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Medhi Walerski\u2019s \u201cBlink of an Eye\u201d began the program in the resounding \u201cyes\u201d category.\u00a0 To be sure, Walerski \u2014 a former Nederlands Dans Theater member who now leads Vancouver\u2019s Ballet BC \u2014 recycled some trendy tropes in this 2011 creation. An industrial lighting grid rises, fingers waggle, and dancers run and slide on slippery socks. We\u2019ve seen all that before.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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But Walerski is responding to Bach violin partitas and sonatas, with their ingenious way of flickering through the whole spectrum of human emotion, and he keeps his selections brisk, avoiding the relentless dourness that marks NDT\u2019s recent repertoire.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Just as importantly, he knows how to develop a motif. The dancers repeatedly hold a foot behind the head in a turned-in back attitude, this position evolving through pretzel-like partnering, virtuosic turns and stop-on-a-dime resolutions. It all shows off the dancers\u2019 dynamic prowess most entrancingly, especially as costumed with bare torsos for the men and black gymnastics-style leotards for the women (reimagined by Jon Taylor from Walerski\u2019s original design).<\/p>\n
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Alvin\u00a0Ailey American Dance Theater in Matthew Neenan\u2019s \u201cDifference Between.\u201d<\/p>\n
Paul Kolnik\/Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater<\/p>\n
Matthew Neenan\u2019s \u201cDifference Between,\u201d alas, ricocheted the audience to the \u201cno, not worthy of these dancers\u201d territory.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Neenan is a co-founder of BalletX, and a prolific creator of quirky works popular with mid-sized suburban ballet companies. \u201cDifference Between\u201d follows his usual formula, but with a sprinkling of abstruseness. The alt-pop and Americana-influenced music by MacArthur \u201cGenius\u201d fellowship recipient Heather Christian and her band the Arbornauts is highly lyrics-driven. \u201cIt\u2019s hard, it\u2019s hard, it\u2019s hard,\u201d one selection repeats in harshly intoned tight harmony, while another, sung in a Stevie Nicks-like warble, describes how \u201cinstead of drowning, you become a holy roller.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
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Presumably Neenan had a rapturous personal response to this poetry, but at Zellerbach Hall both the sung words and his ideas remained obscure. The excellent cast of seven mostly seemed to reel their arms in lines. Mason Evans and Xavier Mack did all they could with a milquetoast duet, later crawling forehead-to-forehead around the perimeter of the stage. Pajama-like costumes by Karen Young did not help.<\/p>\n
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Yannick Lebrun in\u00a0\u201cSong of\u00a0the Anchorite\u201d by\u00a0choreographer Jamar Roberts<\/p>\n
Paul Kolnik<\/p>\n
Between these extremes, former Ailey dancer and past resident choreographer Jamar Roberts\u2019s \u201cSong of the Anchorite\u201d had the virtue of connecting us to the company\u2019s history, inspired\u00a0 by a mostly lost Alvin Ailey solo, \u201cHermit Songs.\u201d<\/p>\n
In that 1961 work, Alvin Ailey held branches that evoke a crown of thorns and danced to music by Samuel Barber. In Roberts\u2019s response, the bare branches hovered in a projection overhead, and a solemn Yannick Labrun danced to a jazz trumpet reinterpretation of the adagio from a Ravel piano concerto. It read, often touchingly, as an allegory for the artist committing himself to a lonely, sacrificial vocation. My only reservation is that in Roberts\u2019s choreography, the action \u2014 Labrun lifting what at first seems to be a shroud, then putting on a robe \u2014 seems to happen abruptly, driven more by the dancemaker\u2019s symbology than by the dancer\u2019s embodied character.<\/p>\n
What would it look like for movement to seem both symbolic and fully human, with immediacy of emotion flowing through? An answer arrived in the eternal Ailey closer, \u201cRevelations.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
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Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater in\u00a0Alvin Ailey\u2019s \u201cRevelations.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
Danica Paulos Photography<\/p>\n
Lebrun was devastatingly beautiful in the \u201cI Wanna Be Ready\u201d solo, hinging into those backbends with crystalline control and pleading eyes. Sarah Daley-Perdomo was even more affecting in \u201cFix Me, Jesus,\u201d her extensions all steely strength, her face all surrender. Renaldo Maurice was shaking with the spirit in \u201cWade in the Water.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
Then one of the most loveable of Ailey dancers, the always radiant Patrick Coker, blazed across the stage in \u201cSinner Man\u201d and brought sheer sunshine to \u201cRocka My Soul.\u201d Let the encores commence.<\/p>\n
Rachel Howard is a freelance writer.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Alvin\u00a0Ailey American Dance Theater\u2019s\u00a0Renaldo Maurice, Constance Stamatiou\u00a0and Jacquelin Harris in Alvin Ailey’s \u201cRevelations.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0 Danica Paulos\/\u00a0Alvin Ailey American Dance…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":258119,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[329,1472,143,145,144],"class_list":["post-258118","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-oakland","tag-arts-and-entertainment","tag-dance","tag-oakland","tag-oakland-headlines","tag-oakland-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258118","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=258118"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258118\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/258119"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=258118"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=258118"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=258118"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}