Nevada Ballet Theatre went all in with some of the biggest names in the choreographic world last Friday—and if it didn’t rake in all the chips from the table, it certainly won big.
UNLV’s Ham Hall was close to sold out—no small achievement right there. A big part of the draw was the chance to see NBT’s dancers take on George Balanchine’s “Rubies,” one of the crown jewels from the legacy of arguably the 20th century’s most important American choreographer. The George Balanchine Trust rigidly controls access to his works—a company doesn’t get to perform one of the top pieces unless it comes up to an impressive technical level.
Opening night anxieties, as to whether NBT’s ambitions had finally exceeded its grasp, were dispersed when the curtain raised to the crashing chords of Igor Stravinsky’s Capriccio for Piano and Orchestra. Often described as a ballet with one toe-shoe in Paris and the other in Manhattan, “Rubies” is also a Rolex watch of a dance—there are a lot of brilliantly shiny pieces inside it, all of which have to mesh in perfect sync for the thing to work at all. While Balanchine’s slightly less demanding “Who Cares?,” performed by the company last season, is a fast-paced meditation on the American female’s slinky spine and aggressive hip shots, “Rubies” focuses on flippy ankles and wrists, and mirror-imaged knees plié-ing in opposite directions. The difference between silly and impressive depends upon precise execution—if NBT’s corps dancers weren’t able to snap off those moves like switchblades, the results could have been embarrassing. But they more than ably supported soloist Alissa Dale’s icily regal star turn, as well as the elegant duo work of Alexandra Christian and David Ligon, who left the audience gasping with an exit of accelerating spins into the wings. “Rubies” is a deep piece, despite its glossy surface. If NBT hasn’t yet mastered all its intricacies, it might be just a matter of time, given this impressive start.
In some ways, NBT took an even bigger risk with the program’s concluding piece, Twyla Tharp’s “Nine Sinatra Songs.” With “Rubies,” all that NBT’s dancers had to do was look good in a piece that’s designed to make dancers look good. Tharp’s Sinatra medley comes across as more of a mid-20th-century museum piece, important for its expansion of dancers’ movement vocabulary, yet without achieving the “timeless classic” status of Balanchine. There’s a lot of it that can leave an audience wondering if it’s meant to look quite that awkward. But the awkwardness and even combativeness of some sections is in fact built into the choreography—the piece is something of an onstage encyclopedia of male-female relationships, not all of which go quite as well as in the fairy-tale world of 19th-century ballet that Tharp turns her back on. NBT’s Kylie Kalember, partnered by Zeb Nole, alternately tangoed and glided through the battlefield with a serene seductiveness, while Racheal Hummel-Nole drew slow sparks from a fiercely determined collision with Baris Erhan; if their acting skills weren’t at the same high level as their dance technique, the interplay of sexual antagonism and desire wouldn’t have hit the audience with the same “we’ve all been there” impact.
Where NBT really raked in the chips, though, was in the program’s middle piece, James Canfield’s “Equinox.” Submerged in Jean-Michel Jarre’s old-school, proto-trance analogue synthesizers, the company took the central concept of fluidity to the extreme, with the grouped dancers zipping across the stage almost before the eye could track them. The real action was in the slow parts, though. Cathy Long caught the audience off-guard with her comedienne work, playing off Jeremy Bannon-Neches’ Keatonesque deadpan in “Nine Sinatra Songs,” but her “Equinox” solos revealed an inner classicist, with a precisely controlled line extending through her arms.
But the night’s real stars were the duo of Rebecca Brimhall and Grigori Arakelyan. “Equinox” displays a sensual, even eerie appreciation of human form and movement, which the dancers caught completely. While always in motion, even if at times slowed to an almost amniotic dreaminess, Brimhall and Arakelyan captured the silent moment between heartbeats, where desire is simultaneously at its most abstract and most real. If, not too much later, Tharp brought the audience back to the everyday reality of what goes on between people, at least the audience had its memories evoked of what was possible between those two sides in the battle.
From Stravinsky to Sinatra
****
February 8 and 9
Nevada Ballet Theatre