SK’s theatre thoughts

I was in the mood for visual beauty, after an afternoon going through the Marion Square booths (Tyler Blanton is a favorite) and watching the grounded yet ethereal creation of a sand mandala down at the City Gallery.  So the Boston Ballet was a perfect cap to the day.  The first piece – Brake the Eyes – was definitely my favorite.  It was like a tug of war between structured balletic form and the wild abandon of dance.  Choreographer Jorma Elo, resident with Boston Ballet, uses excerpts from Mozart interspersed with a mechanic hum and what sound like directions being given in (perhaps?) Ukrainian.  I ached to know what was being said.  The dancers flung their arms and legs, as if they were being pulled by centrifugal force and appeared to experimenting with how many different ways their limbs would bend and move.  There were spaces where their movement was completely constricted, robot-like, manipulated by a lead dancer whose power grew stronger as the piece went on.  Their fairly traditional balletic costumes also clashed with their apparent desire to move freely.  A meditation on the limits of traditional form and the dancer’s desire to abandon themselves to exploring the extremes of movement.  I loved every second of it.

The second piece was a series of excerpts from Swan Lake.  I was puzzled by the first few pieces, as it appeared that the dancers were in slow motion, a bit behind the music, not bothering to really jump.  It looked to me like they had all taken half a Xanax.  I wondered if it was simply the juxtaposition of the previous piece, which screamed energy.  But once the White and Black Swan pas de deuxs began, my perplexity vanished.  The precision and perfection of every turn and leap was thrilling.  It was a masterful exhibition of technique.  Especially the Black Swan (danced, I believe, by Erica Cornejo, unless I missed an announcement of cast change) was astounding.  Her pirhouettes never  strayed  from her central point and nearly brought the crowd to its feet.   But this was all really a show-off piece, missing the emotional punch of the full ballet.

The third piece was also wonderful, a performance of Twyla Tharp’s “In the Upper Room”.  The lighting by Jennifer Tipton, with a good bit of stage fog, contributed the most exciting aspect of the piece – sudden appearances by dancers from the back of the stage, as they emerged from a curtain through the fog.  The effect was stunning.  Some of the female dancers wore red shoes and socks, pulling attention to their feet, much like the hennaed fingertips of Shantala Shivlingappa (and most Indian dancers) draws attention to the precise movement of the fingers.   I’ll admit I didn’t get much out of this, theme-wise, but the dancing was beautiful, and there were some really nice moments for the male dancers, which I had missed in the earlier pieces.