In Memoriam: Alexandra Tomalonis
Dance critic, scholar, historian, educator, and mentor Alexandra Tomalonis died April 7, 2023. I met Alexandra in the early 1980s, when I was a college dance and English major with aspirations to write dance criticism. Shortly after I graduated, Alexandra invited me to write for her self-published magazine — Washington DanceView — which at that time came out quarterly. She took me under her wing, frequently inviting me to join her at Kennedy Center ballet performances. I learned much from her during our intermission conversations with what I called the D.C. critics’ huddle, which included Mike and Sali Ann Kriegsman, George Jackson, Suzanne Carbonneau, Pamela Sommers and Jean Battey Lewis on occasion. I was in awe of these seasoned dance critics and learned much from their writings and their conversations, particularly their recollections of performances I didn’t see or their reports of dance in New York and other cities. Alexandra introduced me to the Dance Critics Association, where I ultimately became president. During the hard 2020 summer of the Covid-19 pandemic, we had an almost weekly phone call where our conversations meandered into family histories, politics, and the art-politic confluence. I wish I had continued those calls when I got busy again.
In April 2013, when Alexandra was teaching ballet history and aesthetics at the Kirov Academy of Ballet in Washington, D.C., then-executive director Martin Fredmann asked me to interview her for the school’s magazine. The article is no longer on the Internet, so I share it below as I reflect on the major influence Alexandra had on Washington’s metropolitan area dance community, as well as on ballet and dance nationally and internationally, through the many students she taught and through her graceful writing. May her love of dance and the written word continue to inspire us.
Alexandra Tomalonis
By Lisa Traiger
Dance critic and author Alexandra Tomalonis has been a fixture at the Kirov Academy of Ballet for a decade now. Over the course of that period, she has taught an estimated 120 to 150 students ballet and art history, aesthetics and the popular favorite “The Great Ballets, 1 and 2,” covering the art form’s 19th- to 21st-century masterworks. But Tomalonis has imparted much more than names, dates and librettos to her students, many of whom have gone on to become professional dancers with companies throughout the world.
Just ask 2010 academy graduate Kiryung (Kiki) Kim, currently a member of the Studio Company of the Gelsey Kirkland Academy of Classical Ballet in New York. “She told us many stories and [a] few stuck with me,” Kim wrote via email recently. She recalled Tomalonis’s story about a recent graduate, an excellent dancer who had auditioned “everywhere” and made it to the final cut at each audition, but had not received a contract, instead ending up at a trainee program. “However, the next year she did not lose hope and auditioned again, getting a corps de ballet contract with a prestigious European ballet company that she wanted to dance in.” Tomalonis, Kim recalled, said that “sometimes things don’t work out, but if you keep working, your time may come, too.” Lesson learned.
As important as the intensive daily program of ballet technique classes and rehearsals is at the school, academics, too, remain a mainstay of what makes KAB so special. Tomalonis, as academic director since 2010, and a teacher here since 2003, has set the course along with the artistic department for a cadre of well-prepared and intelligent dancers, many of whom are making their way in the highly competitive and professional ballet world. Others have gone on to college, some later joining company ranks, others finding work in professions outside the dance field. She believes fully that the best dancers are the most well-educated. Beautiful feet, a high arabesque, and a refined ballet line might get a dancer noticed, but company directors these days want far more – dancers who can think, understand and express are more likely to succeed these days. For Tomalonis that means inculcating her students in ballet history, art history, and the canon of the great ballets.
“These kids will all go to college, we hope,” she said. “I just don’t want them to go at 18, but as dancers they’re going to be dealing with people who went to college.” That’s why her courses cover more than the basics. In high school facts are emphasized, but college, Tomalonis said, is where students learn how to put ideas together, synthesize material and begin to think for themselves. That’s what she hopes to achieve in her advanced classes, particularly Aesthetics and Ballet History. “The last two years I try – and all the teachers here do — to give them more college-like experiences so they can put it together and that’s so exciting.”
“From Ms. Tomalonis, I learned how to learn,” said Carinthia Bank. “And that is more useful than whatever actual facts I might be able to recall.” Tomalonis agrees, premiere dates and other information can easily be looked up. Thinking and responding to deeper questions about why a character might dance a specific way require more thoughtful consideration. Presently a dancer with the Donetsk Ballet of Ukraine, Banks had Tomalonis as a teacher in various summer-program classes from 2006 to 2008, at which time she became a full-time Kirov student.
Tomalonis’s own introduction to ballet was somewhat serendipitous. “I actually took modern dance in college because, first, we had to for a phys ed requirement, and I was also interested in it. But I had not seen any ballet.” She grew up in a family that valued intellectual rigor and enlightened discussion. She studied piano and attended the theater as a child, but her first ballet experience came at about age 26.
“A friend told me Rudolf Nureyev was coming,” she said. “I said, ‘Oh, he’s famous, let’s go see him.’ So we went and the curtain went up on ‘Marguerite and Armand’ … and I loved it.” She went back for more. “With all of my cultural education … I realized I knew nothing about a whole art form. That’s when I started reading and reading and reading.” After a semester in a dance writing class with late Washington Post dance critic Alan M. Kriegsman, she began reviewing for the Post and later her own magazine, Washington DanceView, which eventually evolved into the online DanceViewTimes. She also founded the online discussion boards Ballet Alert! and Ballet Talk for Dancers.
“I didn’t set out to be an historian,” she added, “I just wanted to know how it happened, so I just kept reading.” And in those heady dance boom days of the 1970s, The Kennedy Center, which had just opened, was featuring weeks of ballet companies from around the globe and Tomalonis rarely missed a performance. Soon her fandom grew into something deeper as she explored ballet history. “When I started writing,” she said, “I became more interested in where it came from rather than who was dancing. … I had favorite periods: Ballets Russes, then it was the Royal Ballet, then modern dance. I loved Martha Graham. I love people who try to go back to the beginning and try to do it right, which [Graham] was dong with pre-classical dance forms. And I loved that she took on the Greek myths.”
In her Ballet History course, Tomalonis’s students create a timeline of the art form and she’s always amazed at the creativity her students put into the project – one made a clock, another a tree with roots and branches. She loves to have students compare different versions of a work and study different dancers performing the same choreography, it opens their eyes to understanding the variety and expansiveness in the ballet world. She admitted that her teaching has evolved over her decade at KAB, but her goal has remained. “First I certainly want them to know ballet history. And second, certainly with the Great Ballets, I want them to see how ballet works and looks around the world … [KAB students] are very, very much focused on their technique. And I think they should be, but I think they should be able to see other schools [outside of Vaganova training] and know that a different way of doing an arabesque isn’t wrong. It might just be English. Or that the Paris style is very precise. And Bolshoi is different than Mariinsky.”
Adrienne Bot, a senior this year, said, “The most difficult or challenging aspect of Ms. Tomalonis’s class is that she wants us to be able to articulate not only that we liked or disliked what we read or saw, but why we liked or disliked it.” Bot has had Tomalonis as a teacher from 2011 to 2013 in Great Ballets, Ballet History, and Aesthetics. After graduation Bot has her sights set on landing a company contract where she can continue to grow and learn. From Tomalonis she said, “Her challenge to us is to learn about ourselves, to explore more than just a superficial level of who we are and why something appeals to us or not. It sounds easy, but that is deceptive.”
Kim, a former student, appreciated not only Tomalonis’s depth of knowledge but her insider stories. “She would share many anecdotes about famous dancers, choreographers, and companies,” Kim said, because she spent much time researching a book on Royal Danish Ballet dancer Henning Kronstam (Henning Kronstam: Portrait of a Danish Dancer) and knew many first-hand accounts from dancers in the ballet world. “She gave us the [back] story of [many choreographers’] philosophies on dance.”
Bot added, “Her passion and love of ballet is contagious.” A generation of KAB students certainly thinks so and has benefitted from that knowledge and passion.
Lisa Traiger writes on dance and the performing arts from the Washington, D.C. area and is proud to name Alexandra Tomalonis as one of her mentors.
Originally published by the Kirov Academy of Ballet, April 2013.
© 2023 Lisa Traiger
Resolute
United Ukrainian Ballet reinvigorates ‘Giselle.’
While their homeland is fighting for its survival, these dancers rallied to create a unified company in just months, and that sense of urgency is palpable.
Giselle
United Ukrainian Ballet
John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts Opera House
Washington, D.C.
February 1-5, 2023
By Lisa Traiger
Betrothal, betrayal, and the ultimate forgiveness: these are the themes that shape Giselle into one of the beloved ballets of the Romantic canon. This week exuding resilience, courage, and patriotism, an ad hoc ballet company named the United Ukrainian Ballet re-invigorates this warhorse of a ballet, while demonstrating the indomitable spirit of the Ukrainian people.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine disrupted daily life, including the performing artists and ballet dancers of many of the nation’s opera houses. A ballet dancer’s career is brief, and the inability to train and perform can make it briefer. While many female dancers fled their homeland, amid a barrage of Russian strikes on cities and towns in Ukraine, including its capitol, Kyiv, men were conscripted to fight. Ballet company leaders requested that male dancers be released from military service in order to serve the Ukrainian people through their art. It was granted.
Sixty dancers from Ukraine and around the world, including the National Opera of Ukraine, Doinestk Opera House, Kharkiv National Opera House, and Donbas Opera, to name a few, found their way to the Hague, Netherlands. They have been joined by Ukrainian nationals, among them Cristina Shevchenko from American Ballet Theatre and Kateryna Derechyna from the Washington Ballet.
Together this ad hoc group is breathtaking in conception and physical prowess, rallying to create a unified company, which can take years or decades, in just months, while their homeland is fighting for its survival. That sense of urgency, particularly in act II, is palpable and came to a pinnacle with the bows and curtain calls on opening night. Lead dancers Shevchenko and Oleksei Tiutiunnyk took center stage draped in a vibrant blue-and-yellow banner stating “Stand with Ukraine,” followed by Russian-Ukrainian choreographer Alexi Ratmansky proudly stretching the Ukrainian flag above his head.
The journey to Giselle and the Kennedy Center wasn’t easy but was eased by fortuitous circumstances. A former conservatory-turned-refugee center in the Hague became the haven and home for this new Ukrainian ballet troupe. Last year the company performed in London, Australia, and Paris; this relatively late booking at the Kennedy Center Opera House is the only U.S. performance, and it only happened, according to a Kennedy Center staffer, when the cancellation of the National Ballet of China caused a hole in the ballet series. United Ukrainian Ballet filled the bill nicely.
When choreographer Alexi Ratmansky heard the Ukrainian dancers had taken refuge in the Hague, and they needed a ballet, he didn’t hesitate. The renowned ballet maker and stager, while born in Leningrad, has a Russian mother and a Ukrainian father; his heart, he has said, fully beats for Ukraine.
Ratmansky gifted this ingathering of fleeing dancers a fully realized and reinvigorated version of the 19th-century Romantic classic. The result: a refreshingly compelling evening that draws from historical precedents, which Ratmansky unearthed in research into archival notes and accounts of the ballet that originated in 1841 in Paris. He’s done this before with The Sleeping Beauty, among other classics.
The story of Giselle, a vivacious young woman besotted by Albert (Albrecht or Loys, in some versions), who is a nobleman slumming as a villager, is an oft-done standard in the ballet canon. A stable of the repertoire, Giselle offers up two acts of elegant dancing, along with the pathos of heartbreak when Giselle discovers her suitor isn’t who he claims and is engaged to a noblewoman. As a jilted bride who dies before her wedding, she is resigned to haunt the forest as a ghostly spirit called a Wili. The second “white act” — in the midnight forest — features these ghostly beautifully terrifying Willis, clad in shimmery, bell-shaped gossamer tutus. But their beauty deceives: having been jilted by their fiancés, they haunt the forest to take revenge on single men whom they dance to their doom.
While basing the work on choreography by 19th-century ballet master Marius Petipa, after Jean Coralli and Jules Perrot, from the early 19th century, Ratmansky resuscitates what can, depending on the company, be a staid experience aimed at ballet stalwarts. Here he returns to mime passages that often receive short shrift, particularly by American troupes. The codified gestures typically express basic feelings of love, fear, promises to marry, and a passage that presages death. This version allows Berthe (Olena Mykhailova as a fierce helicopter mom), Giselle’s mother to “speak,” miming her worries and the spooky backstory of what happens to young ladies who disobey their mothers’ wishes and court someone in secret. Her sharp gesture as her forearms form a cross pointed to the ground rings true for all the mothers of teenagers over millennia who declared, “Be careful or you’ll find yourself in an early grave.” Sergii Kliachin’s Hilarion, Albert’s rival for Giselle’s attention, broodingly eyes the happy couple as he plots his revenge in order to win Giselle’s heart. He’s a bit like outsider Judd from the Rogers and Hammerstein golden-age classic Oklahoma!
Throughout both acts, small and large details provide for a more compelling Giselle than I’ve seen in decades of dance-going. Some, I’m not sure are fully necessary, like shifting the first-act demi soloists’ variations during the villagers’ variations to a more formalized grand pas de deux structure. For those who know, the four-part grand pas de deux is typically reserved for four-act classical ballets and allows the principal ballerina and danseur to demonstrate their technical virtuosity.
In act II, before the Wilis appear, a bumptious forest scene features a group of drinking buddies out at night for a lark. This “bro” moment, when they toast each other and nearly bump fists, feels like any testosterone-filled Saturday night at the pub. Then Hilarion, and later Albert come upon them. A distant bell chimes midnight and the thought of ghosts makes them scatter. The Wilis, led by the imperious Myrtha, fearsome mean-girl Elizaveta Gogidze, dart and even fly across the stage as they gather to dance under the watchful eye of their tall leader, their translucent veils whisked away as if by magic.
Ratmansky has furthered beautified and given weighted meaning to this white act, through his sensitive staging and floor patterns. The dancers gather, tracing circles and lines and, most notable, forming themselves into the shape of a cross as Giselle’s fresh grave stands to one side. Other intriguing moments include the fight-club-like rounds of dancing Albert is compelled to do at the behest of Myrtha, her gaze steely, her arms crossed across her chest. He is pushed and pulled up and down a diagonal line of Wilis until he collapses in exhaustion.
Shevchenko imbues her Giselle with a vivid personality, she’s girlish but a bit of an adventurer in the first act. Often Giselle is scolded by her mother for her weak heart; this Giselle projects a feisty spirit. It’s no wonder that Count Albert falls for her vivacity. Tiutiunnyk, lean and leggy, is not nearly as caddish as many Albert/Albrechts I’ve come across. His leaps soar, suggesting he’s used to a larger stage than the Opera House, and he’s a fine partner to Shevchenko, guiding her gently into balances. Shevchenko, who returns to the Opera House later this month as Juliet in her home company American Ballet Theatre’s Romeo and Juliet, has a lovely sense of ballon, or rebound, which is perfect for the many versions of the “Giselle step,” a gentle hop on one foot as the other leg opens and closes at the ankle like a hinge. It’s her signature dance — made for a 15-second TikTok video.
The Birmingham Royal Ballet (Great Britain) lent its sets and costumes for this production. Act II’s Wilis shimmer in moonlit colors of palest gray-blue rather than the traditional stark white Romantic tutus, which only Giselle wears.
The new staging of Giselle’s final moments, when she forgives Albert, completely shifted the demeanor of the ballet. Giselle settles herself into a raised berm or hillock at the corner of the stage — resigned to her fate as a jilted woman, foretold by her mother in act I. As Albert approaches her aggrieved one last time, she lifts her head and shoulders, and gestures to him — the sunrise in the background showing the royal retinue arriving — to go to his original fiancée Bathilde. Giselle earns her wings forgiving and releasing her beloved. She will remain a Wili, resigned to a ghostly life only to arise at midnight in the forest.
In a Giselle filled with moving moments, this final gesture was deeply felt and resonated with the resilient and unstinting performances of the company. At the final curtain call, the company stood together, shoulder to shoulder, as the orchestra struck up the Ukrainian national anthem:
The glory and freedom of Ukraine has not yet perished
Luck will still smile on us brother-Ukrainians.
Our enemies will die, as the dew does in the sunshine,
and we, too, brothers, we’ll live happily in our land.We’ll not spare either our souls or bodies to get freedom
and we’ll prove that we brothers are of Kozak kin.
This review originally appeared on DC Theater Arts on February 3, 2023, and is reprinted here with kind permission.
© 2023 Lisa Traiger
Spotlighting Ballet Excellence
Reframing the Narrative
Dance Theatre of Harlem, Ballethnic Dance Company, and Collage Dance Collective
John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts Opera House
Washington, D.C.
June 14 – 19, 2022
By Lisa Traiger
Ballet has had a white supremacy problem since the earliest steps were codified in the court of Louis XIV. Once a way to broadcast power, wealth, and proximity to the French king, over the years, the dances once practiced and performed by courtiers evolved into a professionalized artform that emulated the strictures and hierarchical structures of the European court system. More than four centuries later, ballet remains an elite and, in many cases, predominantly white artform.
Predominantly Black ballet companies have been few over the past century — among them was one homegrown right here in Washington, the Capitol Ballet Company, founded by the formidable Doris Jones and Claire Haywood of the Jones-Haywood School of dance, which still teaches new generations of primarily African American ballet students in its Georgia Avenue NW studio. On the heels of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King’s assassination, a New York City Ballet star and George Balanchine’s first Black male principal dancer named Arthur Mitchell founded the now-venerable Dance Theatre of Harlem, today directed by native Washingtonian and former DTH ballerina Virginia Johnson.
But Black ballet dancers are not unicorns. And that was exactly what two mixed-bill ballet programs in the Kennedy Center’s Opera House, plus additional panels, master classes, and ancillary events comprising Reframing the Narrative, intended to demonstrate. The opening night performance began with a narrator invoking the spirit of Sankofa, from Ghana’s Twi language, meaning to look back while moving forward, as a way to honor past “unicorns” — Black ballet dancers whose successes have not always been recognized and lauded in equal measure as their white counterparts’.
Following, a simple screen featured a roll call of dancers collected by a one-time Dance Theatre of Harlem dancer, Theresa Ruth Howard’s Memoirs of Blacks in Ballet, an archival project to gather the evidence that Black bodies matter in ballet and must be neither ignored nor forgotten. The scrolling list of 624 names on opening night, just four nights later on Friday, June 17, had grown to 650 names.
Reframing the Narrative is meant to illuminate Black excellence in the ballet world, co-curator Denise Saunders Thompson, president and CEO of the International Association of Black in Dance, stated in an address to the audience during the program. She was joined on stage by co-curator Howard, who worked on a Kennedy Center–commissioned work meant to showcase Black ballet voices from the selected choreographers to the dancers who were invited from high-level ballet companies from around the world to participate. Howard then offered the audience a question to ponder in this historic coming-of-age moment for the ballet world: “What does reframing mean for you?” She noted that it is set forth as both a provocation and invitation, but it is also intentionally a gift “to ourselves and to you,” the audience.
The two distinct programs featured three ballet companies that center Black and Brown dancers, choreographers, and artistic directors — Dance Theatre of Harlem, Atlanta’s Ballethnic Dance Company, and Memphis’s Collage Dance Collective, along with the world premiere commission by Seattle’s Donald Byrd featuring 11 dancers.
“From Other Suns” was created by Byrd during a two-week Kennedy Center residency at the REACH this month. Based on The Warmth of Other Suns, Isabel Wilkerson’s 2010 account of the Great Migration, it reflects on Black Americans who moved from the South up North, to the Midwest and the West starting in the early 20th century. This migratory shift changed the nation, as Wilkerson asserted. In “From Other Suns,” set to a score by Kennedy Center resident composer Carlos Simon, the work is a meditation on movement — migration, if you will — from the opening when a single man walks on stage to the evolving groups, trios, and pairs that interweave dancers in linked chains, swirling vortexes, and, ultimately, a line traveling single file across the diagonal and off stage. Byrd, a modern dance choreographer, has an affinity for the clear precision and lines of ballet, but he is not wedded to classicism. Rather he draws on ballet’s codified vocabulary yet makes it his own, allowing dancers freedom in their torsos, hips, and arms before they reconnect with their centers. In intricate coupled moments, pretzel-like lifts support women in difficult balances, while dancers find the floor, even flat on their backs, their point up in the air.
If Byrd has a narrative for “From Other Suns,” it is not evident or necessary. Instead, the evolving structure of groups moving en masse, or individuals or couples breaking away, lends a migratory sensibility to the piece, and, with Pamela Hobson’s saturated, shadowy lights and the black practice wear of leotard and tights for costumes, the work resonates with a somber tone. In a nod to mid-20th-century neoclassicism, a few Balanchinisms glimmer forth, but in no way make a statement or pay homage to America’s most prominent ballet choreographer. Instead, these glimpses are simply an acknowledgment that this 21st-century American ballet draws from many roots; others include simple vernacular and pedestrian moments tucked into and between multiple pirouettes or splicing split leaps.
With DTH’s long history as a regular visitor to the Kennedy Center, particularly in the 1980s and ’90s, and later offering yearly pre-professional summer ballet training for aspiring dancers, the Reframing week opened with the company’s “Balamouk,” a bright, jazzy and folkish romp by Belgian-born, Amsterdam-based Annabelle Lopez Ochoa, which allowed the company to display its personality and aplomb. The troupe, known for its classical and neoclassical chops, also shared the “Odalisques” variation for the classical work Le Corsaire, a study in sturdy balances, turns, and pointe work performed by Amanda Smith, Alexandra Hutchison, and Ingrid Silva.
Opening the second program on Friday night, DTH gave a nod to its lineage with resident choreographer Robert Garland’s “Gloria,” featuring Francis Poulenc’s setting of part of the Catholic mass. The curtain opened to reveal a septet of girls, smiling and displaying their youthful port de bras — coordination of the arms. Garland draws frequently from street and club dances, facilely rebranding them into the ballet vernacular. “Gloria” hints at that on occasion, with quirky elbows and folksy grapevine steps, but the piece emulates both a bright reverence and a spiritual force, particularly when one woman is borne overhead in a cross position.
On Tuesday’s opening-night program, Ballethnic Dance Company also brought a spiritually based work. “Sanctity,” choreographed by company co-director Waverly Lucas, with a live percussion and jazz score by L. Gerard Reid, draws on African roots evident in the score and in the physicality. Each dancer contributed both poetic statements, which were voiced over (although hard to hear over the live drumming), and talisman-like objects. These were carried on and placed at an altar-like structure while the performers, clad in white, danced. The cultural connections to root African forms and structures remained evident even with the balletically based point work in the foreground. On Friday, the company brought excerpts from its full-length “The Leopard Tale,” an entertaining and imaginative trip to the African jungle and plain featuring undulating snake-like creatures, and a playful and predatory pair of leopards. This audience pleaser featured plenty of splits, high kicks, and acrobatic tricks along the adventure.
Muddy Waters, B.B. King, Koko Taylor, and Bobby “Blue” Bland put the Collage Dance Collective artists in a bluesy mood. To the tremor and twang of slide guitar, “Bluff City Blues,” a jazzy and hip take on the blues, features its earthy moments from choreographer Amy Hall Garner, but sometimes even with the fan kicks, hip switches, and rolls, it gets a bit staid, and the men’s blue polo shirts don’t feel quite right. But the company does a great job at getting the audience to clap along — a feat in a ballet-focused program.
Collage topped off the Friday evening program with its new production of “Firebird,” featuring the famed Igor Stravinsky score. The Canadian-trained founding artistic director Kevin Thomas choreographed this fairy tale of a prince — Ricky Flagg II on Friday — seeking his soulmate who runs into an enchanted firebird — Chrystyn Fentroy — in the forest who gifts him with a magical feather. The cast is rounded out by Precious Adams of English National Ballet as the Princess of Unreal Beauty and various wizards, maidens, and monsters. The colorful ballet had scenery by Alexander Woodward and costumes by Gabriela Moros Diaz. Originally a 1910 Ballet Russes piece, this 2021 version retains the ballet’s plot and vision and reflects a contemporary attitude in the performances.
Reframing the Narrative’s co-curator Saunders Thompson shared with the audience that in visioning these programs she wanted to create a “blackout.” In high-school pep rally parlance, that means one team’s fans wear all black to a nighttime game. But here, at the Kennedy Center Opera House and rehearsal studios for a fortnight in June, this blackout was far more significant. Representation on stage was a given, but Thompson went further, ensuring the orchestra conductors, stage managers, lighting designers, and others working behind the scenes were also Black or Brown-identifying artists. Ballet for centuries has been a white artform, from its tutus and tights to its choreographers and dancers. Reframing the Narrative is another step in forging a path forward toward re-visioning ballet into a more equitable and representative art form for all people.
This review originally appeared on DC Theater Arts on June 22, 2022, and is reprinted here with kind permission.
© 2022 Lisa Traiger
Another Swan
Swan Lake
The Washington Ballet
Staged by Julie Kent and Victor Barbee
Kennedy Center Eisenhower Theater
Washington, D.C.
February 9, 2022
By Lisa Traiger
As the apotheosis of classical ballet, Swan Lake has captivated audiences for more than a century. With its achingly poignant Tchaikovsky score and its resonant themes of the transformative power of love and the power of memory, accompanied by images of white tutu’ed ballerinas in swan-like formations, for many Swan Lake is the definitive ballet.
As frequently as this ballet is performed, nothing about producing Swan Lake is easy or ordinary. The Washington Ballet, which celebrated its 75th anniversary in 2019, just tackled its second production of this epitome of ballets. Under the company’s founder, the late Mary Day, it developed as a small chamber-sized troupe specializing in 20th-century contemporary ballet. Without the breadth or depth of a large troupe of classically trained dancers, Swan Lake wasn’t an option for the company until artistic director Septime Webre, who took the helm from Day, staged a Swan Lake coup in 2015. Webre’s production attracted worldwide notice for featuring Misty Copeland and Brooklyn Mack as the first African American Odette and Siegfried in a major company.
Under the direction of retired American Ballet Theatre ballerina Julie Kent, The Washington Ballet’s second production of Swan Lake — lovingly and carefully staged with the assistance of Victor Barbee, the company’s associate artistic director (and Kent’s husband) — had been planned for 2020, but the pandemic halted performances.
Ballet lovers would likely call The Washington Ballet’s latest Swan Lake, which runs through Sunday, February 13, at The Kennedy Center’s Eisenhower Theater, respectable, if uneven. The demands on the ballerina, who plays the dual role of Odette, the Swan Queen, and Odile, her evil imposter, are akin to playing Hamlet — outsized. On Thursday, the opening night cast featured Eun Won Lee, a ballerina with imperious technical abilities, among them clean and precise footwork and a purity of line, making her an obvious choice and Kent favorite. Yet the challenges of playing Odette demand more than technical excellence. Odette must reveal her soulful side, but also her longing and her hesitancy. She stands at the helm of a band of women like her cursed to be swans by day and humans at night. Their abode? A lake filled with her own mother’s tears. The only way to release the curse is a pure declaration of true and forever love.
The ballet opens at Prince Siegfried’s castle — in this production not the grandest, but a stately edifice with imposing steps that cramp the Eisenhower Theater stage. The opening celebratory atmosphere of the ballet — Siegfried has come of age and friends and courtiers arrive at the castle grounds to celebrate. Yet here he’s not the most popular of princes, his entourage, hangers-on, and friends are few and the stage feels far less busy and filled than in many productions. The Act One pas de trois featuring Ayano Kimura and Ashley Murphy-Wilson along with Ariel Martinez displayed precision, technical facility and allowed each dancer a moment to shine.
As Siegfried, Gian Carlo Perez captures that wavering moment between boy and man, uncertain of how he can take the next step and choose a bride and his desire for a boys’ night out – in this case hunting by the lakeside. Sona Kharatian, one of the company’s senior dancers, portrays his mother with dignity and high expectations — yet she seems too young for the role, even clad in heavy brocades. Some of the most natural moments of the evening are those between mother and son, when he turns to her with an “oh, Mom” look or when he seeks her comfort. Perez displays his finesse and ballon — ability to jump with ease — and as a partner, he’s unfailing.
Lee and Perez frequently dance together, yet their partnership felt surprisingly bereft of electricity and passion. Lee projects a cool and calm presence on stage — I’d say more of an ice princess than a hot-blooded dancer — so that first meeting between Siegfried and Odette in Act Two takes a while to warm up. Lee is far more reserved than many of my own past favorites in the role, among them Gillian Murphy, Nina Ananiashvili, and the gorgeous Russian-trained Natalia Markova.
As woman-turned-swan, Lee, alas, is more human than swan-like. Among the edifying choreographic moments in the ballet, here Kent and Barbee draw from the Petipa/Ivanov 1895 version the wing and bird-like arm gestures, undulating from the shoulders effortlessly and magnificently through to the fingertips. Lee, alas, doesn’t initiate from deep in the scapula, thus the arm-torso connection is not as evident, and her Odette finds less expression in the torso and shoulder girdle — ballet folks would call it epaulement.
In the climactic third act, as Odile, the sinister Black Swan meant to lead Siegfried astray, Lee uses her icy demeanor to advantage. Her brilliant and brittle technique is meant to mesmerize, and here Perez as Siegfried is completely taken in, vowing his love for the wrong woman — and dooming his true love to an eternity as a swan. It’s an exacting and technically difficult set of sequences of high-powered precise leaps, balances, and turns — featuring applause-garnering fouettes, whipping turns on one leg — that Lee pulls off without a blink. And behind her, whispering in her ear, lanky Stephen Nakagawa uses his stature to embody an imposing Von Rothbart, the sorcerer who cursed Odette.
Act Three is also filled with a series of European cultural dances representing Spain, Hungary, Poland, and Italy — think of them as postcards from abroad, recalling that when the ballet was created in St. Petersburg 125 years ago, these locales seemed exotic. Each of these lively variations was well-performed, but again, the smaller stage space lent a less celebratory air to the act yet also felt more intimate.
In recreating this Swan Lake, Kent called on Russian ballet scholar Natalie Rouland, who dug into the history of the iconic work and drew from archival notations from the Harvard Theatre Collection and Russian librettos at the St. Petersburg Theatre Library. With these historic gleanings and the body-to-body legacy of the Petipa and Ivanov choreographies, The Washington Ballet’s production feels notably authentic and even includes a few surprises. Among them, in Act Four, in addition to the corps de ballet of 18 white swans, an additional six cygnets, clad in gray feathery tutus accompany their grown sister swans. As well, the beginning of this final act felt far brisker and bouncier than many versions, though I’m not certain if that was a musical change or just tempos. And, while the corps de ballet danced valiantly striving for uniformity, it was not always attainable. Blame it on the pandemic pause, when dancers couldn’t work together in the studio, or the small company roster with roles filled out by second-company members, but the ideal of a group of 18 dancers balancing, swaying, and even breathing in absolute unison hasn’t quite been attained.
Throughout the storytelling through ballet, mime was keenly articulate — not always the case for American companies — but Washington’s dancers have put much care and attention to conveying the dramatic meanings thus furthering the plot with ease. The ballet, which clocks in at a solid two hours and 45 minutes, was accompanied by a live orchestra led by conductor Charles Barker. The sets, from Ballet West in Utah, were serviceable and avoided outlandish updates or changes to the libretto, although they did feel tight on the Eisenhower stage.
With a mostly satisfying, if not exceptional, production under her belt, Julie Kent continues to mold The Washington Ballet into something that more closely resembles large mainstream repertory companies, particularly Kent’s former home base, American Ballet Theatre. The question arises, though, with the resources and national stature of The Kennedy Center, where at least one Swan Lake lands every year, does Washington need its own swan-filled production?
This review originally appeared on DC Metro Theater Arts on February 11, 2022, and is reprinted here with kind permission.
© 2022 Lisa Traiger
Stepping Boldly Back to Normalcy
Tear the Edge
Chamber Dance Project
featuring four world premieres
Perry Belmont House
Washington, D.C.
July 14, 2021
By Lisa Traiger
In the past 16 months, as a society we have been collectively torn asunder — cut off from face-to-face contact with family, friends, coworkers and from live, in-person art experiences. As performers — musicians, singers, actors, dancers — take careful first steps to return to studios and stages, it remains hard to determine if those torn edges can be fully repaired and how long that might take.
An evening of new choreography titled Tear the Edge demonstrates a bold step back to normalcy. The premiere performance was held indoors in the chandeliered ballroom of the Beaux Arts mansion near Dupont Circle, the Perry Belmont House, before an audience of about 60 unmasked ticket buyers.
Diane Coburn Bruning created Chamber Dance Project in 2013 to fill a void in the dance community. While the region receives frequent visits from some of the best world-class companies, and its home team, The Washington Ballet, wields a hefty season of classics and contemporary works, Chamber Dance focuses on smaller chamber-size pieces — as its name suggests — to an eclectic selection of classical and 20th- and 21st-century musical choices, performed live. Bruning’s model for the small part-time troupe takes advantage of the typical big ballet company off-season. Thus, her dancers spend the year at professional companies like The Washington Ballet and BalletMet, Milwaukee Ballet, Pittsburgh Ballet, among others. Bruning brings them together for an intensive rehearsal period and the brief summer season, often performed in unexpected locations rather than traditional theater spaces. Thus the glorious Perry Belmont House.
The July 14, 2021, program featured a remarkable four world premieres, including the opener, Alight, by white-hot choreographer Claudia Schreier, who received promising notices for her work for Dance Theatre of Harlem at the Kennedy Center, pre-pandemic, of course. The work for five, using a contemporary classical string quartet composed by Chris Rogerson, sets the dancers in whirling thrums and slicing scissorslike jumps. The two women, in point shoes and sleek earthy-toned leotards, get carried and manipulated singly and together by the three men. Schreier is a George Balanchine acoclyte and it shows in the complexity of the partnering work she devises, the splicing legs, and the little daisy chains as three, four, or all five connect and carve spatial paths.
While Balanchine’s works are frequently described as plotless, perhaps it’s better to say storyless but not meaningless, for movement and gesture carry meaning and viewers make their own interpretations. Alight doesn’t tell a story, but at this moment it feels like a flight, away from stasis, darkness, and isolation. What Schreier hasn’t yet finessed is Balanchine’s sage notion of paring down his choreographic masterpieces, in the way Coco Chanel advised her clients to remove one piece of jewelry or scarf before leaving. Sometimes Schreier could as well.
Bruning’s Four Men shares a different energy, a bit more grounded, playful, and physically competitive, as the quartet — Christian Denice, Davit Hovhannisyan, Alexander Sargent, and Graham Feeny — slides and slips, dives and tumbles to selected Boccherini trios. While the demeanor is playful, with heavy-footed stomps, falls, and what I would call a “butt pirouette,” other moments allowed these guys to display more graceful notes, careful balances, petite footwork more commonly danced by women, and care in partnering their fellow men.
Dancer Christian Denice contributed two works, Arriving, a pas de deux to a cello solo by Phillip Glass, and Dwellings, a complex group work using a score for the Kronos Quartet with sections contributed by Stephan Thelen, Aftab Darvishi, and Glass. Dwellings draws subtly on modern dance’s loose-limbed release technique as the three women and three men favor looser torsos, as the sock-clad dancers slip and swoop across the space in canon and unison as the music swells their arms meandering like ribbons before they settle. With dancers clad in tones of gray — women in chiffon dresses, the men in slacks and tunics — Dwellings suggests a shifting community, but there’s an added effect with the hair-ography: dancers finally let their hair down, and especially the women’s long locks added a sensual, free feeling to the piece.
Aside from his choreographic contributions, Denice also performed Bruning’s Sarabande, a lush and enticing solo. The choreographer brought out Denice’s innate qualities as a powerfully grounded, compact performer. With his feet massaging the floor, he locomoted without taking a step. His gestures occasionally subtly semaphoric, sometimes shape and define the emptiness. Here the focus eschews the physical virtuosity of ballet technique, allowing Denice to home in on his innate qualities as a grounded, powerful mover.
The program allowed the string quartet to shine without dance: on violin was Sally McLain and Karin Kelleher, Jerome Gordon played viola, and Todd Thiel, cello. McLain shared Jesse Montgomery’s “Rhapsody No. 1” solo; the quartet plucked and strummed through Benjamin Britten’s “Playful Pizzicato.”
This review originally appeared on DC Metro Theater Arts on July 16, 2021, and is reprinted here with kind permission.
© 2021 Lisa Traiger
Bowen McCauley Dance Preps for Final Bow, Gives Penultimate Performance
25th Anniversary Program
Bowen McCauley Dance
Artistic direction and choreography by Lucy Bowen McCauley
Kennedy Center Terrace Theater
May 26, 2021
By Lisa Traiger
As the dance world eases back to stages amid the COVID-19 pandemic, Bowen McCauley Dance was among the first to dip a toe in to test the waters, dancing together on the Kennedy Center’s Terrace Theater stage before a very limited audience of the company’s friends and supporters. The rest of the audience, including this reviewer, attended virtually.
Lucy Bowen McCauley founded her Arlington-based company a quarter century ago, and with her musical acuity and penchant for balletically flavored contemporary dance technique, it became a mainstay on the local dance circuit and beyond. But just as a dancer’s onstage career is most often measured in years not decades or a lifetime, a dance company, too, can have its limits. At the program May 26, 2021, McCauley publicly announced that this performance would be her company’s penultimate. She’s not closing up shop due to the pandemic pause; in fact, Bowen McCauley shared with me years ago that she didn’t foresee leading her company indefinitely and was considering the best time to choreograph her troupe’s final performance. Twenty-five years felt like the right time. Then a global pandemic happened. So instead of finishing with a virtual production, Bowen McCauley Dance Company will take its last bows in September at the Kennedy Center Eisenhower Theater.
In anticipation of that finale, McCauley created a new work for the Terrace Theater virtual program, “Trois Rêves,” to Maurice Ravel’s complex three-movement piano score “Gaspard de la Nuit,” based on a bleak poem by Aloysius Bertrand. The dream ballet opens to a trio of women in flowing waves and undulations of movement; arms swirl like anemones and other sea creatures. When they cock a raised bent leg behind (attitude, for ballet aficionados), balancing on the other, an image of seahorses comes to mind. Later the men join, yet dancers never meet; all their interactions are safely distanced. The second movement, “Le Gibet,” or gallows, proceeds slowly, steadily, relentlessly as Dustin Kimball, in black down to a pair of leather gloves, plods in. As the specter of death, he lashes his arms toward the grounded dancers. They succumb. Then a white-clad angelic figure (Justin Metcalf-Burton) enters; a battle of life forces ensues like a galactic faceoff as the two never make contact. The nightmarish sequence ends with Death in a moment of morose contemplation, yet a noose drops from above. Death prevails.
The final section lightens the mood with quick-footed, playful dances of nymph-like creatures coursing around a pajama-clad sleeping figure. Bright and spirited, the women leap with catlike grace, their silky dresses floating up around them, while the men cartwheel and squat like frogs. They gambol and scamper stalking the restless sleeper with frolicking abandon. “Trois Rêves,” expertly played by pianist Nikola Paskalov, the company’s music director, demonstrates Bowen McCauley’s sensitivity for and love of challenging 20th-century classical scores that suit her balletically inspired movement language.
The program opened with 2019’s “Dances of the Yogurt Maker,” a lovely abstraction drawing on elements of swirling and churning momentum that I imagine are involved in making yogurt. The score by Turkish composer Erberk Eryilmaz also provides Middle Eastern flavor. The dancers move through shapes hinting at Turkish architectural elements — arms raised above their heads palms together allude to Ottoman arches or the onion domes of minarets. Flexed wrists and bent elbows create curlicues and broken lines as a nod to calligraphy and curvilinear arabesques — the arcing swirls of Middle Eastern design not the ballet pose.
Bowen McCauley honored two longtime BMDC dancers: Alicia Curtis — 14 seasons — and Kimball — 15 seasons. The previously filmed duet from the choreographer’s 2015 work “Victory Road,” with a country-rock accompaniment by Jason and The Scorchers, showcased the dancers’ artistry and their valuable contributions to the company.
The resilience of the company and its dancers was evident in the strength of the well-rehearsed performances as well as the mindfulness to ongoing pandemic concerns. For both live works, the dancers wore masks, and Bowen McCauley adjusted any choreography that required physical contact in “Yogurt Maker”; thus no lifts or partnering occurred. Choreographed while following COVID-19 social-distancing restrictions, “Trois Rêves” featured seven dancers moving expertly and connecting and interacting without ever making any physical contact to comply with COVID safety regulations.
This review originally appeared on DC Metro Theater Arts on June 2, 2021, and is reprinted here with kind permission.
© 2021 Lisa Traiger
Ballet Americano
Ballet Across America
featuring Dance Theatre of Harlem and Miami City Ballet
Kennedy Center Opera House
Washington, D.C.
May 28-June 2, 2019
By Lisa Traiger
The Kennedy Center closed its 2018-19 ballet series with its fifth iteration over more than a decade of its signature program, Ballet Across America. The curated performances include multiple American companies with the aim of showcasing the depth, breadth and reach of the art form. The question — what does American ballet look like now? — has been answered variably over the years.
This year elevated women’s artistic leadership, focusing on women’s contributions to an art form, which in recent decades has been dominated by male leaders. With just two companies — Dance Theatre of Harlem and Miami City Ballet — splitting a week of performances May 28 – June 2, 2019, and one shared evening featuring a world-premiere commission, women were featured not just as dancers, but as choreographers, composers, designers and even in the orchestra pit, where DTH conductor Tania Leon led the Kennedy Center Opera House Orchestra. That this is unexpected illustrates why female artistic direction remains necessary in the tutus-and-tights world of ballet.
That women — Virginia Johnson and Lordes Lopez — lead DTH and MCB, respectively, is no small matter, particularly on the heels of the #metoo movement, which rattled the ballet world last year. This was a week to smash ballet’s patriarchy — just a bit, it is still ballet after all.
The commission merged both companies in a single new work with a female creative team led by New York choreographer Pam Tanowitz. “Gustave Le Gray No. 1” is her tightly constructed quartet danced with a promising post-modernist flair. Both enigmatic and Cunninghamesque, the title references the 19th-century French photographer responsible for the development of art photography. Tanowitz toggles seamlessly between the subtle embellishments inherent in ballet language and the stringent not always humorless ascetics of post modernism. Caroline Shaw’s inventive score, played succinctly by Sylvia Jiang, meted out silences, staccato rhythms and even a snippet of a Chopin waltz with ease. The dancers, swathed in fire-engine red body stockings with billowy flaps that catch air when they spin, shift in tight geometric floor patterns, mostly cubes, embellished by syncopated permutations. Sharp foot taps in ¾ time break up classical poses. The quartet — Renan Cerdeiro and Lauren Fadeley from MCB and Anthony Santos and Stephanie Rae Williams from DTH — becomes a moving jigsaw puzzle of shifting individuals and pairs, always returning to a tight-knit square formation. When the four gather to push the piano — as Jiang walks along still playing — across the stage, smirks become guffaws. The cheeky joke’s punchline: a dancer carries out a new bench for Jiang, who simply sits and keeps playing. Though not monumental, “Gustave” is neither a piece d’occasion nor an inconsequential one-off. Perhaps its wit and whimsy will live again on another company.
Dianne McIntyre’s “Change” radiated power and determination. Honoring the strength of women — “Black, Brown, and Beige” as the program noted — it featured the recorded voices of the all-female Spellman College Glee Club singing “I’m Going to Lay Down This Heavy Load” among other selections. Each dancer in the female trio bears a burden, struggles to break through the shadowy light. Lindsey Croop, Ingrid Silva and Stephanie Rae Williams subvert the pointe shoe overthrowing delicacy for sturdy space-swallowing bourres and pricking parallel walks, no partners required. Their upraised palms, churchy fanning motions, prayerful regard and fierce thigh slaps acknowledge the struggles of African American women. This is not tribute; it is triumph denoting how the women broke free from oppression. A barrage of drums interrupts the choir for mood and costumes changes. The trio changes from black chiffon to short patchwork unitards that speak their own fraught history — sewn from the multihued tights of DTH dancers in shades of coffee, beige, café au lait, and mahogany — the dancers literally wear the legacy of oppression and triumph on their backs.
Claudia Schreier’s “Passage,” with a new score by Jessie Montgomery, was commissioned in 2019 for DTH’s 50th anniversary and the 400th anniversary of the first documented arrival of slaves on American shores. An abstraction, the work meanders, although Schreier’s pretty undulating lifts — ballerinas carried like waves across the space — draw applause. The duet featuring Anthony Santos and Derek Brockington pits the two men in a push and pull partnership their physicality distinctive from typical ballet pas de deux, particularly its studied groundedness and strength rather than weightless uplift.
Suitably Miami-esque, Justin Peck’s playful “Heatscape” uses Shepard Fairey’s sunny mandala-like mural, recalling the Wynwood Walls of the city’s mural district. Clad in short tennis dresses for the ladies and summery shorts and tank tops for the men, the dancers jog on and off, stand in rows and columns as if waiting on line, then escape the clump to mete out quick little jogs. Soloist Renan Cerdeiro opens the first movement, danced to Martinu’s “Concerto No. 1 for Piano and Orchestra,” reclining in sunny light. He chases Emily Bromberg and the playful, beachy feel, the shimmery piano, the hot lighting by Brandonn Stirling Baker and the frolicsome choreography are exuberant. Peck playfully nods to Balanchine and Robbins — with wickedly fast footwork, a quote from “Apollo” and another from “Other Dances,” along with noticeably obvious repetition, demonstrating his deference to his ballet forbears.
Both companies opened with a Balanchine work, acknowledging the company founders Arthur Mitchell for DTH and Edward Villella for MCB. DTH chose the sweetly stirring “Valse Fantaisie,” the dancers swirling to Glinka’s Fantaisie in B minor, while Miami City Ballet danced “Walpurgisnacht Ballet” exquisitely. With a glamorous corps of pony-tailed women in Karinksa’s shades of lavender chiffon, the dancers looked healthy and strong and when the women let their lush locks loose, the allure was captivating.
“Ballet is Woman,” George Balanchine famously said. Across the centuries women in ballet were typically subject and object, muse and material, for a male creator. This Ballet Across America gave voice to women — on stage, back stage, in the studio as creators, and, of course, in beautiful dancing. During a pre-performance panel discussion, both Johnson and Lopez acknowledged the dearth of women leaders roles in today’s ballet world. “Why,” Lopez wondered, “did it take so long?” of her ascent, as well as Johnson’s. They see their work as artistic directors to shift ballet’s male-centric culture. The time has come.
Photos: Miami City Ballet’s Stephanie Rae Williams, Renan Cerdeiro, Anthony Santos, Lauren Fadeley in Pam Tanowitz’s Gustave Le Gray No. 1. Photo by Teresa Wood.
Lauren Fadeley in Walpurgisnacht Ballet. Photo by Daniel Azoulay.
Dance Theatre of Harlem’s Ingrid Silva and Alison Stroming in Dianne McIntyre’s Change. Photo by Kent Becker.
This review originally appeared in the Fall-Winter 2019 issue of Ballet Review, which is the penultimate issue. After more than 50 years, Ballet Review will cease publication with the Spring-Summer 2020 issue.
© 2020 Lisa Traiger
2019 Danced: A Year of Watching
In a year of shutdowns and quid pro quo, #metoo and they, fake news and brutal losses in journalism, migration and detention, drain-the-swamp and impeachment, dance was a salvo and an appeasement in light of the incessant and depressing 24/7 news cycle of 2019.
The good news prevailed: curtains still rose, lights continued to shine, choreographers created, dancers danced, and audiences came and applauded. For all that, I am thankful.
My own 2019 dance year contained a few personal bests, including an invitation to take part in the Kennedy Center REACH opening programming on National Dance Day in September. For the free outdoor stage, I curated and narrated what was called a “D.C. Local Dance History Program.” In hindsight, a better title, perhaps “D.C. Dance Luminaries” or stars, would have made it sound sexier. I was fortunate to bring together under a single umbrella The Washington Ballet — performing an excerpt from choreographer Choo San Goh’s signature piece, the sleek neo-modern “Fives” — and Jones-Haywood School of Ballet. I even got a quick photo op with TWB AD Julie Kent and Jones-Haywood AD Sandra Fortune Green — probably a first. I was moved to bring Melvin Deal and his African Heritage Drummers and Dancers to a Kennedy Center stage for the first time.
Beyond that, I published a 2,500-word piece on the history and increasing popularity of Israeli contemporary dance artists around the world for Moment magazine.
And I continued to watch and write on dance. Here are my highlights from a year of highs and lows.
2019 began and ended with two of the most intriguing — and artistically different — programs featuring locally based choreographers. January 26-27 at Dance Place, Orange Grove Dance left me intrigued and wanting more from its evening-length Waking Darkness. Waiting Light. Filled with momentous moments of mystery, of dreams, of haunted memories and profound reflection, the four performers, including choreographers Colette Krogol and Matt Reeves, fill the work in ways that make this tightly knit piece feel expansive. With washes of light and hand-held coffee-tin spotlights, designed by Peter Leibold, and an atmospheric yet musical sound score by Dylan Glatthorn, along with Mark Costello’s projections that give the evening a noir-ish feel, Waking Darkness. Waiting Light is both physically and emotionally athletic in parsing the netherworld of half-remembered dreams and unforgettable nightmares. The visceral approach to movement by Krogol, Reeves, Jonathan Hsu, and Juliana Ponguta let this work resonate deeply.
Another local best, also on view at Dance Place came late in 2019: tap dancer extraordinaire Baakari Wilder and director/choreographer Kerri Edge brought the searing REFORM: Racial Disparities in American Criminal Justice to Washington, D.C., November 23-24. Though still under development, the evening-length piece is a polemic — in the best sense — on the legacy that slavery and racism has wrought on our beloved United States. Featuring tappers Omar Edwards, Abron Glover and Joseph Webb joining Maryland-native Wilder, along with live jazz from the Dom Ellis Trio, REFORM is the type of piece on would expect in a year of so much political and social upheaval. This is a piece that aims to change audiences’ perspectives on race, racism, incarceration and institutional prejudice. Intermingled with live solo and accompanied tap numbers are torn-form-the-headlines or -history video clips: Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, and Yusef Salaam, one of the young men accused of being a “Central Park Five” member.
I heard chatter in the lobby after the show that tap was not an expressive medium to carry forth the heavy message this show imparts. But tap is exactly the appropriate genre to pull back the curtain on America’s long-standing racist and hate-filled roots. With its heavy-hitting footwork by Webb and Edwards, its lighter more nervous tremors from Wilder’s solo performed in prison stripes, to the chorus line of leggy beauties from the Divine Dance Institute, tap is exactly the right means to express the anxiety, fear despair and hope these men represent as they parse through the history of slavery, racism and discrimination in America. REFORM, in ways, reflects and moves past some of the methods and materials in the groundbreaking 1995 musical Bring in ‘da Noise, Bring in ‘da Funk, of which Wilder is an alum, but REFORM feels more like a sequel, taking audiences further by immersing them in the ramifications of black-men’s actions that are still statistically more likely to land them in jail or dead, than their white counterparts. REFORM is difficult to watch and doesn’t leave audiences with much uplifting. Rather it’s a call to both acknowledgement — particularly for privileged audiences, white or otherwise — and action.
Two other works in 2019, too, left me feeling a sense of urgency to step forward and do something. At Dance Place February 16 and 17, Brooklyn-based Urban Bush Women’s Hair & Other Stories, crafted from personal narratives from a wide-ranging tour of kitchens and living rooms, beauty shops and church basements, that demands audience members to ask who they are, where they stand and, ultimately, will they take a stand. With text, spoken word, narrative vignettes, video sequences and participatory sections, over nearly two-and-a-half hours, Hair & Other Stories becomes both a celebration of resilient black women and a challenge to outsiders. Co-choreographers (and UBW associate artistic directors) Chanon Judson and Samantha Spies lay out plenty of provocative concepts through song and dance, narrative and lecture, stylists’ props like pomades and combs. The performers’ rolling shoulders, undulating spines, bodies pulled earthward, fluttering arms and articulations of torsos, pumping knees, and raised fists draw from the lexicon of Africanist movement. And along with the equal purity of stillness and work gestures like sweeping, brushing, and stirring motions a variety of embodied cultures are braided into the choreographic language. As in any UBW concert, the audience is asked to stand, come down to the stage and move with and alongside the dancers. that draws from deeply planted roots. We’re told, and reminded, that this isn’t merely a performance: “This is the urgent dialogue of the 21st century.”
Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater celebrated its 60th anniversary at the Kennedy Center Opera House with a glitzy opening night featuring hip-hop master Rennie Harris’s “Lazarus.” It was the company’s first two-part piece and the work is a companion, really a sequel, to Ailey’s masterwork, “Revelations,” which mined his own “blood memories” growing up in the African American church. While “Revelations” is a journey from slavery to renewal to a celebration of freedom in church, that tracks African American history, “Lazarus” picks up where Ailey left off, dealing forthrightly with the U.S. history of racism, the nation’s original — and ongoing — sin. Harris draws movement motifs from Africanist body language and the searing recognition of the continuing struggle — and triumph — of being black in America. For more, see my review here.
February also brought New York-based Zvi Dance to Dance Place February 9-10, performing his 2012 Dabke, previously seen in the area at the late American Dance Institute. In fusing the Arab folk dance typically performed in lines with hands clasped or arms around shoulders with contemporary dance, Zvi Gotheiner sets his dancers into patterns of complex rhythmic stomps, fierce and barefooted. Lines and groups play off and against each other, and groups and solos merge and fade, as snakelike lines intersect and disperse. There’s a harshness of attack that’s both thrilling and disconcerting and subtle, barely-there gestures a raised fist, steely gaze, the throwing of stones, or chest-bumping confrontation, suggest sparring, even uprising. That the Arab-born dabkah, merged into the bouncier less earth-bound debke in the Israeli folk dance community, also tells a story in this dance about cultural convergence and appropriation.
Beyond hometown presenters, a new work, premiered on the Kennedy Center’s signature Ballet Across America program, intrigued me. The pair of programs May 28 – June 2 in the Opera House brought together Dance Theatre of Harlem and Miami City Ballet on separate evenings, and then, together, the two companies shared the world premier of Pam Tanowitz’s quirky, enigmatic, yet engrossing “Gustave Le Gray No. 1.” DTH offered up one of its classics, Geoffrey Holder’s sunny-hued Caribbean-inspired “Dougla” along with a presentable “Valse Fantaisie” by Balanchine. Miami City Ballet brought the little-seen Robbins/Tharp “Brahms/Handel,” smartly and lovingly performed, along with a sunny but slight work by Justin Peck, “Heatscape,” which probably plays well in sunny Miami.
Tanowitz’s “Gustave,” though, took ballet into the realm of post-modernist conceptualism. The spare piano score by Caroline Shaw, played by fearless Sylvia Jiang, set the four dancers, clad in Reid Bartelme and Harriet Jung’s silky red tunics and pants. Shaw’s score was named for 19th-century French photographer Gray and it pings with staunch chords and equally staunch silences, then tinkles with a touch of, is that Chopin? The dancers are set on a cerebral course, there must be a written set of instructions somewhere detailing their squiggles, shakes, walking patterns, and formations as the four — Renan Cerdeiro, Lauren Fadeley, Anthony Santos and Stephanie Rae Williams — make their way across the stage. And, soon, the piano, and pianist, too, get in on the crossing. Yes, the dancers themselves push the piano across the stage — and, yes, Jiang continues to pluck out notes and chords, and once in her new spot, on the other side, one of the men carries out a piano bench for her to perch upon before the four gather ‘round like they might share a song to her accompaniment. When the curtain closes, it’s with a sigh of wonderment and regret, for, “Gustave Le Gray” was a piece d’occasion, likely never to be seen and wondered on again.
The Washington Ballet continued, under artistic director Julie Kent, to seek out new works for the ballet repertory. Its April 3-7 program at the Harman Center brought three, respectable, but not likely important new works to the stage. (Alas, I missed the fall program of new repertory.) Dana Genshaft’s “Shadow Lands,” with its glimmery sheer costumes and music for orchestra and recorded tracks by Kennedy Center composer-in-residence Mason Bates, already elevated the work. The balletic-based movement is clearly executed but it’s the far more subtle interactions that make this a piece to be seen again. Along with the eight dancers, two principal roles — the Observer, Javier Morera, and the Outlier, Katherine Barkman (the evening I attended) — suggest a story or at least a relationship, with meaningful looks and glances. Let’s hope this one gets another viewing to parse the piece.
And a mid-summer treat brought Meredith Monk and her vocal ensemble to the Rasmuson Theater at the National Museum of the American Indian, presented by the Hirshhorn Museum. Performing Cellular Songs: Concert Version, Monk, in her signature brown braids, was joined by three other voice artists and Allison Sniffin on voice, violin and keyboard. With Monk on keyboard and voice, the ensemble created rich sound sculptures along with a moving kaleidoscope of video scenarios designed by Monk and Katherine Freer. The all-female configuration of voices felt as if Monk has built an alternative society, damn the patriarchy. And as the singers, all clad in pure, crisp white, maneuvered around and across the stage in various geometric configurations, seated, standing, walking and pausing, they became a metaphor for being, a human kaleidoscope. There’s great mystery — even subversively so — in the way Monk builds on the beauty and significance of the voice — here solely female — in rising, alliterative, contrapuntal and choral rushes and diversions. Together with bodies and background videos moving together and in tandem Cellular Songs builds and subsides. And in the lingering hum of the final sung notes, before the audience applauds, there is enough air space for a collective breath. A sigh. Is it responding to the disappointing year we’ve had, or, maybe, just maybe, it’s a sign that everything might be all right. At the very least, that’s one way to move forward in the coming year.
Finally, I spent three weeks at the Dagara Music Center near Accra, Ghana, in July and August, studying African dance, drumming and gyl, African xylophone. This unforgettable and challenging experience emphasized for me that technique is highly valued in African dance, particularly from the Dagara people — the region the DMC emphasizes. The technique has little to do with body placement, turnout, leg and arm positions and head placement, athleticism or virtuosity — even when those values are often expected in African dance. Instead, musicality and rhythm are the key to technical proficiency and that was much, much harder than I anticipated. Staying on top of the beat and clapping on four-one, rather than one-two or one-three, took me a while to assimilate. Additionally, living in the DMC compound and going on excursions throughout the country enabled me to see the physicality Ghanaians embody in their daily lives: cooking, chopping, pounding, harvesting, carrying — anything and everything on their heads from baskets to once a sewing machine — sweeping, brick making, starting fires to cook on coals outdoors, pounding and grounding nuts and gourds. These work motions and gestures become the choreography. It was a beautiful ad unforgettable lesson on how beautifully bodies speak through and of culture.
Photos: Meredith Monk’s Cellular Sounds, photo Richard Termine
Orange Grove Dance in Waking Darkness. Waiting Light, photo @evangelina_g
Baakari Wilder in REFORM, photo Michael Leroy
Jacqueline Green in Rennie Harris’s Lazarus, Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, photo Paul Kolnik
Tendayi Kuumba in Hair & Other Stories, Urban Bush Women, photo (c) Hayim Heron
The Washington Ballet’s Gian Carlo Perez and Kateryna Derechnya in Dana Genshaft’s “Shadow Lands,” photo Victoria Pickering
© 2019 Lisa Traiger, published December 30, 2019
Lukewarm Welcome
TWB Welcomes
The Washington Ballet
Kennedy Center Eisenhower Theater
Choreography: Fokine, Balanchine, Ratmansky, Lopez Ochoa
Washington, D.C.
September 28-29, 2018
By Lisa Traiger
Three seasons ago, The Washington Ballet welcomed former ABT principal ballerina Julie Kent as artistic director, only its third since Mary Day founded the company in 1976. Expectations were high on how Kent would remake the chamber-sized company Septime Webre directed for 17 years. Aptly titled “TWB Welcomes,” the fall 2018-19 season opener at the Kennedy Center Eisenhower Theater provided some insight into the company’s direction. Alas, that direction is nowhere near new or innovative. The welcome in the title alluded to invited guest artists: ABT’s Stella Abrera, Ballet Manila’s Katherine Barkman, Houston Ballet’s Connor Walsh and Marcelo Gomes. Together they provided star quality amid the 24 company members and six apprentices, particularly after the loss of renowned and much-loved dancer Brooklyn Mack, whose contract was not renewed after protracted negotiations.
The two programs featured a classic Balanchine and a Fokine, a smattering of pas de deux, and each closed with a newer 21st-century work, presenting the company in agreeable light. The pair of mixed bills provided another glimpse at Kent’s vision for the company, which can be summed up as “ABT South,” for she appears to be re-shaping TWB into what’s most familiar to her — ABT-friendly repertory and story ballets, like last year’s Romeo and Juliet and this season’s The Sleeping Beauty, both ballets frequently danced in Washington by touring companies.
Program A, titled “Exquisite and Exotic” — do ballet programs always have to be named these days? — was like summer television re-runs, opening with “Serenade” (which the company danced in the season prior 2017-18 season) and closing with Alexei Ratmansky’s “Bolero,” another repeat from the previous season. Likewise, Program B — “Ethereal and Evocative” — opened with Fokine’s “Les Sylphides,” another recent re-tread. Its closer, Annabelle Lopez Ochoa’s “Sombrerisimo,” an all-male play on jazzy incongruities, was on the season opener just three seasons earlier in 2015. These programming re-runs rather than fresh repertory, put a damper on what should have been an auspicious welcome for a new season and invited guests.
“Serenade” was well danced and offered the debut of Gomes in the ballet. The company demonstrated growth in tackling the Balanchine staple, particularly the corps de ballet, which is looking stronger, crisper and more unified under Kent’s direction. “Les Sylphides,” alas, emitted a musty scent, save for the spritely Maki Onuki in the Mazurka, joined by Rolando Sarabia. The dancers looked bored, their performances mostly underwhelming.
Both evenings featured gala fare like the grand pas de deux from “Swan Lake,” and Houston Ballet’s Walsh proved a stalwart partner to EunWon Lee, while Katherine Barkman (invited into the company shortly after her guest appearance) displayed her solid technical attributes and lively demeanor, accompanied by apprentice Alexandros Pappajohn. Balanchine’s “Tarantella,” alas, lacked brio from Stephanie Sorota and Alex Kramer, and on the following evening Tamako Miyazaki and Masanori Takiguchi made this spicy morsel into milquetoast. The standout proved to be the richly layered and profoundly expressive pairing of Gomes with long-time Washington Ballet dancer Sona Kharatian in the first duet from Ratmansky’s “Seven Sonatas.” Kharatian’s maturity and heartfelt emotions pierced the sensitive work. With Gomes, the pair was spellbinding in communicating the work’s lush and resonant shadings, beautifully accompanied by pianist Glenn Sales.
Both programs concluded with 21st-century works. “Bolero,” with its sporty costumes — tank tops numbered from one to six — skillfully set the six dancers into singular solos against the group. Their bored worldliness fleshed out Ravel’s oft-heard score. “Sombrerisimo,” with its jazzy riffs and competitively boyish roughhousing, ended Program B with a flourish as a flood of bowlers tumbled from the rafters.
Kent’s re-runs suggest either that she hasn’t solidified her vision for the company, or, perhaps, budget constraints are forcing the troupe to rely on recent repertory rather than investing in new works. Whatever the reason, the impression left was that The Washington Ballet’s “Welcome” is barely lukewarm.
Above: Katherine Barkman, photo: Ari Collier, courtesy The Washington Ballet
This review originally appeared in the Spring/Summer 2019 issue of Ballet Review. To subscribe, visit Ballet Review here.
© 2018 Lisa Traiger
Cuban Ballet Strives To Leave Behind the 20th Century
Don Quixote and Giselle
Ballet Nacional de Cuba
Kennedy Center Opera House
Washington, D.C.
May 30 – June 3, 2018
By Lisa Traiger
The star of Ballet Nacional de Cuba’s most recent U.S. tour did no pirouettes, arabesques or grand jetes. She simply stood and executed a little port de bras ballet with her arms. Before the curtain was lifted at the Kennedy Center Opera House, an announcer intoned, “Ladies and gentlemen, pleased turn your attention to the box.” The audience turned around and peered upward. Ninety-seven-year-old Alicia Alonso, channeling fictional faded movie star Norma Desmond, rose in the center box at the Kennedy Center Opera House, her skin ghostly pale, interrupted by oversized black glasses, her hair wrapped in a glamorous, sequined-studded turban, waved and fluttered her arms – suggesting the last gasp of a dying swan.
The prima ballerina assoluta has, of course, earned those accolades. A brief film recounted the Cuban dancer’s life and her early career in the U.S., dancing with Ballet Caravan, New York City Ballet’s precursor, and then-brand-new American Ballet Theatre, before returning home to found the Cuba’s national ballet school in 1948. Her determination is legendary: after losing much of her sight at 21 and subsequent surgeries and bedrest for a year, she learned and rehearsed the role of Giselle lying in bed, then returned to the studio and stage. It became her signature, defining Giselle for generations to follow.
Nearly to the day of the fortieth anniversary of the National Ballet of Cuba’s United States debut at the Kennedy Center, the company and Dame Alonso returned, May 30-June 3, 2018, closing out Artes de Cuba, the largest Cuban arts festival in the world, featuring music, theater, dance and visual arts. Bringing two classics for which the company is renowned, Giselle and Don Quixote, was a safe choice for story-ballet-hungry Kennedy Center audiences. They enabled the company to show off its well-trained corps and principals in easy-to-digest works.
While Alonso and her late ex-husband and company co-founder, Ferdinand Alonso, honed their ballet technique in New York in the 1940s, once the island nation came under Fidel Castro’s hold, there was virtually no American contact for decades, lending the company a decidedly Soviet technical prowess – sturdy balances, muscular jumps and turns. In fact, in some ways these dancers are more Russian in their attack and technique than present-day Russian dancers.
The Cuban’s Don Quixote resembles the nation itself – striving to be up-to-date yet stuck in the mid-20th century. Sets and costumes appear a bit shabby, but lend the ballet a quaint, simple aura. The ladies’ pink, yellow, and lavender flounced dresses have seen better days, as have the matadors’ and gypsies’ flimsy red capes. But no matter, it’s the dancing that should shine.
Alonso and her assistants have added some sunny flair to the proceedings beyond the principals – Kitri and Basilio, the young lovers, who seek to marry, against Lorenzo, Kitri’s father’s, wishes. The title role, the doddering Don, danced on opening night by Yansiel Pujada, is played as a gentle, feeble dreamer; his clouded vision sees dragons where shaky windmills stand, and a queen when Kitri treats him kindly. His Sancho Panza, loyal aide de camp Dairon Darius, has a soft side for the old man that’s sweet-natured in the way he takes his hand and leads him or calms his agitations.
Viengsay Valdes was no stranger to Washington audiences as Kitri, having performed the role with verve and astonishing balances – it felt like she could have made a sandwich balanced on one leg en pointe, the other lifted high — as a guest with The Washington Ballet in 2009. On opening night in 2018 with her home company, nearly a decade later, she battled wobbles in her arabesques en pointe and unsteadiness even in completing her pirouettes. She smiled appealingly, though her fiery temperament was set on low. She managed to finish her requisite fish dives and supported pirouettes with flourish.
Alas, few sparks flew between Valdes and tall Dani Hernandez, her rather milquetoast Basilio. He used his lanky frame and long legs for lengthy jumps that stretched across the stage. Ariel Martinez, the lead matador, proved spicier, his power-packed barrel leaps and knee-ending turns punctuated with a slinky-like arch of his back. The Opera House orchestra played bright tempos under the baton of Giovanni Duarte, who milked the Minkus score with syncopated pauses, especially for Valdez to savor an extra 3 or 5 seconds in poses.
Alonso’s Giselle doesn’t veer from its classic Romantic roots. Premiere danseuse Sadaise Arencibia proves herself up to the task. In act one she is pony-tailed and playful, though reserved, even shy as Albrecht – Raul Abreu – woos her and wins her heart. Ernesto Diaz as Hilarion, bearded and earthy, is no match for Abreu’s refined, poetic mannerisms.
Act I offers no surprises, the dancing and mine by the principles and the corps de ballet are sufficient, without being spectacular. The white act II is when the ballet should sing. The Wilis, floating and bourre-ing the stage in a wave of white tulle, are a power-packed army, not delicate ballerinas. And Ginett Moncho as Myrtha, Queen of the Wilis, emits an icy chill; her staunch gaze could crack glass. Here Arencibia’s gentility and lush technique softens her cold, ghostly nighttime forest compatriots. And her gracious generosity doesn’t only save Albrecht from his dance to death, it elevates the steps closer toward sublime.
Photo: Viengsay Valdes and Dani Hernandez in Alicia Alonso’s Don Quixote, courtesy Kennedy Center.
This review originally appeared in the Winter 2018-19 issue of Ballet Review and is reprinted here with kind permission. Click here to subscribe.
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