BWW Reviews: Ecstatic Sight and Sound at the ARB American Artist Showcase

With its American Artist Showcase, the American Repertory Ballet has given dance enthusiasts an early Christmas present. Taken together, the three short pieces in the Showcase amounted to a spectacle as sprightly and luscious as any given production of The Nutcracker. The first selection, choreographer Gerald Arpino's Viva Vivaldi (1965), sets Vivaldi's robust "Concerto in D-Major" to classicizing dance; the second, Patrick Corbin's Caress (2013), is a color-saturated study of affection and attraction. Closing the entertainment is Mary Barton's Faerie Tyme (2012), which mixes together a whimsical libretto, quirky costumes, and English country dance music from 1651, or thereabouts.

The ARB's fresh, wondering, fantasy-filled approach to motion and color requires plenty of aesthetic intelligence. When you don't have such smarts, you get a production that's kinetic, flashy, and crudely imagined, like the American Ballet Theatre's recent Swan Lake. But when you have the right depth and discipline, you get something closer to the American Artist Showcase. Performed at New Jersey's own Hamilton Stage-a small but sophisticated theatrical space-the ARB's new offerings are neatly fitted to a scaled-down format. Small format, but broad emotional resonance. For the most part, these are dances that give off reassuring warmth, let you get comfortable-then, when you least expect it, burst into fantastic heat and light.

Viva Vivaldi, for instance, is an ensemble piece first and foremost. It relies heavily on well-behaved formations, and the blacks, whites, and browns of Peter Anthony's costumes add to the regulated feeling of some of the dances. However, those same subdued colors make Viva Vivaldi seem like a Rembrandt painting come to life. And without breaking formation, the dancers project plenty of personality-just like the splendidly arranged, splendidly individuated figures on an Old Masters canvas. The standouts for me: Samantha Gullace's sinuous, diva-style performance in the first segment, and the contrast between a spontaneous Stephen Campanella and a severe Alexander Dutko in the final movement.

Caress isn't as elaborately staged, but it certainly makes a stronger first impression. The costumes are simple, the dances coherent, yet the coloration ranges from arid red to arctic white to amazon green. Once you've gotten over the acid shock of all these hues, you might realize that Corbin is working some of contemporary ballet's more common material. This year alone, choreographers as different as Miro Magloire, Kate Weare, and Paul Taylor have showcased ballet's unique powers of portraying eros and affection; so what is Corbin doing differently?

Actually, plenty. Caress possesses a unique element of surprise. Based on the title and the placid opening sequence, I thought I was in for one display of carefully-calibrated tenderness after another, and I'm delighted that I was wrong. A soft duet ("Meditation") is followed by a more vicious dance for two ("Fire"); a sequence of man-and-woman couple dances is capped by tacitly aggressive man-man, woman-woman pairings. But some of the surprises are less fraught and more openly joyous. In a dance called "Amabile," a single performer (Joshua Kurtzburg) dances against a glacial background. This could have been a supremely melancholy sequence; instead, it has a celebratory air-the feeling not of a man alone in a frozen wasteland, but of a child celebrating an unexpected snow day.

There's more in the way of direct storytelling in Faerie Tyme: enough story, in fact, to warrant a closely-printed half-page synopsis in the ARB program. The narrative revolves around a human girl (Karen Leslie Moscato) adopted and raised by the Queen of the Faeries (Samantha Gullace). When a human stranger (Stephen Campanella) stumbles into the faeries' territory, the girl realizes that there is a world beyond the faerie realm-and finds her loyalties divided. This is the main action; there are rivalries, romantic sub-plots, bits of psychodrama. On the whole, Faerie Tyme is busier than its short run time and pared-down stage properties really allow; but, there's never a dull instant.

There's something about Barton's creation that holds remarkably strong in your mind, when you've given it a little thought. Maybe it has to do with the notes of melancholy that begin to sound towards the end, or the echoes of A Midsummer Night's Dream that reverberate throughout. Or maybe Faerie Tyme stays with you because, after all, ballet is its own faerie land: a place of light and color and sound like nothing in daily life, a place where age and worry disappear. Where an entire life, an entire civilization, can pass by in an hour or less.

Photo Credit: Leighton Chen

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