E-Mail This Article to a Friend Feijóo times two The Feijóo sisters dance in Boston and New York, plus the Dance Critics Association Annual Conference and more

Feijóo festival: Lorna in New York, Lorna and Lorena in Boston

It hasn’t been a bad week and a half for Boston Ballet principal Lorna Feijóo. As if dancing Odette/Odile in four performances of the company’s Swan Lake (with her husband, principal Nelson Madrigal, as Siegfried) weren’t enough, she was invited by New York City Ballet to do the Merrill Ashley lead role in its three spring-repertory performances of George Balanchine’s Ballo della Regina. Writing in the May 15 New York Times, Anna Kisselgoff described the performance Feijóo gave with San Francisco principal Gonzalo García as "fabulous" and said that their Ballo was "not to be missed." And writing in the May 19 Boston Globe, Christine Temin said that Feijóo and Madrigal "triumphed" in Swan Lake. This past Saturday, moreover, Lorna got to share her Swan Lake role with her sister Lorena, who’s a principal at San Francisco Ballet, with Lorna doing Odette and Lorena taking Odile.

Boston Ballet principals don’t get invited to guest with New York City Ballet every day. In fact, NYCB hardly has guest artists at all, but this spring, as part of its Balanchine Centennial celebration, the company is bringing in artists associated with the companies that Balanchine helped nurture. Merrill Ashley, on whom Balanchine set Ballo della Regina, was here last September for a week of coaching Boston Ballet, and she recommended Feijóo for NYCB’s Ballo. (Boston Ballet itself performed Ballo last spring, with Ashley here to set it, but Feijóo didn’t join the company till September.)

I caught Feijóo’s final Ballo a week ago Tuesday, when she confirmed Kisselgoff’s good report. The Times headline read, "Two Guests Uncover a Different Side of Balanchine," but as Kisselgoff states in the review, "Even in Balanchine’s time it was possible to dance his ballets in different ways without betraying him," and the contrasted performances of Tchaikovsky Pas de Deux displayed in PBS’s American Masters: Balanchine documentary make that abundantly clear. Kisselgoff says of Feijóo and García that "their style is not standard Balanchine. It is more muscular and romantic." But why is that not standard? Who could be more muscular than Edward Villella? Or more romantic than Suzanne Farrell? Ashley’s strength and speed and amplitude are the standard for Ballo; Feijóo doesn’t have Ashley’s amplitude, but on Tuesday she compensated with even more speed and a teasing spontaneity. At the end of the polka, she was butterfly-light and fluid in landing those little tours on pointe in fifth position; she also flowed through the tours in arabesque with the arm flung out, and after the Spanish national anthem had turned into a circus galop, she seemed to piqué-step out stage right even faster than Ashley, if that’s possible. García contributed a noble elevation and an uplifted carriage that made her look taller, and he matched her in bravura if not quite in personality.

The "Italian Evening," a tribute to NYCB principal conductor Hugo Fiorato (who’s nearing 90 and still vigorous in the pit), was filled out by Square Dance and La Sonnambula. Set to Vivaldi and Corelli, the former registers more like European than American square dancing, and without the caller (which Balanchine removed for the 1976 revival), it can seem a little straight-faced. Yvonne Borree and Sébastien Marcovici didn’t overcome that problem, though her feet did indeed go wickety-wack and he’s another strong-upper-body dancer. La Sonnambula brought Wendy Whelan as an unsettlingly robotic Sleepwalker, a far cry from Karen Scalzitti and Susanna Vennerbeck in the 1993 Boston Ballet production, but also Peter Boal, always expressive and always welcome, as the Poet. It was tempting to imagine Feijóo as a subtly subversive lead in those ballets as well.

Casting the same ballerina as Odette and Odile is a tradition that may go back to opening night in 1877 (Odile is uncredited on the poster). It makes sense: Siegfried falls for Odile because she reminds him of Odette, maybe even because he thinks she’s Odette sexed up and come to celebrate his birthday. Otherwise, he’s just running after another woman, the way the Poet does in Sonnambula. Still, a performance with sisters in the two roles is an opportunity not to be missed. Even though they appeared to be the same height at the curtain call, Lorena seems taller than Lorna, with longer legs. She’s less yielding in her carriage; when she and Sabi Varga as Rothbart ran on stage Saturday night, she issued a challenge, not an invitation. There was temptation in the way she held her shoulders back, but for the most part she used her eyes rather than her body. In her imperiousness, she reminded me of Nina Ananiashvili, though she doesn’t quite have Ananiashvili’s line or technique. She did show pace and power in a manège of piqué and chaîné turns, and she just about made it to the end of the fouetté music (albeit with some doubles that were passes), but she wasn’t able to match the speed or the extent of her sister’s tour de force backward sautés on pointe in arabesque. All the same, she was a welcome guest in an intriguing and worthwhile experiment.

— Jeffrey Gantz

Dance Critics Association Annual Conference

The Dance Critics Association will be marking its 30th anniversary this year when it holds its annual conference next weekend in Philadelphia (June 4 through 6 at the Prince Music Theater), and Boston Phoenix dance critics past and present will be prominent. Current Phoenix contributor Marcia B. Siegel, whose books include At the Vanishing Point, Watching the Dance Go By, The Shapes of Change, and The Tail of the Dragon, was a founding member of the DCA back in 1974, and she’s this year’s Senior Critic Honoree, which among other things means that on June 5 she’ll be delivering an address on the state of dance criticism. And Laura Jacobs, who wrote for this paper in the mid ’80s and is the author of the 2002 novel Woman About Town, will be interviewing choreographer Christopher Wheeldon about his new Swan Lake, which the Pennsylvania Ballet will be premiering June 4 in Philadelphia. Other conference highlights include a panel with DCA founding members moderated by Deborah Jowitt and a panel in celebration of the centennial of George Balanchine moderated by Christie Taylor and including dancers from New York City Ballet. Registration for the conference is $130 for non-members, $85 for seniors and students; for more information, call Anita King at (877) 274-8423 or e-mail dancecritics@hotmail.com.

— Jeffrey Gantz

Un-Conventional arts

Besides creating traffic constipation of bowel-bruising proportions, the Democratic National Convention, which takes place here July 26 through 29, is also inciting a squall of politically inspired events and performances. "There’s nothing conventional about it" goes the Convention’s predictable tag line. The same sentiment holds true for Zeitgeist Gallery in Cambridge (though we expect it would phrase the sentiment less lamely). From July 15 through 30, the Zeitgeist will host "Yo! What Happened to Peace?", a pro-peace, anti-war, anti-occupation traveling poster show headed up by Los Angeles artist and activist John Carr. An expanded version of an exhibition that Carr curated in Tokyo, "Yo!" will go to New York for the Republican Convention after its stint in Inman Square.

Zeitgeist director Alan Nidle is encouraging Boston-area artists to submit to the show, and he’s not necessarily limiting the work to posters. "I don’t want to put any serious guidelines on it. I want to open it up as wide as possible."

As of now, the show includes work by Eric Drooker, who’s done art for Rage Against the Machine as well as a number of New Yorker covers, as well as Kiku Yamaguchi and Shepard Fairey, who have worked with Mos Def and Black Eyed Peas. One poster shows the ubiquitous McDonald’s M upside down against a red background in an inverted golden W with, underneath, the phrase "I’m Bombin It." The message of the show, says Nidle, is not just " ‘Let’s get Bush out’ — it’s about communication, about the catharsis of communication." Artists interested in submitting to "Yo! What Happened to Peace?" should call Nidle at (617) 876-6060 or e-mail him at alanidle@hotmail.com. For information about the show, visit www.33graphic.com/yo.

Jimmy Tingle riffs on the unconventional theme with "The Unconventional Comedy Convention: A Celebration of Political Humor," which runs July 7 through 31 at Jimmy Tingle’s Off Broadway Theatre, 255 Elm Street in Somerville’s Davis Square. Mort "Is There Any Group He Hasn’t Offended" Sahl opens the comedy caucus on July 7. Barry Crimmins performs on July 16 and 17. Will Durst, Jim Morris, and A. Whitney Brown appear on July 22 and 23. Janeane Garofalo arrives on July 24 and 25 with her Air America co-host Sam Seder. And there’s always the possibility of surprise guests — as the press release notes, "You never know who might be hanging around the Democratic National Convention." For more information, call (617) 591-1616 or visit www.jtoffbroadway.com.

Improv Asylum, a quick walk away from all the action at the Fleet Center, is the current front-runner for the wittiest Convention-related pun. The comedy troupe takes on W and the Democrats alike in "Run DNC," a combination of improv and sketch comedy from July 23 through 30. It’ll also get saucy and satirical in "Burlesque Exposes Bush; or, How Dubya Got Kerry’d Away," which runs the same week. Improv Asylum is at 216 Hanover Street in the North End; call (617) 263-6887.

— Nina MacLaughlin