A night of ‘Play’ and catharsis for Houston Ballet.
In some ways, Houston Ballet’s “Play” mixed rep was beyond reproach.
The company celebrated the city’s resilience after Hurricane Harvey with an abbreviated, four-performance run this past weekend. “Play” was the second program of contemporary ballets artistic director Stanton Welch cobbled together for the George R. Brown Convention Center during the company’s “hometown tour,” while its home stage at the flood-damaged Wortham Theater Center is under reconstruction. The first utilized Houston Grand Opera’s Resilience Theater.
This one embraced the expansive, open stage of the center’s General Assembly Hall, which is open on three sides, below the seats. That perspective made the dancers look smaller and more exposed than they do on a typical proscenium stage, although they managed to fill the air with personality and great energy.
And frankly, it was a night of play for them. Some of the dances looked physically but not technically demanding, more like an act of treading water than serious ballet near the end of a season that has had artistic triumphs but has also been a nightmare in so many ways.
Soloist Oliver Halkowich and principals Melody Mennite and Connor Walsh, in their first choreographic collaboration, did themselves and the company proud with the show’s most demanding piece, “What we keep.”
Featuring 12 dancers and an electronic score by James Templeton, their architecture moved swiftly in continually shifting lines and groupings, with a sleek, contemporary vocabulary. Brief pas de deux for Yuriko Kajiya and Linnar Lorris and Katharine Precourt and Jared Matthews added emotional depth to the enigmatic feel of the abstract dance, which was lit dramatically and effectively by Lisa J. Pinkham.
I hope we see this dance again; it could reveal more with each viewing. I wish I could say the same for the more incidental pieces Welch created for the program.
His collaborations with Houston poet laureate Deborah D.E.E.P. Mouton and another local poet, Outspoken Bean, mimicked the spoken words too closely, leaving nothing to the imagination. Putting Mouton and Bean onstage with the dancers was good; they are both powerful entertainers. Mouton’s poem “Revisit, Rebirth, Revolt,” had some nice passages. Bean’s “What the H Stands For” was less profound, not verse that will have much life once people have moved on from Harvey’s headaches. And that final line — “what the H does not stand for: Harvey” — just felt juvenile and not true.
Welch’s “Class” filled the space but was over before it went anywhere, with dancers spaced evenly around the stage, going through the motions of routine studio exercises while Katherine BurkwallCiscon provided the night’s only live music, bringing quietude to selections from Bach’s Goldberg Variations.
Fluttery video projections on the hall’s gridded walls made me think of rippling water, an element that could have been played up more. But lacking sets all night, Pinkham created an innovative environment mostly with patterns of light on the floor. For the title piece “Play,” she laid down big stripes of blue and yellow, perhaps to reflect the Adidaslike bars on the women’s pointe shoes. She opened “Bolero Triptch” with a densely drawn black-and-white pattern that looked textile-inspired.
“Play,” made to a medley of songs from Moby’s album of the same name, looks tailormade for a show like “So You Think You Can Dance.” How else to describe what happens when elite artists get to bust their pop moves and fling their long hair around for a few minutes? Welch created the piece 14 years ago for Ohio’s smaller BalletMet, and it contains a lot of walking, posing and stop-and-start action.
The loose narrative might be about how the urge to play is often at odds with the responsibilities of work. The casually dressed women could represent creative urges. In two sections of the piece that bother me, they get into knockdown, drag-out fisticuffs with the suit-clad men.
Welch sometimes sent the dancers “offstage” by having them plop into the bottom row of the seats — probably thrilling those next to them in the audience. This version of “Play” had a supersized cast. While that didn’t make the steps any more challenging, the scale itself made the piece seem somehow more substantial. That happened with “Bolero Triptych,” too.
Welch has used Maurice Ravel’s pounding, repetitive score before, but he reimagined it for this program as a building block for a vision that built from a central spotlighted area. From one dancer, to two, then four, the piece gathered steam as the group grew steadily — dancers entering down the steps through the audience seats. The circles became concentric rings, moving in opposite directions; not just a procession but a ritual.
By the time the music was driving me crazy, the entire company crowded the stage. Welch is often at his best with this kind of kinetic abundance, and “Bolero Triptych” had that magic — the delirious force that only comes from a sea of bodies gathering and making something immense together. No one needs to say anything about hurricanes or overcoming adversity when dance and music can summon a spirit this strong.
No wonder the audience jumped to its feet, applauding wildly. This was the catharsis they needed.