Oregon Ballet Theater, Portland Community College Performing Arts Center, Portland, Oregon, February 3-8, 1998

Dance Magazine, June, 1998 by Martha Ullman West

FEBRUARY 3-8, 1998 REVIEWED BY MARTHA ULLMAN WEST

Can a classically trained dancer move easily in the course of one evening from a down-and-dirty, street-wise dance to a Limon-based solo that builds, expressively, on her own heritage? James Canfield, artistic director of Oregon Ballet Theatre, demands that kind of versatility and, fortunately, Vanessa Thiessen has it, in spades.

On opening night of the company's Moving Signatures concert series--a program designed to develop touring repertory for a chamber company and to offer opportunities for choreographers to work on a small scale--Thiessen was pure dynamite in Trey McIntyre's Speak. A playfully speedy dance, it was performed to rap songs punched out on the one hand by Tracie Morris, and on the other by Bloodhound Gang.

Impudent and angular, classical line thrown away, Thiessen high-stepped her way through a rapid opening solo and made it virtually impossible for Matthew Boyes to keep up with her in the duet that followed. If you looked hard, you could see that McIntyre had slipped more than a few classical steps into the foot stomps, but it was very subtly done. This sort of fusion is hard to bring off successfully, but McIntyre is on to something here that could be developed into extremely interesting work.

Josie Moseley teaches in OBT's school, where she passes on the Limon-based training she received on the East Coast. She is an accomplished choreographer who has been nominated for San Francisco's Isadora Duncan Dance Award. Quiet Stories, her second piece for OBT, is a lovely, contemplative work that capitalizes on the life experience of the dancers as well as on Moseley's own preoccupations of the moment.

The stories are three solos, the first called "French," danced eloquently by Katarina Svetlova, usually cast as a sultry sexpot, but this time as a mother, cradling a child in her arms, then flinging the fledgling from the nest. Thiessen, who is half Filipina, is cast as "Tagalog," a gamine dancing to Lou Harrison's Suite for Violin Gamelan, in a performance remarkable for its evocation of a lost childhood. Alison Roper, not always secure in her dancing in the classical repertoire, as "German" inhabited Moseley's movement with heart-stopping intensity.

Also on the program were former Joffrey Ballet dancer Tyler Walters' Enclosure, a pretentious but well-danced example of angst on pointe, and Melissa St. Clair's Sanctuary, a jazzy piece that skillfully took the dancers from the gym to the chorus line. The evening opened with a half-hour lecture-demonstration that needed considerable fine-tuning, which it received at later performances.