Thrown Together Just Right

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The New York Sun

To the long list of the Pascal Rioult Dance Theatre’s virtues, add pluck and show-must-go-on determination. On Tuesday night, the company opened its Joyce season (complete with a world premiere) with a characteristically well-oiled performance. If not for an addendum tucked into the Playbill, few would have guessed that the company had hastily shuffled roles and repertoire to accommodate the lastminute loss of its injured star, Penelope Gonzalez.

The world premiere, “If by Chance,” represents a departure from Mr. Rioult’s recent work. After a few seasons of choreographing tumultuous dances, Mr. Rioult is taking a walk on the lighter side of romanticism. And he couldn’t have chosen more fertile music for the experiment than Jacques Loussier’s sprightly jazz arrangements of Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 23.

Unlike most improvisations on classical music, the Loussier arrangements are for both jazz trio and concert orchestra. Perfectly straight classical orchestrations alternate with looser jazz stylings. Just as the score shifted between strict classical counts and jazz syncopation, so do the dancers.

The effect was appealingly whimsical – like one of those cartoons in which, at the drop of a music cue, Mickey Mouse instantly morphs into a snake charmer. A girl whipped through her prim chaine turns and – as the music went jazzy – suddenly shifted her weight onto a sexy, rolling hip, instantly relocating the scene from barre to barroom.

A delicate arched lift with perfectly pointed toes dropped onto flat feet. A formal pose melted into a casual slouch. Guys swaggered onstage like hepcats, followed by a line of bolt-upright girls. Mr. Rioult exploited the classical-jazz contrast almost as a pastoral-urban one: Now she’s a shepherdess, now she’s a flapper.

Piano Concerto No. 23 has the restless energy of a flock of birds scattering to the winds, and Mr. Rioult got some of that feeling into the dance, especially with his glorious use of turns and sweeping unison sequences. He worked in a lot of other things, too: extensive same-sex partnering, ballet tableaux, a little Broadway – even a quote from Martha Graham’s “Diversion of Angels.”

The four bare-chested men wore red tights, while the four women wore summery midriff-baring halter tops and yellow skirts lined with flouncy red fabric. A summertime mood was in the air. Unfortunately, the lighting for “If By Chance” was essentially blue twilight. The shadowy lighting sucked a good bit of the fun out of the dance, painting it moody instead of sunny. Perhaps it was the out-of-character lighting that made “If by Chance” feel less exultant than expected.

Mr. Rioult’s 1995 piece “Wien” was a late substitution for the duet “Black Diamond,” and an excellent addition to the program. The menacing rhythm of Ravel’s “La Valse” seemed to dictate the dance’s circles, around which the dancers shuffled in a slavish pack. As the waltz whirled faster and gayer, this craven society shambled into darker corners, bowed down by shame, driven forward by hysterical energy.

The program also included last season’s “Les Noces,” Mr. Rioult’s reimagining of the Stravinsky-Nijinska classic. In Mr. Rioult’s version, four women gather on one side of the stage under a rack of petticoat hoops; on the other side the four men assemble under a rack of wedding suits. They begin the hypersexual dance wearing nothing but underwear.

The brides-to-be alternately basked in their nascent sexuality and cowered before it. Instead of the traditional benches there were chairs, which the girls danced over with a leggy, cold precision that suggested a higher-end “Cell Block Tango.” On the other side of the aisle, their fiances ground their hips through an equally erotic (sometimes homoerotic) dance. As the dance progressed, it added both clothes and partnering, but lost momentum, never regaining the exacting clarity of its first five minutes.

In contrast, there was not an ounce of fat on the crowd-pleasing finale, the company’s 2002 hit version of “Bolero.” Here Mr. Rioult displayed the distinct combination of lithe romanticism and cool analytics that defines his best work. Ultimately the phase that defines the dance (a motion with squared-off elbows and open palms reminiscent of a traffic cop’s signals) proves as irresistible as Ravel’s cunning little melody. Eight slender dancers in metallic bodysuits moved in knife-sharp unison before a cubist mural in hues of soot and sand. Each time a spotlight picked a dancer out, his or her limbs turned into taffy, stretched into long, difficult arabesques.

“Bolero” is a curiously subversive piece. We know we’re supposed to be against the machine, but the machine is so gleaming and attractive. Late in the dance, Mr. Rioult reels the silvery dancers in to a vortex, whirling them in and out in breathtakingly lovely turns, and we find that we crave that unison, to the point that we resent the dancers’ freestyle diversions. “Bolero” reaffirms Mr. Rioult’s ability to excite both the emotions and the eye.

Until June 25 (175 Eighth Avenue at 19th Street, 212-242-0800).


The New York Sun

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