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November 11, 2005
Latest Dance Articles
It's a Leigh-o-rama in the current issue (Fall, 2005) of Ballet Review. It is not available on the web - ask about purchasing copies or subscriptions at info@balletreview.com.
Pennsylvania Ballet Triple Bill (Raymonda Variations, Continuum, The Concert)
Made between Polyphonia and Morphoses, which were commissioned by New York City Ballet in 2001 and 2002, Continuum was created for San Francisco Ballet. The three works, all to music by György Ligeti, are said to be a trilogy. Maybe so, but it is a trilogy that has not been seen together, I think wisely. [Authors note - this article was written before the performances at the Miller Theater last September that presented all of the works together.] Continuum does not look like a sequel to Polyphonia but closer to its mirror, as if Wheeldon had too many ideas for a single ballet and split them between commissions. Better to do that on two separate companies and coasts.In addition to both using Ligeti’s piano pieces (Continuum also adds in a piece for harpsichord that gives the work its title) both ballets use four couples and concentrate on a series of pas de deux and solos. Of course the steps are not exactly the same as those in Polyphonia, but Wheeldon’s response to very similar music is.
An Italian Straw Hat at the National Ballet of Canada
The human interactions belabor the point as well. We got the joke about Virginia and Felix’s insatiability about five penetrations back. All the sex actually gets in the way of character development. The differing attitudes towards love and sex among the three couples exist principally in Kudelka’s head and never make it across the footlights to us.At the end of the ballet Kudelka makes a traditional pas de deux for Ferdinand and Hélène to celebrate their wedding. It’s lovely, and it also shows that ballet already has, and always has had, an expressive language for love in its own vocabulary that makes the same point better than brute literalism. It’s not only unnecessary to be literal; it’s duplicative.
San Francisco Ballet Repertory Programs 4 and 5 (including Yuri Possokhov's Reflections and Study in Motion)
Possokhov thinks big; both are sprawling works for large casts to music that doesn’t easily support a ballet – Scriabin Piano Pieces and Mendelssohn’s First Symphony. His work doesn’t fall easily into the usual boxes. It’s not ballet mixed with modern dance, it doesn’t lean toward tanztheater or dramballet, and it isn’t House of Balanchine formalism. Possokhov is most interested in theatrical effect, but not at the expense of form or vocabulary. He’s literally making contemporary ballet – not a hybrid form but an attempt to make classical ballet on his terms and in his era. That alone makes him interesting.
Posted by Leigh Witchel at November 11, 2005 10:41 AM
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