Saturday November 23, 2013 - New Chamber Ballet's 2013-2014 season continued this evening with a program featuring a Miro Magloire premiere and a revised version of a Constantine Baecher ballet. As always at New Chamber Ballet, live music was an essential component of the performance: pianist Melody Fader and violinist Doori Na were in their element, particularly in the very demanding (commissioned) score by Michel Galante for Miro's new ballet.
In Miro's "A Present" which opened the evening, three women (Elizabeth Brown, Holly Curran, and Amber Neff) go to great lengths to have and to hold onto a necklace which has been sent them by an unknown admirer. A note is enclosed with the gift, but we never learn who it is from or what it says. After some under-handed pilfering and a frantic chase, the bauble is destroyed and the note torn to shreds. Doori Na played a suite of melodies from Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker, arranged for solo violin, while the three girls fought for possession of the mysterious gift.
Another conflict ballet comes in the form of Miro's "Sister, My Sister" wherein dancer Amber Neff is annoyed - to the point of becoming homicidal - by her sister, soprano Charlotte Mundy. The Morton Feldman score calls for Ms. Mundy to vocalize on single, sustained notes. This gets under her sister's skin. Melody Fader and Doori Na (unseen) played the angular Feldman score as the two women battled it out.
"Stay With Me", the new Magloire/Galante collaboration, is perhaps Miro's finest achievement to date. There are narrative undercurrents but no specific scenario is suggested: the ballet is essentially two duets - the first for Holly Curran and Traci Finch and the second danced by Ms. Curran with Sarah Atkins. The girls wear simple tights and halter tops. In the first duet, Holly and Traci dance an entwined mirror-image adagio; Traci at one point executes a wonderfully fluid backbend. Sarah Atkins silently observes the end of the Traci/Holly duet and then she takes Traci's place - as the latter walks away - and continues the dance with Holly. The choreography presents a stylized language of intimacy, and the mystery of who these women are and what they mean to one another remains unsolved as the ballet ends.
Above: dancers Holly Curran and Traci Finch in a rehearsal image by Amber Neff
The Galante score for "Stay With Me" is fascinating and it challenges the two musicians in terms of both technique and stamina. The piece opens with both piano and violin playing in the highest range. Doori's violin slithers up and down rapid chromatic scales or lingers for measure after measure on a single pinging tone, while Melody at one point produces a series of sweeping downhill glissandi covering the full keyboard; elsewhere the piano writing favors ethereal high shimmers. Kudos to these two musicians for their spell-binding performance. "Stay With Me" is a ballet I will want to see and hear again soon.
Constantine Baecher's "Allow You To Look At Me" was originally a sort of joint-biography of Mr. Baecher and dancer Elizabeth Brown and their long-time association. In tonight's revision, now titled "Allow You To Look At Me Again" that intensely personal element has been discarded in favor of a more generalized narrative about what it means to perform and to expose oneself to public scrutiny. Narrator Jonathan Parks-Ramage now reads the biographies of each of the three participants - Ms. Brown, Holly Curran and Mr. Baecher - rather than the former poetic story of Constantine and Elizabeth's mutual admiration. At the piano, Melody Fader plays familiar melodies which underline the personal facets of each dancer's self-view. The solo for Elizabeth Brown, danced to Debussy's ever-poignant Clair de Lune, was the evocative apex of the ballet and a lovely portrait of this dictinctive dancer. The work, though now less personal, remains powerful.