Cincinnati Ballet
Like most dance companies, the Cincinnati Ballet spends much of its season performing balletic warhorses: The Sleeping Beauty, Giselle and, of course, The Nutcracker.
For the past two seasons, though, Artistic Director Victoria Morgan has launched the season with a New Works Festival performed in the company’s 250-seat studio theater.
This year’s festival, which opened September 28, offered an intense assortment, including Lynne Taylor-Corbett’s Lost and Found, inspired by the post-9/11 kinship that enveloped the nation, and Morgan’s Journey, a lyrical showcase for one of the company’s most underappreciated dancers: Mishic Marie Corn.
More challenging, however, is Luca Veggetti’s Traces, an austere work, that is like a dark and unsettling puzzle. The stage is dimly lit, the only visual accessory a rectangular pool of light that is, apparently, a forbidden zone for the four dancers. They skitter around it. They peer into it. They teeter along its edges like kids walking an imaginary tightrope.
Veggetti, who rarely has more than two dancers moving simultaneously, is as fascinated with stillness as he is with movement. So while it is riveting to watch Janessa Touchet’s writhing, twisting solo downstage, it’s nearly impossible not to watch the motionless Cervilio Miguel Amador 15 feet away. The tension of his stillness is almost unbearable. Amador is a fiery dancer, so you know it’s only seconds before he explodes into motion.
Later, the roles reverse, and Amador swirls across the front of the stage. But once again, eyes are drawn elsewhere, to Dmitri Trubchanov and Kristi Capps (who stands so close behind Trubchanov that you can almost feel her breath on his shoulder).
The work is part of a trilogy that Cincinnati Ballet dancers will perform in an all-Veggetti program at New York’s Guggenheim Museum next year.
Viktor Kabaniaev’s Ozhedanye (“yearning,” in Russian) is a disquieting and wildly dramatic piece danced by eight women. Moody and dense, it’s as eye-catching as it is menacing.
Kirk Peterson’s Javelin, performed to Michael Torke’s score, gives the evening a finale so broad and boisterous that it borders on kitschy. This choreography isn’t searching for the cutting edge. Rather, it’s an unabashed crowd-pleaser that Peterson plans to expand before it enters the repertoires of American Ballet Theatre, Cincinnati Ballet and several other companies.
Ten men, scantily clad in unfortunate costumes that resemble baggy diapers, rollick like so many gods who have abandoned a temple frieze in search of an evening’s romp in the world below.
Fun, flirtatious, fanciful and engagingly muscular, Javelin makes it difficult to keep the grin off your face.
A lesser choreographer might have turned this ballet into choreographic frou-frou. But Peterson, the Cincinnati Ballet’s resident choreographer and director of ABT’s Studio Company, is a savvy dance-maker. He understands that it’s not enough to be cute. A successful ballet has to have brains as well as brawn. Javelin has plenty of both.
David Lyman lives in Cincinnati and writes about dance for a variety of publications.
