A Few Bricks Shy of a Revolution

I’ve just been to see ‘New Works,’ a studio performance at Kansas City Ballet’s Todd Bolender Center. It’s a program of, yes, newly-created works, some by Kansas City Ballet dancers and some by invited guests.

KCB artistic director Devon Carney kicked off by noting, among other things, that it’s very expensive to produce a show in KC’s uber-venue, the Kauffman Center. Because of that, he said, it’s not viable to showcase risk-taking programming there.

That’s a surprisingly frank admission from an artistic director, but it’s a concise rationale for staging ‘New Works’ in the compact but functional theater built into KCB’s headquarters; the lower financial risks of presenting in-house enable higher artistic risks of producing daring programming. Carney worked that theme by noting that dance needs innovative, cutting edge work in order to keep the art form moving forward, while the program notes drew comparisons to the daring of past revolutionaries such as Stravinsky, Picasso and Steinbeck.

The only problem with all that talk was that the product didn’t back it up. Yes, ‘New Works’ was the most interesting KCB program I’ve seen lately. But while real revolutionaries pry up the paving bricks of art and chuck them at The Man, “New Works” was several bricks shy of a revolution.

Honestly, if Carney thinks any of these works would horrify a Kauffman Center audience, he needs an injection of goat glands. The pieces were all competently crafted, well-danced, and safely within the contemporary ballet mainstream — nothing nearly as challenging as, say, some of the more daring offerings I saw on Ballet Nebraska’s new-works program last weekend.

(The Ballet Nebraska concert was more uneven, but nothing on the KCB program topped the drama of Bridget Carpenter being literally hurled onto the stage at the opening of Chloé Watson’s “Temporary Dwelling”, or the intellectual challenge of Danielle Pite’s mathematically-inspired “Polychoron.” But I digress.)

Getting back to the KCB program, the opening work — Ian Poulis’ “Reflections: A Culmination”, a quartet for three men and a woman — would have been perfectly at home on a Kauffman Center program, if only as a “filler ballet.” How to describe it fairly is a problem: Too obvious to be memorable, but too well-crafted to be trivial? Not much to say, but an interesting vocabulary? Whatever; I enjoyed the mix of classical and neoclassical looks, plus the occasional fillips of Bournonville technique, and I wouldn’t object to seeing it again… but I didn’t sense any envelopes being pushed here.

The second work, Anthony Krutzkamp’s “Counterpose,” pushed a little harder, and was more intriguing as a result. Krutzkamp focuses on two dancers — Molly Wagner and Ryan Jolicoeur-Nye — and his movement vocabulary for them is an interesting mix of hard-muscled classical technique and floppier, more-released postmodernism. He’s also especially good at varying scale, effort, weight, and angularity to yield a kinesthetic payoff: it FEELS good to watch this movement. Still, Krutzkamp seems content merely to hint at relationships that I would have liked to see more fully developed.

By the time we hit the third work, Travis Guerin’s “Meta” (set to an electronic score that Guerin also composed) I was beginning to sense a trend: “Hey, you know all those contemporary ballets you’ve seen? Well, here’s another one.” Again, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with Guerin’s craftsmanship, and his technique of blending classical and neoclassical movements probably would have seemed more striking if I hadn’t just watched Poulis and Krutzkamp do basically the same thing.

Perhaps because he composed the score himself, Guerin seemed a bit doctrinaire in how he fitted the dancers’ movements to the beats of the music, and he also seemed somewhat dogmatic about what kinds of movement men should do vs. what kinds of movement women should do; Krutzkamp and (particularly) Poulis had taken more liberties with that, and to good effect. On the other hand, Guerin seemed to make more room in his choreography for the dancers to display individual character, which would have been good for Krutzkamp and Poulis. Could we maybe lock these three guys in a studio together and have them pool their strengths? They might come up with something pretty special.

After intermission, we started out with what seemed like “déjà vu all over again.” Charles Martin’s “The Forgotten” reminded me of Poulis’ work: a sound, well-proven balletic format (in this case, that of a female soloist interacting with a five-woman corps); a polished, pleasant-to-watch movement vocabulary; and a sense that this nicely crafted work (set to Charles Ives’ “The Unanswered Question,” by the way) could have gone to the next level if only Martin had pushed a bit harder. Again, I think this work would look just fine in the Kauffman, and I’d be happy to see it again… but we’re supposed to be revolutionaries here, remember?

Ilya Kozadayev DID remember. While his “Bounded Regions” didn’t exactly storm any barricades, his format choice was the most daring so far. He began with a long passage danced in silence, during which single dancers and groups would run onto the stage, interact in various ways (sometimes forcefully) and then run off again. One idea they explored repeatedly was that of interpenetration: one dancer hitting a shape that defined a “personal space,” and then another dancer using a body part to pierce that space.

After several minutes of this, the dancers ran off; a solo piano (playing a section of Bach’s “Goldberg Variations”) struck up; and the piece coalesced into tidy duets for three couples, dancing more formally and lyrically, but still working with the same concepts developed in the first section. It was as if Kozadayev had first roughed out some sketches, then refined them into a finished drawing. The cynic in me thought, “He’s finishing with something familiar to avoid scaring the big donors,” but it’s a strong concept that gave the work intellectual as well as aesthetic appeal.

It wasn’t until the last work on the program, though, that I finally got the sense of a choreographer willing to flirt with the edge of Out There. Erin Lustig’s “Departure” was the outsider in every way: the only female choreographer (out of six? WTF, Carney?!?); the only true independent (she has her own company, Seamless Dance Theater); and the only one to draw on a purely contemporary movement aesthetic.

None of which particularly wowed me at first. As the piece opened, with a line of morose-looking dancers dragging each other down the diagonal, I thought, “Here we go again.” I felt as if I were watching a danced version of Young Adult Fiction: a dystopic world of tired, angsty sufferers, from which a Chosen One would erupt at intervals and try, futilely, to rescue the others.

Then the music (an original composition by Gabriel Smith) changed to a more positive, uplifting mood; the dancers began arcing joyously upward, raising outstretched arms. The feel-good finale, it seemed, had begun, and I was about to flare into full-on cynical mode again. But Lustig stopped me with the way she ended the piece.

Frankly, I was expecting a big, messy, emotional closer. Instead, the dancers merely stood smiling at each other for a moment, then turned and quietly walked off the stage in different directions. It was simple, it was unexpected, it was in character with the piece, and it just worked.

And then I realized that that was what Lustig had accomplished with her entire ballet. It did what it set out to do, in a way that was non-obvious but uncontrived. And it worked.

The most revolutionary work on “New Works” had turned out to be a quiet revolution. No brick-throwing necessary.