SAN FRANCISCO’S Smuin Ballet returned to Carmel for the final program of its 21st season, attracting large, enthusiastic audiences to Sunset Center. In her 17-minute Petal, first danced by Smuin here in 2013, choreographer Helen Pickett intentionally expects her dancers “corporeally, emotionally and spiritually” to “reach a state of vulnerability,” by which she means a totally honest style of communication. Petal opened on a large yellow box, the four women dancers in pale yellow leotards, the four men in dark pants. Later, the color in the box went to rose, then pink, and back to rose. (Photo by Keith Sutter.)

Driving music was by Philip Glass and Thomas Newman, the latter best-known for his many Hollywood film scores. Pickett’s style here is abstract except for implicit flirtations between pairs dancing in full physical contact and occasionally with the audience, gratuitously breaking the fourth wall. (It tasted of Twyla Tharp’s wit and whimsy.) Dancing was nearly always nonstop but now and then the dancers not central to the focal action were allowed to walk on and off casually. Groupings of dancers were both symmetrical and asymmetrical, from full ensemble to duos and trios. Coming at the end of a long run of Bay Area performances it felt less than fully-charged with Smuin’s usual intensity.

Following the first intermission were two well-known works by Michael Smuin, the company’s late founder. The Balcony Pas de Deux from Romeo and Juliet, with music by Prokofiev, featured Erin Yarbrough and Jonathan Powell with a sustained high lift at its climax. A thing of beauty, it was set before a backdrop of twinkling stars on a clear black night. (The stage surface was now black and would remain so for the remainder of the program.) Smuin’s Hearts Suite, excerpted from his Le Ballet des Coeurs, an homage to the Carné film Children of Paradise and the songs of Edith Piaf, presented Nicole Haskins at Garance, a courtesan in red and black, and Ben Needham-Wood as Baptiste, a mime artist. The three panels could be called Girl Meets Boy, Girl and Boy Dance Together, and Boy Dances Alone, Abandoned and Brokenhearted. The performances were suitably melodramatic, especially the last scene.

Adam Hougland’s Ask Me, in its world premiere production, brought back the full company. This talented young choreographer has made major waves in terpsichoredom. He danced with the Limon and Lar Lubovitch companies and created his first choreograph while a student at Juilliard that won the Hector Zaraspe Prize. His works have been staged by more than a dozen major companies and institutions here, in Canada and Europe. He created his own Rite of Spring for Louisville Ballet and the entire Mozart Requiem and a new Firebird for Cincinnati Ballet.

Ask Me is a dark steamy piece full of punk attitude and street smarts, costumes of glitter and splash, body paint, tattoos and shades. Dozens of lights hanging from the fly flashed and faded in bursts and patterns. The five selected Joan Wasser songs (that she recorded as Joan the Police Woman) provided the heat and energy that Hougland captured into his designs. Most of the ensembles were physically engaged in calisthenic workouts of full body language that kept the arms as busy as everything else. Ensemble rank and file alternated with a pair of duets, one scene each that began with only men and only women, joined halfway through by the other. Instead of ending the 22-minute piece with the full corps, it wound down to a brilliant solo by Weston Krukow.

Beneficially, Hougland uses the devices of classical ballet—material presented at the start reappears literally or in variations later on. Hip-hop makes perfect sense in dance just as Wasser’s nouveau R&B does in music.

By Scott MacClelland

CALLING its current program “Untamed” inspired two opposing interpretations of the word in Smuin Ballet’s Saturday matinee in Carmel. It got its desired implication in founder Michael Smuin’s 1996 Frankie & Johnny, a narrative piece full of color, attitude, Hispanic music and Terpsichorean delight. It got the opposite result in the program opener, Serenade for Strings, to the famous Tchaikovsky work of that name, in Garrett Ammon’s 2013 choreography that entered the Smuin repertoire last October. In short, Ammon’s work came up short, even lame at times, in matching the character of his designs to the character of the music.

Yes, there were echoes of Balanchine and de Mille, and no doubt others whose work I may not be as familiar with, in the patterns and ensembles chosen from among the 11 dancers but, gratuitous posturing and cutesy mugging here and there, made it as superficial as it was clever. The Tchaikovsky only gets really playful in the last of its four movements and this is where cutesy should have been consigned.

Having said that, the corps of barefoot dancers, the women in short skirts of muted blue, the men in dark pants and light shirts, all illuminated from the wings, performed admirably. To Ammon’s credit, he came up with some startling effects. But they could, or should, have been drawn organically from his original thematic ideas, the well-established ‘economy of means’ aesthetic. And, all respect to the dancers, their ensemble precision, a hallmark of Smuin’s abstract choreography, did not always stay on the rails, particularly in the opening movement of the Tchaikovsky. This strikes me as lower artistic sensitivity to available talent and resources than Ammon’s formidable resumé suggests.

Then things got better.

Objects of Curiosity, which Smuin premiered in 2007, is the work of resident choreographer Amy Seiwert, and seemed as if the music—by Philip Glass and Foday Musa Suso—could have been added after the fact. Seiwert built her design on geometric shapes and forms. A large rectangle on the stage floor anchored the action, which included entries from the wings as well as through a vertical gap in the backdrop. (See above photo.) The 20-minute piece began in darkness with four men each occupying a square at the edge of the stage discretely lit in white light from above. Their motion was slow. As the lights came up so did color, revealing dancers, nine men and women, in yellow costumes each wrapped with its own fanciful red stripe designed by Cassandra Carpenter. Ballet, modern dance and calisthenics all seemed to come from a single vision. And an architectural one at that. At one point, the women at the corners of the rectangle, feet wide apart, were used by the men to measure distances the same way a draughtsman uses his compass. The lighting and scenic design were adapted from Matthew Antaky’s original.

The fab finale, Frankie & Johnny, Michael Smuin’s 1996 homage to his idol Gene Kelly—“I didn’t want to be like him. I wanted to be him.”—is a narrative creation that retains all of its original power. Johnny and Frankie were lovers. But he did her wrong and got what was coming for it. A scrim opened the show blazed with a banner and the voice of Glen Walters singing the ballad. Then Perez Prado’s Que Rico Mambo launched the recorded track that included songs by Celia Cruz, Beny More, Tango Project, Tito Puente, Arturo Sandoval and many more, all fitted neatly to the action. Yes, action! Its 30 minutes felt more like 15.

Totally in character throughout, Susan Roemer was Frankie, Robert Moore Johnny. In the Prologue they fall in love. The scene quickly dissolves into Seaside, more an interlude, with swirling colonial-style gowns, that finally arrives at Johnny’s Saloon, a real piece of scenic art. That’s where things got steamy. While Johnny looked the other way, Frankie was accosted and harassed by four men. When he wised up he accepted cash in exchange for Frankie then took up with Cat, danced by Jo-Ann Sundermeier. Somehow Frankie returned with a pistol and in four shots dispatched her faithless Johnny. Two cops arrived to arrest her but in the epilog she managed to cuff them to each other.

Compared to the abstract Objects, this scene was entirely representational, and vivid. Jonathan Powell’s Tango Dancers, a solo for two, with a mannequin head for the female half, provoked laughter across the audience.

The company’s early June show in Carmel, “Unlaced,” will include Smuin’s famous Romeo & Juliet pas de deux and a world premiere by Adam Hoagland.

Photos by Keith Sutter

Eleven California choreographers, professional and student dancers strutted their classy, expressive and sensual moves Sunday afternoon at SpectorDance in Marina, the town’s premiere performing arts venue.

The company’s student corps opened the matinee with Flocking, choreographed by Marika Brussel and inspired by birds flocking over Monterey Bay. The seven young ladies, grouped mostly in twos and threes, ‘flapped’ their wings up and down most gracefully. That short piece was followed by another, Erica Klein’s own Oh Darling, a solo of exceptional athleticism and physical expression. Klein is an ambitious high school senior who divides her time between Monterey and Los Angeles.

Lasting three times as long, Coupling: Cycles 1-3, choreographed in 2013 by Jenn Logan (pictured), featured Katrina Amerine and Scot Tupper in a complicated love sequence, warmly together, in conflict, then reconciled again. (All three are members of the Nancy Evans Dance Theatre in Pasadena.)

Some of the students then joined the pros for Dawn, designed by Brussel to the music of Requiem by Lenny Tristano as played by the Ethel String Quartet. (The middle part of the music turned quite jazzy.) The company opened the ballet, which then gave rise to a substantial solo and finally a return of the group which put on a vivid show of hand gestures.

A startling highlight of the program was Matthew Nelson’s Stories of Guerilla Superheroes when, after a few minutes improvising, he began a narration that carried through the rest of the 12-minute piece. Remaining in constant restless motion he explained that he had exchanged his boyhood running with grownup dancing, which, like the running, he now did outdoors and in public. Obviously, he’s gotten very good at this. He calls it “guerilla dance practice” and tells his story in ecological terms. He called on the audience to doff shoes and join him, and 11 men, women, girls and boys did, some of the former well up in years, others of the latter budding dancers. (I believe he was also joined by his wife and little son.) As the floor filled up he invited the audience to be aware of the space, the size of it, the feel of it and, “if you get close to me, the smell of it.” He also admitted that he might be “trying too hard to be cool.” A fair amount of laughter also filled the space. And, in his narrative, he insisted that everyone read his daily blog out of Santa Barbara at www.guerilladance.org.

To the music of Bach’s Sheep May Safely Graze, Jacqueline Cousineau danced her own The Meandering Meaning of Words, a dissonant start-stop, callisthenic conflict with the soothing music. The Salinas native now lives in France. Jahnna Biddle’s How Will I Know? used props (umbrella and two chairs) as she was joined by Alyssa Renard and Harley Thompson in ensembles and solos with lots of hand and arm gestures and a distinctive African-American style.

The second half opened with nine of the student dancers in Mads Ericksen’s largely rank and file Walk, Sleep, to chamber music by Antonín Dvořák. Ericksen comes from Ballet San Jose.

Mark Foehringer and Brian Fisher, of San Francisco’s Mark Foehringer Dance Project, were here for Foehringer’s Brevis in Longo, danced by Fisher and Marina Fukushima to Chassidic music for cello and piano by Ernest Bloch. Foehringer’s work is predictably graceful, fluid and sensual. Fisher made his lifts and carries look effortless.

Nancy Evans’ own Casualties—Duet Between The Wife & The Husband/Ghost, danced by Jenn Logan and Scot Tupper, was very moving. It’s the same idea explored in the Patrick Swayze/Demi Moore movie Ghost, but here was inspired by Evans’ grandmother’s drawing in 1917 as she waited for her husband to return from the Great War of a century ago. In the piece, the couple dance in loving contact. When the ghost returns to the grieving widow, he circles her with love but she cannot see him and he cannot touch her.

Katrina Amerine (right) was the predatory Beast of her own design, a hybrid cat/serpent of amazing flexibility, stalking prey but ever-mindful that it might itself be stalked. She was deliciously scary.

Jenn Logan then danced her own 8-minute Alter Ego with Jen Hunter, at first in strict imitation, then with physical conflict, a regular Doppelgänger encounter.

Brian Fisher’s Reflect/Refract, which ended the program, returned the Foehringer compliment in an even-more gorgeous duet, with Melissa Gomez and Thomas Woodman dancing to the slow-pulsed meditative music of Arvo Pärt.

Fran Spector, who avers that dance is about real life, is currently working on a large project with residents of Rancho Cielo called East-West which will premiere in October. I can’t wait.

To the delight of dance lovers at Carmel’s Sunset Center Saturday afternoon, Smuin Ballet celebrated their 20th season with two world premieres. The first was Tutto Eccetto il Lavandino (“everything but the kitchen sink”) by San Francisco Ballet veteran Val Caniparoli. It used a miscellany of Vivaldi concerto movements and modulations for thirty minutes of every bit of ballet vocabulary seen in the last 50 years, honoring more dance masters than I could name but certainly including Balanchine, Tharp and Smuin himself. Predictably, the full ensemble (of 12) opened and (of 15) closed the program, sandwiching duos, trios and ensembles with solos.

Costumes in muted shades of green kept the focus on choreography and allowed the expressive rhetoric and whimsy to shine through undistracted by flashy colors and excessive lighting. (The choice of unfamiliar Vivaldi pieces reinforced that call.) Caniparoli also used that timeless classical trick of recycling particular gestures and poses, imparting an organic sense of continuity that glued his plan together. In its discipline, wit and romance, “everything” contributed to the whole. Some smartass technical bits provoked the occasional giggle, and a regular guffaw as, just before the curtain closed after the last bows were taken, a baby blue kitchen sink rolled out to the center of the stage. This was dance about dance and a pleasure to witness and engage, though, from some comments overheard at the interval, not to everyone’s taste.

Dance lovers and supporters Fred Terman and Nan Borreson of Carmel provided the lead sponsorship of Amy Seiwert’s But now I must rest. The 22-minute piece–the second premiere–paid homage to Cesária Évora, the beloved Barefoot Diva of Cape Verde, that archipelago off the coasts of Mauritania and Senegal that was colonized by Portugal in the 15th Century. The work’s title is from comments Évora made to Le Monde after suffering strokes and a heart attack shortly before her death in 2011; its score is made up of songs that propelled her to worldwide fame, most importantly São Tomé na Equador, which begs St. Thomas’ help to ameliorate the “equator of pain” suffered by the people, especially women, of Cape Verde and other Portuguese-speaking Atlantic islands. Évora’s voice haunts this music with its African and Latin-American flavors. Costumes and lighting added exotic spices while Seiwert’s designs turned up the sensual heat with slowly undulating duos and trios seen against fast-moving ephemera across the stage by other members of the company. The men repeatedly lifting their partners got a real physical workout. But Smuin dancers somehow always make it look easy.

Lastly, a revival of Michael Smuin’s irresistable Dancin’ with Gershwin. Created in 2001, it demonstrates that the late founder of this always-welcome company was as much showman as choreographer (which did not please all Bay Area dance critics.) Choosing which Gershwin, and performed by whom, was Smuin’s first challenge. Michael Feinstein’s They Can’t Take that Away from Me was followed by Prudence Johnson’s S’Wonderful. Tracks by the Canadian Brass, Peter Gabriel, Sting and Carmen McRae became terpsichorean magic, some of it laugh-out-loud sexy, like Erica Felsch and the men of the company with their trembling feather fans to Marilyn Monroe’s Do It Again. (Good as it is, Keith Sutter’s photo doesn’t really capture Smuin’s outrageous cheek.) And of course, this was where all the colors came out, costumes and lighting, pizzazz and attitude. Do I need to mention the bellowed cheers and standing ovation?

Smuin’s 2014-15 “unbelievable” season will bring three programs to Sunset Center. “Untamed” in late march, “Uncorked” in early December, and “Unlaced” in early June. Smuin’s work will appear in all three, and a world premiere by Adam Hougland will punctuate the June performances.

By Scott MacClelland

A baker’s dozen of Smuin Ballet dancers took the stage at Carmel’s Sunset Center on Saturday in a mixed program that paid tribute to figures of major artistic talent no longer with us. I say mixed because the three works on offer were choreographically very different from one another. Amy Seiwert’s Dear Miss Cline, premiered by the company in 2011, opened the afternoon with boisterous energy and cheeky moves to a string of ten songs by Patsy Cline, a true and legendary queen of American country music whose life was tragically cut short in the prime of her career. Then came Return to a Strange Land by Jiří Kylián, a 1975 homage to John Cranko, who made the Stuttgart Ballet world famous and who also died untimely. The second half of the program was given over to company founder Michael Smuin’s Carmina Burana, premiered in 1997, to excerpts from a 40-year-old Cleveland Orchestra recording that frankly shows its age. At the time of his death, at age 68, Smuin was doing some of his best work.

Seiwert’s choreography and her costumes—co-made by Jo Ellen Arntz (see above photo by David DeSilva)—were fresh and fabulous. The cast opened the show with Come On In and Walkin’ After Midnight, and closed it with I Don’t Wanta. Most of the interior numbers focused on two sides of a failed love affair. (Isn’t that always the story of county music?) Accordingly, lots of boy/girl pairings for the slightly comedic tragedies were on display. Some of the numbers caught the spirit of the songs perfectly, like Tra le la Triangle, Foolin’ Around and Pick Me Up On Your Way Down. But others, like There He Goes and Stop The World & Let Me Off, seemed too congested with dance traffic to do justice to the song narratives. But the choreography itself made keen use of all kinds of gestures and sight gags, startling and delightful in its physicality, nuance and detail.

The Kylián piece, with two groups of three dancers in muted contrasting colors, took a more sober tone to selected piano pieces by Leoš Janáček. The dancing was also more formalized, often beginning or ending with complex structured poses. The repertoire of dance moves clearly came from Kylián’s classical training at London’s Royal Ballet School. And though expressively reserved, the piece was clearly heartfelt, given that as a Stuttgart Ballet member he was also a student of Cranko. I won’t attempt to claim, as some with keener eyes might, that Cranko’s work showed through Kylián’s, but it would come as no surprise.

Smuin used about two-thirds of Carl Orff’s cantata masterpiece. A glow from behind the darkened stage was enough to illuminate silhouettes of four dancers in pantomime before the stage was lit and the music began. The famous opening scene of Carmina Burana cries out for ritualism, and indeed ritual was an overarching character for the dance. But the texts (which were not offered) reveal the lusty, satirical and even erotic verses from the 11^th and 12^th centuries that Orff discovered in the Benediktbeuren Abbey, a Bavarian monastery. Several of the numbers were duets and solos which, in contrast to the ritualized numbers, were far more personalized. Lighting, designed by Sara Linnie Slocum, was a more complex component than earlier in the program and included two key light operators high in the Gothic-arched lighting truss above the rows of seats close to the stage.

This was the last of ten performances of a demanding program spread over just ten days and the company’s usual snappy precision went fuzzy a few times in the Carmina Burana. The Kylián piece also disclosed a couple of minor glitches. Maybe titling this program XXTREMES was a telltale. But the dedication, discipline and artistry of these dancers was otherwise an object lesson to the crowd on hand, which included both former and future dancers on the Monterey Peninsula. Meanwhile, Dear Miss Cline was a huge and virtually flawless success.

Smuin Ballet returns to Carmel with XXCENTRICS on June 6 and 7.    

A Choreographer’s Showcase

By Scott MacClelland

As coordinated by artistic director Fran Spector Atkins, six California choreographers converged on SpectorDance Saturday night to showcase their work before a well-primed audience that included lots of young student dancers. The evening was framed, beginning and ending, with the work of Danish-born Mads Eriksen, now on the faculty of Ballet San Jose School. A student performance of Influx opened the show with seven young women dancing to piano music of Beethoven. A brief opening solo and generous ensembles the seven created patterns clearly born of neoclassical ballet. 

These dancers also appeared in last December’s all-student performance in the spacious SpectorDance studios in Marina and, as here, revealed the different levels of achievement these teenagers have attained. With Olympic figure skating in Sochi freshly in mind, it was hard not to think about such perils as over- and under-rotating and how well these dancers could ‘stick’ their finishes. In this case, they all displayed similarly advanced skills and—they might be surprised to know—individual personalities.

The two-hour program concluded with another piece by Eriksen, Casting Shadows, danced by a precision troop of four women in toe shoes and two men. This was described in the handout as ‘an homage’ to neoclassical ballet, exactly as one would expect to see in the works of George Balanchine at the American Ballet Theatre, a tradition well remembered from the many Ballet San Jose seasons under that company’s founder Dennis Nahat. Abstract lines and figurations echoed the music of Dvořák’s String Serenade.

Neoclassical dance also infused Apparition, an excerpt from Marika Brussel’s The Tempest. Michelle Ellis, as the solo character Miranda, was guided by four dancing spirits, adding a narrative character to the classic moves. Now based in the SF Bay Area, Brussel’s background includes dancing with the Joffrey Ballet Concert Group. Her choreography has been danced in San Jose, Berkeley and other Bay Area venues. The music came from an Ethel CD of works by Chickasaw student composers from Oklahoma.

Earlier in the program, Jamielyn Duggan used a Philip Glass string quartet and a lazy Susan to perform a ‘wow’ solo, Revolve, by Milissa Payne (Bradley). The piece darted in many unexpected directions as its printed description suggested. California-born Payne, teacher, dancer and self-producer in the SF Bay Area, is the recipient of many awards and accolades. She is an ABT Certified Teacher and is currently a resident artist at San Francisco’s Performing Arts High School.

The laugh-out-loud piece of the evening was Karl Schaffer’s Trio for Six, in which six arms appeared through holes in a dark screen creating playful geometrical shapes and gestures with each other, a “hand dance” from a show called Daughters of Hypatia. The three ‘dancers’—you couldn’t really tell how many until the end—were Jane Real, Saki and Lila Salhov. Schaffer, a UCSC mathemathics PhD, has won NEA awards for combining these two disciplines, and has taken his art around the country. He is partner in the Schaffer-Stern Dance Ensemble.

For exotic Asian sensuality and vividly colorful costumes, the nod goes to Manifestations, created by its dancers, Lucrecia Navarro, Kristie Lauren and Tara Metzger, to music by Kalya Scintilla. Here was modern and belly dance with seductive moves and atmospheric 3-D postures.

Stacey Printz, out of Corte Madera, teaches as much as she choreographs, and her work on both counts has been seen all over the U.S. and in Europe. She was represented here with excerpts from two works, Soul + Mates and Hover Space. Printz danced with three colleagues, two female and one male, showing off her highly personal style. It was difficult to get the full measure of these larger pieces that call for many more dancers, and use vertical spaces in which to “hover”, but crawling on the floor, and moving together then pulling apart fed an appetite for more.

Julie Mulvihill and Marisol Garcia danced their own Home: A Performance Collage, and used props, including a dozen cardboard boxes with slogans written on them. The longest piece on the program, it was described as Draft 1, and it needs work. It attempted to answer the rhetorical question ‘what is home?’ by making references to memories, an embrace of family, folklore and other nostalgic sentiments. As such, it followed a verbal narrative, but the actual dancing, which included a fair amount of physical contact, did not align well with the promised context. As a performance artist, with lots of experience, Julie prefers to work out her ideas in ‘conversations’ with others. Maybe she’ll return in the next SpectorDance showcase with another draft of this one.

Stacey Printz hovering photo by Jeff Zender

By Rob Klevan

Call it dance, call it gymnastics, or mime, or just plain great theater. Whatever the audience imagined they would witness prior to entering the World Theatre at CSUMB July 1st to watch CSU Summer Arts 2013 kick-off event with PUSH Physical Theatre certainly proved to be much more at the conclusion. PUSH was acrobatic, athletic, funny, sad, beautiful, controversial, but above all it was art in motion, and art at a very high level. The four men and one woman who comprise the PUSH Physical Theatre Company are an awe-inspiring and extremely gifted ensemble. Their short term themes, such as Web, The Soldier, Grace, Red Ball, which utilized iPads to create on-stage adventures, and Parenthood, to name a few are exceedingly clever and thought-provoking. Performer and artistic director Darren Stevenson served as the Master of Ceremonies and led the audience with a brief and often humorous description of the story-lines being presented.

For this observer, the vignette entitled The Visit, which featured Darren’s wife Heather Stevenson interpreting the actions of an elderly women suffering from Parkinson’s disease proved extremely poignant. In addition to Darren and Heather, the remaining PUSHers include Avi Pryntz-Nadworny, Jonathan Lowery, Andrew Salmon and tech and light director Toni Elderkin. Should PUSH Physical Theatre make its way back to the Monterey Peninsula area again, and I certainly hope it does soon, I can vouch wholeheartedly that it is something not to be missed!

By Scott MacClelland

Smuin Ballet’s performance at Carmel’s Sunset Center last Saturday sorely tempted this writer to go down the reckless path of glowing adjectives, those telltales that say more about the writer than the subject at hand. On Saturday afternoon, consistent excellence was topped off with moments of breathtaking flash. Offhandedly called Spring Bouquet, the two performances marked the end of the company’s current Northern California tour, and saw the Smuin premieres of Helen Pickett’s Petal, which first appeared in the 2008 Aspen Santa Fe Ballet’s production, and Darrell Grand Moultrie’s Jazzn’. These plainly gifted choreographers, the former born in San Diego, the latter in Manhattan, both make New York their professional home. Their work revealed classical schooling but with startling originality. And they are both still in the early years of already successful careers.

The full-house Carmel audience on Saturday gave a warm response to the opening number, Michael Smuin’s Chants d’Auvergne, the late company founder’s setting of eleven of the Auvergne folk songs in the popular orchestrations by Joseph Canteloube. Costumed in muted tones of blue, green, pink and ochre, the dancers displayed a pastoral picture of mostly classical ballet moves and poses. These fit the music’s bucolic ideal, while at the same time matched Canteloube’s urbane and sophisticated arrangements. (The recording on offer featured the voices of Kiri te Kanawa and Victoria de los Angeles.) As Smuin himself explained, “There’s no story…just the daily life of the young people in a French village.” Pairings alternated with the ensemble, sometimes asymmetrically but often returning to traditional choreographic harmony. In turn, the dancing was playful, flirtatious, sometimes jealous and, at others, deeply expressive.

Then came Petal, fifteen minutes of highly callisthenic energy. In her essay Connection, the author stresses that very goal. Yet, and despite her highly organized design, what came across was the degree to which the dancers achieved individual absorption of their parts. The four men wore blue pants, the four women pale colored leotard-style costumes. Much of the program depended on counterpoint and asymmetry yet stayed in remarkable focus. Still, cadences brought the busy scene to moments of repose and resolution. This starburst ignited cheers and a standing O.

The company is losing four of its valued dancers after this season: Robin Semmelhack, Janica Smith, John Speed Orr and Jonathan “Mango” Mangosing. The latter is retiring from the stage, torn between loving the dance and the physical cost in pain and stress. But you couldn’t tell any of this by watching him. Indeed, his own farewell gift, not listed in the program, was his virtuosic, intensely masculine solo to John Lennon’s Come Together, from Michael Smuin’s To the Beatles, the ballet that led to his downfall at the San Francisco Ballet. Mango was sensational here, and his standing O also saw three bouquets of flowers land on the stage at his (sore?) feet.

For Jazzn’ Moultrie set six jazz numbers—music by Wynton Marsalis, Duke Ellington, Billy Strayhorn and Andy Razaf—for the full company (14 dancers) small ensembles and solos. Premiered in March of 2012, by the Sacramento Ballet, this work revealed Moultrie’s eclectic mastery and sheer authority of execution. He seems a complete package that ranges from classical to Broadway and from one generation’s style to another’s. His work has been danced on stages across the nation and seen in television commercials and in collaborations with numerous well known solo artists. Costume and lighting changes matched the mood of each setting, some deeply thoughtful, some laugh-out-loud funny, as in Terez Dean’s solo to Ruth Brown’s naughty “If I can’t sell it, I’ll keep sittin’ on it—why should I give it away?” All the variety and energy finally came together in a blistering finale that set the place alight. Another roar from the crowd, a home run for Smuin Ballet and, as suddenly, it was all over but the rush and buzz of a shocked, awed and thrilled audience.

Posted June 11, 2013