What a great night of dance! Any concerns that I harbored going in that Atlanta Ballet would not pull off this concert were, thankfully, unfounded. The performances by the company as a whole and each dancer individually ranged from decent to excellent and every piece was well realized by the dancers on the stage.
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Every busy Monday should end like this one. I went to a dance performance choreographed by Jonah Bokaer in the elevated patio above the courtyard of the Contemporary. The slight chill in the air was so fitting for the piece. The dancers were dressed in shades of gray, black, and white. The music was a rather generic sounding, though effectively used, collection of softly spoken words on a background of electronic noise.
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I think that Atlanta Ballet slowed down the tempi of Scarlatti’s sonatas for Ratmansky’s “Seven Sonatas.” The pianist sounded a bit too Classical period for me last season but this season it was downright Romantic period. There was waaay too much sustain pedal for a baroque keyboard piece, but it may have been necessary to make some of the pieces work with a slower tempo. The choreography seemed almost awkward at that pace, but at least Mara was able to keep up this time. Last year she was slinging her limbs into place but this time she was much more graceful and, of course, managed not to look like she was losing her balance as she had the last time that I saw it. She’s a decent dancer when given a roll that suits her but I honestly feel that this was poor casting. Nguyen really seemed to inhabit his part in the piece, but that was mostly because his general slacker approach to dancing smoothed over the sharp edges that looked out of place in the slowed down version of the piece. The real person to watch was Lee, whose clean, intentional movements seemed to convey what the piece could be if performed at the pace intended. I have no complaints about Van Buskirk’s performance — she was performing it exactly as it was choreographed — but she came across as awkward and jerky because, when slowed down, the choreography doesn’t make as much sense. It’s funny: I was wondering if perhaps the tempo thing was just me but during the intermission they had a clip of last year’s performance and it really was faster. I’ve actually written to Ratmansky care of ABT to ask after the reference recording of the sonatas to find out what the original tempo was that he had in mind. I wonder if I’ll get a response.
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I was terribly disappointed last night at CORE Performance Company’s ‘a world too wide’ at the Rialto Center for the Arts. The piece was danced to live accompaniment by a baroque orchestra from Houston called Mercury. The concertmaster was so bad that I was actually embarrassed for the orchestra. I felt even worse seeing the second violin cringing at the concertmaster’s mistakes over and over again. I have no idea if the mike was causing some of the problems, but a lot of that was just poor performance and possible poor instrument maintenance — some of that creaking sound was probably due to rosin buildup on the strings of the violin. Unfortunately, it wasn’t just the concertmaster; the violinist most down stage left had no idea how to handle his bow and one or two people needed to learn the music a little better so that they could peek up at the conductor more often and stay with the ensemble. And could anyone even hear the theorbo? Why would you have only one theorbo in that large of a violin string orchestra? For that matter, why would you have a theorbo in that large of a space? It’s a very quiet instrument. We have two perfectly good baroque orchestras in Atlanta but Schroeder wanted to bring these guys in all the way from Houston?
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