Ballet West: The Shakespeare Suite

David Bintley’s The Shakespeare Suite, the title piece of Ballet West’s spring season, opens with Kyle Davis as Hamlet and a chorus of four couples slinking across a maroon carpet, the women dressed like Audrey Hepburn in Funny Face and the men (save Davis) in kilts and mesh shirts. Davis and the chorus’s repetitive sharp gestures usher the audience into the comical world created by the marriage of Duke Ellington’s music, Shakespeare’s characters, and Bintley’s tongue-in-cheek choreography. The Shakespeare Suite humorously portrays the most famous Shakespearean characters from both tragedy and comedy in a series of vignettes set to Ellington’s big band sounds.

Christopher Sellars and Katherine Lawrence charmed in the first duet as a Converse-clad, pop punk Kate and Petruchio from The Taming of the Shrew. Lawrence’s eye rolls and huffing marches, all done in a fluffy wedding dress, argued with Sellars’ spiky-haired, jaunty prankster. Typically cast in sparkling but demure roles, it was exciting to see Lawrence’s amusing over-exaggeration.

The only solo of the work was Davis’s portrayal Hamlet, which both opened and closed The Shakespeare Suite. Beginning with a pinpoint focus off stage, Davis, whom I have not had the pleasure of seeing in soloist roles before, showed a confident coolness, even while going mad. His technique skillfully folded into the character, making him an apt guide for Bintley’s surreal world populated by beatnik Shakespeareans.

It was a treat to see Ballet West’s dancers portray characters so far beyond the scope of their typical repertoire. I hardly recognized Adrian Fry stalking across the stage as Othello, and Allison DeBona’s devious smiles made her a delightfully manipulative Lady Macbeth. The ballet showcased a rarely revealed, comedic side of Ballet West. With all its character and wit, The Shakespeare Suite doesn’t try to be more complex than it is; it’s a romp, a gleeful amusement both for the dancers and the audience.

Soloist Jenna Rae Herrera and Demi-Soloist Joshua Whitehead, as Titania and Bottom, in David Bintley’s The Shakespeare Suite. Photo by Beau Pearson.

The first work of the evening, Jiří Kylián’s Return to a Strange Land, was the most benign. Dedicated to John Cranko, Return to a Strange Land presents two pas de trois and two pas de deux, each featuring Kylián’s often imitated style of smoothly intertwined partnering. Costumed in academically simple blue or gold leotards and soft-hued tights, the dancers begin on an autumn-colored stage, piles of leaves in the background, as they wind and unwind their arms, tangling their bodies until interwoven connections emerge. A dancer is lifted in an arch and spun into a deep plié while her partners draw connected circles around her. When the dancers do separate, they rush away from each other, flying around the stage like the leaves piled upstage.  Eventually they come together again, knotting themselves into moments of delicate, embracing balance as their kaleidoscopic shapes, perfectly symmetrical yet complex, emerge and disappear. The partnering is intricate but was deftly handled, especially by Chase O’Connell. Paired with Emily Adams, whose musicality is entrancing, the blue pas de deux was clear and heartfelt without being overly earnest.

Principal Emily Adams and Chase O’Connell in Jiří Kylián’s Return to a Strange Land. Photo by Beau Pearson.

Artists of Ballet West in Jiří Kylián's Return to a Strange Land. Photo by Beau Pearson.j

Principal Emily Adams and Chase O’Connell in Jiří Kylián’s Return to a Strange Land. Photo by Beau Pearson.

I will confess, I was most excited about Ballet West’s spring season because of Summerspace, Merce Cunningham’s masterwork that premiered at the American Dance Festival in 1958. The work was created with Cunningham’s unique collaborative process in which composer, choreographer, and designer each created independently, only coming together at the premiere of the work, a process still imitated as the work is reset on new dancers. Summerspace features colorfully dotted unitards and a backdrop designed by Robert Rauschenberg, as well as a spacious score composed by Morton Feldman. This type of collaborative process is obviously risky, but in this case yields a work where each element is fully realized, able to simultaneously stand on its own and interact with the other elements. Granted, it’s a great help for Summerspace to have had such accomplished collaborators. To quote Feldman, “Say you’re getting married and I tell you the dress won’t be made until the morning of the wedding. But I also tell you it’s by Dior.”  

Though it was the oldest work of the concert, Summerspace was the most unconventional, challenging both physically and conceptually for a typical ballet audience. Its clarity and simplicity made it an easy work to watch, however. Dancers charge through the space with impossible sequences of spins and springs. Spacious lines that lean toward balletic, speedy turning sequences, and simple patterns of skips, triplets, and leaps are juxtaposed against abrupt stillness. The music drifts in and out, filled with silence, almost fluttering past your ears. Ballet West’s cast was spritely in their charming interpretation, and their youthful verve was dazzling. Katlyn Addison’s open presence anchored the work. She kept the lift and speed of Summerspace from flying away, grounding the performance with her voluminous dancing.

Summerspace was clearly a challenge for Ballet West’s dancers: the movement passages are physical non-sequiturs, technically brutal in their composition. But seeing such accomplished dancers struggle is its own reward. In one moment, Katie Critchlow balanced on the subtlest of relevés, shaking as she shifted her weight to one leg. There was a sense of concentration that I have never seen at a Ballet West performance, an almost palpable air of risk. That the dancers were able to maintain humor and playfulness made their attempts and successes even more intriguing to watch. More than once the audience giggled and burst into spontaneous applause, reactions that are as rare as they were delightful and well-deserved.

Mary Lyn Graves, a native of Tulsa, OK, studied dance at the University of Oklahoma. She currently dances with Ririe-Woodbury Dance Company.

Alwin Nikolais through the ages: Ririe-Woodbury's Strata

The work of Alwin Nikolais presented in Ririe-Woodbury Dance Company’s Strata spanned three decades, but the exploratory nature of Nikolais’s work appears to transcend time. What was once progressive still feels to be so; while others have emulated areas which Nikolais pioneered, his work maintains its sense of existing on the edge, despite the ebb and flow of many dance trends.

This article seeks to place the works featured in Strata within their original contexts rather than presume new observations and, in doing so, seeks to reveal how Nikolais’s choreography, concepts, and staging hold up, or even accumulate layers, as they continue to be performed and discussed.

Nikolais’s “Tensile Involvement” premiered in 1955; to place it historically, this was both the same year Arthur Mitchell first joined the New York City Ballet, later to become the company’s first African American principal dancer, and the year the polio vaccine was approved by the FDA. Around the same time, Nikolais himself wrote the following in a piece for the New York Times:

“We speak of dance necessitating humanistic relationships and concern, but new semantic meanings of man and his relativity within our present historical strata are constantly being redefined. The tools of the dancer - motion, time, space, light, sound, shape and color - have greatly extended and altered in meaning during the last quarter-century.” (August 18, 1957)

Nikolais’s observation may be extended more broadly, but is certainly an apt description of his own work and intent, as embodied in “Tensile Involvement” (if not equally embodied throughout his repertory). In the piece, dancers cavort, energetically but purposefully, weaving paths back and forth across the stage with long, ribbon-like cords. The dancers’ relationships to their environs triumph here; their relation to each other is important and evident, but is perhaps only a byproduct of the primary task at hand.

Withstanding the test of multiple viewings, the premise of “Tensile Involvement” continues to feel refreshingly new; arguably, the same holds true for the test of the span of decades since the work’s premiere. Perhaps this is also to credit the bright performance quality brought out by the spirit of the dance and the inherent quality of Nikolais’s movement: energy radiating from the eyes down to the metatarsals, and, in this case, even still outward along the full length of the cords, from the floor all the way up into the fly-space.

“Gallery” premiered in 1978 as part of a two-week run at the Beacon Theater in New York; in the same year, the U.S. would launch the first global positioning satellite and Yvonne Rainer would perform her iconic “Trio A” for the camera. New York Times dance critic Anna Kisselgoff wrote the following after attending the opening night of “Gallery”:

“[The] metaphor of an ordinary fairground shooting gallery representing humanity is typical of Mr. Nikolais’s way with a message. Yet it comes as no surprise that he also seduces his public with the dazzle and wit of his technique… It is one of Mr. Nikolais’s strongest works, in which he has achieved a great deal of variety within self-imposed restrictions.” (April 20, 1978)

Nikolais’s success in fully exploring one idea, living within restrictions set in place by a specific world, was a recurring impression throughout Strata, but especially in “Gallery.” Harkening back to composition class, the idea of exploring one thought completely before moving on to the next is tantamount to choreography; a thorough exploration is akin to sweeping out all the nooks and crannies, unlikely to leave a viewer wanting.

“Gallery” is an embodiment of such thorough exploration, as it twists and turns through various iterations of similar themes. The dance’s dominant imagery consists of red and green targets, bobbing heads, DayGlo masks, and dancers serving as abstractions of goofy yet macabre caricatures. While far from appearing human, the mime-like performers still elicit human responses from the audience - laughter, shock, discomfort, surprise - in their odd renditions to an eerie sound score.  

At first, the cast of “Gallery” seems to be in control of the fairground shooting gallery they inhabit: popping their heads up and down, going in and out of view, swirling back and forth along the counter they are behind, doing the backstroke, eventually creating elaborate counterbalanced shapes on two stacks of tables in front of the counter. But by the end, all are compelled to return to the confined gallery space from whence they came, and are subjected to invisible projectiles that render the mask-like targets in front of their faces shattered. Were they ever in control? “Gallery” explores such a full range of possibilities within its parameters that it seems for a time that they are.  

1980 saw not only the premiere of Nikolais’s “Mechanical Organ” but also those of the Pac-Man game, Star Wars’ The Empire Strikes Back, and Salt Lake City’s very own Ballet West in New York City. Nearly a year after the debut of “Mechanical Organ” at the Spoleto Festival in Charleston, South Carolina, Kisselgoff observed the following after a Nikolais Dance Theater performance at City Center:

“An ensemble precedes the best moment, a solo beautifully danced by Marcia Weadell-Esposito. Like a lean wildcat pacing in her cage, she darts and whirls, discovering her own shape and yet still alluding to the mannequin image, her own head lolling atop her neck...As a pure-dance piece, "The Mechanical Organ" is as good as its choreography. It does not seemingly aim for the philosophical resonance of "Gallery." (February 12, 1981)

Mary Lyn Graves, in the solo described above by Kisselgoff, is a highlight of Ririe-Woodbury’s staging of “Mechanical Organ.” Quick and crisp, elegant and elongated, Graves’ performance of the doll-like solo was a perfect balancing act of precise attack and languid release.

Throughout “Mechanical Organ,” specifics of choreography remain of greater interest than the dance’s conceptual arc. While a divergence in that regard from other pieces in Strata, there was still delight to be found in Juan Carlos Claudio and Bashaun Williams’ virtuosic duet, in which they leapt over and rolled under each other, and supported each other in hinges and other counterbalances, and in an all-male quintet that took place largely on the floor for a transition from male bravura to more meditative contortions.

“Mechanical Organ” featured a sound score composed and edited by Nikolais himself, who forged a new path, technologically speaking, in 1964, when his company commissioned the first commercial Moog synthesizer. Nikolais used a synth to create jarring, discordant, computer-y sound scores for decades of dances, including for all those featured in Strata (all the program’s scenic and lighting designs are also his work).

In 1985, the year Nikolais’s “Crucible” premiered in Durham, North Carolina at the American Dance Festival, many now-common technologies were in their infancies, including the Internet Domain Name System, the Nintendo home console, and Microsoft Windows. William Forsythe’s first collaboration with composer Thom Willems was in 1985, the year following Forsythe’s appointment as director of Ballett Frankfurt. Jennifer Dunning wrote about the opening night of “Crucible” at ADF for the NY Times:

“One cannot help feeling that Mr. Nikolais will continue to play with ''Crucible,'' which doesn't look quite settled in. For the piece is almost at odds with itself after its first stunning and amusing moments. ''Crucible'' begins with a play with mirrors...and the nudity is meant to be one more abstract element...As is often the case with stage nudity, the bodies do become abstract and asexual very quickly. But as ''Crucible'' now stands, there is little eloquence to this design with bodies beyond a play of shapes and patterns.” (June 16, 1985)

“Crucible” employs optical illusion to create its otherworldly choreography; a sloped mirror duplicates hands, arms, and legs that poke upward, first like flora, swaying and multicolored, then metamorphosing into fauna, pecking and chopping. The emphasis here is truly on form and limb, and the kaleidoscopic imagery is successful due to the abstraction of bodies, which enables the eye to see a whole rather than a sum of many.

However, as the dancers begin to reveal more of their bodies above the slanting mirror, the abstraction wavers. Though the original nude dance thongs are foregone here for more SLC-friendly nude unitards, the focus very quickly shifts to the human body as, transparently, a conglomeration of its parts; the audience audibly tittered and even whistled as the dancers turned (the illusion of) nude rear ends to face them.

Viewing “Crucible” now, much may have settled that Dunning felt was incomplete following the work’s premiere. And, rather than sharing Dunning’s skepticism at the success of bodily abstraction, this writer wondered what lay at the heart of the interplay, even conflict, witnessed in “Crucible,” between the abstracted body and the human body. Through barriers of costuming, lighting, distance, and concept, the dancers’ bodies still appeared as unrelentingly un-abstract to many in the audience. It is a testament, perhaps, to the power of the body to announce itself, no matter its additional trappings.

By their very natures, history (both dance and otherwise) and technology have barreled ahead since the premieres of “Tensile Involvement,” “Gallery,” “Mechanical Organ,” and “Crucible.” But Nikolais’s singular and inventive use of lighting, projection, sound, costuming, concept, and movement still elicits strong response. Among a relatively small canon of enduring choreographers, Alwin Nikolais has proven what is unique about a dance may remain so, and that new layers may even be acquired in a dance's lifetime. This writer fancies that is because of, rather than despite, not only continued performance of the work but continued conversation and criticism surrounding it.

Amy Falls manages loveDANCEmore’s cadre of writers and edits its online content. She works full-time in development at Ballet West and still occasionally puts her BFA in modern dance to use, performing with Municipal Ballet Co. and other independent projects in SLC.