Ballet Excerpts Tease in Opening

By JENNIFER NOYER For the Journal

Moving People Dance opened its 2008 Santa Fe Dance Festival on Friday at the Lensic Performing Arts Center, featuring excerpts from Bill T. Jones’ newest work, “A Quarreling Pair.” Ballet Austin presented “KAI,” a pas de deux inspired by South Pacific’s “Bali Hai.” Moving People Dance repeated Curtis Uhlemann’s dynamic “Roda de Agua.”

“Roda de Agua” opened the program as it did a week earlier in Albuquerque, where it was reviewed. This time the 12 dancers entered in silence. The powerful metaphor of the turning water wheel was again successfully brought alive, in human physicality, to Steve Reich’s rhythmically driving music.

“KAI,” meaning ocean and water, was choreographed by Stephen Mills to music by John Cage. Allisyn Paino and Frank Shott performed the duet as a mating dance with Balineseinspired shapes imposed on a ballet vocabulary. Pirouettes and grands jetts blended smoothly with off-center, hipslung poses and fluid acrobatics.

Friday evening Bill T. Jones teased the audience with excerpts from “A Quarreling Pair,” promising to present the full ballet Saturday evening. This was physical theater in a vaudevillian structure, and based on the puppet play of the same name by Janet Bowles. Live original music, composed and performed by Wynne Bennett, Christopher Antonio William Lancaster and George Lewis Jr. drew on songs and poetry in a sound design by Sam Crawford and text by Jones.

Two sisters, Harriet and Rhoda, quarrel about their life roles in the world. The quarrel opens as a carnival scene within a puppet theater as the dancers carouse to ragtime rhythms in front of a red screen projected behind and above them. One man wearing a collar like a Pierrot ruff helped set the crossover medieval/contemporary

ambiance. A trio of men, with backs to the audience, then stamped across the stage in a jazzy takeoff of classical ballet’s cygnets.

A shadow puppet scene emerged next with the silhouetted figures of the two women arguing about female roles in the world. Harriet brings a nourishing cup of milk to her sister, while Rhoda announces she is leaving to pursue a singing career. It was humorously melodramatic, in fine 19th-century style, yet served to state the serious theme of one of life’s eternal questions in a surreal setting.

Tracy Ann Johnson, as Rhoda, entered in a brilliant yellow gown to sing “a bit of history” but was ordered off the stage by the musical director. She followed groups of dancers as an outsider until the end, carrying her suitcase with her.

“Dreams of dreaming,” set in a beautiful space design with a video of a large window scene by Janet Wong, brought romantic couples on stage in swirling duets in front of a lamp-lit chaise longue. The dancers floated around each other, were lifted lovingly, and leaned toward each other to Lewis’s song “Hold Me.” Harriet and Rhoda were urged in song to “come home now, to bed.”

The final excerpt opened with the words “Where have you been, my blue-eyed son” as dancers began to glide across the stage in a kind of fast, slightly irregular waltz, changing direction constantly, moving in twos, threes or larger flocking groups. Rhoda, in her yellow gown, watched, tried to follow, but was “someone always left behind,” observing as the video screen revealed a city scene in rapid motion; people rushing about, with cars speeding by. The final shot is of a highway sign reading “Bienvenidos” to New Mexico, bringing it all home to us.

(c) 2008 Albuquerque Journal. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.