Grace and power in three parts
Big-hearted performance makes for enjoyable show
If dancing at Resilience Theater is a handicap for Houston Ballet, it didn’t show with Thursday’s opening performance of the mixed-rep program “Rock, Roll & Tutus.”
Choreographer Trey McIntyre, there for the company premiere of his “In Dreams,” told me he liked the temporary space at the George R. Brown Convention Center even better than the ballet’s home stage at the flood-decimated Wortham Theater Center because it feels like a stage one might find in an industrial European setting.
Not all in the audience agreed: From the higher perspective of the risers, the stage looks immense for small-scale, intimate dances. A few people seated on the sides complained about sight lines.
What made it work for me, ultimately, was the big-hearted performance by the company’s versatile dancers.
The three company premieres on this bill contribute meaningfully to the repertoire, for various reasons.
Australian choreographer Tim Harbour’s “Filigree and Shadow,” the most substantial addition, is riveting in its complex yet clean physicality.
Among its virtues: swiftly evolving choreographic architecture with an aggressive vibe. A spare but beautiful set featuring a curved back wall of white, lit provocatively. And a score by the experimental music group 48nord that Ridley Scott would appreciate.
With all of this taken together, the dance feels as if it might be taking place on a starship infected with aliens. Occasional growls in the music suggest the belly-ripping, primal growls of those ominous moments in sci-fi films, and the 12 dancers seem to be engaged in continuous battle with the unseen force. Thursday’s cast had not a weakling in the bunch, ably handling Harbour’s extreme, athletic demands.
McIntyre’s “In Dreams” opened the program on softer notes of rapture. His sentimental journey captured the tremble and yearning of a medley of Roy Orbison hits with an engaging, stop-and-start sharpness and earthy fluidity. In the vein of such company classics as Christopher Bruce’s “Sergeant Early’s Dream,” which interprets songs by the Irish band the Chieftans; and Paul Taylor’s “Company B,” which evokes a youthful, World War II spirit through music by the Andrews Sisters, McIntyre’s modestly scaled dance is the best kind of crowd-pleaser.
“In Dreams” could be developed further into a longer work — more Orbison is never too much, is it? — but McIntire’s movement utilizes the narrative capacity of his five dancers superbly to convey the sense of shared loneliness in the songs, without resorting to melodrama.
And it just gets better as it moves swiftly along. Soo Youn Cho and Connor Walsh partnered evocatively through the twists and turns of “I Never Knew.” Jessica Collado, magnetic all night in various modes, found a pitch-perfect, plaintive tone for her solo to the title song, then slid effortlessly into a buttery waltz with Walsh that became the highlight of highlights, to “Cryin’.”
McIntyre does the songs justice, and then some. A brief audio clip of Orbison speaking makes the dance feel both specific and universal: “I’m often asked how I would like to be remembered,” Orbison says. “I really would just like to be remembered … maybe bring a little happiness to someone and help them hold things together.”
That could be a hard act to follow, but artistic director Stanton Welch’s brief, neoclassical pas de deux “La Cathedrale Engloutie” provided an appropriate segue. Nozomi Iijima, back in Houston after two years in Europe, and Chun Wai Chan were an elegant pair. They absorbed the Claude Debussy music with graceful strength and gorgeous lines, conveying a less-defined but no less emotional drama. Pianist Katherine BurkwallCiscon, unseen but definitely heard, dominated the piece with a performance that felt overbearing to me.
The program ends with Alexander Ekman’s quirky and visually stunning “Cacti,” a surreal romp full of pluck and circumstance that pokes fun at the process of dancemaking. Each of the 16 dancers manipulates a boxy platform and a potted cactus. A quartet of string musicians from the Apollo Chamber Players also figures nicely into the action, mixing some squealy-sounding stuff with compositions by Franz Schubert, Joseph Haydn and Ludwig van Beethoven.
The most memorable moments of “Cacti,” however, are driven by other noise: Synchronous, percussive clapping and body slapping, and the recorded, streamof-consciousness voices of a choreographer and dancers dealing with creative decisions and indecision.
Collado and Walsh are adorable in the main duet. And while the entire cast has this one down, recently-minted soloist Harper Watters was a sinuous, seductive standout in a solo moment.
At one point a “dead cat” drops from the ceiling, leaving a cloud of powder in the air. I love kitties, really, but the interruption is hilarious. And absurd, like much of “Cacti.”
“What does it mean?” the choreographer’s voice says, more than once. The point, really, is that dance doesn’t have to mean anything. Just loosen up, laugh and enjoy.