Grand Rapids Ballet. - Civic Theatre, Grand Rapids, Michigan - dance reviews

Dance Magazine, Dec, 1996 by Kate O'Neill

How should a company celebrate its twenty-fifth anniversary? With revivals of past triumphs, or a production that breaks new ground?

Grand Rapids Ballet chose to open its silver-anniversary season in September with a program that looked back at the company's greatest hits. But it has also scheduled an all-new ballet, Alice (based on the Lewis Carroll classic), for March 1997.

The program, which included five ballets. excerpts from five others, plus a brief video retrospective of past performances, was by turns satisfying and frustrating It was good to be able to revisit some of the fine works from the company's past repertoire, many of them Grand Rapids premieres, but the impact of these works was diluted by too many excerpts The extended graveyard scene from Philip Jerry's ballet Our Town worked well on its own But a number of variations from Swan Lake and The Sleeping Beauty seemed to crowd the program.

Among the evening's high points were Patricia Kavanagh's Array of Green and Robert Estner's Potentia both of which won awards when they were premiered, respectively, at the Midstates Regional Ballet festivals of 1995 and 1993.

In Array, Kavanagh takes delight in the parallels between Irish dancing and classical ballet. The speed and brilliance of the petit allegro performed by the ensemble of six women recalled the dazzle of Irish step dancing In counterpoint to this flurry of footwork, Amy Sobesky and Cory Goei glided joyously through their pas de deux.

There was also strong counterpoint between the soloists and ensemble in Potential But here the mood was somber and intense, a sense of striving against odds.

One of the great satisfactions in this program was watching company members in a wide variety of roles. Shayne Elizabeth Dutkiewicz made an especially strong impression as Emily in Our Town, as she slipped easily from the girlish Emily in the flashback scenes to the young mother, who dies in childbirth. But Dutkiewicz, in her fourth year as principal dancer, also gleamed with porcelain elegance in the Bluebird Pas de Deux and showed a fine sense of comedy in Graduation Ball and as the daredevil rider of a steno chair in Linda Graham's Chair Study.

Christy Guth, a former company member guesting in this program, brought a special exuberance to the madcap Chair study, and to Rachel Lampert's Doing the Dance. Goei matched Guth's comedy in the latter, as they portrayed two dancers caught in a performance, wondering if they are doing the right dance.

Like many company members, Goei is still in high school, but with the strong technique and intensity that inform his dancing, he is surely the company's outstanding male performer. Sobesky, also a high school senior, and, like Goei, in her first year as a professional dancer, also shows remarkable promise. Grand Rapids artistic director Charthel Arthur can take pride in the dancers she has nurtured.