Archive for dance
Worth the “Diversion”
Posted by: | CommentsAbove: Link to Ballet Arizona’s new YouTube channel
Five hours and counting until the final performance by Ballet Arizona of its Classic Innovations program at the Orpheum Theatre. The program includes company director Ib Andersen’s newest ballet, Diversions, set to the score of the same name by Benjamin Britten.
Post-Balanchine, it has become a choreographer’s duty to uncover music never used before in dance, and to unfold through it his or her relationship to that music. Andersen accomplishes this in stellar fashion in Diversions, an eye-filling essay on masculine and feminine movement types. Among other things, Andersen has taken care to use his airborne males to maximum effect. I’d wager (hyperbole alert here) there are more jumps in this ballet than in any three others.
Britten composed the music during his American sojourn in the early ’40s. (He’d come from England as a pacifist to avoid involvement in World War II, only to find the USA engaged after Pearl Harbor.) Written for Paul Wittgenstein, who’d lost his right arm in World War I, the piece for piano, left hand, and orchestra amounted to a wordless protest of sorts against the imbecility of war. There’s no such subtext in Andersen’s ballet, which exults in the sheer energy and inventive complexity of the music.
Ballet Arizona will make its Kennedy Center debut in June with Diversions.
Last-minute romance
Posted by: | CommentsNo video is yet available of Ballet Arizona’s Sleeping Beauty. Above, to give a taste of the company’s excellence: Natalia Magnicaballi in Ballet Arizona’s La Sylphide a few years back.
I’ll let the print media tell you, as I assume they will, about Ballet Arizona’s lush and energetic production of The Sleeping Beauty; about how Ginger Smith danced Aurora Thursday night like a sunbeam lighting up a landscape; about Roman Zavarov’s astonishing knack for staying aloft at the exact height of a jump; about how Natalia Magnicaballi’s Lilac Fairy owned the stage at Symphony Hall by dint of her seemingly easy musicality and presence. Certainly they’ll tell you that, and if they don’t, well, I just did.
That’s the good news: Phoenix has a production of this treasured, damned-difficult-to-produce ballet to rival that of any city our size and a good many considerably bigger.
The bad news: You waited too long to get those ever-so-romantic tickets to the Valentine’s Day performance of The Sleeping Beauty and now it’s SOLD OUT! (You might be able to catch a couple tickets for the performance tonight, Feb. 13.)
Luckily for you, there are about a gazillion other Valentine’s Day-appropriate events where you can take your sweetie to curry the intimacy you so desire. Okay, Sleeping Beauty would have been No. 1 to that end, but you blew it, so make the best of your situation and choose from the following:
I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Change (Mesa)
The title says it all. This Off-Broadway musical hit explores the craziness of relationships, ca. Now. The Valley perennial is in its fourth production.
Gypsy (Peoria)
There’s life in the old girl, and more romance than you might recall if all you know is the movie version. Oh yeah, and there’s stripping – not exactly romantic, but in the right direction.
Madama Butterfly (downtown Phoenix)
If tragic love somehow fulfills your emotional need and gets her or him in the right mood, you can’t do better than Puccini’s classic about love to die for.
The Play About the Naked Guy (Phoenix)
Here’s a wild card: Stray Cat’s production of a play that pits commerce against art. Commerce wins, I guess, since the play is marketed partly on the basis of the very nudity-as-sales-device it satirizes. Not your traditional Valentine’s Day date, but who said we have to be traditional?
She hasn’t been kissed in a hundred years…
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A scene from Ballet Arizona’s production of The Sleeping Beauty. (Photo by Tim Fuller)
Everyone knows Nutcracker, and everybody at least knows about Swan Lake.
But Tchaikovsky composed three full-length ballet scores and it’s the least-known, Sleeping Beauty, that many balletomanes count as his greatest.
“It’s less often done than the other Tchaikovsky ballets because of the number of people you have to put onstage,” says Maria Simonetti, rehearsal director for Ballet Arizona. Ballet Arizona’s production of Sleeping Beauty plays Feb. 11 -14, with Tchaikovsky’s music performed live by The Phoenix Symphony.
Simonetti’s job is to coordinate the activities of everyone involved in the mammoth production. She plans rehearsals for the 40 dancers, apprentices and trainees of Ballet Arizona, and if a dancer needs to be called out for a costume fitting or a press interview, Simonetti schedules it.
She doesn’t get much sleep doing her job for this ballet.
“We have 26 little children, 30 teenagers and 40 company dancers in Sleeping Beauty. Some of them have as many as five costume changes,” Simonetti says.
The story of Sleeping Beauty follows the famous fairytale, in which an envious witch puts a beautiful princess under a spell. The princess pricks her finger on a spinning wheel and falls into a deep sleep. Only “love’s true kiss” can awaken her – and that takes 100 years to arrive. The music was used as the basis for the score to Disney’s animated feature of the same name.
The 100-year wait poses a challenge for productions of Sleeeping Beauty, Simonetti says. Since a century has gone by when the princess awakes, all the costumes and wigs on the cast have to be different from the ones before.
Another part of Simonetti’s job is observing the rehearsals run by company artistic director Ib Andersen. She notes Andersen’s choreography and corrections, and helps ensure continuity in future rehearsals and performances. As she puts it:
“I work to make sure the dancers are moving the same feet, the same arms” from one time to the next.
A native of Buenos Aires, Simonetti was trained there at the fabled Teatro Colon and worked as ballet mistress for Chicago’s Hubbard Street Theatre before joining Ballet Arizona in 1997. In the year 2000, the company near extinction, Andersen came aboard as artistic director. Simonetti became his right hand in rebuilding Ballet Arizona into a viable company, and one of high artistic quality.
“I’ve been working for Ib for ten years now,” she says. “He’s a great artist to work for as well as a great boss.”
That the company can stage all three Tchaikovsky ballets in a single season – Swan Lake and Nutcracker came earlier in the year – is tribute to Andersen’s vision, the dancers’ talent, and to the persistent striving of Ballet Arizona’s board, staff and administration.
Behind the ballet
Posted by: | CommentsBallet is made of sweat and grace. As Ballet Arizona’s production of Ib Andersen’s The Nutcracker enters its final week for this year, the grace will be evident to anyone sitting in the audience at Phoenix Symphony Hall. To see the sweat, you have to attend rehearsal – or talk to someone in the company.
Click above to hear an interview with Ballet Arizona’s Ian Poulis talking about the production. The interview is from the radio show Arts on the Town from two years ago, but Poulis’ comments — about Nutcracker and Ballet Arizona, about Balanchine technique and the challenges facing young dancers — still apply.
Snow Queen is 19
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Amber Robins in the title role of The Snow Queen
Nineteen years ago, Frances Smith Cohen had the idea of blending Hans Christian Andersen, Sergei Prokofiev and Center Dance Ensemble into a holiday meal called The Snow Queen. The work, which began as a smallish one-act with no set, is now a staple of December in Phoenix.
A modern-dance alternative to ballet’s annual cash cow, Nutcracker, The Snow Queen relates Andersen’s tale of a love lost to the evil title character and a love regained by a young woman’s true heart.
The genesis of The Snow Queen is shrouded in two decades of changes. Cohen recalls choosing the story as holiday fare because of its relationship to winter. But she can’t remember why she chose Prokofiev’s music for the ballet, The Stone Flower, as backdrop to the story’s colorful parade of children, villagers, animal spirits, enchantresses and robbers.
“I heard the music on the radio, and in 1990 there was no CD of the score,” Cohen says. “I had to go to a record finder in New York to get it on vinyl.”
She set Snow Queen’s choreography to the vinyl, and today, though CD versions abound, she sticks with a tape of the LP because the dancers of Center Dance Ensemble are used to the tempos in that performance.
“Every once in a while, you hear a crack or a pop,” Cohen says, apologizing for the soundtrack.
By its third year, Snow Queen was a full-length piece, employing dozens and dozens of children on the stage of the Herberger Theatre. A lavish set was added in the late 1990s. As the years went by, characters came and went, choreography mutated, and dancers moved on. None of the original cast is left among the current crop of 15 adult dancers.
The children are the most ephemeral of all. This year alone, 165 of them from 47 different Valley dance schools, ages 7 to 18, will slide across the stage at some point in the three-week run.
Cohen’s choreography is at last in final shape – the “Lady Autumn” dance added five years was the last major change – but this year will bring some new costumes.
Snow Queen is a unique Phoenix dance experience. Says Cohen:
“To the best of my knowledge, no one else in the world does this story in dance.”
Opus 131
Posted by: | CommentsAbove: Paul Taylor’s take on songs from the Great Depression
What is the secret of conductors and choreographers? Dancers retire young, actors lose roles as they age, and singers generally peak around 50-60. But conductors wave the baton into their 80s, and choreographers make dances seemingly as long as they have breath. Witness Paul Taylor, 79, who started his own company in 1954 and swiftly established himself as one of the true greats of modern dance.
Since that beginning 55 years ago Taylor has created 131 dances. The 131st, Brief Encounters, will be performed Wednesday, Nov. 18, at Scottsdale Center for the Performing Arts as part of the first-night program of the Paul Taylor Dance Company. The company will dance a second, totally different program Thursday night. For complete info, go here.
Taylor’s work was an early inspiration to me in my discovery of modern dance. His Arden Court showed that nonstop energy onstage might, given the right artistry, amount to a lot more than just nonstop energy. His astounding gangland take on Rite of Spring – complete with Tommy guns – made it radically clear that a score’s gestures, and not its sensibility, are a choreographer’s most essential musical requirement.
Of Brief Encounters, premiered earlier this month in New York, The New York Times says:
“The dancers, beautifully adult and near naked in trim black underwear (by Santo Loquasto), passed through transient scenes of sexual desire, emotional perplexity and more…. I wanted Brief Encounters to last twice as long; certainly I am impatient to see it a second time…. An essay in the very stuff of theater poetry.”
I suspect we will be seeing Paul Taylor’s 155th work ten years from now.
Magnicaballi’s Odette/Odile
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Natalia Magnicaballi, Astrit Zejnati in Ballet Arizona’s Swan Lake
The mission of Cultural Desert does not include reviews. A review is generally thought to be a big-picture, after-the-fact estimation of a performance, including comments on the various facets of that performance. But something has to be said about Natalia Magnicaballi. So while this isn’t exactly a review, it is definitely a commentary. Nothing about costumes, sets, production values, or music – just a few words about one dancer.
To see a major ballerina dance a great role is a privilege few cities enjoy. Phoenix is among those few this weekend. Magnicaballi is dancing Odette/Odile in Ballet Arizona’s Swan Lake, during the evening performances of the famous ballet at Phoenix Symphony Hall. I saw her in the production Thursday night. It is not a performance to miss.
Technique is so often divorced from expression in ordinary chatter that we don’t stop to think what “technique” means. It simply means the way of doing something; for instance, the way to convey character in ballet is through the nuances of classical dance vocabulary. When Magnicaballi was Odette, the white swan, she used being on pointe to suggest the character’s vulnerability; the height she reached on toe was an expression of Odette’s openness and trust. As Odile, the black swan, Magnicaballi used the same physical stance to convey the opposite trait: her Odile on pointe was commanding and even domineering. Port au bras – the carriage of the arms – was for Magnicaballi’s Odette fluid and seemingly unconsciously embracing, while Odile’s was purposeful, projecting exclusion. Magnicaballi danced the famous fouettés that end Odile’s scene (was there a triple early on? or was that just a very quick double?) like knives thrown into Siegfried’s heart.
The last act, with its pathos of Odette’s final moments, found Magnicaballi fairly floating above the stage. She was helped in this by Astrit Zejnati, who as Siegfried held her aloft with uncanny persistence. One supported lift seemed like it was never to end, so softly and tentatively did Zejnati lower her to the stage floor.
I can’t imagine a performance of Odette/Odile that more perfectly embodies Swan Lake’s theme of nature’s terrible hold on us than the one being danced in Phoenix this weekend by Natalia Magnicaballi.
See the music, hear the dance
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Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
Music written for ballets was largely undistinguished, frothy, insubstantial and not particularly memorable – that is, before Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky composed his triptych of masterful ballet scores in the late 19th century.
Ballet Arizona this season presents all three Tchaikovsky ballets, starting this weekend with Swan Lake. The others are Sleeping Beauty, scheduled for February, and of course, Nutcracker.
Tchaikovsky himself loved to dance, which may have had something to do with his innate feeling for shaping melodies that mirror human movement. The dour-seeming Russian, who looks prematurely old in pictures taken of him in his early 50s, was self-deprecating and in nearly constant turmoil over aspects of his sexuality. Yet from all reports, his outer life was that of an exuberant man embracing life in all its rich meaning. That attitude is palpable in his music.
He was also a composer of highly dramatic scores, and ballet — not capable of telling complicated stories — needs all the dramatic help it can get. Choreographer George Balanchine’s famous statement, “We don’t have synonyms in dance,” was intended to put the onus of theatrical tension on some other aspect of a ballet’s production; namely, the music. The evil Von Rothbart in Swan Lake cannot express in movement the complex character of his evil. But the music can.
Timothy Russell, who will conduct The Phoenix Symphony in live accompaniment to Ballet Arizona’s Swan Lake, puts it this way:
“”First, and foremost, Tchaikovsky was a great composer. He wrote glorious melodies, and infused the sounds of the stage with infectious driving rhythms that tug at your heart sleeves at a very visceral level. As a ballet composer, Tchaikovsky provides sonic inspiration that offers both a sense of lift and a sense of line, always propelling both the story forward and the dancers onward.
“His mastery provides for a total aesthetic experience of sound and sight, creating a magical melding of music and motion.”
Click below for a video preview of Ballet Arizona’s Swan Lake.
Bring on the dancing vampires…
Posted by: | CommentsAbove, an excerpt from the 2007 production of A Vampire Tale, using Beethoven’s Moonlight sonata. The 2009 edition will feature all new music.
Long before Twilight, long before the current vampire craze, Lisa Starry and Scorpius Dance Theatre explored the world of the undead. Six years ago, Starry first presented her contemporary dance take on the legendarily fanged. This week she unveils – in two cities – her newest version of A Vampire Tale, complete with an original score.
“I commissioned Kristofer Hill to write new music so we could take this show other places. I couldn’t continue to use the licensed music,” Starry says.
Starry knew Hill from Metro Arts, the Phoenix arts charter school where they both teach. The score comes just in time to coordinate with the sudden national interest in a work that’s been called dark, sexy, comic, sexy…and sexy. An indie film director found out about A Vampire Tale at the Scorpius website (www.scorpiusdance.com) and is coming to the Valley to see the show for a possible movie version. The director of something called the Vampire Film Festival also discovered it at the website and invited Starry to bring her company to New Orleans – the heart of vampire culture in this country, thanks to Anne Rice.
That means Scorpius Dance Theatre will open A Vampire Tale Wednesday night in Phoenix, take the show to New Orleans a couple days later, and return to Phoenix with it after that. See ShowUp.com for performance details.
A life for the arts
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Marvin Cohen with his wife, Frances Smith Cohen
The spirit of art is the opposite of the spirit of greed. The artist is inherently a giver – someone who wants to share a vision, an idea, a way of hearing/moving/seeing/being.
But artists are alone and unable to give without the help of those even more selfless: arts patrons and promoters. The Valley lost one of its greatest arts patrons when Marvin S. Cohen died in June, age 77, of Lou Gehrig’s disease. An attorney specializing in eminent domain, aviation law, civil litigation and public-utilities law, he was accomplished enough to have argued and won a case before the U.S. Supreme Court.
Marvin – he was on a first-name basis with everyone – might have gone still further in law, might have carved out even greater professional glory for himself, but he cared about one other thing so much that he sacrificed inordinate time and energy to it: the arts. Marvin was a co-founder of Arizona Theatre Company in Tucson, and later pushed it to become the two-city operation it is today. Over the years, he served on the board of the Scottsdale Cultural Council, as chairman of the Arizona Commission on the Arts (twice), as president of the Herberger Theater Center and as president of Center Dance Ensemble, the modern dance company in residence at the Herberger. His wife, Frances Smith Cohen, is the company’s founding artistic director.
This week, Center Dance Ensemble gives its first program since Marvin’s death. A certain sadness will likely attach to the event, and yet, Marvin’s presence will be palpable in the joyous art onstage.
“Center Dance Ensemble would never have made it without Marv,” says Frances Smith Cohen.
“The financial help was huge, but more than that, he was a great sounding board. I don’t remember one time where he thought I shouldn’t try something, no matter how weird it sounded to him. He was so proud of what I did.
“There were many times, I really wanted to quit. I would get so discouraged. But he was such a great fan–I couldn’t let him down. He never complained about the really late suppers, or the rehearsal times that went into the night. It was, he felt, part of the deal of being married to an artist.”
This week’s program, called “Shakespeare at the Herberger,” will feature The Fateful Loves of Hamlet, choreographed by Fran. It’s the fourth version of her take on Shakespeare’s tragedy, and she feels Marvin would’ve given it a positive nod.
“I looked at the Hamlet ballet Friday and thought, ‘He would have really liked this version four.’ Version three began to explore the women of Hamlet and Marv felt I was really on to something. This version really develops this idea further. I’m pretty sure it would have been a favorite.”
What made Marvin Cohen an effective arts supporter? Shelley Cohn, who succeeded him as director of the Arizona Commission on the Arts, thinks it was his ability to “see both the big picture and the policy implication of decisions we made.”
And then there was his energy:
“I swear the man never slept.”
Cohn is not alone when she says she will “miss Marvin’s wisdom, his zest for knowledge and reading, his passion for the arts and his friendship.”
Many will miss those things. I barely knew Marv Cohen, yet he once gave me a personal tour of his and Fran’s home — which he showed with great relish — and even took the time to inquire after my own artistic goals. He had the kind of life-force energy that makes it hard to believe he’s gone. And as long as Center Dance Ensemble, Arizona Theatre Company and the Herberger exist, he’s not.
