Complexions Contemporary Ballet makes its Jacob’s Pillow debut
BECKET — Complexions Contemporary Ballet made its Jacob’s Pillow debut on Wednesday night, but there was nary a tutu nor a swan maiden in sight. Rather, the troupe — cofounded and co-directed by choreographer Dwight Rhoden and master performer-teacher Desmond Richardson, both former members of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater — is a gathering of highly trained ballet dancers who also deliver every kind of movement under the sun gorgeously. Despite its base in classical technique, the company aims to innovate, remove boundaries, and integrate styles, traditions, and themes from around the planet.
The weekend program, presented through Sunday in the Ted Shawn Theatre, comes in two parts, including a fastpaced first half.
After the opening, an excerpt from “Hissy Fits,” which introduces the 14-member company, their backs to the audience and profiled in shafts of white light among the black shadows, the works proceed mostly in duets. A stunning solo, “Elegy,” performed by the 6foot-2 company diva, Jillian Davis, is a wonder of precise placement of arms and legs that stretch out to the next county. Rhoden created all the choreography for these works, set to music by Johann Sebastian Bach, Sven Helbig, Ludwig van Beethoven, and Tye Tribbett, plus the homage to David Bowie, “Star Dust,” of the second half.
The men are bare-chested throughout, wearing only tiny shorts and soft shoes, the women in leotards that look like bathing suits, and pointe shoes. Later the men added one-legged pants. In truth, the muscular bodies and the fluid ripples that animate them provided the most potent decor, aided by the brief coverings designed by resident costumer Christine Darch. Resident lighting designer Michael Korsch took care of the rest of the scenery.
However, it was after intermission that the evening took flight, literally in movement and in spirit. “Star Dust,” set to nine songs by Bowie that span the decades of his influential career, opens with “Lazarus,” from Bowie’s 2015 off-Broadway musical, to continue for 40 minutes by performers in various patterns of dancing, prancing, walking, shrugging, wiggling, gyrating, skipping, and bopping. The movement was interspersed by repeated gestures of one hand held up before an eye, sequences of triple claps, and a wide, bent-knee sinking (a second position plie in ballet-speak). Diehard ballet fans will recognize the linked turns from one ballerina, and the male flourishing of an arm, as if to revisit the character of the Prince from the 19th-century ballets. In emphasizing Bowie himself as a performer, each song is led by a dancer who lipsynchs the lyrics — an uncommon practice on the dance stage.
We’ve seen choreographers using pop music before: George Balanchine and George Gershwin, Twyla Tharp and Billy Joel, Mark Morris and the Beatles, and Burt Bacharach and Hal David. But Rhoden has made something special in “Star Dust.”
The movement, brutal in terms of endurance by the dancers, yet lots of fun to watch, built to a hypnotizing finale that placed the entire company across the front of the stage to suggest that the performers would drop into the laps of the audience. No surprise that the curtain call response echoed the screams from a packed house at the end of a touring concert show.