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Dance to the Music

BalletX concluded its 2024 season in its new home, the Suzanne Roberts Theatre across from the Wilma, a theater that had been its home for 18 years. The strongest program by the company this season, it began with a piece by company co-founder, Matthew Neenan, and ended with a world premiere by Margeurite Donlan who has choreographed for BAX once before. The new guy on the program is Takehiro Ueyama, whose “Heroes,” premiered in 2019. Although it is the only noncommissioned work this run, it premiered with new choreography for BAX last summer at the Mann Center for the Performing Arts.

Performance

BalletX: Fall Series

Place

The Suzanne Roberts Theatre, Philadelphia, PA, November 24, 2024

Words

Merilyn Jackson

BalletX in “Mapping Out A Sky” by Matthew Neenan. Photograph by Christopher Duggan

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Neenan’s “Mapping out a Sky” premiered BalletX in 2021 during the last of Covid. Christine Darch’s flippy, vertically striped costumes in black and white, like piano keys, hinted at Neenan’s ideas for the dance, underscoring that his often wry dances have a message. Here, he played with a medley of Stephen Sondheim’s songs, sans lyrics, performed live on piano offstage by Grant Loehnig. The live music was played so well, but sounded tinny in the poor acoustics in the Suzanne Roberts Theatre. Nonetheless, dancers dance to the count, not necessarily the music. So Neenan’s choreographic style, with his intricate structures, sussed out the somber and silly of Sondheim for all he was worth, winning over even those in the audience unfamiliar with Sondheim.

It opened with a stunning tableau of Kali, the Hindu Goddess of Time, with all ten of the cast forming her body and eight sets of arms outstretched and perfectly spaced like spikes of a wheel. Ashley Simpson was a central figure on the night I attended. She’s been with the company for four years and her dancing beautifully formed bridges between company seniors Francesca Forcella and Skyler Lubin and new cast members, Minori Sakita and Eileen Kim. Along with the latter two, Luca De-Poli and Mathis Joubert expanded the company to 16 dancers this year with, as announced, a new notable 52 week annual contract. 

Simpson’s verve sent her soaring onto a pyramid of men to be held aloft and swirled back down to earth. Forcella joins her in a brief duet as other cast stroll across the backdrop in silhouette. Suddenly, there’s a full stop and the stage is thrown into darkness, as if daring the audience to applaud. Blink, and the stage fills again with light (by Michael Korsch) and Kim struts out en pointe, a willowy, haughty and heartstopping solo figure. Blacked out again and blink again and dancers canter to honkytonk plinking, kicking their heels up in foxtrot mode—a frequent characteristic of Neenan’s style.

BalletX in “Heroes” by Takehiro Ueyama. Photograph by Christopher Duggan

BalletX premiered Takehiro Ueyama’s 2019 work, “Heroes” with new choreography last spring at the TD Pavilion at the Mann, an outdoor amphitheater in Philadelphia’s Fairmount Park. On the Roberts’ smaller stage, it was compact and began with atmospheric music by Kato Hideki. Videos introduce each work with comments by the choreographers. Ueyama says he loved America and moved from Japan to study at Juilliard, dancing with Paul Taylor Company for eight years before founding his own company, Take Dance, in 2005. “Heroes,” he said, is an homage to the resiliency of the Japanese people after the horrific end of WWII and how they rebuilt Japan and a “love letter to his parents.”

Ueyama also talked about being interested in the way John Cage and Merce Cunningham worked together for Merce’s ballets. I’m not convinced he completely understood their process of chance and independent creation. Hideki’s opening soundscape was just too right for this dance that portrayed Japanese going about their workday, robotically riding their unparalleled rail system. He used a series of white chairs which the 12 dancers stepped onto with up reached arms as if holding onto a strap. This is repeated many times as Forcella and Jerard Palazo connect foreheads like conjoined twins, place their hand over mouths, eyes, ears as if in horror. Whispers float in the air, they make deep plies in first position as Hideki’s composition slows to a heartbeat and a faint, ashen light falls over them, (Christopher Ham and Michael Korsch) as if dancing the unspeakable. When the company assembles in full, we see Graham contractions, cowboy lasso dance images. Midway, they removed the jackets of Eugenia P. Stallings’ red suits, and used them to cover bodies before carrying the jackets off in a bundle.

Confusingly, when John Adams’ “The Chairman Dances” begins somewhere midpoint, it’s driving pulse immediately reminded me of Steve Reich’s “Different Trains.” Since this is mainly a dance about the WWII era and has the imagery of Japanese trains, I thought, why not use a piece which evokes both post-war America and the trains that took victims to the camps in Germany? After all, Japan and Germany were part of the Axis powers.

BalletX in “Big Wig” by Marguerite Donlon. Photograph by Christopher Duggan

Marguerite Donlon mounted her first work, “The Last Lifeboat,” on BalletX in 2018, a dance theater paean to her grand aunt, Kate Gilnagh, who was given the last seat in the last lifeboat on the Titanic. The Irish-born, Berlin-based choreographer created her second work for the company, a world premiere called “Big Wig.” It’s a comic delight that riffs on Irish folk dance.

Like marching bands, the Ice Capades, and the Rockettes, Riverdance once stole the hearts of American audiences. Donlon grew up on Irish dance and hilariously spoofs the rigidity of the upper body, the dangling arms, the proscribed kick steps, and most of all the curly-haired little girls who dance it. I once encountered a gaggle of pre- and early teens in a hotel lobby, all costumed and made-up, for an Irish dance competition. They were not wearing wigs, but were coifed in their own russet shaded curls. Dance critic, Jack Anderson, scornfully called one of Riverdance’s spin-offs a “garish mixture of Irish dance and other forms.”

Donlon blends those other forms—ballet, contemporary, tap—into a dance that begins with 14 dancers in Silke Fischer’s scanty nude undies, the better to play with her long comically overdone auburn wigs. The women, en pointe, walk out like street girls looking for a john or a fight. De-Poli, the tallest of all, in a black swirl from the waist down that could have passed for an Ottoman Sirwal, was devilishly whirlish. It all quickly begins to look tribal and unhinged, the audience almost ready to hoot along. 

Composer Paul Calderone borrowed musics from Irish folk bands, and arranged them as an original composition—“My Lagan Love” (by the Chieftains,) is a mournful nineteenth-century lullaby rooted in the culture surrounding the River Lagan in Belfast, and tunes from other parts of Ireland. Dancers exit the stage and return with the wigs as ties, shoulder pads, or tails. As music from wild Irish Folk traditions takes over, the dancers fall into a feral romp degenerating into what could be a scene from Lord of the Flies. 

“Big wig” is also a jibe referring to a self-important person. I can’t help but think Donlon also had in mind a sly swipe at Michael Flatley, Lord of the Dance. Someone had to do it. 

Merilyn Jackson

Merilyn Jackson has written on dance for the Philadelphia Inquirer since 1996 and writes on dance, theater, food, travel and Eastern European culture and Latin American fiction for publications including the New York Times, the Warsaw Voice, the Arizona Republic, Phoenix New Times, MIT’s Technology Review, Arizona Highways, Dance Magazine, Pointe and Dance Teacher, and Broad Street Review. She also writes for tanz magazin and Ballet Review. She was awarded an NEA Critics Fellowship in 2005 to Duke University and a Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Fellowship for her novel-in-progress, Solitary Host.

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