| Brilliant Balanchine RWB presents three stunning works by master choreographer George Balanchine
(All Balanchine!, Royal Winnipeg Ballet, May 7-11, Centennial Concert Hall)
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| The Royal Winnipeg Ballet brought the full bore of Balanchine's vision of beauty to the stage Wednesday night, closing its season with a program of three of the iconic choreographer's masterworks, All Balanchine!
Staged by guest Balanchine expert Joysanne Sidimus, the five-show run is the first time - incredibly - that the RWB has presented a full evening of the 20th century Russian-born artist's works. George Balanchine - or Mr. B - is revered for his pure choreographic style that pares ballet right down to its very bones, with pristine lines, unique movement vocabulary, emphasis on musicality, and insistence on dance for its own abstract, non-narrative sake.
There can be no greater thrill than when the curtain rises on the wondrous Serenade (1935), revealing a female corps costumed in diaphanous, ice-blue tulle skirts poised as though in moonlight. Choreographed to Tchaikovsky's romantically lush Serenade in C Major for String Orchestra, Op.48, the classic ballet seems to float through 35 minutes until its final elegy, where principal Vanessa Lawson (alternating with Tara Birtwhistle) is lifted high above a cortËge that underscores the work with mythological solemnity.
The RWB premiere of The Four Temperaments (1946) set to Paul Hindemith's dissonant score, remarkably still looks - and sounds - as fresh today as when it was created over six decades ago. Inspired by the medieval notion that the human constitution derives from one of four bodily fluids (humours) - the wonderfully strange choreography is filled with jutting hips and flexed wrists, angular shapes and distortions that characterize each temperament: gloomy melancholic, passive phlegmatic, headstrong sanguinic and hot-tempered choleric.
The men appeared in particularly fine form, with Mexico-born principal Jaime Vargas bringing the right degree of dramatic intensity to Melancholic, while principal Gael Lambiotte imbued his Plegmatic solo with fluid grace and an unsettling placidity.
It was Birtwhistle, however, who stole the show as the fiery Choleric, bursting defiantly onstage until the final montage of exploding lifts.
The program opened with lively Concerto Barocco (1941), with eight dancers embodying the contrapuntal musical lines of Bach's Double Violin Concerto in D Minor. An inexplicably sluggish tempo in the first not-so-vivace movement became the show's only weakness, with maestro Earl Stafford picking up the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra's pace by the final, joyfully kinetic allegro.
— Holly Harris |
Uptown
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