Tue 10/11
We wrote a preview of Cleveland Ballet based on an open rehearsal — but how did it all come together in the Ohio Theatre? We drifted downtown on Tuesday night to see.
The evening began with something we didn’t see in the open rehearsal, a showcase for the students of School of Cleveland Ballet. Choreographers and teachers Gladisa Guadalupe and Meghan Haas knew what their students could do but they also knew how to make an interesting dance composition while staying within those limits.
The first and youngest group, self-possessed school-agers, who already showed classical use of their arms and neat positions, performed their technical, academic phrases with confidence. Unison movements were followed by an applause-getting tableau. The first group exited to be replaced by the next, slightly older group performing with a little more complexity, a little higher degree of difficulty. Meanwhile, violinist Alexandra Preucil and cellist Martha Baldwin, onstage as promised, provided rock-steady support with highly danceable music by George Frideric Handel.
When we watched choreographer Ramon Thielen’s The Cycle of My Love in the studio, we found Lauren Stenroos and Carson Sandiford-Hoxie the most compelling of the three duets. In the theater, however, the audience burst into spontaneous applause at several points during Lüna Sayag and Victor Jarvis’ more traditional duet. Sayag showed what an enormously appealing dancer she can be and Jarvis drew on partnering skills we’d seen when he danced with Verb Ballets and Neos Dance Theater.
The third couple, Rainer Diaz and Theresa Holland, had only marked their duet in the studio so we were blindsided by Diaz’ display of bravura technique and amused by the sadistic flair that Holland’s character showed at the end of their tango-like duet. After the three duets, all three couples danced together in an apotheosis. We especially enjoyed an applause-getting passage in which the men lowered each woman to the ground in a spiral. Thielen brought good movement invention to this piece. We hope to see more of his work.
A performance piece that looks wonderful in the studio can look less wonderful on the stage and vice versa. Happily, the two final pieces in the concert — the men’s trio danced to a Beethoven piano trio and the ensemble dance to a Mendelssohn octet — both looked even better on the stage than they had in the studio. We can only guess how much problem-solving and how many spacing rehearsals were required, but at the concert it seemed only natural that the musicians and the dancers shared the stage.
Given his international reputation, tenor Mikhael Urusov probably attracted a sizeable portion of the audience on Tuesday night all by himself. We’d have to say that he was unusually successful at sharing the stage with the dancers for, unencumbered by a cello or a piano, he moved around the stage much more than the instrumentalists could, interacting smoothly with the dancers. Still, we wished for more from this veteran. In Granada, for instance, the flirtatious interaction between the dancers and the singer did not read as clearly in the theater as it did in the studio. And in both of his numbers Urusov sang to recorded accompaniment, a choice that set him apart from a concert that otherwise featured live music throughout.
The dancers’ costumes in beautiful, harmonious colors were designed by the talented Victoria Mearini, who once danced for the original Cleveland Ballet herself.
We were happy to see that many of the musicians wore clothes that went considerably beyond standard black concert attire. Music artistic advisor Alexandra Preucil performed in a series of exceptionally beautiful gowns. Who says Clevelanders don’t dress well?
Cleveland Ballet has events scheduled throughout the coming year including excerpts from Nutcracker at various venues and a gala in February. We’re particularly looking forward to their new, original production of Midsummer Night’s Dream Fri 4/7/17 at the Ohio Theatre. Using the music of Felix Mendelssohn, choreographer Ramón Oller does his own take on Shakespeare’s comedy.
[Written by Elsa Johnson and Victor Lucas]
Cleveland, OH 44115