Aspen Santa Fe Ballet
made its Jacob's Pillow debut last week and the capacity audience could not have been more delighted. Inveterate Pillow-goers take unusual pride of ownership over a young company's arrival in the Becket area (in 2003, this deserved sense of self was recognized when Jacob's Pillow was named a National Historic Landmark, the first dance institution to be so honoured) and intermission responses guarantee that a return visit for this exciting company will be validated at the box office.Established in 1996 as the Aspen Ballet Company and expanded to its current two-city base in the year 2000, the Aspen Santa Fe Ballet Company boasts a dozen young dancers whose collective energy and passionate enthusiasm infuse a mixed programme with warmth, humour and athletic abandon that doesn't overlook technique, precision or a wide range of solo and ensemble styles.
sans detour, choreographed by Dominique Dumais and set to music by Philip Glass, Guillaume Cote, Pergolesi and Bach, juxtaposes fluid lines with abrupt and artless body positions that suggest the individual's struggle to find balance and, in a series of intoxicating duet and trio combinations, the need for relationships to survive their missteps by occasionally building harmony in space. Dumais' eclectic choice of music is well suited to her unpredictable patterns and rhythms, and the dancers' uninhibited recklessness makes the opening piece an ideal introduction to the ASFB itself.
Ave Maria, Dwight Rhoden's 4-minute ballet set to music by Cacini, was danced by Brooke Klinger and Seth DelGrasso. Combining remarkable control and tender attention to each other, the couple demonstrates that ASFB appreciates the character-driven nature of dance as much as it does the robust athleticism on display elsewhere in the impressively ranging repertoire.
Noir Blanc, conceived and directed by Morris Pendleton, MOMIX founder and Artistic Director, is the evening's most immediately accessible piece as it combines visual magic with frivolous confection. The dancers, confined upstage of a scrim and wearing black and white unitards that effect a sensation of liquid bodies in space, pass side to side across the stage as they execute movements in isolation and combination that are the human equivalent of animated Rorschach ink blots. Following the first two pieces of the mixed programme, Noir Blanc also serves to remind us that dance can be funny all on its own and that ASFB values a sense of humour among its dancers and its dance creators.
Vertical Dream, Nicolo Fonte's third commission for the company, is the most abstract performance of the evening. Four vertical tubes of green light form a backdrop against which the company, sporting black swimsuits, thrusts and manipulates bodies to a score by David Lang and Arvo Part. Emotionally cool compared to the three ballets preceding it, Fonte's concentration on duet work begins to repeat itself only to startle us as snow falls from the flies, the lighting (Lloyd Sobel) shifts mood and the choreography insinuates a sinewy quality that is as haunting as it is unexpected.
ASFB reinforces its own position as a strong voice in the dance community. The relative infancy of the company makes this achievement all the more noteworthy and Jacob's Pillow, by having the foresight and the generosity to bring them to us in the company of Tharp, Morris and Cunningham, among many others, only consolidates its new title as a National Historic Landmark. Let's hope that ASFB and the Pillow can find other opportunities to share in each other's development.