Boston Conservatory's ''Triple Play'' flies

New spirits
By MARCIA B. SIEGEL  |  February 22, 2012

main_Tripleplay_480
THE CONSTANT SHIFT OF PULSE Doug Varone's piece was staged for 19 dancers at Boston Conservatory Dance Theater— and it was explosive.
Doug Varone's 2006 The Constant Shift of Pulse is a modern dance classic of recent vintage: fast, death-defying, and passionate about nothing but the movement. It was given a marvelous performance Thursday night by the Boston Conservatory Dance Theater as part of "Triple Play," the second program under the dance department's new chair, Cathy Young.

Hubbard Street Dance Chicago brought Varone's piece to Boston three years ago, but this time around it made a bigger impact. Hubbard Street performed the work with a modest 12 dancers. Staged for 19 by Natalie Desch and the Conservatory's Leslie Shafer Koval, the dance was explosive. John Adams's dense two-piano "Hallelujah Junction," played live by Yu-Hao Chen and Juliana Chalsen, galvanized the dancers as no recording could. Adams's post-minimalism doesn't lure the choreographer into formalist lines and groupings. Instead, the music releases its pent-up energy into movement.

Varone's big bursts and waves of surging, subsiding, and renewing activity invokes the dynamic of a crowd— unruly but momentarily purposeful. The dancers fling themselves into stretched-out, dirt-devilish spins, slides, dives. They erupt out of nowhere to streak across the space and suddenly run smack into other people and topple to the ground. In the slow section, their almost-random contacts — shoulder to back, head to fist — lead them into lifts and tumbles and contented pileups. Their fragmentary encounters are nothing like the contemporary dance's contrived simulations of erotica. In their gender-neutral jeans and T's, they might have been discovering something more grounded and supportive than sex.

Daniel Pelzig is well-known around Boston as a ballet choreographer, but he's been working in opera and commercial theater for a while. His Trio in A Minor, choreographed for the Conservatory students, premiered on Thursday night. It seemed a lot more substantial than other pieces made to show off the students' classical training that I've seen in the past. Pelzig deftly arranged Tchaikovsky's set of variations on a theme (played by Rui Urayama, piano, Egle Jarkova, violin, and Edevaldo Mulla, cello) to feature several of the dancers while retaining the traditional setting of soloists and corps de ballet.

The dance started out looking classical, with the 10 women in pointe shoes and tulle ballet dresses. (Costumes were by Susan Slack.) At first the five men looked incongruous in their chinos and flesh-colored muscle shirts. But even within Risa Yokoi's introductory solo there were modernistic gestures, and the dancers went on to augment the vocabulary with one-handed cartwheels, knee-walks, sprints, and back rolls. For the last variation all five men partnered Evelyn Toh, and each other, against a backdrop of twinkling stars. I thought of Jerome Robbins's romantic ballets — classical but anchored to the real world of dancers.

Curiously, the formal patterns of Cathy Young's jazz piece Zero Cool (1998) were a less easy fit for the dancers than either of the other two works. At least on the first night, they seemed to be groping their way into the movement and the Duke Ellington music, but with encouragement from their pals in the audience, they began to get down withit.

1  |  2  |   next >
Related: Boston Conservatory does Graham and Limón; Doug Varone gets literary at the ICA, From Mozart to milonga, Portland Ovations + Bates Dance Festival = Doug Varone choreography, More more >
  Topics: Dance , Boston Conservatory, Boston Conservatory, Dance,  More more >
| More


Most Popular
ARTICLES BY MARCIA B. SIEGEL
Share this entry with Delicious
  •   MARK MORRIS'S SOCRATES, THE MUIR, AND FESTIVAL DANCE  |  May 22, 2012
    Erik Satie called his vocal work Socrate a "symphonic drama," though it's anything but dramatic in a theatrical sense — or symphonic, either.
  •   JOFFREY BALLET GETS ITS DUE  |  May 08, 2012
    New York has two great ballet companies, New York City Ballet and American Ballet Theater. Any other ballet troupe that wants to put down roots there has to develop a personality that's distinct from those two.
  •   THE BOSTON BALLET’S DON QUIXOTE  |  May 01, 2012
    In the long string of ballet productions extracted from Miguel de Cervantes's novel Don Quixote, the delusional Don has become a minor character, charging into situations where he shouldn't go and causing trouble instead of good works.
  •   THE TREY MCINTYRE PROJECT IGNITES THE ICA  |  March 21, 2012
    When Trey McIntyre found a base for his infant company in Boise, Idaho, four years ago, eyebrows lifted in the dance world.
  •   BALLET HISPANICO FALLS SHORT  |  March 13, 2012
    All three dances presented by Ballet Hispanico at the Cutler Majestic last weekend depended heavily on costume effects to convey their messages.

 See all articles by: MARCIA B. SIEGEL