Kansas City Ballet – October 12, 2013

Kansas City Ballet this weekend opened its first season under its new artistic director, Devon Carney, with a massive mixed-repertory program. Here are my impressions:

Watching this program, I sometimes felt as if I was trying to drink champagne from a fire hose: loving almost every minute, but sometimes wishing I could pause the stream and catch my breath.

Fancy Free — It was great to see this live, with real people, after hearing about it and seeing filmed excerpts all these years. It’s beautifully constructed: the choreography flows seamlessly yet is nicely segmented into episodes so it has definite sense of pacing. Having said that, it didn’t really come alive for me until the girls came on, which is odd considering that this is very much a ballet about men. I think this is specific to performances: the men danced entertainingly and with energy, but seemed very slightly fuzzy around the edges; the women’s dancing just had more fluency, giving the piece the sparkle it needs.

Triple Play — this ballet for a couple was by William Whitener, Carney’s immediate predecessor as KCB’s artistic director. He originally created it earlier this year for a festival in St. Louis. I think that means that technically it was done after his tenure as KCB artistic director was over, and it has a beautifully relaxed off-the-leash feel that I never got from any of his work when he was artistic director.

It’s set to three piano pieces by Poulenc (played by an onstage pianist) and it’s only seven minutes long — but what marvelous minutes they are. The idea is that of a happily evolving relationship between a man and a woman: from a teasing sizing-up to a playful romance to a more mature, deeply satisfying love. There’s a wonderful moment at almost the very end, at which — after they’ve been together for the whole ballet — the woman briefly walks away toward the wing by herself; it’s just a moment, and then she goes back to the man, but during that moment you can feel the world turning.

The woman is in soft ballet shoes, not pointe shoes, which made me think of Loyce Houlton’s Wingbourne — another lovely little ballet that KCB performed several seasons ago. It had been utterly unheralded, but it turned out to be my favorite piece on that program, as “Triple Play” was on this one.

Triple Play also gave me echoes of the work of the late, great Todd Bolender, former KCB director — specifically in the effortless way Whitener flowed clever little surprises into the stream of choreography. Example: the man leans the woman back in a dip, then makes what looked to me like a comic Dracula-biting-the-neck gesture — just a flash then it’s gone and on to the next thing; blink and you missed it. Just an absolute little jewel of a ballet, filled with humor and tenderness. My biggest regret is that on such a packed program, I’m afraid it may not get the appreciation it deserves.

Jodie Gates’ Keep Me Wishing in the Dark — Set to music by Bach and with a large cast dancing an assertively modernist style of ballet choreography, this work was a visually stunning and complex — but with visual complexity, more isn’t necessarily better, and I sometimes felt Gates was throwing away some beautiful moments.

The work opens with a stage full of dancers, standing in shafts of light and all (men as well as women) wearing long slit dance dresses in a palette of graduated colors — the idea of men in dresses may sound gimmicky, but it read just fine on the stage and gave a welcome formal coherence.

From there, costumes and groupings changed in kaleidoscopic progression, with a movement vocabulary combining dynamic large-scale movements — including some spectacular partnering sequences — with small, intricate gestures. I suspect it would handsomely repay repeat viewings — but in one go, I couldn’t help feeling I was getting hit with a bit too much of what probably would be a very good thing, if my brain could only keep with the pace.

Allegro Brillante — Gates could learn some pacing from Balanchine, who packed a lot of ballet into this 13-minute work, but still provides enough visual and temporal breathing space to let the eye absorb it all. Speaking of breathing, though, I could hear the men breathing all the way back in row N; this, plus a few moments that seemed only nominally together, made me suspect that the long, demanding program was taking its toll on the dancers’ stamina as well as mine.

That observation, though, definitely does not apply to the principal couple (Jill Marlowe and Geoffrey Kropp), who not only danced strongly but brought a welcome touch of human warmth that Balanchine performances don’t always have.

Opus One — new artistic director Devon Carney chose to introduce himself to his audience with a tutu-and-tiara ballet that used, as near as I could tell, the whole darn company — as many as 18 women and 13 men onstage at some points. If you love tutu-and-tiara ballets as much as I do, the effect was spectacular: the purple-and-gold-accented tutus were beautiful, nicely offset by the simpler lines of the men’s darker tights and short military-style jackets.

There wasn’t, frankly, anything startlingly original or inventive in the choreography, but it furnished some nice moments: I particularly enjoyed one in which a line of men and a line of women, arrayed from downstage to upstage, crossed each other in the center — parting just in time to reveal the female soloist leaping onto the male soloist’s shoulder. The dancers’ energy level was still high during this final piece on the program, although again I saw a few slightly rough-around-the-edges moments that provided evidence that the dancers were giving 100%, or even 101%.

Side note: as the result of a last-minute program change, I saw diminutive Laura [Wolfe] Hunt as the female lead. Seeing her reminded me of her first year with the company, when I had briefly mistaken her for a talented but definitely under-aged student; even now that she’s a six-season KCB veteran and a married lady, she still looks onstage like an especially adorable 12-year-old, and she absolutely sparkled in this role.