MIAMI CITY BALLET
Multiply this sense of possibility by 30 dancers, and you have Miami City Ballet. This vibrant young company (it was founded in October 1986) is full of eager young faces with big, bright smiles. You look at Miami City Ballet and think “potential.” Not that the company isn’t already professional or technically sound. Its performances are good now; they might be great. I imagine this is how the cognoscenti felt in the early days of New York City Ballet, when there were jeers at Balanchine’s neoclassical aesthetic. Not that MCB’s resident choreographer, Jimmy Gamonet De Los Heros, has anything like Balanchine’s genius. But there is a certain feel and look to the company that spells ultimate success.
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“We wanted to skip provincialism, and bring in and develop our own talent,” said MCB’s artistic director Edward Villella in a preperformance lecture. Villella, a former NYCB dancer and a great one, is clearly used to being center stage. He gave some pointers on what to expect from the evening’s program: Balanchine’s 1961 Raymonda Variations comes from a 19th-century tradition but adds a 20th-century veneer and understanding, expressing a constant elegance of bearing. De Los Heros’s Movilissimanoble (premiered this May) also deals with people moving in a noble manner, but in an even more contemporary vein. “Rubies,” a section from Balanchine’s full-length ballet Jewels (1967), has a sense of a new American elegance. Villella tells us that Balanchine wanted the set to create “a Milky Way of jewels.”
Once the lead couple (Iliana Lopez and Franklin Gamero) enters dressed in blue, the pastel palette is picture-perfect. Lopez has a restrained, studied lyricism as she raises or rounds her arms. Her smile implies a European sophistication, as if she were holding back but could do so much more for you if she wanted to or if you asked her. She doesn’t dance with a dynamic full-out force that would bowl you over, preferring a subtle sophistication that matches Gamero’s sensitive partnering. His intent attention to her reminded me briefly of Ivan Nagy’s famed partnering abilities.
