Tag Archives: Damara Bennett

Dance, General, Martha Ullman West

OBT’s ‘Rush + Robbins’: Some further thoughts

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Fund drive as of Wednesday, June 10THE LATEST NEWS FROM OREGON BALLET THEATRE, which is struggling with a life-threatening deficit that has it feverishly trying to raise $750,000 by June 30 to keep from going out of business: The campaign hit the $524,000 mark by Wednesday. That morning OBT’s Erik Jones said 900 tickets were still available for Friday night’s gala benefit performance Dance United, which will bring star performers from across North America to raise money for OBT. Buy your tickets here — this could be the event on the season!

At Portland Arts Watch, meanwhile, Barry Johnson reports on the challenges OBT faces AFTER June 30.

And prominent national dance critic Martha Ullman West, who plies part of her trade (the pro bono part) here at Art Scatter, has some things to say below about last weekend’s season-ending program and how it revealed the necessity of keeping this company alive. She even took time to give her Scatter editor a scolding for something he posted on the subject: When you’re pro bono, you get to do that!

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When I wrote on Monday in The Oregonian that the way Oregon Ballet Theatre‘s dancers performed The Concert last weekend clearly and painfully demonstrate how much we have to lose if the company folds, I didn’t mean the same assessment couldn’t be applied to the rest of what was a very difficult program.

Artur Sultanov in The Concert. Photo: BLAINE TRUITT COVERTOBT’s season-finale program was designed to accomplish several goals, one of which was to challenge the dancers. And there is no getting around the fact that the work those dancers had performed most often — Rush, Afternoon of a Faun and The Concert — was polished to the accomplished shine you see only in major companies: New York City Ballet, San Francisco Ballet, Pacific Northwest Ballet, Houston Ballet and the like. These are troupes with far bigger budgets, many more dancers and far more opportunities to perform than OBT.

What Christopher Stowell, as artistic director, and Damara Bennett, as OBT School director, have accomplished in Portland in six years is truly remarkable. And it’s known throughout the country, which is why, when OBT announced its life-threatening financial emergency last month, so many artistic directors answered his call for help in the affirmative.

This company is extremely well-schooled. That was abundantly clear in Rush and in the second performance of The Cage on Saturday afternoon, as it was in the spring performances of William Forsythe’s The Vertiginous Thrill of Exactitude, which OBT’s dancers will perform in Friday’s benefit gala. I was startled when I returned from Kansas City last spring, having seen Kansas City Ballet the night before, by the contrast. KCB celebrated its 50th anniversary last year, but it’s OBT that has a true company style.

That’s an achievement for which Stowell, Bennett and ballet mistress Lisa Kipp can take credit. Most of these dancers had quite different training. Sure, there’s a cadre that has been to the School of American Ballet that includes Gavin Larsen, Adrian Fry, Lucas Threefoot (summer program), Christian Squires and Javier Ubell. But a number were trained in OBT’s school, at PNB or SFB. And the excellent Ronnie Underwood trained in Tulsa, so is part of the Ballets Russes strand of American ballet style. Artur Sultanov’s schooling was Russian, at the Vaganova Academy, and Chauncey Parsons, who joined as a soloist last fall, trained at the Kirov Academy in Washington, D.C. Parsons will show us some bravura Kirov style dancing at the gala. Yuka Iino — hardly second string, Mr. Hicks, as the Novice in The Cage at the matinee (nor was Grace Shibley in Faun) — trained in her native Japan, as did Ansa Deguchi.

Continue reading OBT’s ‘Rush + Robbins’: Some further thoughts →

Bob Hicks, Dance, General

Scatter hits the ballet, and revels in the next generation

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Pianist Carol Rich and Olga Krochick, The Concert. BLAINE TRUITT COVERT

Loyal readers know that Art Scatter is fiercely in favor of protecting Oregon Ballet Theatre from the financial wolves that are nipping at its heels, eager to drag it down and devour it for a mid-recession munch. I’ve made the case that this is Portland’s finest theatrical troupe, a company on the rise nationally, and that to lose it would be a devastating blow to the city. I remain confident, cautiously, that Portlanders will pull together like a hardy band of foresters and help carry the wobbly sojourner out of the economic woods to safety, where it can get its feet back under itself and figure out a prudent path into the future.

So on Saturday afternoon I went with more than usual anticipation to see OBT’s season-ending program of Christopher Wheeldon’s Rush and three dances by that Broadway-driven balletic dramatist, Jerome Robbins. Martha Ullman West, a frequent contributor to Art Scatter, reviews the program perceptively for The Oregonian and, I’m hoping, might post more thoughts later here. Scatter cohort Barry Johnson was there, too, writing on his Portland Arts Watch blog; and The Oregonian’s Grant Butler had a good update in Sunday’s Oregonian on this Friday’s coming benefit blowout. I won’t repeat what they had to say, but give ’em a read!

I went to the Saturday matinee partly because I knew some of the major roles would be performed by the “second stringers” — the alternate casts that don’t do opening night. I like to do this because it’s a terrific way to get a sense of the depth of a company. Yes, several principal dancers and soloists perform in the matinees — Gavin Larsen was superb in Rush, for instance, and Artur Sultanov was an electrically restrained faun in Robbins’ Afternoon of a Faun — but the matinees also give you a chance to see who’s developing in the corps.

Let me tell you who: Grace Shibley, one of the company’s youngest dancers, who paired beautifully with Sultanov in Afternoon of a Faun and simply ran away with the role that company star Alison Roper danced on opening night in Robbins’ witty, gorgeously performed lark The Concert. Shibley is graceful and funny and superbly trained (she came through OBT’s school, which under Damara Bennett’s leadership does wonderful work) and she has personality. The future, if economic troubles don’t bring it tumbling down, is big for her. As for the rest of Saturday’s dancers: Any number of companies across the country would be thrilled to have a starting lineup as good as these “reserves.”

And that got me to thinking about something that I want for this company and this city: I want the joy of succession. Other cities and companies — San Francisco and its San Francisco Ballet, Seattle and its Pacific Northwest Ballet, New York and its New York City Ballet — have the honor and pleasure of seeing their great dancers come to the end of their careers and leave on high notes, secure in the knowledge that capable, fresh young dancers are ready to fill their shoes. It’s how traditions are created; how they’re refreshed and reinvigorated for the future. That tradition is taking root here.

Roper and Sultanov and Larsen and Anne Mueller and Yuka Iino and other OBT stars won’t be dancing forever. Dancers are like professional athletes: They have their time, and then a time comes to hang it up. The Grace Shibleys are always in the wings, ready to learn, ready to take their place in the spotlight, ready to pass the torch on to someone new when their time comes.

And audience members will smile, and cheer, and say, “Isn’t that girl marvelous!” and “Remember when …?” and “Doesn’t he remind you of …”

And the show will go on, always changing, always reinventing itself, always the same.

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And now, on to tonight’s Drammy Awards at the Crystal Ballroom. What fun: Should I pull out my tux?

Dance, General, Martha Ullman West

Dance in Portland: The kids are alright

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Portland Ballet Academy, Concerto in F/BLAINE COVERT

Dance passes from generation to generation: style, technique, muscle memory, handed down from experienced dancers to those just learning the art and craft. In Portland, no one’s observed this process more carefully than Art Scatter’s friend and associate Martha Ullman West, a distinguished national dance critic who has recently been keeping her eye on the spring spate of performances showing off the skills of young dancers at several of the city’s dance schools. Here is her report:

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By MARTHA ULLMAN WEST

“Twas in the merry month of May, when green buds they were showing,” begins that lovely folk song Barbara Allen, referring to the kind of verdant spring we are finally enjoying in Portland.

But green buds showing also applies to young dancers — the students who show what they can do in school performances designed to showcase their talents and their training — and I’ve been a happy member of the audience at three of them in the last couple of weeks.

My first stop was an open dress rehearsal at Portland Ballet Academy, out on Capitol Highway, on April 30. The school, founded in 2001 by Nancy Davis and Jim Lane, both former dancers who trained at the School of American Ballet and elsewhere, provides professional training for ballet dancers, and some of their former students are now performing with such companies as Pacific Northwest Ballet and Houston Ballet. Like everything else, PBA has been hit by the recession, but few people are more creatively resourceful than dancers in hard times, and they converted their main studio into a perfectly respectable black box theater to showcase their students as professionally as possible.

I am invariably impressed by how well trained PBA’s male students are, and this year was no exception. In a Cliff Notes version of Act I of Don Quixote, adapted by faculty member Jason Davis, the enthusiasm of all the dancers was infectious and the dancing of Henry Cotton and Skye Stouber, both headed this year to the School of American Ballet’s summer program on full scholarship, was exuberant and correct. Generally speaking I would rather watch Dick Cheney sneer than have to sit through this swaybacked, spavined war horse again in any version, yet I enjoyed this performance mightily because — and here’s the test for very young dancers — the performers were having a blast.

Continue reading Dance in Portland: The kids are alright →

Bob Hicks, Dance, General

Portland Ballet: an invitation to the dance

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“There are more good dancers in the world right now than there have ever been,” Christopher Stowell told me soon after he arrived in Portland a few years ago to take over Oregon Ballet Theatre.

He wasn’t talking about great dancers — those streaks of lightning and passion who come along every now and then and rearrange our assumptions about the possibilities of the human body. He meant good dancers: well-trained, devoted, flexible, athletic, intelligent, capable of realizing the complexities of a choreographic mind. And he was right.

God knows why. You don’t strike it rich as a dancer — in fact, even if you work for a modest-sized professional company, chances are you’re waiting tables or slinging drinks in your off-hours to help pay the rent. But dancing, which like acting was once considered not much more than a variation on the world’s oldest profession, has become an honorable goal, even a noble one. And even as dance companies are struggling to keep their audiences and pay their bills, they are flooded with aspiring young dancers eager to join their ranks.

You can see the evidence all over town — and all over most towns of any size. Something important and time-honored is going on, something that feels like the best parts of the old medieval guild system: Those who have mastered the skills are passing them along to the next generation of artisans.

Stowell brought Damara Bennett from San Francisco to run OBT’s school, which does triple duty: developing new dancers for the company, preparing dancers to go on to other companies and schools, providing training for amateurs who will become the backbone of the future’s dance audience. Sarah Slipper has once again brought together several leading choreographers and young dance professionals for her summer intensive Northwest Professional Dance Project. The highly competitive Jefferson Dancers high school company continues to scatter alumni into professional companies and elite college programs across the country.

And in a small but handsome studio in Portland’s Hillsdale neighborhood, tucked between the farmers’ market and the feisty Three Square Grill, home of the flourishing Picklopolis culinary empire, The Portland Ballet continues to put its own spin on the city’s dance personality, quietly sending forth young dancers into the larger world. Founded under the name Pacific Artists Ballet in 2001 by husband-and-wife Nancy Davis and Jim Lane, Portland Ballet attaches “Academy and Youth Company” to the end of its name, and that’s a precise description: This is a school for young people who want to make dancing their profession.

Continue reading Portland Ballet: an invitation to the dance →