Smuin Ballet’s celebratory world of dance
Smuin Ballet opened its Dance Series Two this past weekend at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, showing not only new work but a whole new face, artistically and as a company. The program featured three pieces: Tutto eccetto il lavandino (Everything but the kitchen sink) by choreographer Val Caniparoli, Return to a Strange Land with choreography by Jiří Kylián and the world premiere of Oasis, choreographed by Helen Pickett.
Oasis was commissioned by Smuin Ballet and the making of the ballet was very much a collaboration between the composer Jeff Beal, Pickett and the company. Pickett, who is the Resident Choreographer at Atlanta Ballet, says the inspiration for creating the ballet was based on Last Call at the Oasis, a film by Jessica Yu, about the water shortage in California. But the ballet, she qualifies, is meant to be a celebration of water, which she sees as the basis of nature’s vitality. Beal’s music has the lushness that is typical of film music and can be convincingly connected to the ever-present and expansive qualities of water.
The sets by Emma Kingsbury were fabricated of strands of luminescent material and hung like curtains above the stage. The curtains were cut into a wave pattern, and videos of the bubbles of poured water into water are projected across their surface, creating abstract and sensual patterns. Nicholas Rayment did the lighting design.
Pickett danced with William Forsythe’s Frankfurt Ballet for over a decade, but her choreography in this ballet bears little resemblance to Forsythe’s speedy and über-demanding work. Rather the ballet is intensely lyrical, with innovative movements that step outside the ballet vocabulary.
The ballet is an ensemble piece with solos and duets moving throughout. Some of the most fetching moments were in what I would call the ballroom sequences, when the dancers shift suddenly into whirling waltzes across the stage. Undoubtedly fun to dance, it was both refreshingly familiar and exotic at the same time.
The program opened with Tutto eccetto il lavandino, a ballet composed of a vast and diverse set of movements. Among them, the swing of baseball batters, the open mouth exertions of opera singers, boys crying and dancers sneaking across the stage like melodramatic villains. All of these sequences were short, colliding chaotically and humorously with more conventional ballet steps.
The piece opens with the company in formations like a ballet class, and with movements similar to those in class. It then breaks into smaller configurations and dance sequences, among them an absolutely five-star trio with Terez Dean, Weston Krukow and Robert Moore and a Celtic knot of a duet with Erica Felsch and Dustin James. The piece is mistitled though. It should be “everything including the kitchen sink.” I won’t tell you why. No spoilers.
The music was comprised of short-ish pieces by Vivaldi. Which brings up the only complaint (if it is complaint) I have. Taped music is never quite up to the standard of live dancing. It’s always a bit disappointing, lacking as it does the vibrance that the dancers have live onstage.
The program’s second piece was the absolutely lovely Return to a Strange Land by the wonderful Czech choreographer, Jiří Kylián. In the program notes, Kylián writes that he dedicated this piece to John Cranko, who died unexpectedly two years before the piece’s premiere in 1975. Set to the music of Leoš Janáček, the work is poignant in mood and strikingly innovative in movement. Comprised of two trios and two duets, the trios seem organized around the concept of a third dancer acting as a bridge to the other two dancers. The duets seem to emphasize soaring, not in the usual way of ballet lifts but rather as the male dancer revolves slowly, his partner spinning out from his center. The floor existed as something pulling the dancers down and into each other. This is a piece that truly shows the power of grief to inspire an artist to deep insights into physicality and human relationship.
The 22-year-old company is losing three of its dancers to retirement: Susan Roemer, Weston Krukow and Robert Moore. And changing its identity. With the 2016-17 season, it will be known simply as Smuin.
– Jaime Robles
Smuin Ballet’s Dance Series Two tours the Bay Area through May and June with performances in San Francisco, Walnut Creek, San Mateo and Carmel. For information and tickets, visit smuinballet.org.
Photo: The ensemble in Oasis. Photo by Keith Sutter.