Diana Vishneva does contemporary

What impressed the most about Diana Vishneva's Beauty in Motion program at the Orange County Performing Arts Center on Wednesday was her complete commitment and willingness to something different - something different from her usual tutu-pointe shoe classical ballets, different from the usual self edifying diva evening, and different, even, than conventional concepts of concert dance. Using her star power to build Beauty in Motion, she lent herself over to three major choreographers - two of whom don't usually work in classical ballet - and asked them to simply create work.

Though the evening was ultimately an uneven affair, you have to give Vishneva a lot of credit for trying this. She could have easily danced around in her usual tutu, collected our ticket money,and gone back to Europe where contemporary fare is more common. Or she could have put together an egotistical program designed to show off Diana and only Diana, in the manner as so many divas of past. While she did star in each of the three ballets on Wednesday's program, she wasn't always the spotlight: she was part of an ensemble in one, virtually unrecognizable through darkness, costuming and non-ballet dancing in another, and a queen among equals in the last. It shows that Vishneva is very interested in seeing where she can push and shove ballet in the present day, using her star power as the impetus - that is a pretty great thing to see in the usually static ballet world.

The latter two works on the program, Moses Pendleton's F.L.O.W. (For the Love of Women) and Dwight Rhoden's Three Point Turn, worked the best. Alexei Ratmansky's Pierrot Lunaire was an unfortunate bust of a way to open the evening, but lets talk about the more interesting works first.

(Rehearsing Pendleton's F.L.O.W. These and photos below by Steve Dawson, Orange County Performing Arts Center.)

Pendleton is artistic director and choreographer for MOMIX dance company, a spinoff of Pilobolus (they were last year's dancers at the Oscars, who created images from the nominated films with their bodies). His work F.L.O.W. was a clever three-movement piece of visual theater. In the first part, the entire stage was dark and there is a blacklight - the three dancers, Vishneva, Maria Shevyakova and Ekaterina Ivannikova wore glowing cloth on their arms and legs made shapes and lines (like a pyramid, bookstacks, fish in the water) by waving their arms or stacking them on top of each other. At one point, they simulated a ballerina using three sets of either arms to make arms, body and feet; the movement of the feet-arms was very clever in that it really did make the "dancer" look like a puppet in the dark. Very clever. In movement two, Vishneva laid over a sloped mirror and created surreal images and shapes with her sinewy acrobatic body (Appollinaire Scherr's New York Magazine article has a close-up posed picture of Vishneva on the mirror.) For the last movement, Vishneva donned a headdress draped all the way around in long strings of beads, then spun and spun around like a whirling dervish dancer, moving the headdress up, down and around to create mesmerizing patterns with the whirling beads. I barely recognized Vishneva in F.L.O.W. - she didn't look like herself in the last two, even though she was along on stage, because they weren't indulgent solos. She was serving Pendleton's vision of a theatrical image, and the images created were fantastic to see.

Three Point Turn closed the evening with Vishneva looking a little bit more like her usual ballerina image. She was wearing pointe shoes, but that's about all that was classical about it. Dwight Rhoden is choreographer and director of Complexions Contemporary Ballet (which tours to the Ahmanson Theatre in May), and his piece was a highly athletic, industrial vision of ballet. Vishneva was joined on stage by Complexions' Desmond Richardson - who was simply fantastic - as well as Shevyakova, Ivannikova, Mikhail Lobukhin and Alexander Sergeev, all four of them dancers from Vishneva's home theater in Russia, the Mariinsky (aka the Kirov). The stage set was a metal platform with the supports exposed, with the stage framed by lighting trusses, from which harsh columns of light illuminated the dancers. The dancing had a lot of exaggerated extensions and three acrobatic pas de deux and solos. Richardson and Vishneva smoldered in their bits, with Vishneva showing us her glamorous appeal and Richardson showing intensity and insanely beautiful feet. I wouldn't say the ballet had a theme, but there was a lot of pulling and tugging amongst the couples, and by the end we were just appreciative of the gorgeous athleticism on stage.

New can be a risky proposition, as Ratmansky's Pierrot Lunaire showed at the outset of the evening. Ratmansky is rapidly becoming one of the ballet work's most prominent choreographers (see this article in today's New York Times). We haven't seen much of his work here other than Bright Stream with the Bolshoi Ballet in 2005, but he's had many successes on ballet stages in Europe and New York so this premiere was of particular interest to local ballet fans. Unfortunately, Pierrot Lunaire was a mess on Wednesday night. (In Laura Bleiberg's advance feature in the Orange County Register last Sunday, she wrote "Ratmansky predicted 'Pierrot Lunaire' would be finished the afternoon of the premiere. He observed dryly, 'It makes it more exciting for everyone.' Does that suggest that what we saw on Wednesday may have been unfinished?) Set to Arnold Schoenberg's song cycle of the same name, the ballet just seemed to start randomly as soon as the curtain went up. Four dancers in dowdy clown outfits jumped onto the stage and bopped around to Schoenberg's jagged atonal score. Every once in awhile, a dancer adopted a vaguely clownish mannerism, but it didn't develop into any definable character. And when a song ended, so did the dance - quite suddenly, with everyone rushing off into the wings. Every once in awhile there'd be a solo for a dancer, who'd come out and do something bendy, or in Vishneva's case, do fantastic pirouettes then disappear into the wings. The whole piece felt slapped together and unorganized, it was boring to watch and a disservice to the music, which despite its jagged sound, is organized and purposeful. I didn't get a chance to revisit Ratmansky's ballet later in the week - but perhaps it will become a different with tweaks as Beauty in Motion travels to New York next week?

Anyway, I was glad that Vishneva pulled off what she did with Beauty in Motion, even if not all of the ballets created were successful. I've thought a lot lately about ballet as an art form and about what kind of relevance it can have for audiences today: does it have to rely on the grand classics that were created over a hundred years ago for its transcendent effects? Or can it continue to inspire with ever new work, the way theater and film can? This program didn't answer that question for me, but it certainly provided food for thought.

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So, I changed course after my last post about only doing dance stuff this week and next. Deciding upon them at the last minute, I've now seen a play and an opera, and will be seeing two operas tomorrow and going out to the see the new building at LACMA on Monday. Thoughts forthcoming. Wheeeee!