Helene

Thank you, Giannina, for reviewing this performance and for your great description of his physical presence. I was hoping that "Classical Savion" would be the program he brought to the Moore Theater in Seattle this past March, but alas, it was not. I hope he returns with it.

I think the issue may be contrasting requirements of live performance and video. What feels natural when watching something onstage is distracting on video, where the eye is being focused for you and the background is disproportionately important. Having seen several operas in the past two months where the chorus froze onstage to focus on the principals, my impression was extreme artifice (and unsuccessful at that). (A similar technique during the Carmen/Toreador duet in Act IV of Carmen was the only thing that marred the Corsaro Spanish Civil War production at NYCO for me.) Ironically, in one of the operas, in the scene before, the director made the opposite choice, and elected to have controlled and soft movement for the chorus during the second verse of "Casta Diva" and it was magical.

The Past, Present, and Future program, Peter Boal's second for PNB, consists of Balanchine's Concerto Barocco, staged by Francia Russell, Nacho Duato's Jardi Tancat, staged by Hilde Koch, Marco Goeke Mopey, originally commissioned by Peter Boal & Company and staged by Sean Suozzi, the role's originator, and Kent Stowell's 1985 Handel tribute Hail to the Conquering Hero. Sadly, between work and traffic, I arrived late two Fridays ago, in time for last five minutes of the 3rd Movement of Concerto Barocco. I watched this on the small monitors in the lobby, but one thing that struck me from watching the work at a distance was how tight the corps was. When I saw it again last Thursday, the corps was also very disciplined. This can make the performances a little airless, and if not quite academic, and a challenge for the principals, who sometimes look like they are dancing in a slightly updated, alternate production and who sometimes are a bit contained. Thursday's cast was Carla Korbes, Mara Vinson, and Batkhurel Bold. Korbes simply embodied musicality and Vinson warmth and charm, and between Korbes' pliant, unadorned legato phrasing and completely turned out retire and Vinson's radiance, the dancers breathed life into the ballet, and it infected the corps. Jardi Tancat is a great audience favorite, and I've never seen a less than enthusiastic response to it here. In the Friday performance, Korbes teamed with Herd, Vinson with Jordan Pacitti, and Chalnessa Eames and Kiyon Gaines danced the third couple. On Thursday, Ariana Lallone and Jeffrey Stanton, Vinson and Bold, and Carrie Imler and Olivier Wevers danced the three couples. Korbes can't miss and was a joy to watch, but Lallone really lives the role; her back alone makes the performance and her expressiveness reflects the underlying sadness of a people worked to the bone. (Korbes was a happier character; perhaps the gorgeous music by Maria del Mar Bonet, some based on traditional Baleiric music, touched her.) Eames' role was a bit of a challenge; I've seen her more expressive in other ballets, but it's nice to see this very fine dancer stretched. Watching Imler, I was reminded how much I missed her dancing. (I haven't seen her much this year.) Vinson's two partners, Pacitti and Bold were most vivid among the men; although they have different quality of movement, both are whole dancers, using their upper bodies extremely to great effect. Herd came alive once he started to partner. Stanton, a veteran of this work, has a tendency to fade a bit once he starts to partner, but it was hard to watch anyone else when Lallone was dancing anyway. I can understand why there might be controversy over whether Mopey is ballet and/or should be performed by a ballet company, but I'm a bit perplexed by Boal's comments that people either love or hate this work. It's a very fine, structured, evocative dance work. According to a Seattle PI phone interview with Goeke, the choreographer who became ill seven weeks before the program and who couldn't create an originally scheduled new work for the Company, after the work was completed, he determined it was about "an angry teenager in his room." Despite this description, Mopey is a remarkably disciplined piece. Jonathan Porretta, who performed the solo in both performances I saw, said in a post-performance Q&A that without knowing this, he performed it like a kid alone in his house, and only updated the age when he found out it was supposed to be about a teenager. For all of his explosive energy, Porretta, who can switch from being the embodiment of Broadway to the personification of darkness in the flick of an eye, never completely obliterates an adult stage presence, and this gave his performance depth. To describe the piece briefly, it begins in a flood of horizontal light on black, and the dancer is dressed in black pants and shoes and a black hoodie; the only white showing is his hands, his nose, and, occasionally a sliver of his back, where hood and pants cease to meet. This first section is danced in silence. The costume set-up is comical and the energy is infectious, but not completely under control; flickering and jumpy hands appear throughout the piece. When the dancer returns, to music by CPE Bach, he's shed the hoodie, and by virtue of the lighting alone, all emphasis is on his back and hands. Watching the sudden changes of direction and the unlikely contrasts of contraction and expansion, I was reminded of Push Comes to Shove -- partly because of the music -- but without that work's self-conscious "get it?" jokiness. Goecke, in his 30's, was born 20 years too late for Baryshnikov; this role, which Porretta claims as his inheritance, would have been a supreme challenge for Baryshnikov. The third part is an extended solo in silence, in which the dancer must hold the attention of the audience, while recovering from the last solo. Porretta used his breath as part of the piece, as his back expanded in its undulations and his hands intermittently became the focus of the dance. The silence turned into a piece by The Cramps, which was loud and a bit dissonant, and the body language reflected the music. The piece ended whimsically, with a single overhead light, that dispersed when the dancer blew it out with a little puff, like a candle. Boal, in the post-performance Q&A, emphasized the anger and angst and being misunderstood behind the piece. As the original commissioner of the piece, he'd have seen Suozzi's performances, and his interpretation is in line with Goecke's. However, having spent many hours with fellow nerds growing up and working with many for a long time, there's a more complex set of emotions and behaviors that are depicted in the choreography: role play, self-flagellation, repetition, posing, the body getting away from itself, the mind getting ahead of the body, the retreat into childishness and innocence, and just trying to figure out who one is. Porretta embodied all of these in almost strobe light succession. The program ended with Hail to the Conquering Hero. I think this was a mistake. It is not a closer, and it is too soft to follow Jardi Tancat and Mopey. Placed at the end of this evening, it was enervating, like asking a crowd whose team had just won the National Championship to meditate. I don't think HTTCH is a particularly good ballet; the opening group dances never really take fire, and the dance for women, "He smote all the first born," gets tied up in start and stop phrasing. The first pas de deux, "Andante," is a nice opportunity for the dancers, but like the "Xerxees largo," the main pas de deux, which is too similar to the first pas de deux to Chaconne -- down to the loose hair and some signature moves -- to feel original, neither seem to go anywhere. The last scene, where the corps holds candles, is static. However, the ballet has an original sensibility, almost religious in nature. When the hero enters the stage to "Piangero, piangero," it's as if the first thing he does after the battle is reflect -- and not entirely happy reflection; there was plenty of low-key angst -- and pray, before taking his place in the victory celebration. I was actually disappointed when I had to leave after Mopey Friday night, whatever its flaws. In my opinion, this ballet is a self-contained opener, the type that should be performed as part one of a program with a two-act, before La Sylphide, Harlequinade, or in contrast to Stowell's own Carmina Burana. Mara Vinson is having a great mini-season with this program, showing versatility and strength in roles as diverse as the second soloist in Concerto Barocco, second couple in Jardi Tancat, and the rambling "Andante" of HTTCH (partnered by Anton Pankevitch).

Anton Pankevitch has joined PNB as a member of the Corps de Ballet. His photo is not yet on the website or in the bio section of the printed program, but he's listed in Company Roster in the Past, Present, and Future program.

Many thanks, miliosr, for your detailed review and the report on the Q&A with Carla Maxwell for those of us who couldn't be there.

I just returned from On the Boards, where I saw the 75-minute piece Super Vision, performed by The Builders Association and dbox. The play is built around three separate story lines: a young, computer savvy woman from Sri Lanka who is living in New York and who communicates with her grandmother in Sri Lanka through her PC, working on a project to "digitize" her grandmother's existence when her corporal one is still alive; a thirty-something businessman of Indian descent who is travelling to the US on business from his native Uganda and encounters US immigration officials; and a family of three living beyond their means on credit and the "creative" way the father juggles the family's finances. Scenes from each story line are presented in rotation. The set consists of a backdrop, against which remarkable 3-D computer-generated images are projected. Downstage are several movable, transparent screens, which also serve to display images, including those of the actors who sit in a long table in front of the stage's apron with computer cameras capturing their performances and "morphing" them into the action on stage. The only props are computer furniture, computers, and other tech devices, like scanners. The overarching theme is the way data is gathered, used, and manipulated and its relationship to the users' and gatherer's power or lack thereof. Patterning as a means of detection, whether justified or not, whether correct or corrupted, is contrasted by the only way out: erasing one's existence. As esoteric as that may sound, among what is portrayed onstage is the constant tension of living under the foot of credit; the conflict of being an entrepreneur supporting an extended family in a cutting edge industry and an important person in his own land, but having brown skin, coming from an African country, belonging to the "wrong" religion; the situation of having every mechanical gadget imaginable, but finding interest only in birdwatching; the use of technology to set up a care and communication system for an elderly relative halfway across the world, in an interesting update of a traditional role that no longer ties young woman to a home; the danger of information in the hands of the powerful, but semi-informed, bureaucrat. And the acting was simply superb, particularly Rizwan Mirza as the Traveller, David Pence as the father, and Moe Angelos as the grandmother. While there was enough humor -- some of it gallows humor, in retrospect, particularly a dubious "happy" ending. where we're supposed to celebrate that the worst didn't happen -- my pulse was pounding non-stop with tension, anxiety, outrage, and something else that must be generational: the romance with technology. I don't think this is relevant to younger people who've grown up on it and take it for granted, like the young Sri Lankan woman in the play, who does not spend a second that is not attached to a piece of technology, usually multitasking. But I grew up in the Star Trek generation, back in the day when the rocks were made of styrofoam, and the control panels were tacky flashing lights. The 3-D computer graphics made my heart quicken as I associated them with "space, the final frontier," even knowing that the underlying data could be completely false, and even as evidence of the petty and nefarious use of it was right before my eyes. The upcoming schedule is: On the Boards (Seattle): November 11-13 Brooklyn Academy of Music: November 29-December 3 Montclair State University: December 8-10 Tramway, Glasgow: May 4-7, 2006 ZeroOne San Jose: August 10-12, 2006 University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign: October 5-7, 2006 Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago): October 12-14, 2006 UC Davis: November 27-December 2, 2006 If you have a chance to see Super Vision, I can't recommend it enough.

Just as an FYI, the Met didn't increase the number of performances: they decided to take a break in January, during a particularly slow period, which pushed out their end date. Re: NYCO, until the last decade, when the Met started commissioning new pieces (aside from the opening Antony and Cleopatra), NYCO was the place to see modern works: Susannah, Ballad of Baby Doe, Don Rodrigo, Beatrix Cenci, Die Soldaten, Moses und Aron (years before the Met produced it), X, Die Tote Stadt, among others. Not to mention presenting Giulio Cesare -- before the recent influx of Handel operas -- for Sills and Treigle and the Donizetti Queen trilogy for Sills, and Idomeneo when it was ignored at the Met. Recently they've presented early operas and lesser works by Rossini. The company has always had a niche of its own at which it excelled. Perhaps the recent blitz by NYCO to get younger folks in the theater for the gala is to send some energy to the dancers, who must feel they're performing to an audience of corpses, the typical gala audience.

When I was in Phoenix last weekend acting Managing Director Kevin Myers announced before a couple of performances that both subscription sales and single ticket sales had increased to record numbers. Ballet Arizona moved back into Symphony Hall, where the acoustics were renovated last year, after a year of performing in the smaller Orpheum Theatre a few blocks away. The last performance on Sunday afternoon started 15-20 minutes late to accommodate same-day single ticket buyers, who formed a line which snaked around the block. Pacific Northwest Ballet saw a similar rise after the move back into McCaw Hall, but I'm not sure if that meant matching or surpassing the sales figures before the dive during the year and half in Mercer Arena. (The Opera House lost a few hundred seats in the transformation to McCaw Hall.) In my opinion, there were a few too many empty seats for the current Past, Present, Future program, although the audiences last Friday and last night were very vocal and enthusiastic. With the exception of The Nutcracker Ballet Arizona performs 4-5 performances per program (Thursday or Friday through Sunday), while PNB performs eight performances over two weekends. Like any company that plays one program at a time, which covers most North American companies except NYCB, ABT (at least the Fall season), and San Francisco Ballet -- SFB alternates between two ballets over several weekends -- attendance is dependent on how any given program "takes." While Ballet Arizona has scheduling issues that would limit the number of performances -- it plays in the same venue as the Symphony and the Opera -- it's also important for companies to know what market saturation is in their city. Ballet Arizona was fortunate to get a rave review for Romeo and Juliet, which not only was well-deserved, but which lauded the characteristics that a general audience could appreciate and recognize when they attended.