BALLET CHICAGO
Ballet Chicago seems well aware of this danger, and the fledgling company has so far avoided pandering to the lowest common denominator. In the year or so of its short life, this troupe has presented an intelligent, varied repertoire, challenging to dancers and audience alike. It has risen from the ashes of Chicago City Ballet to attain a remarkable new life of its own, in part I think because these dancers and their artistic director, Daniel Duell, are hungry. But do they have the audience for what they’d like to achieve?
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I have to say, though, that of the two new dances I saw, only one seemed a worthy addition: Peter Martins’s 1978 Calcium Light Night. With its chilly, stark choreography, its angular subversions of the ballet idiom, and its intense verticality–like an El Greco in a modernist style–it was a bracing slap in the face, given the evening’s other, more traditional works. It was also nicely and coolly danced by Petra Adelfang and Manard Stewart.
The other dances I’d seen Ballet Chicago perform before were George Balanchine’s 1941 Concerto Barocco and Lisa de Ribere’s Orchesographie, which was created for Ballet Chicago last fall. Orchesographie is a saucy, atypical dance for five men. But instead of emphasizing men’s power, it shows their wit, pliancy, and vivacity. It also integrates an inventive mix of idioms, from Renaissance court dancing to jazz dance, so you see everything from mincing little bows from the waist to sexy hip swings. The men look fine in their tight black “tuxedos,” both slim and curvy, like so many animated musical notes.
Rodin is so bad that it occurred to me it was meant to be tongue-in-cheek. I thought it might be a spoof of 19th-century romanticism, with its Impressionist-sculptor subject, romantic music (by Chopin), and the silly, diaphanous floor-to-ceiling drape that was the main feature of the set. But nothing in the dancers’ presentation seemed ironic. I can only assume that Rodin is nothing but a bald-faced appeal to the ballet audience’s taste for schmaltz.
