Apollo (chor. Balanchine/music Stravinsky)
Gong (Morris/McPhee)
Jeu de Cartes (Cranko/Stravinsky)
Orange County Performing Arts Center, Costa Mesa
May 2, 2006
Photo: A press photo for ABT in Mark Morris' Gong. Photo by Rosalie O'Connor.
First of all - it's SO nice to have some big ballet in Southern Calfornia after an 8 month drought. Sure, there were Nutcrackers and some random, very good modern dance items, but there's nothing like pointe shoes and a big repertory ballet company. For me anyway.And American Ballet THeatre's opening night was a very enjoyable evening, even if it was a bit rough around the edges.
Apollo, as a ballet, is always so enjoyable to me, no matter who is dancing it well or not. It's a breath of fresh air and the choreography is so incredibly perfect as it flows completely logically, yet always surprisingly, from step to step and form to form.
David Hallberg's debut in the title role was very promising, though understandably not fully formed yet. He plays the puppy-dog, wide-eye wondered Apollo throughout, instead of progressing from child through to adult elegance. Additionally, the dancing was weighty - the jumps landed with loud clunks, and his steps were heavy, as though he were over characterizing the role. That said, though, he will certainly grow into it and there was lots to like about his performance. He's got that incredibly strong elegance and posture, and his sheer tall blondness makes him appear god-like very naturally. Promising debut.
The three muses were Julie Kent as Terpsichore, Gillian Murphy as Polyhymnia and Maria Ricetto as Calliope. Kent was lovely as Terpsichore - a kind of effortless grace, even if parts were a bit *too* soft at times. Murphy was fine in the trio bits, but her variation verged on clunky, salvaged somewhat at the end by her cute exclamation and run off stage. Ricetto looked the most Balanchinian of the bunch. The only bad part of the performance was when a cell phone nearly ruined the pas de deux for the audience; the dancing went on as usual, but I was jarred out of the performance.
Mark Morris' Gong was quite the contrast to Apollo; Morris' choreography has a sort of forced musicality when it is played right next to Balanchine. But with the very fun score and equally amusing quirks in the choreography (a supported arabesque hop on point becomes a kind of jackhammer as it gets repeated with heavier emphasis repeatedly, for example - to the amused delight of the audience), one sees that Morris is going for a more witty effect than purely musical one. Misty Copeland stood out in the pink tutu role, partnering with Marcelo Gomes in the later pas de deux set to no music.
Jeu de Cartes, in this version choreographed by John Cranko originally for the STuttgart Ballet in 1965, was a company premiere and it's certainly a fun piece, though still a bit rough in many of the transitions last night. No one was entirely comfortable in anything yet, but again it looked like it will come together fully very soon. As if to show how they are still trying to figure everything out, curtain call was a mess with no one being quite sure when to bow, or who to bring on the conductor, etc.
The ballet is staged as a set of three vignettes with roughly 5 dancers each, with the "cards" trying to fit in and make a good poker hand of sorts - running around, bumping into each other, with off-beat choreography in tune to the angles of the Stravinsky score. Herman Cornejo was a bouncy Joker who wove between the three movements of the ballet - starting off as Queen Irina Dvorovenko's antagonizer in the 1st movement, then becoming the butt (literally) of the five mens' joke in the 2nd movement, to being a prankster who helps out the girl left out in the 3rd movement. Despite the plotless nature of the ballet, there is a kind of progression here for the Joker: from being cruel at first (making the Queen cry), to learning what it's like to be the object of a joke, to then using jokes to help someone.
THere was fantastic dancing in five variations during the second movement (the men were Julio Bragado-Young, Aaron Scott, Grant Delong, Jared Matthews and Gennadi Saveliev), and Erica Cornejo was the cute 5th-wheel girl, trying to get in between two dancing couples. Dvorovenko's performance was the showgirl performance of the evening, with huge extensions and big dancing - plus curtain call eating after the show - but the performance less characterization and more Dvorovenko-izing.
Overall, a fun evening and its great to see the company doing works like this when they usually only visit with story ballets. It will be interesting to see how my perspective of the ballets goes with cast 2 of the mixed rep tomorrow night (Dvorovenko will dance Terpsichore... which should be, well, interesting).
www.ocpac.org
Most of this also appeared as a post on Ballet Talk.
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