Houston Ballet Archives

Like so many great art forms, dance is a series of interlinked relationships and memories, a tradition that continually redefines and reinvents itself. It lives in the past, and the present, and the future, and its story is written in the memories and associations of open-hearted observers as well as the muscles of dancers and the patterns in choreographers’ minds.

Dance writer Martha Ullman West, one of our best observers, took in last Friday’s Dance United, and for her it was like biting into a madeleine: The reminiscences and connections just began to flow. Somehow, no matter how far-flung, they all looped back to Oregon Ballet Theatre, its history and successes, and this extraordinary event to keep the company alive and vital.

Here is the link to Martha’s review in The Oregonian of the performance. And here, below, is her more personal report on what it all meant:

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Daniel Ulbright, New York City Ballet. Photo: BLAINE TRUITT COVERT Really, it was a cross between a potlatch and an Obama rally, a gathering of the clans.

Dancers came from Texas, Utah, Massachusetts, Canada, Washington state, California, Chicago, Idaho, and that other geographical location, in New York called Downtown, here designated as Portland’s modern and contemporary dance community.

The gifts they brought were generous: their talent and their time. And they were welcomed to Keller Auditorium with the same enthusiasm as Obama’s supporters do and did, reaching into their wallets with many relatively small donations to keep Oregon Ballet Theatre alive. On Tuesday, OBT had in hand $720,000 of the $750,000 it needs to make up THIS season’s deficit.

I’ve been watching dance in Portland and elsewhere for more decades that I wish to reveal, and professionally since 1979, when I wrote an essay on postmodern dance in New York for Dance Magazine. In so many ways, this gala triggered some Proustian moments, also making me think of all the ways that dance and dancers are connected to each other.

Linda Austin’s thoroughly postmodern “anybody-can-dance, any-movement-on-stage-is-valid” Boris & Natasha Dancers (on catnip) took me back to New York’s SoHo and a performance created by Karole Armitage consisting of a group of dancers on their hands and knees, painting stripes on the floor, in humorless silence. They were not skilled at either painting or dancing, but it was the same democratic approach to the art form as Austin’s new dance, which featured such pillars of the Portland community as two Bragdons (Peter and David), Scott Bricker, James Harrison and Peter Ames Carlin galumphing across the stage, one of them wearing red sneakers that I wondered if he’d borrowed from White Bird’s Paul King. (Armitage, you may remember, also made work on OBT’s dancers on James Canfield’s watch.)

Sarah Van Patten Damian Smith, SFBallet. Photo: BLAINE TRUITT COVERT The Joffrey Ballet’s Aaron Rogers, performing Val Caniparoli’s Aria, recalled for me the profound pleasure of watching Val work with Portland dancers, first at OBT’s precursor Ballet Oregon, and then at OBT. Caniparoli’s kindness and courtesy in the studio turned out to be extremely productive when the company performed his Street Songs and other work. Rogers looked like he was enjoying himself, flirting with that mask, and certainly seduced the audience in the process.

And I thought about Mark Goldweber, ballet master at OBT under Canfield, then for some years at the Joffrey, and now at Ballet West. (He gave the only authentic performance in Robert Altman’s dance film The Company, in my view.) I wondered what Mark thinks about the way Adam Sklute, now Ballet West’s artistic director, staged this version of the White Swan pas de deux.

When I encountered this ballet’s real-life Prince Siegfried, Christopher Ruud, at OBT’s studios earlier in the week, I spoke with him about his father, who had helped Todd Bolender at Kansas City Ballet (Bolender is the subject of a book I’m working on). Ruud told me he had staged one of his father’s pieces on the company several years ago.

Continue reading Martha Ullman West on Dance United: a personal take →

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 →

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