As near as I can tell from reading her reviews, Gia Kourlas has a very narrow definition of what ballet is. The things Kourlas – the New York Times second (or is it third?) string dance reviewer – singles out for praise in her writings about performances are moments of "pure movement," the simple sight of "tendons shifting over bones as muscles flex and release."
Use those tendons and muscles to do something like, say, tell a story or evoke an emotion, or present anything choreographed by Nacho Duato, and you've lost her.
So it's not too surprising that Kourlas' review of the opening night of Tulsa Ballet read as it did. The program the company presented was three ballets that dealt with stories and emotions, and one of them was a Duato creation.
Kourlas was also apparently flabbergasted by the fact that state and city government officials from Oklahoma and Tulsa would make a trip to New York City to watch a ballet company – a display of "hometown pride" she found both "sweet" and "surreal."
She liked MacMillan's "Elite Syncopations" for most of the right reasons – the way it uses the rigorousness of classical technique in unusual ways, its insouciant humor, its bright cartoonish colors.
She doesn't say this directly, but she also liked it because it's shallow. "Elite Syncopations" is a fiendishly difficult work to dance, and Tulsa Ballet – both on opening night and on the Tuesday night performance, which we also attended – danced it in winning fashion. The person who set the ballet on the company said Tulsa did it better than a company like San Francisco Ballet, for which this work is something of a signature piece.
But it's a tableau of color and movement and comedy. It's a ballet easy to like because it's all surface.
She found Duato's "Por vos Muero" to be "limited," a piece which "dips in and out of images referring to formal court rituals." Really? That's it?
Our own reaction, also written on deadline when Tulsa Ballet first performed this work in 2007, saw a bit more in this ballet than Ms. Kourlas was able to ascertain.
We wrote: "Like much of Duato's work, this is a ballet that evokes an almost-overwhelming number of emotions and narratives. Duato described it as a homage to a time when dance was part of all aspects of life.
"One way of looking at it is it begins in a colorless present, with dancers in flesh-colored leotards and shorts walking in place. One woman (Karina Gonzalez) suddenly breaks away from this crowd and begins dancing. And the scene evolves into various vignettes that recall earlier times: courting lovers; a formal gavotte at the palace; gossiping women; children at play; priests in church; women in mourning; a festive celebration.
"But this transport into the past fades away – for all except Gonzalez, who tries desperately to hold on that more colorful, more vibrant time."
Perhaps the New York Times doesn't pay its reviewers enough for them to have emotional reactions on company time.
As for Kourlas calling the choreography of "This is Your Life" "amateurish" – again, it is a ballet of stories, and in Kourlas' way of thinking, ballet shouldn't do that. Ergo, it must be amateurish.
On the other hand, the audience at Tuesday's performance – unlike opening night, the capacity house at the Joyce Theater wasn't packed visiting Oklahomans – greeted each of the ballets Tulsa Ballet performed with enthusiastic applause and shouts of "Bravo!" And ticket sales are for the remaining performances are selling briskly.
