Kinetics and kitsch: Dance trumps story in two ballets
After a stunning season opener two weeks ago, featuring masterpieces by Balanchine, Robbins and Forsythe, Houston Ballet is now offering something quite different, both for audiences and its dancers, with two ballets spanning the impressive career of artistic director Stanton Welch.
The first is the more recent, Welch’s generally abstract “Son of Chamber Symphony,” set to American composer John Adams’ three-movement score of the same name. Thursday night’s performance at the Wortham Theater Center was a Houston Ballet premiere, and it is one of Welch’s most successful pieces to date.
Adams clearly had dancing in mind, not to mention the Second Viennese School, when he fashioned these infectious melodies and rhythms, and what one might call divergent episodes or musical outbursts. Conductor Ermanno Florio led the orchestra in a confident, if not a bit cautious, realization. Adams’ scores, almost all of them, need to go a bit crazy at some point. Florio nearly achieved this in the third movement.
In terms of its organization, “Son of Chamber Symphony” is direct and refreshing to watch. Karina Gonzalez and Charles-Louis Yoshiyama, who danced together in the recent Robbins and Balanchine, made a striking opening impression in the first movement.
At times, Gonzalez looked a bit like a preening bird, which sounds odd, though it seemed to work as the movement progressed. The choreography is a kind of strange traffic that repeats itself. No narrative is evident. It has the quality of discipline and invention, even if it is sometimes played too directly to the front of the stage, like a pageant.
The second movement featured perhaps the finest dancing that Yuriko Kajiya has offered since she joined the Houston Ballet. She was partnered expertly, or one might say expressively, by Christopher Coomer.
This is an extended, fluid and emotional pas de deux that takes almost no support from the score. Rather, the choreography and the music travel the same path until they meet at the finish. Katharine Precourt and Chun Wai Chan offered some final inspiration in the third movement, and the piece kind of sweeps into one final flourish. It is just the right length.
I don’t love the way “Son of Chamber Symphony” looks, and it seems that Welch always has trouble defining the exact aesthetic of his abstract ballets.
A grid of big black squares upstage suggests sculpture by Sol Lewitt or Tony Smith, but the costumes are at odds with any sort of minimalist pursuit. The men’s costumes, in particular their scooped neckline tops that expose the nipples and armpits, are in extremely poor taste. We could blame this on costume designer Travis Halsey, but Welch should know better.
The full program, even with only two ballets, feels too long. This is because Welch’s two-act “Madame Butterly” makes up the remainder of the evening.
It’s been more than two decades since The Australian Ballet premiered this narrative work in Melbourne. If there is something to remark, it is that Houston Ballet principals Sara Webb and Ian Casady, in the roles of CioCio San and Pinkerton, respectively, starred in the Houston Ballet premiere in 2002. They came back in the same roles Thursday night, demonstrating that they are supreme artists of the highest caliber. It is unfortunate only that they couldn’t be returning in something more sophisticated and suited to their talents.
Even as an opera, “Madame Butterfuly” is kitsch at best. Puccini’s music is glorious, it goes without saying, and the late John Lanchberry’s arrangements for this ballet are sumptuous. But to witness the action of this ballet is to wallow in dismal Orientalism, and Welch’s choreography is efficient but unmemorable.
By way of example, the opening scene provides analysis. It’s lively, and the music is invigorating. The characters enter and fill the stage, not unlike the opening party scene in “The Nutcracker.” Gradually, the viewer comes to see that nearly everyone leaps and tumbles in Japan, even though their entrances and exits are well managed. Archetypes are evoked but in a hokey way. All the Japanese characters seem to be samurai or geisha. The Americans, typically, are thoughtless and self-centered.
Fulfilling a narrative is useless if that narrative is hollow in the first place. The first act of “Madame Butterfly” is colorful and somewhat entertaining. The second act is embarrassingly old-fashioned. Welch brought his company into the present recently with Forsythe’s dazzling “Artifact Suite.” Couldn’t he have let them rest there just a bit longer?