Seiwert rises to ambitious challenge
Amy Seiwert is likely to look back on 2017 as the year that changed her career forever. The sought-after freelance choreographer triumphed this spring with her first narrative work, in Opera Parallèle’s production of Philip Glass’ “Les Enfants Terribles,” and she was recently announced as the next artistic director of Sacramento Ballet.
And after a decade of creating short-form abstract ballets, Seiwert premiered her maiden evening-length work, “Wandering,” on Friday, July 21, at the Cowell Theater. Commissioned by New York’s Joyce Theater Foundation and performed by her company, Imagery, “Wandering” was presented through Sketch, Seiwert’s seventh annual summer production.
Seiwert loves to challenge her limits, and with “Wandering,” she set herself the monumental task of interpreting Franz Schubert’s 1827 “Winterreise” song cycle as contemporary ballet. It was ambitious, bold and risky, and worthwhile. “Wandering” is a thing of immense beauty, and a very fine accomplishment.
Based on 24 poems by German lyric poet Wilhelm Müller, “Winterreise” lays bare one young man’s lost love and existential angst. It is heavy territory: 70 minutes of brooding, passion and grief, dashed hope and frozen tears. (Seiwert chose a recording by the late baritone Dietrich FischerDieskau and pianist Gerald Moore.)
Seiwert’s lyrical modernism follows the spirit of the music, rather than the letter of the lyrics, creating a series of sense impressions more than a character-driven narrative. The songs are divided into eight groupings, each led by a different dancer clad in a red overcoat.
James Gilmer is commanding in the opening “Good Night,” while Alysia Chang fights fate in “A Look Backward” and Ben NeedhamWood is emphatically gestural in “The Post.” Gabriel Gaffney Smith’s marvelous emotional presence makes the bittersweet “Spring Dreams” materialize anew in each moment. Anthony Cannarella, Tina LaForgia, Jackie Nash and Shania Rasmussen complete the cast, and each is unique and compelling.
When not in the lead, the dancers forgo individuality and merge into a chorus of energy, leaning in and heaving outward in canons, pirouetting and partnering, and pausing in intertwined tableaux. Touch emerges as the driving force of “Wandering,” a tender counterpoint to lyrics about desperate aloneness.
That anguished theme both inspires and confines “Wandering.” “Winterreise” occupies a narrow range of tone and tempo, and the mood of Müller’s poetry swings from gray to black; Seiwert’s challenge was to choreograph illusions of variety in the pace, and for the most part she succeeds.
She teased allegro and pizzicato out of the music, and devised a movement vocabulary that is expansive yet stripped of superfluity. Perhaps inevitably, though, the weight of “Winterreise” eventually oppressed; more momentum, particularly late in the piece, would lighten the load.
Brian Jones’ lighting artfully shapes the space around the dancers, and Susan Roemer’s leotards suggest the poet’s fractured emotions.
Imagery performs “Winterreise” in the Joyce Theater’s Ballet Festival Thursday through Saturday, July 27–29, and excerpts at the prestigious Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival in August. Seiwert intends to bring Sketch back again next year, but with a career on such a dramatic upward trajectory, there’s no knowing what lies ahead.