BWW Dance Review: Barak Ballet, July 6, 2018.

To criticize the Barak Ballet is difficult. It's a relatively new company, so you have to give it time. A critic has to look and write objectively and rationally.

Barak was a corps member at New York City Ballet for nine years, while also choreographing four ballets for the company. So she has pedigree. She forsook New York City Ballet to return to her native Los Angeles to dance with Los Angeles Ballet, and then founded a company of her own, Barak Ballet. That takes guts, ambitions, brains, which Barak has shown. And judging by some of her videos on YouTube, she is articulate, sharp, and clear. She makes her point.

A program note: "Barak Ballet is dedicated to envisioning, developing, and performing a contemporary dance for the modern age. Attracting renowned choreographers as well as energized, technically brilliant dancers, Barak Ballet thrives in a work environment that coaxes and nurtures the creative impulses as its artists."

Of course, you are a new company and that's your mission. You don't have to remind us.

Especially if you're appearing at the Joyce Theater.

If we're talking about dancers, what a magnificent company: Xuan Cheng, Lauren Fadeley, Jessica Gadzinski, Zachary Guthier, Brian Simcoe, Tiffany Smith, Sadie Black, Julia Erickson, Stephanie Kim, Robert Mulvey, Francisco Preciado, Evan Swenson, Jorge Villarini and Hannah Wilcox. Any choreographer would be over the moon to have them.

But then we come to the choreography, and here's the problem. It all seems like a lot of bombast. So much of what I've been seeing lately in the name of the modern ballet takes its cue from interesting music that seems to shrug off any notion of being compatible with steps, which can seem arbitrary to the point of non-interest. It's as if they're in competition, rather than harmony. Is this the wave of the present or the future? I can hear cries echoing the 1913 premiere of Rite of Spring. Sorry on that one; I can't draw comparisons since no one I know was there, nor has the choreography survived.

Am I advocating for a return to classical music? Not at all. That would just be regressing back to the twentieth century, and ballet-just like every other art form-needs to move forward. But I'm still wondering what it is moving forward to? Most of what I see-and saw-is centered on a faceless crowd.

Worse, there is absolutely no warmth. The choreography is cold, yet calculated to ensure maximum audience approval and ovations at the end. As we explore gender fluidity, can't there be a nod to the heart? Steps are important, so is music. But so is feeling.

Take Barak's E/Space. Lots of visuals, projections, digital drawings. It leaves nothing out. And the dancers perform to a frenzy. As I said above, what a wildly talented group. Sleek, fast, high octane, drive. Have I left anything out?

I don't want to sound flippant, but this has got to be at least the eighth ballet I've seen like this in the past six years. The world is coming to an end, the images are there to show us that we are in a nuclear world, we bury our souls in darkness.

I suppose it's meant to shock.

Both Barak's Cypher and Nicolas Blanc's Desert Transport had interesting moments but, in the end, there was a failure of creative ignition Again, there was an accent on the new ballet, new images, new theories, new expeditions into the imagination. Yet, for all of that, the works failed to connect with me. But to others in the audience, they were a sensation.

So the journey continues. What is there to expect in the dance world? Those who grew up in the latter part of the previous century-are we now the old guard? What have those choreographers we revered bequeathed to us? How do we judge today? Criteria?

I'm still searching for an answer.

Photo: Dave Friedman.

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