‘Best talent out there’
‘Stars of American Ballet’ features works by Robbins, Balanchine
The “Stars of American Ballet” will pirouette into Santa Fe, bringing both ballet and ballroom to the Lensic Performing Arts Center today and Saturday.
The concert marks the dance troupe’s eighth visit to the city. The program features works by dance masters George Balanchine and Jerome Robbins, as well as three premieres.
This year marks Broadway and ballet choreographer Robbins’ centenary, company founder Daniel Ulbricht said. Robbins is bestknown for choreographing “West Side Story” and “Fiddler On the Roof,” as well as many others. Many people don’t realize Robbins also shaped the ballet, Ulbricht said.
“He choreographed over 60 different ballets and ended up with four Tonys and two Oscars,” Ulbricht said in a telephone interview from New York. Ulbricht is a principal dancer for the New York City Ballet.
Three couples will perform the choreographer’s “In the Night” set to music by Frederic Chopin.
On Saturday, the dancers will move to the music of Bach in “A Suite of Dances.”
Robbins debuted the piece with the legendary Mikhail Baryshnikov in 1994.
“It’s set to four of Bach’s ‘Suite of Dances,’ ” Ulbricht said. “It’s about 15 minutes; it’s an endurance piece for the artist.”
Also on Saturday, the dancers will perform the Divertissement Pas de Deux from “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” by Balanchine.
“It’s the celebration of the wedding of Theseus and Hippolyta,” Ulbricht said. “It’s extraordinarily tricky partnering.”
Ballroom dancers Antonina Skobina and Denys Drozdyuk will move to Michael Jackson’s “Smooth Criminal.”
“I just met this couple last year,” Ulbricht said. “In addition to (being) world-class ballroom dancers, they’re world-class people.”
Ulbricht founded the troupe after bringing a group of dancers to Florida to perform for his sick mother.
“I realized I was bringing it to an underserved community,” he said. “The idea is to draw upon the best talent out there. All the dancers except two are principals and soloists.”
Here’s what Eduardo Navaroo gives you to work with:
“the wind is an animal. pet him.”
“you are a mirror with legs. play a game only mirrors would like to play.”
Navarro, an Argentinian artist, has painted dozens of these “cryptic” statements, a blend of riddles and instructions, onto a large rainbow sundial in the middle of Santa Fe’s Railyard Park.
He describes his new installation, entitled “Galactic Playground,” as something that can be enjoyed by humans or any other “entities” that happen to pass by.
“The idea is that anyone who is here can visualize these instructions and see what they can do with them,” Navarro said. “It’s like a spaceship that lands and, according to where it lands, on Earth or on different planets or in different galaxies, the rules and the shadows work differently.”
The installation — 32 feet in diameter, made of concrete and painted bright yellow, red, orange, green, blue and purple — was commissioned for SITE Santa Fe’s biennial show “SITELines: Casa tomada” that opens today.
Exhibitions manager Sage Sommer said “Galactic Playground” will stay up for six months in partnership with the Railyard Park Conservancy. Everyone is invited to use it for free, any time.
Navarro, originally from Buenos Aires, but who now mostly resides in Basel, Switzerland, said he’s long been inspired by the idea of combining “dialogue with natural phenomenon.” This led him to conceptualize a large, board game-type piece that operates via the sun’s movement across the sky and the changing shadows that it generates.
“(It’s) like one of the players is the sun,” he said.
After he pitched the idea for the sculpture in October, he visited the Jantar Mantar in New Dehli, India, a conservatory with what has been described as the largest and most accurate sundial in the world.
The needle in the middle of “Galactic Playground” creates a shadow arrow that points either directly to or near one of Navarro’s instructional phrases as long as the sun is out. Which phrase depends on the location of the sun.
Before he started work, SITE conducted a six-month shadow study to determine where Navarro should paint his phrases, according to Sommer. As the seasons change, where the arrow starts and the directions it goes in will differ.
He first imagined the game with more literal instructions that would tell visitors how to maneuver the concrete rainbow. As time went on, he decided to make the piece a more interpretive experience, where kids (or anyone) playing on it can use their imaginations to decide what the phrases mean to them.
When Navarro was showing and explaining the piece during a July afternoon, the arrow was pointing to “your hands are so long they can touch the sun. bring the sun to earth.” He described one written instruction, “triplicate yourself,” as his favorite.
“It’s open to what they want to make out of the game,” he said. “They’re not rules. They’re kind of like how to behave.”
A few of the phases are in Spanish. Navarro translated them as “invent a game with the trees and the ants” and “a crying computer arrives from the future. Choose a color where you have tea with it and explain the present.”
“It opens a door to what is a crying computer, what is the future, what is the present?” he explained.
Some visitors may want to act out the instructions. For others, he said, just imagining mentally what they could mean may be enough. But he said he purposely made the phrases poetry-like, so they can simply be read line by line.
“So it’s like a book with a needle,” he said. “It’s like a solar book.”