Two weekends ago, the Miami City Ballet appeared for the first time in their now-abbreviated season at the Kravis Center for the Performing Arts presenting just three performances of its second program, Winter Mix.
The company’s offerings in Palm Beach have been dramatically clipped. Its previous seasons were composed of four different programs ranging from repertory shows to evening-length ballets as well a slew of Nutcracker performances. This season, just two repertory programs were scheduled at the Kravis.
The Winter Mix program that I saw March 8 consisted of what has become a familiar format for MCB: Two works by iconic choreographer George Balanchine together with a new work by a young, upcoming choreographer. In this case, it was Balanchine’s Walpurgisnacht Ballet, set to the passionate music from composer Charles Gounod’s opera Faust, and La Valse, set to Maurice Ravel’s emotional score that caught the passion of the Viennese waltz.
These two substantial works with their enormous casts, rich music and yards and yards of flowing tulle bookended the world premiere of Coincident Dances, a non-narrative contemporary work by celebrated New York-based choreographer Pam Tanowitz who set her work to the very contemporary score of Grammy Award-winning composer, violinist and educator Jessie Montgomery.
The bright and light Walpurgisnacht Ballet was an excellent opener to the program. The curtain opened on a stage filled with dozens of ballerinas posed in a lovely tableau wearing long pink and lilac tutus designed by Balanchine’s long-time artistic colleague, costume designer Karinska. Originally choreographed for a 1975 production of Faust by the Théâtre National de l’Opéra that was danced by the Paris Opéra Ballet, the work was later reworked as a standalone ballet and premiered by The New York City Ballet in 1980 as a vehicle for one of Balanchine’s most famous muses, Suzanne Farrell.
In the March 8 performance, diminutive principal dancer Ashley Knox performed the role accompanied by the single male dancer in the work, the tall, blond Cameron Catazaro, who was recently promoted to principal soloist.
Building on a sense of joyful revelry in Gounod’s score, the 24 female dancers traversed the stage with their long hair and tulle flowing behind them as they served as an ever-changing background for soloists Mayumi Enokibara, Nicole Stalker and Taylor Naturkas. Who really caught my eye with her musicality, airy jump and lovely expression, was Naturkas.
Choreographer Tanowitz and composer Montgomery have a shared interest in interweaving classical forms with a variety of other styles of their art forms, so it is understandable that they would have come together to create a work like Coincident Dances. I found that both the music and the movement had a similar layered, urban, multi-cultural feel to them. It was as if you were standing on a busy city street corner surrounded by a vast variety of fragmented sounds and movement that randomly seemed to function in some odd sense of harmony.
The elegant dancewear-styled costumes designed by Harriet June and Reid Bartelme somehow put this arrangement of these bits and pieces of urban energy into the calmer place of a dance studio. Despite the idiosyncratic quality of some of the movements, like the mechanical stiff arms and hands of the dancers, the choreography (which had a seemingly unstructured look to it) failed to draw me into the work.
A standout in the 15-person cast was Rui Cruz, with his joyful stage presence and articulate technique, as was the elegantly commanding Hannah Fischer, who became the main focus of the second half of this work as she changed into a bright orange leotard and demonstrated her slowed-down vocabulary of movement.
Listening to the Miami City Ballet Orchestra as they tackled the diverse scores of the three different composers was quite the thrill. Under the experienced baton of principal conductor Gary Sheldon, it was easy to recognize how having a live orchestra adds quite a bit of extra magic to the evening. When Sheldon took his well-deserved bow after the second intermission, he acknowledged the orchestra below him in the pit. In a response that I always enjoy, the musicians waved their instruments and bows high above their heads as the audience continued to enthusiastically applaud.
Then, when the orchestra played the prelude for La Valse before the curtain rose, filling the theater with Ravel’s magnificent music, I took pause wondering if ballet companies would be able to continue having orchestras play live for their performances in the future.
La Valse was another Balanchine swirl of long tulle and satin pointe shoes. This time it was set to Ravel’s symphonic tribute to the genius of composer Johann Strauss II, known as “the Waltz King.” Ravel originally conceived this work as a ballet but it is most often heard as a concert work.There has been much discussion regarding Ravel’s intentions because of its ominous and powerful ending.
Balanchine’s choice for costume designers was once again Karinska. Her long, translucent ball gowns had a top layer of dark grey tulle that subdued the under-layers of red and orange and contrasted with the women’s long white satin gloves. The men wore black tuxedo-like costumes and short white gloves. As the swirling of waltz crescendoed, the hot colors of the under layers of the ballgowns were more and more exposed to accentuate the dancers’ passions rising (the Viennese waltz was considered quite scandalous in its heyday).
Balanchine chose to follow Ravel’s haunting score by building his plotless ballet with dramatic elements that included a lead ballerina, who stood out amidst the whirlwind of 34 swirling dancers as she was starkly dressed in white. It was easy to see her as she begins a romantic attachment with her partner.
The energy and chemistry between Dawn Atkins and Stanislav Olshanskyi, the regal Ukrainian dancer who joined MCB as a principal in 2022, was engaging. Their lovely pas de deux, filled with yearning reaches and courtly partnering, was refined and convincing but watched by the dark figure of Death played by Ariel Rose. In a theatrical moment, all movement on stage stopped as Atkins was drawn to Rose’s power and succumbed to death.
La Valse was created in 1951 and its Hollywood ending attested to this as the white lifeless beauty was hoisted high — as if she was in a casket — for all to see and mourn and the dancers onstage continued to swirl to the music as the curtain slowly fell. The lead ballerina role was made especially for Tanaquil LeClerq, one of Balanchine’s first muses (as well as one of his wives). The tragic ending could now in hindsight be viewed as a sad foreshadowing of the death of LeClerq’s dancing career as she contracted a debilitating case of polio a few years later and was confined to a wheelchair for the rest of her life.
This beautifully performed program was overshadowed by the recent news that Artistic Director Lourdes Lopez recently announced that she will be leaving Miami City Ballet after this season. Lopez, who has made an indelible mark on the company in the last 12 years she has been leading it, said in the company’s press release that she feels that it is time to move on as she has become passionate about working for another project. She wants to explore ways for Miami arts institutions to collaborate more closely.
So Miami won’t be losing Lopez. She is just rebranding herself, but now Miami City Ballet has the difficult task of finding the right person to replace her. It will be a challenge as those are big shoes to fill — albeit ballet shoes.
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The second (and last) program MCB will present this season at the Kravis, Spring Mix is scheduled for Saturday, April 12, at 2 p.m. and 7:30 p.m. and on Sunday, April 13, at 1 p.m. The program consists of Jerome Robbins’ Glass Pieces, set to music by Philip Glass, Alexei Ratmansky’s Pictures at An Exhibition, to the music of Modest Mussorgsky, José Limón’s Chaconne, to the music of Johann Sebastian Bach, and George Balanchine’s Tchaikovsky Pas de Deux.