Miami City Ballet in New York: Symphony in Three Movements, La Valse and In the Upper Room

(Miami City Ballet in Balanchine's Symphony in Three Movements. Photo: Joe Gato)

Wed, Jan 21 – This was an exhilarating performance. It reminded me why I attend ballet, and of the high that you can get from watching that rare combination of great choreography and great performances. There was real life in the dancing. The ballets looked vital and exciting, and the performances were fresh and immensely appealing.

Miami City Ballet is run by Edward Villela, a major star of New York City Ballet in the 50s and 60s. He established a company in Miami some time after his retirement from dancing. Word from rapturous reviews in the New York Times and among ballet watchers was that the company was giving fantastic performances of Balanchine and other repertory previously thought to be best done only at NYCB. This engagement at New York City Center is Miami City Ballet's first performances in Manhattan, and the press is treating it as a homecoming of sorts for Villela.

I had seen the company do some Balanchine before: on the company's various tours to the Southern California area, I saw them do a Rubies ( it was early in my ballet watching, so I don't remember very much about the performance itself), a Stravinsky Violin Concerto that was well-danced but felled by a horrendous orchestral performance, and a Western Symphony that was also well-danced but marred by tinny sound from the recorded music. But I had seen them do an absolutely wonderful performance of Jerome Robbins' Dances at a Gathering - the best that I have seen to date - so I knew that they were capable of doing great things. These performances in New York lived up to all of the hype.

Balanchine's Symphony in Three Movements was the first ballet on the program (my first time seeing the work). It was pulsing with energy from the moment the curtain rose on the ballet's iconic battalion of girls, arranged diagonally on the stage, dressed in stark white and swinging their arms aggressively to Stravinsky's booming opening chords. Throughout, there were surprises and quirks in the choreography that played with the ballet's normal conventions: in one part, groups of dancers were speed-walking in circles around the stage, complete with arms cycling in running motion; in another, the corps was lined up and hiding just inside of the wings, peerint out on the stage, though still visible to the audience; there were athletic flying jumps, and ponytails straight out of the 70s. It had a raw energy that was incredibly exciting to see. The company's performance made the ballet seem new, particularly Jennifer Carlynn Kronenberg and Jeremy Cox's coy and playful pas de deux in the second movement.

Next was La Valse, also by Balanchine (another first in live performance for me, after having seen it in various forms on video). The ballet takes Ravel's symphonic work La Valse as an inspirational starting point: written in 1919 and 1920, the work has been said to represent European society's headlong plunge into the chaos of war, waltzing to its doom, as it were. The short, twelve-minute orchestral piece ominously, builds into a bright colorful waltz, then builds and builds until it virtually explodes in a chaotic cacophony or orchestral color. In creating the ballet, Balanchine incorporated a related Ravel work, the Valses Nobles et Sentimentales, to make the stage ballet longer. (Ravel wrote the Valeses before La Valse, creating several musical motifs he later incorporated into La Valse as well.)

In Balanchine's ballet, there is a vaguely sketched out story: a dark, ghostly ballroom, elegantly dressed party-goers, a girl in white and the figure of death. In the first part, three couples and a triplet of elegantly dressed female dancers dance in a hauntingly lit ballroom, while the quietly haunting music hints at darker things to come. The music turns sweet when the main couple enters, the girl dressed all in white, dancing brightly and innocently. As the Valses give way to Ravel's titular La Valse, the ballroom swirls more rapturously with an entire ensemble of men and women. A figure dressed all in black enters and the ensemble freezes: the girl in white is fascinated by the man and accepts his gifts of black gloves and a shawl. She realizes too late, however, that the elegant gifts spell doom, and she falls too the floor as the ballroom continues to whirl heedlessly around her.

I found Miami's performance fabulously vivid and entrancing, and I totally fell under the spell of the work. Deanna Seay was the girl in white and Carlos Miguel Serra her partner. It was appropriately haunting and beautiful, only the ending I felt was a bit more chaotic than perhaps was intended, as the dancers rushed around the stage to meet the choreography.

Twyla Tharp's In the Upper Room closed the program. It's a rousing, energetic piece that charges straight forward to the end, the athletic dancing never stopping for a breath. Dressed in red shirts and black-and-white striped pajamas, various pairings and groupings of dancers stomp across the smoke-filled stage in choreography that is part classical, part athletics. The thrill came from having watched the dancers charge through such an invigorating and challenging piece - a visceral thrill from all that athleticism on stage. The piece was a flash of energy, spectacularly entertaining. Curtain calls at the end were loud and deserving.

All photos by Joe Gato: (1) Symphony in Three Movements, choreographed by George Balanchine. As captioned above. (2) Jeremy Cox and Katia Carranza in Symphony in Three Movements. (3) The company in Twyla Tharp's In the Upper Room.