BWW Reviews: The Joyce Theater Foundation Spring Gala

Monica Bill Barnes and Anna Bass performing Luster (an excerpt)

Photo by Mallory Rosenthal

Gala occasions for dance companies are usually about packing in as many stars as possible who then oblige the audience by showing off with excessive pyrotechnics. The Joyce Foundation Spring Gala, honoring Paige Royer and Kerry Clayton as well as Michèle and Steven Pesner, bucked the trend by having four different repertory pieces performed by a highly diverse group of dancers assembled from across the dance world.

Monical Bill Barnes & Company opened the night with a piece called Luster (an excerpt) and got things headed in the right direction with an affectionate valentine of a ballet. Barnes and Anna Bass, her favorite co-conspirator, were featured in a short film by Kelly Hanson and Joel Knutson that was projected onto an onstage screen. In the film, accompanied by the opening strains of "Also Sprach Zarathustra," Barnes and Bass are seen heroically loading out their portable proscenium (complete with red velvet curtain) from the Joyce Theatre down on Eighth Avenue. They proceed to laboriously schlep their burden on the Number One train uptown to Lincoln Center and then across Broadway. Their destination, of course, is the Koch Theatre and the gala. As the film ends with them dragging the proscenium backstage, they dragged it onstage with them to continue their performance in person.

Bass and Barnes are two performers who light up a stage. They began with wide-eyed, golly gee enthusiasm as they talked to each other and soon devolved into shamelessly eating up the crowd's attention with unapologetic enthusiasm. They made a great big show out of their humble little proscenium and finished with a bang of confetti. They left Little Room for doubt about which two dancers you would choose to have accompany you for a night out on the town.

New York City Ballet's Wendy Whelan and Complexions Contemporary Ballet's Desmond Richardson then took the stage to perform Charter, a piece choreographed on them by Dwight Rhoden. Nicholas Payton, the great New Orleans trumpeter, played his own composition, fronting his eponymous quartet in the night's musical highlight. His playing was nuanced and deeply felt.

The experience of Whelan and Richardson dancing together is like a long, deep sigh of contentment that is tinged with regret. These two should have been dancing together a long time ago. They are a perfect study in how two dancers of contrasting styles can mesh together with lush fluidity and create something that neither could do alone. Future occasions to see them work together will unfortunately be altogether too rare as Whelan's career is winding down and Richardson has largely withdrawn from regular performing to spend more time teaching.

These are two of the world's great dancers and they came together for this piece as though they had been working together for decades. This was partnering as it was meant to be, full of strength, passion and easy physical familiarity. Dwight Rhoden had to have been thrilled to be able to choreograph a pas de deux for these two. It is not a show off piece but rather a testament to how beautiful the simple things can be when they're done with love.

The Lyon Opera Ballet contributed a quartet of male dancers who performed Benjamin Millepied's Sarabande, set to music of Bach for solo flute and solo violin. Millepied began his career with Lyon and he brought out the best in the four men. This is neo-classical ballet at its best. The discovery of the evening had to be Randy Castillo. It's seldom one gets to say this about a male dancer but his port de bras is hypnotic. He has large hands with elegant, long fingers that compel as much attention as his feet. The rest of the quartet, Raúl Serrano Núñez, Harris Ghekas and Franck Laizet, were all fine dancers and a pleasure to watch but they were not as thrilling to watch as Randy Castillo. Any dance company would be lucky to get their hands on this dancer. The accompanists, Stefán Ragnar Höskuldsson on flute and Tim Fain on violin, were both fine but the amplification of their instruments was not well handled by the audio equipment in the Koch Theater. The violin particularly suffered from the distortion of its sound.

Closing the evening was the Netherlands Dance Theater (NDT) performing Sh-boom!, choreographed by Sol León and Paul Lightfoot. NDT is a theater company that dances rather than a dance company that does theatrical pieces and that is exemplified by Sh-boom! The typical dance company could never pull this off without making it ridiculous or trite. This is simply the most interesting company in the world and it has been breaking new ground since the days when it was directed by Ji?í Kylián. Now under the direction of Paul Lightfoot with his choreographing partner, Sol León, NDT seems ready to continue the course. The company currently has 50 dancers representing 22 different nationalities which should make for a confusing salad visually but the binding factor for all these different dancers is the element of theater that imbues everything this company does. Each of these dancers is brimming with intelligence and expressive capability.

As the closing piece, Sh-boom! was the one intended to send everyone away with a smile. That smile, however, came with more than a trace of uneasiness. Beginning with Silas Henriksen, decked out in a white suit, this piece of dance theater harkened back to the good old days of the Weimar. Behind all the smiles there was a grimace. Henriksen modulated with disconcerting ease from funny to creepy in a heartbeat by stretching his smile painfully across his face into a rictus. There was laughter at his antics but it was laced with nervous tittering. He was followed by Spenser Theberge who turned in a madcap version of the old classic, John and Marsha. Theberge invested both sides of the two-worded vignette with enough louche enthusiasm to make anyone giggle while squirming.

When he was considering joining NDT as a young man, Lightfoot was warned that he would have to dance naked. Presumably that didn't scare him off because he and León included an obligatory naked dancing part in this ballet. The dancer in this piece began by coyly covering his genitals while sparely lit by four women wielding flashlights. When he grabbed the small saucepan to cover himself the dance really took off and covering himself became an afterthought. Clearly dancing in this company means learning to let it all hang out. At the close of the dance, he stretched his penis out as far as it would go and let it snap back (much like little boys do) causing the audience to laugh, but again with just a touch of uneasiness. The Netherlands Dance Theater delivers more than just dance. They are a group of totally committed performing artists, fearless and dynamic. With compelling and original material like this one can only hope that the Netherlands Dance Theater's next visit to New York will be longer.

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