Building a Ballet Vocabulary

New Chorographers on Point, founded in 1990 by Michael Kraus and Ruth Chester, presented its annual Ballet Builders concert at the Florence Gould Hall on Saturday night. True to its name, but somewhat to my surprise, ballet vocabulary — tweaked but respected at the same time — was the square root of most of the pieces. The Ballet Builders concert was refreshing by virtue of the fact that the choreographers were at least aware that there is a fine line between the enrichment and the dumbing down of classical vocabulary.The opening piece, however, was one of the least balletic. In David Justin’s “Solemn Opus: The Journey of Lost and Found,” a five-member tribe of heavybreathing bacchantes were buffeted around the stage to changing moods of two movements from Shostakovich’s chamber music. Following that was a duet, “The Rest Is Secret,” choreographed by Kelly Ann Sloan, and performed by Jay Goodlett and Sarah Hairston to traditional Japanese melodies. Ms. Hairston wore a kimono and Mr. Goodlett was bare-chested. The piece, composed in two parts, showed two distinct sides of a relationship. In the first part, Ms. Hairston was meek and docile, a Madama Butterfly, or perhaps a wounded Blanche DuBois. In the second half, the music was more plangent, and she was considerably more assertive.The use of the flexed foot as the rejoinder to traditional ballet’s elongated, pointed foot has become a staple of contemporary ballet, if not a cliché. It cropped up frequently Saturday night, particularly in the duet “Everything That Grows,” choreographed by Jennifer Hart. Mifa Ko and Ramon Thielen recognized various spatial planes — one the floor, two the air, and another defined by a bench on and around which they were frequently arrayed. “Everything That Grows” was performed to a selection from a Beethoven piano sonata.Gina Patterson’s “Liquid Eyes,” employed a musical gambit, and a gamble. Ms. Patterson used a score — Jeff Buckley intoning “You and I, Hallelujah” — that is not quite ambient but also certainly not metric. Rather than cuing their movement, the music covered the dance and dancers like a canopy, as two men and two women took turns being a couple or being a context, or even a Greek chorus of sorts.Graham Lustig’s “North Star,” was meant to be a dialogue in movement between Peng-Yu Chen and Li-Chuan Lin. He rolled into the wings and then she appeared. Mr. Lustig put together ballet steps with slides and skids from sports as well as modern dance. The piece might have been trite, but turned out to have some real charm.Then came an entirely different duet, an excerpt from Robert Sher-Machherndl’s “TigerLilly,” performed by Tessa Victoria and Mr. Scher-Machherndl. The two dancers engaged in odd partnering: he supported her in developpé, his arm wrapped around her neck, and they arrayed themselves in oblique mirror images.The program closed with a gag piece, “les reveuses” by Christophe Garcia, in which three women in wacky lampshade tutus dance to selections from Adam’s score for “Giselle.”This piece belonged to the genre of parodies that follows familiar music only in its structural lineaments, while providing images that sabotage, mock, and undermine the music’s original intent and associations. The dancers seemed to be sharing the same zone of insanity to which Giselle succumbs in the ballet, but here there were ungainly sprawls, thrashes, and twitches executed to music that has traditionally accompanied otherworldly virtuosity. It was amusing, but the genre itself has come to seem like an old joke that has worn a little thin.

Building a Ballet Vocabulary

Building a Ballet Vocabulary

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