Much has been made of the fact that three of Tulsa Ballet's leading dancers will be leaving the company at the conclusion of this season.
It is true that the distinctive personalities and individual talents of principal dancers Alfonso Martin and Ma Cong and Senior Soloist Alexandra Bergman will not be easily –– if ever –– replaced.
Yet Tulsa Ballet's newest production –– a triple bill titled "Balanchine and Beyond," which opened Friday at the Lorton Performance Center –– demonstrated that the company has a great many dancers who are more than capable of commanding the stage.
The program included two works already familiar to Tulsa audiences –– George Balanchine's "The Four Temperaments" and James Kudelka's "there, below" –– with the Oklahoma premiere of "Classical Symphony" by Yuri Possokhov, a former Bolshoi Ballet dancer who is now choreographer in residence with San Francisco Ballet.
Tulsa Ballet is only the third company to perform this work –– the others being, not too coincidentally, the Bolshoi and San Francisco. Even so, this work would be a supreme challenge for any company.
Much like the Prokofiev Symphony No. 1 that is its score, Possokhov's work takes all the elements of classical ballet and presents them in a way that can be taken as a straight homage, or a modernist interpretation, or a flat-out parody.
Classical postures and combinations of steps get twisted suddenly, surprisingly out of shape. The angular, perpendicular line of the body is held off-kilter, or undulates in a very non-classical way. Common pirouettes become bizarre and fascinating feats of strength and balance.
And all of this –– all these seemingly dangerous and risky moves –– are performed at breakneck speed. It's a wild, exhilarating display of pure physicality pushed to the extreme, and the Tulsa Ballet dancers brought it off in winning style.
Within this amped-up ballet were a number of stand-out performances. Newcomers Hyonjun Rhee and Yoohee Son, both senior soloists, excelled in the second movement solo, and Rhee sailed through the fourth movement solo with style.
Rodrigo Hermesmeyer brought a distinct and welcome sense of sparkle to his solo in the third movement –– the movement isn't described as a scherzo, but Hermesmeyer's dancing had a jovial panache to it. And that contrasted nicely with Jiyan Dai's dancing in that same movement, which was equally energetic and expressive, although Dai's attitude was more formal and assertive.
"there, below," which the company last performed in 2010, is almost the polar opposite of Possokhov's work. Set to Vaughan Williams' "Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis," it is a deliberately enigmatic work, a series of entanglements between five couples that wax and wane in counterpoint to the almost aquatic pulse of the music.
This ballet may also be the last time that Martin, Bergman and Cong share a stage together, and Cong and Bergman are one of the couples and Martin danced with Madalina Stoica.
But the real surprise here was the performance by Dai and Chelsea Keefer, two members of the corps de ballet who seem to have the makings of a marvelous working partnership. Their interactions in this work –– as well as in the other two pieces on the program –– had an almost intuitive quality to them, as if they had been dancing together for years.
"The Four Temperaments" is built around the four fluids that were once thought to control human emotion. Balanchine's ballet evokes those qualities more than dramatizes them, but there is room within his choreography for dancers to imbue their steps with a little something extra.
That certainly was the case with Hermesmeyer's solo work in the "Melancholic" section –– he seemed to fill the stage with finely controlled but very definitely expressed emotion. Cong brought out a kind of happy-go-lucky air to "Phlegmatic," while principal dancer Sofia Menteguiaga slashed through the solos in "Choleric" with fierce, fiery focus.
This was Tulsa Ballet's first time to perform at the Lorton Performance Center, the University of Tulsa's new performing arts facility. And it is a venue perfectly suited for a program such as this, providing just enough intimacy to make the audience feel a part of what is happening on stage.
"Balanchine and Beyond" continues with performances at 8 p.m. Saturday and March 22-23, and 3 p.m. Sunday and March 24 at the Lorton Performance Center, 550 S. Gary Ave. For tickets: 918-596-7111,
tulsaworld.com/mytix.
