Washington Ballet
At the Kennedy Center Eisenhower Theater, Washington Ballet’s October season opener showed the company in top form. There’s nothing this company won’t tackle gamely.
The demanding program opened with the iconic, poetic couplings of Jerome Robbins’s In the Night. To a selection of Chopin nocturnes, three couples successively entwined, awash in deeply felt moments of mystery. Elizabeth Gaither and Jared Nelson displayed abiding depth in their filigreed pas de deux. Erin Mahoney-Du exhibited her regal air, but Runqiao Du appeared more tense than reserved in his partnering. Luis Torres gave attentive, passionate support to Sona Kharatian, who drew away before succumbing in his cradling arms.
Associate Artistic Director Jeff Edwards set the Robbins work, taking care not to diminish the power of its details. The way a hand alights or a head turns was as significant as the dramatic lifts, skimming leaps and braided footwork.
Presenting Artistic Director Septime Webre’s world première on the heels of the Robbins work proved unfortunate. Oui/non featured chanteuse Karen Akers onstage singing selections from Jacques Brel and Edith Piaf. The dancers, wearing Vandal’s off-white tanks and slacks for the men, and ratty cocktail dresses for the women, were swamped with over-caffeinated steps. Webre poured a lift, split, barrel turn or fall into every sung moment of heartbreak and disillusionment.
Behind the dancers, Elizabeth Peyton’s painting of a reclining woman, her expression bored, summed up the ennui of oui/non: Its eight variations lack the dramatic arc of Robbins’s work. When sultry-voiced Akers finally belted “Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien,” the dancers, particularly Mahoney-Du, tried mightily to beat the heavy mood with something more stirring than a whiff of smoke and a nod.
It took the brashness and speed of Twyla Tharp’s In the Upper Room to clear the air. The 1986 work attests to both Tharp’s acuity for music and movement and to the dancers’ endurance. In the Upper Room also suggests a meeting between the shod and unshod camps in dance, a postmodern fusion that Tharp once called “sneaker pointe,” her two camps wearing one or the other, along with Norma Kamali’s still chic, black-and-white stripes and red solids. The nine sections parlay to Phillip Glass’s crescendo-ing minimalism, dancers building up a lexicon of twists, turns, leaps and jumps, while stripping away formalist distinctions.
Tharp wove ballet, modern, jazz and calisthenics into her tightly meshed choreography. As the work built, some of the dancers lost steam, but Maki Onuki, who didn’t dance in the other works, remained fresh, her red satin pointes steely until the end.
In the Upper Room demands exhausting physicality; but more so Tharp requires—as her title suggests—a measure of spirit. That Washington Ballet attains it speaks to breadth of the company’s abilities and of its intrepid director, Webre.
Based in Maryland, Lisa Traiger is co-chair of the Dance Critics Association and writes frequently on the performing arts.
