Sacramento Ballet
Sacramento Ballet ended the 2005-06 season with another installment of its Modern Masters programs, a series of new works by what company Co-Artistic Director Ron Cunningham calls “the next generation of master choreographers.” These are frequently dancers or former dancers who recently have begun to make works for others. This year’s program, April 28 to May 7, at the Mainstage of the Sacramento Theatre Company, featured premières by Peter Quanz, Helen Pickett, John Selya and Amy Seiwert, plus works by company dancers Nolan T’Sani, Joo Hwan Cho and Jack Hansen.
T’Sani, once a member of New York City Ballet, opened the program with his Concerto for Ten & Two to music by Prokofiev. It was pure classical ballet, with a touch of Balanchine in one passage of beautiful batterie. The work featured company soloists Kirsten Bloom and Hansen.
Quanz, a former dancer with Stuttgart Ballet, created She Guards Her Secret, a traditional pas de deux to Rachmaninov’s “Vocalise.” Alison Kappes and Hamilton Nieh performed the tender balancing act of desire and disappointment that was elegantly staged, but not terribly challenging.
The same could be said of Cho’s Just Like That, performed to “Whatever Lola Wants” from Damn Yankees. Cho performed a clever pas de trois along with Bobby Briscoe and Tarah Finley.
Seiwert, a former Sacramento Ballet dancer now with Smuin Ballet in San Francisco, created On the Care and Feeding of Ecstasy to music by Mozart. The ballet began with male dancers prone on the floor, their partners poised above them. Seiwert made use of all three levels of space, filling the air with high, elegant lifts. A series of gymnastic partnerships had the women performing awkward squats on pointe. It looked difficult and not really pretty.
The most audacious dance on the program was Selya’s Unlikely Saint, set against the hip-hop music of Aesop Rock. Selya, a former dancer with American Ballet Theatre and Twyla Tharp, now teaches at STEPS On Broadway in New York. Fanciful costumes belied the grit of this urban ballet in which movements suggesting the hubbub of city streets and the zombie-like stroll of the drugged and/or disillusioned were performed to a jumble of rapped-out words.
Hansen contributed Agnus Dei, to music of Samuel Barber, which he danced with Bloom. The unremarkable pas de deux featured arched backs and fluttering arms simulating the movement of angels’ wings.
The program ended with Pickett’s Amaranthine, to selected movements from three Beethoven piano sonatas. Pickett danced with William Forsythe’s Ballett Frankfurt and recently completed a major commission for Boston Ballet. Like the flower that never fades and gives this dance its title, Amaranthine was a classic and timeless piece celebrating the beauty of the human body and its movement. The work emphasized extension—arms and legs were outstretched repeatedly—and a high degree of pointe work. Despite the complexity of its leaps and spins and lifts, it was simply beautiful.
Jim Carnes writes about dance for The Sacramento Bee.
