Tag Archives: Jerome Robbins

Dance, General, Martha Ullman West

OBT Next: schooling the audience

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By Martha Ullman West

The School of Oregon Ballet Theatre delivered a promising and rewarding evening of ballet on Thursday night. It repeats on Sunday, and it’s well worth seeing even if you’ve no little hostage-to-fortune performing on the Newmark stage.

sobt_asp2012The evening began with a clean, musical performance of Balanchine’s Divertimento No. 15; Mozart’s gorgeous score, in a piano reduction, was played elegantly by David Saffert. As a curtain-raiser, Divertimento works well for professional companies, too: the solos of the Theme and Variations show off the skills of individual dancers, and the group sections – the opening Allegro and closing Allegro Molto  – reveal a cohesive corps de ballet. Clearly, SOBT is training dancers to feed the company, men and women both. I was particularly taken by the dancing of Jordan Kindell, a company apprentice, in this and everything else in which he danced, as well as Chloe Shelby in the First Variation.

If Divertimento 15 shows off the pre-professional and upper-level dancers, Jerome Robbins’ Circus Polka, with Ring Master Kevin Poe flicking the whip (thank God) rather than cracking it, gives an excellent indication of the various levels of training, from the tallest kid in blue or green to the littlest one in pink. This was followed by a tidy accounting of an excerpt from Trey McIntyre’s Curupira, a percussive dance with the pointe shoes providing the music, much as they do in Dennis Spaight’s Crayola.

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Dance, General, Martha Ullman West, Theater

Belly-dancing on the Nile: Our far-flung correspondent hobnobs and returns

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Martha Ullman West, Art Scatter’s chief correspondent, has been trotting the globe. She’s endured an evening of wretched belly-dancing on the Nile, chatted with a centenarian ballet dancer in Philadelphia, revisited the works of Jerome Robbins in New York, and returned home to Portland, where she found irritation with Random Dance and happiness with Oregon Ballet Theatre. Here’s her report:

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Here are some scattered (no pun intended) thoughts about what I’ve been seeing in the world of performance, mostly dance, since I departed on February 1st for a glorious Metropolitan Museum of Art tour of Egypt with a postlude in Jordan, followed by 10 days in New York, where I ploughed through many clipping files in the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, at Lincoln Center.

These endeavors were interrupted by snow and a day trip to Philadelphia to interview Yvonne Patterson. She is a former dancer in Balanchine’s first companies, now a whisker away from turning 100, still swimming every day and teaching the occasional master class in ballet, no kidding. There was also a fair amount of hobnobbing with my New York colleagues, during which the state of dance and dance writing was discussed with a certain amount of hand-wringing on both counts.

The River NileThe worst performance shall come first: an unspeakably godawful belly dance demonstration on board the Nile River boat on which I spent four otherwise glorious nights.

I’ve seen better at various restaurants in Portland, although the effects of her lackluster undulations, which bored even the men in the audience, were somewhat mitigated by the sufi dancer who followed, a very young man who was completely committed to spinning himself into a trance, and therefore pretty compelling.

In New York, I was taken to see a play called Mr. and Mrs. Fitch, oh so cleverly written by Douglas Carter Beane, at Second Stage Theatre, starring the suave John Lithgow as a gossip columnist running out of copy and Jennifer Ehle as his equally ambitious and rather more unethical wife. They invent a celebrity to write about, and despite such wonderful lines as “I swear on a stack of Susan Sontag‘s Against Interpretation” and the cast’s finely tuned delivery of the lines, the ethics practiced by the real-life press these days made it all rather less than funny for someone who still thinks journalism is an honorable profession, or at the very least that it should be.
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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?

Bob Hicks, Dance, General

An emergency plea: Save Oregon Ballet Theatre!

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Mia Leimkuhler in Hush by James Kudelkae. Photo: Blaine Truitt Covert.The bad doo-doo has just hit the fan. Art Scatter’s Barry Johnson, on his alternate-universe blog Portland Arts Watch, has just reported that Oregon Ballet Theatre has its back against the wall. It needs $750,000, and it needs it fast — by June 30 — or it could fold up shop and simply disappear.

Make no mistake: That would be a catastrophe. No doubt the sneerers will be out in full force, snickering about how the marketplace has spoken and it just doesn’t care about twinkle-toed terpsichores trouncing around in tutus. I’m sorry, but Just. Shut. Up. Even if ballet leaves you cold, if you care about Portland and believe it has both the right and responsibility to be a full-fledged city, this is important stuff.

The fact is, we are in the middle of an economic disaster — I just learned this afternoon of yet another friend who’s lost her job — and it is taking down both people and organizations with no respect for their talents or worth. “The marketplace” has failed the nation. Right now, it’s a lousy measuring stick for anything.

Why is it essential that Portlanders keep Oregon Ballet Theatre alive? For a lot of reasons, one of which is that this is the city’s most gifted performing ensemble — or at least right up at the top, along with the Oregon Symphony, Portland Baroque Orchestra and Third Angle New Music Ensemble — and a beacon, in every show, for the heights that any group, artistic or not, should strive to achieve. It is our target, our model, our proclamation that we can stand shoulder to shoulder with the best.

Under artistic director Christopher Stowell OBT has achieved a solid historical grounding, a mastery of technique and an exciting artistic personality. The best part is, it’s still growing, and promises to achieve much more if only given the chance. No financial crisis should put a stop to that.

It’s simply unthinkable that dancers with such zest and style as Alison Roper, Artur Sultanov, Anne Mueller, Gavin Larsen, Yuka Iino, Kathi Martuza and Ronnie Underwood should suddenly find themselves out on the street, unemployed and unappreciated. All of them, and their fellow dancers, have created something special, and it is Portland’s duty to help them when they need help the most.

As Barry points out, the ballet world has taken notice. People in the know, know that this is a company on the rise, and a company of increasing national importance. So on June 12 — shortly after OBT’s season-ending program of works by Jerome Robbins and Christopher Wheeldon — dancers from the New York City Ballet, Boston Ballet, San Francisco Ballet, the Trey McIntyre Project and elsewhere will be in town for a giant gala benefit performance that promises to be a true bell-ringer. Buy tickets to Robbins and Wheeldon. Buy tickets to the gala.

And if you’re able, write a check. OBT is too important to fail.

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.

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Dance, Film, General

The week that was in dance: fusion and confusion

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Trey McIntyre Dance/Chris Riesing

Friend of Art Scatter Martha Ullman West got back to Portland from a lengthy stretch in Kansas City, where she’s been researching a book on ballet legend Todd Bolender, just in time to take in one of the Rose City’s busiest dance weeks in quite a while. Here’s her report — and thanks, Martha, for Scattering!

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Portland Dance Journal, Saturday Feb. 21 through Friday Feb. 27, 2009

I didn’t realize it until I sat down to to write this Scatter post, but what we had in Portland last week was fusion, fusion, fusion, and some con-fusion. It was not a week for purists, that’s for sure — from Oregon Ballet Theatre to the Trey McIntyre Project to Tuesday and Wednesday night’s performances at Reed College by Pappa Tarahumara, a Japanese company that performed what it claimed was a version of Chekhov’s Three Sisters, this one set in rural Japan in the 1960s.

Moreover, critic and historian Marcia Siegel was in town to give two lectures to Portland State University’s dance history students on fusion in ballet, and also to teach composition students in the same place. In addition, she showed two extraordinary films, Carolyn Brown’s Dune Dance and Merce Cunningham’s Biped. She also led a session with Reed students on how to write about dancing, based on the Pappa Tarahumara performance. And if you haven’t read Howling Near Heaven, her recent book on Twyla Tharp and her work, or The Shapes of Change, a book published in 1979 that is an indispensable part of my library, go and do so immediately.

Herewith a log of sorts:

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Saturday, 8 p.m.: I go to opening night of Oregon Ballet Theatre and the premiere of Christopher Stowell’s Rite of Spring. The program opened with Peter Martins’ Ash, with Yuka Iino and Chauncey Parsons in the principal roles and doing a sparkling job of dancing them. Bang off, the company showed how well-schooled it has become under Stowell’s leadership, how fast and how accurate in its technique: In Ash the dancers contributed artistry to what is basically an aerobic workout danced to an unstructured score.

"Rite of Spring," Stowell/Stravinsly/OBT. Blaine Truitt CovertGod knows Stravinsky’s 1912 Sacre du Printemps, played brilliantly here in its two-piano version by Carol Rich and Susan DeWitt Smith, is structured. Its lyrical beginning builds to a pounding crescendo in music that is still startling for its highly stylized brutality.

Seeking to do something new with Vaslav Nijinsky‘s anti-classical ballet about a primitive Russian fertility rite that calls for the sacrifice of a Chosen One (female, it’s almost needless to say), Stowell, assisted by Anne Mueller, has come up with an episodic narrative that is more about 21st century Americans and our seemingly endless search for community and catharsis than anything else. Or is it an episodic narrative? It’s definitely episodic, but the narrative may be up for grabs.

Michael Mazzola‘s movable-set-piece walls contribute to this effect, as do his lights. But on opening night, while I was impressed with the dancing and the production values, I was also more than a little mystified by Stowell’s intentions, and glad to know I’d have a chance to see it again.

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Dance, General, Martha Ullman West, Music, Theater, Visual Art

A native scatters in New York: Home sweet … hmmm

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(Friend of Art Scatter Martha Ullman West, she who knows a plie from a pirouette like nobody’s business, has recently sojourned in her home town of NYC and brings us back this Big Apple journal from October 21 to November 5, 2008. The city seems familiar, but …)

Can you actually be a tourist in your home town? At times I certainly felt like one on my recent visit to the city in which I grew up, quite a long time ago.

I attended a performance in a theater new to me — the Rose, where I heard a stellar rendition of Bach’s St. John’s Passion by Musica Sacra in a space that is usually relegated to jazz. And I felt so even more when I had to ask not one but two of the hordes of security police on Wall Street to direct me to One Chase Manhattan Plaza, the bank’s headquarters and the location of the Ballet Society/New York City Ballet archives. These are not exactly housed in a vault, but they have been relegated to the fifth floor sub-basement of that temple to Mammon for good reason: a board member of the Balanchine Foundation arranged for donated space.

There couldn’t be a worse place to work– no air, harsh fluorescent lights, a desk that was too high, a chair that was too low. But it was a gold mine of information regarding American Ballet Caravan‘s 1941 tour of South America, the first North American ballet company to go to the region, on a goodwill tour arranged through Nelson Rockefeller by Lincoln Kirstein for the overt purpose of a cultural exchange, and the covert purpose of undercutting anti-American propaganda disseminated by Germany before Pearl Harbor.

I spent two days delving into boxes of documents and photographs, physically uncomfortable, but psychically happy as the proverbial clam. The archivist, Laura Raucher, who has a degree in the science of dance from the University of Oregon, photocopied anything I wanted and spent more than an hour searching the database for the heights of various Balanchine ballerinas, information needed for another project.

A few days later I was at the Jerome Robbins Dance Division in the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center, for which I daily thank Robbins, whose royalties support arguably the best dance library in the world, looking at film of Marie Jeanne coaching today’s dancers in her role in Balanchine’s Concerto Barocco, created for her before that 1941 tour. I learned that the ballet, a high-speed visualization of the Bach Double Violin concerto, used to be performed even faster than it is today. The library is an extremely comfortable place to work, fluorescent lights notwithstanding, but there you must do your own photocopying and pay for it, sigh. Always something.

Continue reading A native scatters in New York: Home sweet … hmmm →