Simple Stories, Clearly and Quietly Told

By Jennifer Dunning (excerpted)

"In this era of high technique and low irony, there is something to be said for artlessness. Programs on Saturday by Miro Magloire’s New Chamber Ballet and Dance China NY, though different in tone and nature, communicated their choreographers’ quiet visions of dance that blooms where it is planted.

The German-born Mr. Magloire studied musical composition in Cologne, and his love of classical music was central to the program he presented in the evening at Studio 4 at City Center. It is not every performance that has scores by Mozart, Tartini, Dallapiccola and Scriabin, performed live, and sumptuously, by Melody Fader on piano and Erik Carlson on violin. And Mr. Magloire’s three pieces felt like conversations with the music.

Music is clearly his first language. His ballet vocabulary is circumscribed, and he covers space, ardently, with sweeping to-and-fros. Some of his dancers are unpolished, but each is engaging company. There were intriguingly odd, personal accents in his new “Velvet,” and even more in “Silk,” which recalled sweet gawkinesses in Eliot Feld’s ballets for his own early companies.

A strange solo for Denise Small in “Silk” had her perched on her toes in fourth position in delicately trembling inaction, as if borne up by indecisive air. Ms. Small’s latent mischievousness came to the fore in Constantine Baecher’s “Terzetto,” a cheeky romp for her, a dreaming Christin Hanna and a peppery Elizabeth Brown. The company was completed by Damien Johnson, whose lanky body seemed a conduit for pulsing music. (...)"

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