Tulsa Ballet

Tulsa Ballet

“Elite Syncopations,” “Por Vos Muero,” and “This Is Your Life”
Tulsa Ballet

On paper, the program for Tulsa Ballet’s return to New York after an absence of more than two decades must have seemed an ideal showcase for the company’s versatility and seriousness of purpose. There were ballets by noted chorographers—one to display the dancers’ classical technique, another their fluency in the idiom of contemporary European dance—topped off with the New York premiere of a recent commission. There was variety in the music, décor, and costumes. There was even a latent theme: social dance refracted through the prism of ballet.

Alas, the whole was less than the sum of the parts. The problem wasn’t the dancers; they’re talented, committed, and engaging and it’s easy to see why they’ve garnered the kind of community support that makes both touring and new commissions possible. The problem lay in the dances: they all promised more than they delivered.

The program opened with Kenneth MacMillan’s 1974 “Elite Syncopations,” a suite of solos, duets, and ensemble pieces set to orchestrated piano rags by Scott Joplin and his contemporaries. It’s the kind of ballet that tempts marketing departments to plaster “rollicking” and “light-hearted” all over the subscription brochure. MacMillan tarts up his classical vocabulary with knowing winks, wagging derrières, and music-hall jokes: the “Calliope Rag” might be a variation for The Fairy of Shimmy. And in case we’ve missed any of the nudge-nudge-wink-wink naughtiness, Ian Spurling’s famous Peter-Max-on-a-bender-costumes helpfully direct our attention to the ballerinas’ points of anatomical interest with strategically placed stars, bullseyes, and arrows. There’s nothing wrong with celebrating the erotic charge at the heart of social dance with a bracing shot of the vernacular. But a puerile snicker informs “Elite Syncopations” cartoon cheer: it isn’t “Dances at a Honky-Tonk” or “Storyville Waltzes”—it’s Benny Hill in pointe shoes.

To their credit, the Tulsa dancers didn’t just vamp to the jokes. Karina Gonzalez and Alfonso Martin—justifiably the company’s stars—invested their “Bethena Waltz” duet with both the tenderness in Joplin’s music and the elegance in MacMillan’s steps. Gonzalez and Kate Oderkirk dispatched their solos (“Stop Time Rag” and “Calliope Rag,” respectively) with the self-assured élan of women to reckoned with, not leered at.

The company used the Orchestra of the Royal Ballet’s recording of the score, which sounded flat and charmless over the Joyce’s sound system and seemed as close to unsyncopated as it was possible to be and still be ragtime. They‘ve performed the work with a live band in the past (see the accompanying photos). The dancers might have been better served had they dispensed with the recording and simply put a pianist on stage.

The company looked its best—energized, expansive, and musical—in Nacho Duato’s “Por Vos Muero” (For You I Die), a pretty essay in broody House-of-Kylian atmospherics set to 15th and 16th century Spanish dance music and voiced-over extracts from the poems of Garcilaso de la Vega. The ballet was easy to watch: Duato swept us along on a steady current of one lengthy and sinuous phrase after another. He rarely varied their rhythm and texture, however. Decorated though they may have been with a sprinkling of the usual contemporary dance ornaments—head rolls, flexed feet, angled limbs, contractions—as well as with references to Renaissance court dance, they were really just the same phrase over and over again: step–jump–turn–lunge–sink down–rise up–repeat.

Duato took care to vary the stage picture and its mood with changes in music, lighting, props, and ensemble—and it might have worked had the apparatus not been freighted with a portentousness all out of scale with the proceedings. Every prop, every shadow, every ray of light seemed intended to Mean Something—about love and its object, presumably—but there wasn’t really enough going on to attach a meaning to. Rather than deepening the impact of the dancing, the effects put quotation marks around it. Still, Serena Chu’s radiant musicality throughout the evening—but especially during “Por Vos Muero”—deserves a special mention.

Young Soon Hue’s newly commissioned ballet was also a suite of dances—tangos in this case. Unfortunately she elected to frame them with irritating device that emulated edgy wit but was mostly witless: we were the studio audience for an episode of the 50’s TV show “This Is Your Life” watching seven hapless and painfully stereotyped characters deliver monologues that told us more than we really needed to know. Then they danced about it. Why this device? It might have worked as a barbed send-up of reality TV and the tell-all/see-all culture that feeds it—in which case Jerry Springer or Judge Judy would have been better models. But there seemed to be no more to it than the need to set up the backstories that we should have gotten from the dances and to give the costume designer something retro to work with.

The choreography was in the Xtreme Broadway mode—think “Tango Argentino” filtered through William Forsythe—but wasn’t totally without craft. An amusing group dance for the men seemed to rely on the disconnect between what they were wearing—shirts, ties, sheer black tulle crinolines, socks with garters—and their affect, which was all tribal fierceness, but I suspect it would have been fun to watch even if they’d been in practice clothes.

copyright © 2009 by Kathleen O’Connell

Top: Wang Yi in “Elite Syncopations”

Photo by Christopher Jean-Richard

Middle: Karina Gonzalez and Alfonso Martin in “Elite Syncopations”

Photo by Christopher Jean-Richard

Bottom: Ricardo Graziano, Serena Chu, and Ma Cong in “Por Vos Muero”

Photo by Ralph Cole