Friday June 11. 2010 - Miro Magloire's New Chamber Ballet presented their final programme of the current season at New York's City Center studio. Above: Miro photographed by Kokyat at a recent rehearsal. Miro's evenings always offer fine dancing and wonderful live music, and he usually has something new up his sleeve to offer us.
Tonight's new addition to the repertoire is a charming piece called WATCHED -A PIANO PLAY in which Miro for the first time presents a ballet with a story line. Three dancers - Victoria North, Lauren Toole, and Elizabeth Brown - seem to be sisters who lapse in and out of dreamlike trances: when awake, they dance gracefully on pointe and when they nod off, they sit quietly with eyes closed. The pianist Melody Fader also participates in the action whilst meanwhile playing a Haydn sonata. As the work evolves, Lauren orchestrates the waking and sleeping of the other three, placing chairs for them when the trance overtakes them and summoning them out of their slumbers to dance. It becomes a sort of SERVANT OF TWO MASTERS situation; in the end Lauren closes the piano keyboard: the only way she can get a moment's peace.
In a complete change of mood, the music of Leos Janacek sets the tone for Constantine Baecher's VIDUITY, a stately expression of grief and mourning. Four dancers - Emily SoRelle Adams, Emery LeCrone, Madeline Deavenport and Elizabeth Brown - dance with somber grace: four widows pondering what lies ahead for them in their bereavement. Wearing beautiful backless gowns with trains (by Candice Thompson) the four women create an atmosphere of resignation where weeping is the only consolation.
Following the intermission, Erik Carlson took up his violin and played - magnificently - Pierre Boulez's Anthemes as Emily SoRelle Adams danced Miro's long and demanding solo IN A SIMPLE BLACK DRESS. We were sitting directly behind Erik and were impressed by his mastery of all that Boulez demands of him, often paring his tone down to sooty piani and gossamer whispers. The solo, in which Emily wears one toe shoe and one slipper, is a beautiful gift from choreographer to dancer. Earlier in the week we watched Emily rehearsing this work, from which came Kokyat's photo above.
Emery LeCrone's CHAMBER DANCES is a three-part ballet for three women in which musicians Erik Carlson and Melody Fader provide the propulsion for movement playing
Above: Kokyat's photo of pianist Melody Fader wearing a lovely peacock frock. Melody's musicianship is always an essential component of Miro's evenings.
Since founding New Chamber Ballet in 2004, Miro Magloire has presented more than forty works both of his own creation and by guest choreographers. Seeing dance in an intimate setting with live music is an engrossing experience and I look forward to Miro's 2010-2011 season which will commence on September 17th.
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