| Houston Ballet readies an edgy 2007-2008 season
A merry widow will waltz gaily and a sylph will float romantically through Houston Ballet's 2007-2008 season. But narrative dance will also have a leaner, meaner aesthetic as artistic director Stanton Welch presents his tough-girl Cinderella and three new one-act story ballets. "There's a taste of everything," Welch says of the season's mix. Popular music by George Gershwin, Peter Tchaikovsky, Astor Piazzolla, Antonio Vivaldi and Wolfgang Mozart inspired some of the works. There's fierce fare from Christopher Bruce and William Forsythe. What there isn't, for the first time in memory, is a ballet other than The Nutcracker by Welch's predecessor, Ben Stevenson. The days of new blockbusters such as The Snow Maiden and Cleopatra which Stevenson once cranked out like clockwork seem like ancient history.
Mix it up with some modern ballet
MORRISTOWN -- The American Repertory Ballet performs "Mix It Up!" at 8 p.m. Friday, Feb. 9 at the Community Theatre. The dance makers in this program have been chosen to represent a broad diversity of different choreographic styles and include "Baker's Dozen" by Twyla Tharp; world premieres by Val Caniparoli, Harrison McEldowney and Susan Shields, part of the "Dancing Through the Ceiling" commissioning program; and the company premiere of "Six Pianos" by Graham Lustig. Specially created for smaller stages, "Mix It Up!" features pieces that have smaller ensembles of dancers, showing off the multifaceted performing skills of each of the talented dancers of the New Brunswick-based troupe. "Baker's Dozen," first performed in 1979, is performed to piano compositions written in the 1920s by Willie "The Lion" Smith.
All aboard the 'Show Boat'
Fish got to swim, birds got to fly, and every now and then, big Broadway scores got to be performed by a symphony orchestra. That seems to be the feeling, according to the growing number of semi-staged musicals - meaning actors performing shows with some movement but minimal sets, costumes and props, and musicians onstage rather than in the pit - happening around the country. This week, Casa Mañana jumps into the game in a big way, with a semi-staged version of the 1927 Jerome Kern masterpiece Show Boat, accompanied by no less than the Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra, under the baton of Miguel Harth-Bedoya. It will be fully costumed, but with no sets or projections (although there are some lighting effects). "The audience gets to be involved in the writing of the show, and not just the presentation," says Show Boat director Mark Madama.
Ballet shines in long-absent 'Giselle'
Giselle is one of the most popular ballets of all time. Yet until Friday night, the Pennsylvania Ballet hadn't danced it for nine years. It was worth the wait. The company looked better than it had in a long time. Choreographed by Marius Petipa after Jean Coralli and Jules Perrot, Giselle is one of the great Romantic ballets and a notoriously difficult one to dance. But the Pennsylvania Ballet rose to the occasion. It is the story of a peasant girl who loves to dance, despite a weak heart. She is involved in two love triangles and winds up going mad and dying of a broken heart. After death, she is recruited into the Wilis, made up of the spirits of young women who died before they could marry. Giselle ultimately saves Albrecht, the man who betrayed her, from the Wilis, who make men dance to their deaths.
Dancing through a wintry mix Review: KC Ballet dances through a wintry mix
Lynne Taylor-Corbett's popular choreographic "Great Galloping Gottschalk" is easy to underestimate and ultimately hard to ignore. It buys into the sentimental elan of 19th-century composer Louis Moreau Gottschalk's pre-ragtime salon music, yet it brings enough heft to its vignettes about love, play and dance to have made it a staple of American dance for 25 years. "Gottschalk" was the culmination of the Kansas City Ballet's winter program that opened Thursday at the Lyric Theatre. The commitment with which it was tackled made it the evening's highlight. The whimsical core began with costume designer Gretchen Ward Warren's playful palette, with improbable ranges that subtly shimmered in and out of each other. In "Souvenir de Porto Rico," dancers initially in silhouette against orange emerged into light to dance a loose-limbed ballet, arms swinging and hands out.
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