It’s always interesting to have a line-up of seven never-before-seen works on the program, as we did last night at Kansas City Ballet’s annual showcase of contemporary ballet, New Moves. How do we prepare ourselves for the unfamiliar? I remember reading a line from a well-known interior designer to the effect that one should always include at least one antique in a space because it grounds everything else. I feel much the same way when watching contemporary ballet.
Evidently, the whole gorgeous, unexpected architecture of new works are expressed by dancers who have been through rigorous classical training, and who can take all the liberties they want as a result. But I also find it striking that choreographers often choose non-contemporary scores: tonight, where we had Vivaldi, Ravel and Schubert pieces played by string quartet, Opus 76, and recorded works by Shostakovich, John Stanley, Charles Avison and Giuseppe Torelli, was a case in point.
I used to think in terms of interesting juxtaposition, but now I think of such music grounding new forms, allowing choreographers to take risks and give the audience just enough auditive comfort to take them on unusual journeys.
And we did have some unusual journeys tonight as well as the more predictable ‘beautiful bodies in motion’ kind. It began even before the program, as the dancers of second company limbered up casually on stage. It reminded me that although we invariably hear an orchestra tune up (always a lovely moment of liminality), we never see dancers tune up, as it were. It was like we, the audience, was a voyeur in one of those Degas’ rehearsal canvases.
This sense of beginning in ‘media res’ carried on until they all formed a macabre body heap for the opening of Gabriel Lorena’s thought-provoking Under My Skin. The inert formlessness makes us think of terrible atrocities, and though they rise up into energetic form, a synchronized energy flow as if they were doing some form of sun salutation, the solo female dancer who peels off, hair covering her face, is a doom-laden reminder of the existential terror at the heart of the work (and of life?). Hands were a big feature here – fingers flayed, extended, grasping, stretched, crucified. I always like my contemporary ballet seasoned with a large dollop of existential angst, maybe to compensate for some of the neatness of classical ballet, so we got that here in spades.
Emily Mistretta’s This Version of you looking at you you looking back used a curiously postmodern idiom that made you think. In a nutshell: three men, three women, in athleisurewear down to the generic white socks, borrowing movements from a kind of elevated contemporary vernacular. Imagine ordinary people, caught in the existential puzzles of everyday existence, who suddenly happened to transpose everyday movements into style, sculpture and movement. That’s what it felt like. It ended in a place of formlessness, as the principal dancer, Naomi Tanioka, shrunk into apparent nothingness.
Caroline Dahms and Haley Kostas’ Circle Back, again featuring athleisurewear (black socks this time, if memory serves), and the haunting Martin Phipps’ ‘Gunpowder’ score fused forms with a female pugilist shadow-match at its core. Boxers and ballerinas: both professions where you have to be supremely light on one’s feet. I really enjoyed the energy and power Elliott Rogers brought to his role in Natasha Adorlee’s beautifully patterned Komorebi: he had a very watchable stage presence.
In Cameron Thomas’ Rather Lively, Very Rhythmic, Parish Maynard’s Secret Places and Morgan Sicklick’s I am, lost to all but this, the company further honed their exploration of contemporary forms. Talking with the violinist from the quartet afterwards, I asked him what it was like to accompany ballerinas, compared to, say, singers. ‘You conduct singers’ he said. ‘For dancers, you provide a backing track: they carry the rhythm in their bodies.’ Well said.
