Up Close and Too Personal

By Joel Lobenthal (excerpted)

" (...) Perhaps because Mr. Magloire himself is both a musician as well as a choreographer, he had the confidence to avoid being trapped or subservient to the cascade of notes that poured forth in the Mozart piano Sonata to which he choreographed "Spring," the first work shown Saturday evening. Mr. Magloire organized "Spring," a trio performed by Ms. Hanna, Ms. Brown and Mr. Johnson, around schematic positioning of the three dancers in varied triangular configurations. Ms. Brown sat and watched while her two colleagues bowed to each other, an affectionate nod at Rococo formality. Then Ms. Brown joined the other two for the Sonata's middle section.The movement of all three dancers together was marked by meaningful contrasts between unison unanimity, and canonical delay, in which one dancer fell in and out of formation with his or her colleagues.

Mr. Magloire's "Silk" was performed by Ms. Brown, Ms. Small, and Ms. Toole to a violin piece by 18th-century composer Giuseppe Tartini. Mr. Magloire seeded his piece with references to Balanchine's "Apollo," and its three muses, that provided a platform for his own imaginative variations.
Occasional folk elements in the music perhaps inspired a tendu pose, performed with both the supporting leg and the leg extended on the floor turned in. Each of the three women danced a solo, with Ms. Brown more relaxed than she'd been in "Spring." Ms. Small executed a virtuoso cadenza on pointe in which she made slow, smoothly sustained transitions from one classical position to another. Mr. Magloire used astute positioning to demarcate depth in the performance space, and I would have liked to see how it read viewed from a wider and higher vantage point.

Mr. Magloire's "Velvet" was a duet for Ms. Toole and Mr. Johnson, choreographed to 1950s music by Luigi Dallapiccola that pays tribute to Tartini. In "Velvet," Mr. Magloire seemed inspired by the way Balanchine frequently used the second position plié — a splayed-leg squat — to interject an element of jarring, non-sequitorial shock and graphic punctuation. Mr. Magloire brokered his own, gentler conjunction between these sinks into the ground and the more traditionally buoyant ballet vocabulary in a way that didn't seem self-conscious.

The program concluded with "Terzetto," an amusingly innocuous novelty piece choreographed by Constantine Baecher to Scriabin piano Etudes. Ms. Brown, Ms. Hanna, and Ms. Small each performed solos that cumulatively described a response to the music that became less rhapsodic and more astringent. Each woman's solo was accompanied by exchanges of derisive pantomime, in which the two women not performing poked fun at the colleague in center stage.

It was clear Saturday night that the New Chamber Ballet has already carved out its own niche; it will be interesting to watch its continued evolution."

Return to About the New Chamber Ballet