Philadelphia-based BalletX’s latest program at the Joyce Theater in New York barely achieved lift-off under the weight of Matthew Neenan’s earnest Credo – but found its cruising altitude with Jamar Roberts’ thrilling, unsentimental take on romantic relationships and Jennifer Archibald’s rousing fusion of street dance and classical ballet. Both works showed off this company of magnetic dancers at their most powerful.
Impeccable musical choices throughout the program: Roberts’ Honey buttressed by Don Shirley’s soaring yet intimate interpretations of standards of the American Songbook; and Archibald’s Exalt fueled by an assemblage of Afro House, anchored by Chuck Roberts’ now-legendary invocation from 1987 (Let there be House) and kicked off by an eerie fire-invoking hymn from Indian film score composer duo Salim-Sulaiman.
For Credo, Neenan stitched together Haydn and an absorbing modern work for string quartet by Kevin Puts, in a spirited live performance by members of ensemble132, ensconced upstage right; however, the music was over there and the dance was over here and they never seemed to mesh. (I felt a similar disconnect in Neenan’s 2018 piece for New York City Ballet.) His dancers assumed a vertical pelvic thrust with depressing regularity – suggestive of childbirth – while gazing blankly at the audience; they stomped, shuffled their feet, mysteriously cupped their chins and foreheads, peered through imaginary spy-glasses, serpentined their arms, waggled their fingers, cocked their heads like birds and rode invisible ponies in and out of town. Only Lanie Jackson in mauve managed to convey a singular commitment to this enterprise, every fiber of her being wired into the musical source of energy. The heroic Francesca Forcella and Jerard Palazo intermittently attempted to exert leadership over this frazzled community. At the end, the ensemble was ensembling while Jackson backed off into the wings, as if drawn by an invisible force. We should have wanted to know why.
Neenan was reportedly inspired by his travels to India; visions of ‘Eat, Pray, Love’ suggested themselves with dancers gamboling in filmy loungewear whose vivid hues could not dispel the notion of a grey place.
While the stomping and romping in Credo was all shoe and no footprint (yes, that’s a quote ripped out of context from spy novelist Mick Herron), the smoking footwork in Exalt was entirely the opposite. Marvels of daring, speed and precision, the dancers surfed waves of energy and rhythm, whipping in and out of classical ballet moves. The sensational bare-chested men often renegotiated their relationship with the ground in insouciant displays of lofting. Their shiny black pleather skirts swirled splendidly as they spun, sometimes upside down with an arm braced into the floor. The bare-legged women in modish black leotards were magnificently twitchy in petit allegro on pointe and expansive in their off-kilter dives on pointe, their hyperextended arms claiming vast swaths of air space.
Archibald’s relentless fusillade of steps documented a mechanistic world, largely stripped of human emotions: when the women ran a hand down the men’s thighs, they could’ve been doing a maintenance check on an aircraft wing. Here and there a requisite street battle but more often the ensemble drilling, preparing for war. Exalt was a crowd-pleaser – and also an illustration of the subversiveness of house as it invades the classical establishment: not attempting to stomp out ballet but breathe new life into it.
The ironically titled Honey bore witness to private moments in three relationships whose Facebook statuses could more accurately be identified as “it’s complicated”. The soulful yet classically rigorous score and Roberts’ muscular, heady choreography operated as a single impulse, each enlarging the possibilities of meaning of the other. Pianist and cellist were less than ideally squeezed into the stalls (not onstage like the musicians in Credo.) Shimmery gold and black costumes and pools of light on an otherwise dark stage suggested rituals about to unfold as six dancers peeled off into duos.
The feisty Itzkan Barbosa and Shawn Cusseaux tested each other’s physical limits as if new to this relationship business, but moments of stillness and reflection gave us hope. Jared Kelly ported Ashley Simpson onstage as if this was manual labor: they are veteran combatants in the war of the sexes. After some epic grappling, she stepped away and repeatedly snapped her fingers in his direction, each time causing him to convulse. He finally had enough and walked out. For Francesca Forcella and Jerard Palazo, Roberts turned the simplest of movements – a slow demi-plié – into an aching expression of vulnerability. This couple finds a way to stay the course as Shirley’s gently elegiac version of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s This Nearly Was Mine rained gently down on all of us.
