dances flat-out no matter what -- I'm sure there are others too who do the same. My guess is that she is a born "performer".....she's never fully alive unless she's on stage. She's good, incredibly good, and she knows it. Her confidence is unbounded. I hope she's at the Q&A tonight.)

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Some extra thoughts on this program.

In many ways, “Petite Mort” is what modern dance in the US would have looked like years ago without the disdain that American modern artists have had for ballet technique and heritage.

The opening is quite menacing, from the deep rumbling we hear before the curtain gets fully up, through the epees the men carry, to the chest slapping and posturing they do (almost like apes) -- between the intricately detailed shorts they wear and their bare chests they are teetering on the edge of civilized behavior.

Non-musical sound is important here -- the rumble, the swish of the swords, the woosh of that giant silk ‘scarf’ (what do you call something that large?) as the men run downstage with it, and as it flutters away off stage right.

This and “Sechs Tänze” are loaded with cultural references and magic tricks. Some of them, like the ‘magic carpet’ that whisks people off stage, have ballet ancestors (the original Sugar Plum Fairy variations used a similar gimmick), while others seem to connect all over the map. (Andrew Bartee sitting on Sean Rollofson’s shoulders, wearing one of those stunningly rigid gowns so that he’s a cross-dressing giant, is straight out of Pilobolus ca. 1975, yes, but also from Alwin Nikolais earlier, and then from the puppetry world and the commedia). These jokes work, and so we repeat them -- they are as much a part of our cultural heritage as the Mozart scores.

Some things are only funny once -- we laugh when, in the first quintet with the women in the gowns, we realize that they aren’t actually wearing them (the women step back and away) but not when they tilt to the side and look out around the waist of the dress.

The duets are a paean to Newtonian mechanics. How far can you lean with how much counterbalance, how do you wind up to get the momentum to swing someone up and over your head?

Lindsi Dec and Karel Cruz dance the final duet in PM -- when they back upstage hand in hand, it’s like Adam and Eve in reverse.

Ariana Lallone gets a lot of credit for dancing as tall as she is, but not enough recognition for the small detail underneath. There’s a lot of filigree here, and it adds great texture to what she’s doing.

Even before anyone really does much dancing we know that “Sechs Tänze” is going to be sillier than “Petite Mort” -- the specificity of the costumes here (breeches and wigs and bare chests for men, ruffles and frizzy hair for women) rather than the more abstracted corsets and shorts in PM (face it, the men’s costumes look like long-line girdles) gives it away.

Brittany Reid’s hair was teased twice as large as her head on the Saturday matinee -- it was really effective, particularly for anything involving changing focus (great reverb in the hair) but she said later in the Q/A that it took her all of the intermission and “Jardi Tancat” to get the tangles combed out and her hair up in a bun for “Glass Pieces.”

The variation in response to the bubbles at the end is great. Some are just loopy, some enchanted, Kiyon Gaines was extra excited, like a school kid waking up to a snow day, but Carrie Imler looked exasperated, like she could pop them with the heat of her mighty laser vision. I’m not sure there is anyone who does exasperated better than she does, from the controlling matron in “The Concert” to the manipulative Queen Mother in “Swan Lake,” and here, glaring at the froth coming down from the ceiling. Such a treat.

I always think of Jose Limon and his “There is a Time” when I see “Jardi Tancat.” It’s more abstract, and constructed more formally, but the sense of community is the same. There are also connections to Tudor’s “Dark Elegies” -- this is a group that has experienced hard times, and is having difficulty living through them. So much of the standard ballet rep is either overtly about nobility, or at least carries that heritage in the vocabulary of the technique -- it’s fascinating to see things that explore other dynamics.

If most crossover work combines ballet with traditional modern dance styles, “Glass Pieces” is a mash-up of ballet and post-modern dance, particularly the minimalists. The grid on the scrim is so reminiscent of the written scores that Lucinda Childs made for her early ensemble work, the accumulation patterns in the choreography (A, AB, ABC…) are right out of Trisha Brown’s bag of tricks, the new folk dance feel of the third section is like Laura Dean -- ballet and modern dance don’t always track together historically, but this piece fits right into its time slot!

And yet there seemed to be historical references too (though probably not intentional) The entrance of the men in the third section, in those long curving thumpy running phrases, looks so much like early modern dance -- a freeze frame of them with the front leg stretched our and the foot flexed hard is almost a dead ringer for Graham’s Primitive Mysteries. As they are joined by more men and the group really coalesces, it feels like a scene from Rite of Spring, and then when the women come out with that little limping step we’ve shifted a few years earlier in the Ballet Russe rep to the entrance of the princesses in Firebird.

The white curtains and pale blue grid upstage were really vivid when the curtains opened, and a great contrast to the dark, dark, dark of the first three works. Several people in the Q/A (including Peter Boal) remarked on the rather dated color palate for the costumes (Olivia Newton John’s name was raised), but I think that we’re just in that awkward place where something is old enough to be dated, but not old enough to be period. In a few more years, this won’t be a problem.

Everyone always looks fresh and rested in the first rep of the season. Maria Chapman is back, after almost a year of surgery and rehab, and she looked great in “Petite Mort” and “Glass Pieces.” Jeff Stanton was dancing in all but “Sechs Tänze,” and Chapman mentioned him particularly when she was talking about how grateful she was to her partners during this return. And Laura Gilbreath, who really started to soar at the end of last season, took up exactly where she left off and had a fabulous performance in the duet in Glass Pieces -- she and Karel Cruz looked like Egyptian gods in the oblique poses.

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Several people in the Q/A (including Peter Boal) remarked on the rather dated color palate for the costumes (Olivia Newton John’s name was raised), but I think that we’re just in that awkward place where something is old enough to be dated, but not old enough to be period. In a few more years, this won’t be a problem.

I thought "Jennifer Beal" :) I didn't find the colors that jarring, but the cuts of leotards have become a lot more sophisticated since 1983, and it's been a long time since I've seen one of those poofy tops.

I miss the power headbands.

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Last night I saw what was for me a "dream cast" in Jardi Tancat. Due to an injury there was a last minute (24 hours actually) change. Carla Korbes, Carrie Imler, and Leslie Rausch ended up on the same stage in the same piece as the 3 women in this piece. Individually they were magnificant, and in ensemble their performance oozed artisty in this heavily emotional piece. These 3 woman are arguably my 3 favorite female dancers at PNB (all for very different reasons), and to see them togther was for me: heaven.

To add to the magic of this performance of Jardi, these women were partnered by 3 of the finest men in the troupe: Lucein Postlewaite, recently promoted Seth Orza, and Kiyon Gaines. I was thunderstruck by the performance (and intra-communication) of these 6 extraordinary dancers in a piece they clearly love.

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