Dreams and Memories
"Mirrors", "Utopia", "Classroom Fantasy", "Dreamscapes"
Avi Scher & Dancers
Alvin Ailey Citigroup Theater
New York, NY
April 23, 2011
The young choreographer returned to the Alvin Ailey Theatre with a crop of new dances and an exciting group of dancers. The performance last year was notable for its cast which included outstanding dancers such as Marcelo Gomes, Veronika Part, and Ashley Bouder. This year Scher also had fine dancers from ABT and NYCB, including Tyler Angle, Ana Sophia Scheller, and Craig Salstein, but he also offered Carla Körbes and Seth Orza from Pacific Northwest Ballet, Sofiane Sylve from the San Francisco Ballet, and Misa Kuranaga and Jospeh Gatti from the Boston Ballet. So often, New York only sees visitors in a gala format, whacking off one pas de deux or solo after another, so it was a welcome treat to see these fine dancers in complete choreography, especially since these works showed off the dancers performing as well as technical skills; Scher can use stillness and gesture to convey mood.
"Mirrors", with live piano and violin accompaniment (music by Elena Kats Chernin and Dustin O'Halloran), opens with the veteran dancer Deborah Wingert looking in an imaginary mirror, remembering youth, love, and loss, conveyed in a few, telling gestures. She seems to conjure up this youth in three couples with simple, colorful dresses (the elegant, understated and very danceable costumes were by NYCB dancer Janie Taylor). Körbes and Orza were the main couple, and Scher's choreography used his gracious partnering and her golden radiance very well. They were joined now and then by two other couples, Nicole Graniero with Craig Salstein and Laura Feig with Joel Prouty. Salstein and Graniero's dance had the more defined character, as Scher used Salstein's outgoing charm and clear gestures to fine comedic effect--I still am not sure if the fall Salstein took was intentional, but if not, he made it seem very funny. Wingert returned at the end, to look regretfully in that imaginary mirror--an echo of all of us, who would love to look back and see our youth in Körbes.
"Utopia" is another memory, a memory of all those Jerry Robbins piano ballets evoking Slavic folk dancing and young love. But Scher's work (to live piano music by Rachmaninov) was a lively and well-crafted example of the genre. (And Robbins' wonderful "Dances at a Gathering" itself certainly was influenced by a Chopin piano piece by Jose Limon.) Misa Kuranaga flew through the windswept and ecstatic opening. She was followed by the more meditative Joseph Gatti; again Scher is not afraid to let his dancers stand still and show the audience thoughts and feelings. The two get together in a final pas de deux, which built in intensity, as their feelings seem to swell.
Dreaming and memories were both involved in "Classroom Fantasy", as a little ballet girl at the barre (a student from the Manhattan Youth Ballet) dreams of a grown up couple in a formal ballet get up. Wingert, the fussy taskmaster, starts the class, which is overrun by marauding sylphs--the ballet teacher's memories perhaps, or the young students' dreams.
The dreams of the final work were in the title, "DreamScapes". This, to minimalist electronic music, was the almost obligatory homage to William Forsythe, though Scher softened the edges a bit, which gave the movements a hypnotic, underwater quality. Sofiane Sylve, almost unrecognizable in her Little Orphan Annie hair do, stood out for her fiercely committed solo, which made her look like a super-human Amazon celebrating some mysterious victory. And indeed, the whole evening was really a victory, a group of very fine dancers obviously dedicated to the choreography.
copyright © 2011 by Mary Cargill
