Matt Ulrich
Three dancers in front of a geometric design projected behind them.
Charlotte Junge, left, Emily Dietz and Gianna DeMassio in 'Static Undertones,' by visiting choreographer Yury Yanowsky. With lighting design by Julie Ballard.
Madison Ballet is putting on a remarkable show called “Rock the Ballet.” Prepare for frequent applause and standing ovations as happened Friday night.
The most ambitious dance of the evening is Ja’ Malik and Mr. Chair’s Rhapsody in Blue. Ja’ Malik, the artistic director of Madison Ballet, does the choreography and jazz trio Mr. Chair remakes Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue. The dance begins with five interlinked dancers doused in red light as Mr. Chair, live onstage, stretches out the opening slide of Rhapsody in Blue and then pulls and pushes all of Gershwin’s music the way Jimi Hendrix stretched The Star-Spangled Banner. As the dance develops, we see allusions to the 1920s flapper-era Charleston, the 1930s Jitterbug, chorus line high kicks, movie musical dancing of the 1950s and more.
The costumes by Fernanda Yamaguchi feature a New York skyline motif that for me changes into piano keys as I listen to the dancing fingers of Mr. Chair’s pianist, Jason Kutz.
Couples hoist partners into the air on high notes, a man leaps into a woman’s arms, and Lauren Thompson and Michaela King engage in a friendly dance rivalry. At one point the stage clears, the drummer solos and Thompson comes forward by herself for a quiet dialogue with the drummer. After some intense group dancing the women step back and eye the men as they come forward in a line. The dbancing is infectious and you will wish you could join in.
Visiting choreographers Meredith Rainey and Yury Yanowsky offer world premieres: Rainey’s Euphoric Divertissements and Yanowsky’s Static Undertones. Richard Walters of Madison Ballet has reworked his dance Parallax.
Meredith Rainey, in a post-performance talk by the choreographers and members of Mr. Chair, says that in keeping with the theme, “Rock the Ballet,” he wants to strip his neo-classical Euphoric Divertissements down to something raw, with the help of transparent music. Lotic provides an electronic soundscape with a truly raw musique concrète sequence consisting of the sound of something painfully heavy being winched ratchet by ratchet. Shannon Brianne Quirk, accompanied by Benjamin Shepard and James Wainwright, moves slowly through a series of stretches as if her body is winching oh so painfully from one position into the next. After all, ballet does require the dancer to train joints, muscles and tendons to move opposite to where the body wants to go. The whole dance is built around dancers rehearsing in a studio.
The women (most humorously Amor Williams) often roll across stage doll stiff, propelled by the stutter of feet en pointe. Men and women slice the air with razor sharp turns and jumps. But the rehearsal is accompanied by little jealousies and dramas. Two dancers show tender love for each other, one man seeks out a woman who threatens to throttle him, and Quirk reappears at the end, raised high by Shepard and gliding through the air as if to say, “here I come, make way, prima ballerina!”
Walters, in Parallax, is inspired by nebulas and the swirl and forming of bodies in space. However, I feel that the exotic dance space he creates is underwater, lit by shafts of light by day and lavender flickers at night, but never emerging from underwater darkness (lighting by Julie Ballard). At times the music creates a throbbing bass, as if an enormous propeller turns overhead.
Yamaguchi’s costumes are black and glistening. The dancers shape-shift to the shifting sound, their movements at times gelid, like boneless sea creatures, varieties of molluscs. Dancers group like clumps of sea grasses, throwing waving shadows of their arms against the back screen, or become a row of sea anemones opening their flowers. A moment later they dart like schools of fish. In one of my favorite actions, two dancers move as if attached, the hand of one on the forehead of the other, then turn and attach back-to-back as they shuffle off.
Yanowsky’s Static Undertones reminds me of a teenage friend who lived in a room filled with oscilloscopes. Wave patterns form and fall away and reform on a back screen. All the dancers are exciting, but two couples emerge: Ben Rose and Charlotte Junge, and Eric Stith and Michaela King. Rose and Junge wind in and out making the space between them into a mobius strip. King passes a shock through her body to Stith who is electrified. The stage clears and he performs a solo in honor of wave oscillations.
Dancers incorporate references to hip hop: sliding onstage, balancing on their hands and kicking up their heels, becoming animated robots. When they form groups their movements have a hypnotic precision. Even as the music crescendos, building to chaos, the dancers order and reorder like electrons knocking themselves free and then reattaching. Matter finds order in a disorderly universe.
“Rock the Ballet” is an endlessly inventive dance mix of classical, modern, hip hop, swing and chorus line, leavened with a sense of humor and accompanied in part by great live music.
Performances of “Rock the Ballet” continue Oct. 11 at 2 p.m. and 7 p.m., and Oct. 12 at 2 p.m. at the Starlight Theater in the MYArts building, 1055 E. Mifflin St.
