Naughty Boy …
It’s spring, and that means love is everywhere for the Smuin Ballet Company. Of the three pieces that make up the spring concert, which opened May 8 at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and will move this coming weekend to the Dean Lesher in Walnut Creek, two were choreographed by the company’s late director Michael Smuin. Bouquet and Suite from St. Louis Woman were essential Smuin—romantic, sexy, accessible and entertaining.
More engaging—both choreographically and thematically—was the opening piece by guest choreographer Trey McIntyre. Set to Mozart’s Violin Concerto in G Major, The Naughty Boy! is an ode to Cupid. McIntyre has set work for Stuttgart Ballet, American Ballet Theater and New York City Ballet, among others, and it’s easy to see why: his choreography is deft and original, making demands on the dancers to perform at the top of their form but also allowing them to approach their craft with both humor and panache.
McIntyre’s fresh approach to the dance stage is clear from Naughty Boy’s first moments, when the stage is set askew by a curtain drawn two-thirds closed. Within that smaller, confined space, the petite Jessica Touchet appears in a short red tunic and red feathery cap: she is Cupid, displaying a mischievous insouciance as she cavorts through her opening steps with dashing speed and grace. Abruptly, a man’s head and torso flop down onto the floor on one side of the curtain-defined opening. A woman’s head and torso flop down on the other side. The audience laughs, and Cupid continues her buoyant footwork. Colorful streamers fill the air around her. It’s party time!
As the violin concerto skitters along, four couples appear and dance pas de deux. These are not romantic pas de deux—lyrical and saturated with repressed longing; rather, they are playful, with an eroticism that is both heartfelt and joyous. There are many lifts, but, unlike in classical ballet, they are part of the quickness of the movement—short flights that move fluidly through the dancers’ immediate space. The woman is never lifted above the man’s head like a leggy trophy of romantic femininity—static and back-breaking; instead, her short flights become metaphors for excitement, realizations that the man allows her heart to take flight as easily and as effortlessly as a breath, a step or his own dynamic actions.
Who arrives in each of these pas de deux, leaping into the man’s arms, displacing the adored woman? Why, that naughty boy!—not only setting love in motion but also disrupting and devilishly partaking. It’s an insightful comment on the role of Cupid, and perhaps matchmakers everywhere, that love is a magnetic force drawing in all those surrounding.
McIntyre’s sense of ballet is equally quixotic. Where we expect classical movement, we get a flip of the hip, an in-turned knee, a flexed foot—each of which makes a small exclamation mark in its unexpectedness. Ballet becomes a volatile force, rather than a stable and symmetrical one. When Touchet bourrées on stage toward a love-smitten couple, she is in sixth position, toes pointed forward, both feet parallel and touching. The position makes her movement doll-like and improbable, in counterpoint to the couples, who now and then stop, aligned in a row, obeisant to the capricious instigator of love.
And more and less of the same
The first movement of Smuin’s Bouquet, set to a piano concerto by Shostakovich, is created along the lines of the storybook ballet’s grand pas, with three princes and one princess moving symmetrically through a series of courtly exchanges; never mind the Russian costuming. The second movement is more contemporary in feel, overtly graceful and romantic.
The closing piece was Smuin’s lively and sexy Suite from St. Louis Woman. With snappy sets painted in Stuart Davis style, this story of sex and male competition put the company through a variety of dance styles from cakewalk to tango, all woven into a substrate of ballet. Ryan Camou did some splendid dancing, with a precision to jumps and turns that made the air crackle. Matthew Linzer was more brooding and theatrical. And Robin Cornwell, the object of their attentions, was both elegant and sexy. Everyone had a great time, admiring the dancers’ lusciously muscled bodies.
Smuin Ballet continues its spring performances at Dean Lesher through Sunday, May 24, after which it moves to Mountain View. For information, visit www.smuinballet.org, or call 415-495-2234.
—Jaime Robles
Originally published in the Piedmont Post
Photo: Kevin Yee Chan and Courtney Hellebuyck in Naughty Boy. Photo by Marty Sohl.