I dance of arms and the man. Ludwig Minkus’ Don Quixote, choreographed by Anna-Marie Holmes and receiving its first performances here at the Kansas City Ballet is a perfect paraphrase of Virgil’s celebrated lines. From the transparent curtain depicting plated armor at the opening in a messy tangle, right the way to Don Quixote’s heralded exit at the end, carrying his preposterously long lance, we are in the Cervantian world of satire and romance, tongue-in-cheek but also strangely heart-warming.
Kudos to the KC Ballet for such a striking and well-danced production. It’s a big ballet (28 women on stage in Act 2, not least), and it moves like the clappers. As it would do, in its ambitious attempt to depict the perpetuum mobile of open-air life of Renaissance Spain. Whirling turns, clapping hands, tapping feet, rustling skirts, mantilla combs, fans, cloaks, volatile head and arm-gestures, gypsies, fighters and dancers, puppets and fortune-tellers: they are all there, in a riot of color, as well as all the accoutrements down to even the poor old bird-cage man, high up aloft on a bridge overlooking the action. The goal of this ballet seems to me to allow free play to a wildness cleverly tamed by rigorous classicism, but one that still walks the wild side powerfully. And in this they succeeded tonight.
The two leads paired with style and finesse. Joshua Kiesel as Basilio brought a terrific robust energy to the stage and a cheeky impudence of his own. His turns and jumps were full of bravura, and he showed a natural sense of comic timing. From Naomi Tanioka (Kitri), we have come to expect clean lines, a refined style, and the charm and buoyancy of an ingenue, and this is indeed what she gave off even unto the 32 fouettés. I would love to see her explore her shadow side a little more as a dancer, the edge of her emotional range. She did shoot her dreadful aristocratic inamorato one glance which recoiled from him as if he were slimy: this was perfect. Otherwise, her pretense at dismay or disgust was not particularly believable. She much prefers to be sanguine.
The sets were quite lovely throughout. That opening scene well revealed the decayed grandeur or shabby gentility of Don Quixote’s room (and life), with its red velvet tapestries and raggedy curtains over a four-poster bed: a perfect resting (or launching?) place for literature’s most lovable fabulist. The Don himself (Parrish Maynard) was a warm presence throughout, a kindly fool, avuncular even in his romantic imaginings, and therefore never remotely dangerous to womenfolk.
As regards the play of the narrative, I thought the contrast between him and the foppish aristocrat (Gabriel Lorena), who threatens to derail true love, was especially well-played. With his scented handkerchiefs and fainting fits, the latter was marvelously camp, so we have before us a perfect set-up (and eventually fight-off) between the fantasy knight on the one hand and the phony knight on the other (inheriting a title, presumably, because merely his ancestors in the long-dead past were good fighters). We laugh at the former’s excesses but acknowledge his innate goodness; the fop we merely laugh at. His final defeat comes when the Don takes off his curly wig, leaving him completely bald, ridiculously undone by his hair: an unSamson-like Samson.
The matadors, headed by Paul Zusi, brought commanding elevation, good carriage of heads and speedy cloak movements to their sequence, while the fandango sequence which opened Act 3 was strikingly choreographed. The orchestra was silent while we were brought into a paroxysm of intensity by the tapping of the stick and of the men’s healed shoes: a ritualistic dance-off, which could also be, with its definite ceremonial menace, a kind of restrained fight-off. I loved it, and I loved the edge that Andrew Vecseri and Whitney Huell brought to their pas de deux. Earlier, the dream sequence of Act 2 showed off a charming array of dryads, and polished, well-timed solos from Gillian Yoder and Sidney Haefs.
In short, a truly energizing and successful first run of one of ballet’s best renditions of a literary classic.
