Charlotte Ballet: Celebrating 50 years / Stuart, Pite, Caniparoli, Aiello
By Steve Sucato
Charlotte Ballet’s 50th Anniversary Celebration program, delayed from 2020 because of the global pandemic, was worth the wait. The final production for outgoing artistic director Hope Muir (now artistic director at the National Ballet of Canada), the program cast a wide net in terms of audience tastes, with four topflight works that not only celebrated the company’s past, but also how far it has come artistically since its founding, by Canadian Robert Lindgren, in 1970.
The October 7-9 mixed bill at the Belk Theater in Charlotte, North Carolina, featured live music by the Charlotte Symphony Orchestra. The program opened with the world premiere of Charlotte Ballet interim artistic director Christopher Stuart’s Then, Now, Forever, set to music by Philip Glass. A contemporary ballet work for ten dancers, it was performed in front of a backdrop of stained-glass windows as in a Frank Lloyd Wright design. It began with a trio of male/female pas de deux couples in lavender costumes who faced the audience, with two couples bracketing them, facing and walking upstage. The couples then split off into various configurations throughout the ballet’s four sections, each a pleasing vision of Stuart’s well-crafted and sophisticated contemporary ballet choreography. Danced with airiness and feeling on both nights I attended (October 8 and 9), of note were dancers Emily Porter and Colby Foss (Oct. 8), whose command of Stuart’s elongated, turning movement and delicate partnered lifts was elegant.
Next, Crystal Pite’s 2010 A Picture of You Falling, a contemporary dance duet with original music by Owen Belton and text by Pite, set quite a different tone. On a mostly darkened stage, a semi-circle of tall amber theatre lamps on rolling stands created a pool of atmospheric light. Robert Sondergaard’s creative lighting design gave the viewer the impression of perhaps being inside the mind of the work’s female character as she relived a life-changing romantic breakup.
Pite’s choreography was in part a reflection of her text. “This is a picture of you falling…knees, hips, hands,” were all mirrored in the movement of dancer Ben Ingel, who played the love interest opposite Sarah LaPointe (Oct. 8) and Amelia Sturt-Dilley (Oct. 9). A contemplative work tinged with human fragility, the duet unfolded with quiet beauty in its ambling, leaning, and falling movement. Highlighted by a solo danced with abandon by Ingel and the emotionally nuanced performances of LaPointe and Sturt-Dilley, the work felt emotionally genuine.
The program’s second half began with Val Caniparoli’s Ibsen’s House (2008) about five heroines from the works of 19th-century playwright Henrik Ibsen. Danced to excerpts from Antonín Dvořák’s Piano Quintet in A Major, Op. 81, the lush neo-classical ballet’s first half introduced each of the Victorian-era-costumed heroines, from The Lady from the Sea’s Ellida Wangel to Ghosts’ Mrs. Alving, revealing their personalities and motivations. It was the ballet’s second half, however, with the addition of the women’s husbands or companions, where Caniparoli’s detailed choreography shone. Most engaging was dancer Emerson Dayton as a nervous Nora Helmer from A Doll’s House, whose controlling husband Torvald (Ingel) found out she has been stealing from him. Their tension-filled pas de deux left one on edge. Also a standout was a pas de deux in which the domineering title character from Hedda Gabler (LaPointe) directed every movement of her husband George Tesman (Josh Hall) while repeating a gesture of bringing her index finger to her lips as if to say to the audience, “I have a secret.”
The program closed with a newly costumed reprise of former company artistic director Salvatore Aiello’s The Rite of Spring (1993), which the company (then called North Carolina Dance Theatre) last performed in 2003.
The two-part theatrical spectacle opened with Adoration of the Earth, in which the Earth Figure, performed with striking regality by October 8 cast’s Raven Barkley, released several bodies from cocoon-like, floor-to-ceiling cylinders of white fabric, like a birth of sorts. From there the ballet launched into a tour de force of pagan bloodlust and suggested murder, cannibalism, and coitus.
While retaining roots in Vaslav Nijinsky’s 1913 original for the Ballets Russes and set to Igor Stravinsky’s iconic score for that ballet, Aiello traded the original’s Russian winter pagan look for that of a fourth-century scantily costumed rainforest tribe. His 38-minute ballet with a minimalist set of an overhead cage of bamboo and atmospheric lighting was driven by primal urges and superstitious beliefs and proved an exhilarating re-imagining of the original ballet. Both the October 8 and 9 casts performed Aiello’s illustrative choreography marvellously, especially The Chosen One as performed by Sturt-Dilley (Oct. 8) and LaPointe (Oct. 9), who each fought ferociously until their end, in one of the most badass female roles ever created in ballet.
