dvd review – Page 2

DVD Review: La Bayadere – The Bolshoi Ballet

July 2, 2014 by 4dancers

The impressive sets and exquisite costumes for Yuri Grigorovich’s staging of La Bayadere primed me to be blown away by the whole production. It’s superbly danced, but some just-missed dramatic moments left me wanting more at the final curtain.

In scale and technical execution, the ballet is outstanding, as should be expected from one of the world’s top companies. Parades of dancers with scarves, fans, drums, birds, and water jugs fill the first two acts in strings of divertissements celebrating the engagement of Gamzatti (Maria Alexandrova) and Solor (Vladislav Lantratov). When the High Brahmin reveals Solor’s involvement with Nikiya, a temple dancer (Svetlana Zakharova), Gamzatti vows to seek revenge. After Nikiya’s death by snakebite, Solor falls into an opium dream in which Nikiya is multiplied by thirty-five shadows. His guilt and despair remain unresolved as the curtain closes on the third act.

Few companies display character dances as energetic as the Bolshoi, and those in Bayadere are no exception. The drum dance is a highlight of the Act 2 variations. The dances for the bridal attendants look crisp and fresh. Soloists in all three acts excel dancing to tempi that bit excitingly at their heels.

As Gamzatti, Alexandrova commands the palace scenes. She’s a haughty woman, fully in control of her body, her kingdom, and her future. Her rage toward Nikiya is unsettling, lending suspense to her forced composure as the Bayadere dances. Lantratov’s Solor seems youthful in comparison to her power.

Zakharova’s extreme flexibility is hypnotizing, but her Nikiya is frequently unreadable. She really opens up in a solo in Act 2, dancing a plea to the gods accompanied by a lone cello. Her prayer is in vain; after an inconvenient dance with a basket of flowers, a snake hidden inside the basket bites her fatally. In this version, Gamzatti is never implicated. Who would dare accuse Alexandrova?

After the extravagance of the first two acts, I looked forward to the simplicity of the Kingdom of the Shades. The Shades’ entrance—32 white tutus , one arabesque after another, snaking down a three-tiered ramp to assemble in a wispy, reverent block—is worth the wait. There’s nothing flat or tedious here, just a dreamy treat for the eyes and ears.

The highlight for Zakharova and Lantratov’s chemistry is her scarf solo in Act 3. It says as much about Solor as Nikiya; her sensitive footwork and phrasing make her no more or less than an extension of the opium smoke that brought about his delirium. I wanted that connection to continue through the end. The rest of the dance-mime in the act is beautifully musical but lacks candor.

If the purpose of remounting the classics is to transport the viewer to the past, the Bolshoi’s production does so. This performance is expertly danced, though it raises few questions about the principal characters.

DVD Review: Still Moving: Pilobolus at Forty – A Film By Jeffrey Ruoff

April 28, 2014 by 4dancers

by Emily Kate Long

The dance company Pilobolus is named for a fungus that has the ability to launch its spores a distance of up to two meters—for a person, that would mean being thrown through the air at 100 times the speed of sound. The pilobolus fungus is also remarkable for its accuracy. The company makes no such claims; late co-founder Jonathan Wolken describes how Pilobolus’s first forty years brought about “the evolution of our own style…whatever that might be.” As co-diector Robby Barnett remarks, and as Ruoff illustrates, the company is process-oriented. For Barnett, that process is more interesting than any of the finished dances the company has produced.

Still Moving opens with footage of the dancers loading up a couple of cars and hitting the road. They’re on their way from the company’s studios in Washington Depot, CT to Dartmouth College in Hanover, NH. Wolken, Barnett, and Michael Tracy began the collaboration that would evolve into Pilobolus at Dartmouth in the early 1970s. With no prior dance education, they worked to amuse themselves, living communally and practicing in any spare space they could find.

Forty years out, the company still embraces that experimental, simple, communal way of living and working (some interviews are punctuated by insects chirping in the background). The dancers are like a family, supporting one another through injuries and Wolken’s death in 2010.

Ruoff captures the company thoughtfully through interviews, performance footage, and clips of Pilobolus in rehearsal. Perhaps most telling is footage from the community workshops, classes in which the public get to participate in the creative process of developing movement, comfort and trust in one another to make a short dance work.

The film runs 38 minutes. The DVD also contains a version dubbed over with Ruoff’s insightful commentary. This documentary does a thorough job of celebrating what’s so unique about Pilobolus, a modern dance company that, as Barnett half-jokes, doesn’t “know anything about modern dance.”

Contemporary Dance Warmup For Intermediate/Advanced Dancers With Bruno Collinet

November 4, 2013 by 4dancers

by Emily Kate Long

“Organic” is the word Bruno Collinet uses most to describe his movement philosophy in this 60-minute Contemporary Dance Warmup (by Tezoro LIVE Productions). That word has become so widely used in so many different contexts that it carries little descriptive power, but in this case one thing “organic” certainly means it that the movement feels good. Technique is not the emphasis here, rather, a sense of listening to the body while directing its energy. The movement is expansive and invigorating, challenging yet therapeutic. Bruno Collinet’s teaching manner is warm and welcoming, dynamic and energetic as he guides the viewer through five sections of elastic, visceral movement.

Each section is demonstrated in the studio by Collinet and two assistant dancers, and then shown with music in a class. The dancers on the video are arranged in different facings, making the movement sequences easy to learn.

Section I is floor work—a series of contractions, swings, rolls, and stretches “to put the body in a good mood,” as Collinet puts it. This is followed in the class by shoulder stretches, balance, and spotting work. In turning the head, Collinet emphasizes taking the eyes (“the look”) first, then following through with the head, something that often gets overlooked in many exercises for spotting or head isolation. I was happy to see it addressed here.

Section II focuses on the hips, backs of legs, and outsides of legs in a sequence of standing weight transfers, loose developpes, a fall, and a little more floor work. In section III, plies in first, second, and fourth position are deliciously tangled up with suspensions, cambres, and balances on two feet and one foot. Sections IV and V are a set of leg swings front and back in attitude. Section V emphasizes equilibrium with more suspensions and balances punctuating each repetition of the leg swing set.

This warmup is a comfortable and stimulating full-body workout. It was easy enough to follow and left me feeling powerful, coordinated, and in touch with my limbs and the ground. Taken at a slower pace or performed in reverse order, it could also make a good cool-down for looseness and relaxation after dancing.

DVD Review: Alonzo King LINES Ballet: Triangle Of The Squinches; Scheherazade; Dust And Light

October 3, 2012 by 4dancers

by Emily Kate Long

Alonzo King LINES Ballet: Triangle Of The Squinches; Scheherazade; Dust And Light

This DVD is the first I’ve seen of Alonzo King’s work. I dearly wish I could have seen these dances live; in this case, film detracts from the real thing. The number of cuts and close-ups at inappropriate moments is distracting—these are extraordinarily beautiful dancers doing beautiful movements, and it’s a shame to be denied the ability to watch all of them and study the spatial and dynamic relationships among bodies in the whole space.

Triangle of the Squinches features music by Mickey Hart and imposing sets by architect Christopher Haas. The ensemble sections are busy, made busier by the closeness of the cameras. My favorite moments in this piece are the simple ones: a man nearly falls and is caught and supported by another; a woman walks along the set, as if the wall is the floor, suspended by two men; later, the same woman runs slow-motion with the help of her partner. Dancers occasionally stop and watch one another as if something larger than themselves is passing among them.

Scheherazade is set to a re-working of the Rimsky-Korsakov score by Zakir Hussain. It is costumed simply but spectacularly, and overall is more impressionistic than narrative. A highlight is a moving pas de deux for Laurel Keen and David Harvey, but even here the break is too great between what is dancing and what is relationship.

Dust and Light is another marvelously costumed dance—simple but impeccably well-fit leotards and dresses for the women and shorts for the men in soft, luminous shades. The music is by Corelli and Poulenc, and the atmosphere of the piece is dreamy and sublime.

There are truly lovely moments in all three pieces, but even more that are missed because of the general absence of external focus of the dancers while dancing. I appreciate the cerebral nature of King’s work and the originality of shapes, but I feel as if I’ve just been in a room with a lot of people thinking out loud at once and have no idea what was actually said. The dancers deliberately watch one another when they are not dancing, but as soon as the movement starts, the focus goes inward. I desperately want to go with them and watch them take one another along. Something so thoughtful and intelligent shouldn’t give the impression that it may not be shared.

Here’s a sample of the DVD:

Assistant Editor Emily Kate Long began her dance education in South Bend, Indiana, with Kimmary Williams and Jacob Rice, and graduated in 2007 from Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre School’s Schenley Program. She has spent summers studying at Ballet Chicago, Pittsburgh Youth Ballet, Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre School, Miami City Ballet, and Saratoga Summer Dance Intensive/Vail Valley Dance Intensive, where she served as Program Assistant. Ms Long attended Milwaukee Ballet School’s Summer Intensive on scholarship before being invited to join Milwaukee Ballet II in 2007.

Ms Long has been a member of Ballet Quad Cities since 2009. She has danced featured roles in Deanna Carter’s Ash to Glass and Dracula, participated in the company’s 2010 tour to New York City, and most recently performed principal roles in Courtney Lyon’s Sleeping Beauty, The Nutcracker, and Cinderella. She is also on the faculty of Ballet Quad Cities School of Dance, where she teaches ballet, pointe, and repertoire classes.

DVD Review: Ballet and Orchestra of the Lyon National Opera in Maguy Marin’s Cinderella

September 12, 2012 by 4dancers

by Emily Kate Long

There’s the saying that if you want to hide something, you put it in plain sight. By dressing her dancers as dolls—wigs, masks, and full-body stuffed suits—Maguy Marin places the un-reality of the fairy-tale as such in plain sight. It is not about a girl and a boy feeling specific things in response to specific events governed by the norms of a specific time and place. Joy in response to love, sadness because of loss, fear of despair and isolation—none of these things are character- or situation-specific to Cinderella. They are simply human, and this staging of Cinderella brings them front and center.

Visually, the work is wonderfully strange with plenty of irony and, sometimes, downright silliness. The Sisters and Stepmother are pitifully rude, comic at times and sinister at others. Their torment of Cinderella is violent—thank goodness for the padded costume! Some of the same partnering elements are used later and more gently among Cinderella and the Good Fairies, effectively contrasting the Sisters’ roughness with the Fairies’ care.

Most touching in this work is Cinderella’s awakening solo in Act Three. After attempting to console herself with a broomstick version of her beloved prince, she collapses to the floor in utter despair. Who hasn’t felt so hopelessly wretched upon losing the things most dear to us: love and affirmation?

Marin incorporates play in a very literal way—the Gavotte contains plenty of flat-on-the-back falls for Cinderella as the Good Fairies encourage her to dance, and the ball scene includes guests sliding down the stairs and games of hopscotch and jump-rope. The pas de deux between Cinderella and the Prince features a shy game of paddy-cake and the “airplane,” with her supported off the ground on his feet. All this happens without seeming contrived; the exuberance and joy build naturally. After all, we are dealing with the language of young children, which is widely understood without any words at all.

Also striking about this version of Cinderella was the collision of old-fashioned and futuristic elements. The plaster-face doll masks reminded me immediately of dolls I used to play with at my grandmother’s house. The little girl through whose imagination we witness the story is dressed in vaguely Victorian clothing. Yet, the construction of the dollhouse is minimalist, the Fairy Godmother is an androgynous robot, and Cinderella travels to the Ball in a miniature car. The ballet concludes with a parade of Victorian pull-toys and a clear cellophane film descending as a scrim would. It seals the dolls in their house, as if reminding us that projections and interpretations are just that, real though they may seem. They exist both uniquely for each of us and commonly for all of us.

Ballet and Orchestra of the Lyon National Opera in Maguy Marin’s Cinderella. ArtHaus Musik GmbH, 2012. 87 Minutes.

Assistant Editor Emily Kate Long began her dance education in South Bend, Indiana, with Kimmary Williams and Jacob Rice and graduated in 2007 from Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre School’s Schenley Program. Ms Long attended Milwaukee Ballet School’s Summer Intensive on scholarship before being invited to join Milwaukee Ballet II in 2007. She also has spent summers studying at Saratoga Summer Dance Intensive, Miami City Ballet, Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre School, Pittsburgh Youth Ballet, and Ballet Chicago.

Ms Long has been a member of Ballet Quad Cities since 2009. She has danced featured roles in Deanna Carter’s Ash to Glass and Dracula, participated in the company’s 2010 tour to New York City, and most recently performed the title role in Courtney Lyon’s Cinderella and the role of Clara in The Nutcracker. Prior to joining Ballet Quad Cities Ms Long performed with Milwaukee Ballet and MBII in Michael Pink’s The Nutcracker and Candide Overture, Petipa’s The Sleeping Beauty and La Bayadére, Balanchine’s Who Cares?, Bournonville’s Flower Festival in Genzano and Napoli, and original contemporary and neoclassical works by Tom Teague, Denis Malinkine, Rolando Yanes, and Petr Zaharadnicek.

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