Sunday, September 17, 2006

Kansas City Ballet

Kansas City Ballet
Battery Park, Manhattan
"Evening Stars," River to River Festival
September 6, 2006

Program:
Jaywalk
Sentinel
Meditation
The Catherine Wheel Suite

Occasionally sharing the stage with a scene-stealing bat (not the baseball kind), the Kansas City Ballet (that’s Missouri, not Kansas) brought four pieces to New York that showed them off as a likeable, hard-working group of dancers. Jaywalk, choreographed by William Whitener, showed their jazzy-theatrical side; Sentinel (David Berkey) and Meditation (Jacques d’Amboise; these short pieces replaced Todd Bolender’s The Still Point), their modern/classical side; and the Twyla Tharp Catherine Wheel Suite, their gutsy fearless side. While the Tharp piece was most likely the biggest draw of the evening, and it was certainly the flashiest, it wasn’t the piece that I liked the best. Granted, what we saw was not the entire work (which I’ve never seen), so it was hard to fit the three sections that were presented into any kind of context. And, while I have always loved David Byrne’s music (it was great to hear it on this beautiful evening) I couldn’t help wondering how suitable it was for a ballet; like Tharp’s (pretty awful) Beethoven’s Seventh ballet for the New York City Ballet a few years ago, I wonder whether she is sometimes overoptimistic about the suitability of certain pieces of music, however terrific they may sound, for the creation of cohesive, interesting choreography.

The piece that I thought the dancers looked best in was the Berkey piece, Sentinel, set to Brahms and danced by four men, all wearing white, Christopher Barksdale, Matthew Donnell, Paris Wilcox and Lateef Williams. Not an overly-ambitious piece, not filled with blindingly original choreography or anything like that, but an unpretentious, sincere work, that was danced with a simplicity and honesty that was very refreshing and very pleasant. (The piece includes a moment when the men, facing the audience right diagonal, bend to one knee and make a sweeping gesture with their right arm—whether this alluded to the final moment of Balanchine’s Emeralds or not I don’t know, but it made me remember that the Paris Opéra’s performance on PBS last week omitted that melancholic final section). The dancers may have had to work harder at, and were probably more challenged by, the Tharp; but in the end, I found Sentinel to be the more rewarding piece.

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