Ballo della Regina, ABT at City Center, Sunday matinée, November 2, 2008

Gillian Murphy in Ballo della Regina

Gene Schiavone photo

Ashley Bouder in Ballo della Regina

Paul Kolnik photo

Today's 1:30 performance (Nov. 2) began with Ballo and the slip of paper announcing Yuriko Kajiya and Eric Tamm in place of Gillian Murphy and David Hallberg. I knew Gillian wouldn't be dancing as planned, but I was so looking forward to David in this. But no worries -- it's always exciting to see a new'un in a new role and I thought Eric Tamm was very, very good. Kajiya, too, after her troubled "Theme" a week ago (last Sunday's afternoon performance) was confident, strong, and bursting with energy. I was happy I saw her in a better light. When she got to that special Merrill Ashley variation, I looked at her very closely, Ashley's dancing running through my head.

Merrill Ashley
Martha Swope photo

Allegra Kent was seated near me and I wondered what she was thinking, too. Kajiya tried her darndest, she really did, and without the knowledge of Merrill Ashley's precedent-setting performances, one could say Kajiya did very well indeed. Alas, we DO have knowledge of Miss Ashley's incomparable antecedent! It makes you treasure having seen Ashley do it all the more and place a higher value on her considerable ability with the special choreography of this piece.

Isabella Boylston and David Hallberg in Ballo della Regina
Gene Schiavone photo

It was the collaboration with George Balanchine , who simply incorporated things Merrill Ashley could do -- and she could do just about anything -- that made this ballet so special. The speed! The precision of those hops! That unique 3-part drawing in of the leg from grand battement à la seconde to high passé!


But this review is supposed to be about Kajiya. I was pleasantly surprised at how pleasantly and surprisingly she danced today.

With ease and showing beautiful lines, good elevation and a much better facial expression -- joyful! -- to replace that upper lip curl that looked almost like a sneer last week when she was dancing unsure, Kajiya won my heart. She is quite the sublime dancer. I'm glad that I can end my season of watching by saying so, that I was able to change my mind about her (even knowing she was thrown into "Theme" and had to make [really sour] lemonade). Yuriko, you were wonderful this afternoon and you have t-i-m-e to get better at things like Ballo. You certainly took the bull by the horns today. More power to you.

Yuriko Kajiya in Ballo della Regina
Gene Schiavone photo

Eric Tamm -- such a fine danseur noble. He's been given so many opportunities this fall season and he is using them so well. He stepped up today, too. Most of his turns were straight, fast, and beautiful-looking. His line is gorgeous. He was an attentive, strong partner. He covered the stage with his leaps and was right on the music throughout. I can still see him in my mind's eye, so that makes him memorable as well.

The corps was crisp, generous of movement, sprightly and long-limbed. My Isabella was there, so of course I watched her loveliness quite a lot of the time. Maria Bystrova stood out for me, too. It's a darn shame she grew so tall and big-boned for I think that's what's keeping her from being moved up. She was a darling, pixielike 15 year old who danced like a dream in all the cute little girl variations. I was so excited when she joined ABT. For years, I've been itching to scream at someone about her still being kept from showing us all she's got. The other females (Nicola, Zhong-Jing, Nicole, Melanie, Anne, Luciana, Jacquelyn, Christine, Leann, and Karen U.) each had their own personality as they danced and it was fun to identify them as they whizzed by.

All were in good form, some in sensational form. The four soloists -- Misty, Maria, Hee, and Marian -- were wonderful. I don't have a bone to pick with any of them. Sheer pleasure in beautiful costumes. Marian Butler is so pretty!

Preview: My new corps favorite is Roddy Doble (who knew?!) in “Company B”.
He was fantastic! And Carlos Lopez! Could he BE any better? WOW!

Isabella Boylston, Luciana Paris, Nicola Curry in Ballo della Regina
Gene Schiavone photo

Hee Seo in Ballo della Regina
Gene Schiavone photo

Baker's Dozen -- ABT at City Center, Sunday matinée, October 26, 2008

Baker's Dozen

Same cast as Sunday evening. Barbara Bilach at the piano. I had a good seat for watching Bilach as she played the overture. We were facing each other, she in the orchestra pit, me in the front row. Her face was calm throughout as she tackled yet again the contrapunctal jazzy rhythms of Willie "The Lion" Smith.

She is used to playing this. The ritardandos and diminuendos, accelerandos and and crescendos linking the different pieces are usually also in counterpoint, making it a bit of a difficult piece to get under your belt. Perhaps that is why I felt she was a little insecure at Bard. I take it back. She is skilled enough to be able to play this wildly speedy, galloping music with nonchalance. For viewing purposes (knowing that the pianist is to be heard, not seen, when she accompanies ballet), Bilach was boring. Were she in concert I'd love to see some animation as she tickled the ivories.

Curtain opens. Female dancers in white tops with criss-crossed straps in the back. An embroidered-looking beige sash-width belt cinches the waist of beige skirts, split to the top both front and back to allow for acrobatic movement. Legs are covered in lacy, legging-like tights which end inside white jazz shoes. The males are in beige trousers and shirts.One thing about ABT's rendition, as has been mentioned in previous reports, is the lightness of the company's dancers. I agree that this must be, if not the finest, then one of the finest ballet casts to dance this modern work.

Misty Copeland in Baker's Dozen

Gene Schiavone photo

So much of this piece is performed in the air as dancers grand jeté on and off the stage, throw themselves into each other's arms or onto their backs, jump off each other's bodies, and propel themselves straight up like rockets, with legs tucked in beneath them. There's groundwork, too, with lots of sliding movements, being pulled into the wings while in splits, rolling around from one side to the other via a fellow dancer's back, plenty of rond de jambes in plié, falling to the floor, turning upside down with butts sticking up, and signature Tharp traveling modes.

Sassy shoulder rotating, arms loosely hanging, leading with pumping arms to traverse the floor, funny bits like not being let onto the stage by an unseen dancer in the wings, first pulled back by an arm, then a leg, and being left alone on stage to display antic moves as if in front of one's bedroom mirror, make for a lively, infectious gambol that leaves the onlookers in such good spirits.

Isaac Stappas and Kristi Boone in Baker's Dozen

I could see "Baker's Dozen" again and again. There's too much going on for me to follow everyone in only two showings. I'd like to follow each dancer throughout the piece -- that's how I enjoy ballet. The whole cast had great facial expressions as they acted their way through the dance. Sitting where I was I got to really see everything.

Standouts in Sunday's matinée were Arron Scott, who got the plum role of the dancer alone on stage sitting on his knees who starts to sway his hips as he realizes the others have taken a powder, and continues into an endearing solo dance charming himself as well as the audience, the very blond Blaine Hoven who was high-spirited throughout, Eric Tamm, looking so Tommy Tune and Broadway, and Isabella Boylston, to whom I will devote the next few paragraphs.

Isabella Boylston, left

Järvi Raudsepp, right 

I have to preface my remarks by stating that I knew Isabella when she was Hildur Boylston and a 12 year old summer ballet student at the Kirov Academy of Ballet in Washington, D.C., 1999. My daughter and she became soulmates that July.

They're the two dancers at the barre in the forefront of this picture. 

The following summer, Isabella went to SAB and the year after, also, after winning the Gold medal at the Youth America Grand Prix finals at Pace University, which I attended because my daughter was in the competition too. A few months later, after the SAB SI, my daughter and I saw her taking class at STEPS where a crowd of students had gathered around the doorway to watch her in Willie Burman's class, informing those who didn't know, that she was this "amazing" dancer from the SAB SI. She was 14 years old. And, yes, she was indeed amazing.

Isabella went on to complete 2 1/2 years at the prestigious Harid Conservatory, graduating from high school there to move right into ABT's Studio Company (having already been approached at ABT's SI the previous summer). She participated in several ballet competitions, including the NYIBC, and won some top prizes and gained notice, becoming one to watch.

(Sidebar: A veteran competitor, she was a Grand Award winner at the Colorado State Science Fair in 2000, winning first place, Junior Division All Fair, for her project on Beetle Juice.)

My daughter has not seen her since the last two classes they took together that day at STEPS 7 years ago, but I made a point of going to ABT's Met season this past summer in order to see Hildur dance. She was featured as a D'Jampe soloist in La Bayadère and otherwise performed corps roles, and as I was sitting on the hard right side the day she was lined up with the corps on the same side (thereby not visible), I felt really gypped out of getting my full dose of Isabella Boylston.

Well, it seems I was to be deprived of her again, since the cast I got for City Center was the second cast for Citizen, in which Isabella is first-cast, and just as I was resigning myself to my fate, I noticed her name in the program for Baker's Dozen! Happy days (as Jamie Oliver would say)!

With nearly in-studio proximity, I sat upright in my seat ready for bliss. And I got it! Isabella Boylston is a blissful dancer, no question. And anyone who saw her nine-page photo spread and sublimely tutu'ed cover shot in Dance Spirit in September 2006 knows she has the ballet body of perfection: long, shapely legs, high insteps and arches, long arms, fingers, and toes, a beautiful countenance, narrow hips, taut yet free torso, linear sculpted muscles, gorgeous flexibility.

Her solo in "Baker's Dozen" (thank goodness she had a solo!) showed off her ease of technique, speed, musicality, lyricism, and charm. Isabella even threw in a "glinch" reminiscent of the great Suzanne. I enjoyed her performance so thoroughly and wondered why other reviewers hardly refer to her (lumping her in with others, or not even mentioning her dancing at all when she was indeed one fifth of a small ensemble).

Her duet with Patrick Ogle in Baker's Dozen was full of split positions, both on the ground and en l'air, high-swinging grand battements, energy, energy, energy, and fun. She'd be a major standout even if I didn't know her. But I'm so glad I do.

Baker's Dozen -- ABT at Bard College, Friday October 17, 2008

Overheard in the washroom at intermission after Baker's Dozen:
"There weren't any principal dancers in that piece, but they were all really good!"

LOL! I'll say! Understatement of the evening.
Divided into five pieces, Baker's Dozen (with its non-baker's, but actual dozen of loosely mated dancers), its sections titled "Relaxin'", "Echoes of Spring", "Tango à la Caprice" and "Relaxin", received its world premiere on February 15, 1979 and its ABT premiere last year during the City Center Season.The ballet begins with a lengthy piano overture to set the mood. The dancers are dressed in white and beige from head to toe, evoking the ambiance of elegant Long Island parties in the early part of the last century, at least as we have been encouraged to imagine them in novels such as "The Great Gatsby". With jazzy music as smooth as the dresses for their setting, a dozen dancers assemble and disassemble in various pairings, often with comical results.

Cincinnati Ballet dancers in Baker's Dozen

This is a nostalgic romp, riddled with youthful antics, for a social group of friends who are having romantic fun and are trying to outdo each other in their solo turns. Dancers get thrown around from one to another, get flipped upside down, fall unexpectedly from the wings into the arms of whoever's onstage at the moment, dance out of the wings only to be pulled back in again by the leg, slide or get propelled across the floor, and generally ham it up.
I was sitting so close to the stage that I could see the facial expressions clearly, a necessity to get the most enjoyment out of this ballet. The intimate relationship of my seat to the performance floor gave me a vantage point that was almost like an in-studio view. The choice of contemporary works for the Bard program is perfect for closeup viewing. Classical ballet with its elaborate costuming, props, and stage scenery requires an audience to be seated further back in order to support the illusion. But I just love being close! One can really identify every dancer and see their strengths and abilities.
I saw incredibly arched feet on all the women (the entire cast wore white jazz shoes) which just dazzled! Speedy yet very precise movements displayed stellar technique. Gestures which might not be seen by those seated further away helped make the ballet as they showcased the acting ability of the dancers. And the energy! It came pouring out of each dancer with gushes of frenetic choreography, seamlessly sequeing into generous swaths of exquisite perfect-lined pas de deux (or trois) highlighting the gorgeous technique of each dancer. Oh the legs! The turnout! The comedy!
Standouts of this performance of Baker's Dozen: Devon Teuscher (loveliness and beauty dreamily personified), Kristi Boone (crisp, sassy, athletic), Thomas Forster (ebullient stage presence), Eric Tamm (super charisma), and number one standout: TOBIN EASON! (a smile that embraced the whole auditorium, a honed technical display of dancing, impetuous maneuvers, playful and mischievous facial expressions). Tobin was my fave of the first act, and Eric Tamm's shining performance also stayed with me.

Blaine Hoven and Maria Ricetto in Baker's Dozen