Diablo Ballet: Sleepless Nights

Diablo Ballet
‘Who Cares?’ ‘3 A.M. Suite,’ ‘Pas de Quatre et Pas de Six’
Dean Lesher Regional Center for the Arts
March 24, 2006

Dancers kick in their sleep.

Like catnapping felines, they twitch and jitter as they dream about arabesques and passes, and sometimes they deliver a good swift battement that sends the covers flying. Could such a

“3 A.M. Suite,” Viktor Kabaniaev’s restive new ballet sends Bohnstedt on a journey through vaguely dreamlike terrain, populated by bodies moving with an ominous undercurrent. Kabaniaev doesn’t sketch out the details of these characters, and there is no need to. Are these people, dream-ideas, the embodiment of worries preying on her inner mind? We may never know, but, in fact the piece seems all the more intriguing for not knowing.

As “3A.M. Suite” begins, to an insistent, thrumming score created by Sam Chittenden, Bohnstedt is a diminutive figure in space, apparently tossing in her sleep with legs dangling over the orchestra pit and arms writhing in a slow semaphore. Against the expanse of the Lesher Center stage – looking wider than usual with the bare walls, backstage emergency exits and light trees exposed -- Mayo Sugano slips by looking fearless and precise, as does Edward Stegge, who looks exceptional in this clean, modern-ballet style of choreography. Cynthia Sheppard, Matthew Linzer and David Fonnegra lurk in the shadows of the stage, asserting themselves briefly only to vanish.

Kabaniaev’s work looks like it takes cues from the William Forsythe philosophy of pulling the impulse of a step from different areas of the body and creating oppositional lines of movement. Alonzo King’s LINES Ballet delivers a similar effect, but where King’s choreography can often look too introverted and self-absorbed, Diablo’s dancers have turned the focus outward in “3 A.M. Suite,” bringing a layer of added dramatic intensity that is, quite frankly, a little chilling. It lends the perfect feeling of unease to the dreamy theme.

Linzer, who was brightly gallant in “Who Cares?” -- which opened the program -- was dark and mysterious here. And Fonnegra – dancing with Fred Astaire grace in the “Liza” segment of Who Cares?” -- made a understated partner for Bohnstedt in a duet in which every move, every lift, every balance, looked both calculated and inscrutable.

Linzer and Fonnegra, along with Jekyns Pelaez, made handsome partners to Lauren Main de Lucia, Amy Foster and Sheppard, respectively, in “Who Cares?” Diablo Ballet performs a concert version of this George Balanchine crowdpleaser, which includes the duets and solos for three couples, and it makes for a pleasant enough diversion, although it does lack a bit of context.

For all its lightheartedness, “Who Cares?” is not fluff. It demands a certain technical brilliance along with an offhanded delivery and among the women, only Main really served this up in her solo of hair-raising turns to “My One and Only.” Foster needed a bit more lightness in the jumps and beats to match her engaging smile in “Stairway to Paradise,” while the intricacy and speed simply seemed to elude Sheppard, whose footwork was blurry and not well-syncopated in “Fascinating Rhythm.” Still she and Pelaez made a relaxed and likeable couple in the opening “The Man I Love” number. Fonnegra also brought a jazzy elegance to his duet with Foster danced to the title song.

Jazziness is the watchword for Nikolai Kabaniaev’s saucy “Pas de Quatre et Pas de Six,” which closed the evening. After dancing all night, the company gave this signature ballet – a deconstruction of the classical idiom to modern backbeats – a thoroughly energetic push, to the delight of the crowd, who responded warmly to every solo.

ODC: Part of a Longer Story...

ODC/SF
Dancing Downtown Season
Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 700 Howard Street @3rd, San Francisco
through March 19, 2006

Sentiment was in the air at last week’s opening gala for ODC/SF’s annual Dancing Downtown Season at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco.

Even the most jaded couldn’t miss the bittersweet edge to the special program that included premieres from both Artistic Director Brenda Way and co-Artistic Director KT Nelson. But even as ODC lures retired San Francisco Ballet principal Joanna Berman back into the spotlight for the company’s three week home season, it also marks the retirements of favorite sons Brian Fisher and Private Freeman.

It was the glamorous Berman who opened the show in Way’s “Part of a Longer Story,” a work set to W.A. Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto in A that the choreographer has returned and added to in stages between 1993 and 2002. Way’s group sections -- created most recently, in 1995 and 2002 -- are disarming and sexy. She establishes encounters between dancers sketchily and then immediately melts them away in a flurry of sinuous movement. However, nothing is quite satisfying until Freeman and Berman emerge in the central movement, originally choreographed in 1993.

Guest artists often have a hard time fitting into a company’s signature style, but not so with Berman, who looks at least a lovely as she did when she retired from SFB in 2002. Though at the start of their duet she looked pensive, perhaps even a touch self-conscious, within a few measures of music, both she and Freeman seemed to release themselves to the moment, created a lyrical impression of a romance joined in progress. Partnering with an almost quizzical sensitivity, Freeman and Berman offered a transporting glimpse of how to make much more than just sense of a series of steps—of how to create nuanced shades of grey in between the black and white.

If the duet struck a chord of emotional depth, the last movement returned to a festive mood, highlighted by Fisher’s mischievous antics. It was a light-hearted if also light-weight showcase for Fisher, who was joined by Justin Flores, Corey Brady, Anne Zivolich and new apprentice Elizabeth Farotte.

One can only wonder if it’s the personalities of dancers like Freeman and Fisher, who have inspired the zany air of works like Way’s “time remaining,” which received its premiere on Thursday night.

Though packed with amusing imagery – dancers in saucy little tan tunics with peekaboo underwear, dancers sliding behind and tangling with dressmakers mannequins scattered like soulless stand-ins about the stage, a smarmy duet for Freeman and Andrea Flores – ultimately the meaning of time remaining is elusive. Is it a meditation on religious fanaticism, an investigation of the modern search for meaning, or a sketch of Heaven’s Gaters waiting for Comet Hale-Bopp? Ultimately, it is Freeman who entertains the most, with his jovially absurd holy-roller type. Seemingly unperturbed at the idea of looking ridiculous, Freeman plays his faith healer to the hilt with a consciously cheap twinkle in his eye to match the cheap twinkle of the giant blue rock on his ring finger.

ODC’s women of the moment – Andrea Flores, Zivolich, Yayoi Kambara, Marina Fukiyama and Quilet Rarang – ably displayed the their power-pack punch in KT Nelson’s premiere, “Stomp a Waltz,” to the music of Marcelo Zarvos. Flores, who was faintly subdued in “time remaining,” here blends sex appeal with knowing shrewdness in her quick glances at the audience from under her eyelashes.

Clad in black with pert splashes of red, the company headed into the final work of the evening full throttle, as if working off of the adrenaline push of a runner’s high. Nelson’s choreography, which bears the company’s trademark high-energy intricacy, is the kind of fast-moving and complex work that demands boldness. But though the strokes of each step are carefully calculated for the greatest effect, the dancers add a pleasant looseness as well, giving “Stomp a Waltz” a forward momentum to match the rhythmic drive of the music.

Watching the closing moments of the performance, with a freewheeling Freeman partnering Kambara, or Fisher and Andrea Flores cavorting, we suddenly remembered that there are only two more weeks to see them in action. At the reception after the show, an audience member murmured the same thing that was overheard at Berman’s retirement gala, “After that, it just won’t be the same again.”

This review originally appeared in the Contra Costa Times.