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REVIEW: Tulsa Ballet's "Carnival"
Published: 3/28/2009 6:43 PM
Last Modified: 3/28/2009 6:43 PM

NOTE: According to the Tulsa PAC, both the 8 p.m. Saturday and the 3 p.m. Sunday performances of "Carnival" will take place as scheduled.


Each of the three ballets Tulsa Ballet that make up the “Carnival” program, which opened Friday at the Tulsa Performing Arts Center, more than lived up to its name.
Massimiliano Volponi’s world premiere “Amade” — named for the way Mozart would sometimes sign his name in his letters to friends and family — was a intimate and playful mediation on the brightness and humor in Mozart’s music. Sir Kenneth Macmillan’s “Elite Syncopations” was a jazzy, sophisticated grab bag of complicated, and at times comic, dance vignettes. And Christopher Wheeldon’s “Carnival of the Animals” was a delightful upending of the world as we know it, as seen through the eyes of a child.
Volponi’s work is best known in his native Italy, where he has worked with most of that country’s leading dance and opera company, most notably La Scala. This is the first piece he has choreographed to music of Mozart — movements from the composer’s Serenades and Divertimenti — but the naturalness of how the movement meshes with the music is impressive.
The ensemble scenes are all about precision and unanimity — or harmony, if you prefer — and were danced by the four Couples in Color and the three Couples in White with a peppiness that never obscured their attention to the details: arms in perfect sync, lines kept more or less straight, every step executed with a kind of snap, in much the same way that the music itself seemed to percolate rather than flow.
And Volponi made room for some sharp and brief moments of pure humor: males dancers in the front movement, for example, picking up their partners and setting them to one side, so the men could take what they thought was their rightful place at the front of the stage, or Ke Da trying to make his way across the stage being gently impeded by Kate Oderkirk and Ashley Blade-Martin.
It all came together in the third movement, an extended pas de deux for Karina Gonzalez and Ricardo Graziano, a sly and playful dance that wasn’t so much romantic as it was a languid game of trust between the two, filled with demanding dancing and partner work that the two handled with aplomb.
There were moments when Graziano seemed to manipulating Gonzalez as if she were a life-sized fully articulated doll, only to be followed by a section in which Gonzalez took the lead — in one instance, standing en pointe and letting herself fall backward just as Graziano turns to catch her. And through it all was a sense of fun, of innocent if not necessarily simply play.
“Elite Syncopations” is the first work by Macmillan that Tulsa Ballet has performed. It’s also something of a departure from much of this British choreographer’s work, which, in the words of Julie Lincoln, who set this ballet on the Tulsa company, is “all about sex and death and violence...all that dark stuff.”
This ballet, on the other hand, is set to ragtime music and takes place on a bare stage with just some folding chairs ringing the perimeter, like a make-shift dance hall with the brightly adorned dancers take turns showing what they can do.
What immediately hits you about this ballet is its speed; a lot happens, and it happens very, very quickly. At Thursday’s dress rehearsal, some dancers struggled a bit to keep up with the pace of some passages, but Friday night’s performance was up to speed in every sense of the word. The opening and closing full-cast ensemble pieces crackled with energy, while Oderkirk and Wang Yi did superb jobs with solos that were excitingly risky, calling for some steely pointe work and sassy strutting from Oderkirk in “Calliope Rag,” and some soaring, off-balance leaps from Wang in “Friday Night Rag.”
Wang, Graziano, Mugen Kazama and Ma Cong had a grand old time as a bunch of preening would-be macho men in the “Hot House Rag,” while Cong and Blade-Martin added a poignant touch with their duet to “The Golden Hours,” with Blade-Martin as the shy girl not quite sure about Cong’s invitation to dance. Gonzalez and Alfonso Martin danced a slinky duet in “Bethena Waltz,” ending with Martin carrying an upside-down Gonzalez off stage, holding over and behind his head.
And, for a purely comic touch, there was the duet between Kazama and Marit van der Wolde in “Alaskan Rag” that made antic hay out of the disparity between the relatively compact Kazama and the very tall van der Wolde (another recent Tulsa Ballet work, “This is Your Life,” exploited the couple’s height difference to similar effect).
Yet for all its energy and brightness — even the 14-piece band on stage was decked out in costumes just as garishly colored, if not quite so form-fitting, as the dancers — there is an undercurrent of darkness in this piece. Part of it comes from the speed of the work itself — the frenetic speed of some of the dances gives them a desperate air. Part of it come from the look of the piece: the bare stage, the painted-on costumes that could be stylized versions of turn-of-the-century attire, or the sort of dress one might associate with the residents of a Victorian brothel.
Then there’s the music itself. The rags by Scott Joplin, Max Morath and others, can sound jolly or sad, and the tinny sound of the upright pianos played by music director Nathan Fifield played brought out that sadness.
“Carnival of the Animals,” on the other hand, was simply fun. Wheeldon’s ballet uses a poem by actor John Lithgow, about a boy who gets locked inside a natural history museum one night, and where all the animals on display come to life as visions of people the boy knows.
The choreography may not be as challenging as that of Macmillan’s or Volponi’s, but it is perfectly suited both to telling the ballet’s story and to creating the characters — a kind of reverse anthropomorphism. The Hens and Cockerels were hilariously chicken-like, Cong was a remarkably convincing Baboon, Gonzalez made a nice transition from a bounding, shadow-boxing Kangaroo to a serene and elegant Mermaid, and the Turtles — two cloche hat wearing ladies hiding under umbrellas — were at once stately and silly.
Daniela Buson, the company’s one-time ballerina, now ballet mistress, returned for the brief segment as the Swan, and it was marvelous to watch her perform — she’s one of those dancers who has such presence that she can communicate more when a turn of the wrist than some dancers can in an entire evening.
Paul Hope, an actor from Houston who has stepped in for Lithgow as narrator in past productions, narrated in an easy-going style, and also appeared as the Elephant — in this incarnation, a school nurse guided about by white-tuxedoed mice.
The Tulsa Symphony Orchestra — whether playing Mozart or Saint-Saens in the pit, or decked out in ragtimey finery on the stage — played the evening’s music with great spirit, in spite of a few rough patches in the early portions of the Mozart.


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ARTS

James D. Watts Jr. has lived in Oklahoma for most his life, even though he still has people saying to him, "Don't sound like you're from around these parts." A University of Oklahoma Phi Beta Kappa graduate, Watts has received the Governor Arts Award, Harwelden Award and the National Conference of Christians and Jews Beth Macklin Award for his writing. Before coming to the Tulsa World, Watts worked for the Tulsa Tribune.

Contact him at (918) 581-8478.

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