Anew take on an old score
Garrett Ammon must knowit takes chutzpah to choreograph Tchaikovsky’s “Serenade for Strings in C Major,” the same music George Balanchine used for the first ballet he created in America, in 1934. Balanchine’s “Serenade” isn’t just a classic; it’s a cornerstone of 20th century ballet, awork that everyone in the ballet world sees dozens, if not hundreds of times. And every time you see it, it breaks your heart.
Ammon’s new treatment of the same score, given its West Coast premiere by Smuin Ballet Friday at the Palace of Fine Arts Theatre, doesn’t reach for that pathos. But it does draw smiles, and makes you forget about the Balanchine version for long stretches of amusement, which is saying a lot.
This playful interpretation befits Colorado choreographer Ammon’s movement style, which draws on the quirky groundedness of European choreographers including Mats Ek, and shows some affinities with Finland’s Jorma Elo, particularly in the turned-in lunges and head squiggles that pour with ease into straight classical sequences of textbook steps. The five couples here wear flat shoes— none of the women are on pointe— and one running joke involves the man suddenly scuttling on his back between thewoman’s knees, and thewoman realizing he’s looking up her skirt.
A breed apart from Balanchine’s mournful angels, these dancers cavort like school kids, though the intimacies become more serious when Erica Felsch and Joshua Reynolds share the stage alone for the yearning third movement. Ammon’s phrases have strong propulsion, and he stages nicely offkilter entrances and exits, building to several exciting climaxes of swirling formations. He’s left themusic’s four movements in Tchaikovsky’s original order— Balanchine switched the final two to end at a moment when devastation just begins to look toward hope— and the upbeat resolution is of a piece with the lighthearted community that Ammon creates onstage.
The whole cast danced it vibrantly and flawlessly — Smuin company ballet mistress Amy London must be drilling them within an inch of their tendus.
But the most important woman behind the scenes is artistic director Celia Fushille. She is doing a stellar job of increasing the technical polish of the dancers and the sophistication of the repertory, while keeping founder Michael Smuin’s legacy of unabashed showmanship alive. Smuin’s 1996 “Frankie and Johnny,” set in Cuba, is a better-thanusual choice of revival, showing off Smuin’s character-building skills and treating viewers to Douglas Schmidt’s cartoonish scenery. Erin Yarbrough and Eduardo Permuy rocked the Mambo violence. Jo-Ann Sundermeier made a fearsome other woman.
I think Smuin would smile upon the more high brow collection of ballets Fushille is cultivating. A fewyears before his death, he began mentoring then-company member Amy Seiwert, a much less theatrical choreographer given to challenging abstraction. Her 2007 “Objects of Curiosity,” finished shortly after Smuin’s death, is the entrancing centerpiece of this program. Cool and mysterious— but punctuated by a gallivanting solo from Susan Roemer — it is one of Seiwert’s best works, and “the boss” is surely proud.