NCDT Extends Its Reach - North Carolina Dance Theatre - Brief Article

Dance Magazine, May, 2002 by Clive Barnes

North Carolina Dance Theatre Belk Theatre, North Carolina Blumenthal Performing Arts Center Charlotte, North Carolina February 8-9, 2002

Resident dance companies have to be many things to many people; beyond everything else, they must have variety. For the delicate relationship between a dance company and its potential audience, variety is not just the spice of life, it is life itself. The last time I was in Charlotte, it was to see the North Carolina Dance Theatre in Jean-Pierre Bonnefoux's sumptuous production of Prokofiev's Cinderella, a real spectacular with lavish sets by Alain Vaes and gorgeous costumes by A. Christina Giannini. I was therefore particularly interested to be invited back to see a couple of performances calculated to show the company in a totally different light.

This time, instead of one of ballet's traditional and crowd-friendly extravaganzas NCDT was offering a program called "Three Premieres"--two of them, Mark Diamond's Hamlet and Dwight Rhoden's Verge, with Desmond Richardson as guest artist, were world premieres, while the third, Alonzo King's Tango, was a local premiere by a choreographer who has already given the company three world premieres. So here we were, the troupe unadorned, with no sets, no fuss, nothing much more than music and choreography, with most of the latter in that third-stream mode fusing classic and modern.

The ballet--not unexpectedly featured on the posters--that at least had a story was, of course, Hamlet, and I have a feeling that an audience that didn't know Shakespeare's play fairly well would be at a loss to follow the ballet. Unlike Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet has never been particularly popular with choreographers--the relationships are frankly too difficult to explain in dance. It is not easy to express that when Laertes is partnering Ophelia he is a brother, whereas Romeo, doing much the same thing, is a lover. I've seen two Hamlet ballets of particular interest in the past--Robert Helpmann's phantasmagorical, post-Freudian and literary take on the theme, and Antony Tudor's sharp-etched vignette of Nora Kaye playing Sarah Bernhardt playing Hamlet in La Gloire, a ballet now sadly lost.

I would have swapped Diamond's rather heavy-handed swipe at the play for either of them, for Diamond's choreography, although neatly matched to the tuneful melodramatics of John Corigliano's Symphony No. 1--the one inspired by AIDS--lacked expression and expressiveness. Nor did it add to the play, although Alexei Khimenko was effective as the irresolute Hamlet, and Amy Price-Robinson made the' most of Ophelia's drowning, which was itself the ballet's most poetic and effective moment.

King's Tango--set to music by Astor Piazzolla, as if there's ever been a tango ballet that wasn't!--was smoothly exciting in itself and most sensuously danced by both of the casts. These crisp classicists I admired last year in Cinderella showed no compunction in getting down and getting dirty. King's amusingly accentuated view of the Argentinean tango might have given even Jorge Luis Borges, that smoky poet of the tango, a shrewdly executed kick.

The most exciting work was Rhoden's Verge, which according to the choreographer has some kind of theme which I must admit I failed to notice. However, from the moment when the dangerous and marvelous Richardson stalked up from the orchestra pit to face a huge target (which looked suspiciously like a mall-store ad) to the exhausted end, the work and the dancers maintained a fever-pitch intensity pumped up by Rhoden's quick-gear-change choreography. The minimalist electronic music by former dancer Antonio Carlos Scott--Rhoden's customary collaborator--provided the dance with the ideal carpet, and the young company went prancing on it happily.

It is extraordinarily difficult for classic ballet companies to introduce genuine diversity into their repertoire, and the choice here of such inventive and classic-friendly masters as King and the triple-threat combo of Rhoden/Richardson/Scott from their company, Complexions, proved nothing less than inspired.