Washington Ballet - Naima Prevots

The Washington Ballet
Kennedy Center
Washington, D.C.
March 28, 2007

by Naima Prevots
copyright © 2007 by Naima Prevots

This was an evening of contrasting approaches to choreography. Christopher Wheeldon’s Morphoses emphasized abstraction and lush minimalism, while Septime Webre’s Carmina Burana played itself out in the arena of grand spectacle. The dancers showed their versalitity and virtuosity, and live music for both pieces significantly enhanced the performances. Wheeldon is a master of dynamics, spatial exploration, and poetic, sweeping movement phrases, while Webre sometimes falters in his search for grand statements and visual pyrotechnics. Wheeldon’s abstraction captured the imagination with its consistency and clarity, while Webre’s spectacle had a tendency to wander in excessive action and fragmentation.

The music for Wheeldon’s Morphoses was by Gyorgy Ligeti, and the complex, mood filled score was played beautifully by two violinists, a violist and a cellist (Tom Chiu, Conrad Harris, Wendy Sutter, Danielle Farina). The four performers (on March 28: Sona Kharatian, Luis Torres, Jade Payette, Jared Nelson) were given the task of functioning both as a group and as individuals in explorations of space, time and energy. Individually and together the performers danced with artistic and technical brilliance, as the piece progressed from an image of four bodies slowly awakening on the floor to various configurations of solos, duets, quartets. The dictionary defines “morphoses” as “the mode of formation or development of an organism or any of its parts.” Wheeldon’s choreography was a marvelous abstraction of this idea, and every moment and movement related to a sense of folding, unfolding, growing, sharing, and being part of a large and re-shaping whole.

Morphoses, created for The New York City Ballet, was a D.C. premiere, and a welcome piece for The Washington Ballet repertory. It challenged the dancers to create an emotional framework from within, from the musical and dance impulses, as opposed to something derived from narrative or literary allusion. Wheeldon is a masterful choreographer; he knows when to go and when to stop. He is extremely musical, and the Ligeti score, while strong and beautiful on its own, gained a new power in partnership with the dance. Phrases in the music became the basis for investigation of impulses in the body with clear phrasing in initiation and follow through of dance statement. Rising from the floor, the dancers became a unit of four moving as one, and then gradually separated as duets formed. Ripples of torso and sweeping legs brought the couples together and then apart, and then together again, as the dance ended back on the floor. Wonderful moments of silence allowed us to incorporate the bodies clad in red leotard type costumes, and the stage environment bare of sets but accented periodically with colored vertical bars appearing on the back curtain.

Webre’s Carmina Burana, set the to the well known music of Carl Orff, has been seen before and utilized the entire Washington Ballet company, as well as apprentices and guest artists. When the curtain opened, we saw the striking set design by Regan Kimmel, which consisted of layers of tiers encompassing the whole stage, housing the choral members who stood facing the audience. In the middle of the space were a large group of dancers in soft lush costuming, and hanging from the ceiling was a large round circular prop occupied by a standing dancer. The scene was truly breathtaking, and provided an atmosphere of a contained and vibrant universe. This setting remained constant throughout the twenty-four sections of the piece, as different groups of dancers moved in and out of the space, and choral soloists shifted to prominent places on the various platforms.

Webre used the version of Orff’s music scored by Wilhelm Killmayer for two pianos and percussion. (Scott Dettra, Alejandro Hernandez-Valdez, Julie Angelis Sodee, Christopher de Chiara, John Kilkenny, Nathan Lassell, Christopher Rose, Donald Spinelli, Pamela Lassell). The singers were from The Cathedral Choral Society, directed by J. Reilly Lewis, and the Children’s Chorus of the Cathedral Schools. The soprano, tenor and baritone soloists (Laura Lewis, Robert Baker, Stephen Combs) were superb, and added enormously to the performance. One of the important things about Septime Webre’s choreographic explorations is his ability to collaborate with live musicians, and he deserves credit for his determination to avoid taped sound. His ability to convince musicians that working with dance is a worthy and fulfilling enterprise is a real plus for The Washington Ballet, the dancers, and the audience.

Carl Orff premiered Carmina Burana in 1937, and many choreographers have been attracted to the powerful score over the years. The choral text is based on a collection of secular medieval poetry discovered in the 19th century, which as the program notes “extols young love, the joy of springtime and the celebration of sexual union.” These erotic verses were written by monks and itinerant scholars in Latin and early German. Unfortunately, the program did not provide any of the text, so that the audience could get a sense of the earthy nature of the poems, and have a feeling for the relationship of words to dance, or how the numerous sections might connect with one another.

Webre’s choreography was characterized by constant and unrelenting motion, with varied groups and soloists moving on and off the stage for the different sections. His emphasis seemed to be on capturing the undeniable pounding energy of the score, rather than the eroticism of the text. As the sections kept surging forward, with the dancers appearing in different costumes and groupings, the sense of fragmentation is increased, and the sense of a whole was lost. The dancers were brilliant, the singers were marvelous, but it became hard to capture and retain specific images. The choreography for the male soloists and groups seemed to capture more of the earthiness of the text, and particularly striking were a solo performed by Jason Hartley and a section for a group of men on chairs. As Hartley dug into the floor and leaped from it, and as the men clapped and bounded and pounded from and on to their chairs, there was a wonderful sensuous feeling. This was captured occasionally in some of the women’s solos and a few of the duets, but too often the movements did not reflect the pounding and driving feeling of the score or the erotic context of the words.

It is possible that for Webre much of the significance of the text was embedded in the figure of the woman who descends from her cage like sphere and becomes a sensuous symbol as she is surrounded and embraced. A strong image at the end occurs when she is set back in her sphere, and at her feet is a male dancer embracing her legs and rising with her back to the top of the stage. This could be seen as a celebration of physicality and love, and a statement that encompasses the earthly concerns of the text. There is no question that there was a great deal of virtuoso movement in the choreography designed for solos, duets, and various groupings, but as the sections continued in rapid fire one after the other, there were too many similarities in the movement phrases. Although the costumes changed often, we saw the same leg extensions, turns, and arm thrusts, and the male/female duets were physically demanding but not particularly sensuous.

Perhaps Webre’s concept was of an overall lush spectacle, and that for him encompassed the feelings of both music and text. This is legitimate, and for many in the audience this was sufficient. For this viewer, more depth in exploring beyond the surface would have provided a more compelling experience, and opportunities to pause occasionally and capture images would have given power to the choreography. Carmina Burana was certainly sacrilegous for the monks who were supposed to espouse purity of body and worship of God and not earthly pleasures, and Orff’s music is meant to have a primal feeling. Webre’s version celebrates a world of constant motion and interaction, and a world of fleeting and rapidly changing encounters.

This dual bill of Wheeldon’s and Webre’s choreography had a run at the Kennedy Center from March 28-April 1, 2007. Hopefully, The Washington Ballet will keep Morphoses in its repertory, and commission more work from Wheeldon. His approach to choreography provides important challenges for the company, and an exciting perspective on dance for the audience.

Photo: Jason Hartley in "Carmina Burana."

danceviewtimes