Smuin Ballet opened its 25th year with a performance of six short pieces that showed the company moving definitively into new territory. With five dancers joining this year, only one dancer in the 16-member company, Erin Yarbrough-Powell, remains from the time when Michael Smuin was the company’s artistic director.
Although the current artistic director, Celia Fushille, was the associate director under Smuin, it’s clear she has a direction of her own, and the company has gradually changed under her leadership. The emseble is redefining – in new terms – what Smuin strove for when establishing the company in 1994. It is becoming a more contemporary ballet company, rather than a fusion of Broadway and ballet.
Each season since Smuin’s unexpected death in 2007 the programming has included his work, and this Dance Series 01 is no exception. The program opened with two of Smuin's pieces, Schubert Scherzo (2007) and The Eternal Idol (1969). The latter was choreographed for American Ballet Theatre, which Smuin joined in 1965.
Both ballets are romantic and lyrical. The Scherzo features five couples, all in white, who dance primarily as couples, synchronously with gendered variations on similar movements: she pirouettes à terre, he spins en l’air. The dancers’ attention is directed toward the audience with smiles and visual focus. It’s well done choreographically, vibrant and sweeping, and well danced by the company. Terez Dean and Ben Needham-Wood were the lead couple.
The earlier ballet is less conventional. Based on a sculpture by Rodin, a couple unglues itself from a rock that sits center stage. Their lengthy duet is set to that most intimate and Romantic of composers, Chopin. Dressed in flesh-colored unitards, Erica Felsch and Peter Kurta delicately and sensuously portrayed the generative eroticism that the sculpture suggests, but the choreography overlooks the struggle implied by Rodin’s half-finished sculptures, which reflect the sculptor’s dilemma of drawing living humanity out of cold stone.
In the program’s second section Ben Needham-Wood’s Echo most connected with Smuin’s The Eternal Idol. It too strives for the iconic and mythological, taking its story from that of Echo and Narcissus. But Needham-Wood’s choreography is brainier and more complex. Narcissus, danced by Peter Kurta, kneels on top of a circular table-like platform that is turned by dancers crouched beneath. In the opening tableau Kurta reaches down below the platform to touch an arm reaching up from below, an effective portrayal of Narcissus reaching into a pool to touch the reflection of his own hand on the water’s surface. Echo, dancer Valerie Harmon, is lifted onto the platform, and she and Kurta dance a cramped and intense duet while the dancers below spin the platform. The dancers lurking in the shadows of the platform and stage can be easily imagined as subterranean forces rising and falling to direct the actions and interactions of the couple. Who loves whom, or who loses whom, is not so clearly defined in this interesting dialog of space and intimacy.