

An Ocean of Emotion
We went to Verb Ballets’ one-night stand at Breen Center for the Performing Arts and, as is always the case with Verb, we saw lots of good new stuff.
We’d seen Cleveland Flats Suite in various stages of completion but this was our first look at the finished work.
The visual projections by Jay Horowitz were eye-catching, so good that at first we feared we’d end up ignoring the dancers to focus on the projections. To the credit of the dancers and choreographer Diane Gray, this mostly didn’t happen. Score by Richard Rinehart, projections and dancers all co-existed as objects of our attention, although sometimes the dancers seemed to take a break from dancing to stand motionless with their backs to the audience, apparently watching the projections.
Any number of dances have taken as their subject the Flats, Cleveland’s lakefront, or the Cuyahoga River, but Gray and her collaborators in the Cleveland Flats Suite managed to be at once elegant and encyclopedic. In her choreography we saw it all, the beleaguered wildlife, the nightlife, the industry. In an arresting final image, the dancers formed 2 towers (bridge piers?) that persisted, eerie and precipitous as the lights went to black.
You can see and hear excerpts of the music, Richard Rinehart’s Cleveland Flats Symphony, and see the graphics by Jay Horowitz – in 3D, yet – at (FlatsMusic&Graphics).
See excerpts of the dancing at (FlatsDancing)
Reflections Of… was our first look at what is to be an ongoing collaboration between Terence Greene and Michael Medcalf. We were initially dazzled as the 2 men moved big and fast or big and slow and then small and very, very quick. Vic was reminded of being in a jazz dance class with Greene many years ago and being impressed then with how tightly Greene could pack movements into a time frame. The dazzling speed and intensity of some of their movements came, as often as not, during held notes or legato portions of the music, one of several effective devices.

In pride of place at the end of the program was the seasonally appropriate The Myth and The Madness of Edgar Allan Poe, a company premiere. Choreographed by Christopher Fleming, who is familiar to local audiences through Ohio Ballet’s performances of his Play Ball! and Edge of Assurances, the Poe piece is an imaginatively conceived ballet in 7 scenes. Company stalwart Brian Murphy played the embattled author. Initially surrounded by his loved ones — his mother (Katie Gnagy), wife (Ashley Cohen), Annabel Lee, his love in literature (Kara Madden), and his surrogate father (Gary Lenington) -Poe loses them all in the course of the ballet through illness, untimely death, and estrangement. Choreographer Fleming personifies these misfortunes as Ravens and Red Death.
It is to the credit of Fleming and the Verb dancers that 47 minutes of personal catastrophes were never in the slightest danger of sliding into camp or unintentional humor. Good period costumes added immeasurably to the piece; designed by Lowell Mathwich, they were made available to Verb courtesy of Dayton Ballet with whom the piece premiered last October. Less successful were the Raven costumes, straight-off-the-rack black unitards with timid indications of wings sewed to the arms; Poe is doubtless rolling in his grave over this failure of imagination.
Principal Raven Stephanie Krise, who performed Tarantella to loud bravos at Cain Park last summer, is emerging as Verb’s petite powerhouse on pointe. Antwon Duncan was fearsome as Red Death. We’ve noticed in the past that Brian Murphy always does distraught characters especially well… but time to acknowledge Murphy’s protean talent and his ever-expanding range. We’ve watched him grow immensely over the years.
[Pictured: Michael Medcalf and Terence Greene in The Greene/Medcalf Project piece @ Verb Ballets’ show. Photos by Dale Dong.]
Verb Ballets performed at Breen Center for the Performing Arts on Friday, 10/1/10. http://www.VerbBallets.org
