ARKA Ballet
Chamber-sized companies offer an up-close look at ballet as an evolving art form, mindful of its past but seeking a future. At the studio theater of American Dance Institute in Rockville, Maryland, in June, the ARKA Ballet presented a dozen works spanning nearly 160 years.
Because ARKA’s founder and artistic director, Roudolf Kharatian, a graduate of the prestigious Vaganova Academy in St. Petersburg, taught at the Washington School of Ballet, the performance showed some WB dancers in a new light.
ARKA’s program, “Hearts & Minds in Motion,” offered WB apprentices and its established members the opportunity to perform 20th-century classics and 19th-century variations typically absent from the larger company’s repertoire. More importantly, the dancers also had the chance to try choreographing on their colleagues; among these new works, Jason Hartley’s Two Houses was an evening highlight.
Hartley, ARKA’s resident choreographer, premiered his taut male duet drawing on the escalating tension of Isaac Albéniz’s Spanish guitar accompaniment. Jonathan Jordan and Jared Nelson, a well-matched pair, sparred in close proximity, building a contemporary tango of advances and retreats, and gymnastic dives and falls.
Kharatian, also a painter, showed small works with painterly attributes, including excerpts from his Bach’s Passion and Narayama, both featuring Luis Torres and Kharatian’s daughter, Sona. The overwrought emotional intensity of Passion favored static moments: Sona held in a high arch, lowered into deep bows and lifted in crucifix formations. The coolly restrained Narayama, with its Asian influence and complex entwined partnering, parsed out sculptural poses reminiscent of Japanese calligraphy.
The second world première, Within, fared less well, its five sections choreographed by Kharatian, Hartley or Jordan, or Hartley and Jordan together. The sections of this meandering work required sharper focus.
The evening opened with the sweet, light “Ocean and Pearls,” a pas de trois from Arthur St. Léon’s 1864 The Little Humpbacked Horse. Brianne Bland and Elizabeth Gaither bubbled as Pearls, while Corey Landolt was serviceable but not sweeping as Ocean.
Later, Gaither swooned as the dreamer in Mikhail Fokine’s 1911 Spectre de la Rose. Marcelo Martinez’s Rose was acceptably buoyant but lacked the charisma and charm this piece demands. Rui Huang danced a workaday rendition of Fokine’s Dying Swan.
St. Léon’s La Vivandière is another light, Romantic classic, with a quicksilver Bournonvillian temperament to the choreography. Bland, partnered by a somewhat hesitant Tyler Savoie, and four gracious ladies—Giselle Alvarez, Liz Gahl, Huang and Jade Payette—percolated with energy. The final pose, five women in arabesques of various heights forming an arc, predates the famous sun-ray pose from George Balanchine’s Apollo; and it ended the program on a hopeful note.
Lisa Traiger writes about dance and the performing arts from the Washington, DC area.
