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Cedar Lake Contemporary Ballet, “World-Class” & Dance in Seattle

Cedar Lake Contemporary Ballet
Cedar Lake Contemporary Ballet in Violet Kid, Matthew Rich. center
(Photo: Julieta Cervantes)

Next up in the UW World Dance 2012/2013 season: Compagnie: Marie Chouinard (January 24–26, 2013, at Meany Hall).

Mark Morris recently said in The Stranger that “world class” is a “horrible term” to apply to the arts. I agree with him. Somehow the phrase cheapens art.

Still, I like world-class art. And after I watched the world-class Cedar Lake Contemporary Ballet dancers perform world-class choreography under world-class lighting at Meany Hall on Thursday, I wondered:

  • What makes something world class?
  • How—apart from the high you get when you see it—can you tell that something is world class?
  • What would it be like to live in a city like New York, where I imagine you can see world-class dancers any day of the week?
  • What would it be like if these world-class Cedar Lake movers were “ours”?  Would we love them like we love our world-class Seattle dancers Amy O’Neal, Jim Kent, Vincent Lopez, Carla Körbes, Kaori Nakamura, Jonathan Porretta, et cetera?
  • What about the dancers we love who aren’t world class?
  • How does experimentation fit into world-class dance?
  • I’m not the only dance writer in town who misses (and misses out on!) a good chunk of local experimental work because it can sometimes be boring. Don’t say it’s our job, because most of us don’t get paid to watch and write. Do say “boring” is subjective and biased, because it is. Laugh when we miss it and we hear tantalizing reports from people who bet on the right horse. Cry when it robs dance companies of the reviews and the public record that could help them get grants to grow on. I’ll cry too.
  • Experimentation is key. In a perfect world, there would be a place where experimentation and process is honored and enjoyed, regardless of the outcome. And there’d be a place, too, where forking over $50 for a ticket and carving an evening out of your busy schedule would guarantee you awesome world-class dance.
  • Guarantee? Why on earth would anyone want a guarantee in art? Guarantees kill art.
  • In writing these questions, I see that what I dislike about non-world-class works can be easily applied to this very article: Inner musings, personal explorations aren’t always interesting to an audience. They have to—what?!?! There has to be something else for them to be interesting art. A curtain speech this long is self-indulgent. I will stop. I will. Stop.

Cedar Lake’s first piece, Violet Kid, is—and not in a cheap way—world-class.

This frenzied works starts with stillness. Choreographer Hofesh Schechter’s confessional monologue wanders around as the 14 dancers stay still in a tight line at the front of a darkish stage: “Do I talk too much? Maybe if I didn’t talk so much, I’d have more friends. … In the first 15 seconds, you already make up your mind about a show. [pregnant pause] Fuck.”

That’s the only funny moment of this work. The program notes say it’s about “man’s struggle for harmony within a complex and sometimes horrifying universe.” Sure, whatever. What amazes in this piece is not its bleak, spastic interpretation of a theme. What amazes is the layering of rhythms, rhythms that come from layered steps, layered movement qualities, layered music (percussive), layered lighting (architectural), and layered, constantly shifting group sizes. What amazes is the way these individual dancers, each with his/her own essence, move as one.

Video clips online do not convey the flavor of this work, but they do show some of the movements that Schechter has the dancers repeat over and over again, ad delirium. There’s oozing and convulsing, a up-and-down jig, a militaristic pogo dance, ape arms and boxer arms and protester arms. There’s a dash of Fiddler on the Roof traditional dance and a pinch of West Side Story jazz. While the dancers often switch between movement styles in split-second precise shifts, there is a feeling that the overall movement is unstoppable and continuous. “Dancer onslaught” my friend called one move; we loved the anticipation of watching the organic invasion gather upstage left and then spilled out across the stage.

Violet Kid starts quietly but builds quickly into an intriguing noisiness; its 40-or-so minutes include well-timed pauses and blackouts so we can rest. The dancers don’t get to rest much, though. During one of those pauses, they stand balanced on one leg, right up front near the audience, seemingly for eons. When, toward the end, we see a single dancer balanced this way, he seems so alone—and yet, not alone, as I felt the clear memory of the earlier line-up hanging in the air around him.

When the curtain dropped, I was ready for a break. There is so much going on in Violet Kid. But I would have been happy to see it several more times that night. I wanted to know who the dancers were, to follow each dancer’s thread through the fray, to connect names with these amazing artists who seemed to be able to move every inch of their bodies.

It’s hard to know who’s who from the ultra-cropped headshots in the program. And so it was a pleasure to find out that part of the second piece, Alexander Ekman’s Tuplet, played off the names of six of the dancers; we got to know their names. I found out that the “kid in the striped shirt” from the first piece, is Jon Bond, although from the way he rolled onto the stage during the second piece, he might have been named Ninja Cat Tumbleweed, so soft, and light, and fast was he.

Cedar Lake Contemporary Ballet
Cedar Lake Contemporary Ballet in Tuplet (Photo: Julieta Cervantes)

Tuplet was more relaxing for the audience. The program notes indicate that Tuplet endeavors to understand a small fragment of  the question, “What is rhythm?” Since, as the voice-over tells us, “nothing isn’t rhythm,” there are a lot of possible answers. Ekman explores many of those answers through a series of vignettes, using six dancers, the white square material they dance on/with, and a background of split-screen projections. It was like a really good, fun lecture, which, seeing as how we were at the University of Washington, is fitting.

The problem with pieces that use multiple vignettes is that some vignettes pass too quickly. At one point, the group plays patty-cake with the floor, creating compelling rhythms—rhythm in sound, rhythm in movement, and rhythm in line. How frustrating to have it end just as it was building up to some kind of answer. The vignette that followed cracked up the audience, though.  The rhythm explored here was ballet photos: hit the pose, smile, flash of light from the camera, rest, repeat.

I know the projections in Tuplet were a key element, but for the most part I missed the point of them. Some of the images were of folks who were endearingly jovial in their creation of rhythm (band players, people laughing, etc.) but surely there was more to it. Just as I was getting really annoyed at how the projections upstaged the dancers, though, I found one projection that worked for me. The right screen showed a woman from the hands-up playing the piano and the left screen showed (her?) feet working the piano pedals: two hands, ten flying fingers, two sensible shoes—so many different rhythms from one person playing one song!

Some of the vignettes went over my head, too. Was there a rhythm to my understanding some and not understanding others? (Yes, I think so. My brain and heart were saying: got it, don’t get it, got it, got it, don’t get it, don’t get it, got it…”)

I think a second viewing would have clarified some vignettes for me. There were enough to enjoy on first viewing, however. One of my favorites incorporated the self-talk that dancers do—the onomatopoetic sounds they make or think as they’re memorizing a new piece. In Tuplet, we hear recordings of these intimate, individual rhythms as the dancers run the same dance phrase multiple times. In Bond’s solo, there’s an added punch line: each time he ends the phrase, he takes a moment to check where his feet are. That look down is yet one more rhythm, and I thank Professor Ekman for helping me to see/hear/feel that.

Cedar Lake Contemporary Ballet
Cedar Lake Contemporary Ballet in Grace Engine (Photo: Julieta Cervantes)

The third piece of the evening, Crystal Pite’s Grace Engine, was a huge disappointment to me. I’ve missed every single one of her much-acclaimed shows in Seattle (not on purpose) and so I was particularly eager to experience her work. This was the wrong one to start with. It was beautifully polished and specific, which I appreciate, but it reminded me of an improv class I watched last summer. This is not to say anything negative about improv classes. It’s just to say that when I touch your shoulder, you move your leg, the assignment is to stay connected and flowing, so now I’ll put my head in the arch of your foot, and then I’ll put my head in the arch of your knee doesn’t touch me. And do we really need so much crying and slow motion?

The interesting lighting and the cool subway rumble score and those gorgeous, intense dancers couldn’t help me over the hump with this piece. This, I thought at one point, is what happens when theater workshop and yoga take over the dance studio. Of course, I don’t know that for sure. I do know that at least one critic this year thought Grace Engine was the strongest piece of the night. That’s comfort for Pite, who perhaps is growing something important here. Comforting for me, though, is that my Crystal-Pite-fan friends assured me that her other work has a different feel. I hope to get to see that other work.

This was Cedar Lake Contemporary Ballet’s first trip to Seattle. They’ll be 10 years old in 2013. I hope they come back so we can celebrate their anniversary. In the meantime, we have online videos and can glimpse the company on their home turf in the movie The Adjustment Bureau. I admire and appreciate Cedar Lake Contemporary Ballet’s skill, flexibility, specificity, musicality, strength, and stamina. They have, as the Tuplet voice-over said when describing rhythm that works, “a sense of heart.”

 

First Glance at Mark Morris’s Kammermusik No. 3 (and More) at PNB

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(l-r) Pacific Northwest Ballet company dancers Jerome Tisserand, Ryan Cardea, and William Lin-Yee in Mark Morris’s Kammermusik No. 3, presented as part of ALL PREMIERE, November 2 – 11, 2012. (Photo © Angela Sterling)

Pacific Northwest Ballet corps de ballet dancers Brittany Reid and Ezra Thomson in Mark Morris’s Kammermusik No. 3, presented as part of ALL PREMIERE, November 2 – 11, 2012. (Photo © Angela Sterling)

Pacific Northwest Ballet principal dancer Carrie Imler in Kiyon Gaines’s Sum Stravinsky, presented as part of ALL PREMIERE, November 2 – 11, 2012. (Photo © Angela Sterling)

Pacific Northwest Ballet principal dancers Lesley Rausch and Batkhurel Bold in Kiyon Gaines’s Sum Stravinsky, presented as part of ALL PREMIERE, November 2 – 11, 2012. (Photo © Angela Sterling)

Pacific Northwest Ballet soloists Kylee Kitchens and Jerome Tisserand in Margaret Mullin’s Lost in Light, presented as part of ALL PREMIERE, November 2 – 11, 2012. (Photo © Angela Sterling)

Pacific Northwest Ballet principal dancer Seth Orza and soloist Laura Gilbreath in Margaret Mullin’s Lost in Light, presented as part of ALL PREMIERE, November 2 – 11, 2012. (Photo © Angela Sterling)

Pacific Northwest Ballet corps de ballet dancer Angelica Generosa in Andrew Bartee’s arms that work, presented as part of ALL PREMIERE, November 2 – 11, 2012. (Photo © Angela Sterling)

(l-r) Pacific Northwest Ballet principal dancer Kaori Nakamura and corps de ballet dancers Sarah Pasch and Leah O’Connor in Andrew Bartee’s arms that work, presented as part of ALL PREMIERE, November 2 – 11, 2012. (Photo © Angela Sterling)

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The good news is that if you are late to McCaw Hall, Pacific Northwest Ballet has arranged the All Premiere program (through November 11) so that the two pieces with the most to say to each other follow the first intermission. Mark Morris’s new work, Kammermusik No. 3, takes as its title the name of the music Morris has chosen for the dance, Paul Hindemith’s cello concerto, while Kiyon Gaines, for Sum Stravinsky, has turned his ear to Stravinsky’s Dumbarton Oaks. Both have been accused of neoclassical output, but Hindemith was German, and at the time of Oaks, Stravinsky was a French citizen, living in Paris.

Picking up on that neoclassicism, Morris has PNB’s dancers open the work with statuesque poses–arms outstretched in unbroken line, palms flat–that resolve into what I came to think of as the Archer (one arm arcing behind, one arm slicing forward: a bow and arrow). They’re in Mark Zappone’s dark legging-trousers, with red tunics, against a wash of rosy backdrop (almost harsh downward lighting by Michael Chybowski carves them out in haut relief).

There’s a tense sprightliness to Hindemith’s music (a restless piccolo, a note worried over in the violins) that in retrospect feels premonitorily pre-war. The very precise Carrie Imler has everyone lined in (shifting) formations. Morris at times uses the stage as a sort of scrolling score, with dancers leaping in from the wings to dance a phrase, and leaping back off when it’s done. The synchronization is so acute that when, suddenly, a line of male dancers jetés diagonally across the stage through a second group of dancers, it generates a strongly visceral thrill.

As the dance progresses through its four movements, a black “curtain” descends at the intervals to smother rosy-fingered dawn, until rising again for the final movement. The dancers aren’t aware of that, they form triplets, little human machines for lifting and jumping. Then, one after another, they drop suddenly to the floor, and the living regard them curiously, wait for them to get back up. That they do is bemusing.

I don’t want to overstate the historical context for Hindemith’s music (Emil de Cou conducts a brilliant performance, with gorgeous cello solos from Page Smith, and some terrific–and achingly exposed–work from the horns). The classical line tends to stoicism–all of this has happened before, will happen again. Morris, returning to those Grecian urn gestures, finds that sublime.

Kiyon Gaines gives his dancers all the leaping anyone could want in Sum Stravinsky, an altogether accomplished work that takes as its inspiration the choreography, says Gaines in his notes, of Balanchine and Stowell. This is a popular line to take with a PNB crowd, but the proof is there onstage. Everything is bright “Balanchine blue” or shades thereof, Pauline Smith’s trim, perky costumes updating the tutu’d look. Gaines, a PNB dancer himself, has placed his colleagues in duos, like jewels in dance settings perfectly suited to them: Carrie Imler and Jonathan Poretta, Maria Chapman and Karel Cruz, Lesley Rausch and Batkhurel Bold. Yet, there’s Morris in it, too–Chapman’s arms stretch out the length of a violin’s bowing, once, twice. (Morris, who was sitting in front of me, was obviously engaged with the piece, seat-dancing out a few of the movements for Chapman and Rausch–and hunching his shoulders as if scolding himself for burbling aloud.) There’s no expression “joie de bleu,” but Sum Stravinsky might require its invention.

Andrew Bartee’s arms that work has a rubberbandy set that reminds you of how elastic Bartee is as a dancer. The choreography, to spiky music by Barret Anspach, is more a question of a wall and the opportunity to see what sticks. But Kaori Nakamura, in her weightless, steely pas de deux with James Moore, astounds once again. Bartee’s approach is hyper-modern: modern, but hyper. Shoulders wriggled seem like they must be close to dislocation; hips, cocked, want to shoot off in different directions. There’s an improvisatory feel to the dancers’ interactions with the set, but there’s also a chilling moment when one becomes tangled in the bands–you’re initially watching someone else, and it’s only when they fall still that you notice someone is caught.

Margaret Mullin’s sentimental Lost in Light (music by Dan Coleman) is given background by a program note that you might not otherwise grasp from a determinedly pretty dance, with fine work by Laura Gilbreath and Chelsea Adomaitis, and Carli Samuelson and Gaines. Mullin credits Antony Tudor as a major choreographic influence, so I think that dance mavens may find her work more interesting than a general audience. Here the issue is simply a lack of tension (conceptual or dramatic)–it’s more of a tone poem featuring a single, attractive tone.

PNB’s ‘Contemporary 4′ is Bullish on Ballet’s Future (Review)

Pacific Northwest Ballet principal dancers Karel Cruz and Carla Körbes in Alexei Ratmansky’s Concerto DSCH, presented as part of CONTEMPORARY 4, March 18 – 27, 2011. (Photo © Angela Sterling)

Contemporary 4, at Pacific Northwest Ballet through March 27, concludes with the PNB premiere of Alexei Ratmansky’s Concerto DSCH. The phrase, “From Russia, with love,” takes on a new context here.

If you follow dance, you’ve heard about Ratmansky, the former Bolshoi dancer who “grew up” to become the former Bolshoi artistic director, now with American Ballet Theater. Concerto DSCH, though, he created for New York City Ballet, where, the New York Times will tell you, it was a “smash hit.”

It went over big in Seattle on opening night, bookended on this program with Mark Morris’s Pacific, which is the opener. From an early age, Ratmansky told PNB director Peter Boal–who was doing a more-than-credible Dick Cavett impression during a pre-run interview with Ratmansky earlier in the week–he was in love with Shostakovich. When you see Concerto DSCH (the “DSCH” is a musical motif), the depth of that affinity is apparent from the first seconds. You will be enraptured.

It feels right to pair Ratmansky with Morris because although you would not mistake one for the other (unless you freeze-framed on one slumped-over pose that appears in both works), their dances share a remarkable, rigorous charm. If Concerto DSCH is described as one of Ratmansky’s “abstract” works, you should know that it’s not Mercer Cunningham abstraction. It reminds me more of what Brian Wilson was trying to accomplish with Pet Sounds‘ emotional tone poems–a distillation of feeling. Ratmansky is aided in this by the wonderful performance coming from the pit, led by Allan Dameron and featuring Duane Hulbert on piano.

It opens with dancers stepping out of a ring of other dancers, as if a rebirth is taking place, and except for the sorrowful, more contemplative second movement (in which a group casts out a member, recalling Shostakovich’s ins and outs with Party society), the stage is filled with vibrant motion, with dancers actually dancing–some hopping–as if from the sheer joy of it (Carrie Imler was all wide smiles and stepping). If it’s equally a joy to watch, it’s not because it’s easy. Ratmansky shuttles the dancers all over the stage in rings within rings, or diagonal flights, and gives Batkurel Bold and Seth Orza a series of entrechats, spins, and leaps with weight shifts that evolve in mid-air so that they land on a different foot than you expected, facing a different direction. Karel Cruz and Carla Körbes are a playful, winsome couple who meet and test each other out with a flirtatious shyness that contrasts with the work’s overall neo-Realist, boldly-we-face-the-future aesthetic (Holly Hynes’s beautiful costumes). That’s the more serious question repeated at the heart of the work, as a dancer is pushed to the floor, who the “we” is and isn’t, and how to repair the circle.

Pacific Northwest Ballet principal dancers Ariana Lallone and Lucien Postlewaite in Mark Morris’s Pacific (Photo © Angela Sterling)

I’m just going to say it, if you like your male dancers bare-chested and ripped, the first half of the program is unmissable. Perhaps because it was opening night, the work began a little stiffly, but why quibble about that when you get to see Ariana Lallone and Lucien Postlewaite in that duet pictured above, and Olivier Wevers partnered with Carla Körbes.

Pacific Northwest Ballet corps de ballet dancers Ezra Thomson and Margaret Mullin in Marco Goecke’s Place a Chill, presented as part of CONTEMPORARY 4, March 18 – 27, 2011. (Photo © Angela Sterling)

The dancers are in flowing shades of blue, green, and a reddish-orange (Martin Pakledinaz’ designs) and while you’re used to that on women, the way it recasts and opens up the men’s movement is striking. The fluidity of below-the-waist movement is countered by gestural series in the arms and hands, which, people will tell you, evokes the “Kathak style of southern India.” I’ve never managed to make narrative sense of this work, but I’ve never felt that I needed to, it’s so purely evocative, and of a piece with Lou Harrison’s music. If you surrender to it, you’ll find yourself transported by the smallest thing–a just-missed chance for hands to meet one moment that finds its resolution in hands clasped a little later.

Place a Chill is a world premiere from choreographer Marco Goecke, and it’s one of the more startling, sui generis works I’ve seen, beginning with the Mark Zappone costumes that have bunches of flowers protruding from the dancers’ shins. To Camille Saint-Saëns’ Cello Concerto No. 1 (there’s a story to that cello music, performed by Page Smith), the dancers scuttle about the stage by petit pas, like sea creatures moving with the tides.

Their arms are in constant, hyperfast movement that appears more digital than analog, as if the dancers’ hands were simply appearing in different positions, rather than moving there. It actually becomes taxing to watch, because of the speed and extraordinary precision of the movement.

The movements, although alien at first glance (to ballet, in any event), have a definite connection to the music. It’s just that instead of dancing out the plangent melody of the cello, the dancers are vibrating to microtones and the frictions of the bow on strings, or even bending each other into imitations of the celloist’s contortions around the instrument. It may be a dark, eerie underworld, seemingly far from the cool serenity of the music, but it shows you artistry’s daimonic face, where the music arises from.

PNB soloist Chalnessa Eames and corps de ballet dancer Josh Spell in Paul Gibson’s The Piano Dance (Photo © Angela Sterling)

The Piano Dance, from Paul Gibson, in this company, felt like an entr’acte that was a little too long. Put another way, it was the maraschino cherry of the evening–some people really go for maschino cherries, but I can usually just handle the one. That’s not to fault the pianist (Christina Siemens), who had the following on her plate:

Frederic Chopin (Prelude, Op. 28, No. 4, 1835-1839), John Cage (Opening Dance for Sue Laub, c. 1940), Gyorgy Ligeti (II, III, IV, VI, and X from Musica Ricercata, 1951–1953), Bela Bartok (“Chromatic Invention” and “Ostinato” from Mikrokosmos, Sz. 107, BB 105, 1931-1939), and Alberto Ginastera (Suite de Danzas Criollas, Op. 15. No. 1, 1946)

There were moments of invention–Lesley Rausch attaching herself to Seth Orza’s midsection (Orza was dancing for Jeffrey Stanton) like an urchin, then slowly opening her arms and legs like pincers–but more frequently what I saw were ballet études, pretty enough, but sometimes sentimentally flip. The dances themselves were outshone by Mark Zappone’s lurid red costumes and the use of red backdrops of shifting height (lighting was by Lisa J. Pinkham). I could tell that a portion of audience was sighing comfortably and thinking, Ah, this is ballet, but then they had yet to see Concerto DSCH.