So, for one last time, Karen Gabay joined her colleagues at a Ballet San Jose season closer. The program will be at the San Jose Center for the Performing Arts through Sunday afternoon with a special 7 p.m. tribute to Gabay on Sunday night.
In an evening that was largely contemporary ballet at its edgiest, Gabay's "Amour Gitan" became a lovely interlude of romance a la gypsy. In 1998, she had choreographed it to Ravel's bravura showpiece "Tzigane" for herself and now Ballet Master Raymond Rodriguez. A splendid Maykel Solas partners her in these final performances.
"Amour" vividly highlights Gabay's expressive range. She still turns respectable pirouettes but she truly came alive as a lover who was teasing and flirtatious one moment and temperamental and sexually demanding the next. At the end, she generously shared a bouquet of red roses with Maykel and the fine musicians, pianist Keisuke Nakagoshi and violinist Lev Polyakin.
Jessica Lang's world premiere "Eighty One" proved to be the evening's other highlight. Lang had introduced herself last year with a visually fetching "Splendid Isolation III." The Ballet San Jose commission, strongly performed by an 11-dancer ensemble, is a much more intriguing work. It's a happy tailor-made acquisition for a company that seems to be finding its way toward a new identity.
"Eighty One" is a fast-moving, constantly
changing ensemble piece in which small groups -- a trio for men here, a quick diagonal for women there -- emerge but never interfere with a communal thrust. Jeremy Kovitch may lift Alexsandra Meijer overhead into an upside down split but she snaps her legs closed, and the two disappear in the group. Francisco Preciado and Maria Jacobs-Yu end up on the floor like some multi-limbed creature, but then he just walks away.
Lang's piece works as if an intricately designed machine whose interlocking
Dancers Damir Eric and Shannon Bynum rehearse at Ballet San Jose. ( Quinn B Wharton )
parts keep the place humming yet with few of the anti-humanist implications that such an endeavor might suggest. Jim French's design of banks and beams of high intensity lights evoked a self-contained universe.
But Lang's most brilliant decision was working with composer Jakub Ciupinski. He created a score of electronics and live theremins -- an early 20th century instrument that appears to pull sound out of thin air. Placing Ciupinsky on a podium upstage left, he looked like the wizard who kept this world in his hands.
Jorma Elo's 2006 "Glow-Stop", in a production borrowed from ABT, was created to odd musical bedfellows, the 4th movement of Mozart's Symphony No. 28 and the 2nd movement from Tirol Concerto for Piano and Orchestra by Philip Glass. Yet the combination worked -- perhaps because Elo had yanked the selections out of their context.
With an almost identical cast to the one in "Eighty One", this was not the company's most imaginative programming or, at least, casting choice. However, it did challenge the dancers toward a kind of excellence that they seem to thrive on. Amy Marie Briones, Cindy Huang, Akira Takahashi, James Kopecky and, above all, Kovitch left particularly strong impressions.
Despite its less than convincing performance, Merce Cunningham's "Duets" was a gift. So full of inventive and witty touches, a glorious spatial design and John Cage's gurgling score, this essay on duet dancing is easy on the eye. It was set primarily on corps members, perhaps to make them shine individually. However, except for soloists Beth Ann Namey and Rudy Candia, these young dancers did not have the maturity to step outside their ballet training.
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