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FeedNo Dearth of Dance
By David Gregson
Meanwhile, the occasional outings of the Patricia Rincon Dance Collective (formerly the Jazz Unlimited Dance Company) enjoy a vociferously dedicated following. Earlier this year UCSD Events brought us the exciting Alvin Ailey Dance Theatre for two sold-out evenings at the Spreckels, and the San Diego Area Dance Alliance put together seven stimulating programs for the Nations of San Diego International Dance Festival. Steven and Elizabeth Wistrich’s City Ballet has just staged a stunning one-act Carmen featuring celebrated San Francisco ballerina Evelyn Cisneros, while Irish tap dancers (Michael Flatley’s Lord of the Dance) had crowds flocking to the Sports Arena.
Still, ever since the collapse of the San Diego Foundation for the Performing Arts in 1993, visits by the world’s top professional modern-dance and ballet companies have become rarities. This year, several major classical companies have come tantalizingly close without alighting downtown in the Civic Theatre or in Escondido’s California Center for the Performing Arts. The Orange County Performing Arts Center hosted Britain’s famed Royal Ballet (Tchaikovsky’s Sleeping Beauty and an all-Ravel program), the American Ballet Theatre (Coppelia and Agnes de Mille and Jerome Robbins classics) and the Royal Danish Ballet (La Sylphide).
Former Royal Ballet star Adam Cooper as the leader of the swans in Michael Bourne's radical rethinking of Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake.
Orange County also is the place for the big modern-dance troupes. The Mark Morris Dance Group (with one of Morris’ major works, L’Allegro ed Il Penseroso) and the Nederlands Dans Theater have paid recent visits to Costa Mesa. Both companies are essential viewing for anyone even vaguely interested in modern dance. The Nederlands group, directed by Jiri Kylian, treads the cutting edge with some of the world’s best dancers. Morris has been in San Diego before, of course, but never with an important, full-length work.
The major torchbearer for classical dance locally is Maxine Mahon’s semiprofessional California Ballet, a venerable institution celebrating its 30th anniversary next year. Mahon’s company showcases her ballet students in several annual productions bolstered by professional soloists. The Christmas Nutcracker has been the company’s bread and butter, just as it is for the San Diego Ballet, the City Ballet and other school-based troupes.
But this year Mahon realized a six-year-old dream: a new, fully staged production of Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake. Mahon has good reason to be proud of her achievement. Unlike her A Midsummer Night’s Dream, a pantomime-padded project that has survived 20 years of evolution, Swan Lake benefited from the cultivated, disciplined coaching and choreography of Dame Sonia Arova and Thor Sutowski, two richly experienced professional artists. The featured soloists glowed: Denise Dabrowski exceeded all her former achievements in the double role of Odette/ Odile; Calvin Kitten provided gymnastic excitement as the Prince’s pal, Benno; and the well-drilled corps smoothly coordinated their movements.
Dreaming her dream, tirelessly planning, struggling with $80,000 worth of expenses, working with students, rented costumes and sets and without an orchestra, Mahon finally got her Swan Lake up for a mere three public performances at Escondido’s California Center for the Arts. A glance farther up the coast provides startling, nearly ironic contrast.
Exulting in rave reviews after an unprecedented six-month run on London’s West End, Matthew Bourne brought his modern-dance version of Swan Lake to L.A.’s Ahmanson Theatre, where the production has just completed a remarkable eight-week run. As both an artistic and a capitalistic venture, this is an amazing achievement for the young company, Adventures in Motion Pictures. Imagine a 21¼2-hour-long evening of choreographed Tchaikovsky that filled houses and made money!
Superb local ballerina Denise Dabrowski as Odile in the California Ballet's traditional production of the same work.
There are a number of lessons to be learned here: True creative genius is priceless. You either have it or you don’t. The classics can be a commercial success under the right circumstances. And it doesn’t hurt to have an inspired gimmick. For his Swan Lake, Bourne junked the original Ivanov/Petipa choreography, rewrote the entire story as a parable of tragically unfulfilled obsessive desire, turned most of the human characters into parodies of British royalty, and—most significantly—transformed all of the swans, traditionally danced by women, into men. Manly men with feathered legs, not drag queens in tutus.
Attempting now to conquer New York, this Drake Lake (as many Bourne admirers like to call it) boasts two of the world’s best dancers: the great Lynn Seymour, now 58, a former member of Britain’s Royal Ballet; and Adam Cooper, the Royal’s leading male dancer until he defected to be part of this show. Cooper commands the stage for a large portion of the evening in the taxing double role—as the "good" swan, an alluring feral vision; and as the macho amoral "bad" swan, swathed in leather and carrying a whip. Seymour is unforgettable as the flighty, nymphomaniac Queen, who ignores her son, the Prince, danced with great sympathetic identification by Scott Ambler. Mahon would have a tough time acquiring such talent, even if she wanted to.
The Royal’s largely traditional full-length Sleeping Beauty, by the way, was so overproduced that the vertiginous sets and opulent costumes by Maria Bjornson (designer of The Phantom of the Opera, seen on tour here this year) overshadowed the beautiful Petipa/MacMillan/Ashton/Dowell choreography. Still, Darcy Bussell brought jewel-like perfection to the central role of Princess Aurora. KPBS-TV viewers will have caught many glimpses of Bussell’s dancing and Bjornson’s sets in the recently aired six-chapter Royal Opera House series. I would be more grateful to KPBS for running this absorbing program had our local station not aired most of it opposite 60 Minutes.
Classical music: August, of course, means SummerFest, the La Jolla Chamber Music Society’s annual series. This year’s top-flight event honors Johannes Brahms (1833-1897) and runs from August 15 to 24, opening with an all-Brahms program featuring violinists Daniel Phillips and Roger Wilkie, violist Heiichiro Ohyama and pianists Bernadene Blaha and Max Levinson.
If I were asked to recommend three more concerts from this distinguished series, I’d go with the August 16 program featuring the Brahms Piano Trio in C Major with pianist Levinson and cellist Gary Hoffman; the August 19 concert with the Brahms Sextet for Strings in B-Flat Major; and the August 24 program with Brahms’ Quartet in C Minor for Piano and Strings featuring pianist David Golub. Both of the Rising Stars concerts (August 17 and 22) are highly recommended for the skilled, youthful enthusiasm of the participants.
Nothing to grouse about here—except, perhaps, that the season is not nearly long enough. (A similar series that began July 12 in Santa Fe, New Mexico, runs through August 18.) All SummerFest concerts (except a private gala) are in Sherwood Auditorium at the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, 700 Prospect Street in La Jolla.
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