Miami City Ballet: "Dances at a Gathering" and more

Miami City Ballet
July 1 & 2, 2006
Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, Los Angeles, CA

Photos by Steven Caras. Above: Dances at a Gathering. Below: Fancy Free.

This visit by Miami City Ballet was an uneven set of performances, redeemed by a gorgeous performance of "Dances at a Gathering" at the Sunday matinee. The company is great from a technical standpoint, especially for a so-called regional ballet company; the men can jump, tour and spin with the best of them from ABT and the Kirov. But under the artistic direction of Edward Villela, a former star of New York City Ballet, what the company has really become known for is the Balanchine and Robbins repertory, particularly the repertory that Villela danced during his own dancing days.

First the good: "Dances at a Gathering" is choreographer Jerome Robbins' masterpiece of simplicity and subtle emotion. It is a one hour ballet set to Chopin piano pieces; all we hear musically is the single piano - a plaintive and still change from the big orchestra ballets. Similarly, the dancing looks pure and simple: no frills costumes, only 10 dancers. They gather on stage in pairs and alone, dancing deceptively simple dances in small groups on a bare stage - it is, as the title suggests, dances at a gathering of friends and companions. There is a complexity in the movement and emotions - constant flowing and innovation in the steps, subtle hints that there may be more going on in the relationships between the dancers without anything ever explicitly being mentioned. "Dances" is ballet that, despite its length, is completely satisfying in its appearance of simplicity and grace.

At the Sunday afternoon performance, the 10 Miami City Ballet dancers accomplished it with aplomb - the difficult steps and pas de deux looked disarmingly easy, and the dances just flowed organically on and off the stage. The hour flew by mesmerizingly.

One wishes that the rest of the weekend went as swimingly: "Fancy Free" is about three sailors on a one-day leave in New York City. They hit up the bars in search of women, and when they meet two, they try to win their affection by doing a dance competition. This ballet pre-dates the musical "On the Town" for both Robbins and composer Leonard Bernstein, and later served as the inspiration for it. It was Robbins' first big success as a ballet choreographer, and Bernstein's big success, also, as a symphonic composer. It requires that the dancers be both technically skilled for the dance competition, but also adept at mime and story telling to propel the plot. On Saturday night, however, the ballet fell flat with unconvincing mime and flat performances from the five dancers; they seemed to wake up in time for the jumps and difficult spins, but technical fireworks do not a successful "Fancy Free" make.

The middle ballet on Saturday was Twyla Tharp's "Nine Sinatra Songs," a fairly insubstantial party piece when you look only at the choreography - its a bunch of ballroom dance inspired duets, with athletic lifts and impressive kicks and the like. For it to work, the dancers need to really sell it and make it worth watching. Unfortunately, a bundle of technical mishaps and a general lack of charisma had me counting each song going "ok here's the second song, only 7 more to go!"

Balanchine's "Stravinsky Violin Concerto" closed the Saturday evening performance, and it showed good dancing: the dancers are clearly more comfortable in the neoclassical stuff. However, this time the orchestra in the pit completely failed the company: Stravinsky's score is definitely modern, with rapidly changing meters, complex rhythms and an almost angular melodic line. Let's just say the orchestra didn't much accomplish this. While the dancers on stage were finally rising to the occasion, there wasn't much that they could do when the music wasn't going with them.

Fortunately, "Dances at a Gathering" was so wonderful that this is what will be left in my mind from the company's performances in Los Angeles. I guess this just means that Miami City Ballet is a great company - but only when its dancing the right repertory.