Ballet Memphis
When Ballet Memphis took its act into a downtown nightclub on September 7, the company clearly came to re-establish its rock ’n’ roll credentials. The Gibson Lounge—attached to a factory that makes the Gibson guitars B.B. King plays in his club on nearby Beale Street—is the hippest venue Ballet Memphis has found for its inventive “Momentum” dance series.
Symbolic value aside, the lounge was the perfect place to get acquainted with this season’s new faces and weep by candlelight over the departure of long-time principals pursuing new careers, including Dawn Fay and Garrett Ammon.
This “Momentum” was also an experiment to test new partnerships and see how the company’s in-house choreographers are growing. One of them is Julie Niekrasz, a young dancer with an expanding movement vocabulary and a flair for emotional partnering. A few years have passed since blues music provided the soundtrack to a company ballet, and her selections from Eric Clapton gave her love-themed Reveling in Fidelities a healthy dose of soulfulness. After the upbeat introduction of the corps, the piece divided into four pas de deux showing different states of affection. The first couple was flirty, the next in a new relationship, the third in a sultry and well-worn affair and the last on the verge of a break-up.
Associate Artistic Director Karl Condon choreographed the program’s only classical work, to showcase two new members. The multiple lifts and fouettés in Fall Festival Pas de Deux were pure eye-candy, but precisely executed. It will be interesting to see how the poised 19-year-old Hideko Karasawa will adapt to the company’s earthier contemporary repertoire, given her classical pedigree: San Francisco Ballet School training and first place at the 2005 Youth America Grand Prix. The petite ballerina will make a formidable (and aptly sized) partner for the company’s other classical standout, Kendall Britt.
Steven McMahon seems as well suited to choreography as he is to playing enchanted beasts and one-eyed uncles bearing nutcrackers. His intriguing work, Off Kilter, set to string quartet versions of Radiohead tunes, aimed to capture a sense of alienation and insecurity through broad contemporary swaths of movement. The highlight of his dance, however, was an exquisitely minimalist, angular solo by Rachel Shumake.
Ammon was commissioned to provide the evening’s spectacular closer, Mediate. Inspired by the excesses of the 1980s, his movement to music by the band INXS was intense and vivid, with robotic gestures that suggested an automatic and repetitive society. The cast members slowly stripped to their underwear as the song’s lyrics intoned “liberate, liberate.” The movement then turned vigorously athletic. Ammon has absorbed much from his mentor, Trey McIntyre, and his work continues to be meaty and full of ideas that, well, just rock. Exactly what Ballet Memphis needed to launch the season.
Christopher Blank writes about dance for The Commercial Appeal in Memphis.
