Smuin program has moves to please
Smuin Artistic Director Celia Fushille has a keen eye for inventive ballet choreographers, bringing dance makers like Trey McIntyre and Helen Pickett to the Bay Area. Now Fushille scored the West Coast premiere of Annabelle Lopez Ochoa’s “Requiem for a Rose.” The work is the centerpiece of the company’s 24th season, which opened at the Lesher Center in Walnut Creek on Friday, Sept. 22, and moves to the Palace of Fine Arts on Friday, Sept. 29.
The Colombian-Belgian dance maker, who is based in the Netherlands, has choreographed for nearly 50 companies worldwide, from Turkey’s Modern Dance Theater Ankara to New York City Ballet, yet only the defunct Silicon Valley Ballet and the Scottish Ballet at Cal Performances have previously presented her work here; her first San Francisco Ballet commission premieres in the company’s Unbound festival in April.
At the matinee on Saturday, Sept. 23, Ochoa’s 18-minute “Requiem” was a brief but intriguing glimpse of her artistry. Created for Pennsylvania Ballet in 2009, the piece treads familiar Smuin territory — the ups and downs of love — in a more abstract, unsentimental way than one expects from the company. As a meditation on the nature of love, “Requiem” is also a bit of a one-off for Ochoa, who describes herself as “rational” and “unromantic” and chose the adagio from Schubert’s String Quintet in C major as her score because it is “the most romantic music I knew.”
At the heart of the piece is the Rose, performed by Erica Felsch. The thrum of heartbeats filled the air as she writhed and gestured under a down light; barefoot in a pale leotard, her hair loose and a red rose between her teeth, Felsch appeared naked, grounded, direct. Twelve redskirted dancers, representing a dozen roses, subsumed her in duets and groups that were as fleeting as cut flowers. Ochoa lulls you from one tableau to the next with invisible shifts from fast to slow, busy to pensive.
Ochoa’s choreography melds her native modernism with classical elevation and lush port de bras, emphasized by the layered fabrics swirling around the women’s turns on pointe and the men’s jumps. The brilliant fabric draped over Valerie Harmon and Oliver-Paul Adams’ adagio, and framed Erin Yarbrough-Powell and Ben Needham-Wood’s ecstatic duet as the company arced behind them. In the end, Felsch claimed her place as the fractious but real love that sometimes outlasts romantic illusion.
Garrett Ammon’s “Serenade for Strings,” given its West Coast premiere by Smuin in 2014, opened the bill. The artistic director of Denver’s Wonderbound reworked Tchaikovsky’s score, indelibly associated with George Balanchine’s iconic 1934 “Serenade,” as a chirpy revue for five couples who woo and win. The dancers enliven it with boundless energy, showmanship and flirtatious comic timing; Harmon with Dustin James, and Lauren Pschirrer with Adams, stood out.
The company closed with “Fly Me to the Moon,” a Frank Sinatra jukebox ballet choreographed by the late Michael Smuin in 2004. It’s an overeager crowd-pleaser with retro costumes, sherbet colors and on-the-nose choreography set to signature songs like “Fly Me to the Moon” and “New York, New York.” But look past the pizzazz and you’ll find some rigorous classicism, with challenging turn combinations, nifty footwork and allegro jumps, well dispatched by all 13 dancers. The piece has moves.