DANCE

My Year in Tango: Dénouement

Some final reflections before the next Milonga!

By: Sabina Samiee
Published May 20, 2013, in CULTURE, DANCE

I am wondering if you are inspired to try tango, or exhausted from the sheer thought of it?

It is our last chapter together. I am wondering if you are inspired to try tango, or exhausted from the sheer thought of it? Or wondering how on earth people engage in such odd behaviors…and for what?! Have these weeks of a confessional tango evolution prompted you to let tango whisk you away? I feel obligated to offer you something more. As if the story were not enough, you might feel you deserve a moral, or a summation of my psychological state? A finishing comment, perhaps, where I fillet my feelings, laying it all on the line: the reward for reaching the end, a gift to you of resonance and moment. What will that be?

My story was a mixture of real time, contemplations, confessions. And here we are, squarely at the end. In a somewhat subdued mood, I think back over the last months. This has been a journey of reflection, relation, and response, but most of all, of many connections but not necessarily to the actual human being who held me close.

Continues…

Dancing to the how and why of ‘It’

Katherine Longstreth and Christy Funsch find a beautiful way to the heart of women

By: admin
Published May 17, 2013, in DANCE

Katherine Longstreth in “O Where.” Photo: Marv Johnson

By MARTHA ULLMAN WEST

What is the “it” in “The How and the Why of It,” the title that Katherine Longstreth and San Francisco choreographer Christy Funsch bestowed on their new show, which opened in Studio 2 at Zoomtopia on Thursday night?

In the highly detailed, beautifully clear movement of Longstreth and Funsch, as well as New York-based dancer and filmmaker Kelly Bartnik, “it” reveals itself as a “way” — the way women think, the way they move, the way they cope, the way they love, the way they find strength, the way they suffer, the way they take all of the above and make it into art.

The show begins with “Reins,” a film made by Geoffrey Ehrlich and Bartnik, that has been screened at a number of festivals, and sets the evening’s introspective mood. Bartnik walks down a city street, has a glass of wine, encounters some bones arranged at the center of what might be a mandala, goes to a ladies’ room, sits on the toilet, watches projections of her dancing self (Doppelgangers, they’re called in the program), looks at herself in the mirror, goes up to the building’s roof. I am urban, I am human, I am an artist, this film seems to be saying.

In “O What,” a solo choreographed by Longstreth, Funsch – after playing with a flashlight, shining it around the darkened space to the strains of “O What a Beautiful Mornin,” – rises slowly from a bed of artificial turf, a fluffy crinoline at one end, stretching her arms, seeing if they function, moving one shoulder in a small circle, shrugging at one point with considerable elegance. Some of the movement is finely detailed, and much of it is expansive, although there is little traveling, as Funsch thinks about the day ahead of her, then returns to the turf, gets down on all fours and rests her chin on the scratchy stuff. The day might not be so beautiful, after all.

There is an immediate bleed into “O Where” and Longstreth’s gorgeous performance of her own choreography. It starts with a slow, musical walk, to Dvorak, fingers flowing like sea anemones, her movement self-contained and gentle. Then she sinks to the floor, rolls, pushes herself against the floor on one side, is on her feet, performing a deep arabesque, her black-clad legs seeming endless. She removes the white tailcoat she’s wearing and folds it, slowly, precisely, the way flags are folded at military funerals. Throughout the piece she uses her face as well as her body in a performance that is simultaneously theatrical and introverted.

Christy Funsch. Photo: Lydia Daniller

Funsch, who has been working with Longstreth since they met in graduate school in the early 1990s at Arizona State, next performed her solo, “Moving Still(s).” The two have a shared aesthetic sensibility, and both are gorgeous dancers, but Funsch’s style in this piece is quite different. It begins with her standing with her arms raised, her elbows over her ears, then she slowly puts her hands over her eyes—something terrible has happened. The music (a soundscape of music by several composers, designed by Alex Keitel) becomes jittery as all get-out. So does Funsch’s dancing: fingers shake, hips jerk, she falls to the floor. As the sound gets jazzy, so does she, dancing with the only real playfulness in the show, noodling around as if she’s alone in the studio, then scooting along the studio floor on her bottom, reminding me of Eliot’s lines in “The Love Song of J.Alfred Prufrock” – “I should have been a pair of ragged claws, Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.” The solo is in many ways a tour de force, a meticulously detailed performance, in which Funsch seems completely unaware of the audience, but nevertheless connects.

Longstreth’s “Narrative Medicine” ends the show on a fascinating, poignant note. It will resonate with anyone who has been through the diagnostic process themselves, or with someone they love, and speaks volumes as well about the friendship of women, perhaps because it is danced by two women, Bartnik and the choreographer. It begins with the two dancers on opposite sides of the stage, holding big wooden spools (originally for electrical cable), props that are integral to the choreography. Each, rolling a spool, walks toward the center of the space in silence, where they meet, place the spools on their sides and sit on them, facing each other. They use their hands to communicate, in a rhythmic, elegant little dance. Next, Longstreth walks to the front of the space to read something on a cloth rectangle suspended from the ceiling, probably an X-ray, using a pencil light, which she then uses to “examine” Bartnik, who is now lying on the two spools – like, thank you Mr. Eliot, “a patient etherised upon a table.” Then suddenly, to some ominous music, the two are again on opposite sides of the space, shoving the spools at each other extremely aggressively. Bartik pulls strings from Longstreth’s costume, and hangs onto them. Then they link hands and pull each other around in jumping, heaving movement, every jump and every heave imploring, Do not leave me. It’s a stunning expression of helplessness and vulnerability. And affirmation.

Jeff Forbes’ lights, Rochelle Waldie’s costumes, and for the last piece, the textile design by Jen Hurley, all contributed to a highly theatrical, polished show.

NOTE:

There are two more chances to see this show, Friday and Saturday nights (May 17-18), before it goes to San Francisco the end of the month. Ticket information is here.

BodyVox with a B: bold, breezy, Bollywood

In Program B of the dance company's 15-year retrospective, the pleasure is ours

By: admin
Published May 11, 2013, in DANCE

Skinner, writing his book. Photo: Blaine Truitt Covert

By MARTHA ULLMAN WEST

A celebration of “All-American optimism” is what my colleague Bob Hicks called Program A of the BodyVox fifteenth-anniversary retrospective. That applies to Program B as well, which opened on Thursday night with a dozen pieces (two of them on film), ranging from the silky and stylish excerpt from “Leave the Light On,” which opened the show, to the bruising, elbow-in-your-ribs humor of “Man I Keep Hid,” which closed the first half. In the second half, the elaborately costumed and highly entertaining “Bollywood” opened the entertainment and a repeat of the new mixed-media “Café Blanco” ended the evening on a gleeful note.

Along with American optimism, and fifteen years of hard and talented work, BodyVox celebrates the stylistic egalitarianism that has marked much of our theatrical dance since Eugene Loring made “Billy the Kid” in 1938. Want to mix classical ballet with gymnastics, ballroom dance, modern dance, jazz dance and contact improvisation? The three choreographers represented in this show are fearless genre-blenders. I saw more classical ballet steps Thursday night than I did the night before at the Schnitz when Ballet B.C.’s gorgeous dancers performed nearly everything but in their Portland debut.

“Leave the Light On,” danced to bluegrassy music by Edgar Meyer, set the eclectic tone. Company founders Jamey Hampton and Ashley Roland, who choreographed and performed it with Zachary Carroll, Heather Jackson, Daniel Kirk, Anna Marra, Josh Murry, Holly Shaw, Eric Skinner and Katie Staszkow, made the blending of several styles look easy, lyrical, romantic, the women’s tiered ruffled dresses adding to the rippling effect, the men energetically courtly. No surprise about the men: three of them, Skinner, Kirk and Carroll, are former ballet dancers; all of BodyVox dancers have some ballet training.

Costumes, all of them designed by Roland, are integral to most of the work made by the BodyVox artistic directors, from pure and lovely dance pieces like “Leave the Light On” to broad comedies like “Open Line,” in which dancers in mix-and-clash outfits of plaids and stripes take calls from the audience on their cell phones and say things like, “It’s hard to dance and talk at the same time.” This was mildly funny in 2005; today, for me, not so much, but the Thursday night audience was vastly amused. As for the oversized, baggy shorts worn by the dancers in Roland’s “Man I Keep Hid,” performed with their arms thrust down into the waistband, sort of like Irish step dancers who must keep their arms plastered to their sides, it looked clever and amusing for about two minutes, before it descended into cuteness.

On the other hand, Hampton’s “Stop,” a takeoff on choreographers, and possibly Arthur Murray (there is a diagram of dance steps on the stage) delivers its humor through the dancing itself, especially Hampton’s own. With the twitch of an eyebrow, the lifting of a knee, the reach of one of his long, eloquent arms, Hampton can, and does, send the viewer into gales of laughter. He did it in “Carmina Burana,” for the Portland Opera, which was really the beginning of BodyVox; he does it in “Bollywood” as a sort of 007 figure being chased by a bad guy (Jonathan Krebs) in sunglasses, and he definitely does it in “Stop,” one of several pieces set to songs by Joe Henry, in which he treats Roland and Carroll like mannequins (or puppets, my seat-mate thought), manipulating their bodies into the positions he thinks he wants, then changing his mind and doing it over. I’ve been watching Hampton dance for more years than he wants me to reveal (also Skinner and Kirk). After seeing him perform in “Stop” and with Roland in the two Mitchell Rose films – the superb “Advance,” in which he and Roland, filmed facing away from the camera, dance their way through landscape and cityscape, even the Portland Art Museum; and the witty “Contact,” which seems to be a send-up of James Bond – I hope he doesn’t quit ’til he stops breathing.

Easy wheelin’ in “Café Blanco.” Photo: Blaine Truitt Covert

As a choreographer, Hampton, who certainly knows his craft, has one tic I wish he didn’t. The company aesthetic is determinedly apolitical and non-polemic, and that’s refreshing. But we live in a political world, and pieces like “Trampoline,” in which a lone female dancer is bounced up and down and dragged around by seven men who form the equipment of the title, remind me a little too vividly of the amount of abuse, physical, emotional and I’d venture to say economic, that women are being subjected to in contemporary America. Nevertheless, Anna Marra looks lovely while being dragged, and permits herself to be bounced with considerable aplomb. There’s a bit of such dragging in the lovely duet “Alice,” danced by Jackson, one of the stars of this company, and Skinner to a Tom Waits song about the vicissitudes of love, against a projection of clouds that make the piece as visual as it is musical. But all this hefting of the female body is truly becoming, no other word for it, a drag.

On the other hand, I was delighted to see again Skinner’s 2010 “Write My Book,” a solo he made for himself in which he dances with, around, through and in a small collection of rubber car tires. It hasn’t a lick of tap-dancing, but is nevertheless highly reminiscent of that great exemplar of American dance Gene Kelly. I liked this piece when I saw it the first time, for the fearless insouciance of Skinner’s seemingly improvisational performance and the natural ease of his boyish dancing. This, too, is danced to Joe Henry, and makes a a seamless transition to “Man I Keep Hid” when the dancers in that piece make their entrance via chute and Skinner beats a hasty retreat.

All of the transitions in this show are seamlessly done, with film often functioning like the entr’actes in classical ballet, little performances given in front of the curtain so the scenery can be changed behind it. It was opportunities to change costumes that were needed in this show, and this device made the 12-piece program move very fast indeed. As did the dancers, a fairly unusual mix of the experienced and the young, all of whom seem to have an equal amount of energy on stage. We saw this in “Bollywood,” with its faintly tawdry costumes, giving it the feel of the Tony Curtis version of “The Thief of Baghdad,” and “Shed,” in which the dancers perform with two-by-fours, placing them on the stage floor and hopping from one to another, then breaking into quartets and the like, executing pirouettes and fouettés along the way with considerable éclat and technical skill. BodyVox-2 company member Jeff George was exuberantly outstanding in “Bollywood”; all the young dancers – Samuel Hobbs, Marra, Josh Murry, Shaw, Staszkow – distinguished themselves as individuals and ensemble members throughout. And technical director and lighting designer James Mapes does a superb job of creating settings with lights that also move the proceedings right along.

“Café Blanco” certainly flashes by rapidly, even after the dancers hop off the Razor scooters. As choreographers, Hampton and Roland seem to be exploring all of all the ways in which dancers can use their arms. It’s highly effective, and as Hicks notes, it ends the show with a very American exuberance, as manifested in a duet of rapid little jumps and a brief solo for Hampton in which he scoots rapidly across the studio space on his butt, ruefully grinning all the way.

They know what they’re doing, these BodyVox folk, and they’re providing considerable distraction at a time when as Americans we need it. Me, I’m grateful for the entertainment, and the pleasure of watching lovely dancers move, even with the caveats above. I had fun. You will, too.

NOTE:

Program B repeats at 7:30 tonight (Saturday, May 11), 7:30 p.m. May 17, and 7:30 p.m. May 18. Program A repeats at 7:30 p.m. May 16 and 2 p.m. May 18. Performances are at BodyVox Dance Center, 1201 Northwest 17th Avenue, Portland. Ticket information here.

Dance Preview: Slater and Anderson’s ‘Find It’ at Conduit

By: admin
Published May 10, 2013, in DANCE

By JAMUNA CHIARINI

“Find It,” an evening of contemporary dance choreographed and produced by close friends Kristine Anderson and Rachel Slater, opens tonight at Conduit Dance in downtown Portland and then will repeat twice on Saturday.

“Find It” is an accumulation of dances choreographed by the pair separately and together over the last year. After meeting at the Blue Sky Festival produced by the Dance Coalition of Oregon where they were both performers and Artists Grant recipients, they went on to work together in Conduit’s Dance+ performance festival, Ten Tiny Dances, Tere Mathern’s GATHER and the N.E.W Festival at Studio 2.

Rachel Slater and Kristine Anderson’s FIND IT opens at Conduit Friday night.

The program of 10 dances spans a range of human experience: joy, loss, panic, failure and love. With live musical accompaniment by Tim Ribner, the concert luxuriates in yards of luscious red crepe, sexy sequined dresses, complicated gauzy white netting and a chair that isn’t just a chair. Dancers Elizabeth Bressler, Erika Lachenmeier and Ruth Nelson help bring to life Slater and Anderson’s emotional and deft choreography.

This performance is the last opportunity to see Kristine Anderson and her choreography before she leaves Portland in August on a permanent move to Guatemala. She and Slater have plans to take “Find It” on the road to Guatemala and El Salvador. If you are interested in helping make this happen you can make donations at the show or contact them at their website.

When: 8 pm Friday, May 10, 5 and 8 pm Saturday, May 11
Where: Conduit Dance, 918 SW Yamhill St. #401, Portland
$10-$15 check or cash please
For reservations or further information please contact Kristine and Rachel: finditdance@gmail.com

My Year in Tango: Part Eight

Please, Tango, take me away...

By: Sabina Samiee
Published May 8, 2013, in CULTURE, DANCE

Tango….take me away.

What began for me as a casual interest grew into a pleasure I hope to engage in for the rest of my physically able life. I get that my interest in tango will come and go, but, it is something I can always return to, and I get the feeling it will be ready to receive me with a close embrace.

I have spent much time trying to figure out the tango treasure, that feeling of soaring high, being taken somewhere special while remaining firmly grounded. We all seem to have our pursuits of pleasure, our flights of fancy: gardening, cooking, photography, biking, kiteboarding, yoga. This temporary divergence from our own “normal life” is a way to find solace, engagement, relaxation, to fly our thoughts away with something more than the expected. Tango was now one of these pursuits for me.

EDITOR’S NOTE: If you are behind on My Year in Tango, do not despair. We have an intro , a Part One, a Part Two, a Part Three, a Part Four, a Part Five, a Part Six, and a Part Seven, all just a click away! Look for our last episode in a few days…

How do you get there, you ask? It takes time. And a focus on the music.

According to Portland tango instructor extraordinaire, Alex Krebs, a one-year dedication to the dance should incorporate taking lessons, attending milongas, listening to the music, and frequenting practica, (those several-hour-long sessions where tangueros and tangueras practice, practice, practice). Krebs describes the connection with the dance that can be unearthed with dedication and perseverance during this 365 day experience:

“Becoming one with the art, the trance: time slows down, you forget you are doing all the steps, you think about other things. There is no anxiety, no worrying. You are not conscious of anything but the interpretation of the music and the movement. The steps themselves disappear and fade away; there is no compelling force to really do anything. You have learned to use the closeness and the space.”

To get to that level, a determination and resolve to press forward must exist for both leader and follower. This has been a frequent point of discussion, I know, mostly because it runs SO counter to our own cultural sensibilities. Accepting the idea that it’s OK to have a leader and a follower is central to learning and loving tango. As you advance in your dancing abilities and with a well-informed instructor, you will get a chance to explore the relatively new concept of “passing the lead back-and-forth” from leader to follower as the playfulness and feisty nature of this dance moves into a more modern realm…but that’s an entirely different story. Let’s get back to basics.

Continues…

BodyVox tricks up the time machine

The Portland dance company's effervescent new show celebrates 15 years of all-American optimism

By: Bob Hicks
Published May 4, 2013, in DANCE

Six is a crowd: boys meet girl. Photo: David Krebbs

Six is a crowd: boys meet girl. Photo: David Krebs

You can’t keep those BodyVoxers down: like a whack-a-mole or an inflatable punch-me clown, they just keep popping up. About an hour and 38 minutes after landing in Portland at the end of a European tour – all right, it was three full days – there they were again Thursday night on their home stage, ripping through 11 energetic pieces in about two dizzying hours.

And that was just the beginning. BodyVox‘s newest show, “Fifteen,” is a two-parter, with a second program set to open next Thursday. In all, the two programs will include 22 pieces and 13 dancers, all traveling at something close to warp speed. The title is a celebration of the number of years BodyVox has been around, and the organizing principle is retrospective: a fond frolic down memory lane. Except for one new piece – the dreamy, fluid, Razor-scootering “Café Blanco” – all of the pieces are repertory works, going back in Program A as far as 1998 and otherwise concentrating on the years up to 2005.

BodyVox is something of an anomaly in the dance world, quirky and contemporary but outside the mainstream of both the traditional and experimental wings. With a deep affection for circus, mime, vaudeville, and silent film in addition to training in ballet and contemporary-dance techniques, it’s really movement theater – less dancerly than many companies but usually more dancerly than Momix, Pilobolus, and ISO Dance, the companies that artistic directors Ashley Roland and Jamey Hampton worked in before creating BodyVox. BodyVox dances can be serious, but they arrive with a buoyant and deeply American optimism that often bubbles over into outright comedy. The company mines old American pop culture for material, from classic songs and movies to social dances like the Lindy Hop. Costuming, usually designed by Roland, is a witty and extravagant rustle through the Goodwill aisles of a slyly imaginative mind. BodyVox performers are artists, but they’re also unabashed entertainers – they can milk a moment by the overflowing gallons – and while that might put off some serious-minded devotees of high art, it’s also built a legion of enthusiastic and not at all undiscerning fans.

Jackson: resident ingenue in a whirl. Photo: David Krebbs

Jackson: resident ingenue in a whirl. Photo: David Krebs

It’s a good thing for artists to look back now and again on what they’ve done in the past, and BodyVox audiences got a sneak peek at the deep past in March’s BodyVox-2 program, which included two ebullient pieces that Hampton and Roland created even before BodyVox was born: 1985’s “Scare Myself” and 1987’s “Psycho Killer.” The current program moves forward from there with 1998’s ebbing and flowing water piece “Rip/Tide” (it actually closes the evening) and includes such favorites as 2005’s diners-gone-wild “Hopper’s Dinner” – set to Tom Waits’ scratchily funny “Tabletop Joe,” and preceded by Jeff George’s solo rendition of Roland’s wall-kicking 2005 “Reservations” – and Eric Skinner’s 2001 “X-Axis,” a taut and lovely bright-red aerial piece for himself and Daniel Kirk, that is somehow tensile and languid at once. Hampton and Roland’s 2002 “Falling for Grace,” in which Hampton, Skinner, and Josh Murry upend a meeting between Kirk and Heather Jackson to a score by Danny Elfman, holds up nicely, while 2001’s “Reverie” seems a little overly cute in retrospect. Hampton is once again a miming virtuoso, riffling his hands through his elbows and fluttering through space, in his 2001 solo “Moto Perpetuo,” which suitably kicks off the program. Few companies are as comfortable with film as BodyVox, and some of the company’s best, including Mitchell Rose’s 2000 “Deere John,” with Hampton mooning and swooning over a giant earth digger, break up the live action.

The company’s continuing high energy and effervescence are all the more impressive considering that its four mainstays – Roland, Hampton, Skinner, Kirk – have been performing for so many years. They’re still working at a high level, and in the past few seasons the company’s reinvigorated itself by adding younger performers like Zachary Carroll, Jonathan Krebs, George, Murry with his yellow flop of young-Baryshnikov hair, and the sassy Jackson, who eagerly digs into many of the ingenue roles. Program A is boy-heavy, with only Roland and Jackson as woman performers. Program B will add several woman dancers to the mix.

On Thursday night I happened to be sitting in front of a longtime BodyVox fan who kept a running commentary going. “I don’t remember this one,” she’d say; “we must’ve missed that show.” Or, “Oh, yes! I love this piece!” Ordinarily I’d have been irritated, but I realized she was genuinely swept into the thing and felt completely at home, in her own way a part of the company. At the end she turned to one of her companions, a BodyVox newcomer, and asked, “Are you glad you came?” “Oh, yes!” her guest replied. “I absolutely loved it!” But no one got closer to the BodyVox spirit, I think, than the little girl, maybe 7 or 8 years old, a few seats to the side of me. What I heard from her, over and over, was giggling. Sometimes she was overtaken by giggles, cascading in a torrent of delight. Watch out. That sort of thing can be contagious.

NOTE:

Program A of “Fifteen” repeats on Friday, Saturday, May 16, and in a May 18 matinee. Program B opens on Thursday, May 9, and continues May 10, 11, 17 and in a May 18 evening performance. Performances are at the BodyVox Dance Center, 1201 Northwest 17^th Avenue, Portland. Ticket information is here.

OBT School show: a serenade to the future

Lots of promise lights up the ballet stage. But with director Damara Bennett moving on, what's next?

By: admin
Published April 27, 2013, in DANCE

Chloe Shelby and Joseph Warton in “Serenade.” Photo: OBT School

By MARTHA ULLMAN WEST

Oregon Ballet Theatre’s Annual School Performance opened at the Newmark Theatre on Thursday night with George Balanchine’s sublime “Serenade,” and closed with excerpts from the same choreographer’s ridiculous “Who Cares?”, a piece I enjoyed watching for the first time ever, because of the obvious joy and technical skill with which these young dancers performed it.

In between, we had fairly standard recital stuff, including Jerome Robbins’ “Circus Polka” with Kevin Poe as the gentle ringmaster; that complex exercise in working together, the Maypole Dance from Sir Frederick Ashton’s “La Fille Mal Gardeé ”; Christopher Stowell’s “Rose City Waltz”; and “Etudes Variations: Boys,” followed by “Etudes Variations: Girls”. Note: there are a lot more boys in the school than there used to be, and many more students of color; both will benefit the art form in the future, if not Oregon Ballet Theatre itself, and the Portland audience.

Excerpts from “Serenade” were included in last year’s SOBT show, leaving the audience hungry for more. This year, we got to see all of the first piece Balanchine made in this country, in which he famously incorporated into the choreography the latecomer to rehearsal, the dancer who fell. OBT ballet master Lisa Kipp staged it, Gavin Larsen polished it, and in most respects it looked like the “Serenade” I remember from my youth, when City Ballet’s season opener always included the intensely musical work.

Here, the soloists were all accomplished technically; that’s no surprise from Jordan Kindell, who is now an OBT company artist, or apprentices Kelsie Nobriga and Chloe Shelby, and advanced student Maggie Weirich, also featured in “Who Cares?,” is clearly very promising. But Joseph Warton, who is all of 14 years old, his long limbed body still in the coltish stage, while a somewhat tentative partner, danced in “Serenade” with a maturity beyond his years and experience, and was a knockout in “Who Cares?,” his pirouettes precise, centered and finished, his joy in the dancing both palpable and infectious.

Live music made a huge difference, as it always does. Tchaikowsky’s “Serenade in C Major for String Orchestra, Op. 48,” transposed for piano, was eloquently performed by David Saffert, an extremely gifted musician who knows how to play for dancers, an unusual and often underappreciated gift. “Rose City Waltz,” which Stowell made for the School at the end of his and departing school director Damara Bennett’s first year here, is danced to the familiar strains of the Act 1 waltz from “The Sleeping Beauty,” also played in a piano version by Saffert. There are roles for several levels of students, and they all did well; Bennett did the staging, and she is a particularly fine teacher of children, which showed in this and in “Circus Polka” which gives the tinies in pink a tiny moment in the spotlight.

Joined by company members Christopher Constantini and Kindell, wearing the glitzy costumes created by the OBT costume shop for the version of “Who Cares?” they performed several years ago, the advanced students whipped their way through the technically demanding choreography Balanchine made to such Gershwin tunes as “Somebody Loves Me,” “Bidin’ My Time,” “s’Wonderful,” and the exuberant finale, “I Got Rhythm,” with considerable éclat. As a program note tells us (as well as the backdrop of the city’s skyline) Balanchine intended the work to be particularly evocative of New York and its American energy. That’s an energy that Portland, for all of its hip reputation, doesn’t have, but “Serenade,” at the beginning, and “Who Cares?” at the end of the concert, put me back in my home town for an evening, and I’m grateful.

When Bennett came here, she revived a school that was failing. I hope her successor will build on her achievements, and that the end of the year shows will continue to be a pleasure for both the student dancers and the people who watch them perform.

My Year in Tango: Part Seven

The beginning Tanguera faces down her first Milonga...

By: Sabina Samiee
Published April 26, 2013, in CULTURE, DANCE

Every tango student reaches the moment when she realizes that you really cannot claim to “dance tango” until you have been to a Milonga. As a fledging tanguera, I needed to experience the Milonga on a frequent basis, to get comfortable with dancing among friends and strangers. But I hesitated. The idea of the Milonga is intimidating to anyone who is used to a well-lit, spacious, dance floor with the comfort and security of an instructor nearby. But attending practica (hours-long opportunities to practice with an instructor on-site) only goes so far—the real tango dancing is done at the Milonga. This was my next challenge.

EDITOR’S NOTE: If you are behind on My Year in Tango, do not despair. We have an intro , a Part One, a Part Two, a Part Three, a Part Four, a Part Five, and a Part Six, all just a click away! Look for Part Eight in a few days…

My time came one spring night.

Continues…

American song, American violence: OBT’s dance for troubled times

Two world premieres and a company premiere reveal the dancers' range

By: admin
Published April 21, 2013, in DANCE

From left: Michael Linsmeier, Xuan Cheng, Javier Ubell, Lucas Threefoot in Trey McIntyre’s “Robust American Love.” Photo: Blaine Truitt Covert

By MARTHA ULLMAN WEST

Pontus Lidberg’s “Stream,” Trey McIntyre’s “Robust American Love,” and Matthew Neenan’s “At the border” were made well before the horrific events of recent months: the Newtown school shootings, the Boston bombings, and the weak-kneed failure a few days ago of the United States Senate to pass minimal gun control legislation.

Yet each piece, as unveiled Thursday night at the Newmark Theatre in Oregon Ballet Theatre’s American Music Festival, spoke in subtle and not so subtle ways to the country’s current emotional climate – for many of us a roller coaster of grief and fear, hope and helplessness, resignation and resilience. All are quite different, stylistically, musically, and in point of view, but each speaks to the human condition, in this time and in this place.

Lidberg’s “Stream,” an unusually low-energy curtain raiser set to a commissioned score by Portland-born composer Ryan Francis, and a world premiere, showcases the legato talents of Alison Roper and Lucas Threefoot. They are the linchpins of a piece its Swedish maker proclaimed is “cyclical, but non-linear,” without a beginning and an end.

This is a little disingenuous, since the piece begins and ends with Roper and Threefoot performing an elegiac pas de deux, alone on stage. In between, the ten cast members, including technical virtuosos Julia Rowe and Chauncey Parsons, perform an extremely limited vocabulary of runs and lifts and sculptural groupings, more dependent on the billowing skirts that are a feature of Reid Bartelme’s unisex monochromatic costumes for movement fluidity than they are on Francis’s unstructured score. Having said that, very occasionally there is a pulse to the music that energizes the proceedings on stage, but not often enough; this stream has few ripples, and seemingly no rocks.

If “Stream” is laced with fatalism and resignation, McIntyre’s “Robust American Love” expresses the can-do, optimistic attitude of the pre-Civil War pioneers who settled the American heartland. Its choreography is firmly rooted in his own idiosyncratic melding of classical ballet and modern movement, with the seamless addition of a stylized square dance, all performed to the eclectic music of Seattle indie band the Fleet Foxes.

The women, Roper and Xuan Cheng, appropriately are not on point; this does not mean that Roper doesn’t deploy her long, space-eating legs like the true ballerina she is, every extension and developpé symbolizing the steadfast resolve of the women who built this country. McIntyre shows us a new side of Cheng, moreover, a gritty girlishness that is very appealing. For the men – Threefoot, Michael Linsmeier and Javier Ubell, who is an exuberant, quick-footed knockout in this piece – the movement is equally expansive. At one point Ubell is paired with Roper, pretty clearly the mother of this adventurous family, who lifts him, perhaps to calm him down, possibly to keep him from going off on his own, which unaccountably made the audience laugh.

Costumes are always an integral part of a McIntyre piece. These, denim tailcoats for everyone except Roper, who wears a cutaway dress worn over flesh-colored tights, are intended to symbolize the discarding of Victorian corseted clothing that was beginning to take place at this time. They worked well for the women; for the men, not so much: they looked like they’d been “pantsed.” Nevertheless, this short narrative ballet about one aspect of the American spirit left the audience smiling and feeling uplifted. And unlike “Billy the Kid,” its Americana genre predecessor created in 1938 by Eugene Loring and Aaron Copland, in “Robust American Love” nobody gets shot, symbolically or otherwise.

Neenan’s “At the border,” choreographed in 2009 to John Adams’ richly textured, eminently danceable “Hallelujah Junction,” begins with the dancers running across the stage as if pursued by demons, or, I couldn’t help thinking, shrapnel caused by pressure-cooker bombs. It’s a highly athletic, musically acute piece, the movement inflected with Balanchinean jazzy angularity, reminiscent of “Agon” and “Stravinsky Violin Concerto.” (The latter to be seen in June on OBT’s season-closing program.) It’s tempting to look for influences in a young choreographer’s work, and “Border,” with its relentless speed and athleticism, did make me think of Twyla Tharp’s “In the Upper Room,” although Neenan gives both the dancers and the audience far more chance to breathe.

What was wonderful to see was impeccable classicists like Parsons, Haiyan Wu and Yang Zou inhabiting this contemporary movement, replete as it was with such classical steps as bourrées and pirouettes, but also somersaults and skidding stops. And Ubell’s classical virtuosity, executed at top speed in this aerobic work, along with his performance in “Robust” made the evening very much his. In both the opening “Stream” and “Border,” Olga Krochik also stood out, joined in the last piece by Martina Chavez, the increasingly lovely Grace Shibley and Julia Rowe. Costuming was pretty basic for this piece, lycra shorts and tops for everyone, for the principal women in brilliant colors. The lights, designed by John Hoey and executed by Michael Mazzola, are as spectacular as the music and the dancing.

The show repeats next weekend; I hope to see it again.

NOTES:

“American Music Festival” continues Wednesday, Friday and Saturday, April 24, 26 and 27. Ticket information is here.
Catherine Thomas’s review for The Oregonian is here.

My Year in Tango: Part Six

The Black Knight of Tango arrives on the scene...

By: Sabina Samiee
Published April 18, 2013, in CULTURE, DANCE

The tango aficionado tends to be a fascinating individual—well-read, interested in challenging music, aware of arts and culture issues and a good quiet conversationalist, capable of filling the long moments of silence before the music starts. I guess, one wouldn’t last long being less than charming in such close circles. The more I ventured into the tango world, the more I was sure tango attracted the kind of person who might be nice to add into my circle of trust. And then, sometimes I am just flat out, plain wrong. Perhaps, especially when it comes to judging people, history has proven I am a terrible, hopeless judge of character. Or should that be, hopeful?

EDITOR’S NOTE: If you are behind on My Year in Tango, do not despair. We have an intro , a Part One, a Part Two, a Part Three, a Part Four, and a Part Five, all just a click away! Look for Part Seven in a few days…

Part VI Lumination from the Black Knight I

By that late spring Saturday afternoon, our little class had whittled itself down to about six unreliable singles. Remember the statistical warning? People were falling in all directions…in love off the dance floor. Our steadily diminishing yet dedicated group quietly and obediently circled in the line of dance. We now had the added ability of ochos, (when the woman forms a beautiful figure 8 pattern by caressing her foot across the floor), and the abrazo (embrace), the molinete (going around windmill-like the leader in long, lean steps), the ocho cortado (with an added cross step). Whenever something new was introduced we looked rather like robots being ushered around counterclockwise by a zombie, but we tried to ignore that. New stuff threw the class into an atavistic spin.

Then, just in time to shake things up, The Black Knight came to class…

Continues…

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