Wednesday, August 31, 2022

Miami City Ballet Flourishes

Hannah Fischer, Cameron Catazaro, and Adrienne Carter in
Diversion of Angels. Photo: Christopher Duggan

Miami City Ballet closed out Jacob’s Pillow’s 2022 summer festival with a flourish. The selection of repertory performed—by Martha Graham, Margarita Armas, Jerome Robbins, and George Balanchine—showed artistic and technical versatility under the direction of Lourdes Lopez, an alum of New York City Ballet. It was also proof that MCB has established itself as one of the most accomplished ballet companies now working.

The company danced Graham’s vivacious Diversion of Angels, with its trio of couples in white, red, and yellow, plus a chorus of five. The style demands some solid technique shared by ballet, most notably the ability to balance at length, canted on one leg with the other extended high to the side, and explosive leaps and jumps that expand in the air as if turbo-boosted. MCB handled these feats with ease, raising their legs ever higher, and leaping ferociously high. The Graham company’s bodies are drilled in her vocabulary continuously, sometimes to the point of exaggeration—contractions can read as gut punches, and breaths visibly chuff in and out. MCB’s rendition is softer and more fluid, befitting a more lyrical work like Diversion.

Renan Cerdeiro in Geta. Photo: Danica Paulos
Renan Cerdeiro danced Geta, a world premiere by Armas and an ode to the late Geta Constaninescu, a teacher at the MCB School. Dressed in a long white tunic, and set to “Ne Me Quitte Pas” sung by Nina Simone, the solo clicked through dramatic poses, bursts of energy, diagonal oppositions of the limbs, heart clasps, and ended with an arm sweeping to the side, a staple of end-of-class “reverences,” often a thank-you to the teacher and pianist. The devotion and passion elicited by Geta were palpable.

Interestingly, whether by chance or purpose, a similar sweeping arm move opened Robbins’ Antique Epigraphs (1984), a dance for eight toe-shoe clad women to Debussy. Each wore a different pale-hued chiffon sheath, lending a columnar, caryatid feel to dance at moments. Formal experiments, canons, and the occasional stasis dotted this work, on the more classical and lyrical side of the Robbins spectrum, even if it lacked his essential wit and snazz.

Miami City Ballet in Serenade. Photo: Danica Paulos.

Seeing it just before the milestone of Balanchine’s Serenade, to Tchaikovsky, raised some questions about the programming. There are similarities, even if Mr. B’s icon of ballet was created a half-century earlier. The ankle-grazing chiffon skirts, the formations of (mostly female) bodies shifting through geometries, and pleasing, gentle scores that accompany both, underscored the shared DNA. And of course, it’s tough for a dance to lead in to Serenade, one of the most beloved and seminal plotless classical ballets, a rich enough source to spawn a recently published fascinating book, Serenade: A Balanchine Story, by Toni Bentley. It’s part memoir, part analysis of the ballet, which remains among the most influential in modern ballet. And no doubt it must have influenced Robbins, whether overtly or subconsciously, when he created Antique Epigraphs, as it has countless other dances. It need not have preceded Serenade directly on the bill, unless the intention was to underscore the similarities.

One other nit to pick—the Ted Shawn Theater stage at the Pillow is slightly too small to accommodate the atmosphere and space required by Serenade. I usually see it performed by New York City Ballet at NYC’S Koch Theater, where it appears as if immersed in water, or in the clouds—just far enough away to remain dreamlike. At the Pillow, the dancers are much closer, so they read as human, rather than ethereal or archetypal. In the iconic opening scene, when the corps stands evenly spaced across the stage, there is not enough space between them and the proscenium, making it feel cramped. 

But who could argue with seeing a world-class company perform one of modern ballet’s greatest works, to close out a robust summer festival at the Pillow? A late summer treat, indeed.

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